'Unfathomable' — one father's tale of his son, murdered in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack

Ruby Chen

     If Ruby Chen had not closed his talk by mentioning the anniversary, I'd never have thought of writing this on Oct. 7. But he did.

     Ruby Chen does not have to speak to drive his message home. He wears his sorrow etched upon his face, his mouth set in a firm flat line.
     When he does speak, at a breakfast for the Israeli ambassador during the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he speaks plainly.
     "We are 240 families," he begins, explaining that he will avoid politics. "We are not spokespeople for the state of Israel. We're just people who have this tragedy. We are families. Our loved ones have been abandoned, and have to come back."
     Chen, 55, outlines his story. 

     "I am a U.S. citizen, grew up in New York City," he says. "We moved to Israel about 25 years ago. Have a family, three sons. My eldest is here with me, also in the IDF" — the Israeli Defense Forces, aka, army. "That's how we taught our kids. To give. To commit, when you can. My wife's dad is a former IDF Air Force fighter. He fought in the 1967, 1973 wars."
     He is holding up a large plasticized photo of his son, Itay Chen, bearded, grinning slyly, 19, along with the imperative, "Bring them home now!"
     "When the time came, at age 18, to join the IDF is mandatory. In the Israeli army, he joined the tanks division. He excelled, as he has always been as a kid. He is the 'sandwich,' the middle one that needs to always find his path. A lot of extracurricular activities, from singing, dancing, climbing on walls. Playing professional basketball. Being in the Israel Boy Scouts, so he was big on giving back," Chen says.
     "He excelled as well inside the tanks division. He was in a special tank, with special capabilities. On the morning of Oct.7, he called — not us, he has a girlfriend. She got the last call from him. He said 'They're here now,' he said. ... He was being operationalized. He was at a base, the one with the female soldiers who had their tragedy as well."
     "At the time, it was hard to figure out what was going on. The videos started coming out and we knew it was something different. We were not able to get in contact with him. The day after, state of Israel, the police created a lost and found, a lost people compound."
     "He is not physically identified. Not in one of the hospitals. We, as U.S. citizens, said 'OK, let's go to the U.S. embassy.' I don't want to get into politics. We are very much bipartisan. But I do have to say, we have been blessed by this administration. After four days, Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken came in, sat with all the U.S. families. President Biden had a call with the U.S. families on the first Friday. It was supposed to be a 15-minute call. He stayed on the phone an hour and a half."

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The burned decry the fire they started

     Monday is the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, and the protests have already begun. Palestinians activists shut down Lake Shore Drive Saturday afternoon. More are scheduled over the next few days.

    A person from Mars considering the situation afresh might be forgiven for wondering what the Palestinians are protesting — the attacks that their own elected proxy, Hamas, carried out against their neighbor Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping another 200 more? What exactly is their point of grievance there?
     And the answer is, Oct. 7 is passed by with barely a glance. They are upset about the war sparked by the attack, and the 42,000 Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza against Hamas, which exists in an extensive network of tunnels and safe buildings in civilian areas.

    The attacks should never have happened, the thinking seems to be, because Israel should never have been there in the first place. The Jews who have lived there for thousands of years, well, don't count, as Jews tend not to, and should instead be thriving at that magical place where all Jews everywhere are supposed to go, far away from where they actually are.
     So, in retrospect, do Palestinians think the Oct. 7 attack was a good idea? If pressed, they explain that the attacks are "resistance" against the colonial occupation of Israel in 1948, when people who never lived there somehow just showed up and took possession of the land while the original residents fled. Can you really blame someone for seizing a nation that was so easy pickings? A fruit trembling on the vine, so ready to fall that a bunch of emaciated DPs can show up from Europe, pick up a few sticks and seize the place?
     That isn't true. But it's the premise used to justify the attacks. The Palestinian strategy for a long time has to be commit yet another brutal terror attack, rationalized as resistance, then point to the reaction to that attack as evidence of the depravity of the people they've just attacked, ignoring of course the provocation. The story begins Oct. 8. The story always begins the hour after the terror attack. I punch you, then fall to the floor howling when you punch me back. This approach hasn't gotten them very far, but they're all in. Mistaking attention for success, they're going to think it worked, and do it some more. Which is one reason the war continues (the other is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the worst prime minister in Israeli history).
     The questions that would come to that Mars visitor — Gee, if these people are such brutal monsters, why do you keep attacking them in strategically unsound ways that always blow back on you far worse than they do on the Israelis? And the answer, again, is, because resistance. Because, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. They have a dream, and this is the way they are going about trying to get it. How's that workin' for ya?  Because from my perspective, not all that well.
     Okay, it is not working for them at all. That a certain swath of left-leaning Americans buy it is not the endorsement they think it is. Because the kids will  rush over to some new cause. They already have. The war grinds on, and campuses are ... well ... pretty quiet. 

     There is no end to this conversation, so I'll just stop. Final thought: imagine this for a moment: in the year 2200, Israel is still a nation, most likely. Where will the Palestinians be? In a place they hope to find themselves? And is their current strategy bringing them closer to that place, or further away?

Entire Chicago Board of Education quits

"The Free Stamp," Claes Oldenburg, Willard Park, Cleveland.

     The administration of every Chicago mayor ends up expressed in shorthand. Years pass, extraneous details evaporate, and the story concentrates, becoming a reduction of its basic elements. Richard J. Daley, The Boss.

     With his son, Richard M. Daley, it's either the Bean and the 1996 Democratic National Convention — if you like him — or the midnight destruction of Meigs Field and the disastrous parking meter deal, if you don't. Rahm Emanuel is either the River Walk (pro) and Laquan McDonald (con). Harold Washington is the First Black Mayor and, if you want to go into details, Council Wars paralysis — there is really nothing else to talk about. Jane Byrne was Chicago's first woman mayor. Her train wreck of a single term was marked by three strikes in three months:  the transit workers, public school teachers and firefighters. Boom boom boom. 

      And now Brandon Johnson has his albatross — the entire Chicago Board of Education resigned Friday, en masse, effective later in the year. Don't underestimate the importance of that "entire." All of 'em. Seven of seven. If only five members quit, it wouldn't have been quite the same. Instead, we can really get our backs into it: "Johnson's ennnntiiiiiiiire school board quit. Hook. Line. And sinker. The whole ball of wax."

      That's never happened before, and there's something about a new problem that catches the attention, lodges in mind. "Unsatisfied with screwing up in the traditional manner, Brandon Johnson explored new subcellars of blundering..."

      Johnson was having a hard time already, besieged and bewildered. He demanded his CPS CEO Pedro Martinez quit. Martinez said, "No." 

    And these are Johnson's people. He picked the seven last July. This is some next level dysfunction.

      Johnson wants a high-interest loan to kick CPS budgetary woes down the road — worked for every other mayor. Martinez said no, Chicago will only go broke faster, and right now it's Wile E. Coyote hurtling toward the canyon floor. 

    Nor can I explain how the board went from Johnson appointees, new to their jobs, going over the employee handbook, beholden to the mayor, to the Rebellious Seven, walking out the door rather than do his bidding. Maybe they looked at the books and decided to take their jobs seriously. That's not the Chicago Way. But I suppose it can happen. It just did.

    Sure, you could say the mayor wins. On Monday he'll announce a new and, one assumes, properly pliant school board, having rounded up more dependable puppets with stronger strings. But what kind of authority will this board have? The pawn is the lowest piece on the chess board. Brush seven off the board and replace them with — oh I don't know — subpawns, and the game, well, is off into uncharted territory.

     Such an unprecedented mass resignation has to be an embarrassing slap in the face to a mayor whose whole term has been a continual Stations of the Cross punishment and humiliation. Remember, the board bailing out are already his own team of hand-picked progressives. "In October 2024, Brandon Johnson's entire school board quit." Roll the presses on the history books now. There's your epitaph right there. "The board was expected to be Johnson's rubber stamp," the Sun-Times wrote. Guess not. 

Joseph Epstein's Lucky life

     An East Coast magazine asked me to review Joseph Epstein's new book. I tried to be generous — in making the assignment, the editor informed me that Epstein was a friend. Despite my efforts, the publication rejected what I turned in. Bad for me, but good for you, in that you don't have to wait for this to work its way through the innards of a magazine and be deposited on subscribers' doorsteps, but can enjoy it right now, a scant few days after it was baked, tasted and spat back. 

     I'm not sharing the publication's name, since I've written for them in the past and hope to continue our relationship, this miscue notwithstanding. And to thank them for paying me anyway, which came as a welcome surprise. They're good eggs, politics notwithstanding — and I understand that the bonds of friendship can blind. I feel blessed with a sense of candor that overpowers fraternal feelings. When I wrote a book about my father, he didn't talk to me for a year.

Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life, Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life 

by Joseph Epstein 

(Free Press: $29.99) 

     It takes chutzpah to critique the curtain call of a show you missed.

     So when an editor asked me to review Joseph Epstein's recent autobiography, I felt compelled to inform him that I had never heard of Epstein, 87, not even in the four years I went to Northwestern while he was teaching there. Nor have I read any of his 33 previous books, nor the intellectual journals he stewarded. This must be a lapse on my part.      

     Lack of familiarity, I suggested, either makes me totally unqualified to evaluate, "Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life, Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life," (Free Press: $29.99) or its ideal reader. Someone who brings fresh eyes to a book that should not be placed on the pedestal of his previous writings, but judged on its own merits as an independent work. 

     Go for it, the magazine said. I'm glad they did. Handing the work to an Epstein novice turned out to be apt, because notoriety is a leitmotif running through it.

     Epstein begins with laudable modesty. "Over what is now a long life, I did little, saw nothing notably historical, and endured not much out of the ordinary of anguish or trouble or exaltation," he writes. "What, then, is the justification of this book?"

     His answer: chronicling the milieu he grew up in — "petit bourgeois, Jewish, Midwest America." And the formation of his right-of-center-views which, I'd describe as a soft revanchism — decrying the present, dreading the future, keening for the past. Plus frequent potshots at the left. The biggest ripple Epstein has sent out lately was in 2020, when he decried Jill Biden using her educational doctorate honorific as "fraudulent, not to say a touch comic." Prompting Northwestern to put out a statement observing that he hasn't taught there since 2003 and the university "strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein's misogynistic views."

     Epstein briefly limns Chicago of the 1940s and 1950s, the ugly corduroy knickers, and Chicago Cubs pitcher Johnny Klippstein working in a sporting goods store in the off-season.      

     Doing this affords him ample opportunity to pivot from his own life to the world at large. The child of inattentive parents — the style at the time — he turns neglect into a positive attribute. Epstein rejoices that he himself did not become "one of those fathers who these days show up for all their children's school activities, driving them to four or five different kinds of lessons, making a complete videotapes record of their first eighteen years, taking them to lots of ball games, art galleries, and (ultimately, no doubt) the therapist."

     Setting aside the anachronism of videotape, the reader has to wonder whether the road to a shattered psyche is truly paved by dads showing up at their kids' events. In case the reader misses the point, Epstein decries "the almost crippling, excessive concern for the rearing of children." I wish he had shown his work here, perhaps revealing a few sources. I'm a fan of Lenore Skenazy and her Free-Range Kids. Yet I still went to my sons' games and concerts, and they seem to have emerged from childhood unscarred.

     The trait that bothered me most is Epstein's tendency, as he marches methodically through his stints at various magazines, to tar his long ago coworkers in passing, by name, as drunks, incompetents, closeted gays (decrying, of course, the use of the word "gay" as it sullies a term for the kind of happiness he would enjoy if only nothing ever changed). He notes that a beloved Cub infielder married a prostitute, a needless jab that only confirms Epstein as reflexively vindictive, someone who can't pass a reputation without clawing at it. I'd credit him with candor, if I thought he were intentionally revealing himself as a score-settler abusing the corpses of his former colleagues as payback for their slights. But my hunch is this will come as unwelcome news to him. 

     Epstein mourns the loss of the word "Negro," as "once a term of great dignity." Yes, and "idiot" was once a neutral medical term. But times change. Epstein clutches at "Negro" twice — manfully restraining himself from daubing a tear for minstrel shows — never devoting a second's thought to the churning racial dynamics that drive such changes. I like nothing more than to hear a good argument, even for positions I don't hold. But Epstein views his opinion as so patently obvious, there's no need to make a case. He utters his opinion and QED.

     Every book has a moment where its author either gains a reader's loyalty, or loses him entirely. Epstein lost me when, shortly after unspooling a dozen pages of detailed description of his pledging to Phi Ep at the University of Chicago, he delivers this sentence: "I went to poetry readers given by T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore." That's it. A dozen words. If those two giants offered anything notable, he should have noted it. Otherwise Epstein is just dropping names, something he does a lot. I've met and interviewed my share of late 20th and early 21st century greats — including one that Epstein is quite proud to have regularly played racquetball with — but I'm going to withhold them all here, preferring to stand or fail on my own merits, without conjuring up a Justice League of the Famous to rub my elbows until I, too, ascend into their empyrean. 

     I blame his editor, for letting Epstein off-gas contempt for the current world leading to all sorts of wrong-footed moments. He meets his wife, they sleep together, then Epstein raises a finger and apologizes: "In our-hyper candid age, I suppose I ought here to describe in some detail our sex."

     No, he ought not. No reader imaginable looks up from the book at this point, rattles its pages and cries, "Details! Tell us all about having sex with your wife!" Particularly a reader drawn to Epstein's work, who no doubt is nodding along in agreement at the deterioration all around, with Black culture being taught in once-noble universities as if it had merit and was not just victimhood rampant, to paraphrase his sentiments.

     A meticulous editor would also have noticed that twice he shares his jokey fantasy headline about imagining Saul Bellow's death during their racquetball games. Once is plenty.

     Here's a suggestion for Epstein's future books, sure to come so long as he draws breath: if you actually care about being embraced by readers in the future, perhaps you should avoid reflexive dismissal of every change that occurs on the way toward that future. Just a thought.

     I've been panned by non-entities who rear out of the mist to plant a harpoon in my side, so do not relish filling that role for a far more accomplished writer. The best I can say about "Never Say You're Lucky" is it inspired me to want to seek out Epstein's other books and get a better sense of his work. His latest collection of essays, "Familiarity Breeds Content," begins with a rapturous introduction by Christopher Buckley, who compares Epstein to James Boswell, Christopher Hitchens and Philip Larkin. He also says Epstein's readers are no mere readers, but devotees, cult members. I apologize to them all. I must be slow on the uptake. Perhaps I will warm to him; though considering he calls society's triumph over tobacco "health fascism," maybe not.

     Credit where due. At an age when many writers have furled their sails and found safe harbor, Joseph Epstein has bound himself to the helm, tacking against the future that will swamp all of us, like it or not. Joseph Epstein's long, well-lived life offers up yet another very readable and thought provoking book. I know I will think of it whenever I am tempted to drop a name or deliver an unmerited kick, and thank Joseph Epstein quite sincerely for that.

Every 15 minutes

 

     Happy New Year! I've fallen out of the habit of actually attending synagogue, but will join my wife as she livestreams services from Central Synagogue in New York. They're musical, meaningful and brief.
     Not as brief, alas, as the services at the Millinery Center Synagogue were. My wife and I strolled past it during our visit to New York in September, and I took the above photo. I was saddened, assuming from the doors and the pried-off announcement boxes that it had fallen into disuse. Although I made a few calls, and found... well, let's save the update for after the item. It does go some unexpected places.
     Back in 2005, I was writing for the New York Daily News and during one of my research trips to the city attended a service. I remember my original draft noted the cautionary signs in the synagogue that said, in essence, "If you talk during services your children will be cursed forever." I found that quaint, but my pieces for the paper were short — half a dozen items on a page — and had to cut it. 

     While I have been to some extraordinary synagogues — a Moorish wonder with minarets in Florence, a delicate sun-baked pastel delight in Bridgetown — most in America are big, drab, boxy affairs, with some modernistic tangle of brass and red glass for an eternal light and about as much sense of timeless faith as an airport lounge.

     Thus I was charmed to encounter the Millinery Center Synagogue, a contender for the smallest temple in New York. A narrow, three story structure, wedged between a croissant shop and a construction site, you could pass it every day and miss it, what with the building almost completely obscured by scaffolding, a huge hot pink billboard and Cantor Tuvia Yamnik selling towels and sheets off a table before the doors.
     Inside, a scarred, stained wooden floor. Big bronze memorial plaques andframed Hebrew prayers on the walls, the way they once did in Eastern Europe.
     The synagogue introduced me to an idea I did not heretofore associate with prayer: brevity. the services are 15 minutes long, and they pack in a dozen a day, fulfilling the basic requirements for observant Jewish working around Times Square. Men in beards and fedoras, or baseball caps and windbreakers, rush in and out. Since they go home at night, the Millinery Synagogue closes on the Sabbath.
     Like so much in Judaism, the Millinery Synagogue is the shadow of something vanished, in this case the Jewish workers of the once-robust hat industry, who founded it in 1935. The synagogue is located at 1025 Sixth Ave., welcomes Jews across the spectrum, though bring a buck or two since it lacks dues-paying members — another rarity — so at the abrupt end of each service they pass the hat, appropriately enough.  

     —Originally published in the New York Daily News, March 13, 2005

     I went online, fully expecting news of the Millinery Center Synagogue closed long ago. Instead I found ... nothing. A Facebook page, not updated for five years, but few phone numbers, including one that led me to Rabbi Isaac Friedman.
     "It is still limping along," he said, noting that he was the assistant rabbi from 2017 t0 2o2o. "When I was there, we had three or four services a day and lots of classes."
     We talked more, and I learned that "limping along" really means "no longer operational."
     "Since COVID it has been closed and somebody has the keys and opens it up when he's around but it's not really active."
     Then Rabbi Friedman made an unexpected pivot.
     "Since it's Rosh Hashanah, I have a high holiday thought for your readers," he said. "On Rosh Hashanah, we tend to talk about a sweet new year. People steer clear of the heavier themes. We talk about Judgement Day on Yom Kippur. We walk about forgiveness. But we don't talk about sin. I want to talk about it. I think that's a mistake, because sunlight is the best disinfectant. The prophet Isaiah gives us a brief point of how we should view talking through our insufficiencies with God. Isaiah says, 'Let's sit down and hash this out.' God says, 'If your sins are blood red, I will make them white as snow."
     Something I wish Tim Walz realized when he was asked at Tuesday's debate about projecting himself into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. He vomited up a mess a verbiage during his generally sub-par performance. What he should have said is, "Like a lot of people, I was pumping myself up and stretching reality. It was a mistake and I'm sorry." Air the sin and be clean. Imagine how THAT would have gone over. When battling liars, bind yourself to the truth.
     "That's the blueprint," continued Friedman. "The purpose of facing our sins is not to feel miserable, but to bring them out into the light. Hopefully we can do something about them, at least make them faceable."
     I find that was useful, and an admirable sermon to deliver off-the-cuff over the phone to a unknown congregation of one. I asked Rabbi Friedman about himself, and he said: "I am one of the many thousands of Americans impacted by the tech layoffs right now, doing some rabbinic work, repairing torahs."
     We here at the EGD family extend our best wishes to him for a sweet, successful new year. I asked Rabbi Friedman to keep in touch, and hope that he will.

Happy Jewish New Year! OK, not exactly 'happy,' but ...

Shofar (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

      My first impulse was, "Ixnay on the whole Jewish New Year thing." I don't normally mention Rosh Hashanah anyway. 

     After all, there's Israel's wars in Gaza and now Lebanon, plus, just on Tuesday, Iran launching missiles against Israel, and rising anti-Semitism everywhere including Donald Trump preemptively blaming Jews if he loses the upcoming election.

     So maybe talk of apples and honey and a sweet new year — while forgiving ourselves for any past mistakes, say, involving occupied territories, which might have unfortunately occurred in the past 12 months— would only be asking for trouble.
     But difficult times are exactly the moment when you should stand up, manifest yourself, and be counted.
     Last year, I only mentioned the holiday in passing, feeling obligated to point out that Trump was threatening Jews: "He marked Rosh Hashanah by warning 'liberal Jews' who voted 'to destroy America & Israel' when they booted him out of office in 2020 to get in line. Or else."
     That aside, the last column devoted to the holiday was fall of 2020, when COVID had jolted society; I took a moment to share the obvious:
     "The Chosen People are not newcomers at celebrating holidays during hard times. As grim as the COVID pandemic has been, it doesn't hold a candle to Babylonian captivity or Roman persecution, the Inquisition or the Holocaust."
     Before that, 2014.
     "Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe," I noted. "Jewish stores burn, Jews are killed in the street, Jewish centers attacked. Maybe not that much on historical terms, or compared to the massive horrors currently being inflicted in, oh, Syria, or South Sudan."
     The reason for this outbreak in 2014 might sound familiar today.
     "Why now? That’s easy, no expert needed. The war in Gaza. Its leaders, the terror group Hamas, fired rockets into Israel, and Israel blasted them back, killing lots of civilians, to the shock of the world, which then let the beast of anti-Semitism off its chain."
     Before we go any further, let's play Guess the Jewish New Year. It isn't as if we use it to sign our checks.
     I squinted and thought ... umm ... 5732? Checking Prof. Google ... whoops 5785, off by 53 years. Quite a lot really. Though I was 11 in 5732; no wonder it stuck in my head. Religion was a bigger deal, then.
 

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Not so smart.

 

    Donald Trump constantly proclaims himself to be smart, in fact a genius. Actual smart people rarely do that. First, it isn't smart, but an invitation to disagreement. Second, there are problems being smart. It isn't all whipping off the correct answer and collecting glittering prizes. People tend to hate you. You can feel cut off from the world, particularly now, when we are witnessing an apotheosis of dumbness, a Grand Festiva del Idiocy, infecting half the country and seems poised to take over half the world. 

     Third, no matter how smart a person can be, generally, you are still capable of making spectacularly stupid mistakes.

     For example:

     The birds are eating me out of house and home. So I reach the bottom of the galvanized garbage can normally filled with seeds and hurry to the nearby Ace Hardware to get more.
    Confronted by the choice above, I paused, considering. To the left, two 20 pound bags of seed for $20. Or a 40 pound bag for $25.99. Hmm. That was easy. I muscled the big 40 pound bag into my little red cart and headed for the check out.
      The two Ace clerks looked  the bag. Then at me. Then each other. 

      "Umm," said one. "You save money if you get two 20 pound bags instead."

     I started to object, then did the math again. Ahhhh. Quite a lot more, really. Six dollars. And what galled me is I had thought about it, had considered the figures.

     I thanked them, profusely. I went home and fed the birds. And considered it a healthy reminder. No matter how smart you are, usually, there are lapses. Sometimes you are wrong and the clerks at the Ace Hardware are right.