Can Judaism Survive Without Israel?

Can Judaism Survive Without Israel?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Rabbi Daniel Gordis has recently penned an op-ed piece entitled “No Jewish People Without Israel” (http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/109429/no-jewish-people-without-israel) in which he made a cogent case for the fact that the American Jewish community in particular will not be able to survive the potential loss of Israel.  

The motivation for the piece, of course, is what we hear regularly from America that younger Jews living there are disconnected from Israel and would not see it as a personal tragedy if Israel were to disappear.  As Peter Beinart put it in his much heralded book The Crisis of Zionism, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Gordis, an author, rabbi and educator for whom I have the highest respect, makes a cogent case why he believes that “The loss of Israel would fundamentally alter American Jewry. It would arrest the revival of Jewish life now unfolding in parts of Europe. And Israeli Jewry would be no more. The end of Israel would, in short, end the Jewish people as we know it.”  It’s worth reading the article but the one item I found missing is the lack of personal experience in an America that existed before there was an Israel, and certainly before the amazing events of June, 1967.

Gordis was born 11 years after the state was founded and, therefore, doesn’t have the personal memory of living in America prior to ’48 although he probably remembers the sea change that occurred after June ’67 even though he was only 8 years old at the time.

I was born at the end of 1939 and even though I was only eight years old when Israel was established I remember what life was like living in the Bronx (where there were 650,000 Jews representing 44% of the total population) in the 40s and 50s.

When I was going to Hebrew School (as the after-school programs were called in those days) my friends and I had to walk just one block from 168^th Street to 167^th Street to get to the Jewish Center of Highbridge.  When we saw the Irish coming the other way, we crossed the street to avoid them.  We were bigger than they were but were still afraid and many times crossing the street did not help, because they could also cross the street and beat us up which they did….and often.

During that same period in 1952 right before Easter, the men’s club of the Sacred Heart Church in the neighborhood decided to pressure (under threat of boycott) all of the storekeepers on 168^th Street, most of whom were Jewish, to put a sign in their windows that said the following:  “We will close from noon-3 PM on Good Friday, April 11th in observance of the death of Christ.”  Can you believe?  And the Jewish storekeepers agreed.  I remember my father returning from work one night during this period and when he saw the posters he called an emergency meeting at the synagogue and, under pressure, the Church recanted. 

(see the NY Times article at: 

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9404E1DD103AE53ABC4E53DFB2668389649EDE ) 

But the fact that they even tried to do this was an indication of the pressures Jews felt in the US in those days.

I recall in 1956 at a college interview at Syracuse University when the interviewer asked me “tell me how you spend your Saturdays?” After all, they could not ask blatantly anti-Semitic questions but the meaning was clear…..we want to keep Jewish enrollment down.  Why in those days, with a Bronx return address, I couldn’t even get a course catalog from Smith College in Northampton MA.  And when my parents tried to make a reservation at a hotel on Cape Cod, which the hotel confirmed by phone said that they had space available, once they received the deposit and saw the Bronx address it was returned saying they made a mistake, there was no room at the inn after all.

Of course, some of that changed a bit after ’48 but the big shift came in ’67 because of Israel’s victory over its neighbors.  It was only then that people were comfortable walking around with kipot instead of hats, openly wearing stars of David around their necks and being more “up front” about their Judaism.

We know there is no guarantee that this situation would surface again if Israel were to go by the boards, but the risk is high and the memory is short.  I still remember Natan Sharansky telling people how much better the jailers treated him and other Jews in Russian prisons each time Israel scored another victory.

So if Beinart and the many surveys are correct and young people are opting out of support for the Zionist enterprise and feel that its demise will not affect them, Gordis’ analysis is “right on.”  

I heard a presentation once in Chicago by Yehezkal Kaufmann Professor Emeritus of Bible Studies at the Hebrew University, Shalom Paul who said:  “Judaism is the only religion in the world whose adherents continued to practice their faith once their temple was destroyed.  After all, if God lets his temple be destroyed, what kind of a God is he in any event?”  Those words are with me today, 32 years after I heard them as if it were yesterday.  We met that challenge once, heaven forbid we should be faced with it again as we just may not be up to the task.

 

Say No to a Visa for Ahmadinejad

Say No to a Visa for Ahmadinejad

By Sherwin Pomerantz

The last week has seen an increase in anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric coming out of Iran.   Ahmadinejad said there was no place for the Jewish state in a future Middle East, echoing previous remarks he has made about Israel. He has also repeatedly called into question whether the Holocaust actually took place.  Khamenei said last week that Israel would one day be returned to the Palestinian nation and would cease to exist.

Last Friday, the last Friday of Ramadan which, in Tehran, is observed as Jerusalem Day, Ahmadinejad said:  ““Arrogant countries vowed to protect the Israeli entity, which is their pretext to infiltrate inside the Muslim World.  U.S. presidential candidates won’t reach the power unless they bow to the Zionist entity.  It’s for the West’s benefit to abandon the Zionists," adding that there'll be no place for the US, and Zionists in the new Middle East.

He went further:  “Today, countering the entity of Zionism and the fabricated Zionist regime safeguards rights of all human beings, defends human dignity and paves the way to save humankind from arrogance, poverty and misery,” the Iranian President stated, noting that the International al-Quds (i.e. Jerusalem) Day is the day of unity among all human beings to remove the Zionist “black stain” from the human society. The Iranian president pointed out that al-Quds will be set free, and the cancerous tumor [i.e. the Zionist entity] will be removed.

  

All of this, of course, from a member state of the United Nations against another member state.  However, it was not sufficiently destructive to stop the UN Secretary General from attending the conference of non-aligned nations meeting in Tehran next week where Iran itself will take over the chairmanship.  Need I say more?

But there is something that Americans particularly can do to show their combined displeasure regarding the vitriolic statements being made by Iran.  On September 18^th the UN General Assembly will convene for its annual meeting.  Traditionally heads of state from around the world converge on New York where each is given an opportunity to address the full General Assembly.  For the past few years Ahmadinejad has attended these meetings and has been granted a visa by the US to do so.  That is at is should be given the fact that the US hosts the United Nations on its soil. 

However, each time he traveled to the US he did more than address the General Assembly.   He has addressed a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, met with a student group at Columbia University and has been free to do whatever he pleased in the US for the time he was there.  But the US is under no obligation to grant him a visa to do anything else but travel there, speak at the UN and go home. 

In his September 23, 2010 speech to the UN he said:  "Some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack [9/11] to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view."  Does someone who makes such insane accusations against America deserve to be granted free passage in America?  I don’t think so.

What thinking Americans should do now is write to their senators and congressmen as well as to the State Department demanding that Ahmadinejad’s visa be limited to the 24 hours he needs to be in New York for the General Assembly meeting.  Further that his travel be restricted to going to and from the airport as well as to and from his hotel and UN headquarters.  A nation that keeps Jonathan Pollard in jail for 25 years for passing information to a friendly country and then allows the personification of evil from Tehran to roam the streets of the US freely is simply not true to its own principles.  Fortunately the US remains a free country where legislators are answerable to their constituents.  Those constituents, American citizens, need to raise their voices today and keep evil off the streets.  There is no reason to do less.  Ahmadinejad must not be allowed to roam America at will.  Act now, please!

ISRAEL’S ECONOMY CONTINUES TO GROW

ISRAEL’S ECONOMY CONTINUES TO GROW.  IS IT COUNTER-INTUITIVE?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics late last week released a report indicating that the country’s economy grew by 3.2% in the second quarter of this year, an increase of the prior quarter’s figure of 2.8%.  One of the prime factors in this growth was a 10.3% annualized growth rate of Israel’s exports and a 5.4% rise in personal expenditures.

On the surface this seems to be counter-intuitive.  It would have been reasonable to expect, for example, that the slowdown in the economies of the US and Europe, two of Israel’s largest export destinations, would have a negative ripple effect on our economy here.   In addition, the constant dialogue in the press, both locally and internationally, about the possible run up to war with Iran would also be expected to dampen economic growth.  And yet the growth rate increased, clearly counter intuitively.

These figures do not reflect what was expected to be a downturn in July and August (i.e. the 3^rd quarter of the year) and even with this growth the economy, overall, is going through a contraction relative to 2011.  On the positive side however, Israel in 2012 will have its best year ever as a tourist destination.  Hotels are running close to capacity, measurements of the population here show high levels of happiness and satisfaction, unemployment remains relatively low and foreign direct investment continues unabated.  So what is really going on?

Nobody, of course, is endowed with the gift of prophecy when it comes to economic forecasting or anything else but thriving businesses generally look at the long term when making their investment plans, rather than short term blips in the market.  If one looks, for example, at the mission of the Coca-Cola Company, the very first statement they make is “To continue to thrive as a business over the next ten years and beyond, we must look ahead, understand the trends and forces that will shape our business in the future and move swiftly to prepare for what’s to come….. our 2020 Vision…creates a long-term destination for our business.” 

Israel, of course, is also seen as a very resilient community quite practiced in dealing with the idiosyncratic issues unique to this socio-political environment.  For example, during the Gulf War in 1990-1991 Intel Israel, the largest overseas employer in the country, did not suffer the loss of even one day of production.  The fact that this economy continues to grow is testimony to the faith that the business community has in Israel’s long term viability in spite of the recent global economic slowdown and the ever present military threats.

Predicting the future is always risky and all of us believe that we are basing our decisions on facts.  But as Malcolm Forbes once said “Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five year projections.”   

  

Sherwin Pomerantz is president of Atid-EDI Ltd., a Jerusalem-based economic development consulting group with 20 years’ experience in assisting overseas companies and public entities in their export promotion and business development efforts.   

The Winds of War Continue to Blow

The Winds of War Continue to Blow

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Over the last couple of weeks the winds of war vis-à-vis Israel’s approach to dealing with the Iran problem have been blowing at an increasing rate of speed.  There is hardly a day when there are not at least five articles in the local press about how we should be handling the situation.  Seemingly all of them now conclude, whether for or against an attack, that our Prime Minister (Netanyahu) and his Minister of Defense (Barak) are both looking more seriously every day at a pre-emptive strike directed at Iran’s nuclear installations given what they see as an existential threat to the survival of Israel.

Of course, the Iranian’s leadership most recent pronouncements in observance of Al Quds Day (i.e. Jerusalem Day) at the end of Ramadan simply adds to the growing concern about how best to handle the situation.  Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s statement on Friday that “the Zionist regime is a malignant cancer, an insult to humanity” and that he hopes for “a new Middle East with no memory of the American or Zionist presence” certainly does not give any of us living here a sense of comfort that everything will be ok.  Add to this General Amir Ali Hajizadeh’s remark (he is head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Aerial Corps) that he would welcome an Israeli attack because it would allow his country to “get rid of Israel forever” and one could not blame our leadership for seeing this a declaration of war to which we must respond.  Or should we?  I still think not!

The problem that faces those of us who live here is that we simply do not have the facts and we have trouble sifting what people know from what people think.  We certainly have no idea whether the Iranians are ready to commit political suicide by either launching a nuclear attack against Israel or responding to a pre-emptive attack of ours with all the armament at their disposal along with the estimated 50,000 rockets aimed at by Hezbollah on our northern border as well. 

But there are some facts that we do know.  They are:

·        * We have the capability to strike Iran but do not know what obstacles will be put in our way by the countries we need to overfly in order to reach Iran,

·       * We have the capability to strike Iran but do not know how much damage we will be able to inflict or by how much we will be able to delay their march to military nuclear capability.

·         * We have the best trained and most sophisticated military capability in the Middle East.

·        *The Iranians take every opportunity to threaten our existence, as well as that of the West, and the West seems reluctant to internalize that threat to the point of implementing an adequate response to the threat.

That is really all we know.  But what we don’t know is a much longer list:

·    *We don’t know how many Israelis will be killed and injured in a counter-attack by Iran if we engage in a pre-emptive strike.  The Home Front Command says a maximum of 500 Israelis dead and an undetermined number of injured.  My gut tells me 500 dead is too low a figure in the event of serious retaliation.

·     * We don’t know the extent of the damage to our infrastructure (power stations, water systems, transportation network, hospitals, schools, etc.) that we will sustain nor if we have the resources to rebuild them speedily enough to calm the population and avoid panic.  We also don’t know if we can house all of those who may find their homes destroyed.

·        *We don’t know how many people living here will, in the event of a serious retaliation, give up on the Zionist enterprise all together and simply opt out to live in another country.

·        * We don’t know that the Iranians, who may be religiously motivated but not politically stupid, will actually use nuclear weapons even if they have them.

·        *We also don’t know who will stand with us in the event of any military action, whether or not it is initiated by us.    

There is no question that we here in Israel must do what we determine is in our best interests.  Yet, we are not alone in this world and what worked successfully in prior years may no longer be an effective strategy.  Sadly, it has been a long time since Israel won a decisive military victory and it is not because we are not capable, but rather because the playing field has changed.  Our allies are not the same kind of allies we had 30 years ago and our enemies are not the same kind of enemies we had then either.  Our allies seem to be less supportive and our enemies seem to be a bit smarter and certainly better equipped.

So we need not rush into war.

Winston Churchill once remarked “The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”  For the moment we are in control of our destiny and before we let the genie out of the bottle we better be as sure as we can be that there is no other alternative.

In spite of the rhetoric of our enemies I believe that the time for war has not yet arrived and that there are yet other options in our arsenal.  We need to know that all of them have been tried and failed before we unleash our war machine in an attack against Iran as tempting as it may to do so.     

What the West Doesn’t Get

By Sherwin Pomerantz

My mentor when I lived in Chicago, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Schafler of blessed memory, gave a lecture 30 years ago wherein he made a single point very relative to the situation in which the world finds itself today vis-à-vis religious fundamentalism.

He postulated that the essential difference between Judaism and other religions, is that while Judaism clearly dictates in the Torah “and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your might,” very quickly in the same set of books it goes on to say (as we shall hear again at Sabbath services in just two weeks): “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”  

His point was that in the name of love people are capable of doing terrible things to others which would be impermissible in the name of justice.  So, for example, in Christianity the love of God was so great that it fostered the Crusades and the Inquisition, neither of which would have been possible under the dictum of pursuing justice.  In Islam Mohammed’s approval of the killing of the Jews of Banu Qurayzas after they surrendered could not have occurred in the pursuit of justice.  And I could cite other examples as well.

Bringing this forward to today, we hear now almost weekly, if not more often, the ranting and ravings of the Iranian leadership urging that modern Israel be wiped of the face of the earth, and that the Zionist presence in this part of the world is a cancer that must be destroyed.  Even this week, we heard a new warning from Tehran that any outside interference in the affairs of Iran’s ally, Syria, will be met with the equivalent of a third world war. 

If one delves even deeper into the remarks of the Iranian leadership one sees additional references to the coming of the Mahdi and what needs to be done to bring the messenger of Islamic redemption to the earth.  The Inter-Islam Organization (see http://www.inter-islam.org/faith/mahdi1.htm) has created a list of what must happen in order for the Mahdi to appear.  One thought runs through the entire list of events as to what must occur for the Mahdi to appear and that is that calamities, death, and destruction have to be the order of the day.  Each time these terrible events stop they must start again and only under that situation will the Mahdi finally make himself known.

So, for the Iranian leadership that seems to believe it has the sole responsibility in the world to make all of this happen, it is imperative that they support death and destruction (as in Syria where over 20,000 people have died over the last 18 months) as well as threaten death and destruction as they do regularly against Israel (the little Satan), the United States (the big Satan) and now even the rest of the western world.

Thus, in the name of the great love of Allah it is permissible to sow the seeds of death and destruction anywhere in the world with the concomitant message that justice be damned.  It is this “value” that the West never understood about religious fundamentalism and, sadly, still does not understand.   As a matter of fact, the West probably does not even want to understand it. 

This morning’s papers are full of information saying that Iran has made “surprising” progress towards military nuclear capability.  Really?  We have been warning of this here for a number of years but the West, and particularly the U.S., chose to believe the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had suspended its nuclear military development in 2003.  And now the West is “surprised” that this was not the case?  What else has to happen before the West will believe the threats and act on them?  Or is it, God forbid, too late for that as well?

“Justice, justice shall you pursue” says the biblical commandment.  It is not simply enough to love God, the imperative is to serve God as well and the parameters that define that service are clear enough if anyone it willing to take the time to listen and act.   Edmund Burke was correct when he said “Evil prevails when good men do nothing.”  So the question remains, will we all pay the price of the blindness of our international leadership?  Clearly the enemy understands what it must do……do we?