When It Comes To Freedom Of Speech, Turkey Is Still All Talk
December 17, 2012 § 1 Comment
It looks like the attention being paid to Turkey’s abysmal record on speech issues has finally created enough noise to get the government to sit up and take notice. Deputy PM Bülent Arınç said on Saturday that there is a draft law in the works that will change the Anti-Terror Law, which criminalizes making “propaganda” on behalf of a terrorist organization, to have “propaganda” be interpreted more loosely. According to Arınç, he does not want to see any journalists in jail, and he claimed that this issue has been discussed in cabinet meetings and should be resolved soon, although he did not hesitate to add that no parties save the BDP want to see the Anti-Terrorism Law scrapped entirely.
The good news here is that it appears that the efforts of NGOs to highlight the detestable state of press freedom in Turkey are having an effect. Arınç cited the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Press Institute, both of whom recently have called out Ankara for jailing journalists. When the CPJ issued its report in October, I was critical of the organization for not calling attention to this issue sooner and for actually providing cover to Turkey in the past by downplaying the scope of the problem. Thankfully Ankara is sufficiently worried about the CPJ report to feel the need to address it publicly, which is why Arınç was trotted out there to talk about how terrible it is for even one journalist to be wrongly imprisoned. If the Turkish government didn’t feel some heat over this issue, it would still be doing what it did when the report was released in October, which is try to sweep the whole thing under the table.
Nevertheless, I am highly skeptical that Arınç’s public relations offensive represents a genuine move to ameliorate Turkey’s draconian treatment of the press. It is difficult to imagine that Prime Minister Erdoğan and his cabinet are seriously considering amending the Anti-Terrorism Law to make it easier for journalists to report on Kurdish issues and to criticize the government at the same time that Erdoğan is calling for the creators of a soap opera to be prosecuted because he doesn’t like the way they are portraying Ottomans sultans, or when members of his government are introducing bills to not only ban the show but to educate Turkish filmmakers on proper Turkish values and morals. On the one hand, the AKP wants to shut down any speech that it finds objectionable in any way at all, and the on the other hand it wants you to believe that it is going to loosen restrictions on speech that it has long claimed to be a security threat that is equivalent to terrorism. It also beggars belief that Erdoğan is considering any real amendments to Articles 6 and 7 of the terrorism law at the same time that dozens of Kurdish politicians are being arrested under these very same provisions and the prime minister is trying to strip BDP deputies of their parliamentary immunity. That Arınç can even say with a straight face that he has a draft of a revised law on his desk and that he hopes it can be passed soon when the campaign to sweep up even more people under these very same articles he claims to want to revise is being prosecuted with even greater ferocity is outrageous. It’s as if the government thinks people have no capacity to independently judge what is taking place, and that everyone should just trust that they will do the right thing despite having no track record worthy of garnering trust.
Furthermore, Arınç’s claim that the law is going to be reinterpreted is a specious one even if you set aside the government’s recent actions. As noted above, after saying that the government was going to relax the law, he made it very clear that the law is here to stay, that all parties other than the Kurdish BDP support it, and that propaganda is going to remain a crime if it lauds terrorism or violence. So, based on Arınç’s interpretation of things, right now Turkey has a law on the books which it uses to throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism, and after these alleged revisions that the government is debating, Turkey will still have a law on the books that will allow it throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism. I fail to see what Arınç claims is going to be tangibly changed aside from a loose promise to reinterpret the word propaganda, which is a meaningless and empty promise if the law as it is currently written is not significantly altered or done away with. In short, given the government’s continuing assault on free speech of all varieties and arrests of Kurdish journalists and politicians, there is little reason for anyone to trust that Arınç means what he says. Until the Erdoğan government takes some actual steps toward relaxing its restrictions on speech, its rhetoric and promises on this issue will remain hollow and meaningless.
Egypt Is Adopting A Turkish Model After All
December 12, 2012 § 5 Comments
As Mohamed Morsi continues his campaign to push through a referendum on the Egyptian draft constitution at all costs, it is increasingly clear that Egypt is emulating a Turkish model, but not the one it might have intended to emulate. I wrote last week about the danger of Egypt falling into the same pattern as Turkey when it comes to military interventions in civilian politics, and while that may indeed come to pass, it is still too early to tell. The new Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government is, however, following Turkey down another path. The Turkish model that Egypt has already begun to mimic is one of an alternate, yet just as unsavory, variety, which is the government’s adaptation of the very same authoritarian strategies of its predecessors despite formerly being victimized by those very same strategies and tactics. It requires a sort of historical amnesia to do to your opponents what was previously done to you, and while in Turkey this took a little more time to play out, in Egypt it is happening at lightning speed.
Turkey’s more authoritarian bent during the last five years or so of AKP rule has manifested itself primarily in restrictions on speech and targeting journalists, politicians, and others for expressing opinions outside the bounds of what the government deems to be acceptable. Turkey has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world, and more recently there has been controversy over Prime Minister Erdoğan suggesting that prosecutors should take action against a soap opera depicting the life and times of Suleiman the Magnificent and over a fine levied against a private broadcasting station for airing an episode of The Simpsons deemed to be blasphemous. Erdoğan’s beef with the soap opera, Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century in English), is that he does not like the stylized description of Suleiman’s life as an endless parade of battles and harem trysts, and he threatened to have production shut down by saying, “Those who toy with these values should be taught a lesson within the premises of the law.” One of the AKP MPs followed up by introducing a bill that would ban the show along with establishing guidelines for filmmakers to conform with Turkish moral values. What is surprising about the heavy emphasis on targeting objectionable speech is that this is precisely the tactic used by previous governments and the Turkish military to go after current AKP members in the past. As pointed out by the blog Atatürk’s Republic, “Having been born, raised and educated in a society which accepted and even welcomed a certain level of state media control, the leadership of the AKP has now begun to echo their secular predecessors, almost in spite of themselves. After all, Erdogan himself spent nearly a year in jail for a speech crime.” The hypocrisy of Erdoğan, who was imprisoned for four months (although sentenced to ten) for reading a poem at a rally that the state deemed as a violation of the law against inciting religious hatred, now going after others for speech that offends his values carries a large degree of irony, and is part of a pattern of the AKP resorting to the same tactics as its predecessors used on it to punish action that it does not like.
In Egypt, Morsi has taken this lesson and run with it. For years, Muslim Brotherhood members were subject to torture on the part of the Mubarak regime intended to elicit false confessions and uncover hidden evidence of foreign conspiracies. During the uprising against Mubarak in January 2011, opponents of the regime were detained, beaten by plainclothes thugs bussed into Cairo from other parts of the country, had their wallets and phones confiscated while being tortured into confessing that they were being paid to demonstrate, and Mubarak would give speeches alleging foreign hands trying to break the sovereignty of the state and how it was up to him to hold firm and protect Egypt from outsiders. And yet, last week this scenario played out identically except that it was Muslim Brotherhood thugs rather than felool baltagiya doing the detaining and beating, and it was Morsi giving a speech decrying the nefarious influence of foreign conspirators determined to bring down Egypt. It was Morsi threatening to reinstate martial law and claiming that “temporary” emergency measures would be necessary to restore order and calm. If I put up two articles side by side, one from January 2011 and one from last week, and removed all named references to the actors involved, you’d be hard pressed to tell which article was from which time period, and yet before it was Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (among others) being repressed and now it is Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood using the exact same playbook to do the repressing.
The reason this happens is simple. Like I wrote about military intervention last week, existing institutions constrain the range of available political outcomes, and make it easier for a country’s politics to repeat the same patterns irrespective of who is at the top. New governments often inherit a logic of action and behavior that is difficult to unlodge, and when the same institutional rules, resources, and patterns of competition remain in place from one regime to the next, the behavior exhibited by the state’s new rulers begins to look identical to that exhibited by the state’s former ones. In this case there is something else at work as well as my friend and colleague Hesham Sallam has insightfully pointed out, which is that Egypt has a deep state of powerful interests and institutions that have resisted attempts to break their autonomy, and it thus becomes easy for the Muslim Brotherhood to cut a deal with these military and security apparatuses and adopt the same tactics used by its predecessor. This all combines to create a situation in which Morsi was elected to the presidency, realized early on that the easiest way to get what he wanted given Egypt’s weak political institutions and lack of cohesion was to adopt the same antidemocratic measures under the guise of legalism as Mubarak did, and when faced with protests resorted to the same tactics of torture, prosecuting his leading opponents, and alleging foreign conspiracies. Because he cut a deal with Egypt’s deep state, he is so far getting away with all of this under the protection of the military and security forces, who are happy to let him do as he pleases as long as their own prerogatives are not trampled. And just like that, it turns out that the man and organization that bitterly denounced Mubarak for torture, detentions, and giving up any pretense to democracy are doing the exact same thing themselves not even one year into coming to power.
Unfortunately, this is how authoritarian politics works, and nobody should be surprised to see the same patterns repeating themselves. In some ways, it is a miracle that democracy ever occurs, and the conditions have to be right and a healthy dose of luck must be involved for a successful transition to happen. In Egypt, neither of these two variables seem to apply so far, and thus it has been very easy for Morsi to morph into Mubarak. There is a reason that Mubarak resorted to the tactics that he did, which is that it was the most effective way for him to hold on to power, and Morsi has quickly learned that the Mubarak playbook works. Just like Erdoğan has conveniently forgotten what was done to him, so too has Morsi, and it means that Egypt is even more unlikely now than it ever was to adopt the Turkish model of a religious society with a democratic secular government.
Kemalism Is Alive And Well
December 11, 2012 § 3 Comments
Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it has been increasingly fashionable to declare that Kemalism – Turkey’s dominant political ideology since the founding of the republic in 1923 – is on life support. Successive governments have paid lip service to Kemalism, particularly since the military has always viewed itself as the ultimate guardian of Kemalist principles and crossing Kemalist red lines has been the best way to precipitate a military coup, but the AKP is viewed as hollowing out Kemalism through its electoral dominance. Most people immediately associate Kemalism with secularism and Westernization, and whether it be the AKP’s battle to make wearing a headscarf acceptable in universities or the controversial decision to allow middle schoolers to attend imam hatip religious schools, the government certainly does not appear to feel that Kemalism should constrain its policies.
It is not just the AKP, however, that has embraced this trend. The opposition CHP, which was essentially created to translate the precepts of Kemalism into tangible policies, has also seemed to go through a post-Kemalist phase. In July, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu defended charges that his party has moved away from Kemalism by declaring that Kemalism is a dynamic ideology and that he rejects a “traditional” interpretation of Kemalism. Kılıçdaroğlu’s elevation to CHP leader was widely viewed as heralding a new direction for the party, which has been out of power for decades, and part of this new direction was a greater focus on social liberalism and less of a focus on traditional Kemalist principles.
Kemalism, however, was always about much more than secularism, and the CHP’s current line of attack against the government demonstrates that Kemalist principles still carry some weight. Kemalism has six arrows, and the two that bear on recent events are republicanism and populism. Republicanism meant popular sovereignty, freedom, and legal equality, and stood in stark opposition to the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate. While Atatürk’s idea of republicanism was based on the French model, the pre-democratic reality of Turkish republicanism was a paternalistic dictatorship containing aspects of liberal rule. Republicanism in the Kemalist sense meant sovereignty of the people as the basis of the state rather than sovereignty of the sultan, and the idea that the state existed to further the advancement of its citizens rather than the glory of a royal dynasty. Connected to this was the idea of populism, which was the notion that the Turkish people should be mobilized in the name of social progress and modernity, but also encapsulated a sense of solidarity among disparate societal or professional groups. Unity was essential in Atatürk’s mind to building a modern state, and he believed that only through popular unity and solidarity had Turkey achieved its independence. Populism was operationalized in a way that would ensure unity among different groups and eliminate class conflict by enacting socioeconomic and educational reforms meant to achieve equality and social mobility. This tied into republicanism, since equality and unity required the rejection of the Ottoman sultanate as it privileged a ruling class above the people. It was also a response to Marxism and the concept of revolutionary class struggle, and was meant to forestall any such possibility in Turkey. Throughout the 1930s, populism was used to push off dealing with potentially disruptive social issues by repeating that there were no class or social fissures in Turkey, and among the six principles of Kemalism this was the one that gained the most widespread acceptance prior to WWII.
During the parliamentary debate yesterday over the next budget, the Kılıçdaroğlu accused Prime Minister Erdoğan of running roughshod over republican principles by trying to circumvent the Grand National Assembly’s role in budget planning. Kılıçdaroğlu claimed that Erdoğan and the AKP are trying to elevate themselves above the republic, which Erdoğan vehemently denied and said that making comparisons between Turkey’s economic performance under the AKP and Turkey’s economic performance in decades prior is intended only to demonstrate how the AKP has improved Turkey. This seems like a strange argument to be having, as there shouldn’t be a question as to whether the current government is part and parcel of the republic or not, yet it can be understood in the context of Kemalism and whether or not the AKP is adhering to its tenets. Republicanism was meant to forestall exactly the charge that Kılıçdaroğlu is hurling at the government, of placing its own glory above the good of the people and the state, and the fact that it appears to have hit a nerve with Erdoğan demonstrates just how ingrained Kemalism really is. The CHP is attempting to tar the AKP with only looking out for its own interests, and Erdoğan’s response has been that the AKP’s success is actually Turkey’s success and the republic’s success, which feeds directly into the Kemalist republican ideal. Similarly, the debate involves populism as well, since the idea of popular solidarity and unity is violated by the AKP’s claiming economic success as uniquely its own.
In a world in which Kemalism was defunct, none of this would really matter; in fact, it would be perfectly natural for a party to crow about its economic success and use it as a tool with which to hammer its opponents. The fact that Erdoğan felt the need yesterday to reiterate his commitment to the republic and that Kılıçdaroğlu was nakedly appealing to two of the six tenets of Kemalism in order to score political points demonstrates that for all of the talk about post-Kemalist Turkey, shaking off decades of Kemalist ideological hegemony is easier said than done. As much as the AKP may want to water down the secularist component of Kemalism, the rest of it is still very much intact.
Wieseltier Is Right About The Lost Cause That Is The Peace Process
December 10, 2012 § 3 Comments
Leon Wieseltier has penned a eulogy for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in his lifetime, and while this is not going to surprise anyone save the most Pollyannaish dead-enders, it is difficult to conclude that he is wrong. I’ll take it even further and say that absent armed U.S. intervention with the purpose of imposing a solution on the two parties, or concurrent Israeli and Palestinian civil wars, it is unlikely to happen in my lifetime either (and Wieseltier has almost three decades on me). Wieseltier describes peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a lost cause, and he refers to a number of recent events that bolster his case – Hamas rockets, Mahmoud Abbas’s overheated rhetoric at the UN, the E1 settlement announcement, and the alliance between Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, among others. There is no doubt that the particulars of the last few years, or even the last few months, provide little reason for optimism, and Wieseltier recounts, “People assure me that all this can change if there is the political will to change it; but I do not detect the political will.” This is actually where I disagree with Wieseltier, because he frames the issue as a lack of will or courage, but I think it runs much deeper. We are rapidly getting to the point, if we have not passed it already, where structural conditions make a genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians impossible without an outside shock to the system, irrespective of who each side’s leaders are and whether they have the will of Rabin, Ghandi, and the Dalai Lama rolled into one.
Not only is the peace process stagnant, the situation is actually getting worse by the day rather than just cruising in a holding pattern. The reason for this is that each side’s position is hardening, but in different ways. On the Israeli side, the problem is literally a structural one, in that Israel is too intertwined in the West Bank to be able to exit it in any comprehensive manner. Let’s say the Israeli government struck a deal tomorrow and agreed to keep a few of the largest settlement blocs in return for proportional land swaps within Israel, and all that needed to be done was to evacuate the rest of the settlements (and to figure out the precise parameters of such a deal, check out this amazing new tool from the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and the Atlantic that lets you draw borders and see the precise implications in terms of population and percentage of the West Bank). There is just no way that the government could ever carry this out anymore. Gaza was a cakewalk compared to what will be when Israel orders settlers to pick up their stakes and move, and partially this is because the promises that Israel made to Gaza’s settlers on compensation and resettlement have gone unfulfilled. Just look at what happened with Migron, which is a tiny outpost, or the gnashing of teeth over settlers having to evacuate the neighborhood of Ulpana and literally move just down the street. The idea that Israel will be able to just pick up and leave when it finds a suitable negotiating partner on the other side would be a joke if people didn’t actually think it was true. Furthermore, the argument that Israel was able to pull out of Gaza or Yamit and so it will be able to pull out of the West Bank when push comes to shove is at this point hopelessly naive, as if those instances have any real bearing on the situation in the West Bank, or as if Israeli politics and public opinion can just be overcome with a government order to evacuate. This is not a question of political will in the near horizon, but one of whether a certain action can ever be accomplished under any circumstances. I hate to say that I don’t think it can, and trying to do so would ignite a full blown civil war in Israel, with settlers fighting the IDF tooth and nail and a significant portion of Israelis sympathizing with the settlers who were urged and incentivized by their government for decades to go put down roots in the West Bank.
On the Palestinian side, what is being hardened is not necessarily the physical situation on the ground but the ideological situation. For every poll showing a majority of Palestinians supporting peace negotiations there is a poll showing a majority rejecting a two state solution. More worrying than any specific poll is that Hamas now controls Gaza, is making inroads in the West Bank, and smart money is that ten years from now Hamas will be the face of the Palestinians rather than Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (unless Hamas comes to control the PA). Lest you think that Hamas’s views toward Israel and accepting Israel inside the 1967 borders are moderating, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal wants to make sure that you are aware that Hamas is as radical as ever, as he reiterated to hundreds of thousands of cheering Gazans over the weekend that Hamas will literally fight to the death until Israel is gone. In addition, the apparent decision on the part of Sunni states such as Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey to prop up Hamas and the trend of emerging Islamist governments in the region means that Hamas is only going to grow stronger and be seen as more legitimate, and it follows that the same will happen to its views on negotiating a real two-state solution. Make no mistake, this is even more of a problem – and one that is just as intractable – as the problem I highlighted on the Israeli side, and once again making the problem disappear probably requires a Palestinian civil war, in which a Palestinian Authority led by a committed two-stater like Salam Fayyad defeats Hamas in open warfare.
So, is Wieseltier’s recent essay a depressing one? It is, and not just because one man has decided that the peace process is an irrevocably lost cause. It is depressing because it might be even more of a lost cause than Wieseltier acknowledges, and from where I’m sitting, I don’t see a good way out of the morass absent some terrible infighting and bloodshed on both sides. Ehud Olmert might have convinced some people that all he needed was a few more months and everything would have been solved, but a more realistic assessment suggests otherwise. That doesn’t mean that anyone should stop trying to work toward a two-state solution but it is as much of an uphill battle as exists anywhere.
Guest Post: Should Rabbis Be Political?
December 7, 2012 § 3 Comments
After the controversy that erupted this week over the email sent by the rabbis of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun to their congregants celebrating the Palestinian statehood vote at the United Nations and their subsequent apology for the email’s tone, I was talking about it with my close friend and college roommate Ephraim Pelcovits and I asked him to write a guest post for me on the proper role of rabbis in politics. Ephraim is uniquely qualified to speak on this issue since not only is he one of the smartest and most erudite people I know, he is also the rabbi of the East 55th Street Conservative Synagogue in Manhattan, and so this is an issue with which he grapples on a daily basis. He has an interesting take on the larger picture at play here, and so without further ado here is Ephraim:
Behind my desk in my synagogue study sit three photographs: The first is of my two little boys, three year old Alexander giving his infant brother Lev a kiss on the cheek. That picture reminds me to hurry up and get my work done at the synagogue so that I can spend time with the two of them. The second photo on that shelf is of the sanctuary of a tiny, but wonderfully warm, Buffalo synagogue – Congregation B’nai Shalom – where I served as student rabbi my senior year of rabbinical school, and it reminds me of the enormous potential for rich communal life with incredibly limited resources. And finally, there is a third photograph, of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – the great 20th century theologian and activist – marching in Arlington National Cemetery in 1968 together with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath. While many American Jews recognize the famous photograph of Heschel and King marching arm in arm during the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965, I have deliberately chosen to display a more obscure photograph of these American heroes, protesting yet again, this time against the Vietnam War.
The reason that lesser known photograph speaks to me is because it shows these great religious leaders willing to speak out a second time – breaking with some of their closest allies – when their consciences told them that their country faced a second moral crisis. While many of Rabbi Heschel’s colleague’s supported his heroic efforts on behalf of the Civil Rights movement, quite a few of them – including his disciple and right hand man on his trip to Selma in 1965, Rabbi Wolfe Kelman – disagreed vehemently and publicly with his opposition to Vietnam. Heschel’s appearance at that rally in Arlington in Febuary of 1968 caused an uproar, when photographs of his Reform colleague Rabbi Eisendrath holding a Torah scroll in a cemetery, in contravention of Jewish religious law, appeared in the press. Heschel did not cower from these attacks, and instead argued that under these circumstances a Torah most certainly belonged in Arlington National Cemetery. In response, Heschel quoted a noted 18th century rabbi who had argued that, “a Torah should be taken by the community to the cemetery to pray…to stop a plague.” For King too, opposition to Vietnam was not easy, and he waited until his famous “A Time to Break the Silence” address at Riverside Church on April 1, 1967 to speak out against the war. That public attack on the Johnson administration tore apart his alliance with a president who had worked so hard to pass the Civil and Voting Rights Acts through Congress just a few years before. But as King put it in that address, “Men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy… We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
Last Friday, my esteemed colleagues, the rabbinic leadership of New York’s second oldest congregation, B’nai Jeshurun (BJ) issued a letter in support of the Palestinian Authorities approved bid for enhanced status at the United Nations. My own feelings about the Palestinian delegation’s status change are more subdued and less celebratory then theirs were, but I certainly followed this vote with hopes and prayers that this latest diplomatic gesture would, against the odds, advance the cause of a peaceful Palestinian state for its people in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside the Jewish people’s homeland, the State of Israel. While neither the BJ letter nor the excitement about it in the press were particularly surprising to me, I was surprised at the reaction of my own congregants and family to the coverage of the letter in the New York Times. What I heard from them was dismay that these rabbis had spoken out on what they dubbed a “political” issue, one which they argued was beyond the purview of clergy. That repeated theme left me pondering Heschel and King, and why and whether their support for civil rights or Vietnam might be different than this situation? Was this rabbinic stance any different?
The US Tax code allows a far wider range of political activity by houses of worship than many people understand, including speaking out on specific social issues and organizing congregants to vote. But synagogues, churches and mosques may not endorse specific candidates nor engage in partisan advocacy, or risk losing their 501(c)(3) charitable status. Clearly the statement by BJ rabbis will not affect their synagogue’s tax status, yet there are several other questions, more important (or at least interesting to me) than parsing the intricacies of our tax code, which I try to consider before taking such a public stand on a controversial moral issue.
1. “Do I have a broad and deep understanding of the issue I wish to comment upon, and can I clearly filter my thinking about the issue through the prism of traditional Jewish study – which is my specialty as a religious leader?”
Here I look to Heschel’s example yet again, this time in his essay explaining his involvement in the anti-war movement, which he carefully grounds in Biblical and Rabbinic text. “There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.”
2. After considering this first question, I then ponder, “Will I be able to best address this issue via a public statement – a community letter or sermon – or might I do a better job of persuasion by discussing the problem with a smaller, more informal group, or simply by setting an example of the conduct I think is best?” Most of the time this is the course that makes the most sense to me, and which I choose to pursue
3. Finally, and this is most critical as I consider a thorny issue like Israel and Palestine, I ask myself, “Am I getting too far ahead of my community?” As a mentor once pointed out to me, “A rabbi should always be one or two steps ahead of his or her community – to keep pulling them forward – but if he or she gets further ahead than that, the community will be left behind. They’ll never be able to catch up with you.”
The rabbis of B’nai Jeshurun are deep thinkers whom I have no doubt asked these, or similar, questions of themselves before writing their letter to their community. While it is not a letter I could or would have chosen to sign and send to my community, I have no doubt that they wrote that letter with the same conviction that Dr. King had when he decided to speak out against the Vietnam War, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” May the hopes and aspirations that were expressed in that letter for peace and prosperity for all of the inhabitants of the Holy Land be speedily accomplished.
