Standing Up by Sitting Down

All readers who know me personally know that I’m not exactly a sports-guy. I occasionally follow baseball, although always from a safe distance and rarely in person at an actual game. I’ve attended exactly one NHL game in my life and one NBA game. I’ve never been to a professional football game and, no, I hadn’t ever heard of Colin Kaepernick until two weeks ago. But I’ve heard of him now!

For readers even more clueless than myself when it comes to professional sports, Colin Kaepernick, age 28, is a quarterback who plays for the San Francisco 49ers. He is, by all accounts, a remarkably good player and a true asset to his team. For people who do not follow football, however, he came to prominence only a few weeks ago when, before a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers at the end of August, he pointedly and publicly declined to join his teammates in standing up during the playing of the National Anthem. During a subsequent interview, he explained his decision to remain seated as a matter of principle and an expression of his reluctance to show pride in a nation that, to use his own words, “oppresses black people and people of color.” Furthermore, he commented that, in his opinion, it would be an act of personal selfishness to garner the respect of onlookers by appearing to respect the flag when, again to quote his exactly words, “there are bodies in the street and people…[are] getting away with murder.”

Then, in the 49ers final pre-season game on September 1, Kaepernick modified his protest gesture and, instead of remaining seated, instead knelt down during the playing of the national anthem. This, he subsequently explained, was his way of continuing his protest while at the same time showing respect to former and current members of our Armed Forces.

As could certainly have been anticipated, Kaepernick’s behavior was vocally lauded in some circles and just as loudly deplored in others. Some few other professional athletes have followed suit both as a way of expressing support for his gesture and, presumably, because they feel the same way about the state of the nation. The National Football League responded to the incident by issuing a bland statement noting that players are only encouraged to stand for the national anthem, but not specifically required to do so. For their part, the 49ers’ management weighed in with a more pointed statement that, by begrudgingly recognizing the right of any individual player to choose whether or not to “honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we are afforded as its citizens” by standing during the anthem, somehow managed to be supportive and insulting at the same time. It didn’t take long for Kaepernick’s behavior to turn into a national cause célèbre with people of all sorts and with no ties to professional sports quickly taking sides and expressing themselves, some very aggressively, one way or the other.

One interesting argument put forward has to do with the national anthem itself, the Star-Spangled Banner. For most of us, it’s a thing, a relic, a hymn…something that has always been there and presumably always will be part of our national culture. We learned it, or at least its first stanza, when we were children. It’s notoriously difficult to sing, but at P.S. 3 we did our best to sing it out with gusto as the opening part of our weekly schoolwide assemblies. I don’t recall learning much about its history. I’m sure I didn’t understand what it was all about. I liked the part about America being the land of the free and the home of the brave, but the rest of it was, to say the least, obscure. I’m sure I had no idea who exactly the “we” in the song were who watched the stars and stripes gallantly streaming o’er the ramparts. I’m not entirely sure I even knew what ramparts were back then, let alone which specific ramparts we were singing about the flag flying o’er.

Later, I filled in the details on my own. Francis Scott Key was thirty-five years old when, on September 14, 1814, he witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore by the British navy. Watching through the night to see if the flag was yet flying o’er the fort, Key was so inspired when, by dawn’s early light, he saw the same flag he had noticed in the last gleaming of the previous evening’s twilight still proudly flying over the fort that he was moved to song. Or at least to poetry. Key himself called his poem “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” but once it was set to a then-popular tune the song became widely known instead as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It became a popular patriotic hymn instantly, but slightly surprisingly—to me, at any rate—was only made our national anthem 117 years later by a resolution of Congress on March 3, 1931, which was subsequently signed into law by President Hoover.

At P.S. 3, we only sang the first verse. Nobody ever sings anything but the first verse. That, it turns out is all for the best, because later on the song takes a decidedly racist turn. Possibly. The background for that part of the poem has to do with the success the British had during the War of 1812 (which lasted until 1815 and of which the Battle of Baltimore was a prominent part) in recruiting American slaves to fight on their side by promising them their freedom in the wake of a British victory. These escaped slaves became the “Colonial Marines,” which regiment helped the British win the Battle of Bladensburg on August, 24, 1814, the victory that led directly to the occupation of Washington and the torching of the White House later that same day.

And it was possibly with reference to those slaves that Francis Scott Key wrote the now-infamous third stanza of his poem in which he wrote, slightly obscurely, that “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. / And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

There are a dozen different ways to interpret those lines. Some take the “slaves” in question to be the British themselves, who—unlike the Americans—were still ruled over by a despotic monarch. Others imagine the lines to be referencing American sailors seized by the British and impressed into service as seamen in the Royal Navy. But, as far as I can see, most take the reference to be precisely to those American slaves who, disgusted with their lot in a slavery-tolerant United States, saw their best hope for freedom to lie with fighting for the British. That white America was not amused goes without saying. That Francis Scott Key, who was present for the Battle of Bladensburg as a volunteer aide, was enraged at the sight of escaped slaves fighting for his nation’s enemy, ditto: the burning of the White House shook Americans’ sense of their own security and the ability of their government to defend its own institutions, and was in its day probably no less traumatic than the attack against the Pentagon on 9/11 in terms of the degree to which it made the citizenry feel vulnerable and nervous.  That slaves didn’t feel the same level of patriotism in their bones that their masters did hardly needs to be justified. But that we don’t actually ever sing that third verse, or any of the song other than its first stanza, is also key: those lines may be regrettable and, if they do reference the Colonial Marines, they certainly suggest a deplorable worldview in which a nation founded on the bedrock principle of the freedom of the individual somehow managed to tolerate slavery nonetheless. But, at the end of the day, no one—not anyone, really, other than historians and scholars—knows about any of this.

To argue that the national anthem, and I quote from an online essay I read just the other day, “literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans,” is so exaggerated a claim as to be essentially meaningless. (For those interested, click here to see that essay.)  The War of 1812 was, in a sense, the true birth of our nation. Forgotten by most and confused by many with the Civil War (just ask yourself how many Americans can distinguish easily between the roles played by Fort Sumter and Fort McHenry in our nation’s history?), the War of 1812 signaled, not the birth, but the coming-of-age of our nation.

Independence had been achieved not even thirty years earlier when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783. But, as we all know, being born is only the first step towards adulthood, towards maturity, towards “real” existence in the world of grown-ups. As children, we take our first steps, gather our wits about us, learn about the world. We grow into adolescence, test the boundaries, experiment with all sorts of possibilities…and then, at a certain moment, we step over the line into autonomy, into the state of personal freedom that characterizes true adulthood. And the same is true for nations. Becoming an independent American nation was a bloody, violent process. But once American independence was achieved, the next great question was what this newborn child would grow up actually to be. That, as with us all, was the great challenge facing our nascent nation at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Things were not great. American trade was being inhibited by the British War with France. As many as 10,000 American sailors had been seized by the British and forced to serve in the Royal Navy. The British were actively fomenting armed revolt by native Americans on the western frontier. The time had clearly come for America to test its resolve to defend its own interests, to stand up for itself in the forum of nations, to insist that it be granted the rights of sovereign states. Finally, the people could take no more and, on June 18, 1812, President Madison signed a declaration of war already approved both by the House and the Senate.  The battle was joined. The great American victories at Plattsburgh, Baltimore, and, eventually, New Orleans made victory inevitable. When the Treaty of Ghent was ratified by Congress on February 17, 1815, America’s place as a sovereign state, and as a force to be reckoned with, was secure.

And that brings me back to Colin Kaepernick. I can’t imagine that he had the Colonial Marines in mind when he chose to disrespect the national anthem as a way of giving voice to his concern for the plight of African-Americans, nor did he indicate even in passing that he did. A few years ago, I wrote to you about Justice Salim Joubran, an Israeli Arab justice of the Supreme Court in Israel, who created a huge brouhaha by declining to sing Hatikvah at a ceremony honoring one of the other Supreme Court justices on the occasion of her retirement from the bench. His disinclination to sing aloud the ode to Zionist principles that is his nation’s national anthem was just as widely condemned and lauded as Kaepernick’s parallel gesture all these years later. I wrote there (click here if you wish to read my comments for yourself) that I thought the whole matter was a tempest in a teapot, a huge amount of rancor generated by a simple act of personal courage.

Whether Justice Joubran should have allowed his allegiance to the State to trump his personal discomfort is a question I could cogently argue in both directions. And I feel the same way about Colin Kaepernick. His gesture was defiant and angry. He no doubt meant it to be both those things. But it’s important to take it for what it was, not what it wasn’t. It was a public way to attract attention to the cancer of unresolved racism gnawing at the underbelly of our national culture. It was not meant to insult the anthem or, I suspect, the nation for which it stands, one that, for all it may yet provide liberty and justice for all in precisely the same way, indubitably is already the land of the free and the home of the brave…including some brave enough to put their reputations and future earnings’ potential on the line for the sake of saying something challenging and provocative that fate has somehow granted them the audience and the framework to say powerfully and loudly.

Losing Me

How should we respond when allies, or people we thought of as allies (and still wish to think of that way), turn their backs on us? I suppose the answer depends on the context and on the details: if the people whose actions we are evaluating were personal friends or business associates, if there was a well-thought-out point to their decision to behave as they did or if it was a mere act of thoughtlessness, if the upshot of it all is that we are left merely with hurt feelings or if the consequences of the deed in question will be far-reaching and long-lasting in truly consequential ways, and if we—speaking wholly honestly—can say with certainty that we ourselves did nothing to provoke the incident. These are the questions I bring to last summer’s decision of the Black Lives Matter organization to label Israel an apartheid-state in its recently-published official platform and to accuse it of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian people. At the very least, that made me personally—and morally, if perhaps not fully legally—into an accessory to genocide. I did not take it well, particularly because the real cause the organization exists to espouse is so personally resonant with me, and so meaningful.

To say that our nation has a racial problem is not something with which any thoughtful person would wish to argue. Black Americans, for example, comprise roughly 13% of the American population, yet 37% of the people arrested annually on drug-related offences in the United States are African-Americans….and no one considers that a mere function of the fact that three times as many black Americans as white ones use illegal drugs.  Just a few years ago, the United States Sentencing Commission determined that, on the whole, black people convicted in court receive 19% longer sentences than white people convicted of the same crimes. Some studies I’ve seen lately say that there are jurisdictions in which the police frisk 85% of the black people they pull over for driving offenses, as opposed to 8% of whites similarly pulled over.

All these statistics, of course, are open to interpretation. And, also to be sure, different groups put forward different sets of statistics to make their very different points regarding all the matters mentioned above.  Still, what does seem clear as day is that there are issues here in desperate need of sorting out, and it also bears saying that the issues do not have to do solely with police- or court-related matters: there is a certain inarguable inequity between the races in employment, education, and banking in our country as well.

And then there is the actual matter of black people’s lives. Here too the numbers are confusing. In 2015, twice as many white people as black people died in police shootings, but the percentage of black victims so killed was double the percentage of black people in the population. If the statistic is redone to include only unarmed civilians, the percentage of black citizens in the mix jumps from 26% to 37%. Again, there are dozens of websites offering not only different interpretations of these statistics, but different actual statistics. And the background against which these statistics need to be considered is itself a moving target depending on whose analysis you find the most persuasive. Labelling police officers as trigger-happy racists is beyond insulting to people who face incredible challenges in their daily work, including the daily obligation of making split-second decisions regarding their own safety and the safety of others. But to say that there are issues here in desperate need of resolution feels like the kind of statement that stands easily on its own. There’s a problem. It needs a solution. Upon that much, we can surely all agree.

All that being the case, the Black Lives Matter organization hardly need to prove, and least of all to me personally, why it needs to exist. But when the organization chose not to draw me in to the ranks of its supporters but instead to accuse me of being party to genocide…that’s where they lost me.

Let’s discuss this whole concept of genocide. According to Palestinian sources, there were 1.4 Palestinian Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948. Earlier this year, the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics determined that the global Palestinian population stands now at just under 12.4 million, about half of whom live in Israel or the Palestinian territories, including Gaza, and half live in other countries. If Israel were committing genocide against the Palestinians, shouldn’t the numbers have gone down, not up? After the Second World War, there were six million fewer Jews in the world than in 1939. After one hundred horrific days in 1994, there were almost a million fewer Rwandans, of whom about 300,000 of the dead were children. The population of Cambodia declined by about 3,300,000 from 1970 to 1980 as a result of the in-house genocidal policies promulgated by the Khmer Rouge against its own people. Those numbers suggest how genocide actually works: regardless of the details, the numbers go down as the killing continues.

Even the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah, which vigorously opposes a continued Israeli presence on the West Bank and which had been openly allied with Black Lives Matter, issued a statement condemning the use of the language of genocide as a casual insult: The military occupation does not rise to the level of genocide—a term defined as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” While we agree that the occupation violates the human rights of Palestinians, and has caused too many deaths, the Israeli government is not carrying out a plan intended to wipe out the Palestinians. There is no basis for comparing this situation to the genocides of the 20th century, such as those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, or Armenia, or the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, each of which constituted a calculated plan to destroy specific groups, and each of which killed hundreds of thousands to millions of people. The Black Lives Matter platform also does not address the use of violence by some Palestinians, including the rocket attacks against civilians that Human Rights Watch has classified as a war crime. One can vigorously oppose occupation without resorting to terms such as “genocide,” and without ignoring the human rights violations of terrorist groups such as Hamas.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, had this to say along similar lines: Whatever one’s position on the relationship between Israel, its Palestinian citizens, and the residents in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s repellent and completely inaccurate to label Israel’s policy as “genocide.” And the Platform completely ignores incitement and violence perpetrated against Israelis by some Palestinians, including terror inside the country and rocket attacks lobbed from Gaza. Unfortunately, these phenomena are not new but have been challenges that have faced the Jewish state since its inception more than half a century ago.

I couldn’t agree more. And I write as someone strongly predisposed to take civil rights matters to heart, as someone who does not need even slightly to be convinced that the fantasy many of us once maintained that racial discrimination was a thing of the past was just that, a fantasy in need of some serious revision. But to accuse Israel of genocide without being able to point to the actual killing fields, to the execution pits, to the gas chambers, to the extermination camps…or to the ever-declining numbers of their victims as the slaughter progresses—that is not just inaccurate, but libelous and insulting in a way that few charges made against Jewish people—or any people—could possibly match.

At the end of the day, an organization that promulgates hatred against Jews—and I don’t see how the use of the genocide-charge to defame Israel could reasonably be described otherwise—such an organization is not worthy of the support of decent-minded people. The decision of the leaders of Black Lives Matter formally to drive from their ranks anyone who stands with Israel is, I suppose, their decision to make. But it excludes me personally from feeling drawn to their ranks or interested in being known publicly as a supporter.

But where does that leave us actually? To walk away from the racial issues that divide our nation would be a huge error for the Jewish community. The Black Lives Matter movement is hardly the only organization that is working towards healing the wounds that racism inflicts on our society! The cause itself—the effort to create a color-blind society in which all citizens are treated equitably and fairly—could not be more worthy of universal support and should surely not be dismissed as something solely for the victims of racism to pursue. Our American nation is facing a problem that many of us imagined was quickly on its way to becoming a feature of the past, something we imagined our children would soon find strange to the point almost of being bizarre to contemplate in the way kids today find it odd to learn that women have been allowed to vote in our country for less than a century or that there was a time when it was illegal in every single state for gay men to pursue their intimate lives on their own terms and privately…and that the first state to repeal such laws—Illinois in 1962—was not joined by a single other state for almost a full decade.

To imagine that it isn’t possibly both to pursue the goal of racial equity in our nation and to refuse to associate with people who use groundless, deeply vituperative rhetoric to accuse Israel of pursuing a Nazi-style agenda of extermination against the Palestinians—that seems to me illogical in the extreme. I myself am proof positive that it is possible to do both those things and feel both those ways: I have nothing but contempt for racism and those who pursue a racist agenda…and yet I will never knowingly associate with people who make common cause with enemies of the Jewish people or of the State of Israel.

Being Halakhic

In the English-language press in Israel and, just lately, here in our American Jewish press as well, I’ve lately noticed the word “halakhic” being used to qualify not behavior or rituals, but people. That may seem like a natural extension of the earlier usage, but the whole notion of describing someone as being “halakhic” strikes me as yet another blow to the nuanced, thoughtful definition of the word halakhah that, at least in my personal opinion, should be nurtured and fostered by all who hope to see Judaism retain its relevance and its appeal to a new generation.

The word itself, the Hebrew word halakhah, is used widely (although, other than in academic prose, almost solely by Jewish authors) to denote Jewish law in all of its jurisprudential detail and maddening intricacy. To be a master of halakhah does not mean merely to be an observant Jew, therefore, but truly to be conversant in a legal system that is known both for its precision and its almost byzantine complexity. To embrace halakhah, on the other hand, requires, not scholarly bona fides at all, but rather a humble willingness to step into the world of Jewish observance as governed by an ever-evolving system of legalized norms based on ancient principles that have morphed forward through the ages to the point in their development that they have attained to date. Neither of those concepts—becoming a master of halakhah and embracing halakhah as the measure of daily behavior both within and without the context of formal worship—seems particularly obscure to me. And yet I somehow balk at the thought of people “being” halakhic, as though that were a thing that you could be or not be, something like being a college graduate or a convicted felon. Both those things you can say in an instant if you are or aren’t…but is “halakhic” something you can that unambiguously choose to be or not to be? That is the question I’d like to explore in this space this week.

The word halakhah, itself not a word in biblical Hebrew, nevertheless has its roots in the classical language, and in two contexts that suggest its two aspects nicely: the standard verb used to denote walking or traveling in classical Hebrew is halakh, which has a far more obscure homonym used several times in the Book of Ezra to reference some obscure travelers’ tax imposed on wayfarers in the Persian Empire. Both antecedents are relevant: although in rabbinic literature the term is mostly used to denote the correct legal opinion in a potentially confusing context, the term came in later times to refer both to the life-path followed by people eager to live in sync with the laws of the Torah and also to the sense those people have that their choice of that specific course forward in life is not rooted solely in their will to live in that particular way but by a deep sense of obligation that hovers over the whole enterprise…thus making it, in some possible/impossible way, their personal choice to live lives governed by law not by choice at all but rather imposed on them from the outside by Heaven itself.

In our world, the term halakhah has come to denote the set of rules, norms, laws, and obligations that have evolved as the context in which Jewish people seek communion with God through the medium of allegiance to the covenant that binds the people Israel and the God of Israel. On that more or less all would agree. But fewer appear to know that those norms and rules have their own developmental trajectory in the world, one fully consonant with the etymological component of the term that suggests the notion of halakhah as journey rather than as destination, as process rather than product, as something you do rather than something you are.

Hold that thought…and let’s talk about grammar instead, at least for a moment. Languages evolve naturally from generation to generation as words change in meaning and as grammatical rules are abandoned and others adopted. That much seems obvious. Indeed, the sign of a vibrant, living language lies precisely in the ability of its speakers easily to understand each other despite the fact that speakers of that same language from half a millennium earlier in history might find it impossible to understand people speaking in their own language all those centuries later. Verbs particularly morph forward in unexpected ways, but the hallmark of native speakers is that they can easily and naturally identify exceptions to the standard rules as authentic or inauthentic. As a native English speaker, for example, I recognize “he sung a song” as a legitimate variant of the way I myself would express that thought, but “he becomed a dentist” as an obvious error that no native speaker would ever make.

And that brings us to grammar, the attempt of scholars to create patterns that explain, and thus can also predict, how a given language works. I suppose things may have changed, but when I was in school, grammar was a tetchy thing: verbs that appeared not to fall into one of the categories scholars determined as the rubrics that governed a given language’s verbal system were characterized with language almost always related to deviancy or defect. Sometimes they were called “weak” verbs; other times they were labeled “deficient” or “corrupt” instead. The specific terms changed from language to language—and I studied a lot of languages in my undergraduate and graduate school years—but the common denominator was that the terminology used to describe verbs that marched to their own drummers was always insulting, as though the verbs derided as corrupt or deficient were, like naughty children, willfully refusing to follow the rules imposed on them. Despite the use of such bizarre language, however, all the existence of such verbs really proved was degree to which the grammarians studying that particular language had failed to understand the system perfectly.

The study of halakhah is a bit like that, I think. There is, clearly, a strong sociological element to halakhah that scholars tend to ignore: when behavior patterns (or liturgical norms or the specifics of ritual practice) fail to suit the rules devised by scholars, they are derided as somehow deficient, inauthentic, or aberrant rather than as living proof of the dynamism of the larger enterprise.

Our Jewish observance is rooted in the system described in the columns of the Torah, but exists independently of our best efforts to explain it or categorize its elements. There are whole areas of Torah-based law, for example, that are widely ignored by all, and for no obvious reason other than the people’s blanket rejection of their underlying principles…which category includes people who would bristle mightily at that thought. Even in the most observant communities, for example, I don’t believe there are people who follow Scripture’s unambiguous instruction to bequeath a double-share of their estates to their eldest sons and leave it at that. (There is a complicated way to manipulate the laws of gift-giving and estate planning so as to appear to be leaving a firstborn son his double share but without that son actually ending up with twice as much as his younger brothers, but that only proves my point: even the people who don’t just ignore the unambiguous injunction to leave firstborns a double share of their parents’ estates don’t actually leave their firstborns that double share at all. Nor, as far as I know, do regular Jewish people disinherit their daughters if a family has at least one son despite the clear instruction of Scripture to do exactly that.) Our tradition exists independently of our best efforts to categorize its norms in many other ways as well, including liturgically.  For example, we routinely label as the fulfillment of Torah law rituals that do not constitute the fulfillment of any law of the Torah at all—eating maror at the Passover seder in these post-Temple years when there is not paschal lamb of which to partake with those bitter herbs, for example, or performing the n’tillat yadayim handwashing ritual before eating “regular” food, as opposed to holy foodstuffs like t’rumah (the ancient grain tax paid by the populace to the priests of ancient Israel and which had to be eaten in the context of ritual purity). Behaving as though the mikveh can bring those who bath in it to a state of purity in our post-Temple world is also a chimera, yet the world is filled with people who insist exactly the opposite to be the case.

We continue to evolve standards of behavior that appear to exist outside the system as conceptualized by even our most adventurous scholars. Why else would I constantly notice, particularly in Manhattan, very ritually punctilious people who would never enter, let alone dine at, any other non-kosher restaurant routinely drinking coffee at Starbucks and not appearing to mind the fact that the same barista who served them their coffee is serving other patrons non-kosher meat sandwiches? And then there are aspects of halakhic observance that simply come and go. There was a time when people routinely referenced Erev Rosh Ḥodesh, the eve of the new moon, as “the lesser Yom Kippur” and fasted on that day as a means of atoning for sins committed during the month then concluding. The greatest rabbis endorsed the custom—Rabbi Moses Cordevero, the sixteenth century kabbalistic master, and Rabbi Yeshaya Horowitz, called the Holy Shla after the initials of his greatest work, the Shnei Luḥot Ha-b’rit, for example—but I’ve never actually heard of anyone fasting on that day. Are there some who do? I suppose there might be…but none I’ve ever come across. Nor have I ever met anyone who fasts on Mondays and Thursdays during the weeks on which the first eight Torah portions of Exodus—called by their acronym Shovevim Tat—are read aloud in synagogue even though this was once a relatively wide-spread custom. (Again, the existence of some obscurantists somewhere who do do this is hardly the point—there are exceptions to every rule, but my point is that the custom itself has completely fallen away and is surely unknown to the vast majority of Jewish people who otherwise consider themselves observant Jews.)  Halakhic observance is always in flux, always morphing forward to suit new norms of behavior and an ever-evolving sense of morality. The Talmud is filled with rules that fell into desuetude centuries and centuries ago, but it’s hard to think of that as a tragic development: life, including spiritual life, is growth…and that is so both on the personal and on the national level.

And that is why it strikes me as odd to use the term halakhic to qualify an individual. To live within the four ells of halakhah is to subjugate one’s will to the will of heaven. That much any rabbi would affirm easily as the noblest of goals. But to accept that that level of submission to God is itself a moving target, one that is permanently in flux and that thus requires of those would attain it not mere allegiance to a fixed set of rules but rather extreme sensitivity to the tenor of the world, to the most widely respected ethical norms, and to the ability of the Jewish people to remain faithful to a system built on a firm foundation of immutable principles and norms that is somehow also ever-evolving into its next finest iteration—that is why it takes not just perseverance but a truly supple intellect to be the kind of Jewish person the men and women of the House of Israel should all aspire to become. And that is why it seems spurious to me to label people as “halakhic,” as though it were something you could just be, like a diabetic or a Democrat: the halakhah is a framework for spiritual growth across the years of a lifetime and not a goal in and of itself to attain and then be proud of having attained. 

At Home and Abroad

Where does the self reside, that fully unique, private, idiosyncratic part of ourselves housed in, but wholly distinct from, our physical bodies? It sounds like the kind of question only an undergraduate could ask, let alone attempt to answer…but it’s nevertheless one I’d like to pose this week. And answer as well, if not definitively then at least with reference to some of my experiences this summer in Israel.

Some readers will surely have read earlier this summer about the wedding of Jeni Stepien and Paul Maenner, who were married on August 5 in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, a borough in Allegheny County just east of Pittsburgh. The wedding could have been, as weddings go, ordinary…but several factors made it remarkable. The first, the dour one, is that the bride’s father, a chef, was murdered one evening in 2006 as he walked home from work in a local restaurant. For a brief while, the family harbored some home that he might survive. But then he died of his wounds and, as a final, graceful gesture of letting-go, Michael Stepien’s family donated his organs, including his heart, to donors across the country waiting for transplants. A police investigation ensued. It took almost two years, but eventually an arrest was made. A trial followed that ended with the conviction of the accused, one Leslie L. Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Later, in accordance with a decision of the Supreme Court curtailing the right of lower courts to impose that specific sentence on convicted defendants who were minors at the time their crimes were committed, the sentence was altered to forty-years-to-life, plus a three-to-six-year consecutive term resulting from the defendant’s conviction on a firearms charge. The murderer was sixteen in 2006, eighteen when he was finally arrested, and nineteen when he was convicted; his victim was fifty-three. Both, coincidentally, were the fathers of two.

And that brings me to the second reason the wedding was remarkable. The bride, missing her father more than ever as she prepared to walk down the aisle without him, hit on the idea of inviting the man who received her father’s heart to accompany her instead. She knew his name—the specific organization that dealt with the donation and distribution of his organs allows donors and recipients to know each other’s identities and to establish some sort of relationship if they wish—but they hadn’t ever met in person. And so, not knowing how he would respond, she sent him an invitation. He accepted. It wasn’t too long a journey—Arthur Thomas, the man in whose chest now and for the last decade beats the heart that was originally the bride’s father’s, lives only one state over, in New Jersey—but it still can’t have been the simplest decision for him to make, and for lots of different reasons. But make it he did. And now we can fast-forward to the wedding and…there he is, standing next to the bride when she suddenly pauses halfway down the aisle to place her hand on his chest and thus to feel, if not exactly her father’s beating heart, then at least her father’s heart beating. I feel very moved by that image just writing this out—I can hardly imagine what it must have been like actually to be there and watch her place her hand on this stranger’s chest and sense her father’s nearness on her wedding day. What fatherless bride wouldn’t wish for the same thing?

Was Michael Stepien really there on his daughter’s wedding day? Surely none of us thinks deceased organ donors remain in some obscure way alive for as long as their donated organs function, much less that the people who receive those organs somehow, in some magical way, become—in addition to who they already are—some version also of the people whose organs they’ve received! And, yet, to dismiss her gesture as mere symbolism, as just a gesture of remembrance that effectively created the false but satisfying sense that her father was nearby when, of course, he was not there at all—that doesn’t feel quite right either. We all understand that the heart is the organ in our chests that pumps blood into our circulatory systems, not the seat of emotion or intelligence as which we regularly reference it in common speech: when lovers declare that they love each other with all their hearts, we understand well enough what they mean…but none of us thinks that their hearts are actually capable of loving independently of their brains…or, speaking honestly, at all. The heart is a muscle, a pump, a machine…not the seat of personality. But if the heart is not the seat of personhood, then where does the part of us that is who we truly and uniquely are, where does it reside? That’s the question!

I found myself thinking about these matters repeatedly as I wandered around Jerusalem this summer and marveled at how at home I somehow feel in a place that isn’t really home at all. Some few of you reading this have actually visited with us on Gad Tedeschi Street. But even without having had the actual experience of spending time with us in Jerusalem, all of my readers know how deeply connected we are to that place and how emotionally tied to it we are. Occasionally, people ask which is the “real” me, the one who lives here and vacations there or the one whose home is there and who works here? It’s a confusing question even to formulate, let alone honestly to answer. I’m not even entirely sure it makes sense even ask why the inner me needs to reside anywhere at all other than, like salt in a stew, invisibly but fully really within the confines of my physical perimeter. Don’t what-I-am and who-I-am have almost by definition to occupy the same space, thus to coincide neatly with where-I-am?

It’s me when I’m there, obviously. But it’s a slightly different version of me. In Jerusalem, I live in a different home. I drive a different car. I daven in a different shul. I have a different phone number (and, until we finally bought our own SIM cards this last year, a different phone as well). Indeed, not unlike an actor who looks like a different person in every show in which he is cast but who, beneath all that make-up and costuming, is essentially and always the same person, I too am the same person wherever I find myself. And so the answer is not that one is the more real me and the other, the less real version…because the true me is exactly the same in both places, maybe just dressed up a bit differently to suit the setting.

But for all it’s surely so that it’s me in both places, there is a dimension to life in Jerusalem that feels unique when I’m present in that place. I notice it in different ways. I sleep soundly there, and I have long, elaborate dreams that I can remember upon awakening with far greater frequency than I can here at home. I daven differently there too…finding different sections of the t’fillah to speak to me in different ways. Because the custom in Jerusalem is for kohanim to pronounce the Priestly Benediction with their arms aloft daily (and twice on Shabbat and chag, as opposed to only on weekday holidays as is our custom in the Diaspora), I feel a connection to my own ancestors—and to their specific stream within the larger river of Jewish consciousness that leads from history through reality to destiny—in a different, uniquely deep way. It’s me in both places. But there is a level of enhanced sensitivity to almost every aspect of my Jewishness in the Holy City that is hard to describe in mere words.

The other question we’re constantly asked—whether we intend eventually to leave North America and settle permanently in Israel—is also a question with no answer.  Like everyone, we have invented our own lives…and have dealt ourselves the cards we hold. When I’m there, part of me misses our “real” home on Reed Drive and our friends and our community. When I’m here, part of me misses the whole scene we by now slip into more and more effortlessly upon arrival. And yet I’m more of here than of there, in many ways more at home at H-Mart than at Supersol-Deal, more (and far more) rooted in the soil of the land I actually was born in than the one I could, in some alternate universe, have been born in had my great-grandparents headed east instead of west on their way out of Poland and Belarus.

It’s good to be home. I fall easily into my familiar ways here, reconnecting with the world that is our native setting here, slipping into patterns honed over years of service to the Jewish people and, more specifically, to Shelter Rock.  The real me is the only me there is: a man at home in two different places, whose Jewishness is rooted both in the diasporan experience and in the soil of Eretz Yisrael, whose sense of purpose derives alternately from the propagation of Judaism and Jewishness in the context of service to a community of like-minded fellow travelers eager to live rich, sustaining, profoundly Jewish lives and from a vibrant, meaningful connection to the Holy Land and the Holy City.

In the end, I’m a stew of many ingredients that combine to create the specific individual who I have willed myself to become. Being made of many things is not a sign of confusion or of indecision, however, as much as it is the natural human condition and, at that, the specific aspect of our humanity that reflects the one great thing that distinguishes humankind from the animal kingdom: the ability we all share to perceive the world and then to self-create along the landscape thus fashioned.

The bride in my opening story who felt her father’s presence as she put her hand to that stranger’s chest was not succumbing to self-serving fantasy…because the heart is as good a symbol as any for the constellation of attributes that create the individual. Her father was there because she willed his presence into being with her hand and her own beating heart…just as we all create ourselves through the sheer force of our desire to exist in the world along the lines we will into existence. And that’s my story as well: I am who I am because of my roots and because of my branches, because of what I do and what I am, and because of the specific feel to the settings in which I choose to flourish…and, for as long as I can, in which I hope to grow forward creatively and productively into the future.

Return to Alonei Yitzchak

Now that we’re back in the States, our whole time in Israel seems to me like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, of course, just five restorative, relaxing, productive weeks in Jerusalem that went by all too quickly!

Over the year’s we’ve gotten used to some aspects of life in Israel—it no longer seems that odd to me, for example, when the plumber pauses in the middle of fixing the shower drain to tell you the story of his parents’ aliyah—and less used to others. (I still can’t quite figure out exactly why property has to be registered by its owners in twelve different registries, including one that even our lawyer says only exists in Israeli law as a relic of the Ottoman Empire and on the crucial nature of which the non-existence of the actual Ottoman Empire does not seem even slightly to impinge.) And whatever Israel lacks—it’s almost impossible, for some reason, to find a lime for sale in the nation’s supermarkets or a can of black beans—it more than makes up for with all the things you really cannot find anywhere else: shops in the shuk that only sell halvah, health clubs that open on Tisha Be’av afternoon but with the usual deafening music turned off out of respect for the fast, restaurants with one single main dish on the menu and people lined up around the block to get in, and more guns than I’ve ever seen anywhere in public (including, occasionally, in synagogue on Shabbat) combined with a murder rate lower than a full 117 of the world’s other nations. (Do I have to add: “including our own”?) It’s that kind of place.

I feel safe and secure in Israel. Contrary to the image of Israel constantly being broadcast by the news media in this country, the streets are filled with people out and about, the cafés are filled with people drinking coffee and watching the world go by, the shopping malls are filled with shoppers (including, at least in our neighborhood and also completely contrary to what the news media would want you to think, lots of Arab families shopping alongside Jewish families), and the synagogues—or at least the synagogues Joan and I frequent—are filled with an interesting mix of types who seem not to have heard about the much-discussed chasm between the religious and the secular in Israeli society and who are content to be themselves and to seek spiritual fulfillment where it might be found…and not according to some pre-ordained labeling plan devised by sociologists or, worse, the authors of op-ed pieces.

I want to return to the events of this summer several times in my letters over the next few months, but today, to inaugurate my tenth year of writing these weekly letters, I’d like to tell you all about a single afternoon we had in Israel a few weeks ago, one that stays with me still and was both remarkable, deeply satisfying…and as strange an experience as I’ve had in a long time.

When I was thirteen years old, my parents sent me to Israel for the first time. It was a long time ago. I hadn’t ever been on an airplane. I hadn’t ever been to another country, let alone one on the other side of the world. I certainly hadn’t ever left my parents other than to go to summer camp…and the camp I attended as a boy was owned by the best friends of my father’s oldest sister which meant that I wasn’t too far from their watchful gaze even in camp, or at least from their watchful gaze by proxy. And the decision itself to send me along to Israel with the American Zionist Youth Foundation, defunct since 1995 but in its day the major organizer of youth trips to Israel, was unexpected for another reason as well because my parents, Jewish to the core, were at best arm-chair Zionists who themselves hadn’t ever been to Israel. And, on top of all that, my parents were slightly over-protective types…and particularly when it came to matters concerning their only child, which led to the strange paradox of them being willing to send me off to Israel with the AZYF before they felt comfortable letting me take the subway into Manhattan by myself. But somehow it all came together and off I went.

The cost was $700 for seven weeks including airfare. Since camp in those days was $500 for eight weeks, the experience cost significantly more than another summer at camp would have. And yet my folks seemed not to care about that at all, only that I have this specific experience they for some unspecified reason wished me to have. And so off I went with a suitcase filled with all the wrong clothing (my parents seems to have missed the part about it never raining in Israel in the summer, nor about the temperature not really ever dropping down below freezing during August); an envelope filled with lirot purchased by my mother at the Bank Leumi on Queens Blvd. for me to spend on snacks and souvenirs; and, because it was, after all, Israel, a single yarmulke for me to wear if unexpectedly obliged to cover my head somewhere along the way.

We were lodged at a youth village called Alonei Yitzchak adjacent to Givat Ada, not far from Binyamina, Pardes Chanah, or Zikhron Yaakov. The program was far more like camp than the kind of tours kids go on today: we spent most of most of our days in our village, having classes in the morning and swimming or hiking in the afternoon. A few times a week we went on tiyyulim to different parts of the country, which part of the experience culminated in a three-day trip to Jerusalem. This was, of course, the bad old days. Jerusalem was a divided city. The Old City, the meat-and-potatoes of any tiyyul to Jerusalem today, was in a different country…and the Jordanian soldiers easily visible through the Mandelbaum Gate at the end of Shmuel Hanavi Street did not look at all friendly as we peered through the barricade and attempted to photograph them with our Kodak Instamatic 100s. Nor was this the Israel of today. Significant numbers of the amenities I had come to think of as normal parts of life—televisions in every home, public telephones that worked more or else always, free toilet paper in public restrooms—were not much in evidence. You could only phone home from a post office. Smaller roads, including the one that led from Givat Ada to Alonei Yitzchak, were unpaved. And yet I loved the whole thing. The pioneering spirit was alive and very well in our village. The landscape, the food, the laissez-faire attitude of our counselors (who slept apart in their own cabin, leaving the boys’ dorm solely to us boys after lights-out), the whole Jewish feel to the place (so unlike what I had previously encountered at home or in shul)—I loved the whole thing. And it altered my life, that summer: in a very real way, my journey through adolescence to the specific version of adulthood I ended up adopting as my own—that journey began that summer at Alonei Yitzchak.

I left at the end of August in 1966. I’ve never gone back…not because I couldn’t have figured out how to get there, but because the place itself somehow came to exist—for me personally, at least—on the cusp of memory somewhere across the insubstantial boundary between recollection and reality. I remembered the place clearly. I returned to it a million times over the years as something brought to mind some aspect of life at Alonei Yitzchak…but only in my mind, only as a journey through my own recollective consciousness to some shore beyond an uncrossable sea, not as an actual journey to an actual place.

And now this summer’s story begins. Joan and I were having lunch with our cousins Lionel and Joyce in Zikhron Yaakov. It was a hot day, but there was a nice breeze and I was fully relaxed as it somehow came to me that Alonei Yitzchak must be somewhere nearby. (I once wrote to you all about the strange experience I had coming to realize that my great-grandparents’ shtetl actually exists as a real place in today’s Poland, that it has a website and a football team, that you can actually go there. This was something like that. Click here to revisit that piece from 2009.) I took out my phone, opened Waze, and was amazed—truly amazed, as odd as that must sound—to learn that Alonei Yitzchak was all of eighteen kilometers from where we were sitting. We got in the car—our cousins are very good sports (plus it was our car) and Joan was intrigued—and off we went. Twenty minutes later, we were there.

I got out of the car and approached the guard. (There certainly wasn’t an eight-foot-high retractable gate when I was last there; I don’t actually recall there being a gate at all.) He asked what I wanted. I, slightly flummoxed, told him I had spent a summer there fifty years earlier and was hoping I could look around a bit. Unsure how to deal with someone who wanted to walk back into the place after being absent for half a century, the guard phoned the director, a young man named Yaakov who showed up after a few minutes and unexpectedly enthusiastically took us all inside. The place was mostly unchanged. The foliage was the same, including the peculiar (but not at all unpleasant) scent of the place that I suddenly recalled after all those years away. There had been improvements, obviously: a much nicer pool, a huge dining hall far larger than the one I recalled, many more cabins and bunks than were there in 1966. But, in every essential way, the place was the same as it was when I left. I eventually found my bunk, still standing (like myself) after all these years. As I approached that part of the place, I kept noticing boy-me slipping around the corner each time grown-up-man-me tried to turn around quickly enough to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the past. Whether or not he was consciously allowing me to see him at all, I can’t say. But he was there—not my ghost exactly or some spectral version of myself, but the boy-version of the man-version both present enough in the same place for long enough to make reasonable communion on some possible/impossible level outside the normal flow of moments. And then it was over. I stepped out of the twilight zone, rejoined Joan and our cousins, got in the car and drove back to Jerusalem. It was, to say the very least, a strange experience.

The rings of wood that date back to an old tree’s earliest years are right there beneath the bark and blea, invisible to outside observers but nonetheless fully present. Archeologists make their living recovering the artifacts of ancient civilizations lying beneath the sand and soil of the places in which they once flourished. But what becomes of the children we once were? Are they in there somewhere, like the rings of a tree or the clay vessels embedded deep within the tell? Or do they exist only within the barely-real realm of memory itself, the phantom landscape this side of the Lethe that only exists—to the extent it exists at all—within the mind? The boy I kept catching glimpses of at Alonei Yitzchak was clearly real…but what exactly even I myself mean by that thought is hard to say. I suppose he was as real as I myself am: a function of my conscious will to exist only tangentially related to the need for physical things to exist in physical space. All I can say with certainty is that boy-me was there no less really than man-me was. The whole experience, even with several sightings taken together, lasted seconds. The whole visit to Alonei Yitzchak was less than an hour. Less than five hours after we paid the bill at lunch, we were back in Jerusalem.

In one of his greatest stories, Hermann Hesse noted that youth is a place out from which lead only one-way streets. I first read that story in college—Hesse wrote in exceptionally clear, precise German tailor-made for people learning the language—and have forgotten most of the details. But that line stays with me still, and it was in my mind as we drove back to Jerusalem and, almost for the first time, it struck me that there might be more to Hesse’s story—and specifically to that single line in his story—than I thought when I first encountered it in college. 

Looking Back and Ahead

One of the books I’m planning to read this summer is Chuck Klosterman’s book, But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, published earlier this month by the Blue Rider Press, a Penguin imprint. (Klosterman, whose work appears regularly in Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, is best known for his acerbic essays evaluating pop culture and modern mores. His books Eating the Dinosaur and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs will be familiar to at least some, I’m sure.)  I bought the book because its slightly outrageous theme—how our world will appear to people attempting to evaluate and explain it five hundred years into the future—called out to me. What he has to say, I’ll find out soon enough. But I thought that I’d take my leave of you all for the summer by answering the question, or attempting to answer it, first on my own.

To begin to wonder how we will seem to people in the distant future—in the first weeks of summer in 2516, say—we would probably do best to think for a long moment about how people five hundred years in our past seem to us. 1516 was a long time ago. And I find myself able, therefore, to make its events sound distant and wholly unfamiliar. But I can also make the year 1516 sound fully familiar and recognizable….and I find myself able to do both those things on the transnational level and on the level of the individual.

On the global level, I could, for example, describe a world that has nothing at all to do with our own, a world of treaties no one’s ever heard of (the 1516 Treaty of Noyon, for example, in which France—to our thinking oddly—granted hegemony over Naples to Spain in exchange for Spain recognizing France’s claim to Milan, or the Treaty of Brussels, signed that same year, that established peace between France and the Holy Roman Empire) and battles like the Battle of Younus Khan that are obscure today even to relatively astute students of world history. But I can also describe the world of 1516 in a way that will be strangely familiar: that year half a millennium ago featured a Middle East in turmoil (the Battle of Younus Khan, fought near Gaza City, was basically fought between the Turks and the Egyptians to see who would be the dominant force in the region), Europe in endless agony over the degree to which its nations wished to be each other’s allies (the Treaty of Brussels, also mentioned above, was at least in part about the degree to which the nations of Western Europe could function as partners and peaceful neighbors), countries vying with each other to do business in ever-increasing volume with China (Rafael Perestrello, a cousin of Mrs. Christopher Columbus, became the first European to arrive by sea in mainland China for the purpose of developing trade relations in 1516), and Europeans being somehow able to integrate republican ideals with vicious anti-Semitism (the Jews of Venice were forced from their homes into a ghetto, Europe’s first, in 1516 as well). Putting it that way, the world of 1516 doesn’t sound so foreign, does it?

And that dual way of looking at the past that works on the macro level works just as well on the personal level.  The world in 1516 was wholly alien from the one in which we live…but only in a certain sense. There were, obviously, no cars, no trains, no electric lights, no internet, no television (even not cable), no recorded anything, no computers, no nukes, no e-books, no telephones, and no cellophane. I could make a much longer list of things too we take for granted that were unknown in the sixteenth century, but that’s only one way to think about life five hundred years ago….and in a different sense life was not at all that different from life today. Young people grew up and fell in love. Parents struggled over the right way to raise their children. Children felt burdened but also challenged by the demands put upon them by their parents. Students studied to pass their examinations. Soldiers served in their nation’s armies. Composers wrote music. Painters painted. Preachers preached. Teachers taught. Dancers danced. The old found the young brash and foolish. The young found their elders annoying and stodgy. Employers found their employees lazy and demanding. Employees found their bosses imperious and greedy. People feared illness and death, but people became sick and died anyway. Babies were born. Eggs were hatched. The sea was filled with fish. That doesn’t sound so unfamiliar, does it?

And now we move to the future. It is 2516 or, as I expect the Jews will privately call it, 6276. Everything will be different and nothing will be. I can’t even begin to imagine what technology will be like. Even the most basic questions about life in the twenty-sixth century resist answering. Will human beings still live only on earth? Will computers still be external machines that people use to do things, or will their abilities by then be so fully internalized into the body that people and computers will no longer exist as independent entities? Will the countries of today’s world still exist? For that matter, will any countries exist…or will globalization at a certain point make it bizarre to think of the world’s peoples divided down into national states instead of as fellow-citizens of a global republic? Will we have visited nearby stars? Will their citizens have visited us? How much of today’s landmass will be submerged beneath a vast global ocean once the ice caps melt entirely? Will there still be Coke? To none of those questions, do I have any ready answers.

And yet, on the other level, the level of the individual, I imagine that things will be unchanged. The heart will still follow its own rules.  People will occasionally wake up next to the wrong person and have to bear the consequences of their own folly. Friends will fall out and reconcile…or not. Children will live up their parents’ expectations in some ways and disappoint them in others. People will yearn for wealth, only to discover later on how little money can really buy. People will grow older as the years pass, but only some will succeed at doing so gracefully. Parents will describe their children’s favorite music as noise; children will know their parents well and not at all. Siblings will occasionally resent each other. Love will be elusive…as will also be happiness. No one will really think he or she is earning enough or being compensated adequately. The sky will still be blue.

If I can narrow my gaze to the world I know best, things will also change and be the same. Nations will rise and fall, but Israel, the am olam, will endure…always on the brink of disaster but never quite vanishing from the pageant of history. When people imagine that only the ḥareidi world will survive and the rest of us—including everybody not self-isolated into hermetically-sealed communities and self-deprived of the option of going out into the real world and earning a living there—that we will eventually assimilate into the general population and be gone from the world, they’re missing the point of being an am olam, an eternal people, in the first place. There will always be people, I fear, for whom intellectual and spiritual integrity are inconstant with “real” religious life, but in my opinion it is those people who are far less likely to survive the onslaught of time. To hide, after all, only works for as long as you can remain hidden; when that option no longer exists, the only remaining choices will be to live in a world you have no training to encounter or else to flee to even more remote hideaways located in even less accessible places. Eventually, all who play that game will lose…and those whose faith requires engagement with the world and who can therefore adapt to an ever-changing environment without resenting the challenges life places upon the living—those, in my opinion, will be the ones who endure.

When I compare the Jewish world of 1516 with the one I imagine for 2516, the details change but the pillars upon which the world stands—Torah study, public and private worship, and a thick sense of inner-communal responsibility—remain the same. The seas will rise, but Jerusalem will endure. The sonim will cackle and jeer, but the power of a single individual reciting the Shema with a full heart and a willing spirit unsullied by ulterior motive will prove mightier than even the most oppressive regime. It’s hard for me to imagine the world dishing out worse punishment than the Jewish people has already endured, yet the divine spirit that guides and protects the House of Israel—as regretfully opposed to individual Israelites—exists outside the context of action and reaction, of violence and stoic endurance. The Jews of 2516 may wonder how we ever survived our own history…but much would be fully familiar if we could only peer through the looking glass that far into the future. There will still be children falling asleep at Pesach seders. Rabbis will still be wondering what to say about Parashat Tzav. The price of truly fine t’fillin will still seem exorbitant (including to those who shell out the dough and buy them anyway). And no one, even half a millennium from now, will truly understand what the etrog is meant to symbolize. All this will endure! And, in the end, the part that never changes will prove more profound than the part that does. In that regard, the history of the am olam is the same as the story of any individual: the part that changes as the years pass, for all it feels distressing to contemplate, is the less crucial part of the mix…and the part that is inviolate and unchanging, the spark of divinity that animates the soul and which exists without reference to time past or time future, that is the part that matters, that truly counts.

A week from today, I hope to be sitting at my other work desk, the one located on Gad Tedeschi Street in Jerusalem, and working on some of my summer writing projects. I am never more at peace, never more relaxed or more focused, than when I sit at that desk and look out at the walls of the Old City hiding in the distance behind the tall trees that line Rechov Ha-askan, the street that leads from our neighborhood north towards the Haas Promenade, one of Jerusalem’s loveliest look-out points. There is real peace for me in that place…and I wish I could share it will all of you. Barring any unexpected adventures like we encountered in 2014, I’ll write to you all again upon our return. In the meantime, I bless you all from afar and in advance with the peace of Jerusalem, and pray that God keep us all safe until we are together again in August.

Life and Death

Last week, I wrote about my disinclination to lump the people killed in Orlando together as “victims” of an armed madman’s rage or even as "people" whose horrific deaths were somehow more terrible than if they had been murdered in some less dramatic way as individuals rather than en masse as a group. A number of readers took issue, asking me if I really thought that there was something inherently demeaning to each deceased individual in the suggestion that his or her death was more awful than it would otherwise have been because of the numbers involved. Given that I’ve said the same thing many times about victims of terror in several other contexts—that, human life being of inestimable value, there is something slightly off about taking context into account when evaluating the deaths of innocents—I was slightly surprised by those responses. And yet, even now after having rethought the issue over these last days, I stand by my original remark and continue to believe that, had Omar Mateen killed one single person instead of fifty, that person’s death would be no less awful to contemplate—and the loss to the world no less acute—because forty-nine other people weren’t killed by the same crazy person on the same evening. As I wrote last week, each person murdered in Orlando was a world unto him or herself, a universe of history, ability, intelligence, and potential. As the great Hans Fallada wrote, “every man dies alone and on his own terms,” i.e., as an individual, as a person, as a complete world.

That there is something perverse and demeaning in the effort to evaluate the worth of a human life is key. Indeed, for most Americans the whole notion of assigning a specific value to a specific person’s life sounds like something connected to the slave trade in olden times, a wretched, degrading effort that rested on the traders’ ability to maximize profit by “correctly” determining the dollar-value of any particular man, woman, or child put up for sale. (Just for the record, when the Bible discusses the case of the naïf who pledges the value of a specific person to the Temple, a pledge both ridiculous and so inherently sacred that it cannot simply be set aside or ignored, it fixes the specific amounts to be paid based on age and gender specifically to avoid the possibility of people actually attempting to say what a specific individual is worth monetarily. I’ll write about that very interesting chapter some other time.) When expressed as a philosophical concept, the concept that life is of incalculable value sounds relatively inarguable. But the corollary notion that the lives (and, by extension, the deaths) of specific individuals can also not be rationally or ethically hierarchized feels seriously less undisputable…at least most of the time and in most contexts.

We establish such hierarchies all the time, after all. There are more people in need of all varieties of organ transplants than there are donors, and so must the regulatory agencies that supervise such procedures establish a way to determine whose life among those in need, say, of a new kidney or heart is more worth saving. The version of the famous “trolley” conundrum that imagines the conductor of a runaway train having to decide whether to steer a train he cannot stop towards a terminally-ill elderly man or a healthy child is another good example: for all we claim that no one can assign actual worth to any human life, it would be the rare person indeed who would say that it doesn’t matter what the conductor decides because the death of a centenarian suffering from an incurable disease with just weeks to live is no more or less tragic than the death of a seven-year-old in excellent health who could conceivably live on for eighty or ninety more years and whose potential contributions to the world cannot yet even be imagined. And even if some among us would argue that there is something inherently wrong in saying that the life of a child is more valuable than the life of an elderly person, then surely even they would admit that the situation feels different when the numbers are ratcheted up sufficiently and the conductor’s choice is differently imagined to present him having to choose between aiming his train at a single old man and a group of fifty or eighty children. Or between steering his runaway train towards an elderly man and his ailing wife, and aiming it at a nuclear power plant that, if seriously enough damaged, could conceivably spew radioactive material into the atmosphere and end up harming or even killing countless thousands. In such cases, it feels possible to determine the relative value of two sets of human lives without transgressing any ethical boundaries. But how to do it and what criteria to bring to bear in making such a decision—that is a different matter entirely.

Horrible things have happened in our world just recently. An eleven-year-old girl from Bexley, Ohio, was killed earlier this week when a tree struck by lightning fell on her cabin in a summer camp in Bennington, Indiana. A little boy from Omaha died after being snatched by an alligator from some shallow water at the edge of lagoon at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Fourteen boys and girls aged nine to eleven, none of whom was wearing a life jacket, died when the raft they were paddling around on in Lake Syamozero in the part of northwestern Russia called Karelia capsized during a sudden storm. And all this has happened since the horrific murder of fifty young people out for a night of carefree dancing and flirting in Orlando.

To say that each of these horrific incidents is each other’s precise equal because, the value of life being unquantifiable, the loss of any life is a tragedy no different from the loss of any other life sounds reasonable enough at first blush. But is that really how we feel? The girl from Ohio was the victim of a terrible accident that, truly, none could have foreseen. The little boy in Florida, not so clear: given that five alligators were taken from the lagoon after the boy’s death and that the boy was obeying the sole sign in the area that merely said “No Swimming,” a sign that most parents (myself included) would easily take to mean that swimming is forbidden but not splashing around at water’s edge, it feels as though there must be some real responsibility of both the moral and legal varieties to be assigned. Does that make the boy’s death more tragic than the girl’s? When put like that, the question feels bizarre even to pose aloud. But agreeing that a disaster none could have foreseen is different in kind from—and thus reasonably deemed more awful than—one that could easily have been averted doesn’t feel as though it constitutes a rejection of the principle that no individual’s life can be judged more valuable than anyone else’s.

The situation regarding the children in Karelia make this point even more forcefully: this disaster happened at a holiday resort in which the children were theoretically being watched over by responsible adults, yet they were permitted out on a huge lake without life jackets despite cyclone warnings being in effect for the region. (Four adults, including the director and deputy director of the hotel and two water-safety instructors have been taken into custody and will probably face criminal charges in the matter.) So although it feels wrong to attempt, however ridiculously, to determine which loss of life constituted the greater tragedy, it also feels natural to categorize these horrors in terms of the degree to which they could possibly have been avoided. In other words, attempting to evaluate the pristine value of any human life seems wrong. But establishing a hierarchy based on the degree to which a given individual’s death could have been averted feels not only right, but reasonable and just. But is that what we want to assert: that the loss of life can best be evaluated in terms of whom there is to blame? The children in Russia died because the people theoretically watching over them were inept and irresponsible. But what then should we say about the dead in Orlando, none of whom died because of ineptitude or incompetence on the part of others but who were gunned down in cold blood by a murderer who knew exactly what he was doing? Does the fact that they were brutally executed make their loss different in kind from the death of that poor child in Indiana who died when a tree fell on her bunk?

In my opinion, the most reasonable approach to these issues would be to agree that we can assign a degree of tragedy to deaths based on the degree to which they could possibly have been averted without contravening the basic principle that human life is possessed of incalculable value.  But another idea suggests itself to me as well: that, without attempting to evaluate the worth of lives, we can entirely reasonably assign value to deaths based on the posthumous good they inspire.

And that brings me to my final example of a young person who died last week: Mahmoud Rafat Bardran, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian teenager in the wrong place at the wrong time as members of the IDF opened fire on Palestinians who were attempting to murder Israeli civilians driving west on Route 443 outside Jerusalem by throwing rocks and firebombs at randomly chosen cars. The dead boy does not appear to have been among those attempting to take innocent Israeli lives; he and some friends had gone swimming after breaking their Ramadan fast and were returning home in a taxi when their vehicle was accidentally hit by gunfire. To describe his death as a tragedy does not require any specific moral courage; how can the accidental death of a teenager not be deemed tragic? In that sense, he joins the others as innocent victims of circumstance. But by mentioning such a politically charged death in the same context as the others, I sharpen my earlier point: his life was worth no more or less than anyone else’s, but the worth, so to speak, of his death will be determined posthumously by the effect, if any, it has on the world.

There is already no dearth of individuals lining up to assign blame. For some, his death was, to quote one Palestinian official, a “cold-blooded assassination.” That seems to me an example of almost grotesque grandstanding by someone prepared to stand on the back of a dead child to score some political points, but to wave his death away as mere collateral damage only works if you are prepared to share that thought with his grieving parents, if you are prepared to say that the unwarranted death of an unarmed teenager riding home in a taxi is somehow less tragic than the death of an innocent murdered by terrorists while eating ice cream in the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.

The stories are not each other’s equivalents. The Palestinian boy was killed accidentally by people behaving nobly in the defense of innocents, whereas the people at the Sarona Market were killed by people behaving criminally and, to say the least, ignobly. But, in the end, none of them deserved to die…and that’s my exact point:  no innocent life is more or less valuable than any other, but deaths can be evaluated in terms of what they bring in their wake.In most contexts, this pill feels easier to swallow because it doesn’t feel like there could be another side to the story: who could argue against more sturdy bunks in summer camps, more clear signage at resorts where alligators might possibly be lurking near children playing in shallow water, or more stringent safety training for people charged with watching over children in boats or on rafts? In the context of the Middle East, however, nothing is ever that simple. Still, what single incident could be more likely to move the parties involved to seek and find a way peacefully to co-exist in the same corner of the world than the death of a child? You could say the same about all the other victims of terror or of the response to terror, of course, including the victims of last week’s horrific shooting in Tel Aviv. But what if this specific incident were somehow to bring the world to its senses? It feels unlikely. It could hardly be more unlikely. But unlikely isn’t impossible…and with that hopeful thought in place, I conclude my ninth year of writing weekly with this, my 355^th more or less consecutive letter to you all.