Jewish Mythology

 I remember the incident well, even after all these years. I grew up surrounded by survivors of the Shoah. I went to school, including elementary school, with many kids whose parents came here as refugees (as survivors were then called) and I knew many of those parents well. Our next door neighbors were an older couple that fled Vienna at the very last minute and ended up here after brief stops in Sweden and the U.K. They were everywhere, those people. It was commonplace to see men with numbers tattooed on their forearms in the grocery or at shul. But things were different back then. Eager to move forward into their new lives as Americans, my friends’ European parents specifically did not talk about their wartime experiences and certainly didn’t dwell on them. They may have spoken Polish, German, French, or Yiddish at home, but they certainly did not speak in anything but English in public. I can even remember my mother cautioning me when I was ten or eleven about asking our neighbors about their backstory in too much detail, explaining that those stories were too personal “just” to inquire about. As a result “So what was Auschwitz like?” was a question more unaskable than unanswerable in those days. And no one did ask. Just to the contrary, actually: it was considered in poor taste even to suggest obliquely that our survivor-neighbors weren’t Americans in the fullest sense of the word, something that asking about former lives might somehow suggest.

But the moment I’m talking about came years later. As many of my readers know, I lived and worked in Germany from 1984 to 1986, teaching ancient Jewish history and Bible at the Institute for Higher Jewish Learning attached to the University of Heidelberg for four semesters. It was an exceptional experience, and in a dozen different ways. I could make a list! But at the top of that list, I think, would have to be the fact that the taboo inculcated in me from childhood about asking survivors’ about their stories in too much (or any) detail, that did not at all seem to be part of survivor culture in Germany itself. Our synagogue in Heidelberg had no actual German Jews among its members (or at least not in the way we in New York used the term to denote Jewish people whose families had been in place Germany for centuries before the war), but there were a fair number of survivors, mostly Eastern Europeans who simply had no place to go after they closed the D.P. camps and so stayed in place and made a life for themselves in, of all places, Germany. This was in the mid-eighties. The war was only forty years in the past. The people I’m describing were at the time younger than I am now. Some had been hidden children, but most came through the camps and somehow survived. And, unlike my friends’ parents back in Forest Hills, these people couldn’t stop talking about their experiences.

The specific incident I want to write about today features a guest who came to the community, an actual German Jew. She was a woman then in her sixties who lived in Paris, but she had once been a little girl in a wealthy Jewish family in Cologne where her parents had owned a huge department store. She spoke about her childhood, about Kristallnacht, about the deportations. And then she turned to the topic of anti-Semitism itself. She had been vaguely aware, she said, of anti-Semitism as a concept, as a malign part of the history of Western culture, as something dark and scary…but as something from the distant past, something connected with 15^th century Inquisitors and 17^th century Cossacks, and certainly not as something to fear or worry much about in modern-day Germany. She spoke about how no one in her parents’ circles took Nazism—at least not in the early days—as a serious threat. I specifically recall her saying that no one in our world worries seriously that the world might well be flat and it was that same lack of serious attention her parents and their friends brought to the vulgar prejudice promoted by the Nazis in the years before Hitler came to power.

They changed their minds quickly after that, she said almost wryly. Those who could escape got out. The rest waited to see what was going to happen. And what happened was that about 180,000 of the quarter-million Jews present on German soil the eve of the Second World War were murdered.

The rest of her talk was also interesting and very moving. But the detail that’s stayed with me over all these years is the way she described her parents and their friends as thinking of anti-Semitism as some medieval scourge, as something antique to regret and from which to recoil, but not something you would expect actually to encounter.

Up until recently, I felt the same way. I lost count years ago of the books about the Shoah I’ve read. And I am more than aware of the fact that there are people in our country who harbor prejudicial feelings about Jewish people: if any of us doubted that before Pittsburgh or Poway, then surely no one thinks that now. But even after the rank anti-Semitism on display, say, in Charlottesville, where the marchers chanted anti-Semitic slogans out loud without the slightly reticence, let alone shame, I still felt safe, certain that these were “just” white-supremacist types wholly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. I still do think that! And yet there was something new and particularly unnerving about the incident in Colleyville, something that only came to light in the days following the release of the hostages.

At first, no one—myself certainly included—understood the significance of the phone calls to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. What she could possibly have had to do with this was unclear—and not solely to me personally. Had she ever had any contact with Malik Faisal Akram, the hostage taker? Did they somehow know each other? Did he take a rabbi in Texas hostage as a way of getting himself in contact with her? Surely, he could have just phoned her himself if that were the case! But as days passed after the incident, it became clear that Akram had swallowed his own poison and truly believed—not theoretically or hypothetically, but really and truly—that a rabbi of Rabbi Buchdahl’s stature could simply order the President of the United States to release a federal prisoner and he would have no choice but to comply. The Jews run the world, don't they? Hadn’t Aafia Siddiqui, the woman he was trying to spring from prison, herself noted that her guilty verdict had not been determined by the American jury before whom her case was tried, but by Israeli Jews who apparently had the power to instruct an American jury how to find in any case at all in which they care to intervene?

This notion that the Jews somehow run the universe is not new, of course. There was a very interesting essay by Professor Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University posted on “The Conversation” website last week, one in which the author writes that the myth of Jewish power over the world’s leaders was already present in these United States before the outbreak of the Civil War. (To read Professor Sarna’s article, click here.) And he writes specifically about two books. The first is a book by one Telemachus Thomas Timayenis called The American Jew: An Exposé of His Career that was first published in 1888 and which is currently available to all interested parties for download on any number of internet sites. Can you judge people by the company they keep? Sometimes you can! And so it seems more than relevant that a recent reprint of Timayenis’s book, which details the specific ways in which the United States government is a puppet of world Jewry, contained a preface by the man convicted of the 1958 bombing of Bethel Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and author of The Gospel of Jesus Christ Versus the Jews and other similar works.

And the second, almost of course, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in the nineteenth century as a kind of expose detailing the plans of world Jewry to dominate the world’s nations and make them into slave states. Nor are the plans themselves left unexplicit: the book purports to present the minutes of a meeting of world Jewish leaders at which their specific plans to take over the world were drawn up. The book is silly and unconvincing, but many people bought and still do buy into its basic theory. Henry Ford promoted it shamelessly in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. (Ford eventually apologized for promoting anti-Semitic theories. But his book, The International Jew, is available for purchase around the world and for download from any number of internet sites. If you find that unlikely, just google The International Jew and see what pops up. (And even more bizarrely, click here to see the reviews on the Goodreads site and—my personal favorite part—the box on the side of the screen noting that readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed Mein Kampf.)

It's easy to laugh this stuff away. (Goodreads also suggests The Myth of German Villainy by Benton Bradberry and The Zionist Seizure of World Power by Deanna Spingola as books that Henry Ford fans might also enjoy.) But Colleyville only ended well because it did—because the moment for escape presented itself, because the rabbi had the courage to act decisively, because he had a chair nearby to throw at the Malik Akram’s head—and could just as easily have ended with a living hostage-taker and four dead hostages. So we can be grateful that that didn’t happen. But we can’t look away from the hostage taker’s worldview and we certainly should all be beyond laughing it off as craziness. Nazism was craziness too, but it led to the deaths of millions. The notion that Rabbi Buchdahl could have sprung a federal prisoner by making a phone call or two is easy to wave away as even crazier than the notion that the rabbi of a Reform temple in a Texas suburb could have. But we ignore this kind of craziness at our own risk. Crazy people do crazy things, yes. But in sufficient numbers such people can alter the course of human history…and not in a way that any decent American should be able to imagine calmly.

Colleyville

In “Everything Foreseen Is Also Unforeseen,” the story I published for the High Holidays this last year (and which is now available in the revised and updated collection of my stories, To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011-2021), I divided the story into three segments, each with its own narrator, and ended the first two sections with two of those narrators’ descriptions of the same event. The external details were the same—where it took place, who was present, at what time of day it occurred, etc. It was, after all, the same event they were describing! But what I hoped to convey was how two people can perceive the same incident wholly differently not because they can’t remember if it was cloudy or sunny out or what color jacket the other person was wearing, but because each individual sets the incident into the context of a different life and so brings a different universe of facts, emotions, and history to the table, so to speak, when attempting to decipher even the most ordinary event, in this case something an outside observer would consider wholly ordinary: two men taking a walk around Meadow Lake near the old World’s Fair site in Queens and talking about their fathers.

I was thinking about that story as I read about the events of this last weekend in Texas. Like most Americans, I’m sure, I hadn’t ever heard of Colleyville and wouldn’t have known there was a synagogue there. I don’t know the rabbi personally or even by reputation. Even now it seems like a strangely out-of-the-way place for anyone to choose as a place from which to pressure the federal government into doing some specific thing. Nor are the now-deceased hostage taker’s motives at all clear. Was he so poisoned by his own anti-Semitic worldview that he actually imagined that, since Jews rule the world,  the four he took captive could just phone up the feds and order them to release a woman convicted years ago of attempting to murder American servicemen? Or, even more bizarrely, did he imagine that he could scare his hostages into placing a call to the Elders of Zion and asking them to order the federal government to release a woman convicted of the attempted murder of American soldiers and sentenced to a cool eighty-six years in prison? Did he think all Jews have access to the space lasers? I suppose we won’t find that out now. Or perhaps when some of the details that remain unknown, or at least unpublicized, become known—how the man got from New York to Texas, who financed his journey, why he chose that specific congregation to attack, why he wished to speak on the phone specifically with Angela Buchdahl, the rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan, or what his specific connection to Aafia Siddiqui, the woman whose release he wished to bring about, was—when some of those details become known, perhaps the larger story will clarify. More likely, though—and by far—is that the incident will fade from the front page quickly enough and be waved away by most as another crazy act carried out by a crazy person crazily hoping to pressure the federal government into doing something no normal person would imagine it ever would do. End of story. Don’t irrational people do irrational things all the time? Why is that even newsworthy?

Of course, Jews across the country (and the world) responded to the story entirely differently. To FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Matt DeSarno, who informed the world that the FBI did not view this incident as “specifically related to the Jewish community,” it was hard to know what to say. Did Special Agent DeSarno imagine that Malik Akram was just driving around Texas randomly looking for some folks to take hostage and—presumably because half the locals having breakfast at MacDonald’s were probably themselves armed (he was in Texas, after all) and the local Buddhist temple was closed on Saturday morning, he randomly hit on the idea of taking some Jews hostage in their own synagogue? And does he imagine too that this criminal act directed at Jewish innocents was completely unrelated to the extreme and unapologetic anti-Semitism of the specific individual he was trying to spring from prison? (This was a woman, after all, who asked the judge to administer DNA tests to perspective jurors to guarantee than none was Jewish or possessed of “Zionist or Israeli background.” What specific Zionist genetic marker the defendant, who holds an earned Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University, wished the court to check for was left unexplained.) And then, as if to make it clear that Special Agent DeSarno was not speaking just for himself, the FBI later released a statement to the Associated Press in which they said, unequivocally, that in their opinion the hostage taker had not “focused” on Jews, thus suggesting that in their professional opinion this was not an anti-Semitic act at all. When they furiously backpedaled just a day or two later and announced their revised opinion that Colleyville actually did have something to do with the hostages’ Jewishness, it made me feel slightly better…but it also prompted me to wonder how many people out there will just take this as yet another piece of proof that we Jews control the media and the government—and so can just order the FBI to revise its opinion in public when the original statement proved not to suit our tastes.

I myself view the world through my own eyes. And, indeed, for those of us who lived through the Pittsburgh massacre just three years ago—and for those of us for whom the image of Jews being murdered in their own synagogue evokes some of the most horrific stories of the Shoah (for example the murder of the 2000 Jews who were locked in the Great Synagogue of Bialystok on June 27, 1941, and who were then burnt to death when the Germans set the synagogue on fire—a massacre witnessed by the father of one of our Shelter Rock congregants who later wrote about his experiences on that indescribably horrific day)—the image of an armed man threatening to murder Jews in their own shul was not something we could explain away as an act of random political theater or as just another hostage-taking incident. For us, then, this was anything but something that could have happened anywhere and to anyone but which by happenstance just did happen to Jewish people gathering for worship.

We are not alone in this assessment. Indeed, President Biden himself contradicted the FBI’s initial statement in a statement of his own that was as clear as it was blunt: “Let me be clear to anyone who intends to spread hate,” the President said unequivocally, that “we will stand against anti-Semitism and against the rise of extremism in this country.” So that was satisfying. But, at least in the long run, rhetoric—even of the high-minded and wholly well-intentioned variety—is not going to make anyone feel safer in synagogue.

I’ve lost track of how many security seminars I have attended since Pittsburgh. I’ve watched the videos, listened to the lessons taught by local police officers and by government officials specially trained to respond to active-shooter and hostage-taking events. I can’t say how many meetings I have attended to discuss the specific security standards we have in place at Shelter Rock. I suppose more meetings will be scheduled presently. I even attended a Zoom meeting last Tuesday with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney-General Merrick Garland, and, yes, the FBI Director Christopher Wray. (The originally assessment by the FBI that this was not an anti-Semitic act was discreetly left unmentioned.) Everybody said all the right things. Mayorkas, whose own mother was a Shoah survivor, was particularly eloquent, encouraging us all to hold steady the tiller, to take security even more seriously in the future than we have in the past, to trust the advice of the police, and to remember how rare these incidents are and how unlikely we are, even now, to end up taken hostage by a madman seeking to leverage the government into doing something. So that was satisfying. And even a bit encouraging.

But there are plenty of people in our nation, I suspect, who thought the FBI had it right the first time, that anti-Semitism is how Jewish people interpret every slight, every insult…and certainly every crime of which they are the victims, like those poor people in Colleyville. Those, I suppose, are the same people who wonder how anyone can say that racism still exists now that we’ve had a black President and a black Vice President. Maybe it’s inevitable that these things look differently to those on the inside. But that the seizing of innocents at worship in a synagogue as hostages by someone intent on springing from prison a woman who blamed her conviction in an American court of attempting to murder American soldiers on Israel’s apparently irresistible power to dictate to American judges and juries how they must find, and particularly when the defendant is Muslim—to understand that an act like that is directed as much at all Jewish Americans as at those four unfortunates in Colleyville, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch at all. 

A Glimmer of Hope

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the establishment of the Mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations, which was then handed over to the British to administer in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. To say that a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then is really to say the very least. And yet that specific shift in Middle Eastern reality—the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the assignment of its territories outside of Turkey itself to one or another of the victor nations—created the Middle East we know today more than did any other single political or diplomatic event. The British, of course, had their hands full from the beginning, appearing—at least at first—only barely to understand what it was going to mean to govern almost two million people, more or less none of whom trusted them or wanted to be governed by them even benignly. Nor did Britain’s racist and imperialist history of governing its own overseas colonies in Asia or Africa with little to no respect for the rights or culture of the governed bode particularly well for their chances of governing Palestine effectively or successfully.

Looking at the map a century later, we can see how much has and hasn’t changed. The Brits themselves are long gone, of course. But the legacy the Mandate bequeathed to the region and the world—primarily the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan, but also the mass of Palestinian Arabs who failed to create the Arab state envisioned by the authors of the Partition Plan adopted by the United Nations in 1947 but who also failed to embrace the possibility of Israeli or Jordanian citizenship and so who were left with neither a country of their own nor easy entrée into the social fabric of any other—that legacy remains in place and needs to be confronted by all who wish for peace in the Middle East. Laying the intractability of the Middle Eastern situation at the feet of the British feels a bit overstated. But the map of the region with which all who yearn for peace must come to terms is precisely a result of their legacy.

Just lately, however, after decades of endless deliberation and failed initiatives, things are beginning to feel just a bit different.

The Palestinians appear to be increasingly unhappy with their own leaders, and particularly the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Time and time again, they have declined to accept any sort of offer from Israel, including offers along the lines of the Oslo Accords of 1993 that would have led directly to an independent Palestinian state. Equally meaningfully, though, is the fact that the Palestinian leadership has declined to act unilaterally and simply to declare their own independence. The world would surely run to accept such a development as legitimate and beyond acceptable. (Despite the fact that no such state actually exists, over 130 nations have already recognized the existence of the State of Palestine.) But that would require coming to terms with the reality of an independent Israel next door…and that, the Palestinian leadership seem unable or unwilling to contemplate. Nor has the situation in Gaza been all that different—after Israel withdrew in 2005 and the Palestinians in Gaza voted to be governed by Hamas, the possibility existed for the Palestinians to declare their independence and move forward to create a nation. But Hamas, unwilling to abandon its terrorist orientation and live in peace with the neighbors, could not bring itself to do that. And so the Palestinians remain, year after year, in a self-made limbo that arouses the sympathy of a world all too willing to look away from the fact that the Palestinians could declare their independence at any time and move forward from there.

But now, as we pass the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the British Mandate, things seem to be changing. Arab states, once implacably opposed to living in peace with Israel, seem slowly to be coming around. The long-standing, occasionally beleaguered, peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan have remained in place. The Abraham Accords have led three significant Muslim nations to establish an official and public relationship with Israel. The “big” Middle Eastern conflict is no longer the one between Israel and the Arabs, but the one between an aggressive Iran on the brink of becoming a nuclear power and the nations that entirely reasonably fear Iranian expansionism and terror. As a result, there is a certain discernible frustration in the Arab world with the way the endless insistence of the Palestinians on their right to a state is belied by their refusal actually to move forward towards statehood.

The Palestinians have done very well promoting themselves as a cause célèbre among progressive groups in North America and in Europe. But that success apparently does not extend to nations who truly fear Iran and who are more than aware of the fact that the real possibility of preventing Iran from becoming the world’s most dangerous nuclear power rests with Israel’s willingness to prevent that from happening and not from the slightly pathetic efforts of Western powers, the U.S. included, to negotiate yet more agreements that the Iranians will sign and then ignore. When people ask, as they do constantly, why nations like Bahrain or the UAE would make peace with Israel before the final resolution of the Palestinian issue, the answer has far less to do with their feelings about Palestinian intransigency, real thought they may well be, than with their fear of Iranian aggression. And the next countries to join the Abraham Accords will surely be nations who understand the world in precisely the same way as the Bahrainis and the Emiratis. And, yes, there is a certain irony in the fact that this realignment of the political landscape of the region will help, not hinder, those Palestinians who are sick of their endless war with a nation they cannot defeat and who yearn for autonomy, for independence, and for peace: once the Palestinians acquire leaders who understand that they can no long refuse to negotiate a just peace with Israel without alienating a serious number of nations on whom they have traditionally counted for support, including especially financial support—once that happens, the path to Palestinian independence will be straighter and far easier to negotiate.

So, despite all the reasons I generally feel gloomy about the Middle East, I’m entering 2022 feeling a bit upbeat. There was a time when the thought of the Saudis and the Israelis exchanging ambassadors would have seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. But now, given the current state of affairs and despite the fact that I don’t imagine the Saudis are on the brink of joining the Abraham Accords any time too soon, it no long feels like something that couldn’t plausibly happen, just like something that hasn’t happened yet. I noticed an online article the other day that referenced somebody as a “Saudi Zionist,” an expression that would once have sounded unimaginable for someone to say out loud seriously. But there it was in print (so to speak) for all the world to see. Nor was it meant sarcastically or cynically. (To see the article, click here.)

The resolution of conflict in the Middle East is not just around the corner. But each nation that signs onto the Abraham Accords constitutes a chink in a wall that was once deemed impenetrable, each a door that just a moment ago existed only in the imaginations of inveterate dreamers. The notion that Israel could take its place among the nations of the Middle East not as a pariah state doomed to fight for its very right to exist, but as a welcome partner in the intellectual, commercial, and cultural life of its own neighborhood—that idea is as intoxicating as it is wild.

In the long run, the Palestinians will eventually have to accept the reality of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel and move forward with the work of nation building. They’ve seemed so unwilling for so long to move forward into their own future that it seems bizarrely Pollyanna-ish even to imagine a bright, peaceful future for the Middle East involving an economically robust Palestine living in secure peace with its neighbors in Israel. But I’m that kind of mood these days for some reason, willing to imagine a future in which the Palestinian leadership finally opts to act in its own best interests and follow the lead of other Muslim nations in accepting Israel as a worthy member of the family of nations. I know it feels unlikely that could ever happen. But, hey, I can dream, can’t I? 

One Year In

 Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the events of last January 6, events that even a full year later feel difficult to assign the past and reference as something firmly put behind us. Just the opposite is the truth, actually: in some profound ways, it feels like the “real” work of dealing with the events of that day still lies almost wholly in front of us. Nor would it be hard to explain why it feels that way. It took almost six months for the House of Representatives to vote to create a select committee dedicated to investigating the insurrection, if that’s what it was, of last January, and even then the decision to proceed just barely squeaked through. So that was almost half a year wasted and a lot of our nation’s leaders openly opposed to the nation undertaking the kind of thoughtful reckoning that possibly could put the events of January 6 firmly in the past. And then, once the panel finally began working, the sheer volume of material its members had to wade through was beyond daunting: they have to date heard reports from more than three hundred witnesses of various sorts, including members of the Capitol Police force, and issued more than forty subpoenas requesting testimony and documents from a wide variety to souls connected, or believed possibly to be connected, to the events of that day. Nor do they appear to be anywhere near the end of their work as they go public, so to speak, with hearing that we will all be able to follow if we wish. Eventually, of course, they will issue a report. Possibly by November. But I don’t see that report bringing the incident and its aftermath to a close. Far more likely, I think, is that the events of January 6 will become a permanent part of our national self-conception, something in the way that Pearl Harbor or the fall of Saigon or 9/11 theoretically slid into the past but somehow remained nonetheless etched in the national consciousness as a permanent feature of our national present. (The past and the present are only theoretically contiguous, after all; as any student of Jewish history knows, it is perfectly possible for events that occurred in the past also to exist, and to exist fully and palpably, in the present.)

There are, however, deeper issues afoot here, issues related more to philosophy than to history.

Our nation has a deeply ambiguous attitude towards rebelliousness, insurrection, and revolution. The founders of our nation, after all, were insurrectionists who made the conscious decision to turn their backs on the law of the land and to rise up in armed insurrection against the legitimate king of their own country. The British did what they could to put down the revolt, but were in the end unsuccessful in preventing the birth of our nation. And so was set the stage for an American people destined (or do I mean doomed?) both endlessly to admire the nation’s founders for their daring, their bravery, and their righteous iconoclasm, and, at the same time, to think nothing of punishing violent insurrectionists who take up arms against the state or its duly elected government officials as though such was not the very kettle in which our nation was cooked up less than two and a half centuries ago.

The leaders of the Confederacy felt they were following the Founders’ lead in seceding from the mother country and going to war to secure their own future independence. This was hardly a secret: President Lincoln addressed that specific assertion in his address to Congress on Independence Day in 1861. As my contribution to the discussion regarding January 6 as the first-year anniversary passes and we await the report of the House Select Committee, I would like to review his words with you and explain what they mean to me personally.

It was a fraught time in our nation’s history. Just the previous February, the six states that had seceded from the Union (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana) formed the Confederate States of America. Five more (Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee) would soon follow. The bombardment of Fort Sumter had just taken place in April, making a peaceful solution to the crisis more or less impossible to imagine. And, indeed, President Lincoln, who responded to the fall of Fort Sumter by calling for 75,000 volunteers to defeat the Confederacy, soon added a request for an additional 43,000. Some skirmishes and smaller battles had already been fought. The question on the table was whether a nation conceived in armed, seditious rebellion was going to use the full force of its military to put down an armed, seditious rebellion on the part of eleven of its states. It was that specific question that President Lincoln came to Congress that July 4 to address.

It was, to say the very least, a pivotal moment in the history of the republic. And, indeed, things were to get bloody very quickly: the first major battle of the Civil War,  the First Battle of Bull Run, was not three weeks in the future when Lincoln came to the rostrum. But first, before sending our troops into battle, Lincoln needed to explain why insurrection could not be tolerated.

Some of his arguments were arguably weak. The argument, for example, that the states cannot secede because they have no other legal existence other than as states of the Union does not impress: could not the same have been said about the thirteen colonies in the 1780s? Similarly, the argument that states may not secede because there exists, or should exist, not enmity but friendship between the states seems unconvincing. (Do we expect unhappy couples to stay together because they were once happily married to each other?)

But the argument that Lincoln stressed the most passionately and at the greatest length had to do with the role destiny assigned to the United States at the time of its inception by making of it the only functioning democracy in the world. (The only other national experiment with democracy—the one triggered by the French Revolution—had failed by then and led directly to the efforts of Napoleon to conquer the world and create, not a French republic but a French empire.) And so he laid out his argument against the backdrop of history itself.

The question of the legitimacy of insurrection, the President declared, “embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question of whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether the discontented individuals…can always—upon the pretenses made in this case or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense— break up the government and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: ‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people or too weak to maintain its own existence?’”

Lincoln clearly took the long view when it came to history. The evolution of systems of human governance had led to absolute monarchies and the excesses and cruelty that such absolutism almost invariably brings in its wake: as Lord Acton would write in 1887 but as Lincoln clearly already knew years earlier, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Six months later, Lincoln would return to this theme in his annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a speech delivered just a few days before the largest battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Fredericksburg, was to get underway. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. And the President couldn’t have been more eloquent:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history…The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

And that is why the argument that the insurrectionists of January 6 were merely citizens exercising their First Amendment right to speak freely and freely to gather fails to convince. By entering the Capitol illegally, by unambiguously threatening to murder lawmakers (including the Vice President of the United States acting that day in his role as President of the Senate), by seeking to intimidate the Congress into falsifying the results of the 2020 election, and by showing contempt for the peace officers in place to maintain order in our nation’s most sacred space, the insurrectionists were revolting against the core values of Americanism not all that differently than did the leaders of the Confederacy in their day.

President Lincoln was right to refuse the leaders of the Confederacy the right to dismember the nation and frustrate its national destiny. People who revere Lincoln’s memory, myself certainly included, have no choice but to support the current administration in its decision to pursue the insurrectionists of last January to the fullest extent that the law allows.

As One Year Ends

I suppose rabbis are supposed to nod at the arrival of a new secular year without endorsing the concept overly. And yet the secular New Year does mean something to me. I may have been born in 5713—I actually was born in 5713—but that is not the year that springs to mind when someone asks me for the year of my birth. Nor do I think of 5726 as the year of my bar-mitzvah or 5740 as the year of my marriage. Those numbers are correct. But, for all I feel myself steeped in Jewish culture in most ways, I still find it far more amazing to think that we’re about to cross the line to 2022 than it seemed remarkable to me last September to think that the world had made it to 5782. 

And so, as we prepare for 2022, I’d like to offer my readers a reverie on the passage of time…but in a specific key.

In 1995, Moonstone Press (then located in Goderich, Ontario) published my first book of essays, Travels on the Private Zodiac. The idea of the lead essay was that the ancients were right and wrong in their astrological thinking. Wrong, because the specific lay-out of the planets and stars in the sky at the moment any of us is born does not really have any effect on the courses our lives subsequently take. But, albeit in an intimate, person-specific way that they themselves would have found unfamiliar, they were also right.

In my understanding of the private zodiac, we are influenced throughout our lives by the people into contact with whom we come. Some of these people are in close-by orbit—our parents and our siblings, then eventually (at least ideally) our spouses and children. In slightly more distant orbit is a different cast of characters—not quite as close to us as the people in the first category, these are the people whose presence in our lives affects who we become and what we do just a bit less irresistibly than the people in the first group. These are our grandparents and our elementary school teachers, our neighbors and our parents’ best friends, our clergypeople and our camp counselors, our housekeepers and our coaches. And then there is a third group as well, this one populated by people who affect our courses through life not as meaningfully as our teachers or our neighbors, but whose influence is still discernible and real. These are our elected officials and our high school principals, the professors who lectured to us in college and the authors whose books we have found the most moving and influential, the performers whom we only know through their artistry and yet whose work has nonetheless affected us profoundly and, at least in some cases, mightily as we made decisions regarding the rest of our lives. Taken all together, these nearer planets and distant stars constitute our private zodiacs.

And then there are the comets.

At the end of August in 1998, I flew from New York to Vancouver via Montreal. I had come to New York to see my ailing father and expected things to be truly grim, but things had improved in the day or two before I arrived and my visit ended up being far more upbeat than I had expected it to be. And so I flew home in a relatively good mood. It was late in the evening. The flight from Montreal to Vancouver was only half-full. I had an aisle seat, so there was the window seat to my left and the aisle itself to my right. For a while, I thought I would have both seats to myself, but then, just before they closed the doors, a young man appeared and sat down next to me.

He looked hale and physically well enough, but also beaten down and sad. In my usual way, I smiled affably at him and then began to read. The stewardess demonstrated, presumably for travelers who had never been in a car, how to fasten a seatbelt. There was that helpful video outlining all the safety features of our aircraft (but which to me personally just serves as a kind of a catalogue of all the terrible things that can happen on airplane flights). Eventually, we were in the air. The fasten-your-seatbelt sign blinked off. Beverages were served. I tried to read for a while, then gave in and, turning slightly to my left (and already sensing I was making a huge mistake), I said, “Heading to Vancouver?”

And so it began. He wasn’t going to Vancouver at all, it turned out, just going to change planes there for a JAL flight to Tokyo. He was, he said, planning to spend a year teaching English in Osaka, which experience he was hoping would help him get over the events of the previous few months. I asked if he wanted to talk about it. And talk about it he did. The story began with a young woman who had unexpectedly become pregnant. My seatmate, the future father, proposed marriage. She gratefully accepted. A date was set. And then, unexpectedly, she lost the baby. He stayed with her, not only accompanying her to the hospital but spending the night sleeping in a chair in her room and only returning home to wash up and put on clean clothes the next morning. A day or two later, she was discharged from the hospital. And the day after that she broke off their engagement, making it clear that she had only agreed to marry him because she felt trapped by circumstance…but now that her “circumstance” had changed—apparently, in her estimation, for the better—she saw no reason to carry on with their engagement. Or, for that matter, with their relationship. The next week, the young man, a graduate of McGill with a degree in education, signed on for a year in Osaka. This had all happened the previous March, two-thirds of the way through his first year of high school teaching. The young woman began dating someone new almost immediately. My row-mate carried on with his life as best he could, but slipped into a bad state nevertheless. He was, he said, drinking almost daily and smoking way too much pot. He had actually gone to school—he taught English in some suburban high school near Montreal, he said—he had gone to school stoned a few times, but hadn’t been caught. He stopped going to the gym, stopped sleeping well at night, began to put on weight. He stopped doing the laundry, just stopping off at the local K-Mart to buy more underwear and socks when he ran out. He was, he admitted, a mess.

I listened, prompting him every so often to continue by asking a pertinent question. It took him hours to tell the whole story. (Trust me, I’ve left out a lot of the details.) I wasn’t bored. I had no place to go. I listened and then, when he was finally done, I told him what I thought. I made some suggestions, pointed out that changes of scenery generally only solve problems related to scenery. I suggested “real” counseling (as opposed to the kind you get on airplanes from strangers), but I also tried to encourage him. He was, after all, only twenty-six years old and his entire adult life was still in front of him. I tried to be kind and encouraging. By the time we landed in Vancouver, he was my best friend.

I never saw him again. We didn’t exchange e-mail addresses. I didn’t give him my telephone number or encourage him to stop by for a visit the next time he flew home through Vancouver. When the stewardess said we could unbuckle our seatbelts and retrieve our baggage from the overhead bins, he shook my hand and thanked me for listening. I wished him success in Japan and a good life. And then I turned and got my bag and that was that.

On the private zodiac, we were comets streaking past each other before vanishing forever into the darkness. We didn’t need more. I think I behaved kindly. He seemed better for having unburdened himself. It was what it was, no more but also no less. I don’t need to know what happened. I hope he had a good year in Osaka, then went home, forgot how bad things had once been, found someone to love, settled down, built a life. I can’t remember his name. (Other than Halley’s, how many comets actually have names?) But he remains, even after all these years, part of my story. Just a tiny part, to be sure. If I were a book, he’d be a footnote. Or part of a footnote. But he is a presence, or a kind of a presence, in my life nonetheless.

I wish the fifty-year-old version of himself well as 2022 dawns, whoever he was and wherever he ended up. I always end up feeling a bit global, even a bit cosmic, as years end and new ones begin. I’m thinking about the planets and stars I can see in the sky, those still there and those whose light is still there even though they themselves are long gone. I’m thinking about the distant stars too, the ones that are just pinpoints of light in the nighttime sky. And I’m thinking about the comets as well…and finding myself able to wish them all well even without knowing what trajectories they followed after brushing up against me for a moment before continuing on into the night.