How I Spent My 80th Birthday

What I didn’t do:

I didn’t fly to Nashville on Avelo. I didn’t rent a Ferrari for the day. I didn’t strip naked at Lighthouse Point and attempt to swim to Long Island.

Instead, I embarked on an adventure of a different sort, one of the mind, testing reason, emotion, and heritage.

To back up a bit, my wife Suzanne had asked me what I wanted to do on the 80th anniversary of my birth.

On that question, I felt ambivalent. For the evening hours, a small dinner party had been arranged by longtime friends. Something to look forward to. But how was I to take full advantage of a landmark day otherwise?

I surveyed websites of local events, something I do often. And, later, when my granddaughter, a college student, texted a birthday wish from Pennsylvania, I wrote back that my plan for the afternoon was to attend a lecture.

She wrote back that the idea ​“sounds fun.” I imagine she must have rolled her eyes when she wrote that, and thought, ​“Well, Goppy is an egghead.”

But, as I stressed in my recent book about the virtues of New Haven, there are so many enriching free programs hereabouts. Many, open to the public, are at Yale.

I was attracted to one there, a talk by Roger Cohen, the Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, a journalist whose work I have admired over many years.

The timing of his visit seemed ideal. Though the formal title of his talk indicated he would focus on France and the United States, I guessed – correctly – that he would include commentary on the Israeli-Hamas war, as he had just reported on that cataclysm, which has had my head spinning for a month.

He had observed the war in person, just as he had in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, three decades ago, the Serbian genocide against Muslims in Bosnia.

In bearing witness to the devastation in Israel as a result of Hamas’s barbaric attack on civilians on Oct. 7, he’d heard testimonies about the rapes and the cold-blooded murders of parents, children and concert-goers, and from terrified families of hostages.

Indeed, in his address at the Humanities Quadrangle on York Street, he stressed this requirement for credible reportage and commentary: Be there.

Without seeing disaster first-hand, and investigating it, accounts and opinions are missing authority and a credible sense of humanity.

In this regard, the internet has blown a proverbial gasket as it transmits millions of pontifications, the great majority devoid of awareness of the eons of struggle and heartbreak shared by vast numbers of Israelis and Palestinians over a little spit of land.

We know nothing if we are ignorant of this history, and worse, without knowledge we become targets in the massive struggle for public sympathy, or what Cohen refers to as ​“competitive victimhood.”

It’s not hard to make a case to question accounts by Hamas, whose expressed purpose is to send Jews ​“from the river to the sea,” backed up by its recent assertion will produce many more Oct. 7s.

And yet, as I hoped he would, Cohen noted the heavy human cost of the Israeli response, for whatever its strategic necessities: the great numbers of civilian deaths in Gaza, including that of children.

I have lamented this as well, and have questioned more than before the effectiveness of the scriptures we Jews treasure.

The teachings of Torah have been valuable for sure, but they seem to be ignored by a power-hungry Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seemingly indifferent to Palestinian pain while leveraging the politics of fear to the exclusion of any other strategy.

As a Jew, I know well the ugly history of hate and slaughter. My view, though, is also shaped by life experiences, including my tour as an officer in the Vietnam debacle, in which soldiers were taught that the enemy is inhuman, a common psychological tactic.

Cohen sees it as well, which leads him, surprisingly, to a tiny burst of optimism about Israel and Palestine, and that someday the two-state solution, the only reasonable measure, will come to fruition.

“At some moment, if not in my lifetime [he is 68 years old], young people will set aside the outrages of history and come to agreement on mutual respect and discover a way for all to live in peace. They will realize that being consumed with vengeance is a kind of death of its own”.

On this point, I didn’t realize it until a few hours later, it isn’t just young people who are capable of arriving, after catastrophe, at peace.

Later on at the birthday dinner, I was aware that some guests have family histories that have shaped their own views of threats to Jewish life. Thus, it seemed pertinent to describe Roger Cohen’s presentation, and to see how it resonated with them.

Two of the guests are descendants of parents or grandparents who survived the Holocaust, or had Auschwitz as their final address.

Two others have a daughter who lives in a city where threats against Jews — now spurred by the actions of Israel’s hard-right — proliferate. She is stricken with fear.

But one guest provided an astonishing affirmation of Roger Cohen’s sense of hope, telling us that her mother, who suffered greatly from Nazi persecution but survived, refused afterwards to carry around hatred for her oppressors.

How, I wondered, was that even possible? And if it is possible for one woman is it a possible path for many?

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but recall two scenes etched in memory from Israel. I visited a settlement on the West Bank where residents brushed off any charge they had usurped Palestinian land because scripture says God had promised it to the Jews.

And this, from Israel proper: A guide led schoolchildren on a walk through an outdoor historic site. The man at the tail of the assemblage was an Israeli soldier carrying an automatic rifle.

At the time, I wondered how it was possible to live in such a state of fear. And yet now in our country we are doing just that. My own synagogue spends heavily security. Nationwide, threats have quadrupled. And mosques and Muslims face the same issue.

We Jews, once again, are denounced and have become targets, an immediate result of judging us all by the actions of Israel’s hard right.

At our dinner party, all of this had pushed us through an emotional wringer. Maybe this is why the chorus of ​“Happy Birthday to You” seemed as if it was performed in keys that haven’t yet been invented.

On the drive back to East Rock, I was feeling that my landmark day had been beshert, Yiddish for destined. At age 80, I was five years older than Israel, and maybe that extra time had taught me something. But if so, it wasn’t how to avoid common perils of aging.

When I got out of the car, I slipped on some leaves. There I was, spread-eagled on the ground, my right shoulder aching.

Little Lucca, the pooch, ran to my inconvenient fate. I assured him I was OK. That the most important body part, my mind, was still showing signs of function and, I hoped, healthy confusion.