LETTER FROM JERUSALEM: Gulping Tranquilizers

By Arlynn Nellhaus

As 2001 begins, my friends are gulping tranquilizers. I toss at night. Our worries about Israel's future are overwhelming. Will there be a future? Will there be war if we don't give in to Palestinian demands? Will there be war if we do give in to Palestinian demands?

We are seeing our prime minister, Ehud Barak (aided and abetted by Nobel Peace Prize hungry Pres. Clinton) slicing up Israel like so much salami and tossing it away.

Until Yasser Arafat gives Clinton an answer to the latest "peace"offer, Israelis are dangling on the hook on which Barak has hung us.

Whence cometh salvation? Surreal as it seems, from the Palestinian chairman, himself. We are praying that he will get us off the hook.

We are praying that khaki-covered Arafat will again petulantly stamp his foot and demand, "More, more, more." And thus he will say no to this latest Barak/Clinton offer of "Take my country, please."

Thursday mornings, I sit with friends around a long table and in chairs filling the rest of the room and study Talmud. That I am doing this amazes me. But I've gotten hooked on the Talmud's intricacies and dramas.

For social and emotional reasons, we get there almost an hour early. Before our rabbi arrives, Pesach Schindler of the Conservative Movement, we talk about – what else? – the latest in "the situation."

We are men and women from a variety of countries, backgrounds and dispositions. The English among us are the quickest with the quips. A native Israeli constantly dazzles us with her ability to quote from the Bible. The calmest, gentlest among us is a Jewish woman from Texas who is the former Christian wife of a Baptist minister.

But we all are of a mind. Each week we compare notes on the latest red line that Barak has crossed. He's giving up the Jordan Valley? "But Jews far outnumber Arabs in the valley," says a classmate. "The Palestinians will destroy Jordan," says another. "King Abdullah must be praying that Israeli voters (at the Feb. 6 prime-ministerial elections) will save his kingdom."

Two names set the conversation pitch higher – Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin. I hear, "How can men who sound so reasonable and intelligent when they speak, say such stupid things?"

The English-born man at my elbow seriously responds – no quips this time, "They simply are evil – just plain evil." My own contribution is the information that it was Beilin who fed Clinton his controversial "bridging proposals."

A Canadian reminds us, "Remember Clinton's story about his pastor who, on his death bed, told Clinton always to protect Israel? Now he's destroying it. Israel won't be able to defend itself."

We are irate over a recent buzz word – that the Temple Mount, that the Mount of Olives with its oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, and other Jewish sites – are only "symbols."

"Sure," says a kibbutznik, who travels two hours to get to our class, "tell that to the Christians about their cross, about their wafer and wine. `They're only symbols – you don't need them. Get rid of them.'"

After discussing rabbis' arguments amongst each other thousands of years ago over how to live a Jewish life, we go home.

Instead of the Talmudic world, in which opposing arguments were acknowledged and retained in the record, we face today a world in which unilateral, far-reaching decisions affecting the Jewish people forever are made by one man.

And this man only has some 30 out of 120 Knesset members supporting him and has resigned from office. Still he demands the right to plow ahead and make fateful decisions.

Instead of the logical hair-splitting of the Talmud, we get surrealism and proposals to split Jerusalem and Israel in ways no Jew before has even imagined.

Barak often comments that Israel must agree to certain proposals, even though they threaten Israeli needs and deny Judaism, because otherwise the rest of the world will look on Israel with disfavor.

"So what?" my English-born friend responds. "They always looked on us with disfavor. So what else is new? We have to do what's good for us – period."

I say of Barak, Peres, Beilin & Co., "You can take the Jew out of the Galut, but you can't take the Galut out of the Jew. `Oy, vey, what will the goyim think of us?' It's a guiding question to them."

No wonder I can't sleep at nights. No wonder my friends are taking tranquilizers.

Arlynn Nellhaus is a former Denver Post reporter now based in Jerusalem and the author of Into the Heart of Jerusalem.