An Ancient Sparrow in The Old City

Does anyone have a place they never visit because it’s right next to another place they always visit? For us, that would be the Bible Lands Museum, which is across the street from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. We often get to the latter, even though it is still undergoing massive renovation and most of the museum will remain closed for another year. Still, they usually have something of interest to see there, and it’s always fun to walk around the model of the Old City in Second Temple days (the one that used to grace the premises of the Holy Land Hotel) which is wonderfully done, if somewhat fanciful in its representation. But on Sunday, Barbara and I would cross the street and head into what some people have called The Avoda Zara Museum, because it does house an impressive collection of ancient cultic objects from the Fertile Crescent region. Our point of interest, however, was not the artifacts contained therein, but an exhibit of photographs, lithographs, paintings, etchings, etc. of Egypt in the nineteenth century, made at a time when explorers, missionaries, and men of commerce swarmed over the length and breadth of the British Empire. This was also the period of the infancy of photography, and so dozens of men from England and France brought their cumbersome equipment and began making images of the ruins of ancient Egypt. Other artists with lighter loads, the painters, the lithographers, the water colorists also arrived, drawn by the exotic subject matter and the very different quality of light.
One of our treasured books – among many – is “The Holy Land, 123 colored facsimile lithographs and the journal from his visit to The Holy Land” by David Roberts R.A. (that’s not a baseball term; R.A. is Royal Academy, the association of British artists). A highly respected artist of his day, Roberts was able to use his connections to travel throughout the country, gaining access to Christian and Muslim sites. What he was able to do was convey a sense of what it was like, wandering as a pilgrim, seeing for the first time the past grandeur and the then desolation of the land. What I had not known was that Roberts had made a similar voyage to Egypt, and there were a host of his lithographs gracing the museum walls, showing a landscape filled with the glories of ancient Egypt. What his work and the many photographs on display were able to convey is something which is difficult for us moderns to appreciate: the magnitude of ancient Egypt. Ancient Rome, ancient Greece, these we can understand. We have what remains of their art and their literature (for example, the Greek playwright Sophocles [5th century B.C.E.] wrote over 120 plays of which only seven [including Oedipus Rex] have survived in complete versions), their philosophy, their technology, and in many ways their languages; many of us have spent some time in school studying their history and their culture. Like all neighboring civilizations, both the Greeks and the Romans tried to destroy the Jewish people one way or another, but they were no worse than others like the Huns, the Visigoths, the Mongols, the Aztecs would have been if they had found us, and no worse than our actual pagan neighbors like the Philistines were. It is easy to appreciate the ‘classical’ accomplishments because, in their way, they speak to us today. Consider this part of the following lyric by the Roman poet Catullus [first century B.C.E.], which everyone who has studied Latin in high school or college has stumbled and fumbled through sooner or later: My girl has lost her darling sparrow;/he is dead, her precious toy/that she loved more than her two eyes,/O, honeyed sparrow following her/as a girl follows her mother,/never to leave her breast, but tripping/now here, now there, and always singing/his sweet falsetto/song to her alone./Now he is gone; poor creature,/lost in darkness,/to a sad place/from which no one returns. (translation by Horace Gregory) I can only admire such writing, and I am sure that most of us can easily relate to the emotion.
But Egypt, a civilization which flourished for a thousand years and more? We have lots of mummies encased in museums, along with stuff which was looted from half buried pyramids, the broken face of the Sphinx, and that’s about it. This is definitely a civilization that does not speak to us, despite the best efforts of Cecil B. DeMille. I think the reason is because Ancient Egypt was a culture which worshipped death – a concept generally foreign to the modern Western mind and certainly to Jewish thought – and their deities, like Isis and Osiris, ruled The Realm of the Dead, a place no one wants to visit of his own free will. As NY Times/IHT writer Souren Melikian observed in his recent review of an exhibition entitled [in English] “The Doors of Heaven: Visions of the World in Ancient Egypt” now on display at the Louvre, “Most myths are so far removed from modern concepts that it is difficult to grasp the role they played in the living religion. Their emotional charge certainly escapes us.”
The purpose of the exhibition in the Bible Lands Museum – not by coincidence shown around Pesach – was very different, to give a context to the Exodus, the foundation of our still vibrant religion rather than “reconstructing the secrets” of a vanished one. When you see the dozens of photographs, made on large, fragile glass plates 150 years ago, you begin to get a sense of scale: just how large the pyramids and the temples were, how impressive they would have seemed; maybe you can get an inkling of what it took to build them, how strong and centralized their government was, and how big their army must have been. At least that’s the reckoning I was making as I walked around: how easy it would have been for the Children of Israel to have been swallowed up in the jaws of a civilization as mighty as this, and just how big a miracle it was for us to have been brought out alive as a nation. It would have been worthwhile to have seen this exhibit before we sat down to the seder.
By this time, Barbara and I had worked up a mighty fine appetite. We had ascertained beforehand that the museum had a cafeteria which was a) open and b) had kosher food. There wasn’t much left by the time we got there, and there in the refrigerated bin was a cheese sandwich on a Pesach roll. Now there has always been the concept of “marit ayin” (or Morris Ayin [like the accountant] as they would say in Brooklyn, which means that one shouldn’t do something which is perfectly legitimate, but looks bad, like standing in front of a store window on Shabbat and looking intently at the merchandise inside – even though you are not going to go in and buy something. For this reason, in the early days of margarine, a housewife in a sixth floor tenement kitchen wouldn’t have served the butter substitute with meat – in case a neighbor just happened to be flying through the air, would happen to see the suspicious item on the table, and would thus assume the housewife was mixing meat and milk. This principle does not seem to apply to Pesach, witness the ersatz Passover breakfast cereals and pasta. But nothing looks more real than the Pesach roll. When we were on the tiyul to Shilo mentioned before, one of the women whipped out a sandwich on a Pesach roll, and there was an audible gasp from those around. The woman realized what had happened and quickly blurted out that she definitely was not eating chametz. Here’s the kicker, though: although the Pesach roll looks like bread, it certainly doesn’t taste like bread. It tastes like what it’s made of: compressed matzoh meal. Not only is it nasty, but it could probably make one ill, if eaten in sufficient quantities. Stick to matzoh; your soul and your stomach will feel better.
We finished our meal, such as it was, and returned to tour the rest of the museum, which is comprised of random collections of items from many ancient civilizations. I have trouble jumping from one area to another, and I have much more of an appreciation for jewelry when someone is wearing it, or an artifact when someone is using it as it was intended. These things lying lifeless in a display case, unless they are breathtaking in quality, cannot hold my very limited attention span for any great length of time. But objectively it is done much better here than in similar institutions, for example, the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. We finally left, waited patiently for the bus which would meander back to the center of town (which if it had gone directly the Central Bus Station would have taken three minutes instead of half an hour). We needed to regroup and get ready for Monday and two tours of The Old City.
Let me add a qualifying remark (and who would there be to say no?). When most of us think of walking around the Old City, we are thinking about that part where Jews tend to hang out, which is a relatively small section of what is enclosed within the walls that Suleiman the Magnificent (!?) built 500 or so years ago. We are not thinking about the Christian quarter or the Armenian quarter, and we are certainly not thinking about the large area called the Muslim quarter, although I remember the time very vividly when an ordinary Jew would have no qualms about walking anywhere in Ir Atika. We are thinking about that section which the Arabs reduced to rubble in between 1948 and 1967 and which is being lovingly restored. But even in that tiny area of land, there is enough history, ancient and modern, to occupy someone for most of a lifetime. Barbara had suggested that we take the time to travel down to Beersheva to join up with a bus tour of the area, which the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel was sponsoring from there. However, I convinced her to take it a little easier and spend the day on these two walking tours which the same organization was sponsoring which focused on events two millennia apart: The Old City in the Second Temple period and during the War of Independence in 1948.
We began in the morning with Shraga who led us on a tour that I might have thought didn’t need a guide: one that focused on two archeological sites: the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, and to begin with, the Wohl Archaeological Museum nearby. One might wonder why you would need a guide to take you to a place that has copious material available in English. The answer is that you can read the signs, but you (or at least I) don’t really absorb the material or make sense of what it says. The Wohl Museum encloses the remains of a series of houses which were owned by well-to-do Cohanic families who had left ‘downtown,’ i.e.; the City of David area, to move to the posher Herodian section, ‘closer to work’ in the Beit Hamikdash in which they served. (The area had been excavated as part of the removal of rubble when Israel reclaimed the Old City in 1967.) Without a good guide, you could easily walk through the place in ten minutes, say “that’s nice,” and never give it another thought. But the walls, the floors, the mosaics, the artifacts, everything that was found there has a story to tell, assuming that we know how to listen, about how we know who lived there, what their daily life was like, whether they were more or less ‘religious’ over the course of generations; and that’s what the guide is for, to have listened and to retell what happened these centuries ago.
From this microcosmic look at the residences of a few families, our tour group headed down to the Davidson Center and the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, which is the area below (to the south of) the Kotel Plaza. Shraga wanted to take us down to the area where the Western Wall abuts the Southern Wall, but in order to get there we had to climb over, around, and between some very large rocks that were in our way. As we edged toward the Western Wall we came upon what I assume were two ‘bar mitzvahs’ in progress. Men and women, some of them wearing brand new talletot which they may have purchased two days before in one of the shops on Ben Yehuda, were standing around tables with Torah scrolls. At one of the groups, a woman was leading the assembled in “Hinei matov”, which is not normally part of a Monday morning davening. We had stumbled onto the small area, still technically part of the Kotel, which the powers-that-be have allotted to the Conservative movement to do its thing. I felt as if we were intruding as we went crashing through. You can imagine if you were having such a ceremony in a shul, and a tour group passed through; it would be somewhat disconcerting! I am not known as a big fan of Conservative Judaism, but these folk came all the way from America to celebrate an important event, and they deserve a little respect, a little privacy. It would be impossible to let them have their prayers and ceremonies closer to the Kotel plaza because a riot would certainly ensue, and that would only make matters worse. (It goes without saying that there will be no political solution in the near future because there is no constituency here that cares.) If anyone wants my opinion as to which is a greater impediment to the arrival of Moshiach, giving a woman an aliyah, or throwing stones and worse at such folks because you ‘know better,’ I would be happy to offer it.
We arrived at the appropriate spot for Shraga’s next discourse which focused on the two massive walls in front of us. Today, when we think about the Western Wall, we tend to think about The Kotel and the large adjacent plaza constructed after 1967, although, as we know, this is only a fraction of the retaining wall which Herod built. When we think about the southern wall….; actually we rarely think about the southern wall, just as we rarely think about the two other walls, either. But we can see part of this wall, the section that connects to its more illustrious western neighbor, which because it was closer to the Holy of Holies was always considered more prestigious. (The rest of the Southern Wall is hidden by homes built during the Turkish rule.)
One can look at these walls, and one can read or hear about them, but there is nothing like looking at them and hearing about them at the same time to make it sink in how impressive this project was. We are talking about taking stones that weighed up to fifteen tons and moving them long distances with fairly simple equipment and then placing them exactly where they were supposed to be; in the case of the southern wall, each row set two centimeters back from the row below (to alleviate the sense that the wall would be toppling over). And then you have to take into account the fury of the Romans – the same Romans who could wax so eloquently about avian mortality. Not only were they intent on capturing the Second Temple and ransacking it; they were determined to destroy even the walls around it, hurling these same fifteen ton stones to the ground. It goes without saying that it would be easier to push the stones down than to pull them up, gravity being what it is; still it would have been a lot easier to leave everything in place and turn our Beit Hamikdash into a bowling alley or a supermarket. Shows you how you can miss out when you lose your temper. Of course, it wasn’t simply a matter of anger; the Romans were determined to eradicate any vestige of a Jewish presence in the area. What better way than to destroy our holiest place; and heaving large rocks to the pavement certainly makes the point emphatically. Up to that point, 1900 years ago, the area in which these rocks have fallen was a busy thoroughfare, and opposite the wall, on the other side of the street, were the stalls of vendors who exchanged coins and sold the items which a worshipper would have needed to offer a korban (sacrifice) in the Beit HaMikdash. But to see this in your mind’s eye, you need a guide who has already imagined it.
Lest one think that it was only the Romans who acted towards the Jewish people with a sense of vindictiveness, the last stop on our tour was the nearby Golden Gates, the Shaar Harachamim (Gates of Mercy). Jewish tradition has it that Moshiach will enter the Old City through these gates. So what did Suleiman the Magnificent (!?) do? He blocked up the gates so the Jewish Messiah would be thwarted. Then the Turkish sultan created a cemetery in front of the gates to keep away Elijah the Prophet. Right. Hey, Suly, we laugh (ha, ha) at your pitiful efforts. If you ever want to know how to prevent Moshiach from coming, watch us. We have figured out ways of delaying his progress which you in your wildest imagination would never have thought of. (If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.)
In case we hadn’t been able to form a mental image of what it was like in Temple days (and because it was very, very hot), Barbara and I went into the Davidson Center itself and watched the film, the same one we had seen several years before. A modern-day actor, speaking in either Hebrew or English – depending on which version you happen to walk in on – strolling around today’s Old City suddenly becomes a pilgrim entering Jerusalem in bygone days, purchasing a young animal for a korban, eyeing a beautiful Jewish lassie, etc. Nice effects, but a little stiff.
When we had paid our admission to the Wohl Museum, for a few shekels more we bought tickets for the Burnt House, which is the remains of another house destroyed when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, and which was probably owned by the Bar Kathros family, mentioned (not too favorably) in the Mishnah. While there are the typical artifacts inside, the main attraction is a film, a dramatization of the destruction of the Temple, told from the family’s point of view. (From where this house is located, one would have had a bird’s-eye view of the Temple going up in flames.) The film is in Ivrit, and the visitor is offered headphones which have a soundtrack in a dazzling variety of languages. Barbara got us the English version (she was being lazy; she can easily handle the Hebrew). We arrived at the screening area just as the presentation was starting and the lights were dimming. Barbara quickly inserted her phones into the little jack under the seat and gave me mine to do the same, I realized immediately that I had a choice: either I could spend the next ten minutes in the now darkened room crawling around on the floor, trying to locate the phone jack, or I could watch the film in Hebrew. Over the years, I have certainly made sense of enough operas in French or Italian without even a libretto. So I watched the film without a translation. This would not have worked for a feature-length film, but for ten or fifteen minutes, knowing the basic plot outline – no problem; I could readily understand what was flying. Another small step towards mastering Hebrew!
We had several hours before our next tiyul was to start. Personally, I was exhausted from the walking and from the unseasonable and unexpected heat of the day. To be blunt, I was ready to call it quits and crawl back to the comfort of our apartment in Maale Adumim. But my indefatigable wife was ready to go on. So we decided to find a place to get some lunch and sit down; we could decide on our course of action once we had rested. As many of you know, there are scads of places to eat in the Jewish Quarter. The ones that serve pizza or bagels were mercifully closed (that is they made no attempt to create Pesadike pizza, for which the world can be grateful). But pretty much all of the meat restaurants were open for business; here in Jerusalem, one can readily obtain kosher-for-Passover falafel (minus the pita), which is what we settled for. A little food and a fair amount of caffeine will usually revive my spirits, and so we set off for the Zion Gate, the meeting place for the second tour of the Old City.
As I mentioned before, both of these tours were sponsored by the A.A.C.I., and perhaps they could have bundled both of them into a package entitled something like “Jerusalem: Where History Seems to Repeat Itself,” or perhaps, “Jerusalem: The City That Others Love to Destroy.” If the morning’s venture was about how the Jewish people battled the Romans and were decimated for their efforts, the afternoon’s activity was designed to show the battle for Jerusalem in 1948, which also ended with the Jewish quarter being reduced to rubble by our friendly Arab neighbors. They, of course had no Har HaBayit to ransack, so they settled for destroying the most prominent of our synagogues, specifically the Hurva and Tifereth Israel.
When I think of these two grand edifices, I am reminded of something I heard many years ago, about how even inanimate objects have ‘mazal,’ some good, and some bad. The reference point was a row of seats in a ‘temple’ in Wilkes-Barre, PA. There was one seat which a man, then in his nineties, had been occupying every Shabbat for over sixty years. Every other seat in that row was never used. Synagogues in general have mazal: some are used for many years; others are built to last for centuries, but no sooner are they finished than ‘the neighborhood changes,’ and all the Jews move away.
When the Hurva was destroyed, a central arch was left standing, leaving an image of a large, defiant rainbow, a symbol of Jordanian treachery and the Jewish will to reclaim sovereignty over the Old City. It didn’t hurt that the Hurva was in a prominent place in the plaza between the Cardo and the Kotel – you can’t miss it. And so, for big bucks, it is being rebuilt, in effect, recreated down to the last detail. (Whether there will be enough worshippers to fill it regularly is anyone’s guess.) On the other hand, Tifereth Israel (also known as the Nissan Bak synagogue), despite its glorious past (its beautiful dome was funded in part by Kaiser Franz Joseph!), remains an abandoned shell on an off-the-beaten-path street whose main attraction is the Karaite synagogue. There do not appear to be any grandiose plans to restore this treasure, whose name means “The Splendor of Israel,” to its former glory. Looking at it, you just have to let your imagination run rampant; otherwise, it’s just another place where the weeds grow wild.
Of all the things we did over the Passover holiday, the one activity of which I have little recollection was this afternoon’s tour. We started at point A, the Zion Gate, walked across the Old City to point B, circled back to point C, zigzagged over to point D, and so forth, back and forth, each stop representing a place or event of great importance in 1948. But in the heat and the throng of people, a lot got lost in translation. You want to know the one thing that stands out in my mind? There was one woman on the tiyul who was also missing something in her own translation, if you get my drift. Not exactly a person you would want strapped to you during a sky dive. At one point, she had gotten separated from the rest of the group – which could have happened to any of us. As our guide was talking to the group, his cell phone started ringing; the woman at least had the presence of mind to call him. He found out approximately where she was and told her to simply retrace her steps. She would come to a very large brown and yellow sign, about two and a half feet tall; to the left of the sign was a stairway up to a higher level, where we were. A number of us went over to the edge of the balcony to look for our missing lady. Sure enough, there she was coming back up the street, not paying attention to anything, looking totally confused. She stopped directly under the big sign; all she had to do was look up, but as I said, she was bewildered and befuddled. There were ten of us yelling down to her, “Up here, up here.” Nothing. The tour guide was on the phone with her. Nothing. It took about ten minutes to get this lady the fifty feet from where she was to where we were. Barbara and I were laughing hysterically because the incident reminded us of a scene in a movie called “Ruthless People” (with Danny Devito and Bette Midler) where the police are looking down at an aborted robbery and considering shooting a man for being the stupidest person alive.
Actually, there was one other thing I remember, and that is the throng of people milling about in the Old City, people from all over The Land and all over the world. You can rightfully expect the place to be mobbed for a specific occasion or event, like the Birkat Cohanim or on Yom Yerushalayim. But on this afternoon, people were just there, some in organized groups, some just ‘hanging out,’ (shopping, looking, listening to the ubiquitous musicians, eating, and perhaps contemplating their special place in Jewish history) – although I didn’t see anybody bring out a mangol and start grilling some burgers – all part of the generalized hofesh (vacation) that engulfs The Land during this festival. (Try driving from Jerusalem on a chol hamoed morning, past the turn-off to Maale Adumim, on the way down towards the Dead Sea, and see how far you get and how long it takes you!) I could write and write and write, trying to convey what was an existential feeling, that this is ‘how things are supposed to be,’ the Nations assembling in Jerusalem during a pilgrim festival for the specific purpose of praising G-d. But writing about it seems platitudinous and propagandistic, as in “We’re here, and you’re not (rub it in; rub it in…..),” which is not really fair. On the other hand, some wise-acre out there could retort that he is no farther away (distance-wise) from the actual Beit HaMikdash than we are. And I could reply that we are further (conceptually) along towards rebuilding it because of our presence here; but that is a pointless discussion, and I’m not a big fan of pointless discussions (good grammar being my thing).
And so, it was time to leave both The Old City and the new city of Jerusalem, time to wend our way home to the newer city of Maale Adumim (where even the limited amount of new construction makes the ‘Give-it-all-to-the-Arabs’ crowd go completely nuts). The following day, we would divide our labors: Barbara would join our downstairs neighbor Devorah on a walking tour of Even Sapir in the Jerusalem forest, and I would resume my culinary duties, in time for the last day of the Holiday, fast coming to a close. We would soon be closing our Pesach drawers and opening the regular ones. The taste of matzoh would fade from our mouths, none too soon. Are we any closer to all the wonderful things and events that we fervently hope for when we sing “Hashana habaah” at the end of the seder; or will next year bring more of the same? One thing that will happen: we are advised that there will be thirty-five new families making aliyah to our community. The sand in the demographic hour glass is slowly but inexorably shifting, and we are enjoying watching the movement.

Madame Bovary and the Second Day of Yuntif

Sometimes we find solace in the strangest places. I have often wondered why it takes me so long – up to two weeks – to write my articles, which range from three to seven pages in length. Then I found an article in a recent weekend section of the international edition of The Wall Street Journal – one of the few voices of sanity in the print media – entitled “Madame Bovary meets the mouse click,” which made me feel a lot better about the sluggish pace of my writing. The article details the efforts of team of 130 volunteers in deciphering the 4,500 page manuscript of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and placing the whole kit-and-caboodle on the internet for the whole world – or at least, that section of which that cares and can read French – to see. It took them two and a half years to complete this project, two years less than it took Flaubert to write his novel, working four or five days a week, upwards of twelve hours a day. In other words, it would take him a working week to produce a single completed page. As journalist Brigid Grauman described, “Flaubert was obsessed with concision, the repetition of sounds, the elimination of transitions and direct speech, and the effectiveness of his sexual innuendo. He hated his natural ability to think in comparisons. He said that metaphors attacked him like fleas, and cut three-quarters of them out of his final draft.” Her description of his writing and over-writing all over the page, under and over the lines, in the margins, on the back of the page, in an indecipherable scribble, reminded me of the process which Marcel Proust employed in producing his masterpiece A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, which took him a lifetime of preparation and the last fifteen years of his life to almost finish. Now these guys were writing full time; they weren’t concerned with cooking and shopping, trying to learn a very foreign language, answering the phone, being constantly interrupted by a cat that has just woken up and is hungry and won’t leave me alone until I feed her, let alone that I spend many hours a week editing stuff for my buddy Mordy for Rav Aviner’s yeshiva. Also few writers have to share their writing pad with members of their family. I imagine that a ‘technical difficulty’ for Flaubert would have been if he ran out of ink! So if I take a little time to make certain that I at least am satisfied with what I have written, so be it. Of course, fifty years from now, no deranged graduate student in English Lit., desperately in search of a research project, would be able to go through my manuscripts. Writing on a computer, there is usually only one glorious final version, so no one will ever know how often I have replaced a “the” with a “that,” changed the order of words, or deleted an entire paragraph. An entire ‘cottage industry’ of research is being ‘industrialized’ out of existence!
But while I slowly wend my way through these articles, I am faced with a serious problem: memory loss. Do I remember with any certainty what I did or saw or read or heard a month or more ago? Can I recapture the flavor that excited me at the time? Maybe yes; maybe no. But you can’t knock a guy for trying. So what follows are my recollections of this Pesach past, five or so weeks after the fact, but who’s keeping track? It occurred to me the other day that if I picked up the pace, I might get my article about Pesach finished and out before Shavuot, which led me to consider the following motto: “Never more than one holiday behind.”
First of all, I remember spending all day Wednesday in the kitchen, cooking as much food as I could fit on our four burners and cram into the oven. In the course of our preparation, Barbara had asked me to locate a certain recipe. I could not find the one she wanted; instead, I found a recipe for a Syrian dish made with ground beef, potatoes, prunes, and tomato sauce, a recipe I had been trying to locate for several years. The recipe had initially intrigued me because it said that one would need a big, heavy pot, and, sure enough, some people we know had just given us a really big, heavy, enamel-covered pot which they had used for Pesach. But there is a special poignancy to this business. I had made this dish for some friends one Pesach; the woman was so excited about the dish that she asked me for the recipe, which I why I remember the incident. Recently, the man suffered a tragic accident and is pretty much paralyzed, and all the time I was layering the meat and the potatoes and everything else, I kept thinking about him. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is: if you can make a tasty meal for friends, do it while you can and while they can enjoy it.
Anyway, the plan, which we carried out flawlessly, was to spend as little time as possible during the next seven days in the kitchen, and do as many fun things as we could fit in during the intermediate days when things would be jumping in The Land. Of course, we were cheating a little, because we were not preparing the Seder. We were invited to our friends Ron and Esther, as we had been last year. All we had to do was supply some good Israeli wine and four kilos. of shmurah matzoh, a relatively simple task.
I like Ron’s Seder. We start on time, we don’t dawdle, we move along at a respectable pace taking turns reading the text, either in Hebrew or English depending on one’s comfort zone – but not first Hebrew and then English, which takes forever. I am proud to say that my ability to read the Hebrew has improved markedly since I have been in The Land; I no longer sound like a third grader reading the Haggadah. But there is something else that I have begun to notice, a very interesting phenomenon. I don’t know what to call it, but I can give you an example of something similar. Last year, Barbara and I were at one of the many outdoor festivals that go on in Jerusalem in the summer – of course with lots of food. A man came up to us and started talking, and it was obvious from what he was saying that he knew us. Barbara and I were drawing a complete blank, and we were in that awkward situation that you never, ever want to be in when you have to say to someone who knows you that you have no idea who he is. Turns out the friendly gentleman was Dr. Baum, our Maccabi physician, whom we see at least six times a year! It wasn’t our fault: he wasn’t in his office. How were we supposed to recognize him in a different setting?
There are words in Hebrew which those of us who daven (pray) regularly come across once, twice, dozens of times each day in the siddur, but when we see them on a sign, or in a paragraph in an ulpan workbook, we do not recognize them. I say “we” because this phenomenon occurs with alarming frequency with the religious young people in my ulpan classes. There was one young lady who did not recognize the word “leshabe-ach,” and it was all I could do not to start singing “Alenu leshabe-ach la’adon hacol” (‘It is incumbent upon us to praise the Master of Everything,’ the beginning of a prayer which concludes every service – often sung, sometimes by children, usually to the same annoying melody, but at least recited, three times a day. But just as we do not recognize our doctor, our bank teller, our bus driver, once they leave the narrow compartment to which we have mentally assigned them, once we have finished praying and leave the confines of the synagogue or ‘temple,” the words we have just read in our prayer books may get lost in our memory bank. One of the miracles of modern Hebrew is that words that were formerly confined to our texts have taken on a meaning that would have startled the Men of the Great Assembly. For example, one of the first prayers in the morning ‘blesses’ G-d who has commanded us “laasok b’divrei torah,” to busy ourselves with words of Torah, has in it the same root as in the words for the Israeli equivalent of a business man’s lunch, aruchat iskit.) I am delighted to say that I am beginning to make the necessary connections, so that whether I am looking at a prayer book, a menu, or a billboard, I realize that I am reading the same language. No doubt this would gratify Eliezer Ben-Yehuda immensely.
And so we read the venerable text, drinking our wine, performing the required activities: pointing to things, holding them up, putting them down, etc., eating the meal and the afikoman, finishing the text, saying good bye, walking home, going to sleep, secure in the knowledge that we mercifully would not have to repeat the performance until next year; and that, if by next year, Yerushalayim would be b’nuyah (rebuilt); i.e., the Temple rebuilt, we here in Maale Adumim would be amongst the first to know.
It’s never ‘good form’ to rub it in that we here in The Land have only one day at the beginning and one at the end of Pesach which are formally ‘Yuntif,’ but I am as guilty of this lack of compassion for you Westerners as the next guy. Friday, Natania and I were going on a tiyul to Shilo, the first site of the Mishkan (the tabernacle). Barbara and I had already done a tiyul there with the same outfit, Tanach Tiyulim, but our daughter had limited time off from the army for Pesach and wanted to do something. And so it came to pass that the two of us, with loads of time to spare, were walking from the Jerusalem’s tachana hamercazit (the central bus station) to the OU Center on Keren Hayisod, a hefty walk. We were on King George, a block or two past The Great Synagogue, when we came upon a family of Exilers, a man, his wife, and two kids, all in their Shabbat finery, the man clutching his talit bag and a siddur, obviously on their way to the Great Synagogue, one of the few places in town set up to accommodate the crowd from the Galut. I can only hope and pray that I will be forgiven for this, but as we passed this family and I sized up the situation, I began singing to myself, “Second day of Yuntif, na na na na na na.” I am proud to say, however, that Natania was appalled at my hubris and gave me a good talking-to.
No question: it’s considered to be a mitzvah to be in The Land, especially during one of the three pilgrim festivals, but there is definitely a down side as well. It’s bad enough in most places in The States, and it’s a ‘weekday’ and you are walking to shul the first day of ‘yuntif’ and it’s painfully obvious that ‘everyone else’ is going about his normal business, and, boy, are you in a minority. But there, you are among the gentiles of the world; what do you expect? Here, you are amongst Jews, religious Jews at that, and all around you on the second day, the stores are open, the buses are running, and everyone else is either working or partying. On this beautiful spring morning (and it was a fine day), you are leaving your hotel room, going to the one place where there will be a minyan – where of course you will probably know almost no one – after which you will return to the dining room of your hotel for your pre-paid but over-priced meal, where you will huddle with similarly shell-shocked tourists, many of whom will be remarking that it just doesn’t feel like ‘yuntif.” You will, of course, repeat this routine for one more day, Shabbat, making it a “three day yuntif,” just as if you were back in The States. But by then, all or mostly all of Jerusalem will be joining you, and you will remember the special magic of Shabbat in The Holy City, something which you will never experience anywhere else in the world – sorry about that.
Ezra Rosenfeld was running several of his English language tanachtiyulim during chol ha moed (the intermediate days of the holiday); the others were already sold out. Because so many of his potential customers would be sequestered in the gloom of the Central Synagogue, this wonderful tour was undersubscribed, barely enough people to make it financially feasible – so I was definitely glad that Natania wanted to go. Our small group boarded the large bus, and we were off.
The whole purpose of a tour guide on a trip like this is to help conjure up what you cannot see. As is the case with so many ancient sites in Israel today, there is really very little left in Tel Shilo, that is, if you are looking by yourself. What’s there are the ruins of a town that flourished for several hundred years as the home of the Mishkan (the Tabernacle) in which the Ark described in the Torah was placed, and was during that time, the period of The Judges, the happening place for the Jewish people. You need someone to help you create a mental image, (without overwhelming you in a mass of facts and details) while you are climbing around what seem to be just piles of rocks, actually the foundations of homes and workshops and mikvaot, so that you can try your best to imagine that people lived there once and Judaism existed in a way very different from what we experience today.
As we were walking around, it occurred to me that even though Barbara and I had been here before, it was like seeing it for the first time, at least in part because the truly wonderful tour guide, Margalyt Friedman, gave a different emphasis to things, and also in part because it was a different time of year, and now the wildflowers were blooming in a sea of reds and blues, sending Natania hither and yon with the digital camera (one of the pictures is now the wallpaper on our computer), whereas months before there was hardly a weed to be seen between the rocks. I had asked Ezra why he had chosen this day for a tiyul to Shilo. He replied that by Sunday, the place would be ‘crawling’ with tourists and that on this day, at least, we would have the place to ourselves. This conversation jogged my memory: I remembered that the first time Barbara and I came, the place was filled with buses and there was a large contingent of Christian tourists who were waving large flags, perhaps from their countries of origin. I did remember the combination coffee and gift shop as well as the building which contained a scale-model replica of the Mishkan, and in which one can see a short film recreating the episode in which Eli, the High Priest realizes that a) his two wayward sons have lost the Ark of the Covenant which they have taken into battle, and b) that the real Philistines will destroy everything in their path (may we also remember and learn from our past mistakes). It goes without saying that I remembered the exact location of the ‘facilities,’ a mental feat which I have always been able to perform. On a more spiritual note, I remembered the layout of the beautiful synagogue in the modern Shilo with its breathtaking view which we visited later, built to roughly replicate the Mishkan. The one thing I didn’t really remember was the most important thing of all, which was the purpose of the tiyul. Every time Ezra goes to Tel Shilo, he goes to a particular deserted non-descript area which is contained within a set of low-set boundary walls, and he measures the dimensions within. The place in question, now completely level, is the exact dimensions of the Mishkan; and if these calculations are correct, this field is where the Mishkan, containing the Ark which contained the second set of tablets which Moshe received on Mount Sinai, stood for 390 years. And that is where we were standing. Talk about past glory. I’m sure that somebody will want us to give away this piece of property – something to do with Iran, no doubt – but I’m not ‘buying’ it. I, for one, do not want to do a live reenactment of the film I had just seen, so that the modern day spiritual descendents of the Philistines can destroy us again.
(Part 2 coming up momentarily)

The Primordial Blob Meets the Bochrim

I was pondering whether or not to write about this topic, going back and forth, yes, no, yes, no, when I came upon an article in the English language Haaretz (the newspaper I most love to hate) which sort of clinched the deal for me. But when I started to work on my article, I couldn’t find the newspaper page I needed. I searched everywhere, until I realized that Barbara had put that particular sheet under Mimi’s (our geriatric cat) food bowls (Mimi has at least two food bowls going all the time: one to eat from, one to ignore. Why she needs to have four water bowls spread throughout our apartment is another matter.). When you have finished reading what I have written, you can decide for yourself whether I should have left the article to keep the floor clean!
Even secular Jewish periodicals have felt obliged to note that the morning before Pesach would be the time to recite the Birkat Hachama, a prayer which has something to do with the sun’s return to its ‘starting point’ at the moment when it was created. Now, I am already in trouble because I haven’t the faintest idea what this is supposed to mean. So when Barbara asked me the obvious question: ‘how is anybody supposed to figure out the position of the heavens when everything was created?”, I had nothing to say. Even after reading a number of articles on the subject, it was as clear as mud to me because I don’t think along those lines and there are times when my brain shuts down – sort of like a circuit breaker – to prevent excess strain on my few remaining grey cells. I gather that it has something to do with the spring solstice, and because of slight inaccuracies in our calendar, something recognized in the Talmud, the date has shifted from close to March 21 to whenever it happens to occur these days –always on a Wednesday morning – which, as always, is once every twenty eight years – although how our sage Abaye figured this out is completely beyond my comprehension.
(Like most events that occur this infrequently, I do remember what I was doing the last time it happened: Barbara and I were standing on top of the Empire State Building. The Martin Steinberg Center, a Community of Jewish Artists [where I was the head of the photography workshop], was holding a prayer service on the observation deck with a new-age rabbi doing whatever he was going to do. [I was more interested in photographing the event to be concerned with the davening.] The time before that was the year before I was a bar mitzvah, and I wouldn’t have had a clue. The next time, twenty eight years from now……? Let’s not concern ourselves with twenty eight years from today; there are times when you don’t want to do the math.)
But I was fascinated by the article in Haaretz. First of all because Yair Ettinger wrote that this event would occur on “Passover eve,” which he somehow thought would occur on Tuesday instead of Wednesday – kind of a sad commentary, don’t you think? But even more startling were the following two paragraphs, which I will copy as they appear:
“Yeshivas in the capital are holing special sessions to interpret the significance of the event. At the Kahal Hasidim yeshiva, posters promise ‘a comprehensive lesson accompanied by an enormous model of the zodiac and constellations, according to the renowned expert on the stars’ positions and heavenly bodies, Rabbi Mordechai Ganot, may he live long.’ Ganot and other speakers fill auditoriums. He said ‘many questions remain’ over ‘the thesis of a certain Polish priest named Copernicus,’ but emphasized, ‘Anyone who believes in the new system is not considered a heretic.’”
Let me join with (I hope) everyone who will ever read these words in wishing Rabbi Ganot a long and healthy life. And I am certainly relieved to know that he does not consider me a heretic. You have to understand that they love this kind of stuff over at Haaretz: anything they can find to mock and belittle Judaism, because if they can make us look foolish, greedy, malevolent, and intolerant (feel free to add to the list), that makes their estrangement from the entirety of the religion easier to justify. But do we have to make it that easy for them? Are we still engaged in the dispute between Ptolemy and Copernicus?
One way to avoid inner turmoil is to simplify your life and one way to do that is to ignore a lot of what is going on around you. Of course, you might miss out on a lot, but that’s the price you have to pay. Now a student at the Kahal Hasidim yeshiva ‘knows’ everything there is to know about the origins of the universe. On the other hand, if you were to ask a perceptive boy or girl at one of the modern day schools which some of our kids attended, “Tell me, how old is the universe?” He or she might thoughtfully reply, “Who’s asking, the rabbi or the science teacher?” And some of us go through our lives with our brains bifurcated in this way. (One of my current ambitions in learning Hebrew is to get to a stage where my otzar milim is at least ten percent of my English vocabulary.)
Let’s take a step back and consider the following situation: your young child, now old enough to ask, inquires of you why the sky is blue or why the leaves turn brown in the fall. Perhaps you actually remember the answer; maybe not. If the child starts asking about human reproduction, that get’s a bit dicey. The one thing you never want to do with children is resort to bubbe meises (the closest English equivalent would be ‘old wives tales’) like ‘the stork brought you.’ You probably want to say something that, while generally true, is geared to the comprehension level of your audience – always a good idea. So you have to leave out a lot of the details. You may also be trying to convey other messages that you feel are more important. For example, you may be more concerned about how your five year old gets along with his siblings, that he or she stops pulling the cat’s tail and remembers to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Stuff like that, which in the scheme of things, dwarfs the need to explain DNA or photosynthesis to a young child.
My buddy up the block, Michael, was trained as a chemical engineer, and he can explain how any process or any thing works in such exquisite detail that you are sorry you asked. But imagine if you were the world’s biggest authority on a subject, or better still, the universe’s biggest authority, and you had to provide an explanation or, even better, a series of explanations to an audience that was not up to the task. That, in my view, sort of explains the dilemma inherent in our sacred Torah.
I’m trying to be careful here. In no way am I suggesting that our ancients were either child-like or cognitively challenged. To begin with, even the most wild-eyed pagan, one whose method of worship was to defecate in front of his idol (I hope no one is eating lunch while reading this!) was on a higher spiritual madrega (level) than the average Joe today. The avoda zara-nik was at least trying to locate the spirit(s) which animated the world around him; it would never have occurred to him to postulate that “things just happen,” the predominant idea of the educated classes today. In the midst of a sea of idols of every size and shape, our Jewish ancestors somehow managed to seek out, identify, and connect with the one true universal Deity and receive from Him a book of instructions called “The Torah,” which must be examined with great care. Just as it was not meant to serve as a biographical study of our matriarchs and patriarchs, it was never intended to be understood as a textbook of any of the natural sciences. Even if you go through it casually, you have to notice that, once we have been introduced to our patriarchs and matriarchs and have been brought in and out of Egypt (with signs and wonders), crossed the Sea of Reeds and witnessed the revelation at Mount Sinai, the Torah’s major emphasis shifts to an extensive list of what we are to do and not do, a detailed description of building the temporary sanctuary, what the priests are to wear, the sacrifices that are to be brought to them and how these are to be performed, maintaining ritual purity, rewards and punishments for our behavior, and so forth, leading up to our entrance into The Promised Land. Of course, one has to start somewhere, and to answer the question posed by an anonymous young man on a recent Birthright trip to Israel, “Who’s this Hashem guy everyone keeps talking about?”, our Bible begins with the single most momentous utterance in human history, “Bereishit bara elo(h)im et hashamayim v’et haaretz.” Many have pondered on the precise meaning of “bereishit,” but it is clear to the great commentator Rashi that “this verse does not intend to teach the sequence of creation…..” If I were to offer up my (very) free translation or interpretation of this verse, it would be something like “Let me introduce myself; I’m ‘The Guy’ who is responsible for everything you see or don’t see around you, now listen up to what I’m going to tell you, so you can get it right.”
What follows has to be seen, in my view, as a basic explanation of a very complex process of creation that would satisfy the needs of our holy ancestors – many of whom were given the gift of prophecy, none of whom had either a microscope or a telescope to aid them in their understanding of the natural world – yet would majestically resonate throughout the ensuing millennia, sweeping away the aboriginal animisms, the savage idolatrous gods of antiquity, the overgrown and over-sexed adolescent deities of the Greeks and Romans and their Nordic counterparts. And just as our rabbis have spent the last several thousand years poring over every letter in the Torah for its hidden meanings and interpretations, so others have been engaged in teasing out the secrets of creation in a process of discovery which has reached a crescendo over the last hundred years. And just like two teams drilling a tunnel from opposite directions starting miles apart, one has to hope that the rabbis and the scientists would somehow meet up in the middle.
Here’s an amazing idea. If I were to ask you who is the grand forerunner of the modern scientific revolution, what would you answer? My nominee: Moshe Rabbenu, the man with an unrivaled knowledge of G-d. Was it not our great leader who wrote (in psalm 90) “For even a thousand years in Your eyes are but a bygone yesterday, and like a watch in the night.”? (translation courtesy of Artscroll) The standard explanation of this verse, taken from the context, is a call for repentance, insofar as our ‘reservation’ on this planet is barely long enough to see the sights, but long enough to get into trouble big-time. Then a hundred years ago, when my parents were small children, another smart Jew, a guy named Einstein began making some calculations which changed ‘our’ understanding of how energy and time and mass related to each other and led, among many other things, to the startling but inescapable conclusion that time is not universally constant. Moses was not just being poetic, ethical or moralistic. Somewhere in his ‘conversations’ with G-d, the word slipped out that His method of tracking time was markedly different from our own. In other words, if G-d had a wrist on which to put a watch, or perhaps a pocket to hold an hourglass, the watch hands or the sand would no doubt be moving very differently from how our devices would.
It is hard today for most of us to understand this concept or so many other recent scientific discoveries: from quantum mechanics to string theory, from atoms to antimatter. Fortunately for all of us, Hashem in His kindness has created a world in which we can function quite well day to day – without understanding or pondering over the subtleties of the cosmos. For example no- one-I-know’s life has been altered dramatically in the last several weeks since we were informed of the discovery of the ‘primordial blob’ (given the name Himiko by its discoverers at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, after a “mysterious ancient queen in Japanese folklore.”) This beauty (which “could be a massive gas cloud energized by a supermassive black hole, a primordial galaxy gobbling up gas from its surroundings, two young galaxies colliding, or a single massive galaxy”) spans 55,000 light years and is approximately 12.9 billion light years away – give or take a few decades. (They determine this by the “extreme redshifting of its hydrogen spectrum.”) No, there has been no noticeable difference recently in the frequency of buses to and from Maale Adumim; the hill up to the bus stop seems just as steep since I read about the ‘blob,’ and the ants and sand flies will begin to multiply at alarming rates. But did any else read about this phenomenon and have the idea that when it talks about “tohu and bohu” (in our sentence from Bereishit) that maybe, just maybe, what is being referred to in those mysterious and absolutely untranslatable words is something like this formless shape?
If anybody else did, it probably wasn’t our friends at the Kahal Hasidim yeshiva with their “enormous model of the zodiac and constellations.” But if I were to engage these worthies in a civilized conversation, I might ask them something like this: “Silly people! Do you really think that G-d’s creation would be something so elementary that it could be encapsulated in one diagram you can hang on the wall of your illustrious yeshiva? Wouldn’t be that much of a deity, now would He?”
There’s a lot that we can all be grateful for, including living at a time when we have regained sovereignty over The Land. But how about that the ‘secrets’ of creation are being revealed to us in our lifetime at an astonishing rate – whether we understand them or not – peeled away like the leaves of a cabbage – except that for every leaf we reveal, there seem to be a greater number of leaves underneath and the cabbage seems to be getting bigger and bigger! Only now are we beginning to get a sense of the size and scope of “Day One” of The Creation and that the universe, constantly expanding, contains black holes so dense that light cannot escape and simultaneously particles so ephemeral that they disappear faster than employees at quitting time. Modern string theory postulates additional dimensions that we will never see, the contents of which we will never know, while new creatures, almost phantasmagorical, are constantly being discovered in the remotest depths of our oceans. Our Creator is even more super-awesome than we had ever imagined! And yet this Creator has ‘taken the time’ to have a relationship with us (“Hashem, what is man that you would even think of him,” from psalm 144)! Perhaps that is the main point to consider – something which you can’t fit on any wall, even the Kotel.
All of the above helped me put Birkat Hachama in perspective, as an opportunity to give thanks to our Creator, both for His creation and His kindness to us. AND (that’s a big “and”) for giving us the capacity and the will to continue our exploration of the universe around us. So that if we come to realize that our original concept of the sun – which is in fact one of uncountable stars hurtling through the shifting cosmos at amazing speeds – ‘returning to its starting point’ is a breath-taking metaphor of renewal….., that’s OK by me.
I have it from my unimpeachable source here in Maale Adumim that the mitzvah associated with Birkat Hachama is simply to recite the bracha, “osseh maaseh bereishit,” and that everything else that people say today are relatively recent add-ons (because saying a nine word blessing for something which you do once every twenty eight years is kind of a letdown). And that blessing is precisely what I said. I did not join the throng of locals here in Maale Adumim assembled in the area near Sde Chemed where the kids play basketball; I did not join the tens of thousands of people assembled at the Kotel or in any number of smaller venues in and around the Old City (all of which took place at about 7AM). I had to finish disposing of my chametz and start cooking for Pesach, neither of which could be put off, regardless of where the sun was or wasn’t. My plan was to prepare as much food for the entire seven days as possible, in order to enjoy the intermediate days with a spirit that I would never been able to muster in former days. And that is exactly what I did and what I will be writing about shortly.

Jewish Leadership

But now I'm back where you found me, Out in the cold again….(Out in the Cold Again, Lyrics by Ted Koehler, music by Rube Bloom)
“So aside from faith, or magical thinking ("somehow" it will all work out), what is your prognosis/advice?” One of my loyal readers, in response to my last article about the Great Debate, sent me back two questions. The first was easy, what is an rbi? It’s ironic that I take the trouble to explain virtually every Jewish-type reference, because I know that everyone who gets my articles is not learned in these matters; but it never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t understand this baseball statistic (which measures a player’s success in batting in runs, the whole point of the game). But the second: not just my prognosis/advice, but what I suggest – aside from faith. Now I’m in big trouble.
In between my various activities, tasks, and chores (which list I will not burden you with), as well as the vagaries of my computer, I have been pondering the matter of “Jewish leadership.” In fact, I will present to you two men with different points of view on this topic: one, that he is it; two, that it doesn’t yet exist. Of course, it would be beneficial to begin with a definition – although it is usually easier to start with a negative. So ‘Jewish leadership’ certainly doesn’t mean someone in a leadership position – either here in The Land or especially in the Exile – who happens to be Jewish; there are copious examples of that.
Actually, we ought to start with the term “leadership” itself, and my off-the-top-of-my-head definition would be something like “a leader is someone who unites people to solve agreed-upon problems and achieve agreed-upon goals.” Not bad, huh! Except it assumes that there are agreed-upon problems and goals, and you can begin to see the difficulty straight-away.
About a month ago, I came upon an article on Israel National News (Arutz 7) by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed (the esteemed chief rabbi of the community Har Bracha and the head of the yeshiva there) entitled “How Are Leaders Produced?” in which he discusses the leadership problem in the (Jewish) religious community. His first point is that in contrast to family life, where we have developed rich and successful traditions no matter how difficult the circumstances or environment, we have no tradition of real communal leadership. Instead, we have had a tradition, through no fault of our own, of what he terms shtadlanut (persuasive ‘entreatment’, although I’m not certain that’s a real word), centering on communal survival in a hostile world. As he puts it, “most religious leaders know primarily how to deal in intercession, to make declarations and condemnations, or to serve secular leaders.” In general, I like what he is saying – with one important modification. I can’t see what our parenting skills have to do with his argument, and, therefore, I would redefine his terms to communal vs. political leadership. If I had to give an example of shtadlanut, I would offer up the response of the American Jewish community during the Holocaust. While most rank-and-file American Jews were unaware of the impending disaster, several hundred rabbis and lay leaders who were aware of what was going on tried to persuade other Jews in official positions to use their access to help save their about-to-be-wiped-out-brethren abroad. Sort of like Mordechai asking Esther to go to Achashverus (in the Purim megillah) to cancel Haman’s decree against the Jews; except that she agreed, and in the 1940’s, almost none of the Reform and secular advisors to Roosevelt would lift a finger. But no one at that time and place was suggesting a political approach, for example, a mass march on Washington involving hundreds of thousands of Jews – even though in 1941, African-American leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin (representing a group even more oppressed and despised than the Jews were) threatened such a march to protest discrimination in the war industries, government agencies, and the American armed forces, a forceful campaign for equality which these leaders continued throughout the war, a precursor to the civil rights movement which exploded a decade later. I think you can see the difference in the two approaches; and while there is a time and a place for both of them, it is perhaps the forceful approach which better suits the leaders of a nation state. There can be no question that historically we have excelled at a communal level, developing and maintaining a rich religious and social structure through good times and bad, and that has been what kept us going. But I think it’s fair to say that self-government is not part of the Jewish skill-set. Anyone who doubts this assertion should turn in our Bible to the prophetic and historical writings about our sojourns in The Land from the conquest by Joshua. How many good kings did we have when we had a kingdom? Very few. Certainly during the almost two millennia of our exile, we had no opportunity to practice any kind of political activity, and the incredible achievements during the last 60 years in Israel seem to have been accomplished often times despite the government, the prime minister, and the Knesset.

Being aware of our lack of leadership, Rabbi Melamed suggests that “Therefore, the least we can do is ask the various religious movements and figures to spare us the tension and competition, to unite for the sake of the common goals of all sectors of the religious public.” Doesn’t sound that radical, does it? You are free to give your own estimates of whether this will happen or not – at least in our lifetimes.
However, continues our respected rabbi, “the religious-Zionist public has another problem, one which is more serious: our fundamental goals are not well enough defined.” What he is getting at is that the integration of our societal values is not clear. His examples: Torah and science, Torah and livelihood, Judaism and democracy, Torah justice and the law of the state, as well as yeshiva study and army service, and so on. (To which list I would add integration into or separation from Israeli society by the religious community.) And then Rabbi Melamed concludes with what unfortunately should be obvious: “We do not have leaders because we do not have clear goals, and we do not have clear goals because we lack able leadership.” What he doesn’t mention is that this lack of direction is pervasive throughout Israel and the rest of the Jewish World.
Perhaps now would be a good time to introduce (or re-introduce) Moshe Feiglin, the head of a faction entitled “Manhigut Yehudit” (Jewish Leadership), a most intriguing fellow with a lot of good ideas. What distinguishes him from many others on the political right in Israel is that he is a firm believer in the capitalist system and electoral reform and is not a supporter for religious parties. He advocates a state based on ‘Jewish values’ in the media, the courts, the educational system, the economy, and in how the affairs of state are carried out. He claims to be against religious coercion, although it is not clear to me how you could force rabid secularists to adhere to Jewish values and have their children attend schools in which Judaism is taught without the government making them do it. Anything that a government does, from building roads, collecting taxes, or having school children recite “The Pledge of Allegiance” involves coercion of some kind. Nonetheless, in many ways, Feiglin is on to something. Consider the following position (which I quote from the Manhigut Yehudit website):
“Our problems with the Arabs are a reflection of the problems between the Jews. The Left is fanatically anxious to 'solve' the Arab problem so that they will stop reminding them that they are Jews. They erroneously think that if the Arabs no longer hate the Jews, they will also be free of their Jewishness. This psychosis has accompanied the Jewish people for generations. The Arabs have subconsciously identified the obsessive need of Israel's leftist leaders for their recognition. This is a tremendous psychological asset that they use to manipulate us. That is why there will be no peace with the Arabs until we make peace with ourselves.”
If we change “for generations” to “for centuries,” and add to “Arabs” “everyone else in The Western World,” I think that we have created a good thumbnail sketch of a good part of the conflict in Jewish thought since ‘The Enlightenment’ in Europe in the nineteenth century.
The ‘Big Question,’ in fact the ‘Really Big Question’ is how you create a state in which ‘Jewish values’ are inculcated; or phrased somewhat differently, how do you create a government in Israel to do anything at all? For reasons that in hindsight seem unfathomable, The Jewish Agency in 1948, having many different models from which to choose, decided to pattern the fledgling Israeli system of government upon the most unstable model they could find, that of Italy: lots of parties, lots of factions, lots of elections. And never a clear majority. That’s what we’re stuck with; we can bemoan the fact and cry for changes, but it would be like trying to straighten a bent tree on which children have already fastened a swing. Political parties exist here because of the system; hence the system exists because of the political parties and their needs and their narrow constituencies. Here, individuals and groups have the opportunity – with all its many liabilities – to focus on the kind of political and especially the religious differences that would go virtually unnoticed when all political discourse is confined within the parameters of two political parties, into one of which most Americans find their place.
Moshe Feiglin, probably because he sees an inherent virtue in a two party system, has determined that his best course of action is to take control of Likud; and has been trying to do that for a number of years with little success, although his support within the party seems to be growing. The last primary election in December showed in great detail the problems that Feiglin has faced. I have described in a previous article the difficulty some of us have had in joining the Likud party or being a member long enough to vote in the primary. One might sense that the Likud is not that interested in attracting a large cadre of new voters who might be supporters of Feiglin. Even so, once the votes were counted, Feiglin was number 20 on the list, which would certainly have guaranteed him a seat in the Knesset. But lo and behold, the ‘big boys’ changed the rules of the game, and suddenly Feiglin kept getting dropped to a lower and lower slot, until he wound up at number 38, meaning the closest he would be getting to the Knesset would be a view from the sculpture garden at the Israel Museum nearby. Don’t ask me how this happened: it had something to do with other candidates (women, olim, regional candidates) who were guaranteed seats, and maybe they had done well enough not to need the slots allotted to them; but I really don’t understand it – even though it was explained in the newspapers – and for the sake of my sanity I hope I never do understand it. Anyway, this left our subject with an interesting dilemma. The only way he could get back his rightful spot would have been to go through the court system. However, he is on record as saying (correctly) that the Supreme Court in Israel has been hijacked by the Left, and he does not accept their jurisdiction. So he couldn’t go that route, which I imagine Netanyahu’s crowd understood – meaning that if the Likud leaders announced after the election that they had disqualified anyone whose name begin with a peh and ended with a nun, there is nothing that Feiglin could or would have done about it – except declare a moral victory and continue to maintain that he is on the way to taking over the Likud leadership, something which some of us would question.
Given these facts, and given the political reality, many voters in The Land – whether they are on the political Left or Right – were faced with a big (as Barbara’s late friend Miriam would have put it) “Vat to doo?” which can be translated literally into the Hebrew “ma l’assot.” Do you finesse your ideas into one of the larger parties which approximate more or less, usually less, what you want? Or do you stick to your guns and go with a smaller party that really represents you? A very interesting phenomenon occurred in the general election: The Left did one thing and the Right the other.
One thing became clear after all the votes were counted in February: a lot of people did not want Binyamin Netanyahu to be in control of the government. The Left was so scared that they abandoned their parties by the droves to support Tzipi Livni and Kadima. Several small parties didn’t even make it past the minimum threshold and won’t be represented at all in the Knesset. The real Left-wing party Meretz was reduced to three seats; Labor was down to an historic low of thirteen seats. But while these voters were afraid that the Likud leader would not be sufficiently conciliatory in negotiating with the Arabs, the voters on the Right believed just the opposite, that he would cave under increased pressure from the new American administration to form a ‘Palestinian’ state no matter what. Once the debacle in the Likud primary became clear, voters began to drift away from the party, mostly towards Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, because he, in his far-from-perfect Hebrew, sounded tough. There was also an increased interest in the National Religious Party, which – because a Jew needs minimally two parties, one to vote for and one not to vote for; and ideally three parties, one to vote for, one not to vote for, and the third, he wouldn’t be caught dead voting for – had to, simply had to, split into two competing factions: National Union and the Jewish Home.
After hearing Aryeh Eldad’s lucid and compelling presentation on behalf of National Union and the (less than) Great Debate between candidates from the several parties (both discussed in previous articles), all that was left to do was to catch “Tuesday Night Live” (a ‘television’ program run by the now web-based Arutz7) which would host a quasi-debate between Feiglin, the still-dreary Daniel Hershkowitz of Habayit Yehudi, and for National Union, Ichud Leumi, its chairman, Yaakov Katz, known to friend and foe as ‘Katzele,’ (as opposed to all the other Yaakov Katzes in Israel, one a reporter for JPost, another a former Knesset member from Poalei Agudat Yisrael, and probably fifty other guys) one of the larger-than-life characters still inhabiting the scene in The Land. In 1970, when Katz joined the Israeli paratroopers, almost all of his comrades were secular kibbutzniks. Kippot were as scarce as the proverbial hen’s teeth. (Today, as we know, the kibbutz movement is in decline, and most of the young men in the elite fighting units are national religious, including Katz’ sons.) For his troubles, Katz lost a leg in the 1973 war (he didn’t actually ‘lose’ it; it got shot off), and he is now a big man with a small cane. He reminds me in a way of a religious version of Ariel Sharon, for whom he worked for many years: a resourceful man, a natural leader, a doer, not so much a thinker. He was the founder of the town of Beit-El and the yeshiva center there; he later founded Arutz7 as a radio station based on a ship floating in the Mediterranean and later as an internet based operation. So he is sort of “the boss” for Ari Abromowitz and Jeremy Gimpel, the hosts of ‘Tuesday Night Live.”
Actually, the two hosts regarded all three of these men as their mentors, and everyone greeted each other warmly, as if they were at a college reunion. This was not going to be an evening of contention and confrontation as virtually everyone in the auditorium was in substantial agreement on most everything – except whom to vote for. I cannot imagine that many in the audience changed their minds based upon any of the speakers’ presentation. In the end, I decided to stick with the party, Ichud Leumi, because Aryeh Eldad was number three on its list because of all the candidates from all the parties, he is the guy I would want to represent me in The Knesset.
But there were other considerations as well. My line of reasoning, for better or worse, went as follows. Supposing all of us in ‘our camp,’ (i.e., those of us who are ‘religious’ or at least ‘very traditional,’ and want the values, traditions, and history of the Jewish people to be the basis for universal education in our country, who want honesty and integrity in our government, and who are opposed to relinquishing any of the tiny amount of land allotted to us) got together and agreed to vote for one set of candidates. If we all voted for Likud and the party triumphed in the election, what would be the result? It would be seen universally as a big win for Bibi, a mandate for him to do whatever he is going to do – whatever that is – and a defeat for ‘The Right.’ Whether Likud garnered twenty seats or forty seats, it would not make any difference in the direction the party would take, because there are ‘leftists’ and ‘rightists’ scattered throughout the list; in other words, the ‘Right’ would be no stronger within the party even if all the national religious people voted for it. One might even argue that a Likud with forty seats would give Netanyahu more power than if it had only twenty seats.
On the other hand, supposing ‘everyone’ voted for Ichud Leumi instead. How would that have played out? We know in hindsight that between them, Ichud Leumi and Habayit Yehudi won seven seats and were 8,000 votes short of an eighth. Add to that the dati leumi voters who stayed with Likud or who voted for Lieberman and the total could well be close to fifteen seats. The Labor party got only thirteen seats and they now have been bribed handsomely to join the government. What a victory it would have been if a national religious party were as big as or bigger than Labor! Imagine the Op-Ed page in Haaretz the next day….. the next week, etc. Not only would it have been a clear statement about the wishes of a considerable segment of the electorate, but it would have created a formidable voting bloc that could not have been ignored, that could have thrown its weight around in forming a coalition government. (The idea just struck me: If our forces were sufficient to take control of Likud, why would we need to do so?) But, as we know, this didn’t happen. Instead, Bibi is angling to form a coalition which will not need either of the national religious parties, and if it wasn’t clear before, it is becoming clearer now, that Israel’s ‘foreign policy’ will be a hodgepodge determined by all the ‘cooks’ in the coalition who are stirring the broth, rather than the other way around; i.e., the coalition formed by agreement over a set of policies. Our votes were again scattered and, whether or not we are in the government, our voices once more will hardly be heard. We may indeed be “out in the cold again.”
We are back to the beginning, to the words of Rabbi Melamed, “We do not have leaders because we do not have clear goals, and we do not have clear goals because we lack able leadership.” To which I can only add, “How can we unite the country if we cannot unite ourselves?”
All of which might lead the loyal reader to infer that I am becoming pessimistic about the future of the-only-state-we-will-ever-have. The truth is that Barbara and I are in the process of plunking down a substantial amount of money to buy an apartment with a breathtaking view of the eastern hills of our eternal never-again-to-be-divided capital. (Sort of putting our money where are mouths are.) Those of you back in The States should be aware that the latest hot topic on our community Anglo chat group (with over 1300 members) is the ever rising cost of real estate in Mitzpe Nevo, the “religos” (that’s what the sign says!) neighborhood down the hill and the need for the Anglo community to continue spreading out throughout the other neighborhoods where real estate is less expensive.
I believe I have said this before, but it bears repeating: the greatest antidote to anxiety and depression is the ability and the willingness to go about one’s life from day to day. That is often the most provocative, the most radical, and the most effective thing one can do. Here in Maale Adumim, as in most places in our Land, Jewish men and women are waking up, getting their children ready for school or gan, going to work, and preparing for Pesach. Throughout The Land, homes are being built, and unprecedented numbers of men, women, and children are learning Torah. With great frequency, we read about amazing developments in science and technology (which may someday solve some of our economic and environmental problems); at the same time we are told about new archaeological finds that strengthen our historical connection to Eretz Yisrael. And all of this is going on while the Nations of the world find newer and more hypocritical ways of denouncing us, and 120 men and women in The Knesset are playing musical chairs over who will become the thirty or forty ministers in the new government.
What is so amazing is that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the economic and spiritual development of the country and the strength of its political and religious leadership. But, as we said before, that always seems to have been the case. Our strength comes from the fortitude of our citizens: the ones who, over the years, have waited patiently to board the same number bus that was blown up the day before, or stood on the same corner where an Arab worker had recently taken his tractor and gone on a rampage. And this fortitude is, I believe, based on two things: the realization that after two thousand years there really is nowhere else to go (which truly is the case: most people here don’t have American passports), and a much stronger belief in G-d than would be apparent at first glance. So what is my prognosis? Somehow, we here-in-The-Land will muddle through, one way or another, as we always have. (I am not so sanguine about many of the Jewish communities in The Galut.) Now I’m fully aware that I haven’t answered the question, except by resorting to “faith or magical thinking,” which is what my reader specifically asked me not to. Again, ma l’assot, what am I to do? Were I to discuss this matter in terms of world history and diplomacy as conceived by The New York Times, I would have nothing to say. Many of us understand that there is no logical explanation for 2000 years of Jewish survival in exile, and there is no rational reason to believe that our ‘winning streak’ will continue when more and more of the other players are using marked decks. If I were to consider the matter primarily from the perspective of Bibi vs. Obama, or how the European Union is going to view us, let’s say I would be writing a very different article. Those of us zealots who believe that the renascence of a modern Jewish state is somehow part of G-d’s plan have no choice but look at things differently. Sorry about that. The second question: what is my advice? To whom: us or you? Let’s just say that we have taken our own advice, and leave it at that. And when you come to visit us, starting in the fall, G-d willing, not only will we be able to offer you even more deluxe accommodations, but a view from our balcony that one can find only a little bit East of Yerushalayim.

The Great Debate?

Yes, you could imagine activities or events more dissimilar than the election forum with Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party which I reported on before and the “great debate” held several days later between eight different candidates, but at some point you are comparing turnips and pomegranates. Eldad’s appearance was brought about by the initiative of a handful of people here in Maale Adumim and was held in the small downstairs social hall of a modest local beit knesset. The speaker was free to speak about whatever he wanted for as long as the audience had the patience to listen. There was no problem getting in, and people arrived on Jewish time, meaning whenever they felt like it. But the great debate? This would be an entirely different ball of wax.
The Jerusalem Post, together with Barbara’s employer, the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, was hosting a series of widely publicized debates in a number of cities in which there is a large Anglo crowd: if memory serves me correctly, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ra’anana, and perhaps one or two other places. But the really big show has been and we hope always will be Saturday night in Jerusalem….at the Great Synagogue.
Barbara had gotten the word from AACI vatikim (old-timers) to get there early – real early – otherwise we wouldn’t get in. So we had arranged for a taxi to pick us up ASAP after Shabbat ended and whisk us down to King George St., meaning we would get picked up at 6:15 so that we would arrive before 7 for a program that was scheduled to start at 8! Our main concern – as it always is – is getting through the machsom (checkpoint) on the way into Jerusalem, the purpose of which is to prevent terrorists and anyone-who-doesn’t-belong from entering the city and doing who-knows-what. In the process, however, it means that every vehicle coming from Maale Adumim also is inconvenienced. It is sort of like the toll booths on the Jersey turnpike used to be before EZ-pass; sometimes you would whizz by and other times you would sit on a line for an hour to deposit your dinky quarter in the stupid basket. Here, you never know what the instructions du jour will be for these young soldiers and police officers assigned to the checkpoints. Some days, everyone is waved through. Other days, soldiers board the buses checking for who knows what. For several days during the recent operation in Gaza, they stopped and inspected everyone’s car, causing a backup of over an hour during the morning rush hour. Using the usual laws of physics, the more in a hurry you are, the longer the delay (this worked back in New Jersey too, so I know it is a universal principle). Because we were definitely early, there was no more than a five minute delay getting through, and we arrived in front of the Great Synagogue at 6:45. The doors had not been opened, and yet there were at least fifty people already waiting. The crowd had swelled to about 200 people by the time they opened the doors about fifteen minutes later.
The few times in my life when it would have been logistically possible to daven at the Great Synagogue on a Shabbat morning, I chose not to do so; the poor quality of my prayers and the shortness of my attention span preclude me from participating in the kind of lengthy formal type of service – complete with a well-trained cantor and, I believe, a choir – that this house of prayer offers. I had never even been in the building before. It is no longer the largest synagogue in Jerusalem (the Belz hassidim have erected a replica of Herod’s temple which holds 4000 of their ranks; perhaps they think that when the time comes, their building will slide over to the Temple Mount – a lot less problematic than dropping down from the sky), but still, the minyon at the Great Synagogue could max out at 850 men (and 550 women), which would severely limit one’s chances of ever getting an aliyah. Of course, on the night in question, no one was getting an aliyah except for the candidates, and the evening’s program was not going to be in the main sanctuary, but in the ballroom downstairs. Somewhat bigger than the social hall in the “Down Shul” which could probably accommodate 100 or so people for a stand-up Kiddush on a Shabbat morning, this place might comfortably fit 500 people for a lavish wedding and a lot more for an event like this. By 7:20, every seat was taken, mostly by middle-aged or above men and women of the Anglo persuasion; by 7:30, the hundred or more seats on a mezzanine were filled; and by 7:45, we were informed, several hundred more seats upstairs (closed-circuit TV) were also taken, so if you merely arrived on time, you were too late to get in. The program actually started as close to on-time as is legal in Israel: the introducer was introduced, who in turn introduced the moderator, who introduced the candidates and explained the agreed upon format (each speaker, in alphabetical order would get an initial five minutes and a turn at answering questions from the audience), and we were off and running.
There is a special fascination to these election events; I see politics in general as great theater at no cost (except what you shell out as a taxpayer later on). Even though I was strongly leaning towards the National Union slate, I definitely wanted to hear what these would-be Knesset members had to say for themselves and their parties: were they for something, against something, trying to woo voters from a specific party, did they speak well, were they unduly defensive, did they lose their composure under the pressure of defending their position? The correct answer, as I discovered, was “all of the above.”
Leading off was Danny Ayalon, representing Yisrael Beiteinu. Many of us were wondering why someone who had been an ambassador to the United Nations (in which capacity he had made a lot of useful contacts in the American Jewish community) and then had been involved with Nefesh b’Nefesh would want to make his debut in Israeli politics in such a controversial fashion and what he wanted to accomplish. Instead, he came out swinging, speaking in favor of Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to make Israeli Arabs take an oath of loyalty to the State. Talk about a waste of time: if you make every Israeli citizen take this oath, then many of the Hareidim wouldn’t agree either, nor would the Haaretz crowd on general principles, and you have accomplished nothing and wasted a lot of time better spent on improving our military strength, our infrastructure, our economy, our educational system, and perhaps getting Gilad Shalit released. One down.
The second batter was Uri Bank from the National Union. Having come here as a boy with his American parents – staying here alone as a teenager when his parents later returned to the States – Uri was the only mother-tongue-is-English candidate from any party with a realistic shot at getting elected. Playing to his strength, Uri made the point that he would serve as the personal representative of the Anglo community; he also made the point that his party was the only one unequivocally opposed to giving up one grain of our holy soil to anyone. No great orator, but he spoke clearly and to the point.
Perhaps because his family name is Begin, I expected a little more pizzazz from Benny ben (the son of) Menachem, and, perhaps, an explanation of why he was rejoining Likud after so many years in exile. He had a perfect opportunity to stir up the crowd. Instead we were treated to a debunking of a list of Kadima justifications for the Gaza expulsions, none of which had come to fruition. But not a word about why we should trust Netanyahu and vote for Likud. A perfect opportunity for an r.b.i. wasted!
Next, we were ushered into a parallel universe: the world of Meretz, the most left-wing ‘Zionist’ (i.e., in favor of maintaining at least a tiny fragment of a Jewish state) party we have. Now most of the Meretz crowd are rabid secularists; but there is always one ‘black sheep’ in every family. Tonight’s representative was Tzvia Greenfield, a sheitel wearing woman who considers herself Hareidi, even though she supports ending army deferments for yeshiva students and giving the Temple Mount permanently to our ‘cousins.’ I definitely wanted to hear what she had to say! In soothing tones – she reminded me of a school ‘marm’ or perhaps the fairy godmother in the Disney version of Cinderella – that if we really, really believed in peace, and we tried hard enough, we could achieve it. And that we were being ‘negative’ for thinking otherwise! Either this woman is privy to some dark secret that has eluded the rest of us, or she is off in la-la land. You can imagine what the audience thought.
How can I describe the performance of the next speaker, Daniel Hershkowitz, a mathematics professor at the Technion, a pulpit rabbi in Haifa, and newly chosen head of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) – the other half of the old National Religious Party? This is the best I can do: have you ever heard a rabbi or your history professor give a talk, and ten minutes later when somebody asked you what it was about, you had no recollection? I think that Hershkowitz was saying something about Jewish unity, but it made no impression on me, and I have no idea why he was saying whatever it was that he was saying.
You could never say the same about the next candidate, Michael Melchior, former chief rabbi of Norway, member of the Knesset, representing the hybrid Meimad (a left-wing religious party) and the one of the Green parties. If nothing else, he speaks clearly and passionately about his concerns. What distinguished him from every other speaker was his emphasis on social and environmental issues – things which unfortunately were otherwise ignored during the debate. You gotta admire the guy, even if you don’t agree with him.
The bravest speaker of the evening was Avraham Michaeli, the last-minute entry from the Shas party. Here’s a man with a cherubic face, looking a little like Natan Sharansky, who made aliyah from Soviet Georgia in 1971. His official Knesset biography lists his languages as English, along with Russian and Georgian (we can assume Hebrew), but that would be like my listing Hebrew as one of my languages! It would take a lot to get me to address a crowd of several thousand people in the language I m trying to learn, but Michaeli got up there and did his best in his halting English – and I give him lots of credit for trying. But it tells me how distant Shas is from the Anglo community.
The person with the greatest gap between his resume and his performance was good ol’ Nachman Shai for Kadima. Formerly the IDF spokesman and a big honcho for the UJC (another one of Barbara’s employers back in the States), he justified his decision to run for the Knesset by saying that Tzipi Livni had moved from the political right to the center, and he was doing the decent thing by moving from the left to join her. Nice of him to do that.
I suspect that very few people in the audience knew much about the last speaker, Einat Wilf, the representative for the Labor party, and I also suspect that few people there had walked into the hall planning to vote for the political arm of the Israel trade union movement. Nevertheless, she was by far the most effective speaker of the evening. Dr. Wilf is someone with impeccable scholarly credentials and an impressive background. Like Netanyahu, she spent time in prestigious American academia and has pitch-perfect English, the kind few American candidates can call upon. Like Netanyahu and like Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, she has that rare ability to command a room, so that everyone is paying strict attention. In five minutes, she painted a picture of her party as being the bedrock of Israeli society, a “boring” (her words) but effective political entity – and she made it sound exciting! I tell you, if I had just landed from the moon and didn’t know better, she would have convinced me to vote for her party.
I think it would be fair to say that there was no blood shed in round 1. Round 2, everyone getting a turn to answer pre-selected questions from the audience, proved to be a little more interesting. The main topic on virtually everybody’s mind that night was national security, and the questions reflected that concern. Uri Bank, representing the most hawkish party, raced to the microphone to be the first to respond, attacking the two-state solution as a recipe for disaster and accusing Benny Begin and Danny Ayalon of hypocrisy for disguising their parties’ support for such a solution (I would have been more tactful and suggested that they were ‘running away’ from their parties’ platforms). His tactic was very effective because he caught both of them off-guard (I don’t know why they were so ill-prepared). The former U.N. ambassador interrupted Bank (drawing a rebuke from the moderator) and denied that Avigdor Lieberman is prepared to divide Jerusalem, when it is clear that he is – a very poor performance by Ayalon. Benny Begin kept making snide remarks about the lack of credibility of ‘splinter’ parties, somehow ignoring the fact that his illustrious father was for many years the head of a small, discredited faction. (Bank was able to bring into the discussion the plan promoted by MK Benny Elon to return pre-1967 Jordanian citizenship to Arabs living “over the green line” without changing the borders of our country. This plan has two distinct advantages: it does not require us to commit suicide and, while the Jordanians will not say so publicly, they are less than thrilled with the idea of having a potential Hamas-controlled government on their now-quiet border. There are suggestions that they might be willing to give expatriate citizenship to ‘Palestinians’ if the world community ‘begged’ them to do so.)
But again, the worst performance of the round award went to Nachman Shai, who insisted on passionately defending the destruction of the Gush Katif communities – without bothering to explain why and how this seemingly self-defeating enterprise remains a good idea, but that is often the case when people put their brains on auto-pilot. The rest of the cast of characters gave a reprise of their first round performances: Hershkowitz seemed to be in another zone; Greenfield on another planet; Michaeli unable to express himself; Melchior unable to change the focus of the debate to other substantive issues; Wilf again giving a winning presentation for a losing proposition.
The final question, what should Israeli do to forestall an Iranian nuclear attack if one were imminent, brought a rare moment of consensus: everyone, including the Meretz candidate agreed that Israel should take whatever steps were needed to defend itself. We were then reminded not to trip over the electrical wiring on the way out, and a thousand or more people wended their way out to King George Street to find their way home and reflect on the words of the candidates. As with most events of this kind, the opportunities missed surpassed the successes and the loudest words were those not expressed. Looking back at this event in the hindsight afforded by the election results, I might have changed my opinion in this regard: rather than call the evening ‘grand theater,’ I might have better described it as watching “Night of the Living Dead” or some other captivating horror flic. The three pompous pugilists, Shai, Begin, and Ayalon were virtually guaranteed seats in the Knesset even though, judging by their performances, there is not one original idea amongst the three of them. Michaeli got the last seat that the linguistically-challenged Shas party won. Hershkowitz’s party managed to cross the minimum threshold; as number one, he will represent Bayit Yehudi like a ship without a rudder. Uri Bank was number five for National Union, which won four seats; he may enter the Knesset sometime down the road. The truly gifted Dr. Wilf was too far down on the Labor list to get elected; likewise the sheitel-wearing woman from Meretz. Rabbi Melchior’s party was shut out and his voice for environmental issues will no longer be heard in the Knesset.
It should be no surprise that we will not be looking to the Knesset for Jewish leadership. In fact, we could walk the streets of our cities, towns, kibbutzim, yishuvim, moshavim, and yeshivot holding a lantern and looking for positive leadership but rarely finding it. That this is true throughout the world is of small comfort.