LEONARD FEIN
LEONARD FEIN GUEST COLUMNIST "Apeople's memory is called history." DoAmerian Jews have collective amnesia ? In an old story by Y. L. Peretz, a Jew asks, "What's the use of history?" And the...
...Not from across that divide, nor even from the hills...
...in Eastern Europe, who knows...
...Shall we, then, say that unless we survive, Jewish history is done...
...Nor is there any need to forge a grand consensus...
...Here, where living as a Jew is an open option, where no external force imposes "Jew" upon us, we must be able to offer something more than an invitation to survival...
...And to shape the future of the Jews, the capacity to dream must be renewed...
...Surely the best and brightest of our progeny will ask, "What is it that our survival will make possible...
...they are no less a part of our reality than the food we ate, than the ways we worshiped...
...Most of us are less familiar with Jewish history than, say, American eighth graders are with world—or even with American—history...
...Shall we say that our survival ensures our redemption...
...then we shall see about dreams...
...Survival" is not a dream...
...Our help cometh from our hearts, from there where the embers of memory retain a touch of warmth, there where dreams are born...
...A people's memory is called history...
...And the narrator explains, "Not only an individual but a people, too, must possess a memory...
...But sooner or later, and more likely sooner than later, a litde boy here and a litde girl across the street will notice the emperor's nakedness, will ask, in innocence and sadness, "What is this parade of hobblers with breaking crutches who move only in circles, whose banners read 'Survive!' whose leaders chant curses against our enemies but do not see nor say what tomorrow is for...
...There is need only to become, again, a serious people, a people not so obsessed with survival that it forgets what, beyond habit, beyond inertia, beyond stiff-neckedness, warrants its survival—as a people...
...What it is, and the reason it induces envy, is a way—and, absent a way of our own, we gaze wistfully across the divide between us...
...he lectures country-wide on current Jewish events...
...To which sentiment most of us would no doubt agree, at least in the abstract, much as we together lament the steady reports on how little history Americans in general, and American youngsters in particular, know...
...There is a name to the Jewish dream...
...Some call it God, some call it the end of days and some call it the repair of the world, tikkun olam...
...All these names and the others by which we have known the dream point in the same direction...
...Whence cometh our help...
...there were only the dreams...
...It is about a very specific element of Jewish history, the forgetting of which endangers the Jewish future still more than it does the Jewish past...
...The dream, six days a week, of the impending Shabbat...
...Who has time to dream...
...The Inner Life of America's Jews (Harper &f Row, 1988...
...How shall we answer them...
...What are we to think, then, of the collective amnesia of America's Jews...
...We may debate, even vehemently, the diverse meanings of those words—in the last years of this century...
...How can we invent a Jewish future unless we know the Jewish past that chronicles the dreams of our people...
...our passion runs so deep that the bumbling is less important than that the Jewish state remains beleaguered, and we its distant defenders...
...First let us survive...
...the dream, from generation to generation, of the day on which God would be One and God's name would be One...
...But we do not believe that...
...And long after Isaac and Jacob set the example, through all the bitter centuries of wandering, it was our dreams that sustained us...
...The past, after all, can be written down in books...
...in the Soviet Union, Pamyat...
...There is a point and a purpose to Jewish history...
...For a time, the anti-Semites can sustain us...
...there were only dreams...
...But the future...
...But their way, whether or not we think it attractive, is not accessible to most of us—nor is the claim that it is the way credible to us...
...And some among the rest of us profess to envy these their certitude...
...To live with Jewish ambition is to add fuel to the dying ashes...
...the dream, every day of the year and all the years of our lives, of our return to Zion...
...He is the author of several books, includingWhere Are We...
...What are they about}" What are we about...
...In 1985 Fein founded Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, which is a Jewish community vehicle to combat world hunger...
...For a while longer, Israel can sustain us...
...In the Middle East, stones...
...There is no remembering that day, nor the days that followed, without remembering the dreams...
...This is not about Santayana's "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it," or about the Baal Shem Tov's "Remembrance is the path to redemption...
...To teach Jewish history—not the dates and the names and the places, but the dreams— is to take a bellows to those embers...
...I do not know how it is for others, but I know how it is for us, for the Jews: There is no survival without a dream...
...itmust be invented, then lived...
...Some say we are about walking the way that has been shown us, about life as halachah (religious law and tradition...
...it is a self-defeating confession of emptiness...
...On the first day, there was no memory...
...On the first day, there was no memory...
...Political scientist Leonard Fein is the founder and former editor of moment...
...For here, at least and at last, Jewish lives are not in danger...
...And so it will be, and worse, unless we stop blaming others for the danger, unless we stop using the danger as a crutch, unless we remember what it was that called this people into being...
...when we have need of it, we can find it...
...The future cannot merely be studied...
...A dream, you say...
...And if, with us, the dreams die, what then shall our children and theirs have to remember of us and of those before us who kept the dreams alive...
...here, it is Jewish life that is endangered...
...True enough, but unless Jewish history is about something, what does it matter if it be done...
...nothing inspires a people's obstinacy so well as gratuitous hatred...
...We have been, since our beginnings, a people of dreamers...
...It would be strange, indeed, if we were not to disagree...
...We need not be bound by the content of yesterday's dreams, but we cannot survive as Jews without a collective dream that derives from them...
...The point and the purpose are the fulfillment of the Jewish dream...
...And here, in freedom's land, intermarriage, assimilation, atrophy...
Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3
