Essays and viewpoints

PURELY COMMENTARY

for openers

Name That Man

What shall we name the baby? This is a question that is often posed by new parents. How many realize that the names for boys that are chosen are actually part of our everyday parlance? By GEORGE, it sometimes seems that every TOM, DICK and HARRY has a commonly used moniker. But let me be FRANK; finding a suitable name is not like playing Where’s WALDO?

Alcohol and drinks made therefrom are laden with men’s names though why these are masculine is a wonder. (What latent suggestion is there?) Consider: ROB ROY cocktail, JOHNNIE Walker and gin RICKEY.

Well, it would be just JIM dandy to be able to get a cup of JOE without having to JAYwalk and be a mindless pedestrian. Out of funds? (No BENJAMINs?) Do not get in the habit or robbing PETER to pay PAUL; that is rarely a good solution. Be wary of MAXing out your credit; getting BILLs in the mail is no fun.

I do not JOSH when I say that seeing a skater perform a double AXEL is a real treat. Some even perform twirls while holding on to a partner’s HANK of hair! That’s a perfor-

mance after which you could “drop the MIKE.” CAR(R)Y that picture with you! Ever feel like hang-gliding over a CLIFF? Well, GRANT me the assurance that you will DON protective clothing and then that will be JAKE with me. At this point, I VAN(t) you, dear readers, to find some of Sy Manello Editorial the MAN(N)Y other exam-

Assistant ples that are out there. When you do, well, then BOB’s your uncle! As I was getting ready to end this article, I had a vision of female protesters who ROSE to call me to task for not getting a PEARL of an idea and to formulate a column of women’s names. Please have the GRACE to be patient and I promise to develop that soon.

essay

Living in a Pandemic

A reflection on the past year.

Originally, I started my journey as an undergraduate student at Wayne State as a biology major. However, after taking a few bio classes, I found quickly that this would not be the route for me and got on track to become a public health major instead. At the beginning of my second semester, now public health major, my life went on as normal. Besides beginning to hear of the coronavirus in the news and discussing it with my professors and peers, it had no major presence in my day-today life.

I was a happy, normal college student. I ate in the dining hall, went to all my classes in person, and slept in the on-campus dorms. It was a conventional college experience. I went out with friends, studied in the library, suffered through my midterms and was even planning a trip to New York at the end of the semester.

I had made wonderful connections with Hillel of Metro Detroit’s Jewish Student Organization on campus and met some amazing new friends. I attended Hillel’s events and even organized some of my own. At Wayne, I felt safe expressing my Jewish faith and religion openly, knowing that Hillel was like a family on campus that would always welcome me for a Shabbat dinner or a coffee and understand me spiritually. Everything was going according to plan!

The email students received

extending spring break for another two weeks was at first a welcome surprise. I, along with my friends, took it as a bonus, a chance to relax a bit more before the insanity of finals fell upon us. However, about three weeks in, we noticed this seemingly small change in plan was nothing short of a single falling domino in a cascade of Loren Safta jewish@edu changes that would alter our daily lives. writer

A DRASTIC CHANGE

As the pandemic came upon us in full force, my normal

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued from page 4

happy college life shifted dramatically. Classes were transitioned to a virtual format, which came with its share of complications. My lovely dorm I had been enjoying for the last five months had to be emptied prematurely. I moved out with the help of my family one rainy afternoon, clad in masks and gloves. No longer could I meet my friends in the dining hall, hang out in the Hillel lounge or simply walk about without a mask.

The changes hit me hard. My precious independence I’d gained over my time in college was suddenly cut off, and I was forced to resort to Zoom and Facetime calls in order to connect with my loved ones. School online was totally new territory. Above all else, I felt I was missing out, that I was squandering these precious few years I had before I would need to join the workforce and become a full-fledged adult.

Being a student during the pandemic has been a learning experience, one that has certainly shaped more than just my appreciation for the field of public health. It made me appreciate the smaller aspects of on-campus life I had previously taken for granted, such as the ability to study freely in a library or the chance to get a meal with friends in the dining hall before having a dorm movie night. It was these little things I miss most.

It has now been over a year since I have been inside of a classroom, over a year since I have last been on campus. Now, I am poised to return. The dawn of the new fall semester rapidly approaches, and I look forward to it with hope. While it may not look like the student life I left behind all those months ago in March 2020, it is a step toward healing from the many rugged changes the pandemic foisted upon our daily lives. It is a step on the road to normalcy.

As I begin down this path, I walk with a newfound appreciation for all things small, a moment chatting with a friend, a second in a library, and I thank God for the opportunity to begin my college life anew.

Loren Safta is a junior majoring in public health at Wayne State University.

letters

Locker Room Memories

I really appreciate Jeffrey London’s reminiscence about the WB JCC’s Locker Room in the health club (Aug. 19, page 6). I also appreciate his thoughtful and touching comments about my Uncle Leo. I was a member of the Oak Park JCC for 21 years. We had the same camaraderie and fellowship in our locker room albeit for a shorter time. There was nothing like the JCC locker room in terms of building a sense of community, which many of us miss even more these days with so many COVID-19 restrictions still in place. It was a place where people of different neighborhoods and levels of religious observance could all come together and share a shvitz or watch a game. The empty field along 10 Mile Road makes the memory of our Oak Park locker room that much more special.

— Joshua A. Lerner Huntington Woods

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PURELY COMMENTARY

guest column

Am I My Brother’s Keeper? Reflections on Jewish Unity Before the New Year

This year saw some great Jewish highs — two gold medals for Israel in the Tokyo Olympics — and some great Jewish lows — a COVID-violating engagement party in Australia caught on tape, mocking a universal lockdown. We saw Israel taking the lead in vaccines — inoculating Arab and Jew in Israel as equals and sharing vaccination information with the world — and we saw Jews heaping abuse at other Jews for merely praying in the egalitarian section of the Western Wall.

Jews in America, in all their political and religious diversity, came together for Zoom rallies, Washington rallies and West Bloomfield rallies to fight antisemitism, and we looked on in horror as our fellow Jews were violently and verbally abused — simply for being Jewish. In a year of COVID, there were many highs and lows, but I would like in particular to ask: Am I my brother’s keeper? Am I responsible for all Jews and can I get nachas (prideful joy) from Jews I don’t even know and who don’t know me?

Indeed, Jewish accomplishments make us feel so proud to be Jewish. Didn’t we feel that sense of Jewish pride and Jewish unity seeing everyone stand for “Hatikva” in Tokyo? But doesn’t the worst behavior by Jews stir in us a collective desire to repent?

Watching videos of that terrible religious engagement party in Australia or videos of Jews screaming at other Jews because they pray differently — how painful for all Jews, and how deeply disturbing and thought-provoking at this time of introspection and asking of forgiveness. We are, after all, one people, with one heart, with a common destiny.

As director of the Jewish Community Relations Council/AJC of Detroit, I see firsthand how the rest of the community sees Jews as one, where one Jew doing good can be so meaningful to all our people, and one Jew doing bad things can be so detrimental.

There is never an excuse for antisemitism and never an excuse for the world to condemn Jews as a collective. At the same time, our tradition tells us Kol Yisrael Areivim Ze Bazeh — all Jews are responsible — literally, guarantors — for each other.

All of us must unite to take pride when one of us does something commendable or incredible; we must also condemn actions that harm the world and bring embarrassment to our people and to God, even if just a few Jews, far away, are doing them.

Just as the world saw proud Jews during the Olympics, I was so heartened that some of the greatest rabbis, in particular, Rav Eliezer Melamed, condemned those who heaped insults and vitriol on those praying at the Kotel’s egalitarian section.

We cannot escape responsibility for each other’s actions; we must share in the praise when one of us wins a gold and we must share in the concern when even one of us acts badly.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

THE NEED FOR UNITY

Jews — few or many — set an example of partnership and cooperation with our non-Jewish neighbors, no matter what their religion, ethnicity or race, when we show we care about those around us. Indeed, one of the best ways to fight antismetism and ignorance is to demonstrate to the greater society how unified the Jews are in promoting ethical work that makes the greater Metro Detroit a better place to live for all of us.

As we get ready to observe Rosh Hashanah, the holiday where Jews celebrate the creation of the universe, the JCRC/AJC celebrates not only the impact our Jewish community can have on the broader community, but also the importance of the Jewish community accepting responsibility, as one, as guarantors for each other. Rosh Hashanah tells us that each Jew has a responsibility to the great world that God created and a responsibility to encourage every other Jew to work hard to better this world as well.

L’shanah tovah, for a year of good health, free from the shackles of COVID, full of Jewish pride and filled with a deep sense of responsibility to look out for each other and work as a unified people to improve this great world we are blessed to live in.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin is executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council/American Jewish Committee.

PURELY COMMENTARY

essay

The Folly of Hasty Withdrawals — Both America’s and Israel’s

Like every national leader, the president of the United States has a prime obligation to safeguard the security and well-being of his citizens. And like his predecessor, Donald Trump, President Joe Biden concluded David that the presence

Horovitz Times of of U.S. troops Israel and contractors in Afghanistan was having the opposite effect — that the American military deployment, as Biden put it on Aug. 16, was “not in our national security interest.”

Thousands of Americans had lost their lives in the course of the 20-year war since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration began targeting Afghanistan for harboring al-Qaeda terrorists. And Biden, inheriting an agreement to withdraw the last few thousand U.S. troops, decided to go ahead with it and, as he said, avoid a “third decade” of war.

ISRAEL’S EXPERIENCE

Before we get into the profound and dismal wrongheadedness of this decision — which in a matter of a few days has seen the United States humiliated and weakened in the eyes, most especially, of its Islamist enemies — we should note that Israel has twice in recent decades carried out its own hasty military withdrawals on our very own doorstep, under circumstances and with consequences it has to some extent lived to regret.

We left southern Lebanon unilaterally in 2000, under public pressure amid the relentless loss of soldiers’ lives in the Security Zone, and were plunged into the Second Lebanon War six years later. Now we face a full-fledged Hezbollah army on that front.

We left Gaza unilaterally in 2005, choosing neither to negotiate the pullout with the Palestinian Authority nor to heed the warnings that emboldened terror groups, claiming vindication, would fill the vacuum. Now we face endless friction and intermittent bloody conflict with Hamas.

Israel, in other words, is not immune to the urge to cut and run.

And that is what the United States has now done in Afghanistan, to devastating effect. It has handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban — brutal and benighted Islamic fundamentalists who, when they last controlled the country, oppressed women with a methodical viciousness unparalleled by any other regime worldwide; indiscriminately massacred civilians; restricted education; destroyed agriculture; banned culture and recreation.

In consigning Afghanistan to its grisly fate, moreover, the U.S. has shown itself to have been incapable of forging the Afghan military into a competent fighting force, despite all the training, the tens of billions in equipment, the lives lost.

And while Biden now blames Afghanistan’s political leaders for fleeing, and the Afghan army for laying down its arms, the U.S. also reveals itself to have been unable to recognize the unreliability of its Afghan allies. As recently as July 8, Biden asserted with outrageously misguided complacency that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

Taliban fighters stand guard in a vehicle along the roadside in Kabul on Aug. 16, 2021.

AFP/TIMES OF ISRAEL

ISRAELI SELF-RELIANCE

For Israel, the debacle is a reinforcement of our insistence that we, and we alone, put our lives on the line in the defense of this country — even as we forge and nurture our alliances with our vital allies, and none more so than the United States. We do not and must not ask U.S. or any other forces to risk their lives for us, and we dare not rely on any other country or alliance to protect us from our enemies.

For Israel and its allies and semi-allies in the region, the U.S. mishandling of Afghanistan also shocks and horrifies because it gives succor to terrorist groups and extremist regimes. First and foremost of these is Iran, closing in on the nuclear bomb, toying with the U.S. in negotiations over a return to the 2015 nuclear deal, determined to destroy “Little Satan” Israel, and now even more contemptuous of the “Great Satan.”

For the United States, however, what’s ultimately worst about the abandonment of Afghanistan to some of the darkest forces on the planet is that it negates, rather than serves, that core presidential obligation to ensure the security and well-being of the American people. The U.S. deployment had been greatly scaled back, and the losses, still of course, terrible, reduced to a fraction of those in earlier years.

The hapless departure and

essay

Here for Good: A Message from the Jewish Federation

Ayear ago, we celebrated Rosh Hashanah in the midst of the global pandemic. For the first time, our seders were limited to immediate family members and we worshiped at services streamed on the internet. Today, as we once again prepare for the High Holidays, we can be grateful that many aspects of our normal lives have returned. The COVID vaccine has made a tremendous, life-saving difference, though clearly the devastating impact of the virus is not yet over. For many, life remains difficult and uncertain. The pandemic is still an ongoing public health threat, affecting our community in a variety of ways.

A dramatic shortage of workers has made it more difficult and expensive to deliver services to the thousands of individuals who depend on the support of our Jewish agencies. Significant mental health issues continue to be a challenge for youth in our community, requiring a variety of interventions to counter depression, anxiety and suicide. And our Jewish communities in Israel and elsewhere around the world have been impacted by the pandemic in similar ways to our local community.

Beyond this, antisemitism has risen over the past year, prompting a coordinated response to counter hateful and threatening rhetoric and to keep the community safe.

Despite these challenges, there is reason to be hopeful. If we have learned anything from the experience of the pandemic, it is that together, as a unified community, we can weather any crisis.

Throughout the pandemic, our communal leaders and institutions worked to make sure that our most vulnerable individuals were protected, providing millions of kosher meals to seniors and others in need, emergency aid to struggling families and protective gear for frontline workers. This was the most collaborative effort in recent times, uniting individuals from every corner of our community, every organization and stream of Judaism.

The Jewish Federation played a central role in this response, mobilizing $7.6 million dollars in critical funding to protect individuals and families as well as the Jewish organizations that are the heart and soul of Jewish life. Just as importantly, we continued to coordinate the response effort, working shoulder to shoulder with agencies, schools and congregations throughout Jewish Detroit on a daily basis. This work is far from over and will continue for as long as the needs exist.

Several years ago, we introduced a new theme for the Jewish Federation, a “tag line” to express the essence of our mission. Here for Good proclaims that Federation is an enduring entity whose purpose is to support, strengthen and advance our local and global Jewish community. We are here to take care of our most vulnerable individuals Matthew B. Lester and to build a vibrant Jewish future for all. Today, this theme has never been more relevant. Here for Good reflects not just the essence of the Federation, but also of our Jewish community itself. Thanks to the commitDennis S. ment of many individuals —

Bernard including nearly 11,000 donors to our Annual Campaign — Jewish Detroit remains as vibrant and cohesive today as it ever has. Even as we recognize the ongoing impact of the virus

Steven and other complex challenges,

Ingber we will never lose our vitality, spirit and gratitude for the richness and depth of our Jewish heritage and culture as well as the strength of our community. With that in mind, we want to offer a warm Shanah Tovah to our entire Jewish community. May this be a time of peace and prosperity for the Jewish people, and a year of meaning, growth and joy for all.

Matthew B. Lester is president, Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. Dennis S. Bernard is president, United Jewish Foundation. Steven Ingber is CEO, Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. continued from page 10

its consequences, bitter experience indicates all too well, will exact a far greater cost than maintaining that deployment would have.

DANGER TO U.S.?

Biden’s two immediate predecessors complained that, notwithstanding the U.S. commitment to championing freedom and democracy, it was not America’s job to solve all the problems of this part of the world (Barack Obama) and fight the Mideast region’s stupid wars (Donald Trump).

But that the debacle is playing out around the 20th anniversary of 9-11, when 3,000 people lost their lives in al-Qaeda’s horrific terrorist assault on America, and serves to grimly underline the direct consequences for the United States itself of failing to reckon with the ruthless, amoral and sophisticated forces plotting to harm it.

Those regressive forces, most of them strategizing in our part of the world, are murderously hostile to everything that is best about America — its defense of freedoms, its commitment to democracy, its striving for opportunity and equality, its fundamental humanity.

Today, they are more confident and stronger than they were just a few days ago. And the bastion of the free world’s defense against them, the United States of America, looks tired and irresolute.

This, at the risk of catastrophic understatement, is not in the U.S. national security interest.

David Horovitz is the founding editor of the Times of Israel.