Job's Dung Heap: part 8

Tikkun ha’Olam:

Putting the World all Back Together Again in the Right Way

The best and the brightest of among us need ample opportunities to ask challenging questions, debate the issues, reflect together, and devise the best way to advance Israel’s case for the good of the world.[1]

Though I would hardly call myself on of the brightest and best, since Jonathan Carey has brought up the case (in the essay from which the above citation is taken)  of Alfred Dreyfus’s ten-year-long legal battle for exoneration against the charges of treason and espionage, since I have spent more than the last ten years studying the Affair and the persons involved with that instance of anti-Semitic abuse of military justice—and written three books and dozens of essays and reviews on the topic—I will try to marshal the insights gleaned to understand the specifics of the current crisis in Gaza.  Why are the world’s media “Eyeless in Gaza” (to borrow John Milton’s expression from his mid-seventeenth-century dramatic poem Samson Agonistes.

Thus I am continuing this discussion of Bernard Lazar’s book Job’s Dungheap though some people find it rather difficult to follow.  There are issues that are very complex—not the question of whether Israel is right in what it is doing and Hamas dead wrong[2]—but in what way the so-called liberal and leftish western intellectuals and journalists cannot see the difference, and indeed go beyond moral equivalence to come down squarely on the side of terror, fanaticism and worse, the annihilation of Israel and the murder of the Jews wherever they are in the world. There are really two questions here: one is how the misuse of language in the media works and the other why the minds of so many otherwise intelligent and perceptive people goes all wonky when it comes to Israel and Jews—even amongst Jewish intellectuals.

Bernard Lazar’s Job’s Dungheap

Why can’t so many liberals understand the pure evil of Islamic Jihad?[3]

The question of what Bernard Lazar wrote about in his book called Job’s Dungheap is not the same as what is contained in the English translation published by Shocken Books close to fifty years later.  As with the man himself, whom we briefly treated in the previous section of this essay, the book represents a set of political opinions pertinent to the fin de siècle in France and the rest of Western Europe.  Such a book responds to questions being asked implicitly and explicitly in the conditions of the time, as well as to more abstract moral and spiritual problems faced by a man such as Lazar who wishes to be French and Jewish at the same time, something which on the one hand, more Orthodox rabbinical thinkers would for the most part say is not possible, except insofar as the Jew is tolerated passively within the nation where he or she happens to reside and makes no trouble for the rest of the community. 

On the other hand, the person who imagines himself or herself to be an assimilated Jew is never accepted as anything else than an outsider at best, even if not rejected, as happened when a crisis like the Dreyfus Affair erupted—something shown by Proust in his long novel In Search of Lost Time.  The more nasty anti-Semites also point out the facets of appearance, attitude and lack of civility they feel in the presence of the Semite; if not completely true, the Jew smarts under the lash of these statements of his or her otherness, proving that difference by the sensitivity to each cutting remark, no matter how subtle it may be.  

Thus, while in his main books on anti-Semitism and Jewish nationalism Lazar attempts to deal with his own people in a dispassionate manner and to investigate the causes of their negative impact on society, he cannot escape from showing himself to be involved, interested and hurt by what he discovers.  When at last his own rejection of Zionism collapses and he takes up the cause, he only proves to be exactly what he thought he had walked away from and which his enemies—his condescending fellow Frenchmen—claimed to see all along.  Dreyfus also came to realize he could not be absorbed into the society he was willing to give his life for as a soldier when after the formal pardon for his second conviction as a traitor and a spy the men who had taken up his cause for their own political ends refused to tolerate him any further, blamed him for not being willing to reject the grace and continue the struggle from exile yet again, and when he sought their support they brushed ghim aside, as Clemenceau did, as an annoying little Jew.

The language of the 1890s and first decades of the twentieth century up to the First World War is not our own.  It often comes close, uses words that seem familiar, but altogether the sense of the intellectual and emotional content is strange, sometimes clunky in its lack of fit, sometimes cloying in its outdated sentimentality, sometimes shockingly off-putting by its inner incoherence.  We cannot wash away our own awareness of what happened from 1914 to 1918 because of nationalism and militarism, we cannot will away our knowledge of what the consequences of anti-Jewish words and deeds and institutions after the rise of Nazi racism and the pursuit of a Final Solution to the Jewish Question.  

Considerably more uncanny now, having become conscious both of what Lazar, Dreyfus and other Jews went to through at the end of the nineteenth century and what would be far more abhorrent in the third and fourth decades of the past century is to watch and listen to the undercurrents of Judeophobia in the media of our own say, especially in relationship to the misuse of discourses of tolerance, liberalism, anti-colonialism and multiculturalism to send out messages of demonization of Israel as the embodiment of all Jews, their culture and history.  It seems outrageous that our once close friends, colleagues and respected intellectuals mouth such vicious lies, condescendingly advising Jews to become aware of how they appear to others, admonishing them to remember the lessons of the Holocaust, and throwing in their face grotesque charges of racism, imperialism and sadism.

Lazar’s Job and his Dungheap in the Context of our Times

Kristallnacht was the sign of a total attack on Judaism, and the destruction of the European mind. Today, the same thing is happening, a vital space is founded in the hatred for Jews, in the hatred for Israel. It is sufficient to be against Israel, and you belong to the majority.

Fiamma Nirenstein

Job not only has the right to reject his comforters’ fatuous comments about his probable guilt on the grounds that they have misread and misinterpreted the Holy Scriptures; they have not looked closely at the texts, not noticed the witty word-play, the subtle allusions, and the appeals within it for creative thinking.  They have made assumptions unwarranted by their failure to consider historical, political and social contexts, and to apply the implicit and explicit laws in accordance with those circumstances and in the light of basic tenets of the Law that are at once mysterious (valid within the limits of reason and logic) and negotiable (on a horizontal plane where the divine itself subordinates its powers to that Law and is open to human promptings from a mortal and moral perspective).  For instance, where the friends cite a passage about everything in the universe being under strict control by the deity, so that every bird of the air will be provided with what it needs, Job points to the ostrich that hides its nest in the sand and then forgets where it is.  The rain does not always fall when required and the sun may disappear from the sky at crucial points in the growing season.  Nature, including human nature, is not transparent to the spiritual core of the intelligence that created the universe, and simplistic analogies drawn from the visible and tangible things of ordinary experience do not always hold true, either in regard to individuals’ needs nor in relation to some presumed all-surveying and directing supernatural mind.  Job is right to question the intelligence supposedly within the natural order and call it to account against scientific and philosophical understanding; the duty eve n to complain when things are not as they should be, for even if he does not fully understand why he is being made to suffer—and he never learns, for instance, about the pact made between the Shatan and God—his resistance to an arbitrary justice on the grounds that might makes right or priority of existence equal a higher moral order. 

There is a fundamental flaw, absence, incompleteness in the creation of the world, which each individual and each nation is called upon to help rectify, fill and complete. Gradually, haltingly and sometimes incoherently; especially through study, meditation, dialogue and debate.  When the sacred vessels of primary energy were broken during the moment of creation, at the time when the divine fullness withdrew into itself to make room, time, and shape for the world, the sparks were scattered; and though an almost complete void was consequent to that tzimtzum or contraction, there was still left in its both the shadow or face of the divine, the Shekhina, but also a spiritual presence in potentiality. 

 Gradually over generations and millennia, the sparks of primal energy have been recovered, and at some undisclosed time in the future, the wholeness of creation as originally conceived will be restored; but until then, all of us, through the merits of our ancestors, through our own performance of mitzvoth, and through the patterns of moral goodness we bequeath to our children and their children, we make good what was meant to be.  If we think we know what is perfect, if we think we are beyond reproach, if we claim to speak on behalf of the ineffable and infinite one, Eyn Sof, then we descend into idolatry, worshipping our flawed minds and hearts and souls, we presume to be the image of a god we have only imagined.  When the world was first created in six symbolic days or eons, the result was, as we are told could be seen on the seventh day of rest, something good: good to think about, good to work up into a better shape, good to live through no matter how painful, humiliating and dangerous, and good to argue about. 

We cannot, as Job proved, allow others to think for us, tell us what to do, or live on our behalf.  Nor can we give up in despair, surrender to superior forces, kneel before those who claim to be more righteous and wise.  How could we do that when experience collectively instructs us in two certain things: on the one hand, there are illusions, delusions and deception s loose in the world, sometimes of their own accord and sometimes constructed by our enemies, false images that pretend to be reality, that are sworn by idolaters, affirmed by charlatans, and sealed by the enthusiasm of imbeciles; and on the other, even when seemingly confirmed by our own perceptions, tested by our logic, and longed for in our hearts, everything must be studied carefully and interpreted, torn apart by the sharp blade of logic and rhetoric and then weighed on scales of facile desire and infantile fear, and also tested in the confusing matrix of history.

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[1] Jonathan Carey, “Israel’s Endless Trials: The Times of Israel  (14 August 2014) online athttp://blogs. timsofisrael.com/israels-endless-trials

[2] I leave for others to continue to expose the lies of Hamas and the details of what the western press and network new purvey as truth but is anything but “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” let alone objective reporting. 

[3] David French, “Iraq Vet: Why Liberals have Trouble Understanding the Evil of Jihad”  The National Review (8 August 2014) online at htrtp://nationalrveiw.com/corner/384877/why-do-liberals-have-trouble-understanding -pure-evil-jihad-david-french