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Jewish Journal

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December 30, 2004

One Historian’s Look at How Jews Shaped the Modern Age

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“The Jewish Century,” by Yuri Slezkine. (Princeton University Press, $29.95).

Yuri Slezkine opens this major new book by declaring: “The modern age is the Jewish age, and the 20th century, in particular, is the Jewish century.” This assertion may ring bells.

Anti-Semites have long claimed that Jews, a miniscule fraction of the world’s population, exert a disproportionate influence, be it in local settings, such as fin de si?cle “Judapest” (as Budapest was known) or through that irrepressible literary trope, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Along comes a university-trained historian and suggests that, indeed, the modern age has been permeated through and through by Jewish influence.

But before we leap to a quick and erroneous conclusion, Slezkine is no anti-Semite. He is a gifted historian from Berkeley who has written a big, provocative and brilliant book.

Indeed, in a year of big books that offer intriguing new perspectives on the Jewish condition — Philip Roth’s counterfactual “The Plot Against America” and Jonathan Sarna’s “American Judaism” come to mind — Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” may be the most important. And what is most intriguing in the book is the claim that those qualities that the Jews have historically embodied and still represent — social mobility, economic ingenuity, intellectual achievement — are the defining features of the modern age, all the more so in the era of globalization.

Now one may agree that Jews have embodied these qualities, perhaps more than any other group. And yet, it seems premature, at the very least, to suggest that these properties have won out over their opposites: economic stasis, national-ethnic tribalism and cultural revanchism.

Could we not argue as plausibly that the 20th century was the century of genocide, or totalitarianism, or capitalism, or, perhaps, of the Americans? It is certainly the case that Jews figured prominently in some or many of the century’s dramas.

Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein surely had a major hand in defining the cultural and intellectual direction of the century. And it may well be that the Shoah is the paradigmatic act of genocide — and anti-Semitism, the longest and most enduring of hatreds.

But it still strikes me as triumphalist and tunnel-visioned to award the entire 20th century, no less the whole modern age, to the Jews. This Judeo-centric vision, while framed in most idiosyncratic fashion by Slezkine, has more popular (and misguided) versions of which we should be cautious: assertions of the unreplicable uniqueness either of Jewish achievement or of Jewish tsuris that wrench the actual Jewish experience out of its deeply embedded context.

Despite these reservations about the book’s core thesis, I hasten to add my admiration — I dare say envy — for “The Jewish Century.” It is a work of staggering erudition, literary grace and most precious of all, big ideas. While one may disagree with its big ideas, it is hard to avoid being stimulated by them. It is equally hard to deny the book’s contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history.

Not only does Slezkine shed new light on largely unknown chapters of the Jewish experience in Soviet Russia; he also fleshes out the personality of one of the most vexing and elusive characters in the modern Jewish experience: the non-Jewish Jew.

A Russian-born historian of partial Jewish origin, Slezkine happened on to this book by chance. Initially, he was interested merely in producing a textured social history of life in a certain apartment building in Moscow. This point of entry soon led him to a broader domain of inquiry: the story of Soviet Jewish communists, a fair number of whom populated the apartment in question.

Slezkine used these Jewish communists, a few of whom were his own relatives, to unfold an even larger story: the unsurpassed success of Jews in gaining access to positions of prestige and power in the Soviet Union in the early decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, only to end up — after Stalin’s purges began — as one of the most anti-Soviet and oppressed groups of all.

This compelling and tragic story led Slezkine to yet another vast new domain of inquiry: the migration of millions of Russian Jews from that large chunk of Eastern Europe (including parts of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine) known as the Pale of Settlement, into major urban centers like Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late,19th century.

Slezkine presents in “The Jewish Century” a thick and nuanced description of this Jewish migratory stream that, along with Benjamin Nathans’ “Beyond the Pale” (2002), sheds important new light on an enormously consequential — and yet under-researched — movement of Jewish life and culture.

One of the key innovations of Slezkine’s approach is to juxtapose this migratory current to two other — and more notable — currents issuing from the Pale around the same time: the large stream of Eastern European Jews to the United States and the smaller, but influential, current of Russian Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Slezkine associates these tributaries with three of the five daughters of Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman,” the hero of the classic “Fiddler on the Roof.”

He uses this literary cover to suggest that Tevye’s daughters, emblematic of most turn-of-the-century Russian Jews, were of one mind in seeking exit from the confines of the shtetl but disagreed considerably over their preferred locus of resettlement. Thus, in Slezkine’s version, Bielke followed her husband to the “goldene medine” of America, Chava made off to the land of milk and honey and Hodel became a revolutionary and emigrated from her parochial shtetl to a major urban center in Russia.

In tracing these three paths, Slezkine offers far more than an homage to Aleichem. His use of Tevye’s daughters as vectors of historical change belies an unusually keen and subversive literary sense. This sense is manifest both in Slezkine’s own writing (which, owing to his formative upbringing in another language, evokes the likes of Conrad and Brodsky) and in the breadth of his reading. Indeed, “The Jewish Century” is, among other virtues, a feast of literary delights, with extended borrowings from and learned excurses on Pushkin, Proust, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joseph Roth, Osip Mandelstam, Vassily Grossman and Roth, to mention but a few.

At the same time, the book is also a piece of uncommon scholarly virtuosity. While a newcomer to the precincts of Jewish history, Slezkine reveals a commanding knowledge of the Eastern European Jewish experience, and, particularly, of the Jewish “immigrants” to big Russian cities.

His perspective is decidedly not that of an insider — what we might call an internalist Jewish historian — who relies on Jewish communal records or self-consciously Jewish cultural expressions to tell his story. Rather, Slezkine is an externalist, and this has a number of important implications.

First, his chief interest is not in the overtly and avowedly Jewish historical personality, but in those whom Isaac Deutscher famously called “non-Jewish Jews,” those hundreds of thousands who willingly surrendered a distinctive Jewish cultural idiom in favor of a more universalist political agenda or cosmopolitan social milieu. Through a mix of conceptual analysis and statistical evidence, Slezkine traces the rise and fall of these Jews, particularly intellectuals and political activists, who abandoned their Jewish origins to embrace the Soviet communist vision, only to become the chief enemies of the very system in which they had invested so much blood, sweat and faith.

To the extent that these figures were far less identifiable and visible than their Israeli and American Jewish cousins, studying them requires a fine and nuanced set of historical tools. Slezkine makes masterful use of these tools, and his treatment of the metaphorical figure of Hodel and her Russian Jewish descendants is the finest portion of the book. More ambitiously, it amounts to a kind of Jewish counterhistory in which the non-Jewish Jew stands at the center.

There is a second way in which Slezkine’s externalist perspective becomes clear. It is in his tendency to adopt a sweeping comparative perspective in studying Jews. Throughout the book, the Jewish experience is placed alongside and in contrast to that of many other groups, especially fellow Diaspora travelers like ethnic Chinese, Indians and Gypsies.

This tack provides him with an opportunity to make the bold equation of Jewish and modern mentioned at the outset, although, in fact, the origin of Slezkine’s analytical framework lies in Greek mythology. The world used to be divided, he argues, into two distinct groups: Mercurians, who were fleet and fast-moving service nomads, and Apollonians, who were landed, rural food gatherers. Historically, Jews were the classic Mercurians — “urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious and occupationally flexible.”

In the modern age, these qualities have become more widely disseminated and absorbed — to the point that they seem to blend seamlessly into what we routinely call today “globalization.” Through this process of dissemination, much of the world has become Mercurian. In that Jews are the Mercurians par excellence, the past century was, by extension, “the Jewish century.”

In laying out this stark Mercurian-Apollonian divide, Slezkine recalls grand social theorists of the past like Karl Marx and Max Weber (as well as less notable figures like Werner Sombart and Thorsten Veblen) who have advanced sweeping claims about the social function of the Jews. But he also exposes himself to the congenital weaknesses that theorizing of this scale produces.

For example, beyond similarities in their economic functions, do we gain much by comparing and then conflating the cultural experience of Jews, Gypsies and ethnic Chinese into a single Mercurian type? And even among Jews, themselves, does the Mercurian label really tell us very much?

Imagine if we were to assemble in one early-20th century Parisian salon the following characters: Aleichem, Walter Benjamin, Nathan Birnbaum, Freud, Rosa Luxembourg, Max Nordau, Baron Edmond de Rothschild and Leon Trotsky. Would this mix of capitalist and communist, Orthodox and atheist, Zionist and cosmopolite find common cause, indeed, speak a single Mercurian language? It is highly doubtful.

And if we have difficulty affixing the unified label Mercurian to this group, all the more so for the modern age at large. After all, the potent and enduring force of nationalism, with its spasmodic outbursts of ethnic violence, has marked much of that era. This pervasive neotribalism is the embodiment not of Mercurianism, but of what Slezkine calls the Apollonian instinct.

Accordingly, it seems a stretch to label our age Mercurian. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a ceaseless battle between Mercurian and Apollonian impulses, if not of outright Apollonian victory.

Both the porousness of Slezkine’s opposing categories and the premature victory accorded Mercurians (i.e., Jews) in the modern age ultimately undoes the grand theory undergirding “The Jewish Century.” But the merit of this book does not rest on the theory’s ultimate success. Through his wide-ranging erudition, Slezkine challenges us to think about deep structural patterns in human and Jewish history, as well as about the uniqueness of the Jewish historical experience.

Moreover, his wide comparative lens brings into focus three distinct Jewish paths in the modern age, two of which are rather well trodden (America and Israel) and one of which (the Soviet Russian) receives rich new attention. The effect is a fascinating literary and historical journey that leads to a rewriting of modern Jewish history, a kind of counterhistory populated by a motley crew of mainly non-Jewish Jews. At once ubiquitous and marginal, privileged and persecuted, Mercurian and Apollonian, these figures rise up against their creator to demonstrate that the modern Jewish condition is complex, diverse and resistant to reduction.

At the same time, they empower their creator to ask the big and important question of whether the age in which they live is created in their own intriguing image. At the end of the day, I think it is not. But Slezkine is owed a big debt for forcing us to think deeply about our own purchase on the claim of Jewish uniqueness.

 David N. Myers is a professor of Jewish history and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.

 

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Israel’s Cain and Abel Syndrome

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“Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East,” by Matt Rees (Free Press, $26).

Journalist Matt Rees was born in Wales, the great-nephew of two brothers who joined the Imperial Camel Corps and made their way to Egypt in 1916. His uncles fought in a World War I campaign that brought fame to another Welsh-born soldier, Col. T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. In 1917, the year in which the Balfour Declaration was issued, they rode through Jerusalem astride their camels.

Eighty years after his uncles’ journey, Rees traveled to the Middle East to report on the conflict. Now bureau chief in Jerusalem for Time, he has been covering the region for eight years. In his first book, the award-winning correspondent looks to the relationships between brothers who, unlike his uncles, don’t get along. His focus is not the conflict between Palestinian and Israeli, but among the people on each side; it’s a picture of betrayals, hatred and, sometimes violence.

Rees draws on another pair of brothers for the title of his book, “Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East.” As he writes, “These two Middle Eastern nations battle over a land that was the field Cain farmed in the Book of Genesis. Cain’s offering of ‘the fruit of the ground’ pleased God less than the ‘firstlings of his flock’ offered by his brother Abel, a shepherd.”

He explains that Cain, who felt wronged by God, answered with a new wrong, murder. As he traveled around Israel and looked more closely at different readings of the text, he began to see the story differently than he had as a child, where Cain was seen as simply evil. Instead, he empathizes with Cain’s simple humanity and sees divine injustice. But, as he points out, people on each side, both Palestinians and Israelis, see themselves as Abel, having been wronged by their brother, Cain.

The book is particularly timely, in light of Yasser Arafat’s death, and new possibilities for hope in the Middle East. Rees writes about individuals, many of whom have not spoken publicly before, and he proves himself a good listener and skillful as a teller of other people’s stories. Each chapter is built around internal rifts, whether between supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, or secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. While still the objective journalist, it’s clear that Rees cares deeply about the people he’s writing about. He has a great eye for detail, noticing, for instance, that the cellphone of a Palestinian father — whose unarmed son was killed by Arafat’s police and another son was wanted for the revenge killing — trills out the lambada.

“Neither side,” Rees says, “will be able to risk a true peace with the other until it feels secure enough in its own society. Without such a sense of security, the internal ruptures will prove deep and will be disastrously exacerbated by attempts to make peace with the other side. That’s why an Israeli rightist shot Prime Minister Rabin, and it’s also why the peace process inexorably led the Palestinians toward their violent intifada of the last few years.”

“It seems to me now,” he writes, “that the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is like the spark that jumps between two electrodes. The electrical charge flashing between the two sides is real, but to focus entirely upon it, as interpreters of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle are doing, is to ignore the tangle of wires leading back from each electrode to the source of the current.”

Rees looks like Central Casting’s version of a foreign correspondent: tall and confident with rugged good looks; he speaks both Hebrew and Arabic, and his English is Welsh-accented. Before moving to Israel, he lived in New York for six years and covered Wall Street. From the time he arrived in Jerusalem, he was struck by how much he liked the people he met. In writing about business, he says that he never met people who explained the drama of their lives, in ways that are eloquent and real, as Israelis and Palestinians do.

Unlike his uncles, Rees is a Jew. He converted before his marriage, although he is now divorced. To the Palestinians, he doesn’t look like an Israeli, “which is what a Jew looks like,” so his identity is concealed.

Even those who follow and study the conflict intently will learn something from this book. On the Israeli side, one of the most surprising and troubling chapters, “The Dark Refuge,” relates to the treatment of Holocaust survivors in the country’s mental institutions. He profiles Dr. Yoram Barak, who has been working to ease their current suffering, recognizing that absolutely nothing can make up for being “consigned to little more than a steamy dungeon for half a century by the State of Israel, the country that was supposed to be a haven for people just like this.

When Barak takes a new job as head of a hospital psychogeriatrics ward, he learns that most of his patients do not speak, and all are survivors. Rees explains “this ghostly quiet was a mirror of the silence that greeted these people in Israel when they came from Europe. It was not only Barak’s predecessor who was complicit. An entire society refused to listen to these people when they arrived.”

After experiencing the worst of inhumanity, most suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. But they were incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenics — and were treated over the years with insulin shocks, cold showers, antipsychotic drugs, electroconvulsive treatments and lithium, beatings, too. No one talked to them.

Their situation was created by inequities of patronage and corruption inherent in the health care system, as it was established by the early Zionists. With sensitive reporting, Rees demonstrates the way the Zionists looked down upon survivors.

He highlights the Sephardi-Ashkenzi rift by interviewing a singer who asserts a new identity performing the songs of his Moroccan background. Rees also describes the role of venerated Sephardi rabbis considered holy men and visited for their advice and blessings. And he interviews settlers and those on the Israeli left.

On the Palestinian side, he follows stories of splits between the old guard and young guard, between power brokers and street fighters, fugitives and henchmen. He interviews Zakaria Baloush, an official who had been part of Arafat’s inner circle, who speaks openly about Arafat’s destructive and divisive rule, and how he played people off of one another. Rees spends time with Hamas member Imad Akel, tracking him down in a refugee camp and in relatives’ homes. Akel, who was sought both by the Palestinian Authority, for a revenge killing, and by the Israelis for killing Jews, told Rees that if he wrote truthfully about him, the two men would be in paradise together one day. But Rees thought that surely Akel would arrive first, “for he sought it and there were many who wished to send him to the world beyond life, whether he found paradise there or not.”

Although the stories in the book can be harsh and profoundly sad, Rees is ultimately hopeful about positive changes, both within the two societies and between them: “I think that right now we have the opportunity, with the death of Arafat, to really change Palestinian society fundamentally.”

He sees the situation getting better between individuals, if people learn to listen to one another and to look inward, “It’s harder to hate a person you can put a face on than an institution. I don’t think there are any intractable problems. If you think it’s intractable, you haven’t been able to think outside of conventions.”

He’s critical of much daily reporting, which he sees as cliché-ridden and formulaic, too dependent on what the leaders are thinking. Unfortunately, he says, many journalists are trying to find the story, not the reality.

Rees, who lives in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, has already stayed in Israel longer than most journalists who pass through for a couple of years. For now, he has no plans to leave, and admits that living in Israel has made him a more tolerant person. He enjoys his life, has friends who share his passion for his soccer team, Manchester United, and he finds that in the Middle East, there’s always something new to see.

Sandee Brawarsky is the book critic for The Jewish Week.

 

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LAX Security Study Fails to Fly

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While the Los Angeles mayoral candidates battle over the proposed $11 billion expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, a study completed by the RAND Corp. think- tank on the airport’s security has gone under the proverbial radar.

Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which runs LAX, plus Ontario, Palmdale and Van Nuys airports, commissioned the RAND study in July to determine the most likely types of terrorist attacks at LAX and what can be done now to minimize casualties. The results were released Sept. 24.

One of the deadliest types of attacks at LAX, according to the study, would be a bomb in the check-in (ticketing) area or curbside near the taxi pickups. Passengers there haven’t gone through any security checkpoints and they are usually crowded together in lines. RAND found that a 5 percent increase in airport check-in and security screening staff could cut casualties in this type of attack by 75 percent.

RAND wrote: “Substantial reduction of lines can be implemented immediately with small changes to airline and TSA staffing policies. This is our strongest recommendation.”

Despite the fact that RAND’s changes could be made immediately and the report was released months before the holiday travel period officially began, LAWA had no comment this week on whether they’ve acted on the recommendation. In the meantime, LAX is expected to handle about 2.8 million passengers between Dec. 17 and Jan. 2.

To its credit, the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) has opened 12 new screening lanes at LAX for the holidays. But why would a terrorist bother to walk all the way to the security queue when he could detonate a bomb just inside the front door near ticketing, where there are fewer guards and bigger crowds? In 2002, a shooting at LAX’s El Al ticket counter took place outside the security checkpoint

So what has LAWA done to convince the airlines to hire more personnel and speed up the lines as RAND recommended? Apparently, the answer is up in the air.

On a Mission

It’s fairly common to see progressive groups blasting the Bush administration’s efforts to weave faith-based programs into government. It’s far more unusual to see these groups battling a Democratic senator.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) introduced a bill recently signed into law (H.R. 1446) that will grant the California Missions Foundation (CMF) $10 million in federal money to repair and restore the 21 Spanish missions in the state. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU) is suing to stop the legislation.

AU says 19 of the 21 missions are still functioning Catholic churches with active congregations. In essence, the churches would receive millions of taxpayer dollars to renovate their places of worship.

CMF said the missions are “historically significant for reasons that have little to do with Catholicism,” noting that it’s already mandatory for fourth-graders in California public schools to study the buildings.

AU said it doesn’t doubt the historical significance of the missions, adding that if they were simply museums, there would be no problem with the grant.

“If in fact the control [of the buildings] went to the government and not the church officials, that would make a difference,” AU Executive Director Barry Lynn told The Journal.

Boxer and CMF are defending the grant as a secular pursuit, even though the Los Angeles County Seal debacle earlier this year revealed that there is a wealth of public support for maintaining public religious icons in California.

But just as happened during the county seal debate, it’s likely that mission proponents will see no contradiction in defending the importance of a public Christian heritage, while simultaneously saying that the buildings should be interpreted secularly. In fact, CMF’s Web site blames the “wrath of secularization” following the Mexican Revolution (and the American occupation of California) for causing the missions to fall into ruin in the first place.

For more historical context on the nature of these buildings and their proselytizing purpose, a quick reference to the California Native American Heritage Commission is in order: “Despite romantic portraits of California missions, they were essentially coercive religious labor camps organized primarily to benefit the colonizers.”

As of yet, no date has been set for the lawsuit.

Mayoral Race Quotes

The lively and informal Dec. 21 mayoral debate, sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters, allowed the candidates to jump into a question at any time. The candidates generally agreed with each other on most of the issues, spending more time blasting away at personal character issues. Some quotes:

Bob Hertzberg: “I’m just flabbergasted at the proposal for an $11 billion airport — [a] building where you’ve got one ingress and one egress. If your purpose was to try to eliminate traffic or to avoid a terrorist threat, this is about the dumbest thing anybody could have done.”

State Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Van Nuys): “I stood up to Mayor [Richard] Riordan when he wanted to privatize DWP and sell it to Enron. I think we all know that would’ve been a disaster.”

City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa: “We need to get the Red Line to go down Wilshire Boulevard all the way to ocean. We need to connect the Green Line to LAX and down Lincoln Boulevard to the Expo line. We need to connect the Red Line in North Hollywood to the Metrolink in Sylmar. And if you elect me mayor, that’s what I’m going to do.”

City Councilman Bernard Parks: “I am the only candidate that has proposed an alternative to the [LAX plan] that was adopted unanimously by the Board of Supervisors — The mayor has an answer for everything but a solution to nothing.”

Mayor James Hahn: “Violent crime is down. Housing production has doubled. We’re changing the direction of the Port of L.A. [with] new technologies to plug ships into electric power [and], I stopped construction of a dirty new coal plant.”

Upcoming debates: Jan. 11, 7:30 p.m., Temple Judea, 5429 Lindley Ave., Tarzana; Jan. 13, 7:30 p.m., Temple Beth Am, 1039 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles.

 

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Faith, Responsibility Top OU Convention

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In his keynote address at the Orthodox Union West Coast Torah Convention last weekend, Judge Daniel Butler told the crowd of 300 the harrowing tale of the difficult but celebrated life of his son, Mikey.

“Mikey’s sign-off line was ‘Day by glorious day,’ said Butler, describing how Mikey spent his truncated life in and out of the hospital, coughing up phlegm in his lungs from cystic fibrosis.

Before he died earlier this year, at age 24, from lung transplant complications, Mikey graduated from Yeshiva University, where he was vice president of the student body. He was also a counselor at Camp HASC (a New York camp for children with special needs), a drummer in a band — and his story inspired hundreds of Orthodox communities across the United States to pray and do good deeds in his merit.

“We have been very, very lucky,” Butler said in his speech, referring to his family. The Butlers, who live in Pittsburgh, have four other children, two of whom have Fragile X Autism.

Butler’s speech — and his message of hope, faith in God and recognizing the silver lining in even the darkest clouds — brought much of the audience to tears and set the stage for the weekend convention, whose theme was “God’s Role in Our World: Our Role in God’s World.”

The convention is the Orthodox Union’s (OU) largest West Coast event. It draws together rabbis and lay people from all the Orthodox synagogues in the greater Los Angeles area. By bringing speakers from other Orthodox communities in the United States and abroad, the convention connects the Los Angeles community to the greater Orthodox world.

This year, 15 scholars from Israel and throughout the United States came to Los Angeles to speak, and 16 local synagogues hosted scholar-in-residence programs last Shabbat in conjunction with the convention. Organizers estimated that more than 1,000 people participated in convention-related activities, which included a dinner, book signing and 19 workshops on issues pertaining to the future of the Orthodox community.

The convention workshops tackled issues pertinent to the challenges of observing Jewish law in a modern world, such as questions about genetic engineering and cosmetic surgery. They also addressed some of the growing concerns in the Orthodox community, such as the role that the Diaspora community needs to play in Israel’s affairs, the importance of secular education and the increasing number of divorces in the community.

The convention theme was chosen as a response to a number of tragedies in the Orthodox community, including the deaths of a high school student and two young adults, said Rabbi Alan Kalinsky, the OU’s West Coast director.

“There has been tragedy in our community, and it caused a lot of people to question their own faith,” Kalinsky said. “We wanted the theme to reflect something more positive, so here is Judge Butler, whose son’s illness has been a challenging dimension for him and his wife to deal with on a daily basis, but he has always been a model of emunah [faith].”

While Butler talked about his personal journey to faith and acceptance, the other workshops took a more global view of current issues.

In the session “Is the Diaspora Doing What It Should for Israel?” Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., argued that Jews living outside of Israel are obligated to have a strong interest in Israel’s affairs for reasons that include an obligation to help other Jews and because combating terror in Israel will also help combat terror in the United States.

On the domestic front, in the matchmaking-related workshop “If Shidduchim Are Made in Heaven Why Are There So Many Divorces?” Rabbi Daniel Alter, from the East Denver Orthodox Synagogue, argued that our current understanding of beshert — a soul mate handpicked by God — often causes people to have unrealistic expectations of marriage. Many believe that perfection is divinely ordained, and anything falling short does not need to be tolerated.

“We need better support services and training in the community [to assist married couples with their relationships],” Alter said.

“We always try to have a mixture at our conventions of Torah Lishmah — Torah at a high level [of study] — and also the practical kinds of questions of what people think about on a regular basis,” said Stephen J. Savitsky, OU president.

“I go [to the convention] for two reasons — educational and informational,” said Rabbi Harry Greenspan of Young Israel of Beverly Hills, one of the convention’s participating synagogues. “Educationally, there are some quite significant rabbinical authorities who come to these things, and they generally have very informative panels by very prominent professionals in their field. In my eyes, this is an opportunity for the Los Angeles community to connect with the big people in New York community.”

 

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Living Torah

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Imagine yourself forgotten, without anyone to protect you. Ruling powers are oppressing you and killing your children. The purported

“reason” is economic, but a deep hatred based on mere difference underlies this attempted genocide. Helpless, you cry out. Who, in heaven and on earth, will hear your cries and move to save you? Awaiting relief, what do you do?

Now, imagine that you are privileged — a son or daughter of the ruling class. Your life is comfortable, even luxurious. You witness the sharp contrast between your situation and the suffering of the underclass. They are slated to die, and your cooperation, whether tacit or overt, will help make it happen. What do you do?

This is not a theoretical values clarification exercise. It is, in broad strokes, our Torah portion. In Shemot, the Israelites live out the first scenario. A new king arises, who “did not know Joseph” (1:8). The Israelites are enslaved and afflicted; their male children are to be murdered. The motives are ostensibly practical: “Let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and join our enemies” (1:10). Yet Pharaoh undermines the economic benefit of having slaves by denying them straw to make bricks (5:7). Ultimately, he sacrifices his regime and his life in a prideful effort to destroy the Hebrews. Against this senseless and murderous oppressor, our ancestors can only cry out. They fear that any intervention will make their situation worse (5:21).

According to the midrash, however, the women manage to maintain hope; they insist on procreation — despite the death sentence against their sons. The challenge by women to Pharaoh’s decree is established in the Torah itself: Moses’ mother and sister are proactive, hiding him in a basket and returning him to his mother once he is discovered. The midwives may be Hebrew or Egyptian (the text is ambiguous). Either way, their civil disobedience against Pharaoh’s edict to kill Israelite male babies is remarkably brave. If Israelite, the midwives defy everything about the status quo, asserting a power no one would dream of according them. If Egyptian, they risk their lives for slaves unrelated to them. Either way, their success in deceiving Pharaoh depends upon his dehumanization of the slaves.

The midwives evade their assignment, saying: “[The Hebrew women] are not like the Egyptian women; they are chayot [lively or, according to the midrash, like animals who give birth to litters] and deliver before the midwives come to them” (1:19).

This week’s portion also imagines the position of the child of privilege. Pharaoh’s daughter has compassion for a Hebrew baby and saves him, despite her father’s decree. Moses, who grows up in Pharaoh’s house, is filled with rage against the oppressors. Caring figures display mercy and fury, saving and killing, in response to genocidal acts. But individual action itself cannot, by itself, be effective. Nothing less than massive social change will suffice. Saving the enslaved requires miracles, battles, and the downfall not just of individual oppressors, but of the entire regime.

How well have we learned these biblical lessons? What would we really do?

Today, sadly, we have the chance to find out, because Pharaoh is alive and well in Darfur. The people of Darfur, like the Israelites, seem to have been forgotten, for they are without allies willing to protect them. The United Nations and our nation have failed to act quickly or decisively. The Janjaweed militia, aided by a corrupt and oppressive Sudanese regime, is persecuting civilians and killing children. The purported “reason” is economic, but a deep hatred based on mere difference underlies this attempted genocide. The goal is a land-grab — ironic, given that the land has never been rich and is now ravaged by war and fire. In fact, an ethnic rivalry (Arab Muslim vs. African Muslim) seems to be at least as powerful a cause for violence as the lust for property. Women in Darfur are dehumanized, as they were in ancient Egypt. Rape is routinely part of war and of life.

Today, we Children of Israel, descendants of a slave people, find ourselves in the position of the children of privilege. We may feel compassion and we may feel rage, but what are we willing to do? Nothing less than massive social change will suffice. Saving today’s subjugated peoples will, as in days of old, require miracles and battles. It will necessitate the downfall of both individual oppressors and entire regimes. To make this happen, we must follow in the footsteps of Shifra and Puah, midwives willing to help birth freedom even at the cost their own safety. And we must be sure not to fulfill the slave’s worst fear: That inadequate intervention will make a hellish situation even worse.

Do we hear the cry of the oppressed? This week’s portion is not about “them” — or then. It is about us — and now. To learn what Jews are doing and can do for the people of Darfur, visit www.jdc.org, www.ajws.org or www.socialaction.com, “for you know the soul of a stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).

Author’s note: The recent, massive suffering in Asia may eclipse, for some, the chronic pain of Africa. It’s tempting to turn away from the affliction in Darfur because it is so awful to recognize that we have stood idly by the blood of our neighbors. Of course, we need to help on both continents. But, in the face of genocide, nothing should distract us from voicing, meaning, and enforcing the message “never again.”

Rabbi Debra Orenstein is spiritual leader of Makom Ohr Shalom synagogue in Encino (www.makom.org).

 

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Stay Tuned

Leave a Comment / Rob Eshman /

 

Last October, a man called with a complaint. Before I could ask what was the matter, he launched into a tirade about a biased and

inaccurate article. He said he couldn’t believe a serious newspaper would print such lies. He was so angry, he was this close to canceling his subscription.

I wasn’t sure which article he was referring to, so I gently asked him to be more specific. He went on to describe a piece I had absolutely no memory of.

“Are you sure you read this in The Jewish Journal?”

“The Journal?” he said. “No! This was in The Los Angeles Times.”

“The Times?” I said. “So why are you calling me?”

“Because they won’t pick up the phone!”

I tell the story often, because among other things, it says a lot about the role of community journalism. We are the paper that responds. We are the paper that can’t help but listen attentively to its readers. We are the paper that picks up the phone. My hope is that readers will keep this in mind as The Journal embarks on a new business model that is, as far as we know, unprecedented for a Jewish newspaper.

Starting Jan. 1, Journal readers who received their weekly newspaper by donating to The Jewish Federation will still be able to get it, but not as part of their Federation donation. For 18 years, The Federation purchased annual Journal subscriptions for its donors. Last year, it purchased about 20,000 of the 60,000 papers The Journal distributed each week. Beginning next week, it will no longer do so.

Readers will be able to subscribe directly to The Journal for home delivery or pick it up for free at distribution sites around Los Angeles (subscriptions and a list of sites are available at www.jewishjournal.com).

When we announced this new arrangement earlier this year, many people approached me with their condolences, as if we had been consigned to our doom. But the impetus for this change came from us — yes, from us — and I believe it is a big step forward for the paper and the community.

Granted, of the 135 Jewish community papers in North America, none has a distribution plan like ours. But Los Angeles is a Jewish community like no other, and our new model will serve it well. Most importantly, it will enable us to reach the greatest number of readers across a vast and diverse landscape. Under the previous arrangement, postal regulations limited the number of papers we could distribute for free. But free distribution has been a boon to us — bringing the paper to readers who might otherwise have no connection to Jewish life, increasing our visibility to advertisers and giving us an audience far more diverse in terms of age and background than that of almost any Jewish institution I know of.

Our goal is to reach every possible reader we can (thereby becoming, not incidentally, the largest circulation mainstream Jewish weekly in the country), and this step takes us leaps and bounds closer to achieving it.

The move also establishes The Journal as one of a handful of truly independent community Jewish newspapers. About 85 percent of Jewish papers are either owned by or sell thousands of subscriptions to federations or other major Jewish philanthropies. These arrangements provide a cushion of guaranteed income.

But even when there is little question of outside editorial influence, as at the superb New York Jewish Week or at this paper, the arrangement is less than ideal. It diverts Federation dollars from urgent philanthropy, it involves a charitable organization in a business where it has little expertise and it creates a temptation for either censorship or self-censorship, which isn’t healthy for the Jewish community.

If a Jewish paper can survive economically free of one organization or the other, it should make every attempt to do so.

Jewish newspapers have played an important role in Jewish life since the very first one was published just 70 years after the printing press was invented. As Jews dispersed, they no sooner established mikvahs and cemeteries as they did newspapers. There is no community without communication, and these papers have functioned over the centuries to deliver important news, to serve as a kind of communal bulletin board, to broadcast the teachings and values of Judaism itself.

Is the form antiquated? If anything, I believe a Jewish paper, whether delivered on newsprint or by Internet, is more important than ever.

We are a far-flung community, spread out from the South Bay to the East Valley to Thousand Oaks. We contain multitudes of different backgrounds, practices and beliefs. And The Journal is one place where we can meet each week, if only virtually, to engage in a common discussion on the things that matter so much to us. That conversation needn’t be parochial — it mustn’t be.

The crisis in Sudan and the disaster in Southeast Asia may not have a “Jewish angle,” but they do implore a Jewish response, which can be called forth and described in the pages of the Jewish press.

Since we announced our change in the business model several months ago, the response from current subscribers has been heartening. Far more Federation subscribers than we expected to took out new subscriptions. Of course, if you haven’t already done so, I hope you will, too.

But in any case, I hope you keep reading. We are heading into uncharted waters here, but we are doing so with a terrific group of journalists, sales personnel, office staff and board of directors. We also do so with a community we are so proud to be a part of, and so excited to continue serving.

 

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A Numbers Game

Leave a Comment / Singles /

 

A few months ago, I scribbled out a Web site, bought a camera, hired a director, raised $42,000 and embarked on a journey across

the United States.

“I’m looking for true love,” I told my father, “even if she’s husking corn in Iowa.”

In three weeks on the road, I dated a radio station DJ in New Hampshire, a beauty queen in Maine, seven feminists in Rhode Island, a yeshiva attendee in New York, a 42-year-old mother in Washington, D.C., and some eccentric others. I was often asked by the critics and by the media (who were never that critical) to justify the camera’s intrusion on dates.

“Won’t it get in the way of true love?” they’d ask.

“Well maybe,” I’d reply. “But” — like all great artists who excuse their art by calling it a social critique — “this is a social critique.”

“But how?” they’d ask.

“Well, everyone knows reality shows are a misnomer. They don’t accurately portray reality. In the real world, I think, most women aren’t as superficial or slutty as the ones on television. They actually care about stuff like honesty, sense of humor, and sensitivity in a man. To show this, I’m asking any and all of them to give me a try.”

The idea was that I am not a typical bachelor type or anything close. I am short, silly, sensitive, love-struck, yada yada yada. And, if a nice, sensitive, albeit not-so-all-American guy like me can find true love and be a figurehead for not-so-perfect men around the world, then I’d be doing a service to myself and millions of others.

Of course, things didn’t exactly go as planned. I was producing a mainstream film without film experience, without enough money, without trustworthy contacts and without much of a brain. As a result, I returned home penniless and humbled after just 12 dates.

“You’ve got to deal with the facts,” my father said. “You’re $35,000 in debt, you don’t have a job, you have a huge inventory of ‘Sensitive Guy’ T-shirts that nobody wants and you can’t seem to get serious about anything.”

I swallowed hard.

“But I was on the front cover of the Style Section in The Washington Post,” I said. “They called me a Beau on the Go.”

“You were wearing a propeller hat,” he said. “That’s nothing to be proud of.”

“Well,” I said. “There are still 5,274 women who asked me out on dates.”

His jaw dropped: “5,274?”

“There’s more every day,” I said. “They’ve seen me in the newspapers or on television, or they’ve heard about me from their grandmothers, and they just ask for dates.”

He repeated the number as if it held some sort of significance: “5,274. That’s a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It gets better — 263 mothers asked me out for their daughters. All but three of the mothers were Jewish.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I mean, I’m not surprised the mothers were Jewish.” He scratched his head. “Have you dated any of them, you know, since you failed with this whole endeavor?”

“I haven’t been able to,” I said. “There are too many. I wouldn’t know where to start. Sixty-two called me a ‘soul mate’ and 14 called me their ‘partner in crime.’ That’s a lot of pressure. They don’t even know me!”

“That might be a good thing,” my father said. “No offense, but you weren’t doing too hot with girls that actually did know you.”

“You’re missing it,” I said. “If I date any of these women, it’ll be under false pretenses. They asked a different guy out, an imaginary one. They saw me on a 90-second telecast, or read about me in an 850-word article, or browsed a few silly childhood stories on my Web site, and they think they know me well enough to assert that I was the missing piece of their puzzle.”

“So?” my father said.

“It’s scary,” I said.

“I think you should start with a Jewish one,” he said.

“Which?” I asked, showing him the thousands of e-mails. “That’s my biggest demographic. I’ve got 2,768 Jewish women to choose from.”

“Get a short one,” he said. “And make her smart and funny, too.”

“But I’d have nowhere to take her,” I said. “I don’t have money or a future.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But this is the new millennium. Ask her to pay. She’ll probably like you better for it. And that reminds me; make sure she’s rich, too.”

“That’s a lot to ask,” I said.

“Well, 5,274 is a big number,” he said. “Use it!”

 

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Kosher Slaughtering Proves Humane

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Torah /

 

Many people expressed concern about the standards for humane treatment of animals at a kosher slaughterhouse after viewing a well-publicized video of kosher slaughter at the AgriProcessors plant in Iowa, which was released by the animal rights organization PETA.

Any slaughterhouse, whether kosher or nonkosher, is by definition a disconcerting, blood-filled and gruesome place. Torah law, however, is most insistent about not inflicting needless pain on animals and in emphasizing humane treatment of all living creatures.

Kosher slaughter, shechitah, involves cutting the trachea and esophagus with a sharp, flawless knife. At the same time, the carotid arteries, which are the primary supplier of blood to the brain, are severed.

The profound loss of blood and the massive drop in blood pressure render the animal insensate almost immediately. Studies done by Dr. H.H. Dukes at the Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine indicate that the animal is unconscious within seconds of the incision.

After the shechitah at AgriProcessors, an additional cut is made in the carotid arteries to further accelerate the bleeding. This is not done for kashrut reasons, for after the trachea and esophagus have been severed, the shechitah is complete, but rather for commercial reasons to avoid blood splash, which turns the meat a darker color. The carotid arteries are attached to the trachea, and at AgriProcessors, the trachea was excised to facilitate the bleeding.

In the overwhelming number of cases, the animal is insensate at that time. However and inevitably, particularly when it is considered that 18,000 cattle were slaughtered during the seven-week period when the video was shot, there was a tiny percentage of animals whose carotid arteries were not completely severed, so they were not completely unconscious. Although this is very infrequent, the removal of the trachea immediately after the shechitah has now been discontinued.

It should be kept in mind that in a nonkosher plant, when the animal is killed by a shot with a captive bolt to the brain, it often has to be re-shot, sometimes up to six times, before the animal collapses. The USDA permits up to a 5 percent initial failure rate.

At AgriProcessors and at other plants it supervises, the Orthodox Union (OU) is committed to maintaining the highest ritual standards of shechitah without compromising the halacha (Jewish law) one bit. The OU continues to vouch for the kashrut, which was never compromised, of all the meat prepared by AgriProcessors.

As I indicated previously, images of slaughter — especially selected images in an abbatoir — are jarring, particularly to the layman. Statements by PETA that animals were bellowing in pain after the shechitah are an anatomical impossibility. After the animal’s throat and larynx have been cut, it cannot vocalize.

PETA is well known for the passion it brings to the issue of animal rights, but it is an organization devoid of objectivity. PETA’s comparison of the killing of chickens to the Holocaust is, at a minimum, morally obtuse. So to whom should we turn for an objective view about the situation at AgriProcessors and about kosher slaughter in general? Here are the opinions of some experts:

1. Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Patty Judge inspected the plant. She found the handling of the animals to be humane and commendable.

She said after viewing the shechitah that the animals were unconscious within two to three seconds. She also said that chickens were handled more carefully by the rabbis than by her own “grandmother on the farm.”

2. AgriProcessors is under constant USDA inspection. Dr. Henry Lawson, the USDA veterinarian at the plant, told me that he considers the treatment of the cattle at AgriProcessors to be humane, and that the shechitah renders them unconscious within a matter of seconds. He determines this by certain physiological criteria related to the eyes, tongue and tail of the animal.

3. Earlier, Rabbi Dr. I.M. Levinger, a veterinarian and one of the world’s foremost experts on animal welfare and kosher slaughter, called the shechitah practices at AgriProcessors “professional and efficient,” emphasizing the humane manner in which the shechitah was handled.

Levinger was also highly impressed with the caliber of the ritual slaughterers. He issued his evaluation following a thorough two-day on-site review of shechitah practices and animal treatment at the plant. He viewed the kosher slaughter of nearly 150 animals.

4. AgriProcessors has hired an animal welfare and handling specialist to evaluate the plant processes. The specialist was recommended by both Dr. Temple Grandin, a foremost expert in animal welfare, and also by the National Meat Association. In reviewing the shechitah process last week, the specialist made the following observations:

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• The shechitah process was performed swiftly and correctly;

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• The shechitah cut resulted in a rapid bleed.

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• All animals that exited the box were clearly unconscious.

The OU and AgriProcessors are committed to the Torah principles of humane treatment of animals. At the OU, we constantly review our procedures, evaluate them and if necessary, improve or correct them. We don’t want ever to be wedded to a mistaken procedure.

AgriProcessors has been completely cooperative in working with the OU and shares our philosophy.

As Torah Jews, we are imbued with the teachings which require animals to be rested, along with people, on the Sabbath and fed before the people who own them, and that the mother bird must be sent away before her young are taken to save her grief. These and similar statutes make it clear that inhumane treatment of animals is not the Jewish way.

Kosher slaughter, by principle, and as performed today in the United States, is humane. Indeed, as PETA itself has acknowledged, shechitah is more humane than the common nonkosher form of shooting the animal in the head with a captive bolt, for reasons noted above.

The Humane Slaughter Act, passed into law after objective research by the U.S. government, declares shechitah to be humane. For Torah observant Jews, it cannot be any other way.

Rabbi Menachem Genack is the rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union’s Kosher Division.

 

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International Left Rooting for Barghouti

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

 

Progressives of the world, including those in Israel, have a thing about Marwan Barghouti and with good reason: He’s so cool. He’s the coolest

Palestinian since Yasser Arafat first turned up in a keffiyeh and Ray Bans.

Journalist Patrick Bishop put it just right recently in England’s Daily Telegraph, writing Barghouti up as a celebrity revolutionary:

“Since first mentioned as a successor to Yasser Arafat, he has attracted extravagant comparisons from a world yearning for a visionary figure to break the deadlock in the Middle East. [Former British defense secretary] Michael Portillo described him as having ‘the charisma of Che Guevara’ and likened him to Nelson Mandela.”

And if that’s not enough, Shammai Leibowitz, grandson of Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and a former Barghouti attorney, once argued in court for his client’s release by comparing him to Moses.

Barghouti, who last week took all the excitement out of the upcoming Palestinian election by withdrawing his candidacy, filled a huge gap for the international left when he fired up the intifada a little over four years ago. The international left — those who find it impossible to ever take sides with the West against the Third World — needed a symbol for one of their favorite romantic causes, the Palestinian national liberation movement, and what did they have? — old men; rich, corrupt, old men.

In the hard left’s good old days, the late ’60s to early ’70s, they had Arafat, Abu Jihad, George Habash, Naif Hawatmeh, Abu Nidal — guerrilla legends, men who ran revolutionary training camps in Africa, men who slept in a different safe house every night. But by the eve of the intifada, Abu Jihad was dead, Habash and Hawatmeh were effectively pensioners, Abu Nidal had become a crazed mercenary.

And Arafat? Arafat was a corrupt multibillionaire past 70, a caricature of a megalomaniacal dictator. He no longer looked like an outlaw, he looked like a leering old bum.

It had been a long, dry season without a Palestinian leader worth rooting for. Then along came Barghouti — or, as his admirers simply call him, Marwan. Beautiful name, isn’t it? Young, dark, fiery, charismatic Marwan.

He wasn’t corrupt nor even rich. Spoke Hebrew, English, loved to talk to the press. During the Oslo years, he hung out with Israeli peaceniks at the “dialogues” in Europe.

He was perfect: On the one hand, he was pure “street” — prison, exile, those Palestinian Shabiba kids he organized in the first intifada, Tanzim in the second. Authentic. On the other hand he had a master’s degree in international relations from Bir Zeit University, so, you know, he could talk the talk.

And look at the other alternatives for the post-Arafat leadership. Either they’re these hard-eyed ex-cons who look like backroom torturers, or they’re old men who look like corporate VPs. Compare Barghouti to the Palestinians’ bureaucrat-in-chief, as Bishop does in the Telegraph:

“Certainly he is a great deal more interesting than his rival in the succession stakes, Mahmoud Abbas, who critics say is more suit than man. Glamorous he is not.”

But glamorous Marwan is, and glamorous he will stay — as Israel’s No. 1 political prisoner, in the view of the pro-Palestinian left.

I, however, am not an international leftist but a Zionist leftist — someone who thinks that even though the Palestinians, politically, are a nasty piece of work, Israel still doesn’t have the right to rule them or their land — and so I have a very different view of Barghouti.

I remember seeing a clip of him sitting in the studio of a Palestinian TV station when one of his comrades from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade called in to announce the latest “operation” in Jerusalem. Barghouti became absolutely buoyant over the news, full of praise and gratitude. This was March 2, 2002, and the “operation” was a suicide bombing in the middle of a Saturday night crowd in the haredi neighborhood of Beit Israel. Ten people were killed, including an 18-month-old girl and a 7-month-old boy.

It was Barghouti more than anyone, more than Arafat, who was identified with the outbreak of the intifada, with that explosion of rage and euphoria, of glorying in the spilling of blood. The Al Aqsa intifada made him.

And in those first days, while all Israeli believers in peace went into shock watching the future being wiped out, this fiery, charismatic SOB was triumphant.

As warlord of the West Bank, he more than anyone else was responsible for making the intifada what it’s been since Day 1 — a celebratory bloodletting. Not killing and self-sacrifice just as means to an end, but also as great deeds in themselves.

I don’t know Che Guevara’s history, but I know that Nelson Mandela, in his days as an insurgent, lived in a very distant moral universe from the one Barghouti inhabits. Mandela planned to sabotage installations, not to kill people — and the blacks of South Africa had a great deal more justification for violence than the Palestinians ever did. Mandela turned to violence only after South African blacks went decades asking the whites politely for equality. For Mandela at that time there was no South African Rabin, Peres or Barak, no Oslo accord, no Camp David negotiations. For Barghouti, there was, but — whatever he told his Israeli friends — he went for war instead. And with such enthusiasm.

The world’s hard-core leftists have always had a thing about fiery, charismatic types who kill for the oppressed. George Jackson, Huey Newton, the gunmen and bombers of the IRA, the Weather Underground, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigade.

They were all bloody-minded but cool. So now the international left loves Barghouti — what else is new?

Larry Derfner is The Journal’s Tel Aviv Correspondent

 

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Holy Knots

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Judaism /

 

Red string. A whole ball of it. That was what a dear relative in Los Angeles asked me to bring her from Israel when I come to visit.

But not just any red string. It has to be the kind that vendors hawk at the Western Wall. That is, it has to be the stuff from which you make a bendel — a wristlet that wards off evil, restores health and makes barren women fertile. It has to be the stuff that Madonna has turned into a fashion item and that sells for $26 a throw. And there has to be lots of it.

My first reaction is incredulity.

“It’s just string!” I bellow at my laptop. “Just red string.”

Then I counsel myself, “Have respect for someone else’s talisman. You, too, have secret ways of cajoling the hostile forces around you.”

My 90-year-old mother-in-law, who was born in Jerusalem, says that when she was a child no one had heard of red string. It was red ribbon then, and a bit was tied around her wrist after she recuperated from typhus.

The string’s sanctity (and hence its efficacy) derives from its having been wrapped seven times around Rachel’s Tomb. Rachel is one of the four biblical matriarchs, and religious women seek her intercession for everything from a good husband to a cure for cancer.

The wrapping should be easy, I think. But Rachel’s Tomb — on the road to Bethlehem just outside Jerusalem, where I live — is in the territories, neighboring the Aida refugee camp. The building is now a fortress shrouded in a concrete casing. No one enters or leaves without the permission of security personnel. The only way to get there is by armored bus.

Egged, the national bus company, has regular service to the tomb, except on special days, like this one. So first I have to get to the roadblock on the road to Bethlehem and then hop an armored bus.

“When do you leave?” I ask the driver.

“When the bus is full,” he replies.

There are only two other passengers: a modestly dressed teenage girl and a bearded young man in a black suit and hat. But there’s hope. “It’s the eve of Elul,” says the black-suited passenger. Elul is the month of penitence that precedes the Jewish New Year, a time when many religious Jews visit holy places to plead for good health and prosperity in the coming year.

“I just got here from the Machpela Cave,” the burial site in Hebron of Abraham and Sarah, he announces with a grin.

Tomb-hopping seems to be a turn-on.

Suddenly a crowd materializes and starts boarding. From the back of the bus comes the call, “There’s another seat here for a man.” (Religious men and women don’t sit side by side.) In the aisle, men and women of all ages have become one sweating mass.

When it seems there’s no oxygen left, the bus sets out on the five-minute run to Rachel’s Tomb. We pass the Lama Bros. shop and the Jewelry Center, once filled with tourists and now shuttered — victims of the intifada.

The scenery ends as the bus enters a concrete womb. The passengers are hurried into the building by nervous security people. Anyone outside makes an easy target for snipers.

Signs direct us to the men’s section and the women’s section, both in a domed room. And there is the tomb: about eight feet tall and eight feet wide, covered by a navy blue velvet cloth embroidered with symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel. An embroidered inscription implores the Lord to bless “the woman who comes to Your house as [You blessed the biblical matriarchs] Rachel and Leah.”

A plastic cover protects the embroidery.

Ahead of me, as I get as close as I can, at least 30 women are jammed together in rows of six. Those in the first row lean against the tomb, their faces and hands pressed against the plastic. They mouth their prayers inaudibly; the only sound is of their weeping. Teenagers and gnarled grannies, all are crying as they beseech Rachel to intercede for them. It’s hard to ignore the intensity of their prayers. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s only a tradition that marks this spot as Rachel’s Tomb. There is no way to circumnavigate the tomb; partitions separate the men’s section from the women’s. I reduce my ambition to touching the string to the sacred spot.

A short, heavyset woman pushes in front of me. She has iron-spike elbows; in a trice she’s at the tomb. I motion to Iron Elbows to take the string and do the deed for me.

With the now-sanctified treasure back in my hand, I head for the bus. As we board, I ask a middle-aged woman in a blond wig whether it’s always this crowded on the eve of Elul.

“You’re just lucky you didn’t come on the eleventh of Cheshvan, the date of Rachel’s death,” the woman answers. “Then the tomb is really mobbed.”

Yes, I’m lucky. And I have the red string.

Esther Hecht is a freelance writer based in Jerusalem.

 

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