Last night Rabbi Jonathan Sacks delivered an uplifting talk at the Center for Jewish History. He argued that the Jewish nation had blessed the world through words. Its commitment to wide literacy nurtured an ethic of equality on which our civilization rests (“And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed”). In the book of Judges, Gideon comes into the village of Succoth, finds a boy, and asks him to write down the names of the town’s elders (they had earlier refused him hospitality—bad idea). One thousand years before Christ, it was assumed that any Jewish boy in the street would know how to write.
Of course, not everyone in the world feels blessed by the Jews. Today brought news that a member of the Stanford student government thinks that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions . . . is not anti-semitism.” It is hard to know the relative proportions of ignorance and dishonesty in such statements, but they are compounded of nothing else.
When asked about such campus antics last night, Sacks said they are simply another example of what Julien Benda called the “intellectual organization of hatred.” How to counter it? Not just with prudence and force, though that will be necessary (the metal detector that I passed once again on my way out, like the squad cars often parked outside New York synagogues, was ample reminder of that) but also through an education in love. Until the world learns the lesson of God’s love and man’s dignity that comes from the Jewish people, the Jewish people must continue to teach it. Too bad: when it comes to things that matter, we are not quick studies.
Matthew Schmitz is literary editor of First Things.
