OPINION

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Extreme Language

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t is said that in the garment dis-
trict in New York, there are
three responses to the question:
How's business? The mildest is
"terrific," then comes "sensational."
And if you have just won the fran-
chise to sell gatkes to Alaska and cloth
caps to China, you may use the ulti-
mate superlative, "Not bad, not bad."
Jewish parlance here operates on
different principles. If you approve of
a politician, he is Moses. If you dislike
him, he is Mussolini. Every rabbi is
seen either as a nasi (prince) or a
Nazi. There is nothing in between, no
acknowledged demilitarized zone of
public discourse in which one is
allowed simply to disagree.
Consider the events of recent days.
The specter of Nazism was invoked in
politics and in religion. In this furor
over the fuehrer, it was implied that the
Likud's new slogan is reminiscent of the
Reich, and that Reform Judaism is the
most effective agent of Jewish decima-
tion since the concentration camp. In a
lesser development, the prime minister
was likened to the devil.
A heavy price is paid for this slide
into the rhetoric of apocalypse.
Firstly, we devalue history when we
make every political episode into a
reenactment of some heinous episode.
There is a limit to the number of
times we can compare a contemporary
politician to a totalitarian tyrant.
After a while, the words lose any
significance; and we lose historical
perspective.
A further victim of this verbal-
inflation is our own capacity to see
what's really happening in our society.
We are busy squabbling about words,
while grave developments go almost
unnoticed.
The decision to ease the prison
sentences of murderers as a "humani-
tarian" act passed almost unnoticed,
while pundits and politicians continue
to quibble about terminology.
When our language is pushed to
extremes, we lose the ability to deal
with complexity. Also, we make our-
selves more stupid than we already
are. Take, for example, the line of
thinking which likens Reform
Judaism to the Nazi program of anni-
hilation of the Jewish people. If I
make even the slightest effort to
answer this charge, I grant it a validity
it does not warrant. If I find myself
arab uinab within these terms of refer-
ence, I have already lost the debate.

For my fellow Jew who honestly
believes that the millions who affiliate
with non-Orthodox streams are
engaged in mass suicide; for that per-
son who maintains that the presence
of non-Orthodox Jews at the Western
Wall or on religious councils consti-
tutes a threat of mass extermination,
what is there to be said? Such beliefs
ought to become like hemorrhoids: If
you have them, you should be embar-c_
rassed to talk about them in public.
People suffer when Nazi compar-
isons are made. I can think of men
and women who came out of the
whirlwind of wartime Europe and
who have struggled all their lives to
establish a vigorous liberal Judaism.
We should not expect them to feel
warmly toward those giants of Jewish
genius who tell them that they are
doing Hitler's work.
As a bar mitzvah boy in England, I
recall that one of the books I and my
contemporaries received was an impres-
sive tome called Roget Thesaurus.
Roget — whose name sounded sus-
piciously Gaelic for such an important
contributor to the English tongue —
gathered together synonyms, so that
the reader could find 15 ways to say ` \
the same thing. Years later, as a rabbi,
I began to realize what an indispens-
able tool this could be.
Now, in Israel 1999, we should be in
search of a social thesaurus which gives
us a terminology we can use when we
want to say that an opinion is bad, neg-
ative, wrong, inappropriate, ill-consid-
ered, uninformed, in error, unfounded,
self-defeating or counter-productive.
The book will be in Hebrew, of course,
and there is much richness and variety
to be found there, too.
The point is that there should be
no room on the list of words for
Holocaust histrionics. To disagree
with someone, it ought to be suffi-
cient that he gabbles without trying tom
make out that he is Goebbels.
The language of the New York gar-
ment district has something to corn-
mend it, after all. It preserves the pre-
cious category of understatement, the
notion that one can imply much by
saying little.
I confess that despite the alarming
trends evident in our society, I still
dream of when we will be able to char- \–\
acterize modern Israel with the techni-
cal phrase, "Not bad; not bad at all." PI

Michael Marmur, a rabbi, is the clean
of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion in Jerusalem and
writes for the Jerusalem Post.

