Christmas, the Jewish Intellectual and “Good News”
by: Eli Zaretsky on December 27th, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Given the ubiquitous tolling of church bells, the public spaces swept by Christmas music, the decorations, the stores open late at night on Christmas Eve, and the “good news” on the Christmas Morning Front Page concerning the Senate’s passing of health care reform, this may be a moment in which it is worth reflecting on what it means to be Jewish and, in particular, what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, recognizing that intellectuality is one of the most pronounced traits of the Jewish people.
To be Jewish means to be in the minority. It means to oppose the overall consensus and to hold on to certain principles against a dominant consensus, the common sense of one’s time, the overwhelming pressure of public opinion, the group. It is interesting that when Jews go to Synagogue or celebrate together they mark such foundational moments of Jewish history as the Covenant between God and Abraham, and the exodus from Egypt, but they neglect another moment, which was of nearly comparable importance, namely the Jewish rejection of Christ’s message.
That rejection was not an easy one. Jesus, after all, was no alien bringing in a foreign religion. He was a Rabbi, preaching not the foundation of a new religion, but the realization of Judaism. Furthermore, the intellectual and emotional, not to mention religious, character of his teaching was not so easy to dismiss. To this day, such arguments as that love and mercy trump justice, or that a truly universal creed must burst the integument of community, retain their force. Any Jew who does not take Christ seriously as one of the greatest of all Jewish thinkers has not reckoned deeply enough with the problem of being Jewish.
Yet the Jews rejected the “good news” that Christ and his followers brought. They did so not for riches or prestige or most forms of emotional satisfaction, for their rejection brought none of that. They did so, because they felt they had a better idea: the individual’s direct, personal, one-to-one, relation to God, not mediated by God’s son-messenger or a Church, and loyalty to an ethically-defined, particularistic community. This rejection, almost as much as the Exodus, gave the Jews their character, often described as stubborn, stiff-necked, and negationist. But it also helped consolidate the great Jewish tradition, which goes back to the ban on graven images, of thinking. When modernity brought the freethinking intellectual to the forefront of social life, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of that opportunity.
I write this as a Jewish intellectual who has rejected the “good news” of Obama’s coming in general, and of the health care bill in particular. This does not mean that I would have voted against the bill; on the contrary, I would have voted for it. But unlike another Jewish intellectual — one who for years exemplified stiff-necked resistance — namely Paul Krugman, I am not yet ready to celebrate. I prefer to keep thinking. And what I am thinking is that the Obama administration continues the more or less perfect merger of corporate interests and party interests which the Democrats pioneered in the 80s, in good part with the help of Jewish Neo-Cons and New Democrats who see the relation of Judaism and the dominant majority differently than me.
If being Jewish means being in the minority, how does that affect Israeli Jews, who at least in their own country, are in the majority?
I think this is part of the problem plaguing Israel. Jews have been in the minority for so long that we have not given much thought to how to wield power. We have thought about how to remain moral within the context of other peoples’ power structures.
What is a moral state? How do we form one? What do we do with weapons and a military when we have one? How do we treat strangers in our midst?
The people who hold power in Israel are still governing as if they were powerless.
Great point. I think this is a critical issue for all progressives who are coming up from the bottom, which is after all the main historical path of progressives, or “the Left” or whatever we call it: the powerless organize and struggle their way into sharing power or taking power. But the revolutions, in which they fully succeeded in taking power, tended towards dictatorship, whereas the countries in which they ended up sharing power thereby became more democratic: though the struggle in shared-power democracies has to be constantly renewed as the newly powerful there, those who are brought into the power structure, become co-opted by the values of the long-time powerful.
The newly powerful in every case have to learn how to wield power responsibly and for the good of the whole. We can’t just depend on popular struggle from below to always keep the powerful honest, because frankly people don’t want to be political all the time: we want new norms of behavior for how to wield power and this is a hard thing for people who have always been oppressed to develop and internalize in their own minds, because it means first and foremost admitting that one is prey to the same kinds of corruption and temptation that the powerless have always excoriated in the powerful. The more the oppressed have demonized their oppressors in the past, the harder it is to admit when they become powerful themselves that they may possess the same kind of human nature. But we are all human, all capable of misusing power and likely to do so once we have it. [Later: it strikes me that "demonized" may be the wrong word. I mean that when the oppressed have been so brutally treated that they find their oppressors incomprehensible and "other" it can be hard to find the potential in themselves for acting in even partially similar ways to be too hard to really face, in part because it may mean rethinking just how "other" one's oppressors were.]
an excellent point. This may help explain the difference between Israelis and other Jews. Also, the Israelis are in the minority I believe, or close, if we count the West Bank.
I don’t see how you can write that Jews “rejected Christ’s message” at all. Just look at our more or less collective turning of the other cheek to centuries of “Christian love.” But on a more individual level, I have always found Jews to be very concerned with how well we live up to (little c) christian moral values.
I think maybe your later point about Jews rejecting a mediator in our relationship with God is more what you meant to emphasize?
Ooooo, Eli, that last paragraph was so slick… nice touch.
This is an outstanding diary. You have completely hit the nail on the head on a lot of issues including rejection of messianic thought then and now. My son is being Bar Mitzvahed on Feb 6 and his reading is Yitro. I thought it was interesting that he didn’t pick out God coming down to the mountain to give the ten commandments, or any of the miracles and hoopla as central to the text, but rather Yitro’s advice to Moshe. When I asked him why, he told me, “Because it’s like today and the way things are in America.”
He meant that we’re still responsible for participating in our own governence. Which means that we can’t wait on Messiahs to do it for us then or now.
I often find that your diaries spur me on to deeper thought, whether its because I absolutely hate what you said or I love what you said. In this case, it’s because I love what you said! At the moment there is a great deal of polarization among progressives on other blogs. Messianism lies at the heart of it. One group of bloggers is absolutely intent on tearing down Obama because he did not live up to their Messianic ideals. So a few of them have formed alliances with the far right for this purpose. Another group is patrolling diaries for any sign of criticism, and then hijacking the comment threads with slurs and threats. None of them are focusing on the structural issues that underly Obama’s decisions.
The basic underlying issue that should be compelling our debate is the relationship between public and private interests. What role should government be playing in our lives? Elevating Obama to Messiahood removes our responsibility to define these roles ourselves.
I don’t know what the correct balance between public and private is, but I am sure it is not defined by an ideology. It must be determined through dialogue. And for that to happen you need ten adults: a community. Or in the case of our religion, the ten adult Jews required to make up a minyan.
Thanks for sharing the link – but sadly it appears to be down? Will anybody have a mirror or another supply?
The article started off good BUT did not really examine why the Jews rejected Jesus (in his lifetime). I can understand that the movement’s later ‘Christian’ form was a turnoff but can the author or someone else explain why (they think) he was rejected while alive? Yes we know that for some he seemed to be calling people to break the Law but then he was also telling them to fulfill it by accomplishing the two great commandments – to love God and neighbor.