The Wicked Son Read online

  Well and good. But what if that outlet were denied him? What if tattooing were viciously punished, or fatal? If so, he might be forced to face and so to understand and perhaps deal with the longing the conventional expression of which was denied him.

  He might, then, ask “Why do I wish to be tattooed? Why is it unimportant to me that, though my tastes may change, my tattoo will remain? Is it truly possible to distinguish myself and proclaim my individuality by doing the exact same thing as all of my peers?” Thus, perhaps, “Is there a happier, a more exclusive, a more attractive group to which I might aspire than the mere confederacy of the tattooed?”

  These ruminations, prompted by restraint, might reveal to the questioner something surprising, unsuspected, and perhaps useful about that time of transition in which he finds himself. This process of thought, then, might be a true period of matriculation, these mental and spiritual ruminations themselves an ordeal of change, whose worth (as opposed to that of the tattoo) might grow over time. And this period of restraint might bear fruit over time in the choices that might proceed from it.

  The apostate Jew, the wicked son, similarly, bears the curious double longing: to individuate himself and to be an individual worthy of inclusion in a group—to feel self-worth.

  Ignorant of the practices of his own tribe, he gravitates toward those he considers Other: other than his parents, his race, his religion—thinking, as does the adolescent, that they possess some special merit (that they are not his parents).

  But these new groups are attractive to the apostate merely because they are foreign. In his attraction to them, he thinks, as does the adolescent, that he has discovered a special, magic stratagem: “I may simply flee!”

  The urge to belong is real; it is strong; it is, in most, irresistible.

  But imagine if this adolescent being ratifies the urge but reconsiders its expression. What if he exercises restraint? What if he denies himself the undeniable urge to leave, to gash his flesh, to be the Other, to flee the tribe? He will, then, be confronted with those feelings he has feared and suppressed, which are his deepest desires.

  He may then perceive the true, the natural, the inevitable nature of his longing, which is simply to belong, and may, in this period of restraint, reason further, why not study how to belong to the tribe that is his own?

  * * *

  Dead Jews and Live Jews

  “Don’t forget you must pitch the old black male vs. the young black male, and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves, and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female.”

  —From the Willie Lynch Letter, a speech purportedly given in 1712 in the colony of Virginia by a British slave owner from the West Indies, on the subject of subjugation*14

  Well,” the old lefties said, “we just discovered correspondence between Anne Frank’s father and the U.S. Department of State. He was, it seems, begging the United States for those documents that would allow him and his family to immigrate. And he was, of course, denied.”

  We shook our heads. This was a familiar form of communion between Jews of our age—I was born right after the War; they were born in the thirties. We all had either relatives of some degree of consanguinity, or friends of relatives, who had died in Europe. We all knew Jews with the camp tattoos on their left arms, and the murder of the European Jews was to us a living, ineradicable memory.

  One of the members of our group had fled from Warsaw in September of 1939, her family strafed by the Luftwaffe on the roads out of Poland.

  In the 1970s and ’80s, we talked of our fears for America in the midst of a period of radical change, and dinner talk progressed pleasantly, and familiarly, as might have been predicted. And then my friends continued their—our—harangue against the administration with an indictment of their position on Israel.

  “And how can they support the Israelis over the Palestinians and call themselves champions of freedom?” they wondered. “The two-state solution is the only answer.”

  “But,” I said, “the Palestinians have vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. A two-state solution would mean the end of Israel.”

  And they shrugged, meaning “Let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Do you realize,” they said, “the indignities to which the Palestinians are subjected by this new wall?”

  I nodded.

  “They are forced to wait hours to travel from their homes to their jobs.”

  I responded that many Israelis did not have that problem, because they were dead, killed by suicide bombers, killed in their buses on the way to school. My friends shrugged again.

  “The problem,” they said, “is Israel itself. Do you know, do you know that Ben-Gurion said that Israel was settled by ‘the scum of the camps’?”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  They explained that Ben-Gurion’s view and their view was that the only Jews who escaped the camps were those who had sufficient criminal instincts or talents to sell out their like, to collaborate with the Nazis, and, thus, live to freedom.*15

  I thought this was the worst comment I had ever heard—vicious race treason, the leftist equivalent of the most rabid rantings of the know-nothing Right. My friends had adopted the Jacobin rhetoric of the suicide bombers, directed not only against humanity, but particularly against their own people.

  Their idea of a Jew, then, was Anne Frank. Why? Because she was dead. She could, in failure, be accorded merit, but, had she lived, had she and her family survived, they would have been guilty of a crime against humanity, to wit, having survived.

  The only good Jew was, in effect, a dead Jew.

  Now, my Jewish friends—how were they exempt? They had lived through the War but bore no taint. Through what personal excellence had they survived?

  Had their immigrant parents delayed their European emigration by some scant years, my friends would have died in the camps, and yet they felt themselves free to anathematize the survivors. This was not survivor guilt but cowardice; it was preemptive treason. They were selling out, in advance, their like.

  There was, of course, an element of self-reassurance in their stance—that such could never befall them. But why? Because they were intellingent? Because they were bold? They were neither; because they were “Jewish but not that Jewish.”

  The Holocaust, to them, was not tragic but intellectually inconvenient.

  Who is this savant who blames the victim? Who is this immune individual who asks, as does the Wicked Son, “What does all this mean to you?”

  Who are these vile friends on the Left, who enjoy and applaud themselves for enjoying the quirks, customs, and observances of every race and culture but their own? They are a plague.

  They are the Korah Rebellion, turning against Moses; they are the generation of the desert, worshipping the golden calf, and they are the spies who would not enter Canaan.

  The rabbis, again, teach that all sin is essentially that of the golden calf, or that of the spies.

  In the first, the Jews are awaiting Moses’ descent from the mountain with the word of God. Overcome by the imminence of revelation, terrified of loss of autonomy, guilty with the burden of their own sinfulness, and loath to cease sinning, they set up a golden bull calf and worship it. They award themselves the ability to create a God, in effect, in order to become God. This is the sin of idolatry.

  Later, Moses sends twelve scouts to spy out the Promised Land. They report that it flows with milk and honey but that it is unfortunately guarded by giants, against whom the Jews could not possibly prevail. This attitude infects the Jews, who are, then, kept out of the Promised Land until the coward generation of the desert dies. This is the sin of discouragement, which might also be called “lack of belief in God.”

  Rabbi Mordechai Finley taught that the Jews were not asked to prevail alone against the Giants, they were asked to trust God and to prevail with God�
��s help. Rabbi Finley taught, further, that Reform Judaism has long held that religion is based upon acts, and that a belief in faith characterizes the Christian religion and is foreign to Judaism.

  Each religion, however, he taught, contains the same elements, taught in different admixtures. One may emphasize, at some point, one element over another, but each contains them all, and it is a mistake to suppose that Judaism does not both recognize and demand that spiritual devotion which might be called faith. Rabbi Nachmann taught that life is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.

  Continuing fear is usually metamorphosed by the sufferer into some more easily assimilated form. Into self-idolatry, for example—“I am immune, for I possess some inchoate excellence.” Lack of belief becomes rejection of belief.

  My good friends saw, in themselves, heroes who would have, in that time, championed the right, who would have stood up for the Frank family. They, in a fairly benign fantasy, elected themselves wise and powerful and courageous.

  Faced with the same situation today, asked to side with, to understand, at the very least to empathize with, that same group, their people, the Jews, they took the part of ignorance and abandonment and sided with their people’s enemies.

  The novelist W. C. Heinz was a war correspondent in the European theatre. He landed on D-Day and stayed in the front lines until the end of the War.

  He wrote that the correspondent was constantly torn between fear and guilt. He had to get up every morning and choose to go into battle.

  Meanwhile the young men around him had no choice. They fought to live; the correspondent fought to live with himself.

  * * *

  Clerambault’s Syndrome

  The conversos of Spain escaped the Inquisition by pretending to embrace Catholicism. They acted, in all outward forms, as Catholics but secretly practiced Judaism in their homes. The new converso, the assimilated Western Jew, in a curious inversion, practices no religion whatever, retaining only his self-identification as a Jew.

  How odd. This self-identification offers neither protection nor joy—indeed, quite the opposite. It is observably unpleasant to the individual, usually tempered by “But I’m not observant” or “My parents were…” and so on; it is not a proclamation but a confession. As such, it can be seen as a wish, and this is, I think, the true link to the converso: the apostate Jew confesses what to him, as to the Inquisition, is a sin.

  Just as with the converso coreligionists, his confession is a step toward acceptance by the wider community. The converso could not live, let alone thrive, in Spain as a Jew; the current apostate makes a clean breast of his genetic error in an unconscious hope of thus being acceptable to the Christian community.

  Ignorant of religion (his own and that of those he attempts to placate), he unthinkingly performs an act of submission. In this he is as the victim of de Clerambault’s Syndrome.

  Here the sufferer, awed by the supposed power of another, is driven to offer sexual submission. For example, the new recruit at Marine boot camp must begin and end every sentence with the word “sir.” Should he omit the closing, the drill instructor might say “I need you to put the ‘sir’ on the end, or else I might suspect you’re going to end your sentence, ‘and I want to suck your——.’”

  The powerful and famous are familiar with the phenomenon of total strangers, in a crowd, miming sexual submissiveness and availability. These afflicted admirers would, perhaps, be mortified to recognize their behavior—they have, in their awe, been regressed, via the most ancient of neural pathways, to an animal state, self-prostrated before a conqueror.

  The Marine recruit, however, is rescued from his terror. His psychosis has been induced by the organization that intends, by that means, to assimilate him. He is being broken down so that he may be rebuilt by and in fealty to his new tribe.

  But not the apostate. He will continue in a bearable, if regrettable, state of unconscious submission, not recognizing the symptoms of his misplaced—and for that, all the more pathetic—desire to belong.

  Why is this desire repressed?

  Because he considers it shameful.

  Why does he consider it shameful?

  Because he has adopted the view of the anti-Semites—his enemies. He is frightened by the presence of a natural urge, to belong, as he, ignorantly, feels its most proximate object as forbidden.*16

  Separated from the Jews, knowing nothing of Judaism except the slander of its opponents, the apostate would transfer his fealty to those he considers the stronger group. His first motion toward them is the offer of a gift: he accepts their notional superiority—he then endeavors to ape what he considers their practices: he confesses his sin. But the Christians never will accept him, and he has rejected the Jews.

  What persists? The habit of confession, which is to say, of anomie, which is his ongoing state; it has become a constant of his own self-image, indeed an article of unreasoning, fervent belief.

  He has in effect created a new, unnamed religion. It does not offer peace, but it has the merit of familiarity.

  * * *

  Moses and Monarchy

  The wicked son is, largely, a phenomenon of twentieth-century America. He shares with his country the delusion that a vague notion of his own benevolence will protect him in the world. In what this benevolence consists is unclear. It is somehow allied to the idea of inherited merit: that one’s father fought in World War II, the American feels, will somehow win from the descendants of other nations good wishes, understanding and, truth be told, submission.

  But gratitude, as Eric Hoffer tells us, is a greatly overrated sentiment and never to be relied upon.

  Why should heredity confer impugnity? A moment’s reflection teaches that it will not.

  Further, the fallen-away Jew is bifurcated in his magical understanding of inheritance: he has been freed to espouse or enjoy a doctrine of lassitude and privilege by the same fathers whose religion and race he discards. “I am Jewish but not too Jewish” can be understood as a statement of secularity and ingratitude, to wit: because my ancestors suffered persecution and prevailed, I will renounce their struggle and call my ingratitude enlightenment; my ignorant scorn of the Israelis and their struggle will be called championship of the oppressed, my ignorance of religion common sense; and my supercilious superiority to its practices a licensed diversion.

  Licensed by whom or what? This scoffing at the seder table, the proud announcement of X decades without having set foot in a synagogue, the delighted self-mockery at wearing a handout kippah at a wedding? This boorish, ignorant behavior, unthinkable in practice toward the customs of another, are practiced against his own kind—good clean fun to the wicked son.

  I attended a bar mitzvah, proudly announced by the parents as the first in their family in sixty years. The reception was lavish; vast jumbo shrimp were the first course, and an African band serenaded the large group. The bar mitzvah’s uncles came onstage to congratulate him, one of them stark naked and covered only by the fronds he had filched from the stage’s décor. He delivered his congratulations in a “darky” voice, to some merriment from the group.

  Those left at the foot of the mountain waited for Moses to bring down the law. They overcame their fear with ceremony—they melted down the gold they had taken from Egypt, formed it into a bull calf, and worshipped it. They, again, were not unaware but rather too aware of the closeness of God, and they felt shame—such shame that it reduced them to buffoonery, to idolatry, to a depraved attempt to escape from the knowledge of their own unworthiness.*17

  What is this supposed store of cost-free merit upon which the fallen-away Jew relies? It is Mama’s Bank Account. There is nothing there.

  His historic impugnity (call it fortuitous or God given) has created arrogance. The arrogance will vanish, however, in time of trouble, for in the pogrom the apikoros will look for a house with a mezuzah, and the afflicted will plead to be taught to pray.

  This should be evident to even the mo
st comfortable. But the reason of the apikoros has been troubled. Like the American electorate, he has been deranged by freedom of choice.

  We humans autonomically endow a leader with magical powers. It is a tropism allied to that of love, wherein, we are reminded, lovers cannot see the petty follies they themselves commit.

  The chemical, neurological endowment of the leader induces a sort of madness as the masses are now unable to impute to the leader humanity. His supporters think him incapable of human frailty, his detractors see in him nothing else. He has been raised to supernatural status.

  Our human tendency toward self-aggrandizement and our sad knowledge of our own worthlessness are cathected onto the elected leader; for good or ill, he is no longer human. The will to believe in the leader is so strong that even elected governments devolve inexorably toward monarchy—consider, for example, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, Gore, Bush, the Sinatras.

  In a democracy, however, the electorate is unaware of the process, and the residual illusion of rational choice blinds the voter not only to his wish for monarchy but also to its essential nature, which is acknowledgment that the role of the monarchy’s leader is symbolic.

  In the actual, contemporary monarchy, that is evident which in its supposedly democratic imitators is hidden: that the individual, and that a society must govern itself, as the monarch is a figurehead.

  Acknowledgment of the nonpotent nature of this figurehead diffuses the unconscious, unavowable, infantalizing wish to be ruled; after which the individual now-aware voter can get down to the business at hand: the unromantic, mundane, and most necessary day-to-day government of and by fallible human beings—the schools, the sewers, the crumbling bridges, and the price of corn.