Mr. Oren Goes to Washington, Maybe

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Gershom Gorenberg

Michael Oren is an old friend of mine. I respect his scholarship (his Six Days of War is the best history of June 1967). He wrote an endorsement for my last book, The Accidental Empire. And when we (rarely) discuss politics, the differences are also respectful. So a I am not an unbiased judge of the reports on his possible appointment as the U.S. ambassador to Washington.

I am however, an extremely bemused judge. Depending on which Israeli paper you’ve picked up, Mike is either too conservative for the job, or too dovish.  I hope Mike is getting a good laugh out of all this.

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Axis of Sorrow

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Gershom Gorenberg

In my new article at The American Prospect, I argue that choosing either the Israeli or the Palestinian version of history as correct is no way to make peace.

Spring is national trauma season in the land between the River and the Sea. The wildflowers that blossom briefly after the Mediterranean winter wilt, and Jews and Palestinians relive their agonizing memories, symbiotically, backs turned to each other.

Their memories negate each other. Nonetheless, they are tellings of the same story. Because there is now an American administration interested in diplomacy, because the public debate in America about Israel and Palestine may be opening up, this small truth bears mention: Deciding that one side’s telling is valid, and the other’s is false, is not an act of peacemaking. The trauma itself is a strategic fact, as important as topography, borders, and water.

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Loud and Clear: What Israelis and Americans Talk About in Public Places

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Haim Watzman

While we’re on the subject of Israeli-American behavioral stereotypes as parsed on the New York Times op-ed page, what about David Brooks’ “A Loud and Promised Land”, of April 16? (Brooks was discourteous enough to publish this the day after Pesach, when we were all exhausted from lugging boxes of dishes down to the storeroom-who could write then?)

Brooks has some witty things to say about the volume and nosiness of quotidian Israeli discourse:

One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.

Wasn’t it an Israeli Jew who wrote the homily about the mote in one’s eye? My wife, a native Israeli, never ceases to be amazed at how loud and indiscreet Americans can be in public places.

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‘Sir’ As an Expletive, as in ‘Service’

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Gershom Gorenberg

Though I am thoroughly anti-messianic, I did briefly consider the possibility last week that I was seeing signs of redemption: Marty Peretz liked  a column by Roger Cohen, and I mostly liked it too.

However, Peretz’s comment that the column is about diarrhea strikes me as akin to someone asserting that Pride and Prejudice is about ballroom dancing: missing the point, most grievously. So I guess the messiah is not coming.

Cohen’s column is about a man arrested because he pushed his way past a flight attendant to use the business-class lavatory. This was on Delta Airlines. A refreshment cart was blocking the economy class facility, and the attendants would neither move it nor allow him to venture into the territory of his betters to avoid mortal shame. He imagines them telling him:

“You’ll have to wait, Sir. We’re doing the drinks and tiny pack of peanuts service.”

Cohen comments, masterfully,

The intonation of that “Sir” will be familiar to many of you, a tone peculiar to American airline companies, one in which resentment, superiority, fear, contempt and impatience are coiled into a venomous parody of politeness — a three-letter expletive really — that stands the notion of service on its head and tells the whole dismal story of U.S. carriers in recent years.

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Gay, Orthodox, and in Love: Chaim Elbaum’s “And Thou Shalt Love”

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Haim Watzman

When Chaim Elbaum stood up to field questions last night, he said that Kehilat Yedidya, is the first Israeli Orthodox community to ask him to come to screen and speak about his short film And Thou Shalt Love , and about his personal decision to accept his homosexuality while insisting on remaining an observant and believing Jew.

It would be all too easy to dismiss all the synagogues that have not invited him as benighted and homophobic-and those would certainly be correct adjectives to apply in many cases. But Orthodox Judaism’s legal structure requires that changes in attitudes and behavior be grounded in the halachic discourse. In the case of homosexuality, the prohibition in the Torah and in rabbinic writings is so severe that the halachic resolution is likely to require decades of discussion and argumentation. Even Elbaum acknowledged last night that he doesn’t yet know what the ultimate halachic resolution of the issue could or should be. Will the proscriptions against homosexuality eventually be completely overturned, placing same-sex relationships on a par with opposite-sex ones, like those sometimes seen on Babestation and other channels? Or will the solution involve a recognition that the heterosexual family is still an ideal to be aspired to-but that homosexuals who are unable to achieve that ideal may legitimately and openly have families of their own type? Or is some other, as yet unimaginable resolution in the offing?

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What Happens to Permanent Revolutions

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I wasn’t planning to post, given that it’s almost Shabbat, but I came across a bit of news that I must with SoJo’s readers: Trotsky’s ashes stolen and baked in cookies From the left-Zionist-Orthodox perspective, I’d just point out that: 1. These should not be consumed until the party of the revolutionary vanguard rules on … Read more

Singing at the Sea

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Haim Watzman

If you skipped something in the Haggada last week it may well have been that page of disputations among the Sages in which they argue about precisely how many plagues the Egyptians suffered at the Red Sea. Was it 50, or 200, or 250? Since the book of Exodus only tells us about ten plagues in Egypt and says nothing about plagues at the Red Sea, it’s hard to fathom what the Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Akiva were trying to get at here. And could there really be enough permutations of vermin, disease, and natural disaster to make up 250 plagues? The answer is yes! Because most of this disease was carried through vermin itself! And in those times, they didn’t have companies like https://www.pestcontrolexperts.com/ with the expertise to get rid of them!

But this midrash, like a number of others, shows that the Sages believed that, in some ways, the miracle at the Red Sea-which we commemorate on the seventh day of Pesach-was greater than the miracle of the escape from slavery. In fact, in many midrashim, the crossing of the Red Sea, not the Exodus itself, is the archetype of redemption, the model for the future salvation of the Messiah.

Rav Tzair, an anonymous Hebrew blogger, cites a midrash (Shemot Rabba 23) in this spirit:

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Bibi II: Same Character Flaws, Same Plot Line

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece about Netanyahu’s second term as a remake of the first is up at The American Prospect:

Since my wife began writing screenplays, I get a lesson in the mechanics of a film each time we watch one together. First lesson: Pay rapt attention to the opening moments. Character is being revealed; the entire plot is being laid out, though we may not yet understand how. Take the monologue at the start of Michael Clayton, where in a manic voiceover, a lawyer insists he’s not insane but rather, that his firm’s work has left him covered in excrement from which he cannot cleanse himself. Yes, we will learn, this madman is the sole compass of sanity in a world where the law is utterly befouled. It’s all there, the whole story.

I suggest watching the opening scenes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power — call it Bibi II — in the same way. It’s not just that the Netanyahu cabinet…  is the largest in Israel’s history or that key positions are held by politicians manifestly unqualified to deal with the crises that Israel faces. What’s revealing is how Netanyahu constructed his coalition, in more of a panic than a process.

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People’s Committe for a Free Seder: Alternative Agendas

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Gershom Gorenberg

More suggestions for Seder discussion:

We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand of peanut butter to buy); we can believe what we want (even if few people believe anything with a passion that grips their lives, and those few, we know, are eccentrics).

“In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt,” says the Haggadah, “as is written, ‘for the sake of this, the Lord acted for me when I went out from Egypt.'” It’s easy to read on quickly, thinking of the historical Egypt and even of a metaphorical one, a country or a time in which our parents or grandparents did not have our freedoms.

Read more slowly:

In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself… To find yourself in the retold story, to relive it, you have first to see yourself. In the grand metaphors Egypt as the Pale of Settlement, Egypt as the days of Jew-badge and ghetto we see history, but can forget ourselves. “Where are you?” God asked Adam (Genesis 3:9), knowing well the answer, knowing well that Adam did not; the Haggadah repeats the question.

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People’s Committee for a Free Seder

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Gershom Gorenberg

My friend Josh has a lovely riff on the Seder at his blog, Frost and Clouds – a smart comment on a dazzlingly stupid article in the New York Times. The Times reporter found about colleagues – writers Judith Shulevitz and Nicholas Lemann who have a dairy Seder every year, and wanted to know if any rabbi considered this a real Seder.  Then the reporter found out that Judith and Nicholas and their guests sit around munching appetizers and asking questions about the meaning of freedom for hours before they get to main course before they eat.  Our reporter thought that the idea of the Seder was to read through a set text, without asking anything or thinking about, and then eat.

In other words, the reporter thought that a particular main course was an absolute requirement of Judaism, and had no ideas that asking questions at a Seder is an absolute requirement – and felt sure that enough other people “knew” the same things that she could base an article in the Times on this knowledge. I’d like to think that this reflects extraordinary ignorance, but I think it’s probably very ordinary ignorance.

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Remembering Slavery

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Haim Watzman

Adi Nes, Abraham and Isaac
Adi Nes: Abraham and Isaac
Jews who grew up in the Diaspora and have raised children in Israel face a challenge at the Pesach Seder every year. The text of the Hagadah, and the spirit of the holiday, call on us to remember that we were slaves in Egypt, strangers in a strange land, outsiders. I grew up as a member of a minority. My children, on the other hand, have grown up as members of a majority that rules over a disadvantaged minority population. When I was a child, Pesach was my favorite holiday—its message resonated strongly with who I was. On Seder night, my own children clearly have a hard time seeing themselves as Others.
At this year’s Seder I’m going to focus particularly on this message. Fortuitously, I’ll have the help of a booklet of supplementary Hagadah readings published by Bema’agei Tzedek, an Israeli social and economic justice organization. Called Kriya L’Seder: A Call to Order! (and available only in Hebrew at present), the book let offers materials that seek to link the Jewish people’s experience of slavery and liberation to the injustices we see around us today.
Specifically, the booklet reminds us that slavery has neither vanished nor retreated to the far, benighted corners of the earth. As Israelis, we benefit from the labor of exploited foreign workers and maintain a law enforcement system that has allowed our country to become a world center for sexual slavery. Slaves, in short, are all around us.

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Soldier, King, Slave–“Necessary Stories” Column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The heart is two
It’s yes and no.

<em>Avraham Halfi on stage</em>
Avraham Halfi on stage
It’s an Avraham Halfi moment. Like an overstimulated actor, I’ve pushed my way to center stage. Slipping between mothers sitting in chairs, climbing over brothers and sisters on stools, I’ve gotten to the edge of the clear spot next to the screen on which we’ve just seen a film of our sons in action. Only then do I see that N’s father is there, ready to speak. I’m such an idiot. Sorry, I mumble, go ahead. No, it’s fine, N’s father says. Really, I didn’t . . . Don’t sweat it. He steps aside.

We’re in the backyard of S’s house, a green corner deep in one of the commuter suburbs that has sprung up between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv over the last two decades. “We” are the families of the dozen young men in my son’s commando squad, who a week before finished their year and then some of intensive training. In collusion with us, their commander, O, brought them to S’s house, where they discovered their mothers and fathers and sibs waiting. Meat was on the grill, salads abundant. The setup was worthy of a wedding, because H’s parents, who have a company that stages events, brought a truckfull of sleekly-designed tables, chairs, stools, and even four couches to lounge on, not to mention lights, gas heating elements, a screen, a projector, and flowers.

The newly-certified commandos don’t look particularly warlike. They’re dressed in shorts and teeshirts despite the winter chill. Grins on their faces, but beyond that no sign of surprise or emotion. They are the survivors of a grueling selection process that whittled their numbers down from a group twice the current size; one of the main criteria for selection seems to have been the ability to project an air of insouciance. We parents are beside ourselves, want the boys to be surprised and ecstatic. We know nothing about what they do in the army—can’t we know something about what goes on inside them? Apparently that, too, is classified.

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