Reflections of a Lapsed Orthodox Jew

Avraham Sutzkever: July 15, 1913 - January 20, 2010

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:00:35 -0500

The New York Times headlined its obituary, “Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and
Partisan, Dies.” In a sense the phrase “Jewish Poet and Partisan” says it all, and certainly the obituary was respectful and moving—what better tribute to a poet than to present his own words?

But in another sense enough can never be said about this hero of the Jewish people, one of that brave band of Vilna fighters in the forest who resisted the greatest and most powerful evil in history. And there can never be enough quotations, translations, or editions of the work of this greatest of all Yiddish poets. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in the Yiddish-language Forverts of Sutzkever’s magnificent “Siberia,” his was a classical and universal poetry, not just a Jewish take on literature and life.

I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting him in Tel Aviv in 1985, in his space among the offices of the Histadrut labor organization, from which he launched and edited Di Goldene Keit—The Golden Chain, the leading Yiddish-language journal of literature and social thought.

We talked in my few words of Yiddish, his few of English, and then in our more-or-less mutually intelligible half-way decent French, mostly about American poets. We shared an admiration for Robert Lowell, not an easy poet, but one of the century’s greatest. A few months later I had the opportunity, in a letter published in The New York Times Book Review, to inform that august publication that, contrary to the claim in one of their articles, Sutzkever was not yet dead but alive and well and writing beautiful poems.

I got his permission to translate (or at least imitate) his poems about Africa, which had moved me immensely, not only because it was so counterintuitive to read poems in Yiddish about Africa, but because they were transcendentally beautiful and evocative. I had lived in a remote area of Botswana for two years, and I resonated strongly to these poems. Finally, I had the good fortune to have some of my versions of his poems published in a special edition, gorgeously designed and illustrated by Ed Colker. It is the publication of which I am most proud.

Ed, a fluent Yiddish speaker who had been Sutzkever’s friend for decades, first contacted me after reading these pages about the poet in my book Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews:

For better and for worse, Avraham Sutzkever contains within his superb life the whole of twentieth century Ashkenazic history.1 And as one of the era’s great poets in any language, he gave life to it in words. If he had not been trapped in Yiddish, he would be universally recognized as a leading modern poet, but he would not leave his mother-tongue. He was born just before World War I in Smorgon, near Vilna. When German troops burned the town, his family moved to Siberia--not the Siberia of Stalin’s Gulags, but a strange and wondrous landscape of sun, snow, and ice. Exile, yes, but that was nothing new for Jews. To a small, dreamy boy who had known nothing else, it was magical. Years later, with his poetic gift in full strength, he would write a long poem called “Siberia,” later published with drawings by Marc Chagall. “Sunset over blue and icy roads,”it opens,

My soul filled with sweet and sleepy colours.
Down in the valley a little hut,
Covered with the snow of the sunset, is ablaze with light.
Shadows of trees swing strangely across window-frames,
magic sledges jingle round in circles.
In the tiny loft the cooing doves
spell out my name. Beneath the ice,
sparkling with lightning crystals,
the River Irtish, half-awake, struggles along its course.
In the dome of space, dreamed up from silence,
a child of seven years moves in a world of his own making.2

As Chagall said in his preface, this is “Jewish poetry of a new kind.”3 The gifted translator, Jacob Sonntag, said of the long work, “The poem does not once refer to Jews or specifically Jewish ideas of any kind. Nor, for that matter, is the child’s experience burdened with the memory of the war and the flight of his parents.”4

Yet the poem was written in 1935, in the heart of Jewish Vilna, in the eye of the gathering storm. But Sutzkever took himself out and away from all that to a childhood memory ablaze with light and beauty. The only sad part of the poem is an elegy for his father, who died in Siberia when Sutzkever was nine. The stanza, “In a Siberian Wood,” calls up a time two years before his father’s death:

…I hear my father say: “Come, my child,
let us go to the forest to cut wood!”
Our white colt is harnessed to a sledge.
The day shines bright in the flashing ax
and the flaming snow is cut with sharpened sun-knives.
Sparkling dust—our breath! We leave
through a sunny web, speeding across steppes,
past sleeping bears, to the sound of clicking hoofs.
All the stars which yesterday were shaken from the sky,
rest frozen now on the ground.

His father’s death shaped his life, and he continued to write about him:

A shade takes down the violin from the wall.
And thin, thin, thin snow-sounds fall upon my head.
Hush. That’s my father playing,
And the sounds—graved on the air—
Like bits of silver breath in a frost
Ranging blue over the snow moonlike glassed.5

He said of his father’s death, “That moment the poet in me was born.”6 Sutzkever came from a long line of rabbis; his father had been ordained but did not practice. In his memory his father collapsed while playing the violin, the haunting Hasidic melody composed by Rabbi Levi Yitzkhak of Berdichev, addressing God with one repeated syllable, du, du, du—“You, you, you.”

This death sent the family back to Vilna, where he lost his much-loved older sister to a fever. He went to a Yiddish school and began to write poetry, first in Hebrew, then Yiddish. But at sixteen he burned his poems and started again with a new commitment. A group of poets, “Young Vilna,” were crafting a new Yiddish and would enter its literary canon. But Sutzkever was rejected; Siberian snowscapes and peasant romances did not fit the pretensions of urban poets trying to join the mainstream of European literature. Ultimately he would be viewed as one of the greatest Yiddish poets; for now writing sustained him as the terror closed in.

Another Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, described him: “A thin slim youngster, tripping along the narrow twisted little Vilna streets. His steps are light. He does not walk. He floats. He floats all over the humps and bumps of the town. In his imagination everything is symmetrically rearranged. Created anew. Not for nothing he tells himself to learn from the Creator of all how to create poems.”7 For the great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, part of Young Vilna himself, Sutzkever “put to himself poetic problems like mathematical problems, and he was delighted when he solved them…It was Sutzkever whom Fate put into the Vilna Ghetto, made him live in Hell and come out alive…[He] saw everything he had believed in and had loved trampled under the German jackboot—and he stood the test, came out unbroken, whole.”8

He married as World War II broke out and the Russians occupied Vilna. He published a book of poems, “the most exquisite crystal of the Yiddish language and, perhaps, the last Yiddish book printed in Europe before the Holocaust.”9 But the German assault crushed Vilna, and about 100,000 of the city’s Jews were murdered by systematic shooting and buried in mass graves in the dull suburb of Ponar. Lithuanians, staunch aides of the Nazis, took Sutzkever and the Vilna Rav into the hills—they happened to be arrested on the same day--and made them dig their own graves. The Lithuanians cocked their rifles behind the two men—the fierce young secular poet and the old bearded rabbi. Sutzkever recalled, “When they ordered us to put our hands over our eyes, I understood that they were going to shoot us. And I remember as if it were now: when I put my fingers on my eyes, I saw birds fluttering…I never saw birds flying so slowly, I had a great aesthetic joy in seeing the slow-slow motion of their wings between my fingers.”10 But the Lithuanians fired over their heads and, having tired of the game, took them back to the ghetto.

Sutzkever wrote and wrote, and he and some literary friends risked their lives to save archived Yiddish manuscripts—they claimed they were burning them to heat their freezing rooms. Once he hid in a coffin to elude passing Germans:

Or let it be a boat
On stormy waves.
Let it be a cradle…
I still sing my word.11

As the Vilna Jews were relentlessly murdered, Sutzkever lost almost everyone he loved. “I went to see my mother. She told me the glad news that my wife had given birth in the Ghetto Hospital. My mother had forgotten Murer’s decree that children born in the ghetto must be killed. The next day the child was gone…Unable to compose myself after this calamity with my child another tragedy followed. I went to my mother’s home and my mother was gone.” She had been taken to Ponar during the night.

Still, his was an indomitable spirit. The poem to his dead baby gives the boy mystical power:

You—the seed of my every dream…
who came from the earth’s ends
wondrous as an unseen storm,
to draw, flood two together
to shape you in delight:--

Why have you darkened creation,
why have you shut your eyes
and left me outside begging
bound to a world swept with snow…
In this cold world he imagines swallowing the tiny boy to warm him, but demurs:
I don’t deserve to be your grave.
I will let you slip
into the beckoning snow,
the snow—my first holiday,
and you will sink
a sunset sliver
into its still and deep
and bear my greeting up
into the frosty shoots of grass12

Even then the Siberian landscape comforted him. In “My Mother,” he depicted her praying on Friday night, “quivering in the moonlight on the prayer book.” His faith kindled, he wrote, “Your devotion is like the warm challah/you prayerfully feed the doves.” Her bullet wounds are roses, she blesses him with her last breath. Then, “The shots clatter./She falls like a dove on the throne of the sun.”13 In another poem, “The Shoe Wagon,” he recognizes her best shoes, the ones she only wore on Shabbes, among the thousands of pairs being carted from Ponar to Germany.14

Still writing sustained him. He referred to the poems as “burnt pearls,” still reflecting light, the only thing visible in the ashes. “To a Friend” reads in part,

Unbroken friend
on the barbed wire,--
you pressed a bit of bread
to your heart.
Forgive me my hunger
and forgive me my brazen nerve,--
I’ve bitten through your bread
your bread flecked with blood…

Quieted comrade,
I take you in and live…
If like you I fall
on the barbed wire—
may someone gulp my word
as I your bread.15

Throughout his life words would be like bread to him, and he would go on recording every meaningful experience. He and his wife Freydke joined the underground led by the Jewish hero Abba Kovner--also a great poet, but in Hebrew. They planned a ghetto rebellion, but well-organized opposition from Jewish “leaders” who worked with the Nazis, prevented the uprising. Sutzkever and others escaped through the sewers to the forest, and attempted to join the partisans. But the Polish underground was slaughtering Jews in the forests; even in Byelorussia the partisan units disarmed Jews and forced them into menial service roles. Sutzkever’s poetry was already known in the Soviet Union, however, and the Soviet-Jewish critic Ilya Ehrenburg had praised it highly.

By coincidence, the president of the Moscow-based Lithuanian government-in-exile had once translated Sutzkever into Lithuanian. He arranged for Sutzkever and Freydke to be allowed to travel to Moscow. Repeatedly shot at by Germans and anti-Semitic partisans, walking through a live mine field strewn with human bodies and animal carcasses, they somehow managed to cross the German lines. After the war they returned to Vilna, where they salvaged Jewish cultural treasures and established a museum. It was later closed by the Soviets, but the Sutzkevers managed to get to Israel in 1947. He fought for Israel’s independence and defended it in several wars. He wrote poems about picking blackberries at night with the forest fighters, about his first inspiring encounter with Jerusalem, and about the Negev and Sinai Deserts, as eerily beautiful as the snowscapes of Siberia.

Some of his most beautiful poems are about Africa, which he toured for several months in 1950. The collection, called Elephants at Night, opens,

All rushing, all sounds sleep.
Terror sleeps under seven streams.
And the elephant sleeps so soundly,
You could cut off his tail...

Many years later, he was still strangely moved by African echoes:

Remembering three flamingos at Lake Victoria
That stay for me unaltered in their splendor:
Three strings taut on a wave, as an arc
Curves over them, the great arc of a rainbow.

Fiddle or lyre will not bring forth such music:
Such a three-stringed instrument is not known to be.
Its master had an impulse to test his creation,
To play the living strings with his own hand…

Yet it is the image in his own mind that fascinates him most:

…They glisten in their unchanging revelatory pose,
On their unchanging wave, like a pink dawn…

Once in a lifetime such a gift is given,
Intended to be seen, and to be heard.16

This was written in the 1960s, and almost forty years later his poetic career has not yet ended. Although Hebrew had by then eclipsed Yiddish as the main Jewish language, the reigning Labor party had a sense of noblesse oblige and supported Sutzkever’s periodical, Di Goldene Keyt—The Golden Chain—for half a century. He continued to edit it until 1996. He once said that Yiddish and Hebrew are the two eyes of the Jewish people. It is an apt metaphor; you can see out of one eye, but without depth.

1. Leftwich, Joseph. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet. New York/London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971.
2. Sutzkever, Abraham. Siberia: A Poem by Abraham Sutzkever, with a Letter on the Poem and Drawings by Marc Chagall. Translated by Jacob Sonntag. London/New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961., p. 17.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. 13
5. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 29.
6. Sutzkever, A. Selected Poetry and Prose. Translated by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991., p. 166.
7. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 43.
8. Ibid., p. 42.
9. Harshav, Benjamin. "Sutzkever: Life and Poetry." In A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991., p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 17.
11. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 48
12. Sutzkever, Abraham. Poetishe Verk, Band Eyns: Lider Un Poemes Fun Di Yorn 1934-47. Tel Aviv, Israel: Yovel, 1963., pp. 278-9.
13. Ibid., pp. 265-8.
14. Ibid., p. 275-6.
15. Sutzkever, Abraham. Di Feshtung: Lider Un Poemes Geshribn in Vilner Geto Un in Vald 1941-1944. New York: Yiddisher Kultur Farband, 1945., p. 50.
16. Sutzkever, Abraham. Tzviling-Brider: Lider Fun Togebikh 1974-85. Tel Aviv, Israel: Farlag Di Goldene Keyt, 1986., p. 129.
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Who’s a Jew?

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:27:19 -0500

I put this question to my “Anthropology of the Jews” class when it met for the first time on Thursday. They came up with some interesting answers.

The first, surprising to me—it’s a class that always draws a broad spectrum of Jews and others—the first definition offered was the halakhic one, the one according to Jewish law: a Jew is somebody who has a Jewish mother. I had to explain that this is not the only way to be Jewish under Jewish law—kosher conversion being the other.

But I wanted to know if they thought this was a racist, or at least racial, definition. They didn’t say so, but it’s hard to get around. Kosher conversion is a pretty big hurdle—you have to study for a long time, learn a lot, and pledge to follow Jewish practices like the kosher and Sabbath laws among many others.

Nevertheless, many people have joined the Jews over the centuries. In fact, the genetic evidence proves two things: the Jews of all nations have something in common in their genes, which links them to their Lebanese and Jordanian Arab cousins; and the Jews of all nations look at least somewhat like the people they have lived among for generations.

Which tells you that genes have flowed in, but not freely. Becoming a Jew-by-choice is a pretty serious matter and it ensures a certain commitment. Orthodox Rabbis, including those who determine the definition of a Jew in Israel, cast a pretty jaundiced eye on the many conversions triggered by marriage. As my friend the Rav (Rabbi Emanuel Feldman) likes to say, it should be about Moses, not Melanie.

Moses, however, (the Bible tells us) married a daughter of a priest of Midian, so that presumably was about both Moses and Melanie (or rather, Moses and Zipporah). Joseph married the daughter of the Egyptian priest Potiphar, whose wife had unsuccessfully tried to seduce the young man and then accused him of rape. Yet Jews have for centuries blessed their sons in the name of Joseph’s sons with Potiphar’s daughter. Esther saves the Jews of Persia by being married to the emperor, whom she hasn’t even bothered to inform that she is Jewish.

And of course, Ruth, the most famous Jew-by-choice--although she stems from the tribe of Moab, sworn permanent enemies of Israel—marries not one but (after being widowed) a second Jewish man, and through the second (a rich community leader) becomes the great-grandmother of King David and, through him, the ancestor of the Messiah.

Of course, the rabbis will tell you, it was different then. For one thing, in Biblical times Jewishness descended through the father, as it does in many religions; for another, Zipporah, Ruth, and Potiphar’s daughter were true Jews-by-choice. After a certain point the law was changed to make descent matrilineal, perhaps because many Jewish women were raped by outsiders.

In any case the Reform movement now recognizes descent through either parent, and this causes no end of difficulties in and outside of Israel. For example, a local Jewish high school here in Atlanta catered to Reform and Conservative families. The more traditional parents were worried that their kids might be dating Jews from more liberal families who were not considered Jewish according to the strict definition. In Israel, whether or not you are considered a Jew affects many aspects of your life.

Then there is the reverse-inheritance definition: A Jew is someone who has Jewish children. Once when Shimon Peres, now President of Israel, spoke in Atlanta, he said he liked that definition, but that as he got older he was thinking of amending it to: A Jew is someone who has Jewish grandchildren. The childless shouldn’t be penalized, but if you do have children, the logic is almost ironclad; what better proof than that you have passed it on?

Of course, the students also came up with definitions based on belief (for example, in one God) and practice (following Jewish law). And I reminded them of the really racial definition in the Nuremberg laws: a Jew is someone who had a Jewish grandparent. This law tragically informed countless Jews who thought they were German that leaving Jewishness behind may not be up to you.

Then there is the old wag’s definition that a Jew is anyone who says he is, because who would be crazy enough to claim it if it weren’t true?

But actually—all the romantic Melanie’s (and Michael’s) of the past notwithstanding—it has never been so easy to choose to be Jewish, because the Jews have always been under pressure, if not under siege. So it took a certain amount of character to join them. And that is part of the reason for Jewish success: Their imports were better than their exports.

Egypt Builds a Wall

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:19:45 -0500

News that Egypt is building a secret underground wall to separate itself from the Gaza Strip and its troubled people is full of interesting implications. This wall, said to be half built already, will be seven miles long and sixty feet deep. All concerned are denying the news (of course), but progress on the wall appears to be real.

Designed and implemented with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it is made of impenetrable reinforced steel that has been tested and proven to be bomb-resistant and impossible to drill or cut through. It is made up of slabs that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The wall will slash through and block a vast network of tunnels that Palestinians use to smuggle many items of everyday life they have been deprived of by the Israeli-Egyptian blockade—oh, and also to smuggle terrorists and their increasingly sophisticated weapons.

Egypt initially condemned Israel’s own security barrier, but now it sings a different tune, saying that anyone has the right to erect a security fence to protect his own property and people. Egypt has already done that and strengthened the fence above ground between itself and Gaza, since a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians who broke through parts of the barrier and streamed into Egypt in early 2008.

This influx included Hamas terrorists who were plotting against targets within Egypt, as well as many radicalized Gazans who wanted to ally themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood, a longstanding Islamist threat to the Egyptian government. Egypt obviously does not want these sorts of Palestinian refugees, and it did its best to send all the hundreds of thousands of them back.

But in fact, it has never wanted any of the Palestinian people. Egypt ruled over the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, and in those nearly two decades did not lift a finger to absorb any of the Palestinians into Egyptian society. This was in contrast to Jordan, which did admit many Palestinians in the same period, during which it controlled the West Bank.

And of course, it is in stark contrast to the stance and actions of Israel toward the Jewish refugees who were driven from almost every Arab country in the wake of Israel’s war of independence. There were hundreds of thousands of them, forced out of lands and nations where they had dwelt for many centuries, and struggling little Israel absorbed them all.

But the Gazans, many of whom were refugees from Israel’s first war with Egypt, wanted to enter that vast and populous country but could not find a new home among their Egyptian brethren, even while Egypt ruled over them. Egypt also steadfastly refused to take Gaza back under its wing when Israel gave back the Sinai in exchange for peace in 1979.

After the Oslo accords in the early nineties the Gazans were supposed to rule themselves, but the Palestinian Authority never really succeeded in establishing a government there, and after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, elections there led to civil war, and Hamas brutally drove its Palestinian rivals out of the territory.

Nevertheless, the world blames only Israel, which has continued to try to enforce a blockade around Gaza, turning it into what many view as a huge prison. However, to the extent that it is a prison, the guards have always been both Israeli and Egyptian. It’s just that Egypt’s commitment has been rather indifferent at times. Until now.

This enormous new steel barrier will not stop all smuggling, but it will slow it down. Gazans can tunnel deeper than sixty feet, but it will take a while, and all the currently existing tunnels will be abolished--not by Israel, but by Egypt.

One lesson here is that the Middle East is a dangerous place for everyone in it. Extremism such as exists in Gaza (fomented by Iran) and Southern Lebanon threatens not just Israel, but Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the emirates, and of course also Egypt.

Egypt is reacting accordingly, and its response shows a strange similarity to Israel’s own attempts to protect itself. Perhaps in time there will be echoes of sympathy as well as wall-building between these two old enemies, and perhaps that sympathy can warm up what for thirty years has been a pretty cold peace.

Lunch with the Rav

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:03:45 -0500

I had the rare privilege yesterday of having lunch with Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, the retired and revered spiritual leader of what was then the only Orthodox synagogue in Atlanta. He served that community for four decades, expanding it greatly, often bringing lapsed Jews back into the fold.

His son Ilan took over the pulpit from him when he moved to Israel, quite a few years ago now, so that the Broadway Café, a kosher restaurant a pleasant walk from his old shul, was full of people only some of whom recognized him. When I introduced him to the waitress, he said, “You blew my cover!”

I also waved to Rabbi Ilan, who hadn’t seen us, and Rabbi Emanuel told me about the time his father (the seventh generation of rabbis in his family, Emanuel being the eighth, Ilan the ninth) came to visit Atlanta from their original home in Baltimore. A congregant came up to the older visitor and asked in a friendly way who he was. “I’m his father,” said the visitor, pointing at Rabbi Emanuel on the pulpit. “Are you also a rabbi?” the congregant wanted to know. “No,” came the answer. “I’m the rabbi. He is also a rabbi.”

Humor runs in this family along with rabbinical gifts. When Ilan extricated himself from some unavoidable pastoral chat and came over to say hello, I told him I’d just heard the “also a rabbi” story. “No doubt you’re familiar with it.” Ilan nodded and said with a wry smile, “It’s number 23.”

That’s what it’s like with Rabbi Emanuel, one minute you’re laughing, the next you’re discussing the Shoah, or the Jewish people weeping by the rivers of Babylon. I wanted to know what he thought about the seeming contradiction between Psalm 137, which ends, “O daughter of Babylon, soon to be laid waste . . . Happy is he who will grasp and dash your little ones against the rock,” and the advice of Jeremiah during the same captivity, “Seek the peace of the city wherein I have caused you to be taken captive.”

“Contradictions are part of the story,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be contradictions?”

Why indeed? Life is so full of joy and pain we sometimes don’t know which one to embrace first, and we usually don’t have the choice. You would think that the Rav and I have very little in common. Okay, I was raised Orthodox, but he knows I am not observant. He never tries to persuade me to be anything other than what I am.

And when you come down to it, we do have a lot in common. Both of us are trying to figure out the human place in this crazy world, both of us laugh on the verge of tears, both of us think long and hard and yet know there are many things we’ll never understand.

And neither of us can be happy for very long without scribbling something. I brought along a copy of my latest, The Jewish Body, as well as the copies of three of his recent books he had sent me from Israel. He had brought along a fourth, and he has another on the way in a few months time.

So there was his stack of recent books and my puny little one. Not that many people make me feel lazy, and I have to either love him or hate him, so I love him.

I’ve written before in this space about his first book, a stunning diary of the Six Day War as experienced by his family, living there at the time and refusing all advice to leave. We’ve also had an interesting exchange of views about the role of women. But I’m approaching this stack of his books with relish.

The Shul Without a Clock, the one he just gave me, is a collection of essays (Tales Out of Shul was his previous one) about the whole experience of Jewishness as lived by an Orthodox rabbi. The title essay yearns meditatively for a synagogue where worldly time is irrelevant.

In “The German Soldier,” which brought tears to my eyes, he sits on an El Al plane stopping over in Munich and has vivid “hallucinations”—would that they were only that—of the dreadful details of the Shoah, while gazing out the window at the young, blond German in uniform who is protecting this Jewish plane with his automatic rifle.

“Brave young German soldier, protecting me so diligently out there in the snow and wind, forgive me…my mind wanders. I know that you were not there in 1944…forgive me my hallucinations, you who are my present guardian and protector.” Yet he cannot bring himself to leave the plane and breathe the Munich air.

“Of Pennants and Penitents” is a classic essay on the intersection of Yiddishkeit in the highest sense and the American Jewish boy’s--even the boy who has grown up to be an Orthodox rabbi--love of baseball. During one of Rabbi Emanuel’s visits to Atlanta, “The Enticer” comes to him in the form of a congregant with World Series tickets (behind third base!) and he succumbs.

So he’s rooting for the Braves along with sixty thousand other fans, except he has a black yarmulke and a big grey beard. Temptation draws him into the spirit of the game and then, lo and behold, a pop fly is hanging in the air over his head.

“Suddenly I am eighteen years old again…I leap from the ground, reach backward for the ball, and feel the satisfying slap into my outstretched palm. I clutch it and tumble down into the row of seats behind me, where a dozen hands and arms break my fall.” He is berating himself when he hears the cheers, “Great, Rabbi…Attaboy…Sign him up.” This is America, where a good catch is a good catch, and can even be good for the Jews, but he dreads facing his former congregants back at the shul.

Of course, they have seen it on TV, and the Rav is the hero of Orthodox Atlanta. But there is still Orthodox Jerusalem to return to. Oy. He takes comfort in the belief that they won’t know. They do, and some of them are impressed, but snide too. How can this revered man, the descendant of rabbis, be an “athlete”—something “between barbarian and lout”? He promises himself he will resist temptation on his next Atlanta visit.

“But if perchance the Enticer works his cunning on me once again and I fail the test and somehow find myself at the game, I humbly pray for two things: (1) that no balls, fair or foul, come my way; and (2) if one does happen to come my way and I instinctively leap for it, that I have the good sense at the very least to drop the ball.”

After lunch, I pulled out my iPhone and found the Birkhat ha’mazon—the grace after meals—on my i-Siddur. Even the Rav was impressed with that, although he of course needed no text. So many threads of conversation during that lunch, so much that I learned. The highlight yesterday was probably when he was talking about the prayer, Mi chamokha that ends, “osay feleh”—“Doing wonders.”

“You know,” he said, “feleh in Hebrew is Aleph spelled backwards. So the very first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, when you turn it around, spells wonder. This teaches us that the first thing in Judaism, and Jewish life, is wonder.”

As I walked the Rav back to his old shul, now his son’s, through the lovely autumn day, he said, “I’m eighty-two, and I’m still vertical.” I dearly hope he will remain vertical and funny and wise for a good long time to come. And should I see him catch a ball on TV, I will be the first to stand up and cheer.

Wonder, after all, is wonder.

Crisis for the Two-State Solution?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:05:12 -0500

A Palestinian friend who now lives in Atlanta recalls fondly that she grew up in a part of Israel where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in harmony, and she sees no reason why that can’t happen again. That is why she believes that the two-state solution is wrong, and that there must be one democratic, tolerant, multiethnic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

She doesn’t feel this way because she wants to bring about an end to the Jewish state, although that in effect is what it means. She doesn’t want what Hamas wants, which is a Muslim state that gets the Jews out of there. She wants the tolerance and harmony she remembers from her childhood, and the democracy she loves in her adopted country.

She is not alone. Her dream may be naïve, but it is increasingly widely shared, among moderate Palestinians and among fair-minded people throughout the world. Many believe it is an idea whose time has come.

That is why the recent threat by Abu Mazen—Mahmoud Abbas—to resign as the leader of the Palestinian Authority could be a game-changer. He has made such threats before, but this one may be different. It was provoked by the (also recent) change in America’s position on the settlement freeze, in which what Israel views as “natural growth” of existing settlements under certain “restrictions” will be tolerated by Obama’s administration.

Some American Jewish leaders are taking credit for this change, and certainly I don’t like to see a U.S. administration trying to make policy for Israel. But I’m not sure those Jewish leaders fully understand the powers of the weak, which were prominently on display in Abu Mazen’s threat to resign.

At a minimum, it is a brilliant political gambit, and one that has apparently already borne fruit. In the few days since that announcement, he and his colleagues have succeeded in postponing the scheduled January elections, so that Abbas can remain in place for the immediate future.

In a seeming contradiction that is of course part of the game, his government has also said it may go to the UN to seek recognition of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has duly counter-threatened that if the Palestinians do that, Israel will also begin to act unilaterally. However, all this depends on there being a government in the West Bank.

What if there isn’t one? The threat to walk away may be a kind of nuclear option for Abu Mazen, because a number of others in the leadership have said that they will follow him. What happens if the Palestinian Authority effectively dissolves itself?

In that case, Israel will be left holding the bag, and it will be filled with nasty things. Hamas will try to fill the vacuum as it did in Gaza when Fatah failed miserably there. But Israel cannot withdraw from the West Bank. There are not just a few thousand settlers there, there are hundreds of thousands, and there is no popular will in Israel in favor of removing them by force.

So the IDF stays there, protects the settlers and their roads, tries to root out Hamas terrorists, just as it does now. The difference is that there will not only be no negotiating partner on the other side, there will be no authority there except Israel. And the world will gradually give up on the idea of a two-state solution, because the Palestinians won’t want it any longer.

Some Israelis will be happy about that, but most (in poll after poll) realize that only a two-state answer is compatible with the long-term existence of a Jewish state. Moderate Palestinians who have no truck with terrorism do understand the demographic realities, and they can be patient for another generation or two. Meanwhile, the “apartheid” epithet applied so often to Israel will become a recognized truth.

It’s not apartheid when you wall off enemies in a bordering state, or an entity perceived as being on its way to becoming a state. It’s quite another if there is no authority there but you, and the world increasingly sees you the way it saw South Africa: a unified state in which a racial minority rules a racial majority in a clearly discriminatory and even brutal way.

As an American, I don’t ever tell Israelis what to do. However, I try to keep them informed about American opinion. I do not believe that Americans will be friendly toward a Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority that will never have a chance at equal rights.

Saib Erekat, a key spokesman for Abu Mazen’s government, said recently that if Israel continues to refuse to freeze settlements, the only course open to Palestinians will be to “refocus their attention on the one-state solution where Muslims, Christians and Jews can live as equals." He went on to say, "It is very serious. This is the moment of truth for us."

It could be the moment of truth for Israel too.