The Baby in the Ditch
This article was first published in the Minden Times in May 2025.
It must be difficult to be Jewish these days. Because Netanyahu, the man elected by the people who live in Israel -- Jewish by definition – is acting like Hitler, the man who manifested the illogical hatred that Jewish people have absorbed in many places over many eras. Netanyahu says Hamas made him do it. The Gazans, who did not elect Hamas, are carnage in the crossfire.
And when we say elected, we know that doesn’t mean that everyone who lives in the jurisdiction cast their vote for the party that won. In our world, if we could have voted but didn’t, we’ve forfeited our right to complain. If we voted for other than the party that won, it is our democratic duty to respect the will of the majority. Except it’s seldom the majority, usually the plurality (30% will often do it!) that carries the day. So from a personal rather than political perspective, there’s wiggle room, some space to disavow what your jurisdiction collectively said. ‘I didn’t vote for Ford’, you can say, ‘So I’m not responsible for what he’s doing.’ If you’re so inclined, you can even embrace I-told-you-so superiority.
But in the meantime, what the leaders, elected or not, majority or plurality, are doing is happening in real time and real life, as the Gazans have reason to know. The Jews who live in Israel can vote another way another time and change the trajectory. The Jews who don’t live in Israel don’t have that leverage. But they are nevertheless held responsible in the eyes of many. The only way out is to deny their Jewishness. That’s a heavy price to pay, a big chunk of oneself to incinerate, although it has been done many times, many ways, for many reasons.
I’m thinking of these things these days because we just had an election – two elections – and will be living with the consequences. And because my Jewish friend just published her book One in Six Million:The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity which is about the importance of knowing where you came from in order to know in some fullness who you are. The character around which the book circulates is Maria, whose parents left her as a baby in a ditch as they trundled off to the death camp. A community of volunteers led by Stanley Diamond, a distant relative of my author friend, sifted for years, across countries and languages, through a mountainous morass of details to finally be able to not only assure her she was Jewish, but also to introduce her to a bevy of relatives. The knowing filled an aching emptiness.
The centrality of Jewishness to sense of self is one thing; is being Canadian different?
Perhaps, because as far as I know being Canadian hasn’t to date been grounds for being hated or discriminated against. We can jettison our maple leaf pin and pass for other-than. We are experiencing some embarrassment as we acknowledge our colonizing past, and time will tell whether we think that apology, our Canadian go-to practice, is sufficient recompense. Whether the that-was-then-and-this-is-now argument will get us a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It shouldn’t. Not if our roots are important to our identity. You don’t have to be perfect to be proud. In fact, any genealogist will tell you perfection does not exist in the family tree. You research at your peril: for every royal scion or brilliant businessman, there is a con or a scoundrel hiding in your roots. They may be, in fact, the most illuminating clues to who you are. Canada’s history of genocide on Indigenous peoples is as real as Israel’s war on Gaza and Hitler’s war on Jews.
We must acknowledge that we ourselves, in the present, are the roots that the future builds on. Our rooty tendrils include who we elected and how we adapted to reality not entirely of our own making. How we position ourselves about the Marias left swaddled in the ditch, an innocent wrapped in silenced history. Maria was adopted and nurtured by a childish non-Jewish couple and had a life that was not as good as one might wish but good enough. She honored her imperfect adoptive parents (who may have done a flit in the night to prevent her from being claimed by relatives) even as she searched for her unknown (was abandoning her perfection?) biological parents.
The rooty ethical challenges that face us in this time of international upheaval are not as evident as a baby in the ditch. But they’re there. We are some kind of summation of what we do with what life hands us – DNA, history, weather, health, serendipity. You can’t deny it so you might as well embrace it.
