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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. . „41