June 25, 2009

Now that Arab leaders and Western pundits have expressed their disapproval of Netanyahu’s policy speech of last Sunday, it is time for peace visionaries to point out the opportunities that the speech has opened to the international community, especially to President Obama.

A large portion of Netanyahu’s speech was no doubt a reaction to Obama’s landmark speech in Cairo, a week earlier, in which he addressed the Muslim world and sent some chilling messages to the Israeli prime minister. No one can hide the fact that most Israelis, including seasoned peace activists, felt less than buoyant about the Cairo speech.

There are two main reasons.

Firstly, it made Israelis wonder whether the Obama administration is aware of the fierce, subterranean “battle of intentions” that has been preventing the peace process from moving forward in the last few years. Everyone knows, of course, that Palestinians view settlement construction as the litmus test for Israel’s intentions vis-à-vis a future Palestinian state; it is constantly drummed up in the media. Yet not everyone knows that Israelis, too, have a litmus test; they view Palestinian textbooks, TV programs and sermons to be the litmus test of Palestinian intentions vis-à-vis the future of Israel. A society that teaches its youngsters to negate its neighbor’s legitimacy, any reasonable observer would agree, cannot be serious about respecting a peace accord as permanent.

This understanding did not radiate from Obama’s Cairo speech, which had crisp and stern words to say about Israeli settlements but hardly a word about Palestinian denial and incitement.

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” the president said. “It is time for these settlements to stop.” The hoped-for reciprocal sentence — “It is time for Palestinian incitement to stop” — was conspicuously absent. Commentaries on Israeli TV noted, disappointedly, that not a single responsibility was assigned to the Palestinian Authority.

While the majority of Israelis understand that massive uprooting of settlers may be a necessary price to pay for a lasting peace, few if any are willing to engage in a civil strife for anything less than a lasting peace. Even the harshest opponent of the settlement movement would not support the emergence of a sovereign neighbor, rocket range away, that is unwilling to invest in education for a lasting peace.

But now that Obama’s overtures have won the attention of the Muslim world, perhaps even its trust, it is time for him to outline concrete steps toward Middle East peace. A call for a simultaneous freeze on both Israeli settlements and Palestinian incitement, clad in timetables and monitoring methods, would invite both sides to an equal honesty test, a test that is crucial to jump start the “new beginning” that Obama called for in Cairo.

Secondly, Obama’s rationale for Israel’s legitimacy began with the Holocaust, not with the birthplace of Jewish history. “The aspiration for a Jewish homeland,” he said, “is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” This may have been intended as a jibe at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his obsession with Holocaust denial, but it was taken by many Israelis as a distortion of history and an assault on their identity as a nation. Basing Israel’s legitimacy on the Holocaust plays into the hands of Arab rejectionists who see Israel as a foreign entity to the region, hastily created to soothe European guilt over the Holocaust at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. Israelis, and in fact most Jews, consider themselves equally indigenous to the biblical landscape. Accordingly, the formation of Israel, though accelerated by the Holocaust, is considered a historical and moral imperative based on a 2,000-year continuous quest to rebuild a national homeland.

Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University reminded the world of this historical perspective and further opened the door for Obama to use history as an instrument of peace.

Notably, while Netanyahu made recognition of Israel’s historic right an axiomatic part of any peace agreement, he did not insist on Arabs recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state.” Rather, he called for “recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.” This appeal to nationhood and peoplehood, rather than religion, amounts to an appeal for recording the trust deed that Jews have to their birthplace, while leaving the cultural character of the state to be determined by its citizens. It is a litmus test of Arab intention, rather than an imposition on Arabs’ rights; what one teaches as historical imperative is what one expects the future to entail.

This now creates a golden opportunity for Obama to join Netanyahu in a call for a mutual recognition of the historical claims of both sides as equally indigenous, hence equally deserving a permanent status in the region. An affirmation of “Israel’s historical right to exist” is what moderate forces in the region need to hear from Obama, and it is also what the Israeli public wants to hear as it prepares for peace-bound sacrifices.

The magic words “historical right” have the capacity to change the entire equation in the Middle East. They convey a genuine commitment to permanence and can therefore invigorate the peace process with the openness and good will that it has been lacking thus far.

A presidential call for affirmation of this right would turn Obama’s speech in Cairo into a huge leap forward in the quest for peace and understanding in the region.

Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son. He is a co-editor of “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Lights, 2004).

In the same week that violent protests engulfed Iran following its hotly contested election, W Magazine ran a lengthy spread about the Iranian immigrant community in Los Angeles and the incredible name they have made for themselves. Given all the tragedies and trampling of human rights coming out of Iran, it was a welcome reminder of the astonishing success of one community basking in freedom and is a potent example of how Iran and other countries could likewise flourish.

The central theme of the article was that Iranians who moved to America in the wake of the country’s last revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s have not only survived in a foreign land, but also thrived. They’ve created unimaginable wealth for themselves, but also serve as role models, given the scope of their philanthropic endeavors, civic and religious participation, and pursuit of elected office.

Of course, the Iranian community in Los Angeles is not alone in standing out. In August 2008, Newsweek ran a story on a group of Iranian students who received the highest scores ever on Stanford’s Ph.D. entrance exam, known to be tremendously difficult. The majority of the students came from a single Iranian university, Sharif University of Science and Technology in Iran, known today to have one of the best undergraduate electrical engineering departments in the world, despite competing with perennial all-stars such as MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Tsingshua (China) and Cambridge. As the article goes on to say, Iranian students from Sharif and other outstanding Iranian schools have been recognized in the International Science Olympics and have won top prizes in physics, math, chemistry and robotics. Unfortunately, up to 90 percent of these students leave the country for graduate school or to work elsewhere around the world.

Shortly after the article was published, another Iranian American also made the news. Professor Maysam Ghovanloo, of Georgia Tech, was singled out by then-President George W. Bush at a White House dinner and described as “one of our nation’s most ingenious biomedical engineers.” Ghovanloo invented a technology that could revolutionize how people with severe disabilities operate their wheelchairs and engage in daily activities simply by moving their tongue.

I am reminded of these anecdotes as I watch the blood spill onto the streets of Tehran. Iranians in my community speak of the rhetoric they used to hear from the mullahs after the Iran-Iraq war, that these kids and young adults who risked certain death by being forced onto minefields were gharemans, or heroes of the Iranian people. It’s plainly evident how Iran is treating its gharemans now. I’m reminded of these stories when I hear about ordinary citizens and journalists in Iran being thrown in secret prisons, violently tortured and beaten, brainwashed and forced to admit to crimes they didn’t commit. I’m reminded of these stories when I hear reports of Iran employing the death penalty more often than nearly every other country, sometimes hanging people from a crane in public for all to witness this ghoulish scene. Why, then, is Iran willing to risk public humiliation, the ire of its citizens and the opprobrium of the Western world?

These are important questions to ask, since today, just as in 1979, Iran stands yet again on the edge of a precipice. For all its chants of “Death to America,” Iran has little to show for itself these last 30 years. With a population that is about 70 percent below the age of 35, there is double-digit unemployment (estimated at 13 percent by the Iranian government), inflation (28 percent in 2008) and discontent among the working class. Thanks to its clerical regime, instead of welcoming Iran into the international fold as a forward-thinking nation, we have Iran to thank as one of the world’s greatest state sponsors of terror, providing financing and weaponry to Hezbollah and numerous other terrorist groups. What will be the legacy of Iran a mere 30 years from now?

These are the questions America, Europe and the Arab world should be asking themselves today. These issues are emblematic of the deep-rooted dichotomy emanating out of the Middle East, not just Iran. It’s convenient to label America, Israel and the West as scapegoats and the root of the world’s problems, but even removing these countries from the equation, what do you have left? To what extent are Iran and its Middle Eastern brethren sufficiently introspective, as the United States and other democracies are, to assess, evaluate and adapt its current ways?

Thomas Jefferson once said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Unfortunately, Iran’s current leadership seems more focused on instilling fear and hatred into its citizens, rather than inspiring hope and cultivating an environment where legitimate discourse and dialogue allows the government to actually learn from its people. For Iran to emerge from this crisis, the international community must involve itself to a greater degree once the dust settles from this electoral nightmare. Although the United States has rightly stood on the sidelines until a path forward becomes more clear, we cannot assume Iran’s leadership is willing to “unclench its fist” of its own accord. We must offer our assistance to Iran’s innocent civilians and further emphasize the constructive role the United States can play in Middle East developments, as President Obama discussed in his recent speech in Cairo. If America and its partners are not involved now, clearly a role will be thrust upon us in the future in the form of another war in the Middle East or defending one of our allies.

The spectacle on our screens this last week couldn’t have laid out the issue in more stark terms. Either we nurture the Iranians and allow them to contribute to the world at large, or we witness more clerical-style “nurturing” of Iranian dissent and another dismal chapter of the Iranian legacy.

Arash Farin is an investment banker based in Los Angeles.

Being pregnant for the first time I’m scared and I want my mommy. I just don’t want my mommy.

My mom hates babies and kids, always has. She didn’t put her cigarette out on my arm or throw me in a pit of snakes, but having kids just wasn’t her diaper bag, and it showed.

I’m not here to trash my mother, only to worry that I’ll become her.

While most people say having children gives them new compassion for their parents, I’m not having that experience so far. Instead, I’m filled with a renewed, fuming and bottomless disquietude about the mom hand I was dealt, which consisted of one truly evil, now fortunately dead stepmother, and a wildly superior though still problematic biological mom who raised me with a combination of ambivalence and benign neglect.

For her part, it was nothing personal against me, she just found all babies to be life-snatching buzz kills.

The syllogism was as impossible to ignore as a tot shrieking in a high chair, spitting noodles: Mom hates children. I am a child. Therefore, mom hates me. I must also be an irritating burden. In fact, I grew up thinking that everyone hates babies. It was all I knew.

Don’t get me wrong. My mom is a fun person, and people genuinely like her. If Auntie Mame were less chirpy, more medicated and prone to dating angry, homeless Berkeley poets or leaving her kids for a month to chop trees in Vermont, that would be my mom. Part Mame, part maimed, all out of her element when it came to lullabies and hugs.

To this day, if a baby cries in a restaurant with my mom around, we all have to bail immediately, but not before she shoots the family several piercing, withering looks. Long looks. She doesn’t look away until she has properly shamed the parents for ruining her meal and her day. Even when she hears a baby laugh she fixes her face in an expression to communicate to the world that she is being put upon, that the sounds coming from your child are no less than a knife in her brain.

I am not her, or she, or however you say it. I know it, but there are tinges of her infirmity, her intolerance, times I notice my head involuntarily snapping toward a wailing baby in a restaurant, a vestige of that sticky notion that babies are serenity-piercing killjoys.

I’m terrified that just as I have her broad shoulders and freckled skin, I may inherit her lackluster mothering skills. How can I be sure I won’t resent my baby? My therapist assures me I won’t, that true maternal detachment of my mother’s sort is very rare, that even though my baby is only half-cooked, I’m already bonded to the kid, and that seems true. Still, when I think about how much the whole experience sucked for my mom, I worry.

My mother’s exasperation with me started even before I was born.

She bought “It’s a Boy” cards when she was pregnant, just trying to sway the gender gods. Her desire for a second boy was based on this chestnut, “A boy would be your father’s problem.” This card story isn’t one she tried to hide. In fact, it was in heavy rotation on the “Mom’s Top 40 hilarious anecdotes” list, staying there for an unprecedented 20 years.

Mom’s particular bouquet of crazy sometimes has top notes of mean with a strong insensitivity finish.

“If you look at pictures, your mom holds you like a sack of potatoes, like she didn’t connect — I think she must have had that postpartum thing,” says my dad, trying to explain some of this, trying to defend her even though they have been divorced since I was 3. He argues that it wasn’t her fault; she just wasn’t cut out for motherhood. In one old snapshot taken in a park somewhere, she holds me as I hold my stuffed bunny. My older brother is down at her feet, and she is looking away, yellow headband in her black hair, squinting. If there was a caption it might read, “How can I get out of this?”

When I was a baby, she got a job as a Los Angeles County school bus driver so she could afford to pay a nanny named Inez to baby-sit me for the first couple of years of my life. Let that sink in for a sec: My mother, a college graduate with an above-genius IQ, preferred spending her days driving a diesel school bus through the smog-choked San Fernando Valley to staying home with her kids, me and my brother, who is a year-and-a-half older.

When I was 3, she decided she needed a break from the whole married-with-kids endeavor and left the family for six months to take a job in Chicago. By the time she got back, she was starting to get that “you’re not such a good mom” look from people, including the judge, who awarded custody of my brother and me to my dad.

My new stepmother suggested I would be better off with my mom and that’s how I ended up with her, most of the time anyway.

Once a month, starting at age 4, she put me on a plane alone to see my dad. That isn’t even legal anymore; kids that young can’t fly unaccompanied. Summers and holidays, she put me on a Greyhound bus to stay with my grandparents in Santa Barbara. Those were 10-hour bus rides, just one little girl reading Mad Magazine eating Twizzlers with an assortment of vagrants, fugitives and visitors to the California Men’s Colony. When I confronted my mom about it later, she asked, “What was I supposed to do? Drive you myself all those times?” Um … yes?

Still, she is not and was not a bad person. In the end, she was simply self-centered, not hateful. Here’s where I struggle to say something positive so I don’t come across like a horrible, slandering, ungrateful daughter just for telling the truth; the more self-reliant we became, the more tolerant she was, and I can say she did have some sparkling mom moments, reading us Steinbeck by flashlight when she took us to Yosemite, taking us to see great grown-up movies and revivals. I was the first in my elementary school crowd to see “Easter Parade” and, of course, “Mame.” 

She also encouraged me to write, something she probably regrets right about now.

It was really just the baby thing.

I have been told I am at “high risk” for postpartum depression. My husband will have to look for “signs” and be prepared to toss some Prozac down my gullet if I get all withdrawn and affect-less. If this happens, I’m assured that it will pass quickly. Before going ahead with the baby making, I talked about it for months with my therapist, who once offered me a million dollars if I have a baby and don’t love it. She’s positive I’m going to be fine, but she wants me to be prepared.

The plan is to get some help for the first few weeks so I don’t get too sleep-deprived. The rest is just faith. Yesterday, I was working on this column at a coffee shop when a baby started crying into his baggie of Cheerios. It’s not a beautiful sound to me, but I forced myself to question whether it’s the worst, or whether an even more festering sound is my mother’s voice in my head.

Teresa Strasser is a Los Angeles Press Club and Emmy Award-winning writer. She is currently writing about her pregnancy at exploitingmybaby.com.

Can sarcasm, irony, surrealism, irreverence and Joycean wordplay with Talmudic references help bring us closer to Torah and to God? Can you turn the rabbinic tradition upside down and still honor it?

Is it possible to understand a religious message better when you play with it, challenge it and even mock it?

These are not questions that have often crossed my mind. Until, that is, I started hanging out with Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, spiritual leader of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Westwood.

Bouskila believes there’s one Jew who can revolutionize the way Torah and Judaism are taught, and, in the process, bring a generation of Jews closer to their Judaism.

That one Jew is the late Israeli novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

Agnon (1888-1970) was a religious Jew and talmudic scholar who was raised in a shtetl in Ukraine and who, after moving to Israel in 1907, became a world-famous novelist and storyteller. He used traditional religious sources and folklore, played with sacred and secular texts, blended classic and rabbinic Hebrew and fused irony with religious storytelling to create a body of work unlike any other.

The problem, however, is that because Agnon was seen mostly as a literary figure, he was never embraced and given his due by the Torah and religious world. Bouskila, who fell in love with Agnon years ago while studying in Israel, would love to change that.

Over lunch at Shilo’s the other day, the rabbi spent several hours giving me examples of Agnon’s potential to revolutionize Torah study.

His argument came down to this: For people who get bored easily (most of us?), the best way to teach is to surprise, challenge and provoke.

For example, let’s say you want to teach the importance of not speaking lashon harah. You can go through the laws of the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch, analyze and debate the commentaries of the Chofetz Chaim and other great thinkers, study the relevant biblical stories, meditate on the mystical dimension of the mitzvah or give a passionate sermon on the ethics of avoiding hurtful language.

Bouskila has no particular problem with these traditional approaches. It’s just that for him, if you want the message to “really stick, ” there’s nothing like the magic of an Agnon story.

To help make his point, he read me an Agnon story of a woman who sits at home knitting on Shabbat instead of gossiping with her neighbors. One day, the great Moses happens to walk by her house and notices that God’s spirit hovers above the house. Moses is shocked that the woman is desecrating the Shabbat by violating one of the 39 prohibited Shabbat labors.

He instructs her to sit with her neighbors so that she should not violate the Shabbat, yet the following week, when he once again passes by her house, he notices that God’s spirit no longer hovers above the house. Moses understands that her original practice was better, so he instructs her to return to it.

Agnon, a Torah-observant Jew his whole life, had the chutzpah to challenge the notion of “violating the Shabbat,” and through the character of Moses — God’s lawgiver, no less — he suggests that idle gossip is more of a legal violation than the other 39 prohibitions. He concludes his story by mocking rabbinic authorities who concocted a cover-up to protect Moses’ reputation.

Amazingly, Bouskila says, even though the story challenges halachah, a reader can walk away with a deeper appreciation for both the holiness of Shabbat and the importance of avoiding lashon harah.

Because Agnon’s stories are so fertile and real and often surreal, they can touch you in a way that a typical Torah class cannot. And because the stories are textured with hard-core talmudic elements, they have enough Torah credibility to be taken seriously. The resulting brew is like midrash on steroids: it plays with your mind, sneaks up on you, tantalizes you, enchants you, provokes you, and, finally, invites you to challenge away.

After all that, Bouskila says, the reader begins to own the message.

At a Torah salon at my house recently, Bouskila took us through Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat,” a short story that touched on the themes of intergenerational conflict and the yearning to return to Zion. The story was only three pages long, but we debated its meaning for hours. After a while, the story became ours.

Bouskila, who’s written about Agnon in The Jewish Journal in the past, has hundreds of these rich Agnon stories in his repertoire. The stories are his ammunition to spark a greater interest in Judaism — both with his flock and the community at large. He’d love to publish an anthology one day that will connect specific Agnon stories to each week’s Torah portion and make Agnon “an engaging and thought-provoking guest at every Shabbat table.”

He’s banking on the notion that a lot of Jews are not turned on by the traditional ways of the religious trade — the preachy classes and sermons, the easy stories, the mitzvah pitch, the talmudic micro-debates, etc. — and that it’s time to try a new, provocative and literary approach to Torah studies that can open up and energize Jewish minds.

At the very least, he’ll have a ball trying.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine, Meals4Israel.com and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at {encode=”dsuissa@olam.org” title=”dsuissa@olam.org”}.