DON'T WORRY: WHEN THEY PUT YOU IN THE OVENS, THEY
The
title of this chapter refers to a remark that I heard more than once growing up
as a Jewish boy in Boro Park , Brooklyn in
the 1940s, a time when being a Jew was a matter of mixed fear, pride, and
guilt. Yet aside from the specific
reference to the events in the Holocaust, the saying of my grandmother and her
friends reflects an attitude very characteristic of that form of Judaism which
grew up in the shtetls of East
Europe and which flourished in the first half of the twentieth century in America Temple
When I
speak of a "contradiction", of course, I do not mean this in a
derogatory sense of absolute self-annihilation, but as a description of a
normal aspect of any and all human institutions and social formations. The contradiction is a form of tension that
keeps a language or culture from feeling totally adequate to its experiences in
history. Thus, on the one hand, Jews
profess a rigid adherence to a code of law proliferating continuously from the
Mosaic dispensation through the total manifestation of Talmudic and rabbinical
revelation; while, on the other hand, that dispensation and revelation is not
viewed as complete or codified article of faith. Whatever authority one Jew may credit to a
statement of divine writ or an insight of some saintly teacher, another Jew
will counter with an equally canonical text of Scripture or valid opinion by another
rabbi. Yet in fact Judaism is not a
free-flowing system of relativity, no more so than it is a dogmatic
rationalisation of archaic myth. The
real situation needs to be looked at by approaching Judaism less as a religion
in the sense of Christianity or other major religions in the West and more as
the cultural system or civilization we find familiar when discussing Islam or
other major religions of the East. For
Judaism is a civilization within a civilization rather than a body of
individuals professing the same doctrines of belief; these individuals do not form a racial or
national type, as ethnic history will show, and except in modern Israel
In this
light, with Judaism taken as a civilization more than a religion, it will be
possible to enunciate some of the significant implications of the customs and
behavioral characteristics, not as racial stereotypes but as what we may call the
language of mentality. Of course, what I
am speaking of here is very much the view that I see in myself though I use
some authorities. Thus the only kind of
coherence I am attempting to present in the first part of this book is of a
personal testimony, and so experience is as valid as citation, and what I seek
is to stimulate discussion rather than offer a definitive treatise.
A
second anecdotal statement to follow the words of the title set out another
answer given to me as a Jewish boy in Brooklyn . This time the statement came from a
Conservative rabbi and then was confirmed by my parents. Asking about the reality and nature of God, I
was told:
If there is a God, and God willing there is one,
then the only kind of God we can imagine is a loving and reasonable God. If he is to judge our actions, he will be
concerned with our acts of kindness and respect for other people. So be good and kind, obey your parents, study
hard, and show respect for the customs of your parents and grandparents and all
our ancestors. Then if there is a God,
no matter what you believe or what you may do about prayers and all the laws of
eating and observance, you will be rewarded as a good person. And if, God forbid, there is no God, then at
least you will have made your life meaningful and made the world better for the
people you love and come into contact with.
If, on the other hand--may I bite my tongue and suffer for it--there is
a God who cares more about belief in him and observance than he does about acts
of lovingkindness, then it would be better he does not exist. And so we shouldn't worry about beliefs, but
only do good.
Interestingly, this statement reconstructed from
memory contains some useful insights into the kind of Jewish civilisation I am
talking about, and is presented in a tone which I could not but articulate
almost on the verge of what is typical of the Jewish joke. Some of these main points are that the
question of Jewish faith and observance does not rest on the retelling of
biographical myth or interpretation of particular sacred words. Jewishness of this kind also stresses the
significance of good deeds and of moral choices. These elements are decidedly non-Christian
and that brings into focus a negatively defining aspect of Judaism, namely, that
to be a Jew is not to be a Christian--and aside from a few pockets of Islamic
culture in the Balkans, the Jews are the only European people who are not
Christian. That requires a special
clarification of European culture itself, something which the scope of this
paper does not allow.
Yet one
clear element of the Jew as non-Christian should be stressed, and that is that
Jew does not believe that the Messiah has come and that the world is redeemed,
nor even that a process of redemption has begun which is to be completed at the
Second Coming of the Saviour-figure.
This is something Martin Buber emphasized in his writings. The Jew not only knows that the world is
unredeemed and the Messiah yet to begin the healing of all the evils in the
world, but he feels the double alienation of confronting a Christian society
operating on the principle of that very premise. To all but the most cloistered Jewish
community in the Pale of Settlement--and perhaps not even then--the guilt of
knowing this truth against the burdensome assertion of the Christian masters
was a mixed feeling--a feeling of superiority and also of fear of what the
Christians would do because they knew the Jews would not believe their very
fundamental lie.
If the
Jews do not have the myth of a Holy Saviour who came into the world, suffered,
died, and rose from the dead, and a body of ecclesiastically-sanctioned dogma
to believe in, to meditate and interpret, they have something else which
centers their religious experience: the
myth of study. To study is a verb, for
the Jew, which means to pray, to argue, to know, to have faith in, and to make
choices. Leo Rosten says, "For
centuries, Jews have had the sense of being part of one flowing, continuous, uninterrupted
prayer to (and dialogue with) God."
Yet to
pray, even if the words of many prayers were those of formal liturgy, repeated
with little concern for their actual content, and so containing notions which
could not be believed in if taken as dogma rather than acts (praxis) of
piety,--yet to pray also meant to study and to study meant active dialogue,
argument, and even debate with God.
Franz Rosenzweig, as reported by Samuel H. Bergman, spoke of the
importance of each Jew believing that he added some part, no matter how slight,
to the continuous and cumulative prayer or articulation of truth and to about
God. And Hermann Cohen, another early
20th Century thinker reported by Bergman, gave as one of the six distinguishing
traits of Judaism the following declaration:
There is an indissoluble relationship between
knowledge and belief in Judaism. Study
is a sacred duty. Hence Judaism knows no
conflict between faith and knowledge.
At
times, of course, knowledge easily conforms to traditional faith, but the
record of rabbinical commentary shows that for the most part conflict is there,
and knowledge and faith jockey for position in the pages of Talmud, Mishna,
Gemorah, and more recent versions of the oral Torah.
The
third aspect of this stress on study is that of choice. Again this does not mean that Judaism was
open to an infinite range of options, but it does mean that the ordinary Jew,
however naive his reasoning and whatever his motives, to paraphrase Rosten,
confronted a spectrum of choices and not a core of mystical beliefs. Thus we find even in so mystical a Chassidic
figure as the Rabbi Nachman that Buber writes of the following saying:
The Aim of the
World
The
world was created only for the sake of the choice and the choosing one.
Man,
the master of choice, should say: The
whole world has been created only for my sake.
Therefore, man shall take care at every time and in every place to
redeem the world and fill its want.
This is a heavy moral responsibility to place on the
head of every man and woman, especially every Jew, already burdened with the
knowledge that the world has not been redeemed though all of Christendom swear
to the contrary.
There
are other implications of this emphasis on study, and we shall have to come
back to them shortly: for the creation
of a whole culture that knows how to read, enjoys the virtual malleability of
language, and loves the toffee-pull of intellectual debate, such a civilisation
will feel most comfortable, and even find its very existence dependent upon,
the stickiness of irony--and perhaps express itself most truthfully in the
self-deprecating postures of the Jewish joke.
But let
us turn to the myth of study as it appears in the Talmud, and trace its course
into the kind of Jewish joke I am speaking of.
For to quote the sages themselves:
"Fill your belly with Torah before you confront Epikoros (i.e.,
Epicurus, the worldly temptations), otherwise Epikoros will easily knock you
over with a straw."
The
myth of Judaism is proclaimed at the very start of what is called "Ethics
of Chapters of the Father", that Talmudic section appended to the book of
prayers which is read chapter by chapter each Sabbath from the Saturday after
Passover until the Saturday before New Year.
It is a myth of intellectual continuity and of the sacrality of
intellection itself. I cite from the Sephath Emeth (The Speech of
Truth), the prayer book given to me on my Bar Mitzvah by Temple Beth-El of Boro Park , Brooklyn on 6 Jun e 1953 :
Moses received
the Torah on Sinai, and handed it down to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the man of
the Great Synagogue [Knesset hogdola].
They said three things: Be
deliberate in judgment; raise up many
disciples, and make a fence around the Torah.
Immediately on the heel of these words, in which
continuity and understanding are proclaimed, we are introduced to Simon the
Just who gives the ethical summation of what Torah--which the footnote to this prayer
book glosses as "the Pentatuech, the Scriptures, the Oral Law, as well as
for the whole body of religious truth, study, and practice"--represents
and is to be explicated and infinitum by the Pirké Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). Simon
used
to say, Upon three things the world is based:
upon the Torah, upon Temple service, and upon the practice of charity.
Then
passage by passage the essence of Torah is passed from sage to sage, each
generation explicating, dividing, arguing, expanding and modifying the sayings
of the previous generation. And thus the
first chapter concludes:
Rabbi Chananya, the son of Akiba, said, The
Holy One, blessed be he, was pleased to make Israel worthy; wherefore he gave them a copious Torah and
many commandments, as it is said, It pleased the Lord, for his righteousness'
sake, to magnify the Torah and make it honourable (Isaiah xlii.21.)
(p.232)
A
copious Torah is certainly not restricted to the Ten Commandments or to the
Pentateuch or to all the canonized books of the Hebrew Bible or to the first
collection of Oral Law, the Mishnah, or to all its subsequent commentaries,
expansions, and additions. The copious
Torah is the continuous, open-ended, ever-fruitful discussions by all Jews
everywhere over the meaning, value, and obligations of studying Torah.
Particularly
in its East European rabbinical manifestation, Judaism has been a religious
culture in which a whole people dedicate themselves to the constant study of
Holy Books, but not a solitary meditation on unassailable texts which have some
magical aura to impart. Though there
have been individuals and groups which have momentarily taken themselves apart
for precisely that effect, the enterprise study has been a vocal, communal, and
vociferous one--an endless argument rather than polite discourse, and
especially not a unison incantation. To
be sure, the process has occasionally led to pockets of sterility, especially
where social and economic factors have forced communities into defensive
seclusion in books. This has created an
almost paradoxical situation of mythic amnesia, a community effectively unaware
of where it is, and dreaming it is wrapt away to an eternal Sabbath.
Yet
more often, the consequence has been more self-conscious. To be a Jew in Europe is to be forever on the
fringes of the dominant Christian culture, to be alienated from the
possibilities of full participation in the society's basic formations, to be at
best treated as a retarded child--a people who are condemned because they
failed to recognize the very god their prophets had designed--and at worst as a
cancer in the bowels of the body politic.
Rarely could a Jew pass any sustained period of time without being aware
or being made aware of a negative definition--of being a non-Christian. Even today that is a key defining element in
the character of a Jew. Confronted by a
society which may be more secular than its own earlier manifestations but which
is so clearly Christian--Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox-- in its unspoken
presuppositions despite all the rhetorical pleadings to the contrary by its
desperate holy men, the Jew is conscious of decisions of morality and
perception to be at every step of life.
If these are today hardly those of strict food tabus and distinctions in
dress, they are yet inherent in formularies of juridical and business
agreements, the casual phraseology of domestic encounters or the more
ritualised language of weddings, funerals, and school or political meetings,
not to mention the commonplaces of art and theatre, the rhythms of
entertainment and the patterns of relaxation.
For so long as the Jew retains any identity, even if it is removed from
overt statements of belief or participation in the fixed rituals or prayer and
religious study, he still retains attitudes towards learning which are not
equal to those of the Christian; he does
not harmlessly hear the commonplaces of Christian liturgy and belief; and he does not easily accept Sunday as more
important than Saturday, or find bearing a cross a satisfying image of human
suffering. Though he has often not had
the option of turning the other cheek, but had his face pushed into the mud,
nevertheless the Jew finds it difficult not to be argumentative in the face of
dogmatic credos, statements crying out for discussion, if not voluble
rejection, such as all those mysteries which Christians believe precisely
because they tease reason into silence.
For
more often than not Jews believe or believe that rather than believe in their religion, insofar as the rabbinical authorities
prescribe, on the one hand, there are upwards of 613 commandments to obey
everyday, a tangled fence guarding the very outer limits of restricted
territory; while on the other hand the
codes and digests tells them that concern for human life obviates all other
laws and puts at the center only two linked realities--the integrity of the
unitary soul and the need to love in active deeds of charity all mankind. Even when "belief" is in doubt,
"practice" is required. What
to the outsider may seem, and occasionally is for individuals driven by a
variety of personal and public obsessions, a sterile tangle of legalisms and
pointless and arbitrary restrictions and hysterical behaviour, is from the
inside very much a dynamic of intellectual discussion and controversy, a
shadow-play only because so often significant public motions are
disallowed. It was not for nothing that
even so early rabbis as Shemayah advised, "Love work, hate lordship, and
seek no intimacy with the ruling power."
To the Jew the world and the flesh do not couple with the devil to form
a trinity of guilt-evoking alienation from the self; but in the historical world, it does often
seem that religious belief and political ideology too often do inhabit a figure
of the devil and threaten the very fabric of material life. It is other peoples' beliefs in that make it often impossible for
the Jew to live out that practical behaviour he or she believes that ought to
be done. Hence, I suggest, so strong a
dislike for things to believe in, and credos to rationalize. As Maurice Cuddihy has shown, if from a
somewhat hostile position, when Jews were finally allowed into the Christian
European civility in the 19th century, they quickly asserted these modes of pilpul, of argumentative scepticism and
intricate burrowings under the skin of orthodoxy, that many of their names have
become bywords for all that threatens the Christian normative concern for order
and consistency--Marx, Freud, Einstein.
The cumulative development of human character and human society, with
earlier forces working their way through to the lates layers and interacting
with them; the sense of a universe of
relativity, where space and time can bend in upon themselves. These are Jewish attitudes, though of course
not exclusively so.
But to
be Jewish is not always a misery, and it is not all a deliberate attempt to
undermine the civil facade of the host culture's polite society. As any one familiar with even a smattering of
Yiddish or of Yiddish tradition will know, the language, the culture, the
people are permeated by a unique ironic sense, a vocabulary which finely
distinguishes between dozens of shades of inadequacy, pretentiousness, and
folly; a host of formulary expressions
and customs to mitigate and control lapses to taste, judgment, or passion; and an intricacy of human relationships
which, while it could never agree on something so simplistic as a world plot,
devises endless schemes to prevent drunkenness, plant trees in Israel, and
entertain the aged. The Jesuit scholar,
Father Walter J. Ong, has expounded rightly on the male domination of instruction
in Latin amongst European youth, and on the rhetorical culture which arises
from such alienating rites of passage.
But against the playfulness and violence attendant upon such an elitist
culture, the situation of Jews stands out.
For not only were boys taken from their mothers and their mother
language of Yiddish in order to learn Hebrew and the masculine roles of the
liturgical office and of study, but these boys were not an elite--they were all
the males. And they were not alienated
for that reason; the alienation arose
from the fact that their mother language was Yiddish--wherever they were, in Germany or Poland
or Romania
The
playfulness arises in Judaism from the very nature of the religion and
culture's central concern: study, and
discussion, and argumentation about words.
To demand of every Jewish male that he be a scholar is to make of many
only middling scholars but of all a people who love to play with words, who
relish a good verbal slinging match, who are ready to hear both serious truths
and all too true trivialities in the truth that words express. And you cannot make every male study Torah
and argue about it at every conceivable chance without creating an atmosphere
in which most, if not all, women take part in the grand debate. Whilst a certain amount of formal study takes
place in the shul or
synagogue, the kitchen table is an altar of altercation as well, and the bed a
bed of controversy too: yet altercation
and controversy couched in love, in the joy and anguish of holding the family
and all Israel together.
Joy and
anguish come together. Not just in the
rhythm of the triumphant Sabbath separating one day in heaven from a week in
hell, but in the realization that, despite all the Christians' belief in it,
the Messiah has not come, and the world is still very much a vitiated
paradise. It is a terrible joke that
those who proclaim the reality of a God of Love visit such horrors on the
people of the law who are out of all Christian law. But the joke is not always so tragic or so
cosmic. It is usually more restricted,
personal and domestic, focused on the ever-self-contemplating Jew
himself. Shlemiels, shlamazels, shleps, and shmeggeges inhabit this little
community, locked off from political concerns by the walls of the ghetto or the
boundary stones of the peasants' fields that surround the shtetle. Probably with much less magic and occultism
than Isaac Bashevis Singer paints, this little world is dull and ordinary, yet
only in the important sense of being a world of real concerns taken seriously -
food, shelter, children, and old age. It
is not dull because such a world, whose echoes are in learned discourse rather
than mystical dreams, is forever analyzing the slightest details and nuances of
its crowded encounters. It is not
ordinary because refined and honed by Talmudic study and family debate the Jew
is forever meeting with new forms of worry and anxiety. As the old Jewish woman said to the young
lady who put off a family until she would first make her career: "No children, so what do you for
aggravation?" What is often taken
as a solecism, using aggravation where you mean irritation, because to
aggravate is to intensify what is already irritated, is correct indeed: to be is to be irritated, life is a bit of a
sore, and everything and everybody aggravates.
Aggravation becomes in that sense intransitive--who needs to shlep in more: it is the very quality of our being once we
are.
If we
believe that God made this world and is responsible for it, what can we say
about all the aggravation? Can we blame
God because one man is a shnook and
another is a nebbish or
because that lady is such a yenta
she drives everyone crazy? What makes
the Orthodox priest lead the ceremonial parade that precedes a pogrom or the Stormtrooper kick a
pregnant mother to death? Are we to say
this is God's plan, that somehow all this is for our good, that it is
meaningful and that suffering is a sacred duty imposed on the human race? Whatever he may profess, that priest is not a
Jew-hate because of his Christianity but inspite of it--he doesn't know what he
is doing; he is all vershimmelt or verdrayt in his kopf. And that Nazi, nu, so he is a hooligan given
too much power, a sick creature. Yet
that doesn't help or exorcise what they do.
And those Jews who are tortured, raped, or killed are not being punished
for their sins or rewarded with martyrdom for their virtues. The enemies are too stupid to make such
distinctions and we cannot pretend that God has some special plan making all
this madness part of a great mysterious beauty.
In all
those generations of Talmudic argument, in all those hundreds of thousands of
arguing out Gemorrah and Mishna a suspicion arises, that which seems to have
some pattern may not; that perhaps there
is no plan, no meaningful order... except that which our study and our
arguments impose. Our copious Torah,
ever more copious, and yet always the same, that is perhaps all that has any
meaning. The light of learning is the
eternal light. The intricate
machinations to fill ever more little blue and white cans (pishkele) of charitable
money for the sisterhood, the orphans in Poland, the tree-planting in Israel,
the refugees in boats, all this is the very heart of charity.
Not
that aggravation should be taken to the metaphysical heights or depths of
Original Sin, of course. Jews do not
harp obsessively on homiletic or eteological myths from ancient cults and
liturgies trapped within the fixed pages of Holy Writ. Rather, tsuris is the very stuff of life, external to the individual
but intrinsic to the family and the community, to all of Israel
There
are so many Jewish jokes which deal with close, domesticated, fallible images
of God, a God who is not a withdrawn image of perfection, but very much one of
us, a Jewish God, that it may be justifiable, if not in theological at least in
effective cultural terms, to speak of the moral and metaphysical implications
of these jokes. Such jokes may report
God's complaints about his son carrying on with shiksa, Mary; or of God
calling on his old partner, Satan, to ask if, during the Holocaust, he wouldn't
mind taking some of the overflow until more accommodations in Heaven could be
arranged and agreeing to install air-conditioning himself. Less perhaps than the joke proper, with its
climactic reversal or witty revelation, there are the anecdotes which envisage
God joining in discussions at a synagogue in Lodz
or Lublin
The
implications to be drawn from this phenomenon are that Jews live at one and the
same time in a sense of domestic familiarity with a God who is warm and humane
and with a God whose awesomeness too easily becomes vitiated into something
like a great joke--a sense that he may have abandoned the world to its own
vices and devices, or even that he may not exist at all. The phenomenon also implies that Jews tend,
somewhat like Odysseus upon learning from Athena that cunning lies and
shape-shifting have their moral value to the one man who has precipitated
self-consciousness from the virtual trance-like stupor of heroic posturing, to
revel in irony and to find cunning virtually the only effective weapon of
survival in a world of hypocrisy and mystical self-delusion. Again, the Jewish joke, with all its witty
plays on words and nice distinctions between fools, pretenders, and overly
self-conscious scholars, reveals a cultural heritage of ironic behavior. For Christian Europe a sustained programme
against rural-based oral culture under the names of Reformation and
Counter-Reformation, climaxing in the twin secular modes of Christian
seriousness, Enlightenment and Romanticism, effectively silenced the playful
and festive rhetoric of the great masses;
it reduced them to regular behavior and and internalized morality to
the point where religious institutions have become obsolescent. Pockets of resistence now are clearly
identified as rowdyism, drunkenness, and lazy disregard for normal working
rhythms. But for Jews, the transition to
most of the commercial aspects of the post-medieval world came with less
disruption to community life, and rebelliousness could bypass the wide range of
aesthetic and philosophical fashions and go directly into the confrontation
between religious reform and religious rejection. Not that the path into modernity was easy: it was a path thoroughly mined with pogroms,
restrictions on everything from clothing styles to marriage, and a variety of
subtle biases to the etiquette and speech-habits of the Jew. And it was a path no less blocked by
conservative forces within Judaism than by Antisemites on the outside.
Yet
even all this resistance simply reinforced the habits of ironic behaviour. Yet only for some people, of course: since the great number of Jews, like any
other people, cover the full gamut of human types of personality and
intelligence, and simple, serious piety would be the norm. What is significant appears in the jokes and
the folk anecdotes, and that is, the harping on the ironic type, the cultural
pleasure in dwelling on intellectual acumen, to the point at which God himself
is a participant in the process.
Having
said that, however, we need to see another clear aspect of modern Judaism,
especially that which developed in the two places of most recent assimilation
and success, Germany and America Germany Germany
due to the obvious intrusion of Nazi extermination, the situation in America more recently in the past World War II
years has evolved to one of great ambiguity, and this reverberates even to Israel
Attempting
to meet Christianity on its own grounds, that is, with moral statements
relevant to the society's political and social problems, as well as with an
articulated code of religious beliefs, Judaism has only met with limited
success. Today, outrageously against
statistical evidence, Judaism is accepted as one of the three main religions of
America
And yet
atheism is not so much the danger, given the reality of Jewish traditions where
practice has always preceded belief in importance; the danger is in that kind of secular life
that divided Jews from the community of Jews, from the continuing, indeed the
continuous argument and discussion which is the core of study. Insofar as the study is limited to traditional
texts, from Talmud and all its expansions and commentaries, the nature of study
becomes virtually self-defeating in the approach of Judaism to participation in
the modern world; but such study
widening its discussions to a new encounter with the philosophies and beliefs
of that world, that is, incorporating to the continuing dialogue, can make its
adjustments.
To find
out how Jews fit into the world, we have to remember that the world, olam, is sacred and the place of
sanctification. The process of
sanctifying the world is what we would call history—history not as a mere record
of past events, but the dynamic flow of human events, and in fact the very
substance of our humanity.
[i]
This is one of the first essays I wrote on Judaism early in the 1970s, I give
it virtually as first presented orally to a seminar of clergymen in the Chapel
of Auckland University.
well, the problem has been resolved in 1948. wasnt it?
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