Feeling safe
By Barbara Sofer

(Januaary 18) Sitting in an Old City abounding with young 
tourists this week, I was basking, both in the winter 
sunlight and jubilant vibes from the Birthright Israel 
students breaking bread in the kosher deli across from 
the Hurva Synagogue. 

Nine thousand strong this year, these young adults were 
awarded free trips to Israel to buttress their Jewish 
identity. 

Listening to the lucky ticket winners emote, one impression 
of Israel after another captivated me. 

Jon (I've changed their names), an American from the Deep 
South, had been to synagogue only once since his bar mitzva 
seven years earlier. But this week in Safed, determined to 
try everything, he plunged into a mikve and an hour later 
felt at peace with the world. 

Liat left Israel as a toddler when her parents emigrated. 
She found a missing piece of herself when she landed back 
in Israel for the first time since then. 

Andrew a long-assimilated descendant of biblical Aaron, 
described an epiphany crossing the Sea of Galilee in a 
disco boat. 

For Sol, a glance backward over Galilee from a Golan Heights 
jeep filled him with a sense of overwhelming beauty. 

Lo and behold, the ability of the magic of our land to touch 
our Jewish souls was still potent. 

Only Natasha's reaction was a little different. Born in Moscow, 
now a student in what the Israeli popular song calls 
"San Francisco-on-the-water," she was enjoying - of all things 
- a "feeling of safety" in the Old City. For the past five 
months, Natasha has been frightened by the menacing gatherings 
of Palestinian militants on her campus. In San Francisco, 
she scurries by them, lowering her eyes less they discover 
her Jewishness. "Here in Israel the Arabs don't seem so 
powerful," she said. 

Natasha's words resonated with others I had heard just a few 
days earlier, on a visit to bitterly cold New York City. 
Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick was speaking at the publication 
party for Constantine's Sword, Catholic writer James Carroll's 
personalized treatise on the Church and the Jews. Ozick 
described the "fear and revulsion" of her New York girlhood 
as she passed churches and of a public-school outing to a 
neighborhood Catholic school. Much like Natasha, she scurried, 
lest her Jewish identity be found out. 

Constantine's Sword, Carroll's tour de force, goes beyond 
being a well-told chronicle of the Church's dark anti-Jewish 
history. It serves as Carroll's personal vidui (confession) 
because he is a Christian. The book traces Christian 
antisemitism for two millennia, but opens and closes with 
Carroll's response to the six-meter-high cross, an intersection 
of railroad ties, which shadows Auschwitz. 

For Carroll, that cross is the embodiment of the Church's 
attitude of supersession, with its derision of our biblical 
Covenant. He calls on the Christian Church to perform, 
in silence, the penitential rite of dismantling the cross. 

"To remove the cross from Auschwitz, deliberately, reverently, 
and in the presence of living Jews, would restore Auschwitz 
to those who were murdered here, asking nothing from them 
in return." 

Carroll's reading in New York felt like a page turning in 
history. Indeed, Ozick likened it to hearing the Gettysburg 
Address. Jim Carroll is a friend and I rejoiced in his triumph. 

Then why did I leave, clutching my signed copy on an El Al 
747, feeling dispirited? 

The weight of 2,000 years of antisemitism felt so heavy. 
Worse was the sense of how different history might have been 
if the Church had recognized and respected the Jewishness of 
its own origins. And for all its deserved praise and 
attention (a favorable front-page review in last Sunday's 
New York Times) Constantine's Sword has received, I realized 
Carroll's noble suggestion was unlikely to be acted upon. 
The cross at Auschwitz has become a symbol of "national 
independence" in that country where much of the Holocaust 
could be carried out because of a compliant local population. 
Even Carroll, the most articulate of Catholics, couldn't 
convince them. Not even the pope, who tearfully placed a 
request for forgiveness in the cracks of our long-despised 
Western Wall, dares remove it. 

And when, at the end of the evening, Ozick demanded from the 
audience, which had come to pay homage to the author and his 
courageous stand, that they support the living state of 
Israel, the applause fell short of thunderous. 

Our relationship with Moslems has striking parallels. Just 
recently on Israel TV, the mayor of our largest Israeli 
Moslem municipality, Umm el-Fahm, waved away the belief 
that Solomon's Temple had preceded Islam as nonsense. 
To him, the ancient Jewish people never existed and we 
have no claim to sacred space in our own land. Despite the 
vaunted tolerance of the Moslems, the subtext of the violence 
of the past five months is the Moslem doctrine of supersession. 
Pan-Moslem calls for jihad are cries for a holy war against 
an infidel, not to secure olive groves for the Palestinians. 

Which explains why - when we should be voting about honest 
government, good schools and better highways - we are 
painfully deciding which of the two generals makes us feel 
less safe and then voting for his opponent. 

Here lies the paradox. I feel forever privileged to be 
living in Jerusalem and to be bound in an ancient Covenant 
with the Source of all Blessing. 

I don't share any of these thoughts with Natasha. She has 
thoughts of her own. She is about to embark on what 
previous Birthright students have described as the 
ultimate moment of the trip. Feeling safe enough to close 
her eyes, and walk - no need to scurry - hand in hand with 
her fellow Jewish students across the Jewish Quarter, 
Natasha will be shepherded by the bareheaded Israeli 
guide to the site he loves most above the Western Wall. 
Blinking against the sunshine, she will have her first 
dizzying view of the Western Wall against a cobalt sky. 

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. 

I wonder if she knows that's a Jewish psalm.