I There are facets of my being of which I am ashamed, but the love of my people is not one of them. (Reader, hear me out.) The bond is primordial, though I am under no illusion that its primordiality exempts it from thoughtful consideration and the question of justification. It has nothing to do with biology: peoplehood does not reach that deeply. The species precedes all the peoples, all the differentiations, even if they go to great pains to disguise this humane fact. A happy childhood surely had something to do with the formation of my national love. I was raised to be a loyal son of my people, and this instruction, much of it unspoken, delighted me; to this day I tingle at the sight of a Torah, and I cheer when my plane hits the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport. I do so unthinkingly, because expressions of profound affiliation are often made prior to reflection, the way happiness at the sight of someone I love does not await a process of validation. Long before politics enter the picture, I respond with a visceral joy to the feel of the soil of the land of Israel beneath my feet, and to the sight of its punished stones and its giddy deserts and its voluptuous forests and its cathartic sea; my very senses feel Jewish, even if I know better. For me this land will always be the land, though I am not at all against sharing it. For the sake of my brothers and sisters who live in it, I long for the day when it will be peaceably shared. And Hebrew is my island paradise; a portable paradise, a paradise unlimited by place, which is the most perfect paradise of all. I have loved it ever since I heard it. Some of my teachers taught me that my people is a chosen people, but at home I was taught self-esteem more than superiority, and anyway the belief in chosenness got tangled up early on with vexing questions about the alleged chooser. I once heard a distinguished American rabbi tell his congregation that Jewish history is “the story of a God who fell in love with a people.” We do flatter ourselves. Who could believe in such a pushover of a God? I was fortunate that my parents elected to provide for me an immense education in my people’s tradition and history and language, because nothing corrects arrogance so much as knowledge. As I acquired a familiarity with that history, moreover, I came to be schooled in a saga of sorrow. At a chillingly young age I learned to speak the language of lamentations, all the way up to the murder of my parents’ own families in an extermination that ended only seven years before I was born. So this is not a completely sunny love. For a while in my youth I lived chiefly in the Jewish shadows, and was swayed by hideous supremacist ideas. My people had recently been decimated, and I wanted to feel big and menacing. I thought I was loving my people when I was hating other people. But as I studied more and experienced more of what was bequeathed to me, the conceit of superiority, the romance of militancy, became not only ugly in my eyes but also gratuitous. It was enough that my heritage was incalculably rich and deep and beautiful; it did not need to be better than everybody else’s. The comparative impulse bespeaks an insecurity about the value of one’s origins that I utterly lack. A man who spends his days hating his origins is not a free man. Of course I recognize the dignity in alienation and the necessity in rebellion, and I believe that a life that ends exactly where it began is a wasted life. But over the decades I have grown suspicious of the psychodrama of identity, of recreational dissent and glamorous infidelity. I accept my duties, or many of them; I do not wish to see my patrimony die on my watch. It was not supposed to reach me, except miraculously; it surmounted many centuries of obscene obstacles to make it all the way to here and now; and so I have a solemn responsibility of stewardship. My people’s anxiety about survival is not a hallucination, even if it is not all we need to know about ourselves and our circumstances. The anxiety can be politically abused. We now possess power in various forms, including state power, which means not only that we can protect ourselves from hurt but also that we can inflict hurt on others — a vast ethical challenge that is still preferable to the vulnerability from which we so long suffered. The world has made morbidity very tempting for us. A large portion — too large, sometimes — of our culture is consecrated to commemoration; we are a mourning people. What we love is what’s left. When I speak of my love, I am not saying that my tradition is perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect tradition. When the Talmud does not fill me with awe it makes me cringe. I am saying rather that I feel lucky to have been born a Jew. This feeling of my good fortune — what is luck but a godless version of providence? — extends to almost the entirety of the Jewish universe. I say almost, because Jewish civilization, like every great civilization, holds many things within itself, and like every great civilization it contains nonsense and prejudice. Moreover, the notion that nothing Jewish is alien to me — to narrow, and thereby betray, Terence’s humanistic motto — makes no sense to me; it is mere ethnicity. I have in my time gladly participated in all kinds of quarrels within my community. (It helps that the tradition includes a reverence for controversy.) Even in settings of love, judgements must be made. And yet the love that I am describing surpasses
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