Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

Crossing into the New Millennium: American University Convocation, August 1998

Crossing into the New Millennium American University Convocation, August 1998 As we walk up the steep incline of the final years of this millennium , we have witnessed the staccato light from the tracers and antiaircraft fire above the ancient riverbeds that were our mothers and fathers ten thousand years ago—Iraq, the birthplace of the legal code of Hammurabi, the city of Nineveh. We have witnessed civil wars in many regions, brutalizing in ways we had dared to believe could not happen now. Events we did not expect to witness in our lifetime were compressed into weeks—the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain turned to filigree, as Eastern Europe, Russia opened. National borders changed, nations partitioned. There is a joke about the woman who goes to sleep one night in what was then Russia and wakes up in the morning in what is now Poland. “Oh,” she says in the morning, “I’m so glad. I always hated those Russian winters.!” 1 7 0 INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE MESSIAH 1 7 1 We have witnessed the terrible brief utterance freedom makes when it takes up residence in those long suppressed and is crushed, as in Tiananmen Square; we have witnessed Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom after twenty-seven years’ imprisonment. The dislocation from imprisonment to freedom cannot be comprehended by ordinary means. Natan Sharansky, taken from the Gulag to Berlin, crossing the Berlin Wall into the free world in 1986—when some of you were only six years old—describes the “almost unbearable elation ” as well as the nagging apprehension that this was “just another prison dream . . . that he would soon awake in a cold, brutalizing cell.” “Through seven mountain frontiers/ barbed wire of rivers/ . . . executed forests and hanged bridges/ I kept coming . . . / I hadn’t a hope/ but I’m here . . . ”1 the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert has written. In the post–Cold War era, our real work has begun and all of you will be part of that work—to determine how the nations and their citizens will interact. We know already that national boundaries are no longer the sole determinants. During your time at American University we will cross over together into the next millennium. I want to talk a little about our journey. Not the arrival. About how what we experience becomes to a large extent who we are. As the Argentine writer Borges wrote: Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.2 At times we do not understand how a certain direction we take will prove to be useful to us in the end, but we are drawn to that path. I have always believed it important to attend to such inclinations. Even if it meant that we would find out only years later just what that direction had to do with the main journey of our life. I’d like to share a personal story. I was born before the advent of antibiotics. Because I was relatively frail as a child and often sick—there was essentially no treatment for strep infections or other upper respiratory illnesses. Sulfa drugs that were sometimes used caused me a major allergic reaction—and because rheumatic heart disease, caused by complications of untreated strep, was so prevalent in my childhood, I was essentially put to bed for weeks at a time. My mother’s brother had died as a young adult of the complications of rheumatic heart disease. If memory serves, I would say that I attended school only a third of the time. When I was well enough to go outside again, but not well enough to return to school, I would spend my days playing alone in the woods— it was safe in those days for children to wander unattended out of doors—near my house, examining insects, tasting the inside of the bark of sassafras, eating sour grass, or I would sometimes go to work with my scientist father, something I loved to do. I remember pushing a tiny ball of mercury around on the floor, trying to gather it up from the cracks between oak planks, pressing a thumb down on the tiny bead and watching it break into minute celestial fragments. We...