Haim Watzman

The Humanity of Evil: Amir Gutfreund’s “Our Holocaust”

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Haim Watzman

The title Amir Gutfreund chose for his novel Our Holocaust has a quadruple meaning. “Our Holocaust” is the Holocaust of the survivors who populate his story; it’s the Holocaust of Hans Underman, the German scholar who intrudes on the story; it’s the Holocaust of the narrator and his childhood friend, Efi, who appropriate the Holocaust of their parents’ generation for themselves; and it’s the Holocaust that human beings can suffer, or perpetrate, under circumstances beyond, and within, their control.

It’s an appropriate book to write about on Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples. The Jewish prophets and sages understood that each of these awful catastrophes, which were accompanied by the slaughter and enslavement of their people, had a double meaning. These previous Holocausts were crimes committed against the Jewish people by other nations, but they were also evidence of the depravity of God’s chosen people, of their failure to adhere to the moral code of God’s law.

In today’s Holocaust discourse, that synthesis is often absent. Some see the Holocaust as an unparalleled crime committed by the Germans, a nation with a culture uniquely degenerate. Therefore, the Jews, as the particular victims of this crime, derive a special status from it. Others see the Holocaust as just another instance of man’s inhumanity to man. From that they deduce that the experience of the Holocaust ought not to have changed the Jewish nation’s perception of itself. But both these propositions are true. The Jews learn from the Holocaust that they can trust to the protection of no other nation but themselves; humanity—including the Jews—learns that no matter what cultural failings led the Germans into the hell they created, the crimes they committed were human crimes. Thus every human being, Jews included, have a duty to guard themselves, and their nations, against the possibility that they will sink into moral dissolution (one need not sink to the level of the Nazis to commit horrible deeds).

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Delta Blues — Airline Security in the Age of Terrorism

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Haim Watzman

Here I am stuck in New Jersey, while the four suitcases checked by me and Ilana are in flight. In other words, while security at Kennedy International Airport kept Ilana and me from bringing hand cream into the secure area, our luggage was allowed to fly on its own to Israel. If a terrorist wanted to blow up an airplane, would he rather use a jar of Ponds or a large valise?

The story began when we arrived at JFK last evening for Delta flight 86 to Tel Aviv. We checked our suitcases, received our boarding passes, had our carry-on bags x-rayed and our persons put through sensors. But when we arrived at the gate, we were informed that the flight would be delayed by an hour and a half. We waited, and then take-off was put off until midnight, and then until 1 a.m.

By that time it was clear that the flight would, at best, arrive only minutes before Shabbat came in, leaving us no time to get to Jerusalem. So we reluctantly relinquished our dreams of a warm Shabbat with our four children and asked to be rescheduled for Sunday night’s flight.

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Biking the 401–Crested Butte, Colorado and the Jewish Question

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Ilana was eyeing a silk-print wrap-around skirt as a present for a friend when a retirement-age Jewish mom with an eastern accent started up a conversation with me. When you wear a kipah, everyone assumes you are Israeli.

We spent this morning at the summer arts fair in Crested Butte, Colorado, a town of 1,600 or so permanent residents that forms a half-moon of built-up area in the midst of a plain between high mountain ridges that still boast patches of snow at the beginning of August. Four hours from Denver, it’s not the kind of place you expect to find a Jewish community, but the woman told us that the local synagogue, the cleverly-named Bnai Butte, counts 60 families among its members. If you add to that the Jews for whom Bnai Butte is the shul they refuse to enter, we must be one of the town’s leading denominations and ethnic groups.

Like other minorities, Jews in outlying places either form insular groups or try to beat the locals at their own native culture. The latter was most evident over our weekend in Crested Butte. A dark-complexioned, kinky-haired young mountain biker wearing devil-blue Duke duds (that’s my alma mater) eyed my tzitziot and smiled a greeting as he passed by me on the street on Shabbat, and a heavily tatooed, long-haired country banjo man called out “Shalom” from his street-musician perch.

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The Bounds of the Human: Holocaust, Army Service, and the Importance of Clean Underwear

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In the Holocaust, the Jews were, uniquely, the victims of a horrible, unprecedented crime. In the Holocaust, the crime committed by the Germans against the Jews shows how fragile the boundary between humanity and beastiality is and how human beings are capable of committing unimaginable crimes. Both those statements are true, but a difference in emphasis is characteristic of the dialogue on the Holocaust between American Israeli Jews–as was brought home to me in a discussion the other day.

An American participant in this discussion of the Holocaust criticized Israeli author David Grossman’s novel See Under Love, for depicting a Nazi concentration camp commander with human depth. In the third part of that novel, the commander and one of his victims share memories of children’s stories.

I responded that, in my reading, Grossman used this device to show that, however deep into inhumanity the Nazis had sunk, they were still human beings. While the Nazi evil represents a decay of natural human morality far deeper than any other in the modern age, the Nazis were nevertheless human beings and their actions represent an extreme to which any human being, and any nation, has the potential to reach.

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The Waste Land: The Problem With Space

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American suburbia is like an SUV. It’s big. It’s spacious. It can be beautiful, quiet, and well-kept up. But it’s such a waste.

Ilana and I always have opposite reactions when we visit America’s great suburbs. This last Shabbat in southern New Jersey was typical. Ilana gets dreamy about having her own lawn, house, garden–all that elbow room, all that green. And I get antsy–why should I want to live in a place where you have to drive half an hour to buy a pair of socks?

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Jewish Literature As It Ought To Be: Naomi Alderman’s “Disobedience”

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Haim Watzman

Last month I published an essay in the Jewish Chronicle of London in which I asserted that something is missing from most of the literature being produced by and about Jews today: “What I seek are books that, without being bound by conventions of religion and history, nevertheless use familiarity with and respect for the past as an instrument for thinking about the future of the Jewish people and what it means to be part of that collective.”

Had I read Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience before I wrote that, I would have written: I’ve found it. This is exactly what I mean.

Disobedience presents us with the most intriguing, unusual, and complex love triangle I’ve seen in contemporary fiction for quite some time. Rabbi Krushka, the spiritual leader of a small, straight-laced, insular, and conventional Orthodox community in London’s Hendon neighborhood, has passed on. He groomed as his successor his nephew, Dovid, but Dovid lacks his uncle’s charisma and native wisdom. Even worse, Dovid is married to Esti, a woman known for her long silences. She doesn’t mix much with the community’s women, she’s born no children, and everyone thinks that she’s more than a tad weird.

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The Kipah and the Gun

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Haim Watzman

“It’s no coincidence that men with knitted skullcaps-two of them soldiers-were involved in killing the terrorists who carried out the last three terror attacks,” Nadav Shragai writes in today’s Ha’aretz. Shragai, who himself hails from the mainstream of Isareli religious Zionism, is right to be proud, but he doesn’t tell the whole story.

The kipah (why does Ha’aretz insist on using the ugly term “skullcap?”) and the rifle weren’t compatible in classic Zionism. The Palmach ethos pretty much excluded religion. The authors of soldier memoirs from the pre-state period through the 1970s almost always express surprise when the occasional religious guy shows up in their special forces unit, and the religious guy almost never made it through the rigorous selection process. In the mindset of most of the IDF’s early commanders, being religious meant being weak, and time spent observing the mitzvot was time wasted.

The settlement movement, which I think has been a catastrophe for Israel, nevertheless played a role in an important and positive sociological process in Israeli society-it brought the modern religious population into the mainstream. In a society in which so much revolves around the army, military service, and in particular service in elite units, is the key to larger social acceptance. From the 1970s onward, young religious men increasingly sought service in such units and, overcoming no little prejudice, proved their worth and their ability. This process was an important one for creating a more tolerant, open, and multicultural Israeli society (notably, many of these young religious men were Sephardim).

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A Guy at a Bus Stop — New “Necesssary Stories” column in The Jerusalem Report

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I spotted Guy at the shabby bus stop on the south-bound side of the Geha Highway, at the foot of the narrow bridge that leads to the Ramat Gan campus of Bar-Ilan University, near the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak.

Most highway bus stops in Israel have been cleaned up, but 30 years ago, they all looked like this – pockmarked, cracked, crumbling, covered with graffiti and posters. Trash litters the ground, and behind us, down in a gully, stands a small trailer-cum-snack bar, whose stick-skinny and unshaven proprietor sprawls on one of several plastic chairs scattered around his enterprise, which may or may not be legal, but looks like it isn’t.

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Losing Our Religion: The Unfortunate Need for a Secular Israeli Identity

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Haim Watzman

In his recent post on the conversion obstructionism of Israel’s established church, Gershom wrote: “We need to define a civic Israeli identity not dependent on halakhic status.” He’s right, but it’s sad that he is.

The secular Israeli state’s way of determining who is Jewish—and therefore who belongs to the state’s majority culture and ethnic group—is a religious definition. True, that’s partly an artifact of Israeli politics, but not just. It’s a definition with roots in deep in Jewish religion and history, and in the way the Jewish nation views itself. And it’s something to be proud of.

The halachic position is that a person need not be Jewish to be close to God. Being a member of the Chosen People means being subject to special duties, but it gives you no monopoly on righteousness or spirituality.

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Principle vs. Love and Devotion in Israel’s Prisoner Exchange

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Haim Watzman

In principle, I oppose uneven prisoner exchanges, but that’s not why I wasn’t able to watch the television coverage of Wednesday’s exchange of Lebanese terrorists for dead Israeli soldiers. My wife had the television on but I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t have a way of dealing with my conflicting emotions and fears; my anger and frustration; my agony.

Neither did I have stomach for writing about it that day here, or for participating in the debate over the deal (see, for example, themiddle, Esther, and grandmufti over at Jewlicious, and so many others in the Israeli and Zionist papers and blogs).

When Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were dragged off by Hezbollah guerrillas two summers ago—at that time we had to presume they were still alive when taken prisoner—these two reservists could have been me or any of my friends. During my years of reserve duty, I conducted innumerable border patrols of this sort. I know how easy it is to fall into false security, to assume, on the last day before you head home, that all is quiet and nothing can happen. I identified completely with the anger and frustration of their fellow-reservists, who wanted to fight to get their friends back.

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Science and Art in “Ice People”

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Haim Watzman

Ice People is ostensibly a documentary about geologists in Antarctica, but beyond than that it’s a work of art about the continent’s landscapes. More than informing us about south pole science, director Anne Ahgion tells us something important about the processes of artistic and scientific creation.

In a central scene, the four geologists she whose work she chronicled climb up to one of the ridges of the Trans-Antarctic mountain range and gaze out over a huge ravine at a volcano. Aghion’s camera takes a long shot, showing a small human figure dwarfed against this primal landscape—one that only a handful of human beings have ever seen. It’s a moment of breathtaking, majestic beauty.

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