I don't go for blowing Temple Emanu-El's trumpet, so to speak, but I cannot resist bringing your attention to David Brooks of the New York Times calling out Professor Moshe Halbertal's article in the New Republic as one of the finest magazine essays of the year. Brooks wrote in today's column:
After the Israeli incursion into Gaza, the U.N. produced the Goldstone Report, a tendentious and simple-minded account of Israeli tactics. But the report at least produced a sophisticated response, “The Goldstone Illusion,” by Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic.
Here’s a typical problem: Hamas fires rockets from apartment buildings. Israel calls the residents of the buildings to warn them a counterattack is coming. Hamas then escorts the residents to the roof, knowing Israeli drones will not fire on crowded roofs. Israel then deploys a “roof-knocking missile,” a weapon designed to scare people off roofs in preparation for an attack. Halbertal wrestles with the moral boundaries that should guide this kind of warfare.
For those who came to our scholar in residence Shabbaton this fall with Professor Halbertal, this is all old news.
Without comment (yet), let me direct you to another recent article--different subject, different author, but also of deep relevance. Here is Timothy Garton Ash's article on historical reckoning at Jedwabne and the deep recesses of the human soul: As at Auschwitz, the gates of hell are built and torn down by human hearts. This killing in Poland 1941 by Poles against their Polish Jewish neighbors during Nazi occupation has lost none of its power to shock. It gives one pause before any easy assumptions we may make about man's essential goodness or any other trait. Reading this piece made me search for the words of the great Polish Jewish writer, intellectual and former dissident Adam Michnik whom I recalled writing something in the New York Times when the revelations of this massacre were made some eight years ago. I was gratified to find them and startled once again by their power--here is the piece. I am a rabbi, not a moral philosopher, nor a politician, but I wholeheartedly endorse the words of Professor Ash when he remarks
what human beings are capable of when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And to be a small town in eastern Poland occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, then by a Soviet-imposed Polish communist regime, is almost a definition of wrong place, wrong time.) Anyone born in a luckier place and time must say: there, but for the grace of geography, go I.
I am also reminded that Zionism was a movement dedicated to the notion of never letting Jewish Geography be a game of chance...
Recent Comments