Praying for Ukraine

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine wears on, the outcome becomes increasingly less simple to predict. Time is the friend of the Russians, the ones with the limitless resources of personnel and firepower. But the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians, which surprised even their closest allies and supporters, might in the long run prove more important than the Russians’ wealth or numbers: wars are generally won by the brave (and the lucky), not necessarily by the many. Like all decent people, I am praying for the Ukrainians and find myself repulsed by the barbarism of the Russians. I read Bret Stephens’ appreciation of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Times’ the other day (click here if you didn’t see it) and found myself agreeing, and vigorously, with every single point he made.

For most Americans, the sense that the Ukrainians are the good guys comes naturally. That is my sense as well—that the angels  in this conflict are on the side of the Ukrainians—but I can’t say it comes to me naturally. In fact, just the opposite is the case.

All of this came to a head for me the other week when, just a few days before Pesach, the Rabbinical Assembly asked me to join a few other colleagues in proposing some prayerful supplements that could be offered to families that want to introduce the story of the Ukrainians resistance to tyranny into their seder. I was flattered to be asked and was eager to rise to the occasion. I did compose such a prayer and submitted it (after trying it out once or twice at Shelter Rock to see how it would be received). But the reading that I forced myself to undertake to prepare myself to compose a prayer that would be reflective of Jewish history in the Ukraine accurately and reasonably was beyond sobering. And it was in the wake of that self-assigned review of how things were that I found it, finally, in myself to compose a prayer suggesting of how I hope that things might yet turn out to be.

There have been Jews living in Ukraine forever…or at least since the days of Kievan Rus in the eleventh century. Indeed, in the days of Yaroslav the Wise (978–1054), one of the gates of Kyiv was called “The Jewish Gate,” presumably because it opened onto the Jewish quarter. There were good times in the ensuing centuries when the Jewish community flourished and created profound works of mystic theology and sharp halakhic acumen. But there were also bad times—the popular uprising of the mid-seventeenth century undertaken by Bohdan Khmelnytsky led to the massacre of scores of thousands of Jewish citizens and the upper annihilation of upwards of three hundred separate Jewish communities. (Nor is it irrelevant to note that Khmelnytsky, regarded by Jews as the Hitler of his day, is a revered figure in today’s Ukraine whose face adorns Ukrainian banknotes and whose statue dominates one of Kyiv’s central squares.)

In our own day, the amazing thing is not what happened to the Jews of Ukraine before the Shoah, but how almost universally the various pogroms that took Jewish lives in the course of those terrible years have been totally forgotten…including by Jewish people.

I can’t recall the last time I heard someone mention the Kyiv Pogrom of 1881, a widespread riot that resulted in the destruction of thousands of Jewish homes in Kyiv and the surrounding region, let alone the Odessa Riots of 1821, in which fourteen Jews were murdered. But it was the twentieth century that saw the worse of the pre-Shoah disturbances. It is widely and reasonably estimated that at least 100,000 Jewish people were murdered in the streets of Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, yet I have not noticed any reference to that almost unbelievable number in the last two months that I’ve been reading daily about Ukraine and the heroism of its Jewish president. Well worth reading in this regard is Jeffrey Veidlinger’s book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, published just last October by Metropolitan Books. A blurb for the book reads as follows: “Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.”

You see where we’re going. And then came the Shoah itself, which featured an unholy alliance of Ukrainian collaborators working hand-in-hand with the German invaders to murder Jews: in July 1941, it is estimated that as many as 5,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv alone. In an essay by Veidlinger published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (click here), he notes that during the first months of German occupation as many as 35,000 Jews were murdered and that “many of these massacres were perpetrated by locals, some without even a German presence.”

There’s way more to say. But the question is not how many horrific details I can stack up, but to decide what to do about this part of Ukrainian history. Do we take some sort of perverse pleasure in the Russian effort to inflict maximum punishment on the Ukrainian people for daring to wish to live in an independent state? Or do we remind ourselves that the murderers of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not the citizens of today’s Ukraine, that those people are long since gone from the world (or, speaking of the Shoah period, almost gone—but how many could have survived, let alone still be among the living?), that the citizens of today’s Ukraine are so far removed from the previous generations’ anti-Semitism that they’ve actually elected a Jew as their president? Or do we step outside of history entirely and focus on what we see before our eyes: a weaker nation being invaded by a larger, more powerful nation unafraid to kill civilians if that’s what it must take to bring the smaller nation to its knees? And what of President Zelensky’s Jewishness? Should that be the decisive detail here, the specific point that makes it impossible to turn away from the plight of Ukraine as the Russians murder children with impunity? And what if the president weren’t Jewish? Would that make it easier to turn away? And what would it say of us, we American Jews, if it did?

These were the thoughts I brought to bear as I sat down to attempt to write my prayer. I had no obligation to submit anything—I was flattered, as noted, by the Assembly’s request of me, but under no specific obligation to respond. I could easily have said no. My grandfather, my mother’s father, traveled—as far as I know—from his home in Belarus through Ukraine to board a ship for America in Odessa. This would have been around 1900. What if he had decided not to get on the boat at all and, instead, to settle down in Odessa, then as now a truly cosmopolitan city and a great cultural center. (I was there in 1990 and saw for myself just how attractive and interesting a place it was.) But what if he had stayed on and not come here? Would he have survived the pogroms and the Shoah-era massacres and deportations? Would one of his descendants (not myself—he and my American-born grandmother met here) be holed up in Odessa (or Lviv or Kharkiv or Kyiv) right now hoping not to be killed by an incoming Russian missile aimed directly at a civilian target?

And so I decided to accept the challenge and to create a prayer, something I could get behind emotionally and intellectually…and that would express my feelings about the past and the present, and my hopes for the future. Did I succeed? Only others can say, but I reproduce my work here for your consideration:

Avinu She-ba-shamayim, dear God in Heaven, as we watch on as a huge nation headed by a despot attempts to swallow up a neighboring state merely because it can, we are brought back to a different era not that long ago when a different nation headed by a different despot sought to swallow up neighboring nations large and small merely because it could. And that memory, for all it terrifies, also energizes. Ukraine has a long, complicated, and not at all happy, history with its Jewish citizens. We refuse to forget the past, as the Torah commands, and always to remember. But we also understand that the right to self-determination is the basic right of all peoples and that freedom cannot be a prize offered to some but not to all. And in that spirit we pray that You hear the groaning of Ukraine as it endures ruthless and merciless attacks against its citizenry, just as You once heard the Israelites in Egypt when they cried out to You in their misery. And also that You prompt the aggressor to open his heart to peace and to understand that, in geopolitics as in life itself, restraint is power and peace is the great end towards which humankind must strive if it is to endure.

Pesach 2022 (2)

One of the more unusual features of Passover is the way it prompts us carefully to consider the future by obliging us to remember the past. That aspect of the holiday comes out in many different ways, some intellectual (for example, reading haftarot so totally focused on the future as complements to the Torah portions we read in the course of the festival that are all about the past) and some intimate and sensory (for example, the strange sense I had at both seders of my grandparents’ presence as I contemplated my youngest granddaughter in her high chair playing with her the kiddush cup we bought her in Israel the summer after she was born and trying to figure out when, if ever, dinner was finally going to be served and what these grown-ups were so busy talking about in such detail).

It is even possible to sharpen our thinking about the future by focusing on the past, and specifically by reading the ancient prayers and lessons collected in the Haggadah. I had just such an experience at our first seder as I contemplated a text that I not only know by heart, but have—I think—known by heart for all of my adult life. It’s not an obscure passage either of the kind only a rabbi would know by heart, but rather one truly known to all. And its place is one of true prominence, so also not something at all hidden away. The setting is key. A child—usually the youngest present, although any will do—asks the four questions. All the questions have answers, of course (although, mysteriously, the Haggadah itself only addresses two of them), but the Haggadah doesn’t have us proceed, as would feel normal, to answer even the two questions that will formally be answered eventually. Instead, the individual leading the seder  lifts the plate of matzot aloft and says words that truly are known almost to all: “Behold, the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the Land of Egypt. Let all who are in need come and celebrate Pesach with us. Let all who are hungry come and eat. This year, we are here—but next year may we all be celebrating Passover in the Land of Israel. This year, we are still (in so many ways) enslaved—but next year may we all be free people.”

This proclamation is famous in its own right, encapsulating the key values promoted by the festival: charity, hospitality, generosity, and compassion. The only thing is that the second sentence is almost always mistranslated—and it was in the contemplation of that mistranslation, and the correct meaning of the words (and, even more so, the implication of that correct translation), that I found myself caught up as a door opened in my mind where I hadn’t ever noticed it before. (In intellectual and spiritual matters, just as in physical reality, doors have to be noticed before they can be opened and stepped through.) And so, having opened that door in my mind at our seder, I thought I would invite you all in my second Pesach letter of the year to step through it with me.

The text is in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Roman Palestine and the language of daily discourse for its Jewish citizens, not in Hebrew. And it’s shorter in the original too, complete in just four words: kol ditz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach. The first two words, the sentence’s subject, are easy to translate as “all who are in need.” The third word is simple Aramaic too and is the first of the sentences’ two verbs: yeitei is means “let come,” to yield a simple invitation to the needy and lonely to come inside and visit with our families on this festive evening. But it’s the last word that is mistranslated almost always: it doesn’t mean “[come inside] and celebrate Pesach with us,” but rather “[come inside] and partake of the paschal offering, the zevach pesach, with us, with our family.”

The background is clear enough. On the evening of the tenth plague, the Israelites slaughtered a kid or a lamb and painted its blood on the doorposts and lintel of their homes to remind God to pass over their homes on the way to smiting the firstborn sons of Egypt. And that was to become an ongoing ritual. Not the blood painting part, but the offering up of a lamb or kid on Passover Eve that was then eaten that evening in pre-organized groups called chavurot tailored to be the right size to consume all the meat of one lamb or kid, thereby leaving nothing over at meal’s end.

The chavurot part is part of the story and part of the law. The beginning of Exodus 12 discusses this in detail and, if anything, overexplains the concept: “In the tenth day of this month shall every individual select a lamb, one per household. Yet, if the members of any household be too few to consume a lamb, let neighbors come together to form larger groups; these groups shall take into account how much each individual can eat so that the lamb be totally consumed.” And that notion of pre-organizing the groups became law. Indeed, in Maimonides’ great law code, the point is made specifically that the animal can only be slaughtered in the first place for a specific, pre-signed-up group of individuals and that only they, and no one else, can then eat of the meat of that paschal lamb or kid.

So that’s the puzzle: the Haggadah bids those gathered to consume the flesh of the paschal offering to fling open the doors of their homes and invite all who are hungry to come and eat, and all who are in need (presumably because they didn’t register properly with any group to sponsor a paschal-lamb sacrifice) to come in and partake of our family’s zevach pesach. But the law forbids that specific thing: if the hungry person in the street whom the seder-leading is inviting inside isn’t already signed up to be part of a zevach pesach, then he specifically may not partake of the sacrificial meat. Inviting a hungry soul inside to eat is a lovely mitzvah. But inviting an unsigned-up individual to eat of some other family’s paschal lamb is not only awkward, but actually forbidden. So how can the Haggadah feature that line that appears to invite illegal behavior?

I suppose we could start by wondering why this mysterious person-in-the-street didn’t sign up to be part of a group paschal sacrifice. Did he have no family or friends? Was she so impoverished that she couldn’t afford to chip in even a token amount towards the purchase of the animal? Was he too ashamed of his own disconnectedness from religion and its requisite rituals to do what it would have taken to find a group to join in sponsoring a lamb or a kid? Perhaps we’re supposed to imagine a homeless person or an urban nomad of some sort who simply has no home in which to dine, or a street person who simply had no acquaintances to join with for a seder meal? Or are we talking about someone so disconnected from Jewish life that the idea of co-sponsoring a paschal sacrifice simply hadn’t occurred to that person as a viable idea, as something he or she could actually do?

And so the Haggadah turns away for a moment from the rulebook and, forgetting to remember that you have to sign up in advance and be part of a chavurah to sponsor a sacrifice, simply opens the door to being kind and welcoming to people who ought to have gotten themselves organized in advance but who just didn’t. For some reason. Maybe for multiple reasons. Maybe even for lame, silly reasons.

And that is what I learned from thinking this year about a line in the Haggadah everybody knows by heart. The law is sacred, its details inviolate and holy. The ideal is for all Jewish people to live within the four cubits of halakhah always. To know, or even really to know of, the God of Israel requires the Israelite to submit fully and absolutely to the yoke of God’s commandments. And yet there is still room to improvise, to step around the strict letter of the law to be kind or generous, or to be hospitable or caring. It is always reasonable to look at someone languishing outside the sanctuary and kindly to reach out to that person with compassion and humility even if it means stepping gingerly around a strict detail of the law. Okay, so you didn’t sign up in advance. Come in anyway and join my family, my children, my friends. You’ll sign up next year. But this year…be my guest and feel included, not excluded. And feel very welcome. Yes, I could justify excluding you with reference to your own failure to prepare properly for the holiday. But how could that possibly be the right thing to do?

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.