Affirmation: Dear

...And all because Mama read detective stories and liked Chinese food...

...The Christians make it easy for Ms...

...That question is what it has always been, not how to tear down the walls tiat separate us from one another—those walls also defend against the destabilizing flood—but how to build bridges from wall to wall...

...One symbol among many, each, save the Jewish, equally compelling...

...Abstract ethical imperatives which require that we regard our every act as having cosmic significance are a terrible drain...

...Although, be it noted, it was that same ghettoized mother who introduced the Christmas tree in the first place...

...Roiphe does us the favor of confirming the assumption...

...Does it really require advanced graduate study to be aware of the subtle and elaborate ways in which Jews have simultaneously pursued survival for themselves and redemption for the world...

...No, the question is how to make of the tribe a place where one learns in specific ways with specific people lessons which can then be applied to the entire family of man...

...Roiphe has other things to keep her busy: holiness to pursue, Dickens to read, trees to decorate, meaning to discover...

...Samoans, Buddhists, gypsies and Navahoes she endorses—that is, variety either long ago or far away, variety as anthropological delight, variety without sweat glands, variety as a suburban abstraction, variety in the library, but not, heaven help us, on the streets...

...Judaism is not a trap, it is an opportunity...

...She does all this without for a moment wishing us ill...

...Or, perhaps, they will want to know more about their great-grandfather...

...It is in her persistent double-standard, which leads her to condemn the God of the Holocaust—"What God would choose his people for this...

...no one of us will destroy them...

...Roiphe for centuries, and we've managed despite her...

...Not that insight, not any of the insights and experiences that give some of us such pride and such joy are easily available to Ms...

...Roiphe believes that when "one learns enough of the nature of man there is no longer a we and a them, an aggressive, destructive other, a pagan or heathen to be avoided...

...Thundering and complex myths replaced by pablum...

...And though that may make our task more difficult, we must repress a sense of betrayal...

...The private decisions that people make always have public consequences, but it is only in a never-never land of literally self-less people that the individual can place the public weal above his private needs...

...Grant Ms...

...Roiphe's actions have consequences for the rest of us, for the entire Jewish people, she is obliged to be sensitive to those consequences and to be responsible for them...

...The shame of the thing is that after all the courses in philosophy and the history of art and revolution, in psychology and anthropology, she has nowhere learned that she is heiress to something more than a tradition of country clubs and canasta, and that by making the choice she has, she is depriving her children of their birthright...

...But her anger intrudes...

...Her words have long since lost their shock value...

...She is under no obligation, explicit or implied, to order her life in a way that will satisfy our needs, our tastes, our commitments...

...Roiphe's mother bought that first tree because it was pretty and provided an occasion for presents...

...The great lesson of modern Jewish history is that the people who care the most and try the hardest and do the best job of healing the world-in-general are those who have first learned to care and to try and to succeed in the most intimate settings: in the family, and then in the tribe...

...It is a way of imposing meaning on accident, and the price of freedom is that some Jews will seek to flee the accident rather than to make sense of it...

...Anne Roiphe owes us exactly nothing...

...The fact, of course, is otherwise...

...We live in a place, a blessed place, where Jews, as others, get to choose for themselves which ways to follow, which stars to set course by...

...The substance is in her assertion of noble vision: "I can see humanity where my grandfather saw only the march of cossacks...

...Indeed, she proudly avers that on the day the persecutions start, she will don the yellow star and stand with us...

...More important, the reassuring empirical fact is that most of what we do has no transcendent meaning...

...And that is a question which Jews are uncommonly adept at answering...

...Unless Ms...

...One learns—more often from life than from courses, but also from courses, especially in the Prophets—that each with its own symbols and metaphors, each with its own God, can seek Zion...

...We breed narrowness, fritter away our time at card games, country clubs and charity balls, worship a tribal God, deny great art, choose the wrong miracles to remember, even cast spells over defectors ("May your Christmas tree fall during the night...

...And more than persist: We go on writing books and inventing medicines as well as playing canasta...

...It is, instead, the arrogance, the quiet assumption of superiority, ethical and intellectual...

...No matter...

...What else makes variety worth praising...

...Perhaps they will take the next step, the step from Jesus as symbol to Jesus as Christ the King...

...And Ms...

...Most likely, she will not understand when we suggest that when that grim day comes, we'd just as soon she make a clean getaway...

...For what does she have to say about the Jews...

...No one of us will save the Jews...

...Tear down the wall, prohibit the tribes, in the name of a bloodless universalism, and you inherit mass society, the lonely crowd, the totalitarian's delight...

...Roiphe tells us she is "uncertain," "vague," it soon becomes clear that these words reflect stance, not substance...

...In times of terror, we'd prefer to be sustained by those who sustain us today, in life and in love...

...One hopes, for their sake, that they will find real choice possible, despite the anemic abstractions of a quietly authoritarian and intolerantly judgmental background...

...that really doesn't matter...

...but to accept the God of the Crucifixion, which leads her as well to condemn us for picking the wrong miracle to make Chanukah from—"The proper miracle would have been to have created Romans without the need to conquer and avoid the bloody war altogether," as if the Romans and the war and the blood were an invention rather than an event...

...Jewish history in this country provides precedent for either choice...

...Frosty the Snowman as an allegory for the triumph of good over evil, instead of God weeping as Pharoah's riders are cast into the sea...

...Such a massive intellectual lapse and so manifest a hostility must have its origins in personal history...

...It is hardly possible to have less respect for human difference than one who imagines life as a choice between belonging "to the entire human community," or to "merely one small tribal band...

...How very tawdry...

...The hidden anger is more telling than the announced virtue, for it is only that anger which can explain how an apparently well-educated and cultured woman can be so monumentally ignorant...

...The Editors...

...But the children...

...Some of us might quarrel with that assertion, might insist that because Ms...

...How can it possibly have escaped the attention of a serious and thoughtful person in our time that Jews are so regularly to be found among the healers, the civi-lizers, the caring, the creative...

...What will they make of the tree and the rest...

...But today, Ms...

...Roiphe wants very badly to see herself and to be seen by others as kind, thoughtful, enlightened...

...She has severed the umbilical cord, and she prepares her children for a new world, a world beyond atavism, beyond memory, beyond superstition— perhaps, one day, even beyond Christmas trees...

...And that holds even for a mother who decrees that after four thousand years, the descen-dents of her ancestors will cease to be Jews...

...Forget the fact that it wasn't the Romans, in any case, it was the Syrians...

...No, she would stand with us because she loathes evil, because if it comes to a choice between the hunter and the hunted, she prefers the hunted...

...They will want new meanings, their own meanings...

...Scrooge as a metaphor for redemption rather than "in every generation, each of us must feel as if he personally were redeemed out of the house of bondage...

...So it is not the act of defection that so annoys...

...She would learn that there is no such thing as a human being in general, and, learning that, she would come up against the really tough question...

...The distasteful fact is that for all her veneer of civility, Ms...

...Yet we are annoyed, even angry...

...One hopes, for her sake, that when they become the feminists, humanists, foreign correspondents and ranchers they want to be, they will describe their mother rather more charitably than she describes hers, will display less contempt for her naive abstractions and angry denials than she does for her mother's "practicality...

...Otherwise, she'd be standing with us now...

...Roiphe does, after all, make it harder for us by willing, for all practical purposes, the end of the Jewish people...

...Roiphe means that the Jews alone are a "small tribal band," she recklessly condemns all groups that are less than the whole of the family of man...

...Her children are, of course, the central issue...

...The substance is that she assumes, so very casually, that she knows more of the world's variety and difference than we, that she cares more for it, that we, trapped by our parochial atavisms, know nothing and care nothing for Indian dances, Islamic myths, Shinto lore—to say nothing of Christian myth...

...Her grandfather's travail was meaningless, because history is progressive...

...Nor can we deny that she is entitled—as each of us is—to her own curious mixture of anger, naivete, confusion...

...She has made herself into a cultural amnesiac, and is satisfied with the result, parades it...

...Nor, for that matter, is it clear how a student of the history of revolutions remains unaware of the blood that has been shed, the innocent blood, in the name of abstract civilization...

...But it is clear that she would not stand with us out of a desire that we survive...

...In which case the variety she praises can be praiseworthy only when it is about lore rather than life, only when it is quaint rather than meaningful...

...They might see her announced preference for "the stranger's ways" as a threat, as a clear and present danger to Jewish survival...

...It is entirely possible that her children will one day condemn their mother for denying them what was theirs...

...Roiphe is much less tolerant of Judaism than most Jews are of her adopted tradition, than most non-Jews are of Jewish ways...

...Indeed, she owes even her grandfather nothing, though she frames her moralistic musing as an "explanation" to her grandfather...

...So far as the Jews are concerned, we persist, despite all the Roiphes...

...Yes, the enclave is often, too often, a trap, but the remedy is not to destroy the enclave, for that remedy would be worse than the disease it is meant to cure...

...But not yet Jesus, "just a symbol, an excuse for human bravado against the void...

...Four thousand years of productivity reduced to one canasta playing bourgeois mother and rejected, one supposes, because of her...

...Roiphe that knowing what she knows, there's little reason for her to celebrate with us, to urge Judaism upon her children...

...She withholds herself and her children from Jewish life, and, adding insult to injury, announces her ignorant anger in public...

...If they would only put Jesus back into Christmas, she would have a harder choice...

...We do not share that view...

...But when one goes beyond the sophomore level course, one learns that not all "thems" are aggressive and destructive, that "different from" need not lead to "better than," that the assertion of group identity does not divide the world into good guys and bad guys...

...Roiphe, bequeathed a trivial tree, sought to impute meaning to it, and so Christmas has become "a sacred event in our family life...

...It is not the Jews that matter, but the principle of the thing...

...For though Ms...

...As if she'd have the choice...