IN THE WAKE OF PEACE
Fein, Leonard
IN THE WAKE OF PEACE LEONARD FEIN It has come time to search for an idea that will help us to understand ourselves, to be ourselves. This essay is offered as an introduction to that search. It...
...And the trouble becomes the source of our inspiration: "in spite of everything," "against despair," "survival...
...That is not a belief, that is a make-belief...
...Some triumph...
...Israel's most dramatic challenges, its most exciting years, lie in its future, not in its past, however heroic that past has been...
...Even when I have been most critical of one or another aspect of Israel's own policy, I have known that the bottom line remains Arab perversity, an intractable which could accommodate interruptions to the fighting but not to the core hatred...
...Yes, but so what...
...That effort will require—and deserve our material and moral support for decades to come...
...But having chosen to march, they have made common cause, and properly, with all those others who have, for other reasons, chosen the same path...
...So, peace...
...Hence we do not "study" Revelation, or even remember it...
...Trouble enough to spare, trouble to last the rest of our lives...
...Not even if you accept the argument of those who insist that only the One Way will keep us alive...
...In the meantime, it needs our support, our love, our money, our understanding...
...It will also require and deserve our continuing critical appraisal, and, if the partnership is working right, that appraisal will be welcome, so long as it is offered with sensitivity, with modesty, with full awareness that when those who eat from the flesh-pots preach ascetic virtues to those who still eat crusts, their advices are suspect...
...There are some signs that we can, even now...
...we are Jews, and that is the way in which we choose to be human beings...
...Actually, I don't know much about peace...
...We have never been an especially theological people...
...If it is an answer, if Judaism is a reaction to others' meanness, then those of us who care that the Jewish people lasts are bound to wish that meanness last as well...
...Still, after all these years of reciting "Grant us peace, Thy most precious gift," there was a part of me that expected a UPS delivery, a package wrapped and ribboned...
...Nor is it only our giving that has been affected by Israel's clear and present danger...
...That, too, is a possibility...
...Either we pursue justice, for ourselves and for all others, as Jews, or we destroy our distinction—as well as our raison d'etre...
...There will be no sudden stomach cramps, for we shall emerge from the depths in stages...
...Aerial bombing doesn't break the moral of the bombed, it raises their morale...
...We live in history, the secular unfolding of time...
...Maybe they'll sign it in Washington, maybe in Oslo...
...That is bound to confuse those who know no other connection to Jews...
...And you even develop a certain style, a talent for living with it gracefully, the way some people with chronic lung disease manage to cough where the punctuation marks belong...
...And though infinitely soft, as perfectly shaped...
...The peril continues, but it is considerably mitigated...
...He will talk of the Yom Kippur War, of Munich and of Entebbe...
...Consider: Ask a Jew to remember the high points of Jewish life over the course of the last decade or so, and he will first say "1967," meaning thereby just six days of that year...
...It stands history, logic and theology on its head to argue, "I want to be Jewish, therefore I will believe in God...
...Back, then, to God...
...Each year, at Pesach time, we have read the V'hi She'Amdah—"It was not merely one enemy who rose up to destroy us...
...We are not Jews and human beings...
...So let us begin to ask what the glue that will take us to the year 2000 will be, what new connection there can be...
...For in the end, it does not matter, not a whit, whether the Revelation happened...
...And as to peace in the Middle East, peace for Israel at last, I know even less...
...there is always enough to satisfy the pessimists and para-noiacs and those who would exploit pessimism and paranoia...
...Trouble, the Jewish connection...
...It tries to explain why the search is necessary now, and to propose a framework for its pursuit...
...Nor are these merely phrases to take heart from...
...For as long as we can remember—since the year 70 anyway—we have lived with the knowledge that disaster was imminent...
...It will take our best effort to resist a falling away, an erosion of the connection, as war is replaced by welfare...
...In short, God—more broadly, religious conviction—may once again become the core of the Jewish self-understanding, but it cannot be forced into happening...
...And you take as your job seeing to it that "chronic" doesn't mean "fatal...
...But whatever our hopes and our entitlements, whatever the balance between virtue and venality, it is not likely that an Israel that gropes its way toward decency can excite our imagination as has the Israel whose very survival was at stake...
...What of the right to life as opposed to the right to one's own body, what of euthanasia, what of DNA research, what of the distribution of medical care...
...Accordingly, it can no longer be taken as the central metaphor of Jewish self-understanding...
...we experience it...
...In the past, the level of our Israel-directed philanthropy has mushroomed in time of active war, shrunk in time of relative quiet...
...Yes, it is still hypothetical...
...Yet there will be dislocations if and as the sense of chronic crisis passes...
...Is the joy of our calling less cementing than the fear for our lives...
...I do not know that the Jews are unique in their possession of the understanding...
...The prospective treaty does not alter the character of the Covenant...
...The astonishing staying power of Orthodox Judaism, and its apparent increased appeal to those who had been thought immune to such appear—both in Israel and in the United States—suggests the possibility...
...That would resolve the problem of glue easily enough, but it would leave most of us unstuck...
...And with what shall we replace all the network of activities and understandings which derive from it...
...But you don't, can't and shouldn't come at all those who suffer from breach of premise with the argument that God is necessary if we are to make it as a cohesive people...
...If the premise comes to be widely shared, yes, it provides cohesion as well...
...Insofar as Jews have chosen to pursue justice, they have—in the main—marched in a polyglot parade...
...All my life, the Jews have been a beleagured people, and all its life, Israel a threatened state...
...What, in short, of a world we profess to care about, to whose repair we are called, we are pledged...
...To study, to commandments, to daily devotion to ritual behavior...
...Not counting Vietnam, where peace was the name given to getting it over with at last, the times I remember are the surrenders: MacArthur on the Missouri, General Jodl at Reims...
...One of the primary reasons that the Jews have not folded their tents and gone away is because that is what they have been expected to do by those who have wished them ill...
...The lunkheads of the Left are busy denouncing the agreement as an imperialist ploy that leaves the basic problem unresolved...
...On the contrary: insofar as Jews choose to act out their parochial motives in universal arenas, they tend to wander away from their roots...
...That does not mean that all Israelis are soon to become holy men and women, any more than all have been heroes in Israel's wars...
...What, for example, of the bio-ethical questions which now emerge...
...Moreover, we are approaching the year 2000, and it is almost certain that millennial fantasies will seize the imagination of vast numbers of people, Jews and non-Jews...
...Stiff-neckedness...
...But the answer that may, in time, emerge, is that it is not Israel's peril that engages our attention and our energy...
...it is Israel's promise...
...But as the Israelis have risen to the occasion when the occasion called for excellence at warmaking, so— perhaps—will they rise to the more constructive occasion that now begins...
...And watch the marginal Jews, those who don't belong, who don't work, who don't give...
...Shall we now demand that they be our paragons while we mix drinks, warmed by the delicious tingle of vicarious virtue...
...The immediate temptation will be to answer these questions by arguing that the crisis is not, in fact, over...
...We have been since our beginning, a people parochial in its structure, universal in its ideology and its concerns...
...The problem for those who reject the One Way is that will no longer have Israel to fall back on as evidence of their Jewish connection and commitment...
...To these questions, different constellations of Jews will bring different kinds of answers, each drawing from its own experience and resources...
...And what we are entitled to expect is very sometime success, for the effort to craft a nation-state that brings out the best in people, that translates prophetic vision into workaday behavior is improbably ambitious...
...You learn to live with it because you can't really flesh out the picture of its alternative, or any way of getting from here to that alternative...
...We are Jews, and there are questions that cry for answers...
...Is the pursuit of their answers less exciting than reciting the Kaddish still again...
...If the guns fall silent, we will look for other elements of crisis...
...And, loving justice, pursuing it, Judaism becomes less a motive force than a residual category, a way of organizing the calendar and the life-cycle, but not the day, not the life...
...From 1967 to 1973, years when national attentions might have been turned to the quality of public life, most of Israel's energies, public and private, were being invested in aping the least appealing aspects of American lifestyles...
...The peace treaties got signed much later, almost as afterthoughts...
...Well, not quite...
...It is already clear that it will not mean, not for a while, a total reversal in every aspect of Israel's life...
...As consciousness of the approach of so auspicious a time grows, so will religious strivings, especially among the hitherto untempled...
...But we no longer live in such a world...
...It was only this week that China and Japan signed the peace treaty marking the end of their war, which stopped being fought thirty-plus years ago...
...If those on the one side, who would cloister themselves in yeshivot and fight a rearguard action for Jewish survival, condemning all the rest of us for trafficking with heretics, or if those on the other side, who would throw themselves into the arena with no regard for whence they come, with no concern for the transmission of the tradition, for the structure and welfare of our community, if either of these were to "win," or if, as is more likely, they were both to "win," leaving us with an either-or choice—either Judaism or justice— our people will lose, be lost...
...There is a vision that has inspired our people since its inception...
...And if there will now be less reason to weep, then that vision may be seen—and reclaimed— more clearly, more resolutely, than ever...
...Barbecue pits and swimming pools are as enticing a substitute for meaning in Ash-kelon as they are in Orlando...
...We will drive them into the sea," and all that...
...It is that understanding which is required if the world is to be healed of its fractures...
...If Zionism, narrowly defined (the creation of a Jewish State) is now less compelling, and if secularism, broadly defined (saran wrap, napalm, but also open heart surgery) is now more problematic, and if neither provides adequate glue, why resist the motive and the method that has informed most Jews since the first...
...Here, the Orthodox will seek to apply answers from other times and other places, answers which may still illuminate...
...The ancient midrash that holds that all Jews—the living, the dead, the still unborn, therefore we as well—were present at Sinai does not mean that we were there on that day, at that hour...
...Tikun Olam...
...Judaism is not a room where we meet to discuss Jewish interests...
...one does not give up a central metaphor so quickly...
...In the inevitable post-Auschwitz confusion about Jewish theology, Israel neatly took up the ideological slack...
...the statistics of Jewish participation certainly so indicate...
...But, on balance, it may not be a bad or unhealthy thing...
...Israel...
...You don't have to be Jewish to love justice...
...Closer to home, he will recall Skokie, "Holocaust," Shcharansky, the Zionism-as-racism resolution, Jews in trouble, always in trouble...
...Why give...
...The entrepreneurs are already busy, planning Tel Aviv-Cairo excursions...
...Necessary, yes...
...It is time to begin the task of shaping a Jewish life that is more than a response to threat...
...more important still, there is now the seed of reason to believe that peril is not our permanent condition...
...A people requires ambition, not merely memories...
...It is impossible to conceive what America would be like today had not Jews devoted themselves with such enthusiasm to its betterment...
...The recession of that danger will inevitably leave a void...
...Nonetheless, it is time to craft a new speech, which means a new way of thinking, not only about Israel and its neighbors but also about the Jewish condition itself...
...It has inspired some—very few—of our people all of the time, but it has inspired all of our people some of the time...
...Why go...
...But less acute...
...What kind of an answer is it to a child who asks "Why...
...Israel as the common denominator of Jewish identity, the one glue that binds all Jews, will fade as the guns fall silent...
...To find the glue, we must move beyond dependence on events...
...No, what we must hope for and help with is not any more than we are prepared to ask of ourselves: a stumbling search for something better, for meaning beyond making it...
...With wisdom and work, we shall remain powerfully connected to Israel, but we shall no longer be able to look to Israel to provide our connection to one another...
...Whether we respond to our calling because it was God who called us, or whether we respond because the work is so uplifting, or whether we respond because we know no other way, whether our response is born of commandment or of culture, it is the fact of our response that bridges all the gaps and all the ideologies, that gives meaning to the term "Jewish people," a people otherwise so diverse in its beliefs and its behaviors...
...to respond "the Ku Klux Klan," or even "Shcharansky...
...But we are informed by Revelation, which stands outside history...
...Israel was meant to be a place, a cause, an opportunity—not a theology...
...But it is time to think about a Jewish life whose central metaphor is something different from disaster...
...but not sufficient...
...Ethnicity...
...Is there, then, no glue that can be prescribed...
...Many American Jews, of course, will ask for less...
...never was the fear that brought us to this place...
...A small package: peace is an exquisite gift, no larger than a gem...
...Weighty foreign policy debates, focused especially on the West Bank problem, will continue...
...And the rest of us are still holding our breath, trying to figure out what it may come to mean...
...Therefore, even were there now to be a swelling of the ranks, a rebirth of civic commitment, a resurgence of liberalism, and even if the Jews were to emerge from their decade of hibernation and re-involve themselves in such matters, beneficial fall-out to the Jewish collectivity would not necessarily ensue...
...With what, then, shall we replace it...
...And left the question hanging, knowing that it was wholly hypothetical...
...But now the most consequential exhibit on the table of evidence is in the process of being withdrawn...
...The truth is, now that I stop to think about it, that I never expected to have to change that speech...
...The secular liberals will bring answers from the hurly-burly of contending groups and the non-Orthodox religious will try to carve out a new Hala-chah, a code for themselves and for the rest of us...
...Some day" meant always a time closer to the end of days than to this day...
...For more than thirty years, the best evidence of the Jewish peril has been the fury of the Arab hostility to Israel, a fury far beyond the logic of international conflict...
...You learn to live with it, as you learn to live with any malady that's chronic...
...It was not the peril that made us cling to one another, but a shared vision, a vision seen too often through eyes abrim with tears...
...We are rachmanim b'nei rachmanim, a people that cares, children of those who cared, and now, with wisdom, parents of those who are still needed, always will be, to care...
...And what of old age and of inflation, and what of Jewish learning...
...it matters only that it happens...
...Primarily because God-as-Glue is a consequence of belief, not a reason to believe...
...And that is why what we have managed to accomplish, at our best, has been to link the sacred understanding to the secular unfolding...
...it is also our understanding of the basis of our partnership with Israel...
...We study Revelation not as history nor as current events, but as the always Current Event...
...And what, for example, of the family, of its sudden restructuring, what of loneliness and fear, what of disarray and of moral uncertainty...
...Obviously, very many Jews have responded to that concern, have devoted large parts of their lives to the repair of His world, our world...
...I gave my first formal speech on Israel's behalf in 1955, and adjusting for change in the details, I've been giving the same speech ever since: Israel is beseiged, the innocent victim of mindless hostility, of primitive enmity...
...Our concerns have centered not on the properties of God, but on the condition of His world...
...Given the attitudes and behavior of the One Way exponents, we would soon enough become a cult rather than a people...
...We may believe about them, they may even know about themselves, that they would not have marched at all had they not been Jews...
...A culture requires experience, not merely recollection...
...Nor is it seemly for those of us who eat, swim and are merry in all the Orlandos to sneer at those who yearn for pits and for pools in all the Ashkelons...
...Some of us come close to doing just that, sniffing everywhere for evidence of meanness, then, finding it, brandishing it with glee: "We told you so...
...clearly, the Jewish contribution has been a major shaping element, the Jews who have made that contribution an ongoing lobby for humaneness...
...They," of course will not disappear with the signing of peace, for "they" include the Soviet brutes, the PLO, the anti-Semites everywhere...
...How is it that we know them as Jews...
...Shcharansky languishes, trouble in Argentina, trouble in Uruguay, trouble in Ethiopia, trouble in a dozen different places that year, in a dozen new ones next...
...In war, they were our heroes while we prepared balance sheets, and we found ourselves walking with a touch of swagger...
...That has been a central element in the self-understanding of the Jew, that is a large part of what we have meant by the term "the Jewish condition...
...And the question then becomes, having lost Israel, will they find God, or will they lose Judaism...
...It is the pursuit of the answers that warrants our survival...
...But it is not necessary that we lay exclusive claim to that understanding in order for it to provide an entirely adequate foundation for Jewish identity, for Jewish consciousness, for Jewish connectedness...
...God is a premise, not a conclusion...
...God What then of God, the traditional connector, the nominator and denominator of the Jews...
...For what is this Promising Land about...
...There is no memory of non-war to fall back on, no time of plowshares and pruning hooks to remember...
...We shall have to repress the urge to ask of the Israelis that they continue to compensate us for our own sense of deficiency, that they be our surrogates in peace as they have been in war...
...Obviously, Israel should and almost surely will continue to matter greatly, deeply...
...Trouble, still, in the West Bank...
...What of racism and of quotas, what of worship and tradition, what of poverty and what of pollution...
...Aches and pains, not mortal threats...
...Both the structure and the ideology merit attending...
...And it is the pursuit of the answers that creates the prospect for our survival...
...What of taxes, what of gays, what of privacy and what of order...
...on the contrary, in every generation, 'they', rise up and seek to destroy us...
...They have done so under noble banners: civil rights, science and medicine, socialism, civil liberties, liberal reform, the arts, law, a hundred others...
...In Israel, the answers will be offered by the agencies of the State as well as other groups...
...But we can no longer assume that it is a fixed condition of Jewish existence...
...There is some cohesive power to stubbornness...
...Some day, things will get better...
...But it would have been wrong, it is wrong, to see Zionism as Torah, to see devotion to Israel as a fully adequate expression of Judaic conviction and intention...
...I hope we are not, even though I sometimes fancy that we have a special calling for it...
...And in all of secular time, there has been no more dependable vessel of concern for and commitment to the healing of this world than the Jewish people...
...It will not be easy...
...And if we look hard enough, we will find evidence...
...Tikun olam—the repair of the universe— is still the stuff that binds secularists, religionists, Zionists, all who would be thoughtful Jews...
...If all's well, why care...
...It is no answer at all...
...The lunkheads of the Right are busy denouncing the agreement as a ruse, a sell-out, a prelude to disaster...
...Because they, too, tremble in times of terror...
...At the very least, there will be a sharpening of the debate—quite likely, an increase in its nastiness—between those who contend that there is but One Way and those who cannot or will not walk that way...
...By now, then, it will be clear that it does not matter very much whether the troubles will go away quite so quicky as we hope, or whether they will linger for generations more...
...Have we not, all of us, ourselves debated whether Jews could survive without oppression...
...Jewishness is in, no...
...The State of Israel is the principal arena for the translation of that vision into a present reality...
...Israel deserves better...
...It has lasted two millennia, to be sure, and it may continue for a time...
...There is no corner of the world where we can hide and stay a people...
...Or do we really mean to argue to our youngsters that they should stay Jews because "it might happen here...
...It is not yet time to rewrite the Hagaddah...
...But it is a tasteless source of cohesion, and one of limited utility as well...
...Terrorism will continue...
...Cannon and gore are more riveting than slum clearance projects, than medical insurance programs, than modest acts of kindness...
...But not really God, to Torah...
...So long as we lived in a world where anti-Semitism was endemic, where there was no escaping it, perhaps the act of resisting it—that is, of staying Jewish—was a decisive and self-defining act...
...The temptations lie in other directions...
...The language of peace is still less familiar than the language of war, and if the thing were to fall apart now, we'd revert to the old language with ease and even a measure of relief, having been spared the burden of learning a new language...
...Massive military expenditures will continue...
...What of the Third World, what of Rhodesia, what of crime and what of prisons...
...You notice it only when the coughing stops...
...There is no more certain way of transmitting that concern to our children than to make Jews of them...
...I know that prayers are not meant to be taken literally...
...Maybe they'll sign the thing at the foot of Mt...
...it was the pity...
...And periodically, we will all pause, together, and offer praise and thanksgiving, it mattering little whether we agree on the address, praise and thanksgiving that we see things as we do, that we are priviledged to care...
...It means that Sinai is here, on this day, at this hour, if we are open to it...
...There is no need, on entering the world, to resign our peoplehood...
...Maybe they'll sign it this month, maybe not until next year, but they'll sign it, because now that we know it's a possibility, there's no going back...
...Sinai, although I expect (and hope) that the rumor they will is just a reporter's fantasy...
...The world is not a place we enter only after having cleansed ourselves of our particularity...
...Or stake out some new path for themselves...
...It is a vision of how things are supposed to be, in a world made right, in a world that works...
...God is not a name you give to Jewish identity...
...Yet few of the reformist banners are inscribed with the Magen David...
...Israel is the Jewish people's collective effort to demonstrate that, left to our own devices, we can create meaning and decency and law and justice where there was, as there is everywhere, futility and ugliness and chaos and evil...
...There is no Jewish monopoly on decency...
...There are escapes aplenty...
...How can we doubt the adhesive power of ethnicity when everyone is into roots, when the Lower East Side has become a piece of chic nostalgia, when every marginally Jewish college sophomore wants to take his Presbyterian girlfriend to meet his still-accented grandfather, knowing she will then invest him with a mystique that outdoes the most potent aphrodisiac...
...And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for peace...
...They will want only that Israel's hotels should be comfortable, the waiters efficient, the beaches well-maintained...
...Can we look to a renewal of religious sensibility and, more important, of religious conviction, to a restoration of God and Torah as the core elements in Jewish identity...
...Are these questions less urgent than what the range of the next generation of missiles will be...
...It was not the terror that kept us together, but our messianic madness, our intoxication with justice, and with mercy...
Vol. 4 • November 1978 • No. 1
