In 2005, I somehow or other surfed my way to the website of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial, and there I found my political conscience. Up to that point, mine had been a politics of breezy, amoral abstractions. Universal emancipation — the project to which I was committed as a college and post-college Marxist — entailed great upheavals and great sacrifices. “So what if a few million have to die?” was the sort of thought that crossed my mind and sometimes even my lips. In my defense, I was a twenty-year-old special-education teacher working on the US-Mexico border; whereas Eric Hobsbawm made such chilling calculations in his seventies.
But then, on the Yad Vashem site, I ran across an account of a dirt-poor Polish farmer who, risking his life, had taken in Jewish neighbors; a Japanese diplomat who had issued life-saving visas until the last possible minute; a Berlin-based Egyptian urologist who had gone so far as to procure a certificate of Islamic conversion for a protégé in order to protect her from deportation; and many others of the kind. Righteous Among the Nations — the label used by the Yad Vashem authorities to describe such men and women was itself sufficient to elicit hot tears. I would read one account, break down, collect myself, then click the next, rinse, repeat.
The Righteous, and the unspeakable evil they countered, punctured every easy resort to grandiose abstraction. They made it impossible to coolly partition politics from ethics, the gyre of the dialectic from right and wrong. I could no longer speak of History with a capital-H demanding this or that compromise with inhumanity. No, politics was inseparable from the question of what I might do when faced with this person, these facial features, these interlaced fingers. Life or death. Righteousness or unrighteousness.
Was I one of the righteous? Would I have been counted among them if I had been born a few decades earlier?
I have visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem several times since then. But that early encounter with its webpage was more influential on my mind than strolling through the brick-and-mortar museum, emotionally overpowering as that experience is. Reading about the Righteous put an end to my strict Marxian historicism: the belief that all ideals, sentiments, and ethical claims reflect the contingent material conditions and hierarchies of a given society at a given point in time. Such thinking was logically self-defeating, as Leo Strauss had pointed out: how could historicism survive itself? How could historicism remain transhistorically valid if it were true? (Marx himself, in his best moments, took for granted the existence of moral values traduced by capital when it extracted surplus value from women and children chained to factory machines.)
But more important, radical historicism could not withstand the actions of the Righteous, which attested to the existence of an objective moral order, whose dictates were inscribed in the hearts of people from a vast range of backgrounds. And inscribed in my own heart. My interior moral awareness — the conscience which urged me to do good deeds and eschew bad ones in mundane matters, and which chastised me when I failed to heed its injunctions — had political implications. The aim of political life, then, was to secure a public realm in which acting in accord with the conscience did not require extraordinary private courage; one in which ordinary people could live ordinary decent lives.
But there were more immediate consequences. For one thing, I threw myself into the life of the Jewish mind. The questions of the Jewish intellectual tradition, broadly understood, became my questions. If the Jews could somehow resolve the contradictions of their modernity — memory and progress, justice and mercy, and above all national particularism and ethical universalism — then perhaps the rest of us stood a chance, too. I took out a subscription to the (old) New Republic. Read the poems of Yehuda Amichai and the prose of David Grossman. Learned journalism more or less by imitating Paul Berman. Started pitching Michael Kazin at Dissent and John Podhoretz at Commentary. I published in both, becoming one of a very few writers this side of the 1970s to embody Woody Allen’s old joke about the two journals merging to form Dysentery.
And another thing: I would henceforth defend the right of the Jewish people to a safe, sovereign state in their ancestral land. There was no religious component to my newfound Zionism; I was an avowed atheist back then. And while I have since converted to Catholicism, the faith has neither deepened nor diminished my Zionist commitment. Rather, my Zionism was and remains a strictly secular affair: for so long as the world is divided into nation-states, the Jews, of all people, are eminently entitled to one they can call their own.
They tried conversion (Heine), and it didn’t work. They tried assimilation (Dreyfus, Herzl), and it didn’t work. They tried calling their places of worship “temples” — as in, here in Munich or Amsterdam is our temple — and decking them out with stained glass, and it didn’t work. They tried pork, and it didn’t work. They tried actually existing socialism, and ended up dead in Lubyanka prison and on trial in the Doctor’s Plot. A sovereign Jewish state, then, was a paramount necessity in the nationalist world that emerged in the nineteenth century, and it became a dictate of political conscience in the first half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the events depicted on that Yad Vashem website.
Two decades later, I still believe firmly in the need for a sovereign Jewish homeland. The problem — and I know it isn’t mine alone — is that lately the conscience-based call to defend Israel clashes with other pressing dictates of the conscience. Not to put too fine a point on it, today’s Israeli leadership — and, I fear, much of the country’s wider political culture — are brutal to a simply intolerable degree.
This brutality, this cruelty, is evident in the Jewish state’s actions toward the Palestinians in Gaza: the reckless firing at civilians; the imposition of a starvation siege on the enclave; the murder of nearly a thousand innocents at aid-distribution sites; the blocking of humanitarian supplies, sometimes by civilians who make of it a festive family affair (to starve the Gazans); the Milosevic-style calls for ethnic cleansing issuing from sitting Cabinet members; and on and on.
It is not just Israel’s viciousness in armed conflict that troubles the conscience, but also the crude, absolutist collapsing of those constitutive tensions of Jewish life. Too many among today’s Israeli elites appear to have closed off the horizon of authentic progress and reconciliation in favor of blood grievance. They have definitively given up on mercy to pursue justice to the Nth degree, going far beyond the classical definition of giving each his due: Hamas killed 1,200 people on that terrible October day, so Israel will “wipe out Gaza,” as one minister recently declared. Worst, they have definitively foreclosed universalism in favor of the most pinched particularism.
I flip through my copy of the English translation of Sefer Ha-Aggadah, or The Book of Legends, the marvelous compilation of Talmudic and Midrashic lore composed by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the scholar Yehoshua Ravnitsky. The handsome volume opens up, serendipitously, to the section on “Israel and the Nations of the World.” There it is written: “This people is distinguished by three characteristics: they are merciful, modest, and benevolent. He who has these characteristics is fit to join this people.” (The text cites the Babylonian Talmud and the sixteenth-century anthology Ein Yaakov).
Anyone who takes such statements for a sign of Jewish self-regard doesn’t know the first thing about the Jews, the Bible, or the rabbinic tradition. When the rabbis taught that mercy, modesty, and benevolence are the essential ingredients of Jewishness, they weren’t patting their people on the back. Rather, they were underscoring the high ethical standards emanating from He who, time and again, called the patriarchs and the prophets by name, prompting them to prostrate themselves in the dust: “Here I am, Lord!”
The Talmudic passage adds: “He who does not have these characteristics” — mercy, modesty, benevolence — “is not fit to join them.” These few crisp, stern sentences seem to encapsulate the whole drama of Jewishness, and what has made Jewish civilization such a precious gift to the moral development of our species: the expression of ethical universalism in a particular people and through their particular movement in history.
The ancient Jews, as Pope Benedict XVI taught in his lecture at Regensburg in 2006, held out definitive answers to the questions that consumed the civilizations that encircled them, particularly the Greeks: Who or what is the uncaused cause behind everything else that there is? In a world defined by relentless change, what is the unchanging agent without which there would be an infinite regress of potential agents? And could human beings approach this ultimate agent? Could they participate in its life through contemplation or ethical activity?
Aristotle offered satisfying philosophical answers, but he could not reconcile them with the religion of his people. Early in the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, he doubted the popular belief that the dead may be rendered happy or unhappy by the fate of their living descendants. This, even as, in the Politics, he insisted on the need for a priesthood for the celebration of rituals that Aristotle the philosopher considered inefficacious (such as the “feeding” of the dead). The divinities of the city, then, had to be upheld only for the sake of social cohesion. They had little to do with the god of the Academy.
It was different with the Jews. They preached not household divinities, nor mere local patrons, but a God who was the lord and creator of all; who assailed myth and was identified with the source of being and as being itself. As Benedict said at Regensburg: “The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, ‘I AM,’ already presents a challenge to the notion of myth” in tandem with Greek philosophy.
As Israel moved through history — as defeat and exile scattered them among the nations — biblical religion came more and more to emphasize the universal reason embedded in the I AM. This gave rise, in Benedict’s account, to “a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands.” Amid Hellenistic conquest and the Jewish reaction against it, biblical faith and Greek philosophy came to mutually enrich each other (as evidenced, for example, in the striking parallels between Ben Sirach and Solon).
From a Christian perspective, of course, this convergence culminated in the figure of Jesus, divine reason made flesh. As Benedict contended in a different context, Christianity made definitive and explicit the process of “universalization” already latent in biblical faith. Gentile and Jew alike were invited into a new covenant; the cultic commandments of the old religion were dispensed with in favor of their inner meaning — the “circumcision of the heart”; faith supplanted flesh as the locus of election. (Again, this is the Christian view of Jewish faith; Jews object strenuously.)
Ever since, the obdurate persistence of Israel, of a people bound to the old, but not the new, covenant, has confronted Christianity as a challenge — what Jacques Maritain called “the mystery of Israel” in a critique of anti-Semitism that he published in 1937. “Israel is a mystery,” wrote Maritain, in the same way that the Church is a mystery. Thus, “to wish to find, in a pure, simple, decisive sense of the word, a solution of the problem of Israel is an attempt to stop the movement of history.”
Classic anti-Judaism, in which European society projected its inner demons onto the despised figure of the Jew, was one such “solution”: after Christ, the purpose of the Jew was to stand as a negative monument, a reminder of the price of rejecting the new covenant. Modern anti-Semitism was an even more monstrous “solution” (Maritain, writing four years after Hitler came to power, chose that word carefully). Yet the temptation to collapse the mystery of Israel is not limited to the Gentiles. As the State of Israel’s current descent into barbarism attests, the Jews themselves at times yearn to escape their dilemmas: to renounce mental and ethical universalism once and for all as an external imposition, mottling Jewish blood and endangering Jewish vitality.
The dichotomy is serious, as Jewish thinkers have been the first to recognize. The philosopher Michael Wyschogrod, to take one, argued that the very openness of the Christian covenant, its displacing of flesh by faith, had pushed the Christian mind “to an ever greater concern with philosophy, a tendency that, while not totally absent in the history of Judaism, never reaches the proportions it does in Christianity.” The latter’s “deep involvement” with Greek thought, for Wyschogrod, gave rise to “myriad problems” for the faith. The Jews, by implication, had escaped these problems by remaining within their own theological framework, their encounters with Greek philosophy notwithstanding.
A few decades earlier, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik made a similar point. The “cosmic” spirit exemplified by Greek philosophy, he thought, did not belong in the realm of law and morality, certainly not for the Jew. “Cosmic man,” he wrote, rebels against divine edicts unless he can discern some deeper meaning and logical purpose behind them. But the Jew must accept the mitzvot, the commandments — not just the moral ones but also the cultic ones proscribing certain foods and so on — simply because they are God’s laws. Put another way: Rabbi Soloveitchik more or less rejected the natural law as a sufficient basis for reconciling reason and revelation.
The tension is even more glaring when it comes to the question of political form. As I have argued at length elsewhere, historic Christianity’s proper political form is the multinational empire: a fundamental Roman-ness is woven into the faith’s warp and weft. The Jews, by contrast, have always thought in terms of the nation. “The mystical body of Israel,” observed Maritain, “is that of a specific people; its basis is temporal and involves a community of flesh and blood.” The cosmopolitanism engendered by dispersion was real enough, but it was bittersweet; all along prayer kept alive the yearning for the particular place, for the city of David.
Yet we cannot close the analysis at this point. Doing so would mean acquiescing to the worst anti-Semites, who claim that the Jewish pretense to universality is just that: veiling naked particularism and Jewish “ethno-narcissism.” It would also mean giving succor to the most rabid of today’s Jewish ultra-nationalists and the violent settlers, who maintain that, when it comes to the Palestinian problem, universal values and international law and the “opinions of mankind” are irrelevant at best. The rabid Jewish particularist as much as the anti-Semite would sever the Jews from ethical universalism (out of a shared hatred of it). But the fact is, it was the God of the Jews who, beginning with the Noahic covenant, disclosed himself as a universal God, bearing a message for all humankind, over and above pagan myth and local deities. It was the God of the Jews who bestowed Sabbath and jubilee upon the Jews and “the sojourner among you.”
The Hebrew Bible, and the Jewish tradition, are riddled with calls to universal values. “The Holy One declares no creature unfit, but receives all,” teaches the Talmud. “The gates [of mercy] are open at all times and he who wishes to enter may enter.” The Tanna devei Eliyahu, an early medieval midrashic compilation, teaches in Elijah’s name: “I call heaven and earth to witness that whether it be Jew or Gentile, man or woman, manservant or maidservant, the holy spirit will suffice each in proportion to the deeds he has performed.” And Eikhah Rabbah,the ancient rabbinical commentary on Lamentations, instructs: “Should a person tell you that there is wisdom among the nations, believe it.” And on and on, to the detriment of an old stereotype about the Jews.
Maritain’s interpretation of Jewish modernity had it right. Although the Jews had rejected the universalization of biblical faith in Jesus, they would nevertheless devote their best energies to the promotion of ethical universalism whenever the Gentiles permitted it. Maritain described this as the Jews’ historic mission to “stimulate the world,” without which the Gentile world was bound to become duller and more unjust. Hence, the Jewish contribution — held in such odium by Israel’s haters — to the great modern projects of enlightenment and emancipation: liberalism, socialism, racial egalitarianism, even psychoanalysis. Hence, a figure such as Heschel, for whom there was no contradiction between assiduously upholding Sabbath and marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King.
It is this Jewish high-wire act — the admirable complexity of Jewish ethics — that is put at risk by the behavior of the Netanyahu government, the viciousness of much Israeli political culture, and the willful blindness of pro-Israel advocates who should know better. It is an immense betrayal: the trading of the birthright of Jewish universalism for a Serbian ethnic chauvinist’s mess of pottage — Israeli children taught by their parents to destroy supplies meant for the famished of Gaza; Israeli ministers who can’t seem to go a day without calling for the destruction of “human animals”; IDF soldiers who trample the tzelem elohim, the imago dei, by shooting into crowds awaiting their meager rations; Israeli TV pundits who mock Gazan mothers who’ve lost their children to hunger; and American Jewish writers and advocates blinding themselves to all this or else offering soul-killing apologia.
Blessedly, the Jewish impulse to “stimulate the world” with ethical rectitude is irrepressible and ineradicable. As I write, tens of thousands of Israelis are marching down the streets of Tel Aviv, demanding that the siege be lifted, that the children of Gaza be fed, that Hamas’s hostages be released. Today, it is they — the Israeli left — who carry the Jewish conscience, who grasp all the dimensions of Jewish moral responsibilities (which of course include security).
For its part, Yad Vashem, the institution that played such a significant role in forming my political conscience, is also mobilizing against the horror in Gaza. Recently, the museum’s director published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post in which he rebuked Israeli leaders’ “calls for indiscriminate bombing, for denying humanitarian aid, or for erasing the distinction between civilians and terrorists.” In issuing the statement, Yad Vashem proved itself worthy of the Righteous whose memory it celebrates and the victims of the Shoah whose names it safekeeps.
“This people are said to be like dust and said to be like stars,” states the Talmud in the tractate Megillah. “When they go down, they go down to the very dust. But when they reach up, they reach up to the stars.”