I don’t remember what I’d been intending to write about today. Perhaps no topic had as yet occurred to me. Earlier this afternoon I’d been talking to an Israeli cousin – about life and love and family lore – and savoring a felt closeness, though we hadn’t seen each other for years.

Then, I got off the phone, and looked reflexively at the news. It was Sunday. There was the massacre of the Jewish Chanuka celebrants at Bondi Beach, which is the beach near the city of Sydney in Australia.

As it happens, I’d spent meaningful professional time at one of the philosophy departments of Sydney University. Although once or twice there’d been glancing incidents of a prejudicial type – to me these had the character of trailing streamers from the old country (England) and stopped well short of concerted bigotry.

Just offhand, this feels to me as if the “anti-Zionist” cover story (if that ever served as a credible cover) has broken down and the admitted target is now Jews. Quite simply. Quite openly.

In consequence:

     1. it’s hard for Jews to gather if they’re going to be picked off at a gathering;

     2. it’s hard for Jews to fight this thing alone.

Since I don’t have Big Answers to these interesting strategic questions, it might be illuminating provisionally just to review my own relation to my identity insofar as it is specifically Jewish. I realize that murderous anti-semites don’t care what kind of a Jew one is – but I do care.

First of all, I am the granddaughter of a rabbi who has two streets named after him (Rehov Rav Tzair) in Israel, who’d walked through bullets to stop a pogrom, who held a German doctorate in Judaica, and looked a lot like God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I was his favorite grandchild. We loved each other. He rooted my life in this ancient lineage, although he was a modernizer and a Zionist.

My father had been a rabbi in his younger years, though the profession did not suit him and he later became a professor of philosophy. He and my mother brought over ten families whom they did not know, rescuing them from the Holocaust, while rescue was still possible.

During the War, my mother uncovered a Nazi spy ring in the basement of the building where we lived, in Manhattan’s Yorkville. The building’s superintendent had a shortwave radio and related equipment in the basement, which probably kept him in contact with enemy ships off the New York shore. It seems likely that he was part of the Duquesne Spy Ring that was rounded up on June 28, 1941. Alerted by my mother, the FBI added a raid on our building and hustled him off to … what I always think of as “volleyball camp” … where he remained at least until the War in Europe was won. My mother saw him in the neighborhood after the Allied Victory and reported that he gave her “a very sour look.” 

Those, so far as I now recall, were the broad lines of immediate connection to my Jewish inheritance, though the spaces between the broad lines were quite interestingly filled in too.

On my mother’s side, I have family whose connections and influence at one time might have provided a partial map of Israel’s political interrelations. Or so an Israeli colleague – who hadn’t known that all these people were related – told me.

One instance: during the year when I was in Paris on a Fulbright, my mother’s cousin was the Israeli ambassador to France.

These relations, though dear to me, I gave up as the price of defending a young Israeli cousin whose parents had wronged her quite consequentially. I did it for the sake of her parents whom I loved, as much as for her, but I knew it would cost me the entire Israel connection. An irreparable loss.

*     *     *

Meanwhile, I had not been raised in the surround of Jewish observance or synagogue affiliation. So my Jewish aspect – which ran deep but along idiosyncratic lines – remained “Jewish in the head.” As one ritually observant Jewish friend told me, I had “the Jewish essence but not Jewish existence.”

So what is it, the Jewish essence, now that the wolves are back on the prowl for Jewish existence? What is it that I have – besides a target on my back?

It’s the great privilege of being in the ever-renewed and ever-renewable paradigmatic relation to God in history.

I wouldn’t change that for the world.

Related Content: Tales of Rav Tsair | Tales of My Mother