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Stuart Schoffman: Uncomfortable Positions

On the day after Rabin's yahrzeit -- the eighth anniversary of his murder -- I found myself in a sunny apartment not far from the Old City, at a meeting of peace activists, most of us Jewish. This was not your typical gaggle of leftists; indeed, some of those present would have chafed indignantly at that label. What defined us as a group was that we were all Israelis who had traveled to Poland last spring as part of a large Arab-Jewish delegation, a project that had been initiated by Israeli Arabs in the hope that in confronting, together, the devastating nadir of inhumanity at Auschwitz, we might find a spark of hope, a basis for new ways of thinking about our shared lives as citizens of Israel.

The apartment in which we met belonged to a teacher of yoga, a middle-aged Jewish woman. Before we began our discussion she suggested we engage in a yoga exercise. I had settled into a reasonably comfortable chair and was frankly not looking forward to removing my shoes and socks and attempting to sit cross-legged on the floor, a position I have never been able to assume with any degree of comfort. I was relieved when our hostess merely asked that we stay where we were and close our eyes and stop intellectualizing and pay attention to the rise and fall of our breathing, and listen to a tape made by her teacher. She switched on a cassette player and we heard a soothing female voice explaining in indeterminately accented English that the essence of tolerance is "breathing easy," and that the Sanskrit word for "trust" -- viswaas -- also means exactly that. When you are about to make an important phone call, advised the voice, "breathe easy" before you do, so that you will behave confidently and tolerantly on the phone. And so on.

To be perfectly honest, I cheated every so often and opened my eyes and looked around the room at my fellow breathers -- adamantly secular and born-again hasidic, Christian and Jew (but, as it happened, no Muslims) -- some of whom were clearly more at home than others with the viswaas vibe. But then I closed my eyes and a portly, huff-puffing image entered my mind, that of the right-wing politico Shaul Yahalom, who had lately insisted that Israel�s attorney general prosecute for treason the authors of the new "Geneva Accord" peace plan, and whom I had seen on TV the night before, as he addressed a special session of the Knesset and accused the left of hijacking the memory of Yitzhak Rabin. If ever a guy was in dire need of breathing easy, he was it.

Other candidates in my book for therapeutic yoga include the American academics, too many of them Jewish, who encourage the clueless campus canard that Zionism is the root of all evil; the European intellectuals, foremost the Nobel laureate (Literature, 1998) Jos� Saramago, who contend that the abusive Jews no longer (as he put it) deserve "sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust"; and the Muslim autocrats, exemplified by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who believe that the Jews rule the world -- either "by proxy," as he couched it in his recent speech to the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference, or by black magic.

But if we Jews really did control the world, what kind of world would it be? Would it be a world governed according to the ethical teachings of the Hebrew prophets, devoted to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, cleansing the air and the oceans? Or would it be a world as fractious and fearful and prone to demagoguery and self-defeatism as the sovereign State of Israel -- much like the rest of the planet -- is today? Come to think of it, even the teachings of the Hebrew prophets are a subject of controversy among Jews, with Norman Podhoretz�s recent book on the subject taking neo-conservative issue with the classic liberal reading of Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Jewish argument and internal debate are as old and venerable as the ancient Abraham, and are canonically enshrined in the Talmud. Yet in today�s menacing global milieu, we have mislaid, it often seems, this precious legacy, our talent for self-scrutiny. Over the ages, when times were bad, Jews went to the synagogue and asked God what they had done wrong. Today, too often, Jews around the world respond to the crisis by becoming over-defensive of the Israeli government and castigating fellow Jews who challenge the consensual support of current Israeli policies. Here too, some easy breathing might come in handy.

Following the New Age prologue, our group on that sunny Friday morning got down to business. The conversation had its ups and downs but in the end I came away realizing, as I had in Poland, that Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs have many things in common with each other that they do not share with Jews or Arabs who live elsewhere. Just as Zionism was always about more than finding a refuge -- it was about creating a new, strong, proud breed of Jews -- today�s Israeli nation, which includes a rising proportion of non-Jews, needs to rethink its civic values and priorities, slowly and calmly and confidently. I know this is a position that many Jews find uncomfortable. It�s not easy for me either, but I take a deep breath and begin.