ruminativerabbi

[ruminativerabbi]

An In or Out Moment Is Upon Us

There’s a line in the Haggadah that seems to me especially meaningful this year. And, although my letters to you all have been getting darker and darker as the year has progressed since last October, the line in question—when read in the correct light and with the correct background information—that line contains a message of hope that I think may be just the thing for all of us as we live through our annual festival of freedom and feel, it seems with each passing week, less certain where this will all lead.

The line opens the long Magid section in which seder-meal participants fulfill the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The setting really could not be better known. The leader uncovers the matzot, lifts the plate, and recites words we’ve all heard a thousand times. “This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat…and let us gather together next year in Jerusalem.” Most seder-regulars can easily recite the words from memory. At some tables, they are sung aloud, which only makes it easier to remember them from year to year. But hiding behind the words is a riddle that will feel particularly relevant to this nightmarish year through which we have all been living since last October.

The invitation to the hungry to come and join in the feast is suggestive of the natural sense of hospitality that Jewish people bring easily to the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there is a problem here, and it has to do with the second part of that invitation, the part represented above by the three dots that separate the invitation to the hungry and the prayer that we all have seder together next year in Jerusalem. The familiar words, kol di-tz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach, are often mistranslated as “Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.” That makes it sound like a mere restatement of the opening remark: “let those who are hungry come and eat / let those who have no seder to attend feel welcome at ours.”

So that’s a nice sentiment. But that’s not precisely what the words mean. The Torah enjoins upon the Israelites the eternal obligation to celebrate Passover by offering up the sacrifice called the paschal offering or, more commonly in Hebrew as the korban pesach or the zevach pesach and then by consuming its meat on Erev Pesach, on the Eve of Passover. That being the case, a more literal translation would be something like “Let all enter who need to share our korban pesach, our paschal offering.”

And that too, of course, is a noble thought. The Torah says unequivocally at Exodus 12:8 that “you shall eat the meat [of this sacrifice] on that night; broiled in fire and with matzah and bitter herbs shall you eat it.” So what could be more natural than helping others perform the very mitzvah your own family has already gathered to undertake?

But there’s a detail that needs to be considered: the Torah specifically requires that the Israelites consume the sacrifice in chavurot, which is to say: in pre-formed groups constituted of the specific sponsors of the specific offering they will then consume together. And, indeed, this is the law. Maimonides, for example, writes unequivocally that “the paschal offering may only be slaughtered as a specific offering for its specific sponsors,” who become the people thus entitled to consume it (Hilkhot Korban Pesah 2:1). So how can the seder leader blithely invite any in need to eat the korban with his or her own family? Such people specifically cannot accept the invitation without breaking the law.

So that’s the riddle. What the “real” answer is, who knows? But what the riddle means to me, and particularly in this year of pogrom and war and surging anti-Semitism, is that sometimes you need to step around your normal practice for the sake of a greater good. Yes, the invitee—the specific person the seder leader is addressing when inviting the hungry to come eat and the needy to share in his or her family’s paschal sacrifice—that person being invited in should have signed up for his own sacrifice, should have sponsored a korban pesach in the specific way required by law. But that’s not what happened! And who can say why not? Was the invitee too poor, too shy, or too unfamiliar with the law properly to have dealt with its requirements? Was the invitee held back by physical disabilities, or by mental or emotional ones? Was the specific person being invited in a traveler, a stranger, or perhaps an alienated local who up until that very moment was certain that the very last thing he or she wanted was to do the whole Pesach thing with someone else’s family? Whatever! This person has somehow appeared at the door. The time limit for slaughtering the pesach is long past. The kohanim, the Temple priests, are all off to attend to their own seder meals with their own families. The Temple itself is shut down for the night, its nighttime security detail in place but otherwise empty. The moment has clearly passed to do this the right way. And yet, as the burden shifts from obligation to generosity, from harshness to kindness, from halakhah to aggadah, the host, accepting the situation not as it ought to be or could be but as it actually is, turns to the person standing at the door and, preferencing the real over the ideal, invites that person in to join the family inside and to participate in celebrating Passover by consuming the flesh of the sacrificial offering with which the festival shares its name. The folk genius of the Jewish people allows for things like this, for people knowingly to step occasionally around the rules for the sake of a greater good.

And that is where we are today in the wake of the Simchat Torah pogrom. What is needed, more than anything really, is for the Jewish people to set aside the political or even religious debates that divide us and to face the future united as one people possessed of one Torah and devoted to the service of the one God. As everybody knows all too well, we are a fractious people. Arguing is what we do best. (The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is funny and not funny at the same time.) But the bottom line is that what we need to do now is to come together. We don’t all have to agree about everything. We certainly don’t all have to like Bibi or his politics, and neither do we all have to agree whether the IDF has done all it could to free the hostages held captive in Gaza. We certainly don’t have to agree with anything our own President or Vice President have said about Israel over the last half year, both speaking so regularly out of both sides of their own mouths that we barely even notice the disconnect between today’s comment and yesterday’s and the day before’s. But what the Haggadah is saying is that we have to open the door and invite all in who are somehow still on the outside wondering if they even would be welcome at a seder without having first signed up to sponsor a korban pesach in the Temple.

What that line in the Haggadah about the korban pesach and the unsigned-up stranger at the door is there to teach us is that the pursuit of the greater good will always be the wiser choice. That thought should be our watchword as we negotiate these stormy seas on which we are all afloat this year: the key is draw into our ranks all who would seated at our table and then, united and with one voice, to face the world and demand justice—justice for the captives in Gaza, justice for the people whose own lives were ruined on October 7 or whose loved ones were murdered, justice for Israel in the international halls of justice that so frequently, almost routinely, treat Israel unfairly and unreasonably harshly. If we can’t speak as one now, then when exactly will we? And if not now, then when?

If we can manage that, we’ll have done a lot. Yes, there will be those who cannot bring themselves to stand with Israel or with the Jewish people. I regret that, but I also accept it—but I am thinking about swelling our ranks, not thinning them. And so, even with the seder meals behind us now, I invite you all to join me in opening up the doors—of our homes, of our synagogues, of our communities—to all those Jewish people (and they are legion) on the outside and inviting them in to stand with Israel and to stand with all of us who stand with Israel. And allies in the non-Jewish world whose hearts beat with Israel are welcome in my house too. There are moments in history when you have to stand up or back off, to be in or out, to declare yourself part or apart. This, I think (and, yes, fear) is one of those moments.

[ruminativerabbi]

Pesach 2024 - Leil Shimmurim

History is filled with Rubicon moments, moments at which the course of history is altered by an event so widely understood to be of colossal importance that everything that follows feels related to that specific juncture in time, to that specific event. Pearl Harbor was that kind of moment in history. 9/11, too. So must have been also July 4, 1776. And the original Rubicon moment—when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy in January of 49 BCE and thus initiated the insurrection that led to the end of the Roman Republic and, eventually, to the reorganization of the nation as the Roman Empire with Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son Augustus as its first emperor—that was (obviously) the first of them all. The famous words Caesar spoke aloud as he crossed the river into Italy, “the die is cast,” sums up the moment aptly: just as you can’t unroll dice, so did Caesar mean to say that his act of leading an army across the border into Italy could not be undone and would have to be allowed to lead wherever it went as the future unfolded in the wake of his decision. In the history of the Jewish people, Pesach itself is the original Rubicon moment. And it involved crossing a body of water as well!

Was October 7 such a moment for Israel? Was it one for Hamas? Or was it one for both, and also for diasporan Jews in all the various lands of our dispersion? I suppose those questions could conceivably all have different answers, but it doesn’t feel that way to me: as the months have passed since that horrific day last fall, things feel to me more and more as though the Simchat Torah pogrom permanently altered the course forward into the future for all directly and indirectly concerned parties. As Pesach approaches, this notion of a Rubicon moment has become the lens through which I feel myself called to think of the Simchat Torah pogrom.

The specific way in which the conflict in Gaza has poisoned the atmosphere not solely on our college campuses, but even in our nation’s high schools and elementary schools, is by now common knowledge, as is also the way that this conflict has opened the gates to the expression of overt anti-Semitism in the American work place and at other public events that feel totally unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like the Christmas Tree lighting in Rockefeller Center last December. Nor are the halls of government immune: the fact, once unimaginable, that a member of Congress could formally decline to condemn people in her own district chanting “Death to America” at an anti-Israel rally and that that refusal be greeted by her colleagues with an almost universal shrug, is only this week’s example of how things have changed for Jewish Americans in the last half year. That people at the highest echelons of our American government could overtly—and without any sense of shame—suggest that American material support for Israel could, and possibly even should, be conditional on the elected leaders of Israel obeying the instructions of their American masters rather than those of their own constituents is just further proof that October 7 was a Rubicon movement for us all.

But history is not all Rubicon moments. Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about the slow deterioration of the Israelites’ status in ancient Egypt as year after year passed until their enslavement ensued almost naturally. Could slavery have been averted? Surely, it could have been: the Israelites had scores upon scores of years to pack up and go back to Canaan, but chose instead to remain permanently in Egypt on the assumption that their status would never change, that they would always be welcome, that no one would ever resent them as privileged foreigners living off the fat of somebody else’s land. I won’t repeat here what I wrote there, but the bottom line was (and is) that they could have saved themselves but, because there was no specific Rubicon moment, no pivot, no event that changed everything, they apparently chose to assume that nothing was changed at all. And then, just like that (or so it must have seemed), they were slaves possessed of no civil rights at all in a world in which midwives were charged not with assisting women in labor but with murdering the babies born to them.

I’ve written before about my relationship with Erna Neuhauser, my parents’ next-door neighbor. Born in 1898, Erna was in her 60s and early 70s when I was a teenager. But, long before that, she was a young married woman with a young daughter in Nazi Vienna, the city of her birth and the place in which she grew up. Some readers may recall that I’ve mentioned many times that Erna was a childhood friend of the woman later known as Miep Gies, the woman who risked her life years later to hide Anne Frank and her family in German-occupied Amsterdam. But the reason I mention her today is not related to Miep Gies’s story, but to her own. Erna was the first Shoah survivor I knew intimately. Of course, she never let anyone call her that because she was, she always insisted, not a survivor at all: she, her husband Ernst, and their daughter Liesel had been able to escape Vienna in 1938, first traveling to Sweden (where her brother had acquired residency earlier on and was able to sponsor them as refugees) and then to New York, where they settled and lived out their lives. But, also of course, she was a survivor—of the Nazification of Austria, of the intense anti-Semitism Anschluss brought in its terrible wake, of the degradation experienced daily, sometimes hourly, by the Jews of Vienna. And it was her story that framed my first effort to think seriously about the Shoah and to establish my own relationship to the events of those horrific years.

It was from Erna that I learned that the difference between Rubicon moments and non-Rubicon ones is not as clear as historians sometimes make it out to be. Yes, the moment Hitler annexed Austria—the event then as now known simply the Anschluss, the “Annexation”—was the Rubicon moment back across none could step. But it only seemed that way after the fact and what really happened was not one disastrous transformation from being welcome, respected citizens to despised Untermenschen, but the slow, step-by-step deprivation of the rights and privileges to which all had become accustomed. Jews couldn’t get their hair cut in non-Jewish barbershops. Jews could no longer ride the streetcars. Jewish children could no longer attend public schools. Some patriotic souls hung on, certain that things in their beloved homeland would soon improve. Others fled—some to America, others to the U.K. or to Sweden, still others to British Palestine. Many committed suicide in despair. I remember Erna saying that things somehow changed slowly and quickly at the same time. I’m feeling that right now in our nation, that sense that things are unfolding quickly and slowly somehow at the same time.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that Jewish parents would have been overjoyed to send a child to Harvard or to Stanford no matter what the cost? When did it feel reasonable not to wear a kippah on the subway or even on the LIRR? At what point did it feel wiser for Jewish teachers in New York City’s high schools not to mention their pro-Israeli sentiments for fear of being attacked by their own students? When did it start to feel normal for synagogues to hire armed guards to protect worshipers? When did I stop speaking in Hebrew on the phone in public places? I can’t even say that I don’t do that anymore—but I certainly don’t do it if I think someone might overhear me.

This isn’t the Weimar Republic we’re living in and it certainly isn’t Nazi Vienna. The center, at least so far, is definitely holding. Both presumed nominees in this fall’s presidential election self-present as allies of the Jewish community. The issue of anti-Semitism on campus is finally being addressed by people with the authority to effect real change. And, at least eventually, I still think reason will prevail, that people will come back to their senses and understand that Israel is not only our nation’s sole true friend in the Middle East, but also a fully reliable ally. But I am also sensitive to Pesach—now almost upon us—not solely being our annual celebration of freedom, but also our annual opportunity to obey the Haggadah’s famous injunction to think of ourselves not only as now-free people, but as once-enslaved ones…and to use that opportunity to consider how the Israelites ended up as slaves after having watched small micro-aggressive incidents become more and more overt, more difficult to endure, more suggestive of what was soon to come.

At Exodus 12:42, the Torah calls the eve of Pesach by the mysterious name leil shimmurim, a night of “keepings,” of “things kept or guarded.” What that means exactly has been a matter of debate for millennia. But for me it means: a night of holding on to history, of seeing time present through the lens of time past, of understanding our current situation as a function of what we’ve already experienced. Pesach is a hopeful holiday that celebrates the liberation of slaves from their bondage. But there is a monitory side to Pesach as well, one intended to make us think carefully about the present by focusing our gaze on stories from the past and in their light formulating our hopes for the future. Elijah comes to my seder table specifically with his intoxicating promise of redemption and survival. But Erna also comes, and her message is far more sobering than intoxicating…even after four cups of wine.

#Passover #Leil Shimmurim

[ruminativerabbi]

Like a Letter Left Unread

The whole eclipse thing earlier this week made a big impression on me, but not (maybe) for the reason you’d think.

It all started when I mentioned to one of my grandchildren that I hope it will be a clear, non-cloudy day when the sun goes into eclipse. This was met with the kind of equanimity only a child can muster up effortlessly: “Me too, Saba. But if it’s so cloudy you can’t see anything, the next eclipse is in just twenty years and we can see it then.” Well, okay, I thought, and just how old will I be on August 23, 2044? You see where we’re going here: I surely do hope to be somewhere in the summer of 2044 looking up through safety sunglasses at a clear, cloudless sky as the moon passes before the sun and hides it totally from view for a few minutes. But suddenly the whole discussion made me feel mortal—not fragile especially, just more aware of where I am actuarially than I generally enjoy being. Of course, it could have been way worse: she could have reminded me that Halley’s comet is due back in the summer of 2061.

How to relate to a total eclipse of the sun is a different matter entirely, however. For most moderns, it’s just a thing—something that happens every so often and creates a dramatic effect for a few minutes, then stops happening. Not good or bad, not something overly to focus on and certainly nothing to fear. But our sages in ancient times were less certain: possessed of the conviction that the Creator at least occasionally speaks through the medium of Creation itself, they sought meaning in all sorts of natural phenomena that moderns tend to wave away. Nor is this solely a rabbinic thing—the biblical story of Noah ends with God’s observation that rainbows are not just natural phenomena that sometimes occur, but signs from God that there will never again be a flood that wipes out humanity as was the case in the days of Noah and his ark. And it’s for just that reason that tradition dictates that we recite a short prayer—just a few words acknowledging the rainbow as a symbol of optimism and hope—when we see a rainbow. How often does this happen? Often enough! Joan and I saw the most beautiful rainbow in Niagara Falls, New York, just last week on our drive to Toronto. And, yes, I said the blessing.

But the rabbis were less sure about eclipses. There’s a semi-famous passage in the Talmud (at Sukkah 29a) that declares that any solar eclipse should be taken as a bad sign for the world, for example. And the text then goes on to flesh that thought out with an elucidatory parable: a solar eclipse, they taught, is God behaving roughly in the manner of an earthly king who prepares a giant banquet for all of his servants, perhaps as a way of thanking them for their loyal service. But then, suddenly, the king becomes aware of some specific way in which his servants have conspired to do him ill. So what does he do? He can’t cancel the banquet entirely—that would be (I’m guessing) bad form—but what he can do is instruct his personal valet to remove the torches that had been illuminating the banquet hall. And that, according to the parable, is what a solar eclipse is like: suddenly aware of some way in which humanity has failed to behave honorably or decorously but not quite prepared to wipe clean the slate as in Noah’s day (and which God had promised never again to do anyway), God simply darkens the sun as a way of expression divine displeasure.

Other sages, however, took a more nuanced view. Rabbi Meir, for example, agreed that both solar and lunar eclipses are bad omens, but solely for the Jewish people not for the entire world. And he too had a parable to back up his lesson. The situation that pertains during an eclipse, he taught, bodes poorly for the Jewish people only because they are m’lummadin b’makkoteihem. That’s not that easy an expression to translate, which even Rabbi Meir apparently thought might be the case. And so he too offered up a parable to make his point a bit clearer. A solar or lunar eclipse, he taught, is like when a teacher comes into the classroom and he is already holding a giant razor strop, the kind that was apparently used in Rabbi Meir’s day to punish school children for their poor behavior. Who gets the most jumpy upon noticing the strop in the teacher’s hand, Rabbi Meir asked rhetorically. And he then answered his own question: the student who is beaten with it the most often gets the most nervous—because that student supposes that the teacher is intending to beat him again. And that is what it means to be m’lummadin b’makkoteihem, as above: Jewish people are so used to suffering and being again and again beaten down, must not it be they specifically who are being prompted to fear the worst when the sun disappears and the world is plunged into darkness? (The words literally mean “well-versed in their own beatings” or something like that.)

Still other rabbis took an even more nuanced approach. Solar eclipses, they opined, are bad news for everybody, whereas eclipses of the moon are meant specifically to augur bad times for the Jewish people. And the rationale behind this approach has its own logic to it: the Gentile nations, who use a solar calendar to count off their years of their lives, are addressed through the solar event, whereas Jews, who maintain a mostly lunar calendar, God admonishes by making the moon disappear briefly from the nighttime sky. And then they go on to discuss solar eclipses, discussing the specific significance of the location of the sun in the sky when the eclipse takes place and assigning specific meaning in terms of the disaster soon to ensue to the hue the sun in eclipse takes on.

And then, as if all this weren’t enough, the Talmud goes on to quote an ancient source that lists the specific sins for which a solar eclipse may reasonably be taken as the divine response. That thought—including the peculiarly modern-sounding horror of people in an urban setting simply ignoring a woman calling out for help in fending off a would-be rapist—founders, though, on the fact that it isn’t correct: people fail to show proper respect for deceased community leaders all the time (another sin on the list) and yet the sun does not go into instant eclipse as a response!

Is there anything to any of this? We moderns understand what eclipses are and why they occur, and we also understand that they are fully naturally phenomena that are not related to, much less triggered by, the behavior of Jewish or non-Jewish terrestrials. As a result, our natural response is to turn away from tradition and make a kind of smug virtue out of feeling grateful that we know better. The Talmud, after all, is filled with ancient ideas about all sorts of things that we moderns, who understand that epilepsy is a disease and not a function of the circumstances under which the epileptic individual was conceived, can only smile at. And, indeed, the Talmud is filled with all sorts of medical observations that no one today considers even remotely to be scientific truths. So it would be more than reasonable just to wave all this away. But I have a different idea I’d like to propose, one a bit less literalist and more fanciful, but also, I think, reasonable.

In a long, fascinating passage towards the end of the talmudic tractate Berakhot, the Talmud offers up a detailed lesson regarding the correct way to interpret dreams. It’s a long passage filled with lots of theories about the meaning of dreams, but the basic principle set forward is that the importance of dreams depends fully on their interpretation. In other words, nothing in a dream means anything at all until the dream is ably interpreted by the kind of oneirocritic trained to offer up that kind of interpretation. So the dream contains solely the meaning we find embedded in it, a principle later to serve as the foundation of Freudian dream analysis. When the Talmud says that a dream left uninterpreted is like a letter left unread, it means precisely that: leaving a dream uninterpreted deprives it of the chance of having any impact on the dreamer at all, just as an unread letter has no potential to affect the person to whom it was addressed at all.

Maybe we should apply that kind of thinking to eclipses. I was in Glen Cove last Monday at 3:18 PM and, looking up at the sky through the special glasses, I saw almost all of the sun disappear behind the moon. As the sky darkened and the temperature fell, I felt the trappings of civilization falling away as I stood there under the sky and watched the sun that defines our lives here in earth darken. I felt small and fully insignificant as the planet on which I was standing and the sun it orbits and the moon that orbits it began their brief cosmic dance. My interpretation of the whole event, therefore, had to do with humility. And with resolve: more than I do usually, I felt the presence of the Earth, alive and not alive at the same time, sturdy yet fragile, immeasurably big yet also cosmically insignificant. And I felt a renewed sense of responsibility for the planet, for its climate and its ozone layer, for its air and its water, for its wellbeing and security. My interpretation of the eclipse, therefore, is that the sun and the moon teamed up to remind us that we are, at best, stewards of this world we inhabit. And that the degree to which we shuck off that feeling of insignificance that the eclipse did its best to instill in us—that will also be the degree to which we have left this rare celestial phenomenon as a letter left unread, as a dream left uninterpreted.

#Solar Eclipse #Talmudic Dream Interpretation

[ruminativerabbi]

Israel in Egypt

Slow change is hard to notice. This, we all know from daily life: you hardly notice children growing taller if you see them every single day, whereas you are often amazed at how much those very same children have grown if you haven’t seen them in a few months. The same is true about gaining or losing weight: you can see changes easily in people you see once a year that you would hardly notice at all if you saw that same person daily. And the same is true about far more challenging aspects of life than height or weight: it’s always hard to notice incremental change.

With Pesach approaching, the story of Israel in Egypt is on my mind. There are a thousand different ways to think about that famous story, but the one that seems the most relevant—and chillingly so—to our current situation has to do with just that notion, with the concept of incremental change.

Sometimes, the Torah teaches its best lessons so subtly that it is entirely possible to miss them entirely. When Jacob comes to Egypt, he is awarded a private interview with Pharoah, something that must have been as rare and special in his day as it would be today. Their conversation is an interesting one in lots of different ways, but the most interesting part is when Jacob tells Pharaoh that he is 130 years old. It sounds a bit like a throwaway line to most: Pharaoh asks and he obviously has to answer, so he does. And yet there is a lot packed into that single number.

Jacob comes to Egypt in the second of the seven years of famine. That would make him 135 when the famine ended five years after his arrival and life in Egypt returned to normal. But the Torah makes the point later on that Jacob lived to be 147 years of age. So why, Scripture prompts us to wonder, didn’t Jacob and his clan return to Canaan once the famine ended and they needed no longer to fear starvation back at home? (Jacob would have had a full dozen years to get that all organized.) The question is unasked, so also unanswered. But then Scripture tosses some new numbers into the mix.

Joseph, who was sold into slavery at seventeen and who was thirty when he became the grand vizier of Pharaoh’s Egypt, presided over the seven years of plenty that preceded the seven years of famine. That would make him thirty-nine years of age when his father and his father’s family arrived in Egypt in the second year of famine, and forty-four years of age when, five years later, the famine ended. That being the case, he would have been fifty-six when, twelve years later, Jacob died. But the last lines of Genesis report that Joseph lived to be 110 years of age, which means that the Israelites would have been living in Egypt for something like fifty-four years when Joseph died.

Eventually, a Pharaoh came to the throne who, to quote Scripture, “knew not Joseph” and that was the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. Were there Pharaohs in between the one who welcomed Jacob’s family to Egypt and the one who knew not Joseph? The Bible doesn’t say. But what it does say—albeit subtly—is that the Israelites were in Egypt for more than half a century, and possibly a lot longer than that, when their situation had finally deteriorated to the point at which they could no longer just go home and, in fact, they had no choice but to endure the misery that slavery brought them in that land not their own.

They should obviously have left when the famine ended, but they didn’t. I suppose they eventually realized that. (After the fact, everybody’s a chokhom.) But my question has to do with the years between the end of the famine and the rise of the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

Let’s imagine another half-century passed as things began to deteriorate for the Jews of Egypt. At first, it was small things, what moderns would call instances of extra-legal microaggression. Then as now, these kind of things were easy to shrug off: an overheard insult, a vulgar joke, an instance of being made to feel unwelcome in familiar places—in the locker room at the gym or at the pool or in the supermarket. But public opinion began slowly to shift as the Israelites were increasingly less welcome in their host country, increasingly resented, increasingly disliked. Could they have stemmed that tide by acting forcefully to make things right? There’s no answer to that question, but in my fantasy version of the long stretch of time I’m imagining between Jacob’s death and the Israelites’ eventually enslavement, things began slowly to snowball as the Israelites’ prosperity was resented, their clannish ways disliked, and their refusal to embrace the national religion of Egypt found more and more insulting.

But the Israelites failed to notice any of that. Or to take any of it too seriously. They withdrew into their communities, failing entirely to understand the depth of the antipathy they were dealing with as they circled their wagons and took pride in the degree to which they had managed to keep the world at bay while, at the same time, missing the point about the level of rage that was slowly reaching boiling point in the world in which they actually lived. In other words, they managed to make a virtue about looking inward when what they really should have been doing is looking out at the storm brewing on the horizon and working to fix things before they truly became unfixable.

Could they have returned to Israel? Was that door ever really shut? Or did the Israelites just like living in the world’s most sophisticated superpower, in a center of world culture, in one of the handful of nations never to have been conquered or subjugated by any hostile neighbor ever? Did they think of themselves as Egyptians? It’s a less silly question than it sounds at first. They must have spoken Egyptian. (How else could have communicated with the citizens of their host nation?) They surely must have had contact with Egyptian officials of various sorts. I imagine that, at least in the beginning, they did think of themselves as some version of Egyptians, perhaps some going so far as to think of themselves as Egyptians-of-Israelite-origin, something in the away the more assimilated Jews of Germany used to refer to themselves as deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischer Herkunft, as German citizens of Jewish origin. (This was only ironic after the fact, obviously.) But things got worse, not better. At first no one even noticed, not really. And by the time they all fully understood how things were, they were making bricks for Pharaoh and building his storage cities as his fully unwilling slaves.

We just came back from a few days in Canada visiting with Joan’s family. Everything seemed normal. But things have changed, almost without any of the locals noticing. The Canadian government, once a staunch defender of its citizens civil rights, has outlawed kosher slaughter. Of course, they didn’t put it that way and said instead that they were enacting a new law that would guarantee that animals be slaughtered in a way that they argued would be more humane than the way Jewish tradition requires and they simply didn’t care if that basically meant outlawing kosher slaughter. (This from a nation that sanctions as legal the clubbing of baby seals because outlawing such a barbaric practice would offend the basic right to cultural self-preservation of the Inuit nation that inhabit Canada’s Arctic. For more on that, click here.) Of course, Canada is not alone. Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Estonia, Slovenia, and Finland have also outlawed kosher slaughter, in effect saying that Jews are tolerated in those places as long as they don’t mind abandoning their own traditions and living as others would prefer them to live. But my point today is that none of this is evident—and not even slightly—on the streets of Toronto. Everything really did feel normal. When I asked some of the people we met about the kosher meat thing, they mostly shrugged. Yes, they agreed, it’s terrible. But what can you do? We’ll just import meat from the States. So it will be a bit more expensive—it already costs a fortune so it will cost slightly more of one. It’s just the government. It’s just the Liberal Party. It's just the New Democrats. It’s just the Greens. It’s just Justin Trudeau. It’s always just something! No one said any of this to me in Egyptian, but they might as well have! (To be fair, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, a kind of umbrella group representing Canada’s Jews, is suing the government to force them to amend the legislation. But I don’t think anyone is especially hopeful this effort will be successful.)

And that brought me to thinking about our nation in that same light. Things have changed quickly and slowly at the same time. Some of our most prestigious college campuses have become centers of intolerance, including of the violent kind, aimed directly at Jewish students. Some of our most revered public officials—including the President, the Vice President, and the Senate Majority Leader—have spoken hostilely, even crudely, about the duly elected Prime Minister of Israel. (The President’s endless critique of Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the settled results of a fairly-held election seems only to apply to our own country, not to our allies.) Suddenly, things feel different. The bond between Israel and our nation feels less strong, less sturdy, less un-unravelable. The degree to which the Trump campaign has begun openly to mix evangelical tropes into its campaign rhetoric feels ominous, not merely exclusionary and off-putting. The subtle sense that it might be wiser not to wear a kippah on the subway, a feeling I had previously only felt strongly on the Metro in Paris, suddenly feels fully reasonable.

Everybody knows that you can boil a frog alive in an open petri dish if you only heat the water slowly enough. Whether that’s actually true or not, I have no idea. (The blogosphere is equivocal.) But the Haggadah’s famous remark that Jews are required at Pesach to think of themselves as though they personally were slaves in Egypt and were personally liberated from their bondage by God’s might hand and outstretched arm—that remark seems to me to include the parallel obligation to think about all the years that led into slavery, decades of ever-increasing signs of degeneration blithely ignored by all until it really was too late.

#Israel in Egypt #Passover #Anti-Semitism

[ruminativerabbi]

Purim 2024

Purim begins on Saturday night. Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It feels like we’re ready.

And it also feels like we couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from somewhere. When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim. That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually does come from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place. Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs and haters.

But much-younger-me was unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details, of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia. And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad people being defeated instead of the good people.

Eventually, much-younger-me grew up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere.

So I was in. But not entirely. In 1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for years after reading Schindler’s List (then still called Schinder’s Ark) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was always with me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade.

And that brings me to Purim 2024, the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical, quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable.

Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we can surely observe it eighty years later too!  But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to speak as current-me, as who I am today.

We live on the razor’s edge, all of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought. As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there if they wished—they all seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim and, yes, having great fun at the same time.

Living on a razor’s edge is uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from somewhere. And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all. That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least eventually, from somewhere.

#Purim 2024

[ruminativerabbi]

Ezra and Esther

Being an ancient book, the Bible makes many of its best points using all sorts of literary techniques that are unfamiliar to modern readers. Sometimes these are subtle flourishes that only someone reading truly carefully would ever notice. But other instances are totally overt, fully visible, and noticeable by even someone just casually perusing the text. The willingness of the narrative to depict the same individual as being two different ages at the same time is a good example: to most moderns, passages that do that have a clumsy feel to them and suggest that some ancient editor must have been asleep at the switch and simply failed to see a giant discrepancy that could easily have been fixed. (To see an essay I published years ago about that specific feature of the scriptural text, click here.) But discrepancy is more wisely taken as a literary feature of the text, as a kind of riddle fully intended to teach something to those who take the time to solve it.

Also in that category is the apparent willingness of Scripture to present two versions of the same story that are essentially incompatible with each other. The most famous example of that would be in the very beginning of the biblical text, where Genesis starts off with two wholly irreconcilable accounts of the creation of humankind. Many and clever have been the attempts of countless commentators to “fix” the problem by finding a way to fit the stories together into a single, cogent narrative. But the far more interesting way to approach the problem is to understand this opening riddle as one of many places in the text of Scripture in which the same story is told in two discordant versions not to confuse or to annoy, but to invite the reader to exploit the differences between the two conflicting texts to learn a lesson that Scripture prefers for some reason to teach subtly rather than fully openly.

As Purim approaches, I’ve been thinking how that approach to mismatched texts can be applied not solely to texts within a biblical book, but also to the larger biblical corpus itself. (I have an essay about that too: click here.) In other words, taking the Bible as a book (as opposed to a collection of books) allows the reader to approach the full text of Tanakh as a single literary unit to which the interpretive rules generally brought to bear in explicating passages within specific single books can be fruitfully applied.

In the second of my two essays mentioned above, I applied this principle to a huge difference between the biblical books of Jeremiah and Daniel, one that would be simple to wave away as a mere instance of misspelling on the part of one or both authors. Today, I would like to apply that same principle to the biblical books of Esther and Ezra. And then I would like to apply the lesson that comparison suggests to our present situation as Jewish Americans.

The Book of Ezra, one of Scripture’s most understudied books, begins where Chronicles leaves off: with the surprise announcement that, as one of his first royal edicts, Cyrus, king of Persia, formally ended the exile in Babylon and told the Jews living in modern-day Iraq and Iran that they could return to Israel and re-establish Jewish life in that place. It’s a complex story. The edict of Cyrus itself appears in Scripture in several different versions. The specific relationship between the work of the Chronicler (as the anonymous author of Chronicles is chummily called by scholars) and Ezra and its own sister work, the Book of Nehemiah,is a matter of endless scholarly debate. But, for all that, the storyline itself is clear as day. In the waning days of the Kingdom of Judah (the sole remaining Jewish state in its day, the northern Kingdom of Israel having been dismantled by its Assyrian overlords more than a century earlier), the Babylonian hordes arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. There was a brief window of opportunity during which the coming debacle could have been averted. (The prophet Jeremiah was at the peak of his powers in the months leading up to said debacle and promote surrender as a means of survival.) But the king of Judah wouldn’t hear of it. And what ensued was the razing of Jerusalem’s walls, the slaughter of countless citizens, the destruction of the Temple, and the annihilation of the nation’s hopes for some sort of continued existence as an autonomous state. What ensued is known as the Babylonian Exile. Some Jews—the poorest and least educated ones—were ignored. But the rest of the nation—the royal court, the scholars, the businesspeople, the upper and middle artisan classes—were taken off into exile and forced to attempt to survive while “weeping on the shores of Babylon.”

There is endless debate about the details: how many people went into exile, how many survived, how successful they were or weren’t in retaining their ties to their own Jewish culture while in a hostile environment. But none of that alters the basic the storyline: the Babylonians exiled some or many (but not all) the Jews and then, when they were defeated in turn by Cyrus of Persia, those Jews and their descendants were permitted to go home and it is their story that the Book of Ezra tells. Nor is the moral of the story hard to suss out: Jewish life in exile is possible, but the only real hope for continued Jewish existence lies in return to the land. Yes, Cyrus’s decree specifically permits any who wish to stay behind and support the returnees financially (“with gold, silver, goods, livestock, and valuables”). But the author’s point couldn’t be clearer: exile is barely bearable and only briefly. When the opportunity presents itself to return to Zion, the people who care about their own future get going—because that is where their future lies. From there, life progressed. In the chronology put forward in Ezra, Cyrus is replaced on the throne by Darius, who is followed by—surprise!—King Achashveirosh, known to all from the Esther story. (His “real” name was Xerxes, and he was followed by his son Artaxerxes, who was on the throne in Ezra’s own day.)

Let’s go back to Achashveirosh. I love that he has two names. (I do too, as do most diasporan Jewish types.) And I love that he’s mentioned not only in the book that is so much “about” him, but also in other books: here in Ezra and also once in the Book of Daniel (whose author thought he was Darius’s father, not his grandson. Whatever.) And thus does he serve as the link between Ezra and Esther by appearing in both, albeit briefly in Ezra and at length in Esther.

The storyline of Esther is known to all who have ever been in shul on Purim. But that story contains some riddles generally left unposed, thus also unsolved.

A terrible decree goes forth calling for true genocide, for the total eradication of the Jewish people. The edict is met with astonishment by the people, who are given a full eleven months to prepare for their execution. Eventually, things end up well. But I’m focused on what happens before that happens. The people is in a panic. They appear to inhabit every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. The portrait drawn by the Chronicler and by Ezra of a people temporarily banished from its homeland and more than eager finally to abandon exile and return to Israel seems oddly out of sync with the scene depicted in Esther. Cyrus reigned for about twenty years, from 550 BCE to 530. Darius reigned for about forty years after that. And then we have Achashveirosh/Xerxes, who came to the throne in about 465 BCE and who reigned for about forty years. In Cyrus’s day, the Book of Ezra has the Jewish people returning en masse to the Jewish homeland and leaving a few stragglers behind. But, a mere century later, the Book of Esther depicts a Persian empire with Jews living in all 127 of its provinces and apparently well settled in and, until Haman, secure.

And how do the Jews in the Megillah respond to impending genocide? (This is, of course, real genocide they were facing, not the phony kind modern-day anti-Semites see whenever Israel dares defend itself forcefully against its enemies.) They weep. They fast. They daub themselves with ashes, essentially pre-sitting shiva for themselves while they still can. But no one seems to remember that Israel—then called Yehud (the Persian version of Judah)—was one of those 127 provinces. And that there was no specific reason for the Jews, instead of cowering in terror, not to return to their own ancestral homeland and there to defend themselves against their enemies. This course of action—forceful, beyond justifiable, and possible even fully successful—this seems to have occurred to no one.

The Jews seem to prefer their misery. Mordechai forbids Esther to reveal her Jewishness to the king until precisely the right moment. But surely the Jews of Shushan knew that Esther was Jewish—how could they not have? They all seem to know who Mordechai is. And Esther was his ward, an uncle’s daughter whom he had adopted and promised to raise. Surely she too would have been known to all. And yet no one seems to light upon the idea of getting Esther to beg the king for permission to return to Zion  and there, in their own homeland, to resist the terror-onslaught planned by wicked Haman.

And so we have two worldviews in conflict: the one set forward in Ezra in which it goes without saying that the future of the Jewish people depends on their ability to flourish in Israel and the one in Esther that seems to think that the best hope for Jews in the diaspora is to hope that salvation from even the most extreme version of violent anti-Semitism (i.e., the kind that promotes genocide as its end goal) is to pray that salvation comes, to quote Mordechai himself, “from somewhere.”

Or do we? Could the point of Esther be to show the folly of charting a future for the Jewish people by hoping for salvation “from somewhere” or anywhere? The Jews of Persia were saved because of Esther’s daring and Mordechai’s cunning. But that their plan works at all is presented as something just short of miraculous. The Jews of Persia are depicted as powerless and foolish…and wholly unable to see that their only real hope rests in returning to Zion and there flourishing out in the open and fully in the light as proud members of the House of Israel. Ezra simply starts off by taking that for granted. Esther depicts a people gone astray a mere century later. Reading each in each other’s light is meant, I think, not to confuse, but to challenge those inclined to suppose that Jews can be safe by relying on others and hoping for the best and, to encourage them, ayin l’tziyyon tzofiah, to see where the ultimate destiny of Israel lies.

#Book of Ezra #Megillat Esther #Cyrus of Persia #Xerxes #Achashveirosh

[ruminativerabbi]

Seeking Solace in Small Things

I’m feeling the weight of it all these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how precisely it may have come about.

Paired with the rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats, directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.

And so I’ve found myself seeking solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and survived.

The first is, of all things, an earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging. There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death: when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr. Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just recently, the earring was discovered.

It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful. Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past (which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be unable to shake off.

My second small thing is even tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing: a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7th or 6th century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that place.

Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always something left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by remembering.

And my third small thing is, of all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I ❤️ Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims, visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I ❤️ Jerusalem” pin, an ancient version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.

[ruminativerabbi]

Heroes

I was troubled, but also very moved, by the death of Alexei Navalny, the personality at the core of the resistance movement in Russia struggling to oppose the dictatorial and oppressive policies of the Putin regime. What exactly happened is not at all clear. At the time of his death, Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony in Western Siberia in a place called Yamalo-Nenets near the Arctic Circle. According to the warden, he was taking a walk just two weeks ago after telling some guards that he didn’t feel at all well. And then he collapsed. The prison authorities claim to have done all they could to resuscitate him, but were, they said, regretfully unsuccessful, as result of which regretted unsuccess he was dead by mid-afternoon. His body was then held for well over a week and then finally released to his family for burial. And so ended the life of one of the world’s true heroes, a man who not only put his life on the line to stand up for his beliefs, but who personally embodied the struggle for human rights in today’s Russia. Yehi zikhro varukh. May his memory be a blessing for his co-citizens in Russia and for us all.

There’s a lot to say about Navalny, but the detail—one among many—that is particularly resonant with me has to do with his return to Russia in 2021, an act that was as noble as it was death-defying. By 2021, of course, Navalny had a long history of being a thorn—and an especially sharp one at that—in the side of Vladimir Putin. He had led countless demonstrations against the Putin government. He repeatedly accused, certainly correctly, Putin of engineering his own victories whenever he stood for re-election as Russia’s president. And he openly opposed the war against Ukraine.

Navalny tried several times to gain a foothold in the bureaucracy he so mistrusted. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013. And then he ran for president of Russia in 2018, a move that was in and of itself daring given that he had previously been found guilty of embezzlement, which detail would normally have disqualified him from running for elected office despite the fact that there appears to be no reason to think that the verdict was just or reasonable. But the real reason Navalny was such a problem for Putin was that he appeared to be unfazed by the forces of government, including the Russian judiciary, that were openly and brazenly arrayed against him. And so the government eventually took matters to a new level.

In 2020, on a flight to Moscow, Navalny took ill and ended up on a ventilator in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his airplane had been obliged to make an emergency landing. It didn’t take doctors long to realize that he had been poisoned. (It later came out that his clothing, including his underwear, had somehow been suffused with the Novichok nerve agent, a poison known to have been used by Russia in the past to murder dissidents abroad.) Eventually, the German government, acting unilaterally, sent an airplane to Omsk to bring Navalny to Germany. Amazingly, this actually worked. And it was in Berlin that doctors at the famous Charité Hospital determined with certainty that Navalny had been the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his life and that he had definitely been poisoned. Remarkably, his life was saved and he recovered. And then, in January of 2021, he returned to Russia.

Because Navalny had been convicted in a 2014 trial that was almost certainly politically motivated and unjust, he had theoretically been forbidden to leave Russia even for medical treatment. And so was he arrested at the Moscow airport upon his return to Russia and imprisoned to await a judge’s decision about his future. And it was just a month after that, in February of 2021, that a Moscow judge decreed that his suspended sentence, minus time served, would be replaced with an unsuspended one and that Navalny would have to serve two and a half years in a Russian prison. He was sent to one prison, then to another. Eventually, the government determined that it did not want to face a freed Navalny in less than three years and so began new proceedings against him again, this time charging him with fraud and contempt of court. In March of 2022, just two years ago, he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison. And then, because even nine years was apparently not long enough, Navalny was put on trial again last summer and sentenced to an addition nineteen years on extremism charges. And so he ended up in the Arctic Circle prison in which he died two weeks ago at the age of forty-seven.

Navalny’s is a long, complicated story. But the one detail that stands out to me, the single part of the story that is the most resonant with me—and with my lifelong interest in the concept of heroism—has to do with Navalny’s decision in January 2021 to leave safety in Berlin and return to Russia. He had every reason to expect that he would be arrested upon return. He had no reason to suppose that any future trials to which he would be subjected would be just. He surely knew not to expect clemency or mercy from Vladimir Putin, the man behind all the juridical procedures overtly and unabashedly designed to silence him. And yet he chose to return—not specifically, I’m sure, because he wanted to die or because he wanted to participate in yet another crooked trial, but because he saw himself as a moral human being who had been granted the opportunity to inspire his co-citizens to demand justice and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

 I’ve written in this space, although not too recently, about my boundless admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was safe and sound in New York when the Second World War broke out, but who made the noble (and eventually fatal) decision to return to Germany and there to try to inspire people to resist Nazism and to turn away from the path of ruinous and fascist barbarism down which the Nazi government was intent on leading the nation. (To revisit my comments about Bonhoeffer from 2011, click here.) Here was, in my eyes, a true hero: a man fully committed to his own ideals who made the conscious decision to leave the safe haven he had already found and to travel to a land that would probably, and which eventually did, kill him. To me, that decision to risk everything to attempt, even quixotically, to do good in the world represents the essence of heroism. It came to naught, of course. He did a lot of good for a lot of people, but, in the end, he paid the big price. On April 8, 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was tried on the single charge of treason in a court set up in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. There were no witnesses. No evidence against him was brought forward, nor was a transcript of the proceedings made. He was found guilty, apparently on Hitler’s personal order, and executed the next day in a way that was specifically intended to maximize his personal degradation and agony. (Eric Till’s 2000 movie, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, is a worthy attempt to tell Bonhoeffer’s story even if the director couldn’t quite bring himself to depict the barbarism of Bonhoeffer’s final moments in any detail, let alone explicitly. For a more detailed account of his life, I recommend Eric Metaxas’s 2020 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, which I read a few years ago and enjoyed immensely.)

So, two men who lived scores of years apart, who spoke different languages, who came from different countries. One, a political man fully engaged by the political process. The other, a man of God fully in the thrall of his own calling to preach God’s word in the world and to inspire others to seek justice and to act righteously. But both heroes in my mind—both fully safe in a place their tormentors could not reach them and yet both of whom made the decision to return to their separate homelands to seek out in those places the destiny to which each felt called. Would I have left New York in 1939 or Berlin in 2021 to risk my own life to follow the destiny I perceived to be my own? I’d like to think I would have. Who wouldn’t? But we don’t all have it in us to act that boldly, to risk everything to be ourselves fully and in the most noble way possible. To be a man in full—or a woman in full—is never quite as easy in real life as it sounds as though it should be on paper. And that is why I admire those two men, Bonhoeffer in his day and Navalny in ours—and their willingness not merely to talk the talk, but truly—and at their own mortal peril—to walk the walk. May they both rest in peace!

#Alexei Navalny #Dietrich Bonhoeffer #heroism

[ruminativerabbi]

The Jewish Wind Phone

All of us for whom prayer is part of daily life have occasionally been challenged to justify our practice—possibly even just to ourselves—by saying clearly whom we think we are actually speaking to when we pray. It’s not that easy to know how to respond. There are numerous traps to avoid when answering. Saying simply that we are talking to God seems inevitably to lead to two derivative questions, both unsettling to address: how exactly we know that and why it is we think all-knowing God needs to be told anything at all. And a third question too, equally disquieting, also surfaces regularly, the one that asks why it is, if prayer is dialogue, that God never seems to talk back in the way we would consider perfectly normal with any other interlocutor.

The problem, however, lies not in our answers but in the questions themselves: all are rooted in a simplistic understanding of what language is and the role it plays in our human lives. Yes, language is communication: you ask the nice lady in the store which aisle the paper towels are in and she tells you. But language is also self-expression, a means of ordering the world, of grappling with the unfathomable by addressing it, by naming it, by interpreting it. And it is that latter definition of language that we bring to prayer: the world feels overwhelming in the wake of disaster and, instead of withdrawing into our shells like terrified turtles, we face the darkness by naming it, by labeling its parts, by addressing it from the depths of our consciousnesses. We thus allow language to serve as a kind of bridge that connects our inmost selves to the terror just ahead…and, instead of trembling in our boots or shutting our eyes, we speak. And thus do we subdue the raging world with language, with words, and, yes, with prayer.

Almost entirely forgotten—at least by Americans—is the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, a nightmarish disaster in the course of which 15,894 died almost instantly, most from drowning. More than 2,500 simply disappeared and were never seen again.

In the wake of that disaster, I remember reading about an older man named Itaru Sasaki, who lives in a place called Ootsuchi where over eight hundred people were washed out to sea in less than a single minute. His town was devastated by the tsunami, but he himself was in mourning for a cousin, someone he truly loved, when the disaster struck. And so, feeling bereft and totally alone, he came up with a very strange way to deal with his grief: he purchased on old phone booth and set it up in his garden. Then he purchased an ancient rotary phone, a black one, and put it on a table in the booth. There was no dial tone because the telephone wasn’t attached to anything. But on that phone, Mr. Sasaki would talk to his cousin and tell him about his life now that he was carrying on alone and without someone he truly loved. He called it the kaze no denwa, the “wind telephone.”

And then, the amazing part. Word spread about this thing, this crazy, unconnected, telephone in a phone booth in a garden by the sea. People started coming. In droves. From all over Japan. NPR sent a reporter to cover the story and he got permission to record some of what people were saying into the phone.

“Why only me, dad? I’m the only one left alive. People don’t realize what it’s like,” a teenage boy said to his missing father.

“Everyone’s good here. We are all trying hard,” an elderly lady told her long-time spouse, a man who disappeared when the sea overwhelmed his town.

“You were going to buy me a violin. I just bought it myself finally,” a girl says to her vanished parents through tears.

“I’m building a new house but without you or our little girl and boy, there’s no point is there?” The words choked up in the throat of a middle-aged man who lost his entire family.

It’s a touching story, but the big question—to me, at any rate—is why this thing worked at all. Shouldn’t it not have worked? It’s an idiotic thing, after all: an ancient rotary phone that isn’t connected to anything in a phone booth that is also not connected to anything in a garden in front of someone’s private home. But what makes it interesting to me is that it somehow does work…and not because it really does anything at all. These poor people in Japan found in that phone booth not a portal to the afterworld, but a way of using language to communicate with the universe and all of its parts, a way of facing the unimaginable using the tools offered by language itself, a way of speaking into the dark and finding, not silence and not nothing, but glimmers of hope, of light, of promise. For me, that is what prayer is, almost by definition. For more about the wind telephone, click here or here.

It was this story, which I first read about years ago, that came to mind when I first visited the remarkable website called Coming Home Soon (click here to go see for yourself). Currently a real-space exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam and created in Holland by people consumed with worry about the hostages being held by Hamas, the on-line version is remarkable. The front page of the website offers pictures of every single one of the hostages held or still being held in Gaza, presenting all 253 and not distinguishing between the 110 who were released in a prisoner swap a few months ago, those still being held, and those already dead: all are or were prisoners of Hamas. (Hamas is holding the bodies of the deceased hostages to use as the most ghoulish of bargaining chips to use in future negotiations.)

Who thought of setting up this website, I don’t know. But the idea couldn’t be more simple: on the front page of the site are on display color photographs of each of the hostages. The dead have tiny “forever in our hearts” badges attached to their pictures; the ones already freed have “welcome home” badges. But otherwise they are all mixed up together on the page—just as they are in our hearts. And each photograph has just behind it a biography you can read of the hostage and—and now I get to my real point—and an opportunity to write to that hostage. The hostages don’t get mail. They don’t have access to email or to text messages. The letter you write and send off does not go into some cosmic in-box to wait for the hostages to log on and see what you had to say. The messages you send to the dead will not be any more unread than the ones you send to the living.

This is not a real mail service; this is the Jewish kaze no denwa, the Jewish wind phone. You write not to communicate—or at least not to communicate in the normal manner of people dashing off emails or dictating text messages to tell other people this or that—but to express, to pray, to use language as a kind of bridge between despair and hope, between the dismal reality of where we are and the bright light that beckons in the distance—the flickering flame of faith, of courage, and of confidence in the future.

When this is all over, all the hostages will come home—some, surely most, to their families and others to their graves. But, until that happens, the job of the righteous is to pray for their released and for their survival. Language is the bridge to God; that is why prayers are constructed of words. Sometimes, it feels right to turn to God directly in prayer. That, we do all the time. But there are also times when you can use language to pray to God by addressing a human party, living or dead. That is the opportunity the Coming Home Soon website affords: a way to pray for the hostages through the medium of language directed not directly to God but to those of God’s creatures in the most need of redemption.

#Prayer #Hostages in Gaza #Wind Phone

[ruminativerabbi]

Rage and Regret

Dear Friends,

One of the surprises Jerusalem offered up to us shortly after we bought our apartment and began to explore the neighborhood was a peaceful cemetery just a few blocks from our street in which are interred 79 Indian soldiers who served with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, as well as the bodies of 290 Turkish prisoners-of-war who died while in British captivity. So it is a strange place, that cemetery: a Hindu burial ground in which are also buried hundreds of Muslims who fell far from home and who had to be buried somewhere. There are no individual graves; the British apparently decided to bury the dead in two mass graves, one for the Hindus and one for the Muslims. Facing stone monuments record the names of the dead.

We’ve walked by many times; Joan’s cousin Rina used to live just down the road. It’s a peaceful place, a quiet place. But it never fails to strike me how strange the whole concept is: hundreds and hundreds of young men who died in a war fought basically over nothing at all in a distant place and who were then shoveled into a common pit (why do I think white soldiers would have been buried in separate graves?) and left to sleep in the earth in a place that none of them would ever have thought to call home.

Walking by that place never fails to re-awaken in me my recollection of Joan’s and my visit to the Beersheva War Cemetery, the resting place of more than 1200 soldiers from the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India. It’s also a peaceful place, well-tended, verdant, and well watched over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But what is shocking about the place are the stones themselves: row after row after row featuring the graves of young men, some just teenagers, who died on the same horrific day in 1917. It was a terrible day, too. By the beginning of October in 1917, the British forces under the leadership of General Edmund Allenby were well entrenched along the Gaza-Beersheba road with the intention of seizing Beersheva from the Turks. By the end of the month, all was ready. And on October 31, the battle was joined. The attack was led by the 800 men of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade, brave souls who leapt on horseback over the Turkish trenches and continued on into Beersheva, while other branches of the army attacked the Turkish legions from the side. In the end, the attack was successful and the Turks were soundly defeated. In many ways, in fact, the tide of war turned against the Ottoman Turks at Beersheva. And, indeed, before a year passed, the war was over and Turkish Palestine, wrested from the Ottomans, was handed over by the League of Nations to the British.

But the cemetery has its own story to tell. Now shady and peaceful, the silence is more ominous than calming as you enter through the shady gate and come across row after row after row of young men who died, all of them, on October 31, 1917. The place is well worth visiting, but what the experience yields, or at least what it yielded in me, was a deep sense of sorrow, of loss, of the true tragedy of war. Young men who should have been planning their lives, their weddings, their careers, their futures…instead dead as part of the incomprehensible madness that was the First World War and planning nothing at all other than an eternity of moldering far from home in someone else’s soil.

That many of the dead at Beersheva were veterans of Gallipoli only makes the story even more tragic and more poignant. (I saw Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, when it came out in 1981 and still remember the harrowing effect it had on me. If any readers are still laboring under the delusion that war can be glorious, Gallipoli really is a must-see.)

And that brings me to Gaza. To most, Gaza is a strip of land that has been ruled over by too many different foreigners since its glory days as ancient Philistia. The Romans, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Israelis all tried their hand at governing the place; I get the sense from my reading that all of the above couldn’t leave fast enough once the opportunity presented itself. (And, yes, I know there are people in Israel now demonstrating in the streets in an attempt to provoke the government into re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. Those people, with all respect, are living in a self-generated dream state fully divorced from reality.)

But Gaza has its own Jewish dead to consider. And I do not mean by that to reference the fallen of the current IDF campaign.

There was a very touching piece in the paper the other day about Israeli troops coming across Jewish graves in Gaza. And, indeed, the Gaza War Cemetery, established in 1920, contains the graves of over 3000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza. And some of those soldiers were Jewish, which fact was duly recorded on their tombstones. I suppose the idea was that the IDF soldiers felt a sense of kinship with the Jewish soldiers buried in that place, which is almost an ordinary thought, but somehow the story—by Troy O. Fritzhand, which I read in the Algemeiner (click here)—affected me in a less expected way as well.

I understand the logic behind the Israeli war against Hamas. I have no trouble with Israel going to war with the forces of evil, with people whose hatred of Israel and its Jews expressed itself on October 7 with almost unimaginable barbarism and Nazi-style brutality. Nor do I have any trouble with the notion that, when fighting a war against evil, the only true sin is to lose. I hate the thought of civilian casualties. But I also understand that the fact that the hostages have been held now for more than 120 days means that time is running out. All that, I get. But part of me feels the weight of tragedy pressing down as I read the news day after day.

I hate Hamas for having started this war. I grieve daily for the 1200 Israelis murdered, maimed, and raped on October 7. I can’t stop thinking about the 225 IDF soldiers who have died so far in this terrible war. And I think about the Hamas soldiers too—each a victim of his own fanaticism and willingness to die as part of an army of terror, but each also once an innocent babe who could have grown up to live a peaceful, productive life, who could have brought joy instead of unimaginable misery to the world. And, of course, I think also of the civilians of Gaza, people who, yes, put Hamas into power and who are now paying the awful price for that colossal error of judgment, but the large majority of whom could surely not have imagined October 7 and its aftermath.

To know with certainty that you are on the right side of a war does not make the war less tragic. Nor does it make it any less crucial that you win. But the tragedy feels overwhelming. I wasn’t alive when the Allies carpet-bombed Germany, but I think I would have felt the same way about the 600,000+ civilians who died during those bombing campaigns, which number includes about 76,000 children. The Allied leadership did what they perceived to be necessary to win the war, which they did. But my response to the civilian death toll is not censorious outrage, but deep sadness. How can the Germans have made us do that to them? How can the Japanese have created a situation in which Hiroshima was imaginable, let alone actually doable? And how can Hamas have created this situation in which the only way to rescue our hostages is to go in on foot to find them and liberate them from their captors’ control? The civilian deaths in Gaza are, in my opinion, all on Hamas. But that doesn’t make them less tragic.

And those are my emotions this week: weariness (because I am so tired of this burden of worry and anxiety), outrage (because what kind of people can have thrust this upon us?), terrible sadness (because of the children of Gaza, all innocents, who are paying the terrible price for their parents’ bad decisions), resolve (because if not me, then who?), and, despite everything, hope (because the God of Israel neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, and surely, at least eventually, light always wins out over darkness).  I continue to pray, even more fervently than in the past months, for peace, for resolution, and for victory. I’m feeling the burden of it all. I suppose we all are. But the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, of redeeming those held in captivity, is key here: defeating evil is the means, but bringing the captives home is the goal. And that’s what I’m praying for, day in and day out.

#Battle of Beersheva #Gaza War Cemetery #Hindu-Muslim Cemetery

[ruminativerabbi]

Can the Center Hold?

As we move forward through these strange times, I find myself careening these days back and forth between my native pessimism about the world and the occasional flash of uncharacteristic optimism. On the whole, things are probably no worse than they have been in the course of these last few months. And in some ways, things are actually looking up. (For one thing, I keep hearing rumors about some sort of imminent deal that will bring at least some of the hostages home. So that sounds hopeful.) I know both those things. But another part of me feels that the gyre is widening and that, at least in the end, the center will not hold. I write this week not to scare or depress, but to share my ill ease and to find comfort in inviting you to join me in hoping together for better times to come.

Yeats (that is, William Butler Yeats, 1865—1939) was one of the world’s greatest English-language poets, a Nobel laureate, eventually a senator in the Irish government. He was a strong Irish nationalist and he definitely flirted—and probably even more than just flirted— with the rising fascist movements of the 1930s. Not an anti-Semite in same sense as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, he was nonetheless part of a world that held anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to be part of a normal, educated person’s worldview. (For a brief but trenchant review of Irish anti-Semitism over the ages that appeared in the Irish Times a few years ago and that specifically mentions Yeats, click here.) There’s a lot of evidence to review, but I don’t wish to sort it all out here. Nor do I want to comment—not now, at any rate—about the set of bizarre reasons that have led Ireland to be the most consistently anti-Israel nation in Europe. (For a recent essay published in the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle on that precise topic, click here.) Instead, I’d like to use one of Yeats’ most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” to frame my thoughts about the world we are all living in.

Yeats begins his poem with a stunning image:

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre

            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

A gyre is a gigantic circular oceanic surface current. Before the poet starts to write, he looks out at the sea and finds it calm, placid, and peaceful. And then the churning begins. At first, it is barely perceptible, hardly even noticeable. And then, slowly, the motion picks up speed. What was tranquil and serene just a moment earlier is suddenly unsteady and unfixed in place. And as the speed of the water picks up, the pleasurable expectation of swimming peacefully in calm waters is replaced by the fear of drowning in those same waters. Nothing, suddenly, is as it should be. The tightest personal connections—Yeats uses the intimate relationship of the falcon and the falconer—become attenuated, then ruined entirely by the deafening gyre as it picks up speed and grows louder and stronger. In the world the poet is comparing to the sea, then, things that are normally each other’s natural complement—butter and toast, coffee and cream, pillow and pillowcase, socks and feet—these normal connections too weaken. And, in the end, the center itself around which life revolves—the family, the house, the workplace, the church, the shul, the park, the grocery—the center doesn’t hold and what was once normal, even pedestrian, now seems unpredictable and in a state of permanent, debilitating flux. And then, just like that, nothing at all seems fixed in place. Or safe.

I’ve lost track of the news even though I read obsessively. I subscribe to a dozen daily news bulletins, peruse half a dozen on-line newspapers, have an inbox that is constantly overflowing. My junk file has its own junk file. I am, I think, as up-to-date on the world’s goings-on as anyone who has a day job could possibly be. Mostly, I deal with it all by compartmentalizing the data, thus storing it in manageable chunks for later degustation (which I occasionally even get to). In that way, my center can hold. But just lately the center is not holding. And the gyre feels more than ever as though it is ominously large and ever-widening.

Let’s consider one single week’s worth of news. A man was arrested last Monday in London and charged with having attacked several employees in a kosher supermarket with a knife. In Haifa, a terrorist drove his car into a crowd of civilians just yards from the front entrance to the Haifa Naval Base. A Chabad rabbi in Washington was pushed out of a Lyft cab by the driver, who then violently attacked him. A terror cell about to perpetrate an “October 7-like attack” was identified and neutralized in Jenin. A would-be terrorist was shot and killed as he tried to murder soldiers standing guard at the entrance to Tekoa, a peaceful town in the Gush Etzion bloc that Joan and I visited just last summer. The International Court of Justice considered seriously a charge of attempted genocide made by South Africa against Israel, then rendered its decision almost without reference at all to the October 7 pogrom that took the lives of well over twelve hundred innocent Israeli civilians, some of whom were beheaded and others of whom were raped. The speaker of the French National Assembly commented the other day that the steep resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in France had reached the level at which it poses “a threat to the foundations of [the French] republic.” Federal agents in Massachusetts arrested a man who was making credible threats of mass violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in his state. Undeniable proof was adduced that UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations charged with supplying humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, is so suffused with actual Hamas-affiliated terrorists and sympathizers that it wouldn’t be that unreasonable for UNRWA itself to be considered a terrorist organization. (If you have access to the on-line version of the Wall St. Journal, click here for a truly shocking account of the whole UNRWA scandal.) The top civil rights officer at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent her entire professional life as a civil rights attorney, declared herself “astounded” at the level of anti-Semitic aggression the characterizes our nation’s college campuses. To offer one single example, students at Stanford University, once a school I would have characterized as one of our nation’s finest, were chased just last week from a campus forum on anti-Semitism by a crowd of haters threatening to hunt them down in their homes and, at least by implication, to murder them there. (Click here for the horrific details. They’d have to pay me to send a kid of mine to Stanford. But I wouldn’t anyway.)

Is the center holding? More or less. So far.

The poet continues with reference to anarchy being “loosed upon the world” and goes on to imagine innocence itself drowning as the “blood-dimmed” tide rises. And the problem is not only the brutal barbarism of the aggressor; it’s also the fecklessness of the aggressed-against: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Oy. And so ends the first half of the poet’s poem.

Being a Christian, Yeats imagines the salvation of the world in Christian terms. No problem with that for me: in what language should the man speak if not his own? And so the Christian man looks to the horizon for salvation and expects Jesus. But Jesus does not appear at all. The poet is ready for the Second Coming, for the messianic moment, for redemption. But on the horizon he suddenly espies something else entirely:

…somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare…

The savior cometh not and instead cometh the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” The poet expects to be saved, but his hopes are dashed as his faith turns out to have been misplaced entirely because all the distant horizon can deliver up is a monster. All the promises of modern society—prosperity, human dignity, security—turn out to be hollow,  misshapen fantasies; none will help much. Or at all. The much-awaited Second Coming yields only an ogre, a fiend, a “rough beast.” There is no hope.

And where does that leave us? I too look to the horizon and wait for redemption. I also fear the “rough beasts” of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, anti-humanism, and anti-Americanism, the four horsemen (to wander back into Christian terms) of my personal most-feared apocalypse. And yet, despite it all, I don’t find myself entirely drained of hope. I keep perusing the headlines with all the doom they presage for the world and all the terribleness they recount, but somehow find myself able to retain hope in the future. Where that comes from, I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with relativity. Hamas is Amalek, but we’ve faced worse. Our American college campuses are minefields for Jewish students, but things will surely improve as the problem is dragged out into the light and the world can see the haters for what they are and respond accordingly. Israel’s set of tasks in Gaza is beyond daunting, but the tide seems slowly to be turning. I continue to harbor the real hope that the hostages are all still alive and that the rumors of a deal to release them will turn into reality. And even though the streets of our cities seem clogged with villains whose hatred for Israel feels visceral rather than rational, I still have confidence that the American people will never embrace anti-Judaism and that the republic, the indivisible one featuring liberty and justice for all, will never turn on its own citizens. Do I sound Pollyanna-ish or rationally hopeful? Like an ostrich with its head in the sand or a Jew with his head held high? Even I am not sure. But I continue to believe in the future, in our future in this place and in the future of Israel. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

#W.B. Yeats #Gyre #The Second Coming

[ruminativerabbi]

The Two-State Solution

You would think that by now no amount of hypocrisy on the part of the great world out there could surprise, let alone startle, me at this point. Even I think that! And yet I find myself consistently amazed to find myself amazed at the duplicity of our so-called friends, not to mention the out-and-out phoniness of self-proclaimed allies who insist that they only want the best for the Jewish people or for the State of Israel.

If I had nothing to do for the rest of my life I could begin a list. But since my time is limited, I’ll settle for writing about our “friends” who have suddenly discovered, or rather re-discovered, the “two-state solution” as the cure for all that ails Israel and its neighbors. And they are legion: I’ve lost track of how many different newspaper articles I read this last week alone in which the author breathlessly announces that the reason the entire Arab-Israeli sikhsukh wasn’t resolved long ago has to do with the intransigence of Israelis with respect to the famous “two-state” solution, the compromise invariably touted by such authors as the obvious panacea to all that ails the Middle Eastern world. Here, for example, is a story from Taiwan explaining to readers of the Taipei Times how things would calm down instantly if only Bibi would heed President Biden’s call for a “two-state solution.”

The notion itself of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli problem, of course, is as old as the state itself and, in fact, there actually are two states, one Arab and one Jewish on the territory of the old British Mandate of Palestine. Or, rather, there would be had the British not unilaterally sawn the entire kingdom of Jordan, then called Transjordan, off of the mandated territory and offered it to the Hashemites as their own country. So the U.N. was dealing with the part that was left and that, indeed, they voted on November 22, 1947, voted to split down into two nations, a Jewish one and an Arab one.

The next part, everybody knows. The Jews of the yishuv accepted the plan and declared independence on May 14, 1948. (Our apartment in Jerusalem is actually just half a mile or so from November 22nd Street, a pretty place named specifically in honor of the U.N. decision.) The Arabs of British Palestine, however, did not follow suit and declare their own state. Instead, they went to war and lost, which failure laid the groundwork for the subsequent seventy-five years of hostility towards the Jewish state.

Whatever the problem really is, it certainly doesn’t have to do with not enough ink having been spilt—or time wasted—trying to work things out. The Madrid Conference of 1991, the Oslo Accords of 1991 and 1993, the Wye Plantation Memorandum of 1998, the Camp David Summit of 2000, the Annapolis Conference of 2007, the John Kerry shuttle diplomacy of 2013, the Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan of 2020—all of these were “about” the two-state solution, each in its own way an effort to finesse the details while ignoring the fact that only one party to the dispute seemed even remotely interested in recognizing the other’s right to nationhood.  Nor does the concept lack international sponsors: a quick google of “international leaders in favor of a two-state solution” yields a very impressive list, a list that includes President Biden, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, British P.M. Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian P.M. Justin Trudeau, Australian P.M. Anthony Albanese, New Zealand P.M. Christopher Luxon, and, saving the best for last, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. They are all on board!

Most impressive of all is that a full 138 nations have alreadyrecognized the State of Palestine, the fact that none of the above efforts to create a viable two-state solution has succeeded waved away as a mere detail hardly worth mentioning.

So, all that being the case, what actually is the problem? Just this week, we were exposed to the current administration’s pique with Israeli P.M. Netanyahu for not being fully enough behind the two-state solution. The L.A. Times had a particularly interesting op-ed piece on the topic (click here). CNN’s piece (click here) was also quite good. And, of course, nothing could ever deter the New York Times from trying to pry some space out between the Biden and Netanyahu administrations, of which only the latest examples appeared in the last few days: Peter Baker’s “Netanyahu Rebuffs U.S. Calls to Start Working Towards Palestinian Statehood,” Thomas Friedman’s “Netanyahu Is Turning Away from Biden,” or Aaron Boxerman’s “Biden Presses Netanyahu On Working Towards Palestinian State.”

So, okay, I get it. The only solution is the two-state one. But why is everybody so irritated with Israel? The Palestinians could solve the problem overnight by declaring their independence, agreeing quickly to exchange ambassadors with the 130+ nations that already recognize their state, and getting down to the gritty business of negotiating safe and secure border with Israel. Bibi would probably not be pleased. But what could he do? The entire world would be on the Palestinians’ side and all it would take was a single unilateral announcement on the part of the Palestinians to get the ball rolling. The presence of Jewish so-called “settler” types in Judah and Samaria would not be a problem unless the State of Palestine intended itself to be totally judenrein—otherwise, why couldn’t those people live on their own land in an independent Palestine if they wanted to? (Most, I think, would not want to. But some surely would.) Nor would the status of Jerusalem itself be an issue: while the Palestinians are in unilateral-proclamation-mode, they could simply declare East Jerusalem to be their capital, then get down to work organizing a workable plan with Israel for policing the city, controlling traffic, and figuring out who picks up whose trash on which days.

Yes, I’m making light of intense issues. But, at the end of the day, why precisely couldn’t this happen? Everybody is happy to be irritated with Bibi, but Israel has demonstrated over and over—including in the context of all the above-listed conferences—that it is ready to negotiate for peace. And declaring independence would assist in Gaza as well: terror organizations like Hamas flourish in the atmosphere of hopelessness and desperation, but that would quickly move into the past if the Palestinians were occupied with nation-building and self-determination instead of endlessly complaining that the world hasn’t given them enough aid. If the Jordanians were big-enough hearted to create a kind of economic union with New Palestine, then there really would be no stopping the peace train. Even the United Nations would be unable to stop the momentum.

But, of course, none of the above has happened or, I fear, ever will happen. It’s much easier for the Biden administration to waste its time trying to bully Bibi into making concessions in the context of theoretical negotiations in which the other side has not given the slightly indication it wishes to participate. Yes, it’s more dramatic to build terror tunnels, murder babies, rape women, and take innocent civilian hostages. But that cannot—and will not—ever lead to statehood for Palestine. What will lead in that direction is the clear indication that the Palestinian leadership is prepared to create a viable Palestinian state and then to live within its borders peacefully and productively.

If the United States wants to defang Iran and lessen the likelihood that the Iranians will lead the world into World War III, it could take no more profound and potentially meaningful step forward than convincing the Palestinians to stop complaining, to take the independence the entire world wishes to offer them seriously, and to get down to the actual business of nation-building. The mullahs will be outraged. But they’ll get over it. And the world will be a safer and better place.

#Israel #Two-State Solution #Netanyahu

[ruminativerabbi]

The Court on Trial

It’s hard to know where even to begin writing about the truly outrageous law suit brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Law, the United Nations tribunal located in the Netherlands, in the Hague. The charge itself—the charge of genocide allegedly being inflicted on the Palestinian nation by Israel—should make clear to all what kind of nonsense this all is. (The term “genocide,” coined only in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to characterize the behavior of the Nazis towards the people it intended to exterminate, derives from the Greek genos,  meaning “people,” “tribe,” or “state” and the familiar “-cide” suffix, from the Latin, denoting killing, as in suicide, homicide, fratricide, etc.) To be guilty of genocide, therefore, a nation would have to undertake wholly to annihilate another people or nation. The Nazis didn’t invent the concept, but there have not been that many serious efforts of one nation embarking on the effort, not merely to decimate, but actually to eradicate another: even the almost unbelievably barbaric massacre of civilian Cambodians undertaken by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978, in the context of which a full quarter of the national population was murdered, even that was not really an effort to rid the world of all Cambodians: for one thing, the murderers themselves were Cambodian. The Rwandan nightmare of 1994 comes closer: the Hutu militias did their best to massacre the entire Tutsi tribe and managed actually to murder as many as 800,000 before they were finally stopped by Tutsi militia groups that invaded from neighboring lands and gained control of the country. Had they succeeded, there would today be no Tutsis at all. That is what the term “genocide” denotes.

But the term has its limits—and those limits have to do with intent, not with numbers. To lament in humility and shame the fact that, by the time American independence was achieved, the population of native Americans had dropped by about 90% from what it had been before Columbia “discovered” America is the fully correct response. But to characterize that decline as the result of genocide would require arguing that the Europeans who came here undertook a conscious effort to exterminate the native population, that they brought along smallpox and other deadly diseases not by accident and not unawares, but fully intending to let disease do what they lacked the physical ability to manage on their own. Of course, there is no such proof at all that that was their intent. And that is true even if it is also true that the colonials in Central, South, and North American were cultural imperialists who had neither respect nor interest in interacting in any meaningful, mutually respectful way with the aboriginal population, and most of whom would not have minded at all if the decline had been 100% instead of just 90%.

And that brings us to Gaza. For a Jew considering the charge of genocide, the matter is straightforward. No one needs to lecture the Jewish people on genocide or on its most effective techniques. Nor does anyone need to explain the process: we are more than familiar with the slow (or not slow) progression from petty microaggression to disabling discrimination, and from there to the dissolution of civil rights (including the right to be a citizen of one’s own country, to live in one’s home, and to work in one’s own business) and finally to the withdrawal of the right to live itself, which new reality the state then helpfully accommodates by undertaking to murder the disenfranchised individuals and making them not alive at all and therefore no longer in contravention of the law. There isn’t a Jew in the world—or at least not one with even the least sense of intellectual or emotional engagement with his or her Jewishness—there isn’t a solitary Jewish soul out there who doesn’t know all of this. We’ve seen this movie We’ve swum in this stream. We’ve been there, all of us.

So that actually makes us just the kind of expert witnesses the International Court of Justice should be seeking as it gathers evidence.

Mind you, the Court has its own problems. Its justices come from any number of different countries in which human rights are not respected: Somalia, China, Uganda, Russia, etc. So that’s not too encouraging for a tribunal devoted to the cause of justice between nations. Nor is the Court’s record too impressive: although it has existed for more than three-quarters of a century, it has managed not to take note of the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians murdered by the Assad regime, the fate of the million-plus Uighurs forced by the Chinese into a gulag all their own, or the fate of the millions of North Koreans who live with neither civil rights nor any hope of escape. The Court has not censured any of this, nor has it taken note of it. It certainly hasn’t put Syria on trial for genocide, let alone China. Instead, it is now training its steely gaze on Israel to determine if Israel, of all nations, is committing genocide in Gaza.

I’d like to offer my perspective to the court. (It’s unlikely they’ll be interested in rationality or reasonableness—this is an organ of the United Nations, after all—but nonetheless I’d like to say my piece.) Yes, there have been many civilian deaths in the course of these last 100 days, while Israel has combed Gaza for its own citizens being held hostage by Hamas and, at the same time, for the perpetrators of the October pogrom in the course of which more than a thousand civilians were murdered, the dead were mutilated, and women were savagely and repeatedly raped. That is regrettable. Civilian deaths are always regrettable! No one could hate Nazism more than I myself do. But even I, whose loathing for the German government that murdered more than a million and a half Jewish children could not be more unambiguously felt, even I regret—and regret profoundly—the deaths of innocents, including children, during the carpet bombing of Germany, including Hamburg and Dresden especially, that paved the way for the successful invasion of Germany from the West by the Allies under General Eisenhower and from the east by the Red Army.

This is not an especially  courageous position I’m staking out for myself here. What kind of monster can take delight in the death of a child? There were babies in Dresden too, just as there were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How can there not have been? But the International Court didn’t get off to a good start in 1945 by putting the United Kingdom or the U.S. on trial for genocide. And it didn’t do that because those deaths took place as part of a wartime initiative to defeat an enemy that was evil itself. And when fighting a war against evil, the only truly immoral act is to lose.

But back to Gaza. Where exactly are the gas chambers? Where are the boxcars shuttling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians to the killing sites? For that matter, where are the killing sites? If the goal was to eradicate the Palestinian nation, then why drop leaflets encouraging civilians to flee areas in the northern part of Gaza that were targeted for bombing? Why let any humanitarian aide in at all if the goal is to turn Gaza into a beach-front version of Treblinka? Most trenchant of all questions to ask: why would Israel risk the lives of any IDF soldiers at all if the “real” goal of the operation was to empty Gaza of Palestinians? Before the IDF incursion, there were, after all, no Israelis at all in Gaza, so the field could have been relatively clear. If the only goal was killing civilians with the specific intention of emptying Gaza of Gazans, the entire operation could have been safely—and totally effectively—conducted from the air with the chances of Israeli casualties minimized, if not totally eradicated.

Much has been made in some quarters of a throw-away remark of Bibi Netanyahu’s equating Hamas with the ancient nation of Amalek and I’d like to address myself to that as well.

Amalek occupies a strange place in our history. They attacked the Israelites on their way out of Egypt from the rear, picking off the elderly, the infirm, the part of the people the least likely successfully to be able to defend themselves. Israel went to war and was victorious. The Torah makes a big deal of this, but then ends up on a note of ambivalence. On the one hand, the name of Amalek has to be wiped out entirely. On the other, the Israelites are commanded to labor to remember all the despicable, dastardly deeds that Amalek committed when they were attacking. So how does that work: if they’re completely forgotten, their very name erased from the world’s memory banks, then how can the Israelites guarantee that they will always be remembered? They have either to be remembered or forgotten, don’t they? You can’t have it both ways!

And yet that’s the Torah’s command. And when the Torah appears to self-contradict, it’s always pointing to a deeper lesson just beneath the surface. Amalek is not one of the Canaanite nations. It’s fate is not sealed. They represent pure hatred for Israel, what we would call fanatic anti-Semitism. The Nazis were Amalek. Stalin was Amalek. And Hamas is Amalek too. The Torah is saying that these people must be fought back against vigorously, just as the IDF is doing. But it’s also saying they will always be there: there will always be people out there who hate Jews. Labeling Hamas as Amalek simply means that they are not “merely” hostile folks, but part of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Bibi probably should have kept Amalek out of this, but, in the end, Amalek is a theological concept, not a battle plan. By bringing Amalek into the discussion, Bibi was speaking in the natural idiom of Jewishness, not recommending genocide.

In the end, it’s not Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice. It’s the Court itself that is on trial. Its future reputation rests on getting this right. Its actual future itself may rest on that as well. In the end, the verdict will tell us clearly if the International Court is a force for good in the world to be respected and supported…or just another failed, biased, and bigoted wing of the United Nations.

#Israel #The Hague #International Court of Justice

[ruminativerabbi]

Looking Forwards/Looking Backwards

For the last three months now, I have basically written about nothing other than the situation in Gaza and the impact that situation is having (and continues to have) on daily life in Israel. As a result, I haven’t focused overly on the slow deterioration of things on this side of the ocean as our own nation grapples with issues that, each in its own way, could end up proving just as fateful for our nation as the effort to decimate Hamas will surely be for Israel.

It's hard to know even where to start. The shocking image of the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning all (including the Jewish one) being unable to bring themselves unequivocally to condemn calls for genocide directed against Jewish people as outside the limits of bona fide free speech on campus was bad enough. But that dismal spectacle has focused the nation’s headlights on our university campuses in general, which experience has been infinitely more upsetting. And the picture that has emerged is both terrifying and sickening: a portrait of schools, including some of our most respected institutions of higher learning, that have lost their moral compass entirely, that have descended into an Orwellian mirrorscape of reality in which traditional values are ignored, only radical extremists are granted a voice, and racism directed directly against Jewish students is considered both legitimate and, when dressed up smartly enough in anti-Israel vitriol, even virtuous. And then there is the rising tide of anti-Semitism outside the academy in all fifty states, a phenomenon that will feel eerily and deeply disconcertingly familiar to anyone possessed of even a passing acquaintanceship with Jewish history. And then, on top of all that, we are about to plunge full-bore into a presidential election in which the winner will undoubtedly be a member of a party that has room in its Congressional ranks for overt anti-Semites and/or Israel-haters. So I apologize for not writing more about our American situation lately. I do want to keep writing about Israel, but I will also try to find time to write about these United States and the future of the American enterprise as we move into 2024.

I wanted to begin writing in a positive vein, if possible even optimistically. And so I thought we might begin, in that traditional Jewish way, by looking forwards by looking backwards and focusing on a time in our nation when the citizenry was united, when respect for our leader was basically universal, and when coin of the realm was optimism, confidence in the nation’s destiny, and hope in the future. Yes, it’s been a while. But, speaking candidly, what’s two hundred years between friends?

As we exit the time machine, the president of the United States is James Monroe. Later on, he would become a high school in the Bronx (the one from which my mother graduated in 1933) and a housing project. But, in 1820, James Monroe was a man, a politician. And his story is beyond instructive.

In those days, we had Election Month rather than Election Day: in a predigital world that was also pre-electric and pre-electronic, voting took place in 1820 from November 1 to December 6. All alone on the ballot was James Monroe, the incumbent candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. Because his was the only name on the ballot, Monroe won in all twenty-two states. It’s true that Monroe was not the first to run for president unopposed (that would have been George Washington, who ran unopposed both in 1789 and in 1793), but Monroe was the first to do so after the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which set in place the rules for presidential elections that we more or less still follow. He was also the last American President to run unopposed. Can you imagine the nation fully behind its elected leader? The man didn’t come out of the blue, however.

In his own way, Monroe personally embodied the American past such as it was in 1820. He served as a soldier in the Continental Army under Washington. He studied law under Thomas Jefferson. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress that ratified the Constitution. He had been our ambassador to France and he served as governor of Virginia. Then he decided to aim higher and he ran for president in 1816 and won. And then he ran again in 1820 and this time not only won, but received every electoral vote cast but one—and that naysayer, one William Plumer, was actually a so-called “faithless elector” who defied the election results in his state of  New Hampshire because he apparently wished to ensure that Washington would forever be the sole American President to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College.

So we had at the helm a leader who had won the confidence, more or less, of the entire American people. As noted, this was Monroe’s second term of office. In 1816, he beat Rufus King, the Federalist candidate, and he beat him soundly, getting more than double the votes King got. And now that he had proven himself in office, he put himself forward as candidate for a second term. No one chose to run against him. The split of the Democratic-Republican Party into the parties we know today was still in the future. The nation was at peace. And it was fully unified behind a proven leader.

At the time and since, these years were and are called the “Era of Good Feeling.” The War of 1812 had been won. The nation was prosperous and at peace. The great debate about slavery that led eventually to war had yet to begin in earnest. (Indeed, the nation had formally outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and this was widely thought of—at least by abolitionists—as a first step towards eradicating slavery totally. That that didn’t happen—and would probably never have happened other than in the way it did happen—was, of course, unknown to American voters at the time.) There seemed to be endless possibilities for expansion to the West.

I first became interested in this stretch of American history several years ago when I read Daniel Walker Howe’s masterful What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848, for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in History. It’s a doorstopper of a book, coming in at just over 900 pages. But it is truly fascinating, a work of history distinguished (this is so rare) both by its author’s mastery of his subject and also by his great skill as an engaging author able to keep readers’ interest as they wade through material that the author surely understood would be unfamiliar to most. He paints a complex picture of a nation in its adolescence, one reminiscent in many ways of the nation today but with the huge difference that the native optimism that once characterized American culture was in its fullest flower in the 1820s. The belief that the Revolution had not solely ended with an independent United States, but had actually transformed the world by demonstrating the possibility of living free, of citizens living lives unencumbered by the will of despots and fully able to chart their own course into the future by using their own hands to wield their own tools, thus to fashion their own destiny—that distillation of the American ethos as freedom resting on a bedrock of decency, morality, and purposefulness was enough to bring the entire nation to support the man who, in the minds of all, served as the physical embodiment of that ideal. And that is how James Monroe came to run unopposed and to be elected by the entire electorate speaking as one.

How bizarre that all sounds now! Most people in the throes of crochety old age tend to idealize their adolescent years. Nations do that too. But there’s more to that thought than pathos alone. The hallmark of adolescence is fantasy unencumbered by restrictive reality—and that is true of nations as well as individuals. Nobody told the citizenry in the 1820s that they were “just” dreamers, that it could never work out as planned. And, yes, they were blind to many social issues that we now find it hard to believe they passed so blithely by—the slavery issue first and foremost, but also the harsh and terrible treatment of native Indian peoples, the degree to which women were denied a place in public life, the restrictive higher educational system to which only white males (and, generally speaking, only wealthy ones at that) were admitted. Yes, that’s all true. But the nation was also possessed of a deep, abiding sense of its own destiny. And, in the end, that’s what mattered.

It didn’t last. The nation grew up. The forced dislocation of countless thousands of native Indians from the lands they had farmed and occupied for centuries, the ongoing nightmare of slavery, the inability of the nation to keep from splitting in two and the unimaginable amount of blood that was spilt to put it back together—the resolution of all those issues was in the future when James Monroe was in the White House. And the foundation upon which his administration rested—the good feelings of the so-called “Age of Good Feelings”—was sturdy enough to support the weight of a nation.

As we embark on the 2024 Presidential election, this all seems so far away, so foreign, so unattainable. Maybe it is. Or maybe the right national leader, ideally one who has waded through Daniel Walker Howe’s giant book, is waiting in the wings to rescue us from ourselves. I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough!

#James Monroe #Presidential Election of 1820

[ruminativerabbi]

Counsel from Scripture

The news this week that Israel is planning to withdraw several thousand troops from Gaza is a signal to the world both that the fighting will continue (because the rest of the IDF currently stationed in Gaza is staying) and, at the same time, that the future will be different from the past, that the struggle to destroy Hamas is poised to move into a different phase. That phase will require fewer soldiers in place, clearly. But it doesn’t mean that Israel is planning to act less aggressively to free the remaining 100+ hostages. That decision—to abandon the hostages to their fate—would be as unimaginable ethically as it would be suicidal politically for the current government, and there is virtually no chance of that happening. So we who are watching on from the wings are basically being prepared to expect the current struggle to last for weeks, perhaps even for months, into the future. Eventually, the situation will be resolved one way or the other. But no matter how successful Israel eventually is in securing the release of the hostages and in degrading the ability of Hamas ever again to perpetrate a pogrom on the scale of last October’s, the issues that divide Palestinians and Israelis will remain in place either to be resolved eventually or never to be resolved.

I have written over these last months from many different vantage points, but today I’d like to put my favorite yarmulke back on and discuss Gaza from a theological point of view, from the point of view of our own tradition. And there’s a moment in the scriptural narrative that comes right to mind too!

Shortly after returning to Canaan with his family, Jacob settles in Shechem (today known more regularly as Nablus, a corruption of the Roman name for the place Flavia Neopolis). It turns out not to have been such a good choice however. Shortly after arriving there, Jacob’s sole daughter, Dina, heads into town to make some girlfriends among the locals. Nothing too strange there: Dina had twelve brothers and, as far as Scripture relates, no sisters at all. (The reference elsewhere in Genesis to Jacob’s “daughters” is generally taken to denote his daughters-in-law.) The basic idea seems harmless enough. Why wouldn’t she want to get to know some local women her age? Whether she is successful or not, Scripture doesn’t say. But what does happen is that she attracts the attention of one Shechem ben Hamor, the son of the local prince-in-charge, who is so drawn to her that he forces himself on her. What follows then is unexpected: having attacked her because he was drawn to her, he is now depicted as being drawn to her (possibly) because he attacked her…or at least because his intimate knowledge of her confirms his initial suspicion that Dina is lovely and worthy. And now he wants to marry her. His father approaches her father. An initial proposal is made, but Jacob refuses to answer and insists that he has to wait for his sons to return from wherever it was they were herding their cattle and take counsel with them.

What follows is one of the Torah’s darker stories. The brothers return and they are outraged. Why wouldn’t they have been? But, being vastly outnumbered, they decide to proceed stealthily. They agree to Hamor’s father’s suggestion that Jacob’s family and the locals ally themselves together as one people, which he suggests will happen their children marry each other. The brothers appear to consider this, then respond formally by agreeing if  the men of Shechem agree to be circumcised. A Jewish girl marrying an uncircumcised man? They can’t imagine such a thing! Amazingly, the locals agree. And they do it too, proceeding—in their world with neither anesthesia nor sterile O.R.s—to have their foreskins removed.

And then we get to the even bloodier dénouement of the story. While the local men are still smarting from their surgeries and are obviously in a weakened state, two of Jacob’s sons, Simon and Levi, go on a killing rampage, executing all the males of the city, bringing Dina back home, making the local women and children their captives, and taking all local wealth as booty.

But what follows is the reason I’m writing about this story today to interpret it in light of the October pogrom, a brutal attack that also featured rape and the degradation of Jewish women as part of the foes’ attack plan. (That part of the Hamas attack has only just recently been told in detail: if you somehow missed the NY Times story on the matter, gruesome and harrowing as it is, click here.) Jacob, playing the traditional role of the golus-yid, cries out, “All you’ve accomplished is to make the surviving Canaanites hate me. Plus there are not that many of us—and now they will all gather up against us and murder not just me but my entire house…including all of you as well.” In other words, his primary goal here is to avoid riling the locals up, to avoid friction or hostility, and to stay safe. The brothers listen politely, then respond with a  single rhetorical question expressed in exactly four words in the original Hebrew: “Were we supposed to let him treat our sister as though she were a whore?”

The story provokes at lot of unanswered questions. But the issue really has to do with the final few lines cited above. Jacob’s chief goal here is to live in peace with the neighbors and he is apparently ready to overlook something as horrific as the rape of his own daughter to achieve that goal. He is therefore being depicted as the kind of person who prefers cowering in the shadows to risking the possibility of making people angry by standing up for himself and demanding justice. This is not meant to be a flattering portrait, nor is it one. But the portrait of Simon and Levi (and possibly, if they were in on it, Jacob’s other sons too) is also unflattering in the extreme. Rape is horrific. But in what justice system is someone other than the perpetrator punished? To go on a killing rampage that shows neither mercy nor forbearance to anyone at all in an entire city because of the deeds of one person—that is not meant to be a flattering portrait either. In the end, both sides are caricatures: one featuring Jacob as the apotheosis of nervous timidity and the other featuring Simon and Levi as the archetypes of extreme violence prompted not by the quest for real justice but by rage.

And what does that story mean in terms of Gaza? The key here is that neither portrait is meant to be flattering, let alone something to emulate. For Israel to have looked the other way after October 7 to avoid upsetting the locals and their fellow travelers in Iran and Lebanon (not to mention Turtle Bay) would have been fully unjustifiable from any point of view, including especially the moral. To annihilate Gaza entirely because of the actions of specific people would have been no less tragic and certainly morally wrong. But the correct response is what we actually saw: Israel going into Gaza with the specific goal of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice, and also doing whatever it was going to take to guarantee that Hamas would never be capable again of mounting that kind of attack on Israeli civilians. Despite the rhetoric of so many haters, I see no evidence that Israel has embarked on a campaign designed to solve the problem in Gaza the way Simon and Levi solved the problem in Shechem: with wholesale slaughter of all inhabitants as a kind of collective punishment for existing in the same place as terrible wrongdoers. That there have been casualties, including deaths, among civilians is terrible—and not something any normal person should not regret. But the civilian Gazans are not mere bystanders either: they are the ones who put Hamas in power in 2005 and so are not that different from the civilian Germans who overwhelming put the Nazis in power in 1933: both paid and are paying a truly bitter price for having put themselves under the governance of violent fanatics who could not have been clearer about their plans for their enemies.

In my opinion, Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza in response to the events of October 7. That the leaders of the nation chose to find a middle path between Jacob’s timorousness and Simon/Levi’s rage speaks well for the nation and its leadership. How this will all end, who can say? But to pretend that the Torah’s most specific lesson about responding to violence—and particularly to violence against women—has gone unheeded is simply incorrect. It merely requires reading carefully and thoughtfully. And it requires understanding that sometimes Scripture depicts a moral dilemma as a kind of crossroads not because either path is the correct one forward, but because neither is.

#Dina #Rape of Dina #Gaza

[ruminativerabbi]

Colonialism

As we face the end of the year with the IDF still conducting its campaign in Gaza, with so many hostages still not released, and with the support of the world waning by the minute, we could all use a bit of shoring up. I am speaking of myself as well, by the way: despite my abiding confidence in the innate tolerance of Americans, I continue to feel shaken by the ferocity of the anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism that seems to have arisen almost from nowhere in the wake of Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah massacre.

This week, I would like to address a specific aspect of that ferocity, the accusation—by now almost a commonplace among the haters—that Israel is nothing but a last-gasp outpost of colonialism. And, as a result, that the Jews of Israel have the same right to Palestine that the Belgians had to the Congo, the Dutch to Indonesia, the French to Algeria, the British to India, and the Germans to Namibia: none at all. (It is interesting how few of those who regularly tar Israel with that brush feel the same way about Australia or Canada, not to mention our own nation, which actually were founded by overt colonialists who saw nothing at all wrong with moving onto other people’s turf and declaring their independence in that place. About that paradox, I will write on another occasion.)

Colonialism, sometimes called imperialism, surely was one of the most pernicious avenues of political theorizing ever devised to justify the conquest of other people’s countries and the addition of those conquered lands to the conquerors’ self-proclaimed empire. And this is so much the case that, at least for most of us, even the rationale behind the concept seems impossible to grasp. It is true that decades of mini-trade-wars between Dutch, British, and Portuguese set the stage for the eventual absorption of India into the British Empire, but the larger picture is the one that survives of a rapacious Empire ignoring the fact that it had no conceivable right to a country thousands of miles away from Britain with which it had no history of enmity, let alone of overt hostility or warfare, and unilaterally making that place part of its Empire, and then using the full force of its own Armed Forces to stifle dissent and to prevent any serious movement on the part of the people whose country it actually was towards self-rule. This was the story of the British in India, but it was also the story of many other nations struggling to annex the maximum number of overseas territories without regard for the wishes of the people who actually lived there.

I have to assume that most colonialists were motivated by pure greed. But there were others who were motivated not by rank acquisitiveness or covetousness, but by the supremely arrogant assumption that they were actually doing the native people’s whose nations they occupied a huge favor by exposing them to Western ways and beliefs. The prize for the most grotesque expression of that idea, even after all these years, has to go to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), whose famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” depicted colonialism not as venal or brutal, but as virtuous. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” he wrote to his fellow Brits. “Send forth the best ye breed. / Go bind your sons to exile / to serve your captives’ need: / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It’s really hard to know what to say to that! (The poem goes on at length along similar lines. To read the full poem, click here.)

But what could any of this have to do with Israel?

The history of Israel is recorded in the historical books of the Bible and confirmed by archelogy: there have been Jewish people, or the ancestors of what we reference as the Jewish people, in the Land of Israel since the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE and there has never been a day since then that there was not a Jewish presence in the land. That’s about 3000 years of continued residence in the land and that is at the core of the Jewish claim to consider Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The nations they replaced have long since vanished: there are no surviving Girgashites or Kenites to negotiate with. But where did the Arabs come from?

As the seventh century dawned, the world’s two great super-powers, Byzantium and Persia, were at war. Things were calm in the Holy Land for a while, but then, in 613, the local Jews joined with the Persians in their ongoing campaign against the Byzantines. In 614, the Persians, now fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters, captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia.

But the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden.

And now we get to the relevant part. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arab colonialists until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099. Nor is “colonialist” a vague term here. In fact, it is the precisely accurate one: a powerful nation wrests land from a neighboring nation that it bests on the battlefield, then annexes that land to itself with reference neither to the history of the place nor to the wishes of its citizens.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, even eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were not great, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism and things just continued to deteriorate from there. (To read more about the Pact of Umar, click here.)

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. But although Muslim rule eventually gave way to a long series of foreign overlords who seized the land and ruled over it for as long as they were able, the Muslims who came along with the armies of occupation remained in place. And so were set in place the ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

To refer to today’s Palestinians as imperialist colonizers because their ancestors came to the land as part of an army of occupation thirteen centuries ago—that seems exaggerated: thirteen hundred years is a long time! But to refer to the Jews of Israel, whose ancestors have been present in that place not for centuries but for millennia—that seems even wackier and far less reasonable. I suppose some of Israel’s enemies must be sincere in their sense of Israel as a force of occupation, as a last-gasp vestige of European colonialism. But leaving aside the detail that most Israelis are not of European origin, the notion itself is simply incorrect. The Land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people from time immemorial. To argue to the contrary is to ignore history. And ignoring history is never good policy, not for our own nation and not for anybody. Arabs have lived in Israel for more than a millennium. But to use that fact to deny the reasonableness of there being a Jewish state in the Land of Israel is simply an abuse of history.

#Colonialism #Imperialism #Zionism #Israel

[ruminativerabbi]

Anti-Judaism Then and Now

On Sesame Street, they used to sing a song that challenged young viewers to decide “which of these things belong together.” The idea was that the youngsters would be presented with a group of things all but one of which belonged to the same group. But the trick, of course, was that the specific nature of the group wasn’t revealed—so the young viewer had to notice that there were three vegetables on the screen and one piece of fruit, or three garden tools and a frying pan. You get the idea. All of the things belonged together but one didn’t. It wasn’t that complicated. But the tune is still stuck in my head and I don’t think I’ve heard the song in at least thirty years.

In the grown-up world, there are also all sorts of groups made up of things that are presented as “belonging together.” Some are obvious and indisputable. But others are far more iffy.

Languages, for example, are in the first category. Danish, Japanese, Laotian, and Yiddish all belong in the same group; each is an artificial code devised by a specific national or ethnic group to label the things of the world. You really can compare the Japanese word for apple with the Danish word because both really are the same thing: a sound unrelated in any organic way to the thing it denotes that a specific group of people have decided to use nonetheless to denote that thing. Languages are all codes, all artificial, and all each other’s equals. The world’s languages, therefore, really are each other’s equivalents

Other groups, not so much. Religion comes right to mind in that regard: we regularly refer to the world’s religions as each other’s equivalents, but is that really so? In what sense, truly, is Judaism the Jewish version of Hinduism or Buddhism? Is Chanukah the Jewish Christmas? Is the New Testament the Christian version of the Koran in the same sense that the Danish word for cherry is the Danish version of the French word for that same thing? You see what I mean: the notion that the religions of the world are each other’s equivalents hardly makes any sense at all.

But what about prejudices of various sorts? Are racism and homophobia each other’s equivalents, distinguished only by the target of the bigot’s irrational dislike? Are sexism and ageism the same thing, only different with respect to the specific being discriminated against? And where does anti-Semitism, with its weird medial capital letter and its off-base etymology (because it denotes discrimination against Jews, not other Semites), where does anti-Semitism fit in? Is it the same as other forms of discrimination, differing only with respect to the target?

I suppose my readers know why this has been on my mind lately.

Last week I wrote about that grotesque congressional hearing in which the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, including two of the so-called Ivies, could not bring themselves to label the most extreme form of anti-Semitism there is, the version that calls not for discrimination against Jews but for their actual murder—they could not bring themselves unequivocally and unambiguously to say that that calls for genocide directed against Jews have no place on their campuses. The president of the University of Pennsylvania paid with her position for her unwillingness to condemn genocide clearly and forcefully. But hundreds and hundreds of faculty members at Harvard, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious college, spoke out forcefully in support of their president despite her unwillingness to say clearly that calling for the murder of Jews is not the kind of speech that any normal person would imagine to be protected by the First Amendment.

At a time when anti-Semitism is surging, it strikes me that treating different versions of prejudice as each other’s equivalent is probably more harmful an approach than a realistic one. That is what led to the moral fog that apparently enveloped the leaders of three of our nation’s finest academies and made them unable simply and plainly to condemn calls for genocide directed against Jewish people.

I think we should probably begin to deal with this matter in our own backyard. And to that end, I would like to recommend three books and a fourth to my readers: the three are “about” anti-Semitism (and each is remarkable in its own way) and the fourth is a novel that I’ve mentioned many times in these letters, the one that led me to understand personally what anti-Semitism actually is and how it can thrive even in the ranks of the highly civilized, educated, and cultured.

The first book is by the late Rosemary Ruether, known as a feminist and as a Catholic theologian, but also the author of Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, published by Seabury Press in 1974 and still in print. This was not the first serious study of anti-Semitism I read—that would have been Léon Poliakoff’s four-volume work, The History of Anti-Semitism, which also had a formative effect on my adolescent self. But Ruether’s book was different: less about anti-Semitism itself and more about the way that anti-Jewish prejudice was such a basic part of the theological worldview of so many of the most formative Christian authors that the task of eliminating it from Western culture would require a repudiation of some of the basic tenets set forth by some of the most famous early Christian authors. I was stunned by her book when I read it: stunned, but also truly challenged. In think, even, that my decision to specialize in the history of the early Church as one of my sub-specialties when I completed by doctorate in ancient Judaism was a function of reading that book and needing—and wanting—to know these texts (and, through them, their authors) personally and up close. Jewish readers—or any readers—concerned about anti-Semitism could do a lot worse than to start with Ruether’s book.

And from there I’d go on to David Nirenberg’s book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, published by W.W. Norton in 2013. This too is something anyone even marginally concerned about anti-Semitism in the world should read. The book is not that long, but it is rich and exceptionally thought-provoking; its author describes his thesis clearly in one sentence, however: “Anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought,” but rather as one of the “basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.” Using detailed, thoughtful, and deliberate prose, Nirenberg lays out his argument that Western civilization rests on a foundation of anti-Judaism so deeply embedded in the Western psyche as to make it possible for people who have doctorates from Harvard to feel uncertain about condemning genocide—the ultimate anti-Semitic gesture—unequivocally and forcefully. This would be a good book too for every Jewish citizen—and for all who consider themselves allies of the Jewish people—to read and take to heart. Anti-Judaism is deeply engrained in Western culture. To eradicate it—even temporarily, let alone permanently—will require a serious realignment of Western values and beliefs. Can it be done? Other features of Western culture have fallen away over the centuries, so I suppose it can be. But how to accomplish such a feat—the best ideas will come from people who have read books like Nirenberg’s and taken them to heart.

And the final book I would like to recommend is James Carroll’s, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, published by Mariner Books in 2001. The author, a former Roman Catholic priest, makes a compelling argument that the roots of anti-Semitism are to be found in the basic Christian belief that the redemption of the world will follow the conversion of the world’s Jews to Christianity. I was surprised when I read the book by a lot of things, but not least how convincingly the author presses his argument that the belief that the redemption of the world is being impeded by the phenomenon of stubborn Jews refusing to abandon Judaism is the soil in which all Western anti-Semitism is rooted. It’s an easier book to read than either Ruether’s or Nirenberg’s—written more for a lay audience and clearly intended by its author to be a bestseller, which it indeed became—but no less an interesting and enlightening one.

So that is my counsel for American Jews feeling uncertain how to respond to this surge of anti-Semitic incidents on our nation’s streets and particularly on the campuses of even our most prestigious universities. Read these books. Learn the history that is, even today, legitimizing anti-Jewish sentiments even among people who themselves are not sufficiently educated to understand what is motivating their feelings about Jews and about Judaism. None of these reads will be especially pleasant. But all will be stirring and inspiring. And from understanding will come, perhaps, a path forward. Any physician will tell you that even the greatest doctor has to know what’s wrong with a patient before attempting to initiate the healing process. Perhaps that is what is needed now: not rallies or White House dinners (or not just those things), but a slow, painstaking analysis of where this all is coming from and an equally well-thought-out plan for combatting anti-Jewish prejudice rooted in the nature of the beast we would all like to see fenced in, tamed, and then ultimately slain.

And the novel? My go-to piece of Jewish literature, André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, was published in Stephen Becker’s English translation by Athenaeum in 1960, just one year after the publication of the French original. A novel that spans a full millennium, the book traces the history of a single Jewish family, the Levys, and tells the specific story of the individual member of the family in each generation who serves as one of the thirty-six just people for whose sake the world exists. (The book begins in eleventh century England and ends at Auschwitz, where the last of the just perishes.) I read the book when I was a boy and have returned to it a dozen times over the years. No book that I can think of explains anti-Semitism from the inside—from within the bosom of a Jewish family that is defined by the prejudice directed against it—more intensely, more movingly, or more devastatingly. This is definitely not a book for children. I was probably too young to encounter such a book when I did, but it is also true that, more than anything else, it was that book that set me on the path that I followed into adulthood. (And that is probably just as true spiritually and emotionally, as it is professionally.) I was too young, perhaps, to process the story correctly. But when I was done reading even that first time as a sixteen-year-old, I knew what path I wished to follow. The Last of the Just is not a book I would exactly characterize as enjoyable reading. But it is riveting, challenging, and galvanizing. To face the future with courage and resolve, the American Jewish community needs to look far back into the past so as to understand the challenges it now faces. And then, armed with that knowledge, to find a path forward into a brighter and better world.

#anti-Semitism #anti-Judaism #Rosemary Ruether #David Nirenberg #Andre Schwarz-Bart