There is a Talmudic story (Avodah Zarah 19b) about Rabbi Alexandri, who lived in Eretz Yisrael in the 3rd century, entering the marketplace and crying out, “Who wants life?”
Of course, people rushed to buy the elixir of life that they believed he was selling. But when they came to him, he merely quoted from “Psalm 34”: “Who is the man who desires life? Keep thy tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking guile.”
Today, journalists who write for the Jewish press in the Diaspora are also entering the marketplace. The commodity they are offering is not so much life as Jewish identity. Many, perhaps the majority, of Diaspora Jews have only minimal contact with their synagogues and the rituals of Judaism, yet they are reluctant to let go of their heritage altogether.
The Jewish newspaper that they read once a week gives them a tenuous hold on their identity, a means of staying afloat in a sea of assimilation that threatens to engulf them today.
They read the Jewish press for various reasons. First, it bonds them to their community. Secondly, it gives the Jewish and Zionist slant on public policy and social issues, helping them decide “Is it good for the Jews?” and offering a different perspective on many anti-Israel articles that frequently appear in the general press.
The variety and consistency in Jewish newspapers
Jewish newspapers abroad vary greatly – from the high quality of The Jewish Chronicle in London, which offers in-depth insights on Jewish life and regular literary supplements, to small-circulation papers, read mostly for their “hatched, matched, and dispatched” articles (births, matrimonial and obituary columns), recipes for gefilte fish, and the week’s communal social activities.
However, in every case, editors and readers are eager for articles that deal with the Jewish festivals as they occur. Even if few readers fully observe them, they would feel cheated if special Rosh Hashanah and Passover editions did not appear, as well as features on all the other festivals at the appropriate time in the Jewish calendar.
They want to be both educated and entertained, and the journalist has quite a difficult assignment. Every year, the same holidays occur, but writers must find a different way of telling the same story, introducing new perspectives and, most importantly, finding a way that events that happened thousands of years ago can be made relevant to life today.
However, they must be written without a “holier than thou” approach, without preaching, while still conveying the kind of ethics the reader expects to find.
For example, a successful feature on Passover will retell the story of the Exodus only briefly – after all, it’s read in the Haggadah every year. A fresh perspective would be to write about the life of the Jews in ancient Egypt before the Exodus; to do a character sketch based on biblical sources of Moses the man, as opposed to Moses the lawgiver; or feature the many varieties of Haggadot that have appeared over the centuries and describe their histories.
For Hanukkah, instead of retelling the legend of the cruse of oil that miraculously burned in the Temple for eight days instead of one, the focus could be on the fact that the Festival of Lights was Judaism’s first encounter with the danger of assimilation that threatened to wipe out Jewish identity for all time.
Today, the real miracle of Hanukkah is that the light of Judaism is still burning brightly, despite the surrounding darkness, due to our Torah and the State of Israel.
For journalists living in Israel, the task is a little easier, as here is where it all began and where it all happened. As it is written: “For out of Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
The writer is the author of 14 books. dwaysman@gmail.com