Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

for Thea Wieseltier

I

In the spring of 1866, on the front page of Ha’Carmel, a Hebrew literary weekly that appeared in Vilna for a few decades in the latter half of the nineteenth century and served as an important organ of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which was beginning its exhilarating and damaging march through the traditionalist Jewries of Russia and Eastern Europe, a poem was published. It was a manifesto-like summons to a more cordial relationship, even to a deep bond, between the Jews and Western modernity. It was called “Awake, My People,” and its author was Judah Leib Gordon, who had composed it three years earlier. Gordon was an extraordinary man of letters and one of the most controversial writers in modern Jewish history. (As is often the case, the controversies included injustices.) Though twentieth-century Hebrew poets came to despise Gordon for reasons of political or aesthetic doctrine, and though his poems now read with a quaintness that often crosses the line into archaism, Gordon was a founding father of modern Hebrew culture, which in some ways was an even more breathtaking creation than the modern Jewish state. There is an old story, se non è vero è ben trovato, that Gordon once called on one of the masters of the newly founded “science” of critical Jewish scholarship in Germany, another founding father, and when the old sage asked the young firebrand to identify himself, he declared “I am a Hebrew poet!” “Oh really?” came the reply. “When did you live?”

Having exhorted its readers to participate in the societies in which they live, to speak their languages and learn their ways of thinking, to participate in the cultures that they proudly shunned, Gordon’s poem comes to its climax in its penultimate stanza whose infamous third line continues to reverberate in the interminable struggle of the Jews to find an honorable definition of who and what they are. “Become a man as you leave and a Jew in your tent” — from Deuteronomy 34:18, “rejoice Zebulun in thy going out, and Issachar in thy tents.” As I say, archaizing. By a “man,” of course, Gordon means a human being, and more specifically, an agent of universal principles that are shared across the society in which the Jewish community finds itself. (The idea that Western principles, or Eastern principles, or any principles, may call themselves universal is offensive only to those for whom the provenance of an idea is its most salient feature.) In modern parlance, Gordon’s line is most familiar as “Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home.” A great psychological and cultural bifurcation, though it should be added that Gordon was not calling for the abolition of either term and certainly not for an erasure of Jewish culture in favor of European culture: the development of Jewish culture was his holy if secularizing cause. In his hostility to Jewish religion, in fact, and in the hostility of other      maskilim or enlighteners, one witnesses the birth of the very notion of Jewish culture: the culture is what one continues to adore when the religion is gone. Gordon regarded his prescription as a meliorist formula for a respectful integration. The irony seems to have been lost on him that he was insisting upon the revival of precisely the punishing spiritual structure wrought by the Iberian catastrophe centuries earlier, the eternally anxious double life of the crypto-Jew.

A double life was anathema as much to traditionalists as to assimilationists; the warring camps both sought the same thing, which was a single life, a ringing consistency, one thing and one thing only. Gordon’s prescription at least had the merit of recognizing that there is no such thing as one thing. Who else would dream about uniformity, if not creatures who are multiple? The furiously (and learnedly) anticlerical poet was correct: a person’s identity is finally determined by the internal relations of the parts, all of which are real regardless of their respective ideological reputations — by the negotiations and the accommodations between the many elements of which every person is always comprised. There are no hollow humans. Radical exercises in self-amputation are invitations to psychological misery. Before one even arrives at the matter of one’s presentation to others, at home and in the street, there is the pressing question of one’s presentation to oneself: the inward arrangement of one’s influences and ideals, and how one’s inner tent shall comport with one’s inner street. The burning question of the seam.

Gordon’s proposal was roundly scorned as a kind of soft treason, even though there is not a page in his writings that is not animated by the love of his people. In 1885, in Odessa, HaMelits, a Hebrew weekly that in the following year became a Hebrew daily, the first one in Russia, published an influential response to Gordon’s maxim by Moshe Leib Lilienblum, an early maskil who became an early Zionist.

Be a man in the street and a Jew at home. The poet is not the first to give us such a lesson. Many are the writers who urged us to hide the “Jew” in us (that is, our being Jewish), this contraband stuff, in the secrecy of our tent, as if it were a disgrace for a man in the nineteenth century to be known as a Jew. Many have heard this cry and the results are evident in our children.

It was Gordon’s luck, I suppose, that the notion of the “self-hating Jew” was still half a century away. (This call to order, this insinuation that development is defection, has been the stock-in-trade of American Jewish reactionaries, of “proud Jews,” for a long time. I first heard it from the lips of Meir Kahane.) (Already I regret mentioning Kahane, and certainly his lips, in the context of Lilienblum and these other Jewish nobles.) Other contemporary critics of Gordon were a little kinder. The beloved Hebrew writer Yosef Hayim Brenner complained about the “spiritual obsequiousness” of Gordon’s formula and called it “terrible,” but he instantly qualified his polemic with an affectionate encomium to Gordon’s lifetime of devoted membership in his nation, adding that “a life is greater than any formulation.” He also noted graciously that Gordon had composed his call for other-directedness in Hebrew, the Jewish language. (Which is to say, most of the Jews in America’s tents and streets would not know what to make of it.)

In the spring of 1892, also in Odessa, in a short-lived Hebrew periodical called Pardes — the kind that used to be called a “miscellany,” the one in which Bialik’s first poem was published: for some of us these forgotten Hebrew publications are like stars in the night sky — there appeared a highly original response to Gordon’s slogan and its scandal. Its author was Ahad Ha’am, born Asher Ginsburg, whose nom de plume is a Biblical phrase that means “one of the people.” (An unimaginable appellation in the age of YouTube channels and naming opportunities.) In the form of an open letter to the editor of the journal, who was himself one of the most formidable Hebraists of this Hebraizing era, Ahad Ha’am did not denounce Gordon for his suggestion that Jews, too, must engage with universal notions of truth, goodness, and beauty. Not at all: Ahad Ha’am was an anti-parochial nationalist. He contended, instead, that Gordon had misconstrued the relations between the tent and the street, between the particular and the universal, by banishing the universal to the street. In his view, this amounted to a false and paltry conception of the Jewish tent.

His essay — he was a significant thinker who never wrote a book, who did it all in essays — was called “A Man in His Tent.” Like some of the other critics, he worried that Enlightenment would weaken group feeling and “nationalism.” (Earlier he had authored one of the most sterling Jewish sentences I have ever read: “I for one know ‘why I will remain a Jew,’ or more properly, I do not understand the question, just as I would not understand the question of why I will remain my father’s son; I can make any comment that my heart desires about the beliefs and the ideas that my ancestors bequeathed to me without any fear that I will thereby sever the connection between myself and my people;” and these heterodox thoughts included, he added, his support for “the scientific heresy that carries the name Darwin.”) He proceeded to demolish the distinction between universalism and particularism, arguing that the abstraction “humanity” is real even if it is not available to the senses, for “there is no sensuous existence for universal concepts, since every individual, for example, is of necessity either Reuben or Simeon and so on.” The compound character of human life therefore requires of us that we double up and make ourselves responsible for both “the reform of ‘humanity’ and the reform of ‘nationalism.’”

Ahad Ha’am’s splendid objection to Gordon’s construction of the relation of the universal and the particular in the Jew was not merely that Gordon sought to confine the particular to the private sphere — such a mistake was obvious to a Zionist who championed the cause of Jewish nationalism publicly. Of course we will be Jews in the street! No, Gordon’s error was to expel the universal from the private sphere of Jewish life. Here was a Jewish nationalist instructing that Jewish nationalism was not enough, not the whole Jewish story. In his own time, when the Jews “turned their hearts to nationalism,” they “forgot humanism, the inner spirit on which everything depends.” And so Ahad Ha’am coined a retort to Gordon: Be a man in your tent. This, he explained, is “the great teaching [he uses the word “Torah”] that has been lacking in us.” The man in his tent is “the great cause whose wisdom and power will be apparent in all our external actions.” He insisted that this become “the strong foundation of the new edifice” of Zionism.

He concluded with a counterintuitive dictum that most present-day Jews in America would find confusing or insulting: “A day of adversity is a day of castigation.” By castigation, he means self-castigation. Are we, then, to blame ourselves as we mourn? It seems like an unfair demand, but the Zionist philosopher demands it. (As does the ancient and medieval rabbinical tradition, for which the ultimate objective of sorrow is introspection. The mourner’s repentance!) Ahad Ha’am asserts that times of grief and peril are appropriate not for self-celebration — for dwelling on “Israel and its nationality, on its beauty and its wisdom and its righteousness” — but for the discovery of our failings, when “the eyes of the nation will be opened to its own shortcomings,” all of it with “a warm heart, a loving and hurting heart.”

It has been a long day of adversity for Jews, but castigation has not been welcome. Even a loving and hurting heart finds little hospitality in the community if it deviates from the emotional and intellectual and political consensus; if it proposes to think critically about trauma and the methods for mastering it; if it disputes the bleakest reading of events and dissents from the climate of despair and makes no time for easy pessimism at the Shabbat table (people love dead Jews, pass the challah); if it suggests that calm analysis will serve us better in the crisis than rampant feeling, and that hysteria never made anybody smarter; if it has the insolence to insist that Jews have been, in our other country, in Israel, not only the victims of adversity but also the agents of adversity, and that we have betrayed our Israeli brothers and sisters by inhibiting and even forbidding the expression of the misgivings, or the horror, that we may harbor about some of their actions.

Introspection, even under duress? Self-criticism, even in the midst of self-defense? I’m afraid so.

II

About the scale of the trauma that October 7 inflicted upon Jews in Israel and in America there can be no doubt; and this crucible occurred at the same time that American Jews were confronting a revival of antisemitism — and not only a revival: some of the anti-Jewish violence of recent years was unprecedented on these shores. All this misery seemed to rattle and even to refute the hallowed American Jewish theory of the United States as a place where such a fate, the master plot of the other refuges in exile, cannot happen. Suddenly American Jews could feel the sort of natural connection to their ancestors that the American dispensation had blessedly disrupted: after all, when American Jews allude in their prayers to the sufferings that “we” have endured, the first-person plural requires an exertion of the imagination. Except in collective memory, which is not like personal memory, we ourselves endured none of them. We were the lucky children of our ancestors who had escaped the sordid and unjust conditions of their lives, so much so that the United States, which certainly represented a revolution in world history, also represented a revolution in Jewish history. But now a dark continuity with the time-honored typological interpretation of Jewish history — the view that Jewish history is an eternal repetition of a single wretched story in which, as the Passover Haggadah puts it, “more than once has an enemy risen to annihilate us” — seemed plausible here, too. The community put on a shroud. American Jewish exceptionalism seemed to be going the way of American exceptionalism itself, as the United States surrendered to meanness and chaos, to ethnonationalism and a war on difference, and suddenly there seemed to be a basis in American life for the fear that the philosophical and political protections of the American republic, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the laws of the Constitution, American liberalism, would not hold.

It has not been easy to assess the dimensions of the danger or the historical implications of the unfamiliar circumstances. Our default setting can be very dark. It has been clear, at least to anybody interested in the whole sobering truth, that we have enemies to the right of us and enemies to the left of us, just as it has been clear that some American Jews have found a home in both fevers. A certain tiresome game of whose-side-is-worse has characterized a lot of the internecine communal debate — internecine debating does not exclude shouting on cable television — and wasted a lot of our time. It should be uncontroversial, for example, to assert that what has happened in the United States in recent years is a mainstreaming of antisemitism in American politics, and that the perpetrator of this poisoning, the man who switched on the green light, was Donald Trump — uncontroversial even if the American left, unsurprisingly, also has a lot to answer for in the contemporary fragility of the Jews. Trump and the MAGA right have introduced a new creature into the American political bestiary — the pro-Israeli antisemite; and too many American Jews, even when they are guilty of no more than anti-anti-Trumpism, have fallen for it. (So, too, has the prime minister of Israel, who recently, as he welcomed a leading official of the reactionary antisemitic Freedom Party of Austria, affiliated himself with the so-called Patriots for Europe, a grouping of populist anti-Jewish parties presided over by Marine Le Pen’s marionette Jordan Bardella, including Fidesz from Hungary, ANO from the Czech Republic, the AfD from Germany, the Party for Freedom from the Netherlands, VOX from Spain, and other gargoyles of post-liberal Europe.)

The most important requirement of threat assessment, as military planners call it, is that it be nothing if not empirical. Generalizations from lurid public events are not enough to go on. In evaluating the dimensions of antisemitism in America, what is needed is not ethnic pride but social science, data and the study of it, numbers, responsible inferences and projections; and in combating antisemitism what is needed is not soaring eloquence but a tireless exercise of local and national politics and political coalition-building, and the wise exertion of political and economic muscle. The media, without which we would not know what we need to know, always provides much more than we need to know, and so, once the facts have been established, as they still can be for those who care, the less media the better; the impact of the media upon the formation of opinion in America is one of the gravest challenges to our democracy and our good sense. I am myself unqualified to do the empirical work that is necessary to arrive at a trustworthy judgment about the trajectory of antisemitism in America. Since we must always err on the side of caution, I can live with a certain amount of prudent exaggeration. What I find it hard to live with is the sort of exaggeration that is designed to inculcate in the Jewish community a permanent state of apocalyptic excitation, when the apocalypse — this is as much a philosophical issue as an empirical one — is nowhere near.

Let us begin with the Holocaust, which hovers inevitably over every discussion of Jewish danger, and rightly. I say rightly, because the European catastrophe permanently planted in contemporary Jewry a suspiciousness about the world that we are powerless to exorcise, and it would be a deformation of our character to wish it otherwise. It actually happened, and not so long ago. (In this instance no amount of italicization will suffice.) Refresh the shock diligently and bequeath it to your children. Jewish honor requires us to live partially in its shadow, and in that semi-darkness to devise ways not to hate the world. Yet the invocation of the Holocaust must never be designed to shut down clear thinking, or the power to make distinctions. We do not properly respect the memory of the Holocaust by seeing it everywhere. Consider the most sensitive example of all: it took only a few hours after the pogrom of October 7 for a platitude to form, not only among Jews but everywhere. Owing to the scale of the slaughter, October 7, it is everywhere said, was the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Quantitatively, on a per diem basis, if you will pardon the expression, this is true. But the analogy never sat well with me, because these things do not, as we like to say, scale smoothly up or down. Every atrocity is as large as it is and no larger. (And no smaller.) The genocidal intention of the Hamas invaders was clear, and in this respect the association was justified; and twelve hundred Israeli Jews — may God avenge their blood, the traditional Jew in me almost said, except that He has, and in Biblical proportions — were murdered on October 7 because they were Jews. On any given day in Eastern Europe between 1942 and 1945, however, more Jews were murdered, by many orders of obscene magnitude.

The platitude makes me uneasy. Sometimes precision matters most where it seems to matter least, not only for the sake of knowledge but also for the sake of compassion: I do not want my people to be more tormented than reality asks them to be. The platitude certainly did not clarify anything for me about the crime that was committed on Jewish soil. I already knew that Hamas is a wildly antisemitic organization consecrated to the destruction of as many Jews as possible and to the total extirpation of the Jewish state. (That is why I wondered for years about Benjamin Netanyahu’s bizarre insistence that Hamas had changed for the better, a cunning bit of misdirection whose aim was to shift the national focus to the cause of “Judea and Samaria,” where his bread is buttered.) I rejoiced in the assassination of Yahya Sinwar, but not because he was Adolf Hitler; it was enough that he was Yahya Sinwar. The platitude is more comprehensible as an expression of emotion, of anger, of sorrow, about a defeat without precedent in Israel, and I certainly lack the temerity to tell my brethren in Israel that they should not feel what they feel. The problem is that feelings are sometimes elevated into something grander, into an illusion of objectivity, into a worldview or a philosophy of history, which then plays a decisive role in the analysis of particular cases. The platitude struck me as an obfuscation that was an early form of incitement.

What is gained by imprecise or excessive analogies, except to frighten — and in almost every conceivable circumstance in which the Holocaust is invoked, to delude — those whom one seeks to fortify? In a heartfelt essay called “Despair Not!,” my old friend Ruth Wisse, ma soeur-ennemie, attempted to stiffen the spirits of her Jewish readers with the battle cry of the Jewish warriors in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. Gvald, Yidn, zayt zikh nisht m’yaesh! “Oh no, Jews, do not despair!” (Gevald or Gevalt: how to translate that common cry of alarm? Wisse leaves it as untranslatable, but I must note a macabre linguistic coincidence that I owe to Hillel Halkin, who many years ago pointed out that the canonical Yiddish translation of the Bible renders as ot shray ikh gevalt Job’s lament hen ets’ak hamas.) Wisse admits that she never expected to begin an essay addressed to the present day with those words. And she admits also that “we are a century removed from the existential and intellectual threats that Jews faced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is unwise and even dangerous to exaggerate urgency if there is no need for it,” and also that “we are now a sovereign people and in America too Jews have agency as never before,” and also that “the many fellow American lovers of Israel among us prove that everyone does not hate the Jews,” and also that Jews were far from perfect and often fell short of their own moral standards. Wise words, all of them. (But is proof really required for the view that everyone does not hate the Jews? And must you be a lover of Israel to not be a hater of the Jews?)

Wisse then proceeds to a review of her customary opinions — that “the nations [the Jews] lived among were constituted very differently,” that the Arabs will never agree to coexistence with Israel, that “Islamist anti-Jewism [is] the regnant ideology of a new world order,” and so on. None of those propositions seem correct to me as a description of the world in which we live and for which we must plan, and some of them are disagreeable historiosophical speculation. And when she writes that “just as the Germans were considered the most cultured nation in Europe, Palestinians were considered the most intelligent among their fellow Arabs,” and that “the worst Israel does is far better than the best that the Palestinians do, to their own people and to their neighbors,” she is discarding the moral probity and historical complexity for which I was just now admiring her, and turning nasty. Wisse worries about the “demoralization” of the Jews, which she has always located in Jewish politics that differ from her own, but it is not a form of “demoralization,” or self-loathing, or indeed any failing at all, to reject the discourse of superiority. Must we really be the best of all peoples? Is it not good fortune enough to be what we are and revel uncomparatively in our richness? It is more than a little comic to encounter the belief, stated without a trace of irony, that my ethnonationalism is better than your ethnonationalism.

So why, then, mention the Warsaw Ghetto? Are there Nazi stormtroopers, or jihadi terrorists, on the Upper East Side, or any likelihood of them? And why omit the central difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and us, which is the astounding and historically anomalous fact of Jewish power — political and economic power in America, every variety of power in Israel? If only Mordechai Anielewicz had commanded an army! Whereas the spectacle of what Israel’s army has recently accomplished, and recently wrought, is plain to all. In the aftermath of October 7 and the virulent eruptions of domestic antisemitism, the American Jewish community almost completely surrendered to its proclivities for morbidity, which were already quite considerable. Just when we needed clear heads, we could not pry our heads away from commemorations. We lost our elan. We quaked. We were in mourning, of course, and lucidity is not to be expected from mourners — but that is precisely why shiva must last no more than a week, and why avelut, or mourning, must last no more than a year. The rabbinical tradition warns sternly against those who mourn overmuch, and in the medieval centuries even the mourning for the destruction of Zion devolved into a sect when it became permanently active and the primary coloration of the faith of certain unrelievedly grim believers. We are enjoined instead to return to the world, to the reality from which our grief severed us, and to operate smartly and decently within it, injured and intact, for the sake of our values and our interests.

Let us consider another sensitive example. I watched with dismay as the Jewish community of New York appeared to take leave of its senses about Zohran Mamdani. I have little admiration for the man: he has a lovely smile but he is a doctrinaire socialist who began his victory address with the words of Eugene Debs, so as to compare his own election to nothing less than “the dawn of a better day for humanity.” How can we know everything that we know about the history of socialism and not almost completely detest it? Mamdani also adheres to the odious belief system that is the postcolonialist picture of the world, with its selective preferences among the world’s victims and its high-minded scorn of the West and its pious disguise of its political agenda as nothing more than a search for justice, though Mamdani is correct to insist on the imperative of affordability and on the outrage of economic inequality in present-day America. It is obvious that there is no room in the mayor’s progressive heart for a fair view of Israel, and that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians are just about all that he has heretofore cared to know about the Jewish state.

When there are so many legitimate grounds for the criticism of Netanyahu’s Israel to be made, why go rabid? The zeal is what perturbs me. Too much of the progressive opposition to Israel has curdled into something more, and less, than disagreement. Hatred is more, and less, than criticism. A prejudice has no place in a battle of ideas. (So many American battles of ideas have decayed into battles of prejudices.) While I have no expectation that Mayor Mamdani will treat the Jewish citizens of his city unfairly or unkindly, he owes it to them to seek to understand what Israel means for them, just as they owe other groups with whom they live an effort to comprehend their deepest motivations. Still, Mamdani was not running for the presidency, and he will not determine in any way the foreign policy of the United States. Moreover, not all the citizens of the city are Jewish, and the Jewish citizens who supported him were not all traitors to their people, and every mayor of New York must find a modus vivendi with its Jewish community and, well, times are changing. Brothers and sisters, they are. The response of the Jewish community of New York to the Mamdani movement exposed a complacent lack of preparedness for new challenges and new generations.

It was discouraging to learn that the central body of the Jewish community of New York had instructed the rabbis of the city to devote their sermons on the Sabbath before Election Day to denunciations of Mamdani, and then to learn that many of them had complied. (And a few days before Mamdani’s expected landslide! Pretty shrewd.) Their compliance was owed, I expect, to their need to pander to the panicked Jews in their pews. Leave aside the matter of whether political endorsements should count as teachings from the pulpit. The donors wanted to hear it. Yet the responsibility of the rabbis, the wisdom with which they could have strengthened their shaken parishioners, was, I think, to explain to them why panic was not warranted. For a start, sometimes in political contests we will lose. When we lose, does our existence hang in the balance? Is Amalek now the mayor of New York? Has the day of the suitcases arrived? I think not. Our insecurities have disarmed us for the vicissitudes. All my life I have listened to American Jews compulsively assuring themselves that the current occupant of the White House, from Kennedy to Trump, is “the best friend that Israel ever had.” (The exception was Carter, who certainly became a friend to the Arabs but also established the peace between Israel and Egypt that persists as a pillar of Israeli security.) Anxiety — what psychologists in recent decades have called, in less grandiose contexts, “extinction anxiety” — was always given the last word in our accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths. The psychological is one of the most effective obstacles to the empirical.

In a democratic society, one must be ready for disappointment and ready to go into opposition. The rules allow you, they encourage you, to try again and to try harder. In a democratic city, moreover, one should be pleased that the future of City Hall has not been determined by a bunch of bullying plutocrats in their Escalades who flee the city at the first sign of a pandemic, even if some of them are to be found in our synagogues. A democratic city is not a macherocracy. And American Jews are proud democrats, aren’t we? But there, on the night of Mamdani’s victory, was a prominent New York rabbi — a man who built a shul in the Hamptons and, more to the point, created a Foundation for Ethnic Understanding — tweeting in a tone of emergency that “with the news of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory, I am announcing plans for the building of the first Jewish day school in the Hamptons. This is in anticipation of the thousands of Jewish families that will flock to the Hamptons and greater Suffolk County to escape the anti-Semitic climate of Mamdani’s New York City.” Maybe the jitney can get them across the border under cover of night. I always suspected that they regarded the Hamptons salvifically.

The extinction anxiety of American Jewry has recently taken a new form. It is the idea that, to quote a popular cover story in The Atlantic a few years ago, “the golden age of American Jews is ending.” “For several generations,” Franklin Foer ruefully wrote, “liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence . . . without [Jews] having to abandon their identity.” He added: “Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.” The evidence that he adduced for this Golden Age, this historical apotheosis, included Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, Leonard Nimoy, Henry Winkler, Ralph Lauren, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Betty Friedan, Sid Caesar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Adam Sandler, Gilda Radner, Steven Spielberg, Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon, Norman Mailer, David Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn, Bella Abzug, Barry Manilow, Edward G. Robinson, and Kirk Douglas, along with the old chestnut — I was not aware that you could still cite such a statistic with a straight face — that “approximately fifteen percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.” Where in Yahweh’s name was Sandy Koufax? The only rabbi in the hallowed bunch was Abraham Joshua Heschel, but that was owed to his solidarity in Selma. The American Jewish veneration of entertainment has always baffled me. Comedians have become our pastors.

Yet Jewish success in American society is not the same as a golden age of American Jewry. A golden age is not defined by what our hosts do for us or by what we do for our hosts. It is defined by how we utilize the political and social blandishments that we enjoy, all this stupendous liberty, to cultivate ourselves not only as Americans but also, and sometimes mainly, as Jews. None of the stars and the luminaries listed above contributed anything of significance to Jewish culture and Jewish religion, except perhaps to solidify certain ethnic stereotypes about us, for which a thousand thanks. In a golden age one aims higher than ethnicity. Foer appositely celebrates Horace Kallen, the philosopher of American pluralism many decades before the melting pot fell into disrepute, but Kallen’s epochal contribution was to the American self-understanding, rather like the Hollywood moguls who were his contemporaries. Some of the American Jewish writers whom Foer included in his ode to the glitter gone by — Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Bernard Malamud, Clement Greenberg, Cynthia Ozick — are intermediate cases: Howe and Ozick lived (and Ozick still lives!) also in Yiddish, which means that, unlike the author of the article and no doubt his editors too, they could actually read the Yiddish fortune-cookies with which the magazine’s cover was sprinkled; and Bellow, who, stubbornly and with a subtle understanding of what it means to be a Jewish writer insisted on not being regarded as a Jewish writer, was gleefully immersed in Yiddish culture and could mischievously include a Hebrew verse from Psalms in a hilarious limerick in Herzog. (He told Yiddish jokes in their native tongue, which was part of their delight for him.) Malamud was the strange and magical case of a Yiddish writer writing in English. Roth, who began his career as the enfant terrible of the Jewish middle class, making locker-room fun of Jewish daughters and Jewish mothers, and eventually decided that he was the community’s exilarch, boasted in Operation Shylock that Hebrew letters may as well have been Chinese to him. He made ethnicity brilliant, nothing more. There were so many other Jewish intellectuals — the ones whom Carole Kessner once identified as the “other Jewish intellectuals,” Hayim Greenberg (the Jewish Orwell, if you ask me), Ludwig Lewisohn, Marie Syrkin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, and many others — who did not make the cover of The Atlantic because they chose to deploy their talents internally, to the substance of the culture of which they veritably were the heirs and the stewards.

I do not mean to give out grades or to check the tzitzis of other Jews. None of us has done enough in America. I mean only to suggest that the “Golden Age” was not all that it is now cracked up to be, and that if we wish to satisfy ourselves with that quality of gold we will certainly have more of it again. (Chalamet, Madison, Steinfeld, Eisenberg, Garfield, Hill, Safdie, Baumbach, and many other fledgling proofs of the spirituality of show business for American Jews are waiting in the wings.) We did a lot for America but we did too little for ourselves. There was not enough integrity in this. Moreover, during “the Golden Age of American Jewry” many of its heroes had to contend with ferocious American antisemitism. Indeed, the real golden ages of Jewish history — in Spain, for example, and in Eastern Europe — were attended by anti-Jewish discrimination and anti-Jewish persecution. What made them golden was what the Jews did in those circumstances with their own material. Physically they were forced inside, but spiritually they preferred to be inside, where their treasures could be developed. And when they were forced outside, amid all the expulsions, they persisted inside. They envisaged an informed and cordial apartness, with various levels of vigilant participation and porousness, depending on the circumstances, but such a benign segregation was almost impossible; and when a convivencia was achieved — to borrow the idealizing phrase of Américo Castro, the remarkable Spanish historian who argued tirelessly for the heterogeneous character of Spanish society and included the Jews, in their presence and in their absence, as one Spain’s constitutive and ineradicable elements — it always turned out to be only a beneficent parenthesis in a longer saga of aggressions against our alterity. (More con than vivencia, as a friend of mine once said.)

The primary blessing of tolerance and emancipation and freedom is not the outer-directness that it makes possible, though episodes of acculturation can have a quickening effect on our own traditions; but too many modern Jews felt differently, and construed the new possibilities for complexity and adventure as opportunities for promiscuity and flight. In freedom we are free not least to grow ourselves. Let us live multiply in our tents — but two commitments means two commitments; and how is it that more of our traditions have slipped through our fingers in conditions of security and prosperity, here in America, where we are welcome, than ever fell away in the cursed times and the cursed places?

How close should we be to ourselves, as individuals and as groups? What is the scope, and the proper order, of our obligations? Since we are beings with many fidelities, our ethical probity requires that we arrive at a justifiable account of our priorities among them — at a hierarchy of our homes. And it is entirely natural, there is no selfishness or solipsism involved, in beginning with our own. What defines the distinction of our moral life, rather, is what we do after we have seen to our own. The Jewish tradition has fruitfully wrestled with this quandary. There is a verse in Exodus about the moral requirements for moneylending (preferably without interest) that begins, “If you should lend money to My people and to the pauper among you”, and in his gloss on these words Rashi, citing a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, deals with the problem of precedence: “A Jew and a gentile — a Jew comes first; a poor man and a rich man — a poor man comes first; the poor of your town and the poor of another town — the poor of your town come first.” Indeed, the fact that the poor man is one of your own, Rashi exquisitely continues, will enhance you ethically, because it will inhibit you from deriding him for his poverty. And then Rashi adds — in his own voice, with no Talmudic prooftext — a few far-reaching words on the Biblical phrase “and to the pauper among you”: “You are obligated to see yourself as if you are yourself poor.”

In other words, this ethical exercise, like most ethical exercises, depends upon a certain detachment from self, upon a correction of personal experience by means of an imaginative enlargement, so that for the fulfillment of our human purposes we are never completely imprisoned in who and what we are. A cognitive incarceration is where we always begin, but many of the conflicts between individuals and groups are owed to their willingness to end there, too — to what we might call their epistemological self-satisfaction. It is always surprising how little about the world and its meanings may be understood from the standpoint of personal experience, which we must beware of granting more authority than it deserves. Cosmopolitanism represents an inversion of a natural order of care, an insult to the suffering that is before one’s eyes, but its extension of perspective is an admirable objective, even if no woman ever gave birth to a universal and all citizens of the world have local addresses.

We may place ourselves in the center, then, but only if we recognize how small a place the center can be. It is a dot; a hot dot. One of the afflictions of our time is a resurgence of Judaeocentric pictures of the world. Antisemitism is Judaeocentric at its core; without such a cosmology it could not attribute to the Jews, or rather imbue them with, the superpowers by means of which they dominate all things. Why fear the powerless? An omnipotent enemy, on the other hand, gives the gift of an entire world-picture. (Such hyperbole, we now know, marred the postwar literature on totalitarianism, Arendt and Friedrich and some others, who painted a picture of the Soviet Union as so unprecedentedly strong, as such a juggernaut, that it dissolved any hope that it could change or collapse.) I confess that I have sometimes enjoyed a tenebrous chuckle at the sheer stupidity of antisemitism, especially since all we have ever asked of our host societies in two thousand years is to be left alone to practice our ways and to live peaceably with our neighbors. We never sought to change minds, at least not non-Jewish minds. It was not even that we dissented; we preferred not to engage. Many of our thinkers welcomed new ideas from their surroundings, but they brought them home.

For a minority, you might say, this was a practical matter, but keeping our heads largely to ourselves was not merely the cunning of exiles. It was also the temper of our faith. We had no desire for the world to be like us. Our sense of chosenness played out chiefly as a magnificent sense of self-esteem, unbreakable even when we were laid low, and if the idea of chosenness seems crazy or repugnant, so, too, were the circumstances in which we maintained our pride. We did not need power to validate our beliefs. And this turned out to be precisely the uncoercive religious sensibility that Christians (and to a lesser extent Muslims) could not abide. They simply could not live with people around the corner or on the other side of the wall who woke up every morning not in the conviction that Jesus was the son of God. Their hysteria about difference was pathetic, and it had the dangerous consequence of promoting the Jews into a historical and religious force so formidable that they qualified as a mortal enemy worthy of persecution and even destruction. Instead of putting us in the center they should have left us alone — which eventually was what the Zionists wished to accomplish for us, even as they themselves failed to leave others alone.

Along with their Judaeocentrism, however, there is our Judaeocentrism — our absolute centrality, our unreconstructed immediacy, to ourselves. The view of history according to which the fate of the world is in the hands of the Jews, which is a terrible thing, is currently being fought on the Jewish right by the view of history according to which the fate of the world is in the hands of the Jews, which is a wonderful thing. Sometimes the self-love becomes an instrument for interpreting events that have little or nothing to do with the Jews, as if we are the key to all mysteries. During the most recent rebellion in Iran, for example, Bret Stephens published a column in the New York Times with the rather unexpected title “The Ayatollah’s Antisemitism Has Undone Iran.” I had been following the tumultuous events in the Islamic Republic closely, hoping against hope as I had hoped against it before, and I was in touch with various Iranian friends and scholars so as to better understand the rebellion, and not once did I hear, or did it cross my own mind, that many thousands of Iranians were marching and dying in the streets for the sake of the Jews, for my sake, or as a protest against what the Supreme Leader had done to anybody but themselves, the perdurable people of Iran. Am I falling off the path of righteousness when I suggest that a Judeaocentric explanation for democratic unrest in Iran is a narrow focus?

Stephens was enamored of his group-narcissistic reading, and he developed it further: “Societies that have expelled or persecuted their Jewish communities, from Spain to Russia to the Arab world, were all destined for long-term decline. The same has been true for modern-day Iran.” This is risibly crude, though it is not unlike the view of world history that prevailed among the Jews in the medieval centuries, prior to the development of rigorous historiography, when the history of the world was the history of the Jews in the world. So let us begin at the beginning, with a primer on historical causality, and stipulate that many things happened in countries that expelled the Jews after they expelled the Jews and that not all those things were caused by the absence of the Jews, because there is no monocausal explanation for the fates of nations. Countries decline and fall for a host of reasons. It is possible to decline and fall, as it is to grow and prosper, without ever having enjoyed the company of Jews on your soil. Examples are beside the point; the point is the size of the world and the lasting inadequacy of simplifications about it. Stephens’ eccentric causality had a certain internetine quality. He laudably concluded that “a regime that sought to project on Jews its own malevolence may soon have its long overdue comeuppance,” but when the happy day arrives it will not be because the Jews are the pivot of Iranian history, because Murray finally persuaded Mordy at the Elders of Zion brunch at Barney Greengrass to settle the Persian account. That we are central to our own experience does not mean that we are central to the experience of others.

The Judeocentrism of the Jewish right, the myopia of intense belonging, takes also other forms. There is the impassioned identification of Judaism and Americanism, for instance, which is always accompanied by the strikingly inaccurate idea that the American republic was founded on the values of the Hebrew Bible. Recent decades of scholarship have added certain Hebrew influences to the tale of the American founding, but looming large over the Biblical verse on the Liberty Bell is, well, the glory that was Rome. The authors of The Federalist Papers called themselves Publius, not Yankel. Yet the psychological satisfaction in the perfect equivalence of country and religion is clear: everything that one loves becomes the same as everything else that one lives. What enviable harmony! If not quite a single life, the myth of such a confluence promises at least a double life without dissonance. There are many ways to purchase untroubled sleep. Never mind that this patriotism — or these patriotisms, which I share enthusiastically up to the point of their putative merger into a single patriotism — flies in the face of what we know about history and about religion.

The mistake in the modern German-Jewish identification of Deutschtum and Judentum was not that they picked the wrong tum to make synonymous with Judaism. The procedure itself was at fault. Judaism is like nothing but itself. It is a singular and autonomous entity that in its long progress through time has accepted some external influences and rejected some external influences without ever being reducible to any external influence, and never lost its quiddity, its essence, against the many forces that were arrayed against it. (Except later at the hands of Jews, but that is for another day.) It is infinitely larger and deeper than any political ideology and any political constitution. It is neither liberal nor conservative, neither Jeffersonian nor Hamiltonian. It shares principles with other traditions, but not because it is congruent with them. There never was and never will be such a coalescence. The Judeo-American tradition is as much of a fiction, a politically cheering fiction, as the Judeo-Christian tradition. The coziness is a fantasy. (Meir Soloveichik recently published a piece called “The Christian-Jewish Alliance and Its Enemies,” which bore this imperishable subtitle: “For Hashem, for country, and for Yale.” What do you give the man who has everything?) All good things, when they are good things, are not the same. Dissonance, friends, is our destiny.

After the outcome of the experiment in Deutschtum und Judentum — I refer not to Auschwitz, which really I do not expect to see, but to the intellectual and political confusion that followed from the myth of German-Jewish communion — it takes a certain foolhardiness, and a certain arrogance, to play this game, especially now. The purpose of religion is not to justify states or sacralize parties, and not only because the First Amendment frowns on the politicization of the holy. The distance that religion should keep from its society is warranted, rather, by its essentially countercultural nature. How can a religious individual call a society Christian or Jewish, how can he identify a moral code and a spiritual telos with any particular society, when every society sins and every society corrupts? There has never existed a country so morally impeccable that it would make an equivalence with an ideal version of religion even remotely plausible. Indeed, religion has sometimes demonstrated its usefulness to society by providing an independent standpoint from which to criticize it. The prophets did not counsel complicity with the majority, and neither did the man from Nazareth. Anyway, all is not well in the actually existing estates of religion, to which politics has been laying waste for many decades; and these optimistic fairy tales about incandescent convergences have a way of blinding their votaries to certain crises in their own midst, or worse, of simply hating those crises, which they regard as somebody else’s fault and somebody else’s problem. (I have a lot of Orthodox Judaism in mind.) Of course it makes no sense to hate a crisis. It is only a way of battening down a bubble.

There is an even more absurd claim in the attempt to elevate the Jews historically, to install us at the epicenter. It is the idea that we will save Western civilization. This breaks new ground in Jewish self-importance. It is a somewhat more complicated endeavor, since there are not many people, however excitable they are, who could posit a Judeo-Greek or Judeo-Roman tradition. Yet there is no denying that Western civilization — or the humanities — needs saving. (This journal was created as a modest contribution to that effort.) Jews in the West, living doubly as we do, have been among the greatest beneficiaries of the West’s better angels, and we should certainly lend a hand. But as Jews? I’m not so sure. We have experienced also the West’s worst demons. (Its two very worst demons, in fact, and less than a century ago.) Western civilization is both our civilization and not our civilization, our heritage and not our heritage. Its preservation is only partly our responsibility, though I will remain indefatigable in the struggle. The notion that Plato will survive because he will be taught in some Jewish schools is ridiculous. (It also suffers from a certain Straussian preciosity.) I ardently support the teaching of Plato in Jewish schools, not least so that the students may gain a sense of the contradictions beyond the civilizational pieties and learn to see through the empty promise of frictionlessness. When I was in a yeshiva day school, we used to call this “secular studies.” “Secular studies” were fully the other half of our education, all that stood between Athens and Jerusalem was lunch, and long may such abundance flourish, though I gather that in many religious Jewish schools today it is far from flourishing. We never had the sense that we were coming to their rescue, or that they — Shakespeare, Keats, even Ferlinghetti — depended on us for their survival. We felt, rather, that we were fortunate to have been born in such a diaspora.

I will confess that the dimensions of Jewish ignorance and Jewish illiteracy in the American Jewish community — even now, when many educational initiatives are taking place — incline me to prefer a rescue of Maimonides to a rescue of Plato. We have the resources with which to restore Maimonides — whose name I am using here as a shorthand for the Jewish heritage, religious and secular, in its own languages — to his rightful place in the minds of his descendants; but in the fight for Plato we will need allies, Jews and non-Jews, mainly non-Jews I expect, who are already on the front lines at many of the universities that the American Jewish right is so gladly giving up on. The poor of your town and the poor of the other town: eventually they will both receive charity, eventually we may bring relief to them all — but we will not save Western civilization, though the goal is noble and we must do what we can as liberals who are Jews or as conservatives who are Jews. It will have to save itself. The Jewish humanist’s work is never done. Will our Shabbes ever come?

III

The most egregious failing of the American Jewish right, its most lasting delinquency toward our children, is its refusal to discuss, or even to acknowledge, that the State of Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. After 1,200 of our own were massacred, 73,000 of their own were massacred, and it is estimated that it will take three years to clear the rubble and reveal what is beneath it. I do not see how the murder of 73,000 people falls comfortably under the rubric of self-defense. There were thousands of Hamas fighters among them, but still. And the death of their own civilians was an important element of Hamas’ savage strategy, but still. In the course of defending itself, the state that many of us love (though in smaller and smaller numbers) performed acts of evil. This is not the first time in history that a state has broken the hearts of its supporters in this way. A just war was turned into an unjust war. (My spirits sank when I saw that a certain apologist for the Netanyahu government announced a lecture on “the Jewish morality of war.” Get it?) The campaign in Gaza, whose outcome was never in doubt, was waged by Israeli leaders who disregarded all considerations of ends and means, for whom the malice of the campaign mattered more than its justice. It turns out that Jews, when they are threatened, are no saintlier with power than many other nations; and this too, alas, is a demonstration of Zionism’s rudest ideal, which is the normalization of the Jewish people. We are, in many senses, human beings in our tents. Worse, our children saw the images with their own eyes, and all the media criticism in the world will not erase from their memories the suggestion that the Jewish state is a cruel state. The depredations of intersectionality were not responsible for the carnage in Gaza.

It needs to be added that in the West Bank the Jews are not threatened. In the West Bank they are the threat. What exactly are the government-approved and army-protected pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank a retaliation for? The opposition of the people of Hebron and Jenin and Nablus to Israel? But opposition to Israel is surely not a warrant for Jewish atrocities; and it should not be beyond our empathetic abilities to comprehend why Palestinians might hold a rather negative view of Israel. The Jewish violence in the West Bank is premised on a number of assumptions that desperately need to be examined and challenged — that most, or all, Palestinians are terrorists, or potential terrorists; that the interests of the Jewish population in Israel are the same as the interests of the Jewish population in the West Bank; that the Bible should play a significant role in determining political sovereignty in the territory, and that Judaism (which anyway teaches us to be pursuers of peace) has a proper place in the discussion of Israeli safety; that the apartheid reality on the West Bank does not impair Israel’s cherished self-image as a democracy; that a state founded axiomatically on the doctrine of equal rights, as Israel was, has the authority to take away rights and behave as capriciously as monarchs and dictators; that Israel has no reason to fear the future effects of decades of the systematic humiliation of the millions of people with whom it will always, like it or not, share the land; that our feelings for the land preempt their feelings for the land because they are our feelings for the land. And if we still propose to include democratic pride about Israel in our instruction to our children, we must reckon also with the democratic disfigurements of a government that defines full citizenship ethnically and seeks to destroy the high court’s power of judicial review and attempts to ban a newspaper that has the impudence to criticize it. Jews who are concerned that the love of Israel — the critical love, the love that is not blind, which is the only valuable love there is — should not end with us must attend to what is happening.

Yet the American left, and the American Jewish left, will not help us. They are generally the sworn enemies of such an effort. On Israel, the left is venomous. While it is true that not all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, a lot of anti-Zionism assuredly is antisemitism — and more, anti-Zionism represents a denial of, a slander against, one of the fundamental pillars of Jewish identity, which is Jewish peoplehood. If you deny Jewish peoplehood, you do not deny Jews but you do deny the Jews; and as Edward Said taught, you have no right to correct or distort our understanding of ourselves, to tell us who we are. In the vocabulary of modern politics, in which peoples came to be called nations, nations have been deemed to be worthy of states; and I fail to see how you can be against Zionism and not against nationalism and nation-states tout court. If the Jewish right to a state does not negate the Palestinian right to a state, neither does the Palestinian right to a state negate the Jewish right to a state. Unless, of course, you believe that the Jews are different, a special case of unparalleled iniquity, that they alone among the nations do not deserve a state because Israel’s culpability against the Palestinians dwarfs the culpability of all the other nation-states in all their wars against all their minorities and all their neighbors — that, with their hands more bloodied than the hands of any other people ever were, the Jews and only the Jews have forfeited their claim to sovereignty; but only imbeciles and villains can believe that.

The indifference of the American Jewish left to intellectual honesty in the matter of the historical comparisons upon which moral judgments are made is despicable. And in these times the left is a veritable gusher of indifference. I do not recall it marching for Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda and Syria and the Uyghurs and the Iranian protestors (from 2009 to 2026)  and Ukraine. Even before Trump’s fraudulent action against the Venezuelan dictator, progressives were loudly  defending Maduro and denouncing María Corina Machado, the running dog of American imperialism, because her democratic revolutionism made her an ally of the dwindling numbers of Americans who still support the proliferation of democracy — in whose company the marauding Trump is nowhere to be found, he may as well be the United Fruit Company.

The astonishing range of the progressives’ indifference to les damnés de la terre — except those in une certaine terre — encompasses their own people. I do not recall articles in progressive journals, Jewish and otherwise, on problems of Israeli security and Israeli vulnerability: they have no time for such disquiet. More, I do not recall many progressives marching against antisemitism. Quite the contrary. Many on the left, and the American Jewish faction of it, regard the campaign against antisemitism cynically, as a community-wide maneuver to disguise the ugly designs of the “Zionist settler-colonial state” with the critic-proof discourse of victimization. Or more accurately, they denounce the antisemitism of the right, which is more ideologically inconvenient for them, and then pretend that reactionary antisemitism, Richard Spencer and Tucker Carlson, is all the antisemitism there is. There are many prooftexts for this mendacious electivity to cite, but here are some dismal sentences from Foer’s essay: “Like many American Jews, I once considered antisemitism a threat largely emanating from the right. . . . Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of antisemitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own.” No! It is precisely this failure to see the difference between progressivism and liberalism that is making the political renovation of America much harder. Foer’s piece is a lame document of a late awakening. After all, the career of the left wherever it has flourished has been thoroughly riddled with antisemitism. That is Jew-Hatred 101. There are libraries replete with the documentation, and nobody who calls himself a liberal, let alone a progressive, should be ignorant of them. May we agree, please, that in the struggle against those who hate us we are on our own, with no presumption of solidarity about any of the sides, catching allies as catch can?

Of late a new strain of Jewish anti-Zionism — which is a tale as old as Zionism, by the way, even though contemporary Jewish anti-Zionists regard themselves as valiant freethinkers, a sizzling vanguard — has appeared in America. It consists in an infatuation with diaspora. The new Jewish diasporism is a way of abandoning Zionism without seeming alienated from, or unfaithful to, your origins. It holds that there is glamor in an anomalous existence, in extraterritoriality, and it prefers the costs of powerlessness to the moral wrestling with power. Are these anti-statists aware that there is no predicament in the world more dire than statelessness? For these anti-Zionists, however, the “subaltern status” of the Jews was a sign of their virtue, of their cultural force. (George Steiner used to gloat that no Kafka appeared in the Jewish state, but of course no Kafka appeared in the Belgian state either.) The Jewish identity that diasporism recommends is entirely a cultural identity, as if the Jewish people will ever enjoy the luxury of an existence without politics. There is something decidedly not charming about tenured professors in Berkeley and Cambridge and Manhattan choosing to overlook entirely the subject of Jewish security. I wonder how their blithe contentment with the exile would fare among the Jews of Argentina and Iran and Russia and France.

Anyway, the historical joke is on them. Of all the principles of classical Zionism, the “negation of the diaspora” was the first to go. Conceived by an early-twentieth-century thinker named Jacob Klatzkin — a philosopher of Jewish particularism who joined the outcry against Judah Leib Gordon — and championed robustly by David Ben-Gurion, the expectation was that the founding of the Jewish state would empty the exile of its Jews, since Jewish life everywhere else had become illegitimate; but the expectation did not survive the early years of statehood, when it became clear that, as with the ancient return from the Babylonian exile, most of the Jews were not coming back. One of the most obvious facts about the history of the Jews is that Jewish civilization was created overwhelmingly in their dispersion. For some Zionists this persistence of the exile — which for many Jews, and certainly for all the Jews of the United States, is a voluntary condition — was a crushing national failure, though it turned out that the Jewish state needed the Jewish diaspora, and especially the American diaspora, to survive, and also the mass emigration to Israel of Russian Jews in the 1970s and again in the 1990s somewhat vindicated the earlier hope. In the presence of a homeland, moreover, the diaspora came to seem less “pathological” and more like another aspect of the common fate of peoples. Jews will live where they want to live unless they are no longer wanted where they live. Progressives all, the new diasporists may enjoy their non-Levantine cocoon for as long as it is enjoyable, but in the coming struggle for the reconstruction of Israel after Netanyahu, in the epic project of re-liberalization — of the restoration of decency — that sooner or later will be undertaken in Israel and the Jewish world, we will be sure not to count on them. Et qui vivra verra.

IV

In the Jewish tradition there are two canonical approaches to the question of self-criticism, of telling the truth to ourselves within the confines of our fidelity to each other.

One approach advises going easy. It originates with Hillel, the sage who moved from Babylonia to Judea in 70 BCE and restored the study of Torah there, founding the intellectual lineage of rabbinical Judaism. The Babylonian Talmud relates an incident in which the Jewish authorities who preceded him there were unable to produce a conclusive ruling in a matter of ritual law. It pertained to the question of whether Passover overrides the Sabbath in the sacrificial obligations at the Temple. (The question was not yet moot.) They had lost the thread of tradition on this question. When Hillel demonstrated, rationally and hermeneutically, that he had the answer, the defeated authorities abdicated and appointed him in their place, at which point he began to scold them for their “laziness” in the perpetuation of their patrimony. Then they asked him a related question, and he replied, perhaps a bit sheepishly, “I once heard the correct account of this law, but I have forgotten it.” And then he added this momentous observation: “But let the Jews be, for if they are not themselves prophets they are the sons of prophets.” In other words, let them do what they believe it is right for them to do. Or as a medieval commentator paraphrased it, “we can rely on what they do on their own.”

Hillel’s words — hanah lahem, let them be — acquired a meaning beyond the realm of law and became the motto for an inclination to self-forgiveness, to a prior generosity in our evaluation of ourselves. Let them be — or trust them, or relent in your rigor about them, or cut them a break. Hillel’s reference to their descent from prophets might signal a certain snobbery about the Jews — that they know better because they are spiritual aristocrats; but I detect in it also a measure of compassion, and also a measure of love, which is consistent with Hillel’s spirit in his other pronouncements. I find it hard, when I come across those words in later Jewish sources, to keep history out of the picture, and not to reflect that the hardships that the Jewish people have endured perhaps qualify them for an extra parcel of kindness from the world. I do not expect the world to comply with my tender thought; and more importantly, my tender thought can be easily abused, as it has been by contemporary Jews who have angrily maintained that after the Holocaust the world has no license to lecture the Jews on their conduct. I was raised among them. There are many responses to victimization, and one of them is to imagine, and even to demand, a degree of exemption from universal standards of truth and goodness, which certainly did not restrain the people and the peoples who made us victims. But that is not what Hillel had in mind.

Their acquaintance with injustice may also have a refining effect on the consciences of victims, since they have been deported, you might say, from evil as a concept to evil as an experience, and will never unsee what the rest of us may never see; and this evolution to vividness may become particularly important when victims become victimizers, which has been known to happen. Is it harder or easier for the oppressed to oppress? The answer is excruciatingly unclear. And so there is the other Jewish approach to the challenge of self-criticism. It is even older than Hillel and may be found in Leviticus: “Reproach and reprove your neighbor.” Hocheakh tochiakh: the verse uses the verb for “criticize” twice, emphatically, “criticize criticize,” from which the rabbis in the Talmud inferred that this criticism of one’s fellow must be delivered “even a hundred times” and “in all circumstances.” While the verse explicitly gives as a reason for the injunction “that you should not hate your brother in your heart,” a fine instance of moral education by means of law, there is nothing lenient about the injunction. We owe each other an honest reckoning. The rabbis derived a protocol for the rebuke from the interpretation of this and other verses: that it should be uttered privately to avoid the humiliation of the wrongdoer — “anyone who whitens the face of his fellow with public mortification has no place in the world to come” — though in medieval Jewish communities there were occasions and allowances for the public airing of criticisms, and there was plainly nothing private about the classical chastisements of the prophets; that it should be delivered patiently and gently; that it must be made clear to the wrongdoer that the critical words are uttered for the sake of his improvement and his well-being (the verse after this one strictly forbids vengeances and grudges); and that if it is not taken to heart by the wrongdoer on its first hearing, the rebuke must be repeated to the point of obnoxiousness, until the wrongdoer can no longer stand the hectoring and strikes the critic and says “I am not listening to you.” Reformers can sometimes be an effective bulwark against reform.

Let them be, and rebuke and reproach them. All that one can conclude from this thicket of ethical regulations is that the Jewish tradition was not designed for angels, or for a unanimous community. Also that there are no situations that unburden us from scrupulousness about our own behavior. Also that where there is love, there must be reason.

END