Reflections on Judaism

I listened tonight to a tape I bought about 15 years ago in Hungary, of authentic Jewish music.

It is sobering to realize that some of these songs were probably sung when Julius Caesar was still a boy in the Alban hills, before there was a Europe as we know it.

That they were sung again when Jerusalem's zealots battled against the might of the entire Roman Empire.

That they were sung in Jewish ghettos through the long medieval night, from Spain to Moscow; and then as the Shoah unfolded in all its horror in our supposedly modern age.

I walked through the burned-out shell of a synagogue in one little Hungarian city, left that way still 50 years after the Nazis had rampaged through it. I have never forgotten that experience.

What will the future hold for this ancient people? Disappearance by assimilation? A judenrein Middle East via nuclear missiles from Iran? Or once again, survival against all odds?