Artifacts

I wear my grandmother’s wedding ring. She was born—in, of all places, Pottstown, Pennsylvania—in 1883 and she married my grandfather in 1907. I have their wedding invitation framed and hanging on the wall of our living room. (They were married on November 10^th of that year at my great-grandparents’ home at 60 East 113^th Street.) I have their ketubbah as well, also framed and hanging in our home. And I have the ring they used at their ceremony, and which my grandmother then wore, as far as I know, every day of her life until she died a few months before my bar-mitzvah in 1966. The ring passed into my mother’s hands, and then, when she died, into my father’s. So my dad had two wedding rings to give us, and to this day Joan wears my mothers’ and I wear her mother’s. It’s nice being connected to the past in that specific way, feeling her presence from time to time just by noticing the ring on my ring finger.  I didn’t know either of my grandfathers. My other grandmother passed away when I was just four years old. So the grandmother whose ring I wear is my only real connection to the world from which she came, a world different in so many different ways from our own.  What East 113^th Street looked like in 1907, I have a reasonably clear idea. (I’ve never seen a picture of that specific block, but there are loads of photographs of Manhattan at the turn of the century to give someone like myself the general idea.) The ghosts are surely real, but sometimes you can feel the reality of people loved and lost in their absence simply by contemplating some specific thing they left behind.

But there are artifacts and there are artifacts! My grandmother’s ring surely counts as one. But just this week there was an announcement regarding something seriously older than my grandma’s ring, something left behind by someone who lived and died about 30,000 years earlier.

When I was growing up, referring to someone as a Neanderthal was not a compliment. (One of my friends once had to serve detention for referring a bit too loudly to our of our stricter gym teachers that way.) But it turns out that, as is so often the case with respect to the language of casual disdain, that usage may have been a bit hasty. The real Neanderthals—named for the Neander Valley in near Düsseldorf in Germany (the German for “Neander Valley” is Neandertal, formerly spelled Neanderthal) where their fossilized bones were first unearthed and identified—turn out not to have been such bad guys at all. Mind you, we don’t know all there is to know about them. Anthropologists aren’t even united on whether they should properly be characterized as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (the species to which we ourselves belong) or a separate species of the same genus.  But whether the Neanderthals are correctly to be called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or just Homo neanderthalensis, the bottom line is that they were around for a very long time, appearing in Europe somewhere between 350,000 and 600,000 years ago, and becoming extinct—although not quite completely—something like 30,000 years ago. Nor is the “not quite completely” part is a detail to be passed by lightly: results of efforts to map the Neanderthal genome in 2010 yielded the surprising conclusion that at least 2.5%  and possibly as much as 4% of the genetic material carried by modern non-African human beings today was inherited directly from the Neanderthals, probably through cross-breeding between Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals when the former arrived in Europe on their journey out of Africa somewhere between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago. So, like so many other things in life, they’re gone and also not gone…because, at least a little bit, they are us.  Or rather, to say the same thing more clearly and more challengingly, we are they.

Among the bits and pieces of fossilized remains that constitute all—other than ourselves—that’s left of the Neanderthals is a single child’s tooth, a molar, found at an archeological site in Belgium. That, in and of itself, is amazing enough a fact to give pause—I don’t know what happened to my own milk teeth (perhaps the Tooth Fairy still has them), yet this one tooth has survived as a sole dental sentinel still, after all these countless millennia, bearing witness to a world that came and went, to a world like and unlike our own, to a world inhabited by some version of who we are—people slightly shorter, far stronger, and possessed of brains about the size of our own who somehow became part of who we are. But it’s what scientists have managed to learn from this one tiny tooth that’s the truly amazing part.

It turns out that researchers in Sydney and New York (the locals affiliated with the Carl Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan) have learned successfully to exploit the fact that the age at which a child is weaned from its mother’s breast can be determined after the fact with reference to the presence of trace-levels of barium in the tooth’s enamel.  Why that is exactly, who knows? But by studying the data, the scientists in question, whose work was published earlier this week in the journal Nature, determined that the child from whose mouth the tooth originally came was weaned from the breast at 1.2 years of age. That’s 1.2 years of age…more than 30,000 years ago. (By way of comparison, the average age of weaning in non-industrial countries today is, at 2.5 years of age, more than twice that. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that mothers nurse their babies for a minimum of six months. Among other primates, the suckling period is much longer: wild chimpanzees, for example, wean their young at about 5.3 years.)  The conclusions published in Nature were not universally accepted.  One Michael Richards, a specialist in the study of ancient bones and teeth at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (and clearly not the guy from Seinfeld), wondered aloud in response to the publication of the article how the researchers could be sure the barium hadn’t seeped into the tooth from the soil in which it was embedded for tens of thousands of years. Other scientists held back for different reasons from fully endorsing these new findings.  But, aware of those demurrals, I still found myself drawn to the article and its findings.

We truly do live in an age of miracles. A child loses a tooth, and 30,000 years later—or rather, 30,000 years later at least—someone in Belgium picks it up.  Instead of mistaking it for tiny chip of stone, this person somehow recognizes it as a fossilized tooth. Then, after somehow figuring out that the age at which a baby is weaned from its mother’s breast can be determined after the fact by analyzing the traces of barium left behind in the enamel coating of the child’s teeth, scientists determine that the child from whose mouth that tooth came was weaned from mother’s milk at 1.2 years of age. Just like that!

Did the child have a name?  Almost definitely it would have! The Neanderthals spoke and used some kind of language to communicate. (Interested readers may wish to consult University of Reading archeology professor Steven Mithen’s book, The Singing Neanderthals, published by Harvard University Press in 2007 for more information on the Neanderthals’ language. I haven’t read it myself…but I will!) They lived in communities and when they were injured they nursed each other back to health. When they died, surviving members of their communities buried them. They were, in short, some version of us possessed of slightly larger and differently shaped brains. So the child had parents and probably siblings. The child lived in a community. And probably it had a name as well.

I’ve been thinking about that child. Scientists say that the sun will turn into a fiery giant that will render life on earth impossible in about 50 million centuries. That’s more than enough time for scientists—or whatever they’ll be called by then—to discover one of my lost baby teeth in about 30,000 years and to make whatever conclusions they can draw about me and my life. (I was bottle-fed from the start, so I can save them the effort of analyzing the barium levels in my tooth enamel—assuming my letters to you also survive for 30,000 years, that is—by just admitting that up front now. The rest, they can figure out on their own.) Who can even begin to imagine what life will be like in a mere three hundred centuries?  Nothing will be the same! But also…everything will be the same, I think. People will find their greatest happiness in each other’s arms. Surviving the loss of a loved one will still be the greatest of all life’s challenges. People will still, I think, invest their greatest hopes in their children, and spend their lives worrying about them and trying not to hover. I suppose that even that far in the future people will still occasionally eat too much and drink too much, then wake up the following morning regretting either or both. Everything changes and nothing changes!  The next time any of you is in Düsseldorf, you can take the train over to Mettmann and from there you can go to the actual Neandertal and visit the actual Neanderthal Museum. (In the meantime, click here to take a quick look!)  And there you will find evidence of people wholly unlike and remarkably like ourselves, people depicted as living in family groups, as worrying about feeding each other, about growing old together, about how to face death and survive loss.

Why people who profess faith in God and for whom the Bible serves as the foundation of their spiritual lives would turn away from remarkable evidence like this—evidence for the commonality of the human experience in all its unimaginable variegation—merely because it needs to be read as a kind of scientific midrash on the story of creation as presented in Scripture, I can’t imagine. This kind of scientific research confirms my faith without weakening it even slightly: I find it infinitely easier to believe that all humanity has a Creator in common when I learn about the amazing ways that the human experience is precisely one of shared experience from continent to continent over the course not of centuries or millennia, but scores, even hundreds, of millennia.  The core ideas around which the Torah’s story of creation rotates: that we all have one Creator, that we all share common ancestry, that the human genome testifies to the brotherhood of humankind far more meaningfully than it can be construed to divide us from each other—these are the ideas suggested to me by that tiny tooth…and the lesson scientists have managed to bring forth from its ancient enamel.

Bringing In The Clones

Humanity crossed an amazing threshold just this last week, but the world seems mostly to have yawned. But in terms of the history not only of science but also of human culture itself, it seems to me that it will eventually sound just as odd to say that we barely took note of the event to which I am referring as it would sound now to say that at the time we hardly realized that Neil Armstrong’s first step onto lunar soil constituted a very big step forward in the history of human accomplishments. I am referring to the successful use of cloning to create human stem cells that was announced by scientists earlier this week at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. You could easily have missed it, however.

We live in an age of blasé attitudes towards everything. Perhaps the pace of technological advances in the last several decades has simply dulled our ability to be impressed: when I attempted the other week to have a video conference call with colleagues in Israel, the U.K., France, and California all at once and the picture was briefly distorted slightly, I found it far more natural to be irritated that the program wasn’t working properly than to be amazed that such a thing exists in the first place and that this kind of technology is available for free to normal people such as myself for the mere effort of downloading the program and clicking the “install” button.  But this announcement in Oregon was far more than a simple threshold over which some team of scientists finally figured out how to step; it seems to me that this achievement constitutes a real game-changer in the history not only of science but of human culture itself. Or, at the very least, that it constitutes a huge challenge for a society that must now make regarding innovative procedures that have the capacity to change the way we think of, and define, human life.

The scientists in Oregon were attempting to help an eight-month-old baby born with a genetic disease. (To protect the patient’s privacy, neither the child’s name or gender, nor the specific disease from which the child is suffering, have been made public.)  That much—doctors attempting to help sick children recover from debilitating conditions or illnesses—happens a million times a day in every country of the world. But it was the specific way in which they chose to attempt to help that is of note here: the scientists were successful in using simple skin cells from the baby to create several embryos that were the precise genetic doubles of the baby.  Then, having created these several embryos, the doctors were able successfully to extract stem cells from them which they will now use to “cure” the baby of its gene-based illness. Not long ago, this would have sounded like science fiction of the most unlikely variety imaginable. And yet it happened just this last week in Portland.

The key principle is that embryonic stem cells have the amazing capacity to turn into any kind of cell within the human body. Healthy ones, therefore, can be used successfully to replace unhealthy, genetically-diseased cells and that in turn can cure people suffering from the diseases brought on by some specific kind of genetic imperfection in the first place.  Today, these kinds of curative stem cells are generally derived from embryos created in vitro in laboratories from two gametes in a process that is merely the mechanical version of the normal human reproductive process. But those embryos are not—and cannot be—the exact genetic match of anyone at all, just as all babies, because they are the genetic heirs of both their parents, can never be the precise genetic matches of either. And it is precisely because the chances for rejection are far greater when recipient and donor are not exactly matched that this week’s achievement in Oregon, in the context of which a human embryo was created from single parent, is so important. It apparently no longer takes two to tango.

This is not unlike the way Dolly, the world’s most famous sheep, was created in Edinburgh in 1997. Yet although Dolly was born healthy and grew to ovine adulthood, the Oregon team, led by Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, are insisting that the embryos they created would not be implanted in a human womb and, far more to the point, could not develop into human babies even if they were implanted. They did not say why not, or at least no news source I could located quoting them as explaining other than with reference to similar experiments with monkey embryos, none of which traveled successfully through the stages of gestation to birth. Still, this is surely a step in that direction, albeit one in need of further tweaking actually to create human beings from a single gamete. If this is a road down which society does not wish to travel, then this would clearly be the moment—and perhaps the last one, at that—to get off the bus.

The responses to the Oregon announcement were so predictable they could almost have been scripted in advance. The loved ones of people the most likely to benefit from the Oregon announcement—people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injury, and diabetes—were thrilled. People who place supreme emphasis on the sanctity of human life were less enthusiastic. The distinction between therapeutic cloning (i.e., cloning for the sake of helping cure sick people of their illnesses) and reproductive cloning (i.e. cloning that has as its point the creation of human life) was trumpeted by those eager to support the former without feeling concomitantly obliged to support the latter, while others—myself included—found the distinction between the two a bit blurry, especially if the specific issue addressed by therapeutic cloning has to do with a couple’s fertility issues and leads to the creation of an embryo that would then be implanted in the uterus of a woman who would then give birth to the baby and become its mother. When put that way, how different is the use of cloning to help infertile couples become parents from the use of in vitro fertilization techniques to accomplish exactly the same thing? In that context, at least in my opinion, the fact that the embryo that grows through gestation to become that couple’s child was created from material harvested from one rather than two parents seems more like a detail than a crucial factor in evaluating the procedure’s moral acceptability. So the child is the genetic match of one parent rather than the genetic amalgam of both. So what?

Sheep have been cloned. Monkeys also have been cloned, as have been goats, cattle, mice, horses, pigs, frogs,  carp, fruit flies, rabbits, camels, rats, wolves, and at least one water buffalo. It feels inevitable that, at least eventually, someone is going to figure out how to clone human beings. And it will be specifically at that juncture that society is going to have to decide how to proceed. In the United States, federal law has since 1996 prohibited stem cell research that leads to the destruction of embryos. (It was just this last January, however, that the Supreme Court decisively declined to hear a lawsuit intended to forbid the federal government from financing any stem cell research at all.) But although there are no federal laws that ban cloning completely, there are laws on the books in thirteen states that specifically outlaw reproductive cloning. The distinction, as noted above, is not as absolute as it at first might sound. But more to the point is that, in the end, genies escape from bottles and can rarely, if ever, be successfully forced back inside. Somewhat in the same way the world cannot unlearn how to create nuclear weapons although there are many who wish this were not the case, this kind of technology, once developed and proven to work, will not be unlearnable…and people desperate enough to reproduce will always find ways to access the kind of technology they need to become parents. If, that is, that technology is permitted to be developed and perfected.

Society has long since accepted the principle that there is nothing inherently wrong with providing assistance to couples who would once have had no choice but to remain childless. Still, the whole concept of cloning raises the possibility of misuse in a way that “regular” IVF technology doesn’t and, as a result, the real question is how real those possibilities actually are. Yes, it is true that bereaved parents could attempt to create precise genetic replacements for their lost sons and daughters. The relatives of murder victims could attempt to create babies bearing their lost relations’ exact genetic code. Societies could respond to genocide by creating, or rather re-creating, legions of their formerly lost citizens to live on in their stead. Totalitarian governments could create armies of genetically pre-programed workers possessed of precisely the skills needed to perform some specific job. Of course, none of these cloned individuals would be the people they replaced. They would carry the same genetic code, but neither their memories nor their experiences. They would not be the same people, although, somewhat like Dr. Evil and Mini-Me, they would probably look very much alike…assuming they lived similar lives in similar places, spent similar numbers of hours in the sun or at the gym, and weighed roughly the same number of pounds. But, other than cosmetically, they would simply be possessed of the same genetic potential as their former iterations absent any of the actual results that that potential yielded.  The real challenge facing society in light of this week’s breakthrough, therefore, is to decide how seriously to take any of the above possibilities…and how to weigh it against the right of individuals to reproduce as they wish and can, and of scientists and physicians to seek to cure disease by whatever means suggests itself as feasible.

We don’t say, after all, that deaf people have some sort of moral obligation not—in cases where it is possible—to have surgery to restore their hearing because God created deafness in the world and undoing that aspect of creation would be tantamount to thwarting God’s will. We certainly don’t follow that line of reasoning with respect to the blind or the lame. So why should an individual who simply hasn’t married or found a partner with whom to create life be forbidden by law from reproducing merely because, up until now, the reproductive process has been always a pas de deux and never a pas seul. Things change! In my opinion, the challenge facing society is not to embrace or reject the kind of cloning techniques that can lead to healing for some and, eventually, families for others, but to figure out how to move forward in a way that is consonant both with our ever-evolving moral values and with the rights of any individual in a free society to chart a course forward in life that corresponds to that specific person’s wishes and desires.

One thing is clearly the case: it’s a whole new world out there, and it’s getting newer with every passing year!

Tannhäuser Returns!

When I wrote last week about Jodi Picoult’s novel, The Story Teller, I hadn’t anticipated how chock full of Shoah-related news the days to follow were going to be. And the news was mostly good!

The good news—and it is very good news—was the conviction of the final three of the despicable lowlifes who stole $57,000,000  from the Hardship Fund, a fund established by the German government in 1980 to provide one-time payments to people who abandoned their property when they fled to the Soviet Union from the Nazis but who were neither German citizens nor citizens of countries that had already been occupied by the Germans. (The other twenty-eight indicted individuals simply chose to plead guilty to the changes against them.) And, as though that wasn’t bad enough, they were also convicted from the so-called Article 2 Fund, a fund established in 1990 following the re-unification of Germany to provide reparations to Shoah survivors who had the very bad luck to end up living in East Germany when the dust settled and Germany was divided into West Germany and East Germany, and who were thus denied reparations at all by the Communist government. (The Communists of East Germany, instead of owning up to their guilt as Germans, chose instead to pursue the fantasy policy that they were actually the victims of Nazis and not the perpetrators of their crimes.)  With these final convictions, a total of thirty-one individuals have pled guilty or been found guilty. Sentencing is still to come, although it’s hard to think of a ring in hell hot enough for people who would participate in a plan to steal from people whose suffering was, even before this final ignominy, incalculable.

The next piece of news, also good, relates to something I wrote to you about a few weeks ago.  In that letter, I discussed the work of the German government’s so-called “Z Commission,” more properly called the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, and its announcement that it had uncovered the names and identities of several individuals who had participated in the murder of millions at Auschwitz, mostly guards at the camp who had never before been identified, let alone indicted of their crimes and tried courts of law. Since Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, we are talking about crimes committed almost seventy years ago and I specifically wrote to discuss with you whether it was just or cruel to pursue nonagenarians this long after the fact. (If you are reading this electronically, you can reread what I had to say about that by clicking here.)  And now, only a few weeks later, the games are on with the arrest this week of one Hans Lipschis, the ninety-three-year-old who occupies (or rather, until this week occupied) the number four spot on the Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted war criminals.  Mr. Lipschis was arrested at his home in the picturesque Germany town of Aalen, formerly the hometown of Nazi Field Marshal Rommel, where he has lived since being deported from the United States after an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations uncovered his Nazi past. Born in 1919 in Lithuania, he admits to having belonged to the SS and to having been stationed at Auschwitz but insists that he was only a cook. The members of the “Z Commission,” who should know, apparently think otherwise.  For my part, I think only good can come from trials like the one Hans Lipschis is apparently about to have.  There is no statute of limitations for the crime of murder, nor should there be. The argument, therefore, that if the defendant is really, really old, he should be allowed to die in peace seems to me somewhere between absurd and silly: if there is no statute of limitations for murder, how could there logically be one for mass murder?

And that brings me finally to the scandal surrounding this spring’s production of Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. I am not a huge fan of Wagner, and not solely because he was later on so beloved of the Nazis. That, in and of itself, says more about them than about him. (Beethoven, after all, to whom no anti-Semitic attitudes have ever been ascribed, was also lionized by the Nazis.) But Wagner was also the author of the infamous anti-Semitic screed, “Jewishness in Music,” which was every bit as much an attack on Jews and Judaism in general as it was “about” the worthlessness of specific composers of Jewish descent like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and which became a landmark publication in the history of pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism. On the other hand, Wagner was apparently one of those salon anti-Semites who had Jewish friends and had it in him to like certain specific Jewish people, but who saw no reason to hide his distaste for Jews in general and for Judaism. Still, to lay Treblinka at Wagner’s feet also seems exaggerated. The man died in 1883, six years before Hitler was even born.  He was, by all accounts, no more anti-Semitic in his world view than the average German of his day and place. Perhaps more to the point, there are no offensive characterizations of Jews in any of Wagner’s operas. (Indeed, the specific characters sometimes identified as Jewish “types” in Wagner’s operas, specifically Mime in the Ring cycle, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger and Klingsor in Parsifal, are specifically not identified as Jews.)  The whole issue is complicated. Readers who want to know more and who are reading this electronically can read an excellent, I believe fair-minded, survey of the whole issue by clicking here.)

And now we have the whole brouhaha surrounding this year’s production of Tannhäuser  in Düsseldorf.  Tannhäuser was a real person, a historical figure of the thirteenth century remembered as a bard and as a poet.  His poetry survives, but far more famous, however, are the legends that surround the poet’s life, and particularly the one that features him first locating the subterranean home of the goddess Venus and then spending a year there worshiping her. Eventually filled with remorse, Tannhäuser  —all this according to legend rather than historical record—then travels to Rome to ask the pope to absolve him of his sins. The pope declines, observing that just as likely as Tannhäuser achieving God’s forgiveness after spending a year steeped in debauchery and idolatry would be the pope’s staff sprouting blossoms. Three days later, the pope’s staff does indeed produce such blossoms (just like Aaron’s in Parashat Korach), but by then Tannhäuser has returned home to seek earthly redemption not on his knees before the pope but instead in arms of his true love, Elisabeth. Wagner’s libretto, which he himself also wrote, is based directly on this legend and thus features a combination of themes guaranteed to interest any opera-goer: debauchery, regret, atonement, rejection, absolution, and redemption. How could that combination of themes not draw audiences?

Tannhäuser premiered in Dresden in the fall of 1845. It has been produced and re-produced countless times in opera houses all over the world, including famously in an updated version in Paris in 1861. (The opera’s American premiere was in 1859 at the Stadt Theater on the Bowery in lower Manhattan.) But there has never been a production like this spring’s one in Düsseldorf. In this production, directed by Burkhard Kosminski, sets the story in Nazi Germany. Venus appears as a Nazi officer; her subterranean crypt is recast as a gas chamber.  In one especially brutal scene, an entire family—mother, father, and daughter—are stripped naked and murdered on stage. Apparently the scenes were so graphic that some audience members actually required medical assistance after leaving the theater. Others stood up in their seats and booed loudly.  Many people walked out. Even more complained to the management that the liberties taken with libretto made it reasonable to wonder if what was being produced even was Wagner’s opera, even if it featured Wagner’s music.

Watching from the outside, it’s hard to know what to make of this. It’s not at all hard to understand why Germans would prefer to recall the Nazi era as an aberration, as a bizarre departure from the noble culture of pre- and post-war Germany.  The thought that the roots of Nazism can be traced back to the nineteenth century—the century during which most of the upper-level Nazi leaders were born, after all—is one thing, after all. But to move beyond that to find the roots of the Nazis’ brutality in the complex of myths and legends that form the medieval foundation upon which rests the very pre-modern civilization that most Germans would like to think that Nazi barbarism was a deviation from—that, I can also understand easily, is something most contemporary Germans would want ardently not to believe. Maybe it’s even not so, although books like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s make me wonder if that might not be just so much wishful thinking. But what interests me in all this, however, is not specifically the way the audience’s revolt in Düsseldorf has been resolved (the Deutsche Oper announced yesterday that the work would henceforth be performed in concert version rather than as a dramatized stage piece with the singers in costume), but the fact that finally, after all these years, the question of how deep in the culture of modern Germany the roots of anti-Semitism lie appears to have become the question to ask…and, if possible, to answer honestly.  The audience’s response to the Düsseldorf Tannhäuser clearly signals that today’s Germans are eager to contextualize their nation’s Nazi legacy. That, surely, is their right. But to do so in a way that corresponds to history—and particularly to the history of German culture within the broader context of European culture—without falling prey to wishful thinking or to satisfying, but basically groundless, fantasies, that is the challenge facing modern Germany as we approach the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht this November and, with each passing year, the horrors of the Shoah slip further and further into the past.

The Storyteller

I am not a literary snob. I am not, therefore, someone who looks down on books that hoi polloi read and enjoy, but that fail to meet my lofty standards of literary excellence. Instead, I prefer to judge books, including mass-market best sellers, based on the degree to which I find them engaging and satisfying to read, and specifically without respect to the author’s pedigree, education,  day job, real-life status, or prior accomplishments.

It was in that spirit, in fact, that I bought and read Jodi Picoult’s new novel, The Storyteller. She’s a good example—Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy are others—of people who write hugely bestselling books but who have never acquired the cachet of a “serious” author, the kind of author whose books are taught to undergraduates as opposed merely to being read by them.  But there was another reason I was drawn to read The Storyteller and that had to do with its plot. It is a big hit, that book, currently on both the Times’ bestseller list of hardcover fiction and its list of bestselling e-books. It will be read, at least eventually, not by thousands but by hundreds of thousands, if not more. (In aggregate, Jodi Picoult has about 14 million books in print. Her twenty-odd previous books have been published in thirty-five countries in thirty-four different languages.) As a result, she constitutes her own private voice of America to many out there in the big, wide world. And this novel she has just published, The Storyteller, is therefore going to be what all those uncountable people read and believe specifically about the Shoah.

People who haven’t ever heard of Elie Wiesel, Saul Friedländer, or Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, much less read their books, have heard of Jodi Picoult! And so it was also for that reason that I set myself to reading the novel last week. What countless thousands across the globe are going to know of the Holocaust, I want to know too! (I plan to be particularly interested in reading how the book is received in Germany when it comes out in German translation.) In truth, I know Picoult’s work only slightly. Joan and I once listened to one of her novels on long drives to and from Toronto, and we both found it somewhere between cloying and irritating, and did not come away as long-term fans.  But I was more than prepared to give her a second chance this time ‘round. If someone with fourteen million books in print is prepared to set a book in the Lodz ghetto and in Auschwitz, then I am prepared to read what she has to say!

I have to say that I was impressed. Not by the literary quality of the book particularly, but by her willingness not to cut corners and to tell her story plainly and clearly. At the heart of the novel, which is told from ever-shifting points of view by four different narrators, are the two chapters narrated by the “main” narrator’s grandmother, an elderly woman named Minka. These chapters, not unlike the two “Shoah” chapters in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (about which novel I wrote to you at length last year), these twin chapters are the axis around which the rest of the plot revolves. And they are, to say the least, harrowing. Even the worst stories of all—the story, for example, of the unimaginable events leading up to September 4, 1942, the day on which the residents of the ghetto were ordered to hand over all children under the age of ten for immediate deportation—even that story is told in detail and without flinching. Or without flinching much. Nor is Minka’s account of her time in Auschwitz told other than in stark, plain prose. Since she lived to tell her tale, Minka’s story was atypical of those who were sent there. But Picoult understands that, or seems to, and bends the story just far enough—but without taking readers actually into the gas chambers in the way Andre Schwarz Bart did in The Last of the Just or Herman Wouk did in War and Remembrance or Grossman did in Life and Fate—for readers to get a reasonable picture as well of what fate those not selected for work met upon arrival.

I’ve read more Shoah novels than I can remember the names of. But I found myself engaged by Minka’s account, even when it veered so far into unlikelihood that it was barely believable. To say the same thing differently, the people in the foreground were whoever Picoult’s storyline required them to be, but it was the background that drew me into the book, the stories of the people about whom the book isn’t but who are simply present as the story of the people that the book is about unfolds around them.

Two themes that are featured throughout the book are worth mentioning. One is the theme of forgiveness. I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who may read the book, but the story turns on the question of whether anyone has the right to forgive someone for wrongs done to other people. The k’doshim of the Shoah died in the whirlwind, for example, and are no more. Does that, in and of itself, mean that there can be no forgiveness, no repentance, and no atonement for the perpetrators?  Most of us, I think, would handily agree with the notion that there can never be atonement absent reconciliation with the wronged party. But Picoult moves the discussion onto even less comfortable ground by twisting the plot to make this a point of contention between an ex-nun who represents the Christian notion of forgiving one’s oppressors, of turning the other cheek, and of seeking absolution through confession and penance, and a young self-denying Jew (that is, the child of Jewish parents who insists that she is not a Jew at all, which is—perhaps not irrelevantly—how Picoult describes her own relationship to her parents’ Jewishness in an interview presented on her website) who appears to represent the traditional Jewish disinclination to offer cheap forgiveness for aggression against others.

Neither position fits well. The Christian position is presented simplistically and, in my opinion, oddly. The Jewish position is presented oddly as well, clearly seen through Christian lenses and not especially flatteringly at that.  What Picoult is doing—and what she herself says she is setting out to do in her preface—is responding to Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, which is about the efforts of a former SS officer to gain forgiveness after the fact not from the people in whose murder he was complicit (which story is told in horrific detail in the book), but from some other Jewish person—Wiesenthal himself—whom he has arbitrarily selected as his source of potential Jewish absolution.  Wiesenthal’s book is one of the more profound works on forgiveness (and particularly on forgiveness in the context of the Shoah) I have ever read and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly, especially in its later editions which include responses from all sorts of others, including Primo Levi, Desmond Tutu, Albert Speer, and the Dalai Lama. This book constitutes Jodi Picoult’s answer to Wiesenthal’s question. (My own answer, I believe, is that the gates of repentance are always open—just as tradition teaches us—yet that not all may step through them. And thus is laid the groundwork for the traditional Jewish approach to atonement as well: that the ability to repent oneself of one’s sins and to atone for them is itself a gift from God that must be earned, and that it is perfectly possibly not to have earned it. So my response to that part of the book is also equivocal.)  

On the one hand, the book for interested parties to read is The Sunflower, not The Storyteller. On the other, I’m willing to guess that an overwhelming majority of Picoult’s readers will never have heard of Wiesenthal or his book, and so may possibly be led to consider reading it not by reading this letter by me to you but by reading Jodi Picoult’s preface to her own book. And we are talking, at least potentially, about a lot of people.

Also running through the book is an odd countertale about vampires. Presented in the book as a story written by Minka—one of the most ridiculous parts of the storyline features Minka, who just happens to speak perfect German, as a prisoner in Auschwitz gaining all sorts of favors from one of the upper-level Nazis employed there because he likes to listen to her read from her manuscript—the actual tale is chilling and, in its own way, interesting. If I understand the concept correctly, we are supposed to understand that there are people—the undead in our midst—who are congenitally programmed to devour their brethren. Is the point that Nazis, like vampires, had no choice? Precisely the opposite point is argued throughout the novel, yet the vampire story moves forward throughout the whole book and only ends when the vampire himself stops destroying because he himself is destroyed. Of course, the undead cannot really die, and so…we are left wondering if and when the story will recommence.  Somewhere in there is a Shoah parable, something to do with the impossibility of eradicating anti-Semitism because of the degree to which it is embedded in Western culture. (In this regard, readers would do better to read University of Chicago professor David Nirenberg’s new book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, which I read earlier this spring and found very worthy and interesting.) But the whole vampire story is distracting and, in the end, even I wasn’t sure what exactly the point of telling it was. It was not, however, intended to make readers reeling from the impact of the worst of Picoult’s Shoah stories feel any better. As well it will not!

We who have accepted upon ourselves the sacred task of keeping the memory of the martyrs alive cannot be sorry that a major popular author has written a book that will introduce the basic story of the Shoah to countless readers who might otherwise know little or nothing about it. That the story as told is unlikely in the extreme—Minka’s granddaughter breaks off her affair with a married mortician because she ends up falling in love with the agent from the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations who is sent to her idyllic New Hampshire town when she comes to believe that she has inadvertently befriended one of the SS officers, now living in hiding half a century later, who tormented her grandmother and murdered her best friend—but compelling in its unlikely, convoluted way. The vampires are intriguing, if under-explained. The whole plot is a bit silly—the theme of baking is also featured very prominently both in the real book and the book-within-a-book about vampires—but the Shoah passages are truly harrowing and, within the limits of mass-market fiction, accurate enough.

The short answer is that I didn’t love the book. But I love that the book is out there, that thousands upon thousands of Americans and readers in other countries will read it and be moved by Minka’s story and by her granddaughter’s. And if some of those readers are moved to read Wiesenthal’s book or other historical accounts of the Shoah, then Jodi Picoult—even despite her glib disavowal of her parents’ Jewishness—will truly have done something of merit for Jews everywhere.

The Pursuit of Justice

There are, it seems to me, two overarching reasons that society undertakes to punish criminals. One, surely, is to make society safe both by preventing wrongdoers from reoffending (incarceration works well in this regard, at least temporarily, as does more permanently execution) and also by deterring others from following in their footsteps by making the consequences  of illegal behavior horrific enough to outweigh whatever benefits criminal behavior might occasionally bring along in its wake. But the other is less goal-oriented and has more to do with the concept of retribution: to most citizens, it simply feels just and right to respond to bad behavior by making those who willfully engage in it suffer the consequences of their own actions. 

In the ideal situation, these two concepts work together to create a sense of justice accomplished. Someone commits an awful crime, a murder. That individual is then arrested, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  Unless he managed to kill somebody in prison (which I believe is far more difficult in real life than on television, although clearly not impossible), that specific person will commit no more murders. Others who may be contemplating murdering someone will, at least theoretically, be prompted to rethink their plans once they hear that someone convicted of murder has been sent to prison for life with no chance ever of being released.  And, finally, the citizenry, upon hearing that someone who willfully and in a premeditated manner took another’s life will henceforth have no control of any sort over his or her own future life, will feel that justice has been done. If the murderer in question lives in a jurisdiction with the death penalty, then the equation is even simpler:  one who took the life of another will now pay with his or her own, just as the simple meaning of Scripture suggests ought be the case: ha-shofeikh dam ha-adam ba-adam damo yishafeikh. One who spills the blood of a human being, by human beings shall such a one’s blood be spilt.  That was neatly put. But is it really that simple? Even the Torah itself moves on to offer complex legislation designed to modify the original idea and protect, to give one example, the inadvertent manslayer.

The prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsanaev, the surviving Boston bomber, provides an excellent example of how these ideas can work together well. If he is convicted in federal court, he will either be executed or sentenced to a very long prison sentence. And all of the requirements for the reasonableness of punishment will be in place. His sentence at least may deter others from embarking on the same kind of terror mission upon which the defendant and his brother witlessly embarked. It will certainly prevent the defendant himself from reoffending. And it feels just and right for the person convicted of the senseless murder of three and the maiming of hundreds to be forced to accept a punishment commensurate with his crimes, whatever it turns out to be.  It seems to me that this latter point serves as the key concept for most of us. When President Obama, on the day of the bombing, declared that it was only a matter of time before those responsible for the bombing feel the “full weight of justice,” he was in effect saying that same thing exactly: although the point of catching the criminals is surely also to deter others and prevent re-offense, the primary reason for capturing the wrongdoer or wrongdoers is to bring them to justice and make them pay for their crimes.

But how should society respond when only one of these avenues of justification is operative, when only one makes sense? That, I realize, is by far the more interesting question to ponder. (I’ve just lately been reading a book, The Urgings of Conscience: A Theory of Punishment, by University of Arkansas professor of philosophy Jacob Adler and I’ve been prompted by what I’ve read to reconsider these issues in light of his very cogent, compelling arguments. The book, which is very clever and interesting, was published twenty years ago by the Temple University Press in Philadelphia and is still available.)

A good example of how complicated it is to decide where fairness and justice lie when the “other” justifications for punishment—inhibiting criminals from re-offending and discouraging would-be criminals from following in their footsteps—are absent could derive from the announcement last week by the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (known in German-government-prepared English-language documents as Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes) that it has prepared a list of fifty still-living individuals, men and women, who served as guards at Auschwitz and that it intends to pursue their prosecution if such a path forward proves feasible and legally viable. The history of the organization is interesting. At first, it fell to the Allied authorities to prosecute war criminals. (The trials at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 were the most famous, but there were many others.  In the end, the total number of Nazi criminals convicted of war crimes under British, French, and American jurisdiction between the end of the war and 1949 was 5,025, a mere 806 of whom were sentenced to death.  Of those, however, an even more negligible 486 were actually executed, the rest successfully having had their death sentences commuted to prison sentences of various lengths. It is not known how many Nazis were executed or imprisoned by Soviet authorities after the war, but the number is presumed to be in the tens of thousands.) After 1949, however, the responsibility to prosecute Nazis guilty of war crimes fell to the German government itself. However, the German justice system as it then existed was only legally capable of acting with respect to war crimes committed in Germany itself. And so it was specifically to create a government agency possessed of the right to prosecute Nazi criminals whose crimes were committed outside of Germany that the Zentrale Stelle was created in 1958. To date, the agency—sometimes popularly called the Z Commission—has prosecuted some 7000 former Nazis. Generally speaking, the formerly occupied countries of Europe have prosecuted their own collaborators and war criminals.

The next step, the Z Commission announced, will be to discover if any of the people on the list was tried for his or her crimes either by the Allies after the war or by the German government itself.  (Why this was not done before the announcement was made was not made explicit. I personally would have wanted to know that before going public.) More to the point is that this is not an old list that prosecutors have decided now for their own reasons to resurrect; the press release specified that on the list are some names that were only added in the last year as a result of ongoing investigatory research.  There could, therefore, be individuals on the list who have never been publicly identified (much less brought to justice), who have never answered for the willing role they played in the murder not of thousands or hundreds of thousands, but of millions.

These are, naturally, very old people.  Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, more than sixty-eight years ago.  Assuming the guards were all at least in their twenties, that would make the youngest of them eighty-eight. Some were surely older. Is there any point, really, in prosecuting nonagenarians for crimes they committed well over half a century ago? They are surely not going to reoffend now. Their prosecution, especially if it is successful, will not deter others from serving in the S.S. or from volunteering to serve in the Nazi war against the Jews.  The only reason to proceed, therefore, is the pure pursuit of justice itself. And that, interestingly enough, is where the debate begins.

Some have suggested that a more reasonable approach to the handful of elderly surviving perpetrators would be to create public forums in which these few remaining mass murderers could finally speak openly and freely about what they did, what they saw, what they felt as they participated in genocide. In court, the argument goes, they will say as little as possible and nothing at all personal. But the point of these forums would not be to convict, then punish, the perpetrators, but to allow their candor to lead Germans into a future energized by the resolve never again to allow fascism to take root in their country. Allowing these few remaining war criminals to speak freely and without the fear of punishment, the proposal suggests, could lead to a kind of national reconciliation, something in the way that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa sought to bring former enemies together to create a new South Africa.

In South Africa, the concept worked well. Other similar commissions in the world, for example the National Commission for Forced Disappearances in Argentina, have worked less well. In the end, the key to success in such an undertaking is the ground-level assumption, shared by all, that reconciliation, although difficult and painful, is possible. In South Africa, for example, the commission brought oppressed and oppressor together in a cathartic effort to exorcise the past of its demons and thus to create a demon-free path forward into the future. That, I believe, was a reasonable, even a noble, undertaking. But in the context of Auschwitz we are talking about something else entirely: the proposed reconciliation will not be between the murderers and the murdered, but between a nation having trouble “reconciling” itself to its own crimes and the ghosts of its fascist past. I can see why Germans would long for that kind of cathartic depuration of national guilt. Who wouldn’t? But that kind of expurgation can only come, as our own Torah teaches, from some combination of repentance, prayer, and charity…and not from a commission that specifically exists to circumvent the justice system.

The Torah verse that does seem relevant to me is the famous injunction tzedek tzedek tirdof, usually translated as “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”  The repetition of the word for justice has puzzled generations of scholars and commentators. To me personally, the verse suggests that true justice is always possessed of a dual aspect and invariably provides justice for the victim, who seeks and attains a just response to a crime committed against him or her, as well as justice for the accused, who is to be presumed innocent until found guilty by a jury of his or her peers. To sidestep that entire process merely because a murderer has successfully avoided prosecution for decades is to deny justice to the dead, who in my opinion even posthumously retain their right to see their murderers brought to justice.  Therefore, I applaud the decision of the Zentralle Stelle to pursue those who had a hand in the murder of millions even after all these many years have passed. The dead are still dead. So why should their murderers not still be answerable for their crimes?

The Wall

For outsiders looking in, it must be difficult to imagine why the latest attempt to resolve the whole brouhaha regarding women’s rights at the Kotel matters so much to so many people or, for that matter, why the issue itself is important in the first place.  I can see that easily when I attempt to imagine what readers, say, of the New York Times, must see when they read the recent series of articles and updates regarding Natan Sharansky’s efforts, so far not unsuccessful, to broker a deal between the opposing parties in the conflict:  Jews arguing about who stands where on a shadeless plaza in front of an old wall that was not even part of the ancient Temple, just a support wall built into the ground to buttress its foundation so that the hill upon which it stood would not collapse under its unimaginable weight.  When viewed from that vantage point, it does seem—even to me—to be a peculiar setting for a war. And a war—albeit of the cultural variety rather than the military one—has been exactly what has been going on there for a very long time now, one that has included arrests, injuries, insults, violence and the threat of violence, and a level of incivility that is shocking even by the usual standards of in-house Jewish fractiousness.

The short version is that there is no short version. The Western Wall—once called the Wailing Wall because of the emotional laments over our destroyed Temple once sung there by people overcome with emotion and tears—has always been there.  The rights of Jews to gather and worship there were a hugely contentious issue under British rule and eventually became one of the defining issues of the conflict between the Jews of British Palestine and their English overlords. From 1948 through 1967, during the years Jerusalem was divided and the Old City was under the Jordanian occupation, the issue didn’t exist: Israelis couldn’t enter Jordan and there weren’t enough Jews from other countries willing to come as tourists to a country at war with Israel not to be accommodated in that narrow lane. Nor was there anything like an organized rabbinate looking over Jewish affairs in Jordanian Jerusalem. And then Jerusalem was united by the IDF in 1967 and the issue, dormant for decades, came quickly back to life.

The plaza in front of the Wall was added after the Six Day War to accommodate the huge number of visitors and worshipers who could not squeeze into the narrow lane that previously had been adjacent to the Wall. Other than when the Old City was under Jordanian rule, there had always been worshipers there. But the Wall was some sort of combination of shrine and tourist site, nothing at all like a “regular” synagogue where people gather for organized, scheduled worship services. Indeed, all the many photographs of the space from the first half of the twentieth century show men and women worshiping together, side by side, in a way that most of them would have found uncomfortable and unfamiliar in any other setting.  After the Six Day War, the situation changed dramatically. The Wall—the sole remaining vestige of the Temple, although as explained above not strictly speaking part of it—became a symbol of Jewish Jerusalem and of Israel’s intention never again to lose control over the ancient part of its capital city. The space before the Wall—about 1,300 square feet before 1967—grew incrementally until it reached its current size of about 26,000 square feet. All of these developments were salutary, but somewhere along the way the sense that the Wall should be a national symbol of unity and resolve was replaced with the feeling that what the Wall “really” is, is a synagogue. And an Orthodox one at that.

It’s easy to see how that came to pass. The Chief Rabbinate, always in the hands of the Orthodox, had become a bastion of extreme right-wing types whose views regularly shock even Israelis who nominally self-identify as Orthodox. The sense that the Wall should therefore be governed by the same rules that govern worship in Orthodox synagogues—and particular in the kind of synagogues in which the people now in charge prefer to worship—gained traction. Most Israelis didn’t seem to care one way or the other. The issue was resolved by not being resolved.  But then came along the Women of the Wall.

That’s not entirely correct. There were many people—Jews outside Israel and Israelis alike—who found the situation unpalatable. But it was the Women of the Wall who brought the matter finally to a head.

Founded in 1988, the organization is only twenty-five years old.  But it has been in the forefront of the fight to make of the Kotel a place of worship, as the prophet said, for all people…including women who want to lead themselves in prayer.  It’s been a long struggle. In 2002, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that the Women of the Wall had a legal right to conduct prayer service at the Wall. A few days later, extremist parties in the Knesset introduced a bill making it a criminal offense for women to worship at the Wall in what the bill referenced as “non-traditional ways.” The bill did not pass, but then, in the spring of 2003, the Supreme Court, reconsidering its earlier decision, determined that the government’s earlier ban on women reading Torah at the Wall or worshiping there under their own auspices was indeed legal because doing so would constitute a “threat to public safety.”  The Court did, however, instruct the government to create a space for non-Orthodox prayer in the vicinity, and specifically at Robinson’s Arch, an archeological site adjacent to the Wall plaza. (Named after British archeologist Edward Robinson who discovered its remains in 1838, Robinson’s Arch was once a huge footbridge built by King Herod at the extreme southwestern corner of the Temple Mount. The Arch itself was destroyed during the Revolt of 70 CE when the entire Temple complex was demolished, but the site remains and some remnants of the stonework are still visible.)  This actually happened, and the site—the scene of countless Masorti/Conservative bar- and bat-mitzvahs that some readers may have attended—was inaugurated in 2004.

But, as all Americans knows, separate is never really equal. And there have been persistent efforts to worship at the Wall itself, at the actual Kotel Plaza. In 2009, Women of the Wall member Nofrat Frankel was arrested for wearing a tallit at the Kotel. (I wrote about that incident to you then, which letter those of you reading electronically can access by clicking here.)  In the summer of 2010, Anat Hoffman, the group’s leader, was arrested and charged with the bizarre crime of holding a Torah scroll, then fined 5000 shekels.  Last October, Hoffman was arrested again, this time charged with singing too loudly and, in so doing, disturbing the peace.  This February, more women, including two American rabbis, were detained by police for having conducted an illegal prayer service at the Wall.

Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. In a world that seems ever less devoted to spiritual enterprise, women are being prosecuted for wishing to devote time to public prayer. In a world that accepts pluralism as one of the foundation stones of democracy, we seem unable simply to agree to disagree.  And in a world that understands gender-equity to be a norm from which society should only deviate when the deviation under consideration can be justified rationally and reasonably, we seem unwilling simply to allow women simply to pursue their spiritual journey unmolested by men who see things otherwise.

Or rather that was how things were until just recently. Last December, Prime Minister Netanyahu asked Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency, to find a just solution, one that all concerned parties could live with. It can’t have been easy. And what he has proposed is guaranteed not to satisfy everybody. Still, it sounds reasonable to me.  The Robinson’s Arch area is going to be expanded until it is roughly the same size as the Kotel plaza itself. Prayer services, which are currently only allowed at certain times of day and after an entry fee is paid, will be ongoing and free.  The access corridors leading to the larger site will also be redone so that visitors can find their way easily to both areas. And governance of the new area will specifically not be placed in the hands of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation that currently oversees activities at the Wall.

It’s still separate, but it’s more equal. It’s not perfect, therefore. But it is a sign that Israel is moving in the right direction towards recognizing the legitimacy of different schools of Jewish thought and practice, or, more exactly, towards realizing that the government has no business controlling the spiritual lives of the citizenry in a way that prevents them from living Jewishly as they wish. Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi who oversees the Kotel, has indicated that he can live with this compromise solution. That’s huge.  (It can’t have been easy, even for a Natan Sharansky, to bring a very traditional rabbi like Rabbi Rabinowitz on board.)  But the bottom line is that he says he can live with it. I myself also can live with it. And I think that the women of the Jewish world, so long marginalized and their spiritual aspirations denigrated, should learn to live with it too. As I said, it isn’t ideal. But it’s a huge step forward. And huge steps forward are good things for people who want to set forth on long journeys to take.

As many of my readers know, the Temple—both in its historical guise as an actual building complex and in its ghostly guise as the epicenter of God’s enduring presence on earth outside of historical time—is at the shrine at which I personally worship daily. When I face Jerusalem to say my prayers, it is towards a Temple that exists outside of both space and time that I turn to face a God who also exists without reference to time past or forward, or to physical space. I haven’t ever passed up an opportunity to worship at the Kotel, nor will I. But I think I can live with davening at Robinson’s Arch, especially in its future, expanded version. It wasn’t part of the Temple. But, then again, neither was the Western Wall. Not really!

The Silver Platter

Next week, Israel will celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of its independence. For most Jewish citizens here, the date comes and goes without much fanfare. Of course, the same could be said for the Fourth of July, which in our country has become more a day for shopping and barbecuing than for recalling the specific eighteenth-century events that led to American independence. Of course, there are no living Americans who participated in the Revolutionary War, nor are there any among us who could possibly have known such people. (Even my grandmother, born a mere 102 years after Yorktown, could hardly have met a veteran of the Revolution, although her parents just barely could have!) But in Israel there are many veterans of the War of Independence still among the living and, as a result, Israeli Independence Day is taken much more seriously in Israel than American Independence Day is here.

To create what Israelis consider just the right atmosphere for their national holiday, Independence Day is preceded by Memorial Day, a day of national mourning. But by juxtaposing the two days—one of intense grief and one of great national pride—and by allowing one naturally to flow into the other, the Israelis are also saying something profound about the way they understand the very existence of their state: that it was not handed to them by kismet, much less by the United Nations, but was purchased, so to speak, with the blood of all those who gave their lives so that the state could be born. Among Israelis, the most profound literary expression of that thought—or at least the mostly widely known—is Natan Alterman’s poem Magash Ha-kesef (“The Silver Platter”), which generations of Israelis have learned to recite by heart and which I myself also committed to memory as a university student trying to complete a major in modern Hebrew in a single year before graduating. (When I returned from my junior year in France—during which I had abandoned all my courses except the ones in Hebrew language and literature—and had one year of college left, my goal was to become proficient enough in modern Hebrew to avoid having to take any language courses while in rabbinical school and part of my self-imposed regimen involved memorizing modern Hebrew poetry. It worked too!)

Alterman was an interesting figure. Born in Warsaw in 1910, he moved with his family to Israel when he was fifteen, but—in this one way like myself—spent years in France studying at the very same university I did. (Peculiarly, I’m the one who studied Hebrew. The Hebrew poet himself studied agronomy.) Eventually returning to what was then British Palestine, Alterman worked briefly as a teacher but then turned to journalism and spent the rest of his career writing poetry and working as a journalist and translator. His translations of Shakespeare and Molière into modern Hebrew won him important prizes, but it was his poetry that made him famous. His greatest work, a book called Simhat Aniyim “(The Joy of the Poor”), was written when he was only thirty-one and is considered a true masterpiece of Hebrew letters. But his single best-known poem would have to be Magash Ha-kesef, the poem I learned by heart when I was nineteen. 

The title itself Alterman didn’t make up. That honor goes to Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, who in 1947 after the United Nations had voted to partition the British Mandate and from it to create two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab, remarked famously that "No state is ever handed on a silver platter…The Partition Plan does not give the Jews [a state,] but [only] an opportunity." And it was from that thoughtful, chastening remark that Alterman took the concept that he spun out into his poem, which itself was also written before independence was declared in 1948. The poem is therefore not a reflection on the War of Independence, although it reads that way now, but an almost prophetic prediction of what exactly it was going to take to create a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, and of the level of commitment and dedication, but also the level of loss, that was going to be required to transform the dream of an independent Jewish state into reality.

And so, despite the fact that I am so much more adept at writing prose than poetry, I would like to offer my readers a fresh English translation of Alterman’s poem in honor of the sixty-fifth anniversary of Israel’s independence. Forty years have passed since I set myself to learning these lines. I’ve changed. Israel has changed. Everything, almost, has changed. But the degree to which these lines continue to inspire and move me—that actually hasn’t changed at all.

The Silver Platter
Natan Alterman

As peace comes the land, the red of the skies
Grows slowly less intense over smoke-covered borders
As a nation, still breathing despite its broken heart, rises in its place
To experience something unprecedented, something miraculous.

To prepare for the ceremony, the nation rises up in the moonlight
To stand before the dawn seized by celebration and by terror.
And it is then, at that moment, that a boy and a girl come forward
And slowly take their place before the nation.

Armed, dressed in fatigues, still wearing combat boots,
They come forward along the assigned path in silence,
Having found the time neither to change their outfits nor to wipe
Away the traces of exhaustion earned in the line of fire.

Tired to the point of exhaustion and, indeed, deprived of all rest,
Dripping with dew, or rather with the sweat of Jewish youth,
The two approach and stand perfectly still,
And for a long moment seem neither dead nor fully alive.

In tears but seized by curiosity, the nation asks simply
“Who are you?” The two remain still, considering the question,
But then they do answer. “We are the silver platter,” they explain,
“The one upon which the state has been granted to you.”

And then, having said their piece, they fall back into the shadows
And leave the rest to be recorded in the Annals of Israel.