Rabbi Landsberg's Blog

You heard it here first...

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...

It's been a long time...

It has been a while since I posted to this blog - more than a year, in truth . The reasons I stopped are  shrouded in mystery (otherwise known as preparations for the Chagim (High Holy Days) last year).   I say ashamnu.  I miss this route for contact with Temple Emanu-El folk; my days were often invigorated by a congregant's thoughtful response to a post.  I never cease to be amazed by our congregation's love of learning and the Jewish people.   So today I begin anew.   I have chosen a new design with blooming new flowers to both celebrate the relaunch and to hearten me against the snow outside.     

There is so much going on at Temple Emanu-El, and I  know not everyone can attend it all, given our busy lives.  A few weeks ago we were honoured to have Professor Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University, The Hartman Institute and NYU.  Professor Hartman spoke about many things:  forgiveness in Jewish tradition, and State and Religion in modern Israel.   But Professor Halbertal also spoke about the Goldstone Report and what it means for Israel.  His words are bracing and not always easy reading for those of us who hold Israel dear, but I recommend them to every Jew who wishes to posses a morally grounded but not demagogic understanding of the challenges facing the Israel Defense Forces today.   The presentation that Professor Halbertal made was a preview of a much remarked upon article he has since published in The New Republic - read it here. for an alternative view on Goldstone amongst many may I direct you to this view of Professor David Shulman also of the Hebrew university.

"The Time Has Come to Say These Things.."

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a much talked about interview in Yedhiot Ahronoth.   Read it here.        

Parshat Hashavua....

It is not always so easy in our hectic schedules to keep abreast of the Parshat Hashavua. I keep my pocket sized Torah by my bed for those moments of nocturnal lucidity brought on by parenting. Here is another way -  Lech Lecha (Genesis 12:1 - 17:27) brought to you by G-DCAST. It's quite entrancing.

copyright 2008, g-dcast llc

You can subscribe to the G-DCAST site and receive the Parsha everyweek here.

Late one night ...

Late at night by the side of my computer I am sitting with my daughter Noa - she is very awake.  On the screen courtesy of You-Tube a speech by Barack Obama was playing that I hadn't seen. Noa turns to me and says "That is Barack Obama !" with the special emphasis an endorsement from a three your child brings.  It is a spine tingling moment when your children join you for the grand unfolding story "out there".

Without wishing to reveal my sympathies too clearly please enjoy this video.

"driven down Broadway by a Maccabee"

The chagim are over, and I return to occasional blogging.  Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker attended the preview screening of a  movie based on the extraordinary story of the Jewish partisans  - the Bielski partisans who fought the Nazis from the Belorussian woods. The scale of the valour shown is hard to  imagine.  Gopnik does well when he explains that the director:

"originally considered starting the film...with a scene of a customer finding himself in the back seat of a taxi and realizing that he was being driven by a Bielski, as one might be driven down Broadway by a Maccabee"

Read the rest of the piece here.   The trailer for the movie can be seen here.

Rosh Hashana

Rosh Hashana, originally uploaded by Ayala Moriel.

Shana Tova to you and your families..

My congregation teaches me...

One of the many rewards of congregational life at Temple Emanu-El is the collective learning of my ever-probing congregation.  An example:  here is a link to an article on the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict that was recently forwarded to me.  Probably on my own I would not have come across it.

The piece  is by Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Foreign Minister in the Ehud Barak government.  It is a review (in the magazine Foreign Affairs) of the new Benny Morris  book about the 1948 War of Independence.  Ben-Ami outlines in his review, what was achieved, but also the grisly and ongoing cost of Israeli independence for both Jews and Palestinians. 

Looking clearly at events shrouded in national myth is hard but vitally necessary.  To engage young Jews who are skeptical of any national narrative in today's less credulous age, I must be prepared to talk tachlis, as it were.  The facts of Israel's founding do not undermine my love of Israel nor my Zionism, but they do impact how I speak; my Zionism is grounded in a harder, more nuanced world of power and painful compromise than the softer and simpler world of myth.  Instead of myth, I offer young Emanu-Elniks (together with us older ones) a relationship with Israel unafraid of fact and grounded in a Zionist commitment, that can love the Jewish nation in Israel and beyond "warts and all" .  

So, for your copy of Foreign Affairs left in outside my study door:  thanks, Phil!

Catching up on the Times and tales of Savta

I have been so engrossed in the US election and the preparation for the chagim, that I confess I have not been as diligent as I should be in following events in the wider Jewish world.  Now as I play catch up on the events of the last few weeks, I am stumbling on pieces that I want to share.

Here is an article from the New York Times magazine from a couple weeks ago entitled Evening in Jerusalem. It is a bittersweet recollection of a grandson (now living in Los Angeles) of an Iraqi Jewish  woman in Jerusalem.  Savta (the Hebrew for "grandmother") is from a world away, both metaphorically and literally.

According to my husband, his savta was not dissimilar in circumstance and manner from the  savta described here. She came from Basra Iraq and moved to Abadan Iran as a small child (from where later on she would make aliya on the creation of Israel). She died some months before I met Adam, but I like to imagine we would have enjoyed sharing some Nana tea as we spoke  in broken Hebrew.

the income of Episcopalians and the voting habits of Puerto Ricans ....

For any Jew raised in the U.S., this phrase needs no explanation.  For all others: it refers to the voting habits of US Jews, who refute class based explanations of voting patterns (i.e.,  with above average incomes but wedded to the Democratic party).  Now as the U.S. November elections approach, my attention has returned to developments south of the border.  There have been a spate of articles about how Jews will vote this cycle.  For one example, read this piece about the Democratic primary in Florida: "As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have doubts"

I have always fought the easy syllogism that says: Jews tend to be politically progressive, therefore Judaism is progressivism.  There is much wrong with that position, not least that it is increasingly untrue for a vocal section of the U.S. [and Canadian] Jewish community.  More importantly, however, the civilization of the Jews is something so expansive it can respectably support almost any political stance.  To reduce the Covenant to politics is a transgression.

That said, I still read about the likely voting intentions of US Jews this November.   M J Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum writes:

"American Jews are, for the most part, well-off. But they vote as if they still were poor ghetto dwellers, somehow understanding that their fate is connected to the fate of those who have little or nothing."

For more read here.