The Courage of One's Convictions

I don’t believe anyone can say with certainty who first said of someone else that he or she had the courage of his or her convictions. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms says the expression first entered English in the mid-1800s as being about people who maintained the courage of their opinions—it was apparently a direct translation of the parallel French expression—and then, perhaps just because it sounded so much better, the opinions in question somehow morphed into convictions and so was born one of those overused expressions that people suppose must just always have been part of the English language. But overused or not as an expression, the concept itself strikes me as not being worn out at all. Just to the contrary, actually. I’ve written a lot just lately about the concept of heroes—about people like Miep Gies or Rosa Parks or Nofrat Frenkel who risked arrest and serious personal loss for the sake of standing up (or in Rosa Parks’ case, sitting down) for what they believed to be right and just—and it strikes me now that I consider the matter that what all the people I think of as being truly heroic figures have in common is precisely that it could easily be said of them all that they were unable, or at least unwilling, not to maintain the courage of their own convictions even, or perhaps especially, when the going got truly tough.

It sounds so much easier to do than it actually ever is in the context of real life! Nor does it invariably end up well for such people—we celebrate endlessly the Ghandis of this world who struggle to maintain their own moral bearing in the face of brutal opposition, but rarely hear about those who finally are crushed by the very system they felt morally bound to oppose. Is having the courage of one’s own convictions its own reward? I suppose that in the end it has to be: what you get for not crumbling when challenged to betray your own beliefs is that you get to go to sleep that night untroubled about the strength of your own character. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me! And yet, if that is true (and, really, how can it not be?), then why exactly is it so difficult to remain faithful to ideals you actually do hold dear?

I’ve been reading this week about the scandal surrounding Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a large Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx. Rabbi Weiss, who has been a thorn in the side of the Orthodox establishment for many years and in many different ways, outdid himself considerably in terms of raising the ante by establishing a yeshivah last May in which he intended to ordain women not precisely as rabbis but rather as spiritual leaders virtually indistinguishable from rabbis who were intended instead to use the title Maharat, an acronym for the Hebrew words that mean something like “spiritual leader of Torah and halachah.” A woman, Sara Hurwitz, eventually graduated the program and was awarded that title, but now Rabbi Weiss, prompted by his realization that the title Maharat was too much of a mouthful ever really to catch on, has announced that henceforth Maharat Hurwitz will simply be called by the title Rabbah, a kind of feminine equivalent of the Hebrew word for rabbi.

Why Sara Hurwitz can’t just be a rabbi is a different question, one rooted in Rabbi Weiss’ interest in pushing the envelope only so far as it can be pushed without creating an unbridgeable chasm between himself and the more traditional end of the Orthodox world. (The term rabbah, by the way, is used in our masorti circles in Israel as the Hebrew word for a female rabbi. But female masorti rabbis are invariably called “rabbi” in English, not rabbah, precisely to stress that they are rabbis in the same sense that our male colleagues are.) Rabbi Weiss may seriously have miscalculated, however, in that the response has been scathing even by the standards of the people Rabbi Weiss is trying not totally to alienate. The Agudath Israel, an organization of haredi rabbis, denounced the decision as “a radical and dangerous departure” from Jewish tradition and declared that any synagogue that hires a woman in any sort of rabbinic role in so doing gives up its right to be considered Orthodox. The Jewish Week reported that the Rabbinical Council of America, the international organization of modern Orthodox rabbis, was considering cancelling Rabbi Weiss’ membership. (You can read more about that at http://matzav.com/rca-considering-kicking-out-avi-weiss). If you google “Weiss-rabbah-Riverdale,” you’ll find people calling for Rabbi Weiss not solely to be kicked out of his professional organization but actually excommunicated. Even for someone like myself who browses these sites all the time, I found the language used to condemn Rabbi Weiss to be shocking in terms of its shrillness and its vituperation.

Sitting on the sidelines as someone with no ties of any formal sort to that world, it’s easy to be smug. We, after all, have been ordaining women within our Conservative movement for almost a quarter-century. And we have not felt the need to invent some alternate title to describe qualified women who join the rabbinate so as specifically to avoid calling them by the title they have earned and to which they are thus formally entitled. But our growth towards the eradication of illogical gender bias has not been as forthright or as direct as many would prefer to imagine. For years, our scholars poured over medieval law codes to find some precedent, no matter how slight, for calling women to the Torah. Eventually, they found one too—an obscure reference in an obscure book to an obscure medieval French rabbi of whom it was obscurely said that he (possibly) allowed women to come forward for aliyot to the Torah in his synagogue—and upon that most slender of threads was hung what should have been a moral decision in the first place based on the fact that irrational discrimination is morally unjust and should invariably be set aside. A similarly elaborate effort went into the decision to count women in a minyan or to allow women to sign a ketubbah as the witnesses at a wedding. But all of that paled in comparison to the years of debate that led to the decision at JTS finally to ordain its first women rabbi in 1985. Specifically not choosing to frame the issue in moral terms, the decision was rooted instead in an elaborate halachic compromise based on the discovery that it could theoretically be possible to be physically female yet halachically male. (For the uninitiated, halachah is the Hebrew word for Jewish law. The adjective “halachic” is used to mean “in accordance with halachah.”) In other words, it could just as correctly be said that the decision at JTS in 1985 was actually not to ordain women, or at least not to ordain women who chose to remain faithful to the traditional strictures delimiting women’s participation in ritual life, but instead to focus on a candidate’s willingness to accept the obligations traditionally understood to rest upon men regardless of that candidate’s anatomical or physiological gender, thus creating some sort of weird hybrid of legally male rabbis housed in physically female bodies. To say the least, it was not our finest hour. Preferring that sort of legalistic legerdemain to clear moral reasoning did not do us proud, nor does it matter much to me that this compromise, which I believe remains in effect de jure, is today widely (and wisely) ignored by all or most concerned parties.

Of course, having the forceful courage of one’s own convictions does not make right or good anything at all that anyone believes forcefully because the concept rests on the supposition that the convictions in play are themselves morally defensible and not merely passionately maintained. And it is surely so that many of those who the most bitterly oppose Rabbi Weiss’ decision to ordain Sara Hurwitz as a rabbah would argue in precisely that vein that the concept in play is not whether Avi Weiss is a moral individual possessed of the courage to live by his own convictions but whether his basic assumption—that there is something morally indefensible about denying someone the fruits of her own labor merely because of her gender—is itself seriously flawed. That society as a whole appears almost fully to have accepted the distinction between rational and irrational gender bias—and so permits gender-restricted locker rooms and hospital wards, but not gender-restricted country clubs or professional organizations—seems not to carry any weight with these people. But, in the end, it is they—the people who so hate Avi Weiss—who have failed to understand that the effort to balance fidelity to tradition with the moral imperative is at the very core of Jewishness. Indeed, trying to negotiate a path of integrity between the obligation every Jewish person must feel to embrace as sacred the word of God as revealed in the Torah and the parallel obligation to hear the word of God as spoken directly and distinctly to every human being willing to open his or her ears to the communicative presence of the divine in our midst—that is the definition of Jewishness that I find the most compelling and the most attractive. That we in the Conservative movement have adopted this as one of our foundational principles speaks, I think, well for us. That we have occasionally allowed ourselves to look away from that principle, less so. But the bottom line has to be that we see the path forward guided by the twin obligations to be traditionally faithful and morally just. And that, in the end, has to be the determining factor in justifying our right to success as a movement and as a legitimate philosophy of Judaism.

What the future will bring for Avi Weiss, who knows? If he is finally ejected from the RCA, I believe it will in the long run hurt them more than him. And no matter how much opprobrium they bring down on him simply for having tried to be just and fair, the more important point in evaluating the larger implications of this whole rabbah affair will have to be the moral reasonableness of Rabbi Weiss’ actions. If the powers that control Orthodoxy determine that there is no place for a man such as Avi Weiss in their world, then there will surely be a place for him in ours.

Queen Esther's Fate

When I was a boy—and before I fully seized the concept that movies were make-believe—I remember always wanting my parents to tell me what happened next. What became of the characters on the screen after the movie ended. Whether they married and had children later on. If they lived to be old people. Questions like that came to me naturally and then, later on, when I began to read books on my own I transferred those questions to novels as well. Occasionally (as anyone who eventually also got to Tom Sawyer Abroad or Tom Sawyer, Detective knows), you do get to find out. (And you get to find out what happened to Huck too, by the way.) But mostly you have to make your peace with not knowing, with accepting—however begrudgingly—that the question itself has no meaning because the characters you are asking about themselves don’t really exist outside the framework of the literary work in which they appear. I suppose adults find that a natural thought, but it didn’t come to me naturally…and I still find myself wondering occasionally what happens next after I read something I’ve found totally engaging. (I’m in the middle right now of Muriel Barbary’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by the way, which is precisely in that category. I’ll write and tell you about it when I’m done.)

Obviously, I’m been thinking a lot lately about the Megillah, the Book of Esther we will read aloud twice this weekend in the course of Purim. Presented as a historical account of events that actually took place, its author has written up that account not really as piece of historical reportage but more as though it were a novella. And, indeed, that author did an excellent job, one so skillful that it is only the rare reader who pauses to wonder how exactly he or she knew the precise words that passed between Achashveirosh and Esther in a throne room that the Megillah itself says none but a royal invitee was ever permitted to enter, or between Zeresh and Haman in the privacy of their own home. And reading the book as a novella leads me almost always to muse about the same questions that occupied me so regularly in my younger years.

The Megillah ends laconically, to say the least. After a giant ninth chapter of thirty-two information-filled verses, the final chapter in Esther consists of all of three short sentences. Mind you, they too offer all sorts of details readers will find very interesting. King Achashveirosh invents a way to raise even more money by imposing new sorts of taxes on even the furthest flung reaches of his empire, thus making himself even more wealthy than he was at the beginning of the story. Mordechai ends up not only second in command to the king himself, but also formally, possibly even permanently, installed as the head of the Jewish community. (Moreover, the enormous power vested in him, the Megillah scruples to assure us, never went to his head, never made him imperious or overbearing, never made him into a little dictator so exaggeratedly concerned with the honor due his office as to turn himself into an ironic, if wholly unaware, parody of the very Haman whose downfall triggered the events that led to his own great success.) For their part, the Megillah reports that the Jews of the realm were left safe under the protection of a wise and benevolent patron, their position in Persian society happily and unassailably secure. We are clearly supposed to imagine that all is well in Persia as our story draws to its happy ending and the audience, relieved, is released to make its way to the bar or the masquerade ball or whatever celebration is planned following the reading of the Megillah in their community.

Left unmentioned in this epilogue to the larger story, however, is Queen Esther herself, the player whose quick thinking and whose bravery were the true catalysts that led both to the people’s survival and Mordechai’s amazing success. Given that the maidens left unchosen to become queen were forever sequestered in a special harem placed under the watchful aegis of the eunuch Shaashgaz, we can suppose that no one simply walked away from the king’s bed in old Shushan and went back home. (And even if some few somehow did manage to escape the seraglio, surely a queen would least of all have had that option available to her!) And so we are left not knowing what happens next (because, of course, nothing does), but nevertheless imagining poor Esther forever in place in the palace, a prisoner in a gilded cage stuck spending the rest of her life sleeping with her drunken fool of a husband and either thinking the deliverance of his people to have been worth the price she was left forever afterwards paying or not thinking that. Did the Achashveiroshes eventually have children? Was the next king of Persia the son of a Jewish mother, thus also a Jew? Did Esther, having successfully come out of the closet, pursue her Jewishness openly once the events retold in the Megillah were well in the past? The next time the king asked her to ask for anything at all even unto half the kingdom did she ask that a mikveh be installed in the palace?

None of these questions has an answer. The story ends where it ends. Esther, unknown to historians outside the literary confines of the sole book that features her, exists as far as moderns can know of her only within the tale as told. But the question that readers are left with is one still well worth asking and it is precisely this question that I would like to leave hanging for my readers to ponder as we (or at least we in New York) prepare for a white Purim. Is the moral of the story that there is no bottom line, that anything at all is worth doing, any law worth breaking, any taboo worth ignoring, if it leads to the downfall of the enemies of the Jewish people? How that squares exactly with the obligation of fealty to the law every Jew bears as his or her part of the eternal covenant between God and Israel is a question that each of us must answer for him or herself. And surely part of the point of reading the Megillah year in and year out is to ask that very question of ourselves. But that the destiny of Israel is ultimately the responsibility of every single Jewish soul cannot seriously be debated…and the inculcation of that point is also part of why we come back over and over to this story. Indeed, this latter point is—for me personally and possibly even for the author of the Megillah—the Purim story’ ultimate lesson and its most profound point. It is the reason Jewish people continue to read this story over and over. And it is the reason that our sages declared that although the advent of the messiah will obviate the need to observe most Jewish festivals, Purim itself, although currently only a minor holiday in an overpacked festival calendar, will alone never be considered obsolete or passé, nor will its back story ever be forgotten or its lesson regarding the role every Jew must play in fulfilling the destiny of the Jewish people ever be deemed to be of mere historical interest.

These are the thoughts that are occupying me as I sit here at my writing desk dolefully watching it snow and hoping that it will stop in time for us to come together in large, satisfying numbers on Saturday night to hear the Megillah. Obviously, none of us is ever going to know what really did happen to Queen Esther after the story we read in the Megillah ends. But perhaps the simple answer is that, stuck for life sequestered in a gilded palace bearing the full weight of Jewish destiny on her slender shoulders, she grew up to be us.

Missionary Judaism?

The Jehovah’s Witnesses hadn’t come to our front door in quite some time, but they showed up the other week coincidentally just as I was sitting at my writing desk reading yet another pamphlet I received in the mail encouraging me to think that the “real” solution to our dwindling Jewish numbers is to abandon our traditional distaste for missionary work and to get to work converting large numbers of outsiders to our faith and our way of life. (I refer to our dwindling numbers in passing as though that were a given. But who knows where the truth really lies? Every successive study I read offers different statistics that point the reader to almost diametrically opposing conclusions. For example, the World Jewish Population Survey of 2002 concluded that the world Jewish population grew by about 44,000 in the same year that the Jewish Agency concluded that our numbers were down by about 50,000. You see what I mean. But even if we aren’t truly dwindling, we are still a tiny people in a huge world—something like fourteen and a half million Jews out of roughly six and a half billion people living on the planet. So adding that reality to our endemic, slightly neurotic certainty that we could disappear at any moment—a mishigas not entirely peculiar to the Jewish people but surely one we have perfected almost to the level of an art form—only creates more of a context for pondering our population statistics dolefully and wondering if we may not seriously have missed the boat by making a virtue out of our disinclination to drum up new business by actively seeking out fresh converts to our faith.)

There are, I suppose, lots of reasons for our general lack of interest in missionary work among the nations. One surely has to do with the word “missionary” itself, a word that leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of so many of us after all these centuries of concerted activity by so many different Christian missionary groups to talk Jews into abandoning their Jewishness. (The twist on that well-worn theme put forward by groups like the Jews for Jesus to the effect that Jews would actually be affirming their Judaism by abandoning their faith and adopting someone else’s would be just silly if there weren’t people out there gullible and trusting enough actually to swallow that kind of pap without choking on it.) And another surely has to do with the general assumption, repeated so often as almost to sound axiomatic, that Judaism is not a missionary faith, that knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets is what Mormons do, and so many others too, but not what we ourselves would ever do to plump up our numbers. Indeed, the oft-cited custom that calls upon a rabbi who actually is approached by a potential convert not to welcome that individual warmly at first but rather to be discouraging even to the point of turning him or her away not once or twice but on three separate occasions—that seems to most Jewish people what our response should be to the suggestion that we not only stop discouraging potential converts, but that we actually go out to find people who might be interested in considering conversion if we present our faith in a positive and welcoming enough light.

So it was with great interest that I bought and read a book by one Michael F. Bird entitled Crossing Over Sea and Land: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period, published last month by Hendrickson Publishers in Peabody, Massachusetts. The author, an Australian scholar who teaches at the Highland Theological College in Dingwall, Scotland, takes his title from a passage from the New Testament that will be unfamiliar to most of my readers but that is absolutely worth our careful consideration. There, in the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, the text recounts a long list of bitter, angry remarks Jesus made about the Pharisees toward the end of his life. (Among other things, the text features Jesus calling the Pharisees hypocrites, snakes, blind guides, sons of murderers, and criminals.) And it is in the context of that kind of vicious language that he also says this: “Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to win one convert; and when you have won him you make him twice as fit for hell as you yourselves are.” Obviously, this is meant as an insult. But is it an insult because the Pharisees—the spiritual leaders of Jewish Palestine under the Romans—actually did go out as missionaries into the world to find converts to Judaism or is it just an example of vituperative rhetoric absent any specific basis in reality? That is the question that Michael Bird set himself to researching.

The results are fascinating. Bird first reviews the evidence, meticulously going through relevant comments made by Greek and Roman authors, plus evidence from rabbinic and early Christian literature. He dwells at length on Josephus’ account of how the entire kingdom of Adiabene (in what is today northern Iraq near the city of Arbil) converted to Judaism in the first century. And he considers all sorts of other evidence, including many different texts that purport to tell the stories of Romans, including some situated at the highest levels of Roman society, who became attracted to Judaism in different ways and for different reasons. But for all the many references to Gentile conversion to Judaism in ancient times, Bird cannot find any unequivocal evidence of actual missionary work undertaken by Jews for the express purpose of finding would-be converts and then talking them, so to speak, into taking the plunge. Even apparently clear texts, he shows, can be interpreted other than how they read at first blush. The Roman historian Dio Cassius, for example, explains the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in the year 19 CE under the reign of the emperor Tiberius with this brief remark: “As the Jews flocked to Rome in great numbers and were converting many of the natives to their ways, Tiberius banished most of them.” That sounds clear enough, but only at first. Does that text really imply missionary work or could it be read merely to be saying that the Jewish population allowed interested Gentiles to convert to Judaism if they arrived under their own steam? The same incident is referenced the works of other noted Roman authors such as Suetonius and Tacitus, but neither has anything at all to say about conversion to Judaism as one of the causes of the expulsion. Nor does Josephus suggest that the expulsion was triggered by the emperor becoming increasingly unnerved by the numbers of his citizens converting to Judaism. And so what sounded possibly to be about missionary work turns out to be a lone reference to conversion on a large scale, but not necessarily about missionary work at all.

In the end, all the sources Bird proposes for study point to the same conclusion. Conversion was a fact of life in ancient times. Lots of inscriptions that have survived from Jewish antiquity attest to that fact, as do many different texts with all sorts of different provenances. In the end, Bird endorses the comment of my own teacher and doctoral advisor, Shaye J.D. Cohen (then of JTS and now of Harvard University) who described the passage quoted above from Matthew as being the “only ancient source that explicitly ascribes a missionary policy to a Jewish group.” And that, barring the discovery of new evidence to the contrary, appears to be the final word on the matter.

What drew ancient Gentiles to embrace Judaism in serious numbers? Bird organizes the data and offers seven specific answers. First, Romans were predisposed to find ancient Eastern religions fascinating and there are many other examples of religions and cults of various sorts from the eastern part of the empire gaining a foothold in Rome among the citizenry. Second, Romans were always inclined to respect ancient religions and the more reasonably a religion could claim the mantle of antiquity the more likely it was to appeal to the masses. Third, the Romans were totally at home with ritual and so found Judaism to be an entirely natural way to express religious sentiment. Fourth, it was widely believed that embracing Judaism was an effective first step in petitioning God for healing and relief from suffering. Fifth, the exaltation of the monotheistic ideal would certainly have appealed to a certain segment of Roman society trained by their native philosophers to find the belief in many gods to be primitive and the belief in one God to represent a higher level of religious thinking. Sixth—and most surprising to me personally—Bird adduces lots of evidence that there were financial and social advantages to embracing Judaism. (He mentions, for example, that Jews were exempted by Julius Caesar himself from military service.) Seventh, Bird writes about the way the way Judaism blends ethical behavior with ritual activity would have appealed to Romans used to thinking about morality and cult as two entirely separate entities. And finally, eighth, he suggests that the fraternal bonds between wide-spread Jewish communities would have seemed especially attractive to Romans used to living in a disconnected world of unrelated and mutually suspicious peoples. For all these reasons then ancient Gentiles were drawn to Judaism and, although some chose to remain mere sympathizers, others actually chose to become Jews by undertaking formal conversion.

I think there’s plenty here for moderns to consider. That we seem as a people to have no interest in beating the bushes to find perspective converts is not a modern peculiarity, it turns out, but an ancient attitude that has survived all these years and is with us still. That we find no profound contradiction between thinking of ourselves a blood group linked by a common genetic heritage and accepting converts as full members of the House of Israel also turns out not to be a mere instance of our modern inclination to accommodate incongruent ideas for the sake of some greater good, but part and parcel of our attitudinal history going back all the way to late antiquity. If we are going to increase our numbers through conversion, then, the route will not involve trips to the front doors of strangers armed with tracts and (I shudder to write this) fridge magnets, but to a renewed resolve to make our synagogues welcoming to strangers and to open our courses of study to interested outsiders without setting up all kinds of off-putting preconditions guaranteed to discourage all but the most passionate would-be students.

We are not doing a very good job of any of this. In my almost eight years at Shelter Rock, I have supervised the conversion of exactly two people, both of whom approached me on their own. I don’t see myself heading into the street to introduce myself to strangers and see if I can find someone whom I can talk into studying our faith, but I also doubt we’re doing our best—and I speak of the larger Jewish community here, not just of my own congregation—I doubt we’re doing what we could to make people who are naturally drawn to Judaism feel unselfconscious about making inquiries into the conversion process or to make such people fully and unambiguously welcome when they eventually do find the courage to cross the threshold and visit us for the first time. Our numbers, even if not actually shrinking the way we all assume they must be, are small. We can only benefit from the presence of righteous converts in our midst. Perhaps if we work together and think this through seriously we’ll find a middle path forwards, one that will not veer off into the kind of missionary work most of us find unappealing at the same time it keeps us clear of the unfriendliness that so often characterizes the face we show to people who are only not interested in conversion yet.

Killing Bad People

In ancient times, our sages developed specific methods for interpreting the text of the Torah. Some of these sound quite cogent even today—their technique of supposing that details regarding the same topic that are mentioned in two different chapters can be used to shed light on each other, for example—but others seem significantly more far-fetched. And of this latter category surely the most simple example would be the humble hekesh, the interpretive technique that supposes that topics unrelated other than by appearing in adjacent sections of Scripture can be brought to bear in eliciting each other’s deepest meaning. It seems, to say the least, an improbable avenue of productive interpretation! And yet for all it sounds unlikely as a sound way to allow God to speak to us from between the lines of the biblical text, I find that there is a modern version of hekesh that repeatedly has allowed me to feel, also just a bit improbably, that the subtle juxtaposition of events in my life is not without meaning…and that the mere happenstance of two unrelated activities devolving upon me simultaneously can occasionally seem fraught with meaning.

I’ve written about this here before, most recently when I described the odd experience I had of seeing Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Inglourious Basterds, while I was in the middle of Hans Falluda’s great novel, No Man Dies Alone. But it had happened to me before. And it just happened again to me earlier this week again as I saw a program on television the same evening I was gathering material for the topic I want to broach with you today. Is that how God speaks to us today, by prompting us to turn the radio or the TV on at a certain moment when the hour is precisely right for us not just to hear, but really to hear, what the announcer is saying at that specific moment, or by guiding us to open a book or to go out to the movies on some specific evening when we are truly ready to hear what’s about to be said to us? Who knows? I’m still a bit dubious about the reasonableness of hekesh in interpreting ancient texts. But in real life…who knows if God doesn’t speak to us through the juxtaposition of events? How cool would that be? And it does feel as though it keeps happening to me!

And now I come to the topic I actually do wish to write about today: the reasonableness of killing bad people. When the topic of capital punishment comes up, I generally feel a certain deep ambivalence clouding my vision. On the one hand, the same biblical text that presents the prohibition of murder as one of the cardinal laws on which a just society must rest also appears to have no qualms about endorsing the idea of some crimes being so horrific that society’s only appropriate response is the execution of their perpetrators. That much seems clear…but then there is also the other side of the coin to consider. And there’s a lot written on that other side to take into account. For one thing, the list of capital crimes includes sins for which no reasonable person would today want to punish the wrongdoer with death. (The biblical text that ordains the execution of the fellow caught gathering sticks on Shabbat comes to mind.) For another, the halachah as it evolved eventually placed so many restrictions on the practice of executing criminals that it would not be exaggerated to say that the practice was outlawed by the law itself if not de jure, then certainly de facto. (To give only one example, to qualify a defendant for execution not only do witnesses have to come forward to testify that the accused committed the crime in question, but also that he or she was specifically warned that the act about to be undertaken carries the death penalty and then that the accused formally indicated awareness of that fact by actually saying so aloud. And how many times can we suppose that actually happened?) And finally there is the work of the Innocence Project to consider, a project undertaken in 1992 by lawyers at the Benjamin Cardozo Law School that to date has proven categorically that 250 individuals found guilty in court, including seventeen who were sentenced to death, were in fact innocent. So there’s also the question to consider of whether the fallibility of the system itself should render unreasonable the death penalty regardless of whether it would be reasonable if the system were infallible. (You can read more about the Innocence Project at http://www.innocenceproject.org/ and I encourage you to do so. It’s powerful reading, inspiring and upsetting at the same time but more than worth every citizen’s time to consider.)

I’ve been reading lately about the case of our co-religionist Martin Grossman, who is scheduled to be executed in Florida next Tuesday evening. The details of Grossman’s case are not in doubt. When he was nineteen years old in 1984, he and a friend got high and went off into the backwoods of Pinellas County to shoot a stolen handgun. When they were discovered by Florida wildlife officer Margaret Parks, herself only twenty-six years old at the time, Grossman begged her not to report the incident. (Grossman had previously been arrested and convicted of burglary and was on probation at the time. Both being in Pinellas County and possessing a weapon, even not a stolen one, would have been considered serious violations and he would undoubtedly have been sent back to jail.) A struggle ensued when Officer Parks tried to radio for help and it was in the course of that struggle that Grossman was able to seize her gun and shoot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. None of this appears to be in doubt. But even so there are questions to consider. Should people be put to death for murders that were clearly not premeditated? Does it matter than he was a mere teenager when he committed the crime? Should the fact that the murderer was high on self-administered illegal drugs be considered a mitigating factor or does that detail make him even more responsible for his crime by having personally rendered himself so clearly out of control? Does it matter that the rabbi who regularly visits him in prison, a certain Rabbi Menachem Katz of the Aleph Institute (a Chabad-based outreach effort to Jewish men and women in prison) reports that he is fully remorseful and that he even received permission from the warden of his prison to put on tefillin during the rabbi’s last visit? All of these issues trouble me when I try to think clearly about sending this particular murderer to his death. And yet, I also ask myself, what of Margaret Parks’ family? Surely they would be reasonable in feeling that commuting Grossman’s sentence would somehow imply that his life is more valuable than hers, that it would be unfair and unjust for him to qualify for a new lease on life while she must remain dead merely because he, unlike her, isn’t dead yet.

And now we get to my hekesh. I was thinking about this—and reading the exceptionally interesting comments Grossman’s story has elicited from a certain segment of the Jewish world at the Yeshivah World News site at http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/45861/Jewish+Inmate+Convicted+Of+Murder+To+Be+Executed+In+Florida.html —when I found myself watching a very interesting program on the Public Broadcasting Service website about the Allied bombing raids on Nazi Germany. (You can see the program on-line at http://video.pbs.org/video/1405744809/.) It’s a very good documentary, one in the extremely well done American Experience series that I am pleased to recommend to you. But it does not make for easy or simple viewing because it focuses on the moral issue of bombing as much as on the military ones, thus inviting viewers to decide how they feel about the larger effort not solely in terms of its tactical effectiveness.

Readers of mine cannot doubt that in my opinion nothing that led to the Allied victory deserves to be labeled, especially after-the-fact, as immoral. The documentary does not allow you to dismiss the issue by mouthing slogans or relying on priorly formulated theories, however. Instead, you are obliged to back up your certainty about the morality of the bombing raids over Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and many other target cities by looking at footage displaying the mountains of corpses those raids left behind. Was it morally justified to kill civilians, including children, merely because they belonged to a rogue nation that had collectively undertaken to commit the greatest crimes against humanity imaginable? Even Abraham, after all, stopped when he got to the possibility of there being ten righteous people in Sodom! What if there had been eight or seven? Is the lesson there that as the level of depravity a nation embraces becomes the greater, the right of the individual citizen not to pay for the crimes of the larger polity diminishes? Does the eradication of evil justify the taking of human life? Clearly, our tradition endorses that idea unequivocally! And if the unavoidable nature of collateral damage—as anyone, even we who suffered so indescribably at the hands of the Nazis, should surely be able to label the deaths of babies—is not enough to make it unreasonable to do whatever it takes to defeat evil no matter what, then how can we question the decisions made by the Allied leaders to do just that regardless of what they surely must have understood that such an all-out effort was inevitably going to entail?

And then, having watching the documentary in its entirety, I returned to my writing desk to ponder the fate of Martin Grossman. The State of Florida is poised to take his life in just a few days. Are they being just or vicious, reasonable or vindictive, fair or inhumane? I would possibly have considered the issue in different terms had I not paused in my work to watch that documentary, but in its wake it now seems to me that the criterion for executing a criminal in our country, or in any country, should be whether that act of taking that specific human life can reasonably be said to help effect the eradication of evil from our midst. To answer that question, obviously, requires being able to define “evil” and not just to refer to it vaguely. Are all murders by definition evil acts? Does it matter if the murderer is a drugged-out teenager only vaguely aware of his actions? Or if the murderer’s subsequent remorse is so total that his subsequent execution will not eradicate evil because the evil that prompted his crime itself no longer exists after having been already eradicated not by a lethal injection but by the murderer’s absolute repentance for his deed? Leaving aside the question of who would ever be qualified to make such a decision regarding the purity of another’s teshuvah, would the absence of evil in the heart of the murderer render his execution immoral? These are the questions I find myself asking as I contemplate the imminent death of Martin Grossman.

It seems to me that as we continue to debate the death penalty issue in our country, the specific contribution of our Jewish community can and should be to force the issue to be discussed not solely in terms of how effectively the death penalty can or does serve as a deterrent to future crime, but whether the act of taking a human life in any given case can be reasonably and fairly described as a step toward the eradication of evil in the world. By focusing the issue in that specific direction, we will be helping our society to move forward in the establishment of a criminal justice system that has the betterment of the world and not merely the punishment of criminals at its moral core. Nor does saying that mean that criminals should not be punished, merely that the act of taking a human life is a matter of such ultimate moral gravity that it should only be undertaken when it serves society positively and not merely by punishing a bad person or by preventing him or her from doing more bad things (which result could be just as effectively achieved with permanent incarceration). And that’s where I am in my thinking on the matter after being obliged by an unexpected hekesh to consider the matter as it plays out on the level of the individual in light of the larger questions that swirl around the same issue when discussed in terms of warfare between nations.

In Search of Heroes

Last week, I wrote to you about the death of Miep Gies, one of the parties responsible for hiding Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis for as long as they did and the woman who actually found Anne’s diary and preserved it until she could return it to Anne’s father. Partially, I wrote because I wanted to take formal note of her passing at age 100. But I also wrote because I find myself both fascinated and challenged by her constant refusal to let others label her as a hero, and specifically because her stance was prompted not by of her innate humility (or not solely by it) but because of her contention that it does the world no good to use the language of heroism to refer to people who simple do the right thing when the opportunity presents itself to safe a life or to watch over a child in danger or to sustain people trying to evade persecution. I wrote last week that although I find it impossible not to think of Miep Gies heroically I also do agree with her argument that there is something peculiar and counterproductive in labeling regular people as heroes merely because they choose the moral path and do the right thing. Maybe I’ll just have to think both things and at least for the moment leave it at that.

More peculiar than labeling as heroes people who merely choose to act morally is society’s regular use of that same term to describe people who become the catalytic agents for the moral advancement of society merely by being in the right place at the right time. Rosa Parks would be in that category. She was, of course, the black woman who in 1955 simply refused to give up her seat to a white passenger when a bus driver arbitrary moved the sign marking the seats on his bus in which black people could sit to make room for some white passengers who might otherwise have had to stand. She certainly acted bravely, reasonably, and responsibly. But her fame derives from the fact that her action—and her subsequent arrest—ended up sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott which in turn became one of the seminal events in the Civil Rights Movement, consequences she could not have foreseen and certainly hadn’t planned when she stepped onto that bus in Montgomery. And now we have the same song sung in a Jewish key in the story of Nofrat Frenkel, the woman who was arrested at the Kotel last November for the simple act of attempting to say her prayers there while wearing a tallit.

Nofrat Frenkel, twenty-eight years of age, is a fifth-year medical student and a native-born Israeli. She is also an active member of the Conservative kehilla in Kfar Saba, her hometown, and an officer in the Israel Defense Force. Like Rosa Parks climbing onto that bus in 1955, she had no expectation that her visit to the Kotel—the Western Wall—was going to make her name known internationally or that her arrest would galvanize the feelings of so many with respect both to the position of women in Jewish life and the position of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel. The fact that she was arrested on my own mother’s thirtieth yahrtzeit made a strong impression on me personally as well. My mother would have been outraged by the disgraceful way she was treated. I feel the same way. And I expect my readers will as well.

Like all incidents such as this—including Rosa Parks’—the short story of a woman’s arrest for refusing to obey a capricious, mean-spirited law specifically designed to legitimize prejudice has a longer story that goes along with it. In Rosa Parks’ case, the back story would have to do at least partially with the death of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black teen who had been brutally murdered just a few months earlier by racist thugs in Mississippi and whose death had been the topic of a civil rights meeting Rosa had attended just days before declining to give up her seat after a long, tiring workday. In Nofrat’s case, the back story has to do with the organization called The Women of the Wall which was founded in 1989 to guarantee that the Western Wall was not placed under the control of extremist haredi rabbis to whom any kind of non-traditional practices on the part of women—including things as innocuous as donning a tallit or reading aloud from a Sefer Torah—are anathema.

Most reasonable people would find it amazing that rabbis would devote this much energy to preventing people from deepening their piety through the performance of mitzvot, but to think that such people would have not to be familiar with the religious scene in Israel as it has developed over the last two decades. The short version begins in 1991, when the Women of the Wall first approached the Supreme Court of Israel to gain formal approval of their plan to worship in the Kotel Plaza. Eventually, they were turned down, but this led to the establishment of a commission to study the matter and the subsequent introduction of a bill into the Knesset by the ultra-Orthodox parties that would have changed the status of the Kotel from a national historical site to an Orthodox synagogue. Ultimately, the commission’s findings were rejected by the Women of the Wall and the bill to alter the Kotel’s status was defeated. Then, in 2002, the Supreme Court of Israel finally did authorize the Women of the Wall to hold prayer services in the women’s section of the Kotel Plaza. A few days later, however, the extremist religious parties in the Knesset introduced a bill that would not only have forbidden such practices de jure, but actually made participation in them into a criminal offense that carried a maximum punishment of seven years in prison and a hefty fine. The bill did not pass, but it did prompt the Supreme Court again to reconsider the matter and a year later, in 2003, a new ruling was passed that prohibited the Women of the Wall from holding prayer services at the Kotel, but required that the government provide them with an alternate area at Robinson’s Arch, an area almost adjacent to the Western Wall Plaza but not formally part of it. Eventually, a kind of begrudging compromise was reached with the Women of the Wall holding services mostly at Robinson's Arch and occasionally in the Kotel Plaza and their opponents mostly ignoring them.

And that brings us to the events of last November. I’d like to let Nofrat speak for herself, which I will do by citing an excerpt of an essay she published in the Forward just a few days after her arrest. “The morning of Rosh Chodesh Kislev, November 18, was a cold Jerusalem morning,” she wrote in the Forward on November 24 of last year. “We stood, forty-two Women of the Wall, and prayed in the women’s section. Our tallitot were hidden under our coats; the Sefer Torah was in its regular bag. There was no booing, no pushing, no shouting. We were surprised that our service passed off without any disturbance, and we thought that, perhaps, they had already become accustomed to our presence and that we could even read from the Torah opposite the stones of the Kotel. Then, just moments after we had removed the Sefer Torah from its bag, two men entered the women’s section and began abusing us. All we wanted was to conclude our prayers in peace, so we decided to forgo the Torah reading there and go, as on every other Rosh Chodesh, to read the Torah at the alternative site. As we were exiting with me carrying the Torah, a policeman met us and began forcefully pushing me toward the nearby police station. Our pleas and explanations that we were on our way to the alternative site were of no use. I was transferred for questioning to the station at David’s Citadel. All I had on me was my tallit, my siddur and a Sefer Torah. In my interrogation, I was asked why I was praying with a tallit when I knew that this was against the Law of the Holy Places. I am an Israel Defense Forces officer, a law-abiding citizen, a volunteer for the Civil Guard—I have never incurred even a parking fine—and the idea of having broken the law was most trying. Nevertheless, I cannot allow my basic right to freedom of religious worship to be trampled because of a court ruling given years ago….I was banned from visiting the Kotel for two weeks and a criminal file has been opened against me. I hope that the file will be closed, especially so that my medical studies will not be jeopardized. Perhaps, with God’s help, this regretful event will awaken wide public objection, enough for the high court to re-evaluate its decision and annul it.”

Nofrat’s case remains open, but even supposing that the police do not choose to pursue the matter, the question of whether her arrest will galvanize Israelis and Jews outside of Israel to respond as forcefully as Americans of all races responded to the arrest of Rosa Parks remains to be answered. Is she a hero? Miep Gies wouldn’t think so! And I suppose that I too hesitate to accord that kind of status to someone who merely exercised her basic civil right to worship according to the dictates of her own conscience without backing down in the face of legislation enacted solely to deprive her of that very right. And yet, just as I do when I consider Miep Gies’ story or Rosa Parks’, I find myself unsure how I really feel. To risk everything—her place in medical school (from which she could be expelled if she ends up with a criminal record) and in the army (which does not allow convicted criminals to serve) and her right to daven at the Kotel (which certainly should be considered the inalienable right of every Jew with no exceptions whatsoever of any sort)—for the sake of living in harmony with the dictates of her conscience sounds pretty heroic to me. And so here too I think I will have to live with a bit of paradox and simultaneously believe both that Nofrat Frankel did what any moral person should do by defying unreasonable laws and insisting on justice for herself and for others, and also that she acted heroically last November when she risked arrest merely by standing up for herself and doing the right thing.

On the Death of Miep Gies

I found myself very moved by the news the other week of the death at age 100 of Miep Gies, one of the principals responsible for hiding Anne Frank and her family for as long as they remained hidden, and also the individual who found and preserved Anne’s diary after the Franks were arrested and deported.

Her story is interesting in a lot of different ways. With a name like Miep she sounds as Dutch as anyone could possibly be, but she wasn’t actually Dutch at all but Viennese (and her original name, Hermine Santrouschitz, sounds as Austrian to my ear as Miep Gies sounds Dutch). As true heroes really almost never are, she wasn’t born to greatness. Indeed, her story up until the war years isn’t that atypical of people born in her time and place. To evade the food shortages that plagued central Europe after the end of the First World War—Miep was born in 1909—she was sent by her parents to live with a foster family in Holland and they were the ones who gave her the Dutch nickname Miep. Eventually met and married a Dutch social worker named Jan Gies and took his name, thus completing her transformation from Austrian girl to Dutch woman. But she retained her sense of herself as a Viennese her whole life and that is whence my slight personal connection to her, such as it is, derives: when Miep was a child in Vienna, she was the next door neighbor and playmate of the little Jewish girl who grew up eventually to become my parents’ next door neighbor in Forest Hills when I myself was growing up there. (I should write to you eventually about our neighbor, a woman named Erna Neuhauser. She was the first person I know well as a boy whose experience of Nazi anti-Semitism was based on personal experience and the stories she told of her pre-war experiences in Vienna shaped—and to a certain extent probably continue to shape—my own thinking about the Shoah in many profound ways. But today I want to talk about Miep Gies, the woman Erna played with as a girl and who later risked her life daily to save the Franks from deportation for as long as she was able.)

The actual story of the Franks, I suppose everybody knows. When the Frank family, the van Pels family, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer went into hiding in July of 1942 in the secret annex—called the Achterhuis in Dutch—over the Franks’ spice business on the Prinsengracht in central Amsterdam, they became dependent totally on the support they received from outside helpers. In providing that support, Miep was not alone. Nor was she the only one to survive. (Victor Kugler—called Mr. Kraler in the diary—died in Toronto in 1981, Johannes Kleiman—called Mr. Koophuis in the diary—died in Amsterdam in 1959, and Bep Voskkuijl died in 1983 also in Amsterdam.) But because it was she who found the diary after the Franks and the others were arrested, it was Miep who became the most well-known and celebrated of them all.

As she regularly noted, a good deal of the story regarding the diary rests on happenstance. It was amazing enough that Anne had the presence of mind and the literary skill to produce such a remarkable document under such unbelievable circumstances. It was even more amazing that it survived the raid on the Achterhuis and that Miep was able both to sneak into the building after the Nazis had sealed it and then to find the diary in the mess the Gestapo left behind after searching the place. She herself said on more than one occasion that it was a stroke of amazing good fortune that she didn’t read the diary when she found it, because if she had she would also have destroyed it once she saw that Anne made reference to all the people who helped the Franks in hiding. (The Gestapo arrested two of them, Kleiman and Kugler, and would surely have arrested the others as well if their identities had become known.) Later, of course, when it became all too clear that Anne was never coming home, Miep gave the diary to Otto Frank, the sole member of the family to survive. Eventually, it was published and became one of most enduring documents connected both with the annihilation of the Dutch Jews, of whom only five thousand of the 107,000 deportees survived, and even more famously with the fate of children during the Shoah.

I grew up with these stories in my ear. I read the diary when I was in high school, as I’m sure did so many of you reading this, and identified not so much with Anne herself but with Peter van Pels, the boy in the story who later died at Mauthausen at age eighteen exactly three days before the camp was liberated by the U.S. Third Army on May 5, 1945. Something about the story got under my skin. I saw the movie with Millie Perkins as Anne and Dodie Heath as Miep and found it wanting, mostly because the Jewish angle—which for me was the whole point—was so dramatically and, I thought, unnecessarily played down. I went with my parents to see the play on which the movie was based when it was revived in some summer stock theater near where we were spending part of one summer and found it similarly dissatisfying. But I never found the book anything but mesmerizing and I returned to it many times, reading it most recently in 2002 after a final edition containing some previously suppressed material was published. (The suppressed pages contained some comments Anne made about her parents’ marriage and her feelings towards her mother which her father did not wish to be made public.) And, of course, there was also the personal link, tenuous though it was, that put me at only three degrees of separation from Anne Frank and the others in the story in that Anne knew Miep and Miep knew Erna and Erna knew me.

Later, the world couldn’t praise Miep extravagantly enough. Yad Vashem recognized her as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germany offered the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic. In Holland, she was knighted by Queen Beatrix. Austria offered her the Grand Decoration of Honor. A huge asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter was named 9949 Miepgies in her honor. But for all the world couldn’t admire her enough, Miep herself invariably refused to refer to herself in heroic terms. Indeed, she never wavered from her insistence that what she did was normal, not abnormal, and that she was merely following the dictates of her own conscience, something human beings should hardly be celebrated endlessly for doing. In the introduction to her book, Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Allison Gold, Miep wrote these words:

There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time.

To me, those are exceptional words by an exceptional woman distinguished not by well-earned pride in the role she played in helping innocents facing deportation and death, but by humility. I read her book years ago but it was just recently that I came across the website Miep maintained in her later years. You can visit it too at www.miepgies.nl and I think you will find it just as moving as I did.

There’s a lot in Miep Gies’ story to consider, but the part that keeps coming back to haunt me has to do with her refusal to see herself in heroic terms. The quote cited above gives you the general idea, but she also tackled the issue in more specific terms, for example in this answer she gave to a question that specifically referenced her courage and her bravery: "I am afraid,” she wrote, “that if people feel that I am a very special person, a sort of heroine, they may doubt that they could do the same things I once did. Not considering themselves very talented or courageous, they would refrain from helping endangered people. This is the reason that I want everyone to know that I am a very common and cautious woman and definitely not a genius or dare-devil. I did help like so many others who ran the same or more risk than me. It was necessary so I helped." (There’s a whole FAQ section consisting of 100 questions and answers on the website. All are fascinating. I started to look for a quote relating to her sense of her own bravery and ended up reading the whole thing from beginning to end. You will too!)

And so that brings me to the real question that I find myself pondering in the wake of Miep Gies’ death on January 11. Was she a hero? She denied it, of course. But what do I think really? If I agree with her that part of the basic framework for moral living has to include a simple willingness to do good in the world, then I suppose I’d have also to agree with her assertion that she herself was not a hero at all but simply a moral human being who saw people in dire straits and exerted herself to save them. But how far am I willing to take that thought? Miep cannot have been under any illusion about what her fate was going to be if the Nazis caught her providing shelter to Jews in hiding, yet she did what she felt she had to do. Does that mean simply that she was behaving as a moral human being? Or is it more reasonable to say that her readiness to risk her life (and her husband’s life) to save innocents is by definition a heroic act and should be celebrated as such? I suppose that if I’ve been thinking about Miep Gies for all these years and admiring her bravery, then it can only be because I do think of her in heroic terms. But underneath the unambiguous admiration I surely do hold for her rests the question that her humility brings to the fore. At what point do people lose the right to think of themselves as moral human beings merely because they decline to put their own lives on the line to do, to use Miep’s own expression, what is necessary? And where exactly is the line to be drawn between reasonably looking after your own wellbeing and callously disregarding the wellbeing of others? These are complicated questions, but also endlessly engaging ones. And within the warp and woof of these issues her life provokes me to consider lies the most precious part of Miep Gies’ legacy to us all, a legacy for which I feel profoundly grateful as I take note of her passing and pray that she rest in peace and that her memory always be a blessing for us all.

Middle-East Avatars

When Joan and I were in Toronto last week, we went to see James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar. You’ve surely heard of it. Many of you have probably seen it. It’s a huge hit, both at home and abroad. But it set me thinking in an unusual direction about a topic that I doubt occurred to the director or to any of the people appearing in the movie and that is what I’d like to write to you about this week.

The story—a kind of Dances With Wolves set in outer space—unfolds in the year 2154. It’s a strange new world in many different ways, but Cameron avoids any dramatic paradigm shifts and the future is imagined merely as an intensified version of the present. We have machines, for example, but they have even faster ones and better ones. We send astronauts to the moon, but they send travelers to distant planets (including the moon of the planet Polyphemus called Pandora on which the action in Avatar takes place). We have computers, but they have really, really cool ones that do all sorts of stuff we think of as theoretically possible but which no one now actually knows how really to accomplish. We have sophisticated weapons, but they have even more devastating, more accurate ones. We have fantasy movies about toy Transformers magically made real, but they really do have robots the size of buildings that do whatever the controllers strapped into their metallic laps wish them to do. It’s like our world on steroids.

But for all that the world in the movie is different and more sophisticated than our own, it’s also very similar. We see many of the same problems that plague our world in the present no less insolubly plaguing Pandora in the future. And chief among them is the problem of how fairly to apportion resources and how to live in peace with other nations. Earthlings have come to Pandora, it turns out, not to make friends or boldly to go where no one has previously gone, but to mine for precious ore called—you have to love it—unobtainium. That in and of itself doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, but the fly in the ointment is that the richest and best deposits of unobtainium are under the part of the pandoran jungle inhabited by the Na’vi, a race of blue-skinned, yellow eyed giants who live in harmony with the flora and fauna of their planet’s ecosystem in a way that humans today can only dream someday of achieving. And they are disinclined to move off their sacred camp merely because some big, bad earthlings with really big, bad guns have blown into Dodge. The concept of there being avatars on Pandora is related to an effort to head this potential conflict off at the pass: scientists have figured out how to make model Na’vis (I almost wrote: model nevi’im) that look and smell like the locals but which are actually man-made shells inhabited solely by the psychic identity of earthlings (soldiers or scientists or whomever) safely locked up in the secure confines of the mother ship. And thus do earthlings wander Pandora looking like Pandorans on the outside, but remaining pure earth people on the inside. The slightly condescending concept is that the locals will be too stupid to notice the presence of any Stepford Pandorans in their midst and so will be susceptible to the well-timed suggestion that they move on to some other neighborhood and leave their current turf to whomever might wish to settle there once they’re gone. That, at any rate, is the plan. It doesn’t work.

The actual plot of the movie is not what I want to write about, however. The short version is that there’s this paraplegic guy, very well played by Sam Worthington, who ends up entering the avatar shell originally prepared for his lately deceased identical twin. (This sort of makes sense in the context of the movie.) When his life is saved by a real Na’vi maiden, extremely convincingly played by Zoe Saldana, he ends up going native, falling in love, and, in the end, leading the charge to save the Na’vi and their homeland from the big bad invaders who have endless fire power but no moral consciousness. I won’t give away the ending, which is as moving as it is little surprising, except to say that the audience is clearly intended to understand that the right people won, and that the day was duly saved by the one guy who had the courage to stand up to his own people and to do the right thing.

So that’s what the movie is about on its outermost level. But hiding behind the story of a paraplegic ex-marine and his twelve-foot-tall, blue-skinned girlfriend is another story, one most viewers will recognize all too clearly. Other than the hero, a handful of his friends, and some scientists (including a peculiarly cast Sigourney Weaver), the earthlings are depicted as rank imperialists. They have no respect for the natives, no interest in learning about their ways or about their culture or their faith. They are clearly mimicking those Europeans who arrived in the New World and claimed it for their European masters without regard for the fact that the land was already populated by millions of people who had no need to be discovered at all and whose civilization was, in many ways, the equivalent of the Europeans’ in terms of its complexity, its sense of social justice, and its morality.

We all know how that story ended. And, for the most part, we don’t think about it that much. We tell ourselves that times change, that history marches on. We know in some vague way that wrongs were done, but most Americans would be unable even to identify by name the Indian tribe that was living on the land on which their own houses now stand before European settlers arrived here three or four centuries ago. Being sensitive, moral people, we find the story of how the indigenous population was disenfranchised, then neatly gotten rid of, to be upsetting. But we solve that problem, mostly, by ignoring it and telling ourselves (a) that there’s nothing to do about it now and (b) that it wasn’t our people who arrived here when there were still indigenous Indian tribes in place where we live, so it’s not really our burden to bear. And besides, who knows if those tribes in place when the Europeans arrived were themselves the original indigenes? One way or the other, we tell ourselves that what’s done is done and we have no choice but to learn from the past and move forward into the future.

I find myself thinking about Israel in this context as well…and I suspect that Avatar will be taken as a kind of midrash on the Israeli-Palestinian controversy by viewers all over the world. In terms of the battle for world opinion, it suddenly strikes me—after seeing the film and liking it so much—to wonder how much has turned and will turn in the future on the question of which party ultimately gets to play which role when the story of the film is transposed onto the world of Middle Eastern politics. The Palestinians have done yeoman’s work in presenting themselves as the Na’vi, after all, by depicting themselves precisely as the indigenes pushed off their space by morally obtuse Europeans who, almost arbitrarily, chose to settle in their place and then semi-amazingly got a world racked with guilt over its own genocidal tendencies to ratify its take-over of somebody else’s property. Indeed, if there’s one point upon which all Palestinian groups seem to agree, in fact, it’s precisely the concept that the fate of the Palestinians in Israel is precisely parallel to the fate of native peoples the world over. Taking the story into outer space is merely the next logical step in the effort to come to terms with the horrible heritage of racist imperialism.

I wonder why it is that Israel hasn’t devoted itself to noting more passionately and more clearly that the Jews are the real indigenes in this story and that it was the Arabs who came lately to the land, arriving first on the scene in the seventh century (the precise date is 636 C.E.) when Muslims first wrested the land from a decaying Byzantine Empire. Okay, it’s true that today’s Palestinians are not the invaders who seized the land thirteen centuries ago. And it’s surely also true that thirteen hundred years is long enough to feel rooted in a place for any people. (Consider how Americans feel about their country after only two and a quarter centuries, for example.)

But the other side of the coin, the one I see unrepresented in Palestinian comments on the conflict is a willingness to own up to the fact that they are not the indigenes, that the fact that they call themselves Palestinians does not make them historically or ethnically related to the Philistines who once lived on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. (It was the Romans who chose to insult the Jewish population by naming their subjugated province after the by-then-vanished people whom the Jews recalled as having once been their bitterest enemies. But there is no connection between today’s Palestinians and the inhabitants of ancient Philistia other than the etymological one.) It seems to me, however, that there is room for compromise on this point…and that this single idea would be an excellent way for two people at loggerheads to begin to accept each other’s presence in what is, after all, a very small place where they are destined somehow to co-exist.

The Bible stresses over and over, of course, that the Israelites came to the land from elsewhere. Abraham came from Ur, today in southern Iraq. The Israelites themselves arrived from Egypt. You could dismiss those traditions are mere red herrings because there simply are no living representatives of the earlier Canaanite nations in our world, no Girgashites or Perizites or Amorites or Edomites and Israel alone is left standing of all those nations. Or you could use the fact that the Israelites too arrived from somewhere else as the stimulus to engender a kind of humility generally lacking almost entirely from the discussion.

In the end, the competing claims of both sides have to be tempered with a sense of historical reality. For Jews, Israel will always be home, the land promised to their ancestors and in which generations upon generations of their ancestors lived not for thirteen but for thirty centuries, if not for longer than that. But that sense of rootedness in the ancestral homeland could be seasoned with the recollection that, in the end, our own traditions stress over and over that we came from somewhere else originally.

The Palestinians could do well to drink of a bit of that broth as well. They, after all, aren’t really the aborigines either…and I can’t imagine that their leadership doesn’t know that perfectly well. The history of the Muslim invasions of the seventh century CE, after all, are unknown to most Americans, but to the key players in the Middle East these details are anything but obscure. So we’re dealing here with two competing claims to be the native indigenes pushed out by the big, bad invaders neither of which is as absolutely anchored in historical reality as their most vocal proponents would like to think. What that means to me is that it should be possible to replace arrogance with humility…and to seek a kind of peace that will not only accommodate the living but also suit the memory of generations long since passed from the scene.

In the end, Avatar is about invaders stealing what they want because they can. To cast the Israelis as ruthless invaders come to take what they want merely because they somehow can is to ignore history. But to look past thirteen centuries of Muslim presence in the land and to wave it away because the first among them to arrive came as invaders from afar—that too seems just a bit overstated. Avatar is a first rate movie, one that I think all my readers will enjoy immensely. But, in the end, it’s just a gorgeous cartoon. And the lesson the film holds for those of us who daily pray for peace in Israel is that peace will never be made by people who look across the table at their counterparts from the other side and see not men and women trying to negotiate a fair and reasonable agreement but cartoon characters somehow magically, not to say sinisterly, transmogrified into avatars that only look like real human beings.