 
Remembering William Safire (1929–2009)
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By Toby Klein Greenwald
Published on Saturday, January 10, 2009 -
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William Safire, who died on Sunday, September 27, was the winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, a former speechwriter for President Nixon, and a New York Times columnist. He was the author of 14 books on grammar and usage and the author of four novels, The New Language of Politics, and an anthology of great speeches, Lend Me Your Ears. He was responsible for bringing Nixon and Khrushchev together in the 1959 Moscow “kitchen” debate. Not a bad record for someone who dropped out after two years at Syracuse University, where he later became a trustee.
At the 2005 dinner of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies of Bar Ilan University, directed by Professor Joshua Schwartz, Safire was presented the Guardian of Zion Award. Other recipients have included Arthur Cohn, Charles Krauthammer, Elie Wiesel, A.M. Rosenthal, Herman Wouk, Sir Martin Gilbert, Norman Podhoretz, Carolyn Glick, and William Pipes.
Safire’s ardor for justice was evidenced in his keynote address at the dinner, titled, “Jerusalem, Job, and Justice.” When Job (Iyov) cursed G-d, Safire said, “G-d’s answer was, first and foremost, to answer at all, which demonstrated that a human being, no matter how miserable his state, is never alone in the universe . . . If it’s permissible in the Book of Job to challenge G-d’s justice, then it’s okay to challenge—publicly, perhaps outrageously—the judgments of political leaders, religious leaders, social arbiters and even media pundits.
“‘Jobans,’ with their sensitivity to injustice are—by nature, and in a positive sense—troublemakers.”
Safire raised some eyebrows in the mostly traditional crowd when he recommended that Jews engage in “outreach” and even “proselytization.”
“It is time for us to consider whether seeking new converts may be in our interest . . . Roughly speaking, there are still about five million Jewish Americans . . . That means the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Jews has plummeted . . . to about 2 percent . . . If numbers count in terms of ultimate survival—and they do—we have to give more serious thought to encouraging outsiders to embrace our faith.”
But he added, “It would be the height of chutzpah for a Jew visiting from America, representing nobody but himself, to tell my co-religionists here what’s best for their future. Nor is it for me to talk about altering the standards for your Law of Return; that’s the business of Israeli Jews.”
He reminisced about his well-deserved reputation as a supporter of Israel. “As a new conservative columnist for the New York Times three decades ago . . . I became known for being a real shtarker about U.S. support for the security of Israel. I believed then—and do even more now—that what the Jewish state needs more than an ‘evenhanded’ broker in the Middle East is a strong, staunch global ally.”
He was “rewarded” for this attitude by annual deliveries of handmade matzos from Chabad, leading to a “fifth question” at his Seder table—“Where did you get this terrific matzah?”
However, the annual gift ended, he said, when he came out on the side of a more liberal approach to accepting converts to Judaism, leading to the question, “What ever happened to that handmade matzah?” A Lubavitcher who was present at the awards ceremony, on hearing the story, approached Safire after dinner and told him that he would renew the shipment.
Some of Safire’s ideas for “broadening the base” of world Jewry included exploiting the age of the “screenager”—using the movie screen, the television screen, the cell-phone screen, and the Internet to create “electronic Jewish communities . . . of the like-minded.” This included making “virtual aliyah,” to reverse assimilation.
At the time of the awards ceremony, Safire was retired and giving a great deal of his time to the Dana Foundation, which he chaired. It supports brain science, immunology, and arts education. He talked about some of the ethical questions being raised in modern times: Is it ethical to inject human cells into animals, or vice versa, if it will lead to treatment for diseases? Are memory-enhancing pills for students the equivalent of steroids for athletes? Should the police, or potential employers, be informed of an innate tendency toward violent behavior discovered through one’s brain scan? “Perhaps Judaic studies can help offer . . . an ethical guide before irreversible decisions affecting human evolution are made.”
Linking science with ideology, he enthused about the “Methuselah” seedling, grown from seeds germinated from a 2,000-year-old date palm discovered by a Bar Ilan University scientist, and said, “It reminds the world that this land and this people have roots in ancient history, and seeds of plants and ideals strewn then are sprouting in our time.”
Regarding the uprooting of the Jews from Gaza, which took place several months after the ceremony, Safire described it as “your government’s painful but necessary Gaza decision,” but when asked what kind of [Palestinian] state he anticipated, he replied, “I don’t want to get into that here.”
Regarding the civil disobedience sweeping the country in response to the imminent disengagement, he told this reporter, “It’s in the grand old tradition of democracy. Henry David Thoreau wrote about it. If people are willing to accept the consequences, that’s fine. Civil disobedience is a part of democracy.”
Safire called Job his “biblical hero,” in that he demanded justice from G-d, reminding us “to accept the moral obligation implanted in our genes to stand up for justice by ourselves in our lifetime. This applies to the . . . enduring symbol that is Jerusalem . . . Jerusalem is in good and tolerant hands at last; even so, some want to re-divide it; others want to internationalize it . . . By nationality as a Jewish American, and by religious belief as an American Jew, I join my lifelong Israeli friends in the conviction that their Jerusalem—our Jerusalem—will remain ‘one city, under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’
Toby Greenwald reports on events in Israel and is the editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com. ♦
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