The Nuclear Age on the Jewish Agenda

Bray, Howard

THE NUCLEAR AGE ON THE JEWISH AGENDA At the intersection of ancient tradition and advanced technology, the organized community is focussing on nuclear issues as a particular Jewish concern Those...

...Now that has begun to change...
...But the hawks are better versed in the technical aspects of the argument than we are...
...That message stems from the Holocaust...
...Lately, he has resumed, with passion, his public focus on the bomb...
...But today, when he calls from the Washington Committee on Nuclear Disarmament, the response is "Let's talk...
...Irving Greenberg calls "messianic sobriety...
...we've been largely silent in the 'nuclear 80s,'* said Micha Taubman—whose Emet Foundation financed the conference—at the opening session...
...For a time, he continued to write and lecture extensively about arms control, but finally, he had to stop making speeches about the ghastly consequences of a nuclear war...
...Rabbi Saperstein goes on to point out a little-noticed but significant side-benefit of Jewish activism in the peace movement...
...the universal danger of nuclear annihilation was ignored...
...Israel's vulnerability adds a special dimension to Jewish consideration of the proposed freeze...
...After he preached last Rosh Hashanah on the dangers of nuclear strife, Serotta was perplexed when students asked what the subject had to do with Jews...
...But he is as disturbed as Rabbi Serotta by the relatively small number of young Jews who are working within Jewish organizations on arms questions...
...The radicals awakened the community to this issue," says Greenberg, Director of the National Jewish Resource Center, "but the radicals should not ignore the realists' concerns...
...And, in taking account of all aspects of the nuclear weapons issue, "moral values must be considered...
...Some Jews, for example, fear that their support for the freeze might antagonize the White House and the Pentagon, thereby costing Israel military aid...
...And in Me-norah, Waskow has urged the commemoration of Noah and the Flood each spring, in the month of Iyyar...
...Some Jews have contended that to use the word 'Holocaust' to refer to anything other than the Nazi murder of Jews demeans the term," says Ira Silverman, President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College...
...Our history demonstrates that acts so horrible as to be considered unthinkable take place if they are not actively prevented...
...It's a loss, because they remain outside the Jewish community...
...Adds Arthur Waskow, a leading Jewish authority on disarmament, "The Holocaust was the foreshadowing and the warning...
...Ben Abelow, the UAHC intern, mentions a statement by President Eisenhower that describes what's happening: "The people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our government," Eisenhower said...
...He found them in Fabrangen, a group that relied on its members (rather than rabbis) to lead its services, while experimenting with traditional liturgy...
...He began to talk with other Jews who shared his particular concern about the danger of atomic war, Jews who were trying to forge a Jewish response...
...Serotta blames the "rigid separation" of Judaism from social concerns that developed after the civil rights struggle peaked...
...Recent evidence seems to support the contention that the envenomed U.S.-USSR relationship has been disastrous for Jewish emigration...
...How, then, Jewish critics of the freeze ask, can any Jew endorse policies that arguably favor Moscow...
...The freeze movement itself picked up early on the symbolism of the Holocaust...
...One is the protection and preservation of the earth...
...Major national groups spanning all branches of Judaism have called for a freeze on "nukes" by the U.S...
...But avoidance of war was essential, Freud said, because "the high perfection of modern arms . . . would mean the sheer extermination of one of the combatants, if not both...
...In fact, Israel itself endorses arms reduction and has repeatedly called for the designation of the Middle East as a nuclear-free region...
...Still, Fleishman sees a change these days...
...and USSR—the world's nuclear giants...
...Protestors have scrawled in blood the word "Auschwitz" on the walls of American nuclear weapons facilities...
...For Rabbi Saul J. Berman, Chairman of Yeshiva University's Department of Jewish Studies, halachah sustains the case against further expansion of nuclear arsenals because such arsenals threaten to prevent compliance with two Jewish obligations...
...arms for Israel...
...We need to be able to apply the teachings of Torah to the questions of the bomb," he said...
...Military might is to be used to secure peace rather than as an end in itself...
...Still, though many Jews find in Jewish tradition and ethics and in the experience of the Holocaust the foundation for their commitment to halting the contest for nuclear superiority, there are those who find, in those same sources, support for the opposite view...
...But, unlike some of his associates, he chose not to join the new agency...
...For the first time ever, the power of the Exodus story gripped him...
...And the role of the organized Jewish community in that movement is here as well, and seems likely to grow...
...Micha inherited his father's commitment to a just world and sense of devotion to Israel...
...We really wanted to make things happen...
...Sidney Shapiro, director of the Levinson Foundation, who works with Taubman on nuclear issues, explained, "His Judaism and the threat of war coalesced...
...To this, Jewish backers of the freeze reply that the Russians will gain no more than the United States from the policed, bilateral freeze they support...
...If, as some have suggested, the freeze movement is to the 1980s what the civil rights movement was to the 1960s, the community doesn't want to repeat the earlier experience...
...And he joined the intensive pro-freeze lobby during the debate in the House last spring...
...Having become immersed in the arms control movement, "Jewish organizations will be in a position to mobilize effectively" for an appropriate accord between the nuclear superpowers, says Rabbi Saperstein...
...What matters is stability...
...It was his reading of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth that prompted him to join the movement, although he disagrees with Schell's unilateralist conclusions...
...I am a father and a grandfather who suddenly awakened to the horror of nuclear holocaust about four years ago," said the 65-year-old Californian...
...Many Jews recall that in the heyday of the civil rights movement, activist young Jews often felt that there was little room within the organized Jewish community to act on their convictions...
...Among those who helped spark Taubman's interest in these issues were activist-businessman Harold Willens, who met with President Reagan earlier this year to challenge U.S...
...He described a kind of "psychic numbing" that had dulled the world's awareness of nuclear dangers until the renewal of tensions between the nuclear superpowers...
...Among the activities Taubman has aided is A Traveling Jewish Theater, a unique dramatic institution...
...Rabbi David Saperstein, Co-Director and Counsel of the Religious Action Center of the UAHC, holds that Commentary succeeded for some time in "neutralizing" the Jewish position on the arms race because many Jews assumed there "had to be something to its intellectual argument...
...The letters, says League Executive Director Bemice Baiter, "reflected an almost panic" over the unrelentingjjtos buildup...
...We helped invent the bomb, we let the 'genie' out of the bottle," he said, in reference to the many Jewish scientists involved in developing the first atomic weapons...
...A lot of Jewish kids are involved," he says, "but not as Jews...
...The murder of Martin Luther King in April of that year ignited riots in many cities, including the black community near Waskow's home in midtown Washington...
...Thus, Waskow plumbs Jewish history as he searches for those answers and for themes of modern application...
...If war is reprehensible, an unjust war is immoral...
...The expectation is that the center's budget will grow as its visibility increases...
...Modernism fractured the synthesis religion once provided...
...And, at his Seder table, he was moved to add a few lines to the Haggadah to make the ancient chronicle contemporary...
...In the terrifying wake of a nuclear bombing a special horror may await Jews, Jacob Agus, Rabbi Emeritus of Baltimore's Beth El Congregation, told the conference...
...The other is the protection of civilian populations...
...Still, Noah, God's first witness to the rainbow sign, wasn't an expert...
...Until now, history cannot record many Jewish voices who have spoken on the peril of nuclear war...
...Thus, for example: Since the days of the czars, Jews have had good cause to loathe the harsh anti-Semitism of Russian governments...
...His new book, These Holy Sparks, will be published by Harper & Row in October...
...According to the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, Jewish emigration has declined from more than 51,000 in 1979 to 2,688 last year and only 484 in the first five months of 1983...
...A half-century ago, as world war When 125 Jewish intellectuals met for two days in June 1982 at Yeshiva University to discuss the danger of atomic war, they were breaking new ground...
...So he became involved—full time—in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations' Religious Action Center, working on arms-related questions...
...Luttwak argues that the freeze is folly because it ignores the hard realities of massive Soviet conventional and nuclear forces...
...Copies, at $5.95, can be obtained from the Religious Action Center, 2027 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C...
...The sound heartened Rabbi Gerald Serotta, Hillel Director at the university— where roughly 40 percent of the 5,300 undergraduates are Jewish...
...Elsewhere, antiwar activists declared, "Every nuclear weapon is its own Auschwitz...
...Indeed, Waskow finds traditional Jewish codes regarding just and unjust wars to be of limited value in thinking about nuclear destruction...
...In what may have been a preview of the next campaign, President Reagan last March, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, accused arms control advocates of trying to put the U.S...
...But he wishes many more young Jews were connected with Jewish efforts for peace...
...The Torah promises there will never again be such a flood," said Waskow, "but the Midrash warns of a flood of fire...
...Together, the U.S...
...In the early 1960s, after his father's death, Micha lived in Israel for a year...
...The conference was sponsored by the Emet Foundation...
...In what may have been the first organized exploration of the Jewish perspective on nuclear proliferation, more than a score of Jewish leaders, academics and rabbis met for two days of probing discussion in June 1982 at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York...
...Still, while Jewish law may offer useful insights into controlling war's inhumanity, the nuclear age raises questions that were simply not imaginable many centuries ago...
...He preferred to remain free to criticize policies—such as President Kennedy's fallout shelter program—that he considered futile...
...He was just a pious man...
...Until quite recently, Jewish organizations were preoccupied with one overriding issue—the security of Israel...
...Orthodoxy can't cope with social justice but can deal with law...
...He recalls that when the American Friends Service Committee sent him out to talk about disarmament years ago, "a synagogue for me was just another collection of people, like a campus or a church...
...I'm not competing for any kavod (honor...
...In an effort to link his interests in Judaism and eastern religions, Taubman spent six months in an ashram in India four years ago...
...House passage of the freeze resolution (by a vote of 278-149) does not end the lobbying effort...
...God cast a rainbow to signal His covenant with Noah, and Waskow borrowed the symbol for his Rainbow Sign peace education and action program...
...Women, she adds, bring a special quality to the debate because "we haven't got that macho thing...
...This kind of merciless arithmetic helps explain the widening appeal of the anti-nuclear campaign...
...Witness the case of the 200,000-member Women's League for Conservative Judaism, where a spontaneous outpouring of letters got the ball rolling...
...It doesn't do much good simply to say we're against nuclear holocaust...
...They were expressing their Jewishness...
...The law has to be generated...
...What is fundamentally different is that the 49-year-old, heavily bearded Waskow is acting now as a devoutly committed Jew...
...Late to join the growing religious-based movement against the accelerating nuclear arms race, the Jewish community is now deepening its involvement...
...My involvement in the anti-nuclear movement," said Taubman, "caused me to question the absence of organized Jewry...
...We have to build a base for a new way of thinking about the world...
...Along with the Levinson Foundation, his Emet Foundation has established the Shalom Center at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia...
...For the first time, the proliferation of nuclear weapons was examined in a Jewish moral and historical framework...
...In response, Jewish leaders have pressed their organizations to act—although in some cases, the initiative has come from the other direction, from the gmss roots...
...But he wanted to work in a Jewish context, a desire that was reinforced by his discovery that within some peace groups, there is an anti-Israel bias...
...and Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles...
...During an earlier controversy over how best to meet the danger of nuclear conflict, Orthodox Rabbi Maurice Lamm wrote incisively of the dichotomy in Jewish law and tradition over war and peace...
...threatened, two eminent Jews exchanged views on how mankind might be delivered from the scourge of war...
...in a position of military and moral inferiority" in a "struggle between right and wrong, good and evil...
...At that point, Waskow turned his activist zeal to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements...
...It was this absence that prompted Taubman to sponsor last year's conference...
...Citing the need for a "totally new framework of Jewish law," he appointed a 10-person commission to study the halachic implications of nuclear weapons...
...What accounts for the change...
...Norman Sisisky (D., Va...
...Although God is referred to as Shalom, Peace, He is also called Ish Milchamah, the Lord of War...
...What's important," she says, is U.S.-USSR "reduction first," the position of President Reagan...
...As the enormity of this destructive capacity has finally registered on our consciousness, Jewish scholars have been drawn to ancient Jewish law and tradition for guidance...
...Among the critics of that judgment was Rabbi Walter S. Wurzburger, former President of the Synagogue Council of America (which has endorsed the freeze...
...They talked of "throw weights" and "projectiles"— the technical language of the arms race—after establishing their approach to the Jewish position...
...In May, the World Health Organization estimated that about half the world's population of 4.5 billion would be "immediate victims" of an all-out nuclear war...
...Taubman, a major contributor to Israel and other Jewish causes for more than 30 years, has made the nuclear arms race a central philanthropic and personal concern...
...The destructive power and accuracy of nuclear weapons now deployed— the more so those that are now planned—and the variety of ways they can be delivered brings us all closer to Freud's grim forecast...
...There is in all this, he adds, "a sense of vision, of putting our other concerns in perspective...
...There is little surprise in that: Jews— probably in disproportionate numbers to their percentage in the population—have long campaigned against atomic weapons...
...Father and son attended the World Zionist Congress in 1937, where they met such luminaries as Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky and Weizmann...
...and USSR possess the equivalent of one million of the bombs that shattered Hiroshima...
...Howard Bray is a freelance journalist living in Washington, D.C...
...The Central Intelligence Agency has projected 150 million American and 130 million Russian dead if the two nations were to fight a nuclear war...
...and Willis D. Gradison, Jr...
...People all over the country responded to it," Waskow said...
...Let gedder remind us," Berman suggests, that "we Jews have our own context from which to argue the impermissibility" of nuclear war...
...Jews should be more aware of the consequences of weakness than other people," Luttwak has said...
...For us, 'nuclear holocaust' is more than a metaphor...
...I had a boiler plate bar mitzvah and became a secularized grown-up for whom Judaism was interesting but irrelevant...
...Jewish security," he says, "is very dependent on a sense of hope and betterment...
...He doesn't flaunt his maverick approach to life, nor does he try to cloak it...
...After a year of teaching in Yerucham, in Israel's Negev region, Abelow returned home "feeling more traditionally Jewish...
...Already, the issue has emerged as a focus of the 1984 presidential campaign...
...Halachah, Rabbi Berman says, provides for a sanction called "gedder," or "fence," to bar certain acts that might cause great evil...
...That fire, as he interprets it, is thermonuclear war...
...He began studying Torah, and was encouraged to discover that the early rabbis and, later, the Chassidim, created new religious forms that still related to the past...
...The pressure has also come, implicitly, from the young...
...An apparent revival of the Cold War, increasingly bellicose rhetoric, the knowledge that the Pentagon and Kremlin take seriously the prospect of fighting a "protracted" nuclear war, have propelled the peace movement here and in Western Europe...
...Later, he became director of the Quaker-financed Washington Peace Center, and there he learned to expect negative reactions from Jewish organizations when he called to talk about disarmament...
...He discovered that many of the 2,000 residents of that community were young American Jews...
...By the very nature of their huge destructive power, atomic and hydrogen bombs present profound moral questions...
...That's almost totally missing now...
...Reagan is our best recruiter, because his statements are so frightening," Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton told a conference of involved Jews last summer...
...Similarly, when urging Jewish congressmen earlier this year to vote for a mutual and verifiable freeze on nuclear weapons, five national Jewish organizations declared, "There is a special Jewish viewpoint on this issue...
...As a result, he adds, "Our agenda had become distorted...
...Halachah (Jewish law) distinguishes between obligatory wars of national survival in which all the people of Israel must fight, and permissive wars that provide many justifications for non-service—the forerunners of contemporary draft exemptions...
...Waskow grew up in a largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore in a family that was "mostly unobservant," he says...
...Not a diminution of concern for Israel, but a growing awareness, as the freeze movement has gained strength throughout the society, of the stakes...
...Rabbi David Saperstein criticizes— again on Jewish grounds—such boosts in arms spending while funds for domestic needs are sharply cut...
...Five years ago, Taubman married Naomi Newman, the theater's artistic director...
...And many Jews—not only scholars—believe that the Jewish experience offers a unique and deep message for the nuclear age...
...Peace now and always has come from the stability of deterrence...
...And a congressional resolution to freeze nuclear arms production spoke of the need to avoid a new Holocaust "that would be humanity's final war...
...Perhaps, suggests Fleishman, who is 30, young Jews—much like other young people—are uninvolved because they do not want to jeopardize their careers or because they perceive war protesters as hippies...
...If a divided and angry people is out of work and out of hope, Jewish security is jeopardized...
...Not all Jews agree with the movement's view that the continuing buildup of nuclear arsenals threatens peace, just as some Catholics oppose their bishops' support of the freeze...
...Not since Vietnam and civil rights have there been so many Jews and Catholics and Protestants speaking on an issue in each other's churches and synagogues...
...It is not enough to deal only with government policy," Waskow argued...
...But polls last November showed that 90 percent of Jewish voters favored the freeze in state and local referenda...
...physician Helen Caldicott, a leader in the freeze movement...
...Now, in the early stages of the anti-proliferation effort, activists are sensitive to the need to go beyond the obvious emotional response, to rest their case as well on a serious intellectual statement...
...But they did so mainly as individuals who happened to be Jews...
...Before'war commences, the enemy is to be permitted a chance to surrender...
...We didn't change any minds," says Agenda's David Fleishman, "but they did understand that the major Jewish organizations favor the freeze...
...The existence of the "two superpowers . . . facing each other with taut trigger fingers on cocked nuclear weapons," he argued, calls into question the applicability of halachah...
...And Rabbi Rebecca Trachtenberg of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College drew the attention of conference participants to one of the earliest sources of all...
...Taubman was reared in a traditional Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father, Herman, grew wealthy in the oil business...
...Says Abelow: "It's here, that popular movement that Eisenhower talked about...
...Just wars, Lamm explained, were waged to drive out evil greater than war itself...
...See sidebar...
...Jews, having suffered near-genocide, ought to be in the forefront of this [nuclear war] issue...
...As an aide to a liberal Democratic congressman in the early 1960s, Arthur Waskow helped write the law establishing the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...
...As the House vote on the freeze resolution neared, interreligious pro-freeze lobbyists identified some 80 representatives, including four Jews, as "on the fence...
...Back during the Vietnam War, his appeal for conscientious objector status—based on his view that Jewish law proscribes the shedding of innocent blood—was denied...
...Citing God's command to Adam, v'chivshuhah—conquer the earth—she suggested that perhaps it is our impulse to master and destroy that must be conquered, if we are to become true descendants of Adam, the earth-creature, and of Noah, the covenant-maker—creatures who live in harmony with the world...
...Twenty-four year old Benjamin Abelow is surely an exception to Rabbi Serotta's "lost generation...
...But, for all the appeal of the movement, and for all of the new enthusiasm it has generated, it will gain stature and authority—so say some observers—only if it rests on what Dr...
...Waskow began to seek out other Jews who also were searching for ways to build a Jewish path through the modem world...
...Its horror physically sickened him...
...Luttwak is a frequent contributor to Commentary, which takes a rather hard line on U.S...
...But the freeze endorsed by Jewish organizations and others is the wrong approach, argues Shoshana Bryen, Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for Security Affairs, a Washington-based think tank concerned with strategic issues mainly as they affect Israel...
...Among the panelists was psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who was one of the first scientists to study the psychological and social consequences of Hiroshima^ "From being exposed to the bomb for a split second, the survivors experienced a split second, lifelong immersion in death," said Lifton, not only by virtue of the immediate casualties but also by virtue of their unrelenting fear of radiation's effects on future generations...
...The next year he wrote the Freedom Seder that Ramparts magazine and Holt, Rinehart & Winston later published...
...Everyone is...
...We have to extrapolate new applications from halachah to deal with the morality of nuclear weapons escalation," Gilbert Klaperman, President of the Rabbinical Council of America, told some 200 Orthodox rabbis last January...
...Reform Judaism deals with social justice but not halachah...
...Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government better get out of their way and let them have it...
...He says, "It has recreated a sense of solidarity among interfaith coalitions that had been strained because of differences over abortion, the Mideast and affirmative action...
...Perhaps," he says, "they were concerned that some peace groups oppose U.S...
...Because a nuclear conflict would mean "the destruction of the planet," some other way of thinking is necessary...
...The President has every right to oppose a nuclear freeze," the rabbi said, "but he has no right to stigmatize those who disagree with his brand of 'civil religion.'" In addition to the moral and military questions that are raised in the debate, there are also important financial questions...
...He has considered the possibility of becoming ordained...
...War-making hasn't been a women's thing...
...20036...
...One of these is Edward N. Luttwak, a military analyst and professor at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies...
...The lobbying was an outgrowth ol our resolution," Benice Baiter, of the Women's League, observes...
...Being a rabbi," he says, "may increase people's readiness to listen...
...This time, by addressing directly an issue that preoccupies so many young people, it intends that they should feel at home within the community...
...On August 9, 1981, for example, he led a Tisha B 'av service to commemorate two anniversaries: the destruction of the Temple two millenia ago, and the nuclear annihilation of Nagasaki on that same date in 1945...
...Working on this issue will attract more Jews back to the community as an arena for their concerns," he maintains...
...The Torch doesn't call it [such destruction] war...
...Suddenly, he imagined them to be Pharaoh's legion...
...I'm just doing my thing," he told an interviewer some years ago, "and if the community happens to agree, that's OK, and if not, it's also OK...
...The combatant nations survived the ensuing World War II Freud spoke of—though 51 million civilians died...
...That position, the lobbyists emphasized, was reflected in pro-freeze resolutions that had been adopted by their organizations and by five other national Jewish groups—the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Council of Jewish Federations, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Rabbinical Assembly of America and the Rabbinical Council of America...
...We felt a deep sense of solidarity with and concern for Israel," says Albert Vorspan, Vice-President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations...
...Restraint is commanded in order to protect forests and fields so that life can be sustained after the battle...
...Abelow is a strongly committed Jew active in the peace movement...
...Launched with $50,000 from the Levinson and Emet foundations, with Silverman as Chairman and Arthur Waskow as Director, the center will develop and distribute information in support of disarmament to all Jewish organizations and denominations...
...The heavy spending for weapons, both nuclear and conventional, is an issue for some Jews...
...The views aired at the conference were both visionary and pragmatic and quickly aroused leading Jewish organizations to join the nuclear freeze campaign...
...As his religious life intensified, he broke with old movement friends over their approach to social and political change...
...nuclear policies...
...Silverman says that increasing Jewish understanding of the intricacies of disarmament strategies will be one of the tasks of the Shalom Center, which opened last May on the Philadelphia campus of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College...
...And a priest is to recite these rules to soldiers just before they enter battle, in order to insure their compliance...
...During an ecumenical vigil for the nuclear freeze last autumn at George Washington University, a Jewish woman student blew a shofar in symbolic warning of the arms race...
...There is no ark big enough to protect all the species...
...He says: "It teaches that the human race is obligated to protect life on earth...
...Jewish theologians involved in the current concern over nuclear war note that the Bible, the Talmud, and, later, the codes, regulated how a war was to be fought, much as do the modern Geneva conventions...
...The publication reflects his search for Jewish answers to today's pressing social and political questions of which, he says, nuclear war is most urgent...
...Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud told physicist Albert Einstein that religion's injunction, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," was a starting point, albeit hard to achieve...
...The proposed freeze would leave the Russians militarily stronger than the U.S., she contends, and such an imbalance would threaten Israel...
...Jews were prominent in the civil rights movement two decades ago, he recalls, because they were "particularly propelled by a sense of Jewish concern for justice and equality...
...Moreover, she adds, she has witnessed no attempt on the part of the administration to link the ongoing debate over nuclear policy to the situation in the Middle East...
...THE NUCLEAR AGE ON THE JEWISH AGENDA At the intersection of ancient tradition and advanced technology, the organized community is focussing on nuclear issues as a particular Jewish concern Those who were puzzled, a year and more ago, by the relative silence of organized American Jewry regarding the issue of nuclear arms can now relax...
...Representatives of five organizations (American Jewish Congress, Synagogue Council of America, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Women's League for Conservative Judaism and New Jewish Agenda) together spent 30 to 45 minutes with each of the Jewish fence-straddlers...
...they were neither acting within an organized Jewish context, nor were they making explicit the links between their opposition to the arms race and their perception of the Jewish tradition...
...But no other phenomenon exemplifies total destruction by fire...
...A congregation in Gradison's district was alerted to his uncertain position, and sent him a petition signed by scores of members along with their children's vivid drawings of what they imagined of nuclear war...
...They also emphasize that Soviet Jewry has fared better when tensions between the two giants are subdued...
...relations with the Soviet Union...
...And many Jews explain their support of a freeze by noting that the Middle East is today widely regarded as a likely arena for nuclear conflict...
...Ben Erdreich (D., Ala...
...Armed soldiers patrolled his street...
...The rabbi's forbidding vision conjures up the memory of Jews being persecuted as the alleged perpetrators of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the 13th century...
...Serotta, a member of the Washington Jewish Committee on Nuclear Disarmament, hopes that for those Jews who do get involved in the nuclear issue, "it will cause them to re-examine what being Jewish is about...
...Keep in mind, while imagining the near-insanity that will grip the nation after a nuclear attack, . . . [that] Jews will be its first victims...
...There is peace now between the great powers because they are terrified of going to war...
...In Washington, Waskow became allied with the non-violent left student protest groups, helped to establish the Institute for Policy Studies, a politically-left think tank, and in 1968 was elected an alternate delegate to the stormy Democratic national convention...
...The four Jews— Elliot Levitas (D., Ga...
...There he helped produce "Preventing the Nuclear Holocaust: A Jewish Response," the UAHC's 303-page compendium of information and action programs...
...A political liberal, Taubman was one of the 100,000 people at the Peace Day rally in Pasadena in June 1982, and an early supporter of the freeze referendum that California voters approved last November...
...That experience was part of a spiritual search that often has led him to seek paths different from those chosen by many establishment Jews...
...And the efforts of organized Jewry, given the political hyperactivism of American Jews, could make a dent in the views of the candidates...
...Radicals need the support of realists to make this a serious mainstream issue...
...That spring, he says, "totally unexpectedly, I found something pulling me toward Jewish tradition" as a way to deal with the awesome issues that divided America...
...R., Ohio)—were targetted for special attention by Jewish organizations that backed the resolution...
...David Fleishman, of New Jewish Agenda, is more optimistic...
...And beyond simply passing resolutions condemning the weapons race, Jewish organizations now are lobbying Congress, teaching congregations a Jewish approach to the issue and strengthening old social action ties to interfaith groups...
...Civilians are to be allowed to escape even from a city under siege...
...But Bryen, though herself an opponent of the freeze, observes that "if we have that fear and we give into it, we're giving up our ability to participate in the democratic process...
...We lost a generation of idealistic young people, and I don't think it's going to be turned around dramatically...
...I see myself as a shaliach (messenger) helping to bridge the old and the new in the race for planetary survival," says Taubman...
...Waskow moved to Philadelphia in 1982 to teach in Swarthmore College's religion department and at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College...
...But it also signals that only rabbis know how to teach and guide...
...Jews have suffered great loss due to weakness...
...For me, it was the gateway to Jewish life...
...As Ira Silverman says, "We will have to do our homework, become more sophisticated...
...In 1981, Waskow became the editor of Meno-rah, a periodical he helped to found...
...Despite all the prayerful yearnings for peace, neither the prophets nor the sages of the Talmud were pacifists," Lamm said in 1962...
...Together, they sought a Judaism that would infuse "the fabric of life—family, sexuality, work, politics—with a sense of holiness," explained Waskow, "that was not isolated to Friday and Saturday...
...After spending long hours getting food and medical aid to isolated blacks, Waskow walked home to prepare for the first Seder, a ritual that, despite his non-observant background, he had always celebrated...
...Lamm dealt with the delicacy of the issues when he counseled against glib references to Scripture to support the case for "peace at any price" or for war under certain extremes—and then went on to conclude that it would nonetheless be "unfaithful to the universal, life-embracing spirit of the Torah to presume such a shallowness of Judaism by implying that it can offer us no guidelines in these days of apocalyptic cataclysm...

Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7


 
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