Yes, you could imagine activities or events more dissimilar than the election forum with Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party which I reported on before and the “great debate” held several days later between eight different candidates, but at some point you are comparing turnips and pomegranates. Eldad’s appearance was brought about by the initiative of a handful of people here in Maale Adumim and was held in the small downstairs social hall of a modest local beit knesset. The speaker was free to speak about whatever he wanted for as long as the audience had the patience to listen. There was no problem getting in, and people arrived on Jewish time, meaning whenever they felt like it. But the great debate? This would be an entirely different ball of wax.
The Jerusalem Post, together with Barbara’s employer, the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, was hosting a series of widely publicized debates in a number of cities in which there is a large Anglo crowd: if memory serves me correctly, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ra’anana, and perhaps one or two other places. But the really big show has been and we hope always will be Saturday night in Jerusalem….at the Great Synagogue.
Barbara had gotten the word from AACI vatikim (old-timers) to get there early – real early – otherwise we wouldn’t get in. So we had arranged for a taxi to pick us up ASAP after Shabbat ended and whisk us down to King George St., meaning we would get picked up at 6:15 so that we would arrive before 7 for a program that was scheduled to start at 8! Our main concern – as it always is – is getting through the machsom (checkpoint) on the way into Jerusalem, the purpose of which is to prevent terrorists and anyone-who-doesn’t-belong from entering the city and doing who-knows-what. In the process, however, it means that every vehicle coming from Maale Adumim also is inconvenienced. It is sort of like the toll booths on the Jersey turnpike used to be before EZ-pass; sometimes you would whizz by and other times you would sit on a line for an hour to deposit your dinky quarter in the stupid basket. Here, you never know what the instructions du jour will be for these young soldiers and police officers assigned to the checkpoints. Some days, everyone is waved through. Other days, soldiers board the buses checking for who knows what. For several days during the recent operation in Gaza, they stopped and inspected everyone’s car, causing a backup of over an hour during the morning rush hour. Using the usual laws of physics, the more in a hurry you are, the longer the delay (this worked back in New Jersey too, so I know it is a universal principle). Because we were definitely early, there was no more than a five minute delay getting through, and we arrived in front of the Great Synagogue at 6:45. The doors had not been opened, and yet there were at least fifty people already waiting. The crowd had swelled to about 200 people by the time they opened the doors about fifteen minutes later.
The few times in my life when it would have been logistically possible to daven at the Great Synagogue on a Shabbat morning, I chose not to do so; the poor quality of my prayers and the shortness of my attention span preclude me from participating in the kind of lengthy formal type of service – complete with a well-trained cantor and, I believe, a choir – that this house of prayer offers. I had never even been in the building before. It is no longer the largest synagogue in Jerusalem (the Belz hassidim have erected a replica of Herod’s temple which holds 4000 of their ranks; perhaps they think that when the time comes, their building will slide over to the Temple Mount – a lot less problematic than dropping down from the sky), but still, the minyon at the Great Synagogue could max out at 850 men (and 550 women), which would severely limit one’s chances of ever getting an aliyah. Of course, on the night in question, no one was getting an aliyah except for the candidates, and the evening’s program was not going to be in the main sanctuary, but in the ballroom downstairs. Somewhat bigger than the social hall in the “Down Shul” which could probably accommodate 100 or so people for a stand-up Kiddush on a Shabbat morning, this place might comfortably fit 500 people for a lavish wedding and a lot more for an event like this. By 7:20, every seat was taken, mostly by middle-aged or above men and women of the Anglo persuasion; by 7:30, the hundred or more seats on a mezzanine were filled; and by 7:45, we were informed, several hundred more seats upstairs (closed-circuit TV) were also taken, so if you merely arrived on time, you were too late to get in. The program actually started as close to on-time as is legal in Israel: the introducer was introduced, who in turn introduced the moderator, who introduced the candidates and explained the agreed upon format (each speaker, in alphabetical order would get an initial five minutes and a turn at answering questions from the audience), and we were off and running.
There is a special fascination to these election events; I see politics in general as great theater at no cost (except what you shell out as a taxpayer later on). Even though I was strongly leaning towards the National Union slate, I definitely wanted to hear what these would-be Knesset members had to say for themselves and their parties: were they for something, against something, trying to woo voters from a specific party, did they speak well, were they unduly defensive, did they lose their composure under the pressure of defending their position? The correct answer, as I discovered, was “all of the above.”
Leading off was Danny Ayalon, representing Yisrael Beiteinu. Many of us were wondering why someone who had been an ambassador to the United Nations (in which capacity he had made a lot of useful contacts in the American Jewish community) and then had been involved with Nefesh b’Nefesh would want to make his debut in Israeli politics in such a controversial fashion and what he wanted to accomplish. Instead, he came out swinging, speaking in favor of Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to make Israeli Arabs take an oath of loyalty to the State. Talk about a waste of time: if you make every Israeli citizen take this oath, then many of the Hareidim wouldn’t agree either, nor would the Haaretz crowd on general principles, and you have accomplished nothing and wasted a lot of time better spent on improving our military strength, our infrastructure, our economy, our educational system, and perhaps getting Gilad Shalit released. One down.
The second batter was Uri Bank from the National Union. Having come here as a boy with his American parents – staying here alone as a teenager when his parents later returned to the States – Uri was the only mother-tongue-is-English candidate from any party with a realistic shot at getting elected. Playing to his strength, Uri made the point that he would serve as the personal representative of the Anglo community; he also made the point that his party was the only one unequivocally opposed to giving up one grain of our holy soil to anyone. No great orator, but he spoke clearly and to the point.
Perhaps because his family name is Begin, I expected a little more pizzazz from Benny ben (the son of) Menachem, and, perhaps, an explanation of why he was rejoining Likud after so many years in exile. He had a perfect opportunity to stir up the crowd. Instead we were treated to a debunking of a list of Kadima justifications for the Gaza expulsions, none of which had come to fruition. But not a word about why we should trust Netanyahu and vote for Likud. A perfect opportunity for an r.b.i. wasted!
Next, we were ushered into a parallel universe: the world of Meretz, the most left-wing ‘Zionist’ (i.e., in favor of maintaining at least a tiny fragment of a Jewish state) party we have. Now most of the Meretz crowd are rabid secularists; but there is always one ‘black sheep’ in every family. Tonight’s representative was Tzvia Greenfield, a sheitel wearing woman who considers herself Hareidi, even though she supports ending army deferments for yeshiva students and giving the Temple Mount permanently to our ‘cousins.’ I definitely wanted to hear what she had to say! In soothing tones – she reminded me of a school ‘marm’ or perhaps the fairy godmother in the Disney version of Cinderella – that if we really, really believed in peace, and we tried hard enough, we could achieve it. And that we were being ‘negative’ for thinking otherwise! Either this woman is privy to some dark secret that has eluded the rest of us, or she is off in la-la land. You can imagine what the audience thought.
How can I describe the performance of the next speaker, Daniel Hershkowitz, a mathematics professor at the Technion, a pulpit rabbi in Haifa, and newly chosen head of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) – the other half of the old National Religious Party? This is the best I can do: have you ever heard a rabbi or your history professor give a talk, and ten minutes later when somebody asked you what it was about, you had no recollection? I think that Hershkowitz was saying something about Jewish unity, but it made no impression on me, and I have no idea why he was saying whatever it was that he was saying.
You could never say the same about the next candidate, Michael Melchior, former chief rabbi of Norway, member of the Knesset, representing the hybrid Meimad (a left-wing religious party) and the one of the Green parties. If nothing else, he speaks clearly and passionately about his concerns. What distinguished him from every other speaker was his emphasis on social and environmental issues – things which unfortunately were otherwise ignored during the debate. You gotta admire the guy, even if you don’t agree with him.
The bravest speaker of the evening was Avraham Michaeli, the last-minute entry from the Shas party. Here’s a man with a cherubic face, looking a little like Natan Sharansky, who made aliyah from Soviet Georgia in 1971. His official Knesset biography lists his languages as English, along with Russian and Georgian (we can assume Hebrew), but that would be like my listing Hebrew as one of my languages! It would take a lot to get me to address a crowd of several thousand people in the language I m trying to learn, but Michaeli got up there and did his best in his halting English – and I give him lots of credit for trying. But it tells me how distant Shas is from the Anglo community.
The person with the greatest gap between his resume and his performance was good ol’ Nachman Shai for Kadima. Formerly the IDF spokesman and a big honcho for the UJC (another one of Barbara’s employers back in the States), he justified his decision to run for the Knesset by saying that Tzipi Livni had moved from the political right to the center, and he was doing the decent thing by moving from the left to join her. Nice of him to do that.
I suspect that very few people in the audience knew much about the last speaker, Einat Wilf, the representative for the Labor party, and I also suspect that few people there had walked into the hall planning to vote for the political arm of the Israel trade union movement. Nevertheless, she was by far the most effective speaker of the evening. Dr. Wilf is someone with impeccable scholarly credentials and an impressive background. Like Netanyahu, she spent time in prestigious American academia and has pitch-perfect English, the kind few American candidates can call upon. Like Netanyahu and like Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, she has that rare ability to command a room, so that everyone is paying strict attention. In five minutes, she painted a picture of her party as being the bedrock of Israeli society, a “boring” (her words) but effective political entity – and she made it sound exciting! I tell you, if I had just landed from the moon and didn’t know better, she would have convinced me to vote for her party.
I think it would be fair to say that there was no blood shed in round 1. Round 2, everyone getting a turn to answer pre-selected questions from the audience, proved to be a little more interesting. The main topic on virtually everybody’s mind that night was national security, and the questions reflected that concern. Uri Bank, representing the most hawkish party, raced to the microphone to be the first to respond, attacking the two-state solution as a recipe for disaster and accusing Benny Begin and Danny Ayalon of hypocrisy for disguising their parties’ support for such a solution (I would have been more tactful and suggested that they were ‘running away’ from their parties’ platforms). His tactic was very effective because he caught both of them off-guard (I don’t know why they were so ill-prepared). The former U.N. ambassador interrupted Bank (drawing a rebuke from the moderator) and denied that Avigdor Lieberman is prepared to divide Jerusalem, when it is clear that he is – a very poor performance by Ayalon. Benny Begin kept making snide remarks about the lack of credibility of ‘splinter’ parties, somehow ignoring the fact that his illustrious father was for many years the head of a small, discredited faction. (Bank was able to bring into the discussion the plan promoted by MK Benny Elon to return pre-1967 Jordanian citizenship to Arabs living “over the green line” without changing the borders of our country. This plan has two distinct advantages: it does not require us to commit suicide and, while the Jordanians will not say so publicly, they are less than thrilled with the idea of having a potential Hamas-controlled government on their now-quiet border. There are suggestions that they might be willing to give expatriate citizenship to ‘Palestinians’ if the world community ‘begged’ them to do so.)
But again, the worst performance of the round award went to Nachman Shai, who insisted on passionately defending the destruction of the Gush Katif communities – without bothering to explain why and how this seemingly self-defeating enterprise remains a good idea, but that is often the case when people put their brains on auto-pilot. The rest of the cast of characters gave a reprise of their first round performances: Hershkowitz seemed to be in another zone; Greenfield on another planet; Michaeli unable to express himself; Melchior unable to change the focus of the debate to other substantive issues; Wilf again giving a winning presentation for a losing proposition.
The final question, what should Israeli do to forestall an Iranian nuclear attack if one were imminent, brought a rare moment of consensus: everyone, including the Meretz candidate agreed that Israel should take whatever steps were needed to defend itself. We were then reminded not to trip over the electrical wiring on the way out, and a thousand or more people wended their way out to King George Street to find their way home and reflect on the words of the candidates. As with most events of this kind, the opportunities missed surpassed the successes and the loudest words were those not expressed. Looking back at this event in the hindsight afforded by the election results, I might have changed my opinion in this regard: rather than call the evening ‘grand theater,’ I might have better described it as watching “Night of the Living Dead” or some other captivating horror flic. The three pompous pugilists, Shai, Begin, and Ayalon were virtually guaranteed seats in the Knesset even though, judging by their performances, there is not one original idea amongst the three of them. Michaeli got the last seat that the linguistically-challenged Shas party won. Hershkowitz’s party managed to cross the minimum threshold; as number one, he will represent Bayit Yehudi like a ship without a rudder. Uri Bank was number five for National Union, which won four seats; he may enter the Knesset sometime down the road. The truly gifted Dr. Wilf was too far down on the Labor list to get elected; likewise the sheitel-wearing woman from Meretz. Rabbi Melchior’s party was shut out and his voice for environmental issues will no longer be heard in the Knesset.
It should be no surprise that we will not be looking to the Knesset for Jewish leadership. In fact, we could walk the streets of our cities, towns, kibbutzim, yishuvim, moshavim, and yeshivot holding a lantern and looking for positive leadership but rarely finding it. That this is true throughout the world is of small comfort.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Nearin' High Noon
Do not forsake me O my darlin'On this our wedding day.Do not forsake me O my darlin'Wait, wait along.
(The Ballad of High Noon,music by Dmitri Tiompkin, lyrics by Ned Washington)
Last Saturday night, Barbara and Natania left right after Shabbat and headed into Jerusalem to see an adaptation in Hebrew of Nicolai Gogol’s play “The Marriage.” (The report I got the next day was that they were able to understand about three quarters of it; our collective grasp of the language is increasing. I am bringing up the rear, even though I got a 78 on my ulpan final two weeks ago.) I was more than happy to stay home alone and entertain myself. Recently we bought a second hand TV; not a new, sexy flat-screen model, a regular old bulky 19 inch’er, the kind we had in the States. Being across the hills of Jerusalem, we don’t even get the usual channels one or two that most people can get without a dish or cable – neither of which we have because they keep raising the price, and there is even less here to watch than in The States – unless you like ‘football’ (soccer), which I don’t. So we use the TV to watch videos. For the last several weeks, we have been downloading some films over the internet, and I could think of nothing more fun than spending a Saturday night watching a movie, maybe with some popcorn. My choice for the evening? “High Noon,” a different take on getting married.
Sunday night, I mentioned to my charming other half that I had watched this film and inquired if she had ever seen it? Barbara didn’t think so. So I began describing it to her, knowing full well that what makes this film so special is not the creaky plot, but the screenplay, the direction, the camera work, and especially some great acting: There’s this marshal, played by Gary Cooper, and when the film starts, he is getting married to Grace Kelly, who is a Quaker and a pacifist. The plan is that the marshal will resign his position, and that he and his wife will set off for parts unknown, perhaps to open up a store somewhere. After the ceremony, word comes that a dangerous outlaw who had terrorized the town had been paroled and was heading back to town on the midday train to meet up with three of his gang. The outlaw had sworn to kill our marshal, the one who had arrested him and made the town a fit place for women and children. The newly-weds set off in a carriage, but after they leave town, the marshal stops the carriage and decides to return to town. He has never run from any one before; and even if he does so now, the killers will only come after him. The couple will know no peace, and they will be defenseless when they are caught. The two quarrel; the bride cannot understand her husband’s position. If he will not go away with her, she will leave by herself on that same noon train. They return to town and he puts his badge back on.The marshal tries to raise a posse of deputies, but no one will join him. The judge who sentenced the outlaw immediately resigns, grabs his possessions and leave town. The deputy marshal, still angry that he was not given the position permanently also resigns. The marshal goes to the local saloon; no one will volunteer. He goes to the church and interrupts the Sunday service; no one will volunteer. The mayor is afraid that a gunfight on the main street will scare away potential business. Everyone hopes that the marshal will leave town; somehow when the new marshal will arrive the next day, everything will be better. Our marshal is left to fight the four bandits by himself. Meanwhile, his bride is waiting at the local hotel for the train to arrive, where she meets the woman who owns the place, who is also leaving town. She chastises the bride for running away, saying, “If it was my man, I would stay with him.” The train arrives precisely at 12 noon. The two women get on, and the outlaw gets off, joins his confederates and they set of to kill the marshal, searching for him throughout the town. The marshal, carefully keeping out of sight, kills the first bandit. Just as the train is about to leave, the wife, hearing the first gunshot, hurries back to town to see that the dead man lying in the street is not her husband, who by now has killed the second gang member. Our heroine waits inside a store, and when the opportunity arises, shoots number 3, leaving only the villain alive. When he is finally killed, all the townspeople emerge from their hiding place and crowd into the main street. The marshal looks at them in disgust and drops his badge to the ground.
When I had finished, Barbara looked at me and said, “That sounds like Israel.” Which took me by surprise, because that was more or less what I had been thinking as I watched the film. Either great minds think alike, or we’ve been married too long.
Now let’s be clear about one thing: nobody was thinking about the mid-East when “High Noon” was made in 1952. The topic du jour in those days was ‘blacklisting’ in Hollywood. The screen play by Carl Foreman (who also produced the movie and would later be prevented from working in Hollywood) was supposed to be an indictment of all those who refused to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy. It’s a rather clumsy parallel, and if you didn’t know what Foreman was trying to do, it is unlikely that you would realize it today. The case against McCarthyism was made more effectively by Arthur Miller in his play “The Crucible,” about the Salem Witch Trials. And the counter-argument, that ‘ratting on’ individuals who were themselves less than exemplary was a noble activity, was presented more effectively by Elia Kazan in his masterpiece, “On the Waterfront.”
It is fifty seven years after ‘High Noon” was made. As far as I can tell, everyone (except for the child actors) who had anything to do with this film has passed away. Political commentators are still debating which was worse: the red-necked, bigoted, anti-Semitic members the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Leftists and their (often unwitting) supporters who made certain that no films ever came out of Hollywood critical of Communism or Stalin. But the idea of a lonely fight against evil, impeded by fools and cowards, still resonates today. And Barbara and I are free to take it personally and draw appropriate parallels.
He made a vow while in State's Prison,Vow'd it would be my life or his andI'm not afraid of death, but O,What will I do if you leave me?
No question that for the last several thousand years, the Jewish people have been hotly pursued by every varmint, rustler, and tin horn who had it in for us. For most of the time, we weren’t even packing a six-gun to defend ourselves. We have always been an ornery bunch, chasing down idolators and spreading our own vision of frontier justice, which includes just one deity and adherence to His Law. No one has been on our side – for very long. Every one we thought would ride with us found a reason not to, sooner or later. No one even seems put out that people are trying to kill us and steal our horses. The Nations are even embarrassed that we are still around. If only we would agree to be reasonable; if only we too would leave town and head out to the next territory! The new marshal – perhaps the new religion – will solve everyone’s problems.
In the movie version, though, who finally comes to the marshal’s side? The woman he had married, the one person he had not asked for help, the one person he had given up on. That is why I am so fond of this self-constructed allegory. For we, the Jewish people, are also in a long-term (several thousand years!) relationship, with Someone who we often feel has abandoned us, the one Someone to whom we often do not turn for help – even though that Someone has been the only one who has ever helped us. I am sure that John W. Cunningham, who wrote “The Tin Star” originally for Colliers Magazine would be astonished with our ‘spin’ on his story, but maybe not more so than with Foreman’s. Remember that his story appeared in 1947, the year when we as a People – with Someone’s help – put on our holsters and started shooting back at the bad guys.
(The Ballad of High Noon,music by Dmitri Tiompkin, lyrics by Ned Washington)
Last Saturday night, Barbara and Natania left right after Shabbat and headed into Jerusalem to see an adaptation in Hebrew of Nicolai Gogol’s play “The Marriage.” (The report I got the next day was that they were able to understand about three quarters of it; our collective grasp of the language is increasing. I am bringing up the rear, even though I got a 78 on my ulpan final two weeks ago.) I was more than happy to stay home alone and entertain myself. Recently we bought a second hand TV; not a new, sexy flat-screen model, a regular old bulky 19 inch’er, the kind we had in the States. Being across the hills of Jerusalem, we don’t even get the usual channels one or two that most people can get without a dish or cable – neither of which we have because they keep raising the price, and there is even less here to watch than in The States – unless you like ‘football’ (soccer), which I don’t. So we use the TV to watch videos. For the last several weeks, we have been downloading some films over the internet, and I could think of nothing more fun than spending a Saturday night watching a movie, maybe with some popcorn. My choice for the evening? “High Noon,” a different take on getting married.
Sunday night, I mentioned to my charming other half that I had watched this film and inquired if she had ever seen it? Barbara didn’t think so. So I began describing it to her, knowing full well that what makes this film so special is not the creaky plot, but the screenplay, the direction, the camera work, and especially some great acting: There’s this marshal, played by Gary Cooper, and when the film starts, he is getting married to Grace Kelly, who is a Quaker and a pacifist. The plan is that the marshal will resign his position, and that he and his wife will set off for parts unknown, perhaps to open up a store somewhere. After the ceremony, word comes that a dangerous outlaw who had terrorized the town had been paroled and was heading back to town on the midday train to meet up with three of his gang. The outlaw had sworn to kill our marshal, the one who had arrested him and made the town a fit place for women and children. The newly-weds set off in a carriage, but after they leave town, the marshal stops the carriage and decides to return to town. He has never run from any one before; and even if he does so now, the killers will only come after him. The couple will know no peace, and they will be defenseless when they are caught. The two quarrel; the bride cannot understand her husband’s position. If he will not go away with her, she will leave by herself on that same noon train. They return to town and he puts his badge back on.The marshal tries to raise a posse of deputies, but no one will join him. The judge who sentenced the outlaw immediately resigns, grabs his possessions and leave town. The deputy marshal, still angry that he was not given the position permanently also resigns. The marshal goes to the local saloon; no one will volunteer. He goes to the church and interrupts the Sunday service; no one will volunteer. The mayor is afraid that a gunfight on the main street will scare away potential business. Everyone hopes that the marshal will leave town; somehow when the new marshal will arrive the next day, everything will be better. Our marshal is left to fight the four bandits by himself. Meanwhile, his bride is waiting at the local hotel for the train to arrive, where she meets the woman who owns the place, who is also leaving town. She chastises the bride for running away, saying, “If it was my man, I would stay with him.” The train arrives precisely at 12 noon. The two women get on, and the outlaw gets off, joins his confederates and they set of to kill the marshal, searching for him throughout the town. The marshal, carefully keeping out of sight, kills the first bandit. Just as the train is about to leave, the wife, hearing the first gunshot, hurries back to town to see that the dead man lying in the street is not her husband, who by now has killed the second gang member. Our heroine waits inside a store, and when the opportunity arises, shoots number 3, leaving only the villain alive. When he is finally killed, all the townspeople emerge from their hiding place and crowd into the main street. The marshal looks at them in disgust and drops his badge to the ground.
When I had finished, Barbara looked at me and said, “That sounds like Israel.” Which took me by surprise, because that was more or less what I had been thinking as I watched the film. Either great minds think alike, or we’ve been married too long.
Now let’s be clear about one thing: nobody was thinking about the mid-East when “High Noon” was made in 1952. The topic du jour in those days was ‘blacklisting’ in Hollywood. The screen play by Carl Foreman (who also produced the movie and would later be prevented from working in Hollywood) was supposed to be an indictment of all those who refused to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy. It’s a rather clumsy parallel, and if you didn’t know what Foreman was trying to do, it is unlikely that you would realize it today. The case against McCarthyism was made more effectively by Arthur Miller in his play “The Crucible,” about the Salem Witch Trials. And the counter-argument, that ‘ratting on’ individuals who were themselves less than exemplary was a noble activity, was presented more effectively by Elia Kazan in his masterpiece, “On the Waterfront.”
It is fifty seven years after ‘High Noon” was made. As far as I can tell, everyone (except for the child actors) who had anything to do with this film has passed away. Political commentators are still debating which was worse: the red-necked, bigoted, anti-Semitic members the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Leftists and their (often unwitting) supporters who made certain that no films ever came out of Hollywood critical of Communism or Stalin. But the idea of a lonely fight against evil, impeded by fools and cowards, still resonates today. And Barbara and I are free to take it personally and draw appropriate parallels.
He made a vow while in State's Prison,Vow'd it would be my life or his andI'm not afraid of death, but O,What will I do if you leave me?
No question that for the last several thousand years, the Jewish people have been hotly pursued by every varmint, rustler, and tin horn who had it in for us. For most of the time, we weren’t even packing a six-gun to defend ourselves. We have always been an ornery bunch, chasing down idolators and spreading our own vision of frontier justice, which includes just one deity and adherence to His Law. No one has been on our side – for very long. Every one we thought would ride with us found a reason not to, sooner or later. No one even seems put out that people are trying to kill us and steal our horses. The Nations are even embarrassed that we are still around. If only we would agree to be reasonable; if only we too would leave town and head out to the next territory! The new marshal – perhaps the new religion – will solve everyone’s problems.
In the movie version, though, who finally comes to the marshal’s side? The woman he had married, the one person he had not asked for help, the one person he had given up on. That is why I am so fond of this self-constructed allegory. For we, the Jewish people, are also in a long-term (several thousand years!) relationship, with Someone who we often feel has abandoned us, the one Someone to whom we often do not turn for help – even though that Someone has been the only one who has ever helped us. I am sure that John W. Cunningham, who wrote “The Tin Star” originally for Colliers Magazine would be astonished with our ‘spin’ on his story, but maybe not more so than with Foreman’s. Remember that his story appeared in 1947, the year when we as a People – with Someone’s help – put on our holsters and started shooting back at the bad guys.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Who Stole the Horse?
The king was a very good monarch, but he had one interest that bordered on obsession: his passion for horses. He had an equestrian stable that rivaled King Solomon’s with many noble steeds. But of all his horses, there was one that stood out, for it was by all accounts the finest stallion in the land. Of course the king was especially proud of this horse, but he began to develop a feeling of paranoia. He began to think that everyone in his kingdom wanted to steal his horse. And so, he reinforced the royal stables so that no one who didn’t belong could get in: he built a moat; he constructed an electrified fence around the stable. The more steps he took to protect his horse, the more insecure he felt and the more he believed that everyone wanted to steal it. Finally, he hired a special guard to keep watch over his prize, who would sit outside the horse’s stall every night to make certain that no one would steal it. If anyone would approach within fifty yards without the special password, the guard was to sound an alarm, and within three minutes, 100 of the king’s special forces stationed outside would be on the scene.
Did the king feel any more secure? Certainly not. The first night his new guard was on duty, the king, who could not sleep a wink, went down to the stable in the middle of the night. Of course, he had the password and so the guard admitted him. “Are you sure that you will be able to stay awake the entire night?, “the king inquired. “No problem,” said the guard. “To make certain that I remain awake and alert, I have at my disposal a large selection of riddles, puzzles, and conundrums to occupy my time and make certain that I do not doze off. For example, tonight I am considering a proposition which I found in the Talmud: that if one digs a hole and then tries to fill it with the original dirt or sand, the hole will never be completely filled. So I am wondering where the rest of the sand would go?”
The king was mightily impressed. He came back a second night, and the guard was pondering where the very real hole in a donut would go when the donut was consumed. The king, less concerned now about his horse, but fascinated by the powers of reasoning his guard possessed, began to show up in the middle of every night. Until one night, when it was obvious to the king that his trusty guard seemed especially perplexed. The guard looked at the king and said, “Here’s something I cannot figure out. How is it that with your moat and your electrified fence, and your hundred special forces surrounding the stable, and the secret password; how is it that, with all that, someone has stolen your horse?”
Do you suppose that the powers-that-be who decided that the Israeli elections would be on February 10 realized the close proximity of Tu B’Shvat one day before? I wonder. One might ask: Is there any connection under the sun between The New Year for the Trees and an election which may or may not be a new year for our beleaguered nation?
The election, which will determine the next prime minister and the makeup of the Knesset and maybe not much more, has been, off and on, the main focus of attention here for the last four or five months. I’m used to thinking about elections, but as a former Jew of the Exile, Tu B’Shvat never made much of an impression, and just like last year, I was astonished when I realized it was creeping up on me. Two or three weeks ago, I noticed that the center aisle in MisterZol –where they tend to put their seasonal displays – was filled with wine and dried fruits. Last week, the center area of the mall was filled with vendors selling the same dried fruits, nuts, seasonal baskets, and the like. Even the Mahane Yehuda shuk in Jerusalem had a greater concentration of these seasonal items. So ready or not, Tu B’Shvat, a tick on the Jewish calendar, was barreling our way. Last Friday, we could hear the voices of children, several classes from one of the local schools, heading down the service road right below our back yard on their way to the nature area to plant a few trees. I began to do some mental gymnastics along the lines of: if every schoolchild is Israel were to plant his or her own tree this year, how long would it take to make up for all the trees destroyed in the Galil by Hizbollah in the Lebanon campaign two years ago? And perhaps only when these children would be standing under their wedding canopy would these just planted saplings amount to much. You may draw your own conclusions from this line of reasoning.
According to recent surveys, environmental concerns are way down the list of priorities for the Israeli voter, which is really a pity and a shame. It’s easy to understand why: a constant state of near-warfare doesn’t do much to improve the eco-system; falling kassams don’t do much to improve the quality of air or water – or one’s state of mind for that matter. When life is uncertain, it’s hard to have the equanimity of our friend, the Old Man in The Talmud, who was planting palm trees for the benefit of future generations. Equanimity: that’s one of the things in short supply in this part of the world – just like water, in a year when winter and its attendant rain still has not really arrived.
There are two things which have not been in short supply around here: the number of political parties, thirty three (down from thirty four; one party, ‘Turnaround in Education,’ just dropped out), and the amount of campaign hot air produced thereby. (I am surprised that Al Gore and the global warming police did not descend en masse, but that might be a situation of the pot calling the kettle black.) Of course, all thirty three parties are not to be taken seriously. Only about a dozen of these slates have a realistic chance of getting elected. The rest (and the rest include parties with intriguing names like ‘Party for the Struggle with the Banks’ [in all cases, I will be giving you the official English translations] or amorphous names like ‘The Israelis’) are running………Why are the rest running? Unfortunately for them, some of these groups are caught in what I call the Marzel dilemma, named after Baruch Marzel, a well-known (very) right wing figure who has run unsuccessfully for the Knesset several times. “Baruch, you know we agree with you, but why should we vote for you? You’re not going to get in, so we’d be wasting our votes.” “If everyone who agrees with me would vote for me, I would get in.” This conforms to one of my iron principles of life, “Success begets success; failure begets failure.” I though this up well before I ever heard of game theory. Then there are the ‘moth around a flame’ type of parties like ‘The Pensioners’ which became enough of a cult favorite in the last election that they even managed to get themselves elected – although probably never again.
All of this would make more sense if I were to describe, as best I can, knowing that I’m not doing full justice to this arcane topic, how the electoral system works in Israel. First of all, every citizen is automatically registered to vote: you have an identity number and ‘They’ know who you are and where you live. All you have to do is show up at the polling place, identify yourself, stick a paper ballot with the slate of your choice (we vote for a slate of candidates for the knesset, not individuals) in an envelope, deposit the envelope in the box, and ze hu (that’s it). Deciding who won is a little more tricky. OK. Let’s say that there were exactly 1,200,000 valid ballots cast. As there are 120 seats in the Knesset, each seat, in effect, is worth 10,000 votes; except that to be a player, you have to cross the ‘threshold,’ meaning you have to get at least two percent of the vote to qualify. If you get fewer than that, you lose. Your paper ballots can then be saved for the next Lag B’omer campfire, or, in the spirit of Tu B’shvat, recycled until the next election – which may be sooner than we think. Those slates left standing have their votes reapportioned somehow to add up to 120 MK’s. Except that it’s never that neat and tidy. Let’s say your party has won five seats, and you have 3000 votes more than you would have needed. You can donate those 3000 to another party which is short 2000 votes to get an additional seat. Except that you must make this stipulation in advance; so before the election, all the parties routinely pair up to maximize their strength.
Now for the prime minister, the rosh hamemshalah. For three elections here, you could actually vote for the PM by a separate ballot, just as (gasp!) is done in America. This method was too simple for all concerned, and so we are back to the old, tried-and true way of doing business. It goes without saying that no party will have a majority. (If that ever happened, Moshiach would be arriving in a big, fat limo within three hours.) So the president, currently Shimon Peres, has to decide which large party stands the best chance of cobbling together a majority, a coalition. The head of the leading party (who will be the prime minister) has then about forty five days to convince parties which agree on almost nothing to form a coalition – usually by bribing them with cabinet positions. It just occurred to me that all this should be made into a board game. We could call it ‘Bechirot Balagan,’ (Election Confusion) for want of a better title. It might one day replace Monopoly as the game du jour.
Once we understand how the election is conducted, we can turn our attention to the sobering prospect of deciding who to vote for. Oy. In The States, you’ve got the Democrats and the Republicans and specific candidates whom you may like or dislike. But the choice is fairly simple, like shooting ducks in a barrel. Here it’s like one of the shooting games at the penny arcade. Parties keep popping up, changing their names, combining and recombining, so that in this election the ‘Holocaust Survivors’ are running on a joint list with the ‘New Leaf’ party – and they don’t mean: as in New Year’s resolutions.
Quite a few of us olim came over here intending to support The Likud party, partly out of nostalgia for Menachem Begin, a leader of unquestioned pride and integrity. One couple I know came over here and actually registered to join the Likud, specifically to support and vote for Moshe Feiglin and his Manhegut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership), a militant faction trying to take over the party leadership from Bibi Netanyahu. I also need to mention that, unlike the States, where you simply advise the election officials if you wish to register as a Democrat or Republican, here, at least with Likud, you have to contact the party, register with them, and pay dues – not a lot of money, but still………. Anyway, my friends managed to do all this and pay their dues for sixteen months, until, when the time came for them to vote for Feiglin and his representatives in the recent Likud primary, they were told, “Sorry, you haven’t been Likud members for eighteen months. You can’t vote in the primary.” Other people told me that they submitted their paperwork, and it never got processed. When I heard about this experience, I thought to myself, if this is how they run their party, then how can they undo the bureaucratic hurdles and fix the country’s problems, when they’re an example of the problem? Even without my friends’ votes, Feiglin managed to get himself up to the twentieth position on the Likud slate, when, WHAM, the rules suddenly changed, once and then again, so that the leader of Manhegut Yehudit was buried in the thirty-something slot, meaning he would never get elected. We can only wish that Bibi would have waged as strong a campaign against Tzipi Livni as he waged against Feiglin – but I am getting way ahead of myself.
At that point, I had no clue whom I would be voting for, and, rightly or wrongly, I have always felt uncomfortable if I don’t have a candidate to support. There would be a number of debates and other forums in which some or all of the slates could present their views, and Barbara and I determined to go to as many of these as we could, especially a debate co-sponsored by the Jerusalem Post and Barbara’s employer, the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, in the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, which would have representatives of nine of the parties which were viable and relevant to the audience. We were told to get to that one an hour early to make sure we could get a seat. But the first forum would a meeting in Maale Adumim which one of my shul buddies here was organizing, at which MK Arieh Eldad would be speaking on behalf of his party, Ihud Leumi [National Union], a new grouping of four right-wing factions (in this context, ‘right-wing’ means “we’re not giving away a sandbox worth of land to anybody”). I figured, why not? We could walk there, and, if nothing else, we would help Chaim fill the room. I knew nothing about Ihud Leumi, except that they were running a separate list from the other National Religious group, ‘The Jewish Home’ party (because if there was going to be two Arab parties and two ‘green parties,’ it would only be fair that there be two national religious parties.)
Meanwhile, some people I know had put a message on our local Anglo e-mail group, MA-chat, mentioning on on-line survey about the election. So, I’ll check it out. What I realized was that the Institute for Democracy in Israel and Ynet, the web version of a local newspaper, had put together a way for undecided voters to match their views on current topics with those of seventeen political parties. You could take this test in Hebrew, English, or Dutch – they were using the facilities of a group in Holland to host this venture, and, as it turned out, 600,000 Israelis took ‘the compass’, as it was called, probably few in Dutch.
The survey had twenty five very specific statements (none of them hinted at global, existential, or theological solutions) which covered the gamut from ‘territorial compromise,’ to the role of religion in the State, questions about the economy and environmental concerns; and you could strongly agree, somewhat agree, be neutral, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree, or completely cop out by saying you had no opinion. Some of the statements were easy for me to respond to: “As part of a peace settlement, Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem should be given to the Palestinians.” (No.) Some more problematic: “Civil marriage [in addition to religious marriage] should be instituted in Israel.” (Very mixed feelings on this issue.) or “The state should provide a security net for pensions, retirement, and long-term savings for its citizens.” (can’t begin to answer the question without knowing what kind of ‘security net’ is being discussed.) None the less, I gave this ‘test’ my full attention and somehow answered all of them. Now the Institute had, in effect, given this survey to all of the political parties by reviewing their campaign material; and so, in the end, my profile, broken down into three components, security, socioeconomic, and religion, was matched with the profile of each of the parties, and I was told “You have a substantive agreement of x%” with each one, in rank order. No one is telling me what I should think; they’re telling me who agrees with me. Can’t argue with that! In my particular case, while Likud and Israel Beiteinu (my home) had a respectable showing, my highest substantive agreement (77%), security, 95% [what question did I answer wrong?],socioeconomic, 63%, religion 80%, was with Ichud Leumi, the National Unity party. Wait a minute, isn’t that the group I’m going to hear? What about the other national religious party, The Jewish Home? Their ‘score’ was only 63% (two percentage points lower than Kadima, Ehud Olmert’s party), proving to me that these two groups do not agree on a lot of things. I have already indicated that I was less than thrilled with Likud, and I share with Barbara a general distrust of Avigdor Lieberman, the one-man rule of Israel Beitenu: cursing Arab MK’s does not to me constitute a political program. (Speaking of Arab MK’s, I almost forgot: my substantive agreement with Ra’am-Ta’al was 38%, with Balad, the other Arab party, 37%, and in last place with 35% – what a surprise! – was Hadash, the communist party. Of course, Meretz, the darling of Haaretz, didn’t do so badly either: they were up there at 40%.)
Anyway, I began to consider what Ichud Leumi had to offer. The evening of the forum, we met friends for dinner (the disenfranchised Feiglinites) in another part of Maale Adumim and walked the forty or so minutes down to Mitzpe Nevo (the ‘religos’ [that’s what the sign says] neighborhood), on the way meeting another friend, making a caravan of people going to hear MK Eldad. I still had a lot of questions: was it worthwhile to support a small party that would probably wind up with a handful of seats in the next Knesset? Was this a one issue group that only concerned itself with territorial integrity?
The forum was to take place in the social hall at the ‘Down’ shul (in Mitzpe Nevo, they have the ‘Up’ shul, the ‘Down’ shul, and the ‘Happy Minyon,’ and some other time when I have the strength, I will explain why they’re called that). The organizers had optimistically set up about 100 chairs, and by the time people finished drifted in, the room was almost filled up. I motioned to my friend Michael, “Let’s sit in the middle.” He didn’t understand my reference, so I explained, “It’s enough we’re at a meeting of the most right-wing party there is. Let’s at least be in the middle of the right-wing.” He got the idea and joined me. Introducing the main speaker was a young man, Yehuda HaKohen who works for Arutz Sheva Radio an on-line print, radio, and TV media center, appealing to a basically national religious audience. Yehuda spoke about Yigal Yadin, the Israeli archaeologist who was also the head of Israel’s first army in the War of Independence. On one of his digs, hidden away in caves in the Judean desert, Yadin found ancient documents, some of which turned out to be letters to his troops from Bar Kochba, the leader of the last revolt against the Romans in the year 132 C.E. And so, military instructions from the last Jewish ‘chief-of-staff’ somehow had been delivered to his successor, the first chief-of-staff of the modern Jewish state some 1850 years later. As always, you are free to consider this a mere coincidence, an historical anomaly. You are also free to discern something significant in this chain of events, and it would be fair to say that the audience assembled understood the implicit message which Yehuda HaKohen was giving. Perhaps we need to consider ourselves the legitimate heirs to an ancient legacy, and without question Aryeh Eldad considers himself as part of that tradition.
Eldad opened his remarks with a version of the anecdote which I rewrote 3000 words ago at the beginning of this article. And his question to us was, “How did we, the Jewish people lose the horse?” We were in Exile these long years, and throughout those dark periods, we had a collective belief that we would someday return to The Land. How, when, under what conditions, were the subjects of never-ending controversy; but that we would again be one day a Nation in our own Land was certan; in fact, it was often our sole bitter-sweet consolation for the bitter lives we led among the Nations. We understood what our Land was and where it was, and we certainly understood the centrality of Jerusalem. So how did we get to a point, when we actually are back in our Land, and we are on the brink of greatness (these are my words), and suddenly we have in our midst so many who are willing to give away our Land. “Har Habayit b’yadeinu” (The Temple Mount is in our hands, the famous words of Motti Gur, the troop commander who seized this holy site in 1967). How did we give it away? Eldad related to us, a mostly ‘religious’ audience, when he talks about “The people of Israel in the Land of Israel with the Torah of Israel” to a more secular crowd, and he senses people trying to look at the back of his head to see the kippah that he is not wearing, and their bewilderment when they cannot identify him as part of the ‘religious’ sector. For him, the People, the Land, the Torah are the inheritance of all Jews, regardless of their ‘lifestyle.’ How did so many of us lose this understanding?
Aryeh Eldad, MK is also Aryeh Eldad, M.D., previously the head of the plastic surgery department at Ein Kerem branch of Hadassah Hospital (where the Chagall Windows are; not the branch on Mount Scopus). He’s not the guy you would go to if you wanted a ‘nose job.’ He treated soldiers and civilian terror victims for their burns and wounds; and he began to think more and more about the standard concept of preventive medicine. Any sensible government would seek to prevent malaria rather than treat its victims. Why wasn’t the Israeli government more vigorous in eradicating terrorism within its borders? Most of us at this forum did not need to be convinced that setting up a terrorist Arab state within or current borders would pose an ‘existential’ threat to our continued existence, something we must absolutely oppose – and something which essentially all the existing political parties have not made clear in words and/or in deeds.
The second ‘existential threat our speaker chose to deal with is the endemic corruption within the Israeli government. Now Eldad knows something about this topic, as he has been the chairman of the Ethics committee within the Knesset, using the authority of the office to locate and read the many, many dossiers kept on file in government offices, which detail the illegal activities of various politicians, which information can be used at will against these officials. The most famous and egregious example is Ariel Sharon, who three days after his reported indictment, announced his plans to expel 8000 citizen from Gaza, a decision which I understand took the American government by surprise. Sharon was never indicted by the attorney general; he received his punishment in a different way. And then there is the story of an obscure Arab mayor of an equally obscure Arab town somewhere in the north, which for obscure reasons has 300 registered voters for the Labor party. During the last primary several years ago for the head of this party, which Ehud Barak won by several hundred votes, 299 of these 300 voters took the trouble to come to the polls, and in the spirit of camaraderie, all 299 of these like-minded Arab citizens voted for Barak. After a year of investigation, Eldad managed to find the file on this Arab mayor, detailing his corruption; although for obscure reasons, the helpful mayor was never put on trial, either.
Eldad finished his presentation and fielded a number of questions. By and large the audience, many of whom were ‘undecided’ at the beginning, left convinced or at least ‘strongly leaning’ towards Ichud Leumi – the latter group including your correspondent. I had decided not to make an absolutely final decision until I had heard the Great Debate the following week (which you will read about shortly). It was far from clear whether Eldad or members of his groups had a comprehensive plan to address these ‘existential’ threats, but at least they were clearly stating the problems from a Jewish perspective, and I was not convinced that any other party was even doing that. I was aware that some of the people in this ‘united front’ which Eldad was representing were even more right-wing than I am. But that would be OK; at least 100 of the 120 members of the next Knesset would be more left-wing than me. A few to the right wouldn’t be so terrible. And perhaps some of them would actually represent how I feel.
We got a ride home; it would have been a forty five minute walk up the hill from Mitzpe Nevo to the friendly confines of HaMitzadim where we reside. I was beginning to feel better; maybe, just maybe, we would have someone to back in the election, a proverbial horse in the race – one which we can only hope will not get stolen.
Did the king feel any more secure? Certainly not. The first night his new guard was on duty, the king, who could not sleep a wink, went down to the stable in the middle of the night. Of course, he had the password and so the guard admitted him. “Are you sure that you will be able to stay awake the entire night?, “the king inquired. “No problem,” said the guard. “To make certain that I remain awake and alert, I have at my disposal a large selection of riddles, puzzles, and conundrums to occupy my time and make certain that I do not doze off. For example, tonight I am considering a proposition which I found in the Talmud: that if one digs a hole and then tries to fill it with the original dirt or sand, the hole will never be completely filled. So I am wondering where the rest of the sand would go?”
The king was mightily impressed. He came back a second night, and the guard was pondering where the very real hole in a donut would go when the donut was consumed. The king, less concerned now about his horse, but fascinated by the powers of reasoning his guard possessed, began to show up in the middle of every night. Until one night, when it was obvious to the king that his trusty guard seemed especially perplexed. The guard looked at the king and said, “Here’s something I cannot figure out. How is it that with your moat and your electrified fence, and your hundred special forces surrounding the stable, and the secret password; how is it that, with all that, someone has stolen your horse?”
Do you suppose that the powers-that-be who decided that the Israeli elections would be on February 10 realized the close proximity of Tu B’Shvat one day before? I wonder. One might ask: Is there any connection under the sun between The New Year for the Trees and an election which may or may not be a new year for our beleaguered nation?
The election, which will determine the next prime minister and the makeup of the Knesset and maybe not much more, has been, off and on, the main focus of attention here for the last four or five months. I’m used to thinking about elections, but as a former Jew of the Exile, Tu B’Shvat never made much of an impression, and just like last year, I was astonished when I realized it was creeping up on me. Two or three weeks ago, I noticed that the center aisle in MisterZol –where they tend to put their seasonal displays – was filled with wine and dried fruits. Last week, the center area of the mall was filled with vendors selling the same dried fruits, nuts, seasonal baskets, and the like. Even the Mahane Yehuda shuk in Jerusalem had a greater concentration of these seasonal items. So ready or not, Tu B’Shvat, a tick on the Jewish calendar, was barreling our way. Last Friday, we could hear the voices of children, several classes from one of the local schools, heading down the service road right below our back yard on their way to the nature area to plant a few trees. I began to do some mental gymnastics along the lines of: if every schoolchild is Israel were to plant his or her own tree this year, how long would it take to make up for all the trees destroyed in the Galil by Hizbollah in the Lebanon campaign two years ago? And perhaps only when these children would be standing under their wedding canopy would these just planted saplings amount to much. You may draw your own conclusions from this line of reasoning.
According to recent surveys, environmental concerns are way down the list of priorities for the Israeli voter, which is really a pity and a shame. It’s easy to understand why: a constant state of near-warfare doesn’t do much to improve the eco-system; falling kassams don’t do much to improve the quality of air or water – or one’s state of mind for that matter. When life is uncertain, it’s hard to have the equanimity of our friend, the Old Man in The Talmud, who was planting palm trees for the benefit of future generations. Equanimity: that’s one of the things in short supply in this part of the world – just like water, in a year when winter and its attendant rain still has not really arrived.
There are two things which have not been in short supply around here: the number of political parties, thirty three (down from thirty four; one party, ‘Turnaround in Education,’ just dropped out), and the amount of campaign hot air produced thereby. (I am surprised that Al Gore and the global warming police did not descend en masse, but that might be a situation of the pot calling the kettle black.) Of course, all thirty three parties are not to be taken seriously. Only about a dozen of these slates have a realistic chance of getting elected. The rest (and the rest include parties with intriguing names like ‘Party for the Struggle with the Banks’ [in all cases, I will be giving you the official English translations] or amorphous names like ‘The Israelis’) are running………Why are the rest running? Unfortunately for them, some of these groups are caught in what I call the Marzel dilemma, named after Baruch Marzel, a well-known (very) right wing figure who has run unsuccessfully for the Knesset several times. “Baruch, you know we agree with you, but why should we vote for you? You’re not going to get in, so we’d be wasting our votes.” “If everyone who agrees with me would vote for me, I would get in.” This conforms to one of my iron principles of life, “Success begets success; failure begets failure.” I though this up well before I ever heard of game theory. Then there are the ‘moth around a flame’ type of parties like ‘The Pensioners’ which became enough of a cult favorite in the last election that they even managed to get themselves elected – although probably never again.
All of this would make more sense if I were to describe, as best I can, knowing that I’m not doing full justice to this arcane topic, how the electoral system works in Israel. First of all, every citizen is automatically registered to vote: you have an identity number and ‘They’ know who you are and where you live. All you have to do is show up at the polling place, identify yourself, stick a paper ballot with the slate of your choice (we vote for a slate of candidates for the knesset, not individuals) in an envelope, deposit the envelope in the box, and ze hu (that’s it). Deciding who won is a little more tricky. OK. Let’s say that there were exactly 1,200,000 valid ballots cast. As there are 120 seats in the Knesset, each seat, in effect, is worth 10,000 votes; except that to be a player, you have to cross the ‘threshold,’ meaning you have to get at least two percent of the vote to qualify. If you get fewer than that, you lose. Your paper ballots can then be saved for the next Lag B’omer campfire, or, in the spirit of Tu B’shvat, recycled until the next election – which may be sooner than we think. Those slates left standing have their votes reapportioned somehow to add up to 120 MK’s. Except that it’s never that neat and tidy. Let’s say your party has won five seats, and you have 3000 votes more than you would have needed. You can donate those 3000 to another party which is short 2000 votes to get an additional seat. Except that you must make this stipulation in advance; so before the election, all the parties routinely pair up to maximize their strength.
Now for the prime minister, the rosh hamemshalah. For three elections here, you could actually vote for the PM by a separate ballot, just as (gasp!) is done in America. This method was too simple for all concerned, and so we are back to the old, tried-and true way of doing business. It goes without saying that no party will have a majority. (If that ever happened, Moshiach would be arriving in a big, fat limo within three hours.) So the president, currently Shimon Peres, has to decide which large party stands the best chance of cobbling together a majority, a coalition. The head of the leading party (who will be the prime minister) has then about forty five days to convince parties which agree on almost nothing to form a coalition – usually by bribing them with cabinet positions. It just occurred to me that all this should be made into a board game. We could call it ‘Bechirot Balagan,’ (Election Confusion) for want of a better title. It might one day replace Monopoly as the game du jour.
Once we understand how the election is conducted, we can turn our attention to the sobering prospect of deciding who to vote for. Oy. In The States, you’ve got the Democrats and the Republicans and specific candidates whom you may like or dislike. But the choice is fairly simple, like shooting ducks in a barrel. Here it’s like one of the shooting games at the penny arcade. Parties keep popping up, changing their names, combining and recombining, so that in this election the ‘Holocaust Survivors’ are running on a joint list with the ‘New Leaf’ party – and they don’t mean: as in New Year’s resolutions.
Quite a few of us olim came over here intending to support The Likud party, partly out of nostalgia for Menachem Begin, a leader of unquestioned pride and integrity. One couple I know came over here and actually registered to join the Likud, specifically to support and vote for Moshe Feiglin and his Manhegut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership), a militant faction trying to take over the party leadership from Bibi Netanyahu. I also need to mention that, unlike the States, where you simply advise the election officials if you wish to register as a Democrat or Republican, here, at least with Likud, you have to contact the party, register with them, and pay dues – not a lot of money, but still………. Anyway, my friends managed to do all this and pay their dues for sixteen months, until, when the time came for them to vote for Feiglin and his representatives in the recent Likud primary, they were told, “Sorry, you haven’t been Likud members for eighteen months. You can’t vote in the primary.” Other people told me that they submitted their paperwork, and it never got processed. When I heard about this experience, I thought to myself, if this is how they run their party, then how can they undo the bureaucratic hurdles and fix the country’s problems, when they’re an example of the problem? Even without my friends’ votes, Feiglin managed to get himself up to the twentieth position on the Likud slate, when, WHAM, the rules suddenly changed, once and then again, so that the leader of Manhegut Yehudit was buried in the thirty-something slot, meaning he would never get elected. We can only wish that Bibi would have waged as strong a campaign against Tzipi Livni as he waged against Feiglin – but I am getting way ahead of myself.
At that point, I had no clue whom I would be voting for, and, rightly or wrongly, I have always felt uncomfortable if I don’t have a candidate to support. There would be a number of debates and other forums in which some or all of the slates could present their views, and Barbara and I determined to go to as many of these as we could, especially a debate co-sponsored by the Jerusalem Post and Barbara’s employer, the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, in the Jerusalem Great Synagogue, which would have representatives of nine of the parties which were viable and relevant to the audience. We were told to get to that one an hour early to make sure we could get a seat. But the first forum would a meeting in Maale Adumim which one of my shul buddies here was organizing, at which MK Arieh Eldad would be speaking on behalf of his party, Ihud Leumi [National Union], a new grouping of four right-wing factions (in this context, ‘right-wing’ means “we’re not giving away a sandbox worth of land to anybody”). I figured, why not? We could walk there, and, if nothing else, we would help Chaim fill the room. I knew nothing about Ihud Leumi, except that they were running a separate list from the other National Religious group, ‘The Jewish Home’ party (because if there was going to be two Arab parties and two ‘green parties,’ it would only be fair that there be two national religious parties.)
Meanwhile, some people I know had put a message on our local Anglo e-mail group, MA-chat, mentioning on on-line survey about the election. So, I’ll check it out. What I realized was that the Institute for Democracy in Israel and Ynet, the web version of a local newspaper, had put together a way for undecided voters to match their views on current topics with those of seventeen political parties. You could take this test in Hebrew, English, or Dutch – they were using the facilities of a group in Holland to host this venture, and, as it turned out, 600,000 Israelis took ‘the compass’, as it was called, probably few in Dutch.
The survey had twenty five very specific statements (none of them hinted at global, existential, or theological solutions) which covered the gamut from ‘territorial compromise,’ to the role of religion in the State, questions about the economy and environmental concerns; and you could strongly agree, somewhat agree, be neutral, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree, or completely cop out by saying you had no opinion. Some of the statements were easy for me to respond to: “As part of a peace settlement, Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem should be given to the Palestinians.” (No.) Some more problematic: “Civil marriage [in addition to religious marriage] should be instituted in Israel.” (Very mixed feelings on this issue.) or “The state should provide a security net for pensions, retirement, and long-term savings for its citizens.” (can’t begin to answer the question without knowing what kind of ‘security net’ is being discussed.) None the less, I gave this ‘test’ my full attention and somehow answered all of them. Now the Institute had, in effect, given this survey to all of the political parties by reviewing their campaign material; and so, in the end, my profile, broken down into three components, security, socioeconomic, and religion, was matched with the profile of each of the parties, and I was told “You have a substantive agreement of x%” with each one, in rank order. No one is telling me what I should think; they’re telling me who agrees with me. Can’t argue with that! In my particular case, while Likud and Israel Beiteinu (my home) had a respectable showing, my highest substantive agreement (77%), security, 95% [what question did I answer wrong?],socioeconomic, 63%, religion 80%, was with Ichud Leumi, the National Unity party. Wait a minute, isn’t that the group I’m going to hear? What about the other national religious party, The Jewish Home? Their ‘score’ was only 63% (two percentage points lower than Kadima, Ehud Olmert’s party), proving to me that these two groups do not agree on a lot of things. I have already indicated that I was less than thrilled with Likud, and I share with Barbara a general distrust of Avigdor Lieberman, the one-man rule of Israel Beitenu: cursing Arab MK’s does not to me constitute a political program. (Speaking of Arab MK’s, I almost forgot: my substantive agreement with Ra’am-Ta’al was 38%, with Balad, the other Arab party, 37%, and in last place with 35% – what a surprise! – was Hadash, the communist party. Of course, Meretz, the darling of Haaretz, didn’t do so badly either: they were up there at 40%.)
Anyway, I began to consider what Ichud Leumi had to offer. The evening of the forum, we met friends for dinner (the disenfranchised Feiglinites) in another part of Maale Adumim and walked the forty or so minutes down to Mitzpe Nevo (the ‘religos’ [that’s what the sign says] neighborhood), on the way meeting another friend, making a caravan of people going to hear MK Eldad. I still had a lot of questions: was it worthwhile to support a small party that would probably wind up with a handful of seats in the next Knesset? Was this a one issue group that only concerned itself with territorial integrity?
The forum was to take place in the social hall at the ‘Down’ shul (in Mitzpe Nevo, they have the ‘Up’ shul, the ‘Down’ shul, and the ‘Happy Minyon,’ and some other time when I have the strength, I will explain why they’re called that). The organizers had optimistically set up about 100 chairs, and by the time people finished drifted in, the room was almost filled up. I motioned to my friend Michael, “Let’s sit in the middle.” He didn’t understand my reference, so I explained, “It’s enough we’re at a meeting of the most right-wing party there is. Let’s at least be in the middle of the right-wing.” He got the idea and joined me. Introducing the main speaker was a young man, Yehuda HaKohen who works for Arutz Sheva Radio an on-line print, radio, and TV media center, appealing to a basically national religious audience. Yehuda spoke about Yigal Yadin, the Israeli archaeologist who was also the head of Israel’s first army in the War of Independence. On one of his digs, hidden away in caves in the Judean desert, Yadin found ancient documents, some of which turned out to be letters to his troops from Bar Kochba, the leader of the last revolt against the Romans in the year 132 C.E. And so, military instructions from the last Jewish ‘chief-of-staff’ somehow had been delivered to his successor, the first chief-of-staff of the modern Jewish state some 1850 years later. As always, you are free to consider this a mere coincidence, an historical anomaly. You are also free to discern something significant in this chain of events, and it would be fair to say that the audience assembled understood the implicit message which Yehuda HaKohen was giving. Perhaps we need to consider ourselves the legitimate heirs to an ancient legacy, and without question Aryeh Eldad considers himself as part of that tradition.
Eldad opened his remarks with a version of the anecdote which I rewrote 3000 words ago at the beginning of this article. And his question to us was, “How did we, the Jewish people lose the horse?” We were in Exile these long years, and throughout those dark periods, we had a collective belief that we would someday return to The Land. How, when, under what conditions, were the subjects of never-ending controversy; but that we would again be one day a Nation in our own Land was certan; in fact, it was often our sole bitter-sweet consolation for the bitter lives we led among the Nations. We understood what our Land was and where it was, and we certainly understood the centrality of Jerusalem. So how did we get to a point, when we actually are back in our Land, and we are on the brink of greatness (these are my words), and suddenly we have in our midst so many who are willing to give away our Land. “Har Habayit b’yadeinu” (The Temple Mount is in our hands, the famous words of Motti Gur, the troop commander who seized this holy site in 1967). How did we give it away? Eldad related to us, a mostly ‘religious’ audience, when he talks about “The people of Israel in the Land of Israel with the Torah of Israel” to a more secular crowd, and he senses people trying to look at the back of his head to see the kippah that he is not wearing, and their bewilderment when they cannot identify him as part of the ‘religious’ sector. For him, the People, the Land, the Torah are the inheritance of all Jews, regardless of their ‘lifestyle.’ How did so many of us lose this understanding?
Aryeh Eldad, MK is also Aryeh Eldad, M.D., previously the head of the plastic surgery department at Ein Kerem branch of Hadassah Hospital (where the Chagall Windows are; not the branch on Mount Scopus). He’s not the guy you would go to if you wanted a ‘nose job.’ He treated soldiers and civilian terror victims for their burns and wounds; and he began to think more and more about the standard concept of preventive medicine. Any sensible government would seek to prevent malaria rather than treat its victims. Why wasn’t the Israeli government more vigorous in eradicating terrorism within its borders? Most of us at this forum did not need to be convinced that setting up a terrorist Arab state within or current borders would pose an ‘existential’ threat to our continued existence, something we must absolutely oppose – and something which essentially all the existing political parties have not made clear in words and/or in deeds.
The second ‘existential threat our speaker chose to deal with is the endemic corruption within the Israeli government. Now Eldad knows something about this topic, as he has been the chairman of the Ethics committee within the Knesset, using the authority of the office to locate and read the many, many dossiers kept on file in government offices, which detail the illegal activities of various politicians, which information can be used at will against these officials. The most famous and egregious example is Ariel Sharon, who three days after his reported indictment, announced his plans to expel 8000 citizen from Gaza, a decision which I understand took the American government by surprise. Sharon was never indicted by the attorney general; he received his punishment in a different way. And then there is the story of an obscure Arab mayor of an equally obscure Arab town somewhere in the north, which for obscure reasons has 300 registered voters for the Labor party. During the last primary several years ago for the head of this party, which Ehud Barak won by several hundred votes, 299 of these 300 voters took the trouble to come to the polls, and in the spirit of camaraderie, all 299 of these like-minded Arab citizens voted for Barak. After a year of investigation, Eldad managed to find the file on this Arab mayor, detailing his corruption; although for obscure reasons, the helpful mayor was never put on trial, either.
Eldad finished his presentation and fielded a number of questions. By and large the audience, many of whom were ‘undecided’ at the beginning, left convinced or at least ‘strongly leaning’ towards Ichud Leumi – the latter group including your correspondent. I had decided not to make an absolutely final decision until I had heard the Great Debate the following week (which you will read about shortly). It was far from clear whether Eldad or members of his groups had a comprehensive plan to address these ‘existential’ threats, but at least they were clearly stating the problems from a Jewish perspective, and I was not convinced that any other party was even doing that. I was aware that some of the people in this ‘united front’ which Eldad was representing were even more right-wing than I am. But that would be OK; at least 100 of the 120 members of the next Knesset would be more left-wing than me. A few to the right wouldn’t be so terrible. And perhaps some of them would actually represent how I feel.
We got a ride home; it would have been a forty five minute walk up the hill from Mitzpe Nevo to the friendly confines of HaMitzadim where we reside. I was beginning to feel better; maybe, just maybe, we would have someone to back in the election, a proverbial horse in the race – one which we can only hope will not get stolen.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Not So Friendly Fire
In between the time of the US residential election in November and the inauguration of the new resident, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss the results of the election with some olim like us and some friends visiting form the U.S. I can report with some certainty the following trend, at least for people that we know: most Jewish women seem absolutely unable to relate to Sara Palin. I asked one woman, a friend of a friend, here for Shabbat lunch, why she so disliked a candidate who actually did keep a flag of Israel in her office, even though the number of Jews in Alaska may be lower than Joe Biden’s I.Q. Her response was interesting, although I couldn’t quite get the sense of it. She said that she thought that Palin would be good for Israel but bad for the U.S. The young woman was our guest and I wanted to get on with lunch, so I let her remark go unchallenged, although I see this as a false dichotomy: I didn’t and still don’t understand how anything that was bad for the U.S., politically, economically, militarily, or any other way you can think of, would be good for Israel. I can think of a number of scenarios whereby America would dump its ally, but in all of them the land of my birth would be sinking into a European-style mediocrity. Pardon me my “fundamentalist” approach on this one, but I believe that G-d will abandon any American administration which abandons Israel. (Some people say that this is what happened to the outgoing president.)
Most people I spoke with, even those who supported the Democrat candidates, were fully aware that the media in America had made mincemeat of Ms. Palin, playing up every rumor (generally false), half truth, and innuendo while giving a pass to Joe (a gaffe a day) Biden. So you would see a report that Palin’s husband had been arrested in the 1980’s for drunk driving, yet no reporter seemed interested in reminding the folks back home about the plagiarism scandal which derailed Biden’s presidential aspirations at about the same time. The result of the media’s assault on the Republican vice-presidential nominee could be seen in a video of some interviews with Obama supporters either directly before or after the election, in which the interviewer tried to elicit how much they knew about the candidates. Now you have to be careful here: it would be the easiest thing to interview 100 perfectly normal voters and then find ten abnormally stupid lumps of protoplasm and interview them. The people being interviewed were among those whom I describe as “cheerfully clueless,” people who feel a sense of pride in their ability to remember from day to day the names of the major candidates. Still, the results were edifying, if somewhat scary. These witless souls were asked questions like, “Which candidate said that there are 58 states in The Union?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Obama) “Which candidate didn’t know the year in which FDR was first elected president?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Biden) “Who said that you could see Alaska from his/her living room?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live) “Which candidate defeated an entrenched political machine to get elected?” “Obama?, Obama?, Obama!) (correct answer: Palin) You get the idea. We need to remember one simple rule about how many people think: they begin with an opinion or impression about other people or groups of people and then bend the facts to conform thereto; sort of like banging second-hand auto parts to fit the somewhat dented frame. You will not create a Unified Field Theory in this way, but what the heck! However, if the rest of us realize the importance of first impressions, we can then understand the power of the media in shaping world opinion.
I don’t think Ms. Palin had any idea of how the American media could take her, a gifted newcomer whom they didn’t like, and turn her into a caricature of herself (just as they could take another political neophyte whom they adored and turn him into something akin to The Messiah.) One need not feel sorry for the moose hunting governor from Alaska; she will, if she chooses to remain in national politics, have her day. And if it’s any consolation to her: “Hey, Sara, we the Jewish people collectively have had the pleasure of being “Palinized” for the last 2000 years!”
All this is a prelude to a thought I had last week on an entirely different matter, one much closer to my new home. You are all aware that there has been a bit of a ruckus in this part of the world recently, and in all the ensuing carnage ten of our fighting men have been killed – about half of whom have been killed by “friendly fire,” which is the apotheosis of an oxymoron. I have seen photographs of these men in the local press, a few with kippot, some without, in fact one or two were not Jewish, Druse or Beduin. Most of them were smiling, with their whole lives seemingly ahead of them. When I looked at their faces, I had the thought, “I’ve seen this guy before. Wasn’t he sitting on a bus going to Tel Aviv; wasn’t he with his buddies on a bus in Jerusalem, with their huge backpacks and their guns, and didn’t he get up and offer me his seat?” Or perhaps, one of these soldiers was involved in the following story making the rounds, one of the endless series of “American olim mangle the language.” It seems that a young woman was getting off an Egged bus, and she wanted to remind the driver that her belongings were in the luggage area on the side. But instead of saying “under the bus,” this innocent young lady told the nonplussed driver that she had something “in his underwear.” There were, apparently, four soldiers who overheard this and couldn’t resist the temptation to inquire about their own underwear.
I could have encountered those young men who had been killed, but I guess I didn’t. It was probably a different chayal on the bus; they all have the same uniform (except for the berets which identify their assignment). For a time in Teaneck, at the early Shabbat minyon I attended, the gabbai would read out the names of any Israeli, civilian or soldier, who was killed in the previous week during one of the intifadas. And at the annual community-wide Israel memorial day/independence day event, school children would read out the names of all the soldiers who had died during the previous year. Hearing the names of men and women you have never seen is chilling enough, but when you are here, and every day you see so many of them in their uniforms, the fighting forces and the jobniks, riding the buses to and from their bases, coming and going for Shabbat, I keep telling you that it’s a lot more tangible, as if something that’s part of you has been ripped away.
Generally, the articles in JPost which described their deaths would include a statement from the bereaved family. Despite the almost unbearable anguish in losing a son, many of the parents noted a slight feeling of comfort and consolation knowing that their loved one died Kiddush Hashem (sanctifying G-d’s name) defending His people and their Homeland. Better that than having someone killed by a drunk driver in a senseless road accident. But supposing that sense of comfort were ripped away? Supposing your son’s death was as “senseless” as having your neck broken falling on an errant banana peel? Or even worse: suppose your son, the one you knew in your heart of hearts was a hero – was being called a murderer, a baby killer, a villain of the worst sort? Suppose he, and the cause for which he was fighting was being…….Palinized? Suppose that every day on the Yahoo home page and the world’s press there were half-truths, stories sensationalized or ripped out of context, and blatant lies, all the while the obvious excesses of your opponent were minimized, ignored, explained away, or even glorified?
The bereaved parents might not even be aware of the animosity being fomented against us throughout Europe and Asia. The local papers, reflecting the ninety plus percent support for the IDF military campaign, have trumpeted the military successes, highlighted the unusual popular consensus, and been supportive of the government. Even the left-wing Haaretz has pretty much confined its negativity to the cranks who inhabit its editorial pages. And, frankly, I don’t think at this time and in this situation, the “average” Israeli is particularly concerned about how the U.N. will respond. It’s only when someone like me picks up the International Herald-Tribune (which accompanies Haaretz) that I realize the feeding frenzy which has been going on around us, and which those of you in The West, if you are paying attention, see all around you.
But for some of those who are aware of the hatred being brewed in the world’s capitals, there is a sense of puzzlement. The letters to the editor in JPost are filled with questions like: Don’t these people realize that Hamas doesn’t even recognize that our State exists; that they have no intention of negotiating with us; that they conduct warfare from the middle of cities; that they deliberately put men, women, and children at grave risk while their leaders hide from danger; that they use mosques and hospitals as military bases? Don’t these people realize that all we want is for Hamas to stop attacking us, and we can’t wait while they improve their weaponry? Don’t these people realize that the forces attacking Israel will someday try to take control of Western Europe and impose Shariah law on them? Haven’t these critics been ignoring the rockets which have been falling on Sderot for eight years? And why aren’t they protesting with equal passion the starvation, rape, and pillage going on every day in parts of Africa? Personally, I am not surprised by the outpouring of venom directed at the State of Israel and Jews in general. I am not happy, but I think I know what we are up against.
I have written before about replacement theology, the insistence of the religions we have inadvertently spawned that they take our place as “the chosen people.” One of the problems herein is that the Nations, while wanting the glory, do not seem to understand or be willing to accept the challenge of being “a light unto the nations.” (Of course, even when given the opportunity to perform this task, we have not done such a good job of it either.) Certainly, the nations of the West have done an excellent job over the last 1000 years in many field of human endeavor: sciences, technology, artistic and philosophical expression. But being a “light unto the nations” involves something substantially more: the task at hand is much grander, to spread G-d’s kindness throughout the breadth and width of the lands in a way that has never been understood, let alone tried. Despite a common misconception, the Nations cannot be worthy of G-d’s affection, if they are not hospitable to his People; and that won’t happen when they have not even been nice to each other – and that is one huge understatement. Why would it be a surprise that, in front of their beautiful cathedrals, they would burn every copy of The Talmud they could find – and sometimes us with it – when they were burning each other alive at the stake because they disagreed on a point of theology? You could say that they don’t do that anymore, except that people were burned alive in my lifetime – some of them family members of some of you – because of who their great-grandparents were. You could say that they don’t still torture each other, rape each other, engage in unbridled savagery one against the other anymore, and then engage in the most exquisite forms of hypocrisy to justify their actions – except they do.
Many years ago when I was a supervisor in NYC’s child welfare administration, I worked with a fellow who had had a yeshiva education which taught him about every calamity that had befallen the Jewish people and who was quite cynical about our relations with the gentiles of the world. With my secular, humanist education, I felt he was exaggerating; certainly, the non-Jewish people I had met in my lifetime, with few exceptions, seemed free of any desire to murder me, and I didn’t like to think in those terms. The older I get, the more I realize that his pessimistic view of world history was closer to the mark than I had realized. Who are these people in the pictures and videos from all over the world demonstrating in support of Hamas – or against our efforts to stop the terrorists from destroying us, which winds up essentially being the same thing? Who are these folks calling us murderers, carrying placards calling for “Palestine from sea to sea,” vandalizing our houses of worship, urging boycotts of Jewish businesses in Italy? These are the descendents of the very people who have been murdering, brutalizing, condemning, and expelling us from their midst for well over a thousand years. These are the people who are assuaging their own guilt for allowing so many of us to be butchered by the Nazis by labeling our self-defense as a “holocaust.” You may not appreciate this answer and they will deny these accusations, but perhaps they are true. The irony therein is overwhelming.
I am not in a position to say what has been accomplished by this military action. The Hamas leaders have climbed out of their rat holes and have put their uniforms back on, all the while claiming victory. The devastation on their side is appalling, but I cannot imagine that any great wave of introspection will occur. While they bewail their horrendous loss of life, many of these people would willingly strap on themselves or their children an arsenal of explosives and set off to blow up themselves with as many Israelis as they could find. The tunnels through which they smuggle weapons will be rebuilt, probably before any of the homes. Gilad Schalit remains a prisoner of war; Jonathan Pollard expects to live out his life in an American prison. The elections here will go on as scheduled in February.
During the course of the campaign, thousands of Israeli soldiers requested and received sifrei tehillim (books of psalms) and tefillin. Thousands of Israelis – even Hareidim who in theory are not supporters of The State – volunteered to recite prayers for specific soldiers who requested it. The story has been circulated here within religious circles about two soldiers who were on patrol in a town in Gaza. They were about to go in one direction down a street when they were stopped by a woman dressed in black who told them emphatically to go the opposite way. A minute later a bomb exploded where they would have been, had they gone where they intended to. The woman in black then identified herself as Rachel immeinu. Now, the story is as likely to have happened as some big cheese from Hamas coming to my home in Maale Adumim tonight and joining me in some Elmer T. Lee (my favorite bourbon.) The fact that the story is being circulated at all (ignoring the gullibility of the tellers and listeners) is what interests me. As Rav Aviner delicately put it, we should remember that the spirit of Rachel the matriarch has sustained us for these millennia. I would say, leave it at that, but maybe that is the point of all this. We are who we are, and “they” are who they are. The “theys” of the world will always be who they are. We can try mightily to forget who we are, but doing so will lead us in the wrong direction down the wrong street in the wrong place with unfriendly fire from unfriendly forces waiting at the end of the road.
Most people I spoke with, even those who supported the Democrat candidates, were fully aware that the media in America had made mincemeat of Ms. Palin, playing up every rumor (generally false), half truth, and innuendo while giving a pass to Joe (a gaffe a day) Biden. So you would see a report that Palin’s husband had been arrested in the 1980’s for drunk driving, yet no reporter seemed interested in reminding the folks back home about the plagiarism scandal which derailed Biden’s presidential aspirations at about the same time. The result of the media’s assault on the Republican vice-presidential nominee could be seen in a video of some interviews with Obama supporters either directly before or after the election, in which the interviewer tried to elicit how much they knew about the candidates. Now you have to be careful here: it would be the easiest thing to interview 100 perfectly normal voters and then find ten abnormally stupid lumps of protoplasm and interview them. The people being interviewed were among those whom I describe as “cheerfully clueless,” people who feel a sense of pride in their ability to remember from day to day the names of the major candidates. Still, the results were edifying, if somewhat scary. These witless souls were asked questions like, “Which candidate said that there are 58 states in The Union?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Obama) “Which candidate didn’t know the year in which FDR was first elected president?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Biden) “Who said that you could see Alaska from his/her living room?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live) “Which candidate defeated an entrenched political machine to get elected?” “Obama?, Obama?, Obama!) (correct answer: Palin) You get the idea. We need to remember one simple rule about how many people think: they begin with an opinion or impression about other people or groups of people and then bend the facts to conform thereto; sort of like banging second-hand auto parts to fit the somewhat dented frame. You will not create a Unified Field Theory in this way, but what the heck! However, if the rest of us realize the importance of first impressions, we can then understand the power of the media in shaping world opinion.
I don’t think Ms. Palin had any idea of how the American media could take her, a gifted newcomer whom they didn’t like, and turn her into a caricature of herself (just as they could take another political neophyte whom they adored and turn him into something akin to The Messiah.) One need not feel sorry for the moose hunting governor from Alaska; she will, if she chooses to remain in national politics, have her day. And if it’s any consolation to her: “Hey, Sara, we the Jewish people collectively have had the pleasure of being “Palinized” for the last 2000 years!”
All this is a prelude to a thought I had last week on an entirely different matter, one much closer to my new home. You are all aware that there has been a bit of a ruckus in this part of the world recently, and in all the ensuing carnage ten of our fighting men have been killed – about half of whom have been killed by “friendly fire,” which is the apotheosis of an oxymoron. I have seen photographs of these men in the local press, a few with kippot, some without, in fact one or two were not Jewish, Druse or Beduin. Most of them were smiling, with their whole lives seemingly ahead of them. When I looked at their faces, I had the thought, “I’ve seen this guy before. Wasn’t he sitting on a bus going to Tel Aviv; wasn’t he with his buddies on a bus in Jerusalem, with their huge backpacks and their guns, and didn’t he get up and offer me his seat?” Or perhaps, one of these soldiers was involved in the following story making the rounds, one of the endless series of “American olim mangle the language.” It seems that a young woman was getting off an Egged bus, and she wanted to remind the driver that her belongings were in the luggage area on the side. But instead of saying “under the bus,” this innocent young lady told the nonplussed driver that she had something “in his underwear.” There were, apparently, four soldiers who overheard this and couldn’t resist the temptation to inquire about their own underwear.
I could have encountered those young men who had been killed, but I guess I didn’t. It was probably a different chayal on the bus; they all have the same uniform (except for the berets which identify their assignment). For a time in Teaneck, at the early Shabbat minyon I attended, the gabbai would read out the names of any Israeli, civilian or soldier, who was killed in the previous week during one of the intifadas. And at the annual community-wide Israel memorial day/independence day event, school children would read out the names of all the soldiers who had died during the previous year. Hearing the names of men and women you have never seen is chilling enough, but when you are here, and every day you see so many of them in their uniforms, the fighting forces and the jobniks, riding the buses to and from their bases, coming and going for Shabbat, I keep telling you that it’s a lot more tangible, as if something that’s part of you has been ripped away.
Generally, the articles in JPost which described their deaths would include a statement from the bereaved family. Despite the almost unbearable anguish in losing a son, many of the parents noted a slight feeling of comfort and consolation knowing that their loved one died Kiddush Hashem (sanctifying G-d’s name) defending His people and their Homeland. Better that than having someone killed by a drunk driver in a senseless road accident. But supposing that sense of comfort were ripped away? Supposing your son’s death was as “senseless” as having your neck broken falling on an errant banana peel? Or even worse: suppose your son, the one you knew in your heart of hearts was a hero – was being called a murderer, a baby killer, a villain of the worst sort? Suppose he, and the cause for which he was fighting was being…….Palinized? Suppose that every day on the Yahoo home page and the world’s press there were half-truths, stories sensationalized or ripped out of context, and blatant lies, all the while the obvious excesses of your opponent were minimized, ignored, explained away, or even glorified?
The bereaved parents might not even be aware of the animosity being fomented against us throughout Europe and Asia. The local papers, reflecting the ninety plus percent support for the IDF military campaign, have trumpeted the military successes, highlighted the unusual popular consensus, and been supportive of the government. Even the left-wing Haaretz has pretty much confined its negativity to the cranks who inhabit its editorial pages. And, frankly, I don’t think at this time and in this situation, the “average” Israeli is particularly concerned about how the U.N. will respond. It’s only when someone like me picks up the International Herald-Tribune (which accompanies Haaretz) that I realize the feeding frenzy which has been going on around us, and which those of you in The West, if you are paying attention, see all around you.
But for some of those who are aware of the hatred being brewed in the world’s capitals, there is a sense of puzzlement. The letters to the editor in JPost are filled with questions like: Don’t these people realize that Hamas doesn’t even recognize that our State exists; that they have no intention of negotiating with us; that they conduct warfare from the middle of cities; that they deliberately put men, women, and children at grave risk while their leaders hide from danger; that they use mosques and hospitals as military bases? Don’t these people realize that all we want is for Hamas to stop attacking us, and we can’t wait while they improve their weaponry? Don’t these people realize that the forces attacking Israel will someday try to take control of Western Europe and impose Shariah law on them? Haven’t these critics been ignoring the rockets which have been falling on Sderot for eight years? And why aren’t they protesting with equal passion the starvation, rape, and pillage going on every day in parts of Africa? Personally, I am not surprised by the outpouring of venom directed at the State of Israel and Jews in general. I am not happy, but I think I know what we are up against.
I have written before about replacement theology, the insistence of the religions we have inadvertently spawned that they take our place as “the chosen people.” One of the problems herein is that the Nations, while wanting the glory, do not seem to understand or be willing to accept the challenge of being “a light unto the nations.” (Of course, even when given the opportunity to perform this task, we have not done such a good job of it either.) Certainly, the nations of the West have done an excellent job over the last 1000 years in many field of human endeavor: sciences, technology, artistic and philosophical expression. But being a “light unto the nations” involves something substantially more: the task at hand is much grander, to spread G-d’s kindness throughout the breadth and width of the lands in a way that has never been understood, let alone tried. Despite a common misconception, the Nations cannot be worthy of G-d’s affection, if they are not hospitable to his People; and that won’t happen when they have not even been nice to each other – and that is one huge understatement. Why would it be a surprise that, in front of their beautiful cathedrals, they would burn every copy of The Talmud they could find – and sometimes us with it – when they were burning each other alive at the stake because they disagreed on a point of theology? You could say that they don’t do that anymore, except that people were burned alive in my lifetime – some of them family members of some of you – because of who their great-grandparents were. You could say that they don’t still torture each other, rape each other, engage in unbridled savagery one against the other anymore, and then engage in the most exquisite forms of hypocrisy to justify their actions – except they do.
Many years ago when I was a supervisor in NYC’s child welfare administration, I worked with a fellow who had had a yeshiva education which taught him about every calamity that had befallen the Jewish people and who was quite cynical about our relations with the gentiles of the world. With my secular, humanist education, I felt he was exaggerating; certainly, the non-Jewish people I had met in my lifetime, with few exceptions, seemed free of any desire to murder me, and I didn’t like to think in those terms. The older I get, the more I realize that his pessimistic view of world history was closer to the mark than I had realized. Who are these people in the pictures and videos from all over the world demonstrating in support of Hamas – or against our efforts to stop the terrorists from destroying us, which winds up essentially being the same thing? Who are these folks calling us murderers, carrying placards calling for “Palestine from sea to sea,” vandalizing our houses of worship, urging boycotts of Jewish businesses in Italy? These are the descendents of the very people who have been murdering, brutalizing, condemning, and expelling us from their midst for well over a thousand years. These are the people who are assuaging their own guilt for allowing so many of us to be butchered by the Nazis by labeling our self-defense as a “holocaust.” You may not appreciate this answer and they will deny these accusations, but perhaps they are true. The irony therein is overwhelming.
I am not in a position to say what has been accomplished by this military action. The Hamas leaders have climbed out of their rat holes and have put their uniforms back on, all the while claiming victory. The devastation on their side is appalling, but I cannot imagine that any great wave of introspection will occur. While they bewail their horrendous loss of life, many of these people would willingly strap on themselves or their children an arsenal of explosives and set off to blow up themselves with as many Israelis as they could find. The tunnels through which they smuggle weapons will be rebuilt, probably before any of the homes. Gilad Schalit remains a prisoner of war; Jonathan Pollard expects to live out his life in an American prison. The elections here will go on as scheduled in February.
During the course of the campaign, thousands of Israeli soldiers requested and received sifrei tehillim (books of psalms) and tefillin. Thousands of Israelis – even Hareidim who in theory are not supporters of The State – volunteered to recite prayers for specific soldiers who requested it. The story has been circulated here within religious circles about two soldiers who were on patrol in a town in Gaza. They were about to go in one direction down a street when they were stopped by a woman dressed in black who told them emphatically to go the opposite way. A minute later a bomb exploded where they would have been, had they gone where they intended to. The woman in black then identified herself as Rachel immeinu. Now, the story is as likely to have happened as some big cheese from Hamas coming to my home in Maale Adumim tonight and joining me in some Elmer T. Lee (my favorite bourbon.) The fact that the story is being circulated at all (ignoring the gullibility of the tellers and listeners) is what interests me. As Rav Aviner delicately put it, we should remember that the spirit of Rachel the matriarch has sustained us for these millennia. I would say, leave it at that, but maybe that is the point of all this. We are who we are, and “they” are who they are. The “theys” of the world will always be who they are. We can try mightily to forget who we are, but doing so will lead us in the wrong direction down the wrong street in the wrong place with unfriendly fire from unfriendly forces waiting at the end of the road.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
A Letter to ..........
Have you ever had the experience that you have left your house to go somewhere, and you get halfway there and you have to turn around and go back to where you started – maybe you forgot something: your lunch, your glasses, your bus pass, or your cell phone, whatever. That’s sort of how I feel right now. I finished my last article about Sderot, “First, Steal a Lamppost,” and I was working assiduously, as promised on a new piece about the United Jewish Council’s General Assembly in Jerusalem, when I realized that I had to go back to the topic of Sderot and deal with some unfinished business. First of all, the ceasefire there has ended, kassams began to fall from the skies, war with Hamas appeared inevitable, and then, as we know, it broke out, first in the skies and now on the ground.
But something else had happened, albeit a lot less dramatic. After I sent out the last piece, I got back a message from a very devoted reader in Teaneck, thanking me for the article. It seems that she is in touch with a college classmate (this goes back more years than we are willing to discuss!) who she wrote has recently become “observant,” and the college buddy had sent his e-mail list an article about the sad plight of the Arabs in Gaza. My friend, after wiping away her crocodile tears, sent him my article and asked him to send that as well to his list. My feeling was that I wasn’t going to hold my breath; most Liberals I have come across recently are less than liberal when it comes to considering divergent points of view. But, to his credit, my friend’s friend, who will remain nameless, did circulate my piece, which prompted to me to look at it again – whereupon it occurred to me that a) it wasn’t intended to be “hasbara” (an explaining) to a world which doesn’t “understand” what’s going on in Gaza and why there was at times a partial or complete blockade of goods going in from Israel and why there is again open hostilities; b) I really don’t do hasbara, and there are times when hasbara is either not appropriate or a total waste of time.
Nonetheless, I began with a feeling that I should respond to him and address his humanitarian concerns. And as the crisis escalated, the war began, and the shrill cries of denunciation began to fill the streets and airwaves around the world, my sense that I should communicate to our new friend and to his circle of friends only increased. I’m sure he is a good guy, and maybe he and his wife, both of whom I understand are apparently relatively recent returnees to Torah Judaism, are still in the process of sorting things out, evaluating and coming to terms with lifelong held beliefs. So I am putting aside for now my (almost) half written article on the GA to write this piece, working on it for over a week, which I hope will find its way Lew and perhaps give him pause to think. Here goes:
Dear (),We, of course, have never met. I know you only as someone who I’m told went to school with M.; and you know me only as the author of my article “First Steal a Lamppost,” which you were good enough to forward to your e-mail list. We do have several things in common. First of all, my name – at least my middle name – is the same as yours, and I do have some very old and dear friends, who, for reasons I will not bore you with, still refer to me by that moniker. I am also someone who grew up very much estranged from the Torah and only discovered much later in life that “Its ways are ways of pleasantness.” If you went to school with M., then we are roughly contemporaries. And both of us, in our own way, feel a connection to the Land of Israel, although how we have chosen to express that commitment is very different.
We have had the good fortune, my wife, my children, and I, to move to Maale Adumim, a community of almost 40,000 Jews, which as everyone knows by now is ….. a little bit east of Yerushalayim, and which our Arab “cousins” and many others want us to “give back” – although twenty five years ago there wasn’t even a stray cat living here, and the land on which my house, my street, my neighborhood stand was as barren and “unoccupied” as any piece of property could ever be. Living here has been a revelation, strengthening my belief in the value of empirical observation. That is to say, something which you have heard with your own ears or seen with your own eyes becomes more tangible and significant than anything you have only read or heard about second hand. For example, now that I have been to Sderot and walked around the shopping mall, when I read about the kassam rockets which landed several weeks ago in the mall parking lot, I knew exactly where that was, and I could picture in my mind’s eye the exact spot and what the damage must have looked like; it was no longer an abstract place in an abstract town.
Being in a place also allows you to have a relative sense of the danger you might be in. It’s like calling a friend in California and asking, “Did you get injured by the earthquake?” And your friend responding, “That was in Los Angeles. I live in San Francisco.” A friend of my older daughter was visiting in Tel Aviv; she was scared to come to Jerusalem because someone had told her that if “anything happened” it would be in Jerusalem. Never mind that she was more likely to be injured in a traffic accident on the way to Jerusalem.
Walking around downtown Jerusalem the last week, you would never know that there is a military engagement less than two hours away. Shops in the “Arab quarter” may or may not be closed, but Arab workers in the Mahane Yehuda shuk are still dealing in cucumbers. (Our biggest problem continues to be maneuvering around the light rail construction on Rehov Yaffa.) I read about two opposing demonstrations at Hebrew University on Monday: Arabs on one side of the street; Jews on the other. At about the same time, my daughter Natania – on vacation from the army – and I were on that very same campus on Mount Scopus, innocently looking for the newly refurbished botanical gardens. There are signs all over the place, but no mention of the gardens. We kept asking security guards where to go, and each time we got a different and conflicting set of directions, and we then set off this way and then that way. Finally, we were sent walking through a very long tunnel under the main set of buildings, where students wait for buses. We came out of the tunnel into a dead end at the Egged parking lot. (No flowers there!) At that point, it began to rain lightly and we gave up, hopping on a bus going back to Jerusalem. So for all I know, the Arab students could have been throwing Molotov cocktails less than a mile from where we were wandering. We wouldn’t have noticed. I should mention that the next day, Natania and I were in MisterZol, our local supermarket, when Natania got the call to return to her base. The other young woman who runs the weapons depot with her was out sick; even though hers is only a training base, they wanted the neshkia open and the weapons therein available. So Natania did not get the chance to join us that evening for a wonderful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeoman of the Guard,” instead joining thousands of resolute young men and women who are guarding us, making it possible for all of us to remain safely in The Land. Friends of ours were joining us for the performance and gave us a ride to the theater. One of their sons was in the car, and he related his experiences on the last day of Hannukah going back to his former yeshiva in Otniel (south of Hebron) for their annual “alumni” event, and seeing burning tires on the sides of the road and in the middle of the road and seeing Arab boys throwing rocks at buses passing by. It was the first time, he said, that he felt a sense of danger on these roads. He had hitched a ride to his school; he took a bullet-proof bus back to Jerusalem. Again, the only problem on our way to the theater – perhaps an hour from the yeshiva –is the on-going construction on Rehov Bar-Lev.
One problem with first hand observation is that often when you relate what happened to other people, they fail to understand why you think it is so important. Let me relate to you a seemingly trivial incident which happened to me about a year ago when I was sitting in class at Ulpan, listening to a young Arab college student give as an oral presentation an explanation of Eid el-Adha, a festive day on which Muslims still publicly slaughter goats, sheep, or cows to commemorate Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his chosen son, Ishmael. Our teacher went on asking him questions; he could have been discussing building a geodesic dome or eating a life snake, for all she cared. But I sat through this painful presentation, trying and barely succeeding in keeping my composure, trying not to exhibit any body language of discomfort and keeping my sighs of distress inaudible. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming, “Yitzhak, Yitzhak, not Ishmael!” Now I have related this incident to many of my friends, and usually the response is one of bewilderment. It is as if I rushed in and said something as novel as, “It snowed last night, and, guess what, the ground is all white!” “Everyone” knows what the Arabs think. My point is that you can read about Eid-el-Adha in Wikipedia and find it of academic interest, but when I heard this young man with my own ears talk about our Patriarch and his favored son Ishmael, it was like my bumping into the real live Santa Claus or the Abominable Snowman. Here in front of me at Bet HaAm in the Gerard Behar Center located on Rehov Betzalel in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, was a living, breathing embodiment of ………replacement theology.
In case you are no familiar with this construct, this is where all the promises and rewards recorded in The Torah that were given to our Patriarchs and to Moses become nullified and transferred to other faith groups. We all know how that has been played out over the centuries by our Christian neighbors. The Muslim version is much more subtle. They have no problem allowing us to live (they even honor our prophets) and be well – as long as we acknowledge our second-class status. They have replaced us in G-d’s eyes and therefore they must rule over us. We are now theological nobodies, and it is for that reason that our holiest sites, The Temple Mount and the Ma’arat Hamachpela were turned into mosques and other shrines, and when they have been under Muslim control, we have had no access to them. The best student in this Ulpan was Rami, a big teddy bear kind of a guy, originally, I think, from Saudi Arabia, and trained as an engineer. If anybody needed an answer, we would turn to him, fairly certain that he would supply it. He mentioned in class once that every day he would go up to the Al-Aqsa mosque to pray. As sweet a guy as he is, can you imagine his response, if you mentioned to him that his mosque and the beautiful Dome of the Rock were built where our Holy Temple once stood and that there will come a time when we will want that real estate back?
I can envision thousands of people at this point getting up and yelling, “Who cares which son of Abraham was chosen for what? What does that have to do with anything? This is 2009. Is that what’s holding up Peace in the Middle East? We are trying to run a world here, not referee some stupid theological argument which is completely irrelevant.” That seems to be what many Israelis think and what seems to be the consensus of non-Islamic world opinion. Now I can give you a number of reasons why we as Jews, especially we as Torah-mindful Jews should care if our Torah is truthful or not. But leaving that aside, there is one rather important point: They, that is the Arab Muslim world, believe in complete sincerity that they are rightfully entitled politically and theologically – which in this part of the planet is essentially the same thing – to the entirety of what we consider our Homeland, this tiny speck of real estate which (I keep repeating) is the size of New Jersey. They believe it, not because they are evil, mean, venal, or retarded (here’s a good, politically incorrect term!), unkind, unfeeling, or uncouth, but because they are impelled to by their religion. As far as Allah is concerned, we don’t count; they do. Agree with it or not, this idea is not that difficult to understand. It is only a Western arrogance – that if “we” don’t believe something, it must be stupid, and therefore “they” can’t really believe it either – that prevents people from accepting the fact that the Arab world really does believe in a number of things that seem “crazy” to the Western mind. And anyone who will take the trouble to remove his ideological blinders can’t help but see the Muslim version of “Palestine.” Just walk into any school in an Arab area and look at their maps or their textbooks.
As I sit here looking out the window of my office at a seemingly endless set of sand dunes, a better question than “Who cares…” might be, “Why would anyone want to live here?” Where I am sitting is close by the trade route on which in bygone days camels laden with goods traversed north and south between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Hardly so today. Birds – some 50,000,000 of them every year – still fly over this picayune piece of property on their way from Europe to North Africa and back. But the camel has long been replaced by the airplane. So there has to be another reason, something else impelling us Jews to return to a land that had few discernable natural resources, and there has to be something else impelling the Arab world to claim as their own a place which they – except for taking over our Holy sites – more or less ignored for 1500 years. It seems to me that we ought to take the time to figure out some good answers to these questions.
And if we don’t take the trouble to understand why we want to be here and why it is so important to “our cousins” that we not be here, we will wind up with some very curious ideas. Here’s an Op-Ed piece I clipped out of a recent edition of Haaretz, written with much conviction by Elia Leibowitz, who asks the absorbing question, why the left-wing Meretz party will do so poorly in the next election even though it brings “the best people to the Knesset.” The answer? “Meretz does not tell the whole truth to the public.” I know that you are dying to know what that elusive truth is, so here it is, in a nutshell: “The State of Israel cannot force the Palestinians to agree to anything, either good or bad. At the same time, Israel does not have the strength to continue to holding on to the occupied territories. The only obvious conclusion from these two facts is that Israel must prepare a plan to withdraw to the Green Line……” In other words, Meretz’s failure to say just that Israel must announce its weak position before sitting down to negotiate to is behind The Left’s poor showing with the Israeli voters. Now if we were sitting down together over a large latte or something stronger, I would ask you what you make of this convoluted logic. As we are not, let me share with you a few well-chosen thoughts of my own: a) I reject the notion that the real estate under discussion was taken – stolen – from a non-existent entity called “The Palestinians,” (there have been for several millennia, Arabs living in villages and organized in tribal groups scattered throughout what the Romans renamed “Palestine;” but to consider them a “People” or a “Nation” when they never did so is ludicrous, even if it is fashionable to do so) and that our living in the Land promised to the descendents of Avraham, et. al. is in anyway “immoral.” b) Whether you fully accept premise (a) or not, there is something baffling about the notion that because I can’t get X to do what I want, I have to do what X wants. c) This is especially true when I am fairly certain that even if I do what X wants, he still will not be satisfied and will want me to give up even more. So what brings about this logical lapse? To my way of thinking, and I have expanded on this idea in earlier articles, the problem is that many of us now consider “The Palestinian question” to be our problem, rather than their problem; and if we “own” the problem, then we are required to find a solution – which the other side can obviously veto. If the Israeli government, at great cost, expels 8000 of its citizens from Gaza, but the Arab population there considers this action insufficient, then the onus for creating a peaceful solution still rests with the Israeli government. It’s sort of like negotiating with a three year old.
A peaceful solution. One thing I have figured out from trotting around many blocks a few times in my sixty seven years, something that I hope you can appreciate and understand – and it does take a considerable period of time for this to sink in; and for many it never does – is that life is often counter-intuitive. Only a certain number of people on this globe actually want bloodshed and the loss of human life. Most of us, in our own way, would prefer “shalom.” Some of us assume that because we want peace, if we insist on peace, if we demand peace, we will achieve it. “All we are saying, is give peace a chance…” “Peace, now.” “One, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.” “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.” You get the idea………. But it’s not just fuzzy faced lads and rosy cheeked lasses – as we all were once upon a time – but also great and seasoned minds that retain this level of naiveté. I came across the following summary of an article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on December 29, 1933 “Roosevelt Calls for Disarmament,” which begins “Widely applauded at home for a stirring appeal to the people of the world to take disarmament into their own hands…” Roosevelt’s program included “scrapping of offensive weapons, refusal to open borders to the armed forces of another power and a covenant to keep the peace.” “The President maintained that at least 90 per cent of the world’s population was ‘content with the territorial limits of the respective nations.’” That’s telling ‘em!
Almost twelve years later and more death and destruction than I am prepared to contemplate, Roosevelt’s successor struck a different tone. One day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman said, “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold... We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war." I know this kind of talk makes liberal cringe, but I ask you, which of these Presidents talked about peace, and which one brought it about?
You see, peace is a funny thing. You can’t will it into existence, and it doesn’t just happen by itself. Sometimes you have to fight for it – and that’s a notion that drives people batty. That’s because life is more complicated than at first it seems; sometimes things work just the opposite of how we expect them to. We do have peace of a sort in the region. The reason so many of us can live in Maale Adumim and the Jewish communities surrounding it is because we have a calm border with Jordan. We also have a grudging peace treaty with Egypt. Why do we have this détente? For one and only one reason: Because we kicked the stuffing out of both countries several times, and the leaders of both countries came to realize that there was no benefit in continuing the aggression against us, that they were better off trying to run their own countries. And there will be peace with our other Arab neighbors, in some way, shape, or form, when, and only when, they come to understand that it is in their interest to do so and, most important, they cannot and will not have it on their terms. Why should any Arab leader sit down to discuss détente when they read in an Israeli newspaper that we do not “have the strength” to continue, and he infers that the longer he holds out, the better the deal he will get? Would you negotiate with us – Israel – if you were the head of Hamas and you thought we were too weak, too addle-brained to continue? On the one hand, I do feel sorry for any Arab living in Gaza; I would certainly not want to go through what they have had to endure, what with high unemployment, limited opportunity, food shortages, and now being in the middle of a war. I also would have had a drop of sympathy for the little children of Dresden in 1945, which was being bombed without mercy by the combined air forces of the U.S. and Great Britain – and Dresden wasn’t even a major military or industrial center. And certainly, certainly, I would have had compassion for the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victims of the most deadly weaponry known to mankind. However, maybe, just maybe, they brought it on themselves, and there were then and are now others for whom I should have a little more sympathy. Perhaps I should feel a tad more compassion for the civilians, the yeshiva students, the kibbutzniks in and around Sderot who were under attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups for seven years. Likewise for the 8,000 former residents of Gush Katif, most of whom five years after their expulsion still have not been “made whole” by their, our, own government; and whose “sacrifice” brought no tangible benefits to the rest of us.
There have always been people pleading for peace without understanding how to achieve it. Certainly there were such people in the 1930’s when some were certain that there would be “peace in our time.” We know what happened instead. In the 1940’s there were pacifists and others who cringed at the Allies efforts to win WW II. There were people in The West in the 1950’s calling for nuclear disarmament, many of whom did not realize that this was supposed to mean American nuclear disarmament. Nobody disarmed; instead The Iron Curtain fell. Yesterday, I saw photographs from the on-line New York Times of an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. And there in the background were a host of placards announcing, “Palestine from Sea to Sea.” You see, nothing has changed. There have always been people who will use our humanitarian concerns against us, who will try to trick us into surrendering because we feel sorrier for our opponents than we do for ourselves. You have to decide for yourself where you fit in the scheme of things; but for myself, let the battle continue until we win and they lose. Then there will be peace.
Sincerely,
Fred Casden
But something else had happened, albeit a lot less dramatic. After I sent out the last piece, I got back a message from a very devoted reader in Teaneck, thanking me for the article. It seems that she is in touch with a college classmate (this goes back more years than we are willing to discuss!) who she wrote has recently become “observant,” and the college buddy had sent his e-mail list an article about the sad plight of the Arabs in Gaza. My friend, after wiping away her crocodile tears, sent him my article and asked him to send that as well to his list. My feeling was that I wasn’t going to hold my breath; most Liberals I have come across recently are less than liberal when it comes to considering divergent points of view. But, to his credit, my friend’s friend, who will remain nameless, did circulate my piece, which prompted to me to look at it again – whereupon it occurred to me that a) it wasn’t intended to be “hasbara” (an explaining) to a world which doesn’t “understand” what’s going on in Gaza and why there was at times a partial or complete blockade of goods going in from Israel and why there is again open hostilities; b) I really don’t do hasbara, and there are times when hasbara is either not appropriate or a total waste of time.
Nonetheless, I began with a feeling that I should respond to him and address his humanitarian concerns. And as the crisis escalated, the war began, and the shrill cries of denunciation began to fill the streets and airwaves around the world, my sense that I should communicate to our new friend and to his circle of friends only increased. I’m sure he is a good guy, and maybe he and his wife, both of whom I understand are apparently relatively recent returnees to Torah Judaism, are still in the process of sorting things out, evaluating and coming to terms with lifelong held beliefs. So I am putting aside for now my (almost) half written article on the GA to write this piece, working on it for over a week, which I hope will find its way Lew and perhaps give him pause to think. Here goes:
Dear (),We, of course, have never met. I know you only as someone who I’m told went to school with M.; and you know me only as the author of my article “First Steal a Lamppost,” which you were good enough to forward to your e-mail list. We do have several things in common. First of all, my name – at least my middle name – is the same as yours, and I do have some very old and dear friends, who, for reasons I will not bore you with, still refer to me by that moniker. I am also someone who grew up very much estranged from the Torah and only discovered much later in life that “Its ways are ways of pleasantness.” If you went to school with M., then we are roughly contemporaries. And both of us, in our own way, feel a connection to the Land of Israel, although how we have chosen to express that commitment is very different.
We have had the good fortune, my wife, my children, and I, to move to Maale Adumim, a community of almost 40,000 Jews, which as everyone knows by now is ….. a little bit east of Yerushalayim, and which our Arab “cousins” and many others want us to “give back” – although twenty five years ago there wasn’t even a stray cat living here, and the land on which my house, my street, my neighborhood stand was as barren and “unoccupied” as any piece of property could ever be. Living here has been a revelation, strengthening my belief in the value of empirical observation. That is to say, something which you have heard with your own ears or seen with your own eyes becomes more tangible and significant than anything you have only read or heard about second hand. For example, now that I have been to Sderot and walked around the shopping mall, when I read about the kassam rockets which landed several weeks ago in the mall parking lot, I knew exactly where that was, and I could picture in my mind’s eye the exact spot and what the damage must have looked like; it was no longer an abstract place in an abstract town.
Being in a place also allows you to have a relative sense of the danger you might be in. It’s like calling a friend in California and asking, “Did you get injured by the earthquake?” And your friend responding, “That was in Los Angeles. I live in San Francisco.” A friend of my older daughter was visiting in Tel Aviv; she was scared to come to Jerusalem because someone had told her that if “anything happened” it would be in Jerusalem. Never mind that she was more likely to be injured in a traffic accident on the way to Jerusalem.
Walking around downtown Jerusalem the last week, you would never know that there is a military engagement less than two hours away. Shops in the “Arab quarter” may or may not be closed, but Arab workers in the Mahane Yehuda shuk are still dealing in cucumbers. (Our biggest problem continues to be maneuvering around the light rail construction on Rehov Yaffa.) I read about two opposing demonstrations at Hebrew University on Monday: Arabs on one side of the street; Jews on the other. At about the same time, my daughter Natania – on vacation from the army – and I were on that very same campus on Mount Scopus, innocently looking for the newly refurbished botanical gardens. There are signs all over the place, but no mention of the gardens. We kept asking security guards where to go, and each time we got a different and conflicting set of directions, and we then set off this way and then that way. Finally, we were sent walking through a very long tunnel under the main set of buildings, where students wait for buses. We came out of the tunnel into a dead end at the Egged parking lot. (No flowers there!) At that point, it began to rain lightly and we gave up, hopping on a bus going back to Jerusalem. So for all I know, the Arab students could have been throwing Molotov cocktails less than a mile from where we were wandering. We wouldn’t have noticed. I should mention that the next day, Natania and I were in MisterZol, our local supermarket, when Natania got the call to return to her base. The other young woman who runs the weapons depot with her was out sick; even though hers is only a training base, they wanted the neshkia open and the weapons therein available. So Natania did not get the chance to join us that evening for a wonderful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeoman of the Guard,” instead joining thousands of resolute young men and women who are guarding us, making it possible for all of us to remain safely in The Land. Friends of ours were joining us for the performance and gave us a ride to the theater. One of their sons was in the car, and he related his experiences on the last day of Hannukah going back to his former yeshiva in Otniel (south of Hebron) for their annual “alumni” event, and seeing burning tires on the sides of the road and in the middle of the road and seeing Arab boys throwing rocks at buses passing by. It was the first time, he said, that he felt a sense of danger on these roads. He had hitched a ride to his school; he took a bullet-proof bus back to Jerusalem. Again, the only problem on our way to the theater – perhaps an hour from the yeshiva –is the on-going construction on Rehov Bar-Lev.
One problem with first hand observation is that often when you relate what happened to other people, they fail to understand why you think it is so important. Let me relate to you a seemingly trivial incident which happened to me about a year ago when I was sitting in class at Ulpan, listening to a young Arab college student give as an oral presentation an explanation of Eid el-Adha, a festive day on which Muslims still publicly slaughter goats, sheep, or cows to commemorate Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his chosen son, Ishmael. Our teacher went on asking him questions; he could have been discussing building a geodesic dome or eating a life snake, for all she cared. But I sat through this painful presentation, trying and barely succeeding in keeping my composure, trying not to exhibit any body language of discomfort and keeping my sighs of distress inaudible. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming, “Yitzhak, Yitzhak, not Ishmael!” Now I have related this incident to many of my friends, and usually the response is one of bewilderment. It is as if I rushed in and said something as novel as, “It snowed last night, and, guess what, the ground is all white!” “Everyone” knows what the Arabs think. My point is that you can read about Eid-el-Adha in Wikipedia and find it of academic interest, but when I heard this young man with my own ears talk about our Patriarch and his favored son Ishmael, it was like my bumping into the real live Santa Claus or the Abominable Snowman. Here in front of me at Bet HaAm in the Gerard Behar Center located on Rehov Betzalel in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, was a living, breathing embodiment of ………replacement theology.
In case you are no familiar with this construct, this is where all the promises and rewards recorded in The Torah that were given to our Patriarchs and to Moses become nullified and transferred to other faith groups. We all know how that has been played out over the centuries by our Christian neighbors. The Muslim version is much more subtle. They have no problem allowing us to live (they even honor our prophets) and be well – as long as we acknowledge our second-class status. They have replaced us in G-d’s eyes and therefore they must rule over us. We are now theological nobodies, and it is for that reason that our holiest sites, The Temple Mount and the Ma’arat Hamachpela were turned into mosques and other shrines, and when they have been under Muslim control, we have had no access to them. The best student in this Ulpan was Rami, a big teddy bear kind of a guy, originally, I think, from Saudi Arabia, and trained as an engineer. If anybody needed an answer, we would turn to him, fairly certain that he would supply it. He mentioned in class once that every day he would go up to the Al-Aqsa mosque to pray. As sweet a guy as he is, can you imagine his response, if you mentioned to him that his mosque and the beautiful Dome of the Rock were built where our Holy Temple once stood and that there will come a time when we will want that real estate back?
I can envision thousands of people at this point getting up and yelling, “Who cares which son of Abraham was chosen for what? What does that have to do with anything? This is 2009. Is that what’s holding up Peace in the Middle East? We are trying to run a world here, not referee some stupid theological argument which is completely irrelevant.” That seems to be what many Israelis think and what seems to be the consensus of non-Islamic world opinion. Now I can give you a number of reasons why we as Jews, especially we as Torah-mindful Jews should care if our Torah is truthful or not. But leaving that aside, there is one rather important point: They, that is the Arab Muslim world, believe in complete sincerity that they are rightfully entitled politically and theologically – which in this part of the planet is essentially the same thing – to the entirety of what we consider our Homeland, this tiny speck of real estate which (I keep repeating) is the size of New Jersey. They believe it, not because they are evil, mean, venal, or retarded (here’s a good, politically incorrect term!), unkind, unfeeling, or uncouth, but because they are impelled to by their religion. As far as Allah is concerned, we don’t count; they do. Agree with it or not, this idea is not that difficult to understand. It is only a Western arrogance – that if “we” don’t believe something, it must be stupid, and therefore “they” can’t really believe it either – that prevents people from accepting the fact that the Arab world really does believe in a number of things that seem “crazy” to the Western mind. And anyone who will take the trouble to remove his ideological blinders can’t help but see the Muslim version of “Palestine.” Just walk into any school in an Arab area and look at their maps or their textbooks.
As I sit here looking out the window of my office at a seemingly endless set of sand dunes, a better question than “Who cares…” might be, “Why would anyone want to live here?” Where I am sitting is close by the trade route on which in bygone days camels laden with goods traversed north and south between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Hardly so today. Birds – some 50,000,000 of them every year – still fly over this picayune piece of property on their way from Europe to North Africa and back. But the camel has long been replaced by the airplane. So there has to be another reason, something else impelling us Jews to return to a land that had few discernable natural resources, and there has to be something else impelling the Arab world to claim as their own a place which they – except for taking over our Holy sites – more or less ignored for 1500 years. It seems to me that we ought to take the time to figure out some good answers to these questions.
And if we don’t take the trouble to understand why we want to be here and why it is so important to “our cousins” that we not be here, we will wind up with some very curious ideas. Here’s an Op-Ed piece I clipped out of a recent edition of Haaretz, written with much conviction by Elia Leibowitz, who asks the absorbing question, why the left-wing Meretz party will do so poorly in the next election even though it brings “the best people to the Knesset.” The answer? “Meretz does not tell the whole truth to the public.” I know that you are dying to know what that elusive truth is, so here it is, in a nutshell: “The State of Israel cannot force the Palestinians to agree to anything, either good or bad. At the same time, Israel does not have the strength to continue to holding on to the occupied territories. The only obvious conclusion from these two facts is that Israel must prepare a plan to withdraw to the Green Line……” In other words, Meretz’s failure to say just that Israel must announce its weak position before sitting down to negotiate to is behind The Left’s poor showing with the Israeli voters. Now if we were sitting down together over a large latte or something stronger, I would ask you what you make of this convoluted logic. As we are not, let me share with you a few well-chosen thoughts of my own: a) I reject the notion that the real estate under discussion was taken – stolen – from a non-existent entity called “The Palestinians,” (there have been for several millennia, Arabs living in villages and organized in tribal groups scattered throughout what the Romans renamed “Palestine;” but to consider them a “People” or a “Nation” when they never did so is ludicrous, even if it is fashionable to do so) and that our living in the Land promised to the descendents of Avraham, et. al. is in anyway “immoral.” b) Whether you fully accept premise (a) or not, there is something baffling about the notion that because I can’t get X to do what I want, I have to do what X wants. c) This is especially true when I am fairly certain that even if I do what X wants, he still will not be satisfied and will want me to give up even more. So what brings about this logical lapse? To my way of thinking, and I have expanded on this idea in earlier articles, the problem is that many of us now consider “The Palestinian question” to be our problem, rather than their problem; and if we “own” the problem, then we are required to find a solution – which the other side can obviously veto. If the Israeli government, at great cost, expels 8000 of its citizens from Gaza, but the Arab population there considers this action insufficient, then the onus for creating a peaceful solution still rests with the Israeli government. It’s sort of like negotiating with a three year old.
A peaceful solution. One thing I have figured out from trotting around many blocks a few times in my sixty seven years, something that I hope you can appreciate and understand – and it does take a considerable period of time for this to sink in; and for many it never does – is that life is often counter-intuitive. Only a certain number of people on this globe actually want bloodshed and the loss of human life. Most of us, in our own way, would prefer “shalom.” Some of us assume that because we want peace, if we insist on peace, if we demand peace, we will achieve it. “All we are saying, is give peace a chance…” “Peace, now.” “One, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.” “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.” You get the idea………. But it’s not just fuzzy faced lads and rosy cheeked lasses – as we all were once upon a time – but also great and seasoned minds that retain this level of naiveté. I came across the following summary of an article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on December 29, 1933 “Roosevelt Calls for Disarmament,” which begins “Widely applauded at home for a stirring appeal to the people of the world to take disarmament into their own hands…” Roosevelt’s program included “scrapping of offensive weapons, refusal to open borders to the armed forces of another power and a covenant to keep the peace.” “The President maintained that at least 90 per cent of the world’s population was ‘content with the territorial limits of the respective nations.’” That’s telling ‘em!
Almost twelve years later and more death and destruction than I am prepared to contemplate, Roosevelt’s successor struck a different tone. One day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman said, “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold... We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war." I know this kind of talk makes liberal cringe, but I ask you, which of these Presidents talked about peace, and which one brought it about?
You see, peace is a funny thing. You can’t will it into existence, and it doesn’t just happen by itself. Sometimes you have to fight for it – and that’s a notion that drives people batty. That’s because life is more complicated than at first it seems; sometimes things work just the opposite of how we expect them to. We do have peace of a sort in the region. The reason so many of us can live in Maale Adumim and the Jewish communities surrounding it is because we have a calm border with Jordan. We also have a grudging peace treaty with Egypt. Why do we have this détente? For one and only one reason: Because we kicked the stuffing out of both countries several times, and the leaders of both countries came to realize that there was no benefit in continuing the aggression against us, that they were better off trying to run their own countries. And there will be peace with our other Arab neighbors, in some way, shape, or form, when, and only when, they come to understand that it is in their interest to do so and, most important, they cannot and will not have it on their terms. Why should any Arab leader sit down to discuss détente when they read in an Israeli newspaper that we do not “have the strength” to continue, and he infers that the longer he holds out, the better the deal he will get? Would you negotiate with us – Israel – if you were the head of Hamas and you thought we were too weak, too addle-brained to continue? On the one hand, I do feel sorry for any Arab living in Gaza; I would certainly not want to go through what they have had to endure, what with high unemployment, limited opportunity, food shortages, and now being in the middle of a war. I also would have had a drop of sympathy for the little children of Dresden in 1945, which was being bombed without mercy by the combined air forces of the U.S. and Great Britain – and Dresden wasn’t even a major military or industrial center. And certainly, certainly, I would have had compassion for the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victims of the most deadly weaponry known to mankind. However, maybe, just maybe, they brought it on themselves, and there were then and are now others for whom I should have a little more sympathy. Perhaps I should feel a tad more compassion for the civilians, the yeshiva students, the kibbutzniks in and around Sderot who were under attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups for seven years. Likewise for the 8,000 former residents of Gush Katif, most of whom five years after their expulsion still have not been “made whole” by their, our, own government; and whose “sacrifice” brought no tangible benefits to the rest of us.
There have always been people pleading for peace without understanding how to achieve it. Certainly there were such people in the 1930’s when some were certain that there would be “peace in our time.” We know what happened instead. In the 1940’s there were pacifists and others who cringed at the Allies efforts to win WW II. There were people in The West in the 1950’s calling for nuclear disarmament, many of whom did not realize that this was supposed to mean American nuclear disarmament. Nobody disarmed; instead The Iron Curtain fell. Yesterday, I saw photographs from the on-line New York Times of an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. And there in the background were a host of placards announcing, “Palestine from Sea to Sea.” You see, nothing has changed. There have always been people who will use our humanitarian concerns against us, who will try to trick us into surrendering because we feel sorrier for our opponents than we do for ourselves. You have to decide for yourself where you fit in the scheme of things; but for myself, let the battle continue until we win and they lose. Then there will be peace.
Sincerely,
Fred Casden
Sunday, December 14, 2008
First, Steal a Lamppost
I had to admire Josh. First, he had advertised that the buses would be leaving at 10:30AM; now he was sending all the participants an e-mail saying he wanted everyone there twenty minutes early, so he could collect money and get everyone onboard to leave on time. Once a yekke, always a yekke! At any rate, Barbara and I took him at his word, and we left our house especially early so we could get the bus from Maale Adumim first to the Central Bus Station and then another bus to the Inbal Hotel.
It was the second day of Chol Hamoed. If I had forgotten that this was “duchaning day,” when tens of thousands of Jews would converge at the Kotel to hear the priestly blessing recited by thousands of Cohanim, I would surely have remembered when I saw the fleet of #1 buses, the one that goes to our holy site, lined up opposite the Tachana Mercazit, with passengers scrambling to get aboard. Whenever I think about this twice yearly celebration, I remember back to our experience exactly 28 years ago when we were at the Kotel. To be more precise, we were trying to leave the Kotel after the Birchat Hacohanim. It wasn’t quite as crowded then as it is these days, but still, there were thousands of people all trying to get on a #1 bus. As many of you know, Israelis are not noted for their ability to form a line, especially to get on a bus. But to make it worse, it never occurred to the drivers taking people from the Kotel to stop their vehicles at any one designated spot. So no matter where you were standing, it was the wrong place to get on the next bus. You can imagine the chaos that was ensuing. Here it was, only a few minutes after the “shalom,” the final word of the final blessing had been amplified around these ancient walls, and a small scale riot was about to break out. Finally, we were about to board a bus, and there was a woman standing behind Barbara who was going to push her way onto that bus, come hell or high water. She began shoving Barbara as hard as she could. The problem was that my wife was standing directly behind a small boy, and this woman was inadvertently causing Barbara to crush this child. After remonstrating with this woman several times, Barbara, in complete frustration, turned around and smashed her fist on top of this woman’s head, almost knocking her sheitel off. The woman finally stopped pushing and started shrieking, “She hit me, she hit me” to everyone within earshot – several thousand people. I will never forget the bus ride back. Barbara was sitting and pretending that she didn’t understand what the woman was saying, and I was pretending that I had never seen either of these women before.
That was then. Today I would be playing hooky from my priestly responsibilities and heading to Sderot, the town which has come to symbolize the dangers facing Israel today and the fortitude of its residents. We got to the Inbal Hotel real early, giving us an opportunity to go inside, use the facilities and look around. For those of you who don’t know, the Inbal is one of the swankiest hotels in Jerusalem, definitely out of our league – except to use the bathrooms. It has an enormous dining area in the center of the lobby which must have some sort of retractable roof, because it had been turned into a very, very large sukkah. There were all these families, parents with two, three, or four children having breakfast in the hotel before starting their day of sightseeing. And all I could think of at that moment was how much it would cost for a family of six just to have breakfast at the Inbal Hotel, and what percentage of our weekly food bill that would be; and how nice it would be to have that kind of discretionary income. And perhaps how different Israel would seem from the respective vantage points of a posh lobby in downtown Talbieh and a yeshiva in hunkered-down Sderot. For it was the latter which was sponsoring our tour, officially the Max & Ruth Schwartz Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot (a hesder yeshiva is an institution in which for five years young men combine learning and serving in the Israeli army).
Soon we joined the growing number of people in front of the hotel, all waiting patiently to board their bus to somewhere. Josh was right; it took at least twenty minutes for him to gather all the Sderot people together, collect our money, and get us all on the appropriate buses. It turned out that the guide for our bus was someone we had met before in the home of friends in Beit Shemesh. Win and his wife live in Beit Shemesh half of the year and in NYC half of the year, when they are not globe-trotting and photographing. They had recently been in India and had together taken 20,000 digital images (the equivalent of almost seven hundred rolls of film), some of which we had the opportunity to see this past summer on a Shabbat afternoon in June. Win had previously been to the yeshiva and was so impressed with their efforts that he spends a considerable amount of time doing volunteer work for them, talking, writing, and, of course, photographing.
Since we arrived here last summer, there has been a lot of activity in support of Sderot. For example, our friend Jeff was one of many to organize a shopping trip there to support the local merchants. Someone here in Maale Adumim for a while had arranged to have challot and other baked goods sent here every Friday. But we were always doing something else to take one of these trips, and, frankly, I didn’t care much for the challah. So we never really got involved in the Support Sderot campaign or thought that much about it. Thus, the first thing I needed to do was get up to speed about Sderot, to realize that it was more than just a landing place for the Kassam rockets which have been falling for over seven years. Like a lot of other communities in Israel, this one began as a development town in the early 1950’s, providing a permanent place to live for Jews who fled from Asia and North Africa and had previously been living in tents in refugee camps elsewhere in Israel. There had been almost 20,000 residents before the Kassams began to rain; no one has a handle on exactly how many people left and what the population is today.
As we neared the town, Win pointed out that Sderot has two main attractions: the Osem plant (a very large manufacturer of food), just off the road, still operational and the largest single employer in the area, and our hosts at the yeshiva (to be inclusive, I should also mention Sapir College, an academic institution with a highly regarded program in film making, which has been in the news because it too has been the target of rocket attacks and because of a dispute involving an otherwise qualified Arab film maker who allegedly refused to allow a student doing reserve duty to come to class wearing his IDF uniform). The first thing noticed as we entered the town was that, just as in most other Israeli communities, there were hundreds of campaign posters for a host of candidates in the local elections on November 11 (many of them in Russian – testament to an ubiquitous presence in The Land). Believe it or not, there was a food festival going on in downtown Sderot when we arrived; the main road into town was cordoned off and we had to go around the back way to get to the yeshiva. One might have expected to see a town reduced to a pile of rubble; but at first glance Sderot did not look much different from a number of other not-so-upscale towns we have visited – except for the existence of a bomb shelter next to every bus stop. The damage done to the community was in many ways more subtle. We were supposed to meet some of the local residents and hear some firsthand accounts of living under the constant threat of attack when you have fifteen seconds to find shelter when the sirens go off and the long term psychological damage caused by living under such conditions. However, there just wasn’t time for such interviews in our busy schedule. Nor did we speak with any of the students from the yeshiva either because, being Chol Hamoed, they were all away. But we did get a tour of the facilities and an idea of why this facility is so special.
To understand anything about this hesder yeshiva, it must be placed in context. It is October, 2008 (in our secular calendar), a point in time which everyone understands is a temporary lull in the fighting with Hamas. The same “everyone” is aware that Hamas is using this time-out to improve their rocketry, increase their fighting strength, build tunnels to infiltrate our side of the border, and in general prepare for the next round of fighting in their on-going effort to drive us out of our homeland. What the IDF is doing is uncertain – and whatever it is should be rightfully cloaked in a veil of secrecy. But what the town and the yeshiva are doing is public knowledge: they are all digging in, increasing and improving their fortification. The townspeople, by and large, are not leaving. The yeshiva definitely is not leaving, and that was the main point of the tour.
There are about five hundred young men currently learning at this facility in Sderot. While hundreds have already graduated, only a few have ever left because of the fighting. To make it possible for the school to continue to grow and thrive, they are, building by building, fortifying every nook and cranny: the dormitories, the beit midrash (house of study), and every other structure on the campus, in a way which will be both safe (according to the regulations of the Homefront Command) and esthetically pleasing. They are, as I said, not leaving; on the contrary, the yeshiva is expanding.
After stopping for a snack in the dining hall, looking at the existing dormitories and the new ones under construction, we headed over to the new beit midrash, which is being used as it is being built. We davened mincha there, and then we ascended to the roof, two stories up. This is, I believe, the highest point, not only in Sderot, but in the Western Negev. On one side you can see across the central plains all the way to the hills of Hebron. On the other side, you can see Gaza. We were asked to notice a large hill not too far away; from over that hill have come the kassams. It reminded me of the big empty hill near us in E-1, the “contested” area to the west of us in Maale Adumim. Place a rocket launcher on top of or behind that hill or any hill, and the hostile forces that surround us would be in control. It is that simple.
Looking down and around from on top of the roof, you realize fairly quickly that the yeshiva is right in the center of the town. Of course, that is no accident; the whole purpose of this institution is to be part of the community. Now you could say that about most hesder yeshivot. But here, they take that idea to the next level. Not only do these “yeshiva bochers” serve in the army, they drive the local Magen David Adom ambulances and form an emergency response team. They have formed another “army,” dedicated to performing chessed: bringing food for Shabbat, giving gifts to children and emotional support to adults, creating a climate of caring and concern. The boys dance through the streets on Yom Haatzmaut; last Simchat Torah, students from throughout the country came to Sderot to participate, strengthening the spirits of the entire community. Perhaps the best way to describe what is going in Sderot is found in a publication which the yeshiva distributes with the following caption: “A World of Chessed Will Be Created.”
Somehow, in this world filled with confusion and animosity, a simple message is going out: “Torah is the light of the world. It is not there to be a ladder for one’s own success, a vehicle to show how smart or important one is, a bludgeon to hammer others into submission, a means to show that some of us are different, better, or more moral than the rest of us. It is to share G-d’s glory with anyone who hasn’t noticed it until now; and to do that sharing is the reason why some of us were put upon this Earth.” (Note: these are my words, not the yeshiva’s.) The students who learn at this institution look like thousands of other typical Israeli young men who will go to school and ultimately to the IDF. What distinguishes them is their desire to serve and to inspire: to share their learning with elderly men, to befriend and serve as role models for adolescent boys, to join local families at their Shabbat tables. And when they graduate from the yeshiva, they do not run away; many of the young men begin their married life in downtown Sderot.
How can you quantify the value of all this? How can anyone begin to assess the importance of this institution to the survival of this town? There are no delicate instruments to measure the effect of an act of kindness on one’s heart or how one’s resolve has been strengthened by an act of valor. But, as the former mayor expressed it, “It is hard to imagine Sderot without this dynamic young force.” Here is a Jewish response, a Zionist response, a Torah response to the forces that are hell bent on annihilating us.
None of these activities or even the continued existence of a yeshiva in a war zone could have happened without the vision and leadership of Rav David Fendel, the American born Rosh Yeshiva who discusses (and embodies) what Maimonides describes as a ruach Hashem, a special spirit of G-d, which has enabled Jewish people throughout the generations to perform acts of extreme heroism. Talk about a “man with a plan.” His (Rav Fendel’s, not the Rambam’s, although I am sure the latter would approve) intention is to turn the beleaguered “development” town of Sderot into a center for Jewish learning and culture in the Western Negev. Not content with only one program, six years ago the yeshiva opened a satellite center to accommodate students with limited backgrounds from Southern communities; this program, using former students as instructors and role models, has grown from eight to one hundred twenty students. Following this model, the yeshiva has now opened a similar program in Kiryat Gat, a community of 50,000 a half hour away. Both of these institutions focus on preparing young men spiritually and emotionally for a regular stint in the IDF.
Perhaps the most ambitious project is the construction, now underway, of the Jewish Identity Center in Sderot, a cultural and pedagogical center which will serve in a number of capacities: audio-visual programs for students; a resource center for teachers; a place where graduates can continue their studies and obtain an academic degree. I am certain that should we revisit Sderot a few years hence, we will find some additional programs up their sleeve (Can one say that a yeshiva has a sleeve?). But more fundamentally, many hundreds of young men will have had an amazing yeshiva education and will spend their lives influencing for the good untold numbers of others in ways too subtle and diverse to consider.
After a much needed break for lunch, we were escorted on a shortened tour of the town. Although, as I mentioned, we were not able to meet any of the residents to hear their first-hand accounts of life in a war zone, we did hear some memorable stories of miracles in Sderot, the kind of remarkable incidents which have been happening in The Land for the last sixty years. When you hear one story about this person or this group of people trying to seek shelter from a kassam attack and somehow being prevented – perhaps by a door which is always open mysteriously being locked – from going to the one place they believe will be safe, whereupon it is precisely that place where the rocket lands, perhaps you can reasonably say, “It’s a coincidence.” But when you hear variations on this theme which have occurred over and over again: a kassam landing in the next room six or eight feet away and no one is injured: a rocket lodges in the ceiling between two floors and never explodes; at some point, even the most committed rationalist would have to calculate the odds against such a series of events re-occurring and would have to wonder if maybe – just maybe – there is something (gasp!) super-natural, non-rational, otherwise unfathomable, going on to explain this incredible safety net.
But it was time to confront “the belly of the beast.” For this we were taken to the local police station, which has become de facto a kassam museum, a showcase for thousands of rockets which have landed in Sderot and neighboring areas. (Actually, this is only part of the treasure trove; many thousands of other rockets have been discarded because there was simply no place to store them.) A volunteer police officer explained to us how a rocket of this type is constructed. I immediately thought of the recipe for chicken soup from a fictitious Hungarian Cook Book: “Step 1) Steal a chicken.” A kassam rocket is made using a hollow, cylindrical tube, about four inches in diameter. Where would one find such a tube? A street sign, a lamppost, or something similar. An Arab terrorist would simply remove such an object from its base (preferably from a Jewish source, as in the following true story: the residents of a nearby kibbutz woke one day to discover that all the street signs nearby were missing. They were soon “returned” when a series of rockets landed nearby, still retaining the original inscriptions on them.) However, if you can’t steal a sign from a Jew, take one of your own from Gaza. If you are contemplating sending your child laden with explosives to kill as many Jews as possible, you probably don’t need traffic lights. One point of interest: just as American Indian tribes would create distinctive markings on their arrows, each Arab terrorist organization has a slightly different way of making the tail of their rockets, so we should know exactly who our attackers are. For weeks after, every time I would see any similar object on the streets of Maale Adumim, I would think of its potential as a weapon of destruction, something to blow up our apartment.
So that our tiyul shouldn’t end on a “downer,” our last stop was the main shopping area, so we could do our part in improving the local economy. Nobody was going to buy a refrigerator and have it shipped to Jerusalem or wherever, and there wasn’t time to go grocery shopping in one of the local superrrrrrrrrrs, but our tour-mates did spread out and buy a few things. Barbara went to one of the chain drug stores, and I walked around the mall and checked out the shops on the adjacent streets, which went on for several blocks, all the way to where the food festival was going on. I was amazed at how many shops there were in this relatively small town (a little more than half the size of Maale Adumim). Then something which had been mentioned earlier in the day began to make sense. Sderot is not an isolated town; there are any number of small kibbutzim and other communities nearby. No doubt, people from the surrounding parts come here to shop. To put it simply, the destruction of Sderot would have a devastating effect on the economy and morale of the entire Western Negev. You may, if you wish, take that thought a step further. If I hadn’t until fully comprehended the importance of this hesder yeshiva as the moral backbone of the Jewish resistance to Arab terror, I did now.
A few weeks later, I met one of my buddies on the bus, and I began to describe our tiyul and my admiration for Rav Fendel and his bochrim. My friend asked me if there were any Americans at this yeshiva. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we simultaneously realized how absurd this question was. No, there were no American students on a one year program, or any program, in Sderot – or the “Muslim Quarter” of The Old City, or any number of other places we could think of. Maybe that, in a nutshell, summarizes one of the differences between the Israeli experience and that of the Exile. If G-d gives me the strength, I will elaborate on this point – and infuriate some of my audience – when I discuss the General Assembly in my next article.
It was the second day of Chol Hamoed. If I had forgotten that this was “duchaning day,” when tens of thousands of Jews would converge at the Kotel to hear the priestly blessing recited by thousands of Cohanim, I would surely have remembered when I saw the fleet of #1 buses, the one that goes to our holy site, lined up opposite the Tachana Mercazit, with passengers scrambling to get aboard. Whenever I think about this twice yearly celebration, I remember back to our experience exactly 28 years ago when we were at the Kotel. To be more precise, we were trying to leave the Kotel after the Birchat Hacohanim. It wasn’t quite as crowded then as it is these days, but still, there were thousands of people all trying to get on a #1 bus. As many of you know, Israelis are not noted for their ability to form a line, especially to get on a bus. But to make it worse, it never occurred to the drivers taking people from the Kotel to stop their vehicles at any one designated spot. So no matter where you were standing, it was the wrong place to get on the next bus. You can imagine the chaos that was ensuing. Here it was, only a few minutes after the “shalom,” the final word of the final blessing had been amplified around these ancient walls, and a small scale riot was about to break out. Finally, we were about to board a bus, and there was a woman standing behind Barbara who was going to push her way onto that bus, come hell or high water. She began shoving Barbara as hard as she could. The problem was that my wife was standing directly behind a small boy, and this woman was inadvertently causing Barbara to crush this child. After remonstrating with this woman several times, Barbara, in complete frustration, turned around and smashed her fist on top of this woman’s head, almost knocking her sheitel off. The woman finally stopped pushing and started shrieking, “She hit me, she hit me” to everyone within earshot – several thousand people. I will never forget the bus ride back. Barbara was sitting and pretending that she didn’t understand what the woman was saying, and I was pretending that I had never seen either of these women before.
That was then. Today I would be playing hooky from my priestly responsibilities and heading to Sderot, the town which has come to symbolize the dangers facing Israel today and the fortitude of its residents. We got to the Inbal Hotel real early, giving us an opportunity to go inside, use the facilities and look around. For those of you who don’t know, the Inbal is one of the swankiest hotels in Jerusalem, definitely out of our league – except to use the bathrooms. It has an enormous dining area in the center of the lobby which must have some sort of retractable roof, because it had been turned into a very, very large sukkah. There were all these families, parents with two, three, or four children having breakfast in the hotel before starting their day of sightseeing. And all I could think of at that moment was how much it would cost for a family of six just to have breakfast at the Inbal Hotel, and what percentage of our weekly food bill that would be; and how nice it would be to have that kind of discretionary income. And perhaps how different Israel would seem from the respective vantage points of a posh lobby in downtown Talbieh and a yeshiva in hunkered-down Sderot. For it was the latter which was sponsoring our tour, officially the Max & Ruth Schwartz Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot (a hesder yeshiva is an institution in which for five years young men combine learning and serving in the Israeli army).
Soon we joined the growing number of people in front of the hotel, all waiting patiently to board their bus to somewhere. Josh was right; it took at least twenty minutes for him to gather all the Sderot people together, collect our money, and get us all on the appropriate buses. It turned out that the guide for our bus was someone we had met before in the home of friends in Beit Shemesh. Win and his wife live in Beit Shemesh half of the year and in NYC half of the year, when they are not globe-trotting and photographing. They had recently been in India and had together taken 20,000 digital images (the equivalent of almost seven hundred rolls of film), some of which we had the opportunity to see this past summer on a Shabbat afternoon in June. Win had previously been to the yeshiva and was so impressed with their efforts that he spends a considerable amount of time doing volunteer work for them, talking, writing, and, of course, photographing.
Since we arrived here last summer, there has been a lot of activity in support of Sderot. For example, our friend Jeff was one of many to organize a shopping trip there to support the local merchants. Someone here in Maale Adumim for a while had arranged to have challot and other baked goods sent here every Friday. But we were always doing something else to take one of these trips, and, frankly, I didn’t care much for the challah. So we never really got involved in the Support Sderot campaign or thought that much about it. Thus, the first thing I needed to do was get up to speed about Sderot, to realize that it was more than just a landing place for the Kassam rockets which have been falling for over seven years. Like a lot of other communities in Israel, this one began as a development town in the early 1950’s, providing a permanent place to live for Jews who fled from Asia and North Africa and had previously been living in tents in refugee camps elsewhere in Israel. There had been almost 20,000 residents before the Kassams began to rain; no one has a handle on exactly how many people left and what the population is today.
As we neared the town, Win pointed out that Sderot has two main attractions: the Osem plant (a very large manufacturer of food), just off the road, still operational and the largest single employer in the area, and our hosts at the yeshiva (to be inclusive, I should also mention Sapir College, an academic institution with a highly regarded program in film making, which has been in the news because it too has been the target of rocket attacks and because of a dispute involving an otherwise qualified Arab film maker who allegedly refused to allow a student doing reserve duty to come to class wearing his IDF uniform). The first thing noticed as we entered the town was that, just as in most other Israeli communities, there were hundreds of campaign posters for a host of candidates in the local elections on November 11 (many of them in Russian – testament to an ubiquitous presence in The Land). Believe it or not, there was a food festival going on in downtown Sderot when we arrived; the main road into town was cordoned off and we had to go around the back way to get to the yeshiva. One might have expected to see a town reduced to a pile of rubble; but at first glance Sderot did not look much different from a number of other not-so-upscale towns we have visited – except for the existence of a bomb shelter next to every bus stop. The damage done to the community was in many ways more subtle. We were supposed to meet some of the local residents and hear some firsthand accounts of living under the constant threat of attack when you have fifteen seconds to find shelter when the sirens go off and the long term psychological damage caused by living under such conditions. However, there just wasn’t time for such interviews in our busy schedule. Nor did we speak with any of the students from the yeshiva either because, being Chol Hamoed, they were all away. But we did get a tour of the facilities and an idea of why this facility is so special.
To understand anything about this hesder yeshiva, it must be placed in context. It is October, 2008 (in our secular calendar), a point in time which everyone understands is a temporary lull in the fighting with Hamas. The same “everyone” is aware that Hamas is using this time-out to improve their rocketry, increase their fighting strength, build tunnels to infiltrate our side of the border, and in general prepare for the next round of fighting in their on-going effort to drive us out of our homeland. What the IDF is doing is uncertain – and whatever it is should be rightfully cloaked in a veil of secrecy. But what the town and the yeshiva are doing is public knowledge: they are all digging in, increasing and improving their fortification. The townspeople, by and large, are not leaving. The yeshiva definitely is not leaving, and that was the main point of the tour.
There are about five hundred young men currently learning at this facility in Sderot. While hundreds have already graduated, only a few have ever left because of the fighting. To make it possible for the school to continue to grow and thrive, they are, building by building, fortifying every nook and cranny: the dormitories, the beit midrash (house of study), and every other structure on the campus, in a way which will be both safe (according to the regulations of the Homefront Command) and esthetically pleasing. They are, as I said, not leaving; on the contrary, the yeshiva is expanding.
After stopping for a snack in the dining hall, looking at the existing dormitories and the new ones under construction, we headed over to the new beit midrash, which is being used as it is being built. We davened mincha there, and then we ascended to the roof, two stories up. This is, I believe, the highest point, not only in Sderot, but in the Western Negev. On one side you can see across the central plains all the way to the hills of Hebron. On the other side, you can see Gaza. We were asked to notice a large hill not too far away; from over that hill have come the kassams. It reminded me of the big empty hill near us in E-1, the “contested” area to the west of us in Maale Adumim. Place a rocket launcher on top of or behind that hill or any hill, and the hostile forces that surround us would be in control. It is that simple.
Looking down and around from on top of the roof, you realize fairly quickly that the yeshiva is right in the center of the town. Of course, that is no accident; the whole purpose of this institution is to be part of the community. Now you could say that about most hesder yeshivot. But here, they take that idea to the next level. Not only do these “yeshiva bochers” serve in the army, they drive the local Magen David Adom ambulances and form an emergency response team. They have formed another “army,” dedicated to performing chessed: bringing food for Shabbat, giving gifts to children and emotional support to adults, creating a climate of caring and concern. The boys dance through the streets on Yom Haatzmaut; last Simchat Torah, students from throughout the country came to Sderot to participate, strengthening the spirits of the entire community. Perhaps the best way to describe what is going in Sderot is found in a publication which the yeshiva distributes with the following caption: “A World of Chessed Will Be Created.”
Somehow, in this world filled with confusion and animosity, a simple message is going out: “Torah is the light of the world. It is not there to be a ladder for one’s own success, a vehicle to show how smart or important one is, a bludgeon to hammer others into submission, a means to show that some of us are different, better, or more moral than the rest of us. It is to share G-d’s glory with anyone who hasn’t noticed it until now; and to do that sharing is the reason why some of us were put upon this Earth.” (Note: these are my words, not the yeshiva’s.) The students who learn at this institution look like thousands of other typical Israeli young men who will go to school and ultimately to the IDF. What distinguishes them is their desire to serve and to inspire: to share their learning with elderly men, to befriend and serve as role models for adolescent boys, to join local families at their Shabbat tables. And when they graduate from the yeshiva, they do not run away; many of the young men begin their married life in downtown Sderot.
How can you quantify the value of all this? How can anyone begin to assess the importance of this institution to the survival of this town? There are no delicate instruments to measure the effect of an act of kindness on one’s heart or how one’s resolve has been strengthened by an act of valor. But, as the former mayor expressed it, “It is hard to imagine Sderot without this dynamic young force.” Here is a Jewish response, a Zionist response, a Torah response to the forces that are hell bent on annihilating us.
None of these activities or even the continued existence of a yeshiva in a war zone could have happened without the vision and leadership of Rav David Fendel, the American born Rosh Yeshiva who discusses (and embodies) what Maimonides describes as a ruach Hashem, a special spirit of G-d, which has enabled Jewish people throughout the generations to perform acts of extreme heroism. Talk about a “man with a plan.” His (Rav Fendel’s, not the Rambam’s, although I am sure the latter would approve) intention is to turn the beleaguered “development” town of Sderot into a center for Jewish learning and culture in the Western Negev. Not content with only one program, six years ago the yeshiva opened a satellite center to accommodate students with limited backgrounds from Southern communities; this program, using former students as instructors and role models, has grown from eight to one hundred twenty students. Following this model, the yeshiva has now opened a similar program in Kiryat Gat, a community of 50,000 a half hour away. Both of these institutions focus on preparing young men spiritually and emotionally for a regular stint in the IDF.
Perhaps the most ambitious project is the construction, now underway, of the Jewish Identity Center in Sderot, a cultural and pedagogical center which will serve in a number of capacities: audio-visual programs for students; a resource center for teachers; a place where graduates can continue their studies and obtain an academic degree. I am certain that should we revisit Sderot a few years hence, we will find some additional programs up their sleeve (Can one say that a yeshiva has a sleeve?). But more fundamentally, many hundreds of young men will have had an amazing yeshiva education and will spend their lives influencing for the good untold numbers of others in ways too subtle and diverse to consider.
After a much needed break for lunch, we were escorted on a shortened tour of the town. Although, as I mentioned, we were not able to meet any of the residents to hear their first-hand accounts of life in a war zone, we did hear some memorable stories of miracles in Sderot, the kind of remarkable incidents which have been happening in The Land for the last sixty years. When you hear one story about this person or this group of people trying to seek shelter from a kassam attack and somehow being prevented – perhaps by a door which is always open mysteriously being locked – from going to the one place they believe will be safe, whereupon it is precisely that place where the rocket lands, perhaps you can reasonably say, “It’s a coincidence.” But when you hear variations on this theme which have occurred over and over again: a kassam landing in the next room six or eight feet away and no one is injured: a rocket lodges in the ceiling between two floors and never explodes; at some point, even the most committed rationalist would have to calculate the odds against such a series of events re-occurring and would have to wonder if maybe – just maybe – there is something (gasp!) super-natural, non-rational, otherwise unfathomable, going on to explain this incredible safety net.
But it was time to confront “the belly of the beast.” For this we were taken to the local police station, which has become de facto a kassam museum, a showcase for thousands of rockets which have landed in Sderot and neighboring areas. (Actually, this is only part of the treasure trove; many thousands of other rockets have been discarded because there was simply no place to store them.) A volunteer police officer explained to us how a rocket of this type is constructed. I immediately thought of the recipe for chicken soup from a fictitious Hungarian Cook Book: “Step 1) Steal a chicken.” A kassam rocket is made using a hollow, cylindrical tube, about four inches in diameter. Where would one find such a tube? A street sign, a lamppost, or something similar. An Arab terrorist would simply remove such an object from its base (preferably from a Jewish source, as in the following true story: the residents of a nearby kibbutz woke one day to discover that all the street signs nearby were missing. They were soon “returned” when a series of rockets landed nearby, still retaining the original inscriptions on them.) However, if you can’t steal a sign from a Jew, take one of your own from Gaza. If you are contemplating sending your child laden with explosives to kill as many Jews as possible, you probably don’t need traffic lights. One point of interest: just as American Indian tribes would create distinctive markings on their arrows, each Arab terrorist organization has a slightly different way of making the tail of their rockets, so we should know exactly who our attackers are. For weeks after, every time I would see any similar object on the streets of Maale Adumim, I would think of its potential as a weapon of destruction, something to blow up our apartment.
So that our tiyul shouldn’t end on a “downer,” our last stop was the main shopping area, so we could do our part in improving the local economy. Nobody was going to buy a refrigerator and have it shipped to Jerusalem or wherever, and there wasn’t time to go grocery shopping in one of the local superrrrrrrrrrs, but our tour-mates did spread out and buy a few things. Barbara went to one of the chain drug stores, and I walked around the mall and checked out the shops on the adjacent streets, which went on for several blocks, all the way to where the food festival was going on. I was amazed at how many shops there were in this relatively small town (a little more than half the size of Maale Adumim). Then something which had been mentioned earlier in the day began to make sense. Sderot is not an isolated town; there are any number of small kibbutzim and other communities nearby. No doubt, people from the surrounding parts come here to shop. To put it simply, the destruction of Sderot would have a devastating effect on the economy and morale of the entire Western Negev. You may, if you wish, take that thought a step further. If I hadn’t until fully comprehended the importance of this hesder yeshiva as the moral backbone of the Jewish resistance to Arab terror, I did now.
A few weeks later, I met one of my buddies on the bus, and I began to describe our tiyul and my admiration for Rav Fendel and his bochrim. My friend asked me if there were any Americans at this yeshiva. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we simultaneously realized how absurd this question was. No, there were no American students on a one year program, or any program, in Sderot – or the “Muslim Quarter” of The Old City, or any number of other places we could think of. Maybe that, in a nutshell, summarizes one of the differences between the Israeli experience and that of the Exile. If G-d gives me the strength, I will elaborate on this point – and infuriate some of my audience – when I discuss the General Assembly in my next article.
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