If you were to take a survey amongst Jewish people to gauge how they earned a living, I would guess that in a statistical sample of thirty individuals, you would expect to see the following categories included (in no specific order):
Medicine,
Accountancy, Law, Teaching, Sales, IT, Driving a Cab, Engineering, Surveying,
Banking/Finance and Media.
I don’t
imagine that being a Sea Captain would feature in the list (the Israeli Navy
notwithstanding).
Which
reminds me of the following joke:
Harry
Cohen is showing his elderly parents around his new yacht. He dons a captain’s hat and pronounces:
“Look Mum,
I’m a ship’s captain!”
His
mother looks at him and replies tersely, “Harry, to me, you’re a ship’s captain. To your father, you’re a ship’s captain but
to a ship’s captain, you’re no ship’s captain!”
As you
may be aware, although the Tanach is not exactly replete with examples of Jews and
boats, a few notable exceptions stand out.
A few weeks ago, on Yom Kippur, we read about Jonah’s (ultimately
futile) attempts to flee Gd by boarding a ship to Tarshish.
The
second, possibly even more famous example, occurs in this week’s Parasha of
Noach. Noach was not Jewish but one of
his sons, Shem was the progenitor of the Semitic nations and according to Chazal,
he and Malkitzedek, the High Priest of Shalem – later Jerusalem, were one and
the same.
Gd tells
Noach that he will destroy the earth which is filled with violence (which is a
translation of the Hebrew word ‘Hamas’ – interpret this as you wish) and
that he, Noach, is to build an ark of gopher wood. The world’s first ship’s captain has a crew
of eight, along with a cargo of animals, and they are escaping a world that is
hell-bent on perpetrating evil. Hence,
the watery divine punishment.
This
theme is echoed a few hundred years later when a different sort of passenger becomes
the sole occupant of his own miniscule boat.
Escaping a murderous decree by Pharaoh to kill the Hebrew baby boys,
Moshe’s basket floats amongst the bull rushes until he is rescued by none other than
the evil king’s own daughter. Both Shem
and Moshe are saved by a ‘Tevah’ (the Torah uses the same word). If you read the Hebrew carefully, you can see
striking similarities in the descriptions of both arks. In essence, each boat provided refuge to its
occupants. The vessels quite literally
saved their lives.
A few
weeks ago, a five-hundred-year-old mystery linking Jews to boats seems to have
been solved. Along with Shem and Moshe, the
identity of a third sea-faring Semite (and not a few of his crew members) might
have been revealed.
For as
long as I can recall, my mother (of Blessed Memory) believed that Christopher
Columbus was a member of our tribe. She
wasn’t the only one to do so and it appears that a forensic medical expert, at
the University of Grenada, José Antonio Lorente, spent twenty-two years trying
to discover the ethnic origins of the renowned explorer. He extracted DNA from the remains of Columbus’s son Hernando Colón along with that of a distant cousin, Diego Colón and
compared these with Columbus’s remains at the Cathedral of Seville. His findings suggest (and this remains to be
proven) that my mother and many others were correct in their assumption that
one of history’s most famous captains, was a Sephardic Jew. It is evident that amongst his crew of ninety
sailing on the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria were several Conversos (Jews who had
been converted to Catholicism but practised their Judaism secretly) including
his translator, Luis de Torres. It was again
a case of Jews using naval means to flee for their lives against the
antisemitic Inquisition instituted by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
Notwithstanding
the current evidence regarding Columbus’s Jewish ancestry, I can’t help but consider
the thematic links which connect Noach and Shem, Moshe and the crew of the
three Spanish ships sailing away from Spain in that catastrophic year of 1492.
In all three cases, albeit in differing circumstances, the evil machinations of human beings led to vulnerable people having to escape to save their lives using a particularly dangerous method of transport. I know very little about sailing, but I have experienced what it feels like to be travelling on a surface that is anything but stable or predictable. In a car, you can rely on a (usually smooth) road underneath. An aeroplane is statistically one of the safest methods of transport and trains run on rails that run in continuous lines, even when they turn a corner.
Water, as
we know, is very different. On a boat,
you are at the mercy of the environment and how it impacts the sea on which you
are travelling. It sometimes feels as
though the water itself is your enemy, especially when it becomes ‘rough’. You may feel that although the boat is
providing protection from external threats, it can become as dangerous as the
human elements you are trying to escape.
So,
although we may not consider sailing as being a ‘Jewish thing’, it turns out that
without boats, we may not be here today.
At our
Sederim, in ‘Vehi She’amda we talk about how ‘in every generation, there rose
those who wished to destroy us, but Gd saved us from their hands’.
How many
of you are descendants of those who fled the Russian and Polish Pogroms and
landed on these shores a few centuries ago?
During
World War Two, the Danish Resistance Movement saved 7,220 of the country’s 7,800
Jews by ferrying them to neighbouring Sweden.
The Exodus 1947 brought Jews to Palestine (eventually) and the fact that
I am here today is because my father and his parents were able to escape
Belgium on ‘the Westernland’ in April 1940.
His life was saved through boarding a ship and arriving safely in New
York.
We may
not have captained those ships but without them, we could not have ended up
being doctors, accountants, solicitors, teacher, salespeople, IT experts, cab
drivers, engineers, surveyors, bankers or media stars.
I know
it’s hard to admit that we are not good at everything and perhaps, we will
never be ship’s captains but I don’t think we’d be wrong admitting that,
looking at our history, we are definitely ‘The Boat People’.
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