Judge Roy Altman’s presentation at Congregation Neveh Shalom Sunday, Aug. 2, was not an average book talk. In fact, the author of “Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law” explained, his speech wasn’t a book talk at all.
“I want you to read the book, so I’m not going to tell you about the book,” he explained to a full Stampfer Chapel at the event, which was co-sponsored by CNS’s Israel360, StandWithUs Northwest and the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.
Instead, Altman, who was appointed a federal district court judge in 2019, talked about the chapter in his life that led to the book, beginning on Oct. 7, 2023.
“I do think that Oct. 7th is an inflection point not just in the history of the Jewish people, my people, a special and ancient and noble people, despite what they say about us on TikTok,” he said, “but also an inflection point in the history of our civilization, Western civilization, which has given us, whether you like it or not, all the benefits and privileges that you enjoy today, including the right which didn’t really exist before, to say that you don’t like Western civilization.”
Altman gave a description of the Hamas attacks on southern Israel and the subsequent kidnapping of 251 people, from Holocaust survivors to children.
“You can go home tonight and watch the videotaped confessions of Hamas and Palestinian men admitting to the widespread sexual violence they perpetrated as a weapon of war against girls and women on Oct. 7,” he said. “Yet at the United Nations, an institution that was specifically created for the purpose of ensuring that never again would this level of subjugation, humiliation, and degradation be visited upon the Jewish people, we Jews have become the violators of what? Human rights. How can this be, this moral inversion, this moral perversion, this moral confusion about everything that we as members of Western civilization have always known to be true and right and just?”
Altman got phone calls from around the country offering support – and asking him to come speak about Israel and its history. Some of those he spoke to were his peers – federal judges – who wanted to see Israel, to understand it better. From there, he started leading trips to Israel specifically for federal judges. So far, Altman’s program has taken ten percent of the sitting Federal judiciary to Israel, and the program will expand to state supreme court justices later this year.
“These judges with perfect lives and extremely intellectually stimulating jobs, challenging jobs where you get to serve the public every single day at the highest level, they dropped it all, and they traveled thousands of miles away to a teeny tiny country in the desert in the middle of an active war,” Altman explained. “they’re right, they’re left, they’re black, they’re white, they’re Latin, they’re Indian, they’re everything you might imagine. And they come back totally transformed by what they’ve seen.”
The nexus of his talk, Altman said, was not his book, but the three reasons that judges who went on these trips found them so transformative.
“The first reason is that in Israel, you see a people who are still willing to fight and, in some cases, die for the Western civilization most of us claim to still believe in, but all of us participate in and benefit from whether we want to pay for it or not,” he said.
The second, he explained, is that “in Israel, let’s face it, miracles still happen.”
As an example, Altman told the story of a trip that occurred over the Christian observance of Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the period leading up to Easter in the Christian liturgical calendar. Altman had great difficulty finding a church service for the judges of his group to attend in Tel Aviv or in the Golan Heights. Travelling from Golan to Caesaria, on the coast, Altman called the first church he found on a search engine in the area – The Church of the Primacy of St. Peter, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Altman explained that the priest who answered the phone said, “You’re not going to believe this, but 15 or 20 minutes ago, my supervising priest came to me and said, ‘Father, go home. It’s the afternoon. Whoever’s wanted an Ash Wednesday service has had one. We’ll see you tomorrow.’ I had a premonition that I should stay for 15 or 20 more minutes and in 20 minutes, you call with 25 federal judges who desperately need an Ash Wednesday service from America.”
The waters of the Sea of Galilee lap up against the foundation of the church, which is built around the stone where Jesus is reputed to have performed the miraculous Feeding of the 5,000.
“Despite what you see on TikTok, no one walking around them was called a Palestinian, okay? No Palestine had even been invented. That’s a Roman invention to sever the ancient connection between the Jewish people and the land. And boy, did Emperor Hadrian never imagine that he would be this successful at convincing 18-year-olds in Portland and Seattle and all across America that the Jews had no connection to Judea. There’s no J in Hebrew, right, so the word is actually Yehudia, which unfortunately for the Palestinians, literally means ‘Land of the Jews.’”
The third reason, Altman explained, is “because in Israel, you can feel our joint Judeo-Christian heritage; the heritage that, whether you like it or not, built Western civilization The heritage that, whether you like it or not, founded the United States of America, the crown jewel in the history of Western civilization.”
An example of that came when that same tour group visited the Siloam Pool, an ancient mikvah just under a half-mile from the Temple Mount, which Jesus is reputed to have used before visiting the Temple.
“For decades, the Palestinians claimed that this was Jewish, Zionist fantasy land. But 20 years ago, digging underneath the city of Jerusalem, adjacent to the City of David, archaeologists found first the Siloam Road and then the Siloam Pool,” Altman said.
The tour visited the road, which is still underground but will be open to the public later this year, and the tour group knelt, to a person, and touched the stones. One locked eyes with Altman.
“On that slab of stone deep in that tunnel underground,” Altman recalled this judge saying to him, “I recognized for the first time that we had all come here for you and your people and your heritage and your history, but that we would leave that tunnel understanding that we had actually left our own people, our own heritage, our own history, because no one who has ever walked in the Valley of Elah or who’s climbed the steps of Masada or taken the road deep down into the Siloam Pool will ever be confused about whether this land is really Palestine ever again.”
Altman concluded by noting that judges and other professionals in Israel laid those trades down after Oct. 7 to take up the profession of arms, with nearly 1,000 IDF personnel being killed on active duty in the wars that have followed that day.
“They didn’t just do it for the 7 million Jews who live in Israel,” Altman said. “They did it for each and every one of you and your children and your grandchildren and your supposedly rich and vibrant and assimilated communities all around the world so that if it came down to it, you would one day have a place to go. And no matter what you see on television, what you read in the newspaper, what they show you in TikTok and on your phone, don’t ever let them make you forget it.”
PHOTO: Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review