The prayers of the evening and morning services are a
movement through a range of ways to feel God’s presence in our lives. The liturgy begins praising
God for His acts of creation, specifically the sun, moon and stars. The change from light to darkness
and darkness to light are the most immediate manifestations of God’s daily work of creation. (This
prayer is called “Orot,” meaning “lights” or “luminaries.”) Then the service moves to
praise God for giving us Torah and mitzvoth, which are understood as expressions of God’s love for the Jewish
people: as a parent gives moral instruction to a child, so too God shows His love for us by giving us
moral instruction. (This prayer is called “Ahavah,” meaning “love,” though it’s often
referred to as “revelation,” God’s teaching His will to the Jewish people.) Next comes the
Sh’ma.
After Sh’ma is “G’ulah,” meaning “redemption”
– a prayer that uses the liberation from Egypt as the paradigm of God’s acts of real, political redemption. God defeats the
forces of tyranny to bring freedom to His people. This is traditional Jewish theology:
However long He may tarry, God is active in history, bringing destruction to the arrogant and liberation to the
oppressed.
Here is the movement of our worship. We
see God’s presence in three broad areas of life: the natural order; the moral order; and the
political order.
Whenever I teach about the service, when I come to the
“G’ulah” prayer, I use the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, and peace in Northern Ireland as contemporary examples of God’s redemptive role
in history. I mention my hope for peace between Israel and her neighbors as an experience of redemption that would be little short of the
messianic coming.
For the last week and a half, I was very hopeful that we
might be witnessing another moment of God’s redemptive power in history. I prayed that the regime
of the mullahs might actually fall in Iran; that the people had finally had enough of their oppressive and destructive
rule and might overwhelm the Revolutionary Guard with their spirit of hope. We have seen these
moments before in recent history – in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. We had high hopes for China twenty years ago during the Tiananmen Square
movement.
But today, while some protesters continue to march quietly
in the streets of Tehran, their numbers are very diminished, and
I fear this mass crying-out for free and open elections and for change will be squelched by an overpowering
military. God’s redemptive power has not yet reached the people of Iran. They, and all their neighbors,
Israel included, are still very much in
harm’s way as the government will surely try to deflect attention away from its own oppressive policies and search for
a scapegoat.
I don’t know if a government led by Mir Hosein Mousavi
would have been any less threatening to Israel than one led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But, ironically and tragically, I believe that the current
situation in Iran is good for Israel. The whole world can see the current regime in
Iran for what it really is – a bunch of
tyrannical thugs who will oppress their own people just as quickly as they will threaten to annihilate
others. Only the blind can now say, “We don’t have to take seriously the belligerence of
Iran.”
What the U.S.
or Israel should do now?
About that I make no policy prescriptions. Though a rabbi once said that one of the Jewish
lessons from the Holocaust is that when someone says they’re going to destroy you, you must take them
seriously. What “taking them seriously” specifically means in this case, I cannot
say.
As with many pundits, I remain hopeful though not optimistic
that God’s powers of redemption will yet be seen in Iran, bimheirah b’yameinu, speedily and in our time. Until that happens,
Iran’s government has shown itself as dedicated to its own power and willing to use any means to keep it.
No one can say to Israel that this
threat is not real.
