Robert Meeropol

I can’t imagine that any of you knew when you were little children that your parents would die on a specific day, at a specific hour and minute, their lives brought to an agonizing end by the Zeus-like hand of an executioner wielding his lightening bolt of vengeance. Yet this is the story of Robert Meeropol, né Rosenberg, son of Julius and Ethel, both convicted of conspiracy to sell secrets to the Soviets. There’s more to him than that, of course, but the actions of his parents and the government define him in a unique way from which he cannot and apparently does not wish to escape. I spoke with him a couple of days after his appearance in Providence at the Jewish Community Center.

“I was raised surrounded by Jews,” he tells me. “But I was raised in the heart of Jewish culture, not religiously in the traditional sense, but in the Shalom Aleichem tradition.” Able Meeropol, his adoptive father, “used to write alternative bar/bat mitzvah services for Jews in the Mt. Vernon area.” To them, the bar mitzvah was all about a performance, so they wrote scripts and music based on Jewish history. It was in this sort of Jewish milieu that he grew up.

And yes, he had a bar mitzvah ceremony of his own, but as he tells it, the circumstances were very unusual. “After we started living with Able and Anne Meeropol we were seized by the police. The lawyer who had defended my parents died of a heart attack before he’d finished the adoption process. Other Jews wanted us removed from the Meeropol’s. Part of the eventual agreement that allowed our return was we had to be bar mitzvaed and attend synagogue.” So, he says, “I was brought up believing that I was bar mitzvaed by court order.” To this day he continues to feel most comfortable in a cultural Jewish setting.

He feels that “Jewish reaction to his parents was a sign of insecurity. People were terrified. They presumed my parents were guilty,” and that there would be a backlash. Thus the Rosenbergs were traitors to their people even more than to the United States. The odd thing is that Jews in America who had a dual loyalty, to Israel and to the US objected when the Rosenbergs’ dual loyalty was exposed. But to Meeropol his “parents dual loyalties, were of a different sort. In our country we are not steeped in class, but in national, religious etc. loyalty so when seeing my parents, people wondered if they were loyal to the US or to the USSR? They were loyal to the working class which a small portion of capitalists were exploiting. They saw themselves as helping workers by defeating the Nazis.”

His argument is that his parents, or at least his father, gave or sold information to our wartime allies against Nazi fascism, knowing that it was illegal to do so. After all, the government was shipping tons of material there in its Lend-Lease program, why not give them something else to help in the fight against Fascism. But spying for Stalin? True, the breadth and depth of his atrocities had not yet been revealed, but even by the war years his brutality should have been obvious even to casual observers, which the Rosenbergs were certainly not. And the secret to the Atom bomb? No, that information was way above Julius’ pay grade; he couldn’t have revealed what he did not know. In fact he was never formally charged with that crime, only with the more nebulous conspiracy to commit espionage. The case is still shrouded in mystery. In 2008, Morton Sobell who was tried with the Rosenbergs admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was “in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.” But then in a letter to the New York Times he denied that he knew anything about Julius Rosenberg’s alleged atomic espionage.

In 1990 Meeropol, no doubt with his own experiences in mind, established a foundation called the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which according to its website “provides for the educational and emotional needs of both targeted activist youth and children in this country whose parents have been harassed, injured, jailed, lost jobs or died in the course of their progressive activities. In its 19-year history, the Fund has awarded more than $3 million in grants to benefit hundreds of children.”

Betrayed by WGBH

I suppose that an unstated rule of writing a column in a Jewish newspaper is to write a column on a Jewish theme. So, I’m trying to figure out how the following is Jewish and have decided that if a Jew writes it, it is Jewish. If beloved editor agrees you will read this. If she doesn’t there will be a gap in the paper, a void unfillable.

People of Rhode Island, join in my crusade. Here’s our challenge, inadvertently initiated when a nice lady from WGBH called me the other night asking for my annual pledge. GBH is the Boston based public radio station to which I became addicted when I moved to Rhode Island in 1969. Starting in 1971 Robert J. Lurtsema hosted a five hour a day, seven days a week classical music program.

Each morning at 7:00 my clock radio would as if by magic turn itself on and my wife and I would awaken to the sounds of birds singing, chirping, warbling, cooing, for several minutes, followed by the classical opening of the day. One morning it was always Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances Suite another the Entrance of the Queen of Sheba by Handel. If for some reason I couldn’t remember if I’d awakened on Tuesday or Thursday, I could always tell by which theme music lovingly nudged me awake.

And then there was Lurtsema’s rich, sonorous voice and the dead-air pauses he allowed himself, visualizing in his mind, he said, what his audience was thinking, because it was obvious he really, really cared about his audience (apparently unlike the current corporate Philistines who run the station today).

Especially on weekends he might play music featuring one part of the orchestra, the flute, one week, cellos the next or he’d play, in order of composition all the string quartets of a particular composer always at the same time of day. We counted on their being played, looked forward to the next installment as if to a reading of a 19th century novel by chapters and learned about each piece and composer. God, he was good, and then he got sick and shortly before dying he gave an on-air mesmerizing, not previously announced, valedictory statement discussing what he had done in life, and so ended Morning Pro Musica in 2000, nearly 30 years after he first came into our lives. We have a poster of a painting he did hanging in our dining room, a constant reminder of the pleasure of those mornings back then.

But now GBH has decided, except for some off hours jazz and Celtic music to go all news and talk all the time. Fine. But what of us classical music junkies? Ah, not to worry, the station bought the studio of the old WCRB in Lowell which broadcasts on the FM dial at 99.5. But you can’t get 99.5 in Rhode Island. Static, yes, hissing, yes, Mozart and Handel no.

So when the lady called asking for money I told her my complaint and she said I should buy a gizmo to improve reception. “What,” uttered I in undisguised astonishment, “you people read a demographics report, turn the world upside down, change format and I have to pay for the inconvenience imposed? And do those gizmos work in my 1992 Volvo?” “Well, no,” she admitted, really ruing by now having made the call, “but we’re thinking of increasing our signal strength. “When, you do,” I said as politely as I could, “call me back.” Argghh. I betcha Robert J. is rolling over in his grave.

I know that news is important, so is opinion, but we get most of the programs GBH is now saturating the airwaves with from our own local NPR station, WRNI 1290 AM, and in Boston proper, the same news shows are already being broadcast on WBUR 90.9FM. So this displacement was necessary because, why? So as not to be original any more, so that uniqueness could be placed on the shelf along with the old LPs? For shame, GBH, for shame!

So is that Jewish enough? I mentioned Philistines, traditional enemy of the Jews, and God, traditional Friend of the Jews. Gotta be.

A Jew in Music

It’s ironic but this smallest state is blessed with a great symphony orchestra. Larry Rachleff wields the baton, in this his bar mitzvah year with the orchestra. We chatted a couple of weeks ago about being Jewish, about how being Jewish affects his work, his sensibilities, and about his decision, to play works by Richard Wagner.

As a boy in New London he grew up the son of a Conservative Jew who started attending minyan when his father-in-law died and then kept on going until his own death at age 82. “He was the minyan man and he would open up the synagogue.” During that time he developed a relationship with a rabbi with whom he studied Torah, especially what Rachleff calls the “integrity” of Torah which was passed on to him and which he is trying to imbue in his own child, a boy of 5. “We talk to him about his Jewishness and will continue to,” he reports.

Rachleff defines himself as “more spiritually oriented than religious.” His wife was raised Anglican but has Jewish roots on her father’s side and has lived in Israel so she has a wonderful component of both.” When I asked if he celebrated Christian holidays as well as Jewish ones, his answer again reflected his spiritual, non-denominational perspective. Yes Christmas, and yes, he’s gone to church on Easter. In all his travels he participates either directly or indirectly in what he feels is the deep spiritual faith of people. “I’ve always been moved by it. We’ve spent days in Assisi so we can sample the energy of St. Francis.” And does this spirituality influence his music? “It would be hard not to be who you are without all of the influences. It’s there; you can’t erase who you are.”

Inevitably the conversation turned to Wagner and his decision to perform him. First some background. Wagner, one of the 19th century’s most magnificent composers of magisterial music, was also one of the century’s outstanding anti-Semites who, by lending his name to the movement made Jew hatred culturally respectable. Judaism was inherently alien and inferior to European culture, he preached. In his notorious Das Judentum in der Musik (Jews in Music) Wagner denied the existence of any Jewish cultural creativity. Musical originality was totally inaccessible to the Jew. The Jew is the most heartless of all human beings, alien and pathetic in the midst of a society he cannot understand, whose history and evolution are foreign to him. There’s more, but you get the idea.

Rachleff has been quoted as saying that “it was important to do this,” to perform Wagner. But why, I asked? “Well, it’s been an enormous struggle for me. Mostly out of the deepest respect for my family and my family’s family. “So it wasn’t just Wagner I couldn’t bring myself to do. Some of the music of Richard Strauss—nearly a Nazi—I don’t know if he was a sympathizer or he was just protecting himself… And so I waited and waited and then I started to see some revered maestros—Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim bringing to Israel the music of Wagner and Strauss.” And while the reaction there was at best mixed, “the point they were making was ‘Listen, this is music of grand and great worth. And what others did with it, perhaps was not necessarily completely their own doing.’ To this day I’ve only conducted and performed one piece of Wagner. But I haven’t made a night of it. And I’m delighted that we did do it because the prelude of the Liebestod [from Tristan und Isolde] is enormously gratifying and deep and wonderful music. I guess the point is our message is to present all these issues and things with the fullest of our integrity.”

The rest of our conversation covered music and what it means and why we listen and how black notes on white pages are transformed into soul stirring glory by the skill of the musician who can take a piece written by Mozart (“Probably the single greatest creature who has ever lived on the planet,”) and bring it to life. But those remarks are for another time when more column inches are available.

Have you read the November 9 New Yorker article on Gaza yet? Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is the centerpiece, used as a metaphor by each side. For Israelis he represents the inhumane lawlessness of Hamas in Gaza, for Palestinian Arabs, he’s but one man isolated from his family, like all of Gaza is from the whole world. To me his kidnapping is another example of Arab response to nobody taking their case seriously. Yassir Arafat would order the hijacking of a commercial airplane. Now it’s Shalit upon whom all of Israel, and through Israel all the world, is focused. Hamas wants for his return fourteen hundred individuals, four hundred and fifty of whom have been convicted of terrorist killings. One Jew is equivalent to 1,400 Arabs? I’m surprised they admit it. The chief “negotiator” between Hamas and Israel is Osama Mozini, a professor of education at the Islamic University. The New Yorker reporter “asked him why he could not be more flexible in his negotiations for Shalit.”

Mozini began reciting the names of Gazan prisoners. Hassan Salameh, is serving forty-eight consecutive life sentences for recruiting suicide bombers. Walid Anjes helped plan the bombing of at least three devastating attacks. He has twenty-six life sentences. Abdel Hadi Suleiman Ghneim’s name came up. According to Mozini all he was doing was riding in a bus when he grabbed the steering wheel and took it over a cliff. (Mozini laughed at this point, apparently seeing the humor in the situation.) Sixteen people died, many others were wounded—including Ghneim who received a life sentence for every person who died on the bus. “These punishments struck Mozini as ludicrous.”

With such people Israel is supposed to negotiate? With Hamas whose charter maintains that “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad”? The last time Israel bargained with kidnappers, it turned over a mass murderer and received in compensation the corpses of two Israeli soldiers. Israeli families, wanted their sons back for a decent Jewish burial, but from an objective viewpoint it’s lunacy to trade murderers for the bodies of people murdered. It can only encourage more cross-border kidnappings. Relatives of Palestinian prisoners have gone on record that more Israelis should be kidnapped to exchange for those in Israel’s jails. “Just outside Rafah, the smuggling capital of Gaza,” reports the New Yorker, “there is a billboard with a portrait of Shalit, behind bars, juxtaposed with a photograph of a masked Hamas fighter. The Arabic text declares, ‘Your prisoner will not have safety and security until our prisoners have safety and security.’”

In fact, the Arabs who say, as does Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister “We are all Shalits” are right. They are prisoners, but not of Israel, but of their own rage. Rockets raining down on Israeli towns, suicide bombers blowing up pizzerias are actions met with incarceration. Israel is also prisoner of Arab extremists. It’s like the cancer patient whose disease is being treated as chronic. It’s not too bad today, but what will tomorrow’s test results indicate? When will the next plane explode, the next suicide murderer detonate himself killing innocents who are merely riding a bus or crossing a street. To the bomber there are no innocents. Like Shalit everyone in Israel, whether citizen or tourist is part of the occupiers who must be driven into the sea and if the world will not provide us with warplanes and tanks, we’ll do it our way.

The paranoids who control the Muslim world in their grip with their grudges, imposing their fundamentalist religious beliefs, would rather die than concede that Allah has returned Israel to the Jews. They talk of al-Nakba, the calamity. But the real calamity is war and grudges and kidnappings and rockets and suicide bombings all for nothing, for nothing except more blood, Jewish and Arab. Tom Friedman was right in last week’s Times. Nobody over there wants peace; it’s all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Yousuf, the Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister says, “we are all Shalits,” to which I add, “caught in a world of madness unimagined even by Kafka.”

Do Jews under 30 care about Israel?

In the October 15 Jerusalem Post Daniel Gordis, an American ex-pat in Israel since 1998 writes that he is very concerned. So am I, if he’s right.

A recent sociological study reports that “among American Jews aged 35 and younger, a full 50% said that the destruction of the State of Israel would not be a personal tragedy for them.” Assuming that the findings are accurate, the obvious questions are why and what does it mean?

Prof. Jonathan Sarna, who Gordis calls “perhaps the greatest living analyst of American Jewish life” argues that “the problem is that American Jews have been raised on an idealized image of Israel, and that ‘in place of the utopia that we had hoped Israel might become, young Jews today often view Israel through the eyes of contemporary media: They fixate upon its unloveliest warts.’” There’s probably truth in that statement but I think more in the reflections of Rabbi Morris Allen of Minnesota. He argues “that for contemporary American Jews, life-cycle rituals have become infinitely more significant than the holiday cycle.” We are interested in the “me,” not the “we.” Bar/Bat Mitzvah, marriage, even death are the focus of attention, not Sukkot, not Shavuot, not even Shabbat. The things that define us as a people are of less interest than the things that define us as individuals. And this is reflected in the growing number of youths for whom Israel, the embodiment of the people Israel, is less important than social justice, things we can do that make us feel good about ourselves. In my day, a long time ago, the two were seen as complementary, not antagonistic; we could march for civil rights and sing Hatikvah. Black people were bullied by whites in Mississippi; Israel was surrounded by Arabs determine to destroy it.

The plight of the Palestinians must be taken into consideration if Jews are to be faithful to the principles of Judaism, it’s argued. I don’t remember the birth of the State of Israel, but I do recall the pride I felt in 1967. But I think 1967 is the dividing line between people of my age and people who do not remember what it was like to live in little Israel with its narrow waste and exposed borders and divided Jerusalem, the guns of Golan pointing at the Galilee. The generations that have grown up since only see the tail we hold, not the tiger at the other end. Of course the Palestinian people are suffering—Arabs need them to suffer at our hands; their plight could have been resolved decades ago, but to promote a bifurcated Arab state or to create a bi-national state within Israel are both to destroy Israel, the dawn of our redemption, no to save it. But for people of my generation (who think as I do) the destruction of Israel is the inevitable consequence of even well intentioned appeasement.

Readers may recall the columns by Alison Golub in this newspaper as she, a young American who made Aliya opposed the give-back of Gaza; more recently we’ve been reading dispatches from Daniel Stieglitz, another young man who has moved to Israel and joined the army. At the same time, some people of my generation are willing in the name of good conscience and the hope of peace to surrender land with no assurances that peace will result. In July 2008 we gave Hezbollah Samir Qantar who had murdered four Israelis. We received in return two corpses. In appreciation for the pullout of Gaza, Israel received rockets on Sdorot and another soldier was kidnapped. There are Arab advocates of peaceful co-existence, but do they represent anyone other than themselves? I’ll check with Hamas and Hezbollah leadership on that and get back to you. When the desire for peace is one-sided, as it appears to be, Israel will cease to exist, and it won’t take Iranian nuclear bombs to do it; we’ll have accomplished the task ourselves. Will half the Jews under the age of 35 not care? Will the appeasers be content that at least the Palestinians finally have a home of their own? If you are under 35, write to me on this issue at the address below and I’ll take your comments and report the sum of them in a future column.

The Jewish Bishop

“Two roads diverged in a wood/And I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.”

I recalled Robert Frost’s words when a couple of weeks ago I met a very godly woman. We talked about religion and growing up Jewish; we talked about life and death and mysterious feelings we sometimes get that give direction to our lives. We talked about saying Kaddish for loved ones (I’m doing it now, her turn was a decade ago). We talked about Israel and the Arabs, about choices people make. The woman with whom I shared these thoughts was Geralyn Wolf, the Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island, a woman born Jewish with fond memories of Jewish ceremonial whose grandparents were observant (but not her parents).

Once as a girl of five, Wolf went with her Orthodox grandfather to shul. She remembers asking him, “Grandpa, what were you saying to God?” And he admitted, “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because God knows.” For Wolf that interaction between a little girl and her elderly grandfather was and remains seminal. What she learned is that in a relationship with God we don’t always have to know everything we are saying to God or God is saying to us but that God knows and God can sift through things we cannot know, things that to us remain mysterious.

As a little girl Wolf was left by a babysitter on the steps of a Roman Catholic church while she looked for her own son in the play yard. No one bothered her, the doors to the church were closed, she could neither see nor hear if anything was going on, but she remembers having “this incredible sense that God was there and that I had heard that the God who lived at the Catholic Church was Jesus.” How do we explain such a thing? Is she a latter day Joan of Arc? No, she doesn’t claim any supernatural voices nor a re-birth, just a feeling which she held on to while still attending synagogue and Passover Seders like any other Jewish girl of her generation.

Again, a few years later, she felt this calling, this time when she went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and was overawed by the sights, sounds, fragrances, the Latin, the candles, the feeling that God was there, and that their God was Jesus. This feeling was very real to her and it started her on a search for God as Christians worship him. Her parents were not pleased. They were not religious, so this was a challenge not only to their Jewish roots, but to their basic irreligious perspective. Eventually she found a sympathetic response to the English speaking Episcopal Church that did not dwell on sin and Hell as its punishment, but was welcoming. Telling her parents the news wasn’t easy. Her mother was full of guilt. “I should have done this, I have done that, I should have raised you as a Jew.” Her father, who had no use for religion, and certainly not for Christianity told her, that the story of Jesus “is concocted; two young people got in trouble, and this is what they concocted, and for some reason it caught on.”

So she became first an Episcopalian, then a priest and, remarkably, a bishop. One question that pervaded our conversation, though it wasn’t always spoken, was, “Is there any Jewishness left in your view of the world; is there still a Jewish soul whispering to your subconscious core? The bishop might disagree, but I think the answer would be a muted, “Yes, there is.”

When her sister died she asked her non-religious family, “‘Who will say Kaddish for Val?’ They all looked at me dumbfounded, like you have to be crazy. And I said ‘I will, she deserves that much.’” So for eleven months the Episcopal bishop of Rode Island sat in the chapel of Temple Emanu-El, twice a day, and said kaddish for her sister. You can’t tell me that there isn’t a Jewish heart beating in that body. (Once she was away from Providence for a few days. Upon her return, one of the minyan regulars came up to her and said, “Glad you’re back. We were worried. After all, we’re the only shul that has a bishop and a rabbi.”)

The Episcopal Church leans towards support of the Palestinians. “I think the Episcopal Church has been extremely one-sided” she says. “In my mind they have been looking at the situation from the lens of the Palestinian people and they compare the Palestinian people with the Israeli government. But they don’t look at it from government to government or people to people. So we hear about how the Israeli government does such terrible things to the Palestinian people, but then I sort of question, well the Palestinian people have also suffered at the hands of Palestinian leadership.”

As a young woman of Jewish descent Geralyn Wolf decided to take the road less traveled. Where it will bring her is hard to say. I think co-existing with her mitre and her staff, there is still something Jewish about her, something she does not try to conceal or avoid but which makes its presence felt like the unexpected Call she received as a little girl at those Catholic churches. Is she still a Jew according to halacha? Once on a snowy morning, there were only ten people at minyan at Temple Emanu-El, but one of them was the Episcopal bishop, born Jewish. Did she count? No one knew; a teacher from the Schechter school was brought in and the issue resolved that way, by not resolving it at all. It’s not for me to say that this woman who is a leader of the Episcopal Church maintains her Jewishness, but I can say that despite her conversion and her sincere belief in Christian doctrine and practice, that she is a friend of the Jewish people, and in that way her road and ours are at least parallel, occasionally intersecting before diverging again.

High Holiday Thoughts

The rational side of me, normally dominant, concedes that the other part exists, especially at this time of year. As I write it’s the 27th of Elul, the penitential month preceding the High Holy Days. Each day in shul the normally staid services are punctuated with the shofar’s blast. Tekiah! Teruah! Tekiah-Gedola! “Wake up, you sleepers, from your sleeping, and those of you who are in deep slumber, arouse yourselves from your slumber. And Return to Hashem!” The rational side of me says I’m not sleeping, I’m fully awake, aware, curious about my surroundings, exploring possibilities, but the other side, the normally dormant one looks forward to the opportunity to stop being rational. Do I really believe in my heart of hearts that there is a beneficent though awe-inspiring grandfatherly figure in Heaven, sitting on his throne of thrones, a huge book in His hand, staring down to earth, to Providence, within the actual walls of my synagogue at me, judging me, gauging my sincerity of repentance, deciding whether to write my name in his Book of Life? Me, of all people?

Let me tell you of another irrational part of my being. I have a lucky number. I know, I know, how stupid can I get? (The answer, apparently, is “quite.”) Today is my luck number, 27. I was born on the 27th; my street address growing up in a loving household was 27-09; my father’s office address was 207; I was married on my 27th birthday, therefore on the 27th. And all this month of Elul in shul we’ve been reading the 27th psalm. Surely this can not be coincidence. Let us parse (partially).

“The LORD is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?” I like that, don’t you? It’s like the closing words of the Adon Olam hymn, “Adoni li, v’lo ee’rah.” “God is with me, I fear no evil.” It’s a comforting thought as we wend our way through life’s intricacies, facing challenges and whether true or not, the irrationalist in me wants to believe it, so I do. Then after elaborations on that theme we come to: “Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me.” That gives pause. My mother died 13 years ago, my father this past February. They did not forsake me, I know that; they did not betray me, I know that; if they could have stayed and continued their loving guidance, they would have, but death which strikes without rhyme or reason which blindsides us all took them; I know that, or the rational person in me, the usually dominant one knows that—but today we’re concerned with the irrational half of our psyche, what Jung called the anima. And so, yes, I feel betrayed, but I don’t know by whom—by them for leaving me, by nature for designing us to expire? But though they have left, though their deaths have suddenly made me an adult, it’s comforting on the irrational level to think that there is another father/parent who is there to guide me. And finally there is this: “Wait for the LORD; be strong and resolute!” I particularly like that last verse. It’s a take-off on Moses’ instruction to his successor whose name I bear. Joshua is told to be strong and resolute, so in my self-centered view of the universe at this time of the year, I’m convinced the words apply to me, and through me to those I love—my family, my friends, my students and my teachers.

So, when I sit and stand in shul on Rosh Hashanah, which begins today, and when I repeat the exercise ten days later on Yom Kippur, do I really, really do I really believe in my heart of hearts that there is a beneficent though awe-inspiring grandfatherly figure in Heaven, sitting on his throne of thrones, a huge book in His hand, staring down to earth, to Providence, within the actual walls of my synagogue at me, judging me, gauging my sincerity of repentance, deciding whether to write my name in his Book of Life? Me, of all people? You better believe I do. On those days, anyway.

Shana Tova, Haverim. I hope I’ve not offended any of you this year; if I have, I beg your forgiveness.

A Jewish Police Chief

I’m reading Daniel Silva’s latest Gabriel Alon page turner, The Defector while this column percolated in the back of my mind. It’s my method. Do one thing, let the subconscious do the real work behind the scenes. In a flash the connection was made. On page 314 American, British and Israeli spymasters are trying to figure out how to extricate hostages from an inaccessible location. The American president has offered his services. “Kachol v’lavan” says the Israeli. “It means ‘blue and white,’ the colors of the Israeli flag. But… it also means much more. It means we do things for ourselves, and we don’t rely on others to help us with problems of our own making.” Perfect, I thought. Dean Esserman to a T.

The chief of the Providence’ police force speaks in aphorisms that summarize his beliefs. In two interviews a few permeated our discussions: Fear no man, but respect them all; practice integrity; walk the talk; compassion is not a weakness, it’s a strength.

I had written to him to ask if we could meet, my principal question, from which others flowed was how does being Jewish influence your thinking?

His response in a nutshell was: “Being Jewish is good practice for being a police chief…because you learn to stand alone, because being popular turns out to be pretty easy, but doing the right thing isn’t easy and isn’t going to make you popular.…I don’t always make the most popular decisions but I work hard to make the right ones. That’s why I wear a uniform though many police chiefs don’t; that why I still go out on patrol every week; that’s why I insist my command staff does it. All are first police officers before they are the rank they wear. And perhaps what I’ve learned most is … that the rank on the uniform is not as important as the man in the uniform. You have to earn the trust; you have to earn the respect.”

His office is decorated with memorabilia ranging from children’s drawings to reminders of who he is—the words on the Statue of Liberty, a placard reflecting his own view on life: “Tough times don’t last, tough people do.” And police hats from international constituencies including Jerusalem. When I asked him about Zionism he responded that to him it “means first and foremost you rely on yourself and know that if all you have to rely on is yourself that would be enough.” So I asked, not yet having read The Defector, How is that Zionist? That’s the way you conduct your business here, but within the concept of the knowing who you are and relying on yourself, where’s the Israel part of that particular Zionism?”

He answered by suggesting that his Zionism his Zionism is internal, not a chauvinistic response to harsh realities. “My sense of self and my strength comes from the shoulders I stand on, which are my father and mother before me and my grandparents before them. And though we grew up in a family that was really very involved in the Ethical Culture Society and in the Humanist movement, I know it was also a Jewish home, and it was a family proud of being Jewish. And there was a sense that you get things done by your own work, that ability and achievement come from within you, that integrity, compassion and strength are all on the inside, and that those qualities can all be ones you can stand alone with, that you don’t need to lean on others, and growing up as … a Jewish child in New York in the ’60s and the ’70s that’s how I looked at Israel; stand alone if need be, fight alone, the strength comes from within and the strength and resources to survive and to move forward don’t come from outside the state.” And, I thought, perhaps Ethical Culture was influenced by Hillel’s famous dictum that “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

Esserman understands that he’s not better than his officers. “This is my office,” he says, pointing to the floor. “That out there, the streets, that’s their office. In this business as chief of police I’ve put officers in harm’s way. That’s what I do. I can’t ask them to do anything I won’t do.” The son of a Judeo-humanist doctor who spent summers tending to the sick in Guatemala and in Ethiopia and China, he continues the process by not staying in the office but going out onto the streets.

Jewish or Ethical Culture, which has had the biggest impact on his life? Probably the latter, but there is a strong element of Judaism reflected in the personality and actions of this not particularly observant Jew, a new aphorism for whom might be Kachol v’lavan.

The Forward's Past

Does biblical literature get any better than Koheleth (Ecclesiastes)? Well, maybe for action the books of Samuel can’t be beat and for pick-up lines there’s none better than Song of Songs (especially if the love of your life deeply appreciates being compared to one of Pharaoh’s horses. I tried this once but it got me nowhere.) As to Ecclesiastes (a Jewish form of Stoic Greek philosophy) I particularly enjoy the message of Chapter 1 verse 9 which reads in the original, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (Only that shall happen which has happened, only that occur which has occurred; there is nothing new beneath the sun.)

I was reminded of the truth of this piece of eternal wisdom while perusing the Forward, my second favorite Jewish newspaper. Not only does one find news about Jews unavailable elsewhere, editorials that cheer the soul or boil the blood, a personals column that smokes, but there’s that section which picks and summarizes a story from 100, 75, and 50 years ago.

One hundred years ago this was a story in the Forward: The workers’ strike of the 200 ladies shirtwaist makers at the Rosen Brothers factory in New York turned into an all-out war, with “professional brawlers and rented bums” attacking the striking workers on a daily basis. Numerous workers with bandaged heads and limbs were plainly visible. The piece goes on to tell grizzly details. And today? Well, being by trade an historian I first see things in the past. I’m reminded of events of 20 years ago, when Nicolae Ceausescu, the last remaining Communist leader outside of the Soviet Union was being challenged by democracy advocates. As a last ditch effort he brought in coal miners from the provinces, high on whiskey and propaganda to beat up those who wanted to change the outlandish system which had governed the country since the end of the Second World War. So that’s 100 years ago and 20. Today there are those in the minority who do not want to change the way medical care is administered, who gin up the folk with outlandish stupidities that the president and Congress intend to see the euthanasia of America’s elderly, that people won’t be able to choose their own physicians. Some in the mob are lobbyists; others are dupes of the insurance companies who stand to lose while citizens gain. This calling out the troops drugged on hyperbole is the last toss in a lost game, but sometimes it works. But let’s not pretend that this disruption of town meetings is democracy.

Seventy-five years ago there was a man named Benno Karpeles who drew the attention of the Forward. His story in sum: He started out as an Orthodox Viennese Jew, became a Socialist, then a Communist, then a Jesuit priest and finally, by 1934 a fascist. And of whom does this remind? Well, if there’s a better example than the rabbis caught up in the New Jersey corruption sting, I can’t think of one off hand. Raised pious they abandoned the teachings of Judaism and reached deeply into the slime of greed, participating without apparent scruples in money laundering, organ selling, smuggling and God knows what else. Rabbis indeed! In the next world may they meet Benno Karpeles and share his quarters. (Walter O’Malley is probably in the next room.)

Fifty years ago a stormy debate took place in Lebanon’s parliament, during which it was alleged that the country’s 7,000 Jews are more loyal to Israel than to Lebanon. It was also claimed that Israel plans to take over all Arab countries by military force or by other means. Jewish assertions of loyalty were ignored. And today? Well, today there are no Jews in Arab countries, none to speak of anyway, because they’ve been expelled or killed or seeing the writing on the wall they’ve chosen to emigrate. Yet still the calumnies persist, a classic example of anti-Semitism without Jews. Israel is a war-mongering nation; it intends to control the Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates; the settlements are the problem; the Jews are the problem.

Ah, Kohleth had it right. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Howard Lipsey

The motto of the Rhode Island Supreme court is in Latin which translates as “Not by man but by God and law.” As a devout though shul-going secularist I’m not sure I agree that this is appropriate, but Howard Lipsey is not so offended. In fact on the doorpost of his office in the Garrahy Judicial Complex, there hangs a mezuzah. Howard, we have to talk, I said, and so began a series of conversations on how being Jewish affects his thinking on the bench, presiding over disputed divorce cases in family court.

My theory is that since the motto is behind the heads of the justices, they don’t see it. Howard reminds that it’s in Latin so no one understands it anyway. We agree that the 10 Commandments in the Alabama courtroom were over the line, and then choose to disagree on the Rhode Island court’s motto or his putting the mezuzah on his office doors.

Does your being Jewish ever interfere with your judicial thought process? I asked. He gave me a copy of his decision in a disputed custody case. The father, a good man who had moved to Ohio wanted custody of his son. The mother, who had subsequently remarried, wanted to keep him here. Oh, the mother’s new husband hung Nazi flags in the house and participated in WWII re-enactment battles where the Nazis always won. Apparently the mother saw no harm in this. So, how to decide? The Jew in the judge wanted to get the kid out of there, but the case law dictated otherwise. He awarded custody to the mother. (I picture him holding his nose as he rendered this verdict, though I’m sure he would deny that that was the case.)

So you are a strict letter of the law guy? No, he said. One can’t live by sechel (intellect) alone. Fairness is the Jewish element that comes into his decision making. When I asked him if putting fairness before the black letter of the law isn’t what got Judge Sotomayor in trouble with Republicans in the Senate, he said “no.” When the law is clear, it’s clear, but when it’s ambiguous there is room for latitude. We are all products of our upbringing and experiences, but we can’t allow that to substitute for law. But on the Supreme Court principles of justice are allowed to penetrate. He cites cases like Brown v. Topeka which declared school segregation unconstitutional despite precedents to the contrary.

We studied some of the 613 mitzvot as catalogued by Maimonides dealing with how the law should operate. With some he was in obvious agreement as are all regardless of religion—“A judge must not pervert justice” and “judge righteously,” and “Judges must not accept bribes.” But one injunction reminded him of a case he regarded as his most significant success—though it didn’t start out that way. Maimonides warns against using circumstantial evidence. Howard once did. The case concerned an infant with bones broken symmetrically on both sides of her body. The people at Hasboro Hospital reported the circumstance to DCYF who wanted to take the child from her parents. The circumstantial evidence was that the girl had these multiple fractures and that only the parents were ever with her. The parents claimed that there was a medical reason for what had happened to their daughter and had an expert testify to that effect. Other physicians said this was not the case. As a judge Howard found for the DCYF and placed the little girl with her paternal grandparents allowing only supervised visits from the parents. That’s the way the issue stood until another physician using medical tests not available at the time of the first trial demonstrated that the little girl’s condition was indeed medically induced. With this new testimony Howard, in effect, overruled himself and ordered the child to be returned to her parents. DCYF appealed to the state supreme court and lost. For the past 10 years the re-united family sends Howard a Christmas card with photos showing the girl’s progress. A success based on recognizing that circumstantial evidence, as Maimonides had pointed out 900 years before, ought to be used with caution if at all.

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This is the first in a series of occasional columns I’m planning on how Jews (and in one case a former Jew) in unique positions in Rhode Island discuss how their being Jewish impacts on what they do, how they think in their professional capacity. Each is or will be asked a variation on the question “If there is such a thing as a Jewish soul, how do you think yours affects your perceptions—or does your career and current status work to dampen Jewish instincts?”

Responses from those who read the spiked 7/24 column

1- I liked it. It may be irreverent, but it's not objectionable (from local Jew)

2- I love it! ...particularly:

People sometimes ask the question “What would Jesus do?” I’m not sure I know the answer, but two guesses relative to what he wouldn’t do are “buy a Hummer, and pack heat.” (from local Jew) But then it was followed the next day by:

2a- Back to the issue of whether or not your column should have been printed in the Voice/Herald, or any Jewish publication. As I emailed you upon first reading, I loved it. But I have read it several times more and, in spite of my admiration of your column, I find myself gradually coming around to the conclusion that the right decision was made not to publish it in a Jewish outlet. I know you worked hard to inoculate yourself from criticism by establishing your own Christian creds, so coming from you it would not be offensive. Unfortunately, the Voice/Herald cannot slip on the same robe. It is a Jewish organ, and to publish a column critical of a Christian cleric for his faulty interpretations of Christian teachings is not in good taste, and could easily offend the Christian partner in a Jewish/Christian mixed marriage. It could also open the paper up to criticism from the Christian community.

On the other hand, if you were commenting on a Christian cleric's activities or pronouncements which affected Jewish interests or were directed in any way at the Jewish people, that would be another story. (No pun intended.) Fortunately, thank g-d, that is not the case here. Be comforted that you still wrote a brilliant piece. You might consider re-writing it for submission as a letter to the editor or guest column to the ProJo or the CSM epaper, where it would have even more validity and impact. Then, all your friends on your email list will know the true identity of the author. (If they hadn't already figured it out.)

3- In response to your colleague: "Of course this should be printed. There are three bureaucratic entities involved - the United States government, Judaism and Christianity. The U.S. government supports free speech and is founded upon working through dissent. In the Jewish tradition, scholars constantly disagree to get a more understandable solutiuon. In fact, in the Old Testament, man is allowed to argue with God (and win!). Christianity, unfortunately, survives purely on faith and following blindly without questioning. If you want to be a better Christian, perhaps the article is too blasphemous. But I don't think that is your intent." (from a distant Jew)

4- Read the article...a good one... (from a local Catholic)

5- I was raised a Christian and still consider myself to be one based on my understanding of the teachings although many within the church would not consider me so. In my view this is exactly the kind of article which should appear in a religious publication be it Jewish, Christian or any other faith. It is difficult to understand the editor's concern. My advice to editor ..."Be not afraid...". My advice to the writer ... submit the offending piece to the New York Times. (from a local Protestant)

6- I would not print the column. I would suspect many Christians would be insulted. The gun bearing pastor does not speak for all Christians. There is also a distinction between not believing and disbelieving. Last, it just doesn't do the Jewish community any good. So, no, I would not print it. (from a local Jew)

7- I liked the column, but then I'm not Christian, Jew, Muslim, or even, as I tell my students, a reformed Druid. I do believe, however, that we (whoever that may be) are allowing the fundamentalist jerks of the world freedom to publish their rants while we (again?) restrain ourselves, or are forced to by editors real and metaphorical. It's time that we use our power to oppose sloppy thinking. And if the 2nd amendment won't allow us to ban guns, then let's ban the bullets! (from a distant person born Christian)

8- I don't understand why the article wasn't printed. It reminds me of an editorial (for lack of a better word) that was printed in The Walrus a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the writer's name, but -- if I recall correctly -- he was posing as a conservative Christian arms enthusiast who believed that God was cool with guns. To support his theory, he alluded to the wisdom enshrined in a favourite Country and Western song: "His Finger's on Your Trigger (And It's Itchier Than Hell). "If I weren't so lazy, I'd try to track it down (the article -- not the song). (from a distant Protestant)

9- Hard to know what the Jewish press would have done, but I'd like believe (in fact I do believe) it would have been printed. I cannot for the life of me see anything unprintable in this. (from a local Jew)

10- Mmmn. Maybe you should try a Christian paper? I'm thinking there must be still be a few surviving Jesuits on the left side/social justice focused part of the Catholic church; maybe they have a good underground paper.

11- I don’t see why this column was nixed. For my part, this is unwarranted censorship which should especially concern Jewish newspapers. Where is your friend located on the West coast? LA, SF, Seattle? What newspaper. The curious want to know. Maybe even his name. (from a distant Jew)

12- My 2 cents. The editor used good sense. It is a fine article for a secular paper like the NY Times but not for a Jewish community paper. (from a local Jew)

13- As for your friend's article I agree with the editor that pulled it out of a Jewish paper
1) Why should a Jewish paper make such a big deal about Christian ethics. I am sure there are wiser Rabbis that can refute their beliefs better than the writer.

2)Of what interest is there for Jews to learn about the teachings of Jesus in a Jewish newspaper ?

3) and finally coming from the South (Florida ) I can see no harm in taking guns to Church [ but not the Synagogue ] The overwhelming number of gun-slingers are Goyim and so you need guns to go to church in the South (from a distant Jew)

14- After having read this, I enjoyed today's homily even more than usual and as best as I could keeping my 22 month old daughter entertained in the church's reading room. Our priest, a caring and thoughtful Pole with a thick accent, spoke about vocations, and that the basis of all vocations was found, among other places, in the most often quoted prayer of St. Francis of Assisi "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace." He said the entire prayer for those of us, such as myself, who were in need of a refresher, which made the message all the more powerful, and reminded me of my theology classes that I took at Providence College.
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
In part I was also struck by the Beatitudes, which I sang in Latin several months ago during chapel service. They are increasingly a forgotten piece of faith, perhaps because of their simplicity. They do not mince words and there is no room for interpretation and are as close to the original sayings of Jesus and the Q document as biblical studies can achieve.

It is in this that I found the written piece so valuable, for it reminds me of how ever present the forces within my own religion, and all religions, have the potential to be so wrong, destructive and hateful. (I have always found it a paradox that we, the collective mob we, are fighting fundamentalists in Iraq and Afghanistan while fomenting fundamentalist behavior here with our own faiths.)

Any article which challenges the paths of fundamentalist religion should be welcomed. I have encountered in even here in New England and found it truly disturbing; the collecting of ammunition, stock piling weapons, voices of hatred against "Osama Obama." Truly disturbing; but perhaps a prelude of the next presidential race? Of course, it is here in this point of depressing thinking and forshadowing that the Beatitudes and the prayer of Saint Francis consoles me.

It should have been printed, but that is coming from me, a liberal Catholic whose grandparents subscribed to "The Catholic Worker" and voted the progressive ticket.

Thank you for sending this along,

15- It was perhaps a little bit of a controversial article - maybe that’s why the editor declined to publish it. It really called to light the level of hypocrisy and insanity reached by the fundamentalist Christian right. It appealed to me - even though I am a Christian - albeit a "bad" Christian who doesn’t believe in the historical accuracy of the bible but rather that the teachings are sound and true. Does the article maybe appeal to the wrong audience? Is it too "left" leaning?

Liberals as Fascist? Bah, nonsense!

Recently I was told to read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism so that I would know the truth at last. Well, I’ve looked at it and at the National Review on line and seen the video of Goldberg speaking at the Heritage Foundation and I am convinced. The right wing is in panic mode.

Until recently Carl Rove was predicting a permanent Republican majority. But then George W. Bush happened and most of the people weren’t fooled most of the time anymore. Now Republicans have lost the House, the Senate, the White House and are within a confirmation of losing their majority on the Supreme Court. Republicans now hold only 22 governorships and in Rhode Island no Republican currently seems willing to run.

Rather than asking themselves what went wrong, the radical right now in control of the party that once boasted of Javits and Rockefeller and Eisenhower, Edward Brooke and the two Chafees, is constantly in attack mode. I’m reminded of French general Robert Nivelle before his disastrous assault on unassailable German lines in April 1917. When asked how he intended to break through, he responded with “Violence, brutality, rapidity” to which some had added stupidity. Attack is all they know. Goldberg’s nonsense is just another manifestation of the Nivelle mentality.

In a nutshell, Goldberg argues that as Hitler and Mussolini started out as Socialists, their fascism retained Socialist elements shared by modern Liberals. Nazis and Fascists had some progressive social ideas, it is true, but that is not what defined them. Liberalism comes from the Latin for free; it has a long tradition from at least the writings of John Locke and Roger Williams. Liberals believe that all men are created equal; conservatives of the south, at least, and Nazis and Fascists in Europe, disagree; they believe that there is a superior race; they take Darwin’s concepts and distort them to “prove” the superiority of our race (whoever “our” is) over all others. In America this was justification for segregation disguised as an appeal to states’ rights. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the paragon of the American conservative movement opened his presidential candidacy by going to Mississippi, to the very neighborhood where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered because they were black and white trying to register black voters. He chose to announce there, there of all places, that “I believe in states’ rights ... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” And then later as president he went to Bitburg cemetery and paid homage to Nazi soldiers buried there. Liberals were outraged; nevertheless Reagan said of the German war dead, “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps,” a visit to which he chose not to make.

Goldberg clouds his case with so many irrelevancies and unsubstantiated innuendos that I cannot cover them all in the 700 words allotted me. But race, race won’t go away. The Nazis were racists and so were the conservatives whose dogs attacked protesters in Mississippi and Alabama; when president Johnson signed the 1964 civil rights act he knew that we was signing away the south for generations, but he did it anyway and in 1968 Nixon’s Southern Strategy brought him to the White House as surely as the Willy Horton advertisement swept in the first president Bush in 1988.

Goldberg tries to separate conservatives from Nazis by suggesting that conservatives don’t send inferior races to their deaths. That’s true; so far. (See how innuendo works? Like that.)

They used to call Liberals commie pinkos; during the recent election they tried to make us congruent with terrorists; that didn’t work, so now they seek the roots of Liberalism in fascism. Hitler tried to end Christianity and substitute Teutonic gods, Goldberg informs. Do any of the Liberals you know worship Thor? But many of my liberal friends attend church or synagogue; Hitler was in favor of euthanasia. Are liberals? None that I know of. Who is against gay rights, Nazis, yes; conservatives, yes; liberals, no.

It’s not only the Nazis use the big lie technique.

This column was spiked. I like it though

If you can believe it, I’m an even worse Christian than I am a bad Jew. This may take some explaining. I’m a bad Jew despite going to shul twice a day, seven days a week to say kaddish for my father, and my long-suffering wife and I maintain a kosher home, and she lights candles and I say the Shabbat blessings, but I don’t for a moment believe that any of it is ordained by God, the master of the universe (the diameter of which is roughly 27 billion light years). I’m a worse Christian because even though I’ve read the New Testament and have studied the beliefs of Catholics and a variety of Protestants past and present, and while I believe that much good can be found coming from the mouth of Jesus, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, and that Christianity, like the ancient Greeks and Jews is a cornerstone of western civilization, I’ve not been baptized, I don’t go to church, and I don’t believe that Jesus is God or the Second Person of the Trinity made flesh, or a prophet.

The Socialist in my DNA loves the statement that Jesus makes to a rich man who wants to know how to achieve eternal life. “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” The man is naturally hesitant and Jesus tells him that “...I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Take that, you greedy Wall Street S.O.Bs!

But it’s the Sermon on the Mount that I want to discuss in relation to some current events. He begins: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Not bad, eh? So I begin to wonder. Who are these peacemakers? Seems obvious on the surface, but to some, at least there is confusion. Let me take you from the mountain in the Holy land to Leitchfield, Kentucky. In that unholy land the pastor of the New Bethel church, the Rev. Ken Pagano, staged what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed “a Saturday night special.” People were invited to attend a special event described as “not a service” at his church bringing their unloaded guns with them. I cannot explain why the pistol-packing-preacher insisted on this. In fact, one member of the audience expressed the fear that the Obama administration, even if it didn’t take away guns would limit access to bullets. Sweet Jesus, say it ain’t so. No bullets? How can we protect ourselves? Can you imagine such mishagas is a civilized country, like England or France?

In perusing the web for stories on this event I saw this caption on msnbc.com: “About 200 church members brought their unloaded handguns for a one-day celebration of the Second Amendment which stipulates the right to bear arms.” I wonder if any of these bible thumpers have read either the bible or the Constitution. When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers” I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean the Colt .45; when the founders wrote the Second Amendment they stipulated that the right to bear arms was to maintain a well regulated militia. Today we call the militia the National Guard and we supply it with tanks and machine guns. And the Christian bible? Need I repeat the Beatitudes above? People sometimes ask the question “What would Jesus do?” I’m not sure I know the answer, but two guesses relative to what he wouldn’t do are “buy a Hummer, and pack heat.” Rev. Pagano and his flock are fundamentalists when it comes to their misunderstanding of the Constitution while the words of Jesus they are willing to ignore completely. I began by saying that I was an even worse Christian than I am a Jew. Well, maybe the Rev. Pagano is an even worse Christian than I am.

Acts of bravery and cowardice

As I write on Father’s Day Iranians are on the verge of rebellion. The odds are against the insurgents; they have neither the guns nor the organization, just Twitter and Facebook. They do have the moral authority, and sometimes that’s enough. I wish president Obama were more forthright in his support, just as I wished that president Reagan had been more forthright in his support of Filipinos when they took to the streets following their rigged elections in 1986, and I wish that president Bush (41) had come to the defense of the Tiananmen Square democracy advocates, but that didn’t happen either.

I envy the Iranian (and before them the Filipino and Chinese) protestors courageous enough to face the armed police without themselves resorting to violence. But it embarrasses me to see the brave of Teheran demanding an honest recount while in America we stood idly by as our presidential election was stolen in 2000. Yes, in Florida there were protests (Mary Matalin famously denigrated them as Jesse Jackson’s rent-a-riot) but the rest of us who were in the plurality did nothing. What a fiasco that election was. Buchanan won votes from myopic Jews of Palm Beach instead of to Al Gore their intended recipient; remember the hanging chads, and the confusion of the butterfly ballot, and the uncounted ballots, and the disenfranchisement at black polling places, and the fact that one candidate’s brother was in charge of the farce? Florida should have become the epicenter of a mass protest; instead one person (and four of his colleagues) gave the election to Bush, the fellow with the fewer votes, and what a swell job he did. And we did nothing as government became a shambles and the Afghanistan war was abandoned before victory was attained, and Osama bin Laden still taunts, and we still cower. Congress should have discussed scuttling the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College and substituting direct elections or some other way of approximating reality, but it too did nothing. In America, the self-styled land home of the brave we dared not oppose the coup. In Teheran, they are daring.

In shul last week we read about the ten spies Moses had sent into Canaan along with Joshua and his doggedly honorable friend Caleb. Yes the land was beautiful and flowed with milk and honey, but the people are giants, the ten wailed, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked like it to them, they groveled. And despite the contrary testimony of Joshua and Caleb the people refused to believe in themselves, refused to believe that they had the power to overcome the obstacles, refused to believe in God, if you will. The lesson of the Hebrew spies is that failure to do the right thing, the moral thing, failure to have confidence in oneself can be a recipe for disaster. I wish I had been braver in 1961 and again in 1967 when each time I had the opportunity of doing the right thing, but didn’t. In 1961 I didn’t join the Freedom riders as they boarded their integrated busses and headed southward. In 1967 I didn’t fly to Israel to work the fields or factories. I live with the shame and try to make up for it.

Then I read of Jihad Jaara who orchestrated the murder of an unarmed 71 year old American turned Israeli during the second Intifada, ironically a man who’d befriended Arabs. Jaara was part of the murderous crew trapped in the Church of the Nativity in the spring of 2002. After a five weeks’ siege U.S. officials of the Bush (43) administration arranged for the European Union to take the killers. Jaara was flown to Dublin where he cowers in fear of Mossad or CIA attack. When a reporter from the New York Times found him he was shocked and afraid. His physician told the reporter, “You must give up the name of the person who gave you this address. Jihad is terrified because his security has been so easily breached.” “You must help us," Jihad said, angry, moving toward [the reporter]. "They want to kill me.” Shakespeare put into Julius Caesar’s mouth the sentiment that cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Jihad Jaara, who conspired in the murder of innocents now fears inevitable retribution and dies his thousand deaths one by one, day by day. Poor Jihad.

Filming the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide

In a previous column I wrote of my friend Mark Grashow who has dedicated his retirement years to furnishing school children in Zimbabwe and Tanzania with books and school supplies and teachers. Now let me tell you about my step-nephew-in-law, Taylor Krauss.

A Yale graduate, Taylor began his professional life working for documentary film maker Ken Burns. On assignment in post-genocide Rwanda, he saw something that struck a chord. As a student at Yale he’d visited the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies. But in Rwanda, where during 90 days of hell, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans, no one was recording testimonies, or even providing social services for survivors. He worried that the mistake of not listening to survivors of the European holocaust was being repeated, with potentially devastating results. After all, if the story was forgotten, it could happen again, there or elsewhere. So he founded “Voices of Rwanda,” to record on film survivors’ testimonies about the destruction of their families during the genocide, and of the lives they’d lived before.

This is psychological and historical aid he brings. It’s not food or school books, such as Mark is providing, but on another plane it’s just as vital. It’s an opportunity to make sure that no one forgets, that unlike our holocaust, which is denied by Nazis and their sympathizers. Now, while stories are still fresh they can be recorded, and by recording, perhaps the victims will achieve some sense that what they went through was something the world will care about. It’s therapy for us too; we can’t just ignore Rwanda, tucked away there in the middle of nowhere, as we tend to view central Africa, but it’s a land where savage murder occurred on a massive scale, one “master race” of blacks perpetuating it on another, as one “master race” of Europeans perpetuated it on us.

The parallel isn’t lost on Taylor. Unlike the Holocaust, after which survivors mostly fled to Israel or the United States, in Rwanda, he says, “you’re living next to the killer who killed your family. There’s no space to tell stories,” which must be told. Here’s where he, the outsider, the Jew, comes in. “The reason I can be doing this work is because I am a Jew.” Krauss graduated from a Catholic high school in Phoenix, in 1998. He says that being in such an environment forced him to confront his own Jewishness because he had to represent a whole religion. When he would explain to Rwandans that he was a Jew, they would respond, “Oh, OK, you understand.” His being Jewish made it easy to relate to the survivors, and easier for them to tell him their stories. He said that in some regard, they feel that there is a shared history. And obviously so does he.

Taylor and his colleagues sit for as long as each story takes, sometimes more than 12 hours, and they have collected hundreds of hours of testimonies. But numbers don’t matter, he says. “Even one testimony is priceless. The more people share their testimonies the more I realize the importance of being there. The act of listening is the most important thing.”

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Taylor has a credo, but if it does it might be this: “If you care about these issues [man’s inhumanity to man], then you have to make changes in your life.” He believes that it is a Jewish obligation to be listening to survivors in Rwanda. “We will be committing the same mistakes if we are not listening. The retelling of the [Rwandan] Holocaust is exactly the reason I am here.”

I was reminded of all this while reading president Obama’s recent speech—the one at Buchenwald.

“To this day,” the president reminded, “there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened... This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

It is exactly in this spirit that my nephew Taylor is working in Rwanda, because he is a Jew.

You can read more about Taylor and his activities on his website: voicesofrwanda.org

President Obama’s comments can be found in their entirety at http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005677/obama-at-buchenwald

Memorial Day Relfections

I type this on Memorial Day. The rain has ceased, spring may have arrived at last, but not for them, not for America’s fallen. Some of the wars they fought kept us free, others were of no discernable purpose, either then or now, but yet they are all equally dead, the brave ones and those who cowered in fear, the enlisted men and the officers, the Jew the Christian the Hindu and the atheist. In schul this morning we paid tribute to them by reading David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan (“Oh how the mighty have fallen”) and from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”) As we did so I thought of another biblical lament, also ascribed to King David. His son Absalom, in revolt against his father, had been killed. When the news was brought to the king, I imagine he tore his clothes and cried out what all parents must feel, even if they do not know the words—“My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son!” But it did not bring Absalom back. The war dead, all of them our sons, are gone. We concluded the service, before the final mourner’s kaddish, by singing the first verse of America the Beautiful “O beautiful, for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Afterwards it wasn’t just us mourners who remained standing for kaddish, but all of that small congregation.

It’s an historical oddity that both Israel and the United States commemorate their war dead in the spring, in the time of new life. In Israel, I’m told, there is no one who does not know a fallen soldier, few who do not have a brother or a son or a father or a cousin or a friend who have paid the ultimate price for keeping Israel alive. There as here some of the wars were of necessity, others could have been avoided, but the dead are equally dead, the survivors weep, the parents, widows, and orphans wonder might have been.

The First World War was a conflict that produced poets. John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields which begins as a eulogy but ends with an appeal to continue the struggle:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

From the other perspective there is Seigfried Sassoon’s Memorial Tablet:

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?

Shavuot approaches, the end of the Passover season, it’s said. From the Exodus to the giving of the Law at Sinai, 50 days later. It’s not biblical, you know, this association with the Ten Commandments; it’s an add on by the ancient rabbis who wanted to give some Jewish significance to an even more ancient agricultural festival, but the myth holds; we are grateful for the early spring Exodus from slavery, for the late spring law which turned us from tribes into a people. Yesterday I saw parent cardinals teaching their fledgling to fly by a tree outside our window. Spring is here; the dead are gone, new life continues.

Who is the ass?

[This column began with a picture of a young donkey draped in ceremonial robes with Hebrew writing on them.]

If your Hebrew is a bit weak, I’ll translate. The sign on the donkey’s drapery says, “I feel like a damn fool, but I’d rather look like an idiot than be in that sheep’s clothing.” Or something like that.

With all the world’s trouble, from economic melt down to swine flu to Taliban successes in Afghanistan and Pakistan I turn to the daily Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily Briefing with some trepidation. But then I read this story and wondered if it wasn’t a holdover from Purim.

Here’s what grabbed my attention. How could it not: “SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- It took nearly two years, cost more than $7,500, and involved two donkeys, one sheep, a case of mistaken sexual identity, several DNA tests and the unwavering faith of two fervently Orthodox Jews in Australia.” Now there’s a lead paragraph to capture the reader’s attention.

My theory is that it all began because people in Australia are all walking upside down and the blood rushes to their heads and they get dizzy and giddy and waltz with machine guns named Matilda. Two chasids from normally rival sects (Vishnitzer and Belzer) who study at Adass (read that slowly and carefully, and no, I’m not making it up) Israel Congregation in Melbourne found an obscure passage detailing the rituals of pidyon petter chamor—redemption of a first-born male donkey. The ceremony is like the more familiar pidyon haben, where if the first born child of an Israelite Jewish woman is a boy, money is given to a Kohen to redeem him, to prevent the necessity of giving the child to the Kohaneem. A very simple ceremony and a lot less painful than the one that takes place 22 days earlier. But I digress. Instead of money changing hands, at a pidyon petter chamor, in exchange for the donkey, a sheep is handed over to a local Kohen.

The problem was (one of the many problems was) that the chasids didn’t actually have an appropriate donkey. Who does? But resourceful as only the obsessive can be, they found a donkey breeder in Canberra, about 400 miles away. “There, a maiden female ass who had never been pregnant or miscarried was selected and mated with a male. She soon became pregnant.”

Mazal tov! Problem solved, right? Wrong. Or maybe right. The breeder reported that the foal was female. Quoting an ancient rabbinic text our two chasids lamented, “how all occasions do inform against us.” A new search for a virgin donkey would have to commence immediately. But lo and behold, miracle of miracles the breeder called back a few days later to report that the foal was, indeed, the desired male. Since there was some uncertainty the Adass rabbi ordered a DNA test. On the third try it confirmed that the ass was indeed a male.
Everything was now set. “We were thrilled,” Berel Goldberger, the Vishnitzer, said. “We really wanted to do this mitzvah.” Naturally, because of the rarity of event, a simcha fête was declared. Parliament member Michael Danby, whose electorate includes the Adass schul, was among those in attendance, reports the JTA. (One can only wonder what he reported to his wife upon returning home, weak and weary from the festivities. “For votes, honey, you’ll never guess what I did today,” is my guess.)

So, blessings recited, the sheep was handed over to the Kohen, the donkey was redeemed, not slaughtered.

“It probably looks strange, a bit primitive,” Yumi Rosenbaum, the other chasid, acknowledged. “But there’s a general theme throughout Judaism about the first of anything -- the first fruit, first born and so on. It was fairly unique.”
The sheep was slaughtered, its meat distributed to the poor, its hide to be used at circumcision ceremonies in the Adass community.

And the donkeys? Mom has been named Tip Top and baby is going to be called Peter. I don’t know why.

So, nu, what do we learn from this story? That it’s better to be an ass than a sheep? That absurdities of religion come in all forms—from the slaughter of Muslim women in honor killings in Pakistan to the benign (from the human perspective) killing of an innocent sheep so that another animal might live? I don’t know; I’m only grateful that our Adass chasids didn’t find an obscure passage saying that the son of a virgin donkey could be used as a substitute for a rooster in the Yom Kippur ritual of shlugen kapores. Oy, what absurdities we weave when first we practice to believe.

Booking a trip to Africa

With luck, next summer I won’t be trampled by an elephant in Zimbabwe.

This particular terror has never been high on my concerns’ list. (Falling asleep during one of my own lectures is a much more frequent fear.) But then I got a note from an old college chum, Mark Grashow. In 2002 he and his wife Sheri Saltzberg were attending a wedding in Zambia. Not far away in Zimbabwe is Victoria Falls. As he was a recently retired teacher (mathematics, Lincoln High School in Brooklyn) and she from a career in public health, it was suggested that they visit a school while in the area. What he saw was out of a Dante canto. “The school had no books, no pencils, no paper, no desks, no blackboards, no chairs, nothing.” He knew that schools in America throw out thousands of used books every year. It was almost an algebraic equation. There had to be some way to get the two together. So that was the dream. I dream too, but Mark and Sheri also had the will.

Upon returning to the States they organized an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) the U.S.-Africa Children’s Fellowship Program. Schools in New York are partnered with schools in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. But they had to commit for three years, donating all old textbooks, library books and other materials no longer in use, packed and labeled. Students in the American schools are asked to donate pencils, pens, notebooks and children’s books, art supplies, toys, games, toiletries, sneakers, sports uniforms and musical instruments. Sometimes specific items are requested. One day there was a bicycle drive. Students brought their old bikes to a waiting U-Haul truck. Seventy bicycles were collected in a single day. (The school athletic uniform drive may have been too successful. Reports have reached Brooklyn of five Zimbabwe soccer teams showing up for a match, each wearing the colors of Abraham Lincoln HS.) Students are encouraged to engage in an ongoing pen pal program and schools to raise money for shipment of supplies to Africa. These are shipped over in containers at a cost of about $11,000 to Zimbabwe and $10,000 to Tanzania. Each school is encouraged to raise $400.

There are three permanent 40-foot containers in the back parking lot of Hanger B in Floyd Bennett Field. Donated materials are brought there pre-boxed. The containers hold about 1,500 boxes weighing about 40,000 pounds. Four times a year the materials are brought by ship to Africa, escorted by Mark and Sheri who supervise the distribution of the contents. Bill Clinton in his new book “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World” devotes a section to the effort. And his foundation donated $25,000 to the cause.

So far the program has partnered with 100 schools. Libraries have been created; classes have textbooks; the passing rate of the 7th grade reading exam has risen from 5% to 60%; art classes have been organized where none existed before; the population of many kindergartens has more than tripled with the introduction of toys. Boys and girls are participating in sports impossible before because they had no balls, and had no shoes—in fact, students now with shoes can attend schools in the winter. Before it was too cold to walk that far.

There have been difficulties. Hyper-inflation is the order of the day. Steve Hanke, an economist with Johns Hopkins and the Cato Institute estimates that in the two years following January 2007 the rate of inflation is 89.7 sextillion percent (89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%). What cost 1.00 Zambian dollar then cost 853,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 in November 2008. In this economy, combined with an epidemic of AIDS, and another of cholera, teachers are leaving the schools by the thousands. Students don’t bother to return after vacation because there are no instructors. So USACF started a new program. It pays $250 a year to high school graduates to cover “distance learning courses” as long as they agree to teach in one of the Zimbabwean schools. In four years they will earn a degree. Currently there are 40-45 students receiving these scholarships. More would if there were more money. Write me if you want to contribute; I’ll send you the address; USACF is a 501(c)(3).

Mark does not describe himself as a religious Jew, but he wonders what great force brought him to that school to observe it. I wonder if he’s not more Jewish than he thinks. There is the concept of Tikkun Olam reflected in his use as a credo “There’s a big planet out there. Someone’s got to fix it.” Well, I give money; he does things.

Which brings me back to being stepped on by a pacaderm. Mark organizes trips to his African schools. He’s invited his old college friends to join him, but he warns “the safari part (six days) is in tents. Elephants wander through the camp site at night.”

Next summer I hope to see with my own eyes the results of his Herculean efforts. I’ll report.

Kaddish at Fenway Park

On the day before Passover I said Kaddish in memory of my father. This is not unusual, I say Kaddish in his memory every day, morning, afternoon and evening. It was the setting that was peculiar. On opening day I was at Fenway Park with my friend Sam, and I did a hasty count. We were two. There were at least three Jewish ball players on the field, that was five; we knew of two Jewish executives of the Red Sox we assumed were on site, seven. Three short. But then I looked at the throng before me and surely, I told myself, of the 37,000+ other people in the ball park, three of them must be Jewish. So, during the Seventh Inning stretch, after singing “God Bless America,” while everyone else warbled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” I said Kaddish.

Saying Kaddish doesn’t bring my father back to life, and certainly not to health, and I don’t actually believe in the efficacy of prayer to begin with, so I wonder why I arrange my daily schedule to accommodate the needs of someone who cannot possibly know that I stand for him and utter words in Aramaic I do not understand—even when I read them in the arcane English translation generally supplied? Is it ancestor worship as a rabbi/scholar I know maintains? Is it a hope that if I say Kaddish my children will say the prayer for me in my time?—and if they do, how does that benefit me, exactly? I’ll be pretty much dead under the circumstances. Is it for the same reason I keep a kosher diet, so as not to break the link in the chain unlikely ever to be mended, a chain that I suppose goes back to Pharisaic days?

In point of fact I could not deliberately skip the daily ritual for my father any more than I could eat a ham and cheese sandwich with a pork rind chaser, but I can’t rationally tell myself why. Passover, the story of our liberation, has just ended, but it’s also the story of our bondage to ancient law we neither created nor formally consent to except in the observance. Hegel in the 18th century argued that what gives us freedom is acceptance of the burden of law; Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher argued that without law we are no better than the savages whose lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So, do I obey the law to avoid the chaos of freedom, or does the law give me freedom while it binds me to action, the purpose of which eludes? The law we obey, is it that which makes us Jews? That’s a simple one. No. There are Jews who never consciously observe any Jewish ritual law, and yet they are Jews. (We call many of these people “Israelis”.)

This is my constant quandary, why observe the laws of Judaism. An associated one was added before Passover when I saw the play “Grace” at the Gamm Theater. Grace is the eponymous central character, a professor of natural science. She refuses to call herself an atheist because that defines what she is not, a not believer in god. Instead she defines her attitude as “naturalism”. She mocks William Paley’s creationism and fawns over Darwin. The universe has no purpose. Things just happen. Then her son announces that he is becoming an Anglican priest. The sparks fly.

She attacks: You with your moderate religion are giving cover to Scriptural literalists who turn the irrationality of religion into the violence of bomb-throwing fanatics. But is it true? That’s the question, never fully resolved in the play. Do the moderate practices of religion, the observing Passover, for instance or Lent or Ramadan, provide cover for the fanatics who would destroy all that is not of their revealed belief? If benign religion morphs into cultural oppression or murder, is the irrationality of religion compensated for by its social values? Hamas, after all, runs hospitals.

Religion pretends to be rational when it bothers to. Maimonides and Aquinas believed in Aristotle’s rationality, but even that depends on the irrational belief in an unmoved mover, a contradiction in terms. I’d like to abandon formal religion. But then I’d have no opportunity to say Kaddish for my father in that lyrical little band box of a ballpark off of Yawkey Way, a whimsy that would have brought a smile to his baseball loving heart.

In the end the Red Sox won the opening game, Kaddish was recited, the tulips are coming up; the trees are showing their leaves. Spring is in the air. Let us rejoice.

Poems intrude: Thoughts on the Death of My father

Poems intrude. The first begins:

“Say this when you mourn for me:
There was a man—and look, he is no more.
He died before his time.
The music of his life suddenly stopped.
A pity! There was another song in him.
Now it is lost forever:”

The second urges:

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Out of the canon of Scripture we read:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens; a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

In August my father, still strong, still vibrant, still a lover of life suffered a series of strokes. He was left physically debilitated but his mind remained as sharp as ever. I don’t know if the medical teams saved his life or prolonged his death. I know that as a result of their efforts my father suffered, too weak to live, too strong to die. Until he died.

His sons and others who loved him mirrored his physical pain with our own emotional anguish. Seeing him unable to speak, I knew that thoughts were cascading around his brain and that he in frustration could only try and fail to express them. There was so much more to say; I was his son; I am his son; I have learned so much from him about being a man—but there is so much more to learn and suddenly I am fatherless, left to cope with the world as though I knew its answers, as though I even knew what questions to ask of it. I know there was at least one more piece of instruction in my father but he could not move it even the brief distance from his brain to his mouth to my waiting ear. And I know what words I could not speak. I could not say, “Father, you are dieing” because I could not move the words even the brief distance from my brain to my mouth to his ears. He had given me so much; could I deprive him of hope? But because I kept his hope alive (because I kept my own hope alive?) I denied him the dignity of facing up to his own death; I denied myself the last words of truth I could give him.

He did not want to die, though in the last days he accepted death’s inevitability. I think he was afraid to die, afraid to give up the pleasures of life which consisted mostly of kvelling over his grandchildren, walking the golf course, attending schul, schmoozing with friends, breathing air, tasting water. He did not want to die, of that I am certain. He did not want go gently into that good night; he would not even have acknowledged that the eternal night he was entering was good. He wanted to live, but he could not. I wanted him to live, but knew he couldn’t. I did not want his death prolonged, but it was, and selfishly I was happy to have him just a few more days, though it broke my heart to hear him gasping for air. I could have let the mucus in his lungs overwhelm him, but each time I rang for the nurse, “Hurry, hurry, he’s choking,” and each time they did deep suction and each time he suffered the pain and each time I wept.

Once he was young, but now he isn’t and it was his time. By most measures 95 years is a good long life. But he had another song; he struggled to breath. The Stoicism of the poem is a front-porch kind of philosophy, easy and obvious, but he had another song to sing. People whose parents died before they were 95 might resent my feelings. And it’s true, as far as it goes; I was lucky to have him so long. But it wasn’t long enough. There is a time to be born and a time to die—and I have wept on both occasions—for as my first child was born I held him and thought, “What have I done? Selfishly, satisfying my physical and emotional needs I’ve brought this innocent person into the world and he who was not is now destined to die. And then I wept again as my father lay dieing, his teachings incomplete with at least one more lesson he could not get out as he lost his fight against the eternal night.

As I shoveled dirt onto my father’s coffin I thought, “He had been a man, a good man, an accomplished man, an intelligent, loving, kind and wise man. And now I, his weeping son, am covering him with earth. He had covered me as a baby, protecting me from the cold night as I slumbered innocently in my crib. Now I was covering him, and the all the poetry, all the philosophy, all the stories of heaven and resurrection were powerless to bring him back or to comfort me. There lay a man. My father, who was dead.

Three Peace Proposals

In my last column I tried to show how the vaunted two-state solution is impracticable, at least under current circumstances. Israel would be surrounded by enemies, similar to Poland in 1939; “Palestine” would be bifurcated, separated by an unfriendly power, the problem Pakistan had until Bangladesh seceded in 1971. I promised to provide a solution that would work. Instead, I propose three. Will any peace plan succeed? I frankly doubt it, but what I propose might, just maybe have a chance if there is a sudden eruption of reason and the stars are aligned just right.

Suggestion one: Restore the area as it was in 1967 with modifications re: Jerusalem and any settlements that are permanent. Jordan and Egypt re-absorb the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, and bits of Israel to compensate for Arab lands taken by Israel. Advantages include that Israel will negotiate with sovereign nations that recognize it, not with war lords who don’t, and it will be Jordan and Egypt which police the area, helping in the economic development, opening channels of food and communication. Advantages to the Arabs—taxes to flow to Amman and Cairo; the people of Gaza will have unlimited access to the outside world, subject no more to Israeli blockades, and the people of the West Bank would have access to the sea through Jordan proper. The principal disadvantage is that neither King Abdullah nor President Mubarak is likely to agree. Mubarak knows what happened when his predecessor Sadat made peace with Israel, and Abdullah would not want to suffer the fate of his great-grand father who was assassinated in 1951 for even considering a peace treaty with Israel.

Suggestion two: Not a two-state, but a three-state solution. Create an independent West Bank nation and an independent Gaza. This will double the potential Palestinian vote in the UN (not that they need that many more sympathetic votes) and grant sovereignty to the people who call themselves Palestinians. Each will be able to make diplomatic, economic (and inevitably military) alliances with others and it will avoid the highway across the dessert that the two-state solution presupposes. The inevitable dissolution of untied Palestine will be immediate without the hard feelings and angry parting of the ways caused by delay. Israel may still have two potentially hostile neighbors, but at least it won’t be a single hostile neighbor, as when the old UAR surrounded Israel from 1958-1961 until the Syrians had enough and left.

Would Palestinians accede to this? I don’t know. They might. They should. But will hatred of Israel blind them? It has in the past. They will have their nation states; they will not have all of Israel.

Suggestion three: The solution to the problem from Israel’s persctive is eternal vigilance. Isaiah tells us that when the Messiah comes the wolf will dwell with the lamb (Arabs will live peacfully with Jews?) but as those two great Jewish sages, Maimonides and Woody Allen have so succinctly put it, the lamb will still be very nervous. Israel should be very nervous.

Counting my suggestions, by rough estimate, there have been 500 approaches to peace since the First World War. Highlights include the Balfour Declaration (vague promise to Jews); the McMahon pledge (vague promise to Arabs); the Sykes-Picot Agreement (planned carving up of non-Turkish areas by Britain and France); The League of Nations’ Mandate; the Churchill White Paper (excluding Transjordan from the area designated as the Jewish National Home); the Peel Commission Report of 1936 (the first to suggest partition); the British rejection of the Peel Commission Report; the 1939 White Paper (limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine); the Anglo-American Conference of 1946 suggesting opening Palestine to Jewish refugees; the UN partition plan (three Jewish zones, three Arab zones, crisscrossing at specified points; the 1949 armistance agreement. Oslo; Madrid; Clinton Peace Plan. Need I go on? To paraphrase Golda Meir, peace will only come when Arabs love their children more than they hate us. (Hamas leader Nizar Rayan and his four wives and eleven children were killed in an Israeli air raid. That Rayan was a terrorist commander is indisputable. But his wives and children? Well, he’d already sent one of his sons to be a suicide bomber. So how much did he love them?)

If there is a sudden outpouring of reason, if the stars align just right, if Arabs start loving their children more than they hate Israel there will be peace. In the meanwhile we prepare for the next engagement we hope won’t come.

Why the Two State Solution Won't work

I have friends (yes, even I). Many, probably most of these friends believe that the best way to resolve the Mid-East conflict is with a two state solution, Israel and Palestine (consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab Jerusalem).

Let us examine this possibility. There are three problems with it—West Bank access to Israel proper; connecting the West Bank to Gaza; and the grandmother-of-the-mother-of-difficulties, Jerusalem.

The two state solution assumes that Israel will have defensible borders even without natural frontiers other than the unnatural security fence separating the West Bank from Israel to prevent dissatisfied jihadists or other fanatics from crossing it and blowing up (insert here the name of a civilian meeting place—a bus, a sidewalk café, a synagogue) after making a touching farewell tape. This is a normally one-way street. Yes we hang our heads in shame when we remember Baruch Goldstein, but his slaughter of the innocents was by a lone murderer. People who cross the Green Line and blow up pizzerias are mentored, trained, equipped and filmed before they go. They become heroes (and occasionally heroines). If there is a Hell I have no doubt that our Goldstein is trying to strangle their Ahmed as the remnants of Ahmed (don’t forget, he’s been blown to smithereens on a cross-walk in Jerusalem) tries to stab the bad doctor. Poor Goldstein, alone in Hell with 500 Ahmeds. Well, it serves him right.

Gaza as part of this proposed Palestinian state, separated by Israel from the West Bank by about 25 miles, means that Palestine would surround Israel with potentially hostile and (I imagine) frequently actual, enemy action by those who believe in a one Arab state solution. That’s the bad news for Israel. From the Arab side, the West Bank presumably would be Palestine central, Gaza the proverbial step-child.

When it achieved its independence, India was divided into Hindu and Muslim areas—but the Muslims were in the Northwest and the Northeast so Pakistan became a country separated by India, its enemy; the area that became Bangladesh was untenable. It declared its independence and is untenable still. Look to Poland which, following the Great War, separated the bulk of Germany in the west from East Prussia to the east. When war came again it was attacked on both fronts, the pincers having been put in place by the diplomats of Versailles in their attempt at fairness. Either way, bifurcated Palestine will not survive and surrounded Israel never rest easy. A solution to the problem (for the Arabs) would be a raised highway across 50 kilometers of Israel. Arab traffic above would flow east to west, Israeli traffic below from north to south. Who would pay for construction, maintenance and police remains to be seen. It’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. Gaza would be the new Bangladesh. Israel would be the new 1939 Poland. The plan presupposes men of good will on both sides. Who amongst you trusts Hamas or Hezbollah not to try for a one-state Arab solution? Seeing no hands, we’ll proceed. The only historical model I can think of where a country divided by another has survived is us. Canada separates the lower 48 from Alaska, but we’ve been friendly with Canada ever since “Fifty-four forty or fight” morphed into “OK, the 49th parallel is good enough.” I’m not picturing a squadron of blood-thirsty Royal Canadian Mounted Police invading Alaska for its oil, or the United States launching a two pronged invasion to conquer British Columbia. There is good faith and cooperation on both sides.

As to Jerusalem, well, on the one hand it’s just a city which has road and sewer and lighting and school issues to resolve like any other municipality. The problem is that this particular city is JERUSALEM, FOR GOD’S SAKES! When the United Nations partitioned Palestine Jerusalem was designated an international city. When the British withdrew the Jordanians tried to grab it; the Jews fought to keep the road to it open, and the city was divided. The Jordanians got the holy places until Israel conquered it in 1967. In the 2000 near-peace agreement brokered by President Clinton, Ehud Barak offered Palestinians control over East Jerusalem, including most of the Old City and “Religious Sovereignty” over the Temple Mount, and the West Bank and Gaza. The offer was rejected. The Second Intifada irrupted.

A hopeless situation? Well, maybe, but I have a solution that might work. Read about it in my next column.