(Author: Chuck Volpe, Vol. 72, #3, Chanukah, 2017)
Abstract
The West is in retreat, if not in decline. The free and democratic world so dearly achieved, can no longer be taken for granted. If hope lies anywhere, it lies with the people who despite the fact that they suffered more than any other group in the Second World War, today hold the flag of freedom and hope highest. Call it what you will – God, fate or chance – the Jewish people have an unrivalled prescription for individual and collective flourishing. Can Jewish civilisation save the West?
Introduction
In November 2015, the American Jewish magazine Commentary devoted an entire edition to the subject of The Jewish Future. They asked 69 prominent Jews from every walk of life – religion, politics, academia, the arts, even then world chess champion Garry Kasparov – to write a page on how they saw the Jewish world fifty years on, in 2065. I read through the magazine carefully, and while I found no consensus (could there possibly have been amongst Jews?), there were three points of substantial agreement: a) Israel would be okay (there where many threats, but Israel would face them down), b) religious Jews in the Diaspora would be okay (their faith would sustain them as it had for 100s of years), and c), and here’s the problem, non-religious Diaspora Jews would continue to assimilate in ever increasing numbers.
The prospect of losing more Jews through assimilation really bothered me, and I felt a responsibility to do something even if in a small way, by trying a different tack. I started by asking myself two questions:
- Do these Jews realise what they’re giving up?
- Do they know what they’re getting in exchange?
This paper is an attempt to answer these two questions. In view of how big the subject is, it is intended as being a tentative, exploratory essay aimed at promoting further thinking and discussion.
I will start with a few comments about the assimilating Jew before looking at Western civilisation and some of its problems. Then, by way of contrast, I will present a view of Jewish civilisation in the hope of convincing the reader that not only is it “a light unto the nations”, but a light unto Jews too. Too often, Jews themselves are blind to this light.
I myself am not a religious Jew in the conventional sense of going to shul regularly or laying tefillin, but I am deeply aware of my Jewish heritage and with the passing of time, this awareness continues to deepen. When I think of its span across almost all of recorded history, its survival and phenomenal achievements, it seemed to me that the assimilating Jew in his quest for greener pastures is giving up gold bullion for ‘piepkes’. It makes no sense.
I can understand, with a push, how Jews, having been cloistered in ghettos for centuries and wishing to take advantage of the opportunities during the Haskalah, crossed the bridge to foreign cultures in the belief that their lives would be improved. But today, that bridge leads to a wilderness devoid of values and antithetical to a better life. The two options stand in the starkest contrast imaginable. I’m speaking about a life of maximal fulfilment, supported by the values of family, community and the collective wisdom gathered from three and half thousand years of ruminating on what makes a good life.
The assimilating Jew appears could be likened to a new kind of ‘wandering Jew’, one who wanders blindly from his promised land back to Egypt. Three thousand years after his forebears arrived, he decides to return to the wilderness, taking with him, in imaginary procession, his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Before I elaborate on this metaphorical Egypt, let me state a few definitions. When I refer to ‘the West’ or Western Civilisation, it primarily signifies the ‘Old West’ i.e. Europe, even though much of what I deal with also applies to the ‘New West’, the United States, Canada and Australia. I use the term ‘Jewish civilisation’ to mean the entire Jewish world – Judaism, its texts, Jewish culture, values, history, psychology, aspirations, the notion of Jewish peoplehood and nation, and being a ‘light unto the nations’. Jewish civilisation in this sense is greater than any one part or combination of parts.
The soul of the West: Two confrontations
Eighty years ago, the West was confronted by two cataclysms – the first was the all-out war against the Nazis and the second was the Holocaust. Why separate these two events, one might wonder? After all, they both occurred at the same time. I do so because each represented a different kind of threat, with a different outcome.
The war against the Nazis was a threat to the body of the West, a physical threat, involving physical resources like tanks, planes and soldiers. The Holocaust was different. While it was a physical threat to the Jews, in fact, it was a catastrophe to the West – a threat against its soul, ethical values and how it saw itself. In the physical confrontation, the Western Allies were victorious, but in respect of the Holocaust, the West failed to address the threat, and it may yet prove to have rendered a mortal blow.
The West was forced to recognise that at the very heart of its civilisation lay a brutal paradox: that the civilisation that could produce Mozart and Goethe, Kepler and Heisenberg, could also produce the Commandant of Auschwitz, a man who operated a gas chamber during the day and wept over Mozart and Goethe at night.
I list here only German names, but it wasn’t just the Germans who brought about the Holocaust. Every country in Europe, with the exception of the Danes and possibly the Bulgarians, played a role. So pervasive was this collective involvement that new usages for the words perpetrator, collaborator, onlooker, appeared in the dictionary to describe their various roles. “What did you do in the war daddy?” became a much-feared question, one which still reverberates not just in individual minds, but collective minds too.
The West had looked in a proverbial mirror and seen its own depravity, and ironically, it was the very group who for centuries had been persecuted by the forebears of those perpetrators, collaborators and onlookers who had held up that mirror. Some of the West’s most sacred beliefs had to be revised – the belief that culture and learning would humanise man, and the belief in human progress, that the world was progressing towards a better place. The one belief that gained traction was the belief in a karmic destiny.
Damaged and demoralised
Like people, civilisations have inner lives. One can refer to the soul of a nation or a people or civilisation. This soul encompasses a civilisation’s identity and self-concept, its source of thought, feeling and action and what it stands for. It has a strong moral aspect too, which serves to constitute that civilisation as ‘having worth’ and that in turn motivates its members to want to preserve and defend it. When civilisations lose that sense of worth, decline is not far off.
In his celebrated History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell speaks of great civilisations containing the seeds of their own destruction:
What … happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: History of Western Philosophy traditional moral restraints disappeared … [and]… the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the Dominion of nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.1
Robin Shepherd, a political commentator and analyst is more graphic in his description:
… European civilisation [has been weakened] by the legacy of its momentous and terrible past; devoid of believable ideals; cracked by self-loathing; fatally deficient in the world even to defend itself; hedonistic, materialistic, relativistic, pacifistic; puffed up, and lazy; complacent, and defeatist. It is an image of a continent bereft of the ability to make serious judgements about matters of consequence.2
This is an awful depiction, but is it true, and if so, to what extent is it true? Well, ‘terrible past’ is certainly true and being ‘devoid of believable ideals’ is also true. But especially concerning is what Shepherd has to say about the inability to defend itself: ‘fatally deficient… even to defend itself’, ‘pacifistic’, ‘lazy’, ‘complacent’, and ‘defeatist ’.
When Germany attacked Britain in 1940, Winston Churchill rallied the Brits to the defence of the realm. “You do your worst and we will do our best”, he boomed addressing Hitler on behalf of the British. He knew that the Brits would rise to the clarion call for collective action. They did; but that was then.
In 2015 a survey found that the majority of Brits would no longer fight for their country. Only 27% said they would defend the realm if called upon to do so. The situation elsewhere in Europe was even worse. The figure in Spain was 21%, in Italy 20%, in Germany, a country once defined by martial values, it was 18%. Vladimir Putin, for one, understood this. In 2014, the Russians marched into Crimea and soon after into eastern Ukraine. Now there is talk of a threat to the Baltic States. Putin had done a quick comparison in respect of his own country. He knew that most of his countrymen – 59% – would be willing to fight for Russia. In China the figure is even higher, at 71%. This is deeply worrying. It appears that Europe has lost its will and the belief that it has something worth defending. The morally-sapping guilt for the Holocaust is one reason, but there is more.
A terrible past – an uncertain future
In the 75 years prior to 1945, Europe fought three progressively savage wars – the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War and the Second World War.
These conf licts, effectively civil wars, were the result of rampant nationalism. By 1945, the countries of Europe were exhausted and terrified by what they had wrought, and no country more so than Germany. Like exhausted boxers drained of energy and the will to fight, they went into a clinch, desperately holding on to one another. This joining together into what became known as the European Union came about not because it was a good thing, but because they feared worse. This abdication of national sovereignty in favour of an amorphous unity had the result of erasing national identities, a vital component of social cohesion and common purpose.
Nationalism comes in different forms. Nazi Germany represented the jingoistic, fanatical and narrow form. But nationalism can also take the form of patriotism, loyalty and public spiritedness. These features play a vital role in creating identity, meaning and purpose, and the sense of belonging to a community of value. When this is lost, confusion and anarchy reign. In the words of Robin Shepherd the young, lacking a higher purpose, become hedonistic, materialistic, pacifistic, and complacent. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is an attempt to remedy this.
It is said that the future is notoriously difficult to predict, but one way of doing so is to look at fertility rates, i.e. the number of babies per woman. The theory is that no one brings a child into a world they don’t believe in or value. If this is true, it follows that a high fertility rate indicates an optimistic view of the future and a low rate the opposite. The standard replacement rate is 2.1 and anything above or below tells a story.
In the European Union today the average fertility rate is 1.6 – well below the replacement rate. In Italy and Spain, Catholic countries which in the past had high birth rates, the rate today is an astounding 1.2. For the record, Germany has the lowest birth rate in the world. Furthermore, the rate is dropping and there are grave doubts that it can be arrested.
By contrast, the fertility rate in America is 2.1 and in Israel it is 3.08% which is the highest fertility rate in the developed world. This is not only the work or the pleasure of religious Jews; the rate for secular Jews is 2.8%.
Low fertility rates cause other problems. The next generation (of fewer people) will have to bear the massive social security costs of the present aging generation. Furthermore, there is no one to do the work so migrants have to be brought in. These migrants, largely from Muslim countries, have created new problems which I will not go into here. While many have integrated, a significant number have not and cannot change their beliefs or way of life. As the Roman poet Horace once said: they change their skies, not their souls, who run across the sea.3
The crisis of liberalism
I want to deal with something which in many respects lies at the heart of Europe’s problems today, and that is the crisis of liberalism. What I am referring to here is not liberalism in the old sense, by which is meant generosity of spirit, tolerance of others, commitment to the rule of law, the love of freedom and the value and dignity of all men. I’m referring to the dogmatic political ideology of the liberal left today, an ideology whose vision and practices are taken from the failed socialist and Marxist utopias of the 19th Century.
There is a reason which explains how these utopias managed to survive into the 21st Century. When the two totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century – Nazism and Communism – collapsed, they were not dealt with in the same way. There was a thorough reckoning only in respect of Nazism. During the Nuremberg Trials all the evil of this diabolical regime was brought into the light of day to be examined, catalogued and acknowledged for the evil they were and for the massive bloodshed they caused.
But there was no such reckoning with Communism and its fellow utopian ideologies. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 there was no Nuremberg, nor was there an acknowledgement that this ideology with its promised utopias had brought death to 100 million people. Its power to intoxicate and mislead the millions of ‘useful idiots’ as Lenin called them, was hardly examined, with the result that these utopian ghosts still stalk the corridors of Western politics. Their new acolytes are the liberal-left, who will henceforth be referred to as ‘liberals’.
The liberal today is a good person – we know this because he tells us. He parades his goodness in conversation and on his T-shirt and placard. His support for what he perceives as the right and the good, however, is not based on a reasoned position but on impulse. One could call him a ‘passionate ethicist’, with the emphasis on passionate because his ethics are based purely on emotion. Ethical discussions employing reason and argument are a waste of time; what counts for him is feeling and he is overf lowing with that, generally of the righteous variety. He discards Descartes’s Enlightenment credo of “I think therefore I am” and replaces it with “I feel therefore I am”. In other words, if it feels right, it must be right. So sure is he of his feelings, that in defence of his faith, he wields emotion like a club, beating up on people who, as he puts it: “have no compassion”. He is a true believer, the practitioner of a new religion.
To understand why I refer to it as a religion, one has to delve into the history of utopian theory. When religious belief started to wane in the middle of the 18th Cent u r y, people still needed something to hang onto which would give them security and a belief in the future that religion had once done. Socialism and Marxism later stepped in to fill the gap with their new secular versions of utopia; they took their ideas straight from Christianity, which 2000 years before had taken them from prophetic Judaism.
Judaism is a religion of the Law, as is Islam. Christianity is not. When Christianity broke from Judaism it appropriated the Hebrew Prophets but repealed the Law. This gave Christianity the advantage of being less onerous and more appealing. No less appealing were the utopian ideas of the Prophets, ideas such as ‘the end of days’ when the ‘lion will lie down with the lamb’ and ‘the brotherhood of all men’. These feel-good ideas may be innocuous when spouted on a street corner, but as a political ideology they can be deadly dangerous.
For this reason, Judaism has always handled the Prophets with kid gloves. ‘Prophetic Judaism’ and ‘Rabbinic Judaism’ represent two unequal poles, with Rabbinic Judaism the stronger. In order to mediate the siren call of the Prophets, they were always studied together with the law of Rabbinic Judaism. One might say that Rabbinic Judaism was the ballast that kept the ship of Judaism upright.
The problem today is that liberalism has no check on these utopian enthusiasms. Liberals may be appalled to hear this, but what they practice is, in effect, a secularised version of Christianity, Christianity without the cross if you like. To this they add a self-styled concoction of passion ethics – a fatal brew.
In many respects, this form of liberalism bears comparison with Christianity:
- like Christianity, liberalism has universal pretensions. It is a one-size-fits-all ideology which claims to hold good for all men in all circumstances at all times. Judaism, on the other hand, is particularistic – it doesn’t prescribe for others. So is Zionism particularistic in its call for a Jewish state. Jewish particularism in both cases has led to antisemitism – in former times, because Jews wouldn’t accept Jesus, and now, because Jews want Israel to remain Jewish;
- like Christianity, liberalism is suffused with unrealistic utopian visions. It believes all problems can be resolved by talking, preferably over a cup of tea. When your enemy says he wants to kill you, turn the other cheek and take no notice. But unlike Christianity, the liberal is impatient. He doesn’t want to wait for the Second Coming to see his utopian views realised. He wants them realised now, which is why he wants the lamb to lie down with a lion now (or Israel to make peace willy-nilly);
- political correctness is the way liberals enforce their dogma, precisely as the mediaeval church once enforced blasphemy laws. Actually, it’s worse now. In mediaeval times, the church did the work of censorship, but today PC demands self-censorship. That’s outsourcing without pay, surely, a prohibited labour practice;
- finally, liberalism has its own version of original sin. This remarkable phenomenon, called ‘cultural masochism’, is mostly to be found in the minds of the liberal elite and young people at universities. It assumes an ineradicable guilt for all the problems of the Third World, while at the same time deeming the Third World to be entirely innocent. This guilt, a form of self-hatred, also manifests as a desire to undermine the civilisation of which they are a part. One can see this playing out in the current crisis with terrorism. When a terrorist atrocity takes place, the liberal tells us to look at ourselves rather than at the terrorist. We are the guilty ones, and the greater the atrocity, the greater the guilt.
At stake here is the soul of Western civilisation. In many respects the West is already on the ropes, confronted by an enemy it neither understands nor has the grit to deal with. The enemy knows our psychological weaknesses and plays on them.
Jewish civilisation – A unique cultural ecosystem
n his bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari discusses the evolution of Homo sapiens. He makes the interesting point that because the birth canal limits the size of the human head, all humans are in fact born prematurely. This means that a critical part of human development takes place after birth.
One can think of a human as comprising hardware and software. The hardware is what is given at birth and soon after, while the software is the programming of that hardware that takes place after birth. “Culture goes beyond DNA” says Hariri. It is a composite of values, practices, social, economic and religious institutions, all of which order society while enabling individuals to develop free and f lourishing lives. This development takes place through the conduit of language and in the interactions we have with family and community.
Culture is by its very nature particularistic, specific and limited. There is no such thing as the universalist culture imagined by liberals. That’s why universalist social experiments always fail. People don’t buy into them simply because they don’t satisfy the basic human need to belong. A universalist identity is a non-identity, a disappearing act into anonymity.
Jewish civilisation constitutes a unique cultural ecosystem. I have appropriated the term from biology, where ‘ecosystem’ describes ‘a group of interconnected elements formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment’. The term can also be applied to culture. A cultural ecosystem is the framework of interconnected elements comprising religion, rituals, beliefs, institutions, values and incentives – the list is long – that constitute the way of life of a particular culture or civilisation.
Every civilisation inhabits its own cultural ecosystem, and functions well or badly depending on the circumstances and the ability of that ecosystem to adapt. If the cultural ecosystem cannot adapt, that civilisation may die. Such was the case with the Crow Indians in the United States in the mid-19thCentury. Their way of life depended entirely on hunting buffalo, and accordingly, their cultural ecosystem consisted of religion, ritual, songs and dances, what it meant to be a virtuous Crow man or woman, how their children were to be raised, and all of these were in some way connected with buffalo hunting or the protection of their lands from encroaching tribes like the Sioux.
When the white man arrived and hunted the buffalo herds to extinction, the Crow cultural ecosystem collapsed. No buffalo, no culture; no culture, no identity, no identity, no meaning, no meaning, no future. As one of the Crow chiefs described it: “Our world disappeared”. They no longer knew who they were, what their place was in the world, or what to do when they got up in the morning. I shudder even as I say this. It’s an appalling situation for any human to face.
Jewish civilisation could easily have gone the same way after the First Temple was destroyed, or after the Second Temple, or the Holocaust, or after the hundred other catastrophes in between. But something in Jewish civilisation saved it. Not only did it survive, it f lourished. It’s not surprising that Winston Churchill once referred to Jews as “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world”.
The moral law
Three-and-a-half thousand years ago, the Hebrews, a tiny people, found themselves in trouble. Sandwiched between a slew of great empires – Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian – they wondered how they might survive. They couldn’t compete in numbers or resources so they developed alliances. But that wasn’t enough to ensure survival. They needed something more.
At that time, the law, such as it was, was the law of the jungle, whose text consisted of a single principle “Might is right”, another way of saying that justice resides with the strongest. What the Hebrews did was nothing less than revolutionary. They reversed the notion that “might is right,” and came up with its opposite, “right is might”. What they had done in effect was to replace a law derived from the animal world, with a law worthy of humans. They called it the moral law and in a stroke they had created the possibility of a humanistic civilisation.
In effect, they had turned a spotlight on human nature, and highlighted the essential difference between the natural world and the human world. That difference is free will. Lions do not choose to be brave or peacocks to be proud. They just are. But humans do choose, and in choosing how to be and to act, they create themselves as human beings. This freedom to choose what we want to be is as supreme an act of creation as any that can be imagined. It’s an act which is almost godlike.
If science is the study of nature, Judaism is the study of human nature. It recognises the deep evolutionary instinct towards social behaviour in the human psyche. This instinct, in effect, aligns the interests of the individual with that of the community. We are cooperative and ethical because it is in our interests to be. Rabbi Hillel’s invocation to “love others as you love yourself ” is not just a command – it represents a deep insight into human nature, which is that loving others is to love yourself.
This idea which links an individual’s own good to that of the community is a profound insight, and its effect on humankind has been vast. It created the possibility of ordering society without force, for large numbers of people to live together amicably balancing the two poles of individual freedom and social order. It linked freedom with responsibility, and together with the sanctification of human life, it gave man both self-respect and the notion of well-lived life. In time, it became the foundation of Western civilisation.
Identity
In the 1968 American comedy The Party, Peter Sellers playing the part of an Indian from the subcontinent, is assailed by a Hollywood bigshot: “Who do you think you are?” the bigshot asks Sellers, to which Sellers replies: “In India, we don’t think who we are, we know who we are.” This self-assured response is the sign of a strong identity. Indeed, Indians, coming from a millennia-old civilisation, do know who they are, something which cannot be said for many people in the West today.
Identity is the base from which we live our lives, and Jews possess the sort of deep and meaningful identity that few people have. It is rooted in community in both space and time. Natan Sharansky in his book Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (2008) speaks of “a gravitational pull on the human spirit, an interconnection of souls,” of souls that “interact across time and space.”
Fi rstly, space.
The Jewish community in Israel and around the world, is a single community of solidarity. In Hebrew we say Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh, “All Israel are responsible for one another”. Think of it like this. Nature and instinct instil in us a special duty of care towards our immediate family, our spouses, our children, our parents, and so on.
What the Torah does, is extend this duty of care, beyond our immediate family to the whole community: Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh. That’s why Jews are natural institution builders, building old age homes, kindergartens, schools, and institutions like Jewish Care. It’s called mutual responsibility which means that no Jew ever stands alone.
This is a profound social development and quite rare. Two non-Jews had this to say: ex-Prime Minister John Howard whom I met at a Zionist conference in Johannesburg a few years ago remarked that what he admired most about the Australian Jewish community were their community structures and their self-reliance. More recently, at a Board of Deputies luncheon an Australian Labour MP who had just returned from Israel had this to say: “In Israel everyone feels and acts as if they’re part of something bigger.”
Secondly, time.
As Jews, our identity doesn’t just encompass those Jews living now. It encompasses Jews from millennia past and forward into the future. To be a Jew is to be a part of a community of memory and a community of destiny.
So when we sit at the Pesach table, we connect horizontally through space to every Jew on the planet, and vertically through time with a hundred generations that have lived before us and the countless generations as yet unborn. This gives our lives a meaning beyond life itself, beyond the f leetingly physical and material. To be a Jew is to be part of something greater. To use the words of the American poet Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Memory
Memory is a core concept in Jewish civilisation and the reason is, without memory there can be no identity. This is a statement of material fact. Think of Alzheimer’s disease – when the memory goes, identity goes with it, for what is identity other than the memory we have of ourselves over time?
The same is true for a people or civilisation. Just as my memory constitutes who I am, so collective Jewish memory constitutes who we are. Western civilisation today is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. People have forgotten their past and the Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment foundation upon which this once-great civilisation flourished. Remember the Crow Indians – no identity, no meaning, no meaning, no future.
Jews have survived for three and a half thousand years because of their collective memory. We may take it for granted but memory has the power to change the world. When David Ben-Gurion walked up to the podium in the United Nations in 1947, to argue the case for the creation of the State of Israel, he used the story of Pesach to explain how Jews see themselves:
Three hundred years ago a ship called the Mayf lower set sail to the New World. This was a great event in the history of England. Yet I wonder if there is one Englishman who knows at what time the ship set sail? Do the English know how many people embarked on this voyage? What quality of bread did they eat? Yet more than 3300 years ago, before the Mayf lower set sail, the Jews left Egypt.
Every Jew in the world, even in America or Soviet Russia, knows on exactly what date they left – the 15th of the month of Nisan. Everyone knows what kind of bread they ate. [On Pesach] they retell the story of the Exodus and all the troubles Jews have endured since been exiled. They conclude the evening with two statements: this year, slaves. Next year, free men. This year here. Next year in Jerusalem, in Zion, Eretz Israel. That is the nature of the Jews.
One year later, Israel was a re-established, 3000 years after the Exodus and 2000 years after it was destroyed by the Romans. Then began the ingathering of the exiles drawn by the gravitational pull of memory. They came from 103 countries, speaking 82 languages, and in a miraculous reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel, the 82 languages became one – Hebrew. Is there a better example of the power of memory and how it can change the world?
It is Jewish memory that makes us immortal. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, “You achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues – but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us and we in our children, and so on until the end of time”.4
Freedom
Despite the fact that freedom is one of the foundation stones of Western civilisation, it’s a little understood concept. It’s most complete exposition is the story of the Exodus, but a more succinct one is given by Isaiah Berlin, the Latvian-born Jew and Oxford philosopher. In his essay Two Concepts of Liberty he distinguished between two kinds of freedom – negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from, and positive freedom is freedom to.
Negative freedom is freedom from something, for example, from constraint or from oppression. It is freedom from being forced to do something you don’t want to do. In the context of the Exodus it is freedom from slavery in Egypt. Similarly, black people in South Africa in 1994 were freed from oppression and the status of second-class citizens when they got the right to vote. Sometimes one has to fight for this freedom as part of a collective but it can also be given by an outside authority.
Positive freedom is completely different. It is the freedom I have to act in my own best interests, to do what it takes to make myself happy, to fulfil myself. This freedom cannot be given; one has to reach for it. In the context of the Pesach story, the Jews were given freedom from slavery, but then had to reach for positive freedom themselves. This involved a long journey through the wilderness to get to their own land. No one did or could do that for them, they had to do it for themselves. The idea that positive freedom must be taken and cannot be given is illustrated in the old Chinese saying that “man who stand with mouth open and wait for roast duck to f ly in, wait long time.”
This idea may not be uniquely Jewish, but it is deeply embedded in the Jewish psyche. It extends the notion of freedom way beyond ‘freedom from’. One can also say that freedom from has to do with the way others govern us, while freedom to, has to do with the way we govern ourselves, i.e. self-governance.
Before I can start to become the person I want to be, that is, to create myself, I have to learn self-governance. I have to learn to control my impulses by becoming the captain of my own ship. It is a lifelong project with oneself as both subject and object, and is certainly not easy, but Jewish wisdom comes to the rescue with two powerful ideas.
The first is hope. The primal expression of Jewish hope is in the Pesach story, when we say: “Now [we are] slaves, next year we shall be free; now we are here; next year in the land of Israel”.
In his book, The Legend of the Baal S he m-Tov the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber gives a metaphor for hope which comes from the Hasidic tradition. It goes like this: there is a rope stretched across a bottomless abyss, each end tied to a slender sapling. We have to cross that abyss by walking the rope and we have to cross it alone. How do we manage this? We need hope but hope of a special kind.
Hope is a double edged sword. If it is not regulated by at least a small dose of reality, it can lead to self-delusion and worse. In his little book The Uses of Pessimism Roger Scruton, the British philosopher, distinguishes between the two types of hope. He uses the word optimism instead of hope. On the one hand, there is the scrupulous optimist, the person who hopes with caution; on the other hand, the unscrupulous optimist, the person who indulges in vain hope.
Firstly, the unscrupulous optimist, which I would suggest is a fair description of the present-day liberal. The unscrupulous optimist is upbeat but doesn’t bother to find out how the world works. Instead, he relies on a utopian vision, which, like a template, he superimposes upon the world in order to interpret it. His optimism is based on his ideology rather than ‘the facts on the ground’. He regards his ideology as universal and has no qualms in applying it to everyone, including communities and cultures very different from his own – a one-size-fits-all ideology. The unscrupulous optimist does not consider the possibility of failure and when he does fail he takes no responsibility.
The scrupulous optimist, on the other hand, understands the world and is under no illusions about the way it works. His optimism is based on what he knows and understands rather than wishful thinking or utopian theories. He thinks carefully, plans with care, and recognises the limits of his knowledge. One can say he tempers his optimism with a small dose of pessimism. He always considers the possibility of failure and holds himself accountable if this happens. This is the kind of optimism and hope required to cross the abyss. It is kind of hope illustrated by the story of the Exodus.
As parents, we teach our children to be scrupulous optimists. We introduce them to a world that is and always will be imperfect. We teach them that while life has its difficulties, these can be managed by careful thinking and prudent action. We teach them that they are no shortcuts and easy fixes, and that failure is always a possibility. If this happens, we teach them to take responsibility. If we succeed, our children will be well-balanced individuals and useful members of society. It is the lesson of Jewish civilisation.
Na’aseh v’nishma
The second powerful idea is Na’a s e h v’nishma – ‘do and you will understand’. As students of human nature, Jews realised that people could not know what they had not yet experienced. For example, how do you convince somebody to embark on a journey when they have doubts about their ability to complete it? As the Nike ad says: “Just do it”. This insight, which took hundreds of years to penetrate the common consciousness, was known to Jews thirty-five centuries ago.
Judaism is a religion of doing, rather than intentions. The ideal lies in the doing, not in the thinking. Whether it concerns mitzvot, or spreading goodness, or working to make something happen, if you just start, the chances are, you will succeed. Even miracles begin with a single step. At the recent United Israel Appeal of Western Australia launch,5 ex-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a statement that literally exploded in my mind. Referring to Jews in Israel, he observed that it was the people who had suffered most during the Second World War that were the people who today hold the f lag of democracy, freedom and hope higher than any other nation. To rise from the ashes of Auschwitz, and in 70 short years, build one of the most advanced and successful democracies in the world is almost beyond belief. In a recent survey of 21 000 business leaders, Israel was ranked 8th most powerful nation on the planet. Yes, Jews can take a punch and recover. That’s the power of positive freedom, the freedom to make the most of ourselves.
A shining light
One of the meta-narratives of Jewish civilisation is being “a light unto the nations.” I’ve often wondered what this meant and how it plays out. I can only imagine that it means being an example to others. If this is the case, Jewish civilisation is indeed a shining light. The West has always been ambivalent about Jews. But whatever the prevailing sentiment, Jews get on with their lives, defining themselves in the process. And if anyone’s looking, they’ll notice that Jews value soul over body, courage over convenience, hope over despair, self-reliance over dependency, responsibilities over rights and community over self-centredness. And they’ll also notice that a tiny country, condemned to death on the day of its birth by its neighbours, is growing and thriving. And if they wish, they can join in this great project of renewal and rebirth and enjoy the benefits it brings.
The West has taken much from the Jews. The story of the Exodus is the West’s meta-narrative of hope and the sourcebook of its liberty, and its inf luence has been immense. As the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine expressed it, “since the Exodus, freedom is always spoken with the Hebrew accent.”
The story of how a small people escaped from persecution and oppression and made a long and hazardous journey to an unknown land is not just history or an interesting collection of facts. It defines what Jewish civilisation has offered the world and continues to offer. It is the patrimony of the world and of every Jew.
Walter Benjamin, a prominent German Jewish philosopher, who came from an assimilated family and had a liberal upbringing, developed his understanding of Jewish civilisation only later in life. He had to acquire, or re-acquire, his Jewish identity. In a letter to Gershon Scholem, his closest friend, he said, “I am learning Jewish [Ich lerne Jude] because I have finally grasped that I am one”.
To young Jews, I want to say this. If you’re in danger of drifting off to imaginary greener pastures, stop for a moment and think. Think about who you are. Look into the mirror of time, as Macbeth did when he saw the endless line of Banquo’s heirs. Look into that mirror and you will see your children, and their children, and your entire genetic line unto the end of time. They depend on what you do. Don’t condemn them to an anonymous, non-identity. To be a Jew is to have roots, to know who you are, to enjoy the benefits and the collective wisdom of one of the world’s most remarkable people. It is your legacy. But it is your job to find these roots.
Chuck Volpe, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former Port Elizabeth-based businessman and Jewish communal leader now living in Australia. This article is adapted from a paper he presented at Limmud Oz in June 2017.
NOTES
- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945) – from the Introduction.
- Robin Shepherd, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009,Introduction.
- Book I, epistle xi, line 27.
- http://rabbisacks.org/topics/children-continuity /
- February 2017
