Beginnings
A warm welcome to the more than 2,000 moment subscribers who've joined our jolly band since December. Alef, which is what you're reading now, is the place where I monthly ramble through some...
...May their slavery speedily be over...
...A magazine—like life?— should be a mix of surprises and rituals, of the new and the familiar...
...But this month, there's so much information to share that I must forgo the rambling...
...6. And may your celebration of Passover be rich with thanksgiving, with remembering, with yearning, with joy...
...Not just to imagine the event, but to remember it...
...Won't you send your favorites on to us—including, please, their source, as well as your own name, address, and telephone...
...There are times it's irritating to be on a monthly publishing schedule, with the magazine spending some ten working days at the printer and who knows how many more meandering through the mails...
...As to the Commission report—I expect some comments on it will find their way into the piece I'm working on for our April issue...
...3. Anthony Burgess is an unlikely name to encounter in our authors' listing, but there it is...
...In the meantime, we've moved Forthcoming from the middle of moment to the end, and—lest the moment seem too fleeting—expanded the total number of pages by more than a third...
...Alef, which is what you're reading now, is the place where I monthly ramble through some introductory ob: servations...
...But, quite frankly, this is not one of those times...
...In a generation when significant numbers of Jews are still waiting for the waters to part, and when, instead of parting, they grow deeper and more turbulent, the task of remembering is made somewhat easier...
...1. This month's moment includes the second issue of Forthcoming, an independent literary enterprise we're helping to launch...
...Instant analysis is not a very constructive pastime, and I'm just as happy that this month, our major piece is a symposium on the always timely matter of the rights and responsibilities of American Jews in regard to criticism of Israeli policy...
...The editors of Forthcoming share our view that their magazine would develop more sturdily standing on its own, not presented as a supplement to moment...
...The Cowans will, we hope, become a moment ritual, writing each month on the diverse array of issues associated with conversion to Judaism, with intermarriage, with identity in general...
...5. The Haggadah instructs us to see ourselves, in every generation, as if we, personally, had been brought forth out of the house of bondage...
...That, of course, is why Bill Aron's photographs of our Soviet kinsfolk are offered here...
...And so (most likely) it shall be...
...We're still trying out different formats, and the current plan is that future issues of Forthcoming will be separately bound and will be sent to all moment subscribers as a bonus twice a year...
...Which leads me to suggest to all of you who interpolate your own favorite readings into your Seder rituals that you keep in mind, this Pesach, that we'd like (next year) to share with other moment readers such addenda to the traditional readings...
...4. This issue of moment is off to the printer on the very day Israel's Commission of Inquiry has issued its report...
...2. A word of welcome is also due Paul and Rachel Cowan, who join our regular contributors with this month's issue...
...Heavy...
...At my Seder table—yes, Pesach is sooner than you think—we've read some selections from Burgess' remarkable Moses for some years now, and his words are too good to hoard...
...Paul Cowan's book, An Orphan in History, is still at your local bookstore, and you might want to bone up for the next decade or so of moment by buying and reading it...
...That means, among many more important things, that by the time you receive these pages, the papers will have been full of lengthy analyses of the implications of the report—and, perhaps, that we will all have been witness to high political drama in Israel...
Vol. 8 • March 1983 • No. 3
