Tuesday on the Mall

I rarely write about our nation’s press and news media outlets, but sometimes you just don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Or both.

The front page of Wednesday’s New York Times website made no reference at all to the gigantic pro-Israel demonstration in Washington. It was mentioned, however, in “The Morning,” a daily news summary that the Times sends out to people like myself who subscribe to it, where the text reads, and I quote, “Tens of thousands joined a rally at the National Mall in Washington in support of Israel.” Tens of thousands? Any reasonable reader might wonder how many tens exactly. You can’t find out by clicking on the link, however: that leads to a story that is buried somewhere in the bowels of the website (and not visible to people who “just” type www.nytimes.com into their browsers to see what’s on today’s front page) which—I have to assume intentionally—merely repeats that “tens of thousands” had converged on the Mall, adding the helpful information that neither the U.S. Parks Department nor the Metropolitan Police Department provided any estimate of the size of the crowd.

Well, I was there. So was Joan. So were, by most estimates, something like 290,000 other people. Some estimated the crowd as over 300,000. Would any reputable newspaper refer to a number like that as “tens of thousands”? That’s something like saying that a new Rolls Royce costs “hundreds of dollars.” Yes, the price of a new Rolls is definitely some multiple of 100. (I just checked: the average price of a new Rolls is $435,000, or about 4350 hundreds of dollars.) But no one would reference the price of a Rolls that way and the Times should be ashamed of itself for going to such bizarre lengths to avoid saying just how many people its crackerjack reporters—a team so endlessly willing uncritically to estimate civilian casualties in Gaza based on information provided by Hamas—how many people its crackerjack reporters estimated were there on the Mall on Tuesday.

Okay, now that I have that off my chest I can write about the rally itself. Oddly described (in the Times and elsewhere, but for no obvious reason) as “a march,” the rally featured no one marching anywhere at all, just people in massive numbers gathering and staying put on the National Mall, the gigantic park space that stretches in our nation’s capital from the Capitol to the east and the Washington Monument to the west. The crowd was so large that we chose voluntarily to stay towards the back where there were gigantic television screens broadcasting the speakers and singers who were speaking and performing at the far eastern end of the Mall—where only invited guests with special blue bracelets could go. So we were fine with that—I’m not a huge fan of crowds and was more than happy just to be present in that place without needing to be all the way up front—and were content to hang back.

The speakers were a strange mix: some A-list politicians (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, but not President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), some much less well-known types (Republican Senator Joni Earnst of Iowa, for example, or Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada), some Israeli singers I personally hadn’t ever heard of (but also Matisyahu, whom I at least had heard of), and a strange sprinkling of Hollywood types like Debra Messing and Tovah Feldshuh, whose presence at the podium seemed to baffle most of the people in my immediate area. There were also a large number of relatives—including parents and siblings—of the hostages being held in Gaza. The parents of Omer Neutra, a lone soldier from Plainview who graduated the Schechter School of Long Island in 2019, were front and center to demand the release of all the hostages being held by Hamas. As they surely well deserved to be and needed to be.

Several speakers stood out in my opinion, though, and, first among them, Democratic Representative from the Bronx Ritchie Torres who spoke, I thought, remarkably forcefully and clearly, calling unequivocally on Israel, and I quote, “to do to Hamas what America did to ISIS in the twenty-first century and what America did to the Nazis in the twentieth century.” That matches my sentiment exactly, so it was very satisfying to hear an ally generally identified as a progressive speaking so forthrightly and clearly on Israel’s behalf.

Next, I would like to mention Deborah Lipstadt, United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Anti-Semitism. I’ve heard her speak before and I read with great interest and respect her 2019 book, Anti-Semitism: Here and Now, as well as her biography of Golda Meir and her 2011 analysis of the Eichmann Trial called just that, The Eichmann Trial. In her remarks on the mall, she spoke forcefully and clearly about the link between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. Because of her status as a senior official in the Biden Administration, her presence was especially important. And she could not have spoken more eloquently or more forcefully on Israel’s behalf.

Natan Sharansky spoke from Jerusalem via video hook-up, as did Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel. (President Herzog said he was speaking from the Kotel, but it looked as though his spectral presence must have been somehow suspended above it since there were no people visible on the ground and the giant stone blocks of the Kotel were weirdly visible through the president’s diaphanous body.) 

I was particularly interested in hearing the Reverend John C. Hagee speak. That he was invited at all surprised me—here is a super-conservative type who has made dozens of statements opposing women’s reproductive rights, the civil rights of LGBTQ people, and the right of American children to attend public schools in which they are not encouraged, including not even subtly, to embrace the Reverend’s own faith as their own. And yet, despite all the reasons he shouldn’t have been there, there he was. He spoke forcefully and clearly. He prayed aloud that God bless the State of Israel. He declared himself and his followers to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people” and noted that, in the current conflict, “there is no middle ground. You are either for the Jewish people or you’re not.” And, sounding fully sincere (at least to me), he noted that “if a line has to be drawn,” then the world should “draw that line around both Christians and Jews, because we are one.” So that was all good. But it begs the question of what to do with allies who speak out forcefully for good with respect to Israel, who raises gigantic sums of money for Israel (about $100 million and only rising), but who support so much of what most of Israel’s most fervent American supporters abhor. I came away unsure how I felt: impressed that he came, pleased that he spoke so forcefully and so unambiguously about his support for Israel and the degree to which he feels that all Christians should be fully supportive of Israel’s efforts to annihilate Hamas in Gaza…and yet not at all ready to say that we should just look past the Reverend’s many abhorrent remarks with respect to so much that we believe to be right and just. I suppose I give the man a pass for the moment: he came, he spoke forcefully and forthrightly, he didn’t mention any topic except Israel, and then he sat down without abusing his invitation to speak.

The crowd was interesting in its own right: lots of regular-looking Jewish people (some with yarmulkes on their heads but most without), some super-Orthodox-looking types (but nowhere near enough, at least not in my opinion, given their actual numbers), some quirky sub-groups (Iranians for Israel was probably my favorite), some pro-Israel Christian groups (mostly behaving respectfully, some not so much), and pro-Zionist LGBTQ people draped in rainbow flags emblazoned with huge Stars of David.

Tuesday’s rally appears to have been the largest ever gathering of American Jews and could conceivably have brought together almost a full five percent of the entire Jewish population of the nation. And so let me wrap up by saying what Tuesday’s rally meant to me both as a Jew and as an American.

We all pay lip service to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the power that inheres in those freedoms is rarely something we experience personally. The right to speak out, the right to assemble without interference, the right to protest…and to be protected by the authorities while protesting, the right to insist that public officials listen when people speak out—all those are things we learn about in high school and then mostly don’t think much about. And yet there we all were, all of us together and united and expressing ourselves as one without anyone having needed a permit to show up or a license to speak out. I don’t suppose high-school-me could have imagined about-to-retire me on the Mall last Tuesday embodying all those rights we had to memorize for the American History Regents exam. But there I was. And there Joan also was. Both of us were proud and happy to stand up for Israel and to be two among many, many others united in their disinclination to remain silent when Israel is under attack.

  

A Kishenev Moment

Yesterday was the 85^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Reich-wide pogrom in 1938 that signaled to the world that the Nazis were not going to settle back into being armchair anti-Semites who expressed their loathing for Jews through hate-inspired rhetoric and discriminatory legislation, but were going to morph forward into becoming brutal, barbarous killers for whom there would eventually be no bottom line at all when it came to attacking Jews or defaming Judaism. The numbers say it all. 267 synagogues were burnt to the ground in the course of that unimaginable night. Over 7000 Jewish businesses, including both family-owned shops and giant department stores, were damaged, looted, or utterly destroyed. Over thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the fig leaf of some sort of phony indictment accusing the incarcerated of having committed some sort of crime not even bothered with. Hundreds were murdered or prompted by the pogrom to take their own lives. The die was cast. Millennia of Jewish life in Germany and Austria were at their end. Other than for those able somehow to escape at the very last moment, there would be no future at all, not even a difficult or unpleasant one, for the Jews of the Reich.

We have not forgotten any of this. Nor has the eventual adoption of Yom Hashoah as the annual memorial day for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi anti-Semitism made it feel superfluous to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht each November. Yom Hashoah, which has its own complicated backstory, ended up as the day on which Jewish people formally mourn for the martyrs who died al kiddush ha-shem during the Second War. But Kristallnacht has its point, its own specific contribution to make. And, indeed, for many of us, Kristallnacht represents not the final debacle, but the early-on turning point, the moment at which the anti-Semitism which underlies so much of Western civilization stepped boldly out of the closet and blatantly shed even the patina of shame that is in theory supposed to attach to race- or ethnicity-based prejudice in the sophisticated lands of our dispersion, in the enlightened West, in lands ruled (as was Germany in the 1930s) by leaders democratically elected by voters fully aware of their platform and program for the nation. There is something tragic about both Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht, but whereas Yom Hashoah inspires regret, Kristallnacht inspires dread.

For me personally, the events of October 7 in the towns and kibbutzim on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border inspires just that kind of ominous feel that Kristallnacht also awakens, that sense that a line was crossed, that the fantasy that a reasonable solution could one day yet be reached with the Hamas leadership was not only a pipedream, but a malign, dangerous one at that, an example of the kind of illusory pipedream that leads, at least eventually, to Treblinka, to the slaughter of innocents, to hell.

And yet the event in Jewish history that I keep seeing referenced with respect to the Simchat Torah pogrom is not Kristallnacht at all, but Kishenev.

Today, Kishenev (now called Chișinău) is the capital of Moldova, a landlocked Balkan nation wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, and home to almost a full third of its population. But long before Moldova was an independent nation, Kishenev was the capital of the Bessarabian Governate in the Russian Empire and home to a huge Jewish population of about 50,000 (out of a total population of 280,000). The Jews of Kishinev were neither better nor worse off than any other Jewish community in eastern Europe: they had business dealings and social dealings with their neighbors, people with whom they shared a common nationality, a common language, and a common hometown. But shortly before Easter in 1903, things began to go off the rails. There were low level anti-Semitic incidents at first, some violent and others just defamatory. But things escalated quickly and an out-and-out pogrom began on April 19 of that year. The violence was, at the time, almost unprecedented. Countless Jewish homes were broken into, plundered, and destroyed. Synagogues were demolished. Jews were openly attacked by mobs armed with pitchforks and guns; hundreds of women were raped openly in the streets. The violence went on for three days and, at the end, about 1500 homes had been destroyed, forty-nine Jewish people had been murdered, and many hundreds had been seriously wounded. The whole story is told in detail in one of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time (which is saying a lot): Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishenev and the Tilt of History, published in 2018 by Liveright Books. The book, which I can recommend wholeheartedly, is well written and very thoroughly researched. Intelligent and fully forthright in its account of the terror, the book should be read—and read carefully—by every single one of the so-called academics on our nation’s campuses who are willing to be known publicly as supporters of Hamas.

It might be hard for readers familiar with the horrors of the Shoah to take a pogrom in which only forty-nine people were murdered all that seriously. (By way of comparison, the Nazis murdered about 15,000 Jews every single day from August to October in 1942.) And yet the importance of Kishenev lies not so much in its own detail, but in its aftermath because it served in its day as a wake-up call that had repercussions and echoes across the entire Jewish world. And that phenomenon too is chronicled in detail in Professor Zipperstein’s book.

The sense of powerlessness felt by Jews who had no recourse but to cower in their own cellars and hide from the miscreants, rapists, and murderers wandering the streets in search of their next victim was chronicled by many contemporary authors, but by none as successfully as Hayyim Nachman Bialik in his famous poem, Be’ir Ha-hareigah (“In the City of the Killing”), which soon became his most famous work. Others wrote in a similar vein, focusing not on the power of the crowd by on the powerlessness of their victims. And, according to Zipperstein, the combined weight of journalistic accounts, poetic responses, dramatic representations, and literary retelling led to a sea change in Jewish attitudes towards the world and the place of Jewish people in it.

And, indeed, the notion that the Jewish people could only survive in the long term in a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people—the core concept of Zionism—moved quickly from an out-there kind of political theory espoused by some to the kind of basic truism that Jews the world over suddenly found themselves embracing naturally and easily. Kishenev was thus a kind of a catalyst moment, a threshold in time over which the Jewish people itself had somehow stepped…and which could not really be crossed back over again. This was a sea change in public opinion rooted in the realization that the barbarism of the Middle Ages—a time when Crusaders routinely and without fear of reprisal massacred entire Jewish communities and Inquisitors burnt at the stake any Jewish person deemed not wholeheartedly enough to have abandoned Judaism, that that level of barbarism was not a thing of the past but a thing fully of the present. And that triggered a response in the Jewish world that was, so Zipperstein writes, unprecedented.

And that brings me back to October 7, to the Simchat Torah pogrom, to Gaza. I follow the news incessantly. I suppose we all do. The story has yet to reach its conclusion, but I’m already sensing that Gaza was a kind of Kishinev moment for Jewish youth in our nation. The college campuses, once naively imagined by most (including myself) to be bastions of learning, of dispassionate scholarship, of culture, and of civilization, have shown themselves—and we are talking about the biggest and most highly-rated schools in America, these schools have shown themselves to be cesspits of anti-Semitism staffed by at least some faculty members morally depraved enough to feel that the murder, mutilation, and rape of innocents, including children, is a valid mode of political expression. But the Jewish students in those places are waking up and feeling—some, I’m sure, for the first time—the danger, the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself, the angst that underlies even the most confident statement of Jewish self-awareness. They too have crossed a line in the course of these last few weeks. And that, just as it was in the wake of Kishenev, will have to suffice as the silver lining in this cloud of unremitting horror stories that we have all heard and read over these last weeks.

Whether this truly will be a transformational moment for America’s Jewish youth remains to be seen. But Kishenev, which surely could have ended up as just one more pogrom on a long list of such events, somehow altered something in the DNA of the Jewish world. Nothing was the same afterwards. And the rise of Nazism just a few decades later only made even more evident the fact that, in the end, hiding from the hooligans and hoping that someone else steps forward to save their potential victims is not a cogent plan forward. Not for Jews, certainly. But also not for anybody.

Professor Zipperstein’s book is a shocking, bracing, very intelligent study of a single moment in Jewish history, but one that somehow nonetheless managed to divide what came before from all that came after. You won’t enjoy the book. No normal person could. But you will learn a lot from it, as I did. For those struggling to understand Gaza in the context of Jewish history, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

What Would Ike Do?

Anti-Semitism and its alter-ego anti-Israelism rarely wear the same dress to consecutive balls. Yes, of course, there are people so blinded by their own hatred that they don’t really care how their behavior appears to people who disagree with them (and even less than that to the actual objects of their loathing). But then there are those—and they are legion—who feel the need to dress up their bigotry and present it, not as something wicked or depraved, but as something rational and reasonable, even as something noble.

It's a big closet. There are lots of outfits to choose from. And the most favored outfit for today’s anti-Semite is pacifism, the struggle for peace in the world. Who could be against peace? And yet the constant, and ever-more-shrill, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza come not from people who support the effort to bring peace to Gaza by eradicating Hamas (and thus granting the actual Gazans a chance finally to live in peace with the neighbors), but precisely from those who wish the IDF to withdraw so as to allow Hamas and its fighters to regroup and plan their next horror-Aktion against Israeli civilians whose only “crime” is the wish to live openly as Jewish citizens of the Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people. By redefining pacifism as a path forward to more numerous, more violent, more brutal, and more devastating attacks against innocents undertaken by people so blind with hatred that even Nazi-style barbarism does not feel like a path too perverse to embrace, such people have truly stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy universe where nothing is as it seems, where words can mean what they mean or what they don’t mean depending on the whim of the one speaking them. When Lewis Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” he expected readers to laugh at the absurdity of words meaning only what the people speaking them wish for them to mean.

Adding to the irony is the fact that peace—the real kind, the kind that features individuals and nations living calmly and respectfully by each other’s side and resolving their disputes without rancor or violence—is the single most culminatory concept in all of Jewish prayer. The Kaddish ends with a prayer for peace. The Amidah—the series of benedictions that is the core of every Jewish prayer service—also ends with a prayer for peace. As do also the Grace after Meals, recited at the end of any formal meal, and the Priestly Benediction that features kohanim like myself coming forward to channel the very choicest of God’s blessings to the congregation. So if there ever were a people devoted to the idea that the yearning for peaceful coexistence between nations is the beating heart of prayer undertaken for the good of the world (as opposed to the kind undertaken solely for personal advancement or gain), it would be the Jewish people. And yet the calls for a cease-fire are becoming more shrill by the moment, more overtly hate-filled, more blatantly anti-Semitic.

Many years ago, Joan and I lived in Heidelberg, a storybook town dominated by a gigantic, half-ruined castle in what was then West Germany. How I got there and why someone like myself whose entire life could reasonably be described as a response to the Shoah would have agreed to live there at all, let alone for years—that will have to be my subject on some different occasion. But we were there—and the experience was some combination of fascinating, stirring, bizarrely otherworldly, and gratifying. I taught at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg’s downtown core, but we lived in a suburb called Rohrbach, once a little town on its own called Rohrbach-bei-Heidelberg but by the time we got there long since redefined as a neighborhood within the city limits of its much larger neighbor. This was forty years after the end of the war, yet the Shoah was my constant companion. I couldn’t walk to the market without passing the red sandstone monument marking the site of the synagogue destroyed on that site on Kristallnacht in 1938. I couldn’t walk to work down the Plöckstrasse without remembering that it was once the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Nor could I take little Max (then just a baby) to the park by the river—the one place he still vaguely recalls as an adult—without passing the square in which the surviving Jews of Heidelberg were finally assembled before being shipped east to their deaths.

And yet the town I was living in was a peaceful place, a university town in the old-fashioned sense of the term: a place alive with concerts and lectures, with sporting events and social gatherings. The disconnect for me personally was beyond jarring: these were Germans, these people I was living among, yet they appeared to me neither warlike nor barbarous. If anything, my neighbors seemed like regular people pursuing their regular lives along fully banal lines: shopping for dinner, drinking beer in a pub, waiting for the streetcar, going to the movies, reading a newspaper in a café, attentively watching children playing on a climbing structure in a park to make sure they were safe. No one in our building on the Heinrich-Fuchs-Strasse seemed like the kind of savage who could murder entire communities’ worth of people in a single morning or who could operate gas chambers or who could shoot babies in their mothers’ arms. If anything, they seemed like peaceful sorts trying to earn livings and eager to live meaningful, productive lives. If there were any unreconstructed Nazis hiding out in Rohrbach, I never came across them. Or heard of their existence, even.  I’m usually a fairly good judge of people’s characters. I knew the history of the place in which I was temporarily living. But none of the people in our building or on our street struck me even remotely as the kind of person who could have brought such unimaginable suffering to the world, such misery, such violence, such uncontrolled and uncontrollable hatred.

When I think back on those days these days, I find myself wondering how exactly the most bellicose, savage, brutally violent nation ever to exist (with the possible exception of their Japanese allies), how such a nation became peaceful to the point at which the thought of today’s Germany going to war with Denmark or Holland is not just unlikely but truly unthinkable. And, yes, I say that known full well that there is serious (and growing) support for the ultra-right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party among the German electorate. But war with Holland? With France? That really is unthinkable, which brings me back to wondering what turned people whose entire national ethos was fueled by the most base kinds of hatred and bigotry into the nation Germany is today?

It certainly didn’t come about because General Eisenhower, having embarked on the boots-on-the-ground land invasion that followed the carpet bombing of Germany’s largest cities, decided that what was really needed to bring peace to Europe was a unilateral ceasefire.

What was needed, the Supreme Allied Commander knew, was to eradicate Nazism by neutralizing the Nazi leadership, by bringing the military to its knees, and by granting the German people a way out of this unimaginable catastrophe they had basically brought upon themselves. The defeat of Nazi Germany was total. The nation’s Armed Forces ceased to exist. The government was replaced briefly by ad hoc governing authorities created by the Allies, but soon after that by a democratically elected government of Germans eager to shed the horrors of the past and embrace a future that could steer the nation away from extremism and savagery, and towards playing a useful and helpful role in a reconstituted Europe built on the ashes of a nightmarish past. The role of the vanquishing nations then turned to assisting the vanquished to rebuilt by treating the citizens of Germany generously and fairly, by inviting them to imagine a peaceful future for their nation and then assisting them in making real that dream. The Marshall Plan was part of it. But even more essential than the money provided by the Plan was the willingness of the victors to redefine victory so that it no longer meant the annihilation of the enemy nation but its reconstitution as a useful partner in rebuilding a world that lay in ruins because of them.

People who truly yearn for peace should be thinking along similar lines with respect to Gaza.

The last thing that would ever lead to peace would be for Israel to leave Hamas in place, to go back to “regular” daily life, and to concentrate on working on some hugely lopsided deal to rescue the captives being held by Hamas. What is needed to bring peace to Gaza, on the other hand, is precisely what Israel is doing: working to eradicate Hamas by neutralizing its leadership, by bringing to justice the perpetrators of the October pogrom, by freeing the captives, and then, generously and willingly, to find a way for the citizens of Gaza to create a future for themselves that features peaceful relations with Israel and a governing body for themselves that has their own best interests at heart.  If General Eisenhower was here to put his two cents in, I think he would agree wholeheartedly.

There Will Yet Be Singing

Every so often, we encounter stand-up moments—opportunities to, well, stand up and show (to yourself, to your children, to the world) if you actually hold the values you claim to espouse, if you are the person you think of yourself—and wish others to think of you—as actually being. I had a moment like that last week, which I thought I’d share with my readers this week. Life doesn’t dole out these opportunities so often. But this this was my moment and, because Joan was part of the discussion and the decision, it was hers too.

Like every student of Scripture, I have my favorite Tanakh personalities. I actually identify with bits and pieces of lots of different biblical personalities and regularly have “wow, that guy in that story is just like me” moments in the course of which I suddenly see the text before me as a kind of mirror in which I suddenly—and mostly unexpectedly—find myself reflected. That is a feature of all great literature, I suppose: that ability to function both as a gateway into the author’s world and, simultaneously, as a mirror in which the reader (or, in the theater, a member of the audience) is suddenly possessed of the conviction, impossible yet fully real, that the play being watched or the book being read is actually about him or herself. Historically speaking, of course, that conviction is lunacy. Shakespeare lived and died centuries before I was born and there are no secret messages meant just for me in any of his plays. But that is not how it feels when I am seated in the theater and my level of engagement with the dialogue makes it feel precisely as though King Lear has stepped out of time to speak directly to me. Or, far more disconcertingly, to others about me.

For me personally, the biblical personality I’ve always identified the most meaningfully with has been the prophet Jeremiah. And, yes, I understand fully well that this makes no sense at all. For one thing, his life could not have been less like mine. He had no wife and, as far as anyone knows, no children. He spent a serious portion of his adult life under arrest or in jail. His was the epitome of bravery in the face of impending doom, speaking the oracles of God aloud and in public regardless of the danger that he knew fully well inhered in doing so. He was beaten, mocked, pilloried. He was brave, but he paid a gigantic price for that bravery and was considered a traitor to his king and country by most of his fellow Jerusalemites. He was nothing at all like me.

But he was also just like me. Or rather like the version of myself I would like to think I could yet become. He was fearless. He was righteous without being self-righteous. He was the both articulate and eloquent. And he was secure in his faith, unrattled by the existence of phony prophets who insisted that their good-news messages were the true oracles of God sent to guide the people forward and that Jeremiah’s jeremiads were just the depressive ravings of a seriously depressed person blinded by his own pessimism. Despite it all, though, the man had it in him to stand up in public and speak honestly—and that is the quality I'd like to find reflected in myself, in my own preaching, in my writing. I want to be secure in my faith and unequivocally honest. And I want also to be suffused with hope—which Jeremiah also was, and at the same time (this is the big trick, at least for me) that he was both realistic and honest.

The prophet had been vouchsafed a double-screen vision of the future. There was still time for the people to avert catastrophe by embracing the core values of their faith, but otherwise destruction and devastation were on their way. And this was a make-or-break moment: the destiny of the nation was in its own hands if they had the courage to seize it. But even if the people refused to mend their ways and proved unable to avert catastrophe, there would always be a future for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. There would be exile. But there would also be return. There would be devastation, but there would also be renewal. There would be a miserable past, but there would also be a future.

And then the opportunity presented itself to put his money where his mouth was. It was the last year the kingdom of Judah would exist. The Babylonians were already at the gates of the city. The king had put Jeremiah in jail for refusing to lie to the people about what the future was about to bring—to them, to their city, to their nation, and to their king. And then, out the blue, a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Haname’el showed up in prison with the news that a parcel of land outside the city in a place called Anatot was Jeremiah’s to purchase if he wished it. Why exactly this offer came to Jeremiah is not made clear; probably he was the closest male relative to the recently deceased owner of the field. But the point was that this was the worst real estate deal imaginable, buying land in a nation at its lowest point, facing implacable foes, its very future uncertain. But Jeremiah had it in him to look past the moment and see a bright future for the land and for its people. He closed his eyes and saw bridegrooms and brides standing beneath their chuppah, children playing in the city streets, young people out together drinking and singing. And so he bought the land, using his fellow prisoners as witnesses to the transaction. (The whole story is in the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah for those who wish to read it. Shul-goers will recognize part of it as the haftarah  assigned to the Torah portion called Behar.)

So the other morning, Joan and I had a Zoom call with our kablanit, a nice woman whom we have engaged—but without yet signing a contract—to undertake some renovations on our apartment in Jerusalem. When we first conceived the project, it was just fun. We are hoping soon to spend a lot more time in our apartment and there were repairs that needed to be made. There were some cracks in the flooring. There wasn’t enough storage space in either of the bathrooms. There wasn’t the kind of closet in which you could hang coats or winter jackets. The oven wasn’t big enough. There was no shade on the balcony, which problem we wished somehow to address without making it impossible to build a sukkah on the balcony. That kind of stuff. In the world of renovations, small potatoes. But not to us: for us, this was a way for us of staking out our future in a part of the world we love and in which we want to spend maximal, not minimal time as the years pass.

But that was last summer. Then we had the chagim. And now we have Gaza. The stories we’ve read are horrific. The story is nowhere near over. More loss is, I’m afraid, on the books. The IDF has shown remarkable forbearance to date, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? And the stories of the pogrom itself—the violence, the Shoah-style brutality, the almost unimaginable savagery of the attack—all that has made the bathroom storage space issue seem—to say the very least—strange to worry about, almost bizarre to discuss seriously. We were going to sign the contract before Rosh Hashanah, but then the contractor’s father died and she was busy with shiva and dealing with her loss. We obviously stepped back, told her to take her time, promised her we didn’t mind waiting a few weeks to settle things up.

Should we move forward as planned? Are we being ridiculous to worry about the sukkah-on-the-balcony issue at a time like this? We both dithered for a while, unsure how to proceed. But then I caught a glimpse of Jeremiah, my guy for all these years. I noticed him in a few different places, actually. He doesn’t speak—at least not to me personally—but I somehow know who it is. And then I somehow see that poor man in his jail cell pondering his own real estate decision and, somehow in my mind’s ear, I hear him singing his own words to himself: od yishama ba-makom ha-zeh…b’arei Yehudah u-v’chutzot Yerushalayim, kol sason v’kol simchah, kol chatan v’kol kallah. There will yet be heard in this place, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, sounds of joy and merrymaking, the voices of bridegrooms and brides. And that was enough.

The man bought the property in Anatot. And we signed on with the contractor.

Israel is facing tough times. The enemy is savage and violent. The devastation left in the wake of the massacre will take years to repair, the psychological damage to the national psyche even longer. But I am possessed of the unshakeable faith that the state will endure, that Jewish life will never again be uprooted from the Land. And we will yet—one of these years—enjoy our Sukkot dinner in our own sukkah on our own balcony overlooking Gad Tedeschi Street, and I know that just as surely as I also know that God will yet spread out God’s own sukkah of peace over the land and over its people.

  

Eyeless in Gaza

I was waiting for the elevator in one of our local hospitals when my phone started to vibrate last Tuesday afternoon with the news—reported as simple fact by the Bing-Microsoft news service that funnels breaking events into my personal news feed—that Israel had intentionally blown up a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 hospital staff and patients, including children. Then the elevator came and I got into it. By the time I got out on the ninth floor, the original story had been “confirmed” by the New York Times. So how could it not be true?

Two hours later, the original message was gone—magically withdrawn into thin air—and unretrievable. The original Times banner “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was also gone, replaced with the slightly (but only slightly) less inflammatory “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” But the damage was done. Not everybody who has an iPhone that features ongoing news alerts is as involved in news from Israel as I am. (Could anyone be? Maybe. But no one could be more emotionally and personally involved in the events of these last weeks.) And a fair number of them, I’m guessing, just quickly scanned the first headline, then filed it internally as yet one more terrible thing Israel has done to the innocents of Gaza. And so a scurrilous story—one that for me (and for anyone who knows as many IDF veterans as I do, and who has the respect for the IDF that it deserves) could not possibly be true—gains traction. By evening, the murder of these poor innocents was lighting up X, formerly Twitter, as though it were an established fact, as though it were a story featuring confirmed reality that only a willfully blind Zionist would even try to deny.

But, in fact, the story was not true. Or rather it was not true as reported. Yes, a terrible explosion killed hundreds at the al-Ahli hospital (also called the Baptist Hospital) in southern Gaza. And it is also true that all the victims appear to have been innocent civilians. But the IDF insists that it did not target that hospital and that, as far as they can tell, the damage was done by a missile intended by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to murder Israeli civilians that misfired and landed in Gaza not far from where it was launched. And they also noted that the IDF is bound by rules of combat that specifically forbid its servicepeople from slaying civilians indiscriminately. And then, shortly after that, the P.M., Bibi Netanyahu himself, issued his own statement on Twitter saying plainly and unambiguously that this was not the work of the IDF.

Later, the President of the United States said clearly that American intelligence supported Israel’s claim of non-involvement. Plus, the hospital, it turned out, was not “blown up” at all, but is still standing. Aerial photographs showed rocket shrapnel on the roofs of adjacent buildings. And then, later that night, Israel released an apparently undoctored recording of Hamas operatives more or less confirming the Israeli version of events. (The recording is in Arabic, but click here to hear it with English subtitles.) Even the Gazans themselves eventually pulled back from their initial inflammatory reports, no longer mentioning 500 dead but merely referring to unidentified “hundreds.”  But by then the damage was more than done. The Arab street was on fire. There were huge demonstrations in many Muslim capitals, including Istanbul, Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. President el-Sisi of Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled their plans to meet with President Biden, apparently thinking that insulting him for not embracing the initial (and almost fully incorrect) version of the story was a rational plan forward. On home turf, our own Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) asserted unambiguously (but apparently fully falsely) that the Israelis had “bombed the Baptist Hospital and killed 500 Palestinians.” And Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) shamelessly referenced the incident as an Israeli war crime without a shred of evidence to support her vitriol.

To wave this whole incident away as yet another success, albeit a temporary one, of the Palestinian misinformation campaign against Israel would be very wrong, however. The tragedy here is fully real. These poor people fled south in the first place to avoid being caught in the crossfire if Israel ultimately decides to enter Gaza to find and free the 199 hostages being held by Hamas. I suppose they must have imagined they were safe, or safer, in the southern part of Gaza and safer still in a hospital, a place of refuge and healing. If it turns out that this was “just” an accident, that the jihadists trying to murder innocent Israelis accidentally ended up murdering innocent Palestinians, then that will be terrible enough and grimly ironic. But if it turns out that this was intentional, that Hamas did this to prompt—almost to force—el-Sisi, Abdullah, and Mahmoud Abbas publicly to disrespect President Biden by refusing to meet with him in the course of his trip to the Middle East, then the raw cynicism of the move will be almost too much to bear.

I want to think that this was an accident. What normal person wouldn’t? But what if this was intentional, if this actually was undertaken fully intentionally as a piece of grotesque political theater intended to upend President Biden’s visit to the region? To refer to the concept of blowing up a hospital to further political aims as bestial behavior would be an insult to the animal kingdom. But some part of me wonders if that isn’t precisely what’s happened. And, indeed, President Biden’s trip to underscore our nation’s support for Israel and to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA—that may simply have been too clear a harbinger of a future featuring an alliance of leaders implacably opposed to the kind of barbarism for which Hamas stands for the Hamas leadership not to do whatever it was going to take to prevent from happening. And the fact that the Palestinian president was going to be included—for which invitation the price was surely going to be his willingness to join in a blanket condemnation of Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel and the unimaginable destruction directed almost solely against innocent civilians that incursion brought in its wake—that just may have been too much for Hamas to swallow. I have no evidence of any of the above. But I am too much a student of history to wave the darkness in my heart away as merely depressive or necessarily delusional. Terrible things happen in the world. And they often happen fully intentionally.

And that brings me to my real point. The challenge facing me personally in the wake of his incident is to find it in my heart to set everything I know about the Middle East—about Hamas and about the IDF and about Israel itself—to set it all aside and to mourn the dead of al-Ahli. I am by nature a bit cynical, but I specifically do not want to bring politics or cynicism to my appraisal of this tragedy, of this disaster. The children who died in the hospital was no more deserving of their fate than the Jewish babies and children murdered in cold blood by Hamas two weekends ago. So to wave them away as “mere” collateral damage in a larger story to which they were tiny footnotes—that would require a level of callousness and insensitivity of which I want—even need—to think of myself as being incapable of sustaining.

Since Simchat Torah, thousands have died on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border. To look past the death of innocents should be an impossibility for all who fear God and revere the sanctity of human life. Many more will die as Israel does what it can to eradicate Hamas and, in so doing, to avenge the death of its citizens. Still others will die as Hamas descends to ever darker degrees of demonic depravity in its anti-Israeli rage and does whatever it thinks necessary to hurt Israel and put space between it and its allies. In the end, Hamas will surely be annihilated. Of that, I harbor no doubts at all. But to take pleasure in that thought without mourning the innocents of al-Ahli should be impossible for even the most ardent supporter of Israel. As well it is with respect to me personally: I ardently look forward to the day when terror is defeated once and for all, but I mourn for those innocents who died when that rocket landed on the hospital in which they were seeking healing and refuge, and I feel their loss as a stone in my heart. To feel otherwise would be to deny their humanity—and that is something no decent person should even be able to do, let alone wish to do. 

The Simchat Torah War - One Week In

I was a college senior in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out and I can remember all too well the shock and dismay that permeated not only the big Jewish world out there but also my own synagogue community and my own circle of family and friends as the first terrible days of the war unfolded on our television screens. But as the tide turned quickly and it became increasingly clear that Israel would yet again vanquish its enemies, that dread lifted and was replaced—and replaced easily—by my customary confidence in the future, by my faith in God’s watchful and protective guardianship of the people Israel, and by my certainty that, in the end, good always wins out over evil. If I had been temporarily uncertain, my trust in the future snapped back into place almost instantly.

I was busy preparing myself that fall for the entry exams you had to pass back in the day to be admitted to rabbinical school at JTS. And my studies in the course of the  rest of the year only appeared to support that trust that sprung up so automatically for me once the tide turned and Israel’s victory seemed certain. Indeed, the more I read to prepare for my exams, the more certain I became that the course of the war had merely mirrored the larger course of Jewish history. Yes, we’ve known nights of unimaginable sadness. But then dawn breaks and the sky is filled again with light. The tide ebbs, but soon flows back. A remnant always survives, always returns, always re-asserts its right to chart the destiny of the Jewish people into the subsequent generation. My father’s joke about the difference between a Jewish optimist and a Jewish pessimist—the Jewish pessimist says, “Oy, things couldn’t get any worse,” to which the Jewish optimist responds, “Of course, they can. And will!”—seemed funny to me precisely because it so little mirrored how I perceived things really to be. The arc of Jewish history, I felt certain, always bends towards survival.

I have begun this letter a dozen different times. My original plan was to recount my memories of the Yom Kippur War in even more detail and then to assure you all that just as our enemies were vanquished then, so will they also be beaten now. I know everybody wants to hear that. And mostly I do write today to tell you all that—and not because it’s my personal job to cheer people up, but because that conviction regarding the inviolate destiny of Israel is too much a part of who I am to dissolve in even seriously bad news. I am, as always, a man of faith devoted both professionally and emotionally to the cultivation in others of the confidence in the destiny of the Jewish people that is so foundational to my own worldview and so much a part of who I am.

But this has been beyond challenging for me, this whole detour into hell that we have all been experiencing over this last week. I suppose part of that has to do with the degree to which the terrorists have somehow turned in my mind from merely violent thugs motivated by raged-based frustration into latter-day Nazis. And, indeed, the images and stories that have come out from the events of this last week would earlier on have been familiar to me only as the stuff of Shoah memoirs. But these stories, all verified and clearly true, are not made-up or embellished. And the first-hand accounts I’ve read—that we’ve all read—of young women being raped, of old people being dragged from their homes and killed, of babies being slaughtered, of young people at a desert concert being shot by the hundreds at point-blank range—these cannot be decried as mere crimes or acts of brutality. Nor do I see a way to explain any of this even as extreme political activism. After the events of last weekend, the enemy has surely lost all pretense merely to be acting forcefully to improve the lots of Gazans as the soldiers of Hamas takes their place in the history of the world as true monsters who have done their worst to destroy the Jewish people. Yes, I am more than aware that the Nazis were eventually vanquished, that they lost the war, that at least some Jewish people did end up surviving in every single country the Nazis occupied. I know all that. And yet I feel myself seized by a sense of dread that I am not quite sure how to justify or even explain.

Yes, the support that Israel has received—and especially from some unexpected quarters (including especially in Europe)—has been heartening. Even the New York Times managed to publish an editorial that was far more supportive of Israel than that newspaper has been in a very long time. President Biden’s and Secretary of State Blinken’s unequivocal statements of support meant a lot to me, as I’m sure it also did to all of you. (On the other hand, underlying all that heartening rhetoric is the certainty that, in the end, no amount of supportive rhetoric will mean anything if it is not accompanied by an equally solid commitment to deny Iran entry into the nuclear club.) Still, both the President and the Secretary of State did say the right thing and I have to give them credit for that. So did a lot of people—say the right thing in the course of this last week, I mean—but the real test, of course, will be to see if those lovely words are followed by action or not.

So that’s where I’ve been for most of this last week: buoyed by confidence and seized with dread, riven and subdivided like an actor impossibly hired to play two different roles on the same stage at the same time. (There’s a reason they don’t save money on Broadway by doing that: because it can’t actually be done.) But, in the end, I have to let what I know about Jewish history guide me forward.

I wish I could promise you all that this will somehow end well. I actually do think that, of course. But I also know that the journey from here to there is going to be long, painful, and beyond arduous. Our friends and family in Israel are mostly too old even for reserve duty, but their children and grandchildren—other than the ones who are actually in the middle of their military service—have more or less all been called up. I’ve been speaking to friends and family all week, and the message I’ve heard over and over has been more or less the same one: yihyeh tov, things will work out…but the journey from here to there is going to be grueling and challenging. And so, in the end, that is my message for all of you as well. Yihyeh tov.  This will end with a total defeat of Hamas, with the annihilation of its stores of menacing weaponry, with the restoration of Gaza to the actual people who live there and many of whom (click here) would be thrilled to live in peace with Israel and to prosper and thrive as their neighbors’ neighbors. The Saudis will eventually joint the Abraham Accords. The Palestinians will eventually realize that they can have their own state as soon as they are signal their right to nationhood by signaling their readiness make peace with making peace with the people next door. Hamas will join the Crusaders and the Cossacks and the Nazis in the dustbin of history. And the same God who makes peace on high will bless the world with peace as well.

And our job, as ever, is to remain staunch and steadfast in our support for the State of Israel. I can’t stress enough how important it is to write to the President and the people who represent us in Congress in support of Israel.  (Click here for guidance.) We need to give as much as we can manage to the charities that support the soldiers of the IDF and the civilian population of Israel. Most of all, we need to find the courage to reconstitute our riven selves into single-minded individuals possessed of faith in the future and confidence in the IDF. As I wrote above, I feel that riven-ness too, that uncertainty, that ill ease that we’re all feeling. But I plan to devote myself in these coming days and weeks to shucking it off, to re-integrating what I believe and what I know and what I hope to create the fully confident Jewish soul that I know myself capable of becoming, the one that is reflective of the truest me there is. The task in front of us all is a daunting one. I myself am on that journey as well. But if we travel together, we’ll at least have each other for company. And we’ll surely reach our destination with our faith and our trust intact. 

Neilah on Dizengoff Square

It’s hard to know what to make of the events that unfolded in Tel Aviv towards the end of Yom Kippur. But what’s not difficult at all is to understand that the incident—not quite a riot, but a serious incident of incivility and poor behavior—is a good example of what happens when people mistake intolerance for zeal and antagonism for principled disagreement.

The incident had to do with a public-space gathering to recite the Neilah Prayer that ends Yom Kippur. Every shul-Jew knows this to be a highlight, not only of Yom Kippur or even the High Holiday season, but really of the entire prayer-year. The mood in our sanctuary at Shelter Rock, for example, is intense, focused, and very stirring. The spirits whose palpable presence made the air in the room so heavy during Yizkor have mostly departed back to Sheol (or wherever), but the residue of their ghostly presence lingers still in the room. The fast has begun to take its toll; people are hungry and thirsty. Those of us for whom a day without caffeine is torture are mostly nursing giant headaches. The specific nusach that the cantor uses to chant the prayers is hauntingly beautiful, but also vaguely ominous; the notion that the gates are poised to swing shut—and our chances to have our initial inscription in God’s great Book of Life upgraded through some combination of repentance, prayer, and pledges of charity thus dwindling by the minute—creates a unique blend of resignation and (despite all we know of ourselves) hope that all who have experienced Neilah in a traditional setting will recognize easily. It’s a remarkable moment.

And, for the last few years, an effort has been made to hold public prayers services in Tel Aviv, the heart of secular Israel, in an attempt to reach out to Jews who would otherwise not experience any aspect of Yom Kippur as a day devoted to prayer and introspection. The service the previous evening—the Kol Nidre service—went well enough, but there were those present who strongly objected to the insistence of the prayer service’s organizers, a group called Rosh Yehudi (“A Jewish Head”) headed by one Israel Zeira, to separate men and women during the service. Gender segregation is a big deal in today’s Israel, a kind of a flashpoint between secular and Orthodox-religious Israelis. It's not only a matter of synagogue seating either—the issue has to do with mixed-gender seating on buses and trains, on mixed-gender classes in public schools, and in public swimming pools maintaining “men only” and “women only” hours alongside the “regular” schedule that invites men and women to use the pool simultaneously. So this is a big deal in Israel and, as such, a much touchier issue than it is in our country.

Erev Yom Kippur went more or less as planned. But the following evening, both sides of the dispute dug their heels in. Suddenly, there was an actual barrier separating men and women, albeit a flimsy one that was really just a wall of plastic Israeli flags. But that was just as provocative as the Rosh Yehudi people should surely have known it was going to be. And so, when secular Tel Aviv arrived in Dizengoff Square with their own agenda and their own strong, angry, hostile words to add to the mix, things did not end at all well.

To refer to what ensued as a riot (as I noted in several on-line sources) is probably an exaggeration. But what happened was a travesty nonetheless and, at that, one that could and should have been avoided.

The good news is that large numbers of secular Israelis, most of who would not think of spending Yom Kippur in a synagogue, have been drawn to these public prayer services since their inception in 2020. That yearning for spiritual fulfillment I have noticed in Israel over the years in many different contexts—and to such a great extent that even the traditional division of Israelis into secular ones and religious ones has seemed less meaningful to me in recent years. So the idea itself of organizing public prayer for shul­-averse citizens is not only rational but, in my opinion, laudable. But by insisting on gender segregation during prayer—given the status of that specific matter as a hot-button issue across Israeli society in recent years—was almost to doom the effort to failure even before it got off the ground.

On the other hand, the secular types who came to the service with their dukes up, spoiling for a fight and prepared to use the most vile, insulting, and vituperative language—those people have a lot to learn about what Yom Kippur means and should mean. A day devoted to prayer, to repentance, and to making peace where peace needs to be made was sullied by extremists more eager to make their own point than to reconcile with people who feel differently than they do. And that was a true travesty and a disgrace.

It's easy to make peace with people with whom you disagree slightly, significantly less so when the parties involved are at loggerheads on foundational issues relating to culture, societal norms, and a nation’s basic ethos. But that is how peace is made in a society divided against itself—by listening carefully to the good on the other side and by finding a way to be flexible emotionally and politically without being untrue to yourself.

The secular types who were outraged by the idea of gender segregation in a public spot needed to get a grip on themselves: this wasn’t an instance of women being denied the vote or made to wear chadors in public, and neither was it an instance of women being told to go home or not to participate or not to say their prayers at all. Yes, it was a bit ham-fisted (if you can say such a thing about religious Jews on Yom Kippur), but it was also a way to draw in Jews used to the idea of separate seating during worship and so to make such people feel comfortable and welcome. And that seems to me to be the more crucial issue here.

The Rosh Yehudi organizers and their follows who couldn’t imagine a Neilah service that didn’t involve gender segregation needed to get a grip on themselves too. Dizengoff Square is not a synagogue. The whole idea of public prayer is that the prayer service be welcoming to the public, a goal at total cross-purposes with an insistence on flouting the laws regarding gender separation. The idea of creating an opportunity for secular Israelis to feel drawn to tradition through the medium of public prayer is a noble one, a good one. But if someone is drowning in the sea, you can only do good by throwing a life preserver into the water where the person in trouble is, not where you yourself are! To involve secular Israelis in prayer means to create a setting in which such people are comfortable and at their ease, in which they are predisposed to let the words of the liturgy enter their hearts and move them, possibly even to awaken some kind of dormant faith in them. And if that requires abandoning some norms that would prevail automatically in a room in which everyone present self-defines as an Orthodox Jew, then that’s what’s required. The Rosh Yehudi people, as far as I can see, wished to do good. But they wished only to do it on their own terms. And that is, generally speaking, not how good is really ever done.

So that was last week. This week, Israel is covered with sukkot both in public places and on people’s roofs and balconies, and in the courtyards and gardens of apartment houses. Those sukkot represent the great sukkah of peace for which we pray daily in our evening prayers. And this year those sukkot should be suggestive to all of the great lesson of Sukkot: that the medium in which spiritual progress—both on the individual and the societal levels—is made is peace: peace between nations, peace between warring factions within society, and peace between individuals. Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square was a disaster. But it could also serve as a wake-up call for a riven nation in need of healing on all fronts: politically, religiously, and societally. What is needed is compromise, the cultivation of intellects supple enough to respect others’ opinions, and the abandonment of the kind of cultural arrogance that cannot imagine an alternate opinion to one’s own being valid. Intransigency is not a virtue. Reaching out to others with respect and a willingness to compromise—those are the virtues that can save any society, no matter how divided against itself it might have grown.