02/25/2022
The world has turned upside down again and for me, it’s not right side up!
After a very intense cat and mouse game, Russia invaded Ukraine and I am so not happy about it. I find myself feeling shocked but somehow not surprised; this was something that many of my generation thought would not happen again in our lifetimes.
When I was a little kid, the “Red Menace” blanketed the airwaves. Yes, we had radio and television(black and white screen housed in a big protective box) in the olden days. As young students, we practiced safety drills that involved scrambling under a desk, lights off, blackout shades, and a very dark room.
No one dared to utter a sound!
There was also a designated shelter room that was packed with emergency supplies. It usually sat untouched for so long that all of the supplies expired long past their safe to use dates.
It was all pretty routine and very scary for us little kids who were growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.
When I looked at the faces and heard the quiet worried voices of so many of our kids yesterday, it brought me abruptly back to these crazy times of my own childhood. Following the drill, too many of the kids asked if this was because of what’s going on in Ukraine? Even as I tamped down my surprise that these seemingly oblivious kids were aware of what was going on in the world, their expressed worry echoed.
I know that I share this thought with many of my contemporaries who also practiced those long ago drills: really, Putin is doing what? I got one of those dropped stomach feelings, a sense of unease and trepidation coupled with an open mouthed disbelief that a seemingly unstoppable Putin is actually pulling off a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
As a history teacher for over 25 years, I taught my students that the thinking about World War I was that it was the war to end all wars.
Well, that didn't happen.
When we entered World War II and the onslaught of the Holocaust, we thought that the lessons taught by the horrors of unleashed hate and the spoils of destruction, would be learned?
The world, not just the Jewish people, truly wanted to believe that after seeing the images and hearing the bone chilling stories of Anti-semitism, it would finally be eradicated once and for all?
No response is expected here.
Why did Putin wait for the Olympics to be over to invade Ukraine? Does he have an image problem? Does he really think that the world does not know what he stands for?
Do not have that answer either.
For many years, the Russian athletes “cheated” when it came to admitting using the banned performance enhancing drugs. This year was no exception; a 15 year old ice dancer tested positive for banned drugs. She garnered sympathy because of her age and the fact that her coaches basically run her life.
She still cheated and the world barely blinked.
The consensus seems to be that the ״Russians will keep trying to get away with things that others don’t or won’t,” or something like that.
If my memory serves, that was, still is and will be the case.
This is my truth, it may not be yours; Anti-semitism lives and does not die. It patiently lies in wake ready to raise its ugly head. It may not be in the forefront of our minds or the news, as it is currently, but as history has tried to teach us, anti-semitism will never, ever go away.
It is my heartfelt belief that it is better to know and understand this truth. We need to figure out when and how to share it with our children. We must practice ways to keep them safe but not ignorant.
We must never forget; to always be on the alert. When we lose that filter and think everything is just fine, we get caught by surprise.
The same may be true about tyrants and tyranny; Putin is a tyrant, always has been and it now seems, always will be. It will be up to the Russian people to bring him and his policies down, not the United States, Europe, any strong threats or saber wagging.
The struggle for me is in the scared faces of the innocent good people of the Ukraine who look and think like you and me. They, as well as others, thought that the pandemic was the worst thing that could happen, now we know that that’s not true.
How do we help the frightened and fleeing children, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who banked on democracy and a peaceful life?
I will not sit under my desk, believing that I am safe, while my brothers and sisters actions the ocean are burning. How do we help our students feel safe and secure when we do a “practice” drill, when sirens in Europe are heralding real terror?
Will that siren be “real'' for us one day in the future?
I/we can’t.
In the coming weeks, let’s search our hearts and heads for ways to figure out what we can do to help our people in Ukraine. We have hopefully learned the lessons of the silent bystander from wars past. My own experiences and memories have given me the ability to make change but I will need your help as well as those of others, to make it happen.
We have survived so much as a people of Torah. As we continue to fight hate, we must unite in that pursuit; this is a mission that will not be accomplished alone.
Good shabbos; let’s pray for the end of craziness, for good times and the end of this siege on the people of the Ukraine.
Postscript.
Frank Bruni writes for the New York Times, his article and insights in many ways confirms my own reflections this week.; let me know what you think.
Putin is Teaching Us a Brutal Lesson About History.
By Frank Bruni, New York Times Newsletter.
What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? Then came communism and the Red Menace; when the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.
Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.
I don’t know if it’s a boomer thing, a modern thing, an elite thing or some other thing, but in my lifetime, in this country, among many of my generational peers, there has been a sense that people had learned particular lessons and were evolving past extremes of pettiness and barbarism, certainly in the corners of the globe deemed more enlightened.
In Europe, so devastated and so educated by World War II, sovereign nations wouldn’t be invaded just because their neighbors were mightier, meaner and more rapacious. That was a grandiosity and folly of the past — before the European Union and before all of our “advances,” a word we’ve used so frequently and clung to so tightly, as if the accretion of knowledge and the epiphanies of science were guarantors, or at least harbingers, of affluence and peace.
This perspective wasn’t just overly optimistic about history’s arc. It was blind to the present — to the unabated factionalism in the Middle East, to the blood spilled on borders all around the world, to the enduring and enduringly potent strains of territorialism and tribalism, to human nature. We are creatures of magnificent grace, capable of extraordinary altruism and empathy, and I usually choose to focus on that. But we are also acquisitive, aggressive, envious, suspicious. Look no further than the theaters of political warfare here in the United States — exemplar and tribune of the West — for evidence aplenty of that.
Knowledge is no antidote to the most destructive human qualities. It’s no vaccine. To wit: vaccines. As my Times colleague Bret Stephens recently noted about conspiracy-minded Americans of the current moment: “Here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”
We scale fresh zeniths of sophistication; we tumble into the same old savagery. We devise technologies to usher us into a new information age; they become tools of misinformation. Three steps forward, two steps back, because, as my colleague David Brooks wrote last week, we’ve been cavalier about the constant hard work of progress and inadequately mindful of the full, messy spectrum of human tendencies. It’s not just that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s that the past repeats itself, not precisely but to a significant degree, because the psychologies that shaped it survive it.
I was struck by a passage in Madeleine Albright’s excellent guest essay yesterday about Putin and her first impressions when, as the U.S. secretary of state, she met him in 2000. In the notes that she wrote down of their encounter, she remarked not only that he was “small and pale” but also that he was “embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”
He has stewed in that embarrassment ever since. He has grown more intent and less inhibited. And now the small and pale man has struck. He announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine today. He ordered and commenced a sweeping invasion by land, air and sea. By late this morning there were already reports of dozens of Ukrainian casualties, and there were explosions not just near the Russian border but also in cities all across the country, whose citizens find themselves at the mercy of Putin’s megalomania.
Embarrassment, vanity, viciousness: History never moves on or gets past these forces, which drove invasions and conquests in centuries past and will drive invasions and conquests in years to come. There should be no great shock about Russia’s audacious attack on Ukraine — only profound sadness and painstaking thought about what to do and what’s to come.
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