Is the Hebrew phrase for, “Next year in Jerusalem”. ( לשנה הבאה בירושלים). A couple of things have been making me think of that phrase this past week.
Today, for example, is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. It happens right before the week of Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day. I’ve been in Israel twice for it. It’s a stirring thing to see all traffic come to a stop on the roads, people get out of their cars, and stand in stillness for two minutes while the siren goes off. This year that is not happening and Israel is not having an in-person ceremony. For the first time ever it was a virtual ceremony.
Despite Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square being eerily deserted, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day ceremony nevertheless went ahead in perhaps the strangest circumstances of the country’s history. In the shadow of the coronavirus epidemic, the host of the ceremony addressed an empty square and vocalists performed without an audience – but the speeches from the country’s leaders, the stories of survivors and the prayers for those murdered all went ahead regardless.
The video in the link is worth watching, although it is an hour and 15 minutes long. The Kaddish Prayer ( Hebrew prayer for the dead) is said and at the end of the ceremony HaTikvah, the Israeli national anthem is sung. I’ve included that part of the broadcast in the clip below:
I much enjoyed my work in Israel and miss my trips there a lot. I am going to return there for a while probably after the first of next year, God and this damn disease willing.
The other reason I have thought a lot about the phrase is the fact that I have been watching the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America.” It is based on the 2004 Philip Roth novel of the same name. I started reading it when it came out as I am a big Philip Roth fan, but for some reason, I never finished it. In subsequent moves, the book got given away, and I no longer have it. The book is an alternate history of America where Charles Lindbergh becomes President – and makes accommodations with the Nazis.
I have been watching the series with great interest, however, and I find it to be at the same time, compelling TV and also a disturbing analogy to where the United States of America is headed with Donald Trump as President. Roth never wrote the book to be a prophecy, but events have turned his novel into one. See the trailer here:
While I am not Jewish, I find much to identify with in the Jewish faith, especially in the last few years. And one does not have to be Jewish to understand the effect of fear – and a nation whose people turn their backs on decency – going entirely to the dark side.
This commentary from the Jerusalem Post, by Gabe Friedman, which is explicitly discussing the anti-Semitic back story – nonetheless struck a chord with me. He calls it “the scariest story he has ever watched.” I can fully agree with him, the alternate past it portrays, and the potentially deadly future that he and I and many others may yet face is indeed frightening.
In many senses, the Levins feel like the 1940s version of my family. They’re not very religious but have strong Jewish cultural ties. They go to their local Jewish bakery more than their synagogue. They can recite memorized lines of Hebrew, but don’t know what the words mean.
Other recent shows that have depicted Jews have leaned toward stereotype, not archetype. “Hunters,” the recent Amazon series about Nazi hunters in New York City, offers an example: Its efforts toward Jewish authenticity rely on matzah ball soup, gefilte fish jokes, prayers and ridiculous Yiddish accents. So when one “Hunters” character calls another a “kike,” it didn’t feel like an attack on me or anyone like me.
By comparison, every slur in “Plot” packs a strong punch. When the Levins are told to leave their hotel for no reason other than their Jewishness, and the police ignore their claims of discrimination, I got queasy. When an intimidatingly large antisemite comes over to their café table to tell them to be quiet, I cowered into my couch pillows. But Simon also captures a feeling that’s even more crucial, from an affect point of view, than the characters’ Jewishness: the feeling of being watched over, manipulated and on one’s own. Their government claims to support them, but it’s only a nominal protection, a state of being that could easily slip into a much darker place.
The tension of being on that dividing line, between safety and a lack of it, filled me with dread as I watched. For me at least, that made the show more powerful than a gut-wrenching Holocaust film that shows Jews being violently abused and murdered. It shows what I could be dealing with in the future, should the gears of history tilt slightly the wrong way.
The fear he describes is real. As I watched the first two episodes, I could substitute the name Trump” for Lindbergh and understand precisely how stressful 1940, with a Lindbergh candidacy, could be for the Levin family. Substitute “2016” for “1940,” and you can capture the stomach-wrenching dread that I experienced as the months went by. The Republican party abandoned any shred of decent behavior to kowtow to this foul-mouthed talking yam of a President.
And as for the events of the later episodes in 1941 and 1942? Well, to me, they are real, and it’s easy to see similar type events occurring if the nation is foolish enough not to destroy this orange monster at the ballot box. The ease with which Americans in Roth’s world abandoned any pretense of decency and turned on their fellow Americans is very believable. After all, we see it play out in a smaller form just this week. As I have stated again and again on these pages, the Trump GOP wants a dedicated type of political apartheid with a minority (a minority in the sense that it never represents the will of the majority of the people, just like now) government driving home a twisted vision of what they think America should be. It won’t just be ethnic minorities that will be chased in that America, and it will be all of us who had the nerve to point out how truly absurd all of this is.
So, while Roth did not intend to write a social commentary, social commentary is what we got from his novel. If and when the worst happens, and America commits national suicide, folks like me will have to seek out a new home. Eighty years ago, that is what the idea of Zionism was about. Realizing the home you had was about to turn totally against you in a vicious way, so it became time to find a new home.
Overreacting, you say? I think not. Let me remind you what we saw on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, just this week:
It’s a stark reminder, “the people who believe conspiracies about science are likely to harbor and join forces with those who have conspiracies about race and religion. Bigots, in other words. There is no larger group of extremist believers in conspiracies than on the right. And as this COVID issue worsens, with the aid of a conspiracy-mongering president, bigotry will also rise.“
In Roth’s novel, 1940 was a pivotal year. 2020 is turning out to be one also. The Plot Against America shows us where the bad road leads.
L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim