It’s amazing the wisdom one can learn from a cooking show — even if it does come from a fake quote, in this case, attributed to Charles Darwin.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” A contestant on the “Great British Menu” played a dramatic recording of the quote as he was serving a dish inspired by Darwin.
When I wrote about “fight or flight” last year, I posited that on the individual level, “if safety is the number one objective, fleeing might be the wiser choice.”
The fake Darwin quote reinforces that for me.
My great-grandparents fled Eastern Europe. Had they stayed, my great-grandfather would have been conscripted into the tsar’s army and my great-grandmother would likely have been killed in a pogrom, as others in her family were.
Flight required enormous adaptability. Had either of them ever been to a big city? Taken long train journeys? Not to mention the transatlantic voyage by ship and travel to Colorado upon arrival.
My great-grandmother came to Denver to marry my great-grandfather; they were from the same community in Brisk, but how well did they knew each other? Needless to say, neither were fluent in English when they landed on these shores.
Here I am, three generations later, living and thriving in Denver — because they took the risk. They were driven to survive. Their sacrifices shaped me into a “fight” person. From a safety perspective, I’m extremely fortunate. Even though the Jewish people are facing an existential threat, we also know what survival looks like — my maternal grandparents, both of whom emigrated, alone, shortly before WW II broke out. Or of the many Holocaust survivors I was blessed to know.
As contemporary American Jews, we don’t actually know what it feels like be threatened in the way Jews in tsarist Russia or in the Middle East post-1948 did.
The “fight” option is, ironically, a privilege.
Then I come to the difficult question of the value in fighting a losing battle. Is it worth taking up arms if the overwhelming odds are that one will die? The fight option may truncate an individual’s life, but those individuals’ sacrifices inspire generations hence, just as the Warsaw Ghetto fighters did a nascent Jewish state facing overwhelming odds. In that way, they survive — not physically, but spiritually.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at shana@ijn.com
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