From The Bimah: Jewish Lessons For Life

How many of you have seen the play or the movie Golda’s Balcony?  If you have, you know about that powerful moment, early in her career for Israel, she is Golda Meyerson at the time, it is January, 1948, it is three years after the Shoah, it is five months before Israel’s independence would be declared and the war for independence would start, and Golda is with American Jews, at the General Assembly of Jewish Federations, held in Chicago on January 21.  Her mission was to inspire American Jews to support the incipient Jewish state and the Jewish army in the war for its very existence.  She was supposed to raise $25 million.  She ended up raising $50 million.  Make no mistake.  This is our Golda moment.  Golda’s secret sauce contained three ingredients.  They apply to us with equal force. First, American Jews in 1948 learned of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews of Europe.  Slaughter.  It made American Jews angry, sick to their stomach, nauseous, worried, grief-stricken, and de