Fear of Freedom: A Growing Jewish Dilemma
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Summer 1996
The organized American Jewish community, more and more, views itself as being in a state of siege.
There have been endless meetings and seminars about "Jewish continuity" and "Jewish survival." The enemy is not the traditional one of anti-Semitism but, quite to the contrary, a concern with growing rates of inter-marriage and the fear that Jews will abandon Judaism in the free and open American society.
Asking a cross-section of American Jewish leaders their thoughts about the future, Commentary Magazine (August 1996) presented a variety of voices, many of whom were deeply concerned about the condition of American Jews. Some seemed disillusioned with freedom and expressed the view that only Jewish separatism could ensure Jewish survival.
David Singer, editor of the American Jewish Yearbook, noted that, "Separatism is anathema to the vast majority of American Jews, but it remains a fact that without a heavy dose of it there can be no Jewish survival. This is especially true in an open, tolerant society like the United States, where Jews are less threatened with anti-Semitism than with being hugged to death by the Gentiles.... From my point of view, the key failing of Conservative and Reform Judaism is in making insufficient allowance for a separatist dimension. Indeed, these movements, together with Reconstructionism and Havurah Judaism, consciously strive for maximum integration into the larger society, One can fully understand the impulse that is at work here, but it is nonetheless a formula for Jewish disaster."
Mr. Singer calls for Jewish day-schools from elementary through high schools as well as "summer camps with solid Jewish content, plus meaningful trips to Israel.... All this is clear-cut; it is merely a matter of will."
Assimilation and Intermarriage
Jack Wertheimer, professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Conservative) states that, "The American Jewish community must confront the consequences of this exercise in self-deception. Situated in an open society that welcomes Jews with unprecedented hospitality; American Jewry is losing a significant portion of its population to assimilation and intermarriage.... In such a climate even the traditional Jewish prohibition against intermarriage may no longer be invoked. Indeed, one of the first lessons young Jews learn in high school and on college campuses today is that an unwillingness to date members of other ethnic communities is the hallmark of a racist. Only a bigot (or a member of a sanctioned racial or cultural minority) would let parochial loyalties limit his or her marital choices. Even the decision to remain Jewish is now defined as a personal choice, we are not bound by the collective decision of our ancestors, let alone by a system imposed upon the Jewish People by God...."
Israelis, of course, continue to tell American Jews that they are in "exile," and that they should emigrate to their real "homeland," Yisrael Lau, chief rabbi of Israel, calls assimilation in America and other Western countries a "path of spiritual destruction" which "leads, like physical destruction, to the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem," Some rabbis have called intermarriage a "holocaust" and philosopher Emil Fackenheim says that Jews are obligated to remain Jewish lest Hitler be given a posthumous victory.
Standing up against inter-marriage, it seems, is the first line of Jewish defense against disappearing for good into the American melting pot. When a Jew and a non-Jew marry, they should not expect a rabbi or cantor even to attend a civil ceremony, much less officiate at the wedding, a statement issued in May by the Leadership Council of Conservative Judaism declares. Beyond this, says the statement, intermarriages should not even be acknowledged publicly at a service or in a synagogue newsletter.
The percentage of Jewish first marriages to non-Jews rose from 4.4 per cent in 1965 to about 50 per cent in 1990, according to a study by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. The trend has raised alarms in some Jewish groups.
Open American Society
The fact is that Jews, like other religious and ethnic groups, are part and parcel of the open American society. Approximately 3.2 million American households include at least one Jew; 8.2 million people live in households which include at least one Jew, and over half of America’s 5.5 million Jews are not affiliated with any Jewish organization at all, according to Dr. Egon Mayer, Director of the Jewish Outreach Institute at the Center for Jewish Studies of the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
Other groups have seen exactly the same demographic trends. Michael Lind, a senior editor of The New Republic, writes that, "The European ethnic groups that seemed so distinct at the beginning of this century have almost completely faded away. Four-fifths of Italian-Americans born since 1950 have married outside their ethnic group.... Nor is intermarriage limited to white Americans. One third of Hispanic Americans and one half of Asian-Americans marry outside their officially designated categories ... the American melting pot continues to bubble."
In her recent book about intermarriage and the future of the American Jewish community,
Embracing The Stranger, Ellen Jaffe McClain writes that, "The surprise
is not that half the American Jews who have married since 1985 may have married
non-Jews; the. surprise is that it took so long to get there. Most other white
American immigrant groups that arrived since the late nineteenth century, had
a 50 per cent intermarriage rate in the second generation — half the children
of immigrant Germans, Swedes, Irish, Italians, Poles, you name it, married outside
their national or ethnic group. Today only a fraction of Americans who identify
with a specific European ethnic group marry within that group. Jews didn’t reach
the ‘halfway mark’ until close to the fourth generation; the children of the immigrants
and even most of the grandchildren made enogamous marriages. What we’re seeing
now is decades of assimilationist behavior finally being played out in marriage
patterns."
There is something particularly unseemly about Jewish spokesmen in the U.S. and Israel charging that the attractions of a free society are similar to the depradations of the Holocaust. What this represents in the end is a very real fear of freedom.
Successful People
In his book, Where Are We?, Leonard Fein writes: "How is it that a people
so manifestly successful continues to represent itself — and in truth, to see
itself — as a victim people? Is Jewish survival everywhere and always at stake,
as Jews so often announce, or ought a people that has weathered 4,000 years of
time, much of it traumatic, take its continuing survival pretty much for granted."
The real question the Jewish establishment prefers not to confront is the one Leonard Fein poses: "Why, now that Judaism is no longer a condition but an optional commitment, why be Jewish? What are the motives that move Jews to act as Jews, and sometimes to live as Jews? ... For this generation of Jews ... the more urgent question is not how to defend the Jews against their external enemies, but how to defend Judaism from its internal erosion and corruption. For the threat to Jewish survival in our time is less that the Jews who bear Judaism’s meaning and message will be destroyed, more that the meaning and message will be forgotten and distorted.... America offered more than new options for its growing number of Jews; here Judaism itself became an option.... True freedom meant freedom from class, from group, perhaps, above all, from the past. It meant, therefore, the freedom to stop being Jewish."
Fear of freedom is hardly a new phenomenon in Jewish history. It appears, in reality, to be a recurring theme.
In The Fate of The Jews, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht writes that, "Jewish separateness was not exclusively forced upon them by anti-Semitic gentiles; it was often the chosen position of the chosen people.... Belief in their chosenness, and their stringent dietary laws, separated Jews from their environment. No matter where they lived, they felt religiously superior to the host nation. The poorest Jew in an Eastern European shtetl felt superior not only to the peasants but to the nobility because they had the Torah and they did not.... The Talmudic sages reassured Jews of their chosenness and did what they could to keep from losing them. Intermarriage was forbidden. Jews were prohibited from witnessing or in any way aiding a non-Jewish religious ceremony. There was a ban on doing business with a gentile three days before a gentile festival.... Jews were forbidden from fraternizing with gentiles in any but the briefest transactions. Though dietary laws already made eating together impractical, Jews were prohibited from eating with gentiles even if ritual requirements were observed. To make the estrangement absolute, a Jew could not drink wine touched by a gentile. The most common social act — two men having a drink together — was forbidden between Jew and non-Jew."
Modified Laws
Professor Jacob Katz, in his book Exclusiveness And Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile
Relations In Medieval and Modern Times, points out that these prohibitions
were observed when large groups of Jews lived together and were economically self-sufficient.
As small groups of Jews moved farther and farther apart in many countries, Jewish
existence often depended on direct dealings with non-Jews. The ritualists, who
were also realists, reinterpreted or modified the laws to permit what Jews were
doing anyway — buying food from non-Jews, hiring them as workers or servants,
selling to them whether before a feast day or not. But contact was confined to
the realm of business.
"It became a method of personal conduct," writes Katz, "enabling the individual to preserve his inward sense of aloofness from those with whom he came into everyday social contact." A Jew could sell wine to a gentile but he still was not permitted to drink socially with him. The great fear was not really of men drinking together but of the possible consequences — particularly intermarriage. The Talmud said, "Their wine was forbidden on account of their daughters."
The fact is that Jews shared responsibility, in many areas, for their segregation from the general community. Dr. Katz notes that, "Since no neutral social sphere was developed in the Middle Ages, social segregation between Jews and gentiles was merely the logical consequence of their religious separation.... The institution of the closed Jewish quarter was not in itself resented by Jews. It was accepted ... as corresponding to their social and religious needs.... The ghetto became, in fact, the home of exclusively Jewish activity, possessing all the characteristics of a distinct civilization."
According to Katz, the ghetto reinforced the feeling of "Jewish exclusiveness." Separated from the Christian world, Jews tended to dismiss it. Judaism again became a "closed system of thought ... which accepted Jewish fundamental beliefs as uncontested truth." Jews, as a result, reverted to a form of tribalism and reintroduced the claustrophobic atmosphere of Judea. The diaspora had, earlier, been a liberating experience. It exposed Jews to new thoughts and new climates and enriched Judaism. Scholar Israel Abrahams, in Jewish Life In The Middle Ages, states that, "The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment.... It was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza."
Religious Freedom
When Jews were granted political and religious freedom in Europe, many rabbis lamented these trends and the challenge to their own authority in the once-isolated Jewish communities. Shortly before 1832, Rabbi Moshe Sofer of Pressburg (now Bratislava), in what was then the autonomous Hungarian Kingdom in the Austrian Empire, addressed a message to Vienna in Austria proper, where Jews had already been granted considerable individual rights. He lamented the fact that since the Jewish congregation in Vienna lost its powers to punish offenders, the Jews there have become lax in matters of religious observance. He declared: "Here in Pressburg, when I am told that a Jewish shopkeeper dared to open his shop during the Lesser Holidays, I immediately send a policeman to imprison him."
Professor Israel Shahak, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, points
out that the "most important fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the
modern state was: observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their
inculcation through education, were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from
which one could only escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting
in the circumstances to a social break and for that reason very impracticable,
except during a religious crisis. However, since the modern state had come into
existence, the Jewish community lost its powers to punish or intimidate the individual
Jew. The bounds of one of the most closed of ‘closed societies’ ... were snapped."
Sadly, Shahak writes, "a great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the Zionist movement always wanted to restore it — and this part has gained the upper hand."
Indeed, the point has been made by many commentators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that Zionism has a close relationship with Nazism which, in one respect, is its antithesis. Both ideologies think of Jews in an ethnic and nationalistic way. The Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg frequently quoted from Zionist writers to prove his thesis that Jews could not be Germans.
Welcoming Hitler
Afraid of the assimilation which genuine freedom might foster, some German Zionists welcomed Hitler’s rise to power because they shared his belief in the primacy of "race" and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among "Aryans." They congratulated Hitler on this triumph over the common enemy — the forces of liberalism. Thus, Dr. Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the U.S., where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leader in the World Zionist Organization, published in 1934 a special book Wir Juden (We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler’s so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism: "The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk."
The victory of Nazism ruled out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews in Germany. "We are not unhappy about this," said Dr. Prinz, In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he saw "the fulfillment of our desires." He continued: "We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. A state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations."
In his study, The Meaning Of Jewish History, Rabbi Jacob Agus declares
that, "In its extremist formulation, political Zionism agreed with resurgent anti-Semitism
in the following propositions: 1) That the emancipation of the Jews in Europe
was a mistake. 2) That the Jews can function in the lands of Europe only as a
destructive influence. 3) That all Jews of the world were one ‘folk’ in spite
of their diverse political allegiances. 4) That all Jews, unlike other peoples
of Europe, were unique and unintegratable. 5) That anti-Semitism was the natural
expression of the folk-feeling of the European nations, hence, ineradicable."
Nazism and Zionism
Nazi theoretician Rosenberg, who was executed as a result of his conviction for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, declared under direct examination: "I studied Jewish literature and historians themselves. It seemed to me after an epoch of generous emancipation in the course of national movements of the 19th century, an important part of the Jewish nation also found its way back to its own tradition and nature, and more and more consciously segregated itself from other nations. It was a problem which was discussed at many international congresses, and Buber, in particular, one of the spiritual leaders of European Jewry, declared that Jews should return to the soil of Asia, for only there could the roots of Jewish blood and Jewish national character be found."
Feyenwald, the Nazi, in 1941 reprinted the following statement by Simon Dubnow, a Zionist historian and author: "Assimilation is common treason against the banner and ideals of the Jewish people.... But one can never ‘become’ a member of a national group, such as a family, a tribe, or a nation. One may attain rights and privileges of citizenship with a foreign nation, but one cannot appropriate for himself its nationality too. To be sure the emancipated Jew in France calls himself a Frenchman of the Jewish faith. Would that, however, mean that he became a part of the French nation, confessing to the Jewish faith? Not at all.... A Jew ... even if he happened to be born in France and still lives there, in spite of these he remains a member of the Jewish nation...."
Zionists have repeatedly stressed the fact that, from their viewpoint, Jews are in "exile" outside of the "Jewish state." Jacob Klatzkin, a leading Zionist writer, declared "We are simply aliens, we are foreign people in your midst, and we emphasize, we wish to stay that way."
Consistent with that view, one of the major efforts of organized Jewish groups in the U.S., increasingly dominated by Zionist thinking, has been to fight "assimilation," particularly as it manifests itself in such areas as religious inter-marriage. Dr. Nahum Goldmann, one of the world’s leading Zionist spokesmen said at the opening session of the Zionist General Council in 1966 that, "The danger to Jewish survival resulting from the integration of Jewish communities into the life of the peoples among whom they live ... is greater than any danger which emanated from external threats, from anti-Semitism and the new persecution of past periods."
American Experience
The American experience provides a unique challenge to those who seek to promote
an ethnocentric and nationalistic brand of Judaism, rather than the universal
Judaism of the prophets. In A History Of The Jews, Paul Johnson writes
that, "America was, from the start, unlike any Jewry elsewhere. In Europe and
Afro-Asia, where religious barriers were universal in some form, the Jews always
had to negotiate or have imposed upon them a special status. This obliged them
to form specific and usually legally defined communities, wherever they settled.
To a greater or lesser extent, all these Jewish communities were self-governing,
even though the actual condition of the Jews might be miserable and perilous.
In Poland, under the monarchy, the Jews enjoyed a kind of home rule, governing
themselves through the Councils of the Lands, which their wealthier members elected.
They were taxed more heavily than the surrounding Poles and had no real right
of self-defense, but otherwise ran their own affairs. To a less pronounced extent
this was true of every Jewish settlement in Continental Europe. The Jews always
ran their own schools, courts, hospitals and social services. They appointed and
paid their own officials, rabbis, judges, slaughterers, circumcisers, schoolteachers,
bakers and cleaners. They had their own shops. Wherever they were, the Jews formed
tiny states within states."
This pattern was completely broken in America. "In North America it was quite different," Johnson writes, "even before the U.S. attained independence. With the virtual absence of religious-determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen merely as internal religious discipline. Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in constituting itself into a separate community, All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but congregational lines, like the other churches.... American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community,’ as they did in Europe, They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Dutch, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on comparable lines. Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue, just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church. In other respects, both Jew and Protestant were part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus for the first time, Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration."
Something New In History
The Zionist theorists of a separate Jewish ethnic identity never anticipated or understood the uniqueness of the American experience. In the book Jews And The New American Scene, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, set forth the manner in which America was something genuinely new in history: "Almost every country with the exception of the U.S. and the now-deceased Soviet Union is a historically defined nations united by a common history, not a political doctrine. Though immigrants may acquire citizenship almost everywhere, the meaning of being English, French, German or Russian is predominantly a birthright status. As a new nation legitimated by a revolutionary ideology, America differed from all these other countries, and the meaning of being an American was different.... As the self-conscious center of liberal revolutions from 1776 into the 20th century, the U.S. has been open to new citizens who are willing to accept the creed."
Edward Tiryakian, in an essay on "American Religious Exceptionalism," points out that, "... Jews in America have not been marginalized ... by virtue of their religion ... there has been no historical ghetto experience, no pogroms, In fact, because of a deep-structure affinity of Calvinist Puritans for Judaism, it is in America that Jews have increasingly found full societal and cultural participation and acceptance, symbolized by widespread acceptance in recent years of the term ‘Judeo-Christian.’"
The American society has provided citizens with individual freedom in matters of religion and it is against this very idea of freedom that many in the Jewish establishment seem to be rebelling. The overwhelming majority of American Jews, to the dismay of such spokesmen, are eager participants in the American society, as are men and women of other faiths and backgrounds. They are not interested in entering the kind of narrow self-segregated ghettoes so many Jewish leaders would like to construct.
If by "Jewish survival" and "Jewish continuity," those who express dismay with "assimilation" mean they fear an end to an isolated and separated Jewish community with only limited contacts with the non-Jewish world, they are correct in their assessment. From their point of view and value system, they are right to be alarmed.
Survival and Continuity
But if by "Jewish survival" and "continuity" we mean the perpetuation of Judaism as a religion, such concern is misplaced and, beyond this, is not only counterproductive but may make Judaism even more difficult to successfully present in America’s marketplace of religious ideas and beliefs. In recent years, for example, there has been a dramatic decline in membership in Mainline Protestant churches — such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian — yet no discussion of "Presbyterian survival" or "Methodist continuity."
If many Jews are alienated from Judaism — and fewer Jews are members of congregations or attend religious services than is true of members of other religious groups in the U.S. — it is necessary to explore the reasons for this situation. This is as true of Jews married to other Jews as it is of Jews married to non-Jews.
Part of the reason for the decline in synagogue membership may be the spiritual vacuum which exists in much of organized Judaism. All too often, Jewish "ethnicity" and identification with Israel has replaced religion. Because religion has been placed in the background and "ethnicity" and Israel in the forefront, many Jews seeking religion and spirituality have found it in other sectors. The Guru of a prominent Buddhist movement once came to the U.S. to find out why a majority of his members in this country were of Jewish background.
Ellen Jaffe McClain writes that, "Of all major religious groups, Jews are the least likely to establish a formal connection with a house of worship and the least likely to attend services even when they do affiliate. Over the past generation, American Jews have come to view themselves less and less in religious terms and increasingly as an ethnic or cultural group.... Institutional Judaism got sidetracked from any consistent attention to spirituality by issues of ethnicity and peoplehood.... The State of Israel became the filter through which all Jewish experience passed: only Israel, it seemed represented the promise of Jewish redemption after the Holocaust; only Israel provided a society in which Jews could live without the danger of assimilation into an alien culture. The spiritual lives of American Jews took a back seat to preserving Israel, supporting Israel, getting Soviet and Ethiopian Jews into Israel.... Another generation of American Jews grew up with the message that being Jewish was about what you ate, and how much money you gave to the UJA, not about your heart and soul, let alone your relationship to God."
False Gods of Ethnicity
It is the Jewish establishment — the very ones who express such concern about "continuity" — who have created an atmosphere in which the false Gods of ethnicity and nationalism have replaced Judaism, and then wonder why young people are not interested. Tikkun editor Michael Lerner notes that, "The Jewish establishment ... has created the problem and then wants to project the problem onto individuals who are trying to search out and make some kind of life choice for themselves, and for whom their Jewishness isn’t that important because the Jewishness they were exposed to didn’t turn them on...."
Demographer Stephen Bayme says that the criticism of American Judaism as spiritually arid is "a legitimate criticism." He states: "The Jewish community has to take itself more seriously as a spiritual community.... The notion of Judaism as addressing the ultimate questions of the meaning life and the meaning of death, of addressing where religion can play a role in our consciousness.... What we don’t transmit is that this is an about incredibly rich heritage that has much to say about personal ethics, about relationships, about personal meaning."
It should be clear by now that "ethnicity" cannot be preserved in the American society, for Jews or anyone else, lest we find America a Balkanized country. The doomsday rhetoric we now hear from the groups providing a variety of programs to further Jewish "continuity" — such as sending high school and college students on trips to Israel to connect with their "roots" — is irrelevant, if not counterproductive. Somehow, they never considered.trying the advancement of a religious faith. Their efforts, write Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, are "often tautological: Jews would be better and stronger Jews if only they would be better and stronger Jews."
Research projects have been multiplied in an effort to find the social engineering that will fix the problem. But, for the most part, the problem is beyond social engineering, as it is for other tribal groups; it is rooted in the dynamics of American society.
In 1948, Israeli philosopher Simon Rawidowicz published an essay, "Israel, The Ever-Dying People," in which he listed the many Jewish thinkers from the Talmudic period onward who were sure that their generation of Jews was the last. He wrote: "There was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain." Jews have considered themselves in danger of disappearance for four thousand years. Thus, the current complaints about "intermarriage" and "assimilation" and "continuity" should be put in some perspective.
Land of Opportunity
For men and women of all nations, races and creeds, America has been a land of opportunity in which an individual could go as far as his own ability would take him. In terms of religion, there was freedom — both freedom to practice the religion into which one was born, and freedom to change. Government was strictly neutral. For Jewish leaders to seek to escape from such freedom in fear is perhaps the greatest guarantee that young people will recoil from them and their pronouncements.
To the extent that a Zionist-influenced Jewish establishment persists in telling American Jews that they are, somehow, in "exile" in their native country and that a foreign country, Israel, is really their "homeland," the irrelevance of their efforts will become abundantly clear. Continuing along these lines is a policy certain not to attract young American Jews but to drive them away.
Judaism as a separatist ethnicity is doomed in America. Judaism as a religion of universal values has as much opportunity for growth and continuity in the American society as does any other religious faith which speaks to the spiritual needs of Americans. The fear of freedom which dominates so much Jewish thinking will only produce the negative results so often prophesied. Abba Eban once declared that, "The Jews are a people who cannot take ‘yes’ for an answer." America has said "Yes." The Jewish establishment has responded by trying to re-erect ghetto walls. The problem, in the end, is not with freedom but with the negative response to it.
Time For New Outlook
The time has come for a new, open and hopeful outlook — one which welcomes the opportunities freedom provides and looks beyond its occasional pitfalls. Let us prepare for the 21st century and not seek to recreate the closed societies of the Middle Ages.
In 1919, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote — expressing the traditional American view about the value of freedom — that, "When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."
Judaism should not fear the marketplace of ideas but welcome — and enter it. That, in the end, is the only way to insure any kind of "survival" and "continuity."
|