Today's Postings

Donald H. Harrison in San Diego: "'Bubbie and Zadie,' who live in Taiwan, actually speak Yiddish"

Natasha Josefowitz in La Jolla, California: "Thinning out the wardrobe closet."

Ira Sharkansky in Jerusalem: "Are Abbas-Olmert negotiations diplomatic window-dressing?"

Isaac Yetiv in La Jolla, California: "Warming the North African winter with Maimonides"

                              The week in Review
                            (click on dates to see back issues)

Letter from Jerusalem                                 By Ira Sharkansky

Are Abbas-Olmert negotiations diplomatic window-dressing?
 

JERUSALEM—It is hard to know why Ehud Olmert is investing so much time and energy talking with Mahmoud Abbas. Virtually no commentator says this will produce anything. There may be a ceremonial meeting in the United States, hosted perhaps by the Secretary of State or someone else who can buffer the President from an embarrassment. Things look worse now that reports are telling of Fatah-Hamas conversations with an eye toward accommodation. Israel has signaled that it will stop talking to Abbas if he talks to Hamas.

My guess is that a meeting will occur, and that American and Israeli officials will declare it a success, thank George W. Bush, and admit that much work is left to be done.

All signs are that that the Israeli and Palestinians are so far apart as to be irreconcilable. As always, the Palestinians are demanding everything on their agenda, and Israelis do not expect them to deliver anything.

So why is Olmert soldiering on? My own answer goes back about 1940 years, or 1700 years before the United States came into being. Rome was the boss, and the people of Judea were not behaving as desired. Some of the Jews were proud to be within the Roman Empire, but others insisted on behaving as they thought Jews should behave. They rebelled against Romanized Jews, and against Rome. Roman forces set themselves against all the Jews, destroyed the Temple and much else in Jerusalem. Sixty years later, the Jews tried again, and lost even more.

Since then, Jewish leaders have sought to survive by doing much, if not all of what the biggest power demanded. Now that is the United States, whose foreign policy comes largely from George W. Bush. He tried to bring democracy to Iraq, and has managed only a civil war. But the President is the President. He speaks optimistically about peace in the Holy Land, and that means a conference in a month or so.

It is not easy to overestimate Israel's dependence on the American government. Its support of Israel in international forums in crucial. Among other things, it allows the governments of other countries to pander to the Muslims, and assume that the United States will save them from doing serious damage.

The assistance is not entirely one-sided. Last month's Israeli air force raid into Syria penetrated the air defense system on the way in and the way out, and the word is that Iran uses the same air defense system. If all that is true, then Israelis are already sharing equipment and advice with their American counterparts. What will come of this, we can only guess.

So when Bush wants a conference, and expressions of optimism, he gets it. Israel will take care of itself. I doubt it will agree to all, or perhaps any of Palestinian demands, but it will be careful to demonstrate that it is not the one being obstructive.

Is the whole thing a show? Most likely. But never say never. Peace may be around the corner. Palestinian authorities may work systematically against the violent among them. It has never happened before, but who knows? Democracy may even come to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Messiah may arrive. Anyone seeing a handsome person on a white donkey, please report ASAP. The sun may rise in West.

Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University
 

To learn more about the Agency for Jewish Education, please click on this ad
 

Warming the North African winter night with Maimonides 

By Isaac Yetiv,  Ph.D.

LA JOLLA, California—I remember, as a child  growing up in Tunisia, the long winter nights when my father read from a bookwritten in judeo-arabic (Hebrew letters and Arabic
language), the Massiot Harambam before a fascinated audience of family and neighbors.

Written by Harambam (Hebrew acronym for Harav Moshe ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides), it was an epic
story of the miracles wrought by this venerated "saint" and of
his  intellectual genius, his prolific writings both religious and secular, from the commentaries on the Torah to his famous treaties on medicine.

Judeo-Arabic was then the lingua franca all over the Muslim
world. Tunisia boasted a few periodicals in that language,
the  most important of which was En-Nejma (the
Star) with a wide national  circulation. There were  also
three publishing houses that put  out an abundance of original literary works and  translations.

Although the reading , the questions, and  the commentaries were in the vernacular, my father concluded each  session with the famous Hebrew
 saying, well-known all over the Jewish  world, mimosheh ad mosheh lo kam kemosheh (From [the biblical] Moses to Moses[Harambam] there was no one like  Moses [Harambam]).

 These lessons  instilled in me, from a tender age, the love and admiration for this  scholar, and later helped me pursue more diligently the study of his
life and works and what came to be called "the Golden Age" of  the Sephardic Jewry in medieval Muslim Spain.

Harambam was born in Cordoba, in 1135,  the son
of Maimon, himself a rabbi and a scholar in
Judaics and  in astronomy, who soon recognized the
intellectual abilities of the  precocious adolescent and
tutored him in Torah studies and other  secular disciplines.
At the age of 13, his quiet world was shattered when
the Almohades conquered the area and forced the Jews
to convert, die, or go into exile. Maimon chose the latter and  thus started a long painful period of peregrinations in Maimonides'  life that took him
from Cordoba to Almeria in Spain to Fez in Morocco to a brief stay in Palestine to Alexandria in Egypt and finally  to Fustat, near Cairo, where he died at the age of  sixty-nine.

But, despite poverty, and constant danger of
travel by land and sea under the constant menace of storms
and  pirates, his study never new respite. Nor did
his writing. At the age  of 45 (in 1180) Maimonides
completed his monumental ouevre that took  him 10
years: the Mishneh Torah whose scope was so vast that
his contemporaries and some modern scholars couldn't
believe it  was the work of one man and not of a
 long line of scholars over a few  generations. It is a
summary of the entire body of Jewish law, and it
was written in Hebrew. His detractors even accused
him of supplanting the Talmud, which he denied
vehemently.

In 1190 , he published an even more  controversial book, in Arabic, The Guide of the Perplexed,  "an accommodation between science, philosophy, and religion", a  little too early for his time. It was
translated into Latin and strongly  influenced Jewish and Christian philosophers such as Baruch  Spinoza, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. But his enemies were stronger; the book was banned and even burned by Jewish , Christian, and Muslim authorities before it became  one of the most respected and authoritative philosophical works of all  time because of his Aristotelian logic, his clarity and simplicity
and  his analysis reconciling science with faith  and philosophy.

Harambam died in his glory as the nagid (religious
leader of the Jews) , the author of an immense
body of work, the personal doctor of kings and nobility, the scholar  whose responsa (answers to difficult questions on religion and lore) to  all the corners of the Jewish world were famous for their compassion  and perspicacity;  for many he was a saint, a prophet
driven by his  own intimate image of the God of his
 fathers.

(This is  only a short introduction to encourage more
study of the man, his time,  and his work. Any library
will provide days of enjoyable and  instructive reading).


 
 
 

__________________ The Jewish Citizen              by Donald H. Harrison

'Bubbie and zadie,' who live in Taiwan, actually speak Yiddish

SAN DIEGO—One of my favorite stories from my days as the editor of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, z’’l, was the time two of its reporters met each other at a social occasion. 

“Gerry Greber,” said one.  “I know that name from somewhere.”

“Perhaps from the Heritage,” responded Greber.  “I write for the Heritage.”

“You do?” asked I. Gerry Burstain incredulously.  “I write for the Heritage too. “

“Really?”

“Yes,” said Burstain, “and you know what that means? We both have the same butcher!”|

More recently, Sheila Orysiek, who writes for San Diego Jewish World with great versatility on subjects ranging from classical dance to politics to Judaism, delightfully explained why she was less than enthusiastic about a punning headline I had written for one of her stories:

Ahem, well, we editors have to learn to grin and bear some of our writers’ complaints.

It is undeniable that sometimes an editor (especially an unmusical one) does indeed turn the sweetest of melodies into cacophony. 

Alas, that happened just recently to my friend Dan Bloom, who lives in Taiwan, where each year, in the guise of “Zadie” he answers Chanukah-wish letters from Jewish kids who, of course, don’t write to Santa.

In his wonderful tale, Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House: A Story for Hanukkah,” Bloom—using the more formal byline of Daniel Halevi Bloom—appears to introduce his story’s main characters with the words:  

“Yes, Bubbie and Zadie, whose names mean ‘grandma’ and ‘grandpa’ in the Hebrew language, are two magical friends who always reminded me of my very own grandparents.”

Poor safta and saba—have they been replaced as the “grandma” and “grandpa” of the Hebrew language?

Of course not.  In his original manuscript, Bloom wrote that Bubbie’s and Zadie’s names mean ‘grandma’ and ‘grandpa’

in the Yiddish language.  But some nameless editor, who may have thought Yiddish and Hebrew were one and the same, changed "Yiddish" to "Hebrew."  The story was published without the error when it first came out in 1985, but in this reissue by a different

publisher, and with intriguing full-color illustrations by Alex Meilichson, these two Jewish languages got confused.

When I asked Bloom by e-mail about the error, he wrote back that he had been shocked when he saw it—but what could he do, the books had already been printed.

Except  for a moment of linguistic indigestion, the error really doesn’t hurt the charming story about Chanukah visitors who come floating, Chagall-like, into a Jewish home, and play with the children who proudly prove to the ethereal “bubbie” and “zadie” that they know all about the origins of the Chanukah holiday.

Situations like Bloom’s gave rise to the joke about the difference between doctors and journalists.  Doctors bury their mistakes.  Journalists publish theirs.

If children write to Bubbie and Zadie's Hannukah Mailbox, 115 Herricks Road, New Garden City, New York 11040, the letters will be forwarded to Zadie at the Far Eastern Pole (Taiwan), and he will answer them, in the guise of Zadie, free of charge.  As he has a great sense of humor, his answer to your child may well be a keepsake.

Hopefully, no one will edit his correspondence, or your child’s.