A Purim piece (redux)

Josh Stein is on a research assignment in Greece. He sends this classic piece for the Purim edition.

I remember my first Purim as a groom. It was the last day of our F. Scot and Zelda period. We were in England on a quick exchange. We’d swapped houses with a professor of British colonial history who needed a place to stay in Rhode Island. It was a marriage made in heaven, much like the one upon which I was embarking.

Our plane landed the day before Purim and being young and in love, my wife and I had celebrated the beginning of the holiday by ourselves, drinking to excess in the traditional manner, falling fast asleep on top of the down mattress we had the pleasure of using for those two weeks. The next morning around midnight (according to my biological clock, though it was 6:00 a.m. English time) we heard a pounding on the front door. We both responded with the same articulate grunts, “Huh, wha’ what’s happening?” More pounding. I got up, not knowing where and when my clothes had come off. More pounding. Whoever it was, he or they were certainly persistent. “I can’t go down to the door like this,” I protested. “Here, wear this,” saith the bride. Hurriedly I put on her pink shorty robe. Inside out. Naturally I could not find the buttons and because of an obvious discrepancy between her sveltness and my rotundity I couldn’t properly close the thing. Stumbling out the door of the bedroom, half blindly (my glasses hadn’t been anywhere near my fumbling fingers when I’d shot bolt upright as the pounding began), I found the stairs, and trooped down, half falling, half stumbling, fully confused, head throbbing, eyes bleary, mouth dry, hair a shambles, eyes bloodshot. After an interminable moment I remembered how to unlock the bolt and I threw the portal open to confront an uncaring world.

The man I blearily saw hadn’t shaved that day, nor the day before, apparently. He wore work cloths that hadn’t been washed since the Blitz. He stared at me incredulously. I stared back at him with wonder—as in “I wonder what this fellow is, and what he wants?” He attempted to resolve the issue by saying, screaming at me, really, “DOOSTBINMIN” which did not do a great deal to clarify anything. “What?” I shouted in reply. “DOOSTBINMIN” he said, still louder. “What?” “ROOBISH!” Well, this was not getting us very far.

By now Penney had gotten dressed and sylphlike glided down the stairs. (She’d just abandoned Zelda and entered her Loretta Young phase). She said to me, calmly. “Josh, he’s the dustbin man and he wants to collect our rubbish.” “Oh,” I said sheepishly, glad once again that I’d married a linguist. “Tha’s right, Guv,” said the now smiling dustbinmin, as he lasciviously eyed my pretty bride and waited for me to collect any household garbage we might have. Sadly the owners had left us a spotless home to move into, so there was none Feeling abashed at the lack I found a slipper half chewed by some kind of animal I’m glad to say we never actually saw. This meager object I placed into a plastic bag and proudly presented to our garbage man, who looked at the meager offerings with ill-disguised disdain. “Tha’ it, Guv?” he asked. “Yup,” I said, sheepishly. “Right-o,” he replied. “Hag Purim Sameach!” and off he went.

My mouth agape I tried calling after him. “How’d you know we were Jewish, that this is Purim?” But the words didn’t come out, and as I saw him toss our trash into the back of the big garbage truck I’d somehow failed to notice until this point, he waved enigmatically and that was the last I saw of him on that morning. “A Jewish dustbinmin?” I mumbled snobbishly.

Only later did I find out what really happened that morning. Our dustbin man was, in fact, the rabbi of the local Reform (they call it “Liberal”) synagogue who was a friend of the house’s owner who had told him that Jews were moving in for a couple of weeks. In the spirit of Purim the rabbi had donned the garb of a garbage man and pulled our legs. After all these years (thirty by last count) we still exchange Purim cards and visit each other when we are in the other’s country. An odd way to begin a life-long friendship, but life is strange with its twists and turns. Just ask Queen Esther.

Boomers in the White House (Or: How I guessed wrong)

Caveat Lector. Reader, beware! In 1980 I confidently predicted that President Carter would narrow defeat Ronald Reagan. In 1992 I was sure that President George H.W. Bush would defeat little known Bill Clinton. In 2000 it was obvious that Al Gore would win over George W. Bush. (On that one I was right, except that…well, you know…) So I’ve given up on predicting presidential contests, even primaries. By the time you read this Obama will probably be the prohibitive favorite, or even the nominal nominee of the Democratic Party (whoops, poor Obama, I’ve just made a prediction!). The rules of the game are that I can’t endorse, and I wouldn’t, but I can comment in the comment section of this paper, and so I will.

Those who voted in the Democratic Primary earlier this month were purportedly given a choice between style (Obama) and substance (Clinton). But as Barbara Fields alluded last week, there might be more than that; we were given a choice between my generation and the next, and for those of us in my age-range we can compare to those in our parents’ generation.

My parents’ generation was represented by Kennedy and Nixon, the one the golden boy of change, the other an exemplar of suspicion and trickery; Ford and Carter are of their generation too, both men of honor, neither up to the job; Reagan was a throwback, the front man for those who wanted ever since its inception to undo the New Deal. Then after H.W. Bush it was my generation’s turn to produce presidents. We gave you Clinton and Bush, both draft evaders, the former a womanizer whose indiscretions cost his party its hold of congress and later the presidency. The latter is a failed example of a puppet king who succeeded in doing his masters’ task, lowering their taxes, and then thought he could assume the mantle of leadership by creating an unnecessary war, and in so doing has alienated 70% of the country.

My generation was the product of the sexual revolution (thanks to Hugh Heffner, et al.) and rock and roll—that most mindless of music which has now further degenerated into the non-music of racial slur, misogamy and gangstas. We were babied by our doting parents who had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War, determined that we should have what they had not, and we appreciated it. But if Clinton and Bush are our representative presidents, we have failed to live up to our enormous potential.

Now another Clinton is running for president. At first she seemed to be the prohibitive favorite, the all but anointed champion of her party, the heir presumptive to her husband’s popularity. She was thought of as inevitable. And she was. Until the voters had their say. First in Iowa, then in South Carolina, then not able to eliminate her rival on Super Tuesday she suffered a string of defeats until the March 4th contests which are before me, but by the time you read these words you will know whether she was able to survive as a viable candidate, or not. Yes, she’s strong on policy, but she’s of my generation, and therefore I think that she’ll lose; I think the American public has had enough of us baby-boomers whose time in office was brief (16 years) but perhaps too long.

Obama on the other hand seems to have surmounted the twin trials of being inexperienced and half African. He is reputed to be a Manchurian Candidate, a crypto Muslim who will betray America and Israel. It’s nonsense, of course, but such are the tactics of conservatives who fear that he will defeat whomsoever the Republicans put up—whether it be the aged war hero or the amusing creationist.

As a people we seem at this writing to be at the tipping point. Should we give one more chance to the old discredited generation, or take a blind leap of faith towards the new? Not to belabor the cliché, but it’s the same question voters were asked to resolve in 1960. Nixon the man of experience, who while the same age as Kennedy, seemed a throwback to the old, or take a chance on the less experienced visionary. Then, narrowly, we looked forward. Today? I think we will again. My generation has failed America in its offerings as president. I think America is looking for new hope in a new generation of mixed blood. I may be wrong. It’s happened before.


A correction: Last week quotation marks were inadvertently omitted, making it appear that I had said that I would like to ban the writings of David Duke, etc. but that we don’t do those things in America. While I agree with the sentiment, the words were not mine; I was quoting a colleague, J. S. Friedman of the College of Wooster in Ohio.

The Hissing of Hatred Towards Jews

In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, there is a hissing stream of hatred toward Jews and things Jewish, including Israel. It’s usually condemned by governments of the moderate right and left, but it persists. Is it possible to side with Arabs in the seemingly endless conflict with Israel without being anti-Semitic? Yes, it is. If by siding with Arabs is one hoping for the destruction of Israel? Not necessarily. But something else is worming its way to the surface of normal life. In Italy, a land I love, three events have recently cast shadows, crossing the line from intelligent disagreement to venomous strike. One attack is from the left, another from the right, the third is from the Roman curia.

The first assault has made national headlines and needs no more explanation here. In Turin there is an annual international book fair. This year it was decided to honor some of Israel’s most prestigious authors—Amos Oz, David Grossman, and Abraham Yehousha. Some leftists, led by the leader of the Communist party, protested that honoring Israelis at the same time that Israel is celebrating its 60th birthday was tantamount to the fair taking an Anti-Palestinian stance and they called for a boycott. One hardly need wonder for long if this would have been the response to a salute to Arab authors.

The Roman church has decided to allow the Latin Good Friday Mass which before Vatican II referred to Jews as blind and perfidious but now only contains this pearl: “Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men. Almighty and everlasting God, you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of the truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved.” Well, it’s better than being called perfidious, I suppose, and the odious reference to Matthew 27:25 is omitted, but, still, I could do without prayers for my conversion with its implied condemnation of retrograde Judaism.

If all that weren’t enough, on January 16 anonymous Italian bloggers took it upon themselves to publish the names of 150 Italian professors identifying them as “publicly and politically” loyal to Israel, not to Italy. While their university affiliations were listed their home addresses and phone numbers were not. But how long would it take even a fascist (for this assault is from the far right, from people who look back fondly to the good old days of il Duce) to find it out…and take action?

The obvious intention of the blog was to intimidate Jews. The government of Italy took swift action. Reuters reports that it was removed and that Interior Minister Giuliano Amato ordered police to investigate. Education Minister Giuseppe Fioroni called the blog a shameful “kind of Ku Klux Klan of the digital age.” Reuters further reported that the blog had “links to far-right websites and themes like Holocaust revisionism, appeals to boycott Israel” and in support of Mussolini.

An Italian colleague, Donatella Ester De Cesare wrote a letter of appeal which reminded that “The aggression towards intellectuals is the first sign of the savagery. We ask your solidarity. A word, a gesture could be important.” Faced with this cry for help, academics around the country discussed what could be done. Initially it was proposed that letters to the Italian embassy in Washington be sent thanking the government for its swift action. One well-known professor of Holocaust studies put Donatella’s letter on her website. But then it was suggested that here we would not close down even the most obnoxious of webpages. “Sure I would love to shut down David Duke’s website and a host of others, ban David Irving’s books and so forth, but here we’ve agreed not to do things like that.”

I signed a petition which reads in part, “We stand in solidarity with, and thank those colleagues from Italy, of different faiths and ethnicities, to let them know that they are not alone and that, as scholars, we have an obligation to stand against racism and anti-semitism.”

Will it help? Probably not; the Italian government already knows how academics feel, and so does the fascist right. But still, it’s a beginning. Anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism is rife. The serpent has slept; now he awakes, ever with more audacity. “The perfidious Jew is your enemy,” he hisses; into willing ears.

Prayer: Is anyone listening?

In last Saturday’s pre-Super Bowl edition of the Providence Journal, various local clergy responded to the question, “Does praying for victory in a football game help?” The Catholic bishop said it probably does no harm, but he assumes that God has more important things to worry about. (This is true only if God is not a New Yorker or a New Englander, because obviously to us there’s nothing more important!) True to his heritage the pastor of the First Baptist Church in America said he believed in separation of sports and religion. But then he added that he doesn’t pray about sports as it’s not fair to the other team. A local imam of my acquaintance advised against praying for frivolous things. Nevertheless, if his team (The Giants) is losing late in the fourth quarter, he might, deep down in his heart, offer up a prayer—and then ask for forgiveness. And what said the rabbi? He offered this gem: “It’s not right to pray for one group and cause distress to others…[but] “based on Biblical teachings, the side that has the most spiritual effort is the one that will win out. Sometimes the spiritual forces are stronger on one side than the other.”

What do all these have in common? Incredibly enough they all think that prayer can affect the outcome of a game (but that we shouldn’t stoop to that). Holy Moley! Are these guys kidding? Haven’t we as a species yet grown out of the idea that magic works? Here’s the Religious Studies 101 distinction between magic and religion. The latter implores the spirit world, the former commands it. According to the rabbi, God weighs the spiritual strength of those who pray and grants victory to their team? Did I read that right? Sir James Frazer, in his classic The Golden Bough argued that mankind goes through three stages of contact with the unknown world—first magic, then religion and finally, the stage we are entering (he wrote in 1900) the scientific. But apparently when it comes to football, monotheists among us have taken a giant step backwards. Only the Hindu swami began to approach the question with the mindset of a rationalist: “Whoever plays better wins.” (At this point, if I knew how to spell Homer Simpson’s famous ejaculation, I would insert it. “Dough!” Does that capture it?)

The older I get, the closer to death I come, the more I realize the futility of prayer. God or nature is self-evidently indifferent to what happens to us. We exist, we die and someone else is born and the cycle goes on and on and on and on. I don’t pray. In schul I sit, I stand, I sing, I meditate, I make a minyan. Prayer itself? Much of it is in praise of God, but I figure He knows how great He is; He doesn’t need me to tell Him. Prayer for the sick? Better to see an AMA approved physician. The eighteenth century deists said that God made the world and then merely observes. Sometimes it’s hard to disagree. And on Saturday, the death of a friend caught in a fire fresh in my mind, I didn’t. On Sunday I attended a shivah minyan and then went to friends’ house and rooted for the Pats. Life goes on, and there is no evidence at all that God cares.

When my mother died, I attended daily morning and evening minyans. I donned a talis, wrapped my arm with tephelin, and stood to say kaddish at the appropriate moments. Those who attend the services on a regular basis read Hebrew faster than I can think in English. So I tried various tricks. I read only the first half of each line. And still fell behind. Then I switched to reading every second or third line. No good. All this left me with the obvious question: Why do I do this each day, twice a day. In the end I concluded that as my mother was always there for me when she was alive 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 schul. It’s what dutiful sons do.

This newspaper loves to receive letters from readers. Let’s start something. Flood the editor with your opinion on the value of prayer. We can begin a dialogue.

Oh, and my friend the imam, Allah may forgive him, but I don’t.

Symposium on Night

I want to thank Alan Zuckerman for his path breaking column in the last edition of these pages. I don’t mean his public disagreement with Yehuda Lev. I’ve already done that. No, it was his decision to promote programs at his schul. Twice, within his allotted 750 words. I’ll see if I can break that record today in urging readers to trek down to remotest Bristol, a half-an-hour’s drive south.

At Roger Williams University we celebrate with a campus wide series of lectures and discussions books whose “special” anniversary is being observed. This year it’s Elie Wiesel’s Night. To most readers of this newspaper Night is probably a familiar text, but on a campus not heavily populated by Jewish students it is an opening into a world of horror unmatched in human history.

In the fall semester a colleague and I taught a one credit course on the book and its two sequels—if sequels they be as each has a different main character, a different locale, and a different texture. The three books are Night, Dawn, and Day. From the titles one might intuit a gradually increasing sense of wellness, hope, faith. And one would be wrong. Descent into ever lower realms of Shoah is Wiesel’s itinerary. Night is a memoir of a young boy caught up in the holocaust, shipped to Auschwitz and then as the liberating Soviet army moves inexorably westward, forced to traverse Poland and Germany on a death march that made life in the camp seem almost bearable. By the end, all of Wiesel’s family has been lost, as has his faith. When prisoners see a young boy hung from a gallows, one asks, where is God in this camp? And the answer is to point to the dead child; that’s Him, there. God is dead. At one point Wiesel comments that he prayed to the God he no longer believed in.

Dawn reverses the roles. The young protagonist is an Irgun or Stern Gang guerilla. One of his comrades is captured in a raid on British stores and is sentenced to hang on a date certain at dawn. In retaliation, Jews kidnap a British officer and hold him as ransom for the return of their comrade. The narrator, haunted by the images of his family, all dead, all judging him, is assigned to be the executioner of the British officer, a man with a child his own age. Realizing that he now is in the position of the Nazis who had control over his life and death, the young man awaits with dread the coming of dawn to fulfill his gruesome obligation, uncertain that he can. Whether he will actually shoot, or not, is the tension the reader feels until the last page.

It doesn’t get better in Day. The new protagonist is in New York, a UN reporter. He has a girl friend but cannot love. Wracked with existential doubts he can find no purpose in his life. One night he is struck by a cab as he crosses Times Square and nearly killed. Was it an unconscious suicide attempt? We are left to wonder, but not for long. He feels guilt—not for what he did in the camps, but for what he did not do—die, like all the others. Why did he survive? To what end, if he is only a hollow shell of a man without a soul?

As I say, there is no hope, no redemption in these books of the holocaust and what its impact on its survivors.

From February 4 until March 15 there will be an exhibit in the main library (which I’ve suggested calling “Stein Hall” but so far no one has taken me up on my suggestion). Featured objects will be Jewish items from before and during the Holocaust, books, papers, a Torah scroll confiscated by the Nazis for use in a proposed museum of the destroyed race. I’ve been tapped to give a lecture on Hitler and the Jews on February 6 (3:00 pm); my colleague and I will lead a book discussion on Night for Honors Program students (and anyone else who wishes to join us) on February 7 at 5:00 pm in the Library. The keynote address will be delivered on February 13 at 3:00 pm by Professor James E. Young of the University of Massachusetts who will speak on “50 Years of Night: Between History and Memory.” All events are free and open to the public. Come join us.

Catch-22 for Sudanese refugees in Israel

Immigration occupies the attention of candidates because it occupies the attention of voters. Democrats and Republicans agree that America is fast approaching, or has already passed, its saturation point. There is antipathy to illegal immigrants and resentment against the infusion of Spanish language options at ATMs and on the telephone. But two diametrically opposed sub-cultures welcome the immigrants—exploitive capitalists to whom the availability of cheap labor is very seductive, and those imbued with the spirit of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “The New Colossus” which graces the Statue of Liberty, each glorifying the other. So, we are a conflicted nation.

Israel is as well. I offer as example Sudanese victims fleeing political violence. Some arrived in Egypt, only to find themselves subject to beatings by Muslim thugs, the same element which in the Sudan had driven them from their homes in the first place. Faced again with poverty and brutal treatment, many walked across the desert to the border of the Jewish State, where they were arrested and put in the Ketziot Prison in southern Israel (the men separated from their wives and children) housed with Palestinian terrorists and common criminals,. Their only crime was the attempt to cross Israel’s border without proper papers or authorization. Are they refugees? Well, not by the usual definition of the word. In Egypt, maybe, but once they left Egypt they became an indefinable something else. But what is not disputable is their condition—hungry, tired, poor, homeless, often sick, and subject to a repatriation, the consequences of which not even Dante could adequately describe.

But all is not completely bleak. Israeli authorities are willing to release the Sudanese families if they have a home to go to in Israel. Enter my wife’s cousin Glenn. First he formed a small network of Israelis who have been working full-time to care for this population. Out of his own pocket he provided funds for three months’ rent for a two-bedroom apartment in south Tel Aviv (plus one month security deposit and one month rental fee for the agent) which is now home to 11 Sudanese. Every drop in the bucket is still only a drop in the bucket, but it’s a beginning. He was told that all of the Sudanese in Israel have blanket permission to work while they are there, so they can become completely self-sufficient during the three months. Others have followed his example.

Still, of the 1,900 Sudanese in Israel, 600 are in jail, 96 of them, children.
The Israeli government is considering plans to allow 498 of the Sudanese to stay in Israel but may transfer the others to Egypt (this despite probable deportation back to Sudan—if they avoid being killed in Egypt). The “Hotline for Migrant Workers” (the main organization coordinating what relief efforts there are) is planning to challenge this in the Supreme Court if and when the government tries to implement the scheme.

To make their lives even more difficult the Sudanese are caught in a bureaucratic snafu. They were originally arrested under the “Israeli Infiltration” law which is administered by the Defense Ministry. But the Supreme Court ruled that they should have been arrested under the “Entry into Israel” law which is administered by the Justice Ministry. So, all of these cases now need to be reviewed and moved from the one Ministry to the other. In the meantime Defense says it cannot release the families because they are no longer under its jurisdiction and Justice says it cannot do anything until the cases are assigned to it. Gevalt!

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, DC (RAC) has been accepting tax-deductible donations for the housing effort. The RAC will turn over the funds it receives to the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center in Jerusalem (IRAC) which will use the funds to pay for apartments.

Our cousin reminds that “I learned long ago, while working at the RAC and trying to help El Salvadoran refugees in the United States, that in the Torah the commandment to ‘protect the stranger’ is repeated more often (32 times, I believe) than any other commandment. It’s not because it’s the most important commandment, but because it’s the easiest to forget.”

Strangers at the gates seeking asylum. In Israel and in America, two lands of refuge. The movement of populations seeking better lives is inexorable; the strangers will change the character of the places they seek to enter. The unanswered question is—if so, for worse, or for better?

Nightmare Scenarios

My recurring nightmare first hit in Junior High School. The dream is always different, yet in theme always the same. I’m wherever I am and suddenly I remember that I hadn’t submitted a required term paper in Spanish class (that was the first, so I give it as exemplar of all). If a benevolent deity were observing he’d wake me then and there; but no such luck. On and on I dream of flunking out of Junior High; the fear becomes angst, the angst, blooms into panic until, finally, gasping for breath, sweat covering my body I awake with a start. But even then the terror has not subsided because I can’t immediately ascertain if the task not done was a dream, or not. Gradually, reality takes hold and I remember that there were no Spanish term papers in the 8th grade. But still the heart palpitates, still the light of day is slow to comfort, still the vice around my head is not fully loosened, until it is.

I tell you that because a variant of it happened again, recently. On Saturday last I napped. But my reverie was suddenly interrupted by the dream of the undone assignment. I had a column to write for the Voce & Herald and unlike Spanish term papers, this was real. I awoke with a start but without an idea. What to write, what to write, what? The Forward had arrived while I slept. It’s usually good fodder for ideas, but not that issue. But then, grasping for straws, I knew there was one ace in the whole as yet unexplored. David Klinghoffer. He doesn’t always appear and so my immediate prayer was, “Let there be Klinghoffer,” and I was rewarded with … Klinghoffer! His essay was on Huckabee and evolution, but, to be honest, I didn’t follow the thread of it, and so I despaired. But then I read the description of the author: “David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is the author of the forthcoming ‘How would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative’ (Doubleday).” So maybe there is a compassionate deity who hath delivered a column into my hands, after all.

Now, one of the first things you learn in PhD school is “Never discuss something you’ve not read.” Normally this makes excellent sense, but as Doubleday has not yet spewed forth this tome, may I be excused if I disobey, just this once? Done! I grant myself the dispensation.

Let’s start with basics: What’s the difference between a conservative and a liberal? The former thinks society is pretty much the way it should be. The latter realizes that things could be much better. I’m thinking that a compassionate deity would not expect readers of Tanakh to support policies that make the rich richer, the poor poorer, the nation engaged in unnecessary wars of opportunity.

According to a recent column by Bob Herbert in the Times, Wall Street fat cats are collecting $38 billion in seasonal bonuses this year. My guess is that they read Klinghoffer and vote for Bush. On the other hand, only 16% of workers think their children will be better off than they are. And Tanakh says about this? “And you shall not glean your vineyard…; you shall leave them for the poor and stranger.” This is one of six references in Leviticus which suggests that rapacious employers should leave at least something for the tired, the poor, the homeless, the people liberals are concerned to protect. I don’t know how Klinghoffer will address this issue.

Labor is protected in Tanakh, not to be exploited as modern conservative are wont to, justifying it with market-driven theories. Every Yom Kippur Isaiah asks: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen… to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house; when you see the naked, that you cover him…?” Liberals seek to provide for the needy; Bush conservatives cut taxes and when a hurricane struck New Orleans the poor (and the poor always suffer most in a natural disaster) found that there was neither money nor interest in helping them recover. Is that what Tanakh teaches? I’ll have to wait until Klinghoffer’s tome enlightens.

I began by discussing nightmares, but the real nightmare of course, would not be a column unwritten, but four more years of compassionate conservatism with faith-based initiatives and tax breaks for the wealthiest.