Ambassador Yitzchak Mayer

Under the Deep Blue Swamp

A rallying cry for educators

A Rallying cry for educators

Military force will not eradicate the terrorism that spreads fear among the peoples of the world. Force will crush the head of a snake when it bites, if the latter won’t slither away into the cracks of the cities from whence it came or the wilderness where its venom ripened. However, there is no military force, fire power, stealth capabilities, policing units, monitoring agent, the might of a violated sovereign state or the power of a cluster of state who can stand up to that kind of terrorism. It comes from outside and it comes from within, it comes from the distorted readings of canonic texts, and it comes from the admiration fostered by followers who feel slighted by civilization, and would take it to task at the cost of their blood and souls  . It comes from the teachings and ideologies sanctifying hate and worshiping gods of hate, filling the skies with their hostilities, unfearing that God would tear them down from the heavens. It’s a perverse sort of terror, taking its satisfaction in the sights of dismembered bodies, severed heads, women and children running for their lives, their skin still burning, before they collapse on sidewalks or in theater lobbies.

Humanity’s greatest challenge in this hour is to educate itself to moderateness as a virtue, to the center as a destination, to rejecting radicalization wherever it rears its ugly head while it still appears to be just another viewpoint, lest it grow and transform into a sword and a suicide bomber’s belt.

This is not terrorism emanating from a single fixation. Wherever it strikes, it strikes in terrible proportions, exploiting the fears of its victims, whoever they happen to be, fears which are not the same everywhere, following a long and varied list of targets. However, as much as an anxious eye may see terrorism spreading out, blowing out of proportions – it remains a single terrorism, a violent arm of extremism for its own sake, a radicalization of faith in some absolute. It is a rational terrorism, it obeys laws of its making, laws that dictate that the fringe is the center, and therefore every center which isn’t on the outer edges – be it left of center or right of center – is nothing but fraud, a deceit, and therefore it is no less than Holy Writ, whether religious, or secular, or civilian, or apocalyptic, to expose it as such with a steel blade and an all consuming flame.

The belief that the extreme edge is the center is not solely the faith of terrorists. They are they ones who take it over the edge. The belief that the outer edge is the center spreads out in a world that perceives itself as enlightened, and that belief finds fertile land in the minds of a host of human cultures, in the faiths, the views, the deity worshiping, in the acceptance of unfathomable gaps explained away by economic ideologies claiming dominion over every humble social ideal, by branding courts of law as a threat, art as subversion, literature as conspiracy, harsh discourse as blunt authenticity seeking the truth while spraying it into the faces of one’s fellow men and women, in the self-aggrandizing personality type, in the idealization of the desire for superiority over all others, be it man, country, faith, ethnicity, or genetics.

If the educators of the generation, in every people and language, in every gender and religion, will not teach that going to the extreme edge is dangerous, that beyond every extreme, lurks a further extreme, and beyond it – the ultimate extreme, from which one goes out to stage a hostile take over of the center, there will be no power in the world that could stand up to terrorism.

Humanity’s greatest challenge in this hour is to educate itself to moderateness as a virtue, to the center as a destination, to rejecting radicalization wherever it rears its ugly head while it still appears to be just another viewpoint, lest it grow and transform into a sword and a suicide bomber’s belt. In a world where extremism is fostered as if it preserves the purity of values, millions take it up as a destiny, and are willing to leave everything behind and die a martyr’s death in its cause, serving as a paragon for legions of victims of radicalization waiting to follow in their footsteps.

This isn’t a story of teachers and instructors, with all the significant respect due to to them, it is the story of those who are in charge of the teachers. It is the story of newspaper editors, of movers and shakers of media, of Rabbis, Kadis, Priests, Ministers, Prime Ministers, of all the powers that be in charge of this generation, and by extension – whether or not they are aware of it – of the subsequent generations. Whereas extremism pretends to be a dedication to the Truth, the purest of the purest, it is really the murky swamp, and below the cover of its smooth surface, the eggs of the ultimate radicalization are spawned, the breeding ground hatching terrorism.

Every decent person knows where the center is. There is no real justification for those who claim the relativity of all things, that one person’s extreme edge is another person’s center. That is the relativism of Sophist style rhetorics. The musings of late night teen chats, unformed, immature, deceptive. Every decent person knows that one can fight with every fiber of one’s being for one’s beliefs and views balanced by the sheer force of respect one has for the beliefs the other fights for. All that while willing to listen, to form new positions, to accept, to reject, as part of a discourse woven with the tone of love for the thinking man, of the free man enslaved to camaraderie of humanity.

Therefore, calling people to “be moderate in your judgments” is not a call for surrender, or for a fantasy, or for a political view suitable for weaklings. It’s a call to action for the world of education at all levels, for all ages, to see extremism, every form of extremism, as an enemy endangering all people, a threat to both religion and science, a menace for this day and the next.

This is not a motto that one takes to the voting booths, because in that booth the votes are weighed by whatever the “flavor of the day” is, and on this day it is extremism, closed or populist, overt or subversive. This is a call that speaks to the way we speak with our children.

We brought them into this world, we have a moral obligation to their future. The extreme edge can only lead them to chaos.

VETERANS: YITZCHAK MAYER, FROM MARSEILLE TO ATLIT

Written by GLORIA DEUTSCH
Reblogged from The Jerusalem Post
I lived in a world without Israel and one with and to me living here means to participate in one of the most noble exercises in history.
“In 1940 I fled Belgium and in 1946 I was expelled from Switzerland, but I had the good fortune to return to both countries as the Israeli ambassador,” says Yitzchak Mayer, today living in Kochav Yair with Rivka, his wife of 50 years. His story is a microcosm of Jewish suffering and renaissance, an inspiring account of his survival as a child in the war, of his arrival in Eretz Yisrael in 1946 and his fascinating life in education and diplomacy. His biography is due to be published shortly.
LIFE BEFORE ALIYA “We fled from our Antwerp home on May 10, 1940, two days before the Germans came. I was five years old but remember it distinctly. We took the only train to France and were bombed on the way, but two carriages managed to arrive in the south of France where we were detained at the border with Spain and imprisoned in a camp. My father escaped to join the resistance and we got out and got to Marseille where we lived as gentiles. “My father, who was forging papers for the underground, was denounced and arrested in January 1943 and deported to Auschwitz with thousands of French Jews. I saw the trucks taking the Jews to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz. They were throwing out notes hoping people would discover their fate.
“We decided to try to get to Switzerland, and it was decided that my mother would feign being deaf and dumb as she knew no French and we were passing ourselves off as French. So at nine I became the spokesman. My little brother of six – who was later killed in the Six Day War – was very scared. I was quite convincing, but not enough and we were taken off the train. My brother and I were sent to a monastery and my mother, through bribes – we had smuggled out diamonds in a block of soap – came to take us out and we carried on with our escape to Switzerland. It took two months to get from Marseille to Switzerland. At one point we were taken in a truck hidden by hay to a village on the Swiss border and there we walked across the mountains, sleeping in barns and walking by day in the snow. We had a paid guide, a passeur, who disappeared at the border. “The soldiers at the border were going to send us back, but I pleaded with them. My mother was pregnant, so they called a doctor who said she must not be sent back. She gave birth to my brother there on March 31, 1943. We waited out the rest of the war in Switzerland and came to Palestine in 1946 on an illegal boat.”
PREPARATION The small family, mother and three boys, were waiting in a French army camp in Marseille with thousands of survivors of the concentration camps. During the Seder that was celebrated there, Mayer asked the Four Questions. The survivors danced and sang, watched over by Jews from the Yishuv who were going to smuggle as many as possible into Eretz Yisrael. “My brother and I had certificates from Youth Aliya and could enter legally, but my mother and baby brother didn’t,” he recalls.
THE JOURNEY The boat, a French military craft called the Champollion, built for 700 passengers, was bursting at the seams with another 2,000 survivors. “The toilets didn’t work, there was nothing to eat, but these orphans and widows who had seen hell were singing and dancing,” says Mayer. Somewhere at sea, the Hagana boarded the ship and confiscated all the certificates and threw them into the sea so the British authorities would not be able to differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants.
ARRIVAL All the passengers were put on trucks to be detained in Atlit. “There was barbed wire on both sides of the road from Haifa to Atlit, and thousands of Jews stood behind it, shouting out names to try to discover a missing relative. Every time a boat arrived in Haifa they did this. You could hear the shouts as you drove up north – ‘Rosenberg,’ ‘Schechter,’ ‘Bloom.’ Suddenly we heard ‘Winkler’ and my mother looked across the crowd and saw her sister Olga. It was the first time either realized the other was alive. Later Olga came to Atlit and took us back to her room in Bnei Brak.”
SETTLING IN “We were six people living in a rented room. My mother took in sewing to make ends meet, and I was on the streets, but eventually she reached an agreement with a children’s home that I would be there and she would pay for me by sewing clothes for them. I also started working for a carpenter, and learned how to make small wooden toys which I would in turn teach. As I got older, I became a counselor in the institution and later in summer camp.”
DAILY LIFE Mayer always worked from his early teenage years and found his vocation first in education. He studied literature and education at the Hebrew University, worked as a teacher and married Rivka, who is an artist and studied at Bezalel, in 1957. They have three daughters.
LIFE SINCE ALIYA Soon after their marriage they were sent as Bnei Akiva emissaries to London. Mayer soon discovered that his Shakespearean English sounded all wrong when used to speak to his pupils. “I was saying things like ‘thou art’ and ‘I beseech thee’ and they looked at me very oddly. When I needed to buy a pair of trousers, I realized I had no idea what the word should be.” Today he speaks beautiful English and seven other languages. After the sojourn in England, he became the principal of the Yemin Orde youth village, where he introduced concepts of art and music to the totally religious curriculum. “I wanted to enrich the lives of the children and put into practice my beliefs in freedom of choice and aesthetics,” he says. At about the same time he became involved in the National Religious Party and was a member of the Jewish Agency executive with an interest in education in the Diaspora. This caused some problems with his party which did not like the fact that he instructed his emissaries to help all the branches of Judaism and not just the Orthodox. In 1979 he joined the Foreign Office with a first posting to Zurich as consul-general and another to Montreal. But it was the return to Belgium and Switzerland as ambassador, in 1991 and 1997 which was the highlight of his diplomatic career. “I was welcomed back to the village where I had hidden during the war with a big ceremony,” he recalls. Still active in education as an adviser in international relations at Netanya College, he moved to Kochav Yair 10 years ago.
BEST THING ABOUT ISRAEL “I don’t think there is anything better than Israel. I lived in a world without Israel and one with and to me living here means to participate in one of the most noble exercises in history.”
ADVICE TO NEW IMMIGRANTS “Shed your immigrant status and become Israeli. The day I arrived, I became a veteran. I started to belong.”

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