From the old Olivetti

Winter Reflections: Of stars and bugs

2012-02-03T06:52:00.000-05:00

As I sit at my desk, a bug flutters by. It and its family share my home, adding little but some small annoyance. They are each about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Yes, that dot, or maybe smaller. They seem to waft like a slow-motion knuckleball, though still too swift in their gyrations for me to catch them (except when I do) and they are easily killed once entrapped. But I look at these things and wonder, does it have a name (I’m hoping some scientist has dubbed it something like Timwakefieldius minoris). More importantly, does it have a brain? I know it has wings and I assume it has sex organs because spontaneous generation is no longer de rigueur in the scientific world. But how to cram all that and a digestive system and sensory organs into such a small space, and why—yes, yes, I know the story of David asking God why are there spiders, but I’m not David—all elude me.

Then I look up to the sky. It’s glorious in the winter. When there are neither clouds nor moon and the air is crisp I can see to the South the Great Winter Oval, an asterism consisting of first magnitude stars from six different constellations. Starting at what appears to be the top and proceeding clockwise there’s Capella from Auriga (the Charioteer), Aldebaran from Taurus (the Bull), Rigel of Orion (the Hunter), Sirius of the Great Dog, Procyon from the Little Dog and Pollux of the Twins. In the midst of all this, just a bit off center, is Betelgeuse, which forms the right shoulder of Orion. Viewed as in a gallery over my neighbor’s house this elongated circle forms an enormous object d’art. The red giant Betelgeuse throbs, big enough to cover our solar system at least to Mars, and possibly beyond. No Timwakefieldius minoris here. And yet, these glorious points of light are only the local eye-catchers. Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars (estimates vary) and there are probably as many galaxies as stars in our Milky Way. In the autumn, find Andromeda, two lines of stars that seem to come out of the square that is the constellation Pegasus (the flying horse). If you know just where to look, out of the corner of your eye (you can’t see it straight on) is the gauzy blur of the Andromeda Galaxy, a good 2 million light-years away (a light year is approximately five-trillion miles. Now multiply that by 2 million and you’ll agree that it’s not walking distance). It’s the farthest thing you can see with the naked eye.

How big is the universe? It depends on who you ask, but a good guess is that its diameter is just shy of 14 billion light-years from here. All of which makes me think that none of us is much more, and probably considerably less, than a Timwakefieldius minoris in the grand sweep of things.

The psalmist asks:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, …what is mankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?” and then answers his own question, “You have made us a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor.” Well, that’s one approach. Shakespeare expressed another: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who is closer to the mark, the psalmist or the bard? I know not but as old age creeps upon me, as I look at the tiny bug and at the glorious stars and imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe beyond, I think … it must be Shakespeare. We come, we go, like the tiny Timwakefieldius minoris unremarkable in the vastness, alone in our teeniest speck of the corner we occupy of outer space. So, petty as we are, it is the petty that consumes us. Locally this is expressed in the anger directed at a young woman who wants to honor the spirit of Rhode Island’s founder and of the US Constitution by fighting to remove a prayer from a public school. To quote Shakespeare one more time, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Republicans as Socialists?

2012-01-20T07:27:00.001-05:00

Last Thursday morning as I lay in bed looking at the rain coming steadily down on the window pane I thought of Mitt. He’s narrowing the gap. Good for him. In Iowa a full 75% of the Republican voters chose someone else but in New Hampshire it was only 63%. By any measure (“A victory is a victory” he said after winning Iowa by eight votes) this is progress. Whether it’s juggernaut progress remains to be seen. South Carolina looms, though observant Jews are excluded. Its primary is being held tomorrow, on Shabbat. But there’s hope for Jewish participation. The obnoxiously wealthy among us can still try to buy their favorites a few delegates.

Sheldon Adelson, one of the multi-zillionaires, has pledged $5,000,000 to help Newt Gingrich’s Super Pac run anti-Romney ads that would make a socialist proud. For nearly half an hour viewers see how Romney’s Bain Capital would buy up ailing companies, strip them of any latent and residual value, and then through a process of financial reverse peristalsis throw the workers onto the street. It’s capitalism at its worst, Republicans (REPUBLICANS, for crying out loud!) are charging. “You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” Gingrich asked, ignoring the fact that Adelson is bankrolling him. Griffin Perry, son of Texas Governor Rick Perry, got snide: “Mitt Romney knows how to lead ... Lead people straight out the door with a pink slip.” Père Perry was not shy about entering the verbal jousting contest either. “I am as much of a capitalist and have a record to prove it … by helping create over a million jobs in the state of Texas,” he said in an interview on Fox. “But there’s a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism, and that’s what we’re talking about here.”

Matt Brooks, the director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, isn’t bothered by the attacks. “At some point it’s fairly obvious that the Obama campaign would have raised this issue anyway,” Brooks said. “I’m not sure they’re happy that it’s been taken away from them and is not on their terms.” Matt, you disingenuous spin doctor, of course Democrats are happy, though thrilled may be a better word. It’s usually the job of the Vice Presidential candidate to smear the opposition. Now Joe Biden, the presumptive candidate, will only have to quote Republicans, giving that much more credibility to the anti-Romney barrage. This piling on Mitt will end only when Romney’s finally nominated in August, but as Saul Ricklin, a local contributor to the New York Times letters section wrote, “I can hardly wait for the coming hilarity of hearing all the Republican candidates now denigrating Mitt Romney start to laud him as what this country needs as a president if and when he wins the nomination.” Me, too, Saul, me too.

Of course Romney has his own Jewish money baggers including Mel Sembler, the Florida shopping center magnate, and Fred Zeidman, a Texas lawyer. And so the money flows. At least these guys aren’t also trying to determine Israeli politics the way Adelson does. He’s a major backer of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pouring money into his coffers as well. Well, I suppose that if I’d made my millions by luring people to Las Vegas so they could lose their money in glitzy, gilded, gaucheness while fondling show girls I’d want to make sure my ideas, obviously sanctified by a Higher Power as I’m so successful, become the laws of the lands.

You’ll note, of course that this Republican brouhaha is about capitalism. Romney of the unbridled kind, Gingrich and Perry who would rein it in. But let’s take a look at the founder of capitalism, Adam Smith (1723-1790). His most famous book is the Wealth of Nations which advocates an unregulated market-driven economy. But Smith wasn’t talking about Bain Capital getting wealthy but of the nation. He was as much a moralist as he was an economist. He believed that labor is what gave things value. A cotton seed is worth nothing, but apply labor and eventually you get a shirt. A Jewish economist of the same era, David Ricardo (1772-1823) took this point and extended it. Only labor gives things value. Are Republicans finally giving credence to this perspective which has been with us since the dawn of capitalism? Probably not. Mitt’s got it sewed up so the Bain Capital model will likely be the United States’ given a Romney victory in November. Ah well, people like labor saving devices. But maybe they don’t like labor destroying financial devices as much. We’ll see.

The Haredi bane

2012-01-06T00:42:00.002-05:00

The story is by now familiar enough to make grown men gag in disgust. In Israel, the Haredi, the ultra-Orthodox (as opposed to the merely “Orthodox” who are called Dati) have raised their voices and thrown their excrement. One Dati women dared to sit in the front section of a public bus and was abused by Haredi passengers. Students who attend an all-girls school set up by Dati parents near an Haredi neighborhood in Beit Shemesh have to run a gauntlet to get to class. Little girls are called whores and have had eggs and bags of feces thrown at them. Apparently the sleeve and hem lengths the girls don are not long enough for Haredi standards of modesty even though they cover the arms and legs entirely. Oh, wait; examining a photo, I think I can see the stocking-covered ankles of eight year-old Na'ama Margolis, the little girls whose torment finally made the national and international news. Burkas, anyone?

Two weeks ago when city workers tried to remove signs (illegally erected) mandating the separation of the sexes on city streets (this is so familiar isn’t it—think 1938 after the Kristallnacht) new signs went up in defiance of the law. When police showed up to remove those, about 300 Haredi men threw stones at them and burned trash cans creating a foul stench and polluting the air with smoke as a supplement to their verbal outrage at little girls whose ankles show. Television reporters were attacked when they attempted to film these events.

Not surprisingly Israel’s president, Shimon Peres is on the side of the girls. Urging Israelis to attend a rally on their behalf he said, “Today is a test for the nation, not just for the police. All of us, religious, secular, traditional, must as one man defend the character of the State of Israel against a minority which breaks our national solidarity.” Tzipi Livni, formally foreign minister, currently the head of the Kadima Party which holds the largest number of seats in the Knesset, lent her support to the forces of sanity: “We are struggling over Israel's character not only in Beit Shemesh and not only over the exclusion of women but against all the extremists who have come out of the woodwork to try and impose their worldview on us.” Even right-wingers, religious and secular, oppose what the Haredi in their arrogance, their “my way or the highway” do. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the police to act aggressively against violence aimed at women and urged Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to make certain that laws against excluding women from public spaces are enforced. Moshe Abutbul the mayor of Beit Shemesh, himself Haredi, decried the violence against young girls. “Beit Shemesh denounces such behavior,” he said according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Violent men belong behind bars,” he continued. “I urge the Israel Police to act with a firm hand against all the rioters,” adding that reporters should not make assumptions about all Haredi Orthodox Israelis.

The mayor, however, seems not to speak for the Haredi he claims to represent. Shlomo Fuchs, for one, seems not to have gotten the memo. He was arrested for calling a female soldier, Doron Matalon, who dared to sit in the “men’s section” of a public bus a whore and a shiksa. As she is 19 years old and not a mere eight, as is Na'ama Margolis, she at least knows what a whore is. Fuchs was joined in his insults by other Haredi passengers. The same day that Fuchs was indicted, female members of the Knesset's Committee on the Status of Women rode in the front of a bus Haredi demanded be segregated. They were insulted by male passengers who complained that the women were acting in a provocative fashion by sitting with men. The MK’s were accompanied by television crews. When these were spotted by brave Haredi, they opted not to get on the bus.

Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of the People of Israel, bless the State of Israel, dawn of our redemption. Shield it with Your love, spread over it the shelter of Your peace. The rabbis of old believed that the Second Temple was destroyed because of senseless hatred. That was Jerusalem of old. We thought we were over that. Welcome to Jerusalem, 5772. According to Othello, Cyprus was for goats and monkeys. Jerusalem? It has Haredi.

The Truth Can Hurt

2011-12-23T06:11:00.000-05:00

There are times when the truth hurts—not the subject of the statement but the maker of it. Two recent examples, one from a Republican, the other from a Democrat:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (he’s the Republican) said that Palestinians are an invented people (and as such have no legitimate territorial ambitions). His actual words were: “Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940’s, and I think it’s tragic.” He later asked rhetorically in defense of his remarks: “Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. We are in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States—the current administration—tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process. Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth,” he continued. “These people are terrorists, they teach terrorism in their schools.”

This was a fine opening for his Republican challengers. U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said, “That’s just stirring up trouble.” Mitt Romney, who currently (December 16) stands second or third in polls, said he agreed with Gingrich’s comments about Palestinian terrorism, but that Gingrich went too far in publicly questioning Palestinian peoplehood. “I happen to agree with most of what the Speaker said,” Romney responded. “Except by going and saying that the Palestinians are an invented people. That I think was a mistake on the Speaker’s part.” Romney warned against throwing “incendiary words into a place which is a boiling pot” and that doing so could make things harder for Israel. Rick Santorum, agreed with Romney’s comments.

You’ll note that none of these gentlemen denied the truth of what Gingrich had said, only that he shouldn’t have said it. Even Gingrich seemed to acknowledge this as his campaign later issued a statement stressing that despite his comments on Palestinian peoplehood, he still favors the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. “Newt Gingrich supports a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, which will necessarily include agreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the borders of a Palestinian state,” they intoned. Remember when Republicans made hay over John Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it” sound bite?

I began by saying that Gingrich was speaking truth; the Palestinians are an invented people. But so are we all. I’m American, my paternal ancestors emigrated from Russia; my maternal ancestors from Austria-Hungary. Before that, I have no idea. But I (and my Italo-American and Polish-American and Hispanic-American and Afro-American friends are all now Americans, proudly). Arabs who trace their ancestry to grandparents and beyond who lived in the Ottoman Empire have the same right to call themselves whatever they want, even if it gives them a political advantage.

The other truth teller was The American Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman. He delivered a speech at an event hosted by the European Jewish Union in Brussels in which he noted “the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews is largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.” Advancing peace between Israel and its neighbors was the key to addressing this issue, he said.

Jewish groups condemned the statement as one sided. In response, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that the views expressed by Gutman were the envoy’s and not the administration’s. Gutman has said that his remarks were “misinterpreted” and that he condemns all forms of anti-Semitism.

Tempest in a teapot? Seems like it to me. The man spoke truth. Let’s pretend that there was no Zionist movement, no Balfour Declaration, that after the First World War the Ottoman empire was carved up with what we call Israel not intended as a Jewish Homeland but an Arab one, and that since 1919 it’s been Arab. Would Muslims in Europe be acting in an anti-Semitic fashion? I don’t see it. They can’t win their war in the Middle East so they take their frustrations out on Jews in France, England, Germany and the Netherlands. Gutman was right, his Jewish critics wrong. But apparently he shouldn’t have said it.

The Republican Games

2011-12-09T06:19:00.000-05:00

I don’t normally think of myself as being particularly sadistic, I’m not the sort of guy who rues missing the opportunity to cheer on gladiators going at each other to the death, but let’s face it—who doesn’t love the way the Republicans are behaving in the pre-caucus, pre-primary phase of their blood sport. They all want to unseat President Obama, and none are willing to raise a penny in taxes to help resolve the debt brought about by the Bush tax cuts and unfunded wars. All believe in cutting off their noses to spite their faces. For example, when asked at a recent debate if they would be willing to increase taxes by a dollar in return for spending cuts of ten dollars, there was a universal response—none would. But after those areas of agreement, it’s strop the razor, hone the machete, sharpen the tongue and praise Jesus. (Mitt Romney is a bit behind on the praise Jesus part, though as a Mormon he does believe in three gods, one of whom is the aforementioned gentleman from Nazareth.)

Romney has always been the pace setter, the one the others are trying to dethrone. One by one they rise up against him and one by one they fall by the wayside. I write this on December 2 so don’t know how things will be on the 9th, but I can report with certitude that today Newt Gingrich is the current first tier challenger, having replaced Herman Cain who previously had edged aside Rick Perry who’d steamrollered over Michele Bachmann. At this pace, poor Rick Santorum, who is universally ignored, might just emerge as the next great white hope to defeat Romney. Tim Pawlenty may have dropped out too soon. And Sarah Palin, too. Even she might have had a decent run at Romney before going down in flames against Obama. It’s all too wondrous to behold. Like watching gladiators. As is said about fox hunting, enjoying this is as indefensible, but irresistible.

And what does all this mean to the Jews? Well, on the one hand nothing more than to gentiles, but there is the Israel question now. Yes, all are passionate about the survival of the Jewish State but Ron Paul, who is opposed to spending any money unless it can be justified by the standards of the eighteenth century, opposes foreign aid altogether and Rick Perry, in what seems by comparison to be a more moderate view has come out with the idea that in any decision on foreign aid he would start at zero dollars and “then we'll have a conversation in this country about whether or not a penny of our taxpayer dollar needs to go into those countries.” Gingrich immediately signed on. The former House Speaker who looks fondly back on his suicidal shutting down of the Federal Government in 1995-’96 said the idea “made absolutely perfect sense.” Off camera Perry latter waffled, a technique he learned from Romney. “Obviously,” he said, “Israel is a special ally. And my bet is that we would be funding them at some substantial level. But it makes sense for everyone to come in at zero and make your case.” Time to bring out the maple syrup. Oh, and save some of that Aunt Jemima’s for Romney whose spokesmen announced immediately after the debate that he would exempt Israel from the policy.

What Perry seems to have forgotten (or never knew about) is a ten year Memorandum of Understanding that governs US-Israel funding levels, signed in 2007 providing for long-term assurances guaranteeing Israel both financial assurances and political support. So, while reneging on international promises is not unheard of, no Republican, whether Perry or any other GOP candidates in unison with him, would start with zero dollars for Israel; and if not for Israel, than probably not for other countries in the Middle East, all of which would look askance at America supporting the Jewish State to the exclusion of their own. Well, it sounds fiscally conservative anyway, if undoable (like much fiscal conservatism).

So, as Republicans vie with each other uttering “morituri te salutant” their razors stropped, their machetes honed, their tongues sharpened, their minds numbed (Oops, I shouldn’t have said that) how will Evangelical Republicans or Orthodox Jews, those bastions of the Republican Party, feel when Gingrich is brought low and they are ultimately forced to choose between voting for Obama or for a tritheist? Who can say? We can only sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Let the games continue!

Autumnal Reflections

2011-11-25T06:06:00.000-05:00

I wandered into the Pawtucket Tax Assessor’s office because I’d been told that they will tell you the history of your house. “Sure,” said the nice lady. “What’s your address?” I told her and she looked something up in one book and then went to another and within minutes she had the page with the ownership record of my home.

I knew we’d bought the house from Betsy Joslin, a widow, shortly before her re-marriage, and once I’d met a man named Rosenfield who’d sold it to the Joslins, but I’d buried that information somewhere deep in my shallow sub-conscience. But now, looking at the list of owners of Lot 547, Plat 66 dating back to 1914, it suddenly hit me that there are an awful lot of people who also said, “this is my home” as they entered my front door and slept in my bedroom, cooked their meals in my kitchen, ate those meals in my breakfast room. I knew that the Joslins had two children who I imagine played and whooped and screamed as they tore through the house, as did mine, but how many other children have there been who felt that the walls that protect my family, protected them? Did Rosenfield (1963-1970) have children sleeping in my sons’ rooms? Or Sherlee Gershman (1954-1963) or Samuel and Edna Orenstein (1952-1954) or Esther Halpert (1941-1952)? Who was Frederick R. Marquis, Jr (1938-1941)? Is he still alive, did he love this house the way we do? Why was he only here for three years? Or Thomas and Muriel Mitchell (1929-1938)? Did they have children who played in the same backyard ours did? Were they the ones who switched from coal to oil, and who was it who then switched from oil to gas? Conrad Paris lived in my house from 1925-1929. Was he forced to sell by the coming of the Great Depression, or had he seen the house as a starter home? In 1924 there were two owners, and I don’t know why. Rosalun C. O’Brien sold to Thomas and Catherine Gill, but why did Thomas Gill buy the house when he (or someone who had the same name) owned it in 1918—or was it a house in 1918, or just an empty lot waiting to be developed? I don’t know. Gill bought the house (or the lot) from the Oak Hill Lawn Company who had bought it in 1916 from M. Jenckes and E. H. Thornton (if I decipher the handwriting correctly) who were the first listed owners, in 1914.

Sometimes, not often, I think I see a shadow, or sometimes a flash of light, or hear a peep of sound and then it’s gone and I wonder if the shade of a previous owner ever comes back to check on us, and then I remind myself that I’m an enlightened rationalist. Still, I wonder who these people were? Who will be the next people, and the next who won’t even know of our existence, of our joys and sorrows, of what we did to improve the house they will think of as theirs? We’ve had the house the longest, since October 1977, but I know we are really only caretakers.

I’d gone to City Hall to get a dog license for Emma who has lived with us for a year and a half. She knows nothing of Morgan whose home this was for ten years and she had no idea that Wordsworth had lived here for 17 ½ years. Wordsworth had no inkling that he was dog number two, that Jonathan had been first. In time no one will know of any of those animals who gave us such joy.

At the university where I’ve been on faculty since 1969 people who have been teaching for decades retire, and then in four years, no student on campus remembers them. Only we somewhat younger old geezers recall the ancient days, the long gone people. Someday, I suppose nobody will know I was there either, just as nobody knew until I went to the Pawtucket tax assessor’s office that while I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Sherlee Gershman lived my house, thinking it hers. Who were her friends? Who came to visit? Why did she sell? And what of those shadows caught in the corner of my eye, that vague flash of light, that peep of a sound?

A lesson from History

2011-11-12T23:18:00.000-05:00

The ancient Roman historian Titus Livius (59 BCE – 17 CE) reminds his readers in every age that “in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”
The ancient Roman philosopher/statesman Cicero (106-43 BCE) tells the story of consul Marcus Atilius Regulus who was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians during the First Punic War. (Consuls were the chief civil and military officers in the Roman Republic. To get an idea of someone with equal status and authority combine General Eisenhower in 1944 with President Eisenhower in 1954.) The Carthaginians thought this provided them a great opportunity—one consul could be exchanged for hundreds of prisoners. So Regulus was sent back to Rome on parole, sworn to return if Carthage’s prisoners of war were not released. He came to the senate and stated his mission; but he then advised against the deal; for they were young men and officers who would make war on Rome, while he was only one man, already bowed with age. In the end Rome kept the prisoners, and Regulus returned to captivity in Carthage.
What do we learn from this? If nothing else it’s that before the exchange of prisoners the prudent thing is to win the war. Giving back over a thousand Palestinians, a goodly number with Jewish civilian blood on their hands, in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier was inopportune. Doesn’t anyone over there read history? The Regulus story may be in the preserve of a few fussy scholars but ask this—during the First World War, how many prisoners were exchanged (answer: None before the Armistice). During World War II did we send back any Germans, Italians or Japanese in exchange for American POWs? (Hint: “No”.)
I know the rationale. Israel makes a commitment to the families of its conscripts (pretty much all age appropriate Israelis minus those in Yeshivas) to bring them back—alive if possible, if not, at least for burial. I understand. But when are they brought back, that’s the question. Three years ago Israel gave up a multiple murderer, Samir Kuntar who in 1979 killed a police officer then took a 28-year-old man and his 4-year-old daughter hostage. He shot the father dead in front of his little girl and then smashed her head in, killing her. Kuntar was sentenced to 542 years in prison. But in 2008 Israel arranged a swap. It received the cadavers of 1st Sgt. Ehud "Udi" Goldwasser and Sgt. 1st Class Eldad Regev in exchange for this sadistic murder who upon his return to Lebanon was hailed as a hero by Hezbollah. And now the returning heroes of Hamas have been greeted in Gaza with cries from the crowd to kidnap more Israelis, to get back more prisoners. Sergeants Goldwasser and Regev were spared what Gilad Shalit may soon suffer. Can you imagine the young man’s anguish when the first of the terrorists released to get him back blows up a pizzeria, or a bus, or a Seder, or a pedestrian mall?
Israel prides itself on the return of conscripts but has forgotten the other part of the social contract, the part that says we will protect the civilians of Israel from terrorists. Israel, any government, must remember to do no harm to its population. It’s bad enough that despite seeking peace Israel has been in a state of perpetual war for its entire existence; it’s worse that it gives enemies fresh soldiers to make war on it. Hamas is strengthened; Israel has handed it potentially returning terrorists or if not them, has encouraged another generation to take the risk. After all, if they are captured before or after their assaults on civilians, all they have to do is wait a few years in jail and then come home to a hero’s welcome.
This edition of the Jewish Voce & Herald is due out on November 11, 2011, 11/11/11 for you numerologists. On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 AM, the First World War came to an end and then prisoners were exchanged, no longer a danger to the countries that had held them in captivity. I’m glad that Shalit is home, but the price was too high. Wait until after victory. Remember the lesson of Regulus, that honorable man.

Kol Nidre at the Wall (Street Occupation)

2011-10-28T08:31:00.000-04:00

On Kol Nidre my oldest son and his wife attended services in their new shul in Virginia. My wife and I kvelled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as our son the cantor chanted the haunting melodies and gave life to the ancient words. But it’s the experience of our youngest son I’d like to discuss with you.

Much has been written about the so-called Wall Street Occupation. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that leftist activists in New York have taken over a small public park which they use as a staging ground for speeches and occasional marches on Wall Street. I’m pretty sure I know what the protesters are opposed to—corporate greed, but I’m not sure what they favor instead. Is it a genuine movement or warm weather flight of fancy, a nostalgic return to those thrilling days of 1968 in Chicago? Time will tell.

Here (edited for space) is what my son saw on Kol Nidre:

The service was held at a public plaza across the street from Zuccotti Park, where the occupation itself is centered. We were surrounded by police (and food carts, probably in the worst possible place for business that night). I got there right before it started. I’ve read that 1,000 participated. At 7:00, two rabbis and a cantor (Avi Fox Rosen, Getzel Davis and Sarah Wolf) stood in the center of the plaza and got everyone’s attention in the standard Occupy Wall Street style by shouting “Mick Check” in call and repeat style. They asked everyone to form concentric circles around them. They distributed some machzors and kippot, and created 4 aisles through the crowd. Some people brought folding chairs, but most of us stood and sat on the concrete. All instructions were given in call and repeat, so that everyone could hear. There are no microphones or bullhorns, as the occupation does not have a sound permit.

Most of the service was in Hebrew, a traditional Conservative service with some added phrases to make it more egalitarian. There was some singing and some nigunim (wordless melodies) as well. For most of the service we were sitting in a circle facing the Rabbi, but for the Amidah and for Al Chait (confession of sins) we faced East. We did the traditional Al Chait in Hebrew, and then a more political version in English afterward. It started, “We have sinned by yielding to confusion and falling into passivity.”

The sermon was in the same call and repeat fashion. The Rabbi took traditional Jewish concepts and made them relevant in ways that I was not expecting. For instance he talked about the origins of the holiday—the Jews seeking forgiveness for worshiping the golden calf. That got him talking about contemporary “gold worship”, wealth, capitalism, and the rest. Then he talked about how Yom Kippur can easily be embraced as an opportunity for forgiveness, and is therefore described in some texts as the happiest day of the year. He talked about what it means that humanity was created in God’s image. If we are meant to serve God on earth, then what better way to do it than to serve humanity? It was a smart way of making a humanist argument in a religious context.

The sermon was followed by an “unconventional Alenu.” He said Alenu is our commitment to serve, and do better in the future. So he had people shout out things they commit to do in the new year, and if anyone wanted to take on that commitment, they could shout “Alenu” afterward. The commitments ranged from “I will call my mother more often” and “I will question my own assumptions” to “I will work to end capitalism,” and “I will fight for a living wage for all workers.” People were shy at first, but after a few shout-outs there were too many hands up to call on, so the Rabbi had everyone yell out their own oath together, and we all did, and laughed, and then sang the traditional end of Alenu together.

We said Kaddish, and that was it. People milled around, and many wandered over to join the occupation across the street. The organizers say they are planning to do Friday night services there as long as the occupation continues. All of this—the whole political Yom Kippur concept—could have failed on both religious and political grounds, but I thought they did a really good job on both fronts. I think it was especially successful because it had an immediate and clear relevancy and urgency to it, and the Rabbi and Cantors all did a great job with the difficult circumstances (the constant call and repeat, the lack of chairs, etc.).

It was a very memorable Kol Nidre at the barricades of the revolution!

A very brief video of a nigun moment at the Occupation can be found at http://www.twitvid.com/6HEQ8

Does Israel Matter?

2011-10-14T00:54:00.000-04:00

Even before his inauguration the right-wing of the American political spectrum was predicting that Barack Obama would not be a friend to Israel. Almost on a daily basis since I’ve been receiving e-mails all of which declaim that Obama is selling Israel down the river.

Some of the e-mails point to the recent bi-election for the New York 9th congressional district, a traditional Democratic enclave lost because the Democrat because Obama was too pro-Palestinian, the conventional wisdom would have it. But David Weprin, the defeated Democratic candidate, is an Israel hawk. Yet his Orthodox co-religionists voted en bloc for the Republican, Bob Turner, who has never set foot in Israel So what did Weprin in? As Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker points out in his blog it was his votes in the New York State legislature in favor of gay rights which earned him a virtual fatwa from the local rabbis: “It is therefore Assur [forbidden according to Torah law] to vote for, campaign for, publicly honor, fund, or otherwise support the campaign of Assemblyman David Weprin.” In other words, Israel had nothing to do with the vote.

A recent Jewish Telegraphic Agency story caught my eye. It discusses why the candidates for the Republican nomination for president are all so pro-Israel. Rick Perry flies to New York for the UN General Assembly meeting and accuses Obama of appeasement (a word most Jews rightly view with abhorrence) and Mitt Romney argues that “You don’t allow an inch of space to exist between you and your friends and allies.” But ought Obama and the Democrats be ashamed of his attitudes in the Middle East?

The Obama administration tried desperately to prevent the Palestinians from formally applying for UN recognition of statehood. It’s been selling Israel bunker-busting bombs since 2009. It’s opposed to new settlements, but so are a lot of Jews. To the Republican charge that Obama has “the most consistently one-sided diplomatic record against Israel of any American president in generations,” Democrats counter with reminders of the $3 billion sent to Israel for military assistance, including $205 million to build the Iron Dome rocket defense system for communities on Israel’s border with Gaza. They emphasize the United States’ effort to block the Palestinian declaration of statehood, and intervening to protect the Israeli ambassador when a violent mob stormed the embassy in Cairo.

Previous Republican presidents have put pressure on Israel. Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel to give up the Sinai in 1956; Richard Nixon prevented Israel from administering a coup de grace to the Egyptian Third Army during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Gerald Ford announced that America would henceforth take a more even-handed stance in the Middle East (and Jews voted for Carter in 1976). While his father protected Israel with Patriot missiles, George W. Bush cajoled Israelis and Palestinians into the ill-fated 2007 Annapolis talks. So what’s different now? According to Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the cold war is over when it made sense to pressure Israel so as to woo Arabs from the Soviet camp. And Republicans can count. Noam Neusner, a former domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush and now a communications consultant to Christians United For Israel points out that: “There are 5 million American Jews and 50 million Evangelicals,” who are even more monolithic in their support of Israel’s current government than are Jews.

As to Israel, does it matter if we have a Republican or a Democratic president? Both are committed to the survival of Israel; they disagree on how to achieve it. So do Jews. If a Republican wins in 2012 will he really always be so pro-Israeli as to be anti-Palestinian? Not likely. Marshall Breger, an adviser to President Reagan reminds, “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” meaning that all the sweet words aimed at wooing the Jewish vote will mean nothing when trying to decide what’s best for America. Dov Zakheim, a former senior Pentagon official in both Bush administrations, said that a Republican president likely would have to make decisions that displeased Israel. “Elections are about principle, holding office is about realties.”

My advice, for what it’s worth? When deciding for whom to cast your vote, think domestically. The Cold War is over. The Nazis are dead. Vote for the person you think will get us out of the economic mess Obama inherited; vote for the jobs program you think will work; vote for the social programs your think are necessary or aren’t. Israel can fend for itself quite nicely, regardless who sits in the White House.

Essay Writing 101

2011-09-30T00:11:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the ways of the US Postal Service are strange to behold, beyond human comprehension. If things work as they should you’ll receive this on Friday September 30 just in time for an après Rosh Hashanah lunch sit down in your favorite easy chair. But as we know Saturday or next Wednesday is as likely a delivery date as any.

So, I ask you, what is this essay about? Will it rail against the inefficiencies of a privatized government bureau? Is it about Rosh Hashanah, perhaps lunch? Or easy chairs? Answer: None of the above. Instead it’s time for a redaction of the Essay Writing 101 a course I never took in college.

In the last issue I took a swipe at a letter writer who asked in what I thought was a patronizing and disingenuous fashion why Jews continue to vote for very liberal politicians when you would think that our values would be more in line with more conservative candidates. I found this patronizing because it suggested that Jews should be more like the author, like the majority of Americans, and, let’s face it, (and this is the disingenuous part) why aren’t we Christian. It would be to our advantage and like being a conservative would only require us to give up the past several centuries of our development to join the greater community. So I wrote a strong rejoinder but wanted to temper it a bit. So I added what I thought was a dollop of humor by teasing my editor (who nevertheless I described as “terrific”) for publishing what seemed to me a letter verging on the anti-Semitic.

It’s called “misdirection” in the essay writing business, sometimes it’s described in dance terms as a “lateral Arabesque” the starting with one thing you don’t intend to pursue but which sets up what your real target is, and then concludes with the initial misdirection either for emphasis or humor. It’s a technique used since at least the time of Homer’s Iliad.

So what was the reaction to the piece? Did I hit too hard, below the belt, score a knockout? None of the above. You shouldn’t have attacked Nancy (the editor) is all I heard. But I didn’t attack Nancy, I used Nancy’s publishing the letter as a springboard to dive into my real subject, the letter, I responded. You shouldn’t have attacked Nancy, is the response. Well, I give up. Nancy knows I didn’t attack her. In fact the original column concluded with a deliberate non-sequitur that I thought pretty clever, but she didn’t so out it went. Her only objection to my using her as a foil was that I referred to her as the paper’s editrix. She said it sounded too much like dominatrix but I said I had Amelia Earhart in mind who is always referred to as an aviatrix, but again the change was made. Never did she suggest that I was being unfair to her or complaining in a more than friendly tease.

So, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

(One person who wrote to me asked why I seemed not to know that most American Jews vote for very liberal candidates and chides that I should have known from the New York Times on September 23 that Jews have long proved a solid voting block for the Democratic Party. But my column was published in the September 16 edition of the Voice & Herald and submitted a week before that. I appreciate my correspondent’s belief in my prescience but if I knew what the Times was going to print two weeks before publication I’d be a very much richer man than I am.)

As this is designed to reach you on Rosh Hashanah and is the edition of the paper that precedes Yom Kippur, please let me take the opportunity to thank those of you who have made reading this column a regular part of your bi-weekly activities and to ask sincerely that if I’ve offended with anything I’ve written to forgive as my object may have been to provoke, but never to offend. Shana Tova, everyone; may 5772 bring us all the blessing of lives filled with love and joy, peace and prosperity, good health and the wonder of discovery. And may the US Postal Service get this to you in time for your après déjeuner period of overstuffed relaxation in an overstuffed chair. Amen

Jews as Liberals

2011-09-16T15:07:00.001-04:00

Sometimes the ways of editors are strange to behold, beyond human comprehension. At the Voice & Herald we have a terrific editrix but why she chose to print a patronizing letter to the editor from a self-proclaimed practicing Catholic who asks “Why do most American Jews still support and vote for very liberal politicians when you would think that their values would be more in line with more conservative candidates?” is beyond me. You’ve got to wonder how desperate she is to have a letter to the editor.

Dear self-proclaimed practicing Catholic: I don’t know if most American Jews vote for very liberal candidates for office. Hopefully we do, but I cannot testify to that as I’ve not taken a poll. In fact I know several Jews who would take offense at your generalization pointing to themselves as George W. Bush conservatives. But if it’s true that we vote liberal it’s because of our history and our values. We have been at the noose end of the rope, the saber’s edge of the Cossack, the victims of the triangle shirtwaist fire, the inhalers of Zyklon B. What? Do you think that because many of us are now prosperous we should forget where we came from, forget that others are not yet prosperous and, in fact, are sliding into the morass of poverty as the wealthiest become wealthier? Should we ignore their plight which used to be ours? Should we forget that Jews marched in Selma, rode on Freedom busses, were slaughtered by conservative red-necks for daring to help African Americans register to vote? Should we forget the dogs that bit us, the tears we shed when we watched the news on TV and saw the atrocities of the south, the new heartland of the conservative Republican Party? Am I living in the past? Well, if so, I guess I’m a conservative after all. I’ll go to my local gun show and buy me an unregistered Glock. After all, I wouldn’t want no gov’ment revenu’ers interfering with my Second Amendment rights to pack a rod.

That’s the history we bring to the table, those of us who have not become conservatives. As to our values they go back to the bible. We were slaves in Egypt and I’ve lost count of the number of times we’re reminded of that fact in the bible and told, don’t treat your workers as you were treated in Egypt. Our prophets trump our desire for profits. They were advocates of social justice. Those of us who go to shul read them every week. Those who don’t attend regularly probably go on Yom Kippur where we always read, “This is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, clothe him, and not ignore your own kin.” Well, thanks to Reaganism there are now too many homeless for us to take care of ourselves, so we depend on government to do the job for us and pay our taxes so that it can be done. We pay our taxes so that government can build high-speed trains and repair roads. Oh, wait, I forgot, as a conservative I don’t want to pay taxes; after all, it’s my money; why should I share it with some vagrant, why should I want it spent on trains when I own a car?

As long as I’m quoting bible, here’s a question for our purported practicing Catholic: What would be the political philosophy of someone who said that it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? Just wondering.

And finally, why was this question addressed to Jews in the first place? I know for a fact that many mainstream Protestants are more liberal than I am, and many Roman Catholics who are also. OK, Protestants, raise your hands if you are a liberal. I see, one, two, three, a million, ten-million. Now Roman Catholics, are any of your liberal? I see, one, two, three, a million, ten-million.

Please, Madame Editrix, enough. As to the rest of you, write a letter to the editor for her; she obviously is very lonely. Praise this column or attack it—or better yet, praise this column and attack Rosenberg’s.

A New Hero

2011-09-02T11:24:00.001-04:00

I have many heroes, but today I add a new one to the list. In literature my hero is Hector of the Shining Helmet, defender of idyllic Troy from the barbarians at the gate. The Bible has a slew of heroes to choose from but I’ll stick with Joshua bin Nun, for obvious reasons. In science Galileo, who refused to back down from his researches even knowing the fate of those who preceded him tops the list, though modest Isaac Newton is close behind. Of American presidents I’ll stick with Kennedy, hero of my youth. In sports Gil Hodges wins the prize. His denied entrance to the Hall of Fame is a modern day equivalent of Hector being defeated outside the walls of Troy by the Achilles and Athena.

Except for Joshua, none of these fellows was actually Jewish, except in my mind. But the new guy is. One rainy day we drove to the Clark Museum in Williamstown to see the special exhibition called “Pissarro’s People”. (It’s there for another month if you have the inclination to make the drive.) I didn’t know much about Camille (since he’s my new hero we are now on a first name basis) other than vaguely that he was an early exemplar of the Impressionist School of French painting. What I didn’t know was that he was a Sephardic Jew. In fact, that morsel might be a clue to his personality and world outlook. Now, the world outlook of which I speak is not exclusively Jewish (it was shared by his exact contemporary Leo Tolstoy—1828-1910)—but Jews of his time, 1830-1903 and later, or some Jews, hold a similar perspective.

Pissarro is sometimes called the “Dean of Impressionism” or its “father”. He was an older member of that group that included Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, etc. which broke with the sanctified traditions of Beaux-Arts formalism to create the more fluid art that gave the idea of passing reality rather than perfected views of the past. So why is a guy who painted fuzzy a hero? Not because of his skill (which is indisputable) nor because of his courage in defying the establishment (also indisputable) but because of how he lived and painted. His real rebellion was against the self-satisfied bourgeoisie to whom material possessions were the be all and end all, who treated laborers as if they were replaceable cogs. He married Julie Vellay (1838-1926) one of his mother’s maids, a woman he loved for who, not what, she was, and to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life. That he would see in the maid servant virtue was reflected in his paintings of peasants who worked his rural lands. They are shown during hard work and deserved leisure. They are respected, not revolutionary as suggested in Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners”. To Pissarro the peasants he painted from the mid-1870s on were interesting people living interesting lives best shown in their collective markets, kind of like what is now springing up as nostalgic throwbacks such as the Saturday morning and Wednesday afternoon Blackstone Blvd. farmers’ markets, a place to see and be seen, to meet and to gossip, to buy (Blackstone Blvd farmers’ market prices are not for peasants) and to sell, a place other than the church to congregate. It’s a romantic image ignoring the smells and feel of cow dung and the backbreaking labor of sowing and reaping, but to Pissarro (and to Tolstoy, both of whom worked side by side—at least on occasion—with their peasants) it was the forecast of what was to come, a time when labor, peasant labor in this case, would own the land and determine what was to be bought and sold and for how much, the profits distributed according to effort and need. Think kibbutz.

In the end, Camille realized that this edenic vision was not to be and he drew a series of sketches called Turpitudes Sociales (Social Disgraces), Hogarthian depictions of life in the industrialized cities with a prediction of the uprising of the workers against those who exploited their labor. (You can find the complete set at http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/pissarro/content/slideshow-turpitudes-sociales.cfm)

So, my new hero in art is the Jew, Camille Pissarro—not because he’s Jewish but because his Jewishness colors his work in a way I’d never realized until I saw his people at the Clark.

Prophets, not Profits

2011-08-19T09:28:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-05T07:25:00.000-04:00

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.

A Plan That Won't Work

2011-07-22T06:57:00.000-04:00

I don’t doubt the man’s loyalty, bravery or honesty, but I do think Ephraim Sneh whose op-ed piece “Bad Borders, Good Neighbors” in the July 12 New York Times is off the mark. Sneh, a retired general in the Israel Defense Forces, was Israel’s deputy minister of defense from 1999 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2007. His credentials are excellent; his proposal for peace between Israel and the Arabs is flawed.

Sneh advocates a Rube Goldberg plan of returning to the 1967 borders (with territorial concessions based on exchange of Israeli land to Palestine in return for land occupied by Jewish settlements on the West Bank), and a disarmed Palestinian state, and Israeli soldiers patrolling the border with Jordan—which he argues disingenuously would not violate Palestinian sovereignty—and a three-way Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian defense treaty. This “would bring about a dramatic, strategic change in the Middle East. It would remove the obstacle preventing moderates in the region from uniting against militant Islamist extremists and lay the groundwork for a new strategic alliance in the region, including the Persian Gulf countries, which are natural business partners for Israel, Jordan and Palestine. As a result, Israel would be able to extend its hand to new democratic and secular governments in the Arab and Muslim world. And those committed to Israel’s destruction would be confronted by a new alliance with enormous economic and military power.”

Right. And grateful members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will throw rose petals at the feet of Israeli troops who bring them this new era of democracy and prosperity. Has no one learned anything from America’s Iraq and Afghanistan experiences?

Oh, and lest I forget, nowhere does the word “Jerusalem” come up in Sneh’s piece. I suppose he intends to re-divide the city if it’s 1967 borders he deems most viable, but he doesn’t say so. I can’t imagine why.

He does talk about Gaza, though, the worm in the apple of his argument he must deal with, but he never does so satisfactorily. Gaza he admits has been the launching pad for thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli towns and villages since Hamas wrested control in 2007. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that that Hamas could not have taken over the territory if Israel hadn’t unilaterally withdrawn in 2005. I’d like to add to the Gaza discussion. Hamas is in control and is unlikely ever to surrender the power it won in 2007. Those who disagree, please raise your hand. Seeing none, I’ll continue. So, with Hamas held Gaza to the West, and the heirs of Yasser Arafat in the East, just how secure can borders be? How united will this new Palestine be divided by Israel? How much resentment will being disarmed, unable to protect itself, will Palestinians feel? And those Israeli troops patrolling the border with Jordan? That’s going to fly?

And one more thing. Let’s look at the land exchanges. Base the new borders on 1967 lines Sneh argues, but with modifications to account for Jewish settlements. Fine. The 1967 borders were with Jordan and Egypt, not with a people not yet known as Palestinians. If it were up to me I’d give the territories back to the quasi-stable governments in Cairo and Amman before handing them over to Hamas. But that’s not going to happen. I know, I know. That the proposed new borders zigging and zagging in and out of the West Bank region would be impossible to defend Sneh does not mention, but the sound of snip-snap, as Arabs cut off the Jews of the West Bank and Jews cut off the Arabs in land that used to be part of Israel will most certainly be heard in the land. And there’s another question I don’t think anybody has asked, so let me be the first. Do Arabs living in Israel really want to leave a stable and prosperous land where, granted, they live as a minority, in order to revel for a while (and it will only be for a while until reality raises its ugly head) in the nationalism of an impoverished united Palestine? Has there been a secret ballot on this question or are advocates of the old borders with territorial concessions on each side merely assuming that the Arabs of Israel would prefer being the Palestinians of Palestine? Just asking.

Anthony Weiner and Jesus

2011-06-24T18:34:00.000-04:00

As if Anthony Weiner doesn’t have problems enough. For a really, really, really smart guy, you’d think he’d know how to keep his pants and shirt on when in camera range and how to pronounce his own name. Clue: From the German, the diphthong “ei” is pronounced “eye” never “ee” as in creep or peep. I know it’s tough for him either way, but what with his lewd behavior and all it would be better to be a whiner than a … well, you get the idea. Then there are the lewd photos, the denials, the admissions. You know all about that. “Drat,” I thought when the story was breaking. This is supposed to happen to Republicans—the Governor of South Carolina, the Senators from Louisiana and Utah, the Congressman from upstate New York, the Holy Roller televangelists. These are the people of the party of family values, not a skinny Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn whose mother taught at Midwood High, a mile from my boyhood home. Yes, I know about Spitzer. Before all this broke Weiner was my man in Congress. Yes, Patrick Kennedy and then David Cicilline actually had the seat but Weiner was to the left of Obama, the one who chastised him for capitulating over and over and over again to the white Christian party on the health care bill. And now this.

But there’s more; it gets worse for Anthony. Apparently he’s going to Hell. Unless he makes one little life change. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky—the Southern Baptist Convention's flagship school, has taken it upon himself to give the Jewish fella some unsolicited advice. According to a tweet that Mohler sent to “Dear Congressman Weiner: There is no effective ‘treatment’ for sin. Only atonement, found only in Jesus Christ.” This may be true; but I’m pretty sure it’s not the kind of treatment the Congressman was thinking about when he asked for a leave of absence to get his life in order.

When rebuked by Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA TODAY for hitting a Jew when he was down Mohler responded that “he was simply stating the Christian doctrine that “every single human being is a sinner in need of the redemption that is found only in Christ.” But then Mohler claims that he never actually sent the tweet to Weiner, only to the 27,000 people who follow his twitters. “As far as I know, Rep. Weiner is not among my ‘followers’ on Twitter,” Mohler complained disingenuously. “I did not assume that he was reading my posting. My message was mostly directed at my fellow Christians as a reminder of this very concern—that the American impulse is to seek treatment when our real need is for redemption.” Strangely, though, the tweet was addressed “Dear Congressman Weiner”. Unabashed, Mohler continued: “I never mentioned Judaism. Rep. Weiner’s problem has to do with the fact that he is a sinner, like every other human being, regardless of religious faith or affiliation. Christians—at least those who hold to biblical and orthodox Christianity—believe that salvation is found through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him alone... We also understand that other religions claim ‘routes to restoring righteousness.’ But biblical Christians cannot accept that these ‘routes’ lead to redemption and the only righteousness that saves—the righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer, who is justified by faith in Christ alone.” Got that, sinner? Yes, you. Not only is Weiner going to Hell but you are too. The Rev. Mohler has it on good authority. This is the same Rev. Mohler who, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reminds, caused a stir in 2003 “with his staunch advocacy of evangelizing Jews. He had explained then that warning non-Christians of the ‘eternal danger’ they face in not embracing Jesus ‘is the ultimate act of Christian love.’” How sweet.

I really, really, really wish that the holier than thou crowd would love me less, that Evangelicals would stop trying to get us (me) to convert to Jesus. Jesus probably wishes that they would stop trying to convert me too. He was a good Jew after all, who never left the fold, living as a Jew, dying as Jew and most likely in Heaven as we speak, despite being the Jew that he was. Well, maybe I’m being cynical again. OK, no Rapture for me. Oh, wait a minute…

Bannning Brit Milah?

2011-06-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

Have you heard about Moishe who walked by a store featuring clocks and watches in its window? He needed a repair so he went in and asked the proprietor how much it would cost to fix his watch. “We don’t fix watches here,” the man replied. “I'm a mohel.” “A mohel? Why do you have clocks in your window?” “And what would you put there?”

I remember the brit milah of each of my sons. The first time I was amazed that I burst into tears. The second time I was amazed that despite telling myself that I would not weep this time, I did again. The third time I steeled myself against such unmanly behavior and cried hardest. I’m a wimp, I guess. I was delivering these innocents pain. I’m their father; I should be protecting them from men with sharp knives about to cut them, not delivering them up to them. It was like a sacrifice each time. Yes, I knew it was part of an ancient ritual welcoming the boy into the community, an opportunity for friends and relatives to kvell and to eat and to sing and to dance. But to me it was, well, if I believed in psychology I might be tempted to say that it was a subconscious return to my own eighth day experience.

We read that God told Abraham to circumcise himself and all who were of this party and his son Ishmael and later his son Isaac on his eight day but we’re not told why this should be the everlasting sign of the covenant. Speculation abounds—that by marking the organ of reproduction we are initiating our children into the covenant from the moment of conception, that it was always intended as a health measure, that it was borrowed from other ancient societies, perhaps even from the Egyptians and the Canaanites (who waited until just before puberty to perform the ritual).

The US Constitution prevents government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion (First Amendment). Nevertheless in two California cities, San Francisco this November and Santa Monica next, there will be a referendum decreeing that anyone who circumcises a boy under the age of 18 within city limits faces a $1,000 fine and up to one year in jail. The only exception would be for “compelling and immediate medical need.” To get on the ballot known as the “MGM [Male Genital Mutilation] Bill” 12,000 people signed a petition. Matthew Hess, who founded MGM Bill in 2003 and spearheads its legislative efforts, says he is trying to protect boys from what he considers a barbaric mutilation of their bodies. He became an activist in his mid-20s, he says, when he decided that his own circumcision as an infant resulted in diminished sexual sensitivity as an adult. “Freedom of religion stops at another person’s body,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

Ironically Hess is echoing the great medieval Jewish sage Maimonides who argued in his Guide to the Perplexed that “with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible… The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished.” Thus Jews have more time for study, less interest in lust as compared to uncircumcised Gentiles.

Opposing the ballot initiative is Nathan Diament, director of the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs. He argues that “The stakes are very high. Circumcision is a fundamental aspect of Jewish ritual practice and Jewish identity.” In this he is joined by other Jewish groups and Muslim ones as well. The San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, with Abby Porth, the JCRC’s associate director in the lead, organized a wide-ranging coalition of religious, medical, legal and political leaders to oppose the ballot measure. The Council on American-Islamic Relations Bay Area director Zahra Billoo notes that CAIR rarely finds itself on the same political side as groups such as the Orthodox Union. “It’s the assault on religious freedoms that brings the two together,” Billoo said. “The civil rights of Jews and Muslims are being impacted,” she told the JTA.

On the legal front Joel Paul, professor of constitutional law and associate dean of the University of California Hastings School of Law, says the law likely would not survive a court challenge as it entangles the state in religious matters by putting the state in the position of judging whether a certain religious practice is permissible.

It’s very unlikely that the ban against circumcision will become a reality. Neither the votes nor the Constitution will permit it. But in any event, I’ve looked and have found no creditable indication that the proposed ban is anti-Semitic in origin. Nevertheless, passage of such bills, even if based exclusively on humanitarian considerations, would be a devastating blow to the Jewish (and Muslim) communities. My tears at my sons’ brit milahs ended; but ending brit milah would end Judaism as we know it.

A crazy week

2011-05-27T05:34:00.001-04:00

What a week!

First there was the Rapture. Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock of ages you know that according to indisputable biblical prophesy, on May 21 all true Christians will have been wafted up to Heaven for all eternity whilst the rest of us would be subject to agonizing torments of biblical proportions until October 21 when the world itself would come to an end. I’m not sure if at that point we go to Hell or simply cease to exist, but in any case we give up our chance to sing psalms and strum harps and praising Jesus for the next 20 quadrillion years. If you are reading this without suffering the torments of Hell on earth the prophesy proved false. But millions were taken in by it and some of those millions, desirous of having their pets looked after, after they are in the hereafter paid enterprising atheists to look after their dogs and cats while they were gone. I don’t know how much cash changed hands but the whole story is proof to me that the sprit of Elmer Gantry is alive and well and living in the mouth of a false prophet somewhere beyond the New England/New York region.

Then there was the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Maybe “affair” is the wrong word in this context. After all, when people have affairs there’s presumably a degree of mutual consent involved. But M. Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist head of the International Monetary Fund (and how that happened is beyond me if the word “socialist” still has any meaning. The IMF, that pillar of support of the capitalist system is the last place you’d expect to find a socialist in charge. Or maybe that would be in a $3000.00 a night hotel room.) In any case Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a cleaning lady, this with the impunity and insouciance you might expect from one of his international standing, and was on a plane waiting to fly home to France when New York City policemen came aboard, cuffed him and escorted him via a perp-walk to Rikers Island where as of this writing he is ensconced wondering, no doubt, how he of all people could end up in such a predicament. American journalists have been congratulating the United States for not turning a blind-eye, as Europeans, especially French or Italian Europeans might. Of course American (and European) members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have been turning a blind eye to the activities of pedophile priests for decades and as part of the weird week I might mention that after an exhaustive investigation a commission has concluded that priests trained before the 1960s were not properly prepared for the social upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, so they made passes at little boys who wore glasses (and those who didn’t as well). Makes sense.

Then Mahmoud Abbas published in the New York Times a statement justifying the Palestinian Authority’s decision to approach the UN to ask for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state. According to his view of history “the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states.” By “our homeland” he means all Palestine west of the Jordan River. (If he still thinks of all Palestine as west of the river than Israel has troubles. So does J Street.) Then, according to his distorted perspective, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.” I guess it was a lucky coincidence that fully mobilized Arab brigades were at the border ready to invade.

The week continued with a counter blast from Danny Danon, deputy speaker of the Knesset. In his op ed piece he says if the West Bank/Gaza Palestinians declare themselves an independent nation, Israel will (or should) declare all Jewish settlements in the West Bank part of Greater Israel, and deny Arabs living in those zones Israeli citizenship. While Danon concedes that there would be international uproar over this he feels it will soon pass. I am not a believer in the two-state solution for reasons enunciated from time to time. But this is crazy. Danon and Abbas deserve each other, the one with no sense of the past, the other with no sense of the future. But if they deserve each other, why should we suffer?

As I’ve said, it was a crazy week.

More foolishness on the founders scene

2011-05-13T10:17:00.001-04:00

Does anyone read the Constitution anymore? I mean, yes it has embarrassing elements (Article 4, Section 2, clause 3 allowing vigilantes from the South to come up North to retrieve run-away slaves comes to mind immediately. But we got rid of that one. It cost us a Civil War with 620,000 deaths, but we got rid of it.) But there are some gems. I particularly like the phrase in Article 6 that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Many of the framers then went on to sit in the first Congress which passed and sent around to the states a dozen amendments for ratification including one that contains this little piece: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Which brings me to David Barton. He belongs to that school of unprofessional historians known as Christian polemicists. At a recent conference on church-state relations held at Roger Williams University (full disclosure – I organized the conference) Professor Matt McCook of Oklahoma Christian University (which I do not believe is a hotbed of radical leftists) defines Christian polemicists as suspicious of professional historians whom they believe make too much of the Enlightenment and deny the fundamental Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Instead this group argues that the founders were devout Christians who wanted to create the United States as a Christian nation. Other conferees took it as a given that the founders, even if some were religious, did not want to make America a Christian nation and one pointed out that the Constitution is godless (in that God is not mentioned at all).

Barton, according to a recent story in The New York Times (May 5), has been consulted by several potential Republican presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee who extols Barton as “maybe the greatest living historian on the spiritual nature of America’s early days,” Newt Gingrich, who believes that “American freedoms are divinely granted,” and Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann. All praise his work dedicated to the argument that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin because we have forgotten this and abolished prayer in school.
As do all of his kind, Barton has a problem with Thomas Jefferson’s argument in his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association which called for a wall of separation between church and state, the basis (along with actual words of the Constitution) of the principle that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. According to Barton, Jefferson’s “wall” was meant only to protect religion from the state, not the other way around. It was intended to keep “Christian principles in government,” not prevent religion in the public sphere. Sadly, there’s nothing in Jefferson’s letter or in his life to substantiate this. Jefferson was an atheist, convinced that within a generation all Americans would be Unitarians (another way of denying Jesus’ divinity).

At the Roger Williams conference mention was several times made of different tiers of founders. There were those who participated in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and those who didn’t. Patrick Henry is an example of the latter. He was a devout Christian who advocated taxation to support religion, and limiting public office to Trinitarian Protestants. But the people who actually wrote the documents that define America rejected Henry’s ideas.

Even ignoring the fact that Barton twice spoke before neo-Nazi groups (he claimed not to know they were neo-Nazis) his distortions ought to offend Christians and Jews (and Muslims and atheists). America’s radical departure into modernity was acting upon what it learned from Europe – to separate church and state. When the state creates a preferred religion, the state will be engulfed in civil war, learning will be stifled, dissenters will be jailed (or worse) and society will stagnate.

God gave the United States a nonsectarian Constitution – I know because Newt Gingrich tells me so. But if we allow the David Bartons of this world, based on cherry-picked quotations and a misreading of the past, to convince us that America was intended to be a Christian nation, America will not be strengthened; it will be destroyed.

Spiked Pieces

2011-05-01T10:54:00.002-04:00

Neither the piece immediately below nor the revised version following were published in the April 29 edition of the Voice & Herald. The editor said there were factual mistakes and wouldn’t run either version. I wonder, though, if I’d been commenting on identical events in, say, Topeka if she would not have published it. Ironically the optimist in me says she wouldn’t, but the realist who occasionally emerges thinks she would have.

When on the Morning of the Long Knives the suits descended from their aerie the eleven victims were doing their jobs, as far as I know with dedication and competence. It was not to help them; they were marked for elimination. We are told that budgetary considerations were paramount, that staff had to be cut as funds were down. I’m sure that’s true, as I’m sure that the salaried suits all agreed to take a pay cut in this time of economic distress.

The word on the street is that as the layoffs were announced the victims were immediately escorted out of their building in front of patrons, allowed only to take their personal belongings. No lingering good-byes, no opportunity to ask “why me?” just a security enforced exit. A person with experience in these matters reports that this is how business works and the Alliance is a business. Things have to be done this way to avoid badmouthing, bad morale and general malaise if the fired are not taken away immediately.

At the preschool the children were playing outside when their teacher was told to go upstairs to talk to the manager and hear about the layoff. When she went down to collect her things, with an escort, the kids were inside and saw her leave. There’s a lasting memory for you. “My pre-school teacher got busted. I don’t know what she did but it must have been really, really bad.”

The chief suit, the chairman of the board, responded to public outrage by throwing other people under the proverbial bus. They chose who to terminate, not me, he suggested. He then asked that we feel sorry for the poor souls—for those who chose who would be let go, not the laid off themselves. “Let us all respect the process and the unimaginable burden they had to bear. They acted with compassion, dignity, and respect,” he writes. I wonder who has the greater burden to bear—those fired or those who selected those to be fired. In his explanation of events could not the chairman of the board, a distinguished attorney and political figure in the state have chosen a phrase less offensive to Jewish eyes and ears than “The genesis of that final action…”? Was I the only reader who saw the coincidence of “final action” and “final solution”? And the word “action” of course is the very word used in the 1940s winnowing process. Is there no sensitivity? At all? Maybe not. Here’s what he also says: “Let’s remember who and what we are and focus on our future. We are social justice, lifelong Jewish learning, and loving kindness.” Loving kindness? Escorting dedicated long-term employees out the door as though they were potential criminals? He then concludes with wishes for a happy Passover. I assume that the people who were terminated so suddenly on the Monday before Passover and two weeks before Easter were either Jewish or Christian. Is it a demonstration of loving kindness to let people go before, not after, they celebrate normally joyous holy days with their families? I’m guessing that the Passover Seders in the afflicted homes were glummer than they traditionally are; I’m guessing that Easter Sunday was marred in those homes where Jews showing loving kindness fired Christian workers just before the holiday. Could it not have waited? I guess not. Loving kindness apparently has its limits.

This newspaper is published by the Alliance but is not a house organ. If you are reading this column, you know the truth of that. But I think we failed the public with our headline and sub-headline in the last issue. While in print the story of the firings occupied prime space, right corner above the fold, the on-line version was buried below “Relearning and Rethinking the Passover Saga” and “Israeli Knesset Members Try Listening”. The headline in both was deliberately sanguine despite this metaphorically sanguinary event: “Restructuring at Alliance leads to streamlined efficiencies: Even with staff reductions, no interruption of services is expected.” Our readers deserve better; so do the eleven who were terminated. The remaining staff ought to look into joining a union. It may not save jobs in a period of economic difficulties, but it might at least give the suits pause before they swoop down in such a cavalier fashion with their security guards.

After this was rejected I tried to tone it down and made some “factual” changes, but not enough, she said. No security guards, for instance. Had the opening two sentences of the paragraph above really been true these minor issues would have been resolved in the usual editorial fashion, not by spiking the piece.

This is not the column I wanted you to read. That one was spiked by the editor. She said that my criticism of the Chairman of the Alliance board of directors for his explanation of why and how eleven employees were let go was an ad hominem attack on him. She also said that some of my language was over the top and that that there were factual errors in the piece. She also objected to my contention that the layoffs just before Passover and Easter were poorly timed, pointing out that there is no good time.

As to the first complaint, I can see where she was coming from but I never attacked the man; in fact I respect him. I did think though that his justification for the way employees were treated was disingenuous. As to the second, that some of my criticism was over the top, she was dead on; it was and shouldn’t have been. My facts? Well, I referred to people being fired and she pointed out that firing is for cause; letting go or laying off is for economic reasons and that there were justifiable if unfortunate economic reasons to reduce staff (a point I never contested). That language could have been easily fixed if there were not the other problems. As to the timing of the lay offs, the editor is correct, but so am I. A draw.

I still hold with my closing paragraph which as she did not criticize it I imagine she’ll let stand. I said: “This newspaper is published by the Alliance but is not a house organ. If you are reading this column, you know the truth of that. But I think we failed the public with our headline and sub-headline in the last issue. While in print the story of the [layoffs] occupied prime space, right corner above the fold, the on-line version was buried below ‘Relearning and Rethinking the Passover Saga’ and ‘Israeli Knesset Members Try Listening’. The headline in both was deliberately sanguine despite this metaphorically sanguinary event: ‘Restructuring at Alliance leads to streamlined efficiencies: Even with staff reductions, no interruption of services is expected.’ Our readers deserve better; so do the eleven who were terminated. The remaining staff ought to look into joining a union. It may not save jobs in a period of economic difficulties, but it might at least give the suits pause before they swoop down in such a cavalier fashion with their security guards.”

In 1997 Robert D. Kaplan wrote what has become a famous essay in the Atlantic Monthly. He called it “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” He wrote about how and why democracy always fails in emerging nations with no middle class and no tradition of nationhood, but in advanced industrial societies the principal villain is corporations, those faceless though familiar entities that govern our every moment. They establish their own communities, their own rules, their own police. They have power in the halls of congress and with the presidency and work to maximize profits by becoming global, leaving the workers of their home constituency with scraps. They are the oligarchs of the modern world, the few governing for the benefit of the few. “Neither the Founders nor any of the early modern philosophers ever envisioned that the free market would lead to the concentration of power and resources that many corporate executives already embody,” he writes.

What does this have to do with the way the lay offs at the Alliance were handled? A friend of mine who defended the actions argues that this is how businesses must do things and the Alliance is a business. That may be, but some of us at any rate were working under the assumption that the Alliance was a different kind of business. Yes, the bottom line could not show a deficit, just as no business can. But the idealist in me thinks of Jews as a people apart, a light unto the nations, not a business copying the ruthlessness of corporate others but a people with an ethos allowing them to find ways to do things that must be done more humanely, and then not being disingenuous about it.

Reflections on "Paul"

2011-04-15T02:40:00.000-04:00

The only recognizably Roman Catholic member of the clergy I could identify was a nun sitting in the front row. We (and a capacity audience) were watching the North American Premier of Howard Brenton’s “Paul” at the Gamm Theatre. When the play was over, she was the first person to stand and applaud. I turned to my wife, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nun with my chin and asked “Did she see the same play we did?” It’s hard to imagine.

Some background: According to “The Acts of the Apostles” the fifth book of the New Testament, those who knew and followed Jesus were still Jews, but Jews who thought the Messiah had come in the person of Yeshua (Aramaic for Joshua). They still obeyed the old laws but because they shunned rabbinic authority and were baptized, they were shunned and persecuted. The principal persecutor was Saul of Tarsus who, hearing that there were Jewish followers of Yeshua in Damascus determined to go there to stamp out the community. On the way, he was blinded by a light and heard a voice saying “Why do you persecute me?” and realizing that only the voice of Yeshua would say such a thing—though he was dead—he converted to the new faith. And to him it was a new faith. Unlike Jesus’ old colleagues who thought of themselves as Jews, Paul (the name he adopted upon having his miraculous experience on the road to Damascus) creates a new religion, one where circumcision is not required, nor eating of kosher meat etc., the better to attract gentiles (Greeks) to the new faith.

Now, all of that is a given. The play, though, assumes facts not generally found in the Christian texts—that Jesus and Mary Magdelna, a prostitute, were married, that Jesus did not die on the cross, so was not resurrected but kept in hiding by Peter and James (Jesus’ brother—another thing not generally accepted by Christians) that Joseph and Mary were wealthy purveyors of religious objects in Nazareth, that Peter and James sent Paul out to convert the gentiles assuming that he’d be ignored—or stoned, that they brought Yeshua with them to Saul’s encampment and had him talk to Saul, a well meaning hoax that Saul believed in its entirety. The depiction of Nero is so off the wall that I won’t even mention it other than to say that if you missed Kelby T. Akin as the despotic emperor you missed something rare.

So, we are there the night before Paul’s execution is scheduled. He’s chained, chanting almost as if in a self-induced trance “Christ is risen” over and over and over again. He is a man of faith. But then Peter (played by Gamm veteran Jim O'Brien) is brought into the prison and as the play unfolds he reveals to Paul all the deceptions. Jesus was not God, but an inspiring man. This Paul the believer refuses to believe, that he has been deceived, that his life’s work is based on someone else’s artifice. Peter, who knows the truth ultimately joins in with him intoning, imploring, Jesus the risen God, to help them. If he’s going to die, he may as well die for a cause—whether he believes it or not.

So, why was that nun applauding? I don’t know, but I suppose she does.

A good piece of theater ought to leave us with questions—all the best literature does. Here the question is not so much was Jesus God (the answer is “No”) but the epistemological question, how do we know that the things we know (and are the things we know truly true)?

And we Jews? We enter the Passover season in a couple of days. Our tables will groan under the weight of food, we’ll be a little drunk after four cups of wine, we’ll open the door to allow Elijah the prophet to come join us (he hasn’t yet, but maybe this year) we sing songs and prayers, we ask questions to which we already know the answers, but do we? Were our ancestors slaves in Egypt, rescued by God through his servant Moses? Were there all those plagues? Or miracles? It hardly matters. If one wants to believe, there’s no harm; if one sees the story simply as a metaphor for the potential of the oppressed to rise and liberate themselves, so be it. To my uncertain knowledge there is no historical evidence that the story of the Exodus is true, but it’s a wonderful story nevertheless. If nothing else it gives us the opportunity to clean behind those corners we never normally get to, to be with friends and family to sing and rejoice. Dayenu.

What's a Jewish Subject?

2011-04-01T07:31:00.001-04:00

A recent letter complains that the Voice & Herald is becoming a platform for the Democratic Party with a leftist agenda that alienates conservatives and uses me and my last column as his prime example. I admit to being an economic liberal. In fact, I’m proud of it. I think that taxing the wealthy to support public programs such as bridge repair, heath insurance, medical research etc. is all to the good. I think that President George W. Bush was right on target when the announced that his form of conservatism was “Compassionate Conservatism” suggesting that the other kind, the usual kind, the Reagan kind, is not. It’s too bad that his words were lip service only. In his 1988 acceptance speech when nominated by the Republicans to run for President George H. W. Bush talked of making America a kinder gentler nation which upset Reagan acolytes, but he too was on to something. Do liberals have all the answers? No. Do I disagree with some liberal positions? Yes. As to being called a liberal or a conservative, I think the terms have lost their meanings. Given the choice I’ll define myself as a “Humanist” by which I mean someone in the tradition of Cicero, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, someone who believes that if an action liberates humanity it is positive; if it retards it, if it enslaves, it is to be opposed. If humanist is too vague, just call me Jewish.

So, in my last column I started out by discussing union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere and then segued to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Where’s the Jewish content? My critic wants “to hear about Jewish news and interests in the paper.” In the Forward (a Jewish newspaper) Leonard Fein (a Jew) writes in his March 2 column about “Sam Gompers, David Dubinsky, …Albert Shanker, to say nothing of … Andy Stern, Randi Weingarten and a host of others who have played — and still play — central roles in America’s labor history…[Labor] is… a Jewish issue because justice is everywhere and always a Jewish issue.” Who can disagree? You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that the ruthless exploitation of the worker is not only immoral but economically counter-productive—just read Adam Smith’s “On the Wealth of Nations,” that primer of capitalism and you’ll find the same thing. Is Smith not Jewish enough? “Justice, Justice thou shall pursue,” is or ought to be a familiar quotation. It’s from an old book my critic might once have read. Each Yom Kippur we chant from Isaiah on treating our workers fairly and find nothing with which Governor Walker and his ilk would agree. Jeremiah’s explanation for the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was that masters were enslaving their workers. Micah (another Jew) asks “what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Does this include depriving people of their rights so that the wealthy can become wealthier? Is Moses Jewish enough? Read what he has to say about Egyptian labor practices and about how Jews in their own land should treat gleaners.

Too old fashioned? There’s Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who along with James Cheney were lynched, two Jews and a black man murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi because they tried to register Negroes to vote. Not by liberals. When Ronald Regan, that demigod of the modern conservative movement began his quest for the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980 he went first to Philadelphia, Mississippi of all places, and proclaimed that he believed in states’ rights, a code word in those days (and maybe in ours) for segregation. He was a conservative; I’m not, I’m a Jewish humanist, and if being a humanist offends those who are not, such is life.

If there are conservative Jews who in the modern context place the greed of the land owner above the rights of the gleaner, who do not walk humbly with their God, who do not place Justice before all other considerations, are they living up to the standards set before them by generations of greatness? Or have they succumbed to Mammon like the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Max Blanck an Isaac Harris, union-busters who locked poor immigrant girls into their factory and escaped while 146 of them died within a few minutes, jumping out of the building, crushed against the bolted doors, of burns and smoke inhalation. Blanck and Harris were found not guilty of manslaughter by a jury of their peers, other people who as Abraham Cahan (another Jew) reminds uswere businessmen, salesmen, rent-collectors, not poor Jewish women denied the rights of collective bargaining.

Modern Day Pharoahs

2011-03-18T19:05:00.001-04:00

If turn around is fair play, if the majority cannot simply clobber the minority into submission in the land of the free and the home of the brave, let’s pass a law that calls for annual election of governors of Wisconsin and not have their salaries automatically deposited. Let’s pass a law that for every dollar a billionaire donates to one party he has to donate 50¢ to the other. Free speech isn’t free, after all. Soon enough it will be Passover and we will be reminded again about Pharaoh’s unfair labor practices. At our table I think we’ll contrapuntally read excerpts of the conversations between Governor Walker and the man he thought was David Koch. (If that fundraiser from NPR resigned after he was caught in a sting; if the woman who was NPR’s CEO resigned after her subordinate was caught in a sting, doesn’t fair play suggest that Walker resign too? When kosher pigs fly. Maybe.)

I’ve been thinking about union busting a lot lately. You can’t avoid it; it’s everywhere: Wisconsin, Ohio, Providence. The old manufacturing unions are pretty well pre-busted. Not because American workers abandoned them but because capitalists decided to close shop up north and move south only later to discover that they could make even more money off the backs of cheaper labor in Asia so they hightailed it across the Pacific. Conservatives and “Right to Work” advocates (= right not to have any say in working conditions or salary) now are after the public unions recruiting the jealous, the ones who used to have a good job but whose livelihood has been snatched away by the recession brought about by the economic activities of the very people now giving themselves huge bonuses and buying politicians, having managed to defeat campaign finance reform. These unfortunates are willing to say, “If I can’t have a pension, why should they?” as if the public employees’ pensions are taking food out of their mouths, as if the suffering should be shared only by all poor people while the wealthiest get tax breaks. But the public workers of Wisconsin were willing to take lower salaries and contribute more to their benefit packages. Their line in the sand was collective bargaining.

Next week we mark the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster. Many of us remember the Station Nightclub fire that cost this community 100 lives. If there was anything good to come of that tragedy it was a series of laws to tighten fire codes (I suppose we are still paying fire marshals even though they are public employees). Back on March 25, 1911 600 workers, the vast majority immigrant girls, mostly Jewish, were working on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the ironically named Asch Building. A match carelessly dropped onto some fabric cuttings set the conflagration going. The fire hose was rotted and fell apart as men tried to extinguish the fire which quickly spread among the materials and cleaning chemicals. Some of the women managed to get to the roof and from there escape to other buildings; a brave passerby manned the elevators until the shaft was engulfed in flame. To prevent pilfering the owners of the business had the doors barred shut. In only 18 minutes a hundred and forty six women were killed, either from burns, from suffocation or from smashing into the pavement as they jumped in their desperate attempt to survive. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, managed to escape the conflagration, thank goodness, and later they managed to escape prosecution. Let us all praise devious lawyers. (The owners subsequently lost a civil suit and were required to pay $75 per victim which they could well afford as their insurance company paid them $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours and fined $20.)

Did any good come of the fire? Well, there were new safety regulations, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900 was greatly enhanced and served for decades to protect workers against the Max Blancks and Isaac Harrises of the world, men who put the bottom line before the lives of the people who made their profit possible. But I forget; we are all anti-union nowadays; we see the unions as self-serving and out of touch with the real working people of America—the ones without jobs.

A Modern Purim Story

2011-03-04T11:16:00.002-05:00

Paul Krugman stole my Nobel Prize. I don’t hold it against him, but I think the guy should at least publicly acknowledge the debt. As many of you know we were roommates in college (Yale ’74) who’ve maintained our friendship over the decades meeting each year on Boxing Day to exchange gifts and get hammered (he’s a Jameson’s man, I go for Glenlivet French Oak 15 year old). It was my idea that resulted in the paper that he was cited for in his Nobel ceremony; he just did the statistical analysis. He doesn’t exactly deny this, but he claims that anything written down on a sleazy bar’s coaster dated December 26 any year, doesn’t count as co-authorship. “Nonsense,” I counter, but he rejoins with “Ha!” and shows me his medallion.

But now his guilt feelings have paid big dividends as he’s shared with me in strictest confidence an explosive WikiLeaks revelation that he’s planning to release in his column on March 20, “Just in time for Purim,” he tells me. He thinks I’m going to sit on this, that I’m not going to scoop him, not beat him to the publication punch, that the promise I made last December 26 to keep his confidences holds the same weight as if spoken when sober? He thinks the Nobel is his exclusively? Ha! Read on.

Not content to embarrass American diplomats, the WikiLeaks people have tapped into the (formally) private correspondence of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker is nervous that a Cairo-like rebellion is in the making, that public employees, who are rallying at the State House in Madison demanding that he reverse course on his attempt to abolish their collective bargaining rights might soon demand his recall. He’s even sought advice secretly from Hosni Mubark who faced a similar crisis last month. That correspondence is part of the WikiLeaks revelations as are Walker’s concerns that the Book of Esther he’s been reading on the advice of a local rabbi describes a situation uncomfortably like his own, for just as Haman wanted to kill Jews because Mordechai refused to bow to him, Walker is trying to kill public employee unions which did not support him in his election bid. Just as Hosni called in his thugs to beat up the Tahrir Square protestors, Walker has called in the Tea Party to out-shout the Public Employees. Walker knows it didn’t work for his pal Hosni, but is trying it anyway; he also knows what happened to Haman, and he looks with fright at all those three-corned hats the cheeseheads wear to Packers games. The internal memos reveal that he thinks they are mockingly reminding him of Haman’s fate.

In another WikiLeaks revelation there is correspondence between Walker and his former top aid who has the euphonious name of Ima Goodheart. Goodheart, in E-mail correspondence with Walker, points out that “public workers essentially make a deal to get paid less now and collect pensions upon retirement. So we can’t renege on good-faith contractual agreements.” Thus Goodheart is described as a “former aid.”

In public Walker claims there is no other solution to Wisconsin’s debt crises. In private he thinks the solution is two-fold. “First,” as he puts in the WikiLeaks’ revelations, “we kill the unions and then we give big tax cuts to the wealthy.” When Walker sent an E-mail to George H.W. Bush asking what he thought about this, the former president tweeted: “LOL, Voodoo economics in the land of pasteurization. Will you never learn?”

Walker has also been corresponding with other Republican governors. WikiLeaks revealed that he congratulated Governor Rick Scott of Florida for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando which would have created 24,000 new jobs at a cost to Floridians of only $1.25 million. As Scott wrote to Scott “Well, done Scott! Together we can deny public services to all!”

Can the Scotts be stopped, or do we all have to start drinking Scotch to forget some Scotts Welsh on obligations. After all, on Purim, which rapidly approaches, we are enjoined to get so drunk that we can’t tell an Aleph from a Beth. On Purim we tell stories that are not necessarily true in all details, like this one you’ve been reading—actually none of them are—but we tell the essential truth that arrogance in high places has its comeuppance if, like the protesters in Madison and in Cairo, like Mordechai and Esther, we stand up to manipulative oppressors. It’s happened before, Scotts; it can happen again.

Happy Purim.

Europe and the Jews

2011-02-18T10:17:00.001-05:00

Have you subscribed to “Habitus: A Diaspora Journal” yet? Twice yearly Josh Ellison (originally of Providence where his parents still reside) and his staff bring forth a journal of essays, fiction, poetry, photographs with a focus on a city in which Jews have or are still playing a major cultural role. Number 7, just out, features Berlin, one of those cities where Jews no longer reside in large number, but you cannot think of the Jews of Europe without also thinking of Germany and its capital. The events of 1933-1945 still resonate. The cancer of anti-Semitism, exploited by the Nazis who found it waiting for their use continues. It’s still part of the “What is a Jew,” or rather, “What is a European” question.

The Jews of Germany had been living their since ca. 1000 CE., a generally impoverished and persecuted minority. But with the coming of the Enlightenment, Jews (some Jews, I have in mind as exemplar Moses Mendelssohn--1729–1786) discovered the beauties of western culture and Germans (some Germans) realized that Jews were people with intelligence who ought to be welcomed into society—either as Jews or as converts. For their part Jews were willing to modify their religion so as better to fit in, to assimilate—the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox movements have their origins in 19th century Germany. The point is that Jews made a successful transition from pariah to bulwarks of culture, industry and finance. In the end, that’s part of what did them in. How could such a small population rise to control the stock market, the theater, be so prominent in law, science and medicine? It must be that they are using unscrupulous methods. The Jew was seen as an outsider who only pretended to be German!

So under Hitler Germany became judenrein, Jew-free. Most Jews in modern Germany are from the former Soviet Union, their predecessors having escaped before the War or killed during it. There they live with government subsidies, a kind of reparations.

Today in Germany there is a new outsider, principally Muslim, often Turkish. They are not re-living the Jewish experience in that they are new to the country, new to the continent unlike the Jews who resided as a subject race within Germany for centuries and who knew western culture if only by observation. But these new Germans, living in the land for a generation or more can identify with the older group. Jews were rejected; Turks are being rejected.

Zafer Şenocak is a Turko-German. He was born in Istanbul and with his parents moved to Germany when he was child. His native tongue is Turkish, but he writes in German when his themes demand it. In an interview with “Habitus” he concludes, “It is very strange: anti-Semitism describes Jews as less than human. Then you have this anti-anti-Semitism, describing the Jew as something unreachable: good at everything, knowing everything. Jews are just people. They kill and are killed like every other people. In Europe there is no balance on this issue—you move from one extreme to the other. This is the problem with idealization—it’s a broken image. There is no real discourse with the Jewish people. There is no direct contact. Everything has to be deflected. Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face.”

It was that last line, “Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face” that sent chills down my spine. We are the overachievers who hold the broken distorted mirror in the face of Europeans who killed us, reminding them of what they did. Few are left who organized the slaughter, manned the gas chambers, found and destroyed hiding places. But Europe knows what it’s done, Şenocak reminds.

In Europe, some of us were socialists, others capitalists, some were intellectuals others shop keepers, the gamut of intellectual and economic behavior. All were destroyed, except those few who managed to survive. Here in America, we are in a similar circumstance. We came to a country not our own, a country where Christians were the dominant element bringing with us our strange ways. Many of us have subsequently modified, but we are still strangers in a strange land. When “Americans” are of the left or right they are still Americans. Jews though are Jews of the left or right. And we are caught in the middle between those who have become anti-Semitic through being philo-Palestinian on the left and the gun-totting yahoos on the right, neither of which represents us, both of which might be very happy if we left.

From J'Accuse to Indignez-Vous

2011-02-04T11:10:00.002-05:00

How do you argue with a man who helped author the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a resistance fighter who managed to escape death at Nazi hands at least twice, a man who in February 2008 denounced the French government’s failure to make funds available to provide housing for the homeless, who frequently uses his prominence to urge younger generations to live by the legacy of the resistance including its ideals of economic, social and cultural democracy, a man who received the UNESCO/Bilbao Prize for the Promotion of a Culture of Human Rights? Here is a man who has dedicated his life to the well-being of his countrymen and to people around the world, particularly in Africa where a foundation he established has sent more than 20,000 hospital beds.

Stéphane Hessel (father Jewish, mother Protestant, refugees to France from the Nazis) has recently published an essay Indignez-vous! (“Be Indignant,” or “Get Angry!”). By year’s end 600,000 copies had sold; 1,000,000 is anticipated. As he has before he argues that the people of France need to get outraged, as when under German occupation. The new enemy is blasé acceptance; me firstism; materialism. He includes in his indictment the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France’s treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, the need to protect the environment, the plight of Palestinians, and the importance of protecting the French welfare system.

Whoops.

How did calls to reform France get to include advocacy of Palestinians? Well, this is not Hessel’s first venture into those waters. In August 2006 he made an appeal against the Israeli air-strikes in Lebanon—but the key here is in who sponsored the call—it was published in French newspapers on behalf of the French Jewish Union for Peace.

Two years ago, in January 2009, Hessel decried Israeli military operations in the Gaza strip: “In fact, the word that applies - that should be applied - is ‘war-crime’ and even ‘crime against humanity’”

We’ll pause here for a moment for a necessary headcount. All those in favor of condemning Palestinians to being perpetual victims of Israeli ruthlessness, please raise your hands. Seeing none, I’ll proceed.

The problem with arguing with Hessel is less that he ignores the Arab slaughter of Jews; that he seems not to understand that the Palestinian problem could have been resolved decades ago the same way the Jewish problem in Yemen and Iraq was, but that he brings to the discussion the perspective of a man whose genuine love of humanity, whose attitudes of social reform, of resistance to oppression are unimpeachable. He is not an anti-Semite; he is not pro-terrorist. And in at least one way he is not terribly off the Franco-Jewish mainstream. French Jews have historically never been ardently pro-Zionist. Initial reactions to the movement in the 19th century were that it was a German-Jewish idea, not a French one. Yes, there was the Dreyfus Affair, but on the whole the Jews of France lived a good life with no need to emigrate. (At least one French Jew rejected Zionism wondering what would happen to the native Arabs.) Even after the holocaust there was no mass migration of French Jews to Palestine/ Israel. What anti-Semitism in France is violent is from Arab immigrants, not from traditional Frenchmen. I don’t know how typical of French Jewish feeling it is but Joel Schalit in his blog “the-arty-Semite” reports on the conflict within the French Jewish community. “Coming on the heels of the formation of JCall (the French equivalent of the American JStreet) and the conversion of such figures as JCall founder Bernard-Henri Lévy to routine criticism of Israeli policy, in all likelihood more French Jews find themselves receptive to Hessel’s words than not.” Sigh.

This is Israel’s new burden. Add it to the list—the failure of Labor to keep the promises of the original leaders for an economically just society; the pressure to create a potentially hostile Palestinian state which would surround it; the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb aimed at Tel Aviv; Hezbollah in charge in Lebanon; Hamas in Gaza; Jews, some honorable such as Hessel, others whose motives are more obscure, ignore all the above and condemn Israel. I can only tell the Israelis what Moses told my namesake. Be strong and resolute.

On Misreading the Constitution?

2011-01-21T15:17:00.002-05:00

Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn (about the original intent of the founders). They lived in their time, we live in ours and the times they have a changed. They established a government, they did not write Holy Scripture.

In fact, I’m convinced that there is no original intent. If by the founders we mean those bewigged eighteenth century gentlemen in short pants and high stockings who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, let’s face it, the former also gave us the Articles of Confederation which was a compact of thirteen sovereign states (as in State of Israel, an independent nation) unified in fighting Britain but in hardly anything else, and then when that wasn’t working too well, some of them met in secret session to create the Constitution. So what was the original intent of that group? Hard to say. Some left mid-session in anger at what was going on; some refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t say what they thought it should; others agreed with Ben Franklin who said, in effect, well, it’s not what anybody wants, but it’s the best we can do, so let’s sign the thing, hope for the best, and go home.

Immediately it was realized that the Constitution even with all its compromises wasn’t quite right so amendments were proposed by James Madison, ten of which were ratified very quickly, and then an eleventh and then a twelfth to resolve problems that none of the founders in their infinite wisdom had anticipated.

And yet, there are some today who seem to think that they know the Original Intent and that it is good.

Which brings me to Thomas J. Tobin, the Roman Catholic bishop of Rhode Island. Writing in The Providence Journal on January 12 he throws down the gauntlet to Governor Chafee who didn’t have a prayer service before his inauguration and who had the temerity to declare that Rhode Island was a secular state. “By now,” the bishop writes, “you should be aware that the exact phrase ‘separation of church and state’ isn’t found anywhere in our nation’s Constitution but rather was a principle that evolved later on…to protect religion from the interference of the state. It was never intended to remove every spiritual aspiration, prayerful utterance or reference to God from public life.” He then backs this up by quoting a Catholic archbishop, a pope, and quotations from Madison and Washington.

As to no mention of separation of church and state in the Constitution, the bishop is correct. There is also no mention of toleration of slavery (or even the word “slavery”) but there was slavery. There is no mention of judicial review, but there is judicial review. There is no mention of the air force, and yet the President is commander-in-chief of that as well as the army and navy which are mentioned. If we only look at what the founders said we’d only count three of every five black people every census. The Constitution was not written by divinely inspired men but by politicians. I’ll spare the bishop Thomas Jefferson’s vituperative remarks about Christianity and priests but will recommend that he look at Brooke Allen’s “Moral Minority” which demonstrates with ease that the founders were anything but religious folk and that they wanted as little to do with religion as possible.

The bishop also contends, rightly, that religious leaders have “every right, indeed the duty, to speak out on public issues. If we fail to do so, we’re neglecting our role as teachers, preachers and prophets.” Prophets? The age of prophesy is still with us? OK, let’s just chalk that off to hyperbole and agree that yes, religious leaders as citizens have a right to express their views. But do they have the right to threaten legislators with excommunication or denial of the sacraments to those of their faith who disagree with the hierarchy’s views? Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis publicly stated that he would deny John Kerry communion because of his views on abortion and Archbishop Sean O’Malley of Boston, told Catholic elected officials who are pro-abortion that they should not be receiving communion and that they should refrain from taking part in the Christian sacrament on their own. This goes beyond writing a letter to the paper or seeking an interview to express differing views. Closer to home Bishop Tobin forbade Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because of his advocacy of abortion rights. That’s what the founders had in mind? I’m thinking not. And if it is, I refer you to my first sentence.

On Russ Feingold

2011-01-10T16:34:00.000-05:00

You remember Jesus, of course. No, not that One. I have in mind Jesus ben Sirach, credited with one book of apocryphal writings. That Jesus. He wrote Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach. Only deep into the book do we find its most famous line “Let us now praise famous men…” and then with permission granted to myself to edit quasi-sacred writ, here are some examples of why the famous men are to be praised—for “giving counsel by their understanding, and by their knowledge of learning, wise and eloquent, honored in their generations, and the glory of their times who have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.”

Heady stuff. Few qualify in the modern world. Russ Feingold is among them however, recently turned away by the voters of Wisconsin, though still young enough at fifty-seven to return to the fray. Known as a great dissenter, Feingold voted against his own party 887. Looking remarkably like Daily Show host Jon Stewart, Feingold attributes his independent spirit to growing up in the small town of Janesville, Wisconsin where most of his friends were Protestant, many from conservative homes. Rather than conform, he excelled.

Not surprisingly a biblical analogy is used by a colleague to describe him. “He has been the David against some pretty big Goliaths,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. “He never shied away from a fight, even if he had to fight alone.” He opposed the Patriot Act, the Bush bank bailouts, and the Obama troop surge in Afghanistan. Most recently Feingold joined 18 other senators from both parties in voting against President Obama’s compromise extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. The measure also extended unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, a key demand of Democrats. To me this is his most important vote in opposition. To give multi-billionaires tax breaks for two years in return for thirteen months of unemployment compensation to the neediest, the people who multi-billionaires put out of work to begin with, is a shanda, and I’m sorry our delegation voted for it, pleased as punch, to quote another mid-westerner that Feingold refused to do so. Feingold’s argument was more economic than my moral stance, but it holds: “Rather than include a combination of responsible spending cuts and revenue increases to offset its projected cost [the tax breaks] of nearly $900 billion … instead just adds its cost to our already massive national debt.”

Those were dissenting votes; he had positive ones as well, most notably the epic coalition-building that resulted in the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 (after a seven years legislative struggle) that severely limited national political party committees from raising or spending any funds not subject to federal limits, and “issue ads” that name federal candidates within 30 days of a primary or caucus or 60 days of a general election, and prohibiting any such ad paid for by a corporation or by corporate or union general treasury funds. So-called soft money was the target; big business complained and in 2009 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission the guts of the bill were ripped out. Big corporations objected that free speech was imperiled, that money was speech and could not be regulated by federal legislation. The Supremes in Washington agreed (well, five of them, anyway) and McCain-Feingold went the way of the passenger pigeon. If the Court is right, if money = speech, America is in trouble; deep trouble. There are those few with many dollars and those many with few dollars. The rich can shout from the highest minarets, the poor get to write the occasional letter to the editor. Parity, which Feingold and John McCain (in his maverick mode) sought, is destroyed. The dollar rules, the voice of the people is muted. The bill took seven years to pass, and then seven years later it was declared unconstitutional. Pharaoh’s dream came to reality, again.

In bidding adieu to his colleague, McCain said “In his time in the Senate, Russ Feingold, every day and in every way, had the courage of his convictions. And though I am quite a few years older than Russ and have served in this body longer than he has, I confess I have always felt he was my superior in that cardinal virtue.”

In the 112th Congress there will be thirteen Jewish senators (counting Michael Bennet [D-Colo.], who does not identify a religion, but notes that his mother is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.) Missing will be Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

On Palestinian Sermons

2010-12-24T09:44:00.001-05:00

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

2010-12-10T13:34:00.001-05:00

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.
---
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

2010-11-26T09:54:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-12T14:36:00.001-05:00

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

2010-10-29T10:34:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-15T10:34:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-01T16:45:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-09-17T16:04:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-20T19:01:00.003-04:00

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

2010-08-06T19:00:00.000-04:00

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?

2010-07-23T13:53:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-11T11:23:00.000-04:00

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

2010-05-28T14:28:00.001-04:00

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

2010-05-14T11:54:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

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

2010-04-02T17:58:00.001-04:00

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

2010-03-19T16:58:00.000-04:00

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

2010-03-05T17:17:00.001-05:00

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?

2010-02-19T17:15:00.001-05:00

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

2010-02-05T17:12:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-22T09:50:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-08T09:39:00.000-05:00

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.

Robert Meeropol

2009-12-25T17:27:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betrayed by WGBH

2009-12-11T11:32:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Jew in Music

2009-11-27T11:30:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-11-13T11:28:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Do Jews under 30 care about Israel?

2009-10-30T19:24:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Jewish Bishop

2009-10-16T12:44:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Holiday Thoughts

2009-09-18T12:42:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

A Jewish Police Chief

2009-09-04T12:40:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forward's Past

2009-08-21T12:34:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Lipsey

2009-08-07T14:01:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Responses from those who read the spiked 7/24 column

2009-07-25T14:07:00.000-04:00

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

2- I love it! ...particularly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sending this along,

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

Liberals as Fascist? Bah, nonsense!

2009-07-24T13:59:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This column was spiked. I like it though

2009-07-24T13:56:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Acts of bravery and cowardice

2009-06-26T18:29:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

Filming the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide

2009-06-12T09:30:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memorial Day Relfections

2009-05-29T09:27:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is the ass?

2009-05-15T11:34:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booking a trip to Africa

2009-05-01T11:33:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaddish at Fenway Park

2009-04-24T11:31:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poems intrude: Thoughts on the Death of My father

2009-03-06T11:27:00.000-05:00

Poems intrude. The first begins:

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

The second urges:

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

Out of the canon of Scripture we read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Peace Proposals

2009-02-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the Two State Solution Won't work

2009-01-23T10:56:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crocodile and the scorpion

2009-01-10T17:54:00.002-05:00

There’s an old joke. It’s not very funny, but it is hoary with age, and so has become a cliché. A scorpion asks a crocodile to let him ride on his back across the Nile. “But if I carry you, mid-way across you’ll bite me and I’ll die,” responded the worried Crocodylus niloticus. “Not to fear, if I bite you mid-way across, we both die, so I won’t.” This appears to be a convincing argument. But mid-way across the scorpion stings the crock in the back. The dying lizard turns to the venomous betrayer and says, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both die,” to which the scorpion replies just before it drowns, “well, that’s Africa.”

Because of an early deadline I don’t know how the current Israeli offensive against Hamas will turn out. But this I do know—its hatred for Jews is a cancer that can neither be contained nor eliminated, which in fact metastasizes proportionately to the efforts of Israel to excise it (or, to switch my metaphor yet again, it’s hydra-like—whenever Israel cuts off one head, two grow in its place). But what else can Israel do? It pulled out of Gaza and instead of peace it got Hamas.

Some pro-Israeli doves argue that Israel ought to moderate its counter-attack. For example: Diane Balser, executive director of Brit Tzedek intones, “We can already anticipate that this incursion will be yet another failed attempt to resolve this fundamentally political conflict by military means. It is high time to break with this cycle; only through serious and sustained international diplomacy can the problems with Hamas and Gaza be resolved.”

Such organizations are to be commended for their consistency, but none recognize the nature of the beast with which it is trying to reconcile. Hamas does not recognize the despised State of Israel and sees no option other than to continue its struggle to the death by any means possible. If that requires putting its headquarters in the middle of a civilian population of innocent Arabs so be it. The more televised martyrs the better. If it means attacking Israel indiscriminately and waiting for the inevitable retaliation so that it can cry “foul!” and have its world-wide community of sycophants take to the streets, hurling stones and vituperation, urging vendetta, bring it on! The pictures we see on television of civilian suffering are perfect for Hamas. “Look what the Jews do to us, we must get revenge,” is the war-cry taken up around the world. An intifada is to be expected; indeed, it’s been prophesized by Hamas.

Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni also misses the point when in an interview with al-Jazeera she urges Arab governments to stop Hamas’ attacks because they are injurious to the Palestinians of Gaza; she ignores the volatility of the Arab Street.

Negotiation with Hamas is like the crocodile’s discussion with the scorpion. The scorpion knows only one thing and it does it even if it loses its own life. Negotiations with Egypt were possible because Anwar Sadat had achieved a victory of sorts in the Sinai in October 1973. Hamas achieved a victory of sorts when Israel pulled out of Gaza in August 2005. The one came to pray in Jerusalem and made peace, the other fires rockets onto Sderot.

But, I fear, the air assault (followed by a ground incursion?) will fail as well. Like Lebanon two summers ago, Hamas may be lulling Israel into its rope-a-dope strategy. We hit and hit and hit harder, exhausting ourselves; and they claim victory by not surrendering. Their intifada, when it comes, will provoke greater responses in an escalating progression of civilian deaths.

Israel has other choices beyond shock and awe. It might take the French suggestion of a two-day cease fire to see if Hamas will stop its assaults or it should return to targeted assassinations of Hamas leadership (and Hezbollah’s for that matter). We should abandon precision bombing because the bombing is never precise enough and because its collateral damage—both human and structural—is a provocative outrage.

An army uses the weapons it has, so Hamas uses rockets and will be using human bombs in Jerusalem and elsewhere, and it doesn’t care about the blow-back. We have planes, but we do care. We also have courage and intelligence. We have Mossad. (Gabriel Allon, where are you when we need you most?) Just as in that other old story, sometimes slow and steady wins the race. But trust the scorpion? Only if we have a death-wish.

Fanatics, Madoff: The worst of the Jewish community

2008-12-26T20:10:00.002-05:00

We as a people, are as noble as the greatest tsadik, as low as the worst of our villains. (I remember my mother always breathing a sigh of relief when she knew for sure that a criminal was not, in fact, Jewish.) Between goniffs like Bernard Madoff and anti-Israel pro-Messianic religious fanatics in Hebron are we losing the legitimacy of our claim that we hold the moral high ground?
Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme cost Yeshiva University $110 million; Hadassah $90 million; the endowment fund of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington more than $10 million; the Jewish Funds for Justice $3.9 million; the Forward (that other Jewish newspaper) a mere $355,000. If you’ve been doing your arithmetic you’ll see I’ve accounted for less than 10% of the $50 billion he’s reputed to have embezzled (or vaporized as far as anyone can tell). When I read in the Times last Week of a rich man, one of Madoff’s Judas goats who brought him clients, and then followed Max Bialystock’s guiding principle until Bernie’s scheme bankrupted even him, I didn’t cry. Schadenfreude is one of my minor sins. But cheating Hadassah? Yeshiva University?
If all that weren’t bad enough, he’s also handed a loaded shotgun to those who already despise us and want to see us dead. Here’s a sample from a blog with the innocuous sounding name, “The Truth will set you free”:

“Madoff was elected chairman of the board of [Yeshiva Universty’s] Syms School of Business in 2000…Does the ‘Jewish tradition’ taught at Yeshiva U. support giant ‘Ponzi’ schemes like the one run by their chairman? Is this the kind of business they teach the students at Syms? Cheat the ‘goyim,’ i.e. non-Jews, and steal their money? That is exactly what the Talmud teaches, make no mistake about it. It is the main reason that Jews have been despised and expelled from so many nations throughout history. Anyone familiar with the teachings of the Talmud, i.e. ‘Jewish tradition,’ will know that such anti-Christian schemes are at the heart of such an ‘education.’ This is why so many of the financial criminals involved in the current Zionist-produced ‘credit crisis’ are Jewish Zionists who have been indoctrinated in such ‘Jewish traditions.’ The Zionist criminals involved in 9-11 and the cover-up of the truth are all tied to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which is a similar Zionist institution.”

Thanks, Bernie, for letting slip the dogs of anti-Semitism; if this is the first step towards welcoming back the Middle Ages, to accusations of us using Christian blood to make our matzah, you can look to Bernie for inspiring it. Fascists of all stripes who would destroy the Jews are out there. Read further for another example.
Have your read Josephus’ The Jewish War, his history of the struggle between Jews and Romans that reached its crescendo with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the suicides at Massada two years later? According to him, the slaughter of Jews in Jerusalem was by the Jewish zealots who objected to those Jews who would live amicably (if warily) with the Romans.
Earlier this month the Israeli Supreme Court ordered a disputed property in Hebron vacated until it could decide ownership. The army moved in, expelled the 200 or so zealots in occupation and then the fanatics went on a rampage—against Arabs. Their policy is called “Price Tag.” If the government wants to be conciliatory to Arabs, the price is these pogroms (not my term, nor the term of the Arab press, but one used by the Prime Minister of Israel). The hooligans shot Arab civilians, set fire to their homes, destroyed their crops and terrorized them. The Premier’s terminology sounds about right. He might also have called it an intifada.
Further to fan the flames of backlash, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two of the Ayatollahs who urge the young on their destructive rampage and then attempt to justify it, threatened to march with their troops bearing 100 Israeli flags through the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm near Haifa. Their group? It has the evocative name of “The Jewish National Front,” a name which immediately brings to mind fascists in France, Britain and the United States who call themselves the National Front and want to impose racist policies on their reluctant homelands.
Were not the fascists of Europe enough for the world? Have we learned nothing? Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

2008-12-12T20:03:00.001-05:00

Nous sommes tous Américains!” Thus the headline on September 12, 2001, Le Monde’s declaration of French solidarity with America in its time of wrenching agony. Our civilians had been hijacked, forced to become part of inhuman missiles. The World Trade Center had been converted into two dusty tombs for thousands of innocents and 10 demented mass murderers; the Pentagon was hit a glancing blow and brave passengers died having revolted in the air attempting to re-take a fourth pirated plane.

The comparisons to events in Mumbai are overt. Here parallel towers, there parallel hotels; here the financial capital of the United States, there the financial capital of India; here warnings were ignored, there warnings from us were ignored; here they flew in from the sky, there they sailed in on boats; here they were well organized Arabs, there they were (it would seem) well organized Pakistanis; here our response was poorly organized—and so was theirs; here president Bush’s term was beginning, now it is ending, bookending tragedy; here there was shock and anger, there there was shock and anger.

But there is one substantial difference. Jews. In the New York tragedy the murders let it be thought that the whole thing was an Israeli plot. Jews didn’t report to work that day, because they had been tipped off. Only the deliberately stupid believed the calumny. This time Jews were a target, perhaps for all we know the target, the other assaults mere diversions. Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his 28-year-old pregnant wife, Rivka, were killed, though the couple's son, Moshe survived after his nanny, Sandra Samuel escaped with him 10 hours after the hostage incident started. There is intense pressure to declare Miss Samuel a “righteous among the gentiles”. No less significant, though often over looked are 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who was traveling in India, Bentzion Chroman, 28, and 38-year-old Leibish Teitelbaum who were all killed as well—not in the cross fire, not with a spray of machine gun fire, but tortured to death in ways I cannot describe because I cannot know them. First the Indian coroner and later Israeli Zaka (Orthodox Jews who help to collect body parts after terrorist attacks in Israel) felt compelled to leave the room where the bodies were found, appalled by what they saw. As I write, two other Jews are in critical condition.

At about 2:00 on that pleasant Thanksgiving Day, Chabad rabbi Joshua Laufer called. He was trying to organize a prayer service for the hostages. I asked “What time?” and he said “4:40.” Our company was due at 4:30. But I said that we’d pray at home. As family and our guests sat at our groaning table, I distributed yarmulkes and asked my son, a fifth year cantorial student, to lead us in a prayer for hostages. He chanted Psalm 130 in Hebrew and then translated it: a truncated version follows:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Oh Lord, hear my cry!
Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
It is He who will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

But while I heard those words of supplication, I was thinking others about the Deccan Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba or whoever it was that decided to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. It’s from another Psalm, number 94, not one of my favorites, normally, but parts of it seemed more than appropriate at the time: “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! How long shall the wicked exult, shall they utter insolent speech, shall all evildoers vaunt themselves? They crush your people, O Lord, they afflict Your very own; they kill the widow and the stranger; they murder the fatherless, thinking, ‘The Lord does not see it, the God of Jacob does not pay heed.’ Take heed, you most brutish people; fools—when will you get wisdom? Shall He who implants the ear not hear, He who forms the eye not see?”

The previous Shabbat the young Mumbai rabbi had been talking about the humane slaughter of animals Jewish law demands. The irony? Jews slaughter animals humanely, but the animals of the Deccan Mujahideen slaughter Jewish human beings by torturing them to death. “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, Judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts!”

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

A History Lesson: One we hope won't be repeated

2008-11-27T11:58:00.001-05:00

Last Shabbat I was reminded of how American and how Jewish I am. In schul we read of the death of Sarah, first of the matriarchs. We also commemorated the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ask any person of a certain age (my age) if they remember where they were and you will get a stream of reminiscence. I was just coming out of an art history exam, thinking about going home for Thanksgiving; I overheard a couple of other students talking about presidents elected in years ending in zero dying in office and wondered why they were bandying about that old chestnut. Moments later I knew.

In my lifetime’s memory, I can’t think of a better, certainly not a more inspiring president than JFK whose words were eloquent, whose public actions were on the mark, whose wife added grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington. If things work out as we hope they will, now my children will have the experience of a Kennedy-like president in the White House—a man whose words are eloquent, whose public actions are on the mark, whose wife will add grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington.

At our house we commemorate the mournful event in Dallas as we always do, with song and quotation. We began with a toast made over Jameson Irish whisky, and sang,

“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must abide.

One guest rose to recite a line from Edward Everett, the other speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery and now inscribed on the Rhode Island World War II monument. “No lapse of time, no distance of space, shall cause you to be forgotten.” Then, unbidden lines from a poem I’d memorized in 7th grade came to mind. It’s from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” a stanza of which seemed appropriate. From Jameson affected mind to quivering lips it passed, including this stanza:

Rest, comrade, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be,
As sentinels to keep
Your rest, from danger, free.

I don’t know if this will resonate with many, but two historical events, I hope not precedents, intrude into my mind with nightmare vividness. Briefly in 1618 there was a king and queen of Bohemia, Frederick and his English wife Elizabeth who were of the same lofty plane as the Kennedys and the Obamas. So gracious were they, so open to the arts and sciences that this so-called Winter King—for so brief was his reign—was a foretaste of last century’s Prague Spring. But as in 1968, so in 1619 the forces of repressive reaction drove them from Prague and restored unimaginative conformity, while simultaneously ushering in the Thirty Years’ War. Another historical model: The Gracchi, two brothers in second century BCE Rome, children of wealth and privilege who objected to the outsourcing of jobs (importation of slaves) and importing of cheap products (grain which came virtually free into Rome from conquered provinces) and the displacement of the small farmers who could not compete, their lands snatched up by wealthy aristocrats for a song to grow not wheat but olives and grapes—and then when there was no Italian grain the price of the imported stuff went sky high. The Gracchi sought to curb these abuses by, yes, by spreading the wealth, by limiting the size of the great estates and restoring to the displaced farmers new lands confiscated from those who had taken advantage of their poverty in the first place. Naturally the forces of law and order (yes, Virginia, I am being sarcastic) took matters into their own hands and both brothers in their turn were brutally assassinated. John and Bobby were their modern day counterparts. Those who know me know that I don’t actually pray. Usually. But this I do pray—that the Secret Service does its job. The brothers Gracchi and Kennedy were sacrifices enough.

As you read this, Thanksgiving will have been and gone. I hope it, the quintessential New England holiday, the holiday that doesn’t exclude Jews was a joyous one. Already we are being bombarded with Christmas music and decorations, but with the economy so bad and getting worse, who can blame retailers for rushing the season. So, in that spirit, though to me as I write this it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, Happy Hannukah to all, and to all a good 2009.

The Party

2008-11-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday we woke early hoping to beat the crowd at the Francis J. Varieur Elementary School where we vote. By the time I arrived it was necessary to stand beyond the outer door—on a beautiful autumn morning, chatting companionably with neighbors and strangers. Promptly at 7:00 we were allowed into the gym; I stood on the R-Z line, took my ballot, walked to an open booth and completed broken arrows with a felt-tipped pen. I voted for the Irish guy—O’Bama, (I was number 37 that morning to cast my vote) and left the building at 7:15. Feeling patriotically uplifted I drove to school where the pro-McCain people were dourly looking at the latest polls, wondering if they could hold the states W. took in ’04 while the pro-Barack throng nervously asked of each other, “How will they steal it from us this time?”

The rest of the day dragged on and on and on and on. Finally it was time to go home to the hopefully celebratory party we’d arranged for some friends, fifteen of us, armed with polling statistics and as each state was reported we checked to see if it was expected for this candidate or that. We ate and swigged and ate some more, occasionally engorging something recognizable as part of a legitimate food group other than chazerie. Swing states were coming in remarkably slowly. Finally Pennsylvania was awarded to Barack, greeted by whoops and a hollers and shouts of “That’s it, that’s it,” to which others said, nervously, “No, not yet, let’s not put a kenyna hura on this.” But then Ohio was reported solidly in Barack’s camp! By the time the networks proclaimed the winner, shortly after 11:00, we had just heard that Virginia, where my son Sam had been working on the campaign since the summer, had come in for Obama.

We cheered, popped the corks off bottles of champagne, and spontaneously burst into song—first “God Bless America/Land that I love/Stand beside her, and guide her/Thru the night with a light from above./From the mountains, to the prairies/To the oceans, white with foam…../God bless America/My home sweet home” and then a modified version of a song that had been going through my head all day—“We have overcome/We have overcome/We have overcome, today/Oh, deep in my heart/I did believe/We would overcome, someday.” We drank to our healths, and to Obama’s, and to the health of the United States. We felt as though America had done something good and noble that day. Tears flowed as freely as the bubbly. I called Sam and shouted into his voicemail, “You did it, you did it, you did it!” My wife and three others in the room took credit for New Hampshire, the swing state they drove up to last weekend to knock on doors and speak to undecideds. It was a wonderful night. Those of us who proudly call ourselves liberals know that we’ll face our comeupance in some future election, but tonight was ours and we savored the feeling of triumph.

McCain made a graciouis and conciliatory concession speech, but I was bothered by two things—while the Democrats had planned their victory party out in the park and open to all, the Republicans met in an exclusive hotel (I’ve seen it; it’s gorgeous) by invitation only. (Someone at my house commented that this was a microcosm of the difference between the parties.) The other grouse was in his reflection that “This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” But as I heard these words I immediately thought, “and white people too.” Without an overwhelming number of people of European descent voting for Obama, this political miracle could not have taken place. It was a multi-racial victory, a victory for America, not a victory for black people only. We did this thing also. My pro-McCain students are proud to have been alive when America broke the color barrier—they just wish the black man had different policies. I’m glad he doesn’t.

And so, we enter a new era. Both McCain and Obama made the same point. It’s time to put the bitterness behind and to work together instead to solve the myriad problems that confront the nation. In a way, winning the election was the easy part; now comes the tough work of reconstructing a viable economy and finding Osama bin Laden, hidden in his cave, so long ignored.