April 2008

In the jovial mood of Israel reaching its independence day marking 60 years of life we must also take into account other anniverseries this year. It was 65 years ago this week that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. From April 19th through May 16th 1943 the Jewish insurgency along with Polish fighters repelled the Nazis with whatever crude weapon they could make or steal. It was a reaction to the rising awarness that their brethren were being shipped off to the Treblinka death camp and not an allegedly easier work camp. When the news reached back to Warsaw Jews inside the Ghetto decided to fight. Ghetto fighters were mostly armed with pistols and revolvers (if at all), with just a few rifles and automatic firearms available. They had little ammunition, and relied heavily on improvised explosive devices and incendiary bottles. Their sheer determination and spirit amidst such horrid conditions is a testament to their strength and our potential. In 1948 many nations thought that Israel would evaporate yet we survived. In 1967 many thought we were done for yet we survived. Since the Ghettoization of the Jews in Poland, begining in 1940, we still carried a will to live and be free. Even though most of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters perished, their struggle will be a permanent ficture in the Jewish Subconcious. I have just returned from Poland and I think every Jew owes it to these fighters to commemorate their bravery. Shine a light oh so bright and just a reminder that May 1 is Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah).

The photo below is a remnant of the Warsaw Ghetto wall.

http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/741/picturespoland072jx2.jpg

This post was crossposted on the 60Bloggers for Israel blog, a project of Jewlicious.

And so it was that a month from yesterday a fight with my mother had broken out. My mother had insisted that I do something around the house, and I had requested for a break - for the opportunity to take a little time for myself. Interests clashed, truths were in conflict, and everyone went away dissatisfied. We yelled, we threatened, we criticized and we sulked. We even stayed away from each other for some time - I the son fulfilling her request yet demanding an apology; she the mother content that I had honored her wish but angry at my choice of words. And yet there was not a minute in which our love for one another faltered — even at the hottest moments of the fight, I would risk my life without a moments’ hesitation for her safety, as she would for me. That is love.

Accordingly, some Biblical scholars note that the Hebrew word for love — Ahava — did not have the romantic connotations that cling to the modern use of the term. Ahava — as in, v’Ahavta et YHVH Eloekha — was a word for loyalty, for obligation, for the feeling that one feels towards one’s father and mother and not towards one’s, ehm, “lover.” 

Defining love as a feeling of obligation has a deep wisdom in it, one that recognizes the truths about life; which of us has not been angry at, disgusted by, or felt frustrated during an interaction with someone we truly loved? Only those deepest relationships with the strongest sense of obligation survive — and thereby enable us to live to our fullest potential; healthy families who know how to have healthy fights produce healthy individuals, ones who know that it is okay sometimes to fall, okay to stumble, okay to hurt and be hurt and make up and start again.

My fear is that our consumer-driven society has forgotten this wisdom, has been so very consumed by the notion of the romantic crush, self-gratifying cloud-nine love that we’ve forgotten that love means sticking by during the bad as much as the good, accepting the sting along with the honey. As such, our families are becoming ever-more fractured as children grow up in divorced family structures; our communities seek purity in action above all, seeking loyalty to the rest of People as long as everything is on our own terms; and our politics are mired by the yearning for the Knight in Shining Armor who will “change” instead of those who have experienced the Public’s highs and lows. This focus on the immediate and the pure leads to shallow relationships, shallow communities and shallow politics.
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Our friend Dotan Harpak at the Union for Reform Judaism is organizing a young adults track at the upcoming 2008 ARZA National Assembly in Baltimore. Here’s some info:

The ARZA National Assembly, which takes place every two years, is an opportunity for Reform Jews who are passionate about Israel, and the ARZA professional and lay leadership, to meet and discuss the future of Reform Zionism in North America. This year, the ARZA National Assembly will take place at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland from May 11^th through the 14^th. The Young Adults Track will start on Motzei Shabbat, May 10^th, before the National Assembly opens, and will continue till Monday, the 12^th in the afternoon.

The Young Adults Track is a an opportunity for those of you who are passionately involved with Reform Zionist programming on your campus, in your community, or at your URJ Camp to help create the future leadership of ARZA, and to discuss the issues that are at the essence of Reform Zionism today with your peers and the ARZA leadership. If you are a young passionate Zionist, and you want to hear and be heard about the future of Reform Zionism in America today – the Young Adults Track at the ARZA National Assembly is for you!

And here is the link for more.

Like writing about Jewish things? There are opportunities out there to get paid! Here is one stellar one:

MyJewishLearning.com is proud to announce the creation of its Editorial Fellowship program. The inaugural two-year fellowship will begin in September 2008, concluding in August 2010.

The fellowship is open to recent college graduates interested in writing, editing, Jewish life, and new media.

MyJewishLearning.com, a transdenominational source of Jewish information, is currently undergoing a major site redesign, ramping up technological capacities and integrating new features, including video and an Ask-the-Expert function.

The Editorial Fellow will work closely with the site’s senior editors to shape MyJewishLearning.com’s editorial vision, solicit material from freelance writers, write and edit articles, and contribute daily to our popular blog Mixed Multitudes.

More info here.

Recently, Israel and Palestinian archaeologists have hammered out an agreement about how archaeological artifacts and sites could be handled in the even of a peace treaty. The resulting agreement makes it clear just how difficult and wrenching it would be for a peace treaty to ever come to fruition.

Two California archaeologists spent years cataloguing all the significant archaeological sites in Israel as well as the various artifacts that have been uncovered. They noted which artifacts had been removed by Israel from the West Bank. They then invited three Israeli and three Palestinian archaeologists to negotiate over the future of these sites and artifacts. Americans served as mediators during the process.

The results, according to jpost:

Under the proposed agreement, as well as under international law, Israel would have to make the major concessions, including return of large number of sites and artifacts located in, or taken from, the territory of a future Palestinian state.

These may include such sites as Qumran, where the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls may have lived and worked; Samaria, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel; and Mount Ibal, where Joshua built an altar to God.

Other provisions of the agreement include:

• Full protection of all sites and free access for scholars and the public, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

• More than tripling the area of Jerusalem under special protection as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which now includes the Temple Mount, Western Wall and the walls of the Old City. The extended area would roughly equal Jerusalem’s boundaries during the 10th-century Crusades.

• Prohibiting the destruction of archaeological sites because of their religious or cultural affiliations.

• Support for establishment of archaeological museums, laboratories and storehouses to assure proper handling of returned artifacts.

And according to Israeli Army Radio, also tacit agreements that certain artifacts could be “borrowed” for extended periods of time.  

Oh man. Giving up the Dead Sea Scrolls? Access to historical sites in the West Bank? I don’t know what to think. This is going to take a lot of faith in our peace partners, faith which I currently don’t have.

I would just like to call everyone’s attention to the blog 60 Bloggers. Daily between now and Yom HaAtzmaut, they will publish an article by a new author each day, discussing Israel’s 60th birthday. Go there are read the first two posts, discussing Hungarian Zionists and 60 Reasons to Love Israel.

Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame this week. He also owns the Detroit Shock of the WNBA and the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL. He has owned the Pistons since 1974, a period during which they three times won the championship. It should be noted that he was an inaugural inductee to the less-renown Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

So, what’s the connection to Zion? Davidson, a Jew from Detroit, is the owner of Guardian Glass and a noted philanthropist. If you ever go to visit the Southern Kotel excavations, you may notice that they are called the Davidson Archaeological Garden. Furthermore, last year he made a donation to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem to the tune of $75 Million. The new facility that is being built in Hadassah will be named after Davidson’s mother, Sarah Wetsman Davidson, who founded the Detroit branch of Hadassah (WZOA).

According to Davidson: “I so appreciate the long history my family has had with Hadassah, the women’s organization, whose impact on the Jewish world I have admired over the years. Moreover, we have maintained a long-term relationship with the Hadassah Medical Organization, first on Mt. Scopus and now in Ein Kerem. The power of family is truly a binding one and I feel privileged to be the third generation to support Hadassah’s goals and achievements. In 1917, Hadassah’s founder Henrietta Szold spent a week in my family’s home. In 1921 my grandparents purchased a parcel of land on Mt. Scopus.

 But Davidson’s donations to Israel don’t stop there. From pistons.com:

He has also endowed the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York with a $15 million gift, and the American Technion Society to establish the world’s first educational institution entirely dedicated to the international management of technology-based companies at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. In 1999, the Davidson Institute of Science Education was established at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. His $20 million gift was the largest private donation ever given to the Institute that is a leading international science research center and graduate school.

So hats off to you, Mr. Davidson. As a Pistons fan, I’ve been happy to cheer for your team, but as a Zionist, I owe you a much greater debt.

A submission from Calev Ben-Dor:

My work computer was ‘upgraded’ this week. There was nothing wrong with the old one – it had served me pretty well…its just the new one is supposed to better, more advanced – an upgraded graphics chip, a faster hard drive. Yet in many ways the process has been frustrating. Some things didn’t quite survive the move - desktop items, my screensaver. Email addresses and signatures were lost. My favorites webpages are somewhere in cyberspace. I-Tunes music needs to be downloaded again. Things that made the old computer mine – pictures, emails and music - are no longer to hand. Making the switch means being prepared to take a short term loss for what one assumes will be a longer term gain. And the hardest time comes before the gain becomes apparent. In many ways changing computers reminds me of making Aliyah. My friends and I didn’t run away from a country – our computer wasn’t broken. We just fancied an upgrade, believed that the new life offered a richer, (clearly not financially) more meaningful experience. Yet the moving period is never without its problems – acclimatizing takes time, bureaucracy needs to be overcome, new friends and memories need to be forged anew. Professional and social status takes time to re-establish. Sometimes important things disappear along the way. Some can be reclaimed; others can’t. Olim trade in an old life for a new because we believe (or hope) that in the long run it will be worthwhile… its just the bit in between that’s difficult.

In a move that should shock no-one who understands the history of reform Judaism and its paradigm shift away from Judaism-as-a-lifestyle, the JTA is reporting that congregations have decided to stop or change their recitation of the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel.

From a Zionist perspective, this move is further proof that a Judaism that is limited to the religious tradition of the Jews acts to tear apart our historical community. From a more objective perspective, one shouldn’t be surprised that the same ideology that pushes to marginalize Jewish identity within one’s own life — making it one of ‘many identities’ instead of the primary operating system through which other decisions are made — is extending itself to further separate the Religiously-Jewish from the Jewish People.

Not to go over old argumentation, I’ll raise a different point here:  the Jewish spiritual tradition fundamentally differs from that of its daughter religions — and many other sects — in that its focus has always been on the sovereignty of the community within the Kingdom of Earth, while those other sects seek to put forward an ideal vision of a Kingdom of Heaven that humans are expected to toil and sacrifice in order to enter. Judaism’s main text deals with the nitty-gritty, with what is sacrificed in order to heal what skin-disease, and other niceties — the others speak of the rings of hell and the glories of heaven.

In this case, the unwillingness of American Jewish ’spiritual folk’ to get their hands dirty suggests, I would argue, that they’re leaving us behind - that is, the Jewish People - in their own search for purity. But since they haven’t yet accepted the principal of conversion, they’re less like the early Christians and more like the Essenes — and if history is any indication, I’m not sure it’ll turn out so well for them either.

In Part 1 I acknowledged that Barack Obama’s record supporting Israel during his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate has been excellent. Despite that I am extremely worried about what an Obama administration would mean for Israel because he has surrounded himself with a foreign policy team that is openly hostile towards Israel.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. The ex-President has famously written a book equating Israeli policy to South African apartheid. In addition to serving as a senior foreign policy to Senator Obama, Brzezinski has made a career of writing scathing attacks on Israel and making the rounds of the talk show circuit eloquently explaining to Americans why Israel is at the root of all evil in the Middle East and probably beyond. I cringe every time I see him on TV.

Brzezinski is the only senior American official, past or present, who has openly supported John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s claim that the “Israel lobby” has shaped American foreign policy to the detriment of the United States. Alan Dershowitz cited Brzezinski’s views as damaging to the Obama campaign:

It is a tremendous mistake for Barack Obama to select as a foreign policy adviser the one person in public life who has chosen to support a bigoted book.

More recently, in response to the Annapolis peace conference Brzezinski signed a letter calling on the Bush administration to open a dialogue with Hamas terrorists, the same people who daily fire rockets and mortars into southern Israel, in part to scuttle any chance for peace. Brzezinski also blamed American and Israeli foreign policy rather than Hizbullah for the 2006 Lebanon War

Brzezinski’s quickness to attack any Israeli government as an obstacle to peace was demonstrated in 1996 appearance on PBS’s The Newshour With Jim Lehrer when he had signed a letter urging pressure on the then new government of Binyamin Netanyahu. Brzezinski gave this assessment of the Israeli Prime Minister:

In my view, there is the real danger that Netanyahu is pursuing a policy not of peace with security, which is what he was elected to pursue, but of peace with territory, which is what the Likud has stood for, for a long time–peace with territory, which really means security with territory, and peace being sloughed off.

Prime Minister Netanyahu went on to negotiate, sign, and implement the Wye River Agreement and pulled out of most of Hebron in an attempt to push the Oslo peace process forward. We may have already seen some of Brzezinski’s antagonism toward Netanyahu expressed by Senator Obama in his statement that supporting Israel doesn’t mean supporting Likud

.How damaging is Brzezinski to Obama with supporters of Israel? Just ask Mark Siegel, who served as Jewish liason for President Carter until 1978:

Brzezinski was a major obstacle to bridging the divisions between the president and the Jewish community. I’m very, very surprised that someone would have him directly involved in a presidential campaign.

Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to fail to capture a majority of the Jewish vote. With foreign policy advisers like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Malley I think it is very likely that Obama will follow in Carter’s footsteps. The loss of supporters of Israel, Jewish, Christian, and other, could easily cost Obama a close election is he is the Democratic nominee.

In Part 3 of this four part series I’ll introduce one more adviser that’s even more worrisome than Brzezinski.

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