As I, at 16, traveled through Israel for the firsttime, my Jewish nerve endings were hypersensitive. Every stone, face,taste, smell, breeze, star, touch, glimpse — everything — moved me.
A woman in a fancy hat approaches Bert Dragin at Spago. She wantsto know if he is an actor, someone from \”Dallas\” or \”Falcon Crest.\”\n\nActually, the distinguished, sixtyish Dragin is not an actor; he\’sa film producer who sold his Cleveland-based furniture business andmoved out here to get into the movies in 1981. But he is \”doinglunch\” at Spago to talk about his latest, very non-Hollywood project:directing Paddy Chayefsky\’s \”The Tenth Man\” at the West Valley JewishCommunity Center.
The New York Times devoted 1,500 words last Sunday to a biographical profile of Monica Lewinsky, the 24-year-old woman who allegedly had an 18-month affair with President Clinton and who has been accused of lying about it under oath.
The Nazis took my uncle Henry at the beginning ofthe war. He survived more than five years as a slave. Young andstrong, he was a carpenter, and they needed carpenters. At first,they moved him from camp to camp, including a stay at Pleshow, whereSchindler\’s people were kept. And, finally, Auschwitz. A slavelaborer, he built parts of the camp. When the Allies advanced, he wastaken on the infamous Death March from Poland into Germany. He wasliberated from Buchenwald by the U.S. Army in 1945.
Abraham Joshua Heschel said that he prayed for one thing: the gift of wonder. He prayed for astonishment, for the capacity to be surprised. As he wrote, \”I try not to be stale. I try to remain young. I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised at life and at ideas. This is to me the supreme Chassidic imperative.\”
Pity Esau. One moment of weakness, one moment ofimpulse, and his birthright is gone. He goes out to fulfill hisfather\’s dying wish for a savory meal of game, and while he\’s outhunting, his mother and brother conspire and rob him of his blessing.Returning to his father with the feast, expecting at last to gain hisdue position as head of the clan, he is met with his father\’s emptyexcuses. And so Esau cries: \”Have you but one blessing, Father? Blessme too, Father!\” And Esau wept aloud (Genesis 27:38). Tears ofbetrayal, of pain, of rage, of broken dreams.
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