A Season of Grief and Joy

When it comes to interpreting the tides of history, Francis Fukuyama is arguably the most influential American intellectual of my lifetime. His 1989 essay, “The End of History,” did not merely launch a decades-long debate about democracy’s apparent triumph after the cold war. It also profoundly shaped post-cold war US foreign policy. And Fukuyama had a ringside seat. His effort to convince his old friend, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that the Bush administration was courting disaster by invading Iraq, makes for one of the most intriguing subplots of the march to war.

This Friday at Noon ET, Fukuyama will join our weekly Zoom call. We’ll talk about the fate of democracy—including in the US—three decades after Fukuyama’s legendary essay, about his efforts to convince his influential friends not to invade Iraq, and about “the end of American hegemony,” which happens to be the title of a provocative new essay Fukuyama has just published in The Economist. As always, I’ll include your questions alongside mine. Subscribe and you can join Friday’s conversation, and listen to all our previous ones, with guests like Spencer Ackerman, Noam Chomsky, Omar Barghouti, and Ben Rhodes.

Stuff to Read:

In Jewish Currents (to which you should subscribe!), I wrote an essay about how American Jews can protect and learn from each other across the widening Zionist divide. 

Jewish Currents also published a terrific piece by Dalia Hatuqa about why the recent escape of six prisoners from an Israeli jail resonates so deeply among ordinary Palestinians.

Last week witnessed a contentious vote in the House of Representatives on giving Israel an additional $1 billion for its anti-missile system, Iron Dome. Lara Friedman analyzed how Democratic leaders mismanaged the politics of the vote. Yousef Munayyer questioned whether all of the funding was actually being used for Iron Dome. And The Middle East Institute’s Khaled Elgindy (last week’s Zoom guest) debunked the widespread claim that Iron Dome saves Palestinian lives.

Marilyn Golden, the noted disability rights advocate, who I was honored to have as a subscriber to this newsletter, died this week. Here’s an interview she did with Jewish Currents and an obituary that captures the historic importance of her work.

A Personal Note:

Usually in this newsletter, I write about things happening in the world. But last week was the first anniversary (or yahrzeit) of my father’s death, so I’ve been thinking mostly about him. Rather than prepare a commentary on the news, I prepared a D’var Torah (literally “word of Torah”), which I delivered last Shabbat at our synagogue. I don’t know how much resonance this will have for people who didn’t know my father, or don’t celebrate the holiday of Sukkot. But sharing memories of him makes me happy, which I’m trying to be at this time of year. I’ve adapted the talk to make certain references clearer to a general audience.

Remarks on the First Yahrzeit of Julian Beinart, of Blessed Memory

My father died last year just before the start of Sukkot. So as the holiday began, I tried to find him in it. But it wasn’t easy. Sukkot is called Z’man Simchateinu, the Season of our Joy, which felt ironic. And the character of the holiday didn’t seem to line up all that well with my father’s character. Sukkot is a national holiday. Like Passover and Shavuot, but unlike Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it commemorates events—in this case, the Israelites’ wandering in the desert after leaving Egypt—that happened to the Jewish people, in particular. And when the Temple stood, Jews celebrated Sukkot by leaving their homes to journey to Jerusalem for a period of national rejoicing. But my father wasn’t much of a nationalist. And his life’s journey wasn’t about moving from the individual to the collective. It was closer to the reverse. He was born to Lithuanian immigrants in Malmesbury, a provincial farming town in South Africa’s Western Cape. And he experienced leaving Malmesbury, and apartheid South Africa, and, in all honesty—Orthodox Judaism—as a form of liberation. In contrast to the pilgrims who journeyed to Jerusalem to affirm their collective bonds on Sukkot, his pilgrimage—from Malmesbury to MIT, where he spent his career as a professor of architecture and urban planning—was largely about escaping collective bonds that he found stifling and finding a place where he could create a new identity for himself.

But this year, as I looked at Sukkot again, I began to see elements of the holiday that help me feel his presence. Kohelet [The Book of Ecclesiastes, which Jews read on Sukkot] is my father’s kind of text. While a Sukkah [the booth which Jews build during Sukkot] evokes the Jewish people’s special reliance on God as they wandered in the desert, Kohelet—like my father—is more universalistic. It speaks of God as Elokim, the God of nature and creation, not Hashem, the name we use to evoke God’s personal, intimate relationship with the Jewish people. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has noted, Kohelet also comes from the Hebrew root kuf-hey-lamed, which can be translated as teacher, which my father was. And my father wasn’t just a teacher, or professor. He was a professor who, in the middle of lectures and sometimes in the middle of conversations—after having offered a lengthy disquisition on some subject or another—would often pause, and say, in words right out of Kohelet: “Who knows if any of this matters anyway?”

When I was a kid, my father’s nihilistic statements didn’t unnerve me because it was so clear from his actions that he did think certain things mattered. Human equality mattered—he believed in that principle enough to resist apartheid to the point that the South African government tapped his phone and sent him threatening messages. Intellectual effort mattered—it was intellectual effort that powered his academic and professional journey. My father may not have amassed the “treasures of kings and provinces” like King Solomon, the reputed author of Kohelet, but he acquired tenure at a prestigious university and the respect of academic colleagues, and hordes of dutiful graduate students. He saw the fruit of his labors. So when I was younger I never considered that he might actually believe, in the words of Kohelet, that “I looked at all the things I had done and the energy I had expended in doing them [and] it was clear that it was all futile.” To me, it clearly wasn’t futile.   

Then again, when I heard my father’s Kohelet-like utterances as a child, my father was in middle age. And King Solomon, according to Jewish tradition, didn’t write Kohelet in middle age, at the height of his powers. He wrote it as an old man. And when my father grew old, his life changed. He stopped addressing large lecture halls. And then he stopped being able to walk.

He remained erudite even as he began, during bouts of sickness, to hallucinate. Once a doctor asked where he was. Without missing a beat, my father responded: “We’re in a house in Jerusalem—modest, 19th century, built by a well-regarded British architect.” “No,” the doctor responded gently, “We’re at Beth Israel hospital in Boston.” To which my father replied: “That’s plausible too.” 

But as my father began to lose even his ability to talk, I began to think differently about his occasional declarations about the inscrutability and futility of life. It became easier to imagine that he wasn’t always sure what his long, arduous journey had amounted to.

In Masechet Shabbat (30b), the Talmud says that the sages didn’t suppress Kohelet because they decided it wasn’t really nihilistic. It starts, they claim, with a discussion of Torah and ends with a discussion of Torah. But the rabbis of the Talmud required a lot of imagination to read the phrase early in Kohelet—"what profit has man to of all his labor which he labors under the sun”—as a paean to the virtues of Torah-study. And watching my father suffer, I felt sometimes that the pshat [plain meaning] of his experience was a lot more straightforward: Getting old is brutal and can induce despair in almost anyone.

But perhaps there’s a different way of finding hope and meaning in Kohelet’s seemingly bleak words. Kohelet’s author may sometimes sound like he believes that he has left no meaningful legacy. But through their daring interpretation of Kohelet, which kept the text alive for future generations, the rabbis of the Talmud ensured that Kohelet does have a legacy. The author’s gold and vineyards may not have endured, but his words did. And so it is with my father. His legacy can’t be measured in concrete things. It’s better measured by the interpretations his life has spawned. And if you look closely at those who loved him—from my son, who is fascinated by design and the New England Patriots, to my daughter, who inherited his passion for writing and hot sauce—you can read their lives as interpretations of his.

As many have observed, a Sukkah is like the human body, fragile and temporary. It comes down and we build a new one the next year, which may not look exactly the same but shares certain essentials. And so when I build a Sukkah with my kids, I think about how they construct their lives from some of the same materials that my father constructed his. And for at least a moment, that makes this season of grief a Z’man Simchateinu, a season of joy.

See you Friday,

Peter