The Jewish Wind Phone

All of us for whom prayer is part of daily life have occasionally been challenged to justify our practice—possibly even just to ourselves—by saying clearly whom we think we are actually speaking to when we pray. It’s not that easy to know how to respond. There are numerous traps to avoid when answering. Saying simply that we are talking to God seems inevitably to lead to two derivative questions, both unsettling to address: how exactly we know that and why it is we think all-knowing God needs to be told anything at all. And a third question too, equally disquieting, also surfaces regularly, the one that asks why it is, if prayer is dialogue, that God never seems to talk back in the way we would consider perfectly normal with any other interlocutor.

The problem, however, lies not in our answers but in the questions themselves: all are rooted in a simplistic understanding of what language is and the role it plays in our human lives. Yes, language is communication: you ask the nice lady in the store which aisle the paper towels are in and she tells you. But language is also self-expression, a means of ordering the world, of grappling with the unfathomable by addressing it, by naming it, by interpreting it. And it is that latter definition of language that we bring to prayer: the world feels overwhelming in the wake of disaster and, instead of withdrawing into our shells like terrified turtles, we face the darkness by naming it, by labeling its parts, by addressing it from the depths of our consciousnesses. We thus allow language to serve as a kind of bridge that connects our inmost selves to the terror just ahead…and, instead of trembling in our boots or shutting our eyes, we speak. And thus do we subdue the raging world with language, with words, and, yes, with prayer.

Almost entirely forgotten—at least by Americans—is the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, a nightmarish disaster in the course of which 15,894 died almost instantly, most from drowning. More than 2,500 simply disappeared and were never seen again.

In the wake of that disaster, I remember reading about an older man named Itaru Sasaki, who lives in a place called Ootsuchi where over eight hundred people were washed out to sea in less than a single minute. His town was devastated by the tsunami, but he himself was in mourning for a cousin, someone he truly loved, when the disaster struck. And so, feeling bereft and totally alone, he came up with a very strange way to deal with his grief: he purchased on old phone booth and set it up in his garden. Then he purchased an ancient rotary phone, a black one, and put it on a table in the booth. There was no dial tone because the telephone wasn’t attached to anything. But on that phone, Mr. Sasaki would talk to his cousin and tell him about his life now that he was carrying on alone and without someone he truly loved. He called it the kaze no denwa, the “wind telephone.”

And then, the amazing part. Word spread about this thing, this crazy, unconnected, telephone in a phone booth in a garden by the sea. People started coming. In droves. From all over Japan. NPR sent a reporter to cover the story and he got permission to record some of what people were saying into the phone.

“Why only me, dad? I’m the only one left alive. People don’t realize what it’s like,” a teenage boy said to his missing father.

“Everyone’s good here. We are all trying hard,” an elderly lady told her long-time spouse, a man who disappeared when the sea overwhelmed his town.

“You were going to buy me a violin. I just bought it myself finally,” a girl says to her vanished parents through tears.

“I’m building a new house but without you or our little girl and boy, there’s no point is there?” The words choked up in the throat of a middle-aged man who lost his entire family.

 

It’s a touching story, but the big question—to me, at any rate—is why this thing worked at all. Shouldn’t it not have worked? It’s an idiotic thing, after all: an ancient rotary phone that isn’t connected to anything in a phone booth that is also not connected to anything in a garden in front of someone’s private home. But what makes it interesting to me is that it somehow does work…and not because it really does anything at all. These poor people in Japan found in that phone booth not a portal to the afterworld, but a way of using language to communicate with the universe and all of its parts, a way of facing the unimaginable using the tools offered by language itself, a way of speaking into the dark and finding, not silence and not nothing, but glimmers of hope, of light, of promise. For me, that is what prayer is, almost by definition. For more about the wind telephone, click here or here.

It was this story, which I first read about years ago, that came to mind when I first visited the remarkable website called Coming Home Soon (click here to go see for yourself). Currently a real-space exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam and created in Holland by people consumed with worry about the hostages being held by Hamas, the on-line version is remarkable. The front page of the website offers pictures of every single one of the hostages held or still being held in Gaza, presenting all 253 and not distinguishing between the 110 who were released in a prisoner swap a few months ago, those still being held, and those already dead: all are or were prisoners of Hamas. (Hamas is holding the bodies of the deceased hostages to use as the most ghoulish of bargaining chips to use in future negotiations.)

Who thought of setting up this website, I don’t know. But the idea couldn’t be more simple: on the front page of the site are on display color photographs of each of the hostages. The dead have tiny “forever in our hearts” badges attached to their pictures; the ones already freed have “welcome home” badges. But otherwise they are all mixed up together on the page—just as they are in our hearts. And each photograph has just behind it a biography you can read of the hostage and—and now I get to my real point—and an opportunity to write to that hostage. The hostages don’t get mail. They don’t have access to email or to text messages. The letter you write and send off does not go into some cosmic in-box to wait for the hostages to log on and see what you had to say. The messages you send to the dead will not be any more unread than the ones you send to the living.

This is not a real mail service; this is the Jewish kaze no denwa, the Jewish wind phone. You write not to communicate—or at least not to communicate in the normal manner of people dashing off emails or dictating text messages to tell other people this or that—but to express, to pray, to use language as a kind of bridge between despair and hope, between the dismal reality of where we are and the bright light that beckons in the distance—the flickering flame of faith, of courage, and of confidence in the future.

When this is all over, all the hostages will come home—some, surely most, to their families and others to their graves. But, until that happens, the job of the righteous is to pray for their released and for their survival. Language is the bridge to God; that is why prayers are constructed of words. Sometimes, it feels right to turn to God directly in prayer. That, we do all the time. But there are also times when you can use language to pray to God by addressing a human party, living or dead. That is the opportunity the Coming Home Soon website affords: a way to pray for the hostages through the medium of language directed not directly to God but to those of God’s creatures in the most need of redemption. 

Loss and Rage

One of the surprises Jerusalem offered up to us shortly after we bought our apartment and began to explore the neighborhood was a peaceful cemetery just a few blocks from our street in which are interred 79 Indian soldiers who served with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, as well as the bodies of 290 Turkish prisoners-of-war who died while in British captivity. So it is a strange place, that cemetery: a Hindu burial ground in which are also buried hundreds of Muslims who fell far from home and who had to be buried somewhere. There are no individual graves; the British apparently decided to bury the dead in two mass graves, one for the Hindus and one for the Muslims. Facing stone monuments record the names of the dead.

We’ve walked by many times; Joan’s cousin Rina used to live just down the road. It’s a peaceful place, a quiet place. But it never fails to strike me how strange the whole concept is: hundreds and hundreds of young men who died in a war fought basically over nothing at all in a distant place and who were then shoveled into a common pit (why do I think white soldiers would have been buried in separate graves?) and left to sleep in the earth in a place that none of them would ever have thought to call home.

Walking by that place never fails to re-awaken in me my recollection of Joan’s and my visit to the Beersheva War Cemetery, the resting place of more than 1200 soldiers from the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India. It’s also a peaceful place, well-tended, verdant, and well watched over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But what is shocking about the place are the stones themselves: row after row after row featuring the graves of young men, some just teenagers, who died on the same horrific day in 1917. It was a terrible day, too. By the beginning of October in 1917, the British forces under the leadership of General Edmund Allenby were well entrenched along the Gaza-Beersheba road with the intention of seizing Beersheva from the Turks. By the end of the month, all was ready. And on October 31, the battle was joined. The attack was led by the 800 men of the 4^th Australian Light Horse Brigade, brave souls who leapt on horseback over the Turkish trenches and continued on into Beersheva, while other branches of the army attacked the Turkish legions from the side. In the end, the attack was successful and the Turks were soundly defeated. In many ways, in fact, the tide of war turned against the Ottoman Turks at Beersheva. And, indeed, before a year passed, the war was over and Turkish Palestine, wrested from the Ottomans, was handed over by the League of Nations to the British.

But the cemetery has its own story to tell. Now shady and peaceful, the silence is more ominous than calming as you enter through the shady gate and come across row after row after row of young men who died, all of them, on October 31, 1917. The place is well worth visiting, but what the experience yields, or at least what it yielded in me, was a deep sense of sorrow, of loss, of the true tragedy of war. Young men who should have been planning their lives, their weddings, their careers, their futures…instead dead as part of the incomprehensible madness that was the First World War and planning nothing at all other than an eternity of moldering far from home in someone else’s soil.

That many of the dead at Beersheva were veterans of Gallipoli only makes the story even more tragic and more poignant. (I saw Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, when it came out in 1981 and still remember the harrowing effect it had on me. If any readers are still laboring under the delusion that war can be glorious, Gallipoli really is a must-see.)

And that brings me to Gaza. To most, Gaza is a strip of land that has been ruled over by too many different foreigners since its glory days as ancient Philistia. The Romans, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Israelis all tried their hand at governing the place; I get the sense from my reading that all of the above couldn’t leave fast enough once the opportunity presented itself. (And, yes, I know there are people in Israel now demonstrating in the streets in an attempt to provoke the government into re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. Those people, with all respect, are living in a self-generated dream state fully divorced from reality.)

But Gaza has its own Jewish dead to consider. And I do not mean by that to reference the fallen of the current IDF campaign.

There was a very touching piece in the paper the other day about Israeli troops coming across Jewish graves in Gaza. And, indeed, the Gaza War Cemetery, established in 1920, contains the graves of over 3000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza. And some of those soldiers were Jewish, which fact was duly recorded on their tombstones. I suppose the idea was that the IDF soldiers felt a sense of kinship with the Jewish soldiers buried in that place, which is almost an ordinary thought, but somehow the story—by Troy O. Fritzhand, which I read in the Algemeiner (click here)—affected me in a less expected way as well.

I understand the logic behind the Israeli war against Hamas. I have no trouble with Israel going to war with the forces of evil, with people whose hatred of Israel and its Jews expressed itself on October 7 with almost unimaginable barbarism and Nazi-style brutality. Nor do I have any trouble with the notion that, when fighting a war against evil, the only true sin is to lose. I hate the thought of civilian casualties. But I also understand that the fact that the hostages have been held now for more than 120 days means that time is running out. All that, I get. But part of me feels the weight of tragedy pressing down as I read the news day after day.

I hate Hamas for having started this war. I grieve daily for the 1200 Israelis murdered, maimed, and raped on October 7. I can’t stop thinking about the 225 IDF soldiers who have died so far in this terrible war. And I think about the Hamas soldiers too—each a victim of his own fanaticism and willingness to die as part of an army of terror, but each also once an innocent babe who could have grown up to live a peaceful, productive life, who could have brought joy instead of unimaginable misery to the world. And, of course, I think also of the civilians of Gaza, people who, yes, put Hamas into power and who are now paying the awful price for that colossal error of judgment, but the large majority of whom could surely not have imagined October 7 and its aftermath.

To know with certainty that you are on the right side of a war does not make the war less tragic. Nor does it make it any less crucial that you win. But the tragedy feels overwhelming. I wasn’t alive when the Allies carpet-bombed Germany, but I think I would have felt the same way about the 600,000+ civilians who died during those bombing campaigns, which number includes about 76,000 children. The Allied leadership did what they perceived to be necessary to win the war, which they did. But my response to the civilian death toll is not censorious outrage, but deep sadness. How can the Germans have made us do that to them? How can the Japanese have created a situation in which Hiroshima was imaginable, let alone actually doable? And how can Hamas have created this situation in which the only way to rescue our hostages is to go in on foot to find them and liberate them from their captors’ control? The civilian deaths in Gaza are, in my opinion, all on Hamas. But that doesn’t make them less tragic.

And those are my emotions this week: weariness (because I am so tired of this burden of worry and anxiety), outrage (because what kind of people can have thrust this upon us?), terrible sadness (because of the children of Gaza, all innocents, who are paying the terrible price for their parents’ bad decisions), resolve (because if not me, then who?), and, despite everything, hope (because the God of Israel neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, and surely, at least eventually, light always wins out over darkness).  I continue to pray, even more fervently than in the past months, for peace, for resolution, and for victory. I’m feeling the burden of it all. I suppose we all are. But the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, of redeeming those held in captivity, is key here: defeating evil is the means, but bringing the captives home is the goal. And that’s what I’m praying for, day in and day out. 

Can the Center Hold?

As we move forward through these strange times, I find myself careening these days back and forth between my native pessimism about the world and the occasional flash of uncharacteristic optimism. On the whole, things are probably no worse than they have been in the course of these last few months. And in some ways, things are actually looking up. (For one thing, I keep hearing rumors about some sort of imminent deal that will bring at least some of the hostages home. So that sounds hopeful.) I know both those things. But another part of me feels that the gyre is widening and that, at least in the end, the center will not hold. I write this week not to scare or depress, but to share my ill ease and to find comfort in inviting you to join me in hoping together for better times to come.

Yeats (that is, William Butler Yeats, 1865—1939) was one of the world’s greatest English-language poets, a Nobel laureate, eventually a senator in the Irish government. He was a strong Irish nationalist and he definitely flirted—and probably even more than just flirted— with the rising fascist movements of the 1930s. Not an anti-Semite in same sense as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, he was nonetheless part of a world that held anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to be part of a normal, educated person’s worldview. (For a brief but trenchant review of Irish anti-Semitism over the ages that appeared in the Irish Times a few years ago and that specifically mentions Yeats, click here.) There’s a lot of evidence to review, but I don’t wish to sort it all out here. Nor do I want to comment—not now, at any rate—about the set of bizarre reasons that have led Ireland to be the most consistently anti-Israel nation in Europe. (For a recent essay published in the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle on that precise topic, click here.) Instead, I’d like to use one of Yeats’ most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” to frame my thoughts about the world we are all living in.

Yeats begins his poem with a stunning image:

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre

            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

A gyre is a gigantic circular oceanic surface current. Before the poet starts to write, he looks out at the sea and finds it calm, placid, and peaceful. And then the churning begins. At first, it is barely perceptible, hardly even noticeable. And then, slowly, the motion picks up speed. What was tranquil and serene just a moment earlier is suddenly unsteady and unfixed in place. And as the speed of the water picks up, the pleasurable expectation of swimming peacefully in calm waters is replaced by the fear of drowning in those same waters. Nothing, suddenly, is as it should be. The tightest personal connections—Yeats uses the intimate relationship of the falcon and the falconer—become attenuated, then ruined entirely by the deafening gyre as it picks up speed and grows louder and stronger. In the world the poet is comparing to the sea, then, things that are normally each other’s natural complement—butter and toast, coffee and cream, pillow and pillowcase, socks and feet—these normal connections too weaken. And, in the end, the center itself around which life revolves—the family, the house, the workplace, the church, the shul, the park, the grocery—the center doesn’t hold and what was once normal, even pedestrian, now seems unpredictable and in a state of permanent, debilitating flux. And then, just like that, nothing at all seems fixed in place. Or safe.

I’ve lost track of the news even though I read obsessively. I subscribe to a dozen daily news bulletins, peruse half a dozen on-line newspapers, have an inbox that is constantly overflowing. My junk file has its own junk file. I am, I think, as up-to-date on the world’s goings-on as anyone who has a day job could possibly be. Mostly, I deal with it all by compartmentalizing the data, thus storing it in manageable chunks for later degustation (which I occasionally even get to). In that way, my center can hold. But just lately the center is not holding. And the gyre feels more than ever as though it is ominously large and ever-widening.

Let’s consider one single week’s worth of news. A man was arrested last Monday in London and charged with having attacked several employees in a kosher supermarket with a knife. In Haifa, a terrorist drove his car into a crowd of civilians just yards from the front entrance to the Haifa Naval Base. A Chabad rabbi in Washington was pushed out of a Lyft cab by the driver, who then violently attacked him. A terror cell about to perpetrate an “October 7-like attack” was identified and neutralized in Jenin. A would-be terrorist was shot and killed as he tried to murder soldiers standing guard at the entrance to Tekoa, a peaceful town in the Gush Etzion bloc that Joan and I visited just last summer. The International Court of Justice considered seriously a charge of attempted genocide made by South Africa against Israel, then rendered its decision almost without reference at all to the October 7 pogrom that took the lives of well over twelve hundred innocent Israeli civilians, some of whom were beheaded and others of whom were raped. The speaker of the French National Assembly commented the other day that the steep resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in France had reached the level at which it poses “a threat to the foundations of [the French] republic.” Federal agents in Massachusetts arrested a man who was making credible threats of mass violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in his state. Undeniable proof was adduced that UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations charged with supplying humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, is so suffused with actual Hamas-affiliated terrorists and sympathizers that it wouldn’t be that unreasonable for UNRWA itself to be considered a terrorist organization. (If you have access to the on-line version of the Wall St. Journal, click here for a truly shocking account of the whole UNRWA scandal.) The top civil rights officer at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent her entire professional life as a civil rights attorney, declared herself “astounded” at the level of anti-Semitic aggression the characterizes our nation’s college campuses. To offer one single example, students at Stanford University, once a school I would have characterized as one of our nation’s finest, were chased just last week from a campus forum on anti-Semitism by a crowd of haters threatening to hunt them down in their homes and, at least by implication, to murder them there. (Click here for the horrific details. They’d have to pay me to send a kid of mine to Stanford. But I wouldn’t anyway.)

Is the center holding? More or less. So far.

The poet continues with reference to anarchy being “loosed upon the world” and goes on to imagine innocence itself drowning as the “blood-dimmed” tide rises. And the problem is not only the brutal barbarism of the aggressor; it’s also the fecklessness of the aggressed-against: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Oy. And so ends the first half of the poet’s poem.

Being a Christian, Yeats imagines the salvation of the world in Christian terms. No problem with that for me: in what language should the man speak if not his own? And so the Christian man looks to the horizon for salvation and expects Jesus. But Jesus does not appear at all. The poet is ready for the Second Coming, for the messianic moment, for redemption. But on the horizon he suddenly espies something else entirely:

…somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare…

The savior cometh not and instead cometh the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” The poet expects to be saved, but his hopes are dashed as his faith turns out to have been misplaced entirely because all the distant horizon can deliver up is a monster. All the promises of modern society—prosperity, human dignity, security—turn out to be hollow,  misshapen fantasies; none will help much. Or at all. The much-awaited Second Coming yields only an ogre, a fiend, a “rough beast.” There is no hope.

And where does that leave us? I too look to the horizon and wait for redemption. I also fear the “rough beasts” of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, anti-humanism, and anti-Americanism, the four horsemen (to wander back into Christian terms) of my personal most-feared apocalypse. And yet, despite it all, I don’t find myself entirely drained of hope. I keep perusing the headlines with all the doom they presage for the world and all the terribleness they recount, but somehow find myself able to retain hope in the future. Where that comes from, I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with relativity. Hamas is Amalek, but we’ve faced worse. Our American college campuses are minefields for Jewish students, but things will surely improve as the problem is dragged out into the light and the world can see the haters for what they are and respond accordingly. Israel’s set of tasks in Gaza is beyond daunting, but the tide seems slowly to be turning. I continue to harbor the real hope that the hostages are all still alive and that the rumors of a deal to release them will turn into reality. And even though the streets of our cities seem clogged with villains whose hatred for Israel feels visceral rather than rational, I still have confidence that the American people will never embrace anti-Judaism and that the republic, the indivisible one featuring liberty and justice for all, will never turn on its own citizens. Do I sound Pollyanna-ish or rationally hopeful? Like an ostrich with its head in the sand or a Jew with his head held high? Even I am not sure. But I continue to believe in the future, in our future in this place and in the future of Israel. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

 

 

 

The Two-State Solution

You would think that by now no amount of hypocrisy on the part of the great world out there could surprise, let alone startle, me at this point. Even I think that! And yet I find myself consistently amazed to find myself amazed at the duplicity of our so-called friends, not to mention the out-and-out phoniness of self-proclaimed allies who insist that they only want the best for the Jewish people or for the State of Israel.

If I had nothing to do for the rest of my life I could begin a list. But since my time is limited, I’ll settle for writing about our “friends” who have suddenly discovered, or rather re-discovered, the “two-state solution” as the cure for all that ails Israel and its neighbors. And they are legion: I’ve lost track of how many different newspaper articles I read this last week alone in which the author breathlessly announces that the reason the entire Arab-Israeli sikhsukh wasn’t resolved long ago has to do with the intransigence of Israelis with respect to the famous “two-state” solution, the compromise invariably touted by such authors as the obvious panacea to all that ails the Middle Eastern world. Here, for example, is a story from Taiwan explaining to readers of the Taipei Times how things would calm down instantly if only Bibi would heed President Biden’s call for a “two-state solution.”

The notion itself of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli problem, of course, is as old as the state itself and, in fact, there actually are two states, one Arab and one Jewish on the territory of the old British Mandate of Palestine. Or, rather, there would be had the British not unilaterally sawn the entire kingdom of Jordan, then called Transjordan, off of the mandated territory and offered it to the Hashemites as their own country. So the U.N. was dealing with the part that was left and that, indeed, they voted on November 22, 1947, voted to split down into two nations, a Jewish one and an Arab one.

The next part, everybody knows. The Jews of the yishuv accepted the plan and declared independence on May 14, 1948. (Our apartment in Jerusalem is actually just half a mile or so from November 22^nd Street, a pretty place named specifically in honor of the U.N. decision.) The Arabs of British Palestine, however, did not follow suit and declare their own state. Instead, they went to war and lost, which failure laid the groundwork for the subsequent seventy-five years of hostility towards the Jewish state.

Whatever the problem really is, it certainly doesn’t have to do with not enough ink having been spilt—or time wasted—trying to work things out. The Madrid Conference of 1991, the Oslo Accords of 1991 and 1993, the Wye Plantation Memorandum of 1998, the Camp David Summit of 2000, the Annapolis Conference of 2007, the John Kerry shuttle diplomacy of 2013, the Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan of 2020—all of these were “about” the two-state solution, each in its own way an effort to finesse the details while ignoring the fact that only one party to the dispute seemed even remotely interested in recognizing the other’s right to nationhood.  Nor does the concept lack international sponsors: a quick google of “international leaders in favor of a two-state solution” yields a very impressive list, a list that includes President Biden, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, British P.M. Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian P.M. Justin Trudeau, Australian P.M. Anthony Albanese, New Zealand P.M. Christopher Luxon, and, saving the best for last, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. They are all on board!

Most impressive of all is that a full 138 nations have already recognized the State of Palestine, the fact that none of the above efforts to create a viable two-state solution has succeeded waved away as a mere detail hardly worth mentioning.

So, all that being the case, what actually is the problem? Just this week, we were exposed to the current administration’s pique with Israeli P.M. Netanyahu for not being fully enough behind the two-state solution. The L.A. Times had a particularly interesting op-ed piece on the topic (click here). CNN’s piece (click here) was also quite good. And, of course, nothing could ever deter the New York Times from trying to pry some space out between the Biden and Netanyahu administrations, of which only the latest examples appeared in the last few days: Peter Baker’s “Netanyahu Rebuffs U.S. Calls to Start Working Towards Palestinian Statehood,” Thomas Friedman’s “Netanyahu Is Turning Away from Biden,” or Aaron Boxerman’s “Biden Presses Netanyahu On Working Towards Palestinian State.”

So, okay, I get it. The only solution is the two-state one. But why is everybody so irritated with Israel? The Palestinians could solve the problem overnight by declaring their independence, agreeing quickly to exchange ambassadors with the 130+ nations that already recognize their state, and getting down to the gritty business of negotiating safe and secure border with Israel. Bibi would probably not be pleased. But what could he do? The entire world would be on the Palestinians’ side and all it would take was a single unilateral announcement on the part of the Palestinians to get the ball rolling. The presence of Jewish so-called “settler” types in Judah and Samaria would not be a problem unless the State of Palestine intended itself to be totally judenrein—otherwise, why couldn’t those people live on their own land in an independent Palestine if they wanted to? (Most, I think, would not want to. But some surely would.) Nor would the status of Jerusalem itself be an issue: while the Palestinians are in unilateral-proclamation-mode, they could simply declare East Jerusalem to be their capital, then get down to work organizing a workable plan with Israel for policing the city, controlling traffic, and figuring out who picks up whose trash on which days.

Yes, I’m making light of intense issues. But, at the end of the day, why precisely couldn’t this happen? Everybody is happy to be irritated with Bibi, but Israel has demonstrated over and over—including in the context of all the above-listed conferences—that it is ready to negotiate for peace. And declaring independence would assist in Gaza as well: terror organizations like Hamas flourish in the atmosphere of hopelessness and desperation, but that would quickly move into the past if the Palestinians were occupied with nation-building and self-determination instead of endlessly complaining that the world hasn’t given them enough aid. If the Jordanians were big-enough hearted to create a kind of economic union with New Palestine, then there really would be no stopping the peace train. Even the United Nations would be unable to stop the momentum.

But, of course, none of the above has happened or, I fear, ever will happen. It’s much easier for the Biden administration to waste its time trying to bully Bibi into making concessions in the context of theoretical negotiations in which the other side has not given the slightly indication it wishes to participate. Yes, it’s more dramatic to build terror tunnels, murder babies, rape women, and take innocent civilian hostages. But that cannot—and will not—ever lead to statehood for Palestine. What will lead in that direction is the clear indication that the Palestinian leadership is prepared to create a viable Palestinian state and then to live within its borders peacefully and productively.

If the United States wants to defang Iran and lessen the likelihood that the Iranians will lead the world into World War III, it could take no more profound and potentially meaningful step forward than convincing the Palestinians to stop complaining, to take the independence the entire world wishes to offer them seriously, and to get down to the actual business of nation-building. The mullahs will be outraged. But they’ll get over it. And the world will be a safer and better place.

The Court on Trial

It’s hard to know where even to begin writing about the truly outrageous law suit brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Law, the United Nations tribunal located in the Netherlands, in the Hague. The charge itself—the charge of genocide allegedly being inflicted on the Palestinian nation by Israel—should make clear to all what kind of nonsense this all is. (The term “genocide,” coined only in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to characterize the behavior of the Nazis towards the people it intended to exterminate, derives from the Greek genos,  meaning “people,” “tribe,” or “state” and the familiar “-cide” suffix, from the Latin, denoting killing, as in suicide, homicide, fratricide, etc.) To be guilty of genocide, therefore, a nation would have to undertake wholly to annihilate another people or nation. The Nazis didn’t invent the concept, but there have not been that many serious efforts of one nation embarking on the effort, not merely to decimate, but actually to eradicate another: even the almost unbelievably barbaric massacre of civilian Cambodians undertaken by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978, in the context of which a full quarter of the national population was murdered, even that was not really an effort to rid the world of all Cambodians: for one thing, the murderers themselves were Cambodian. The Rwandan nightmare of 1994 comes closer: the Hutu militias did their best to massacre the entire Tutsi tribe and managed actually to murder as many as 800,000 before they were finally stopped by Tutsi militia groups that invaded from neighboring lands and gained control of the country. Had they succeeded, there would today be no Tutsis at all. That is what the term “genocide” denotes.

But the term has its limits—and those limits have to do with intent, not with numbers. To lament in humility and shame the fact that, by the time American independence was achieved, the population of native Americans had dropped by about 90% from what it had been before Columbus “discovered” America is the fully correct response. But to characterize that decline as the result of genocide would require arguing that the Europeans who came here undertook a conscious effort to exterminate the native population, that they brought along smallpox and other deadly diseases not by accident and not unawares, but fully intending to let disease do what they lacked the physical ability to manage on their own. Of course, there is no such proof at all that that was their intent. And that is true even if it is also true that the colonials in Central, South, and North American were cultural imperialists who had neither respect nor interest in interacting in any meaningful, mutually respectful way with the aboriginal population, and most of whom would not have minded at all if the decline had been 100% instead of just 90%.

And that brings us to Gaza. For a Jew considering the charge of genocide, the matter is straightforward. No one needs to lecture the Jewish people on genocide or on its most effective techniques. Nor does anyone need to explain the process: we are more than familiar with the slow (or not slow) progression from petty microaggression to disabling discrimination, and from there to the dissolution of civil rights (including the right to be a citizen of one’s own country, to live in one’s home, and to work in one’s own business) and finally to the withdrawal of the right to live itself, which new reality the state then helpfully accommodates by undertaking to murder the disenfranchised individuals and making them not alive at all and therefore no longer in contravention of the law. There isn’t a Jew in the world—or at least not one with even the least sense of intellectual or emotional engagement with his or her Jewishness—there isn’t a solitary Jewish soul out there who doesn’t know all of this. We’ve seen this movie We’ve swum in this stream. We’ve been there, all of us.

So that actually makes us just the kind of expert witnesses the International Court of Justice should be seeking as it gathers evidence.

Mind you, the Court has its own problems. Its justices come from any number of different countries in which human rights are not respected: Somalia, China, Uganda, Russia, etc. So that’s not too encouraging for a tribunal devoted to the cause of justice between nations. Nor is the Court’s record too impressive: although it has existed for more than three-quarters of a century, it has managed not to take note of the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians murdered by the Assad regime, the fate of the million-plus Uighurs forced by the Chinese into a gulag all their own, or the fate of the millions of North Koreans who live with neither civil rights nor any hope of escape. The Court has not censured any of this, nor has it taken note of it. It certainly hasn’t put Syria on trial for genocide, let alone China. Instead, it is now training its steely gaze on Israel to determine if Israel, of all nations, is committing genocide in Gaza.

I’d like to offer my perspective to the court. (It’s unlikely they’ll be interested in rationality or reasonableness—this is an organ of the United Nations, after all—but nonetheless I’d like to say my piece.) Yes, there have been many civilian deaths in the course of these last 100 days, while Israel has combed Gaza for its own citizens being held hostage by Hamas and, at the same time, for the perpetrators of the October pogrom in the course of which more than a thousand civilians were murdered, the dead were mutilated, and women were savagely and repeatedly raped. That is regrettable. Civilian deaths are always regrettable! No one could hate Nazism more than I myself do. But even I, whose loathing for the German government that murdered more than a million and a half Jewish children could not be more unambiguously felt, even I regret—and regret profoundly—the deaths of innocents, including children, during the carpet bombing of Germany, including Hamburg and Dresden especially, that paved the way for the successful invasion of Germany from the West by the Allies under General Eisenhower and from the east by the Red Army.

This is not an especially  courageous position I’m staking out for myself here. What kind of monster can take delight in the death of a child? There were babies in Dresden too, just as there were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How can there not have been? But the International Court didn’t get off to a good start in 1945 by putting the United Kingdom or the U.S. on trial for genocide. And it didn’t do that because those deaths took place as part of a wartime initiative to defeat an enemy that was evil itself. And when fighting a war against evil, the only truly immoral act is to lose.

But back to Gaza. Where exactly are the gas chambers? Where are the boxcars shuttling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians to the killing sites? For that matter, where are the killing sites? If the goal was to eradicate the Palestinian nation, then why drop leaflets encouraging civilians to flee areas in the northern part of Gaza that were targeted for bombing? Why let any humanitarian aide in at all if the goal is to turn Gaza into a beach-front version of Treblinka? Most trenchant of all questions to ask: why would Israel risk the lives of any IDF soldiers at all if the “real” goal of the operation was to empty Gaza of Palestinians? Before the IDF incursion, there were, after all, no Israelis at all in Gaza, so the field could have been relatively clear. If the only goal was killing civilians with the specific intention of emptying Gaza of Gazans, the entire operation could have been safely—and totally effectively—conducted from the air with the chances of Israeli casualties minimized, if not totally eradicated.

Much has been made in some quarters of a throw-away remark of Bibi Netanyahu’s equating Hamas with the ancient nation of Amalek and I’d like to address myself to that as well.

Amalek occupies a strange place in our history. They attacked the Israelites on their way out of Egypt from the rear, picking off the elderly, the infirm, the part of the people the least likely successfully to be able to defend themselves. Israel went to war and was victorious. The Torah makes a big deal of this, but then ends up on a note of ambivalence. On the one hand, the name of Amalek has to be wiped out entirely. On the other, the Israelites are commanded to labor to remember all the despicable, dastardly deeds that Amalek committed when they were attacking. So how does that work: if they’re completely forgotten, their very name erased from the world’s memory banks, then how can the Israelites guarantee that they will always be remembered? They have either to be remembered or forgotten, don’t they? You can’t have it both ways!

And yet that’s the Torah’s command. And when the Torah appears to self-contradict, it’s always pointing to a deeper lesson just beneath the surface. Amalek is not one of the Canaanite nations. It’s fate is not sealed. They represent pure hatred for Israel, what we would call fanatic anti-Semitism. The Nazis were Amalek. Stalin was Amalek. And Hamas is Amalek too. The Torah is saying that these people must be fought back against vigorously, just as the IDF is doing. But it’s also saying they will always be there: there will always be people out there who hate Jews. Labeling Hamas as Amalek simply means that they are not “merely” hostile folks, but part of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Bibi probably should have kept Amalek out of this, but, in the end, Amalek is a theological concept, not a battle plan. By bringing Amalek into the discussion, Bibi was speaking in the natural idiom of Jewishness, not recommending genocide.

In the end, it’s not Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice. It’s the Court itself that is on trial. Its future reputation rests on getting this right. Its actual future itself may rest on that as well. In the end, the verdict will tell us clearly if the International Court is a force for good in the world to be respected and supported…or just another failed, biased, and bigoted wing of the United Nations.

  

Looking Forwards By Looking Backwards

For the last three months now, I have basically written about nothing other than the situation in Gaza and the impact that situation is having (and continues to have) on daily life in Israel. As a result, I haven’t focused overly on the slow deterioration of things on this side of the ocean as our own nation grapples with issues that, each in its own way, could end up proving just as fateful for our nation as the effort to decimate Hamas will surely be for Israel.

It's hard to know even where to start. The shocking image of the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning all (including the Jewish one) being unable to bring themselves unequivocally to condemn calls for genocide directed against Jewish people as outside the limits of bona fide free speech on campus was bad enough. But that dismal spectacle has focused the nation’s headlights on our university campuses in general, which experience has been infinitely more upsetting. And the picture that has emerged is both terrifying and sickening: a portrait of schools, including some of our most respected institutions of higher learning, that have lost their moral compass entirely, that have descended into an Orwellian mirrorscape of reality in which traditional values are ignored, only radical extremists are granted a voice, and racism directed directly against Jewish students is considered both legitimate and, when dressed up smartly enough in anti-Israel vitriol, even virtuous. And then there is the rising tide of anti-Semitism outside the academy in all fifty states, a phenomenon that will feel eerily and deeply disconcertingly familiar to anyone possessed of even a passing acquaintanceship with Jewish history. And then, on top of all that, we are about to plunge full-bore into a presidential election in which the winner will undoubtedly be a member of a party that has room in its Congressional ranks for overt anti-Semites and/or Israel-haters. So I apologize for not writing more about our American situation lately. I do want to keep writing about Israel, but I will also try to find time to write about these United States and the future of the American enterprise as we move into 2024.

I wanted to begin writing in a positive vein, if possible even optimistically. And so I thought we might begin, in that traditional Jewish way, by looking forwards by looking backwards and focusing on a time in our nation when the citizenry was united, when respect for our leader was basically universal, and when coin of the realm was optimism, confidence in the nation’s destiny, and hope in the future. Yes, it’s been a while. But, speaking candidly, what’s two hundred years between friends?

As we exit the time machine, the president of the United States is James Monroe. Later on, he would become a high school in the Bronx (the one from which my mother graduated in 1933) and a housing project. But, in 1820, James Monroe was a man, a politician. And his story is beyond instructive.

In those days, we had Election Month rather than Election Day: in a predigital world that was also pre-electric and pre-electronic, voting took place in 1820 from November 1 to December 6. All alone on the ballot was James Monroe, the incumbent candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. Because his was the only name on the ballot, Monroe won in all twenty-two states. It’s true that Monroe was not the first to run for president unopposed (that would have been George Washington, who ran unopposed both in 1789 and in 1793), but Monroe was the first to do so after the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which set in place the rules for presidential elections that we more or less still follow. He was also the last American President to run unopposed. Can you imagine the nation fully behind its elected leader? The man didn’t come out of the blue, however.

In his own way, Monroe personally embodied the American past such as it was in 1820. He served as a soldier in the Continental Army under Washington. He studied law under Thomas Jefferson. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress that ratified the Constitution. He had been our ambassador to France and he served as governor of Virginia. Then he decided to aim higher and he ran for president in 1816 and won. And then he ran again in 1820 and this time not only won, but received every electoral vote cast but one—and that naysayer, one William Plumer, was actually a so-called “faithless elector” who defied the election results in his state of  New Hampshire because he apparently wished to ensure that Washington would forever be the sole American President to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College.

So we had at the helm a leader who had won the confidence, more or less, of the entire American people. As noted, this was Monroe’s second term of office. In 1816, he beat Rufus King, the Federalist candidate, and he beat him soundly, getting more than double the votes King got. And now that he had proven himself in office, he put himself forward as candidate for a second term. No one chose to run against him. The split of the Democratic-Republican Party into the parties we know today was still in the future. The nation was at peace. And it was fully unified behind a proven leader.

At the time and since, these years were and are called the “Era of Good Feeling.” The War of 1812 had been won. The nation was prosperous and at peace. The great debate about slavery that led eventually to war had yet to begin in earnest. (Indeed, the nation had formally outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and this was widely thought of—at least by abolitionists—as a first step towards eradicating slavery totally. That that didn’t happen—and would probably never have happened other than in the way it did happen—was, of course, unknown to American voters at the time.) There seemed to be endless possibilities for expansion to the West.

I first became interested in this stretch of American history several years ago when I read Daniel Walker Howe’s masterful What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848, for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in History. It’s a doorstopper of a book, coming in at just over 900 pages. But it is truly fascinating, a work of history distinguished (this is so rare) both by its author’s mastery of his subject and also by his great skill as an engaging author able to keep readers’ interest as they wade through material that the author surely understood would be unfamiliar to most. He paints a complex picture of a nation in its adolescence, one reminiscent in many ways of the nation today but with the huge difference that the native optimism that once characterized American culture was in its fullest flower in the 1820s. The belief that the Revolution had not solely ended with an independent United States, but had actually transformed the world by demonstrating the possibility of living free, of citizens living lives unencumbered by the will of despots and fully able to chart their own course into the future by using their own hands to wield their own tools, thus to fashion their own destiny—that distillation of the American ethos as freedom resting on a bedrock of decency, morality, and purposefulness was enough to bring the entire nation to support the man who, in the minds of all, served as the physical embodiment of that ideal. And that is how James Monroe came to run unopposed and to be elected by the entire electorate speaking as one.

How bizarre that all sounds now! Most people in the throes of crochety old age tend to idealize their adolescent years. Nations do that too. But there’s more to that thought than pathos alone. The hallmark of adolescence is fantasy unencumbered by restrictive reality—and that is true of nations as well as individuals. Nobody told the citizenry in the 1820s that they were “just” dreamers, that it could never work out as planned. And, yes, they were blind to many social issues that we now find it hard to believe they passed so blithely by—the slavery issue first and foremost, but also the harsh and terrible treatment of native Indian peoples, the degree to which women were denied a place in public life, the restrictive higher educational system to which only white males (and, generally speaking, only wealthy ones at that) were admitted. Yes, that’s all true. But the nation was also possessed of a deep, abiding sense of its own destiny. And, in the end, that’s what mattered.

It didn’t last. The nation grew up. The forced dislocation of countless thousands of native Indians from the lands they had farmed and occupied for centuries, the ongoing nightmare of slavery, the inability of the nation to keep from splitting in two and the unimaginable amount of blood that was spilt to put it back together—the resolution of all those issues was in the future when James Monroe was in the White House. And the foundation upon which his administration rested—the good feelings of the so-called “Age of Good Feelings”—was sturdy enough to support the weight of a nation.

As we embark on the 2024 Presidential election, this all seems so far away, so foreign, so unattainable. Maybe it is. Or maybe the right national leader, ideally one who has waded through Daniel Walker Howe’s giant book, is waiting in the wings to rescue us from ourselves. I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough!

Counsel from Scripture

The news this week that Israel is planning to withdraw several thousand troops from Gaza is a signal to the world both that the fighting will continue (because the rest of the IDF currently stationed in Gaza is staying) and, at the same time, that the future will be different from the past, that the struggle to destroy Hamas is poised to move into a different phase. That phase will require fewer soldiers in place, clearly. But it doesn’t mean that Israel is planning to act less aggressively to free the remaining 100+ hostages. That decision—to abandon the hostages to their fate—would be as unimaginable ethically as it would be suicidal politically for the current government, and there is virtually no chance of that happening. So we who are watching on from the wings are basically being prepared to expect the current struggle to last for weeks, perhaps even for months, into the future. Eventually, the situation will be resolved one way or the other. But no matter how successful Israel eventually is in securing the release of the hostages and in degrading the ability of Hamas ever again to perpetrate a pogrom on the scale of last October’s, the issues that divide Palestinians and Israelis will remain in place either to be resolved eventually or never to be resolved.

I have written over these last months from many different vantage points, but today I’d like to put my favorite yarmulke back on and discuss Gaza from a theological point of view, from the point of view of our own tradition. And there’s a moment in the scriptural narrative that comes right to mind too!

Shortly after returning to Canaan with his family, Jacob settles in Shechem (today known more regularly as Nablus, a corruption of the Roman name for the place Flavia Neopolis). It turns out not to have been such a good choice however. Shortly after arriving there, Jacob’s sole daughter, Dina, heads into town to make some girlfriends among the locals. Nothing too strange there: Dina had twelve brothers and, as far as Scripture relates, no sisters at all. (The reference elsewhere in Genesis to Jacob’s “daughters” is generally taken to denote his daughters-in-law.) The basic idea seems harmless enough. Why wouldn’t she want to get to know some local women her age? Whether she is successful or not, Scripture doesn’t say. But what does happen is that she attracts the attention of one Shechem ben Hamor, the son of the local prince-in-charge, who is so drawn to her that he forces himself on her. What follows then is unexpected: having attacked her because he was drawn to her, he is now depicted as being drawn to her (possibly) because he attacked her…or at least because his intimate knowledge of her confirms his initial suspicion that Dina is lovely and worthy. And now he wants to marry her. His father approaches her father. An initial proposal is made, but Jacob refuses to answer and insists that he has to wait for his sons to return from wherever it was they were herding their cattle and take counsel with them.

What follows is one of the Torah’s darker stories. The brothers return and they are outraged. Why wouldn’t they have been? But, being vastly outnumbered, they decide to proceed stealthily. They agree to Hamor’s father’s suggestion that Jacob’s family and the locals ally themselves together as one people, which he suggests will happen when their children marry each other. The brothers appear to consider this, then respond formally by agreeing if  the men of Shechem agree to be circumcised. A Jewish girl marrying an uncircumcised man? They can’t imagine such a thing! Amazingly, the locals agree. And they do it too, proceeding—in their world with neither anesthesia nor sterile O.R.s—to have their foreskins removed.

And then we get to the even bloodier dénouement of the story. While the local men are still smarting from their surgeries and are obviously in a weakened state, two of Jacob’s sons, Simon and Levi, go on a killing rampage, executing all the males of the city, bringing Dina back home, making the local women and children their captives, and taking all local wealth as booty.

But what follows is the reason I’m writing about this story today to interpret it in light of the October pogrom, a brutal attack that also featured rape and the degradation of Jewish women as part of the foes’ attack plan. (That part of the Hamas attack has only just recently been told in detail: if you somehow missed the NY Times story on the matter, gruesome and harrowing as it is, click here.) Jacob, playing the traditional role of the golus-yid, cries out, “All you’ve accomplished is to make the surviving Canaanites hate me. Plus there are not that many of us—and now they will all gather up against us and murder not just me but my entire house…including all of you as well.” In other words, his primary goal here is to avoid riling the locals up, to avoid friction or hostility, and to stay safe. The brothers listen politely, then respond with a  single rhetorical question expressed in exactly four words in the original Hebrew: “Were we supposed to let him treat our sister as though she were a whore?”

The story provokes a lot of unanswered questions. But the issue really has to do with the final few lines cited above. Jacob’s chief goal here is to live in peace with the neighbors and he is apparently ready to overlook something as horrific as the rape of his own daughter to achieve that goal. He is therefore being depicted as the kind of person who prefers cowering in the shadows to risking the possibility of making people angry by standing up for himself and demanding justice. This is not meant to be a flattering portrait, nor is it one. But the portrait of Simon and Levi (and possibly, if they were in on it, Jacob’s other sons too) is also unflattering in the extreme. Rape is horrific. But in what justice system is someone other than the perpetrator punished? To go on a killing rampage that shows neither mercy nor forbearance to anyone at all in an entire city because of the deeds of one person—that is not meant to be a flattering portrait either. In the end, both sides are caricatures: one featuring Jacob as the apotheosis of nervous timidity and the other featuring Simon and Levi as the archetypes of extreme violence prompted not by the quest for real justice but by rage.

And what does that story mean in terms of Gaza? The key here is that neither portrait is meant to be flattering, let alone something to emulate. For Israel to have looked the other way after October 7 to avoid upsetting the locals and their fellow travelers in Iran and Lebanon (not to mention Turtle Bay) would have been fully unjustifiable from any point of view, including especially the moral. To annihilate Gaza entirely because of the actions of specific people would have been no less tragic and certainly morally wrong. But the correct response is what we actually saw: Israel going into Gaza with the specific goal of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice, and also doing whatever it was going to take to guarantee that Hamas would never be capable again of mounting that kind of attack on Israeli civilians. Despite the rhetoric of so many haters, I see no evidence that Israel has embarked on a campaign designed to solve the problem in Gaza the way Simon and Levi solved the problem in Shechem: with wholesale slaughter of all inhabitants as a kind of collective punishment for existing in the same place as terrible wrongdoers. That there have been casualties, including deaths, among civilians is terrible—and not something any normal person should not regret. But the civilian Gazans are not mere bystanders either: they are the ones who put Hamas in power in 2005 and so are not that different from the civilian Germans who overwhelming put the Nazis in power in 1933: both paid and are paying a truly bitter price for having put themselves under the governance of violent fanatics who could not have been clearer about their plans for their enemies.

In my opinion, Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza in response to the events of October 7. That the leaders of the nation chose to find a middle path between Jacob’s timorousness and Simon/Levi’s rage speaks well for the nation and its leadership. How this will all end, who can say? But to pretend that the Torah’s most specific lesson about responding to violence—and particularly to violence against women—has gone unheeded is simply incorrect. It merely requires reading carefully and thoughtfully. And it requires understanding that sometimes Scripture depicts a moral dilemma as a kind of crossroads not because either path is the correct one forward, but because neither is.