Light and Thanks

I spent most of this past week at the United JewishCommunities (UJC) General Assembly (GA), the annual gathering which, this year,brought nearly 4,000 Jewish communal representatives (and journalists) fromNorth America, Israel and elsewhere overseas.

The GA is part sales seminar, part pep rally, partcontinuing education, and major schmoozefest. This year, it was also somethingelse: befuddling.

Spend a half-hour in the hallways between sessions and youget a sense of the intensity and vigor of contemporary Jewish life. Acharged-up communal leader from Knoxville, Tenn., told me the Jewish communitythere is strong and active. The rabbi from Austin, Texas boasted of abeautiful, multimillion dollar new Jewish Community Center campus. The layleader from Tulsa, Okla., said Jews there were active and involved, andactivists from Boston, Chicago and New York talked a mile a minute about newprojects, new organizations, new ventures.

As I write this it’s past midnight on the third day of theconvention, the hotel lobby is still noisy with animated conversation, and agiant electronic scroll board over Center City reads, “WELCOME UNITED JEWISHCOMMUNITIES WELCOME UNITED JEWISH COMMUNITIES WELCOME UNITED JEWISHCOMMUNITIES.”

Then there are the actual, big lectures, the plenarysessions that are meant to rally and inspire the troops. They are lugubrious:anti-Semitism in Europe, on campus, in Canada. Terror here and abroad. Crisisin Israel, in Argentina, in the economy. Outside the meeting rooms, strengthand vigor; inside, doom and gloom. Outside, “Candide”; inside, Cassandra. 

As one speaker went on (and on) about the tragediesconfronting the Jews, I ducked into the hallway, where I bumped into MortKlein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America. “What is this guytalking about?” said Klein. “On and on and on, all these tales of woe.” Hewasn’t being callous — he’s as aware of the tragedies as we all are — he justwanted to hear a call to action. Ease up on the hysteria and give it a littleinspiration — and a little reality check.

The very people listening to the tales of woe are the verysame lay and staff leaders whose fundraising efforts place UJC as thehighest-ranking Jewish philanthropic organization in the United States,according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. They have access to the worlds ofmedia, government and business unprecedented in the history of the Jewishpeople. They are, by almost any measure, stronger and more vibrant than at anyother time in their history.

Events are terrible, as the brutal Jerusalem bus bombing onThursday morning showed. Israelis suffer daily under the fear and the realityof terror.

But even that reality doesn’t begin to describe theremarkable fact of Israel, its resilience and the daily achievements of itspeople. To cement Israelis in the American Jewish mind as nothing butvictims-in-waiting is to demean the country and its people. My sense is thatmost of the participants gathered information in the meeting rooms, but a senseof perspective in the hallways.

I gained some perspective dipping into a book I had broughtalong. “Emma’s War” by Deborah Scroggins documents the life and death of anEnglish relief worker in Sudan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The horrorsdescribed in the book, the famines, massacres and slave raids that destroyedmillions of lives while we in the West did little to help, stayed with me as Iheard the Jewish people’s current woes enumerated.

It demeans no one’s suffering — and there has been too muchthis past year — to also count our blessings. Happy Thanksgiving and HappyChanukah.