Diary of a Chief Rabbi

The Thing Jews Have Learned And That Is Patience

A few days ago I had a visit from Professor Hans Kung, the well known Catholic theologian who in recent years has become one of the great campaigners for a 'global ethic'. We spoke of many things including, of course, the current situation in Israel. After an hour, he began to look at his watch and as the minutes ticked by he became increasingly agitated. The car scheduled to pick him up was late, and he was obviously a man who valued punctuality. I said to him, "Professor Kung, Judaism has many things to teach, but one above all. For more than two thousand years we have been expecting the Messiah daily. After that much time, we have learned how to wait!"

I meant it, of course, not just as a joke. The events in Israel in the past few weeks have been nothing less than tragic. The violence, the injuries, the deaths, the anger have been appalling, and none of the arguments as to who is to blame diminish by one iota the senselessness of it all. For this has not occurred as a result of war. It happened at the very moment that an Israeli Prime Minister was offering more in pursuit of peace than any previous Israeli leader - more than his coalition partners were prepared to accept, more perhaps than Israeli public opinion would have countenanced. Ehud Barak has risked his career, as the late Yitzhak Rabin risked and lost his life, for peace. Nothing can be achieved by violence that cannot better be achieved through negotiation. I weep, as many do on both sides, for the loss of one of the great opportunities to build a path to a future from which both sides would gain.

More has been lost than life. There is a grave danger that hope too will be lost. Already there is a mood, especially among Israelis most active in the peace movement, that is close to despair. Amos Oz, the novelist, has been a leader of Israel's secular left. Although his views are diametrically opposed to mine, he is a man I respect for his intelligence, integrity and high moral principle. In an article he wrote for the Guardian, though, his anger and sense of betrayal were unmistakable. "The Palestinian people," he wrote, "are suffocated and poisoned by blind hate."

There always was a danger in calling a movement Peace Now. Peace takes time. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides reminds us that human beings change slowly if they change at all. That, he says, is why it took so long for the Israelites to get from Egypt to the Promised Land. As one Hassidic teacher put it: It took one day to take the Israelites out of Egypt, but it took forty years to take Egypt out of the Israelites. The risk in aiming at 'peace now' is that when it doesn't happen now, one is tempted to conclude that it won't happen ever. Impossible expectations lead to premature despair.

If our history has taught us anything it has taught us how to wait. No people has waited longer or with more patience. In the early nineteenth century the French historian Chateaubriand visited Jerusalem, where he met the Jewish community and was awe-struck by their faith. The Jewish people, he wrote, "has seen Jerusalem destroyed seventeen times, yet there exists nothing in this world which can discourage it or prevent it from raising its eyes to Zion." The great empires - the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans - had all vanished, but the Jews remained. "If there is anything among the nations of the world marked with the stamp of the miraculous, this, in our opinion, is that miracle."

Peace will come to the Middle East. Of that, I have no doubt. It may not be a warm peace, it may not be a total peace, and it will not be tomorrow, but it will come. Homo sapiens is a learning animal, and we eventually learn to control our self-destructive instincts. The great danger is impetuosity, the belief that whatever can be achieved can be achieved quickly. When I was a student, they used to tell the story of the American tourist who admired the lawn in the courtyard of a Cambridge college. "How do you get grass to grow that green?" he asked one of the dons. The academic replied, "First you dig the ground, then you add fertiliser, then you sow the seeds - and then you wait a hundred years!" Mutual acceptance, like a lawn, takes time to grow.

Israel's greatest strength is not military, or political, or economic, but spiritual. In the course of our long and painful history, we learned to wait. It is said that Napoleon was once passing a synagogue in Paris and heard the sound of people wailing and lamenting. He asked, "What are the Jews weeping for?" "Jerusalem," his aide replied. "How long ago did they lose it?" he asked. "About seventeen hundred years," came the reply. "A people that can mourn the loss of Jerusalem so long," Napoleon said, "will one day have it restored to them." So it was with Jerusalem, and so it will be with peace.

To Professor Kung, though, I added one further remark. Almost everyone, I said, believes that the issue at stake is territory - whose flag flies over which bit of land. It isn't so. The Hebrew poet Ibn Gabirol, paraphrasing a sentence in the Talmud, once wrote: "When two people love one another, they can stand together on the head of a pin. When two people hate one another, the whole world is not wide enough for them to co-exist." If Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Muslim, can make space for one another in their hearts, they will find space for one another in the land. Without that, no territorial solution, no partition, will bring peace. It will take time, but Jews are used to things taking time. We have lost many things in our history, but the one thing we never lost was hope.