Uvalde

The simple, and so-very-satisfying, way to deal with the Uvalde shooting is to wave it away as the irrational act of a crazy person. And there is, as there always is, something deeply appealing to that approach. Who but a truly insane individual, after all, could bring a loaded weapon to an elementary school and start shooting, apparently randomly, at the children and teachers present? (That the shooter started off his day by shooting his own grandmother only makes it easier and simpler to explain the school shooting as the act of a deranged person.) But is that really all there is to say?

In crime novels, the perpetrator is generally located through some thoughtful application of the cui bono rule. Those Latin words, originally spoken in this context by Cicero more than two thousand years ago, mean “to whom does it benefit” and supposes that, because people generally commit crimes because they expect to reap some sort of benefit from their actions, perpetrators can often be identified by figuring out who stood to profit from the crime. According to this line of thinking, jewel thieves generally steal jewels because they want them but can’t afford to purchase them honestly. The murder of people about to appear as witnesses in court can be supposed to have something to do with the person they were going to testify about wishing to keep them from doing that thing. Arsonists set fire to buildings because they believe they will somehow benefit from that specific edifice burning to the ground—and out-of-control pyromaniacs are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. And now we get to the point: since the police have yet to uncover any specific way that the shooter can possibly have imagined that his terrible act would benefit himself or, for that matter, anyone at all, it feels reasonable to wave this horror away as the insane act of a crazy person. Doesn’t that feel logical?

Maybe not so much. Would you have the courage to tell one of the bereaved parents that this was just a bad thing that happened, that crazy people do crazy things all the time, that there is no one to blame because the shooter is dead and there is no one else to blame? And what of the shooter’s own family? To know that your son’s name will live on in infamy as the murderer of innocent children has to be unbearable, as no less so must also be the knowledge that, not only is your son dead, but the overwhelming majority of citizens think that’s a good thing, that he deserved to die, that even had he survived he should have been sentenced to death and then executed by the state—would you comfort them by explaining that their son was crazy and that no other explanation is called for or needed?

Statistics provide no comfort at all. About thirty-five Americans die every single day of the year from gun violence. Americans own about six times as many guns per capita as, say, Germans, but have thirty times as many gun murders on an annual basis. Comparisons with other countries are even more unsettling: Americans own about six times as many guns per person as Spaniards, but there are in these United States three hundred times as many gun murders per year as there are in Spain. Are Americans simply more violent and prone to gun-based crime than other nations? Is there such thing as a national predilection for violence that can be brought to bear to explain events like Uvalde or Buffalo? Or is such a thing just a made-up fantasy promulgated by people eager to explain away this never-ending carnage as something indelibly stamped on our national character, thus as something we have to live with despite its obvious undesirability, something like the way blind people  have no choice but to learn how to cope in the world without being able to see?

I have never been able to understand how the specific words the Second Amendment uses to permit citizens to formed “well-regulated” armed militias to defend their cities and states can magically be made to mean that teenagers with no training in gun safety have the right to buy assault rifles even though they specifically do not belong to any sort of state-run militia, well-regulated or otherwise. So I won’t even begin to go there. I understand I am fully out of step with the way the text has come to be read. But, unburdened as I am with any actual training in constitutional law, I simply do not see anywhere in the language of that amendment anything even remotely related to the issue at hand.

And so that leads me to my next question: is it possible that there simply is nothing to do to stem these kinds of mass shootings, events so numerous in our nation that no one can keep them straight any longer or remember precisely which shooter goes with which event? In an article I read a few years ago by Nicholas Kristoff, the author argued that what’s needed is a national approach to gun safety based on our very successful efforts to make driving cars safer. And, at the face of things, there is something to recommend that approach: by introducing more and more safety features in automobiles (seat belts, air bags, etc.), we have managed to lower the rate of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles by six-sevenths since 1946. That number would be amazing under any circumstances. But to note that we reduced automobile fatalities by 85% without outlawing cars or making them impossible to acquire or use is beyond amazing. Kristoff’s essay very interesting and I recommend it to you all. (Click here to see the updated version published on the Times’ website earlier this week.) But it’s also a cosmetic solution—something worth exploring and putting into action, but still an approach that wants to alleviate the symptoms because it seems impossible to cure the disease. Doctors do this all the time, of course, and who, if we are dealing with a terminally ill patient, would object to a doctor focusing on the effort to make the symptoms of that patient’s disease easier to bear? But—in medicine as in life—the first choice will always be to cure the disease and not merely to alleviate the symptoms.

So what would that mean on a national level for our stricken country as the blood of murdered innocents yet again seeps into our American soil? That is the question I think American should be asking themselves today.

The ultimate answer, who knows? But I don’t think there is no point in trying to think this through—and specifically not with reference to making guns safer and harder to steal. (Those would be too good things. But neither speaks to the real issue at hand.) Instead, we need to repair our cavalier American approach to the value of human life…and then seriously discuss the price we are prepared to pay to live lives in sync with that approach. In our cultural milieu, being “pro-life” means being opposed to abortion either entirely or mostly. (I’ll write about that some other time.) But what if we were somehow to nudge society along to the point at which the inviolate sanctity of human life was paramount in the minds of all as the bedrock foundation upon which the national ethos rests, and not just as a handy slogan to push one specific approach to one specific issue? What if it were to become natural and normal to do everything conceivable—with no exceptions at all—to safeguard the lives of the children in our schools? Or if it started to go without saying that the willful taking of another person’s life was never, and not under any circumstances, to be explained away with reference to the circumstances of the murder or the mindset of the murderer, but instead was considered, as an offense against the living and against God? What if we taught our children truly to believe that human life is of inestimable value—by which I mean that its value cannot be calculated in terms of money—and then enacted legislation based on that assumption? What if the notion that you can effectively express political or personal rage by buying an automatic weapon and then discharging it in a public place were to be so totally anathemized that only the truly deranged—and not the merely angry or disgruntled—would even consider expressing themselves in such a way? If we as a society were to find the courage to answer all or even just some of these questions, we’d be on our way to restoring the secure decency of our lives in this place.

There is no way to make the world totally and absolutely safe. But there are nations where the chances of being killed by a violent maniac holding a loaded gun are basically infinitesimal when compared to our own nation. It can, therefore, be done. And, that being the case, the only real question is whether we have the national will to do it.

  

Buffalo

Like most American Jews (and, I imagine, most American non-Jews as well), I was confused back in 2017 when white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlotteville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” At first, I supposed that the slogan referenced some crazy belief that Jews were slowly taking over the nation and pushing non-Jews out of their jobs, their communities, and even their place in American society. That there are hundreds of millions more non-Jews in the United State than there are Jews seemed not to matter; all that I thought I heard those people saying was that they were afraid that, one by one, the non-Jews of the nation would somehow be replaced by Jews. But then I learned that that was not at all what they meant and that the idea was that Jews, by controlling the federal government and its immigration policies, were behind the effort to bring gigantic numbers of non-white foreigners into the country and that it was those people—dark-skinned types from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—it was those people whom the Charlottesville marchers were afraid were slowly going to take over their jobs, their churches, and eventually their state legislatures and their delegations to the Congress. So the verb was transitive, not intransitive: the marchers were insisting that the Jewish plan was to replace them not with themselves but with various kinds of people of color and foreign ethnicity, but that that was not going to work because they were not going to permit it to happen.

At the time, this theory—that white “legacy Americans” (to use the more recent term of choice) need seriously to fear being replaced by non-white newcomers who will slowly become the majority in their towns and states, and eventually in the nation itself—was new to me. But that was then. And, in the meantime, it has taken off in the blogosphere and on the kinds of internet websites that appeal to white supremacists. Brenton Tarrant, the man who murdered more than fifty worshipers in two different mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019, left behind a seventy-five page long manifesto that he called “The Great Replacement,” in which he detailed his theory that people of color—and particularly Muslims—were on their way to becoming the majority in New Zealand and that it was only a matter of time before they replaced the white population and were in a position to elect their own officials who would complete the task of transforming New Zealand from a republic of primarily white people with European ancestors into some version of a caliphate. That Muslims currently constitute a mere 1.3% of the population of New Zealand did not apparently strike the shooter as a relevant statistic.

Closer to home, Robert Gregory Bowers, the man accused of murdering eleven and wounding six worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018, is also a proponent of this “Great Replacement” theory. (He apparently chose his target in Pittsburgh because one of the congregations housed there was part of the HIAS-sponsored “National Refugee Shabbat” intended to build support for treating refugees seeking asylum in our nation kindly, generously, and fairly.) And Patrick Crusius, the man charged with murdering twenty-three people in a Wal-Mart’s in El Paso on the third of August in 2019, appears also to have written a manifesto similar to the one composed by the Christchurch killer, one in which he writes openly that his belief in that same theory prompted him to take action against the Latino population in his home state.

And now we have Buffalo, a tragedy allegedly perpetrated by a teenager earlier this week in which ten people were killed and another three injured. Of the thirteen, eleven were Black Americans, which was apparently the point: the young man accused of the crime, Payton S. Gendron, allegedly drove hours from his home in Conklin, New York (south of Binghamton on the border with Pennsylvania), to a supermarket he had already scouted out and which he correctly imagined would be filled with Black shoppers on a weekday afternoon. And he too was a fan of the “Great Replacement” theory, as evidenced by the fact that the manifesto he posted on Google Docs was to a large extent cribbed from the manifesto composed and posted by Brenton Tarrant before he shot all those people in New Zealand. For good measure, he wrote approvingly as well both about Anders Breivik, who murdered seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers in an Oslo summer camp, in July of 2011, and Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black worshipers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in 2015, and who has since been sentenced to death.

Where did any of this come from? Even if we are prepared to ignore the illogic of someone killing innocents in a supermarket, none of whom was an immigrant to these shores or a refugee, to address the nefarious plot to replace white Americans with darker-skinned replacement citizens, it is still hard to imagine what could motivate someone to adopt a worldview so little in sync with reality. Is this then just a kind of mental illness in which an outlandish theory takes root in the psyche of a group of fellow travelers and leads them to act in a way that would be explicable if the theory were grounded in fact? Or is this something else, perhaps the poison fruit of some sort of malign nostalgia for a fantasy version of bygone days—when the Congress was completely white, gas was thirty-five cents a gallon, and women had no ambitions other than marriage and motherhood? (Just for the record, women have been part of the work force since Colonial days and Congress hasn’t been completely white since the middle of the nineteenth century when the first Black members of Congress were elected in the 1860s. Gas, however, really was once thirty-five cents a gallon, and in my very own lifetime too.) Or is this merely traditional racism dressed up to sound slightly less disreputable than it otherwise would—in other words, an effort to justify the hatred specifically directed at Black people or Hispanic people by asserting that such people are provoking the hatred directed against them and therefore deserve to be hated. (In other words, is “Great Replacement” theorizing just a refurbished version of the favorite theory of old-school anti-Semites—that we Jews are responsible for the hatred directed against us—revised to suit prejudice based on race or ethnicity rather than religion?)

The irony in all this is that, of all peoples, Jews really do know what it means to be replaced. In my opinion, Aharon Appelfeld’s book, Blooms of Darkness, is one of the best Shoah-based novels ever. (I’ve written about it in this space too: click here and here to revisit two of those letters.) It’s an understated work about a little boy, Hugo, whose father has already been deported and whose mother, facing her own imminent disappearance, has the notion of begging an old friend , a Ukrainian woman named Mariana, to hide her son. Mariana agrees, but fails to make clear that she lives in a brothel where she works as a prostitute and that most of her clients are German soldiers. The story is dramatic and extremely moving, but the most powerful part of the book is at the end. The war is over. Mariana is arrested as a collaborator who gave comfort to the enemy and is summarily executed. Hugo is alone in the world, then somehow realizes that the city he is in is actually his home town, that his parents’ neighborhood is nearby, that he finally actually can return home. And so he set forth, this little boy of eleven, and eventually does find the right neighborhood. But everyone—every single Jewish soul—has vanished and been replaced by Gentiles who have taken over their homes and their businesses. He actually finds his parents’ home and, peering through the window, sees some other family seated at his parents’ dining room table enjoying their evening meal. The sense of unimaginable loneliness a child in that situation would feel is effectively conveyed in the author’s sparse, unadorned prose; what made Appelfeld a truly great author was his ability to tell complicated, emotionally overwhelming stories plainly and simply. If Hugo, the little boy, were somehow to step out of his book to visit in jail with the Buffalo shooter, he could explain what it means actually to be replaced, to be dragged away from the stage on which your life is unfolding so that your own murderers and their relations can settle into your space and eat their meals on your mother’s good china. He could explain that this really did happen, but who is going to explain to people caught up in the concept of replacement theorizing that nothing even remotely like that is happening to white Americans?

Questions relating to immigration and the bestowal of refugee status are legitimate topics for debate among principled citizens eager to promote the best interests of the nation and its citizens. But when that debate crosses the line to invoke a phantom phenomenon by its nature so unnerving and upsetting that it encourages its adherents to conclude that only violent action can resolve the matter fairly—then the discussion no longer serves the nation and instead becomes part of the problem it was undertaken in the first place to address.

It's hard to feel sympathy for a mass murderer and I don’t. Not really. Not at all, actually. But another part of me wonders where the real responsibility here lies if not with those who intentionally and maliciously got a young person—a boy not yet old enough to buy cigarettes legally in New York or to order a glass of beer in a bar—to imagine that he would be acting nobly and patriotically by murdering innocent men and women shopping in a supermarket on a sunny afternoon. The fate of the accused will be decided in court. But the matter of what role others played in prompting him to act—that too is part of the issue our nation needs to face in the wake of the massacre in Buffalo.

The Evolving Ethics of Law

The question of how sound the reasoning was that the Supreme Court brought to bear in 1973 when deciding in Roe v. Wade  that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects a woman’s reproductive autonomy is for people far more trained in American law than myself to answer. Nor do I feel particularly qualified to evaluate the constitutional legitimacy of way that right was redefined by the court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1993. But I do feel qualified to offer an opinion about the question of whether or how the nation’s ever-evolving morality could or should be enshrined in law…and  particularly when the innovation under consideration is something that the Founders would have found unfamiliar or even inconceivable.

Same-sex marriage is a good example. Certainly, no one in eighteenth-century America imagined marriage as other than a sanctified (or at least governmentally sanctioned) union between a man and a woman. But as of June 2021, a full 70% of Americans had come to support the idea of marriage equality for same-sex couples. I imagine that number must be even higher now. For most, I think, the question was a simple one of fairness and the 70% figure simply reflected the fact that society had evolved to the point at which a large majority of citizens felt it was morally wrong to deny gay people the right to form monogamous unions and live together as married spouses. And so, for all the Court in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 based its decision on the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, the more important detail is that what brought the court to imagine the Equal Protection clauses to apply to gay couples was the reality of an ever-evolving sense of reasonableness and equity. People changed. Society changed. Opinions changed too, as did also social mores—and this, combined with the natural tendency of Americans to be inclusive and fair, created an entirely new playing field on which to consider the issue. And so the time had come for the law to change…even if it was necessary to find a peg to hang that change on in the Fourteenth Amendment.

As a lifelong student of Jewish law, I am more than familiar with the search for such pegs. The Talmud is full of rabbis grappling with the fact that Judaism as it had evolved to their day included countless practices that are unreferenced anywhere in Scripture. And much of what the Bible lays down as normative practice had also evolved: the Passover seder of rabbinic times mirrored only vaguely the way the holiday is outlined in the columns of the Torah. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, even less so. Nor did the norms of worship that pertained in the synagogues of Roman Judea or elsewhere in the Roman Empire or in Persia—in none of those settings did the realities of synagogue life mirror even slightly the scant rules set out in Scripture to govern daily or weekly worship.

The rabbis, fully embracing a core allegiance to the notion of the Torah as authoritative, sacred, and divine in origin, nonetheless understood that a new world required new provisions grounded not in slavish imitation of the past but in innovative thinking about the future. And so they set themselves to developing methods of drawing meaning out of the text…including in ways that they must have understood would have seemed foreign and unfamiliar to the nation camped at Sinai to whom they imagined God bestowing the Torah in what even for them constituted ancient times. This process of drawing out meaning—called exegesis in English from the Greek words meaning just that, “to draw out”—became the meat and potatoes of rabbinic Scriptural analysis: the goal was to exploit the tension between fidelity to the written Torah and the need to teach lessons in sync with the ever-evolving moral bearing of the people listening to those lessons, and in that way to create a kind of religion that was both formally faithful to the past and wholly consonant with the values of the people to whom it was being pitched as a way of serving God through submission to divine law.

And this is part of what Jewish antiquity has bequeathed to the modern world, this willingness to exploit the tension between wanting to remain faithful to the past and needing to move forward into a future characterized by what people actually have come to think of as just and proper…and to exploit it in a way that matches both what the people think of as fidelity to the nation’s founders (or Founder) and what they perceive as fidelity to their own moral code.

The leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has pushed abortion, and particularly the original Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws banning it, to the front of the stage. To consider how we should move into the future, let’s start by looking back into the past.

In 1857, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The backstory is long and complicated, but the short version is that Scott was a slave whose owner had brought him from Missouri, a slave state, to Illinois, where slavery was illegal. When his owner wished to bring him back to Missouri, Scott sued his owner on the grounds that when he entered Illinois, he became a free man and was therefore no longer a slave. He lost his case in a Missouri state court, then again in a federal court. And then he appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Looking back at the Constitution, the justices determined that the word “citizen” in the Constitution was not intended by its framers to reference people of “African descent,” which meant by implication that such people, not being citizens of the United States, were also not entitled to any of the civil rights or privileges awarded by the Constitution to American citizens. And since Scott was deemed not to be an American citizen, he was ipso facto also deemed not to be the citizen of any state in the union. As a result, the “diversity of citizenship” required by the Constitution to enable a federal court to adjudicate a case that does not involve federal law (i.e., that the litigants be citizens of two different states) did not apply and so Scott was deemed permanently subject to the laws of the State of Missouri and the decisions of its courts. And then, for good measure, the Court went on to strike down the entire Missouri Compromise of 1820 that brought Maine into the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, but which prohibited slavery on most of the territory of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri.

It did not play well. Widely derided as the Supreme Court’s worst decision ever, Chief Justice Charles Hughes (who served from 1930 to 1941), referred to the decision as “the Court’s greatest self-inflicted wound.” Another historian, David Konig, referred to the decision as “unquestionably, our court’s worst decision ever.” And yet it certainly was true that the Founders did not consider Black slaves to be their co-citizens. And while it is true that not every Founder owned slaves, the roster of slave owners is remarkable and includes George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. There is certainly something to be said for the argument that at least many, possibly even most, of the nation’s Founders would have been astounded by the thought that Black people should have the vote or be counted in the national census as more than three-fifths of a “real” person. All that is true. But which of us would imagine that those details can be rationally martialed in defense of taking a freed slave like Dred Scott and forcing him back into servitude merely because his former owner wished to drag him back to a slave state?

That is what I mean about an ever-evolving ethic forming the basis for new laws hung on a Constitutional peg just as the rabbis hung their innovative laws on Scriptural ones. Endorsing reproductive rights for women is certainly a break with our past. (Abortion was forbidden by law in all thirteen colonies.) But expecting the Supreme Court, in effect, to effect that change is not a reasonable expectation: it is the job of the Congress, not the Court, to legislate. The matter of abortion—and reproductive rights in general—is an example of an issue rooted in our ever-evolving American ethic that constitutes a serious break with the norms and mores of the past. But evolution is possible! The most recent survey—the Pew Research Center Study of “America’s Abortion Quandary” released just last week (click here)—says that a full 71% of Americans believe abortion should be legal at least some of the time. The solution to the larger issue, therefore, is for Americans to elect officials to the Congress whose views are consonant with their own, and for those legislators to enact laws the mirror the will of the people to be governed according to their evolved moral compass. If the people speak loudly and clearly enough, the jurists will find an appropriate peg upon which to hang the new law.

On the Cusp

This week brought us both Yom Hazikkaron (the Israeli version of Memorial Day on which the almost 25,000 soldiers, sailors, and peace officers of various kinds who have fallen in the defense of their nation are remembered and mourned) on Wednesday and Yom Ha-atzama·ut (the 74^th anniversary of the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948) on Thursday.

Originally, these two were actually the same day: in 1949 and 1950, memorial services for those who fell in the War of Independence were held on Independence Day itself. I suppose that must have seemed only fitting at the time. The strange mix of emotions stirred up by the challenge both to mourn and to celebrate on the same day ended up stirring a confusing set of contradictory emotions, however, and so in 1951 the government of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decreed that these observances would henceforth take place on two adjacent days in the Hebrew month of Iyar. And that is where things stand even today.

The hinge between the two days is particularly fraught. The only time I’ve been in Israel for either was in 1984, when I was getting towards the end of a year-long post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University. It was a fabulous year and not only for my studies: our oldest child was born in Jerusalem that year. And his b’rit milah was held precisely on the cusp between Yom Hazikkaron and Yom Ha-atzma·ut.

After we got married but before we had children, Joan and I discussed the possibility of celebrating our children’s Hebrew birthdays each year rather than their secular ones. We didn’t (and don’t) do that with respect to our own birthdays, but it somehow appealed to us both to imagine bucking the system in that specific way. We left the idea in abeyance—we didn’t yet have any children to try it out on anyway—and then Max was born on Yom Hashoah and that was the end of that.

At the time, we were—like all first-time parents—a little overwhelmed by the complex, multifaceted impact becoming parents was going to have on our lives. My lovely mother-in-law arrived the next day—I went to the airport myself to retrieve her and bring her directly to Joan’s side—which calmed things down a bit. Also, we had a lot of friends in Jerusalem, most of whom were already parents, and their presence and their counsel calmed us down as well. Within a few days, things seemed dramatically less overwhelming. We had somehow turned into a family of three. The future beckoned. Israel itself was in the throes of hyper-inflation, but we ourselves were secure (my stipend was pegged to the U.S. dollar and so, unlike the salaries of so many others, was specifically not in freefall) and so we turned our attention to our major short-term obligation and set ourselves to figuring out how to make a b’rit milah in Israel.

Finding a mohel was the easy part. The date, however, was an issue: Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth days of their lives, which meant that Max’s bris was going to fall on Yom Hazikkaron, the saddest of all days in Israeli culture.

It’s a small country. There weren’t then and aren’t now many families that haven’t been touched by war—and the loss war inevitably entails—one way or the other. Perhaps, speaking in the broadest terms, there aren’t any. If you add the more than four thousand Israelis who have died at the hands of terrorists since 1948 to the number of fallen servicemen and women, the total is close to 30,000. For a nation of under ten million citizens, that is a staggering number. And so, unlike in our strange land where Memorial Day mostly features picnics, beach outings, and big sales in stores, Yom Hazikkaron is taken dead seriously by Israelis. It is a day devoted solely to remembering, to honoring the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate price for the privilege of defending their country. The mood is somber and serious. When the siren rings out at 11 AM, everything stops—including traffic. All stand at attention for two full minutes. No one  has anyplace else to be: it is as though the national resolve to endure despite loss and to persevere in a hostile world is somehow simmered down to those few minutes of national silence. It’s easy to describe, but it’s also the kind of thing you have actually to experience personally to understand fully.

So that was going to be Max’s eighth day, the day of his b’rit milah. We ourselves were living in a small apartment on Haportzim Street, but I had a colleague, an older friend, who had a very beautiful and much larger home just a few blocks away, and he and his wife graciously offered it to us for our simchah. We were very pleased and gratefully accepted. And it really was a beautiful home with a large balcony overlooking the whole neighborhood. (We couldn’t have known it at the time, but in the distance was the hill on which we would acquire our own apartment in Jerusalem two decades later.)

To try to play down the somber feel of the day, we scheduled the b’rit for later afternoon. Usually, it’s customary to schedule b’ritot for early morning—but this seemed like a good day to deviate from that custom. It turned out to be an inspired idea. (It was Joan’s, obviously.) The mohel was friendly and talented. Joan’s father’s family showed up from all over Israel to be with us, including two of Max’s great-great-uncles, featured below, men old enough to have emigrated from Poland not to Israel or to British Palestine, but to Turkish Palestine. Lots of our friends from Canada and the States showed up. (Rabbi David Golinkin, who will be our scholar-in-residence next February at Shelter Rock was there too.) Our Lamaze class came too, as did our teacher.

At the time, I thought we were being clever by scheduling our simchah on the cusp of Yom Ha-atzama·ut so as to make the atmosphere less dour than it would have been earlier in the day. But later on it seemed like an inspired choice for a different reason. The circumcision took place, as it had to, before sundown, i.e., on the eighth day of Max’s life. But shortly after that the sunset and fireworks, easily visible from our friends’ balcony, lit up the eastern sky. As the nation turned from grief to celebration, I felt myself—and I say this not poetically or metaphorically, but simply and really—I felt myself stepping into the ever-flowing river of time that connects the past with the future, and history with destiny. I was intimately familiar with the history of Jewish suffering. I had read countless—truly, countless—books about the Shoah. I had read chronicles detailing the savagery of the Crusaders and the even more bestial behavior of the Cossacks in Khmelnitsky’s day. I’ve written about that side of my education many times in this space, but, as I stood on our friends’ balcony and watched the fireworks, I was suddenly possessed of the sense that I had responded to it all with a single series of gestures. I had gotten married. We had produced a child…and not just any child, but a tzabar, a Yerushalmi, a child who was ushered into the covenant as the nation all around acknowledged unimaginable loss and then went on to see a bright future for itself and for subsequent generations of Israelis.

It was, to say the very least, a fabulous moment. It was the first moment, I think, that I was able to think of myself as a player and not just as a student of other players, as someone who was on the stage and not in the audience, as someone who had finally contributed something meaningful to the history of the House of Israel. Joan and I were on exactly the same page, too: both of us slightly overwhelmed by the whole experience of hosting a b’rit milah on the cusp between regret and resolve…and between inexpressible sadness and irrepressible hope.

The psalmist famously declared that those who sow in tears will yet reap in joy. That evening between Yom Hazikkaron and Yom Ha-atzma·ut all those years ago was the embodiment for me personally, and for Joan too (of course), of that mysterious sentiment. And that is what the juxtaposition of those two days means to me.