;COMMUNITY VIEWS

When Forced To Pick
The Greater Of Evils

D1 VICTORIA GREEN
Special to The Jewish News

think one of the reasons I've been
given the opportunity to write
these commentaries is because
I'm fairly average when it comes
to being a young Jewish adult in metro
Detroit.
So, when I read in The Jewish News
that the American Jewish Committee,
an organization on whose board I used
to sit, had published the results of a
-Survey in which I participated, I wasn't
too surprised to see that my views were
reflected in the majority of answers.
Granted, I thought some of the ques-
tions were impossible to answer on an
C3 objective scan-tron sheet (shades of col-
-- lege exams rise to haunt me every-
where), especially the question that
struck me as strange to begin with. It
;;,vas along the lines of "which is a big-
ger threat to American Jews, anti-
Semitism or intermarriage?" It's like
asking who's the better superhero,
Batman or Superman (or maybe who's
the worse supervillain, the Joker or Lex
Luthor).
I came down on the side of anti-
Semitism being the greater threat, as
did most people who answered the sur-
I vey. What really surprised me, though,
was the reaction of some people in the
local American Jewish Committee
office, who believed the results of the

?-'')Victoria Green, a Bloomfield Hills
attorney, is on the staff of the Michigan
Internet Communication Association.

011111ENT

Palace Date

Learning the Talmud
ensures the future of our
people.

RABBI ELIMELICH GOLDBERG
Special to The Jewish News

orry, Bill
Davidson,
but Madison
Square
Garden recently out-
shined the Palace.
I am not exactly a reg-
ular at sporting events,

survey were ultifairly skewed away from
intermarriage as the greater threat, since
the majority of the people answering
the survey were older adults. They
thought that young people would see

intermarriage as the greater threat.
Well, I'm young, and I say it's anti-
Semitism! Am I that far off the norm? I
began to ask around. When I went to
dinner or lunch with another Jew, I'd

but I have been to the arenas enough to
know the excitement that permeates the
air, the allegiance to the home team.
Yet nothing could have prepared me
for Sept. 28 at the Garden. There, some
30,000 crowded into the main arena
and overflowed into the theater.
Chartered buSses took thousands more
to Nassau Coliseum and made their
way to dozens of locations across the
world to celebrate together the commu-
nal learning of the "Daf Yomi" cycle of
the Talmud.
Almost 100,000 Jews across the
globe joined hands as the final page of
the last tractate was read and, from
location to location, jumped into the
aisles to sing and dance in ecstacy. I
have never felt anything like it. The
Talmud describes the special intensity of
God's presence in a group of 22,000
Jews. We were well above that mark.
One could reach out and touch the
presence of our King.

For the last 7 1/2 years, I have been
privileged to have taught the cycle of
Talmud that requires us each day to
transverse one folio, two sides of the
page of the Oral Law. In Southfield, we
have a "later" class. It begins at 6 a.m.
An earlier one starts at
5:30 in Oak Park. There
must be seven or eight reg-
ular classes and hundreds
of people following the
cycle here. The classes are
geared to every level of
background and under-
standing.
I feel that we are a part
of something that goes well
beyond the quiet streets of
our neighborhood. For at
the same time as our class,
there is a commuter train in New York
that is speeding along its route with
dozens of Jews huddled around their
teacher with their daily class on the

pose the question. I e-mailed friends
around the country and asked them to
ask their friends what they thought.
My e-mail box is filled with responses
from Jews all over the world, and the
answers were fascinating.
First of all, as I should have known,
you ask two Jews, you get 12 answers,
some of which may actually relate to
the question you originally asked. I'll
try to stick to the answers that were to
the point, but some of the off-topic
answers were really funny, like the guy
who swore the biggest threat to
American Jews was Hebrew school.
One friend said that she encounters
anti-Semitism a lot, especially when she
travels for business to Europe, and so
she thinks anti-Semitism is a greater
danger. As a "young Jew" she believes
intermarriage actually benefits Judaism,
especially when the non-Jew converts,
since so many Jews by choice are so
active in communal affairs. She
thought the attitude of the Jewish
establishment was very important
because turning away intermarried peo-
ple eliminates the possibility of involve-
ment and conversion.
Rather than picking from column A
or column B, Bonnie, who responded
to my forwarded e-mail, created a col-
umn C and said the danger is both
anti-Semitism and intermarriage. She
said, "When people intermarry, the
non-Jewish spouse has some precon-
ceived notions about Judaism that are
transmitted to the children. Many peo-
ple have no idea why raising children as
EVILS on page 34

"dal:" As the morning sun shines in the
Holy Land, there are smelled Jews on
kibbutzim who have arisen before their
arduous day to learn today's daf.
Chasidic Jews with flowing, long
black coats crowd into the study halls to
open their pages. Soldiers
on the front lines have
special thin editions so
that they may remain on
schedule. The Jewish peo-
ple all over the world are
learning together. OUT
words, the same ones
uttered across the globe,
the very ones that were
learned by our parents,
connect us.
It was impossible not to be
swept away in the eupho-
ria of that moment. A great deal of the
program was dedicated to the memory
of the destruction of European Jewry

The
Talmud is
the secret
of Jewish
survival.

DATE

on page 34

10/24
1997

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