Orlando Furioso

Part of me wants it to be a gay thing. A closeted gay man, out only to himself and the people he meets surreptitiously on dating sites that allow him to mask his identity (and so not actually out to them either in any meaningful way) finally finds bearing the burden of being himself only to himself too great to bear and he snaps. Seeking out a club full of happy gay people enjoying an evening of dancing and partying, none of whom appears to be viewing his or her sexual identity as an unbearable burden, he decides to take the ultimate revenge on them for daring to live their lives unencumbered by subterfuge and unsaddled by shame.  Living in a state in which assault rifles are sold in strip malls to anyone over eighteen years of age who has never been charged with or convicted of a felony, convicted twice of drunk driving, involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, or the subject of a restraining order, the man buys a gun and lots of ammunition, then sets out to make the point as viscerally as possible that he is nothing like those weirdos who go dancing in gay nightclubs. There’s something virtuous about this narrative too, because it focuses on the victims and remembers them as innocent targets of violent prejudice rather than merely as innocent bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In that sense, explaining this as a kind of anti-gay pogrom carried out by a sole Cossack honors the memory of the dead by refusing to obscure the reason they died in a way that referring to Orlando as an example of “senseless murder” would suggest: it wasn’t senseless, because it was fully intentional. And it is a satisfying narrative for the nation as well because it makes the whole thing about the shooter, thus something we can move past simply by turning the page and reading instead about some other catastrophe somewhere.

Another part of me, however, wants it to be about guns. That too is a satisfying narrative, or a semi-satisfying one. A man who is clearly crazy—because how could someone who carries out the cold-blooded murder of strangers enjoying an evening out in a dance club possibly not be a deranged person?—a man who is obviously deranged takes his place in the unholy line-up of other crazy people who have committed mass murder with guns. Some of the citizens on that line-up have become famous or semi-famous, like Jared Lee Loughner, Adam Lanza, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Nidal Hassan, or Dylann Roof. Others, like James Holmes, Wade Page, Syed Farook, and Tashfeen Malik, all of whom committed terrible crimes, somehow failed to gain the attendant celebrity generally accorded to mass murderers in our country. But they all are united in my mind by the fact that they had, all of them, easy access to the guns they used to kill and didn’t have the moral strength to resist the demons that urged them forward to perpetrate their horrific crimes. (For the record, James Eagan Holmes murdered twelve people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. Wade Michael Page murdered six people in the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, earlier that same year. Farook and Malik were the perpetrators of the massacre in San Bernardino last December.)

It’s satisfying, this narrative, partially because it explains something that would otherwise feel inexplicable, partially because it explains—or rather explains away—the crime as the insane act of a deranged individual and leaves us free to draw the conclusion we all so desperately want to draw: that no further action is required, that crazy people always do crazy things, that this was a disaster…but not one that could have been prevented. And that seems key as I survey the opinions flying around the blogosphere: that we, the people, find a way to believe that we didn’t do anything wrong, that he, the insane perpetrator, is—or rather, was—the criminal. If he were still alive, he could be tried in a court of law. But he isn’t and so he can’t…and with that grim thought in place, those who embrace this version of the narrative too are free to turn the page and read about something less distressing.

This is the narrative put forward by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and his fellow filibusterers, whose basic point was that, if gun purchases were more restricted in certain specific ways, then fewer bad people would have guns. Leaving aside Second Amendment issues, there are still deep problems with this narrative.  Criminals are by definition law breakers, so tightening up existing laws will only affect people who are law-abiding. Furthermore, guns like hunting rifles, which no one would dream of banning entirely, can also be used to commit horrible crimes. Most important of all, the sheer number of guns out there at the moment—about 300 million according to the Congressional Research Service—makes it unlikely that any effort to change the rules for acquiring guns would matter much for decades, if not scores of years, to come.  But the “guns narrative” is satisfying nevertheless because blame renders cogent the inexplicable. And that, more than anything, seems to be exactly what we want: for this whole incident to be explicable.

And then there’s the Islamicist narrative, the one that casts Orlando not as Charleston, but as San Bernardino. An American-born Muslim of Afghan descent is somehow radicalized and embraces the barbaric militarism of Islamic extremism. Pausing in the middle of the massacre to reiterate to some random 911 operator that he was acting as an ISIS operative, the murderer in this narrative too grants us the right to qualify his act as explicable…because he himself has explicated it. Seeking to murder innocents as a way of expressing his hostility to Western culture in general and the country of his birth—our country—in particular, the shooter was, according to this narrative, neither crazy nor confused. Indeed, according to this narrative, he was entirely aware of what he was doing, which was doing his best to bring to these shores the kind of terror that the residents of ISIS-occupied Syria and Iraq know all too well and which ISIS has already brought to Paris and Brussels. The question of whether Omar Mateen was a “real” ISIS operative is irrelevant: either he was or he wasn’t, but the bottom line is that it hardly matters if he was a self-appointed operative or one taking specific instructions from his handlers across the sea because, regardless, he killed not for personal gain or out of any animus against any of his victims, but as an act of Islamic martyrdom. There is something satisfying about this narrative as well. It grants international stature to what would otherwise be a solely American tragedy. It explains the deed, however perversely, as a kind of political statement rather than one prompted by “mere” insanity. But although it is true that no one seems to know how to prevent these acts, it is also true that even as draconian a measure as Donald Trump’s proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigration or even entrance to our country would not address the danger posed by home-grown jihadists like the Omar Mateens of this world.

The key to all of the above narratives is that they all attempt to explain a deed that would otherwise be deemed inexplicable…but none is entirely convincing. The world is full of closeted gay men who do not turn to mass murder to express their frustration with their lot in life. Millions of people buy guns and behave fully legally and responsibly with them. The large majority of Muslims who live and thrive here do not become radicalized or intoxicated with the siren call of Islamicist martyrdom. So all of these lines of explanation say something about what happened in Orlando, but none explains it entirely.

By almost every conceivable measure, we are a sophisticated nation. But a lot of the cutting-edge culture in which we take such pride is, I fear, a mere patina the only obscures the child-like, impulsive, cowboy deep within the American soul. We pride ourselves on being a nation of peacemakers and consensus builders. But I begin to wonder if that isn’t only how we enjoy thinking of ourselves…but if, just beneath the surface, we aren’t a nation of gunslingers that not only doesn’t truly abhor gun violence, but secretly—or not so secretly—revels in it. We couldn’t possibly loathe more the violent extremists who perpetrate terrorists attacks on innocents at home and abroad, but there is something in our collective American soul that admires violence, that is just a bit fascinated by it. We abhor murder and rape. But Hollywood turns out an almost endless series of movies that pander shamelessly to a movie-going public that is far more transfixed than repulsed by acts of savagery and violence. We speak endlessly about how much we yearn for peace. But no one buys video games that feature peoples living in peace and learning pacifically to co-exist in God’s world.

To blame Orlando on the degree to which the shooter turned his back on our gentle society to embrace the fiery rhetoric and siren call of the barbarian elements in his own religious world…is at least a little to miss the point. Since 9/11, ninety-four Americans have died at the hands of violent jihadists. By comparison, about half as many people, forty-eight, have died at the hands of far-right extremists. (Click here for both complete lists.) But in the years between 2001 and 2014, almost 221,000 people in the United States were victims either of murder or non-negligent manslaughter. For American men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, gun homicide is the third-leading cause of death. If every single day of the year France were to endure a mass shooting like the one last year that took 130 innocent lives, their annual rate of gun homicides would still be lower than ours.

And that is the dark side of the story: that Omar Mateen, disgruntled and enraged, was tapping into something dark and terrible deep within the American psyche that doesn’t hate violence anywhere nearly as passionately as we never tire of saying that we do. That he perpetrated a crime of unspeakable evil goes without saying. But for Americans merely to wave him away as a crazy person without acknowledging the degree to which we have created a culture that accommodates violence and fosters a Wild-West kind of gun culture that no one seems to know how to defuse—that would be an example of self-serving rhetoric at its least introspective.

I can’t even bring myself to look at the portraits of the dead. As I wrote a few weeks ago in an entirely different context, each was a universe of experience and potential, a world of intelligence and emotion. Each had a backstory and a future to invent. None was a victim or a fatality; each was the whole world. As a nation, we must mourn our dead and pay homage to their memory. To do so while simultaneously looking away from the incredible number of gun homicides in our country and wondering how we can stem that vicious, horrific tide…that is not to honor them at all, but to treat their deaths like statistics instead of taking their loss as a moral challenge that the nation that lost them should and must now face.

Ruth, Naomi, Hillary

Our rabbis, clever sages who knew how to read exquisitely slowly and carefully, found something fishy in a word in the Book of Ruth that most people who know the book well, myself surely among them, have passed by a thousand times without thinking to notice, much less thoughtfully to interpret.

The word in question is only nineteen verses into the story. Naomi, a widow old enough to have married off both her sons but also young enough to imagine herself bearing more children, has decided to return from Moab, her current domicile, to her homeland, to Judah. What she was doing in Moab, the country across the Jordan from Judah, is simple enough to explain: there had been a terrible famine at home and so Naomi and her husband Elimelech moved east to wait it out in a place where there was apparently plenty of food. But things in the Bible (or in life) never go quite as planned. Elimelech died in Moab, leaving Naomi with her two sons. Eventually, they married, choosing local girls as their wives. But things in the Bible (or in life) really never do go as planned and, before the famine wound down, the boys—now young husbands—themselves died. And so was Naomi left with two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth.

And now the story begins to get interesting. The famine finally ends and the three prepare to remove to Judah. But even though they actually do set out on their journey, they don’t get very far before Naomi comes to her senses and tells her daughters-in-law that they don’t owe this to her, that it would be more than acceptable to her for them to return to their parents’ homes and revert to their original status as Moabites of Moab. There do not appear to have been formal conversion rituals in the time in which the story is set, the era of the Judges that followed the initial conquest of Canaan, so the women’s status is at best ambiguous: they had been married to Israelites and so were deemed Israelite themselves, but now that their husbands are dead and buried, they’re in ethnic limbo—not exactly Moabites any longer but connected to Israel only by ties that were buried with their husbands.  Orpah demurs briefly, but eventually she takes Naomi up on her offer and goes home. But Ruth sticks with Naomi and Naomi, because she can clearly see how committed to going along with her Ruth is, eventually relents. And so the two of them, Naomi and Ruth, set forth from Moab on their not-too-long journey to Judah, to a homeland Ruth hasn’t ever known.

And now we get to our word, one among the 2,039 that together constitute the tenth shortest book of the Bible. The phrase in which our word appears is in relatively easy Hebrew: va-teilakhna sh’teihem ad bo·ana beit-lechem. And it’s easy to translate too: “and so the two of them walked together until they reached Bethlehem.” So far, so good…but there’s a tiny issue with the second word: if we’re talking about two women, it should be sh’teihen, not sh’teihem. The latter word would work if the plural subject referenced two men or even a man and a woman. But if it’s two women, then the rules of grammar require a feminine suffix and the word would then be sh’teihen. But it isn’t. And thereby hangs an interesting tale.

The Torah takes a dim view of crossdressing, formally forbidding men to dress up like women and women, like men. (You occasionally hear this verse used to condemn transgendered people presenting themselves other than as their biological bodies would suggest they should, but that seems exaggerated to me: even the ancients understood Scripture here to be speaking specifically about people who dress up like members of the opposite gender to gain entry to places that only women or men are allowed for their own dishonorable reasons.) But the Book of Ruth is set in a time when the laws of the Torah were either not widely known or not widely observed—there are several examples of this in the book—and so our sages imagined the masculine suffix (which is not even a word, just a single letter) there to hint to us that Naomi and Ruth dressed up like men for their journey home to Judah.

It was, apparently, that kind of world. No one was too safe on the nation’s highways. But men were safer than women and so Naomi and Ruth made the choice to be men, or at least to present themselves as men, to go where only men safely could go. And it worked: eventually they arrived safe and sound in Bethlehem and our story commences in earnest.

It’s that image of Ruth and Naomi dressed up like men that stays with me. They could, of course, have demanded to be treated fairly and equitably. They could have asserted their natural right to travel on the nation’s highways unmolested and unbothered by predatory males eager to take advantage of women traveling on their own. They could have done a lot of things, but they chose, if not actually to masquerade as men permanently, then at least to present themselves as manly enough to discourage would-be assailants or harassers.

As I reread the Book of Ruth this last week as part of my lead-up to Shavuot, I was struck by the fact that my study was interrupted by the A.P.’s announcement that Hillary Clinton has become the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, which would make her the first woman nominated by a major political party to run for President. If she wins, of course, she will be the first woman in our nation to serve a President.

Given our nation’s more than slightly conflicted attitude towards gender in general, Mrs. Clinton now finds herself in a strange situation. If she is perceived as behaving “like a man” (a thought further complicated by the fact that it’s hard even to say what that means exactly), then she risks alienating all those who are drawn to the possibility of allowing a woman to crash through the ultimate glass ceiling and serve her nation as our first female president. But if she insists on behaving “like a woman” (whatever that means), then she will clearly lose the votes of a certain slice of the electorate that would only be able to countenance a female president if she appeared somehow to be manly enough to make her actual gender an irrelevancy.

Confusing the soup even further is the fact that the notion of gender-based affect is itself suspect in the minds of most forward-thinking citizens. On the one hand, we want people to behave according to a canon of norms associated with their gender and are unkind to people who appear to want to sit on one side of the aisle and vote on the other: consider the difference between calling a man manly and a woman mannish, or between referring to a woman as possessed of womanly virtue and man being called effeminate. But on the other we also seem eager to tear down irrational gender-based distinctions in life and culture—in a world in which women routinely become doctors and men routinely go into nursing, it seems slightly retro for there even to be separate Oscar categories for “best actor” and “best actress.” (Indeed, in a world that would never countenance referring female dentists or lawyers as dentistesses or lawyeresses, it feels quaint even just to use the word actress these days to refer to female actors.)

All that being the case, Mrs. Clinton’s gender constitutes a complicated riddle for Americans to work through. Nevertheless, even people who are not planning to vote for her can surely take pride that we have set to rest yet another instance of irrational gender-based bias, just as the nomination and election of President Obama can be celebrated by all, including his non-admirers, as the ultimate example of America setting the ultimate race-based barrier to rest.  So the simple fact of Mrs. Clinton being a woman should be something Americans should celebrate without reference to her specific policies or chances actually to win the presidency…and surely also not with reference to the degree to which she appears to embody or not to embody a set of stereotypes associated with womanliness or femininity. (Are those words synonyms? The fact that I’m not sure is also a point worth pondering.) It should surely be possible to celebrate Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishment without getting stuck on the ridiculous question of whether she is an appropriately female woman or an excessively mannish one…whatever those terms mean in today’s America. But when I think of poor Naomi and Ruth—two heroic figures whose bravery and cunning led, albeit a bit circuitously, to the birth several generations later of King David, Ruth’s great-grandson, and thus will lead, bi-m’heirah b’yameinu, to the eventual redemption of the world—when I think of them forced to pretend they were men to take their rightful place in their own society lest they come to harm on their way from the margins to the center, I also think of Mrs. Clinton and marvel at how far we’ve come.

No one has been formally nominated by anyone at all, yet the 2016 presidential election has already turned into one of the oddest presidential campaigns our nation has known. But even before anyone wins, the American people itself has won by following its rejection of race-based limitation—informal and surely illegal but wholly real until it suddenly wasn’t—on a citizen’s right to run for the highest office in the land with a rejection of the parallel gender-based limitation, one also un-enshrined in law and rarely mentioned in polite company but also entirely real in terms of the effect it had on women’s aspirations for political office.

I suppose Bernie Sanders deserves mention in this complex of ideas as well. He was, after all, the first Jew (and also the first non-Christian) ever to win a state in a presidential primary. So it feels right to see his campaign—and his twenty-three primary wins—as constituting a kind of third leg in the repudiation of irrational prejudice based of race, gender, or religion.

Maybe our nation really is growing up! Others paved the way, obviously. (Shirley Chisholm, for example, cleared a path both for President Obama and for Hillary Clinton when she, a black person and a woman, ran for president in 1972.) And the issues in play remain complicated. But the days of women having to dress up, either literally or figuratively, like men to be considered worthy candidates for public office are clearly over. And so our nation joins India, Israel, Germany, and the U.K.—as well as many smaller countries like Ireland and Iceland—in setting aside as irrelevant the concept of gender when it comes to choosing an able national leader.  My own feelings about all of this year’s crop of candidates are fairly conflicted. (More on that in the months to come.) But I know progress when I see it. And I think therefore that Mrs. Clinton’s designation as the presumptive candidate should be something of which we can all be proud. If her nomination leads to a national discussion of gender-based issues—and particularly to the timely demise of the notion that men or women are supposed to “be” one way or the other, and that failing to behave according to these pre-conceived norms is a sign of mental confusion, emotional distress, or moral turpitude—then that would be a very positive development indeed.

Harambe

So a scorpion is standing on the bank of a wide river wondering how he’s going to get across when he suddenly notices a frog dozing on a nearby lily pad. Seeing an easy solution to his dilemma, he approaches the frog and asks if the frog would agree to swim across the river with him, the scorpion, on his back. The frog thinks for a minute, then declines. “How do I know you won’t sting me?” he asks reasonably. The scorpion, having expected the question, has a good answer at the ready. “Obviously I won’t harm you. Why would I? If I were to sting you,” he notes entirely plausibly, “you would die and we’d both drown.” The frog considers the response, then helpfully agrees to take his fellow creature across to the other side. And so they set off for the other bank and are just about exactly halfway across when the scorpion suddenly does sting the frog. As the venom seeps into the frog’s bloodstream and the paralysis sets in that will now kill them both, the frog summons up whatever strength he has left to ask the scorpion why he could possibly have chosen to do such a thing…and particularly because the scorpion’s betrayal of his own promise will now inevitably lead not only to the frog’s death but to the scorpion’s own demise as well. “What can I do?” the scorpion replies just before they both slip beneath the water. “It’s my nature….”

It’s a famous story. I remember it being told to great effect in The Crying Game, Neil Jordan’s terrific 1992 movie starring Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, and Jaye Davidson. But it’s way older than that. In the Talmud, for example, we read that Samuel, one of the greatest talmudic sages, once took note of a frog swimming across a river with a scorpion on its back. When they reached the other side, the scorpion stung some unfortunate soul who just happened to be passing by. That’s how these things work, Samuel then commented: when your time is up, your time is up…and even the least likely partnership can be brought to bear by Providence to enforce God’s edict.  That’s not exactly the same story, of course, nor does it teach the same lesson, but the image of the frog with a scorpion on its back is exactly the same…and that specific image appears as well in Sanskrit and old Persian literature where it is featured in stories that use it to good effect to teach different lessons of various sorts. A full survey of such ancient stories would take us too far afield of the topic I want to write about this week, but the interesting detail is that the image itself of a frog ferrying a scorpion on its back across a river is a constant…and the lesson taught in the version cited above—that the difference between animals and people is precisely that animals are hard-wired to act in certain specific ways and have no control to behave otherwise— is certainly worth taking seriously. Nor should we pass blithely by the corollary of that thought: that people, in this wholly unlike animals, do have that kind of control…if they choose to exert it to overcome their natural inclination to behave in some specific way that their moral compass recognizes as wrong or perverse. In other words, all God’s creatures come predisposed to behave in certain ways. But only humans possess the ability to override those predispositions and thus to behave as they see fit, not as their natures demand.

That story and its moral popped into my mind the other day when I was reading about the death of poor Harambe, 17, the 450-pound silverback gorilla shot dead the other day by a zookeeper at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The story is essentially a simple one. A family of five—a mother and her four children—were enjoying a day at the zoo when suddenly one of those kids, a little boy of three, somehow climbed through the protective barrier intended to keep visitors from coming too close to the animals they’ve come to observe. He fell into a shallow moat intended to keep the gorillas from approaching the barrier and was plucked from the waters by Harambe, whose intentions were not at all clear. I’ve watched the video several times (click here to see it if you haven’t) and concur, without any specific zoological training to buttress my opinion, that the only thing that was clear was that nothing at all was clear. At moments, Harambe appears to be acting almost protectively towards the child, helping him to his feet and almost gently touching the boy’s hand. But then he begins to drag the child by his feet first through the water and then across the floor of his enclosure, the little boy’s head bouncing up and down on the concrete as he is dragged off. What would have happened next, no one will ever know, of course, because Harambe was almost immediately shot dead by zoo workers who then rescued the boy.  The boy, fortunately, was not terribly hurt physically. If he was traumatized by the incident, I don’t imagine we’ll ever find out. Nor do we need to know. Three-year-olds are resilient, though, and we can reasonably hope for the best in his regard.

The real question has to do with the gorilla. Harambe was a very strong animal. The point was made by the director of the Cincinnati Zoo that silverbacks can crush coconuts with their bare hands, an image no doubt put forward because of the similarly in size between a coconut and a three-year-old’s head. (I’m guessing it takes a lot more strength to crush a coconut.) Because they can take up to seven minutes to work, the use of tranquilizer-darts was not feasible in a situation like this one. Nor was there much time to consider how to respond, much less to debate the matter thoughtfully or to take counsel with experts: a child’s life was in danger and the zoo officials had to decide on the spot whether to save the child by the only effective means available to them or to tranquilize the animal and hope nothing too bad happened while the darts took their time to work. Nor was it at all helpful that there was a crowd of onlookers, including the child’s mother, screaming while this was all unfolding, thus potentially unnerving or upsetting the animal and prompting him to act more, not less, violently than he might otherwise have. So the situation was grave, the amount of time to weigh options was negligible, and the assumption that Harambe, a noble-looking beast whose pose and affect are both almost human in his official portrait (reproduced above), would somehow rise up over his animalness to behave gently and kindly towards the boy was zoologically absurd. It is true that gorillas are generally herbivores, so the chance that Harambe might have mistaken the boy for his lunch were almost nil. But that he could easily have inadvertently killed the boy is, as far as I can see, beyond question.

All that being the case, the hue and cry over the decision to save the boy by shooting the gorilla dead is all the more bizarre. What makes human beings human is precisely our ability—often ignored but always real—to direct our own behavior by engaging in a process of moral decision-making that we can then use to override the genetic predispositions with which we, as animals ourselves, come pre-equipped at birth. We do have the ability to behave gently and kindly when our genetic predisposition would be to act violently and without regard for the safety or well-being of others. But gorillas are, in the end, animals. They can be adorable and they are certainly more sophisticated beings than cockroaches or field mice. But they lack the ability to reason morally in the sense that human beings do…and we forget that at our own peril. The zoo staff in Cincinnati acted correctly, making the split-second decision to value human life over an animal’s even if that animal belongs to an endangered species. The bottom line: you’re only allowed to value the life of a gorilla over the life of a little boy if you would be prepared to stick to your guns if the boy in question was your own son or grandson. Otherwise, you’re just posturing to make a point over the potentially dead body of somebody else’s child.

What interests me about this whole story are its implications for the way we view the world in general. All living human beings belong to the species homo sapiens (“wise person”); the other species that once compromised the larger homo genus—homo erectus, for example, or homo neanderthalensis—are long gone. It’s just us now…and the specific name we have chosen to assign to ourselves declares that our distinctiveness from our forebears lies precisely in that we—as opposed to they and certainly to non-human fauna—are capable of bringing some combination of learning, understanding, and ethical insight to bear in the decision-making process that we ourselves celebrate as the very hallmark of being human.

And yet we continually decline to allow that specific dimension of humanness to serve as the foundation stone upon which we stand as we view the world. Stereotyping, imputing to others an animal-like inability to override genetic pre-sets when attempting to find a moral path forward, deriding fellow-humans as beasts who specifically cannot behave other than violently or harshly—all of these prejudicial approaches to the world merely excuse unethical behavior by making it somehow a consequence of the fault in someone else’s stars rather than the result of unprincipled decision-making.

When I hear people, for example, attempting to excoriate terrorists who murder innocents by saying things like “that’s just what those people are like,” or “they’re violence-prone reprobates, so what do you expect?” or comments of that sort, all they’re really doing is excusing their behavior with reference to the inability of the perpetrator to decide not to perpetrate his or her crime. In fact, to attempt to insult people with reference to their genetic make-up, their religion, or their nationality is actually to say the precisely opposite thing—that they are somehow not fully responsible for their actions. That’s the stance we have to combat, I believe.  Harambe would not have been responsible for his actions even if he had killed that child. But that’s precisely because he was an animal, not a human being.

I’ve occasionally noted from the bimah that every single guard at Treblinka or Majdanek was once an innocent babe nursing at its mother’s breast, that none of them—despite ending up among the most grotesquely depraved criminals ever to walk the earth—none can have his or her actions excused with reference to religion, nationality, or political affiliation. Each chose the path of utter depravity and indifference to human suffering. Each wholly and totally rejected the concept that life is a gift from God, that the life of every individual human being is of inestimable value. Each embraced criminality on a scale never before known to humankind. But none had to! Just as none of the 9/11 murderers had to choose a life of terror and violence. Perhaps in our day, that lesson is even more important to say out loud. Islam didn’t make them do it. Their Saudi (or Egyptian or whatever) citizenship didn’t make them do it. Their teachers or imams didn’t make them do it either. Each had the possibility of choosing to revere life and to behave decently towards others, yet each chose to behave otherwise. To deride their crime as a function of their faith and not as the decision made by those specific people to behave in that specific way—that is not to damn them but to excuse them. And the same is true of every other knife-wielder or suicide bomber.

Harambe’s death was a tragedy. A poor beast who did nothing wrong was obliged to pay with his life for behaving naturally and normally. If any good can come from this whole incident at all, however, it would come not from encouraging us to think ill of animals, but from reminding us all exactly how it is animals and human beings differ.

Fifty Years On

Why is it I can believe how old I am and how old my children are, but am having such difficulty in believing—by which I specifically do not mean “coming to terms with” but actually believing—that tomorrow, May 28, 2016, is going to be the fiftieth anniversary of my bar-mitzvah, which took place (obviously) on May 28, 1966? That’s the question I’d like to address in this space this week!

I really can believe how old I am. (I might as well!) And I can also believe, more or less, how long I’ve been married. I can believe lots of things! But what I can’t quite grasp is how half a century can possibly have passed since that fateful day—and in terms of my future life it truly was fateful—how a full half-century can have passed since that day on which I, like every bar-mitzvah boy before me and since, stepped uncertainly forward as my name was sung out, grasped the wooden rollers of the Torah scroll that lay open before me, and, in my thirteen-year-old’s still-highish voice, pronounced the blessings that somehow constituted the liturgical equivalent of the threshold I was expected at that tender age to step over into manhood. Or at least into adulthood. Or rather into the specific combination of the two that everybody says matters incredibly in terms of who you are in the world even if you do have to go back to junior high school the following Monday. (Note to younger readers: in olden times before there were middle schools, “junior high school” was where you went to wait out the hellish interval between elementary school and high school and, occasionally, to learn something.) I was a young thirteen at my bar-mitzvah too, as I recall, even the advance heralds of impending pubescence still considerably further down the pike than I myself was at the moment.

But it wasn’t my boyish demeanor or my slightly-too-big suit from Barneys—much less my clip-on necktie—that I remember the most vividly from that day: it was my mother sitting in the front row between her own aunts Bea and Alice and crying as she focused not on me or my great accomplishment in becoming a man, much less on my haftarah, but rather on the death of her own mother only a few months earlier on, a loss which both overshadowed and lent unexpected meaning to my big day.

I was a precocious lad, I suppose, but I truly recall thinking that, with the death of my grandmother leaving me with no grandparents at all (and placing my parents in the front line facing the eventual void that we all fear less when there’s someone around we deem likely to fall into it first), I was in some way taking their collective, now fully vacated, place in the Camp of the Israelites. In that thought, I included them all—the grandfathers I never met, the grandmother I only vaguely recalled from my days as a toddler, and my maternal grandma (of whom I’ve written in this space many times with respect to her Bensonhurst-blue hair, her gentle demeanor, her considerably artistic talent, and her almost unbearable overheated apartment on 84^th Street in Brooklyn)—and felt that, by stepping forward into at least theoretical adulthood, I was ensuring both the continued existence of my own family and, in some extended sense, of the Jewish people itself.

This latter notion I didn’t come up with on my own—no thirteen-year-old is that precocious—but was rather planted in my brain as a result of something the rent-a-rabbi provided by Riverside—whom I met the day of my grandmother’s funeral and never saw again and whose name I can’t recall if indeed I ever knew it—said to me in the limousine that took us from the I.J. Morris Funeral Chapel on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont. I was listening carefully, impressed that he was even talking to me at all as we drove eastward down the Belt. And, even if I was still unable to detect any nascent stubble where I was certain my sideburns were supposed to be, I got the message. When people ask, as they occasionally do, when I decided to become a rabbi and to spend my life in the service of the Jewish people, the formally correct answer is “years later, when I was already in college.” But that answer only records when the plant blossomed, not when the seed was planted.

But I digress. My bar-mitzvah took place on a beautiful May day. Strangely, the entire operation was conducted on foot. We walked from our apartment house to the Forest Hills Jewish Center for the service not because we were strictly—or even vaguely—Shabbat-observant, but merely because my father was certain that we would have ended up parking further away from the synagogue than we actually lived. (Anyone who lives or ever has lived in Forest Hills will attest to the reasonableness of that thought.) And then, when the service was over, my parents led a kind of Cohen Family Parade down Queens Blvd. to the Stratton Restaurant, in its day a well-known roast beef restaurant with an interior vaguely reminiscent of an English pub (or, rather, what its owners must have hoped their customers would imagine British pubs to look like) and today a branch of the TD Bank. We were entertained, as I recall, by a three-piece band, a trio consisting of a bass, a piano, and a drummer. We sat in pre-assigned seats, as indicated on an elaborate table created by my mother herself on a large piece of oak tag using blue and red magic markers. There were supercool cylindrically-shaped boxes of matches on each table, each covered in yellow velvety paper and emblazoned with my name and the date of my bar-mitzvah in fancy gold letting on the side. And then, when it was all over and all the other guests had left, my parents, myself, and my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Herb walked home to our apartment.

Where my mother and her sister went off to once we got home, I don’t remember. But my father, my uncle, and I repaired to my bedroom to tally up my checks and to inspect the rest of my gifts. And then eventually my aunt and uncle also left—in their white Cadillac convertible with red leather seats, which the thirteen-year-old me deemed even cooler than the yellow match box cylinders—and I was home alone with my parents, a boy no longer (or at least not in the sense I had been only a day earlier) and more or less ready to begin the rest of my life.

After all these years, when I think back on that day in May of 1966, I’m stunned by how much has changed in my life and in the world since then. It was a tumultuous month, that May. The siege of Da Nang in South Vietnam was underway in full force. The Cultural Revolution in China was just beginning. Bob Dylan had just released Blonde on Blonde. The number one song on the radio was the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” (The thirteen-year-old me was about to become a huge Stones fan.) Cuba was under martial law as the Cubans awaited an American invasion that never came. LBJ was in the White House. John V. Lindsay, whom my father particularly reviled, was mayor of New York City. It all seems like such a very long time ago!

And yet it also doesn’t. From the vantage point of half a century’s worth of days, something like 18,250 of them, I can see the trajectory of my life more clearly than ever before. I can understand that, although it was weightless, imperceptible, and invisible, the mantle that was settled on my shoulders as I stood before the incredibly byzantine, slightly scary Ark of the Law on the bimah at the Forest Hills Jewish Center and tentatively read out the haftarah that morning that recounted the birth of Samson was totally real. I didn’t perceive it at the time. I was more focused on being annoyed—this I do remember clearly—that the other boy having his bar-mitzvah that morning and with whom I thus had to share my big day, was also named Martin…which led to people amusingly confusing us throughout the morning. (My parents thought I was overreacting, particularly since even I myself couldn’t say why I was making such a big deal out of what was obviously a mere coincidence.)  But although I could barely perceive what was happening to me at all, I now see myself on that day crossing a line back over which I haven’t ever crossed or even, speaking honestly, thought to cross. Somehow, I actually did become a man, or at least a pre-man, on that specific day and in that specific place.

The haftarah was also a coincidence, merely the lesson from the Prophets that went with the Torah portion assigned to me because it went along with the Shabbat that itself had been assigned to me. But sometimes even the most fully coincidental happenstance can lead somewhere profound and real.

In the story as told, a man appears out of nowhere and tells the wife of one Manoah that, although she has never in the past been able to conceive a child, she will yet be a mother and that the child she conceives will devote his life to the service of God. Later, the man (an angel, it turns out) repeats the same message to Manoah himself. But when Manoah demands that the man reveal his name, he responds that the request cannot be honored, that his name is not merely unknown but actually unknowable. And, with that, he steps into a flame rising from Manoah’s makeshift altar and, riding it aloft, ascends to heaven. The best part is that the man’s promise actually comes true. Manoah’s wife conceives and eventually gives birth to a son, whom his parents name Samson. And then we get to the bottom line: va-yigdal ha-na·ar va-y’varkheihu ha-shem. The boy grows up and God blesses him in every way.

I lack Samson’s physical strength. (Who doesn’t?) But we only children tend to stick together and for that reason alone I’ve always felt connected to Samson’s story. I don’t suppose my future existence was announced to my parents by an angel. But I do know that my parents, both of them, were not at all sure they would ever produce a child until they finally produced me and that, in this just like Samson, I too was born to my older parents in the context of expectation and mild amazement. And I too grew up to be blessed by God in every imaginable way: with marriage and children, career and vocation, creativity and productivity, purposefulness and a deep, abiding sense of wonder that I ended up charged with doing so much and serving so many…and that now, after all these many, many years, I still feel myself in the middle of the journey, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, proud of the past but far more filled with curiosity and hope, still, about what the future might yet bring.

These are the thoughts I bring to this fiftieth anniversary of the day on which I stepped into manhood and took my place in the House of Israel not as my parents’ child but as a man in my own right. I didn’t look like a man. I probably didn’t act much like one either. But as the mantle settled onto my shoulders, I was altered by the moment…and thus became myself long before even I had any idea what that would or could possibly come to mean.

Obama at Hiroshima

President Obama is planning to visit Hiroshima on his forthcoming trip to Japan next week to attend the Group of Seven meeting at Ise-Shima, and thus to become the first sitting American president to pay a visit to one of the only two cities in the world ever totally to be devastated by a nuclear bomb. (Nagasaki, of course, was the other city. The other presidents to visit Hiroshima were Richard Nixon in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1984, the former before he became President in 1968 and the latter after he left office.)  The G-7 has its own agenda, obviously. But the decision to visit Hiroshima calls for consideration in its own right.

Presumably to head off criticism in advance, the White House has announced in no uncertain terms that the President will not apologize for the American decision to use atomic weaponry to end the Second World War when he visits Hiroshima. Nor, indeed, has any other of our other post-war presidents done so, although President Eisenhower’s publicly-expressed regret for our nation’s use of “that awful thing” to bring the war to a close probably came the closest. But his off-hand expression of regret was hardly an apology, nor did anyone (including most definitely the Japanese) take it that way.

My own feelings about Hiroshima are complicated. On the one hand, the loss of civilian life was truly horrific. About 140,000 civilians are thought to have died as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, about half of whom died on the day of the attack itself. (In addition, about 20,000 Japanese soldiers also died on that day in that place.) An additional 80,000 died as a result of the bombing of Nagasaki two days later, also half of whom died instantly.  Whether or not the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan was justified depends on the vantage point of the person asking the question, but no one can dispute the fact that the attacks were fully successful: Japan surrendered unconditionally not even a full week after Nagasaki and with that ended a war that took the lives of somewhere between seventy and eighty-five million people, constituting more than three percent of the entire population of the planet.

Comparing the number of dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the number of dead at Pearl Harbor—by comparison a mere 2,471—is, to say the very least, ridiculous: the men and women who died at Pearl Harbor were murdered—executed in cold blood by a nation that was specifically not at war with the United States—whereas the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were citizens of a country that not only was at war with the nation that attacked them, but which had itself initiated the war with its horrific surprise attack on our naval forces in Hawaii in the first place. The number of people murdered by the Japanese regime between the invasion of China in 1937 and the end of the war—5,400,000 by most estimates, to which must be added the more than half a million POWs who died in Japanese custody and the tens of millions who died in China, the Philippines, and other countries occupied by the Japanese of various combinations of disease, deprivation, and occupation-induced misery during the war years—seems a more reasonable figure to discuss in this context, but even that gargantuan figure doesn’t really work: the more than 300,000 civilians that the Japanese executed at Nanking alone during the winter of 1937-1938, for example, were killed for no military reason at all, whereas the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can reasonably be said to have saved all those civilians and soldiers, including most definitely American and other allied soldiers, whose lives would have been forfeit in the land invasion of Japan that would surely have ensued had the war not ended when it did. Whether more or fewer Japanese civilians would have died in the course of a massive land invasion than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is, of course, unknowable. What is certain, on the other hand, is that they would surely not have been the same people who died on those days in August 1945…which means that uncountable numbers of Japanese civilians who survived the war also owe their lives to the American decision to do whatever it was going to take to bring the war to an end.

What I keep reading, including in comments by Benjamin Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor, is that the President’s decision to visit Hiroshima is related more to his vision for a nuclear-free future than to his feelings one way or the other about the ultimate rightness or wrongness about President Truman’s decision to authorize the attacks of August, 1945. I suppose that make sense—nuclear weapons have only been deployed twice in the history of our planet, and so the most dramatic place for the President to make what will probably be his last major appeal for nuclear disarmament would have to be one of the sole sites, other than test sites, ever to experience the actual force of a nuclear explosion.  And yet, even though that thought has a certain cogency to it, any number of factors—including not least of all our current relationship with Japan—will prevent the President from speaking openly and fully honestly about the events of August 1945 and require that he focus himself instead on the horrors of war generally without indicting—and certainly not forcefully—the Japanese as the authors of their own debacle. Nor will he feel free to opine, even obliquely, that the barbarism that characterized the behavior of Japanese forces in the lands they occupied during the war—and the millions of dead in those countries, and particularly China, at their hands—simply required that the war be ended by whatever means were available to whomever could deploy them and that, in the end, nothing else mattered more. Even less likely is the possibility that he will choose to quote President Eisenhower’s famous remark that the sole immoral act possible when fighting against demonic enemies like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan would have been to lose the war.

But even if the President could speak totally openly, does it really behoove us to enter into the kind of ghoulish calculus that would likely follow his assertion, unproven and unprovable, that more lives were saved than lost by President Truman’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons against Japan. My guess is that it probably is true, but do we really want to go there? The civilians who died at Hiroshima were not personally responsible for Pearl Harbor or the rape of Nanking. They were, as is inevitably the case for so many in wartime, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—innocents, including babies and young children, who were incinerated to end a war they personally didn’t start and in which they, speaking specifically of the children, didn’t play any role at all.

Not to regret their deaths, let alone actually to blame the dead for their own fiery demise, would be an example of moral depravity. And I say that as someone who thinks President Truman did make the right decision to bring to the war to an end with the means he had available to him and who considers himself a moral, decent person who would never step over dead babies on the way to perform even the most moral or praiseworthy act. The moral conundrum is acute, then: to approve of the bombing means to look past the victims and in essence to blame their fates on their own nation’s leadership, but to wave away their deaths as mere collateral damage in an otherwise fully justified military action requires that the waver-away be made of sterner stuff than I personally am. In my own opinion, since the President will be constrained both by the strictures of good taste and the realpolitik of the day from speaking totally openly at Hiroshima—and since the moral puzzle is insoluble, yet to speak on the subject at all is by definition to present at least obliquely one side of the argument as one’s own—it would probably have been a better idea not to go at all.

When I was a senior in high school, I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Originally a full-issue-length essay that appeared in The New Yorker in 1946 but subsequently published and republished many times as a stand-alone book, Hiroshima focuses solely on the individual fates of a handful of people present in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded and makes it more or less impossible to think of the people incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a faceless mass of indistinguishable dead people. Being a child of my time, I read Hersey’s book in the light of our nation’s ongoing experience in Vietnam. But being as well the teenaged version of my future self, I also read it in light of Auschwitz and resolved never again to speak of “the dead” without recalling that the gas chambers were not filled with “people” or with “victims,” but with an endless number of individuals, each an entire universe, each a world of passion and culture, of intelligence and potential. Nor was it again possible for me to think of the dead at Hiroshima as a faceless mass of unfortunates.

As I contemplate President Obama’s coming visit to Hiroshima, I find my mind turning—slightly unexpected and probably not entirely fairly—to the events of December 7, 1970, when Willy Brandt spontaneously fell to his knees before the monument marking the spot that was once the entrance to the Warsaw Ghetto as an act of personal remorse and national contrition. “Under the weight of recent history,” he later explained, “I did what people do when words fail them. In this way, I commemorated millions of murdered people.”

In a sense, Chancellor Brandt had it easy. He represented the nation that perpetrated evil in the world on a previously unimaginable level and brought unprecedented levels of human suffering to countless innocents. It must have been wrenching for him to go to that place and do that thing…but he did it and his reputation as a man of honor was established permanently, at least in my mind, on that day and at that specific hour.  But President Obama is facing an altogether more vexing challenge. Like Willy Brandt, he represents a nation that brought about the deaths of countless innocents. But he does not represent a nation that acted indecently or immorally at all, but, just to the contrary, he represents the nation that defeated the forces of demonic evil and helped establish democratic governments not only in the countries occupied by the fiends and their allies, but in the perpetrator nations as well. He has, therefore, nothing to apologize for…and yet to use that truth as an excuse for looking away from the horrific loss of life our best efforts to win the war brought to people who were neither the leaders of their nation nor the perpetrators of their horrific policies in the countries they occupied—that would not behoove the leader of the Free World even slightly.

And it is that precise conundrum I wish the President had chosen simply to avoid by flying directly home after the G-7. To walk the tightrope before him and to speak honestly and candidly about the legitimacy of America’s efforts to win the war at all costs, and at the same time neither to demean the civilians who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor to blame them for their own deaths—that is a challenge that I’m not sure can be successfully met at all. Willy Brandt was correct that there are some things that really cannot be said in words. But the gesture he chose to give voice to thoughts that could only be expressed outside of language is certainly not one available to the President, and neither does he have the option of appearing in that place but saying nothing at all.  The world will be listening next week to what he does choose to say…and so will the ghosts. 

Israel at 68

Earlier this week, I delivered the eulogy at the funeral of a woman I knew my entire life, Helen Levy, and whose children—one slightly older and one slightly younger than myself—I’ve also known forever. I mention that because I want to retell here a detail about Helen’s parents, Jacob and Bertha Bloch, who had the unimaginable experience as newlyweds of living through the greatest of life’s joys and the most horrific of life’s disasters on adjacent days in 1926. On the first of those days, both in mid-March, Bertha gave birth to twin daughters. Helen and Rebecca were their first children, and I’m sure Jacob and Bertha experienced the same indescribable happiness we all feel as our children—and particularly our first children—are born. But the babies were preemies and they met with entirely different fates: Rebecca lived for one day and then died, whereas Helen lived into her tenth decade and died in her nineties last week. As a rabbi, I’ve made the observation countless times to people I was trying to help through analogous situations that the heart is a wide thing that can accommodate all sorts of emotions concurrently…and specifically including emotions that feel as though they shouldn’t be able to co-exist in the same space. And that, although a cup of coffee can only be hot or cold but not both, the human heart therefore somehow can be happy and sad at the same time. And, most of all that there’s no percentage in feeling obligated to choose between discordant emotions that both feel equally real to the person experiencing them: you can just be both those things—happy and sad, joyful and miserable, accepting and angry—and leave it at that. So it’s a contradiction, I often finish up by pointing out…so what? Not everything has to be so logical!

I mention that story today in this space because I find myself bringing the same set of emotions to the twin “yom ha’s” that Israelis and Jewish people everywhere observed this last week: Yom Ha-zikkaron, Israel’s memorial day for the fallen of the IDF (as well as those who died in the struggle leading up to statehood in 1948), on Wednesday, and Yom Ha-atzma·ut, Israel Independence Day, on Thursday. Like twin panels in a medieval diptych, these two days function as separate entities commemorating different and distinct things…but are only fully intelligible in each other’s light. They are two, therefore, because they are two: two adjacent days with two names that do two different things. But they are also the same thing, and in just the same way that silence and sound are the same thing, and light and shadow. They exist, obviously, on their own. But what they truly mean, or should mean, to all who see in the creation of an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel a tangible harbinger of redemption only comes to the fore fully when they are viewed in each other’s light. And, of course, also each other’s shadow.

In a world in which Israel’s very right to exist as a Jewish state is still routinely brought into question by all sorts of people who should know better—and who would never dream of wondering if Iran has the right to self-define as an Islamic republic or if Pakistan or Afghanistan do—the juxtaposition of Yom Ha-zikkaron and Yom Ha-atzma·ut feels particularly ominous.

In all, 23,477 individuals—men and women, young and old, draftees and volunteers, native-born and immigrants—are recognized as have given their lives in the struggle leading up to independence and in the wars Israel has had to fight, including the War of Independence itself, since independence was declared on May 5, 1948. This figure includes regular soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, but also members of the Shin Bet and the Mossad, the Israel Police Force, the Israel Prison Service, and the Jewish Brigade that fought with the British during the Second World War. Each was a universe, a world of potential extinguished by an enemy bullet or by a terrorist’s bomb. Each died al kiddush ha-shem, as an act of martyrdom suffered for the sake of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. And each, by definition, did not live to see how the world would or would not react to his or her death, and thus to know with certainty that he or she did not die in vain. To tell each of their stories would take a lifetime, obviously. And yet, taking them together as an aggregate also seems slightly wrong…not insulting, to be sure, but also not entirely accurate because, in the end, they weren’t members of some club or players on the same team, but disparate individuals brought together in our collective Jewish consciousness only posthumously. The figure mentioned above, by the way, specifically does not include Israeli victims of terror attacks against civilians, who are also memorialized in Israel on Yom Ha-zikkaron in a different set of ceremonies, and who are now said to number over 3,700 individuals. (That figure includes those who died at the hands of terrorists since 1920.)

It's easy to wax lachrymose in contemplating these numbers. Indeed, it would be hard not to feel that way…and particularly for those of us who have family and friends in Israel whose children serve in the IDF and who bravely put their lives on the line daily to keep their nation safe and secure. And yet regret alone cannot be the antidote to the kind of melancholy inspired by the contemplation of loss on this scale. Particularly for those of us on the sidelines—whose children do not serve, whose nation is too well established in the forum of nations for anyone to doubt its right to exist, and who never wonder as we get onto a bus or a train if there just might possibly be among our fellow travelers someone planning to kill us—it feels wrong to allow regret to constitute our sole response to Yom Ha-zikkaron. Israelis, of course, do move on: they transition from Yom Ha-zikkaron to Yom Ha-atzma·ut with a national torch-lighting ceremony that formally marks the end of national mourning and the onset of national rejoicing. But how exactly should those of us ensconced in the diaspora respond?

We could, of course, just mimic the Israelis and move on too from being weighed down by loss to being buoyed by a sense of gratitude to God that we live in the right age to experience the reality of an independent Jewish state. And, of course, to a certain extent that is what we do. But the transition is never fully real, at least not to me. Just as the Blochs cannot possibly have separated their emotions as they prepared to bring their one daughter home and to bury the other, and thus must simply have had to learn to live with both sets of emotions, so do I feel it impossible to separate my emotions entirely and simply to live through the one and then move on to the next. That sounds like it would be the rational way to proceed. It probably would be the rational path forward. But, at least for me personally, it just doesn’t work.

Looking on things from this specific vantage point of the nexus point between these two days of remembrance and celebration, I feel more than ever how true the ancient oracle was that characterized Israel as an am badad yishkon, as a people set apart. I feel this in a thousand different ways, each distinct yet part of a larger picture.

Israel is subjected to criticism of many kinds never leveled at other nations, its representatives so regularly treated with contempt in the press and on college campuses that most incidents go unreported in the mainstream press.

Israel’s effort to defend itself against a bloodthirsty enemy eager to cause as many civilian casualties as possible with ceaseless rocket attacks specifically targeting civilian centers is derided as excessive by citizens of countries who would never, not in a million years, tolerate that kind of violent aggression against its citizens.

Despite the fact that it was the Palestinians who walked away from the Oslo Accords at Camp David, and thus from the very autonomy they now insist Israel is somehow withholding from them, the onus for the ongoing stalemate in the Middle East is somehow always placed on Israel and only rarely, other than by Israelis, on the Palestinian leadership. In this thought, I include many of our own political leaders and those in countries we reasonably consider to be our allies.

Despite the fact that Iran has openly and shamelessly proclaimed its interest in wiping Israel off the map and murdering its citizenry—and despite the fact that any other country in the world that openly expressed its interest in annihilating some other country among the family of nations would be pilloried as an enemy of world peace and then fully or at last partially ostracized, Israel’s vehement objection to last year’s agreement that will lead directly, and long before children born this week will graduate high school, to an Iran unfettered in the fulfillment of its obvious wish to acquire a nuclear arsenal, was mocked by many, including many of our co-citizens in this country, as were those who spoke out against it.

Despite the fact that the world is rife with countries shamelessly pursuing aggressive, hostile policies against neighboring countries or against their own civilian populations, the United Nations seems incapable of focusing its attention anywhere at all other than on Israel and its alleged misdeeds. To say that the United Nations has long since squandered whatever moral capital it once possessed is surely true…but contemplating its hypocrisy does not undo the effects of its policies or make its double standards any more palatable.

Despite the fact that Israel has integrated immigrants from more or less every country on earth and made them into proud Israelis, Israel is characterized not as the world’s most successful melting pot society, but rather as the heirs of South African apartheid…and specifically because they do not wish to allow people pledged to their own annihilation enter the country at will and mix freely with the civilian population, a policy that is specifically not applied to Israel’s Arab citizenry who face no special restrictions at all in terms of where they go, with whom they assemble, and what they say. There is even an Israeli Arab on the Supreme Court of Israel, Salim Joubran. I do not recall there being any black judges on the Supreme Court for as long as it existed under real apartheid in South Africa.

For all these reasons, I feel a certain mix of pride and ill ease as I join together with all right-minded Americans, and with friends of Israel in every country, to celebrate the sixty-eighth anniversary of Israeli independence. As my readers must all know by now, the only home Joan and I own is in Israel. To the extent that the purchase of an apartment can be considered a kind of political statement, it was one we were and are both proud and pleased to make. It isn’t much, our two-bedroom on Gad Tedeschi Street, but it’s ours and we feel happy and secure when we’re there. Similarly, our tiny State of Israel, the 149^th largest nation in the world (right after El Salvador in terms of square mileage), isn’t much either in terms of size, but it is nonetheless the single greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in the last two thousand years…and that is surely something for all Jews, and all who would call themselves their friends, to celebrate. There is every reason to feel uneasy as we pass from Yom Ha-zikkaron to Yom Ha-atzma·ut this year. But, in the end, I suggest we allow ourselves to get over that…and to join all people of good will everywhere in celebrating the independence of the Jewish State. If the State of Israel were an Israeli citizen, it would be gearing up to retire and access its pension at age sixty-eight. But that’s only how it works for people: the State itself at sixty-eight is just attaining the fullest flower of its potential—and that, surely, is something to celebrate with unconflicted emotion. May the Rock of Israel bless the State of Israel and ever keep it strong, safe, secure!

Yom Hashoah 2016

A few weeks ago, I wrote to you all about the sorites principle in philosophy that illustrates how things can be possible and impossible at the same time. The word sorites, the Greek word for “heap,” lends its name to the principle because Eubulides of Miletus, a fourth century BCE Greek philosopher, used the image of a heap of sand to illustrate the principle: no one would call one grain of sand a heap, nor is it possible that something as tiny and inconsequential as a grain of sand could possibly change a handful of such tiny grains into something as large and consequential as a heap…yet, if you slowly add one grain of sand after another, there logically must be a moment at which you actually do have a heap of sand in front of you. Logically, somewhere in the process there must have been one grain that made the difference, one gain of sand that somehow—and all by itself—turned a tiny mound into a heap. And that is how something can be possible and impossible at the same time.

But Eubilides’ principle works in reverse as well: if you start with a huge heap of sand and start slowly and methodically to remove grains of sand from it, there must be a specific moment in the process at which you suddenly don’t have a heap of sand in front of you…but that leaves you puzzling over the obvious question of how something as minuscule as a grain of sand can possible make that much difference? How could anyone even notice if a single grain were missing from a huge mountain of sand? And yet…it both has to be noticeable and also can’t possibly be noticeable, which leads to the same conclusion: that things can indeed be possible and not possible at the same time.

My mind wandered back to Eubilides on Yom Hashoah this year, the day the Jewish people sets aside to honor the martyrs of the Nazi Holocaust.  We, in our world, think of survivors as older people. And, indeed, they surely are: the camps were liberated seventy-one and seventy-two years ago, so thirteen-year-olds then would be eighty-five now. But, other than children in hiding, there were no thirteen-year-old survivors (or almost none). And that leaves us today with a survivor community mostly in its upper eighties and nineties.  We’ve gotten used to thinking of them that way…but it wasn’t always like that. They didn’t used to be this old. And they surely didn’t used to be this few. As many of you know, I grew up in Forest Hills, not fifteen miles from the home in which Joan and I live now. When I was a boy, Forest Hills was filled with survivors…but they weren’t octo- and nonagenarians: they were young men and women in their twenties and thirties trying to figure out how to construct new lives for themselves in a new place. All had suffered grievous losses. Some had lived through the murder of their entire first families. But there they were—and in huge, impressive numbers—trying their best to re-invent themselves, to learn to speak English well, to find jobs, to establish homes, to create families. This all made a huge impression on the young me. My own parents were Yankees, born and bred in these United States. But all around me I saw different kinds of Jewish people from many different places…and that sense that there was far more to this whole Jewish thing than the Hebrew-School-version of myself could imagine was, I think in retrospect, part of the set of influences that led me into my career and into my studies, and also into my life.

Not all refugees throve in their new homeland, of course. Nor did those survivors who settled elsewhere, even in Israel, all do uniformly well. If any of my readers haven’t read Amir Gutfreund’s remarkable novel, Our Holocaust, describing his life as a young man growing up in a town outside Haifa almost entirely settled by survivors, I can’t recommend it too highly. If you want to get what it means to have survived, that’s the place to start. (Gutfreund, one of Israel’s most talented authors, died tragically of cancer earlier this year at age fifty-three, but he left behind a body of work that would be impressive even for an author with decades longer to work.) Some of the people in his book do remarkably well, but others of his characters are lost to the world, stuck in an endless loop of misery and recrimination, unable to loose the shackles that others imposed on them and that they themselves seem unable to shake off entirely or, for some, even at all.  Some few in his book really are mad. But most are just regular people trying to find some comfort and pleasure in life even if it means facing down almost unimaginable trauma and simply refusing to surrender to it. I recommend the book to all very highly as a true tour de force, but the bottom line—both within Gutfreund’s book and outside its covers—is that even in Israel the number of survivors in our midst is dwindling.  And that thought—somehow both banal and chilling at the same time—is what I bought to Yom Hashoah this year along with a sense of marvel that these people exist at all, a sense of wonder at their achievements (and the unsettling questions regarding my own mettle that the contemplation of their lives inevitably stirs up in me), and a sense of abiding regret that future generations will know these people only from a distance—through their books and their Spielberg interviews, and through the stories they tell and to which we, even now, we avidly listen.

Earlier this year, on what would have been my own father’s 100^th birthday, the world lost Samuel Willenberg, the sole remaining survivor of Treblinka.

The camps had certain underlying principles of brutality, barbarism, and depravity in common, but they differed dramatically one from the other in terms of their final chapters.  By the time the Germans had done their best to empty out Auschwitz as the Red Army advanced, for example, there were only 7,000 prisoners left in that place to liberate. By the time American forces reached Buchenwald, on the other hand, there were four times that many prisoners present. (The wrinkle in that detail is that about ten thousand of those who were liberated at Buchenwald had survived death marches to that place from Auschwitz and a handful of other camps.) The numbers in other places, however, were dramatically and tragically smaller. In Sobibor, for example, where over 170,000 people were mercilessly murdered, there were precisely fifty-eight survivors. The numbers in Treblinka were even more shocking: of the three-quarters of a million people murdered in that place, only sixty-seven are known to have survived and Samuel Willenberg was among of them. He was not, however, present gratefully to be liberated when the Red Army arrived because even more amazing than the fact that he survived at all is the fact that he survived by escaping the camp after the famous prisoner revolt in that place in the summer of 1943. His odds of survival were not good: of the 200 or so escapees, all but 67 were recaptured and summarily murdered. Making his story even more incredible, Willenberg survived even though he didn’t manage to escape Treblinka unharmed—he was shot in the leg as he leapt over the top of a barbed wire fence after climbing up a pile of unburied bodies temporarily stacked up against it and from there somehow catapulting himself over the top—but he did manage to get away.

Born in 1923 in Czestochowa, Poland, Willenberg was still a teenager when he was deported to Treblinka and became the sole survivor of the three transports that arrived at the camp that day, each of which included twenty packed cars of prisoners. (Even that part of the story is amazing—the Germans needed a bricklayer to help build something and, since that was the fictitious occupation he reported upon arrival, they took him onto the work force instead of killing him with all the other sixty boxcars full of innocents.) After his escape, he made his way through the forest and eventually came to Warsaw, where he joined the Polish Home Army and spent the rest of the war fighting his personal war with the Germans with the Polish resistance. He participated personally in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, then, after the war, emigrated to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. He married and raised a family. And he wrote a book, Revolt in Treblinka, which, although not the sole book by someone who escaped Treblinka, is riveting and very worth reading. (For readers interested in the same story from a different vantage point, I recommend The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman, originally written and published in Yiddish, but since 2012 available from Pegasus Books in English.)  And then, just this past February, Sam Willenberg died at age 93. He was the last living survivor of Treblinka.

I watched the survivors in our midst with some combination of awe and nervousness. They were many, it was true, but I knew what had happened—or I thought I did—to those who were not rebuilding their lives in Forest Hills because they and their families had ended their lives in execution pits and gas chambers. I took comfort in their numbers, however, telling myself that, had my family fallen into German hands during the war, we too surely would have been among the survivors. Weren’t we also living in Forest Hills, just like so many of them? I know better now—times six million—but back then, thinking the survivors to be rules rather than exceptions, I imagined us as some sort of honorary members of the survivor community nonetheless…and particularly once I learned the fate of the Jews of my great-grandparents’ shtetlach in Poland and Belarus. The indomitable spirit of the survivor community is what buoyed me as a boy…and what gave me the sense of self that, in some profound ways, I carry with me even today. And that is why the death of Sam Willenberg made such an impression on me. My children, of course, know many survivors. But their own children will know them only at a distance, and my children’s children…at even more distance than that.

Eubilides’ principle is at work here: the loss of one single survivor can’t logically make that much difference to the larger picture. How could it? And yet…somehow, as the years have passed, the picture has changed dramatically: where there was once a mountain, there was at first just a heap. But now that heap has itself diminished and will soon enough just be a collection of disparate grains of sand. And that makes it that much more important for those of us who knew and know these people, and who heard their stories firsthand—it is that much more crucial for us to make sure that their stories do not vanish with them…and that their personal testimony is not merely recorded, but cherished and made available to future generations.

We did our part at Shelter Rock this week, coming together to hear the testimony of a woman who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, and who participated in one of the so-called “death marches” when the war was almost over and the Germans were eager to empty the camps of those they hadn’t managed to kill. We listened, recording the details we had mostly all heard before…but the point wasn’t that we learn this or that detail, but that the testimony itself be given, and that it be spoken and recorded. All that, we managed to accomplish. But how will future generations recreate the experience of actually knowing people who lost everything and yet who managed somehow to survive? That is the unsettling question that is left to churn and roil around within me as we move past Yom Hashoah this year, sixty-three years after it was inaugurated in Israel as a national and international day of remembrance and more than seventy years after the end of the war.