Wanted: A New Myth

Neusner, Jacob

A NEW MYTH To what question is "the Holocaust and the Redemption" the answer? That it is an answer is plain. For these events, far from America's shores and remote from the everyday experience of...

...Why it is that people choose to work out their sense of themselves and their society in terms essentially irrelevant to their ordinary world and everyday experience—that is the puzzle...
...No Zionism can ask itself to deny the importance of taking up life in the Jewish State...
...To what question, then, are the stories of the destruction of European Jewry and the creation of the State of Israel, compelling—and to the believers, even self-evident— answers...
...Around that contradiction all other discourse on Zionism must circle, weaving and bobbing, drawing near and moving far...
...Hence there can be no evasion of the Zionist challenge to American Judaism, the Zionist defiance of American Jewry's comfortable and complacent situation...
...The extermination of European Jewry has been transformed into "the Holocaust" because we have needed it to be so transformed...
...I have no answers that satisfy...
...Finally, Zionism insists that Jews must not only concede, but actively affirm, the centrality of Jerusalem and of the State of Israel in the life of Jews throughout the world...
...If there is to be a Zionism, there must be a Zion...
...So let us talk more about this matter of self-image, of self-understanding...
...What vision is it that we have of the world that so captures our attention as to make the Zionist perception persuasive to us...
...Understanding is made possible by the Redemption...
...These are the Jews who do not wholly practice the disciplines of Judaism and also do not wholly neglect them...
...Who are these Jews who respond to the myth...
...Such large events generate social change and dislocation, and social change is the source of symbol change...
...a Land without an outside-the-Land is not possible...
...There is a persistant dissonance between where I am and who I want to be, and the myth of "Holocaust and Redemption" expresses that dissonance...
...Second, American Jews have not the remotest thought of emigrating from America to the State of Israel...
...setting up a Jewish state in the ancient homeland did as well...
...It tells us very little, however, about the commonplace realities of American Jews, no more, indeed, than "the Holocaust" tells us...
...They may not feel fully at home, they may never...
...But the beam in my eye will not be removed by my effort to magnify the mote in the eye of my fellow...
...And they have such status because they answer the basic questions of American Jewish life, questions that have to do with assimilation and with self-hatred...
...I know that there are other questions which are no more tractable and which confront my counterparts across the oceans: What sort of Zionism do you contemplate that is different from the nationalism of the State of Israel...
...The rites of the redemptive myth involve attendance at ritual dinners at which money is given and at which Israel is celebrated, endless cycles of work in that same cause, rehearsal of the faith to outsiders and marginal Jews, trips to the State of Israel...
...it is a concrete reality...
...But the Zionist cannot be reluctant...
...And it is our own circumstances, our own fears, our own perceptions that have accomplished the transformation...
...A theology, with rites and rituals...
...What can such a theory be built of...
...Let us talk again about exile...
...And we are not terrified by it because the Redemption assures us that "the Holocaust" will not happen again, that all is not, in the end, absurd...
...Exile, by the same token, is not merely an existential alienation...
...None can speak of a central point other than Jerusalem...
...The puzzling thing is not that political events—the destruction of a group, the formation of a nation state—should inform the imagination of a people...
...Zionism speaks of the flesh, of the this-worldly facts of Jewish political existence...
...All these propositions are commonplace to Israeli Zionism...
...Of course there are many American Jews to whom Zionism is simply unknown...
...In short: If you want to know why, and then how, to be Jewish, you have to remember that (1) the gentiles wiped out the Jews of Europe, and so are not to be trusted, let alone joined...
...And if Zionism is principally identical with Israeli nationalism, then what do you have to say to the rest of the Jewish world, with its other nationalisms...
...We may be reluctant to give account of ourselves, knowing that such an account would be riddled with contradiction...
...But when the myth is completed by the Redemption, "the Holocaust" becomes manageable, it takes on a different and acceptable dimension...
...And if there is a Zion, there is also a non-Zion...
...Implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—Zionism concludes that those Jews who live outside the State of Israel are in significant ways less "good Jews" than the ones who live there...
...But that is as far as it goes...
...The shift in the symbolic life of those Jews fortunate enough to find their way to the Jewish state, the use of the destruction of European Jewry in the self-understanding of that state, the formation of a consequent symbolic structure which draws on the event and converts it into a myth and into a rite—all that is straightforward, plausible...
...Zionism promises redemption, but it does not offer sufficient redemption...
...3) it follows that for your own sake and for the sake of your children, in order to insure your personal safety and theirs, you have to "support Israel...
...it solves some problems, but not all the problems of the human condition, or even of the Jewish condition...
...I know only that there are norms, both there and here, both without and within, both social and deep within the heart, which insist not that I cannot go home again, but that I am not supposed to have a home, not now, not ever, not where I am, and not, in the nature of things, anywhere else...
...The Judaism of American Jews makes no concession to the notion of exile...
...Wanting intuitively, instinctively, to be Jewish, without knowing what that might mean, or, knowing, without being prepared to mean quite that, "the Holocaust" offers meaning and motive...
...Moreover, Zionism declares that Jews who do not live in the State of Israel must aspire to migrate there, or, at the least, to raise their children as potential immigrants...
...On the contrary, a Zionist theory of American Jewry—if a theory can be coaxed out of the arid soil of Zionist slogans—becomes necessary...
...There can, however, be no discussion of Zionism within the American Jewish context without confronting the first and most direct judgment of Zionism upon world Jewry: All those Jews who do not live in Israel are in exile from Israel...
...but not-home is not exile...
...The creation of the State of Israel is universally acknowledged to be the single most important achievement of the Jewish people in this time...
...And these inevitably lead to symbol change, to a restructuring of the imagination...
...What is it that American Jews want to know, feel they need to know, that draws them, moth-like, to the flames of other times and other places...
...We are a people who do this-worldly things, yet insist on wearing the prophet's cloak over our shoulders, the philosopher's mantle...
...Zion is not in Heaven...
...American Judaism, then, is a wholly Zionist Judaism...
...Its message is stark and terrifying, too stark and too terrifying to serve, by itself, as an organizing myth...
...I live, as all who share the myth, on ground which is both not mine and not not-mine...
...Not so with America's Jews...
...Are we not bound to ask how it is that people of the particular social and historical profile of the American Jews—fully acculturated Americans, with a considerable measure of educational and financial accomplishment— urgently construct for themselves a world in which they do not live, an ark they do not plan to stock and float...
...It vastly overshadows the achievement of American Judaism...
...Why I should be a stranger there where I think I should be at home, whether in Jerusalem or Providence, I cannot say...
...For were that not the case, the contradiction would be intolerable, and the myth would not be necessary...
...It expresses in an extreme way the potentialities of our pariah-status...
...If I had worthy answers, I would offer them...
...It tells us why we must be Jewish, even in the absence of understanding...
...Why do they draw upon experiences they have not had and do not wish to have for their symbols and their myths, for their rites and their deeds...
...There is no escape from the allegation...
...Our history has become our theology, our metaphysics...
...It justifies our confusion...
...And what do you have to say to the rest of your own population, which is not Jewish at all...
...In the end, all discourse is obsessed with that plain and painful contradiction...
...The question is: How shall we make sense out of our persistence in preserving a distinctive group life when we are thoroughly acculturated in America, when we are chronically (albeit not acutely) the victims of self-hatred, when we are at best marginally related to our own history, to the way of life and the world view of our ancestors, down to our grandparents...
...And the question...
...The Holocaust" asks the question which the Zionism that has been fulfilled by and in the State of Israel answers...
...It is precisely here that the Zionism of American Jews comes closest to telling the truth about American Jews—the truth that they do not take themselves or their future as Jews seriously...
...we act out our Jewishness by way of the Redemption—that is, by commitment to the State of Israel, that place which gives meaning and significance to and remission from the terror...
...The expressive modes which bring the motive and the myth alive revolve around celebration and support for the Jewish state...
...They are, further, passively accepted—at least in their benign verbal formulation—by American Jews...
...The Zionist vision and its acceptance by American Jews tells us something very important about the self-image of those Jews...
...The only lands which I know and the only languages which I use are, lands and languages both, the property of others...
...What kind of Zionism is it that we pursue, or want to pursue, while having chosen for ourselves a permanent exile...
...We are busy and we are practical, and we are also dreamers...
...They know what the Holocaust means and they know what Redemption means...
...We are a people who, with perfect confidence in our righteousness, seek salvation, pursue it...
...Any Zionist theory which purports to deem Shaker continued on Jacob Neusner is a contributing editor of moment...
...Not merely the importance...
...For these events, far from America's shores and remote from the everyday experience of America's Jews, constitute the central myth by which American Jews seek to make sense of themselves and to decide what to do with that (sizable) part of themselves which is set aside for "being Jewish...
...I cannot answer these questions...
...You do not have to live there, but it is a mark of piety to feel guilty for not living there—a piety, like so many others, remarkably rare in American Jewish life...
...Indeed, the more we come to know about this-worldly Zionism, about the flesh-and-bone salvation it offers, the fewer problems it appears to resolve, the more it creates...
...Above all, Zionism tells us, as does its creature, the State of Israel, that our fixation with salvation, with redemption, is not folly...
...And it speaks, therefore, of exile, of non-Zion, and it raises, therefore, the straightforward question: Are American Jews, are we, in exile...
...It is a puzzle I cannot solve...
...we are pointed in precise directions, there are tasks to be performed, there is meaning after all...
...But it must be added that Zionism is not, for most of us, a complete vision of salvation...
...But because the mythic importance of the State of Israel to American Judaism is so utterly fundamental, because the Zionist redemption is perceived as compensation and consolation for the death of six million European Jews, the Zionist perspective is the implicit heart of American Jewish life...
...They take an active part in the life of the Jewish community, its synagogues, organizations, philanthropies, politics, and other practical activities, at the same time living a life essentially void of the spirituality and sensibility of Judaism...
...Or the tangential questions: Of what use is the notion of exile for us...
...Simply stated, Zionism maintains that Jews who do not live in the Jewish state are in exile...
...This is the myth and these are the rituals, this is the answer we have fashioned...
...2) if there had been "Israel," meaning the State of Israel, there would have been no "Holocaust...
...For what manner of Zionism is it that can accommodate so massive and so voluntary an exile...
...Still, Zionism remains the single most powerful and most important movement in the history of the Jewish people in this century...
...But American Jewry, Zionist though it be, chokes on that position...
...That the same myth should be even more powerful, more fundamental here than it is there—that is the puzzle...
...hence the facile affirmation of Zionism which is so central to American Judaism is necessarily called into question...
...these twin notions are their Judaism, they lead to conclusions that have been reached in advance, they fix both world-view and way-of-life...
...American Jews do not think they are in exile...
...I do not...
...The Holocaust—no, not the Holocaust, but "the Holocaust," not the event but the myth—captures our sense of dislocation and that fear of the rest of the world which is our lot...
...Those who identify it with an aching heart—and Zion with the Messianic era—may have something to say to us, but that something is not about Zionism...
...It is true that on ceremonial occasions they will listen quietly as Israeli spokesmen declare such immigration to be their duty...
...They form the vast and vital center of American Jewry, with its wall-to-wall consensus on the importance of the State of Israel to the American Jews' own Judaism and on the self-evident truths yielded by the Holocaust...
...We become Jewish "because" of "the Holocaust...
...The issue of galut, of exile, is the inescapable issue, and the contradiction between the Zionist faith of American Jewry and its self-willed exile is the inescapable contradiction...
...No, what is puzzling is that such dislocation should be made into the permanent and normative condition of a group, that these remembered experiences should come to outweigh the experienced experiences of that group, that without the appropriation of these events the members of that group cannot make sense of themselves...
...We dream of salvation, and, in our time, what more compelling salvific dream is there than the dream of Zionism, Israel as the negation of meaninglessness, of chaos, of terror, of destruction, of the apocalypse...
...it simultaneously explains the necessity of being Jewish and the possibility that others will bear the central burden of being Jewish...
...But they manifestly contradict the simple facts of the situation of American Jews and their Judaism...
...The pariah-people triumphs over its worst catastrophe and creates its home in its ancient homeland...
...Killing off the bulk of Europe's Jews involved a social change of profound and lasting consequence...
...What sort of Zionists are we, can we be, outside the State of Israel...
...For America's Jews, beset by the challenges of assimilation and overwhelmed by a sense of discomfort at their own (paltry) differences from the majority, the myth of Holocaust and Redemption serves both to express fear and to offer remission from it...
...Third, American Jews ritually affirm the centrality of the State of Israel, and, at some level, accept the derivative inference—that is, the peripherally of the Golah, the Diaspora, including the mighty American Jewish community...
...the centrality...
...it is here on earth, in the material reality of the Land and the State of Israel...

Vol. 5 • March 1980 • No. 3


 
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