Looking at the Jewish world

This isn't the first time the buzz goes up and down the hallway where I work, when word of some dreadful event percolates from office to office. At this moment it's news of what Ha'aretz is calling "a Katyusha-type rocket" (or rockets) slamming into a shopping mall in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, a town of 100,000 that has the unhappy lot of now sitting within rocket range of terrorists.

Fact is, it's only some 35 miles south of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, the crown jewel of modern, enlightened, Western-leaning Israel.

Violence in the Middle East is no natural disaster, neither cyclone nor earthquake nor tsunami. It is a man-made catastrophe and the product of bitter delusions that have the frightening capacity to become reality.

Rockets are hardware, but they are fired, as it were, by the human imagination. In the case of the rockets flying into Israel from Gaza, that bastion of revanchist Islam, the imagination focuses on the obsessive desire to see Israel destroyed, to see Jews as satanic, and to see Western values as unclean.

The gross anti-Semitic, anti-Israel rhetoric flying from Teheran, from Beirut, from Gaza, and from Syria is the proverbial finger than pulls the trigger of the rockets that today, like yesterday, and last Friday, kill and wound civilian non-combatants.

That is the essence of terrorism, to kill the innocent in order to make a statement and to cause a result. When it happens, the buzz goes up and down our hallway, and we ponder what to do to help those targeted.

All I can do, is write. As if my words sap the savage fury of those who dream of killing my Jewish brothers and sisters.

This week Chicago’ Jewish community joins with other Jews and friends around the world to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary. We’re proud of our Israeli extended family, the survivors and refugees and visionaries of our people, and their children and grandchildren.

Who are the Israelis? Survivors of Europe’s slaughterhouses, “Displaced Persons” who refused to remain in the lands of the murderers of their parents, siblings, and children; the butchers of their rabbis and writers, scientists and musicians; the annihilators of their bakers and tailors.

Israelis are people who were dispossessed and targeted for revenge in Arab lands, Jews from North Africa to the Arabian Sea who were seen as dhimmis, inferiors who had dared to raise their heads.

Israelis are escapees from the spiritual and cultural obliteration wrought by a sinister Soviet apparatus, which cast dissidents into the Gulag for such “crimes” as teaching Hebrew.

Israelis are refugees from marginalization and forced conversion in the reaches of Ethiopia, where onto the woes of famine and war was heaped the woe of being a powerless Jew.

Above all Israelis are descendents of idealists, whose philosophy of Jewish independence—Zionism—for more than 60 years has inspired Jews around the world. So too has it raised the ire of bigots and supremacists who, at one end of the spectrum, see Jews and Israel as diabolical, and at the other end rail at us to be the first of all peoples to relinquish our right to self determination.

With the highest levels of education, life expectancy, economic growth, technical innovation, and books published in the Middle East, Israel is amazingly successful. Investment is strong; the infrastructure is sound; the culture is vibrant; the press is open; the politics are freewheeling; the judiciary impeccable; the military committed and strong.

All of this rests on foundations, the nature and strength of which Israel’s enemies somehow don’t see. Those survivors, refugees, and idealists were able to create their fragile enterprise and prevail repeatedly against absolute, violent rejection, because the roots of identity, culture, and faith run so deep.

Jews stand in every generation and Israel stands today because we know and remember who we are, and we know and remember the Jewish people’s homeland.

At heart that is what we celebrate. It is a celebration of Ha’Tikvah, a message of perpetual hope.

Confession: I know Donna Kahan as a colleague, someone who works with generous donors to raise millions of dollars to fund the vital infrastructure of the Jewish future, from day schools, to summer camps, to Hillels, to facilities to care for the elderly. She works on complex instruments like endowment funds, charitable gift annuities, and other financial vehicles the likes of which they didn't teach me in kindergarten (or in Journalism 101). 

But on Sunday, May 4, Donna was simply 'The Tzedaka Lady' (my name for her anyway). 

If you were at JUF's Walk With Israel, you couldn't miss her. She was the one who planted herself right in the middle of the path leading from McCormick Place to the Walk route. The one with the big tzedaka box asking for a dollar for the children of Sderot, that beleaguered town in Southern Israel where normal life is shattered by fanatics armed with missiles.

Donna is one of those folks who cares, and thankfully there are lots of people like her in this community. What sets her aside is she has a strong voice (I think she strained it on Sunday!), and she has chutzpah. She asked; people gave.

I saw her in the office on Monday, and asked how much she'd raised in nickels, dimes, and dollars. "Six hundred dollars!" she beamed, excited at the tally, though clearly her vocal chords had taken a toll. 

And this enthusiasm from a woman who spends her normal working day helping people establish their philanthropic legacies. For her, no gift is too small, for the motivation behind it is as large as life itself.

This photo of a sweet young lady who gave a dollar tells the story...

 

Now that's what I call a tzedaka lady in the making!

I recently met Dr. Ruthie Eitan and Dr. Uri Bibi, professors from Sapir College, near the Israeli town of Sderot. They were visiting the Midwest on a tour arranged by United Jewish Communities, JUF's national partner in serving the community.

During ordinary times and in an ordinary place Sapir would be a more ordinary institution, somewhat akin to Oakton Community College.

But neither is Sapir in an ordinary place, nor are the times it is enduring what anyone would call ordinary.

Under any circumstances Bibi and Eitan are impressive. But the fact that their institution and the region of Israel in which it sits are under constant terror rocket fire, demands that they be extraordinary.

Together they painted a portrait of Sapir as an institution that serves Israeli society in all its diversity, including Druze, Bedouin, and Jews; people across the spectrum of religious identity and observance; and men and women (including Muslim women). They also spoke of the meaning of a Sapir education for many families, who see the first family member graduate with a degree from an institution of higher learning. For those families a Sapir education marks the potential to enter Israel’s new, high-tech economy.

To hear them describe Sapir under normal circumstances is to understand the institution as a place that works to underpin Israel’s economic and social development and progress by offering educational opportunity to those who otherwise might not be served.

But Sapir is forced to function in circumstances that are far from normal, and here is where their testimony turns poignant.

They describe a professor-student relationship that has become far more intimate and important than it otherwise would be. Even as they are under attack as faculty, they find themselves needing to provide solace, comfort, and a measure of emotional protection to students, to serve as role models, to counsel and console.

And from the midst of the pain—and here Eitan is quite eloquent— they express not only the hope for peace, but also the commitment to use their educational credentials and commitment to create a center for peace education at Sapir.

Though Eitan acknowledged that “the time is not right now” to work with Palestinian partners in Gaza, she expressed the conviction that the time will at some point be right, and that she will work to do so.

So here is a picture of a college that serves a crucial niche, is forced to operate in grueling—and at times gruesome—circumstances, and despite it all has a vision for serving the lofty goal of lifting up all those in its orbit, across divides of religion, ethnicity, and enmity.

Who came to dinner
This time every year a small group of Jewish community professionals who studied with Prof. Elie Rekhess gathers with our Israeli guru. We enjoy companionship, a good meal, fond memories, and our teacher’s take on the state of the State of Israel.

We studied with Rekhess as members of the Wexner Heritage Foundation in 2000-2001, finishing the program in Jerusalem just as a suicide bomber blew up the Sbarro Pizza Parlor on King George St. 9/11 followed soon after. Rekhess ever since has been our trusted and beloved interpreter of an increasingly vexing reality.

A leading Israeli expert on the country’s Arab minorities, Rekhess is Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. He also is a visiting professor at Northwestern University.

Sometimes wry, sometimes spicy, his sense of humor always brings chortles into our wine glasses and we use it to gauge Israel’s state. The nature and number of his jokes, and the feelings they either mask or reveal, indicate his sense of the situation almost as much as what he says overtly.

During dinner the other night his jokes were somewhat bitter, and he seemed a touch downcast as he told them. Like a weather forecaster he gave, through the language of humor, a barometer reading. Israel is experiencing a high pressure front, for sure, and the forecast is for cloudy, possibly stormy conditions.

Not terribly long after “Freedom Fries” morphed back into French Fries, President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed Pierre Vimont Ambassador of France to the United States.

Now six months into the job, Vimont seems to have proved himself an adept interpreter of France for Americans and vice versa.

According to a February report on MSNBC Vimont “is the one officials in Paris are going to first” for information about U.S. politics, particularly the presidential campaign.

The French are more than merely interested in America; according to Vimont, “We have managed to create a spirit of trust and confidence in our relationship.”

It’s easy to imagine that Vimont himself deserves some credit for that, based on his appearance at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Friday, March 14.

Witty, soft-spoken, articulate, and poised, he outlined France’s positions and perspectives on issues ranging from Iraq to the global economy.

In the realm of foreign affairs, he described his government’s commitment to multilateralism and reliance on institutions such as the United Nations and the G8, while also acknowledging the need to reform those institutions.

Describing relations with the Muslim world as “a very difficult and dangerous issue,” he said France’s strategy is to work with moderates to encourage dialogue and tolerance. “But there needs to be reciprocity,” he said, decrying the pressures on Christian communities in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere.

“We need to look at these crises [in the Middle East] in a global, coherent way, not just militarily,” he said.

Vimont cited economic aid to the Palestinian Authority—for which France recently hosted a donor’s conference that netted $7.4 billion in aid—as a means to help the Palestinians move away from their radical elements.  And he squarely blamed Hamas for the recent deterioration in the security and political situation, implicitly rejecting the concept of a cycle of violence in describing Israel’s response to the rocketing of its civilian population.

Helping find a political solution to the problems of Iraq also is on France’s agenda, as is a “commitment to stay as long as is necessary” to bring stability to Afghanistan, Vimont explained.

Having a man in Washington as engaging as Vimont is a sign of the renewed warmth in U.S.-French relations. But that warmth shouldn’t be misunderstood as total French compliance with American policies.

“France will retain the right to speak and say what it needs to on issues like Iraq, climate change, and currency rates,” he said. “It’s always better to have a friend who says what needs to be said rather than remain silent.”

We Chicagoans are on the verge of emerging from this long, frozen winter, an endurance test not totally without its gifts.

Two of those gifts—Holocaust documentarian Father Patrick Desbois and writer and human rights activist Roya Hakakian—were in town recently.

Roya, as usual, was dazzling. In her advocacy of the Jewish imperative to champion human rights she ignites in me a sense of all that is worthwhile in the world, of what it is necessary to do in order to be a righteous person. She is a brilliant writer and thinker, and committed to an unimpeachable cause (unless, like some in the Iranian judiciary, you favor stoning women to death for adultery). Her premise is that those concerned about an ascendant, militant Iran should not focus exclusively on the nuclear issue, but also must take the high ground morally concerning the issue of Iranian justice. By extending a lifeline to Iran’s oppressed—by showing care, concern, and solidarity—those in Iran who seek and might become an alternative to the apocalyptic, repressive regime would be bolstered.

Father Patrick Desbois is a tzaddik, a righteous man. A French priest who speaks fluent, colloquial Hebrew, he is a man of action. He spends his time roaming the Ukranian countryside, detailing and documenting, and hearing the tales of witnesses (and sometimes of perpetrators), of the slaughter of 1.5 million Jews machine gunned before the Holocaust became an industry of poison gas.

Redemption comes by way of truth, he would argue, and truth comes through confession, through admission, and by bearing witness.

People like Roya and Father Desbois with their words and actions spit in the eye of evil. With great courage, they secure a place for the best aspirations of the human spirit.

They thaw the heart in this time of cold.

News of the shooting of innocents at Northern Illinois University by a young man who by accounts was a gentle, hard-working former student, was shocking. Shocking in another respect was how it's a bit more difficult to be totally shocked by such news, in the wake of the murders at Lane Bryant, in the wake of Virginia Tech, and in the wake of Columbine.

Such is one chilling aspect of American reality, that brutal, senseless killing is commonplace, and that each horrific mass murder becomes somehow less shocking than the previous one.

We live in an age of terrorism, where an entire city--and here I'm thinking about Sderot, Israel--can be under daily rocket barrage, and hardly anyone bats an eye. We live in an age of suicide bombers and assassains, and of course, of petty criminals who kill in the course of committing the crime.

But the kind of crime Stephen P. Kazmierczak committed at NIU Feb. 14 was a peculiarly American brand of terrorism, the kind committed by the alienated sociopath, whose nihilistic pain spits deadly murder from the barrel of a gun.

In the case of political terror, there is a motive that might find expression in nonviolent action; in the case of sociopathic terror, the motive takes the form of a dark demon that lives only off of blood.

We are a nation that, at the end of the day, does little to prevent our darkest, most disturbed nihilists from obtaining weapons. And when those weapons are used to kill multiple victims, who is to say they should not be called weapons of mass destruction? With each death dies a world, our tradition teaches. Is it not our duty to try to save those worlds, those lives?

Might one way to do that be to better assure that weapons remain beyond the grasp of those, like Kazmierczak, who, in their quiet madness, prepare to use them?

May God grant peace to the victims, quiet to their grieving loved ones, and reprieve to this nation, afflicted, as it is, by a strange terror and an ominous dread.