O pinion
THE VIEW FROM HERE
The Pileup Is Straight Ahead, and We Can’t See It
BY JOSHUA RUNYAN
WITH MY DAUGHTER’S
16th birthday last week — an
otherwise supremely joyous
event — I entered into a fright-
ful club: parents of children old
enough to drive.

Friends of mine who are
already veterans of this elite
group, especially those who live
in Center City, have told me not
to worry. Echoing a nationwide
trend, their children put driv-
ing off, in some cases, by several
years. Not so my daughter, who
the day after her 15th birthday
proudly declared to her mother
and me that in just a year, she’d
be driving.

Her overly optimist predic-
tion was a bit off, but at her
birthday dinner downtown
I happily, if a bit anxiously,
informed her that this summer
I would indeed be teaching her
how to drive. As I ponder how
exactly I will impart the wis-
dom of the road to Esti, I’ve set-
tled on the first of what I shall
call the Runyan Commandments
of Driving Etiquette: No matter
what happens, don’t overreact.

This has a precedent. A
“contract” handed to us by our
children’s doctor encourages
young drivers to pledge to never
drive while under the influence
and instead call a parent to pick
them up, in exchange for the cor-
responding parent’s pledge to not
freak out, to pick them up, no ques-
tions asked and defer conversation
for the next morning. I figure that
if I’m being asked to not overreact, I
should be able to insist on the same
mentality from my children.

But my reasoning goes deeper
than that. When I was learn-
ing to fly, one of my first flight
instructors advised when in an
emergency, the first thing you
should do is wind your watch.

Few of us have winding watches
today, so I can’t exactly say the
same thing to my daughter.

The point is that regardless of
the preceding event, responding
to it should be based on calm
reasoning, not jerky reflexes. In
a plane, overcontrolling an air-
frame — what we call “chasing
the gauges” — can quickly result
in loss of control. So, too, in a
car, overbraking or oversteering
in a skid can quickly put you in a
highway median, or worse.

But as my column isn’t a
primer on driving, you’re prob-
ably wondering where I’m going
with all of this. I fear that as
a society, too many of us are
overreacting to the indignities
of the day. Somebody cuts us
off on the Schuylkill, and we
flip out. We see a smug Catholic
school boy smirking at a Native
American in the vicinity of the
Lincoln Memorial, and we go
ballistic. To be sure, the initial images
and clips that came out of the
confrontation between Nick
Sandmann and his 11th-grade
classmates from Covington
Catholic High School in Park
Hills, Ky., and Omaha Nation
elder Nathan Phillips were
jarring. There was Phillips,
banging on a drum and chant-
ing what he said later was a
prayer for peace, seemingly
standing amid a sea of jeering
teenage boys bedecked in red
Make America Great Again
hats. He was face to face with
Sandmann, whose class was in
Washington, D.C. on Jan. 18
for the annual March for Life
protesting abortion rights.

On first glance, it appeared
as if the boys were taunting a
Native American man, who was
in town for a separate, unre-
lated demonstration. That’s the
story national media outlets ran
with, and the boys’ school was
quick to condemn its students.

When I learned all of this the
next night, I felt uncomfortable.

Footage of the boys showed
their behavior to be reprehen-
sible, and it fit into a pattern of
increasingly hateful speech and
actions coming from certain
corners of this country.

It didn’t take long for a friend
of mine on Facebook to relate
the incident to the Holocaust,
posting a meme juxtaposing
the image of Sandmann and
Phillips with a black-and-white
photograph of a Nazi SS officer
face to face with a bearded,
Orthodox Jewish man. The
glaring and the smirk were
almost identical.

But I looked closer at the
Holocaust image. Instead of
showing a stoic but hateful Nazi,
it actually depicted an SS offi-
cer cutting off the Jewish man’s
beard. The only proper corollary
to the events of Jan. 18 — if there
is one — would be if Sandmann
was assaulting Phillips. No one
alleged that happening, so my
discomfort grew to suspicion.

Clearly, the boys were not behav-
ing as parochial schoolchildren
taught to love and embrace their
fellow man should behave. But
what else was going on?
The next day revealed the
backstory, which began almost
two hours earlier.

As the boys made their way
to the Lincoln Memorial —
their chaperones, it should
be noted, nowhere in sight —
they were being taunted by a
few Black Hebrew Israelites,
members of a group identified
by the Southern Poverty Law
Center as racist and anti-Se-
mitic. (These are the same peo-
ple who I’ve encountered over
the years on street corners near
the University of Pennsylvania
and Temple University, alter-
nately telling me that as a visi-
bly religious Jew, I’m the reason
for the Holocaust, and that the
Holocaust didn’t happen.)
The Hebrew Israelites, who
believe themselves to be the
real descendants of the biblical
Israelites, told the boys that they
were school shooters and other
things that can’t be reprinted
here. For most of the time, the
boys kept their composure, but
it appears that toward the end
of their journey — when they
encountered Phillips — the
whole thing had devolved into
an open conflict. Phillips says he
came in the middle of the melee
to offer up his prayer for peace.

The 17-year-olds, who were
tomahawk-chopping, should
have kept their cool. But I
blame their chaperones for
allowing a situation to esca-
late in a city like Washington,
D.C., with tensions already
high one day before the third
Women’s March.

Phillips is blameless. Not
so the Hebrew Israelites, who
despite their vile hatred of pretty
much everybody but themselves
— Phillips says they even had a
few choice words for him — have
managed to effectively stay out
of what has become a national
debate, complete with presiden-
tial tweets and mea culpas from
daytime talk show hosts.

Aiding and abetting all of this
are the social media denizens
who have breathlessly reacted and
overreacted, up to and including
the president, and their enablers
in the national media who have
mindlessly broadcasted the reac-
tions and overreactions instead
of subjecting the entire affair to
logical analysis. For that, as with
so many moments of the past
several years, we as a country
are suffering.

It’s as if we’re all in the driv-
er’s seat, flailing into head-on
collisions of our own making.

It’s time we all wind our watch. l
Joshua Runyan is the editor-
in-chief of the Jewish Exponent.

He can be reached at jrunyan@
jewishexponent.com. Places to Visit in Israel in 2019 If You Really Want to Learn
BY MOSHE PHILLIPS
ARE YOU OR a family mem-
ber planning to go on Birthright
in 2019? Are you looking for
something more than the aver-
age “Israel experience?” Here
16 JANUARY 24, 2019
are some ideas on what to see if
you choose to extend your trip
and your mind. Don’t give in
to the critics of Israel who want
you to leave Birthright and see
the Palestinian point of view
when you know almost noth-
ing about the Jewish struggle
to free Israel from British con-
trol in the first place.

Birthright may take you to
the Kotel, the Sea of Galilee,
the Yad Vashem Holocaust
memorial and Masada — and
JEWISH EXPONENT
those are all worthwhile — but
there are other places to visit
that will help you understand
the amazing history of the pio-
neers who fought the battles
that allowed the modern state
of Israel to be declared.

Here is a list of eight places
to visit in Israel that will help
you develop a more accurate
picture of the struggle to build
the Jewish state.

See Phillips, Page 18
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM