Talking Turkey

I

recently wrote here about the passage in the Yamim Noraim davening of “Uv’chein tein pachdecha” and its relevance to contemporary events. I return to it now, just days after the 30th anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, to focus on one of its more evocative phrases: “V’chol harisha ke’ashan tichleh ki sa’avir memsheles zadon min ha’aretz” — that all of the wickedness will evaporate like smoke, when You remove the dominion of evil from the earth.

Stirring words, evoking in the mind’s eye a scene we pine for. But why is the wickedness described as “evaporating like smoke”?

In City Journal, Guy Sorman reflects on the meaning of the Berlin Wall:

Pictures speak louder than words: The destruction of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, provides an exact date for the end of the Soviet Empire and its Communist ideology…. The fall of the Berlin Wall thus taught us, if we had not already understood, that Communist ideology was a bluff concocted for Western intellectuals and other suckers. The Soviet Union was founded on Communism only in appearance. Since its forced birth in 1917, it was nothing more than a dictatorship based on fear. What Walesa understood applies to all totalitarian regimes, from Syria to Cuba and from China to North Korea….