Liora Ziv-Ami

I am pleased to welcome you to my website.

Briefly describing the history of my name, Liora Ziv-Ami, is perhaps the best way to introduce myself.

As you have probably already guessed, I was not named Liora Ziv-Ami at birth, since names such as this simply did not exist in the former Soviet Union. 

My parents named me Elena. I picked the name of Liora Ziv-Ami myself.

 

In 1979 I became one of many Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate, and at that moment I lost any sense of belonging or identification with the Soviet Union, where I was born and grew up. My already fiercely critical views of Soviet society became even more pronounced after I started reading books prohibited in the Soviet Union. My acquaintance with Jewish religious literature and texts – the TaNaCh (the Hebrew Bible) with commentary, Jewish legends, and essays by Jewish thinkers and theologians utterly transformed my vision of the world. I began to see familiar events and phenomena in a new light.

 

One of these biblical passages – the story of Sodom – affected me more than anything else, as it struck a painful chord.  It was actually the details of the story about Sodom that struck me the most.

The Haggadah – the collection of Jewish legends – tells us that Falsehood ruled Sodom, but not any ordinary falsehood but a kind particular to Sodom.  Its essence was that the connection between events and phenomena was purposefully severed and a new distorted connection was made.  The result of this substitution was that it became impossible to tell Truth from Falsehood, and hence Good from Evil.

All the while, I was myself living in a society whose ideology was founded precisely on this kind of Falsehood – the Falsehood of Sodom.

           

            I saw this particular brand of Falsehood in Soviet propaganda marshaled against Israel.  That was when I decided to write my first article, which I called “Informational anti-Semitism.”

            I was outraged by the fact that Zionism – the Jewish people’s response to the race-based anti-Semitism of Europeans – was itself dubbed a form of racism by the UN.

            For this, I blamed the Soviet Union alone.  That was why my article, “Informational anti-Semitism” took on an anti-Soviet bent.  I sought to distribute my article in the West, which was for us, Soviet human rights activists, a model of integrity and justice.  In those days, I could not imagine that the contents of the article “Informational anti-Semitism” would relate no less to the West than to the Soviet Union.  Little did I know that before my very eyes, the West would become the biggest proponent of Falsehood, a cynical manipulator of public opinion that would seek to turn the world’s nations against the state of Israel.

 

The article, “Informational anti-Semitism” forced me to consider taking on a pseudonym to protect myself.

But what pseudonym should I take?  And I began to deliberate.

Where did the thoughts I expressed in my article come from?  From my acquaintance with the inheritance of my people.

And so I began to review the Hebrew words I knew:

“li” means “to me” in Hebrew;

“or” means “light”;

“am” means “nation”;

“ami” means “my nation”.

Putting all these words together, I got: “to me the light of my nation”.  That was how the name Lior Ami was born.

 

At the time, I thought that I would never again need to use this name.  Yet, in Israel, I had occasion to remember it, since I saw that the Falsehood of Sodom is a universal phenomenon.  All people are prone to reinventing existing phenomena and Jews are no less adept at doing this than anyone else.

This discovery forced me to turn once again to writing, or, to be more precise, to my computer.

 

And so I began to write.  The source of my ideas and my inspiration has remained, as ever, my Jewish people.  Only now, I have the ability to find ideas and inspiration not in the Jewish texts, but in the very lives of the people.  And I cannot help but see that my people are in trouble because they have cloaked themselves in the Falsehood of Sodom.  Living in the Diaspora, among other nations, it is impossible to realize this, since the Truth is revealed only here, in the Promised Land.

And so I thank the L-rd G-d for His covenant with my ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for granting to them this Promised Land, this Land of Truth for all eternity.  I thank all those who created upon this Land the state of Israel for giving me this opportunity to return to the land of my ancestors and to have my eyes opened to the world.

 

In Israel, I changed the name Lior Ami just slightly.

First, I changed it to reflect my gender.  Second, I followed the advice of a friend who was a follower of Kabbalah and added the Hebrew word “ziv”, which means “luminance” to complement “or”, which means “light”.

And though I am a person far removed from mysticism, and even one who has purposefully distanced herself from it, something told me that in this instance, I should follow the advice I was being given.

And that is how I became Liora Ziv-Ami.