This has to be my lucky day. It’s both the eighteenth of September and the eighteenth of Elul, that most sacred month of repentance leading up to the High Holidays. Eighteen, of course, means life, and so today Jews are doubly alive. For me in particular, this Shabbat—Shabbes, as we used to say in Brooklyn—is the 49th anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah, and the portion is Ki Tavo–“when you come.” It begins,

“When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil…put it in a basket, and go to the place where the Lord your God will choose to establish His name.”

Just a few lines further down is what we read every Passover: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers…but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us.

“We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Little wonder I ended up with an intense love for Israel, after this was etched into my thirteen-year-old brain. Growing up in that just-post-Holocaust world, I read the uncanny curses of Ki Tavo with fear and trembling. If we break the commandments,

“The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods…yet even among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest…You shall be in terror, night and day…”

And this: “The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like the eagle…a ruthless nation that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy.” In my timid boy’s mind, having grown up on terrifying true stories, reading this among fugitive European Jews with the smell of the camps in their nostrils, I must have been awe-struck.

But Ki Tavo has other things in store if we keep the commandments: “Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country. Blessed shall be the issue of your womb, the produce of your soil…the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.”

And: “The Lord will put to rout before you the enemies that attack you.”

Ki tavo also means “Because you come.” Because I kept My part of the bargain—the covenant—and brought you to the promised land, you must now keep yours.

We are not supposed to pick and choose among the commandments, but “the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow” are mentioned three times, as in, “Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; and their rights, Ki Tavo proclaims, include the tithe that most of us give so reluctantly.

Surely, this includes the Palestinians, who need the hardest tithe of all: compromise.

The haftorah I chanted that Shabbes in 1959 is Chapter 60 of Isaiah, that great prophet of the rights of the poor, who taught that the fast God wants on the highest, holiest day of the year—that too will soon be upon us—is not an ostentatious display of piety, but an open-handed display of kindness.

Then, Isaiah says in this haftorah,

Raise your eyes and look about:

They have all gathered and come to you.

Your sons shall be brought from afar.

Your daughters like babes on shoulders.

As you behold, you will glow…

And as it says in the last passage of Ki Tavo: Eyleh divray habrit. These are the terms of the covenant.

I am listening at the moment to the late great violinist David Oistrakh play the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, a large, sublimely melodic, complex orchestral piece with a solo slicing through the it like a magic conductor’s wand again and again. I haven’t listened to it in years, but a recent email sent me back to it, and am I glad!

My friend Misha Pless—brilliant physician, polyglot, once-concert-quality pianist, and music lover extraordinaire—who supplied the rather pessimistic assessment of anti-Semitism in Europe I wrote about a few weeks ago, sent an uplifting account of a great composer’s relationship to the Jews:

“On a different, happier note, in the last couple of months I had been coming

back to an old love, the music of Brahms. It is comforting that there is a

tendency in my life to go back to previous anchors, to former safe harbors.

Well, as part of such a return, I had been listening to some more obscure and

yet absolutely riveting vocal pieces of this magnificent composer.  

“Also I decided to re-read his biography when I got the surprise of my life…it turns

out that in his mature years, Brahms, a cantankerous and rather solitary, gruff

type of person became almost obsessed with issues of anti-Semitism, which had

been come to an overt  boil during his long tenure in Vienna. The Wagnerian-Nietzsche camp, under the spell of their rabid anti-semitic rhetoric which took over middle Europe in the mid-19th century, upset Brahms to no end.

“He wrote a few letters to many of his Jewish friends, including to the famous

celebrity violinist and close friend of Brahms' Joseph Joachim, decrying this

trend. To this end one of the most bizarre turns of events took place in and

around 1860 – Brahms began to be known as ‘Brahms, the Jew,’ chiefly by

Wagnerian groupies. In an era of rumor-turned reality, even the public bought

the canard that he was Jewish, even though he was raised in a strict Lutheran

household.  He actually took pride in such rumors and defended his many Jewish

friends with ardent loyalty to the end of his days.” 

Misha reminds us that Wagner and his followers, the reigning force in music in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century, were virulently anti-Semitic, and that was no small part of their popularity. They were an integral, important part of the mutagenic process that led to the Germanic world’s stinking, pervasive, metastatic twentieth-century cancer that ended in six million murders of Jews.

So what was Johannes Brahms doing while his rival Richard Wagner was laying the musical foundations of Fascism? Stuart Isaacoff, in his 2004 article “Brahms the Beleaguered,” explains further:

“To be politically liberal in Brahms's Vienna meant to be artistically conservative…The city was immersed in a struggle between an ascending political right wing and a waning left. Wagner had declared the work of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven superseded by the new music, and the more powerful right embraced Wagner's revolutionary call for a new wave. ‘For the right wing,’ wrote [Jan] Swafford, ‘the exigencies of form proclaimed by the old liberals were to be swept away by a music of passion and blood-instinct.’”

It was a war between liberal ideas of progress expressed in civilized music that built on Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann’s musical discoveries, versus the increasingly vicious passions of a radical, anti-Semitic right, expressed in the bombastic musical bluster giving pride and life to twisted Teutonic dreams.

No wonder Hitler found his muse in Wagner. The “Ride of the Valkyries” would end at Auschwitz. No wonder, either, that Israelis have refused to play his music in public ever since.

For any Wagner lovers who may be reading this, I am not accusing you of being anti-Semitic. I am accusing you of embracing the music of an anti-Semitic composer whose racism and anti-Semitism were an intrinsic part of his creative impulses and goals, and whose musical choices were designed to further the worst conceivable political aims.

Do yourself a favor and download some Brahms lieder. I just did, and now my only problem is, How am I ever going to get back to work?

    Not long ago Nadine Gordimer, a South African Nobel Laureate in literature who happens to be Jewish, visited Israel—reluctantly. Why so? Well, for one thing, the great South African race reformer, Bishop Desmond Tutu, told her not to go. And no, he wasn’t worried about her safety.

    Tutu was long one of my heroes. He played a key role in Nelson Mandela’s movement to end apartheid, always exercising moral leadership. After their triumph, he became a visiting professor at Emory University, where I teach; one year he gave a commencement address marked by eloquence, vigor, spirituality, and trademark humor.

    He also spoke at my youngest daughter’s high school commencement—just an ordinary public school, but one that happened to include the Bishop’s grandson, a terrific boy who had been in my home many times.

    So why was my hero telling a Jewish Nobel Prize winner not to go to Israel? Well, she would be giving aid and comfort to the Palestinians’ oppressors. Gordimer, like many South African Jews, had fought against apartheid; she knew the importance of keeping prestigious people away from that regime.

    Fortunately, she decided to go, and witnessed the debates that Israeli Jews constantly have about the treatment of the Palestinians and the path toward peace. She gravitated toward leftists, of course, but at least she went, watched, and listened.

    Bishop Tutu is of course not alone among black South African leaders in condemning Israel. Nelson Mandela is with him on this. And both are part of a group self-styled as “The Elders,” formed in 2007.

    Among others, the group includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader who has been under house arrest for years, Mary Robinson, formerly President of Ireland and then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and our old friend Jimmy Carter.

    None of these people has ever shown much sympathy for Israel—some have been openly biased, others know little or nothing about it, still others reflexively believe what Palestinians say. It would take too long to go into the record, but it is clear.

    That’s why when the Elders wanted to go to the Middle East in April to make peace, Israel said, No thanks. As Dan Gillerman, Israel’s UN Ambassador, said, “"This is an initiative out of which no good can come. Most of the members of the group, particularly Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter, are people with a bias who have proved to be hostile to Israel.”

    It’s fascinating how this illustrious group has time to focus on Israel’s bad deeds. To their credit, some of them visited Darfur last fall, but the genocide goes on, and they haven’t done much about it since the report on their visit. Didn’t do much about the junta’s crackdown in Burma this spring either. Or the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. Nor did they try to stop the Chinese from using the Olympics to whitewash their image. They issue statements, sometimes. That’s about it.

     Africa, of course, is the place in the world where suffering is by far the greatest. Kofi Annan sat on his hands through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and ordered UN troops to stand aside, so we know what to expect from him. But I am most intrigued by Mandela and Tutu, the South African heroes.

    I think of them planning their Israel-bashing trip to the Middle East. Let’s imagine their flight from Jo’burg to Ben Gurion Airport. First they would have flown over their own country, where many thousands of desperate refugees would soon be victimized by rioters—Mandela and Tutu’s fellow countrymen. One would self-immolate in protest to draw attention to their plight. But they didn’t get much attention from the Elders.

    Then they would fly over Zimbabwe, where dictatator Robert Mugabe has savagely destroyed his own country and hundreds of thousands of its people by ruling for decades with an increasingly iron hand. What did the Elders do about this? They talked.

    Looking down on what used to be Zaire, they might remember how little effort they made as individuals to stop the war that killed millions. As they passed over Rwanda perhaps they would remember how little any of them—several already distinguished leaders—did to stop that mass murder in 1994.  

    Overflying northern Uganda, they could look down on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a supposedly Christian group that specializes in the abduction, rape, maiming, and killing of civilians, including children. I don’t find that crisis on their web site. And then, of course, Darfur, where genocide is ongoing.

    Ah, but these problems are hard to address in any meaningful way if you are an African Elder. Some of your people may think you are a traitor to their cause. You may pay a very big price in public opinion.

    So you hop on your airliner and fly six miles above all those massive, truly tragic humanitarian crises, all too close to home, and you land in the Middle East, criticize Israel’s “apartheid wall,” its blockade of Gaza (a policy with widespread international support), and its oppression of Palestinians.

    Then you can take a deep, satisfying breath, fly back over all of Africa’s huge tragedies, and land in Johannesburg again. Hopefully on the drive home from the airport you won’t run into a pogrom carried out by black South Africans against refugees. When you get home, you can rest in your favorite chair, knowing you have done something important for the world—because, of course, nobody suffers more than the Palestinians.

I sent a chapter of my next book, The Jewish Body, to a very close friend in Israel. She and her husband were featured in the chapter, which was about the renewal of physical and military courage and heroism in Israel after their long dormancy in exile. They didn’t get the point of the chapter, which they found simplistic and stereotyped. They said, “the change of attitude toward the body has also other elements such as sports and fitness, and extreme physical adventures, and awareness of preventive health care, and ballet, drama and martial arts, and fashion and hedonistic/leisure activities, which were not part of my grandparents’ life.” Some of those things are discussed in other chapters of my book. But I answered this way:

Thank you my dear friend,

I had no problem with your negative reaction to my chapter. Let me try to explain. But I am confident that my explanation will not change your opinion. And it shouldn’t. Here is why.

You are Israeli. You have made huge sacrifices to secure the future of your country and, indirectly, the future of the Jewish people. You have a right and an obligation to go beyond, far beyond, the Zionist verities and myths. You stand as a gifted and wise person who has lived a long life in a unique society and culture, and you (and M. too) have learned things and paid prices for that knowledge that I cannot even imagine.

My book is not for you. I don’t expect it to sell a single copy in Israel.

My book is not even for Jewish Americans. My book is for anyone in America who is willing to open their mind to a small people with a big story. It is for people who know nothing about Israel and the Jews and frankly don’t care all that much.

Unfortunately, that includes the majority of Jewish Americans. And by the way, when I say “Jewish Americans” I don’t mean “American Jews.” Like most Jews in America who have a certain dual identity, I am not an American Jew. I am a Jewish American. Jewish is an adjective for me, not a noun at the core of my identity.

I suspect that you and M. are in a way similar, although your noun is probably not “Jew” or “Israeli” but “Human.”

When I was the age that my children are now–twenty-somethings–I was ready to take that step. I was not Jewish, and I was not even American, as much as I was human.

In a way, I still feel it. But in the thirty or forty years since I was their age, I have seen that the world is not like that. I know that the future requires people who only identify as human. But I have seen many people say that this is what they were doing, and most of them were lying.

So I have decided to live more in the world as it is, and less in the world as I wish it would be.

But I don’t speak for you of course, only for myself. What I have to say is that I wrote a book that covers the whole sweep of Jewish history, with a focus on the body and ideas about the body. I wish that in 250 pages about 3000 years I could have found space to talk about the Jerusalem Ballet and Batsheva Dance Company. Probably I should have. Did you know that on my first trip to Israel in 1985 I successfully pressured the tour (all academics who had never been to Israel) to make a special side trip to the Jerusalem Ballet? I am a huge fan of serious dance and it was beautiful.

Probably you don’t know that I have connections to two young Americans, both good friends of my stepdaughter Logan, who are in the main Batsheva company. I’ve seen them dance on numerous occasions, and I hear news of them all the time. So I don’t miss the point about how Israeli attitudes toward the body are more complex than I revealed in that chapter.

I should have found a way to work this complexity in, but it may be too late. In any case, my book is for people who know little or nothing about Israel and Jews. It is for Americans who are mildly anti-Semitic, and who think Jews are cowards. It is for the vast majority of Jewish Americans (80 percent, to be exact), who have never been to Israel. Most of them will probably never go.

I guess I felt it was my role to tell them the main story as I see it, necessarily omitting some of the complexities. You have a different role, and you have earned it. My role was to give a sweeping anthropological view of Jewish history, for the benefit of people who see the Jews as sniveling, craven, money-grubbing cowards who avoid a fight at all costs and who will never stand up for themselves but only sneak around behind decent people and take what they have by subterfuge.

I also was asked by my editor to make my book more personal. Perhaps that is why you didn’t get the point of the chapter. It is deeply personal. It is about the impact on me of having had two uncles who fought in World War I, the impact of being named after my mother’s favorite cousin, who was killed as the copilot of a B-25 bomber. It’s about being a Jewish American who is unreasonably proud of Israel.

I am not surrounded as you are by people who made the same sacrifices and took the same risks you and your children did and who take all that for granted. So I tried to explain it all to them. I should have made room for the ballet.

When I succeeded in diverting my academic tour to the Jerusalem Ballet back in ‘85, an old lady sitting behind me before the overture swept her hand around the hall and said, “Alle Yidn! Mir zind hier alle Yidn!” You fought and sacrificed for the Jerusalem Ballet, and for its performance in front of a hall full of Jews who did not have to live in fear. That is why you and M. are heroes to me.

So I tried to write about that.

I did the best I could, and I know it isn’t good enough. By the way, as I watched the young dancers in the Jerusalem Ballet, I loved their art and skill, but I couldn’t help thinking: Most of them too have been soldiers.

I love and admire you all and I am very glad that you call me your friend.

That’s how it looks from this side of the ocean, on the 45th anniversary of the day when, just a few days shy of age 17, I defied my parents to go to Washington in the middle of the night and stand on the mall and listen to the greatest leader of that era talk about his dream.

Love, Mel

My dear friend Misha Pless is an amazing man. Raised in Bolivia by German-Jewish refugees, he was bilingual in German and Spanish before learning English impeccably and sailing into Stanford. He spent time in Israel, so he also knows quite a bit of Hebrew, and he picked up a good deal of Quechua, the language of the Native Americans of the Bolivian highlands, while scrambling around the Andes. He almost became a concert pianist before going to medical school.

Oh. Did I mention that he’s a professor at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Neuro-ophthalmology at the Massachusetts General Hospital? He’s also married to a physician, who is Swiss and Jewish, and they have four exquisite kids either in or headed for Jewish day school. When I visited him at MGH recently, he spoke passionately about them, music, medicine, Israel, and of course, Jewishness.

So I was sad to learn when he wrote me last week from Switzerland—he and his wonderful family visit his wife’s folks there yearly—that they ran into a nasty bit of old-fashioned anti-Semitism:

“Hello my dear friend,

“Again I find myself writing to you from the Alps…Out of the window right now I can see the Lake of Luzern…Old steamboats criss-crossing the lake in stunning glacier-cut landscape. Such a privileged landscape and such lucky people the Swiss in so many ways. But so many undescribable paradoxes still linger in the air here…I am back at

my in-laws after a week long sojourn in Pontresina, near St. Moritz.  We rented

an apartment big enough for the 6 of us.  Yes, hard to believe now I am in a

family of 6! The landlady was just charming and sweet as can be. The last day

before leaving, while sustaining pretty superficial conversation with her at the

small playground behind her  century old mountain home, she mentioned she has to prepare the house for the next party of people coming up from the big city and she is particularly vexed.  ‘Na ja, die sent Juden…’ (sic: oh, yes, they are Jewish…) Add the roll of the eyes to your visualization of such scene. My blood boiled. I said: ‘I don't know if you knew we are Jewish, too.’ She was caught off guard.  Immediately she mentioned that what she meant was that the ‘lovely’ man (pater familias) called many times to make sure that the kitchen this or that, or that they could bring their own kitchenware, silver, etc.  She didn't mention it ‘that way’…

“Mel, it just runs deep.”

When they left the place, Misha told her more fully what he thought of her remarks. She said Americans shouldn’t comment because we’re the bullies of the world. “It is a sad world out there right now,” Misha’s letter went on. Anti-American/anti-Israel feelings and anti-Semitism “are so alive and well in public opinion that the timid rapprochement in Europe (‘Deutschland Weg Nach Israel’) is about dead right now.”

Misha knows Europe much better than I do, but I have the feeling there is a split at the moment between “Germany’s Way toward Israel” at the government level and the word on the street. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Israel was certainly a good moment in which the privileged status of Israel was strongly confirmed.

She told the Knesset, “Every German government and every chancellor before me was committed to the special responsibility Germany has for Israel's security…This historic responsibility is part of my country's fundamental policy…for me, as a German chancellor, Israel's security is non-negotiable.”

Nicholas Sarkozy, who had a Jewish grandfather, is by far the most pro-Israel and pro-American French leader in decades, and French Jews feel close to him. He told the Knesset, “France will always stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel when her security and existence are threatened. I have always thought this, I have always felt it in my heart of hearts and I will never compromise on this. And those who call scandalously for Israel’s destruction will always find France in their way, blocking the path.”

Finally Gordon Brown just became the first British Prime Minister to address the Knesset. He talked about “the achievement of 1948: the centuries of exile ended, the age-long dream realized, the ancient promise redeemed.” He described his clergyman-father’s many trips to Israel, and his plan to teach his own sons, now just two and four, to love and admire Israel as his father taught him.

He said, “I am proud to say that for the whole of my life, I have counted myself a friend of Israel.” And, “let me tell the people of Israel today: Britain is your true friend…a friend who will stand beside you whenever your peace, your stability and your existence are under threat.”

These are the people democratically chosen to lead Europe’s three greatest nations. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that when (not if) push comes to shove, no one will really defend Israel except Israelis. And I don’t delude myself that classic European anti-Semitism died in a paroxysm of post-Hitler guilt. It’s quietly thriving and forging bonds with the virulent anti-Semitism seething among Europe’s Arabs.

I’m just saying it’s not all dark, and we have to follow the glimmers of light; Misha was right to be hurt and worried. But let’s not miss what is surely the best opportunity in decades to build new relations between Israel and Europe, even over the heads of millions of anti-Semites old and new. It wouldn’t be the first time a friend in the palace made all the difference for the Jews.

Yesterday a dear friend’s oldest daughter made aliya—she stepped off the plane at Ben Gurion Airport along with 240 others, all of whom had filled out their immigration forms on the flight and were already citizens of Israel when their feet hit the runway.

Not only was I able to hear about it, I watched it on the webcam set up by Nefesh b’Nefesh—Soul to Soul—an organization set up to encourage immigration to Israel from Western countries. This was just one of over a dozen plane-loads arriving this summer, from the U.S., Britain, France, and elsewhere.

These new immigrants are olim by choice; they are not fleeing anything, they are strongly drawn to something. That something is the Zionist dream, for the first time untinged by fear at the starting place. In fact, for these olim there is more fear at the landing place.

Interviews of the immigrants—they ranged from a two-month-old baby to a 97-year-old lady—had a consistent theme: asked to send a message to their friends and family back home, most said some version of You come too!

Nefesh b’Nefesh has made it easier than it used to be. My friend was stunned by the contrast with the time thirty years ago when he moved to Israel, only to come home four years later. Not the slightest effort was made to welcome him or ease the way.

Yesterday, his daughter was welcomed by Tzipi Livni, a likely future Prime Minister, who is credited with waking the Israeli government up to the fact that if you are going to attract people from a place like America, you’d better come up with something better than an airlift and a transit camp.

So my friend’s tears on watching this yesterday meant many things, not least the joy of watching his beloved daughter realize his own dream. Even I didn’t have dry eyes, having watched this fine woman emerge from the little girl I met twenty years ago. But for Mara herself, her huge smile as she stepped off the stairs onto the runway said it all.

There are many pitfalls ahead of her. Personally, she’ll do just fine; she’s brilliant and attractive, warm and funny, competent and resilient. But there is this pesky matters of possible war with Israel’s enemies—Hamas, Iran, Syria, who knows?

Israel will do what it can to protect her, and that is a lot. But the enemies of the Jewish state, like the enemies of the Jews, are tireless. Today, the day after Mara’s aliya, CNN ran a remarkable little piece about Palestinian terrorists making rockets. First they filmed graduation (photo) in a training camp in Gaza, where young men train at night and burn tires

constantly to generate smoke so that they can’t be seen from the air. They crawl and shoot among the fires shouting “Allahu Akhbar!”—God is great. They practice hostage-taking, yet they say they are just preparing for an Israeli incursion.

Which they are trying to provoke. The reporters were blindfolded before being taken to the hidden rocket factory in Gaza, but once there they were able to film—the militants are proud to show that they are making rockets steadily, preparing for their own planned end to the cease-fire when they—unless of course Israel meets their demands—will return to launching them several times a day at Sderot and other towns in Israel.

They are now manufacturing fourth-generation rockets that they say have double the range of the third—25 kilometers instead of 12—giving them access to more Israeli territory and more Jews.

As government spokesman Mark Regev said after the report, “The cease-fire that was negotiated through Egypt was very specific that the Hamas movement and the other terrorist groups can’t use it as a period to import more weapons, more explosives, more rockets into the Gaza Strip. And so, that sort of activity is a clear violation of the cease-fire understandings achieved through Egypt. And of course we reserve the right to act if need be to protect ourselves. We don’t want this current quiet just to be the quiet before the storm.”

Of course, the fear that the cease-fire would be used by Israel’s enemies to prepare new and more dangerous attacks was in the forefront of the minds of those who opposed it.

I don’t think Mara will be in the range of the rockets, at least not for the time being, but in a larger sense all Israel is in range—certainly of Iranian missiles, but also of the threat of war with one of several enemies, and finally of course in range of terrorist bombings.

I envy and admire her and I wish her every good thing. She is who is realizing her dream, and becoming part of one of the greatest events in Jewish history—the revival and renewal of the Jews in their ancient homeland.

In 1925 a young pioneer in Israel poured her heart out in a letter: “I am happy to be free…I believe in Eretz Israel and in the people. I am surrounded by people who have faith…I would like to help all those who can understand our truth—who can find a way to us.” Improbable as it seemed at the time, those who found their way would number millions.

Mara, you are a worthy heir to that young woman’s dream. May you go from strength to strength, stay out of the range of the rockets, and build the dream—the Jewish people’s, and yours.

It’s a sad moment for American Orthodox Jewry when one of their own takes to the pages of the New York Times to say how ashamed he is—Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Washington’s Ohev Shalom synagogue.

He and his congregants call it The National Synagogue. It’s over a century old, and Al Jolson’s dad was once the cantor. Herzfeld’s considered a bit of a maverick, but he’s a young man trying to revive a shul that was dying, and he seems to be doing well.

God knows plenty of things about American Jewish life need reviving. So what’s he ashamed of? Well, last May there was a raid on America’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville, Iowa.

“What began as an immigration sting,” he writes, “quickly took on larger dimensions. News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week.”

The official affidavit in the U.S. District Court alleges a rabbi abused a worker on the shop floor; meanwhile two managers at the plant have been arrested for falsifying immigration documents.

This, as Rabbi Herzfeld points out, is not kosher. He cites a precedent where a famous 19th-century rabbi, Rav Yisroel Salanter—founder of the Mussar movement in Jewish ethics–was said to have decertified a matzah factory because of unfair treatment of workers.

The principle is simple: it’s not just what animal you eat, it’s how humanely you slaughter it. And that means not just how sharp the knife is, but how ethically you treat the people you hire to assist you. If Rav Salanter didn’t in fact take away their hekhsher—their stamp of approval for kashrut—he should have.

And so should the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union do to Agriprocessors—a devastating judgment on a kosher meatpacking plant, and one that would fit the crime like a glove–if in fact they find the charges are true. Rav Salanter also said it was worth studying the Torah for a lifetime just to avoid saying one word of evil gossip—lashon harah.

But they aren’t going to find out whether the charges are true because they haven’t set up the independent commission that is clearly needed. They are just going to sit back and wait for the feds to rule. That doesn’t sound to me like ethical oversight by the country’s leading Orthodox rabbis.

My childhood rabbi, Bernard L. Berzon of blessed memory, was president of the RCA, so I’ve always had a certain reverence for that organization. I have a book of his sermons, inscribed to my father, and today I looked up his sermon for the same Shabbat we are approaching: Devarim, the first portion of the last book of Moses–in English, Deuteronomy.

Coincidentally, that Shabbat ended with the beginning of the fast of Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av, just as this one does. His sermon was around the time of the Eichmann trial, and he used this traditional occasion of lamentation—Tisha B’Av, by convention, commemorates the destruction of both Temples—to bemoan the murdered six million and the ongoing threats to the new State of Israel.

But in his characteristic way, when he asked rhetorically whether God was among us, he answered himself that “if He had been admitted into the hearts and minds of Americans, if He really were bekirbenu, the plight of the State of Israel would not be so critical, and the Negro would be treated as a human being.”

In one breath, the plight of the State of Israel and the decent treatment of African-Americans. In one brief sermon, the lamentation over murdered millions and the quest for civil rights.

I can’t know for sure what Rabbi Berzon would have said about the oppressed immigrant workers of that Iowa meatpacking plant, but I am guessing that if he were president of the RCA again today he would launch an investigation. Among other reasons, he had a masters degree in labor economics from the University of Maine.

He too would be sensitive about the evil tongue. But if, as seems likely, the charges proved to be true, I think he would have said, with his always clear, rational, and yet impassioned voice: Dos is nit kosher!

Jews don’t believe in reincarnation of course, but I have a feeling young Rabbi Herzfeld may be channeling Rabbi Berzon. If so, I’m one of his followers.

Now that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he will resign, Israelis have a rare chance to double down. On what? On the number of X chromosomes in the Prime Minister’s office.

That could only be accomplished by replacing Olmert with his brilliant, popular, and

appealing Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni. She would be the second person with a full complement of X chromosomes to occupy that office, just as she is in the Foreign Minister’s office. (The first for both: the great Golda Meir.)

A poll taken today says she would handily beat former Prime Minister and right-wing hardliner, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. As for Shaul Mofaz, her main rival for the leadership of the centrist Kadima party, she would beat him even more badly. And Ehud Barak, the head of the Labor Party—a true hero but, like Bibi, a not-too-successful former Prime Minister—would be barely be able to touch the hem of her skirt.

Livni is 48, was born in Tel Aviv, and is the daughter of two ultra-nationalist heroes; prominent members of the Irgun, they would today probably be considered terrorists, but they helped to evict the British and found the State of Israel. She was an officer in the IDF, served in the Mossad, practiced law for a decade, and entered the Knesset in 1999. Until recently, she was a faithful daughter of her right-wing parents.

But in the last few years she has moved to the center. In an interview with the New York Times in 2006, she said, "I believe, like my parents, in the right of the Jewish people to the entire land of Israel. But I was also raised to preserve Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people and [to preserve] democratic values.

"So choosing between my dreams, and my need to live in democracy, I prefer to give up some of the land."

That same year, as Ariel Sharon’s right-hand woman, she was an architect of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This pragmatic and, on her end of the spectrum, unpopular move disentangled Israel from a hopeless situation but led to a seemingly not-much-more hopeful one; constant rocket fire from there rains down on Sderot and other towns nearby, and Livni, no dove, advocates retaliation.

But in fact the Gaza withdrawal changed many things. First, it showed the world that Israel’s Jewish soldiers can and will drag Jewish settlers out of Jewish settlements when it is good and ready to hand a piece of land over to its enemies. Second, it inadvertently precipitated a civil war between Hamas radicals and Fatah moderates. The latter, no fans of Israel, ended up with the West Bank, and active negotiations are under way to establish a Palestinian state there—sooner, not later.

Tzipi Livni will not drop that ball. Olmert’s resignation will take effect as soon as Kadima chooses a new leader, scheduled for September 17. Olmert has vowed to continue the peace process until that date passes and the new head of Kadima can form a government. Likelier than not, either Mofaz or Barak would pursue the same process.

But Livni, known in Israel as Mrs. Clean, will not have the smell of corruption hanging around her like Olmert and others in the current government do. She does not have the political baggage of the former Prime Ministers who are her rivals. And she does not seem like the same old, same old, which at this point almost any male politician will.

In fact she will be a breath of fresh air. She is smarter than most of the men around her. She has the respect of leaders around the world, having represented Israel as Foreign Minister for years. She is fluent in English and French in addition to her native Hebrew. She comes from a family of dyed-in-the-wool Zionists willing to fight and die for their country, and as a member of the IDF and the Mossad she showed her willingness to do the same.

But unlike some with that sort of background, she is also willing to pay a high price for peace. She is calm, experienced, pragmatic, and judicious. She wants her two children to live in an Israel that is safe within its borders, and she will do what is needed to make that happen without regard to ideology. Like Deborah of old, she may turn out to be both a righteous warrior and a wise judge with regard to peace.

With the Iranian threat looming, Lebanon unstable, Gaza radicalized and violent, and delicate peace negotiations going on with both Syria and the Palestinian Authority, Israel could do a lot worse this fall than choose Tzipi Livni.

The Jewish Community Center of Atlanta has decided to open on Saturdays, and I’m trying to figure out why this bothers me. I’m not religious, although I once was, and I’m rarely in the synagogue myself any more. We have a ceremony at home most Friday nights, but I do what I like on Saturdays, so why should it bother me that a lot of JCC members want to swim and play basketball?

It doesn’t. But it does bother me that they want to do it at a place called the Jewish Community Center. Truth be told, I’m not even a member, although I was when it was in town and accessible to my family. Maybe I don’t even have a right to object. But then, I am a member of something called the Jewish community.

Suzi Brozman, of the Atlanta Jewish Times, reported reactions. Predictably, the Orthodox rabbis in town condemned the move. Rabbi Ilan Feldman of Beth Jacob said, “This is a totally new level of institutional disregard for the sanctity of Shabbos.” Rabbi Moshe Parnes of Anshei Chesed said, “They want to redefine what Shabbos is…[It’s] ripping the community apart.”

And Rabbi Binyomin Friedman of Congregation Ariel said, “I don’t see how having people on the exercise machines watching CNN is going to enhance Shabbos for Jews…I don’t go into their homes and tell them what to do, but when we meet in the public square, it’s important to me that community institutions uphold community values.”

Clearly, the JCC leadership does want to redefine it. In their letter to members, they said, “Our new Shabbat policy is grounded in the belief that by opening on Shabbat, we will be helping to sustain and strengthen the Atlanta Jewish community in addition to upholding the nature of Shabbat itself.”

This seems pretty dubious. It’s one thing to say, look, we can’t survive financially unless we do this, or, our members insist on it and we can’t afford to lose them. But to claim you are upholding Shabbat when you are going into head to head competition with the synagogues strikes me as disingenuous.

As for strengthening the community, I think we will soon see how deeply this hurts a major part of it, and their reactions may well weaken the community.

I was in the synagogue pretty much every day of my life between ages 8 and 17, either for Hebrew school or services. I lost my faith, but I raised my children Jewish, and that took me back into the synagogue frequently—pediatric Judaism, the rabbis call it—including many Saturdays. I think I understand what the nature of Shabbat is, and I don’t think the JCC leaders do.

The Torah doesn’t say, “Remember the Sabbath day to play with other Jews.” It says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”

The JCC letter went so far as to cite the time-honored saying, popularized by the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, that more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews. Their idea is that they can bring more unaffiliated Jews into the Jewish fold in this way.

God knows the Jewish community needs strengthening, but this tactic does not seem likely to do the trick. Heschel wrote a short book called The Sabbath that sealed his reputation as a great spiritual philosopher. He was no hard-liner, and he did not think that obsessive observance of law and ritual was of the essence. He wrote,

“What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time, to raise the good to the level of the holy, to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity…There is a world of things and a world of spirit. Sabbath is a microcosm of spirit…”

Somehow I doubt Heschel would have thought that treadmills and basketball qualify. The JCC claims to be planning afternoon programming that will enhance the experience of Shabbat. I hope they read Heschel’s book first.

If they had been serious about preserving community, they might have started by opening just in the afternoon; they might have asked the rabbis how to go about this in a less offensive and divisive way. One thing seems certain: you are not going to enhance continuity by flying in the face of the most cherished traditions.

And in the end you have to ask yourself: do you want a Jewish Community Center or just a gym with a Jewish name?

This entry is based on reporting by Suzi Brozman in The Atlanta Jewish Times. Their website is http://jtonline.us/

Amid controversy, but with a surprising degree of consensus, Israel decided to pay a huge price for the bodies of two dead soldiers, and many don’t understand how they could have made such a deal—exchanging five live terrorists and 199 bodies of Arab fighters for two Israeli soldiers in coffins.

They have made lopsided deals before, even exchanging live prisoners for dead bodies, but this one seemed particularly painful. One of the five terrorists freed was a savage murderer. He is Samir Kantar, serving three consecutive life sentences for crimes committed in 1979. According to the Associated Press, here is what he did:

Kantar was the leader; he and his fellow terrorists infiltrated northern Israel from Lebanon, by sea, in a rubber dinghy. Their mission: to kidnap or kill Israelis. They killed two policemen. Then they broke into the apartment of the Haran family in Nahariya, a few miles from the Lebanese border. They took the father and one daughter down to the beach, but their dinghy had been punctured by bullets.

Kantar himself shot Danny Haran in the back, killing him in full view of his four-year-old daughter. Then, with his rifle butt, he smashed the child’s head. Smadar Haran, her mother, said recently, “He smashed her head, and she didn’t die immediately, so he smashed it again and again.” Kantar denies that he deliberately killed anyone.

I urge you to watch the brief video and hear this little girl’s mother say what she saw. Yet what she doesn’t say is even more horrific. Not possible, you say? Well, her two-year-old daughter Yael also died in the attack—accidentally smothered by her mother, who was trying to keep her from crying out and being killed as well.

Kantar returned to Lebanon yesterday and received a hero’s welcome. Literally, they laid out a red carpet for him, which he strode along in army fatigues, masquerading as a soldier. "This time yesterday I was in the hands of the enemy,” he said at a second ceremony, “But at this moment, I am yearning more than before to confront them”–so much for contrition after almost thirty years.

I wonder what would have happened if an Israeli had gone to Lebanon and been captured after such acts? Hmm. Israel gave Kantar a fair trial. It has no death penalty except in cases of genocide, so he was serving three consecutive life sentences. In prison, he completed a master’s degree; his thesis, in Hebrew, was about the flaws in Israel’s democracy.

In exchange for him, other terrorists or militants, and the bodies of almost two hundred Hezbollah soldiers killed in battle, Israel got back the bodies of two soldiers. They’d been kidnapped by Hezbollah in July 2006, triggering the Second Lebanon War. Israel’s army is in a way like the U.S. Marines: No Marine Left Behind, period. But it is hard to imagine a U.S. government releasing a vicious child-murderer to recover two bodies.

According to critics inside Israel, the families of the two soldiers, aided by the media, conducted a two-year-long, well-funded campaign that won over popular opinion. Little was heard from the wife and mother of Samir Kantar’s victims. Few politicians were able to resist the pressure, least of all a prime minister riding for a fall.

Certainly the enemies of Israel were watching, and they may have gotten a very unfortunate message. A young architect in Ramallah, Samar Mohammed, said, "Nobody would have expected that Israel would give up the likes of Samir Kantar. Hezbollah has shown that they are mighty people, and Israel is afraid of them and had to meet their demands."

An Israeli security expert said, “What we've done now has made kidnapping soldiers the most profitable game in town." Another pointed out that after the next kidnapping, Hezbollah will have no incentive to go to the trouble of keeping the captives alive.

The funerals held today for the two soldiers were well attended and moving. The families were grateful at last to be able to give their sons a proper burial according to Jewish law. There is a powerful Jewish tradition called pidyon sh’vuyim—the Redemption of Captives—which is considered to take precedence over almost everything else. It was a case at least of the remains of captives. Yesterday there were a few cries of revenge among the mourners outside one of the soldiers’ homes: “Nasrallah,” they said, referring to the leader of Hezbollah, “you will pay.”

But the main notes struck were those of grief over the deaths, gratitude for the redemption of the bodies, and commitment to those who serve and fall. Former prime minister and current defense minister Ehud Barak spoke to a group of soldiers at one of the funerals: "If the worst will happen to any of you, Israel will make every possible and legitimate effort … to bring you home.”

As one commentator said, Israel cannot have a committed citizen army without abiding by this promise—in that sense the exchange was itself dictated by the pragmatic politics of war, which depends in part on national pride and willingness to sacrifice. Barak’s promise to the soldiers was neither idle nor unnecessary.

But if I were Smadar Haran, who lived to see her family’s murderer released by her own government to a red carpet welcome in Beirut—I don’t know her, but I know myself–the only thing I would remember from these memorial events would be the cries of revenge.