A Pearl-Harbor Moment for the Nation

Sometimes your enemies end up pushing you onto the right path forward even despite the fact that they only really wish to do you harm. The best example of that, and one I’ve written about in this space many times, was Japan’s decision to launch an unprovoked attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was a despicable act, one that cost the lives of more than 2400 American servicemen and women. And yet, for all the attack was unconscionable and reprehensible, it is also true that it was that attack that finally brought the United States into the Second World War. Not that we responded to the Japanese attack by also declaring war on Germany. We declared war on Japan on December 8, the day following the attack in Hawaii. The Germans, supporting their Japanese allies, then declared war on the United States on December 11. And only then, albeit later that same day, did our nation enter the war against Germany.

How many survivors of the Shoah owe their lives to the American decision to enter the war? All of them! (Or surely most. For a fictional, but fully believable and totally engaging, imagining of an alternate universe in which World War II finally grinds to a halt without either side ever really defeating the other, I recommend Robert Harris’ terrific first novel, Fatherland. Trust me, it doesn’t end up well for the Jews.) We take pride in the part our nation took in the defeat of the Nazis, but enjoy less—a lot less—remembering that we basically entered the war because we had no choice, because not even the most ardent American isolationists, pacifists, and non-interventionalists were in favor of the U.S. not responding to a declaration of war made against it. And all that being the case, it doesn’t sound unreasonable to say that, at least in a certain sense, those who lived on in the post-war era as citizens of the democratic republics of Western Europe and an independent Great Britain and the Jews who survived and all the others whom the Nazis hadn’t gotten around to murdering yet—they all owe their post-war existence to the Emperor of Japan, the single individual ultimately responsible for Pearl Harbor. (Emperor Hirohito approved the plan to attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 1 and then again on the day of the assault itself; it would certainly not have taken place if he had opposed the plan. Still, the specific degree to which he was responsible for the carnage remains at least slightly a matter of scholarly debate. For an interesting appraisal on the emperor’s role in the attack, I recommend the short essay about Robert Citino posted on the website of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, to see which click here.)

And that brings me to the story in the paper the other day that Russia is using Iranian-made drones to murder Ukrainian civilians. Was it just a month or two ago that President Biden and other administration officials were still speaking encouragingly and optimistically about how reaching a kind of “deal” with Iran would slow down—or at least would possibly slow down—that nation’s entry into the club of nuclear-armed nations? That any such deal would inevitably lead to Iran acquiring the ability to create—and to manufacture and store—nuclear weapons hardly seemed worth discussing. Like President Obama in 2015, the President’s idea seemed to be that since we can’t possibly really keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, we might as well settle on the far lesser accomplishment of slightly slowing them down. (Of course, unlike President Obama, who promised unequivocally to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and then tried to sell the Iran Deal of 2015 as the accomplishment of that goal, no administration official today even bothers attempting to promise any such thing. Instead, they seem to be working on the theory that the American people will agree that something, even a small bit of something, is better than nothing.) Will the talks in Vienna go anywhere? Just a week ago, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the public comment that he did not see any hope for a renewed agreement with Iran. He didn’t explain his pessimism, but it seems inextricably tied to the discovery that Iran is actively sending weaponry to Russia that the Russians are using to murder civilians in the large cities and smaller towns of Ukraine.

I am of two minds regarding the Iran Accord, and have been since President Obama, knowing he would never get the requisite congressional approval, presented it to the world as a “deal” rather than a “treaty.” On the one hand, Iran is in the hands of fanatic Islamicists who are wholly open about their wish to obliterate Israel by killing all of its Jewish citizens. (That the kind of attack they threaten would undoubtedly also kill its Muslim and Christian citizens doesn’t seem to be an issue. I suppose the Christians, in the mullahs’ eyes, would be collateral damage and the Muslims would be martyrs.) Nor are they anything but aggressive and openly hostile to our nation. So concluding a deal—or whatever—that will lead inexorably to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is anathema to me, something that I think should and even must be opposed vigorously by all decent-minded people. On the other hand, President Obama’s argument that delaying their entry into the club is better than not delaying it—in the hope, vain or not, that the people will eventually rise up, throw their totalitarian masters out, and either create a Western-style democracy or bring back a descendent of the Shah (or both)—is not fully without merit. And the beginnings of such a people’s uprising appear to be making themselves known the streets of Iran. So perhaps I was a bit hasty in waving away that argument in 2015.

But that was then. And now we are in a different universe of discourse. Yes, the Iranian street is seething. But Iran itself continues to be implacably hostile to the West, and especially to our nation and to Israel. If they had tactical nuclear weapons, would they use them against their own people in the event of a real armed uprising? I think they would. And even if murdering civilians in Ukraine is different than killing citizens of your own country, how is it different from using those same drones—except with nuclear payloads—against civilians in Tel Aviv? The game has heated up considerably, but only good will come from the world seeing the Teheran-Moscow alliance for what it is: a union of like-minded zealots whose respect for human life is nil, who will do anything at all to accomplish their political goals, and whose ideational framework (both politically and morally) is the precise opposite of our own.

The October 17 drone attack on Kyiv was only the beginning, I fear. American sources seem certain that Tehran is also going to supply the Russians with surface-to-surface missiles that the latter can use against Ukraine’s cities. The more liberal Arab states—and particular the partners to the Abraham Accords and Saudi Arabia—are watching closely, waiting to see if our nation is prepared to treat Iran not as a partner-in-dialogue with ourselves and the states of Western Europe, but as a partner-in-aggression with Russia in the effort to win the war with Ukraine by murdering its civilians and terrifying those left alive into submission.

The part about the negotiations with Iran that no one ever says out loud is the assumption that we can somehow curry favor with the Islamic Republic by entering into deals with them because, at the end of the day, we can all be sure that Israel will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. That kind of wink-wink hypocrisy seems craven to me. The time clearly has come now—now that the Iranians are facilitating the murder of children in the streets of Kyiv—for a kind of Pearl Harbor moment in which we abandon the fantasy that we can do the right thing merely by being vaguely supportive of our allies (and “vaguely” is not even really the word for it—Pearl Harbor came a year and a half after France, our oldest ally of all, had fallen to the Nazis) and embrace the notion that regimes that foster violence against the innocent and that are motivated by the basest of motives—prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism, greed, and chauvinism—are not to be placated or bought off, but opposed strongly, implacably, and unequivocally.

The Headless Guy Not of Sleepy Hollow

A little bit, I grew up in the nineteenth century. Not like my grandparents, obviously, all four of whom actually were  born in the 1800s. But even though I was born (barely) in the second half of the twentieth century, I was brought up to revere the great authors of the previous century as the true greats in our nation’s literary past. (I heard that, by the way, and, yes, all babies are born barely. But that’s not what I meant…and you know it!) And this appreciation extended beyond the well-known greats even to lesser-known and less-appreciated authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Today forgotten by most and dramatically underappreciated in terms of their influence on American culture as it developed during our nations tumultuous adolescence, in their day both Fenimore Cooper and Irving were responsible for creating the background against which the great and more famous mid-century writers—and particularly Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—wrote the books that even today are considered almost canonical in terms of their importance and influence on American culture.

I liked the books of James Fenimore Cooper (and never quite understood Mark Twain’s almost savage dislike of them), but I write today to remember specifically Washington Irving, a man read these days by almost none but who was the most famous American author of his day—and by far—and the most influential. (He was also the first important American author to be widely read in Europe.) I was still a little boy when my father began to read me bedtime stories taken from Irving’s great collection of essays and stories known as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., and then to supplement the experience with occasional excursions to one or another of the places mentioned in the book, mostly to the towns in the Hudson Valley that were centers of Dutch cultural life before New Amsterdam fell to the English. I had (and have) many favorites…but “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was foremost among them. As a result, I was having nightmares about headless horsemen long before Tim Burton got around to making his terrific movie, Sleepy Hollow, in 1999. My father was an excellent reader!

I mention that specific story because Hoshana Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot, falls this Sunday. And it on that specific day that the Jewish version of the headless horseman steps onto the stage—except that he isn’t a horseman at all, just a Jewish everyperson facing the onset of the final day of the season of judgement. And here he is, as depicted in a Yiddish-language book of Jewish customs published in Amsterdam in 1661.

Who is this man? And where is his head? It’s a good question…and one I can make even more intriguing by adding that the man in the picture is standing—possibly unwittingly—at the confluence of two dramatically incompatible ideas that do battle with each other throughout the holiday season. I’ll explain. But first let add to the mix the intriguing side-notion that I was speaking precisely when I mentioned the man in the picture because, leaving out the man in the moon, there is only one person in the picture reproduced above: one person, that is, and his headless shadow.

Everybody who has ever attended synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur knows the best-known of all holiday prayers, Unetaneh Tokef, and its haunting refrain according to which the heavenly court opens its proceedings on Rosh Hashanah and remains in session until our verdicts are finally decreed and sealed on Yom Kippur. That image—of the gates closing at the end of Yom Kippur as the verdicts are sealed, the great Book of Life is shut closed, and the court declared no longer to be in session—is at the core of how most think of the day. But it wasn’t (and isn’t) the only theory regarding the way divine judgment works. An alternate notion, less well known and far less regularly mentioned, imagines the court closing down on Yom Kippur but the verdicts not being entirely unalterable until the court documents recording those verdicts are sent to the heavenly archive where such things are kept. And that process, this line of thinking imagines, is only complete at the end of Sukkot, eleven days after Yom Kippur.

The idea, unfamiliar to most in our day, lingers on in at least some quarters. Among the very pious, you can occasionally hear someone wishing a friend a guten kvittel, which Yiddish expression references that final document that contains the verdict decreed on Yom Kippur but not fully unalterable until formally received by the celestial archivists and entered into the record. (The Hebrew version, according to which one party wishes the other a petek tov, I’ve only read in books but never actually heard anyone say out loud. Of course, I haven’t been in Israel for Sukkot since 1983. And who knows if I was listening hard enough back then?) And that notion—that the really real end of the season of judgement comes on Hoshana Rabbah, as the last day of Sukkot is called—gave way in at least some circles to the strange idea depicted in the woodcut reproduced above according to which the way you can learn how things went when your case was tried in the heavenly tribunal requires only that you step out into the moonlight on the evening of Hoshana Rabbah to inspect your own shadow and to see if your head is casting the same kind of shadow in the moonlight that the rest of your body is. If your head is clearly sitting right there atop your shoulders, you can expect a new year of health and success. If it isn’t there, you should probably stop buying green bananas.

It's a very old idea, one mentioned in passing by some of the greatest rabbis of medieval times, including Rabbi Eleazar ben Kalonymus of Worms, c. 1176–1238), Ramban (i.e., Rabbi Moshe ben Naḥman, 1194–1270), and the Recanati (i.e., Rabbi Menachem ben Benjamin Recanati, 1223–1290). The idea was clearly known to the author of the Zohar as well, and eventually became well-enough known among “regular” Jewish people for the author of the book of Jewish customs from which the woodcut reproduced above comes to include it in his collection of customs. Readers familiar with my own literary output will recognize the custom from the opening passage of Light from Dead Stars, my second novel and the one that begins in a sukkah on a roof in Rego Park on Hoshana Rabbah as the host’s guests prepare to step out into the moonlight to see what the future shall bring each of them in the year about to begin.

But there is another way to think about the concepts of atonement and repentance and that is the one according to which the gates of repentance are always open and it is always possible to forestall suffering the consequences of one’s own iniquity by repenting oneself fully of one’s sins and thus, at least theoretically, gaining forgiveness. And that notion—according to which there is no final judgment, no entry into the Book of Life that cannot subsequently be altered, no kvittel delivering an unalterable verdict to the celestial archivist in charge of human history—is also part of Jewish heritage, also a way to think about the relationship between the deeds of human beings and the consequences of those deeds.

Interestingly, the High Holiday prayerbook seems to have room for both approaches. Indeed, one way to read the Machzor is as an elaborate interplay between these two ideas, the one stressing the urgency of owning up to one’s own shortcomings without supposing that one will always have time later on to regret one’s misdeeds and the other imagining that the possibility of spiritual, moral, and emotional growth remains fully present in the human breast for as long as that person remains among the living.

And that brings us to Hoshana Rabbah itself. The two approaches mentioned above, the one about urgent need to seek clemency for one’s misdeeds and the other about the permanent possibility of seeking of divine forgiveness for those same misdeeds even in the last moment’s of one’s life, both those ideas sound right because they are repeated so often in our prayers. But, of course, they can’t both be right! Either the verdict is written on Rosh Hashanah, sealed on Yom Kippur and then entered into the celestial archive on Hoshana Rabbah or the verdict remains open to being revisited permanently should the individual in question find the courage to acknowledge his or her wrongdoing and to resolve to sin no longer in an act of what our sages called “complete” repentance, t’shuvah g’murah.

In my opinion, Hoshana Rabbah, existing as it does on the cusp between those two ideas—as the holiday season draws to a close and the rest of the year commences—is meant to celebrate the exquisite uncertainty all thinking souls must bring to the notion of divine justice. Are we always able to fix what we’ve broken? Is there a statute of limitations on high that eventually concludes the chance we originally had to make things right? Does this possibility of moral growth continue on throughout the years and decades of life no matter how long any of us lives? Are we ever done growing up? Or do we eventually reach the point at which we are stuck being what we ourselves have made ourselves into? These are the anxiety-provoking questions Hoshana Rabbah lays at our feet each year as we try to feel good about the season now almost behind us…but without actually having anyway to know what the Judge of all the Earth jotted down on our page in the great Book of Life or how long we have to do anything at all about it. If we can, that is, do anything.

Not all theological questions need answers. Some exist to be embraced as riddles, as ambiguities, as instances in which admitting that you don’t know is the truest version of knowing. And that is why Hoshana Rabbah means to me. Will you step out into the moonlight on Saturday night and see what your shadow looks like? It’s going to be a clear night…and the moon will rise at 9:53 PM. See you there. Maybe!

  

Sukkot 2022

When the Bard has melancholy Jacques step forward to remind the audience that “all the world’s a stage / and all the men and women, merely players,” the point is not that nothing that happens in the world has any real importance in the same way that nothing that happens on stage in a play really matters.

In the theater, nothing ultimately matters because it’s all make-believe: when the show’s over, the actors head for their dressing rooms, take off their costumes, put on their street clothes, and go home to their real lives. Even the people killed on stage are fully resurrected in this magic manner: when the curtain goes down, they wash the fake blood off their faces, send their tomato-juice soaked outfits to the show’s laundry service, put on their blood-free (or rather, tomato-juice-free) street clothes, and go home to their husbands or wives or cats or whatever. But the Bard’s point is specifically not that nothing that happens in the world matters, but that society functions in many ways as though we were all part of a theatrical troop of players: people endlessly entering our stage and exiting it, behaving foolishly or wisely, interacting maturely or childishly, successfully summoning up the courage to be brave or good or failing to find the inner strength to behave virtuously at all. And this as well, the Bard implies: as we wind our way through the years of our lives, we all have the potential to transcend the role written for us by the all-seeing and all-knowing Playwright whose magnum opus is human life itself and, even while sticking to a script written by Another, investing enough of our own moral selves in the roles we are called to play to make the part, somehow, our own. That, as any theater critic will agree, is specifically what makes some actors great and others not, that specific ability to be true to the script and yet somehow also to be fully personally and wholly idiosyncratically invested in the role.

So that’s what the Bard meant to say. What the Bard surely did not mean to say is that it is ever morally justifiable to treat other people like pawns in a stage drama, like people who have somehow accidentally stumbled onto a stage without even realizing that there is a huge audience watching them and waiting for them to say a word, without understanding that they have been cast as players in a drama of which they haven’t ever heard, regarding the plot of which they have no idea, and the author of which they cannot name.

And that is the set of thoughts I brought to my analysis of the decision of Governor DeSantis’ decision to spend Florida taxpayers’ money unilaterally to round up fifty refugees who landed in a state a thousand miles to the west of his own and then to ship them to a third-state-destination so that the cold, unfeeling reception he must have been sure they would receive could function as grist for his own political mill, as proof positive that even those airy-fairy liberal types in, of all places, Martha’s Vinyard, would become immigration hawks as soon as they were faced with having to deal with actual refugees on their own turf and not merely by watching them on television as other people try to deal with what all sides to the debate agree is an unmanageable situation as it now stands.

But that’s precisely not what happened. The people in Martha’s Vinyard rose to the occasion nobly and kindly, providing the newcomers with lodging and hot meals. AP Spanish students from the local high school were pressed into service as amateur translators. Eventually, the government will have to decide what to do with these people. But the people in the Vinyard, whose problem this could not possibly have been less, responded decently and generously: they saw homeless newcomers in their midst and they did what normal people do when confronted with hungry, homeless people: they fed them and found them lodging. What happens next is hardly their call. But on the small-stage level, they responded just as decent, goodhearted people always should:  compassionately and humanely. Good for them!

The Bard had a point, but Jewish tradition takes a different tack: the whole world may well be a stage, but the lives we live on that stage are better compared to a journey than to the performance of a play. And that notion of life as a journey is at the heart of Sukkot, which begins this Sunday evening.

The other two pilgrimage festivals, Pesach and Shavuot, are tied in our tradition to specific events: Passover to the actual night on which the Israelites finally left Egypt and set forth on their journey to freedom, and Shavuot to the great moment at Sinai when the people, for a long moment transformed into prophets, heard God speak aloud the first ten commandments of the covenant that would forever more bind the people Israel to its God. But Sukkot, the third pilgrimage festival, is not tied to a specific event, but to a long, protracted experience—the one of wandering in the desert for decades until finally arriving at the boundary of the Promised Land.

The rituals connected with Sukkot are reminiscent, each in its way, of this concept of life as a journey. The Israelites who left Egypt died in the wilderness; their children knew no other life until they finally did arrive in Canaan. So for both generations, life was motion, journeying forward, travel through uncharted (and unchartable) territory dependent on God for their lodging (Scripture specifically says that God somehow provided them with the sukkot in which they dwelt as they made their slow progress through the wilderness), their food (the manna fell from heaven specifically to provide them with sustenance), and their water (the pillar of cloud-by-day and fire-by-night led them from oasis to oasis so that they always had enough to drink). And that experience of life as journey became so embedded in the national consciousness that it eventually merited being honored with an annual festival, one that commemorates nothing other than this notion of life as movement forward towards destiny under the protective wings of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence in the people’s midst.

Perhaps that is why Jewish people are so predisposed to honor others whose lives have become an actual journey. I feel that way myself—and not because I am in favor of people not obeying the laws that govern immigration or, more ridiculously, of opening our nation’s borders to whomever wishes to cross over without exercising any control at all regarding who may or may not settle here. My own great-grandparents were immigrants to this land and they certainly (I actually know this for a fact) obeyed all the rules and settled here fully legally. My own wife came to this country from Canada and I can assure you that we followed each of a thousand rules to make her status here fully legal. All of that is true. And also true is that I have no idea who these poor people flown to Massachusetts as fodder for Governor DiSantis’s campaign mill really are, whether they deserve to settle here as legitimate refugees or are just poseurs taking a chance to improve their lot without waiting on line or following the rules that govern immigration to our nation. I have no idea who they are! But I was beyond impressed by the Martha’s Vinyard residents who, also having no idea who these people are, responded to them compassionately and warmly, leaving the federal officials to work out what their eventual status should be and specifically not using that detail to justify turning away from lonely, hungry people in need.

The road, the voyage, this lifelong excursion through the wilderness that is our lives—that experience of life as journey under God’s watchful presence is at the core of Sukkot, an idea that grants majesty to the human condition not by boasting crazily about our permanence and power, but by owning up honestly and humbly to the transient nature of all life…and to the fragility that inheres in living our lives, as we all do, on the road to Jerusalem. I responded to the story of those refugees the governor flew north because they, like my own great-grandparents once were, are on a journey regarding the destination of which they can only hope. But I too am on that journey. So are we all. And Sukkot is our annual opportunity to set aside the natural fear that that image of life-as-journey engenders and instead to embrace the hope that the road we travel through the years can generate…when viewed not as punishment but as opportunity, not as a death march but as a march of the truly living, not as a torturous trek through an unfeeling, uncaring world…but as the road to redemption. Our ancestors eventually found their way to the Promised Land and they celebrated the journey that took them there. So should we all!