The Wicked Son Read online

  Gun collectors, stamp collectors, aviation enthusiasts, gardeners, golfers, these know the meaning of zeal. Collectors see each other at a swap meet, looking for that missing piece. And as we search, we are drawn, we are awakened, to other possibilities, vertically, across the spectrum of interests and, horizontally, back through time and forward to the similarly devoted. As our collection takes shape, we muse on or plan a completion, a bequeathal, and rejoice at the discovery or induction of an acolyte.

  And yet, what is it? The stoics say, “Of what is it made?” The collector’s object of love is only a bent piece of steel, a stamp, a scrap of shaped wood, a colored plate. Ah, but, we say, the romance is not even limited to the actual object. Are we not moved to a similar state of bliss by mere contemplation of its ideal, its description, model number, recipe?

  It is said there are three happy states of the collector: discovery, possession, and dispersal, each of which, during its period of sway, is supreme: to thirst after, to enjoy, to share; until the burning desire, in the perfected state, is clear of attachment either to the thing itself or to its contemplation—devotion, over time, having been blessed with a repletion of gratitude, sufficient unto itself.

  And yet. This love of community, this love of knowledge, this joy of immersion in history, this thirst for group approval, for moral perfection, this endless variety of vertical and horizontal connection, these are all open to the Jew, both his right and his responsibility, and Judaism goes begging.

  * * *

  Chesed/Gevurah

  I knew a fellow who prided himself on the view that perhaps O. J. Simpson did not kill his wife.

  A laudable disposition to open-mindedness decayed, in late twentieth century, in America, into an inability to arrive at conclusions. Much of what has come to be muddle-headedness derives from a lack of stake in any outcome. The forces operating on our lives seem increasingly remote, less understandable, and so have become moot—capable of being discussed but incapable of being understood, let alone affected.

  But there are issues upon which one must take a stand. One of them, I believe, is that of Jewish identity; for not to do so is to remove oneself from the group.

  An editorial in the Washington Times referred to George Soros as someone who “somehow managed to survive the Holocaust” (quoted in an editorial in The New York Times—read it again—it is an accusation).

  But the wicked son feels he may, with impugnity, abstain when the roll is called.

  George Stevens, the great American film director, was with his Army unit at the liberation of Dachau. He returned, some eight years later, with his son, who photographed him. In the photograph he is dressed in civilian clothes, wearing a raincoat, in back of his Duschbad—shower bath. His face is, to me, the face of responsibility.

  It is not that one might, through laziness, fatigue, or lack of courage, shrink from responsibility, that one might be untrue to the sufferings of one’s fellow Jews—one cannot possibly be other than untrue, one must falter; but one must try again to regard and to assess the unimaginable: that there are, have been, and, sadly, will be, those who wish one and one’s kind dead because of one’s heritage, race, or religious beliefs.

  Self-exclusion must arise from a feeling of indemnity. Converted Jews were hounded by the Inquisition well into the nineteenth century—the reluctant convert and the true convert both liable to accusations of “a lack of sincerity,” and killed. As were the German-Jewish despisers of the Ostjuden (the Polish Jews), those comfortable, assimilated Jews who imagined that anti-Semitism was not a psychosis on the part of the majority populace, but rather that group’s correct understanding of the “Jewish plague” that endangered them all.

  But all who stayed went to the ovens.

  For the Jew to say, of the Jew-haters, I agree with them; and to say, I do not have facts to judge, but, perhaps some of what they say is true, misses the point. The point is that, to the jihadist, to the anti-Semite, the shtetl Jews and the German banker, the West Bank settler and the Ohio dentist are one. To suggest that the rational thinker is exempted, either through identification with the aims of killers, or through a laudable withholding of judgment, posits a position of impugnity. This feeling of impugnity—as the terrorists have limited themselves neither geographically, nor to a degree of consanguinity—is madness. To them, as to the editorialist at the Washington Times, a Jew is a Jew.

  The acquiescent apikoros basks in sloth. This person is not righteous but cowardly, and neither sloth nor cowardice will protect him if, God forbid, the hammer of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the jihad falls toward him. Who will protect him? His fellow Jews.

  * * *

  What Israel Means to Me

  Noam Chomsky was interviewed in Heeb magazine, July 2004:

  Q. What about recent incidents in Europe and the Arab world. It would seem to involve pretty acrobatic leaps of logic to say that those are not anti-Semitic.

  CHOMSKY: In Europe there’s a large Muslim population, and much of it has been driven to fundamentalist Islam. They display hatred toward Jews that is a reflection of Israeli practices. I mean, if you carry out a brutal and vicious military occupation for 35 years…it has consequences. Sometimes the consequences can be quite ugly, and, among them, is the burning of synagogues in France. Yes, it’s anti-Semitism, but Israel insists on it. Remember, Israel does not call itself the state of its citizens. The high court in Israel declared over 40 years ago that Israel is the sovereign state of the Jewish People, in Israel and the Diaspora.

  In effect, since the Jewish State has proclaimed itself as the home of all Jews within its borders and in the diaspora, for the diaspora Jews to do other than renounce this, as a usurpation of their personal rights to self-determination, of their rights as undifferentiated citizens, is tantamount to their endorsement of that which Mr. Chomsky sees as a criminal enterprise (the State of Israel).

  Mr. Chomsky, a Jew, does not recognize the Jewish State’s right to existence; he does, however, recognize as somehow morally binding the pronouncements of this phantom state. Upon whom are they binding? Upon members of that state’s predominant religious group wherever they may live.

  These diaspora Jews, we will note, reside in countries whose right to existence, presumably, Mr. Chomsky does recognize. For example, France. France, as a sovereign nation, then, has the right, as Israel does not, to protect its citizens. The right, however, does not, in Mr. Chomsky’s view, extend to French Jews—their right to live unmolested and in peace has, alone among French citizens, been somehow abrogated by the actions of another state.

  Various Muslim countries, including Syria and the Palestinians have, as a matter of both religious and political doctrine, repeatedly expressed their intention to destroy the Israeli Jews. This intent is not an adjunct of a territorial dispute but an essential component of their polity—this hatred cannot be mitigated by concession, by negotiation, even by capitulation; it can only be assuaged through blood.

  Mr. Chomsky does not seem to object to this incitement to genocide; neither does he extend the same standard for extraterritorial guilt to diaspora Muslims.

  The United States, in the aftermath of September 11, has taken care (it may be insufficient, but it is a matter of national policy) to protect the rights of Arab-Americans—on guard lest an ignorant and frightened populace turn on the guiltless because of their mere ties of race or religion to criminals.

  This would seem to be a most basic operation of human justice—for to endorse a vendetta against the innocent based on race or religion is here seen, and simply seen, as obscene criminality. Mr. Chomsky, however, sees fit to understand and applaud such actions, as long as they are carried out against the Jews.

  This is anti-Semitism—it is race hatred and incitement to murder.

  That Mr. Chomsky wears the mantle of respect, that he occupies the position of “intellectual,” and that he continues to confuse and debauch the young with his filth is a shame. To abide this shame is p
art of the price of living in a free society.

  Israel is a free society. The rights of the minority, of the oppressed, indeed, of the criminally foolish are protected. Mr. Chomsky would be as free in Israel to pronounce this nonsense as he is in the United States. Were he to find himself in the Arab World, he would be persecuted as a Jew (as, indeed, he might in France). And were he, God forbid, persecuted, Israel would offer him a home, under the Right of Return.

  That is what Israel means to me.

  * * *

  Well Poisoning

  There have always been unstated but universally understood exemptions in the laws governing human behavior. In this country the poor are permitted adultery and a certain degree of spousal abuse and internecine murder but are barred from theft; the rich are allowed to steal and to take drugs but are punished for sexual misconduct and physical crime.

  Similarly, on the world stage, Moslem extremists may not bomb New York, but rational human beings—some, to their shame, Jews—hold that Jihadists may bomb Jerusalem. The apologists are or pretend to be incapable of differentiating between the lamentable and decried death of civilians in a military reprisal, and the targeted strategic murder of schoolchildren.

  This license is precarious, for the Palestinians, raised by unsettled Western thought to superhuman status, enjoy that status only as a counterpoise to the “bestiality” of the Jews. Should the Palestinians choose, in their uncontrollable sorrow and extremity, to bomb New York, they would find their license revoked.

  The midrash has it that the Egyptian taskmaster whom Moses killed had spent the previous night raping the wife of the Jewish man who was now being whipped. When the man came to work that morning, the taskmaster singled him out as a fit object of scorn and abuse—a man who would not even stand up for his wife.

  And, indeed, the man submitted to this further brutality, and none of the Jews spoke up; finally, Moses could take no more. He stepped in and struck the taskmaster down. The Jews would not defend their fellow, for they had both the status and the mentality of slaves; and this, perhaps, may be seen as Moses’ first exposure to the problem of Jewish passivity, the problem that would plague him through his life and persists to our own day—that some may identify with their oppressors—the slave with their strength, the apostate Jew with their reason.

  * * *

  Hooked-Nose Jews, or Let’s Make It Pretty

  But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.

  —SAMUEL PEPYS, Diary, October 14, 1663

  Many of the country’s synagogues are defaced, not by anti-Semites but by their own members.

  I was taught by Rabbi Larry Kushner that a display of name plaques, degrees of contribution, and the like, that identification of congregation members by what and how much they had contributed, is a religious offense. And I believe it. His attitude is, in fact, so vehement that transgression is understood, in his teaching, not merely as an offense but an obscenity. But, some congregation members ask, how will we raise money otherwise—it has always been done this way (one of the Three Cardinal Arguments, the other two being: it’s a slippery slope; and, you know and I know, but unless we win the support of the ignorant, we cannot implement our intelligent plans).

  Rabbi Kushner, nonetheless, throve at his beautiful shul for twenty-seven years—a shul in which there were no name plaques, which published no levels of donation, which took real pride in the inviolability of the rabbi’s rule.

  What did this mean? That people were respected for their learning, for their ability to sing trope, for their service to the Congregation, for their more generalized ethical accomplishments: their forbearance or humor in difficult situations, for their ability to lead or follow. The simple rule, in short, inculcated a host of virtues. For what do these plaques mean, other than: so-and-so (the donor) is better than you or I?

  They can have no other meaning. They are the worship of wealth in the spot most inauspicious for that devotion. We Jews are instructed not to display any representation of the human form. How much more objectionable to display a representation of man reduced to an invidious cipher.

  One may, in this display, see a reversion to priestly Judaism. The tensions between the priests and the rabbis at the turn of the Common Era is commemorated, among our Christian neighbors, by the story of Jesus. Jesus, a rabbi, came into the Temple to cleanse it of practices he found in contravention of Jewish Law (the task, then as now, of every rabbi).

  Many depictions of Jesus, including The Passion of the Christ, show him as a rather Aryan-looking (that is, non-stereotypically Jewish) fellow, surrounded, in most cases, by his hook-nosed opponents, the Jews.

  The Christians have no prohibition against the depiction of the human form, indeed, of their gods; and one may see, in this case of the Vulgate rendition (the film), the possibility of great error. For if Jesus is shown as of another race than that of his brothers, might that not facilitate (as it certainly has done) race hatred, anti-Semitism, and an interpretation of certain objectionable parts of the Gospel to the detriment of common sense and, indeed, of their essential message?

  Rabbi Kushner and his shul also composed the first egalitarian siddur in the Reform Movement (V’taher Libenu, 1980). In it God is referred to, not as He, but, simply, as God.

  As with the prohibition on nameplates, this originally disruptive restriction forced the worshipper to constantly confront the true and deeper meaning(s) of the restriction: God, one thought fifty or a hundred times during the liturgy, is not “He.” God is not “She,” God is not human, and I am incapable of the formulation of God’s nature. God is a mystery.

  If, to the Jews, God is not a mystery, then what is God?

  Perhaps God is a fungible commodity, and the more one spends, the greater share one has in God. How wise, then, of the tradition, to put certain things beyond our human reach, to control various aspects of eating, sex, dress, speech—of, in short, our daily lives. For the notion that all prohibitions are subject to reason, interpretation, and convenience turns organized religion into an empty experience of self-help, which is to say, of “self.”

  Why do some Jews reject their religion and their race? For two reasons: because it is “too Jewish” and because it is not Jewish enough.

  The true reason may not be clear to the apostate, and he or she may in fact confuse one end of the spectrum with the other. Surrender is frightening, and surrender to one’s own tradition, race, and heritage is, demonstrably, the most frightening of all. Witness the hordes of Buddhists, ethical culturists, agnostics, practitioners of yoga, Jews for Jesus, etc., these hordes composed almost entirely of disaffected Jews.

  To these, as to the anti-Semites full stop, there is something (find a mark on the spectrum from nonfulfilling to obscene) about the oldest, wisest, and most persecuted yet longest enduring religion in the history of the world. To these the ethical, physical, and spiritual achievements of our race are as nothing; the fact of Jews’ accomplishments, vastly out of proportion to our representation in the population is, in itself, a matter of confusion and often of obloquy.

  Many of these fallen-away consider their race, and, necessarily (though not necessarily overtly or consciously) themselves, an object of scorn. These Jews act in ignorance, and, truth be told, perhaps in cowardice, positing a “general culture,” somehow possessing, magically, more beauty, wisdom, tolerance, or “acceptability” than their own.

  This is an urge to overcome some basic shame; but, as Freud told us, the resistance is the neurosis—and the supposed cause of shame does not exist. All that exists is the repressive mechanism.

  This device shifts shape, operating sometimes in the guise of “common sense,” sometimes as “cleanliness.” It is said it is common sense
that people will give more to a synagogue that blandishes their names and proclaims their generosity. Well, it may be common sense, but it is not Judaism.

  The urge to elaborate, to rationalize, to bypass the unconscious and bring “pure reason” to bear, is the death of both art and religion. They exist to bring us closer to a mystery. “Rational” Judaism supplants spirituality as the cautionary tale supplants the bedtime story, substituting instruction in the obvious for awe.

  The constant battle against personification and rationalization, against our all-too-human desire to cast ourselves as God, is not a prerequisite for the practice of religion; it is the practice of religion. The ignorant Jew may feel a certain queasiness at involvement in a process that requires him to submit to something greater than himself. The reluctance is human. To characterize it as rational abhorrence of Judaism is self-contempt.

  * * *

  The High School Car Wash

  What would Margaret Mead make of our high school car wash? This most American, least offensive outpouring of hijinks, this enlistment of good clean fun in the aid of the band or the debating club is, of course, a wet T-shirt contest featuring jailbait.

  Imagine a Web site full of these nubile and forbidden young women minimally clothed and dripping wet; logging on might open the computer operator to charges of trafficking in pornography. But there, in the high school parking lot, he can ogle the girls to his heart’s content, and get his van washed, too.

  Why is this permitted? It is permitted because the true nature of the entertainment is as hidden to the participant as it is to his potential detractors.