One verse, five voices.Edited by Salvador Litvak, Accidental Talmudist
And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” but his brothers could not answer him because they were startled by his presence. –Genesis 45:3
Mayim Bialik Actor, neuroscientist, author, mom
Imagine being left for dead, sold into slavery in a foreign land and forced to start life anew with no support from your family while surrounded by no one who knows you. You would change.
You might change so much that you hardly recognize yourself. So much that your own kin no longer recognize you. Joseph was not simply older, with more wrinkles, less hair or a chubbier waistline. Joseph had feared death and been abandoned. He had been abused and felt terror. He had been taken from his home and lost his family of origin. He had started over. And this changes a person.
The first thing Joseph asked after revealing himself to his brothers was, “Is my father still alive?”
Why didn’t he reach out to his father sooner? Couldn’t he have sent a messenger? A passenger pigeon maybe? Something? It’s true that the world was different then. Communication wasn’t as it is now. It’s also possible that he was afraid to reach out. Because perhaps Joseph’s question was not simply about his desire to see the man who loved him most. Maybe he wanted to know if the man who loved him most still knew who he was after all of the change he had undergone.
Joseph thus helps us ask one of the most critical questions any person can ask: How much can I change and still have you love me?
Heftsibah Cohen-Montagu Arevot Women’s Beit Midrash of the Sephardic Educational Center
Joseph’s words sum up the drama between him and his brothers at the transitional moment of their relationship from alienation to recognition. For the first time when addressing his brothers, Joseph calls Jacob “my father” instead of “your father.” Even at this moment of intimacy and reconciliation Joseph reminds them that Jacob was most of all his father, only secondarily their father, and never our father.
They look back at all the distancing between them: Joseph’s failure to acknowledge them, the sale, the dreams, all the way back to the coat of many colors and the tragedy of the parent who preferred one of his children over the others. No wonder the brothers are startled! Joseph’s words “my father” bring their relationship back full circle, and they see that the key to their relationship with Joseph lies not between him and them but between all the brothers and Jacob.
Joseph is testing his brothers: Can they live with the pain of his privileged status, which created the original divisions between them? The phrase, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” echoes, “These are the generations of Jacob: Joseph … ” at the beginning of the story, the painful realization that Jacob’s story is the story of Joseph. The brothers have reached the point where they can acknowledge the guilt and the sorrow and accept that this is the way things are. But will the reconciliation be complete if Joseph cannot give up his privileged status and see Jacob as “our father”?
If you think you have family drama, kick back and just read the entire book of Bereshit (Genesis). It’s must-see TV! From Cain and Abel to Joseph’s near-fatal relationship with his brothers, and everything in between, there is family intrigue in spades. And no one is spared. Not Abraham. Not Isaac. Not Jacob. The spiritual giants who were the progenitors of the Jewish people and the embodiment of Jewish values, experienced a level of family dynamics that to the uneducated eye, bordered on dysfunction.
Joseph was betrayed by his brothers, who misguidedly viewed him as a threat to the holy destiny of the Jewish people. They thought about executing him but settled on selling him into slavery. How brotherly! Undaunted, Joseph rose from the degradation of slavery and from the pain of sibling hatred to become the second to Pharaoh. Quite an impressive trajectory!
So now, at the crest of Joseph’s power, standing before the very brothers who betrayed him, the stage is set for an epic encounter and a delicious opportunity for revenge. And how does Joseph capitalize on this moment? He asks about his father and then comforts his stupefied brothers. No outbursts. No recriminations. No revenge. Joseph ascends to the heights of power but does not lose his neshama nor his faith in a higher purpose.
Bereshit’s drama is not random. It’s there to remind us that the most strained relationships can help us develop the most sublime sensitivities. Shabbat shalom.
David Brandes Screenwriter and producer
Why does Joseph ask his brothers if his father is still alive? After all, he already knows the answer. They told him in their long narrative earlier in the text. Moreover, if Joseph needed to know this terribly important information, why didn’t the brothers answer the question, and why didn’t Joseph press them for an answer?
Perhaps the clue is in Joseph’s framing of the question. He uses the singular possessive “my” father rather than the plural “our” father.
Joseph wants to forgive his brothers. He tests them and learns from their responses that they are truly remorseful. But is it possible to reconcile after their cruelty to him? Can what has been done be undone?
Joseph sees and hears that the brothers love their father, as much as he does. He realizes that this mutual devotion might be the key to their reconciliation. That’s when he asks the question in which he signals that the “my father” he is referring to is not the sometimes-divisive father Jacob but rather the transformative father Israel who contained his struggles, kept the family together and ultimately became the progenitor of an eternal nation.
I am suggesting that Joseph knows with certainty that his father Jacob is alive but he doesn’t know if his family Israel has survived. When the brothers fall into each other’s arms crying and hugging, the answer is self-evident. The family lives. Am Yisrael Chai.
Rabbi Gabriel Botnick Mishkon, Venice
Our sages teach that Yosef’s brothers were startled into silence on account of their shame — for not protecting their little brother, choosing instead to harm him, and then hurting their father by concealing their crime from him.
In the intervening years, the brothers likely found ways to cope with their shame — just as many of us do when we err. And yet, when confronted by a living Yosef, they realize the foolishness of their coping strategies. With their shame again upon them, they are left with nothing to say in their defense.
Our tradition teaches that the first words to come off one’s lips in the morning should be Mod(e/a)h Ani — Grateful am I — for God returning my soul to me and having faith that I will use the gift of life to do good. The “Sefat Emet” teaches that whenever we squander the opportunity to do good, we experience shame — for having used our God-given abilities to work against the will of God. And we likely experience further shame after our failures become known to the world.
Shame is a powerful emotion that warns us against misdeeds and keeps us on the path of doing good. The exchange between Yosef and his brothers teaches us this very lesson, and asks us to consider — before taking any action — whether we would be ashamed if the truth of that action were to become known. If we always strive to do good, we need fear nothing at all.
PREVIOUSLY: Ernie has struggled to find acceptance and the control of his kitchen rage
Once, decades after the war, Ernie returned to Lucenec to see what had become of his hometown. He was distraught at what he found there.
Half the city still remained demolished, even after those passing years. He went to his mother’s old restaurant to find the place was still standing. But the walls were crumbling. It was dark inside. Gypsy families lived there.
“It looked like I was walking in the cemetery, that’s what it reminded me of,” he recalled.
It wasn’t just the buildings; it was the ghosts of his parents, everybody.
All gone.
Once, during a trip to Israel, Ernie heard a fantastic story.
A distant cousin had been murdered by the Nazis in Budapest during the last days of the war. Many years later, the fully-intact body was recovered from a makeshift grave.
It was carefully interned in a Jewish cemetery — even with a proper marker.
At least one of Ernie’s relatives had found peace.
So many of Ernie’s family had died in the gas chambers, reduced to ashes. Now there was a tombstone, a poignant marker to the past.
Not only was the man part of his distant family, but Ernie’s newfound passion for his Judaism and Jewish roots drove him to travel to Budapest to research the story.
Perhaps he was looking to close his own chapter of abuse at the hands of the Nazis.
He visited public libraries to look at microfilm. One news article told of how during a construction project, diggers had recovered the incredibly-preserved body of a man — his clothing and facial features still recognizable.
“The doctors couldn’t believe it,” Ernie recalled. “The dress and the suit, everything on him, it looked like it just happened yesterday. It was like a miracle. I mean, two years, that comes apart. Maybe it was because no air came to it.”
Inside the man’s pocket, they found his passport and other identification papers.
As Ernie told it, the relative was walking in the wrong part of Budapest as the war came to a close. He was shot dead by a group of officers.
During the chaos of the Nazi retreat, he got incredibly unlucky.
“It was in 1945,” Ernie recalled. “The war was finished. But there were still parties of Nazis. And they shot him.”
The local Jewish community began an investigation into the background of this man whose body was uncovered decades after the war ended. Local rabbis held a ceremony and erected a marker in his honor at a Jewish cemetery.
So Ernie went there one day with a friend who lived in Budapest. She took pictures of Ernie standing there, next to his last real connection to the past.
His expression is as cold as the tombstone.
There would be no peace for this bittersweet baker.
NEXT: Ernie has his defenders, those able to look past his gruff exterior.
Where once there was confidence and ease in being a New York City Jew —whether you were a Seinfeldian Upper West Sider or more a Brooklyn Chasid tucked into the comfort of a tightly knit community —now, there is fear.
After weeks of assaults, including 10 separate attacks over the eight days of Hanukkah, Jews of every denomination in the New York area are grieving, stunned by the violence and deeply shaken. People who are identifiably Jewish, especially those wearing the distinctive garb of Chasidim, feel especially vulnerable.
“The rate and severity of these attacks is not random. It feels like an explosive expression of anti-Semitism,” said Yocheved Sidof, mother of five and executive director of Lamplighter’s Yeshiva, which she founded, in Crown Heights. There are 147 students in grades K-12.
“It feels surreal that walking from my home to work, I traverse three corners that have had violence in just the past couple of weeks,” she said. “For my young children to even know where those corners are and feel targeted, that feels inexcusable.”
Sidof said she has been flooded with calls from anxious parents since the Monsey attack. Lamplighter Yeshiva is in a predominantly black corner of Crown Heights, she said, and she is keenly aware of the narrative accepted by some local African Americans and Caribbean Americans that Jews are “the white oppressors associated with skyrocketing housing costs.”
School staff and parents have heard, “Get the f— out of here, Jews” from locals, but Sidof said, “Thank God there hasn’t been any violence.” The school has full-time security guards but is investigating ways to beef up safety precautions, Sidof said. She also is planning an event with black members of the local community at the playground next to Lamplighters.
About 1.5 million Jews live in New York City and there are some 2,000 Jewish institutions, including synagogues, schools and camps. Anti-Semitic incidents have seen a sharp increase in 2019 over 2018, up 63%, according to New York City statistics. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charts a smaller uptick from January through November 2019 over the same period in 2018. In figures provided to the Jewish Journal, the ADL measured it rising from 218 to 256 incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault in New York City.
The upward trend and severity of many of the attacks is traumatizing many.
Rivky Feiner has lived in Monsey all her 46 years. A consultant to nonprofits and mother of five children ranging in age from 8 to 26 years old, she never expected anything like the machete attack to happen in her quiet suburb. “It’s very frightening. How did he even know about the rabbi’s house? He might have seen visibly Chasidic people walking in and thought it was the shul. I just don’t know.”
She added, “We crossed a line” into new territory “and we can’t go back, so how do we move forward? My kids are frightened. How do we feel safe?”
About 1.5 million Jews live in New York City and there are some 2,000 Jewish institutions, including synagogues, schools and camps. Anti-Semitic incidents have seen a sharp increase in 2019 over 2018, up 63%, according to New York City statistics.
It also is reawakening the worst imaginable past traumas. An elderly Holocaust survivor in the area was at a meeting the day after the Monsey attack with Steve Gold, who is co-president of the Jewish Federation and Foundation of Rockland County, in which Monsey is located. “He said he was going home to pack his bag and have his passport out so that when they come for Jews here, he could escape,” Gold related.
“This wave of violence [against Jews] seems to be the worst, most sustained and lethal in the history of this country,” said David Myers, the Sady & Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. “It is hard not to ask oneself, ‘Does the U.S. now join so many other places in the world as being unsafe for Jews?’ ”
A few days after the home invasion in suburban Monsey, the thoughts of many in the area are turning to larger approaches beyond increasing police patrols to try to interrupt this terrible pattern of daily attacks on Jews in the New York area. Some are calling for changes in laws; others for building bridges between the black and Jewish communities, where the relationship has grown increasingly tense. Others are demanding major initiatives by elected officials, some of which already had been announced at the many press conferences held in Rockland County and New York City in the first two days after the Monsey attack.
One major new effort announced on Dec. 30 by UJA-Federation — which does not cover Rockland County — and Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York is a $4 million Community Security Initiative headed by expert security analyst Mitchell Silber. The money will fund Silber’s position and those of six security professionals who will be assigned to areas spread across the New York City region to assist Jewish institutions in strengthening their security. That $4 million nearly equals the JCRC’s entire 2017 budget, according to the most recent tax filing available.
Response from elected officials and leaders of various communities came swiftly after the Monsey attack whipped around the internet.
Members of the Guardian Angels patrol in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Dec. 31. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Black Leaders’ Responses
Rev. Al Sharpton — who has been widely disliked and distrusted in the Jewish community since he escalated tensions and disparaged Jews during the 1994 Crown Heights race riots — held a press conference on Dec. 30 surrounded by an array of black church leaders, the leader of the regional NAACP and elected officials, along with Rabbi Marc Schneier of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.
Sharpton alluded to the past troubles when he said at the press conference, “You cannot be anti-hate and pro-civil rights only one way. We rise particularly since the incidents involve blacks that have been arrested and charged, and say we condemn any attacks, any hate crimes, any efforts by anyone to impede the continuing move toward trying to heal whatever we have had to heal in the black and Jewish community.
“We are not unaware there have been tensions, but we have also been those who have strived to work those tensions out down through the years, and this will not set us back. We will stand with any move in our community to investigate hate crimes no matter who the hated and who the hater. We want to be crystal clear that we encourage members of our community to stand for what is right and righteous.”
Rev. Cornell Brooks was president and CEO of the NAACP through early 2017 and now is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. In November, he called on America’s four living former presidents to issue a “national state of emergency on hate” and convene a national summit on hate and democracy.
In an interview, Brooks quickly cited Poway, Calif., where on April 27, a 19-year-old suspected of firing an automatic rifle killed one woman and injured three others at a Chabad synagogue, and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were killed during Shabbat services in October 2018. He also talked about “the recent uptick in and around New York” and asked, “How many Jews have to be attacked for us to realize we have a problem morally?”
Brooks said the approach to hate crimes must change nationally and on every government level. “We see a standardized response — talk retrospectively, prosecution at the back end without policy on the front end. It’s one thing for the NYPD (New York Police Department) to quickly respond. It’s another to prevent the perpetrator in the first place and to have a White House that speaks to these issues.”
Elected Officials’ Responses
New York state Attorney General Letitia James was among the first elected officials to weigh in on the horror in Monsey. “I am deeply disturbed by the situation unfolding in Monsey, New York, tonight,” she tweeted the night of the attack. “There is [zero] tolerance for any acts of hate of any kind and we will continue to monitor this horrific situation. I stand with the Jewish community tonight and every night,” posted James, who is black.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the Monsey attack “an act of domestic terror.”
Four Jewish New York state and city lawmakers representing heavily Orthodox areas issued a letter on Dec. 29 calling on Cuomo to institute a state of emergency and employ state police and the New York National Guard to “visibly patrol and protect” Orthodox Jewish communities. They also asked Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, and that the special prosecutor “immediately assume control of cases already under the jurisdiction of local district attorneys.”
“It is no longer safe to be identifiably Orthodox in the State of New York. We cannot shop, walk down a street, send our children to school or even worship in peace,” wrote New York State Sen. Simcha Felder, State Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein and New York City Council members Chaim Deutsch and Kalman Yeger.
Just after the Monsey attack, Deutsch tweeted, “Can Jews walk down the street without being attacked? Can Jews shop for groceries without being attacked? Can Jews pray without being attacked? Can Jews ride the subway without being attacked? No — we can’t. We are sick of words. We need concrete action!!!”
On Dec. 29, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced what he is billing as a “major new effort” to address hate crime in New York City: dramatically increased police patrols in ultra-Orthodox areas and multi-ethnic interfaith Neighborhood Safety Coalitions in Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park to bring together community leaders. He also announced a major educational initiative in public middle and high schools in those neighborhoods. It appears, from the city’s description, that it will entail discussion with public school students of hate crimes and how to prevent them, and bringing in members of the Jewish community to talk with them.
The red-bereted, red-jacketed Guardian Angels alsodeployed its unarmed patrolsthroughout those same three Chasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods on Dec. 30, promising to keep up its crime-deterring presence.
Jewish Leaders’ Responses
Just about every Jewish group issued a statement or offered interviews after the Monsey attack, which seemed to mark a tipping point in public outcry about the violence against Jews. Threaded throughout all of them was a sense of anxiety —and demands that elected officials strengthen hate crime laws.
Sheila Katz, CEO of the 90,000-member National Council of Jewish Women, grew up in Rockland County not far from Monsey, in a Reform-affiliated home in nearby Suffern. “Jews being attacked in their homes, walking to synagogue, in their supermarkets. Hanukkah is a time of celebrating freedom from persecution and instead, we’re living in fear and mourning,” she told the Journal.
“This wave of violence [against Jews] seems to be the worst, most sustained and lethal in the history of this country,” said David Myers, the Sady & Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA. “It is hard not to ask oneself, ‘Does the U.S. now join so many other places in the world as being unsafe for Jews?’ “
She urged New York and federal legislators to expand hate crime laws. “We’d like to see the New York state hate crimes law — and the federal government, as the United States Commission on Civil Rights recommended in its November 2019 report — place a greater emphasis on collecting hate crime data. In addition, we’re advocating for the passage of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act” in Congress, she said.
“By better tracking and reporting incidents of hate crimes nationwide — which these measures will work toward — we’ll be better positioned to prevent and address these horrific attacks against the Jewish community and all marginalized communities.”
While Katz lit her Hanukkah menorah in a more convenient place in her Washington, D.C., home most nights of the holiday, she said that after the Monsey attack, that changed. “I’m putting my menorah near the window to make sure we’re all being a light in the darkness and showing up as Jews, saying, ‘We’re here and going to continue to be proud of our identities and combat anti-Semitism.’ ”
Agudath Israel of America, which represents the interests of the ultra-Orthodox community, wrote in a statement: “We beseech those in government to do everything humanly possible to halt this cancer. Continue increased patrols; apprehend and prosecute criminals. Get them — and keep them — in jail, to the fullest extent allowed by law. Enhance security funding to our vulnerable structures; work with us to provide training, so those within can protect themselves when necessary.”
It concluded: “We pray to the Almighty for a recovery to those injured in last night’s attack. We also pray that He grants those in leadership the fortitude to boldly do what is right, and heal, or remove, this malignant hatred in our country.”
Allen Fagin, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, told the Journal, “The most important thing is for us to stop the hand-wringing and rhetoric and focus on concrete action in the short and long run. To make communal institutions safer and to engage in really serious community and school education efforts so this disease of hatred of all types is brought to a halt. That is a long and drawn-out battle.
“Perpetrators of hate crimes need to be treated by the criminal justice system in a fundamentally different way. We need to have laws that characterize violent hate crime as domestic terrorism and deploy law enforcement and judicial and prosecutorial resources that are necessary with real significant penalty,” he said. “It is terrorism.”
“A virus depends on the environment, and the environment today is user-friendly to the virus, to anti-Semitism.”
— Abraham Foxman, director of the Center of the Study of Anti-Semitism, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage
All the arms of the Conservative movement together wrote: “We thank law enforcement for their hard work and call on them to redouble their efforts to provide protection. We urge political and civic leaders to speak louder still and to work together even more closely to stem this tide of hatred and to address any repetitive pattern emerging from these attacks and those of the past year in the New York area. We must not allow acts of anti-Semitism to become the new normal.”
Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs tweeted soon after the Monsey attack, “We are outraged by the bloody machete attack in Monsey. We pray for the injured and call out for more protection. This week’s litany of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in NY must be stopped. An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us!”
Others weighed in, as well.
“Antisemitism is not a threat to the Jewish community alone. It’s a danger to our democratic institutions and free society,” said Ira Forman in a statement. Forman is the senior adviser for Combatting Antisemitism at Human Rights First, a nonpartisan human rights advocacy organization. He previously served as the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism under President Bill Clinton.
“Confronting this rising epidemic is a task that requires bipartisan, long-term approaches at the federal, state and local levels. Confronting this scourge demands principled leadership from elected officials, thoughtful educational initiatives, evaluation of our justice system, and a commitment of resources to push back against hate.”
Community members gather outside in Monsey. Photo by Getty Images
Ongoing Black-Jewish Tension
Nearly all of the attacks have taken place in communities where there has been ongoing tension between the black and Jewish — specifically Charedi —communities.
Monsey is near New Square and Kiryas Joel, villages devoted to the communities of Skver and Satmar Chasidim, respectively. No one else lives there. The East Ramapo School District, which covers those communities, controls the local public schools and the public funding that goes to the Chasidic communities for things such as special education and textbooks. Chasidim began voting other Chasidim onto the school board, quickly taking it over. They drained the budget, leaving little funding available for the public schools and leading to state government investigations and lawsuits — and a great deal of animus among the area residents, most of them black or Latino, whose children attend those schools.
In the view of Gold of the Rockland Jewish Federation, “There is absolutely a link between here and Ramapo,” he said. “The hate is out there in the open every day. In some Facebook groups, all they want to do is bash the ultra-Orthodox community. There was a comment today. Someone said, ‘The perpetrator didn’t stab enough of those Jews.’ ”
Missing Accountability
Anti-Semitism is “a virus without an antidote or vaccine and it’s always been present,” said Abraham Foxman, director of the Center of the Study of Anti-Semitism at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. Foxman led the ADL for 28 years, until 2015. “A virus depends on the environment, and the environment today is user-friendly to the virus, to anti-Semitism. The environment kept it latent. We, in the last 50 years in this country, developed a firewall, a social consensus of what is proper and improper and there were consequences for wrong behavior. Truth was a weapon. People were held accountable for their behavior.”
But that has changed. Foxman cited the recent example of a member of Jersey City’s Board of Education who, after the murderous attack on a kosher market in December, posted: “Where was all this faith and hope when black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the Jewish community?”
Many have called for the Board of Education to fire her, but Joan Terrell-Paige remains a trustee of the body. Foxman said, “She’s still on the job. So, where’s the accountability?”
Gold told the Journal that social media companies need to be held accountable, as well, because they provide environments where hate, at times, grows unchecked.
Just about every Jewish group issued a statement or offered interviews after the Monsey attack, which seemed to mark a tipping point in public outcry about the violence against Jews.
“There needs to be some responsibility by Facebook administrators,” Gold said, for what goes on in Facebook groups, like some focused on Rockland County and the Lakewood, N.J., area, where tensions between the ultra-Orthodox community there and other local residents is running high.
“They need to monitor these groups 24 hours a day. They say, ‘What do you want from us? We can’t monitor it.’ That’s B.S.,” Gold said. “The laws pertaining to regular media should pertain to social media.” Because of stereotypes, rumors and lies spread on social media, “no one knows what’s true anymore. Something needs to be done. There have to be some type of repercussions.”
Members of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg’s community gather in front of the rabbi’s house on Dec. 29 in Monsey, N.Y. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Bail Reform Worries
New York state passed a new bail reform law that took effect Jan. 1. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “It will eliminate pretrial detention and cash bail as an option in anestimated 90 percent of arrests.” There are exceptions to the new law in cases of domestic abuse, sex offenses, witness tampering and conspiracy to commit murder. But there appears to be none in connection with hate crimes.
Tiffany Harris, 30, was arrested and charged with attempted assault as a hate crime in the face slapping of three young Jewish women — in separate attacks — while yelling, “F— you, Jews!” on Dec. 27 in Crown Heights. She told police that she did it because they are Jewish, officials said. She was released without bail shortly after. A day later, she was arrested again, suspected of punching another person in the face. She again was released without bail because the charges were misdemeanors. Harris reportedly has been arrested13 times in total, mostly for assault.
Fagin said New York state’s legislature needs to amend the law so those assaulting Jews in a hate crime don’t get away so easily. “The legislature knows how to draw distinctions. When it wanted to take sex offenders out from under the new law, they did it,” he noted. “We need to make the same distinction with hate crime.
“We simply cannot live as a society when those who commit hate crimes against any group are released and do it again the following day. We are turning our streets into a jungle,” he said.
Potential Retaliation
The Jewish security patrols known as the Shomrim in most Chasidic communities have vowed to beef up their presence in light of the recent violence.
There are others urging Orthodox Jews to arm themselves. A recent article from The Jewish Press is titled, “Experts Suggest 6 Firearms That Will Fit in Your Tallit Bag,” for purposes of concealed carry in synagogue.
“I completely broke down. I cried.” — Moshe Wigder, Jewish actor
There are videos like one titled, “Wild West, Monsey Style,”which shows four young Chasidic men toting what appear to be assault rifles as they saunter through a parking lot.
That attitude has one Monsey local very worried.
Moshe Wigder is an actor in one of the hottest off-Broadway shows in New York — the Yiddish “Fiddler on the Roof.” Raised Chasidic, mostly Satmar, he left Orthodoxy a while back but has lived in Monsey for about four years. Wigder was onstage in Manhattan when Grafton Thomas allegedly was swinging his machete, trying to murder Jews in his hometown.
Wigder already was deeply affected by the long string of attacks on Jews in New York and Jersey City. There is a scene in “Fiddler,” after the Jews have been expelled from Anatevka, in which his character, Mordkhe, enraged, talks to Tevye and says, “We can’t allow this! An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” Tevye puts his hands on Mordkhe’s shoulders and says, “Then the whole world will be without eyes or teeth.”
When he went offstage, checked Facebook and saw what had just happened in Monsey, Wigder said, “I completely broke down. I cried.”
The fear he knew as a Chasidic child with long side curls and a large yarmulke came flooding back. “I know that immediate fear. Whenever the goyim got drunk on Halloween or New Year’s Eve, we were afraid to walk in the streets, in Lakewood and in Brooklyn. They would throw things at us,” he recalled.
His anger, like Mordkhe’s, also has been awakened. Chasidim “happen to be the easiest targets because they’re a visual representation” of Jews, he said. “There has been a lot of tension with the black communities (in places he has lived) and that’s not helping anyone.” If the violence against Jews continues and it sparks any retaliation, “We’re going to have two minorities, then, without eyes or teeth.”
Debra Nussbaum Cohen is a journalist in New York City.
This month marks the nine-year anniversary of the death of the beloved Jewish musician Debbie Friedman, who died on Jan. 9, 2011, at 59. Her music touched Jews across the religious spectrum and also impacted the general culture of American Judaism. Friedman is widely remembered for her melody accompanying the misheberach, the prayer for healing, that has become a virtual icon among liberal Jews.
Traditionally, a prayer leader recites the misheberach in a synagogue during the Torah reading. During this prayer, the names of those who are ill are publicly recited. When recited on behalf of a Jew, it is customary to use the Hebrew name of the person for whom the prayer is being said. Although for most purposes, a person’s Hebrew name traditionally includes the Hebrew name of one’s father, in the case of the misheberach, the Hebrew name of the mother of the ill person is used instead. No single reason for this distinction exists, but this tradition has an ancient pedigree.
Despite its origins in traditional Judaism, the misheberachhas been the subject of remix among the majority of American Jews. Friedman’s melody certainly has contributed to its popularity, but there are many other reasons it is so widely appealing. For one thing, it is highly inclusive. It can be recited on behalf of all people. Also, as Friedman’s version illustrates, the actual content of the misheberach can be remixed in a highly accessible manner so that Jews and non-Jews, with little or no knowledge of Hebrew or background in Judaism, can participate. Another important aspect of the prayer’s appeal is that it is readily portable so that it can be invoked as a stand-alone prayer in non-synagogue settings such as support groups for ill patients and their families. The prayer’s malleability also is demonstrated by its frequent extension to cover all emotional and spiritual dimensions of illness for patients, their caretakers and even the loved ones of those of are ill.
Although many people feel a general disconnect between intellect and emotion when it comes to faith, at certain moments of our lives, the intellectual barriers to faith recede.
These applications of a remixed approach to the misheberach allow many individuals other than those who are ill to find a personal meaning in the prayer beyond the original context of petitioning God for a positive outcome. The truth is that people can, and do, find meaning and comfort in reciting this prayer even if they are unsure about the specific nature of their faith. For all these reasons, the misheberachis a remarkable illustration of how Jewish tradition can be remixed to provide a pathway with timeless relevance and appeal.
A study based in Tucson, Ariz., of 35 people’s experience with the misheberach revealed a deeper connection to Judaism based on the consistent recitation of this prayer. This connection was grounded in history, community, peoplehood, strength, comfort and emotional healing. Illness, either one’s own or that of a loved one, has the potential to create especially significant opportunities for embracing Jewish tradition. I have never had anyone refuse me when I have offered to say the misheberach on behalf of a sick relative or friend, no matter how disengaged that person was from any type of religion. Although many people feel a general disconnect between intellect and emotion when it comes to faith, at certain moments of our lives, the intellectual barriers to faith recede. At these times, the emotional or spiritual pull takes over as comfort, history, tradition and community assume more importance.
The beauty, wisdom and power Jewish tradition, including the power of Jewish prayer, can speak to Jews from all backgrounds. The history of the Jewish people is as complicated as Jewish tradition. Transmitting this tradition in today’s largely secularized American society is difficult. Among Jews who don’t feel bound by Divine command to observe the laws of Jewish tradition, religion can be a tough sell. Then again, Jewish tradition always had to be flexible and responsive to the foreign cultures in which the Jews have lived for centuries.The importance of this flexibility was recognized in the Talmud by Rabbi Simeon Ben Eleazar, who is quoted as advocating that one should “be pliable like a reed, not rigid like a cedar.” The underlying message is that rigidity can threaten survival.
Roberta R. Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of “Remix Judaism: Transmitting Tradition in a Diverse World,” forthcoming in February, 2020 (Rowman & Littlefield), “The Myth of the Cultural Jew” (Oxford University Press) and “The Soul of Creativity” (Stanford University Press).
Tour guide Maor Perry’s passion for Israel and Jewish history is as contagious as his smile and good vibes. He sees his role not just as an Israeli educator but a Jewish educator. His goal is to connect people to themselves and their heritage. “I do it in my way,” he said. “I try to simplify and explain. So you do the history first and then you try to connect people to it.”
Perry recently returned from guiding a high-profile multigenerational family from Los Angeles through Jerusalem. After visiting the Western Wall, they went to the Israel Museum to see the Dead Sea Scrolls. “How beautiful is our story that we can stand here in 2019 and read Hebrew that was written 2,100 to 2,300 years ago in this land by people who are probably blood related?” Perry said.
This magical moment, Perry said, brought the visiting family to its “aha” moment. “That’s why they’re here,” Perry explained. “They could have gone to the Bahamas. They’re here for this connection. [They] thanked me today. But I feel like I need to thank them, to get to share this moment with their family.”
Perry grew up in the Jewish community of Eley-Sinai in the Gaza Strip, founded mostly by families evacuated from the Sinai from 1979 and1982. Perry’s family members were forcibly evacuated from their homes during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005. His community was dismantled. His friends dispersed. At the time, Perry was 20 and serving in the navy. “Then my world changes,” he recalled. “I’m in this really dark place. I have no house, no community, no family.”
“How beautiful is our story that we can stand here in 2019 and read Hebrew that was written 2,100 to 2,300 years ago in this land by people who are probably blood related?”
As soon as he completed his mandatory military service, all Perry wanted was “to get as far as possible from this place,” he said. “Put me on a plane anywhere for free [and] I’m in,” he said. Ironically, Perry’s “ticket out” of Israel was the very thing that brought him back: the Jewish Agency for Israel, which sent him to the United States.
Perry worked at a private pluralistic camp in New Hampshire, where “more than healing myself, being far from the balagan (chaos), I got to see a whole new Jewish world that I didn’t know existed,” he said.
Perry went on to work as an Israeli emissary for the Jewish Agency in Pensacola, Fla. After working in the U.S., he came to understand that “there are other ways to be Jewish, not just through the religious practicality of davening,” he said. “And the end result of that, the deeper understanding, is that it’s freaking cool to be Jewish. And I can connect to my Judaism through my history, my culture, my values.”
For Perry, even a walk down the streets of Tel Aviv can be an inspiring, connected, almost miraculous moment. “I do it a lot. I zoom out and I zoom in. It gives me perspective — an understanding of gratitude. I feel lucky to be here right now.”
Several hundred protesters stormed the United States Embassy in Baghdad on Dec. 31 to protest U.S. airstrikes against Iran-backed Hezbollah members in Iraq known as Kataib Hezbollah.
The protesters threw rocks at the embassy, burned items outside and attempted to climb the walls. None of them breached the embassy.
President Donald Trump blamed Iran for the protests.
“Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many,” he tweeted. “We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted, “The attack today was orchestrated by terrorists – Abu Mahdi al Muhandis and Qays al-Khazali – and abetted by Iranian proxies – Hadi al Amari and Faleh al-Fayyad. All are pictured below outside our embassy.”
The attack today was orchestrated by terrorists – Abu Mahdi al Muhandis and Qays al-Khazali – and abetted by Iranian proxies – Hadi al Amari and Faleh al-Fayyad. All are pictured below outside our embassy. pic.twitter.com/2QfGGrfmDd
The U.S. airstrikes, which occurred on Dec. 29, hit five locations in Iraq and Syria, killing 25 Kataib Hezbollah members. The strikes were in response to a Dec. 27 rocket attack against an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk, which resulted in the killing of a U.S. civilian contractor.
These are the words that opened an article I penned seven and a half years ago. The time was August 2012. My soldier-sons were still in middle school. My middle-school daughter was still in preschool. My hair was still more brown than white. I did not yet write my two latest books. I was still driving a red Honda. I was still unaware of the possibility of Donald Trump ever becoming a US President. My late dog, Bubba, was still alive. My young dog, Layla, was not yet born.
In the Talmud a dog appears for the first time on the second page of the first tractate. Each night, says rabbi Eliezer, consists of three watches, of which the second begins when the dog barks. The second appearance of the dog is six pages later, and it presents an interesting twist. While Rabbi Eliezer utilizes a dog to separate the second watch of the night from the first watch – rabbi Meir utilize it to recognize the coming of a new day. When is the exact time in which the day begins? “Rabbi Meir says when one can distinguish between wolf and a dog”.
Seven and a half years ago, the day the article came out, I moderated a panel discussion in Jerusalem, to honor the ending of a cycle – and the beginning of a new cycle – of the Daf Yomi. Literally, “a page a day’’. That is, a page of the Babylonian Talmud, whom Wikipedia economically describes as “the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law and Jewish theology”.
2,711 pages in total.Seven and a half years.Day after day after day.
The panel in Jerusalem included a well-known Israeli scholar: Prof. Avigdor Shinan. As we were gathering to speak about the Talmud and its wonders, he was celebrating a personal triumph. A mission accomplished. Shinan read the last words of the last tractate of the Talmud, and then delivered the cryptic text customarily recited when a tractate ends. “We will return to you, Tractate Niddah, and you will return to us; our mind is on you, Tractate Niddah and your mind is on us; we will not forget you, Tractate Niddah, and you will not forget us – not in this world and not in the next world”.
The modern study of Daf Yomi was initiated more than ninety years ago by a rabbi named Meir Shapiro. He introduced the idea on August 16, 1923, and the first cycle of study commenced a few days later, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Ten years later, Shapiro passed away, leaving behind no children. Yet his legacy marches on. This coming shabbat, the 13th cycle of the Daf Yomi comes to an end. Many thousands of Jews around the world will join together in reading the last words of the last page: “The school of Elijah taught: Anyone who studies halakhot every day is guaranteed that he is destined for the World-to-Come…”
At that Jerusalem panel, Shinan, without knowing, convinced me that I must begin. His face lit up as he was reading the last words, and his shoulders seemed to have straightened. I wanted to have such feeling. I wanted to join a discussion that would be the opposite of an instant-gratification social media discussion. I wanted to take a journey that is the antithesis of today’s collective attention deficit disorder.
So, the next day, I started reading.
*
The Talmud begins with a seemingly simple question: “From when does one recite Shema in the evening?”
Of course, nothing in this question is simple. Nothing in the Talmud is simple. And the answer to the question is not really an answer. It is a few answers. The Talmud begins with Machloket – a disagreement. Rabbi Eliezer (the one of the night watch dog) says this, Rabban Gamliel says that, other rabbis have a third opinion. That’s a routine of the Talmud: Everything is up for debate.
Then we get a story: Rabban Gamliel’s sons return late at night from a wedding. They did not yet recite the Shema. Maybe it was the celebration, maybe the booze, maybe both. What shall they do? Their father says to them: If the dawn has not yet arrived, you are still obligated to recite the Shema. Now you know why a few pages later rabbi Meir (of the morning dog) will need a sign with which to identify when the day begins.
There is more than one Gamaliel in the Talmud. The one in our story is probably the great-great-grandson of Hillel the Elder, and the first leader of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish High Court) after the fall of the Second Temple in year 70CE. The most famous story about him chronicles a dispute between him and Rabbi Joshua on the exact time of Yom Kippur. Gamaliel, the senior among the two, commands Joshua to appear before him on the day Joshua believes to be Yom Kippur, carrying his stick and money. He wants to make the point that the authority of the court trumps all personal beliefs. It is final.
The Talmud is rich with such stories, some of which are astonishing, some just weird. But for the most part, the Talmud is not a corpus of stories, it is a transcription of many unfinished discussions and debates. “A highly discursive text, proceeding primarily by association rather than by any rational scheme”, wrote Ilana Kurshan in her masterful “If all the Seas Were Ink”.
Kurshan’s book mixes the story of her personal journey of crisis and growth, with the narrative of a daily study of Talmud. It is one of two books I am involved with that were published in Israel to coincide with the end of the Daf Yomi cycle. The second is a Hebrew original by Uri Briliant, whose title, tongue in cheek, is: All the Talmud on One Foot.
You are probably familiar with the story that beget this headline, also from the Talmud. There was a gentile who came before Shammai and said to him: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. Then the gentile came before Hillel, who converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.
One can find in the Talmud many sayings and life lessons such as this that can serve us all as we go about living our modern lives.
This short punctual story became quite famous. Much more famous than the similar, yet more complicated story that immediately follows it, about a gentile who asked to be converted to become the High Priest. It is famous because it’s simple. It is famous because it conveniently carries a modern message. Today’s readers see Shammai as the epitome of the rigid rabbinic rejectionist. Hillel is the inclusive, pluralistic nice guy. Shammai pushes people away, Hillel brings them in and sets what could seem as a low bar for participation: That which is hateful to you do not do to another. No keeping of difficult laws, no following Halachic rules, no paying attention to rabbinic decrees. Do no harm – that’s the whole Torah.
One can find in the Talmud many sayings and life lessons such as this that can serve us all as we go about living our modern lives. Hillel and Shammai are the sages whose great debates enriched us with the crucial teaching, the basis of all fruitful Jewish debates: “Divine Voice emerged and proclaimed: Both these and those are the words of the living God”.
Another example: In tractate Sanhedrin, we find this most vivid portrayal of a humanistic lesson: “the supreme King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, stamped all people with the seal of Adam the first man, as all of them are his offspring, and not one of them is similar to another. Therefore, since all humanity descends from one person, each and every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me, as one person can be the source of all humanity, and recognize the significance of his actions”.
But one must not fall into a honey trap. The Talmud is not always an easy-going corpus of easily digested stories. In fact, it is often the opposite. It is direct and often cruel. It is alien to the modern ear as can be imagined. There is slaughter, and incest, there is beating, executions, bizarre ritual. If you think a do-no-harm approach is the common theme of Talmud, read what happens to the wayward wife, when she is forced to drink the bitter water that would reveal her guilt of unfaithfulness: “She does not manage to finish drinking before her face turns green and her eyes bulge, and her skin becomes full of protruding veins”.
Is this shocking? The Talmud could be, and often is, a shocking book. That’s one of the things I like about it. As one enters the gates of this tome – as I did every day, for about an hour – one must suspend preconceived beliefs and must suppress present-day sensitivities. In the strange world of Talmud the rules are different.
Sometimes they are different in a relatively innocent way, as in the many tractates in which the rabbis discuss how ritual was conducted at the Temple. Sometimes they are different in a puzzling way, as in the stories about brothers of the deceased that are expected to marry their sisters in law. And sometimes these rules are incomprehensible. Consider a relatively mild example, from tractate Shevuot: Rav Yosef teaches that from the Torah verse ‘But in righteousness shall you judge your colleague’ what we learn is that a judge ought to treat favorably a person who is “with you in observance of Torah and in fulfillment of mitzvot”. That is, favoritism in the court.
Is this what the Talmud really teaches, an unjust system of law? Of course not. The story is more complicated. It is complicated by the fact that the meaning of “justice” and human understanding on how to achieve justice changes with time. This means that Talmudic justice will not be always compatible with the proclivities of the modern reader. As in this case: There was an incident where two people dispute the ownership of property. One of them said: It belonged to my ancestors and I inherited it from them, and another one says: It belonged to my ancestors and I inherited it from them. What should the court do? “Rav Naḥman said: Whoever is stronger prevails”. The stronger of the two (the word the Talmud uses is “violent”) gets the upper hand. You can read this (unfavorably) as cavemen mentality. You can also read this (favorably) as humility – a realistic acknowledgment of the sages that the courts do not always have a remedy for disputes.
That is to say: Comforting Hillel stories aside, the Talmud is an unvarnished version of an unrestricted Jewish discussion of all matters. It is as far from the “safe space”, demanded by American students today, as one can get.
****
Seven and a half years ago, my father in law was still alive. A few days before he died, as I was sitting with him for what turned to be our last conversation, Yoram asked me to show him my iPad, and the page I was studying. It’s not clear to me what interested him more: the short Talmudic discussion, or the app with which I study. Either way, it was tractate Rosh Hashanah and I showed him that I was just looking at the well-known saying: “Rabbi Kruspedai said that Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Three books are opened on Rosh HaShana: One of wholly wicked people, and one of wholly righteous people, and one of middling people”, those whose good and bad deeds are equally balanced.
There is great debate in the Talmud, and also among the commentators who followed, who are the righteous and who are the wicked and who are the ” middling people”. As I was sitting with Yoram I shared with bits and pieces from this argument. He listened somewhat impatiently for a few minutes, and then blurted: “middling people is everyone”. About a week later, at his funeral, my eulogy included this anecdote followed by a description of what I think was one his most endearing qualities. “Yoram suspected the righteous. He was generally a little suspicious of any kind of displayed grandeur but found the overly righteous particularly suspicious”.
“Do not be overly righteous” is also a Talmudic saying, from tractate Yoma. Another example of a story that ought to make us cringe. It is a creative interpretation of a biblical story whose beginning does not reveal its tragic end. Samuel the Prophet commands Saul to “go and smite Amalek”. Saul does as he is commanded: “And Saul came as far as the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the valley”. But this is precisely where the Talmud intervenes and describes the battle as a twisted affair from the start.
The Talmud tells us that a bitter confrontation between Saul and God preceded the battle. Saul is averse to obeying the command to slaughter the Amalekites. How can a merciful god expect me to slaughter men, women, old people, children and livestock indiscriminately, the disgruntled king asks. His reward for this principled argument, the Talmud tells us, is a humiliating rebuff: “And a voice [from heaven] was heard saying: do not be overly righteous”.
What do you make of that? Once, researching for a book chapter about Jewish values, I learned that philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergmann had a hard time with Saul’s story and the conclusion arising from it. As a Jewish humanist, Bergmann was unable to agree with the command to destroy Amalek. That led him to write that “the principle has to be” that “wherever the holy text is at odds with my moral sensibilities, I must sacrifice the text and not my intellect or my sensibility”.
“Do not be overly righteous” is a talmudic saying from tractate Yoma. It is another example of a story that ought to make us cringe.”
Can a counter argument be made? Of course. But one of the quirky qualities of studying the daily page is that there’s no time for much philosophizing. One has to keep with the tight schedule – or fall behind. When I started studying, I was suddenly exposed to a world of people with horror stories about such falling behind after two years of study, or three, or five. That is, falling behind never to recover. Determined not to repeat their mistakes, one must nod to Saul and move to the next page. Yoma 23. Another day, another tragedy:
“An incident occurred where there were two priests who were equal as they were running and ascending the ramp” of the Temple’s great altar. Then one of them stepped into the path of his colleague, who then, out of anger, “took a knife and stabbed him in the heart”. Tractate Yoma is dedicated to the work in the Temple on the holiest day of Yom Kippur. And the Talmud chooses to tell us that the priests were so eager to fulfil their sacred mission that there was need to tame them. “Once they saw that the priests were coming to danger the Sages established a lottery”.
***
Back then, one needed a dog to bark in the middle of the night – today we have a watch. Back then, priests were running up and down the altar – today there is no altar. Back then, a husband could demand that his wife will drink the bitter water – today, thankfully, he cannot. So, why do it? What does one get from it?
The answer might be nothing. And that’s the whole point. As corny as this might sound, as one ponders the option of studying the Talmud, one must think about love. The love for one’s tradition (there is no Judaism without Talmud); the love for one’s forefathers and sages (they are as human as you can imagine); the love of study for the sake of study (no material or other benefit involved); the love of fierce intellectual discourse (Talmud debates can be extremely complicated); the love of the marathon (the Talmud is truly endless).
And apropos love, in tractate Kidushin, whose main theme is the laws of marriage, we find an interesting question: “The Sages taught: If one has to decide whether to study Torah or to marry a woman, which should he do first?” As you can already expect, there is no one answer to this question (or it would not be a question). There are two. One, anonymous view: “He should study Torah and afterward marry a woman. And if it is impossible for him to be without a wife, he should marry a woman and then study Torah”. But then, there is the other view, of Rav Yehuda who quotes the sage Shmuel. “The halakha is that one should marry a woman and afterward study Torah”.
Another question follows: How can one find time for study, when one has to provide for his family? Rabbi Yohanan uses this colorful metaphor to make the point: “With a millstone hanging from his neck can he engage in Torah study?” The answer is, well, sometimes yes and sometimes no, depends on where you live, or, more accurately, on your financial situation. “This is for us”, the Babylonian sages say, “and that is for them”, the Jews of Israel. In Babylon there’s plenty, and a person can both provide for a family and study. In Israel of the early first millennia the conditions were such that a person cannot both carry his family and make time for Torah.
“The Talmud could be and often is a shocking book.”
Seven and a half years ago, alongside many other Jews, I pondered similar question: Will I find the time? Will it not interrupt with work and family? Will it not be too demanding? The day I made my decision, at that panel discussion in Jerusalem, I handed the microphone to Prof. Shinan and asked him: Will you start again?
Oh, no, he said. This is something you do not repeat in one lifetime.
Then he continued reciting the ending of the concluding text: “We give thanks before You, Lord, our G-d and G-d of our fathers, for you gave us a share among those who sit in the study hall, and not among those who sit on street corners. For we arise early, and they arise early; we arise for words of Torah, and they arise for words of emptiness. We work, and they work; we work and receive a reward, and they work and do not receive a reward. We run, and they run; we run towards eternal life, and they run to a pit of desolation…”
***
This cycle of the Daf Yomi ends on Shabbat, the seventh of the month of Tevet, January 4, 2020. The next cycle begins the next day (January 5) and ends on Monday, the second of the month of Sivan, June 2, 2027. The quotes from the Talmud in this article were adopted from sefaria.org.il, an open online library of Jewish texts.
The year 2019 was tumultuous. Israel held two elections, with a third coming in March; long-awaited indictments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in three separate cases were finally announced; specific plans to annex the Jordan Valley were advanced; and the combustible combination of President Donald Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) made American Jewish politics even more divisive than ever. Some of these issues will be resolved in 2020 while others will not. Here are three large questions looming over the next 12 months.
Will Israeli institutions hold under pressure?
Three elections in the span of less than a year would strain even the healthiest of democracies under the best of circumstances. Add to that the fact that the third Israeli election is likely to result in the same inconclusive deadlock as the first two and you have a recipe for chaos. Factor Netanyahu’s indictments into the mix and you have something truly dangerous.
Netanyahu’s indictments themselves are not the wedge that might crack Israel’s governmental system. It is the various responses surrounding those indictments that make the next year so perilous. Netanyahu has spent two years rallying his troops for a war against Israel’s law enforcement apparatus, asserting that the police who investigated him, the state attorneys whose job it is to prosecute him, the attorney general who decided to indict him, and the judges who will decide his legal fate are all compromised, illegitimate or engaged in a deep state conspiracy to bring him down in a coup. That war is finally here and it may be joined by a high court decision that Netanyahu cannot legally be asked to form a government while under indictment, despite Israel’s relevant Basic Law being clear that a prime minister under indictment need not step down.
There is no moral or political equivalence between Netanyahu whipping up the masses and his most slavish Knesset allies into a lathering froth in an effort to intimidate the law enforcement and judicial systems from doing their jobs, and the judicial system issuing a legal opinion that intrudes on a political matter. The blame for what is taking place begins and ends with Netanyahu for his actions that precipitated the investigations and indictments, and his lack of compunction about burning down the entire house if he cannot reside splendidly within it. But it doesn’t change the fact that a legal decision effectively barring Netanyahu from serving as the next prime minister before he has been convicted of anything may be the spark that ignites the gas that Netanyahu has blown into the sealed space of Israeli politics and society.
Even if none of this comes to pass and Netanyahu is allowed to try to form the next government, it only means that Israel will remain at DEFCON 2 rather than moving to DEFCON 1. No matter how you slice it, a democratic system only works so far as people trust it implicitly. Netanyahu has introduced so much uncertainty with his invective about the fundamental illegitimacy of the efforts to hold him accountable, his vilification of Israel’s Arab citizens and denunciations of any coalitions that include them, and his nakedly transparent insinuations that only he has Israel’s best interests at heart and that any alternatives — be it Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid or Gideon Sa’ar — would sell out the country. At this point, it is a wonder any Israeli voter believes in the sanctity of their vote. Netanyahu spent much of 2019 telling Israelis that nothing they see with their own eyes should be trusted, and 2020 may reveal how much of that message they have absorbed and internalized.
Will Israel heed signals from the U.S. or from everyone else?
In explicitly recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights — rather than continuing to implicitly recognize it by not objecting or ever raising the issue — and repudiating the State Department’s four-decades-old opinion that West Bank settlements are inconsistent with international law, the Trump administration laid the groundwork in 2019 for the logical conclusion to this approach, namely giving Israel a green light for formal annexation of parts of the West Bank. As 2019 came to a close, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was giving interviews in which he talked about the fundamental rights that Israelis have to the West Bank and how that should influence the policies of the European Union and countries around the world, while Netanyahu was making videos promising he will get Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and every existing West Bank settlement. It seems that Netanyahu getting an American blessing for annexation is a question not of if but of when.
At the same time, the message from other quarters is becoming harsher. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced in December, after years of deflection, that she believes there is a basis for investigating Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza, with part of her evidence being Netanyahu’s frequent and recent pledges to pursue annexation. Before the last meeting between Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement rejecting Netanyahu’s Jordan Valley annexation plan, while that same month China’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations told the Security Council that China opposes any West Bank annexation or efforts to legalize or expand settlements. In November, Canada reversed its longstanding position of voting against or abstaining on Palestinian self-determination in the U.N. General Assembly and voted in favor during the preliminary vote and then again during the final vote.
The year 2020 may bring Israel to a determinative choice about which path it chooses when it comes to annexation. The Israeli government and its prime minister — whether Netanyahu, Gantz or someone else entirely — could have to decide whether American backing is enough to outweigh international sanctions and prosecutions of Israelis abroad. If the preliminary evidence is any clue, Israel is taking the flashing red lights more seriously than its denunciations of the ICC, U.N. and international opinion would suggest. Following the ICC announcement, the first meeting of the interministerial panel tasked with implementing Jordan Valley annexation was abruptly canceled.
A legal decision effectively barring Benjamin Netanyahu from serving as the next prime minister before he has been convicted of anything may be the spark that ignites the gas that Netanyahu has blown into the sealed space of Israeli politics and society.
How much worse will the political conflict dividing American Jews become?
It’s been clear for a while that Trump is a nuclear force of fragmentation for American Jews. A not insignificant and vocal minority believes he is history’s greatest president for American Jewish welfare — with Republican Jewish Coalition leader Matt Brooks going so far as to posit recently that Trump is “the strongest defender of the Jewish people ever” — while far more believe that he is a singular threat to American Jewish welfare. One group believes that his support for Israel is ipso facto proof that he cannot do or say anything anti-Semitic, while the other believes the connection between his support for Israel and his repeated insinuations that American Jews’ primary allegiance is to Israel is proof of his anti-Semitism.
Ruth Wisse wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 22 that the response to Trump from American Jews is “confused” — with her first example of Trump’s battle against anti-Semitism being his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — and that Trump’s Zionism inherently outweighs any other arguments that can be employed against him. Meanwhile. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said of Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros, “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel.” Together, these encapsulate the fundamental division that Trump and his Jewish politics represent — the use of Israel as inoculation against anti-Semitism, and the complete fusion of Israeli interests and American Jewish interests. This, more than anything else, is what is tearing American Jewry apart over Trump, and why some genuinely view him as the first Jewish president while others genuinely view him as an unprecedented affront to Jewish values.
Michael J. Koplow is Israel Policy Forum’s Policy Director, based in Washington, D.C.
I’m a relative newcomer to this magical place called Israel. Although I’ll always remain a proud American, my love for my new home increases each day. It’s populated by diverse, argumentative and combative people. But despite our many differences, we’re united by a sense of belonging and rootedness, of having come home after surviving a journey that should have destroyed us centuries ago.
Now, some folks out there don’t particularly appreciate the sentiment. Some of you are doing your best to thwart our progress. Some are aiming for much, much worse.
But here’s the thing. Without intending to, you’ve contributed to our well-being far more than you could ever know. Here’s my list of people to thank for making our lives “richer” in 2019.
To the Palestinians — Without the constant exhortations from your religious and political leaders to kill us, we could be repeating past mistakes when told that we needed to jump-start the peace process through “confidence building” giveaways. You’ve made things much easier by upping — to account for inflation, I guess — your pay-to-slay payments to the families of those who kill Jews, and for the school curricula that deny our existence while teaching martyrdom as the highest goal. Today, there are no illusions and no negotiating partners.
To the United Nations — Your poisonous obsession with demonizing Israel reminds us that much of the world has not come around to accepting our existence any more than it did when Jews couldn’t find a refuge from the Holocaust.
To Iran — For those who think that Israel can ignore what the world thinks, we have Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies to remind us that one misstep on our part, one moment in which we lose our vigilance or our edge, and we can be incinerated.
To Jeremy Corbyn — Thanks to the (politically) late-lamented head of the British Labour Party, for reminding us that a pillar of Western civilization could come that close to installing a brazen anti-Semite as its head.
To white supremacists — Thank you for reminding us that the post-Holocaust frowning upon public Jew hatred has come to an end. The most virulent and primitive anti-Semitism is back — coupled with hatred of people of color, immigrants and others. (Here is the real intersectionality!) For that reason alone, we need a strong Jewish state!
To “The Squad” — You showed us the limits and fragility of congressional support when the leadership of the Democratic Party could not bring itself to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for her overt anti-Semitism. When the media give free passes to Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), no matter how sophomoric, ill-informed (like Tlaib’s recent depiction of the terrorist attack on the Jersey City, N.J., grocery store by blacks with links to the Black Hebrew Israelites, as the work of “white supremacists”), or just plain hatred-inciting they may be, we realize that for some Americans in positions of power, that race, gender and victimhood mean more than facts.
To Jewish Voice For Peace — We needed to show the world that Jews can be foolish and/or anti-Semitic. You did it for us by actively supporting the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Despite our many differences, we’re united by a sense of belonging and rootedness, of having come home after surviving a journey that should have destroyed us centuries ago.
To (too many) Western churches — We’ve lived with the hostility of the elites leading the 590 million-strong World Council of Churches since before our founding. Along the way, we learned that the Mennonites (many of whom were Hitler’s eager supporters in his search for Aryan communities) never had anything positive to say about us, and the Quakers were certainly not our friends. This past year, we saw the Anglican Church of Southern Africa take delegitimizing Israel to new depths, while the U.S. version (the Episcopal Church) became the first mainline denomination to ratchet up a boycott of Israeli goods. Rick Wiles and TruNews reminded us that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in the U.S., with claims that we are “fake Jews” and responsible for all global problems. So deeply rooted that they could find tens of thousands of viewers in the evangelical heartland. We thank all of you for reminding us that it is easier to profess love than meaningfully demonstrate it.
To the campus and academic communities — We have watched as Israeli speakers were shouted down on campus after campus until they could not continue — while administrations consistently did nothing to protect free speech. We’ve seen Jewish students bullied inside and outside of classrooms, sometimes for being pro-Israel, at other times simply for being Jewish. We observed a federally funded program at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill that featured a comedian telling openly anti-Semitic jokes. At Oberlin College, students set up a memorial to Islamic Jihad terrorists.
We thank you for reminding us that IQ and moral rectitude have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
To intersectionality devotees — How could we demonstrate to the world that anti-Semitism is not restricted to alt-right lunatics and Nazis, if it were not for activist and former Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour (Israel is “built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else”; “nothing creepier” than the Jewish liberation movement) types? Thanks for explaining to us that we suffer from white privilege because half of us in Israel are non-white, we would never have realized it.
Here is why we are counting all the blessings you provided us.
TheUnited Nations World Happiness Report has Israel in 13th place, ahead of the U.S., the U.K., Germany and every other Middle Eastern country. This despite having to send our sons and daughters to our borders every day — from which too many don’t return — to prevent our neighbors from achieving their announced goal of pushing us into the sea. For that privilege, we pay ridiculously high taxes and live with the scorn and derision of a world that never forgot anti-Semitism.
Why are we still so happy? It is because Israel is one of the few places where people still can feel a deep sense of mission and purpose. Israel is one of the only places on Earth where increasing income does not mean having fewer children. On Israel Independence Day, that sense of purpose is palpable. Every patch of grass is covered with people celebrating love of country. Can you still remember when the U.S. was like that?
As the quality of life keeps improving, this sense of national purpose could easily evaporate. Each of us could easily turn to our own smaller universes, if we no longer had to worry about simple survival. The beauty of the entire enterprise — and the willingness of all of us to participate in it — would fade. We would lose our best and brightest to emigration.
You are the reason why we have not gone spoiled and soft. You know — like Europe. But you remind us each day that we need to steel ourselves and to be prepared to go it alone. You had no intention of assisting us — au contraire! We do regret, however, what you’ve done to the people you thought you were befriending. Your encouragement does nothing substantive for the Palestinians other than prolonging their agony, enabling them to stay away from the negotiating table that could give them the better life they need and deserve.
Finally, all of you make us appreciate the millions of true friends we have in the U.S. and beyond.
May the New Year bless our true friends.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is the director of Interfaith Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
I am my own narrative, unfinished, exposed and frenzied. Only I can tell myself the next sentence of my story.
I craft adventures out of walks and dance down Cambridge streets utterly and innocently credulous of Sia’s words: “I am unstoppable.”
I am buoyed by my bounce back, by my spirit’s dogged capacity to resuscitateafter ricocheting off the unforgiving walls of existence.
And, yet, I feel defiled by experience, robbed of something I once called joy. In making meaning, I am forced to literally redesign the dictionary,to redefine happiness, wellness and so much more.
The world resonates with perspective. Walks can be journeys, moving can be wellness,disease can set the stage for an unexpected, unscripted, yet magnificent life.
My world echoes with the hum of something I call bliss,which I will define and redefine ad infinitum, forever undaunted.
I crafted this autobiographical sketch while braced in a shoulder garment that hugs my right lower rib and shoulder, which dislocate during sleep almost nightly. A neck brace cloaks my cervical spine and offers some semblance of stability my frequent shoulder dislocations demand. My right arm, a helpless child uncertain of how to carry her own weight, tugs at the base of my scalp.
I was not in a car accident. I do not have whiplash. My injuries occur without cause, without glamorous or romantic narratives to put them on a pedestal of understanding. My connective tissue disorder has a will of its own, and I know better than to attempt to interpret or become mired in its warped logic — or lack thereof.
From a young age, my mother sculpted me into a writer, a poet, an ardent observer of my world. My earliest days dawned with her perched on a chair at our kitchen table, her head bowed over sheets of paper upon which she scribbled with ferocity and doggedness as she tried to write sense into life, to find meaning in the midst of her ill patients and her sick daughter. Through her, as through me, words course. Throughout my life, I have felt an unwavering urge to do them justice, to let them breathe. To that end, I thought it was about time that they, the morass of syllables, pay it forward to me and tell my story — so my invisible illness no longer conceals me from the world.
When I was 10 years old, my life took an acute turn down a path riddled with pain, devastation and, eventually, hope. The culpable agent was woven into the seams of my genetic code but did not rear its unforgiving head until the hormonal shower of puberty rippled through me. As a child, my unparalleled flexibility was an asset; my legs spilt into 180 degrees and my shoulders could withstand an endless procession of flips. Some internal switch flipped when, at age 10, I awaited a tennis ball, poised to respond with my unruly forehand. That memorialized snapshot on the tennis court seemed to be a carbon copy of previous others yet was, in fact, the prodrome of what would be.
The torque in my body did not sit right with my lower spine, which fractured out of alignment. In retrospect, that injury was the initial warning sign of my fragility, a motif that reiterated itself a year later as my family and I charted the uneven streets of Rome and my spine again gave way as I ambled toward the Colosseum. The ancient ruins echoed within as I, unbeknownst to myself at the time, began mourning a loss whose weight would only accumulate in years to come.
Surgeons fused my spine during the time when I should have been in ninth grade, with rods and screws that secured my vertebra for a year, then suddenly abdicated their role. I came undone until a second fusion a year later conferred the stability my spine so desperately needed.
My recollections of adolescence do not match those I might have imagined, expected and longed for myself. Nor do any of my memories, to be honest. My narrative is laced with the harsh and exacting rope of illness, distrust and incredulity. I mold my life despite the toll my circumstances take on dreams that die many deaths within me and persist as internal smoke, ashes in my soul. I live an existence I would not have chosen for myself, and memories suffused with past pain simmer within me. Nonetheless, I live and endeavor with every fiber of my being to etch a life — however imperfect and undesired — out of the brokenness that emerges from living with a chronic and as of yet, incurable disease.
I see myself during the climax of early and middle adolescence, prone and broken on my parents’ king-size bed as hours seemed to pass without me, leaving me behind like something worn and outmoded. Schoolchildren raced down Park Avenue streets with a carelessness and innocence I felt was sliding all too hastily from my own grasp. Alone, day after day, year after year, because of broken bones and torn tendons, I felt like I was fading into a vestige of myself, a worn-out T-shirt that succumbed to far too many cycles of laundry.
I mustered all my energy to maintain my mind, if not my body. My world became fringed with the comprehensible, the rational, rather than the paranormal landscape of the ill. I exchanged letters for numbers and Charles Dickens for Stephen Hawking. I swallowed “A Brief History of Time” and Feynman’s “Lost Lectures” with a hunger I did not know was brewing within. I began to exercise a muscle I never knew I had, something I now refer to as “resilience” or “grit,” and watched part of me emerge from illness. I did not just watch myself, my childhood and the remnants of my innocence die in my parents’ bedroom as I recovered from back fractures and surgeries, I also gave birth to who I am now — someone who accepts she cannot overcome illness but can learn to live gracefully in its midst.
What began with my spine, the body’s pillar of stability and bidirectional feedback, coursed through my limbs rather subtlety — at least initially — then became me, defining my being. Back surgery gave way to nerve damage in my left leg, which led to Complex Regional Pain Syndrome in my left lower extremity. The world felt like a furnace because my nervous system was on high alert, mistaking a soothing touch for a blowtorch. At age 17, I could not walk, stand, sit or lie down. The pain was electric, and my leg acquired a mind of its own, morphing into some abstract and insane work of art that gushed with hues of purple and red. I was hospitalized for months at a rehabilitation center, where I gradually transitioned in my dependency from wheelchair to walker, from two crutches to a single crutch and, finally, to my legs with the aid of anti-gravity machines and mirror therapy.
I struggled to locate myself, the dreams I had for myself, any sense of my present or my future in the context of other teenagers with terminal cancers, cerebral palsy or brain injuries. I lost faith in God and my world, and could not see any light or any gratifying end to my story. Another day, another month, another year were stealthy stolen from me without recompense. My world went pitch black, and I lost whatever vestige of myself I thought I still possessed. Words, my life media, slipped away and I went mute, refusing to speak even to my parents, to connect to a world I felt had relentlessly rejected me. My touchstones became SET and chess, realms in which rules reigned and logic never faltered. I developed an eating disorder and intentionally hammered my crutch into my left leg until it oozed with blood, perhaps longing to punish my leg, or myself, for leading me astray. Learning how to walk again was the most challenging undertaking.
The interludes that intervened throughout my teenage years in which health (at least in relative terms) seemed to dominate were not quite pauses but punctuation marks, periods during which dire challenges demanded my attention, but did not occupy a year or more of my life. Ovarian tumors, dislocated kneecaps and shoulders, torn nerves and pain seemed to call my name from some black hole in the universe.
“From a young age, my mother sculpted me into a writer, a poet, an ardent observer of my world.”
Again and again, I collided, body and spirit, into the invisible walls of illness. I teetered between wellness and illness, and the most micro of movements sent me in an unfortunate direction. My mother, who has become yoked to me throughout our shared journey of my illness, and I have spent countless hours, days and months pacing corridors and reading novels aloud at the Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai, Hospital for Special Surgery, and Children’s Specialized Hospital. The ups and downs that span sinusoidally through my life have, for the most part, occurred in hospital walls with my mother’s hand securely entangled in my own.
After my first year at Harvard College, I experienced a series of hip and knee dislocations that left me bedridden yet again, and immobile. A meeting with a geneticist seemed to connect the islands of hardship I carried with me. Now I know my diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a rare heritable connective tissue disorder that lacks a cure, is a life sentence.
The collagen protein that fortifies joint capsules, the glue of the body, is malformed in me, essentially making me a collage of functioning parts that fail to function in concert. If you see me dancing down Harvard Yard, you may gloss over the reality that my life diverges from that of the average college student in far too many ways. I often am mistaken for a track runner or an all-star athlete, as I secure my lax joints with kinesiology tape and am always draped in serendipitously fashionable Lululemon apparel that fastens my joints into alignment. My hips dislocate if I sit on solid surfaces; my gastrointestinal tract just barely functions; my shoulder will fall limp if I reach forward or put on a shirt; and my kneecaps emerge latterly if they are not properly swathed in kinesiology tape or if I accidentally cross my legs while sitting. I am unique in that I stand after taking a three-hour exam to find both kneecaps dislocated, with my numb legs locked at awkward angles. Those are just a few snapshots illustrating my personal and daily challenges to which the outside world, excluding my dear friends, is blind.
As a senior at Harvard studying biology, I resumed my grasp on my life. I began to question and reason through how and to what extent it is possible to dream, to reach into the unknown future despite having a disease that seems to color all my tenses and dispel my sense of control. I have learned to sit with discomfort, to mourn the losses and longings my body will never be able to deliver. My world is so circumscribed by disease that I often struggle to dissociate myself from the thick of it, to figure out who I am outside the context of my faulty connective tissue.
But perhaps I need not fret over where I end and my disease begins. I am a tangle of experiences, just like everyone else, and my task is to embrace the compilation that is me and to live with the internal fractures as I muster the courage to dream and engage with a world that often feels too “normal,” too geared toward the able-bodied.
My disease may have informed my past and will shape my present and future, but I will never succumb to it. Although it molds my contours, I know I, alone, can determine who I am, despite my body. I am an avid learner, a passionate budding scientist entrepreneur aiming to develop stem-cell therapeutics for connective-tissue diseases. I am someone who adores writing above almost all else, and the sound of keys prancing to keep pace with my thoughts. I will never know what might have been the “well” version of myself, but I am at peace with the woman I am becoming.
My interactions with the world may seem sparse, but they sustain me. Because collagen lines the gastrointestinal tract, I suffer from abdominal distention, dysmotility and diastasis recti in addition to mast cell activation syndrome — all of which prevent me from dining out and digesting many foods. I do not participate in nor have ever set foot in a final’s club or taken a drink or drug of any variety. My brain is the one part of me I can calibrate and control, and I intend to hold steadfast to the reins of my body to the greatest extent possible.
“My brain is the one part of me I can calibrate and control, and I intend to hold steadfast to the reins of my body to the greatest extent possible.”
I prefer quiet rooms and solitude or the company of a friend or two. My social time is confined to parts of the day when I am not relocating my joints or allaying my pain by lying with six ice packs arrayed to cover my backside. The restrictions on my social time transform it a valuable commodity I use with caution. I choose my peers like people in the supermarket select their avocados, scanning each one until they stumble upon the fruit with just the right amount of give. Laughter rains through most of my conversations, in part because much of what I face demands some emotional impulsivity, and laughing is far more preferable and enjoyable than crying.
My walks with my closest friend, Olivia, are metaphors for my life; we migrate for the sake of moving, without destination. We wander until our feet ache and perch ourselves in Cambridge nature reserves until all pressing issues have come under our shared scrutiny. Olivia gazes downward with me at the earth, as she knows I am focused on my feet and the angle my knees make as they stride forward to ensure my security. With her, I am never alone.
My desire to pursue academics at Harvard on my own terms, unbound by my physical limitations, motivates me to contemplate my disease in unconventional terms and craft a blueprint for my body that modern medicine fails to offer. While deeply involved in my undergraduate coursework, I apply the scientific method —rather strictly — and conduct my own research on dietary modifications, nutritional supplements and exercise regimens that may enable me to optimize my physical and mental engagement in my world. I absorb the knowledge of functional and Eastern medicine practitioners, nutritionists, connective-tissue and stem-cell researchers and biohackers; I translate these experts’ holistic understandings of disease onto the landscape of my life. I am my own experiment and maintain regular records of my nutritional and exercise regimens, which I refine and recalibrate on a daily basis to devise a steadier foundation on which I can continue to grow stronger, minimize joint instability and optimize my participation in every realm of undergraduate life at Harvard.
My body continues to and forever will be a work in progress to which I devote significant time and energy. My mother, without hesitation, remains steadfast by my side; we share my pain and own my disease with as much grit as we can muster. I am forever indebted to her for her faith in me, for accepting me and my reality for what it is. My disease may be invisible to the world, but she sees through the veneer of normal into me, and that vision makes all the difference.
At the close of my first week as a senior at Harvard, my head began to feel like a bowling ball, my vision blurred and an internal ringing noise ensued. My thoughts felt like they were crawling along my axons at the pace of mangled ants. I contemplated the possibility I was dying. As it turned out, I was suffering from a spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak, a potential manifestation of EDS. I was forced, again, to take a furlough from my Harvard life and seek medical attention from my team of experts in New York City. While I recovered, I wrote a memoir, which presented me with an opportunity to confront my past head-on and wrest back the control of my narrative from EDS. No one in her right mind would opt to live my life or sign up for the daily series of dislocations that punctuate my existence.
My memoir will resonate with patients contending with chronic illness; with individuals who have frequented one of the many academic or medical institutions mentioned in my book; and, more broadly, with people coming to terms with personal loss, be it physical, psychological or philosophical. My memoir offers a window into the human condition and explores the immeasurable power of grit, love, laughter, silence and writing itself to create an extraordinary life, even in the backdrop of illness. My story will shed light on my “zebra” condition and provide a voice through which the world can begin to understand what it means to live with my disease, which often is invisible, overlooked and misunderstood.
Like “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi, I want my story to motivate others to recognize the small and often overlooked gifts in life, such as waking up with two legs in their respective sockets. The upside of my EDS is that I do not have the luxury of taking anything for granted. Unlike Kalanithi, however, I am going to outlive my story. My memoir will encourage others to recognize what they already have within and around them: the capacity to place one foot in front of another, a brother’s laughter, a mother’s embrace, the feel of a best friend’s hand against your own, your connective tissue (which may or may not connect), and the bottomless quantity of resolve stockpiled in the human spirit.
Elaine Katz is a senior at Harvard studying biology and math who refines the art and science of living with adversity on a daily basis. She says living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disease, has endowed her with far more than it has taken away.
