The Real MisterZol

More often than not, one of my verbal ripostes proves to be the last word on a given subject, but in this case I was seriously outdone, and I don’t even know the doer’s name. One of the things which the Anglo community here loves to hate is our local supermarket (pronounced, ‘superrrrrrrrrrr’) MisterZol, located smack dab in the middle of our local mall, which means that everyone can get there by car, by bus, by cab, even by foot. Now, ‘zol’ in Hebrew means cheap or inexpensive, leading one to believe that this chain of markets is just the place for the cost-conscious shopper. Once one is here for a while, long enough to recalculate what things cost in local coins of the realm, one realizes that this assumption is somewhat off the mark. MisterZol is not the most expensive, but is certainly far from the cheapest. Nor does it have the best and largest selection of products, the most room to maneuver one’s cart, the most courteous and efficient staff. In short, it’s not a fun place to be (although the fact that, like many of its kind in Israel, every item in the store is kosher should not be forgotten or made light of). So when one local resident posted something on MA-chat, complaining about something or other in the store, probably that they systematically overcharged her on their computerized cash registers, there was a predictable barrage of responses with similarly negative opinions. After a day or so, I chimed in with the rhetorical question as to why anybody with a) a car and b) an ounce of sense would want to shop there. Several hours later came the ultimate response from a gentleman who opined that when he died he hoped it would be in one of the aisles of this very store, because if he then went to Hell, it would be an improvement. Kind of says it all.
Now you might be wondering, if I don’t like MisterZol, where would I want to go? Easy. There is a branch of a smaller competing chain, Rami Levi in Mishor Adumim, an industrial zone way down the hill. It is larger, has a better, fresher, and more consistent selection, and in general is a much more pleasant shopping experience. It’s also at least ten percent cheaper. But, and this an enormous ‘but,’ you need a car to get there – or a ride in someone else’s car. For the last several months, I have been able to get a ride every other week on Wednesday afternoon. We go in, fill up our carts, go through the checkout counters – where they usually have somebody to bag your stuff, which speeds things up tremendously – out to the car, and you’re back in Maale Adumim in five minutes. The people I’m with even help me shlep my stuff upstairs. All I have to do is unpack everything, put it away, and get on with my life.
But this wasn’t one of those weeks. So I had no choice but to join all those without a) a car or b) an ounce of sense – a sizeable group – maneuvering through the aisles of Mister Zol. Now I always try to be fair. You can find some real bargains at MisterZol – if, and I stress, IF you know what you are doing. Stores here, just like in The States, can be put into the following categories: across the board good prices, easy to find or get discounts, and hard to find or get discounts. In New Jersey, the Shoprite supermarkets or the Kohls department stores practically beg you to get one of their store cards, which entitle you to serious discounts. But you still have to pay attention. Sometimes in Shoprite, two eight ounce packages would cost you less than one sixteen ounce container; sometimes thirty two ounces would cost ten cents more than sixteen ounces. All the information you need to do the math is listed on the shelves – if you take the trouble to read it. “To read it!” Never an issue back in The States. Never a problem to read the weekly ads that come with your local newspaper or the signs in the store. I had a conversation with two new friends who made aliyah fairly recently and who are just in the early stages of getting acclimated, including figuring out what things should cost. Nor have they as of yet learned any significant amount of Hebrew. As they have a car, I explained to them with copious examples, they could save some serious money by shopping at Rami Levi. What it came down to was that they had ‘mastered’ the aisles at MisterZol, and now that they knew from memory where to find things in one store, they were reluctant to start over again somewhere else. As I was pushing my cart through the aisles on this off-Wednesday, something occurred to me: MisterZol is the worst kind of place to shop – if you can’t read the signs, or the advertisements, or the conditions on the books of coupons you can get – assuming you know enough to go to the courtesy counter and ask for one; or what day of the week the produce is on sale and what day the meat – assuming you have read the fine print and know how much else you have to buy to get the discount. Some of the cashiers will remind you of a weekly discount and some won’t. There is often a special: if you buy the required amount (usually 300 shekels) you can get that week’s item for an additional one shekel. The ground meat I used in the stuffed cabbage I made for this last Shabbat, I had gotten several weeks ago for one shekel a kilo (I had put the meat immediately into the freezer, but you knew that). Come to think of it, the rice I mixed with the meat also came on a special, three packages for a shekel, probably a two week’s supply for a local Sephardic family.
This past week the designated item was water. Mai Eden spring water, one of the local brands. Two six-packs of one and a half liter bottles. That’s eighteen liters of water. In our old apartment, we had a system which filtered the tap water. Here we don’t, so I have started buying bottled water because it tastes better than the perfectly safe tap water. I saw the display of water near the entrance when I entered the store, but, as I was only planning to get the proverbial ‘few things,’ I didn’t pay it any mind. I wound up not getting that much, but 300 shekels (about $80) isn’t that much to spend in a supermarket; and wouldn’t you know it, the cash register rang up 300 shekels. So what was I going to do, not take the water which I would use anyway for one shekel more? Of course I went over and picked up two six packs of Mai Eden water, noting how heavy they were, brought them over to the checkout counter, and dropped them in my own shopping cart. ( The kind of cart I am talking about is virtually extinct in America but is ubiquitous here in The Land. Every elderly Russian has one, and that’s a lot of people. At any moment in time, you can see at least a thousand of these carts blocking your way in the Mahane Yehuda shuk alone. They are invaluable if you are schlepping groceries without a car. We’ve gone through several of them since we’ve been here. On one of them, the wheels fell off; on another, the bottom broke; a third was too short for me to use it comfortably. The one we have now is ergonomically sound but small: the carrying area is twenty one inches high by fourteen inches wide by seven inches deep, always just not quite big enough for what I buy.) I realized, with a sinking feeling, that these two six packs alone took up most of the space in my cart. Undeterred, I proceeded. I put whatever else I could that was heavy in my cart. I had a package of paper towel rolls with its own plastic handle; this I slung over the handle of the cart. Everything else I put into four plastic bags to carry with my other hand and set off out of the store. At this point, I had several options. I could have gone straight across the street and waited for a bus, but why wait as long as twenty minutes for a bus when I can normally walk home in ten minutes? Anyway, I would have to get all this stuff on and off the bus – no easy task. I could have gone to the taxi stand. A cab would cost me fifteen shekels. For twenty shekels, I could have had the store deliver my groceries up the stairs to my front door. But how could I spend fifteen or twenty shekels to get home? It would have been cheaper not to take the water, but how could I turn down eighteen liters of water for one shekel? You see my dilemma. The only option that made sense…….at the time…. was to walk home with my load. So I made a left turn out of Mister Zol, crossed that street, and walked through and around Kikar Yahalom, the original main shopping area when Maale Adumim was a small town, which means going down a hill, and then a while later up an incline, a short walk on a level area, over a pedestrian bridge, and I pretty much home. I should add that once I have left the area by the mall, it’s too late to get a cab or a bus. You are walking home, whether you want to or not.
It is universally acknowledged that I in no way look my age. But there are definitely times when I feel my sixty eight years. There are even times when I feel older than that. How old do you think I felt as I started walking home, pulling a heavy shopping cart with one hand, and carrying what would have been a shopping cart-full of groceries in the other – in the heat of a day which has forgotten that it’s not still summer? The first part, all downhill, wasn’t too bad – except for stopping for the first of several times to pick up a cauliflower that had been precariously placed at the top of the cart and which was determined to escape. But as I got to the uphill part, I had to stop several times to catch my breath. I was perspiring profusely and I could feel the energy seeping from my body. Originally, I had refused to spend fifteen shekels to take a cab home; but as I started up the hill, which is about halfway home, it occurred to me that if somebody were to have come by just then and offered to relieve me of my burden for twenty shekels, I would have gladly taken them up on the offer. My story does have a happy ending though. After I made it up the incline, at a point when I was three quarters of the way home, and I had again stopped to catch my breath, a man came past and picked up my four shopping bags and walked with me most of the way home (No. I am not going to claim that he was Eliyahu HaNavi. I last saw the prophet a year and a half ago on the way to the Kotel.) I got everything up the stairs into our apartment, where I unpacked everything and lay down to rest. I was completely useless for the next three hours.
Now you may say that I was being stubborn, penny wise and pound foolish, but perhaps I was being true to my real nature. They don’t call me Frugal Fred for nothing. MisterZol? Maybe I’m the real MisterZol. Who else would risk a heart attack for fifteen shekels and two six packs of water?

Show and 'Tel' at Ramat Rachel

I came back from Mussar Avicha, the beit knesset where I hang out here in Maale Adumim, one Shabbat morning several weeks ago, and I said to Barbara, “You and I are not with it, and I can prove it.” Herein lies the tale.
One of the couples we met on our cruise was Rich and Barbara (henceforth designated as Barbara II to distinguish her from my Barbara, who will be designated in this article as Barbara I, to avoid confusion). Rich is one of those people who play an essential role in life, the unofficial group leader. For example, there are a bunch of people finishing dinner, and there are several hours left before bedtime. Somebody has got to say, “How about if we…….,” or “Let’s………,” or “We’re……………; wanna join us.” Otherwise, everyone will just sit around and mope for several hours. Fortunately for all of us, Hashem created certain people to fill that role, to take on that awesome responsibility of planning the recreation for the rest of us sluggards.
When our cruise was over, and we were all safely back, not only on dry land, but in The Land, Barbara II, who had a little vacation left, spent a week on an archaeological dig. Some of you, at least, are familiar with Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz at the southern tip of Jerusalem. This place has been around since the 1920’s, and was the scene of extremely fierce fighting between us and the Jordanians both in 1948 and 1967. When one is standing there, its strategic importance is obvious; it occupies a high ground overlooking Beit Lechem and the entire area to the south (which is why it is named ‘rama,’ high place, and Rachel, as it overlooks the site which by tradition is where our matriarch Rachel is buried). It also makes a great scenic backdrop for a chupah. This, of course, is what it has become known for: a great place to have a wedding, and in our short stay here in The Land, we have already been invited to several – thanks to our Teaneck connections.
What is not so well known is that there has been an on-going archaeological dig on and off going back I believe many decades. When you get to the first parking lot, instead of heading towards the hotel and the wedding hall, if you just keep going, past the swimming pool, you will arrive at the tel where the dig has been taking place. And that was exactly what we did when we got off the number seven bus that Friday morning. We were supposed to meet Richard and Barbara II and another couple at the dig site for what was billed as a reunion – partly for us and partly for Barbara II to revisit what she had accomplished and to show it to friends. For in the one week she was there, B II had dug up what seemed to be an ancient mikvah – certainly something to be proud of.
We were the first to arrive, which gave me and Barbara I time to walk around and get a sense of the enormity of this project and the large number of people involved in the dig. Clearly, most of the participants were students, and we could hear an equal amount of Hebrew and English being spoken. We were later told about the arrangements. Each person paid $x per week to participate, which meant they stayed at the Ramat Rachel Hotel and enjoyed all the amenities thereof; except that unlike normal guests, these folk arose in time to start digging at 5:30 in the morning, when most sensible people are firmly glued to their pillows. Later on, when it gets too hot to dig, the process of sifting and evaluating begins.
Within a few minutes, Richard and Barbara II arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Don and Lorraine. (Another couple from Modi’in was invited, but they were unable to make it.) Before we begin the grand tour of the tel, let me throw in an aside about apparel. One of Richard and Barbara II’s more amazing attributes was the fact that between them, they own what is probably the world’s largest extant collection of Jacob’s Ladder Folk Festival (in Israel) t-shirts. I remember remarking to Richard one day on the cruise, that if Jacob’s Ladder ever went out of business, he would have nothing to wear. But now we were faced with a similar phenomenon, the Ramat Rachel dig annual t-shirt, this year’s color a shade of purple, which many of the young folk were wearing. But if you had been on last year’s dig, you had two t-shirts, one from each year. And if you were back for your third dig, you had three t-shirts, each a different color. Of course, considering the cost of participating, you could say that these are very expensive t-shirts – sort of like the Hanukkah menorah or the challah board which Natania made in ‘early childhood’ at the Yavneh Academy, which we have appraised at about $8000 apiece. Nonetheless, with little effort, one could practice the subtle art of one-up-manship, by wearing a shirt from eight digs ago – for there are people, especially the staff, who have been coming back year after year. (I, of course, have my own eclectic collection of t-shirts, from schools I never attended, places I’ve never been, jobs I’ve never had; so I can’t one-up anybody!)
Time to start our mini-tiyul, giving Barbara II a chance to demonstrate what she has learned and show off what she uncovered. I, of course, was listening with only one ear, because I was watching with both eyes and most of my brain. In other words, I was looking at how, what, and where people were digging, at the serendipitous patterns of tools and buckets and wheelbarrows and gloves left lying around, the fact that they were serving breakfast on china dishes, at how you can see much of Jerusalem from these heights, things like that. What I remember most was the look of astonishment and pleasure on Barbara II’s face when we arrived at where she was digging, only a little more than one week ago. When she had put her t-shirt in the laundry for the last time and checked out of the Ramat Rachel Hotel, she was convinced that she had uncovered a mikvah. Now that another layer had been uncovered, it was obvious that what she had dug up was no mikvah – although nobody had a strong opinion as to what this area, partially covered with a mosaic tile floor, had been. The thing is that Barbara II had no stake in the matter either way, no reputation in the field to maintain, no ego to have soothed. Whatever it turned out to be was fine with her; she was just happy to have uncovered something. Perhaps a professional in the field, already preparing a paper or a lecture series on this find, might have less willing to concede the point, but we will never know. The difficulty in assessing anything in a site like Ramat Rachel is that it is one civilization on top of another, and each one felt free to pillage the previous site and use its building materials anew, so you can find a series of artifacts – from a Byzantine church at the top down to the Iron Age at the bottom. What is mystifying about this site in particular is that while it was certainly a Jewish village at one time – probably second temple – there is no mention of it in our sources. Beneath a Byzantine church was a wine press, a grape press, and evidence of a columbaria, where doves would roost. You can see the Temple Mount from Ramat Rachel, and, while I question the assertion that one could get to Har Habayit in forty minutes, certainly it could be done in under two hours. So a pilgrim on his way to bring a korban (sacrifice) at the Beit Hamikdash could stop on the way and get a pigeon, probably cheaper than what it would have cost at one of the stalls that lined the entrances to the Temple (maybe rent was cheaper at Ramat Rachel). At any rate, there was a lot more to consider at this tel, including a palace which seems to expand as they uncover more and more of it and a Canaanite wall which likewise keeps extending itself (they are using some kind of imaging to track it underground).
We did not get a chance to witness the other aspect of archaeological exploration, sifting for artifacts and identifying them, but I had spent a few hours a number of years ago doing some sifting, and I remember how tedious the process is, and how rewarding – IF you find something of interest or of value. The difference between then and now is this: ‘then’ was going through the rubble, tons and tons of debris which the Arabs had removed – illegally of course – from the Temple Mount, and which had been literally rescued from the garbage by archaeologists. So the purpose of this on-going sifting was to ‘prove’ that there had been a Jewish presence on Har Habayit, and so every coin, amulet, or vessel that someone found was in effect ammunition in a political war. The Arabs are less interested in Ramat Rachel (they still want sovereignty over it, as they want sovereignty over all of our land; but they are not yet saying that we never lived there). The main enemy ‘now’ seems to be time and money – getting as much done before the grant money runs out and further exploration is put off. We came upon a large heap of broken pottery, all of which had been evaluated and discarded. Barbara II looked at the pile; she bent down and pulled out a piece of a jug, about two and a half inches by four, with an intact handle, which she gave to Barbara I. Priceless! We took this fragment home, and we are considering where to put it in our new home.
It was now time for the second part of the morning’s activities, heading over to Emek Refaim for something to eat. Anyone who is familiar with Jerusalem knows about this area, the name of which means Valley of Ghosts (the kids who come here on a one year program call it ‘Emek,’ proving only that that they have been in Israel a year without learning much Hebrew). Well Israeli ghosts are well fed, and most of them must eat here, because this street is really a restaurant row. Over the last several years, slowly but surely, most of the restaurants have become kosher – because they can do more business in six days than they would have in seven. So there must be at least twenty places that we can eat in within four or five blocks (eat your collective hearts out, Teaneck!), but many of them are not suitable for breakfast – unless you are a hard-core carnivore. Our little group was headed to Tal’s Bagels, the perfect place for a meal at 11AM on a Friday.
We have been in The Land now for two full years, and invariably, the sixth day of the week finds me at home, cooking and in general getting ready for Shabbat. So you can imagine my astonishment when, after Rich found a hard-fought parking spot on a side street that I would never have been able to locate, and we walked a ways, we arrived at the main drag, and, wow, the joint was jumping. If I had imagined that everybody was home making meatballs, hanging laundry on the line, or cleaning the toilets, boy was I wrong. Shabbat was not going to start for another eight hours, and several thousand people were milling around with the spectral spirits which haunt this street. I am also making the assumption that the ghosts have over the years picked up quite a bit of English by hanging out near the restaurants.
So we sat and had a leisurely meal, undeterred by the water from the air-conditioning unit that was dripping on our heads. Some of us actually ordered bagels. It goes without saying that we ordered coffee (many of you are not aware that nowadays the coffee here is much better than you get in The States). And we just sat and relaxed like the throng of people coming and going from Tal’s Bagels and similar establishments all over Jerusalem. It turns out that one of the young women waiting on us was the daughter of the guy in charge of the dig at Ramat Rachel.
Rich offered to drive us back to Maale Adumim, an offer we readily accepted. They wanted to head that way anyway, to look at the new cars for the Light Rail (the cars are ready, the rails are not) that are all parked somewhere in French Hill. I should note that Barbara II, when she isn’t digging or going on a cruise, is an engineer, and for many years worked for Amtrac, commuting from the Galil to the East Coast. Our friends came in to see our apartment before heading back. They didn’t have a care in the world; they were staying with people in Jerusalem, so they had little to do to prepare for Shabbat.
So that’s how we spent our Friday morning, relaxed and stress-free – and we still got ready in time for Shabbat. Food for thought for the future. Shabbat morning, my good friend Ron – whose family we met on our Nefesh B’Nefesh flight – wished me a Happy Anniversary. I gave him a look. What are you talking about? Yesterday was the second anniversary (secular date) of our mutual aliyah. We had completely forgotten! Isn’t that funny! We were celebrating our arrival in The Land without even knowing it. We thought we were just inspecting mosaic tiles and feeding our faces. How about that! It’s good to have friends to plan our recreation. It’s also good to have friends to help us keep track of the time.

Pagan Gods and Phantoms

It’s a long way aesthetically (down) and spiritually (up) from the glories of the pagan Acropolis to the one functioning but very bland synagogue in Athens, another part of our full-day tour of the city. Our bus driver left us off several blocks away and, led by our effervescent guide in her flowing white sun dress, we walked through an old neighborhood up to the Greek version of a machsom (checkpoint) guarding the street on which the functioning beit knesset and another one, which may or may not be in use, were located.
Yes. Jews have lived in Athens from before the time when the Parthenon was built until the present. And yes. There are Jews living in Athens today. (Although in the nineteenth century when was Athens itself was almost deserted, there were no Jews in the city.) In fact, on the forthcoming Shabbat there would be the celebration of a bar mitzvah; and instead of having a relatively small minyan, there would be a good size crowd. Almost on cue, a young lad entered the synagogue, wearing the kind of rayon yarmulke that one finds at the entrance to many synagogues world-wide, for use by those male visitors who arrive without one. He was the star of the show, the bar mitzvah boy to-be, and those of us assembled were mighty glad to see him and made our excitement known. And that’s all I remember about the synagogue.
Now we know that every shul isn’t going to be visually interesting (although I’ve been in shteibels which are remarkable by their sheer decrepitude). And we are familiar with Jewish houses of worship which are physically gorgeous but, shall we say, somewhat lacking in spiritual enthusiasm (I was told about one temple which spent so much money on its building that the congregation couldn’t afford to pay for a rabbi). There are times, though, when the enthusiasm is great, but the pockets are shallow. The beit knesset I hang out in, Mussar Avicha, is less than opulent. But it’s one of over forty in Maale Adumim, a community of less than forty thousand Jews; and it serves a relatively small, mostly Anglo congregation who insist on using the traditional Ashkenazic order of prayers. So we do the best we can. But here we were standing in what has become by default the main synagogue in all of Greece, built – I assume in a wild burst of optimism – in 1935 and refurbished more recently, and would it have been so terrible to put a little spirit in the renovation? As it is, the interior is as exciting as the aforementioned rayon yarmulke. Somebody was standing in the front of the shul and giving a presentation. At some point thereafter, a number of us were standing outside the building, looking across the street at the other shul. That one had a beautiful pale blue stucco exterior, but it was closed. Again, I do not know if it is ever open for business: we were told no during the presentation, but the pamphlet we received said yes. If we’re ever in Athens on a Shabbat, we’ll let you know.
The standard question: (in unison) Why do they need two shuls in Athens? In addition to the usual answer, having to do with our natural contrariness, there were two distinct Jewish communities in Greece. The original settlers became known as the Romaniote Jews, and they spoke Judeo-Greek. By the end of the fifteenth century, a massive wave of Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula, arrived. They, of course, spoke Judeo-Espagnol, more commonly known as Ladino. (Do you notice a pattern here? From before the Common Era, Jews have been unwilling or unable to speak plain old-fashioned vanilla Hebrew, preferring Aramaic, or Romaniote, or Ladino, or Judeo-German, a/k/a Yiddish. Modern Hebrew is being overwhelmed with loan words, mostly from English. In Ulpan, when there were two possibilities or choices, we did not say, yesh breira, but yesh optsiah [option]. Recently, when I wanted to purchase a flash drive on which to store these articles, I asked my buddy Ron what they were called here in The Land. Sure enough, I went to a store and asked for a disconki; [repeat that a few times, slowly] they guy knew exactly what I wanted and showed me where they were. More on this topic some other time.)
There was one more place for us to go, the Jewish Museum – not the large, well-funded one in New York, with changing, temporary exhibits – but the little one in Athens which had a ‘table of contents’ similar to many other such institutions. In other words, you know exactly what you will find inside: ceremonial items, uniforms and costumes, photographs of buildings no longer extent and people no longer alive. I was reading the caption next to one of the photographs (in English), which related how in one community, the women would assemble in a courtyard after Shabbat was over and roast pistachio nuts together. From the caption and the photograph, I could almost imagine being there, smelling the pistachios as I smelled roasting chestnuts in New York. The story was told in the first person with great emotion by a woman who lived sometime in the past. The museum itself was the collective memory of a community that lived sometime in the past. Is that all? Are we merely a world-wide collections of communities that existed sometime in the past. Maybe if we had all the Madoff-money that never existed, we could create a series of museums for each of the communities that once did exist, but not anymore. Put aside communities like Radin and Salonika, where we were exterminated; don’t consider Tunis or Algiers where we were asked to leave – not so politely. Just concentrate on communities in America which were abandoned by choice: How about Deadwood, South Dakota, where several hundred Jews lived and thrived in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many of whom are buried in Hebrew Hill, the Jewish section of the Mount Moriah Cemetery – where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are the most famous of its ‘residents.’ But even closer to home: Brownsville, Jersey City, the Grand Concourse. How about a museum for the Jewish community from the Moshulu Parkway area of The Bronx, where, as you all know by now, I grew up. Now, while there are hundreds or even thousands of us left to remember the Nathan Strauss Jewish Center, Schweller’s Delicatessen, Jack Ashwall’s ices, or Mrs. Pearl Thaler, the Principal of P.S/J.H.S. 80, where we all went to school and where our lives were shaped. Before varieties of senility cloud are memories, perhaps we should record our recollections. Somewhere in volume four of Proust’s work, Swann (Charles Swann, an important character who is considered ‘Jewish’ in French society, although, if I remember correctly, only his father was Jewish) is described as a ‘connoisseur of phantoms.’ In my view, if all we are is what we used to be, then we are little more than apparitions; we have reduced ourselves to siphoning our memories to fuel our lives.
I was curious as to what Chryssa, a young Greek woman who came of age after the colonels had come and gone, thought of this museum, and so I asked her. We weren’t able to finish our conversation, what with all of the good folks in the group wanting her attention, but I got out of her a sense of pride that such a museum existed, as a tribute to what the Jewish people had contributed to Greek society – although the museum did not single out, nor can I think of any specific Greco-Jews who were world-renowned. Of course, she had not visited an array of similar tributes, as many of us have, nor would our present and our future be of such immediate concern to her, as it would to us. Almost everyone in our group is now living in Israel, and those who aren’t have thoughts or plans to do so. I began to explain to her that I and the collective ‘we’ of the Jewish people were too much alive to be limited to the insides of some plexiglass cases; but at that point in our discussion, somebody else had a question for her, and our conversation came to an end.
It was time to return to the Golden Iris which would sail the long way to Lavrion, where we would meet up with our guide and our tour bus again. Our tour leader, Carole Cremer, had ordered a healthy quantity of wine for our group, and for reasons best known to her, decided to have it served that night. So our dinner was especially mellow, and as there was plenty left over, a few bottles were quietly removed for use later.

There isn’t much to see in Lavrion, and I have no idea why our ship was going to stop there, except it was on the way to Santorini. If anyone wants to talk about a community that had one brief moment of glory and then became submerged in complete obscurity, here’s your example. In the glory days of ancient Greece, Lavrion was the center of the silver mining industry that provided the material wealth for the rise of the Greek city states. And then, nothing. The only historical site of any note in this area is the ancient amphitheater; so we wound up there, sitting on rows of hard stone seats, the same ones which were in use – perhaps a little smoother back then – more than two thousand years ago. The one question I had for Chryssa was, what was on the playbill? Did a theater like this one serve for the final rehearsals, as theaters in Philadelphia or New Haven do today prior to the Broadway opening? Was this the equivalent of summer stock? Did the people sitting in this amphitheater see the same plays and the same casts as one would have seen in Athens? She didn’t know; no one seems to know, and there’s no way of finding out. We have the names of the three dramatists and the one writer of comedies, a small sampling of their work, and that’s all. I can’t believe that they were the only playwrights, essentially working in a vacuum. If you were to look up the Wikipedia article on Elizabethan theater for a comparison, you would find the names of almost ninety ‘playwrights’ (some of them were playwrights like I’m a playwright; some of them specialized in writing certain parts of plays and worked in collaboration with others in an assembly line approach, a few of them are familiar to general students of English literature.) Only a relatively small percentage of Elizabethan drama was ever printed and has survived; still the number of plays we have is about six hundred instead of the twenty or thirty from the Greek theater. Whether or not the Greek playwrights were working alone, one in a generation, we are working with a vacuum in understanding their world, and these benches in Lavrion would maintain their stony silence for the rest of their days.
Anyway, that was the last question I was able to ask Chryssa. Her role as tour guide was over. She headed back on the tour bus, and we returned to our ship for lunch. Some of us ventured forth in the afternoon to see what there was to see in the town itself, which wasn’t much, the highlight being some coffee at a local establishment, whereupon we returned to the ship for dinner.
I believe I have previously described the plentitude of victuals available on the Golden Iris, all set out buffet style, like the ‘smorg’ at a simcha, so you have to pass by everything – and you’re hungry, so everything looks especially good – with a plate in your hand, and you’ll try a little of this and a little of that, and just maybeeeeeee, a little of that over there, until there’s no more room on your plate. Of course, you can come back a second time – or even a third time – for whatever you missed on your first pass through. I am proud to say that I was resolute. The only way that I was going to make it through this cruise without serious damage to my waist line was to set a one plate limit for all meals. No seconds, except to get a few pieces of fruit for later. Fortunately for all, the parve desserts were only fair to middlin’. The result: I gained only one half a pound during the eight days we were away. Not bad.
The formal entertainment on our cruise was avoidable, and we were required to do something which is completely foreign to most people under the age of forty: entertain ourselves. This meant that a bunch of us would take some leftover bread from dinner and, as twilight beckoned, hike up to one of the decks on the side of the ship to watch the gulls and other sea birds following the ship across the Aegean. We would toss small pieces of bread over the side and measure the success rate of the feathered followers in retrieving these morsels. It may not sound very exciting, but this is a perfect way to spend an evening after you have been out touring all day. One night, about nine of us were sitting around a table with a bottle or two of wine on one of the lounge decks which faced the back of the ship. There we remained under the stars, drinking and chewing the fat. None of us had come from ‘religious’ backgrounds; two of the women had been competitive athletes, one in running and the other in field hockey; in each of the married couples, if you needed anything fixed you would need to speak to the lady of the house, but if you were hungry, you were better off talking to the husband. On and on, until sleep overtook us and we retired to our cabins for some zzzzzzzzz’s before our next day’s excursion.
Our final port of call was Santorini, and in order to understand what this island is about, you have to perform the following mental exercise. (Look; up to now, I’ve been doing all the work!) Imagine that you’re at the beach, or if that’s too much trouble, in a sand box. You create a mound, let’s say three feet long and one foot high, more or less round in shape. Now scoop out most of the mound so that you’re left with a big crescent and a few small patches where the other side used to be. That’s what this haven for tourists looks like today: one side has the kind of coastline and beach you would see in most places and the other side, a steep cliff down to the blue Aegean. Thirty five hundred years ago, this was a perfectly normal looking island; and then ‘Mother Nature’ chose to intervene – with the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, five times bigger than the famous explosion at Krakatoa – blowing the island to smithereens. That has been the bane of existence for the Greek island to this day, volcanoes and earthquakes, perhaps their punishment for perfecting idol worshipping. Thirty years ago, one could have gone to Santorini with a suitcase of American dollars and bought a significant chunk of the island. Today? That same suitcase would buy you a week’s stay at one of the better hotels on the posh (cliff) side. The entire island seems to be a tourist trap, a breathtakingly gorgeous one, but let the buyer beware. What I remember most about the island was getting onto it and off of it. Everywhere else we went, we were able to sashay off the gangplank onto terra firma. Here, ships had to anchor in the harbor, meaning you had to get on a small motorboat to reach dry land. This we did, and as Barbara and I were among the last to get on board (the motorboat would make several trips back and forth to accommodate all the passengers), we wound up sitting backwards at the rear of the boat. Anybody ride backwards on a bus recently? Imagine that you’re on a boat which is rocking with the waves AND you’re sitting backwards, and you’re from a noble lineage of confirmed and certified landlubbers. I am getting nauseous just thinking about it, even now. I made it through the ten minute ride, but just barely. Safely on land – where there are not supposed to be any nasty waves – we spent the next several hours wandering around the tourist towns, checking out some beautiful vistas and a lot of stores with stuff I wasn’t going to buy. The final tourist town was a long shop-lined street – sort of like running the gauntlet – which was the only route to the way down: you can walk down a long series of steps; you can do the same thing on the back of a donkey; or you can join the long line waiting to get on a cable car. As you might expect, we opted for the third choice, having stopped beforehand for some liquid refreshment at a little place which looked down over the harbor, and where they were playing a CD of a tenor in fine voice singing some Italian songs. It’s amazing what we choose to remember.
Our turn came and we rode down the cable car, from which we could see people and donkeys going up and down the winding trail. Shabbat would be soon approaching, so all of our group was going one way – down. We found the motorboat going back to our ship – as opposed to one of the other ships in the harbor – and making sure NOT to ride backwards, we arrived back at the Golden Iris.
One amazing thing about being in Israel which is so important and equally hard to explain is how The Land allows the ‘pintele yid’ (very hard to translate: probably ‘the little spark of being Jewish’ would work) to survive and flourish. You can be riding the Egged bus from Maale Adumim to Jerusalem, and a young woman gets on dressed in shorts and a tank top; she sits down and pulls out a volume of psalms and begins reciting them earnestly. The dining room on the Golden Iris was filled with the same people as it had been all week. But now it was Friday night, and many men who had been bare-headed all week were now wearing kippot, and many women were dressed a little nicer – because it was Shabbat. During the week, our morning minyan, basically AACI people, had about twenty or twenty five men (there was a separate Sephardic minyan of about the same size.) Shabbat morning in our combined minyan, we may have had as many as 100 men and a very large contingent of women across a makeshift mehitzah. For the next to last time, my faithful group of leviim (all three of them) joined me at the bar in the lounge to wash my hands so I (and now one other guy who showed up) could recite the priestly blessing. The joy of Shabbat would soon be mingled with inevitable regret that our eight days of being pampered was fast coming to an end. That’s what’s wrong with all vacations: they come to an end.
Carole Cremer had arranged for the AACI contingent to have a special third meal in the late afternoon (after lunch and the compulsory nap), after which Daniel Schwartz gave the last of his lectures to us. There was almost an hour left before the evening service and ushering out Shabbat. It was suggested that we spend the time together, and that perhaps some of us could get up and say a few words about themselves. Absolutely amazing! Two of the women worked as museum curators; another was a published novelist; another was a practitioner of ‘natural’ medicine who had been living in Egypt. On and on. Eight days was not enough time to get to know more than a select number of people out of the fifty seven in our group. Next time. (After the trip was over, I found out that one of the rabbis in our group had majored in classics at Cambridge.)
It was time for havdalah, saying ‘bye-bye’ to Shabbat, and then it was time to start getting ready to leave the boat the next morning. By midnight, the ship’s hallways were crowded with luggage that would be carried off as soon as we docked at Haifa. Our morning minyan was especially early, as was breakfast, and then we were saying ‘bye-bye’ to The Golden Iris and all the nice people we had met – some of whom we would be in touch with, some we wouldn’t. But we had one more task to perform, one more place to stop. DUTY FREE!!!! For there waiting for us were the three bottles I had prudently purchased on our way out: the Balvenie (Scotch), the Bushmills single malt (Irish), and the Jack Daniel’s Silver Select (Kentucky). Who says the nations of the world can’t get along? Through Customs and onto the bus to retrace our steps. Stops at Modi’in, Jerusalem, and the mall at Maale Adumim, from whence we took a monit back to our apartment, where Mimi ignored us for at least fifteen minutes before she decided that she was hungry and she had better negotiate with us about that.
Someone might inquire of me, what do you have left from your trip besides memories (and a lot of whiskey and some hand cream. And some digital photographs)? To which I would answer: there are memories that are real and memories, like Swann’s, that are phantoms, unconnected to anything but a feeling of nostalgia. Anything which helps you make sense out of your life is real, and anytime you meet people with whom you make a real connection, you have spent your time wisely, my friend.

A Promontory Above the Aegean

Athens. If you were to ask me what I remember most about our visit to the capital of Greece, I would say, our tour guide, Chrysa, a young woman, full of energy, enthusiasm, and information about her country, who was waiting for us in a long white sun dress as we left the boat, bright and early on that Wednesday. “How are you enjoying your trip, by far?” she asked us as we began to board the tour bus, demonstrating the difficulty in mastering the bewildering range of English language idioms and expressions.
It turns out that Barbara had been here before, right where our bus was parked. When she made her first trip to Israel in 1967, the ship she was on (that’s right, she went to Israel on a ship; you can’t easily do that today) stopped at Pireus, the Athens port, at two o’clock in the morning. There was just enough time to notice all the seedy bars lining the docks, in case one had a sudden, irresistible urge for a shot of Arak. There were, in fact, several others in our AACI group who had been here around that time, all of whom had the identical reaction. There are no more seedy watering-holes anywhere in sight. The bus was driving through a modern city area which didn’t exist forty years ago. I mention this for a reason. At times, we get so carried away with the physical development which has taken place in Israel during this time span, that we forget the fact that large parts of the world have done the same thing. Not everywhere; in fact there are plenty of places which seem to be worse off now than then. Still, we needn’t fracture our wrists patting ourselves on the back. Consider that the Greek government decided to renovate the one existing subway line in Athens and two construct two new ones in time for the 2004 Olympic games; they started in 2000, with the ensuing discomfort throughout the city; but the work was completed on time. You can look it up on the Internet and see how extensive it is. And then you can contemplate what is euphemistically called ‘The Light Rail’ here in Jerusalem (remembering that the word kal in Hebrew means ‘light’ as well as ‘easy’). It would, of course, be impossible to build a transportation system underground here; in addition to the authentic religious and historical objects that would be dug up and would need to be investigated, no doubt, somewhere along the way, a dog would bury a chicken bone, and certain people would start to riot when it was uncovered. At least the present mayor, whatever his limitations, is taking steps to make certain the Light Rail project gets done in our lifetime (you can actually see men working now, instead of the ghost town atmosphere that prevailed before), and we have reason to feel confident that the wrong tracks won’t be laid, or the right tracks laid upside down, as happened before because the previous administration (David Dinkins, where are you?) provided no oversight. Still, I think it’s fair to wonder why the Israeli government can’t compete with the Greeks in building mass transportation; the completion of the complementary rail link from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem seems to be at least five years away.
To be fair, there are other areas in which the Greek government seems surprisingly incompetent whereas we here in Israel shine. Both of our guides, in their own way, mentioned how lackadaisical their government was in providing funds for maintaining and restoring historical sites. As we rode around the city, we were appalled at the amount of graffiti we saw, not just in out of the way or rundown areas, but on important government buildings, huge black and white scrawls left over from large-scale protests months before. (Sort of reminded me of the pre-Giuliani days in New York.) It would be difficult to imagine anybody having the leisure to apply spray paint to the exterior of a public building in Israel. And if that unlikely event occurred, I’m confident that it would be cleaned up with the same speed and attention as they give to cleaning up after a terrorist attack. And for the same reason, which I trust you understand, without my having to over-explain the value of a government creating the appearance of normalcy.
One of my two conflicting impressions of Athens, as seen from my seat on a bus, was that I could have been anywhere. There were streets that we passed by, especially in the center of the city, where the signs in the shops, especially their logos, were mostly in English. And the young people walking by were dressed exactly as they would have been anywhere in any big city in Europe or The States. In other words, we were passing through that well-known multi-national town, Upscaleville, a place with no geographical boundaries.
Then the bus would turn a corner, and one would see that we were in a great capital of the ancient world, an impression reinforced by Chrysa’s on-going commentary. For placed on sites obviously selected for their significance and visibility, the remains of the ancient temples and shrines on which the Greeks of antiquity lavished so much attention are still visible today. And not just the major sites. Insofar as our tiyul was going to last all day, Carole Cremer had arranged to have box lunches for us. The bus stopped and we all disembarked, taking our lunches with us to eat wherever we could find a place to park our bodies. Barbara and I wound up sitting on the steps of some minor government building, leaving enough room for people to come and go around us. When we were finished eating, we took a little walk through an area which catered to tourists. As we walked through the side streets, we came upon a number of ancient shrines that were just there. I don’t think that they were even labeled as such. On the other hand, across the main street where our bus had parked stood the remains of a temple to Zeus, which you could see for blocks away. We didn’t have time to walk around the perimeter fence – at least fifty yards from the ruins – to the entrance and pay the admission fee to go inside, so I took a few photographs from outside.
From everything we saw and from what Chrysa was saying, it was clear that, I can’t say avodah zara (idol worshipping), but the knowledge of avodah zara was definitely alive in Greece. If you were a boy or girl in Athens, and you kept passing these large ruins, sooner or later you would discover what their original purpose was and to whom – namely, Athena, Zeus, Poseidon and the rest of the cast of characters, and sooner or later you would learn how these pagan gods interfaced with Greek history. So while actual idolatry was wiped out here in The Land a long time ago, its memory lingers on in today’s Christian Greece. I was discussing this matter with some of my colleagues on the cruise. The point I was making was that I didn’t think that this fascination with pagan gods existed with so much vigor in northern Europe, and, surprisingly, no one challenged me on this point (usually someone will challenge you regardless of what you say). About a week or two after we returned, I picked up a book which Natania had borrowed from our Maale Adumim library (which exists thanks to Bnei Zion, and has material in Hebrew, English, French, and Russian) entitled “Vienna Blood” by Frank Tallis, volume two of his “The Liebermann Papers,” a series of historical, psychological detective stories set in Vienna at the turn of the (20th) century – highly recommended if this genre suits you. The novel plunges you into the bizarre neo-paganism of Guido (von) List, who promoted his concept of the sun worship which he claimed was the original Germanic religion. It hit me like a bolt out of the blue: the straight and narrow path from Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the la-la land of Von List to the Aryan supremacy of those-whose-names-must-be-blotted-out. For while it is not true that every pagan is a Nazi; it is pretty much true that every Nazi was in some way a pagan. Von List wrote about himself that, when he was fourteen, he accompanied his father ( a faithful Roman Catholic) down to the catacombs beneath a cathedral in Vienna. At a certain point, far below the ground, they came upon the ruins of a pagan altar; at which point, something came over Von List and he proclaimed "Whenever I get big, I will build a Temple to Wotan!" Guys! This could be a movie, a bad one at that. Somebody playing a villain in the next Batman sequel coming to a theater near you next summer. How about Danny Devito hiding in an underground sewer, planning to destroy all of Gotham City and turn it into a theme park dedicated to the downfall of Batman. There is a certain irony here in the real life version: worshipping the sun inside a catacomb. I guess there is some truth to the notion that evil thrives in the absence of light.
The ancient Greeks did no such thing. They worshipped their pagan gods on the highest hills in their sun-drenched land, usually overlooking the incredible blue of the Aegean. They let in so much light that ultimately their gods, like anything left out in the sun too long, faded away, leaving behind only the incredible beauty of the buildings. There are few man-made things more splendid than The Acropolis (many Greek communities had an acropolis, but only Athens had The Acropolis (acropolis, by the way, means the edge of the city). Now someone out there, in a fit of patriotism, is going to say, “Wait a minute. We know that there was nothing more beautiful than Bayit Sheini (the second temple); our sages tell us so.” Fair enough. The edifice under discussion is the one that Herod built. Does anyone actually imagine that this madman took a hiatus from murdering his sons long enough to dream up the idea that if he built a retaining wall, and he set back each successive row of stones two centimeters, the wall would appear to be straight and not give the sense that it was going to topple over? He had the absolute authority, the managerial skills, the wealth, and the manpower to build all that he did. But none of the geometry came from his own warped mind. Think of the Greeks, perhaps filtered through the Romans.
The Acropolis is on a promontory five hundred feet high. The bus left us off on the paved road at the bottom, leaving us to walk up the well-worn and very slippery stone steps to get to the top. Nowhere near as steep as the footpath up to Masada, for example, but daunting enough for the senior members of our group. There are about twenty original buildings clumped together in a few acres, leading me to believe that this may have been the world’s first theme park, Pagan Promenade, thousands of years before anybody thought of shopping malls or food courts. Their original slogan may have been, “Give Every Deity His Due.” With that many buildings, you can do a lot of serious idolatry.
During our stay up there, Chrysa was busy explaining what we were looking at. I didn’t catch too much of what she was saying; I was off on my own photographing. There was one point near the beginning when I saw an excellent composition, but I needed to be where I wasn’t supposed to be to take it. What the heck. We had come this far, and it would be a long time, if ever, before I returned here. It wasn’t as if I would be jumping into an enclosure with a family of orangutans or doing anything as stupid as that. I just needed to be at a vantage point where they didn’t want me to be. I slipped over the restraining rope, and quickly but unobtrusively zipped over to the spot where I could tell I needed to be, got down on my knees, and was able to take one digital image. “Stay behind the barrier. Stay behind the barrier,” over a loudspeaker (incidentally, in excellent English). I got up and walked back to where I was supposed to be. I got my shot.
Much of what I was looking at was the serendipitous piling of stones and pillars, placed there for sorting and cataloging. At long last, the new Acropolis Museum is open, and perhaps some of the stuff piled on the ground will get to be on display. One needed to have ordered tickets in advance on the Internet to get in, so that was that. We weren’t going to get in. One of the main reasons for the new museum was to provide a final resting place for the so-called Elgin Marbles, named after Robert Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, who, perhaps with the permission of the Ottoman Turks – who themselves had no rights to them – walked off with dozens of statues from all over the Acropolis as well as 250 feet of a frieze that was originally in the Parthenon, quantitatively the largest art heist in recorded history. (Elgin was a partisan of the ‘Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers’ school of archaeology.) Of course there was precedent for this pillaging. Think ‘Arch of Titus.’ (Another scenario for a movie: the Israeli government believes it has located the golden menorah and the other sacred vessels from the Temple hidden in a vault five hundred feet beneath the Vatican. Two stalwart Mossadniks, Micha Bar-Am and Michael Schwartz, played by [you pick ‘em] are sent on a mission to retrieve them. The Vatican would never be able to protest, because they would have to admit they had these sacred objects all along.)
I returned to our group, and Barbara whispered to me that Chrysa had just finished explaining that the Parthenon was constructed without any right angles. I responded, “Just like our apartment.” In the section where we are currently living in Maale Adumim (for another three weeks), every person got to build his own house, which made everyone his own architect and space planner, resulting in the most bizarre home designs you could ever imagine. There are, in fact, no right angles on any of the walls in this apartment; but this occurred because of sheer incompetence, unlike the Parthenon, where they used asymmetry to create an illusion of perfect symmetry. When I stood still for a minute to look at this, the best known building on the Acropolis, I was able to envision dozens of other buildings I had seen for which this was the paradigm, some well known, and some less so, like the old white court house in Owego NY or what had been the Mount Eden Jewish Center near the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. I think it is fair to say that Western architecture had its origins here on this promontory five hundred feet above the Aegean.
Unfortunately, one has to look at the Parthenon through the cranes and other objects in the background. It was not clear to me what exactly what was being done here. Perhaps they were trying to rebuild part of the original structure? Or perhaps they were trying to find away to limit the damage from pollution – a problem which they are having as well in Rome.
At some point, I began thinking of comparable efforts at archaeological digging and restoration here in The Land, sites in which work has been going on for many years, like Masada, where not only have they done a marvelous job of reconstruction, but they created a visitors center AND a cable car to the top, or the City of David, where they keep finding stuff wherever they dig. Recently, I was doing a little research about the Acropolis on the web, and I came across this fascinating bit of information: the Parthenon had been turned once into a Byzantine church, and then into a mosque under the Ottomans. My brain began working in overdrive, and something occurred to me. First of all, a better comparison for The Acropolis, the epicenter of Greek idolatry would have to be, for us, The Temple Mount, the epicenter of monotheism. And consider how easy the Greeks have it today. No one is saying that because The Parthenon was once a mosque, it has to remain one today. Nobody, not the Turks, the Italians, the Germans, the Arabs, especially the Arabs, is claiming sovereignty over this promontory. There are no raucous voices, from within and without the nation, that this area doesn’t belong to the Greeks. No one is squatting there; no one is endangering the integrity of the site by doing illegal digging. Any Greek, any visitor can go up there without impediment. I imagine that if there are any devotees of Athena or Zeus lurking around, they could utter whatever words they might want to utter to their gods without being harassed or arrested. I could go on and on, but I trust you get the point.
There is more to say about this city and the rest of our journey, but that will have to wait until the next installment.

The Harvest Has Passed.......

Our regular scheduled broadcast has been pre-empted to bring you this special Tishah B’Av message.
“The harvest has passed, the summer is over, and we have not been redeemed.”(from the Haftarah for Tishah B’Av morning, from Yermiyahu)
I was sitting on the floor last night, as is our custom, during the reading of Eichah, generally known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is read, as is our custom, the evening of Tishah B’Av; and is my custom, I was listening and following with one ear and eye and thinking with both sides of my brain. Following Eichah, several Kinot are read (how to translate that, dirges?) as part of the davening (i.e.; everyone reads it to themselves), by which point, I don’t even make the attempt. This is a time to do my best thinking.
Eichah and the collected Kinot, most of which are read Tisha B’Av morning, are written in very difficult, perhaps problematic, Hebrew, well above my level of comprehension, and the English translations are, even on a good, day, of limited use. Here is a sample, which I selected by opening my ArtScroll “The Complete Tisha B’Av Service” entirely at random and running my finger down the page: He [God] remembered when [my sin withthe Golden Calf] putrefied my nard.Therefore He told the bride,“Descend from [your place of] honor!”
I remember one year, complaining to a friend who has impeccable Hebrew, expressing my total frustration at sitting there while people around me were whizzing through something which was completely incomprehensible – in any language. We went back to his house and spent a profitable afternoon wrestling with one kina, trying to understand it. Suitably impressed with my friend’s mastery of the material, I subsequently suggested to someone who was a decision maker that my friend be asked to give a series of talks on the Kinot before the following Tisha B’Av. The decision maker could not imagine why I thought these sessions were necessary; all you have to do is look at the ArtScroll.
As many of you know, I have been studying literature for most of my life, mostly in English, but at various times, doing a little bit in Latin, Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon, French, and Spanish, so I think I have a sense of the effort involved to understand what a great poem is about, how if you work at it, the layers of meaning begin to unfold, sometimes very slowly. I cannot imagine picking up a copy of Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury and zipping through it as fast as the Kinot are read. I never have and never will embarrass anyone by asking him to translate, let alone explain, what he has just read. My assumption is that spending two or three hours on the floor in shul on a Tisha B’Av morning going through the Kinot is an exercise in piety, part of the general suffering on this day when so much tragedy befell our people.
So if these abstruse liturgical poems are designed to ‘put me in the mood’ to understand how awful this day is, I’m afraid it doesn’t work. I would need better cues, better props. I would need to conceptualize a specific task I would have been prevented from doing in my capacity as a Cohen when the Temple was destroyed – a second time. The Holocaust I can dimly grasp, in part because of the testimony of so many people and the multiplicity of audio-video tools that are available. I figure that if I imagine the worst day I could ever have, intensify that by a hundred, and multiply that by how many days, weeks, months, that’s what it must have been like to be in Europe in 1940. I can imagine police coming to my door and taking my family away. And I realized long ago, that if it had been me that the Nazis came for, almost certainly I would not have survived.
But my time spent thinking about my lack of comprehension of the enormity of the Churban (destruction) has not been for naught. I have been focusing my powers of concentration, such as they are, on the concept of sinat (in Brooklyn, sinas) chinam. For it was this sin which, we are told over and over and over again, caused the destruction of the Second Temple. We are also told with the same regularity that these words mean ‘baseless hatred,’ causing some to suggest that the antidote is ahavat chinam ‘baseless love.’ The problem is, if we think about for longer than it takes to whiz through a kina, that everything a person does is for a reason, however stupid, irrational, or subconscious it may be. (Except possibly a four year old, who has no explanation for why he through his two year old brother’s pacifier down the toilet; he just felt like it. Of course you can say that ‘just feeling like it’ is in and of itself a reason.) So if you want to tell me that the generation of Jews living around 60-70 C.E. were Torah scholars, but that they just didn’t like each other for no reason at all, I would politely suggest that you reconsider. Do you mean ‘no good reason?’ That doesn’t help much, because generally we are convinced that when we do something, it is for a very good reason; at least we think so at the time. For example, when you bought the five pound bag of peanuts at the market, you were convinced that it would be eaten right away; of course, it’s still sitting there on your shelf three months later. No one, even the most deranged of us – even the Nazis – would say, “I hate him (them) because I feel like it.
Here in The Land, the word chinam has a slightly different connotation. You go to a museum during Chol Hamoed and you take out your money to pay to get in. The clerk will tell you that it’s chinam, free during the Holiday. Just walk right in; no one will stop you. The JPost is chinam today; just take one; no one will stop you. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the key to the puzzle. Chinam is being no longer restricted by what you would expect; you can be as outrageous as you want because nobody will stop you. Everyone may not agree with what you are doing, but the collective ability to maintain what used to be acceptable has been eroded. The ‘rules’ have been changed, not always for the better.
The year 5769 has not been an illustrious one for the Yidden. You all know about Bernard Madoff, and I offer him as an example of what I am trying to say. But there are other examples, more recent, closer to home, and, in a way, even more upsetting. But let’s take a step back for a moment. Many of us are old enough to remember way back when various minority groups in the States were rioting, burning down their own neighborhoods. There were, of course, the usual apologists: we don’t understand their problems; they’ve been victimized for so long; it’s not everybody; it’s only teenagers, etc. Most of us were not amused by these antics and by these apologies. So I must insist (I must, I must) that the worst aspect to the recent riots in Jerusalem (both the ones over the parking lot being open on Shabbat and the subsequent ones over the hospitalized child) by the lunatic fringe of hareidim was the pathetic attempts to justify this insanity and the cowardly silence by their rabbis. It so happened that Barbara managed to get herself in the middle of a fracas one recent Thursday morning when all this was going on. She was on her way into Jerusalem to assist in the weekly packing of comestibles provided for ‘Victims of Terror.’ The buses couldn’t go their normal way because of all the garbage being burned, so my wife got off the bus and tried to get where she was going on foot, winding up somehow (you’d have to ask her how) in Kikar Shabbat, ground zero for trouble-making in the Mea Shearim area. She was so incensed by the hooliganism around her that she lost her cool and started yelling at the men responsible. For her trouble, she got knocked to the ground. You see, a man shouldn’t sit in the same section of a bus as a woman, but it’s OK to knock her down. Just as it’s OK to destroy the traffic lights that are regulating traffic where you live to make sure no one gets run over by a car. If you ask these pathetic specimens why they are doing these things, they will certainly give you an answer because they know that they are right, and it’s only ‘the goyim,’ the ‘Nazis’ who don’t understand. So my wife and a number of other would-be volunteers from Maale Adumim never got to perform their mitzvah that day. Fortunately, Hashem provides, and a busload of teenagers was able to get to the packing place, so the needy people did have supplies for Shabbat. Sinat chinam? You bet your booties.
And then we have the photographs which, I imagine, were front page in every newspaper in the world, from Bridgeport to Borneo: rabbis being led off in handcuffs, along with the usual assortment of political riff-raff in New Jersey (the state I lived in for about twenty five years; but remember, I’m from The Bronx.) It would be inappropriate to comment on their level of culpability before they have been tried in a court of law. But they were arrested based on the testimony of another Orthodox Jew, a man who, we can assume, was himself in so much trouble with the Law, that he had no choice but to ‘cooperate’ with the authorities. All this happened during the nine days. DURING THE NINE DAYS!!!!! An Orthodox Jew accuses other Orthodox Jews of laundering money through tzedekah funds and making obscene profits on human organs at that very time when we are supposed to be eliminating sinat chinam. Or at least repeating the mantra: Bayit sheini was destroyed because of ……………..”
Perhaps you sense my feelings of frustration: the path to our ultimate salvation is relatively straightforward. We have to first and foremost convince the Jewish people of the pleasantness of the Torah and the integrity of our rabbinic leadership. Having done that, we can demonstration to the world that we are truly ‘a light unto the Nations.’ From there, it’s only a short drive to The Final Redemption, however that will come. None of the above will be easy; but consider the alternatives. I’m not just saying that. I want you to consider the alternatives. Some of them are mighty scary. And in the meanwhile, can we announce a moratorium on all platitudinous, feel-good expressions relating to Geula and our being in The Land when we’re not. Pretty please!

The Rhodes Show

“Peace in the world, let there be peace…May our eyes see the erection of the temple in Jerusalem. With G-d’s coming, salvation abounds. The house was completed, with these words, the house of the ‘Kahal Kadosh Shalom’, it is indeed the house of the Lord. The year (5411) 1651.” (excerpt from the entry plaque)
Let’s begin with a ‘pop’ quiz. If I were to ask you (actually I am asking you) to name the biggest structure with the shortest ‘life-span,’ most of you would take a millisecond and respond, “The World Trade Center.” That was easy. But if I were to ask you (actually I am asking you) to name a structure, not as tall but equally imposing, with the second shortest life-span………… tick, tick, tick…………… Give up? How about the Colossus at Rhodes.
For those of you whose ancient history is a little fuzzy, here’s an excerpt from Daniel Schwartz’ booklet which he prepared for our cruise (edited by yours truly): “The most famous event in Rhodes’ history (is) when it successfully withstood a year-long siege by ‘Demitrius the City-Besieger’ in 305 BCE. In memory of this event, the Rhodians built a monumental ‘Colossus’ of their sun-god, Helios – a statue more than 30 meters-high [on a pedestal half that size] that ancient writers listed [along with the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Great Pyramid, etc.] among the Seven Wonders of the World. It was toppled by an earthquake … less than sixty years after it was completed….” Win some, lose some. (By the way, that’s quite a monicker, ‘Demitrius the City-Besieger.’ Imagine this on a business card: ‘Cities besieged. By appointment only.’)
Twenty seven hours (and two of my articles with about five thousand words) after we left Haifa, we arrived at our first stop, Rhodes, a large island (540 square miles) about eleven miles southwest of Turkey. Our dinner over, we made our way down the gangplank, having our swipe cards processed by the ship’s crew. It took us about ten minutes to leave the port area, at which point we met Eva, our guide for a stroll through the Old City. As we approached the Navarhou gate, my initial reaction was that this looked very familiar, and after some thought, I realized why. Where else can you stand and see the ocean and Crusader walls at the same time? Of course. Acco. The same walls built by the Crusaders. In fact, the same water, the Mediterranean. But once you enter the Old City, it’s not the same. We began standing in a town square, with a church behind us, a posh jewelry store to our left, tastefully lit up, and in front of us the venerable Street of the Knights, with a large cream colored mixed-breed dog hanging out on the corner. Five hundred years ago when Rhodes was governed by Christian warriors, the Order of the Knights of St. John, this street, wide enough for five or six people to walk, was the main thoroughfare. It may have been imposing then, but it is not particularly wide by today’s standards; there are no commercial enterprises of any kind, although back then there were inns all along the street. (Rhodes was always a great spot for tourists.) We began walking up and the sun continued to set, until the only way we could see was with the help of the few street lights the town provided and the illumination from inside the apartments we passed. There are several thousand people currently living in The Old City, and some of them live on this street. I would have loved to go into someone’s apartment, just to see what it would be like to live in a structure that may date from the time of the Crusaders. We were not told how old any of these buildings were and how much restoration has been done, but everything about the street cries out, “I’m ancient. Look at me!” Or don’t look at me; I’ll be around long after you’re gone.
Have you ever passed a house, it could be all alone on top of a mountain overlooking a lake, or on a particular corner in the most charming neighborhood somewhere, or with a façade covered with gargoyles, and perhaps you thought to yourself, “Who gets to live here? Out of all the places in the world, out of all the people in the world, how does someone get to live here? Five hundred years ago, this exact spot was the last bastion of Christianity holding off the Ottoman Turks. Not exactly a spot for a restful, tranquil vacation. Now a group of Anglo-Israeli (Jewish) tourists are being led up this street, and there’s a light on in a kitchen; someone’s motorcycle is stored in an entrance way behind a gate. Who are these residents and how did they get to be here? It’s not that I necessarily want to live here, or in any of the real or imagined places mentioned above, there being little to offer for a Jewish person, but still the question remains.
We continued our way in the night air, under the arches that connect both sides of the street, up to the top. Somewhere in our wanderings we had to have come upon the very imposing Castle of the Grand Master, but I really have no recollection of it. Perhaps if we had been able to go inside…
What I do remember is hanging a couple of lefts and suddenly leaving the meditative medieval atmosphere of the Street of the Knights and environs and entering the very well-lit commercial district of the Old City, replete with stores and places to eat. Well, not for us to eat. For some of us, seeing so many people being well-fed and enjoying themselves revived old memories of cuisines gone by………… So we ignored the restaurants for now, and window-shopped in the stores that offered jewelry or tchatchkeles to tourists. No vulgar t-shirts; no ‘adult’ entertainment anywhere in sight – although we were told that the public beaches in Rhodes are ‘topless.’ Wouldn’t know: when we passed the beaches the next morning at about 8:30, they were not only topless, but people-less. Too early for a tan.
When we had done enough gawking, we were free to walk back to the port area and on to the Golden Iris. Barbara and I chose to walk back part of the way with Eva, a Greek woman, I’m guessing about fifty, old enough to have been around the proverbial block – in her case, around the ramparts – more than a few times. Old enough to have lived through the military coup, old enough to have heard about life in the forties, the Italian occupation, then the German occupation, when there were no more Jews on the island. Savvy enough to know about the inadequacies of the Greek government today: how long it takes to get anything done as far as restoring or preserving their antiquities – the main reason why people come to visit. We said good night to our guide and walked back to our gangplank, going through security, handing our swipe cards to the attendants who are able to verify that we have not changed places with some random Greeks while we were ashore, and return to our cabins for some well-earned zzzzzzzzzz’s.
Next morning we were rarin’ to go. But first things first. Activity number one (besides getting dressed and personal hygiene) would the minyan for shacharit. (Actually, it was shacharit and mussaf, because it was still Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of the Jewish month. I would have to recite the cohanic blessing twice; no rest for the weary.) On land, I am just as happy to daven privately in my living room; but our cabin was a little small to designate any part of as a living room, there being sufficient space to sleep and to breathe. My usual excuse that it would be forty minutes travel time back and forth was taken away. I could get up the stairs and across the ship in three minutes. Plus, I was the only cohen in the group. So I went to the morning minyan every day, which, like Nathan Detroit’s ‘oldest established, permanent floating crap game in New York’ (that’s from Guys and Dolls, but you knew that), moved around until we found a permanent spot in the Paamon Ballroom, a.k.a., the Green Room, one of the several lounges on board, where of an evening, one could, glass in hand, watch the sea and the stars. There was also no permanent time for the minyan to begin; it changed day by day, according to our itinerary. What I will never forget is the expression on the face of the Filippino bar man who was getting his station ready for the early imbibers, when three strange looking dudes (the leviim) came over the bar, took a wine glass, filled it with water, and proceeded to pour the water over the hands of an even stranger looking dude (me).
Next, it was time for breakfast. Unlike lunch and dinner which were fairly orderly, breakfast involved a shipload of sleepy people arriving when they arose, trying to decide which combination of hot cereal, cold cereal, eggs (scrambled, omelets, or hard boiled), salads, fish, cheeses, bourekas, and pancakes to put on their oversized plates to go along with their tea, coffee, and a strange liquid that was meant to resemble orange juice. And to get all of the above into one’s mouth before it was time to disembark, which involved everyone trying to get off the boat at the same time, past the helpful crew who would be swiping your card to make certain that you hadn’t snuck on the boat at night and now wanted to leave.
Our little group, which would be touring separately from the rest of the passengers, assembled on shore and boarded our bus, along with Eva the tour guide for our morning tiyul. (To avoid confusion, let me mention that we would be confining our activities to the area around the city of Rhodes, which is the largest of some forty communities on the island.) We drove out of the Old City, past the topless, bottomless, people-less beaches and the hotels where the tourists, we assume properly attired, were staying, past the homes of the Rhodians, around the outskirts of the city, past the remains of the Temple of Apollo (like most of its counterparts, a series of columns reaching skyward, as if frozen in place in the midst of doing a ‘wave’) until we stopped at an archaeological park, whose main attraction was its ancient athletic stadium. Because of their modest design; i.e., a level field and stone benches, many of these stadia have survived. The one here is relatively small, seating about 8,000 people. This was the home base for a local lad, Diagoras, a boxer, the victor in the 79th Olympiad in 464 BCE. How do we know that? Pindar, one of the great poets of antiquity, tells us so in one of his Olympian odes: (And now, with the music of flute and lyre alike I have come to land with Diagoras, singing the sea-child of Aphrodite and bride of Helios, Rhodes, so that I may praise this straight-fighting, tremendous man who had himself crowned beside the Alpheus and near Castalia, as a recompense for his boxing... Pindar, Olympian 7, lines 13-17.) I’m sure that our guide had much to tell us, but I was off photographing the remains of ancient monuments that were strewn about the site.
Back on the bus. We had to be at the Kahal Shalom synagogue, or to give it it’s proper name, the Kahal Kadosh Shalom synagogue, at 11AM for a talk about the Jewish community in Rhodes. The bus would leave us off at the edge of what was the Jewish quarter, and we would walk through the picturesque narrow streets where – as is often the case – other people now live. The building we arrived at was built sometime around 1577 C.E., when official buildings in general were constructed with a sense of architectural integrity which is, how shall we put it, not as evident in synagogues in today’s New Jersey. For example, the floor was made of black and white round stones placed in an elaborate mosaic pattern. Someone, on hands and knees, had laid each piece in place one by one , intending them to remain there through the ages until the Jews of Greece would be summoned back to the Beit Hamikdash in Jerusalem. If it’s any consolation, the stone floor is holding up remarkably well.
There are a number of literary references to Jews living in Rhodes: the book of Maccabis in the second century B.C.E.; the writings of Josephus at the beginning of the Common Era; and a detailed account by the world-traveling Benjamin of Tudela, on his way to The Holy Land in the twelfth century, C.E, when there were four hundred Jews living in Rhodes. In the year 1500, the Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews were expelled by the Christians. Twenty two years later, the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent, whom we have met in earlier articles, (Hey, Suli……..!) decided to re-populate the ‘Jewish section’ of the island and brought in Sephardic Jews who had wound up in the Ottoman Empire after having been expelled from Spain in 1492. (Are you detecting a pattern here?) Things were relatively stable, even after the Italians took control in 1912; the Jewish population reached its maximum of 4,500 in the 1920’s. The unfortunate denouement we all know: in 1944, 1673 Jews were deported to Auschwitz; 151 survived. (The brochure I picked up mentioned that, “Today there are only a handful of Jews living in Rhodes.”)
In addition to the synagogue (which according to the brochure, “…is used for prayer services when visitors or former residents and their families visit the island for Sabbath and High Holiday services and for special occasions.” Sort of like having High Holiday davening in Brownsville.), there is in the adjacent rooms, which used to be the women’s section, a small museum which was established in 1997, “in order to preserve the special heritage of the Jews of Rhodes.”
The museum is filled with local versions of torah scrolls and decorative objects, photographs of Jews long-dead and Jewish life, clothing distinctive to the island, all with appropriate captions. Someone reading this may feel compelled to comment that this sort of describes dozens of Jewish museums which commemorate Jewish life in places where the only Jews today are tourists. That’s because there are lots of communities which fit that description, but every place doesn’t have a museum. Four thousand five hundred Jews? They would have fit into ten blocks along the Grand Concourse in The Bronx.
Back on the bus for our next-to-last stop, the Jewish cemetery. If you want/need to see where every Jew on this island was buried (except the ones murdered by the Nazis), here’s the place to go. They synagogue/museum’s web site has a photograph of the tombs of all the community’s former rabbis, buried in a neat row. This photograph was as close as I was going to get to the real thing. Frankly, I’m more than happy not to have to do cemeteries. I waited by the bus while everyone else went inside to inspect the graves.
Back on the bus for our last stop, the Holocaust memorial, which is located in the Square of the Martyred Jews in the former Jewish quarter, now part of the main tourist area in the center of the Old City. The memorial itself is a six sided column of black granite, with an inscription on each side in Greek, French, Hebrew, English, Italian, or Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). There is no question that for the survivors of Rhodes and the neighboring island of Cos and the families of the survivors, the dedication of this memorial in 2003 was extraordinarily meaningful (check out the Jewish community of Rhodes website, which unfortunately is written in a quasi-English that needn’t be. Please help me with the following: “Friday evening, we will attend the office of Kabbalat Shabbat at the Shalom synagogue which fills the tank.” Any guesses what this could possibly mean?). But after reading the brief inscription in (real) English and then working my way around each side and each language, when I had gone around several times, I wondered what I was supposed to do or supposed to feel? Was I supposed to now have an increased awareness of this tragedy than I had before? Time does not heal all wounds, but it does make us complaisant.
To prove my point, what was the next thing most of us did? Wander through the shops or seek out a café. Barbara and I found a little place where she could get some Greek coffee – which I shared – and I could get a local beer, served in a weird boot-shaped stein. As we were relaxing, we heard a commotion up the street in the direction of a neighboring establishment, which had three parrots perched outside. Barbara, being nosier than I am, went to check it out. It seems that one of the local pigeons had flown onto the parrots’ perch uninvited, and it was definitely not welcome there! If you are wondering whether Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton was dispatched to broker negotiations between these feathered enemies (perhaps the pigeons could get one-quarter of the perch…….) the answer is no; these busy bodies were too busy screwing up elsewhere.
We’re done. Goodbye and thanks to Eva, our guide. Once again back to the port area, past security (emptying out our water bottles because you can take water off the boat, but you can’t bring any liquids back onto the boat). Just in time for lunch. Soon we will be off again. Next stop………Athens.

Plenty of Time to Think

During the twenty six hours it took for the Golden Iris to sail the blue waters of the Mediterranean from Haifa to Rhodes, we had “plenty of time,” to eat, get some rays on the upper decks, take a nap or two, start reading a new book, of course daven (We received an halachic ruling that insofar as we were on an Israeli ship, we were considered to be in Israel, and, therefore, I [the only cohen in the group] was needed to recite the birkat cohanim every morning; no rest for the weary), and for our scholar-in-residence to begin his series of lectures. Dr. Daniel Schwartz is a professor of ancient Jewish history at Hebrew University, his area of specialty being the intersection of Jewish and Greek culture around the beginning of the Common Era. His first lecture served as an orientation, giving us a timeline for Greek civilization and some background information about the four places in which our ship was going to dock: Rhodes, Athens, Lavrion, and Santorini, the first two of which have a definite Jewish connection, the others – that’s where the ship was going! That out of the way, he began a series of lectures about the relevance of Hellenism to Judaism, a topic of obvious controversy, but definitely related to where we would be going and doing.
I approach this topic from a perspective very different from most peoples’. Long before I ever heard of the Mishna or the Gemarra, or gave any thought to Jewish traditions, oral or otherwise, I was sitting in Mott Hall at C.C.N.Y., studying British and American literature and attempting to master Latin and Greek. So while traditional Jewish thought casts the Greeks in the most negative light, the course of study in the Classics department (as taught by Professor Ehrlich) focused on their accomplishments. I have long wondered at the usefulness of describing the villains in the Hannukah story as ‘wicked,’ because if you say A is wicked, you are implying that there must be a B and a C who are not wicked, because if everyone is wicked then telling me A is wicked isn’t saying much. In other words, were the Hellenic Greeks any more evil than the other nations of the world?
Now Professor Schwartz did not set out to answer that question, although, in a way, he provided me with some answers. (I will try to summarize one part of his presentation here, rather than present it in a chronological sequence sandwiched in between our tours.) He began by examining, for reasons we will get to shortly, a fundamental question, who is a Jew (of course, today the question has become, who is a rabbi). We know that Judaism from its inception was not understood to be a Religion; in fact, there is no word for ‘religion’ in Hebrew. In today’s lingo, there is a word dati, (knowledgeable) which is used to describe a person or an institution that is ‘religious,’ but no one would say that ‘knowledge’ is the same as ‘religion’. If you think about it, not having a word for ‘religion’ in Hebrew makes perfect sense: ‘religion’ would have to be a category, meaning that there is more than one religion (just as there is more than one kind of book, or tree, or automobile). Judaism was meant to be distinct and apart from the myriad forms of idol worship festering throughout the mid-east and the rest of the world; there was to be no other ‘religion’ like it. According to Schwartz, a Jew was originally a bnei Yisrael, a descendent of Avraham and Sarah (or married to a descendent) and, later, dwellers in The Land (or, I guess, descendents of dwellers in The Land living in Babylon or elsewhere). But, while we had the Torah, with its list of do’s and don’ts and a knowledge of Hashem, there was not a formal standard of who was a Jew or how one would become one (the rules about formal conversion, I believe, came later). We know that a Jewish soldier would ultimately be allowed to marry a woman he captured in battle and that luminaries from Yosef to Shlomo took foreign wives. And even as our Prophets lamented the pervasive idol worshipping of the people, no one considered or questioned the identity of Bnei Yisrael, dwellers in The Land.
In one of his last lectures, our scholar-in-residence mentioned an essay, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” by Matthew Arnold. Click. Having read a fair amount of Arnold’s critical writing forty or so years ago, I thought I detected the basis for a lot of what I was hearing. When we returned to Maale Adumim, I pulled down my copy of “The Portable Matthew Arnold,” which has a fair selection of the author’s poetry and criticism, and found therein the essay in question as part of a larger work, “Culture and Anarchy.” Here’s a small selection:The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting. “He that keepeth the law, happy is he”; “Blessed is the man that feareth the Eternal, that delighteth greatly in His commandments;” – that is the Hebrew notion of felicity; and pursued with passion and tenacity, this notion would not let the Hebrew rest till, as is well known, he had at last got out of the law a network of prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every moment of it, every impulse, every action. The Greek notion of felicity, on the other hand, is perfectly conveyed in these words of a great French moralist: ‘C’est le Bonheur des hommes,’ – when? When they abhor that which is evil? – no; when they exercise themselves in the law of the Lord day and night? – no; …..but when they think aright, when their thought hits: ‘quand ils pensent juste.’” I say, if the shoe fits, wear it.
If I may lapse into Yeshivish, ‘comes along the Greeks’ (that would be in normative English ‘the Greek civilization arose’) with this very different world view, a set of ideas which could be codified into a curriculum, which anyone could learn. According to our scholar, anyone could become a Greek; you could be born in Pakistan or Puerto Rico, but you could become a Greek by virtue of your education. You could even be a bnei Ysrael and become a Greek; no problem! (Of course, there was a slight problem as far as we were concerned because our Hellenistic counterparts worshipped idols; and it really became a problem when they wanted to put their statues in our Temple.) What the Greeks forced us to do (among other things) by their willingness, even their insistence that we assimilate like everybody else, was make us define who we are and who among us is important. For the first time, there appeared factions or sects within the Jewish community: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and, if you want to include them, the early Christians. Each of them had different ideas of what it meant to be a Jew. As we know, the Sadducees were primarily of priestly descent and strove to maintain the dominance of the Cohanim and the centrality of the sacrifices in the Beit Hamikdash. Once the Second Temple was destroyed, their base of power collapsed and they were doomed to failure. Their rivals, the Pharisees, represented the emerging rabbinic leadership; for them, anybody could become a leader regardless of one’s lineage – if one were learned enough. In addition, their Oral Law could, at least in part, be practiced – had to be maintained – anywhere, even without the existence of a Beit Hamikdash, even apart from The Land. Now Professor Schwartz maintains, and here is where he is controversial, that, while the Pharisees were fighting the paganism of Greek culture and its assimilation by large segments of the Jewish population, they were adapting its democratic and universalistic aspects to survive in what would become a two millennia Diaspora in which we would pray in synagogues and eat the afikomen every Pesach (I trust you get the linguistic point I am making). I know that I have simplified, perhaps oversimplified, our scholar’s presentation, but I think that’s the gist of it.
The main thrust of Arnold’s essay is that there needs to be a synthesis between Hebraism, the search for G-d, and Hellenism, the search for earthly knowledge. However, he was not the first person to consider this. Fifteen hundred years after the Maccabis, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, the Rambam), one of the greatest thinkers in human history and an unimpeachable Jewish source, was busy synthesizing Aristotelian thought and Jewish law. For him, the highest aspiration for a Jew, in addition to ‘imitating G-d,’ was acquiring knowledge of the world; and it was that ability which separated Man from the lower animals (thank you, Nachum, for that insight).
If I may add a thought of my own (and hearing no dissent, I will), it occurred to me that Hellenism was indeed the absolute pinnacle of pagan thought, vastly superior to anything produced by its idol worshipping neighbors. But for ‘civilization’ to advance, they (whoever ‘they’ is) would have to scrap their pagan deities and adopt some form of monotheism. Put it this way, there is a limit intellectually to how far you can go with Zeus. Apollo, Athena, and their buddies. How can you investigate the properties of the sun and still worship a sun god? At some point, the whole thing breaks down. What the Europeans seem to have done is create a hybrid, merging their pagan gods with a monotheism (Judaism) which they could not accept in its pure form. Voila! Christianity. And even so, it took the Europeans a millennium and a half to reach the intellectual level of the Hellenic Greeks.
Strange as it may seem, my sense of who the Greeks were and who we, the Jews, were, and how we interacted, was important to me in how I would look at what we were about to see: were we visiting modern Greece to do a quasi-March of the Living (where, for some unfathomable reason, you take impressionable Jewish teenagers to visit the former concentration camps in Poland, scaring the wits out of them, and then take them to Israel), or was there some other purpose to our journey in addition to the R and R? Were we going to view ancient ruins so that we could feel good about ourselves: “See, their temples to their pagan gods are now piles of rubble, whereas we are still alive.” (One might remark that our beit hamikdash is currently less than a pile of rubble, and the current status of buildings constructed before the Common Era is hardly the defining point for the vitality of a culture. One might also remark, however, that some of us are anticipating the rebuilding and re-use of a third beit hamikdash on the Temple Mount for our very much alive religion. The same cannot be said about the Parthenon.) While I needed to work out how I would feel about visiting the home of the Athenians, it would not be as if I were visiting Oswiecim or Birkenau, where there isn’t one chance in a million that I would ever go. Nor anywhere in Egypt, where I will also never go because they still don’t like us there. The same for Minsk or Riga, where my grandfathers fled in the dead of night, and even, if I were to go, I would have no idea what to look for. Perhaps more like Spain, where Barbara and I visited in the 1980’s, when the Iberian peninsula was beginning to shake off centuries of decline and dictatorship.
Which reminds me of a conversation which I got myself in the middle of recently, and which I’m mentioning now for a reason. Barbara and I were sitting in a little place in Tel Aviv – which we had wandered into because the Tel Aviv Museum and its cafeteria are closed on Sunday, which we didn’t know until we arrived there – and we managed to join a conversation at the next table between a young man who obviously shares my conservative political views and a young woman who doesn’t. Her point was that the new American president, while he was bad for Israel and the Jews (most of whom voted for him), he would be good for America. My response to her was that she was describing an impossibility; if the American government turned against Israel, it would certainly come back to haunt the country of my birth, in ways that are beyond the scope of these articles. Many of the countries which have treated Jews poorly have suffered a rapid decline in the aftermath, Spain being an obvious example, having never really recovered from 1492.
The fate of the Greeks is remarkably similar. After their rapid rise to a position of dominance throughout the Mediterranean, they went into an equally precipitous decline and were under foreign domination from 146 BCE to 1829 CE when they achieved independence from the Ottomans. The population of Athens at the beginning of the nineteenth century was under 10,000 (does that remind you of another ancient city which suffered a similar fate?) More recently, Greece has survived the Nazi occupation (during which, the government and Church did not cooperate in the extermination of the Jewish communities in Athens and Salonika), a civil war after W.W. II, and a military coup from 1967-1974. The small Jewish communities which remain are protected by the government and there seems to be very little anti-Semitism and a lot of anti-Nazism. So you can say that they have suffered mightily for their sins, and while we should be wary of any of the Nations, today’s Greece would be low on the list of countries to worry about. So that’s what I came up with: we would be visiting one of the most picturesque places in the world, with lots to see. Try to look at the many ruins we would visit with a sense of their place in history, with all the positives and negatives implied therein. (Not like a hareidi-by-choice fellow I see once a month, who, upon hearing about our adventures, asked me if we had seen any of the Temple vessels that were hidden away? It took me a moment; then I realized he was talking about the objects that are allegedly in the Vatican. “You’re thinking of Rome. We went to Greece. Not the same place.” I know, from his profession, that before he became hareidi, he had actually gone to school, and despite his best efforts to hide it, he must have learned something – once upon a time. “It’s all the same,” he replied, “Avoda Zara (idol worshipping).” To paraphrase something which Dr. Schwartz said, there is a time to find commonality, and there is a time to look for distinctions. Maybe knowing when to do which is a goal of education. Or, to invoke one of my iron principles of life, “No one is required to act stupider than they actually are.”)
That’s a lot to cogitate about. No wonder my “plenty of time” as we sailed the blue Mediterranean included a second nap. I wonder if the several hundreds of passengers on board appreciated the heavy thinking I was doing for them; somehow I doubt it. The Golden Iris has finally arrived in Rhodes, and we will all be disembarking. Don’t forget to take your swipe cards with you when you leave the boat.