Never to be burned again

It's really amazing what the human mind will do to protect itself from injury.  Unlike children who learn to avoid hot stoves only by burning a finger, the avoidance games the adult mind plays are designed to keep us from experiencing even that initial burn. 

For instance, we all learn about the holocaust... but our mind keeps the lessons in soft focus and refuses to allow the information access to the most vulnerable places in our being for fear of causing irreparable damage. 

The same can be said about the slaughter of our countrymen and co-religionists in terror attacks and warfare.  We read about these horrible events, but unless the victim is a family member of someone we know personally... we somehow manage to hold the information at arms length so as not to let the searing heat of the tragedy too close to our vulnerable soul. 

In short, we understand... but we are never allowed to really learn.

It has gotten to the point where it has become harder and harder to trick our mental gate-keepers into allowing us the painful-but-necessary opportunity to feel real pain.  We need to truly internalize the lessons of the current horrors in order to solidify our national resolve not to allow ourselves to be burned again... but our minds won't allow it.

Instead of learning from current events, we mentally substitute older, more manageable horrors that won't require us to act or learn.  When we read about the holocaust in any book or newspaper, our mind replaces the horrible specifics with sanitized memories of our last visit to Yad Vashem or a safe passage from 'The Diary of Ann Frank'.   

When we read and hear news about the latest victims of terror and see the pictures of our fallen soldiers who will never grow old... instead of seeing the current truth, our minds defensively replay old files with which we've made our peace; Ma'alot... Munich... Sbarros... The Dolphinarium.

Intellectually I understand why our minds play these games. Some might call it avoidance.  Others would call it self-preservation.  But the result is that we end up numbing our national 'Fight or Flight' instinct.  We allow our pain threshold to be raised only as fast as we can survive it... but not so fast that we are forced to identify and deal with the source of the pain.  We are like a frog in the slowly heating  pot of water... What heat? *

A few months back I was checking a fact before sending an email to a friend in Portugal.  It's a silly thing I do, but I hate appearing like a typical American - ignorant of everything but American 'culture' and history.  I don't even remember the context of the missing reference, but I was looking on-line to find out what year the Jews were expelled from Portugal.

After a few minutes of on-line research (i.e. Googling) I stumbled upon the answer:  The Expulsion decree was issued in 1496 and carried out in 1497. 

But while I was reading I was caught completely unaware by a story that devastated me the way no event in the Holocaust or current terror had ever hurt me.  My mind had never considered Portuguese history to be potentially dangerous turf, so it had never constructed the elaborate defenses against it such as I've described above.  The simple reason I was vulnerable to the lesson of this story is that my mind just didn't know this particular stove was hot.

How many of you out there knew that the Portuguese monarch (King Joao II) initially welcomed the Jews when they were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492?  OK, truth be told, he mostly welcomed the wealthy ones who could pay huge taxes to his war chest as well as those who were skilled in such things as weapon/armor-making. 

In fact as I started to read I was lulled into almost admiring the Portuguese for taking in the Jews when few others would have them.  But then a sub-plot within the tale of Portuguese Jewry snuck up on me and completely seared its lesson into my brain:

It seems that as many as 100,000 Jews may have been allowed to enter Portugal as temporary residents after paying a head tax of 8 Cruzados per adult (a large sum of money at the time).  The condition was that within eight months they would leave voluntarily by way of one of three ports.  However, at the end of eight months there was little shipping available that would enable them to leave, and most of them were stripped of their property and liberty and became defacto slaves of the crown.

in 1493, two islands off the west coast of Africa called Sao Tome and Principe came under Portuguese control and King Joao wanted very much to populate them without having to put his citizens at risk.  So he appointed a man named Alvaro de Caminha Captain of the Island of Sao Tome and ordered 2000 Jewish boys and girls (aged 2 -10 years old) to be torn forcibly from their parents... converted to Christianity and sent with Caminha on ships to the distant island.

According to records, many of the 2000 children died en route to Sao Tome, and within one year only 600 of these precious Jewish children were still alive.  However the survivors refused to conform completely to the religion that had been forced upon them and as late as the early 1600s the Bishop of Sao Tome quit in disgust because the descendants of these Jewish children, while nominally Christian, still refused to give up many vestigial customs of their Jewishness.

In 1993 descendants of those Jewish children who still live on Sao Tome (and who are still a distinct segment of the island's population, albeit not Jewish) held ceremonies to commemorate the terrible events of 500 years ago.

This story is no more or less horrifying than any of the countless other cruelties that have been inflicted upon the Jews during our exile.  But because I had never heard of these events, my mind was completely unprepared for it and had not constructed any sort of defense.  All I could picture while reading about these events was someone taking my three children from me and sending them off to live or die in some distant, unknown place.

As I read this story I imagined I could actually smell my mind burning as it was pressed inexorably against the stove.  Without wanting it to, an indelible lesson was burned into my brain.  It is a lesson that too many of us think we know... but yet for all our collective experience and 'knowledge', we continue to allow our enemies to take our children from us in the name of progress, coexistence... peace.

Each time a Jewish man, woman or child is taken from our midst, we adjust and make mental peace with the event.  Each time one of our precious soldiers is killed for the simple crime of being an Israeli... we are saddened, but we find a way to coexist with the news.

Our minds protect us from these horrible events... perhaps too well.  We adjust and adapt to them with such alacrity that we make ourselves immediately vulnerable to the next opportunity to be burned.  And the next.

Every Jewish life is precious and sacred.  We cannot allow ourselves to become accustomed to anyone culling our decimated population.  We can't allow our minds to cushion the blow or avoid it altogether.  We think we are protecting ourselves and our children... but we are really doing the opposite when we hide our minds from the truth.

It is only the child who is allowed to touch the hot stove that will be determined never to be burned again.

Note:  While the two sources  (here and here) from which I drew my information disagreed on some dates including the years of succession... the events described are a matter of indisputable record.

* Yes, I know this has been disproved.  Whattaya gonna do, revoke my poetic license?