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The Mission of the Jews

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:01:00 -0500

You will often hear Jews say, with pride, that Judaism rejects a missionary or evangelizing stance. This is true in the narrow sense that Jews do not pursue converts to Judaism, but it is deeply misleading in another. The German Orthodox rabbi, polemicist, and scriptural expositor Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808“1888), a towering figure in modern Jewish thought, taught insistently that God brought the “Abrahamitic nation” onto the stage of history for “the salvation of the world through Judaism.” As he wrote in his Torah commentary, this was to be accomplished “by example and admonition,” with the Jews as “God’s messengers on earth” (on Genesis 12:1, 11:8, 18:17“19). In Orthodox Judaism today, Hirsch remains a household name. But the most important aspect of his legacy, which deserves urgent practical consideration by the Jewish community, is insufficiently appreciated.

A range of Orthodox communities claim Hirsch’s mantle. One often hears the “Hirschean worldview” invoked. Modern Orthodox thinkers cite his philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz (“Torah with the Way of the World”) as giving a Torah imprimatur to secular education. Hirsch’s pioneering study of the roots of Hebrew words is also well regarded. But Hirsch’s thought extends far beyond his contributions as an educational theorist and etymologist. He illuminated a cultural crisis of which he saw only the beginnings. That crisis, in Hirsch’s own term, is that of the Western world “sunk in materialism” (on Exodus 6:3).

Hirsch held a variety of rabbinic posts in Germany and Austria, culminating in 1851 with his leadership of the Orthodox separatist congregation in Frankfurt am Main. He is still known for his philosophical defense against Reform Judaism and for secession ( Austritt ) from Reform-dominated institutions. He was a meticulous and perceptive interpreter of scriptural text. Rather than Jews’ being called on to “modernize” Judaism, he preached, they were called on to fulfill an ancient “mission” on the model of Abraham himself, who “never leaves off admonishing, teaching, warning, bettering wherever and however he can” (on Genesis 18:23“26). On the famous phrase in Exodus 19:6 (“But ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests”), Hirsch wrote that Jews “by word and example” are called to minister to the world just as the Jewish priesthood ministers to the Jews: “For that which the [Jewish] Priest is to be to the [Jewish] People, the People are to be to the rest of Mankind, the ‘leading ram’ at the head of God’s flock of human beings” (on Leviticus 16:5). The purpose? “To carry through the world [a] proclamation of deliverance ever to be found from evil and guilt, or rejuvenation to freedom and life never to be lost, is your mission” (on Genesis 1:14“19).

Hirsch’s magnum opus, the Torah commentary (1867“1878), may be one of Judaism’s least read classics. Even in a modern translation, Hirsch’s prose can be intimidating. But that does not quite explain why Hirsch’s emphasis on Israel’s mission to the world fails to resonate in contemporary Jewish consciousness. When he wrote, the idea of such a mission to a hostile Gentile culture such as Germany’s hardly seemed prudent or practical. Traditional Jews were more concerned with the threat to Judaism from heterodox movements within the Jewish community. Later, immigrant generations of Jews, struggling to make it in new lands and ambitious for themselves and their children, found in Hirsch a justification for secular education but gave scant attention to his reason for advocating engagement with secular culture.

Hirsch saw the education of mankind”that is, its return to God”as the central drama shaping human history: “This gradual winning of mankind to what is good and true was God’s purpose from the beginning” (on Genesis 2:4). In this historical struggle, God’s people encountered a foe with many faces. Hirsch spoke of the “animal wisdom” of the snake in the Garden, seducing human beings with the idea that the physical urges we feel are nothing less than the “Voice of God” (on Genesis 3:1). Sometimes, Hirsch noted, the force wears the face of Jacob’s brother Esau, carrying “the orb of empire, the scepter and the sword””physical power”with which Jacob wrestles eternally: “it is the meaning of what the whole of world-history really is” (on Genesis 32:25). What these faces and forces have in common can be summarized, Hirsch thought, in a single word: materialism .

By materialism, he meant the conception of reality as made purely of physical stuff and physical processes”the ideological outlook that gave us modern secularism. The deterministic doctrine that people are just an aspect of nature, hairless apes or advanced fishes, saps our will to make free and good”albeit difficult”moral choices of the kind animals do not make. Hirsch taught that the key to mankind’s liberation from materialism lies in the realization that we are free: Nothing holds us back from fulfilling God’s command. Hirsch presented many of the Torah’s laws as being designed precisely to educate us in this truth. He explicated such seemingly arcane areas of Torah law as those having to do with tumah and taharah (ritual impurity and purity) as examples of the subtleties of human freedom.

Hirschean theology sees God as the ultimate model for us in this regard. Hirsch insisted again and again that God must be understood as acting with complete freedom in the world, both as it is now and as it was in the process of creation. Accordingly, Hirsch was critical of the then-new Darwinian evolutionary theory. The history of creation was one in which God’s thoughts emerged and freely influenced the shapes of nature: “They are not the result of some force working blindly, but the work of One thinking Being, creating them with intention and purpose” (on Genesis 2:1).

His case against the Darwinian materialist worldview was framed, not in scientific terms, but in moral ones; it had nothing to do with insisting on a literal reading of Scripture or modern young-earth creationism. Writing just a few years after the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man , Hirsch used the biblical image of the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in a grotesquely animalistic fashion, to illustrate “the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learns to consider itself just a ‘higher’ class of animal” (on Numbers 25:3).

For Hirsch, the Jew’s mission to oppose materialism is conducted primarily in his role as a citizen. Especially in Horeb (1838), Hirsch’s work on the philosophy of the Torah’s commandments, his insistence on this point”the importance of patriotic devotion to one’s “Fatherland””can be startling. Hirsch saw patriotism as nothing less than a divine commandment, “a religious duty, a duty imposed by God and no less holy than all the others,” regardless of whether a Jew’s adoptive Gentile homeland is generously disposed to him. By this he meant to call not for mindless, undiscriminating nationalism, but rather for improving and caring about the moral and religious culture of one’s home in the Diaspora as a good in itself just as one devotes oneself to Jewish welfare and flourishing.

In Orthodox circles, outreach to nonobservant Jews has come to be seen as an important communal interest, a vital good for its own sake. To embrace the Hirschean model today would require adapting that remarkably successful communicative technology, and the dynamic idealism that goes with it, to an even bigger challenge: outreach to non-Jews. Certainly, a first order of business would be to infuse the education of young people with a frankly outreach-directed Jewish mission. Jewish education would be remodeled around the goal of making a profound and Godly impact on the world. Some values that would be emphasized in a Hirschean educational system are rhetoric (writing and speaking, to persuade and affect a general audience); science (to demonstrate how God’s thoughts are made manifest in nature, so that an educated Jew should, as the Mishnah advises, “Know how to answer an apikoros ,” a materialist religious skeptic); and, finally, business ethics (Hirsch was disgusted by the idea that Jews were known for being “sharp” in business).

Perhaps above all, rabbis in training would need to be imprinted with the full scope and grandeur of the Jewish mission, so that they could not only convey it to their congregants but also become frontline spokesmen for Judaism’s thought system in the world. Every Jew has a priestly calling, but none more so than a person whose job, as a rabbi, is precisely that of a teacher. Institutions such as Yeshiva University that prepare rabbis as well as other professionals must think far more in terms of the rabbi as public figure”a writer and speaker not only to Jewish audiences, but also to general ones, on the model of Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. This is not a matter of academic panels “dialoguing,” but, rather, a matter of seeking out opportunities to speak and write about God and man in Jewish terms that can be understood by all levels of Gentile laymen. A flagship Jewish educational institution such as Yeshiva should be at the front line of this effort, as well as at the front in formulating Jewish teachings”on God, family, personal morality, and, yes, politics”for a non-Jewish audience. A full-fledged program of study devoted to Jews’ mission to non-Jews, organized by a new department at Yeshiva designed to stand alongside Accounting, Real Estate, International Business, and Speech Pathology/Audiology, would not seem to be too much to ask.

Undeniably, the authentic Hirschean worldview poses a challenge to the traditional Jewish community, whose members today, like Jonah in the Bible, are reluctant prophets. The Jews are truly Jonah’s children. Yet, at a time when Americans and others around the globe are beset by anxieties about crumbling personal and business ethics”with moral values increasingly ungrounded by permanent structures of belief, with a world economy in distress thanks precisely to factors such as these, with life’s very meaning in doubt for many, and with non-Jews more open to Jewish influence than ever before”surely the time is at hand for Jews to seize their unique moral and spiritual mission.

David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He is the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus and other books and writes the Kingdom of Priests blog on Beliefnet.

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Jews vs. Christians

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

These are troubled times for Jewish-Christian relations. In November, two influential American Jewish leaders, representing large swaths of the Jewish community, gave major speeches vilifying politically conservative Christians. As an Orthodox Jew who has long worked with evangelicals, Catholics, and other serious Christians, I would like to propose an ameliorative measure aimed at furthering inter-religious peace and friendship: Let every Christian gently ask a Jewish friend for a moment of his time. Tell him you’ve been following the news about some of the statements issuing from Jewish organizations in regard to conservative Christians. Tell him you’re confused and concerned. In a spirit of affection and respect, ask your friend if he would be willing to answer six simple but puzzling questions.

Preface this by giving the relevant recent background information. Mention that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, the country’s largest Jewish denomination, called Christians and other religious conservatives “zealots” and “bigots.” Harshly attacking opposition to gay marriage, Yoffie remarked, “We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations.”

Yoffie, whose movement includes 1.5 million members, spoke on the heels of comments from Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. “Today,” Foxman said, “we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To save us!” Foxman warned that evangelicals in particular have “built infrastructures throughout the country,” intending “to ‘Christianize’ all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms of professional, collegiate, and amateur sports, from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants.”

In view of these provocations, here are the questions I’d suggest that Christians ask:

• Is it not true that Jewish leaders have better things to worry about than the spiritual fate of SpongeBob SquarePants? Let’s say, about radical Islam? Or secularism? At a time when radical Muslims threaten Jews and others around the world, why vilify American Christians?

Yoffie and Foxman spoke at a time when fellow Jews were worried about disturbing news from across the Muslim world. In France, Arab youths rioted”the same youths who since 2000 have been harassing French Jews, burning synagogues, and desecrating Jewish cemeteries. In Egypt, television viewers had just enjoyed a month-long dramatization of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . The president of Iran called on Muslims to “wipe Israel off the map.” Meanwhile, the number of Jews lost to any form of Christianity is minuscule compared to the number lost to nothing, to secularism. If the ADL’s institutional purpose is to safeguard the existence of the Jewish people, if the Reform movement cares about Jewish souls as well as Jewish bodies, why has neither group ever campaigned against the threat posed by secularism?

• If conservative Christians were less politically powerful, would this help or hurt the security of the state of Israel?

No nation has been a better friend to the Jewish state than the United States, and for this, our country has earned the enmity of Israel-haters around the globe. In shaping American policy, domestic Christian pro-Israel sentiment has been at least as influential as Jewish support. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that some of them really are looking forward to Armageddon, in the manner of the Left Behind books, with a global war centered upon Israel playing a key role in the unfolding of events at the End of Days. However distasteful you might find that view, please consider: If these same Israel-loving conservative American Christians all retired from political activism now, would Israel be better off or worse? Safer from attack or less so? Would America be a more faithful defender of the Jewish state or a less faithful one?

One prominent religious conservative, Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association, has said forthrightly that attacks on conservative Christians endanger Israel’s safety. In a December 5 radio interview, Wildmon said of Foxman’s latest salvos, “You know, he’s got himself kind of in a bind, because the strongest supporters Israel has are members of the religious right, the people he’s fighting. He’s got himself in a bind here. Because the more he says that ‘you people are destroying this country,’ you know, some people are going to begin to get fed up with this and say, ‘Well, all right then. If that’s the way you feel, then we just won’t support Israel anymore.’”

• Practically, what positive ends could anti-Christian attacks possibly accomplish?

Presumably Foxman and Yoffie, in provoking Christian conservatives, had in mind some positive and practical goal of benefit to the Jewish community. They hoped to accomplish a goal beyond provocation. But what that goal could be is hard to discern. When the Anti-Defamation League and other liberal groups campaigned against Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ , Gibson refused to change his film. Yet the anti-Semitism the ADL warned the movie would spur never even began to materialize. Clearly that ADL campaign benefited no one”except possibly the ADL. What are the chances that the latest insults will convince Christians to give up their political goals and moral principles? If the chances are slim, why risk alienating friends and fellow citizens?

• If evangelicals seek to “Christianize America,” a phrase implying legal coercion, when is the last time anyone tried to Christianize you?

Whenever I ask fellow Jews to explain their support of leaders such as Yoffie and Foxman, the most frequent response I get is that these men defend us against those who would pressure Jews to convert to Christianity. Yet no one I know can point to a personal experience of having been pressured to accept Jesus. Is it possible that Jews think that “Christianizing” is rampant only because the Yoffies and the Foxmans tell us so? True, Foxman can always trot out a quotation from someone in the fever swamps that are supposed to somehow represent the perspective of conservative Christians as a whole. Thus, he points out, something called the Alliance Defense Fund says “court victories are vital steps to . . . reclaim the legal system for Jesus Christ.” But in a big country like America, you can always find some organization that articulates any political or other philosophy that one can possibly imagine. Quote that marginal group and”bingo!”you’ve now “proven” that its bizarre ideology represents a significant threat just because it has been written down somewhere and nailed up on a website. But honestly, does this tell us anything about the sentiments of the majority of American Christians?

• How do you explain the fact that “bigoted” Christian political positions mirror the traditional views of your own religion, Judaism?

Judaism, as understood for millennia, mostly agrees with conservative Christian views on abortion, euthanasia, religion in public life, and other issues. If it’s “Nazi”-like to oppose gay marriage, as Rabbi Yoffie argues, then Jewish tradition must also be Hitlerian. The Hebrew Bible forbids homosexual intercourse, and Jewish rabbinic thought warns against tampering with the institution of marriage. Indeed, a classical rabbinic midrash explains that one of the reasons God was so disgusted with the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan, and caused the land to disgorge them in favor of the children of Israel, was that the Canaanites wrote marriage contracts for members of the same sex. Why are these views evidence of “zealotry” when held by Christians but not so when held by every generation of Jews universally down to about a hundred years ago?

• Have you considered the economics behind these anti-Christian attacks?

A self-perpetuating loop of disinformation feeds Jewish fears: Jewish leaders scare us with the bogeyman of the Christian Right. That causes Jews to open their wallet. If questioned about this, Jews explain that they need to support the Yoffies and the Foxmans because, after all, look at what the Christian Right is up to! The fact that Foxman’s organization has $52 million in yearly expenses, including Foxman’s own $412,000 in total compensation (according to publicly available 2003 tax information), is not irrelevant. The dynamics of a non-profit organization make it imperative that the group continually prove to funders that it remains relevant.

Some non-profits demonstrate their relevance by offering thoughtful commentary on current events or other vital information. But are anti-Christian provocations the best way to spend tens of millions of dollars? Remember that we live in a time of massive Jewish assimilation into the wider secular culture”a disappearance of Jewish families driven in large part by Jewish cultural impoverishment and ignorance of Jewish faith and tradition. Imagine if Abraham Foxman’s salary alone were spent on sending Jewish kids to Jewish schools. Given the goal of preserving the Jewish people, would that be a better or worse allocation?

These are fair questions, and millions of thoughtful Christians must have wondered about them since the early 1990s when Jewish groups like the ADL started lambasting religious conservatives. There is nothing threatening about a Christian politely requesting some clarification. So go ahead, Christians, ask away. Frankly I would be curious to know what answers you get.

But beyond satisfying curiosity, can the disinformation loop actually be broken? I believe there is value in Christians”as distinct from me, a fellow Jew”politely questioning their Jewish friends. When the questions come from outside the seemingly airtight bubble of Jewish-American culture, perhaps the startling fact of actually being confronted by a real Christian will force Jews to rethink our community’s reflexive support of irresponsible leaders. It might just work.

David Klinghoffer is a columnist at the Forward and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. His most recent book is Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History .

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Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites

Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:00:00 -0500

In a Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River, a young woman I know lies awake at 5 a.m., wondering if the sun will rise. That fear has gripped her on more than one occasion recently. This is what happens. She is awakened by the sound of her children crying. Once she has quieted them down, she gets back into bed and looks out the window and thinks, What if the sun doesn’t come up this morning? She is entirely sane, I assure you, but the idea terrifies her until the sun actually does rise through her window, and she can fall asleep again beside her husband.

The other day she happened to mention this to me. I felt that I should console her, even half-playfully. But how?

While giving all due respect to her anxieties, I tried to present a cool, rational view. On the one hand, I said, it has to be admitted that nature is in God’s hands. The meaning of the phrase used in insurance contracts, “Act of God,” is precisely that nature does not always follow predictable rules. The blessing we Jews say before recitation of the Sh’ma each morning acknowledges that the Lord m’chadesh b’chal yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit : God renews the work of creation every day, continually. Theoretically, it’s possible that God might choose to withhold the sun from us tomorrow morning. In the past, on at least one occasion, He has indeed halted the course of the heavenly bodies (see Joshua 10:13). In short, anything could happen.

On the other hand, I told her, clearly there is nothing to worry about. I could show you photographs going back decades of the sun rising over the East River each and every morning. It has never failed to do so. Forget about it.

I thought afterward, however, that I had taken the wrong approach. When someone is irrationally afraid of something, it makes no sense merely to reassure him that he has nothing to worry about. Usually, the smart thing to do is help him step back from his fears and view them at a distance. Let him ask himself: Why is it that I worry about a problem that isn’t there? What is the subterranean meaning of my fear? When a rational person suffers from an irrational terror, the terror serves some purpose, probably an unhealthy one, in the dark attic of his soul.

I thought of the young woman who was afraid the sun wouldn’t rise when I came across an item recently in the New York Times . Bear with me. It won’t be immediately apparent what she has to do with ultra-Orthodox hasidic Jews in New Square, New York.

The Times reported that some hasidim up in Rockland County had been indicted on the charge that they had defrauded the federal and state governments in a multimillion-dollar scheme involving student loans and housing subsidies. Subpoenas had been served at 6 a.m. to ensure that the subpoenaed individuals would be on hand to receive the documents personally. Getting woken up at such an early hour scared the children, the Jews claimed, and was “remindful of the Holocaust that many in this community endured decades ago.”

For many of us Jews lately, everything and anything is “remindful of the Holocaust.” The truth is that anti-Semitism has become an obsession with us. You’ve heard the phrase “anti-Semitism without Jews,” to describe the hostility to Jews felt in countries like Poland that don’t have any Jews. In the American Jewish community we’ve got anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. Or almost without anti-Semites. In a country as big as America you are inevitably going to find nuts and cranks, haters and despisers, of every description-if you look hard enough.

It seems every month the Anti-Defamation League denounces some piddling Army bureaucrat who said “Jew” out of the wrong side of his mouth or some evangelical religious group that had the temerity to hire one man and a secretary to undertake the quixotic task of converting every Jew in America to Southern Baptist Christianity. We follow these developments with eyes opened wide in horror. I regularly receive a big black fundraising envelope from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with promises of dark tidings for the future of the Jewish people: “Outbreaks of a virulent new strain of anti-Semitism around the world confront you with a choice. Urgent: Early reply requested.” Or I receive a business-size, fund-raising envelope from the ADL-or is it the World Jewish Congress?-with a photo of two mangy-looking teenage skinheads with a Nazi flag in the background and the caption “We protect your kids from these kids.” In reality, of course, American Jewish children are in far greater danger of getting run over by drunk drivers, or electrocuting themselves by dropping a plugged-in radio in the water when they’re taking a bath, than they are of getting so much as a hair on their heads plucked out by a neo-Nazi.

Our preoccupation with the ultimate symbol of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, has become notorious. There is no end in sight to the Holocaust history books, Holocaust novels, Holocaust television shows, Holocaust magazine and newspaper articles, chairs in Holocaust studies at universities, Holocaust museums, Holocaust poems, Holocaust paintings, Holocaust sculptures. In fact the flow seems to be picking up speed. Every self-respecting synagogue and Jewish Community Center must now have its Holocaust memorial, the more elaborately grotesque the better. I was driving in a leafy suburb of Seattle recently and passed some sort of public building with a huge, eerie, black concrete cylinder out front, with what looked like devils’ faces on it. Who had erected this sinister totem? Yes, of course, it was the neighborhood JCC proudly displaying its Holocaust memorial.

Whenever something unpleasant happens to us, whenever we are criticized or judged, whether fairly or unfairly, we tend, as a community, to view our discomfort from the perspective of the Holocaust. We operate under the assumption that anti-Semitism is forever threatening to boil up under the surface of American life and bring another trial like that one on us. Otherwise, what would be the point of remembering and remembering, and accusing and accusing, as we do? Like the woman who is concerned the sun won’t rise, we are afraid without a rational reason to be afraid.

If I had the opportunity to console the Jews who fear that another Holocast, or any lesser trial, may be around the corner, I could say: I understand your fears of anti-Semitism. After all, there was indeed a Holocaust fifty years ago. Yes, it could happen here. Theoretically, anything could happen to anyone anywhere.

On the other hand, as Professor Leonard Dinnerstein wrote in his 1994 book Anti-Semitism in America , “Today anti-Semitism in the United States is neither virulent nor growing. It is not a powerful social or political force . . . . The obvious conclusion is that it has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” I would add that in America today there is probably less hostility to Jews than in any country anywhere, including the State of Israel, at any time in history.

I could stop right there and say nothing more.

It would be better, though, if I tried to do what I should have done for my anxious friend. I could say, I am not going to address the content of your anxiety. Rather, I will offer a hypothesis, a proposed explanation of it. You could call it a meta-analysis. I want to know what it is in Jewish culture that accounts for our obsession with anti-Semitism.

Is it, in fact, another Holocaust that we fear? When we scour the printed and broadcast statements of our non-Jewish fellow citizens for the slightest hint of hostility to us, is it omens of a Nazified America we are really searching for? That would be the conventional answer. And as soon as the Holocaust is invoked, all discussion of an impious, questioning kind is expected to cease immediately. That answer, however, is an insult to American Jews. It suggests we are too dim-witted to tell the difference between Europe in 1938 and America in 1998. Instead, I offer you the hypothesis that, when we indulge our obsession with phantom anti-Semitism, we do something deeply related to what is unique about our Jewish souls.

When we want to understand the Jewish soul, religious and secular Jews alike can agree that there is no better way to do so than to read the Hebrew Bible. Some Jews, including me, believe that the Bible comes to us from God and His prophets. So it is obvious why that book can tell us more about ourselves than any other source, even the New York Times .

Jews who don’t believe in the Bible, who think it is a mere pastiche of ancient propaganda tracts culled together by rather unskilled editors called redactors, can still agree that it embodies the essence of what Jews are. After all, it is our national literature. We wrote it, and we have embraced it, however fraudulently, as God’s own word for more than three thousand years. It defines us, and always has. What, then, does the Bible tell us about anti-Semitism? The answer is nothing, and everything.

For, to put it simply, the Bible has never heard of such a thing as anti-Semitism. Naturally it records stupendous disasters that have befallen our people: none greater than the destruction of the First Temple by Babylonian invaders, when Jewish mothers were compelled to cook and eat their children in the streets of Jerusalem, as the Book of Lamentations so appallingly records.

But in Lamentations, and throughout the Bible, there is a striking difference between the way biblical Jews understood the hostility of non-Jews and the way we understand it. When the Jewish people suffer in the Bible, it is almost exclusively at the hands of non-Jews. Occasionally God will send a plague, but, for His own reasons, he prefers to work through Gentile aggressors. The difference between us and the Jews of the Bible, and indeed the Jews of every generation until a century or two ago, is this: They understood Gentile hostility to be an expression of God’s displeasure with us as a community. We understand it to be essentially meaningless.

What’s more, however difficult it is for us to square this mystery with our modern assumptions, they understood that God punishes the People Israel as a community. They believed in collective responsibility. That means that when individual Jews do wrong and bring punishment down from Heaven, innocent Jews may get caught up in the maelstrom. In fact, the guilty may escape punishment in this world altogether, while the innocent die and must wait for their reward in the world to come.

Take that time, recorded in the Book of Joshua, when God stopped the sun in its course. That happened during the conquest of Canaan, when the Israelites emerged from the desert after their wanderings. Shortly before that, we find a typical incident that reflects the authentic Jewish view of collective responsibility. When the Jews besieged Jericho, God instructed them to refrain from looting the ruined city. One man disobeyed. His name was Achan. As a result, when the Jews went out to make war on their next target, a modest little Canaanite city called Ai, they got chased away and lost thirty-six apparently innocent men in the battle. But Achan was not killed. It was only after Joshua had punished Achan that the Israelites could resume their campaign undeterred.

There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than the Holocaust. It would be a presumption to assert that God caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event, we can never know God’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind. It is that latter presumption of which most Jews, including many religiously observant ones, are guilty today. Anyway, if He did intend that event as a -punishment, a warning, or a lesson, it would fit the Bible’s pattern neatly. The Jews liquidated by Nazi Germany were not only, or even mostly, Reformers and secularists. Many deeply pious Jews perished as well, for they were often the last to seek escape from rising Nazi power. Which makes sense. God views the People Israel as an eternal community, not merely as disconnected individuals. All are responsible for all. And as the story of Achan and his friends demonstrates, maybe to emphasize our deep interconnectedness, the Lord does not practice precision bombing.

We modern Jews have entirely lost the consciousness of collective responsibility. A Conservative rabbi called Harold Kushner has crystalized our thinking in a series of bestselling books of contemporary “spirituality.” He asserts that God can do nothing to prevent our suffering, whether it is caused by Gentile aggressors or raging cancer cells. Like President Clinton, the Lord of the Universe feels our pain. Otherwise, Rabbi Kushner pictures Him impotent, weeping quietly in some corner of Heaven, plucking tissues out of a Kleenex box the size of Jupiter.

We are ready now to put the modern Jewish cult of victimhood on the couch. Let’s psychoanalyze ourselves. We agreed earlier that when a person fears something that he has no reason to fear, he would be wise to ask himself, as any good psychologist would do, what subterranean need he is fulfilling through his fear. What is it that we Jews gain, today, by obsessing over phantom anti-Semitism?

The key can be found in another classic statement of the authentic Jewish view of anti-Jewish persecution. It is in the Torah, in parshat B’chukotai . Here, in the Book of Leviticus, God explains to the Jews the ways He will reward us if we guard His commandments, and punish us if we do not. All of us, together. Among the punishments, there is an interesting line that describes the condition of modern American Jews perfectly: “the sound of a driven leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword; and they shall flee when none pursues.”

It is hard to think of a Jewish community in history that has been in much worse spiritual shape than our own. The universally lamented 50-plus percent intermarriage rate is only a symptom. The failure is not of the children who marry Gentiles, but of the parents, the grandparents, even the great-grandparents. We have quit teaching our children that God lives, that He loves us, that He wants a relationship with us-but that He wants something from us in return. That is not merely to be nice people, as some liberal rabbis would have us believe, but to observe the entirety of His Torah as almost all Jews did until about two hundred years ago.

We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial. We have a guilty conscience. We are unhappy about that. What can we do, what defensive strategy can we adopt, to lift the weight of guilt?

Fortunately for us, in the 1960s the Cult of Victimhood made its appearance. Black Americans were the first to embrace it. Its premise was that any ethnic or racial group that has suffered persecution is, by virtue of its victimhood, lifted to a state of moral superiority over everyone who has not suffered as much as they have. Soon homosexuals got in on the act. Even, incredibly enough, some Asian Americans have sought to compete for the honor of being named certified victims of America. I was intrigued recently by a subway advertisement for a gay cultural event that memorialized AIDS victims. The ad bore an image of a winged being in a white robe and halo, with the slogan underneath: “Another angel has gone to Heaven.” In other words, anyone who suffers from AIDS can be considered, merely because he carries the disease, morally superior even to a supernatural extent: an angel. Victimhood used to be considered something about which a normal person would feel ashamed. No longer. Amid the clamoring of would-be victims we find-ourselves, American Jews.

The Cult of Victimhood performs two valuable services for us Jews with our guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels. Our moral failures are turned into a guarantee of moral perfection. That’s quite a relief.

But it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it. God isn’t angry with us. And even if He were, He couldn’t send dangerous Gentiles against us. Our God is the impotent Harold Kushner God, if we choose to acknowledge a God at all.

The function of our obsession with anti-Semitism is to remind us, on a daily basis, that that is the God we sort of, kind of, barely believe in. Every ADL newsletter; every big black fundraising envelope from the Simon Wiesenthal Center; every obsessive discussion of what Pat Buchanan or Pat Robertson may have said about Jews fifteen years ago or through some hack ghostwriter; every Holocaust book, film, poem, and painting; every monstrous Holocaust memorial in the parking lot of a JCC-they all declare, to our great relief, that anti-Semitism is meaningless. They declare this by failing to name God in any discussion of anti-Jewish persecution. They say that anti-Semitism is demonic. It doesn’t come from God. God, if He exists, is in Heaven, weeping on His pillow.

We don’t live like Jews, but that’s alright. God doesn’t mind. He isn’t going to punish us for our disobedience. Our fear of Gentiles who don’t like us, our made-up, manufactured fear, is the greatest comfort we can give ourselves.

The impulse to see anti-Semitism where it isn’t is so powerful it infects Jewish culture at every level, among religious and secular Jews alike. Even New Square hasidim have absorbed this secular ethos from the Jewish society around them. If God, the true God, were to put us on the couch, I think that is what He would tell us. He would tell us there is no such thing as anti-Semitism, at least not the way we understand it. We American Jews aren’t suffering at all right now. For us, life couldn’t be better.

But anything can happen. And it just might.

David Klinghoffer is Literary Editor of National Review .

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Baby Talk

Thu, 01 Jun 1995 00:00:00 -0400

When is a child not a child?

That sounds like the opening line of a not very funny joke, but it is the question that bothers me almost every time my fellow abortion opponents open their mouths. They claim it is “children” who die in abortions. Do they, however, really mean children-like the ones you see toddling in the street? Reactions to the deeds of Paul Hill and John Salvi suggest, to this observer anyway, that people in the anti-
abortion movement often say things they do not and should not mean.

Following the news that a Florida judge had condemned Hill to the electric chair, the National Right to Life Committee expressed the view of most abortion foes. While mourning the deaths of “unborn children,” the committee “unequivocally oppose[d]” Mr. Hill’s decision to kill an abortion doctor to stop the man from going about this daily rounds. On the same day that I read the Committee’s statement, I picked up the December 1994 issue of First Things containing a symposium among conservative religious thinkers on “Killing Abortionists.” Cardinal O’Connor of New York, Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, and others urged against accepting Paul Hill’s statement that “Whatever force is legitimate in defending a born child is legitimate in defending an unborn child.” Nearly all the symposium’s participants agreed that the strictures of such authorities as Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin rule out the deliberate use of deadly force to stop abortions.

It was not that the contributors disputed Mr. Hill’s view that the entity in the womb is unambiguously a “child.” They spoke of abortion as “a moral species of murder” perpetrated against “unborn children,” “innocent human beings.” Indeed, the one thing Paul Hill has in common with the mainstream anti-abortion movement is a tendency to speak about abortion in the language of genocide. One hears constantly about the slaughter of “children” in the abortion “holocaust.”

Thus after John Salvi let loose his own salvo against the abortion industry, it was no surprise to find Randall Terry of Operation Rescue writing in the New York Post about the “slaughter [of] our young,” “the murder of innocent children,” “thirty-five million innocent babies [torn] from their mothers’ wombs”-while simultaneously opposing armed action on the grounds of unspecified “principles of Calvin, Knox, and Cromwell concerning ‘lower magistrates.’”

Though abortion opponents favor the most colorful possible speech, one may oppose abortion without it. For instance, there is the Jewish approach (which is my own). Exodus 21:22 specifies what happens when a man violently brings a woman’s pregnancy to a premature end: he pays a fine, a penalty hardly comparable to that imposed by God for murder (the death penalty) or for manslaughter (internal exile). Citing this and other verses, the rabbis of the Talmud concluded that abortion, while not the murder of a child, is to be strongly rejected as an interference in the divinely guided process of human reproduction.

So, as a Jew, I always stop short at terms like “holocaust” as applied to abortion. A holocaust is the mass murder of entities that are human beings in every sense in which Cardinal O’Connor or Randall Terry is a human being. And if a holocaust were going on in the United States today, one would think the responsibility to take up arms against it would be as great as it was when an undisputed Holocaust was going on in Europe. Within that part of the anti-abortion movement whose members decry the “murder” of “innocent children,” a few, such as Paul Hill and John Salvi, have acted accordingly-bombing clinics and shooting staffers. That these men used force in a wild, uncontrolled way does not mean that sane abortion foes could not come up with a more careful strategy, using the minimum level of violence necessary to accomplish their end: say, by shooting abortion doctors in the legs instead of the head, or setting fire to clinics by night.

And yet when a Catholic priest in Alabama sought to justify the use of force to prevent abortions, his archbishop denounced and suspended him. Reacting to Paul Hill, Cardinal O’Connor said, “If anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist, let him kill me instead.” Some abortion opponents I know disdain even the civil disobedience of Operation Rescue. And the archbishop of Boston has gone so far as to rule out even peaceful protests on the sidewalks outside abortion clinics. These polite people insist on the adequacy of words and votes.

To be sure, they offer earnest intellectual justifications for their inaction. Some allow that they might in theory accept the use of force to stop the murder of “babies,” but “prudential considerations” regarding the practical effectiveness of violence rule it out. Yet I have never heard a sustained discussion comparing the strategic merits of peaceful persuasion (which so far has produced meager results) with the merits of force. Among this variety of abortion foes, as soon as the words “prudential considerations” (or some equivalent) are invoked, the discussion comes to a quick, relieved halt. Others present arguments opposing force altogether, on moral grounds.

A detailed example appeared in the November 1994 issue of Catholic World Report , in which Professor John M. Haas cited the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas: “It is unlawful to take a man’s life, except for the public authority acting for the common good.” Professor Haas, who speaks of “the unborn” instead of “the children,” reserves to the state the right to kill in defense of innocent life, and concludes that “two wrongs do not make a right.” Alternatively, an abortion opponent may say the abortionist “kills children” but does not “murder” them, since murder implies an intent to take the life of an entity you know to be a full human being. Cardinal O’Connor asserts that, despite the mass “murder” going on, “The United States today is not Nazi Germany.”

There is a gap in reasoning here. Assume that a fetus is a child. Then every five years, the United States allows the murder of more babies than the Nazis killed Jews. Yes, the authorities who guarantee the right of abortion and the doctors who carry out the surgery do not believe fetuses are human beings, but neither did the Nazis believe that Jews are human beings. In one case the government itself organized the act of genocide. In the other, the government guarantees the right of a subpopulation-abortionists-to commit genocide. So if a fetus is a child, what’s the big difference?

The truth is, the distinctions offered by the intellectuals and activists I refer to have about them a distinct air of excuse-making. Imagine that fifty years ago a theologian of moral seriousness equal to that of Cardinal O’Connor found himself outside the gate of Auschwitz and holding a machine gun, given the opportunity to liberate some prisoners by shooting a couple of guards. Had you at that moment admonished him-saying “two wrongs do not make a right”-one assumes he would not have been deterred.

I know from experience that most abortion foes are people moved not by some psychosexual desire to enslave women, as pro-abortion activists frequently allege, but by a commitment to moral sentiments. If these intelligent and passionately engaged men and women believed with a whole heart that abortion is murder, if they really believed that the lives of a million actual children are at stake every year, then I have no doubt they would be organizing clandestine paramilitary units to move against abortion providers at this moment. They would find justification in Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin.

Thank God they are not arming for guerrilla war. Yet neither that fact, nor any admiration for their moral commitments, should excuse such sloppy language. For language has consequences. Just as you must not shout “fire” in a theater crowded with people, you must not say “murder” and “child” in a movement that includes people, however few, like John Salvi.

David Klinghoffer is Literary Editor of National Review.

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