Pain That Cannot Forget

On Sunday evening, we were at the home of our daughter-in-law’s parents celebrating their anniversary. As we have with our son-in-law’s family, we’ve become close, which is a blessing.

We are all Jewish, so inevitably there was some scattered talk about the events in Israel. But we had all been following the news, so none of us had anything new to say. In any case, the point of the evening was to celebrate the anniversary and also celebrate how our son Andrew and their daughter Rebecca had brought our two families together.

Then, during dinner, Andrew’s father-in-law Michael said something that stayed with me, “This is a night when Jews should be together.”

That felt so right to me, and it got me thinking about what it means to me to be Jewish at this especially perilous and uncertain time.

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We Diaspora Jews living outside Israel are the beneficiaries of a remarkable document called The Law of Return. It is an open invitation to all Jews to return home to Israel (make “Aliyah”). The two main restrictions are you can’t be a criminal and you can’t have converted to another religion.¹

The Law has been revised a few times to incorporate a very liberal definition of who is a Jew. For example, if you have one Jewish grandparent or if you’re not Jewish but married to a Jew, you qualify. It’s a definition similar to that used for monstrous purpose by Nazi Germany. ² That symmetry of definition combined with asymmetry of result pleases me.

In this world of eight billion people, there are about fifteen million Jews, with about seven million in Israel and six million in the United States. There are about 18 million people in the Diaspora who would qualify for Aliyah under the Law of Return. ³

I thought about the circumstances that might lead my family and me to leave New York City for Israel, which led me to think about worst cases for Jews in America. There would have to be an awful sea change⁴ in American life, some combination of the drowning of Civil Rights Law and a tsunami of anti-Semitism.

Likely? No. Impossible? History, sadly, says no. We Jews have been kicked out of every country on earth except America and Israel. And only Israel is a Jewish state with a Law of Return.

At a time like this, I am reminded that we are a tribe that owes an enormous debt of gratitude to all the Jews who came before us and managed to survive. And an even greater debt to those Jews who have been killed, including as recently as a few day ago, solely because they were Jewish. Just as Abel’s blood cried out to God, the victims’ pain cries out to us, immense and immeasurable over three thousand years, from Egypt in the time of Moses to the border towns of Gaza this past weekend.

So we must bear witness and not turn aside. We owe at least that to the survivors and the perished alike. And we must persist as Jews so that their sacrifices will not have been in vain.

I think of how despite our tribal divisions, we Jews are a family connected by chords of memory that stretch back into the farthest reaches of recorded history. Go back far enough and it’s likely that my wife and I have relatives in common with the parents of our daughter-in-law and son-in-law. So we were truly together as a family this Sunday night.

This weekend, some of our tribe, some of our extended family of fifteen million, were raped, murdered, and kidnapped.

It is good for us to be together and to mourn together.

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“In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

That powerful line by Aeschylus was famously quoted by Robert Kennedy on the night in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Kennedy was campaigning in Indianapolis in a Black community when he heard the news of MLK’s murder. He told the crowd what had happened and then quoted Aeschylus extemporaneously.

His entire five minute speech is worth watching. The quote comes at around the 2:50 minute mark.

1. Meyer Lansky, the inspiration for Hyman Roth in the Godfather, was refused Israeli citizenship because of his criminal past.

I officiated at my brother-in-law’s wedding in Nevada using an on-line, one time marriage officiant service. I made sure the officiant designation was non-religious, keeping the Law of Return in mind.

2. In Isabelle Wilkerson’s book Caste, she describes how the Nazis’ definition of Jews drew evil inspiration from the definition of Black used in the Jim Crow South.

3. Estimated numbers are from The Jewish Agency: https://www.jewishagency.org/jewish-population-rises-to-15-3-million-worldwide-with-over-7-million-residing-in-israel/

4. Thanks to Shakespeare, we use “sea change” to describe any momentous change. But when you think about a body being in the sea, the phrase should really only be used for a momentous change of decay.