Beginnings
This was to have been a summer of three-day weekends—sun, music, and, to keep the fingers in shape, a few hours of writing each day. Well, perhaps next summer. For this one's gone, its lazy plans...
...Those paragraphs are interesting, to be sure, but the body of the letter, which is devoted to an exposition of Mr...
...L'shanah tovah tikateivu v'tichateimu...
...The bulk of this issue, in one way or another, is a celebration of enduring verities rather than a report on ephemeral disputes...
...Instead, that space has been preempted by an exchange of letters between Prime Minister Begin and myself...
...Begin's views on the current situation, seems to me considerably more important...
...Conferences in Copenhagen, conventions in Detroit and New York, Olympics in Moscow, sound and fury in Cairo, in Jerusalem, at the United Nations...
...It is those views to which I have tried to respond in my own letter...
...So it has been for us since our beginnings, a time each year for the world to stop tumbling...
...The world of public events has not been steady, either...
...This was the month I'd thought we'd print my journal on my most recent visit to Israel...
...a writer saves for us a piece of our past, and a Jew from Russia opts in to our future...
...No, our troubles are not over...
...Five poems, spanning a thousand years of time, are joined by common theme...
...I am regularly impressed by our tradition's insistent reminders of regularity, revived by them...
...First—much more detail about this next month—moment has acquired the subscribers of Jewish Living, a new magazine that couldn't make a go of it...
...For this one's gone, its lazy plans swallowed by unanticipated events...
...the brute tramples on, extends his sway...
...The mail I've received in recent weeks in the aftermath of the controversy which led to the exchange attests to the depth of Jewish passion on the subject, and we thought it would be a service to our readers to place the key documents before them...
...two Jews travel from Vermont to Warsaw in a search whose boundaries are fixed on neither map nor calendar, but in a will that is collective...
...Were that not so, we would not need the holidays, the holy days, need them, as we do, for respite and reminder—and, just maybe, as harbinger of better, wholer times ahead...
...The seams of the world body politic unravel, clowns and murderers crawl out of the nether places and strut on our hopes, but now comes once more the time for apples and honey, for contrition and gladness and humility and hope renewed...
...a bureaucrat in Jerusalem is also a soldier, also a saint, still another of those quiet mitzvah-makers who grace our story...
...Amidst all that, it has been, as it always is, a comfort to turn the pages of the calendar and to know that soon enough, the turn would be to a fresh new year...
...From all of us to each of you: A year of sweetness and of peace, a life inscribed for good...
...No respite anywhere, and none in sight...
...We look forward eagerly to this quantum jump in our circulation, of course, but just now, as our desks overflow with memos on the details of the transition, we feel a bit woozy...
...Starting with our October issue, some tens of thousands of new readers will be added to our rolls...
...The Begin letter was rather widely reported in the American news media when it appeared (that, in fact, is how I first learned of its existence), and—>no surprise—the media focussed on its opening and closing paragraphs, which deal with the question of dissent and its propriety...
Vol. 5 • September 1980 • No. 8
