Friday, February 14, 2025
From Ian:
Meir Y. Soloveichik: A Jewish Moment Without Parallel
Meir Y. Soloveichik: A Jewish Moment Without Parallel
In contrast, perhaps the most striking feature of Netanyahu’s trip to Washington is that it featured a meeting with major evangelical leaders, but not with Jewish ones, reflecting the fact that it is millions of non-Jewish Americans who make up the heart of the America-Israel alliance. And this, in turn, reveals a fact about our moment that has no parallel in the biblical past: For the first time since the emergence of Abraham’s covenant nation, there are, numerically, more Gentiles who care about the well-being of the Jewish people than there are Jewish people on this earth. We live, one might say, in unprecedented times.A Free Nation, in Our Own Land
Here, then, is where our moment becomes mysterious. Various aspects of Jewish existence at present seem less like the biblical description of what once was, and more like the biblical prediction of what will be. The Bible speaks of a city of Jerusalem that expands far beyond its walls, that will attract the admiration of nations. None of this is an excuse for Israel to rest on its laurels or ignore its daunting challenges. Scripture also stresses that other redemptive moments in the prophetic past have been squandered by mistakes made by Israel’s leaders, or its people, just as it predicts that Israel’s miraculous story will attract the ire of nations that will ally themselves against it. But it does mean that there may not be other examples of statesmanship in the past that speak precisely to our moment, and that much of our age is paralleled not in history, but in prophecy.
In his address to his son’s high school, Scalia described why the American Founders sought to learn from history, and he utilized the Bible in his explanation.
They knew they were facing great challenges in seeking to establish at one and the same time a federation and a democracy. But they did not think for a moment it was an unprecedented challenge. If you read the Federalist Papers, you will find they are full of examples to support particular dispositions in the Constitution—from Greece, from Rome, from medieval Italy, France, and Spain. So if you want to think yourselves educated, do not believe that you face unprecedented challenges. Much closer to the truth is a different platitude: There is nothing new under the sun.
The Bible does indeed say this, but it also predicts that radically new moments in the Jewish future are yet to come. We seem to be, in some respect, in such a time. Thus Jewish statesmen and leaders, in Israel and the Diaspora, will need, increasingly, to turn not to the tales of Greece and Rome, but to the Bible in order to search for instruction—to not only its description of past events, but also its vision for the Jewish future. This vision was presented thousands of years ago, but it seems increasingly relevant today. And this surely means that, especially in this trying period, we may hope for more surprises and wonders yet to come.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the past became my present. Although San Francisco has been my home for 50 years, having grown up in a Jewish family in Tel Aviv before the creation of the State of Israel, that day was 1943 again and I was a 5-year-old child in a third-floor apartment on Montefiore Street.Welcome to Hamassachusetts
Two British soldiers rang the bell and my mother, Lisa, opened the door. “This is a search.” My grandmother Baboo and I hovered behind my mother, knowing that the appearance of British soldiers at the door could spell trouble. Just the sight of British uniforms was scary enough. My mom spoke some English but we did not, adding to our bewilderment. My father, Boris, who was in the Haganah, the largest Jewish defense group at that time, was not at home.
Our apartment in Tel Aviv consisted of two rooms, a balcony, a kitchen, and a shared bath. The soldiers looked under the beds, pulled open the drawers of the big armoire in the bedroom, rifled through the contents, and shifted the hanging clothes from side to side while whispering to each other. Baboo and I watched the soldiers’ faces. Even as a 5-year-old, I sensed that the soldiers were nervous, too.
We didn’t know what they were looking for or what might happen to us if they found something incriminating. Meanwhile Lisa, as if a hostess at an elegant party, escorted the soldiers around the apartment, gesturing proudly and smiling an appeasing, coquettish smile.
Not finding anything suspicious under the beds, in the geranium planters on the balcony, or behind the small curtain under the sink in the kitchen, the men turned their attention to the large rectangular wooden boxes hanging above the windows. Accordion-like wooden shutters rolled up into these boxes during the day and rolled down at night.
Were any guns hidden there? Any Haganah documents? While they whispered, I heard my mother’s voice,
“Would you like a refreshing drink?”
“Yes, please.”
Lisa emerged from the kitchen with two glasses containing a green liquid and two small cloth napkins on a tray. You might have thought this was a garden party in a fancy house and the men were in military costumes just for fun. In those days, you couldn’t choose from 30-plus varieties of bottled beverages. A cool drink consisted of a spoonful of sweet purple, pink, or green syrup mixed with water.
“You first!” said one soldier, handing my mom the glass with the green drink.
Lisa sipped from the glass daintily. No, not poison. And the soldiers drank. Then they opened all the shutter boxes and finding nothing, left the apartment bearing no contraband. We were safe for now.
At that time, we were under the British Mandate, which was created to bring order to the territory. The resident Arabs resented the mandate and became violent; the Jews responded in kind. To control the violence, the Brits imposed random lockdowns in the cities. Loud sirens pierced our ears day or night and loudspeakers boomed: “Everyone inside!”
Occasional half-hour respites would be blared out, allowing the residents to go out for food. When a break came, my mom grabbed a basket and we ran to line up at the nearby bakery for bread. She wore the new housedress she had bought for these occasions (a simple flowery, button-down cotton dress with pockets). She would look good while queuing up for bread and later, in the bomb shelter, during the War of Independence. Our Arab neighbors to the north, east, and south did not agree that this land of Israel is the home of the Jews.
Inside the Massachusetts statehouse on Monday, State Representative Simon Cataldo displayed the image of a dollar bill folded into a Star of David in front of a packed audience of teachers, activists, and staffers. They were there to attend a hearing on the state of antisemitism in Massachusetts public schools.
“You’d agree that this is antisemitic imagery, correct?” Cataldo, who co-chairs the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, asked Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA)—the largest union in New England, representing 117,000 members.
“I’m not gonna evaluate that,” Page responds calmly.
Cataldo pressed him. “Is it antisemitic?”
Page continued to sit stoically, before breaking into a smile. “You’re trying to get away from the central point,” Page said, “which is that we provide imagery, we provide resources for our members to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way.”
In fact, this image is referenced in materials recently made available to Massachusetts educators for teaching about the Middle East. Entitled “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine,” the union’s Training and Professional Learning Division developed the framework “for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.” Last December, the union published the resource document on a webpage accessible only to MTA members.
The person who created the document is Ricardo Rosa, an MTA director with a history of pushing anti-Israel rhetoric, including showing support for Leila Khaled, a terrorist who hijacked a plane headed to Israel in the 1960s. Two days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Rosa posted “Free Palestine” on his Instagram account, The Daily Wire reported.
Page was asked by the Massachusetts commission about a series of posters contained in the MTA materials, which appear to display an anti-Israel bias. These materials include a poster of a militant wearing a keffiyeh and holding an assault rifle, that reads, “What was taken by force can only be returned by force.”
Another poster portrays George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist group designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. It, too, depicts a militant with an assault rifle.
A third poster calls for a “day of rage” to “decolonize this place,” and a fourth tells “Zionists” to “fuck off.”
Another shows a picture of Joe Biden, labeled a “serial killer” for his support of Israel during his presidency. Yet another displays “Unity in Confronting Zionism” beneath a snake—another antisemitic trope once used in Nazi-era posters.
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