Shalom aleichem.
Anniversaries are of course celebrated, for among other things, to mark and honor special occasions, personal milestones, and historical events. On the personal front, my wife and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary recently, and I can’t speak for her, but I for one would sign on for 40 more, or at least as many as possible, before the inevitable and permanent dirt nap that awaits us all.
And then there are those historic milestones, such as the day JFK was shot. We all remember “what we were doing when….” On the day JFK was assassinated, I was a seven year old “pollywog” in 1963 returning from a swim lesson at the YMCA in Natalie Levine’s light blue station wagon hearing the news for the first time on the car’s crackling radio.
On September 11, 2001, I was the only Arthur Andersen Partner that day on the 26th floor of One International Place in Boston hearing that we were potentially under attack from planes that departed from Boston and were flying into tall buildings, including the World Trade Towers. Fearing for our collective safety, I immediately sent everyone home, drove myself home, then watched like the rest of the world as another plane hit the second tower. Later that morning, we received a phone call, I forget from whom, informing us that our cousin Robin Kaplan, died on one of those planes. Robin was a 33 year old beautiful human being on her way to California on American Flight 11, to help TJX set up a new store in the San Francisco area. She had recently spent a month in the hospital battling Crohn’s/colitis, but was working again and feeling better, and was also recently engaged to a fellow TJX employee. Her dreams, her aspirations, her life, were all incinerated as her plane became a missile in the arsenal of terrorism that struck our country that day and ruined so many lives and forever changed America. “We will never forget” what happened on 9/11 became the popular mantra, and I for one, certainly never will. RIP Robin.
Then came October 7, 2023, another “day that will live in infamy”. Roosevelt used that framing for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and it has since become widely used by the media to refer to any moment of supreme disgrace or evil.
I recently downloaded a book I recommend to all, by the Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Israel Alone”. Lévy is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the “Nouveaux Philosophes” movement in 1976. Israel Alone is a passionate and outraged cri-de-coeur, about the loneliness of Israel and the tragedy of October 7, starting with Lévy’s eyewitness account the day after the pogroms. He articulates the horror of the evil he witnesses personally, which I will not repeat here, except for this eloquent passage:
And for a short moment, too short, but long enough to be marked as a black day on the calendar of those who had sworn to remember—the world was gripped by a brutal, ravaging, stunning fear at seeing the Beast unchained and, with its muzzle bared, hungry for Jewish flesh—which is to say, human flesh.
After such a thing, we can always try to drown it in verbiage, bad faith, and an ocean of tweets.
We can, and already have, launched into a frantic yet methodical rewriting of the whole sequence of events.
But everyone saw, everyone knew, everyone recognized the landscape of a hell covered, as in Dante’s Inferno, in blood, fire, and iron.
Evil was there, and it galloped over the patch of ground that the devil had given it.
Evil was back, resounding, insatiable, in a devasted landscape where the light revealed only nothingness.
Radical evil.”
This weekend, as part of one event leading up to the upcoming one year anniversary of the evil committed against innocent Israelis by Hamas during the October 7 pogrom, we attended a lecture after shabbat services, given by Adele Roemer, a resident of Kibbutz Nirim. Hers is just one of many horror stories we have heard or read about, but hearing it directly from someone who lived through it, who lost so many friends in such a horrifying manner, was to say the least, compelling and hard to fathom. Even more hard to fathom was, and unfortunately continues to be, those on the left, including some fellow Jews, that sympathize with and even support the murderous butchers that clearly have a different value for life than most civilized humans.
How pitiable was this response from one of the more noted Jewish thinkers on the left, Joshua Leifer, who wrote after October 7:
“The loss, the tragedy — incomprehensible,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 8:
Are these not the values that led us to oppose the cruel siege of Gaza? To resist the brutalities of the occupation? To oppose apartheid? Where are these values when Israeli children are held hostage, families wiped out, corpses violated before cheering crowds?
People who were supposed to have been interlocutors, partners in some type of common conversation, self-professed human rights defenders, even would-be colleagues are celebrating and glorifying unspeakable acts that violate the most basic elements of human life. I feel sick.
Now is a time to mourn lives, and, against all odds, keep our faith in the possibility of a better future for all people, Palestinians and Israelis alike. We must not give up on that faith, no matter what, for if we lose that faith, everything is lost.
Israelis are still suffering from the trauma imposed upon them by the brutal Hamas butchers. Their feeling of security, however naive it may have been given their surroundings by nations that want them eliminated, has been shattered. There is no longer any hope of a “two state solution” in a land that is still suffering from such a mortal blow. It will take new leadership, and probably generations of de-radicalized jihadists, before Arabs and Jews in the area will once again be able to even talk about peace, never mind implement some kind of solution.
To end on a more positive note, here is more from Lévy’s Israel Alone:
I love this little world of people stranded on the tiny strip of land they finally received, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and by a larger world wet with the rivers of Jewish blood spilled into the torrent of centuries….
And I love this miracle of endurance and intelligence, lucidity and goodness: As on the first day, exactly as on the first day, when they heard their neighbors calling for their death and the destruction of their nation, the Israelis remain, for the most part, faithful to their founding principles and receptive to peace—as soon as the others are too.
That is a living Zionism. That is a radiant, luminous, exemplary Zionism. Perhaps it is now less widely shared than I believe. But it is exemplary because, despite wars, despite blows administered and blows received, it holds fast to Abraham’s commandment: “This house that we have built” should be “a house of prayer for all peoples.”
Let those who disagree with that say so. In so doing, they will simply be saying that they hate people.”
Brad out.
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