Ukraine Is Iconic
Shaking inwardly again this morning. The day is beautiful. For many days my life has been beautiful. There have been some dark days, dark existentially, a time when I could not foresee a way forward. Nevertheless by act of faith, absurd as it felt, I carried on. Near by were others who believed that I would “make it.” I borrowed from their confidence, when otherwise only despair seemed “real.”
I can imagine that’s how it is for many who remain in Kyiv, the army and the civilian volunteers who are determined to defend their homes. The Russian army by direction of Putin intends to grind the cities to a hellish ruin in the next few weeks. Of course one can hope for a miracle. Putin might have an accident. Clearly the defenders, prefer to die fighting than to live in servile domination by Russia.
I think of the Lord of the Rings epic by J.R.R. Tolkien. The story is of a country of Hobbits, a people with no interest in power, in political games, who want to be left alone. They are set upon by a dark Lord who believes they possesses the one thing that he must have in order for his dominion to be complete. A great army of orcs, soldiers suited for cannon fodder is assembled to obey the command of their evil master.
I offer some excerpts from Tablet Magazine, Jewish Ukraine Fights Against Nazi Russia, about the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It’s very serious, it’s not a movie,” Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN from deep inside his military command-and-control bunker in Kyiv. “I’m not iconic, I think Ukraine is iconic.”…
Zelensky is a master communicator, and his speeches have been pitch perfect. He has, after all, practiced for this role his entire life. There is no doubt in my mind that the Ukrainian army has held and fought as ferociously as it has because of the confidence and conviction that Zelensky has been able to instill in them through his words and actions. Given a choice to evacuate the country by the Biden administration, Zelensky famously reposted that he needed “ammunition, not a ride.” The translator who interpreted his speech to the United Nations last weekend broke into sobs while repeating his words in English. The European Parliament quickly voted to fast-track the Ukrainian application for EU membership.
The Klitschko brothers—both heavyweight boxing champions, one of whom is the mayor of Kyiv and currently leading its militias and territorial defense forces with the moxie and intensity of an avenging angel—are of partial Jewish descent. It is surely no accident, comrades, that the “neo-Nazi” Ukraine that Putin desires to subjugate and cleanse for the sin of resisting his embrace, is led in battle by a president, a minister of defense, chief of administration, and a mayor of Kyiv who all have Jewish blood and roots. All of which signals the ratification of a country that does not look back to any hoary, folk conception of Ukrainian political ethos, but rather to the internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and historicity of a particular Ukraine in reality. This modern vision of Ukraine has won, regardless of the destruction that the superior weaponry of a demoralized and disorganized Russian army inflicts on it.
[Zelensky] represents the opposite of the Russian notion of establishing order in a multiethnic state by centralizing authority with unbending force. Zelensky’s Ukraine is now embracing a loyalty to the nation that implies the acceptance and transcendence of difference, rather than the repression or elimination of differences. That is how and why it can be led by Ukrainians of Jewish descent, and why it has proved so intoxicating to a West that currently seems to lack such qualities of self-confidence and cohesion and the simple virtues of resilience, piety, and valor.
Zelensky’s Ukraine represents the hyperspecific and beautiful contradictions that stem from the acceptance of contradiction, the multiethnic tolerance, and the polyglot nationality of a thoroughly traumatized nation that just wants to exist, and to escape from the toxic bonds of world war and holocaust and gulag and famine that its revanchist neighbor has imposed on its population in the absence of its own ability to provide a normal life.
The heroism that Zelensky has demonstrated in the past few weeks is a refraction of the resilience, cohesion in times of crisis, and other traits of the ordinary Ukrainian. Back in the comparatively peaceful days of 2019, three-quarters of the Ukrainian population took a look at Zelensky, and through some sort of heuristic that I cannot understand, let alone describe, saw a manifestation of their best qualities. And they were right. What is democracy, if not that?
I feel shame that America has not done more to help them. We ought to have been “all in.”
To read the entire Tablet Magazine article CLICK HERE.
