Can You Hear Me Now?

Dec 22

I have many stunning qualities including an incisive analytic skill that is at most a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if even that. That said, I can be a bit of a space cadet and surprisingly oblivious to the world in my immediate vicinity. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening around me; rather, there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam bobbing around in my head, and anything coming to me through the normal five senses must fight hard to make it upstream and into my cerebral cortex.

A few years ago, I was sitting in a park in Perth Amboy. A woman started screaming at a man who was following her. This being broad daylight, the park was filled with people who didn’t pay any attention, including me.

In my defense, such as it is, I was busy preparing a Torah reading for the upcoming Shabbat. I don’t mean to suggest that this was more important than helping the lady – G-d forbid! It’s just that I was entirely focused on the text, and even more out of it than usual. When this tumult made it into my consciousness, I was annoyed that this shrew was being so mean to the poor guy.

That is, until she sat down next to me and said she was trying to get away from this man who wouldn’t leave her alone.

Happily, the Almighty granted me an immediate attitude adjustment. I assured her that she could stay with me as long as she liked. She was relieved, and the guy backed off, but hovered about.

My wife likes to watch true crime shows, and the men who prey on women are always huge, ugly, and mean. This guy, however, was a total putz – one of the most pitiful losers I’d ever laid eyes on. I don’t doubt that she had reason to be afraid of him, but he was not what I would have expected.

She told me something about her story. She had been in a relationship with him – I’m not sure if he had been physically abusive, but he repeatedly stole her money and lied about it. Now, she lived in a shelter and was getting her life back together.

She asked me to walk her out of the park. I told her that I had a car and would happily drive her someplace safe. She accepted. I didn’t think about this until much later, but aren’t girls taught from a very young age not to get into cars with strange men? Of course, I’m a nice guy, but she had no way of knowing that. I guess it shows how desperate a vulnerable woman can be. I dropped her off near her shelter. She thanked me, I wished her well, and I haven’t seen her since.

A happy ending, I suppose. At least I hope so. Sure, I did the right thing, albeit after a false start, but why was it so hard for the universe to get in touch with me?

It reminds me of Samuel’s story. Now, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d compare myself to one of our greatest prophets but hear me out. While young and still living with Eli the high priest at Shiloh, Samuel was awoken by a strange voice. And not just any voice, but the Divine Voice. Confused, he went to see if Eli had called out for him. He hadn’t. This happened several times, until at last Eli told Samuel that it must have been the Almighty calling. I don’t know what had been bobbing about in Samuel’s head at the time, but it could have cost us the Davidic dynasty.

And then there’s Balaam, whose words we repeat when we get to shul in the morning. He didn’t see the looming angel until his donkey pointed him out. And not just any donkey, but a girl donkey. This guy was clearly somewhere out in left field.

There are times when the Divine Voice is misunderstood. For example, Rabbi Akiva read the signs and proclaimed Bar Kochba as Messiah. The Jerusalem Talmud reports that this mistake led to national tragedy.

Did Abraham really have a handle on what G-d wanted at the Akedah? That one is way above my pay grade, but perhaps a certain scholar of my acquaintance can clear that up for us some time.

How about someone who understood the Voice and tried to resist? And I’m not talking about Jonah, who scampered away crying like a little girl. When Moses was at the Bush, he heard the Almighty quite clearly. Still, he tried to duck the responsibility being foisted upon him. Some of that was to be expected – he was after all the humblest man ever to live. But I was taught in Hebrew School that Moses took it just a bit too far. When G-d says jump, you’re not supposed to say “who, me?” This, along with striking the rock at Meribah, kept Moses out of the Promised Land.

The Tanach is replete with stories of folks disconnected from their surroundings, even among family. Isaac mistook one son for the other. Two generations later, Joseph’s brothers had no idea who they were groveling to. What stands out most of all is when Jacob thought he was going to bed with one woman but woke up with another.

I hate it when that happens. You wouldn’t believe how many ladies have a striking resemblance to my wife. She doesn’t believe it either. Sometimes she has a point. There was that cheerleader from the University of Alabama. The bright red hair really should have tipped me off.

In any event, Jacob ended up with both Leah and Rachel. It led to the forerunner of all reality shows: Desperate Matriarchs of Mesopotamia.

I could take some solace at not being alone in my cluelessness. When Jeremiah tried to warn Zedekiah that the Babylonians were too strong to resist, the bullfrog was thrown into a pit, and the First Temple was destroyed. Centuries later, our Sages said the same thing about the Romans, and the Second Temple was destroyed. And what about Belshazzar the Chaldean? He was on the receiving end of the original writing on the wall: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. For those of you who are a little light on your Aramaic, that means: numbered, numbered, weighed, divided. Sure, that’s a bit cryptic. But even after Daniel explained it to him, Belshazzar was still assassinated that night.

But I suppose there’s not all that much solace in any of that.

I’m going to describe an example from more recent times.

For the most part, world Jewry supports Israel, even if some are uncomfortable with the current government. But over a century ago, most did not want to see the creation of a Jewish State. Some opposition was religious. After all, Herzl was not Moshiach. Some opposition was ideological. Given the onset of Emancipation in Europe, Jews should separate religion from national allegiance.

Some probably gave no thought at all to religion or ideology. Plenty of Jews were quite comfortable throughout the Diaspora and couldn’t imagine uprooting themselves. And of course, there was the sheer impossibility of whole project. Zionists were just a bunch of unrealistic, utopian dreamers.

Add to the mix: the Zionists were not exactly a monolith of certitude. There were political Zionists, cultural Zionists, socialist Zionists, labor Zionists, religious Zionists, radical Zionists, general Zionists and revisionist Zionists. I’m sure I must be leaving some out, but how did these folks ever get their act together?

When the Nazis came to power, Jews could not come to a broad consensus on how to respond. Without a doubt, they knew of the danger, if not necessarily the extent. Some tried to organize a world-wide boycott of German goods and services. Others urged a quieter, behind the scenes effort. After all, Court Jews in the Middle Ages were frequently successful in heading of the worst abuses. German Jewish expats were concerned that their families in the old country would suffer even more if the Nazis were antagonized. They had good reasons to think so.

The Roosevelt administration was also worried about annoying Hitler, so it opposed the boycott. And besides, the Germans claimed that reports of Jews being mistreated were “atrocity propaganda”. In modern nomenclature, fake news.

It's quite possible that a sustained boycott would have brought down Hitler as early as 1933, but no one can say for sure. Even the Reich’s own data, which was statistically falsified as per Nazi policy, showed the economy approaching disaster. Perhaps the Fuhrer felt the numbers were rigged. At the time, Zionist leadership was working on a deal with the Third Reich to bring some German Jews along with some of their wealth to the Yishuv. This was at least part of the reason the boycott effort failed.

How could Jews have cut deals with the Nazis? Hitler had written about using poison gas against Jews in “Mein Kampf”, which was published in 1925. To be sure, now we can see that it wasn’t all metaphor and hyperbole. Not only that, but Edwin Black, who wrote about these negotiations in “The Transfer Agreement”, argues persuasively that Israel could not have achieved statehood without them.

Where does this leave us? What can we learn from history? If you listen closely, there’s a voice crying out – can you hear me now? Let’s see where this takes us.

When ancient Rome controlled most of the known world, most conquered territories were reconstituted as full-fledged provinces of the Empire. If the subjected peoples behaved and paid taxes, they were left to themselves. And as far as religion was concerned, the Romans told them, in effect, “we don’t believe in our own gods, so you do you.” They made an exception for those pesky, rebellious Jews. They felt it necessary to prohibit various rituals, including circumcision.

The mark of the covenant is very important to Jews, as it certainly is for me. But, for the most part, I don’t give it a thought. This is not the case for everybody. The Secretary of Health and Human Services recently speculated about a connection between circumcision and autism. There are groups like RECAP – Recover A Penis, NORM – National Organization of Restoring Men, and BUFF – Brothers United for Future Foreskins. These guys are so rattled at having been snipped that they wear some sort of clamp down there to stretch out a replacement. Which, okay.

And it’s not just men. A recently divorced Jewish woman I once knew was dipping her toe back into the dating pool and was looking forward to servicing her first intact member. You go girl!

Here’s my favorite: a friend from my office days, a gentile, underwent the cut as an adult. He was assured that this would lead to better sex. I don’t remember asking him if it did indeed double his pleasure, but you got to admire that kind of dedication.

Today, the federal government is doing its best to forbid gender affirming and reproductive care. Of course, it’s not quite the same thing.

In William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, he mentions that in 1936, the Führer ordered that all judges and prosecutors wear the swastika on their robes. But what did the Nazis care about the law? Quite a bit. Even at the Wannsee Conference where the details of the Final Solution were hashed out, they still tried to keep up a veneer of legality.

Alina Habba was one of Trump’s private lawyers, and Donny tried to install her as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, although her appointment was ruled illegal and she has since resigned. She’s the one who would rather be pretty than smart, because she can always fake smart. She said this more recently on Fox News’s Hannity: “We will not fall to rogue judges … when they should just be doing their job: respecting the president.” To be sure, Trump does complain about corrupt judges whenever one of them rules against him.

He also is calling for George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, to be prosecuted for under the RICO Act - Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. It sounds like something out of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” If there’s a show trial of some sort, perhaps the judge will wear one of those red hats. All this sounds like what Hitler was cooking up, but it’s not quite the same thing.

Shirer also described how quickly Hitler was able to centralize power, stripping individual German states of the self-rule autonomy that went all the way back to the Holy Roman Empire. Similarly, Trump threatens to withhold funding or apply some other sort of coercion to any state, county, or city that doesn’t bend the knee. Still, not quite the same thing.

The Nazis rounded up Jews and herded them onto trains. Today, frightened migrants, and even American citizens, are grabbed by masked men and thrown into unmarked vans. You guessed it: not quite the same thing.

The Nazis changed academic to be more to their liking. So, racial biology, racial eugenics, and racial hygiene were all taught in universities and medical schools. There was also the idea of “Aryan Physics.” Presumably, relativity and quantum mechanics were just too Jewish. So, ideology trumped science. Do we have anything like that today? Let me count the ways: vaccines, climate change, Tylenol. Once again, not quite the same thing.

All sorts of things were named after Hitler. For example, the Hitlerjugend, known in English as the Hitler Youth. Also, Adolph Hitler schools, Adolph Hitler streets, Adolf Hitler bridges, and many more. Of course, these were renamed after 1945.

Do we have anything like that now? I can live with the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, and even the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Arts Center. I’m drawing the line at renaming our shul Neve Trump. Whatever. Not quite the same thing.

Years after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler conceded that the move had been premature. The movement hadn’t done enough preparation. But, by 1933, he said it was easy to toss off remnants of the old state since much of the new state was already in place.

Perhaps January 6th was also premature. But after Project 2025 and the Department of Governmental Efficiency, perhaps they can get it right. Not quite the same thing.

Hitler had a variety of territorial designs. If you ever watched “The Sound Of Music” you might remember that the film ended with the Anschluss, in which Austria was taken over by the Nazis. Hitler claimed that it wasn’t a separate country after all. Today, the Orange Moses talks about Canada being the fifty-first state. Not quite the same thing.

Hitler was also obsessed with Lebensraum or Living Space. That meant expansion into East Europe. Today, Dozy Don seems to be focused on Greenland. Not quite the same thing.

Hitler came to power with the help of disorder fomented by the paramilitary Stormtroopers, also known as the Brownshirts. These thugs roughed up and killed anyone who put up any resistance to the Nazi program, and especially Jews. Today we have Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who don’t seem to be as bad, at least not yet. Having been emboldened by pardons, perhaps they’ll be more active in the upcoming election cycle. Federal agents have already been arresting U.S. citizens and holding them incommunicado for a few days. Not quite the same thing.

Of course, at some point the Brownshirts had outlived their usefulness and were dispatched on the Night of the Long Knives. After that, they were more of a drum and bugle corps.

And today? Turning Point USA is at war with itself over how explicit they should be with bigotry, misogyny, antisemitism, islamophobia, and all the other woke-a-phobias. Some are concerned at how this is coming off in what passes for polite company; others want to turn it up to eleven. Should the Proud Boys be watching their backs? Hope springs eternal. But you guessed it: not quite the same thing.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t connect this next item to anything MAGA. Try as I might, I just don’t have enough Trump Derangement Syndrome. But it is instructive.

In June 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked and diverted to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Once it landed, there was a selection, and Jewish hostages were separated from the gentiles, who were then released.

One of the Jews approached a captor, a German who was a member of the far-left Revolutionary Cells. He exposed the Auschwitz camp tattoo on his forearm and said: “Your parents killed my parents because they were Jews. Now, you’re going to kill me for the same reason.” The German responded: “I’m no Nazi! I am an idealist.” To which the Jew replied: “A German with a gun killing Jews – it’s the same thing.”

Although there are new threats of antisemitism in this country, from both the right and the left, most of the people being victimized today are gentiles. As Jews, what is our responsibility? That’s a complicated question, no less so than that confronted by world Jewry in the run up to the Holocaust. To be sure, we need to keep things civil in our shul and be careful not to harsh the mellow of our sanctuary. Does it really matter who’s suffering as long as it’s not OUR ox being gored?