Beginnings

Veteran readers will recall my occasional use of the marvelous two-liner that asks, "What's the text of a Jewish telegram?" and answers, "A Jewish telegram is one whose text reads, 'Start worrying....

...Tucson is not the Jerusalem of the Americas...
...What the Kahan Commission found was that "it is impossible to justify the Minister of Defense's disregard o the danger of a massacre...
...For all that pe™ speak of his vindication, it is well to bear in mind that this trial was on %. limited matter of whether there is evj...
...those findings remain intact and unchallenged...
...Back when I was a kid, I had a friend who was so damnably lucky that we used to complain of him, "In the middle of the desert, his horse finds grass...
...It's Adar, Purim's month, and we are com manded to be happy...
...The moment staff's not in jail, the charges of trespass in connection with our demonstration against apartheid having been dismissed...
...The findings of the Kahan Commission were not here at issue...
...At the very least, the Commission makes clear, Sharon was grossly negligent...
...Dedicated folk, devoted to Jewish continuity and meaning-in a place that is new and was once thought unlikely...
...If you'd been asked to spend a day with the Jewish educators of Tucson and Phoenix, what would you have expected...
...Fifty...
...Sorry...
...Letter follows.'" Well, I hate to be the bearer of glad tidings, but we're soon going to have to stop telling that joke...
...dence to support the conclusion that Sharon instigated or encouraged the Phalange to do what they did in Sabr and Shatila...
...Many of you are, surely about to go buy Sam Heilman's wonderful new book, The Gate Behind the Wall, which will insure you considerable happiness as you read it...
...Maybe, if you're given to hyperbole, a hundred...
...Well, my horse found grass in Tucson last week, and that's a piece of collective good fortune that ought to give us all a lift...
...Well, there it was, Superbowl Sunday, and there I was in Tucson, with 230...
...Did that sound grumpy...
...Except, of course by Sharon, the lone dissenter when the Israeli cabinet, by a vote of 16to 1 accepted the Commission report...
...Some may have been called out of retirement, but the large majority appear to have several decades to go before they are eligible for senior citizen discounts...
...I have nothing grumpy to say...
...The good news from Tucson is precisely about will, as is also the good news from Jerusalem, which is that Prime Minister Peres has named Avrum Burg his advisor on Diaspora affairs...
...And his blusters do not expunge his blunders...
...Don't misunderstand...
...But surely an oasis, a rebuttal to the bad news...
...And Sharon...
...Jews drop out there not less than elsewhere, and the spectacular natural climate is in some measure offset by front lawns (such as they are) that tend to be decorated by pick-up trucks with bizarrely engorged tires, rifle racks mounted behind the cab...
...In its light, those people who've tended to think of Shimon Peres as an unimaginative politician may want to do some new thinking...
...And the Purim masks on our covei are the graphic expression of our own verbal, and heartfelt, good wishes to you for a happy and grumpless Purim...
...For soon enough, the folks in Tucson-and Phoenix also, for that matter-won't understand why it's funny...
...Vilna, in its day, was known as the "Yerushalayim of Lithuania...
...Mostly retired teachers from up north, probably, and some Israelis drawn to the desert surroundings...
...I suppose you're waiting for me to say something grumpy about Sharon v. Time...
...He's here again this month, in his first post-appointment interview, and I hope and expect we'll be hearing much more of and from him in the months ahead...
...So no Utopia...
...Jewish educators, 110 of whom had boarded buses in Phoenix at seven that morning for the two-hour trek, all come to spend a full day on the issue of how we transmit our values to our kids...
...And since no enduring partnership between Israel and Jews elsewhere can be properly nourished save as it is planted in the soil of a serious Jewish understanding, Burg's accession to his new post is a promising development...
...Fortune," of course, is not the right word, since it suggests the product of fate rather than of will...
...Some of you will remember meeting Burg in these pages a year and two ago...
...What I find exciting about his appointment is not merely that he is a dear friend, nor that our political views are close, but that he has a richly developed conception of Jewish life and Jewish purpose, a conception that does not rest on nostalgia alone...
...Time comes away from the proceedings convicted, as it were, of incredible sloppiness, but not of lyu (Had it lied, the jury would have)^ to find that its error was intended-which the jury refused t0 find...
...his "blunders" constitute the "non-fu fillment of a duty...
...At least in Tucson...
...Thirty people...

Vol. 10 • March 1985 • No. 3


 
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