The press conference on Wednesday, July 7 following the meeting between Israel’s Prime Minister and President Obama was nothing less than a love-fest. The President began by praising a ceremonial Fourth of July speech by his counterpart before coming to the U.S.:

“As Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated in his speech, the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable.  It encompasses our national security interests, our strategic interests, but most importantly, the bond of two democracies who share a common set of values and whose people have grown closer and closer as time goes on…”

The president praised progress, such as it is, in Gaza, but soon moved to Israel’s highest priority:

“… [W]e have instituted through the U.N. Security Council the toughest sanctions ever directed at an Iranian government.  In addition, last week I signed our own set of sanctions, coming out of the United States Congress, as robust as any that we've ever seen.  Other countries are following suit.  And so we intend to continue to put pressure on Iran to meet its international obligations.”

Obama thoroughly deemphasized past tensions: “We’ve seen over the last year how our relationship has broadened.  Sometimes it doesn’t get publicized, but on a whole range of issues — economic, military-to-military, issues related to Israel maintaining its qualitative military edge, intelligence-sharing, how we are able to work together effectively on the international front — that in fact our relationship is continuing to improve.  And I think a lot of that has to do with the excellent work that the Prime Minister has done.  So I’m grateful.”

Netanyahu cut to the chase: “The greatest new threat on the horizon, the single most dominant issue for many of us, is the prospect that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons.  Iran is brutally terrorizing its people, spreading terrorism far and wide.  And I very much appreciate the President’s statement that he is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

He noted international sanctions followed by tougher U.S. ones, “And I urge other leaders to follow the President’s lead… to adopt much tougher sanctions against Iran, primarily those directed against its energy sector.”

In the question period the Prime Minister pressed the issue further: “I think the latest sanctions adopted by the U.N. create illegitimacy or create de-legitimization for Iran’s nuclear program, and that is important.  I think the sanctions the President signed the other day actually have teeth.  They bite. 

“The question is — how much do you need to bite is something I cannot answer now.”

Then came a two-part impolite question, in an Israeli accent:

Q    “Mr. President, in the past year, you distanced yourself from Israel and gave a cold shoulder to the Prime Minister.  Do you think this policy was a mistake?  Do you think it contributes to the bashing of Israel by others?  And is that — you change it now, and do you trust now Prime Minister Netanyahu?

“And if I may, Mr. Prime Minister, specifically, did you discuss with the President the continuing of the freezing of settlements after September?  And did you tell him that you’re going to keep on building after this period is over?”

President Obama played hardball with the questioner but softball with Netanyahu:

“Well, let me, first of all, say that the premise of your question was wrong and I entirely disagree with it… every public statement that I’ve made … has been a constant reaffirmation of the special relationship between the United States and Israel, that our commitment to Israel’s security has been unwavering.  And, in fact, there aren’t any concrete policies that you could point to that would contradict that.

“And in terms of my relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I know the press, both in Israel and stateside, enjoys seeing if there’s news there.  But the fact of the matter is that I’ve trusted Prime Minister Netanyahu since I met him before I was elected President, and have said so both publicly and privately.

“I think that he is dealing with a very complex situation in a very tough neighborhood.  And what I have consistently shared with him is my interest in working with him — not at cross-purposes — so that we can achieve the kind of peace that will ensure Israel’s security for decades to come. 

“And that's going to mean some tough choices.  And there are going to be times where he and I are having robust discussions about what kind of choices need to be made.  But the underlying approach never changes, and that is the United States is committed to Israel’s security; we are committed to that special bond; and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.

“We are going to continually work with the Prime Minister … as well as the Israeli people, so that we can achieve what I think has to be everybody’s goal, which is that people feel secure.  They don't feel like a rocket is going to be landing on their head sometime.  They don't feel as if there’s a growing population that wants to direct violence against Israel.”

Netanyahu also did not like the question, saying, “I’ll have to paraphrase Mark Twain, that the reports about the demise of the special U.S.-Israel relations — relationship aren’t just premature, they're just flat wrong.  There’s a depth and richness of this relationship that is expressed every day.  Our teams talk.  We don't make it public.  The only thing that's public is that you can have differences on occasion in the best of families and the closest of families; that comes out public — and sometimes in a twisted way, too. 

“What is not told is the fact that we have an enduring bond of values, interests, beginning with security and the way that we share both information and other things to help the common defense of our common interests — and many others in the region who don't often admit to the beneficial effect of this cooperation.

“So I think there’s — the President said it best in his speech in Cairo.  He said in front of the entire Islamic world, he said, the bond between Israel and the United States is unbreakable.  And I can affirm that to you today.”

The President praised the slight loosening of the Gaza blockade in the wake of the flotilla disaster, evaded a question about freezing settlements, and all in all gave the impression of a man who had won 78 percent of the Jewish vote and hoped to do that again. Critics accused him of “going wobbly” on Netanyahu. He tried to make it sound like a win-win situation, but it looked like a victory for Israel and an American retreat.

For those who think Israel should have a free hand in all its dealings while being able to count on U.S. support, the meeting went well. For those looking for tough love from Obama to nudge Israel closer to peace with a future Palestinian state, it looked like a sweep for current Israeli policy, and Obama did look soft.

Some say Netanyahu is waiting for 2012, when he expects Obama gone. But American elections are notoriously hard to predict this far out. One strategy for Obama might be to bide his time, making nice until this November, but then come down hard on what he surely still sees as Israel’s intransigence in the face of an increasingly hostile world.

Some further reports about the flotilla episode of May 31st:

According to the IDF as reported by the Jerusalem Post, about 50 of the 700 or so passengers on the Mavi Marmara were prepared and trained to incite violence. Many of the 50 were carrying thick envelopes, each containing thousands of dollars in cash. Some reports put the total at a million Euros. Among the cash-bearers was a group of mercenaries recruited from the city of Bursa in northwest Turkey.

Widely seen videos from the ship’s security cameras show this group preparing to meet the Israeli soldiers boarding the ship. Preparations included wielding metal pipes, slingshots, knives, and other “cold weapons,” as well as gas masks and bulletproof vests. After these preparations the men dispersed into smaller groups and waited for the Israelis.

Each Israeli boarding was surrounded by four or more men and beaten with pipes as well as stabbed and in one case thrown 30 feet from the upper to the lower deck. This was a carefully planned ambush. All nine men killed were in this armed group attacking Israeli soldiers.

According to the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (as translated by Palestine Media Watch), at least three of the attackers were determined seekers of martyrdom. The wife of one said, “he constantly prayed to Allah to grant him Shahada (Martyrdom).” Of another, his brother-in-law said, “Allah granted him the death that he wished for.”     

A video made by flotilla participants and seen on Al Jazeera days before the confrontation shows a woman saying, "Right now we face one of two happy endings: either Martyrdom or reaching Gaza." A group chants, “Oh Jews, remember Khaibar,” the place where Mohamed defeated the Jews, “The army of Mohamed will return!”

The Israeli account of the raid and the soldiers’ actions in self-defense are visible in widely available videos. It is also confirmed by an Al Jazeera camera man, Andre Abu Khalil, who is from Lebanon and who provided eyewitness testimony to Reuters. His account is similar to those provided by the Israelis who landed on the ship.

The possibility exists that elements in the Turkish government knew exactly what these people were about, and helped them on their way. Prime Minister Erdogan himself, who has been vehemently attacking Israel since the Gaza war, is believed by some analysts to have a program of restoring Turkish leadership in the Islamic world, as it once had during the Ottoman Empire.

This may require disengaging from the process of trying to join Europe, rejecting and verbally assaulting Israel, and distancing himself from the United States, all while trying politically to defeat pro-Western parties in his own country. It is possible, though in my view not likely, that his government played a semi-official role in the violent provocation planned for the Gaza flotilla.

In any case, the narrative of Israeli commandos brutally attacking defenseless pacifists bearing humanitarian aid is a complete myth.

It is likely that many of the people on board that ship, like those on the other five (completely peaceful) ships in the flotilla and on the Rachel Corrie, which was boarded peacefully days later, were really humanitarian activists. It is likely that many were unaware that there was a minority on the ship preparing for confrontation and martyrdom, bolstered by highly trained mercenaries. Few may have known that they were aiding such people, or that they were helping to smuggle many thousands of dollars into the hands of Hamas.

But now the world does know these things. Or does it? They are certainly not getting the sort of coverage that the Israeli “massacre” of “innocent peace activists” was getting a week ago. So will the backtracking and apologizing soon begin? Like I said, keep breathing, they’ll take a while.

A feeling of pervasive sadness and, of course, obsession with the news. There are ways to spin this (as always) to make the world’s treatment of Israel seem unfair, since (as always) it is unfair. There are certainly ways to explain it that exonerate the naval commandos, if not their high commanders.

But there is no way to spin it that makes it any less of a tragedy for all concerned—most of all for the dead and their families; but second most of all, for Israel. Nor is there any way to spin it that makes it anything less than a victory for Hamas.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock the past few days, Israeli navy commandos boarded six ships in a flotilla of self-styled peace activists, bound for Gaza with ten thousand tons of mostly innocuous supplies, in international waters. The operation was five sixths successful; crews and passengers on five of the six ships complied with Israeli warnings, were escorted to the port of Ashdod, held for a day or two, and released, while their cargoes were inspected and (with some exceptions) prepared for shipment to Gaza.

But that’s not the five sixths that matters. On the sixth ship, the commandos were set upon as they descended from their helicopter, beaten severely with metal rods and bats, thrown from the upper to the lower deck or into the water, knifed, and/or shot. They defended themselves, and at least nine of the six hundred civilians on the ship were killed, many more wounded.

Videos prove that this was the way events unfolded, and that the crude weapons were at the ready on the ship. Clearly the activists, or more likely some subgroup of them, had been thoroughly prepared. They had their little arsenal, and they had live-streaming video broadcast on Al-Jazeera almost in real time—showing their side of the story of course. This was a classic, planned provocation of the strong by the weak, and it worked like a charm.

As Haaretz put it, Israel walked right into the trap set by the activists. Perhaps they had ties to Hamas and even Al-Qaeda, implausible as the latter connection seems. It doesn’t matter. The world only sees, hears, and feels bleeding civilians, engaged in a humanitarian effort to break the siege of Gaza.

For now, Israel has secured the blockade, a battle won. I hope this is a very important victory, because the likely price of it includes:

–the final nail in the coffin of its special relationship with Turkey, long a natural ally and a trump card in the Islamic world;

–condemnation by France, Germany, Spain, Italy, China, and countless other nations across the globe;

–embarrassment, once again, of the United States, by far Israel’s best friend, but a friend whose patience cannot last forever;

–the burden placed on Jews throughout the world of defending, again, tactics that most people find indefensible;

–the likely postponement of organized international action against Iran to stop its nuclear program, an existential threat to Israel;

–and most important, a massive strategic defeat in the war for the hearts and minds of all humanity, and a big victory for the enemies of Israel and the Jews.

There is no blame, in my view, for the naval officers and sailors. They warned the crews of the six vessels loudly and clearly that they would not allow them to approach the Gaza Strip; they described exactly what they were going to do, which was what they in fact did with five of the ships, their passengers, and cargoes. On the sixth they were assaulted by violent mobs that greatly outnumbered them. They had a right to self-defense.

Does this matter to the world at large? No.

Therefore, Israel has two choices. One is to say, We’ve always stood alone (a dangerous falsification of history) and The world will hate us no matter what we do (most countries that counted loved Israel in 1947, 1967, 1973, and 1993) and We can only rely on God (God, Israel should have learned, helps those who help themselves, and not just with guns).

Choice number two is not to jump when the world says jump. But it’s also not to turn a deaf ear to the world’s concerns. I leave it up to Israel to decide how to listen. But stonewalling is a default to option one above, which will not work much longer. And the clock is ticking.

According to a front-page article in The New York Times of April 16—fortunately below the fold—Richard Goldstone, South Africa’s most distinguished jurist, lifelong opponent of apartheid and supporter of Nelson Mandela when that was a dangerous thing to be, internationally respected prosecutor of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Trustee of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and, yes, also the main author of the now-infamous Goldstone Report, which unfairly and one-sidedly indicted Israel for war crimes in Gaza, will be unable to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah because South African Jews threatened to demonstrate against him and ruin the happy occasion.

For shame. Is this supposed to be good for the Jews?—literally to stand between a young boy and his grandfather, because the elder has taken a position unpopular with the community? Does the Jewish community of South Africa have no other way of expressing its opinion than to destroy the joy of what should be a blessed event in the life of a boy and a family? Is it their view that the whole family must pay for the sin or the foolishness of the grandfather?

This is not the random action of some rogue elements in the South African Jewish community, or a bunch of unruly teenagers. This was an official threat from the South African Zionist Federation, and the ultimate “deal” was brokered by South Africa’s Beth Din, or official religious court. According to reports, the head of the court, Rosh Beth Din Rabbi Moshe Kurtstag, said, "I know that there was a very strong feeling in the shul, a lot of anger. I heard also that the SAZF wanted to organize a protest outside the shul – [there were] all kinds of plans. But I think reason prevailed."

For shame. Reason did not prevail, thuggery did. This was like a Mafia operation. The great rabbi and his elevated court offered to protect the boy and his family…from what? From a sort of pogrom against a Jewish family in their midst which the Beth Din could easily have prevented with another order—a just one, forbidding the Zionist Federation from taking action against the family and the synagogue.

This will be a permanent blot on the reputation of the South African Jewish community, on Rabbi Kurstag, and most importantly on the Jewish community of the world. Is this the vaunted bravery and self-defense of the Jews today? Trashing the bar mitzvah of a completely innocent boy in order to punish the sins of his ancestor? For shame.

Make no mistake. The Goldstone Report was a grave blow to the reputation of Israel and the Jewish people, a twisted, grotesque distortion of the truth. Justice Goldstone proved himself a nar, a fool, in collaborating with the enemies of Israel to condemn it one-sidedly for defending itself in Gaza. It gave scant attention to the years of provocation by rocket attacks from Gaza on Israeli civilians. It noted only in passing the fact that Hamas’s basic strategy from start to finish was and is to use the civilian population of Gaza as human shields, making casualties of the innocent inevitable.

And it did not consult the expert opinion of Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, who testified to the U.N. Human Rights Council after the Goldstone Report was published, as he had said many times in public previously, that “the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Here is more of his testimony:

“The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

“Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

“More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.”

It is fitting to repeat this on Yom Ha’Zikaron, the day of remembrance of the fallen in Israel’s wars: Israel’s soldiers have always been more, not less careful than other armies to try to avoid civilian deaths.

But what does this have to do with the right of a boy in a Johannesburg suburb to have his tateh present in shul to hear him called to the Torah for the first time in his life? Nothing whatsoever.

The grandpa’s narishkayt—foolishness—was indeed bad for Israel and the Jews. But the actions of the South African Jewish community are not just foolishness, they are instead a deliberate and nasty attack on a child, a family, and a revered Jewish tradition. They are not defending the Jewish people with these actions, they are dragging its reputation through the dirt, and confirming the worst opinions the world now has of us.

Reason prevails when words like those of Colonel Kemp are opposed to those of the Goldstone Report, not when a mob threatens a boy’s bar mitzvah, and a rabbi, acting like a Mafia don, “reasons” with that boy’s grandfather to keep the two apart.

For shame.

I had the honor two weeks ago to be the scholar-in-residence at Beth Tfiloh–House of Prayer–in Baltimore, the largest Orthodox synagogue in America. I was welcomed with what seemed to me remarkable tolerance, given the differences in our beliefs and opinions, Their interest in having me visit stemmed from the publication, last year, of my book The Jewish Body, and

was arranged by Sandy Vogel, their director of adult educational programs.

But I discovered in Beth Tfiloh’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg, a man of great warmth, energy, and wisdom, an unlikely kindred spirit. He had read and admired both Unsettled and The Jewish Body, resonating to their embrace and defense of the Jewish people and Jewish civilization.

He and I also had a revered and beloved elder in common; he was delighted to find that in both those books I had described and thanked Rabbi Bernard Berzon, the pastor of my childhood and adolescence. Rabbi Wohlberg had known and warmly admired Rabbi Berzon, who was a close friend of his father, also a rabbi. Both of us were deeply touched by the connection and by the thought that two such different defenders and interpreters of Jewish life could have been, as children, inspired by one and the same man.

Speaking of children, I began my visit by addressing the assembly at Beth Tfiloh’s co-ed high school, where a moving presentation before mine made it clear that kids there were starting a campaign to combat sexual exploitation of girls in Asia. They had also been active in raising money for earthquake relief in both Haiti and Chile. There was no mention of Jewish charities, nor anything that seemed out of the ordinary in these young people’s interpretation of the mitzvah of tzedakah, which led them to reach out to victims of misfortune throughout the world.

I also addressed a group on Saturday afternoon, before mincha, when I presented a series of controversies about the Jewish body. A pretty lively discussion followed, which included two younger rabbis at Beth Tfiloh. They were Daniel Lerner and Ross Singer, each deeply thoughtful and spiritual in his own way. They led the service in the twilight, and we had the Third Meal, Seudah Shlishit in Hebrew, Shalosh Seudos in Yiddish—often morphed in my childhood to Shaleshudes.

I sat beside Rabbi Lerner, who also has a doctorate in neuropsychology, and we talked about many things–among others, his wise advice about how I should approach a young couple I know intending to raise their son Jewish but wavering on whether to circumcise him. Rabbi Singer gave a memorable drash on the dual role of Shabbat, both as a rest from the week past and a spiritual preparation for the week to come.

But the high point of my visit was standing in the pulpit of Beth Tfiloh’s imposing sanctuary-in-the-round, surrounded by a huge semi-circle of worshippers—women on my left, men on my right*—with the brightness of a clear, cold day flowing in through the skylights. Behind me a couple of small visitors, Rabbi Wohlberg’s granddaughters, one with a bright red lollipop, played around his chair on the bima. The blessings of a first-born child to a young couple, and of another couple soon to be married, had already graced the gathering.

All this testimony to continuity, renewal, and the Jewish future touched and energized me as—after congratulating the two young couples, joking that the young parents were showing the way for the soon-to-be-marrieds and reminding them that the first commandment is p’ru ur’vu, be fruitful and multiply–I delivered this sermon:

It’s a great honor for me to stand before you today, and my presence is a tribute to the open-mindedness and wide-ranging interests of Rabbi Wohlberg, Sandy Vogel, and others in your synagogue leadership. It is also fitting that my presence honors Rabbi Samuel Rosenblatt; among his many accomplishments translated and interpreted Saadia Gaon, who believed there is no contradiction between reason and faith.

One anthropologist reasoned that we Jews should be called not the people of the book but the people of the body, so intensely have we been concerned with our physicality. I favor a compromise: the people of the book about the body. Of course, that’s not all it’s about, but taking today’s parsha, Ki Tissa, alone we have so many physical references I can barely mention them all. We begin by counting the people, body by body. Next we find out that Aaron and his sons must wash their hands and feet before offering animal bodies for sacrifice, and be anointed with oil that must not be poured on human flesh. We read of the garments they must wear and of the fragrance of the incense they must burn.

We are reminded that we must rest our bodies one day a week, even on pain of death. Sadly, we see that the abstract Jewish G-d, the god without a body, is not enough for the Israelites; they yearn for the kind of embodied god others worship. Moses is already pleading for them, reminding G-d of the promise to make Avraham’s seed like the stars, arbeh et zarachem k’kochavei ha-Shamayim, and that it cannot have been for nought that G-d brought freed them from Egypt b’yad chazakah, with a strong hand. Yet Moses’ rage is kindled, and he flings the sacred tablets from his own hands. He burns the golden calf, grinds it to dust, and makes the people drink it mixed with water. He orders intimate killings of the faithless by the faithful, and even after that a plague strikes many down. For the first of countless times they are called am k’shey oref, a stiff-necked people, even as G-d promises again, eretz zavat chalav u’dvash, a land flowing with milk and honey. They shed their fine clothing in repentance.

Moses sees G-d’s back, but not G-d’s face, and only with the protection of G-d’s hand. He lowers his head to the ground, and begs G-d for another chance for the people. We are told, not for the first time, that whatever opens the womb belongs to G-d, and that we must not cook a kid in its mother’s milk. And when the “stiff-necked” people do get another chance, Moses descends from the mountain with radiance rising from his face, so intense that he has to cover it to protect them. In the additional reading, Parah, we encounter the enduring mystery of the red heifer with the perfect body, and we learn how to purify ourselves after touching a corpse or a human bone. In these readings as in so much of the Torah, the body is everywhere, and this reflects the fact that Jews never renounced the body, they only tried to control its many dangers.

Let me now focus on just one dimension, that of weakness and strength. At Beth Tfiloh, you will find this theme familiar. If you heard Rabbi Wohlberg’s sermon last week, about the assault on Purim, you will not be surprised by what I have to say. If you agreed with him about Jimmy Carter’s Al Chet—and both those sermons were in part about the same thing, the Jewish right to self-defense—then you will likely agree with me.

I grew up as a pudgy, nerdy little boy in a small modern Orthodox shul in Brooklyn. Our rabbi, Bernard L. Berzon of blessed memory—a wise and broadly erudite man who for a time served as president of the Rabbinical Council of America— spoke passionately about Jewish faith, observance, and learning. But some of his most deeply felt words were reserved for the rebirth of the Jewish people. The Jewish state was only a few years old when I first listened to him, and I can still close my eyes and hear his passionate voice.

I can’t reproduce that voice, but I can tell you that I stopped the presses on my book, because I came across a quote from one of his sermons–which, I belatedly realized, had been one of my hidden inspirations. The passage was in a published collection of his sermons that he had given my father during an illness. It was on Shabbat Shemot, and I was probably there to hear it since I was in the shul almost every Shabbat—back then, it was “Shabbes”–from age 8 to 17. Certainly I keenly recall the sentiment. His drash that Shabbes was on another instance of Moses’ anger—the first—when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave–va-yakh et ha-mitzri—and he struck the Egyptian down–according to the Midrash, with his fist, and with the help of G-d. Here is the passage I quoted from Rabbi Berzon:

“Through the centuries of dispersion and exile, the Jew developed a galut psychology of fear, and, like his ancestors in Egypt, yielded to the onslaughts and insults of vicious men in a degrading and humiliating manner. He bent to receive the kicks and blows of every murderous charlatan without fighting back. He practiced the policy of non-resistance long before Ghandi and Nehru. He became spineless and frail—afraid to strike back. Those who spent their early youth in Europe will bear me out that this was generally the case. When an anti-Semitic scoundrel threatened one of our people, the Jew would either run for his life, beg for mercy, or cover his face with his hands to ward off the blows.”

Many in our synagogue, including him, could speak with authority, having grown up in the Diaspora, and I often heard their stories. But he had more to say:

“We in our generation have lived to witness the rebirth of Jewish courage. Thank God that our sons and daughters in Israel have learned to use their fists against their foes… Blessed be the fist of each one of our heroes! May they continue to use their hands against the would-be annihilators of Israel.”

Recall that this was the 1950s, and the shadow of the Shoah lay across our lives, even as the brightness of not just Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel] but Medinat Yisroel [the State of Israel] broke through with a new dawn. If there was a hint of something almost anti-Semitic in Rabbi Berzon’s words about the Diaspora Jew, let me assure you that no one ever loved the Jewish people more. It’s not for nothing our shul was called Ahavath Israel [Love of Israel]. But those were heady times, the future was full of hazard, and it was many years before the Zionist dream began to detach itself from condemnation of the galut.

When Moses raised his fist against the Egyptian, he had not yet become Moshe Rabbeinu—our teacher—or had he? Certainly he did not cease to be an avenger of his people; at times in their wandering he had to be a warrior. So did Joshua after him, and Deborah and David after them. There were many victories, and ultimately defeat. But the fists of the Jews were raised again and again against their enemies. Saul slew thousands, David tens of thousands.

After the second Jewish revolt against Rome, the time of Bar Kochba and Akiva, this would not be the case for seventeen centuries. There were exceptions, of course. Shmuel Ha-Nagid, Samuel the Prince, was the mid-eleventh century Defender of Granada, entrusted with the command of a Muslim army, yet writing great Hebrew poems invoking the G-d of Jacob in his battles. Jews fought for whatever nation they were exiled to, as much as they were allowed. The story is told about the Battle of Waterloo, that a Dutch Jewish artillery man yelled Shema Yisroel at the top of his lungs whenever he fired his cannon; if he should, God forbid, kill a Jew on the other side, he did not want the man to leave this world without the Shema. Jews fought valiantly in the American Revolution and on both sides in the Civil War.

Yet the Jews in their millennial exile did not in general make martial or even physical prowess their métier; they focused in the main on the life of the mind, and to great effect. But in the year 1882 it was possible for a well-known author to write in a popular magazine, American Hebrew,

“What we need to-day, second only to the necessity of closer union and warmer patriotism, is the building up of our national, physical force. If the new Ezra rose to lead our people to a secure house of refuge, whence would he recruit the farmers, masons, carpenters, artisans, competent to perform the arduous, practical pioneer work of founding a new nation?”

This author recalls a passage in the Tanakh:

“We read of the Jews who attempted to rebuild the Temple using the trowel with one hand, while with the other they warded off the blows of the molesting enemy. Where are the warrior-mechanics to-day equal to either feat?…For nineteen hundred years we have been living on an idea; our spirit has been abundantly fed, but our body has been starved…

“Let our first care to-day be the re-establishment of our physical strength, the reconstruction of our national organism, so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded, and where it cannot be commanded, it may be enforced.”

    Can you guess who this author was? She was Emma Lazarus, whose words of welcome to the world’s suffering masses are emblazoned in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty. This young Sephardic woman in New York was calling for nothing less than a rebirth of the Jewish body. Not incidentally, it was a time when Jews who could not defend themselves were being murdered in Russian pogroms. And at that exact moment, the first modern Jewish settlement in Israel–Zikhron Ya’akov--was being founded, to be followed a few years later by Yemin Moshe. The Memorial of Jacob, and The Right Hand of Moses.

The rebirth of the body became inseparable from the dream of Tzion, Zion. When the great Spanish rabbi and poet Yehuda Halevi sang centuries earlier, “I am in the west, but my heart is in the east,” he did not see himself as one of Emma’s warrior-builders. He dreamed instead of the pilgrimage of a lifetime, to mourn and pray at the Kotel in far-off Yerushalayim. Without such devout yearning, there would have been no Israel, but more was needed.

Max Nordau, a German-Jewish physician, picked up Emma’s banner. In 1903 he wrote the famous article “Muskeljudentums”—“Muscle-Jewry”–a blend of theory and advocacy, calling for a re-creation of Jewish bodies and explaining how to make it happen. Dr. Nordau’s diagnosis?

“For too long, all too long have we been engaged in the mortification of our own flesh.

“Or rather, to put it more precisely—others did the killing for us. Their extraordinary success is measured by hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses in the ghettos, in the churchyards, along the highways of medieval Europe …We would have preferred to develop our bodies rather than to kill them or to have them—figuratively and literally–killed by others…”

    For Nordau, the conditions Jews lived in had worn their bodies down for centuries:

“All the elements of Aristotelian physics—light, air, water, and earth—were measured out to us very sparingly. In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly; the fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers, which rose in crescendo only when our martyrs on the stakes cried out their dying prayers in the face of their executioners. But now, all coercion has become a memory of the past, and at least we are allowed space enough for our bodies to live again. Let us take up or oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.”

    With this rallying cry, he founded the Maccabee and Bar Kochba Clubs, to strengthen young Jews throughout Europe.

For years he had been Theodor Herzl’s ally, but they disagreed on one key point. Nordau the doctor thought it would take three centuries for the Jews to prepare for nationhood. He literally believed that biological evolution would be needed first, to revive the lost Jewish bodily health and strength. Herzl the visionary begged to differ. In a famous diary entry in 1897, back from the First Zionist Congress, he wrote, “At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.” Exactly fifty years and eighty-seven days later the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. So it was revolution, not evolution–a tremendous triumph of mind over body.

A stunning poster announced the Fifth Zionist Congress. At the lower left, an aged, yarmulka-ed Jew in a long robe is holding his head and sighing into his beard. His eyes are closed, so he doesn’t see the angel standing behind him, doesn’t even feel the divine hand on his shoulder. With his other hand, the angel points up and across to where a young chalutz, a pioneer walking behind an ox, plows toward the sun. The galut Jew, though shielded by the Angel’s wing, sits in darkness, but the pioneer is bathed in radiant light. Below, the legend says, “V’sekhezena eyneynu b’shuvcha l’Tzion b’rachamim”—“And may our eyes behold your return to Zion in mercy.”

Every Jew who knew the Sh’moneh Esrei and read the poster would mentally complete the prayer, blessing G-d, ha-makhazir Shekinaso l’Tzion—who restores His Shekhina, his divine presence, to Zion. Even at the dawn of the dream, the Zionists understood: not without G-d, but not with God alone. Not without the depths of tradition and faith, but also not without radical new thinking that could make a revolution in the body. Not without the books, but not without the land. Not without the pen, but also not without the plow, the trowel, and the sword.

The late, great Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, in his book, Patuach, Sagur, Patuach—Open, Closed, Open—praised the pioneers. In the graceful translation by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld,

    I want to sing for those who had the voice of Jacob

      and the hands of Esau,

    the color of Jacob’s eyes and Esau’s smell of a field.

This, perhaps, is the miracle of the rebirth of the Jewish body: the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau, Jacob’s eyes and Esau’s smell of a field—not through a forgivable subterfuge this time, but through sheer force of will.

Another Midrash quoted by Rabbi Berzon, on Shabbat Ki Tissa itself, says that when Moses finished writing the Torah there was something he was puzzled about; he touched his pen to his head, and the remaining ink caused the radiance. Thus humility in the quest for great knowledge lights the world—and yet the light itself is dangerous.

We know about the ancient achievements of the Jews, and the gifts they gave humanity, but that was just the beginning. Today the voice of Jacob has been raised to the level of the Nobel Prize for Literature in eight different languages. The eyes of Jacob have seen the secrets of the universe and found out the cures for dread diseases. And the radiant faces of the children of Moses light the paths of invention and commerce, theory and practice, poetry and mathematics, economy and science. Despite our stumbling in the darkness, our many and serious blunders, our stiff-necked straying from the right even as we ourselves understand it, the dream of a Jewish people that is a light unto the nations becomes more real every year. We are not the only people with great gifts, or the only people with great historical vulnerabilities. But we do have an almost unique combination of the two. So unfortunately, to keep the dream real, it has been and will be imperative for Jews to raise their hands, their fists, in self-defense.

Blessed be the eyes, the voice, and the hands of the Jewish people in Israel, in America, and throughout the world. And we say, Amen.

*A not-very-imposing mechitza, not shown in the photo, was added a few years ago. It’s a low, translucent structure which, as Rabbi Wohlberg put it to me, is meant as a reminder of separation more than a barrier. For the non-Orthodox who believe that a mechitza is always a sign of women’s lesser status, objections remain.

I have to say that when Israel’s Interior Ministry announced an approved plan to build 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, smack in the middle of Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, I felt insulted. I’m not just saying that I thought it was a very stupid thing to do. That is obvious.

Even Netanyahu basically said that. I’m saying I felt insulted. As an American.

And when I heard that Biden not only condemned the announcement on his own and President Obama’s behalf, but deliberately showed up ninety minutes late to a state dinner with the Netanyahus, trading insult for insult, I felt, as an American, glad.

I’m not just talking about judgments here, I’m talking about feelings. Anyone who knows me or my writing knows that I am a loyal supporter of Israel under almost any circumstances, and that I resist the temptation to criticize Israel, also under almost any circumstances. But I am an American first.

The announcement was a slap in the face to the Vice President of my country while he was making the highest-level visit yet made by the Obama administration, at the moment he was talking with the Palestinian leadership, having already met with Israel’s leaders and saying at a joint press conference with Netanyahu that there is “no space” between Israel and the United States.

If Israel could not see a way to avoid such an insult, I have to question whether it is truly interested in either its friendship with the United States or a peaceful resolution to the conflict. I always say that Jews in the U.S. should not tell Israel what to do because we do not put ourselves on the line there, and so we don’t have the gut reactions needed to make the right decisions.

Now I’m saying that I have consulted my gut as an American. It tells me that I and my country have been disrespected, and that makes me feel angry. And you can bet your last shekel that if I feel that way, so will many other Americans, including many American Jews.

Nonetheless, this morning Joe Biden gave a speech at Tel Aviv University full of warmth and friendship. The BBC, not exactly known for pro-Israel bias, carried a long live segment of it, in which Biden described learning admiration for Israel at his Catholic father’s knee. (Also this morning, the BBC had a long segment on a new documentary about the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss, in which the children and grandchildren of the filmmaker—one of them half Jewish–showed continuing condemnation and shame over their connection to him.) 

In the televised part of his speech, Biden also described his first visit to Israel as a young Senator, when he met then-Prime Minister Golda Meir (“we claimed her as our own”) and was treated to a lecture on Israel’s security. It was 1973. Right after the conversation, at a media photo-op, without turning her head from the reporters, Golda said, “Don’t look so worried.” He said he was worried. “We have a secret weapon,” she said. Strategic pause. “We have nowhere else to go.”

He admitted thinking she had invented this line for him, but it doesn’t matter. Between Golda (who hugged him “like my mother would”) and his own father (“who you would refer to as a righteous Christian”), he formed an indelible impression of Israel’s and the Jews’ vulnerability, and their right to a homeland of their own. “This place, it gets in your blood, it never really lets you go.”

As he put it later in the speech–in reference to Iran’s “existential strategic threat”—“Trust me, we get that.” He vowed that the U.S. would ensure that Israel continues to have a “qualitative” edge over its enemies.

But he also said that peace between Israel and “a viable, independent Palestinian state is profoundly in Israel’s interest.” And that, “the demographic realities make it increasingly difficult for Israel to remain both a Jewish homeland and a democratic country.” And that, “this is about both preserving your identity and achieving the security you deserve.”

He also reminded his audience that there is a better negotiating partner on the other side than there has ever been before: “Who has there been better to date, to have the prospect of settling this with? But instead, two days ago the Israeli government announced it would advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. I realize this is a very touchy subject in Israel as well as in my own country. But because that decision, in my view, undermined the trust required for productive negotiations, I — and at the request of President Obama–condemned it immediately and unequivocally.”

He was far too gracious to remind the audience that he and his country had been insulted by Israel, and he ended on an up-beat. But time is not on Israel’s side. The day may yet come when Abba Eban’s famous remark about the Palestinians—“They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”—will apply equally or more to Israelis. That, my gut tells me, will not be a good day for the friendship between Israel and America.

The New York Times headlined its obituary, “Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and

Partisan, Dies.” In a sense the phrase “Jewish Poet and Partisan” says it all, and certainly the obituary was respectful and moving—what better tribute to a poet than to present his own words?

But in another sense enough can never be said about this hero of the Jewish people, one of that brave band of Vilna fighters in the forest who resisted the greatest and most powerful evil in history. And there can never be enough quotations, translations, or editions of the work of this greatest of all Yiddish poets. As Isaac  Bashevis Singer wrote in the Yiddish-language Forverts of Sutzkever’s magnificent “Siberia,” his was a classical and universal poetry, not just a Jewish take on literature and life.

I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting him in Tel Aviv in 1985, in his space among the offices of the Histadrut labor organization, from which he launched and edited Di Goldene Keit—The Golden Chain, the leading Yiddish-language journal of literature and social thought.

We talked in my few words of Yiddish, his few of English, and then in our more-or-less mutually intelligible half-way decent French, mostly about American poets. We shared an admiration for Robert Lowell, not an easy poet, but one of the century’s greatest. A few months later I had the opportunity, in a letter published in The New York Times Book Review, to inform that august publication that, contrary to the claim in one of their articles, Sutzkever was not yet dead but alive and well and writing beautiful poems.

I got his permission to translate (or at least imitate) his poems about Africa, which had moved me immensely, not only because it was so counterintuitive to read poems in Yiddish about Africa, but because they were transcendentally beautiful and evocative. I had lived in a remote area of Botswana for two years, and I resonated strongly to these poems. Finally, I had the good fortune to have some of my versions of his poems published in a special edition, gorgeously designed and illustrated by Ed Colker. It is the publication of which I am most proud.

Ed, a fluent Yiddish speaker who had been Sutzkever’s friend for decades, first contacted me after reading these pages about the poet in my book Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews:

For better and for worse, Avraham Sutzkever contains within his superb life the whole of twentieth century Ashkenazic history.1 And as one of the era’s great poets in any language, he gave life to it in words. If he had not been trapped in Yiddish, he would be universally recognized as a leading modern poet, but he would not leave his mother-tongue. He was born just before World War I in Smorgon, near Vilna. When German troops burned the town, his family moved to Siberia–not the Siberia of Stalin’s Gulags, but a strange and wondrous landscape of sun, snow, and ice. Exile, yes, but that was nothing new for Jews. To a small, dreamy boy who had known nothing else, it was magical. Years later, with his poetic gift in full strength, he would write a long poem called “Siberia,” later published with drawings by Marc Chagall. “Sunset over blue and icy roads,”it opens,

My soul filled with sweet and sleepy colours.

Down in the valley a little hut,

Covered with the snow of the sunset, is ablaze with light.

Shadows of trees swing strangely across window-frames,

magic sledges jingle round in circles.

In the tiny loft the cooing doves

spell out my name. Beneath the ice,

sparkling with lightning crystals,

the River Irtish, half-awake, struggles along its course.

In the dome of space, dreamed up from silence,

a child of seven years moves in a world of his own making.2

As Chagall said in his preface, this is “Jewish poetry of a new kind.”3 The gifted translator, Jacob Sonntag, said of the long work, “The poem does not once refer to Jews or specifically Jewish ideas of any kind. Nor, for that matter, is the child’s experience burdened with the memory of the war and the flight of his parents.”4

Yet the poem was written in 1935, in the heart of Jewish Vilna, in the eye of the gathering storm. But Sutzkever took himself out and away from all that to a childhood memory ablaze with light and beauty. The only sad part of the poem is an elegy for his father, who died in Siberia when Sutzkever was nine. The stanza, “In a Siberian Wood,” calls up a time two years before his father’s death:

…I hear my father say: “Come, my child,

let us go to the forest to cut wood!”

Our white colt is harnessed to a sledge.

The day shines bright in the flashing ax

and the flaming snow is cut with sharpened sun-knives.

Sparkling dust—our breath! We leave

through a sunny web, speeding across steppes,

past sleeping bears, to the sound of clicking hoofs.

All the stars which yesterday were shaken from the sky,

rest frozen now on the ground.

His father’s death shaped his life, and he continued to write about him:

A shade takes down the violin from the wall.

And thin, thin, thin snow-sounds fall upon my head.

Hush. That’s my father playing,

And the sounds—graved on the air—

Like bits of silver breath in a frost

Ranging blue over the snow moonlike glassed.5

He said of his father’s death, “That moment the poet in me was born.”6 Sutzkever came from a long line of rabbis; his father had been ordained but did not practice. In his memory his father collapsed while playing the violin, the haunting Hasidic melody composed by Rabbi Levi Yitzkhak of Berdichev, addressing God with one repeated syllable, du, du, du—“You, you, you.”

This death sent the family back to Vilna, where he lost his much-loved older sister to a fever. He went to a Yiddish school and began to write poetry, first in Hebrew, then Yiddish. But at sixteen he burned his poems and started again with a new commitment. A group of poets, “Young Vilna,” were crafting a new Yiddish and would enter its literary canon. But Sutzkever was rejected; Siberian snowscapes and peasant romances did not fit the pretensions of urban poets trying to join the mainstream of European literature. Ultimately he would be viewed as one of the greatest Yiddish poets; for now writing sustained him as the terror closed in.

Another Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, described him: “A thin slim youngster, tripping along the narrow twisted little Vilna streets. His steps are light. He does not walk. He floats. He floats all over the humps and bumps of the town. In his imagination everything is symmetrically rearranged. Created anew. Not for nothing he tells himself to learn from the Creator of all how to create poems.”7 For the great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, part of Young Vilna himself, Sutzkever “put to himself poetic problems like mathematical problems, and he was delighted when he solved them…It was Sutzkever whom Fate put into the Vilna Ghetto, made him live in Hell and come out alive…[He] saw everything he had believed in and had loved trampled under the German jackboot—and he stood the test, came out unbroken, whole.”8

He married as World War II broke out and the Russians occupied Vilna. He published a book of poems, “the most exquisite crystal of the Yiddish language and, perhaps, the last Yiddish book printed in Europe before the Holocaust.”9 But the German assault crushed Vilna, and about 100,000 of the city’s Jews were murdered by systematic shooting and buried in mass graves in the dull suburb of Ponar. Lithuanians, staunch aides of the Nazis, took Sutzkever and the Vilna Rav into the hills—they happened to be arrested on the same day–and made them dig their own graves. The Lithuanians cocked their rifles behind the two men—the fierce young secular poet and the old bearded rabbi. Sutzkever recalled, “When they ordered us to put our hands over our eyes, I understood that they were going to shoot us. And I remember as if it were now: when I put my fingers on my eyes, I saw birds fluttering…I never saw birds flying so slowly, I had a great aesthetic joy in seeing the slow-slow motion of their wings between my fingers.”10 But the Lithuanians fired over their heads and, having tired of the game, took them back to the ghetto.

Sutzkever wrote and wrote, and he and some literary friends risked their lives to save archived Yiddish manuscripts—they claimed they were burning them to heat their freezing rooms. Once he hid in a coffin to elude passing Germans:

Or let it be a boat

On stormy waves.

Let it be a cradle…

I still sing my word.11

As the Vilna Jews were relentlessly murdered, Sutzkever lost almost everyone he loved. “I went to see my mother. She told me the glad news that my wife had given birth in the Ghetto Hospital. My mother had forgotten Murer’s decree that children born in the ghetto must be killed. The next day the child was gone…Unable to compose myself after this calamity with my child another tragedy followed. I went to my mother’s home and my mother was gone.” She had been taken to Ponar during the night.

Still, his was an indomitable spirit. The poem to his dead baby gives the boy mystical power:

You—the seed of my every dream…

who came from the earth’s ends

wondrous as an unseen storm,

to draw, flood two together

to shape you in delight:–

Why have you darkened creation,

why have you shut your eyes

and left me outside begging

bound to a world swept with snow…

In this cold world he imagines swallowing the tiny boy to warm him, but demurs:

I don’t deserve to be your grave.

I will let you slip

into the beckoning snow,

the snow—my first holiday,

and you will sink

a sunset sliver

into its still and deep

and bear my greeting up

into the frosty shoots of grass12

Even then the Siberian landscape comforted him. In “My Mother,” he depicted her praying on Friday night, “quivering in the moonlight on the prayer book.” His faith kindled, he wrote, “Your devotion is like the warm challah/you prayerfully feed the doves.” Her bullet wounds are roses, she blesses him with her last breath. Then, “The shots clatter./She falls like a dove on the throne of the sun.”13 In another poem, “The Shoe Wagon,” he recognizes her best shoes, the ones she only wore on Shabbes, among the thousands of pairs being carted from Ponar to Germany.14

Still writing sustained him. He referred to the poems as “burnt pearls,” still reflecting light, the only thing visible in the ashes. “To a Friend” reads in part,

Unbroken friend

on the barbed wire,–

you pressed a bit of bread

to your heart.

Forgive me my hunger

and forgive me my brazen nerve,–

I’ve bitten through your bread

your bread flecked with blood…

Quieted comrade,

I take you in and live…

If like you I fall

on the barbed wire—

may someone gulp my word

as I your bread.15

Throughout his life words would be like bread to him, and he would go on recording every meaningful experience. He and his wife Freydke joined the underground led by the Jewish hero Abba Kovner–also a great poet, but in Hebrew. They planned a ghetto rebellion, but well-organized opposition from Jewish “leaders” who worked with the Nazis, prevented the uprising. Sutzkever and others escaped through the sewers to the forest, and attempted to join the partisans. But the Polish underground was slaughtering Jews in the forests; even in Byelorussia the partisan units disarmed Jews and forced them into menial service roles. Sutzkever’s poetry was already known in the Soviet Union, however, and the Soviet-Jewish critic Ilya Ehrenburg had praised it highly.

By coincidence, the president of the Moscow-based Lithuanian government-in-exile had once translated Sutzkever into Lithuanian. He arranged for Sutzkever and Freydke to be allowed to travel to Moscow. Repeatedly shot at by Germans and anti-Semitic partisans, walking through a live mine field strewn with human bodies and animal carcasses, they somehow managed to cross the German lines. After the war they returned to Vilna, where they salvaged Jewish cultural treasures and established a museum. It was later closed by the Soviets, but the Sutzkevers managed to get to Israel in 1947. He fought for Israel’s independence and defended it in several wars. He wrote poems about picking blackberries at night with the forest fighters, about his first inspiring encounter with Jerusalem, and about the Negev and Sinai Deserts, as eerily beautiful as the snowscapes of Siberia.

Some of his most beautiful poems are about Africa, which he toured for several months in 1950. The collection, called Elephants at Night, opens,

All rushing, all sounds sleep.

Terror sleeps under seven streams.

And the elephant sleeps so soundly,

You could cut off his tail…

Many years later, he was still strangely moved by African echoes:

Remembering three flamingos at Lake Victoria

That stay for me unaltered in their splendor:

Three strings taut on a wave, as an arc

Curves over them, the great arc of a rainbow.

Fiddle or lyre will not bring forth such music:

Such a three-stringed instrument is not known to be.

Its master had an impulse to test his creation,

To play the living strings with his own hand…

Yet it is the image in his own mind that fascinates him most:

…They glisten in their unchanging revelatory pose,

On their unchanging wave, like a pink dawn…

Once in a lifetime such a gift is given,

Intended to be seen, and to be heard.16

This was written in the 1960s, and almost forty years later his poetic career has not yet ended. Although Hebrew had by then eclipsed Yiddish as the main Jewish language, the reigning Labor party had a sense of noblesse oblige and supported Sutzkever’s periodical, Di Goldene Keyt—The Golden Chain—for half a century. He continued to edit it until 1996. He once said that Yiddish and Hebrew are the two eyes of the Jewish people. It is an apt metaphor; you can see out of one eye, but without depth.

1. Leftwich, Joseph. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet. New York/London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1971.

2. Sutzkever, Abraham. Siberia: A Poem by Abraham Sutzkever, with a Letter on the Poem and Drawings by Marc Chagall. Translated by Jacob Sonntag. London/New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961., p. 17.

3. Ibid., p. 5.

4. Ibid., p. 13

5. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 29.

6. Sutzkever, A. Selected Poetry and Prose. Translated by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991., p. 166.

7. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 43.

8. Ibid., p. 42.

9. Harshav, Benjamin. “Sutzkever: Life and Poetry.” In A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991., p. 16.

10. Ibid., p. 17.

11. Leftwich. Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet., p. 48

12. Sutzkever, Abraham. Poetishe Verk, Band Eyns: Lider Un Poemes Fun Di Yorn 1934-47. Tel Aviv, Israel: Yovel, 1963., pp. 278-9.

13. Ibid., pp. 265-8.

14. Ibid., p. 275-6.

15. Sutzkever, Abraham. Di Feshtung: Lider Un Poemes Geshribn in Vilner Geto Un in Vald 1941-1944. New York: Yiddisher Kultur Farband, 1945., p. 50.

16. Sutzkever, Abraham. Tzviling-Brider: Lider Fun Togebikh 1974-85. Tel Aviv, Israel: Farlag Di Goldene Keyt, 1986., p. 129.

I put this question to my “Anthropology of the Jews” class when it met for the first time on Thursday. They came up with some interesting answers.

The first, surprising to me—it’s a class that always draws a broad spectrum of Jews and others—the first definition offered was the halakhic one, the one according to Jewish law: a Jew is somebody who has a Jewish mother. I had to explain that this is not the only way to be Jewish under Jewish law—kosher conversion being the other.

But I wanted to know if they thought this was a racist, or at least racial, definition. They didn’t say so, but it’s hard to get around. Kosher conversion is a pretty big hurdle—you have to study for a long time, learn a lot, and pledge to follow Jewish practices like the kosher and Sabbath laws among many others.

Nevertheless, many people have joined the Jews over the centuries. In fact, the genetic evidence proves two things: the Jews of all nations have something in common in their genes, which links them to their Lebanese and Jordanian Arab cousins; and the Jews of all nations look at least somewhat like the people they have lived among for generations.

Which tells you that genes have flowed in, but not freely. Becoming a Jew-by-choice is a pretty serious matter and it ensures a certain commitment. Orthodox Rabbis, including those who determine the definition of a Jew in Israel, cast a pretty jaundiced eye on the many conversions triggered by marriage. As my friend the Rav (Rabbi Emanuel Feldman) likes to say, it should be about Moses, not Melanie.

Moses, however, (the Bible tells us) married a daughter of a priest of Midian, so that presumably was about both Moses and Melanie (or rather, Moses and Zipporah). Joseph married the daughter of the Egyptian priest Potiphar, whose wife had unsuccessfully tried to seduce the young man and then accused him of rape. Yet Jews have for centuries blessed their sons in the name of Joseph’s sons with Potiphar’s daughter. Esther saves the Jews of Persia by being married to the emperor, whom she hasn’t even bothered to inform that she is Jewish.

And of course, Ruth, the most famous Jew-by-choice–although she stems from the tribe of Moab, sworn permanent enemies of Israel—marries not one but (after being widowed) a second Jewish man, and through the second (a rich community leader) becomes the great-grandmother of King David and, through him, the ancestor of the Messiah.

Of course, the rabbis will tell you, it was different then. For one thing, in Biblical times Jewishness descended through the father, as it does in many religions; for another, Zipporah, Ruth, and Potiphar’s daughter were true Jews-by-choice. After a certain point the law was changed to make descent matrilineal, perhaps because many Jewish women were raped by outsiders.

In any case the Reform movement now recognizes descent through either parent, and this causes no end of difficulties in and outside of Israel. For example, a local Jewish high school here in Atlanta catered to Reform and Conservative families. The more traditional parents were worried that their kids might be dating Jews from more liberal families who were not considered Jewish according to the strict definition. In Israel, whether or not you are considered a Jew affects many aspects of your life.

Then there is the reverse-inheritance definition: A Jew is someone who has Jewish children. Once when Shimon Peres, now President of Israel, spoke in Atlanta, he said he liked that definition, but that as he got older he was thinking of amending it to: A Jew is someone who has Jewish grandchildren. The childless shouldn’t be penalized, but if you do have children, the logic is almost ironclad; what better proof than that you have passed it on?

Of course, the students also came up with definitions based on belief (for example, in one God) and practice (following Jewish law). And I reminded them of the really racial definition in the Nuremberg laws: a Jew is someone who had a Jewish grandparent. This law tragically informed countless Jews who thought they were German that leaving Jewishness behind may not be up to you.

Then there is the old wag’s definition that a Jew is anyone who says he is, because who would be crazy enough to claim it if it weren’t true?

But actually—all the romantic Melanie’s (and Michael’s) of the past notwithstanding—it has never been so easy to choose to be Jewish, because the Jews have always been under pressure, if not under siege. So it took a certain amount of character to join them. And that is part of the reason for Jewish success: Their imports were better than their exports.

News that Egypt is building a secret underground wall to separate itself from the Gaza Strip and its troubled people is full of interesting implications. This wall, said to be half built already, will be seven miles long and sixty feet deep. All concerned are denying the news (of course), but progress on the wall appears to be real.

Designed and implemented with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it is made of impenetrable reinforced steel that has been tested and proven to be bomb-resistant and impossible to drill or cut through. It is made up of slabs that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The wall will slash through and block a vast network of tunnels that Palestinians use to smuggle many items of everyday life they have been deprived of by the Israeli-Egyptian blockade—oh, and also to smuggle terrorists and their increasingly sophisticated weapons.

Egypt initially condemned Israel’s own security barrier, but now it sings a different tune, saying that anyone has the right to erect a security fence to protect his own property and people. Egypt has already done that and strengthened the fence above ground between itself and Gaza, since a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians who broke through parts of the barrier and streamed into Egypt in early 2008.

This influx included Hamas terrorists who were plotting against targets within Egypt, as well as many radicalized Gazans who wanted to ally themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood, a longstanding Islamist threat to the Egyptian government. Egypt obviously does not want these sorts of Palestinian refugees, and it did its best to send all the hundreds of thousands of them back.

But in fact, it has never wanted any of the Palestinian people. Egypt ruled over the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, and in those nearly two decades did not lift a finger to absorb any of the Palestinians into Egyptian society. This was in contrast to Jordan, which did admit many Palestinians in the same period, during which it controlled the West Bank.

And of course, it is in stark contrast to the stance and actions of Israel toward the Jewish refugees who were driven from almost every Arab country in the wake of Israel’s war of independence. There were hundreds of thousands of them, forced out of lands and nations where they had dwelt for many centuries, and struggling little Israel absorbed them all.

But the Gazans, many of whom were refugees from Israel’s first war with Egypt, wanted to enter that vast and populous country but could not find a new home among their Egyptian brethren, even while Egypt ruled over them. Egypt also steadfastly refused to take Gaza back under its wing when Israel gave back the Sinai in exchange for peace in 1979.

After the Oslo accords in the early nineties the Gazans were supposed to rule themselves, but the Palestinian Authority never really succeeded in establishing a government there, and after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, elections there led to civil war, and Hamas brutally drove its Palestinian rivals out of the territory.

Nevertheless, the world blames only Israel, which has continued to try to enforce a blockade around Gaza, turning it into what many view as a huge prison. However, to the extent that it is a prison, the guards have always been both Israeli and Egyptian. It’s just that Egypt’s commitment has been rather indifferent at times. Until now.

This enormous new steel barrier will not stop all smuggling, but it will slow it down. Gazans can tunnel deeper than sixty feet, but it will take a while, and all the currently existing tunnels will be abolished–not by Israel, but by Egypt.

One lesson here is that the Middle East is a dangerous place for everyone in it. Extremism such as exists in Gaza (fomented by Iran) and Southern Lebanon threatens not just Israel, but Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the emirates, and of course also Egypt.

Egypt is reacting accordingly, and its response shows a strange similarity to Israel’s own attempts to protect itself. Perhaps in time there will be echoes of sympathy as well as wall-building between these two old enemies, and perhaps that sympathy can warm up what for thirty years has been a pretty cold peace.

I had the rare privilege yesterday of having lunch with Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, the retired and revered spiritual leader of what was then the only Orthodox synagogue in Atlanta. He served that community for four decades, expanding it greatly, often bringing lapsed Jews back into the fold.

His son Ilan took over the pulpit from him when he moved to Israel, quite a few years ago now, so that the Broadway Café, a kosher restaurant a pleasant walk from his old shul, was full of people only some of whom recognized him. When I introduced him to the waitress, he said, “You blew my cover!”

I also waved to Rabbi Ilan, who hadn’t seen us, and Rabbi Emanuel told me about the time his father (the seventh generation of rabbis in his family, Emanuel being the eighth, Ilan the ninth) came to visit Atlanta from their original home in Baltimore. A congregant came up to the older visitor and asked in a friendly way who he was. “I’m his father,” said the visitor, pointing at Rabbi Emanuel on the pulpit. “Are you also a rabbi?” the congregant wanted to know. “No,” came the answer. “I’m the rabbi. He is also a rabbi.”

Humor runs in this family along with rabbinical gifts. When Ilan extricated himself from some unavoidable pastoral chat and came over to say hello, I told him I’d just heard the “also a rabbi” story. “No doubt you’re familiar with it.” Ilan nodded and said with a wry smile, “It’s number 23.”

That’s what it’s like with Rabbi Emanuel, one minute you’re laughing, the next you’re discussing the Shoah, or the Jewish people weeping by the rivers of Babylon. I wanted to know what he thought about the seeming contradiction between Psalm 137, which ends, “O daughter of Babylon, soon to be laid waste . . . Happy is he who will grasp and dash your little ones against the rock,” and the advice of Jeremiah during the same captivity, “Seek the peace of the city wherein I have caused you to be taken captive.”

“Contradictions are part of the story,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be contradictions?”

Why indeed? Life is so full of joy and pain we sometimes don’t know which one to embrace first, and we usually don’t have the choice. You would think that the Rav and I have very little in common. Okay, I was raised Orthodox, but he knows I am not observant. He never tries to persuade me to be anything other than what I am.

And when you come down to it, we do have a lot in common. Both of us are trying to figure out the human place in this crazy world, both of us laugh on the verge of tears, both of us think long and hard and yet know there are many things we’ll never understand.

And neither of us can be happy for very long without scribbling something. I brought along a copy of my latest, The Jewish Body, as well as the copies of three of his recent books he had sent me from Israel. He had brought along a fourth, and he has another on the way in a few months time.

So there was his stack of recent books and my puny little one. Not that many people make me feel lazy, and I have to either love him or hate him, so I love him.

I’ve written before in this space about his first book, a stunning diary of the Six Day War as experienced by his family, living there at the time and refusing all advice to leave. We’ve also had an interesting exchange of views about the role of women. But I’m approaching this stack of his books with relish.

The Shul Without a Clock, the one he just gave me, is a collection of essays (Tales Out of Shul was his previous one) about the whole experience of Jewishness as lived by an Orthodox rabbi. The title essay yearns meditatively for a synagogue where worldly time is irrelevant.

In “The German Soldier,” which brought tears to my eyes, he sits on an El Al plane stopping over in Munich and has vivid “hallucinations”—would that they were only that—of the dreadful details of the Shoah, while gazing out the window at the young, blond German in uniform who is protecting this Jewish plane with his automatic rifle.

“Brave young German soldier, protecting me so diligently out there in the snow and wind, forgive me…my mind wanders. I know that you were not there in 1944…forgive me my hallucinations, you who are my present guardian and protector.” Yet he cannot bring himself to leave the plane and breathe the Munich air.

“Of Pennants and Penitents” is a classic essay on the intersection of Yiddishkeit in the highest sense and the American Jewish boy’s–even the boy who has grown up to be an Orthodox rabbi–love of baseball. During one of Rabbi Emanuel’s visits to Atlanta, “The Enticer” comes to him in the form of a congregant with World Series tickets (behind third base!) and he succumbs.

So he’s rooting for the Braves along with sixty thousand other fans, except he has a black yarmulke and a big grey beard. Temptation draws him into the spirit of the game and then, lo and behold, a pop fly is hanging in the air over his head.

“Suddenly I am eighteen years old again…I leap from the ground, reach backward for the ball, and feel the satisfying slap into my outstretched palm. I clutch it and tumble down into the row of seats behind me, where a dozen hands and arms break my fall.” He is berating himself when he hears the cheers, “Great, Rabbi…Attaboy…Sign him up.” This is America, where a good catch is a good catch, and can even be good for the Jews, but he dreads facing his former congregants back at the shul.

Of course, they have seen it on TV, and the Rav is the hero of Orthodox Atlanta. But there is still Orthodox Jerusalem to return to. Oy. He takes comfort in the belief that they won’t know. They do, and some of them are impressed, but snide too. How can this revered man, the descendant of rabbis, be an “athlete”—something “between barbarian and lout”? He promises himself he will resist temptation on his next Atlanta visit.

“But if perchance the Enticer works his cunning on me once again and I fail the test and somehow find myself at the game, I humbly pray for two things: (1) that no balls, fair or foul, come my way; and (2) if one does happen to come my way and I instinctively leap for it, that I have the good sense at the very least to drop the ball.”

After lunch, I pulled out my iPhone and found the Birkhat ha’mazon—the grace after meals—on my i-Siddur. Even the Rav was impressed with that, although he of course needed no text. So many threads of conversation during that lunch, so much that I learned. The highlight yesterday was probably when he was talking about the prayer, Mi chamokha that ends, “osay feleh”—“Doing wonders.”

“You know,” he said, “feleh in Hebrew is Aleph spelled backwards. So the very first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, when you turn it around, spells wonder. This teaches us that the first thing in Judaism, and Jewish life, is wonder.”

As I walked the Rav back to his old shul,  now his son’s, through the lovely autumn day, he said, “I’m eighty-two, and I’m still vertical.” I dearly hope he will remain vertical and funny and wise for a good long time to come. And should I see him catch a ball on TV, I will be the first to stand up and cheer.

Wonder, after all, is wonder.