RUTHFULLY YOURS

1. Purim’s historical background.  The 586 BCE destruction of the 1st Jewish Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria – by the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar – triggered a wave of Jewish emigration to Babylon and Persia.  The latter replaced Babylon as the leading regional power.  In 538 BCE, Xerxes the Great, Persia’s King Ahasuerus, the successor of Darius the Great, proclaimed his support for the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple and the resurrection of national Jewish life in the Land of Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish Homeland.  In 499-449 BCE, Ahasuerus established a coalition of countries – from India to Ethiopia – which launched the Greco-Persian Wars, attempting to expand the Persian Empire westward. However, Persia was resoundingly defeated (e.g., the 490 BCE and 480 BCE battles of Marathon and Salamis), and Ahasuerus’ authority in Persia was gravely eroded.

2. Purim is a Jewish national liberation holiday – just like Passover and Chanukah – which commemorates the transformation of the Jewish people from subjugation to liberty. It is celebrated seven days following the birth and death date of Moses, who is the role model of liberty, leadership and humility.

Purim is celebrated, annually, at a time when the relatively cold and stormy winter shifts into the relatively warm and pleasant spring.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/

EXCERPTS

When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.

The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.

Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.

Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.

A Republican from Mississippi, Hiram Revels took office on February 25, 1870. He became the first Black senator a mere three weeks after Black men gained the right to vote with the 15th Amendment. During his time in office, Revels fought for Black Americans’ civil rights and education.

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/herbert-hoov

Before serving as our 31st president (from 1929-1933), Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, served as the director of the U.S. Food Administration, and served as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

When the United States entered World War I, President Wilson appointed Hoover, who became known as the country’s “food czar,” to lead the Food Administration. After the war, Hoover led the European Relief Council, which was charged with restoring Europe’s civilian economy and feeding the starving multitudes of Europe. Known as “the Great Humanitarian,” he is credited with saving literally millions of lives, including countless thousands in Jewish communities across Europe.

Hoover’s role administering European food relief brought him in contact with Europe’s Jews and sensitized him to their suffering from both severe economic distress and harsh anti-Semitic persecution. Moreover, a common interest in humanitarian work cemented friendships and political partnerships between Hoover and leading members of the Jewish community, particularly Bernard Baruch.

After Poland’s declaration of statehood in 1918, the Polish army began a campaign of terror against Polish Jews, including the April 5, 1919 summary execution of 37 Jewish residents of Pinsk by a Polish firing squad. Polish leader (and later first prime minister) Ignacy Jan Paderewski persisted in his claim that no Polish pogrom against Jews had ever been perpetrated, until Hoover secured his cooperation with blunt threats to withhold much-needed American support.

Hoover’s food aid to Poland was at the root of the Pinsk Massacre because the murdered Jews were reportedly meeting to discuss how to distribute Hoover’s aid when they were rounded up and shot. According to Lewis Strauss – whom Hoover put in charge of ensuring the equitable treatment of minority groups in the distribution of American aid (more on him below) – Hoover was “the only U.S. Government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists.”

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/01/27/civic_virtues_as_moral_facts_recovering_the_other_half_of_our_founding_656930.html

This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs’s 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind.

Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Few [Americans] would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could – and did – abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the “honorable determination” of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all “values” are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human “moral sense” without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.