We stand here on the shoulders of giants like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Job. This year’s High Holyday sermons will explore what they continue to say to us.

This morning we explore lessons our ancestor Abraham taught us.

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Abraham was a dropout. It’s true. Abraham, the first Jew, was a dropout in a family of dropouts. Listen:

31Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan… [Genesis 9:31]

He lived in a city, a place that was even more different from the country in terms of technology and culture than it is now. Yet his father uprooted the family. They dropped out and assumed the life of the semi-nomad, staying put when possible, roaming when necessary.

Why did they leave? In my opinion it was because of Abraham. Do you know the term “paradigm shift?” It was coined not too long ago by Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science who taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, and MIT. A real dummy. A paradigm shift is a radical change in our way of thinking about, well, almost anything. One of the most famous was when Galileo saw that the earth revolved around the sun, instead of the sun, moon, and planets all revolving around the earth, as everyone believed.

Long, long before that, Abraham broke through to what is arguably the most important paradigm shift in all of human history: there was only one God, not many.

[One night] when the sun sank, and the stars came forth, [Abraham] said, “These are the gods!” But the dawn came, and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not pay worship to these, for they are not gods.” Then the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him will I extol.” But again the sun set, and he said, “He is no god,” and beholding the moon, he called her his god to whom he would pay Divine homage. Then the moon was obscured, and he cried out: “This, too, is not god! There is One who sets them all in motion.” [Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews]

Is this why they left the city of Ur, because of Abraham’s radical belief? Yes.

Abraham’s father Terah made idols, idols of all kinds, says one of our legends. Sometimes Abraham worked in his father’s store. When someone came in to buy an idol Abraham would ask them:

“How old are you?”

“Thirty years.”

“You are thirty years old yet you would worship this idol that I made but yesterday?”

The customers, obviously, would leave in a huff. But the final straw, according to our legends, came one day when Terah was out:

Alone with the idols… Abraham struck the idols from their thrones, and began to smash them with an axe. With the biggest he started, and with the smallest he ended. He hacked off the feet of one, another he beheaded. One had his eyes struck out, another had his hands crushed. After all were mutilated, he went away, having first put the axe into the hand of the largest idol.

[When] the king saw all the idols shattered into pieces, he inquired who had perpetrated the mischief. Abraham was named as the one who had been guilty of the outrage, and the king summoned him and questioned him as to his motive for the deed. Abraham replied: “I did not do it; it was the largest of the idols who shattered all the rest. Don’t you see that he still has the axe in his hand? And if don’t believe my words, ask him and he will tell you himself.” [Ginzberg, ibid.]

After that Abraham and his family had to run for their lives. That’s how Abraham became the first Hebrew, the first ivri, as we say in ivrit, in Hebrew. He was the first of us, the first one to teach monotheism. And he was very much alone. One of the meanings of ivri is aiver, other, as if Abraham was on one side of a great divide and the rest of the world was on the other. Which was exactly the case. If you were all to say, as loudly as you can: “There are many gods,” and while you did that, without using the microphone, I would whisper: “There is only one God,” you would get some idea of what it was like. I did this once with the Religious School kids. They got the message.

But monotheism was only half of this visionary’s dream. He dreamt of a place, a country, where those who believed as he did could practice their belief without fear of persecution, where they could be free to be themselves. So crucial was this that at the very beginning of his story,

When they arrived in the land of Canaan, 7The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I will assign this land to your heirs.” [Genesis 12:5-7]

Yet even though Abraham felt he had God’s promise, it would be hundreds of years before his people came back to settle in what was then called Canaan and is now called Israel. So,

2Sarah [Abraham’s wife] died in Kiriath-arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan…3Then Abraham… spoke to the Hittites, saying, “[Let] Ephron son of Zohar 9sell me the cave of Machpelah that he owns, which is at the edge of his land. Let him sell it to me, at the full price, for a burial site…”

16Abraham accepted Ephron’s terms. Abraham paid out to Ephron the money that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites—four hundred shekels of silver at the going merchants’ rate.

20Thus the field with its cave passed from the Hittites to Abraham, as a burial site. [Genesis 23:2-20]

I’ve quoted this at length to show that promise or no promise, the very first holding we acquired in Israel was bought and paid for in full, legally. And it was no bargainAs the commentary to the Torah we use in the sanctuary points out, about twelve hundred years later King Omri paid only 6,000 shekels for the land on which the entire city of Samaria was built. About six hundred years after that we hear of a small plot of land like Machpelah costing 17 shekels. To gain clear and legal title to the land, Abraham paid top dollar and more. [Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p. 157] . Believe it or not, for our first holding in Israel we Jews didn’t get it wholesale. We paid way above retail, and gladly!

Again, let me stress, our first holding in Israel was legitimate and sold freely to us by the legitimate owners. So why do the over six hundred million Arabs in the middle east who control all but the tiniest sliver of land that is modern Israel begrudge us even that? Because, in my opinion, the vile cancer of anti-Semitism didn’t die with the defeat of the Nazis. It is festering in our world right now with, as Elie Wiesel said recently, a fury that was unthinkable only a few short years ago.

Let me ask you another question, the same question I asked the people who were gathered recently at the Stand With Israel rally not too long ago:

Why did Israel, with the greatest reluctance to be sure, kill innocent people in Lebanon, in the Palestinian controlled areas? Why did Israel kill innocent people?

Because as far as the enemy is concerned, THERE ARE NO INNOCENT ISRAELIS! None. Think a moment. If, God forbid, the unthinkable happens and Hizbollah and Hamas and the al Qassam brigades, and all the rest overrun Israel – if, God forbid, that should happen, would there be any innocent Israelis in their eyes? Would they say: This one was a good guy, he was innocent, let’s spare him? Would they say: That woman was righteous, let’s not kill her? Maybe they’d leave some of their own, some of the Israeli Arabs alive. Maybe. But they’d kill as many Jews as they could as sure as I’m standing here.

They already are. The children killed on the bus and in the street, they’re not innocent as far as the suicide bombers are concerned. The bombers are lauded and their families rewarded with money.

So just as there are no Israeli Jews our enemies would consider innocent, sadly there are no Lebanese or Palestinians or Syrians or Iranians – there are none of our enemies we can, as much as we would want to, consider innocent.

As my colleague Rabbi Michael Gold puts it:

The world, with few exceptions, cowers in the face of the terrorists. They consider a house that hides a Katyusha Rocket to be a civilian abode- even as that family lovingly oils the weapon’s firing mechanism and hides the armaments under their beds.

This enemy, these animals who happen to look human, hide rockets in private homes, gun emplacements in hospitals, bomb factories in schools, and then accuse Israel of atrocities when people other than soldiers are killed. Even so, saddest of all, as Golda Meir once said, is that our enemies have forced our children to kill their children.

Joe McCain, brother of Senator John McCain, a non-Jew, has spoken out in favor of Israel’s need to defend itself:

The irony goes unnoticed --- while we [Americans] are hammering away to punish those who brought the horrors of September 11th here, we [talk about] restrain[ing] the Israelis from the same retaliation. While we mourn and seethe at September 11th, we don’t notice that Israel has a September 11th sometimes every day.

Palestinians, the Arabs, and perhaps most Americans don’t realize -- the Jews are never going quietly again.

I’m sure Joe McCain will understand, and agree, when I say that going quietly is exactly what we want to do, exactly what we’ve always wanted to do:

-- We want our children to go quietly to school, to sit quietly looking into the eyes of a lover, to walk around without wearing uniforms and carrying instruments of death.

-- We want to go quietly to the market without fear that a maniac with explosives strapped to his waist will blow us up.

-- We want to ride quietly on the bus and not have that quiet shattered by the noise of an explosion and the stench of burning flesh.

-- We want to walk quietly in the street and sit quietly in our homes without being afraid that a rocket will fall.

-- We want to go quietly about our daily lives.

But we will not go quietly to our graves. Never! Never again!

When we hear the call of the shofar, may it remind us to appreciate that our lives are blessed and comfortable - and we have much to be grateful for.

At the same time – may it remind us that there are soldiers in Israel who are still in captivity - children whose lives have been changed because a parent will not be coming home for the Holidays - families who must rebuild their homes; and poor and indigent Jewish families here in Rockland as well.

The Jewish Federation helps more than twenty agencies here and overseas. Your generous contribution to the annual campaign will be your way of saying that indeed, we will not go quietly, never again.