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.