Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low;And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go.Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,Still to us at twilight comes love's old song,Comes love's old sweet song.”(Chorus of “Love’s Old Sweet Song,”Lyrics by J. Clifton Bingham, Music by James L. Molloy, 1884)
If someone were to ask me (I can’t imagine why anybody would, but you never know) to select a dozen or so of the most memorable moments in my life, I would certainly include the evening I performed at Carnegie Hall. Of course, I wasn’t alone: in 1957-1958, I was a baritone in the NYC All-City High School Chorus, and together with the All City High School Orchestra, we were performing at the annual concert for assembled family, friends, and assorted music lovers. My musical career was relatively brief. Two and a half years before, I had just transferred from The Bronx H.S. of Science to DeWitt Clinton H.S. On my first or second day there, I ran into my dear friend Al in the hallway. When he realized that I had study hall the second period, he suggested that I join the school chorus, which met at the same time. I had spent the previous three years valiantly but painfully struggling with a clarinet as part of the J.H.S. 80 orchestra. Singing came a lot easier, my vocal chords being more reliable than the reed instrument that had bedeviled and humiliated me these previous years. So I climbed the stairs to the music room in the Tower, met Mr. Dycke, and was immediately accepted into the chorus. (If you are interested, “chorus” is defined on dictionary.com as “a group of persons singing in unison”; “choir” is defined as “a company of singers”; “glee club” is defined as “a chorus organized for singing choral music.” I hope this clears things up.)
For two and a half years, I had the opportunity of singing in the Clinton chorus, loving every minute of it. Mr. Dycke truly appreciated me, not because I was the best singer – I certainly wasn’t – but because I loved music and I was full of enthusiasm. In my senior year, he encouraged me to audition for the All-City Chorus, a highly regarded musical group led by the estimable Peter J. Wilhousky, who, among other activities, had been the chorus master for a number of recordings of Verdi operas which Arturo Toscanini made in the late 1940’s. (I am not even going to entertain the notion that anyone reading this does not know who Arturo Toscanini was.) This being an elite group of singers, there was a real audition. Each of the bass and baritone auditioners came up, one by one, and sang to our pianist Harry Hurwitz the refrain from “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” chosen because of its exquisite simplicity and diabolical vocal difficulty. By the time you hit the high note for the second “twilight,” any musician will know if you can sing or not. I hit the note squarely (I had been practicing all morning) and Mr. Dycke recommended me; so I got in.
We were expected to arrive for rehearsal ever Saturday morning (this was years before I even heard of the concept “shomer Shabbat”) for about six months. The musical arrangements were much more complex, and hence more interesting, than what we were doing at DeWitt Clinton. We spent months learning our music, at first each section separately, and only much later with the full chorus. I still remember the sense of recognition when I could hear and understand how the harmony which the bass and baritone parts provided fit into the whole, grounding the melodies sung by the tenors and sopranos. After a lot of struggling, we were ready to perform our concert. I can’t say that after all these years I can remember much of the music we sang, except for the sentimental “Madame Jeanette,” then a staple of the choral repertoire – Mr. Dycke had a simpler version for the Clintonites. Every concert which the All-City Chorus performed ended with this haunting chestnut (composed by Alan Murray): “Madame Jeanette when the sun goes down, Sits at her door in the rush of the town; Waiting for someone each close of the day, Someone who fell at St. Pierre, they say…….” There were always many alumni sitting in the hall, and they were invited to come up and join in; so there would be hundreds of singers young and old on stage, somehow remembering the music and the lyrics about a French woman who was growing old, waiting for the return of her lover who had fallen in battle many years before. (Anyone who wants to hear this song, sung by a chorus from Dartmouth College, can go to http://www.biggreen65.com/id200.html). And then it was over, the concert and my musical career. I went home and officially retired from singing. As far as I was concerned, this was the Super Bowl, and I was going to go out as a winner. Certainly there was a chorus at City College, but then I was into other things. I never sang again – except to serenade my wife from the vast repertoire I have accumulated in my juke-box-of-a-brain.
It is safe to say that vocalizing was not on my priority list when we made aliyah. There were two occasions here in The Land when my resolve was sorely tested. In one of my earlier posts, I did mention our attending a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. What could be “funner” than singing in the chorus for similar productions? It occurred to me that J.J., the son of our friends Arvin and Gila, had performed in another of the company’s productions a year or two before. I recognized the guy who owns Moked, a stationery store on King George and Hillel in Jerusalem, as being in this production. But I decided not to pursue it.
Another opportunity was an informal invitation extended to me when we were on a tour one Friday morning in the southern part of Jerusalem.. Our guide mentioned that he was a little late for his singing group which met every Friday. What did they sing?. I inquired. Barbershop quartets (albeit with more than one singer to a part). When he saw the look of delight on my face, and he realized that I knew the music, he gave me his card. If I was interested in joining, I could call him. I had the sense not to inquire into their repertoire. If he told me that it included “On the Banks of the Wabash” (Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash…), I don’t know how I would have been able to say no. But this way, I could sensibly remember the time commitment I couldn’t make and my unmistakable loss of vocal stamina over the years.
All of the above may be seen as an introduction to a magical musical evening last week. Barbara is always looking for events for us to go to, especially FREE concerts, and the like. So last Tuesday, we headed over to Sergei’s courtyard, one of Jerusalem’s most overlooked treasures, originally the courtyard of a hostel for Russian noblemen making a pilgrimage to The Holy Land, part of Jerusalem’s Russian compound – another part of the city which Olmert is determined to give away – this time to Mr. Putin, et. al. There would be a concert of a capella music in this quiet tree-lined spot, and that is all the information I had (it could have been doo-wop music, for all I knew). When we arrived at 7:15, the musicians were still rehearsing – strange because the concert, according to my wife, was supposed to start at 7:30. (Also strange was that there was hardly anybody there.) We sat down, and I began to pay attention to what was going on. The conductor (who I later found out was Judy Axelrod) was working with a small group of singers, putting the finishing touches on a performance of a Renaissance motet, a Latin text of one of the Psalms of David. After listening for about a minute to her coach her singers, it was obvious that Ms. Axelrod is a highly gifted conductor of choral music, capable of obtaining highly nuanced results from her forces – again, a capella, without instrumental support. Ms. Axelrod went from piece to piece, each time with a slightly different alignment of singers, who themselves seemed highly qualified. 7:30 came and went, as did 8PM when the rehearsal was over, and the soundmen seemed satisfied with the acoustics. By 8:10, the audience began arriving and filling the many chairs which we had watched being put into place.
At around 8:30, the concert began for real (we did check later; Barbara, who is almost perfect, had misread the starting time). You can say that we “wasted” an hour; we could have at least had a picnic supper while we waited, and we could have been reviewing our Ulpan assignments. But there is sometimes great value in witnessing a rehearsal, and we got to hang out at twilight in a verdant spot seemingly unconnected to the turmoil of today’s Jerusalem. And, believe me, I have spent longer times waiting for a lot less than this concert offered. What beautiful music: Claudio Monteverdi and his Jewish contemporary Salamone Rossi, as well as English madrigals (all from about 1600), something by the still-alive Israeli composer, Yehezkel Braun, and then a collection of “Negro Spirituals,” solidifying my impression that virtually all of the singers, like Ms. Axelrod, were originally from somewhere close to the River Thames. And the thrill of the performances: not just twenty voices coming in together – that you can reasonably expect – but changing the tempo, slowing or speeding up together, stopping together, the voices in perfect balance, louder and softer, together, together, together. With encores, an hour and a quarter of the most glorious choral music one could ask for, interrupted only by Ms. Axelrod’s witty remarks – in good Ivrit – and the sounds of applause. Then it was over, and it was time to go. I located one of the singers and asked him for some information about the conductor and the musicians. Unfortunately, I picked someone who was asked only several months ago to fill in; so he did not have much background information to relate, except to say that “It’s all her” (meaning Judy Axelrod). Not much wiser, we walked over to Jaffa St., going rapidly from the tranquility of Sergei’s courtyard (whoever Sergei was) to the reality of center city Jerusalem, with coffee shops filled with people at ten o’clock at night, despite the fact the main street is now down to one lane, the rest of the thoroughfare being dug up to accommodate the light rail, which may or may not be ready in my lifetime.
Sometime this past Shabbat when I was davening at my current shul, Mussar Avicha, an idea came to me, something overwhelmingly obvious: what is the original meaning of the words a capella? In the chapel, or in the manner of the chapel, as relating to music. In other words, unaccompanied vocal music for a religious service. So what are we doing on Shabbat in most synagogues for at least part of the service? Are we not engaging in a practice which, incidentally, our Christian brethren borrowed from us? For it is generally agreed that the plainsong, the earliest Christian music which dates from as early as the third century C.E. is somehow based on, derived from, or inspired by Jewish sources, possibly what the Leviim sang in the Beit Hamikdash. And it is also understood that these plainsongs and then the Gregorian chants formed the basis for all Western music (up to, but not including Rap).
Now it’s hard for me to relate to this glorious musical history when I walk into – usually late – a synagogue these days. What I have heard as often than not bears only a fleeting resemblance to anything musical: a shaliach tzibbur leading the davening who shouldn’t even be allowed to sing in the shower, off key, or in no recognizable key, with an obnoxious or imaginary melody, leading a group of men who could not even recite a kaddish together, let alone sing in unison. Being aware of my limited skill in correctly enunciating spoken Hebrew, I have disqualified myself from ever leading the davening, but that has not always stopped others. (If anyone thinks that I am making a plug to return to the glory days of chazzanut, let me relate that when I began writing this, I was listening to a concert of such music on the classical music station here in the Land, and I turned it off; the sounds this chazzan was making was so awful, that if he were in the room with me, I would have emptied out all the money in my pockets and begged him to stop.)
An idea occurred to me as I contemplated the discrepancy between music’s inspirational potential and the sonic reality in Ashkenazic synagogues today: was that evening of musical bliss partly a reward for my enduring these many years of aural purgatory in silence? Never once contemplating throttling somebody braying at the bima? But there must be something deeper. Since we moved to the hills and valleys of Maale Adumim (a little bit east of Yerushalayim) I have begun joking that in the world-to-come no one will ever have to walk uphill. If you go from place A to place B, it will be downhill; when you return to place A, it will still be downhill (because the earthly laws of physics will not apply). Maybe in the world-to-come, whoever is leading the davening will have the skill and the musical knowledge of a Levite of old. Maybe we will create music that will outdo the musical sophistication of Bach and the energy and sincerity of the Negro spiritual. And may our praise to our Heavenly Father be sung by the All-Universe Chorus, millions of Jews here in The Land singing sweetly together, together, together.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
On the Horns of a Dilemma, Part 1
One of my guiding principles of life is that there is always a dilemma lurking around the corner, waiting to catch you on its horns. Some are serious issues; here’s one that’s only semi-important: using the dates in the Jewish calendar vs. secular dates. Sometimes it’s clear: my father’s yahrzeit is the ninth of Tevet; my mother’s the twenty fourth of Adar. I’ve long forgotten what the dates were in the Gregorian calendar. On the other hand, we celebrate our wedding anniversary on January 7; I’m sure the invitations indicated the Jewish date, but I don’t remember it offhand. Likewise, my (I should say “our”; I have a fraternal twin brother) birthday. This great event took place on March 16, 1941. Now in Europe, they used to note an approximate birthday, connecting it with a special Shabbat, new moon, or holiday. Our birthday roughly coincided with Purim. In fact, my mother was unable to attend a Purim activity in the Reform temple where my sister was in Hebrew school because she was in the middle of delivering us. So I know we were born on a Sunday. (Even more important in my family, my mother was unable to attend the annual dinner of the Noah Lodge, the Jewish fraternal organization in which my father was a member. When Barbara and I were going through my parents’ effects, we found, wound up like a scroll, a panoramic photograph, dated March 16, 1941, of hundreds of men and women seated at tables at this affair. All the way to the right is my father, seated with my mother’s sister Lil. In those days, delivering a baby – or two – was strictly a woman’s work. I should add parenthetically that no more than thirty years later, my father, in his capacity as an attorney, handled the papers formally dissolving this organization – which had existed and thrived since approximately 1840 – because there were only a dwindling number of members still alive.) So while I celebrate (or ignore) my birthday on its Gregorian date, I am also aware of my connection to Purim, the ultimate account of G-d’s hidden role in our history.
So the question was…………..regarding the anniversary of our making aliyah, should we celebrate on Tu B’Av (the fifteenth of Ave, a special joyous day after Tisha B’Av) when Barbara, Natania, Mimi the geriatric cat, and I took off from Kennedy airport, or on July 31, when the Nefesh B’Nefesh plane actually landed at Ben-Gurion airport. I think what we are going to do in the future is to finesse the issue by celebrating either, neither, or both. This year, Barbara wanted to go on a tiyul, which happened to take place on July 31, and so this is how we celebrated our aliyah anniversary, revisiting some of the events and accomplishments of the heroes, the builders, and the defenders of The Land which make it possible for us to enjoy a reasonably carefree life today. For example, the tiyul for which we had signed up dealt with the defense of the southern borders of Israel in 1948. It was sponsored by the OU Israel Center, the same folks who had organized the walking tour of Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe, the one in which we almost participated several weeks before! (See my previous post………..) When Barbara called Naomi at the OU Center, she was asked politely if she was still taking antibiotics!
The tour bus made a number of stops, some at places of lesser interest, some for what is known in the trade as “pit stops” – this being a group of middle aged people and older – and a few at places that I feel are of great interest. We toured the modern city of Ashdod, and visited a kibbutz called Negba, the only settlement in the area which withstood the Egyptian assault during the War of Independence, and examined the spot which was the most northern advance of the Egyptian army.
One thing that has been drilled into my sometimes-less-than-keen brain is that there were really two separate and distinct phases to the struggle for Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral Homeland. The first was perhaps less dramatic, but equally heartrending: the uprising of Arab villages after the vote in the United Nations in favor of the partition plan on November 29, 1947. It was during this first war that Jerusalem was besieged, a siege which was only broken during the second phase: the invasion of neighboring armies after the decision was made to declare the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the day before the British mandate was set to expire (although the national holiday is usually celebrated on the 5th of Iyar).
Our American-born tour guide, Gideon Abromowitz, who himself served as an Israeli paratrooper in 1971 and who has been here ever since, provided us with a lot of background material, information that is often forgotten, but is chilling in its intensity. Most of us have only a dim recollection of what the 1947 UN Partition Plan entailed. I have the idea that whoever drew up this map had a wonderfully macabre sense of humor. Or perhaps he had seen the Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho and Chico are negotiating a contract. To forestall objections, they keep removing clause after clause until they are left with only the final clause, which Groucho explains is the “sanity clause.” Chico scoffs at this: “There ain’t no such thing as “Sanity Claus.” (If you don’t realize he’s making a reference to a character in a winter holiday which we here in The Land can ignore, the whole thing is pointless.)
The original Jewish state, as envisioned in the Balfour Declaration, was a thing of beauty; it even included Trans-Jordan. But over the years, it kept getting whittled away, until by 1947, only a sad vestige of a state remained. (You can see it for yourself, if you do a google search.) If we remember that Israel today is about the size of New Jersey, try to conceive of the following: take Bergen County and add to that a thin strip along the Hudson River which widens to include the Pine Barrens; also include Passaic County, but keep Bergen and Passaic Counties separate by excluding Paramus. The Jewish state envisioned by the humorists at the U.N. included the Golan and the eastern part of the Galil, close to but not touching the western part of the Galil which extended down along the coast to include Tel Aviv and farther south connected by a t-i-n-y sliver of land to an area which includes much of the Negev (although the American. State Department was advocating that this large and mostly uninhabited land mass be removed from the Jewish part). Jerusalem was to be smack dab in the middle of the Arab state (which nobody then called “Palestine”) and was to be an “international” city administered by the U.N. Some joke.
May I make an observation? (It’s my blog, after all!) The main difference between the Jewish and the Muslim psyche is simply this: In the Jewish world view, if something bad happens to us, somehow, collectively, we have done something wrong and we need to do tshuvah – although this does not make our enemies any less evil. I do not believe that our “cousins” have come close to this level of introspection. If one looks today at the map of the Partition Plan, it is obvious that this was not the basis for a viable Jewish state: three small areas, essentially separated from each other in a hostile environment. We could easily have wound up with most of the world’s Jewish population living in a temporary homeland in Alaska, as fantasized by Michael Chabon in his novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” So when the Arabs call the establishment of our state “Al Nakba,” they somehow fail to internalize that the catastrophe they describe was self-inflicted. If they had done nothing but wait, the Arabs could conceivably have had it all; the fragmented Jewish state might well have collapsed. It certainly would not have been possible for that Israel to absorb so many Jews from around the world. So why did the Arabs start a war and then, inexplicably lose it?
At one point, Gideon told the bus driver to stop; our tour guide then got out and hurried down an embankment and waited for us under a bridge in the shade. (When I say a bridge, I’m really describing a trestle, something about fifty feet long that traverses a gully, nothing grandiose like The Bridge of Strings, an absurdly expensive bridge designed for the light rail in the middle of Jerusalem, a project as ill-conceived as The Big Dig in Boston.) Here on this non-descript spot, a little bit south of today’s Ashdod (not to be confused with a little bit east of Yerushalayim) was the northernmost advance of the Egyptian army. Gideon described with great emotion how three times, on consecutive days, the small band of Jewish soldiers ordered to hold the line attacked the Egyptian army; and three times they were defeated, suffering grievous casualties, at which point, the Jewish army holding the line was no more.
At this point, there was absolutely nothing stopping the Egyptian army from advancing unimpeded to Tel Aviv. They could have driven, they could have ridden camels or donkeys, they could have walked, they could have crawled, they could have done cartwheels, they could have had a three-legged race. There was not one Jewish soldier between them and “The White City,” and that would have been the end of the Zionist dream. But these three days of conflict and the presence of two or three planes of the Israeli “air force” dropping Molotov cocktails down on the Egyptians, convinced their commander that they could not defeat this relentless enemy; and he so advised his commander back in Cairo. They Egyptian army did not advance, and were ultimately driven back.
So what happened? Was there something going on beyond what one might find in Wikipedia? Consider the circumstances, if you will: the world community, for one brief moment in history, seemed to have abandoned its pathological hatred for the Jewish people, sufficient to allow the establishment of a truncated, debilitated State of Israel. Even before the state was officially established, civil war broke out in the area. The leaders of the future state were in a quandary: once they accepted the Partition Plan, they couldn’t go back to the table and ask for more. If they didn’t accept the Plan, most likely some or all of it would be withdrawn. This would be their only chance, and once they went ahead and declared a state, not only would they continue to be faced with an unceasingly hostile Arab population, but within a nanosecond of the Declaration of Independence, they would be in a real war –with all their neighbors who had real if ineffective armies – which if they lost, would be the final nail on the coffin of world Jewry. Of course, if they didn’t declare a state, after the withdrawal of British forces there would be no government of any kind in the region. Talk about a real dilemma, with very sharp horns.
Perhaps we can see the “hand” of our Heavenly Father at work here, in a way which is not obvious, allowing for the believers to believe and the non-believers not to believe – because after all, we have free well to see or believe whatever we want. But to emphasize the point, virtually the same thing happened twice, in 1948 and 1967. It would have been too much, way beyond the pale of expectation for the Nations to have created or allowed a real Jewish state. So they drew up the boundaries of a mock Jewish state, bereft of its heart, Jerusalem, and, in effect, said, take it or leave it; and if you take it, you’re on your own to fight for it. If nothing else, Ben-Gurion had guts, and he took it. So what would be the only way for us to get back the territory promised to us in the Balfour Declaration and by a Higher Authority? To be invaded by hostile neighbors, and when they were on the brink of wiping us out, inexplicably for them to turn tail and run away, allowing us to reclaim The Land piece by piece. This is what happened both in 1948 and in 1967. As I said, you are free not to believe that these were hidden miracles, but – even allowing for the incredible heroism and self-sacrifice of so many Jews in The Land – you would then need to come up with a better explanation of your own. And don’t tell me that our fabled military prowess scared Egypt, Jordan, and the others away!
It was time for us to get back on the bus, and it is time for me to stop for a break. We will soon be heading on to Ashdod, and, not to keep you in suspense, to a very large dilemma lurking down the road.
So the question was…………..regarding the anniversary of our making aliyah, should we celebrate on Tu B’Av (the fifteenth of Ave, a special joyous day after Tisha B’Av) when Barbara, Natania, Mimi the geriatric cat, and I took off from Kennedy airport, or on July 31, when the Nefesh B’Nefesh plane actually landed at Ben-Gurion airport. I think what we are going to do in the future is to finesse the issue by celebrating either, neither, or both. This year, Barbara wanted to go on a tiyul, which happened to take place on July 31, and so this is how we celebrated our aliyah anniversary, revisiting some of the events and accomplishments of the heroes, the builders, and the defenders of The Land which make it possible for us to enjoy a reasonably carefree life today. For example, the tiyul for which we had signed up dealt with the defense of the southern borders of Israel in 1948. It was sponsored by the OU Israel Center, the same folks who had organized the walking tour of Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe, the one in which we almost participated several weeks before! (See my previous post………..) When Barbara called Naomi at the OU Center, she was asked politely if she was still taking antibiotics!
The tour bus made a number of stops, some at places of lesser interest, some for what is known in the trade as “pit stops” – this being a group of middle aged people and older – and a few at places that I feel are of great interest. We toured the modern city of Ashdod, and visited a kibbutz called Negba, the only settlement in the area which withstood the Egyptian assault during the War of Independence, and examined the spot which was the most northern advance of the Egyptian army.
One thing that has been drilled into my sometimes-less-than-keen brain is that there were really two separate and distinct phases to the struggle for Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral Homeland. The first was perhaps less dramatic, but equally heartrending: the uprising of Arab villages after the vote in the United Nations in favor of the partition plan on November 29, 1947. It was during this first war that Jerusalem was besieged, a siege which was only broken during the second phase: the invasion of neighboring armies after the decision was made to declare the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the day before the British mandate was set to expire (although the national holiday is usually celebrated on the 5th of Iyar).
Our American-born tour guide, Gideon Abromowitz, who himself served as an Israeli paratrooper in 1971 and who has been here ever since, provided us with a lot of background material, information that is often forgotten, but is chilling in its intensity. Most of us have only a dim recollection of what the 1947 UN Partition Plan entailed. I have the idea that whoever drew up this map had a wonderfully macabre sense of humor. Or perhaps he had seen the Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho and Chico are negotiating a contract. To forestall objections, they keep removing clause after clause until they are left with only the final clause, which Groucho explains is the “sanity clause.” Chico scoffs at this: “There ain’t no such thing as “Sanity Claus.” (If you don’t realize he’s making a reference to a character in a winter holiday which we here in The Land can ignore, the whole thing is pointless.)
The original Jewish state, as envisioned in the Balfour Declaration, was a thing of beauty; it even included Trans-Jordan. But over the years, it kept getting whittled away, until by 1947, only a sad vestige of a state remained. (You can see it for yourself, if you do a google search.) If we remember that Israel today is about the size of New Jersey, try to conceive of the following: take Bergen County and add to that a thin strip along the Hudson River which widens to include the Pine Barrens; also include Passaic County, but keep Bergen and Passaic Counties separate by excluding Paramus. The Jewish state envisioned by the humorists at the U.N. included the Golan and the eastern part of the Galil, close to but not touching the western part of the Galil which extended down along the coast to include Tel Aviv and farther south connected by a t-i-n-y sliver of land to an area which includes much of the Negev (although the American. State Department was advocating that this large and mostly uninhabited land mass be removed from the Jewish part). Jerusalem was to be smack dab in the middle of the Arab state (which nobody then called “Palestine”) and was to be an “international” city administered by the U.N. Some joke.
May I make an observation? (It’s my blog, after all!) The main difference between the Jewish and the Muslim psyche is simply this: In the Jewish world view, if something bad happens to us, somehow, collectively, we have done something wrong and we need to do tshuvah – although this does not make our enemies any less evil. I do not believe that our “cousins” have come close to this level of introspection. If one looks today at the map of the Partition Plan, it is obvious that this was not the basis for a viable Jewish state: three small areas, essentially separated from each other in a hostile environment. We could easily have wound up with most of the world’s Jewish population living in a temporary homeland in Alaska, as fantasized by Michael Chabon in his novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” So when the Arabs call the establishment of our state “Al Nakba,” they somehow fail to internalize that the catastrophe they describe was self-inflicted. If they had done nothing but wait, the Arabs could conceivably have had it all; the fragmented Jewish state might well have collapsed. It certainly would not have been possible for that Israel to absorb so many Jews from around the world. So why did the Arabs start a war and then, inexplicably lose it?
At one point, Gideon told the bus driver to stop; our tour guide then got out and hurried down an embankment and waited for us under a bridge in the shade. (When I say a bridge, I’m really describing a trestle, something about fifty feet long that traverses a gully, nothing grandiose like The Bridge of Strings, an absurdly expensive bridge designed for the light rail in the middle of Jerusalem, a project as ill-conceived as The Big Dig in Boston.) Here on this non-descript spot, a little bit south of today’s Ashdod (not to be confused with a little bit east of Yerushalayim) was the northernmost advance of the Egyptian army. Gideon described with great emotion how three times, on consecutive days, the small band of Jewish soldiers ordered to hold the line attacked the Egyptian army; and three times they were defeated, suffering grievous casualties, at which point, the Jewish army holding the line was no more.
At this point, there was absolutely nothing stopping the Egyptian army from advancing unimpeded to Tel Aviv. They could have driven, they could have ridden camels or donkeys, they could have walked, they could have crawled, they could have done cartwheels, they could have had a three-legged race. There was not one Jewish soldier between them and “The White City,” and that would have been the end of the Zionist dream. But these three days of conflict and the presence of two or three planes of the Israeli “air force” dropping Molotov cocktails down on the Egyptians, convinced their commander that they could not defeat this relentless enemy; and he so advised his commander back in Cairo. They Egyptian army did not advance, and were ultimately driven back.
So what happened? Was there something going on beyond what one might find in Wikipedia? Consider the circumstances, if you will: the world community, for one brief moment in history, seemed to have abandoned its pathological hatred for the Jewish people, sufficient to allow the establishment of a truncated, debilitated State of Israel. Even before the state was officially established, civil war broke out in the area. The leaders of the future state were in a quandary: once they accepted the Partition Plan, they couldn’t go back to the table and ask for more. If they didn’t accept the Plan, most likely some or all of it would be withdrawn. This would be their only chance, and once they went ahead and declared a state, not only would they continue to be faced with an unceasingly hostile Arab population, but within a nanosecond of the Declaration of Independence, they would be in a real war –with all their neighbors who had real if ineffective armies – which if they lost, would be the final nail on the coffin of world Jewry. Of course, if they didn’t declare a state, after the withdrawal of British forces there would be no government of any kind in the region. Talk about a real dilemma, with very sharp horns.
Perhaps we can see the “hand” of our Heavenly Father at work here, in a way which is not obvious, allowing for the believers to believe and the non-believers not to believe – because after all, we have free well to see or believe whatever we want. But to emphasize the point, virtually the same thing happened twice, in 1948 and 1967. It would have been too much, way beyond the pale of expectation for the Nations to have created or allowed a real Jewish state. So they drew up the boundaries of a mock Jewish state, bereft of its heart, Jerusalem, and, in effect, said, take it or leave it; and if you take it, you’re on your own to fight for it. If nothing else, Ben-Gurion had guts, and he took it. So what would be the only way for us to get back the territory promised to us in the Balfour Declaration and by a Higher Authority? To be invaded by hostile neighbors, and when they were on the brink of wiping us out, inexplicably for them to turn tail and run away, allowing us to reclaim The Land piece by piece. This is what happened both in 1948 and in 1967. As I said, you are free not to believe that these were hidden miracles, but – even allowing for the incredible heroism and self-sacrifice of so many Jews in The Land – you would then need to come up with a better explanation of your own. And don’t tell me that our fabled military prowess scared Egypt, Jordan, and the others away!
It was time for us to get back on the bus, and it is time for me to stop for a break. We will soon be heading on to Ashdod, and, not to keep you in suspense, to a very large dilemma lurking down the road.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Hannah and the Mixed Condition
This is the story of Hannah and her mixed conditional sentence, contrary to fact, thus bringing together the study of languages and Tisha B’Av.
It was time for us to return to Ulpan: Barbara had completed her five free months at Beit Am; Natania had continued pretty much until she joined the IDF in the beginning of February; I lasted until January when I decided that I had done as much as I could do. I wasn’t thrilled with our teacher, and I had reached a point where I couldn’t absorb anymore of what was going on. It was as if the rest of the class was motoring along in an air-conditioned tour bus, and I was stuck on the side of the road, riding a very reluctant donkey. For the next few months, I made it a point of trying to memorize at least one new word a day and somehow using whatever Hebrew I had learned to get around. Most of the time, I can get by. My favorite place of all is the Mahane Yehuda shuk, and I have no trouble getting what I need there, although dealing with Israelis can be frustrating at times. Example: I hand the guy my bags of peaches, apricots, tomatoes, whatever. He weighs it, does a quick heshbon (calculation), and mumbles into his sleeve, “shloshim v’arba shekel.” Should I reply “lo shamati” (I didn’t hear you) or “od paam” (again), he will turn directly to me, and in a voice which can be heard throughout the shuk, scream “thirty four shekels” as if I were not only stupid, but deaf.
But Natania, responding to my snail-like progress, began to noodge me: “Daddy, when are you going back to Ulpan?” And Barbara had already registered at a different Ulpan, Mila, so I assumed that the time was propitious. Now there are several differences between Beth Am and Mila: this is a private Ulpan, so we are now paying about $250 for a ten week course which meets, instead of five mornings a week, two evenings, which I figured would give me enough time to do the homework, review and prepare. I figured I would register for a class that met the same two nights as Barbara’s, but that was not to be. Here you couldn’t just talk your way into whatever class you wanted – resulting in a class of students on wildly different levels. Here they actually make you sit down and take a brief written test to determine your level. I did my best, handed it in, and the guy-in-charge graded it on the spot. He said “beit plus.” I said “gimmel,” hopefully. He gave me the equivalent of a finger wag and said “beit plus.” Beit plus, the level I began with at Beit Am, although I soon discovered that beit plus here is equivalent to gimmel there.(Official digression: In The States, one indicates a negative by a sideways shake of the head. Here, it’s done by taking a forefinger and wagging it sideways at a rate of about one second per rotation, usually three or four times. A classic example of its use: waiting for my appointment with a urologist at the Maccabi clinic in Maale Adumim. The office door was open and there was no patient inside. Did the doctor know I was waiting? I stuck my neck in expectantly. He did not raise his eyes from the computer screen; he did not say a word; he moved exactly one muscle, the one controlling the motion of his forefinger. I returned to my chair and waited.)
And so, with my new note pad and the second volume of “Hebrew from Scratch,” one of the dozens of workbooks I have used in my career as a Hebrew student, I was ready to begin. Our teacher is a tall bundle of energy named Inbal, who I discovered, in response to a composition I handed in, had been a Hebrew instructor at the same base where Natania completed her Kurs Ivrit. As is typical of Ulpans in Israel, there are students from all over with different mother tongues. Most of them speak more than one language, and, of course, almost everyone in the class speaks English, from passably to extremely well. Which leads me up to the story of Hannah and her conditional sentence.
Last week one of the students asked if there would be a session the following Sunday, Tisha B’Av. Inbal said that there would not, whereupon Hannah, a young woman (I’m guessing she’s in her mid-twenties, about Tina’s age) who sits near me, remarked that she was not planning to show up in any event. I agreed that I also wouldn’t be there (I hadn’t even made it for the half fast day in Tammuz, two weeks earlier.) But after I left the class, I began to roll over in my mind her elegant construction: “If they had scheduled it (the class), I would not have come.” To the best of my knowledge, having spent my entire life learning, teaching, reading, and writing English, that construction seemed 100% correct; but I could not remember what to call it. (There is an on-going debate as to whether a true subjunctive exists nowadays in English, but, in any case, that ain’t it) With a good deal of help from my friends at Google, I pinned it down to a conditional construction, a mixed one at that (the condition taking place in a different time frame from the result), and certainly contrary to fact: there was no class scheduled for Tisha B’Av. How did she know to use that construction? In The States, the young women who work at the malls, the ones suggesting that you “Have a nice day” would be hard pressed to say that; even American college students wouldn’t be so eloquent. Plus, despite her excellent English, when she says two words, you can tell immediately that Hannah is not a native English speaker, but comes from the east coast of the English Channel. (As I later learned, from Strasbourg.) I ran all this by my friends Joan and Jerry in Brooklyn, and they were likewise intrigued by this Gallic mastery of English grammar. Nothing to do but ask. So at Wednesday night’s class, I reminded Hannah of what she had said, and asked her where she learned such good English. She asked me, a little apprehensively if she “had said it right.” Absolutely, I replied, but how and where did she learn to say something which 99% of Americans couldn’t replicate? “At the university.” Simple enough! What would Americans say, she inquired. At that moment, I was reluctant to try and imagine what Americans would say. However, after having given the matter some thought, perhaps “I’m not coming on Tisha B’Av.” Or Natania’s suggestion, “I wouldn’t come anyway,” in which American frankness replaces Gallic subtlety.
When I am with people who have managed to master several foreign languages, I invariably think of my own adventures and mishaps in studying, in order, three years of Spanish, two years of French, two years of Latin, three terms of Ancient Greek, and one term of Anglo-Saxon (I’ll discuss Hebrew in a little while). There are people reading this blog who were in my Spanish classes at DeWitt Clinton H.S. in The Bronx, and who can verify that Mrs. Moscoso had an obsession that all of her students (it was an all boys school at the time) were interested in staring at parts of her anatomy. Maybe twenty five year and forty pounds before, yes. But even with the extremely high testosterone count of the Clinton lads, no one was interested. My old friends can also vouch for me that there was a Ronnie Y. and that he did engage in the following futile exchange with another of our teachers: teacher: Yo ablo (I speak); Ronnie: Yo haBLOW; teacher: Yo ablo; Ronnie: Yo haBLOW. This butchery of the language continued until no one in the class could keep a straight face, but has lasted longer in the collective memory of some of us; Ronnie’s verbal infelicity will be remembered until the last of us is muerto. With all this, I did learn some Spanish, and to this day, if you were to give me one of the newspapers prepared for the Hispanic population of New York, I could read a good part of it with little difficulty.
Next came French at City College. What stands out most in my mind is my first term with Mr. Nesselrod, a rather smug, well-dressed Belgian with an eye for the innocent freshman girls. His class began at 8AM and he had a simple policy, diabolical but effective, to make certain that his students came on time: at precisely 8AM, he would close and lock the door to his classroom. If you came later, you were absent. You might as well have stayed in bed! Of course, because we were only allowed a certain number of “cuts,” you can imagine the level of stress in the student body. At every class, you would see students gasping for air, having run the eight blocks from the subway up the hill to the campus. To make matters worse, every once in a while, some doofus would forget to unlock the campus gate nearest our building. It would have been impossible to go around to the other gate and get to class on time, so there was nothing else to do but to climb the ten foot high fence at 7:55 in the morning. Still, when we were in Hebron in 1988 and the only available brochures for Maarat Hamachpela were in Hebrew or French, you know which one I grabbed. I would make the same choice today!
Back in the days when I went to City College, if you planned to major in English, you had to take 18 credits of Latin. And so I spent the next two years puzzling through parts of Virgil’s Aeneid, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the less bawdy verses of Catullus, and everyone’s favorite, Cicero’s First Oration Against Cataline. Next, a little bit of The Iliad in the original, and enough Anglo-Saxon to get through parts of Beowulf; and I was all set to graduate from City College and get on with my life.
More than a decade later, it was time for me to attend Ulpan in New York, part of a process of entering Jewish observance and re-learning the Hebrew that I had forgotten shortly after our (my fraternal twin brother and my) bar mitzvah. If nothing else, I met Barbara at 515 Park Ave., (then the Jewish Agency building) so I rank my experience there a huge success. I have many fond memories of the wild assortment of people who were trying to learn Hebrew right around the time when Menachem Begin was first elected Rosh Hamemshalah (prime minister). But the one incident that more or less sums up my experience in trying to learn Hebrew: in one of my classes were two young women, very close friends who always came together. In the middle of one of our classes, the two of them burst into laughter simultaneously for no apparent reason. When they calmed down, they explained what was going on. The two of them had been studying Hebrew for a number of years, and it reached a point where they would keep going over the same material without it ever sinking in. Our teacher had just taught something which these two girls realized that they had studied time after time and still hadn’t learned. Their laughter was simply a recognition of utter futility.
Futility: that’s a good way to express my feeling about learning the seven binyanim (verb constructions) in Hebrew: Imagine someone juggling balls. Almost anyone in good health can throw one ball in the air and catch it. Most people unless they are drunk can toss two balls in the air. Many people can handle three. Four becomes more difficult, and so on. Each binyan individually is easy, even with learning present, past, and future tenses as well as infinitives and participles, first person singular, second person singular masculine, second person singular feminine, and the rest. But trying to remember and use them all is like juggling three oranges, a pencil, a salami, an axe, and a hand grenade at the same time. Or so it seems. Perhaps our bright young friend from Strasbourg is correct: “It’s like learning Chinese.”
But there is one significant difference: we are not in China (although at this moment half of the planet is there for the Olympics!), and we have no particular reason to live there or learn its languages. We are in Israel, and there is a reason why we are here. Perhaps the following story will help explain my persistence in “breaking my teeth” to learn Hebrew.
Back in my glory days at City College, in addition to the foreign languages and the courses in English grammar and literature – from Chaucer to the 20th century – I also took a course in Linguistics. The textbook was Leonard Bloomfield’s “Language,” written in 1933, (many times reprinted but apparently never revised), probably the most influential work in its field at the time. Like many of the college texts I used, this book got shoved into a bookcase after the course was over. Many years later, I needed to look up something, and picked up Bloomfield’s book. Out of idle curiosity, I turned to the chapter where he was cataloging the various language families and came to the section on Semitic languages, and then to the subheading, Northwest Semitic Languages. There on the page for anyone to see was an unqualified statement that Hebrew was extinct as a spoken language.
As some of you know, I simply adore irony. On the same bookshelf, a few volumes away from Bloomfield, was my much used paperback Latin textbook. I had spent so much of my college days studying truly extinct languages, one of them being Latin, which while it morphed itself into several modern languages – including the ones that Hannah and Maribel speak – is itself as dead as the proverbial doornail. There are very few people today who can read Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, or Cicero in the original, let alone translate the simple inscription on the Arch of Titus in Rome, built to commemorate the destruction of the Second Beit Hamikdash and the triumphant return of Titus with the temple treasures:
SENATVSPOPVLVSQVE·ROMANVSDIVO·TITO·DIVI·VESPASIANI·F(ILIO)VESPASIANO·AVGVSTO"The Senate and People of Rome (dedicates this) to Titus Vespasianus Augustus, now-a-god, son of Vespasian, now-a-god." Kind of gets to you, doesn’t it?
Sitting here yesterday, keeping out of the afternoon heat on Tisha B’Av, and dealing with caffeine deprivation, I had this fantastical notion which I share with you now:It is about the year 80 of the Common Era. A group of Hebrew slaves is being marched in chains through Rome near where the Arch of Titus is being built and where this inscription is being carved. One of them turns to his Roman taskmaster and says something like this, “Today, anyone in Rome who can read and write will understand this inscription and will know the honor due to Vespasian and Titus. But there will be a time when no will be able to read it. There will be a time when only a handful of trained men will know how to read your poets, your playwrights, your statesmen. But we will never forget our sacred texts. Someday, everyone will howl with derision at your list of gods and deified men; but our One G-d will redeem us one day. When that happens, our people will return to the Land from which you have expelled us. And as your monuments to yourselves begin to crumble, our Temple will be rebuilt.”
As is done from time to time, the Israel Museum is displaying “The Great Isaiah Scroll,” the only complete manuscript found in the caves near Qumran in 1947. Many Israelis have gone to see it, and, according to the newspapers here, are visibly moved because they, modern-day Hebrew speakers, are able to read the prophetic message written on this scroll more than 2000 year ago. Much has been made of the idea that within a generation or two, a majority of the world’s Jewish population will live in The Land for the first time since the destruction of the First Beit Hamikdash. The obvious corollary to that is that within two decades the majority of Jewish people will speak Hebrew as their native tongue – even if half of the vocabulary will be borrowed from English!
So here’s to you, Leonard Bloomfield, wherever you are!!!! We, the Jewish people, have spent the last two millennia mastering every language and dialect on the face of the earth – even creating a few pastiches of our own. And now, Jewish children in The Old City are once again mastering “hitpael” without even knowing that they are doing it or how hard it is. So we in Ulpan muddle on. It may seem like “Chinese,” but it’s our own beloved “Chinese” in our own beloved Land.
Tisha B’Av has come and gone, and maybe we are coming closer to The Final Redemption. Is Mashiach on the way? Whenever he shows up, if he addressed the crowd in Hebrew, I want to understand what he is saying.
It was time for us to return to Ulpan: Barbara had completed her five free months at Beit Am; Natania had continued pretty much until she joined the IDF in the beginning of February; I lasted until January when I decided that I had done as much as I could do. I wasn’t thrilled with our teacher, and I had reached a point where I couldn’t absorb anymore of what was going on. It was as if the rest of the class was motoring along in an air-conditioned tour bus, and I was stuck on the side of the road, riding a very reluctant donkey. For the next few months, I made it a point of trying to memorize at least one new word a day and somehow using whatever Hebrew I had learned to get around. Most of the time, I can get by. My favorite place of all is the Mahane Yehuda shuk, and I have no trouble getting what I need there, although dealing with Israelis can be frustrating at times. Example: I hand the guy my bags of peaches, apricots, tomatoes, whatever. He weighs it, does a quick heshbon (calculation), and mumbles into his sleeve, “shloshim v’arba shekel.” Should I reply “lo shamati” (I didn’t hear you) or “od paam” (again), he will turn directly to me, and in a voice which can be heard throughout the shuk, scream “thirty four shekels” as if I were not only stupid, but deaf.
But Natania, responding to my snail-like progress, began to noodge me: “Daddy, when are you going back to Ulpan?” And Barbara had already registered at a different Ulpan, Mila, so I assumed that the time was propitious. Now there are several differences between Beth Am and Mila: this is a private Ulpan, so we are now paying about $250 for a ten week course which meets, instead of five mornings a week, two evenings, which I figured would give me enough time to do the homework, review and prepare. I figured I would register for a class that met the same two nights as Barbara’s, but that was not to be. Here you couldn’t just talk your way into whatever class you wanted – resulting in a class of students on wildly different levels. Here they actually make you sit down and take a brief written test to determine your level. I did my best, handed it in, and the guy-in-charge graded it on the spot. He said “beit plus.” I said “gimmel,” hopefully. He gave me the equivalent of a finger wag and said “beit plus.” Beit plus, the level I began with at Beit Am, although I soon discovered that beit plus here is equivalent to gimmel there.(Official digression: In The States, one indicates a negative by a sideways shake of the head. Here, it’s done by taking a forefinger and wagging it sideways at a rate of about one second per rotation, usually three or four times. A classic example of its use: waiting for my appointment with a urologist at the Maccabi clinic in Maale Adumim. The office door was open and there was no patient inside. Did the doctor know I was waiting? I stuck my neck in expectantly. He did not raise his eyes from the computer screen; he did not say a word; he moved exactly one muscle, the one controlling the motion of his forefinger. I returned to my chair and waited.)
And so, with my new note pad and the second volume of “Hebrew from Scratch,” one of the dozens of workbooks I have used in my career as a Hebrew student, I was ready to begin. Our teacher is a tall bundle of energy named Inbal, who I discovered, in response to a composition I handed in, had been a Hebrew instructor at the same base where Natania completed her Kurs Ivrit. As is typical of Ulpans in Israel, there are students from all over with different mother tongues. Most of them speak more than one language, and, of course, almost everyone in the class speaks English, from passably to extremely well. Which leads me up to the story of Hannah and her conditional sentence.
Last week one of the students asked if there would be a session the following Sunday, Tisha B’Av. Inbal said that there would not, whereupon Hannah, a young woman (I’m guessing she’s in her mid-twenties, about Tina’s age) who sits near me, remarked that she was not planning to show up in any event. I agreed that I also wouldn’t be there (I hadn’t even made it for the half fast day in Tammuz, two weeks earlier.) But after I left the class, I began to roll over in my mind her elegant construction: “If they had scheduled it (the class), I would not have come.” To the best of my knowledge, having spent my entire life learning, teaching, reading, and writing English, that construction seemed 100% correct; but I could not remember what to call it. (There is an on-going debate as to whether a true subjunctive exists nowadays in English, but, in any case, that ain’t it) With a good deal of help from my friends at Google, I pinned it down to a conditional construction, a mixed one at that (the condition taking place in a different time frame from the result), and certainly contrary to fact: there was no class scheduled for Tisha B’Av. How did she know to use that construction? In The States, the young women who work at the malls, the ones suggesting that you “Have a nice day” would be hard pressed to say that; even American college students wouldn’t be so eloquent. Plus, despite her excellent English, when she says two words, you can tell immediately that Hannah is not a native English speaker, but comes from the east coast of the English Channel. (As I later learned, from Strasbourg.) I ran all this by my friends Joan and Jerry in Brooklyn, and they were likewise intrigued by this Gallic mastery of English grammar. Nothing to do but ask. So at Wednesday night’s class, I reminded Hannah of what she had said, and asked her where she learned such good English. She asked me, a little apprehensively if she “had said it right.” Absolutely, I replied, but how and where did she learn to say something which 99% of Americans couldn’t replicate? “At the university.” Simple enough! What would Americans say, she inquired. At that moment, I was reluctant to try and imagine what Americans would say. However, after having given the matter some thought, perhaps “I’m not coming on Tisha B’Av.” Or Natania’s suggestion, “I wouldn’t come anyway,” in which American frankness replaces Gallic subtlety.
When I am with people who have managed to master several foreign languages, I invariably think of my own adventures and mishaps in studying, in order, three years of Spanish, two years of French, two years of Latin, three terms of Ancient Greek, and one term of Anglo-Saxon (I’ll discuss Hebrew in a little while). There are people reading this blog who were in my Spanish classes at DeWitt Clinton H.S. in The Bronx, and who can verify that Mrs. Moscoso had an obsession that all of her students (it was an all boys school at the time) were interested in staring at parts of her anatomy. Maybe twenty five year and forty pounds before, yes. But even with the extremely high testosterone count of the Clinton lads, no one was interested. My old friends can also vouch for me that there was a Ronnie Y. and that he did engage in the following futile exchange with another of our teachers: teacher: Yo ablo (I speak); Ronnie: Yo haBLOW; teacher: Yo ablo; Ronnie: Yo haBLOW. This butchery of the language continued until no one in the class could keep a straight face, but has lasted longer in the collective memory of some of us; Ronnie’s verbal infelicity will be remembered until the last of us is muerto. With all this, I did learn some Spanish, and to this day, if you were to give me one of the newspapers prepared for the Hispanic population of New York, I could read a good part of it with little difficulty.
Next came French at City College. What stands out most in my mind is my first term with Mr. Nesselrod, a rather smug, well-dressed Belgian with an eye for the innocent freshman girls. His class began at 8AM and he had a simple policy, diabolical but effective, to make certain that his students came on time: at precisely 8AM, he would close and lock the door to his classroom. If you came later, you were absent. You might as well have stayed in bed! Of course, because we were only allowed a certain number of “cuts,” you can imagine the level of stress in the student body. At every class, you would see students gasping for air, having run the eight blocks from the subway up the hill to the campus. To make matters worse, every once in a while, some doofus would forget to unlock the campus gate nearest our building. It would have been impossible to go around to the other gate and get to class on time, so there was nothing else to do but to climb the ten foot high fence at 7:55 in the morning. Still, when we were in Hebron in 1988 and the only available brochures for Maarat Hamachpela were in Hebrew or French, you know which one I grabbed. I would make the same choice today!
Back in the days when I went to City College, if you planned to major in English, you had to take 18 credits of Latin. And so I spent the next two years puzzling through parts of Virgil’s Aeneid, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the less bawdy verses of Catullus, and everyone’s favorite, Cicero’s First Oration Against Cataline. Next, a little bit of The Iliad in the original, and enough Anglo-Saxon to get through parts of Beowulf; and I was all set to graduate from City College and get on with my life.
More than a decade later, it was time for me to attend Ulpan in New York, part of a process of entering Jewish observance and re-learning the Hebrew that I had forgotten shortly after our (my fraternal twin brother and my) bar mitzvah. If nothing else, I met Barbara at 515 Park Ave., (then the Jewish Agency building) so I rank my experience there a huge success. I have many fond memories of the wild assortment of people who were trying to learn Hebrew right around the time when Menachem Begin was first elected Rosh Hamemshalah (prime minister). But the one incident that more or less sums up my experience in trying to learn Hebrew: in one of my classes were two young women, very close friends who always came together. In the middle of one of our classes, the two of them burst into laughter simultaneously for no apparent reason. When they calmed down, they explained what was going on. The two of them had been studying Hebrew for a number of years, and it reached a point where they would keep going over the same material without it ever sinking in. Our teacher had just taught something which these two girls realized that they had studied time after time and still hadn’t learned. Their laughter was simply a recognition of utter futility.
Futility: that’s a good way to express my feeling about learning the seven binyanim (verb constructions) in Hebrew: Imagine someone juggling balls. Almost anyone in good health can throw one ball in the air and catch it. Most people unless they are drunk can toss two balls in the air. Many people can handle three. Four becomes more difficult, and so on. Each binyan individually is easy, even with learning present, past, and future tenses as well as infinitives and participles, first person singular, second person singular masculine, second person singular feminine, and the rest. But trying to remember and use them all is like juggling three oranges, a pencil, a salami, an axe, and a hand grenade at the same time. Or so it seems. Perhaps our bright young friend from Strasbourg is correct: “It’s like learning Chinese.”
But there is one significant difference: we are not in China (although at this moment half of the planet is there for the Olympics!), and we have no particular reason to live there or learn its languages. We are in Israel, and there is a reason why we are here. Perhaps the following story will help explain my persistence in “breaking my teeth” to learn Hebrew.
Back in my glory days at City College, in addition to the foreign languages and the courses in English grammar and literature – from Chaucer to the 20th century – I also took a course in Linguistics. The textbook was Leonard Bloomfield’s “Language,” written in 1933, (many times reprinted but apparently never revised), probably the most influential work in its field at the time. Like many of the college texts I used, this book got shoved into a bookcase after the course was over. Many years later, I needed to look up something, and picked up Bloomfield’s book. Out of idle curiosity, I turned to the chapter where he was cataloging the various language families and came to the section on Semitic languages, and then to the subheading, Northwest Semitic Languages. There on the page for anyone to see was an unqualified statement that Hebrew was extinct as a spoken language.
As some of you know, I simply adore irony. On the same bookshelf, a few volumes away from Bloomfield, was my much used paperback Latin textbook. I had spent so much of my college days studying truly extinct languages, one of them being Latin, which while it morphed itself into several modern languages – including the ones that Hannah and Maribel speak – is itself as dead as the proverbial doornail. There are very few people today who can read Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, or Cicero in the original, let alone translate the simple inscription on the Arch of Titus in Rome, built to commemorate the destruction of the Second Beit Hamikdash and the triumphant return of Titus with the temple treasures:
SENATVSPOPVLVSQVE·ROMANVSDIVO·TITO·DIVI·VESPASIANI·F(ILIO)VESPASIANO·AVGVSTO"The Senate and People of Rome (dedicates this) to Titus Vespasianus Augustus, now-a-god, son of Vespasian, now-a-god." Kind of gets to you, doesn’t it?
Sitting here yesterday, keeping out of the afternoon heat on Tisha B’Av, and dealing with caffeine deprivation, I had this fantastical notion which I share with you now:It is about the year 80 of the Common Era. A group of Hebrew slaves is being marched in chains through Rome near where the Arch of Titus is being built and where this inscription is being carved. One of them turns to his Roman taskmaster and says something like this, “Today, anyone in Rome who can read and write will understand this inscription and will know the honor due to Vespasian and Titus. But there will be a time when no will be able to read it. There will be a time when only a handful of trained men will know how to read your poets, your playwrights, your statesmen. But we will never forget our sacred texts. Someday, everyone will howl with derision at your list of gods and deified men; but our One G-d will redeem us one day. When that happens, our people will return to the Land from which you have expelled us. And as your monuments to yourselves begin to crumble, our Temple will be rebuilt.”
As is done from time to time, the Israel Museum is displaying “The Great Isaiah Scroll,” the only complete manuscript found in the caves near Qumran in 1947. Many Israelis have gone to see it, and, according to the newspapers here, are visibly moved because they, modern-day Hebrew speakers, are able to read the prophetic message written on this scroll more than 2000 year ago. Much has been made of the idea that within a generation or two, a majority of the world’s Jewish population will live in The Land for the first time since the destruction of the First Beit Hamikdash. The obvious corollary to that is that within two decades the majority of Jewish people will speak Hebrew as their native tongue – even if half of the vocabulary will be borrowed from English!
So here’s to you, Leonard Bloomfield, wherever you are!!!! We, the Jewish people, have spent the last two millennia mastering every language and dialect on the face of the earth – even creating a few pastiches of our own. And now, Jewish children in The Old City are once again mastering “hitpael” without even knowing that they are doing it or how hard it is. So we in Ulpan muddle on. It may seem like “Chinese,” but it’s our own beloved “Chinese” in our own beloved Land.
Tisha B’Av has come and gone, and maybe we are coming closer to The Final Redemption. Is Mashiach on the way? Whenever he shows up, if he addressed the crowd in Hebrew, I want to understand what he is saying.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Beginning with a Ball of Yarn
My wife, in a rare flight of fancy, said that this part of the story began with a ball of yarn. In fact, it began months earlier with a shopping bag – two of them, in fact. Our neighbor Yaffa, a rather imposing woman, was walking home from a shopping excursion at our local Super-r-r-r, carrying these same shopping bags laden with groceries. She stopped for a minute to rest, and a very tiny kitten ran up to her and jumped into her lap. She looked down at the kitten; the kitten looked up at her. Many people would have removed this small animal, stray cats being a dime a dozen in Maale Adumim (except that dimes are very scarce in our neck of the woods); but there are those who understand, that if there is a stray kitten in your lap, it must be part of G-d’s greater plan. Jaffa picked up this small creature, put him in her pocket book, and took him home, naming him, don’t ask me why, “Witty Kitty.”
Needless to say, as all baby animals do, over the weeks and months, WK began to grow, becoming quite the strapping young cat. Yaffa, meanwhile, had met an appropriate man and was about to get married. She realized that there were two things she would have to give up: her Sephardic eating habits over Pesach, and………her Witty Kitty. Finding a home for her rice and beans would not be a “biggie,” but her cat? There may be as many cats as people in Maale Adumim, and most of these felines depend on human throw-aways for their livelihood. I’m sure some of you are beginning to figure out what comes next, and you are correct. WK, now the size of a young deer, came to co-occupy a litter box with Mimi, our aged American cat, who is not used to sharing. There were quite a few verbal altercations between these two over the next week or so, so when we heard a ruckus in our pinat ochel (dining area) one evening, we assumed it was the two felines fussing. But Mimi was with us in the bedroom, so what could be going on? Barbara went to investigate, and so began the saga of the yarn ball.
A well-meaning friend, herself the manager of a herd of cats, had brought over a ball of yarn, lavender in color, for Witty to play with. In a matter of minutes, he had unwound the ball; and in a few more minutes had wound the yarn around himself and a dining room chair. If we had not intervened, he probably would have dragged the chair around the entire house in his efforts to escape. Barbara realized that we would have to assist in untangling him – which she did, in the process getting scratched and bitten in her thumb by this frantic animal.
The following day, Barbara was sitting at work (she is now employed part time as the Administrator of the Seniors Program, for which she gets paid almost as much as a cleaning lady), when she noticed that her thumb was beginning to swell. She left work at 2:30 and hurried over to the main Maccabi health center in Jerusalem (located in the Clal Building, which I have previously described as the ugliest building in town), waving her swollen thumb in the air so that she would get prompt attention. Her thumb, of course, was infected; so she was given a prescription for an antibiotic, which she got filled at the Maccabi pharmacy down the block. So far, so good, except that everyone, including Barbara, forgot Rule No. 1 about taking antibiotics, which is, DON’T take them on an empty stomach.
Now all this happened in time for Barbara to cross Agrippas St. at 4PM and meet me along with a lot of other people for a tour of the adjoining neighborhoods Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe (both built in 1883 and named for Moses Montefiore, their benefactor). About five minutes into the tour, Barbara, who had been standing, sat down on a stone railing. I walked over to her, and she told me that she did not feel good; she felt as if she were going to faint. If nothing else, my wife is a woman of her word: she promptly fell off the railing onto the sidewalk. I just stood there, looking down at the woman with whom I have been married for twenty nine years, my helpmate, the mother of my children, the love of my life, lying insensible on the ground. Fortunately, there was a doctor and a nurse in the tour group; both of these women took over and restored Barbara to full consciousness (if you are drawing the inference that I am not much good in medical emergencies, you are correct). After a decent rest, time to eat and drink (interrupted by the husband of the doctor, who had come back to alert her that the woman who had arranged the tour [Naomi from the OU Israel Center] had slipped and fell and herself required medical attention), Barbara was fine and was able to return home unaided. We were not charged for the tour.
A few days later, I did get a chance to participate in a tiyul in essentially the same area, this time with with my Ulpan class (I will discuss our return to Ulpan in another entry. Please be patient.). We left our class after taking a brief quiz and walked across King George St. to an area called “The Mashbir” (the name of the first “department store” in Jerusalem) where we met a young woman who served as our tour guide. She soon had us walking through the narrow streets and alleyways which collectively make up an area called Nachlaot, which I have described as a mixture of Mea Shearim and Rehavia. If you know Jerusalem, you probably understand what I’m saying. For the rest of you, here goes: we’re talking about an area in the middle of downtown Jerusalem, a few blocks from where they are tearing up the main street, Jaffa, to build a light rail system, and yet you might think you’re in a small village with tiny streets filled with trees, shrubs, and flowers and carefully preserved houses. The people who live here are a bewildering assortment of hareidim, artists, Bratzlever wannabes, and the usual mix of religious and secular people that you would find elsewhere in downtown Jerusalem. Here we were threading our way at twilight through pathways where I had never been – even though I know the area pretty well. Except for the low voice of our tour guide, who had urged us to be as quiet as possible not to disturb the residents, at times you could have heard a pin drop. The adjectives “calm” and “quiet” rarely seem to apply to anywhere in our ancient capital; it was more like we were in a village in a faraway land – except for the prevalence of synagogues and buildings of Jerusalem stone.
The tiyul ended, and we all went our separate ways. I walked across Agrippas and through the shuk, now closed for business and also strangely quiet (although if you listened v-e-r-y closely, you could almost hear an echo of the men who had been screaming a few hours before, “agvaniot [tomatoes] 2 shekel, kilo) in a never-ending cacophony). I caught a bus up Rehov Yaffa, and then my bus back to Maale Adumim, which, as everyone knows by now, is a little bit east of Yerushalayim.
A FELINE FOOTNOTE: Would that I could say that the two black and white cats, an arthritic old lady from American and a young Sabra, were getting along as well as the men in the competing stalls in the shuk, but they aren’t. More on this and other matters to follow.
Needless to say, as all baby animals do, over the weeks and months, WK began to grow, becoming quite the strapping young cat. Yaffa, meanwhile, had met an appropriate man and was about to get married. She realized that there were two things she would have to give up: her Sephardic eating habits over Pesach, and………her Witty Kitty. Finding a home for her rice and beans would not be a “biggie,” but her cat? There may be as many cats as people in Maale Adumim, and most of these felines depend on human throw-aways for their livelihood. I’m sure some of you are beginning to figure out what comes next, and you are correct. WK, now the size of a young deer, came to co-occupy a litter box with Mimi, our aged American cat, who is not used to sharing. There were quite a few verbal altercations between these two over the next week or so, so when we heard a ruckus in our pinat ochel (dining area) one evening, we assumed it was the two felines fussing. But Mimi was with us in the bedroom, so what could be going on? Barbara went to investigate, and so began the saga of the yarn ball.
A well-meaning friend, herself the manager of a herd of cats, had brought over a ball of yarn, lavender in color, for Witty to play with. In a matter of minutes, he had unwound the ball; and in a few more minutes had wound the yarn around himself and a dining room chair. If we had not intervened, he probably would have dragged the chair around the entire house in his efforts to escape. Barbara realized that we would have to assist in untangling him – which she did, in the process getting scratched and bitten in her thumb by this frantic animal.
The following day, Barbara was sitting at work (she is now employed part time as the Administrator of the Seniors Program, for which she gets paid almost as much as a cleaning lady), when she noticed that her thumb was beginning to swell. She left work at 2:30 and hurried over to the main Maccabi health center in Jerusalem (located in the Clal Building, which I have previously described as the ugliest building in town), waving her swollen thumb in the air so that she would get prompt attention. Her thumb, of course, was infected; so she was given a prescription for an antibiotic, which she got filled at the Maccabi pharmacy down the block. So far, so good, except that everyone, including Barbara, forgot Rule No. 1 about taking antibiotics, which is, DON’T take them on an empty stomach.
Now all this happened in time for Barbara to cross Agrippas St. at 4PM and meet me along with a lot of other people for a tour of the adjoining neighborhoods Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe (both built in 1883 and named for Moses Montefiore, their benefactor). About five minutes into the tour, Barbara, who had been standing, sat down on a stone railing. I walked over to her, and she told me that she did not feel good; she felt as if she were going to faint. If nothing else, my wife is a woman of her word: she promptly fell off the railing onto the sidewalk. I just stood there, looking down at the woman with whom I have been married for twenty nine years, my helpmate, the mother of my children, the love of my life, lying insensible on the ground. Fortunately, there was a doctor and a nurse in the tour group; both of these women took over and restored Barbara to full consciousness (if you are drawing the inference that I am not much good in medical emergencies, you are correct). After a decent rest, time to eat and drink (interrupted by the husband of the doctor, who had come back to alert her that the woman who had arranged the tour [Naomi from the OU Israel Center] had slipped and fell and herself required medical attention), Barbara was fine and was able to return home unaided. We were not charged for the tour.
A few days later, I did get a chance to participate in a tiyul in essentially the same area, this time with with my Ulpan class (I will discuss our return to Ulpan in another entry. Please be patient.). We left our class after taking a brief quiz and walked across King George St. to an area called “The Mashbir” (the name of the first “department store” in Jerusalem) where we met a young woman who served as our tour guide. She soon had us walking through the narrow streets and alleyways which collectively make up an area called Nachlaot, which I have described as a mixture of Mea Shearim and Rehavia. If you know Jerusalem, you probably understand what I’m saying. For the rest of you, here goes: we’re talking about an area in the middle of downtown Jerusalem, a few blocks from where they are tearing up the main street, Jaffa, to build a light rail system, and yet you might think you’re in a small village with tiny streets filled with trees, shrubs, and flowers and carefully preserved houses. The people who live here are a bewildering assortment of hareidim, artists, Bratzlever wannabes, and the usual mix of religious and secular people that you would find elsewhere in downtown Jerusalem. Here we were threading our way at twilight through pathways where I had never been – even though I know the area pretty well. Except for the low voice of our tour guide, who had urged us to be as quiet as possible not to disturb the residents, at times you could have heard a pin drop. The adjectives “calm” and “quiet” rarely seem to apply to anywhere in our ancient capital; it was more like we were in a village in a faraway land – except for the prevalence of synagogues and buildings of Jerusalem stone.
The tiyul ended, and we all went our separate ways. I walked across Agrippas and through the shuk, now closed for business and also strangely quiet (although if you listened v-e-r-y closely, you could almost hear an echo of the men who had been screaming a few hours before, “agvaniot [tomatoes] 2 shekel, kilo) in a never-ending cacophony). I caught a bus up Rehov Yaffa, and then my bus back to Maale Adumim, which, as everyone knows by now, is a little bit east of Yerushalayim.
A FELINE FOOTNOTE: Would that I could say that the two black and white cats, an arthritic old lady from American and a young Sabra, were getting along as well as the men in the competing stalls in the shuk, but they aren’t. More on this and other matters to follow.
Monday, July 28, 2008
"Ambushed," or A Priestly Blessing on a Sunday Afternoon
“Anyone who lives in the Land of Israel should always be happy.” (Elazar Azkari, author of “Yedid Nefesh”)
I realized that it was time for mincha (the afternoon prayers) and I needed to get my rear end in gear and get to shul – something which I don’t always do. The occasion? It was Sunday, July 20, making it the 17th of Tamuz, commemorating the first breach of the walls of the second Beit Hamikdash and the first day of “the three weeks” leading up to Tisha B’Av. It is a (half) fast day, and, therefore, I had roused my body out of bed at 3AM to have breakfast: orange juice with all my pills, softboiled eggs, zucchini bread, and tea; and then just as readily resumed my slumbers. I had spent the entire day indoors. It was much too hot here to frolic outside when you can’t have anything to drink. But now it was time to walk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y up the hill, around the bend, up the path, up the ramp, and around the bend to Mussar Avicha. Once mincha started, we would be almost at the end of the (non-eating) day; one could even entertain thoughts of dinner: in my case, left-over chicken from Shabbat preceded by some of delicious, cold gazpacho.
I didn’t even consider changing my clothes; it was just too hot. So I went to shul wearing exactly what I had been wearing all day: my knee-length beige shorts, an official t-shirt from the Derivatives Russia Conference [March 27 and 28, 2008, Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, Moscow] (there was a time when my t-shirts would come from my kids’ schools; now they come from Tina’s job) and my new crocs (on sale in The Land for 180 shekels; available on the Crocs website for about forty bucks, including shipping – in the US, only). My timing was good; I arrived just as they were taking out the Torah scroll. (Unlike a typical weekday mincha, on a public fast day, there are additions to the prayers as well as a Torah reading and a haftorah.) Having done this many times in The States, I thought I knew what was flying. But, after we said the Amidah, when the shaliach tzibbur (the guy leading the davening) began the repetition and we recited the communal kedusha, it occurred to me that the other cohanim were leaving the room. Then it dawned on me: We have to duchen??!!!! At mincha??!!!!!
If I wanted to describe all the differences, subtle and not so subtle, about living in The Land, I could spend the rest of my life giving examples. Birkat Cohanim (The Cohanic blessing, sometimes called duchening, after the Yiddish word for platform) would be a biggie for me, because it puts me to work. Among the ashkenazim in the lands of the exile, this is performed about twenty times a year – not counting the informal blessing that fathers give their chidren Friday nights: at mussaf (the additional prayers during the morning) on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the festivals. Why only then? Because our Sages decided by that only at these special times would a galut community be in the properly festive frame of mind to receive G-d’s blessing as transmitted by the cohanim. Here in the Land (as many of you are probably tired of hearing) at most batei Knesset (there are some which only do it on Shabbat) the birkat cohanim is done every day at shacharit (morning prayers) and at shacharit and mussaf on Shabbat, Rosh Hodesh, (the new moon) and The Holidays. The fact that we would also be doing it at mincha on this fast day somehow eluded me. Nothing else to be done: I ran after my cohanic brethren, washed my hands, and grabbed a tallit from the rack in the lobby, putting it on hurriedly so I would be ready. It happens that I have two talletot of my own – safe and sound at home: one old one of medium size and weight which I wear during the week, and a nice one, also medium sized but of light-weight “tropical” wool, which I wear on Shabbat. The off-the-rack model from the shul lobby was enormous on me. It was rather heavy – almost blanket weight – probably designed to keep one warm in an unheated shteibel in Vitebsk in the middle of January.
And so, along with a handful of “frat brothers,” I ascended the bima – in my shorts and t-shirt (at least it was white!) completely obscured under my borrowed prayer shawl, my bare feet sticking out from under. “YEVERECHECHA……” (May G-d bless you and keep you safe; may He make His presence seem bright and may He be gracious to you; may He turn his favor your way and create peace for you.) At some point, a thought crept into my head. It was very late in the afternoon on this brutally hot day; we were all very hungry and thirsty and perhaps somewhat fatigued – all because we are commemorating the beginning of the destruction of our Temple, which we have been waiting two thousand years to rebuild; and yet now there was – by definition – collectively more simcha here a little bit east of Yerushalayim than there would be on a Shabbat morning back in New Jersey – wearing our best clothes, anticipating our best food (and perhaps a wee dram of some single malt). How did I know that there was more simcha in this relatively modest beit knesset here in Maale Adumim? Because we were allowed to recite the cohanic blessing!
When the davening was over, Nachum (one of the shul leaders, a wonderful guy who gives wonderfully original and insightful shiurim in English) came over to me and said that he realized that he had not warned me about the duchening. “You looked ambushed,” he said. I admitted that, had I realized I would be “performing,” I would have at least changed my pants. I shared with him my thoughts about levels of simcha, here and elsewhere. His response was, “You don’t have to convince me!” We were waiting for the time to start maariv (evening prayers), after which we would be free, summoning our remaining energy, to race home and eat something. I went up to Baruch P., and repeated my thoughts about the relative levels of simcha here and in The Exile. He also was not taken aback by my idea. He added that there was more simcha in The Land on a typical Shabbat than there would be elsewhere during Neilah (the concluding prayers on Yom Kippur).
I thought about this concept as I walked back home, as I guzzled my gazpacho, and I am still thinking about it. The way I figure it, there are two possibilities: One. Talking about a higher, perpetual level of simcha in The Land is either a vague concept, or simply a vacuous, self-serving idea spread among “the faithful,” i.e.; those of us who have chosen to live here, a way of laying a guilt trip on friends and family who have decided differently where to live, something which the Exilic community needn’t act upon or take seriously. Two. Our Sages understood something of enormous profundity about the value – personal and collective – of living here, which The Galut is ignoring at its peril.
The more I thought about “simcha in The Land,” the more I realized that in discussing this level of abstraction I was out of my league. It’s been unusually difficult for me to explain what this is all about; but I could at least organize my thoughts. Question number one: what are we talking about when we use the word “simcha” in this context? We can’t be using the word as in “I’m going to a simcha tomorrow night, so I‘ll be home late.” We can’t be implying that a wedding or a bar/bat mitzvah in New Jersey is less joyful or meaningful to the participants than one in our neck of the woods (although an event here will be far less expensive and much less formal. There will be no “Black Tie” or “Black Tie Optional.” There will probably be “No Tie.” At one of the weddings we were invited to last fall, the officiating rabbi wore a sweater over his white shirt.) It can’t be that right now Jews in The Land are individually happier than Jews not-in-The Land. So I’m assuming that the simcha we’re after is something collective, affecting the entirety of The People Israel.
Perhaps the simcha we’re describing is related to the kedusha (holiness) that has always been present in The Land since G-d gave it to us, and perhaps it is related to our collective experience as a people. In this tiny corner of the world where we are always in need of more water, we have collectively experienced our greatest tragedies and our greatest times of joy. Now you could argue that the exilic agony of all the pogroms, the expulsions, the book-burnings, the forced conversions, and The Holocaust, is in total greater than the pain of the destruction of both Temples and our expulsion from our Home. And one could respond that without the expulsion of the Jewish people from The Land of Israel almost nineteen hundred years ago, none of the evils of the exile would have occurred.
But what about the simcha? There was also real joy here once upon a time. It would be almost impossible to imagine the mass enthusiasm when tens of thousands of people would arrive in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at The Beit Hamikdash on one of the pilgrimage festivals. But in The Exile? Can anyone point to one moment of true joy for the Jewish people anywhere else in the world? Any time in the last 2000 years? (Yeah, once. In 1948. But that proves my point.) Creativity, yes. Learning, yes. Clinging to G-d, yes. Satisfaction, pleasure, or even prosperity in those periods between the pogroms, expulsions, book-burnings, conversions, or the threat thereof, yes. But joy? Explain to me how it would be possible for a humiliated People, scattered and adrift for close to two millennia to experience joy?
It would be a gross overstatement to suggest that there is now unceasing Joy in The Land. But it is fair to say that as the Jewish people continue to return there is now the possibility, or even a remez,(a hint) of joy from time to time – even with everything that is going wrong here, which I needn’t catalogue. The best analogy I can think of is this: you’re trying to download or install a huge piece of very important software on a very slow computer. It seems to be taking forever, and you’re worried the program might crash. But you’re certain that sooner or later, perhaps with a little bit of help from a friend, the program will be successfully installed.
Something very important is being “installed” here, even though it taking much, much longer to “download” than we’d all like, we seem to be getting constant, annoying “error messages,” and there are times when we are having difficulty contacting “tech support” which is supposed to be available 24/7. What is amazing is that there were men of great foresight like the aforementioned Rabbi Azkari, (part of the circle of kabbalists who lived in Safed) who somehow understood that this process would be beginning – in the midst of almost total desolation, which is what our Homeland seemed to be 500 years ago, and when it would have seemed impossible for anybody to be happy here.
So let’s leave it at that: the simcha that propels a heavenly blessing on a Sunday afternoon is based on a pain created two thousand years before, which we as a People have never forgotten. And it has been nurtured assiduously by our remembrance of a promise made even further back to our very distant ancestors that one day all would be good, and then it would really be good. And now, we can begin to imagine that this promise of Redemption might be starting to come true before our own eyes. So I am transmitting a blessing with the full expectation that there will be a time when that blessing will be repeated on the 17th of Tammuz – on a full stomach.
I realized that it was time for mincha (the afternoon prayers) and I needed to get my rear end in gear and get to shul – something which I don’t always do. The occasion? It was Sunday, July 20, making it the 17th of Tamuz, commemorating the first breach of the walls of the second Beit Hamikdash and the first day of “the three weeks” leading up to Tisha B’Av. It is a (half) fast day, and, therefore, I had roused my body out of bed at 3AM to have breakfast: orange juice with all my pills, softboiled eggs, zucchini bread, and tea; and then just as readily resumed my slumbers. I had spent the entire day indoors. It was much too hot here to frolic outside when you can’t have anything to drink. But now it was time to walk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y up the hill, around the bend, up the path, up the ramp, and around the bend to Mussar Avicha. Once mincha started, we would be almost at the end of the (non-eating) day; one could even entertain thoughts of dinner: in my case, left-over chicken from Shabbat preceded by some of delicious, cold gazpacho.
I didn’t even consider changing my clothes; it was just too hot. So I went to shul wearing exactly what I had been wearing all day: my knee-length beige shorts, an official t-shirt from the Derivatives Russia Conference [March 27 and 28, 2008, Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, Moscow] (there was a time when my t-shirts would come from my kids’ schools; now they come from Tina’s job) and my new crocs (on sale in The Land for 180 shekels; available on the Crocs website for about forty bucks, including shipping – in the US, only). My timing was good; I arrived just as they were taking out the Torah scroll. (Unlike a typical weekday mincha, on a public fast day, there are additions to the prayers as well as a Torah reading and a haftorah.) Having done this many times in The States, I thought I knew what was flying. But, after we said the Amidah, when the shaliach tzibbur (the guy leading the davening) began the repetition and we recited the communal kedusha, it occurred to me that the other cohanim were leaving the room. Then it dawned on me: We have to duchen??!!!! At mincha??!!!!!
If I wanted to describe all the differences, subtle and not so subtle, about living in The Land, I could spend the rest of my life giving examples. Birkat Cohanim (The Cohanic blessing, sometimes called duchening, after the Yiddish word for platform) would be a biggie for me, because it puts me to work. Among the ashkenazim in the lands of the exile, this is performed about twenty times a year – not counting the informal blessing that fathers give their chidren Friday nights: at mussaf (the additional prayers during the morning) on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the festivals. Why only then? Because our Sages decided by that only at these special times would a galut community be in the properly festive frame of mind to receive G-d’s blessing as transmitted by the cohanim. Here in the Land (as many of you are probably tired of hearing) at most batei Knesset (there are some which only do it on Shabbat) the birkat cohanim is done every day at shacharit (morning prayers) and at shacharit and mussaf on Shabbat, Rosh Hodesh, (the new moon) and The Holidays. The fact that we would also be doing it at mincha on this fast day somehow eluded me. Nothing else to be done: I ran after my cohanic brethren, washed my hands, and grabbed a tallit from the rack in the lobby, putting it on hurriedly so I would be ready. It happens that I have two talletot of my own – safe and sound at home: one old one of medium size and weight which I wear during the week, and a nice one, also medium sized but of light-weight “tropical” wool, which I wear on Shabbat. The off-the-rack model from the shul lobby was enormous on me. It was rather heavy – almost blanket weight – probably designed to keep one warm in an unheated shteibel in Vitebsk in the middle of January.
And so, along with a handful of “frat brothers,” I ascended the bima – in my shorts and t-shirt (at least it was white!) completely obscured under my borrowed prayer shawl, my bare feet sticking out from under. “YEVERECHECHA……” (May G-d bless you and keep you safe; may He make His presence seem bright and may He be gracious to you; may He turn his favor your way and create peace for you.) At some point, a thought crept into my head. It was very late in the afternoon on this brutally hot day; we were all very hungry and thirsty and perhaps somewhat fatigued – all because we are commemorating the beginning of the destruction of our Temple, which we have been waiting two thousand years to rebuild; and yet now there was – by definition – collectively more simcha here a little bit east of Yerushalayim than there would be on a Shabbat morning back in New Jersey – wearing our best clothes, anticipating our best food (and perhaps a wee dram of some single malt). How did I know that there was more simcha in this relatively modest beit knesset here in Maale Adumim? Because we were allowed to recite the cohanic blessing!
When the davening was over, Nachum (one of the shul leaders, a wonderful guy who gives wonderfully original and insightful shiurim in English) came over to me and said that he realized that he had not warned me about the duchening. “You looked ambushed,” he said. I admitted that, had I realized I would be “performing,” I would have at least changed my pants. I shared with him my thoughts about levels of simcha, here and elsewhere. His response was, “You don’t have to convince me!” We were waiting for the time to start maariv (evening prayers), after which we would be free, summoning our remaining energy, to race home and eat something. I went up to Baruch P., and repeated my thoughts about the relative levels of simcha here and in The Exile. He also was not taken aback by my idea. He added that there was more simcha in The Land on a typical Shabbat than there would be elsewhere during Neilah (the concluding prayers on Yom Kippur).
I thought about this concept as I walked back home, as I guzzled my gazpacho, and I am still thinking about it. The way I figure it, there are two possibilities: One. Talking about a higher, perpetual level of simcha in The Land is either a vague concept, or simply a vacuous, self-serving idea spread among “the faithful,” i.e.; those of us who have chosen to live here, a way of laying a guilt trip on friends and family who have decided differently where to live, something which the Exilic community needn’t act upon or take seriously. Two. Our Sages understood something of enormous profundity about the value – personal and collective – of living here, which The Galut is ignoring at its peril.
The more I thought about “simcha in The Land,” the more I realized that in discussing this level of abstraction I was out of my league. It’s been unusually difficult for me to explain what this is all about; but I could at least organize my thoughts. Question number one: what are we talking about when we use the word “simcha” in this context? We can’t be using the word as in “I’m going to a simcha tomorrow night, so I‘ll be home late.” We can’t be implying that a wedding or a bar/bat mitzvah in New Jersey is less joyful or meaningful to the participants than one in our neck of the woods (although an event here will be far less expensive and much less formal. There will be no “Black Tie” or “Black Tie Optional.” There will probably be “No Tie.” At one of the weddings we were invited to last fall, the officiating rabbi wore a sweater over his white shirt.) It can’t be that right now Jews in The Land are individually happier than Jews not-in-The Land. So I’m assuming that the simcha we’re after is something collective, affecting the entirety of The People Israel.
Perhaps the simcha we’re describing is related to the kedusha (holiness) that has always been present in The Land since G-d gave it to us, and perhaps it is related to our collective experience as a people. In this tiny corner of the world where we are always in need of more water, we have collectively experienced our greatest tragedies and our greatest times of joy. Now you could argue that the exilic agony of all the pogroms, the expulsions, the book-burnings, the forced conversions, and The Holocaust, is in total greater than the pain of the destruction of both Temples and our expulsion from our Home. And one could respond that without the expulsion of the Jewish people from The Land of Israel almost nineteen hundred years ago, none of the evils of the exile would have occurred.
But what about the simcha? There was also real joy here once upon a time. It would be almost impossible to imagine the mass enthusiasm when tens of thousands of people would arrive in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at The Beit Hamikdash on one of the pilgrimage festivals. But in The Exile? Can anyone point to one moment of true joy for the Jewish people anywhere else in the world? Any time in the last 2000 years? (Yeah, once. In 1948. But that proves my point.) Creativity, yes. Learning, yes. Clinging to G-d, yes. Satisfaction, pleasure, or even prosperity in those periods between the pogroms, expulsions, book-burnings, conversions, or the threat thereof, yes. But joy? Explain to me how it would be possible for a humiliated People, scattered and adrift for close to two millennia to experience joy?
It would be a gross overstatement to suggest that there is now unceasing Joy in The Land. But it is fair to say that as the Jewish people continue to return there is now the possibility, or even a remez,(a hint) of joy from time to time – even with everything that is going wrong here, which I needn’t catalogue. The best analogy I can think of is this: you’re trying to download or install a huge piece of very important software on a very slow computer. It seems to be taking forever, and you’re worried the program might crash. But you’re certain that sooner or later, perhaps with a little bit of help from a friend, the program will be successfully installed.
Something very important is being “installed” here, even though it taking much, much longer to “download” than we’d all like, we seem to be getting constant, annoying “error messages,” and there are times when we are having difficulty contacting “tech support” which is supposed to be available 24/7. What is amazing is that there were men of great foresight like the aforementioned Rabbi Azkari, (part of the circle of kabbalists who lived in Safed) who somehow understood that this process would be beginning – in the midst of almost total desolation, which is what our Homeland seemed to be 500 years ago, and when it would have seemed impossible for anybody to be happy here.
So let’s leave it at that: the simcha that propels a heavenly blessing on a Sunday afternoon is based on a pain created two thousand years before, which we as a People have never forgotten. And it has been nurtured assiduously by our remembrance of a promise made even further back to our very distant ancestors that one day all would be good, and then it would really be good. And now, we can begin to imagine that this promise of Redemption might be starting to come true before our own eyes. So I am transmitting a blessing with the full expectation that there will be a time when that blessing will be repeated on the 17th of Tammuz – on a full stomach.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A Dustup in Pottsville
I hope that none of you are thinking that, with all the excitement of living here a little bit east of Yerushalayim, we are not mindful of what is occurring in the rest of the planet – affectionately known as chutz l’aretz. Six days a week, The New York Times, masquerading as the International Herald-Tribune, arrives at our door, and, because that newspaper undiluted would cause serious brain rot, we also get the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. My favorite newspaper, The New York Sun, is only an internet click away from my computer screen, as are any number of other sources of information. So, if something interesting is going on wherever you are, we’re on top of it, whether it’s political, topical, or gastronomical. Which reminds me: can anyone explain how tomatoes get salmonella? I think of this whenever I am standing at my favorite stand at Mahane Yehuda, picking out luscious, ripe, healthy agvaniot, which sell here, depending on the time of year, for as little as twenty five cents a pound. It makes up for the totally tasteless corn which is being peddled around. Speaking of the totally tasteless, the internecine struggles for the presidential nomination in America are, if nothing else, a lot more entertaining than anything the Kadima group and their Knesset allies could ever put together. I’ve been considering which American politician most closely resembles Ehud Olmert, Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. But both of these were semi-tragic figures, talented men brought down their own personal demons. A better comparison would be Spiro Agnew, a man who might have tried to sell you your own used car.
And from the totally tasteless, we can neatly segue into another zone of discomfort which we can entitle “Am I, or am I not in Chelm” (to paraphrase something in a letter which one of our friends had published in JPost). She was referring to a recent bizarre event here in The Land with a rather tragic ending. An East Jerusalem Arab was working at a construction site near the Central Bus Station, and for reasons not quite clear, drove his tractor onto Jaffa Road, going against traffic, smashing into cars and buses, resulting in the death of three Jews. This madman was finally stopped when a young soldier who had just finished his army basic training killed him with a borrowed revolver. A subsequent police investigation exonerated one of their officers who had failed to stop the terrorist. The report “explained” that when the policeman arrived on the scene, the construction vehicle had stopped, and the Arab was seemingly dead. However, shortly after that, a Hareidi man hurled a rock through the vehicle’s window; whereupon the Arab suddenly regained consciousness and then continued on his rampage, causing the death of the three innocent bystanders. The soldier was appropriately celebrated, but no one mentioned the identity of the Hareidi rock thrower. My personal feeling is that if this man can truly raise the dead, he may well be the Messiah we have been awaiting these thousands of years.
A situation back in The States which I have been following with similar not-to-be-believed features is the on-going desecration of G-d’s name by Agriprocessors, Inc., “the nation’s largest kosher meat producer,” the Rubashkin family which owns the company, as well as the company’s detractors and supporters. (And if you are patient and read until the end, you will figure out why I am taking up your precious time in discussing this particular train wreck.)
Several years ago, somebody employed by PETA managed to get into their main plant in Postville, Iowa and surreptitiously videoed scenes that seemed to document their allegations of animal abuse. Now my take on that is this: it takes a special bit of genius to make PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a group on the extreme lunatic fringe of the “animal rights” movement) appear to be the “good guys” in a dispute. How the Rubashkins managed to do that, I’ll never understand, but they pulled it off.
When one was disposed to forget about all that, with assurances that the abuses had been corrected, in May of this year, Federal immigration officials raided ther Pottsville plant and arrested 390 employees who were “illegal aliens.” Not surprisingly, allegations followed of labor abuses, other mistreatment of these workers, sexual abuse, even that illegal drugs had been manufactured in situ. The Rubashkins and their supporters were “shocked, shocked” to find out that so many of their employees (ten percent of the population of Pottsville) were working illegally. They had simply not noticed that three quarters of the almost 1000 employees had suspicious social security numbers (according to an affidavit filed by federal agents).
As a consequence of these events, labor unions and organizations which focus on specialized “human rights” issues have joined the “animal rights” people in attacking AgriProcessors. The ranks of these critics also include Jews, including leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements. . One Conservative group has called for the creation of an “ethical standards-based certification of kosher food.” Here are religious leaders who normally would not be called upon to certify bottled water – and a majority of whose members are not concerned with issues of kashrut on a daily basis – suddenly injecting themselves into the discussion. The story just gets weirder and weirder.
To make matters even worse, several representatives from various Orthodox groups have chosen to write articles defending Agriprocessors. For example, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the director of public affairs for Agudath Israel (and someone who should know better) wrote an article which I saw in the JPost several weeks ago, in which he summarized the sordid recent events and then asked, “Where’s the presumption of innocence…?” He quotes from a statement from the Rabbinical Council of America (failing to mention that the RCA is the rabbinical arm of the Orthodox Union, which is responsible for providing the certification of kashrut to Agriprocessors) “in the absence of hard facts” one shouldn’t “rush to premature judgments… or impute guilt…” Rabbi Shafran does not understand “…why so many Jewish groups, clergy, papers and pundits are so energetically railing against Agriprocessors in the wake of the recent government raid. The righteous indignation has the smell of adolescent excitement at the discovery of a new ‘noble’ cause.” (In listing the “adolescents” involved in this crusade, he mentions “well-known ‘activists’ like Ruth Messinger, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Avi Weiss” as signators to a boycott petition.)
Rabbi Shafran forgot to mention that, among other things, the company paid a settlement of six hundred thousand dollars to the E.P.A. for wastewater pollution in 2006 and was assessed one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in fines this year by state officials for various health, safety, and labor violations. You can keep your family well supplied with rib steaks for a long time with that kind of money. He also did not mention that KAJ, an agency which also certifies kosher foods, withdrew its certification of Agriprocessors in April. So, if I am permitted a response to the good Rabbi Shafran, as well as the esteemed rabbis who comprise the RCA, it is simply: G.M.A.B., which stands for “give me a break.” (I do not know if Rabbi Shafran has any experience in the field of law; if he does, he might want to consider joining the legal team for Ehud Olmert, who will need all the help he can get for quite a while.)
One might think that this can’t get any sillier. One would be wrong. Last week, I read another column, also reprinted in JPost, by a rabbi from Orange County, NY, who basically repeated the same defense of Agriprocessors. However this rabbi pointed out that Rabbi Riskin had nothing to do with the campaign against the meat packer. This is simply too delicious. The director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America writes an article about the “presumption of innocence,” in which he inaccurately (until further notice, I am accepting the Orange county version) attacks another rabbi for violating “Jewish ethics.”
In regurgitating the same talking points about Agriprocessors, our second rabbi referred to Rabbi Riskin as “Steven,” even though Rabbi Riskin has called himself “Shlomo” for at least thirty years. I am reminded of a mental game Barbara and I have enjoyed playing, which we call “The name on the checkbook.” Many of the people we know in our Jewish world were given an “American” name on their birth certificate, but have chosen to use their “Jewish” name with family and friends – retaining their original legal name. So if you are trying to find “Dovid” in the phone book, remember to look for “Bernard.” And if you call “Eli” at work, remember to ask for “Elliot.” Surely, our second rabbi knows Rabbi Riskin’s name. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what this little dig is all about.
Believe it or not, all this examination of human folly was simply a prelude to my main point, which goes back to Rabbi Shafran’s attack in which he referred to Ruth Messinger and Rabbis Riskin and Weiss as “activists.” Now I have a lot of trouble with that terminology, going back to my days as a caseworker and supervisor in what was then called the NYC Department of Social Services. We had a union which had elected officers and paid staff. In addition, each work location elected shop stewards. Then there were “activists,” people who were somehow “involved” in the union, but were not authorized by anybody to do anything. To put it simply, if you were an “activist,” you were a nobody. You might think you “counted,” but you really didn’t. Don’t agree with my definition? How would you use the term, and to whom would it apply? Would anyone call the late Lubavitch rebbe a kiruv activist? Former Vice President Al Gore an anti-global warming activist? So why would you denigrate Ms. Messinger, a former Manhattan Borough President and current CEO of American Jewish World Service? And why would you insult Orthodox rabbis, even if you don’t agree with them?
Is it merely a coincidence that Rabbi Shafran and his colleague repeat the same lame arguments in defending a company as problematic as Agriprocessors, and, at the same time, find it necessary to belittle as prominent a person as Rabbi Shlomo Riskin? Many of us are aware of his work at Lincoln Square Synagogue which started the revival of Orthodox Jewish life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Anyone who has stood on the hills of Efrat and looked out at the surrounding communities in the Gush Etzion bloc must be at least dimly aware of his role in its development. My hope is that some day, Rabbi Shafran will use his considerable gifts to defend Rabbi Riskin and the tens of thousands of Jews who live between Jerusalem and Hebron.
Yes, we have many things here in The Land as troublesome as the controversies surrounding Agriprocessors, and, unfortunately, we are in the front seat when it comes to corruption. But, ultimately, our struggle will of necessity revolve around our continued right to live in Efrat, Maale Adumim, and even Tel Aviv. There is a certain nobility, an honoring of G-d’s name to this cause. Most of us would rather in this Land engage in this battle, rather than in a dustup with no dignity in Pottsville, Iowa.
And from the totally tasteless, we can neatly segue into another zone of discomfort which we can entitle “Am I, or am I not in Chelm” (to paraphrase something in a letter which one of our friends had published in JPost). She was referring to a recent bizarre event here in The Land with a rather tragic ending. An East Jerusalem Arab was working at a construction site near the Central Bus Station, and for reasons not quite clear, drove his tractor onto Jaffa Road, going against traffic, smashing into cars and buses, resulting in the death of three Jews. This madman was finally stopped when a young soldier who had just finished his army basic training killed him with a borrowed revolver. A subsequent police investigation exonerated one of their officers who had failed to stop the terrorist. The report “explained” that when the policeman arrived on the scene, the construction vehicle had stopped, and the Arab was seemingly dead. However, shortly after that, a Hareidi man hurled a rock through the vehicle’s window; whereupon the Arab suddenly regained consciousness and then continued on his rampage, causing the death of the three innocent bystanders. The soldier was appropriately celebrated, but no one mentioned the identity of the Hareidi rock thrower. My personal feeling is that if this man can truly raise the dead, he may well be the Messiah we have been awaiting these thousands of years.
A situation back in The States which I have been following with similar not-to-be-believed features is the on-going desecration of G-d’s name by Agriprocessors, Inc., “the nation’s largest kosher meat producer,” the Rubashkin family which owns the company, as well as the company’s detractors and supporters. (And if you are patient and read until the end, you will figure out why I am taking up your precious time in discussing this particular train wreck.)
Several years ago, somebody employed by PETA managed to get into their main plant in Postville, Iowa and surreptitiously videoed scenes that seemed to document their allegations of animal abuse. Now my take on that is this: it takes a special bit of genius to make PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a group on the extreme lunatic fringe of the “animal rights” movement) appear to be the “good guys” in a dispute. How the Rubashkins managed to do that, I’ll never understand, but they pulled it off.
When one was disposed to forget about all that, with assurances that the abuses had been corrected, in May of this year, Federal immigration officials raided ther Pottsville plant and arrested 390 employees who were “illegal aliens.” Not surprisingly, allegations followed of labor abuses, other mistreatment of these workers, sexual abuse, even that illegal drugs had been manufactured in situ. The Rubashkins and their supporters were “shocked, shocked” to find out that so many of their employees (ten percent of the population of Pottsville) were working illegally. They had simply not noticed that three quarters of the almost 1000 employees had suspicious social security numbers (according to an affidavit filed by federal agents).
As a consequence of these events, labor unions and organizations which focus on specialized “human rights” issues have joined the “animal rights” people in attacking AgriProcessors. The ranks of these critics also include Jews, including leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements. . One Conservative group has called for the creation of an “ethical standards-based certification of kosher food.” Here are religious leaders who normally would not be called upon to certify bottled water – and a majority of whose members are not concerned with issues of kashrut on a daily basis – suddenly injecting themselves into the discussion. The story just gets weirder and weirder.
To make matters even worse, several representatives from various Orthodox groups have chosen to write articles defending Agriprocessors. For example, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the director of public affairs for Agudath Israel (and someone who should know better) wrote an article which I saw in the JPost several weeks ago, in which he summarized the sordid recent events and then asked, “Where’s the presumption of innocence…?” He quotes from a statement from the Rabbinical Council of America (failing to mention that the RCA is the rabbinical arm of the Orthodox Union, which is responsible for providing the certification of kashrut to Agriprocessors) “in the absence of hard facts” one shouldn’t “rush to premature judgments… or impute guilt…” Rabbi Shafran does not understand “…why so many Jewish groups, clergy, papers and pundits are so energetically railing against Agriprocessors in the wake of the recent government raid. The righteous indignation has the smell of adolescent excitement at the discovery of a new ‘noble’ cause.” (In listing the “adolescents” involved in this crusade, he mentions “well-known ‘activists’ like Ruth Messinger, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Avi Weiss” as signators to a boycott petition.)
Rabbi Shafran forgot to mention that, among other things, the company paid a settlement of six hundred thousand dollars to the E.P.A. for wastewater pollution in 2006 and was assessed one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in fines this year by state officials for various health, safety, and labor violations. You can keep your family well supplied with rib steaks for a long time with that kind of money. He also did not mention that KAJ, an agency which also certifies kosher foods, withdrew its certification of Agriprocessors in April. So, if I am permitted a response to the good Rabbi Shafran, as well as the esteemed rabbis who comprise the RCA, it is simply: G.M.A.B., which stands for “give me a break.” (I do not know if Rabbi Shafran has any experience in the field of law; if he does, he might want to consider joining the legal team for Ehud Olmert, who will need all the help he can get for quite a while.)
One might think that this can’t get any sillier. One would be wrong. Last week, I read another column, also reprinted in JPost, by a rabbi from Orange County, NY, who basically repeated the same defense of Agriprocessors. However this rabbi pointed out that Rabbi Riskin had nothing to do with the campaign against the meat packer. This is simply too delicious. The director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America writes an article about the “presumption of innocence,” in which he inaccurately (until further notice, I am accepting the Orange county version) attacks another rabbi for violating “Jewish ethics.”
In regurgitating the same talking points about Agriprocessors, our second rabbi referred to Rabbi Riskin as “Steven,” even though Rabbi Riskin has called himself “Shlomo” for at least thirty years. I am reminded of a mental game Barbara and I have enjoyed playing, which we call “The name on the checkbook.” Many of the people we know in our Jewish world were given an “American” name on their birth certificate, but have chosen to use their “Jewish” name with family and friends – retaining their original legal name. So if you are trying to find “Dovid” in the phone book, remember to look for “Bernard.” And if you call “Eli” at work, remember to ask for “Elliot.” Surely, our second rabbi knows Rabbi Riskin’s name. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what this little dig is all about.
Believe it or not, all this examination of human folly was simply a prelude to my main point, which goes back to Rabbi Shafran’s attack in which he referred to Ruth Messinger and Rabbis Riskin and Weiss as “activists.” Now I have a lot of trouble with that terminology, going back to my days as a caseworker and supervisor in what was then called the NYC Department of Social Services. We had a union which had elected officers and paid staff. In addition, each work location elected shop stewards. Then there were “activists,” people who were somehow “involved” in the union, but were not authorized by anybody to do anything. To put it simply, if you were an “activist,” you were a nobody. You might think you “counted,” but you really didn’t. Don’t agree with my definition? How would you use the term, and to whom would it apply? Would anyone call the late Lubavitch rebbe a kiruv activist? Former Vice President Al Gore an anti-global warming activist? So why would you denigrate Ms. Messinger, a former Manhattan Borough President and current CEO of American Jewish World Service? And why would you insult Orthodox rabbis, even if you don’t agree with them?
Is it merely a coincidence that Rabbi Shafran and his colleague repeat the same lame arguments in defending a company as problematic as Agriprocessors, and, at the same time, find it necessary to belittle as prominent a person as Rabbi Shlomo Riskin? Many of us are aware of his work at Lincoln Square Synagogue which started the revival of Orthodox Jewish life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Anyone who has stood on the hills of Efrat and looked out at the surrounding communities in the Gush Etzion bloc must be at least dimly aware of his role in its development. My hope is that some day, Rabbi Shafran will use his considerable gifts to defend Rabbi Riskin and the tens of thousands of Jews who live between Jerusalem and Hebron.
Yes, we have many things here in The Land as troublesome as the controversies surrounding Agriprocessors, and, unfortunately, we are in the front seat when it comes to corruption. But, ultimately, our struggle will of necessity revolve around our continued right to live in Efrat, Maale Adumim, and even Tel Aviv. There is a certain nobility, an honoring of G-d’s name to this cause. Most of us would rather in this Land engage in this battle, rather than in a dustup with no dignity in Pottsville, Iowa.
Monday, July 7, 2008
The Man Who Might Not Have Been.....
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away
(Attributed to many sources, but copyrighted [1939] asTHE LITTLE MAN WHO WASN'T THEREBy Harold Adamson / Bernie Hanighen)
One of the difficulties of being a “newbie” in a new land is getting the “how, when, and where” straight. There were a lot of things that I had read or heard about before we made aliyah that I want to do; the challenge is getting the details straight so that we would be able to. For example, every Lag B’omer there is this HUGE festivity in Meron (a small town near Tzvat where the great kabbalist R’ Shimon Ben Yochai is buried), but I could not figure out how to get there. So we hung out in Maale Adumim and watched kids (and their wanna-be-kids dads) make bonfires so big it would have scared the pants off Smokey The Bear (Remember, Only you can prevent forest fires!).
I was determined to do better for Yom Yerushalayim, which occupies a strange and precarious place in the Israeli calendar. Unlike Yom Haatzmaut, which is celebrated throughout the land – except in Arab villages and Mea Shearim – Yom Yerushalayim is wildly celebrated in the city itself and in the areas liberated from Jordanian rule in 1967 and ignored in certain other places. This is to be expected: those people who want to give away our land are hardly likely to celebrate the day when we obtained it! Plus there is the theological element. If we consider the victory in 1948 to be a miracle, what are we to make of the events in 1967? All the Arab armies had to do was keep on marching and the Jewish state would have been history. Instead, we won an impossible victory AND gained control of the Temple Mount, Ir Atika (the Old City), and a few minor areas like the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the sites of the tombs of Rachel and Joseph. In addition, our country stopped being nine miles wide in its center, and we had defensible borders. So why would a current generation of politicians who act as if there is no G-d in history want to make a big deal of this day?
Nonetheless, while our secular leaders avoid the Kotel like the plague, thousands of Yeshiva students dance through the Old City to the Western Wall. At least that was what I had always been told. Now that we are here, I needed to find out when and where all of this was going to happen. According to R’ Mordechai Friedfertig’s schedule of events, the bochrim were supposed to start gathering at around 3:30PM at Kikar Tzion (where Ben Yehudah connects to Jaffa St.) and at some point thereafter head down to the Kotel. Now I’m not such a freier that I would show up at 3:30. I figured 4:30. But when I arrived at Rehov Yaffo at that time, I could see that the streets were blocked off, the sound stages were being set up, and there were a few hundred random students milling around. I walked around for about half an hour and took some photographs. Nothing much seemed to be happening, so I decided to walk down through the Old City to the Western Wall. I had no idea how much activity there would be there, but, if nothing else, I would at least be at the Kotel. I took my standard route: through the Jaffa gate, stay on the main road until you get to a small street which I believe is called St. Andrew’s, take a left there and proceed more or less on a straight path until the steps leading down to the Cardo, keep going straight until you get to the series of steps leading down to the Kotel plaza. Sure enough, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary happening there either, but it took me no more than eleven seconds to locate a minyan for mincha. A soundstage was being set up, but after listening to the interminable “ehad, shteim” into the microphone, I realized that nothing was going to happen here for quite a while, so I decided to head back to Jaffa, grab a quick bite, and somewhere catch a bus to the Nefesh B’Nefesh office, where I was supposed to meet Barbara for a seminar on budgeting your money in Israel. I retraced my steps: up the stairs, past the shops, past the reconstruction of the Hurva synagogue, past the Cardo, up the winding streets in the Jewish Quarter, and finally out onto the thoroughfare which leads to the Jaffa Gate. Along the way, I ran into a family I knew from Maale Adumim; the woman told me that the yeshiva kids had finally assembled at Kikar Tzion and were headed towards the Old City. OK: I’ll take that into consideration.
Needless to say, I was completely unprepared for what I saw as I came out of the Jaffa gate. Within no more than an hour after I had left a fairly empty Kikar Tzion, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people had assembled there and had begun heading towards the Old City. But for now, this huge throng of people had gathered around a soundstage set up in Kikar Tzahal (the renovated and renamed plaza where Bar-Lev and Rehov Yaffo come together) and were singing, waving flags, dancing with flags, dancing with each other.
People who know me long and well know that I am not a stranger to rallies, marches, demonstrations, and picket lines. The fact that a large number of people have gathered in one place does not automatically excite me. There is no automatic wisdom in numbers; the size of a gathering bears no relationship to its virtue or merit. Even a good cause does not guarantee a sense of urgency: many of the Soviet Jewry rallies held in New York in the seventies and eighties seemed like giant picnics (unlike the actual situation on the ground in Moscow or Leningrad).
But there was no question that I was now witnessing the real thing, a sense of joy and urgency coming together into a kind of ecstasy which is very hard to describe (and also next to impossible to photograph). No question: I had to stay a while to witness this.
Then the mass of people began moving, but weren’t they heading the wrong way? I had assumed that they would go more or less as I had done, the safe way through the Jaffa Gate. Instead, they were heading down Bar-Lev. Could it be? Yes! They were heading towards the Damascus Gate! I hadn’t been there since 1980!
Many of my audience will have no idea what this is all about; so let me digress and explain. The Damascus Gate is itself in a part of Jerusalem heavily populated by Muslim Arabs, and it leads into the so-called “Arab Quarter.” When I first visited Jerusalem in 1980, there was no problem walking anywhere in Jerusalem and the Old City. Unlike the “Jewish Quarter,” which had been more or less turned into rubble during the years when it was under Jordanian rule, and which is being lovingly restored and rebuilt, the rest of the Old City looks exactly the way it was for hundreds of years. In 1980, Barbara and I had spent many hours walking through the incredible alleyways, past the hundreds of stalls selling either foodstuffs or Arab versions of “tchochkeles,” savoring the ambience and taking photographs (the amazing contrast of light and dark in these narrow streets is unmistakable). The Arab areas are still filled with tourists, especially Christians looking for the Via Dolorosa – essentially a series of narrow streets like many others, but with a street sign saying “Via Dolorosa.” But by the time we returned to Jerusalem in 1988, things had changed markedly. Most of the Arab shopkeepers were “on strike,” and their stalls were shut tight. One felt less comfortable just strolling around these areas, and it seemed less important to do so. The fewer Jews walking around the Arab areas, the less safe it seems for other Jews – even though there are lots of people there and the area is guarded by police and soldiers. Until recently, my buddy, R’ Mordecai Friedfertig, used to walk through the Damascus Gate on his way to his job at Rav Aviner’s yeshiva, but one day, one of the teachers there was slightly wounded when an Arab attacked him with a knife. Now Mordy goes the longer and safer way to get to work.
But there is safety in numbers – especially really big numbers. Thousands and thousands of mostly young people – escorted by a full complement of trained army personnel – were going to “take back” our streets and go to the Kotel through the narrow streets where we almost never, ever go. As this enormous throng of people headed down Rehov Bar-Lev, all thoughts of my meeting up with Barbara vanished from my mind (there was so much noise that I couldn’t have called her on my cell phone). This was too good to pass up! I joined the line of marchers, of course taking pictures as I went.
Those of you who are familiar with the Damascus Gate realize that it’s much narrower than the entrances at the Jaffa Gate, and it certainly wasn’t designed to accommodate a huge throng (in fact, on the contrary, it was built to prevent an invading army from entering except in small, “defeatable” numbers). And you get to it by going down a series of steps which bring you to a large open area. So try to imagine the following scene: you’re standing at the top looking down. Behind you are thousands of people trying to get to where you are. Ahead of you, the steps are filled with people, the plaza is filled with more people, all waiting to get through this narrow entrance way. While they are waiting, these thousands in the plaza are singing, dancing, and waving their Israeli flags. You might describe it as a Shlomo Carlebach concert from 1975 morphed into an army of Jewish Crusaders.
Finally, it was my turn to enter the Old City. I had not remembered this, but, not only is the Gate itself narrow, but it opens into a dark, narrow alleyway (as opposed to the Jaffa Gate, which opens into a large, open area filled with stores of all kinds). As I entered the Gate, looking at the closed stalls of money changers and at dark, gloomy walls, hundreds of people around me were singing “YERUSHALAYIM” as loudly as they could, with an unmistakable certitude that, with G-d’s help, our eternal capital will remain undivided and that the light of true shalom will penetrate these forbidding alleys. Minutes later, the crowd began singing Hatikvah, but in a way I had never heard before. This was no longer the Hatikvah of the Exile, sung sweetly and piously in conjunction with The Star Spangled Banner at school dinners or the like. This Hatikvah was sung as a war cry: Lihiyot Am Chofshi b’ ARTZEINU (To be a free nation in OUR LAND, where “our” is possessive, not relational.)
And so, we began a slow walk down to the Kotel. All of the Arab shops were closed, their shutters locked tight. Dozens of elite troops trained for this kind of detail guarded the way, their eyes looking everywhere for the slightest sign of trouble. For here were an enormous number of Jewish youth caught in a bottle neck; anything thrown from a second or third floor window could have caused an indescribable panic. Further along, I would see more soldiers on the roofs of the several yeshivas in this area, in buildings which certain people had the foresight to re-purchase. There were barriers set up blocking the side streets, keeping small groups of Arab youth and some elders away from the marchers. Methinks they had a “mean and hungry look,” not that I blame them so much. Ultimately, it will either be Artzeinu, or it will be their land. There simply isn’t enough room in those narrow alleyways for them and us.
Now comes the interesting part: Somewhere along the way, I glanced to my right and noticed an older man with one of those small lapel pins with the Israeli and American flags. He looked at me and struck up a conversation in English. (I wonder how he knew I was an American. Maybe it was the NJ Blood Bank cap I was wearing.) He reached out and held onto my arm, and we walked together to the Kotel. If I was in the upper one percentile age-wise in this gathering of young people, he must have had a good fifteen years on me. He was wearing the mainstream religious outfit: a white shirt and a dark suit, neat and presentable, but one that had been several shades darker when it was new (perhaps at the first inauguration of Bush II, or perhaps at the first inauguration of Clinton,) Likewise his hat. (official digression: almost any type of hat ever worn by gentiles was given a name: the stovepipe hat worn by Lincoln, the top hat worn by Fred Astaire, the campaign hat worn by Smokey the Bear, the Stetson worn by any cowboy who ever rode the range, the bowler or derby worn by Churchill, the porkpie hat worn by Buster Keaton, the homburg worn by Edward VII, the trilby worn by Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther movies, the fedora worn by Indiana Jones and, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, by many Orthodox Jews today. There are other kinds of black hats besides the fedora, mostly with flatter tops. But try to find out what they are called! As far as I can tell, they are simply part of the uniform.)
My new acquaintance told me that he had been in Israel for many years and that his whole family lived in Jerusalem. He had been coming on these Yom Yerushalayim walks to the Kotel for many years. I never got his name. As we walked, he pointed out to me a number of things I might not have noticed, all of which pointed to a Jewish presence in what is now called “The Arab Quarter”: certain architectural details, magen davids on archways above the door, carved out places on doorposts where mezuzot had been placed, buildings which had been synagogues. You see, we lived here too! As we got nearer to the tunnel which would lead us out to the Kotel plaza, we began going slower and slower and it became hotter and hotter because of the press of bodies close together and the lack of ventilation. I looked at this old man, and I thought to myself, “He’s not going to make it.” I was certain that any moment he would pass out. Ma l’assot (what to do)? The answer was obvious: I had been in Israel for over nine months; time to act like an Israeli. And so, making certain that my charge was firmly attached to my arm, and with a giant SLICHA (excuse me), I began to propel us through the crowd, in the same way as someone who has just arrived at a bus stop will, without giving it a thought, enter the vehicle before fifteen people who have been standing there waiting patiently for twenty minutes. We made it through the last hundred yards in about five minutes, although it seemed like forever. Finally we had reached the plaza, now completely packed with people; I kept on going, pushing our way through until I located a vacant white plastic chair so that the man could sit down. When I was reasonably sure that he would be OK, I left him and surveyed the action. The sound stage which only hours before had been the scene of desultory “echad, steim”s was now center stage for the world’s greatest party: Yom Yerushalayim at the Kotel! It is unlikely that we will ever reach the level of simcha that occurred during the reign of David Hamelech or during the water gathering at Sukkot during the Beit Hamikdash. But in today’s world, this is probably as close as we will get. Thousands of men are their side, thousands of women on their side, dancing, dancing until……. By this time, I was too tired (and I hadn’t eaten) to partake more fully in the festivities. So I have no idea what time the party ended.
I began the ascent back, this time taking the familiar route to the Jaffa Gate, thinking about the elderly gentleman I escorted to the Kotel. What was he doing there? Why would a man well into his eighties, who needed help traversing the very slippery stone paths, subject himself to this ordeal? He didn’t say anything about meeting anyone there; and, frankly, his appearance made him stand out in this dati leumi (religious Zionist) crowd. There must have been a reason why he was there, and why he chose to participate every year. The answer was obvious, even if you refuse to believe or accept my explanation. For an hour or an hour and a half, I was walking to the Kotel with Eliyahu Hanavi.
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away
(Attributed to many sources, but copyrighted [1939] asTHE LITTLE MAN WHO WASN'T THEREBy Harold Adamson / Bernie Hanighen)
One of the difficulties of being a “newbie” in a new land is getting the “how, when, and where” straight. There were a lot of things that I had read or heard about before we made aliyah that I want to do; the challenge is getting the details straight so that we would be able to. For example, every Lag B’omer there is this HUGE festivity in Meron (a small town near Tzvat where the great kabbalist R’ Shimon Ben Yochai is buried), but I could not figure out how to get there. So we hung out in Maale Adumim and watched kids (and their wanna-be-kids dads) make bonfires so big it would have scared the pants off Smokey The Bear (Remember, Only you can prevent forest fires!).
I was determined to do better for Yom Yerushalayim, which occupies a strange and precarious place in the Israeli calendar. Unlike Yom Haatzmaut, which is celebrated throughout the land – except in Arab villages and Mea Shearim – Yom Yerushalayim is wildly celebrated in the city itself and in the areas liberated from Jordanian rule in 1967 and ignored in certain other places. This is to be expected: those people who want to give away our land are hardly likely to celebrate the day when we obtained it! Plus there is the theological element. If we consider the victory in 1948 to be a miracle, what are we to make of the events in 1967? All the Arab armies had to do was keep on marching and the Jewish state would have been history. Instead, we won an impossible victory AND gained control of the Temple Mount, Ir Atika (the Old City), and a few minor areas like the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the sites of the tombs of Rachel and Joseph. In addition, our country stopped being nine miles wide in its center, and we had defensible borders. So why would a current generation of politicians who act as if there is no G-d in history want to make a big deal of this day?
Nonetheless, while our secular leaders avoid the Kotel like the plague, thousands of Yeshiva students dance through the Old City to the Western Wall. At least that was what I had always been told. Now that we are here, I needed to find out when and where all of this was going to happen. According to R’ Mordechai Friedfertig’s schedule of events, the bochrim were supposed to start gathering at around 3:30PM at Kikar Tzion (where Ben Yehudah connects to Jaffa St.) and at some point thereafter head down to the Kotel. Now I’m not such a freier that I would show up at 3:30. I figured 4:30. But when I arrived at Rehov Yaffo at that time, I could see that the streets were blocked off, the sound stages were being set up, and there were a few hundred random students milling around. I walked around for about half an hour and took some photographs. Nothing much seemed to be happening, so I decided to walk down through the Old City to the Western Wall. I had no idea how much activity there would be there, but, if nothing else, I would at least be at the Kotel. I took my standard route: through the Jaffa gate, stay on the main road until you get to a small street which I believe is called St. Andrew’s, take a left there and proceed more or less on a straight path until the steps leading down to the Cardo, keep going straight until you get to the series of steps leading down to the Kotel plaza. Sure enough, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary happening there either, but it took me no more than eleven seconds to locate a minyan for mincha. A soundstage was being set up, but after listening to the interminable “ehad, shteim” into the microphone, I realized that nothing was going to happen here for quite a while, so I decided to head back to Jaffa, grab a quick bite, and somewhere catch a bus to the Nefesh B’Nefesh office, where I was supposed to meet Barbara for a seminar on budgeting your money in Israel. I retraced my steps: up the stairs, past the shops, past the reconstruction of the Hurva synagogue, past the Cardo, up the winding streets in the Jewish Quarter, and finally out onto the thoroughfare which leads to the Jaffa Gate. Along the way, I ran into a family I knew from Maale Adumim; the woman told me that the yeshiva kids had finally assembled at Kikar Tzion and were headed towards the Old City. OK: I’ll take that into consideration.
Needless to say, I was completely unprepared for what I saw as I came out of the Jaffa gate. Within no more than an hour after I had left a fairly empty Kikar Tzion, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people had assembled there and had begun heading towards the Old City. But for now, this huge throng of people had gathered around a soundstage set up in Kikar Tzahal (the renovated and renamed plaza where Bar-Lev and Rehov Yaffo come together) and were singing, waving flags, dancing with flags, dancing with each other.
People who know me long and well know that I am not a stranger to rallies, marches, demonstrations, and picket lines. The fact that a large number of people have gathered in one place does not automatically excite me. There is no automatic wisdom in numbers; the size of a gathering bears no relationship to its virtue or merit. Even a good cause does not guarantee a sense of urgency: many of the Soviet Jewry rallies held in New York in the seventies and eighties seemed like giant picnics (unlike the actual situation on the ground in Moscow or Leningrad).
But there was no question that I was now witnessing the real thing, a sense of joy and urgency coming together into a kind of ecstasy which is very hard to describe (and also next to impossible to photograph). No question: I had to stay a while to witness this.
Then the mass of people began moving, but weren’t they heading the wrong way? I had assumed that they would go more or less as I had done, the safe way through the Jaffa Gate. Instead, they were heading down Bar-Lev. Could it be? Yes! They were heading towards the Damascus Gate! I hadn’t been there since 1980!
Many of my audience will have no idea what this is all about; so let me digress and explain. The Damascus Gate is itself in a part of Jerusalem heavily populated by Muslim Arabs, and it leads into the so-called “Arab Quarter.” When I first visited Jerusalem in 1980, there was no problem walking anywhere in Jerusalem and the Old City. Unlike the “Jewish Quarter,” which had been more or less turned into rubble during the years when it was under Jordanian rule, and which is being lovingly restored and rebuilt, the rest of the Old City looks exactly the way it was for hundreds of years. In 1980, Barbara and I had spent many hours walking through the incredible alleyways, past the hundreds of stalls selling either foodstuffs or Arab versions of “tchochkeles,” savoring the ambience and taking photographs (the amazing contrast of light and dark in these narrow streets is unmistakable). The Arab areas are still filled with tourists, especially Christians looking for the Via Dolorosa – essentially a series of narrow streets like many others, but with a street sign saying “Via Dolorosa.” But by the time we returned to Jerusalem in 1988, things had changed markedly. Most of the Arab shopkeepers were “on strike,” and their stalls were shut tight. One felt less comfortable just strolling around these areas, and it seemed less important to do so. The fewer Jews walking around the Arab areas, the less safe it seems for other Jews – even though there are lots of people there and the area is guarded by police and soldiers. Until recently, my buddy, R’ Mordecai Friedfertig, used to walk through the Damascus Gate on his way to his job at Rav Aviner’s yeshiva, but one day, one of the teachers there was slightly wounded when an Arab attacked him with a knife. Now Mordy goes the longer and safer way to get to work.
But there is safety in numbers – especially really big numbers. Thousands and thousands of mostly young people – escorted by a full complement of trained army personnel – were going to “take back” our streets and go to the Kotel through the narrow streets where we almost never, ever go. As this enormous throng of people headed down Rehov Bar-Lev, all thoughts of my meeting up with Barbara vanished from my mind (there was so much noise that I couldn’t have called her on my cell phone). This was too good to pass up! I joined the line of marchers, of course taking pictures as I went.
Those of you who are familiar with the Damascus Gate realize that it’s much narrower than the entrances at the Jaffa Gate, and it certainly wasn’t designed to accommodate a huge throng (in fact, on the contrary, it was built to prevent an invading army from entering except in small, “defeatable” numbers). And you get to it by going down a series of steps which bring you to a large open area. So try to imagine the following scene: you’re standing at the top looking down. Behind you are thousands of people trying to get to where you are. Ahead of you, the steps are filled with people, the plaza is filled with more people, all waiting to get through this narrow entrance way. While they are waiting, these thousands in the plaza are singing, dancing, and waving their Israeli flags. You might describe it as a Shlomo Carlebach concert from 1975 morphed into an army of Jewish Crusaders.
Finally, it was my turn to enter the Old City. I had not remembered this, but, not only is the Gate itself narrow, but it opens into a dark, narrow alleyway (as opposed to the Jaffa Gate, which opens into a large, open area filled with stores of all kinds). As I entered the Gate, looking at the closed stalls of money changers and at dark, gloomy walls, hundreds of people around me were singing “YERUSHALAYIM” as loudly as they could, with an unmistakable certitude that, with G-d’s help, our eternal capital will remain undivided and that the light of true shalom will penetrate these forbidding alleys. Minutes later, the crowd began singing Hatikvah, but in a way I had never heard before. This was no longer the Hatikvah of the Exile, sung sweetly and piously in conjunction with The Star Spangled Banner at school dinners or the like. This Hatikvah was sung as a war cry: Lihiyot Am Chofshi b’ ARTZEINU (To be a free nation in OUR LAND, where “our” is possessive, not relational.)
And so, we began a slow walk down to the Kotel. All of the Arab shops were closed, their shutters locked tight. Dozens of elite troops trained for this kind of detail guarded the way, their eyes looking everywhere for the slightest sign of trouble. For here were an enormous number of Jewish youth caught in a bottle neck; anything thrown from a second or third floor window could have caused an indescribable panic. Further along, I would see more soldiers on the roofs of the several yeshivas in this area, in buildings which certain people had the foresight to re-purchase. There were barriers set up blocking the side streets, keeping small groups of Arab youth and some elders away from the marchers. Methinks they had a “mean and hungry look,” not that I blame them so much. Ultimately, it will either be Artzeinu, or it will be their land. There simply isn’t enough room in those narrow alleyways for them and us.
Now comes the interesting part: Somewhere along the way, I glanced to my right and noticed an older man with one of those small lapel pins with the Israeli and American flags. He looked at me and struck up a conversation in English. (I wonder how he knew I was an American. Maybe it was the NJ Blood Bank cap I was wearing.) He reached out and held onto my arm, and we walked together to the Kotel. If I was in the upper one percentile age-wise in this gathering of young people, he must have had a good fifteen years on me. He was wearing the mainstream religious outfit: a white shirt and a dark suit, neat and presentable, but one that had been several shades darker when it was new (perhaps at the first inauguration of Bush II, or perhaps at the first inauguration of Clinton,) Likewise his hat. (official digression: almost any type of hat ever worn by gentiles was given a name: the stovepipe hat worn by Lincoln, the top hat worn by Fred Astaire, the campaign hat worn by Smokey the Bear, the Stetson worn by any cowboy who ever rode the range, the bowler or derby worn by Churchill, the porkpie hat worn by Buster Keaton, the homburg worn by Edward VII, the trilby worn by Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther movies, the fedora worn by Indiana Jones and, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, by many Orthodox Jews today. There are other kinds of black hats besides the fedora, mostly with flatter tops. But try to find out what they are called! As far as I can tell, they are simply part of the uniform.)
My new acquaintance told me that he had been in Israel for many years and that his whole family lived in Jerusalem. He had been coming on these Yom Yerushalayim walks to the Kotel for many years. I never got his name. As we walked, he pointed out to me a number of things I might not have noticed, all of which pointed to a Jewish presence in what is now called “The Arab Quarter”: certain architectural details, magen davids on archways above the door, carved out places on doorposts where mezuzot had been placed, buildings which had been synagogues. You see, we lived here too! As we got nearer to the tunnel which would lead us out to the Kotel plaza, we began going slower and slower and it became hotter and hotter because of the press of bodies close together and the lack of ventilation. I looked at this old man, and I thought to myself, “He’s not going to make it.” I was certain that any moment he would pass out. Ma l’assot (what to do)? The answer was obvious: I had been in Israel for over nine months; time to act like an Israeli. And so, making certain that my charge was firmly attached to my arm, and with a giant SLICHA (excuse me), I began to propel us through the crowd, in the same way as someone who has just arrived at a bus stop will, without giving it a thought, enter the vehicle before fifteen people who have been standing there waiting patiently for twenty minutes. We made it through the last hundred yards in about five minutes, although it seemed like forever. Finally we had reached the plaza, now completely packed with people; I kept on going, pushing our way through until I located a vacant white plastic chair so that the man could sit down. When I was reasonably sure that he would be OK, I left him and surveyed the action. The sound stage which only hours before had been the scene of desultory “echad, steim”s was now center stage for the world’s greatest party: Yom Yerushalayim at the Kotel! It is unlikely that we will ever reach the level of simcha that occurred during the reign of David Hamelech or during the water gathering at Sukkot during the Beit Hamikdash. But in today’s world, this is probably as close as we will get. Thousands of men are their side, thousands of women on their side, dancing, dancing until……. By this time, I was too tired (and I hadn’t eaten) to partake more fully in the festivities. So I have no idea what time the party ended.
I began the ascent back, this time taking the familiar route to the Jaffa Gate, thinking about the elderly gentleman I escorted to the Kotel. What was he doing there? Why would a man well into his eighties, who needed help traversing the very slippery stone paths, subject himself to this ordeal? He didn’t say anything about meeting anyone there; and, frankly, his appearance made him stand out in this dati leumi (religious Zionist) crowd. There must have been a reason why he was there, and why he chose to participate every year. The answer was obvious, even if you refuse to believe or accept my explanation. For an hour or an hour and a half, I was walking to the Kotel with Eliyahu Hanavi.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)