Our Sisters from Kibbutz Kfar Azza
Friday night, February 9, 2025
Sitting in our service here last Friday night, next to our eight visitors from Kibbutz Kfar Azza, I was worried. What were they thinking? I had warned them ahead of time that because of our construction, we are meeting in a church; but still I wondered what they were thinking about our congregation of mostly non-Hebrew speakers, singing and praying in Hebrew? What did they think about us reading some of our prayers in English? And the choir! How did that feel to them? These eight fierce, passionate, secular Israeli women had lived through the nightmare of October 7th. They lost their homes and so many of their friends. They came halfway around the world to visit us Santa Barbara Jews, living here in comfort, surrounded by beauty, so far from the great Jewish catastrophe and the war, and here we are praying in a church, led by a choir. What did they think of us? I was worried.
Walking down the steps toward the Fellowship Hall after the service I asked two of them “was it very strange for you?” and they replied “it was completely different.” Then one said “this was the first time in many years that I wept in a synagogue” and the other said “I am secular; in Israel if I go to synagogue, it is only for a Bar Mitzvah or on Yom Kippur. But this moved me.”
Last week, eight women who survived the savage October 7th attack on Kibbutz Kfar Azza visited here in Santa Barbara, for an entire week. We hoped that their visit would give them a few days to breathe, and a chance to tell their story, both here in the sanctuary and to our local press. But we could not have anticipated the way that their visit would change us. As we sat in their presence, and heard their voices, and watched their faces and their bodies, and sang with them, and ate with them, we experienced a profound, physical, emotional and spiritual connection to the people of Israel, to the center of our Jewish world.
We are still far too close to the events of October 7th to understand what those events mean for us. We do not yet know how the war with Hamas will end. But one thing we do know is that we have come back to the immense question at the beginning of Zionism. What is the reason for a Jewish homeland?
In the earliest phase of the Zionist movement, that question was being answered in basically two ways, by two very different Jewish giants, rivals for the Zionist leadership. Theodore Herzl and Asher Tzvi Hirsh Ginsberg, better known by his pen name of Achad HaAm. These two men came from utterly different Jewish worlds, and they offered two different visions for Zionism.
Herzl was born in 1860 and lived as an assimilated Jew, first in Budapest and then in Vienna, with little or no personal Jewish identify until he came to Paris in the 1890’s as a journalist to cover the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. There in France, Herzl witnessed a blossoming of antisemitism, in the heart of modern western civilization. What he saw convinced him that antisemitism was an eternal hatred, and that Jews would never be safe in this world until they had their own country. For Herzl, the ultimate meaning of Zionism was the need to create a safe haven for Jews, in a world pervaded by hatred of the Jews.
Achad HaAm was born four years before Herzl, in 1856, in a Hasidic family near Kiev. In stark contrast to the assimilated Herzl, Achad HaAm came from the heart of the religious Jewish world. Like so many in his generation, he eventually left the orthodox Jewish world, but he never lost his passionate commitment to Jewish tradition, Jewish language, and Jewish culture. For Achad HaAm, the greatest danger facing our people in the modern era was not antisemitism, but assimilation. For Achad HaAm, Zionism was not a solution to the vulnerability of individual Jewish people; it was an answer to the problem of how Judaism would survive in the modern world.
Achad HaAm’s Zionism would create a living, creative, dynamic center for Jewish culture and tradition, in the ancient homeland of our people. It would be a fulfillment of the ancient prophecy: Ki miTzion teitsei Torah, udvar Adonai m’Yerushalayim. For out of Zion will come forth Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem.
You may be thinking, why can’t it be both? Herzl and Achad HaAm? In fact, both visions of Zionism have shaped modern Israel—both Herzl’s safe haven for endangered Jews and Achad HaAm’s living, beating heart of the Jewish civilization. But in those early years, it was a huge debate and a struggle between Herzl and Achad HaAm. Herzl won that battle, and by the time he died at age 44, Herzl was known as the modern Moses, the founder of Zionism and modern Israel. Eventually, the Holocaust came to be seen as proof of the truth of Herzl’s view that we Jews require and deserve a safe place, where we can live and defend ourselves. But Achad HaAm’s idea of Israel as a center for Jewish culture and civilization did not die.
In years and decades to come, years from now, October 7th may be remembered as the moment when Herzl’s dream, of Israel as a safe haven in a hostile world, came crashing down. On October 7th, Israel ceased to be our safe haven, and became instead the most dangerous place in the world for Jews. I say this full of fear and trembling. It is impossible to imagine 1,200 Jews being killed in a single day, or two hundred fifty Jews being kidnapped and taken hostage, anywhere else in the world today. Whatever Israel means today, in the aftermath of October 7th, it is no longer Herzl’s safe haven.
As the women from Kfar Aza met people here in Santa Barbara, they were surprised to find that non-Jews in our town greeted them warmly. A security guard, upon hearing that they were from Israel, had them step off to the side where he lifted his shirt to reveal a large patch on his chest with an Israeli flag. And the proprietor of a local chocolate shop, when she learned that they were Israeli, spontaneously offered free chocolates to all of them. Our Israeli sisters met these non-Jews, here in Santa Barbara, who love Israel! And standing in my kitchen, a couple of them asked me whether there was much antisemitism here in Santa Barbara, and I had to answer “some, but the big challenge that we face here is not antisemitism but assimilation.”
In our week with the women from Kibbutz Kfar Azza, I think that we experienced the alternative meaning of Zionism, the answer that Achad HaAm gave to the question of why do we need a Jewish homeland? Our visitors from Israel came to us, halfway around the world, and brought to us a powerful message from the center of the Jewish world. They showed us what vibrant Jewish identify looks like and sounds like. When Yifat spoke from our bimah and said: “I am a woman; I am strong and I am broken.” When Madlen came to the microphone before Havdalah and sang from the depths of her soul Mi haish chechafetz chaim, Who is the man who desires life? When Etty, the kindergarten teacher who raised all of the children of the kibbutz, visited our preschoolers and knelt down and instantly began playing with and teaching them. In one moment after another, our guests from Israel showed us what being Jewish can and should look like.
Ki miTzion teitsei Torah. Out of Zion came Torah. This is exactly what Achad HaAm envisioned. What is Torah? What is the word of God? It is the strength of Elinor. The honesty of Osnat. The courage of Michal. The grace of Ruth. The love of Sigal. In human terms, through friendships and human connections, Judaism came flowing to us out of Zion.
Mysteriously, our Israeli sisters also summoned forth our own Jewish identity. With them among us, we became a new community. Dozens of members of our community stepped up to host them, to welcome them, to drive them, to feed them. Members of our community who have not been around much, who have been feeling disconnected lately from Jewish life, came to sing, to pray and to learn. Our sisters from Israel came to us, across a vast distance, and with their powerful voices, opening to us their broken hearts, they brought us together. Now, after October 7th, more than ever, we know that Israel is the living, beating heart of our people. Now we are family, bound together in grief and in joy, the Jews of Santa Barbara and the Jews of Kibbutz Kfar Azza. Shabbat shalom.