Babylon,
Thebes, Carthage are archaeology. Modern Athens is a travesty of an
unredeemable past. The laws, the epigraphy of Imperial Rome turn up in
the desert. Israel relives; the Diaspora, notably in North America, is
animate with creative force and a lust for renewal...Jews insist on
existing contra the norm and logic of history, which, even
barring genocide, are those of gradual melting, assimilation,
cross-breeding and the effacement of original identity...The Jew has
been chosen and branded for eternity. If he was to perish from this
earth, God's truth and declared intent, the revelation of monotheism and
of morality on Sinai, would be falsified.
Has the
survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost? Would it not be
preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies, if he was to ebb into
assimilation and the common seas? Every Jewish father is, at some point
in his life and paternity, an Abraham to an Isaac on the unspeakable
three-day journey to Mount Moriah. When he begets a child, a Jew knows
that he may be bestowing on that child the inheritance of terror, of a
sadistic destiny.
It may be
that the Jew in the Diaspora survives in order to be a guest – so
terribly unwelcome still at so many shut doors. Intrusion may be our
calling, so as to suggest to our fellow men and women at large that all
human beings must learn how to live as each other's "guests-in-life".
Morality must always have its bags packed. This has been the
universalist precept of the prophets, of Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah and
Jeremiah in their ancient quarrel with the kings and priests of the
fixed nation, of the fortress-state. Today this polemic underlies the
tensions between Israel and the Diaspora. Though the thought must, like
the ritual name of God, be unspeakable, the greater verity is that
Judaism would survive the ruin of the State of Israel. It would do so
if its "election" is indeed one of wandering, of the teaching of welcome
among men.
It is not
the "slaying of God in the person of his son", whatever that macabre
phantasm is taken to signify – which is fundamental to the detestation
of the Jew. It is the narrative "creation", "invention", "definition",
"revaluation" of God in Jewish monotheism and its ethics. It is not as
killer but as "begetter" of God that the Jew is unforgiven.
Three
times, in Western history, the Jew has striven to confront human
consciousness with the concept of the one God and the moral-normative
consequences of that concept.
The moral
dictates which emanate from Sinaitic and prophetic monotheism are
uncompromising...They entail the mutation of the common man. We are to
discipline soul and flesh into perfection.
The second
comes with the Sermon on the Mount. Nearly inconceivably against the
human grain is Jesus' bidding that we offer the other cheek, that we
forgive our enemy and persecutor – no, that we learn to love him.
The third
is that of utopian socialism, notably in its Marxist guise. Marxism is
Judaism's other principal heresy. Marxism demands a complete inversion
of the priorities of privacy, of acquisition, of egoism. We are to
abstain from superfluity, to share and share alike, to invest the
resources, the ambitions of the self in the anonymity of the collective.
