Back to the Mishnah

I was in seventh grade when my parents apparently decided that it was time for me to start studying Talmud.  So a couple of times a week, I'd get pulled from some other class and go sit in a closet-sized room with a kind, quiet man from the old country, and we'd open the first chapter of Bava Metzia.  We started with the Mishnah, the way you're supposed to, and he made me memorize it (the way you're supposed to). 

 

This particular Mishnah, quite appropriate to the tenor of our times, is about how you divide things up when they are contested:

 

If two people are holding on to a tallit, this one saying, "I found it," and that one saying "I found it," this one saying "it's all mine," and that one saying "it's all mine," [then] this one takes an oath that he has a share of no less than half, and this one takes an oath that he has a share of no less than half, and they divide it [equally].

 

[But] if this one says "it's all mine" and that one says "half of it is mine," [then] the one who says "it's all mine" takes an oath that he has a share of no less than three quarters, and the one who says "half of it is mine" takes an oath that he has a share of no less than one quarter.  This one then takes three quarters, and that one gets one quarter.

 

I must not have been a terribly insightful seventh grader, because it took me a really long time (much longer than I'll admit in this setting) to realize that the tallit didn't necessarily have to mean a ritual garment, but that it could be anything.  With time, thankfully, I figured that out.  Even back then, though, it was clear that the Mishnah was seeking fairness.  If two people each claimed the whole thing, then the equitable thing to do was to divide it up evenly.  But if one claimed it all, and one claimed only half, dividing it equally would be to give no credence to the claim of the one who claimed everything.  So then, it was split 3:1.  Seems fair, doesn't it?

 

Fairness seems to be what Israel's leaders believe will settle the Mid-East conflict.  One land, claimed by two peoples.  Kind of sounds like the Mishnah, they apparently believe.  So the fair, equitable thing to do is to split it. 

 

But the Mishnah's notion of equity works only if both parties buy into those ground-rules, if what both sides want is fairness.   But what if equity isn't what both parties seek?  What if one party really wants the whole thing while the other party is still willing to compromise?  Perhaps the Mishnah then becomes irrelevant?

 

I don't think so.  Because, I've begun to think, you can read the Mishnah so that it's not only about fairness, or justice.  Perhaps we can read the Mishnah as hinting at a kind of realpolitik, about the need to figure out how the world really works if you're going to survive.  In that case, the Mishnah can be read like this: 

 

If you and someone else are bound to divide something up, and they agree to split it with you and offer to give you half, don't budge.  Claim the whole thing for yourself.  The more you claim, the more you'll get.  Forget fairness.  Once they offer you half, you just claim the whole thing.  You'll get a lot more that way.

 

Now, in fairness, that's not at all what the Mishnah really means.  But that does seem to be the tactic that the Palestinians have adopted, doesn't it?  They've figured it out - if you really want something, the smart thing to do is to claim the whole thing.  You're bound to get more than the honest fool who starts out with a bargaining position that asks for only half. 

 

This renewed Palestinian strategy became patently obvious in the weeks before and after the Annapolis summit.  Well, not from the summit itself, exactly, but from the "negotiations" (if they can be called that) before and after, and more precisely, from the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish State.

 

While the Jewish character of the Jewish State may seem rather self-evident to many observers, to Abu Mazen and his band of merry men, matters are much less obvious.  Abu Mazen gave an interview to Israeli radio on December 1 in which he stated that there are two states in the area, Israel and Palestine.  "In Israel, there are Jews and others, and that is the only thing that we are willing to recognize."  In other words, Israel is for Jews and Arabs.  And Palestine is for ... Jews, too?  Of course not.  The plan is clear.

 

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, always good for an entertaining quote, did not disappoint this time, either.  He remarked, "It is only a Zionist party that deals with Israel as a Jewish State, and we did not request to be a member of the international Zionist Movement."  OK, we'll make a note of that for future reference.

 

And Saeb Erekat, Abu Mazen's exquisitely-dressed chief negotiator, put matters even more bluntly:  "Israel can define itself how it sees fit, and if it wishes to call itself a Jewish state, so be it.  But the Palestinians will never acknowledge Israel's Jewish identity."  So far, nothing new.  But then Erekat went even further and stated to Israeli radio, "No State in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity." 

 

Now that would seem a bit more difficult to argue.  I'm sure that the Queen Elizabeth would be surprised to hear that, since the web site of the Church of England specifically notes that "Her Majesty the Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and ... she appoints archbishops, bishops and deans of cathedrals on the advice of the Prime Minister."

 

Perhaps, however, Erekat isn't terribly interested in the Church of England.  That's understandable; after all, one imagines that he's got a pretty full agenda.  But is he also uninterested in the Basic Law of the Palestinian Authority?  That, you would think, is pretty important to him, no?  Does he not recall Article IV? - "Islam is the official religion of Palestine." So much for "No State in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity." 

 

These comments from Yasser Abed Rabbo and Saeb Erekat are so nonsensical that you have to begin to ask yourself why intelligent people would reduce themselves to uttering such pablum.  What's going on?

 

What's going on, of course, is nothing new.  It's part of an ongoing Palestinian tactic to argue that the Jews have no real place here, that we invented our connection to the Land of Israel, and that our presence here - like that of the Crusaders - is both illegitimate and destined to end.  To return to the Mishnah, it's the Palestinians' way of saying, "It's all ours."

 

Arafat, himself, had perfected this strategy long before his death.  In an interview he gave to the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat on October 5, 2002, for example, he explained, "They found not a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there, because historically the Temple was not in Palestine."  We'll make a note of that, too.

 

And other academics have picked up where Arafat left off.  Barnard College's Abu El-Haj, one who wrote a book in 2001 titled Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, argues that Israeli archaeology has been a politically motivated, scientifically questionable undertaking, interested only in validating a "national origin myth."  (Despite numerous assertions that her scholarship was shoddy, Barnard recently decided to grant her tenure.) 

 

"Now," you might be tempted to say, "Isn't this all just a tempest in a teapot?"  After all, who really cares what Abu Mazen or Saeb Erekat say about Israel as a Jewish state?  Arafat is dead, and Abu El-Haj is pretty irrelevant to most of the world.  What's the big deal?  Let Israel call itself Jewish, and let the rest of the world say and believe what it chooses.  Why should we care?

 

We should care because these people are very strategic.  And what they're engaging in here isn't mere public relations.  What they're doing is preparing the ground for the next assault not just on the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, but on the Jewish state itself.  And if you believe, as I do, that without a Jewish state, the Jews have a bleak future, indeed, then what they're actually doing is preparing the next assault on the Jewish people, period.

 

How so?  The Palestinians have come to realize that they're not going to destroy Israel with suicide bombers and Kassams.  True, Nassrallah can put up a good fight in the summer of 2006, and lead Israel into paroxysms of self-doubt about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the IDF.  But even Nasrallah himself later admitted that "You ask me, if I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not."  Without planes, without tanks, without the weaponry of Israel's army, they can train and train and do more and more damage, but they can't ultimately win.  (Iran poses a new sort of threat, of course, but one hopes that that will be dealt with unambiguously before too much more time passes.)  Suicide bombers and terrorists can make Israel miserable; but they can't destroy the state.

 

What then?  Well, the Palestinians have decided, the war can be won demographically instead of militarily. And one of the key ways of winning the demographic war is to deny Israel's Jewish character.  For if Israel is not a Jewish state, what reason could there possibly be not to allow the millions of Palestinian refugees back into Israel?  Israel's objection has been, of course, that doing so would turn Jews into a minority in Israel almost overnight.  As long as Israel is meant to be a Jewish state, that's a powerful argument.  But if Israel's not necessarily a Jewish state, then what difference does it make if Jews are a minority?  They're a minority in America; is that so terrible?  The only reason not to allow the refugees into Israel would be callousness, or worse, racism.  "Is racism what the Jews are all about?" Abu Mazen is getting ready to ask the world.  It's actually a pretty clever setup. 

 

That's why this is not a tempest in a teapot.  That's why smart people like Abu Mazen, Yasser Abed Rabbo and Saeb Erekat utter what sound like idiotic sound bites.  They're not trying to win a debate; they're trying to win a war.  And as the Mishnah can be read to suggest, the more you claim, the more you'll get.  So we claim half, they claim the whole thing, and before you know it. ...

 

Back to the Mishnah.  Permit me one more reading, even further out on the proverbial interpretive limb, but still....  It's not about fairness, or justice.  It's not even about realpolitik and "street smarts."  It's about love - if you love this contested entity so deeply and such passion that you genuinely believe that it should all be yours, and deep in your heart, you can't imagine sharing it with anyone else, then your "opponent", who likes it and wants it - but doesn't love it - doesn't stand a chance.  Love always wins.

 

"What's love got to do with it?" one might ask, with apologies to Tina Turner.  Love has everything to do with it.  The non-compromising stance of the Palestinians may sound backward or unsophisticated to us, but to their own population, it communicates pure, unadulterated love, and a non-negotiable sense of entitlement.  "We love this land.  It's always been ours, and  no one else's.  We won't give it up.  It belongs to us, and only to us."  Exactly what we say when we love someone.

 

And on our side?  Love is not to be found in the abundance it used to be.  I had occasion to interview a small group of Israeli high school kids a short while back, for a friend in the States who needed the transcript for a project.  My only job was to sit around a table with them and talk to them, while a photographer snapped some shots, and a reporter fiddled with a tape recorder.

 

I'd never met any of these kids before they showed up at our apartment, but it was easy to get a read on the them.  Native Israelis, all.  Smart kids, nice kids.  Pretty sophisticated kids.  Kids from the best (very) modern religious high schools in Jerusalem.  Some boys, some girls.  So we talked about Israel, their dreams for Israel, the army, their future.

 

But as great as these kids were, I began to get nervous mid-way through the conversation.  I asked about the army.  Interestingly, the girls were going.  The boys ... less clear.  One tells us that his profile has him slotted for a non-combat role.  Perfectly legit, but it's clear that he's deeply relieved.  I'm not. 

 

The other boy says that he's not sure what he'll be doing.  Or that he's going to the army at all, for that matter.  He's definitely not going into a combat role.  Why?  Because he doesn't want to find himself in situations where he might be asked to do things that are morally questionable.  And maybe he won't go at all.  "Even if you avoid the army and just go out and work," he tells me with utter seriousness, "you're still supporting the State, because you're paying taxes." 

 

Right.  Why was I reminded of Yasser Abed Rabbo? 

 

So I push the kids.  Annapolis was just over, and the "Jewish State thing" was still brewing.  "Why do we need this State in the first place?" I asked them.  No answers.  "Well," I pushed, "what have people said about that question when you've discussed it in school?"  Still silence.  "No one's ever asked me that question before," one of them admits.  The others nod their heads. 

 

"Really?" I ask, trying to conceal my amazement.  You go to the very best religious schools, you're almost done with high school, and no one - not at any point - has ever raised the question of why the Jews need a State?  They all shake their heads.  Never. 

 

That's the rub.  The Palestinians get it, and are raising a generation of children to believe that not a single inch of this place is ours.  And we?  We're taking our best and brightest, in the best schools we have, and just don't talk about it.  Then, as they're about to graduate high school, someone asks them why the Jews need a state, and they are completely stumped.  They've never thought about it.  It's simply never occurred to them. 

 

It's that Mishnah thing again.  They're asking for it all, and our kids ... they've actually never been taught why they should ask for any of it, beyond the fact that they live here.  They were smart, these kids, but there wasn't a lot of passion.  "I live here."  "I was raised here."  "My parents moved here."  Why do I suspect that if I hadn't been in the room, and one of them had asked the others about a boyfriend or girlfriend, they would have had a lot more to say? 

 

Which leads us to Ehud Olmert's latest warning that we have to prepare ourselves for a divided Jerusalem.  "The world that is friendly to Israel ... that really supports Israel, when it speaks of the future, it speaks of Israel in terms of the '67 borders. It speaks of the division of Jerusalem," he told the Jerusalem Post in the issue printed on January 1. 

 

He may be right about how the world sees the situation.  And for calling it like he sees it, he surely can't really be faulted.

 

But even if he's completely convinced that we have no choice (which is far from obvious to many others), where is the sense of pain, of loss, of regret?  Where's the love for a city that Jews have dreamed of for thousands of years?  Where's the plea at the end of the Seder, "Next Year in Jerusalem," or the yearning of the kedushah on Shabbat morning, "When will You reign in Zion, may it be speedily in our day"?  Where's the love, the almost erotic longing in Shuli Natan's rendition of "Jerusalem of Gold"? 

 

Is this just about borders?  About agreements?  About international approval?  Or is it about thousands of years of dreaming, of yearning, and more recently, of incredible courage in the battles to have those dreams come true? 

 

You do hear love these days, passion for Jerusalem, an unwillingness to cede it.  But you hear it from the Palestinians, who're even putting stickers (in Hebrew) with the Arabic word for Jerusalem on the Kassams they're firing into Israel.  They know what they want, they know what they love, they know what they won't live without. 

 

Which bring us back to the Mishnah, and its warning of who wins the day.  Reread for our times, it's not about fairness, or equity.  (Those require two sides that play by the same rules.)  It's about realpolitik, and yes, it's about love.  It's about the obvious fact that if you want to survive in this part of the world, you can't just roll over and play dead, compromising on your eternal city while they're still denying that you have a right to be here at all.  Because around here, things work differently.  Indeed, pay close enough attention, and you learn that you could re-write the Mishnah this way: 

 

If two peoples claim a land, and one side claims all, while the other side claims half. ... In the Middle East, the side that claims only half might as well start packing.