Our planet faces serious, comprehensive problems. Potable water is already
a serious issue in many places: Israel, parts of Africa and our own
Southwest are three such places. Water deficits will increase and spread as
world population increases. Greenhouse gases will increase as we use and
abuse the petrochemical resources that all too few people, for example, the
ibn Saud family, control.
    Since not everyone agrees on the threat these problems pose, it places a
greater burden on those who do try to find solutions.  Jews have long been
at the forefront of the world's problem-solvers as one can see from
consulting the impressive list of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners, especially in
the sciences.
    Our list of laureates is often compared with the handful of Muslims who
have won any of these prizes. The idea, of course, is to put Muslims in a
bad light as "underachievers" as over against the far less numerous Jewish
population. For me, this is something of a "cheap shot" and is not my point
here.
    Less numerous.  Far less numerous.  We lost a third of our number in the
Holocaust and have yet even to make good their loss. What else we lost can
only be imagined.
    How many more scientists and inventors, doctors and economists, to say
nothing of writers, artists, entertainers and teachers were in this group?
How many Anne Franks, - she would have been seventy-seven this year - to
say nothing of the children and grandchildren she would now have? How many
of her children would even now be hard at work finding cures for diseases,
ways of increasing agricultural production, in short, mending the world?
    I happen to believe that without the leavening of its Jews, this world
would fall flat as a matzoh.  And it may yet. The world seems all too often
to exhibit what must be seen as a suicidal tendency, namely, the recurring
attempts to exterminate Jews.Just think: those six million dead would now
have 20,000,000 grandchildren. And It's been estimated that Jews would now
number 60 million instead of the current 15 million had these persecutions
not taken place.
    You might think that President Ahmedlooneybin of Iran could learn from the
examples of Poland, Spain, Germany and the Soviet Union. All of these
countries went into serious decline as a result of repressing their Jewish
populations. Admittedly, this is a Jew-o-centric view of things. One might
also say that minorities like Jews are "the canary in the coal mine," the
first to feel and suffer from the poisonous gases of emerging dictatorship.
Then Jewish losses would be a symptom, not a cause of a country's decline.
    But consider this: the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and both
England and Holland in the seventeenth benefitted greatly from Jews who had
to flee persecution elsewhere. Putting two and two together, one might
wonder why countries don't outbid each other to entice more Jews in! Sure,
there are some bad apples, but a Jewish community pays for itself many
times over.
    To the best of my knowledge, no one has claimed that Rumpelstiltskin was
Jewish (though the name is suspiciously Ashkenazic).  But the little guy
who could spin straw into gold is emblematic of so many Jews who have
created material or cultural wealth out of little or nothing, wealth that
they shared with the world.
    When I think of Anne Frank's children, the human "treasure" that was lost,
that never even came to be because of Europe's unspeakable barbarity, my
tears turn immediately to steam.
    Well, in the words of the RaGBaG (Rabbi Gamaliel ben Gamaliel), "If the
world succeeds in destroying itself, no one will learn anything from it."