What is an Israeli?

Every evening during a break in the 8:00 news, the army radio station (Galai Tzahal) usually devotes a minute to exploring an “Israeli” concept. However, most of the concepts, such as who was the Gaon of Vilna, are not Israeli but part of Jewish religious history. I would imagine that for most of the listeners there is no contradiction, while I am always surprised that no civil rights organization has brought the issue—the total identification of Jewish with Israel on an Army radio station (and one of the most listened to stations in Israel)—to the Israeli Supreme Court.

When did this confusion begin? At one time, the Army elite (of which Galai Tzahal was a part), which was secular, would not have permitted this mix-up of religious and national values. Religion and religious history belonged to the Chief Rabbi in the Army and it was given its due in kosher kitchens and observance of Shabbat in the army. But that all seems long ago—and my constant surprise and even indignation at the army’s implicit support of equating Israeli with Jewish probably just indicates my age and which Israeli Jewish sector to which I belong.

It should be noted—as an aside—that not only Jews serve in the Army. The Druze are loyal members of the services, and an increasing number of Arabs are joining because of the financial benefits that service offers (better mortgage rates, for example).

When I first came to Israel, some 36 years ago (omg!), I looked around and said to myself (with that objectivity that for me is second nature), this is a nation of Jews and Arabs. Yes, it is a Jewish nation because the majority are Jews (and, as a corollary, will only remain a Jewish nation as long as the majority remain Jews), but in fact 10% of the population are Arab (today, that number is closer to 20%), and they, too, are citizens; they, too, are Israelis. I was in the minority. For most everyone, the privilege of being an Israeli was reserved for Jews. I was the only one I knew who deliberately said, “Israeli Jews, “although even to my ears, the phrase sounded redundant. In fact, in those days, Israeli Arabs were nearly invisible. When, as occurred annually, there was a national uproar (for a day or two to express our moral outrage) at the number of Israelis living under the poverty level, Arabs were conspicuously absent from newspaper stories, even though Arabs and haredim (the ultra-orthodox) are the poorest sectors in Israel (the haredim by choice, since they follow Jesus’ advice and serve God not Mammon).

When I came to Israel, it was accepted Zionist history that the institutions of the State of Israel were established by the second and third aliyot—the second built the kibbutzim, the unions, the workers’ Bank (Bank Hapoalim—today the richest bank in Israel!), and the third, the moshavim, while continuing to expand the infrastructure the second had built. There was a great deal of truth to this, but the history ignored large sections of the population, which also existed in these periods and continued to expand afterward. The leading members of these two aliyot were often socialist and anti-religion. The Jew in their eyes was a national and not a religious designation; and during a period of the 20’s and 30’s, they called themselves, “Hebrews,” like Hebrews returning to their land.

Nurit’s grandfather Itzhak was, perhaps, typical of the Third Aliyah. He was raised a Gur (Ger in Yiddish) Hassid, but at the age of 13, realizing that he did not believe in the revelation on Mt. Sinai, he abandoned religion for socialism and pioneering. It may be hard for us to understand this conversion because as Western Jews, our sense of being Jewish is utterly different from his. He was not Polish and Jewish, nor was he knowledgeable about non-Jewish culture. To a great extent, it did not exist for him. Once he rejected Mt. Sinai as revelatory, the only solution for his dilemma was to become a Zionist. Religion no longer existed. Religion and being Jewish were not two sides of the same coin. Religion was a mistaken facet of the greater whole called עם ישראל, the people of Israel.

The members of the second and third aliyot might not have understood the question, what is Jewish? since it was so obvious, so intrinsic to their own self-definition. They freely used religious symbols (the color of the flag is taken from the prayer-shawl for example) and religious language (you “redeemed” the land when you made it part of the Zionist enterprise) without any religious intentions. The kibbutz and moshav movements were the only institutions that deliberately tried to offer coherent secular interpretations of Jewish holidays; that is, to be consistent throughout when throwing out religion as an unnecessary part of Jewish identity. But, in general, secular Zionism eviscerated Jewish history and its symbols of their religious references and only left the national. It was like cutting the Jewish tradition—“Shma Yisrael,” Moses’ pronouncement on descending Mt. Sinai, after all, defines both a people and a religion—in half. To some extent these Zionists laid their own trap; to a great extent the distinction was necessary to create a secular Jewish state, but it would inevitably be compromised.

After the creation of Israel, the State absorbed a large aliyah from Northern Africa and Yemen, for whom Israel was a religious aspiration and Jewish identity was a religious one, and, at times, a crudely racial one (we are all descended from Abraham). The Eastern (or mizrachi) Jews often hated Arabs; this despite the supposedly marvelous tolerance displayed by the Moslem world to Jews. In the Likud overthrow in 1977, Begin shrewdly manipulated the religious longings of his supporters and their deep sense of exploitation by delegitimizing the socialist institutions that had built the nation and introducing the pathos of nostalgia. Begin was all about pathos—the pathos of the underdog and the pathos of the wandering Jew, expelled from place to place, inevitably persecuted by the goyim. Unlike the Workers’ Movement, which explicitly rejected the Diaspora (Nurit still criticizes behavior as galuti, i.e., Diasporalike), Begin embraced the sorrows and travails and implicitly, although secular, the culture of the galut.

Nostalgia has no explicit content. Nostalgia can be sentimental, populist, and, as it often rises when little substance joins people together, it becomes a nebulous, unaccountable, not subject to criticism bond. Nostalgia in Israel is essentially ethnic and it blurs the lines between politics and sectoral prejudice. If the supporters are bound by evocations of Jewish values or Jewish memories, then it is equally clear who cannot participate in this vague welling of sentiment—Arabs. The minute in Galai Tzahal dedicated to Israeli concepts implicitly answers that nostalgic longing as it freely mixes Israeli and Jewish. What is important is that the concepts are old.

After the Six Days War, the number of religious Jews also grew—both those Jews who were drawn to the “redeeming” of ancient Israel and the promise of Messianic redemption and the natural exponential growth of the ultra-religious, the haredim. With the increasing prosperity of the country, more American (and French) religious Jews came because one could live comfortable, American lives in a religious context without feeling like a minority. The country that was famous for demanding sacrifices no longer sustained that image.

In addition, the 70’s introduced the Russian immigration, which came in several waves. The first wave, which ended around 1980, included idealistic Russians who saw themselves as integrating within Israeli society. Afterward, came the majority of the Russians (many hardly Jewish), who jumped on economic opportunity and often disdained Israeli culture (Middle-Eastern) and despised Arabs. The Russians had no experience with democracy and little understanding and occasionally little tolerance for it—and certainly no respect for a truly pluralistic society, where each ethnic group is equal. They were like their ultra-orthodox counterparts—bigoted, racist, with no respect for the history of Israel/Palestine and with few democratic restraints in their political attitudes.[1]

So today, Israel has a large Jewish population with little investment or understanding of democracy and sleight knowledge of the country’s democratic-socialist past. In addition, the Likud is traditionally anti-Arab; in its political campaigns often vulgarly so. Moreover, for a large number of Orthodox, Russians, and Likudniks, Arab claims to equality as Israeli citizens is a privilege that the Jewish majority has the right to deny. For the Orthodox, the right of Jews to this land is unambiguous; they don’t argue with their God. The Left, those who wished for peace and integration within the Middle East, were successfully quieted by the Second Intifada, which more than anything destroyed their prospects in Israel, which threatens to descend into a more and more polarized and less and less democratic country.

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[1] The results of a recent study that were published in HaAretz confirm my generalizations.

New Year

My friend Nick reminded me that once upon a time, I used to go to Rosh Hashanah services on the evening of Rosh Hashanah, but although it was probably not too long ago, it seems as if ages have passed. When you live in Israel, the change in weather, the approach of fall, and the coming new year are so apparent that the spiritual aspect, which in the Diaspora assumes such a prominent role, invariably—if one like me is “secular” and goes with other “secular” Jews—diminishes in importance. When I was young, I never understood why Rosh Hashanah occurred in such an unassuming time of year—usually about the middle of fall—a holiday twixt and between, not like New Years, which took place when winter passed its nadir or Pesach, which invariably inaugurated spring. Rosh Hashanah seemed the new year of nothing.

Until I came to Israel. For at least two weeks now I have noticed cumulus clouds, first signs of autumn, in the sky despite the oppressive summer heat. The sky often is a pale blue as if white gauze has been placed over it, and the sunlight is that beautiful yellow light which in Israel you only get in the fall. So for two weeks now I have been awaiting the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, the harbinger of rains, the narcissus and daffodils in December, the cyclamens in January, and the end of the oppressive, rainless summer: the forerunner of rebirth, which here in Israel occurs in winter when the country again becomes green.

Happy New Year to all! May there be rebirth, joy, prosperity, and health.

Saying Good-bye to Michal

I wish I could weep but I can’t. My second daughter, Michal, left for the States. Keats would write, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains…”

Several days before she left, she said to me that I was probably annoyed that here I had left the U.S. to come to Israel, and now she was going back to America. I told her that, no, that didn’t bother me in the least. I had always expected that since I had left my native land, my kids might do the same.

But the moment after we kissed good-bye, I thought of my great grandparents, Perl and Zachariah Katz. They had had nine children. One, Leyb, died in their home town, Smorgon, as did two of his three children. Six immigrated to the U.S. Two remained; one, a cripple, never married and was murdered in World War II. Zachariah and Perl never saw any of their American grandchildren, who must have been many. My grandmother Sheyne (Sadie in English) was the next to the last to arrive, and she had four children. I had never considered the pain and longing of Perl and Zechariah until the moment saying good-bye to Michal. Afterward, I thought, maybe the expectations were different then, and the pain would have been less. But I could hear my good friend Eileen upbraiding me (softly and with a smile), “Michael, mothers are mothers.”

Perl lost seven of her nine children. She lost them never to see them again or any of her grandchildren—except in photographs that, according to my Uncle Bill, were regularly sent abroad, just as every Simchat Torah, a flag to be carried around the synagogue would arrive from his grandfather. My great-grandmother Perl would not come to the U.S. because she was frightened by the journey across an ocean—iber the yam. She ran the family bakery while her husband Zachariah taught children in a cheder. Sheyne said (without the perspective of an adult not perhaps less selfish as the matriarch of her family, but then Litvak women are not known for sweetness of temperament but for commanding intelligence, criticism—not compliments—and an assumption of respect) of her own mother, that her mother was selfish—she went off to visit her sisters and left Sheyne to manage the shop. But how could a woman respond to a child she knew perhaps at birth she was destined to lose? Sheyne and her brother Hillel were the last to go. Hillel, who married twice, would be the third to die, as he was gunned down in a hotel lobby in 1912.

Perl was expected to financially support the family, cook the meals, clean the house (I don’t know if they had a helper), and bear nine children. Her husband, whom Sheyne obviously loved and whom she described as “edel,” noble, had it far easier. Sheyne remembered him as a father who never imposed his own opinion, and one whom parents entreated to teach their children because he was so gentle with them. With a friend, he subscribed to a Hebrew newspaper, which made him a member of the Hebrew Enlightenment. He would die in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine to where he fled after the Germans invaded Smorgon in World War I. My Uncle Bill said of him: “At night he went to bed. Before turning over, he said, ‘Good night, children,’ turned over and passed away.”

How long ago that was. How many forgotten people.

I don’t remember the names of all Perl and Zachariah’s children—and the list a cousin prepared years ago is no longer at hand. Eli was the oldest. He lived in Connecticut. After they came to America, my grandparents and Bill lived with Eli, but according to Bill, his second wife disliked them—and, as a result, all connection was cut off. I know nothing about Eli’s family. Gittel, I believe was the next. She left with two uncles for America in the 1880’s. According to family legend, she kept kosher for them as they traveled west, and she expected to marry one of them. In the end, she married a Goldberg and lived out her life in Elkader, Iowa, in 1900, a tiny town of about 1,300 residents, where she kept a grocery store with her husband. They had one daughter, Dora, and she adopted one of her sister’s sons after that sister passed away. They were the only Jews in town. On Sundays, she would draw the slats and close the curtains and tell the children to hush so as not to disturb the Gentiles going to church. Dora studied at the University of Chicago, and fell in love with a goy, and, as her mother disapproved—her mother could be a fearsome woman—she never married. Hinde may have been the sister in Milwaukee who passed away, leaving three or four children, one of whom Gittel took in. Sara married a Josephson, and they had two sons and, I believe, a daughter, Leonard, Jimmy, and Gladys. I write these names down knowing there are few alive that saw them or remember them. Jimmy had a son and daughter. We used to visit the Josephsons now and then in Connecticut—heaven knows what happened to those children.

They are all lost in time.

Am Yisroel Hai

A number of weeks ago, I passed once again a familiar grafitti, this time written on stone: “עם ישראל חי”, literally, “the people of Israel live,” under a star of David. I’m always surprised by these recurring signs, as if until I come upon them, I’m quite sure they have gone out of style if not existence. The great god of grafitti has stamped them out of date and they are languishing in forgotten warehouses. But they are neither languishing nor forgotten.

Anyone who bothers to write עם ישראל חי for posterity (and these are always meant as historic signposts) is essentially writing, “The Jewish people still lives.” What is not said is as important—or may be more important—than what is said. It is not to a vacuum that the phrase turns. The grafitti comes as a response to an imaginary non-Jewish audience as if to say, you may try as hard as you wish, but the Jews are still around. Essentially, for all its bold assertiveness, the grafitti is an expression of anxiety.

And that is why I always surprised. As if Israel isn’t 62 years old and, currently, the most powerful and certainly the most prosperous country in the Middle East. Doesn’t the graffiti writer know where he is?

Yes, there is Iran and Hamas and the Hezbollah, all of which would love to see Israel destroyed, but that stamp, עם ישראל חי, appeared before these threats and will reappear when the threats disappear. The angst is at heart, although rooted in historical traumas, ahistorical.

The person writing the grafitti has the Holocaust at his back. He is part of a general and problematic view among Israeli Jews that see themselvesprimarily as victims. I remember when I was still relatively new in Israel (yet had been here a number of years) and a friend commented that he had had a professor who had distinguished between countries that look forward such as the U.S. (excluding Republicans, of course) and those that tend to look backwards, like Israel. I was surprised because I had joined forces with the Workers Movement, where people had come to build and be built. The workers’, Socialist, movement had consciously rejected the pathos of religious Judaism for the dynamic of building a land and a nation. It is that pathos the grafitti recalls, that 2,000 year old memory of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Books that Affected my Life

At work, there is an Internet site where we were asked to name the books that have affected our lives. When I initially considered what books, I thought of one, two, then three, but the more I thought about the subject, the more complex it became. What about books of my childhood when I was a voracious reader? Can I estimate the effect of Freddie the Pig or Mr. Popper’s Penguins? So I found myself digging back into my past, past Oliver Twist and past A Child’s Garden of Verses. The first book of my childhood I picked was Fisherman Sims, illustrated with lovely watercolors, and which I had loved as a young child (and which I still have). Fisherman Sims was tall and thin like my grandfather, although unlike him, Sims had round apple cheeks. He lived in a small town and decided to move farther and farther out and closer to the pond where he fished, until in the winter he lived by the pond (a genuine Thoreau!) and cut a hole in the ice to catch the fish. Inevitably, he returned to the town and to the two small children who were his friends. I remember the story especially for one picture where the tall, lanky fisherman is sitting in the woods, a bird (I believe) is eating out of his hand, and other wild animals surround him. This was the Peaceable Kingdom of my childhood, in which I believed, and fisherman Sims lived, in my child’s eyes, the ideal life.

The next specific book that I remember its effect was Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, which was read to us in the fifth grade, and to which I associate my love of travel and the exhilarating expectation of adventure in foreign lands. I still remember how he stole into Mecca—and was it the wall of the Taj Mahal he climbed to see the moon reflecting in its pools? Whenever Haiti is mentioned in the news, I think immediately of Halliburton’s remarkable history of Toussaint Louverture, the liberator of Haiti. Halliburton offered me both the romantic lure of travel and a democratic conviction both that anyone could do it and that all people were approachable.

Next I would pick two series of books I read avidly as a child, the Random House Landmark history books and a series in red-orange (I believe) illustrated with silhouettes on the childhood of American heroes, of which the one I best remember told about Davy Crockett, Young Rifleman, a book I read parallel to the release of Walt Disney’s movie of which I was a great fan, even having the record of the song, which I played over and over: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…” Those were different times, when each morning we clapped our right hands over our hearts and pledged allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America” and recited in unison the Lord’s Prayer. These history books were part of my patriotic heritage. I was—and remain—a strong American patriot, a paradox of an idealist American expatriate living in a country with different ideals.

But it is the next book I thought of immediately (much to my initial surprise) when I first considered making my list: Black Like Me. Black Like Me described the experiences of a white man who disguised himself as an Afro-American and spent six weeks on a Greyhound bus travelling through the American South. The book conclusively portrayed the bigotries of the South, made bitterly ironic by the fact that the man being ridiculed was actually white. But, moreover, for me it displayed my father’s axiom that there are always two sides to every story – here, the false side seen by the whites and the truer side (yet still a mask) of the black man they faced. It was, of course, a paean to equality and a convincing argument that no man should be judged by the color of his skin. It was, moreover, a remarkable anthropological endeavor – j an attempt at a fully empathetic imagination, for Griffin, the writer, had to imagine the motives of the whites, the responses of blacks, and his own troubled understanding.

Alongside this book, I would place both Poverty in America and the essays of James Baldwin as conclusive for me at that period in my life. They helped form my Weltanschauung, my world view. One taught me that poverty was a social condition capable of reproducing over generations; the other gave me the voice of the outsider and enunciated the pain of the minority who suffered from prejudice.

When I was 20 and living in Berkeley, California, for a marvelous summer, I read the Bhagavad Gita, and that would be the next book I would hang on my list. I don’t remember much of it – just a line or half a line – “poised like a lotus in the Atman” – and its image of stillness in moving waters, at one with an unchanging center seemed like an alluring magical portent of how I would like to be and never would be.

Other books no doubt affected me. I often read The Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew. When I am depressed, I would read Shakespeare whose language, intelligence, and human empathy would revive my spirits. I am surprised that there are no books of poetry – perhaps I should add “The Raven,” by Poe, which I memorized in the fourth or fifth grade – or Poe’s “The Bells,” which introduced me to the musical possibilities of language. Or “The Four Quartets” by Eliot – or “Song of Myself” by Whitman, which I read one ecstatic evening.

Yet the others all seem more like commentary, not the essential.

APAC and Israel - or my Sister Jane

Several weeks ago, when Bernard Avishai wrote a piece about APAC’S cheering reception of Bibi Netanyahu, he asked himself why these intelligent and no doubt well-meaning people would support continuous building in Jerusalem. “I do not mean to ask this question cynically. There is some kind of hole in the heart that backing Netanyahu over "Jerusalem" seems to be filling. There are intelligent and decent people gathered at AIPAC, and many young people who are eager to stand for something. What is it, other than the insistence that they, who "didn't do anything," fiercely admire Israelis who did something?”

It is impossible to write in the name of all the members of APAC or all those Jews who support Israel whether right or wrong, but I can, at least, talk about my sister, who, although not in APAC, is an ardent member of Hadassah and an unswerving supporter of Israel (far more so than her brother).

My sister Jane came of age in the 1950’s in an American suburb. The last of our grandparents immigrated to the States in 1904; my sister and I were raised with no connection to Europe, Yiddish, or Orthodox Jewish culture. But, in the 1950’s, outside Washington, D.C., it was quite apparent that we were Jews. The first two streets in our neighborhood were closed to Jews and blacks. She was the only Jew in her class in high school—and could not attend her best friend’s Sweet Sixteen because it was held in a restricted country club. Despite Jane’s economic success and assimilation into America, that insecurity still best defines her Jewish identity—she knows that in a flash she can become a persona non grata. So, in part, she holds on to Israel to guarantee herself security even in America. Israel must be steadfast to save her from her own precarious situation.

It would be wrong, however, to limit her strong support for Israel to an existential anxiety that rather easily devolves into fears of another Holocaust. For her, belief in Israel is an article of faith. What I am trying to convey is that her faith in Israel is the substance of her Judaism. She knows no Hebrew, is rather illiterate in Jewish matters (other than sentimental Yiddishkeit, which she, no doubt, learned as an adult). Her husband of 20 years is a non-Jew; both Chanukah and Christmas are celebrated at home. She is a completely assimilated Jew except for this – her devotion to Hadassah and her reverence for Israel.

But perhaps I have probed too far into my sister’s psyche, and the answer to Avishai’s perplexity is far simpler. I have only to consider my own American Zionism before I settled in Israel and learned its Zionist history. I knew nothing of the Second Aliyah or the secular, anti-religious Socialism that built this country. My Zionism was based on quasi-religious sentiment; and I would imagine that like me, those in APAC are moved by populist nostalgia, unconnected to the actual history of the modern State, and shaped by the insecurities of a minority. Or rather, perhaps, as nothing gives one a stronger sense of identity than to have an enemy, in pluralistic America, the very tolerance makes being Jewish an ambivalent proposition: Israel and unquestioning loyalty offers an escape from the intolerable quandary of liberal tolerance. Since they live in the United States, they have no urgency to be responsible or rather they have only responsibility to themselves and the nostalgic fantasy that gives them strength.

A Man's a Man for a That

Part 1

On a Thursday night at the end of January, I drove to Jerusalem to celebrate Robbie Burns’ birthday. My friend Naomi has a Scot cousin who every year brings out the whiskey, the haggis (which, this night, was not a haggis* at all, as it had none of the offal that characterizes the dish) and with revelry, jokes and toasts in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic, celebrates the birthday of the Scots bard.

The celebration was rung in to the sound of bagpipes performed by a young man in red tartan kilt, black vest, and a white purse on a chain below his waist. Lenny, Naomi’s cousin, also went about in a kilt, as did a number of the other guests, several of whom spoke in an accent so thick, it might have been cut as easily as the haggis.

The Bard, whose name was given an inimitable pronunciation (at least to me) that was a cross between Barnes and Burns, as if someone spoke with a mouth full when trying to say a German umlaut, was praised in a long toast that claimed facetiously that Rabbie Burns was none other than Rabbi Burns, who secretly belonged to either a Shabbatei Tzvi sect or Chabad.

To my surprise if not amazement, I discovered in Wikipedia not only that the Burns supper in honor of the Bard’s birthday has been celebrated since 1802 but it has a proscribed order.

So in outline form, the order follows:
1. Host’s welcoming speech—This was Lenny’s moment of glory as he mingled more Yiddish words than I knew with Scottish pride and humor.
2. The Selkirk grace – Skipped.
3. Entrance of the haggis. In truth, the haggis (here but a pumpkin shell filled with a thick vegetarian rice pudding, too sweet for both a haggis and my taste) was introduced with bagpipe fanfare. Mercifully, the Burns’ poem, “Address to a Haggis,” which begins, “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face/Great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” was not recited.
4. Supper – delayed until after “Immortal Memory.”
5. “Immortal Memory” – This was when Bobbie Burns was gloriously transformed into Rabbi Burns.
6. Appreciation (for the former speaker) – Skipped
7. Toast to the Lassies – Thankfully brief, since this year the man who usually raises the toast was spare in jokes and what was there was generally as flat as beer set out on a summer day.
8. Reply to the Toast to the Lassies – The woman, who claimed afterward that it was all “rubbish,” had the perfect timing of a stand-up comedienne and brought down the house with her toast to men.
9. Other Toasts and Speeches – Spared
10. Works by Burns—These were both read and sung. See Part 2.
11. Closing – Oddly skipped, since even to an American heretic like me, the closing of a Burns supper is self-evident: everyone sings “Auld Lang Syne.”

Part 2

I would like to write about one of Burns’ songs. Dina, an American who despite her white hair and age looked like the idealist hippy she no doubt once was, played a dulcimer (what else?) and sang, “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” by Robert Burns. The last stanza goes:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that,)

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

“Gree” means the prize for victory. I thought immediately of Schiller’s, “Ode to Joy,” “An die Freude” with its famous line, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” and wondered again at the marvelous hope embodied in those lines. Schiller wrote his ode ten years before Burns; both, no doubt, influenced by the American and French revolutions. How simple that period seems in retrospect—although, of course, it wasn’t: the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s Wars—but the current of events was limited to Europe and, in part, to the New World, as Europe’s extension. There was no immediate knowledge of the globe, no El Qaeda, no war on terror or Iran’s nuclear threat. Burns could have the conviction that sense and wealth, over all the earth, would bear the prize, for all that, and under their influence, mankind would realize that all men are brothers.

In the Middle East, that conviction retains its radical ring. The Middle East, as I’ve written before, is about putting up fences to define who you are, where one is assaulted daily by the bigotries of tribal loyalty, and many if not most Orthodox Jews and Moslems would never consider the possibility that all men might be brothers. I return to a story I’ve told before. Once, on visiting an Arab friend in Nazareth, we switched to English, since he had spent several years in Berkeley, CA. Suddenly, it seemed to me that in English, unlike Hebrew, Arab and Jew ceased to be relevant. English offered a different Weltanschauung—perhaps, after all, because neither of us was English and the language had no native, patriotic roots in the Motherland; it was, in this case, a lingua franca.

And yet, one can argue, that the Jews, especially the Jews, have a case for disbelieving in idealistic, rather Christian convictions of the brotherhood of man, for throughout history, they have been singled out. I might be laughed at for Robbie Burns’ convictions: no proof is forthcoming. That is the power of the narrow-minded, for evil in history is always there to back them up.

Lenny’s son had protested the past weekend and been arrested. Orthodox Jews have occupied a house in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and literally expelled its occupants for the past 50 years. The justification – the house was owned by Jews before the War of Independence. According to the same principle, much of Jaffa and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout Israel should be returned to Arabs.

When Lenny’s cousin, a fat representative of the “booboisie” as Mencken labeled them, her face creamed with make-up, a large diamond glinting on a finger, her grandchildren’s photos tucked in her I-Phone, heard the crowd’s applause for Yotam, she grimaced. We should have shouted his praise to the rafters.

*For those, like me, who may be unfamiliar with the allure of a true haggis, according to Merriam-Webster, a haggis is “a traditionally Scottish dish that consists of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or a calf minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal.”