Opinion – Page 101

With respect to assisted suicide, context is everything

I am an oncologist, and I am Jewish. Fortunately, at this moment, I am not terminally ill, nor do I bear an incurable disease. By virtue of my profession and my age, death, suffering and the indignity that can go with it are familiar to me.

That is my perspective. I lead with that declaration because, when it comes to the business of assisted suicide, context is everything.

The rationale for actively ending a life is always posited on the basis of ending suffering and, hence, preserving dignity. At face value, this appears both straightforward and without controversy. It is not. Whose suffering? What is dignity, and is it realistic to provide some idealized form of dignity in every instance, try as we may? Who is to judge? When to decide, and when to act? Who is to act, and on what authority?

Some years ago, at a palliative-care conference in Israel, I was riveted by a panel where Anglican, Catholic and Jewish physicians discussed suffering. The ordained Anglican, a highly respected surgeon, spoke of the purifying nature of suffering and its role in preparing people for the afterlife. For him, the total relief of pain was at cross-purposes with the spiritual transit of the end of life. For me, as a Jew, this was a striking perspective, certainly far from my understanding that pain of this sort had little redeeming value. Lesson No. 1: Cultural context is important.

More recently, I was asked to see a young man dying of cancer, whose pain seemed uncontrollable. He was desperate to go home. The complex logistics of pain management and support appeared to make this impossible. What to do? We talked, initially rather guardedly, then more openly. It turned out that, more than anything else, he wanted to see his dog. That was why he wanted to go home, for the absence tormented him. We arranged for the dog to make a hospital visit. The pain went away. My patient died quite comfortably in his hospital bed a few days later. Lesson No. 2: Understand the pain; you may be able to relieve it.

Almost 30 years ago, a small group of Winnipeg cancer physicians asked what was then a heretical question: Are we treating cancer, independent of the patient, or are we treating a patient who happens to have cancer? We created the “quality of life” concept, and objective measures of it. What happened to the tumor became less important than what happened to the person – physically, emotionally, socially and functionally. We broadened our understanding of our patients, and so were born the diverse range of interventions and supports we now routinely employ to more than keep people alive. We help our patients live lives. Lesson No. 3: It’s about the person, not the disease.

“Assisted suicide” is a euphemism for ending someone else’s life. Every civilized society holds life sacred. The idea of “Thou shalt not kill” echoes in every faith. The penalties for killing are severe, mitigated by an understanding of intent. Whenever we introduce a legal exception, we run into trouble. Similar arguments about relieving suffering were used by the Nazis to justify first exterminating the weakened and disabled, then the mentally ill, and then non-Aryans on the regime’s hell-bent descent into depravity. In order to execute the policy, a cohort of licensed killers was created. This, in a society once considered the world’s most sophisticated and cultured. Lesson No. 4: Assisted suicide is not a legal matter, it’s a moral one, and we can’t legislate morality.

So, where does this bring me in the consideration of assisted suicide? Full circle, to my ancient role as physician. Not as medical technician, nor as the master of prognostic statistics, derived from groups somehow extrapolated to an individual. I am a member of the one profession whose essential role invokes individual life and death decisions, and acts on risks that necessarily include adverse outcomes causing pain and suffering and death. I’m not doing my job unless I understand context, cause and possibility when it comes to suffering. That takes time, patience and experience. The responsibility is a great harbinger of humility.

Each dying patient has their own context and belief frame for their “suffering.” Each case has its own mix of causes, and things that make it worse or better. My contention is that when we fully understand what’s going on, it is rare that suffering can’t be greatly palliated. It then follows that the perceived need to end life to alleviate suffering is a very rare occurrence.

In this most intimate and delicate interaction between patient and physician, the physician also has context and values. I don’t think they can be legislated away.

For me, as a Jew and as a physician, I can give morphine to relieve pain, but not to end a life. I come down against legalizing assisted suicide as a product of my faith, culture, training and experience. Put as a dichotomy, I’m prepared that a few might suffer more than they can bear, rather than countenance in the name of some kind of generosity of spirit the active taking of a life. I know from history, and I have seen too much of the slippery slope of convenience, to find confidence in any permissive legislative process.

Harvey Schipper is a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. This article originally appeared in the Globe and Mail.

The power of social media to terrorize

Others have observed that our generation is the first to carry a device in our pockets capable of accessing the entire depth and breadth of human knowledge, but mostly we use it to watch videos of kittens. This is not always the case, of course. Some of us use it to enrich our character, others less so.

During last week’s World Cup game between the United States and Germany, sports fans invoked Nazi imagery on Twitter 30,209 times. From referring to the players or referees as Nazis to otherwise throwing the term around, the word was tweeted an average of 3.4 times per second throughout the game. At one point, according to a blog that follows these statistics, references to Nazis came 20 times a second.

People say and do things on social media that they would never do without the anonymity it provides. It is not surprising that people looking for an obvious source of ridicule or debasement would focus on the darkest chapter in a country’s history, and one that is well known. Tweeting vicious names is not the worst that soccer fans have done. However, the phenomenal explosion of the use of “Nazi” during a sporting event is troubling in a few ways. From our perspective, accusations of Nazism should be limited to people who behave like Nazis – and that is a very, very small proportion of people in the world today, thankfully. To use this word with flippant nonchalance diminishes its meaning and the history that surrounds it. A worse thought is that people are using it without knowing its meaning and history.

More to the point, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in non-Germans throwing this word at Germans. As a society, Germany has done a great deal to confront the meaning of its Nazi era, to an extent far greater than other countries that collaborated with the Third Reich, for example. The German government has over the decades been exemplary in trying to learn from that history and make a better society, as well as making restitution financially and, as much as such a thing is conceivable, morally to the Jewish people.

More bizarre is the apparent social media wizardry of the murderers that are killing Iraqis in the quest for a Sunni Muslim caliphate. The New York Times reported on Sunday that ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, “has hijacked World Cup hashtags, flooding unsuspecting soccer fans with its propaganda screeds. It has used Facebook as a death threat generator; the text sharing app JustPaste to upload book-length tirades; the app SoundCloud for jihadi music; and YouTube and Twitter for videos to terrify its enemies.” A particularly grisly example was a video of a policeman being beheaded accompanied by the message “This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup.”

The Times reported that, weeks before ISIS overran the city of Mosul, it had issued on Facebook death threats to every Iraqi journalist who worked there. Understandably, most of the journalists singled out for death fled the city, which the newspaper suggests may have accounted for why the successful launch of ISIS’s brutal campaign took time to filter out to wide global attention.

While most people on Twitter and Facebook are posting pictures of summer barbecues, kids and pets, ISIS is broadcasting a steady stream of decapitations and other executions of Iraqi soldiers, police and disobedient civilians. These extremists hope to impose a Stone Age social order in the Middle East and, presumably, beyond, but they have no qualms about using the most modern technologies to advance their cause.

Site owners like Google and YouTube are trying to confront their responsibilities, but it is technically difficult – as soon as one post/tweet/video is removed, for example, the content pops up elsewhere. As well, there is debate about the merits of blocking all access to the propaganda, and not just from free-speech advocates, but from intelligence agencies, who would prefer the content be left online because it aids them in tracking the extremists.

This is the power of social media. Death threats that have a tangible impact on war zones and which also carry the potential for intelligence gathering. It’s not just for cat videos anymore.

Love to win? Or hate to lose?

Pursuing more of my “Love to Win” side at the 2014 Spartan Sprint obstacle race.

Call it ironic, but in my less-than-fit days I was a regular subscriber to Men’s Health magazine.

As I looked upon the cover of each fresh edition I sincerely believed (read: hoped) that this just might be the edition that unveils the ground-breaking discovery that Maple Walnut ice cream contained a fat-burning ingredient that could give me “six-pack abs by summer!”

I eventually decided to take a different route to improved fitness. While I can’t say I would credit Men’s Health for my success, there was one posting that left a long-lasting impression on me.

This specific article effectively split humanity into two simple groups.

Group 1: Those who love to win.

Group 2: Those who hate to lose.

Of course everyone prefers winning and, thus, would rather not lose. But most people, if they really think it through, can probably identify what fuels them more; the rush of victory or resentment toward loss.

It didn’t take me long to realize I was a hate-to-lose kind of dude. If my team, in any sport, was winning life seemed in order and under control. There was balance in the Force. But if we were losing my emotions would take over in an effort to avoid failure. I would walk away from any loss feeling frustrated, unsettled and pondering what I could have done to avoid it. I didn’t need to celebrate the wins as much as I needed to avoid the feeling of loss.

I embraced that discovery and used it to make me better. In hockey I became a defensive, shut-down centre, eventually turning to a pure defenseman where my emotional drive to avoid getting beat could feed my game. It proved to be a good move for my career (boy, do I use the word career lightly).

In the last couple of years, however, I considered if perhaps my friendship with the hate-to-lose side of me had led to complacency and, in some cases, boredom! (we’ll get to that nasty word in a later post)

Generally speaking, of course, hate-to-lose people might play the game of life a little on the safe side. They could miss out on hidden opportunities while choosing to avoid opportunities to test their limits. They are less likely to take risks or seek adventure. Their theory being, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The love-to-win type is ready to take those risks and fly by the seat of their pants for the possible thrill of success. On the flip side, they might take unnecessary risks, act without calculated consideration of consequence, risk losing a lot for the sake of winning a little. Their theory being, “Let’s break it ‘cause maybe we can rebuild it better.”

So which one is better? I could give you all sorts of analogies of how either approach has a proven track record of success.

But the key is to find out who you are and challenge yourself to bring the other element into your life a little more. I’ll use a hockey analogy (get used to it) to show you what I mean. It is commonly preached that “defense wins championships.” But it is also a fact that you can’t win the Stanley Cup without scoring goals. Even the defensemen need to contribute to the offense for a team to be a serious contender. More specifically, the great players who lead their teams to the big games are the ones who find the right balance of defense and offense. Those players aren’t born playing like that. They all enter the league with one style of play that has gotten them to where they are. Then they develop that balance over seasons of growth, experience and hard work. The most successful players develop their weaknesses to complement their strengths.

This is a concept we should all adopt for the sake of growth, inspiration and diversity. Whether you are more of a hate-to-lose or a love-to-win type, heighten your awareness to that and consider the areas of your life where a lack of balance has possibly challenged your growth or development. Then make the effort to approach the opposite way of thinking from time to time.

It worked for George Costanza!

Kyle Berger is a freelance writer and producer of the Berger With Fries health, fitness and entertainment blog. Follow him on Twitter @kberger16.

Happy to be Canadian

For most Canadians, depending on the weather in our locale, Canada Day represents the real kickoff of summer. The kids are out of school, many workplaces are beginning a summer lull, families are looking forward to spending time together outdoors.

Canadians have rarely given ourselves over fully to the flag-waving, sleeve-wearing patriotism of many other countries. There are times when some of us lament this apparent lack of passion for our Canadian birthright, but this seeming lack of passion may well be an innate characteristic of our national spirit: a calm, reserved, nonaggressive attitude that is no less deserving, or indicative, of pride than a more fulsome nationalism.

As we observe events around the world these days, we should probably feel a special level of pride and relief at being Canadian. On every continent, it seems, crises of various proportions and types are roiling. Nigerian girls and Israeli boys are abducted by terrorists. The war in Syria has crossed the border into Israel, with an Israeli teenager dying last week from a roadside attack. Shia and Sunni combat each other in a brutal battle for control over what remains of the state of Iraq, now boiling over into Syria and Jordan – a conflict so multifarious that Western allies find ourselves in the unfathomable position of making common cause with the regime in Iran.

There are 51 million displaced persons in the world today, the highest number since the end of the Second World War. Half of these are children, fleeing violence in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere. Women and religious and ethnic minorities around the world are living in often increasingly hostile environments, with acts against their dignity, and violence to their person at intolerable levels. In Europe, far-right parties are exploiting economic difficulties to spread messages of scapegoating and blame.

A simple glance at any day’s headlines should remind us how lucky we are to be in Canada. We are certainly not without our problems. We have an ingrained history of mistreatment and inequality toward the First Nations of this place, most immediately demonstrated in levels of poverty and health outcomes in those communities that are exponentially worse than Canadian averages, and the murder or disappearance of hundreds of aboriginal women. Nor are we free from other forms of racism or injustice. This is not paradise, though by contrast to much of the world, and for most of us, it comes close.

We are fortunate to share our continent with stable neighbors with whom we share multilateral relations that are among the most peaceful and cooperative of any countries on earth. This fortunate situation is not all a matter of good geography. The comparatively peaceful situation here is not insignificantly a result of the evolution of a uniquely Canadian approach to coexistence across difference. Jewish Canadians and our communal institutions have played an important role in the successes of Canadian multiculturalism.

Our comparatively peaceable nation is also a result of factors including attitudes toward weaponry, which makes our country not immune to violent gun-related incidents, but keeps us far from the crisis situation being experienced in the United States.

All of this should not evoke complacency. We should feel gratitude for our relatively peaceable and prosperous state, but we should feel no less a sense of obligation to making the world better for all people. Our own security and well-being should not relieve us of the obligation to do what we can, as individuals and as a nation, to make things better for people in the world who do not share all of our good fortune. Indeed, our position of relative wealth, health, stability and living standards places on us a greater obligation to act on behalf of others worldwide who are not as fortunate as we are.

What to do in Iraq?

Extremists have taken over much of Iraq, spreading medieval theology using modern weaponry, leaving hundreds of corpses and severed heads in their wake. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has been disowned by the umbrella that spawned it, al-Qaeda. ISIS is said to be more extreme and more anti-American than al-Qaeda. Extremism seems to have taken an even more extreme turn.

The ostensibly democratic government in Iraq that resulted from the American intervention there ended up being dominated by Iraqi Shi’ites, which is part of the reason the Sunni extremists of ISIS have been met with, if not a hero’s welcome in parts of Iraq, at least with little resistance. The lack of resistance is partially due to the propensity of American-trained Iraqi soldiers and police to drop their weapons and flee in the face of ISIS, which observers say is a reaction to a lack of commitment to the ideals of democratic government – a product of the failure of the government to live up to the hopes of the post-Saddam Hussein era. It is also a reflection of just how brutal ISIS has been in its onslaught.

While the capital city of Baghdad was not under immediate threat by ISIS (as of press time this week) Iraq as a country seems effectively inoperative. All of the effort, lives, injuries and expense of the American and allied intervention there may prove to have been for naught. The new reality is far from clear, but all appearances suggest things are worse than ever.

So desperate is the situation that Iran may be our new ally in the conflict. The Shi’ite extremists who run Iran have come to the aid of the American-installed, Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad, sending Iranian Revolutionary Guards to help fight the Sunni ISIS. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading hawk who no one accuses of being soft on Tehran, accommodates the new bedfellow by comparing the situation with the West’s alliance with Stalin during the Second World War.

A wild-eyed optimist might even see this bizarre situation as a backdoor route to a new entente with the heretofore-implacable Iran. Were this catastrophe to have a silver lining of bridging the chasm between Iran and the West, it would be based on our mutual interest in an intra-Muslim sectarian conflict – and it is hard to see how anything good could come from our getting mired in something like that. In fact, the engagement of Western forces in Middle Eastern and Asian situations we really do not well understand may be the greatest lesson of this entire mess. The determination of George W. Bush for “regime change” in Iraq (something his father had, in hindsight, the wisdom to stop short of) unleashed a firestorm of consequences. Saddam was a murderous tyrant, but the current situation presents for Iraqis all the horrors of his dictatorship and more – plus unprecedented instability for the entire region.

Where we go from here is something the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama and other allied leaders are pondering now. And they may be as baffled as the rest of us. Given the West’s past failures in the region, it is hard to be hopeful.

Bringing Judaism into the public sphere

A 28-year-old struggling writer walks up to a checkout counter at Whole Foods. “Where is the Torah study?” he asks. “Oh, the class with the rabbi? That’s in the back, near the nuts.”

The clerk wasn’t being pejorative – the Torah study really is in the back, near the bulk bins of nuts and trail mix. I should know: I’m the nut teaching Torah in the store every Wednesday.

In my 20-plus years as a Jewish educator, I never dreamt I’d be teaching Torah in a supermarket. But, then again, I’m pretty sure the two dozen or so students who regularly participate in the class never thought they’d be studying Jewish text each week, let alone doing so surrounded by organic Swiss chard.

There is nothing new in all this. When the Israelites returned from Babylonian exile in 537 BCE and rebuilt the Temple, Ezra the Scribe noticed that the people were too busy with the pressures of the day to make time for Judaism. On Mondays and Thursdays – the two busiest market days – Ezra stood in the street and read Torah out loud to a people who had all but forgotten their own story. From this seminal moment sprang the practice of reading the Torah on Mondays and Thursdays that continues in synagogues to this day.

Millennia later, public space Judaism is again an emerging trend. I began my own work in this field as a congregational rabbi at Temple Judea in Tarzana, Calif., inspired by Rabbi Kerry Olitzky’s teaching: “In a place where you can be Jewish anywhere, we should grasp the opportunity to be Jewish everywhere.”

Torah study at Whole Foods expanded to a host of Jewish events. On Sukkot, our youth group built a sukkah on Whole Foods’ outdoor patio, a banner explained the structure. We nurtured a mutually beneficial relationship with the store manager and staff, and the store sponsored food and activities at temple events. A year later, the relationship had solidified to the point that the store manager invited our congregation to lead a menorah lighting at Chanukah time. At that moment, I knew that we’d not only engaged Jews beyond our shul’s walls; we had changed the public face of Judaism in our community.

For Jewish communities like Vancouver that lack great Jewish population density, public space Judaism is a bit like online dating: if you want to meet someone, you need to let people know you’re looking.

Afterwards, the room was electric with everyone talking about how wonderful it was to connect with a larger Jewish community while on vacation and brainstorming how we might do this again.

How do we accomplish this? My colleague at Temple Sholom, Rabbi Carey Brown, teaches a Talmud class for millennials in a coffee shop once a month; I teach a text-based Jewish current events discussion at lunchtime in an office boardroom. Ringing in the 2014 year, we led a Shabbat service and Havdalah at Whistler Blackcomb. More than 60 people came to the dinner and service, about 45 to Havdalah. Afterwards, the room was electric with everyone talking about how wonderful it was to connect with a larger Jewish community while on vacation and brainstorming how we might do this again. A few local Jewish families asked if we could help educate their remote community. We now have plans to bring Hebrew school and family education to them.

When the rain and snow subside and the sun shines on Vancouver’s beaches, our congregation leads relaxing, open Shabbat services on the beach. We unfurl a banner and post signs welcoming all who wish to join us. And, like at Whole Foods, they come – Jews and “Jew curious.”

Howard Schultz, the man who developed Starbucks Coffee’s identity, famously explained his business model as trying to create a “third place” between work and home where people could gather and feel they belonged. For generations, the synagogue was that third place for Jews.

Like most rabbis, I have tried everything short of standing on my head to get people into my shul for prayer or study. While many come, some regularly, many others don’t or won’t. We can bring synagogue to them. We can meet in a third place of our own creation, filling it with meaning and a measure of Yiddishkeit.

One group in particular was easy to find but hard to reach: Jewish men. They were everywhere in our larger community, but not at synagogue. I asked a socially connected man in my Los Angeles congregation to host a Guys’ Night with the Rabbi in his home. I suggested he invite anyone he wanted and encourage guys to bring a friend.

To my surprise, 23 guys showed up. When we asked them why, they answered, “Because you asked.” Note that the “you” was not me, but the guy they respected and liked who had invited them to his home. Again, it was all about relationships.

We began that “Guys Night” with a simple but powerful exercise – introduce yourself without saying what you do for a living. Men so often define themselves by what they do, how they provide for their families. Our group would only work, we realized, if we could retrain ourselves to change this damaging, isolating pattern that is related to male competitiveness. We would have to see other men as brothers, each one with good things to give and to receive.

We established ground rules about confidentiality and cross talk. In the first months, we discussed Why Do We Work So Hard?; What Kind of Fathers We Had, What Kind of Fathers We Are; Being a Husband: How Has Your Partner Influenced the Way You Think?; Power and the Male Identity.

I always prepared a contemporary text and a Jewish text to help guide our talks, but soon we needed no more than a trigger to get started. The group of about 60 regulars has now met for eight years. Our annual retreat attracts more than 100 and there’s also an annual Community Men’s Seder, based on a Men of Reform Judaism model, that a core group of guys lead for friends and colleagues, which is growing every year. And many of the men who were once absent from synagogue life are now present.

Public space Judaism has taught me that, even in the congregational context, I need to reach out to members. If I wait for them to come to me, they might never come.

Public space Judaism has taught me that, even in the congregational context, I need to reach out to members. If I wait for them to come to me, they might never come. On my first day at Temple Sholom, for example, I was handed the Kaddish list for the coming Shabbat. I didn’t know any of the names, so I started calling members who were observing yahrzeits. Introducing myself, I explained that it would be my first time reading the name of their loved one. Could they tell me a little bit about the deceased, so I had a context for their memory as I read the name on Shabbat?

One by one, congregants told me their stories. They remembered things about their parents, spouses and siblings they hadn’t thought of in years. Tears flowed on both ends of the conversation. When the mourners came to synagogue that week to recite Kaddish, it was easier for them to walk into the place that had been made unfamiliar because of the change of rabbis, and easier for me to stand before them. We were no longer strangers.

Many of those talks also led to my visiting members’ homes or meeting them for coffee to hear their stories. Whenever possible, I set those meetings away from my office. Like Ezra the Scribe, I feel I need to engage the people in their space, not mine.

Yes, public space Judaism is a blind date, and that takes a bit of chutzpah. It begins with the sukkah, the phone call, the get-together at Whole Foods near the nut department. More often than we think, it leads to a relationship – a relationship with other Jews and with our Jewish selves that endures.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is senior rabbi at Temple Sholom and co-author of The MRJ Men’s Seder Haggadah (MRJ Press 2007). You can follow him on twitter @rabbidanmosk. A longer version of this article was originally published in Reform Judaism Magazine.

Prisoner swaps: painful, ugly, necessary choices

The release of American soldier Bowe Bergdahl has raised in the United States many of the same difficult questions and recriminations Israel has faced over the years.

The Bergdahl trade, in which five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released in exchange for Bergdahl, has sparked intense discussion about the efficacy and morality of such trades.

For people familiar with how Israel has dealt with similar decisions, the trade was less shocking than it seems to have been for some American observers. The moral difficulty of freeing terrorists in exchange for a captive soldier was last a matter of front-page news with the release of Gilad Shalit in 2011.

Some Canadians, including us, were aghast at comments made in advance of Shalit’s visit here last year. The Jewish Tribune, the voice of B’nai Brith Canada, published an inflammatory letter calling Shalit a “stumblebum” and blaming him for his own misfortune. A tepid article in the same newspaper seemed to draw into question the decision to fête the young man with a cross-Canada tour. Shalit, who spent more than five years as a Hamas captive in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, was freed in exchange for the release of 1,027 Palestinian and Arab Israeli prisoners, some of whom were top-level terrorists. The freed Palestinians were greeted as triumphant heroes on their return to their homes, with crowds in at least one West Bank town waving Hamas flags (at a time when Hamas was out of favor in the Fatah-controlled area) and chanting, “We want another Gilad Shalit.”

The Bergdahl case has added complications. While the Tribune published speculation that effectively any soldier who allows himself to be captured has failed in his duty and contributed to his own situation, Bergdahl’s abduction was a direct result of his decision to walk away from his base in eastern Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, given the location, he fell into Taliban hands and was held for five years. Some of the American commentators have suggested that their country traded five Taliban not for an American soldier, but for a deserter. In fact, Bergdahl was promoted in rank during his captivity, so military brass clearly do not view his actions that way.

Fears arose for Bergdahl’s long-term health when a video was released earlier this year showing him gaunt. President Barack Obama took a “no apologies” approach to criticism, insisting that the country he leads leaves no soldier in the field.

Responding to fears that the five Taliban releasees might return to kill Americans, Obama’s Secretary of State took on a familiar pose. John Kerry called such concerns “baloney.”

“I am not telling you that they don’t have some ability at some point to go back and get involved, but they also have an ability to get killed if they do that,” said Kerry.

To make the issue more inflammatory, the New York Times and other media have explored theories – advanced by some within the military, including at least one member of Bergdahl’s battalion – that the search for Bergdahl led to the deaths of six to eight fellow soldiers. The Times concluded that circumstances around “the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive.”

The United States is dealing with the moral quandary of trading human beings in war. The Israeli military, governments and public have faced this unsavory choice many times over the years in the country’s extraordinary situation of almost ceaseless war, insurrection or threat of external violence. Just as some Palestinians chanted, “We want another Gilad Shalit,” American critics of the trade have warned that the deal puts a price on the head of every American soldier and might encourage future abductions.

One of the striking things about the American and Israeli examples of prisoner swaps is that, in Israel, politicization of such deals has been somewhat muted, particularly in the context of the vibrant discourse of Israeli politics. In the United States in recent days, however, these issues have been grist for the mill. There should be a degree of transparency around such prisoner exchanges and a society should openly discuss the morality behind them and the compromises we might be expected to make in life-and-death military situations. Still, the American discussion seems overly politicized.

These are painful, ugly and nauseating choices. There are many variables in each individual case. Ultimately, there is a reliance on the value respective militaries place on protecting their own. In a better world, people would never be forced into these kinds of decisions. The world that we live in, sadly, makes such choices sometimes necessary.

Do we all agree? No. Care? A lot.

If there was any doubt that Jews around the world have strong feelings and opinions about Israel, it was disabused by a major new paper produced by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).

Jewish and Democratic: Perspectives from World Jewry was released several weeks ago at a conference in New York state. It is the result of 40 discussion groups and seminars around the world, as well as questionnaires and an analysis of existing research. The process included participants from much of Canada, though none from Vancouver.

The diversity of comments and the consensus that appears from the document are not particularly startling, but they are interesting for their quantification of some things we probably already assumed. The most significant “finding” seems to be that Jews around the world take great interest in Israel, its security, future, successes, failures and ethical challenges.

The report was undertaken in response to Israel’s Ministry of Justice considering legislation that would codify Israel’s Jewish and democratic character “at a time when different ideological groups within Israel hold conflicting views of how these components should be prioritized.” Israel has always tried to be democratic and Jewish. Long-term concerns are that high Arab and low Jewish birthrates could imperil the Jewish majority and, therefore, the Jewish and democratic system, particularly if some resolution is not found for the stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. More immediately, tensions have existed over questions of whether Israel is Jewish enough and/or democratic enough. Given the range of opinion on the matter, efforts to pin down the perfect recipe for a democratic Jewish state will be like nailing Jell-O to the wall.

We suspect that any proposed legislation will flounder in a tsunami of pilpul, much like the continual but inconclusive debate over “who is a Jew,” which revives itself several times in this report. Even so, the discussion is worth having and the report is full of provocative nuggets.

Jews of all ages are apparently more willing to criticize Israeli policies than was the case several decades ago. In considering Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” nature, the most common concern among Diaspora Jews is the inequality between Jews and Arabs within Israel, as well as political and military control over non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank. Concern over treatment of Bedouins also arises. As small minorities in their home countries, Diaspora Jews have a “special sensitivity to minority rights,” says the report. (We like that the report uses the term “world-Jews,” which sounds like a hip neologism, like “world music.”)

Many participants express concerns over the enforcement of Orthodox standards in civil society. One comment is that Israel is now a “Jewish Orthodox democracy.” Another participant asserts that, “As a Jewish state, Israel needs to be pluralistic and Jewishly diverse.”

Previous research has indicated that many Jewish Americans (and others) resent that the Kotel has a strict gender separation and that enforcement is controlled by the Orthodox. At the conference where the report was released, one Conservative woman expressed her view: “Our support of Israel is unambiguous, it’s wall-to-wall. But I want to know there is a place for me where I can put on my tallit every morning. May I do that in the state of Israel and not have things thrown at me? Will the government arrest me? Is there a place for me in Israel?”

It turns out we’re not so different, Diaspora and Israel. Nearly three-quarters of Israelis disapprove of the way their governments handle religious issues.

Overall, the report suggests that Diaspora Jews on the far right prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic nature, while those on the far left view Israel’s Jewish character as an anachronism. The majority, the report says, want to have it both ways – and believe it is possible to do so.

Despite recent suggestions of a weakening of the bond between Israel and Diaspora Jews, particularly among young people, Jews in diverse countries overwhelmingly declare themselves connected with Israel and identify as Zionist. The report acknowledges that some younger Jews, particularly in the United States, as evidenced in the Hillel movement, are reacting against strictures laid down by their elders over what are appropriate views to hold on topics around Israel. The report takes some pains to note that these young people do not necessarily disagree with the broader consensus around Israel, its Jewish and democratic nature or other factors, but do resent being told what they are allowed to believe, hear and say.

Breaking news? Not much. Still, the report – and, most especially the constructive dialogues that went into creating it – is a sort of snapshot in time of the Diaspora’s thoughts on Israel. Beyond the details, which are themselves interesting, is the tremendous consensus that we care about Israel very, very deeply.

Lessons from debating an anti-Zionist

Mira Sucharov’s debate with Max Blumenthal is on CPAC.

In a previous blog post on haaretz.com, I discussed what appears to be an increasing chill factor in our Jewish communities. By way of example, I mentioned a then upcoming debate on the topic of whether Israel is and can be a “Jewish and democratic state” between prominent anti-Zionist Max Blumenthal and me, a liberal Zionist. Given the event sponsors (Independent Jewish Voices), many in the audience were primed for Blumenthal’s points – a scenario that makes supporters of Israel uneasy. But, unlike a “hasbarah” activist or a right-winger or even a centrist, we liberal Zionists tend to be both emotionally connected to Israel and critical of Israeli policies. So, on the heels of that event, here are some reflections on what happens when a liberal Zionist debates an anti-Zionist.

When it comes to Israeli democracy, liberal Zionists focus on what is possible. From the government actions of the day, anti-Zionists infer absolute limits.

There were times in the debate where, after I had addressed the central question, namely whether Israel’s Jewish and democratic character are mutually exclusive, Blumenthal would imply that we need to move away from pie-in-the-sky ideals and toward how things actually are. But, as with any experiment in nation building, I see Israel’s democracy as a work in progress. The contradictions need to be seen for what they are: temporary challenges to democracy, and requiring key legal reforms that Israel’s supporters and concerned citizens must continue to push for. Which brings me to my next point:

Pope tries to please in Holy Land

The whirlwind visit to the Holy Land by the head of world Catholicism, Pope Francis, left commentators hyperventilating. The brief, two-day excursion was ram-jam full of symbolism, some of it seemingly contradictory.

After visiting Jordan, the Pope traveled to Bethlehem, pointedly referring to the area as the “state of Palestine.” He made an unscheduled stop at the security barrier, adjacent to graffiti reading “Pope we need some 1 to speak about Justice … Bethlehem look like Warsaw ghetto.” The Pope placed his forehead against the barrier and prayed, in an image most commonly associated with visitors to the Western Wall, a few kilometres away.

The Pope’s visit was emphatically billed as “strictly religious” and non-political, but, it appears, everything is political in this part of the world, most of all religion. The “state of Palestine” was festooned in posters of the pope conjoined with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Images abounded of Palestinian suffering parallel with images of the suffering of Jesus, from which some viewers might conclude that the same people who have for millennia borne the blame for the one incident are also solely responsible for the other. Of course, the Pope’s entourage was not responsible for Photoshopping done by Palestinian partisans. Yet, neither was the Pope’s time in Israel free from perceptions of politicization. He visited the tomb of Theodor Herzl, which must certainly have appeared to Palestinians as unambiguous as his reference to the “state of Palestine.”

The Pope invited Abbas and Israel’s President Shimon Peres to a prayer summit at the Vatican – an invitation both leaders accepted and which is to take place next week. Some commentators have noted that Peres is a figurehead who will not be directly involved in future peace negotiations and whose term is nearly at an end, but papal spokespeople noted that Francis and Peres have developed a cordial relationship and the event should not be seen as a snubbing of Abbas’ counterpart in peace talks, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The prayer summit is seen as an opportunity to recast religion as a unifying force in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, rather than the divisive force as which it is frequently perceived. The invitation is an interesting gambit, and an apparently overt move by the Pope to insert the Vatican back into the centre of global diplomacy where it sat for centuries. And while prayers for peace are always welcome, a mass prayer at the Vatican some months ago for peace in Syria seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Still, it can’t hurt.

Papal visits, in the age of 24-hour news, are highly visual and symbolic. Symbolism is powerful, particularly in scenarios of diplomatic complexity. But, by definition, symbolism lacks nuance. The Pope apparently attempted to please everybody, by paying homage to the national rights of both peoples. But while he voiced explicit hopes for an end to terrorism and for the right of Israelis to live in security – which, all ancillary issues aside, are the two pillars upon which eventual peaceful coexistence will stand – his symbolic efforts to please both sides are as likely to please no one. In this, Pope Francis is in good company with everyone else who has attempted to walk the impossible line of equanimity in this conflict.

Meanwhile, as attention was focused to the Middle East, events in Europe reflected a sadly repetitive history. As Pope Francis was incanting “Never again” at Yad Vashem and at a memorial to victims of terror, families were mourning the murders of four at a Jewish museum in Brussels. The Pope condemned the attack as a “criminal act of antisemitic hatred.” As well, the Pope’s travels partially eclipsed news of fringe extremist groups, some openly antisemitic, making significant gains in elections to the European parliament.

As Pope Francis returns to his home in the Vatican and prepares to welcome Abbas and Peres, there is no shortage of topics to pray about.