Cross Country Posting #5 In the State of Ambivalence by Rabbi Goldie Milgram

Zoos and military installations are two points of ambivalence on our trips. We passed on the albino tigers and simulated rain forests promised by the Omaha brochures and highly recommended by my hairdresser in Iowa.

Instead an hour later I found myself leaning against a metal cannister about three feet high and seven feet wide as a WWII veteran explained the "Peacekeeper" airplane in whose shadow we were standing. Vaster than my sci-fi conditioned imagination, the impact of the plane which circled the world during the Cold War as a "deterrent" was diminished by his next comment.

"We never used them, but, the woman in the beanie is leaning against a nuclear bomb six times the power of that used at Hiroshima. These were stacked inside the Peacekeeper as it constantly circled Russian airspace."

My husband recently studied how to use Gestalt to deal with those who suffer from toxic shame. The Strategic Air Command Museum docent’s comment sent me into toxic ambivalence. A sequence of memories played through in what seemed like years, yet must have been seconds.

The first was during my years as director of an archive, taking depositions on video from holocaust survivors and allied soldiers. Changing his voice from sad reverie to pure passion, the survivor described furiously scribbling notes to the President of the United States and begging every passerby to see it would get there.....he would slip the notes through slats in cattle cars into fearful fingers...sometimes they were dropped like electric shocks after being read, others were furtively pocketed.

Always the same message....."Just bomb us all. Stop the death camps. We are prepared to die." Later inside Auschwitz he waited for a message to tell him to have everyone turn on their attackers and climb atop the crematoria to mark the spot for allied bombers. "Just make it stop." Until he died whenever he would come to my office he’d leave a message with my affectionate name for him, "Queen Esther will be dropping by." I was one of two people in town who knew his secrets, gay and Jewish he was marked twice to die.

Sixth graders on our tour caress the cruise missiles on display as we are told the US inventory is down to only 100 and it takes a year to go back into production. Barry photographs a girl hugging the missile unconsciously as she listens. So elegant and sleek in design, both of them.

I flash to a Bosnia rally. My sons are with me at the Liberty Bell. From the stage I see my youngest tugging on the jacket of a camera person. She pushes him away...don’t bother me little boy. Undeterred he goes to the anchor person, who obligingly films his passionate view which airs for 16 seconds on the ll o’clock CNN News. "Why are you all standing here shouting at bad people in Bosnia? Do you think they are watching television? Why doesn’t my mommy and her friends charter airplanes and go right up to those bad men. Do what you do when I make a mistake. Take their hands and lift them high into the air and say "this is unacceptable behavior."

Flash to the Yamim Noraim. An angel of a board member has given me a week at Club Med on Turquoise Island as a gift between leading Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur services. The trick to meeting people turns out to be what language you speak at the entrance to the dining room. Each day when asked "how many people?" I mutter my lonely "one" in a different language. That day I spoke in German....the Berlin wall was coming down as we ate.

Seated at a table of young German businessmen on a company holiday I feel foolish and out of place. The German banter flies over me, I don’t really speak the language. At some point though, I start to make out some of what they are saying. Blood freezes in my veins. "We will defeat America on the battleground of commerce. Then our might will rise again as it always has and next time we will prevail...." "Yah...Yah..."

A word which has become holy to me is supporting horror... "Yah...Yah.....".anger churns up inside me from more voices than my own. I speak out involuntarily.....something to the effect of "How can you say that? Was it all for nothing?"

Heads turn toward to me. One asks in German: "What language is she speaking? Why can I understand it?" Silence. The blond-haired, green-eyed man beside me finally speaks. "It is Yiddish." They look blankly at him. "Yiddish?" one asks. He responds, "It was the language of the Jews." Silence. Another man looks at him and says slowly, distinctly, "and how would

YOU know that?"

Hot tears are splashing down my face. The green-eyed man looks at his peers, wipes my cheeks with his napkin, stands and says to me in English...."come, let us walk." To this day we are still in touch...the secret of his Jewish grandmother wandering between us like a lost missile.

The tour has moved on, we are beside a Russian MIG that was flown against our forces in Vietnam. I walk off lost in oceans of ambivalence. On the other side two tourists stand talking. One reveals he is an air force engineer that works on fighter-planes. He is in transit from a base in Germany to one in Utah. The other was a pilot during the Vietnam war. He recalled that the technical superiority of the Russian MIGs was terrifying. "That plane could outmaneuver us, we would have been doomed, if not for the fact that our pilots were better trained and we had more aircraft than they."

Flash. Economics 101 when I was a student at the Wharton School. The thick accent of the Hindu professor stills resonates in my ears......"One foolish, arrogant leader of a third world country can attack us with a nuclear bomb for no sane reason. How much for guns, how much for butter? Nothing I can teach you will give the right formula. How will we ultimately decide? That is the question that really belongs on the final exam."