Israel's 75th Anniversary Sermon: Two Questions That Heal with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

For some reason--I don’t know why it happens, I just know that it happens--tensions seem to rise in a family before a big milestone or family simcha. People tend to argue. To bicker. To get into negative energy patterns. The classic example of weird negative energy preceding what should be a happy family time is a wedding. If you have ever planned a wedding, you know this. As the day draws near, anxiety rises. Lists proliferate. Who is going to go to Costco to get the bottled water and the small bags of Cape Cod potato chips? Who is going to the hotels to drop off the gifts baskets? We just had a Covid cancellation. We need to redo table 11.

Simcha anxiety is such a well-known phenomenon that I tell every couple that I have ever worked with for their wedding to get out of the wedding business a week before their wedding—no more wedding details, no more wedding to do lists—so that they can spend that last week focusing on what matters: their love for one another.

We the Jewish people are now having a case of simcha anxiety on steroids. Just 10 days from now—today is April 15, on the evening of April 25—we will mark what should be the most joyful milestone imaginable for our people: Israel’s 75th anniversary. This should be the happiest, or among the happiest, moments in Jewish history, but it is not. Three years after the Holocaust, three years after one-third of our people perished in the flames, three years after our lowest low, the State of Israel was founded, and we were recreated as a people. It is not just that there was a new Jewish state, but a new Jew: a Jew who was strong and vigorous, who had a home, who was not subject to pogroms and massacres. The State of Israel would provide not only a safe home, a sanctuary, for the Jewish people, but also a place of Jewish thriving, a renaissance of Jewish culture and letters and music and language. It would be a place where the finest Jewish values of our prophets and rabbis could be actually fulfilled in a sovereign state. Against all odds, what a miracle, Israel was created, and it is here 75 years later.

And yet, like the joyful family milestone where the joy is not felt, but the bickering, the worrying, the quarreling, the joy of Israel is largely not being felt in this season of its 75th anniversary.