Rhodes and the Balanced Life
Gazing at Rhodes under a clear blue sky it occurred to me that the fury of attempts to draw neat ethno-national-religious lines through realities of mingling is matched only by its futility.
I climbed a clock tower. Below me, washed by the wind, lay the city of Rhodes: the castle of the Roman Catholic Order of the Knights of St. John, who for more than two centuries made Rhodes the headquarters of their fight for the Holy Land; the minarets of the mosques built by the Ottomans who vanquished the Knights of Rhodes in 1522; the Square of the Jewish Martyrs, where a memorial recalls the Nazi extermination in 1944 of the Jews of Rhodes and Kos.
Christian, Muslim and Jew trod these smooth and luminous stones. They fought, yes. They also cohabited and allowed their respective places of worship to stand in close proximity. The Turkish consul saved dozens of Jews from the Germans.
Beyond the city walls lay the sea. I gazed across it, imagining Aleppo and the graveyard of Syria, not so far away. There, the struggle to draw new sectarian lines rages. Sunni and Shiites, Kurds and Alawites, outside powers and regime apparatchiks, do battle in the land of a murderous dictator and a barbarous jihadi cult.
The Jews of Syria are long gone and, now, many of the Christians, too. President Vladimir Putin thinks he can sort out whatever’s left of the country with muscle flexing from Mother Russia. Good luck to him in that charnel house.
The exhaustion of war will come to Syria, too. That much, history teaches us. But, as with the 17th century European wars of religion, decades may be needed.
Syria has become the epicenter of every fanaticism spawned by religious schism, state repression and popular uprising in the name of representation. These forces, in a dysfunctional Middle East, will not soon abate. We do not contemplate contemporary events from some clock tower, but from within them, in the shallow cacophony of now.
Across Rhodes and other Greek islands you see the jigsaw of archaeological fragments. It is arduous work piecing them together to recreate, say, a 2,000-year- old mosaic of an elated Eros riding a dolphin. The labor conjures away millennia as we recognize the urges of then, for beauty and order, as familiar. In the same way, archaeologists of our own lives, we try to piece events together, discern a pattern in fragments and draw coherence from confusion.
Then there are the days of magic, when everything is clear and bright, each moment an answer rather than a question.
I wandered down — past stray cats and dry leaves skittering across shiny stones and children playing flimsy accordions — to the Synagogue Kahal Kadosh Shalom. It was closed. This puzzled me. I’d been on a cruise ship and lost track of time.
Reading the sign, I thought the synagogue should be open. Before Mel Rosenberg and Benny Duanis, visiting from Israel, reminded me that it was Saturday, the one day the sign said the synagogue was closed. “Shabbat Shalom,” I said. “Shabbat Shalom,” they said. We got talking. Strange to have a synagogue closed on Shabbat, but then there are only a few dozen Jews left on Rhodes. The synagogue serves partly as a museum. Tough to get a minyan, Rosenberg observed. When I told him I write about international affairs, he said, “Oy vey.”
Turned out Rosenberg had spent much of his life treating halitosis. He’d even invented a mouthwash still sold widely. “But after treating 10,000 people with bad breath, I decided it was enough,” he told me. Now he’s into children’s books. Talk about a salutary career switch.
We were happy to be chatting, out of the nearby Middle East, in a place where history has settled down.
From the synagogue, it’s a short walk to the Square of the Jewish Martyrs. A monument commemorates the “1,604 Jewish martyrs of Rhodes and Kos who were murdered in the Nazi death camps.” They were rounded up in the summer of 1944, sent to Auschwitz in the last consignment of Greek Jews. How conscientious the Germans were, rounding up Jews in far-flung islands while the Third Reich disintegrated.
Fanaticism is most foul. Yeats captured its galvanizing illusions: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”
I got myself lost, inebriated by the beauty of the place. The air, the light and the temperature were perfect. Serendipitous paths of pleasure led to a shaded square. I sat down to a lunch of calamari. Afterward, I got talking to a restaurant owner about Greek toasts — “To our health,” favored today, and “To the balanced life,” favored, he suggested, in ancient Greece.
It seemed apt to end this lovely interlude of church spires and minarets and Jewish memorials with the Socratic notion that humankind must choose the mean, avoid extremes, shun excess and seek for balance.