The Human Spirit: Our Own Narrative

By Barbara Sofer

I was in uncharted territory - not only because I had traveled far from home and was on a maiden trip to a land of vast expanses and rivers. The hospitable Jewish community of Winnipeg welcomed me with Canadian cuisine: triangular salmon party and homemade Shmoo Torte with caramel icing. In addition to talks within the Jewish community of Winnipeg, the community organizer arranged for me to speak at two prestigious private high schools, mostly non-Jewish, but with a substantial Jewish minority. In both, I was invited to give an hour-long update about Israel.

Where to begin the story? I didn't want to explicate the government scandals or the latest rounds of negotiations. What seemed most urgent to me was an explanation of the entire enterprise. I suspected that most of the students - the Jews included - had little more than a sketchy notion about whence the State of Israel had come into the world. More important for me was to give them a sense of from where the local Jews had come. They had grandparents who had immigrated from Europe and who had homesteaded the fertile wheat fields of Manitoba, but how had they left our Jewish homeland in the first place?

INSTEAD OF the Gregorian 1948 I started with the Hebrew 1948: the story of Abraham and Sarah. I skipped ahead to King David with his special connection to Jerusalem, and on to the Babylonian and Roman empires - chapters of history that I assumed would be familiar context. But it seems that Nebuchadnezzar and Titus have slipped from the curriculum.

I described the expulsions of the first and second centuries, how so many Jews were banished from our homeland as slaves that the price of slave labor fell on the flooded world market. Picture your ancestors leaving in chains, I urged them. The tallest and handsomest of the 17-year-olds were selected to be paraded in the Roman triumphal marches and others for arena entertainment. The abject slaves' only hope was to find a community where Jews had settled and who would redeem them.

And so they entered the world of Diaspora, traveling from one country to another, but never giving up the desire to return despite persecution and assimilation.....