I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on the evening of the 4th of November, 1995. It was a Saturday night. I was living and working in Rio de Janeiro, and I had already made firm plans to move to Israel just two months later, to begin my Master's degree. That particular evening, I went to a magician's performance. I was completely offline, disconnected. I did not hear a thing about the murder.
The following day, Sunday, was my father's birthday. I called my parents in Sao Paulo to congratulate him. My mother answered, and her voice was filled with anxiety. "How are you?" she asked, in a tone that clearly implied she expected me to be devastated. "I'm fine," I said, "Why? I'm just calling for Dad's birthday." And it was only then, from my mother, that I learned what had happened. Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, had been assassinated.
Two months later, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport. The country I entered was a country deep in trauma. That raw, collective pain, the profound shock of a Jew murdering a Jewish prime minister, and the sudden, violent death of the fragile hope for peace, set the tone for the entire three and a half years I lived in Israel. The dream of the Oslo Accords, a dream of two states living side-by-side, died that night on the pavement of a Tel Aviv square.
This week, we read Parashat Lech Lecha. The text tells us, "God said to Avram, 'Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.'"[1]
The text tells us that Avraham was 75 years old when he heard this call. Seventy-five. This was not a young man seeking adventure. This was a man established in his life, his career, his worldview. And at 75, he is told to abandon everything: his geography, his culture, and most importantly, the ideology of his "father's house." He is told to leave behind everything that had defined him for three-quarters of a century and to follow a new, radical vision for the future.
This Shabbat, as we prepare to mark the 30th yahrtzeit of Yitzhak Rabin, I find the parallel inescapable.
Here was a man, Rabin, who was Israel's "Mr. Security." His entire life, his identity, was forged in the military. From the Palmach to IDF Chief of Staff during the triumphant Six-Day War, his "father's house" was the doctrine of military strength. His vision for Israel's future was, for decades, one secured exclusively by a powerful army.
And then, late in his life, like Avraham, he heard a different call. He was convinced by a different vision, a different hope for the future. He began a journey that was a complete 180-degree transformation from the man he had always been. He set out on a new path, one of diplomacy and compromise, towards a future that was utterly different from the one he had spent the previous 71 years of his life building.
Changing one's whole approach to life is frightening, and it is difficult. Regardless of your opinion on the Oslo Peace Process—and there are many valid and painful critiques to be made—one must agree that Rabin's transformation took profound courage. He wanted what he had come to see as the best, perhaps the only, path for Israel's survival.
But this kind of change is threatening. It threatens many of the narratives we tell ourselves about Israel, about the conflict, about our relationship to the land. And the reaction to his Lech Lecha was not just disagreement. It was visceral, poisonous hate.
What we now call "Hate Speech" was running rampant in Israel in 1995. I am sure many of us remember the images. The posters of Rabin in an SS uniform. The chants, at rally after rally, calling him a "בוגד," a traitor. Pamphlets were distributed in synagogues debating the religious validity of applying din rodef (the law of the pursuer) to Rabin and the Oslo Accords—pronouncements that, in essence, gave religious permission to kill him.
We pride ourselves, rightly, on a Jewish tradition that is open to debate. We cherish machloket l'shem shamayim—disagreement for the sake of Heaven. But nothing of that worked in this case. This was not debate. This was dehumanisation. Yigal Amir might have pulled the trigger by himself, but his action was the direct result of a political and religious climate that steeped itself in vitriol and made political violence acceptable.
This morning, I was listening to a HaAretz podcast interview with French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur.[2] She was speaking about the current war, but her words echo with chilling precision the events of 1995 and the legacy we still live with. She said:
"What very often comes to my mind is the image of bridges... I feel that I've always been someone who tried to build bridges... And I think one of the first effects or consequences of war... is that it destroys bridges. We actually want to get rid of bridges and of people who are trying to build them...
Suddenly, we are... unable to do what a bridge does, like to make a connection with the other's world. So it started with... empathy... people have a hard time being in empathy with the other. So sometimes the other is the other with a big O. I mean, you cannot find empathy for the enemy... and slowly, slowly this lack of empathy kind of contaminates everything in your life.
Because suddenly you lack empathy for your own tribe, for your neighbour, for the one in your own people who disagree with you. And slowly, slowly you lack empathy for the intimate... It's a pity and it's disastrous... how we can't manage to put ourselves one second in the shoe of the other. Not necessarily to agree with him, but just one second to see from another point of view..."
And then she said this, which struck me to my core:
"It's also what is striking for me is that for us Jews, it has been our absolute talent. I believe that the talent of interpretation, Jewish interpretation, which is the most sacred thing we do religiously, is an ability to step aside... an ability suddenly to look... at the text or at the word in another direction.”
Yitzhak Rabin, in his final years, was trying to build a bridge. It was a bridge to the "Other," yes, but to do so, he first had to build a bridge from his old self to his new one. He had to perform that most sacred of Jewish acts: interpretation. He looked at the same reality he had seen his entire life, and he had the audacity to "step aside" and see it in another direction.
The forces of hate did not just want to stop the Oslo process. They wanted, as Horvilleiur says, "to get rid of the bridge-builder." The assassination was the ultimate act of this "contamination" of empathy. It began with a refusal to see the humanity in the Palestinian people, but it "contaminated" sectors of the Israeli society until it reached the point where a Jew could no longer see the humanity in his own prime minister. The lack of empathy for the "other" became a lack of empathy for "the one in your own people who disagrees with you."
Thirty years later, we are living in the rubble of that destroyed bridge. The trauma I encountered in 1996 has not healed; it has metastasized. The refusal to see from another's point of view is no longer a fringe position; it is the mainstream.
The parallel legacies of Lech Lecha and Yitzhak Rabin's yahrtzeit present us with a stark choice.
Avraham's story teaches us that at any age, we can be called to leave behind the "father's house" of our old certainties, our prejudices, and our fears, and journey towards a new, unknown, but more hopeful future.
Rabin's story is the warning of what happens when we refuse that call. It is a testament to the courage it takes to be a bridge-builder, and a horrific reminder of the forces that will always try to tear those bridges down.
The question for us, 30 years on, is not whether we agree with the specifics of the Oslo Accords. The question is whether we can reclaim our "absolute talent" as Jews. Can we be brave enough to "step aside" and see the world, and the "other," from a different direction? Can we find the courage to build bridges, even when it is frightening, even when it is difficult, and even when others respond with hate?
May the memory of Yitzhak Rabin, and the eternal call of Avraham, be a blessing and a challenge for us all.
Shabbat Shalom.
