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Friday, December 28, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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BY RABBI M. ROBERT SYME
Special to The Jewish News

The Torah portion of this Sab-
bath is call "Vayigash." It means
"and he drew near." Earlier in the
Torah (Genesis 37:18) there is the
word "mayrahchok" which means
"from afar." Note those two He-
brew words. If we study them, in
the context in which they were
used, we will realize what a dif-
ference one word makes.
In the first instance, the Torah
tells us that Joseph's brothers saw
him "from afar . . . and they con-
spired against him." In this
week's sidrah, we are told that
Joseph's brother Judah"drew
near to him." •
Apply that to our personal lives.
Why are there times when the
seeds of prejudice are nurtured in
our hearts, and give birth to
swamps of hatred? The answer is:
because we look at people from
afar. We may have had an un-
pleasant experience with some-

NEWS

British Jews
plan dialogue
with Soviets

London (JTA) — A cautious at-
tempt to establish a dialogue be-
tween Western Jews and the
Soviet Union is to be made follow-
ing this week's visit to Britain by
Mikhail Gorbachov, number two
leader in the Kremlin.
Greville Janner, a Labor
member of Parliament and
president of the Board of Deputies
of British Jews, said that he had a
brief meeting with Gorbachov
who advised Janner to write to
him via the Soviet Ambassador to
Britain, V.I. Popov.
As a result, Janner said last
week that he hoped to. meet Popov
early in 1985. "Doors should be
kept open or else nobody can
emerge," he said.
However, the Jewish commu-
nity was less successful in con-
tacting Gorbachov, the most
senior Soviet visitor to Britain for
decades. Arye Handler, chairman
of the National Council for Soviet
Jewry, disclosed last Thursday
that Gorbachov had been asked to
receive a Jewish delegation but
that the request was not even an-
swered.
Nevertheless, human rights,
including Jewish grievances,
loomed large in the visit. Gor-
bachov was quizzed about specific
cases by the House of Commons
Foreign Affairs Committee and
45 minutes were devoted to this
subject during a prolonged meet-
ing with Neil Knnock, leader of
the opposition Labor Party, who
himself recently visited Moscow
and raised some individual
human rights cases.
At the Commons Foreign Af-
fairs Committee meeting, how-
ever, Gorbachov showed little
sensitivity to the questions posed
by British members of Parlia-
ment. He firmly told the MPs not
to interfere in Soviet domestic
matters and accused Britain of
discriminating against "whole
communities':

one of a different religion, or a
different race, or a different na-
tionality, and we tend to
generalize and say: "They're just
like all Catholics, or all blacks, or
all Arabs."
On the other hand, when we
draw near to people, and discover
that beneath the outer facade, be-
neath the different religion or the
different race, there is a human
being, with the same hopes and
fears, the same dreams and frus-
trations, the same need to love
and to be loved, only then do we
find our divine kinship, that un-
ites us into one human family.
Many years ago, during the
struggle for civil rights, the story
was told of a white elementary
school teacher in the south, who
was taking her black students on
a tour. She was sitting with them
in the back of the bus. The bus
driver who was white, stopped the
bus, and informed the teacher
that since she was white, she
would have to sit up front with the
other white passengers. The
teacher replied that the reason
why she was sitting on the back,
was because she had "colored
blood". That explanation satisfied
the driver, and he continued with
the tour. At that point, the
teacher quietly turned to her stu-
dents and said: "Boys and girls,
it's true that I have colored blood.
By colored, I mean red — just as
every person's blood is red."
Unfortunately, there are many
people today, who still reject the

.

Vayigash:
Genesis 44.18 47.27.
Ezekiel 37:15-28.

-

notion that we are all related to
each other. Nor will this notion
disappear, until we draw near to
one another. That is what this
week's sidrah is trying to teach us.
There they were: Joseph's bothers
standing before him, apparently
strangers to each other. But when
Judah drew near, Joseph said: "I
am Joseph. Is my father still
alive?" • Strangers had become
brothers!
We live today in a world that
has been made small by man's
technolgical genius. And in a
shrinking world, we cannot afford
the luxury of shriveling minds.
Distant places are no longer dis-
tant. The airplane makes them
readily accessible. Different
people are no longer different. The
television scene instantaneously
teaches us that the ravages of
hunger are as devastating and de-
structive in Ethiopia as in any
part of the world.
As we bid farewell to the year
1984, a year which we endured, in
spite of the dire predictions of
George Orwell, let us look forward
to 1985, which hopefully will
mark the beginning of humanity's
earnest quest for universal peace.
This goal can and will be
achieved, only if the statesmen
and the inhabitants of the world,
abstain from looking at each other
from afar, but rather draw near to
one another with understanding,
and ultimately with love.

.

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