Natan's experience: Has anything like this ever happened to you?

Joseph_Botwinick · Jun 6, 2005

One of my favorite books was written by Natan Sharansky last year called the Case for Democracy. In the Preface of his book, he recounts the events of his release from the Soviet Gulag and his return to Israel. As I was reading this, it really struck me how sometimes I feel much the same way, and how much I could relate:

Finally, in fighting with the Soviet regime, we dissidents came to appreciate the power of the solidarity of the free world...

While I brought this prospective on freedom with me to my new life in Israel, I soon realized that there were few who shared it. For many years, I have been asking myself why so many of those who have always lived in liberty do not appreciate the enormous power of freedom. With time, I have come to understand that my exposure to the black-and-white world of the Soviet Union provided me with a unique laboratory to discover the line between good and evil. In the free world, with its varying shades of gray, isolating the black and white, finding moral clarity, becomes far more difficult.

"The prisoner for Zion's struggle for freedom is only now beginning." One of Israel's most prominent journalists used these words three days after my arrival in Israel to warn me about the indigenous forces of "darkness" I would soon be confronting. From the rough translation I recieved at the time, I surmised that "darkness" for this writer meant religion and nationalism, especially the combination of the two. No sooner had I set foot in the country, he noted cynically, than my wife, Avital, having become religious during our long seperation, was changing my name from Anatoly to Natan and slapping a kippah on my head.

I was shocked. For nine years in a KGB prison, I had been struggling and praying to be reunited with my wife and my people and to start a new life in a Jewish and democratic state. How could anyone possibly believe that my real struggle for freedom was only now beginning? As somebody whose inner freedom stemmed from my reconnection to the history and religion of my people, this argument made no sense at all. How could anyone in Israel have a problem with a Jewish-sounding name?...

Similarly, I could not understand how covering one's head could be so politicized. For many secularists in Israel, it would be as treasonable for me to decide to wear a kippah as it would be to submit to the KGB. On the other hand, for religious groups, a kippah would be a clear signal that I was firmly ensconced in their camp, adopting their friends as well as their enemies.

In prison, I thought one wore a kippah whenever one felt close to God. During my confinement, there were many such moments, but I did not have a kippah to commemorate them. That is, until my non-Jewish Ukranian cellmate, knowing how much it would mean to me, used the fabric that protected his feet from frostbite to sew one. To this day, I wear that kippah at every Passover Seder, the holiday when Jews celebrate their people's journey from slavery to freedom...

If anyone would have asked me in prison if I felt more solidarity with Labor or Likud, religious or secular, Orthodox or Reform, I would have considered the question ridiculous. Having served as an activist and spokesman for Soviet Jewish groups, I was certainly aware of internecine rivalries and conflicts - and experienced quite a few firsthand - but in prison, in the struggle against the KGB, against evil itself, these differences were meaningless. I was the connection I felt with all the people of Israel, with our mutual history and destiny, that was the source of my strength.

But on arriving in Israel, I was immediately besieged by all sorts of groups demanding support for their causes. Left-wing groups called on me to fight for Palestinian rights in Israel as vigorously as I fought for human rights in the Soviet Union. Right-wing groups, insisting that only they were the keepers of the Zionist flame, called on me, as a "symbol" of Zionism, to support their struggle for a Greater Land of Israel. Some demanded that I fight against the theocratization of Israeli society, while others wanted me to join their struggle against undermining the Jewish character of the state.

That I felt like a human wishbone being pulled in different directions was bad enough. But it also quickly became clear that identifying with one group was tantamount to rejecting all the rest. To support one cause was to deny another. To endorse one aspect of a struggle was to its opponets to champion it wholesale. From my perspective, forged in the Soviet Union, these groups shared vast common ground and an underlying unity. But from the perspective of most Israelis, they were worlds apart, incapable of being reconciled...

Among those who have always lived in a democracy, this story will raise few eyebrows. After all, in the free world, the competition of ideas and of parties flourishes, and allegiances are often based on a single common principle or purpose that struggles against a competing point of view.

Though generally healthy for a society, this competition can be quite dangerous if we lose sight of the fact that there is a far greater divide between the world of freedom and the world of fear than there is between the competing factions within a free society. If we fail to recognize this, we lose moral clarity. The legitimate differences among us, the shades of gray in a free society, will be wrongly percieved as black and white...

A lack of moral clarity is why an Israeli journalist compared a kippah to a prison. It is why people living in free societies cannot distinguish between religious fundamentalists in democratic states and religous terrorists in fundamentalist states. It is why people living in free societies can come to see their fellow citizens as their enemies, and foreign dictators as their friends.
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Sharansky, Natan (2004), The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, pp.XIII-XVIII.

Do you ever feel like that, like a human wishbone? Do you ever feel like you might want to agree with someone on a particular issue, but are afraid of being targeted by others as an enemy? Do you think that because we take our freedom for granted, that sometimes we lose perspective about what is good and evil, and then what is a legitimate difference of opinion among free people? Thoughts? Comments?

Joseph Botwinick

BillyMac · Jun 7, 2005

Originally posted by Joseph_Botwinick:
Do you ever feel like that, like a human wishbone? Do you ever feel like you might want to agree with someone on a particular issue, but are afraid of being targeted by others as an enemy? Do you think that because we take our freedom for granted, that sometimes we lose perspective about what is good and evil, and then what is a legitimate difference of opinion among free people? Thoughts? Comments?

Joseph Botwinick
Click to expand...

Joseph...... I can't imagine anyone wanting to target you as an enemy............

TexasSky · Jun 7, 2005

Joseph,

I don't worry about what other people think, so I don't feel much like a wishbone, however, I know that 9 times out of 10, standing up for what is right makes you unpopular. Learning not to care about what makes you popular, and to just stand up for a solid set of values is the ultimate freedom.

I grew up in an age where:
"Free love" (translate that to careless sex) was popular and virgins were laughed at.
I stayed a virgin.

I grew up in an age where drinking was legal at 18, and kids who didn't were square.
I stayed square and sober and healthy.

I grew up in an age where making money mattered most.
I put my family before my career, and have never regretted it, despite some very hard times financially.

I live in an age where being Christian isn't popular.
I still proclaim Christ loudly.

Bob Krajcik · Jun 7, 2005

Joseph:

I think understand what you are saying, and yes, I have thought that way. Freedom has no valid significance when people repeat words saying they are free, when they are not aware freedom has been lost.

Freedom is taken for granted and the cost is not considered. Freedom, in this present time, should not be thought of as the absence of conflict, IMO.

I’m certain others have thought the same way, and for an example, I mention the Vietnamese and Cambodian people that turned to a people promising liberation. I think the world is full of such examples.

With individuals, look about and see what can happen if particular doctrine is espoused. And what of many of the chief rulers that were believers, saved I think, but did not confess Christ? Sometimes the cost is high.

John 12:42 (KJV) Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue:

By grace,
Bob Krajcik
Mansfield, Ohio

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