Three Good People

Just this week, three separate emails landed in my inbox that actually made me feel encouraged and hopeful about the future. Since so much of what I’ve written about lately has been so dour and/or anxiety-provoking, I thought I’d change up the pace this week and write instead about three recent events that made me feel hopeful about the future.

First up was the speech delivered at an American Jewish Committee forum in Brussels last week by Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor of Austria (and at age thirty-three the youngest serving head of government in the world). My feelings about Austria in general are complicated, and not least of all because my initiation into the whole world of Shoah-displaced people was via my parents’ next-door neighbors who were refugees from Austria and whose stories of life in Nazi Vienna were beyond terrifying. Nor have my sentiments become less complex with the passage of time, as I continue to marvel at the Austrians’ post-war success in turning themselves from a nation of avid Nazi supporters who enthusiastically welcomed union with Germany in 1938 into, by war’s end just eight years later, a victim nation to be pitied and rebuilt. Nor was this a momentary lapse of reasonableness: the so-called “victim theory,” according to which Austria had nothing for which to apologize and no sins for which to atone became the foundational idea of post-war Austria for decades and decades, only giving way to a more nuanced understanding of Austria’s role in the war (and in the exile and extermination of its Jewish citizenry) after Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi officer, became Federal President of Austria in 1986 and forced the issue onto the public stage both in Austria and abroad.

That was then, however. And now is a whole ’nother story. I first became interested in Sebastian Kurz when I read a transcript of a speech he delivered last June in Jerusalem at a forum sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. One by one, the man addressed every skeleton in his nation’s closet, forcing both air and light into that traditionally very dark space and speaking words that would once have seemed impossible to hear from an Austrian politician. 

First, he took on the myth of Austrian victimhood. “Austria used to see itself as the first victim of the Nazis,” he said plainly enough. But then he went on to make his real point. “That is certainly true for all those who fought in the resistance, whom we cannot thank enough. But the ones who gathered in large numbers in Vienna in March 1938 [i.e., when Germany incorporated Austria into the Reich] were not victims. The ones who watched and participated when their neighbors were robbed, thrown out, and murdered were not victims. And the ones who committed the terrible mass murder of Jews were not victims at all. To remember means to admit the truth. At that time, many Austrians supported a system which killed over 6 million Jews from all over Europe and beyond, among them more than 60,000 fellow Austrian Jewish citizens in Austria alone!”

I was impressed. But he went much further. He admitted that Shoah survivors were specifically not welcomed back to Austria after the war and that his nation’s lack of generosity towards people who had been publicly humiliated and robbed of their possessions was a heavy burden all Austrians must now bear. And then he went on to talk about the efforts being made to foster what he called “a culture of commemoration” in Austria’s schools and to create a Shoah memorial in Vienna. Finally, he spoke warmly about his nation’s ongoing support for Israel, announced a million-Euro gift to Yad Vashem, and concluded with these words: “Let me state very clearly: Austria supports Israel and the global fight against anti-Semitism not for political or economic reasons, but as part of our friendship, of our moral obligation, to humanity. Only if Jewish people can live without restriction in peace and security can the eternal call “never forget” truly become a “never again.”

But that was last year’s speech and now, just this last week, Chancellor Kurz was back at an AJC forum, this one in Brussels, to talk about the resurgence of European anti-Semitism. I listened carefully and I recommend that my readers all do too. (You can click here to hear the speech, which is only less than twenty minutes long. Skip forward to the eleven-minute mark in the clip, which is where Kurz begins to speak. There is no translator; Kurz speaks in excellent, clear English.)  Again, he speaks openly about the grief and guilt he feels as a citizen of Austria when he contemplates his nation’s role in the Shoah. (He uses the term “Shoah” too, which also impressed me for some reason.) He resumes his theme about the importance of supporting Israel, which he references as a “stronghold of democracy, rule of law, and prosperity in the Middle East and in the whole world.” But this speech was primarily about anti-Semitism and I found his comments so important that I want to share them with you all in detail.

He declares openly that, in his opinion (as in mine), “anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are often two sides of the same coin.” The latter especially is not to be confused with being opposed to this or that Israeli policy; anti-Zionism is the global refutation of Israel’s right to exist and the Chancellor correctly understood that there can be no more precise definition of anti-Semitism than that. Particularly moving were his comments about anti-Semitism on the micro level: “No one, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what their faith is, must ever feel afraid to walk in the streets of any European country. We owe this assurance to all people in Europe and especially to the Jewish community.” Try to imagine Kurt Waldheim saying those words other than perhaps sarcastically!

I encourage you to watch the speech and to listen. There are so many horrific things in the world, so many haters, so much violence, so many reasons to feel unsafe and insecure. And then this one person appears on the stage, this very young man, who seems to see things clearly, who is in a position to make a huge difference, and who does not seem to fear speaking his mind openly and courageously. I listened to the youtube clip three times in a row and can only say that Sebastian Kurz accomplished something that I can’t recall an Israeli or American politician doing in quite some time: he made me feel fully hopeful that there are good people in the world…and that the world will be a safer and better place because such people exist in it.

And then I listened to two other speeches and was just as impressed. It was, given my generally dour mood over these last months, a remarkable experience.

First, I listened to the speech Representative Steny H. Hoyer (D-Maryland) delivered at AIPAC last Monday. He’s a good speaker, but it was the content of his remarks that I found so heartening: here was a Democrat—and not just a Democrat but the Democrat serving as House Majority Leader—who spoke passionately about his support for Israel in the way that was clearly meant to distance himself and his colleagues from the two outspoken anti-Israel Democrats in the House, Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). When he dared any who would accuse Israel supporters of dual loyalty to include him in their charge, he sounded to me like an old-time Democrat for whom standing with Israel publicly and unambivalently would have been as natural as supporting any other one of our nation’s allies. His language was clearly aimed at those, like Omar and Tlaib, who frame their criticism of Israel using anti-Semitic tropes. He said that he and most Democrats stand “proudly and unapologetically” with Israel. He announced plans to lead a large delegation of Democrats to Israel later in the year. But most heartening of all was when he said this: “I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel. I tell Israel's detractors: accuse us. And millions of Americans, regardless of race or faith or partisan label, stand with Israel because they understand why our relationship with Israel is so important. Accuse us all!” He took a lot of heat for those words later on, including from some of his own colleagues, and tried to make it clear that he was speaking for Israel rather than against any specific individual. But his words were clear and heartfelt. I came away remembering that although Israel has some vocal enemies in Congress, it also has many friends…among whom Steny Hoyer certainly deserves to be numbered.

And then I listened to my third speech of the week, the one delivered at AIPAC by Joan Ryan, who just quit the Labour Party after forty years as a Labour M.P. in the British House of Commons over the issue of the anti-Semitism that has gripped the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbin, whom she described openly as someone who “proudly declares Hamas and Hizbollah to be his friends” and who now “seeks to demonize and delegitimize Israel.”  She isn’t alone, of course: nine other Labour M.P.’s have quit the party in recent weeks over the rampant anti-Semitism and virulent anti-Israelism of is leader. For her decision to join them, she has been rewarded with what she herself characterized as a “torrent of abuse” that included threats of murder and rape. And yet she has stood her ground and spoke at AIPAC with a kind of confidence born of profound conviction.

I’d like to give her the final word because I was so impressed with her remarks. “Sticking to your convictions,” she said, “isn’t always popular but it is always right.” (We all think that in theory, but which of us has paid the price Joan Ryan has for putting our money where our mouths are?) And then, after mentioning the vicious threats she has had to endure, she waved them all away graciously and bravely, noting that threats like that only strengthen her resolve to stand up for British Jews from attacks from the right and from the left, and to stand up for Israel. And she openly called on us all to “stand together—proud of each other and proud of Israel in the battles that lie ahead.”

So after so much dour news from so many different quarters and for so many months, these three speeches helped me recall that there really are decent people out there who have no trouble standing up for what they perceive to be right. That none of the people cited above is Jewish or a citizen of Israel also means a lot to me: it’s so easy to feel alone in this uncaring, dismal world that it is incredibly encouraging to recall that we aren’t alone, and that Israel also isn’t. The sonim won’t go away. But apparently neither will the good people. And where good people stand their ground and face down their foes, history has taught us again and again that they eventually prevail. 

Christchurch

There was something creepy and unsettling about settling into Purim this week as we were all still reeling from the news about the mass shooting last Friday at the mosques in New Zealand. Yes, it’s true that at the heart of Purim is the encouraging story of how a plot to murder innocents was thwarted by a combination of cleverness, bravery, and extreme chutzpah on the part of Mordechai and Queen Esther. But how could that happy outcome provide comfort for the Muslims of New Zealand (or, for that matter, for New Zealand’s Jews, who could surely just as easily have been the shooter’s victims) given that Haman’s plot failed utterly, while last week’s attack took the lives of fifty innocents at worship? There is something to learn from that comparison, though, but it has to do more with the villain’s motivation in both stories than with how either turned out in the end…because what motivated Haman to plan a nation-wide pogrom openly intended to annihilate the Jewish community in his time and place is more or less precisely what motivated the alleged shooter in New Zealand—at least judging by the so-called “manifesto” he emailed to more than thirty recipients, including the Prime Minister’s office in far-off Wellington, just minutes before the attack on the first mosque.

Assuming the authorities have the right man, which they seem certain they do, the shooter seems to have been motivated by a set of grim fantasies that society needs seriously to address. Admittedly, the seventy-four-page manifesto is a long read, although nowhere near as long as the 1,500-page screed penned by Anders Brevik, the man convicted of murdering seventy-seven people, mostly high school students, in a shooting rampage on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011 and whose writing covered many of the same topics covered in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto. (Brevik’s unabashed motivation in undertaking his act of mass murder was to get his book read by the public, an incentive so real in his mind that he actually referred in public to the shooting as his personal “book launch.”)

At the heart of both documents is the deep-seated fear of replacement, a theme most Americans first heard about when the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville shocked the world back in 2017 by chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a slogan so foreign to most that even I, who consider myself more than knowledgeable about anti-Semitic tropes, did not understand it properly at first. (To revisit what I wrote last fall about eventually coming to understand what the slogan means to those who chant it, click here.)  Nor, I finally seized, was this just a creepy mantra intended solely to unnerve or to upset, but actually a slogan fully expressive of the idea that serves as the beating heart of white supremacist paranoia. The concept itself is simple enough: that the policies promoted by liberal Western democracies that permit immigration from third-world countries, encourage racial integration, promote (or at least permit) interracial marriage, justify ever-descending fertility rates as the result of personal decisions with which the state may never interfere, endorse access to abortion as a basic human right, and enact gun control laws intended to declaw the basic human right to bear arms—that these policies are all part of some mysterious global effort to replace “regular” white people (i.e., working-class whites who belong to Christian churches they either do or don’t attend) with people of color in general, but particularly with Muslims from third-world countries.

The white supremacists of different nations promote different versions of this theory—but they all derive at least to some extent from the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, Le Camp des Saints, in which an ill-prepared host of Western nations, primarily France but others as well including the U.S., are at first slowly and then decisively overwhelmed by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, Western Africa, and Southeast Asia. Eventually South Africa is overrun too, as is Russia, with the result that the world as we know it comes to a decisive end even before the book does. (The book is available in English in Norman Shapiro’s translation as The Camp of the Saints, published by Scribner’s in 1975 and still in print.)

And that specific fear—that faceless hordes of dark-skinned people of various ethnic and national origins are just biding their time on their own turf until the misguided members of the liberal establishment in eventually every First World country blindly and stupidly open the gates without caring who comes through them or what those people stand for—that is the underlying emotion that appears to have provoked the mosque bombings in New Zealand, the mass murder of high school students in Norway, and any number of violent incidents in our own country. When white supremacists talk about the fear of being “replaced,” that is what they mean.

It’s not entirely untrue, of course, that immigrants—and particularly in large numbers—alter the face of the host country that takes them in. That surely did happen in our own country after successive waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally altered the face of American culture. But in the case of our own country, the overall effect was essentially salutary because those groups who came here en masse were composed of individuals, three of my four grandparents among them, who were for the most part eager to embrace American culture and who had no interest at all in attempting to impose the culture of their countries of origin on the citizens of the nation that granted them refuge and took them in.

The accused shooter is an Australian, which adds a strong dollop of irony to his fear of replacement given that both Australia and New Zealand are dominated by cultures brought to those places by imperialist immigrants from Europe who rode roughshod over the actual culture of the actual people they found living in those places when they arrived en masse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But I’m thinking that the real issue isn’t whether cultures do or don’t, or should or shouldn’t, evolve as time moves forward and the ethnic or racial make-up of the populace alters. On a more fundamental level, the issue has to do with the ability to see strangers as individuals rather than as a faceless horde.

The fear of being overwhelmed is probably a natural response when newcomers are seen not as individual men and women—people with children, who need jobs, who want to play a useful and meaningful role in society, who like to swim or to paint or to make music or to cook, who have their own set of fears and anxieties—but solely as part of the groups to which they belong.  And there is irony in this anxiety-driven world view as well because, by refusing to see others as individuals, such people eventually start thinking of themselves in that way as well and end up retreating deeper and deeper into their own communities. This in turn leads to the phenomenon that Canadian author Hugh McLennan once famously called “two solitudes,” a baleful situation in which contiguously situated groups have almost so little contact with each other that they quickly forget that the people on the other side of the line are individuals with whom they could easily engage if they wished. And so the path is laid for once-great countries to become balkanized shadows of their former selves as the sense of national identity that once held the citizenry together slowly erodes and becomes ever more fragile. Eventually, the nation collapses in on itself and something else emerges from the ruins…but the chances of that new entity somehow not facing the same issues of mutually antagonistic solitudes within its borders is nil. And so begins the spiral down towards dissolution and disunity born of fear. It does not—perhaps even cannot—end well!

In the history of the West, the Jews have played the role of the perennial other, of the tolerated alien. The outpouring of sympathy in the Jewish community over the last week for the Muslims of New Zealand—a community that I seriously doubt more than half a dozen Jewish Americans even knew existed before last week—derives directly from that sense that, in the end, what drives the kind of violent animus against Muslims gathering for prayer that exploded last Friday in Christchurch is different only in cosmetic terms from the kind of explosive violence so often directed at Jews. So we add Christchurch to the list of gun-violent massacres in religious settings that already includes (to reference only attacks within the last decade) Charleston, Pittsburgh, Sutherland Springs, and Oak Creek. And we brace for the next attack, which will surely come unless we can find a way to force the haters to look directly at the objects of their antipathy and see, not a faceless horde, but men and women made in the image of God. That sounds so simple when put that way, and so obvious. But you cannot make blind people see merely by forcing them to open their eyes and face in the right direction….

Jews. And Pacific Islanders. And Gay People. And Hispanics....

As everybody surely knows by now, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution last week that condemned more or less every conceivable kind of prejudice imaginable…including anti-Semitism. It was, admittedly, a bold move forward for our courageous Congresspeople. But this is only the beginning! Reliable sources have informed me (yes, me personally) that Congress is thinking of granting women the vote within the next few weeks. And then, possibly, of outlawing chattel slavery as well in our great land. Who knows where this could all end? Eventually, they might even repeal Prohibition. Hardy-har-har!

I’m not really laughing. And neither is anyone who takes the moral foundation of the republic seriously and worries, as any thoughtful homeowner should, about cracks and fissures in the once-rock-solid foundation of democratic ideals and republican principles upon which the structure yet stands. It would be impossible to say that the resolution was not a good thing. But the background against which that good thing was accomplished is suggestive of harsh winds blowing through our land and our nation’s capital. And that part of the story is extremely worrying to me.

The resolution was originally formulated as a single-barreled rebuke specifically of anti-Semitism and was widely understood to constitute an effort by the Democrats in the House of Representatives to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic tweets of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). She herself was delicately left unmentioned in the text of the resolution. But that seems not much to have mattered, as her supporters all understood easily whom this was all about. And so, feeling unable publicly to oppose anti-Semitism, they opted for Plan B…and ended up insisting that the resolution be rewritten to condemn not only irrational prejudice against Jews, but also against Sikhs. And Hindus. And black people. And non-black people of color. And Hispanic people. And Muslims. And Pacific Islanders. (Is that even a thing, prejudice against people born in the Pacific?) And the LGBTQ community. And Asian Americans. To read the resolution, which is seven pages long, click here. Or, read ahead and let me talk you through it.

The resolution duly mentions some non-anti-Semitic incidents and makes specific reference to the horrific attack in 2015 on the church in Charleston in which nine innocent black worshipers were murdered. But mostly it was about anti-Semitism. The text makes specific reference to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And it makes mention of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October in which eleven people were killed by a shooter who declared openly that his ultimate wish was for “all Jews to die.” The text then goes on to take note of a truly unbelievable statistic, that a stunning 58.1% of all “religious-based” hate crimes are directed against Jewish people or institutions. (Pretty good for a group that makes up something like 2.1% of the national population!) Even I, whom no one could possibly accuse of excessive optimism, was shocked by that statistic. Maybe there really is more of a problem here than any of us wants to admit.

 The resolution defines anti-Semitism in an interesting way too, specifically noting that anti-Jewish prejudice includes “blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong; calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist view of religion; or making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotyped allegations about Jews.” I’m not sure who wrote those words, but it all sounds right to me. Still, it’s the first clause that seems the worthiest of taking seriously: blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong was precisely what the Nazis did to garner public support in the 1930s and it is, of all the specific versions of anti-Jewish prejudice mentioned, probably—at least in the long run—the most pernicious. Good for the House to have recognized that!

The text goes on to talk briefly about the appearance of anti-Semitic tropes of various sorts in the media, the public promotion of the bizarre fantasy that American Jews control the U.S. government or seek world domination, and the scapegoating of Jews by racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the America First Committee. And then, finally, we get down right to it as the text of the resolution leaves the general and focuses specifically on the matter at hand, rebuking Ilhan Omar’s tweets without mentioning their source by name.

This is the crux of the matter because, by unmistakably referencing the tweets, the resolution is equally clearly addressing the (unnamed) tweeter when it unambiguously condemns the practice of “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States” and specifically categorizes that as constituting anti-Semitism “because it suggests that Jewish citizens cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors,” which opinion, we read, is particularly offensive given the fact that “Jews have loyally served our Nation every day since its founding, whether in public or community life or in military service.”

And then the text, again without mentioning names, turns to a different congressperson, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and addresses the topic of dual loyalty. (To access my letter about Representative Tlaib and her willingness to raise the dual loyalty canard, click here.) First, we are given a number of instances in which the dual loyalty canard has been brought out by people eager to malign one or many who belonged to a minority faith. Specific mention is made of Alfred Dreyfus and John F. Kennedy, of the interment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and instances of anti-Muslim prejudice. (Some of the statistics in that regard are also shocking: a 99% increase in hate crimes directed against Muslim Americans between 2014 and 2016, mosque bombings in three different states, and, most alarming of all, actual planned mass attacks against Muslims in Kansas in 2016, Florida in 2017, and New York in 2019.)

When the resolution finally gets to say what it is actually proposing, it returns to the dual loyalty issue by formally rejecting “the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the U.S. and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.” Special reference is made to the fact that the United States government maintains an individual designated as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. And the document wraps up with a call to all public officials to live up to the “transcendent principles of tolerance, religious freedom, and equal protection as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the first and 14^th amendments to the Constitution.” (The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law and protects against the deprivation of life, liberty or property, without the due process of law.)

That all sounds almost intensely uncontroversial. So why was the resolution not unanimously adopted? Yes, it passed handily. But twenty-three members of Congress voted against it, all Republicans. A twenty-fourth, Steven King (R-Iowa), who was stripped of his committee assignments following comments endorsing white supremacy, voted “present.” A quick survey of the nay-sayers’ websites yields the conclusion that none voted against it because he or she is in favor of bigotry or prejudice, but because of a sense that there was something peculiar and intensely worrisome about the inability of the House just to condemn anti-Semitism without feeling obliged concomitantly to condemn every other conceivable form of prejudice they could think of. (To see an interesting survey of the twenty-three by Ewan Palmer that was published on the Newsweek website earlier this week, click here.) Is anti-Semitism not something worth condemning without reference to other forms of prejudice? Would any decent person ever say that about racism directed against black people, that it feels somehow wrong just to condemn it on its own demerits without buttressing the sentiment with reference to other kinds of prejudice as well? No one would! Nor should anyone. And yet…we had people saying precisely that last week about a resolution condemning just anti-Semitism.

I find myself on both sides of that argument. On the one hand, I feel eager to find good in a resolution that, after all, loudly and clearly condemns anti-Jewish sentiment and the violence such sentiment all too often breeds. But I am also made extremely uneasy by the apparent fact that the Democratic leadership in the house felt it impossible to condemn anti-Semitism at all unless the condemnation included references to what reads like a list of every other kind of bigotry imaginable.

Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman at the center of the controversy, seems to spend her day sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for inadvertently offending anyone. She responds to criticism, including sharp criticism by members of her own party, by presenting herself as a naïf who keeps accidentally using anti-Semitic tropes to make the point that Israel’s supporters in the Congress are the unwitting dupes of their masters at AIPAC (standing in here for the Elders of Zion in more traditional anti-Semitic literature) rather than accepting that people of intelligence, moral maturity, and political insight choose to stand with Israel because it is our only reliable ally in the Middle East and, even more to the point, because the right of Jewish people to chart their own destiny forward in a Jewish state in their own Jewish homeland is reasonable and just. Israel has more vicious enemies to deal with than Ilhan Omar. But the fact that it was deemed impolitic to bring a resolution featuring a simple, forceful condemnation of anti-Semitism to the floor of the House is a troubling comment on how things are in these United States as we move past the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht and ask ourselves, yet again, why the Jews of Germany didn’t respond more vigorously to the tides that would eventually engulf them utterly.

Great Leaps Forward

Every generation has its “you know where you were when” moments. My dad used to say that there simply weren’t any Americans his age who didn’t know where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor or where they were and what they were doing when they heard that FDR had died. In a different age, that same comment would have been true with respect to Fort Sumter and Lincoln. But for people of my generation, the two “where you were and what you were doing” moments are definitely the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the precise moment Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I was ten years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. It was half past noon in Dallas when the shots rang out, so still early afternoon in New York. I was in Mrs. D’Antona’s fifth grade classroom on the second floor of P.S. 196 when our principal, Mr. Tauschner, came into our classroom and whispered the bad news to our teacher, who promptly burst into tears. Having no choice, the principal himself told us what had happened. And then someone brought a television into our classroom and we were allowed to spend the rest of the school day watching the news.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was sixteen. I was lying on my back on a blanket on the lawn behind the dorm at the University of Vermont in Burlington in which they housed participants in the special music program for high school students they used to run there each summer. Lying at right angles to my head was Lily Goodman, normally of Wilmington, Delaware, but that summer also spending her summer on the UVM campus in the same program I was in (and being much more talented a singer than I was a pianist). Between our heads lay my red transistor radio tuned to some local news station with the volume up as loud as it could go. We listened patiently to endless replays of the great man’s words of earlier that day: “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed.” And then, just few minutes before eleven PM, we heard the man, now speaking from the lunar surface, say that he was taking one single step as a man, but that that step was simultaneously a giant leap forward for all mankind. And it was my memory of that specific experience that came right back to me last week when I read that Beresheet, a 1290-pound spacecraft owned and operated by Israel Aerospace Industries, had successfully lifted off on its lunar mission last Friday atop a Falcon 9 rocket owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. The plan is for Beresheet (appropriately, “Genesis”) to orbit the earth for a while, then to depart for the moon under its own steam and then, after a journey of about seven weeks, to touch down on the moon on April 11.

It’s a pretty exclusive club, the one to which belong nations who have done this: only Russia, China, and our own country have managed successfully to land spacecrafts on the moon. But the club is expanding: India is expected to become its fifth member later this spring, as is Japan within a couple of years. Still, it won’t be that big a club even after India and Japan join. And Beresheet’s, once it lands on the lunar surface, has another distinction worth mentioning because it will be the first private-sector landing on the lunar surface in history.

It’s not hard to understand why this club has so few members. For one thing, it’s a really long ways off—the moon is about 239,000 miles away from the earth. And it’s a journey fraught with dangers and difficulties. And it costs a fortune to undertake a project like this—the price tag for the Beresheet mission is a cool $100 million, and that is the least amount ever spent to send a landing craft to the moon. (Could that detail be related to the fact that this will be the first lunar landing not paid for by a government spending money it prints up itself? I wonder!) Of special interest to me personally, though, is the list of digitized items Beresheet is going to leave on the moon for future visitors—perhaps even some eventually not from Earth—to ponder: details about the spacecraft and the crew that built it, an Israeli flag, a copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, dictionaries in 27 languages and all of Wikipedia, the memoirs of a Shoah survivor, a Hebrew-language Bible, recordings of the most popular Israeli songs, and some children’s drawings inspired by the mission. Just thinking about someone from a distant galaxy coming across this one day and trying to puzzle through all that data is intoxicating!

Things seem to be going well; the spacecraft sent home its first selfie just the other day, looking over its own shoulder at itself and the earth behind it from a distance of about 37,600 miles. (If you look carefully, you can see the outlines of South America and Australia.)

But all of this excitement regarding Beresheet has awakened another set of emotions in me as well. This summer will be the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Last December marked the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8, in the course of which the first picture of “earthrise” was snapped when Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first human beings to leave low earth orbit, reach the moon, orbit it, and then return to earth safely. There’s a “Beresheet” moment in this story as well: Apollo 8 orbited the moon ten times, in the course of which they made their memorable recording of the first verses in Genesis and Astronaut Anders took his now famous picture of the earth rising out of the black of space. 

What happened to our need to discover? The incredible successes of the mid-twentieth century, which included Project Mercury, which sent the first American into space; Project Gemini, which first brought astronauts into space for an extended period of time; the Apollo program, which brought astronauts to the moon and back; the Skylab program, which put our nation’s first space station into orbit; the Space Shuttle program, which endured two terrible tragedies but nonetheless succeeded in bringing reusable spacecrafts into the picture—all of these were enormous scientific, intellectual, and cultural achievements. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have to lose our way.

NASA still exists, of course. We continue to play a leadership role in the International Space Station, although our astronauts travel there and back on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. There are all sorts of research missions underway to Mars and beyond. But the idea of human-led exploration itself—the principled willingness to send people to go where no one has ever gone and to do things that no one has ever done, thus to make more great leaps forward for humankind in the Armstrongian sense—that feels as though it has somehow vanished from the American psyche. The last American to stand on the moon, Eugene A. Cernan, was mission commander of Apollo 17, which went to the moon and returned in 1972. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled due to budget cuts.

Mentioning the Space Shuttle program makes me rethink my comment above about the “where we were and what we were doing” moments in our lives, because I remember—and clearly—where I was in and what I was doing in 1986 when Challenger broke apart just seconds after take-off and all seven crew members died and where I was on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, which disaster took the life of all seven of its crew members as well. (There’s an Israel connection there too, of course, because the sole non-American on board was Colonel Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.)

But those disasters only made us more eager to succeed and, indeed the Space Shuttle program continued until 2011, by the end flying off on 133 successful missions involving 833 crew members (including the fourteen who died on the Challenger and the Columbia). And then we lost interest. Or it feels as though we have. And that is why the launch of Beresheet, for all it excites me, also unnerves me a bit by forcing me to wonder where our American sense of pioneering, of derring-do, of courage in the face of incredible obstacles, of exploration of the unknown, where all that went to? I suppose lots of people can think of lots of better uses for all that money—and the expenses involved were, to use the term literally for once, astronomical. But what price tag can or should we put on the sense that we are actively engaged in setting out on new paths, including ones on which no human being has ever travelled? Or that we are not wrapping up the search for knowledge in the universe, but only beginning to fathom what it is we don’t know about…everything? Underlying the need to explore, after all, is a foundation of humility born of the conviction that knowing how little we know can and should energize us to step further into the seductive unknown rather than retreat into blissful unknowing like timid children.

On one of the Saturday nights after the appearance of the new moon in the nighttime sky each month, we at Shelter Rock gather outside to recite the ancient prayer called Kiddush Levanah, the Sanctification of the Moon. Taking the moon as the embodiment of the unattainable, we use the sight of its return to the nighttime sky as an opportunity to renew our commitment to seeking to know the Creator through the contemplation of Creation. As I look up at the sliver of moon in the dark, I occasionally think of that night long ago in Vermont when I lay on a blanket and looked up at the moon as the first man in history took some first tentative steps onto its surface. It’s that precise sense of courage mixed with awe and, yes, humility, that I wish we could summon up again in our American psyche to remind us that there really is no upper limit to what we can dream of doing.