tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60911962799493644962024-03-21T08:43:52.830-04:00The Ruminative RabbiMartin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.comBlogger646125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-70489744103254701242024-03-21T08:42:00.005-04:002024-03-21T08:42:52.884-04:00Purim 2024<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Purim begins on Saturday night.
Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">feels</i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> like we’re ready.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And it also feels like we
couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of
victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful
promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from <i>somewhere</i>.
When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim.
That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and
to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from
somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually <i>does </i>come
from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place.
Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both
of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was
personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely
uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm
as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and
completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole
counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their
would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs
and haters. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">But much-younger-me was
unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details,
of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first
place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she
can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia.
And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what
makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish
people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I
showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about
the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad
people being defeated instead of the good people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Eventually, much-younger-me grew
up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working
pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of
course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more
reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it
was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But
the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it
did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an
untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened
next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been
Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was
the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me
eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So I was in. But not entirely. In
1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec
and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for
years after reading <i>Schindler’s List </i>(then still called <i>Schinder’s
Ark</i>) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally
specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time
ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was <i>always</i> with
me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi
and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own
ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse
personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was
always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that
I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And that brings me to Purim 2024,
the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being
held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School
of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF
enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a
certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical,
quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to
be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds
or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for
Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large
percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government
feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask
and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator
Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our
leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And
the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even
worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that
would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we
cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we
can surely observe it eighty years later too! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that
thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to
speak as current-me, as who I am today.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">We live on the razor’s edge, all
of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought.
As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the
existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century
after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have
settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They
appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth
and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in
the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there
if they wished—they <i>all </i>seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking
their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some
combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the
destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be
murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always
not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations
from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the
larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to
the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to
pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim
and, yes, having great fun at the same time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Living on a razor’s edge is
uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really
have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is
full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the
global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from <i>somewhere</i>.
And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF
serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all.
That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous
versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the
forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least
eventually, from somewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-14157025051437176222024-03-14T08:19:00.005-04:002024-03-15T06:45:41.288-04:00Ezra and Esther<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Being an ancient book, the Bible makes
many of its best points using all sorts of literary techniques that are
unfamiliar to modern readers. Sometimes these are subtle flourishes that only someone
reading truly carefully would ever notice. But other instances are totally
overt, fully visible, and noticeable by even someone just casually perusing the
text. The willingness of the narrative to depict the same individual as being
two different ages at the same time is a good example: to most moderns,
passages that do that have a clumsy feel to them and suggest that some ancient
editor must have been asleep at the switch and simply failed to see a giant
discrepancy that could easily have been fixed. (To see an essay I published
years ago about that specific feature of the scriptural text, click </span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/105472940/Ishmael_at_Sixteen"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.) But
discrepancy is more wisely taken as a literary feature of the text, as a kind
of riddle fully intended to teach something to those who take the time to solve
it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Also in that category is the
apparent willingness of Scripture to present two versions of the same story
that are essentially incompatible with each other. The most famous example of
that would be in the very beginning of the biblical text, where Genesis starts
off with two wholly irreconcilable accounts of the creation of humankind. Many
and clever have been the attempts of countless commentators to “fix” the
problem by finding a way to fit the stories together into a single, cogent
narrative. But the far more interesting way to approach the problem is to
understand this opening riddle as one of many places in the text of Scripture
in which the same story is told in two discordant versions not to confuse or to
annoy, but to invite the reader to exploit the differences between the two
conflicting texts to learn a lesson that Scripture prefers for some reason to
teach subtly rather than fully openly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">As Purim approaches, I’ve been
thinking how that approach to mismatched texts can be applied not solely to
texts within a biblical book, but also to the larger biblical corpus itself. (I
have an essay about that too: click </span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/109590631/N_N"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.) In
other words, taking the Bible as a book (as opposed to a collection of books)
allows the reader to approach the full text of Tanakh as a single literary unit
to which the interpretive rules generally brought to bear in explicating
passages within specific single books can be fruitfully applied.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In the second of my two essays
mentioned above, I applied this principle to a huge difference between the
biblical books of Jeremiah and Daniel, one that would be simple to wave away as
a mere instance of misspelling on the part of one or both authors. Today, I
would like to apply that same principle to the biblical books of Esther and
Ezra. And then I would like to apply the lesson that comparison suggests to our
present situation as Jewish Americans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Book of Ezra, one of
Scripture’s most understudied books, begins where Chronicles leaves off: with
the surprise announcement that, as one of his first royal edicts, Cyrus, king
of Persia, formally ended the exile in Babylon and told the Jews living in
modern-day Iraq and Iran that they could return to Israel and re-establish
Jewish life in that place. It’s a complex story. The edict of Cyrus itself
appears in Scripture in several different versions. The specific relationship
between the work of the Chronicler (as the anonymous author of Chronicles is
chummily called by scholars) and Ezra and its own sister work, the Book of
Nehemiah,<i> </i>is a matter of endless scholarly debate. But, for all that,
the storyline itself is clear as day. In the waning days of the Kingdom of
Judah (the sole remaining Jewish state in its day, the northern Kingdom of
Israel having been dismantled by its Assyrian overlords more than a century
earlier), the Babylonian hordes arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. There was a
brief window of opportunity during which the coming debacle could have been
averted. (The prophet Jeremiah was at the peak of his powers in the months
leading up to said debacle and promote surrender as a means of survival.) But
the king of Judah wouldn’t hear of it. And what ensued was the razing of
Jerusalem’s walls, the slaughter of countless citizens, the destruction of the
Temple, and the annihilation of the nation’s hopes for some sort of continued
existence as an autonomous state. What ensued is known as the Babylonian Exile.
Some Jews—the poorest and least educated ones—were ignored. But the rest of the
nation—the royal court, the scholars, the businesspeople, the upper and middle artisan
classes—were taken off into exile and forced to attempt to survive while
“weeping on the shores of Babylon.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There is endless debate about the
details: how many people went into exile, how many survived, how successful
they were or weren’t in retaining their ties to their own Jewish culture while
in a hostile environment. But none of that alters the basic the storyline: the
Babylonians exiled some or many (but not all) the Jews and then, when they were
defeated in turn by Cyrus of Persia, those Jews and their descendants were
permitted to go home and it is their story that the Book of Ezra tells. Nor is
the moral of the story hard to suss out: Jewish life in exile is possible, but
the only real hope for continued Jewish existence lies in return to the land.
Yes, Cyrus’s decree specifically permits any who wish to stay behind and
support the returnees financially (“with gold, silver, goods, livestock, and
valuables”). But the author’s point couldn’t be clearer: exile is barely
bearable and only briefly. When the opportunity presents itself to return to
Zion, the people who care about their own future get going—because that is
where their future lies. From there, life progressed. In the chronology put
forward in Ezra, Cyrus is replaced on the throne by Darius, who is followed
by—surprise!—King Achashveirosh, known to all from the Esther story. (His
“real” name was Xerxes, and he was followed by his son Artaxerxes, who was on
the throne in Ezra’s own day.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Let’s go back to Achashveirosh. I
love that he has two names. (I do too, as do most diasporan Jewish types.) And
I love that he’s mentioned not only in the book that is so much “about” him,
but also in other books: here in Ezra and also once in the Book of Daniel
(whose author thought he was Darius’s father, not his grandson. Whatever.) And
thus does he serve as the link between Ezra and Esther by appearing in both,
albeit briefly in Ezra and at length in Esther. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The storyline of Esther is known
to all who have ever been in <i>shul </i>on Purim. But that story contains some
riddles generally left unposed, thus also unsolved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">A terrible decree goes forth
calling for true genocide, for the total eradication of the Jewish people. The
edict is met with astonishment by the people, who are given a full eleven
months to prepare for their execution. Eventually, things end up well. But I’m
focused on what happens before that happens. The people are in a panic. They
appear to inhabit every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. The
portrait drawn by the Chronicler and by Ezra of a people temporarily banished
from its homeland and more than eager finally to abandon exile and return to
Israel seems oddly out of sync with the scene depicted in Esther. Cyrus reigned
for about twenty years, from 550 BCE to 530. Darius reigned for about forty
years after that. And then we have Achashveirosh/Xerxes, who came to the throne
in about 465 BCE and who reigned for about forty years. In Cyrus’s day, the
Book of Ezra has the Jewish people returning <i>en masse </i>to the Jewish
homeland and leaving a few stragglers behind. But, a mere century later, the
Book of Esther depicts a Persian empire with Jews living in all 127 of its
provinces and apparently well settled in and, until Haman, secure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And how do the Jews in the
Megillah respond to impending genocide? (This is, of course, real genocide they
were facing, not the phony kind modern-day anti-Semites see whenever Israel
dares defend itself forcefully against its enemies.) They weep. They fast. They
daub themselves with ashes, essentially pre-sitting <i>shiva </i>for themselves
while they still can. But no one seems to remember that Israel—then called
Yehud (the Persian version of Judah)—was one of those 127 provinces. And that
there was no specific reason for the Jews, instead of cowering in terror, not to
return to their own ancestral homeland and there to defend themselves against
their enemies. This course of action—forceful, beyond justifiable, and possible
even fully successful—this seems to have occurred to no one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Jews seem to prefer their
misery. Mordechai forbids Esther to reveal her Jewishness to the king until
precisely the right moment. But surely the Jews of Shushan knew that Esther was
Jewish—how could they not have? They all seem to know who Mordechai is. And
Esther was his ward, an uncle’s daughter whom he had adopted and promised to
raise. Surely she too would have been known to all. And yet no one seems to
light upon the idea of getting Esther to beg the king for permission to return
to Zion and there, in their own
homeland, to resist the terror-onslaught planned by wicked Haman. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And so we have two worldviews in
conflict: the one set forward in Ezra in which it goes without saying that the
future of the Jewish people depends on their ability to flourish in Israel and
the one in Esther that seems to think that the best hope for Jews in the
diaspora is to hope that salvation from even the most extreme version of
violent anti-Semitism (i.e., the kind that promotes genocide as its end goal)
is to pray that salvation comes, to quote Mordechai himself, “from somewhere.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Or do we? Could the point of
Esther be to show the folly of charting a future for the Jewish people by
hoping for salvation “from somewhere” or anywhere? The Jews of Persia were
saved because of Esther’s daring and Mordechai’s cunning. But that their plan
works at all is presented as something just short of miraculous. The Jews of
Persia are depicted as powerless and foolish…and wholly unable to see that
their only real hope rests in returning to Zion and there flourishing out in
the open and fully in the light as proud members of the House of Israel. Ezra
simply starts off by taking that for granted. Esther depicts a people gone astray
a mere century later. Reading each in each other’s light is meant, I think, not
to confuse, but to challenge those inclined to suppose that Jews can be safe by
relying on others and hoping for the best and, to encourage them, </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">ayin
l’tziyyon tzofiah</i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">, to see where the ultimate destiny of Israel lies.</span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-51366784979031655152024-03-07T08:22:00.004-05:002024-03-07T08:22:57.075-05:00Seeking Solace in Small Things<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I’m feeling the weight of it all
these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a
Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with
each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even
being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of
world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its
bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day
seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another
lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting
that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found
guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such
a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed
crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be
distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid
trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a
good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding
crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven
by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some
in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to
watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to
procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how
precisely it may have come about.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Paired with the rising tide of
anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats,
directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews
targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been
grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that
way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And so I’ve found myself seeking
solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly
without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this
technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that
can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder
of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel,
thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope
in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is
a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and
survived.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The first is, of all things, an
earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its
story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging.
There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called
Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King
David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital,
Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in
the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death:
when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along
cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the
Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably
thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter
in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the
City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers
actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did
Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and
someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off
and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the
pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of
the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has
change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from
his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr.
Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have
been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in
the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just
recently, the earring was discovered.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQvZcKp_2uTUkg_QW8kkDYyPt_PRCJismNCNAYxTTKNuFvIe9PZmEB5u9W8S4c67CfEYdwc6gtN_6i_IeKvRSvhw3sHBBt-6pQwlxIbZ6v7vhXNP6Sq0OD9WkNwvYXxBQ9ZNSe_I2LgLg-iaXgiIfTUyoYI-7tcGJKh1DY4WM0oiT8bJxzqs7-ue5buCA/s667/Phoenician%20Earring%20in%20Palm%20of%20Hand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="667" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQvZcKp_2uTUkg_QW8kkDYyPt_PRCJismNCNAYxTTKNuFvIe9PZmEB5u9W8S4c67CfEYdwc6gtN_6i_IeKvRSvhw3sHBBt-6pQwlxIbZ6v7vhXNP6Sq0OD9WkNwvYXxBQ9ZNSe_I2LgLg-iaXgiIfTUyoYI-7tcGJKh1DY4WM0oiT8bJxzqs7-ue5buCA/s320/Phoenician%20Earring%20in%20Palm%20of%20Hand.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful.
Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny
golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived
for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there
was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading
partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with
workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man
or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more
modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered
one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s
wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past
(which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of
the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours
alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our
descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that
is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing
so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be
unable to shake off.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">My second small thing is even
tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking
in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of
Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing:
a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where
the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either
in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on
the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7<sup>th</sup> or 6<sup>th</sup>
century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who
had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing
to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a
prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that
place. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlZy1JbK1k7rAWzv_DDpoHXNNZpK0lqLHn4yTqTg3IqWAXUMyhaMuGlM2UWFXjCBDQC4EMHHecBovGboFNZPvGTwn63nfXLs4eRncWGHrpPR7foiVlL03Tpwh0zkkcGdUXTlE1nKTnYACm0VZaLoN-RB2TYKnx75wcmasmsjXBF7RKDkwvvyiY6taTC2I/s535/Assyrian%20Scarab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="535" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlZy1JbK1k7rAWzv_DDpoHXNNZpK0lqLHn4yTqTg3IqWAXUMyhaMuGlM2UWFXjCBDQC4EMHHecBovGboFNZPvGTwn63nfXLs4eRncWGHrpPR7foiVlL03Tpwh0zkkcGdUXTlE1nKTnYACm0VZaLoN-RB2TYKnx75wcmasmsjXBF7RKDkwvvyiY6taTC2I/s320/Assyrian%20Scarab.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and
is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the
bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly
super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of
Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of
years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a
business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother
when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily
dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the
path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since
turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has
its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are
fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always
remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always <i>something</i>
left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by
remembering.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And my third small thing is, of
all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I
include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the
great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount
directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a
shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for
millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that
street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists
made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or
souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today
in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was
filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I </span><span style="font-family: "Segoe UI Emoji",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Emoji"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">❤️ </span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But
the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims,
visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on
seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish
cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one
among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan
would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I </span><span style="font-family: "Segoe UI Emoji",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI Emoji"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">❤️ </span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Jerusalem” pin, an ancient
version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its
eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests
and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that
our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our
forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always
something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath
the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone
thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we
attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in
knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to
our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing
that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVezQni_FjBu5c4ao3jSSnOJCAbmTJ4E54rtXOV_uCuYGApRMm9ZMGHqCNAQcOzkm5R9MB0GrG6PNmNrGrU_9ZagoQ9sAifbHreFJ0egM1TaPSlZJXDnC6f8U-0qaB2iKPcav01Wedj4QakJZd5g223B6cS1MPhcePKoy_ucGk_NlUoleAq6-psE4fAME/s523/Limestone%20Box.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="523" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVezQni_FjBu5c4ao3jSSnOJCAbmTJ4E54rtXOV_uCuYGApRMm9ZMGHqCNAQcOzkm5R9MB0GrG6PNmNrGrU_9ZagoQ9sAifbHreFJ0egM1TaPSlZJXDnC6f8U-0qaB2iKPcav01Wedj4QakJZd5g223B6cS1MPhcePKoy_ucGk_NlUoleAq6-psE4fAME/s320/Limestone%20Box.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-77627275414827251762024-02-29T08:31:00.001-05:002024-02-29T08:31:32.828-05:00Heroes<p> <span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">I was troubled, but also very moved,
by the death of Alexei Navalny, the personality at the core of the resistance
movement in Russia struggling to oppose the dictatorial and oppressive policies
of the Putin regime. What exactly happened is not at all clear. At the time of
his death, Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony in Western Siberia in a
place called Yamalo-Nenets near the Arctic Circle. According to the warden, he
was taking a walk just two weeks ago after telling some guards that he didn’t
feel at all well. And then he collapsed. The prison authorities claim to have
done all they could to resuscitate him, but were, they said, regretfully
unsuccessful, as result of which regretted unsuccess he was dead by
mid-afternoon. His body was then held for well over a week and then finally
released to his family for burial. And so ended the life of one of the world’s
true heroes, a man who not only put his life on the line to stand up for his
beliefs, but who personally embodied the struggle for human rights in today’s
Russia. </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yehi zikhro varukh</i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">. May his memory be a blessing for his
co-citizens in Russia and for us all.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There’s a lot to say about
Navalny, but the detail—one among many—that is particularly resonant with me
has to do with his return to Russia in 2021, an act that was as noble as it was
death-defying. By 2021, of course, Navalny had a long history of being a
thorn—and an especially sharp one at that—in the side of Vladimir Putin. He had
led countless demonstrations against the Putin government. He repeatedly accused,
certainly correctly, Putin of engineering his own victories whenever he stood
for re-election as Russia’s president. And he openly opposed the war against
Ukraine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Navalny tried several times to
gain a foothold in the bureaucracy he so mistrusted. He ran for mayor of Moscow
in 2013. And then he ran for president of Russia in 2018, a move that was in
and of itself daring given that he had previously been found guilty of
embezzlement, which detail would normally have disqualified him from running
for elected office despite the fact that there appears to be no reason to think
that the verdict was just or reasonable. But the real reason Navalny was such a
problem for Putin was that he appeared to be unfazed by the forces of
government, including the Russian judiciary, that were openly and brazenly
arrayed against him. And so the government eventually took matters to a new
level.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In 2020, on a flight to Moscow,
Navalny took ill and ended up on a ventilator in the Siberian city of Omsk,
where his airplane had been obliged to make an emergency landing. It didn’t
take doctors long to realize that he had been poisoned. (It later came out that
his clothing, including his underwear, had somehow been suffused with the
Novichok nerve agent, a poison known to have been used by Russia in the past to
murder dissidents abroad.) Eventually, the German government, acting
unilaterally, sent an airplane to Omsk to bring Navalny to Germany. Amazingly,
this actually worked. And it was in Berlin that doctors at the famous Charité
Hospital determined with certainty that Navalny had been the victim of an
unsuccessful attempt on his life and that he had definitely been poisoned.
Remarkably, his life was saved and he recovered. And then, in January of 2021,
he returned to Russia. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Because Navalny had been
convicted in a 2014 trial that was almost certainly politically motivated and
unjust, he had theoretically been forbidden to leave Russia even for medical
treatment. And so was he arrested at the Moscow airport upon his return to
Russia and imprisoned to await a judge’s decision about his future. And it was
just a month after that, in February of 2021, that a Moscow judge decreed that
his suspended sentence, minus time served, would be replaced with an
unsuspended one and that Navalny would have to serve two and a half years in a
Russian prison. He was sent to one prison, then to another. Eventually, the
government determined that it did not want to face a freed Navalny in less than
three years and so began new proceedings against him again, this time charging
him with fraud and contempt of court. In March of 2022, just two years ago, he
was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to nine years in a maximum
security prison. And then, because even nine years was apparently not long
enough, Navalny was put on trial again last summer and sentenced to an addition
nineteen years on extremism charges. And so he ended up in the Arctic Circle
prison in which he died two weeks ago at the age of forty-seven.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Navalny’s is a long, complicated
story. But the one detail that stands out to me, the single part of the story
that is the most resonant with me—and with my lifelong interest in the concept
of heroism—has to do with Navalny’s decision in January 2021 to leave safety in
Berlin and return to Russia. He had every reason to expect that he would be
arrested upon return. He had no reason to suppose that any future trials to
which he would be subjected would be just. He surely knew not to expect
clemency or mercy from Vladimir Putin, the man behind all the juridical
procedures overtly and unabashedly designed to silence him. And yet he chose to
return—not specifically, I’m sure, because he wanted to die or because he
wanted to participate in yet another crooked trial, but because he saw himself
as a moral human being who had been granted the opportunity to inspire his
co-citizens to demand justice and freedom for themselves and for their nation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve written in this space, although not too
recently, about my boundless admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German
pastor who was safe and sound in New York when the Second World War broke out,
but who made the noble (and eventually fatal) decision to return to Germany and
there to try to inspire people to resist Nazism and to turn away from the path
of ruinous and fascist barbarism down which the Nazi government was intent on
leading the nation. (To revisit my comments about Bonhoeffer from 2011, click </span><a href="https://theruminativerabbi.blogspot.com/2011/05/bonhoeffer.html"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">.) Here
was, in my eyes, a true hero: a man fully committed to his own ideals who made
the conscious decision to leave the safe haven he had already found and to
travel to a land that would probably, and which eventually did, kill him. To
me, that decision to risk everything to attempt, even quixotically, to do good
in the world represents the essence of heroism. It came to naught, of course.
He did a lot of good for a lot of people, but, in the end, he paid the big
price. On April 8, 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was
tried on the single charge of treason in a court set up in the Flossenbürg
concentration camp. There were no witnesses. No evidence against him was
brought forward, nor was a transcript of the proceedings made. He was found
guilty, apparently on Hitler’s personal order, and executed the next day in a
way that was specifically intended to maximize his personal degradation and
agony. (Eric Till’s 2000 movie, <i>Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace</i>, is a worthy
attempt to tell Bonhoeffer’s story even if the director couldn’t quite bring
himself to depict the barbarism of Bonhoeffer’s final moments in any detail,
let alone explicitly. For a more detailed account of his life, I recommend Eric
Metaxas’s 2020 biography, <i>Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, </i>which
I read a few years ago and enjoyed immensely<i>.</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So, two men who lived scores of
years apart, who spoke different languages, who came from different countries.
One, a political man fully engaged by the political process. The other, a man
of God fully in the thrall of his own calling to preach God’s word in the world
and to inspire others to seek justice and to act righteously. But both heroes
in my mind—both fully safe in a place their tormentors could not reach them and
yet both of whom made the decision to return to their separate homelands to
seek out in those places the destiny to which each felt called. Would I have
left New York in 1939 or Berlin in 2021 to risk my own life to follow the
destiny I perceived to be my own? I’d like to think I would have. Who wouldn’t?
But we don’t all have it in us to act that boldly, to risk everything to be
ourselves fully and in the most noble way possible. To be a man in full—or a
woman in full—is never quite as easy in real life as it sounds as though it
should be on paper. And that is why I admire those two men, Bonhoeffer in his
day and Navalny in ours—and their willingness not merely to talk the talk, but
truly—and at their own mortal peril—to walk the walk. May they both rest in
peace!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis94JsWsDfMoYaTlW_9Bo1Q3C5ZxuxoLoNqvDbOWtjFlJSaMRg627TgAYakbi97sU0MBMjOMH7IR8Rm-LGkDmnlp3zMyFSOWBt2ZD9F-Yxfpeci6Ek1XaVdQJiuPiQL1ysidWqNNOwtWvjY3QDjdn7zPN3cemb5709mbQhND8sqVz-pdgMWl-5XAJoMDg/s467/Alexei%20Navalny.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="337" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis94JsWsDfMoYaTlW_9Bo1Q3C5ZxuxoLoNqvDbOWtjFlJSaMRg627TgAYakbi97sU0MBMjOMH7IR8Rm-LGkDmnlp3zMyFSOWBt2ZD9F-Yxfpeci6Ek1XaVdQJiuPiQL1ysidWqNNOwtWvjY3QDjdn7zPN3cemb5709mbQhND8sqVz-pdgMWl-5XAJoMDg/s320/Alexei%20Navalny.png" width="231" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8FA5fBuA1lE-0NEXPSZqMOtWdGmMp_kNsfE0Q40KIMJdjIBvn_fT-JB6Y3qGkX9hT5K4ouLwqHNpQiZT5Tj10WXUnFYZAa2YuxRJ9AhCz30gX1i7FMyCsl_1-QLNMxjgHLoXO3LMSVcjRoAj3OvFHWBwAIypYk0vuLjWd8RGFaBu9wjoz7W4FRMg47w/s476/Dietrich%20Bonhoeffer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="340" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd8FA5fBuA1lE-0NEXPSZqMOtWdGmMp_kNsfE0Q40KIMJdjIBvn_fT-JB6Y3qGkX9hT5K4ouLwqHNpQiZT5Tj10WXUnFYZAa2YuxRJ9AhCz30gX1i7FMyCsl_1-QLNMxjgHLoXO3LMSVcjRoAj3OvFHWBwAIypYk0vuLjWd8RGFaBu9wjoz7W4FRMg47w/s320/Dietrich%20Bonhoeffer.jpg" width="229" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-22884682445642652182024-02-15T09:17:00.002-05:002024-02-15T09:57:06.259-05:00The Jewish Wind Phone<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">All of us for whom prayer is part
of daily life have occasionally been challenged to justify our practice—possibly
even just to ourselves—by saying clearly whom we think we are actually speaking
</span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">to </i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">when we pray. It’s not that easy to know how to respond. There are
numerous traps to avoid when answering. Saying simply that we are talking to
God seems inevitably to lead to two derivative questions, both unsettling to
address: how exactly we know that and why it is we think all-knowing God needs
to be told anything at all. And a third question too, equally disquieting, also
surfaces regularly, the one that asks why it is, if prayer is dialogue, that
God never seems to talk back in the way we would consider perfectly normal with
any other interlocutor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The problem, however, lies not in
our answers but in the questions themselves: all are rooted in a simplistic
understanding of what language is and the role it plays in our human lives.
Yes, language is communication: you ask the nice lady in the store which aisle
the paper towels are in and she tells you. But language is also self-expression,
a means of ordering the world, of grappling with the unfathomable by addressing
it, by naming it, by <i>interpreting </i>it. And it is that latter definition
of language that we bring to prayer: the world feels overwhelming in the wake
of disaster and, instead of withdrawing into our shells like terrified turtles,
we face the darkness by naming it, by labeling its parts, by addressing it from
the depths of our consciousnesses. We thus allow language to serve as a kind of
bridge that connects our inmost selves to the terror just ahead…and, instead of
trembling in our boots or shutting our eyes, we speak. And thus do we subdue
the raging world with language, with words, and, yes, with prayer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Almost entirely forgotten—at
least by Americans—is the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March
11, 2011, a nightmarish disaster in the course of which 15,894 died almost
instantly, most from drowning. More than 2,500 simply disappeared and were
never seen again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In the
wake of that disaster, I remember reading about an older man named Itaru Sasaki,
who lives in a place called Ootsuchi where over eight hundred people were washed
out to sea in less than a single minute. His town was devastated by the
tsunami, but he himself was in mourning for a cousin, someone he truly loved,
when the disaster struck. And so, feeling bereft and totally alone, he came up
with a very strange way to deal with his grief: he purchased on old phone booth
and set it up in his garden. Then he purchased an ancient rotary phone, a black
one, and put it on a table in the booth. There was no dial tone because the
telephone wasn’t attached to anything. But on that phone, Mr. Sasaki would talk
to his cousin and tell him about his life now that he was carrying on alone and
without someone he truly loved. He called it the <i>kaze no denwa</i>, the
“wind telephone.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And then,
the amazing part. Word spread about this thing, this crazy, unconnected,
telephone in a phone booth in a garden by the sea. People started coming. In
droves. From all over Japan. NPR sent a reporter to cover the story and he got
permission to record some of what people were saying into the phone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“<em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">Why only me, dad? I’m the only
one left alive. People don’t realize what it’s like</span></em>,” a teenage boy
said to his missing father.</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“<em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">Everyone’s good here. We are
all trying hard</span></em>,” an elderly lady told her long-time spouse, a man
who disappeared when the sea overwhelmed his town.</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“<em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">You were going to buy me a
violin. I just bought it myself finally</span></em>,” a girl says to her
vanished parents through tears.</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“<em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">I’m building a new house but
without you or our little girl and boy, there’s no point is there?</span></em>”
The words choked up in the throat of a middle-aged man who lost his entire
family.</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAjlvFk876UKy_UOV4RSKzaLV7A-UYiVzWyW0tHGm7rhYK2zJ7y-YZz2ZR0-SIsZS_CbAkl1zlQi2rbJtORJXMy0sJ4yLugqxSrkxb_6YPFECrm-VRVLgUrMVsoBhdy-4HQQtufSLS0a8eUZLsfVuKjsg8cd34-9OItEgwOvr62jdBgEep1EJ38uDHUFE/s995/Wind%20Phone.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="661" data-original-width="995" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAjlvFk876UKy_UOV4RSKzaLV7A-UYiVzWyW0tHGm7rhYK2zJ7y-YZz2ZR0-SIsZS_CbAkl1zlQi2rbJtORJXMy0sJ4yLugqxSrkxb_6YPFECrm-VRVLgUrMVsoBhdy-4HQQtufSLS0a8eUZLsfVuKjsg8cd34-9OItEgwOvr62jdBgEep1EJ38uDHUFE/w516-h343/Wind%20Phone.jpg" width="516" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s a
touching story, but the big question—to me, at any rate—is why this thing worked
at all. Shouldn’t it <i>not </i>have worked? It’s an idiotic thing, after all:
an ancient rotary phone that isn’t connected to anything in a phone booth that
is also not connected to anything in a garden in front of someone’s private
home. But what makes it interesting to me is that it somehow does work…and not
because it <i>really </i>does anything at all. These poor people in Japan found
in that phone booth <i>not </i>a portal to the afterworld, but a way of using
language to communicate with the universe and all of its parts, a way of facing
the unimaginable using the tools offered by language itself, a way of speaking
into the dark and finding, not silence and not nothing, but glimmers of hope,
of light, of promise. For me, <i>that </i>is what prayer is, almost by
definition. For more about the wind telephone, click </span><a href="https://lithub.com/how-japans-wind-phone-became-a-bridge-between-life-and-death/"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> or </span><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wind-telephone"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It was
this story, which I first read about years ago, that came to mind when I first
visited the remarkable website called Coming Home Soon (click </span><a href="https://www.cominghomesoon.online/"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> to go
see for yourself). Currently a real-space exhibit at the Jewish Museum in
Amsterdam and created in Holland by people consumed with worry about the
hostages being held by Hamas, the on-line version is remarkable. The front page
of the website offers pictures of every single one of the hostages held or
still being held in Gaza, presenting all 253 and not distinguishing between the
110 who were released in a prisoner swap a few months ago, those still being
held, and those already dead: all are or were prisoners of Hamas. (Hamas is
holding the bodies of the deceased hostages to use as the most ghoulish of
bargaining chips to use in future negotiations.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Who
thought of setting up this website, I don’t know. But the idea couldn’t be more
simple: on the front page of the site are on display color photographs of each
of the hostages. The dead have tiny “forever in our hearts” badges attached to
their pictures; the ones already freed have “welcome home” badges. But otherwise
they are all mixed up together on the page—just as they are in our hearts. And
each photograph has just behind it a biography you can read of the hostage and—and
now I get to my real point—<i>and </i>an opportunity to write to that hostage.
The hostages don’t get mail. They don’t have access to email or to text
messages. The letter you write and send off does not go into some cosmic in-box
to wait for the hostages to log on and see what you had to say. The messages
you send to the dead will not be any more unread than the ones you send to the
living. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWEMpN67E2f9JCK7lxorcNfcDb6G5eFGHxuVAtP96FAnAsBxOX59CMdMWqW30V3x8QtmFxLq1ZjLGN5LZ-fueYiwAe4nfBh1boBF9xrNVx8DYV9y8p20dJBWXeFe2DcuOE6TD2PQBzAzRSLK_tKS1vPPZZhsd2Z6P799t9LC7OAHfczUdWyW8G8_w59es/s1770/Four%20Hostages.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="632" data-original-width="1770" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWEMpN67E2f9JCK7lxorcNfcDb6G5eFGHxuVAtP96FAnAsBxOX59CMdMWqW30V3x8QtmFxLq1ZjLGN5LZ-fueYiwAe4nfBh1boBF9xrNVx8DYV9y8p20dJBWXeFe2DcuOE6TD2PQBzAzRSLK_tKS1vPPZZhsd2Z6P799t9LC7OAHfczUdWyW8G8_w59es/w491-h175/Four%20Hostages.jpg" width="491" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>This is
not a real mail service; this is the Jewish </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">kaze no denwa, </i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">the Jewish
wind phone. You write not to communicate—or at least not to communicate in the
normal manner of people dashing off emails or dictating text messages to tell
other people this or that—but to express, to pray, to use language as a kind of
bridge between despair and hope, between the dismal reality of where we are and
the bright light that beckons in the distance—the flickering flame of faith, of
courage, and of confidence in the future.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilNIqAJHsfIG-mI7VytM7tw3CBYhvLUEbP_rd-nWschsjcVqE4HTBfDMoUT8XLs7BSLbQBiM7EomwU79d5ZoX8RWK20ghoH4D5my1ClqowVHYaTjft8wAQDPyRXJhVnhZ701EwTgh1AyHo0SfGGt5ii8KBpmqKJLSDZFCrw845efsDKnD6r_Hu9q0McyI/s1757/Four%20More%20Hostages.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1757" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilNIqAJHsfIG-mI7VytM7tw3CBYhvLUEbP_rd-nWschsjcVqE4HTBfDMoUT8XLs7BSLbQBiM7EomwU79d5ZoX8RWK20ghoH4D5my1ClqowVHYaTjft8wAQDPyRXJhVnhZ701EwTgh1AyHo0SfGGt5ii8KBpmqKJLSDZFCrw845efsDKnD6r_Hu9q0McyI/w473-h168/Four%20More%20Hostages.jpg" width="473" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">When this
is all over, all the hostages will come home—some, surely most, to their
families and others to their graves. But, until that happens, the job of the
righteous is to pray for their released and for their survival. Language is the
bridge to God; that is why prayers are constructed of words. Sometimes, it
feels right to turn to God directly in prayer. That, we do all the time. But
there are also times when you can use language to pray to God by addressing a
human party, living or dead. That is the opportunity the Coming Home Soon
website affords: a way to pray for the hostages through the medium of language
directed not directly to God but to those of God’s creatures in the most need
of redemption.</span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-67530073790741035652024-02-08T08:02:00.003-05:002024-02-09T15:05:15.506-05:00Loss and Rage<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">One of the surprises Jerusalem
offered up to us shortly after we bought our apartment and began to explore the
neighborhood was a peaceful cemetery just a few blocks from our street in which
are interred 79 Indian soldiers who served with the Egyptian Expeditionary
Force during the First World War, as well as the bodies of 290 Turkish
prisoners-of-war who died while in British captivity. So it is a strange place,
that cemetery: a Hindu burial ground in which are also buried hundreds of
Muslims who fell far from home and who had to be buried somewhere. There are no
individual graves; the British apparently decided to bury the dead in two mass
graves, one for the Hindus and one for the Muslims. Facing stone monuments
record the names of the dead.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcqeWwLorEEyrk-sRBcjNcdjPrTgEDnuD9TPsb8mtitw9MIAM-FMCn1j3O-6ykgcMnhe6W5M5KePG4PTANqIZ2gcCuKDobkCE_lgPMChrP4KnSvk0HEsaCF3B9OrsikPScAF5E_0DU0J0Wh9HRFgYJuqsHMq8mskiN2xoGDat27r7zaXWivVWrWA0quhA/s1217/Hindu-Muslim%20War%20Cemetery,%20Jerusalem.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="1217" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcqeWwLorEEyrk-sRBcjNcdjPrTgEDnuD9TPsb8mtitw9MIAM-FMCn1j3O-6ykgcMnhe6W5M5KePG4PTANqIZ2gcCuKDobkCE_lgPMChrP4KnSvk0HEsaCF3B9OrsikPScAF5E_0DU0J0Wh9HRFgYJuqsHMq8mskiN2xoGDat27r7zaXWivVWrWA0quhA/w501-h262/Hindu-Muslim%20War%20Cemetery,%20Jerusalem.jpg" width="501" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>We’ve walked by many times;
Joan’s cousin Rina used to live just down the road. It’s a peaceful place, a
quiet place. But it never fails to strike me how strange the whole concept is:
hundreds and hundreds of young men who died in a war fought basically over
nothing at all in a distant place and who were then shoveled into a common pit (why
do I think white soldiers would have been buried in separate graves?) and left
to sleep in the earth in a place that none of them would ever have thought to
call home.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Walking by that place never fails
to re-awaken in me my recollection of Joan’s and my visit to the Beersheva War
Cemetery, the resting place of more than 1200 soldiers from the U.K.,
Australia, New Zealand, and India. It’s also a peaceful place, well-tended,
verdant, and well watched over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But
what is shocking about the place are the stones themselves: row after row after
row featuring the graves of young men, some just teenagers, who died on the
same horrific day in 1917. It was a terrible day, too. By the beginning of
October in 1917, the British forces under the leadership of General Edmund
Allenby were well entrenched along the Gaza-Beersheba road with the intention
of seizing Beersheva from the Turks. By the end of the month, all was ready.
And on October 31, the battle was joined. The attack was led by the 800 men of
the 4<sup>th</sup> Australian Light Horse Brigade, brave souls who leapt on
horseback <i>over</i> the Turkish trenches and continued on into Beersheva,
while other branches of the army attacked the Turkish legions from the side. In
the end, the attack was successful and the Turks were soundly defeated. In many
ways, in fact, the tide of war turned against the Ottoman Turks at Beersheva. And,
indeed, before a year passed, the war was over and Turkish Palestine, wrested
from the Ottomans, was handed over by the League of Nations to the British.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6dcN_VVe2ArNuctISEgUQ4w0vkVdpPbLnhxYzEqtsx8CQXX7WqtVmraWOCINpBIclNYbo5tGfsGUhGImFWsyN7miXqpqhm1V-LzurskDNlsWVCNw3ku5SlLG6UbqJYMhed1AkdfoLaYlY0eB9vhv4JO9JAnyVF46q-kcrub80W_E0ACmA0BWHgVj4wpM/s1010/Beersheva%20War%20Cemetery.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="582" data-original-width="1010" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6dcN_VVe2ArNuctISEgUQ4w0vkVdpPbLnhxYzEqtsx8CQXX7WqtVmraWOCINpBIclNYbo5tGfsGUhGImFWsyN7miXqpqhm1V-LzurskDNlsWVCNw3ku5SlLG6UbqJYMhed1AkdfoLaYlY0eB9vhv4JO9JAnyVF46q-kcrub80W_E0ACmA0BWHgVj4wpM/w443-h255/Beersheva%20War%20Cemetery.jpg" width="443" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>But the cemetery has its own
story to tell. Now shady and peaceful, the silence is more ominous than calming
as you enter through the shady gate and come across row after row after row of
young men who died, all of them, on October 31, 1917. The place is well worth
visiting, but what the experience yields, or at least what it yielded in me,
was a deep sense of sorrow, of loss, of the true tragedy of war. Young men who
should have been planning their lives, their weddings, their careers, their
futures…instead dead as part of the incomprehensible madness that was the First
World War and planning nothing at all other than an eternity of moldering far
from home in someone else’s soil.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">That many of the dead at
Beersheva were veterans of Gallipoli only makes the story even more tragic and
more poignant. (I saw Peter Weir’s film, <i>Gallipoli</i>, when it came out in
1981 and still remember the harrowing effect it had on me. If any readers are
still laboring under the delusion that war can be glorious, <i>Gallipoli </i>really
is a must-see.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And that brings me to Gaza. To
most, Gaza is a strip of land that has been ruled over by too many different
foreigners since its glory days as ancient Philistia. The Romans, the
Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Israelis all tried
their hand at governing the place; I get the sense from my reading that all of
the above couldn’t leave fast enough once the opportunity presented itself.
(And, yes, I know there are people in Israel now demonstrating in the streets
in an attempt to provoke the government into re-establishing Jewish settlements
in Gaza. Those people, with all respect, are living in a self-generated dream
state fully divorced from reality.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But Gaza has its own Jewish dead
to consider. And I do not mean by that to reference the fallen of the current
IDF campaign.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">There was a very touching piece
in the paper the other day about Israeli troops coming across Jewish graves in
Gaza. And, indeed, the Gaza War Cemetery, established in 1920, contains the
graves of over 3000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First,
Second, and Third Battles of Gaza. And some of those soldiers were Jewish,
which fact was duly recorded on their tombstones. I suppose the idea was that
the IDF soldiers felt a sense of kinship with the Jewish soldiers buried in
that place, which is almost an ordinary thought, but somehow the story—by Troy O.
Fritzhand, which I read in the Algemeiner (click </span><a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/01/31/jewish-graves-found-in-gaza-from-wwi-fighting/"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">)—affected
me in a less expected way as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWR03hW2tfvhXXC9SWJtQoE1TerFaVv-ymmMQD6snaY7xUoWRYPZR4yDgYqThYSbjbtBIva4cZoKtcYi9ui44w2IT0p5Zt09xpSH_MCZsADiptPAISFV78GY5y2eHTvCFoUrk12BQlzo2H6fKpr3XIIC3RYLKR86VjNBQx7suj9MWaPwBItDmPJ0jzWGs/s862/Gaza%20War%20Cemetery.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="862" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWR03hW2tfvhXXC9SWJtQoE1TerFaVv-ymmMQD6snaY7xUoWRYPZR4yDgYqThYSbjbtBIva4cZoKtcYi9ui44w2IT0p5Zt09xpSH_MCZsADiptPAISFV78GY5y2eHTvCFoUrk12BQlzo2H6fKpr3XIIC3RYLKR86VjNBQx7suj9MWaPwBItDmPJ0jzWGs/w426-h232/Gaza%20War%20Cemetery.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>I understand the logic behind the
Israeli war against Hamas. I have no trouble with Israel going to war with the
forces of evil, with people whose hatred of Israel and its Jews expressed
itself on October 7 with almost unimaginable barbarism and Nazi-style brutality.
Nor do I have any trouble with the notion that, when fighting a war against
evil, the only true sin is to lose. I hate the thought of civilian casualties.
But I also understand that the fact that the hostages have been held now for
more than 120 days means that time is running out. All that, I get. But part of
me feels the weight of tragedy pressing down as I read the news day after day.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I hate Hamas for having started
this war. I grieve daily for the 1200 Israelis murdered, maimed, and raped on
October 7. I can’t stop thinking about the 225 IDF soldiers who have died so
far in this terrible war. And I think about the Hamas soldiers too—each a
victim of his own fanaticism and willingness to die as part of an army of
terror, but each <i>also </i>once an innocent babe who could have grown up to live
a peaceful, productive life, who could have brought joy instead of unimaginable
misery to the world. And, of course, I think also of the civilians of Gaza,
people who, yes, put Hamas into power and who are now paying the awful price
for that colossal error of judgment, but the large majority of whom could surely
not have imagined October 7 and its aftermath. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To know with certainty that you
are on the right side of a war does not make the war less tragic. Nor does it
make it any less crucial that you win. But the tragedy feels overwhelming. I
wasn’t alive when the Allies carpet-bombed Germany, but I think I would have
felt the same way about the 600,000+ civilians who died during those bombing
campaigns, which number includes about 76,000 children. The Allied leadership
did what they perceived to be necessary to win the war, which they did. But my
response to the civilian death toll is not censorious outrage, but deep
sadness. How can the Germans have made us do that to them? How can the Japanese
have created a situation in which Hiroshima was imaginable, let alone actually
doable? And how can Hamas have created this situation in which the only way to
rescue our hostages is to go in on foot to find them and liberate them from
their captors’ control? The civilian deaths in Gaza are, in my opinion, all on Hamas.
But that doesn’t make them less tragic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">And those are my emotions this
week: weariness (because I am so tired of this burden of worry and anxiety),
outrage (because what kind of people can have thrust this upon us?), terrible
sadness (because of the children of Gaza, all innocents, who are paying the
terrible price for their parents’ bad decisions), resolve (because if not me,
then who?), and, despite everything, hope (because the God of Israel neither
slumbereth nor sleepeth, and surely, at least eventually, light always wins out
over darkness).</span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">I continue to pray, even
more fervently than in the past months, for peace, for resolution, and for
victory. I’m feeling the burden of it all. I suppose we all are. But the </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">mitzvah
</i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">of </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">pidyon shvuyim</i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">, of redeeming those held in captivity, is key
here: defeating evil is the means, but bringing the captives home is the goal.
And that’s what I’m praying for, day in and day out.</span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-77940930942503465382024-02-01T08:42:00.003-05:002024-02-02T06:27:39.329-05:00Can the Center Hold?<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">As we move forward through these
strange times, I find myself careening these days back and forth between my
native pessimism about the world and the occasional flash of uncharacteristic
optimism. On the whole, things are probably no worse than they have been in the
course of these last few months. And in some ways, things are actually looking
up. (For one thing, I keep hearing rumors about some sort of imminent deal that
will bring at least some of the hostages home. So that sounds hopeful.) I know
both those things. But another part of me feels that the gyre is widening and
that, at least in the end, the center will not hold. I write this week not to
scare or depress, but to share my ill ease and to find comfort in inviting you
to join me in hoping together for better times to come.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Yeats (that is, William Butler
Yeats, 1865—1939) was one of the world’s greatest English-language poets, a
Nobel laureate, eventually a senator in the Irish government. He was a strong
Irish nationalist and he definitely flirted—and probably even more than just
flirted— with the rising fascist movements of the 1930s. Not an anti-Semite in
same sense as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, he was nonetheless part of a world that
held anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to be part of a normal, educated person’s
worldview. (For a brief but trenchant review of Irish anti-Semitism over the
ages that appeared in the <i>Irish Times</i> a few years ago and that
specifically mentions Yeats, click </span><a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ireland-s-complex-jewish-history-influential-figures-who-were-anti-semites-1.3671755"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.) There’s
a lot of evidence to review, but I don’t wish to sort it all out here. Nor do I
want to comment—not now, at any rate—about the set of bizarre reasons that have
led Ireland to be the most consistently anti-Israel nation in Europe. (For a
recent essay published in the U.K.’s <i>Jewish Chronicle </i>on that precise
topic, click </span><a href="https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/how-ireland-came-to-be-the-most-anti-israel-country-in-the-europe-s6ubshsp"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.)
Instead, I’d like to use one of Yeats’ most famous poems, “The Second Coming,”
to frame my thoughts about the world we are all living in. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Yeats begins his poem with a
stunning image:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Turning and turning in the widening gyre<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The falcon cannot hear the falconer;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed, and everywhere<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The ceremony of innocence
is drowned;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The best lack all
conviction, while the worst<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Are full of passionate
intensity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">A gyre is a gigantic circular
oceanic surface current. Before the poet starts to write, he looks out at the sea
and finds it calm, placid, and peaceful. And then the churning begins. At first,
it is barely perceptible, hardly even noticeable. And then, slowly, the motion
picks up speed. What was tranquil and serene just a moment earlier is suddenly
unsteady and unfixed in place. And as the speed of the water picks up, the
pleasurable expectation of swimming peacefully in calm waters is replaced by
the fear of drowning in those same waters. Nothing, suddenly, is as it should
be. The tightest personal connections—Yeats uses the intimate relationship of
the falcon and the falconer—become attenuated, then ruined entirely by the
deafening gyre as it picks up speed and grows louder and stronger. In the world
the poet is comparing to the sea, then, things that are normally each other’s
natural complement—butter and toast, coffee and cream, pillow and pillowcase,
socks and feet—these normal connections too weaken. And, in the end, the center
itself around which life revolves—the family, the house, the workplace, the
church, the <i>shul</i>, the park, the grocery—the center doesn’t hold and what
was once normal, even pedestrian, now seems unpredictable and in a state of
permanent, debilitating flux. And then, just like that, nothing at all seems
fixed in place. Or safe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I’ve lost track of the news even
though I read obsessively. I subscribe to a dozen daily news bulletins, peruse
half a dozen on-line newspapers, have an inbox that is constantly overflowing.
My junk file has its <i>own </i>junk file. I am, I think, as up-to-date on the
world’s goings-on as anyone who has a day job could possibly be. Mostly, I deal
with it all by compartmentalizing the data, thus storing it in manageable
chunks for later degustation (which I occasionally even get to). In that way, <i>my
</i>center can hold. But just lately the center is not holding. And the gyre feels
more than ever as though it is ominously large and ever-widening.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Let’s consider one single week’s
worth of news. A man was arrested last Monday in London and charged with having
attacked several employees in a kosher supermarket with a knife. In Haifa, a
terrorist drove his car into a crowd of civilians just yards from the front
entrance to the Haifa Naval Base. A Chabad rabbi in Washington was pushed out
of a Lyft cab by the driver, who then violently attacked him. A terror cell
about to perpetrate an “October 7-like attack” was identified and neutralized
in Jenin. A would-be terrorist was shot and killed as he tried to murder
soldiers standing guard at the entrance to Tekoa, a peaceful town in the Gush
Etzion bloc that Joan and I visited just last summer. The International Court
of Justice considered seriously a charge of attempted genocide made by South
Africa against Israel, then rendered its decision almost without reference at
all to the October 7 pogrom that took the lives of well over twelve <i>hundred</i>
innocent Israeli civilians, some of whom were beheaded and others of whom were
raped. The speaker of the French National Assembly commented the other day that
the steep resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in France had reached the level
at which it poses “a threat to the foundations of [the French] republic.” Federal
agents in Massachusetts arrested a man who was making credible threats of mass
violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in his state. Undeniable proof
was adduced that UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations charged with supplying
humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, is so suffused with actual
Hamas-affiliated terrorists and sympathizers that it wouldn’t be that
unreasonable for UNRWA <i>itself </i>to be considered a terrorist organization.
(If you have access to the on-line version of the <i>Wall St. Journal, </i>click
</span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/at-least-12-u-n-agency-employees-involved-in-oct-7-attacks-intelligence-reports-say-a7de8f36"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> for a
truly shocking account of the whole UNRWA scandal.) The top civil rights
officer at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent her entire
professional life as a civil rights attorney, declared herself “astounded” at
the level of anti-Semitic aggression the characterizes our nation’s college
campuses. To offer one single example, students at Stanford University, once a
school I would have characterized as one of our nation’s finest, were chased just
last week from a campus forum on anti-Semitism by a crowd of haters threatening
to hunt them down in their homes and, at least by implication, to murder them
there. (Click </span><a href="https://jewishinsider.com/2024/01/stanford-university-jewish-students-antisemitism-anti-israel-protest/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Kickoff%20January%2030%202024&utm_content=Daily%20Kickoff%20January%2030%202024+CID_7990fe17226948252c919c7477adbbd6&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor%20JI&utm_term=told%20eJewishPhilanthropys%20Haley%20Cohen%20for%20Jewish%20Insider"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> for the
horrific details. <i>They’d</i> have to pay <i>me </i>to send a kid of mine to
Stanford. But I wouldn’t anyway.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Is the center holding? More or
less. So far. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The poet continues with reference
to anarchy being “loosed upon the world” and goes on to imagine innocence
itself drowning as the “blood-dimmed” tide rises. And the problem is not only
the brutal barbarism of the aggressor; it’s also the fecklessness of the
aggressed-against: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of
passionate intensity.” Oy. And so ends the first half of the poet’s poem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Being a Christian, Yeats imagines
the salvation of the world in Christian terms. No problem with that for me: in
what language should the man speak if not his own? And so the Christian man
looks to the horizon for salvation and expects Jesus. But Jesus does not appear
at all. The poet is ready for the Second Coming, for the messianic moment, for
redemption. But on the horizon he suddenly espies something else entirely: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">…somewhere in sands of the
desert<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">A shape with lion body and
the head of a man,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">A gaze blank and pitiless
as the sun,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">Reel shadows of the
indignant desert birds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">The darkness drops again;
but now I know <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt;">That twenty centuries of
stony sleep<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Were
vexed to nightmare… <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The savior cometh not and instead
cometh the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” The poet expects to be
saved, but his hopes are dashed as his faith turns out to have been misplaced
entirely because all the distant horizon can deliver up is a monster. All the
promises of modern society—prosperity, human dignity, security—turn out to be
hollow, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>misshapen fantasies; none will
help much. Or at all. The much-awaited Second Coming yields only an ogre, a
fiend, a “rough beast.” There is no hope. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And where does that leave us? I
too look to the horizon and wait for redemption. I also fear the “rough beasts”
of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, anti-humanism, and anti-Americanism, the four
horsemen (to wander back into Christian terms) of my personal most-feared
apocalypse. And yet, despite it all, I don’t find myself entirely drained of
hope. I keep perusing the headlines with all the doom they presage for the
world and all the terribleness they recount, but somehow find myself able to
retain hope in the future. Where that comes from, I have no idea. Maybe it has
to do with relativity. Hamas is Amalek, but we’ve faced worse. Our American
college campuses are minefields for Jewish students, but things will surely improve
as the problem is dragged out into the light and the world can see the haters
for what they are and respond accordingly. Israel’s set of tasks in Gaza is
beyond daunting, but the tide seems slowly to be turning. I continue to harbor
the real hope that the hostages are all still alive and that the rumors of a
deal to release them will turn into reality. And even though the streets of our
cities seem clogged with villains whose hatred for Israel feels visceral rather
than rational, I still have confidence that the American people will never
embrace anti-Judaism and that the republic, the indivisible one featuring liberty
and justice for all, will never turn on its own citizens. Do I sound
Pollyanna-ish or rationally hopeful? Like an ostrich with its head in the sand
or a Jew with his head held high? Even I am not sure. But I continue to believe
in the future, in <i>our </i>future in this place and in the future of Israel. “You
may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDxvoMQHjym-x2wacvVWrhJPitKXYhD4eDqsYmCcqdt-_9ltrHWcWcbOzE8WWjcOHtT_JVoDAVjvL8XZuJeEipaIx-KWASlDvRAtYVl_VMfdstVri1beVYoC8mlC_iqVuhZ1pFHB7jegULzuiKTcvvVm3qzwi-TrlAjPPTLUBg3Ya3sfQgZy5Bz17XsFE/s711/Ocean%20Gyre.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="711" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDxvoMQHjym-x2wacvVWrhJPitKXYhD4eDqsYmCcqdt-_9ltrHWcWcbOzE8WWjcOHtT_JVoDAVjvL8XZuJeEipaIx-KWASlDvRAtYVl_VMfdstVri1beVYoC8mlC_iqVuhZ1pFHB7jegULzuiKTcvvVm3qzwi-TrlAjPPTLUBg3Ya3sfQgZy5Bz17XsFE/s320/Ocean%20Gyre.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-14236737900656431682024-01-25T08:26:00.006-05:002024-01-25T08:26:57.460-05:00The Two-State Solution<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">You would think that by now no
amount of hypocrisy on the part of the great world out there could surprise,
let alone startle, me at this point. Even I think that! And yet I find myself
consistently amazed to find myself amazed at the duplicity of our so-called
friends, not to mention the out-and-out phoniness of self-proclaimed allies who
insist that they only want the best for the Jewish people or for the State of
Israel.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">If I had nothing to do for the
rest of my life I could begin a list. But since my time is limited, I’ll settle
for writing about our “friends” who have suddenly discovered, or rather
re-discovered, the “two-state solution” as the cure for all that ails Israel
and its neighbors. And they are legion: I’ve lost track of how many different
newspaper articles I read this last week alone in which the author breathlessly
announces that the reason the entire Arab-Israeli <i>sikhsukh </i>wasn’t resolved
long ago has to do with the intransigence of Israelis with respect to the
famous “two-state” solution, the compromise invariably touted by such authors
as the obvious panacea to all that ails the Middle Eastern world. <a href="https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2024/01/22/2003812444">Here</a>,
for example, is a story from Taiwan explaining to readers of the <i>Taipei
Times</i> how things would calm down instantly if only Bibi would heed
President Biden’s call for a “two-state solution.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The notion itself of a two-state
solution to the Arab-Israeli problem, of course, is as old as the state itself
and, in fact, there actually <i>are </i>two states, one Arab and one Jewish on
the territory of the old British Mandate of Palestine. Or, rather, there would
be had the British not unilaterally sawn the entire kingdom of Jordan, then
called Transjordan, off of the mandated territory and offered it to the
Hashemites as their own country. So the U.N. was dealing with the part that was
left and that, indeed, they voted on November 22, 1947, voted to split down
into two nations, a Jewish one and an Arab one. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDbI2HBn09YfZesVMXarMOp_3SMfvLK_yP0gLJ3xALw2XBA7-t0-6Ib8Nd8hOjfmsEw6MD24f5Bkntn8QCVlUd0HZOealbRKxM7tQyrOS_hfedbi2BkFWG7BN-4rEUeC3FrZ-Epko3eq9WKlcx_7u59mJnJdarluO55g3Ym0NuFg1zf-z_ZPQgaPZtB44/s407/Original%20British%20Mandate%20of%20Palestine.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDbI2HBn09YfZesVMXarMOp_3SMfvLK_yP0gLJ3xALw2XBA7-t0-6Ib8Nd8hOjfmsEw6MD24f5Bkntn8QCVlUd0HZOealbRKxM7tQyrOS_hfedbi2BkFWG7BN-4rEUeC3FrZ-Epko3eq9WKlcx_7u59mJnJdarluO55g3Ym0NuFg1zf-z_ZPQgaPZtB44/s407/Original%20British%20Mandate%20of%20Palestine.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="267" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDbI2HBn09YfZesVMXarMOp_3SMfvLK_yP0gLJ3xALw2XBA7-t0-6Ib8Nd8hOjfmsEw6MD24f5Bkntn8QCVlUd0HZOealbRKxM7tQyrOS_hfedbi2BkFWG7BN-4rEUeC3FrZ-Epko3eq9WKlcx_7u59mJnJdarluO55g3Ym0NuFg1zf-z_ZPQgaPZtB44/w210-h320/Original%20British%20Mandate%20of%20Palestine.png" width="210" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_UcORE2WDJuW1TMIzLfWmbqG9yODuPwXfScqpIEBHv2FfnfbB2tc3nYzH1tNTQflbCMGZRG2_dlaZ3YOBGIDZBITKGup4OlqI8vFLKvWbYBPlyrUFzMfPEcNtHDtn5Ad7z90G7-U1ZB2o-OX8pcljYEhXCaHil7AM6icKVW8_5zsdRtnP4Jt-pS2Ms8/s476/Palestine%20and%20Transjordan%20after%201922.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="383" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_UcORE2WDJuW1TMIzLfWmbqG9yODuPwXfScqpIEBHv2FfnfbB2tc3nYzH1tNTQflbCMGZRG2_dlaZ3YOBGIDZBITKGup4OlqI8vFLKvWbYBPlyrUFzMfPEcNtHDtn5Ad7z90G7-U1ZB2o-OX8pcljYEhXCaHil7AM6icKVW8_5zsdRtnP4Jt-pS2Ms8/s320/Palestine%20and%20Transjordan%20after%201922.png" width="257" /></a></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: right;"></div></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The next part, everybody knows.
The Jews of the <i>yishuv </i>accepted the plan and declared independence on
May 14, 1948. (Our apartment in Jerusalem is actually just half a mile or so
from November 22<sup>nd</sup> Street, a pretty place named specifically in
honor of the U.N. decision.) The Arabs of British Palestine, however, did not
follow suit and declare their own state. Instead, they went to war and lost,
which failure laid the groundwork for the subsequent seventy-five years of
hostility towards the Jewish state.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever the problem really is,
it certainly doesn’t have to do with not enough ink having been spilt—or time
wasted—trying to work things out. The Madrid Conference of 1991, the Oslo
Accords of 1991 and 1993, the Wye Plantation Memorandum of 1998, the Camp David
Summit of 2000, the Annapolis Conference of 2007, the John Kerry shuttle diplomacy
of 2013, the Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan of 2020—all of
these were “about” the two-state solution, each in its own way an effort to
finesse the details while ignoring the fact that only one party to the dispute
seemed even remotely interested in recognizing the other’s right to nationhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor does the concept lack international
sponsors: a quick google of “international leaders in favor of a two-state
solution” yields a very impressive list, a list that includes President Biden,
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, British P.M.
Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian P.M. Justin Trudeau, Australian
P.M. Anthony Albanese, New Zealand P.M. Christopher Luxon, and, saving the best
for last, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. They are <i>all </i>on
board!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Most impressive of all is that a
full 138 nations have already<i> </i>recognized the State of Palestine, the
fact that none of the above efforts to create a viable two-state solution has
succeeded waved away as a mere detail hardly worth mentioning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So, all that being the case, what
actually <i>is </i>the problem? Just this week, we were exposed to the current
administration’s pique with Israeli P.M. Netanyahu for not being fully enough
behind the two-state solution. The L.A. Times had a particularly interesting
op-ed piece on the topic (click </span><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opinion-netanyahu-may-be-standing-in-the-way-of-a-two-state-solution-but-hes-far-from-alone/ar-BB1gZeiJ"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">). CNN’s
piece (click </span><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/netanyahu-again-rejects-palestinian-sovereignty-amid-fresh-us-push-for-two-state-solution/ar-BB1h29cR"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">) was
also quite good. And, of course, nothing could ever deter the New York Times
from trying to pry some space out between the Biden and Netanyahu
administrations, of which only the latest examples appeared in the last few
days: Peter Baker’s “</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/us/politics/biden-netanyahu-palestinian-state.html?searchResultPosition=1"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Netanyahu
Rebuffs U.S. Calls to Start Working Towards Palestinian Statehood</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">,” Thomas
Friedman’s “</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/opinion/israel-war-netanyahu.html?searchResultPosition=2"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Netanyahu
Is Turning Away from Biden</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">,” or Aaron Boxerman’s “</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/us/politics/biden-netanyahu-palestinian-state.html?searchResultPosition=1"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Biden
Presses Netanyahu On Working Towards Palestinian State</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So, okay, I get it. The only
solution is the two-state one. But why is everybody so irritated with Israel?
The Palestinians could solve the problem overnight by declaring their
independence, agreeing quickly to exchange ambassadors with the 130+ nations
that already recognize their state, and getting down to the gritty business of
negotiating safe and secure border with Israel. Bibi would probably not be
pleased. But what could he do? The entire world would be on the Palestinians’ side
and all it would take was a single unilateral announcement on the part of the
Palestinians to get the ball rolling. The presence of Jewish so-called
“settler” types in Judah and Samaria would not be a problem unless the State of
Palestine intended itself to be totally <i>judenrein</i>—otherwise, why couldn’t
those people live on their own land in an independent Palestine if they wanted
to? (Most, I think, would not want to. But some surely would.) Nor would the
status of Jerusalem itself be an issue: while the Palestinians are in
unilateral-proclamation-mode, they could simply declare East Jerusalem to be
their capital, then get down to work organizing a workable plan with Israel for
policing the city, controlling traffic, and figuring out who picks up whose
trash on which days. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Yes, I’m making light of intense
issues. But, at the end of the day, why precisely couldn’t this happen?
Everybody is happy to be irritated with Bibi, but Israel has demonstrated over
and over—including in the context of all the above-listed conferences—that it
is ready to negotiate for peace. And declaring independence would assist in
Gaza as well: terror organizations like Hamas flourish in the atmosphere of
hopelessness and desperation, but that would quickly move into the past if the
Palestinians were occupied with nation-building and self-determination instead
of endlessly complaining that the world hasn’t given them enough aid. If the
Jordanians were big-enough hearted to create a kind of economic union with New
Palestine, then there really would be no stopping the peace train. Even the
United Nations would be unable to stop the momentum. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">But, of course, none of the above
has happened or, I fear, ever will happen. It’s much easier for the Biden
administration to waste its time trying to bully Bibi into making concessions
in the context of theoretical negotiations in which the other side has not
given the slightly indication it wishes to participate. Yes, it’s more dramatic
to build terror tunnels, murder babies, rape women, and take innocent civilian
hostages. But that cannot—and will not—ever lead to statehood for Palestine.
What will lead in that direction is the clear indication that the Palestinian
leadership is prepared to create a viable Palestinian state and then to live within
its borders peacefully and productively.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">If the United States wants to
defang Iran and lessen the likelihood that the Iranians will lead the world
into World War III, it could take no more profound and potentially meaningful
step forward than convincing the Palestinians to stop complaining, to take the
independence the entire world wishes to offer them seriously, and to get down
to the actual business of nation-building. The mullahs will be outraged. But
they’ll get over it. And the world will be a safer and better place.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-33370980333557326142024-01-18T09:10:00.001-05:002024-01-18T11:45:17.067-05:00The Court on Trial<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s hard to know where even to
begin writing about the truly outrageous law suit brought by South Africa
against Israel in the International Court of Law, the United Nations tribunal
located in the Netherlands, in the Hague. The charge itself—the charge of
genocide allegedly being inflicted on the Palestinian nation by Israel—should
make clear to all what kind of nonsense this all is. (The term “genocide,”
coined only in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to characterize the
behavior of the Nazis towards the people it intended to exterminate, derives
from the Greek <i>genos</i>, meaning
“people,” “tribe,” or “state” and the familiar “-<i>cide</i>” suffix, from the
Latin, denoting killing, as in suicide, homicide, fratricide, etc.) To be guilty
of genocide, therefore, a nation would have to undertake wholly to annihilate
another people or nation. The Nazis didn’t invent the concept, but there have
not been that many serious efforts of one nation embarking on the effort, not
merely to decimate, but actually to eradicate another: even the almost
unbelievably barbaric massacre of civilian Cambodians undertaken by the Khmer
Rouge from 1975 to 1978, in the context of which a full quarter of the national
population was murdered, even <i>that </i>was not really an effort to rid the
world of all Cambodians: for one thing, the murderers <i>themselves </i>were
Cambodian. The Rwandan nightmare of 1994 comes closer: the Hutu militias did
their best to massacre the entire Tutsi tribe and managed actually to murder as
many as 800,000 before they were finally stopped by Tutsi militia groups that
invaded from neighboring lands and gained control of the country. Had they
succeeded, there would today be no Tutsis at all. That is what the term “genocide”
denotes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But the term has its limits—and
those limits have to do with intent, not with numbers. To lament in humility
and shame the fact that, by the time American independence was achieved, the
population of native Americans had dropped by about 90% from what it had been
before Columbus “discovered” America is the fully correct response. But to
characterize that decline as the result of genocide would require arguing that
the Europeans who came here undertook a conscious effort to exterminate the
native population, that they brought along smallpox and other deadly diseases
not by accident and not unawares, but fully intending to let disease do what
they lacked the physical ability to manage on their own. Of course, there is no
such proof at all that that was their intent. And that is true even if it is <i>also
</i>true that the colonials in Central, South, and North American were cultural
imperialists who had neither respect nor interest in interacting in any
meaningful, mutually respectful way with the aboriginal population, and most of
whom would not have minded at all if the decline had been 100% instead of <i>just
</i>90%.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And that brings us to Gaza. For a
Jew considering the charge of genocide, the matter is straightforward. No one
needs to lecture the Jewish people on genocide or on its most effective
techniques. Nor does anyone need to explain the process: we are more than
familiar with the slow (or not slow) progression from petty microaggression to
disabling discrimination, and from there to the dissolution of civil rights
(including the right to be a citizen of one’s own country, to live in one’s
home, and to work in one’s own business) and finally to the withdrawal of the
right to live itself, which new reality the state then helpfully accommodates by
undertaking to murder the disenfranchised individuals and making them not alive
at all and therefore no longer in contravention of the law. There isn’t a Jew
in the world—or at least not one with even the least sense of intellectual or
emotional engagement with his or her Jewishness—there isn’t a solitary Jewish
soul out there who doesn’t know all of this. We’ve seen this movie We’ve swum
in this stream. We’ve been there, all of us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">So that actually makes us just
the kind of expert witnesses the International Court of Justice should be
seeking as it gathers evidence. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Mind you, the Court has its own
problems. Its justices come from any number of different countries in which
human rights are not respected: Somalia, China, Uganda, Russia, etc. So that’s
not too encouraging for a tribunal devoted to the cause of justice between
nations. Nor is the Court’s record too impressive: although it has existed for
more than three-quarters of a century, it has managed not to take note of the plight
of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians murdered by the Assad regime, the fate
of the million-plus Uighurs forced by the Chinese into a gulag all their own,
or the fate of the millions of North Koreans who live with neither civil rights
nor any hope of escape. The Court has not censured any of this, nor has it
taken note of it. It certainly hasn’t put Syria on trial for genocide, let
alone China. Instead, it is now training its steely gaze on Israel to determine
if Israel, of all nations, is committing genocide in Gaza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I’d like to offer my perspective
to the court. (It’s unlikely they’ll be interested in rationality or
reasonableness—this is an organ of the United Nations, after all—but
nonetheless I’d like to say my piece.) Yes, there have been many civilian
deaths in the course of these last 100 days, while Israel has combed Gaza for
its own citizens being held hostage by Hamas and, at the same time, for the
perpetrators of the October pogrom in the course of which more than a thousand
civilians were murdered, the dead were mutilated, and women were savagely and
repeatedly raped. That is regrettable. Civilian deaths are always regrettable!
No one could hate Nazism more than I myself do. But even I, whose loathing for
the German government that murdered more than a million and a half Jewish
children could not be more unambiguously felt, even <i>I </i>regret—and regret
profoundly—the deaths of innocents, including children, during the carpet
bombing of Germany, including Hamburg and Dresden especially, that paved the
way for the successful invasion of Germany from the West by the Allies under
General Eisenhower and from the east by the Red Army. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">This is not an especially courageous position I’m staking out for
myself here. What kind of monster can take delight in the death of a child?
There were babies in Dresden too, just as there were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How can there not have been? But the International Court didn’t get off to a
good start in 1945 by putting the United Kingdom or the U.S. on trial for
genocide. And it didn’t do that because those deaths took place as part of a
wartime initiative to defeat an enemy that was evil itself. And when fighting a
war against evil, the only truly immoral act is to lose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But back to Gaza. Where exactly <i>are
</i>the gas chambers? Where are the boxcars shuttling hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian civilians to the killing sites? For that matter, where <i>are</i>
the killing sites? If the goal was to eradicate the Palestinian nation, then
why drop leaflets encouraging civilians to flee areas in the northern part of
Gaza that were targeted for bombing? Why let any humanitarian aide in at all if
the goal is to turn Gaza into a beach-front version of Treblinka? Most
trenchant of all questions to ask: why would Israel risk the lives of any IDF
soldiers at all if the “real” goal of the operation was to empty Gaza of
Palestinians? Before the IDF incursion, there were, after all, no Israelis at
all in Gaza, so the field could have been relatively clear. If the only goal
was killing civilians with the specific intention of emptying Gaza of Gazans, the
entire operation could have been safely—and totally effectively—conducted from
the air with the chances of Israeli casualties minimized, if not totally
eradicated. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Much has been made in some
quarters of a throw-away remark of Bibi Netanyahu’s equating Hamas with the
ancient nation of Amalek and I’d like to address myself to that as well. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Amalek occupies a strange place
in our history. They attacked the Israelites on their way out of Egypt from the
rear, picking off the elderly, the infirm, the part of the people the least
likely successfully to be able to defend themselves. Israel went to war and was
victorious. The Torah makes a big deal of this, but then ends up on a note of
ambivalence. On the one hand, the name of Amalek has to be wiped out entirely.
On the other, the Israelites are commanded to labor to remember all the
despicable, dastardly deeds that Amalek committed when they were attacking. So
how does that work: if they’re completely forgotten, their very name erased
from the world’s memory banks, then how can the Israelites guarantee that they
will always be remembered? They have either to be remembered or forgotten,
don’t they? You can’t have it both ways!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And yet that’s the Torah’s
command. And when the Torah appears to self-contradict, it’s always pointing to
a deeper lesson just beneath the surface. Amalek is not one of the Canaanite
nations. It’s fate is not sealed. They represent pure hatred for Israel, what
we would call fanatic anti-Semitism. The Nazis were Amalek. Stalin was Amalek.
And Hamas is Amalek too. The Torah is saying that these people must be fought
back against vigorously, just as the IDF is doing. But it’s also saying they
will always be there: there will always be people out there who hate Jews.
Labeling Hamas as Amalek simply means that they are not “merely” hostile folks,
but part of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Bibi probably should have
kept Amalek out of this, but, in the end, Amalek is a theological concept, not
a battle plan. By bringing Amalek into the discussion, Bibi was speaking in the
natural idiom of Jewishness, not recommending genocide.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In the end, it’s not Israel on
trial at the International Court of Justice. It’s the Court itself that is on
trial. Its future reputation rests on getting this right. Its actual future
itself may rest on that as well. In the end, the verdict will tell us clearly
if the International Court is a force for good in the world to be respected and
supported…or just another failed, biased, and bigoted wing of the United
Nations.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-44196320392079525512024-01-11T08:55:00.000-05:002024-01-11T08:55:06.978-05:00Looking Forwards By Looking Backwards<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">For the last three months now, I
have basically written about nothing other than the situation in Gaza and the
impact that situation is having (and continues to have) on daily life in
Israel. As a result, I haven’t focused overly on the slow deterioration of
things on this side of the ocean as our own nation grapples with issues that,
each in its own way, could end up proving just as fateful for our nation as the
effort to decimate Hamas will surely be for Israel.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It's hard to know even where to
start. The shocking image of the presidents of three of America’s most
prestigious institutions of higher learning all (including the Jewish one)
being unable to bring themselves unequivocally to condemn calls for genocide
directed against Jewish people as outside the limits of <i>bona fide </i>free
speech on campus was bad enough. But that dismal spectacle has focused the
nation’s headlights on our university campuses in general, which experience has
been infinitely more upsetting. And the picture that has emerged is both
terrifying and sickening: a portrait of schools, including some of our most
respected institutions of higher learning, that have lost their moral compass
entirely, that have descended into an Orwellian mirrorscape of reality in which
traditional values are ignored, only radical extremists are granted a voice,
and racism directed directly against Jewish students is considered both
legitimate and, when dressed up smartly enough in anti-Israel vitriol, even virtuous.
And then there is the rising tide of anti-Semitism outside the academy in all
fifty states, a phenomenon that will feel eerily and deeply disconcertingly
familiar to anyone possessed of even a passing acquaintanceship with Jewish history.
And then, on top of all that, we are about to plunge full-bore into a
presidential election in which the winner will undoubtedly be a member of a
party that has room in its Congressional ranks for overt anti-Semites and/or
Israel-haters. So I apologize for not writing more about our American situation
lately. I do want to keep writing about Israel, but I will also try to find
time to write about these United States and the future of the American
enterprise as we move into 2024.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I wanted to begin writing in a
positive vein, if possible even optimistically. And so I thought we might
begin, in that traditional Jewish way, by looking forwards by looking backwards
and focusing on a time in our nation when the citizenry was united, when
respect for our leader was basically universal, and when coin of the realm was
optimism, confidence in the nation’s destiny, and hope in the future. Yes, it’s
been a while. But, speaking candidly, what’s two hundred years between friends?
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">As we exit the time machine, the
president of the United States is James Monroe. Later on, he would become a
high school in the Bronx (the one from which my mother graduated in 1933) and a
housing project. But, in 1820, James Monroe was a man, a politician. And his
story is beyond instructive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In those days, we had Election
Month rather than Election Day: in a predigital world that was also
pre-electric and pre-electronic, voting took place in 1820 from November 1 to
December 6. All alone on the ballot was James Monroe, the incumbent candidate
of the Democratic-Republican Party. Because his was the only name on the
ballot, Monroe won in all twenty-two states. It’s true that Monroe was not the
first to run for president unopposed (that would have been George Washington,
who ran unopposed both in 1789 and in 1793), but Monroe was the first to do so
after the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which set in
place the rules for presidential elections that we more or less still follow. He
was also the last American President to run unopposed. Can you imagine the
nation fully behind its elected leader? The man didn’t come out of the blue,
however. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In his own way, Monroe personally
embodied the American past such as it was in 1820. He served as a soldier in
the Continental Army under Washington. He studied law under Thomas Jefferson. He
was a delegate to the Continental Congress that ratified the Constitution. He
had been our ambassador to France and he served as governor of Virginia. Then
he decided to aim higher and he ran for president in 1816 and won. And then he
ran again in 1820 and this time not <i>only </i>won, but received every
electoral vote cast but one—and that naysayer, one William Plumer, was actually
a so-called “faithless elector” who defied the election results in his state of
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New Hampshire because he apparently wished
to ensure that Washington would forever be the sole American President to be
elected unanimously by the Electoral College. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">So we had at the helm a leader
who had won the confidence, more or less, of the entire American people. As
noted, this was Monroe’s second term of office. In 1816, he beat Rufus King,
the Federalist candidate, and he beat him soundly, getting more than double the
votes King got. And now that he had proven himself in office, he put himself
forward as candidate for a second term. No one chose to run against him. The
split of the Democratic-Republican Party into the parties we know today was still
in the future. The nation was at peace. And it was fully unified behind a
proven leader. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">At the time and since, these
years were and are called the “Era of Good Feeling.” The War of 1812 had been
won. The nation was prosperous and at peace. The great debate about slavery
that led eventually to war had yet to begin in earnest. (Indeed, the nation had
formally outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and this was widely thought of—at
least by abolitionists—as a first step towards eradicating slavery totally.
That that didn’t happen—and would probably never have happened other than in
the way it did happen—was, of course, unknown to American voters at the time.) There
seemed to be endless possibilities for expansion to the West. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I first became interested in this
stretch of American history several years ago when I read Daniel Walker Howe’s
masterful <i>What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848, </i>for
which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in History. It’s a doorstopper of a
book, coming in at just over 900 pages. But it is truly fascinating, a work of
history distinguished (this is so rare) both by its author’s mastery of his
subject and also by his great skill as an engaging author able to keep readers’
interest as they wade through material that the author surely understood would
be unfamiliar to most. He paints a complex picture of a nation in its
adolescence, one reminiscent in many ways of the nation today but with the huge
difference that the native optimism that once characterized American culture
was in its fullest flower in the 1820s. The belief that the Revolution had not
solely ended with an independent United States, but had actually transformed
the world by demonstrating the possibility of living free, of citizens living
lives unencumbered by the will of despots and fully able to chart their own
course into the future by using their own hands to wield their own tools, thus to
fashion their own destiny—that distillation of the American ethos as freedom
resting on a bedrock of decency, morality, and purposefulness was enough to
bring the entire nation to support the man who, in the minds of all, served as
the physical embodiment of that ideal. And that is how James Monroe came to run
unopposed and to be elected by the entire electorate speaking as one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">How bizarre that all sounds now! Most
people in the throes of crochety old age tend to idealize their adolescent
years. Nations do that too. But there’s more to that thought than pathos alone.
The hallmark of adolescence is fantasy unencumbered by restrictive reality—and
that is true of nations as well as individuals. Nobody told the citizenry in
the 1820s that they were “just” dreamers, that it could never work out as
planned. And, yes, they were blind to many social issues that we now find it
hard to believe they passed so blithely by—the slavery issue first and
foremost, but also the harsh and terrible treatment of native Indian peoples,
the degree to which women were denied a place in public life, the restrictive higher
educational system to which only white males (and, generally speaking, only
wealthy ones at that) were admitted. Yes, that’s all true. But the nation was
also possessed of a deep, abiding sense of its own destiny. And, in the end,
that’s what mattered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It didn’t last. The nation grew
up. The forced dislocation of countless thousands of native Indians from the
lands they had farmed and occupied for centuries, the ongoing nightmare of
slavery, the inability of the nation to keep from splitting in two and the
unimaginable amount of blood that was spilt to put it back together—the
resolution of all those issues was in the future when James Monroe was in the
White House. And the foundation upon which his administration rested—the good
feelings of the so-called “Age of Good Feelings”—was sturdy enough to support
the weight of a nation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">As we embark on the 2024
Presidential election, this all seems so far away, so foreign, so unattainable.
Maybe it is. Or maybe the right national leader, ideally one who has waded
through Daniel Walker Howe’s giant book, is waiting in the wings to rescue us
from ourselves. I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough!<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Q78z7hP3VAumFxGox28-PZGl1o00T5dsvuxeMvSNNfwMS3YL3BxgV3liZoMFOAMSFySDF6RVSISZ2U5gqzA4PA0n1TxsJn1N6NqiIWUF37FtR2IFBFIfvR_ZQ7nw2K1kctuKMWkAztaI3qx4DeXJsNWGvuijmSnmN3tggWRhhb3twXrkGMYcGxJzy4Y/s477/James%20Monroe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="378" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Q78z7hP3VAumFxGox28-PZGl1o00T5dsvuxeMvSNNfwMS3YL3BxgV3liZoMFOAMSFySDF6RVSISZ2U5gqzA4PA0n1TxsJn1N6NqiIWUF37FtR2IFBFIfvR_ZQ7nw2K1kctuKMWkAztaI3qx4DeXJsNWGvuijmSnmN3tggWRhhb3twXrkGMYcGxJzy4Y/s320/James%20Monroe.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-76135877635125442552024-01-04T08:32:00.006-05:002024-01-04T10:20:52.849-05:00Counsel from Scripture<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The news this week that Israel is
planning to withdraw several thousand troops from Gaza is a signal to the world
both that the fighting will continue (because the rest of the IDF currently
stationed in Gaza is staying) and, at the same time, that the future will be
different from the past, that the struggle to destroy Hamas is poised to move
into a different phase. That phase will require fewer soldiers in place,
clearly. But it doesn’t mean that Israel is planning to act less aggressively
to free the remaining 100+ hostages. That decision—to abandon the hostages to
their fate—would be as unimaginable ethically as it would be suicidal
politically for the current government, and there is virtually no chance of
that happening. So we who are watching on from the wings are basically being
prepared to expect the current struggle to last for weeks, perhaps even for
months, into the future. Eventually, the situation will be resolved one way or
the other. But no matter how successful Israel eventually is in securing the
release of the hostages and in degrading the ability of Hamas ever again to
perpetrate a pogrom on the scale of last October’s, the issues that divide
Palestinians and Israelis will remain in place either to be resolved eventually
or never to be resolved.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I have written over these last
months from many different vantage points, but today I’d like to put my
favorite <i>yarmulke </i>back on and discuss Gaza from a theological point of
view, from the point of view of our own tradition. And there’s a moment in the
scriptural narrative that comes right to mind too! <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Shortly after returning to Canaan
with his family, Jacob settles in Shechem (today known more regularly as Nablus,
a corruption of the Roman name for the place Flavia Neopolis). It turns out not
to have been such a good choice however. Shortly after arriving there, Jacob’s
sole daughter, Dina, heads into town to make some girlfriends among the locals.
Nothing too strange there: Dina had twelve brothers and, as far as Scripture
relates, no sisters at all. (The reference elsewhere in Genesis to Jacob’s “daughters”
is generally taken to denote his daughters-in-law.) The basic idea seems
harmless enough. Why wouldn’t she want to get to know some local women her age?
Whether she is successful or not, Scripture doesn’t say. But what does happen
is that she attracts the attention of one Shechem ben Hamor, the son of the
local prince-in-charge, who is so drawn to her that he forces himself on her.
What follows then is unexpected: having attacked her because he was drawn to
her, he is now depicted as being drawn to her (possibly) because he attacked
her…or at least because his intimate knowledge of her confirms his initial
suspicion that Dina is lovely and worthy. And now he wants to marry her. His
father approaches her father. An initial proposal is made, but Jacob refuses to
answer and insists that he has to wait for his sons to return from wherever it
was they were herding their cattle and take counsel with them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">What follows is one of the
Torah’s darker stories. The brothers return and they are outraged. Why wouldn’t
they have been? But, being vastly outnumbered, they decide to proceed
stealthily. They agree to Hamor’s father’s suggestion that Jacob’s family and the
locals ally themselves together as one people, which he suggests will happen when their children marry each other. The brothers appear to consider this, then
respond formally by agreeing <i>if </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the
men of Shechem agree to be circumcised. A Jewish girl marrying an uncircumcised
man? They can’t imagine such a thing! Amazingly, the locals agree. And they do
it too, proceeding—in their world with neither anesthesia nor sterile O.R.s—to
have their foreskins removed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And then we get to the even
bloodier dénouement of the story. While the local men are still smarting from
their surgeries and are obviously in a weakened state, two of Jacob’s sons,
Simon and Levi, go on a killing rampage, executing all the males of the city,
bringing Dina back home, making the local women and children their captives,
and taking all local wealth as booty. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">But what follows is the reason I’m
writing about this story today to interpret it in light of the October pogrom,
a brutal attack that also featured rape and the degradation of Jewish women as
part of the foes’ attack plan. (That part of the Hamas attack has only just
recently been told in detail: if you somehow missed the NY Times story on the
matter, gruesome and harrowing as it is, click </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.) Jacob,
playing the traditional role of the <i>golus-yid, </i>cries out, “All you’ve
accomplished is to make the surviving Canaanites hate me. Plus there are not
that many of us—and now they will all gather up against us and murder not just
me but my entire house…including all of you as well.” In other words, his
primary goal here is to avoid riling the locals up, to avoid friction or
hostility, and to stay safe. The brothers listen politely, then respond with
a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>single rhetorical question expressed
in exactly four words in the original Hebrew: “Were we supposed to let him
treat our sister as though she were a whore?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The story provokes a lot of
unanswered questions. But the issue really has to do with the final few lines
cited above. Jacob’s chief goal here is to live in peace with the neighbors and
he is apparently ready to overlook something as horrific as the rape of his own
daughter to achieve that goal. He is therefore being depicted as the kind of
person who prefers cowering in the shadows to risking the possibility of making
people angry by standing up for himself and demanding justice. This is not
meant to be a flattering portrait, nor is it one. But the portrait of Simon and
Levi (and possibly, if they were in on it, Jacob’s other sons too) is also
unflattering in the extreme. Rape is horrific. But in what justice system is
someone other than the perpetrator punished? To go on a killing rampage that
shows neither mercy nor forbearance to anyone at all in an entire city because
of the deeds of one person—that is not meant to be a flattering portrait
either. In the end, both sides are caricatures: one featuring Jacob as the
apotheosis of nervous timidity and the other featuring Simon and Levi as the
archetypes of extreme violence prompted not by the quest for real justice but
by rage. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And what does that story mean in
terms of Gaza? The key here is that neither portrait is meant to be flattering,
let alone something to emulate. For Israel to have looked the other way after October
7 to avoid upsetting the locals and their fellow travelers in Iran and Lebanon (not
to mention Turtle Bay) would have been fully unjustifiable from any point of
view, including especially the moral. To annihilate Gaza entirely because of
the actions of specific people would have been no less tragic and certainly
morally wrong. But the correct response is what we actually saw: Israel going into
Gaza with the specific goal of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to
justice, and also doing whatever it was going to take to guarantee that Hamas
would never be capable again of mounting that kind of attack on Israeli
civilians. Despite the rhetoric of so many haters, I see no evidence that
Israel has embarked on a campaign designed to solve the problem in Gaza the way
Simon and Levi solved the problem in Shechem: with wholesale slaughter of all
inhabitants as a kind of collective punishment for existing in the same place
as terrible wrongdoers. That there have been casualties, including deaths,
among civilians is terrible—and not something any normal person should not
regret. But the civilian Gazans are not mere bystanders either: they are the
ones who put Hamas in power in 2005 and so are not that different from the
civilian Germans who overwhelming put the Nazis in power in 1933: both paid and
are paying a truly bitter price for having put themselves under the governance
of violent fanatics who could not have been clearer about their plans for their
enemies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In my opinion, Israel had no
choice but to enter Gaza in response to the events of October 7. That the
leaders of the nation chose to find a middle path between Jacob’s timorousness
and Simon/Levi’s rage speaks well for the nation and its leadership. How this
will all end, who can say? But to pretend that the Torah’s most specific lesson
about responding to violence—and particularly to violence against women—has
gone unheeded is simply incorrect. It merely requires reading carefully and
thoughtfully. And it requires understanding that sometimes Scripture depicts a
moral dilemma as a kind of crossroads not because either path is the correct
one forward, but because neither is.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-84188993566502693742023-12-21T09:07:00.006-05:002023-12-21T09:07:53.981-05:00Colonialism<p> <span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As we face the end of the year with the IDF still
conducting its campaign in Gaza, with so many hostages still not released, and
with the support of the world waning by the minute, we could all use a bit of
shoring up. I am speaking of myself as well, by the way: despite my </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">abiding confidence in the
innate tolerance of Americans</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">,
I continue to </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">feel </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">shaken </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">by
the ferocity of the anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism that seems
to have arisen almost from nowhere in the wake of Israel’s response to the
Simchat Torah massacre.</span></span></p><p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This week, I would like to address a specific
aspect of that ferocity, the accusation—</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">by </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">now almost </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">a </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">commonplace</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> among the haters</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">that </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Israel
is nothing but a last-gasp outpost of colonialism. And</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, as a result, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that the Jews of Israel have the same right to
Palestine that the Belgians had to the Congo, the Dutch to Indonesia, the
French to Algeria, the British to India, and the Germans to Namibia: none at
all.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> (It is
interesting how few of those who regularly tar Israel with that brush feel the
same way about Australia or Canada, not to mention our own nation, which
actually were founded by overt colonialists who saw nothing at all wrong with
moving onto other people’s turf and declaring their independence in that place.
About that paradox, I will write on another occasion.)</span></span></p><p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Colonialism, sometimes called imperialism, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">surely </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">was one of the most pernicious avenues of
political theorizing ever devised to justify the conquest of other people’s
countries and the addition of those conquered lands to the conquerors’
self-proclaimed empire</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And
this is so much the case that, at least for most of us, even the rationale
behind the concept seems impossible to grasp. It is true that decades of
mini-trade-wars between Dutch, British, and Portuguese set the stage for the
eventual absorption of India into the British Empire, but the larger picture is
the one that survives of a rapacious Empire ignoring the fact that it had no
conceivable right to a country thousands of miles away from Britain with which
it had no history of enmity, let alone of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">overt </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">hostility or warfare, and unilaterally making
that place part of its Empire, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">and </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">then
using the full force of its own Armed Forces to stifle dissent and to prevent
any serious movement </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">on the part of the people whose country it actually was </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">towards self-rule. This was the story of the
British in India, but it was also the story of many other nations struggling to
annex the maximum number of overseas territories without regard for the wishes
of the people who actually lived there.</span></span></p><p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have to assume that most colonialists were motivated
by pure greed. But there were others who were motivated not by rank
acquisitiveness or covetousness, but by the supremely arrogant assumption that they
were actually doing the native people’s whose nations they occupied</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">a huge favor by exposing them to Western ways and
beliefs. The prize for the most grotesque expression of that idea, even after
all these years, has to go to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), whose famous poem,
“The White Man’s Burden,” depicted colonialism not as venal or brutal, but as
virtuous. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” he wrote to his fellow Brits. “Send
forth the best ye breed. / Go bind your sons to exile / to serve your captives’
need: / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught
sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It’s really hard to know what to
say to that! (The poem goes on at length along similar lines. To read the full
poem, click </span></span><a href="https://www.poetry.com/poem/33606/the-white-man's-burden"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.)</span></span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">But what could any of this have to do with
Israel?</span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The history of Israel is recorded in the
historical books of the Bible and confirmed by archelogy: there have been
Jewish people, or the ancestors of what we reference as the Jewish people, in
the Land of Israel since the beginning of the 2</span><sup style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif;">nd</sup><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> millennium BCE and
there has never been a day since then that there was not a Jewish presence in
the land. That’s about 3000 years of continued residence in the land and that
is at the core of the Jewish claim to consider Israel as the national homeland
of the Jewish people. The nations they replaced have long since vanished: there
are no surviving Girgashites or Kenites to negotiate with. But where did the
Arabs come from?</span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">As the seventh century dawned, the world’s two
great super-powers, Byzantium and Persia, were at war. Things were calm in the
Holy Land for a while, but then, in 613, the local Jews joined with the
Persians in their ongoing campaign against the Byzantines. In 614, the
Persians, now fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters, captured
Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege
of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or
so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians
at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the
site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled
to Persia.</span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">But the tide eventually turned. By 617, the
Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the
Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just
what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his
Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked
for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve
minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews
ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally
forbidden.</span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">And now we get to the relevant part. Just ten
years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the
Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. The Byzantines
retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arab
colonialists until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later
in 1099. Nor is “colonialist” a vague term here. In fact, it is the precisely
accurate one: a powerful nation wrests land from a neighboring nation that it
bests on the battlefield, then annexes that land to itself with reference
neither to the history of the place nor to the wishes of its citizens.</span></p><p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that
bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish
residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun
caliphate, even eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous
Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified
Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was
begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status
and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against
non-Muslims. Things were not great, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last,
particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in
691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the
holiest site in all of Judaism</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> and things just continued to deteriorate from there. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(To read more about the Pact of Umar, click </span></span><a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-pact-of-umar-regulating-the-status-of-non-muslims-under-muslim-rule"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.)</span></span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine,
a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half
millennia. But although Muslim rule eventually gave way to a long series of foreign
overlords who seized the land and ruled over it for as long as they were able,
the Muslims who came along with the armies of occupation remained in place. And
so were set in place the ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs.</span></p><p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Working all that data yields the semi-astounding
result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians
laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally
defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab
invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of
Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one
stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E.
and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63
B.C.E.</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">That’s a lot of years of
occupation by a wide range of occupiers.</span></p><p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To refer to today’s Palestinians as imperialist
colonizers because their ancestors came to the land as part of an army of
occupation thirteen centuries ago—that seems exaggerated</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">: thirteen hundred years is a
long time!</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> But to refer to the Jews of
Israel, whose ancestors have been present in that place not for centuries but
for millennia—that seems even wackier and far less reasonable. I suppose some of
Israel’s enemies must be sincere in their sense of Israel as a force of
occupation, as a last-gasp vestige of European colonialism. But leaving aside
the detail that most Israelis are not of European origin, the notion itself is
simply incorrect. The Land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people
from time immemorial. To argue to the contrary is to ignore history. And
ignoring history is never good policy, not for our own nation and not for
anybody.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> Arabs have
lived in Israel for more than a millennium. But to use that fact to deny the
reasonableness of there being a Jewish state in the Land of Israel is simply an
abuse of history.</span></span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-11596650248849332952023-12-14T08:28:00.001-05:002023-12-14T08:28:30.060-05:00Anti-Judaism Then and Now<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">On Sesame Street, they used to sing a song that challenged young
viewers to decide “which of these things belong together.” The idea was that
the youngsters would be presented with a group of things all but one of which
belonged to the same group. But the trick, of course, was that the specific
nature of the group wasn’t revealed—so the young viewer had to notice that
there were three vegetables on the screen and one piece of fruit, or three
garden tools and a frying pan. You get the idea. All of the things belonged
together but one didn’t. It wasn’t that complicated. But the tune is still
stuck in my head and I don’t think I’ve heard the song in at least thirty
years. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In the grown-up world, there are also all sorts of groups made up
of things that are presented as “belonging together.” Some are obvious and
indisputable. But others are far more iffy.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Languages, for example, are in the first category. Danish,
Japanese, Laotian, and Yiddish all belong in the same group; each is an
artificial code devised by a specific national or ethnic group to label the
things of the world. You really can compare the Japanese word for apple with
the Danish word because both really are the same thing: a sound unrelated in
any organic way to the thing it denotes that a specific group of people have
decided to use nonetheless to denote that thing. Languages are all codes, all
artificial</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, and </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">all each other’s equals. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The world’s languages, therefore,</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> really are each other’s equivalents</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Other groups, not so much. Religion comes right to mind in that
regard: we regularly refer to the world’s religions as each other’s
equivalents, but is that really so? In what sense, truly, is Judaism the Jewish
version of Hinduism or Buddhism? Is Chanukah the Jewish Christmas? Is the New
Testament the Christian version of the Koran in the same sense that the Danish
word for cherry is the Danish version of the French word </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">for </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that same thing?
You see what I mean: the notion that the religions of the world are each
other’s equivalents hardly makes any sense at all.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But what about prejudice</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">s of various sorts</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">? Are racism and homophobia each other’s equivalents,
distinguished only by the target of the bigot’s irrational dislike? Are sexism
and ageism the same thing, only different</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> with respect to the specific being
discriminated against</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">? And where does
anti-Semitism, with its weird medial capital letter and its off-base etymology
(because it denotes discrimination against Jews, not other Semites), where does
anti-Semitism fit in? Is it the same as other forms of discrimination,
differing only with respect to the target? </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I suppose my readers know why this has been on my mind lately. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Last week I wrote about that grotesque congressional hearing in
which the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of
higher learning, including two of the so-called Ivies, could not bring
themselves to label the most extreme form of anti-Semitism there is, the
version that calls not for discrimination against Jews but for their actual
murder—they could not bring themselves unequivocally and unambiguously to say
that that </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">calls for genocide directed
against Jews have </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">no place on their
campuses. The president of the University of Pennsylvania paid with her
position for her unwillingness to condemn genocide clearly and forcefully. But
hundreds and hundreds of faculty members at Harvard, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious
college, spoke out forcefully in support of their president despite her
unwillingness to say clearly that calling for the murder of Jews is not the
kind of speech that any normal person would imagine to be protected by the
First Amendment. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">At a time when anti-Semitism is surging</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">it strikes me
that treating different versions of prejudice as each other’s equivalent is
probably more harmful an approach than a realistic one. That is what led to the
moral fog that apparently enveloped the leaders of three of our nation’s finest
academies and made them unable simply and plainly to condemn calls for genocide
directed against Jewish people. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I think we should probably begin to deal with this matter in our
own backyard. And to that end, I would like to recommend three books and a
fourth</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> to my readers</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">: the three are “about” anti-Semitism (and each is remarkable in
its own way) and the fourth is a novel that I’ve mentioned many times in these
letters, the one that led me to understand personally what anti-Semitism
actually is and how it can thrive even in the ranks of the highly civilized,
educated, and cultured.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The first book is by the late Rosemary Ruether, known as a
feminist and as a Catholic theologian, but also the author of Faith and
Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, published by Seabury Press
in 1974 and still in print. This was not the first serious study of
anti-Semitism I read—that would have been Léon Poliakoff’s </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">four-volume work, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The History of Anti-Semitism, which also had a formative effect on
my adolescent self. But Ruether’s book was different: less about anti-Semitism
itself and more about the way that anti-Jewish prejudice was such a basic part
of the theological worldview of so many of the most formative Christian authors
that the task of eliminating it from Western culture would require a </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">repudiation of some of the basic tenets set
forth by some of the most famous early </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Christian</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
authors</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. I was stunned by her book when I read it:
stunned, but also truly challenged. In think, even, that my decision to
specialize in the history of the early Church as one of my sub-specialties when
I completed by doctorate in ancient Judaism was a function of reading that book
and needing—and wanting—to know these texts (and, through them, their authors)
personally and up close. Jewish readers—or any readers—concerned about
anti-Semitism could do a lot worse than to start with Ruether’s book.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And from there I’d go on to David Nirenberg’s book, Anti-Judaism:
The Western Tradition, published by W.W. Norton in 2013. This too is something
anyone even marginally concerned about anti-Semitism in the world should read. The
book is not that long, but it is rich and exceptionally thought-provoking; its
author describes his thesis clearly in one sentence, however: “Anti-Judaism
should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices
of Western thought,” but rather as one of the “basic tools with which that
edifice was constructed.” Using detailed, thoughtful, and deliberate prose,
Nirenberg lays out his argument that Western civilization rests on a foundation
of anti-Judaism so deeply embedded in the Western psyche as to make it possible
for people who have doctorates from Harvard to feel uncertain about condemning
genocide—the ultimate anti-Semitic gesture—unequivocally and forcefully. This
would be a good book too for every Jewish citizen—and for all who consider
themselves allies of the Jewish people—to read and take to heart. Anti-Judaism
is deeply engrained in Western culture. To eradicate it—even temporarily, let
alone permanently—will require a serious realignment of Western values and
beliefs. Can it be done? Other features of Western culture have fallen away
over the centuries, so I suppose </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">it
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">can be. But how to</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> accomplish such a feat</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—th</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">e
best ideas</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> will come from people </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">who have read </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">books like Nirenberg’s and tak</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">en</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> them to heart.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And the final book I would like to recommend is James Carroll’s, Constantine’s
Sword: The Church and the Jews, published by Mariner Books in 2001. The author,
a former Roman Catholic priest, makes a compelling argument that the roots of
anti-Semitism are to be found in the basic Christian belief that the redemption
of the world will follow the conversion of the world’s Jews to Christianity. I
was surprised when I read the book by a lot of things, but not least how
convincingly the author presses his argument that the belief that the
redemption of the world is being impeded by the phenomenon of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">stubborn </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jews refusing to abandon Judaism is the soil in which all Western
anti-Semitism is rooted. It’s an easier book to read than either Ruether’s or
Nirenberg’s—written more for a lay audience and clearly intended by its author
to be a bestseller, which it indeed became</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">—but no less an interesting and enlightening one</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So that is my counsel for American Jews feeling uncertain how to
respond to this surge of anti-Semitic incidents on our nation’s streets and
particularly on the campuses of even our most prestigious universities. Read
these books. Learn the history that is, even today, legitimizing anti-Jewish
sentiments even among people who themselves are not sufficiently educated to
understand what is motivating their feelings about Jews and about Judaism. None
of these reads will be especially pleasant. But all will be stirring and inspiring.
And from understanding will come, perhaps, a path forward. Any physician will
tell you that even the greatest doctor has to know what’s wrong with a patient
before attempting to initiate the healing process. Perhaps that is what is
needed now: not </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">rallies
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">or White House dinner</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">s (or not </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">just </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">those
things)</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, but a slow, painstaking analysis of where
this all is coming from and an equally well-thought-out plan for combatting
anti-Jewish prejudice rooted in the nature of the beast we would all like to
see </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">fenced in, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">tamed</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">,</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> and then ultimately slain.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And the novel? My go-to piece of Jewish literature, André Schwarz-Bart’s
The Last of the Just, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">was
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">published in Stephen Becker’s English
translation by Athenaeum in 1960, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">just
one </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">year after the publication of the French
original. A novel that spans a full millennium, the book traces the history of
a single Jewish family, the Levys, and tells the specific story of the
individual member of the family </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">in
each generation </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">who </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">serves as one </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">of the thirty-six just people for whose sake the world exists. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The book begins
in eleventh century England and ends at Auschwitz</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, where the last of the just perishes</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">)</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> I read the book when I was a boy and have returned to it a dozen
times over the years. No book that I can think of explains anti-Semitism from
the inside—from within the bosom of a Jewish family that is defined by the
prejudice directed against it—more intensely, more movingly, or more
devastatingly. This is definitely not a book for children.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> I was probably too young to encounter such a
book when I did, but it is also true that, more than anything else, it was that
book </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that set me on the path that I followed into
adulthood.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> (And that is probably just
as true spiritually and emotionally, as it is professionally.) </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I was too young, perhaps, to process the story correctly. But when
I was done reading even that first time as a sixteen-year-old, I knew what path
I wished to follow. The Last of the Just </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">is not a book I would exactly characterize as
enjoyable reading. But it is riveting, challenging, and galvanizing. To face
the future with courage and resolve, the American Jewish community needs to
look far back into the past so as to understand the challenges it now faces.
And then, armed with that knowledge, to find a path forward into a brighter and
better world. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-65163027723525894832023-12-07T08:16:00.002-05:002023-12-08T08:09:40.766-05:00Chanukah 5784<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To me—and, I suspect, to most (or at least to most decent people
unburdened by prejudice)—</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">it
feels as though </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">we truly have
stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy world this Chanukah</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, an upside-down world</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> in which nothing is </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">quite
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">as it should be. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Just this week, for example, we were treated (and that is
definitely not the right word) to the spectacle of a member of the House of
Representatives, Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), finding it impossible—even
when being broadcast to the nation on CNN—unequivocally to condemn the brutal
rape of Jewish women, the sordid and truly horrifying details of which are only
now becoming common knowledge. Yes, Representative Jayapal </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">generously </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">allowed, rape is “horrific.” But in the context of the October 7
Pogrom, what we really need to bring to our appraisal of unspeakably grotesque
violence directly specifically against women is, and I quote, “balance.” So
that was one indication, at least to me, that we have departed from a world of
normalcy (i.e., one in which a member of the U.S. government can feel confident
that she won’t lose any votes by speaking out unequivocally against rape) and
entered an Orwellian fairyland in which rape elicits, not blanket condemnation,
but a call for a </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">even-handedness,
for </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">balance</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, for let’s-consider-the-feelings-of-the-rapist-too-ism</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. If Representative Jayapal’s mother had one of the women repeatedly
violated and/or killed (and many were apparently both) on October 7, would she
feel the same way? Or if </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">her
daughter </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">had been? Readers can feel free to answer that
question for themselves.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And then we had the spectacle of U.N. Women (also known as the Entity
for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), the website of which defines
its role as an organization devoted to upholding women’s human rights and to
working to ensure that “every woman and girl lives up to her full potential,”
having nothing at all to say about October 7 for eight long weeks, at the end
of which it issued a strange statement announcing that it was “alarmed” by the
accounts of rape and violence directed specifically against women on October 7.
I don’t know, maybe </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">it’s
just me—but verified stories of men—beasts, really—</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">brutally violating and then beheading women feels </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">as though it </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">should elicit something marginally stronger than “alarm” </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from an
organization whose entire </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">raison d’être </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">has to do with the defense of women. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have to say, though, that the U.N. Women did accomplish something
with their silence (and then </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">with
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">their timid, equivocal statement) and, at
that, something I would have thought impossible: they have made me think even
less of the United Nations than I did</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> even just a few months ago</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. And, believe me, that is no small accomplishment.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And then, as if </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">all
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that w</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ere</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">n’t enough, we
had the spectacle of the presidents of some of America’s most prestigious
universities appearing before the House Committee on Education and the
Workforce </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">earlier this week </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">trying to explain how their schools can </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">have </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">descended so far into an abyss of prejudice and immorality that</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, as their school’s leaders,</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> they fe</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">lt</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> unable unequivocally to condemn calls for the wholesale murder of
Jews. When asked if calling for the genocide of the Jewish people does or
doesn’t constitute bullying or harassment according to the University of
Pennsylvania’s code of conduct, for example, the president of the University,
Professor M. Elizabeth Magill, herself had to be bullied into admitting that,
yes, calling for the slaughter of Jews could be interpreted as “harassment.”
Admittedly, the presidents did describe all they were doing to make their
Jewish students feel safe and to banish anti-Semitic activity from their
campuses. They sounded sincere too, as I’m sure they were. It’s just that they
appeared not to feel that calling for the eradication of Israel and the
annihilation of its millions of Jewish citizens rose to the level of
anti-Semitism. It’s really hard to know what to say.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> I wonder if they Jews of Warsaw or Vilna would
have used the word “harassment” to describe their treatment at the hands of the
Nazis. Readers can feel free to answer that question for themselves as well.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And that brings me to Chanukah, our annual festival of resisting
tyranny and asserting the simple right of Jewish people to live as they wish
and where they wish, to pursue their religious goals without being pestered by
outsiders who find their rituals annoying or offensive, and to feel uninhibited
about supporting their fellow Jews in the lands of our dispersion and in
Israel. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The story of the Maccabees is far more complex than most people
realize and far more interesting. In the end, though, what Chanukah is about is
the natural right of Jewish people to chart their own course forward through
history. Yes, it is true, that the “real” reason King Antiochus sent his army
to Israel in the 160s BCE was to support one </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">side </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">in what was about to degenerate into a true civil war. And it is
also true that the anti-Jewish edicts that we all have heard about in the
context of the Maccabean revolt were instituted specifically to support the
Hellenizers who wished to abandon rituals out of step with Greek culture and to
embrace the institutions which, even today, are considered the hallmarks of
Greek culture at its finest. All that is true.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But it is also true that the Maccabean Revolt was about the right
of the Jews of Israel to work out their disputes, to reach reconciliation on
their own, and to live in peace. The world was no less a dangerous place in
ancient times than it is today. There were always enemies at the gate, always
powerful nations eager to tamp down </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the Jews’ natural yearning for </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">autonomy to serve </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">their
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">own nationalistic ends. Hamas’s wish for
Israel to vanish (and its Jewish citizens to vanish along with it) is not </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">something new at all</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, but </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">merely
the latest recrudescence of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">a recurring theme
in Jewish history. We go through different eras, we Jews. Sometimes the world
is accepting, but other times brutally hostile.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> Sometimes, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">our foes wish us to vanish by adopting other faiths</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, but other times simply to vanish </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">utterly from the world.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> And sometimes</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> we are awarded the right to exist </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">only </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">if we </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">agree
not to </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">annoy the neighbors by asserting our right to
self-defense or to self-determination. It’s always something!</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But the point of celebrating Chanukah each year is to remember
that, no matter how bleak the horizon, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">defeat is never our </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">only option. Yes, this whole Jewish thing </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">seems at times (at times!) to rest on a
foundation of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">anxiety and ill
ease regarding the future. But that’s just who we are. It’s what the world has
made us into. And yet we persevere, moving ahead into the future possessed of
the conviction that we can survive, that we will survive.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We have all stepped through the looking glass just lately into a
topsy-turvy world in which governmental agencies, university presidents, and at
least some members of Congress feel unable unequivocally to condemn rape and
murderous brutality directed against innocents as though doing so would somehow
be unfair to the rapists and brutal murderers. How to fix that, I have no idea.
But I plan to light my candles each night of the holiday and to focus on the
second of the blessings we recite before doing so, the one in which we
acknowledge that God wrought miracles for our ancestors at this time of the
year in ancient times</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
and, in so doing, to affirm my faith in the possibility of miracles even in our
own day</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. The Maccabees should have lost. They were a
tiny fighting force of untrained guerillas going up against a mighty army made
up of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">endless platoons </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">of well-trained soldiers. But God was good…and the Maccabees
defeated their foes. So may the foes of the Jewish people be eradicated in our
day! <i>Amen, ken yehi ratzon</i></span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">!</span></span><o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-33390134560774078242023-11-30T08:52:00.002-05:002023-11-30T08:52:32.846-05:00A Confirmed Verticalist<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As I’ve read op-ed after op-ed by people, including Jewish people,
who seem to understand the events of October 7 totally differently than I
myself do, it finally struck me to wonder why precisely that is. Some are just misinformed,
which category includes people who are naively getting their information online
from openly biased sources all too eager to exploit their </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">readers’ </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ignorance. And others are being guided</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> forward, I think, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">by the siren opportunity to express their basic anti-Semitism in a
way that makes it feel marginally more acceptable by hiding it behind the </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">diaphanous </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">veil of anti-Israelism. But still others, I think, are guided in
their analyses not by prejudice or ignorance, but by a worldview that
preferences the horizontal over the vertical. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">There are basically two ways to understand any specific event:
horizontally and vertically. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">When confronted with an event</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">,</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> and challenged
to explain and evaluate that event, horizontalists look from side to side to
determine how they can fit the event under consideration into the wide world of
similar events. So they s</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">aw</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> the IDF massed at the border of Gaza and, when the moment was
finally right, they saw them crossing that border in pursuit of some of their
nation’s most fiendish enemies. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">That
much, we all saw. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But then </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">horizontalist, instead of asking themselves </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">how</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
this can have happened, ask themselves instead </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">what</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
this is like</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. And then, having framed the issue that way, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">a </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">key to
interpreting the event presents itself easily. After all, it’s not like there’s
any lack of nations </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">throughout
history </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that have sent their armies across the border
into neighboring lands. Some instances of cross-border invasion are known to
all: Russia crossing the border to invade Ukraine in 2014 and then again last
year</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, for example. Or</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. Or </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the Soviet Union invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others instances
of one country invading another were once common knowledge but have by now been
forgotten by most: the American invasion of Panama in 1989, for example, or of
Grenada in 1983. And still other instances of cross-border invasion have become
mere curiosities known these days more or less solely to historians of such
things. The Brazilian invasion of Bolivia in 1903 in the context of the
now-forgotten-by-all so-called “Acre War” would be a good example. And so would
the British invasion of Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, in 1795</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, just one </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">year after the one in which </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">France </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">invaded Holland as part of the so-called French Revolutionary
Wars.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">There are lots of other examples</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, too</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. Most feature one nation ignoring the sovereignty of some
contiguous or not contiguous other nation and then sending troops across the
border </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">into that other nation </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to wrest control from the locals and make the occupied territory
part of the invading nation’s plan for its own future. I have omitted to
mention the invasion of eleven different countries by Germany following the
invasion of Poland in 1939, but those terrible stories</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> are interpretable along similar lines. And,
indeed, w</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">hen a powerful nation invades a less powerful
one, the point is almost always to impose the will of the stronger upon the
weaker…and almost never to restore power to the people of the invaded nation.
(That happens, of course: the invasion by Allied Forces of Nazi-occupied Europe
would be the obvious example.) But, somehow, when </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">horizontalists </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">think of one nation invading another, it’s never to examples like
that that </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">their </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">minds wander, but always, or almost always, to instances of
powerful nations seeking to dominate less powerful ones. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And it is for that reason that opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza
feels so right to so many. Here is the powerful nation of Israel with its
mighty armed forces, its powerful arsenal of advanced weaponry, and its
formidable military prowess invading a strip of land less than one-third the
size of greater Los Angeles that is ruled over by a governing body that has no
air force, no navy, no regular army, and no nuclear weapons. How is that
different from China invading Tibet in 1910? </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that is the path
of horizontalism: you take an event and then, taking a good look around, you compare
it to similar events to the east and the west, to the north and the south. You
set the situation under consideration into the context of similar situations in
other places and draw whatever parallels seem fair. And then, having
contextualized the event in a way that feels reasonable, you</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> feel more than entitled to your opinion</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I am, however, not a horizontalist, but a verticalist.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> I look back, not around.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> When I see film clips or hear descriptions by eye-witnesses of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jewish </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">people being murdered in their beds, of grown women and teenaged
girls being raped, of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jewish
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">children being dragged from their homes and
taken hostage by marauding foes intent not on making some sort of dramatic
statement about their own vision of the future but, far more simply, on killing
as many Jews as possible in as many vicious and brutal ways as time will
allow—my mind doesn’t wander to Ceylon or Bolivia, but directly to Kovno, to Lviv,
to Vienna, and to my grandparents</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> town in Poland, the </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">remaining
</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jews of which place were all murdered on the
same day in 1942 after having been dragged from their homes and marched to
their </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">common </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">grave.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Because I have spent my life reading books relating to Jewish
history, my verticalism goes a long way down and that is the context in which I
evaluate the events of October 7: looking specifically Jewish history</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to find the
correct context in which to evaluate the events</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> under consideration</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In 1963, Salo Wittmayer Baron, probably the greatest Jewish
historian of the twentieth century, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">published </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">an essay called “Newer Emphases in Jewish History” </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">in the journal called </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Jewish Social Studies</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
in</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> which he came out forcefully against what he
contemptuously labelled “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” by which
expression he meant the way of retelling the history of the Jewish people as an
endless series of lurches from one catastrophe to the next, from disaster to
expulsion to persecution to ghettoization to genocide. The core concept of this
theory, which Baron attributed ultimately to the work of Heinrich Graetz (who
is widely recognized as the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century),
is the Jew as </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the
eternal </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">object </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">and never the </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">subject, as the eternally acted-upon party and never </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">as </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the actor, as the
eternal victim of persecution who spends the days of a lifetime hoping that no
one does anything bad to them. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">(</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For an interesting evaluation of Baron’s theory by Professor Adam
Teller of Brown University, click </span></span><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ajs-review/article/revisiting-barons-lachrymose-conception-the-meanings-of-violence-in-jewish-history/2ACA85264350A0E96FD8CEEA19351151"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.) </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have read all eighteen volumes of Baron’s masterwork, A Social
and Religious History of the Jews. I highly recommend the experience</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. I</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">t will</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, however,</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> take a while to get through (and you’ll have to assemble a full
set book by book from various on-line sites), but the gain will more than
justify the time spent reading: this is one of the single greatest works of
Jewish scholarship ever written, a work of true genius. Of course, I get the
point that Jews have surely been actors and not only the acted-upon parties in
the course of Jewish history. But even if that is correct, which it is, the
lachrymose thing is still very resonant with me: the history of the Jews
outside of Israel really can be characterized as a never-ending series of
nightmarish disasters,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of pogroms and
auto-da-fés, of deportation and expulsion. Yes, there was more to it than that.
But there was also that. And that is the baggage I </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">bring </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">with me as I approach October 7.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And t</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">hat is why I see it my way and so many others, theirs. For me, it
is not possible to think about the wanton murder of Jewish children, including
babies, without my mind going directly to Treblinka</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> or </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to Sobibor</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> or </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to Belzec. I
cannot imagine Jewish families annihilated en masse without my mind going
directly to Babyn Yar. I cannot read about parents being shot in their own
children’s presence without the full horror of what I know of the Shoah as the
backdrop to the scene currently at centerstage.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
that isn’t all that comes to mind. Also in my thoughts constantly these days is
the fact that </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">there was no IDF
in 1943, let alone in 1648 and 1649 when Cossacks murdered hundreds of
thousands of Jews across Ukraine</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
or in 1171 when the locals rounded up the Jews of Blois in France and killed every
single one of them</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. There was no
Jewish state for stateless Jews to flee to when they were expelled from Spain
in 1492 or from Portugal in 1496, let alone from England in 1290 or from Hungary
in 1360</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And there was no Israel on the map to speak out in the forum of
nations on behalf of the Jews of the Rhineland merciless massacred by Crusaders
in the eleventh century or on behalf of the Jews of France during the Second and
Third Crusades during </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the
course of </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the twelfth. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We were, basically, on our own</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> in the lands of our dispersion</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">: </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">on
our own </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to cower in the cellar and hope not to be
noticed, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">on our own </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to pray for safety, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">on
our own </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">to hope for the best. And it is </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">why I am a confirmed verticalist when it comes
to events like the October 7<sup>th</sup> pogrom: maybe I’ve just had enough of
facing the future on our own and embracing the “hope for the best” thing as a
thoughtful plan forward. </span></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-26601689876663803252023-11-30T08:51:00.001-05:002023-11-30T08:51:19.501-05:00Thanksgiving 2023<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><a name="_Hlk4053497"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">As I’ve written many times in this space, Thanksgiving is my
favorite American holiday. I have only the happiest childhood memories of the
holiday, most of them featuring my mother’s family gathered around my
grandmother’s dining room table in her apartment on Eighty-Fourth Street in
Bensonhurst. And I have nice memories of the earlier part of those
Thanksgivings as well, the several hours that my mother and her sister, my Aunt
Ruth, would work with my grandmother in her kitchen preparing the meal while my
father and my Uncle Herb were assigned to amusing me (or, as my mother would
have said, “doing something with me”) while the womenfolk did their thing in
the kitchen. (Holiday roles were distinctly gender-specific in our family back
then.) And so we’d go for a walk in the neighborhood, usually wandering down
Bay Parkway or along Eighty-Sixth Street to see what was going on in the
neighborhood or, in the last years of my grandmother’s life, to check on how
much progress had been made on the Verrazzano Bridge, then just being built. Those
were happy times and even now, after all these years, I remember them fondly
and gratefully.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have other nice memories as well, for example the one featuring
my late mother-in-law organizing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her new
American son-in-law when we came to visit Toronto in the first year of our
marriage. (The only strange part was that Joan’s mother had somehow come to
think that part of the fun involved actually dressing up as Pilgrims, to which minhag
she dutifully nodded by buying a kind of white cap that seemed to her to suggest
seventeenth-century New England and then wearing it at the table.) I was beyond
touched by the whole thing and, even to this day, the memory of my first
Thanksgiving outside of these United States remains one of the nicest of them
all. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have other nice memories too—our strange ex-pat Thanksgivings in
Germany, for example, featuring roast chicken since there simply were no kosher
turkeys for purchase anywhere in the Federal Republic, at least not as far as I
could see—but that was all then. And this is now. Tradition bids us gather
around our dining room tables and speak openly about our sense of thanksgiving,
of gratitude, of appreciation for the bounty of the world. It shouldn’t be that
complicated: we actually do all benefit from the bounteous earth and from the
wealth of natural resources with which our nation has been blessed. And yet
what Jewish soul can give him- or herself over to the “normal” sense of
uncomplicated thankfulness the holiday exists to engender while so many
hundreds—including babies, including a newborn, including little children—are
being held captive by a fiendish and barbarous enemy that has shown no sign—or
at least no public sign—of being willing to return these innocents to their
families and to their homes.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Or is that the wrong way to approach the issue? Joan and I are
going to have Thanksgiving at our home, as we always do. (I am writing this
before the holiday although you will read it the day following.) One of our
children, our son Emil, will be in Boston for the holiday with his husband Adam
and their baby. (Adam is from Boston, which is where his mother still lives.)
But our other children will be with us, as will also be our son-in-law’s
parents and a friend of our older son Max who has no other place to go. So we will
have a full house. I can already see the scene in my mind’s eye. The table will
be set beautifully. Four of our five grandchildren will be present. As I contemplate
what this week will yet bring, I feel overcome with the thought that gratitude
is not merely being happy you have some specific thing you have in your life.
It’s much more complicated than that, I realize—and has more to do with the
fragility that inheres in life than with just being pleased with the things you’ve
acquired over the years. My heart aches constantly these days for the hostages
held by Hamas, but particularly for the children and for the babies, for those
poor souls—some not even old enough fully to understand what has befallen them,
some almost definitely unaware of the fate of their families, all but the
babies no doubt terrified of what every next hour might bring. But I know
enough of Jewish history—more than enough, actually—to understand that their
story is not about some tragedy that befell them out of nowhere, but rather
about the nature of Jewish life, about the precariousness that inheres in
Jewishness itself.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We live our lives on a razor’s blade, all of us. The world is
awash in cruelty, in prejudice, in savagery. And things can change on a dime:
the anti-Semitism our Jewish students are facing on America’s college campuses,
for example, would have been unimaginable for most of us even just a few years
ago, let alone when I myself was in college. And yet here we are in a world in
which a credible death threat against Jewish students in one our most
prestigious Ivy League universities actually led to the arrest the other week
of someone who apparently actually was planning to kill Jewish people. All of
this, we all know.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So the real question is how to respond to it. With worry,
certainly. And with action and not just words, just as certainly—Joan and I
went to Washington last week specifically to be present on the Mall when almost
5% of Jewish America gathered to support Israel. But there’s a spiritual part
of this as well and that is the part that coincides, at least emotionally for
me, with Thanksgiving. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I know that when I look out at my table on Thursday, I will be
seized, at least at first, with anxiety, with uncertainty born on my inability
to know what the future will bring to all the assembled. (I know myself at
least that well.) But my plan is to deal with that ill ease by summoning up a
sense of deep, abiding gratitude to God for the gifts that the holiday will
have put right before my eyes. My home. Joan. My children. My children-in-law.
My grandchildren. All of us gathered under one roof, all of us safe and sound,
all of us well-fed and relaxed, all of us together. </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have responded to October 7 in many different ways. I have lost
track of how many emails I’ve sent to our senators, to our (so far
still-seated) representative in the House, to the President himself, all of
them expressing my hope that the United States will never waver in its support
for Israel. Joan and I keep sending checks out as well—to the FIDF and to the
American Friends of the Magen David Adom, but also to other, less well-known
charities doing things in Israel on a smaller scale for displaced families, for
bereaved families, and especially for the families of the hostages. But on
Thanksgiving, I plan to respond emotionally and spiritually to the challenge of
the day not by becoming angry or anxious, but by allowing myself to be filled
to overflowing with gratitude to God for the gifts that will be right there
before me. I plan to look out at my family, at my people, and despite
everything I know of the world—despite everything I know of Jewish history, despite
all I’ve read and learned about the history of anti-Semitism, despite all of it—to
allow myself to be filled with the deepest sense of gratitude for the moment and
for all that that moment will be capable of suggesting about the future.</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p><br /></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-83627617360212916932023-11-16T09:08:00.001-05:002023-11-16T09:08:26.542-05:00Tuesday on the Mall<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I rarely write
about our nation’s press and news media outlets, but sometimes you just don’t
know whether to laugh or to cry. Or both. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The front page of
Wednesday’s New York Times website made no reference at all to the gigantic
pro-Israel demonstration in Washington. It was mentioned, however, in “The
Morning,” a daily news summary that the Times sends out to people like myself
who subscribe to it, where the text reads, and I quote, “Tens of thousands
joined a rally at the National Mall in Washington in support of Israel.” Tens
of thousands? Any reasonable reader might wonder how many tens exactly. You
can’t find out by clicking on the link, however: that leads to a story that is
buried somewhere in the bowels of the website (and not visible to people who
“just” type </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">www.nytimes.com</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> into their
browsers to see what’s on today’s front page) which—I have to assume
intentionally—merely repeats that “tens of thousands” had converged on the
Mall, adding the helpful information that neither the U.S. Parks Department nor
the Metropolitan Police Department provided any estimate of the size of the
crowd. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Well, I was
there. So was Joan. So were, by most estimates, something like 290,000 other
people. Some estimated the crowd as over 300,000. Would any reputable newspaper
refer to a number like that as “tens of thousands”? That’s something like
saying that a new Rolls Royce costs “hundreds of dollars.” Yes, the price of a
new Rolls is definitely some multiple of 100. (I just checked: the average
price of a new Rolls is $435,000, or about 4350 hundreds of dollars.) But no
one would reference the price of a Rolls that way and the Times should be
ashamed of itself for going to such bizarre lengths to avoid saying just how
many people its crackerjack reporters—a team so endlessly willing uncritically
to <i>estimate </i>civilian casualties in Gaza based on information provided by
Hamas—how many people its crackerjack reporters <i>estimated</i> were there on
the Mall on Tuesday. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Okay, now that I
have that off my chest I can write about the rally itself. Oddly described (in
the Times and elsewhere, but for no obvious reason) as “a march,” the rally
featured no one marching anywhere at all, just people in massive numbers
gathering and staying put on the National Mall, the gigantic park space that
stretches in our nation’s capital from the Capitol to the east and the
Washington Monument to the west. The crowd was so large that we chose
voluntarily to stay towards the back where there were gigantic television
screens broadcasting the speakers and singers who were speaking and performing
at the far eastern end of the Mall—where only invited guests with special blue
bracelets could go. So we were fine with that—I’m not a huge fan of crowds and
was more than happy just to be present in that place without needing to be all
the way up front—and were content to hang back.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-Zf-ZFDgO6DNye5X8W8xEdKsgvrW3mrCxH0Opdtlsk8DGK5-gNakkoDLyPFYyZlYcBXL4-CMPECB0PDNdduqo44_TXO7JEH40Mc3GUq0Foxk9dYghEVoRbXgpRY2EgMDA2-W4IKVJgs_E3H__v1yKtOCCRMW-AAAorhN1c4cdmcK_tSi4fyxmNNObjk/s583/Israel%20Demonstration%20on%20the%20Washington%20Mall%2011-14-23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="583" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-Zf-ZFDgO6DNye5X8W8xEdKsgvrW3mrCxH0Opdtlsk8DGK5-gNakkoDLyPFYyZlYcBXL4-CMPECB0PDNdduqo44_TXO7JEH40Mc3GUq0Foxk9dYghEVoRbXgpRY2EgMDA2-W4IKVJgs_E3H__v1yKtOCCRMW-AAAorhN1c4cdmcK_tSi4fyxmNNObjk/s320/Israel%20Demonstration%20on%20the%20Washington%20Mall%2011-14-23.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p>The speakers were
a strange mix: some A-list politicians (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson,
but not President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell), some much less well-known types (Republican Senator Joni Earnst of
Iowa, for example, or Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada), some Israeli
singers I personally hadn’t ever heard of (but also Matisyahu, whom I at least had
heard of), and a strange sprinkling of Hollywood types like Debra Messing and
Tovah Feldshuh, whose presence at the podium seemed to baffle most of the
people in my immediate area. There were also a large number of
relatives—including parents and siblings—of the hostages being held in Gaza.
The parents of Omer Neutra, a lone soldier from Plainview who graduated the
Schechter School of Long Island in 2019, were front and center to demand the
release of all the hostages being held by Hamas. As they surely well deserved
to be and needed to be.</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Several speakers
stood out in my opinion, though, and, first among them, Democratic
Representative from the Bronx Ritchie Torres who spoke, I thought, remarkably
forcefully and clearly, calling unequivocally on Israel, and I quote, “to do to
Hamas what America did to ISIS in the twenty-first century and what America did
to the Nazis in the twentieth century.” That matches my sentiment exactly, so
it was very satisfying to hear an ally generally identified as a progressive
speaking so forthrightly and clearly on Israel’s behalf.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Next, I would
like to mention Deborah Lipstadt, United States Special Envoy for Monitoring
and Combatting Anti-Semitism. I’ve heard her speak before and I read with great
interest and respect her 2019 book, <i>Anti-Semitism: Here and Now</i>, as well
as her biography of Golda Meir and her 2011 analysis of the Eichmann Trial
called just that, <i>The Eichmann Trial</i>. In her remarks on the mall, she
spoke forcefully and clearly about the link between anti-Israelism and
anti-Semitism. Because of her status as a senior official in the Biden
Administration, her presence was especially important. And she could not have spoken
more eloquently or more forcefully on Israel’s behalf. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Natan Sharansky
spoke from Jerusalem via video hook-up, as did Isaac Herzog, the President of
Israel. (President Herzog said he was speaking from the Kotel, but it looked as
though his spectral presence must have been somehow suspended above it since
there were no people visible on the ground and the giant stone blocks of the
Kotel were weirdly visible through the president’s diaphanous body.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I was
particularly interested in hearing the Reverend John C. Hagee speak. That he
was invited at all surprised me—here is a super-conservative type who has made
dozens of statements opposing women’s reproductive rights, the civil rights of
LGBTQ people, and the right of American children to attend public schools in
which they are not encouraged, including not even subtly, to embrace the
Reverend’s own faith as their own. And yet, despite all the reasons he
shouldn’t have been there, there he was. He spoke forcefully and clearly. He
prayed aloud that God bless the State of Israel. He declared himself and his
followers to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people” and noted
that, in the current conflict, “there is no middle ground. You are either for
the Jewish people or you’re not.” And, sounding fully sincere (at least to me),
he noted that “if a line has to be drawn,” then the world should “draw that
line around both Christians and Jews, because we are one.” So that was all
good. But it begs the question of what to do with allies who speak out
forcefully for good with respect to Israel, who raises gigantic sums of money
for Israel (about $100 million and only rising), but who support so much of
what most of Israel’s most fervent American supporters abhor. I came away
unsure how I felt: impressed that he came, pleased that he spoke so forcefully
and so unambiguously about his support for Israel and the degree to which he
feels that all Christians should be fully supportive of Israel’s efforts to
annihilate Hamas in Gaza…and yet not at all ready to say that we should <i>just
</i>look past the Reverend’s many abhorrent remarks with respect to so much
that we believe to be right and just. I suppose I give the man a pass for the
moment: he came, he spoke forcefully and forthrightly, he didn’t mention any
topic except Israel, and then he sat down without abusing his invitation to
speak.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The crowd was
interesting in its own right: lots of regular-looking Jewish people (some with <i>yarmulkes
</i>on their heads but most without), some super-Orthodox-looking types (but
nowhere near enough, at least not in my opinion, given their actual numbers),
some quirky sub-groups (Iranians for Israel was probably my favorite), some
pro-Israel Christian groups (mostly behaving respectfully, some not so much),
and pro-Zionist LGBTQ people draped in rainbow flags emblazoned with huge Stars
of David. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ImpPqv7CQ3PLg88q_GusE-pacILlZaiqNFuotlE08IQdlaz33odxD2Av-YpJdy0IfxEyjTaevLZrRVs5nD1w7UH6zzBIBauKWiKMGw9q4wHR9GNxkbZJ4V1V5-y_MTWHBjEUfGlmEmLsIR341tnm-Ut1J9YZo2iyLIWt0exncsdGjWs117tqoynuGFw/s463/Israel%20Demonstration%20on%20the%20Washington%20Mall%2011-14-23%20(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="318" data-original-width="463" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ImpPqv7CQ3PLg88q_GusE-pacILlZaiqNFuotlE08IQdlaz33odxD2Av-YpJdy0IfxEyjTaevLZrRVs5nD1w7UH6zzBIBauKWiKMGw9q4wHR9GNxkbZJ4V1V5-y_MTWHBjEUfGlmEmLsIR341tnm-Ut1J9YZo2iyLIWt0exncsdGjWs117tqoynuGFw/s320/Israel%20Demonstration%20on%20the%20Washington%20Mall%2011-14-23%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Tuesday’s rally
appears to have been the largest ever gathering of American Jews and could
conceivably have brought together almost a full five percent of the entire
Jewish population of the nation. And so let me wrap up by saying what Tuesday’s
rally meant to me both as a Jew <i>and </i>as an American.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We all pay lip
service to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the power that
inheres in those freedoms is rarely something we experience personally. The
right to speak out, the right to assemble without interference, the right to
protest…and to be protected by the authorities while protesting, the right to
insist that public officials listen when people speak out—all those are things
we learn about in high school and then mostly don’t think much about. And yet there
we all were, all of us together and united and expressing ourselves as one
without anyone having needed a permit to show up or a license to speak out. I
don’t suppose high-school-me could have imagined about-to-retire me on the Mall
last Tuesday embodying all those rights we had to memorize for the American
History Regents exam. But there I was. And there Joan also was. Both of us were
proud and happy to stand up for Israel and to be two among many, many others
united in their disinclination to remain silent when Israel is under attack.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-11650333161740522502023-11-09T08:30:00.002-05:002023-11-09T08:30:53.412-05:00A Kishenev Moment<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yesterday was the 85</span><sup style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif;">th</sup><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> anniversary
of Kristallnacht, the Reich-wide pogrom in 1938 that signaled to the world that
the Nazis were not going to settle back into being armchair anti-Semites who
expressed their loathing for Jews through hate-inspired rhetoric and
discriminatory legislation, but were going to morph forward into becoming brutal,
barbarous killers for whom there would eventually be no bottom line at all when
it came to attacking Jews or defaming Judaism. The numbers say it all. 267
synagogues were burnt to the ground in the course of that unimaginable night. Over
7000 Jewish businesses, including both family-owned shops and giant department
stores, were damaged, looted, or utterly destroyed. Over thirty thousand</span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jewish
men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the fig leaf of some sort of
phony indictment accusing the incarcerated of having committed some sort of
crime not </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">even </i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">bothered with. Hundreds were murdered or prompted by the
pogrom to take their own lives. The die was cast. Millennia of Jewish life in
Germany and Austria were at their end. Other than for those able somehow to
escape at the very last moment, there would be no future at all, not even a
difficult or unpleasant one, for the Jews of the Reich.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We have not forgotten any of this. Nor has the
eventual adoption of Yom Hashoah as the annual memorial day for the six million
Jewish victims of Nazi anti-Semitism made it feel superfluous to mark the
anniversary of Kristallnacht each November. Yom Hashoah, which has its own
complicated backstory, ended up as the day on which Jewish people formally
mourn for the martyrs who died <i>al kiddush ha-shem </i>during the Second War.
But Kristallnacht has its point, its own specific contribution to make. And,
indeed, for many of us, Kristallnacht represents <i>not </i>the final debacle,
but the early-on turning point, the moment at which the anti-Semitism which
underlies so much of Western civilization stepped boldly out of the closet and blatantly
shed even the patina of shame that is in theory supposed to attach to race- or
ethnicity-based prejudice in the sophisticated lands of our dispersion, in the
enlightened West, in lands ruled (as was Germany in the 1930s) by leaders
democratically elected by voters fully aware of their platform and program for
the nation. There is something tragic about both Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht,
but whereas Yom Hashoah inspires regret, Kristallnacht inspires dread.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For me personally, the events of October 7 in
the towns and <i>kibbutzim </i>on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border
inspires just that kind of ominous feel that Kristallnacht also awakens, that
sense that a line was crossed, that the fantasy that a reasonable solution
could one day yet be reached with the Hamas leadership was not only a
pipedream, but a malign, dangerous one at that, an example of the kind of illusory
pipedream that leads, at least eventually, to Treblinka, to the slaughter of
innocents, to hell. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And yet the event in Jewish history that I
keep seeing referenced with respect to the Simchat Torah pogrom is not
Kristallnacht at all, but Kishenev. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Today, Kishenev (now called </span><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Chișinău) is the capital of Moldova, a landlocked
Balkan nation wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, and home to almost a full
third of its population. But long before Moldova was an independent nation, Kishenev
was the capital of the Bessarabian Governate in the Russian Empire and home to a
huge Jewish population of about 50,000 (out of a total population of 280,000).
The Jews of Kishinev were neither better nor worse off than any other Jewish
community in eastern Europe: they had business dealings and social dealings
with their neighbors, people with whom they shared a common nationality, a
common language, and a common hometown. But shortly before Easter in 1903,
things began to go off the rails. There were low level anti-Semitic incidents
at first, some violent and others just defamatory. But things escalated quickly
and an out-and-out pogrom began on April 19 of that year. The violence was, at
the time, almost unprecedented. Countless Jewish homes were broken into,
plundered, and destroyed. Synagogues were demolished. Jews were openly attacked
by mobs armed with pitchforks and guns; hundreds of women were raped openly in
the streets. The violence went on for three days and, at the end, about 1500
homes had been destroyed, forty-nine Jewish people had been murdered, and many
hundreds had been seriously wounded. The whole story is told in detail in one
of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time (which is saying a lot): Stanford
University historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s <i>Pogrom: Kishenev and the Tilt
of History</i>, published in 2018 by Liveright Books. The book, which I can
recommend wholeheartedly, is well written and very thoroughly researched.
Intelligent and fully forthright in its account of the terror, the book should
be read—and read carefully—by every single one of the so-called academics on our
nation’s campuses who are willing to be known publicly as supporters of Hamas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It
might be hard for readers familiar with the horrors of the Shoah to take a
pogrom in which <i>only </i>forty-nine people were murdered all that seriously.
(By way of comparison, the Nazis murdered about 15,000 Jews every single day from
August to October in 1942.) And yet the importance of Kishenev lies not so much
in its own detail, but in its aftermath because it served in its day as a wake-up
call that had repercussions and echoes across the entire Jewish world. And that
phenomenon too is chronicled in detail in Professor Zipperstein’s book. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE3CuZo4VyV5MFt00HHnBWe3CFfCGugLEPGVPW6ZkBJqK-0jxniU0DK_nUXTyUKYwTVzt1d3HQB8ZPXK6ThJX8WBwsUxCjphz1ZBlAYPxRYB2CgOFqic9tbichi3xhTIpNtlgRGmimAcVwUR59buUbuIN5eVmLFBja1MJ-UPEHV41xqeaxSsS2-mcfNpw/s617/Steven%20Zipperstein,%20Pogrom%20(Book%20Cover).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="407" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE3CuZo4VyV5MFt00HHnBWe3CFfCGugLEPGVPW6ZkBJqK-0jxniU0DK_nUXTyUKYwTVzt1d3HQB8ZPXK6ThJX8WBwsUxCjphz1ZBlAYPxRYB2CgOFqic9tbichi3xhTIpNtlgRGmimAcVwUR59buUbuIN5eVmLFBja1MJ-UPEHV41xqeaxSsS2-mcfNpw/s320/Steven%20Zipperstein,%20Pogrom%20(Book%20Cover).jpg" width="211" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
sense of powerlessness felt by Jews who had no recourse but to cower in their
own cellars and hide from the miscreants, rapists, and murderers wandering the
streets in search of their next victim was chronicled by many contemporary
authors, but by none as successfully as Hayyim Nachman Bialik in his famous
poem, </span><i style="color: #202122; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Be’ir Ha-hareigah </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">(“In the City of the Killing”), which soon
became his most famous work. Others wrote in a similar vein, focusing not on
the power of the crowd by on the powerlessness of their victims. And, according
to Zipperstein, the combined weight of journalistic accounts, poetic responses,
dramatic representations, and literary retelling led to a sea change in Jewish
attitudes towards the world and the place of Jewish people in it.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And,
indeed, the notion that the Jewish people could only survive in the long term
in a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people—the core concept of
Zionism—moved quickly from an out-there kind of political theory espoused by
some to the kind of basic truism that Jews the world over suddenly found
themselves embracing naturally and easily. Kishenev was thus a kind of a
catalyst moment, a threshold in time over which the Jewish people itself had
somehow stepped…and which could not really be crossed back over again. This was
a sea change in public opinion rooted in the realization that the barbarism of
the Middle Ages—a time when Crusaders routinely and without fear of reprisal
massacred entire Jewish communities and Inquisitors burnt at the stake any
Jewish person deemed not wholeheartedly enough to have abandoned Judaism, that
that level of barbarism was not a thing of the past but a thing fully of the
present. And that triggered a response in the Jewish world that was, so
Zipperstein writes, unprecedented.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">And
that brings me back to October 7, to the Simchat Torah pogrom, to Gaza. I
follow the news incessantly. I suppose we all do. The story has yet to reach
its conclusion, but I’m already sensing that Gaza was a kind of Kishinev moment
for Jewish youth in our nation. The college campuses, once naively imagined by
most (including myself) to be bastions of learning, of dispassionate scholarship,
of culture, and of civilization, have shown themselves—and we are talking about
the biggest and most highly-rated schools in America, these schools have shown
themselves to be cesspits of anti-Semitism staffed by at least some faculty
members morally depraved enough to feel that the murder, mutilation, and rape
of innocents, including children, is a valid mode of political expression. But
the Jewish students in those places are waking up and feeling—some, I’m sure,
for the first time—the danger, the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness
itself, the angst that underlies even the most confident statement of Jewish
self-awareness. They too have crossed a line in the course of these last few
weeks. And that, just as it was in the wake of Kishenev, will have to suffice
as the silver lining in this cloud of unremitting horror stories that we have
all heard and read over these last weeks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Whether
this truly will be a transformational moment for America’s Jewish youth remains
to be seen. But Kishenev, which surely <i>could </i>have ended up as just one
more pogrom on a long list of such events, somehow altered something in the DNA
of the Jewish world. Nothing was the same afterwards. And the rise of Nazism
just a few decades later only made even more evident the fact that, in the end,
hiding from the hooligans and hoping that someone else steps forward to save their
potential victims is not a cogent plan forward. Not for Jews, certainly. But
also not for anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="background: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Professor
Zipperstein’s book is a shocking, bracing, very intelligent study of a single
moment in Jewish history, but one that somehow nonetheless managed to divide
what came before from all that came after. You won’t enjoy the book. No normal
person could. But you will learn a lot from it, as I did. For those struggling
to understand Gaza in the context of Jewish history, I recommend it
wholeheartedly.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-3267664626425219832023-11-02T08:41:00.004-04:002023-11-09T08:33:02.509-05:00What Would Ike Do?<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Anti-Semitism and its alter-ego anti-Israelism
rarely wear the same dress to consecutive balls. Yes, of course, there are
people so blinded by their own hatred that they don’t really care how their
behavior appears to people who disagree with them (and even less than that to
the actual objects of their loathing). But then there are those—and they are
legion—who feel the need to dress up their bigotry and present it, not as
something wicked or depraved, but as something rational and reasonable, even as
something noble.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It's a big closet. There are lots of outfits
to choose from. And the most favored outfit for today’s anti-Semite is
pacifism, the struggle for peace in the world. Who could be against peace? And
yet the constant, and ever-more-shrill, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza come not
from people who support the effort to bring peace to Gaza by eradicating Hamas
(and thus granting the actual Gazans a chance finally to live in peace with the
neighbors), but precisely from those who wish the IDF to withdraw so as to
allow Hamas and its fighters to regroup and plan their next horror-Aktion
against Israeli civilians whose only “crime” is the wish to live openly as
Jewish citizens of the Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people. By
redefining pacifism as a path forward to more numerous, more violent, more
brutal, and more devastating attacks against innocents undertaken by people so
blind with hatred that even Nazi-style barbarism does not feel like a path too
perverse to embrace, such people have truly stepped through the looking glass
into a topsy-turvy universe where nothing is as it seems, where words can mean
what they mean or what they don’t mean depending on the whim of the one
speaking them. When Lewis Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say “When I use a word, it
means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” he expected readers
to laugh at the absurdity of words meaning only what the people speaking them
wish for them to mean. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Adding to the irony is the fact that peace—the
real kind, the kind that features individuals and nations living calmly and respectfully
by each other’s side and resolving their disputes without rancor or violence—is
the single most culminatory concept in all of Jewish prayer. The Kaddish ends
with a prayer for peace. The Amidah—the series of benedictions that is the core
of every Jewish prayer service—also ends with a prayer for peace. As do also
the Grace after Meals, recited at the end of any formal meal, and the Priestly
Benediction that features <i>kohanim </i>like myself coming forward to channel
the very choicest of God’s blessings to the congregation. So if there ever were
a people devoted to the idea that the yearning for peaceful coexistence between
nations is the beating heart of prayer undertaken for the good of the world (as
opposed to the kind undertaken solely for personal advancement or gain), it
would be the Jewish people. And yet the calls for a cease-fire are becoming
more shrill by the moment, more overtly hate-filled, more blatantly
anti-Semitic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Many years ago, Joan and I lived in
Heidelberg, a storybook town dominated by a gigantic, half-ruined castle in
what was then West Germany. How I got there and why someone like myself whose
entire life could reasonably be described as a response to the Shoah would have
agreed to live there at all, let alone for years—that will have to be my
subject on some different occasion. But we were there—and the experience was
some combination of fascinating, stirring, bizarrely otherworldly, and
gratifying. I taught at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg’s downtown
core, but we lived in a suburb called Rohrbach, once a little town on its own
called Rohrbach-bei-Heidelberg but by the time we got there long since
redefined as a neighborhood within the city limits of its much larger neighbor.
This was forty years after the end of the war, yet the Shoah was my constant
companion. I couldn’t walk to the market without passing the red sandstone monument
marking the site of the synagogue destroyed on that site on Kristallnacht in
1938. I couldn’t walk to work down the Plöckstrasse without remembering that it
was once the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Nor could I take little Max (then just a
baby) to the park by the river—the one place he still vaguely recalls as an
adult—without passing the square in which the surviving Jews of Heidelberg were
finally assembled before being shipped east to their deaths. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And yet the town I was living in was a
peaceful place, a university town in the old-fashioned sense of the term: a
place alive with concerts and lectures, with sporting events and social
gatherings. The disconnect for me personally was beyond jarring: these were
Germans, these people I was living among, yet they appeared to me neither warlike
nor barbarous. If anything, my neighbors seemed like regular people pursuing
their regular lives along fully banal lines: shopping for dinner, drinking beer
in a pub, waiting for the streetcar, going to the movies, reading a newspaper
in a café, attentively watching children playing on a climbing structure in a
park to make sure they were safe. No one in our building on the
Heinrich-Fuchs-Strasse seemed like the kind of savage who could murder entire
communities’ worth of people in a single morning or who could operate gas
chambers or who could shoot babies in their mothers’ arms. If anything, they
seemed like peaceful sorts trying to earn livings and eager to live meaningful,
productive lives. If there were any unreconstructed Nazis hiding out in Rohrbach,
I never came across them. Or heard of their existence, even. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m usually a fairly good judge of people’s
characters. I knew the history of the place in which I was temporarily living.
But none of the people in our building or on our street struck me even remotely
as the kind of person who could have brought such unimaginable suffering to the
world, such misery, such violence, such uncontrolled and uncontrollable hatred.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">When I think back on those days these days, I
find myself wondering how exactly the most bellicose, savage, brutally violent
nation ever to exist (with the possible exception of their Japanese allies),
how such a nation became peaceful to the point at which the thought of today’s
Germany going to war with Denmark or Holland is not just unlikely but truly
unthinkable. And, yes, I say that known full well that there is serious (and
growing) support for the ultra-right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party
among the German electorate. But war with Holland? With France? That really is
unthinkable, which brings me back to wondering what turned people whose entire
national ethos was fueled by the most base kinds of hatred and bigotry into the
nation Germany is today? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It certainly didn’t come about because General
Eisenhower, having embarked on the boots-on-the-ground land invasion that
followed the carpet bombing of Germany’s largest cities, decided that what was <i>really</i>
needed to bring peace to Europe was a unilateral ceasefire. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What was needed, the Supreme Allied Commander
knew, was to eradicate Nazism by neutralizing the Nazi leadership, by bringing
the military to its knees, and by granting the German people a way out of this
unimaginable catastrophe they had basically brought upon themselves. The defeat
of Nazi Germany was total. The nation’s Armed Forces ceased to exist. The
government was replaced briefly by <i>ad hoc </i>governing authorities created
by the Allies, but soon after that by a democratically elected government of
Germans eager to shed the horrors of the past and embrace a future that could
steer the nation away from extremism and savagery, and towards playing a useful
and helpful role in a reconstituted Europe built on the ashes of a nightmarish
past. The role of the vanquishing nations then turned to assisting the
vanquished to rebuilt by treating the citizens of Germany generously and
fairly, by inviting them to imagine a peaceful future for their nation and then
assisting them in making real that dream. The Marshall Plan was part of it. But
even more essential than the money provided by the Plan was the willingness of
the victors to redefine victory so that it no longer meant the annihilation of
the enemy nation but its reconstitution as a useful partner in rebuilding a
world that lay in ruins because of them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">People who truly yearn for peace should be
thinking along similar lines with respect to Gaza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The last thing that would ever lead to peace
would be for Israel to leave Hamas in place, to go back to “regular” daily
life, and to concentrate on working on some hugely lopsided deal to rescue the
captives being held by Hamas. What is needed to bring peace to Gaza, on the
other hand, is precisely what Israel is doing: working to eradicate Hamas by
neutralizing its leadership, by bringing to justice the perpetrators of the
October pogrom, by freeing the captives, and then, generously and willingly, to
find a way for the citizens of Gaza to create a future for themselves that
features peaceful relations with Israel and a governing body for themselves
that has their own best interests at heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If General Eisenhower was here to put his two cents in, I think he would
agree wholeheartedly.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-22217239307267659092023-10-26T08:45:00.002-04:002023-10-27T08:00:25.184-04:00There Will Yet Be Singing<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Every so often, we encounter stand-up
moments—opportunities to, well, stand up and show (to yourself, to your
children, to the world) if you actually hold the values you claim to espouse, if
you are the person you think of yourself—and wish others to think of you—as
actually being. I had a moment like that last week, which I thought I’d share
with my readers this week. Life doesn’t dole out these opportunities so often.
But this this was my moment and, because Joan was part of the discussion and
the decision, it was hers too.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Like every student of Scripture, I have my
favorite Tanakh personalities. I actually identify with bits and pieces of lots
of different biblical personalities and regularly have “wow, that guy in that
story is just like me” moments in the course of which I suddenly see the text
before me as a kind of mirror in which I suddenly—and mostly unexpectedly—find
myself reflected. That is a feature of all great literature, I suppose: that
ability to function both as a gateway into the author’s world and,
simultaneously, as a mirror in which the reader (or, in the theater, a member
of the audience) is suddenly possessed of the conviction, impossible yet fully
real, that the play being watched or the book being read is actually about him
or herself. Historically speaking, of course, that conviction is lunacy. Shakespeare
lived and died centuries before I was born and there are no secret messages
meant just for me in any of his plays. But that is not how it feels when I am seated
in the theater and my level of engagement with the dialogue makes it feel
precisely<i> </i>as though King Lear has stepped out of time to speak directly
to me. Or, far more disconcertingly, to others <i>about </i>me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">For me personally, the biblical personality
I’ve always identified the most meaningfully with has been the prophet
Jeremiah. And, yes, I understand fully well that this makes no sense at all. For
one thing, his life could not have been less like mine. He had no wife and, as
far as anyone knows, no children. He spent a serious portion of his adult life
under arrest or in jail. His was the epitome of bravery in the face of
impending doom, speaking the oracles of God aloud and in public regardless of
the danger that he knew fully well inhered in doing so. He was beaten, mocked,
pilloried. He was brave, but he paid a gigantic price for that bravery and was
considered a traitor to his king and country by most of his fellow
Jerusalemites. He was nothing at all like me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But he was also just like me. Or rather like
the version of myself I would like to think I could yet become. He was
fearless. He was righteous without being self-righteous. He was the both
articulate and eloquent. And he was secure in his faith, unrattled by the
existence of phony prophets who insisted that their good-news messages were the
true oracles of God sent to guide the people forward and that Jeremiah’s
jeremiads were just the depressive ravings of a seriously depressed person
blinded by his own pessimism. Despite it all, though, the man had it in him to
stand up in public and speak honestly—and that is the quality I'd like to find reflected
in myself, in my own preaching, in my writing. I want to be secure in my faith
and unequivocally honest. And I want also to be suffused with hope—which
Jeremiah also was, and at the same time (this is the big trick, at least for
me) that he was both realistic and honest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The prophet had been vouchsafed a
double-screen vision of the future. There was still time for the people to
avert catastrophe by embracing the core values of their faith, but otherwise
destruction and devastation were on their way. And this was a make-or-break
moment: the destiny of the nation was in its own hands <i>if </i>they had the
courage to seize it. But even if the people refused to mend their ways and
proved unable to avert catastrophe, there would always be a future for the
Jewish people in the Land of Israel. There would be exile. But there would also
be return. There would be devastation, but there would also be renewal. There
would be a miserable past, but there would also be a future. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And then the opportunity presented itself to
put his money where his mouth was. It was the last year the kingdom of Judah
would exist. The Babylonians were already at the gates of the city. The king
had put Jeremiah in jail for refusing to lie to the people about what the
future was about to bring—to them, to their city, to their nation, and to their
king. And then, out the blue, a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Haname’el showed up
in prison with the news that a parcel of land outside the city in a place
called Anatot was Jeremiah’s to purchase if he wished it. Why exactly this
offer came to Jeremiah is not made clear; probably he was the closest male
relative to the recently deceased owner of the field. But the point was that
this was the worst real estate deal imaginable, buying land in a nation at its
lowest point, facing implacable foes, its very future uncertain. But Jeremiah had
it in him to look past the moment and see a bright future for the land and for
its people. He closed his eyes and saw bridegrooms and brides standing beneath
their <i>chuppah</i>, children playing in the city streets, young people out
together drinking and singing. And so he bought the land, using his fellow
prisoners as witnesses to the transaction. (The whole story is in the
thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah for those who wish to read it. <i>Shul</i>-goers
will recognize part of it as the <i>haftarah </i>assigned to the Torah portion called
Behar.) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So the other morning, Joan and I had a Zoom
call with our <i>kablanit</i>, a nice woman whom we have engaged—but without
yet signing a contract—to undertake some renovations on our apartment in
Jerusalem. When we first conceived the project, it was just fun. We are hoping
soon to spend a lot more time in our apartment and there were repairs that
needed to be made. There were some cracks in the flooring. There wasn’t enough
storage space in either of the bathrooms. There wasn’t the kind of closet in
which you could hang coats or winter jackets. The oven wasn’t big enough. There
was no shade on the balcony, which problem we wished somehow to address without
making it impossible to build a <i>sukkah </i>on the balcony. That kind of
stuff. In the world of renovations, small potatoes. But not to us: for us, this
was a way for us of staking out our future in a part of the world we love and
in which we want to spend maximal, not minimal time as the years pass.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But that was last summer. Then we had the <i>chagim</i>.
And now we have Gaza. The stories we’ve read are horrific. The story is nowhere
near over. More loss is, I’m afraid, on the books. The IDF has shown remarkable
forbearance to date, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? And the stories
of the pogrom itself—the violence, the Shoah-style brutality, the almost
unimaginable savagery of the attack—all that has made the bathroom storage
space issue seem—to say the very least—strange to worry about, almost bizarre
to discuss seriously. We were going to sign the contract before Rosh Hashanah,
but then the contractor’s father died and she was busy with <i>shiva </i>and
dealing with her loss. We obviously stepped back, told her to take her time,
promised her we didn’t mind waiting a few weeks to settle things up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Should we move forward as planned? Are we
being ridiculous to worry about the <i>sukkah</i>-on-the-balcony<i> </i>issue
at a time like this? We both dithered for a while, unsure how to proceed. But
then I caught a glimpse of Jeremiah, my guy for all these years. I noticed him
in a few different places, actually. He doesn’t speak—at least not to me
personally—but I somehow know who it is. And then I somehow see that poor man
in his jail cell pondering his own real estate decision and, somehow in my
mind’s ear, I hear him singing his own words to himself: <i>od yishama ba-makom
ha-zeh…b’arei Yehudah u-v’chutzot Yerushalayim, kol sason v’kol simchah, kol chatan
v’kol kallah</i>. There will yet be heard in this place, in the cities of Judah
and in the streets of Jerusalem, sounds of joy and merrymaking, the voices of
bridegrooms and brides. And that was enough.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The man bought the property in Anatot. And we
signed on with the contractor. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTwKZXWnNNnpmVMtkr2hUkiq_MChgGf8w_WL5-CHgigoaLTTLlR2Vhs2QJ1aXVuSKlDHRKnvt-o57omDgbRKpz3yb9HQ4Lhq3-H5lD__t-EnjWLPChK1ZwysJv8kkGwudpPhS4S9iCPKI7luktIJk9biOeAnbvk3WQvhRKwGqJc4wb4sDrImfrEvhkvkg/s966/Mirpeset.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTwKZXWnNNnpmVMtkr2hUkiq_MChgGf8w_WL5-CHgigoaLTTLlR2Vhs2QJ1aXVuSKlDHRKnvt-o57omDgbRKpz3yb9HQ4Lhq3-H5lD__t-EnjWLPChK1ZwysJv8kkGwudpPhS4S9iCPKI7luktIJk9biOeAnbvk3WQvhRKwGqJc4wb4sDrImfrEvhkvkg/s320/Mirpeset.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Israel is facing tough times. The enemy is
savage and violent. The devastation left in the wake of the massacre will take
years to repair, the psychological damage to the national psyche even longer.
But I am possessed of the unshakeable faith that the state will endure, that
Jewish life will never again be uprooted from the Land. And we will yet—one of
these years—enjoy our Sukkot dinner in our own <i>sukkah </i>on our own balcony
overlooking Gad Tedeschi Street, and I know that just as surely as I also know
that God will yet spread out God’s own <i>sukkah </i>of peace over the land and
over its people. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-47357414341469567712023-10-19T09:41:00.002-04:002023-10-19T09:41:53.812-04:00Eyeless in Gaza<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">I was waiting for the elevator in one of our local hospitals when my phone
started to vibrate last Tuesday afternoon with the news—reported as simple fact
by the Bing-Microsoft news service that funnels breaking events into my personal
news feed—that Israel had intentionally blown up a hospital in Gaza and killed
500 hospital staff and patients, including children. Then the elevator came and
I got into it. By the time I got out on the ninth floor, the original story had
been “confirmed” by the New York Times. So how could it not be true?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">Two hours later, the original message was gone—magically withdrawn into
thin air—and unretrievable. The original Times banner “Israeli Strike Kills
Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was also gone, replaced with the slightly
(but only slightly) less inflammatory “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza
Hospital, Palestinians Say.” But the damage was done. Not everybody who has an iPhone
that features ongoing news alerts is as involved in news from Israel as I am.
(Could anyone be? Maybe. But no one could be more emotionally and personally
involved in the events of these last weeks.) And a fair number of them, I’m
guessing, just quickly scanned the first headline, then filed it internally as yet
one more terrible thing Israel has done to the innocents of Gaza. And so a
scurrilous story—one that for me (and for anyone who knows as many IDF veterans
as I do, and who has the respect for the IDF that it deserves) could not
possibly be true—gains traction. By evening, the murder of these poor innocents
was lighting up X, formerly Twitter, as though it were an established fact, as though
it were a story featuring confirmed reality that only a willfully blind Zionist
would even try to deny.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">But, in fact, the story was not true. Or rather it was not true as
reported. Yes, a terrible explosion killed hundreds at the al-Ahli hospital (also
called the Baptist Hospital) in southern Gaza. And it is also true that all the
victims appear to have been innocent civilians. But the IDF insists that it did
not target that hospital and that, as far as they can tell, the damage was done
by a missile intended by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to murder Israeli
civilians that misfired and landed in Gaza not far from where it was launched. And
they also noted that the IDF is bound by rules of combat that specifically
forbid its servicepeople from slaying civilians indiscriminately. And then, shortly
after that, the P.M., Bibi Netanyahu himself, issued his own statement on
Twitter saying plainly and unambiguously that this was not the work of the IDF.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">Later, the President of the United States said clearly that American
intelligence supported Israel’s claim of non-involvement. Plus, the hospital,
it turned out, was not “blown up” at all, but is still standing. Aerial photographs
showed rocket shrapnel on the roofs of adjacent buildings. And then, later that
night, Israel released an apparently undoctored recording of Hamas operatives
more or less confirming the Israeli version of events. (The recording is in Arabic,
but click <a href="https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1714545680562184434?cxt=HBwW5IO3kcyNpcsvAAAA&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email">here</a>
to hear it with English subtitles.) Even the Gazans themselves eventually
pulled back from their initial inflammatory reports, no longer mentioning 500
dead but merely referring to unidentified “hundreds.” But by then the damage was more than done. The
Arab street was on fire. There were huge demonstrations in many Muslim capitals,
including Istanbul, Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. President el-Sisi of Egypt,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled their
plans to meet with President Biden, apparently thinking that insulting him for
not embracing the initial (and almost fully incorrect) version of the story was
a rational plan forward. On home turf, our own Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan)
asserted unambiguously (but apparently fully falsely) that the Israelis had “bombed
the Baptist Hospital and killed 500 Palestinians.” And Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota)
shamelessly referenced the incident as an Israeli war crime without a shred of
evidence to support her vitriol. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">To wave this whole incident away as yet another success, albeit a temporary
one, of the Palestinian misinformation campaign against Israel would be very
wrong, however. The tragedy here is fully real. These poor people fled south in
the first place to avoid being caught in the crossfire if Israel ultimately
decides to enter Gaza to find and free the 199 hostages being held by Hamas. I
suppose they must have imagined they were safe, or safer, in the southern part
of Gaza and safer still in a hospital, a place of refuge and healing. If it
turns out that this was “just” an accident, that the jihadists trying to murder
innocent Israelis accidentally ended up murdering innocent Palestinians, then
that will be terrible enough and grimly ironic. But if it turns out that this
was intentional, that Hamas did this to prompt—almost to force—el-Sisi,
Abdullah, and Mahmoud Abbas publicly to disrespect President Biden by refusing
to meet with him in the course of his trip to the Middle East, then the raw
cynicism of the move will be almost too much to bear. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">I want to think that this was an accident. What normal person wouldn’t? But
what if this was intentional, if this actually was undertaken fully
intentionally as a piece of grotesque political theater intended to upend
President Biden’s visit to the region? To refer to the concept of blowing up a
hospital to further political aims as bestial behavior would be an insult to the
animal kingdom. But some part of me wonders if that isn’t precisely what’s
happened. And, indeed, President Biden’s trip to underscore our nation’s support
for Israel <i>and </i>to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA—that
may simply have been too clear a harbinger of a future featuring an alliance of
leaders implacably opposed to the kind of barbarism for which Hamas stands for
the Hamas leadership not to do whatever it was going to take to prevent from
happening. And the fact that the Palestinian president was going to be
included—for which invitation the price was surely going to be his willingness
to join in a blanket condemnation of Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel and
the unimaginable destruction directed almost solely against innocent civilians
that incursion brought in its wake—that just may have been too much for Hamas
to swallow. I have no evidence of any of the above. But I am too much a student
of history to wave the darkness in my heart away as merely depressive or necessarily
delusional. Terrible things happen in the world. And they often happen fully
intentionally.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 191;">And that brings me to my real point. The challenge facing me personally in
the wake of his incident is to find it in my heart to set everything I know
about the Middle East—about Hamas and about the IDF and about Israel itself—to
set it all aside and to mourn the dead of al-Ahli. I am by nature a bit
cynical, but I specifically do not want to bring politics <i>or </i>cynicism to
my appraisal of this tragedy, of this disaster. The children who died in the
hospital was no more deserving of their fate than the Jewish babies and children
murdered in cold blood by Hamas two weekends ago. So to wave them away as
“mere” collateral damage in a larger story to which they were tiny
footnotes—that would require a level of callousness and insensitivity of which
I want—even need—to think of myself as being incapable of sustaining. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Since Simchat Torah, thousands have died on both sides of the Israel-Gaza
border. To look past the death of innocents should be an impossibility for all
who fear God and revere the sanctity of human life. Many more will die as
Israel does what it can to eradicate Hamas and, in so doing, to avenge the
death of its citizens. Still others will die as Hamas descends to ever darker
degrees of demonic depravity in its anti-Israeli rage and does whatever it
thinks necessary to hurt Israel and put space between it and its allies. In the
end, Hamas will surely be annihilated. Of that, I harbor no doubts at all. But
to take pleasure in that thought without mourning the innocents of al-Ahli
should be impossible for even the most ardent supporter of Israel. As well it
is with respect to me personally: I ardently look forward to the day when
terror is defeated once and for all, but I mourn for those innocents who died
when that rocket landed on the hospital in which they were seeking healing and refuge,
and I feel their loss as a stone in my heart. To feel otherwise would be to
deny their humanity—and that is something no decent person should even be able
to do, let alone wish to do.</span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-17672219311159208452023-10-15T19:47:00.000-04:002023-10-15T19:47:01.329-04:00The Simchat Torah War - One Week In<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I was a college senior in 1973 when the Yom
Kippur War broke out and I can remember all too well the shock and dismay that
permeated not only the big Jewish world out there but also my own synagogue
community and my own circle of family and friends as the first terrible days of
the war unfolded on our television screens. But as the tide turned quickly and
it became increasingly clear that Israel would yet again vanquish its enemies,
that dread lifted and was replaced—and replaced easily—by my customary confidence
in the future, by my faith in God’s watchful and protective guardianship of the
people Israel, and by my certainty that, in the end, good always wins out over
evil. If I had been temporarily uncertain, my trust in the future snapped back
into place almost instantly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I was busy preparing myself that fall for the
entry exams you had to pass back in the day to be admitted to rabbinical school
at JTS. And my studies in the course of the rest of the year only appeared to support that
trust that sprung up so automatically for me once the tide turned and Israel’s
victory seemed certain. Indeed, the more I read to prepare for my exams, the
more certain I became that the course of the war had merely mirrored the larger
course of Jewish history. Yes, we’ve known nights of unimaginable sadness. But then
dawn breaks and the sky is filled again with light. The tide ebbs, but soon
flows back. A remnant always survives, always returns, always re-asserts its
right to chart the destiny of the Jewish people into the subsequent generation.
My father’s joke about the difference between a Jewish optimist and a Jewish
pessimist—the Jewish pessimist says, “Oy, things couldn’t get any worse,” to
which the Jewish optimist responds, “Of course, they can. And will!”—seemed
funny to me precisely because it so little mirrored how I perceived things
really to be. The arc of Jewish history, I felt certain, always bends towards
survival.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I have begun this letter a dozen different
times. My original plan was to recount my memories of the Yom Kippur War in
even more detail and then to assure you all that just as our enemies were
vanquished then, so will they also be beaten now. I know everybody wants to hear
that. And mostly I do write today to tell you all that—and not because it’s my
personal job to cheer people up, but because that conviction regarding the
inviolate destiny of Israel is too much a part of who I am to dissolve in even
seriously bad news. I am, as always, a man of faith devoted both professionally
and emotionally to the cultivation in others of the confidence in the destiny
of the Jewish people that is so foundational to my own worldview and so much a
part of who I am.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But this has been beyond challenging for me,
this whole detour into hell that we have all been experiencing over this last
week. I suppose part of that has to do with the degree to which the terrorists
have somehow turned in my mind from merely violent thugs motivated by raged-based
frustration into latter-day Nazis. And, indeed, the images and stories that
have come out from the events of this last week would earlier on have been familiar
to me only as the stuff of Shoah memoirs. But these stories, all verified and
clearly true, are not made-up or embellished. And the first-hand accounts I’ve
read—that we’ve all read—of young women being raped, of old people being
dragged from their homes and killed, of babies being slaughtered, of young
people at a desert concert being shot by the hundreds at point-blank
range—these cannot be decried as mere crimes or acts of brutality. Nor do I see
a way to explain any of this even as extreme political activism. After the
events of last weekend, the enemy has surely lost all pretense merely to be
acting forcefully to improve the lots of Gazans as the soldiers of Hamas takes their
place in the history of the world as true monsters who have done their worst to
destroy the Jewish people. Yes, I am more than aware that the Nazis were
eventually vanquished, that they lost the war, that at least some Jewish people
did end up surviving in every single country the Nazis occupied. I know all
that. And yet I feel myself seized by a sense of dread that I am not quite sure
how to justify or even explain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Yes, the support that Israel has received—and
especially from some unexpected quarters (including especially in Europe)—has
been heartening. Even the <i>New York Times</i> managed to publish an editorial
that was far more supportive of Israel than that newspaper has been in a very
long time. President Biden’s and Secretary of State Blinken’s unequivocal
statements of support meant a lot to me, as I’m sure it also did to all of you.
(On the other hand, underlying all that heartening rhetoric is the certainty
that, in the end, no amount of supportive rhetoric will mean anything if it is
not accompanied by an equally solid commitment to deny Iran entry into the
nuclear club.) Still, both the President and the Secretary of State did say the
right thing and I have to give them credit for that. So did a lot of people—say
the right thing in the course of this last week, I mean—but the real test, of
course, will be to see if those lovely words are followed by action or not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So that’s where I’ve been for most of this
last week: buoyed by confidence and seized with dread, riven and subdivided
like an actor impossibly hired to play two different roles on the same stage at
the same time. (There’s a reason they don’t save money on Broadway by doing
that: because it can’t actually be done.) But, in the end, I have to let what I
know about Jewish history guide me forward. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I wish I could promise you all that this will
somehow end well. I actually do think that, of course. But I also know that the
journey from here to there is going to be long, painful, and beyond arduous. Our
friends and family in Israel are mostly too old even for reserve duty, but
their children and grandchildren—other than the ones who are actually in the
middle of their military service—have more or less all been called up. I’ve
been speaking to friends and family all week, and the message I’ve heard over
and over has been more or less the same one: <i>yihyeh tov</i>, things will
work out…but the journey from here to there is going to be grueling and
challenging. And so, in the end, that is my message for all of you as well. <i>Yihyeh
tov</i>. This will end with a total
defeat of Hamas, with the annihilation of its stores of menacing weaponry, with
the restoration of Gaza to the actual people who live there and many of whom
(click </span><a href="https://theruminativerabbi.blogspot.com/2023/02/whispered-in-gaza.html"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">) would be
thrilled to live in peace with Israel and to prosper and thrive as their
neighbors’ neighbors. The Saudis will eventually joint the Abraham Accords. The
Palestinians will eventually realize that they can have their own state as soon
as they are signal their right to nationhood by signaling their readiness make
peace with making peace with the people next door. Hamas will join the Crusaders
and the Cossacks and the Nazis in the dustbin of history. And the same God who
makes peace on high will bless the world with peace as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And our job, as ever, is to remain staunch and
steadfast in our support for the State of Israel. I can’t stress enough how
important it is to write to the President and the people who represent us in
Congress in support of Israel. (Click </span><a href="https://www.srjc.org/contact-rep"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> for guidance.) We need to give as much as we
can manage to the charities that support the soldiers of the IDF and the
civilian population of Israel. Most of all, we need to find the courage to
reconstitute our riven selves into single-minded individuals possessed of faith
in the future and confidence in the IDF. As I wrote above, I feel that
riven-ness too, that uncertainty, that ill ease that we’re <i>all </i>feeling.
But I plan to devote myself in these coming days and weeks to shucking it off,
to re-integrating what I believe and what I know and what I hope to create the
fully confident Jewish soul that I know myself capable of becoming, the one
that is reflective of the truest me there is. The task in front of us all is a
daunting one. I myself am on that journey as well. But if we travel together,
we’ll at least have each other for company. And we’ll surely reach our
destination with our faith and our trust intact.</span> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-59949491035365084952023-10-05T08:49:00.004-04:002023-10-05T11:17:46.502-04:00Neilah on Dizengoff Square<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s hard to know what to make of the events that unfolded
in Tel Aviv towards the end of Yom Kippur. But what’s not difficult at all is
to understand that the incident—not quite a riot, but a serious incident of
incivility and poor behavior—is a good example of what happens when people mistake intolerance for zeal and antagonism for principled disagreement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The incident had to do with a public-space gathering to
recite the Neilah Prayer that ends Yom Kippur. Every </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">shul</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">-Jew knows this to be a highlight, not only of Yom Kippur or
even the High Holiday season, but really of the entire prayer-year. The mood in
our sanctuary at Shelter Rock, for example, is intense, focused, and very
stirring. The spirits whose palpable presence made the air in the room so heavy
during Yizkor have mostly departed back to Sheol (or wherever), but the residue
of their ghostly presence lingers still in the room. The fast has begun to take
its toll; people are hungry and thirsty. Those of us for whom a day without
caffeine is torture are mostly nursing giant headaches. The specific </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">nusach</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> that the cantor uses to chant
the prayers is hauntingly beautiful, but also vaguely ominous; the notion that
the gates are poised to swing shut—and our chances to have our initial
inscription in God’s great Book of Life upgraded through some combination of
repentance, prayer, and pledges of charity thus dwindling by the minute—creates
a unique blend of resignation and (despite all we know of ourselves) hope that
all who have experienced Neilah in a traditional setting will recognize easily.
It’s a remarkable moment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And, for the last few years, an effort has been made to hold
public prayers services in Tel Aviv, the heart of secular Israel, in an attempt
to reach out to Jews who would otherwise not experience any aspect of Yom
Kippur as a day devoted to prayer and introspection. The service the previous
evening—the Kol Nidre service—went well enough, but there were those present
who strongly objected to the insistence of the prayer service’s organizers, a
group called Rosh Yehudi (“A Jewish Head”) headed by one Israel Zeira, to
separate men and women during the service. Gender segregation is a big deal in today’s
Israel, a kind of a flashpoint between secular and Orthodox-religious Israelis.
It's not only a matter of synagogue seating either—the issue has to do with
mixed-gender seating on buses and trains, on mixed-gender classes in public
schools, and in public swimming pools maintaining “men only” and “women only”
hours alongside the “regular” schedule that invites men and women to use the
pool simultaneously. So this is a big deal in Israel and, as such, a much
touchier issue than it is in our country. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Erev Yom Kippur went more or less as planned. But the
following evening, both sides of the dispute dug their heels in. Suddenly,
there was an actual barrier separating men and women, albeit a flimsy one that
was really just a wall of plastic Israeli flags. But that was just as
provocative as the Rosh Yehudi people should surely have known it was going to be.
And so, when secular Tel Aviv arrived in Dizengoff Square with their own agenda
and their own strong, angry, hostile words to add to the mix, things did not
end at all well.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">To refer to what ensued as a riot (as I noted in several
on-line sources) is probably an exaggeration. But what happened was a travesty
nonetheless and, at that, one that could and should have been avoided. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The good news is that large numbers of secular Israelis,
most of who would not think of spending Yom Kippur in a synagogue, have been
drawn to these public prayer services since their inception in 2020. That
yearning for spiritual fulfillment I have noticed in Israel over the years in
many different contexts—and to such a great extent that even the traditional
division of Israelis into secular ones and religious ones has seemed less
meaningful to me in recent years. So the idea itself of organizing public prayer
for </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">shul</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">-averse citizens is not only
rational but, in my opinion, laudable. But by insisting on gender segregation
during prayer—given the status of that specific matter as a hot-button issue
across Israeli society in recent years—was almost to doom the effort to failure
even before it got off the ground.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">On the other hand, the secular types who came to the service
with their dukes up, spoiling for a fight and prepared to use the most vile,
insulting, and vituperative language—those people have a lot to learn about
what Yom Kippur means and should mean. A day devoted to prayer, to repentance, and
to making peace where peace needs to be made was sullied by extremists more
eager to make their own point than to reconcile with people who feel
differently than they do. And that was a true travesty and a disgrace. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">It's easy to make peace with people with whom you disagree
slightly, significantly less so when the parties involved are at loggerheads on
foundational issues relating to culture, societal norms, and a nation’s basic
ethos. But that is how peace is made in a society divided against itself—by
listening carefully to the good on the other side and by finding a way to be flexible
emotionally and politically without being untrue to yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The secular types who were outraged by the idea of gender segregation
in a public spot needed to get a grip on themselves: this wasn’t an instance of
women being denied the vote or made to wear chadors in public, and neither was
it an instance of women being told to go home or not to participate or not to
say their prayers at all. Yes, it was a bit ham-fisted (if you can say such a
thing about religious Jews on Yom Kippur), but it was also a way to draw in
Jews used to the idea of separate seating during worship and so to make such
people feel comfortable and welcome. And that seems to me to be the more
crucial issue here.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Rosh Yehudi organizers and their follows who couldn’t
imagine a Neilah service that didn’t involve gender segregation needed to get a
grip on themselves too. Dizengoff Square is not a synagogue. The whole idea of
public prayer is that the prayer service be welcoming to the public, a goal at
total cross-purposes with an insistence on flouting the laws regarding gender
separation. The idea of creating an opportunity for secular Israelis to feel
drawn to tradition through the medium of public prayer is a noble one, a good
one. But if someone is drowning in the sea, you can only do good by throwing a
life preserver into the water where the person in trouble is, not where you
yourself are! To involve secular Israelis in prayer means to create a setting
in which such people are comfortable and at their ease, in which they are
predisposed to let the words of the liturgy enter their hearts and move them,
possibly even to awaken some kind of dormant faith in them. And if that
requires abandoning some norms that would prevail automatically in a room in
which everyone present self-defines as an Orthodox Jew, then that’s what’s
required. The Rosh Yehudi people, as far as I can see, wished to do good. But
they wished only to do it on their own terms. And that is, generally speaking,
not how good is really ever done.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">So that was last week. This week, Israel is covered with </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">sukkot</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> both in public places and on
people’s roofs and balconies, and in the courtyards and gardens of apartment
houses. Those </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">sukkot</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> represent the great </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">sukkah</span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> of peace for which we pray
daily in our evening prayers. And this year those sukkot should be suggestive
to all of the great lesson of Sukkot: that the medium in which spiritual
progress—both on the individual and the societal levels—is made is peace: peace
between nations, peace between warring factions within society, and peace between
individuals. Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square was a disaster. But it could also
serve as a wake-up call for a riven nation in need of healing on all fronts:
politically, religiously, and societally. What is needed is compromise, the
cultivation of intellects supple enough to respect others’ opinions, and the
abandonment of the kind of cultural arrogance that cannot imagine an alternate
opinion to one’s own being valid. Intransigency is not a virtue. Reaching out
to others with respect and a willingness to compromise—those are the virtues
that can save any society, no matter how divided against itself it might have grown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p> </p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-43205958305374231462023-09-28T08:29:00.001-04:002023-09-28T08:29:16.446-04:00Taking the Peace Train<p><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The G20 Summit is not an event that often captures my
attention. Yes, it’s a theoretical big deal—the twenty wealthiest and most
powerful nations and international organizations meeting annually (or at least
theoretically annually) to discuss issues relating to the global economy, the
earth’s changing climate, international financial issues, and matters relating
to the question of sustainable development. Lots of talking! But that’s all it
generally feels like to me: lots of talking, not much action, rarely any reason
to foresee real or positive change. Maybe it’s just me! (And, just to be
precise, the G20 has twenty-one members now that they voted to admit the
African Union at this year’s summit.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But this year’s summit was different. For one thing, it was
the first G20 held in India. For another, certain key players were missing:
Vladimir Putin sent his Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Xi Jinping sent
Chinese premier Li Qiang in his stead. But what caught my attention this year
had nothing to do with people in or not in attendance, but with an announcement
by Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modai that President Biden and Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman had agreed to join him in working to create a rail-
and sea corridor that will pass through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and Israel to link Europe and India in a way that even a year or two ago
would have seemed unimaginable. That caught my attention. It won’t come cheap:
conservative estimates put the price tag at something like $20 billion. But this
project has the potential truly to change the face of the Middle East and I
couldn’t agree more with President Biden’s assessment of the project as, and I
quote, “a real big deal.” That, it surely is. Will it be possible to take a train
from Paris to Tel Aviv and then continue on to Abu Dhabi…and then take
advantage of a dedicated ferry link to Mumbai? Now that would be a trip I’d
take in a heartbeat!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">There was a time when the Middle East, including Turkish
Palestine, was linked by a vast network of railroad tracks. I think of that
often when I imagine what could be in the future in the Middle East. But, of
course, thinking of the future by remembering the past is so basic to the way
Jews think of the world that that kind of fantasy comes almost naturally.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Abdul Hamid II, forgotten today by most in the West, was the
last sultan of the soon-to-be-mostly-dismantled Ottoman Empire. He reigned from
1876 to 1909, and left behind a legacy so brutal that he was known in his own
day as the Red Sultan (i.e., with reference to the amount of innocent blood his
forces spilled). But he was also a railroad enthusiast and built the Hijaz
Railroad, connecting Damascus, Haifa, Basra (today in southern Iraq), Lod, and
Medina (in today’s Saudi Arabia). It cost a fortune to build—the final price
was the equivalent of 15% of the budget of the entire empire—and was financed
entirely by the Ottomans with contributions from Muslims around the world. The
remainder, the Sultan made up himself with public funds. It took years to
complete the project and then, finally, passenger service began in 1908.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Israel was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. World War
I was years in the future. No one imagined then that a war of almost
unimaginable barbarism was a mere six years away. But even fewer, if anyone at
all, could have guessed that when the dust settled Israel would be wrested from
the Ottomans and handed over to, of all nations, Great Britain. That actually
did happen, of course. But I believe that prospect would have struck most, if
not all, as unimaginable in 1908. And so, when the railroad began operating, it
was to the Ottoman Empire what the Transcontinental Railroad was for the United
States in 1869: a way to united a large nation of disparate states and regions
by making travel reasonable, inexpensive, and easy between its far-flung states
or provinces. By 1914, there were three weekly trains from Damascus to Medina
and seven weekly trains ferrying people from Damascus to Haifa. (The trip from
Damascus to Haifa took 11.5 hours. By way of comparison, it took 83.5 hours to
travel from New York to San Francisco by rail in 1876.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Not many people think about what life was like in Ottoman
times these days. But, of course, the great efforts of the early Zionists was
precisely to bring Jews to Turkish Palestine. When Joan and I got married in
1980, some of her great-uncles were still alive and I heard lots of stories
from them about their aliyah in 1909 to what was then a moshavah outside of
Petach Tikvah called Ein Ganim. They had a lot to tell, but the detail that
stuck me then was Uncle Shimshon’s comment that they fully expected the Jewish State
to be born on land wrested from the Ottoman Empire. And so these
Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews took Hebrew lessons out of conviction, but they
also took daily Turkish class so as to be able to deal with the government, the
bank, the post office, the local police, etc. Shimshon himself worked as a
trumpet player in the Turkish Police Orchestra in Jerusalem, a job that most
Israelis today would find surprising even to know once existed at all, let
alone was open to Jewish musicians. But it was!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The announcement of a new rail-and-sea link from Europe to
India G20 got me to remember the old Hijaz Railroad. (Hijaz, by the way, is the
name of the western part of Saudia Arabia <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>where Mecca and Medina both are located.) And
then I noted in the paper something even more surprising: that Hayim Katz, the
Israeli Minister of Tourism, entered Saudi Arabia a few days ago to attend a
U.N. Conference, thus becoming the first Israeli cabinet minister to travel in
public to that nation…and that Naif al-Sudairi, the Saudi ambassador to the
Palestinians, traveled through Israel to the West Bank to meet with officials
of the Palestinian Authority. And that double-headed piece of unexpected news, combined
with the endless speculation that I see all across the press and the internet
that the Saudis may soon join the Abraham Accords, which decision would almost
inevitably bring along other Muslim-majority countries as well, has filled me
with an uncustomary sense of cautious optimism as this new year dawns.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What concessions Israel would be called upon to make as
their part of the bargain, I have no idea. Where the Palestinians would fit
into all of this, if they would part of it at all, I also have no idea. (On the
other hand, I can assure you that that is precisely what Ambassador al-Sudairi
is discussing with the Palestinian leadership this week.) But the announcement
at the G20 that the world’s leaders can already imagine flying to Istanbul and
then traveling easily through Israel, Jordan, and Saudia Arabia to India has
truly caught my imagination. The Hijaz Railroad is probably gone for good—I
don’t see the Syrians establishing a rail link between Damascus and Tel Aviv
anytime soon. But the idea of taking the train from Haifa to Medina, or north
to Beirut (which was also a public train line not that long ago) is thrilling. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So that’s my dream. A Middle East united not by political
theory or by treaties, but by actual travel, by the interaction of people eager
to live together and to prosper as neighbors and, even, as friends. To buy each
other’s tchotchkes in the shuk. To attend each other’s universities. To learn
each other’s language. Coincidentally, and while I was daydreaming about taking
the train to Medina, one of our Shelter Rockers sent me a link to a blog
published by the Times of Israel in which a Syrian woman named Rawan Osman
wrote very movingly about her first encounters with Jewish people and with
Israelis. (To read her piece, click </span></span><a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/my-first-encounter-with-jews-changed-my-life/"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.) And her point was the same as
mine: that the way barriers between peoples are broken down is not by politicians
talking at each other, but by people actually meeting, drinking coffee in each
other’s café’s, window-shopping on each other’s streets, etc. But most of all,
connections are created through free, unfettered, affordable travel. And railroad
travel could be the key to it all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This last summer, Joan and I took the train for the first
time from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a great experience for us: on time, clean,
comfortable…and incredibly fast: we were in Tel Aviv less than 45 minutes after
leaving Jerusalem. So that was great. Maybe next summer we’ll take the train to
Amman. Or to Medina. A new year is dawning. Who knows what it might not bring?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDnWzjrkifTrpO8GW58wayONzo7VYE9jvyJY82uPNm-JCaec-FBLjln00VaDN-_wSctmrTjfakpFV096tiijsqLvfVegDCXWWpjpNhfCPQpideeNIiLA7K-5rHRPKpnCwOUNa-jeELuYTsgjZ8qaEgWuc_rS4t6YL3xBHz1gYp7C3BM0XCg1t5KHLsf1A/s653/Haifa%20to%20Medina%20Map.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="630" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDnWzjrkifTrpO8GW58wayONzo7VYE9jvyJY82uPNm-JCaec-FBLjln00VaDN-_wSctmrTjfakpFV096tiijsqLvfVegDCXWWpjpNhfCPQpideeNIiLA7K-5rHRPKpnCwOUNa-jeELuYTsgjZ8qaEgWuc_rS4t6YL3xBHz1gYp7C3BM0XCg1t5KHLsf1A/s320/Haifa%20to%20Medina%20Map.png" width="309" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6091196279949364496.post-42147049942780732932023-09-21T08:46:00.008-04:002023-09-21T08:51:04.985-04:00Reading Jonah<p><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I’ve always felt a special connection to the Book of Jonah,
which is read in its entirety during the Afternoon Service on Yom Kippur.
Partially, that must have to do with the fact that I have been honored every
single year of my service to Shelter Rock by being asked to chant the book
aloud to the congregation. And partially it has to do with my life-long
affinity for the books of Herman Melville, and particularly </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><i>Moby Dick</i></span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, the greatest of all whale
stories in all literature. (I’m even a fan of Ron Howard’s underrated 2015
movie about the incident that Melville fictionalized in his novel, </span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><i>In the Heart of the Sea</i></span></span><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">. Underrated in my personal
opinion, that is.) But it’s not just about the honor, which I have always
accepted gratefully—it’s also about the story itself, which is surely one of
the most misunderstood of all biblical tales. And it’s specifically the whale’s
role that’s the least often gotten right.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">First of all, it’s not exactly a whale that swallows Jonah
down alive. The text does indeed reference Jonah being swallowed down and then
puked out by a sea creature, but the swallower-down or the puker-out is
referenced merely as “a fish” or, once, as a “big fish.” Far more interesting, although
ultimately inexplicable to me, is that the (big) fish appears to be a gender-fluid
creature, called a dag (that is, a male fish) three times and a dagah (that is,
a female fish) once. What that’s all about, if it is about anything at all, I
have no idea. But my point is that it’s always just a fish, never a whale. Plus,
whales are mammals, not fish at all! Of course, it seems highly unlikely the
ancients were sufficiently sophisticated ichthyologists to have seized the
difference between sea creatures who are technically fish and those who aren’t.
And there are denizens of the deep popularly called whales that actually are
fish, for example, the so-called “whale shark” that has a mouth more than huge
enough to swallow a normal size prophet.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdv01V4_938_-Ng597M92yBZVQrxrNxKywWebIkzsNJBe3rDod_9ds6yFWdK_40FK1J2AfFgSZte5P_QHcLLUBMx4dRIFS2YXXn40ZdmmujbhXng4iQfpjeonFGRVSLpl95md-SkpqnX8_UV6OXbSGqHe6ptNAsYxEBOC33CxboI2BaNy_Phs28fvoWhs/s715/Whale%20Shark%20with%20its%20Mouth%20Wide%20Open.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="715" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdv01V4_938_-Ng597M92yBZVQrxrNxKywWebIkzsNJBe3rDod_9ds6yFWdK_40FK1J2AfFgSZte5P_QHcLLUBMx4dRIFS2YXXn40ZdmmujbhXng4iQfpjeonFGRVSLpl95md-SkpqnX8_UV6OXbSGqHe6ptNAsYxEBOC33CxboI2BaNy_Phs28fvoWhs/w556-h235/Whale%20Shark%20with%20its%20Mouth%20Wide%20Open.jpg" width="556" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But Jonah’s fish was definitely not a whale shark. For one
thing, the esophagus of the whale shark is only a few inches in diameter—so
even if Jonah somehow ended up in a whale shark’s mouth, he could never have
made it all the way down to its stomach. And the book specifically says that
Jonah was “in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The blue whale, which can weigh in at 200 tons and the
adults of which species can grow to more than 100 feet in length, is a true
behemoth. And it actually does have an esophagus that is wide enough, barely,
for a man to slither down through. But there are no blue whales in the
Mediterranean Sea and the author of Jonah was certainly not enough of a mariner
to have explored the oceans and seas of the world other than the Mediterranean.
The fin whale, on the other hand, actually does inhabit the Mediterranean and is
a species with which people in ancient Israel could surely have been familiar. But
they too have a narrow esophagus, too narrow to swallow someone down. And so we
are left with the biggest, baddest whale of them all: the sperm whale, of which
Moby Dick himself is the most famous literary example. To read a clever on-line
essay by Christopher Eames, a New Zealander who blogs for the Times of Israel, that
details all of these possibilities and ends up focused on the sperm whale as
the most likely candidate to be Jonah’s “great fish,” click </span></span><i><a href="https://armstronginstitute.org/315-what-was-the-great-fish-that-swallowed-jonah"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">here</span></a></i><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span class="MsoSubtleEmphasis"><span color="windowtext" style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But the whale isn’t the point, not really. For one thing,
when Jonah composes his great psalm that is the 2<sup>nd</sup> chapter of the
Book of Jonah, the prophet perceives his near-death experience as one of nearly
drowning in the sea, not of being eaten by a monster: “</span></span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You
cast me into the depths, / Into the heart of the sea, / The floods engulfed me;
/ All Your breakers and billows / Swept over me.” And a few lines later, he
says even more clearly that he almost drowned: “The waters closed in over me, /
The deep engulfed me. / Weeds twined around my head.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And now we get to the point: God didn’t
send the great fish to terrify the prophet, let alone to eat him, but to save
him. And specifically to save him from death by drowning, which he/she did by
swallowing Jonah down, then, upon divine command, by puking him up onto the dry
land. The whole point, therefore, was the experience of nearly drowning and
then of being saved at the very last moment and in the least expected way
possible (which in this case is really to say the very least). <i>That</i> is
the salvation that inspires the prophet actually to do what he was supposed to
do in the first place: to fulfill his personal destiny by going to Nineveh to proclaim
God’s message to the people there. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
that trope of coming to know God first by almost drowning and then by being
miraculously and unexpectedly saved, that trope appears in lots of different
places in the Hebrew Bible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Does Scripture skip over Moses’s
adolescence and almost all of his first eighty years of life because it wants
to move quickly enough from his experience of almost drowning in the river as a
baby to his experience of hearing God speak at the Burning Bush? For that
matter, does the Torah move the Israelites from the Sea of Reeds to Mount Sinai
with just a few details provided about the journey because it wishes in that
too to stress the connection between the nation risking death by drowning
(i.e., by crossing on the seabed without knowing if or when the walls of water on
either side of their path would collapse) and its arrival at Sinai where God
spoke to them directly and personally from atop the mountain?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Any
number of psalms feature the same progression: yearning for communion with God,
the sense of drowning in that sea of overwhelming desire, then salvation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
sixty-ninth psalm, a favorite, would be an excellent example: the poet feels
himself to be </span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">drowning
(“</span><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Save
me, O God, for the water level is rising to the point of mortal danger. / I am </span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">drowning
in mud so deep I cannot stand up in it / I am in the deepest water and a strong </span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">current
is threatening to wash me away”) and feels death to be almost upon him </span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">(“Save me
from the mud that I not drown / that I be saved both from those who hate me </span><i style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">and </i><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">from the depths of the waters.
Let not the swift currents wash me away nor let the depths swallow me up. / Let
not the well close up its mouth over me”).</span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif; font-size: 12pt;">But then the poet has a remarkable insight—that what he is really experiencing is not imminent death but the presence of God.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Other examples would include the
eighteenth psalm (which also appears in the Bible as the twenty-second chapter
of 2 Samuel) and the sixty-ninth. There are others too. But Jonah’s story is
the famous one, the one everybody knows. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Let me tell the story when
reading through the lens of the larger biblical narrative. The prophet is too terrified
to accept the mission thrust upon him by God. Does he lack self-confidence? Is
he worried that he is just another crazy person who hears voices in his head?
Or is he just afraid of what might happen if he dares to proclaim God’s word in
Nineveh? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can’t know, but then we see
him fleeing from God by jumping on a boat heading north. Things do not go well.
A storm terrifies the sailors on the ship, who soon realize that Jonah is
fleeing from God (and that it is therefore he who is the source of their
misfortune) and so they pitch him overboard, expecting him to drown in the sea.
That is not what happens, however and, instead, a gigantic sea creature is
summoned by God—the same God who was trying to get Jonah’s attention in the
first place—and instructed to swallow the prophet down whole so he can gather
his wits and catch his breath in a safe underwater refuge. And that is when his
eyes are opened and he composes the famous psalm that we know as the second
chapter of the Book of Jonah. He realizes that he has survived, that he was
rescued from death by drowning—and in the most unexpected, miraculous way
imaginable. And then, chastened and ready, God speaks to him directly and,
instead of fleeing or dying, he listens and obeys.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The lesson the Book of Jonah
teaches, then, is that is natural, even normal, to fear the word of God and to
flee when we feel ourselves called to action in God’s name or on God’s behalf.
None of us wants to be told what to do, where to go, how to behave! And even
less do we wish to risk anything, let alone everything, to submit to God’s
will…and least of all when that will expresses itself not vaguely but
specifically by sending us off in a specific direction to accomplish some
specific thing. So Jonah is an everyperson, a regular guy who hates risk and
avoids danger. But he is also a figure of growth who finds the courage to submit
to do God’s will once he learns to face his own mortality. And in so doing he
steps into history as one of the dozen or so best known personalities from
Jewish antiquity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Sylfaen",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The moral for latter-day readers
such as ourselves should be clear. The first step to knowing God, to feeling
God’s presence in the context of daily life, is facing our own mortality, in
accepting that we have no way of knowing what the very next moment might bring.
The next has to do with coming to terms with our fragility, with our
brittleness, with our innate tenuousness: we can pretend otherwise to be the
case, but sailors we’ve never met and whose language we don’t speak and whose
names we don’t know could show up at any moment to pitch us overboard into the
sea. And then we come to the real point: until we feel ourselves fully in God’s
care, we cannot expect to hear God speak. And that is what the Book of Jonah
means to me and why I feel so honored year after year when I am asked to chant
it aloud to the congregation.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Martin S. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11482111817880544122noreply@blogger.com0