From Opposition to Governance, Becoming to Being: Thoughts About the UN and Paris after a Tragic Week

Menachem Begin was a tough opposition leader when the Israeli government was presided over by Labor prime ministers.  He criticized Ben Gurion for multiple reasons, criticized Golda Meir for not having adequate intelligence during YK war, criticized Rabin for making too many concessions for the sake of peace.  He was a clever polemicist, sharp-tongued, and as the leader of the opposition party for decades, he got to take his shots and he took advantage of every opportunity and then some.

And then, he became prime minister, the first non-Labor prime minister elected.

He was no less sharp-tongued, no less polemical, but he quickly learned that it’s different to govern than to criticize government, different to be in charge than to be the opposition.

The opposition merely has to demonstrate why the leader is wrong.  The leader has to actually figure out to do that is the most right given circumstances that are often very difficult.

I think people were surprised that Menachem Begin was so successful at negotiating peace with Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt. 

Begin transitioned well, in my opinion, from leader of the opposition to leader of the country.  He navigated and compromised more effectively than many might have expected. 

I doubt everyone in this sanctuary shares Begin’s political or ideological perspective.  But his transition from oppressed leader of the opposition to empowered statesman was a really important one.  It required him to accept incremental and even partial success.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal wrote the following about Palestinian leader Abbas’s recent efforts at the UN:  “Why does he persevere?  Because the pleasures of dreaming are better than the labors of building, just as the rhetoric of justice, patrimony and right is so much more stirring than the fine print and petty indignities of compromise.  Mr. Abbas consistently refuses a Palestinian state because such a state is infinitely more trivial than a Palestinian struggle.  Becoming is better than being.”  (Bret Stephens, “The Dream Palace of the Arab,” WSJ, January 5, 2015)

The story of the children of Israel enslaved in Egypt and subsequently freed has become a symbolic model for resistance to oppression. 

The Israelites cry out, God heeds their cry, there is a gradual process whereby Moses and the people become increasingly comfortable with the idea of leaving Egypt and setting out on a journey to a new land.

One way to look at the journey through the wilderness in the book of Numbers and the series of talks attributed to Moses in the book of Deuteronomy is that they address the transition from aggrieved victims to founders and leaders of a society, from becoming to being, if you will.  

The challenge of “being,” which Moses laid out in the Book of Deuteronomy, required creating a society based on tzedek, justice, that would extend even to the ger, the yatom and the almana, the stranger, the orphan and the widow.

Bret Stephens identifies an important and difficult challenge, the transition from seeking a home of one’s own to actually building it.  The seeking is, in some ways, more noteworthy, more romantic.  There are few great poems or songs written about balancing budgets and managing sewage systems and dealing with competing priorities and interests. 

But there is a kind of maturity that a group achieves when they make that transition, when they become in charge of their own destiny.

The Muslim world is extremely complex – there are multiple ethnic groups, and a range from moderate to extremist to be sure.  However, again and again we are witnessing murderous violence on the part of the extremists, including the shootings in Paris just a few days ago.

The undercurrent behind the extremism, I would argue, is profound insecurity, a failure to move beyond the narrative of victimhood and to accept the need for compromise, negotiation and responsibility. 

Reasonable people can disagree about whether some of the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo crossed boundaries of decency, but every reasonable person must condemn murder as a response to cartoons.  Period.

You may recall that a few weeks ago, I spoke of Israel as a mature sovereign nation and I suggested that a mature sovereign nation takes criticism under consideration and seeks justice, not revenge.

In her single-volume history of Islam, Karen Armstrong identifies that the umma, the Muslim world-community, overall, has been responding for the past four centuries to feeling vanquished by the West.  A narrative about defeating the oppressor has become so strong within the Muslim world that many of the successes that Islam achieved during the middle ages have remained elusive in modern times.

When this narrative results in extremist behavior, the behavior simply cannot be tolerated.

The extremism that preaches murder, where those who disagree are slaughtered, where the gun responds to the pen, must be seen for what it is – a growing danger that cannot be tolerated or compromised with.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a highly unusual and surprising speech to Islamic clerics at Cairo's Al-Azhar University last week, and a translated version has been uploaded to the internet.

“It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (multinational community of Muslim believers) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world,” Sisi declaimed. “Impossible!”

“That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!…

“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move…because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands," said Sisi.

This past Thursday, Oded Eran gave a talk for the Israel Policy Forum in which he proposed that incremental, bilateral progress with the Palestinians may be possible if the Israeli government agrees and if certain nations in the Arab world pressure the Palestinians.  Incremental, bilateral progress which isn’t sexy, which doesn’t resolve all the major issues, but is just a very limited and cautious first step. 

It’s hard to go from opposition to leadership, from the Exodus story to the Deuteronomy story, from escaping to building, from becoming to being, from protesting oppression to creating a just society. 

With the Muslim extremists that’s not happening, certainly any time soon. 

With Abbas and the PA, it may be possible.  I certainly hope it’s still possible, for their sake and for Israel’s sake.  I hope they will be given, and will successfully meet, the daily, prosaic challenges of being.   

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on January 16, 2015, Parashat Shemot