5768 was so shorn of political distinction that even the bad guys did not produce anything we haven't seen before.
By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Our person of the year 5768 is not an inventor who may have conceived an instrument, a tool or a gadget that we suddenly all use, nor is he a man of letters, who emerged with a must-read book, play or poem widely discussed in cocktail parties, talk shows and literary evenings.
Our person of the year is also no Nobel Laureate who spent decades ensconced in a lab before emerging with a revolutionary medication or vaccine, nor is our person of the year an athlete whose defiance of biology, climate, gravity or poverty inspired millions. And sadly, just as our person of the year is no statesman who struck a peace agreement, or stood up for the poor, or revolutionized education, he is also no gutsy dissident who confronted the tyrannies that throughout this decade are steadily eroding freedom's gains over the previous decade.
In fact, our year was so shorn of political distinction that even the bad guys did not produce anything we haven't seen before, unlike, for instance, 5766, when our person of the year was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; or 1938, 1942 and 1979, in which Time magazine named as Man of the Year, and rightly so, Hitler, Stalin and Khomeini respectively. They did so notoriously, but they sure shaped those years, and much more.
If anything, ours was a year of non-leadership, certainly in the West, where market mayhem humbled leaders from Tokyo to Washington, but also beyond the West, where neo-czarist Russia lost face in a Caucasian brawl, Venezuela's generalissimo failed in his attempted robbery of foreign oil companies, Iran's mullahs ran for cover from inflation's wrath and North Korea's dictator altogether vanished.
Under other circumstances, a year of non-leadership would have been welcome, as it might have reflected an irrelevance of leadership, a time when rains fell, harvests brimmed, investment yielded, wars ground to a halt and crime gave way to charity. Alas, ours remained a time of conflict, perplexity, evil and consternation - so much so that it wouldn't have been implausible to name as Person of the Year Rose Pizem, the four-year-old whose murder united us in shock. Then again, bad as many things remain about us, this atrocity represented neither the moment in which it occurred nor the society in which it happened, but a type of evil that transcended both.
Still, while 5768 did not bring overall moral bankruptcy, it was a year of horrendous leadership, a year that began with bread riots in dozens of poor countries and ended with a financial meltdown in the rich ones, a year when one set of leaders gathered at Annapolis to deliver a peace proclamation as empty as another set's toothless barks in the face of Russia's aggression.
It follows that the elapsing year's most dominant feature was non-leadership, and Israel was no exception in this regard. If anything, the Jewish state's record on this front stood in a class of its own. And so, this is what our person of the year must reflect.
THE MOST banal choice, now that we know what we are generally looking for, would be either the outgoing prime minister or his designated successor. When leaders are named Person of the Year, it is invariably because they impacted. Unfortunately, the man about to depart Israel's helm never this year constituted a skipper, as he graphically demonstrated last July when his thinly veiled effort to manufacture a dramatic photo resulted even in his Syrian enemy's treatment of him as if he were air.
The woman who is out to succeed him is also ineligible for Person of the Year, for the prosaic reason that, with all due respect to her well-tailored jockeys' jackets, she has yet to mount the saddle, seize the reins and finally gallop, let alone arrive, anywhere.
And so, in the aftermath of a year in which the winter's Winograd Report highlighted our leaders' ineptitude, and the summer's court proceedings exposed their immorality, we could possibly have sought a person who was effective in calling our leadership to task.
In this regard, State Attorney Moshe Lador comes to mind, considering his instrumentality in touching off the political process that is now under way. Then again, the legal system's role in what has so far transpired remains to be judged, particularly considering its indecision and stammering in the case of former president Moshe Katsav.
Which leaves us with this grim year's non-heroes.
One thought is the fallen prime minister's longtime secretary and chief of staff, who is being investigated in a slew of scandals involving or surrounding the career she developed alongside her boss. Then again, while she may personify many Israelis' quest to bask in power's warmth, and their failure to understand public office's substance as a sacred mission rather than a financial opportunity, the role she played in shaping the year boiled down to an effort to prevent her boss's downfall. As such, she bucked the year's main trend and can therefore not conceivably emerge from it as Person of the Year.
And so, by default, this leaves us with the most unsung, unassuming and uninspiring of the year's assorted anti-heroes: Moshe Talansky.
THE WELL-MEANING octogenarian fund-raiser from Woodmere, a community whose warm Jews would do anything legal to help Israel, doubtfully ever thought of himself as a kingmaker, or a trailblazer or, least of all, a prophet of doom.
Moreover, what he told the people of Israel through a Jerusalem courtroom has since lost some of its legal weight, as it was marred by some inconsistencies, and then followed by even graver - and reportedly better documented - allegations.
And yes, Moshe Talansky was not a man of authority. Though he routinely brushed shoulders with power, and at times even looked it in the eye, he never wielded it; he was only blinded by it - much like the man he was suddenly disempowering, and possibly incriminating. And that is why he is our Person of the Year.
If it already must happen, one would expect an Israeli premiership to be derailed by poignant judges, vicious terrorists, charismatic generals or savvy statesmen. A successor to David Ben-Gurion is not expected to be deposed by a grotesque reincarnation of the shtadlan, the Wandering Jew and the Court Jew, a Long Island zeidi who sounds as if he had just sprung out of a Sholem Aleichem fable. Yet in 5768, with Israeli leadership in its worst crisis ever, Moshe Talansky was the ideal man to tell us just how low our leadership has sunk.
That is why he is Middle Israel's Person of the Year.
www.MiddleIsrael.com
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