City of Thieves, Day of Mourning (and the Scent of Hope)

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Gershom Gorenberg

Anshel Pfeffer’s article last week against fasting on Tisha Be’Av seemed written for me. I hate to fast. An old friend once told me that on Yom Kippur, he looks at my face in shul to get a real sense of suffering. Enough chastising the flesh. It makes you feel bad.

'There is no sanctity in an occupied city':
‘There is no sanctity in an occupied city’: Demonstrator in Sheikh Jarrah

Pfeffer argued that Tisha Be’Av “has lost any relevance beyond the historical.”

If Tisha Be’Av is meant to mark the exile of the Jewish people, then it’s no longer relevant. For a decade now, there has not been one Jew around the world who was not free to return to Zion. Ever since the quiet exodus of the last Jews of Syria, in the late 1990s, there has not been a country anywhere that has forbidden its Jewish citizens to leave…

As for mourning the Temple,

The only reason that the third temple has not been built is that a majority of Israelis simply are not interested. Secular Jews have no affinity to a priestly caste sacrificing heifers and goats, while the great majority of religious Jews are not very eager themselves.

To which I might add, we should thank God that most religious Jews aren’t interested in slaughtering animals as a means of communicating with the Creator.

Nonetheless, I’m fasting today, and not just out of habit. An email I got just after I read Pfeffers’ article reminded me of why he was mistaken.  From the group Sheikh Jarrah: A Just Struggle for a Just Jerusalem, it was an invitation to a discussion on Tisha Be’Av about the destruction of the Temple and the demolition of Palestinian homes. The process of refuting Pfeffer was completed the haftarah on Shabbat morning, by a midrash that I studied with my son, and by the actual discussion of Sheikh Jarrah last night.

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Do You Know Just How Bad It Is?

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Gershom Gorenberg The human rights group Hamoked has posted an online quiz about the conditions faced by Palestinians living under occupation. It’s worth testing yourself. Since I would never give away answers to a test, I won’t mention that the key to a perfect score is being grimly pessimistic.

Catching Up: Has Obama Given Up?

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Gershom Gorenberg

It’s a reminder to be careful, to avoid making even implied predictions.

For the latest edition of Hadassah magazine, I wrote an article on Barack Obama’s relation to Israel. The idea that Obama is less committed to Israel than his predecessors is a “misconception,” I said very politely. (English provides a more forceful term, but it is not printable in Hadassah or on this blog.) Obama has done much more for Israel’s security and diplomatic status than people realize, I said. If the relationship between him and Bibi Netanyahu has been fraught, I said, it’s precisely because of the president’s commitment to Israel’s future.

…First, some basic information that has received too little media play: The only change in United States military aid to Israel under Obama is upward. In May, the White House asked Congress for $205 million for Israel to finance the Iron Dome project, above and beyond regular defense aid. Iron Dome is an Israeli-produced high-tech system designed to intercept short-range rockets of the type that have been fired at Israel from Gaza and Lebanon. It should make Israelis living in border areas significantly safer.

On the diplomatic front, the Obama administration’s intense lobbying recently gained Israel acceptance to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the elite organization of the world’s most advanced economies. “It’s an economic security matter of highest order,” says Daniel Kurtzer, former United States ambassador to Israel and now a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. “You can either be an object or a subject, and Israel is now a subject. They’re part of the rule-making body.”…

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Catching Up: Winners and Losers in the Gaza Flotilla Fiasco

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Gershom Gorenberg

Busy researching a major writing project, I’ve had too little time in both the real and virtual South Jerusalem. So I’m only belatedly posting recent articles.

Here’s a piece of my piece from the American Prospect, scoring the the raid on the Mavi Marmara:

Hamas
Ismail Haniye’s rejectionist government in Gaza could turn out to be a net loser. Yes, it may gain some public support if economic conditions improve. But the Hamas regime exacts taxes on the rampant smuggling via tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border. If goods can be imported aboveground, that income will dry up. And with no civilian goods coming through the tunnels, Israel may find it politically easier to attack arms smugglers.

Besides, the flotilla undermines Hamas’ dogmatic attachment to the machismo of armed struggle. Firing rockets into Israel didn’t end the siege; it provoked Israel’s Gaza offensive in December 2008. Without rockets, the flotilla organizers accomplished more.

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You’re a Good Man, Bibi Brown — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz
“Fire! Fire! The Temple’s on fire!” I cry out, waking myself up.

Ilana rolls over and glares at me. “Calm down,” she says. “Your freedoms do not include shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded Temple.”

“Ohmigod,” I say. “I had the weirdest nightmare.”

“It must be something you didn’t eat,” Ilana suggests.

“I was a dog,” I say.

“A dog?”

“In a comic strip. And there was this music …”

“This is the fluff of which dreams are made?” Ilana sighs. “Let’s hear it…”

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Stuck on the Fence: Shahar Bram’s “North of Boston”

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Haim Watzman

Shahar Bram
When I encountered Shahar Bram’s lyric “North of Boston” on the back page of Ha’aretz’s arts section last month, I was immediately struck by its plethora—celebration, really—of intertextuality and interlingual word play. A poem awash in allusions and puns that cross textual and linguistic boundaries is by definition impossible to render into any other language without losing precisely that which makes the work stand out. But, inured as I am in expressive frustration, I wrote and asked him for permission to essay an English version.

Robert Frost
I begin here with the usual caveat I affix to my other attempts at translating and commenting on poetry here on South Jerusalem. I’m not a poet, as a translator of poetry must be, so this translation is very much a work in progress that I intend to revise in response to reader comments, and those of Bram himself.

The original Hebrew version can be read here. I’ll follow my translation with some notes to explain what excites me about the poem.

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Why I’m Not at the Gilad Shalit Demonstration

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Haim Watzman

Downtown is closed off, and it looks like half the country is there. So’s my wife, Ilana, who as a soldier’s mother identifies completely with Shalit’s mother. Give Hamas whatever they want, just get the boy home.

Gilad Shalit
As much empathy as I feel for the Shalit family, I can’t agree with that call. As the father of a soldier (two, as of the end of this month), I fear that these well-meaning demonstrators are unwittingly placing my boys in danger. Caving in to Hamas’s demands will reinforce an incentive to kidnap soldiers that, following previous deals, is already too strong. The message is: got demands? Kidnap an IDF serviceman and we’ll give you whatever you want (eventually, after talking tough for a few years).

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South Jerusalem Podcast

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Haim Watzman The International Relations and Security Network, a Zurich-based information service for international relations and security professionals, interviewed me for its current special report on Israel. Hear me talk about Israeli democracy and Judaism, and please come back here to comment, object, question–and perhaps even concur–with my views. Just don’t be confused–the picture on … Read more

Advice to Dissent

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Haim Watzman

Israelis often wail that the country lacks unity. But when most Israelis say “We need more unity,” what they really mean is “More people should agree with me.” Dissent can be a pain, but it’s essential—as is recognized by the Sages of the Talmud in the Horayot Tractate (4b). The Beit Midrash run for the last two years by Kehilat Yedidya last week finished its study of this tractate with just this insight.

Horayot deals with the issue of what happens when a court—a rabbinic court, which served as the chief legislative and moral authority of Jewish communities in Talmudic times—makes a ruling mistakenly. To do this, it reads Torah passages in Leviticus 4 and Numbers 16. These passages deal with a sacrifice called the korban shogeg, to be offered by a person or group of people who has violated a Torah precept without intention. While the Sages of the Talmud lived long after the Temple was destroyed and the sacrificial service ceased, they continue to use this language. Assignment of responsibility for the error is designated by the assignment of the requirement to bring this sacrifice.

The question is: if a court makes a ruling that violates the Torah, does the ultimate responsibility fall on the court, or on the individual who obeyed the court’s instruction?

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You Can Turn the Page. Or You Can Buy a New Atlas for These Newspapers

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Gershom Gorenberg Ha’aretz, as of 1:47 a.m. Israel time: Army Radio reported that a separate Iranian ship, carrying 60 Iranian activists, was being prepared to sail to Gaza via the Caspian Sea. Ynet (Yediot Aharonot) is also hot on the story: However, other Iranian figures are not ready to give up. Iranian Member of Parliament … Read more

A C- for Prof. Fish

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Gershom Gorenberg

Prof. Stanley Fish has a regular online column in the New York Times on education and society. His latest post is intended as a critique of right-wing efforts to treat universities as businesses, and specifically of of a proposed “reform” (“deform” would be a better term) of the Texas A&M college system.

Criticizing free-market attempts to hijack higher education is a good idea. Fish, however, ruins his argument with a needless, grumpy rant against students.

Students, Fish says, all students, the whole awful lot of them,

…like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

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