Why living in Israel
is like being a
recovering alcoholic
This will be my 10th Fourth of July as an American expatriate living in Israel. Compared to my colleagues, friends and neighbors, I'm still a greenhorn. Nevertheless, 10 years - and two weeks - is something of a milestone.
When people from the Old Country ask me what I miss most about my former Manhattan life, I can't give them a straightforward answer. Sure, I miss easy access to Manhattan's bookstores, bicycling along the East River, and above all else going to sleep on a Saturday night comforted by the knowledge that next morning is Sunday.
In other respects, fulfilling the Zionist dream - assuming you find work - scarcely demands much deprivation.
Most American Jews have never visited Israel, so I often get asked about the dangers of life here. The threat of violence concerns me, but only up to a point. There were years in New York when stepping outside the door involved a leap of faith. The worst was 1990, when 2,262 denizens of the five boroughs were murdered. Compare that to 2002, the worst year of the second intifada, when 451 Israelis were killed.
New York is a lot safer these days, but there are still rapists loose in Prospect Park and murderers on the Q train.
As for the mullahs, their rapacious appetites will hardly be satiated by an attack on Israel alone. In a clash of civilizations, it almost doesn't matter where you live.
I CAN'T profess to miss New York's unparalleled cultural attractions - theater, ballet, concerts and museums. Who had the time? Fact is, I've enjoyed more of these as a visitor than I did as a resident.
I do miss the water. The Big Apple is spending $700,000 on an advertising campaign to encourage locals to drink its tap water. Meantime, I've gotten used to lugging bottles of mineral water up the three flights to our apartment.
Which reminds me - I miss having an elevator.
There's plenty about Israel that's uplifting. Take electrical power. The Israel Electric Company generated a record 9,670 megawatts of power, an all-time record, during last week's heat wave. To its credit - and good fortune - the air-conditioners kept humming. (Oh, I also miss not having air-conditioning at home.)
At about the same time New York was experiencing its own heat wave, but Con Ed couldn't keep up with demand, forcing the utility to pull the plug on parts of Manhattan and the Bronx. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had to be evacuated and the Lexington Avenue subways were brought to a sudden halt for hours.
JERUSALEM is hardly immune to the frustrations that make urban life a challenge. Traffic congestion can be maddening. Hebron Road, a main north-south thoroughfare, is frequently bumper-to-bumper during my morning commute; the boulevard's been dug up, repaved and dug up so many times, locals are convinced the work has no real purpose other than to vex commuters and enrich contractors.
Forget about bringing a private car into the municipal center. City fathers have come up with "new traffic patterns" to keep motorists driving in circles. As for public transportation, don't get me started about all the time I waste waiting for the No. 7; or about Egged drivers who, with lead-footed acceleration and precipitous braking, seem to derive a perverse pleasure from keeping elderly passengers airborne.
If the Big Apple has kinder and gentler bus operators, its traffic is anything but. I'm reliably informed that the Van Wyck Expressway was so backed up last Thursday it looked like one very long parking lot. Meanwhile, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for an auto congestion charge (like the one in London) that would make driving in Manhattan even more brutish.
SO IT'S not the supposed deprivation, or the hassles of daily life that make living in Israel a pressure-cooker for me, but rather being out of tune with the Israeli psyche. Had I come at a younger age and gone though the army and college, I'd have been better acculturated. Instead, I'm often left perplexed. In New York, I was street-wise; here I'm a freier.
The biggest disappointment is the realization that Israeli Jews aren't just like their Diaspora cousins.
When someone behaved in a loutish manner on the F train, or carried on inappropriately, I would remind myself that "they" weren't Jewish; what could you expect?
Israel has cured me of that prejudice. Here the yobs are almost exclusively Jewish. In the Diaspora we felt a bourgeois responsibility to deport ourselves properly "in front of the goyim." Living in Israel, in contrast, is like living with a large dysfunctional family. No one, and I mean no one, is embarrassed to behave in a boorish manner.
THERE IS also the discomfiture that comes with not having native-level Hebrew. The other day, I needed a chest X-ray and could've sworn the technician mumbled something about whether I was a fox.
I later figured out she was inquiring if I had a cough.
The inscrutable Israeli psyche is particularly in-your-face on the roads. Signaling before switching lanes is frowned upon, and I'm still not culturally attuned enough to comprehend why someone with a "Peace Now" bumper sticker won't trade a car-length for peace, or why a fellow with "A Jew does not expel another Jew" anti-disengagement sticker has no compunction about forcing this Jew off the road.
Bottom line? The hardest part about living in Israel is adjusting to the mores of the natives, and remembering that I would be setting myself up for endless grief to expect native-born Israelis to embrace the values I brought with me.
Which is why making aliya is a little like being in a program for recovering alcoholics - you've gotta take life one day, one Fourth of July, at a time.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Milestone
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Caveman politics
Liberals and conservatives have been at it for eons
– maybe it's time to move on?
Scholars may have uncovered the root causes of political ideology. We can today better understand why a William F. Buckley, a Harold Macmillan or a Binyamin Netanyahu grows up to be a conservative, while a George McGovern, a Tony Benn or a Yossi Beilin develops into a liberal.
Prof. Randy Thornhill and his graduate student Corey Fincher from the Biology Department at the University of New Mexico, writing in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, argue that all "ancestral humans" are genetically predisposed to either liberalism or conservatism, with the environment serving as a triggering mechanism.
Thornhill and Fincher report: Those with secure childhoods, low stress and strong parental attachments turn out conservative; those who experience stressful childhoods and weaker parental connections (an absent father, for instance) develop into liberals. Evolution required a mix - humans who crave stability, as well as those willing to experiment with new frontiers. For our species to perpetuate, there was a need for both "conservative" family and community builders, as well as "liberals" ready to reach out to humans beyond their own "ingroup."
In their study, Thornhill and Fincher also found that firstborns (who receive a great deal of parental investment) tended toward conservatism, while later- and middle-borns (who, presumably, receive less parental attention) were prone to turn out liberal-oriented.
They conclude that "the relative magnitude of childhood stressors experienced sends conservatives [with secure attachments] down one life track, and liberals [with avoidant attachments] down another."
THEIR NOTION of what makes liberals and conservatives tick flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that insecure children grow up to be conservatives, while confident youngsters become liberals. Indeed, in liberal-dominated academia, liberalism is identified as the "default" normal, while conservative tendencies are viewed as the aberration.
The pre-Thornhill and Fincher distinctions between liberals and conservatives had "optimistic liberals" believing human nature to be essentially good and malleable. This explains why they are always gung-ho on talking, negotiations and peace processes - liberals think people are fundamentally cooperative.
Conservatives, in contrast, are inherently pessimistic about human nature; they assume that no amount of social tinkering can transform man's fundamental make-up. This leads them not to entrust raw power into the hands of the people because "pure democracy" will end up in a tyranny of the mob.
Now along come Thornhill and Fincher to suggest that optimistic liberals had stressful (not to say deprived) childhoods, while distrustful conservatives (like myself) were spoiled with attention.
IN AN e-mail exchange, Fincher clarifies: Conservatives do trust, but only their ingroup - extended family, other conservatives, leaders - but not people who think differently, act differently, pray to different gods.
"You call [them] pessimistic conservatives because they don't believe in the goodness of everyone; while a liberal does believe that everyone has value. We see this as supportive of our findings. Consider that alliances are fundamental to individual survival. Liberals are strategic specialists in developing alliances with just about anyone from their immediate family to former enemies; while conservatives are strategic specialists for developing alliances and maintaining those alliances only within their ingroup."
Individuals who recall growing up in an environment that included a great deal of familial investment and closeness, Fincher wrote me, are primarily conservative and demonstrate a secure attachment style as adults, so they are primarily interested in close, enduring relationships. People who recall growing up in an environment with reduced familial closeness and investment are primarily liberal, and demonstrate a more avoidant style of attachment, meaning they are aloof and lack concern about the permanency of their relationships with others.
"So back to your question, someone is conservative because, in part, their tie to their ingroup is significant and must be maintained. For liberals their tie to any one ingroup is significantly malleable. They have to see goodness in everyone in order to facilitate this kind of mobility."
Broadly speaking, then, what makes people either liberal or conservative is that these are the only two cards evolution has dealt us. How we actually turn out depends largely on the individual nature/nurture experience.
Both liberalism and conservatism are ideologies - or a "coherent and consistent set of beliefs" about politics, according to the venerable political scientists James Q. Wilson. It strikes me, however, that if the liberal-conservative divide is just an accident of the nature/nurture experience, maybe ideological consistency need not be sacrosanct.
MOST ISRAELIS, you'll agree, are not coherent and consistent ideologues. Truth is, you don't much hear the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in the Israeli setting. Instead, people are pigeonholed as right-wing ("bomb the Arabs to smithereens"), or left-wing ("hand the Arabs everything they want on a silver platter, and be nice about it"). Such shallow labeling tells us nothing useful about genuine ideology, or about how thinking Israelis see events.
Speaking personally, I've long known that I'm neither "left-wing" nor liberal because my take on human nature is darkly Freudian. When I lived in the US, I was, like a good conservative, dubious about the government's role in regulating business. I worked in government and knew we didn't always have the answers. I tended to disdain the latest welfare program; I opposed affirmative action, favoring the merit system instead. Still, I was never a social conservative because I opposed government involvement in the personal sphere, and generally favored a broadminded approach to civil liberties.
IN THE decade or so that I've lived in Israel, remaining ideologically "coherent" and "consistent" as a conservative has become ever more difficult. In the Israeli setting, where oligarchs control the bulk of the nation's wealth, I'm not convinced that less government regulation of big business - cable television, telecommunications, transportation, utilities and medicine - is such a good idea.
New York City in my day had nearly 1 million (out of 8 million) residents on the public dole. This struck me as socially debilitating. Plainly, there was something wrong with a system that saw, not atypically, three generations of unmarried women sharing a household, collecting welfare checks and making babies.
There's nothing remotely like that kind of in-your-face abuse of the system here in Israel; no epidemic of welfare queens. But there are plenty of working stiffs earning way below the (modest) average gross salary of NIS 7,491 per month, and they deserve whatever help the state can give them. Certainly when it comes to the truly indigent living below the poverty level, I don't want the state to be parsimonious. And if that breaks with my inherent conservatism - so be it.
In America, like any good conservative, I valued tradition. But here in Israel "tradition" has morphed into religious coercion with ultra-Orthodox rabbis employed by the state controlling citizenship, marriage, divorce and even burial. The bloated religious bureaucracy mixes the worst of liberal big government with the worst kind of personally intrusive social conservatism.
WHATEVER THE answers to the problems of this society, they are not going to be uncovered by an adherence to this or that political ideology. Maybe lockstep ideological consistency is a luxury only people living in a properly functioning political system can afford. But in a system as fundamentally wrecked as ours, adhering to liberalism or conservatism for the sake of consistency seems senseless. And it goes without saying that sticking to even more vacuous left-wing and right-wing distinctions when what most of us really disagree about is managing the Arab-Israel conflict is especially unhelpful.
I'm not saying that there aren't any genuine left-wingers and right-wingers. I'm saying that for most of us they are irrelevant.
MY OWN diagnosis is that Israel's political system suffers from "hyper-pluralism," or group politics run amok. Contending groups are stronger than the government itself. When political parties with diametrically opposing views merrily collaborate in raiding the public purse, the outcome for the overall collective is bad.
In a broken system, ideology offers transparently false choices. After all, say there are new elections tomorrow, and the pro-business Likud Party comes out ahead, does anyone imagine that it would not invite the social-democratic Labor Party to become its coalition partner? And wouldn't both parties gladly bring the centrist Kadima Party into their government? And wouldn't they - disregarding ideology - cut deals with the single-issue parochial parties in return for political backing?
Every Israeli who agrees that this is no way to run the Zionist enterprise has a preferred solution. Mine is James Madison's model of representative democracy, checks and balances, and separation of powers, as embodied in the US Constitution. That comes part and parcel with constituency-based elections.
I'm not holding my breath, but such an idyllic outcome would promote a two-party democracy and pragmatic centrist policies. There would be one large, liberal-oriented party and one large conservative party. Highly ideological single-issue parties would fall by the wayside in a winner-take-all electoral system, and their activists would seek to shape policy within one of the two large amalgamations.
In that long "meanwhile" before the political system is overhauled, both Left and Right need to abandon their dead-end "never-forget-never-forgive" partisanship. When consistency prevents out-of-the-box thinking on both domestic and security issues while tearing the fabric of society apart, it's time to jettison the chains of ideology.
It took a combination of liberalism and conservatism for the human species to evolve. Likewise, Israeli leaders with wisdom must be willing to exploit the best characteristics of both liberal and conservative ideologies in developing a novel, pragmatic survival strategy.
– maybe it's time to move on?
Scholars may have uncovered the root causes of political ideology. We can today better understand why a William F. Buckley, a Harold Macmillan or a Binyamin Netanyahu grows up to be a conservative, while a George McGovern, a Tony Benn or a Yossi Beilin develops into a liberal.
Prof. Randy Thornhill and his graduate student Corey Fincher from the Biology Department at the University of New Mexico, writing in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, argue that all "ancestral humans" are genetically predisposed to either liberalism or conservatism, with the environment serving as a triggering mechanism.
Thornhill and Fincher report: Those with secure childhoods, low stress and strong parental attachments turn out conservative; those who experience stressful childhoods and weaker parental connections (an absent father, for instance) develop into liberals. Evolution required a mix - humans who crave stability, as well as those willing to experiment with new frontiers. For our species to perpetuate, there was a need for both "conservative" family and community builders, as well as "liberals" ready to reach out to humans beyond their own "ingroup."
In their study, Thornhill and Fincher also found that firstborns (who receive a great deal of parental investment) tended toward conservatism, while later- and middle-borns (who, presumably, receive less parental attention) were prone to turn out liberal-oriented.
They conclude that "the relative magnitude of childhood stressors experienced sends conservatives [with secure attachments] down one life track, and liberals [with avoidant attachments] down another."
THEIR NOTION of what makes liberals and conservatives tick flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that insecure children grow up to be conservatives, while confident youngsters become liberals. Indeed, in liberal-dominated academia, liberalism is identified as the "default" normal, while conservative tendencies are viewed as the aberration.
The pre-Thornhill and Fincher distinctions between liberals and conservatives had "optimistic liberals" believing human nature to be essentially good and malleable. This explains why they are always gung-ho on talking, negotiations and peace processes - liberals think people are fundamentally cooperative.
Conservatives, in contrast, are inherently pessimistic about human nature; they assume that no amount of social tinkering can transform man's fundamental make-up. This leads them not to entrust raw power into the hands of the people because "pure democracy" will end up in a tyranny of the mob.
Now along come Thornhill and Fincher to suggest that optimistic liberals had stressful (not to say deprived) childhoods, while distrustful conservatives (like myself) were spoiled with attention.
IN AN e-mail exchange, Fincher clarifies: Conservatives do trust, but only their ingroup - extended family, other conservatives, leaders - but not people who think differently, act differently, pray to different gods.
"You call [them] pessimistic conservatives because they don't believe in the goodness of everyone; while a liberal does believe that everyone has value. We see this as supportive of our findings. Consider that alliances are fundamental to individual survival. Liberals are strategic specialists in developing alliances with just about anyone from their immediate family to former enemies; while conservatives are strategic specialists for developing alliances and maintaining those alliances only within their ingroup."
Individuals who recall growing up in an environment that included a great deal of familial investment and closeness, Fincher wrote me, are primarily conservative and demonstrate a secure attachment style as adults, so they are primarily interested in close, enduring relationships. People who recall growing up in an environment with reduced familial closeness and investment are primarily liberal, and demonstrate a more avoidant style of attachment, meaning they are aloof and lack concern about the permanency of their relationships with others.
"So back to your question, someone is conservative because, in part, their tie to their ingroup is significant and must be maintained. For liberals their tie to any one ingroup is significantly malleable. They have to see goodness in everyone in order to facilitate this kind of mobility."
Broadly speaking, then, what makes people either liberal or conservative is that these are the only two cards evolution has dealt us. How we actually turn out depends largely on the individual nature/nurture experience.
Both liberalism and conservatism are ideologies - or a "coherent and consistent set of beliefs" about politics, according to the venerable political scientists James Q. Wilson. It strikes me, however, that if the liberal-conservative divide is just an accident of the nature/nurture experience, maybe ideological consistency need not be sacrosanct.
MOST ISRAELIS, you'll agree, are not coherent and consistent ideologues. Truth is, you don't much hear the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in the Israeli setting. Instead, people are pigeonholed as right-wing ("bomb the Arabs to smithereens"), or left-wing ("hand the Arabs everything they want on a silver platter, and be nice about it"). Such shallow labeling tells us nothing useful about genuine ideology, or about how thinking Israelis see events.
Speaking personally, I've long known that I'm neither "left-wing" nor liberal because my take on human nature is darkly Freudian. When I lived in the US, I was, like a good conservative, dubious about the government's role in regulating business. I worked in government and knew we didn't always have the answers. I tended to disdain the latest welfare program; I opposed affirmative action, favoring the merit system instead. Still, I was never a social conservative because I opposed government involvement in the personal sphere, and generally favored a broadminded approach to civil liberties.
IN THE decade or so that I've lived in Israel, remaining ideologically "coherent" and "consistent" as a conservative has become ever more difficult. In the Israeli setting, where oligarchs control the bulk of the nation's wealth, I'm not convinced that less government regulation of big business - cable television, telecommunications, transportation, utilities and medicine - is such a good idea.
New York City in my day had nearly 1 million (out of 8 million) residents on the public dole. This struck me as socially debilitating. Plainly, there was something wrong with a system that saw, not atypically, three generations of unmarried women sharing a household, collecting welfare checks and making babies.
There's nothing remotely like that kind of in-your-face abuse of the system here in Israel; no epidemic of welfare queens. But there are plenty of working stiffs earning way below the (modest) average gross salary of NIS 7,491 per month, and they deserve whatever help the state can give them. Certainly when it comes to the truly indigent living below the poverty level, I don't want the state to be parsimonious. And if that breaks with my inherent conservatism - so be it.
In America, like any good conservative, I valued tradition. But here in Israel "tradition" has morphed into religious coercion with ultra-Orthodox rabbis employed by the state controlling citizenship, marriage, divorce and even burial. The bloated religious bureaucracy mixes the worst of liberal big government with the worst kind of personally intrusive social conservatism.
WHATEVER THE answers to the problems of this society, they are not going to be uncovered by an adherence to this or that political ideology. Maybe lockstep ideological consistency is a luxury only people living in a properly functioning political system can afford. But in a system as fundamentally wrecked as ours, adhering to liberalism or conservatism for the sake of consistency seems senseless. And it goes without saying that sticking to even more vacuous left-wing and right-wing distinctions when what most of us really disagree about is managing the Arab-Israel conflict is especially unhelpful.
I'm not saying that there aren't any genuine left-wingers and right-wingers. I'm saying that for most of us they are irrelevant.
MY OWN diagnosis is that Israel's political system suffers from "hyper-pluralism," or group politics run amok. Contending groups are stronger than the government itself. When political parties with diametrically opposing views merrily collaborate in raiding the public purse, the outcome for the overall collective is bad.
In a broken system, ideology offers transparently false choices. After all, say there are new elections tomorrow, and the pro-business Likud Party comes out ahead, does anyone imagine that it would not invite the social-democratic Labor Party to become its coalition partner? And wouldn't both parties gladly bring the centrist Kadima Party into their government? And wouldn't they - disregarding ideology - cut deals with the single-issue parochial parties in return for political backing?
Every Israeli who agrees that this is no way to run the Zionist enterprise has a preferred solution. Mine is James Madison's model of representative democracy, checks and balances, and separation of powers, as embodied in the US Constitution. That comes part and parcel with constituency-based elections.
I'm not holding my breath, but such an idyllic outcome would promote a two-party democracy and pragmatic centrist policies. There would be one large, liberal-oriented party and one large conservative party. Highly ideological single-issue parties would fall by the wayside in a winner-take-all electoral system, and their activists would seek to shape policy within one of the two large amalgamations.
In that long "meanwhile" before the political system is overhauled, both Left and Right need to abandon their dead-end "never-forget-never-forgive" partisanship. When consistency prevents out-of-the-box thinking on both domestic and security issues while tearing the fabric of society apart, it's time to jettison the chains of ideology.
It took a combination of liberalism and conservatism for the human species to evolve. Likewise, Israeli leaders with wisdom must be willing to exploit the best characteristics of both liberal and conservative ideologies in developing a novel, pragmatic survival strategy.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Anarchy has its place
Junk art causes no harm,
and sometimes even amuses.
The same can't be said
for junk politics
It could have been the Tel Aviv Museum or London's Tate Modern, but this time we had plunked down our cash for admission to Vienna's Secession Building. We were intrigued by this 1898 edifice, with its gold cupola and Art Deco facade, and we vaguely knew there was some kind of Gustav Klimt connection. Sure enough, we found Klimt's famous "Beethoven Frieze" and felt we had got our money's worth.
Afterwards, strolling around the museum, we came across a mammoth, well-lit, white-walled room containing what is euphemistically known in the post-modern art world as an "installation." This one consisted of overturned chairs, shirts and trousers hanging askew on clothing racks or strewn on the floor, shoes thrown about helter-skelter and an open chest of drawers. Two guards patrolled the room in case some working-class philistine took it into his head to try and bring a semblance of order to the place by picking up the clothing or setting straight the overturned chairs.
I've been contentedly trained by my more cultured partner to enjoy the work of a Mark Rothko or a Piet Mondrian and, on a tolerant day, maybe even a Jackson Pollock; I've learned to enjoy colorful paintings that are little more than paint splotches dribbled on canvas - but I draw the line at "installation art," which seems to revel in mayhem, meaningless rebellion and nihilism.
Put it this way: Some folks consider a six-foot-high collection of wooden shipping pallets sandwiching construction debris and packaging material to be "art" - I don't.
But junk art is harmless. Sure, there's the question of whether tax money ought to be thus squandered, but those with nothing to believe in and no frames of reference also pay taxes. So, I say, let them have their overturned chairs, shipping pallets and moaning suitcases (trust me on this one). But in the political realm, I would not cede an inch to anarchy.
THE CHIEF imperative of any political system is stability so that citizens can pursue lives worth living. Everyone is "born free," but the reason, philosophers tell us, that human beings cede their natural-born and absolute freedom to a sovereign (the modern nation state, for example) is because the alternative, every-man-for-himself jungle would be beastly. It would mimic "the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" state of nature depicted by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterpiece of political theory, Leviathan.
In other words, the anarchist idea that the authority of the state is inherently illegitimate and ought to be resisted is a prescription for sending humanity back to the early Stone Age.
To buy into the anarchist worldview requires a very special combination of naivete and nihilism. Still, though few in numbers, anarchists have made their raucous, often violent mark on society by hijacking the anti-globalization cause and, locally, by championing the Palestinians' war against Israel.
Most anarchists align themselves with the hard Left (though libertarian capitalist thinkers such as Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick were exceptions).
Generally speaking, anarchists share a wildly optimistic conception of human nature, believing that people are intrinsically good; and that if only the corruptive, coercive State would get out of the way, humanity's default temperament would lead it to mutual aid and utopia. Emma Goldman asserted in 1917: "Anarchy stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraints of government."
In her 1931 autobiography, Goldman explained that such absolute freedom would be feasible because anarchy offers "the possibility of organization without discipline, fear or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty."
FRANKLY, I can more easily abide anarchy's pie-in-the-sky idealism than its down-to-earth hypocrisy. But in any event, I cannot forgive anarchists for having, in effect, made common cause with retrograde Islamist and Palestinian Arab terrorists.
Anarchist hypocrisy manifests itself in a myriad ways. You won't find anarchists jetting off to Moscow or Beijing searching for a confrontation with Russian or Chinese security forces. So what if those regimes are illegally trading weapons to Sudan for use by the Janjaweed militias in the Darfour genocide? So what if Russia and China are polluting the earth's environment with abandon while restricting civil liberties - killing reporters, blocking access to the Web? None of this tips the scales for "direct action" against Russia or China.
You won't find anarchists peacefully marching in any Arab capital, let alone looking for a "direct action" opportunity in defense of gay rights, women's rights or workers' rights. The most you can hope for is a limp Web site posting support for Egyptian textile workers.
Mugabe's reign of terror in Zimbabwe draws a yawn from the worldwide anarchist community. You won't see anarchists marching in the streets of Brazzaville to protest the exploitation of children kidnapped and forced to become soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The mass starvation of Korean peasants carried out by the murderous Pyongyang regime doesn't elicit anarchist "direct action."
Nor does Iran's institutionalized oppression of women, execution of children as young as 14 or campaign against the Baha'i community serve as an incentive for "direct action." And, needless to say, anarchists are not rioting outside Iranian embassies to call attention to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's efforts to build nuclear reactors - let alone proliferate atom bombs - in the Middle East.
Come to think of it, as venues for rioting, anarchists prefer more comfortable Western settings - Scotland (2005), Davos (2000), Seattle (1999), Genoa (2001), Prague (2000), Madrid (1994), Nice (2000) and London (1999) - places where you're never too far from good food, hot water, the Internet and a not-unsympathetic media.
The next big anarchist circus will take place on the outskirts of Heiligendamm, a Baltic Sea resort in northern Germany, where leaders of the G-8 are scheduled to meet in June. It's tough to be a revolutionary.
THE MAJORITY of non-Arab foreign "activists" who come to Israel for "direct action" in support of the Palestinian war effort are anarchists. Israel offers that extra buzz of (self-inflicted) danger - you never know, you might slip under an army bulldozer and your suddenly meaningful life become fodder for a progressive playwright.
In fairness, we can't really expect foreign anarchists to know that had the Palestinian Arab leadership not defied the UN's 1947 plan for the Partition of Palestine, there would already be a Palestinian state alongside a truncated Israel. Or that - more recently - it was Yasser Arafat who launched the second intifada, in September 2000, by rejecting Ehud Barak's obscenely munificent peace offer. Or that before the IDF got a handle on the "free flow of Palestinian traffic," suicide bombers and drive-by shooters had slaughtered 1,130 Israeli bus passengers, caf and mall patrons and schoolchildren.
We can't expect anarchists to know that thanks to the barriers, checkpoints, fences, walls and ancillary "indignities" Palestinian Arabs now face, the number of Israeli fatalities is down dramatically, from 451 killed in 2002 to 30 last year.
We really can't expect foreign anarchists to be aware that before the current Palestinian violence, West Bank and Gaza Arabs could travel to Tel Aviv unimpeded (you'd see cars with the PA's green license plates all over the country) or that traffic between Gaza and the West Bank flowed freely.
Nor can we expect foreign anarchists to know that Arab terrorists relentlessly attacked Israel between 1948 and 1967 - before there was a West Bank "occupation."
I suppose a deeply-rooted ignorance of history is as essential to any genuine anarchist as a complete misreading of human nature.
I AM, HOWEVER, far less indulgent of Israeli-born Jewish anarchists. They know the deadly consequences of removing IDF blockades from roads connecting Palestinian Authority areas of the West Bank to thoroughfares such as Route 60, which runs up and down the spine of Judea and Samaria.
And yet these anarchists can be seen trying to remove those same barricades. Every Friday the Israeli anarchists join comrades from abroad and local Palestinian Arabs at the security barrier near Bil'in (just over the Green Line, in the vicinity of Modi'in Illit) for a choreographed "direct action." They know how many lives the security barrier has saved, yet they try to tear it down.
Israeli anarchists live at the furthermost anti-Zionist reaches of hard-Left lalaland. How else to explain why well-educated, financially comfortable Jewish young people would commit themselves to dismantling the world's only Jewish country (on the grounds that they oppose the coercive structure of the state), yet devote themselves to promoting, in its place, the building of what in all likelihood would be a violently coercive Islamist state?
They assiduously film, photograph and disseminate their violent encounters with the IDF, hoping to make it onto the Israeli evening news (and into the international media). Their modus operandi is to taunt the soldiers with some form of vandalism or violence; and then, in a sort of video ambush, "document" the troops "overreacting" to the anarchists' "direct action."
Good footage isn't hard to manufacture, and it was fairly predictable that producers of Israeli television news programs would allow "good pictures" to trump their news judgment.
Forced on May 9 to choose between another installment of the annual State Comptroller's Report on government efficiency or IDF soldiers and Border Police wrestling with anarchist women and poking male anarchists in the stomach with a rifle barrel south of Hebron, Channel 10 and Channel 2 both opted to lead their broadcasts with the action footage helpfully supplied by the anarchists.
DR. URI GORDON, who is both a scholar of anarchism and himself an anarchist, defended, in the course of a telephone conversation and exchange of e-mails, the behavior of Israeli anarchists. He said that Israel's 200 to 300 anarchists place greater importance on the journey ("direct action") than on the destination - a world without states or borders comprising communities where everybody lives in equality and mutual aid.
According to Gordon, anarchists champion a Palestinian state because the Palestinians are anyway living under the dominion of a state - Israel. Anarchists' commitment to human rights, he explained, must take precedence over their principled opposition to the state in general. You can't tell the Palestinians to live under occupation forever - which is why anarchists' solidarity with the Palestinians is worthwhile, even at the price of ideological inconsistency.
And anyway, Gordon argued, on a qualitative level, a Palestinian state is superior to the present situation even if it brings yet another state into existence.
Gordon complained that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has served as a sort of lightning rod for Islamists, as well as deflecting both Israelis and Palestinians to the wrong issues when they should be thinking about anti-capitalism, feminism and ecology.
Finally, by working hand-in-hand with the Palestinians via direct action, anarchists feel they are swaying Palestinian minds and showing them that not all Israelis support the occupation. Solidarity, he argues, is not about supporting those who share your politics, it's about supporting those who struggle against injustice. It matters little that their assumptions, methods, politics and goals differ from our own.
IN A SENSE, anarchists like Gordon have adopted Fatah's plan for the phased destruction of Israel: First dismantle the "occupation" of 1967, then the "occupation" of 1948.
His politics isn't intended as charity for the Palestinians, he explained, it's part of his commitment to building the non-chauvinistic society he envisions.
Such extraordinary inability to gauge reality, and the anarchists' odd blending of naivete and nihilism, does little harm when confronted in a museum art installation. But in the political sphere, muddled relativism and irrationality of this sort are lethal.
It may not be his intent, but Gordon's way will bring us not Emma Goldman's anarchist utopia but a Hamastan, Shari'a law, and the very centralized fascism anarchists claim to oppose.
Thankfully, however, unlike the world of museums, the civilized political realm encourages law, order and stability.
and sometimes even amuses.
The same can't be said
for junk politics
It could have been the Tel Aviv Museum or London's Tate Modern, but this time we had plunked down our cash for admission to Vienna's Secession Building. We were intrigued by this 1898 edifice, with its gold cupola and Art Deco facade, and we vaguely knew there was some kind of Gustav Klimt connection. Sure enough, we found Klimt's famous "Beethoven Frieze" and felt we had got our money's worth.
Afterwards, strolling around the museum, we came across a mammoth, well-lit, white-walled room containing what is euphemistically known in the post-modern art world as an "installation." This one consisted of overturned chairs, shirts and trousers hanging askew on clothing racks or strewn on the floor, shoes thrown about helter-skelter and an open chest of drawers. Two guards patrolled the room in case some working-class philistine took it into his head to try and bring a semblance of order to the place by picking up the clothing or setting straight the overturned chairs.
I've been contentedly trained by my more cultured partner to enjoy the work of a Mark Rothko or a Piet Mondrian and, on a tolerant day, maybe even a Jackson Pollock; I've learned to enjoy colorful paintings that are little more than paint splotches dribbled on canvas - but I draw the line at "installation art," which seems to revel in mayhem, meaningless rebellion and nihilism.
Put it this way: Some folks consider a six-foot-high collection of wooden shipping pallets sandwiching construction debris and packaging material to be "art" - I don't.
But junk art is harmless. Sure, there's the question of whether tax money ought to be thus squandered, but those with nothing to believe in and no frames of reference also pay taxes. So, I say, let them have their overturned chairs, shipping pallets and moaning suitcases (trust me on this one). But in the political realm, I would not cede an inch to anarchy.
THE CHIEF imperative of any political system is stability so that citizens can pursue lives worth living. Everyone is "born free," but the reason, philosophers tell us, that human beings cede their natural-born and absolute freedom to a sovereign (the modern nation state, for example) is because the alternative, every-man-for-himself jungle would be beastly. It would mimic "the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" state of nature depicted by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterpiece of political theory, Leviathan.
In other words, the anarchist idea that the authority of the state is inherently illegitimate and ought to be resisted is a prescription for sending humanity back to the early Stone Age.
To buy into the anarchist worldview requires a very special combination of naivete and nihilism. Still, though few in numbers, anarchists have made their raucous, often violent mark on society by hijacking the anti-globalization cause and, locally, by championing the Palestinians' war against Israel.
Most anarchists align themselves with the hard Left (though libertarian capitalist thinkers such as Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick were exceptions).
Generally speaking, anarchists share a wildly optimistic conception of human nature, believing that people are intrinsically good; and that if only the corruptive, coercive State would get out of the way, humanity's default temperament would lead it to mutual aid and utopia. Emma Goldman asserted in 1917: "Anarchy stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraints of government."
In her 1931 autobiography, Goldman explained that such absolute freedom would be feasible because anarchy offers "the possibility of organization without discipline, fear or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty."
FRANKLY, I can more easily abide anarchy's pie-in-the-sky idealism than its down-to-earth hypocrisy. But in any event, I cannot forgive anarchists for having, in effect, made common cause with retrograde Islamist and Palestinian Arab terrorists.
Anarchist hypocrisy manifests itself in a myriad ways. You won't find anarchists jetting off to Moscow or Beijing searching for a confrontation with Russian or Chinese security forces. So what if those regimes are illegally trading weapons to Sudan for use by the Janjaweed militias in the Darfour genocide? So what if Russia and China are polluting the earth's environment with abandon while restricting civil liberties - killing reporters, blocking access to the Web? None of this tips the scales for "direct action" against Russia or China.
You won't find anarchists peacefully marching in any Arab capital, let alone looking for a "direct action" opportunity in defense of gay rights, women's rights or workers' rights. The most you can hope for is a limp Web site posting support for Egyptian textile workers.
Mugabe's reign of terror in Zimbabwe draws a yawn from the worldwide anarchist community. You won't see anarchists marching in the streets of Brazzaville to protest the exploitation of children kidnapped and forced to become soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The mass starvation of Korean peasants carried out by the murderous Pyongyang regime doesn't elicit anarchist "direct action."
Nor does Iran's institutionalized oppression of women, execution of children as young as 14 or campaign against the Baha'i community serve as an incentive for "direct action." And, needless to say, anarchists are not rioting outside Iranian embassies to call attention to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's efforts to build nuclear reactors - let alone proliferate atom bombs - in the Middle East.
Come to think of it, as venues for rioting, anarchists prefer more comfortable Western settings - Scotland (2005), Davos (2000), Seattle (1999), Genoa (2001), Prague (2000), Madrid (1994), Nice (2000) and London (1999) - places where you're never too far from good food, hot water, the Internet and a not-unsympathetic media.
The next big anarchist circus will take place on the outskirts of Heiligendamm, a Baltic Sea resort in northern Germany, where leaders of the G-8 are scheduled to meet in June. It's tough to be a revolutionary.
THE MAJORITY of non-Arab foreign "activists" who come to Israel for "direct action" in support of the Palestinian war effort are anarchists. Israel offers that extra buzz of (self-inflicted) danger - you never know, you might slip under an army bulldozer and your suddenly meaningful life become fodder for a progressive playwright.
In fairness, we can't really expect foreign anarchists to know that had the Palestinian Arab leadership not defied the UN's 1947 plan for the Partition of Palestine, there would already be a Palestinian state alongside a truncated Israel. Or that - more recently - it was Yasser Arafat who launched the second intifada, in September 2000, by rejecting Ehud Barak's obscenely munificent peace offer. Or that before the IDF got a handle on the "free flow of Palestinian traffic," suicide bombers and drive-by shooters had slaughtered 1,130 Israeli bus passengers, caf and mall patrons and schoolchildren.
We can't expect anarchists to know that thanks to the barriers, checkpoints, fences, walls and ancillary "indignities" Palestinian Arabs now face, the number of Israeli fatalities is down dramatically, from 451 killed in 2002 to 30 last year.
We really can't expect foreign anarchists to be aware that before the current Palestinian violence, West Bank and Gaza Arabs could travel to Tel Aviv unimpeded (you'd see cars with the PA's green license plates all over the country) or that traffic between Gaza and the West Bank flowed freely.
Nor can we expect foreign anarchists to know that Arab terrorists relentlessly attacked Israel between 1948 and 1967 - before there was a West Bank "occupation."
I suppose a deeply-rooted ignorance of history is as essential to any genuine anarchist as a complete misreading of human nature.
I AM, HOWEVER, far less indulgent of Israeli-born Jewish anarchists. They know the deadly consequences of removing IDF blockades from roads connecting Palestinian Authority areas of the West Bank to thoroughfares such as Route 60, which runs up and down the spine of Judea and Samaria.
And yet these anarchists can be seen trying to remove those same barricades. Every Friday the Israeli anarchists join comrades from abroad and local Palestinian Arabs at the security barrier near Bil'in (just over the Green Line, in the vicinity of Modi'in Illit) for a choreographed "direct action." They know how many lives the security barrier has saved, yet they try to tear it down.
Israeli anarchists live at the furthermost anti-Zionist reaches of hard-Left lalaland. How else to explain why well-educated, financially comfortable Jewish young people would commit themselves to dismantling the world's only Jewish country (on the grounds that they oppose the coercive structure of the state), yet devote themselves to promoting, in its place, the building of what in all likelihood would be a violently coercive Islamist state?
They assiduously film, photograph and disseminate their violent encounters with the IDF, hoping to make it onto the Israeli evening news (and into the international media). Their modus operandi is to taunt the soldiers with some form of vandalism or violence; and then, in a sort of video ambush, "document" the troops "overreacting" to the anarchists' "direct action."
Good footage isn't hard to manufacture, and it was fairly predictable that producers of Israeli television news programs would allow "good pictures" to trump their news judgment.
Forced on May 9 to choose between another installment of the annual State Comptroller's Report on government efficiency or IDF soldiers and Border Police wrestling with anarchist women and poking male anarchists in the stomach with a rifle barrel south of Hebron, Channel 10 and Channel 2 both opted to lead their broadcasts with the action footage helpfully supplied by the anarchists.
DR. URI GORDON, who is both a scholar of anarchism and himself an anarchist, defended, in the course of a telephone conversation and exchange of e-mails, the behavior of Israeli anarchists. He said that Israel's 200 to 300 anarchists place greater importance on the journey ("direct action") than on the destination - a world without states or borders comprising communities where everybody lives in equality and mutual aid.
According to Gordon, anarchists champion a Palestinian state because the Palestinians are anyway living under the dominion of a state - Israel. Anarchists' commitment to human rights, he explained, must take precedence over their principled opposition to the state in general. You can't tell the Palestinians to live under occupation forever - which is why anarchists' solidarity with the Palestinians is worthwhile, even at the price of ideological inconsistency.
And anyway, Gordon argued, on a qualitative level, a Palestinian state is superior to the present situation even if it brings yet another state into existence.
Gordon complained that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has served as a sort of lightning rod for Islamists, as well as deflecting both Israelis and Palestinians to the wrong issues when they should be thinking about anti-capitalism, feminism and ecology.
Finally, by working hand-in-hand with the Palestinians via direct action, anarchists feel they are swaying Palestinian minds and showing them that not all Israelis support the occupation. Solidarity, he argues, is not about supporting those who share your politics, it's about supporting those who struggle against injustice. It matters little that their assumptions, methods, politics and goals differ from our own.
IN A SENSE, anarchists like Gordon have adopted Fatah's plan for the phased destruction of Israel: First dismantle the "occupation" of 1967, then the "occupation" of 1948.
His politics isn't intended as charity for the Palestinians, he explained, it's part of his commitment to building the non-chauvinistic society he envisions.
Such extraordinary inability to gauge reality, and the anarchists' odd blending of naivete and nihilism, does little harm when confronted in a museum art installation. But in the political sphere, muddled relativism and irrationality of this sort are lethal.
It may not be his intent, but Gordon's way will bring us not Emma Goldman's anarchist utopia but a Hamastan, Shari'a law, and the very centralized fascism anarchists claim to oppose.
Thankfully, however, unlike the world of museums, the civilized political realm encourages law, order and stability.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Brest-Litovsk and all that
A nation has a right - even and obligation - to transmit particularistic values
If H.G. Wells was right that human history is a race between education and catastrophe, then I am prudently running with the pessimists. Consider the poor return on the investment we Jews have made in perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust - museums, memorials, anti-genocide curricula and entire libraries weighted down by personal testimonies - only to discover that the forces of ignorance, or evil, prevail after all.
Each Holocaust Remembrance Day brings fresh disappointments: This year, former Sephardi chief rabbi (no less) Mordechai Eliahu put the blame for the destruction of European Jewry on the Reform movement for making God angry. Previously, another former Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, explained that the murdered were "the reincarnation of earlier souls who sinned and caused others to sin and did all sorts of forbidden acts." They returned to be killed in atonement for their sins.
Such being the thinking of benighted "spiritual authorities," is it any wonder that a majority of Israeli youth (66 percent of high school students) prefer to focus on the universal rather than the "narrow Jewish" message of the Holocaust?
Should we be taken aback that one in four Israeli Arabs believes the Holocaust never happened? That a German bishop on a visit to Yad Vashem (of all places) could compare Ramallah 2007 to the Warsaw Ghetto? That more than a quarter of British young people "don't know" if the Holocaust is a myth; and that 31% of them would rename Holocaust Memorial Day the more generic "Genocide Day"?
Let them. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that Israelis should discontinue preaching "our" Holocaust to the outside world and stop schlepping every foreign dignitary who lands at Ben-Gurion Airport to Yad Vashem. That we should not much care how non-Zionist Jews, whether ultra-Orthodox or ultra-assimilated, spin their lessons of the Shoah.
SINCE 1945 the Jewish world has gone through a series of stages in grappling with memorializing the Holocaust. Historian Peter Novick, in The Holocaust and Collective Memory (a problematic book, yet well worth reading), examines how the Holocaust narrative became part of the collective Jewish consciousness.
In the wake of World War II, Holocaust memory was marginalized, compartmentalized; for Israelis there was a country to build; for US Jews there was a ladder of upward mobility to climb. Novick writes: "Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse - especially discourse directed to gentiles."
By the late 1960s and early 1970s (when violent Black and Puerto Rican anti-Semitism in the inner cities was at its peak), the memory of the Holocaust was redefined as a basis for a new Jewish identity: We had been victims once, but now "never again." This form of identity, I know from my own experience, evolved into ethnic pride, Jewish nationalism, pro-Israelism (in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War), and served as a catalyst for the Soviet Jewry movement.
Somehow by 1993, when Hollywood's Steven Spielberg came out with Schindler's List and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors (with the federal government covering most of the operating expenses), the Holocaust had been transformed from a unique collective Jewish memory into a shared phenomenon of pop culture.
Today we're at the point where popular culture remembers the Holocaust as a manifestation of "man's inhumanity to man," while reactionaries (and the badly informed) dispute whether it ever really happened.
Novick argues that Holocaust remembrance is too complex for a single "bumper sticker" message to emerge. He's basically right. He's also correct that no one can impose a single "lesson" to be derived from the Holocaust on all Jews, much less all humanity.
On the other hand, as a society, Zionist Israel (at least) needs to establish parameters for understanding and perpetuating Shoah remembrance.Specifically, we don't want to see a repeat of the way Holocaust imagery was exploited by ultra-right-wing opponents of the Gaza disengagement, any more than we want young Israelis to comprehend the Shoah through post-Zionist lenses.
EVERY POLITICAL culture has a right - indeed an obligation - to politically socialize its youth.Thus if education is to defeat catastrophe, the beleaguered Israeli educational system needs to find a way to make sacred again that which has been profaned. We must abandon teaching the universalistic message of the Shoah - not because it doesn't have one, but because non-Israelis can be counted upon to promulgate it. No one but we Zionist Israelis can be counted upon to remember the Shoah as a unique tragedy of Jewish statelessness.
In the face of medieval-thinking rabbis, Iranian Holocaust-deniers and an indifferent, relativist world, I wouldn't shy away from a sort of Shoah "catechism," so that, at a minimum, Zionist-educated youth (secular, religious, left- and right-wing) know how to understand, and how to remember, what happened to the Jewish people between 1933 and 1945.
For instance, had I the ear of Education Minister Yuli Tamir, I'd suggest she encourage Israeli teachers to instruct our youth about events in Poland this very month 70 years ago. And to remind our youth that May 1937 was two years and four months before the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Thus they'd learn that on May 9, the Polish Medical Association resolved that Jews would no longer be eligible for membership. The Polish Lawyers Association decided to create a quota limiting the number of Jewish attorneys to 10% of its membership. And Fascist parties were marching through Warsaw in support of an "Anti-Jewish Month."
I'd want our young people to know that on May 13 the worst pogrom experienced by Jews in years burst out in Brest-Litovsk (today in Belarus). Perhaps they would also be taught that, as a result of Holocaust desensitization, the very word "pogrom" has lost its meaning: "an organized, often officially encouraged massacre" against the Jews.
The police of Brest-Litovsk - whose population was more than 50% Jewish - provided back-up as peasants raped, robbed and looted. What set off the violence was a report that a Jewish butcher, discovered illegally slaughtering meat, had stabbed a Polish policeman.
I DON'T KNOW if there was a Reform temple in Brest-Litovsk, or if the pogrom's victims had been reincarnated, but this I do know: The events of May 1937 were part of a long series of anti-Semitic outbreaks ignited in the wake of Poland's emergence as an independent state after World War I.
The country had come into being in 1918, with 19 million ethnic Poles despising the fact that they had been saddled with three million Jews. And so it was that by 1920, the Polish Army under Jozef Pilsudski (who himself was said not to be an anti-Semite) stormed through the Jewish communities of the Ukraine, slaughtering 30,000 Jews.
How many Israeli students know that in 1922 Polish Jews had to stay off the streets during democratic elections so their mere existence didn't enrage their Polish neighbors? Or, getting back to 1937, that Jewish college students were obliged to sit on segregated classroom benches (many preferred to stand as a form of protest)?
And how many Israeli students know that by 1937 a "cold pogrom" had systematically eliminated Jews from Polish economic life? That during the period between the two world wars, Poles made Jewish life utterly miserable? That the Polish oligarchy, gentry, Church and politicians shared a mutual interest in blaming Poland's economic depression and political difficulties on the Jews?
Who today recalls that Polish industries in which Jews were prominent (tobacco, shoemaking, liquor, matches, salt) were nationalized and Jewish workers summarily dismissed? One example: Of 2,800 shoemaking establishments, 2,060 were closed.Thus, prior to the Shoah, there had been an almost complete collapse of Jewish economic life. Before a single Nazi boot set foot in Poland, 80% of Jewish children in Vilna already had TB or anemia.
A Zionist education also requires the following knowledge: Even as Poland officially implored Britain to open the gates of Palestine so it could be rid of its accursed Jews, the Catholic primate of Poland, August Cardinal Hlond, was instructing his flock to boycott Jewish businesses.
THIS, THEN, was Poland in the "good times" before the Nazis came. Similar narratives played out elsewhere in Eastern Europe. One calamity washes away the memory of another.
It's bad enough that so much of post-World War I European Jewish history - the pogroms, the starvation, the institutionalized racism - has been forgotten, overshadowed by Hitler's war of annihilation that came afterwards. But the ultimate obscenity is that we should live to see the memory of the Holocaust itself perverted, desensitized and robbed of its Jewish character and Zionist message.
In the race between Zionist education and the catastrophic loss of the Holocaust's message for Jews, it seems to me that Israel's educational establishment needs to develop a core curriculum, acceptable across the political spectrum, from Hashomer Hatza'ir to Bnei Akiva, from Meretz to the National Union. Let each Zionist worldview bring its own nuances, so long as this fundamental and, yes, particularistic message is transmitted: that our statelessness set the stage for the Shoah, and only a secure Israel can increase the prospect of Jewish continuity in history.
The rest is commentary
If H.G. Wells was right that human history is a race between education and catastrophe, then I am prudently running with the pessimists. Consider the poor return on the investment we Jews have made in perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust - museums, memorials, anti-genocide curricula and entire libraries weighted down by personal testimonies - only to discover that the forces of ignorance, or evil, prevail after all.
Each Holocaust Remembrance Day brings fresh disappointments: This year, former Sephardi chief rabbi (no less) Mordechai Eliahu put the blame for the destruction of European Jewry on the Reform movement for making God angry. Previously, another former Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, explained that the murdered were "the reincarnation of earlier souls who sinned and caused others to sin and did all sorts of forbidden acts." They returned to be killed in atonement for their sins.
Such being the thinking of benighted "spiritual authorities," is it any wonder that a majority of Israeli youth (66 percent of high school students) prefer to focus on the universal rather than the "narrow Jewish" message of the Holocaust?
Should we be taken aback that one in four Israeli Arabs believes the Holocaust never happened? That a German bishop on a visit to Yad Vashem (of all places) could compare Ramallah 2007 to the Warsaw Ghetto? That more than a quarter of British young people "don't know" if the Holocaust is a myth; and that 31% of them would rename Holocaust Memorial Day the more generic "Genocide Day"?
Let them. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that Israelis should discontinue preaching "our" Holocaust to the outside world and stop schlepping every foreign dignitary who lands at Ben-Gurion Airport to Yad Vashem. That we should not much care how non-Zionist Jews, whether ultra-Orthodox or ultra-assimilated, spin their lessons of the Shoah.
SINCE 1945 the Jewish world has gone through a series of stages in grappling with memorializing the Holocaust. Historian Peter Novick, in The Holocaust and Collective Memory (a problematic book, yet well worth reading), examines how the Holocaust narrative became part of the collective Jewish consciousness.
In the wake of World War II, Holocaust memory was marginalized, compartmentalized; for Israelis there was a country to build; for US Jews there was a ladder of upward mobility to climb. Novick writes: "Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse - especially discourse directed to gentiles."
By the late 1960s and early 1970s (when violent Black and Puerto Rican anti-Semitism in the inner cities was at its peak), the memory of the Holocaust was redefined as a basis for a new Jewish identity: We had been victims once, but now "never again." This form of identity, I know from my own experience, evolved into ethnic pride, Jewish nationalism, pro-Israelism (in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War), and served as a catalyst for the Soviet Jewry movement.
Somehow by 1993, when Hollywood's Steven Spielberg came out with Schindler's List and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors (with the federal government covering most of the operating expenses), the Holocaust had been transformed from a unique collective Jewish memory into a shared phenomenon of pop culture.
Today we're at the point where popular culture remembers the Holocaust as a manifestation of "man's inhumanity to man," while reactionaries (and the badly informed) dispute whether it ever really happened.
Novick argues that Holocaust remembrance is too complex for a single "bumper sticker" message to emerge. He's basically right. He's also correct that no one can impose a single "lesson" to be derived from the Holocaust on all Jews, much less all humanity.
On the other hand, as a society, Zionist Israel (at least) needs to establish parameters for understanding and perpetuating Shoah remembrance.Specifically, we don't want to see a repeat of the way Holocaust imagery was exploited by ultra-right-wing opponents of the Gaza disengagement, any more than we want young Israelis to comprehend the Shoah through post-Zionist lenses.
EVERY POLITICAL culture has a right - indeed an obligation - to politically socialize its youth.Thus if education is to defeat catastrophe, the beleaguered Israeli educational system needs to find a way to make sacred again that which has been profaned. We must abandon teaching the universalistic message of the Shoah - not because it doesn't have one, but because non-Israelis can be counted upon to promulgate it. No one but we Zionist Israelis can be counted upon to remember the Shoah as a unique tragedy of Jewish statelessness.
In the face of medieval-thinking rabbis, Iranian Holocaust-deniers and an indifferent, relativist world, I wouldn't shy away from a sort of Shoah "catechism," so that, at a minimum, Zionist-educated youth (secular, religious, left- and right-wing) know how to understand, and how to remember, what happened to the Jewish people between 1933 and 1945.
For instance, had I the ear of Education Minister Yuli Tamir, I'd suggest she encourage Israeli teachers to instruct our youth about events in Poland this very month 70 years ago. And to remind our youth that May 1937 was two years and four months before the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Thus they'd learn that on May 9, the Polish Medical Association resolved that Jews would no longer be eligible for membership. The Polish Lawyers Association decided to create a quota limiting the number of Jewish attorneys to 10% of its membership. And Fascist parties were marching through Warsaw in support of an "Anti-Jewish Month."
I'd want our young people to know that on May 13 the worst pogrom experienced by Jews in years burst out in Brest-Litovsk (today in Belarus). Perhaps they would also be taught that, as a result of Holocaust desensitization, the very word "pogrom" has lost its meaning: "an organized, often officially encouraged massacre" against the Jews.
The police of Brest-Litovsk - whose population was more than 50% Jewish - provided back-up as peasants raped, robbed and looted. What set off the violence was a report that a Jewish butcher, discovered illegally slaughtering meat, had stabbed a Polish policeman.
I DON'T KNOW if there was a Reform temple in Brest-Litovsk, or if the pogrom's victims had been reincarnated, but this I do know: The events of May 1937 were part of a long series of anti-Semitic outbreaks ignited in the wake of Poland's emergence as an independent state after World War I.
The country had come into being in 1918, with 19 million ethnic Poles despising the fact that they had been saddled with three million Jews. And so it was that by 1920, the Polish Army under Jozef Pilsudski (who himself was said not to be an anti-Semite) stormed through the Jewish communities of the Ukraine, slaughtering 30,000 Jews.
How many Israeli students know that in 1922 Polish Jews had to stay off the streets during democratic elections so their mere existence didn't enrage their Polish neighbors? Or, getting back to 1937, that Jewish college students were obliged to sit on segregated classroom benches (many preferred to stand as a form of protest)?
And how many Israeli students know that by 1937 a "cold pogrom" had systematically eliminated Jews from Polish economic life? That during the period between the two world wars, Poles made Jewish life utterly miserable? That the Polish oligarchy, gentry, Church and politicians shared a mutual interest in blaming Poland's economic depression and political difficulties on the Jews?
Who today recalls that Polish industries in which Jews were prominent (tobacco, shoemaking, liquor, matches, salt) were nationalized and Jewish workers summarily dismissed? One example: Of 2,800 shoemaking establishments, 2,060 were closed.Thus, prior to the Shoah, there had been an almost complete collapse of Jewish economic life. Before a single Nazi boot set foot in Poland, 80% of Jewish children in Vilna already had TB or anemia.
A Zionist education also requires the following knowledge: Even as Poland officially implored Britain to open the gates of Palestine so it could be rid of its accursed Jews, the Catholic primate of Poland, August Cardinal Hlond, was instructing his flock to boycott Jewish businesses.
THIS, THEN, was Poland in the "good times" before the Nazis came. Similar narratives played out elsewhere in Eastern Europe. One calamity washes away the memory of another.
It's bad enough that so much of post-World War I European Jewish history - the pogroms, the starvation, the institutionalized racism - has been forgotten, overshadowed by Hitler's war of annihilation that came afterwards. But the ultimate obscenity is that we should live to see the memory of the Holocaust itself perverted, desensitized and robbed of its Jewish character and Zionist message.
In the race between Zionist education and the catastrophic loss of the Holocaust's message for Jews, it seems to me that Israel's educational establishment needs to develop a core curriculum, acceptable across the political spectrum, from Hashomer Hatza'ir to Bnei Akiva, from Meretz to the National Union. Let each Zionist worldview bring its own nuances, so long as this fundamental and, yes, particularistic message is transmitted: that our statelessness set the stage for the Shoah, and only a secure Israel can increase the prospect of Jewish continuity in history.
The rest is commentary
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Prayer books and resurrection
Banished to a desert island
which 'siddur' would you
want to take with you?
Our sages instructed: When you address the Holy One, let your words be few.
That's certainly been my approach, though I've piously managed to accumulate scores of siddurim, or prayer books. My latest acquisition - a gift from my London-based parents-in-law - is the recently released Authorised Daily Prayer Book, popularly known as the "new Singer's."
You'll find a siddur, along with the Pentateuch, in every Jewishly-literate home across the denominational divide. But while the Hebrew words of the Torah are firmly codified, the siddur thrives in a multitude of variations. Lately, I've been ruminating on their relative merits and theological approaches.
My most prized siddur, recently rebound, is my late mother's Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem by Philip Birnbaum (1904-1988) issued by Hebrew Publishing. It's the quintessential American Orthodox siddur, first published in 1949. Birnbaum wanted the Hebrew text of his siddur to be of uniform typeface, abhorring the helter-skelter boldface paragraphing found in Old World siddurim.
His translation sought to express reverence, as Birnbaum explained, without appearing archaic. By including the prayer for the State of Israel, "the Birnbaum" reflected American Orthodoxy's newly discovered identification with the Zionist enterprise.
A good yardstick for gauging a siddur's theology is to examine how it handles the resurrection prayer in the thrice-daily Amida (18 Benedictions). Here's how Birnbaum does it: "Thou art faithful to revive the dead. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead." No fudging the literalist definition of the original Hebrew.
SIDDURIM DIFFER liturgically, while maintaining a core of standard prayers. The style differences - what's included, and in what order - is called nusah. (Just to confound matters, nusah can also refer to the different melodies employed in the service depending on a congregation's cultural roots.)
The prayer "style" I'm most comfortable with is nusah Ashkenaz, in which the prayers are comparatively concise, following the practice favored by Jews whose roots are traceable to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belorussia and Lithuania. The Birnbaum siddur follows this tradition.
My father, a hassid from Central Europe, favors nusah Sephard, which is comparable (but not identical) to the Sephardi minhag, or "binding custom," favored by Middle Eastern Jews. But the Yiddish commentary in his siddur quickly establishes that while my father may daven Sephardi, he's not of the Orient.
The point is, there are dozens of style variations in how prayer books are organized - Italian, Yemenite, Spanish and Portuguese, Western European, Central and East European, and so on - just as there are a wide range of melodic variations. While Jewish prayer eschews personal improvisation and is ideally conducted in a quorum, don't let anyone tell you there is only one "correct" approach to Jewish worship.
INFLUENCED by the Talmud, the first prayer book was compiled by Amram Gaon (circa 846-864); his Seder Rav Amram Gaon is the basis of all subsequent siddurim. Other sages followed with modifications, adding layers of rules to guide worshipers on how the three daily services should be ordered and conducted.
As best as I can discover, the siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865; though an Italian siddur printed by Soncino dates back to 1486. The siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538. The first - unauthorized - English translation, by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur (a pseudonym), appeared in London in 1738. A different English translation came out in the US in 1837. Incidentally, many of the siddurim in print today are knock-off editions of originals which have lost their copyright.
Search Amazon.com for "siddur" and you'll get 1,200 hits.
GETTING BACK to my collection: There's the Hirsch Siddur, with commentary by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (born 1808) and published by the German-Jewish Feldheim house in 1972. Hirsch was unyielding in his opposition to Reform Judaism, and this is made plain in his commentary on the Amida's references to resurrection: "There can hardly be another thought that can so inspire man firmly to resolve to live a life so vigorous, unwavering, fearless, and unswervingly dutiful than the belief in [resurrection]…"
Then there's the Authorized Daily Prayer Book by Dr. J.H. Hertz, published by Soncino in 1941, a classic in British modern Orthodox erudition.
Let me digress to explain that, for me, "modern" Orthodoxy does not connote laxity in adherence to Halacha, but rather openness to constructive influences from the larger cultural milieu. This worldview permeates Hertz's Pentateuch even more than his siddur.
Hertz's siddur gives helpful margin citations indicating the textual origins of the prayers; not surprisingly, most come from the Bible.
Here's how he translates the Amida's resurrection prayer: "Yea, faithful art thou to revive the dead. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead."
Comments Hertz: "This emphatic statement concerning the resurrection was directed especially against the worldlings who disputed the deathlessness of the soul, its return to God, and its continued separate existence after its reunion with the Divine source of being."
For reasons best known to my British friends, Hertz's siddur never took off, and United Synagogue congregations stuck with the Authorised Daily Prayer Book translated by Rev. Simeon Singer (1890). His work includes the cherished "He-who" supplication: "He who giveth salvation unto Kings and dominion unto princes, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, - may he bless Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth… and all the Royal family…."
Like the Birnbaum, the post-1948 Singer also provided the Prayer for the State of Israel.
THE 1984 PUBLICATION of the Artscroll Mesorah Siddur, edited by Nosson Scherman, heralded an ultra-Orthodox ascendancy in America.
Frankly, I have a love-hate relationship with Artscroll. I adore the clarity of the radically improved Hebrew font and typography; I appreciate that the siddur is a godsend for thousands who have returned to tradition but may feel like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Orthodox service, not knowing when to rise, when to genuflect, when to take three paces back, or which way to shake a lulav. Artscroll tells them all that.
I'm not a fan of the English font because the script is difficult to read. But my biggest criticism is of the translation and commentary, which is fundamentalist to the core - for example, the use of "Hashem" for the Tetragrammaton instead of "O Lord," or the decision to use Ashkenazi transliteration (aleph-beis).
Here's how Artscroll handles the Amida resurrection prayer: "And You are faithful to resuscitate the dead. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who resuscitates the dead."
I also don't appreciate the absence of a prayer for Israel (special imprints excepted). And it troubles me that many folks will come to the conclusion that Artscroll's approach to prayer is the "authentic" one, and innovation a sin.
I HAVEN'T broken in the "new Singer" yet, but I already value its Artscroll-like Hebrew typeface, fine paper and uncluttered layout. The new translation and commentary is by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and includes a section on understanding prayer, in which he addresses the perennial question: "Is prayer answered?" concluding: Yes, it is never in vain.
Singer traditionalists will be glad to know that while "giveth" is gone; the "He-who" prayer survives.
And Sacks largely sticks with the old Singer's traditionalist translation of the resurrection prayer: "Faithful are You to revive the dead. Blessed are You, Lord, who revives the dead."
THE GAPING holes in my collection are the absence of siddurim from the Reconstructionist, Yemenite and Chabad rites. But I do have siddurim from the Conservative and Reform movements. For instance, the Conservative Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book edited by Morris Silverman with Robert Gordis (1927/1946), now outdated - no prayer for Israel - had much to recommend it.
In keeping with the ethos of classical Conservative Judaism, the editors write: "There will naturally be instances… where reinterpretation is impossible and the traditional formulation cannot be made to serve the modern outlook…. Thus, the emphasis in the Prayer Book upon the messiah need not mean for us the belief in a personal redeemer, but it serves superbly as the poetic and infinitely moving symbol of the messianic age."
In other words, this is not the siddur for those of you inclined to Chabad's messianic mantra, Yechi adonenu, rabbenu vemorenu, melech ha-mashiah le'olam va'ed at the conclusion of your morning prayers.
I kind of like what Silverman does with resurrection. He translates the Amida prayer: "Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed are Thou… who callest the dead to everlasting life."
I have another Conservative prayer book, Siddur Sim Shalom, edited by Jules Harlow (1985). I like that it provides various liturgical options; is egalitarian - so that worshipers thank God for making them in "Thine image" rather than, for instance, "a man." I also never liked thanking God that he didn't make me a gentile, and much prefer the Conservative approach captured in Sim Shalom: "who made me an Israelite."
They've also deleted all the stuff about Temple sacrifices (which I skip, anyway). But there's no way this could have become my "regular" siddur largely because the page flow just isn't intuitive and the alternate services options just get in the way once you pick a direction.
My Reform collection is sparse. I have Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book (1975), which captures the movement well into its Zionist phase. Commendably, there are special prayers for Yom Ha'atzma'ut and for Holocaust Remembrance Day, though it has far too many service options. But the interface of the Hebrew and English (on the same page) is seamless. There is also a welcome emphasis on spiritualism and meditation; think of it as "structured improvisation."
When it comes to resurrection, my Reform siddur radically transforms the blessing to: "O Lord of life and death, source of salvation… blessed is the Lord, the source of Life."
As it happens, the Reform movement is scheduled to issue Mishkan T'filah: A New Reform Siddur later this year.
WERE I banished to a desert island and able to take, say, just two siddurim, I'd bring the prayer book I use every morning, V'ani Tefilati, issued by the Masorti movement in Israel (Hebrew only). It's egalitarian where you want it to be, but basically it's a straightforward, classical siddur for folks who known their way around the liturgy, are Zionist in orientation and appreciate the clean (ragged) layout.
The other siddur I'd take is the ubiquitous (throughout Israel) national-religious standard bearer Rinat Yisrael (Hebrew only), edited by Shlomo Tal (1976). There are rudimentary instructions, a good, readable font, citations (like the Hertz) for many prayers, and that much-appreciated clean layout.
Funnily enough, none of these siddurim contain one of my favorite prayers, attributed to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It's adored at Alcoholics Anonymous sessions (and equally appropriate, incidentally, for those who've made aliya).
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference."
Amen.
which 'siddur' would you
want to take with you?
Our sages instructed: When you address the Holy One, let your words be few.
That's certainly been my approach, though I've piously managed to accumulate scores of siddurim, or prayer books. My latest acquisition - a gift from my London-based parents-in-law - is the recently released Authorised Daily Prayer Book, popularly known as the "new Singer's."
You'll find a siddur, along with the Pentateuch, in every Jewishly-literate home across the denominational divide. But while the Hebrew words of the Torah are firmly codified, the siddur thrives in a multitude of variations. Lately, I've been ruminating on their relative merits and theological approaches.
My most prized siddur, recently rebound, is my late mother's Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem by Philip Birnbaum (1904-1988) issued by Hebrew Publishing. It's the quintessential American Orthodox siddur, first published in 1949. Birnbaum wanted the Hebrew text of his siddur to be of uniform typeface, abhorring the helter-skelter boldface paragraphing found in Old World siddurim.
His translation sought to express reverence, as Birnbaum explained, without appearing archaic. By including the prayer for the State of Israel, "the Birnbaum" reflected American Orthodoxy's newly discovered identification with the Zionist enterprise.
A good yardstick for gauging a siddur's theology is to examine how it handles the resurrection prayer in the thrice-daily Amida (18 Benedictions). Here's how Birnbaum does it: "Thou art faithful to revive the dead. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead." No fudging the literalist definition of the original Hebrew.
SIDDURIM DIFFER liturgically, while maintaining a core of standard prayers. The style differences - what's included, and in what order - is called nusah. (Just to confound matters, nusah can also refer to the different melodies employed in the service depending on a congregation's cultural roots.)
The prayer "style" I'm most comfortable with is nusah Ashkenaz, in which the prayers are comparatively concise, following the practice favored by Jews whose roots are traceable to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belorussia and Lithuania. The Birnbaum siddur follows this tradition.
My father, a hassid from Central Europe, favors nusah Sephard, which is comparable (but not identical) to the Sephardi minhag, or "binding custom," favored by Middle Eastern Jews. But the Yiddish commentary in his siddur quickly establishes that while my father may daven Sephardi, he's not of the Orient.
The point is, there are dozens of style variations in how prayer books are organized - Italian, Yemenite, Spanish and Portuguese, Western European, Central and East European, and so on - just as there are a wide range of melodic variations. While Jewish prayer eschews personal improvisation and is ideally conducted in a quorum, don't let anyone tell you there is only one "correct" approach to Jewish worship.
INFLUENCED by the Talmud, the first prayer book was compiled by Amram Gaon (circa 846-864); his Seder Rav Amram Gaon is the basis of all subsequent siddurim. Other sages followed with modifications, adding layers of rules to guide worshipers on how the three daily services should be ordered and conducted.
As best as I can discover, the siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865; though an Italian siddur printed by Soncino dates back to 1486. The siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538. The first - unauthorized - English translation, by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur (a pseudonym), appeared in London in 1738. A different English translation came out in the US in 1837. Incidentally, many of the siddurim in print today are knock-off editions of originals which have lost their copyright.
Search Amazon.com for "siddur" and you'll get 1,200 hits.
GETTING BACK to my collection: There's the Hirsch Siddur, with commentary by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (born 1808) and published by the German-Jewish Feldheim house in 1972. Hirsch was unyielding in his opposition to Reform Judaism, and this is made plain in his commentary on the Amida's references to resurrection: "There can hardly be another thought that can so inspire man firmly to resolve to live a life so vigorous, unwavering, fearless, and unswervingly dutiful than the belief in [resurrection]…"
Then there's the Authorized Daily Prayer Book by Dr. J.H. Hertz, published by Soncino in 1941, a classic in British modern Orthodox erudition.
Let me digress to explain that, for me, "modern" Orthodoxy does not connote laxity in adherence to Halacha, but rather openness to constructive influences from the larger cultural milieu. This worldview permeates Hertz's Pentateuch even more than his siddur.
Hertz's siddur gives helpful margin citations indicating the textual origins of the prayers; not surprisingly, most come from the Bible.
Here's how he translates the Amida's resurrection prayer: "Yea, faithful art thou to revive the dead. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead."
Comments Hertz: "This emphatic statement concerning the resurrection was directed especially against the worldlings who disputed the deathlessness of the soul, its return to God, and its continued separate existence after its reunion with the Divine source of being."
For reasons best known to my British friends, Hertz's siddur never took off, and United Synagogue congregations stuck with the Authorised Daily Prayer Book translated by Rev. Simeon Singer (1890). His work includes the cherished "He-who" supplication: "He who giveth salvation unto Kings and dominion unto princes, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, - may he bless Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth… and all the Royal family…."
Like the Birnbaum, the post-1948 Singer also provided the Prayer for the State of Israel.
THE 1984 PUBLICATION of the Artscroll Mesorah Siddur, edited by Nosson Scherman, heralded an ultra-Orthodox ascendancy in America.
Frankly, I have a love-hate relationship with Artscroll. I adore the clarity of the radically improved Hebrew font and typography; I appreciate that the siddur is a godsend for thousands who have returned to tradition but may feel like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Orthodox service, not knowing when to rise, when to genuflect, when to take three paces back, or which way to shake a lulav. Artscroll tells them all that.
I'm not a fan of the English font because the script is difficult to read. But my biggest criticism is of the translation and commentary, which is fundamentalist to the core - for example, the use of "Hashem" for the Tetragrammaton instead of "O Lord," or the decision to use Ashkenazi transliteration (aleph-beis).
Here's how Artscroll handles the Amida resurrection prayer: "And You are faithful to resuscitate the dead. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who resuscitates the dead."
I also don't appreciate the absence of a prayer for Israel (special imprints excepted). And it troubles me that many folks will come to the conclusion that Artscroll's approach to prayer is the "authentic" one, and innovation a sin.
I HAVEN'T broken in the "new Singer" yet, but I already value its Artscroll-like Hebrew typeface, fine paper and uncluttered layout. The new translation and commentary is by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and includes a section on understanding prayer, in which he addresses the perennial question: "Is prayer answered?" concluding: Yes, it is never in vain.
Singer traditionalists will be glad to know that while "giveth" is gone; the "He-who" prayer survives.
And Sacks largely sticks with the old Singer's traditionalist translation of the resurrection prayer: "Faithful are You to revive the dead. Blessed are You, Lord, who revives the dead."
THE GAPING holes in my collection are the absence of siddurim from the Reconstructionist, Yemenite and Chabad rites. But I do have siddurim from the Conservative and Reform movements. For instance, the Conservative Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book edited by Morris Silverman with Robert Gordis (1927/1946), now outdated - no prayer for Israel - had much to recommend it.
In keeping with the ethos of classical Conservative Judaism, the editors write: "There will naturally be instances… where reinterpretation is impossible and the traditional formulation cannot be made to serve the modern outlook…. Thus, the emphasis in the Prayer Book upon the messiah need not mean for us the belief in a personal redeemer, but it serves superbly as the poetic and infinitely moving symbol of the messianic age."
In other words, this is not the siddur for those of you inclined to Chabad's messianic mantra, Yechi adonenu, rabbenu vemorenu, melech ha-mashiah le'olam va'ed at the conclusion of your morning prayers.
I kind of like what Silverman does with resurrection. He translates the Amida prayer: "Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed are Thou… who callest the dead to everlasting life."
I have another Conservative prayer book, Siddur Sim Shalom, edited by Jules Harlow (1985). I like that it provides various liturgical options; is egalitarian - so that worshipers thank God for making them in "Thine image" rather than, for instance, "a man." I also never liked thanking God that he didn't make me a gentile, and much prefer the Conservative approach captured in Sim Shalom: "who made me an Israelite."
They've also deleted all the stuff about Temple sacrifices (which I skip, anyway). But there's no way this could have become my "regular" siddur largely because the page flow just isn't intuitive and the alternate services options just get in the way once you pick a direction.
My Reform collection is sparse. I have Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book (1975), which captures the movement well into its Zionist phase. Commendably, there are special prayers for Yom Ha'atzma'ut and for Holocaust Remembrance Day, though it has far too many service options. But the interface of the Hebrew and English (on the same page) is seamless. There is also a welcome emphasis on spiritualism and meditation; think of it as "structured improvisation."
When it comes to resurrection, my Reform siddur radically transforms the blessing to: "O Lord of life and death, source of salvation… blessed is the Lord, the source of Life."
As it happens, the Reform movement is scheduled to issue Mishkan T'filah: A New Reform Siddur later this year.
WERE I banished to a desert island and able to take, say, just two siddurim, I'd bring the prayer book I use every morning, V'ani Tefilati, issued by the Masorti movement in Israel (Hebrew only). It's egalitarian where you want it to be, but basically it's a straightforward, classical siddur for folks who known their way around the liturgy, are Zionist in orientation and appreciate the clean (ragged) layout.
The other siddur I'd take is the ubiquitous (throughout Israel) national-religious standard bearer Rinat Yisrael (Hebrew only), edited by Shlomo Tal (1976). There are rudimentary instructions, a good, readable font, citations (like the Hertz) for many prayers, and that much-appreciated clean layout.
Funnily enough, none of these siddurim contain one of my favorite prayers, attributed to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It's adored at Alcoholics Anonymous sessions (and equally appropriate, incidentally, for those who've made aliya).
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference."
Amen.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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