My Wisconsin accent gets stronger by the day. I hear it happening — the soft, wide A’s that I absorbed during my nine years in Utah and California are turning nasal. My “happy” is turning into “he-appy” and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
But it doesn’t matter how I feel about it because it’s inevitable — I absorb the culture of my environment. It happens everywhere I live and in every chapter of my life.
It was true when I was a high school student in Salt Lake City, investing most of my energy in Jewish youth activities. It was true when I was a college student in chilly, red-bricked Boston and I wrote letters on behalf of Amnesty International. It was true in San Francisco during the first Persian Gulf War and in the Galilee when violence erupted in October 2000. And it’s true now.
That’s why I take lightly what may be perceived as my political drift rightward in relation to Israel. While I am living in the diaspora, events in the Jewish state take on a different tone.
We’ve heard it again and again: the terrorist attacks of the last three-and-a-half years have made many American Jews feel that this struggle means life or death for the Jewish homeland. It may well be; but talking to Israelis in Israel puts the “matzav” (“situation” in Hebrew) in a different light.
Before traveling to Israel last November, I spoke with my father-in-law, a well-read and passionate Zionist who fled to Israel from his home in Budapest, Hungary, arriving three months before the state’s founding in 1948. His mother joined him a few years later, but his father did not survive the Holocaust.
Relax, he told me. We are in crisis, he agreed, but it’s no reason to get hysterical. We must still be critical of our government and we should still expect them to behave morally and responsibly.
Strange normalcy
Then he told me, in a few hundred select words, what he really thought about the current government and its policies. Whereas I had been functioning in emergency mode, my father-in-law — living in the thick of the crisis — was still talking, debating, being critical.
My father-in-law, articulate and deeply invested, jolted my mind back to the perspective I had while living in my home in Avtalion, a little village in the Galilee.
When the violence began just after Rosh HaShanah 2000, my family and I were on our way to visit friends in their home in Moshav Katzir, near the Israeli Arab city, Uhm el-Fahm.
When we neared Megiddo Junction, police stopped us and said riots had erupted and we had to turn around. We immediately switched on the radio, phoned our friends and started for home.
About 20 minutes from home, we passed Kfar Manda, a Muslim village known for religious and political fervor. About half-an-hour later, violence erupted there: villagers trashed electrical poles and ignited tires in the road. (The following day, one of our neighbors was yanked from his car while driving by the village. His car was burned and he was beaten.)
After returning home, we turned on the television. Then we received a call saying that villagers from a neighboring Arab village, Arabe, were heading toward Avtalion, which sits on a dead-end road. They had ignited tires and built a roadblock of rocks.
Police gathered to stop them and the men of our village were instructed to take their handguns and meet at the front gate to protect our homes. Border police shot tear gas and fled, apparently fearing for their safety.
It turned out that our Arab neighbors didn’t reach our homes, but the coming days brought major violence and the deaths of several rioters from Arabe and it’s neighboring city, Sahnin.
We heard our neighbors shouting “Death to the Jews.” We heard that our friends had to guard their factories and offices after arson attempts by Arab villagers. Schools closed and we were told to stay home; the regional council and police could not guarantee our safety.
After those first few days, we settled into a strange normalcy. No longer did we drive to the village for a quick shopping trip or when our car needed work or we craved a plate of creamy hummus. Our hearts began to mend.
But Sirin and Razan, little girls from Arabe, returned to my daughter’s pre-school in Avtalion. And a few days later, Mohammed from Sahnin was back on the treadmill next to me in the health club in our regional center.
As I sit here now, those days seem so dramatic. And they were. But they had a degree of humanity that didn’t allow me to forget that Sirin and Razan were part of this conflict too. That the situation is not colored in black and white but many shades of gray.
And today, as my vowels become nasal and I react with fire when I hear of yet another terrorist attack, I wait a moment before joining the chorus of pundits.
I remember Razan dancing to Zionist songs in our preschool. I talk with my father-in-law. I phone my friends in Avtalion. The shades of gray return, and I get the real story.
Gibson film makes one viewer feel very Jewish
By Leon Cohen
On assignment, I saw the controversial Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ” in a movie theater this past weekend. Condolences will be accepted.
Everything you may have heard about the brutality of this movie is true. I could not look at the screen during many of the scenes in which Jesus was being tortured; and what I did see in the portrayal of the Temple priests and the screaming Jerusalem mob — images and stereotypes that looked torn from every anti-Semitic artwork I’ve ever seen — left me shaking with anger. It was one of the two most upsetting cinematic experiences I’ve ever had, the other being the unsparing Holocaust film “The Grey Zone.”
But I don’t want to rehash that or the problems others have observed in this film. I would like to note what no other commentators seem to have noticed — that Jesus in flashbacks is shown washing his hands and eating without saying any of the Hebrew blessings over those acts. Does that reflect Gibson’s ignorance, or a scholarly belief that the custom didn’t arise until Talmud times? Or was that a deliberate or unconscious way to strip Jesus of his Judaism?
Instead I would like to raise other questions. I have seldom felt more alienated from practically all of Western civilization than I did when seeing this movie. And it was clear when I interviewed some random Christian audience members after that they didn’t see what I saw.
I am no expert in Christian history and theology; but I consider myself better informed on these matters than most non-scholars. I grew up in a neighborhood in which most of my friends went to Catholic parochial school. I’ve read history all my life. And as a music history undergraduate and graduate student, I learned about Christian history, ideologies and liturgies; the origins of all Western arts are linked to them.
In all of this, the emphasis on Jesus’ execution has been one of the most puzzling aspects of Christianity for me. Even apart from the historical use of that story to foment anti-Semitism, the concept of Jesus suffering for humanity’s “sins” going back to the Garden of Eden has mystified me.
Gibson’s film, I think, shows how much the crucifixion seems, to an outsider, to overwhelm everything else Christianity believes about Jesus. “The Passion” devotes about 10 minutes of intermittent flashbacks to Jesus’ teachings, which are immediately swallowed by the spectacle of torture.
Yet we live in a world in which one of every three to four people is a Christian, while one of every five is a Muslim and only about one of every 450 is a Jew. Something about the idea of Jesus suffering for humanity apparently resonates with many people, answering a deep need that I do not seem to feel.
Or maybe I do feel some of it. In my study of music, I have fallen in love with the music of the Renaissance, and especially with the settings of the Ordinary of the Mass. And what I love about this music is its otherworldliness; it seems to lift me out of my body and off the earth. And I have seen other Christian art in other media that creates the same effect.
Judaism, as rabbis tell us, teaches that spirituality can be found by sanctifying the body and through such earthly acts as eating, working and mating when following the disciplines of Jewish law.
Christianity, however, seems to deny and even despair of this and to assert that spirituality can be found only by transcending the body and the earth. “In my inmost self I dearly love God’s law, but I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law that my reason dictates,” says a characteristic passage from Paul’s letters in the Christian Bible. “Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?” (Romans 7:23-24)
But is the destruction of Jesus’ body supposed to demonstrate this? It didn’t for me while I watched “The Passion.” I felt none of the spiritual ascent I feel in listening to Renaissance music, just sick horror. However, the Christians around me were moved, some wept; and one of them, Anne Trindal, a Catholic, told me that the film “confirmed my faith.”
Will this film incite serious outbreaks of violence against Jews? I doubt it will in the United States though it might in parts of Europe and in the Middle East.
But it did show, I think, some of the limits of the human capacity to understand other people. I didn’t feel frightened of the crowd at that theater, and it was easy to find people willing to speak to me even after they heard I was a reporter from a Jewish newspaper. But while I could report their words, I did not understand their feelings, and I did feel very alone and very Jewish.
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