The Girl From Human Street: An Appreciation and Appraisal

What follows are remarks prepared for an event hosted by the Dallas Jewish Historical Society in honor of the South African Jews of Dallas that took place on Monday, May 2, 2016. Roger Cohen was the guest speaker and he spoke eloquently about his book. These remarks were prepared to be delivered in the event that he was not able to make event and are meant as an appreciation.

I have appended some further remarks by way of critical commentary that might be of some interest.

The Girl From Human Street: An Appreciation

In The Girl from Human Street, Roger Cohen has written a fascinating and unusual book. He is an accomplished and talented writer. His descriptions are vivid and insightful full of original clever little epigrams to encapsulate and summarize his observations.

It is easy to recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting and informative read, but it will be of particular interest to those who like to read about history, especially modern Jewish history.  And it is above all very appropriate to discuss it here tonight because of its South African connection.

Roger Cohen is a well-known and respected New York Times columnist and one-time foreign correspondent. He now calls New York his home (for more than 25 years), but by origin he is a South African, who grew up in England, and has strong Lithuanian roots. Human Street is in Krugersdorp, outside of Johannesburg, and the girl from Human Street is his mother. It is Cohen’s memory of her that hovers over the entire book as he struggles to come to terms with her suffering and the effect that it has had on him. And that suffering appears to him to have a lot to do with her exile from South Africa. So the South African Jewish element features very prominently in this book and I will pay particular attention to it.

The book is what one may describe as a bio-documentary. It is first an historical autobiography stretching from before the beginning of Cohen’s life until some unspecified time before the present. It is a very intimate and detailed autobiography of his past, told through the lives of his family members in various generations. It is probably more detailed and intimate in its revelations than any us could or would like to reveal about ourselves and our families. But in it South African Jews will recognize themselves, as I did, in a strikingly familiar way. It is his story, but it is also the story of most of us expatriate South African Jews of his generation, particularly those of us who have come to America. 

So at the inner most level it is the fascinating story of his family for which he clearly has done an enormous amount of research. His talent for writing is evidently a family trait. He was aided in his research by various memoirs of family members, evidencing considerable literary polish. Through these surviving documents and many other historical sources he is able to trace the various strands of his remarkable family and recount their stories over the generations. Most of us Jewish South Africans of Lithuanian origin have not taken the time or expended the energy to find out much about the lives of our ancestors, either in South Africa, or before that in Lithuania, nor about Lithuania after their emigration to South Africa. What would have happened to them had they not emigrated? Cohen has done this and his account is path-breaking.

At another level this book is an historical documentary of the Jews of Lithuania and of South Africa, with significant views of the Jews of England and Israel as well – and a few glances at Italy. In these forays into the surrounding conditions of the time, Cohen delves also into the lives of others, not family members, and treats their stories just as intimately and compellingly as those of his own family.

So there is a lot of stuff mixed up in the telling. It is not a narrative that proceeds in linear fashion from beginning to end. Rather it is collection of themes, “ghosts of memory” (as the subtitle of the book suggests) seemingly randomly presented, but which, upon further reflection, come together in a poignant mosaic. One may wonder, what is the motivation for this particular mode of expression? Before moving on I want to offer a potential explanation for this.

This is a book about identity. Who are we and what makes us who we are? Clearly, we are more than the sum total of our experiences, but those experiences do play a large part in shaping who we are. This works through memory – through the remembering and imprinting of those experiences. But events remembered do not appear in our memory in historical order. They are more random and mixed. One remembered element connects with another far removed in geography and in historical time. Every chapter in the book contains a kind of network of connected memories separated by place and time. The reader thus becomes privy to the way in which the author encounters his memories, and thereby to the reasons for their significance to him.

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Lithuania: Cohen weaves his personal family history into the broader historical picture in different places at different times. These include Lithuania at the time of the emigration to South Africa in the 1880’s, Lithuania at the time of the Nazi occupation and extermination of more than 250 Jewish communities, Lithuania soon after the liberation from the Soviet Union and, finally, Lithuania in 2012, a Lithuania trying tentatively and not completely successfully to face up to the reality of what happened there with the submission of many and the active participation of many others in the genocide of the Jews. One learns also that there were indeed Lithuanians who did not stand by and who distinguished themselves by saving Jews at great risk to themselves.  But they were definitely the rare exceptions. Most Lithuanians, then as now, simply averted their eyes from the horror.

Lithuania is a very small country that has a traumatic history being squeezed between Russia, and later the Soviet Union, on the one side and the Nazis on the other. After the war, when Stalin had already annexed the country, recognition of the genocide was simply ignored and subsumed into the heroic suffering of the Soviet resistance to the Nazis. It is an old story, under Nazism Jews were vilified as communists (Bolsheviks). Under Communism they were vilified as capitalist collaborators. Lithuania achieved independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Only very recently has the Holocaust begun to feature in the Lithuanian collective consciousness and now school children are, at last, being told about it. They are learning about how centuries of Jewish civilization in Lithuania came to an end in a few months during 1941.

We South African Litvaks have all heard vaguely about the pogroms in Lithuania and that the Jews who remained behind were wiped out, but if you are like me, you do not know much more than that. Cohen uncovers painful but vital details about the history of the Jews in Lithuania, the fruits of careful painstaking research including multiple visits to the towns from which his family members came. Of the four pairs of Cohen’s great-grandparents, three were from Lithuania, from towns in close proximity to each other. (Actually in one case it was his grandparents that emigrated, as is the case with many of us). Two of the towns were Šiauliai and Žagarė. Each town has its own particular circumstances and story of how and when the Jews there met their end. Cohen documents the story of these two towns in stark detail. This is the reality of what our ancestors left, this is the fate they avoided, and in doing so they gave birth to us.

What may not be realized about the Jews in Lithuania is that their demise preceded Hitler’s final solution of the gas chambers. Instead, the Lithuanian communities were for the Nazi murderers a first step along the way to the discovery of a more efficient extermination method. The famous Nazi einsatzgrupen (death squads) specialized in mass executions the old fashioned way - with firing squads and naked Jews lined up in front of the graves that they had been made to dig for themselves. In this way they killed thousands upon thousands in a very short period of time. Cohen quotes a recently erected memorial: ”In this place on October 2, 1941, Nazi killers and their local helpers killed about 3,000 Jewish men, women and children from the Šiauliai region.”

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South Africa: Roger Cohen is descended from a remarkable set of ancestors. As mentioned, three of the four pairs that emigrated to South Africa at the turn of the 20^th century were from Lithuania, the other couple  came from England. Three of the four men, starting with nothing and struggling to overcome hardships and setbacks, eventually  made their fortunes, becoming founders of family dynasties in the new South African Jewish aristocracy of riches. One of his great-grandfathers was a founder of the very well-known South African mid-level department store the OK Bazars. His father’s side was of more modest means, but married into wealth.

So we have graphic and familiar descriptions of the life in South Africa for Jews starting in the hard-scrabble immigrant generation, through the formative period, to the ultimate established generation with their mansions in the Johannesburg suburb of Houghton – glimmering swimming pools, lush gardens tended by ubiquitous but invisible black gardeners, lavish meals cooked by invisible black cooks, and waited on by formally attired black waiters, babies and children cared for by uniformed black nannies, all very tranquil and secure.

The South Africa from which we emigrated was rich in blessings both material and cultural. It was a great place to grow up. Our grand-parents, or their parents, had done the hard work and we were reaping the rewards. The Jews were part of the privileged white minority that ruled the country with a view to hanging on to these hard earned blessings. But, of course, there were formidable, if subliminal, tensions. A slightly older friend of mine from that period, the historian Gideon Shimoni, refers in the title of his Ph.D. dissertation on the Jews of South Africa to the Community of Conscience. Whether we knew it or not, we all struggled with the moral dilemmas of living in the midst of the police-state that enforced the Nazi-style requirements of the policy of Apartheid.

Cohen confronts this ambivalence head on. He provides valuable details about the founding immigrant generation – again more than most of us are aware of. His admiration for their achievements is unstinting and well-deserved as is his appreciation of the richness of life in established Jewish South Africa. His South African readers will delight in the vivid familiar scenes – the foods, visits to the Kruger National Park, the rich South African English dialect with its sprinkling of Afrikaans and Yiddish words thrown in. “Howzit, hey?” “Shame, ach sistoch man” “He’s a brainbox” “Let me just go and put on my face” “I stopped at the robot.” [I embroidered here just a bit.]

Whatever the background circumstances there is no denying that it was a period of extraordinary Jewish achievement and creativity. And by contrast to Cohen’s experience in England, South African Jews had no desire to assimilate. South Africa was a society of separate groups living together in an uneasy accommodation. To be Jewish was to be a member of one of those groups. There was nothing to be done about it. They were proud Jews, strong Zionists and they practiced a unique form of Judaism in which the vast majority were affiliated orthodox no matter what their degree of observance – and by the time of our generation most were not observant. We were cultural orthodox Jews who reveled in our various synagogue affiliations boasting of the best cantors or choirs who reproduced the liturgical artistry of the big-city Lithuanian communities that had so recently disappeared. It is natural that in leaving all this behind we felt a considerable loss.

As Cohen points out, these achievement were possible because of the acceptance of Jews into to white mainstream and, notably, because of the absence of institutionalized anti-semitism. It is true that the white Afrikaners, with their seething antipathy toward Britain and to English-speaking South Africans, tended to side with Germany in WWII and identified with the Nazis in their anti-Jewish sentiments. There is a clear incipient anti-semitic movement in Afrikaner history. But after the war, and the gaining of political power, the Afrikaners changed their tune completely, finding it more expedient to coopt the Jews rather than persecute them. They were, after all, white and they were the brethren of those heroic survivors that had founded the state of Israel, in the promised land, out of the ashes of Auschwitz. So began decades of cooperation between the state of Israel and the Apartheid Republic of South Africa.

“Antisemitism was deflected by racism” and Jewish consciences were coopted. But there were notable exceptions, among which were left-wing dissidents, orthodox Jews like the eminent Rabbi Rabinowitz of blessed memory, and the awe-inspiring towering figure of Helen Suzman, the lone Progressive Party member of parliament for decades, a constant thorn in the side of the dictatorial, racist Nationalist Party. But for the majority of South African Jews, as Cohen points out, the name of the game was not to rock the boat. Better not to draw attention to themselves.

This was epitomized in the posture of the organization that styled itself as the official spokesman for South African Jewry, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Throughout the Apartheid period the BOD took the position that it would not comment in any way on political matters and thereby it avoided taking a stand for or against Apartheid and its brutal state apparatus. For this the BOD earned the condemnation of many vocal Jews in the midst of the quiet acceptance of the majority. Only very recently in the post-Apartheid period has the BOD acknowledged the unconscionable deception that this entailed. All this and more is recounted by Cohen with sympathetic cogency.

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England: Though professing to be an atheist, Cohen feels himself to be a Jew, and a South African Jew at that. His parents were South African Jews even though, following his father’s wishes, they tried to leave their Jewishness behind when they emigrated to England. His mother could never make up for the loss of family and culture and geography that South Africa represented and her mental illness, and the mental illness of other family members, is a recurring theme in the book.

Cohen and his sister spent a lot of time back in South Africa while growing up. Still, England left its impression on him. For him England was in many way the not-South Africa. Though nominally open, polite English society had a way of letting Jews know that they were different and would always be different. He refers to “an ingrained bigotry” and recounts the anti-semitic taunts he endured while in school. Yet, for him, as for all South African Jews, the English experience is pivotal. By an accident of history and geography, we ended up in the English speaking section of the white population of South Africa and we developed a strong, if ambivalent, bond with England and with English culture. For Cohen as for all of us, the English heritage is priceless.

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Israel: Israel features throughout the book as it influences the history of the family and of Jewish communities more generally, but it features most  prominently in two chapters towards the end of the book when Cohen recounts his visits with family members living there.  He is a strong and emotional supporter of Israel in its origin as a refuge for Jews and an admirer of the modern state it has become. It is worth quoting a brief passage.

“My family story, like that of millions of other Jews, leads inexorably to Zionism. By the early twentieth century, no alternative offered a plausible chance of Jewish survival and belonging. As Joseph Roth once wrote, “If there is one nation that is justified in seeing the ‘national question’ as essential to survival, then surely it is the Jews who are forced to become a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of others.” Zionism was a necessary break with past, pogrom and persecution.”

But he is worried that Zionism “sought a state on land that was not empty. Zionist resolution on the Jewish question could only give birth to an Arab question.” In the book and in his other writing Cohen expresses a sincere anguish at the fact that by being forced to defend itself, Israel has become an oppressor. Resort to military solutions has had a brutalizing effect on both sides and he worries about this dilemma seeing a two-state separation of irreconcilable peoples as the only solution. He is dismissive of a one-state solution. “One state, however conceived, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state, the core of the Zionist idea. Jews will not allow this to happen.”

Cohen’s sincere grappling with these issues will resonate with his readers. And like us he is troubled by the rise in anti-semitism among the left intelligentsia and on U.S. campuses and he is likewise troubled by the spurious comparison between Apartheid in South Africa and the separation of populations in Israel. As a South African Jew he knows the difference.

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America: Roger Cohen now feels he is at home in New York. He finds in America an openness that was lacking in England. America is a land of immigrants, a land constructively fashioned out of people’s differences. We as Americans are united in our differences. We can be whatever we are, while still being enthusiastic Americans. What better adopted home from which to contemplate and wrestle with the “ghosts of memory” that are the substance of this intriguing book.

Critical appraisal – three comments

One: As noted, this book is difficult to categorize. It is part autobiography and part historical documentary. At times it may seem like the expression of an unconstrained stream of consciousness. Some people have told me that they found this problematic. I suppose it depends on the reader. I think Cohen took a risk in creating the book in this form, but it did work for me. I was not troubled by the frequent jumps in and out of the personal to the general and back. But, clearly, some readers will be.

Two: There is a potential inconsistency in the personal story, the story of his mother. On the one hand Cohen wants to connect her wrenching displacement from South Africa to her tragic mental illness. On the other hand he wants to highlight the prevalence of mental illness in his family – more family member have black dots in the family tree than do not. Both impulses are understandable. Cohen wants to deal with the loss of leaving South Africa for his mother and more generally, and, also, he wants to deal with his personal discovery of this lurking genetic menace in his family. But it does raise the question: was his mother’s mental illness a result of the trauma of emigration or would she have succumbed under any circumstances simply because of her genetic makeup, like Cohen’s Israeli cousin many years later. A possible reconciliation is to imagine that his mother had the genetic disposition toward debilitating depression that was triggered and exaggerated by her traumatic experiences. This is probably how Cohen wants us to read it.

Three: Finally a word about his position on Israel. On these matters I think Cohen, like most analysts of this subject, may be  considerably off base, and, if I may, I would like to offer a few comments on that. 

To worry about the oppression of Palestinians by Israelis as a betrayal of the core Jewish values, values intrinsic to the founding of Israel, is certainly legitimate. The Israeli military and the Israeli government can be and should be called to account in a way that other governments in the region never are. There is a palpable double-standard, and maybe that is ok insofar as we as Jews set that standard for the only Jewish state. But to think that Israel is the ultimate cause of the poverty of Palestine and for the suffering of the Palestinians is just wrong. Cohen, like so many others, fails to mention that the Palestinians have been kept in refugee-dependency not by Israel but by the UN, by the various Arab states who have used them as pawns for their own nefarious purposes, and, perhaps most importantly, by the mendacious, corrupt, self-serving leaders that constitute the Palestinian Authority. It is the PA that has deprived them of the vote by refusing to hold scheduled elections, not Israel as Cohen suggests.

If Israel is responsible at all it is by handing over governance of the territories to the PA via the Oslo Accords. Palestinians fared much better under Israeli rule than they do now under the joint rule of the PA and the Israeli military. It is hard to see how a two-state solution is possible when one of the states is ruled by a grasping kleptocracy bent on the destruction of the other state. 

In fact, the only solution, if there is one, may indeed be a one-state setup in which Israeli civil law is extended to all the inhabitants of the territories together with the option to apply for Israeli citizenship. The fear that this will mean the demise of the Jewish state, though understandable, is probably unfounded. The population of the territories has been dramatically overstated by the Palestinian demographers and the growth of the Palestinian population is slowing down, even while Israeli populations growth is stable and high. Under civil law the Palestinians will be able to develop their own voices and solutions. And while some may elect to apply for Israeli citizenship, many will probably not. Other types of political arrangements, like some sort of local federalism, may emerge.

Whether and under what circumstances such a move (to extend civil law to all of Israel and the territories) is possible is another matter. How this could be done and what the reaction of various parties might be is the subject of Carolyn Glick’s provocative book, The Israeli Solution. Whatever one’s opinion on this, it seems to me that no peaceful coexistence will ever be possible until a way is found to allow the Palestinian people at large to express their own individual goals and desires and this implies a change in leadership and in political system that no one seems to be talking about. 

Our Debt to Spinoza

I have just finished reading Irvin Yalom's The Spinoza Problem.

I am not inclined to review the book, save to say that while I found it very interesting and learnt a lot from it, I also found it contrived, pretentious and anachronistic. The author is a well-known psychiatrist and much of the substance of the book indulges his psychiatric predilections in an ultimately unconvincing way. Still, the interested reader will definitely learn a lot about Spinoza and about the monster Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue of the Third Reich, who seems to have had an interest in Spinoza. So reading this book provoked thoughts about Spinoza, his ideas and the time and context in which he lived by contrast with our own time and context. And it is this that I want to deal with here. 

Living in Amsterdam in 1656, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza was brutally excommunicated by a committee of Jewish leaders and forbidden any kind of interaction with members of that community. For him, one of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition, indeed perhaps the first 'modern' thinker, it was a disaster. He was caught between his love for his community and his inability/refusal to dissemble about his true beliefs. He was cast into a social wilderness, forever sad and lonely – but not completely so, for he lived the rest of his short life in the stimulating company of like-minded thinkers. But his life as a Jew was over.

Today large numbers of Jews (who knows how many?) hold views that in large part agree with those held by Spinoza and they do not lie about them (not to suggest that they comprehend the profundity of his work). They live comfortably within Jewish communities and participate in communal affairs in many ways according to their choice, according, one supposes, to whatever they feel comfortable with and enjoy doing. Secular Jews have come to revere Spinoza, the Jew, - a prominent street in Israel is named after him.

Meantime these secular Jews are the targets of diverse religious Jewish outreach groups who, far from excommunicating them - which would carry no practical consequences for them - seek to attract them to their congregations; never questioning their beliefs or their right to have them and write and speak about them.

The Amsterdam Jewish leaders got their power from tradition, but, moreso, from the government of the Netherlands. The government that welcomed Jewish refugees from the hell of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions into Holland, was a government that was, in part, driven by religious (Calvinist) laws. They placed conditions upon the tolerance of the Jews and gave their leaders the power to enforce those conditions - among which was the punishment of heresy - indeed the leaders had an obligation to punish it. The Dutch would tolerate Jews, within limits, but not atheists or Catholics. So Spinoza had to be banned. The survival of the Jewish community was seen to depend on it.

Today the survival of these religious-orthodox outreach groups depends on their ability to attract adherents, including non-believers, upon whom they must be careful not to make too many demands. The difference? They have no power and obligation to compel. Religion and state are separate and religious beliefs are seen as personal matters.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this development - the 'secularization' of society - a development recommended by Spinoza whose thinking contributed mightily to it. Without it the transition from a zero-sum to a positive-sum society might have been impossible.

Is it not this that holds back much of the Islamic world today?

Israel and Palestine: The real asymmetry

We hear a lot about the asymmetry between Israel and Palestine. David and Goliath. Ironically, in this view, Israel is Goliath – powerful, threatening and oppressive - while Palestine is David, powerless, victimized but defiant. But, this is not the real asymmetry.

Binyamin Netanyahu faces vigorous and unrestrained opposition in Israel, as do all political leaders in Israel. There are hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who believe that Israel can and should adopt policies more conducive to peace with the Palestinians and even with Iran. They are vocal and politically active. Over his high-profile speech to the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu faced opposition from 180 prominent military and intelligence leaders (here). These people are all still alive, there is no threat to their persons, their livelihoods or their loved-ones.

How do matters stand in Palestinian society? Where are the hundreds of thousands of people agitating for peace there? Where is just one such person? I believe that they are there. But we don’t see them. They cannot exhort their people to reach-out to the Israelis in friendship without endangering themselves and the ones they love. That is the key difference between the two peoples. That is the real asymmetry. The Palestinians are twice oppressed: once by the Israelis who perceive them as an existential threat and even moreso by their own leaders who deny them basic freedom of expression and dissent, not to mention basic economic freedoms to produce and buy what they choose.

What is interesting to me it how little attention this gets from intelligent observers of the situation. Of what use is it to vilify Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians without pointing to the more fundamental pathologies within Palestinian society? No Israeli politician could long stand against a clear popular call for peace from a solid Palestinian peace movement – that would certainly team up with its Israeli counterpart (in fact, though muted, there are multiple such initiatives). Those who really care about the Palestinians should be targeting their corrupt politicians who would be made obsolete by the establishment of peace and normality with the Israelis. They should be agitating over the lack of civil rights.

I am not naïve. I understand that given current conditions there is no way to meaningfully ‘democratize’ Palestinian society. The leaders are entrenched and will brook no opposition. Any hint of deviation in the direction of greater acceptance and accommodation of Israel (there have been a few) is immediately and firmly quashed. But without such democratization there can be no real peace. 

Reflections on Yom Kippur - 2013

We associate the day mostly with sin and repentance, but it is in equal measure about death and how we understand and cope with it.

In its origins it seems to me these two themes were clearly connected because transgressing - לחטוא - (sinning - it does not mean quite the same thing in the English translation) was seen to be something that offended God and for which one could be punished - accumulating to a shortened life.

[Squaring the circle with the view that God foresees and knows everything and, moreover, is the cause of everything, is the irresolvable contradiction of all such world views.]

But, in the way it has evolved down the ages until today, with the myth of the supernatural less powerful, and the imperatives of community coming to the forefront, these two parts (repentance and death) seem less connected - but no less poignant We still have to deal with death. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil" - be comforted.

When hearing the names of the long list of congregants who have died this last year, I had these thoughts. Reminding ourselves of the inevitability of death is like teaching economics - one cannot avoid the (budget) constraints. But, there is comfort in the knowledge that though each of us is  destined to die alone, we need never live alone, but may choose, until our dying second, to live connected to those we care about. Yom Kippur is about living connected lives.

More on the Power of the Tribe

Further to my recent post on this issue (see here): Consider the position of a research anthropologist embedded in the tribe he is researching. I have read books about such people who go, sometimes for years, to faraway places, and, after a period of introduction and initiation, become an accepted member of the tribe. In order to fully understand their laws, customs, mores, rituals, values, etc. the researcher participates as a fully-fledged member of the tribe in all of its life-cycle and day-to-day events. 

The researcher has a reason different from the other tribal members for participating in its religious observances, even carefully adhering to the letter of the law. For him it is not a matter of a shared belief in the religious significance of these practices, these injunctions, prohibitions, prayers, religious actions (like prostrations or sacrifices, the intonation of blessings), etc. all involving the supernatural in some way. For the researcher these are a matter simply of tribal practices, having scientific interest. But in order to gain maximum insight, he  considers it necessary to fully immerse himself in the setting, to see what  they see, to feel what they feel, as best he can.  And, often, in the  process, being empathetic in temperament, he comes to value these practices almost as they do, seeing it as they do, but also, simultaneously, seeing them more detachedly as part of the valuable social-capital of the tribe. He sings with them, he celebrates with them, he mourns with them, and by the time he  leaves, he is sad to say goodbye to his close friends. But he does leave and then he writes his book about his experiences and becomes famous and revered in that other world from which he came.

His position is not much different from that of someone born into and growing up in a strictly religious community, who, on the road to adulthood, no longer shares the belief in the supernatural and the associated practices. He still identifies with his family, friends and other members of the community who retain their beliefs. And, moreover, he has an inside understanding of what the traditional religious practices really mean to those who do still believe. He may see these practices as valuable, or aesthetically pleasing and evocative of pleasant childhood memories. And he may still elect to participate in some of them, even though they do not have the same significance to him as they used to.

I grew up surrounded by religious practice. As a young adult I stopped believing the party line. I went through a brief period of rebellion when I distanced myself from all religious practice – or as much as I could. But then I decided this was silly and I  started to participate in whatever felt good to me – for my own reasons, which were mainly to be with those that I loved, enjoying what we had always enjoyed together, appreciating the music, the poetry, going with the flow. I am not alone. Many of my coreligionist community friends are tribal first and religious second, if at all.

A recent example prompted this blog. I continue to participate in the ritual of the priestly blessing at weddings, and, being of the priestly tribe of Cohanim, if I am asked I to give the bridal couple the traditional blessing, as part of the ceremony under the wedding  canopy, I will do so gladly – and did so recently. I see it as tapping into a beautiful age-old practice. I am under no illusions. I don’t believe I have any special power to bestow God’s blessing, nor do many (most) of those who attend these weddings. What others believe is their business, not mine.

Some of my friends didn't understand this and questioned me about it. They see in it an inconsistency between conviction and practice, a kind of hypocrisy. I don’t agree, and I think they are applying an inappropriate standard of “rationality” to my actions. For me, as I have explained before very clearly (see here) it is part of the aesthetic. I am like the anthropologist in my simultaneous identification and detachment.

Just because a particular practice was born of a particular set of beliefs sometime in the past, does not mean that we cannot transcend its original significance and yet continue to use it, for other reasons. This happens all the time, in very complex ways. Some individual components of the social capital continue to evolve and morph into new combinations of meanings and actions, even while some others get discarded. As Friederich Hayek might have said, our current practices embody more wisdom than we can consciously know. As long as no compulsion is involved, why is this even an issue?

Foreign policy and the LALA doctrine.

The name of this blog Against the Current is accurate. But I don’t relish it. It saddens me. My latest disappointment comes upon finding that many with whom I agree on a great variety of issues, hold views that I consider to be untenable and even offensive when it comes to foreign policy.  

I have said on this blog and elsewhere that foreign policy is out of my comfort zone – not my area of expertise. So now, provoked by my discomfort, I am taking the plunge. I don’t think I can avoid it any longer. Please accept these thoughts as very much the ruminations of an amateur with much to learn. 

For clarity of exposition, permit me the inaccurate extensive use of the terms “we,” “us,” “they,” and “them”.  Many of my friends take the L A L A approach – “leave them alone and they will leave us alone.” I think in many (most) cases, they may be right. But surely not in all cases. In most cases it may not matter. The default position should be “leave them alone.” We should not, without overwhelming evidence, assume that they are a real threat to us, one that justifies the kind of interventions that have occurred. I would argue our best position is mostly to wait and see and respond when absolutely necessary. Preemption may be indicated, but it needs to be very carefully justified. 

I cannot but condemn much of the past and present actions of our international agencies and special forces who violate the freedoms and rights of domestic and foreign citizens sometimes with massive and enduring humanitarian consequences. The lack of success of almost all of our foreign invasions should give us pause as to what we can and should try to achieve. These “war actions” are types of central-planning and, as such, are doomed to fail. They face impossible knowledge problems in trying to build or rebuild societies and they face impossible incentive problems that prevent proper oversight, the detection and prevention of enormous waste and corruption. They are a very big part of our overgrown government and runaway fiscal problems, and are serious threats to the cause of freedom. Much more could, should and has been said about this – for example. 

But, sometimes the threat IS real and significant. The tricky part is knowing when it is and (just as important) what to do about it. In these cases the LALA principle may not work. 

The LALA principle rests on the assumption that it is OUR actions, our interventions, that are responsible for the hatred directed against us. The attack of 9/11 would not have occurred but for the cumulative affect of our provocative actions. This type of assertion meets with a very hostile reception. It seems to carry unpalatable moral implications, excusing acts of terror. And its proponents mostly poison the chances of it receiving adequate consideration by the contemptuous and patronizing way in which they present it. It may, however, be true. The traction and support that terrorists receive may be a result of the groundswell of resentment that we have created. The problem is, this is impossible to prove either way. And appeals to the history yield conflicting interpretations. This is no more evident that in the case of Israel vis a vis its enemies. In many ways the Israel-Palestinian situation is a microcosm of the bigger picture. 

Some have asserted that (radical Islam) Islamism is a creature of our making and did not exist as a force until recently. But this is very contentious. Pan-Arabism, and the commitment to a unified Arabia cleansed of foreign influence, had strong affinities to Islamism. And the early Muslim Brotherhood, through its sister organization led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (an active Nazi propagandist), effectively disrupted any attempt at the establishment a peaceful two-state solution as conceived by the British partition plan and as embraced by many Jews and Arabs alike in 1948. Everything that has transpired since then is basically an unfolding of this initial fateful turn of events.   

Applying the LALA principle to Israel in light of the history from 1948 till today, makes little sense to me. There the threat is real. And it is an existential threat. There is a fundamental asymmetry of goals. “Leave them alone” will not suffice to placate them, because they don’t want Israel there – see here. It is not what Israel does that is the problem – though it may aggravate the problem. It is where and what Israel is. 

So my LALA friends who seem to think that all that needs to be done is to force the parties to sit down and talk, are sadly and dangerously deluded. Any attempt to achieve real peaceful coexistence has to begin with a plan to get acceptance of Israel’s right to exist by those who have power in the Arab world. Clearly some of my LALA friends understand this. So, they conclude maybe it is for the best if Israel did not exist. It is this kind of cavalier conclusion that shuts down any type of civil discourse. It stinks of anti-Semitism. See also here. 

But this really has little to do with American foreign policy fundamentals. LALAs should refrain from statements that indicate how little they understand or appreciate the threats that Israel faces. Their position opposing government foreign aid and military intervention does NOT imply an anti-Israel position. It does not imply the need to vilify Israel or call for its demise. It does not imply denying the right of Israelis to defend themselves. 

Thus while we might oppose any government funding of settlements and any coercive displacement of Palestinians to facilitate the establishment of settlements (as I do), we cannot, in good conscience, require of Israel to dismantle its checkpoints, dismantle its fence, and generally stand down in its attempt to combat acts of terror. That makes no sense. These measures have proven incredibly effective in keeping Israel’s population safe after suffering for years a horrendous barrage of attacks directed specifically against civilians, where they live, shop, learn, and play. These measures create great hardships, but, in the final analysis, they are effectively imposed on Israel as much as they are imposed on the Palestinians, by the presence of a real, credible, significant, terrifying danger. Similarly, calls for Israel to withdraw to 1967 borders, or beyond, make no sense. The same threats that exist now, existed before 1967 all the way back to 1948, except that Israel was defending less secure borders. The settlements are not the fundamental obstacle to peace. Nor is the “occupation.” The refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, and actions taken in support of that, are the fundamental problems. The LALA principle does not apply. 

On the matter of foreign policy more generally, I am much less confident. When considering the state of the Muslim world in general, and especially the ubiquity and nature of Islamic fundamentalism, I find it difficult to believe that all of the resentment we face can be attributed to our actions. There is a definite chicken-egg problem. But this may be no obstacle to a the achievement of a much smaller foreign footprint. Careful, but sensible and effective diligence may be called for rather than grand interventions. 

The case of Iran is very problematic because we cannot be sure we are dealing with a “rational” opponent, one that can be deterred. The LALAs are confident that we are, that even if Iran were to get the bomb, they would be no more dangerous than Pakistan (not much comfort there) and would never use it for fear of the kind of retaliation it would provoke. Distorted news reporting on both sides make a good assessment very difficult. 

War with Iran is becoming more likely. The trumpets are sounding. I think it would be a big mistake – a worse proposition than Iraq or Afghanistan. But what is the correct response short of the LALA position? Netanyahu wants to draw a red line around the processing of final-stage enriched uranium. I guess what he means is that if Iran should proceed past that step, its facilities – which are big and visible – should be bombed or otherwise destroyed. Not a full-scale war, but a terrifying prospect nevertheless – where would it lead? 

This is as far as my amateur ruminations take me. 

What does the wicked son really say?

According to the traditional Passover text, the Hagada (the telling), there are four sons who ask questions about the Passover seder (order, the traditional ritual meal at which the Hagada is read), as follows:

The Torah refers to four sons: One wise, one wicked, one simple and one who does not know how to ask a question. What does the wise son say? "What are the testimonials, statutes and laws Hashem [the name] our God commanded you?" You should tell him about the laws of Pesach, that one may eat no dessert after eating the Pesach offering.

What does the wicked son say? "What does this drudgery mean to you?" To you and not to him. Since he excludes himself from the community, he has denied a basic principle of Judaism. You should blunt his teeth by saying to him: "It is for the sake of this that Hashem (God) did for me when I left Egypt. For me and not for him. If he was there he would not have been redeemed."

What does the simple son say? "What's this?" You should say to him "With a strong hand Hashem took me out of Egypt, from the house of servitude."

And the one who does not know how to ask, you start for him, as the Torah says: "And you should tell your son on that day, saying 'It is for the sake of this that Hashem did for me when I left Egypt.'"

There are many creative commentaries on this within the tradition. The sons are, of course, meant to refer to four different temperaments or attitudes.  The wicked son is seen as a threat. He has a really bad attitude, his skepticism is dangerous. He needs to be brought to heel or banished. Here is an example.

"The wicked son's 'question' is merely rhetorical - it deserves no response at all. Yet, the one who does not know how to ask is sitting at the table listening to the wicked son's remarks. He's in danger of being influenced. Therefore, our response to the wicked son is to say to the one who doesn't even know how to ask: "Don't be influenced by his smug cynicism. Had he been in Egypt, he would not have been redeemed. He is cutting himself off from the eternity of the Jewish people."(http://ohr.edu/805).

But actually, I have it on good authority, that the wicked son was not so wicked at all and was really trying to open up a searching dialogue based on some very deep-seated reservations and doubts which troubled him. What appears above as his question is actually just a very short extract of the end of his true question (or series of related questions). This text, hitherto suppressed, has been discovered and I can present it to you in its entirety. His so-called question has to be understood in the context of the whole text. [Of course I cannot reveal my source].

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So, the Jews are enslaved in Egypt. They face an evil Pharoh. Moses shakes him up, but God “hardens  his heart“ so that time and again he refuses to let the Israelites go in spite of the increasing severity of the plagues. Why does God harden Pharoh’s heart? Does this mean it is not Pharoh’s fault? After all, he has no choice – God controls his heart. So why is he the bad one? And what about the collateral damage? How are the poor Egyptian first born sons to blame? Why are they punished, they are just kids? Come to think of it, since it is God who is pulling all the strings, why did God allow the Israelites to become slaves in the first place?

Of course, this brings up the whole question of free-will and how to reconcile it with God’s all-embracing power and goodness. You will say to me that these are unanswerable questions not relevant when talking about God. God is outside of human time and morality and has his own grand plan that we mere mortals cannot possibly understand. Ok, but why then are we encouraged to ask questions, especially during the seder. Does God want us to be curious, and to have our curiosity satisfied or not? Seems to me you can’t have it both ways.

If one believes in a good and merciful God, it makes more sense to me to conclude that he cannot be all-powerful (HT: Rabbi Harold Kushner). Some things are beyond his control and he empathizes with those who suffer. In which case why go through the all those parts in the Hagada that seem to deny this. After all, what does this drudgery mean to you?