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| Volume XI, Spring 2004, Number 1 |
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| Book Review Essay |
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The Future of Dissent: A Reflection on What Shall I Do With This People? Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism, by Milton Viorst. New York: Free Press, 2002. $25.00, hardcover.
Marc H. Ellis
Associate professor of religion, Baylor University
For a printable pdf version of this book review, click here.
I first met Milton Viorst a little more than a decade ago, when we were on a panel together speaking about Jewish responsibility in light of the Palestinian uprising. I was aware of him as a Middle East feature writer for The New Yorker. I had just published a book in response to the uprising -- Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power -- but was unknown to Viorst. I spoke before he did, and when I returned to my seat, he whispered in my year. "Provocative -- a damning indictment," he said, his tone betraying anger, as if I had gone too far. Then in a voice that began to trail off almost as a sign of resignation, he added, "Probably a necessary one."
Those heady days of conflict and angst that characterized the first Palestinian intifada are long gone. Palestinians were imprisoned, wounded and killed; Jews in America, joined by some Israelis, fought among themselves about Jewish ethics and morality. The Holocaust was invoked on all sides, on the one hand, supporting Jewish empowerment at any cost; on the other, cautioning that denying another people their freedom was doing in some measure what had historically been done to Jews.
Amidst the suffering and argument, the uprising carried a hope about which Viorst, like many other Jews, was clearly conflicted. Was the Palestinian uprising a turning point in Jewish history, when a decision would be made as to what Jewish destiny would become? Would Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders and grant a full Palestinian state to those who had been wronged in the creation of Israel? In pursuit of this objective, could Jews actually side with Palestinians, decrying the policies of Israel, as a way of reasserting the centrality of Jewish ethics? Or, with that solidarity, would one's Jewishness be called into question?
In my talk, as in the book that had just appeared, I remember calling for a solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle as an affirmation of a deep solidarity with the Jewish people. Was this the ambivalence I heard in the response of Viorst, himself torn between Israel and the Palestinians, not knowing if his ethical compass would throw him into a world where his loyalty would be questioned by others and perhaps even by himself? Or perhaps he simply found the whole issue of Israel and the Palestinians too complicated for bold statements about Jewish destiny.
It is possible as well that, along with many other Jews of his generation, he had assumed his Jewish identity with little reflection. To be Jewish was to be good, intelligent, progressive and above all compassionate to those who were suffering. Wasn't this true in America, and hadn't this been proven over time in the progressive causes of labor, women's rights, civil rights and the protest against the Vietnam war? In his response to me, I heard this unreflective identity suddenly conflicted. Could we as Jews oppress another people? The other issues were for most Jews uncomplicated and certain -- justice denied, justice to be fought for. Was the Palestinian issue more complicated, less certain, a justice that was needed, to be sure, but one fraught with security concerns, faulty leadership patterns and terrorism?
More than a decade later, the situation is quite different in the political and identity realms. The hopeful days of the first Palestinian uprising are gone, destroyed with targeted assassinations, massive invasions of previously liberated Palestinian areas and burgeoning settlements. A wall that threatens to ghettoize the Palestinian population on the West Bank is being built seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Israeli and Palestinian authorities are locked in a spiral of violence that seems without end.
Years ago Viorst and I engaged in a Jewish struggle of ethics and morality, albeit in a few words, but one emblematic of larger issues. Is that struggle now long past, archaic in its sensibility, a relic of a time when Ariel Sharon as prime minister was unthinkable and a two-state solution and the end of the occupation were, at least in our minds, politically possible? As I read Viorst's new book, I could not help but recall our meeting in light of the situation as it is today. My own speaking and writing on the issue have moved considerably in the ensuing years to a point where the slogans of "two-states" and the "end of occupation" are relatively meaningless. Viorst has also moved. Still, his reaction on a panel with me today might well be the same as it was years ago, and the difference was as important then as it is now: are Judaism and Jewishness reclaimable through a rough justice with the Palestinians? Is rough justice possible today, despite Jewish protests and the assertion of ethical and moral concerns?
Viorst explores this question through a history of the Jewish people framed around a series of internal quarrels that continue today, featuring a sense of ethics and justice on the one hand and a quest for empowerment and a place among nations on the other. The first has Jews and Jewish history as distinctive, driven by a sense of chosenness and mission. The second is a quest for normalcy: should Jews be different from other communities and peoples? After a journey of struggle and suffering, Holocaust and nation-building, can Jews afford to be different, especially in the ethical realm?
Yet the historical journey that unfolds is also told within Viorst's personal journey: growing up Jewish in the northeastern United States and living within the Eastern European immigrant world of his grandparents, then joined by his American-oriented parents and upbringing. The difference between his grandparents' religiosity and culture and his parents' was one of language -- Hebrew and Yiddish to English -- and denominational affiliation -- Orthodox to Conservative -- but also one of cultural perspective. The sense of what it meant to be Jewish was to change radically as Viorst and his generation explored their heritage within broader cultural influences. Even as Viorst and his peers underwent this metamorphosis, the underlying sense of what it meant to be Jewish, a sense of shared assumptions about the world and society rather than theological categories or religious practice, was also to undergo further transformation in Viorst's own lifetime.
His generation was characterized by the need to find its way in America and, while assimilating to American culture, to define the uniqueness of being Jewish. At the same time, the emergence of Israel as central to Jewish identity -- an understanding that only began in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war -- sparked a new quest that saw a Jewish religious fundamentalism and political neoconservatism emerge. As Viorst comments, his quarrel with this new kind of Judaism is less with those Jews who chose these values or practices than it is with their contention that theirs is the only "legitimate Judaism and their insistence that all Jews acknowledge their legitimacy."
For Viorst this intolerance reached its climax in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and provoked this reflection:
The fanaticism that produced this murder was far from the religion on which I -- and I think, the vast majority of Jews -- had been raised. It certainly did not correspond with the ethics I had been taught were intrinsic to Judaism. Though I had never been observant, I strongly believed I was being faithful to my religious heritage in respecting decent differences in outlook between people and for valuing a compassion for Jews and non-Jews alike.
The question thus posed is one that Viorst attempts to answer in the pages of his book: Do Jews, when released from the constraints of exile, turn political differences into bitter religious wars? Do these wars come from Jewish history, or do they represent Jewish inability to come to terms with modernity? Does statehood itself encourage these wars, so that the future of Judaism and Jewishness is now determined by political empowerment? Again Rabin's assassination is seen as a turning point where Jews must come to a reckoning with our history and destiny:
Can this murder be looked upon as an unfortunate growing pain, which time and further maturity will relieve? Or is it the expression of a religious extremism that, removed from the constraints imposed by exile, will continue to exact a great cost? Jews would surely be wise to contemplate the warning that Rabin's murder contains. History may be telling us that the Jews' descent into violence casts doubt on the ability of the state, and perhaps of the community itself, to survive.
To explore these questions, Viorst takes us back to the beginnings of the Jewish people. In their desert origins, Viorst finds the opposite tendencies of the struggle for holiness found in Moses and his difficult relationship with the Israelites and God and the apostasy of the golden calf. While the aim of Mosaic law was to provide a structure for a holy nation, Jews themselves were disposed toward the profane. Thus the promise of holiness is central to Jewish life but so, too, is the inability to reach that holiness. For Viorst this tension among God, Moses and the Israelites provides a volatile mixture; as the founding memory of the Jews, it remains a source of tension even in the contemporary period.
There are other tensions in Jewish history, and Viorst concentrates on seminal events that again resonate in the present. The settlement of the land and the rise of kingship in ancient Israel features the challenge of ethics and power; as a people surrounded by empires, the questions of identity and self-governance are problematic. These difficulties ended in the loss of Jewish nationhood, at least as defined by national boundaries, in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. From that time on, Diaspora religious and political sensibilities were in the ascendancy, with the major reversal coming only in the twentieth century. This was hardly a smooth path; external reality sought to limit or even injure Jewish interests, and internal Jewish life was beset by various challenges represented by the establishment of rabbinic Judaism, the disappointment brought by messianic pretenders, the grappling with modernity, which included, among other things, the bifurcation of Judaism into denominations and the controversy accompanying the rise of Zionism.
But the heart of the book is Viorst's struggle with the emergence of what some have called "settler Judaism." Viorst sees this struggle within the historic tensions of Jewish history and mostly within the split between Jews who accept the Enlightenment and thus embrace tolerance and liberal values and Jews who see those values as eroding Judaism and commitment to the Jewish people. Viorst rarely states his conclusions but suggests them in a series of questions:
Orthodoxy says that Jews influenced by Enlightenment values worship the golden calf today. But cannot an equally compelling case be made that those now dancing profanely around the golden calf are the Jews who have substituted for God the worship of land and the power to rule over a foreign people?
Viorst's sensibility is heartfelt, and his allegiance to Yitzhak Rabin almost complete. Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, fulfills for Viorst the central theme of his work: an intolerant Judaism is paving the way for Jewish self-destruction. Thus his ending paragraph:
The principal lesson of Rabin's traumatic death may be that Jews are running out of time . . . . After two thousand years of strenuous survival in exile, it would be a grim irony if homecoming is remembered by history not as the seed of the Jews' redemption but of their self-destruction.
There is little question that Viorst is a progressive Jewish voice on the conflict in the Middle East. One might say that his voice is representative: while calling attention to fault-lines in Jewish history, he sees Jewishness as infused with liberal values. Clearly, the Jewish peace camp, at least historically, echoes Viorst's analysis. The state of Israel emerges from Jewish history as a response to European antisemitism and the Holocaust and has embodied, although not without a struggle, Enlightenment values, including tolerance and democracy. As with the Israeli peace camp and Jewish liberals in the United States like Michael Walzer, the challenge was and remains the maintenance of those values against a resurgent orthodoxy that represents more or less everything that has gone wrong in the post-1967 phase of Israeli and Jewish history. If only those forces had been -- and could be today -- beaten back! Then Israel and the Jews could return to the balance of the historical patterns of Jewish history.
In this understanding, Yitzhak Rabin is a hero, described by Viorst as a practical man who understood the dangers of Jewish insecurity and Jewish militarism and thus tried to maintain the delicate balance of reason and fervor in Jewish history. Of course, to see Rabin in this light is to necessarily shorten his biography to the post-Oslo years and his assassination. Viorst does this, offering Rabin's background in an abbreviated synopsis:
Rabin, himself, it should be noted, had never been a dove. In his earlier term as prime minister and in the succession of cabinet posts he held, he had built a reputation as a hard-liner. But the considerations that drove him were practical rather than ideological.
In a few sentences Rabin is foreshortened. Gone is the Rabin who, in the founding of Israel, emptied towns and villages of Palestinian Arabs. Gone, too, is the Rabin who ordered the policy of might and beatings to smash the Palestinian resistance in the first intifada. Nor is the Oslo Rabin explored in much depth. Is it correct to say that only the assassin's bullet derailed the plans for a free, full and empowered Palestinian state? Or was Rabin's plan more or less the plan that his successors held to as well: the consolidation of an expanded Israel in Jerusalem and the West Bank with Palestinian population centers having some autonomy and governed by Palestinian authorities? Was Rabin's vision a practical and liberal project that Viorst would accept if offered to Jews or for which he would lobby in the United States, say, for example, for African-Americans or Latinos?
If Oslo is almost uncritically accepted by Viorst, the founding of Israel, at least in relation to Palestinians, is also accepted with little critique. Israel's genesis is analyzed almost exclusively within the internal Jewish struggle exemplified by David Ben-Gurion's historic compromise with the Orthodox religious establishment. Rabin's role in the Israeli War of Independence, like his role as commander of the army in the 1967 war, is described by Viorst as heroic. The suffering of the Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 war and afterward is reduced to a footnote, if that, and thus a series of arguments is preempted.
What if the founding of Israel was heroic for Jews and a tragedy for Palestinians, and what if that founding was not an expression of liberal values but rather a secularized version of the religious fundamentalism that Viorst sees as darkening a Jewish future? What if Rabin was one of those Jews who led us to this difficult burden in history that may not be surmounted? What if the fault line is as much with Rabin as Sharon? What if the problem is a nation-state as Jewish? What if the state itself portends the end of the Judaism and Jewishness that Viorst finds so much his own?
These questions move us beyond the progressive sensibility so evident in Milton Viorst's generation and my own. They radically challenge our own presuppositions of Judaism and Jewish life. Jewish history remains important, but the future of Jewish life, as even Viorst understands, may not recover. We may be at the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it.
This book was begun in the aftermath of Rabin's assassination. As those years fade into history, new facts have made even his half-compromises impossible. In the last decade, new settlements have been created and others have thickened in numbers and extent. The Wall of Separation may not be permanent, but the facts that it represents certainly are. Even the Geneva accords, so celebrated in the international press and so far from implementation, only solidify an expanded state of Israel. Ariel Sharon's recent threat of unilateral withdrawal to a newly created border of Israel makes Rabin's Oslo look almost Utopian by comparison. And the lack of dissent in the Jewish establishment over the last years of the al-Aqsa uprising makes it more difficult to argue from tradition.
The civil war within contemporary Jewish life, a war that Viorst sees running through Jewish history, is over. Those Jews with power in Israel and the United States, Jews who have formed what might be called a Constantinian Judaism, have won. Progressive Jews are fighting a rear-guard action destined to fail. Viorst is part of that tradition; perhaps his book should be seen as one of the last attempts to wrestle Judaism and Jewish life back to a rationality that combines justice and compassion.
For this reason, the pages of this book take on an added significance. And one can only applaud the effort. The next step is the movement of progressive Jews to a position of conscience that means exile from the Jewish world. There are Jews to be found in this new terrain, but that is for another generation, a generation of Jews beyond innocence and militarism, a generation that stakes its life on a critical sense of Jewish history beyond the heroes of the state of Israel and beyond the split of enlightenment and orthodox understandings. This generation surely comes after the Holocaust; it also comes after Israel and what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people.
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