A Rabbi, a Pastor, and a Mensch

It has been quite a crazy week here in Israel. Since no one is running the show, each actor/minister tried to outshine the other, coming up with a series of preposterous ideas.

In the same week we had Israel Katz battling Uber, Naftali Bennet fighting history, and Miri Regev in a crusade against the entire Western Civilization. Luckily one former minister, Benny Begin, played the role of the little Dutch boy who plugged his finger in the dike to prevent a catastrophe.

Incidentally  it was also the week of the International Holocaust Memorial Day. In the past the State of Israel, through Yad Vashem, has always acknowledged the sacrifice of non-Jews, the Righteous among the Nations, and the trees in their honor are the first thing we see once we enter the museum.

It didn’t start yesterday, but recently our leaders have managed to persuade many Israelis that the whole world is against us, and this conviction has made many segments of the Israeli society become more insular, and intolerant.

But perhaps it is still possible, through modeling and education, to change people’s attitudes? and this is exactly what Menachem Daum, an Orthodox Jew and a documentary film maker, tried to do with his own two sons.

In the documentary film Hiding And Seeking (2004), Menachem Daum challenges the hatred of non-Jews within the ultra-Orthodox community. As a son of a Holocaust survivor, who immigrated to the US, he decides to take his wife and two adult sons to Poland on a journey to find the Polish family who saved their grandfather during the war.

Daum’s two sons live in Jerusalem and they have become ultra-Orthodox. He and his wife are aware of the fact that their chosen life style in the Haredi community, isolate them from the whole world.The parents would like their children not to see anti Semitism everywhere and to be more open to the world.

Thus the Daums show  their adult children part of the outside world, which is unfamiliar to them.The sons reluctantly agree to go, but it is clear that in spite of heeding the 5th commandment, they don’t trust the father’s judgment and see no value in that journey

The film consists mostly of conversations, there is nothing dramatic going on, apart from the underlying understanding that the Daum family is alive today because of those Polish people.

Gradually there is a  change, and at the end of the film the Polish family gets the certificate of the Righteous among the Nations, and one of the sons is making an emotional speech in which he shows his gratitude.

At that moment, I knew for sure that Menachem Daum was right not to give up on his adult sons. At the age of 70, he not only changed their attitudes, but he showed them the way to become better people.

Menachem Daum is an Orthodox Jew, but for him this faith means that he is first of all a Mensch. This is the "ethical legacy" which he bequeathed  his sons.

In Israel today we desperately need more Mensches like Menachem Daum. And since Wednesday was International Holocaust Memorial day, it is appropriate to, once again, tell about the courageous Pastor Andre Trocmé who, in response to the demand of  the Vichy authorities to produce a list of the Jews in town, answered: “We do not know what a Jew is, we only know men.”

We should be able to give the same answer here in Israel.

The essay appeared  in the Times of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-rabbi-a-pastor-and-a-mensch/

The Unbearable Lightness of Freedom

 MAR.15.2013

The cinematic moment which symbolizes for me  loss of freedom is when Tomas, the protagonist in the film The Unbearable lightness of Being, 1988  ( based on the novel by Milan Kundera 1984 ),  returns to Czechoslovakia from the west, after the Soviet invasion, and his passport is confiscated at the border, leaving him stranded.

This is not a dramatic scene, quite the contrary, it presents a routine transaction, but the power here is in the implications of the trivial act:  not having a passport means that you are stranded and no longer free to come and go as you wish.  Perhaps I was so moved by this scene because it reminded me of different occasions when I too felt a loss of freedom. One example is when, at the end of the first day of basic training, I realized that no, I could not go home: I had to stay in the army for 20 more  months.

To this day whenever I recollect this scene from  The Unbearable I feel a pang of anxiety not unlike the one experienced when I first watched the film. But I find it hard to envision the picture of me, the unhappy  18 year old girl who could not go home. Although The Unbearable is a poignant film, it is hard to explain why  this  short scene remains more vivid in my mind than my own experience.

Wayne C. Booth in the Rhetoric of Fiction stresses the importance of Showing over Telling in fiction, and we all are familiar with the old saying  that one picture is worth a thousand words.

However, I believe that the strength of this scene is not only in the visuals: confiscating a  passport is a symbol of the arbitrariness of the totaliterian regime and the helplessness of the individual, who is stripped of a most basic freedom, in this case the freedom of mobility. 

 Sometimes we remember meaningful events that we have not personally experienced. Here I have appropriated the memory of life in post-invasion Czechoslovakia.  My family history provides me with an even stronger memory, my father left Nazi Germany in 1934 when he was 21 year old and never got to see his parents and his younger brother. They  were not free to leave Germany or to get a certificate to come to Israel, and they perished in the camps.

Whenever I think of  that  scene at the border, it gives me a chance to reenact, in a small way, that exact moment when freedom is taken away. Lucky for me I can push away the memory and go on with my life, I should not forget those who are not so fortunate.

Blue Jasmine, A College Dropout Or A Gifted Anthropologist?

Although women’s education is not the main theme of Woody Allen’s movie Blue Jasmine, it is an important leitmotif --serving both as a characterization  device and as a moving force of the plot. In the opening scene on the plane, the heroine Jasmine tells the unfortunate lady who happens to sit next to her that after she had met her future husband she dropped out of university. She asks her neighbor whether she could imagine her as an anthropologist.

The neighbor does not have an answer, she has no idea who this rambling lady is, but Woody Allen has made a clever choice. Jasmine has not completed her education, still she is a gifted anthropologist. She becomes involved in a long standing field study of the rich and  famous. She does not keep a scientific distance from her subjects, quite the contrary. For several years she lives among them, carefully observes their movements and studies their practices, gradually she adopts  their norms and attitudes and becomes almost indistinguishable from them.

For years Jasmine has not worried about completing her education, as it served its purpose—marrying a rich man. However, when this chapter in her life abruptly and tragically ends, she is forced into a totally different field. Here she could no longer function as an anthropologist, she has no desire to study her new environment or adopt its customs. Thus she turns to education again hoping that once more it will provide her with the delivery she so desparately needs.

Unfortunately this time around Jasmine cannot be saved, going back to school proves too difficult in her current state of mind, and the connections that she obtains let her down.

Education (or learning), as it is presented in Blue Jasmine, does not have any intrinsic value; it only serves as a means for a specific purpose or as desperate prospect for a way out. I feel that Allen's disbelief in human nature has resulted in his cynical view of education in general and of education of women in particular.

This view of education brings back images of bleak periods in the history of Feminism; for generations women had to work much harder than men in order to be taken seriously. Moreover, their dedication was mocked or frowned upon by men (and sometimes by women). Until the 1980s gaining admission to either Oxford or Cambridge was much more difficult for women than for men, since their enrollment was limited to the only few openings in the women’s colleges.

Once they were admitted, their presence in these universities was not always welcome. Earlier in the century the poet and critic John Betjeman expressed a highly negative view of Oxford’s women who “drive out many good men from the clubs and societies they invade.” He even accused them of raising the standard of examinations since “they work so more doggedly than many of the men” The prominent feminist Edith Summerskill (an Oxford graduate, a physician, a Member of Parliament and a Minister of Cabinet), wrote to her daughter Shirley, a student in Oxford in the fifties that “it would be quite inaccurate to suggest that we were welcomed into the universities or into the public life”

 Blue Jasmine does not take place in the 1950s, a period when women were accused of going to university only to find a suitable husband, but in the present. Thus Jasmine must have attended university toward the end of the 20th century; I don't believe that at that time many women dropped out of school in order  to become  socialites.

Critics would argue  that Blue Jasmine is one of Woody Allen's best films, and  I am quite certain that it will win numerous awards. And yes, it is true that Cate Blanchett is brilliant as Jasmine and Woody Allen's  homage to old Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire is touching. However, we should not forget how hard we worked to get to where we are today and leave the 1950s behind. So at the risk of sounding humorless, I say: "it's not funny" and demand not to be  sent back there.