Op-Ed – Page 37

Trepidation of the world

“Therefore, the Lord, blessed be He, decreed that we count these days in order that we remember the trepidation of the world.”

– Rabbi Moses ben Abraham of Premysl

We count 50 days between Passover and Shavuot, officially called the Omer. Traditionally, this is regarded as a time of mourning because of the infighting and death of thousands of students in the talmudic era and the fact that the Omer sacrifice, which was brought to the Temple in Jerusalem on Shavuot, could not be given once the Temple was destroyed.

The Omer, however, originated as a biblical concept before there was an actual Temple or any rabbinic scholars: “You shall count from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you bring the sheaf of the wave offering [the Omer] … you shall count 50 days until the day after the seventh week; then you shall present a wheat offering of new grain … as first fruits to the Lord.” (Leviticus 23:15-17)

Spring naturally gets our attention as the weather and the plant life around us change. If we were farmers, we would be even more cognizant of our surroundings, counting the days until the harvest. With the harvest came our economic security for the year. On Passover, we recite the blessing for dew as a way to replenish the world with moisture, and we recite the Song of Songs, which takes us deep into the lush world of fruit and fragrance. The book, too, notes the changes: “For now the winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of pruning has come.” (2:11-12)

Between Passover and Shavuot, new grain was harvested and people brought baskets of new produce to the Temple as a way of thanking God for their bounty. The grain offering was one of joy precisely because it meant that we had sustenance for the year ahead. We also had taxes connected to this bounty. Before we could partake of our own food, we had to take off a portion for the poor, the priests and, of course, bring an offering to God. We sanctify the fruit of our labors so that we understand that we work not only for ourselves.

But the joy we experience upon bringing the offering represents the end of weeks of tension, hinted at in the quote above. Rabbi Moshe (d. 1606), the scholar cited above, wrote a work called Mateh Moshe, mostly about customs and laws observed by Polish Jewry. He calls the countdown between Passover and Shavuot “days of trepidation,” probably based on his reading of a midrash (Midrash Yalkut Shimoni, Emor 23:654). He understood that farmers felt themselves to be in peril until they were sure that the harvest would be plentiful in any particular year. The economic insecurity had an impact on their spiritual life. Counting for them was not only about waiting to relive the giving of the Torah on Shavuot; it was about the fiscal expectations and the worries connected to farming.

Nogah Hareuveni, in Nature in Our Biblical Heritage, sensitizes us to some of the natural phenomena that would have made Middle Eastern farmers anxious: “Each of these 50 days can bear either blessing to the crops or irreparable disaster. It was natural that the farmers of the Land of Israel should count off each day with great trepidation and with prayers to get through these 50 days without crop damage.” Rain or harsh eastern winds could wreak havoc on the harvest.

Shavuot is the only one of our three pilgrimage holidays (Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot) that is not marked by a specific date but is dependent on our act of counting. Some believe that this counting connected Shavuot to Passover in powerful spiritual ways, averting pagan celebrations that had to do with marking agricultural accomplishments alone. Seeking to spiritualize economic stresses and economic gains, we think of Passover and Shavuot within fiscal terms and religious frameworks, elevating pure agricultural anxieties and expressions of happiness to a spiritual art form.

We know all about economic downturns. We know about the 99 percent and Wall Street bonuses. What we don’t always appreciate are the spiritual, emotional and psychic costs of changing economies and how important it is to acknowledge trepidation within a religious framework. Money is powerfully connected to identity. Our capacity to count down or count up means something more if we see it within a sacred lens. Trepidation can be paralyzing, but sometimes it gives way to joy. And when it does, we count the days for the blessing they are.

Happy counting, and happy Shavuot.

Dr. Erica Brown is a writer and educator who works as the scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and consults for the Jewish Agency and other Jewish nonprofits. She is the author of In the Narrow Places (OU Press/Maggid), Inspired Jewish Leadership, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Spiritual Boredom and Confronting Scandal. Subscribe to her Weekly Jewish Wisdom list at leadingwithmeaning.com.

Religious belief vs. pretext

There I stood, 13 and terrified. At Beth Torah Congregation in Toronto, on a bimah that my grandfather had literally helped build, I was chanting from a Torah scroll that his father had saved from their synagogue in eastern Poland and smuggled through the war – the same parchment from which my father, uncles and cousins had all read in turn.

The congregation’s eyes seemed to bore tiny holes into my skull as I read the most infamous words of my Torah portion, Acharei Mot: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Bathed in family history and tradition, I thought I was about to drown. I may not have been the first gay shlemazel to have to swallow the words of Leviticus 18:22 during his bar mitzvah, but as the text passed my lips, I still felt completely alone.

The following year, as I was beginning to come out to my family and friends, the Supreme Court of Canada told an evangelical Christian university that it was free to exclude gays from its teacher education program. More than a decade later, the same university, Trinity Western, is invoking that ruling – and my bar mitzvah portion – as it claims the right to open an anti-gay law school.

They’re wrong, and anyone who truly cares about religious freedom should say so.

It’s far from clear that the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision – written, as it was, at a different time and on different facts – still empowers Trinity Western to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Yet, even if it does, the university’s anti-gay policy makes a mockery of freedom of religion. It’s one thing for people of faith to believe that gays are doomed to eternal hellfire, but it’s quite another to exclude them from a law school on that basis.

Read a Christian Bible cover to cover. It doesn’t end well for the Jews, either. Still, those of us who don’t accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior are welcome at Trinity Western University – provided that we don’t sleep with anyone of the same sex while we’re there.

If allowing Jewish students to practise Judaism isn’t a threat to Trinity Western’s religious freedom, what’s so different about allowing gay students to be gay? After all, according to evangelical Christians, we’re all going to end up shvitzing in the same place.

Imagine if the university required Jewish students to promise to abstain from Judaism. If that isn’t discrimination, neither was the Spanish Inquisition.

Can Christian scripture provide a basis for homophobia? Of course it can. Look no further than Leviticus 18:22. But the same set of texts might just as readily forgive racism, slavery or antisemitism. Why doesn’t Trinity Western discriminate against Jews or blacks the way it discriminates against gays? Because only fanatics would ever accept religious excuses for the former, and nothing does more to discredit religious freedom than using it to justify bigotry.

Anti-gay discrimination should be no exception. Those of us who depend on freedom of religion to protect our own beliefs should be the first to condemn its misuse. That doesn’t mean asking Christians (or Jews, or Muslims) to ignore scripture that prohibits homosexuality – though many do, and more should – but it does require us never to condone its use as a basis for odious discrimination. After centuries of blood libel, Jews are only too familiar with intolerance preached from the pulpit.

Those words that darkened my bar mitzvah portion – “v’et zachar lo tishkav mishk’vei ishah to’evah hu” – are chanted in synagogues around the world each year. After more than a decade, they still sting.

We can’t rewrite Leviticus, nor can we force the faithful to overlook passages that give us pause. But that doesn’t mean we can’t distinguish religious belief from religious pretext. If freedom of religion can justify almost anything, then it will be good for almost nothing. It’s up to those of us who need it to defend it from itself.

Adam Goldenberg is a Kirby Simon Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School, a former Liberal speechwriter and a contributor to CBC News: The National. Follow him at twitter.com/adamgoldenberg. This article originally appeared in the Canadian Jewish News and is reprinted with permission. For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.

Connect with “inner reality”

There is an elderly gentleman at a long-term care facility in Ottawa. I have not met him, but I have seen his photograph. At 99, he still possesses a spark in his eye. He looks much more physically robust than his biological age would suggest. And his features still retain the handsomeness I imagine he was said to possess as a younger man.

Recently, I spoke with his daughter, who I’ll call Leah. Leah is keenly aware of the disconnect between how people may perceive her father – living to an age most of us will only dream of, still in decent physical shape, happy and smiling – and her awareness that he once was so much more.

It’s not truly him, she explains, her voice cracking. Her father was always fastidiously groomed, courteous and extremely gentle. Now, under the spell of dementia, what she calls a “cruel” and “insidious” disease, on some days her father must be cajoled into showering. He has, on occasion, resorted to physical outbursts. And he has lost the social filter that we all depend on to carry us through everyday interactions. “It destroys me on a daily basis,” Leah says. Every time she sees him, she adds, she feels he has “died a little bit more.”

But bring him to music, and his spirit comes alive again. Leah sometimes performs at the facility where her father lives. When she does, her father rises from his seat, singing, filled with joy. “That’s my daughter!” he beams with pride.

Rabbi Neal Rose has recently retired as the spiritual director of the Simkin Centre, the Jewish long-term care facility in Winnipeg. He focuses on what he calls “spiritual care,” connecting with the person’s “inner reality,” he told me in a phone interview. This may be achieved through the esthetic markers of identity – things like food, music, language and holiday celebrations – or through more formal religious practice, like synagogue services.

Sometimes, this means entering the person’s current reality. A resident, who I’ll call Mr. Cohen, Rabbi Rose recounts, was getting agitated. “Call the police!” Mr. Cohen yelled, as his children surrounded him, perplexed. Rabbi Rose put his arm around him. “Mr. Cohen,” he said, “I’ve placed the call. The police will be here in five minutes.” Mr. Cohen relaxed, and went on his way.

It’s not lying, it’s not deception, Rabbi Rose emphasizes. It’s entering into their reality.

There’s a fascinating paradox at work. While dementia in many ways robs the sufferer of their identity, it also forces their caregivers and loved ones to be in the moment with them, to engage in pure empathy.

I recently visited an elderly relative who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. She seemed thrilled to see me, though she did not recall who I was. I realized I was desperately trying to penetrate through her fuzzy memory, to crack the code, as if she had a cinematic form of amnesia. “Do you recall the sharp corners on your glass coffee tables?” I asked her. “You used to place blankets over them when I brought my toddler daughter to visit.”

I wanted to fill her metaphorical candy jar with memories, I explained to Rabbi Rose, when we later spoke. I knew how much pleasure my visits had brought to her and how much I enjoyed chatting over Rideau Bakery challah and hard-boiled eggs at her home, the house she had lived in with her family for decades.

My instinct was understandable, but not realistic. “Not if she no longer has a candy jar to fill,” Rabbi Rose offered back. What’s more, too much pressing the dementia sufferer to remember can only leave both the sufferer and their family members in a circle of frustration and anxiety. This is a dynamic that Rabbi Rose emphasized, and which was echoed by Dr. Lee Blecher, a primary care physician in Virginia who treats dementia patients.

Still, Rabbi Rose emphasizes that it’s important for loved ones and caregivers to comprehend the whole person. At the Simkin Centre, a glass box is placed outside every room. Family members fill it with mementos. Of course, the totality of who a person is can never fit inside a glass box. But it’s a gentle reminder of the tension that exists between engaging a person as they are, right here and right now, and imagining a past that puts the present into sharp, sometimes wistful, but ultimately poetic, relief.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. This article was originally published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

Why I joined the Academic Advisory Council

Amid calls for boycotts of Israeli products, institutions and the many minds behind them, and with increasing instances of American academics and writers being muzzled, a new initiative seeks to introduce some intellectual and moral clarity.

As reported by the JTA and other outlets, and sponsored by the progressive Zionist group Ameinu, 50 North American academics have signed on to form the Academic Advisory Council, opposing academic boycotts and promoting efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution. The council will advise the Third Narrative project, an already-launched web-based forum to discuss a progressive approach to Israel/Palestine.

I am one of the 50 academics on the advisory council. (Disclosure: I also sit on the board of Ameinu.) I am aware that the link between opposing academic boycotts and pushing for a two-state solution is no longer universally self-evident. In examining the space between the two positions, though, some deeper insights about this tragic conflict are revealed.

In short, the council’s mandate spans a principled view over both scholarly process and political outcome. How do we, as scholars, think it appropriate to ply our public trade? And which policy outcomes to the Israel/Palestinian conundrum do we think are best?

What might the future hold now that the peace talks have failed?

This article was originally published in the Times of Israel the day before negotiations failed and the editing takes this into account. It is reprinted with permission.

As the current peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have failed, we need to prepare for what comes next.

For some, this preparation involves preparing the public relations case for why “they” are to blame and shoring up our arguments and defence against a partial or broad boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) campaign. It might also involve the circling of wagons around the “loyalists” and a legislative and communal campaign against the “outliers.” Who can march, when and where, who can speak, when and where, whose support is acceptable, and who is included under our “big tent,” are all going to be the subjects of ever-increasing and acrimonious debate, and some around the world might not take it as self-evident that it is “their” fault.

What happens after we accept that, for possibly the next decade, an agreement will elude us? What happens when our aspirational horizons are contracted and the status quo is all we can look forward to? Do we commence with punitive steps, such as annexing Judea and Samaria, expanding our hold on the land through settlement building and expansion, and a cessation of financial cooperation and support with the Palestinian Authority? Do these actions contribute to a stronger and greater Israel, to Israel’s vision of itself and relationship with world Jewry and the international community?

Like U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, I, too, fear the consequences of an energized BDS movement. But, more than that, I fear the ghetto mentality and victimhood psychology to which it would give birth. As a people, we are well schooled in living in the midst of animosity and defensive responses are imprinted on our DNA. Instead of leading the Jewish people away from a Holocaust-centred narrative, Israel would be its new locus of operations.

All criticism will immediately be subsumed under the banner of antisemitism and the world will be divided between the stark categories of friend or foe, with the former an ever-shrinking category. Friends will be confined to those who do not merely support us but who agree with us and reaffirm our narrative. Our world will become smaller and our walls higher as we create with our own hands the greatest ghetto in Jewish history.

This is not the Jewish world into which I want to raise my grandchildren. This is not a Jewish world that has any chance of attracting Jews who are searching for the location of their primary identity. This is not an Israel that can lay claim to a leadership position in Jewish life and attract the loyalty of future generations. This is not an Israel that can build new bridges, whether spiritual, moral, economic or political, with the larger world and our Christian and Muslim friends.

The making of peace requires two sides. Whether we did everything in our power and whether the Palestinians did everything in theirs is a factual question and, as such, paradoxically, unresolvable, for we rarely shape our opinions on the basis of facts, and instead shape our perception of the facts on the basis of our opinions.

We need to ensure that the cessation of the current peace negotiations does not at the same time unleash an uncontrollable process and narrative that will create a broader reality alien to who we are and detrimental to who we want to be.

I am concerned with that over which we do have control – our values, principles and identity as a nation and as a people. We need to ensure that the cessation of the current peace negotiations does not at the same time unleash an uncontrollable process and narrative that will create a broader reality alien to who we are and detrimental to who we want to be.

We now awaken to a world where policy is not the barter of negotiations nor the payment offered for compromises from the other side. We awaken to a world where we have to negotiate once more with ourselves and discover what we really want and what we need to do to get there. Settlement expansion is no longer a Palestinian problem but an Israeli one; educating youth towards violence is no longer an Israeli concern but a Palestinian one.

The demands of the other have ceased to serve as the wall behind which we hide ourselves from our own values and interests. We discover that all the punitive threats of harm that we levied at each other during the negotiations, if in fact implemented, harm “us” at least to the same degree.

Together with the mobilization of our forces for the sake of public relations, we need a mobilization of our best talent and leadership to determine and implement our national policies. We need to lead and not be led.

While a unilateral withdrawal along the lines of Gaza is not prudent, a unilateral implementation of policies that serve our moral and political interests is not only prudent but critical.

Such unilateral policies, I believe, must first fortify our Jewish commitment to the equality of all humankind, to the treatment of others as we would want to be treated ourselves and to the disdain we feel in the role of occupying another people. As an expression of these commitments, we must first clarify the borders we believe are defensible and which at the same time will allow for a viable Palestinian state.

This must be followed by a cessation of all settlement expansion, let alone building beyond these lines. At the same time, this cessation must be accompanied by a gradual dismantling of those settlements that are outside our self-proclaimed borders: first, through stopping economic incentives; second, through the provision of economic incentives to move; and third, through the construction of viable housing alternatives to accommodate the inhabitants of these settlements. All this will undoubtedly take time, but now, in the days after, what we have in abundance is time.

Just as we built a massive infrastructure to support the safety of the Israeli citizens who live there, we must now invest heavily in roads, bridges and tunnels that will allow unencumbered and free passage, to the best of our ability, for Palestinian inhabitants.

As the role of occupier is prolonged, we must be ever more conscious of the effects that it has both on those who are occupied and on those who are occupying. We must engage in an ever more rigorous analysis of our military footprint in Judea and Samaria and minimize our interference in the everyday lives of the Palestinian people to pressing security concerns alone. Just as we built a massive infrastructure to support the safety of the Israeli citizens who live there, we must now invest heavily in roads, bridges and tunnels that will allow unencumbered and free passage, to the best of our ability, for Palestinian inhabitants.

As the occupier, we must realize that the cancer is not merely affecting a small group of radical settlers but us all. We must double and triple our educational programs geared toward increasing commitment and sensitivity to the equality of human beings and to their inalienable rights. We must fight any and all exhibitions of discrimination and national racism. If we are not at the present time capable of applying our values to the Palestinian people in Judea and Samaria, we can double and triple our efforts in implementing them toward our fellow Israeli Arab Palestinian citizens.

Finally, we must relearn the old Diaspora art of living with unfulfilled dreams. The success of Israel has lured us into believing that if we will it, it will become a reality. As a result, we articulate our aspirations but have difficulty holding on to them in the midst of our imperfect reality. If aspirations for peace, justice and compassion are going to continue to define Jewish identity, we must learn to talk about them, write and sing about them, dream about them, despite the pain and disappointment that accompany our inability to as yet fulfil them.

This is part of the Torah of Israel for what happens in the days after negotiations fail, a Torah that challenges us to implement our ideals to the best of our ability and which obligates us to hold on to them, regardless of the reality within which we find ourselves. This is a Torah that empowers us as a free people to shape the world in which we live, instead of merely being its victims. This is a Torah that can prepare us for all the days after.

Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute (hartman.org.il) in Jerusalem and director of the Engaging Israel Project. He is the author of The Boundaries of Judaism.

Rabbinical Council of America’s GPS brings conversions into question

Back in 2008, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) announced a new system of conversion, GPS (Geirus Policies and Standards). Ostensibly, their goal was to create a universal and centralized standard for all conversions. We warned then that the GPS system would result in invalidating conversions that had been done in the past in accordance with Orthodox law and approved by the RCA. (JTA, March 10, 2008, “RCA deal hurts rabbi, converts.”)

Unfortunately, we have been proven correct. In a letter sent by the Beth Din of America (BDA, which is under the auspices of the RCA) to the chief rabbinate’s office, it was stated that “we cannot accept the conversion of any rabbi who served in a synagogue without a mehitza.” The RCA should clarify if this refers to any rabbi who ever served in a synagogue without a mehitza, or if it refers to a rabbi who performed that specific conversion while serving in a non-mehitza synagogue. Either way, this pronouncement should alarm countless converts.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, many Orthodox rabbis ordained at Yeshivah University served in mixed seated shuls. The rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, felt that in certain communities, YU rabbis should serve because the shuls may one day construct a mehitza. The BDA letter now places the conversions of all of those rabbis in jeopardy. This means that the children and grandchildren of these converts, some living in Israel, could be declared to not be Jewish. This is a terrible violation of the law, which prohibits the oppression of converts.

It is also a violation of the RCA’s own promise when it declared, “… any conversions performed previously [before GPS] that met its standards then, would continue to be recognized.” (“RCA response to public attack on GPS geirus policies,” March 19, 2009) Prior to the GPS system, when conversions were questioned, the RCA would vouch for its members who were in good standing. The RCA didn’t think twice about Orthodox rabbis who served in mixed seated shuls in the ’50s or ’60s, as this was common practice. This has now changed.

When we wrote that the RCA would question conversions done prior to the 2008 GPS standards, we never asserted that the RCA would conduct a witch-hunt to actively search out converts, find them and declare them invalid. What we said was that those converts who now needed to have their conversions validated by the RCA would be in jeopardy as the RCA would cast aspersions on pre-GPS conversions by imposing post-GPS standards.

This is precisely what is happening. When a convert or their children or grandchildren make aliyah, he or she needs his/her Jewish status validated. Because of the centralization of the GPS standards, the chief rabbinate’s office now turns to the Beth Din of America for guidance. The upshot of this is that conversions performed by RCA rabbis who served in non-mehitza shuls for years – some who even went on to become presidents of the RCA – are now in question.

RCA validation of conversions may not be limited to converts who emigrate to Israel. It can also encompass those applying to Orthodox day schools in the United States or applying for membership in an Orthodox synagogue, as these schools and synagogues will be looking to the RCA for guidance.

In fact, the matter is even worse. As a result of the GPS system, the RCA now has a practice of not only evaluating converts at the time of conversion, but for years after. Most recently, a convert who converted through the GPS system informed us of a call received from an RCA official. Having heard that the convert was struggling with Orthodox communal norms, the official threatened to retroactively invalidate the conversion.

The RCA practices should be of great concern to every convert who converts today. Now, the RCA is not only invalidating conversions done prior to the GPS system but threatening to undo conversions done through the GPS system itself.

It is these issues that require immediate detailed clarification from the RCA. In the meantime, we should all be concerned about what seems to be both a retroactive application of current GPS principles and also a creeping reduction of the convert’s status in the Orthodox community.

Rabbi Marc Angel is founder and director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals (jewishideas.org) and a former president of the RCA. Rabbi Avi Weiss is senior rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and Yeshivat Maharat. They are co-founders of the International Rabbinic Fellowship (IRF).

Battle for the bronze is where the real excitement lies

As the Winter Olympics returned to the headlines these past few weeks and we were filled with memories of four years ago in Vancouver, I decided this time around to root for the bronze medal winners.

I cheered for the bronze because, in my opinion, the most exiting Olympic competition is not the race for the gold, but the battle for the bronze. While it is exciting to see who will win (I did root for gold medal winners, too), I was particularly drawn to cheer for the ones who didn’t lose.

In 1995, a study was carried out by social psychologists Victoria Medvec, Scott Madey and Thomas Gilovich on the psychology of Olympic medal winners. The study showed that athletes who won the bronze medal were significantly happier with their results than those athletes who won the silver. Those who placed second were more frustrated because they had missed the gold medal, while the bronze medalists were simply happy to have received any honors at all (instead of a fourth-place finish). This is even more pronounced in knockout competitions, such as soccer’s World Cup, or the NCAA Final Four competition, where the bronze medals are achieved by winning a playoff; silver medals are awarded after a defeat in the final.

The truth is that the competitions would seem incomplete without a third-place finisher. Imagine if they only gave out a gold medal. It would be all about one person, too egocentric and too exclusive. For that matter, two is really not much better. The silver medalist is merely the guy who didn’t win. Without a bronze, he or she can’t even say, “Well, at least I didn’t come in third.” Number three, on the other hand, has a sense of fullness, of completion. Like the old saying, “three’s a crowd,” everyone is represented. Or, better put like the TV show, “three’s company.”

We know this in our own colloquialisms, as well. Three is the predominant way we categorize the world around us. What do we call the alphabet? The ABCs. What do you tell your kids when they are trying something and can’t get it right? Third time’s the charm (unless it takes more than that, of course). What does the starter say for a race? On your mark, get set, go! You tell a joke, it has to be: a priest, a minister and a rabbi – leave one out and you risk offending by not being inclusive in your offending humor. Nobody stands up at a wedding and shouts two cheers for the bride and groom. At Starbucks, it’s tall, grande and vente. Even made-up terms have a hierarchy. And, in those cases where the expanse of society has necessitated a fourth category – as in small, medium, large and extra large – it has the clear connotation of existing outside the norm, beyond the scope of what is necessary. It just doesn’t fit – pun intended.

Our rabbis knew this, as well. In the Mishnah, Rabbi Shimon the Righteous proclaims, “Al shlosha d’varim ha’olam omed: al haTorah, v’al haAvodah, v’al gemilut chasadim”: “The world stands on three legs: Torah, prayer and deeds of loving kindness.” Leave out any one of these and the world collapses in disarray. The Vahavtah of the Shema gives the same message: love God with all your heart, soul and might – miss one of these and you have not loved God completely. More positively: do all three of these and you can feel a closeness to God that would otherwise escape you.

Three is a very Jewish number. Three patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was three days into the journey from Egypt when the Israelites encountered God in the desert. Traditional Jews pray morning, noon and night. Hebrew verbs have three-letter roots, which serve as the foundation for the whole lexicon of Jewish expression. The list goes on.

One of the most powerful instances of three in Jewish tradition is the custom of placing three shovels of earth on a grave at a funeral. I am frequently asked, “Rabbi, why three shovels of earth?” We place three shovels of earth for the same reasons mentioned above. Three is complete; it shows intention and a fullness of action. One could be inadvertent, two is somehow just not enough, but three means that you have fulfilled the mitzvah.

One of my favorite teachings from Jewish tradition is about the mezuzah and why it rests on an angle on the doorpost. Rashi said it should lie flat, while his grandson, Rabbeinu Tam, said it should be vertical. In a rare moment of compromise between these two schools of thought, a student of them both, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, ordained a third way, a compromise position. It rests on an angle because, among the many given reasons, the key to a peaceful home, to shalom bayit, is compromise, finding a third way.

Bronze medalists give meaning to the achievements of the others, they place everything in perspective. They are not to be forgotten as last of the best, or even remembered as first of the worst. Rather, they are the essential pillar of the competition, the bridge between just making it and not making it at all.

We live most of the moments of our lives on that bridge – balanced precariously between success and failure. Celebrate the bronze medals in the many moments of your life: they are hard fought and hard won.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is the senior rabbi of Temple Sholom. Follow him on Twitter, @rabbidanmosk.

The rhetoric of Palestine denial

The intensifying Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have caused opponents of a Palestinian state to revive former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir’s 1969 canard that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” However, “Palestine denial” is less a debating point than a conversation- stopper: if there are no Palestinians, then there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and thus no need even to discuss West Bank policies. One problem: Palestinians do, in fact, exist.

In December, Israeli diplomat Danny Ayalon posted a YouTube video entitled “The Real Truth About Palestine,” in which he claimed that Palestine is a place, not a nation: “Like Antarctica, the Amazons or Sahara, naming a place doesn’t create a nation of Antarcticans or Saharans.” And in a recent Front Page Magazine essay, Hoover Institution scholar Bruce Thornton referred to “the so-called Palestinians” and stated that the very idea of a Palestinian nation is but “a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel.”

In 2012, three U.S. Republican presidential candidates endorsed Palestine denial: Newt Gingrich called Palestinians “an invented people”; Rick Santorum said “there are no Palestinians … all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis”; and Herman Cain referred to “the so-called Palestinian people.”

Palestine denial, like Holocaust denial, is easily refuted. Most historians, since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities three decades ago, have accepted that every people is invented, some very recently.

Italian consciousness dates to 1764 and, until 1871, Italy wasn’t a country. Earlier residents considered themselves Neapolitans or Venetians or Florentines, and their primary loyalties were to their religion or ruler. But “Italian” is not a timeless identity, nation, or people.

Before a UCLA professor coined “Asian American” in 1968, Americans whose backgrounds were Chinese or Filipino or Japanese weren’t really part of a unified ethnic group. Yet the government now applies census and voting-rights laws to Asian Americans as if they existed – which, today, they do.

Czechoslovakia, carved from former Austro-Hungarian territory containing mostly Czechs but also Germans and Slovaks, lasted from 1918 to 1992. But the state was only partially successful in creating a unified Czechoslovakian identity out of those ethnicities. The joke among Jewish historians is that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only Czechoslovaks were the Jews of Prague.

Being Jewish is itself an invented identity. Though Judaism is thousands of years old, it’s not ageless. Ancient concepts of tribes and kingdoms differ greatly from today’s nation idea. In fact, Hebrew has a different word for biblical peoplehood (am) and modern nationhood (l’om). Jewish nationalism traces only to the late 1800s, when secular European Jews faced rising nationalist antisemitism in their countries of residence, as expressed in France’s Dreyfus Affair and the Russian pogroms. The central Zionist myth of uninterrupted but dispersed Jewish nationhood with consistent identity tracing to biblical times and finally gathering in modern Israel is historically inaccurate.

Palestinian identity and peoplehood started in the early 20th century, but intensified after the events of 1948 and 1967. The Palestinian nation then developed a strong sense of shared history and future, grievance and aspiration. It has a flag, a shared language (Palestinian Arabic), particular cuisine and a varied literary canon.

Palestine denial is hackneyed and utterly predictable. Its followers boast of the following 1977 citation by Zuheir Muhsain of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pan-Arabist faction: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.” The obsession over a hoary 35-year-old quote from a Palestinian with a minority viewpoint suggests no other textual evidence exists.

Deniers also champion Mark Twain’s 1867 Innocents Abroad, always using the same passage, which describes Palestine in part as a “desolate country” where Twain “never saw a human being on the whole route.” But this 68-word mantra, presented as a single coherent opinion, selectively combines sentences and phrases from pages 488, 520 and 555 of the travelogue. Never mentioned are Twain’s half-dozen anecdotes about encounters with Arabs in Palestine. Innocents Abroad actually offers more support to the Palestinian narrative than the Zionist one.

Finally, West Bank residents are purportedly just a motley collection of Arab economic migrants, not a unified nation. Of course, the United States was also populated by economic migrants, and everyone recognizes the American people.

Denial rhetoric invalidates Palestinian rights by contradicting common sense and nearly all nationalism scholarship. It also leads to very strange questions. Are Italians a nation? Do Pakistanis (a 75-year-old identity) deserve a state? Should we tell a person who says she’s Asian American, “No, you’re not”?

Opponents of a Palestinian state can raise many legitimate points. But the “myth of Palestine” is not one of them. The idea needs to be retired, so real discussions about the Israeli and Palestinian futures can start.

David Benkof has a master’s degree in modern Jewish history from Stanford. He teaches Hebrew in Jerusalem. He can be reached at [email protected].

Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

A message from U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to the people of Casablanca, found on the street of that city in 1942. (image from commons.wikimedia.org)

In the wake of invasion and military defeat in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and the French government in Vichy, now headed by Marshal Pétain, concluded an armistice by virtue of which France was divided into an occupied zone and a non-occupied zone. The conditions imposed by Germany were at first relatively lenient: the French government retained partial autonomy in the occupied north and full autonomy in the non-occupied south. Vichy also retained varying degrees of control over the French colonial empire: while Algeria remained under direct French rule, Morocco and Tunisia had the status of protectorates under their native rulers supervised by France. In Morocco, King Mohammed V defied France by refusing to apply Vichy’s antisemitic laws. In Tunisia, Gestapo and SS followed Erwin Rommel’s army and, in 1942, rounded up the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi death camps.

In the spring of 1942, strong disagreements among the Allies came to light in regard of the strategy to adopt against Germany. While President Franklin Roosevelt initially leaned in favor of Josef Stalin’s insistent demand for a landing in Western Europe in 1942, in the end, he reluctantly rallied to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s view that such a landing at that time could not possibly succeed. He believed that the Allies would not be ready for this risky operation until late in 1943, or even 1944. Churchill proposed that, instead, an Allied landing be staged in North Africa, in order to deny Germany and Italy full control over the Mediterranean and compel Rommel’s army, which was retreating from Libya, to fight on two fronts.

In preparation for this operation, the Americans entered into secret contacts with the anti-Vichy underground in Algiers to enlist its assistance in the landing, albeit with some reluctance since the United States still recognized the legality of the Vichy government with which it maintained diplomatic relations.

Such is the background of Operation Torch placed under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. On the morning of Nov. 8, 1942, a mostly American fleet of more than 100,000 men landed under air cover on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria. Three days later, the Germans violated the armistice of 1940 and invaded the southern zone of France in collaboration with the Italians.

In the port of Algiers, the landing was greatly facilitated by the local resistance, composed in the main of young students, who effectively sabotaged the communications of the local French military, seized public buildings and even arrested two of the top commanders: Admiral François Darlan, Pétain’s former prime minister, and Gen. Alphonse Juin. It is important to note that two-thirds of these 400 young resistance fighters were Jews. The French authorities in Algeria were fanatically devoted to Vichy and so zealous in the implementation of that regime’s antisemitic legislation, that they established internment camps in the Sahara in preparation for the round-up and deportation of the Jewish population to the death camps of Europe. Vichy also deprived the 116,000 Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship that had been awarded them in the 19th century.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

Roosevelt despised de Gaulle and his Free French Forces, and chose to place in command of the French army of North Africa, whose commanders, including Darlan, resented Germany’s violation of the armistice of 1940, the semi-Vichyste Gen. Henri Giraud. The young anti-Vichy fighters were for the most arrested and interned in the Sahara. Some of them narrowly avoided being executed. The Vichy laws remained in force. De Gaulle eventually rallied a number of generals in charge of colonial troops in French Equatorial Africa and arrived in May 1943 in Algiers, where he established the authority of Free France, invalidated the Vichy laws, and restored to the Jews their French citizenship.

Unfortunately for those of us who grew up revering him, Roosevelt’s connivance with Giraud and Vichy’s military commanders, and politicians in Algeria who had conveniently changed sides, was not the only instance of his betrayal of the hope that our people had pinned on him during the dreadful years of the Shoah. As for de Gaulle, the sympathy that he expressed for the suffering of our people at the time of the liberation of France and his sadness-filled admonition to his Jewish soldiers in the Free French Forces that antisemitism was not dead, were expressions of a friendship, which unfortunately did not survive the temptations of realpolitik and opportunism. On the morrow of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, de Gaulle labeled the Jews a “proud and domineering people” and turned France from an ally into an enemy of Israel.

It took nearly half a century for the Jewish resistance in France to win official recognition; for the members of the Jewish communist urban underground, even longer. The Jewish contribution to the liberation of French Algeria is only now beginning to be written about.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.