William Cooper

By Anne Sarzin and Lisa Miranda Sarzin

It is not an uncommon part of the human experience for casual conversations and chance encounters to launch us in a new direction or to begin an extraordinary journey. This is particularly pertinent in the realm of Jewish and Indigenous relationships, in which many exciting initiatives have their genesis in simple but meaningful conversations.

Genuine dialogue between people can produce transformative outcomes and although the journey may be completely unexpected—that is almost the point. We cannot anticipate what can flow from just sitting down together and talking, sharing ideas and knowledge. Simple conversations can break down barriers, as we discover points of commonality and difference, and jettison our reliance on stereotypes. Through exchange comes understanding and, in some cases, this translates into inspiring action and deep connection.

We, Dr Anne Sarzin and Lisa Miranda Sarzin, a mother and daughter team based in Sydney, have written a book called Hand in Hand: Jewish and Indigenous people working together, in which we tell stories that we believe are journeys worth sharing. We record some of the collaborative initiatives between Jewish and Indigenous Australians, stories that emerged from in-depth interviews with 80 people.

As the book was commissioned by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, its focus is on New South Wales in particular; however, there are many stories that may have begun in that State but have had an expansive reach into other parts of the country. Some exceptional stories of national significance are also featured. For example, after the horrors of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, the remarkable 1938 Melbourne protest against the persecution of the Jews in Germany—spearheaded by the late William Cooper, founder of the Australian Aborigines’ League—is an event that has significant reverberations, undiminished by time. William Cooper’s refusal to be silent in the face of injustice is a pertinent message that speaks even more loudly today.

The book includes excerpts from an unpublished memoir written by the late Emil Witton, who with his wife, Hannah, fled Hitler’s Germany in 1939 for Australia and settled in Sydney, where they were active in the battle for Indigenous rights.  We relate the story of the participation of the current Chief Justice of New South Wales, James Spigelman, in the 1965 Freedom Ride. He was a key organiser of the University of Sydney’s student bus tour, which sought to investigate and expose racism and discrimination against Indigenous people in NSW country towns. Also featured in the book is the work of the late Ron Castan, who led the successful Mabo case in the High Court, which overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and gave legal recognition to native title.

The title of the book, Hand in Hand, addresses a question posed in 1997 by Professor Mick Dodson, then the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. He said:

“We have extended our hand to other Australians. Those Australians who take our hand are those who dare to dream of an Australia that could be. In true reconciliation, through the remembering, the grieving and the healing, we become as one in the dreaming of this Land. This is about us and our Country, not about petty deliberations of politics. We must join hands and forge our future. Will you take our hand? Will you dare to share our dream?”

Dr Anne Sarzin is a journalist and editor, with a PhD in English Literature. Her daughter, Lisa Miranda, is a lawyer, who is also a doctoral student at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Hand in Hand: Jewish and Indigenous people working together, by Anne Sarzin and Lisa Miranda Sarzin, is published by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. Copies can be ordered from here.

Anne and Lisa will be speaking on the book at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival on Sunday 29 August

In a letter to Rabbinical Council of Victoria (RCV) President Rabbi Yaakov Glasman, Council of Orthodox Synagogues of Victoria (COSV) President Paul Korbl has called on the Rabbis of the RCV to issue a statement endorsing free market competition.  He has also advised that such a statement “should make no reference to or cast any aspersions on any particular Rabbi.”

Korbl also stated that he believes that:

“The general consensus is that multi Hashgochos may be beneficial as competition is potentially a good thing and would lead to a reduction of prices. It is a fact that different Kashrut standards exist and are frequently based on the perceived piety and the level of stringency of the particular rabbi. For this reason it seems to me that any adverse comments on any particular rabbi would in no way be beneficial. It is impractical for one level of Kashrut to be imposed because a minimum level for one person may be too stringent for another.”

However, Korbl’s message to the RCV has fallen on deaf ears, with the RCV releasing a statement by email that could be the described as the very opposite of the statement Korbl called for.  COSV has since removed the RCV statement from their website on advice that it is potentially defamatory. At the time of writing, the statement was similarly absent from the RCV website.

The RCV’s chosen course of action has prompted a follow up email from Korbl scolding the RCV for failing to heed his advice that Korbl says has caused the RCV to lose public credibility.

Source: RaceForIran.com

By Leah Bloch

Counter terrorism and Middle East expert Avi Jorisch ran several interesting sessions at Limmud Oz recently. In one, he showed us footage from the Hezbollah operated TV channel Al-Manar. At first glance, Al-Manar looks like any other TV network. It has news programs with international correspondents, talk shows, soap operas, family shows, and even music videos. All this lends to Al-Manar a deceptive appearance of professionalism and authority. However, Jorisch presented evidence that the channel’s programming is strategic and insidious. It glorifies taking up arms against Israel and the United States and propagates Hezbollah’s political and terrorist agenda, particularly the destruction of Israel.

Examples shown by Jorisch included a TV-drama which graphically portrayed Jews slitting the throat of a Christian child to make Passover matzah, and a cartoon celebrating suicide bombers, accompanied by an anthem about the glory and honour of taking up arms against the Zionist entity. A montage of violent anti- Israel/ anti-Western images included a scene of ten year olds in army fatigues doing training exercises – the call to take up arms starts young.

Jorisch and others have campaigned for Al-Manar to be removed from twelve pay-TV networks worldwide; it remains on two international networks, and is on air in Australia at the time of writing.

The footage made me pessimistic about the chances for achieving peace, when from early childhood generations of viewers are raised on such racist and inflammatory propaganda

In another session, Jorisch outlined what he considered to be a critical strategy for undermining Iran’s terrorist activities. A great deal of the money Iran spends on terrorism is moved through the international banking system. International banking relies on a system of “corresponding” banks. To move money from your bank in Australia to a bank account in another country requires your bank to have an agreement with a bank in that country, whereby the foreign bank agrees to act as an agent for your bank in that country.

If your bank did not have a corresponding agent in that country, it would not have the ability to move money to that country.

Jorisch argues that putting pressure on our banks to refuse to have any corresponding relationships with Iranian banks will be the most successful way of isolating Iran internationally and reducing Iran’s means of sponsoring proxy terrorist organizations outside Iran, such as Hizbollah.

Iranian Bank Sepah was designated by the US Treasury in January 2007 for providing financial services to Iran’s missile industry. All transactions involving a designated entity are prohibited in the US, and any assets the designees may have under US jurisdiction are frozen. Bank Sepah was subsequently designated by the United Nations in March 2007.

On 16 June 2010, the US Treasury designated Post Bank of Iran for providing financial services to, and acting on behalf of, Bank Sepah. For more detail, readers can see this statement by the US Department of Treasury, published on the Iran Watch website.

Jorisch believes that disabling Iranian banks’ ability to move money internationally will be the most effective sanction on Iran, as well as directly impacting on Iran’s ability to fund terrorism.

While in Australia for Limmud Oz, he commented on ANZ’s announcement that they would seek to remove their listing as a corresponding bank for Bank Sapah. Although ANZ stated that they ceased their relationship with Bank Sapah in 2007, they still remain in Bank Sapah’s list of corresponding banks.

In an article in The Australian, Jorisch has questioned why the ANZ was conducting business with Bank Sepah in the first place, “given Bank Sepah was involved in illicit activity well before 2007.”

Jorisch encourages people to learn more about this issue, and pressure their own banks to cut relationships with Iranian banks in order to isolate Iran. He also encourages people to put pressure on the two pay-TV networks that still air Al-Manar. Jorisch believes that this kind of grassroots activity is critical to effecting change as born out by his own activism on both issues.

Leah Bloch is a member of the Jewish Community in Melbourne who attended Avi Jorisch’s sessions at Limmud Oz Melbourne in June 2010.

David Solomon. Image source: www.InOneHour.net

By Emma Schwarcz

If you take all of Jewish history – all 5000-odd years of it – and whittle it down so that it can fit on four large stretches of butcher paper, and you stick that paper to four walls, and place what is either a genius or a madman (or possibly both) within those four walls and you furnish that man with two permanent markers and a decent hit of caffeine, you will get what most Jewish day-school graduates could only dream of. A kind of madness that takes over a room for an hour, a passion for all that has transpired to this little nation – the covenants, the onslaughts, the exiles and returns, the kings and pharaohs and Caesars, the prophets and warriors and teachers – everything summed up and argued and scribbled in febrile hieroglyphics on this paper, while the students in the centre of the room swivel their chairs to follow his path.

And swivel they did. People were crowded on desks or cross-legged on the floor. The room became humid because of the number of people crammed into David Solomon’s talk, but no one complained. No one even yawned in the hour it took to deconstruct Jewish history – I looked around the room at one point and most people were smiling, in the same way you might unconsciously mimic an actor’s expression while watching TV. Everyone was hooked. If David Solomon chose to establish a cult of some sort, we would all be in trouble.

I have to stop myself here and ask if perhaps I’m exaggerating. Was I just caught up in the moment? Am I even now still caught up in the idea of the talk, of the exuberance and the charisma and the absolute commitment to his subject? But no, the looks on people’s faces said it all – if this is Jewish education, why don’t we study more often?

As I settled in for another of David’s sessions, this time on the Talmud, I wished I could capture the essence of it and simply play it back to my family. When I mentioned I was going to Limmud Oz, they were supportive but a little inquisitive. ‘So why are you going again? It’s for research, right?’ It was for research, but it was also just because. Education for education’s sake. Something to remind me of all the things I’d like to know. My father seemed to be anticipating some sort of announcement, that I was heading to the mikveh or blow-torching the kitchen. We’re not frum, so why would I want to go to this thing? And I think it’s because his contact with Jewish education was with the antithesis of the David Solomons and Mark Bakers and Paul Forgaszes; it came less from a place of enthusiasm and more from one of necessity.

I tried to explain that actually, it was really interesting and dynamic and, yes, even fun. He looked puzzled but accepting, as if I’d just said that I quite like sci-fi conventions and would be speaking in Klingon for the next few days. The only way to convey it to those who’ve experienced the dry, didactic Jewish education, I suppose, is to show them an alternative. And for one weekend in June, at least, we had that alternative in spades.

Sunset in Nahariya. Image source: viewfromgalilee.blogspot.com

By Paul Brown

It is just a month short of a year since Galus Australis published ‘It’s Aliyah all over Again.’ We left Terra Australis one month after that. So how have we found our Aliyah experience thus far?

Israel is not the same country we visited just over 40 years ago, nor is it the country to which we first made aliyah 30 years ago. It is no longer a land of pioneers. It remains a land of immigrants, but these hail from North Africa, Ethiopia, and Russia, much more than from Europe or North America. While the Eurozone languishes, while North America dismantles its leadership role in the world, and while Russia again seeks to abrogate it, Israel unexpectedly finds itself as a very stable democracy. To be sure there is poverty, but no one starves. To be sure, there are enemies. To be sure, there are ever-newer versions of Israeli chutzpah. But there is also brotherhood and forgiveness.

When I first set up my clinic in Jerusalem in 1980, American style medicine was on the way in. But by the mid-1990s, medicine in Israel had become free for all via the four private health funds.  A massive influx of Russian physicians carried the system into the 21^st century. Israeli digital-electronic know-how ensured that the system was served by a computerised infrastructure that would be the envy of most modern countries. The shortfall of doctors is being met by building a fifth medical school ~ in Zefat ~ and a sixth will be needed to meet demographic requirements.

Sadly, psychiatry (my own specialty) is languishing. It is perhaps the most cost-intensive of all the medical specialities, and the health funds have been reluctant to absorb the costs of transfer from the public to the private sector. Thus mental health remains an orphan. Large stand-alone mental hospitals, a thing of the past in most of the developed world, persist here. The funds have not been made available to ensure an efficient or effective shift. If the government were to be true to their word, and were to order the transfer by fiat, then the funds would cut services by at least one half.

That said, many wonderful things are happening in the field of mental health, and some of these wonderful things are the very things that we are enjoying during our re-absorption into Israel. We had always wanted to give more, and to infuse our giving with Yiddishkeit. Two opportunities immediately presented themselves, and half a year on, we are having a ball.

In Nahariya, where we currently live, (we shortly move a few miles out of town to Kfar Veradim) we contribute to a club for street kids, children from Russian immigrant families.  We meet informally with the young people, and we provide counselling supervision for their madrichim.’ (supervisors)  Also, one day a week, we visit a local prison. There we run a counselling group for violent offenders, under the aegis of the ‘Agaf Ha-Dati’ (the religious branch of the prison service).  Our approach is a combination of the more conventional ‘bottom-up’, psychological therapy, and a (for us) a novel ‘top-down’ more spiritual therapy. We open each session with a Divrei Torah, on the Torah approach to such key themes as anger, trust and authenticity. There are plenty of opportunities for jokes and for Hasidic tales. Quite unexpected for us, especially since this is one of the few voluntary activities in the prison, the group participants have been more than willing to bare their souls. And so too have we, in a truly uplifting experience for all.

To pay the bills we are setting up a private practice in the centre of Nahariya. Such private practice is rare north of Haifa, and yet, the local people seem to be ready for it. Naturally, our constituency is different, both demographically and clinically, from Melbourne. Stress, and particularly war trauma, is a baseline-given in everyone that attends our clinic, and the experience of living under siege conditions in Israel must equally be taken into account when treating even the most serious psychopathology. We are learning how to do this. Life is, as ever, full of surprises, and we are enjoying every moment of it.

Dr Paul Brown is a psychiatrist who had been living in Melbourne for two decades, prior to making Aliyah for the second time.

The uniform of a gay inmate of a Nazi concentration camp

By Mark Baker

In the centre of Berlin not far from the Brandenburg gates there is a memorial to the Holocaust made up of thousands of slab tombstones. The group of students I am guiding through Europe on a study tour of the Holocaust disperse inside this abstract cemetery, lost in the labyrinthine structure of stones and questions.

One of the questions leads us to an adjacent park where a solitary tombstone has been erected. It wasn’t there the last time I visited Berlin, in which an invisible city of memory has rapidly sprung up, of plaques, signposts and stumbling blocks that ambush you at every corner with a personalised story of terror.

The isolated tombstone on the margins of Eisenmann’s Denkmal has a window slit built into its surface. It lures you to look into the stone, like a voyeur at a peep show. The image that is projected into the void of the stone is unexpected. It is of two young men, locked in a passionate kiss in the park where we ourselves stand.

I ask one of the students in our group to read the inscription near the tombstone. His voice quivers as he reads about the laws that prohibited same sex contact. A kiss between two men was a ticket to Auschwitz. In another time, this student would have had two triangles stitched onto his uniform, a pink and a yellow one, both core elements of his identity today.

The story of the persecution and gassing of gays in Auschwitz is part of the Holocaust. Yet where it differs is that the legislation that allowed for gays to be incarcerated was not a Nazi law but based on a criminal code that extend back a century. Paragraph 175, which forbad homosexual contact, survived the murder of about 15,000 gays in Auschwitz. It remained on the statue books of Germany and other European countries, including many states in Australia, for decades after the genocidal actions against homosexuals.

When I was a student at the University of Melbourne in the late 70s, my teacher John Foster, who published his memoir before his death, faced the class at the end of a lecture on the persecution of homosexuals and with stern eyes challenged us: Is the world of Auschwitz totally disconnected from our own world?

I thought of my teacher and also my student when I learned that our new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is opposed to legalising same sex marriage. My reaction is perhaps inflationary given my current journey in the footsteps of the Holocaust but I would like to take her to that marginalised tombstone and ask her to peer inside the stone and face the questions it asks of us.  Whether it is for electoral gain or a personal opinion, the message she is communicating to the Australian public says something about gays, their loves and their identities that carry on the remaining vestiges of Paragraph 175.

I would like to come away from this journey by teaching my students that to commemorate means to take the stones of our invisible cities and transfer them to our contemporary lives. Many of the monuments demonstrate the power of a single individual to redirect the seemingly inexorable path of history before it has been written.  For this reason, we must speak out on behalf of those growing number of people who are privileged to live in a time when they, and their relationships, are no longer prohibited, yet suspicions about the sanctity of their love persist .The questions must be asked not only of the state, but of our own faith systems – our churches, synagogues and mosques. In my own Jewish religion, a respected Orthodox gay rabbi, Steven Greenberg, has written about how the prohibitive texts in Leviticus should be understood against the grain of its own historical context in which gay behaviour was associated with pagan worship. Today, our sexualised culture of homo- and hetero- sexuality has pagan elements, but the act of love between two people is nothing more than love. It is not for us to legislate on how these commitments should be expressed. Our religions and states would honour those who were murdered in Auschwitz by thinking about the ruptures and continuities between the past and present, and how our thoughts continue to incarcerate gays in a world of our own prejudices. It is time to eradicate the legacy of Paragraph 175, and to narrow the space that separates that solitary tombstone from all the others.

Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.

Image source: abc.net.au

By Mandi Katz

The Prime Minister has called for an open debate on policy for addressing the asylum seeker issue. I hope that Jewish experience as refugees and forced migrants finds a strong voice in this debate, wherever it takes place. Empathy shouldn’t be the only basis for policy but it’s a pretty good starting point.

You would think that Jewish empathy for forced migrants can be assumed. Expulsion, forced migration, homelessness, persecution and discrimination are so much part of our story. It’s difficult to imagine any serious opposition among Jewish Australians to policies based on compassion for asylum seekers who, like so many Jews last century did, seek refuge here from persecution and poverty by any means they can, often without proper papers in circumstances that would today be called “queue jumping”.

There aren’t many issues on which Jews speak in one voice – the old joke about two Jews and three opinions still rings true. It’s also safe to assume that Jews span the spectrum on all political issues. But I would hope that Australian Jews can be united in our willingness to think the best of people who seek refuge from undemocratic and intolerant governments and who seek to build better lives for themselves and their families.

Add to this our collective memory of detention camps and it becomes important to call out the inhumanity of detaining asylum seekers and removing them from real living, sometimes for years, while their circumstances are examined to determine if they are truly in need of refuge.

In a speech to Lowy Institute yesterday that at least addresses the facts head on, Julia Gillard agreed with Julian Burnside’s contention in The Age on Tuesday that at the current rate of people seeking asylum in Australia by boat, it would take twenty years for that population to fill the MCG. She has also acknowledged that Australia takes in only .06% of the world’s asylum speakers.

In a piece in Wednesday’s Sydney Morning Herald,  Associate Professor Jane McAdam of the University of NSW calculated the figure as a proportion of the world’s refugee population which parlays into a far smaller percentage – 0.0013%. McAdam also supplied the raw number of total refugees we are committed to absorbing each year – 13,750 – paltry by any measure.

Gillard acknowledged in her speech that the percentage of asylum seekers is 1.6% of our total migrant (not refugee) population and said that the factors in the region that push people to seek asylum are far more relevant in causing an increase in numbers than the way in which this country deals with asylum seekers.

So to me it seems pretty clear. Taking into account the scale of the problem (insignificant) and the inhumanity of current and proposed policy, we should be urging this and any government to formulate clear policy, which acknowledges that people who seek entry in this way are more likely than not seeking asylum legitimately from persecution and poverty. Or at least recognises that people who are desperate enough to risk their lives on leaky boats with no guaranteed outcome, should be given the benefit of the doubt and not detained in conditions similar to prisons. Many commentators have pointed out (we seem to need reminding) that the act of seeking asylum is not criminal, which in turn is a compelling basis to say that ongoing detention of asylum seekers is just wrong.

This leads me to the Prime Minister’s proposed solution for a new “regional” processing centre in East Timor (leaving aside the implications of her reported failure to consult the East Timorese government before making the announcement). I don’t like it. I believe asylum seekers should be ‘processed’ on-shore and given qualified resident status, which leaves it open to the government to deport individuals after due enquiry if it is clear that there is no legitimate ground for residency. The law should treat asylum  seekers in the same way as it treats other people trying to bypass official channels (and as an immigrant I can barely bring myself to use the term ‘queue jumper’ about  people who had less opportunity than me to stand in the right queues), including those who overstay their visas. That the issues are more complex and take longer to clarify for asylum seekers who come here on boats than for people overstaying visas, is irrelevant and adds nothing to the case for detention centres.

And yet the issue continues to divide the broader community. I agree with Gillard that all voices should be heard with respect on this. But when I hear Jews speak about the unfairness of bypassing due process, I struggle to understand their concerns and to forgive their short memories. Due process is irrelevant for people who are making decisions in frightening and chaotic circumstances, and in countries where Australia doesn’t have official representation. There is also tacit concession in certain (and hopefully few) Jewish circles that comments which would generally be unacceptably racist, are OK if made about Muslim migrants.

It would also be pretty unfortunate if Australian Jews added to the voices casting aspersions about people who seek to escape “only” from poverty – considering Jews generally sit at the high end of the socio-economic range within a country which is emerging from the global financial crisis in rude health and in which people have an extraordinary high standard of living in global terms. I’m also deeply sceptical about concern for the environment in this context.  Given the scale of this issue, this is hardly the burning platform from which to take a stand on environmental issues. In the Jewish world we could start instead with a campaign to use less disposable paper products during Pesach.

I would take Gillard’s proposal for a “regional solution” as more than political expediency if she also committed to doubling or tripling the number of refugees to this country each year, with commensurate funding for refugee absorption.

A few months ago I spent some time talking to a young Sudanese migrant in a session facilitated by the  Sudanese Lost Boys Association of Australia Inc.  This young man came to Australia as a refugee through official channels after applying for refugee status in a UN camp in Ethiopia. He described the process and it wasn’t pretty. In addition to the inevitable paperwork and waiting, there were extensive medical tests with waiting periods to be sure he didn’t have any undesirable medical or psychological ailments. The upshot (which I didn’t realise) is that our refugee policy on top of being mean on the numbers side, favours the most resilient of a vulnerable population. Which may be a good thing because when refugees do get here they face a whole new swathe of difficulties including language barriers, social isolation and dislocation, and racism.

The asylum seeker issue in Australia is inextricably linked to the broader issue of refugee intake and absorption. And at least until we do better on that front, I’m using my Jewish voice to ask the government  and opposition to formulate and support  asylum seeker policy by starting with rachmonis (compassion) and taking it from there.

Mandi Katz has worked as a lawyer, and now works in management in the financial services sector. She immigrated to Melbourne in 1985 from South Africa and is enjoying writing again, after a long hiatus involving children, professional life and domesticity.

Am Yisrael Chai (The People of Israel Live!)

By Ittay Flescher

Simon Green recently posed a challenging question on Galus Australis entitled “Jewish Continuity – What’s the point?” In it, he argued that too many people are asking the wrong question by focusing on ”How do we keep the kids Jewish?” rather than asking “Why should we keep the kids Jewish?”

As someone who has taught in several Jewish schools in Melbourne, I would like to praise Simon for raising a question that is rarely discussed by leaders and educators. Too often, Jewish continuity is measured by responses to questions such as:

1. Do you attend a Jewish school, youth movement or synagogue?

2. How often do you visit Israel?

3. Do you give regularly to Jewish charities?

4. When you watch or read something in the media, do you ask yourself, “is it good for the Jews?”

And finally, the holy grail of ‘continuity’ questions,

5. Is your partner Jewish?

What the answers to these questions fail to identify are the reasons for answering yes or no to each of these questions. Simon suggests that if youth are only answering yes to these questions because of “unquestioned guilt and compulsion to be Jewish in a prescribed way,” than we have a major problem ahead of us.

Haim Watzman wrote an excellent piece about the trend of people choosing Judaism despite something (rather than because of something) in a blog post entitled “Jews, Despite the Holocaust.” In it, he writes, “I don’t want my children to be Jews who are Jews because they are victims. I don’t want my children to be Israelis because the world hates them. Our history, tradition and culture are rich and powerful and provide adequate reason to want to be a Jew and an Israeli even if Hitler had never been born and the swastika never had reigned.”

Watzman argues that we must have new reasons for engaging with Judaism.  “Why not say “I’m a Jew because the Jewish people produced the Bible, whose stories and poetry have become the common heritage of mankind?” Why not: “I’m a Jew because of my people’s ethos of learning, argument and dialogue, because of the Talmud, midrashim, and thinkers ranging from Maimonides to Spinoza to Soleveitchik?” Why not: “I’m a Jew because my people preserved its language and culture through centuries of dispersion and reestablished and recreated them in the modern State of Israel?”

I agree with Watzman that the answer to the question “Why should we keep the kids Jewish?” must be answered in the positive. I would add three other personal reasons to his argument about why engagement with Judaism is worthwhile:

A. It gives meaning to my life

This was the answer that Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl came up with after several years in Theresienstadt and Dachau. He wrote that whilst “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour, what matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” It is vital that Judaism be meaningful to young people, no matter how eccentric a way they wish to interpret their faith, tradition and culture.

B. It inspires me to be a better person

Almost everyone I know thinks of themselves as a good person most of the time.  These same people are also always looking for ways to be better. Better students, better employees, better environmentalists, better friends and better lovers. It would be wonderful if each person had one teaching, idea or historical lesson from Judaism that they could interpret it in a way that makes them a better person.

C. It is a worthwhile endeavour

Everyone has something that they like to do to fill their spare time. It may be following the news or football obsessively, embracing all forms of art, surfing the net, or thinking about God. It is vital that Judaism enters this mix as a culture, ethnicity of religion that is desirous of endeavour.

In order to have a Jewish community less concerned with Jewish continuity and more with Jewish engagement, here are some questions that could provide a much better measure of the health of our community:

1. Do you find any Jewish rituals or festivals meaningful? Why/how do you make them meaningful?

2. Are you able to have well reasoned discussions with your Jewish and non-Jewish friends about Israel?

3. When you see injustice in the world, do you speak out?

4.  When you read or watch something in the media, do you think about whether similar events have happened in Jewish history before you respond?

5. Does your family share quality time together doing Jewish activities?

To quote Victor Frankl again, “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He who knows the “why” for his existence will be able to bear almost any “how”.”

I wish you all behatzlacah in finding your “why.”

Ittay Flescher is a Jewish Educator in Melbourne. He also blogs for Makom/Haaretz.

Some whithered Levis. Image source: sabbah.biz

By David Werdiger

It’s a common scene in a Shul on Shabbat.  Shortly before the reading of the Torah, the gabbai (that fellow who makes sure all the parts of the shul service that have to be done, are done) walks up to a stranger or guest and asks “Are you a Levi?”

The Jewish nation can be divided into three “classes”: Kohen, Levi and Israel. Of the twelve tribes (the progenitors of which were the sons of patriarch Jacob), the tribe of Levi was designated to work in the Temple, and as teachers. Within the tribe of Levi, the descendants of Aaron (brother of Moses) were designated as Kohanim – priests – and they enjoyed special privileges in return for their service in the Temple.

Today, some these privileges still apply. When we read the Torah, a Kohen is called first, then a Levi, and then one or more Israelites. On holy days (and every day in Israel), the Kohanim bless the congregation and the Levi’im (Hebrew plural, Levites in English) wash the hands of the Kohanim before they perform this ritual. And there’s more.

Assuming that the population growth among Jews did not substantially vary from tribe to tribe, the proportion of Kohanim and Levi’im should stay about the same over the long term. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case. In contemporary times, there seems to be a relative shortage of Levi’im.

When one considers the traditional agricultural tithes of Maaser (given to Levi’im) which is 10% of produce, and Terumah (given to Kohanim), which is about 2% of produce, these proportions are consistent with the tribe of Levi being about one twelfth (8.3%) of the population, and the Kohanim being a small subset of the tribe of Levi. However, modern day figures are entirely inconsistent with these numbers.

From studies done in Jewish cemeteries, Kohanim appear to be around 5% of Jewish males. Given the fact that Kohanim descended from one member of a tribe, that number seems very high. The dispersion of the lost ten tribes might account for an increased proportion of Kohanim in the general Jewish population, but it certainly doesn’t account for the relatively small numbers of Levi’im.

Why might this be so?

One reason might be the so-called “silver medallist syndrome”. The field of social psychology suggests that the emotional response to certain events is driven by people considering “what might have been”. To quote the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (back in 1892):

“So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has ‘pitted’ himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts”.

Our objective achievements so often matter less than how they are subjectively construed. This is not unlike what has been described to me as the law of relative misery: a 5% raise can be quite exhilarating until one learns that the person down the hall received an 8% raise.

In the field of sport, the gold medallist has achieved the best possible outcome in the event. But the emotional response of the silver medallist is to consider “what might have been” in terms of missing out on the gold medal – “if only” they had performed a little better, they would have received the gold medal. The bronze medallist, on the other hand, compares their outcome to the lesser one of coming fourth, in which case they would have been part of the pack that received no medal at all. So they end up happier with their performance than the person who, objectively, did better.

In the same way, rather than accepting their objective status as a privileged tribe, the Levi’im may view their status relative to the prestige of being a Kohen (which particularly in post-Temple times, carries far more privileges), even though they have no control over this. Because of their reduced pride in their identity, they may be less likely to convey the details of their lineage to their children, or perhaps their children may be less likely to identify as Levi’im. This would lead to a long term decline in the relative proportion of Levi’im in the Jewish population.

Further, it is interesting to note that unlike the common societal division of upper/middle/lower classes, the relative proportions (in earlier times) of Kohen/Levi/Israel are approximately 2%/8%/90%. These numbers position the Levi’im as less of a middle class with a clear identity of their own, and more of a “second class elite”. This reinforces the notion that they are more likely to view themselves relative to “what might have been”.

Image source: filmup.leonardo.it/posters

By Simon Holloway

As some readers may be aware, the St Ives Jewish community has been petitioning the construction of an eruv for over two years now. A symbolic perimeter around an area, the building of eruvim dates back at least to the early third century, when their construction and maintenance was detailed in the Mishna. By allowing a public domain to be construed as a private domain (even if only in a purely symbolic fashion), the carrying of objects on Shabbat from one’s home into the street, and vice versa, ceases to be problematic.

The many and complex laws that pertain to these prohibitions, and the many and complex laws that pertain to the construction and maintenance of eruvim, have been such that many religious Jews continue to refrain from carrying on Shabbat, despite the presence of an eruv. Nonetheless, for many Jews in St Ives, the construction of a symbolic perimeter would be of tremendous benefit. Kuring-gai Council has been slow to approve it.

Those who wish to view a recent article in the North Shore Times about this eruv can find it here. The comments are, for the most part, appalling. Unable to draw a distinction between supporting local Jews and funding “Israel’s holocaust against the Palestinians”, several individuals (many of whom have wisely, if not cheekily, opted for anonymity) have decried the barbarous religious practises of rabbinic fanatics, and vociferously condemned the usage of public space for the construction of a ghetto.

Let me make this very clear. The eruv will not be noticeable. The eruv will not drive away people who are not Orthodox Jews. The eruv will not even attract additional religious Jewish people into St Ives. Orthodox Jews move to an area on the basis of the density of its community, the location and number of its synagogues, the availability of kosher food and mikva’ot, and the presence of a Jewish school. The existence of an eruv, while a bonus feature (and one that makes life better for those religious Jews who already live there), is not in itself a drawcard. To suggest that Jews will move to St Ives in greater numbers if the eruv is constructed, implies that they might otherwise favour an alternative suburb on the North Shore.

At the end of the day, this should never have been made public. Most of the decisions that the council makes get made without recourse to the knee-jerk opinions of the broader community. I emphatically do not watch TV, but my opinion was never sought as regards the construction of Foxtel cables throughout my neighbourhood. They are an eyesore and they required both the trimming of trees and disruptive construction work. It is absurd that the constituency of Kuring-gai needs to be heard as regards whether or not these cables may now serve a dual purpose. Shame on Kuring-gai council for their insensitivity, and shame on the North Shore Times for their deplorable “moderation” of comments.