Pesach 2022

We live in a dangerous world, we Americans. People bring guns to schools and to the workplace, to concerts and even to church services. And they use them too: there were over 690 mass shootings (defined as an incident in which more than four people were injured or killed by gunfire) in 2021, in the course of which 702 people died and another 2,844 people were wounded. As Jews, we take those statistics even more seriously as the number of attacks against synagogues and Jewish individuals climbs. Nor does there seem to be any obvious way to prevent these incidents entirely: which of us, myself surely included, would not have responded exactly as did the rabbi in Colleyville, Texas, if a haggard, disheveled looking man were to come to the front door of our synagogue on a cold, rainy day and ask if he could rest inside for a while and possibly use the washroom?

The question, therefore, is not whether the world is or isn’t dangerous, but how we are prepared to respond to that part of how things are—with courage or with nervousness, with faith or with paralyzing worry, with confidence in our own right to live as free citizens of a free land or with ill ease born of a basic uncertainty about our right to exercise freedoms that our co-citizens mostly take for granted.

Like all of you, I suppose, I think about these issues constantly. Different incidents requires different kinds of responses, obviously. But a basic attitude is embedded in one of our best Pesach rituals.

Once the meal ends, things move rather logically forward at most of our seder tables. We negotiate for the afikomen so we can formally conclude the meal, then distribute it among the seder guests. We recite Birkat Ha-mazon because the seder meal is, after all, a meal…and we always end a formal meal with the Grace after Meals. But then something odd happens, something unexpected. We rise in our places, someone (this was my personal job as a child) opens the front door, and we pray together that God stand up for Israel and deal justly with those nations—and no one at all is thinking about the Egyptians at this point, or not just about them—that have behaved barbarically, harshly, and cruelly towards the Jewish people throughout the millennia and, for many, in our own lifetimes or in our parents’ lifetimes as well.

This custom began in Ashkenaz—in the Rhineland—in the twelfth century or so when the memory was still fresh of the murderous Crusaders who rampaged through Jewish communities and left only misery, barbarism, and loss in their unholy wake. Those who survived their wrath apparently felt the need to respond to what had befallen them and this was what they came up with. The idea of responding, even just symbolically, to persecution hardly needs to be justified. But what’s the story with the door?

It feels, to say the least, like a bad idea: if the world really is filled with foes and potential foes, then how can opening the front door be a good plan? Why aren’t we afraid that some latter-day Crusader will barge in and wreak havoc with our families and our guests? We say that we are welcoming Elijah the Prophet, but his name is not mentioned—and this omission is so glaring that lots and lots of families (including my own) sing Eliyahu Ha-navi, the hymn from Havdalah, anyway at that juncture in the seder. More to the point, though, is that he never comes. Or at least so far he hasn’t. As a result, the seder wraps up with redemption still firmly in the future. But that door is opened wide year after year nonetheless…to whomever might pass by and want to make trouble. It makes no sense not to worry about that, even less to imagine that it’s somehow more likely that Elijah will appear at the door to redeem the world than a band of local hooligans will barge in and steal the silver.

And so the open door becomes a symbol, and a powerful one at that. Outside, darkness has fallen. Inside, though, our homes are filled with light. Logic dictates that we should shut out the darkness and keep the light inside. But we do precisely the opposite and open the door—and we do so precisely as we nod to the dangerousness of being openly Jewish in the world. And so is it, year after year, that the darkness is at least slightly dissipated by the warmth and the luminescence of our homes, of our seder tables, of our families. And that simple act of refusing to live in fear and of risking it all to live openly as Jews in an all-too-often hostile world—that act of courage undertaken precisely as we remember the horrors of the past—if anything ever will, that is what will bring redemption to the world…and inspire Elijah, its herald, to announce its imminent advent.

That open door prompts me to think of another one as well.

Emma Lazarus, in “The New Colossus” (the poem nailed to the base of the Statue of Liberty), imagined our own New York Harbor as a golden door. (Her final line, the one in which the Statue says, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door,” was once known by every schoolchild in America by heart and was memorized by myself, along with the rest of the poem, in fifth grade.) My people too came to this country through that harbor, as did so many millions of others. So when I open the front door of our home during the seder (still somehow my job!), I think of Lady Liberty opening that door through which my great-grandparents and grandparents passed and viewing “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” not with fear or with contempt, but with generosity born of the conviction that no one in this world can be truly free unless all are. And that it must fall to all of us who wish to be free citizens of a free world, therefore, not merely to acknowledge and enjoy our own freedoms, but to strive to make sure that all others in the world also live as free people without having to spend the days of their lives struggling, as the poet said, to breathe free.

Pesach is our national festival of freedom. Mostly, we think of that as having to do with the political freedom for which the Israelite slaves in Egypt yearned. But the open door at the seder points in some slightly different directions as well: towards the freedom to live out in the open according to our own lights and without fearing the hostility of others, towards the freedom to welcome strangers yearning to breathe free into our midst without falling prey to prejudice or fear, towards the freedom to live in a world of open doors and open windows through which the light generated by our efforts to live authentic lives as men and women of the House of Israel flows out into the street and from the street into the world…and in which light Elijah will surely be bathed when he proclaims the redemption of the world and its ultimate freedom.

A Possible New Iran Deal?

The nightmarish pictures coming out of Ukraine this week, and particularly the ones relating to the massacre of civilians in Bucha, have—entirely reasonably—occupied our attention almost fully. But while the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been unfolding literally before our very eyes, negotiations with Iran have been ongoing in an attempt to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called “Iran Deal” from which our nation withdrew in 2018. In theory, our nation’s withdrawal did not cancel the deal itself. But Iran’s own announcement in May 2019 that it was going to suspend compliance with the terms of the accord unless it received protection from U.S. sanctions, while technically not cancelling the deal either, practically speaking signaled its end as a practical arrangement in effect between the signatory nations. We were, therefore, left with nothing at all.

At the time, I wrote, preached, and spoke about the deal on many different occasions, expressing—among other sentiments—myself intense ambivalence about the notion of relying on the Iranians to comply with any agreement at all and saying, in effect, that the decision of the Obama administration to negotiate the deal not as a treaty between nations, but rather as the kind of non-binding political commitment that would specifically not require the approval of the Congress to go into effect, was—to say the very least—disingenuous and troubling. Nor was I able to understand how President Obama could sell this deal as the fulfillment of his promise to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power when the agreement as signed was merely going to delay what its signatories seemed to accept as ultimately inevitable. I was personally present at Temple Sinai when Senator Gillibrand gave her word to the assembled that the Obama administration would never agree that Iran be allowed to acquire a nuclear arsenal; to say that I felt disappointed and angered when I read the details of the accord with that promise still ringing in my ears would be to say the very least. To those who said at the time that something was better than nothing, I would regularly reply that I wasn’t at all sure that that was the case…and particularly if the sense that we got “something” allowed us to look away from the ever-increasing likelihood that, sooner or later, Iran—the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism—would have nuclear weapons. Nor did I find John Kerry’s repeatedly repeated assertion that the deal had nothing to do with trust—and specifically with trusting the Iranians (click here)—especially convincing. (To revisit some of my writing regarding Iran over the last few years, click here, here, here, here, and here.)

So that was then. And now the Biden administration is trying to revive the agreement by renegotiating its main codicils. Kerry has been replaced by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley. And since last fall, negotiations have been ongoing between the original signatories to the accord (Iran, Russia, China, the U.K., Germany, and sort-of the United States, together with the European Union) at the Palais Coburg Hotel in Vienna. (The “sort-of” in the previous sentence references the fact that the Iranians refuse to negotiate directly with the United States, so the results of each day’s deliberations are delivered to the U.S. delegation, whose response is then relayed to the Iranians the next day.) I keep reading in the press that a deal could be imminent, but the specifics have yet to be released to the public. It is, therefore, impossible to say whether this is something to support or not to support.

The short version is easy: the Iranians want the sanctions levied against them to be lifted and the rest of everybody at least theoretically wants to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. So that sounds simple enough. But, as always, the devil is in the details. And some of those details are very worrisome, and particularly those that involve the specific benefits Russia is seeking to wring from the deal for itself.

Like all Americans, I look on from afar and ask myself where this can possibly go. Lifting sanctions will bring billions of dollars into Iran—which prospect was supposed to be a carrot so enticing that the Iranians would willingly abandon their nuclear ambitions to come into that much cash. The Iranian economy is in ruins, its exports severely limited, its currency becoming less valuable by the day. The Iranians should  be prepared to do almost anything to fix the mess they’re in. But the key word in the previous sentence is “almost”—and the Iranians have, as far as I know, never indicated that they would consider abandoning all of their nuclear ambitions entirely.

So where we are is…nowhere at all. The Obama Administration decided that delaying the entry of the Iranians into the nuclear club was the best we could hope for. And, we kept hearing back then, who knew—maybe there would be some sort of regime change that would re-install a government in Iran that wouldn’t have hostility to the West and particularly to our nation and to Israel as its guiding foreign-policy principles! Of course, there’s always that possibility. But I don’t only look at the Vienna talks with my American eyeglasses on—I look at them through my Jewish lenses as well.

If there’s one thing Jewish history has taught us unequivocally, it’s that it’s isn’t ever  a good idea to assume that our enemies are kidding around when they talk about annihilating the Jewish people. I’m sure there were Jews in medieval Spain who imagined that Torquemada didn’t really mean it when he spoke about cleansing Spain of its Jewish population. And I know for certain that there were many Jews in Germany who dismissed Hitler’s anti-Semitic speeches as the caterwauling of a maniac until it became suddenly all too clear that he was serious about his plans for the Jews of Germany and, eventually, of Europe.

I could give a lot more examples, but the bottom line is that I take it very seriously when rabid anti-Semites like the Iranian leadership—and not solely its clerical leadership—speak openly and enthusiastically about wiping the map clean of Israel, of murdering its Jewish citizenry, of destroying the Jewish state using either conventional or unconventional weapons. And so should everybody! These are not, after all, people who disagree with Israel about this or that issue—the leaders of this nation struggling to become a nuclear power have no hesitation about talking openly about their genocidal plans directed mostly—but only mostly—at the Jews of Israel. And history has taught me to take that very seriously indeed.

Adding irony to mix is the detail that behind all this negotiating is the understanding Iran will not become a nuclear power because Israel will not allow that to happen. Over and over, Israel has demonstrated its ability to reach deep into Iran in ways that sound, even to me, more like reject episodes of Fauda than actual news stories. And yet, despite the happy optimism that characterized the Obama administration’s approach and continues to characterize the Biden administration’s with respect to Iran, the willingness of the Israelis to do whatever it is going to take to prevent a very bad thing from happening is surely the foundation upon which the Vienna talks shakily rest.

It was not at all encouraging to hear Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), the chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, say the other day that he has not been made privy to any of the important details of whatever putative agreement might yet come out of Vienna.

Senator Menendez was one of four Democratic senators who voted against the Iran Deal back in 2015. (The others were Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), and our own Chuck Schumer.) He is a tried and true friend of Israel. And what he has to say is always worth considering, so let’s listen in. “If,” he said just the other day, “Iran is going to roll back its nuclear program, if it’s finally going to come clean on its efforts to achieve nuclear weapons and give access to the International Atomic Energy Agency to sites that they’ve been asking and demanding for and haven’t gotten to, if Iran is going to constrain its missile program…those [would be] good things. If [on the other hand] all you’re going to get is a limited period of time before [Iran becomes a nuclear power], that certainly doesn’t deal with all the other challenges of a nuclear weapon and certainly of Iran’s malign activity. If it somehow gives Iran relief and if Russia somehow [ends up benefitting] from [a new Iran deal], that would obviously [also] be a problem.”

A big problem! And now that Russia has embarked on a program of intense ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, the thought that a new Iran deal could conceivably exempt Russia from sanctions levied against Iran and allow them to build two nuclear plants in Iran for a price tag of about 2 billion dollars is not something we should swallow easily. Mitt Romney, also a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it clearly and in as forthright a manner as necessary: “Any deal that puts more money in Iran’s hands, that allows Russia to [reap huge financial rewards] makes no sense.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Awakening to Nationhood

At the heart of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the Russian president’s apparently sincere believe that Ukraine does not—or at least should not—exist, that it isn’t a real  country, that its existence is a kind of historical error that enshrines in geo-political reality a present that corresponds neither to the past nor, if he can have anything to do with it, the future. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Putin’s gaze seems to focused on the distant past, on Kievan Rus, the enormous confederation of Northern and Eastern European peoples that existed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries and which managed to expand eventually include territory that today constitutes all or part of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Finland, and Romania. It was an enormous state, significantly larger than the Holy Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, the only two nations even remotely as large as Kievan Rus at its largest or as powerful.

People interested in getting inside Putin’s head need, I think, to focus on the history of Kievan Rus, the nation-state that existed long before Russia or Ukraine on the territory that both now occupy. Part of the problem, in fact, in interpreting the events of the last few weeks has to do with the remarkable lack of knowledge most Americans have of early Russian history. Sviatoslav I (943–972), Vladimir the Great (980–1015), and Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054)—these names are unknown to most, but they are the ghosts hovering over Putin’s bed at night while he sleeps and dreams his dreams of a world without Ukraine. Lenin, not so much!

I made reference a few weeks ago to an essay by Vladimir Putin available for all to read on the  website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look if you haven’t yet. The country he references as Ancient Rus is what historians call Kievan Rus.) The man couldn’t be clearer. Waving away his prose as grandiose posturing is no wiser than it was in the 1930’s to wave away Mein Kampf as the ravings of a madman. And his prose is actually clear as a bell. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are, he writes totally unambiguously, all “the descendants of Ancient Rus, the largest state in Europe.” In Putin’s historical recollection, the ancestors of today’s Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and I quote, “were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and—after the baptism of Rus—the Orthodox faith.” It’s a remarkable essay and I recommend it to all who wish to understand what is really going on in Vladimir  Putin’s head.

As noted, it is a fascinating essay. But it is predicated on the assumption that, for it to be legitimate, the future must mirror the past. But is that really true? Are new developments in the world by definition inauthentic if their point is not to restore a glorious past and retrace a nation’s steps to locate the precise point at which it went off-track, then to fix the errors that led the nation astray and restore—or rather, create—the future that was meant all along to have been that nation’s destiny? Can’t new developments be authentic without leading to a replication of the past?

Where do nations come from? To argue that the existence of the United States, for example, is illegitimate because its independence was the first of a long line of tragic events that reduced the British Empire, an imperialist invention that once claimed as its territory a full quarter of the earth’s landmass, to the actual British Isles (minus the Republic of Ireland) and a handful of bits and pieces of almost no geopolitical importance spread out over the world—that would be absurd. And yet the world is full to overflowing with ethnic groups that would like to exist as independent nations but whose right to chart that specific path forward for themselves has been denied to them for reasons that are hard to explain with any sort of convincing rationale. The Chechens, the Basques, the Uighurs, the Rohingya, the Lapps, the Catalonians, the Inuit—all of these are groups that will probably never attain statehood. But to explain why Bhutan or Iceland should awarded by all the status of independent nations, but none of the above should, is hard to say. There are, after all, more than two times as many Chechens in the world as there are Bhutanese…and more than four times as many Chechens as there are Icelanders!

Amir Gilboa (1917–1983), one of Israel’s greatest poets, wrote in one of his best-known poems, later a familiar Israeli song, that it occurs from time to time that “a person wakes up in the morning / and feels himself to be a nation and starts to walk / and to all whom he meets on his way, he calls out “Shalom.” The idea here is both simple and complex. Nationhood, the poet is saying, is a feature of self-awareness, of self-conception, of willing self-determination. The past exists, obviously. But nations do not come into being because of history, but because the arc of national purpose and will bends towards autonomy and independence. Our nation came into being not because declaring independence from Britain wasn’t a seditious act of open treason against king and country, but because, by the end of the eighteenth century, the colonials living in British North America woke up one morning possessed of the sense that they were a nation unto themselves and could no longer be content to exist as a mere appendage to somebody else’s empire. Gilboa was thinking about Israel, I’m sure. (He fought in the War of Independence, which experience influenced his poetry for the rest of his life.) The tragedy of the Palestinians can be charted along these lines as well, by the way: when the opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter in 1948 to declare independence and get on with the work of building a nation, they simply didn’t possess the national will to be a nation. (In my opinion, the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be based on endless disappointment that in 1948 they hadn’t woken up to nationhood yet. A topic for another letter!)

And that brings me to Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the Ukrainian Parliament, formerly a toothless organization that existed merely to rubberstamp directives from Moscow, adopted what it called a Declaration of State Sovereignty. A year later, that same parliament adopted a formal document called the Act of Independence. A referendum was conducted; 92% of the population supported the concept of Ukraine as a fully independent nation. In 2004, the so-called Orange Revolution took place as the nation, almost as one, rose up to protest against the results of a corrupt election and to insist on a new referendum to choose a national leader: clearly, the people had become used to thinking of themselves as a nation and, although surely ever mindful of the nightmare of the USSR years, were not prepared to be slaves again. And as the nation has charted its course forward, coming closer and closer to the West and doing its best to distance itself from Putin’s Russia and its imperialist fantasies about restoring the good old days of Kievan Rus, the Russians did what they could to thwart the Ukrainians’ plans for their own nation. The invaded and seized Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine since the 1950s, then continued to rebel forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions eager to turn back the tide of history and re-integrate Ukraine into a restored Grand Russia.

When Putin attempts to justify his invasion of Ukraine, he falls back on the legacy of Kievan Rus. But the Ukrainian people have long since moved forward. Just as Amir Gilboa wrote would have to be the case, the populace woke up and realized they were a nation. And, just as was the case with the colonials in the thirteen colonies, there could be no turning back. Our Founders all knew that. And the Ukrainians know it as well. Only poor Vladimir Vladimirovich seems unaware that the yearning for freedom cannot be extinguished even when the freedom fighters are outnumbered and out-armed. As noted, the arc of national self-awareness bends towards autonomy and independence. And that is why, no matter what the outcome of the current war, the idea of an independent Ukraine—rooted, as it is, in the self-conception of the Ukrainians themselves—cannot be eradicated by violence or bloodshed. It is far too late for that! And where should our nation stand in all of this turmoil? As a people who precisely did wake up one morning and realize it had matured into nationhood, we have no choice but to support the Ukrainians as they struggle not to become a historical footnote to a different nation’s imperialist fantasies.

Our Ukrainian Purim

What an interesting experience it’s been having Purim in the foreground—even if just for a day or two—while the Ukrainian War rages in the background. The two stories are disparate and unrelated, of course. But there actually is  a common threat that binds them together and I thought I’d write about that this week. (I promise soon to write about something other than the Ukraine situation, but not quite yet: it’s still in the forefront of my thinking about the world and our place in it. As it is, I’m sure, in all my readers’ as well.)

The last three chapters of the Megillah are in many ways the most interesting ones as the various story lines come to their natural conclusion. Esther reveals her identity and gets king Achashveirosh to order Haman’s execution. Haman himself is gone almost instantly, his lifeless body pathetically impaled on the very giant stake he had previously had prepared for Mordechai’s execution. And Mordecai has already been given the ring that the king took from Haman’s finger, thus moving up in the Persian hierarchy to a position of influence and importance. Furthermore, Esther has been made the executrix of Haman’s estate, an important job given the immense wealth the man appears to have accrued in his lifetime. (This was, after all, a man who declared himself able to part with ten thousand talents of silver to encourage the king to do his bidding.) So all loose ends have been tied up except for one: the pogrom that the late Haman scheduled for the following year has yet to be cancelled.

It feels like this is a mere detail: the king granted Haman the right to annihilate the entire Jewish population and can, we suppose, just as easily withdraw that order. That would  certainly do the trick, but then we find out that it’s not going to be that simple because, it turns out, an edict promulgated over the king’s name and sealed with his signet ring cannot just be withdrawn. In fact, we learn, it cannot be withdrawn at all. And so that leaves Esther and Mordechai with only one reasonable route forward: they need to get the king to issue a new edict not annulling his previous one but instead formally permitting the Jews of the Empire to strike back. And that is precisely what happens as the king authorizes “the Jews in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand up for themselves, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate, any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, infants and women, and to plunder their goods.” Readers are now fully relieved of their anxiety as all seems well: Haman is dead, Mordechai has been elevated to a position of power, Esther is firmly in the king’s good graces, and, although the pogrom has not been cancelled, the Jews have at least been granted formal permission to defend themselves. Does the text mean to imply that the Jews would otherwise not have had the right to defend themselves? It says that almost clearly, leaving readers to wonder how and when the Jews were deprived of the natural right to defend themselves and their families.

And then thing start to happen, but not quite what readers have been primed to expect. (When reading any book, but especially a book of the Bible, readers must force themselves not to know what comes next no matter how many times they’ve been through the narrative in the past: like any book, the Megillah needs to be read from beginning to end without the reader somehow knowing in advance what plot twist is just around the bend.)  The notion that the Jews will not go like sheep to the slaughter but are actually going to defend themselves comes as a huge shock to Persia, one so ominous and worrisome that the Megillah notes in passing that people began to disguise themselves as Jews so as to be safe when the fighting begins. (There are different possibly ways to interpret that reference, but the one proposed here seems to me the most likely.)

And so we reach the end of the story, but without any of the most obvious questions being raised or resolved. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel’s book, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires suggests that the population of the Persian Empire in the time period during which the Megillah is set could easily have been as high as thirty-five million people. The Jews were a tiny minority. The death squads of anti-Semitic hooligans mobilized by Haman must certainly have outnumbered the entire Jewish population—let alone Jews of fighting age—and many times over. So if the king lacked the ability to rescind his own decree, then why didn’t Haman’s people just move forward with the pogrom and defeat the overwhelmingly outnumbered Jews who just recently were busy pre-sitting shiva for themselves in the streets and broad places of the empire? They could certainly have won!

But then, when the big day finally comes, the impression we get from the Megillah is that the sonim are so demoralized that they fail to take up arms at all. The Megillah actually says that in almost so many words. But we would have known it anyway: how else could the death toll as given in the Megillah be 78,500 losses for the Persians and exactly zero losses for the Jews? If that reminds you of the deliverance of Israel at the Sea of Reeds back in the days of Pharoah and Moses (where the millions of Israelites crossed the sea to safety without any losses at all while all of Pharoah’s soldiers, including Pharaoh himself, drowned in the sea when the walls of water collapsed), it’s suppose to!

And so there is lurking behind the familiar story, a less familiar one. The familiar one is about how days that could have spelled doom and disaster were turned into “days of gladness and feasting.”  But behind that story is a slightly different one. Haman’s willing executioners outnumbered the Jews in every conceivable way: in numbers, in arms, in ammunition, in chariots and horses, in back-up, and in training. Yes, the Jews have been granted permission to fight back. But the endless phalanxes of Jew-hating ruffians could surely have prevailed nonetheless! They had the numbers and they surely had the ammo. But something amazing seems to have happened: when the Jews, encouraged by the king’s countermanding decree, finally found the courage to shuck off their timidity and their apparently natural sense of themselves as victims and losers, the enemy responded not by doubling down and making sure they had plans in place to guarantee their victory, but by panicking, losing confidence in themselves, and wondering (maybe) if they were not on the wrong side of history. When the big day came, in fact, the Megillah suggests they were so paralyzed by the specter of Jews defending themselves vigorously that they forgot to fight at all! And so, in the end, numbers proved not really to matter much at all. What mattered was courage born of conviction…and a willingness to call the bullies out and see if they could stand being stood up to.

And that brings us back to Ukraine. The Russians certainly should win. They have the numbers. They have a huge storehouse of nuclear weapons. They have a giant navy and their GPD—because, in the end, everything, even war, is about money— is more than nine times the GPD of Ukraine ($1.658 trillion vs. $181 billion). And they have a limitless number of potential recruits: there are about three times as many Russians in Russia as there are Ukrainians in Ukraine (146,000,000 vs. 43,000,000). So it couldn’t be clearer that the Russians should win. Maybe even they will win. But they also expected the war to last hours, not days and certainly not weeks or months. They expected Ukraine to crumble when the first Russian tank crossed the border and for the invasion to result in a quick, almost effortless victory.

But they failed to take into account the Ukrainians’ lack of interest in going quietly into the night. Once the Ukrainians found the courage to stand up for themselves, the Russians’ superiority in every measuredly military way came to mean significantly less than it would have appeared—to them and to everybody—just a few days before. In other words, the Megillah’s point that what counts when facing the enemy is courage and self-reliance—that turns out to be a truly relevant lesson for all concerned. The Jews of Persia should have lost but didn’t. And on this strangest of Shushan Purims, all decent people across the globe can hope will be the case is that Ukraine, which certainly should not be able to succeed, will turn the tide of battle and end up victorious over enemies who only have numbers, guns, and wealth.

Babyn Yar

The Russian missile that hit Babyn Yar in Kyiv last week brought the war home to me personally in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Was it an accident? It’s hard to imagine what the Russians could possibly have hoped to accomplish by bombing the most sacred of all Shoah sites in Ukraine and one of the most important ones in all Europe. Was it somehow related to Vladimir Putin’s regular—and supremely grotesque—willingness to reference the Ukrainian leadership, very much including its Jewish president, as a gang of neo-Nazi thugs? But even if it was, what exactly was the message here? Was it that the Russian Army liberated Ukraine from the Nazis once and is planning to justify its occupation and (I’m assuming) eventually annexation of Ukraine by selling it to the world as a justifiable, even laudable, effort to accomplish the twenty-first century version of that same thing? It’s hard to imagine that that could be it—not because Vladimir Putin is not cynical and malevolent enough to self-justify along such lines, but because it’s hard to imagine him imagining anyone hearing that without laughing—and yet what part of the events of the last few weeks wouldn’t have reasonably been labelled “hard to imagine” just a month or two ago? So maybe this too!

We grow up incrementally, step by step, stage by stage. No one goes to sleep as a child and wakes up as an adult. I’ve written in this space about my own coming-of-age experience reading Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Black Book of Russian Jewry page by page when the ten- and eleven-year-old me found himself alone in our synagogue library for a few minutes. But that book was only the gateway to other books, some of which became so much a part of my growth to adulthood that I can remember them after all these years as though I just read them recently. André Schwarz Bart’s The Last of the Just was the foundation upon which rested my sense of my place in the world for years and years. So, of course, was Elie Wiesel’s Night. But Anatoly Kuznetsov’s  Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was perhaps the most profound of all in terms of its effect on my sense of what it means to be a Jew…and also what it means to be a human being. (See below.) The slightly fictionalized true story of the murder of almost 34,000 Jews in Kyiv in the course of just two days in the fall of 1941, the book was beyond terrifying and disorienting to me. I grew up in a neighborhood of survivors and had friends whose parents had lived through the camps. But, of course, there simply was no one—or no one I ever met—who lived through Babi Yar. The unimaginable massacres in that place, but also in Ponary Forest (where about 70,000 Jews from Vilna were murdered in the summer of 1941) or Rumbula Forest (where 25,000 Jews from Riga were murdered in November and December 1941)—these dark European forests  were the terrible landscape of my nightmares as a boy, a dreamscape I still wander from time to time even now and which will always be part of me. As all readers know, the camps are central to my sense of self, even today. But I never dream about them.

But it was in the fall of 1973 that Babi Yar came to represent something else to me entirely. It was in the fall semester of my senior year in college. I was busy trying to gain admittance to JTS, but I was also taking my Russian seriously (just in case!) and it was in that context that I met Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at the time the best-known Russian poet in the West. How that came about is easy to explain: I met him easily because one of my teachers at Queens College, Albert C. Todd, was his American translator and invited him to visit our school and, semi-amazingly, he agreed to come. (It was a good gamble on his part too—years later, Yevtushenko himself became a CUNY distinguished professor at Queens.) Places were limited, but I was one of the first to sign up and got a ticket. I admired his writing, and particularly the poems I had read under Professor Todd’s tutelage. I eager to see what the man was like. But I had no idea how profound an encounter it was going to be.

The man began by reading one or two poems in Russian—translations had been handed out in advance at the door so you could read along while he spoke—and taking questions. (He spoke English well, it turned out.) But then he said he wished to read to us the poem that he described as his own literary Rubicon, a poem that could either have led to his ruin or to his ever-lasting fame but back from which he knew in advance there would be no turning. And the poem was, of course, “Babi Yar.”

In those days, the massacre at Babi Yar was famously commemorated yearly by the Soviet government without any reference to the fact that the victims were Jews. (Many thousands of others were murdered at Babi Yar as well, which provided the Russians with a kind of fig leaf covering their anti-Semitism. But it was the massacre of Kievan Jewry that was why Babi Yar was famous, or rather infamous, and that much was known to all.) He began by setting the scene. It was back in 1961, he explained, that the editors of the Lituraturnaya Gazyeta (then as now one of the leading Russian literary magazines) hinted to him that they would be prepared to publish his poem about the Nazi massacre, a piece of work that had to that point only circulated privately. They were clearly well aware that the poem was also about the Soviet government’s anti-Semitic persecution of its Jewish citizens and its revisionist refusal to acknowledge the site as a Jewish memorial. But they were ready to print the poem if he was willing. It was a huge gamble. This was the bad old days in the USSR, a time when people disappeared into the Gulag for far less. Yevtushenko said he considered his options. He knew the offer could not have come out of the blue and must have been pre-approved, possibly even by Brezhnev himself. Or was it a trap? Or a test? There was no way to know. Terrible things could have ensued. But there was also the possibility of advancing the USSR in a positive, liberal direction through his assent to publish. And so he agreed that they could print his poem in their next issue.

It was a huge success. No less a personality than Dmitri Shostakovich—probably the greatest Russian composer of his day—set the poem to music, then used that setting as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. And the opening line of the poem, which reads “No monument stands over Babi Yar / a drop sheer as a crude gravestone” so galvanized public opinion in the Soviet Union that, finally, a memorial was established in that place that formally and unambiguously acknowledged Babi Yar as a site of Jewish martyrdom of almost unimaginable proportions.

 I was beyond enthralled. Here was a man with no Jewish blood in him at all, who understood that anti-Semitism was as much, possibly even more, about the anti-Semite as about the Jew. And when he explained that the Shoah had become the benchmark for Western morality, I was enthralled. I felt as though he were speaking to me personally when he said, almost as though this were a commonplace thought, that identifying with the dead at Babi Yar is in our day the prerequisite for thinking of yourself as a human being, as a fully human being. The end of the poem, he read slowly in Russian while I followed along in translation. “I am each old man here shot dead,” the man read out. “I am every child. Nothing in me shall ever forget! The Internationale, let it thunder when the last anti-Semite on earth is buried forever. / In me, there is no Jewish blood. / But in their callous hatred, all anti-Semites must now hate me as a Jew. / For that reason, I am a true Russian.”

Maybe you had to be there. People applauded. I myself was stunned: this was the first time I truly understood that, even more than it defined my Jewishness, the Shoah defined (and still defines) my humanity, my human-ness. It was a threshold experience for me, the kind of experience you step through and feel changed. The notion that my whole adolescent obsession with the Shoah was as much about being a part of humanity as it was about being a member of the Jewish people—that was transformational for me.

Yevtushenko died in 2017 in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He won a million prizes. He was awarded several honorary doctorates and was made an honorary citizen of many different cities. He had an asteroid named after him! (How cool is that?) But for me he was the guide who ushered me out of the prison I had constructed for myself and helped me understand that my emotional and intellectual involvement in the history of the Shoah was as tied to my human-ness as it was to my Jewishness. And he did that not by psychoanalyzing me or dissecting my psyche, but merely by reading a poem aloud in an overheated lecture hall and managing to speak directly to me as he did so.

The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still unfolding, its final dénouement still unknown. But the defiling the sacred space of Babi Yar moves the Russians’ aggression against Ukraine, at least for me, from the global to the personal. The Red Army was key in defeating the Nazis and rescuing the remnant of European Jewry still alive in 1945. Attacking Babi Yar, even if just symbolically, suggests to me that the Russians have turned their backs on their own history and have chosen to emulate not their own forebears but those forebears’ most vicious enemies.

 

Ghosts

Like all of you, I’m sure, I have been watching the events unfolding in Ukraine all week with the greatest attention. And, also like all of you, I’ve been surprised over and over in the course of these last days. Who would have thought countries like Sweden, Finland, and especially (time a million) Switzerland would abandon their former inability to join the West in anything that could even slightly irritate Russia to take serious, meaningful steps to help the beleaguered Ukrainians? Who would have expected our own government to shake off its doldrums and spearhead what so far feels like a remarkably successful effort to inflict maximal economic and commercial damage on the Russians and thereby, at least theoretically, eventually to dissuade them from pushing forward with the conquest of Ukraine? Watching China and even Israel—both of whom are so traditionally eager not to step on Russian toes—speaking out, respectively, vaguely and less vaguely on the side of Ukraine—that also came as a huge surprise to me. So it’s been a week of surprises that I’ve watched parade past me when I’ve been ensconced in Joan’s shiva room at her father’s assisted-living facility for long enough to peruse the news on my phone. (For non-Shelter Rockers, my wonderful mother-in-law died last Shabbat and we’ve been here in Toronto since Sunday for her funeral and shiva week. May her memory be a blessing for us all.)

As always, I try to respond to current events by setting them in their historical context. Is Putin a latter-day Hitler trying to swallow up as many of the neighbors as he can without caring if anyone does or doesn’t believe whatever fig-leaf justification he offers up to justify his actions and only having begun with Ukraine, just as Hitler only began with the Sudetenland? Or does he see himself more as a latter-day Lincoln, looking south and attempting to bring back into the union a seditiously self-proclaimed rogue state led by the political heirs of the rebels who wrongly and illegally chose to jump ship when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991? I admit that comparing Putin to Lincoln seems beyond exaggerated. But is that only because I—we—consider the nation that declared its independence in the summer of 1776 to have been a true union, a “real” nation, that the South was treacherously betraying by attempting to go its own way—and thus nothing like the USSR, which was—at best—an archipelago of serf-states held in place by the brute force brought to bear by the only “real” country in the union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (or, as it was earlier and later called, “just” Russia)?

It’s a more complicated question than it sounds like at first. Putin himself is clearly a complex mixture of things: part schoolyard bully, part oligarch, part Caesar, part self-labelled patriot, and part gangster. I’m sure people with far more extensive grounding than myself in Russian history will find all sorts of themes from Russian history echoing through his rhetoric and his actions (and particularly his actions of this last week). But to me there are three central ghosts hovering over Putin as he pursues this policy of naked aggression towards Ukraine and each, a bit like the angels in Angels in America (and especially the one played by Emma Thompson in the HBO miniseries), guides the action forward without actually playing a role personally in the way the drama unfolds.

The first ghost is that of Ivan the Terrible. (The word “terrible” is not at all right, by the way. The Russian word grozniy means “formidable” or “fearsome,” not terrible in the way the word is used in modern English.) Ivan was the first of the czars, the grand prince of Moscow who, in 1547 proclaimed himself “Czar of All Russia.” It was a carefully chosen title: the Russian word tsar (usually written “czar” in English, or “tsar”) is merely the Russian equivalent of the Latin word Caesar, just in the same way that Kaiser is the German version of that word. And it was a latter-day Caesar that Ivan set out to accomplish the twin foreign-policy initiatives of his years in power: the effort to make Russia safe from the so-called Golden Horde (as the huge Mongol empire to the east was called) and the parallel effort to gain access for Russia to the Baltic Sea regardless of what countries lay in the way. He accomplished the first of these two initiatives, extending Russian control as far east as the Urals and as far south as the Caspian Sea (and thus creating a huge buffer zone between Russia and the Mongol Empire). But he was unsuccessful in his attempt to colonize and annex Lithuania, in those days the sole gateway to the Baltic for Russia. Still, by rejecting the Russian words for “king” or “emperor” and choosing instead to be known as czar, he was signaling—and not especially subtly—that he viewed Russia’s place in his world as something akin to Rome’s place in its, which is to say as the central state of a giant empire and as anything but a nation among nations.

The second ghost hovering over Putin’s head is Peter the Great, czar from 1685 to his death in 1725 whose self-appointed mission was once and for all to make Russia into a great nation worthy of the role in world leadership he envisaged for it. He invented the Russian navy, completely overhauled the Russian army, created a secular school system devoted to teaching children to think of themselves as citizens of a great world power, and he exerted enough influence on the Orthodox Church to keep it from getting in his way. And, indeed, he made himself into one of the most powerful of world leaders. And he managed to expand Russia decisively, taking over (because he could) large swaths of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, thus gaining access to the Baltic. And he went to war with Turkey, as a result of which he gained access to the Black Sea. And he founded St. Peterburg (named after himself), Russia’s so-called “window to Europe,” which made him truly a towering figure in Russian history. (He was, by the way, also a towering figure in the literal sense of being six-foot-six.)

And the third ghost is the specter of Catherine II, called Catherine the Great, who became empress of all Russia upon the death of her peculiar husband, Peter III, and who remained on the throne until her own death in 1796. Catharine saw herself as the “real” successor to Peter the Great. And Russia dramatically expanded under her reign—conquering Poland and then giving away parts of it to Austria and Prussia. She went to war with Turkey and won, securing the entire northern shore of the Black Sea for Russia. (This is basically where Ukraine is today.) And she also seized the Crimea in 1783, making it part of Russia. To learn more, I recommend Robert K. Massie’s book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, which I enjoyed immensely, as did I also his biography of Peter the Great, called Peter the Great: His Life and World. Both volumes are still in print and available as e-books. The best biography of Ivan the Terrible is probably the one by Isabel de Madariaga, published by Yale University Press in 2006.

In lifetimes of none of the above did Ukraine exist as an independent state. In other words, Putin’s ghosts did not conquer Ukraine because there was no such place: once the Russian Empire existed with its czars and czarinas at the helm, it simply went without saying that the territory that is today independent Ukraine was part of the empire. And that, I think, is the world the ghosts hovering over Putin’s head are urging him to recreate, one in which Russia, the largest nation in Europe (and by far—although Ukraine is second-largest), takes its rightful place as leader of the lesser and smaller nations of Europe, which position of natural power and influence it is being prevented from assuming by the efforts of NATO and the European Union, and by the efforts of our own nation as well, to draw Ukraine away from Russia and to make of it an independent nation in the Western style with ties to the other nations of the world, and Russia among them, that are suggestive not of Ukrainian subservience or servility but of Ukrainian sovereignty, autonomy, and independence.

Where all this will end, who knows? The Russians, it has already become clear, can only lose by winning: having to occupy a gigantic vassal state that will remain openly hostile is not what the Russians can want, but neither—and even more horrifying—would be the specter of actually losing the war they’ve begun and having to retreat. The Ukrainians have played their hand well so far, doing precisely what it took to win the support and admiration of the world. President Zelenskyy has shown himself to be brave, clever, and—crucially—photogenic and appealing. (The man is a trained performer, after all!) The Russian government will not collapse under the weight of criticism levelled against it by the entire rest of the world. But becoming a pariah state can’t have been Putin’s plan either. Perhaps the man needs to look up one last time and see the specters hiding just behind Ivan, Peter, and Catherine—the specters of the emperors of Rome (the real Caesars, after all) who chose to conquer and rule the world only for their empire to collapse in on itself when the weight of the world’s loathing simply became too heavy for it to bear.

Ukraine and Russia: The Backstory

As readers all must know, there is at least some possibility that World War III will begin within the next few days or weeks if Russia invades Ukraine and NATO, including our own nation, rushes to its defense. As I write these words, that possibility still seems unlikely. But, of course, who wouldn’t have thought it unlikely a century and a decade ago that the assassination of a single Austrian man in 1914 would lead to a world-wide conflagration that would last for years and eventually cost the lives of well over 17 million people? What really will happen if Russian troops cross the border into Ukraine, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone really does, including not the Russians themselves. But what I want to write about today is not specifically about the various scenarios that could plausibly ensue if Russia attempts to annex, or even just temporarily to occupy, Ukraine. Instead, I’d like to talk about the shocking—to me, at least—lack of perspective even people writing in our most respected newspapers and websites seem content to allow to form the basis of their analysis of the situation.

To read most of the article and essays that I’ve come across about the Ukraine crisis, you would think that Russia and Ukraine are “just” two contiguous countries that happen to share a common border, like Bolivia and Peru or Italy and Switzerland. Starting from that vantage point, it is simple for authors to find the idea of Russia launching a full-scale invasion of its neighbor to the south inexplicable. But the reality is far more complicated than anyone seems to know. For one thing, the backstory goes back centuries. In other words, what we are watching on CNN these evenings is the thousandth page in a novel still being written. And just as one could hardly just jump into an unfinished novel on page 1000 and get the gist of what’s going on with any sort of accuracy, so is it not really possible to understand what’s going on between Russia and Ukraine without getting a running leap into the story by stepping back in history and attempting to understand today’s details in terms of the larger picture to which they belong. Of course, most American know more or less nothing about Russian, let alone Ukrainian, history. Maybe about the Russian Revolution a little. But the history of pre-Communist Russia is a mystery to most. And the even-more-obscure history of Ukraine is well known, as far as I can see, almost to none.

I begin more than a thousand years ago in the tenth century. Kievan Rus, compromising all of western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland, is the largest nation in Europe. Its capital is in Kyiv, formerly known to most of us as Kiev, the capital of today’s Ukraine. The principal players—who set the table at which both Russians and Ukrainians still dine—are famous abroad but unknown here. Vladimir the Great, for example, reigned from 980 to 1015 and brought Christianity to his nation. His son, Yaroslav the Wise, ruled over the kingdom at the greatest limits of its power and size. But it wasn’t to last: the ethnic groups within the nation were too eager to assert their own autonomy and the unified nation had already begin seriously to disintegrate when the Mongol hordes arrived from the east and completely devastated the nation, burning Kyiv to the ground in 1240 and massacring its citizens.

There followed all sorts of attempts to recreate the original nation. There was no nation called Russia and none called Ukraine, but there were successor states to Kievan Rus that too appear to be unfamiliar to almost all today, including the columnists I read the most regularly.

Where Russia is today, there emerged something called the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which did not manage to achieve real independence until King Ivan III (called “the Great”) finally threw off all foreign domination and united most of today’s Russia under his rule. But it was his son, Ivan IV (called “the Terrible”) who first proclaimed himself czar in 1547 as a way of asserting his legitimate right to rule over his world as the emperor of Rome once did over his. (The Russian word tsar, written in English either as tsar or czar, is the equivalent of the Latin caesar, just as is the German equivalent, Kaiser.)

Where Ukraine is today arose a nation called Galicia-Volhynia. The rest of what had been Kievan Rus was united by a man called Danylo Romanovych into a country called Ruthenia with its capital at Kyiv, in its day the most powerful state in Eastern Europe. But this situation too didn’t last. King Casimir III of Poland invaded Galicia-Volhynia in the mid-fourteenth century and annexed those land to his own. In the meantime, the Lithuanians invaded Ruthenia and annexed it to its own nation. From that point on, the story becomes so complicated that it’s almost impossible to follow at all, let alone easily. In 1386, Poland and Lithuania joined together in something later called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and ruled over most of today’s Russia and Ukraine. In the meantime, the Cossacks began to form armed militias with the specific intention of wrestling control of the territory from foreign domination. But this was also the period when the Tartars began to invade from the east, taking huge numbers of Ukrainian and Russian peasants into the slave trade, eventually selling and deporting as many as two million peasants as slaves. Finally, in 1648, Bogdan Chmyelnitski and Petro Doroshenko led a massive revolt that resulted in the establishment, for the first time, of some version of Ukrainian autonomy. (It was also a terrible time for the Jews—who recall the years 1648 and 1649 as a time of mass slaughter of innocents on a scale that would only be matched three hundred years later during the Shoah.) But then, in 1654, Chmyelnitski offered to put his entire country under the control of Czar Alexis, who accepted only too gratefully. This led to another Russo-Polish War (there had already been several), as a result of which today’s Ukraine was split into two parts, leaving only the eastern part of the country under Russian rule.

From that point on, the story becomes even more complicated. Cossacks, Mongols, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Genoans, Austrians and any number of others vied with each other to control some or another part of Ukraine. (There was no actual country called Ukraine, of course.) A period of history in the mid-seventeenth century called “The Ruin” featured a war between Russia, Poland, the Crimean Khanate (don’t ask where this came from), Cossacks, and the Ottoman Empire that brought death to hundreds of thousands and was only concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (hah!) in 1686 that basically divided up today’s Ukraine between Poland and Russia. And mixed in with all of this are the three separate so-called Partitions of Poland that took place in 1772, 1793, and 1795, decisions forced on the Poles that brought half of today’s Ukraine under Austrian rule and the other half under the rule of Russia. Eventually, this led to Ukrainians entering the First World War on both sides: about 3.5 million Ukrainians fighting with the Russians and about a quarter-million fighting with the Austrians.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 freed the area from all foreign domination except by Russia. And then, and for the first time, a series of Ukrainian entities began to exist: the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and several others. The Polish-Ukraine War of 1918 and 1919, ended with the so-called Peace of Riga according to which western Ukraine became part of Poland and the rest joined the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a theoretically independent nation that was actually a puppet-state totally and absolutely under the thumb of their Russia overlords. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukraine finally—and one could even say for the first time—became an independent state in the way the term is normally used by most people today.

None of any of this appears to be known to the people whose political essays I read in the newspapers I read and online news sources I frequent, all of which seem to consider that Ukraine and Russia are “merely” neighboring states with no back history at all. You can trust me that I’ve only skimmed the surface here—the actual story is a thousand times more complicated and difficult to follow. (No wonder they don’t teach any of this in high school!) But the result is a nation of pundits, op-ed piece writers, and columnists attempting to analyze the events of the day almost in a vacuum.

The relationship between Russia and Ukraine is almost un-unravelable. No nation has ever been dissected so many times and by so many different peoples than Ukraine…or that would be the case had Ukraine ever actually existed. The Ukrainians clearly have the same right to self-determination that any nation has…but even that is a complicated thought since the world completely arbitrarily awards that right to some but not to others. (Oh yeah? Just ask a Chechen, a Basque, a Navaho, an Inuit, a Uighur, a Rohingya, a Lapp, or an Ainu what they think. Or, if it were only possible, ask any of the Jews interned by the Brits for the crime of wishing to live freely and autonomously in their own homeland before 1948.) The Russians’ interest here seems to be purely imperialistic: they wish to dominate a neighboring state because they deem that to serve their own best interests. But to leave it at that without considering carefully the thousand years of history that go into the reality we see on today’s map—that also seems a bit naïve.

To understand Putin’s thinking about Ukraine, you need to know the backstory. You can actually read an essay on the topic by Putin himself entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” that is posted on the website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look.) It is unconvincing, its logic self-serving and rooted in the past rather than the present. Or at least that’s how it reads to me. But Putin’s essay—which is certainly worth reading—is deeply rooted in the history outlined above, which is why I’ve chosen this week to write at least cursorily about the details hiding behind the story unfolding on our screens now daily.