I have often fantasized about teaching a class for primarily non-Jews. I would call this class “Introduction to Judaism and the Jewish People.”
The very first lecture I would give to the group would be about what I regard as the most important single fact about us, a datum I wish would appear first in the minds of all humans whenever they think about Jews, Judaism and the state of Israel.
That fact is this: If you were to compress the entire human population of the planet into 1,000 people, about 330 would be Christians, about 210 would be Muslims — and exactly two would be Jews. (Source: A fascinating Web site called adherents.com that compiles and presents statistics about the world’s religions and beliefs.)
I believe that many, if not most non-Jews do not know or understand just how tiny a minority of the human community we are. I also sense that a significant reason for this may be the amount of news we make.
With Israel so often in the headlines and so many Jews being prominent in the arts, sciences, professions, entertainment media and politics, we get reported on and noticed a lot.
As the excellent popular historian Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her book, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” the recording of any phenomenon (particularly but not only crime, war, dispute, etc.) inevitably gives the impression that said phenomenon is more commonplace in life and more powerful in influence than it actually may be.
Only a handful of people may commit crimes in an urban area with a population of more than one million. But those crimes make news and provoke conversations, while the millions of good or ordinary actions don’t; and so a community’s members may perceive, rightly or not, that they have a huge crime problem.
So we get not only fantasies of active anti-Semites about Jews taking over the world, but the perhaps even more insidious perceptions of ordinary folks who wrongly believe that Jews make up a large portion of the population and are so much more powerful in contrast to the Arab/Muslim world.
Source of discord
But we are not only a minority. We are, and feel ourselves to be, an endangered and threatened minority.
And we are threatened partly by the minority of the 998 others who actively hate us — the “real” anti-Semites — but even more by the vast majority of those others who feel completely indifferent about our existence and wellbeing, and who likely regard us as expendable.
Indeed, that is one of the primary reasons why there are so few of us.
After living as a Jew for more than 50 years and spending more than 20 years as a professional observer of and writer about the Jewish community, I believe these facts explain a lot about our behavior.
For example, as a tiny minority, what is our best strategy for survival in interacting with the majority? Should we emphasize what makes us different or what we all have in common?
The former constitutes the basic position of haredi Orthodoxy and of at least some forms of Zionism. The latter embodies the general philosophy of the more liberal Jewish religious movements and of our defense and community-relations organizations.
Good arguments and historical evidence exist for both strategies; but the perception of threat and the emotional investment many of us make in one or the other strategy helps account for the intensity with which many of us advocate our position and treat with hostility or contempt the opposite view and those who hold it.
Another issue: To some of us, our being a minority means that perhaps there is something wrong with us, our culture or belief system. So they believe Jews and Judaism should learn from and perhaps incorporate ideas and practices from the non-Jewish world. Some even reject Judaism altogether.
For other Jews, our having survived as a minority for some 3,000 years, in the face of persecution from the Christian and Muslim worlds, means that there is something overwhelmingly right — even supernaturally right — about Judaism and Jewish culture. This group therefore holds that we should work on preserving them in as pure a form as possible, and regard the non-Jewish world as having little or nothing to teach us.
I think that our being a tiny and threatened minority does more than explain a lot about Jews’ situation and behavior; I think it justifies the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
We are a tiny and threatened minority living among people most of whom regard our existence with indifference, and for whom helping us survive is a very low priority. Therefore, there must be a state for which the wellbeing and survival of Jews and Judaism are the top priorities.
Of course, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora disagree over how best to achieve that top priority aim. Does it best help our survival for Israel to keep the 1967 captured territories or give them away? To keep religion and state separate or to mix them?
Should Israel’s culture and society and government resemble those of Europe and the U.S. as much as possible, or be as distinctively Jewish as possible? How much of either is possible?
Whatever these differences, it does seem beyond dispute to most of us that Israel’s existence is vital to Jewish survival — and it seems equally beyond dispute that most of the non-Jewish world does not really understand that.
In the new secular year 2008, with U.S. elections and a new round of Arab-Israel negotiations on the horizon, I think it would be a good time for me to ask a favor of Chronicle readers. Whenever you can, tell your friends and colleagues about this fact, that we Jews are only two out of every 1,000 people on the planet. It might help at least some of them better understand and empathize with us.
Peres Center makes skeptic optimistic
By Ellis D. Avner, M.D.
The standard media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict paints a pessimistic image. It focuses on hostilities, violence, bloodshed and political stagnation.
However, on a recent visit to the region, I had the opportunity to see the untold story — situations in which Israelis and Palestinians are coming together, in an environment of understanding and empathy, to jointly build a better future.
This is the story of the Peres Center for Peace, which I had the opportunity to observe as the invited opening plenary speaker at the annual meeting of the center’s program on “Saving Children: Medicine in the Service of Peace,” held in Jerusalem on Dec. 13-14.
My audience was a mixed group of approximately 75 Palestinian and 75 Israeli pediatricians. The goal was education and interactive collaboration focusing on improving health care for all children in the Palestinian territories and Israel.
But, as I rapidly learned, these educational activities are only the tip of the iceberg of an extraordinary, comprehensive program tailored to guarantee immediate and appropriate health care for all children in the region, as well as building independent, high quality, health care capacity for Palestinian pediatricians.
Messengers of peace
The humanitarian “Saving Children” initiative refers Palestinian babies and children for complex investigations and surgical procedures to Israeli hospitals when such treatment is unavailable in the Palestinian Authority.
Over the past three years, almost 4,000 referrals have been triaged, including 600 babies and children referred for cardiac procedures and surgery, 140 for bone marrow transplants or cochlear implants, 50 for complex craniofacial abnormalities including cleft palate, and over 20 for neurosurgical procedures.
More than 2,700 children have been referred for complex diagnostic procedures and management. This humanitarian initiative has responded to the pediatric medical needs resulting from increased violence in the past years and has result in saving children and building friends of peace.
As Palestinian President Abu Mazen stated, “these children and their families return as messengers of peace, demonstrating hope to Palestinian communities.”
The long-term solution to inadequacies in the Palestinian health system is to train Palestinian physicians, largely in subspecialty care that is unavailable in the Palestinian medical education system.
To build independent Palestinian medical capacity, more than 40 Palestinian physicians are undergoing fellowships and advanced residencies in Israeli hospitals in Israeli hospitals, particularly the Hadassah Medical Centers on Mt. Scopus and Ein Kerem in Jerusalem.
Following training, such physicians will return to hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza with skills necessary to support an independent Palestinian medical system, and as ambassadors of peace.
Extensive telemedicine links have been developed so that the Palestinian doctors can maintain contact with their mentors in Israel, discuss cases, and participate in conferences like the one I joined in Jerusalem.
I am a natural skeptic who spent my junior year in Israel while an undergraduate (where I met my wife, Jane, who joined me on this recent trip). I have returned seven times (generally as an invited professor) over the past three decades, and watched our two day-school educated sons spend anxiety-filled summers in Israeli programs.
But I was impressed by what I saw. I spoke to my Palestinian colleagues who are training in pediatric subspecialties at Hadassah Medical Center. I observed their integration into the health care team.
And I watched Palestinian families and their hospitalized children laugh and embrace their Israeli physicians. I do not doubt that they will return to the West Bank and Gaza as ambassadors of peace.
This extraordinary effort of the Peres Center, a non-governmental organization started by Israeli President Shimon Peres (whom Jane and I were honored to dine with during our recent visit) has given me a glimpse of true optimism and an exciting future for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Much hard work remains to be done. Indeed, 16 Palestinian pediatricians traveling to the conference came under fire of Hamas gunmen as they tried to exit Gaza. Fortunately, Israeli soldiers crossed the no-man’s zone and escorted them into Israel.
I believe that mutual respect is the basis for future enduring peace in the region, and as Maimonides teaches, the highest form of “tzedakah” is in providing an individual with the capacity for self-reliance.
Jane and I will be returning to Israel soon, and I am sure we will continue to work as much as possible with the unique programs of the Peres Center.
For more information, visit the center’s Web site, www.peres-center.org.
Ellis D. Avner, M.D., is director of the Children’s Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Health System; and associate dean for research, professor of pediatrics and physiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Tel Aviv bus station exemplifies Israel
By Jacob Savage
Tel Aviv (JTA) — The consensus about the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station is that it is the worst building in Israel, if not in the entire world.
At nearly 2.5 million square feet it is, for no apparent reason, the largest bus station on the planet.
Ha’aretz published an article recently about how most of Israel’s leading architects believe the station should be demolished. It probably should be.
But the bus station might just be my favorite place in Israel.
The building is plagued by pathological dysfunction. Escalators skip floors. The ground slopes up and down at steep angles, bringing riders to enclaves of half-floors. Neon signs point you to other neon signs that more often than not return you, exasperated, to your original location.
Construction on the bus station began in 1967, but because of myriad problems the building wasn’t completed until 1993. Of the station’s seven floors, the top two are devoted to the buses — signs designate the bottom two floors, seemingly abandoned, for “Parkings.”
From the fourth-floor promenade you can see down to the third floor and to the street exit — the exit is tantalizingly close — but you just can’t figure out how to get to the third floor.
Bazaar of the bizarre
More than a thousand shops and stands in the station sell anything and everything: lingerie, shoes, Tibetan trinkets, hookahs, cell phones.
There are tailors and beauticians, jewelers and tattoo artists.
It’s a bazaar of the bizarre. A row of perfume shops flanks the McDonald’s. A woman sells tomatoes from a clothing shop that features oversized bras. Fast-food workers smoke cigarettes in one hand as they serve your food with the other.
The building is also something of a cultural center, with bookstores and art schools and travel agencies. It’s an enormous market, a pastiche of Israeli society at its weirdest and most vibrant.
The holy and the profane mix with comic irony. Earnest Chabadniks wrap tefillin under a large poster of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s smiling countenance within spitting distance of the Eros Sex Boutique.
A synagogue and a Center for Family Safety sit near a pool hall and seedy arcade. The arcade isn’t exactly kid friendly; the ubiquitous mechanical claw fishes not for stuffed animals but cigarettes.
The range of graffiti is startling, everything from scratched-out Jewish stars to the popular “punk is dead” to “Am Yisrael Chai” (“the nation of Israel lives”).
As you arrive at the station from one of its many entrances — there are egresses to at least five streets — sounds assault you from all directions. The pizza place blasts Israeli techno and trance. The Tibetan head shop pumps out Bob Marley. The Russian bookstore plays something indescribable.
Smoking, Israel’s favorite pastime, used to be permitted inside, so the bus station smelled like a giant ashtray. Those who actually wanted a giant ashtray didn’t have far to look: a third-floor shop is devoted solely to ashtrays — ornate, Mickey Mouse, checkerboard or otherwise.
At best, the bathrooms are cleaned infrequently. At the entrance to the restrooms, which require one shekel for admission but are nearly impossible to find, crowds gather around as invariably three middle-aged men try to sneak through the same turnstile simultaneously to avoid paying the extra shekel. Somehow I wind up paying that shekel.
Subcultures have embraced various corners of the building. Some storefronts are exclusively in Thai, some in Russian, some in English.
Of course there is Hebrew, which in much of the station seems almost like an afterthought.
A mini Asia-town has formed inside the bus station. A two-story advertisement for Cellcom, the Israeli mobile phone company, features a Thai woman posed on her cell phone and text in Thai. Asian supermarkets, fast food noodle joints and remittance agencies have signs incomprehensible to most Israelis.
The Russians have an even larger niche, with at least four bookstores, several tattoo parlors and a body oil shop. Russian might be the building’s lingua franca.
The Ethiopians have their “Ethiopian style” hair salon, cosmetics stand and restaurant. A store sells Rasta clothes, Jamaican flags, Ethiopian music and T-shirts that read “I Love Ethiopia.”
People watchers have no better place. Soldiers come and go on leave. Religious Ashkenazim try on jewelry. Ethiopian teenagers walk hand in hand. Heavy-set, elderly Russian women mumble to themselves as they try on bras.
American tourists beg for directions to the elusive bathrooms. An elderly Arab woman sells olives.
A harried Russian cleaning lady yells at a shopkeeper for littering, wearily sweeping her broom. The owner of a juice stand ignores the waiting customers as he chain smokes and finishes his game of backgammon.
Kipah-clad Sephardim buy knock-off Lacoste polo shirts as they talk on cell phones. Israeli punks and Goths mill about among dog walkers.
As I walk around the Central Bus Station, I’ve found a peculiar kind of comfort. If all these people — Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Russians, Ethiopians and Thai — can coexist, however uneasily, amid this dysfunctional riot of petty capitalism and bus fumes, then maybe Israel as a whole has hope.
The scene has a strange beauty, a sort of gritty and defiant charm. On the one hand, this is Israel at its worst: a nation beset by strikes and internal discord, by fantastic and nearly fatal design flaws. But against all odds, the bus station works.
In the end the bus station is Israel — as multicultural, as fascinating and as transcendently weird as it gets.
Jacob Savage is a graduate fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
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