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THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, September 13, 1985
ish occasions — birth, marriage, and
death. Boys were circumcised, a rabbi
usually officiated at marriage, and burial
was in a Jewish cemetery. "At these three
moments they are Jews," he said, adding:
"What happens in between varies."
Baron was struck by the contradictions
in Jewish character and religious thought,
"the contrast between the practical sense
of the Jew and his unrestrained idealism;
between his adherence to tradition and his
proneness to innovations; between his
quick, intuitive grasp and endless, arid
casuistry; between his commercial avidity
and unlimited charitableness."
Often the decision was taken out of his
hands, and a Jew was one who was con-
sidered that by others, treated as such,
mistreated as such. His origins made him
what he was, and what he was ensured his
fate. Survival of Judaism marked these
people as distinct, and the distinctness,
while encouraging and facilitating animos-
ity toward them, ensured their survival.
The difference between Jews and non-Jews
might appear minimal, negligible in belief
and word, hardly discernible in ritual,
dress, and act. But if the Jew were entirely
like the non-Jew, he would have ceased to
be himself, in fact ceased to be.
"A headstrong, moody, murmuring
race," the seventeenth-century poet John
Dryden called them. Apt at finding pleas-
ure or solace in self-mockery, Jews char-
acterized themselves as difficult, rebel-
lious, proud, and stiff-necked. Rent by
divisions, torn asunder by controversies,
affirming, dissenting, worshipful, recal-
citrant, these were the people who bore liv-
ing witness to the claims of ambiguity.
Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound
and liberated by faith, torn between
obscurantism and reason, self-assured and
self-critical, they were a kaleidoscope of
fragments, positions held and abandoned,
images formed and shattered, God-fearing
Jew, God-denying Jew, passionate and in-
- different, hero and villain, yea-sayer, nay-
sayer. A Yiddish saying suggested that
every Jew had his own Code of Laws. Mere
observation confirmed that this was some-
times a questing but eternally a question-
ing people. Why did a Jew answer a ques-
tion with a question? "Why not?" was the
• classical response. In his History of the
Yiddish Language, Max Weinreich offered
a serious corollary: "Frequently we have
to be content when, in place of an answer,
we get the opportunity to ask a new ques-
tion on a higher level."
"A community of historical fate" was
Weinreich's description of the Jewish
people. "A community woven by memory"
were the words of sociologist Daniel Bell.
The classical role of the Jews was as en-
dangered species, forever threatened by
the rancor of others and by their own
ineptness or indifference. Martin Buber,
the philosopher, maintained: "We Jews
need to know that our being and our
character have been formed not solely by
the nature of our fathers but also by their
fate, and by their pain, their misery and
their humiliation. We must feel' this as well
as know it, just as we must feel and know
that within us dwells the element of the
prophets, the psalmists, and the kings of
Judah." Buber suggested that "the Jew-
ish people has become the eternal people
not because it was allowed to live but
because it was not allowed to live. Just
because it was asked to give more than
life, it won life."
One could claim
membership,
assert fidelity,
and yet dispute
virtually every
particle of belief.
Eliezer Berkovits, an Orthodox philoso-
pher, who thus held strictly to the tenets
of the faith, decried attempts to exclude
the non-Orthodox from this community of
fate. "To be a Jew does not mean 'I believe
this or that,' he argued. "To be a Jew
means 'I am!" There are elements in
Jewish identity which identify a Jew even
against his will...To be a Jew means to
open a book of Jewish history and say,
'This is my history — this is me."
Historian Bernard Lewis found recur-
rent themes and enduring obsessions —
bondage and liberation, exile and return,
separateness and assimilation, rabbinical
primacy and secularism, messianism
sacred and secular, myths ancient and
new. Seeking to isolate a sense of Jewish
identity, he noted: "What we are left with
is history — what is left from a waning
culture, a religion that is losing its grip,
.
a community that is falling apart, the
residue of all these preserved through
historical knowledge...and beyond all of
them a feeling of corporate memory, of
group memory, of a common predicament
and of a shared destiny."
Early in the twentieth century, Harry
Wolfson, historian of philosophy, de-
scribed the Judaism of his day, and doubt-
less the Judaism that followed, as "the
changing mood of the Jews." "It is no
longer an inheritance, it is a set of in-
herited characteristics," he suggested. "It
is no longer a discipline, it is a day-dream
... We cannot take Jewish life of today as
the source of Judaism, for we are all now
in a state of apostasy both in a religious
and in a secular cultural sense. To remain
as Jews it is not sufficient for us to con-
tinue to be what we are, for we are not
what we should be. Jewish life of today is
indeed peculiar, but it is not peculiarly
Jewish."
"We can't give each other grades," in-
sisted Emanuel Rackman, who went from
spiritual leadership of a New York Ortho-
dox synagogue to presidency of Israel's
Orthodox Bar-Ilan University. "God gives
us the grades. Our job is not to define who
is a good Jew, but to help people to be
good Jews. You have observant Jews who
are villains and saints among the non-
observant." Alas, even Rackman's form-
ula for tolerance was question-begging,
assuming God's role and suggesting that
one consciously could help a person be
good without any notion of what con-
stituted good.
At a literary gathering in New York to
discuss Jewish influences on American
arts and America's influences on Jewish
life, it was hardly surprising that the
Jewish participants found it difficult to
unite on any secure position. "A Jewish
characteristic," suggested critic Irving
Howe. "Anything you say, somebody will
disagree with it." Author Bel Kaufman
recalled that her grandfather, Sholom
Aleichem, wrote about "losing everything
but winning the argument." "I disagree
with you," said playwright Paddy Chayev-
sky to critic Martin Gottfried. "I sym-
pathize with you disagreeing," rejoined
Gottfried.
In the nineteenth century, poet Emma
Lazarus, noting that Hebrew conjugations
had an intensive mode, called Jews "the
intensive form of any nationality." A
member of the twentieth-century audience
asked why Jews were such warm people.
"I don't think Jews are so warm," said
critic Alfred Kazin. "I think they're hot,
not warm...A lot of what is called warmth
is really anxiety, hysteria." "I know as
many cold Jews as I know of any other
race or ethnic group," insisted playwright
Arthur Miller. "Russians are the warmest
people I know." Historian Barbara Tuch-
man suggested that Jews were "the eter-
nal Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill."
Kazin then recalled Mark Twain's words:
"Jews are members of the human'race --
worse than that I cannot say of them."
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