Opinion – Page 101

Highest level of tzedakah

Ever hear of Heifer International? No? Until recently, I’d never heard of it either. I was talking to my grandsons, ages 7 and 3, via the webcam perched atop my computer screen. The boys were telling me about their Shabbat observances. They wear kippahs, they have a special dinner with challah and wine, Mommy lights candles and Daddy says brachas. And their job is to put money into the tzedakah boxes, the pushkes, they made at Hebrew school. They held the boxes up to the screen so I could see them.

“What do you do with the money when the boxes are filled?” I asked.

“We give it to people who don’t have as much food or money as we have,” the older boy said.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“We send it to this place called Heifer International.”

Intrigued, I looked it up. To my surprise, it’s actually a well-known charity started by a Midwestern farmer named Dan West who was ladling out rations of milk to hungry kids during the Spanish Civil War. He realized that simply doling out food does not solve the problem of hunger.

“These children don’t need a cup; they need a cow,” he said.

He formed Heifers for Relief, dedicated to ending hunger by providing livestock and training, as well. The first shipment of 17 heifers left Pennsylvania for Puerto Rico in 1944. Why heifers? Because they are cows who have not yet given birth. These young cows would supply milk and would also be a continuous source of more cows. Families receiving a heifer agreed to donate female offspring to another family, thus continuing the process.

Today, donors to this organization get to choose which animal they would like to donate: a cow, a goat, chickens, rabbits or geese. In concept, this way of using what my grandmother called “pushke money” is far beyond the pushke concept of her time. The website’s online visual association makes the process more real and less abstract for the kids.

The globalization of the 21st century influences our thinking in many ways, including the choices we can make for charitable contributions. We can think not only of local charities or Israel, but also of the victims of earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes and wars around the world. We are aware of the needs of children, refugees, the hungry and the sick in every country. This is as it should be.

However, charity is more than just giving a donation to a faceless organization. It really involves the feelings of the recipients, too.

Many years ago, I wrote a children’s story that was published in Young Judean magazine. Two boys, Jason and Marty, liked to go together for ice cream every Sunday until Jason stopped going for lack of money. For a while, Marty treats him, but Jason feels uncomfortable with this on a permanent basis. When Jason stops going for ice cream, Marty’s grandfather refers Marty to Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity in an effort to get Marty to figure out a solution. Marty does. He gets Jason a job walking a dog so that Jason can buy ice cream with his own money, thus allowing him to maintain his dignity.

Here is the Ladder of Charity conceived by Maimonides. The levels are ranked in order of preference, from the lowest to the highest.

1. Giving sadly and begrudgingly.

2. Giving less than is fitting but with good cheer.

3. Giving only after having been asked.

4. Giving before being asked.

5. Giving to a recipient whose identity the giver does not know.

6. Giving so that the recipient of the tzedakah does not know the identity of the giver.

7. Giving so that neither the giver nor the recipient knows the identity of the other.

8. In place of giving money, taking the sort of action that will help people to no longer be poor.

An example of level eight would be helping a poor person find a job, or lending money to finance an education for someone in poverty. For example, friends of mine wanted to help a married child who was in financial trouble. They gave the couple a car instead of cash, thus enabling them to have access to jobs in their rural area that did not have public transportation.

There’s a Chinese proverb that says, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It is interesting to note how close in concept this proverb is to level eight of Maimonides’ ladder. You can see that the highest level of charity helps a person become independent and self-reliant, and human dignity is also taken into full account.

We might all do well to assess what we do with our pushke money and other donations. My little grandsons are already learning that there are those less fortunate than themselves. I am proud of my son and daughter-in-law for teaching this to their children at so young an age. I have faith that these boys will grow up to be caring citizens of the world.

Toby Rosenstrauch is an award-winning columnist and a resident of Florida. Her first novel, Knifepoint, was recently published.

Time for a personal Recharge!

Henry David Thoreau once offered this now-famous quote; “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

I’m pretty sure we were all sold that line by one of our high school teachers on graduation day as they proudly sent us off into life’s vast wilderness.

Those teachers would no doubt be proud to know that we have ALL done exactly that! We’re all living the dream, right? Going confidently? As we imagined? Right?

I mean, it’s not as if anything has ever stopped us! Life, societal norms, expectations, responsibility, height restrictions, the law….these things don’t get in the way of going in the direction of our dreams! Nahhhhh.

I’ll spare you from hashtagging the word ‘sarcasm’ because that would be #painfullyobvious. But somehow I don’t imagine many of us have reached adulthood without feeling, in some way, like there is a dream, goal or aspiration we have left behind for one reason or another. Something that maybe just feels missing.

So what is stopping you?

Cue the 2014 Recharge Conference, Oct 26 at the JCC of Greater Vancouver!

Recharge is a one-day (full day) event that offers participants a unique opportunity to open their minds, consider the possibilities and walk away with tools to help take whatever plunge toward positive change they aspire to take. Whether it be mind, body, career, relationship or financial issues one wishes to tackle, Recharge offers a unique opportunity for that under-appreciated first step.

The day will flow with experienced speakers, special presentations, educational wisdom, and hands-on opportunities to consider how to open the right doors to go whichever direction a person might choose.

Experts on a wide range of life-changing topics will be on hand to educate and inspire while participants will have the chance to wander the conference checking out information booths feeding opportunity and ideas.

Founded by Justine Levenberg and Mike Dirks, Recharge was born last year out of a passion to help adults maximize their potential and live their ultimate life, Levenberg explained.

“The conference allows delegates to take a step back from the daily routine and devote a day to themselves to get ‘recharged,'” she said. “The goal of the conference is for delegates to leave with new ideas that have sparked an energized attitude towards their life and the empowered perspective to maximize their potential.”

What makes Recharge different than other self-help sessions? Levenberg said it’s about action, not just inspiration.

“The Recharge conference is different as delegates will leave the with an action plan to implement changes into their daily lives as soon as they walk through the door. Delegates will also have an opportunity to connect with the speakers as all presenters are local leaders in their fields.”

Highlighting a long list of speakers and topics, Recharge will conclude with a final presentation by well-known Lifestyle Designer Matt Corker.

Corker, who authored the book “Getting Over the Rainbow: my journey from self-doubt to self-love,” is also a yoga instructor, ideas retreat facilitator, relationship adviser, blogger and, of course, public speaker.

While that all might sound well and good, the best reason to check out the Recharge conference is to see me speak and heckle me from the crowd.

Tickets and more information on Recharge can be found here.

On that note, I will leave you with this final quote from John Green:

“One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.”

Mind. Blown.

The elite aren’t who you think they are

At any given time, but especially in recent weeks when Israel’s conflict with Hamas has been front-page news, a perusal of the comments under any story involving Jews almost inevitably devolves into some variation on the theme of Jewish control. It is notable how frequently, even in 21st-century Canada, Jews are depicted as manipulating the media and puppet-mastering the powerful, like the United States.

The advent of the electronic age has brought the phenomenon to even greater levels of intensity. We are now all broadcasters. We are all publishers. We are all curators of the news.

A few years ago, the vast majority of North Americans gathered their information from the same couple of sources. While every city and town had its own newspaper, these mostly received international news from the same few press agencies. On television, Canadians were offered CBC or CTV. We now have access to hundreds of English-language TV stations and millions, if not billions, of other sources for whatever information we seek. News, which was once a staid medium, has morphed into infotainment, in which beheadings in Iraq mingle with Kardashian marriages.

Time was, one could count on the fact that most of the people at your dinner party would have heard what Barbara Frum had said the previous night or would catch the reference to a Wayne and Shuster skit. Now, if you don’t “get” the references, an electronic device will promptly be provided so that you can watch the original source of the reference itself.

There is certainly something democratizing about this panoramic access to information. Yet there may be something contra to healthy democracy in this situation, as well. The underpinnings of a successful civil society rest partly on a shared foundation of knowledge. As we have become more individualized in our choices of what we know or ignore, those shared foundations are crumbling. That a great number of young people get their news from sources like Jon

Stewart’s The Daily Show is slightly reassuring in the sense that at least they’re getting some knowledge of world affairs, similar to the transition in the 1960s when attitudes changed from viewing comic books as something akin to pornography to a resigned attitude that “at least the kids are reading.”

It is true that social media has helped young people – all people – take up causes and devote themselves to social change if they seek to do so. One of the greatest examples was this summer’s ubiquitous Ice Bucket Challenge, which has raised millions of dollars for ALS research and advocacy. Still, there is a diminishing of comprehensive, shared, reliable news and information upon which all people form their opinions.

In a democracy, everyone has the same voice at the ballot box. But a democratic society is not formed only on one day every four years. A thriving democratic society requires the engagement of an informed population every day. From that perspective, democracies risk losing an important element of viability and vibrancy when a huge proportion of the population is choosing the garden channel over Newsworld, TMZ over the New York Times.

For centuries, there has been the conspiracy theory that a tiny minority somehow controls knowledge and everything that goes with it. In a strange way, this myth may be approaching reality. But it is not Jews who are the elite increasingly controlling what transpires in the world – it is the diminishing number of people who are actually paying attention.

This is not, like the conspiracy theory, the effect of a minority seizing control from the masses. It is the opposite: it is masses of people abdicating their right and responsibility to be informed, active participants in democratic society. And, as more people look away from the uncomfortable realities of the world, a smaller and smaller elite – those who choose to remain informed – will have an outsized influence on public opinion and what governments do worldwide.

U.S. has many other priorities

It turns out Fidel Castro is still alive and making as much sense as ever. In an article in Cuban state media a few days ago, the former president ranted against the United States, Israel and NATO, the latter of which he equated with the Nazi SS. Even stranger, Castro believes that U.S. Senator John McCain and Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad, created ISIS, the nihilistic terror entity sweeping Iraq and Syria.

Back on planet Earth, more serious commentators are wringing their hands over the state of U.S.-Israel relations. While it may not be exactly the Cuban missile crisis, relations between the United States and Israel are arguably at their lowest ebb ever. Part of this, of course, is a mere clash of personalities between their countries’ respective leaders. That’s old news and everybody by now accepts the fact that Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama are not what constitute “great friends,” whatever that oft-used term means in the context of world leaders.

The Times of Israel is reporting that, during Operation Protective Edge, the United States put together a deal with Turkish and Qatari representatives in Paris that was intended to be a draft agenda for ceasefire talks in Cairo. When Netanyahu saw the document, he rejected it out of hand, seeing it as a putting the interests of Hamas ahead of those of Israel.

The United States, further according to the Times of Israel, was unwilling to put pressure on Qatar, an ally, perversely, of both the United States and Hamas, to “squeeze Hamas politically and financially.”

The United States is said to have come away from the experience shocked at Israel’s undiplomatic response, while Israel walked away distrustful of American intentions, says the Times.

Enmity will only grow with Israel’s latest announcement of more West Bank settlements.

But even that salt in the wound should be eclipsed by news that the blood-soaked regime of Bashar al-Assad has lost control of the part of what is left of the Syrian nation that abuts Israel at the Golan Heights. While no one is quite sure of the exact makeup of Assad’s opposition, it is the black flag of al-Qaeda that is flying over the checkpoint adjacent to Israel’s border with (erstwhile) Syria.

With explosive events also taking place daily in Ukraine, Iraq and so many other places in the world, American leadership sometimes seems to be the only hope for people under threat. Even the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are getting nervous as they watch the expansionist fantasies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The American people have given a great deal of their financial and human resources to overseas conflicts in the past decade and it is understandable that they might be hesitant to reengage in the Middle East or to engage in Europe. America is exhausted.

Of course, what is taking place in the world today are precisely the types of things that the United Nations was envisioned to prevent or ameliorate. The tragedy of that organization is that it is now held captive by leaders who are more sympathetic to the objectives of ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and Putin than they are to the democratic states of the United States, Israel, Canada and western Europe.

The people and leaders of western Europe are also hesitant to get involved in Middle Eastern affairs, perhaps reasonably, given the potential they might have for trouble far closer to home if the Russian bear is not put back in its cage. Putin might have alleviated some international concern had he indicated that eastern Ukraine was the extent of his territorial ambitions, but he has done nothing of the sort.

For Obama’s part, it often seems as though he wishes Israel and Palestine would just disappear. Certainly, every president before him going back decades has tried and failed to resolve the problem and he is probably fully aware that he is not going to solve it either. With everything else happening in the world, this conflict may seem more like a nuisance than a crisis.

As much as Obama’s disengagement from this issue rankles many people, here’s a different take. For weeks, months, even years, people like us have been calling for the world to devote more of its attention to catastrophes that exponentially exceed the comparatively minor conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Say what you will about Obama, but that seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

Keys to healthy marriage

Last month marked my 15th wedding anniversary. Every year has felt significant, but 15 has a somewhat mystical overlay. The Hebrew equivalent for 15 would normally contain two of the four letters of the tetragram spelling God’s name (yud and heh), so there is a different customary formulation: “tet vav” or tu, for short. Sprinkle in some multilingual word play, tu being “you” in French, and “to” in English connoting a mutual connection, and 15 is rife with meaning.

This anniversary has also prompted me to consider what goes into a lasting marriage. I began my mental search by polling those of my Facebook friends who’ve surpassed the 15-year mark. Trust. Communication. Acceptance. Humor. Generosity. Patience. Commitment. Common values. Mutual respect for one another’s journey through life. One friend offered the idea of love, as measured by actually enjoying listening to what the other person has to say. Curiously, no one mentioned sex.

There is an inherent catch here, of course. How can we know which of these many laudable qualities are signs of a healthy marriage, and which are prescriptions? In other words, can a troubled marriage be saved by adopting these practices, or do these practices simply flow, automatically, from a solid union?

Some friends did offer some potential advice. Date nights, even if it involves watching a movie on the sofa with take-out after the kids are in bed, one friend said. Another emphasized how important it is not to “keep score.” Where sometimes partners fall into the trap of believing that “reciprocity has to be quantitatively balanced over a short period of time,” she said, it’s better to think of the “partnership as rooted in generosity and mutual caring.” She added that it’s important for the couple to shed external expectations, whether they come from televised images, societal norms or embedded ideals with which one was raised. That imaginary third party’s judgmental voice can intrude on a couple’s relationship in unhealthy ways. At a dinner party I attended, one woman emphasized kindness. Her husband said it’s important to park one’s ego.

And what do the experts say?

A recent article in The Atlantic by Emily Esfahani Smith profiled a team of researchers who study lasting partnerships. Noting how partners engage in moment-to-moment “bids” for attention, the research team – led by John Gottman – stressed that how the partner responds to these bids is key to the marriage’s success. As Smith describes it, “People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t – those who turned away – would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper.”

This “turn toward” philosophy can also fall into the causality trap. Is “turning toward” a function of a healthy marriage, or a prescription for one? The answer is probably both. But that doesn’t mean that a virtual cycle can’t be consciously created. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been practising “turn toward” and discussing it with whoever will listen, my husband included. My husband and I are now in the habit of “turning toward” more than we sometimes have been in the past.

We even joke about it as we’re doing it, a subtle way of reinforcing the mental links between intention and action.

As for our anniversary, we did something we never get to do anymore: catch a film after work. We saw Boyhood, the tour de force of Richard Linklater, who spent 12 years filming using the same actors. Over the course of two and a half hours, we witnessed the on-screen children developing into adults, and parents struggling to find their way. On the subject of marriage, the film was more bitter than sweet, but we enjoyed it, admiring the director’s fortitude and creativity, and privately reflecting. When we returned home, we discussed the film over a glass of wine, and concluded the evening by “turning toward” one another as one shared with the other some newly discovered National Public Radio podcasts, episodes devoted to love, loss and longing.

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.

Fill your (ice) bucket!

I recently returned from Detroit, Mich., where I was the Team Vancouver-Galil Delegation Head at the JCC Maccabi Games (shameless plug: www.jccmaccabigames.org).

While there with my 22 teen athletes and artist, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was growing momentum faster than a rumored Robert Downey Jr. sighting at Comic Con.

To clarify for those living in the dark ages, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge asks nominees to chose between donating $100 to ALS research or dump a bucket of ice water over their head. Each participant then nominates someone(people) else to accept the same challenge – with 24 hours to act.

The more dumping I saw around Maccabi Land – and the more I saw posted online – the more criticism I began to hear that challenged the validity and purpose of dumping ice on one’s head in the name of a good deed.

I admit, when I first came across the challenge on Facebook I commented, “It is great to see exactly what lengths folks will go to avoid donating money to charity.”

However, as I saw it pop up again and again, growing in epidemic numbers, I started to see the value in the endeavor. Awareness was growing and ALSA.org was receiving more donations in a week than they had previously collected in a year.

By the time the JCC Maccabi Games came along it was rampant. Everyone and their dog (literally) was being challenged and the kitchen at the JCC in West Bloomfield was struggling to make ice fast enough.

By the time I returned home Facebook became flooded with articles like THIS ONE by Scott Gilmore in Maclean’s Magazine suggesting that the cute marketing gimmick (which actually didn’t get initiated for that purpose) was a “horrible reason to donate.”

Gilmore presents a several valid points about ALS research not meeting the top standards of the three factors one should consider when choosing where to send their limited charitable dollars. It is argued ALS doesn’t present the largest need – it is classified a rare disease, ALS research wont offer your dollars the greatest influence and ALS is hardly the most urgent problem in the world today.

Another post on iflscience.com provides an info-graphic on which diseases cause the most deaths in the USA vs where Americans focus their donations. These posts are no-doubt littered with wise words and offer a valid sense of awareness on their own.

However, this is nothing new. iflscience.com‘s info-graphic is not based on facts that have come out just since the Ice Bucket Challenge kicked off. For various reasons – the largest of which is simply due to marketing successes and failures – rare and unique diseases have pulled in a larger piece of the philanthropic pie than the actual leading causes of death, like heart disease or diabetes.

What frustrated me with the timing of these articles is that, at least in the case of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, it is about much more than just targeting American donor dollars. Watching people all over the world connect, bond, laugh and share in the name of something good was a blessing that, quite frankly, we don’t see enough of. Watching my kids – and all of my friends’ kids – get in on the action felt like humanity took a deep breath of fresh air amid a time in which the globe has been filled with muck and tragedy.

Maybe ALS research got lucky that a clever gimmick came along and helped their cause. And maybe ALS isn’t the charity most in need today. But in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge humanity got a win! Stop finding ways to take that away from us.

Talking about Israel

In British Columbia, this summer has been among the finest in living memory. Yet, for Jewish British Columbians and for all those watching events around the world right now, the summer has brought a very dark cloud.

It has not only been the terrible violence between Israel and Gaza, but violence elsewhere in the Middle East that is claiming exponentially more lives and causing horrific hardship and inhumanity.

The advance of the so-called Islamic caliphate from Iraq into parts of Syria opens the potential for additional Western military involvement in the region. The horrors that are taking place under the extremist ISIS dictatorship are almost beyond human imagination. In Syria, meanwhile, the death toll from the now two-year-old civil war has reached 190,000.

Despite all this, global attention remains focused on Israel. At the United Nations, Israel is singled out for condemnation, while Hamas is given a pass. Marches in the streets around the world declare Israel a pariah. Violence against Jews and attacks on Jewish institutions worldwide are legitimately striking fear that a generation or more of Diaspora Jews have never experienced.

There really is no silver lining. But, if there were, perhaps it would be that several fictions have been debunked.

Time was, even Zionists accepted the position that “anti-Zionism does not equal antisemitism.” This has been almost a required disclaimer at the beginning of any conversation on the subject for at least the last 15 years. This needs to be revised, however, to recognize that anti-Zionism at least sometimes equals antisemitism. As we have seen in recent weeks, there are those in the anti-Zionist movement who are motivated by anti-Jewish animus, and then there are those who refuse to condemn them. When it comes down to it, the moral difference between the two groups is minimal.

There is also the position that, by definition, anti-Zionism should legitimately be considered a form of antisemitism. After all, Zionism is simply the national representation of the Jewish people. If one is opposed to that, especially while supporting self-determination for every other national identity in the world, it must stem from some intellectual or emotional process that views Jews differently from other people.

There are certainly reasons why a conflict in a place that is holy to several religions should draw an outsized interest from people around the world. Yet, when the global reaction is so extraordinarily imbalanced, something is clearly beyond reason.

We know what motivates at least a significant part of the anti-Israel movement. More words have been spilled on this subject in the past two months than perhaps ever in human history, given the ability of everybody to broadcast their positions via social media. We have been able to see in greater detail the narrative subscribed to by many of Israel’s critics, from well-known commentators to elected officials to ordinary Facebook friends. Overwhelmingly, it is a simple one: Israel is just plain evil and, because its legitimacy and right to exist are explicitly or implicitly denied, its right to defend itself is likewise repudiated.

These are not words that generally come out of the mouths of anti-Israel activists, because they are not palatable to those who would otherwise consider themselves progressive, well-intentioned people. But push has come to shove and, all over the internet and in face-to-face conversations – yes, those still take place sometimes – we have been able to learn more about what a lot of “ordinary” people think about Israel. It has been painful. The conversations have been difficult. Many of us have lost friends.

But it is always better to know than to proceed in ignorance. We have a new understanding of what we are up against. We also have discovered many new friends, and new ways of engaging with those who don’t share our views.

Others in our community have no doubt had similar experiences. Many of us have felt challenged to present our positions with clear heads and hearts, and we invite all readers to contribute to the discussion by sharing their suggestions for continuing this dialogue constructively.

How to talk about the Middle East peacefully

Some of the violence in the Middle East has inflamed tensions closer to home. Online, there is a recent interview conducted by the University of British Columbia with its resident expert Prof. Robert Daum, who offered his thoughts on navigating these frictions. Daum is a faculty associate with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, a faculty member of Green College, project lead in UBC Transcultural Leaders, a Reconciliation ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a dialogue associate at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue.

UBC: How do conflicts afar, like the Israel-Gaza situation, spark local tensions?

RD: Sadly, some conflicts push people into rigid positions rooted in insufficiently rigorous, self-critical and nuanced analysis. Simplistic narratives about historical and contemporary events resulting in loss of life raise tensions. Inadequate media coverage heightens tensions, and people tend to gather in narrowly circumscribed assemblies of like-minded thinkers. Conflicts such as these are teachable moments, but learning and teaching require an attitude of openness to authentic inquiry on the part of everyone.

Imagine what we can do in addressing any number of complex conflicts and challenges if we can cultivate a culture of evidence-based, authentic inquiry and dialogue. I have seen this approach in action in my work with UBC’s Transcultural Leaders 2014 Conversation Series, SFU’s Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation Canada.

UBC: Have you been surprised by the tensions arising locally and across Canada?

RD: No. In the context of genuine human suffering, we encounter hateful slogans, racist images, one-sided narratives, vicious social media comments and self-righteous oversimplifications. This does not honor the dead. Inflammatory rhetoric gets most of the headlines. Research shows that anxiety and clear thinking tend not to be compatible. Our discourse has to be as levelheaded, sober and reasonable as possible. People need to feel that they can learn in an environment of safety, civility and mutual respect. I consider myself to be a principled pragmatist. It is precisely when we feel angriest about world events that we need to take a deep breath. Imagine if the Supreme Court had to reach decisions under fire. If we cannot learn how to share narrative space – that is, how to reconcile competing, deeply held, national narratives, in a way that does not require the annihilation or complete negation of the other’s position – then how can we expect geographical space to be shared at one of the most fraught intersections of regional and global politics?

I have participated in forums on antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, the Indian residential schools and many other issues. Two years ago, I co-sponsored with the Vancity Office of Community Engagement a three-hour public forum downtown on Islamophobia, featuring a critical media analyst, three Muslim speakers from very diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and three equally diverse non-Muslim speakers, including myself. A mixed audience of more than 250 listened to stories of prejudice experienced and prejudice confronted. It was a thoughtful, nuanced and multi-layered conversation over the course of three hours. And we were just getting started.

UBC: What are some healthy ways in which people can deal with tensions that may arise between themselves and others?

RD: Seek to engage in a dialogue, rather than a debate. Ask genuine questions: “What did you mean by that? What are you trying to say? Have you considered different perspectives on this? Have you tried to understand why others hold positions different than yours? On what can we agree? Is there another way to understand the phenomenon, whereby our positions might be reconciled, even partially?” Try building on ideas and making connections between ideas. Don’t reduce multi-faceted conflicts to a single variable such as religion or oil, for example.

Politics, history and ethics are not reducible to simple equations. Complex questions can rarely be reduced to the logic of black and white, right and wrong. I may see the world very differently than you, but that does not necessarily make you (or me) wrong. Of course, moral assessment matters, and I believe that some behaviors, like the intentional murder of civilian non-combatants as prohibited in the Geneva Conventions, are abhorrent. But, as any first-year law student knows, such an assertion is the beginning, not the end of the inquiry. If such matters were simple enough to be reduced to trial by megaphone, we would not need faculties of law or courts, let alone courses in ethics, history, politics, religion, gender, media or much else.

This interview was originally published by UBC News/University of British Columbia. It is reprinted with permission.

Our Israel connections – the need to tell our stories

The Six Day War may have been history’s most illustrative example of the limitations of a weekly newspaper. Reviewing this newspaper’s archives from 1967 shows one week’s paper filled with ominous foreboding and the next issue, triumphal jubilation.

Every year, we take a short publishing break in the usually quiet news period that is the summer doldrums. Unlike in 1967, though, we now have a spiffy new website that has allowed readers to follow some local events and commentary from abroad during these especially tumultuous few weeks.

The news has not been pleasant. Israel has somewhat successfully stanched some of the infrastructure of the Gazan terrorist regime. The cost has been tragic and the worldwide reverberations deeply disturbing.

“Victory” is difficult to discern. In the biggest picture, victory for all civilians would be peace in the region, but even the most optimistic among us see that as a long way off – the stated objective of Hamas remains the destruction of Israel. For Israel, victory has historically meant a few months or a couple of years of relative peace. By beating back the immediate threat (whether the combined Arab armies in 1948-49, 1967 and 1973, or the PLO in the 1970s and ’80s, and the assorted terrorist entities since), Israel has managed to buy a few periods of comparative peace. And, as a result of Operation Protective Edge, Israel has undermined the strength of Hamas and so that may result in a period of relative peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

There has been another battle: the battle of words around the world. It’s not all words, of course – some of the battle has been violent, with anti-Jewish attacks in Europe and elsewhere – but the discourse about Israel globally, even when largely non-violent, has been unprecedentedly grotesque and incendiary. The United Nations, reinforcing its long failure to live up to the promise of its founding charter, has made a mockery of justice and peace by condemning only Israel. Armchair commentators have declared themselves military authorities to parse Israeli actions. Cartoonists have exhumed Nazi-era imagery to employ against Israel. Street rallies around the world, while accusing Israel of bloodlust, have themselves turned into bloody and violent displays of hatred.

Even some of the more thoughtful contributors to the “debate” have exhibited assumptions that seem to rely on old familiar stereotypes. And people who have never uttered a word of concern in the past nine years while the repressive Hamas regime has tightened its grip on the people in Gaza suddenly, when Israel becomes involved, declare, “I don’t support Hamas. I support the people of Gaza.” Would that they actually did.

In Canada, things are somewhat brighter. All major federal political parties have rightly stood with Israel in its fight against terrorism. (The exception being the Green Party of Canada, but then, it isn’t “major.”) We have a fairly balanced media that has generally not succumbed to the extremism or misrepresentation we have seen in Europe. Still, Canadian opponents of Israel purvey the idea that they can denounce Israel in the most horrible terms without that level of rhetoric having an impact on Jewish Canadians or our country’s multicultural harmony.

Explaining why this type of anti-Israel action affects us as Canadian Jews is not simple. Most Diaspora Jews have a deep and passionate connection with Israel. In part, this has to do with the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not happen because of Hitler and Nazism. It happened, at least in the magnitude it did, because there was not a country on the planet (save the Dominican Republic) that was willing to welcome the imperiled Jews of Europe. The need for Israel as a nation where Jews control the immigration policy is not due to the Holocaust per se, but the world’s nonchalance toward it.

More than this, after the magnitude of the Holocaust became known to the survivors and to the entire world, the unfathomable disaster might reasonably have sunk the Jewish people into a collective depression of hopelessness and fatalism. Instead, the rebirth of the Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel allowed a people seeking some light from a catastrophic darkness to find hope and optimism. Those Jews who made aliyah – and, to no small extent, those who remained in the Diaspora – threw themselves into building the state of Israel, a task that has proven successful beyond any dreams and allowed an optimistic future to salve the horrors of the immediate past.

When street mobs, politicians, UN resolutions, cartoonists and Facebook authorities heap loathing on Israel, despite all their feeble assurances that it is Israel, not Jews, they target, the words and the hatred behind them hurt. There are other historical, cultural, familial and political reasons why Jewish Canadians and others in the Diaspora feel deeply a part of Israel. It might help our neighbors understand us if we told our personal and collective stories better.

***

The JI’s Pat Johnson spoke with David Berner about the Israel-Hamas conflict, global antisemitism and other issues on Aug. 7 2014:

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Playing to win

I’m home when my phone buzzes with a text from my son. Playing for the school basketball team in a city an hour away, his five words carry disappointment, sadness. “I’m just a benchwarmer, mom.”

I’m not one of those parents who cheers on sports games from the sidelines. Perhaps I’m still scarred from high school athletics, when my best friend and I were consistently the last members picked for any team during PE classes, a painful memory to this day. It sounds callous but, for me, sports has never held even a glimmer of interest, not even when my own children are playing.

But something changed when I learned my son had spent most of that game on the bench, watching instead of playing. What upset me was the injustice of his exclusion. He’d attended practices dutifully and loved being part of the team – until that game. “I’m not a bad player,” he insisted. “I don’t know why they didn’t give me a turn.”

The indignation of having been left out hung around the house like a damp cloud for a few days. I felt hurt on his behalf, compelled to try and make things right. So, I did what most writer-parents would do – I penned a letter to the principal. It wasn’t fair, I declared. I was under the impression that in team sports everyone gets a turn. How could the coach exclude certain players and justify that exclusion by the team’s victory? Wasn’t the victory hollow when only the best players had performed?

We don’t guarantee that every player will get to play, the principal responded. Sure, they can get a place on the team, but it’s the coach’s decision about who plays the games – and we play to win.

A friend explained it in a gentler way to me a few days later. In elementary school, the games are all about playing fair, giving everyone a turn and learning to be a good sport. Not so in high school, where the emphasis shifts to winning. “The weaker players sit on the bench so the team can have its best shot at victory,” she said. “That’s just the way it is, regardless which sport we’re talking about.”

I was astonished, but enlightened, too. As parents, we want desperately to defend our kids from insult, bruised egos and perceived injustice. Their hurt becomes our hurt, and we feel compelled, angered even, to speak out on their behalf.

But sitting on the bench might offer some important life lessons. The humility to admit you’re not the strongest player. The insight that you need to work harder to be chosen for the next game. The understanding that, as unifying as the word “team” appears to be, it’s composed of members who are not equally competent: you either shine, or are outshone.

It’s going to be the same scenario at every job interview a few years down the line. The strongest candidates will be selected while the rest will warm the bench on the sidelines until they improve their game.

So, maybe warming a bench a few times is a crucial part of the game, in that it deftly illustrates the distance between where you are and where you want to be. It’s what you do with that knowledge that makes all the difference, on the basketball court and off.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.