On Palestinian Sermons

Imagine if you will the following fictional scenario. The governor of Arkansas is unhappy about criticism aimed at him from the pastors in the pastures; he’s distressed about the hollers he’s hearing from the hollers; so he assigns one of him minions, his Minister of Ministers, to write mandatory Sunday sermons to be read in all churches. ACLU anyone?

It could never happen, you think; it’s a flight of journalistic fantasy, but, it turns out, it’s not so fictional. The bailiwick may not be the Ozarks, but according to the Washington Post (December 15) exactly that situation is playing itself on the West Bank where anxious to court Israeli and American favor, and hating Hamas almost as much as the Israelis do, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, is conducting exactly such a campaign.

Each week, Mahmoud Habbash, the Palestinian Authority's Minister for Religious Affairs, E-mails Friday’s script for sermons each imam is required to deliver. According to the Post, the campaign has been effective and Hamas support is down. How this could be eludes me. I fully expected to read the opposite, that in reaction to this heavy-handed imposition of the state on the teachings of the mosque that riots would erupt. Maybe they will, but apparently, not yet.

Already though, there is opposition. Sheikh Hamid Bitawi of Nablus whose fiery sermons the Palestinian Authority banned three months ago estimates that dozens of other imams have been prevented from preaching. “I’m sure,” he argues, that “the popularity of …the Palestinian Authority is going down. They will be punished for their behavior.” (Insert here a chill down Abbas’ spine.) More moderately Nasser Abed El-Al, who runs a kebab restaurant, hasn't liked the changes either. “They're choosing imams that speak the way they do,” he said. “This regime is not popular with the people here.”

Defending the practice, Habbash argues that “We're convinced this is in our national interest. What we have seen is when mosques are under the control of other parties, it causes division within our people.” (Insert squirm of your liberal reporter as he reads this.) “My main message, Habbash contends” is that “we need to liberate Islam from … extremism and wrong understanding of Islam. Islam does not incite to hate.”

So, do we Jews, we advocates for peace within secure borders for Israel, we advocates of western liberal ideas we’ve read in the writing of Locke and John Stuart Mill have a horse in this race? Yes, we do, but to be safe (which is frequently to live dangerously) we’ve divided our wagers and now watch hopelessly as the animals on the track, those magnificent steeds upon which we’ve based our hopes are running not in a straight line but helter skelter all over the course. Observing from the stands it’s difficult to say what we want the outcome to be. But surely not this.

Maybe after centuries of patriarchal clan loyalties Arabs in the area (as opposed to Arabs who have come to live here) cannot be expected to conform to the norms of first amendment expectations. But can we liberal Americans, even though the censorship is being undertaken to promote causes we believe in (recognizing the legitimacy of Israel) tolerate this blatant disregard for free thought and speech? Or is it time for us to say (insert southern drawl here) “Well, these boys aren’t really ready for advancements our forefathers fought for fiercely, so let ’em play the game by their rules, not ours and we come out on top.” But the problem with that argument is that Arabs aren’t a stupid people and they already see through the heavy-handed control of what their imams are allowed to say.

I see the situation as further evidence of the failure of the idea of the Two-State solution daily touted by its advocates. Look at the map. There’s the West Bank here and Gaza there, Israel in the middle. Look at the political realities. In the West Bank Mahmoud Abbas imposes his views on the mosques; in Gaza the mosques impose Hamas’ opposite views with equal or greater vehemence. One group is willing to work with Israel and the United States but does so by using methods abhorrent to American and Israeli social and political theory; the other group wants only to destroy Israel. There is not a single Palestinian land mass or a single Palestinian perspective on Islam.

Find another solution; one that will work, not this cobbled together pipe dream.

Shabbat in Paris

For December 10, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Joshua Stein

On the Friday following Thanksgiving I went to church with my wife; but not to pray. St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris was a place I’d longed to see for decades. You remember Dagobert, of course, the last Merovingian king to rule as well as to reign? Among his many accomplishments was construction of the church named after the first Christian martyr of Paris, the aforementioned St. Denis, decapitated on Montmartre (martyrs mount). He picked up his head, the story goes, and walked about six miles preaching along the way. I’m not sure exactly how he accomplished either task but he became one of several Christian cephalophores (from the Greek for “head-carrier” a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head.) From Dagobert’s time on, the basilica was the site of royal burials and tombs to commemorate France’s kings and queens.

In the 12th century the church, in need of repair, was refashioned in the new Gothic style, in fact, St. Denis is the first Gothic building in Europe, all others a modification of the original. So we had to go to church to see the tombs and the architecture. I’d been to Paris many times, but the basilica is so difficult to reach (it’s at the end of a spur line on the Metro) that I never could. This time, however, wife in tow, we schlepped and oohed and ahed.

That evening, it being erev Shabbat we went to synagogue, to the Temple Victoire a.k.a. the Rothschild Synagogue. Built in the Romanesque style in the mid-19th century, this enormous edifice is cathedral like except for the missing statues and crucifixes. Its bimah where the cantor sings facing the congregation is several steps up from the ground, higher still is the area behind where he sings facing the ark which is still higher, and above it there is a pillar atop of which is a depiction of the Ten Commandments. People approached us to talk but our French (mine and my two sons) wasn’t adequate but we quickly ascertained that Hebrew would be the Lingua Franca and we got along in that—my son the cantor did.

Afterwards we walked to the Ailes restaurant at 34 Rue Richer, incongruously across the street from the Folies-Bergère where we had pre-paid for our kosher meal. By the time we got there the place was nearly filled, but our reservations were honored and we sat and quietly sang Shalom Aleichem, and then I blessed my sons and my wife blessed our daughter-in-law and I said kiddish over the wine and the motzi over the bread. Since these sons live at a distance from us I don’t get to bless them very often and I noted as I did that tears were misting my eyes as I said the ancient words knowing that there is a limited number of times one gets to bless his children and wondered how many more chances I’d have. All around us I could hear similar songs and prayers chanted by different families, ricocheting through the restaurant like whispering breezes. But then about a dozen young men came in, took their places, but didn’t sit. Instead in perfect 12 part harmony they sang aloud the blessing over the wine, grabbing the attention of the other diners, some of whom applauded, and others walked over to ask if they were going to bench Birkat Hamazon the tuneful grace after meals. Well, they may have, but by that time we’d quietly sang the words ourselves and left, walking back to our apartment, our stomachs full, our souls refreshed.

It was a nice way to spend Thanksgiving, though whether we’ll ever be able to do it again like that I don’t know, but we did it at least the once.
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A sharp eyed reader called me to task for saying that David Koch, multi-billionaire backer of the Tea Party, was Jewish. I’d used him as an example of one who betrayed the principles of the prophets in expectations of greater profits; it was a brief mention at the end of a long article. Well, here’s a lesson for all of you currently taking Journalism 101. Never rely on memory; always double check your sources and yourself. In my rush to make a deadline, I failed to do either and blundered. Koch is Roman Catholic, not Jewish. My thanks to the sharp-eyed reader.

Adam Smith, Socialist

Quiz time, again:

1- What fruit did Eve eat in the Garden of Eden that got her into trouble?
2- In Genesis, which was created first, women or animals?
3- Why did Cain slay Able?
4-Which of the four books of the Maccabees describes the miracle of the oil lasting eight days?
5- In the Constitution of the United States does the oath taken by a new president conclude with the words “So help me, God”?
6- Does the Constitution of the United States establish a democracy?
7- What did Adam Smith mean when he wrote about Laissez-faire, laissez-passer?

Answers:

1- Who knows? The apple is a renaissance artist’s invention.
2- The woman was created at the same time as the man in Genesis I, after the animals in Genesis II.
3- We are never told.
4- None of them; it’s a later rabbinic add-on.
5- No; the word God is never used in the Constitution, ever.
6- Democracy was the last thing on their minds in 1787; the founders mixed the three classic forms of good government, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy giving democracy the shortest of shrifts.
7- Nothing; he knew the term but never used it and didn’t believe in it.

So much for common knowledge.

Discussion:

If the word God never appears in the seminal document creating the American government why do some Christian fundamentalists want to insist that our schools teach that the founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation? If Adam Smith in his classic On the Wealth of Nations didn’t advocate that the government should do nothing to regulate the economy, what did he propose? And why as a Jewish community should we care? (Hint: Think of the Jewish prophets, not the modern emphasis on profits.)

Prof. John Hill of Curry College recently gave a lecture at Roger Williams University on the topic “Laissez-fair, no fair” debunking the myth that Smith ought to be enshrined as the father of modern capitalism. It was a useful reminder to me of those long ago days when I first read On the Wealth of Nations and a wake-up call to my students who only know it by reputation. Hill contends that Smith was a moral philosopher above all; that he was interested in the wealth of nations, not in the wealth of individuals; that while he understood some would become wealthy, that wealth imposed obligations; that he favored a luxury tax to prevent the wealthy from getting too rich and opposed the sort of gap we have in America where 5% of the population controls 75% of the wealth.
In America, we have always stressed the rugged individual. Smith would have preferred we pay homage to the self-made man who gives it all back. The career of Andrew Carnegie is nothing to emulate; he was a strike breaker who ruthlessly exploited his workers and then let his partner take the fall when deaths occurred. But in his The Gospel of Wealth he preached that ostentatious living and amassing private treasures was wrong. He praised the high British taxes on the estates of dead millionaires. He claimed that, in bettering society and people here on earth, one would be rewarded at the gates of Paradise and gave the vast bulk of his state to the creation of libraries and concert halls.

In a different gospel we read “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” a nice Jewish sentiment paralleling Jeremiah’s idea that the reason Jerusalem was about to fall was that the rich were exploiting the poor. Micah tells us what God expects of us and it’s not acquiring wealth for personal gain at the expense of others but “only to do justice and to love goodness and to walk modestly with your God.” Instead David Koch, Jewish multi-billionaire gives his money under the table to the Tea Party which believes that it’s wrong to tax to aid the tired the poor, the huddled masses who have been seduced into taking out foolish loans. When I was a student protester it was on behalf of the poor, the black, the grunts conscripted into the Vietnam War, none of which I was. Today the Tea Party people protest that their pockets are being picked by people who want to introduce a form of European Socialism. Pshaw! Adam Smith knew the truth, if only people would actually read him.

The 2010 Elections

The people have spoken, though I wish they’d spoken differently.

Two years ago Obama and the Democrats were America’s darlings. On November 2 we saw the power of big money behind the scenes and big voices on TV and radio. We Americans ride a pendulum. In 1964 the conservative movement was dead and in 1980 we got Reagan. In 1972 Nixon was overwhelmingly re-elected and then in ’74 was forced to resign in disgrace. Bill Clinton also lost congress two years into his first term and then handily defeated Bob Dole. The big Republican wins on Tuesday will be followed by big Democratic ones at a polling place near you sometime in the future—but not in two years, I wouldn’t think. Such is life.

A man whose intelligence I respect thinks that the stunning Republican victories were the result of, “the power of the American People, who do not want a ‘European Social Democracy’ type of society.” My immediate response was “You've made my point. The Democrats weren't proposing anything close to European style socialism, but the big money and the big mouths convinced the voters big-time that they were.”

It’s mid-term exam time. Question: Which European leader was the first to introduce and have his parliament pass legislation creating social security benefits, sickness insurance (2/3 of the premiums paid by employers, 1/3 by employees), and accident insurance (100% paid by employers), health insurance, civil marriage obligatory (and church marriages optional). Hint: He was Otto von Bismarck, not some far left socialist (in fact, he had a series of anti-Socialist laws passed). Why? One reason was to woo workers from the Socialist party to his Conservative one; the other was that the master of Realpolitik knew that Germany’s economy depended on a stable happy work force.

President Obama has two choices. He could say (and has already said) I’ve learned my lesson and want to compromise with the new Republican majority in the House, the empowered Republican minority in the Senate. This is the Bill Clinton approach, and it’s worked. Then, but it won’t now. Already, within the week of the elections GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) has rejected talk of bipartisanship and made crystal clear his party’s goal is to defeat Obama in 2012. The party of NO will not become the party of “Let’s roll up our sleeves and work together”. Right wing Republicans call Obama “Leviathan” perhaps an homage to Thomas Hobbes as they work to “Reverse the damage done by the Obama-Reid-Pelosi regime since 2008.” (Mark Tapscott, Editorial page editor of the blog “Washington Examiner”)

Memo to Mark Tapscott: Obama didn’t assume office in 2008.

Or Obama could go the other way (but I don’t think he will as he’s shown no inclination to do so when he had large majorities in congress) and roll up his sleeves and say, “I have an agenda, the American people knew what it was when they overwhelmingly elected me and I’m going to push it.” This was the attitude of Cheney and Bush when they rolled into Washington in 2001. They knew the people had wanted Gore and Liebermann, but they’d won and they pushed and pushed and got what they wanted from cowed Democrats and jubilant Republicans. But as I say, I don’t think Obama has it in him. He’s weak; eloquent, but lacking in the reality of how Washington works—not with a whimper but with a whip. Ask Dick Cheney.

The Republican leader in the House is likely to be the only Republican Jew in Congress, Eric Cantor of Virginia. (What does that tell us, that of all the Jews in the House and Senate only one is a Republican? It tells us that Jews are still overwhelmingly concerned with social justice, not bottom lines, with the economics of job creation, not trickle down tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans while the gap between poor and rich increases exponentially.) Jews won and lost this season. Rhode Island sent its first Jewish Congressman to the House and America lost Russ Feingold, a man who with John McCain fought and fought and fought and fought for election reform, only to have it trashed by the Supreme Court. It’s ironic that he was among the first victims of the big money splurge that resulted.

For a complete accounting of how Jews did this season, see: http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2010/11/02/2741564/tracking-the-races

My father's bar mitzvah

After my father died, we sold his apartment in the Promised Land (sometimes known as Florida) but before we put it on the market we found treasures including his parents’ naturalization papers which list him as a one year old, but what struck me most was an invitation to his bar mitzvah. “Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Stein Request the honor of your presence at the Confirmation (and then in Hebrew ‘Bar Mitzvah’) of their son Joseph on Saturday April 10th, 1926 at 9 A.M. at Machzike Talmud Torah of Borough Park 1319-43rd Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. Reception at 8 P.M. at their residence 1847-48th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.”

I wonder if I’m the only reader of the Voice & Herald ever to receive an invitation to their father’s bar mitzvah. The section from the Torah that morning was Sh’mini which among other things describes the deaths of two of Aaron’s sons and his silence in response. The Haftarah was from the book of II Samuel describing the moving of the recaptured Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and the death of one of the men escorting it who made the mistake of touching it when it seemed to fall from its cart. Sixty years later his grandson Daniel, our first born, read the same texts. Life can be odd that way.

I’ve tried to get the weather but people who write columns on typewriters don’t readily have access to such information. But what intrigues me more is that I know the future of those there in a way my grandchildren will know my future and the world as it unfolds beyond our time. I’m just visiting this planet; we all are. Some of us try to make it a better place in our limited allotted time; others simply reside as a tenant in someone else’s apartment, making no improvements, others exploit all advantages intended or not. I do not pass judgment as I am as often willing to laugh at the world’s absurdities from the sidelines as I am to roll up my sleeves to resolve them.

But I know that in 1926 Hitler was merely an ex-con heading up an obscure political party considered too radical to succeed; that the Great Depression was still three years into the future; Stalin would have his show trials in 1936; Pearl Harbor was fifteen years away; my parents married eleven months later and I came along seventeen months after that. None of this was known on that bright sunny day (as I picture it in my mind) when my father read from the Torah and haftarah way back then, eighty-four years ago.

What’s in store for us? One of the things I’ve learned as an historian is that attempting to predict the future is a fool’s game. The old cliché about history repeating itself is a canard, not a truth. Economists and political scientists try to anticipate events and trends all the time, and fail. They study their charts and computer print outs and fail to account for this little thing or that and so they are wrong as often as right. If it were otherwise we’d all be millionaires. After all, who in 1926 was predicting the Great Depression or could have foretold that in seven years Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany?

In Berlin there’s currently a showing of Hitler mementos which opened with some trepidation. This is the first time a German museum has had such an exhibit, and the curators say they have taken great care to avoid glorifying the villain who is their subject. The Central Council of Jews in Germany acknowledges that the timing is right, given today’s political climate where Germans are nervous about the economy and immigrants and some in the lower middle class seem to want a leader to extract them form the doldrums—paralleling some of the conditions of 1933. Exhibits are set up in ways to discourage neo-Nazis from taking heroic photos of themselves near images of Hitler. But Hitler though dead is still a living presence, alive to those who fear foreigners, non-Christians, the better educated. In America their ilk is confined, generally, to the wilds of Idaho and Montana (except when they emerge as a Timothy McVey in Oklahoma City).

None of this was known when my father, a young boy of thirteen innocently celebrated becoming a man in 1926, to which event I’ve just been invited.

A Newspaper's dilemma

There’s a current aphorism. “No good deed goes unpunished.” Case in point, the New Jersey Jewish Standard of Teaneck. Like this paper it has a page to announce bar and bat mitzvahs, births, engagements and weddings. But when the paper printed the announcement of a gay engagement, the consequences set an intercollegiate record for the number of times the word “disgusting” could be used in a single news cycle.

You’re familiar with the incident? If not, here are the pertinent details. In its September 24 issue the paper informed that two gay Jewish men were to marry. This disgusted local Orthodox Jews (and in Teaneck this is a formidable group to antagonize) which complained that community standards had been violated. Embarrassed, the paper issued an apology the next issue and said it would never do so again. The pro-marriage equality community was disgusted by this turn about and demanded that in future the paper publish gay wedding announcements. But that reversal sparked even more furor, prompting the newspaper this week to change course again, this time expressing regret for its hasty apology of the previous week. As of now, it's not clear what the newspaper's policy will be. To adjust a familiar quotation (by Sir Walter Scott) “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to please”

We have four parties at play here. First there is Avi Smolen and Justin Rosen who wish to marry and though Orthodox have found a local Conservative rabbi to perform the ceremony. (A quick Ask.com search suggests that New Jersey does not recognize gay marriage so the whole question may be mute other than symbolically anyway.) Then there’s the Standard which thought it was doing a mitzvah by accepting the notice (and then by apologizing and then by re-apologizing). The Orthodox community is trying to protect what it considers the sanctity of marriage in Jewish law and custom while marriage equality people believe that the newspaper should reflect current sensibilities, or at least their sensibilities. In none of the above is there error, which makes the problem that much more difficult to resolve.

(Years ago, the editorial board of this newspaper discussed what we should do if we were sent notice of a gay engagement or wedding. The debate was heated but polite. I was of the “we should think twice before offending accepted morality mode back then, before I had a column, and in the end we took a rare vote and narrowly decided to accept what we were sent. Since then, we’ve received no such announcements, though my guess is that from now on we will. As I remember it the word “disgusting” was never used, either by the pro or anti sides, but we were younger then.) Back to our story:

Question: Should gay people be allowed to marry? (This is a question for the states to resolve, not me. It pits thousands of years of tradition against current standards of individual choice. If it were up to me government would get out of the marriage license business and let the chips fall where they may, but it’s not up to me.)

Question: If a gay couple wants to marry, should Jewish clergy perform the service? (This is a relatively easy one, and the New Jersey young men found the correct solution. Since what they were doing would be offensive [disgusting] to their rabbi, they found a rabbi who would do it.)

Question: Should rabbinical organizations permit or prohibit their members from performing gay marriages? (Well, the Orthodox say “no” in an unequivocal voice while the Conservative and Reform leave it up to the rabbis and/or their congregations to decide for themselves. This passes the buck. I think the Orthodox are correct in taking a stand unlike the Conservative and Reform organizations which seem to fear to.)

Question: Should Jewish newspapers publish notices of Jewish engagements/weddings? (Community standards have changed since I was worried about offending them. Since getting this column I have offended Orthodox standards on a few occasions, but I’m a columnist expressing an opinion, not the paper of record of the Jewish community of Rhode Island. If we could avoid offending the Orthodox, we should, but we should not exclude those who believe in marriage equality whether they are gay or straight. Does this mean not publishing any engagement/marriage announcements? I hope not.)

Messrs. Smolen and Rosen are scheduled to be married on October 17. It’s not an accepting world they are entering. I wish them luck.

Lea's Torah

The room which moments earlier had been filled with the sounds of adults talking and children running and laughing was suddenly hushed, profoundly quiet except for the scratching of a quill. The last two lines of the book of Deuteronomy were being inscribed onto a parchment section which would soon be sewn to its predecessors in the completion of a Torah scroll. As the scribe Jamie Shear dipped his quill into ink and then wrote, reciting each word before he did so, we his audience at Temple Emanu-El watched silently the fulfillment of an ancient command to write the words of the covenant for every generation. When he was finished the children and the adults started to dance and to sing, but there was more task to be done before the secular could be called holy, before the skin of an animal and wood and ink transcended the level of commonplace to become the sacred.

Our new Torah at Temple Emanu-El had been paid for by subscription. We’d recently lost a favorite teacher, Lea Eliash. Someone, I don’t know who, proposed that a fitting tribute to a woman who had devoted her life in America to teaching Hebrew to young children and mature adults after surviving the terrors of the Holocaust in Europe, would be to honor her memory with a new Torah scroll, and so was launched the “Lea’s Letters” campaign. And now the last of those letters, the word Yisrael, was being inscribed as permanently as anything in this world can be, to be read by bar and bat mitzvah candidates and their parents and grandparents, and by their children and grandchildren for as along as there is a Temple Emanu-El, and beyond, I imagine. Its rollers and handles (called in Hebrew Atzei Chaim, in English “Trees of Life”) were carved by her grandson out of wood from her dining room table, a place I’ve sat at and enjoyed meals and conviviality as have many in the community. Now it is reduced in size but increased in stature. Lea is gone, we all knew that, but this piece of her home will provide ample reminder of her presence and importance to the community for as long as we remembered where they were from. The collective gasp as this was revealed was almost the sound of a breeze through the tall grasses. In time, I suppose there will be fewer and fewer people who will recall that the wood of the trees of life were from the dining room table of a loving and gentle woman who once lived here, but for a while, at least, we who were there will remember, and when we do, her sweetness and grace will be called to mind.

In my mind scribes are old men in black suits, pot bellies, blackened fingers and shtreimels, or at least black fedoras. Shear does not fit the mold. Rail thin and smiling shyly he covers his head with a knitted kippah and while he has a beard, it’s a stylish goatee (I recently had one like that until my wife pointed out that enough was enough). Born and raised in Montreal, he attended High School and Bar Ilan University in Israel, moving there permanently four years ago. Emanu-El’s is his sixth torah scroll. It has the standard 245 columns, each checked by the scribe and then by two rabbis and then by a computer which scans it and spots errors, if any. At Emanu-El, just as he was about to sew the final stage onto the rollers, he noticed that an aleph, one of the letters he’d just written, was just slightly off. He described an aleph as a vov with two yuds, one above and one below. The upper yud was more of a blob than he felt appropriate and with the audience surrounding him he scraped off the offending digit and replaced it with a better one. Now he was finished and when the last stitch connecting parchment to roller was completed we broke out into a she’hecheyanu prayer—Blessed are you, Lord, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion. Nothing else seemed as appropriate.

Lea Eliash now has a suitable memorial; Jamie Shear now has completed another Torah—but he has another almost done which he’ll deliver to a congregation in Hong Kong next month. And we of Temple Emanu-El have a new torah, light enough to be lifted by thirteen year olds and solid enough to contain the words of our people as they have been laboriously penned by other scribes, again, and again, and again.

Save us from ourselves!

Rosh Hashanah is over, though lingering in my mind are its tunes (as well as my envy of those who can stand without resorting to their hands pulling on the pew in front or pushing down on the chair below. That ability is but a memory in my case.)

On Yom Kippur we are enjoined to ask forgiveness of those we might have offended. As a columnist, I have a greater opportunity to offend than most. I can’t tell you how many times people have stopped me to tell me that they enjoy my columns but that they disagree with this that or the other thing. Given the opportunity to talk, we do; if the opportunity isn’t there, I thank them and go on with whatever it was that I was doing. So, if there are those of you out there who by my columns I have offended, please don’t take them personally. The only difference between us is that I’ve been given this forum. You have the ability to write to me (many do) or to write directly to the newspaper which will print your letter if you ask. Dialogue is thus achieved with the opportunity of finding common ground. This is not exactly asking for forgiveness, but, hey, I’m imperfect and this is as close to asking for it as I can get this year. Maybe I’ll do better next year, given the opportunity.

OK, by a show of hands, how many of you think it is a really, really, really stupid thing for Muslims to want to build a mosque within debris range of Ground Zero? Whew, lots of hands. And how many of you think it’s OK to build the Park51 Muslim Community Center anywhere local planning authorities give permission? Just about the same number. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf , a Sufi Muslim, wants to build a 13 story Islamic Cultural Center two blocks from the World Trade Center. The facility would include a 500 seat auditorium, a theater, a performing arts center, a fitness center, a swimming pool, a basketball court and a child care area, a bookstore, a culinary school, an art studio, food courts, a September 11 memorial and, oh, by the way, a prayer space capable of accommodating between one and two thousand people. It’s this latter feature so close to Ground Zero that has raised the hackles of conservative opponents. (When Newt Gingrich argues that there shouldn’t be a Ground Zero mosque until a synagogue or church is built in Mecca he makes a very bad point. For all our faults, America is not, thank God, Saudi Arabia, and Mecca is a holy city while New York is as secular as it gets.)

Question: Do Muslims have a right to build a community center anywhere the law allows? The answer is yes. Does having the right to do something make it appropriate? Well, here we’re on shakier ground. The Taliban had the power, to destroy the Bamyan Buddhas in March, 2001, and so it did. The world is worse off for not having them any longer. Proponents of (a radical form of) Islam destroyed somebody else’s sacred object—as the Rev. Terry Jones was willing to destroy Korans. Why are we more upset with the one than the other? Perhaps because of the sacredness of the printed word, perhaps because Muslims take these things more seriously than Buddhists.

At Auschwitz, sacred (surely that’s not the right word, but what is?) to Jews, Carmelite nuns built a cross on land they owned, and Jews were outraged and eventually it was removed. (Is it a fair generalization to say that when Jews, who are few in number, are outraged they work the system, while when Muslims in the majority are—think here the Danish cartoons and the threatened Koran burning—they go berserk? Just asking.)

Another example of doing what you can but not thinking of the consequences (or caring about them) is when Ariel Sharon took it upon himself to walk on the Temple Mount. He was entitled to. There was no law to prevent an Israeli MK from walking anywhere in Jerusalem, but the fact that Sharon thought to bring a squad of bodyguards with him suggests that he knew he was stirring the pot. Is this the same thing as the Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero? In a way, it is. People with rights will want to exercise them regardless of consequence. And when the violence results they will point to the other guys and say, “Look, we didn’t cause the ruckus, they did.”

Avinu Malkenu, save us from ourselves.

Isaiah the Prophet and the Tax Code

I have many faults, and only a few virtues. On hot steamy nights I roll and toss thinking of the things I’ve done that I’m ashamed of (some of which date to my elementary school days at PS 193 in Brooklyn). So, yes, I have my faults, but being a professional economist isn’t one of them. I say that to alert you to the fact that what follows is the product of thought experiments, not statistical analysis. (You know Mark Twain’s comment on statistics, of course: “There are three kinds of liars—Liars, damned liars and statistics.”)

The question: Which is more deleterious, income tax or sales tax? The answer is, obviously, sales tax. It’s regressive, with the poor paying the same amount as the rich; it discourages, or at least does not encourage purchases; and it’s annoying—always to my surprise the $10.00 item really costs $10.70 by the time I get to the cash register. It may add to the coffers of the state or city, and it may be used to discourage things society wants to discourage—cigarette smoking and gasoline guzzling, but on the whole it’s pretty indefensible. The income tax is no less annoying, but at least in theory, before the lobbyists get to add loopholes for the accountants and lawyers to exploit, people pay into government in accordance to what government does for them. Rich people need armies to protect them more than poor people; they need roads to transport their goods more than poor people who have few goods to ship.

So, here’s the thought experiment: What would happen if the solons who make up the state legislature voted to drop the sales tax (except on gasoline and cigarettes) and, to keep the state’s coffers from running out of cash, increased the income tax? Well, on the one hand there would be great hurrahing by the poor, of which we have many; on the other hand the wealthy would complain that the poor had their hands in other people’s pockets, as though Curt Schilling hadn’t already thought to do that.

If there were no sales tax, people would buy more, improving the state’s economy (this assumes that the capitalists who control the market don’t take advantage of the situation by raising their prices by 7%). People would shop in Rhode Island rather than in near-by Massachusetts and Connecticut. I have been known to take a day trip to New Hampshire because the state liquor store has no sales tax; no sales tax here might encourage people from the Nutmeg State to come here and buy a car. A week ago I went to Home Depot in Attleboro to price some materials. The place was practically empty, which struck me as odd. Then it hit me. Everybody was waiting for the tax-free weekend that would arrive in a few days. Clearly the tax-free weekend was doing nobody any good. People were not buying in advance of it (fewer profits to the store, fewer tax dollars to the Commonwealth which would not receive anything on the weekend. The problem is the temporary nature of the tax holiday. The solution would be to have no sales tax at all. More stores would open employing more people, providing more goods and services to the people. It’s simple; no sales tax means greater prosperity for Rhode Island.

And the income tax? If (as I do) you believe that taxes are a necessary evil to pay for the services we have come to depend on, such as schools and police and firefighters and the court system and (sadly they are needed) the jails, etc. increase the amount paid in income tax and eliminate the loopholes. The poorest among us won’t suffer, the richest can afford it. After all, the BMW they buy will only cost $60,000 not $64,200.

Where’s the Jewish content in this? The High Holidays approach. Each year we read:

This is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
...
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,

Surely, one way to approach the ideal set forth by Isaiah, which Jews since time immemorial have read on Yom Kippur, would be to abolish the sales tax and increase the income tax. Amen, Selah.

A time to be born and a time to die

I recently attended the funeral of a woman I barely knew, though her husband has been an acquaintance for many years. He had recruited me to be on the Board of the Voice & Herald and though we often clash on policy, there’s obviously mutual respect and affection which our disagreements never diminish. For the past few months he’d absented himself from board meetings because his wife’s cancer had metastasized and he felt he had to devote all of his time to caring for her. She, knowing the using her allotted time to say goodbye to friends and relatives, tying up loose ends, of which there were very few, meticulous in life as she was. In mid-June I saw them at the airport, I on the way to my son’s wedding, they wishing bon voyage to their grandchildren who had come for a visit, and frankly I was surprised how well she looked. But six weeks later she was gone, with heavy heart I drove to her funeral.

Temple Beth El was packed with those of us who felt my friend’s loss, who came to bid their friend a final good-bye. Cantor Seplowin sang plaintively, rabbi Mack led us in reciting the 23rd psalm. A daughter spoke lovingly of her mother and rabbi Gutterman’s eulogy was on the mark. Rather than quoting a biblical text, he chose a poem I vaguely remembered from school but hadn’t thought of in years—Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music” which concludes with these lines:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

With that lament still ringing in my ears, feeling perhaps a little of the loss my friend must be suffering, I drove to another ceremony, this time a bris, but in one regard at least, not an ordinary bris. Every baby is a unique individual; every baby is potential energy already becoming kinetic. But this baby, this new life, this hope of the future was being attended to his extraordinary great-grandfather. As usual all the men in the room were a bit nervous, making corny jokes, trying not to look, trying not to feel the momentary pain inflicted on the child. None of this was unusual, but in averting my eye from the ritual event I saw, not for the first time, of course, the numbers tattooed onto the great-grandfather’s left forearm, the numbers he’d been branded with as a young man barely out of boyhood on his first day in Auschwitz, that Hell. He’d lost both parents and a sister and, for a while, his faith—but had survived and regained that faith and had become a rabbi. (You can read of his experiences in his memoir For Decades I was Silent) And now, 65 years after he was at the edge of the pit, at death’s door, he was attending to the covenant ceremony of his child’s child’s child. Of course the baby cried, of course others did as well, but when the tears were wiped away, when the father gave his son to his wife to hold, the three men and then the grandmother danced a joyous hora to the rhythmic clapping of the assembled guests and the singing of “simintov and mazal tov”.

The joy at the bris didn’t wipe away the feelings of regret I felt for the loss of my friend’s wife, but it did remind of hope. From the grave my friend’s wife would never return, but rescued from the grave’s edge the great-grandfather was now dancing. Neither family was aware of the other; I was the only connecting link; but life was going on; it was progressing despite the losses, despite the despair. God was in his heavens was welcoming a wonderful woman, recently come to His kingdom while down here a little baby was the center of our attentions as his mother lovingly held him while his male progenitors were dancing a hora as we clapped and sang in joy.

For centuries philosophers and theologians have, to no avail, tried to figure out the purpose of life, to make sense of the brief period we’re all allotted within the billions of years of the earth’s existence. Attending a funeral and a bris within an hour of each other puts things into perspective though, don’t you think?

Can a Jew be an Anti-Zionist?

Better be careful here, Josh. When walking into a minefield things can go KA-BOOM in the night. And in the day. And I enter this particular field because?

So, here’s my question, one that I’ve been thinking about for the past half-century. “To be a Jew, must one be a Zionist?” The key word here is “must” as in “I must breathe to live.” And what is meant by Zionist? Until someone suggests a better response, let this suffice: A Zionist believes, as a minimum, that there is something called “the Jewish people” which combines a unique combination of genetic and historic heritages and has a right to create a state of its own in (here’s the tricky part) the Promised Land/Palestine/ Israel. Now obviously one can be a Zionist and not a Jew. Many Gentiles fall into this category. I wrote a book, “Our Great Solicitor”, about one such man, Josiah Wedgwood, who in the 1930s and ‘40s strongly advocated for the Jews in Parliament. Some Fundamentalist Protestants make a religion of their support for Israel, their motivations though sometimes give us pause.

But let’s stick with the question of Jews. In the beginning of the movement to create a Jewish state, many Orthodox opposed the idea, arguing that only with the coming of the Messiah would it be appropriate. Concurrently, many in the Reform camp were also hostile to the idea most famously in the so-called Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 which declared that they no longer expected Jews to return to a national homeland in Palestine. This was an American version of the still older claim of Jews in Napoleonic France that they were Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion, not a separate people. But that was then. With the rise of the Nazis a lot changed.

I consider it a form of blasphemy to argue that God brought on (in a variant that He allowed) the Holocaust so as to advance the ingathering of His people. But while the theory may be obnoxious, the reality is that the Holocaust allowed Jews and Gentiles to re-think their attitudes toward the creation of a Jewish state. Ironically, then, the attempt to destroy the Jews created a climate in which the State of Israel could be born.

As always there are those who cling to old ideas even when they are repudiated by new realities. Such people open up buggy whip factories and then wonder why there are no customers. In America we have the American Council for Judaism, the current president of which, Stephen Naman, was recently profiled in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/26religion.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=anti-zionst%20jews&st=cse). Like the Haredim who continue to deny the existence of the Israel upon which at the same time they try to impose their values, Naman’s group has perverted the old Reform concept that Jews are members of a religious group, not a people. I say perverted because he goes farther than the old Pittsburgh Platform which was merely non-Zionist. His group, founded in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War is adamantly anti-Zionist.

The Times article purports (Naman must have been the source, though what follows is not directly attributed to him) that “The rejection of Zion goes back to the Torah itself, with its accounts of the Hebrews’ rebelling against Moses on the journey toward the Promised land and pleading to return to Egypt.” But this is an absurd understanding of the text. Yes, the bible is replete with examples of the followers of Moses rejecting his leadership and pleading to return to Egypt, but that crowd was always pictured as the weak and cowardly, the slaves who were free of their old masters but not of their fears. It was that crowd that God in His despair almost destroyed (on several occasions) opting instead to allow it to die out over 40 years. It’s with that crowd that the Council looks to inspiration? Pshaw.

So I return to my original question. Must a Jew be a Zionist? Well, Jews can eat pork and still be Jews. They can vote Republican and still be Jews. They can be pro-Israel and pro-peace and pro-Israel and anti-withdrawal from the West Bank. All are Jews, but if to be a Jew requires stating “Next Year in Jerusalem” and meaning it, at least for the moment, at least for others who are persecuted, then maybe being an anti-Zionist is incompatible with being a Jew. Ka-Boom.

The Wedding of Jeremy and Amanda

There are those, and sometimes I am one, who think the world is going to hell in a handcart. For evidence, read a newspaper. But there are times, there are times…

Look up the word “kvell” in Leo Rosten’s classic The Joys of Yiddish and you’ll find: “To beam with immense pride and pleasure, most commonly over an achievement of a child or grandchild; to be so proudly happy ‘your buttons can burst.’” Then look up “naches” and you’ll see: “Proud pleasure, special joy—particularly from the achievements of a child.” Put them both together and you get “Only from your children can anyone shep (derive) such naches as makes you kvel.”

On June 13 (read that as 6/13 [613], the number of commandments according to traditional Jewish reckoning) my son Jeremy, the cantor at Congregation Beth Israel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, married Amanda née Ruppenthal.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the multi-day festivities, but will, if I may indulge myself mention one event that took during the post-ceremony celebration.

Among the guests were several cantorial classmates of Jeremy’s and some local cantors and cantor Brian Mayer of Temple Emanu-El, whose first bar mitzvah student Jeremy had been. As the evening wore down they sat in a circle, and each sang one of the traditional seven blessings over the bride and groom while the others hummed in the background. In between blessings they hummed a gentle niggun (a wordless Chassidic melody). It was an indescribably spiritual moment as the cantors serenaded one of their own.

This was my toast to the young couple:

“When I first heard Amanda’s voice it was on the telephone, the evening that Jeremy called to tell us that he had asked, and she that had said yes. The first thing I remember hearing was her laughter, her infectious giggle. I didn’t yet know what she looked like, but I could hear in her voice sweetness and joy and I knew then that like Jeremy, this was someone who could see the lighter side of things. Jeremy and Amanda, may your home always be filled with the joyous sounds of laughter.

“Amanda, we found out that night that you were a musician, a clarinetist. Jeremy the flautist had found a kindred spirit who could take black notes on lined paper and transform them into glorious sounds, giving pleasure to those who hear. Amanda and Jeremy, may your home always be filled with the sounds of music emanating from your talents.

“Jeremy, you were always the one in the family most connected to our religious traditions and practices, and so took your two loves, of music and Judaism, and combined them to become a cantor. Amanda, you found Judaism in college and now you, too, are a Jewish communal worker. Jeremy and Amanda, may your home always be a meeting place for like-minded people who strive to improve the world by maintaining a strong connection to Judaism’s core values.

“Jeremy, child of the Ocean State, and Amanda, daughter of the Mid-West, you begin your lives together with a trip to Costa Rica, hopefully the first of many sharing the sights and sounds of exotic places. May your home serve as a rendezvous point for people from around the world you have met and befriended.

“Jeremy and Amanda, as you celebrate the coming of the Sabbath bride each Friday evening, think of us, who live so far away, and in your minds, know that whether they are at our table or elsewhere I bless our children each Friday night. And in the fullness of time, when you are lucky enough to have a first child and then children, may you bless them each week, as I’ve blessed my three sons, and then Suzanne [my first daughter-in-law] and now you, Amanda who I welcome with love and joy into our family.

“To Jeremy and Amanda, long may their home be a source of joy for themselves and for those who love them.”

Well, maybe if there is such love in the world as is evident between Jeremy and Amanda the place ain’t going to hell in a handcart in such a great hurry. May you all know the naches we had, and kvell.

The Gaza Blockade disaster

For June 11, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Josh Stein

The world’s attention is on the catastrophic oil spill off the Gulf Coast and the president’s enfeebled response, a disappointment to his advocates (I include myself), confirmation to his foes. But while the oil continued to spew from the earth beneath the sea, on the high seas, Israel’s navy attempted to commandeer a flotilla bent on breaking its blockade of Gaza. The consummation, deaths aboard the lead ship, was devoutly to be wished by the organizers of the expedition. For them it was a no lose situation. If Israel allowed the boats to land it would be a small triumph. If the materials were seized without deaths, and, as the Israelis promised, checked then sent to Gaza, it would be a lesser victory, but not nearly as good theater as what actually happened. That was a bonanza—or was it a calculation? We’ll never know. Israel will transfer the food, medicine and building materials to Gaza and Hamas will have martyrs, the world will be able to blame Israel for the loss of life. The world will little note, nor long remember concurrent Muslim murders by Muslims. As Tom Friedman reminds in the Times, within the week, Muslim suicide bombers murdered nearly 100 Muslims in mosques in Pakistan and pro-Hamas gunmen destroyed a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02friedman.html?hp)

On May 31, when I first heard the news of the deaths aboard ship I had a feeling akin to dispair. “Where,” I asked myself “are the people who planned and executed the raid on Entebbe airport to free hostages 2500 miles away?” Israel was the world’s hero back then on July 4, 1976, almost upstaging all the hoopla of the 200 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Lightning fast the Israelis freed 100 people. According to the mission’s overall commander, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, the plan succeeded because since “no one expected the Israelis to take such risks … they took them.” One Israeli was killed, the leader of the strike force, Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of the current Prime Minister. But that was then. Now we have been snookered by people whose public relations skills are exceeded only by Israel’s ability to fall into an obvious trap.

Ehud Toledano, University Chair for Ottoman Studies, Department of Middle East and African History at Tel Aviv University (and a cousin of mine) writes in an E-mail that the commandos were sent into a mission that was ill-planned and ill-conceived by the high command of the navy.” There was “no, or totally insufficient intelligence, both in terms of info gathering and analysis... And, hence, a bad plan for what was wrongly supposed to be a group of peaceniks, but in fact were terror-trained Islamic radicals, ready to use violence in order to kill our soldiers, not just stop the takeover, which they knew they could not do.” He points out that information is “coming out now …to the effect that they were well organized, armed, and had thousands of dollars in their pockets. Families in Istanbul told the press a few hours ago that their relatives had a strong desire to die as martyrs.” This confirms a statement in last Wednesday’s Times that “The Gaza Freedom March made its motives clear in a statement before Monday’s deadly confrontation: ‘A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.’” Ehud continues: Those seeking martyrdom “were on the upper deck, about 40 of them, with the [foreign sympathizers] staying on the lower decks, [who] therefore had no knowledge of what was being planned and executed upstairs. It is due to their high skilled professionalism that the commandos avoided being killed and ended up killing so few of the terrorists.”

Amos Oz, published in the same issue of the Times the Friedman column appears bemoans two simultaneous sieges—Israel of Gaza; Israel by Arabs. He wants Israel to sign a peace with the Fatah government in the West Bank, returning to the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ capital. Once this is done, Hamas in Gaza will either continue to be isolated or will join with Fatah. More pie in the sky? I think so. Even an isolated Hamas still has the capacity to do irreparable harm, much as that tiny hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Neither is going away; Israel can sign peace treaties with willing Arab partners, but the unwilling will still be there and president Obama will probably be as incapable of dealing with the one as he is with the other. I wish it weren’t so, but my wishes count for little.

From the pages of Al Jazeera

For May 28, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Josh Stein

There are those Jews, of which I am not one, who see in President Obama a crypto-Muslim or at least a crypto-enemy of Israel driving it to make suicidal concessions, and who feel those Jews who support him are dupes (or maybe dopes). There are other Jews of which I am not one, who are urging the president to force Israel, for its own good, to conciliate its policies towards the Palestinians so that a two-state solution can happen in our time.

Then there’s As’ad AbuKhalil.

He’s an articulate Lebanese-American professor of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus who describes himself in his blog as an “Angry Arab” (http://angryarab.blogspot.com/). I first ran across him in an Al Jazeera posting (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201051664435120219.html).

The central thesis of AbuKhalil’s piece is that President Obama is a tool of the Zionists and that Arabs have betrayed Palestinians by urging compromise, not war. (This seems to fly in the face of those Jews who see Obama as a tool of the Arabs as well as those who see Palestinians as desirous of peace.) How typical is he? It’s hard to tell but his blog is filled with complimentary posts.

He begins with:

“Every year, Arabs around the world commemorate al-Nakba ... But poems and speeches are now too embarrassing to recite and Arab governments barely seem interested in remembering - so busy are they trying to win Israel's approval for direct or indirect negotiations. While in the past, Arab governments spent money combating Zionist propaganda, last year, the Arab League - with Saudi funding - purchased advertisements in Western newspapers with the aim of convincing Israel that Arab governments are, in fact, eager to make peace and normalize relations.”

I remember those ads and wonder why AbuKhalil thinks they reflect reality, not subterfuge, but it’s his piece. I don’t write for Al Jazeera. As to the Palestinians themselves, AbuKhalil sees evidence of betrayal.

“As far as the Palestinian Authority (PA) is concerned, revolutionaries belong in museums and [traditional Palestinian foods] are celebrated as the only elements of the rich tapestry of Palestinian national identity.”

Palestinian politicians are excoriated as though they were Zionists:
“Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, has become the new darling of the West. The Western press has, accordingly, produced an unending supply of laudatory and fawning pieces about the leadership of the man who …did not receive more than two per cent of the support of the Palestinian people in the last legislative elections.”
He sums up with, “The reality is that Arab regimes washed their hands of the Palestinian struggle long ago.”

The alternative to this cowardly behavior? Armed struggle.

“Armed struggle was responsible for bringing the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world….It delivered the Palestinian people from a time when their very status and identity was denied to a time when the UN had to recognize the fruits of Palestinian self-determination. Armed struggle also unified the Palestinian people under one umbrella and generated Arab support; PLO military operations inside Israel often featured Arabs from across the region. It also instilled a sense of pride among Palestinians and put an end to the sense of despair that prevailed in the wake of al-Nakba.”

I believe he’s right. Nobody was paying attention to Palestinians until they started hijacking airplanes in the 1960s, but oddly enough, Yasser Arafat, the man who authorized the hijacking of planes, the leader of the Intifada, was as bad as the rest. He is responsible for the weak Palestinian government in Ramallah “which operates at the discretion of Israel and its Western allies, protecting Israel from legitimate Palestinian armed struggle.” (I’m reminded when I read this of attacks made by some J Streeters who excoriate Elie Wiesel, Abe Foxman and Alan Dershowitz. Nobody, it turns out is a prophet in his own homeland.)

In a televised debate which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 23, 2010 AbuKhalil stated that President Obama “has given free rein to the Zionist lobby to do whatever it likes, both in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy.” Domestic policy, too? I’m a Zionist but I wait in vain to see Republicans proven right—that Obama will bring about a European-style Social Democracy.

As I asked, earlier, is AbuKhalil typical? He’s certainly articulate, if somewhat inconsistent. He cannot be ignored by the proponents of a two state solution.

Jewish Delis Finally in Israel

Tired of reading yet again about narrowly beating back divestment proposals in California Universities, (Berkeley and San Diego) by student government, I turned to the Forward for escapist folderol. Amidst the discussion of the serious and the portentous I found an article that surprised, yet rekindled memories of my Brooklyn youth.

I lived on Avenue M, just off East 27th Street which, when cars were not intruding, was also our stickball and sewer-to-sewer touch football playground. Farther down Avenue M was a shopping district including a couple of bakeries (Ebinger’s and the Elm), a movie theater (also called the Elm), a pizzeria, a Chinese restaurant and an Italian one, a toy store, grocery stores, an appetizer store, and two kosher delis, these latter a veritable foretaste of the world to come. One was the Palace, the other must have had a name, but I can’t recall it. In the delis everyone knew what everyone else had ordered as the waiters would shout to the kitchen, “Two salamis on rye, one tongue, two corn beefs and a side of fries.” The official drinks were Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray or root beer. In the summers, walking home from the elevated subway stop on East 16th Street, from whatever my summer job in the City was (we called Manhattan “The City”) I’d stop at the deli whose name I can’t remember and buy a knish or a hotdog mustard and sour kraut on a roll and eat it on the way home.

Such a street scene was duplicated on Avenues J and U and on Kings Highway so I assumed this was the norm in the Jewish world. You can then imagine my shock when I read in the Forward that a kosher deli in Tel Aviv called Ruben, was the first of its kind in the country! How could that be? Surely there are Ashkenazi Jews in Israel who would have brought the recipes and the skills to make corned beef, pastrami, tongue, knishes etc. from Eastern Europe.

Turns out, according to Gil Shefler who wrote the piece under review, that yes, there are Ashkenazi Jews in Tel Aviv but deli fare was not Eastern European in origin; it was American! Who knew? The idea wasn’t brought over to New York from the old countries; it was invented by immigrants from the old countries. Those who skipped the opportunity of coming to the land where the streets were paved with gold (AKA the Lower East Side) going instead straight to Palestine couldn’t bring what they didn’t have, so yes there are plenty of falafel joints, and humus is not unknown but only recently has the deli arrived.

So the question is how good is Ruben the delicatessen? Shefler (I picture him in my mind as munching on a knish) conducted an unscientific survey:
A recent immigrant from Washington, DC, who grew up on cold cuts from Katz’s Kosher Supermarket in Rockville, Md., gave it a measured seal of approval.
“The atmosphere’s a bit odd: It’s like a chic, scaled-down version of a deli. Where are the sweaty old Jews?” he said. “But for Israel it’s not bad. It’s what you’d expect a satisfactory Tel Aviv take on the food would be. I’ll be back because the meat tastes fine and I love my pastrami.” An immigrant from London, was even less enthusiastic (if you can imagine). While acknowledging that some guys from Long Island liked the place, “For me,” he said, “the sandwich here pales in comparison to the salt beef sandwiches served at Bloom’s in Golders Green, mostly on account of the bread.”

So a mixed reception ranging from “Not so great” to “Poor”—from the mavens who grew up with deli. To compound the negativity, food critic Janna Gur doubts the business plan. “Ruben is a fun place which serves good food, but I find it hard to believe deli foods will gain widespread popularity in Israel—it just doesn’t fit the mentality.” Maybe, but maybe Israelis are not the prime audience. You and I, Jews from America (especially refugees from New York or Chicago or Montreal) who, on a visit to the Holy Land hunger for corned beef on rye with a glezel Dr. Brown’s are, I imagine, the real sought after market.

OK; next week back to serious discussion of the world and its Jews.

Appalling Students

Nachshon Litzedek is a Jewish student at the University of California, Santa Cruz who says he has struggled with his Jewish identity since he was 12 when an Israeli soldier came to his class in Hebrew school, according to the Jewish Faculty Roundtable (JFR), a list-serve for Jewish faculty around the country addressing Jewish issues on college campuses in the United States.

According to JFR, Litzedek said, “The soldier tried to explain to explain to me why he had to shoot Palestinian kids who were throwing rocks at him. They were about the same age as me.” So, on April 20, on Yom Ha-Atzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) Litzedek was demonstrating against Israel. “This is an audacious day to protest,” he said. “One country’s celebration is another country’s catastrophe. I feel obligated to be a part of this because I’m Jewish. If anyone understands ghetto-ization, persecution and genocide, it’s the Jewish people. Specifically because of my Jewish values I can sympathize with the Palestinians.” There is an interesting choice of words here.

When Litzedek speaks of catastrophe he is using the English language word for al-nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” which is how Palestinians describe the victory of Israel in 1948/49. Odd, isn’t it. And, the JFR reports, in the Cesar Chavez Student Center at the university, pro-Palestinian students waved the Palestinian flag over recumbent white-faced bodies participating in a “dead-in,” arguing for divestment from any companies that did business with Israel. The argument was that Johnson & Johnson and Exxon-Mobil were selling products in the bookstore, which they felt was “appalling.” “Why are we investing money in killing people?” asked a Palestinian student. “This is supposed to be a campus that’s committed to social justice... All of the budget cuts wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for war, so how do you feel about San Francisco State spending money on companies that fund the military?” Ah, Israel, it turns out, is responsible for the economic disaster that is California. Who knew?

Litzedek is appalled that Jewish soldiers defended themselves against rock throwers. I’m appalled that the powers-that-be in the Palestinian movement hid behind youthful rock throwers, cameras at the ready to record the massacre, disappointed when there was none, I imagine. I’m appalled that Litzedek seemed unaware that the previous day marked the commemoration of Jews killed in the various wars against surrounding Arab states and civilians killed by Arab terrorists.

The coincidence of dates is striking for another reason as well. On April 20, 1889, a son was born to Alois and Klara Hitler in the small Austrian border town of Braunau. That Israel could celebrate its coming into being on the anniversary of the birth of the Haman of the 20th century is an unparalleled vindication of the triumph of good over evil, a circumstance that occurs with depressing irregularity.

I remember when my youngest son was 11 and we were choosing when to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The synagogue had several dates available, but one stood out in my mind: April 20, 1986, what would have been Hitler’s 97th birthday. When my son was on the bimah, chanting his portion from the Torah, a thought came to mind: “Take that, you Nazi bastard; my son is having his bar mitzvah on your birthday! You fought a war to exterminate us, and failed. Today another Jewish boy has reached adulthood.” Not charitable words, perhaps, but I’m not sure why we should be charitable to those who wished us harm, who would have killed us all.

I don’t want to pretend that I associate calls for divestment with Nazism; it would be absurd. Such actions by Palestinians and their allies are a political means to achieve a political end, a political fight that ought to be countered by political action on the part of Israel’s friends.

Can there be peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians? Some say yes, but I wonder if generations of hatred, mistrust, fear and loathing can be eradicated by ink on a page. It can happen, I know. Look at Germany and France, enemies since at least the mid-19th century, fighting over Alsace and Lorraine whose territory was French, then German, then French, then German and now French again with the agreement of Germany.

Yes, it can happen, but is now the time it will happen? Is now the time to create a bifurcated Palestine surrounding Israel, each half cut off from the other? Let us explore Palestinian textbooks and TV; then we'll know better.

Advocates of peace now seem to envision an Israeli/Palestinian relationship comparable to that between the U.S. and Canada. They should think instead India/Pakistan.

Passover Reflections 2010

As I sit at this old Olivetti, its motor humming, its keys clickety clacking, its ribbon newly dipped in ink, perhaps the last of its breed still in service, Passover looms. But as you read this, the Seders are memories; the labor of preparations rewarded with the twin joys of hearty fellowship and over abundance of food. The theme of the events was freedom (or if you prefer, of God’s deliverance of His people from slavery). At our Seders for the past few years we mix contemporary song with ancient tradition as we sing the non-Christian parts of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and, to the same tune, “Solidarity Forever.” We sing Negro spirituals (“Let My People Go”) we sing “We Shall Overcome” and Hatikvah. We talk of Civil Rights struggles of the past and debate (for our guests are usually of mixed political views) gay marriage and universal health care. And we do all this in the comfort of our home, in the warmth of friendship, in the security of knowing that in America we are free and safe.

But it wasn’t always this way, we know. In 1943 the Jews of Warsaw, the few who had managed to survive the deportations to Treblinka, knowing that the end was near, gathered what arms they could to make a last ditch effort to… to what, I’m not sure. Not to survive, they knew that was no longer a possibility, and they were not attempting to follow the example of the Jews of Masada or of York, committing suicide to prevent being captured/murdered/humiliated by oppressors. No, the Jewish leadership of Warsaw meant to die with the dignity of resistance to those who were trying to transform them into sheep led calmly to their deaths. If during the fighting a few could escape, so much the better. The sewers were a way out for some, going over the wall for others, but not for many. For the majority of the Jewish survivors of the past four years of systematic starvation and forced deportation to death camps, the goal was to go down fighting. For Jürgen Stroop, the SS commander assigned to crush the rebellion, the challenge was almost too much. Facing unacceptable losses of his men he resorted to burning buildings, one by one, forcing the surviving Jews to flee into adjacent buildings ready to be set alight or into the sewers or onto the streets where they could more easily be rounded up or picked off. In the end, he entitled his report on the successful destruction of the Jews “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more!” though my English language copy is simply called the “The Stroop Report.”

It was on Passover that the Jews of Warsaw chose to time their rebellion, doomed though it was. Liberation was not gained; there were no miracles, no plagues descending from the finger of God striking the evil ones. We do commemorate the event, however with Yom HaShoah, timed to coincide with the rebellion in Warsaw. In my shul (Temple Emanu-El), each year a diminishing number of survivors rises to recite the names of family and friends who were killed by the Nazis. At Roger Williams University this year Hillel’s third annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture will take place a few days early, on April 8 at 5:00 when we host Deborah Slier and Ian Shine, co-editors of the recently discovered letters of Philip (“Flip”) Slier, a young Dutch Jew who while in a Nazi work camp before his deportation to Sobibor, was able to send out 86 letters and postcards and one telegram, materials serendipitously found only in 1997. The lecture is free and open to the public. (Full disclosure notice: I am the faculty advisor of the RWU Hillel.)

On another subject entirely, Jerusalem was never intended to be the capital of Palestine. In the UN partition plan the city, which had a majority Jewish population, was designated an international zone. Only with the attempt by Jordan to crush the new Jewish state was East Jerusalem, including the entire old city, seized. Israel conquered it in 1967 not from the Palestinians who never controlled it but from King Hussein of Jordan. The newly announced settlements may not be wise, but they certainly are not illegal.

J Street town meeting

The Chair recognizes the gentleman in the rear, waving the American flag.

Mr. Chairman I rise to propose that as there is no J Street in Washington, that we create one.

(The Chair): Why in God’s name would we do that?

So that at the end of the day we can say we’ve accomplished something, useless though it might be.

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)

Order, come to order! The chair recognizes the woman in the babushka.

It is to laugh. We have already accomplished many things. We have identified our enemies. And it is us.

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)

Chair: Us or Arabs?

Lady in the babushka: Us of course. It’s Jews who stand in the way of being pro-Israel and pro-peace. Anyway, that’s what that nice Mr. Ben-Ami seemed to be saying in his opening remarks. Never once did he talk about suicide bombers, or Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s Jews who are the impediment.

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman (this from a man in a keffiyeh). May I speak? Thank you. On behalf of Jstreet’s Islamic Heroes Arab Department I’d like to point out that we have no problem with J Street’s goals of withdrawing Jews from our ancestral lands which stretch westward from the Jordan to the Sea. Is that too much to ask for a people which has shown remarkable patience, relying on rocket fire, airplane hijackings and suicide bombers only on occasion, such as when peace was getting uncomfortably close. The Israelis have deprived us of our nationhood. Thank Allah for J Street! The peace process hasn’t had such good friends since Chamberlain and Deladier were running the show.

The Chair recognizes the historian who is pulling his hair out of his head.
Balding Historian: Mr. Chairman. Israel has not deprived Palestinian Arabs of a state; it’s been other Arabs who’ve done that. I…

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)

Balding Historian continues: I, surely, am not the only person in the room who knows that in 1947 the United Nations created two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one. And what happened? Jordan and Egypt (and Lebanon and Syria and Iraq) invaded the nascent Jewish State; they were repulsed; the Jews expanded the land allotted to them and Egypt satisfied itself with Gaza, Jordan with the West Bank. Did it ever occur to these titans of tolerance that they could have a two state solution by combining the two halves of the remnant of Palestine? No? And why not? Either because they used the suffering of the displaced persons as a propaganda tool or because (this is the more generous explanation) they knew that a bifurcated Arab state, with its parts separated by Israel could never work. And it still can’t.

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)

The Chair recognizes the lady with the tears in her eyes.

Mr. Chairman, I have wonderful news. Moments ago, Middle East Peace Envoy George Mitchell announced new Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” - indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians with the United States serving as interlocutor. Oh, to have lived so long that I can witness from the safety of America Israel and the Palestinians talking from separate rooms, close by each other. Messiah, he must be on the way.

The Chair (staring, amazed): And that’s the wonderful news? that the two sides will be talking in close proximity to each other?

Lady with tears in her eyes: Well, in proximity. But it’s the long awaited turn of events.

Skeptic: Oy, the gullibility quotient rises exponentially. In 2000, my dear lady, Arafat and Barak met in the same room with President Clinton and what did we get? Intifada II. Surely this is not the coming of the Messianic age when the straws we grab are so flimsy.

(General hubbub, hands flying, the sound of harrumphing is heard throughout the hall.)
The Chair recognizes the Messiah.

Messiah: Nu, am I late? What can I do for you?

Lady with tears in her eyes: Bring peace between Israel and the long-suffering Palestinians.

Messiah: Sure. Easy. Right after Josh Stein wins the Powerball.

Balding Historian: ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Danger out of Texas

Have you seen the article in the New York Times Magazine of February 14? It’s about the Texas State Board of Education, members of which try to have text books reflect the notion that America is a Christian nation as promulgated by the Founding Fathers. (You can find the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html) Should this make us in New England nervous? Yes it should. Texas’s curriculum and text books chosen by the board are used in every public school in that state, and publishers, desirous of capturing that huge market will re-write their textbooks to pacify the Texans and then try to sell their books nationally. One estimate is that Texas’s decisions are reflected in 46 or 47 states.

The idea is to capture the minds of children. As Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition put it, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members.” And why? As Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas Board puts it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” I thought about where I’d heard that sentiment before, and then it came back to me. “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” It’s a coda from George Orwell’s classic novel of totalitarian mind control, 1984 much of which deals with re-writing history so that the current rulers can be proven always to have been right.

The Christian conservatives argue that separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by the secular liberal establishment (whatever that is). All they are trying to do is uncover the long hidden truth that the founders were Christian men of God who established America as a Christian nation. Therefore there is no legal justification for disallowing crucifixes in government buildings or prayer in public schools. George Washington, the Conservatives say. called for a national day of thanksgiving after the British defeat at Saratoga in 1777. This is proof that the founders wanted religion in public life. But the Constitution (which does not mention God at all and which forbids any religious test for the holding of public office and the first amendment of which bars the establishment of a national religion) had not been written in 1777. Ah, the conservatives counter, but the Declaration of Independence had been and it refers to our creator and to Nature’s God. And by the legal principle of “incorporation by reference” you can connect the two documents, not read them as separate entities. It’s almost Talmudic. What this argument ignores is that Nature’s God is not another way of saying Jesus Christ; it’s a way that the politicians who wrote the Declaration of Independence could put some God into the document without actually referring to any specific deity. What, after all is Nature’s God, anyway?

The founders had an overtly biblical view of the world, the Christian Conservatives say. “In the new guidelines, students…are asked to identify traditions that informed America’s founding, ‘including Judeo-Christian (especially biblical law)’ and to ‘identify the individuals whose principles of law and government…informed the American founding documents,’ among whom they include Moses.” Yeah, we made it! Shabbat on Saturday! I wonder if the Texans know that Mosaic Law forbids pig roasts?

To Christian Conservatives the separation of powers is based on the Founders’ “clear understanding of the sinfulness of man,” not, apparently on Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws” or Cicero’s “On the Republic,” or Locke’s “Treatises on Government” (which specifically condemn the idea of a state religion). When told by a professor of history that “The Supreme Court has forbidden public schools from ‘seeking to impress upon students the importance of particular religious values through the curriculum,’ and in the process said that the founders ‘did not draw on Mosaic law, as is mentioned in the [Texas] standards,’ several of the board members seemed dumbstruck.” But they insisted it was true anyway.

Be very worried, Jews. The Wise Men of Chelm are in charge of what your children and grandchildren may be learning in school. Already, according to the Times’ article, 65% of Americans agree with the statement that “the nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation,” and 55% said they believed the constitution actually established the country as a Christian nation.” Welcome to second class citizenship if the Texas conservatives get their way.

Church and State in England: Who is a Jew?

Oy; you think we have problems keeping church and state separate? What with the annual December dilemma, with crèche scenes on public property declared constitutionally protected if part of an exhibit featuring Santa and reindeer, what with rabbis lighting Chanukah menorahs in the State House? In Britain, takah, they have problems beyond your wildest fears. The government in the guise of its newly established Supreme Court, has taken onto itself the responsibility of defining who is a Jew. Yes, I’m talking about Gentile judges in England, not Haredi rabbis in Israel.

The case, which was decided a couple of months ago in mid-December (your columnist is sometimes a bit slow on the uptake) concerned a boy called “M” in court papers who was denied admission to a Jewish school. “M” comes from an observant family where the father is Jewish and the mother a convert to Judaism through the Reform movement. (In Britain Reform roughly equates to Conservative, while Liberal means Reform as in America.) He applied to the state-supported Jews’ Free School founded in 1732 but was rejected on the grounds that he was not Jewish according to Orthodox halachah, since his mother had been converted by a non-Orthodox rabbi.

So the boy’s parents sued, arguing that the school had discriminated against him. The family lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeals. Ultimately the case reached Britain’s Supreme Court, which ratified the Appeals Court decision in a 5-4 ruling, saying that basing school admission on whether one’s mother is Jewish is by definition discriminatory and in violation of the 1976 Race Relations Act.

Hurrah for the Liberals, eh? Well, not quite. The Modern Orthodox establishment (it’s called the United Synagogue) and a great many liberals are deeply concerned. It’s bad enough that the school, a Jewish institution had defined “M” as not being Jewish, but now the government was deciding who was and who wasn’t. There’s a very dangerous precedent for this. Actually there are several dangerous precedents. I’m thinking of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, both of which were in the business of defining who was a Jew—but not for any particular Jew’s advantage as in this case, I might add.

The decision has left British Jewry divided. Not only did the decision open up the possibility that non-Jews could qualify for admission, but that the government, rather than Jewish religious authorities, can determine who is Jewish in Britain.

Another problem: Jewish groups in Britain remain concerned that the ruling, might stigmatize Judaism as a discriminatory religion anytime schools give preference to those who are Jewish according to Jewish law. However, the president of the court, Nicholas Phillips, said in announcing the verdict that it did not mean that those responsible for the school’s admissions policy had acted in a way that was “racist as that word is generally understood.” Very comforting. Jews could now be called racists of a different stripe.

So now the Orthodox want to fight the ruling, the liberals like what the ruling says, but not the fact that there was a ruling. The Jews’ Free School and other state-funded Jewish schools have made some major adjustments to their admissions criteria. The criteria now focus on requiring applicants to demonstrate participation in faith-based activities, such as synagogue attendance -- something the Chief Rabbi characterized as “a Christian solution for a Jewish school.”

And why do British Jews face the problem of the government defining who and what they are? Because in Britain there is no separation between religion and the state. The Anglican Church is official but so as not to be discriminatory, others are also allowed state funding. But the piper has to be paid, or, to mix my clichés he who holds the purse strings calls the tune. In the case of “M” the Orthodox establishment which takes state money disenfranchised a boy whose family is religiously observant. Foolish school; had it not, the state would not have had the opportunity to declare who is a Jew. The Haredi don’t have this problem. No governmental court is going to define who can attend their schools because they don’t accept funding from the government. Smart Haredi; they didn’t go for the bait which has snared the others. Now if only they’d stop lighting Chanukah menorahs at the State House.

Anti-Semitism flares in Greece

The worst-kept secret in literature is that Homer the Greek depicted the Trojans as innocent victims of circumstance in general and of Greek blood lust in particular. The invading Greeks are described as barbarians while Troy is seen as a utopia. It has broad streets, wise rulers, industrious women, and of course Hector and Andromache, the noblest of the noble.

Yet we think of the Greeks positively. We admire the Parthenon and other architectural treasures; we are impressed with its sculpture, we live longer because it was a Greek who opened the world’s eyes to the fact that disease is the result of natural, not supernatural causes. Ours is a government based on the writings of Plato (not “The Republic” which manages to blend the worst elements of fascism and communism, but his “Laws” and his “Statesman”). Our geometry is Euclidian of Pythagorean elements thrown in. And yet. And yet even the greatest of Greek cities Athens built the Parthenon with money stolen from its reluctant allies. Athens thought nothing of destroying a neutral city because it refused to become its ally (read “slave”) and Athens couldn’t take the critiques of Socrates and so had him executed. The glory that was Greece is a bit tarnished, both in literature and in history.

And now again.

For a long time there was little anti-Semitism in Greece. Yes, there were crazy right-wingers there, but Nazism has a bad name in most countries the Germans occupied. However, with the coming of the Gaza war last year politicians and pundits on both the left and right of the political spectrum have been spewing anti-Semitic remarks. And then the arsons and desecrations started.

On the island of Crete the Etz Hayim synagogue was torched, saved, for a while, by two Albanians and a Palestinian immigrant who lived across the street and alerted the fire brigade. But the building was saved only for a while. A second fire was more successful, and while the first did not evoke condemnation by the Greek government, the second one did. “The attack on the Etz Hayyim Synagogue not only constitutes an attack on one of the remaining Jewish monuments in the island of Crete, but also an attack against the history and the cultural heritage of our homeland, Greece,” Prime Minister George Papandreou wrote to the Anti-Defamation-League. “The Government, I personally as well as the entire Greek nation, condemn this abominable act in the strongest possible terms.” Well, maybe he does, but the entire Greek nation seems to be of two minds. A well know anti-Semite, Kostas Plevris wrote a 1,400 page book condemning Jews. He was brought to trial by the Greek chapter of the Helsinki Human Rights Monitor and the Anti-Nazi initiative. And after a long trial was found innocent of incitement to violence against Jews. Even the prosecutor referred to his screed “Jews: The Whole Truth.” as “a scientific work.”

In 2009 the Jewish cemetery of Ioannina was vandalized four times. Greaves and a Holocaust memorial were destroyed and body parts were unearthed. A high-ranking police officer caught in the cemetery immediately after one of the incidents was not questioned by authorities. Neither the mayor, the governor nor the highest-ranking priest in the city condemned the outrage.

George Karatzaferis, the leader of the far-right political party LAOS wrote an article in his weekly newspaper calling the Jews “Christ killers” and saying that the “blood of the Jews stinks.” Left-wing leaders refused to condemn the anti-Semitic incidents or even join Greece’s commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day in late January. “There are no good Jews,” Jimmy Panousis, a well-known liberal radio personality said on his show. “Jews are pigs and murderers, but fortunately their days are numbered.”

The newspaper Avriani, blames American Jews for causing the global economic crisis, warning that American Jews were plotting to set off World War III. Piraeus Serafim of the Greek Orthodox Church warned of “Zionist monsters with sharp claws.” Salonica Anthimos, another church official known for his anti-Jewish statements said Jews were being punished for killing Christ.

A whole nation cannot be condemned for the rantings of a few. But let’s keep an eye on Greece, whose glory days are long gone, but whose ancestors even then were not above a massacre of innocents.

Reflections on a final Kaddish

Nearly 14 years ago I rose in schul and said a final Kaddish, ending my official period of mourning for my mother. On January 9, I did it again, this time for my father. People asked me why I go. I don’t pray; I think, I read, I write in my mind. Hardly anyone else since I started saying Kaddish in February has stayed with the program at my synagogue, so what do these other people know that I don’t? I doubt if they loved their parents less than I loved mine, so that’s not it. Maybe my academic schedule makes it easier. But ease is not the answer. The hours of services are not so difficult to plan around.

Friends to whom I confided these thoughts either tried to convince me that merely by going I would get into the swing of things, or asked the same question I posed to myself, “Why bother?” This was a tough one. I wasn't sure. When I had these same thoughts about why I was saying Kaddish for my mother, I wrote to friends:

“In the end I concluded that as my mother was always there for me when she was alive (sometimes too much so) I would be there for her, fulfilling the obligation imposed on me centuries before either of us was born. And so, for her, and not for me, I went to shul and said Kaddish and prayed, if at all, that I could pray. There was another reason I went, even less rational than the first. Maybe, just maybe, if I continued this charade and did the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the bowing and swaying, maybe, just maybe when it was all over, she would be back, not dead, laughing with me, talking to me, scolding me for some faux pas I didn't know I'd committed. This was obviously a thought verging on idiocy and I was not blasphemous enough to pray for her to be alive again—but somewhere in the innermost, most primitive recesses of my mind, the thought (if it can be so dignified) lingered. Stupid, I know, but unshakable, nevertheless.”

I no longer held that idea this time, but the other day, a fellow sat in my accustomed seat, the one to which I went every service. He asked why that seat was so special to me. “How else will my father know that I’m here, unless I’m in my seat?” I replied, and then felt myself blushing at the absurdities that spew forth my unguarded mouth.

So, there I sat as the sun set on January 9 ending both Shabbat and my period of mourning, wondering. Wondering why I could not pray, wondering why I was going to miss this twice daily ritual—and I knew that I would. I’d miss the companionship of the others and their bonhomie; I'd miss the special feeling of standing to say Kaddish; I’d miss the forlorn hope; I’d miss the structure it created for my day; I’d miss my father and wouldn’t be doing anything for him again, twice a day as I had for those eleven months. The official period of mourning would be over, but not my personal sense of loss. The eleven months were obsessively too long, but emotionally they were much too short.

When the last time I rose to say that final Kaddish, then for my mother, I found that I couldn’t. My throat choked, tears streamed from my eyes, my knees suddenly felt unable to sustain my weight. I sat, sobbing, trying desperately to utter the magic words which would bring her back to life as she had been before her final illness, though I knew that that could not be. What really hurt was the realization that I could do no more for her. She was now officially completely beyond my futilely outstretched helping hand. That was embarrassing. My hope was that such histrionics would not be repeated, no tears, just a simple stand up, say the prayer and sit down. Over. And so it was. Done.

The Haredi menace

I think of two Rosas—Luxemburg and Parks, and of the Grimké sisters—Angelina and Sarah. I think of Emily Pankhurst and of Susan B. Anthony. I think of Emilia Shrayer standing up to the Communist authorities in the old Soviet Union. I think of Nofrat Frenkel in Israel. All were women who knew something was wrong and risked everything to correct it. Some were killed, others were imprisoned, each was the object of ridicule. What do these women know about how things are or should be? Things are as they are because of divine ordinance. Read the bible. Slavery is divinely sanctioned; women must know their place because they are a pernicious, though necessary gender. “Now, I find woman more bitter than death; she is all traps, her hands are fetters and her heart is snares.” (Ecclesiastes 7:26) Enough said, right? Wrong. We also find “She is clothed with strength and splendor; she looks to the future cheerfully. Her mouth is full of wisdom, her tongue with kindly teaching.” (Proverbs 31: 25-26)

I think of the Women of the Wall and the arrogance of the authorities who arrested a woman for wearing a tallit at the Western Wall, still rankles. Granted, Nofrat Frenkel wasn’t stoned to death—for all their puritanical fussbudgetness the Haredim of Israel are not the Taliban. But they insist that they know the truth and that the truth shall deny others freedom. Just like the Taliban, just like the Puritans from whom Roger Williams fled. And we who are not ultra-Orthodox are asked to bend our wills to theirs, since they are the authentic Jews. Women must sit in the back of the bus, they insist; a 13 year old child converted by a Conservative rabbi has to be buried in a non-Jewish section of a cemetery in Spain by decree of rabbi Shlomo Amar, not a Spanish rabbi, but the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel. So, not only do the Ayatollahs of the extreme right in Israel try to dominate in that country, they seek to extend their purview to the world. Recently mixed-group singing at the Wall was declared Vorboten so singing Hatikvah there to celebrate the return of the Old City to Israel is now a criminal offense. If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d suspect that the ultra-Orthodox who opposed the creation of the State of Israel have found a new way to destroy it—by alienating the vast majority of us who have entered the current century. It’s like supporting Hamid Karzai. Americans look at his corrupt regime and ask, for this we have to pledge our soldiers and our cash? For the Haredi we have to fight in Congress and the White House?

Avi Shafran, spokesman for the Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, has a strange argument. On the one hand “Israel is a country that has functioned with a certain understanding among its religious and not religious Jews. If the activists don’t want to alienate Jews, they shouldn’t thumb their noses at the traditional Jews in Israel.” The fault is all on the side of the progressives. On the other hand, it’s only a handful of the Haredi who protest the women and others who violate traditional standards. Most are in favor of a reasonable compromise, but there are always holdouts, he says. So, which is it—the fault is with the activists, or the fault is with the Haredi hot heads? Pick one. Oh, he also argues that the problem is with foreign Jews who are trying to impose their views on the traditional ways of Israel. Rather like Ross Barnett or George Wallace complaining about outside agitators coming to their states. The defenders of the benighted old ways always blame outsiders.

Modern Orthodox in America also feel the sting of their Haredi brethren who, not content to deny Reform and Conservative conversions, now challange the validity even of theirs.

Oh, lest it be thought that my ire is directed against the Haredi, it’s not. They are what they are. It’s Israel’s government which kowtows to them, allowing a minority within a minority to dictate public policy. That’s the shanda.