In Every Generation: Passover 2010

April 5, 2010: I have replaced the original post with this shorter version.
In every generation, we read on Pesach, they rise up to oppress us. This year we must face down our most implacable foe, the one who has dogged our every footstep since Israel bargained for the birthright and got for himself and his progeny so much more than he bargained for. Members of the tribe, in the immortal words of Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us. For this self-knowledge we can thank the approval of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem when Joe Biden arrived in Israel. By publicly slapping Israel’s one true friend in the face we also gave ourselves a big black eye for all to see. The keepers of the siege who insist that Israel has no real friends in the world are clearly intent on making that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The moral rot within the Jewish community has reached an intolerable level. Bernie Madoff was just icing on the cake. From the inhuman working conditions at the country’s largest kosher meatpacker to the sexual abuse of students at yeshivas in Brookline, to the predatory practices of Goldman-Sachs in Greece and everywhere else in the world, the stench rises to high heaven. If we were trying to validate every anti-Semitic stereotype in the book, the Jews of this generation could not be doing a better job.
How did it come to this? The fetishization of the Holocaust, the use of anti-Semitism as a shield against all critiques from without and within is one part of the story. Coupled with the sense that the world and God owe us big time, too many of us carry the Holocaust like a precious chip on our shoulders. The crisis of faith engendered by the Holocaust is the other half of the equation. Once we were a small tribe of nobodies who believed in something. With that belief we changed the world. Now we are a nation of big shots who believe in nothing and seem incapable of changing ourselves. Never was there a generation of Jews so blessed. Never was there a generation of Jews with so little faith. We venerate prophets we would revile as self-hating Jews if they were so bold as to return today. We pray for a moshiach we would dismiss as a crazy fool should he have the audacity to claim his crown and attempt to redeem us. And so we must redeem ourselves.
Where to begin? With reflection. The answer is as obvious as the shnoz on our faces–obvious to everyone but ourselves that is, unless we reflect. We are not so young anymore. We bear many scars and none so ugly as the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves. We have been unfaithful to our God, our Torah and ourselves too many times and too many ways to believe we were chosen for our virtue or even intelligence.
We’re too old to retain a role as protagonist in the narcissistic fairy tale that has been the astonishing history of the Jews. The only leading roles available for oldsters in fairy tales are as villains. As such we are now cast. It’s time begin a new narrative. The solution to the conflict in the holy land isn’t political, economic, religious or diplomatic. It is all of these but it is first and foremost a literary problem. How could it be otherwise in a conflict over a land that created, and was created by, the holy books the three religions involved hold sacred?
Before we first entered the Promised Land, Moses told the children of Israel that we faced a choice like the twin peaks of Ebal and Gerizim that lay ahead. Blessing or curse, life or death. He might have added another pairing–epic tragedy or divine comedy. Epic tragedy is about death and more death. Divine comedy, life and more life. That’s a choice we each make in our own lives. Collectively we make that choice for our communities, our countries and our world. The literary challenge we face requires twisting the narrative thread of our history from epic tragedy to divine comedy. Each of the narrative threads in this Gordian knot of global geopolitics must be teased out and validated, then knit back together into a beautiful social fabric in which each has its part to play.
Our new story must be an adult narrative in which we recognize that we are the protagonists, like everyone else, but always our own worst enemy, like everyone else. That every antagonist we have is someone we have somehow antagonized. The proposed Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, to be built on the site of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, is a perfect case in point. This museum will literally make the ancestors of the Palestinians of East Jerusalem turn over in their graves. The fact that the Jordanians built a parking lot over a portion of it before 1967 only makes matters worse. The conflict the museum engenders can serve only to increase intolerance, as both sides draw from it fresh validation of their own worst narratives about the other. It would be funny if it weren’t certain to end in tears.
We hate the Palestinians; hate them for ruining the perfect Hollywood ending we contrived for our epic tragedy. In our crowning moment of triumph we returned victorious to the Western Wall, history’s ultimate survivors, truly the chosen ones, only to suddenly find ourselves cast as the oppressor, David transformed overnight into Goliath. But we can thank our cousins the Palestinians, the Jews of this generation, and God almighty for finally revealing just what we were chosen for.
We were chosen to prove that God has no chosen people, not the Egyptians, not the Babylonians or Greeks, not the Romans or Aryans, not even us. That we really are all created equal; equally capable of brilliance and generosity, equally capable of greed, brutality and stupidity. And this remarkable truth is the one truth worth dying for since it is in ignorance of this truth that people are enslaved and murdered in the first place. It is this truth that summons the spirit of the law, that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. Indeed the only way to truly love ourselves is to love our neighbors just as well.
And if we can fully grasp and embrace our part in this divine comedy, if we can look at ourselves in the mirror and laugh off the chains of arrogance that oppress us and our neighbors, end the siege and embrace a world that longs to embrace us, here is what will be said of the Jews of this generation. Our sense of humor was truly our saving grace.