Learning from Caracalla

 I don’t think any of us will ever forgot the bone-chilling sight of hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-right types, and neo-Confederates marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not “replace us.” I was so naïve back then that I actually didn’t understand the actual meaning of those words, which I took to mean that the marchers believed that some sort of plot was underway to replace white-skinned Christians with Jewish people. Indeed, it was only later on that I learned that the chant referenced not the notion that Jews were plotting to replace Christian Americans personally, but that they—we—are working to bring non-white, non-Christian immigrants to these shores in such gigantic numbers that they would eventually constitute a majority of the population and thus be in a position to vote into office candidates who looked and felt about things as they themselves did. (To revisit my thoughts about Charlottesville at the time, click here; for my own revisit of the story a year later, click here.)

I haven’t written about Charlottesville in a while, but my thoughts returned to that series of dark days in August when I came across an essay published in the Washington Post this last week (click here) in which the author, Jennifer Rubin, reflects on the results of a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that self-defines as a think tank devoted to “conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.” In that poll, in which about 40,000 different people were questioned and the results of which were published just last week, the percentage of Americans who self-identified as non-Hispanic white people of Christian faith stood at 42% of the population. Just a decade and a half ago, when Barack Obama came to office, the number was 54%, a majority of Americans. Six years later, the number was 47%--less than half the citizenry. And now the percentage has dropped to 42%, somewhere between a third of all Americans and half of them.

If you narrow the scope of inquiry to features solely white evangelical Protestants, the news

is even worse. In 2006, they constituted 23% of the population. By 2016, the number was down to under 17%. Today, the number stands at 13.6% of Americans.

The idea that Jews are working tirelessly to replace white people with immigrants of color who will eventually take over once their numbers are high enough to vote in the candidates of their masters’ choice is lunacy. But, it suddenly strikes me, the fear that these next decades will see a true sea change in the profile of our American population is not that exaggerated. It’s already begun. Dark-skinned immigrants are not being smuggled in to tip the balance. (That truly is craziness.) But the balance is indeed being tipped.

Rubin’s very worthy essay got me thinking, for some obscure reason, about Caracalla, an emperor of Rome even whose name, let alone whose work, has been largely forgotten by most. Let me explain why he suddenly came to mind.

Born in Lugdunum, which town would eventually morph into the French city of Lyons, in 188 CE, the man did not even live to see his own thirtieth birthday. (He reigned from 198 until his untimely death in 217.) He lived a short life. And yet he did several remarkable things, almost all of them terrible. (The key word here is “almost.” See below.) He was violent and vicious, the instigator of many murders and massacres. He was almost definitely guilty of the murder of his own brother (with whom he shared the throne until he decided he had had enough), his father-in-law, and his wife (whom he loathed, apparently, even before being forced to marry her). On the other hand, he appears to have invented—or at least popularized—the hoodie. (The Latin word caracalla references the kind of hooded jacket the emperor favored and which he wore so constantly that his real name, Lucius Septimus Bassianus, was dropped in favor of his nickname based on his favorite article of clothing.) And he did manage to construct a public bathhouse of such gargantuan proportions, called (what else?) The Baths of Caracalla, that it remained in operation for more than three hundred years. (I suppose they must have replaced the towels every so often.) For a reasonably balanced, very accessible, and interesting biography of the man, I recommend Finnish scholar Ilkka Syvänne’s Caracalla: A Military Biography, published by Pen & Sword Military Press in 2017 and available on amazon and other on-line sites.

But the reason that Jennifer Rubin’s essay brought Caracalla to mind has nothing to do with fratricide, hoodies or bathhouses, because Caracalla was also able to rise up over his own horribleness to do one exceptional thing. And that thing is what I want to write about today.

In Caracalla’s day, the Romans had a huge problem: they were vastly outnumbered in their own nation by non-Romans. How that had happened is easy enough to understand: before Caracalla acted, the sole citizens of Rome were ethnic Romans who lived in Italy plus the descendants of citizens who had settled in the provinces. Some local nobles were granted citizenship too, as were the inhabitants of some few great cities not in Italy. But the bottom line was that only a small minority of the population were citizens. Why Caracalla saw that as a problem is open to debate. Some scholars think it had to do solely with money: only citizens paid taxes so having very few citizens meant bringing in much less money than would otherwise have been the case. (This was the opinion, among others, of the great Roman historian Dio Cassius.) Another possible reason to regret having so few citizens would have had to do with the number of men eligible to serve in the Roman Legion, the national army, because only citizens were permitted to serve. A third motive had to do with the practicalities of the justice system: there were effectively two different court systems in place, one for citizens and one for non-citizens, but this was proving increasingly awkward as the world of commerce increasingly involved citizens and non-citizens in the same undertakings. And so in 212 CE Caracalla issued the decree known now as the Edict of Caracalla in which he formally granted citizenship to all residents of the Empire with only a few excepted categories.

All the theories mentioned above for this move have some cogency. But I’d like to imagine that Caracalla acted because he somehow understood that the Empire could only thrive if a large majority of its residents were personally invested in its future, in the propagation of its culture, and in its expansion north into Europe, east into Asia, and even possibly south into Africa. In other words, Rome could not function—or, to say the very least, could not function well—as a state in which only the smallest percentage of residents were personally invested in the nation’s future. (Before Caracalla, there were something like 75 million people living in the Roman Empire, of whom only about 14 million lived in Italy itself.) And it is precisely in that way that the situation in Caracalla’s Rome mirrors the situation in our nation as we enter the third decade of his strange century.

The Charlottesville chant was pure anti-Semitic craziness: the nation’s Jews are not involved in some nefarious plot to replace white Americans with immigrants, legal and otherwise, of color. But the fear underlying that lunacy is not without foundation. Things are shifting almost before our eyes. Demographically speaking, the nation of the 2060s will be totally unlike the America of the 1960s.

There are two ways to respond to this new reality. One would be to rage at the failing light. This was on full display in Charlottesville. But the other would be to take a cue from Caracalla and to face the new reality not by being enraged or feeling persecuted, but by accepting the challenge demography has placed at our feet. Yes, the Founders were flawed, complicated individuals—the kind who wrote movingly about equality under the law but who also owned slaves. But when they were through being children of their time, they also invented something remarkable on these shores, a nation that was completely different in its day from every other one on earth. That kind of patriotism rooted in that sense of American exceptionalism was once something that grew naturally from the education children received throughout the nation. Nowadays, not so much.

We can, however, learn from the past. Caracalla looked around and saw a huge demographic nightmare about to envelop his nation. By decreeing that, henceforth, almost all residents were to be granted citizenship, he was opening a door and inviting the up-to-that-point-totally-disenfranchised to step over the threshold, to become part of the polity, to exert themselves to become worthy of the citizenship now bestowed upon them. The situations aren’t entirely parallel. But the challenge of a shifting reality is much the same. If I were a young person today trying to decide whether to respond to the new demographical reality by exploding with rage or by extending a hand to those whom I fear the most, I hope I would make the right decision. Whatever his “real” motives, Caracalla made the move that brought in the disenfranchised and challenged them to create their own nation’s destiny. The response to shifting demographics should be thoughtfully to consider how to address a new reality in a way that keeps faith with the past and looks forward to a shared, potentially glorious, future.

Queen Berenice

March is Women’s History Month, an annual observance since 1987 and one of several such months each year proclaimed as such to encourage the study and appreciation of some specific group within the fabric of American society. Known to most will be Black History Month in February and LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June, but there are also Jewish Heritage Month (May), Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15–October 15), Arab-American Heritage Month (April), German American Heritage Month (October), Italian-American Heritage Month (October), Native American Heritage Month (November), and a few others. (For a full list, click here.) These months mostly come and go, leaving in their wake a few op-ed pieces, some longer essays, perhaps a television special or two. And, of course, they are focused on mostly, although surely not exclusively, by the groups whose heritage they exist to celebrate.

To take note of Women’s History Month this year, I thought I would write about a woman no one, I’m guessing, will ever have heard of…and yet who was present at a truly pivotal moment in Jewish history and who rose remarkably to the occasion.

In general, the role of women in history has been understudied and underappreciated—which observation applies across the board to all sorts of academic disciplines. But the degree to which the prominent Jewish women of antiquity have been mostly forgotten, their names themselves mostly unknown, is slightly astonishing. And a little depressing too. Some will have heard of Beruriah, one of the few female Torah scholars from antiquity to be cited and praised in our literature, but fewer will have heard of Yalta, an important figure from the mid-3^rd century CE, a communal leader respected and taken fully seriously, and the second-most mentioned woman in talmudic literature. And fewer still, I think, will have heard of Imma Shalom, the sister of Rabban Gamliel II of Yavneh and the wife of Rabbi Eliezer (one of the most prominent sages of his day), who is also quoted prominently in the Talmud in a way that suggests the respect she commanded in her day and in her place.

Those three—Beruriah, Yalta, and Imma Shalom—were part of the rabbinic world. But women also occupied positions of political importance, some of whom were actually the queens of their countries. Almost all have been completely forgotten, their very names unfamiliar despite their prominence in their own day. Queen Helena of Adiabene is a good example. Adiabene was a small kingdom located in the Kurdish part of today’s Iraq when Helena  and her husband King Monobaz converted to Judaism early on in the first century CE. Eventually, Monobaz died and Helena moved to Jerusalem, where she played an important role as a philanthropist, famously giving gifts of gold to the Temple and personally dealing with a crippling famine by importing gigantic amounts of food at her own expense from all over the world to distribute among the hungry. She was famous for the huge sukkah she constructed in Lod, where she lived before coming to Jerusalem, and for her even larger tomb which exists to this day a few miles north of the city. But who has ever heard of her? No one!

But the personality I thought I’d write about this week in honor of Women’s History Month is Queen Berenice, another personality long since forgotten by all. And yet, in her day, she was the voice of reason that tried—unsuccessfully but nobly—to prevent the destruction of the Holy City by the Romans…and in the same way Queen Esther saved the Jews of Persia from annihilation: by getting the Roman most likely to spearhead the campaign to the destroy the city to fall in love with her and then, at least possibly, to spare the city simply because she wished him to.

It's a long, complicated story. When Berenice was still a child, her father was named King of Judea by the Roman Emperor Caligula. And so, at the age of ten, Berenice became a princess. She was married at age fourteen to a much older man who died shortly after the wedding and left her a widow at age sixteen. Her father died shortly after that, but not before he succeeded in marrying her off a second time, this time to his own brother, King Herod of Chalcis. (Chalcis was a tiny kingdom in what today is Lebanon.) And so Berenice became a queen. And that same year she became a mother too, giving birth to the future king of Chalcis, whom she named Berenicianus after herself.

When Berenice was twenty, she was widowed for the second time. For a while, she lived with her brother—who, in the meantime, had become king of Chalcis and who ruled as Agrippa II—and served as the female presence in his many palaces across Chalcis and Judea, something along the lines of how Grover Cleveland’s sister Rose served as First Lady until he eventually married. And now she really does become a Zelig-like character, showing up everywhere—including, semi-amazingly, at the trial of Paul of Tarsus, the founder of the Christianity as we know it and the author of most of the New Testament.

And then she married for a third time, choosing yet another king as her husband, a man named Polomon, king of Cilicia (a small kingdom in today’s Turkey), whom she insisted agree to be circumcised and fully to convert to Judaism if he wished to have her as his wife. He did it too! But their union still didn’t last. Why, who knows? Maybe he resented the whole circumcision thing. Or perhaps they just weren’t meant to be. But before long she was back in Jerusalem, powerful, famous, and in exactly the right place to do great good.

The 60s of the first century CE were a dangerous, difficult time. The Roman governors of Judea, called procurators, were greedy bullies, or at least most of them were. The procurator in Jerusalem was a man named Florus, who was eager to steal at least part of the vast treasury of riches stored in the Temple. When the Jews protested, he sent in his soldiers to terrify the inhabitants into submission. Berenice, present in Jerusalem, first sent some of her servants to beg Florus to call off his goons. And then, when they were rebuffed, she went herself, bare-headed and barefoot, to beg him to withdraw. In the end, Florus withdrew his men. But Judea was on the brink of open rebellion against Rome nonetheless. Seeing disaster on the horizon, Berenice gave a long, passionate speech in which she begged the locals not to begin a war they could not possibly hope to win. But no one was in the mood to listen. And so the rebellion began.

Berenice, however, had a plan. She moved into her brother’s palace at Banias, a lovely and verdant section even today in Israel, where she was able to hobnob with Roman aristocracy. She met Vespasian himself, the future emperor who was at the time in charge of Roman forces in Judea. But it was when she met Vespasian’s son, a young man of twenty named Titus, that she suddenly saw an “Esther” path forward for herself and her people. She was in her forties. Titus was just twenty. But he was no match for her and he fell quickly into her trap. She did her best to keep him from moving violently against the Jewish rebels, perhaps trying to convince him that the rebellion would just die out if the Romans didn’t rise to the bait.

Our source for this story is the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, himself a client of the Romans, who writes that, in the end, Titus—head over heels in love—only moved against the rebels when he had no choice. And he remained in Berenice’s thrall for all of his years. Eventually, once his father became emperor, Titus returned to Rome and Berenice followed, living with him until Titus was finally forced to send her home and instead to marry a Roman woman who could give him a Roman heir.  

And that is the story of Queen Berenice. Unknown to most today, and yet a woman who invented and re-invented herself time and time again, eventually positioning herself to attempt to defuse a full-scale rebellion against Rome by appealing first to the rebels and then, when that failed, to their future opponent. Queen Esther was successful where Queen Berenice failed. Is that why we remember Esther, but have totally forgotten Berenice? Perhaps we should remember her too: a brave, wily, and daring Jewish woman who did her best to head off catastrophe for the Jewish people and who, even if she failed, deserves to be remembered as someone who, at the very least, tried to do good.

Smotrich Is Coming...Or Is He?

The issues swirling around the upcoming visit of Betzalel Smotrich to the United States are complex and troubling. On the one hand, he sounds like someone more than entitled to make such a journey: Smotrich is, after all, the Minister of Finance of the State of Israel and the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, one of the parties in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition. And yet he has a troubling history of making remarks that are beyond merely obnoxious and go all the way, at least in my opinion, to fully unacceptable. This is a man, after all, who has described himself as a “proud homophobe” who sees no problem with putting gay people in the same category with people who have sex with animals. (For more, click here.) And who has openly expressed his regret that the Arabs of Israel weren’t all expelled from the nascent State of Israel when statehood was first proclaimed in 1948, and that regardless of whether they were or weren’t prepared to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in an independent Israel. But none of those previous comments (and they are legion) compare, I don’t think, to his remark in the wake of the pogrom carried out by Jewish settler types in the tiny Palestinian village of Huwara last week.

The events that led up to nightmare in Huwara are well known. Two brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered by a gunman who rammed their car and then shot them at point-blank range. The brothers, from the nearby Jewish settlement of Har Bracha, died instantly. This was a blatant act of terror, a murder that cannot be excused with reference to political rage. The residents of Huwara, however, did not see it that way; the reports of the villagers handing out candies and sweets in celebration of the brother’s murder, which I initially thought were probably exaggerated, appear to be true. This led to an attack against Huwara by about four hundred enraged Israelis in the course of which one man was killed, almost a hundred wounded seriously enough to require hospitalization, and thirty cars and about one hundred homes set on fire. The identity of the gunman was at the time unknown, so the rioters can’t have known whether he did or didn’t come from Huwara. The Palestinian man who was killed is not suspected to have had anything to do with the murder of the Yaniv brothers.

So that is the basic story. It’s a horrific tale, one featuring the deaths of innocents, the rage of an embittered mob, shockingly poor behavior on the part both of bystanders and participants, and an inexplicable absence of oversight by the people who are supposed to be in place to guard the peace.

And it was into this swamp of misery that Finance Minister Smotrich waded with his now-famous comment that the village of Huwara needs “to be wiped out” and that the State of Israel should “do it.” I understand that he was enraged. Who wasn’t enraged by the thought of Palestinians celebrating the cold-blooded murder of two innocent Jewish Israelis? Or by the thought that the killer might possibly have come from the very town in which the murders were perpetrated? But the thought that an appropriate response to the murder of innocents is the murder of other innocents is an idea that no decent person could rationally embrace, let alone express in public.

Even Prime Minister Netanyahu was apparently shocked by the remark. “I am asking you,” he said to the Israeli people in the wake of the events in Huwara, “while blood is boiling and winds are high—don’t take the law into your own hands. I ask that you allow the IDF and the security forces to do their work.” The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, expressed the same thought in slightly different language. “Taking the law into one’s own hands, rioting, and committing violence against innocents,” the President said, “this is not our way and I express my forceful condemnation. We must allow the IDF to apprehend the despicable terrorist (i.e., the murderer of the Yaniv brothers) and restore order immediately.

And then, eventually, Smotrich walked back his original remarks, calling his comment about the village deserving to be destroyed “inappropriate.” And then he went further down that same path, noting that his comments were “incorrect…a slip of the tongue amid a storm of emotions,” and that he never meant for his comments to be taken literally.

To this walk-back, the Prime Minister responded with obvious relief. “It is important for us all to work to tone down the rhetoric,” he said, “which is why I wish to thank Minister Smotrich for making clear that his choice of words regarding the vigilante attack on Huwara following the murder of the Yaniv brothers was inappropriate and that he is strongly opposed to harming innocent civilians.”

So that sounded like it should (or at least could) be the end of the story. A man given to incendiary rhetoric spoke quickly and crazily in public, was then called on the carpet by his boss, and then withdrew his comments and more or less apologized for having spoken too hastily and without realizing he might be taken literally.

And now Minister Smotrich is headed for our country to speak at the Israel Bonds Conference that begins on March 12 in Washington, D.C. A White House National Security Conference spokesperson made it clear the other day that there are no plans for Smotrich to meet with any Biden administration officials or, for that matter, with any American political or government figures at all.

And that puts the ball squarely in the court of the American Jewish Community. Bonds is a big deal, a huge organization that raises funds for Israel in every conceivable Jewish venue in the United States, including at Shelter Rock. To reference their invitation to Smotrich as “just” a chance for a traveling Israeli to introduce himself to the leadership of a major American Jewish organization is really misleadingly to downplay the significance of the invitation. On the other hand, the man is a member of the Netanyahu government and, at that, one who leads one of the largest ministries within the government and who is in his own right the leader of a party with seven seats in the Knesset. Shouldn’t supporters of Israel feel obliged to listen to a leader well-ensconced within the power structure of the current government of Israel? The man did apologize for his remarks, after all.

Last Friday, 120 American Jewish leaders answered that question by signing a letter demanding that Smotrich “not be given a platform in our community.” (For a full list of signatories, click here.) And then, just a few days later, the JTA reported that the Biden administration is considering withholding an entry visa from Smotrich, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear to belong to any of the categories usually invoked for denying entrance to foreign nationals.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Smotrich’s remarks were vile. Nor am I particularly convinced that he has changed his mind merely because his Prime Minister got him to say he had. But, on the other hand, I am fully afraid that many of those urging the Biden administration to bar Smotrich from entering the United States are not friends of Israel and are merely using this whole incident as a convenient peg upon which to hang their animus against Israel. On the third hand, I do support the right of Israelis to elect their own officials and then, if they become dissatisfied, to decline to re-elect them or even to bring down the government by turning public opinion dramatically enough to make the government unable to govern. As far as the Jewish leaders calling on the Israel Bonds people to deny an Israeli cabinet minister the right to address them, I have mixed feelings there too: who is to say that good couldn’t and wouldn’t come from a man like Betzalel Smotrich, an Israeli born, bred, raised, and educated in Israel, being exposed to the width and breadth of American Jewish culture—something that the Bonds Conference could well provide?

I write today, however, not to vent (or not just to vent), but to offer a concrete solution, one that could and even possibly would satisfy most parties to the affair.  Smotrich did a terrible thing when he, wearing his big yarmulke and openly identifying as a religious Jew, called for the murder of innocents and the eradication of a town merely because a wicked person committed a foul act on its streets. Issuing a press release walking back the remarks was a nice start, but cannot possibly be interpreted—not halakhically but also not realistically—as “real” t’shuvah. But the gates of t’shuvah are never closed, which is to say that the possibility of real repentance is always present. This truth, we repeat over and over and over in our High Holiday liturgy. Surely Smotrich knows those words by heart. So perhaps the time has come to act on them.

My suggestion is Betzalel Smotrich forego the opportunity to address the Bonds Convention and instead head to Huwara. He needs to find the courage to meet the people there and to evolve from an angry politician with a big mouth into a true worker for peace. He needs to find Palestinians to work with him, to find common ground, to build the kind of consensus that could conceivably lead to real change in the endless war between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to take the bright light this whole incident has shone upon him and refocus it out onto the world as a force for illumination and the kind of open dialogue that can lead to peace. The trick is not to condemn the man for using intemperate language in the past, but to challenge him to make of this whole incident the framework for the kind of dialogue that leads, or at least that can lead, to peaceful coexistence.

It’s a cliché to say that no one but Nixon could have gone to China, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Perhaps the time has come for Betzalel Smotrich to go to Huwara.

Preserving the Balance of Power in Israel

One of the themes I’ve returned to again and again in these weekly letters is the strange way that everything changes as the years pass at the same time that nothing does. And reading ancient books, as I like so much to do, only sharpens that thought. The people in those antique works, for example, don’t have smart phones (or any phones) or computers or cars. They don’t dress the way we do or live in homes at all similar to our own. And, yet, when they sit down to worry about the world, the topics that occupy them are precisely the same ones that occupy us. How to live in peace with the neighbors. How to deal with ornery in-laws. How to escape out from under crushing debt. How not to be disappointed when your children choose a path forward in life different from your own. How to live decently and well when your instincts seem constantly to lead you off in the precise opposite direction. So when Jean-Baptiste Alfonse Karr famously wrote that “the more things change, the more they remain the same,” he certainly had it right. And that was back in 1849, when daily life was seriously different than it is today. And also the same.

Scripture, aside from being a theological document, is also a political one that suggests the way a free people should wish to be governed by its leaders. And there are many biblical passages, both within and outside the Torah, that speak to this specific point. Some are slightly contradictory, but taking them seriously as a set of working principles of political science yields an interesting picture and, at that, one that has direct bearing on the nightmarish public debate going on in Israel regarding the way the nation should be governed.

There are, speaking broadly, three instruments of governance in the biblical view: the king (occasionally a queen), the priesthood (as embodied in the office of High Priest), and the prophetic guild (with the occasional outlier who self-presents as a prophet without the backing of that guild). The sovereign has absolute power, but no one—including not the king himself—thinks that he can successfully govern the nation without divine support and, speaking practically, that requires having the support of the Temple priesthood who offer up the sacrifices and attend to the rituals that are understood to be what it takes for the king to stay in God’s good graces. So the king and the High Priest exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship: to retain their authority and their power, they need each other. And that creates an interesting dynamic: the king rules as an absolute monarch but can’t afford to alienate the High Priest, and the High Priest is possessed of the authority that comes naturally from being God’s chosen servant in the midst of the people but has no specific political power. And so they exist, these two, in a kind of symbiotic balance: each master of his own domain but neither able to act fully autonomously if doing so would alienate the other.

But that balance of power has its own corrective. If the king is able to garner the support of the High Priest with respect to a major policy decision—to go to war or to levy new taxes, for example—and so feels free to proceed, there is always the possibility that a prophet proclaiming the word of God will intervene to insist that the policy be abandoned or refined in a way that suits the will of the Almighty. The kings of Israel did not particularly like this arrangement. Why would they have? They did their best to keep the prophets from speaking out—readers who remember my story “Enemy at the Gates” will know something of the kind of brutal, degrading treatment to which Jeremiah was subjected when he opposed the king in public—but the prophetic movement survived for as long as did the monarchy. And so we see a system of checks and balances designed to guarantee that no single leaders—not the king or the High Priest, but also not the prophet—could act successfully without at least the tacit acquiescence of the others. It was in some ways a flawed system. (There was no sure-fire way to test the authenticity of a self-proclaimed prophet’s message, for example.) But the system worked well enough. And when it stopped working in the last days of the kingdom, that was precisely when the nation fell and the fortunate/unfortunate survivors were exiled from their homeland. (“Enemy at the Gates”  is part of my collection of short stories entitled To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011–2021. To purchase, click here.)

In our nation, we have a similar system of checks and balances intended to keep any branch of government from acting other than in the best interests of the people. The Congress can pass bills, but the President has to sign them. The President can decline to sign a bill, but Congress can override the President’s veto. And, in the end, the Supreme Court has the right to declare any law, even those duly passed by Congress and signed by the President, unconstitutional and therefore void. And that system—which specifically does not permit the Court to pass or sign legislation but only to address the work of the other two branches of the government—that system seems to work well enough: Congress and the President exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship, but neither can act contrary to the law no matter how many votes a bill might garner and how willing the President may be to sign it. And, presuming the integrity of the Court and the willingness of the President and the Congress to accept its judgments as binding, the system works well enough. (I heard that! But the system has worked well enough up to now and, I hope, will continue to do so.)

The situation in Israel is related to all the above, but the circumstances are not at all the same. The basic idea is that the Netanyahu government wishes for the Knesset to take control over the appointment of judges and to seriously weaken the ability of the Supreme Court to strike down laws passed by the Knesset by allowing the Knesset to override such decisions by the Court with a simple majority. The opposition to these “reforms” has been massive: hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have been demonstrating in the streets and denouncing these proposed changes vociferously. For a full and vigorous expression of why all those thousands of Israelis are in the streets protesting, I recommend David Horovitz’s incendiary op-ed piece in the Times of Israel from a few days ago in which he equates the proposed reforms as steps that would neuter the Court and, and I quote, “bulldoze the Declaration of Independence.” (Click here to read the Horovitz essay.)  Less incendiary but no less heartfelt, was Michael Oren’s blog post in the Times of Israel from a few weeks ago in which the author, the former Israeli ambassador to our country, explains why someone like himself can strongly oppose Netanyahu’s proposed reforms and still, and at the very same time, feel that judicial reform is warranted and necessary. (To read Oren’s essay, click here.) Even a unabashedly right-wing author like Alan Dershowitz has written recently that the Israeli justice system needs a serious overhaul and has made some serious proposals for what the reforms that would bring about such an overhaul could or should look like. (To read a summary of Alan Dershowitz’s proposals, click here.) But neither Oren nor Dershowitz supports the specific proposals the Netanyahu government seems hell-bent on pushing through the Knesset.

Lots of exaggerated claims that I’ve come across lately only muddy the water. To say, for examples, that Supreme Court justices appoint themselves in Israel is exaggerated enough to be labelled simply untrue. But the reality is different from what we Americans are used to: in Israel, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President, who is obliged to choose from names submitted by something called the Judicial Selection Committee, which is itself made up of three Supreme Court justices, two cabinet members, two Knesset members, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association. Unless some members of the committee are absent, seven out of the nine have to agree on the submission. And if they do, then the President has no choice but to comply. So to say that the Supreme Court selects its own members is not at all true. But also true is that the system does invite input from the Court in a way that has no parallel in the American justice system. Is that a flaw in the system? Given the degree to which our own method of choosing Supreme Court justices has become so incredibly highly politicized that the Congress was able to get away with refusing even to consider President Obama’s final nomination to the Court, it’s hard to say that the American system is not itself in need of serious reform. But it’s also true that the Israeli Supreme Court plays a role in selecting its own members that is unlike the method in use in almost every other country in the world.

At the end of the day what matters—and what matters above all else—is the maintenance of a system of effective checks and balances that keeps any part of the government from acting other than in the best interests of the populace. This was the rule in ancient Israel and it is the rule, for better or for worse, in our nation, just as some parallel version of that concept is part of the way that all successful Western republics—certainly including the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy—govern themselves. So what is of paramount in Israel is that the concept itself be preserved and safeguarded. If the Court has veered off to reflect a political orientation at odds with the general populace, then that is precisely what the system exists to address. Neither the Knesset nor the Court should be able to speak definitively without the assent and support of the other. The President in Israel is politically powerless, yet he or she can use the enormous power of moral suasion that inheres in the office to act as a corrective in his or her own right. On paper, the Israeli system—similar in some ways to our own but also dramatically different in others—should work well. And, in the past, it has.

The Netanyahu reforms seem calculated to disable the system of checks and balances crucial to the moral right of the government to self-describe as representative  both of the will of the populace and of the foundational ideas upon which the State rests. Judicial reform can and should be effected if the system is not working properly. The will of the people in any democracy is both paramount and sacrosanct. But the system of checks and balances is crucial and must be maintained and kept intact. The reforms proposed by the Netanyahu government will seriously limit the ability of the Court to play the corrective role the founders of the State wished for it to play. Judicial reform is a reasonable goal. But the government is overreaching and should scrap the current proposals in favor of alternate ones that will preserve the ability of the Supreme Court to exert corrective influence on the government—just as the founders of the State intended.

 

Flying Things

I’ve never written a screenplay, but I have a great idea for one that I’d like to try out on my readers this week. The scene opens in the Situation Room at the White House. The President is sitting at the end of a long couch deep in thought with a sheaf of papers of different sizes and colors in her lap. Most of the Cabinet is present, including especially the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, but the President’s full team of personal advisors and consultants is there as well. And the First Gentleman is there too, standing in a corner and trying to look unobtrusive.

“So,” the President says, “how are we going to handle this?”

For a long moment, no one responds. But then the Secretary of Defense finds his voice. “I have an idea,” he says tentatively. “Let’s just tell them it was a stealth balloon the Chinese sent over to check out the ICBM silos in Montana.”

The room explodes in derisive snickering. “A stealth balloon!” the President responds. “A giant bright-white spherical stealth balloon the size of three busses end-to-end that we’re going to ask the American people to believe the Chinese just hoped no one would notice floating low against the bright blue Montanan Big Sky? Who in the world would believe that? The American people aren’t complete idiots. Well, some maybe. But surely not all!”

The Secretary of Defense stands up in a clear attempt to regain command of the room. “Yes, of course they won’t believe it at first. But if we just say it over and over, we’ll wear them down. And, besides, what’s the alternative? Telling them the truth? I don’t think the American people is quite ready for that! Not just quite yet.”

The President nods slowly. “Okay,” she finally says, catching the First Gentleman’s eye before continuing. “We’ll go with the Chinese Balloon story. They’ll find out how things are soon enough anyway, won’t they?” The President then turns to face the Secretary of Defense directly. “When exactly do our people expect the Mother Ship to arrive? Our best estimate, I mean.”

The Secretary of Defense looks thoughtfully as he looks down at his telephone and touches a few buttons before responding. “Three days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes, Madame President. That’s our best estimate.”

“Oy,” President Goldfarb says quietly. “This is nisht git.”

 ***********************************************************************************************

So what do you think? Should I keep writing? What’s that? Yes, you all know perfectly well that I have a day job. Okay, okay. But I won’t delete the file either. Not just quite yet!

And now we return to reality. A bright white balloon the size of three busses end-to-end was spotted floating over Montana by eagle-eyed locals about two weeks ago. For reasons as yet undisclosed, the balloon was allowed to float over more or less the entire country until it was finally shot down by our Air Force on February 4 over the Atlantic near the coast of South Carolina. The government has identified the balloon as something connected with Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts, but has left unexplained how the Chinese could possibly have imagined no one would notice such a thing. Did they just not care? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. (Aren’t covert surveillance efforts supposed to be undertaken in a, well, covert manner?) But neither does the argument that we tolerate this kind of low-tech surveillance over our nation because we do the same thing over China convince especially. (That accusation was one the Chinese actually did make in response to the downing of the balloon, insisting that we have flown similar balloons over China more than ten times in recent years. This was categorically denied by our government. For a summary of that set of traded-off accusations, click here.)  No further information has been forthcoming, almost at all. Or at least not any information we could reasonably call definitive.

But Montana was only the beginning. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of last week, the Air Force located and downed three different unidentified objects flying low over North America, one over Alaska, one over the Yukon, and one over Lake Huron, the giant body of water between Ontario and Michigan. (Our Air Force was acting in concert with the Canadian Military and did not enter Canadian air space uninvited.) No real information has been released about any of these incidents either, prompting a firestorm of anger-tinged curiosity in the media and in the blogosphere.

The White House went so far earlier this week as to make the specific point that there is no evidence that these flying objects, the balloon and the other three, constitute evidence that E.T.s are on their way and were simply reconnoitering possible landing sites for the Mother Ship when it finally arrives. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went so far as to laugh out loud at the very thought of these flying things having their origins in outer space. “There is,” she said, chuckling, “no indication of aliens of extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Then, as though she was worried that someone may not have been listening, she repeated herself: “Again,” she said again, “there is no indication of aliens or extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Is the lady protesting too much? Me isn’t sure what methinks. “I loved E.T. the movie,” she concluded even more jocularly, “but I’m just gonna leave it there.” Which she did, putting her amused self in direct conflict with General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD and the United States Northern Command, who, when asked about the possibility of any or all of these flying objects originating in outer space, said clearly that he personally hadn’t ruled that possibility out entirely. Or at all. (What he said specifically in response to the question was “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”)

Then, just last Monday, the administration announced that it was forming an interagency group to address the question of all four incidents. (It’s a good example of where my head is at that when I saw that headline, I misread “interagency” as “intransigency,” which I at first found amusing.) The formation of that group, however, really does suggest that the government is taking this all very seriously, as was evidenced by the remarks by National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who explained that the creation of this interagency group will be “to study the broader implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.” That sounds like a good idea to me! But it still doesn’t go anywhere close to saying what any or all of these flying objects were or weren’t.

I suppose we’ll eventually find out what’s going on. If the Montana balloon was a reconnaissance device, it couldn’t have been more noticeable. Did the Chinese—or whoever—think that Montanans would just suppose that the Earth had acquired a second moon like in Haruki Murakami’s great novel, 1Q84 ? I know at least one Montanan very, very well…and I can assure you he is not the type to be won over easily by the “it’s just a second moon, nothing important” argument. Nor, I suspect, are many—or any—of his neighbors.

So, bottom line, I have no idea what these things in the sky were or are. Will there be more? Who can say? Is the truth that they’ve always been there but we haven’t been looking carefully in any of the right places up to now? I guess…but the notion that they’ve always been floating around but we just didn’t notice them up until now sounds remarkably unlikely. Even the China connection isn’t that certain in my mind. Yes, the Chinese claim now that it was a mere weather balloon that drifted off course. But if that were the case, then why wouldn’t they have notified the Canadians and ourselves that a rogue balloon was about to float into Canadian and/or American air space? The whole story, as Churchill said of Russia, is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.

Myself, I’d like to think it’s a save-the-date kind of thing from Alpha Centauri. Or from somewhere. My faith in God the Creator doesn’t turn me away from imagining life on any of the countless planets out there circling the innumerable stars that exist. (And innumerable is precisely the right word: astronomers estimate that there are something like 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each with an average of about 100 million stars. For more, click here.) When the psalmist wrote millennia ago that the heavens alone are able truly to tell of the glory of God, he was thinking along the same lines. And, if that is so, then it really is inevitable that, somewhere along the way, the residents of one of those planets will find a way to send a note—perhaps in the form of a balloon, perhaps a radio signal, perhaps a gift-comet—inviting us to meet the neighbors and, in so doing, to find out more (and probably much, much more) about ourselves in the process.

Stay tuned on the secret-objects-in-the-sky thing! And if you notice two moons in the nighttime sky, definitely phone General VanHerck and let him know.

Whispered in Gaza

 Regular readers of my Friday letters know that one of the topics that has engaged me continually over the years is the question of how the concepts of individual responsibility and collective guilt (and particularly collective guilt on the national scale) relate to each other in the worldviews of people who wish to think of themselves both as moral human beings and practical souls who live in the “real” world and who know how things sometimes must be done.

I’ve returned to this topic from the bimah many times over the years, speaking personally about this specific issue in any number of historical contexts. No one, for example, could be more caught up internally and emotionally in the story of the Shoah than myself. As a result, I cannot condemn any action deemed necessary by the actual people on the actual ground at the time to defeat Germany and its allies, and thus to rescue from annihilation the surviving Jews of Europe. And yet, even though I certain mean that wholeheartedly and fully unambivalently, I also can’t bring myself just to wave away the deaths of innocents—the children, not to mention the babies—who died in the effort to bring Nazi Germany to its knees, innocents who died in the carpet bombing of German cities or in the course of incidents like the firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945. The Nazis were monsters. But to exult in the death of babies would be grotesque. Easier would be to wave those deaths away with regret as unavoidable collateral damage—but that doesn’t feel quite just or ethically reasonable either. The loss of a child’s life is a tragedy no matter what language that child’s parents speak or how depraved those parents’ political philosophy might be. I really do think that. (How could anyone not?) And so I find myself on the horns of a great dilemma: wanting to maintain my self-conception as a moral human being, yet apparently able to accept the death of innocents as part of a greater plan to do good and bring peace to the world.

All these thoughts returned to me the other day as I visited, and the revisited again and again, a series of twenty-five short videos posted on the website of the Center for Peace Communications by a consortium of media outlets including the Times of Israel, the all-news Arabic-language television channel Al-Arabiya based in Dubai, and the anti-government Persian-language new site called Kayhan London. Entitled “Whispered in Gaza,” the videos feature regular Gazan types speaking openly and, I think, honestly about life under Hamas. These are not happy people. They think of themselves as victims as Hamas as intensely as do the residents of Sederot when rockets are sent over the border between Gaza and Israel with the express intent of killing Israeli civilians. But they dare not speak out for fear of the reprisals against themselves and their families that will almost surely follow, an issue even the people of Sederot don’t face. They couldn’t sound more sincere. Or more believable. And that brings me back to the issue I mentioned earlier: these people are not the enemy, but they share the fate of Gazans when Hamas goes to war, as they have repeatedly in the last decade, with Israel. Are these people the latter-day version of the citizens of Sodom on whose behalf Abraham was pleading when he suggested that the city could be spared if there were just ten decent people living within its boundaries? I’ve known that story my whole life. But suddenly a new question in its regard presents itself to me: what if there had been, say, eleven righteous souls in Sodom and God made good the promise made to Abraham and spared the city. Would the rest of the population—not the eleven, but all the other citizens of Sodom—would they have survived along with the eleven? I suppose they would have. (How else can you read the story?) How to translate that lesson to today’s situation in Gaza is not that obvious. But one inescapable conclusion would have to be that the decent people present in a sea of evil-doers and -wishers—be it in Sodom or Hamas-led Gaza or in Nazi-run Berlin—that those specific people are key players in the ultimate fate of their place, and that that is so even if they themselves don’t know it or would deny it.

To see the videos, click here. I’ve watched almost most of them now. Each is compelling. Each is tragic. Each is a reminder that Hamas’s victims include not only they people whose murder they have effected or sponsored within Israel, but also their own people—held captive by a terrorist government that brooks no dissent and punishes even the faintest whisper of non-allegiance. (To get a clear picture of what that means exactly, click here to read a hair-raising story first published in the British on-line newspaper, The Independent.)

You can start with Ibrahim (click here), a man who imagines living at peace with Israel as a basic right and who has nothing but scorn for the upper echelons of Hamas leadership who themselves have no interest in actually living in Gaza, but who live in Qatar or Turkey and from there pull the strings that make their fellow Gazans as miserable as Ibrahim sounds and no doubt truly is.  And then you can go on to listen to Zainab (click here), a woman who dares to think of Palestinians and Israelis as one people, or at least as the people of one land who can and should be able to live in peace. Her description of her “dream version” of Gaza is beyond moving. But, of course, she and Ibraham (and also all the others) are represented on the screen by animated portraits of themselves to prevent them from being identified by Hamas and duly punished for allowing themselves to dream of peace.

I was particularly moved by the testimony of Khalil (click here), a young man who remember his grandparents’ accounts of the “olden days” when Palestinians were free to travel into Israel and work in the nation’s cities alongside Jewish workers, whom they got to know and even to respect. And also striking was the testimony of Walid (click here), a young man jailed by Hamas on seven different occasions for daring to express himself freely, a basic civil right the exercise of which got him branded as a traitor to the Palestinian people. When, almost casually, he describes the experience of being arrested on seven different occasions for speaking out, in the context of which arrests he was beaten severely and, to use his own word, “tortured” by his Hamas captors, it’s impossible not to see in this young man an ally—a decent fellow whose great crime in life was to wish to express himself openly, a right we in our nation mostly take totally for granted.

Those are just a few of the voices I heard on that website. The videos are all short—mostly just two or three minutes long. The speakers speak in Arabic, but the subtitles are large and easy to read. The interviewers ask a few questions, but mostly the time is given over to the interviewees who are free to speak at length about their lives in Gaza.

Visit the site and you’ll see what I mean. These all sound like rational, decent people…and exactly the kind of people who could live in peace with their Jewish neighbors in Israel if they only had the chance. It’s beyond heartrending, the whole thing. The lot of these people is misery, oppression, and the endless fear of arrest. None is happy. But knowing they exist should be a source of hope for us all. Eventually, good triumphs over evil. And the day will come, I hope in our lifetime, when the people of Gaza find a way to chart their own course forward to a peaceful kind of co-existence with the neighbors and a bright future for their own children and grandchildren.

Given the current climate in the Middle East in general and in Israel in particular, it was very satisfying to spend an hour listening to video clips of people who dare hope for peace…and who found the courage to speak openly and honestly to the world through the Whispered in Gaza exhibition. Take a look and a listen. I think you’ll be as moved as I was.

The Book of Names at the U.N.

The United Nations, so intensely and relentlessly hostile to Israel for almost as long as I can remember, is the living embodiment of the argument set forth in Dara Horn’s 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews, a book I reviewed favorably in this space just a year and a half ago. (To revisit my comments, click here.) Israeli Jews fighting vigorously and strenuously for the security of their nation, uninterested in acting contrary to their own best interests to suit the agenda of their foes and those foes’ supporters in Turtle Bay, and imbued with patriotism born of pride in the might of their military—those people, the United Nations can’t stomach. (For a brief survey of the U.N.’s latest anti-Israel outrages, click here.) But dead Jews, especially in enormous numbers—those Jewish people, the U.N. can’t get enough of.

In 2005, for example, the U.N. took some time off its busy schedule of Israel-bashing to approve General Assembly resolution 607, proposed by (of all nations) Israel itself, recognizing January 27, the day in 1945 that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The fact that Jews the world over—including especially in Israel itself—observe Yom Hashoah annually on the 27^th of Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, makes the observance of the U.N.-sanctioned day feel confusing, or at least superfluous, for most of us. And yet it’s hard to disparage any attempt to memorialize the martyrs who died during the Shoah. And I don’t. But I also don’t know quite what to do with it.

At Shelter Rock, the day comes and goes each year without us doing anything at all to take note of it. Partially, that has to do with my personal disinclination to do anything at all that could possibly appear to be supportive of the U.N. And partially, I suppose, it has to do with the fact that the importance of marking the specific day the Russians arrived at Auschwitz is diminished, at least somewhat, by the fact that the Shelter Rockers themselves who had been prisoners in Auschwitz were all liberated at Buchenwald by the U.S. Third Army. But most of all we are disinclined to make much of International Holocaust Remembrance Day because we are already firmly committed to observing the annual anniversary of Kristallnacht in the fall and Yom Hashoah in the spring.

Nonetheless, I was prompted to rethink the issue after listening to the address delivered to the U.N. General Assembly by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on “their” Holocaust Memorial Day last week. Choosing his words carefully, the Secretary-General spoke directly and specifically about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world. “We now know the terrifying depths of the abyss into which Germany would plunge,” he said unambiguously, “but the alarm bells were already ringing in 1933. Too few bothered to listen, and fewer still spoke out. Today, we can hear echoes of those same siren songs to hate.” I was impressed—both by the sentiment and by the man’s willingness to say it out loud and unequivocally. And then he went on to observe that the rise of Nazism itself was not an unavoidable natural catastrophe like a tsunami or an earthquake, but rather a fully avoidable nightmare that was specifically made possible by “the indifference, if not the connivance, of so many millions.” Hearing him say that reminded me instantly of the many, many times I heard the late Irving Roth, himself a former Auschwitz prisoners liberated at Buchenwald and one of the truly great Holocaust educators of our time, say precisely the same thing. It was, for me personally at least, a striking moment.

And then Gutteres went on to discuss anti-Semitism in the world today. He was sharp and unequivocal, describing as a “painful truth” the fact that “anti-Semitism is everywhere” and is, in fact, “increasing in intensity.” Nor, of course, is anti-Semitism an isolated phenomenon: “Survey after survey,” he went on to observe, “arrives at the same conclusion: anti-Semitism is at record highs. And what is true for anti-Semitism is true for other forms of hate. Racism. Anti-Muslim bigotry. Xenophobia. Homophobia. Misogyny. Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movements are becoming more dangerous by the day.”

As regular readers surely know, I generally find it irritating—to say the least—when the kind of almost unimaginable barbarism that led to the Shoah is served up as just the Jewish version of some other kind of prejudice. And yet, listening to the man speak, I thought I heard a certain cogency in the man’s remarks. The tide of hatred, including violent hatred, is rising. And, although it once would have, it no longer strikes me as inherently absurd or reductionist to see all of its manifestations as part of the same terrifying phenomenon. And Gutteres also highlighted a fully cogent reason for seeing things in that light in his remarks: “The threat is global, and it is growing. And a leading accelerant of this growth is the online world…Many parts of the internet are becoming toxic waste dumps for hate and vicious lies. They are profit-driven catalysts for moving extremism from the margins to the mainstream. By using algorithms that amplify hate to keep users glued to their screens, social media platforms are complicit, and so are the advertisers subsidizing this business model.” I myself am absent from most social media platforms. I don’t have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account but haven’t ever tweeted anything out to my non-existent followers, choosing silently to follow American, European and Israeli politicians and read their tweets. I don’t have an Instagram account. I’m sure I’ve never even visited TikTok, whatever that is exactly. So I’m insulated from the kind of material Guterres was describing. But I know it’s out there. And his words sounded a kind of clarion call to me to speak out about an phenomenon I had until recently mostly managed blithely to ignore.

And then, after speaking, Guterres went personally to see the Book of Names exhibit.

This project, undertaken by Yad Vashem and soon to be on permanent exhibit in Jerusalem, is the result of decades of work undertaken by researchers at Yad Vashem to collect the actual names of all the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah. So far, they have collected an amazing 4.8 million names. There are, historians posit, at least a million names missing. Probably, there are far more than that. When the Einsatzgruppen massacred the entire Jewish population of towns in Ukraine and Belarus, they did not pause to collect the names of their victims. Even those murdered in the camps were not all listed by name: children sent to their deaths, which was basically all of them, were generally not listed in the Nazis’ record books at all. The book itself—a real book, at least of sorts—is gigantic: six feet tall and twenty-six feet wide. And, almost prosaically, the names are neatly arranged alphabetically, each one followed by the decedent’s hometown, year of birth, and place and date of death.

The work has been tedious, but continuous: just last year, 40,000 names were added to the Yad Vashem data base and then included in the Book of Names. The hope is to reach the 5 million mark sometime this year. But the work will become harder and harder as the years pass because so many of the names, and particularly of children, were simply not recorded and are therefore not recoverable.

And so I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. I want to see the book. I want to have that experience personally. But I can’t imagine myself setting foot in the United Nations building, a place synonymous in my mind with the most vile kind of anti-Israel prejudice. For me personally, the problem has an easy solution: I can go and see the Book of Names this summer at Yad Vashem itself. But that only solves the logistical problem, leaving me to grapple with a different problem entirely.

Is there some chance that Israel’s enemies at the U.N.—and they are legion—will be moved by the Book of Names to consider their attitudes? Will they see an exhibit and suddenly understand why Israel needs to exist…and why Israelis feel the need to defend themselves vigorously and not just to trust the rest of the world to look after their interests? Will they see the names of these millions of innocent victims and understand why Jews today cannot imagine a future without a strong Israel defending itself against enemies like Iran, a nation whose leaders regularly use Holocaust imagery to describe the slaughter of Jews it hopes one day successfully to accomplish in the Near East? Or will contemplating the Book of Names just be another task for U.N. personnel to tick off on their already over-packed to-do lists: condemn Israel, get coffee, censure Israel, email Mom, promote violence against Israel, tear up yet another parking ticket I don’t have to pay, encourage anti-Israel terrorism, drop by Book of Names, pick up dry cleaning….

I don’t expect much. In fact, I don’t expect anything. But the presence of the Book of Names in the U.N. Lobby combined with Antonio Guterres’s remarks in the General Assembly gives me some smidgen of hope that the U.N. might someday turn back into the force for good it was expected to become and which it briefly was. I suppose we’ll have to see. But Antonio Guterres has done the impossible by making me think that such a thing even could happen.