Reflections continued from page 14 placed in foster homes, hostels and schools. The 9,000 to 10,000 children were able to leave, and became the few survivors of their families. The war with Nazi Germany was finally over in 1945. Twelve million people includ- ing six million Jews had been systematically murdered. A year and a half later on November 29th, 1947, the day before my twelfth birthday, my family—my mother Bina, my father Dave and my brother Ed—were all at home, glued to the radio lis- tening for the news. The United Nations General Assembly was about to vote on the partitioning of Palestine into two nations. It was a considered solution of what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Displaced Persons who were still alive, liberated from Nazi concentration camps. They had no homes to return to, no country that would welcome them as immigrants. The UN resolution was adopted with a two- thirds majority, 33 in favor, 13 Arab states voted No, and 10 nations abstained. In the aftermath of the genocide, my family and all of the people that we knew in our Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn fully believed that Jewish survival depended upon the creation of a Jewish state. We were all Zionists. You can imagine our joy and relief when we heard the news. There would finally be a safe haven, a Jewish homeland, with the hope for a true social democracy with liberty and justice and equality for all its citizens. Today, my thinking has evolved. I no longer think of myself as a Zionist or a Nationalist of any kind. However, in as much as of global decisions about war and peace, wealth and power are made by sovereign nations, then Israel deserves a place at the table. But things have changed in today’s world and have been superseded by a new reality. International affairs are no longer made between governments but instead by an international global collective cartel of oligarchs, billionaires, dictators, and would be-kings who are calling the shots. After the publication of Roger Kamenetz’ book The Jew and the Lotus in 1994, the Dalai Lama met with a delegation of prominent Jewish thinkers including Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and Ram Dass. The Dalai Lama wanted to know how it was that the Jewish people had been able to survive for thousands of years without a homeland. The profound question that he asked the rabbis was: “How does your spiritual practice purify afflictive emotions?”
I have come to believe that the strength and survival of the Jewish people is actually because we have wandered the globe for thousands of years without a homeland. We have been able to assimilate and still maintain our Jewish identity. In our journeys we have learned from other cultures and made contributions in the places that we have landed. We have been welcomed as strangers and lived peacefully in countries and continents throughout the world. Until we were not. The generational trauma of the Holocaust, accompanied by the hostility of Israel’s Arab neighbors to its very existence, the ceaseless wars, including Gaza, is what Israelis have been living through, and what diaspora Jews and the rest of the world have been witnessing. Living their lives in a war zone has become the norm in Israel for generations. Since the war in Gaza, the conflation of Jews and Israel has foment- ed a rise in dangerous antisemitism here in United States and throughout Europe. The Jews have been wandering for millennia and have survived as a people. We Jews are of many races, speaking a multitude of languages in every hemisphere, continent, climate and time zone on the globe. I truly believe that we shall continue to survive and evolve -- in both our individual personal and collective understandings of what being Jewish means. Not just here, and not just in Israel but everywhere that Jews can live. The title of Molly Crabapple’s recent best seller, “Here Where We Live is Our Country” speaks to that. Some of our original members of the Jewish Congregation of the San Geronimo Valley have moved on, including Andreas Wittenstein, who suggested that we add a Hebrew name for our congregation -- Gan HaLev --Garden of the Heart. But many of us are still here. The Children who attended our Hebrew school and celebrated their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs with us years ago are now grown. Many have moved away and a few have children of their own. We older members continue to gather to celebrate Jewish life in the Valley. More than 100 people attend our High Holiday services in Samuel P. Taylor Park. And in the past few years, a number of new young Jewish families have moved into the community and found each other. They are starting Jewish classes for their children. And so it goes, from generation to genera- tion. L’Dor va Dor .
SGV Community Center Stone Soup Page 19
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