Thursday, March 21, 2024

Purim 2024

Purim begins on Saturday night. Are we all ready? More or less, we’re ready. It feels like we’re ready.

And it also feels like we couldn’t be less ready. In normal times, Purim is fun, a riotous celebration of victory over Haman’s minions and of the truth behind Mordechai’s hopeful promise to Esther that, come what may, salvation eventually comes from somewhere. When I was much younger, I was more than slightly conflicted about Purim. That’s our plan, I thought to myself back then: to face impending genocide and to find comfort in the assumption that salvation will eventually come from somewhere? Great plan! Of course, in the Megillah, salvation actually does come from somewhere as the pieces of the intricate plot slowly fall into place. Haman’s preening megalomania makes it impossible for him not to appear at both of Esther’s banquets. Achashveirosh, confronted with the thought that Haman was personally attacking his queen in his own palace, somehow finds it in him—entirely uncharacteristically—to act forcefully and even to summon up a bit of sarcasm as he condemns Haman to death. And, of course, Esther has amazingly and completely unforeseeably ended up in precisely the right place to set the whole counterplot in motion, the one that features the Jews utterly defeating their would-be murderers instead of themselves being annihilated by those same thugs and haters.

But much-younger-me was unimpressed. The whole story in the Megillah hangs on so many unlikely details, of which the most shocking one has to be the decision of Mordechai in the first place to send Esther off for her overnight “interview” with the king to see if she can beat the gigantic odds against her and somehow become the queen of Persia. And there are lots more unlikely twists and turns in the story. That’s what makes it such a good story. But does that make it a cogent plan for the Jewish people? That was the question that younger-me pondered as, year after year, I showed up to hear the Megillah and to try to get in the mood to feel good about the one pogrom in these last 2.5 millennia that backfired and led to the bad people being defeated instead of the good people.

Eventually, much-younger-me grew up to be less-younger-me (and eventually much-less-younger-me), a working pulpit rabbi tasked with making sense of every Jewish holiday including, of course, Purim. Unexpectedly, I grew into it. Purim started to feel more reasonable to me as I read more and learned more about Jewish history. Yes, it was a mere fluke (and in twenty different ways) that it all ended up well. But the point both less-younger-me eventually grasped onto was that, in the end, it did end up well. The Jewish community survived and was able to contemplate an untroubled future. And then I began to wonder what could possibly have happened next. Did the Achashveiroshes have children? Wouldn’t those children have been Jews, the children of a Jewish mother. (And what a Jewish mother at that!) Was the next king of Persia then Jewish? Maybe salvation, less-younger-me eventually concluded, maybe salvation really does always come from somewhere.

So I was in. But not entirely. In 1943, the last Jews in the Krakow ghetto were sent to their deaths at Belzec and Auschwitz in the days leading up to Purim. That fact stayed with me for years after reading Schindler’s List (then still called Schinder’s Ark) back in the 1980s, even though I don’t think Thomas Keneally specifically made that point in the book. (I could be wrong—it was a long time ago.) And the weirdness of Purim for a post-Shoah Jew was always with me. I didn’t give into it often. Or really ever—I was a congregational rabbi and the last thing a congregation wants or needs is a rabbi displaying his own ambivalence about the traditions he is in place specifically to endorse personally and to promote. So I did Purim. As I still do. But the absurdity was always with me, always floating around like a distant cloud overhead, one that I could see but which I could also tell wasn’t likely to rain on my parade.

And that brings me to Purim 2024, the Purim that follows October 7. Something like 134 hostages are still being held in Gaza, including our own Omer Neutra, a graduate of the Schechter School of Long Island. There is no clear end to the fighting in sight. Whether the IDF enters Rafah this week or not, their eventually entry into the city seems a certainty. And where that will lead, who can say? If the strike is surgical, quick, and fully effective, it will lead to one place. But if it turns out to be long, drawn-out, and bloody, and if it ends up costing the lives of hundreds or thousands of civilians, it will be a debacle both for the Gazans and for Israel. Bibi, the elected leader, seems to have lost the confidence of a large percentage of the people who voted him into office. How the American government feels about the whole Gazan incursion seems to depend wholly on whom you ask and at what specific moment of the day. (I’ll write some other times about Senator Schumer’s unprecedented—and truly shocking—speech last week.) But while our leaders dither, we’re all feeling out of sorts, unsure, and ill at ease. And the situation on our American college campuses seems to go from bad to even worse on a weekly basis, as Jewish students face a level of anti-Semitism that would once—and by “once” I mean “last year”—been considered unimaginable.

Welcome to Purim 2024. Should we cancel the whole thing? If the Jewish world somehow observed Purim in 1944, we can surely observe it eighty years later too!  But there’s more than mere obstinacy in that thought. And with that I shuck off (finally!) all prior versions of myself to speak as current-me, as who I am today.

We live on the razor’s edge, all of us of the House of Israel. And Purim is our annual homage to that thought. As I wrote last week, the story both condemns and yet also celebrates the existence of a vibrant Jewish diaspora. As it begins, the Jews, a mere century after the Babylonians sent the Jews of Judah and Jerusalem into exile, have settled into every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. They appear to be thriving too, possessed of synagogues and businesses, of wealth and a sense of belonging that makes it reasonable for them, all of whom live in the same country as the Land of Israel and could presumably relocate to there if they wished—they all seem to be fine with living abroad and seeking their fortunes in those places. Yes, Haman does present a problem. But some combination of Providence and good fortune neutralize him and lead to the destruction not of his intended victims but of his own gang of would-be murderers. It could have ended up terribly, but it didn’t. It doesn’t always not, of course. (If there had been any survivors of those final deportations from the Krakow ghetto, you could ask them.) But it also does. And in the larger picture of things, it always does: the world has doled out its worst to the Jewish people and yet here we are, still thriving, still doing our best to pass our Jewishness along to the next generation, and still observing Purim and, yes, having great fun at the same time.

Living on a razor’s edge is uncomfortable, obviously. That’s the whole concept, after all! But we really have gotten good at it over all these years. And although the world really is full of the most horrible people who wish us ill, salvation—at least in the global sense—had always come, as Mordechai said it would, from somewhere. And so shall it again come—for the hostages, for the soldiers of the IDF serving in Gaza, for their families and friends across the globe, for us all. That is the message of Purim 2024 and it is one the me that all those previous versions finally grew into—it is the one I can embrace wholeheartedly. Yes, the forecast may occasionally be grim. But salvation really does comes, at least eventually, from somewhere.

 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Ezra and Esther

Being an ancient book, the Bible makes many of its best points using all sorts of literary techniques that are unfamiliar to modern readers. Sometimes these are subtle flourishes that only someone reading truly carefully would ever notice. But other instances are totally overt, fully visible, and noticeable by even someone just casually perusing the text. The willingness of the narrative to depict the same individual as being two different ages at the same time is a good example: to most moderns, passages that do that have a clumsy feel to them and suggest that some ancient editor must have been asleep at the switch and simply failed to see a giant discrepancy that could easily have been fixed. (To see an essay I published years ago about that specific feature of the scriptural text, click here.) But discrepancy is more wisely taken as a literary feature of the text, as a kind of riddle fully intended to teach something to those who take the time to solve it.

Also in that category is the apparent willingness of Scripture to present two versions of the same story that are essentially incompatible with each other. The most famous example of that would be in the very beginning of the biblical text, where Genesis starts off with two wholly irreconcilable accounts of the creation of humankind. Many and clever have been the attempts of countless commentators to “fix” the problem by finding a way to fit the stories together into a single, cogent narrative. But the far more interesting way to approach the problem is to understand this opening riddle as one of many places in the text of Scripture in which the same story is told in two discordant versions not to confuse or to annoy, but to invite the reader to exploit the differences between the two conflicting texts to learn a lesson that Scripture prefers for some reason to teach subtly rather than fully openly.

As Purim approaches, I’ve been thinking how that approach to mismatched texts can be applied not solely to texts within a biblical book, but also to the larger biblical corpus itself. (I have an essay about that too: click here.) In other words, taking the Bible as a book (as opposed to a collection of books) allows the reader to approach the full text of Tanakh as a single literary unit to which the interpretive rules generally brought to bear in explicating passages within specific single books can be fruitfully applied.

In the second of my two essays mentioned above, I applied this principle to a huge difference between the biblical books of Jeremiah and Daniel, one that would be simple to wave away as a mere instance of misspelling on the part of one or both authors. Today, I would like to apply that same principle to the biblical books of Esther and Ezra. And then I would like to apply the lesson that comparison suggests to our present situation as Jewish Americans.

The Book of Ezra, one of Scripture’s most understudied books, begins where Chronicles leaves off: with the surprise announcement that, as one of his first royal edicts, Cyrus, king of Persia, formally ended the exile in Babylon and told the Jews living in modern-day Iraq and Iran that they could return to Israel and re-establish Jewish life in that place. It’s a complex story. The edict of Cyrus itself appears in Scripture in several different versions. The specific relationship between the work of the Chronicler (as the anonymous author of Chronicles is chummily called by scholars) and Ezra and its own sister work, the Book of Nehemiah, is a matter of endless scholarly debate. But, for all that, the storyline itself is clear as day. In the waning days of the Kingdom of Judah (the sole remaining Jewish state in its day, the northern Kingdom of Israel having been dismantled by its Assyrian overlords more than a century earlier), the Babylonian hordes arrived at the gates of Jerusalem. There was a brief window of opportunity during which the coming debacle could have been averted. (The prophet Jeremiah was at the peak of his powers in the months leading up to said debacle and promote surrender as a means of survival.) But the king of Judah wouldn’t hear of it. And what ensued was the razing of Jerusalem’s walls, the slaughter of countless citizens, the destruction of the Temple, and the annihilation of the nation’s hopes for some sort of continued existence as an autonomous state. What ensued is known as the Babylonian Exile. Some Jews—the poorest and least educated ones—were ignored. But the rest of the nation—the royal court, the scholars, the businesspeople, the upper and middle artisan classes—were taken off into exile and forced to attempt to survive while “weeping on the shores of Babylon.”

There is endless debate about the details: how many people went into exile, how many survived, how successful they were or weren’t in retaining their ties to their own Jewish culture while in a hostile environment. But none of that alters the basic the storyline: the Babylonians exiled some or many (but not all) the Jews and then, when they were defeated in turn by Cyrus of Persia, those Jews and their descendants were permitted to go home and it is their story that the Book of Ezra tells. Nor is the moral of the story hard to suss out: Jewish life in exile is possible, but the only real hope for continued Jewish existence lies in return to the land. Yes, Cyrus’s decree specifically permits any who wish to stay behind and support the returnees financially (“with gold, silver, goods, livestock, and valuables”). But the author’s point couldn’t be clearer: exile is barely bearable and only briefly. When the opportunity presents itself to return to Zion, the people who care about their own future get going—because that is where their future lies. From there, life progressed. In the chronology put forward in Ezra, Cyrus is replaced on the throne by Darius, who is followed by—surprise!—King Achashveirosh, known to all from the Esther story. (His “real” name was Xerxes, and he was followed by his son Artaxerxes, who was on the throne in Ezra’s own day.)

Let’s go back to Achashveirosh. I love that he has two names. (I do too, as do most diasporan Jewish types.) And I love that he’s mentioned not only in the book that is so much “about” him, but also in other books: here in Ezra and also once in the Book of Daniel (whose author thought he was Darius’s father, not his grandson. Whatever.) And thus does he serve as the link between Ezra and Esther by appearing in both, albeit briefly in Ezra and at length in Esther.

The storyline of Esther is known to all who have ever been in shul on Purim. But that story contains some riddles generally left unposed, thus also unsolved.

A terrible decree goes forth calling for true genocide, for the total eradication of the Jewish people. The edict is met with astonishment by the people, who are given a full eleven months to prepare for their execution. Eventually, things end up well. But I’m focused on what happens before that happens. The people are in a panic. They appear to inhabit every one of the 127 provinces of Achashveirosh’s empire. The portrait drawn by the Chronicler and by Ezra of a people temporarily banished from its homeland and more than eager finally to abandon exile and return to Israel seems oddly out of sync with the scene depicted in Esther. Cyrus reigned for about twenty years, from 550 BCE to 530. Darius reigned for about forty years after that. And then we have Achashveirosh/Xerxes, who came to the throne in about 465 BCE and who reigned for about forty years. In Cyrus’s day, the Book of Ezra has the Jewish people returning en masse to the Jewish homeland and leaving a few stragglers behind. But, a mere century later, the Book of Esther depicts a Persian empire with Jews living in all 127 of its provinces and apparently well settled in and, until Haman, secure.

And how do the Jews in the Megillah respond to impending genocide? (This is, of course, real genocide they were facing, not the phony kind modern-day anti-Semites see whenever Israel dares defend itself forcefully against its enemies.) They weep. They fast. They daub themselves with ashes, essentially pre-sitting shiva for themselves while they still can. But no one seems to remember that Israel—then called Yehud (the Persian version of Judah)—was one of those 127 provinces. And that there was no specific reason for the Jews, instead of cowering in terror, not to return to their own ancestral homeland and there to defend themselves against their enemies. This course of action—forceful, beyond justifiable, and possible even fully successful—this seems to have occurred to no one.

The Jews seem to prefer their misery. Mordechai forbids Esther to reveal her Jewishness to the king until precisely the right moment. But surely the Jews of Shushan knew that Esther was Jewish—how could they not have? They all seem to know who Mordechai is. And Esther was his ward, an uncle’s daughter whom he had adopted and promised to raise. Surely she too would have been known to all. And yet no one seems to light upon the idea of getting Esther to beg the king for permission to return to Zion  and there, in their own homeland, to resist the terror-onslaught planned by wicked Haman.

And so we have two worldviews in conflict: the one set forward in Ezra in which it goes without saying that the future of the Jewish people depends on their ability to flourish in Israel and the one in Esther that seems to think that the best hope for Jews in the diaspora is to hope that salvation from even the most extreme version of violent anti-Semitism (i.e., the kind that promotes genocide as its end goal) is to pray that salvation comes, to quote Mordechai himself, “from somewhere.”

Or do we? Could the point of Esther be to show the folly of charting a future for the Jewish people by hoping for salvation “from somewhere” or anywhere? The Jews of Persia were saved because of Esther’s daring and Mordechai’s cunning. But that their plan works at all is presented as something just short of miraculous. The Jews of Persia are depicted as powerless and foolish…and wholly unable to see that their only real hope rests in returning to Zion and there flourishing out in the open and fully in the light as proud members of the House of Israel. Ezra simply starts off by taking that for granted. Esther depicts a people gone astray a mere century later. Reading each in each other’s light is meant, I think, not to confuse, but to challenge those inclined to suppose that Jews can be safe by relying on others and hoping for the best and, to encourage them, ayin l’tziyyon tzofiah, to see where the ultimate destiny of Israel lies. 

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Seeking Solace in Small Things

I’m feeling the weight of it all these days. I suppose most of you are too. Israel seems to have ended up in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Gaza, one that that feels increasingly insoluble with each passing day. All 136 hostages remain hidden away in Gaza, without it even being known with certainty which or how many are still alive. The weight of world opinion, briefly with Israel in the wake of the October 7 pogrom and its bestial brutality aimed at innocents, has long since turned away; each day seems to bring reports of more world leaders promoting the idea of another lopsided “prisoner exchange” to deal with the situation, but without noting that none of the captives in Gaza is being incarcerated after having been found guilty of a crime whereas all of the Palestinians who would be released in such a deal are precisely that: terrorists sentenced to prison for having committed crimes, including murder. Each day seems to bring another reason to be distressed. The debacle connected with the storming of that convey of aid trucks in Gaza City last week that led to the deaths of 112 Palestinians is a good example: regardless of how many precisely were killed by the stampeding crowd itself, how many were run over by the trucks carrying the aid (and driven by Palestinian drivers), and how many were shot by Israeli soldiers when some in the crowd foolishly attempted to storm IDF positions set in place precisely to watch over the aid distribution, the death of hungry people attempting to procure food for themselves and their families is tragic regardless of how precisely it may have come about.

Paired with the rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents, including ones featuring violence and death threats, directed against Jewish personalities, Jewish students, and individual Jews targeted solely because of their Jewishness, it’s no wonder my mood has been grim in the course of these last few weeks. How could it not have been? In that way (and also in so many others), we’re all in the same boat.

And so I’ve found myself seeking solace in small things, in the kind of thing I would normally look past quickly without dwelling on much or even at all. It doesn’t always work, this technique. But I thought I would offer my readers this week the comfort that can come from contemplating three tiny things, each in its own way a reminder of the unbreakable link that ties the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, thus—in that peculiar Jewish way I’ve written about many times—a symbol of hope in the future rooted wholly in the past. Each is a thing of beauty. And each is a reminder that Israel has faced far worse enemies than Hamas in the past and survived.

The first is, of all things, an earring. And a tiny one at that, albeit a tiny one made of solid gold. And its story, antique though it may be, is heartening, perhaps even a bit encouraging. There was a time when Israel and its neighbor to the north, then called Phoenicia, got along famously. King Hiram of Tyre, for example, was one of King David’s closest allies: when David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, Hiram sent carpenters and stonemasons south to help build David’s new palace in the northern part of the city. Nor did the alliance end with David’s death: when Solomon, David’s son, built the Temple in Jerusalem, Hiram sent along cedar wood—a local specialty and still today the tree emblazoned on the Lebanese flag—to be used in the building effort and also workers (and probably thousands of them) to assist in the construction of Solomon’s new royal quarter in the Ophel, the part of the city south of the Temple Mount and north of the City of David area. Were some of those workers women? Or did the workers actually move to Israel and bring their families along with them? Or did Phoenician men wear earrings? Regardless, it’s a thing of true beauty and someone dropped it in the sand about three thousand years ago—or took it off and put it in a jewelry box that has long since disintegrated or put in the pocket of a robe when heading into the bath unaware that it would be part of the world long after the bathhouse itself would turn to dust. The world has change in countless ways since King Solomon’s time. Almost no artifacts from his day have survived. But ten years ago, an Israeli archeologist, the late Dr. Eilat Mazar, found the earring while sifting through what literally must have been tons of dust and mud in the Ophel. For a decade, the earring languished in the collection of things unearthed but not fully gone through. And then, just recently, the earring was discovered.


It's a tiny thing. It’s beautiful. Whoever lost it, assuming it was lost, must have had a fit! But this tiny golden thing survived—I speak here fancifully, but also hopefully—it survived for a reason: to remind us today, as all our spirits are flagging, that there was a time when Lebanon and Israel were close allies, friend, and trading partners. In the earliest days of the Jewish kingdom, Jerusalem was filled with workers building new things. (Some things don’t change.) And one of them, a man or a woman, a wealthy person who owned lots of golden things or someone of more modest means for whom a single pair of gold earrings (assuming the recovered one had an ancient mate) constituted a major percentage of that person’s wealth—someone lost an earring that survived to remind us that both the past (which is gone) and the future (which doesn’t exist) are mere reflections of the present. And that the troubles we experience in that present are not ours alone, but ones shared—magically but truly—with both our ancestors and our descendants. We are not in this alone, despite how we so often feel. And that is what this tiny golden thing from ancient times reminded me of, and in doing so brought me comfort and some level of relief from the ill ease I seem to be unable to shake off.

My second small thing is even tinier than the first. An off-duty IDF officer, one Erez Avrahamov, was hiking in the Lower Galilee a few weeks ago in the Nahal Tabor Nature Reserve, one of Israel’s most beautiful places. And there he stumbled across the coolest thing: a tiny scarab made of carnelian stone and probably about 2,800 years old. Where the thing came from, who can say? Probably it was made in ancient Iraq, either in Babylonia or Assyria. Featuring a beetle on one side and a winged horse on the other, the scarab was probably lost by someone in the 7th or 6th century BCE, when a visitor from the East—or possibly a citizen of Judah who had recently been in what is today called Iraq—inadvertently dropped it when preparing to enter the huge bathing facility that once stood on the spot, perhaps as a prelude to dining in one of the giant buildings than then also existed in that place.


Or perhaps it wasn’t lost at all and is simply all that is left of the person who wore it, perhaps as a pendant (the bezel is long gone, of course) or in a ring? In looking at this truly super-cool looking thing, I find comfort—in remembering that the history of Israel is charted not in centuries but in millennia, and that thousands of years ago, my 40x-great grandfather may well have been on his way home from a business trip to Assyria with a lovely present for my 40x-great grandmother when he stopped off for a much-needed bath before returning home and clumsily dropped the present on the floor of the locker room. Or in the woods. Or on the path itself that led from the east. The living of his day have long since turned to dust. But this beautiful thing, this tiny artifact, remains and has its own lesson to teach: mostly, the things of the world and its peoples are fragile, brittle things that don’t last all that long. But something always remains. All is never lost, or not fully lost. There’s always something left behind to remind future generations to look ahead by looking back. And by remembering.

And my third small thing is, of all things, a box. It’s made of limestone and isn’t itself all that tiny—but I include it today because it was made to hold small things. Found along the great commercial street leading up from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount directly through the City of David and the Ophel, the shop in which a shopkeeper displayed his or her wares in this specific box has been gone for millennia. So has the shopkeeper and all of his or her customers. But once that street was a major commercial thoroughfare along which pilgrims and tourists made their slow ascent to the Temple. Stopping off for refreshments or souvenirs to bring home must have been par for the course, just as it is today in the streets leading to the Kotel. And in one of those shops, this box was filled with…with what? Jewels or scarabs? Candies or nuts? “I ❤️ Jerusalem” pins? Who can say? But the thought of Jerusalem in ancient times filled with tourists, pilgrims, visitors, Jewish and non-Jewish people from all over the world, all intent on seeing for themselves the glories of the most glorious of all Jewish cities—that gives me comfort as well. I imagine myself among them too, one among many, a single man strolling along the wide avenue, wondering if Joan would like an Assyrian scarab or a Phoenician gold earring or an ““I ❤️ Jerusalem” pin, an ancient version of modern me feeling fully connected to the Land of Israel and to its eternal capital, to its citizens and to its soldiers, its kings and its priests and its prophets. When I contemplate little things like this, I remember that our present dilemmas and challenges are no different than the ones faced by our forebears or the ones our descendants too will have to face. It’s always something! And, that being the case, you can spend your days submerged beneath the weight of it all. Or you can seek comfort in small things. Will someone thousands of years from now somehow find the earring Joan lost at a wedding we attended ten years ago at the Westbury Jewish Center and find comfort in knowing we were here in this place and survived to bequeath our Jewishness to our descendants? None of us reading (or writing) this will know. But knowing that it could happen—that too brings me solace in troubled times.



 

 

 

 

  

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Heroes

 I was troubled, but also very moved, by the death of Alexei Navalny, the personality at the core of the resistance movement in Russia struggling to oppose the dictatorial and oppressive policies of the Putin regime. What exactly happened is not at all clear. At the time of his death, Navalny was imprisoned in a penal colony in Western Siberia in a place called Yamalo-Nenets near the Arctic Circle. According to the warden, he was taking a walk just two weeks ago after telling some guards that he didn’t feel at all well. And then he collapsed. The prison authorities claim to have done all they could to resuscitate him, but were, they said, regretfully unsuccessful, as result of which regretted unsuccess he was dead by mid-afternoon. His body was then held for well over a week and then finally released to his family for burial. And so ended the life of one of the world’s true heroes, a man who not only put his life on the line to stand up for his beliefs, but who personally embodied the struggle for human rights in today’s Russia. Yehi zikhro varukh. May his memory be a blessing for his co-citizens in Russia and for us all.

There’s a lot to say about Navalny, but the detail—one among many—that is particularly resonant with me has to do with his return to Russia in 2021, an act that was as noble as it was death-defying. By 2021, of course, Navalny had a long history of being a thorn—and an especially sharp one at that—in the side of Vladimir Putin. He had led countless demonstrations against the Putin government. He repeatedly accused, certainly correctly, Putin of engineering his own victories whenever he stood for re-election as Russia’s president. And he openly opposed the war against Ukraine.

Navalny tried several times to gain a foothold in the bureaucracy he so mistrusted. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013. And then he ran for president of Russia in 2018, a move that was in and of itself daring given that he had previously been found guilty of embezzlement, which detail would normally have disqualified him from running for elected office despite the fact that there appears to be no reason to think that the verdict was just or reasonable. But the real reason Navalny was such a problem for Putin was that he appeared to be unfazed by the forces of government, including the Russian judiciary, that were openly and brazenly arrayed against him. And so the government eventually took matters to a new level.

In 2020, on a flight to Moscow, Navalny took ill and ended up on a ventilator in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his airplane had been obliged to make an emergency landing. It didn’t take doctors long to realize that he had been poisoned. (It later came out that his clothing, including his underwear, had somehow been suffused with the Novichok nerve agent, a poison known to have been used by Russia in the past to murder dissidents abroad.) Eventually, the German government, acting unilaterally, sent an airplane to Omsk to bring Navalny to Germany. Amazingly, this actually worked. And it was in Berlin that doctors at the famous Charité Hospital determined with certainty that Navalny had been the victim of an unsuccessful attempt on his life and that he had definitely been poisoned. Remarkably, his life was saved and he recovered. And then, in January of 2021, he returned to Russia.

Because Navalny had been convicted in a 2014 trial that was almost certainly politically motivated and unjust, he had theoretically been forbidden to leave Russia even for medical treatment. And so was he arrested at the Moscow airport upon his return to Russia and imprisoned to await a judge’s decision about his future. And it was just a month after that, in February of 2021, that a Moscow judge decreed that his suspended sentence, minus time served, would be replaced with an unsuspended one and that Navalny would have to serve two and a half years in a Russian prison. He was sent to one prison, then to another. Eventually, the government determined that it did not want to face a freed Navalny in less than three years and so began new proceedings against him again, this time charging him with fraud and contempt of court. In March of 2022, just two years ago, he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison. And then, because even nine years was apparently not long enough, Navalny was put on trial again last summer and sentenced to an addition nineteen years on extremism charges. And so he ended up in the Arctic Circle prison in which he died two weeks ago at the age of forty-seven.

Navalny’s is a long, complicated story. But the one detail that stands out to me, the single part of the story that is the most resonant with me—and with my lifelong interest in the concept of heroism—has to do with Navalny’s decision in January 2021 to leave safety in Berlin and return to Russia. He had every reason to expect that he would be arrested upon return. He had no reason to suppose that any future trials to which he would be subjected would be just. He surely knew not to expect clemency or mercy from Vladimir Putin, the man behind all the juridical procedures overtly and unabashedly designed to silence him. And yet he chose to return—not specifically, I’m sure, because he wanted to die or because he wanted to participate in yet another crooked trial, but because he saw himself as a moral human being who had been granted the opportunity to inspire his co-citizens to demand justice and freedom for themselves and for their nation.

 I’ve written in this space, although not too recently, about my boundless admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was safe and sound in New York when the Second World War broke out, but who made the noble (and eventually fatal) decision to return to Germany and there to try to inspire people to resist Nazism and to turn away from the path of ruinous and fascist barbarism down which the Nazi government was intent on leading the nation. (To revisit my comments about Bonhoeffer from 2011, click here.) Here was, in my eyes, a true hero: a man fully committed to his own ideals who made the conscious decision to leave the safe haven he had already found and to travel to a land that would probably, and which eventually did, kill him. To me, that decision to risk everything to attempt, even quixotically, to do good in the world represents the essence of heroism. It came to naught, of course. He did a lot of good for a lot of people, but, in the end, he paid the big price. On April 8, 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Bonhoeffer was tried on the single charge of treason in a court set up in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. There were no witnesses. No evidence against him was brought forward, nor was a transcript of the proceedings made. He was found guilty, apparently on Hitler’s personal order, and executed the next day in a way that was specifically intended to maximize his personal degradation and agony. (Eric Till’s 2000 movie, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, is a worthy attempt to tell Bonhoeffer’s story even if the director couldn’t quite bring himself to depict the barbarism of Bonhoeffer’s final moments in any detail, let alone explicitly. For a more detailed account of his life, I recommend Eric Metaxas’s 2020 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy, which I read a few years ago and enjoyed immensely.)

So, two men who lived scores of years apart, who spoke different languages, who came from different countries. One, a political man fully engaged by the political process. The other, a man of God fully in the thrall of his own calling to preach God’s word in the world and to inspire others to seek justice and to act righteously. But both heroes in my mind—both fully safe in a place their tormentors could not reach them and yet both of whom made the decision to return to their separate homelands to seek out in those places the destiny to which each felt called. Would I have left New York in 1939 or Berlin in 2021 to risk my own life to follow the destiny I perceived to be my own? I’d like to think I would have. Who wouldn’t? But we don’t all have it in us to act that boldly, to risk everything to be ourselves fully and in the most noble way possible. To be a man in full—or a woman in full—is never quite as easy in real life as it sounds as though it should be on paper. And that is why I admire those two men, Bonhoeffer in his day and Navalny in ours—and their willingness not merely to talk the talk, but truly—and at their own mortal peril—to walk the walk. May they both rest in peace!




Thursday, February 15, 2024

The Jewish Wind Phone

All of us for whom prayer is part of daily life have occasionally been challenged to justify our practice—possibly even just to ourselves—by saying clearly whom we think we are actually speaking to when we pray. It’s not that easy to know how to respond. There are numerous traps to avoid when answering. Saying simply that we are talking to God seems inevitably to lead to two derivative questions, both unsettling to address: how exactly we know that and why it is we think all-knowing God needs to be told anything at all. And a third question too, equally disquieting, also surfaces regularly, the one that asks why it is, if prayer is dialogue, that God never seems to talk back in the way we would consider perfectly normal with any other interlocutor.

The problem, however, lies not in our answers but in the questions themselves: all are rooted in a simplistic understanding of what language is and the role it plays in our human lives. Yes, language is communication: you ask the nice lady in the store which aisle the paper towels are in and she tells you. But language is also self-expression, a means of ordering the world, of grappling with the unfathomable by addressing it, by naming it, by interpreting it. And it is that latter definition of language that we bring to prayer: the world feels overwhelming in the wake of disaster and, instead of withdrawing into our shells like terrified turtles, we face the darkness by naming it, by labeling its parts, by addressing it from the depths of our consciousnesses. We thus allow language to serve as a kind of bridge that connects our inmost selves to the terror just ahead…and, instead of trembling in our boots or shutting our eyes, we speak. And thus do we subdue the raging world with language, with words, and, yes, with prayer.

Almost entirely forgotten—at least by Americans—is the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, a nightmarish disaster in the course of which 15,894 died almost instantly, most from drowning. More than 2,500 simply disappeared and were never seen again.

In the wake of that disaster, I remember reading about an older man named Itaru Sasaki, who lives in a place called Ootsuchi where over eight hundred people were washed out to sea in less than a single minute. His town was devastated by the tsunami, but he himself was in mourning for a cousin, someone he truly loved, when the disaster struck. And so, feeling bereft and totally alone, he came up with a very strange way to deal with his grief: he purchased on old phone booth and set it up in his garden. Then he purchased an ancient rotary phone, a black one, and put it on a table in the booth. There was no dial tone because the telephone wasn’t attached to anything. But on that phone, Mr. Sasaki would talk to his cousin and tell him about his life now that he was carrying on alone and without someone he truly loved. He called it the kaze no denwa, the “wind telephone.”

And then, the amazing part. Word spread about this thing, this crazy, unconnected, telephone in a phone booth in a garden by the sea. People started coming. In droves. From all over Japan. NPR sent a reporter to cover the story and he got permission to record some of what people were saying into the phone.

Why only me, dad? I’m the only one left alive. People don’t realize what it’s like,” a teenage boy said to his missing father.

Everyone’s good here. We are all trying hard,” an elderly lady told her long-time spouse, a man who disappeared when the sea overwhelmed his town.

You were going to buy me a violin. I just bought it myself finally,” a girl says to her vanished parents through tears.

I’m building a new house but without you or our little girl and boy, there’s no point is there?” The words choked up in the throat of a middle-aged man who lost his entire family.

 

It’s a touching story, but the big question—to me, at any rate—is why this thing worked at all. Shouldn’t it not have worked? It’s an idiotic thing, after all: an ancient rotary phone that isn’t connected to anything in a phone booth that is also not connected to anything in a garden in front of someone’s private home. But what makes it interesting to me is that it somehow does work…and not because it really does anything at all. These poor people in Japan found in that phone booth not a portal to the afterworld, but a way of using language to communicate with the universe and all of its parts, a way of facing the unimaginable using the tools offered by language itself, a way of speaking into the dark and finding, not silence and not nothing, but glimmers of hope, of light, of promise. For me, that is what prayer is, almost by definition. For more about the wind telephone, click here or here.

It was this story, which I first read about years ago, that came to mind when I first visited the remarkable website called Coming Home Soon (click here to go see for yourself). Currently a real-space exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam and created in Holland by people consumed with worry about the hostages being held by Hamas, the on-line version is remarkable. The front page of the website offers pictures of every single one of the hostages held or still being held in Gaza, presenting all 253 and not distinguishing between the 110 who were released in a prisoner swap a few months ago, those still being held, and those already dead: all are or were prisoners of Hamas. (Hamas is holding the bodies of the deceased hostages to use as the most ghoulish of bargaining chips to use in future negotiations.)

Who thought of setting up this website, I don’t know. But the idea couldn’t be more simple: on the front page of the site are on display color photographs of each of the hostages. The dead have tiny “forever in our hearts” badges attached to their pictures; the ones already freed have “welcome home” badges. But otherwise they are all mixed up together on the page—just as they are in our hearts. And each photograph has just behind it a biography you can read of the hostage and—and now I get to my real point—and an opportunity to write to that hostage. The hostages don’t get mail. They don’t have access to email or to text messages. The letter you write and send off does not go into some cosmic in-box to wait for the hostages to log on and see what you had to say. The messages you send to the dead will not be any more unread than the ones you send to the living.


This is not a real mail service; this is the Jewish
kaze no denwa, the Jewish wind phone. You write not to communicate—or at least not to communicate in the normal manner of people dashing off emails or dictating text messages to tell other people this or that—but to express, to pray, to use language as a kind of bridge between despair and hope, between the dismal reality of where we are and the bright light that beckons in the distance—the flickering flame of faith, of courage, and of confidence in the future.



When this is all over, all the hostages will come home—some, surely most, to their families and others to their graves. But, until that happens, the job of the righteous is to pray for their released and for their survival. Language is the bridge to God; that is why prayers are constructed of words. Sometimes, it feels right to turn to God directly in prayer. That, we do all the time. But there are also times when you can use language to pray to God by addressing a human party, living or dead. That is the opportunity the Coming Home Soon website affords: a way to pray for the hostages through the medium of language directed not directly to God but to those of God’s creatures in the most need of redemption. 

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Loss and Rage

One of the surprises Jerusalem offered up to us shortly after we bought our apartment and began to explore the neighborhood was a peaceful cemetery just a few blocks from our street in which are interred 79 Indian soldiers who served with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, as well as the bodies of 290 Turkish prisoners-of-war who died while in British captivity. So it is a strange place, that cemetery: a Hindu burial ground in which are also buried hundreds of Muslims who fell far from home and who had to be buried somewhere. There are no individual graves; the British apparently decided to bury the dead in two mass graves, one for the Hindus and one for the Muslims. Facing stone monuments record the names of the dead.



We’ve walked by many times; Joan’s cousin Rina used to live just down the road. It’s a peaceful place, a quiet place. But it never fails to strike me how strange the whole concept is: hundreds and hundreds of young men who died in a war fought basically over nothing at all in a distant place and who were then shoveled into a common pit (why do I think white soldiers would have been buried in separate graves?) and left to sleep in the earth in a place that none of them would ever have thought to call home.

Walking by that place never fails to re-awaken in me my recollection of Joan’s and my visit to the Beersheva War Cemetery, the resting place of more than 1200 soldiers from the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India. It’s also a peaceful place, well-tended, verdant, and well watched over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But what is shocking about the place are the stones themselves: row after row after row featuring the graves of young men, some just teenagers, who died on the same horrific day in 1917. It was a terrible day, too. By the beginning of October in 1917, the British forces under the leadership of General Edmund Allenby were well entrenched along the Gaza-Beersheba road with the intention of seizing Beersheva from the Turks. By the end of the month, all was ready. And on October 31, the battle was joined. The attack was led by the 800 men of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade, brave souls who leapt on horseback over the Turkish trenches and continued on into Beersheva, while other branches of the army attacked the Turkish legions from the side. In the end, the attack was successful and the Turks were soundly defeated. In many ways, in fact, the tide of war turned against the Ottoman Turks at Beersheva. And, indeed, before a year passed, the war was over and Turkish Palestine, wrested from the Ottomans, was handed over by the League of Nations to the British.


But the cemetery has its own story to tell. Now shady and peaceful, the silence is more ominous than calming as you enter through the shady gate and come across row after row after row of young men who died, all of them, on October 31, 1917. The place is well worth visiting, but what the experience yields, or at least what it yielded in me, was a deep sense of sorrow, of loss, of the true tragedy of war. Young men who should have been planning their lives, their weddings, their careers, their futures…instead dead as part of the incomprehensible madness that was the First World War and planning nothing at all other than an eternity of moldering far from home in someone else’s soil.

That many of the dead at Beersheva were veterans of Gallipoli only makes the story even more tragic and more poignant. (I saw Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, when it came out in 1981 and still remember the harrowing effect it had on me. If any readers are still laboring under the delusion that war can be glorious, Gallipoli really is a must-see.)

And that brings me to Gaza. To most, Gaza is a strip of land that has been ruled over by too many different foreigners since its glory days as ancient Philistia. The Romans, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Israelis all tried their hand at governing the place; I get the sense from my reading that all of the above couldn’t leave fast enough once the opportunity presented itself. (And, yes, I know there are people in Israel now demonstrating in the streets in an attempt to provoke the government into re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. Those people, with all respect, are living in a self-generated dream state fully divorced from reality.)

But Gaza has its own Jewish dead to consider. And I do not mean by that to reference the fallen of the current IDF campaign.

There was a very touching piece in the paper the other day about Israeli troops coming across Jewish graves in Gaza. And, indeed, the Gaza War Cemetery, established in 1920, contains the graves of over 3000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza. And some of those soldiers were Jewish, which fact was duly recorded on their tombstones. I suppose the idea was that the IDF soldiers felt a sense of kinship with the Jewish soldiers buried in that place, which is almost an ordinary thought, but somehow the story—by Troy O. Fritzhand, which I read in the Algemeiner (click here)—affected me in a less expected way as well.


I understand the logic behind the Israeli war against Hamas. I have no trouble with Israel going to war with the forces of evil, with people whose hatred of Israel and its Jews expressed itself on October 7 with almost unimaginable barbarism and Nazi-style brutality. Nor do I have any trouble with the notion that, when fighting a war against evil, the only true sin is to lose. I hate the thought of civilian casualties. But I also understand that the fact that the hostages have been held now for more than 120 days means that time is running out. All that, I get. But part of me feels the weight of tragedy pressing down as I read the news day after day.

I hate Hamas for having started this war. I grieve daily for the 1200 Israelis murdered, maimed, and raped on October 7. I can’t stop thinking about the 225 IDF soldiers who have died so far in this terrible war. And I think about the Hamas soldiers too—each a victim of his own fanaticism and willingness to die as part of an army of terror, but each also once an innocent babe who could have grown up to live a peaceful, productive life, who could have brought joy instead of unimaginable misery to the world. And, of course, I think also of the civilians of Gaza, people who, yes, put Hamas into power and who are now paying the awful price for that colossal error of judgment, but the large majority of whom could surely not have imagined October 7 and its aftermath.

To know with certainty that you are on the right side of a war does not make the war less tragic. Nor does it make it any less crucial that you win. But the tragedy feels overwhelming. I wasn’t alive when the Allies carpet-bombed Germany, but I think I would have felt the same way about the 600,000+ civilians who died during those bombing campaigns, which number includes about 76,000 children. The Allied leadership did what they perceived to be necessary to win the war, which they did. But my response to the civilian death toll is not censorious outrage, but deep sadness. How can the Germans have made us do that to them? How can the Japanese have created a situation in which Hiroshima was imaginable, let alone actually doable? And how can Hamas have created this situation in which the only way to rescue our hostages is to go in on foot to find them and liberate them from their captors’ control? The civilian deaths in Gaza are, in my opinion, all on Hamas. But that doesn’t make them less tragic.

And those are my emotions this week: weariness (because I am so tired of this burden of worry and anxiety), outrage (because what kind of people can have thrust this upon us?), terrible sadness (because of the children of Gaza, all innocents, who are paying the terrible price for their parents’ bad decisions), resolve (because if not me, then who?), and, despite everything, hope (because the God of Israel neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, and surely, at least eventually, light always wins out over darkness).  I continue to pray, even more fervently than in the past months, for peace, for resolution, and for victory. I’m feeling the burden of it all. I suppose we all are. But the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, of redeeming those held in captivity, is key here: defeating evil is the means, but bringing the captives home is the goal. And that’s what I’m praying for, day in and day out. 

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Can the Center Hold?

As we move forward through these strange times, I find myself careening these days back and forth between my native pessimism about the world and the occasional flash of uncharacteristic optimism. On the whole, things are probably no worse than they have been in the course of these last few months. And in some ways, things are actually looking up. (For one thing, I keep hearing rumors about some sort of imminent deal that will bring at least some of the hostages home. So that sounds hopeful.) I know both those things. But another part of me feels that the gyre is widening and that, at least in the end, the center will not hold. I write this week not to scare or depress, but to share my ill ease and to find comfort in inviting you to join me in hoping together for better times to come.

Yeats (that is, William Butler Yeats, 1865—1939) was one of the world’s greatest English-language poets, a Nobel laureate, eventually a senator in the Irish government. He was a strong Irish nationalist and he definitely flirted—and probably even more than just flirted— with the rising fascist movements of the 1930s. Not an anti-Semite in same sense as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, he was nonetheless part of a world that held anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to be part of a normal, educated person’s worldview. (For a brief but trenchant review of Irish anti-Semitism over the ages that appeared in the Irish Times a few years ago and that specifically mentions Yeats, click here.) There’s a lot of evidence to review, but I don’t wish to sort it all out here. Nor do I want to comment—not now, at any rate—about the set of bizarre reasons that have led Ireland to be the most consistently anti-Israel nation in Europe. (For a recent essay published in the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle on that precise topic, click here.) Instead, I’d like to use one of Yeats’ most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” to frame my thoughts about the world we are all living in.

Yeats begins his poem with a stunning image:

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre

            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

A gyre is a gigantic circular oceanic surface current. Before the poet starts to write, he looks out at the sea and finds it calm, placid, and peaceful. And then the churning begins. At first, it is barely perceptible, hardly even noticeable. And then, slowly, the motion picks up speed. What was tranquil and serene just a moment earlier is suddenly unsteady and unfixed in place. And as the speed of the water picks up, the pleasurable expectation of swimming peacefully in calm waters is replaced by the fear of drowning in those same waters. Nothing, suddenly, is as it should be. The tightest personal connections—Yeats uses the intimate relationship of the falcon and the falconer—become attenuated, then ruined entirely by the deafening gyre as it picks up speed and grows louder and stronger. In the world the poet is comparing to the sea, then, things that are normally each other’s natural complement—butter and toast, coffee and cream, pillow and pillowcase, socks and feet—these normal connections too weaken. And, in the end, the center itself around which life revolves—the family, the house, the workplace, the church, the shul, the park, the grocery—the center doesn’t hold and what was once normal, even pedestrian, now seems unpredictable and in a state of permanent, debilitating flux. And then, just like that, nothing at all seems fixed in place. Or safe.

I’ve lost track of the news even though I read obsessively. I subscribe to a dozen daily news bulletins, peruse half a dozen on-line newspapers, have an inbox that is constantly overflowing. My junk file has its own junk file. I am, I think, as up-to-date on the world’s goings-on as anyone who has a day job could possibly be. Mostly, I deal with it all by compartmentalizing the data, thus storing it in manageable chunks for later degustation (which I occasionally even get to). In that way, my center can hold. But just lately the center is not holding. And the gyre feels more than ever as though it is ominously large and ever-widening.

Let’s consider one single week’s worth of news. A man was arrested last Monday in London and charged with having attacked several employees in a kosher supermarket with a knife. In Haifa, a terrorist drove his car into a crowd of civilians just yards from the front entrance to the Haifa Naval Base. A Chabad rabbi in Washington was pushed out of a Lyft cab by the driver, who then violently attacked him. A terror cell about to perpetrate an “October 7-like attack” was identified and neutralized in Jenin. A would-be terrorist was shot and killed as he tried to murder soldiers standing guard at the entrance to Tekoa, a peaceful town in the Gush Etzion bloc that Joan and I visited just last summer. The International Court of Justice considered seriously a charge of attempted genocide made by South Africa against Israel, then rendered its decision almost without reference at all to the October 7 pogrom that took the lives of well over twelve hundred innocent Israeli civilians, some of whom were beheaded and others of whom were raped. The speaker of the French National Assembly commented the other day that the steep resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in France had reached the level at which it poses “a threat to the foundations of [the French] republic.” Federal agents in Massachusetts arrested a man who was making credible threats of mass violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in his state. Undeniable proof was adduced that UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations charged with supplying humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, is so suffused with actual Hamas-affiliated terrorists and sympathizers that it wouldn’t be that unreasonable for UNRWA itself to be considered a terrorist organization. (If you have access to the on-line version of the Wall St. Journal, click here for a truly shocking account of the whole UNRWA scandal.) The top civil rights officer at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent her entire professional life as a civil rights attorney, declared herself “astounded” at the level of anti-Semitic aggression the characterizes our nation’s college campuses. To offer one single example, students at Stanford University, once a school I would have characterized as one of our nation’s finest, were chased just last week from a campus forum on anti-Semitism by a crowd of haters threatening to hunt them down in their homes and, at least by implication, to murder them there. (Click here for the horrific details. They’d have to pay me to send a kid of mine to Stanford. But I wouldn’t anyway.)

Is the center holding? More or less. So far.

The poet continues with reference to anarchy being “loosed upon the world” and goes on to imagine innocence itself drowning as the “blood-dimmed” tide rises. And the problem is not only the brutal barbarism of the aggressor; it’s also the fecklessness of the aggressed-against: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Oy. And so ends the first half of the poet’s poem.

Being a Christian, Yeats imagines the salvation of the world in Christian terms. No problem with that for me: in what language should the man speak if not his own? And so the Christian man looks to the horizon for salvation and expects Jesus. But Jesus does not appear at all. The poet is ready for the Second Coming, for the messianic moment, for redemption. But on the horizon he suddenly espies something else entirely:

…somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare…

The savior cometh not and instead cometh the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” The poet expects to be saved, but his hopes are dashed as his faith turns out to have been misplaced entirely because all the distant horizon can deliver up is a monster. All the promises of modern society—prosperity, human dignity, security—turn out to be hollow,  misshapen fantasies; none will help much. Or at all. The much-awaited Second Coming yields only an ogre, a fiend, a “rough beast.” There is no hope.

And where does that leave us? I too look to the horizon and wait for redemption. I also fear the “rough beasts” of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, anti-humanism, and anti-Americanism, the four horsemen (to wander back into Christian terms) of my personal most-feared apocalypse. And yet, despite it all, I don’t find myself entirely drained of hope. I keep perusing the headlines with all the doom they presage for the world and all the terribleness they recount, but somehow find myself able to retain hope in the future. Where that comes from, I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with relativity. Hamas is Amalek, but we’ve faced worse. Our American college campuses are minefields for Jewish students, but things will surely improve as the problem is dragged out into the light and the world can see the haters for what they are and respond accordingly. Israel’s set of tasks in Gaza is beyond daunting, but the tide seems slowly to be turning. I continue to harbor the real hope that the hostages are all still alive and that the rumors of a deal to release them will turn into reality. And even though the streets of our cities seem clogged with villains whose hatred for Israel feels visceral rather than rational, I still have confidence that the American people will never embrace anti-Judaism and that the republic, the indivisible one featuring liberty and justice for all, will never turn on its own citizens. Do I sound Pollyanna-ish or rationally hopeful? Like an ostrich with its head in the sand or a Jew with his head held high? Even I am not sure. But I continue to believe in the future, in our future in this place and in the future of Israel. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”