Jews in Space
I’m starting my blog with an unusual post: a short story I wrote in December 2023, only two months after the October 7th attack, which has sat in my desk drawer until now. The story is Zionist science fiction with a dose of satire. But it is also an allegory which expresses my sadness, not only at the attack itself, but at much of the world’s reaction to it which demonstrated the enduring, irrational and ever-adaptable nature of antisemitism. The reaction was proof that Israel’s geographic location is not the cause of the hatred, Jews are. Wherever the Jewish homeland might have been founded – whether Israel, Uganda, Bavaria or Mars – it would have made no difference. People would find reasons to condemn the Jewish state, especially when need arose to defend itself.
This Sunday, many New Yorkers will join in a celebration of Israel, both as participants and spectators of the annual Israel Day Parade. While they may disagree strongly about several things, such as Israel’s government and many of its policies and actions, it is fair to say that everyone in attendance agrees on one thing: Israel is and remains a necessity for Jews across the globe, especially now.
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JEWS IN SPACE
Many people know the work of Herschel Liberman, the lifesaving immunologist and accused genocidaire. But I will tell you about the man, my grandfather. He was born in Czestochowa, Poland in 1920, one of those inauspicious years for a Jew to be born in Poland, a terrible ordeal awaiting each bald, pink-cheeked tyke. At the age of seventeen he went to university to study medicine. When the Nazis invaded, Hershel was forced out of university and into a ghetto and from there to Auschwitz. He managed to survive long enough to be marched and whipped west through heavy snows ahead of the Red Army’s advance. Like in so many photographs that, for a time at least, shocked the world’s conscience, my grandfather was one of those tottering cadavers when the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. Some have said that his survival was a miracle, but Grandpa always insisted that one survivor among millions of dead was no miracle, just dumb luck. But to anyone who called him lucky he would softly disagree, saying no one forced to endure such horrors can be lucky.
That was 1945. Two years later Herschel Liberman hadn’t left the city of Bergen. Only, by that time the concentration camp had been razed and Herschel lived in the newly constructed camp for displaced persons. Herschel was displaced. He was a Polish citizen, but he refused to return there. Quite frankly, the Poles didn’t want him either. No one wanted him. Not the Americans, the French, or the British. The Argentines, Cubans and Mexicans weren’t keen on taking him. There was one place Hershel dreamed of going. A place that drew Herschel’s heart like the North Pole a compass needle. Palestine.
Each day since he was a boy in cheder, Herschel prayed the words, “May it be your will, God and God of my forefathers, that the Holy Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt speedily in our days.” Before the war Herschel said the prayer in the abstract, as an obligation of daily ritual, often yawning or lost in daydream. But, when he muttered his prayers noiselessly each night in the camps, wedged between so many shivering stick-figure men and boys on bunks of splintery boards, he meant it more than he could have previously fathomed until his frail body almost trembled in pained desire. In Herschel’s dream, however, fulfillment of the prayer wasn’t a physical rebuilding of the Beis Hamikdash in Jerusalem. The land of Israel, Eretz Yisrael, was the temple, and only with the reassembly of Jews in the land would it be rebuilt. Only when all his starving, freezing campmates were warming themselves on the ancient, sunbaked stones of Jerusalem would the prayer be realized. He ached not for a new home; he yearned to return home.
With the war over, Herschel tried to rebuild a normal life, or as normal a life as one could create in the clapboard barracks of a DP camp, with no defined future in sight and hoping each day that just one country would deem him worthy of living among them. Yet, while nation after nation dawdled, 21-year-old Esther Weintraub did not. Herself a “lucky one,” from Mannheim, Germany, with not a single family member left alive, she wasn’t one to waste time restarting her life. Herschel was handsome and mannered, with a gentle humor and a mind as brilliant as a diamond. Esther took Herschel’s hand at a dance in the DP camp and never let go. Grandpa told me he was immediately smitten by the petite brunette with dark eyes and ears that poked out just a little from her long straight hair. In Esther, Herschel saw not only beauty, warmth and intelligence but the beginnings of some permanence following years of tumult. Three weeks later they married in the camp dining hall, moved into a bungalow of their own and, ten months later, baby Samuel, my father, was born.
But more than a baby boy was born in 1948. On May 14th Herschel and Esther, with Sammy on her lap, sat in the dining hall with all the remaining DPs and listened to a staticky Bakelite Volksempfänger radio. This was the moment Herschel had longed for, the 2000-year-old dream made reality, a Jewish homeland once more. As soon as he could save enough money, he would book passage for his young family and live there. But not just anywhere. Jerusalem! No matter that the Jews and Arabs had been at each other’s throats for decades and the violence had escalated drastically in the months since the United Nations announced its partition plan. It was his destiny.
A radio news correspondent spoke in a polished English accent.
“Mr. Ben-Gurion has now risen to his feet. He is flanked by members of Jewish National Council. Behind him hangs a large portrait of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Long banners, each with a Star of David, flank the portrait and bands of sunlight flood through a row of windows overhead. Mr. Ben-Gurion approaches the microphone and holds the papers with his speech in front of him. Let us listen to history.”
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, defiant returnees, and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community.
The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing a Jewish State.
We, members of the National Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel to say that partition has only worsened conflict and not created the intended peace. All we have wanted since the first Jewish pioneers arrived to this land is to live at peace with our neighbors, but peace has eluded us. We, the Jewish people, want a homeland but not at the expense of peace and we are certain that by declaring an independent Jewish state on half the land of the British Mandate we will never find peace. We don’t want war anymore, yet we still demand a Jewish homeland.
In close consultation with the United Nations and, individually, with Earth’s great powers we have arrived at an audacious solution. My Jewish brothers and sisters, with modern technology, much of which was developed for belligerent purposes during the past war, the stars are within reach. Like Jacob’s dream on Mount Moriah, we will create a ladder to the heavens, or more accurately a stream of rocket ships to Mars. Jews of Earth, we will travel to Mars, and we will settle it with the same pioneering spirit we used to settle Eretz Yisrael from the Hula Valley to the Negev. On the dusty red planet, we will build our Jewish homeland. Marzion!
Sammy let out a short cry but Herschel, Esther and every other DP sat in silence, bewildered and agape. Herschel was deflated and confused. Had his dreams of Jerusalem just vanished? Had the pressures of leadership driven Ben-Gurion mad? Was this a joke?
Crazy it as it was, though, immediately after Ben-Gurion’s speech Arabs and Jews in Palestine put down their guns and an anxious quiet settled over the land for the first time in years. Each side wanted to see what would come of Ben-Gurion’s hair-brained scheme before shedding any more blood. And no more was shed.
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On a cool spring morning when the fresh petals of forget-me-nots painted fields in soft blue, Herschel and Esther took young Sammy on his first train ride, across northern Germany to the village of Peenemunde on the Baltic coast. The gallery by the launchpad was thronged with spectators all looking up at the towering, pointed shape shrouded in a river of white cloth. First, a handsome young German, only thirty-seven years old, in a natty three-piece suit, spoke to the crowd in clear English. His name was Wernher von Braun and he spoke about his immense pride in seeing the factory he had developed for weapons of war, the V-1 and V-2 rockets used to blitz London, now being used in the advancement of peace. What could be a better achievement he crowed, than to create a peaceful homeland for all of Earth’s Jews, 140 million miles away? The design of his Mars rocket was his greatest creation. It would take the first twenty Jews on a seven-month journey to the red planet. His confidence in the mission was infectious. No one in the crowd doubted it would succeed.
Next, David Ben-Gurion approached the podium. He was short and stocky with a rim of shaggy white hair around his balding pate. Von Braun towered over him and extended his hand, but the little Jew passed him by.
“I know many of you here today and Jews around the globe were disappointed by the National Council’s decision to reach for the stars instead of growing our roots in Jerusalem. It was a bitter pill to swallow but the right one. Mars will be the new Jewish homeland where all Jews are welcome with open arms to live securely and peacefully. Jerusalem, though, holy Jerusalem—where the creation of the world began, where Abraham bound Isaac, where Isaac prayed for his barren wife Rebecca to conceive, where their son Jacob dreamed his ladder to heaven and which God promised to Jacob and his descendants—Jerusalem will forever remain the heart that pumps the spiritual lifeblood of all Jews, wherever we dwell in the universe. The United Nations has assured us, as has my good friend Hussam ad-Din Jarallah, the newly appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—a true friend of the Jews and a worthy successor to his Jew-hating, Nazi-collaborating predecessor, now living in ignominious exile—that the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and access to the Western Wall shall remain in Jewish control, unimpeded, in perpetuity. I hold both solemn promises, signed, in my hand.”
Ben-Gurion waved official looking papers over his head. Then he laid them on the lectern and grasped a handful of the massive white, silky cloth draped over the spacecraft. He yanked at it so that it slid down a like waterfall, revealing a shiny, silver rocket, over 200 feet tall, which gleamed in the afternoon sun. Painted on its side was the never-before seen flag of Marzion: a white background with a large, sky-blue Star of David at its center and, in the upper right corner, a smaller Star of David, painted red. Esther handed her husband her small lace handkerchief to dab the tears in his eyes.
The speeches over, the audience watched as ten strong men and ten strong women in silvery spacesuits and bulbous glass helmets paraded through the rocket’s hatch and sealed it behind them. When given the command, Exodus I lifted off the launchpad over a ball of flames and pushed upwards, slowly at first, then faster, until it was out of sight.
Then the world waited, anxiously. Jews, Ben-Gurion, von Braun and, especially, Herschel Liberman let out a collective sigh of relief when, seven months and five days later, on a Friday morning, radio transmission reached command-central that Exodus I had landed, living and work pods had been erected and underground ice was being melted by solar power. A week later Exodus II and Exodus III launched from Peenemunde and Ark I left with the first livestock. Soon three or four rockets were launching each week. The rockets got bigger and faster and were soon taking less than a month to transport over 500 Olim to Mars at a time.
Herschel put his family on the list to make aliya. However, before their turn came he received a telegram from Harvard University that he’d been accepted to finish his medical studies. With a family to support, he put his Zionist ambitions on hold and moved his family to America. Hershel studied hard and Esther doted on Sammy in their new American home. It wasn’t Palestine or Marzion, and it was cramped at first, but to Herschel the warm and loving Liberman home was bliss. For the first time in over a decade he was comfortable, settled and at peace.
Herschel graduated medical school, completed his training, completed a doctorate, got a faculty position and established a research lab of his own. He had an illustrious career which culminated in his leadership of Operation Hyperdrive, the team of scientists that, in record time, developed the vaccine that ended the coronavirus pandemic, turning a possible death sentence into a sore throat and a sniffle. In recognition of the millions of lives he saved, the United Nations awarded my grandfather a medal for his service to mankind. The next day my grandfather retired and my grandparents packed their home in Cambridge and, fifty-eight years late, settled into a comfortable two-level home in a new condominium development in New Jerusalem, made of rich red Martian rock which glowed like fire in the sunset.
By the time I visited my grandparents on Marzion during my Birthright trip, the gritty pioneer spirit needed for life on the dusty planet had long ago given way to a comfortable, modern life. The population had reached eight million through immigration and lots of babies. New Jerusalem had become a real city with high rise buildings and great parks under vast glass domes. Other cities like New Tel Aviv, New Haifa and Rosh HaSulam, grew and prospered, connected by trains and highways. There were artist colonies and farming communities. Secular and religious often lived apart but there was little enmity between them.
Marzion had created a bustling economy with large factories and extensive farms housed under glass domes which could easily cover New York City’s Central Park, but it still relied on Earth’s industry and bounty. The relationship, though, was symbiotic as Earth relied on a host of precious metals mined on Mars for its growing dependence on chips and batteries. Marzion leased land around Mars to Earth-based mining companies which exploited the vast deposits of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, molybdenum, lanthanum, tungsten and gold, shipping it back to Earth in slow, egg-shaped cargo rockets.
Every day rockets landed and launched from Marzion’s Ben-Gurion spaceport and from spaceports in New York City, Miami and Lod in Palestine, carrying Marzionists and tourists. For even the proudest Marzionists returned to Earth at times to visit family, walk in natural forests, sit by oceans, and make the pilgrimage to Old Jerusalem where they strolled the alleyways and sipped thick coffee and shared laughter with their Arab neighbors. At Passover, Marzionists filled hotels in the cramped Jewish Quarter and packed into the narrow ally in front of the Western Wall to pray and touch the smooth, ancient stones and feel God’s presence in a way they could not among the stars.
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At the end of my junior year in college my girlfriend, Kirsten, and I were sipping lattes in the campus café after our History of Decolonial Deconstruction final exam when the news broke over the television.
“Marzionist scientists at the New Weizmann Institute, have confirmed that a mysterious substance on a metal ore sample retrieved from a Martian mine by U.S. based MarsExtractCo. is, in fact, a never-before-known fungus. You heard that correctly listeners; we are not alone. Extraterrestrial life, so long a topic of speculation and imagination, is no longer a fantasy. Martians are real!”
Everyone on Earth reacted differently. Thousands of people flocked to Roswell, New Mexico dressed not in the traditional costume of the little green man, but as mushrooms. Religious leaders from every faith stood before their congregations and twisted themselves in knots explaining how this discovery in no way diminished or contradicted their teachings of the divine or traditions of thousands of years. Politicians gave grandiose speeches, scientists raced to understand the new life form and others shouted about fake news from a nefarious cabal set on galactic control. Most people, though, went about their business with a greater sense of wonder and a little extra spring in their step. Kirsten asked if we could take a vacation together to Marzion after graduation so she could meet my grandparents and see the alien. My heart leapt.
Then, just as suddenly as the jubilation began, it ended. It was like climbing to the top of a mountain on a warm, blue summer day with a view that never ends and then, without warning, a blizzard descends so fast that you become disoriented in the white and can’t find the path back down. Late that summer, each of the scientists examining the alien fungus got sick with a red, blistery rash and nervous spasms that seized their muscles and made each breath a struggle. Four died quickly and two clung to life. Despite all efforts, the cat was out of the bag and the fungus and sickness covered Marzion like a tsunami. Marzionists were getting ill at a devastating rate and many were dying within days. Fungal spores, finer than flour, had been pumped through the ventilation systems that delivered oxygen to all of Marzion’s buildings before anyone knew what was happening and once a spore latched to a surface it multiplied rapidly as a sticky mold in the dark recesses of rooms and the dusty creases of furniture. It spread fast and seemed impossible to stop. Shaare Zedek and Hadassah hospitals were at capacity, but none of their medicines did any good. Candlelight vigils for the dead and dying popped up around Earth from Times Square and Trafalgar Square to Nablus and Jerusalem and the smallest unpaved villages in Africa. All traffic between Mars and Earth was suspended.
My grandfather, knowing his duty, once again donned a HASMAT suit and stepped into a lab at the New Weizmann Institute to search for a cure or anything that might help stem the grim tide. On Earth the wait was interminable and the feeling of helplessness suffocating. On FaceTime calls my grandmother put on a brave face as she updated us on which friends were sick, which had died and how she was rationing the food in her refrigerator to delay the need to go to the grocery. She said she was luckier than the young people; the war had trained her well for this. Behind her stoic facade, though, I saw fear.
Earth watched as the deaths mounted and by the end of the third week the situation looked hopeless. Jews on Earth prayed night and day and, as Rosh Hashana approached, they prepared to beat their breasts with extra vigor as penance for their extraplanetary kinsmen. Then one night, five weeks after it began, back at school and crossing the quad with Kirsten on our way to our Thursday night Inclusion Council meeting—on which we’d both served since sophomore year and where we’d met—my grandfather called my cellphone. He’d done it, he whooped with joy, like his beloved Red Sox had just won a World Series. He’d beaten the fungus! He and his team had developed an intravenously administered antifungal medication to treat the sick which was proving 98% effective and an aerosol mist which killed all mold and spores in a room on contact, without harming anything else, not even a flea. He explained, though, that Marzion had only two weeks’ worth of the necessary chemicals stockpiled to manufacture the fungicides. He proudly told me that in five minutes he had a call scheduled with the Secretary General of the United Nations to request immediate rocket delivery of precursor chemicals necessary to produce fludioxoazene, birazophos, tecnazenol, trimethomorph and blasticidin-Z so Marzion could produce the quantities of fungicide needed to cure the sick and fully eradicate the fungus. I hung up and told Kirsten the good news. She hugged me and kissed me and then took my hand as we walked to our council meeting. I felt like I was floating. I kept looking at the night sky comforted that my grandfather was up there looking down on mankind, protecting us.
The news was hailed around the globe as a greater miracle than the victory over the coronavirus. Sick people on Marzion were becoming well again and the fungus was slowly being eradicated room by room, building by building. At Rosh Hashanah services Jews celebrating the new year blew the shofar triumphantly. Marzionists turned from despair to hope overnight and on Earth the sense of joy and salvation among Jews unified us as a community like at no time since the founding of Marzion. Beyond that, though, it felt like a victory for mankind, to be celebrated by everyone, everywhere. Or so I thought.
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Kirsten didn’t join me for Yom Kippur services at the university Hillel. At risk of stating the obvious, she wasn’t Jewish. Connecticut WASP, to be exact. She had joined me at services the year before and I liked it. I had felt a little of what I imagined it would be like to be a family, each sharing and finding joy in the other’s traditions. It was that appreciation of people’s differences that had drawn me to the Inclusion Council. I assumed it was what had drawn Kirsten, too. So, it stung when she said she had too much schoolwork to join me.
Deep in the Unetonnah Tokef prayer in which Jews ask the frightening question of who will live and who will die in the coming year, I gently tapped my chest over my heart as I read the litany of horrible deaths. Who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning? Then came the prescription for tempering God’s harsh judgment: teshuvah, tefillah v’tzedakah, repentance, prayer and charity. Teshuvah though means more than just repentance; it means a return to our original state, before we lost our way.
The congregation muttered along in deep reflection when the sanctuary started becoming noisy. Heads popped up and looked around until we were all eyeing the large stained-glass windows facing the quad, puzzled. Soon the sound of shouting and chanting became unmistakable. A freshman sitting at the back poked his head outside and returned to the entire congregation staring at him in silence, concerned and waiting for an explanation. Without saying a word, the freshmen waved us toward the door.
We all spilled onto the quad, the men topped with yarmulkes and wrapped in tallisim. A crowd of hundreds shouted at us and held signs and placards over their heads.
“Save the Real Martians!”
“Marzionist Prescription = Martian Extinction”
“Symbiotic, not Antibiotic”
“Jews Gas Martians”
“From Pole to Pole the Marzionists must go”
“End the Fungicide!!!”
And there, in the middle of the horde, was an oversized picture of my grandfather, whose brilliant mind had saved millions of lives on Earth, with a Hitler mustache painted under his nose. At first I couldn’t help but smile. With his bushy eyebrows, glasses and prominent nose, the fake mustache made him look more like Groucho than Hitler. But then, there in the thick of it, shouting and shaking her fist in the air, I saw Kirsten. My grin disappeared and my chest hollowed out. I was surprised that with her face contorted in rage she could look so ugly.
With nothing we could do and feeling vulnerable, the whole congregation returned to the sanctuary, locked the doors, and resumed our prayers, though no one could focus, no one could shut his ears to the noise. Then, in a burst of clarity, my initial surprise, confusion and disbelief morphed into the realization that this is how they must have felt; they, every generation of Jews before me. Even in the best of times they understood in their kishkes, if not their heads, that hatred lurked in the shadows. Like a dormant ember covered in ash, all it took was a little disturbance, an unexpected gust of wind, to reignite it into a deadly flame. At that moment, with that realization, I felt more bound to all previous generations of my people than ever before and more dispirited. For now it was my turn.
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Kirsten stopped returning my calls. At the Thursday evening meeting of the Inclusion Council, she arrived just as we were called to session, avoiding any awkward conversation beforehand. The first order of business was a motion to remove Jewish defenders of Marzion from the Council because their de facto genocidal apologetics were inconsistent with the principles of inclusion. Five minutes after taking my seat both Benny Schwartz and I were ousted. As the grandson of the chief genocidaire, Holocaust survivor Herschel Liberman, my removal was never in doubt. One Jewish colleague kept her seat after she denounced Marzion as a colonist state bent on the extinction of its aboriginal neighbors and proposed a motion to petition all nations and intergovernmental organizations to ground all rockets carrying life-saving chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
Around the world people took sides and protests for and against the resupply of Marzion erupted in city centers and village squares. But it quickly became clear that those in power were more sympathetic to the so-called aboriginals than the so-called colonists, or at least they were more afraid of those who were. Jewish groups petitioned the UN to prevent the second Holocaust that would surely occur if medical supplies weren’t sent to Mars. Outside the International Red Cross headquarters, they paraded large photographs of its inspection of the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1944 to shame the organization, reminding it that once before it failed to protect Jews, with tragic consequences.
But it was to no avail. The Red Cross refused to send resupply rockets because it could not condone the slaughter of the only known extra-terrestrial species in the universe. The UN, likewise, demurred.
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I spoke with my grandparents over FaceTime for the final time. They had both become infected and were seeing the first red pustules on their arms and faces and the nervous ticks were just becoming noticeable. It was a sad farewell, but they seemed proud to be going down with their ship and not having to live in golus, or exile, ever again. The lucky ones had beaten the odds for longer than they could have imagined but their luck had run out. Four days later my grandparents died and I wept. I was glad, though, that the end was quick so they wouldn’t have to read the accusations of genocide levied against my grandfather at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. And, they wouldn’t have to witness the rocket the UN finally sent to Mars, not to bring desperately needed chemicals but, rather, to retrieve a sample of Martian fungus and deliver it, encased in quadruple-layered plexiglass and perched on a golden pedestal, to the UN General Assembly where it was given official observer status.
On Earth I’m not at risk from the fungus but I still spend my days under a halo of doom. Three-quarters of my people are within a month or two of extinction and there is nothing I can do. At precisely the time we most need a homeland because so many people despise us, those same people are deliberately causing our homeland to perish, robbing us of our ability to defend ourselves, robbing us of any haven. Soon, all Jews will once again have no option but to live in exile. We have returned.
THE END
