Overcoming challenges - The Jewish Standard

We are such a divided community that at times it feels schizophrenic. As I edit our opinion pages, I nearly drown in the emotion — mainly anger, sadness, and fear — that almost visibly wafts, no, smokes, off the columns.

It’s not possible to agree with all of these columns. They contradict each other. Even as I edit them, I swell in sympathy with some of them and shrink in horror from others. That’s normal and human, I know; to feel sympathy with all of them would be to have a mind so open that of course your brains would fall out.

But somehow we all have to live together.

I often see antisemitism described as the oldest hatred, and that strikes me as ridiculous, even a form of self-flattery. Even if you were to read the Torah literally, you’d know that there were many peoples around before Abram and Sarai took themselves off to follow God, and there was hatred before then.

But certainly it’s a very old hatred nonetheless. And it seems pointless for us to go around hating each other. Can’t we let everyone else do that for us? Because, as Tom Lehrer pointed out, “everybody hates the Jews.”

But then we run across someone like Dani Shachar, the subject of this week’s cover story.

He’s had what could be read as a really hard life. His parents sent him away to school in a foreign country when he was 5 years old. That would be hard to overcome. And then, five years later, he became blind. And then his parents sent him away again, to another residential school.

But note that this is not how he puts his story. He reads it differently. He sees his world as full of challenges, ready to be picked up, felt, smelled, tasted, listened to, and then worked with, enjoyed, or overcome. So he’s blind? Why should that stop him from tuning a piano? Or fixing a bicycle? Or installing a kitchen? Or traveling to middle schools to tell the kids there, in English no less, about how to overcome their challenges?

All of us face challenges, but few of us run into any as formidable as Dani’s. But he overcomes them, seemingly with ease, certainly with gusto. Our challenge should be to face any challenge, including opinions that we think are nuts, coming from people we do (or to be honest should but maybe don’t) respect, and to overcome it.

—JP

Opinion

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