Until last week’s tragedy in Israel, it took only five words to define my take on life: a shande far di goyem.
Roughly translated as “a scandal in gentile eyes,” that Yiddish phrase was my moral gyroscope. It was drilled into my thinking during the 1940s, a byproduct of growing up on the border between a Jewish and a non-Jewish neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
We lived, in fact, in the very last apartment building with Jewish tenants. Just beyond our back porches, the world of the gentiles began. Someone’s mother or grandmother seemed always to be shouting those words out her window at us, a shorthand rebuke for bouncing a ball off the courtyard wall and similar boyhood exuberances.
The urgency in the bobbes’ voices suggested they weren’t just offering etiquette lessons, Molly Goldberg variations on Emily Post. We were to understand that, as humanity is divided between the few of us and the multitudes of them, it isn’t prudent for Jews to draw attention to ourselves.
The Holocaust, then scarcely over, informed our elders’ thinking. History shows that previous generations drew a similar moral from pogroms and inquisitions.
Raised on such assumptions, watching the larger world’s reaction to the slaying of Yitzhak Rabin was a little like peering into a kaleidoscope. For moments, there seemed a logical order to the television images-hundreds of foreign dignitaries, most in the dark, conservative garb of the diplomatic corps, lining up for the funeral rites. Then the images would fly apart into some new, and jolting, alignment: President Clinton’s rendering of the Hebrew for “my friend,” hinting at his own Southern roots; former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Henry Kissinger emotionally offering memories of the Israeli prime minister.
Who knew Kissinger had tear ducts?
It would be simpler to report that this show of solidarity with Israel was balm for my mourning. But a 1940s-vintage Albany Park imagination can’t learn overnight to juggle the sight of a shaken Yasser Arafat offering condolences and the unthinkable thought of a Jewish assassin of a Jewish leader.
It was supposed to happen the other way around: Pain from gentiles, solace from Jews.
For centuries it was just that simple. From the destruction of Jerusalem’s ancient Temple to the Holocaust, we were the victims, they were the enemy. But all that history seemed turned on its head by pictures of Jordan’s King Hussein collapsed in grief while a gunman in a skullcap was arraigned in court.
A recurrent theme in Jewish literature, sacred and secular, is that a Jew can be counted upon to come to the aid of beleaguered brethren.
Every spring for thousands of years, we have read in the Purim synagogue service the story of Esther, a Jewish woman who married the King of Persia yet heard her own people’s anguish and saved them from destruction at the hands of the evil minister Haman.
Like Esther, other Jews have felt that tug of ultimate loyalty even while fleeing all other ancestral traditions.
We have, I think, an almost instinctive, unshakable sense that, in a murderous mood, Hitlers and Stalins and Hamans don’t distinguish between the most devout and the most assimilated of us.
Even if not fully articulated, that thought makes us feel part of a club that otherwise would be hard to define. What else would give me-who was raised Orthodox but rarely goes to synagogue-an overpowering sense of being linked to Hasidim dressed in fur-trimmed hats and ankle-length black coats straight out of the 18th Century? Or, to the ultra-Reform, whose services are frankly too churchish for me?
Until last week, we liked to think that we could expect more of each other. Locking horns with another Jew in a dispute, I can play a moral trump card. “Be a mensch,” I’ll say, calling him to account when he’s been off-base. According to the dictionary, the phrase means: “Act like a man.” But it works precisely because he and I both know what I mean is: “Act like a Jew.”
This is, of course, tribalism of the most naked and primitive sort, the kind of tunnel vision that has torn apart the Balkans, and that must be set aside if this earth is ever to know peace.
Still, the world periodically demonstrates that it is at least a co-conspirator in my paranoia, to which the homage paid Rabin might seem a momentary exception.
Judging by all the kings and prime ministers who witnessed Rabin being laid to rest near the grave of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founder, Israel is now much in favor.
Yet only a few years ago, this same Israel was a pariah. Zionism bore the United Nations’ official stamp of disapproval, branded by the General Assembly as racism.
All the terrible complexities of the Middle East then were reduced by governments and pundits to a simple proposition: Palestinians right, Israelis wrong. Britain and France, which had been the Arabs’ colonial masters for a century, hectored Israel to free West Bank territories, forthwith.
Sentiments toward Israel rose and fell with oil supplies. When petroleum was abundant, the West indulged itself with the image of Israelis as plucky underdogs. But the Palestinians became heroes whenever supplies were short-during the countdown to World War II and again during the shortages and embargoes of the 1970s and ’80s.
Eager to criticize Israel, other nations forgot a key historical fact: They taught the Jews that their security was not to be trusted to outsiders, making Zionism a mass movement, and reinforcing the siege mentality of my Albany Park youth.
The Western nations denied entry visas to thousands of Jews seeking refuge from Hitler’s Final Solution in the 1930s. Even several years after World War II, some Holocaust survivors still were living in former concentration camps. They simply had nowhere to go.
The only option for many was Palestine. Some victims of Treblinka and Auschwitz arrived just in time to fight, and die, in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
There, behind Jewish guns, they were the first Jews in 2,000 years to live independent of the fleeting good will of others. This shift, from victim to victor, had a liberating-occasionally intoxicating-effect that I encountered firsthand.
A few years ago, I was in Hebron, a city wrested from Arab hands during the Six-Day War of 1967. I went to Sabbath services with a group of Jewish settlers who chose to live in the midst of an overwhelmingly Palestinian community. Walking to synagogue, I was the only one who wasn’t carrying an Uzi submachine gun, which the others set down only during prayers.
On the West Bank, they had created something like the Eastern European shtetl from which my great-grandmother was deported to die in Treblinka. Only this time Jews, not Nazis or Cossacks, had the weapons.
Their militant nationalism was shrill. Yet their logic was irrefutable. Why didn’t I come live among them, they asked. Because, I replied, Jews have freedom and opportunity in America.
They countered that when Jews live in exile, persecution inevitably follows prosperity: the golden age of medieval Spain ended in the Inquisition; Germany’s flourishing Jewish community went to the gas chambers.
That line of reasoning provided a strange comfort-until last week, when Rabin’s assassin took away its major premise: That Jewish guns would be used only to defend Jewish life. Equally unimaginable was an outpouring of the world’s sympathy that suggested-fight it though I will-deadly enemies can become friends.
So now, I’ll try on unaccustomed ideas, like the possibility of peace between all peoples.
Stepping to the podium on the White House lawn on that bright day when he and Arafat signed the peace accords, Rabin spoke of how an old soldier makes peace. “It is not easy,” he said.
The general who won the Six-Day War, the greatest Jewish victory of modern times, was willing to give peace a chance. How can I not follow Rabin’s lead?
But believe me, for this old Jew it isn’t easy.
