Prophets, not Profits

Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning has come and gone. Traditionally (though tradition and reality are not always congruent) both Temples were destroyed on the 9th of Av, the first by the Babylonians, the second by the Romans. The rabbis teach that Moses sent spies to scout the Promised Land who reported on its milk and honeyness. But the people wept at the prospect of entering such a formidable land full of giants. God declared, “You wept without cause; I will therefore make this an eternal day of mourning for you.” The day of course was Tisha b’Av. Other events associated with Tisha b’Av are the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt, the expulsion from England, the expulsion from Spain, the beginning of the First World War, the first of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.

A new reason to mourn is always available, this being planet earth. Our grief this time? The abandonment of basic Jewish principles by the Thatcherite State of Israel. Ol’ Margaret once famously said that “the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The problem with that aphorism is that the opposite is also true. After a while the poor will run out of money for the rich to cheat them out of.

In Israel, as you may have read in the last issue of the Voice & Herald Tisha b’ Av was a day of mourning for the heritage of the earliest idealistic days of the new state, of the Yishuv that had preceded it, the Israel of David ben Gurion and the Histadrut and kibbutzim. The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netenyahu has drunk the Reagan/Thatcherite Kool-Aid to the last dregs, believing with them that it is a good thing for the rich to get richer and for the poor to shut up. Thatcherites like Netenyahu and Reagan trickle this treacle down more eloquently but in the end how else are we to interpret the American version that argues that in return for granting another 13 months of unemployment benefits, the super rich receive a twenty-four months re-authorization of the Bush-era tax cuts; more recently, in return for cuts in governmental services, many of which had benefited the growing poor and the shrinking middle class, there are no efforts to tax the rich.

In America we seem to take this lying down, we allow Republican ideologues who ignore the fact that our debt was brought about by Bush era tax cuts combined with a foolish war to trample the economic rights of working and middle class Americans. In Israel privatization has meant that a very few have acquired more money than you know Who. As Leslie Susser put it in the last issue, in Israel “Owners and a select few mega-salaried executives became richer and the middle class relatively poorer. It also led to the rise of the Israeli tycoons, who controlled a great deal of the country's wealth and power. Banks, energy companies, supermarket chains and media properties all were concentrated in the hands of a dozen or so billionaire families. Netanyahu's economic philosophy also entailed a reduction of corporate taxes… while the middle class saw the prices of everything from food to cars to apartments rise considerably. The system produced impressive economic growth but left wealth in the hands of the few. The trickle-down effect, middle-class Israelis said, had failed to materialize.” Of course it failed to materialize. It always fails to materialize. The trickle down effect is to economics what leaches were to medieval medicine. The result was the tent cities, the tens of thousands of young Israelis who demanded more equitable distribution of available resources. They were not violent; they made no demands that were out of line with the traditions of Eretz Yisrael. They want to be able to afford a place to live. After all, they are the conscript soldiers of Israel who daily place their lives on the line, willingly. And in return, the wealthier got wealthier, and they poorer. Jewish this is not.

Shall I quote chapter and verse here? The middle part of Tanach, the prophetic portion, never advocates trickle down economics, never proposes aggregate wealth. Instead Isaiah and Jeremiah, from whose books we’ve been reading the last several weeks as a lead in to Rosh Hashanah advocate the opposite, the care for the poorer classes; they bemoan the powerful’s ruthless exploitation of the poor. Gee, I hope they weren’t Socialists.

Norway and the Jewish Problem

Time has made the joke acceptable. Frequent usage has made it unnecessary to tell the whole thing, short enough as it is already. “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

On a recent Friday my wife, third son and I drove down to Scarborough Beach. It was a glorious day. We arrived a few minutes before high tide so the waves were crashing in, rolling one after another after another to the shouts of children and adults who threw themselves headlong into cresting waters or turned their back, trying to time perfectly when to jump towards land so that the water would catch and propel them forward. Over and over and over again we did one or the other in the great ocean that had seemed so frigid when first we entered but after moments was merely cool against our skin, and then we returned to our blanket and chairs and soaked up those rays capable of penetrating the slathering of SPF 70 sun block she insisted we wear while we read, raided the food locker and talked and laughed and enjoyed each other and the day.

On the ride home we listened to the news on the radio and heard the shocking reports out of Oslo and Utoya Island. The joy was sucked out of the car as the grim reports came through the speakers, more and more and more dead, most of them children, the Oslo bombing probably merely a diversion so that Anders Behring Breivik could operate his death machine uninterrupted on the island. “Other than that Josh, how was the day at the beach?” It loses something in the immediacy, doesn’t it?

Breivik, his lawyer tells the world, is insane. This is either a legal strategy or statement of belief, possibly both. I’m sure that future historians will wade through Breivik’s 1,500 page on-line manifesto which announced his intentions and provided his motivation. I’ve not yet begun the task, leaving it to others for the moment, but it’s become apparent that there are elements in it that smack of pro-Zionist sentiments.

The Jews of Norway are nervous about the perception that Breivik’s anti-Muslim sentiments couched in pro-Israeli terms. (He warns, “If Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next.”) This in a country whose ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, was quoted in HaAretz as saying “We Norwegians consider the occupation [of the West Bank and Gaza] to be the cause of the terror against Israel.” It doesn’t really matter that Arab terrorism long preceded the Six Day War that brought these territories under Israeli control, that’s apparently the way Norwegians, certainly the government, see it. Local Jews are quick to point out that just because some whacko murderer says positive things about Israel doesn’t mean that Norway’s Jews are pro-whacko or that they do not mourn the senseless slaughter of children. They know that just the previous day those children discussed a boycott against Israel and pressed the country’s foreign minister to recognize a Palestinian state. But what of it? Whether we agree wit these ideas or not (and many Jews do) they are legitimate areas of discussion and should not diminish our grief over the slaughter of the innocents.

Michelle Goldberg (who I assume is Jewish) in The Daily Beast comments that “Breivik’s embrace of Israel, far from being unique, is just the latest sign of a great shift among the continent's reactionaries. Indeed, in European politics, fascism and an aggressive sort of Zionism increasingly go together.” (In another piece she sees the massacre as an assault on feminism.) The on-line edition of The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. has a long riposte arguing that while Breivik often speaks of the importance of defending Israel, what he wants to defend is not the Israel of Zionism. “It certainly isn’t any of the values associated with Israel by those liberal Zionists [Breivik] frequently demonizes: democracy; open political discourse; the rule of law.” Rather, Breivik seems to perceive Israel as the frontline in a war all Muslims are waging against Jews and Christians.

My day at the beach ended when I heard the tragic news out of Norway. The children of Utoya Island had their lives snuffed out by an ultra-nationalist who has taken Israel as a hostage in his madness. In May 1974 Palestinian ultra-nationalists took more than 115 people (including 105 children) hostage in Ma’alot, Israel eventually killing Twenty-five hostages, including 22 children. Rest in Peace, children of Israel and Norway. When the über-nationalists come a-calling gone is your innocence, gone is your youth, gone is your life, gone is our hope.