JWR Purim
March 3, 1998 / 5 Adar, 5758

Boro Park Diarist

The Bitter Purim

By Binyamin L. Jolkovsky

The current situation in the Middle East, unfortunately, proves the adage "the more things change, the more they remain the same," is as true as ever. The piece that follows was written four years ago, on a day that your editor will never forget.

CONEY ISLAND AVENUE in Flatbush, Brooklyn on Purim eve was nearly empty when, shortly after 3 a.m, five friends and I were finally making our way home. The evening was a smashing success by anyone's standards.

Dressed as bakers (we called ourselves the Bakers' Half-Dozen), we wore the words "WE NEED DOUGH!' in large, colorful letters on our matching chef's hats and aprons. A list of millionaires' addresses had allowed us to raise nearly $5,000 for charity. We chanted the megillah for the elderly and homebound, and wondrously still managed to fulfill with gusto the most beloved mitzvah (religious precept) of the day: partying.

When we turned onto 18th Avenue, our rented Lincoln, decorated with a six-foot high plastic hamantasch, was blaring a verse from the Book of Esther to the accompaniment of rock and roll. With only four-and-a-half hours before we would arise to go pray and start our activities again, we were in a rush to get home.

Though the streets were empty, we resisted temptation, and waited at the red light. "Better to waste a minute of life, than a life in a minute," I had reprimanded the driver earlier in the evening. As we waited at the light, a blue Chevy pulled up. The driver, Hebron wearing a Yasser Arafat mask, started motioning to us to open our window. "Saddam Hussein" then poked his head out. "Turn on the radio," he yammered drunkenly. "Some Kach nut just blew away 50 Arabs at the Marares Hamachpeilah (the burial site of Judaism's patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron)."

On this night of merrymaking, I assumed it was a joke.

The light turned green.

"Nu, Binyamin, turn on the radio already," said my friend, Avraham Belsky. The driver would not hear of it. The rest of us insisted. WCBS was playing a Hooked-On-Phonics commercial. WINS was broadcasting a weather report, and WABC was rerunning a talk show. The driver flashed an I-told-ya-so smile. It was the first time that evening he had been correct about anything.

The music blasted again.

In the morning, the six of us met at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. Before prayers, we huddled behind the last row of wooden benches in the study hall and rehashed the weird Purim joke played on us the night before. "If Saddam Insane was right, the Israelis are going to face a terrible backlash," Yaakov Laska, a visiting yeshiva student from Jerusalem, observed. "Shouldn't we tell the gabbai (sexton) to recite Tehilim (Psalms) for the Jews' safety?"

The driver, who by now had regained most of his self-esteem, interjected: "Some tipish (dweeb) makes a dumb joke -- remember its Purim, for crying out loud -- and you go and take him seriously! Don't ya think that if there was truth, any truth, to this guy's claim, it would have been plastered on the front page of The Times this morning? Well, I checked. It wasn't."

Half an hour later, a costumed seven year-old entered the study hall and began whispering to anyone who would listen. His mother had just spoken to her sister in Israel. The story he told and "Saddam's" were almost identical. The emotional electricity of Purim joy was beginning to short circuit.

By early afternoon on 16th Avenue, in the heart of Chassidic Boro Park, the name Baruch Goldstein was being repeated in a variety of accents -- with universal disdain. Inside the Stoliner shul, amid tables of brisket, chicken soup with kreplach, seltzer and hamentaschen, bearded passersby dressed in streimelach (fur hats) and bekeshes (caftans), who, like us, had taken a break from their mitzvah activities, sat around a long, wooden table covered with empty shot glasses and wine stains and unwittingly mimicked the talking heads of the McLaughlin Group.

"What is most troubling," noted Yitzi Shechet, a senior computer analyst for PepsiCo., "is that this animal wore a yarmulke and beard and is being identified as a 'right-wing, Orthodox Jew.' It's nuts like him and David Koresh, that Sheik Abdul whatever and Randal Terry, that give religious people a bad name." Then, switching into a Dr. Joyce Brothers mode, he added: "Goldstein, like other religious militants, obviously suffered from Rambo-type delusions. He hid them effectively under the guise of supposedly being religious. It's the most despicable form of blasphemy."

Others, such as Yonason Rubin, a graduate student at the Beth Medrash Gevoha of Lakewood, N.J., (dubbed the "Hareidi Harvard") whom I stopped on 16th Avenue, held harsher opinions. "Life is life, no matter whose life it is, even those considered your ideological enemies. Halachicaily, this Goldstein was a murderer -- without any ifs, ands or buts about it. Just as it becomes a mitzvah to abort a fetus that is endangering a woman's life, so too the Arabs were 100% correct in stopping this poor excuse for a human. His actions have put Jews everywhere in jeopardy."

As this sweet day of merrymaking that suddenly turned bitter drew to a close, I once again found myself attempting to focus my attention on the holiday and, more specifically, the Purim feast on the elegantly decorated table before me.

But as I sang half-heartedly and toyed with my food, my mind wandered off. I drifted back to the fall of 1990 when I was in Jerusalem waiting on Rabbi Sorortzkin Street for the No. 3 Bus that was notorious for its lousy service. After lingering for some time, I decided to thumb a hitch.

A few cars drove by before one, a beaten-up Japanese model, stopped. When I peeked inside the auto, I immediately recognized the driver from his picture that, at the time, was plastered on walls all over Israel. It was Meir Kahane, who is widely believed to have been Baruch Goldstein's mentor and whose death this doctor who had sworn to protect life was supposedly avenging.

I hopped in, told Kahane where I needed to go -- and started to read a Hareidi magazine, Light. I was thankful for the ride but was not interested in conversation with a man my rabbis taught me to regard as a racist, hatemonger, and whose rhetoric, they stressed, would ultimately lead to murder by Jews against Arabs and, consequently, Arabs against Jews.

The article I was reading in Kahane's car was re-titled Of Mice and Men. It was a reprint from the far-right tabloid,The Jewish Press, circa 1965. In the column, the writer was making a passionate but scholarly argument against Jews turning to violent activism to further their causes. He concluded such actions were never sanctioned by Judaism and always backfire. I began to read out loud. Within a few moments, Kahane became noticeably angry. Midway into the article, I continued reading silently. But it was not until the end, when the author's name and biographical data was listed, that I fully understood the militant mentor's rage.

The article had been penned by Kahane himself, when he was a rabbinical student at the Mirrer Yeshiva in Flatbush.

When I picked up my head, my face must have flashed "bewildered" all over it because the now grey-bearded grandfather slammed on his brakes.

"I just remembered that I am not immediately going to Meah Shearim," he said, with remarkable calmness.

I opened the car door, and took one last hard stare at Baruch Goldstein's inspiration.

"Hatred only begets more hatred. You were correct when you wrote Judaism frowns on violence, be it rhetoric or action," I said before closing the door. (Quoting from Proverbs, I added: "The way [of Torah] is always the way of pleasantness.")

In seconds, Meir Kahane was gone, leaving only a cloud of Jerusalem dust behind.

Though Kahane lived a few doors away from my yeshiva, I would never see him again.

A few weeks after our chance encounter, he was assasinated in a Manhattan hotel by an angry Arab who, in all likelihood, had he been born a Jew might well have been Kahane's devotee.

I remembered this encounter at the Purim table while listening to a group of children discuss the Hebron massacre. "The guy was obviously a meshugeneh. He saw so many people he treated die in front of him," a 10 year-old was telling his cousin, trying to rationalize the irrational.

"But even the insane think," I interjected. "Goldstein's thoughts did not occur to him instantaneously. They were the outgrowth of deformed seeds of hatred that gave fruit to sickly actions."

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Binyamin L. Jolkovsky is editor-in-chief of JWR.

©1998, Jewish World Review