EDITORIAL…LOCAL COLUMNISTS…OPINION…LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

May 1, 2008

EDITORIAL
The Yin-Yang of the Jewish Calendar

OPINION

My Own Israel at Sixty: Zionist Odyssey Began in My Teens – Dov Burt Levy

Looking Out for One’s Own– Ben Harris

Publisher’s Column: Lappin Largesse Permeates Throughout Our Community — Barbara Schneider

Religion: Parshah Kedoshim – Leviticus 19:1-20:27 — Are Our Doors Truly Open To All?– Samuel Barth

In Media Blitz, Wright’s Outreach to Jews Still Unsettling for Many – Ron Kampeas

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Corrections

Editorial

The Yin-Yang of the Jewish Calendar

There is brilliance to the ebb and flow of the Jewish calendar. It begins with the introspective days of Rosh Hashanah, which are followed by all-day fasting and prayer on Yom Kippur. Those solemn holidays conclude as the joyous festival of Sukkot bursts forth where we sit as our ancestors did in huts and partake of the plentiful harvest. This yin and yang of solemnity and joy goes on more or less throughout the year. A holiday of restraint is followed by one of rejoicing and living life to the fullest.

And it is happening now as we commemorate Yom Hashoah, the murder of six million of our people in the Holocaust. We gather for services, pay homage to those who died and to those victim/survivors who are still living among us and serve as witnesses to the scourge of Nazi hatred. We cannot help but cry for what we lost and for the genocides that followed and are still going on wrecking destruction of innocent people, land and resources.

This is followed by Yom Hazikaron, our recognition of the Jewish and non-Jewish founders and defenders who died battling for a new state, a refuge where Jews would never again be at the mercy of foreign governments. We will recall these heroes and other soldiers who have fallen since Israeli independence in 1948 when we come together as a community on Saturday, May 3 at Temple Ner Tamid in Peabody.

And again, the ingenious Jewish calendar moves us from that dark period of remembrance forward, to the birth of the new state of Israel created on a sliver of land in the arid desert, one-sixth of one percent of the Middle East. On Sunday, May 4, the community will gather for games, performances, dancing, shopping for Israeli goods and an all-out celebration for what our ancestors created, a feisty, remarkable tiny country whose every move is watched, analyzed and judged by the world.

We know what our people created. One of the smallest countries in the world can lay claim to countless innovations in science, technology, entrepreneurship and pure soul — relative to its population, Israel is the largest immigrant-absorbing nation on earth.

Come, let us celebrate Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron and Israel at 60 together.

Opinion

My Own Israel at Sixty: Zionist Odyssey Began in My Teens

“Why did you become a Zionist, take on Israel citizenship, and make your home in Israel for half your adult life?

That is the question I have been asked most during the six years I have been writing this column. I answer now as we celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday.

When I graduated Revere High School in 1952, I knew nothing, and I mean nothing, about Israel or much else. My childhood experience was defined by the poolroom, racetracks, and working on Revere Beach, not AZA or BBYO, organizations that might have taught me something.

My parents had begun high school when the 1929 Great Depression hit, never finished and worked their lives at minimum wage or a few pennies more.

I joined the United States Air Force in November 1952, the day after my 18th birthday. After training, I spent a year in Greenland where I read my first book from cover to cover, explored Jewish and American subjects and took classes at the University of Maryland Overseas Program.

On that slim basis, my Zionist odyssey had begun.

The next year I was stationed in Frankfort where I met survivors who had hidden during the war or escaped the horrors and returned to Germany. I also had a sobering, two-day visit to Dachau.

My final 18 months in the Air Force were spent at Orly Air Base in Paris. There, I met French Jews and received part of an education from two close American soldier friends, both knowledgeable about Judaism and Israel.

My 24-day furlough in Israel in June 1956 was the high point of my life to that date.

The country was beautiful, the people kind and helpful. So many of those I met invited or implored me to settle in Israel. I visited kibbutzim, cities, small towns, the seacoast and the mountains. I went to an open-air performance of the British Sadler’s Wells Ballet in Tel Aviv and heard my first symphony performance in Jerusalem.

I was a smitten Zionist.

For the rest of my time in the service, when anyone asked me “what are you?” I replied, “Israeli.” I didn’t even know the difference between belonging to a religious group and being a citizen of a state, or that you could be both.

My request to be discharged in Paris (so I could go directly to Israel) was denied. I returned to Boston where I had enlisted. I decided to enroll at Boston University and as often happened in college, marriage and two daughters followed.

The next 25 years made up my American life. BS degree in high school teaching, Ph.D. in political science, wonderful jobs with the Anti-Defamation League, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, the Justice Department and United States Environmental Protection Agency, professorships, and two political candidacies.

The next 23 years was my Israel life, working in a kibbutz, hospital and university.

Now I am a citizen of both the United States and Israel and love both countries with great passion. America was open and key to fulfilling my potential as an educated and liberal human being; Israel was welcoming and helped me fulfill myself as a member of the Jewish people.

In return I have given both countries my best work effort and loyalty. And as it turned out, one daughter and family lives in America, the other in Israel. With grandchildren in both countries, my fondest dreams have come true.

When people ask what I think of the Birthright-Israel or the Robert I. Lappin Foundation programs to send young American Jews to Israel to learn and see the country, I give high praise. I know that what they get in Israel is the present-day equivalent of my own initial experience.

Even though the poverty, prejudice and discrimination suffered by American Jews when I grew up has been replaced by opportunity and accomplishment, l think it is crucial to have young American Jews know and love Israel, visit often and for some to choose to make a life there.

Amazing, isn’t it, how a personal encounter with the Holocaust, some study, plus a three-week visit, could plant a Revere, Massachusetts seed in the rocky, fertile soil of Israel.

Looking Out for One’s Own

Ben Harris
Ben Harris writes from New York

It is not uncommon for pro-Israel hawks to accuse pro-Israel doves of something akin to treason for sympathizing with enemies of the Jewish state so deeply that they privilege the Palestinian need for freedom and statehood over the Jewish need for peace and security. From there, it’s often a short leap to a broader assault sometimes advanced by Jewish conservatives, namely, that the Jewish liberal heart bleeds for Darfur, for the Tibetans, for impoverished Americans — in short, for every oppressed people on earth but their own.

Like every charge, even false ones, there’s a grain of truth here. Jewish liberals are often uncomfortable narrowly identifying with uniquely Jewish concerns. This is somewhat understandable since, as I’ve noted in this space before, it’s hard in the 21st century to see Jews as an oppressed minority — though a quick visit to Sderot might change that.
Regardless, I can picture Jewish hawks knowingly shaking their heads in disgust at a passage towards the bottom of an eye-opening essay by Jared Diamond in the last issue of the New Yorker.

Diamond, a UCLA geographer best known for his books “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse,” was describing how the intrinsic human desire for revenge feeds a seemingly endless, and irrational, cycle of violence among pre-modern societies. In a conspicuously non-judgmental way, he relates how on a visit to Papua, New Guinea, his driver dispassionately recounts the apparently senseless violence he unleashed in an effort to avenge a relative’s death.

After pages upon pages in which he describes the manifold customs and habits of primitive revenge-seekers, Diamond throws in a personal story. His father-in-law Jozef, a Jewish officer in the Red Army, returned to his native village after the war to search out the fate of his family. When he discovers an armed gang killed them, he locates the gang leader and contemplates taking revenge.

Diamond describes Jozef’s thinking: “I’ve seen enough of people killing, and behaving like animals. I’ve done enough killing myself. This man behaved like an animal, but I don’t want to become an animal myself by shooting him.” Jozef eventually turns the man over to the authorities, who hold him for a year before releasing him.

Jozef’s meditation struck me as both the product of an evolved moral sensibility and as an exercise in precisely the type of thinking that Jewish hawks find so enraging. Not to mention the kind of attitude Israel’s Zionist founders sought to eradicate from the Jewish consciousness, to be replaced with a robust self-reliance that restores the prerogative of justice and self-preservation to Jewish hands.

Diamond doesn’t render any judgments on Jozef’s decision. He validates both the drive for vengeance as a natural human urge and the practical necessity of establishing an impersonal central authority as the sole dispenser of justice.

Human societies couldn’t flourish any other way. It’s a credit to Jozef, and to Jews more generally, that we are capable of seeing beyond our immediate emotional gratification and to contemplate the broader implications of our actions — a credit undiminished even if, in certain instances, the larger cause of justice goes unserved.

Publisher’s Column
Lappin Largesse Permeates Throughout Our Community

BARBARA SCHNEIDER Jewish Journal publisher

The eight days of Passover are finally over. This holiday brought home to me in a deeply personal way how fortunate we are on the North Shore to have an organization whose sole focus is finding ways to help us pass on the meanings of these holidays to our children.

I am writing, of course, about the Robert I. Lappin Foundation and its work to keep our children Jewish. If education is the lifeblood of the Jewish people, then the Lappin Foundation is keeping our Jewish community alive with its continuous infusions of educational resources and support for our children’s Jewish education. There is hardly a family on the North Shore who has not been affected by the Lappin Foundation. In 2007 alone, 982 families and approximately 1,900 children participated in its many programs.

This Passover I witnessed in my own family one small fruit of the Lappin Foundation’s efforts. We set a seat at the seder table for my five-year-old grandson and asked him to stay next to his grandfather throughout the seder. He sat quietly until we passed the matzah. Then he became a five-year-old boy again, playing with his piece of matzah. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was acting like the dinosaur. I gave his mother, my daughter, a puzzled look and she explained that he was referring to the dinosaur in the book he got from the Lappin Foundation’s PJ Library.

“He loves the book,” she told me. She added that he loved learning about Passover from the dinosaur. Of course, I was thrilled. My grandson is the product of an interfaith marriage and to have him develop a lasting and meaningful connection to Judaism is one of my greatest wishes. I know similar scenes must have played out all along the North Shore thanks to the Lappin Foundation’s work.

In the next several issues the Journal will be focusing on our Jewish educational institutions. Journal readers will learn that the Lappin Foundation provides resources to each one of them. An extraordinary staff, led by Debbie Coltin, has carried out Bob Lappin’s mission. Through her efforts, the Foundation’s mission to keep our children Jewish pervades every area of our Jewish community.

I have seen first hand how the Lappin Foundation reaches out to Jewish professionals and school directors to provide educational resources by participating in a monthly “learning” session at the foundation office. The Lappin Foundation understands that to instill Judaism in our students we must nourish their teachers.

We at the Journal are now embarked on our annual spring fundraiser. We will be honoring the educators who teach in Jewish schools. This is an honor we think is long overdue and we know many in our community agree it is an excellent idea. Implementing that idea requires an enormous organizational effort. Once again, Debbie Coltin and the Lappin Foundation staff have offered their resources to help in our effort. It was Debbie who invited all the school directors to lunch at the Foundation to learn about the Journal’s plans. Rachel Jacobson, a foundation staff member and Debbie Coltin visited every school to photograph teachers at work. Together they created a moving slide show.

The Journal has carried many stories about the Y2I program as The Lappin Foundation has sent more than 1,600 teens to Israel since 1971. The Journal has published pictures of the teachers on the Teachers to Israel trips. We have written abut the 166 families that have participated in “Rekindle Shabbat.” You have read in our pages about Shalom Baby and the PJ Library and you will soon be reading about all the work the Lappin Foundation does in our schools.
However, it is the pervasiveness of the Foundation’s work that has prompted my message. To be Jewish on the North Shore of Boston is to be touched in profound and wonderful ways by the Robert I. Lappin Foundation.

SAMUEL BARTH
Samuel Barth is the rabbi of Temple Ahavat Achim in Gloucester.

The Torah portion Kedo-shim invites us to explore the concept often rendered by the English word “holiness.” This word conjures up for many a sense of deep and silent reverence, of acts of great piety, of special places and special people. The ancient image that on Yom Kippur the High Priest enters the kedosh kedoshim (the “Holy of Holies”) seems to offer an ideal manifestation of holiness.

Then this extraordinary Torah portion comes and offers us a definition of holiness — a definition that is behavioral rather than theological! We are told that holiness is about rising in the presence of the elderly, about not cursing the deaf, about accurate weights and measures, about rebuking those in our society who go astray, about behaving kindly — even to people whom we do not like.

The 19th chapter of Leviticus challenges us to bring the concept of holiness into the marketplace, into the midst of society, into our homes, our streets, our families, — and out of the rarefied zone of our houses of prayer. Of course the Torah is holy, and of course there are moments of profound holiness that we find, experience and share in all our congregations. But, as our Prophets and Sages have insisted for centuries, if it stops there it is essentially worthless.
We are in the month designated within the Jewish community as disabilities awareness month (www.yesodot.org/month). It is worth reflecting on the verse (Lev. 19; 14) “…You shall not insult the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God.”

In spring of 2006 when my family first came to visit Temple Ahavat Achim, my son Yishai (then 10 years old), who has physical disabilities, was greatly impressed by the efforts the congregation was making to ensure that handicapped access would be added to the 19th century building. He knew that this was something undertaken by the congregation before they even imagined that a member of the rabbi’s family would be in need of it. This effort, and our commitment to ensure that our new temple building will be fully accessible, is true holiness.

The efforts we make to ensure that not only are the deaf free from abuse — but that they are actively included through provision of signing interpretation of services, the provision of prayer books and Bibles in Braille, and the availability of teachers expert in special education in all our schools and programs is true holiness.

There are so many families who live at some remove from our centers of Jewish life — because they know that our doors are not truly open to all the needs within their families. There are kids with hungry souls and little from our communities to nourish them. There are people anxious and eager to join with our synagogues who simply cannot get to us.

Our Torah does not ask kindly — it firmly demands of us that we do better. If we want to call our synagogues and Jewish centers places of holiness, places of God, let us work hard, and find the substantial sums of money, and the personal transformation that will allow us, with pride, to say that our doors are truly open to all.

Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

WASHINGTON — In a series of speeches otherwise notable for their defiant tone against his real and perceived enemies, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. sounded some conciliatory notes toward Jews, casting them as fellow strugglers against inequity and for peace.

But an outburst in a question-and-answer session and an analysis of what lies behind his remarks reveals that the Jewish community may still have reason to be less than comfortable with the former pastor to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Wright launched a media blitz this week just as Obama entered the final stretch of his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.

The media has highlighted inflammatory passages from Wright’s past sermons in which he suggests that white racism remains pervasive and U.S. foreign policy helped bring about terrorist attacks on U.S. targets. These remarks have dogged Obama’s campaign.

The Wright factor may have contributed to his defeat in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, where he lost to U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), 55 percent to 45 percent. In the Jewish community, where the pastor issue has come up repeatedly, Clinton beat Obama 62 percent to 38 percent, according to exit polls.

The candidate has sought to distance himself from his former pastor, calling Wright’s rhetoric “offensive.” On Tuesday, campaigning in North Carolina ahead of next week’s primary, Obama delivered his sharpest denunciation to date of the the preacher he once said nurtured his Christian identity.

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” Obama said. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs.”

In three major appearances over the last few days, Wright confronted what he said were the distortions in a campaign against him created primarily by Republicans but taken up also by Clinton advocates.

The appearances included a PBS interview last weekend with Bill Moyers; a dinner Sunday of the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and a speech Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.

The most strident of his speeches came at the press club, where Wright said the “corporate media” had ripped his statements from their context. That context, he said, was the African-American church that has remained invisible for too long.

“Maybe now we can begin to take steps to move the black religious tradition from the status of invisible to the status of invaluable, not just for some black people in this country, but for all the people in this country,” he said there.

“This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” he said later during a question-and-answer session. “It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.”

Also in the session, Wright addressed his association with Louis Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam leader in lectures in 1984 said Israel represents a “gutter religion” and that Jews in general had corrupted the word of God through “false religions.”

Wright said he disagrees with Farrakhan on some issues but also admires him.

“Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion,” he said. “And he was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter is being vilified for and Bishop Tutu is being vilified for.”

The distinction between Zionism and Judaism will not placate many Jews. Nor will suggestions that to criticize comparisons between Israeli policies and apartheid is somehow “vilification.”

“How many other African Americans or European Americans do you know that can get one million people together on the mall?” he said, referring to the 1995 Million Man March that Farrakhan organized. “He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That’s what I think about him.”

Wright’s overall emphasis was on the liberation theology that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s. He often grounded that theology in the Old Testament texts Christians share with Jews.

“The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive,” he said. “Liberating the captives also liberates those who are holding them captive.”

Outlining such captor-captive dichotomies the evening before in Detroit, Wright placed both Jews and blacks in the “captive” category, criticizing groups who saw the “different” as “deficient:”

“In the past we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient,” he said. “Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient. Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient, and vice versa. Whites saw black as being deficient.”

As if to underscore such solidarity, he started the NAACP speech with a nod to what he said were his Jewish and Muslim supporters.

“I would also like to thank sister Melanie Maron, the former executive director of the Chicago chapter of the American Jewish Committee and the current executive director of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Jewish committee,” he said. “I would like to thank my good friend and Jewish author, Tim Wise, for his support.”

Yet such thank-yous could undermine Wright’s efforts at conciliation. Wise is a Louisiana writer who has written extensively about white racism and tackled expressions of anti-Semitism on the left. But he also has repudiated Zionism as nationalist chauvinism while failing to address the chauvinism inherent in the Arab and Islamic movements that deny Israel’s existence.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, a co-founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said Wright’s radical views were typical of the generation that fell between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. era with its black-Jewish cooperation and the current resurgence of cooperation among young blacks and Jews.

“I have encountered a new leadership in black America committed to bringing black-Jewish relations back to where it was,” he said, referring to Obama’s own pledge to do so. “What many see as an obstacle, I see as an opportunity of righting the Wrights of the world.”

Wright’s recognition of Maron suggested an attempt at outreach to Jews and others.

Maron’s duties at the Chicago AJC chapter included organizing AJC tours of the United States for up-and-coming European civic and political leaders aimed at explaining American pluralism. Maron coordinated visits to Wright’s Trinity United Church.

Letter to the Editor

Honoring Rabbi Jonas Goldberg

It is with great pleasure and humble devotion that the Congregation of Temple Sinai invites the entire North Shore community to join us in honoring Rabbi Jonas Goldberg. Rabbi Goldberg has faithfully served our community for nearly two decades. During that time, he led our temple family as well as served on numerous community boards, presided over simchas and led memorials. His accomplishments are too great to detail in such a short space, suffice it to say, Rabbi Goldberg is truly a treasure.

Please join us in prayer for Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday, May 16 at 7:30 p.m. with the North Shore Hebrew School, and for Shabbat services on Saturday, May 17 at 9:30 a.m., followed by a talk given by Chaplain Jane Korins. The culmination of the tribute weekend is a gala dinner with world-renown Rabbi Harold Kushner on Sunday, May 18 at 5:30 p.m. The services are open to the public and all events are being held at Temple Sinai. Tickets for the Sunday Gala can be purchased by calling the temple office at 781-631-2763.

We hope you will join us in wishing Rabbi Goldberg well as he begins his retirement.
Jodi Smith and the
Temple Sinai Congregation
Marblehead