Living and Dying in in Divided Jerusalem

Jewish cemeteries are fascinating places. I was in one this morning, and noticed this gravestone.

It's the final resting place of Chaya Sarah Safra, who died in the winter of 1957, nine years after Jerusalem had been divided. In all those years she had not been able to visit the grave of her husband, Noah Safra, who had died ten years (to the day!) earlier. He was buried on the Mount of Olives, which in 1957 was in Jordan. Her family buried her in the main cemetery of West Jerusalem, Israel.

Resting in one city but two hostile countries, her gravestone contains all the information from his, so that visiting her might be a bit like visiting them both; and resting separately might be a bit like resting together.

Celebrating (in) Jerusalem

The Jews have been around for quite a while now - 3,000 years, give or take half a millennum and depending upon whom you ask and what criteria you use for "Jews" and "around". If you tried to list the Top Ten events in their history, the list you'd end up with might say more about you than about them. Torah at Sinai? Disliking that Jesus fellow back on Passover that year? Rebbi orally editing an oral tradition? Lobbying Cyrus? David penning Psalms? The Baal Shem Tov shaking things up? Abraham haggling with God about Justice? Spinoza laying philosophical foundations for the Enlightenment?

When you get into recent history - say, 1750 onwards - things get even trickier. The emergence of secular German-speaking Jewish thinkers is probably on the list; should Refael Lemkin convincing the UN to outlaw genocide be on it? For that matter, is the Holocaust a Jewish event, and will it look as important in 2045 as it did in 1995?

The top event on my list for the Common Era is easy: the 28th day of Iyar, or June 7th 1967, the day Israel gained control of the entire city of Jerusalem including all of the Old City. It's not a normal event when a group of people spend 1,897 years vocally waiting for an event, which then happens. I'm not aware of anything remotely similar having ever happened anywhere, anytime, with any other group.

This evening is the 28th of Iyar, Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. We celebrated it at our shul in an unusual way, by celebrating Baruch's 90th birthday, which also happens today.

I wrote about Baruch back when he was a young 85. At 90 he still identifies primarily as the grandson of Rav David W, the chief rabbi of their Slovakian community. A Holocaust survivor, who fought in Israel's War of Independence and then spent 10 months as a POW in a Jordanian camp. One of the speakers this evening recollected stories about his service as a tank crewman in the Sinai War of 1956. Much of the congregation came to celebrate with him this evening, as he is universally regarded as second in importance only to the Rabbi, and he's the more obviously beloved of the two. (Rabbis inevitably have critics because they take positions on matters).

He was surrounded by his family: children, lots of grandchildren, lots and lots of great-grandchildren. It was the most natural and miraculous event imaginable. One of two survivors of a death march on which 2,000 people perished, celebrating his 90th birthday in Jerusalem. Geopolitics, world history, wars, national interests and international cynicism, statesmanship and diplomacy, terrorism and hatred, law, international law, justice, injustice, propaganda, public relations, politics - these and many others are all part of the contemporary story of the Jews and their City. At times, however, a simple birthday party will trump them all with the force of its truth.

More Jewish-Arab integration in Jerusalem

I took this snapshot recently near the Israel State Archives (you can see a sign pointing to us in the upper left). It shows the sign on a truck advertising the driving school from which it hails: Hanan's Driving School.

In Hebrew and in Arabic. Hanan is an equal opportunity fellow. He'll teach whoever pays him to learn how to drive a truck. There are lots of folks in Jerusalem who speak lots of languages, but he advertises only in the languages of those who are likely to want to drives trucks. Hebrew and Arabic fit that bill, so those are his languages. Not Russian (they speak Hebrew by now), not French or English (they probably don't speak Hebrew well, but nor do they drive trucks), not Yiddish ('bal-agulehs' are an extinct breed). Hebrew and Arabic.

Apartheid my foot.

Oh by the way: the sign directing traffic to the Israel State Archives is in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English, in that order.

Jewish-Arab integration in Jerusalem

The neighborhood pool just happens also to be the only full-sized Olympic pool in Jerusalem, and we've got some active swim-teams. Yesterday evening as I was preparing for my swim, there was a gang of teenagers from the team who were showering and dressing. Most of them happened to be Arab teenagers, tho some were Jews. At one point three or four of them were standing near me and I eavesdropped. Only one of them was Jewish, and they were talking about the matriculation exams they'll all be taking in the next few weeks, as they finish high school. The Jew, it turned out, had chosen to take the easiest version of math, and his chief interlocutor was poking gentle fun at him. "Of course it depends on what you intend to do afterwards, but don't you think you should at least try for the intermediate level, not just the easiest?" Two of the others launched into their own discussion, in Arabic, about which math credentials it's best to strive for.

This banal discussion would have been inconceivable in the first decade after Israel annexed Jordanian Jerusalem in 1967. As recently as 10 years ago it would have been conceivable, but not possible. Things are changing in Jerusalem, under our noses but also under the media radar.

After my swim and shower, there were two fellows in their mid-30s chatting as they dressed. They were discussing the hardship of living a mostly sedentary modern work-life, and then going off for three weeks in the infantry and being called upon to make physical exertions that were easy 15 years ago but not anymore.

Reflections on Jewish Law, the Jewish Nation, and a Database

So are the Jews a religious community or a nation? And if a religion, how can secular folks call themselves Jews? And if a nation, how come all members must profess a particular religion? And why can’t the Jews just be simple and clear about these matters, like everybody else?

Far be it from me to resolve these weighty questions. Yet a magnificent book I’ve just completed made me look at them from a new perspective. It’s a 1,600-page book in Hebrew, with hundreds of quotations in Mediaeval Hebrew or Talmudic Aramaic-with-Hebrew, and it was first published in 1973; the copy I own has been sitting patiently on a shelf for more than 30 years, waiting for me to find the opportune time; when I finally did one of my considerations was to pay respect to the author during the first year after his death: Menachem Elon, once the 2nd highest justice in our Supreme Court. The book is his magnum opus, Hamishpat Haivri, Jewish Law.

His thesis, presented in the first of the book’s three sections, is that between the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Roman era, and the end of Jewish cultural autonomy at the beginning of the 19th century, the Jews maintained a national legal system, and lived according to its rules and practice.

This was no mean feat. With Jewish communities spread from Persia in the east to Iberia and England in the west, and from Yemen in the south northwards all the way to the Baltic, throughout the entire 2,000-year period no travel or communications ever went faster than walking, or perhaps rarely horse-riding. Legal decisions routinely took a year to arrive. Then there was the matter of varying political jurisdictions: the Jews shared one among themselves, but were spread over many different external ones. Language was an issue, since for most of the period Jews didn’t share one spoken language, nor did they maintain one language over the entire period in single communities, so their legal system used Hebrew, a language all knew and few spoke. Finally, there was the matter of the form of writing: for most of the period the only ways to record an idea and transmit it was by memory or handwriting. The printing press wasn’t around yet, and an author had to write his treatise by hand, and have it laboriously copied by someone else’s hand. A student interested in reading two items deciphered two handwritings; a student interested in, say, 500 items, read 500 handwritings.

By the time the printing press did get invented, there were thousands of items, some of them very lengthy books, which a scholar needed to have read, in thousands of handwritings. Assuming he could get his hand on all of them, an unlikely assumption, and assuming a dramatic relevant new one hadn’t been written in the past decade but without having yet reached his town, a likely assumption.

There was also the matter of persecution. It’s admirable to see how Elon never puts the persecution up front, yet it keeps on intruding, when scholars had to flee to other countries, or centers of learning were disbanded or ancient communities destroyed. The low-key, matter of fact mention, usually in passing, of an intruding calamity, underlines the extent to which the Jews never allowed persecution to serve as an excuse for collapse or retreat into disorder or even to halt their creativity in its shadow.

So in the first section of the book the author, a law professor at the time, lays out his case that the Jews had their own commonly-held and communally-run legal system in which they lived their lives, and they did so for two millennia, growing the system and adapting it as needed along the way.

The second section deals with what law professors apparently call the legal sources of the system, the legal tools the system uses. Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the 45th century, or the 50th, and you’re living in a United States which still regards the 18th century’s Constitution as its founding legal document. The legal tools are the modes of operation which enabled your forefathers to take that ancient document seriously all along: interpretation, legislation, jurisprudence and so on.

As Elon tells it, the Torah is of course the founding document, the source of authority, and being divine, not a letter of it can be amended. Yet amended it had to be for the system to grow with history. And so there were early tools such as Midrash (hermeneutics) which enabled the early legal scholars to derive their legal needs from the immutable text. Elon gives a very fine description of the various forms of Midrash, of which there were quite a few. Interestingly, however, these tools were mostly used by the Tanaim, the scholars who created that tanaitic literature which was then, in the 2nd century CE edited into (or out of) the Mishna. These Tanaim lived mostly in Israel, indeed, mostly in the Galilee, and held their discussions mostly in Hebrew.

They were followed by the Amoraim, the creators of the Gemara between in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries. They tended to be in Babylonia (present day Iraq) except when they were in the Galilee or elsewhere, and they tended to work in Aramaic, except when they used Hebrew. They used much less Midrash then the Tanaim, and indeed, they related much less directly to the Torah, focusing mostly on the Tanaitic literature, in the Mishna and beyond it. They were followed by Savoraim and then Gaonim, which takes us till about the 10th century. The later in time, the greater the likelihood not to use Midrash, but to prefer decrees (a type of legislation – did I mention that the Jews never had a legislature throughout this 2,000-year period), then local decrees, binding traditions, precedents, and some forms of deduction. As the 2nd millennium began, the center in Iraq lost its luster and its hegemonic power, never to be replaced (until the 20th century?) From then on there were a series of centers, sometime even more than one at once; they all seem to have known of them all at any given moment, and communicated to the extent it was practical. As time went on, the local decrees and traditions took on greater significance – but as the persecution went on, local practices became less likely to be helpful in new communities of Jews from diverse old ones. None of which ever threatened to destroy the system, astonishingly.

A significant reason for this startling cohesiveness can be found in the third section of the book, where Elon describes the documentary sources of the Jewish legal system: the texts.

He harks quickly back to the Torah, Bible and Talmud, but spends most of his time on what came next, from the 9th century on. The central theme of the story is the codifiers vs the interpreters. The interpreters came in a number of flavours, those who saw their task in explaining the earlier texts, and those who worked through all the earlier texts to provide a legal ruling on particular matters. (Rashi being the single most important interpreter, and the Tosafot providing rulings – though neither of those examples is clear-cut). Then there were the codifiers, the scholars who saw the immense (and growing) literature and its extreme complexity, and tried to force order and simplicity on it all in one fell swoop, so to say.

Actually, there was only one scholar who tried to impose complete order on the complete corpus and in one fell swoop so s to serve as the final word on the matter, and that was the Rambam, Maimonides, in the 12th century (who also happened to wander the entire length of the Mediterranean as he tried to sidestep his persecutors). He was so gigantic a figure, so totally a genius, so far ahead of everyone else, that he felt he could carry off the trick; and no sooner had he done it, in his 14-volume Mishneh Torah codex, than a choir of his contemporaries and their disciples for the next few generations all tore into him for his arrogance and presumption, recognizing his intellectual superiority over them as they did so.

Then, over the next four centuries the battle between interpreters and codifiers raged back and forth, eventually ending in the victory of the codifiers with Rabbi Yosef Caro in the 16 century, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch but not until he’d completed the Beit Yosef, a gigantic work of interpretation. (Caro, it should be noted, was back in the Galilee, for those who think there was no significant Jewish presence in Israel for 2,000 years.)

Or did the codifiers really win? I’m not so sure. One of the oddest parts of the story is that while the cutting edge of the system of Jewish law kept on moving forward, as cutting edges tend to do, the single most important layer was and remained the Talmud, until this very day. The Rambam’s presumption to have his work enable the complicated Talmud to be superseded may have happened on the level of legal ruling; but there are 100,000 students of Daf Yomi today, not of the Daily Rambam program (which does exist, but is a pale shadow of the main show).

Where does all this lead us? Beyond being a fascinating yarn and a crucial insight into what made Jews tick? Near the end I found myself with a number of reflections. First, there’s the miraculous mystery of Zionism. Just as the legal and social and cultural tools which maintained the Jews for 2,000 years were being broken down by the modern conception of the individual facing the State without an autonomic community in the middle, as well as by the tidal wave of secularism which detached a majority of Jews from the traditional ways and texts, along came Zionism and replaced the magnificent-but-worn old tools with a whole new set. Just as the intellectual ferment which lasted millennia was finally (largely) exhausting itself, along came Zionism with a whole new context in which to live full Jewish individual and communal lives. (I’m writing this on the evening of Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, so I’ll add that Zionism also gave, and demanded, a new set of reasons and contexts in which Jews lay down their lives for the nation).

Even on a less grand scale, Elon’s book itself demonstrates how the Jews have developed alternative ways of studying their rich cultural heritage: no one prior to the 19th century would ever have thought to write a history of the Jews through the history of their legal development.

Finally, the archivist and information-professional in me looks at technology. Just about the exact moment when Elon was publishing his book, a group of scholarly computer-scientist types were banding together to put the entire gigantic sprawling Jewish legal library into a database, now known as the Bar Ilan project – an invention the Rambam and his fellow codifiers would greatly have appreciated if had they ever been able to conceive of it, which they of course weren’t.

Interim Report from the Israel State Archives

For whatever reason I seem to have a spot of time for blogging (see yesterday's post, and today's. I also recommend this older post, as we approach Memorial Day). So perhaps I ought to use the moment to tell about what's happening at the Israel State Archives (ISA), since my move there was what caused me to (mostly) stop blogging.

In the past few years the Cabinet has passed a series of resolutions about the ISA. The most significant was last November, when Cabinet Resolution 911 essentially redefined the goals of the ISA to fit the needs of the 21st century, while also allocating a significantly enhanced budget to be able to reach them. This is a long-term project, starting in 2015 and scheduled to last 15 years, i.e long after the end of my term (senior officials have term limits in Israel). Until the advent of 2015, we're already up ramping up via the previous resolutions, which began allocating new funds in late 2012.

Almost none of what we're doing will be visible to the general public before summer 2015 at the earliest, and some of it will require many years. Fundamental change on the scale we're enacting takes years and years to work its way towards fruition. So if you go visit our website, for example, you'll see the same 18-century version that's been there all along; even if you visit our reading room, the most that will happen is that you'll hear rumors about rumbles.

The first project we started was scanning the existing paper collection. The reason we started there is that, contrary to what folks think, a scanning project is a low-tech operation, 95% of which is logistics, and 4% of which is purely technical. In 2013 we scanned close to 20 million pages plus ten of thousands of photos; at that rate we should complete the entire scanning project in about 40 years, give or take a few.

We also began planning and developing a new main software system, to replace the existing one which was developed in the 1990s. This is very much a high-tech operation, at which many of us are working very hard. Once completed, perhaps in January 2015, we'll have abilities that will be far advanced over what we currently have, but it will still be entirely invisible to the general public. Also, such projects are never "completed"; development goes on for as long as the system can contain it. Eventually the patches required grow larger and more complex than the system itself, and then it's time to move to the next new system - but hopefully that doesn't happen more than once in 15 years.

We're working on revamping the method (and also a bit of the legal context) of how declassification is done. There's an embarrassing backlog in that field, and I'm happy to say that the Cabinet agreed that it had to be dealt with. Again, right now we're planning, developing methodologies and capabilities; the real breakthrough can't happen before those new systems are in place (see previous paragraph) in early 2015. The public won't begin to benefit until a later date - but that could be late 2015, maybe - not that long from now.

We're just about to begin deploying some new ideas and capabilities about how we transfer digital data from government ministries to the ISA. Since documentation doesn't get opened to the public for 15 years, this won't make a difference anyone notices for quite a while - but once that while comes, it will make all the difference. So it needs to be worked on now.

If everything goes according to plan, we should take down the 18-century website in about a year from now, and replace it with its great-great-great-grandchild. On the other hand, nothing ever goes according to plan, so don't hold your breath.

So those are some of the more obvious things that are happening. There are also a couple of smaller tracks we're moving on, such as writing a new draft Law of Archives to send to the Knesset, and a new system of  knowledge management to accompany the collections of documents and make them more generally accessible. Our staff is training itself to do most things differently than they used to, and it's encouraging to see them do so with commitment and determination. We're going to expand the staff, too, once we find the 5 minutes to write up the new job descriptions.

Our intention is to have a revamped ISA public presence later this decade, with the documents of the State of Israel easily accessible online. We're on track, but it will take time.

Review: Undaunted Courage and a Timeline of Hypocricy

The United States is by now one of the oldest democracies in the world, and still using its original constitution. Yet it actually hasn't been around very long. This point was impressed upon me recently while reading Stephen Ambrose's last book, the excellent Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. In the tone of a master storyteller, Ambrose relates a story everyone knows something about, and makes of it a page-turner. It's the story of how President Jefferson prepared his aide Meriwether Lewis to go and find out what lay to the west of the Mississippi River, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and to bring back as much diverse knowledge as possible: about geography, botany, zoology, about the Indians, about the English, the French and Spanish presence in the area if there was any, and anything else of interest. Since no white man had ever been in the area and reported back, everything was interesting. So Lewis recruited his friend William Clark, and together they created a unit of soldiers and others, never more than a few dozen in all, and off they went.

They set out in May 1804, and got back in September 1806. Ambrose wrote his book a few years before the bicentennial anniversary, and even today we're only 210 years behind them. And that's the first startling thing about the story. As recently as 200 years ago, if you floated down the Ohio River west towards the Mississippi, you were surrounded by hundreds of miles of pristine forest, with, here and there and at great distance from one another, a rough stockade or a one-street trading station with maybe a few hundred locals, all of whom had arrived there in recent years. Cincinnati was a really big city (but did it have more than a thousand people? The book doesn't tell), and it had been founded 15 years earlier.

And the area east of the Mississippi was mapped, known, and part of the United States. Seen from the perspective of where Lewis and Clark were going, it was civilised and tamed. Pretty soon it would even be boring and unattractive for the pioneering spirits who were escaping the stifling civilization of the Eastern seaboard into the unknown and untamed frontier.

They didn't have Whatsapp in those days, and Facebook was unreliable. As a matter of fact, as Ambrose reminds us early on, the the only type of communication anyone had ever dreamed of which was faster than a man's pace of walking, was if he was on horseback. Which means that from the day in May 1804 when Lewis and Clark started upstream from St. Louis (pop. 1000), they were out of contact. Once or twice in the coming years they sent back a few messengers, whom they never saw again and could only hope would arrive back in civilization; they themselves heard nothing from civilization until they appeared one fine September day back in St. Louis, two and a half years later.

In the interval they lived off the provisions they'd acquired in advance, and mostly, they lived off their wits and off the land, essentially reverting to hunter-gatherers. They were very good at being hunter-gatherers, but they'd also chosen a good place. The descriptions of the bountiful land they were moving through are, simply, astonishing. Much of the area is still bountiful, indeed, it's the breadbasket of the world, but it's tamed and controlled by humans. It was different 200 years ago.

So they made their way all the way to Oregon (which wasn't yet called Oregon), took a selfie on the coast of the Pacific, and walked back, proving that it was all there, that area, that there wasn't a combination of big navigable rivers that crossed it, and discovered a few hundred species of plants and critters previously unknown to the taxonomists.

Not part of mapped civilization, perhaps, but not empty of people. There were various tribes of Indians (that was the word used then, and until recently). Each time Lewis and Clark encountered a new group, they gave them a version of their standard stump speech, which needed to be translated through six or eight people, in the probably vain hope that the original English version would come out at the other end in some vaguely recognizable form. Here's the description of the first time Lewis gave it:

Lewis opened by advising the warriors to be wise and look to the true interests of their people. "Children", he continued, as Clark recorded his speech, "we have been sent by the Great Chief of the Seventeen great nations of America to inform you... that a great council was lately held between the great chief and your old fathers, the French and Spaniards". There it was decided that the Missouri River country now belonged to the United States, so that all those who lived in that country, whether white or red "are bound to obey the commands of their Great Chief the President who is now your only great father". (P. 156).

And from there on the speech got worse.

That passage made me stop and think for a moment. In 1804, more than 90% of recorded Jewish history (so far) had already happened. More than 1,500 years of the interval between the collapse of the (western) Roman Empire and the rise of United Europe (such as it is) had already happened. The French Revolution was already history, and Napoleon was wandering around Europe causing uproar. Shakespeare had been dead almost 200 years. Jerusalem, considerably older than Cincinnati or even Virginia, was at one of its many lowest points, but had only a few decades left before it would begin growing beyond its walls, and with a Jewish majority.

210  years is a long time if you're building a family tree, but in terms of history, it's just yesterday. And just yesterday, the first organized white man ever to reach Iowa was preaching at the locals in terms that no kindergarten teacher would use today without blushing. All he was doing was preaching; the really bad stuff was yet to come. As Ambrose notes later in the book, the entire process of the western-moving pioneers regarding the Indians was simple: move out of our way or be killed. Since being in the way meant being on the continent, that left only the option of being killed - and indeed, they're effectively all gone.

Everything I read, I read with an Israeli perspective. Sorry, that's just who I am. The earliest proto-Zionist settlements were started in 1878, and they picked up speed in 1882. The distance in time between Lewis and Clark, first explorers of the western half of the United States, and the advent of Zionism, was 80 years. The final subduing of the American West (sometimes called the Closing of the Frontier) and early Zionism were, quite literally, simultaneous events. The original population of the United States are gone - gone from Massachusetts these past four centuries, but gone from the western half of the country all of, what, 150 years? Less even than that? Meanwhile, in Israel alone there are more Arabs today than there were in the whole country in the late 19th century.

Next time you hear an American enemy of Israel speechifying about the evils of invading someones land and then stealing it, too, ask them what their opinion is of Missouri. Or Oregon. Because it's the same time frame.

Or, if you'd prefer to simply read a book with a great yarn about a world that's gone, read this book.

Library of the Dead

Next week is our double-whammy Day of Commemoration (Yom Hazikaron) and Day of Independence (Yom Haatzmaut). So I'm putting up a story I once posted elsewhere, on Yom Hazikaron of 2008. It's still just as true.
70 years ago, 50, even merely 30 years ago, youth movements played a significant role in the lives of Israeli teenagers. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s, most of them disappeared. Here and there you can still find remnants of the phenomenon, but they’re rather few and far between. The single exception of any significance, so far as I can tell, is the Bnei Akiva youth movement of the national religious strand of Israeli society – roughly the Israeli counterpart of Modern Orthodoxy in the US.

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A couple of weeks ago I chanced by the building that houses the “Central Jerusalem” branch of the movement, one of the larger branches in the country. When I was a teenager the branch – called “Sneef Merkaz,” or simply the “Sneef” – was downtown, at least half an hour away; the more gung ho of us easily spent more time in the sneef than at home between the ages of 8-18. (I wasn’t gung ho). About the time we enlisted, it moved to a spanking new building near where most of us lived, and dozens of us used it as our meeting point Saturday mornings whenever we got home for a weekend. We would converge there for Shabbat morning services, and afterward we’d hang out for half an hour or more, exchanging yarns and tall tales, and hoping the girls were noticing. Though, truth be told, putting on the airs of combat soldiers in front of the girls wasn’t all that useful, since essentially all the guys were in, and it was hard to appear special. We also didn’t get home often enough to create continuity. But we did keep updated about all the other guys: who’s in which course, who’s been sent where, and so on.

I don’t think I’ve been in there for something like 30 years, though I’ve gone by it thousands of times. One morning a week or so ago, as I walked by, the gate was open and no one was there, so on the spur of the moment I went in.

Decades of teenagers haven’t added to its appearance. None of the doors seemed to close. The walls were covered with colorful murals that must have been an inch deep; if someone could figure out how to remove paint layer by layer it could be a fascinating exercise. It looked just like you’d expect a building to look where nobody’s mother has come to check on the maintenance in living memory: ramshackle, worn, chaotic, but also comfy in a way that would appeal to kids in “their own place”. It has a “lived in” look.

At the end of the corridor there’s a stairwell. I remembered that on the second floor there used to be a reading room dedicated to our friend Zvika, who was killed in a hiking accident in the Judean desert when we were 16; on the wall there was a large and dramatic picture taken from the top of a high cliff and in its corner, as if gazing out over the wide vista, a portrait of Zvika. So I went up to see what had happened to the room.

Zvika’s picture is still there. Apparently the kids, none of whom could possibly have any memory of anything about him, have a healthy respect for commemoration. Then I noticed the far end of the room, where the entire wall was covered with pictures of young men, and a long shelf offered a series of publications – books, pamphlets, albums. I didn’t remember this exhibition, and I approached it with a queasy feeling that turned into something bordering on awe. In this house of teenagers with a memory span that can’t exceed 15 years, someone had collected pictures, information, and publications about 60 years of fallen soldiers who had been active at the Sneef when they were of that age. There were more than 30 pictures, the earliest were of two young men killed in 1948.

I followed the pictures. Here’s a young paratrooper who was killed a few months before I was born. Here’s one killed in the early 1960s, a decade remembered as peaceful. Meir R. was killed in 1968. I came to know his father about that time when we moved into this neighborhood. Every year he would lead our congregation during the Ne’ilah service at the end of Yom Kippur, the single most powerful service in the entire year. He never managed to get through the service without weeping, not in all the years I heard him, and no doubt in the many years thereafter until his death, a little old man walking the streets of Jerusalem with his battered leather briefcase. I’d never seen a picture of his son: he was a strikingly handsome young man.

Yakov F. was killed in the summer of 1970, a week before the Roger’s Plan brought the end of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt. I hadn’t known him, but I remember how that week our madrich – councilor – told us that maybe Yakov would be the last soldier killed.

Sariel was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war. He was two or three years older than I, his sister was in my sister’s class. Moshe T. was killed a few weeks later, on the last day of that war. He had been our madrich, and a few months before the war he had married Yaffa, also one of our staff. I remembered them as two exceptionally good looking people; the picture on the wall confirms this.

Moshe K. was a paratrooper, killed a few months after the Yom Kippur war. He was Yaffa’s little brother, so she lost a husband and a brother within six months. The synagogue I go to has a mantle on its podium donated by their parents in Moshe’s memory; his mother passed away last year.

Avi Greenwald was a friend of mine from the moment I joined his school in 6th grade. I wrote about him briefly in Right to Exist. Ram M. was the younger brother of one of my best friends; he used to hang out with us sometimes, and although he was younger than us we welcomed him into the circle for being such a serious kid. Avi and Ram were both killed in 1982 in Lebanon.

Boaz was killed in 1988. Shlomo C. was killed in 1989. I remember his face, but don’t think I knew him.

Here's a picture of Noam, killed in 1992. I taught him history when he was in high school; he was one of those students who fit into the background at school, and then excelled and stood out once they reached the army. He was a highly respected young officer; on occasion I still hear people talking about him with admiration and regret.

Aviad was killed in 2001. I've vaguely known his father since the late 1970s. The past few years we have been studying together in a Talmud study group that convenes every Saturday afternoon.He always comes well prepared, and he never smiles.

Dani C. was killed fighting terrorists in 2002.

Facing the wall was like following an inverted cycle of life, from young men killed before I was born all the way to young men whose parents are my friends. The library, however, is in a building used only by teenagers, who don’t even yet know there is a cycle of life. Somehow, they understand the need to relate to these young men, some of whom were contemporaries of their grandfathers. So in the middle of a building run wholly by teenagers is a dignified section dedicated to young men only marginally older, who never grew old.

Re-learning to Read

In recent months I've been teaching myself to read - or perhaps, re-teaching, since I used to know but forgot. By reading I don't mean the technical ability to recognize letters and the sounds they represent, and thereby to construct conversations, ideas, or whatever nonsense people write. That ability I never lost. The one I did, however, was the ability to take a book and sit and read it, page after page, perhaps even hour after hour. That art I lost sometime during the past decade or two, as I put all my reading abilities into reading stuff on glass screens, and then reading shorter stuff on smaller glass screens, and then skimming over stuff on other glass screens.

Blogs, say. Or Tweets. At least I never started using Facebook.

So it hasn't been easy, re-learning what I used to know. Back in the Old Times I used to read all the time, everywhere. I'd take two books onto an airplane, and six or eight of them to the first week of reserve duty. I would stand in lines in official ministries, reading. Buses? Reading. banks? Reading. I often read three or four books simultaneously. And then I lost the ability, and for a while didn't even notice. Then I did notice but brushed it aside. Until eventually I realized that reading from glass screens - unless perhaps it be Kindle type screens which I never tried - was a form of making oneself dumb. True, just about everyone else was doing the same, but that didn't mean I wasn't getting dumber, even if it was a communal project.

So I tried to reverse the tide. It wasn't easy. For a while it was a physical effort. But eventually the effort began paying dividends, as efforts often do. Recently it has even been getting easier, and of course, worthier.

So here's a quick list of some books I've read recently:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I don't read enough literature to do literary criticism, but this book about a girl in Nazi Germany wasn't what I'd expected. It was, however, a fine read, and I sort of didn't put it down until I'd finished it.

Paul Preston's The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (Revised and Expanded Edition) was recommended to me by my son who is currently working in Spain for an international technology company. I hadn't actually ever read a systematic description of the Spanish Civil War, and this book taught me that it had been much worse than I had been led to think ("the pilot project of WW2), and Franco was considerably more ghastly than I'd thought, in spite of the fact that during WW2 he enabled safe haven to many of the Jews who managed to cross over from France.

Bill Bryson actually convinced me that my secret aspiration to walk the Appalachian Trail from end to end is probably not worth the considerable effort (compounded by the fact that I live more than 6,000 miles away). Though I do hope to do additional sections of it to the few I've already done. Another really fun book: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Then I read Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath. This is the third or fourth of Berman's books I've read. His shtick is that he's an old 68er who has grown up, but is still attached to the idealism that fuelled his young political passions. It's an interesting and worthy perspective, especially the grown up parts of it, though I admit that I weary, slowly, of his built-in and underlying assumption that one needs those roots in the Left to be a compassionate person.

And then I read Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West - but that's a book which deserves its own post. Someday.

Freedom isn't Free: A Sad Rumination on the Eve of Pessach

In the 1950s the CIA put a pile of time and money into disseminating Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago in the Soviet Union. The assumption apparently was that words can be a powerful weapon, if used well - and, of course, if deployed as one weapon among many against the enemy. Of course, in those days the concept of enemy was different than it is today.

A common meaning of the word "enemy" today is anything that causes distress to nice folks like us. We haven't yet reached the middle of April this year, and here's a collection of people who've been silenced since the beginning of the month for fear their words might hurt someone:

76-year-old Barbara Driver used an unfortunate phrase while making a political point in her local municipal council, which ended her career.

Cambridge University Press, an august institution which has been disseminating ideas for centuries, nixed the publication of a book which might have offended Vladimir Putin. (Honestly).

Mozila, the company which produces the web-browser you may be using as you read this, fired its CEO because back in 2008 he donated money to a political campaign in California which went on to win, but which has since been overturned by a court; the hapless CEO had the temerity to hold on to his belief that same-sex marriage is not a good thing. (To his credit, same-sex activist Andrew Sullivan castigated the lunacy of the decision).

Brandeis University disinvited Ayaan Hisi Aly from speaking on campus because it was expected her appearance might offend some folks who disagree with her politics. (An abridged version of her talk is online here, and any decent person should read it no-matter what their political opinion, simply to demonstrate their decency).

I have no doubt there are other recent examples I've missed. Sadly, Voltaire's sentiment about dying in defense of opinions he disagreed with to ensure freedom of expression is long since done with. In the liberal democracies which would never have been invented were it not for his ideas, it is hardly conceivable that citizens would die for anything; freedom of expression and thus freedom of thought has been canceled so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, should their thoughts turn out to be hurtful to someone. Hurt feelings, we are to accept, are the worst thing that can happen to a person.

(Voltaire, by the way, was a committed hater of Jews; he used his distaste to castigate the powerful Church of his day in the roundabout manner of bashing the Jews. Had he lived in the 21st century he would have been drummed out of town. Fortunately, he lived in 18th-century France, so that worked out). (Then again, hurting the feeling of Jews is actually rather acceptable, even in 2014: an exception to the rule).

Steven Pinker writes about this onslaught of gentleness in his magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  He puts it into the context of the end of violence, so that while it's a bit silly, it's also basically a fine thing. The problem is, of course, that the world isn't that gentle a place yet, nor are large swathes of it obviously on their way. This was the gist of my review of Pinker's book. The murderers in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, CAR, Nigeria and so on, don't live in a world where anyone cares a whit about anyone's feelings.

Nor does Putin. Or Khamenai and his sidekicks. Assad. Nor any of their henchmen and, truth be told, any of their enemies. None of them would recognize a hurtful sentiment if they saw it in full daylight, nor are any of them likely to fathom the sentiment. Voltaire would recognize their world, though.

The problem with ending free speech so as not to offend is that it portends the end of fee thought. Having lived for decades in an imaginary world where people forbid themselves hurtful thoughts, they have now lost the ability to see the world as others do, to recognize real enemies, and to deploy weapons that might impress those enemies. And so, having trained themselves not to be hurtful, the intellectual leaders of the free world and the political ones too have lost the concept of enemy. Sadly, their enemies haven't.

Back in the 1950s the CIA - even the CIA - knew the importance of freedom of thought.

Sodastream is a factory, not a settlement

I had an e-mail exchange this week with a fellow who really really doesn't like us. On the topic of that Sodastream factory in Mishor Adumim, he informed me that the Palestinian workers there are treated as slaves. When I suggested I might try to see their payrolls so as to test his proposition, he backed off: payrolls don't prove anything, he told me, the only thing that's important is that Palestine isn't sovereign.

Which got me thinking. The Israeli-Arab conflict famously makes many otherwise reasonably normal people lose their marbles, so that they engage in all sorts of mumbo-jumbo. The Sodastream story seems to be such a case. In any other context, worldwide, a private company maintaining a factory in an underdeveloped country so as to take advantage of its lower labor costs would be regarded as a boon for the hosting country (if perhaps not for the rich country the factory had previously been in). Sodastream, however, isn't paying hundreds of Palestinian workers what they'd get from a Palestinian employer. It's paying the Palestinian laborers Israeli wages, with the social benifits mandated by Israeli law.

Nobody lives in the Sodastream factory: it's a factory. If ever there is peace between Israel and Palestine, Israeli owned factories in Palestine employing Palestinians is precisely the sort of thing everyone should be wishing for. Not for the "soft" advantages of people working alongside one another, which is the kind of thing one can't easily measure: for the "hard", quantifiable advantage of employment and foreign curreny.

In any other context, this is called FDI (foriegn direct investment) and is eagerly sought by politicians and toted up by economists. When it comes to Israel-Palestine, however, normal discourse goes silent.

(On a related note, Yair Rosenberg has a great piece up at Tablet about the debate, 53 years ago today, when Yaacov Herzog forced Arnold Toynbee to cut out the mumbo-jumbo and talk straight).

Dawn and Midnight, Summer and Winter

Here are two sets of pictures. (Click and you should see them enlarged)

Kaffit on Emek Refaim at dawn on a hot September day, and the same place at midnight last Thursday. And then, Rachel Immenu (which is around the corner), at the same dawn (looking west you can see the mornings sunlight on the clouds) and at the same midnight (looking east this time).

 

 

 

Re-inventing the Archives

Two and a half years ago I mostly shut down this blog, except for the occasional foray, and took the position of Israel's State Archivist. One can't be a civil servant and run a political blog; and anyway, as time was to prove, there was precious little time to do much blogging anyway.

Newborn people require about two years to get a grasp of language. My experience has been that two years is often the amount of time it takes to understand other things, too. Most presidents need about that long to figure out their new job, for example, though the media loves to overlook the fact for better or worse. In my case, it took almost exactly two years for me to understand the system enough to launch my bid to change my part of it, and then another four months to cajole the surrounding environment to support us. Last month the Cabinet passed decision number 911 (no mystical significance) which effectively re-invents the Israel State Archives, along with some other bits of the environment too.

In an nutshell, the decision and its accompanying budgetary decisions says the following:

The State Archives must become digital in the full meaning of the term, and thereby put all possible documentation in the hands of the broadest possible public. This is to be done on six main tracks.

1. Identify all the historically significant documentation produced by the entire government and bring it (or a copy there-of) in digital form to the archives. (This is trickier than it sounds).
2. Scan the entire collection of paper documentation accumulated in the ISA so far (at a rate of 2 million pages a month this will still take decades).
3. Preserve the digital documentation for posterity. (Think about this for a bit and you'll see why it's such a major challenge for archives worldwide).
4. Catalogue and declassify the collections. (There's a sad story behind this one).
5. Make all that boring bureaucratic stuff fascinating for the general public.
6. Pay for the entire thing by making the government stop storing paper. (The budget of the ISA has been significantly expanded, but the money has to come from somewhere).

So was it a good thing I stopped blogging (assuming you were of the small group that thought it was a worthy thing to be doing in the first place)? I hope so.

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Here's a quick non-review of Vasily Grossman's magnificent Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics). Non-review, since I don't read enough literature to be able to write a literary review, but I do wish to bring this book to the attention of potential readers.

Grossman (1905-1964) was a Soviet writer and an important war correspondent during the 2nd World War.  He was at Stalingrad, and at the liberation of Nazi camps. His mother was murdered by the Nazis; he himself was later castigated for not being patriotic enough. All of these themes are woven into Life and Fate, a story of the Soviet Union during the battle of Stalingrad which is clearly modeled on War and Peace. Like War and Peace, its multi-stranded story presents the entire society - generals and prisoners, intellectuals and combat pilots, old women and young men, heroes and knaves.

Last year I reviewed Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, and in doing so I mentioned a series of previous books I had read comparing the Soviets and the Nazis. I recommended Snyder's book and still do, but Grossman's is much better. Snyder's has far more historical facts; Grossman's gives the historical truth. He was there, watching and understanding, and he tells it as it was. The oddest part of his book is that he ever thought it could be published in the Soviet Union, even in the relatively benign Khruschev years. Such a damning portrait of Soviet society could only be published outside the system, as it eventually was in 1980, 16 years after the author's death and after the manuscript had been smuggled out of the country.

In an otherwise powerful book, a number of sections stood out in particular in my reading. The first is a farewell letter of a doomed Jewish mother, on the eve of the liquidation of her ghetto. I have to assume Grossman was writing about his own mother. There's a description of how scientific discoveries are made which could have been lifted directly out of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition were it not for the fact that Grossman wrote before Kuhn, and had no way of being influenced by him. There are descriptions of the battle of Stalingrad, and especially the fighters of a surrounded and doomed Soviet outpost which contradict the entire sense of Soviet society for their raw sense of freedom. There is a description of a Nazi death installation which isn't accurate, but the power of Grossman's words about how "life is tuned into inanimate material" makes it more potent than most of what has been written about Nazism. There are descriptions of how individuals coped with life under totalitarianism, how they adapted, and how by doing so they bolstered the regime.

About a hundred pages before the end there's a description of the interrogation of Krymov, a life-long communist who is now in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. This section was one of the most important I've read, ever. It shows how the interrogator takes decades of loyal activity for the Party, and convincingly makes it sound like decades of subterfuge and treason. Krymov knows it's all a lie, but as the interrogation continues, he sees the sense of the allegations, how useless it will be to cling to his version, and how hopeless it will be to continue to believe in his life-long convictions and his own memory at the same time. His cell-mates, all veterans of the party and interrogations, demonstrate that in order not to reject everything he has ever believed in, he must accept that he has been wrong all along - or vice versa. Either way, the Party will remain untouched, while he, the life-long party activist, will be destroyed.

Much of the book is fascinating for a history buff such as I. The section about how the interrogator has collected all possible information about Krymov's entire life, so as to arrange it in the most damning version conceivable, however, is of urgent importance not only for the dwindling number of us who still remember the history of the 20th century. This is how the purveyors of systematic lies operate today, in 2013, and will still be operating in 2113.  Read Mondoweiss any day of the week, or preferably, every day for a few weeks, and you'll see the NKVD in its full glory.

Are America's Jews still Jewish?

OK, I admit, that title was a wee bit provocative. Not nice of me.

On the other hand, given the story of my family, which isn't new, and the PEW survey of American Jews, which was published earlier this month, along with a slowly-broadening fissure opening between the world's largest Jewish community and the second largest, I think it needs to be asked.

My family's story isn't important, were it not for the fact that I've been watching it happen all my life, and I've always assumed that it was typical. My great-grandparents moved to the Goldene Medina in the first years of the 20th century, as is true about most of America's Jews. I no longer have contact with quite a number of my cousins, especially the 2nd and 3rd ones, but so far as a I know, a clear majority of them are no longer Jews. Some are quite open about this (the Pew survey found more than a million descendants of Jews who define themselves as not Jewish); others are too lazy about the issue to make any declarations.

The Pew survey has been dissected, discussed, and dismissed with much fanfare since its publication; it has also caused much dismay. It's also more than 200 pages long, so many of the people who've been discussing it avidly may not have read it all. (I skipped the almost 100 pages that focused on methodology). You don't need me to analyze what's in it; indeed, all I'm going to offer is a very small nutshell. In one brief sentence: America's Jews are disappearing, but until they do, they mostly feel good about being Jews.

Not all of them, and not equally, of course. The 10% who are Haredi, and the 5% who are Modern Orthodox, are mostly flourishing. This wasn't always so, of course, and traditional Jews who moved to America usually lost some or all of their commitment to a halachic lifestyle, but those who held onto it now live in a strong community with little attrition.

All the rest, however, are losing numbers and losing commitment. Households with two committed Jews are losing less than households who aren't like that - but a large and growing number aren't like that. Back in the early 1970s there was a spate of articles in Israeli newspapers, I remember, about how intermarriage in America was going to result in the disappearance of America's Jews. This then didn't transpire, and the Israeli smugness abated - except that it has happened, and is happening, and while it's taking longer than the Israelis expected, it looks inexorable.

Yet the survey also shows that large numbers, and clear majorities, of America's Jews are proud to be Jews. How then to resolve those two characteristics?

The answer, I fear, is in that well-worn issue of what being Jewish means. Is what America's Jews are proud of, really Judaism?

Jewish identity was not complicated since before the Common Era all the way up until the beginning of the 19th century. For the past 200 years however, it has become very complicated indeed. I'm not going to offer a magic bullet to make that complexity go away. Are Jews the people who believe in a certain set of beliefs? Well, sort of, but not really, so no. Are they the people who live according to halachic precepts? Of course not, except when they do. Are they an ethnic group? Walk down the streets of Jerusalem and you'll be hard-put to say what a Jew is supposed to look like. (I remember the exciting moment some 20 years ago when I saw, for the first time, a Jew who really looked exactly what the anti-semitic caricatures said we're all supposed to resemble. I haven't seen him since, however).

Having said all that, there are things that can be said about what being Jewish is, and to ask if most of America's Jews share those characteristics to a significant extent.

The first, sadly, is that often being a Jew was something you were willing to die for. Not eager to die for, or course, but committed to the Jewish way of life to the extent that you'd not abandon it no matter what, come hell or high water or rampaging pogromists or devious designers of laws against Jews. Or suicide bombers on buses or in supermarkets. Like it or not, today's Jews are essentially all descended from forebears who responded to the willing-to-die question in the affirmative. Most of them weren't called upon to make the personal choice, but it was often there, in the near or distant background, and they, their grandchildren and their 10th and 20th generation descendants all answered in the affirmative. Those of their descendant who didn't may still carry the odd gene inherited from them but they're long since not Jewish.

The PEW researchers didn't ask their respondents if they're willing to die for being Jewish, but the answer is clear; they're not willing to make some considerably lesser requirements of themselves and their children.

The second, of course, is the matter of religious lifestyle. I'm carefully staying away from the question of religious belief, because dogma and theology have usually played only a minor role in Judaism. The Protestant concept of belief as an indicator of belonging is rare in Judaism, which means that even if some American Jews believe in a set of Jewish beliefs, if they're not committed to a recognizable way of Jewish life, it's not clear what help the belief is. What has always been important is a Jewish way of life. Since we're way beyond the days when this had to mean a halachic lifestyle it's harder to define, but it still has to be there.

Israelis have a Jewish lifestyle of a sorts by definition: they live in Hebrew, according to the Hebrew calender, in a society which understands itself as having important Jewish elements. Do America's Jews have a parallel phenomenon?

Not that I could find in the survey. In what was to me probably the single saddest finding of the survey, page 55 tells of what American Jews think is essential to their being Jewish. The totals are as follows:
Remembering the Holocaust - 73%
Leading an ethical and moral life - 69%
Working for Justice/equality - 56%
Being intellectually curious - 49%
Caring for Israel - 43%
Having a good sense of humor - 42%
Being part of a Jewish community - 28%
Observing Jewish law - 19%
Eating traditional Jewish foods - 14%.

Of course, there's not a single one of those qualities which contradicts being Jewish. Indeed, it would be fine if all Jews shared them all, so that the response would have been 100% down the whole line (assuming there are any consensual Jewish foods, which I doubt there are). But are these the essentials to being Jewish? The Holocaust happened 70 years ago, which means that for the first 30-plus centuries of Jewish history that element was absent.  The ethical and justice stuff reminds me of the time a German friend told me how proud he was of his Christian values, and I pointedly asked if there were any of them I couldn't also claim, without being a Christian. Intellectual curiosity and a sense of humor? As defining characteristics of Jewishness? Really? Isn't this a bit parochial and arrogant at the same time?

Which leaves us with belonging to a Jewish community, which the section of the survey which deals with the demographics informs us is weak and weakening, and the matter of Jewish law, which leaves no room for a secular form of Judaism.

I was astonished - or at least, I should have been, were I not such a pessimist - that Jewish learning didn't even appear as an option. In about two weeks I should finish my first cycle of Daf Yomi, which means I will have spent about 45 minutes a day racing over a blatt (double page) of the Talmud, every single day. Now, after 7 1/2 years (from summer of 2006 onwards), I am finally about to be able to say I've looked at every single page of the Talmud. Do I know the Talmud? Of course not. Not remotely. But at least I've acquired an idea about what's in it and have a somewhat better conception of what a Jewish scholar, a Talmid Hacham, spends his life at. The fact that a survey of American Jewry didn't notice that being an educated Jew might be an essential element of Jewish identity, at least for a minority, or at least as an ideal most people don't live up to, is devastating. At least it is to me. There was probably never a generation of Jews with a majority of scholars; but to the best of my knowledge all Jewish generations venerated learning of the Jewish canon.

Which brings me back to the title of this post. Jews have been a diverse bunch for a very long time. Yet in their diversity, there has always been among them a core of people who were committed to their Judaism at almost any cost, which gave them a staying power unique in the annals of Man, and thereby an unparalleled cultural longevity; and they have always shared a common ground, be it religious or linguistic or social, which formed a bond of commonality. When the first  Ashkenazi disciples of the Vilna Gaon's reach Jerusalem 200 years ago and found only Sephardi shuls, they deliberated joining the Sephardis or holding out for a minyan of their own. How many secular Israeli Jews would recognize many American Jewish synagogues? This would matter less if America's Jews were creating a viable and recognizably Jewish form of life. But are they? In what way?

So tell me where I'm wrong. So far as I can tell, the 22nd century will see a vibrant and diverse Jewish center in Israel, with small satelite communities in many places in the world, including in America. I appologize for being an arrogant Israeli.

Shalom Chaver: Farewell, Norm.

Norman Geras died yesterday. I never met him personally. We met through the blogosphere, where we linked to each other from time to time, and e-mailled back and forth when we wished to speak directly. His blog, Normblog, was a fount of erudite common sense; he was especially good when he clearly dissected the silliness of public discourse.

His final post, earlier this month, contained a list of books he had read and recommended. As a tribute to him, people might like to choose one of the titles they've never read, and read it. I certainly will try to.

Rest in peace, friend.

Baruch dayan emet.

Aharon Karov, Marathon Man

Back in January 2009, when this blog was still active, I began following the story of Aharon Karov, a young infantry lieutenant who was called to his unit less than 12 hours after his wedding and sent to battle in Gaza, where he was critically wounded. At the time the doctors didn't expect him to live. (My previous post on him, with links to all the previous ones, is here).

Today's edition of Makor Rishon (Hebrew, not online), tells that he and his wife Zvia now have two children, a 3-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, that he's studying at university, and that he's flying to New York this week to run in the upcoming New York Marathon.

The Rav Ovadia as he meant to be

The Rav Ovadia is likely to prove the single person world-wide who dies in 2013, and whose works will still be read in 2113, 2213, and 2513. That's what happens with important Jewish scholars.

On September 3rd 2010 I posted on the Rav Ovadia. I'm putting it up again, in his honor, and also as food for thought for the multitudes of people who disliked him without ever taking the time to understand his world:


Rav Ovadia Yosef has done it again. During his televised Saturday night talk he called for the death of Mahmoud Abbas and "these Palestinians". Saeb Erekat denounced him for preaching genocide, the State Department chided, media outlets pontificated, and in Israel, where at least some people might have been expected to know better, public figures piled onto each other in their haste to condemn.

It seems, after all, a serious matter. Rav Yosef, who just turned 90, is the greatest living Sephardi rabbi, and arguably the most important halachic scholar of our day. One in eight Jewish Israelis vote for the Shas party he founded in the 1980s, and more hold him in highest esteem. Prime ministers and opposition leaders alike visit him to explain matters of state in the hope of gaining his support. He's important. And complex.
 

Along with his unfortunate penchant for expressing himself in earthy bluntness, Rav Yosef has been a revolutionary force for modernizing halachic thought and integrating it into modernity. Again and again he has courageously formulated rulings that contradicted those of all his peers. He found a way to permit and encourage organ transplants; he permitted artificial inseminations; in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War he swiftly freed almost a thousand women from Aginut, and the list goes on. Most famously, in the late 1980s he was the first important orthodox rabbi to announce that peace with the Palestinians is preferable to continued control of the West Bank.
 

How then to explain this week's outburst, let alone excuse it? By listening to him in his natural context.
 

The Rav Yosef doesn't use the Internet, has never encountered a blog, is unlikely ever to have read Haaretz and certainly doesn't follow the New York Times. He doesn't watch television, though his weekly talk is broadcasted live. Lesser men have invested decades in migrating the compendia of all halachic literature into a digital database, Bar Ilan University's Responsa Project; for a long time Rav Yosef didn't even know this was happening, nor did he care. He has read those tens of thousands of books, and knows what's in them. His world is about Jewish learning, Jewish belief, Jewish thought, imagery, and language. It is extraordinarily rich, but overlaps only partially with the secular world, and hardly at all with the world of international diplomacy or media. Had one asked him for the date of his inflammatory speech he'd have answered that it was the 19^th of Elul, not the 29^th of August.

Elul is a distinctive month. For orthodox Sephardi men, it can't be overlooked, as they rise daily at 3am to chant slichot, the mediaeval supplications for mercy. Since Rav Ovadia's words and their meaning come straight from the slichot, any attempt to evaluate what he was saying and what his audience heard ought to notice them.
 

Common wisdom tells that the high holidays are about personal reflection, balance taking, resolutions to improve and divine absolution. Indeed they are – partially. They are also about communal behavior, national survival, and God's obligation to protect his people and avenge them. The theme of the seven weeks between the beginning of Elul and the end of the high holidays is that we're unworthy sinners pleading for God's forgiveness, but also that we're miserable and down-trodden and may he raise us for the glory of his name. That second theme has a clear subtext, that we suffer for our adherence to him and therefore are worthy of his protection.
 

There are numerous examples; here are two. The Ata rav slichot (Thou art benevolent) supplication says

Terrified by their travails

By their revilers and persecutors

Please don't abandon them oh God of their fathers…

Deliver them in sight of everyone

Let the evil ones no longer rule over them

Or the Ase Lema'an (Do it for their sake) verse, repeated every day: Do it for Your Truth, do it for Your greatness, do it for Your name, do it for Your kingdom… do it for Abraham Isaac and Jacob, do it for David and Solomon, do it for Jerusalem… do it for the martyred for Your Oneness, do it for the massacred for Your name, do it for those burned and drowned sanctifying You, do it for infants suckling at the breast who did not sin…

After a month of daily supplication and shofar blowing, Rosh Hashana amplifies the themes in two full days of devotion, followed by another eight of supplication and finally the blast of Yom Kippur. The Yom Kippur service contains the agonizingly long and detailed description of how the Romans tortured ten great scholars to death, followed by Avinu Malkenu (Our Parent, our Sovereign), recited for ten days and repeatedly on Yom Kippur: Avinu Malkenu, abolish our persecution and the conniving of our enemies, thwart the intentions of our enemies, destroy our persecutors, silence them…

Tellingly, the haunting Barbara Streisand recording of Avinu Malkenu drops this part, as do many of the references one can find in Google. It's as if enlightened or secular modern Jews are uncomfortable with the overt violence in many of the texts of this highest of Jewish annual cycles. They misunderstand the meaning.

In the middle of the second century CE the Jews renounced the use of political power. The catastrophe of two defeats by Roman armies, the first destroying the Temple and the second depopulating Jerusalem and Judea, was too much to bear. The Mishna, followed by the Gemara, were so traumatized they succeeded in hiding the true extent of the destruction and horror; it took the archeologists and historians of the 20^th century to decipher the true enormity, especially of Hadrian's genocide. Instead, the Talmud concentrated on the loss of great scholars and the stubborn, sometime suicidal determination to pass on the teaching of Torah. Implicitly, and eventually explicitly, the Jews told themselves they had a pact with God. They would suffer in his name, but he would fight their wars; they might die for his law, but he wouldn't allow their enemies to win. Their personal fate might be terrible, the destinies of their community dire, but the nation would always survive, and the enemies – eventually – would be defeated.

The yearning for divine retribution, at times blood-curdling in its intensity, was a substitute for action and for the need, even the permissibility, of counterforce. No matter how harsh the persecution of the Jews, there was never any cycle of violence. Words of violence effectively replaced the violence itself for 18 long centuries.

Admittedly, this has changed. In the 20^th century the Jews returned to the use of national power. Most of them are secular, they no longer believe in a God to fight their battles for them, and not all of the violence they engage in is wise. The ancient traditions, however, are still there. When the Rav Yosef lifted the theme for his talk straight out of the prayer book, he wasn't calling for genocide, nor inciting to violence. On the contrary. He was continuing a quiescent tradition, by calling on God to do what the Jews won't do and shouldn't do.

There is no causal line from his words to deeds, nor did he intend there to be. He was speaking as a Jew does in Elul. Perhaps it's too much to expect anyone to respect him, but at least they might refrain from damning him.

Where if not in Jerusalem?

No-one really knows how many people attended the funeral of the Rav Ovadia Yosef last night. If it was 700,000, that's more than 10% of the Jewish population of the country. If it was 850,000, as published by some newspapers today, that's almost 11% of the entire population of Israel. No matter what the number, most of the participants were men, so that a similar number of women were left at home with the same mourning sentiments. The entire media agrees this morning that it was the largest funeral in Israel's history.

I think it was probably the largest in the entire long history of Judaism.  Think about it for a moment. The Talmud tells about millions of people who used to come to Jerusalem for the pilgrimages, but those aren't eye-witness reports, rather wistful recounts from a few generations after the destruction of the Temple. Even to the extent they're true, there's no legend of a mass funeral of anyone. From then until the late 19th century, there were no Jewish communities large enough to create such a crowd of mourners. Even in pre-Holocaust Europe, or New York at any point, there were never anything near six-plus millions Jews in a region the size of Israel. And anyway, that's the recent past, so we simply know: there were no comparable events, not of that size, any time in the 20th century, not even at the funerals of the Lubavitcher Rebbe or Menachem Begin.

So what we saw yesterday was the largest Jewish funeral ever. It was a combination of the death of a Jew of historical stature; his followers' confidence of ownership of the public space such that shutting down half a city was not given a second thought; and the simple fact of having enough of them to generate the numbers. All of which came together in the most important city in the Jewish world. Jerusalem.

Postscript: I may be attuned to this insight as I'm in the middle of reading that PEW report on American Jewry, which I may post about once I'm finished. The contrasts are stark, of course, not to say harsh. One of them is that the Rav Ovadia, whom Israeli Jews just gave the biggest sendoff in 3,000 years, was largely irrelevant to American Jewry. To the limited extent he was relevant, it was when they totally misunderstood what he was all about. I once wrote about this, a few years ago; if you wish, you can re-read that post as my obituary of him.

Jerusalem is Destined to Grow

Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi is one of the most quoted scholars in the Talmud - assuming he was one scholar and not two, which he may have been. Whether one or two, he or they lived a very long time ago, in the 3rd century give or take a generation. (And either he, or they, or someone else of the same name, seems to be buried until this very day in Mitch Pilcer's back yard in Zippori).

In any case. Back in the 3rd century Jerusalem was a small town, roughly the size of today's Old City, which is one square kilometer. Yet the Talmud on page 50a of the Pessachim tractate cites Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi as foretelling that in the future the city will be so large that a galloping horse will need half a day, from dawn until noon, to get from the edge of town to its center, and this in all directions.

I'm not an expert in galloping horses, but assuming one can gallop without stopping for all those hours, I expect the Jerusalem of 2013 hasn't yet reached the dimensions Yehoshua ben Lvi had in mind. Give us another 10-20 years and we'll get there, only 1,800 after he said we would.

(The Daf Yomi series, I remind you, is presented and explained here).