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Israel and the Choice

by Shamrock McShane

Marvin the Marxist

My mentor Marvin Rosen, who taught History at Northern Illinois University, was a Marxist. Marvin was wont to say that it's hard to convince blacks that they are not black and gays that they are not gay and women that they are not women — but until we start thinking like a species, we can make no progress; we will be forever divided.

A Jew is as much a Jew as a Black is Black or a gay is gay, or a woman is a woman, with the difference that there is no element of choice in Blacks being Black, nor, despite protestation from the religious right do I believe there is an element of choice ruling our sexual orientation, nor short of surgical intervention is there a choice involved in gender itself, but a Jew must choose to be a Jew.

Really? The Nazis would not have considered it permissible for the six million victims of the shoah to choose not to be Jews.

But why should we apply the Nazi's standards? Ever?

The paradox is entangled in time. The Jews chose to follow Abram, they chose to preserve their unity through marriage, so that, always, one is born a Jew only when born of a Jewish mother.

You can be converted to Judaism, but you cannot become a Jew.

The Catholics excommunicated Galileo. The Jews excommunicated Spinoza. Are these cases parallel?

Marvin was the quintessential apostate Jew. Mamet would hate and denounce him, just as he does Noam Chomsky, who Marvin thought was ok -- only not radical enough. And Marvin would have none of it and would fling the arguments back at Mamet with Marxist gusto. It's rough when your friends hate each other. It's worse when your heroes and mentors do. Must you take sides?

(Greg Galassini writes: "I read your posted correspondence with Prof. Rosen in December. He seems to be a dedicated and bright man, and the mentoring relation you must have had in DeKalb is exactly what a university professor–student relation should be but rarely is. Still…he went all in, as they say in poker, on a failed system. Wonder if he ever read Murray Rothbard.")

(Murray Rothbard is a libertarian. Shit.)

You must. Both sides. You must split yourself in two. It is a harrowing experience. It is a hair-splitting experience, an atom-splitting experience.

You can't have it both ways.

There is no other way you can have it than by having it both ways.

To stand within and without.

Is a logical absurdity.

And yet to embrace the contradictions.

That is nonsense.

You've got to have it both ways — because otherwise you are falling into the trap of post–modernism. By maintaining the "truth" or "reality" of your mysticism or rationality, the objectivity of it, the universality, its timelessness, you lose sight of its history and its place in history.

Like studying a star by taking it out of the sky.

Out of space.

Nothing is outside history.

What about Marvin?

Marvin is dead; he killed himself.

Does that take him out of history?

That places him firmly in history. He lived between 1935 and 2000.

If it's a question of history, the Jews win. Come on, it goes like this: Jews, Christians, Moslems. Now the Christians and Moslems can argue that they were the ones who go it right, but the Jews were first. And the question remains: where does that leave the rest of us?

Freedom

If we were not born Jews, and that is the only way to be a Jew, and we are not one of the Chosen people, then we are free to choose.

We are free, and the Jews are not? You can see why Marx was having none of this.

Nor Spinoza before him.

Two Kingdoms

Israel and Juddah were kickass motherfuckers. They ruled.

I grew up loving the Bible. Can't beat the Bible, wanna talk about stories.

Mythos or Logos. Take your pick. It's got to be one or the other. Posit that which is beyond your grasp, and accept that it is greater than what you can grasp — explain all by the unexplainable.

The Inexplicable

Mythos. The Kabbalah.

The best atheists have been Jews — Marx, Freud, and Proust. The Jews are the first to monotheism, reducing all gods to one, and then they are the first to reduce one to none.

Nietzsche of course was not a Jew, as the Nazis would vehemently affirm, but he was a Promethean atheist.

The notion of atheism, as we would recognize it, didn't emerge till well after Spinoza. You can see it beginning to emerge in the Enlightenment, but even then the philosophers were deists, so their conception of reality still had a classical nexus.

Aristotle filtered through Aquinas is a long way from the Torah.

Far afield? It is in the opposite direction. It is in the wrong direction. It is in the direction of the Apikoros.

The Greeks had to make their choice between Epicurus and the Stoics, and so, it seems, must we.

The Stoics believed in life after death, the Epicureans didn't. You can't have it both ways.

Mark Twain said, "Faith is believing what you know aint so."

David Mamet is a Stoic. David Mamet is a Jew. The Jews are the most stoical people on earth, the most stoical people who ever lived. The have waited practically forever.

Since the destruction of the Temple is 72AD (to be arcane) till 1948. That's 1,876 years. That's a long time to wander the earth, a people without a country.

Wandering Jew

He apparently made some smart remark to Jesus on the Road to Galgotha. Been wandering ever since. He is supposed to have said to the cross-bearing Christ, "Hurry up." To which Christ is supposed to have responded, "I'll go, but you'll be waiting for me here when I come back." And he's been wandering the earth ever since.

It is one of your classic anti–Semitic stories, up there with the blood libel and the like, a strain of racism unlike what the Arab World feels toward Israel now. It is not race hatred that fuels that fire. Race hatred is another fire and its essence is white, its unquenchable desire is power; that's why it is set now on consuming all the oil on the planet.

There is no one who worships nothing. Your sense of awe must be discharged. What will you worship? Wealth? Power? Health? Sex?

The Chosen is the story of two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn in the turmoil of World War Two and its aftermath.

The Chosen was published in 1967, some twenty years after the birth of Israel. Its author Chaim Potok had that odyssean span of time to gain perspective. Israel by then had survived the trauma of birth, and the world was adjusting or trying to adjust to the terror that accompanies the birth of all states, and that always seems to entail pitching people off their land.

Judaism is a religion that honors learning, wisdom, and books.

Imagine.

"Mathematics was my first love," Reuven Malter says in The Chosen.

When you think of the six million think of the fact there are only 14 million Jews in the world now. The Jewish population reached its peak in 1939 at 16 million. Then Hitler started in.

These are a people, the people, who trace themselves back to Abraham, by their mothers, legitimately.

Give Mohammad his due, but he was not a Jew. Jesus was a Jew. I'm not a Jew. Most people aren't Jews. There are only fourteen million Jews in the world.

Don't kill the Jews.
Or, let me put it another way: If you're going to kill the Jews, kill me too.
I don't want to love in a world without Jews.

The Palestinians are not, strictly speaking, anti–Semites. The distinction is a linguistic one. Semites are speakers of Semitic languages. The Palestinians are Semites.

"Apikoros. The word had meant, originally, a Jew educated in Judism who denied the basic tenets of his faith, like the existence of God, the revelation, the resurrection of the dead. To people like Reb Saunders, it also meant any educated Jew who might be reading say, Darwin." — Chaim Potok, The Chosen

"The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. The other is to choose a friend." — Chaim Potok, The Chosen

"Freud had clearly upset him in a fundamental way — had thrown him off balance, as he once put it. But he couldn't stop reading him, he said, because it had become increasingly obvious to him that Freud had possessed an almost uncanny insight into the nature of man. And that was what Danny found upsetting. Freud's picture of man's nature was anything but religious. It tore man from God, as Danny put it, and married him off to Satan." — Chaim Potok, The Chosen

"His father was fine, he said, until he was confronted by any idea that he felt came from the contaminated world." —Chaim Potok, The Chosen

A secular Jewish state was anathema to many Jews. How many? How many are Hasidim?

About a third of all the Jews in the world live in Israel. That's about five and a half million people. That means that the Jews in the United States and Israel make up almost ninety percent of all the Jews in the world. The other ten percent live in fifty different countries.

Five and a half million people on a sliver of land about the size of New Jersey.

It is a place for Jews, but other people can live there too.

The Israelis bought that land, or won it in wars.

But what Mark Twain said is still true.

"There is not one square inch of the world's surface in the possession of its rightful owner."

Five thousand years is one hell of a long time for human beings. No one else has done what the Jews have done — kept to themselves, kept themselves apart, while at the same time being a light of the world.

"You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." — Rabbi Tarphon

Churchill himself went to the Palestinians and told them not to worry — there was no way Palestine would become a Jewish state.

Spinoza maintained that the only sense in which the Jews were a chosen people was coincident with political ascendancy of the nations of Judah and Israel in biblical times, but that certainly God would not choose one people over another.

"You are no longer a child,' my father went on. 'It is almost impossible to see the way your mind is growing. And your heart, too. Inductive logic, Freud, experimental psychology, mathematizing hypotheses, scientific study of the Talmud. Three years ago you were still a child. You have become a small giant since the day Danny's ball struck your eye. You don't see it. But I see it. And it is a beautiful thing to see. So listen to what I am going to tell you.' He paused for a moment as if considering his next words carefully. 'Human beings do not live forever. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?' He paused again, his eyes misty now. 'I learned a long time ago that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."—Chaim Potok, The Chosen

"States which find it hard to live down the tumultuous beginnings because they are too raw and recent are likely to rank among the most unstable. Israel and Northern Ireland may serve as examples. It is hard to pass off your sovereignty as natural when everyone remembers their grandparents being pitched off their land. What is vital here, as Burke argues in his celebrated doctrine of prescription, is the sheer passage of time, which is enough to convert rebels into real estate agents. Legitimacy is really longevity."

"The Hebrew word for accuser is Satan. Satan is the pathological image of God cultivated by those for whom love is an intolerable weakness, and who need to think in terms of power and sovereignty." — Terry Eagleton