Review: Letters to an American Jewish Friend
WISSE, RUTH
Review Ruth Wisse Letters to an American Jewish Friend Letters to an American Jewish i riend by Hillel Halkin, Jewish Publication Society, 246 pp, $7.50. I he blooming of Aaron's rod in its time...
...as they had so often previously, why he wasn't coming to settle...
...The notion of letters and ideas hurtling back and forth between Israel and America is immediately familiar...
...For Israelis too...
...The assessment of current Zionist "reality" is reductionist, as if the author were afraid any claim of special achievement or intrinsic merit would weaken the credibility of his analysis...
...A_'s suggestion that "creative religious experimentation" in the Diaspora may produce a new Judaism, true to the past and responsive to the condition of modern man, is crisply dissected and dismissed...
...slothfully or hypocritically content to live with contradictions should follow the logical road to Jerusalem...
...A_has written that he was surprised, yet pleased, when on.his recent trip to Israel no one asked him...
...or at least should be...
...And at that, I confess, Diaspora Jewry has no equal...
...Halkin's Israel, the place where Jews as Jews have their best chance of survival, is hardly the stuff of aliyah handbooks or romantic dreams...
...recognizes his personal responsibility for the problems of Jewish national sovereignty, and shoulders the risks involved in trying to solve them...
...nor will he brazenly adapt Judaism to suit his modern sensibilities with the criteria of contemporary "significance" as his only guideline...
...Not content with Herzlian Zionism's aim of political normalization (which has had unforeseen ironic reversals), Halkin describes a process of cultural normalization that can only be based, in a secular age, on the "natural" conditions of land and language...
...Here Halkin sets out the irreconcilable differences between Orthodoxy, based on faith in the God of Sinai, and modernity, with its naturalistic premises...
...This is a work of uncomon Jewish literacy, addressed to an audience of literate American Jews, on the assumption that such a group really exists...
...In a careful process of historical demytho-logi/ing...
...I he blooming of Aaron's rod in its time may not have seemed iiore surprising than the appearance in ours of HiMel Halkin's Letters to an American Jewish i riend...
...an unavoidable tension in the relationship between an Israeli and a DifT^^^ spora Jew, a relationship which is ideally an adversary one since the Israeli is living in a community of faith which holds that it alone is the natural place for a Jew to live...
...It may also be, for the identified Jew...
...The most affecting passages, those that touch us more deeply than we might like and against which we have least adequate protection, are not the arguments, even the best of them, but the occasional evocations of a hamsin (desert heat wave), a dull border patrol on the Lebanese front, the lighting of Chanukah candles...
...The first attack opens with a barrage of statistics, skimming briefly over Jewish communities in the Communist bloc...
...Because we already do...
...Despite the polemical form and passion of the argument (or maybe because of them), the book is also an autobiographical confession, tracing the inner, not untypical, dialectic of a modern Jew...
...To claim more is to say either too much or too little...
...to Jews who remain outside Israel, is the result not of more security, but of less...
...Admittedly, this religious dilemma is not resolved in Israel either, but there at least the transmutation of religion into a land, a language, and hopefully, eventually, a culture, provides the secular Jew with his only reasonable hope of historical continuity...
...But as a Diaspora Jew who claims to be as committed to his Jewishness as I am, you bear the more grievous responsibility, that of not being here to share my responsibility with me...
...A work of fiction, perhaps a novel of letters, would have dramatized the dialectical tension between Israeli and American Jewry more evenly...
...Halkin grounds Jewish i radii ions, if one is to speak in their name, in tribal origins, highly particularistic ritual and laws, and personal responsibility to a people...
...Implicit in this debate against the Diaspora is a critique of all Zionist doctrines based on the religious, social, or cultural mission of the Jews...
...But in this acknowledged polemic the Diaspora is given no quarter...
...Perhaps no single book of the last decade so perfectly embodies the ideal of a literary American Jewish culture as this brilliant offensive against it...
...They now wonder why anyone should voluntarily choose to settle among them...
...Halkin quickly, firmly disagrees...
...In other words, the naturalistic model for the survival of a species is Halkin's ultimate justification for the Zionist cause...
...The Israeli, even one who is at odds with the decisions and acts of his government...
...The rest is mere intel-lectualizing...
...For many American Jews who have spent lime in Israel, and for whom aliyah remains a possibility even when it does not emerge as a choice, the overseas operator of the mind is forever plugging in connections...
...The book is written in English, published in Philadelphia, rooted in the experience and conceived in the idiom of American Jewish culture...
...the second is content to pick "significant moments" from tradition "as raisins are picked from a cake...
...He attributes the earlier challenges to insecurity...
...And so the book puts the question, and proceeds to argue it as inventively and forcefully as it can...
...and in this too, in its self-rejection, the book is a characteristic local product...
...What sets the familiar pros and cons apart is their firm sense of ultimate resolutions, the author's determination to arrive at a wholly consistent explanation of contemporary Jewish reality and to live by it...
...In fact, beneath its neat blue and white cover and proper Zionist credentials, the book is almost as critical of Israel and of certain Zionist pretensions as it is of American Jewry and its readiness to remain American...
...Obviously, in full accord with its intentions, the book will provoke thought and argument wherever it is read...
...1 think it isagood thing if Jews from the Diaspora can visit Israel in a free and open way...
...The projections of Jewish population decline and its potential political, social, and cultural repercussions are sobering reading, even for those whom statistical evidence will never convince...
...If its intellection is the quality we most appreciate and admire, the book sways us most when it takes small leaps into fiction—a species of faith—and becomes, momentarily, the cultural organism it hopes to bring into being...
...The modern secular vision of Jewishness as a kind of disembodied conscience and mind is a distortion of Judaism and the sign of a people's faltering will to live...
...The genesis of the debate is an unasked question...
...Fiercer, more controversial, is Halkin's attack on Diaspora Jewish culture, in particular on the prevalent liberal view of the Jews as a spiritual people...
...This is not the first time the biological analogy has been used to argue for Jewish survival, but it may be the first time it has been advanced so exclusively...
...The new "tolerance" of Israelis to non-Zionists, that is...
...many of whom have a taste of gaitit behind them if not before them...
...For this reason modern ortho-praxis and counterculture Jewishness are shown to be equally unsatisfactory: the first is prepared to subordinate intellectual integrity to the ideal of national survival...
...The point of the letters is to convince A _ (the antagonist), and...
...gainst the brain-softening "neo-ilasidic" trend of contemporary American Jewish culture, the hook is the product of Lithuanian intellection, carefully reasoned, richly allusive, harsh in its judgment, but with reserves of humor iciJ warmth that are the mark of a Litvati at his best...
...If Nature has instilled in them the instinct of self-preservation and self-propagation, then it is surely necessary to choose the most favorable available surroundings...
...Nothing can beat the concluding parable as a minimalist Zionist position: A sweet koala bear, in the national eucalyptus park set aside for its protection by the Australian government, argues with its kin that slightly different bears like themselves, threatened as they are with extinction, must come to the preserve, by far the securest place for their survival...
...As much as it obviously pains him, he will not permit himself (or A_) to accept the authority of Halachah without the ontology of faith...
...But the question should have been asked, "because there is...
...Not Israeli, certainly...
...South America and South Africa, and Western Europe, before closing in finally on America...
...Resuscitating some of lli-: old arguments and introducing some of his own, Halkin attempts to persuade the reader that "Diaspora Jewry is doomed," and that "it is natural for a Jew who is committed to h Icuishness to desire to live only in Israel...
...and "if Israelis have outgrown that need in recent years, so much the better...
...But what kind of an organism is it...
...making A_a fair match for "Hillel" and the debate between communities an affair of at least intermittent suspense...
...But its effect may be somewhat at odds with its conscious lines of persuasion...
...Both land and language, if properly mined, will yield deep deposits of historical and cultural wealth, providing not only the means but a good reason for continuing national existence...
...an act of moral evasion...
...When A_writes of his shocked reaction to a television news clip showing the decimation by the Israeli Air Force of a Palestinian refugee camp, contrasting this with the Diaspora Jewish tradition of social justice and intellectual attainment, the author fairly hoots with wounded scorn: "Ethical idealism and the philosophical mind as Jewish traditions indeed, as if these were the distinguishing marks of historic Jewish existence rather than the very symptoms of its disintegration in modern times...
...without being pressured or made to feel that they are on some sort of trial...
...i he author is himself a New York Jew who settled in Israel in 1970 and lives with his wife and two children in Zichron Ya'akov...
...Using details of his biography as a fictional base, he purports to carry on an intensive correspondence with "A_," an old friend from New York, who has just visited Israel but who prefers Jewish life in the States...
...as its subtitle claims, the book is a Zionist's polemic, a strictly internal Jewish pica, written at a time when ideology has seldom been less in fashion, and when Zionism, its cause, has become just a platitude for supporters and detractors alike...
...through him...
...America is the great Other, the alluring temptress...
...This is especially true of the passages on religion...
...And "why should the Jews continue to exist...
...Without evading the issues raised by the book or the polemical points it scores, the American Jewish reader to whom it is addressed may read it, ironically, as a substantive confirmation of his own creative existence, and as a sample of the quality his culture is finally attaining...
...Most surprising of all...
...the reader, that the Zionist argument is irrefutable and that the Jew who is not Riuh Wisse teaches Yiddish literature at McGilt University...
...The reader who identifies with A___the American, is going to find himself squirming...
Vol. 2 • September 1977 • No. 9
