NY’s Trusted Jewish Newspaper • Honest Reporting, Torah-True
TheJewishStar.com
April 12, 2024 4 Nisan 5784 • Tazria • Vol 23, No 14
Publisher@TheJewishStar.com • 516-622-7461
My eldest daughter had a hard day on Sunday… … First, she went to the funeral of one of the four soldiers who was just killed, 20-year-old Amitai Even-Shoshan, who was a friend of hers. After the funeral, she went to the azkarah commemorating one year since the murder of her friend from midrasha, Maya Dee. These are not the only people she knew personally who lost their lives this past year. … From Beit Shemesh
Rabbi dR. NaTaN slifkiN
T Tivkah Slifkin during her service in the IDF.
his is not how I grew up. My children are living a very different life than I had. When I was growing up, the only funerals that I attended were those of my elderly grandparents. In England, it was almost inconceivable that someone I knew would have been killed in a terrorist attack (though not entirely inconceivable, as the IRA bombed my local shopping center). Certainly nobody that I knew was at risk of falling in battle, because nobody that I knew was in the army.
See Daughter’s bad day on page 2
Tivkah Slifkin remembers her friend, terror-victim Maya Dee, writing, “I can’t believe a year has passed without you. … I’m sure you’re making noise up there.”
We are eternal optimists, trusting in G-d’s care daTEliNE: isRaEl
bENJamiN kERsTEiN
I
once interviewed former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval, who was in his 90s (he is approaching 94 this month). He had lived the entirety of Israel’s history, often in high political and diplomatic positions, so at the end of our conversation, I asked if, given everything he had seen in his life, he was an optimist. He smiled and said, “I think Jews have to be optimists.” I’m not sure whether Jews have to be optimists, but most of us are optimists. Considering everything we’ve been through over the
past 2,000 years, this is a rather remarkable thing, but it is the case. For millennia, the Jews have been strikingly inept at despair. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any great Jewish thinker who was a confirmed pessimist. There is Kohelet, whose Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the great statements of philosophical pessimism. And there is Kafka, who on his deathbed reportedly said, “There is no hope in this world. In the world to come, perhaps, but not in this one.” No one else springs immediately to mind, which says something in and of itself. This absence of a pessimistic worldview may be the result of the messianic hope bored deep into the foundations of Judaism. Or perhaps Shoval was right that we have no choice. As James Baldwin put it, “I have to be an optimist, because I’m alive.” It may be as simple as that. Perhaps neither optimism or pessimism is
particularly warranted. The traditional Jewish view tends to hold that there is a good inclination and an evil inclination, and we choose between them. There is no reason to think one will by definition triumph over the other. Recently, however, a darker possibility occurred to me. Last week, probably for masochistic reasons, I was reading the New York Times
Perhaps when the whirlwind of war and hate passes, the world will look different.
editorial page. In it, one of the Times’ more lamentable columnists described the dire situation in Ukraine. Suddenly, the writer veered off into a rant that claimed it is Israel’s fault that the US is finding it difficult to muster up international support for the Ukrainian war effort. The “international community,” the writer claimed, was constantly asking American diplomats why it should support Ukraine while the US is supporting Israel. After all, aren’t Israel and Russia doing the same thing? t that point, I thought: It’s a bad world. The only way Israel and Russia could be doing the same thing is if Ukraine sent hundreds of terrorists into Russia to slaughter, rape and torture thousands of innocent Russians in a genocidal religious frenzy. Comparing Israel’s war to Russia’s is so obviously and See Eternal optimists on page 2
A