Don’t believe everything you don’t read.
Natan Sharansky has resigned from the Cabinet of the
Israeli government and the only audible sound from the political
cognoscenti is a loud but affected yawn. The Associated Press, in
their second version of the story, dismissed him as a marginal
figure in Israeli politics and even disparaged his spoken Hebrew,
too Russian-accented for their refined tastes. Don’t buy into it:
no self-respecting hog would wash in that stuff, and there has been
no balder dash since Ted Koppel was handing out free
hairpieces.
Trust me, Sharansky has chilled everyone to the marrow. The
Right is too dumb to admit it; the Left is too smart to admit it.
Hence the bipartisan yawn. But underneath: the big chill.
A large photograph has a perpetual perch in my “In” box. I never
have the heart to file it away beyond my daily ambit. It is a
never-published tableau of the great Ilya Essas teaching Hebrew to
a picnic of about fifty refuseniks in a forest outside Moscow.
(Essas, one of my best friends in the world, was the teacher of
thousands. He is a genius autodidact who taught groups that went
and taught other groups, reaching a vast audience that extended
across the Soviet Union. By special agreement of all Israeli and
Jewish media, his name was never mentioned in any articles in order
not to jeopardize his work.) A clearly recognizable Anatoly
Sharansky stands and listens thoughtfully.
Shortly after that, Sharansky was arrested and tried on
trumped-up charges as an “enemy of the state.” He spent the years
from 1978 to 1986 first in an urban prison and then in a labor
camp. His fiancee courageously married him a day or two before his
prison term began, then began protesting vehemently for his
release. The Soviets allowed her to emigrate to Israel, where she
took the Hebrew name of Avital and joined the Religious Zionist, or
Mizrachi, movement. She began a campaign of worldwide protests to
free her husband, chaining herself to Soviet embassy gates in
various capitals and conducting hunger strikes.
In 1986, the United States under President Reagan performed the
unbelievably generous act of trading some captured Soviet-bloc
intelligence agents for Sharansky, and he was released through the
Berlin Wall. On his lonely walk across from tyranny to freedom, he
accidentally dropped his worn book of Psalms, his wife’s gift. As
Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in the September 1988 issue of
Commentary: “…It was, indeed, Avital’s Hebrew copy of
the Psalms — those ululating lamentations and jubilant songs of
victory composed by another high-spirited and sassy show-off —
that Sharansky read over and over again in prison and that led him
gradually to a faith much like King David’s: natural, mobile, and
diffuse as the air we breathe…” When he turned and walked back a
few steps to pick up the book, it was one of the most poignant
moments of the 20th Century.
He visited President Reagan and told him that the day he called
the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech in England was the
day that its doom was sealed. Reagan was very touched and summoned
all the West Wing staffers from their offices to hear. After Reagan
died, Sharansky wrote in the Weekly Standard that it is
fair to say that it was he who brought down the Soviet Union.
Back in Israel, the Sharanskys were finally reunited. Their
marriage was very fascinating in that she observed Jewish religious
practices while he committed only to respect her observance and
conduct of the home. A year or so later they had a daughter; then,
another. Anatoly was Hebraicized into Natan, and he became a public
intellectual of sorts, an author and lecturer. I recall standing
next to him at the Wailing Wall one day circa 1990, as he prayed
quietly without fanfare. He is about a foot shorter than me and his
daughter seemed so incredibly tiny and beautiful, tightly clutching
his hand.
Politics do not seem like a natural metier for a man so genuine
and straightforward. Yet the influx of immigrants to Israel from
the former Soviet Union made up more than ten percent of the
population by the mid-'90s, so it seemed natural to create a party
to represent their interests. Sharansky emerged as an important
voice in Israeli politics, defining (perhaps for the first time in
the history of the State) a true center.
Additionally, he anchors the Israeli polity with his unabashed
pro-American and pro-democracy worldview. President Bush has vocally praised Sharansky’s writing and his
political stance.
When Sharansky resigned from Ehud Barak’s cabinet in 2000
because he thought Barak’s peace plan was excessive, it was the
beginning of the end for that plan. Now he has done it again, and
the response is a big yawn. Oh? You fellas sure about that?
