LIFE

Shalom, everyone. It's been awhile, and while I certainly have much catching up to do, for a small time, I have been able to set aside some of my pain over the extraordinarily evil and terrifying events which Olmert and Rice, et al, have wrought upon the Children of Israel.
In these past months, I have experienced a miracle. During this time, I have journeyed between life and death and birth. It has restored hope everlasting, and brought a certain peace in the greater knowledge that my people will never die no matter what horrors may befall us.
The greatest treasures in Israel's vault, and the greatest weapons in Israel's arsenal, are the Jewish mothers of the world.
Cherish us, I say, because we are the future of Israel. We are the reason Israel will never die.
Please join with me to celebrate this, my most blessed miracle, this beautiful symbol of OUR eternal Jewish pride and heritage. She, (and many others like her,) is why we have perservered throughout the ages, and why we will continue to endure beyond the horrors of these days.
Please welcome into our lives another Jewish Mother, born, 23 Tevet, 5768, (January 1, 2008.)
This is my Neveah, truly a gift from HaShem. She is a blessing to me and the continuation of my people. She is my renewed hope, renewed strength, my legacy, and the reason Yisrael Chai!!!

NEVAEH, BELOVED DAUGHTER OF ZION

The essay below was delivered to my mailbox yesterday. When I read it, it echoed so many of the sentiments most of us live and feel every day of our lives, I wanted as many of our people to see it as possible.

B"H.
Can Jews Ever Integrate?
By Yosef Y. Jacobson
"I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member."
-- Groucho Marx
"The modern Jewish maxim is Incognito, ergo sum, 'I am invisible, therefore I am.'"
-- Sidney Morganbesser.
The Case for Genocide
In the biblical book of Esther, Haman, the viceroy and second in command in the large and powerful Persian Empire, and whose defeat we celebrate on the holiday of Purim (this year Friday, March 21), makes a short but powerful presentation to the Persian king, Ahasuerus, attempting to persuade him to embrace his plan of Jewish genocide.
"There is a certain people," Haman says to Ahasuerus (1), "scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from all the other nations, and they do not observe the King's laws. Therefore it is not befitting the King to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let it be recorded that they be destroyed, and I will pay ten thousand silver talents . for deposit in the King's treasuries."
Haman's argument is straightforward and clear: Jews are different. They are alien, outsiders, an obstruction to normal society. They don't fit into the rest of the human family. They have their own faith and their own laws, which they feel are superior to the king's laws. They are a nuisance, a thereat, an alien growth in an otherwise harmonious and integrated society. They ought to be disposed of.
The Talmud (2) records an oral tradition describing Haman's presentation in some more detail. "They don't eat from our food," Haman lamented to Ahasuerus, "and they do not marry our women, and they do not marry their women to us (ironically, at this point they were both unaware that the King's wife was Jewish). They waste the whole year, avoiding the King's work, with the excuse: Today is the Sabbath, or today is Passover."
Haman also discusses bad Jewish habits: "They eat, they drink and they mock the throne. Even if a fly falls in a glass of wine of one of them, he casts away the fly and drinks the wine. But if my master, the King, touches a glass of wine of one of them, that person throws it to the ground and does not drink it (3)." The Jews, Haman argues, see themselves as superior to us; they will forever stand out. Who needs them?
Repeating Haman's Words
Some six centuries after Haman, these same words are repeated by Philostratus, a third-century teacher and resident of Athens and Rome, who summarizes the pagan world's perception of the Jews.
"The Jews," Philostratus wrote, "have long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against humanity; and a race that has made its own life apart and irreconcilable, that cannot share with the rest of mankind in the pleasures of the table, nor join in their libations or prayers or sacrifices, are separated from ourselves by a greater gulf than divides us from Sura or Bactra of the more distant Indies (4)."
The same argument, in one form or another, would be repeated thousands of times throughout history. The greatest Roman historian, Tacitus, living in the first century CE, had this to say about the Jews:
"The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they permit all that which we abhor . toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity, they sit apart at meals and they sleep apart, and although as a race they are prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women."
One example he mentions to describe the moral conflicts between the Romans and the Jews is worthy of note. "The Jews," Tacitus writes, "regard it as a crime to kill any newborn infant." The Romans, as the Greeks before them, killed mentally and physically handicapped infants. In their minds, keeping such children alive was pointless and unaesthetic (5).
First Lady Intervenes
Back to the Haman story. The viceroy's arguments persuade the King. A decree is issued from the Persian throne. Every Jewish man, woman and child living under Persian dominance would be exterminated on a particular date.
Then, in a delightful turn of events, the First Lady, the Jewish queen Esther, invites her husband and Haman to a drinking feast. As we will recall, Esther, from all the thousands of young women who were brought from across the Empire as potential candidates for the role of queen, succeeded in gaining the affection and grace of the King. "The King loved Esther more than all the women, and she won more of his favor and grace than all other women; he set the royal crown upon her head (6)." Years later, during this wine feast, the King makes a pledge to Esther that he would fulfill every request and petition. She utilizes the opportunity to make the fateful pitch.
"If I have won Your Majesty's favor and if it pleases the King," Esther tells Ahasuerus (7), "let my life be granted to me as my request and my people as my petition. For we - I and my people - have been sold to be destroyed, slain and exterminated. Had we been sold as slaves and servant-girls, I would have kept quiet. The compensation our adversary offers cannot be compared with the loss the king would suffer [by exterminating us, rather than selling us as slaves]."
Clearly, Esther is attempting to approach the issue from two sides, a personal one and an economical one. First, she exposes her Jewish identity. The queen is a member of the people condemned to death. Esther knows, however, that this alone may not do the trick, so she continues to discuss dollars and cents (Haman too, as recorded above, used a two-point approach in persuading the King: logic and money). By selling the Jews as slaves, Esther argued, Ahasuerus would be profiting far more than by exterminating them. The money Haman offered him is miniscule vs. the potential profit from their sale into slavery.
The King, who never realized that Esther was Jewish, is outraged at Haman. He has his minister executed and his decree subverted. In subsequent conversations with Esther, Ahasuerus grants the Jews the right to self-defense against anybody who would dare to harm them. The entire climate in the Persian Empire toward the Jew is radically transformed. Esther's first cousin, a Jewish sage, Mordechai, is appointed viceroy in replacing Haman.
Yet, one question remains. Haman did not argue the case for Jewish extermination on the basis of senseless venomous passion. He presented what was to the King a sound and persuasive argument. The Jews, Haman argued, were an alien growth, a bizarre people, a separatist nation that would not accept the King's ultimate authority and even considered their law superior to the King's. A leader could not tolerate such a "superior group" in his empire.
This is a strong accusation. The King accepts it and as a result issues a decree demanding his subjects dispose of all the Jews - men, women and children. Yet nowhere in her entire dialogue with the King does Esther refute this argument. Why did Ahasuerus consent to the abolishment of his original plan if he believed Haman's outcry to be valid?
One might argue that Esther's charm and grace were the exclusive factors for the King's change of heart. Yet, as proved above, it is clear that Esther does not rely on this alone. That is why she presents a logical argument for slavery vs. genocide. She refutes the economic offer made by Haman by demonstrating that the king would lose money. How, then, could she ignore the powerful argument of Haman advocating a "Judenrein" society?
When False Notions Face Reality
Some questions are canceled out via answers; some arguments refuted by counter-arguments. But there are those beliefs or notions that require neither debate nor dialogue to disprove them. Reality does the job. When reality is exposed, they dissolve into nothingness.
Haman's argument fell into this category. Esther responded to Haman's argument for Jewish genocide not by dialogue, but by her sheer presence. The moment she identified as a member of the Jewish people and as a product of the Jewish faith, Haman's previously attractive "thesis" was gone with the wind.
Ahasuerus knew Esther intimately. He sensed her soul, he touched her grace, he cherished her personality. He adored her body, her glow, her charm, and would do almost anything for her (as he explicitly told her). He knew that Esther's character and values were head and shoulders above everybody else he encountered. He chose her from thousands upon thousands of young women, all of them not Jewish. Yet the king never realized that she was Jewish, a daughter of the Jewish people and a product of the Jewish faith.
When Ahasuerus suddenly discovered that she was Jewish, he understood that her extraordinary quality of life stemmed from her Jewishness, from that strange document called Torah, and from that strange people called Israel. He then understood that this alien nation who lived by another code, ought not to be loathed, but respected. They may be very different, but it is an otherness that elevates other nations rather than threatens them. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illuminated with it the entire world (8)."
The Jew, Esther was intimating to the King, may be very different, but it is this "otherness" that has the power to inspire all of the nations of the world to live and love deeper, to encounter their individual path to G-d.
Should We Hide?
The lesson for our times is clear. Assimilation, the eclipsing the otherness of the Jewish people, has never assuaged anti-Semitism. Tradition tells us (9) that the Jews of Shushan (the capital of the Persian empire at the time of the Purim story) were quite assimilated. Yet, this did not deter the Persian viceroy and king from believing that despite all of the Jews' compromises and attempts not to be "too Jewish," they were still strange, distinct and different.
This pattern has repeated itself in every milieu since. Never in history, has assimilation solved the problem of Jew hatred. Jews in Germany were the most assimilated and integrated throughout all of our history, yet it was in that very country where the worst Jew hatred sprouted and gave us the Holocaust.
Scores of great non-Jewish thinkers, sympathetic to Jews as well as to anti-Semites, saw in Jews and Judaism something different, bizarre and extraordinary. In Tolstoy's letter above he continues: "The Jew is the religious source, spring and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions." John Adams wrote that "the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation (8)." Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, believed that the Jews introduced to the world the "slave virtues" like "pity, the kind and helping hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, friendliness," designated "for the weak and envious (10)." Hitler blamed the Jews for inventing the life-denying reality called conscience. Today, many academics and laymen believe that the Jews are responsible for the greatest conflict in today's world.
As much as we attempt to run from our identity as Jews, the non-Jewish world reminds us of who we are and where we came from. The non-Jew senses that since the day the Jew stood at Sinai, he or she has been different.
The solution for the Jewish people is therefore not to deny its otherness. That will never work.
Rather, the Jew ought to embrace his or her Jewishness, and just like Esther, be proud with the lifestyle and moral ethic of Torah. When we learn how to embrace our otherness with love and grace, rather than with shame and guilt, it will become a source of admiration and inspiration for all of humanity.
Israel, for example, will never succeed portraying itself to the world as "a regular country." Its choice is either to run from its destiny or to embrace it, and thus become a source of pride for the entire world.
(This essay is based on a talk delivered by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Purim 5729, or March 4, 1969 (11))
~~~~~~~~~~~

Am Yisrael Chai.
NITZANA


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