More tax, less food perhaps?

Today’s the day that the grassroots movement UK Uncut has shut down stores belonging to the member of our brethren who has avoided more tax as an individual than any Jewish man before him. Friends, rattle your Chanukah presents for Philip Green, who owed £285m to the UK taxman last year but chose to secrete it in the loving arms of his wife Cristina, who just happens to live in tax-haven, Monaco.

Philip likes to spend good money on his son’s barmitzvah (£4m) and his daughter’s home (£1m), on strange mercy flights for the parents of lost children plus holidaying with Simon Cowell, Kate Moss and other glamorous goyim. What he doesn’t like is being expected to pay up his fair share of tax, preferring that his contribution to the nation be dressing bored secretaries in identikit outfits in Topshop and faded suburban housewives in horror-show BHS items. Green’s contribution to the nation is a pastoral scene of faux-vintage frocks, with Green looming over us all, whispering “Et in Arcadia Ego”. His tax avoidance could have paid for 20,000 NHS nurses, 30,000 university places, and a whole load of social housing.

Philip Green is not a good image of UK Jews. I don’t want to give any credibility to the scum on the racist right or some of the confused on the far left, but if you were looking for an anti-semitic stereotype right now, you wouldn’t need to look far. A man who is unapologetic about robbing the nation, and now advises the Government on destroying the welfare state – he should be disowned by the community. Our Rabbis and reps should be condemning him and using him as a warning about where the affluence of the community will lead us, and speaking out about our current complacency on fetid wealth.

But let’s not obsess over Philip Green alone, because he’s not the only one. How many of you have a rich family member or friend of a friend who is creative with their tax returns, or who advises people like that on tax avoidance? We all know it happens, and we turn a blind eye, for fear of upsetting people we know. But we’re part of one of the most wealthy demographics in the UK and the rot has to stop. Name and shame Jewish tax avoiders to each other, and make it socially unacceptable to be an accountant who helps the super-rich to shirk their responsibilities. Let’s build our own Jewish UK Uncut faction, and not tolerate those in our midst who are hiding from the taxman.

We’re excited in Jewdas Towers to see a widespread grassroots movement challenging the economically powerful when our political leaders won’t do so. Go back to your shuls and your community groups and be part of that. The JC, the United Synagogue and the Board of Deputies won’t lead us to a moral position, and nor probably will Liberal Judaism or the JCC. Their existence depends on donations from the people who talk of community responsibility with one hand if it refers to a new wing of the shul building, but dismiss their obligations as taxpayers with the other if it refers to the cross-communal poor.

In my own hometown shul on Rosh Hashanah this year, my usually-reactionary Rabbi upset the applecart by condemning the money spent by those in front of him on barmitzvahs, weddings, cars, houses and holidays. Those around me knew that this was just this was just words and dismissed any need to take their own stance on the issue – knowing that this Rabbi would never truly alienate the hand that feeds, or really tempt losing the support of the big funders of the shul. So it’s our responsibility as a Jewish grassroots movement to speak up. We won’t name names – the nature of tax avoidance is that the criminal doesn’t advertise it – but I think we all know a lot of wealthy businessman who we suspect. So let’s find out the truth and name and shame.

Here’s some inspiration – currently playing in London is a remarkable show, Pins and Needles, a musical theatre revue originally performed in the 1930s by an American garment workers’ union. Given that there were so many Jewish garment workers at the time, and, well, also given that musical theatre and Jews go together pretty well, there’s a heavy Jewish tone to the show. Plus a large portion of the production team are Jewish too (and yes, are friends of Jewdas too, but it’s a brilliant show so stop being annoying), so inevitably we view it with a Hebraic glow underscoring it.

Though written more than 70 years ago, the show includes a section that satirises tax avoidance – including from those who claim to be serving the nation as Green does. The finale of the show is an inspiring warning to the hubris of the wealthy who think that the laws of human decency (not to mention those of the land) don’t apply to them.

The cast write the famous phrase מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין (Mene Mene, Tekel Upharsin) on the wall – “Your Days Are Numbered – Beware”. We should be writing this on the walls of Jewish community buildings, and exposing the greed around us.

Two lay hold of a cloak. This one says: “I found it!” And that one says ‘I found it!” This one says, “It’s all mine!”. And that one says, “It’s all mine!”. This one takes an oath that he has no less a share than half, and that one takes an oath that he has no less a share than half. And they divide it up.

Translation: Neusner

This little nugget of Mishna is traditionally one of the first taught to children. You can see why, it, along with the many cases that follow, is a simple expositions of one of the key aims of the rabbinic project, to present a clear legal system designed to smooth out all uncertainties, resolve conflicting claims and demonstrate a method for dealing with all social issues that might arise. The text is pretty clear, it presents a case when two people have equal claim on an object, having, presumably, both come across it simultaneously. The image suggested is a cartoonish one, each picking up one end, only then realising the presence of the other. We know that their claims are totally equal as they use totally identical language. How can they divide the garment, seeing as they both have a just claim to all of it? To ask they to say that they own only half of it would be to force them to lie. Rather, the Mishna comes up with an innovative solution, that each should swear that he owns not less than half. With this approach, both owners can maintain the integrity of their claim, while allowing a practical division of the garment to take place.

Now I’ve heard this text used several times in recent months, not as an introduction to rabbinic laws of property but as a political analogy.  There seems to be something of a fashion for using this Mishna as a metaphor for the two-state solution. It requires little explanation: just as the two characters each believe the whole cloak is theirs, each side in the Israeli Palestinian conflict believes the whole land belongs to them. They cannot say that only half the land is theirs, as this would be to make a nonsense of their deeply held beliefs. Rather, they can say that ‘not less than half’ of the land belongs to them, allowing each to maintain the theoretical purity of their position whilst permitting the land to be divided into Israeli and Palestinian states in practice.

So far so cute. I can, however see at least problems with this analogy. The first is political – why is it necessary at all? We have been told for so long that the two-state solution is the only, most just and totally inevitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If so, why the need to propagandise on its behalf, to marshal Mishnaic metaphors in support of it.

The second problem is a textual one. While most translations describe the two characters as fighting over a garment or a cloak, the Hebrew is rather more precise. It refers to a Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. The notable thing about a Tallit, the factor that makes it a Tallit rather than any other garment, is its fringes, 613 of them. These represent the 613 Mitzvot (commandments) and the Tallit thus reminds the wearer of their obligations. A Tallit with less than 613 fringes would not be a Tallit and thus worthless. Its value lies in its unity. Therefore an agreement which divided the Tallit in two would be an absurd, monstrous one.

This argument is bolstered by seeing a Biblical story behind the Mishnaic text. It seems to me implausible that a reader knowledgeable in Tanach would not see a connection to the story of King Solomon and the baby claimed by two mothers, found in 1 Kings 3:16-28. Here, famously the urge to divide is seen as proof of a false claim, the true mother would want the baby intact, even if it meant relinquishing ownership to the other.

This is an apt metaphor for the state affairs in what remains of ‘peacemaking’, behind the apparent inevitability and necessity of the two state solution lies its monstrous shadow, the enfant terrible of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the one state solution. Such a solution questions how the land, with its water resources, overlapping populations, criss-crossing roads and contested capital can be meaningfully/justly divided in two. Is not what is most beautiful about the land its unity? Are not borders, and the urge to police them a source of oppression as much as liberation?

Until now these ideas represent the ‘lunatic’ fringe of Israeli Jewish opinion. They were rather more popular amongst Palestinians, but were dropped by the Palestinian leadership in the 1980’s after being told that a two-state solution was all Israel would accept. It turns out however, that even that was too much to expect.

The collapse of the Oslo process in 2001 (let’s not go into reasons here) led to the total ascendancy of the Israeli right, and their associates, the settler movement. What seemed wholly possible in the 1990s, that Israeli state might evacuate almost all settlements as part of an agreement now seems impossible to conceive. The right is so dominant, and increasingly unwilling to concede anything at all to placate the ever-concerned ‘International Community’. The strongest card of what remains of the ‘Peace Camp’ (the fact thus Kadima is seen as part of it shows how far things have come) is the ‘demographic argument’ that points out that in not too many years there will be Palestinians than Jews in the strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. If this tipping point occurs without a Palestinian state existing, then the monstrous option will occur by default, and a one state solution will inevitable occur. For this reason, it was supposed, all Jewish Israelis had to support the two-state solution in one form or another, and when rightists opposed it they were simply putting their heads in the sand, having no other solution.

Until, it seems, now. Haaretz recently published an extraordinary article by Noam Sheizaf on the seemingly impossible subject of settler bi-nationalism. It seems that a series of people within Likud and the settler movement have decided that a) their priority is not to divide the land so no settlements need be removed b) if so, Palestinians must be given the vote, otherwise the world will view Israel as a full apartheid state and thus c) they are prepared to give up on the idea of a Jewish majority. This is a mind-boggling development. Have the most racist, most nationalist Israeli Jews suddenly become the biggest doves of all? Not quite.

As Uri Averny has pointed out, these thinkers have a series of major caveats. Firstly, they try to take Gaza out of the picture, seeing it as an enemy state, and perhaps hoping it could eventually become part of Egypt. Removing Gaza from the picture takes 1.5 million Palestinians out of the equation – certainly helpful for the demographic equation. Secondly they suggest that Palestinians would only be given the vote gradually, in some cases, on some kind of ‘earned’ basis. This is obviously unacceptable to any democrat.  Thirdly, and in connection with the previous point, they maintain that this state will continue to be unambiguously a ‘Jewish state’. This is clearly delusional – if the Palestinians form, say 45% of the electorate, naturally they are going to demand that said state be neutral or bi-national.

These inconstancies, however, do not invalidate the whole idea. If this is the beginning of a total sea change it will naturally take some time to develop into a coherent political programme. Ali Abunimah, at aljazeera.net argues that once the one state principle is established, it will gain its own momentum, however these figures might want to control it. He points out, that right until the end of apartheid, most white South Africans opposed creating a universal franchise, preferring some kind of halfway house or power sharing arrangement. Once the negotiations began it became clear that this was simply a non-starter. The same would be true of any proposal to give Palestinians the vote ‘gradually’.

At the point where the two-state solution’s moment has probably passed, its adherents in the diaspora are sounding more and more desparate. There has been an increase around ‘Zionist left’ activism, through initiatives like J-Street and J-Call, that fail to notice that the Zionist left in Israel is pretty much dead and buried. The last two-staters are desperate to drown out the calls of more radical groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, and the ever-growing BDS movement. They are trying to trap a genie that has already escaped from the bottle – nowadays the whole Tallit is in sight.

Finally, Gustav Landauer in English! Well perhaps it says something about me but I harangued Kuhn for an interview, about Landauer specifically. It’s not that I’m not interested in proto-queer disabled pirates or anti-machismo sober revolutionaries, it’s just that Landauer’s big influence on many of my German friends has made me aware that his ideas are sorely missing from English speaking discourses.

So there we sat, around a large sticky table in Stockholm’s activist hangout number one – Kafé 44 – talking about a man who died ninety years ago; whose thoughts about socialism as anarchism, escaping the state, the Zapatistas (of 1914!), anti-semitism, oil corporations, mysticism and spirituality, and of course revolution itself, seem as remarkable today as they ever were.

Dov Neumann: Firstly, I’d like to say thank you very much for meeting me Gabriel.

Gabriel Kuhn: My pleasure.

DN: In front of me is a copy of what you’ve obviously been working on for several years now, Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings – a rather mammoth translation project if you don’t mind me saying so. To English speakers you’ve made available for the first time a serious body of the writings of probably the most important German Anarchist of the twentieth century. Essays, articles, pamphlets, personal letters, even a postcard.

GK: His politically focused texts anyway. I had to focus on his political writings because he also wrote a lot on the arts, literature and philosophy. His lectures on Shakespeare fill two volumes, for example, which isn’t exactly in the scope of this book.

DN: But Landauer died, or rather was killed, in 1919. Why revive him today?

GK: I think there are two aspects for me. Firstly, I think that if you translate a text – whether it’s 50, 100, 200 years old – if you consider an author important in anarchism, a social movement, philosophical school or whatever: it’s a valuable research tool in itself.

However, I would say that what’s special about Landauer is that he really presented a definition of anarchism and socialism – he used the terms interchangeably – that is, I dare say, pretty unique.

He began his theoretical development with a broadly ‘class-struggle anarchist’ approach to politics, but ended up developing something of a spiritual understanding of socialism. It strongly focused on people finding something within themselves that cultivated inner change, from which values like mutual aid and solidarity would come naturally; rather than through a rational code where you might think, ‘Well it’s better for others therefore it’s better for me.’

DN: He was quite opposed to that kind of rationalism, wasn’t he?

GK: Absolutely. He believed that on that basis you couldn’t develop socialism because people wouldn’t really feel connected to one another. To do so you’d have to, and this is where it becomes complicated because it’s mystical, discover the inner essence of humanity that lies within each individual. You have to turn inwards first and discover this inner essence, and then you will perceive humankind in a different sense and approach people differently.

DN: Difference is a key word for Landauer. For example he vehemently opposes Esperanto for trying to unite humanity with one language. He makes an almost Tower of Babelesque critique.

GK: That’s a good example of Landauer’s opposition to rationalist measures of bringing people together. I guess Esperanto was to him a cold, mechanical idea of providing some kind of common structure of finding one another. Rather, people best do so through cherishing their own cultural traditions, expressions and language.

The idea of a homogenous socialist utopia was not something that appealed to him. If you’re not able to embrace all cultural forms that human kind has produced: you cannot embrace all of human kind, you cannot establish socialism. His idea of difference goes beyond a mere concept of tolerance. Socialism has to ‘grow’, that’s a word that appears often in his writings, it has to grow from the diversity of human beings and cultures that make up humanity.

DN: Perhaps that relates to his agrarianism, his belief in the revolutionary potential of agricultural settlements – what we would now call communes. I laughed when I read in your introduction how he visited one of these pioneering settlements, the Neue Gemeinschaft, but left ‘Disillusioned with the escapism they mistook for social transformation’, as you wrote. My own experience precisely!

GK: His settlement idea is superficially one of a commune movement: you move to the country, set up your commune, hope that more and more people will do the same. That is part of Landauer’s idea, but that alone would not suffice. Your commune could never be an isolated island. It has to be connected to its context and it has to have an impact on society overall.

DN: Does this slow settlement idea make Landauer something of an ‘evolutionary’ anarchist?

GK: Some people have argued that rapid social transformations are contrary to his beliefs, and therefore he’s been criticised for joining the 1918 Bavarian Revolution. I see that as rather short sighted. Landauer did believe that in certain times revolution could be part of a movement to create a better world. He just never thought that socialism could be achieved by changing the structure of government or establishing workers councils. He saw it as an important step but not the one thing that would establish socialism.

Eventually, for Landauer, the state would disappear because it would no longer be necessary. He famously defines it as a ‘social relationship’ between people. You abolish it by developing different relationships and not by changing the political system or the economic structure.

DN: In a way that’s quite a Post-Structuralist way of understanding power.

GK: I think so. For example Foucault’s theory of power stresses that aspect, that a lot of our power structures are reproduced in personal relationships, not just in government institutions. So I think that is one aspect in which Landauer’s theories fit in with more contemporary theory. Another is with the idea of ‘counter-power’, where you try to build a parallel underground society and use that to escape and diminish the power of the state. I think a lot of contemporaries would find something interesting in Landauer’s writings which goes beyond merely satisfying a historical interest.

DN: Landauer had a Jewish background. Did that affect his ideas?

GK: His thoughts on Judaism emerged only later in his life. Like many secular Jewish intellectuals at the time he almost made a point of not addressing that part of his identity. The spiritual aspects of his central political text Revolution focus on Middle Age Christian mystics, not Jewish mysticism. Judaism comes in his later essays, where he confronts the anti-semitism inherent in the Beilis Trial, and seemingly discovers Jewish mysticism for the first time, with the help of his close friend, the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber.

DN: Did he join in with Buber’s enthusiasm for some form of Jewish state?

GK: Landauer just started joining the discussion on Zionism a few months before he died. He was invited to a couple of conferences that dealt with Zionism and settlement projects in Palestine but he couldn’t attend because of the events in Munich, in which he was killed.

DN: He was invited by Nachum Goldman, founder and president of the the World Jewish Congress, right?

GK: Exactly. All we have there are a couple of letters between Landauer and Goldman where Landauer expresses, if you will, – hesitant – interest. It’s really hard to tell whether Landauer would have actively supported settlements in Palestine. Nevertheless, a lot of people in the early kibbutz movement were directly inspired by his idea of developing socialism through a network of agricultural settlements.

It’s hard to believe Landauer would have supported Jewish statehood. Perhaps he would have shared his friend Margarete Susman’s anti-statist interpretation of Zionism; Zionism as part of an international socialist movement. Even before the events of 1948 she declared explicitly that the Zionist movement must not turn into a nationalistic, nation-state-building movement: that would kill the whole idea.

DN: It has been argued that Landauer named his Sozialistische Bund organisation (Socialist Association) that way because of the link between the German word ‘Bund’ and the Hebrew word ‘bris’ (covenant). Would he perhaps have favoured the other significant Hebrew related Bund at the time – the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund (Yiddish Workers Association) – over the Zionist cause? Their values seem closer to his . . .

GK: I’m not aware of any direct links to the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund. That said, if he had lived longer, he would probably have seen the return of Rudolf Rocker [important German anarcho-syndicalist; leading light in London's Yiddish-anarchist movement, despite not being Jewish] to Germany, and it would have been interesting to see what their contact would have been.

In a sense, much of the Yidisher Arbeiter Bund‘s ideas would fit with Landauer’s beliefs. You have this universal, socialist-anarchist ideal, but if your cultural background is Jewish, or you come from a Yiddish speaking background, you want to pursue that as well, because that’s what allows you to formulate and express your ideas best.

DN: One of your next projects, I gather, is something of an accompaniment to your Landauer book. You’re translating a major body of writings from a German anarchist who is even less known outside Germany than Landauer: his friend Erich Mühsam.

GK: Yes. They were the two most important German anarchists of the century. Mühsam was influenced by Landauer’s spiritual socialism and they collaborated quite a lot in writing and action. Both had similar backgrounds – Jewish, middle class – Mühsam was ten years younger though and throughout his entire life saw Landauer as a kind of mentor-teacher. The main difference between the two was that Mühsam was closer to class-struggle anarchism, considering the proletariat a revolutionary subject. Landauer was more skeptical. . .

DN: Landauer called the proletariat ‘Significant but overrated’!

GK: Exactly. The other major difference was that Mühsam, while being very close to the ideas of proletarian council communism, was also a prototypical bohemian. Free love, artist-colonies and so on were important things for him. And that was a conflict between him and Landauer. Landauer considered the family the smallest unit of a socialist society, where you craft the solidarity and mutual aid. He had a well known love affair with a Swiss syndicalist called Margarethe Faas-Hardegger which ended when Margarethe wrote an article which criticised the nuclear family unit and argued for communal child rearing. He also didn’t feel comfortable discussing rights for homosexuals, which Mühsam was very involved in. So there was a conflict there, but they were good friends and shared a lot of ideas. Mühsam would eventually be one of the first prominent victims of the early Nazi concentration camps.

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Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings will be on sale from the beginning of July. See Housemans, Amazon.

Gabriel Kuhn holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and lives as a writer and translator in Stockholm, Sweden. Currently, he is mainly working with Unrast Verlag in Germany and with PM Press in the US.

In the programme I stated that there was no such thing as an Israeli nationality.  I was interrupted by Hadar Sela, a minor Israeli propagandist, who informed me that there was an Israeli nationality.  Indeed it was written on her passport.  I therefore assumed, although this was before the Dubai murder, that Israel had the same attitude to passports as most countries and wouldn’t lie on such a document.  I was wrong.  I assumed instead that Ms Sela was therefore being untruthful about this as she was about much else (‘full equality in Israel between Jews and Arabs’ etc.).

Jonathan Hoffman, co-Chair of the Zionist Federation, intervened in the discussion to argue that there was indeed such a thing as an Israeli nationality and further, that ‘In calling her an “Israeli” you were yourself recognising her nationality! If Israel ‘nationality’ was confined to Jews that leaves non-Jews in Israel effectively stateless.’

Although one would perhaps expect a leading officer of Britain’s Zionist Federation to at least understand the ideological and political building blocks of the State he so avidly defends, this was clearly not the case.  Instead JH argued that ‘it is clearly wrong to mix up the diplomatic concept of ‘nationality’ qua ‘citizenship’ with the ‘peoplehood’ concept of ‘Jewish nation’.’ Because ‘As you well know there are many definitions of ‘who is a Jew?’ depending on who is doing the defining, but there is only one definition of ‘who now has Israeli nationality?’

In fact JH was not only wrong on all scores but nonetheless managed to confuse the question of ‘who is a Jew’ with Israeli citizenship and nationality.  In fact the situation is quite clear:

1. There is no Israeli nationality.

2. If there was such a category and it was confined only to Jews it wouldn’t leave non-Jews stateless as there are 132 other nationalities to choose from!!  All of which seem to be invented on the back of an envelope depending on the situation.

Is there an Israeli nationality?

Of this there can be no doubt.  As Shimon Agranat, head of the supreme court ruled in 1970 in a case brought by Tel Aviv psychologist, George Tamarin:
“There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people.”

Agranat further ruled that

“the Jewish people is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry.”

[Oscar Kraines, The Impossible Dilemma: Who is a Jew in the State of Israel, p. 67).

As Menachem Begin, who even JH couldn’t accuse of being a self-hating anti-Zionist Jew explained:

‘In Western Europe or the United States, “nationality” is synonymous with “citizenship.” A national of a given state is a citizen of that state, or at least one born under its jurisdiction. In Central and Eastern Europe citizenship and nationality are distinct. We have Israeli citizens of diverse religions. on the other hand, Jewish nationality and religion must always go together.”

[Eliezer Goldman, Religious Issues in Israel’s Political Life]

Why is this Important

Some readers may wonder why I am stressing the importance of this.  Surely this is merely a juridicial issue?  A quirk of the Israeli state just as most states have their own quirks? E.g. the fact that the King or Queen of the UK cannot be a Catholic, is maybe just one of those things that enliven the tapestry of life?  Maybe not having an Israeli Nationality is merely a nod in the direction of official Zionist ideology, of which there is no practical consequence today?

If that were so, then of course there would be an argument for leaving this quaint arrangement as it was.  But in fact the distinction between Citizenship and Nationality goes to the heart of Israeli Apartheid.  It is a crucial legal component in the continuing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians, especially those who have lived in the Israeli state since 1948.

It is also crucial to what makes Israel different from all other states (bar South Africa).  Israel is unique in being a State that is a state, not of its own citizens but of its Jewish nationals.  Indeed citizenship is becoming ever more meaningless as legislative attacks on Arab citizens of Israel become more frequent (e.g. not being allowed to live with a married partner from the Occupied Territories or being able to revoke the citizenship of Arabs).  Israel is a Jewish State, a state of its Jewish nationals as opposed to all of its citizens.  That is why it is not a democratic state but one which is ever fearful that the non-Jews (Arabs) are going to breed and multiply and outnumber Jews.  That is the ‘demographic problem’ as it is quaintly termed.

Legal Challenge to Refusal to Include Israeli Nationality

One would think that with 132 nationalities at its disposal, the Israeli Interior Ministry would have no difficulty in adding a 133rd – Israeli.  After all this is Israel!  However that would be like passing the proverbial ham sandwich round the congregants at Yom Kippur.

So Uzzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor and a number of other distinguished Israelis, including Shulamit Aloni and Uri Avneri, (ex MKs) have added their names to the petition to the High Court asking for there to be an Israeli nationality. Ornan himself has been active in the “I am Israeli” movement, which strives for equality among all Israelis. To this end several appeals were submitted to Israeli courts.

The petition has already been rejected by the lower court and no one expects the appeal to succeed, however much embarrassment it causes.

But back to Hadar Selah.  How is it that a minor Zionist propagandist can point to her passport, which clearly has written in English the words ‘Nationality’ and opposite that in Hebrew ‘Ezrahut’ (which is actually citizenship, ‘Le’om’ being the correct term for nationality).  I must confess I was somewhat struck for an answer.  Surely Israel doesn’t deliberately seek to mislead the officials of other states when an Israeli citizen presents their passport.  Surely this is one conspiracy theory too far?

Well that was also my view until I read Jonathan Cook’s “Israeli Nation” vs. “Jewish State” Cook is one of the best journalists writing on Israel and lives in Nazareth.  This what he wrote, quoting the Petition of Ornan and co:

“The group also said it hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign border officials.”

And if that wasn’t enough then the veteran journalist B Michael, of Yedioth Aharonot, Israel’s most popular newspaper, observed that: “We are all Israeli nationals — but only abroad.”

And then it all fell into place.  Internally, within Israel there is no such thing as an Israeli nationality.  But for the goys and those abroad there is!   And the reason?  As Uri Avnery explains:

“The State of Israel cannot recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”

In an appropriately named article ‘No ‘Israelis’ in Israel?’ Ynet observes that:
‘since 1992 Israeli passports declare their holder to be of ‘Israeli Nationality,’ therefore the State does acknowledge such an identity.’

However, Uzzi Ornan, is unlikely to be  successful in his petition because although an Israeli passport may indeed declare the existence of an Israeli nationality, the Supreme Court and legislature of Israel deny any such entity exists, because an Israeli nation would have to include non-Jews.  No longer would the Israeli State be the vehicle for fulfilment of the Zionist project’s main goal, the ‘ingathering of the Jewish exiles’.  It would be just another state in which large numbers of Jews live rather than the centre of Jewish existence.

But since Jonathan Hoffman is quite happy with the idea of an Israeli nation, indeed he believes there already is one, wouldn’t it be excellent if he were to add his name to Ornan’s petition?   In the name of the British Zionist Federation of course!

Tony Greenstein

A current buzzword amongst Jewish professionals is ‘peoplehood’. A strange word this, one absent from most dictionaries, and one seemingly invented by Jews, for Jews. A recent proponent of the term argued that the fact that it appears in no other cultures or languages (including Hebrew) ‘shows just how counter-cultural we are’. Or it just shows we’ve made up a stupid word.

So why is this word doing quite so well at the moment? Unsurprisingly, money has a lot to do with it. The Nadav foundation (‘advancing understanding of Jewish Peoplehood and a strengthening of the individual’s pride in being part of the Jewish Collective’) is giving substantial grants to organisations that run Jewish peoplehood themed programmes, whatever that entails

This explains the inclusion of a ‘new peoplehood track’ in the programme of the recently held Limmud UK conference. A whole host of events, panels, discussions etc, were slotted into the programme at very short notice when a grant became forthcoming. Participants could spot these by a cutesy logo of a Jewish family silhouette with a Star of David above their heads. Bless.

The sessions in said track showed the mix of quality one expects from Limmud, with some very interesting and some leading your head to sink deeper and deeper into your lap. But none could disguise the intellectual vacuity of the concept, and its utter shallowness was clearly evident. The nadir came in a supposedly high profile panel, in which David Saperstein, the respected head of the RAC (Reform Action Center) in America came up with the mind boggling statement ‘I have a dream’ (delusions of MLK here)’ that every Jewish child will go to sleep having listened to a Jewish song and played a Jewish video game’.

Sorry?   What kind of Yiddisher Stepford wives/ totalitarian dystopia is this? Is this what a few millennia of Judaism has come to? Frantic use of technology to try and guilt trip assimilated secular Jews into marrying in?  One might imagine Moses standing at the back of a Jewish Peoplehood classroom, struggling to understand how it has anything meaningful to do with Judaism, before being told by some (probably UJIA accredited) educator that, to maintain tribal loyalty above all else is the true meaning of the revelation at Sinai.

For this is the essence of Peoplehood theory, discarding all meaningful religious, linguistic, cultural, and philosophical elements, lest they offend anyone, Jewishness is reduced to a big ethnic love-in. Love your fellow Jew, the only mitzvah that remains. This is secular Judaism at is most extreme, devoid of the elements, such as the Yiddish language, or shared religious reference points, which 100 years ago made secular Judaism viable and dynamic. Jewish Peoplehood theorists take as their starting point the notion that the Jews are, in some mythic way, one people, despite the many linguistic, cultural and social barriers that separate us. From then they consider which elements can unite us, given this diversity. Religion is obviously out, given the vast gulf between the haredi and the ardently secular. Language fails to unite either, with Yiddish increasingly restricted to the Ultra-orthodox, and Hebrew hardly well spoken in the diaspora. Any gathering of European Jews immediately demonstrates the degree of linguistic separation. Culture? Jews have always had multiple cultures, dependent on geography, and this has only been disguised in modernity by the aggressive dominance of Ashkenazi culture, and the unwillingness of the state of Israel to allow the culture of its Sephardi immigrants to perpetuate judaeo-arabic culture. What about social justice/socialism, which motivated so many Jews at the turn of the last century, and was taken by liberal Jewish movements as the essence of Judaism? To the extent that this agenda has survived the embourgouisment of Western Jewry, this is now a diaspora phenomenon. In Israel, proud to be engage in realpolitik, viewing Jewish utopianism as deriving from the ‘ghetto mentality’, the tradition of centring Judaism around the ethics of the political left is virtually extinct. Social Justice Judaism is now an essentially American movement, and when its proponents turn their focus onto Israel, for example with ‘J Street’, the result shows the division rather than unity of the ‘Jewish people’. So what remains? Ultimately, we’re left with race, a (almost certainly illusory) common ethnic descent. Because to discuss race is somewhat unfashionable in polite company, terms like family (often the folksy mispocha) , common heritage or nation are used as synonyms. But make no mistake, in the absence of a genuine shared culture, religion, language, geography or philosophy, we are talking about a unity based on ethnicity, a community of race.

Despite claiming to be able to speak to the current Jewish reality, Peoplehood theory is intrinsically prescriptive rather than descriptive. It aims to return to a (perhaps somewhat imagined) more innocent age, located somewhere in the 1950s, where Jewishness was a warm club, seemed relatively homogenous and any dissent from mainstream narratives was kept firmly below the surface.  Behind Peoplehood’s shiny new façade lies an attempt to put many genies back in the box, those of intermarriage, of increased Jewish diversity and decreasing connection between Israel and diasporic communities. It is thus an agenda for reconstruction rather than renewal, to use Zalman Shachter Shalomi’s terminology, and a clue to its fearfulness is the fact that it is already moving towards dogma. Anita Shapira, of Tel Aviv University has accused Shlomo Sands (whose book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ will given a full analysis on Jewdas at a later date) of ‘peoplehood denial’, a phrase evidently designed to ‘evoke’ holocaust denial’, and perhaps even suggest that the two are equally dangerous. This represents another, more sinister aspect to the peoplehood concept, its attempt to buttress the legitimacy of the Zionist project. Most Zionist thinkers maintain as central dogma that ‘every nation/people has the right to self-determination’ (whatever that means), and thus maintaining the notion of Jewish nation or people is necessary to ensure the survival of Israel as a state with a Jewish majority.

None of this is to suggest that all notions of ‘the Jewish people’ are nonsense. The term Am Yisrael, though probably originally meaning something closer to tribe or cultic sect rather than nation, is indeed an ancient term. Even if we accept the Shlomo Sands notion that Judaism is essentially a religion, other religions understood themselves as a coherent group, the Ummah for Islam, and Christendom for Christianity. The claim to Jewish peoplehood has always been mythic, rather than based on any empirical uniting features, but we can acknowledge that many practising Jews throughout history understood ‘am yisrael’ to be a meaningful concept, however they interpreted it. What is new, however, is the attempt to separate the notion of the Jewish people from all other elements of Judaism, and make it the sole focus. Traditional Judaism posits a triangle: God-Torah-Israel. Peoplehood eliminates two thirds of the triangle, surely leaving us with something approaching an idolising of race.  This Judaism without content eliminates halacha, aggadah, prayer, philosophy, rabbinic hermeneutics and personal and communal ethics, in the name of building a faux unity. One need not be ‘religious’ in order to appreciate this; a ‘secular’ Judaism can be equally content driven, by Yiddish song and literature, by the Ladino language, by the modern Jewish philosophical tradition, by a knowledge of Jewish history. Such content does indeed unify its practitioners, but focussing on an ‘object’ rather than ourselves, frees us of the narcissicism and exclusivity that otherwise occurs.

It is feared that a focus on particular content, such as modern Jewish philosophy, or the Yiddish language, will fail to connect us to the whole, will in fact detach us from our collective unity and belonging. It probably will. But this is inevitable; there is no unity to which we ought to be belonging, no essence that binds us all together. Judaism/Jewishness is without centre, diverse sets of cultures, practices and politics that are bound together only polemically in the service of particular ideological projects. But so what? Is that such a problem? From Mediaeval philosophers to Kabbalists, Jews have frequently been more attached to their particular ideologies and communities than to the ‘collective’. The strongest Jewish communities had the greatest diversity and argument, only the experience of 20^th century hatred coupled with the fear of corrosive modernity has driven us to strive for an imagined unity.

A recognised trend, amongst certain Jewish commentators, is a shift away from focussing on peoplehood towards a focus on meaning. Perhaps there is something in this. It is arguably a North American phenomenon rather than a global one, and it is a move toward meanings in the plural rather than singular. And it is still an attempt to introduce a meta-narrative, to reinstate an essence to Judaism by the back door. But such a shift, if there is one, towards content(s) and meaning(s) does have a major advantage. When we next meet, for our big ethnic love-in, at least we’ll have something to talk about.

But this time I’m doing it because I keep discovering new Jewish punks, and I wondered whether they hinted at some underlying rebellious super-talent that we all have inside us that’s lying dormant. Normally other Jewish people make me feel like I was dealt a dodgy hand, but then you find people like this and it’s OK. Let’s take a tour.

There’s something of a bible for Jewish punk out there – Steven Lee Beeber’s Heebie-Jeebie’s at CBGBs, which I read recently. It’s not the world’s best read, trying a bit too hard to ‘explain’ why lots of NY Jews were punks, but it’s a treat for “I didn’t know….” fans. Here’s one of them – Richard Hell:

He’s OK. He’s quite buff isn’t he? A wannabe muscle Jew in the making perhaps. But I’m not a fan of American punk especially, preferring the eccentricity and world-weariness of the first British punks, so let’s move on. If you want more on American punk Jews right up to the present day, then you should probably first check out Jewcy. And those featured on the website for the new Punk Jews film.

But in the UK, first you have to go to Malcolm McLaren. McLaren is very interesting indeed. He’s not a punk who merely happened to be Jewish, he unashamedly looks it, and he brought the mix-and-match wheeler-dealing of the shmatte trade he came from with him when he stitched the uniforms for the first punks. He has a wild eye and he’s a loner. I’m fascinated by this man who, whilst heroined-up nihilists failed to work guitars properly all around him, remained an empire-building workaholic with a flair for style and situationist pointlessness. He’s never reneged on the bored-of-it-all contract with punk, and he’s remained a strange old fellow. Here he is in 1984, being wonderful:

McLaren wasn’t involved socially with the other punk era people, but there seems to have been a little group of them who were on the squat scene together. Starting with Mick Jones of The Clash, who looks like he’s stepped in off a 30s anti-fascist march:

I know he wasn’t 100% Jewish, but he passes for me. He’s cheeky and seems to be having fun all the time. He’s cultivated an unnecessarily cockneyfied voice by this stage in his career, which is lovely.

Mick used to be in The Clash with Keith Levene, who was amazing but a bit mad. He had a birds nest hairdo and a hard stare. He always looks sad. He’s very cool. Here he is being almost silent, but when he does talk, he’s really quite beautiful:

Keith was at the deconstructing end of punk. Like my suggestion for finest Jewish punk lady ever, Vivien Goldman, who had done for Jewish-Black cultural relations than anyone else in the last 30 years. Not to be hyperbolic or anything. Here she is:

Now she really looks like a troublemaker. But if you want a real Jewish punk shit-stirrer, forget the UK or the US. In fact forget the 70s, he came before then. I give you greatest Jewish romantic nihilist, Serge Gainsbourg…

What a terrifying sight for bourgeois society. He could bring down society with one flick of his pouty Franco-Jewish chops.

This is not a revelation to any of us who can recognise that Jewish representative groups, from extreme pro-Israel to moderate pro-Jewish, have long attempted to trade on their most recognisable point of influence with easily-swayed politicians – antisemitism. It sells better than the good deeds Jews could do for the wider world. Anyone can be a good citizen, only Jews can be victims of antisemitism, so if Governments are to look after the Jewish people that well-funded institutions are (supposedly) serving, those institutions need to get cracking on the rich fear and sympathy vote.

That’s the heart of this film. The reaction has predictably been dragged into the dirt of polarised Israel-Palestine debate, because Shamir is Israeli, and so are some of the people in his film. One of the (very mild) heroes of the doc, David Hirsch, has played down his sympathetic portrayal, by bizarrely writing that it’s OK, he doesn’t just like Palestinians, he likes Israelis too. Phew – there was me thinking that his moderate opinions that Palestinians might need human rights inevitably meant he was also saying that all Israelis were scum. Thanks for the clarification.

That Hirsch, and the usual tedious parade of Comment is free respondents after his article on there, feel that this was primarily a film about Israel is a frustrating misunderstanding. Israel features in it, but it’s mainly a film about Jewish paranoia, and that’s harder to have a debate about. It’s more painful – it exposes the void at the core of modern Jewish identity. We’re defined by negative identity.

Shamir is previously been known for a straight verite style, for example in Checkpoint observing the interactions between people full of enmity without any intervention. In Defamation though, he’s our presenter, and it’s not a style he seems entirely comfortable with. He’s charismatic, sure, but he’s also not sure what he’s doing, and I love that. He’s genuinely confused about what people say to him and how he feels, and you would not get that from a ‘normal’ on-screen guide who wants to anchor us in their persuasive rhetoric. Shamir isn’t Nick Broomfield. He’s more Louis Theroux, but without any knowing devices to get people to say things they’ll regret. They just do it anyway, because he’s apparently really not sure what to say to them. So they talk themselves into a frenzy.

And who can blame Shamir for his confusion? He exposes the endless trudge that constitutes existence for those who base their lives on antisemitism. It’s a complex world of oral nuance that can break even the most schooled of people. Shamir bounces between speakers with agendas who swing between over-careful pronouncements and wild bizarre accusation. He’s visibly shocked at times – the doc gives new life to the old cliche of the voyage of discovery. Though he’s very occasionally putting it on for show, I think he really is bemused. He claims that he made the film in response to a life in Israel which was for him entirely shielded from antisemitism. And he thinks the concept is now an exclusively diasporic obsession, and it’s become the defining feature of modern Jewish identity.

So he asks key figures who are obsessed with either antisemitism or the lack of it what it means to them. What they say might appall and depress you – Abe Foxman from the ADL especially is a loose cannon of paranoia, albeit (probably) coming deep deep down from a place of genuine concern. But Shamir’s triumph is to make a doc that easily resets the agenda of intra-Jewish dichotomies of Zionist vs Not and Diaspora vs Israel, by showing us the verbal misunderstandings and misuse of words that run over all sides. No more so than when the group of Israeli young people are whipped up by their trip leaders and by each other into verbal confusion, ignorance and finally, shocking anger.

It’s a very clever film which doesn’t judge, but comes out of a complex agenda which is above all for speaking with honesty and not misusing words to stir up conflict. But before I progress much more, I want you to watch it, and you can do so (in the UK) for another 3 weeks or so here

Watched it? Good, you can have an opinions now. My opinion is that it’s a wake-up call to resolve the crisis in what makes us retain our identities as Jewish, however small or large that identity may be. We shouldn’t retain it because we deeply support or deeply oppose Israel, because we strongly fear or strongly reject antisemitism, because we think we’re universally loved or universally hated. There has to be more, there has to be something positive, or there is no point. The time has come to declare that it’s not just boring to keep circling the same arguments about Israel and the racist bogeymen, it’s denying an alternative space for taking pride in what’s positive about our thousands of years of traditions and how we can be positive and indeed radical forces for changing the world.

Shamir is not the only Jewish fiilmmaker to have said over recent years that he finds films about inward-looking Jewish society quite boring, because they inevitably reaffirm the status quo, even if they’re critical of it. There needs to be something new to give us hope for – Jamie Kastner attempted it with his Kike Like Me, although that was hindered by its aim of exploring how non-Jews view us, rather than how we view ourselves. Eyal Sivan has repeatedly tried to imagine a space beyond the screen where we meet collectively to live a Jewish life dedicated to peace and progress. His upcoming Jaffa, The Clockwork’s Orange is an attempt to learn through the mistakes of history to imagine a single state (in both senses of the word) of Jewish-non Jewish radical collaboration. But it’s still a negative approach to what makes Jewish identity, defining us by mistakes and a lack.

Shamir embodies this lack. He does very well, even if I’m sick of films about this lack. If this could be the last film about the lack, and put it to bed for a while, I’d be delighted.

The boycott call invites Israelis to stand alongside in solidarity with Palestinians. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Over the last three years, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has been gaining stride. Individuals around the world have been joining this call, from organizing actions in supermarkets in France and Great Britain protesting Israeli products made in settlements, to filmmakers withdrawing movies from film festivals, to prominent Israelis making a public stand with the BDS movement. Only recently, a multi-billion dollar Norwegian wealth fund divested from the Israeli arms company Elbit, while other companies, like Veolia, a French conglomerate involved in building and managing the Jerusalem light-rail, have suffered setbacks due to the bad publicity the boycott movement has generated.

The list of successful BDS actions has now become too long to list, yet, there are still many out there who do not believe in this movement and have reservations on a number of grounds, offering two main concerns that are rarely tackled, and when they are it is only cursory. The first is the criticism of why a boycott movement against Israel and not countries like China, Sudan or the US. This claim often gets tagged on with the idea that this is due to an inherent anti-Semitism. The second concerns the argument that boycott is against dialogue, which often comes along with accusations that it promotes censorship and is a form of collective punishment.

Boycotting other countries

Two recent open statements on boycott over the summer, by Naomi Klein and Neve Gordon, both anticipated the first criticism, but neither went far enough in explaining why it is necessary to boycott Israel and why we don’t boycott other countries. Gordon asked the question only to almost completely ignore it, while Klein has provided two explanations that when combined begin to form a coherent response. In her article published by The Nation on 8 January 2009, in response to the question of why we do not boycott other western countries that are also human rights abusers, Klein wrote that “Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.” While this is true it does not fully respond to the critics.

There are several other reasons why we do not boycott some of the other countries mentioned above. By far the most important of these, outlined by Klein in an interview with Cecille Surasky for Alternet on 1 September 2009, is that individuals around the world are not boycotting, but rather, they are responding to a call for boycott coming from Palestinian civil society. Klein is not the first to say this; veterans of the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign who led a successful boycott have also stressed the need to stand with indigenous communities. Boycott is a move to heed the voice of an oppressed group and follow its lead. The idea is that there are no movements out of Tibet, in the case of Chinese oppression, or Iraq in the case of the American occupation, that are calling for boycott and for the international community to respond to that call. This is important! The BDS movement comes from within Palestinian society and it is this factor that makes it so powerful and effective. If there were calls for the boycott of places like the US, China or North Korea coming from those the governments oppress, then it would be worthwhile to listen to such calls.

Naomi Klein’s original comment that BDS is not dogmatic but tactical is crucial, in that the movement does not claim that BDS can successfully be used in fighting all oppression wherever it is, but that in certain cases of apartheid and colonial oppression, this tool is highly effective. The case of Israel proves very salient here because it receives an almost surreal amount of aid and foreign investment from around the world, most notably the US, with which it enjoys a special status. This makes the daily operations of the Israeli state and its institutions far more accountable to the international community than a place like Sudan, frequently brought up by boycott critics because of the violence in Darfur. It also means, in the case of economic boycott and divestment, that the international community is withdrawing its gifts and support, rather than allowing it to enjoy its special status — hardly a punishment. It is the high level of support that Israel enjoys that makes it susceptible to BDS, whereas in some of the other countries that are often promoted in debates for boycott, as Klein says, “there are [already] very clear state sanctions against these countries.”

In the same September article, Yael Lerer, an Israeli publisher interviewed alongside Klein, echoed this position: “these countries don’t have these film festivals and Madonna is not going to have a concert in North Korea. The problem here is that the international community treats Israel like it was a normal, European, Western state. And this is the basis of the boycott call: the special relationship that Israeli universities have with European universities and with universities in the United States, which universities in Zimbabwe don’t have. I do believe that Israel could not continue the occupation for one single day without the support of the United States and the European Union.”

Critics of BDS must keep in mind the tactical aspect of the movement. We cannot boycott all countries in the world, but this does not mean that BDS against Israel cannot be applied as a tool to force a restructuring of relations between Palestinians and Israelis. This leads into the next criticism regarding boycott as being anti-dialogue.

Boycott is dialogue

Since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1994, many have walked down the path of dialogue — I tried it for several years — and found this to be a strategy to stall for time while the Israeli government was building facts on the ground. We saw dialogue become the slogan for former criminals to clean their bloody hands and appear as peaceful while they continued their strategies of oppression; Israeli President Shimon Peres has been the master of such tactics. I found on college campuses in the US where I studied that dialogue was a way to neutralize confrontation and sanitize a dirty conflict. But avoiding confrontation favors the status quo, and the status quo has been, until BDS, in favor of occupation.

The boycott movement is, to be sure, against this dialogue, but not dialogue in an absolute sense. In fact, at its very core, BDS is a movement that is premised on dialogue and of re-appropriating the meaning of dialogue to its rightful place — one that sees a communication between two equal partners and not one where the occupier can force demands and dictate terms to the occupied. BDS is supposed to foster dialogue by locating those who are committed to real and consistent struggle against Zionism — and this is most appropriately seen not in economic forms of boycott but in cultural and academic boycott where artists, musicians, filmmakers, academics and other cultural figures are able to come together, converse and build networks in the face of oppressive institutions that are the real target of these boycotts. Where economic boycott creates economic pressure, cultural boycott fosters dialogue and communication precisely because it shames and shuns those that directly collaborate with the Israeli government and its institutions.

The power of all these forms of BDS is in their recognition that true justice can only be achieved when Israelis and Palestinians work together for a common cause, when they realize that their struggle is shared, and when Israelis understand that they must sacrifice alongside Palestinians if they want true peace. The power of BDS is that it offers an alternative to the national struggles of Hamas and Fatah, and calls on Israelis to join Palestinians in their struggle, and to move beyond the comfort zone of preaching peace, and into the realm of action that requires a “no business as usual” attitude. Indeed, BDS provides the means to generate a new movement that can respond to the main Palestinian political parties that have made a mockery of a people’s right to resist, despite their achievements of the past. A significant part of this is that BDS enables a discourse that moves beyond “ending the occupation” to place demands for the right of return and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel as top priorities.

If Israelis and Palestinians can build a movement together, can struggle together, then this movement will embody the world they wish to create, one that is shared. Thus, BDS is not a tactic for a national movement; as it gains strength it will prove to have foes on both sides of the nationalist divide. Its power as a tactic lies in its ability to foster a movement that challenges nationalist discourse. It can create the conditions to make possible a movement that recognizes that while national self-determination remains a central element in a world ruled by antagonistic nationalisms, it should not be constrained by traditional notions of nationalism based on superiority and ethnic exclusion, or by the force of current political parties. In this way, BDS is not anti-dialogue, on the contrary, it is a call out to Israelis to be partners in struggle. It is a call out to Israelis to take a step forward towards envisioning collectively an alternative relationship in the land of Israel-Palestine.

It is time to step out of our comfort zones, to confront, to not be satisfied in talking about tolerance and dialogue for the sake of dialogue. It is time to realize that people already recognize the humanity of the other, but that politics intervene to ensure “we” do not grant “them” this humanity. It is time to realize that it is not the Israeli who is targeted by BDS, but the Israeli government and Israeli institutions that collaborate in the occupation of the Palestinians, and degrade and demonize them. Finally, it is time to realize that BDS is a winnable, nonviolent strategy precisely because it works on slowly changing attitudes and building bridges towards a common vision of justice and equality, and because it creates a real feeling of loss, therefore real pressure, on Israeli governments and institutions, that go beyond the lip service of the “peace process.”

Sami Hermez is a doctoral candidate of anthropology at Princeton University working on questions of violence and nonviolence.

- by Furio Bagnini, edited by Bas Moreel -

“God’s people, the people that received the revelation before Christ came on earth, that is most universally spread on the surface of the earth, has always seen that the Christian teachings of the Church fathers were incomplete, has always proclaimed that a great age would come called “kingdom of the Messiah” with the religious teachings presented as fully as possible, with the spiritual and worldly powers in balance and the human race united in one single religion and one single organisation… The golden age of the human race is not behind us but before us. It is to be sought in the perfection of the social order. Our fathers haven’t seen it but our sons will see it one day. For them we ought to level the road” (Henri de Saint-Simon, Le nouveau christianisme). As a socialist free from antisemitic sentiments Saint-Simon was probably one of the first to formulate the hypothesis that socialism affirms values claimed as its own by the best Jewish tradition.

The modern revolutionary utopias, especially those of the libertarian and anti-authoritarian kind, with their belief in a forthcoming liberating revolution, originate from two different psychological attitudes. One is the critical examination of the essence of human life and of the substance of society; the other is the longing for a more genuine social life, for a human society based on love, mutual understanding and mutual aid. The former attitude springs from Western thinking, the latter from Judaism. The prophets were the first to transform this longing into a “political” message of equality and justice, the Hassidic Jews were the last collectivity trying to live this message as something absolute. At certain times expressed openly, at other times concealed / hidden the longing has never disappeared. When the Jews left the ghettoes and joined the world society the two attitudes merged into the teachings and the apostolate of modern socialism.

Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher who was inspired by a strong “religious anarchism”, defined Judaism as a synthesis of three basic concepts: the idea of unity, the idea of action and the idea of a future. The idea of unity takes shape in the idea of transcendental unity. God, creator of the world, is one and unique, and he alone must be loved as essence of all ethical perfection. The knowledge of God teaches us what man should be, the divine tells us what the human is. The basic teachings of Judaism as a whole are summarised in the prohibition of idolatry, which the prophets saw as the origin of all evil. As God is one, so, the morals as laid down in the Torah, the civil and social law of the people of Israel, must be one. Equality and justice are the basis of the law derived from Leviticus [one of the five books of which consists the Torah]. Equality involves recognition of the basic rights of man (the right to live, to own, to work, of asylum, of rest and of freedom), whereas justice ought to translate itself into the acceptance of the obligations towards the weakest and the poorest.

The second idea is the idea of action. In its essence Judaism doesn’t demand theological adhesion but practical compliance with the law, from the oldest times onwards action was the core of Jewish religiosity. In all the books of the Torah there is very little talk of belief and much more of action. Every action, even the most insignificant one, is somehow linked to the divine and gets universal significance and importance. Every joint action becomes exemplary, as says a Chassidic saying: “When I went to see the rabbi that was not to hear his teachings but to see how he unlaces and laces his felt shoes”. The right praxis is important, important is to live in accordance with the Torah, to behave in accordance with the Torah in daily life. Action in the shape of work and study ought to aim at a transformation of reality towards a more just future. Max Weber showed already that this aspect of Judaism has a revolutionary potential when he tried to find an answer to the question why so many Jews adhered to revolutionary movements. According to the Torah the world is neither eternal nor unchangeable but created, and its orders are the product of actions of humans; it is a historical realisation aimed at making room again for a situation really wanted by God. As Weber observed, the whole attitude of Judaism in respect of life is marked by the idea “of a future political and social revolution guided by God”.

The third basic idea of Judaism is the idea of future. Jews should keep the future in mind. In this respect a traditional Jewish comment on the passage in Genesis (21.9 seq.) in which Sarah, Abrahams wife, chases Ishmael from the house of his father together with his mother Haggar [a maid of Abraham with whom he had got Ishmael]. The teachers have wondered how Sarah could behave so cruelly towards Hagar and her son. One of the answers has been that Ishmael “was playing”, as the word metzacheq is generally translated, with an explicit sexual connotation. In reality, the word metzacheq has the root tzadi chet kof, which means ‚to laugh’ and is also in the name Yitzchaq. One of the possible interpretations then is that Ishmael wasn’t playing but “laughed very loudly”; morphologically the word metzacheq is an intensive form of the verb, whereas Yitzchaq, on the other hand, is rather the one who “will laugh”. Sarah shows her prophetic power here, as she understands before Abraham that somebody who is able to laugh loudly in a world so full of injustice and grief doesn’t deserve to be his heir. But somebody who acts on something and in such a way that he can laugh one day in a more just world deserves to be his heir.

This orientation towards the future is connected with the hope of redemption in the messianic times. From the times of the Torah till the times of the chassidic fervours the messiah and the future in which the perfect life in truth and the unity of the world would have become reality, with the separation between good and evil abolished by the definitive annihilation of sin, were the final existential aspiration of the Jewish people. In Jewish as opposed to Christian thinking, the messiah will not bring an apocalypse or a horrible end of the world but the full realisation of man, also as a social being. The coming of the messiah will not take place in the other world but is being prepared in history. In the Jewish, as opposed to the Christian, thinking about the messiah, the redemption, writes Gershom Scholem, will be kind of “a public historical event in the Jewish community, a visible event unthinkable without this exterior manifestation. Christianity sees the redemption as a spiritual, invisible event that takes place in the soul, in the personal world of the individual human being requiring an interior transformation not necessarily accompanied by changes in the course of history… What Judaism has irrevocably placed at the end of history, as the event in which culminate the exterior events has become the centre of history in Christianity”.

Man is the main agent of redemption, his actions alone which will speed up the coming of the messiah: “If all Israel respected the sabbath if only one single day, the Messiah would come immediately, for it is written: “To-day if you were to listen to his voice”". The mentioning of the sabbath, the day devoted to rest, is not accidental. As say the teachers, the sabbath is “an example of the future world”, an anticipation of the messianic times when man will no longer be another man’s slave and be freed from daily alienation. The sabbatical year when all activities stop is also an announcement of liberation and of the exemption from daily work. The jubilee is also a revolutionary institution, as can be read in Leviticus. It restores social equality every fifty years by the redistributioin of property. On this subject Gustav Landauer wrote: “Uprising as basic law, change and overthrow as a rule for all times… that was the greatness and the holiness of the mosaic social order. We need that again: new rules and a spirit of change that does not fix things and laws definitively but declares itself permanent. The revolution should become part of our social order, the basic rule of our basic law”.

The election of the Jewish people involves in the first place the obligation for every Jew to take part in the anticipation of the day of redemption. The coming of the messiah on earth depends on the free efforts of individual human beings during their life. Not by chance did rabbi Nachman from Breslau , one of the most fascinating and original Chassidic teachers, conclude: “To become more perfect man should renew himself day after day”. What is needed is a permanent mental revolution. Those who live to-day must work for social justice, as in the past those living then had to work for it in their time and as those living in the future will have to work for in the future: the coming of social justice depends on them.. As is said explicitely in the texts of the prophets, this “revolution” will take an international character and will be a universal movement involving all the States of the world. This shows another difference between Jewish and Christian messianism. Christianity has eliminated the political element of the redemption maintaining only the spiritual element. Christianity, writes rabbi Elia Benamozegh, “speaks of ascetic morals, of an ascetic kingdom and of an entirely spiritual messianism; instead of political liberty it has spiritual freedom for its followers”.

In Jewish messianism, religious as well as political, two currents can be distinguished: a restaurative current and a utopical one. The restaurative current expects the return and the resurrection of a situation of the past but that has always been seen as an ideal in the collective imagination of the Jewish people. The redemption was seen as the return to an ideal state of the past, a lost golden age. The utopical current looked forward to a situation that has never existed and was nurtured by the dream of a radical overthrow of all that existed, of the coming of an absolutely new world, of the “the unheard of”, of “something that has never been, the peak of bliss”, as writes Walter Benjamin. Although each other’s opposites these two currents have always gone together, both can be tracked in the historical manifestations and ideologies of messianism and in almost all modern revolutionary currents. This combination of restauration and utopia, as stresses Michael Löwy, can also be found in libertarian thinking, where “revolutionary utopia goes always hand in hand with a profound nostalgia of forms of the precapitalist past, of the traditional peasant community or of the guilds..”.

Isaac Luria’s concept of the Tiqqun, reparation or reintegration, is the most important example of this duality in Jewish messianism. Isaac Luria and his disciples of the Safed school in Galilea had formulated (end 16th century) a cosmologic doctrine directly linked to the belief in the messiah. According to this theory God had voluntarily limited or contracted his powers (tzimtzum) when creating the world. The imperfectness of the world was a symptom of the disintegration of the universe resulting from the Shevirat ha-kelim, the “breaking of the pots”, which had been too weak to contain the divine light. The scattered fragments of the pots had kept small sparks of the divine light, however, and are a harmful residue for the world. From them come the Qelippot, the dark forces of evil. Man and Israel as a whole have the mission to lift the scattered holy sparks and to free the divine light from the domination of the Qelippot, which, historically, represent tyranny and oppression. This process is called Tiqqun and all should contribute to it. The Tiqqun will restore the ideal order disturbed by the “breaking of the pots” and Adam’s subsequent fall. Humankind has the task to repair the pots, to eliminate evil, to bring the absolutely perfect back, to restore the proper nature of things and to put them back in their [right] place.

In this context reparation and redemption become identical notions. When the world will have been repaired it is impossible that there will be no redemption [i.e. that it will not be free], as redemption represents the perfect state of the world, a harmonised world in which everything will be in its right place. The Tiqqun leaves the purely mystical domain and drops its cosmic and ontological dimension becoming messianic and political. The Tiqqun world, as rightly observes Michael Löwy, is thus the utopian world of the messianic reform, of the elimination of impurity, of the disappearance of evil.

Isaac Luria’s kabbalah, which blended old mysticism and traditional political messianism led to an explosive manifestation of the forces that created it and made it successful. The hope of an imminent redemption putting an end to sufferings and injustices found a dramatic historic and spiritual expression in the adventure of Sabbatai Zwi (1626-1676). Sabbatai Zwi was born in Smyrna [now Turkey] on the 9th of [the Jewish month] Av, the day on which the destruction of the First and the Second Temple is commemorated. Already as a young man he had started studying the kabbalah. In Jerusalem, where he had moved in 1662, his disciple Nathan from Gaza persuaded him that he was the messiah. The news that the messiah had come spread like wildfire and caused great excitement among Jews all over Europe. A true mass movement inspired by him developed upsettinbg life in the whole Jewish world. Sabbatianism, “the most polyedric heretical movement of Jewish mysticism”, according to Scholem, became a definitive theoretical system thanks to Nathan from Gaza, who, on the basis of Isaac Luria’s kabbalah and the cosmogonic conepts of those days, imagined that the messiah suffered unspeakable pains when he set out to restore the initial harmony on earth. In order to overcome evil from the inside the redeemer had also to become impure so as to be able to purify the impure and to defeat the cosmic root of evil. Sabbatai Zwi’s anti-law behaviour – including his apostasy: in 1666 he converted to Islam – were seen by his followers as a descent into the abyss of negativity which would enable him to free the particles of divine light imprisoned in the dark. Animated by a strong religious nihilism the Sabbatianists interpreted the talmudic saying “an intentional transgression weighs more than the unintended fulfilment of a precept” (Nazir, 23b) in line with their conceptions and held that a sinner is good in God’s eyes because impurity brings the spirit to holiness. The doctrine of the holiness of sin was not limited to the violation of certain precepts but extended to all the prohibitions of the Torah, and the followers of the movement formulated the following law violating blessing: “Blessed be You, Lord our God, who allow what is prohibited”. Some went so far as to affirm that henceforth everything was pure because Sabbatai Zwi had definitively defeated evil.

In the course of the 18th century frankism, the movement developed around the person of Jacob Frank (1726-1791) took over the teachings of Sabbatai Zwi and developed them further. Jacob ben Judah Leib, as his real name was, was born near the border separating Podolia and Bucovina [now parts of Rumania]. He was a nihilist of a rare authenticity. Initiated into the secrets of Sabbatianism he became a guide for numerous followers and finally claimed an almost divine status as possessor of Sabbatai Zwi’s soul. He proclaimed that man should free himself from all laws, all conventions and all religions. Authentic life meant rejecting all religious acts and every positive belief. Franks belief in the redeeming force of destruction knew no borders: “Wherever Adam came a city was built, but where I go everything will be destroyed, because I have come only to destroy everything – but whatever I will build, will last forever”, one can read in the collection of aforisms which he published under the title Sliwa Panskie (Words of the Lord). This catastrophic-revolutionary view of emancipation is also clear in Mikhail Bakunin’s saying “a passion for destruction is a creative passion”. A merciless war was to be waged against the inadequate laws that govern the world: “And I say to you that all the fighters should be without religion. That is to say, they will have to conquer freedom by their own forces..”. This fight will affect all the layers of the soul that descends into the abysses in order to ascend: “In order to go up one must first go down. Nobody can climb over a mountain without having been at its foot. We have to go down to the lowest point if we want to attain the infinite. That is the mystical principle of Jacob’s Ladder which I have seen and which has the shape of a V. I have not come into this world to lift you up but to throw you into the abyss. You can’t go lower. We can’t get out of there by our own forces alone because the Lord alone can pull us from those depths by the power of his arm”. Man can only become truly free when he has been able to live a truly anarchic life: “The place where we go doesn’t allow any law because all laws come from death whereas we go to life”. How can one again think of Bakunin and his famous formula: “I don’t believe in constitutions or laws… We need something different. Passion, vitality, a new world without laws and, so, truly free”? The expectations and teachings of these last sabbatianists played a decisive role in the opening up of their souls to the apocaliptic wind of the time. They then came close to the spirit of the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, and when the fire of faith weakened they became maskilim, enlightened people, religious reformers, indifferent prophets and true sceptics.

In the beginning of the 18th century, while the wind of sabbatian and frankian messianic madness was still blowing, chassidismo started developing among the Jewish masses of Poland and Russia. This popular religious movement was started by Israel ben Eliezer (around 1700-1760), better known as Baal Shem Tov (master of the good name) or Besht (by the initials of this name). While not significantly innovating doctrine and writings, chassidism was, nevertheless, an explosion of creative religious energy against the old values that had become meaningless. The following story characterises chassidism: “Baal Shem Tov had changed the traditional order of prayers. Some protested: “This order has been established by the great men of our generation”. To which Baal Shem answered: “And who has said that those great men have gone to paradise?”. With study and erudition not considered central chasidism took an anti-elitist character and made the simplest acts of daily life holy, faith became democratic and popular, libertarian, a gigantic social revolution. The great importance attributed to intention, even if remained ineffective, and the fact that evil and sins were attributed some holiness, freed the humble and the weak from all guilt and allowed them to have their imperfections. There is chassidism, writes Marc-Alain Ouaknin, “when a society remembers that it is not enough to be but that we have to exist, that, if we want to live really, we must continually find new ways of life, invent ourselves continually..”.

In chassidism each person becomes the redeemer of the world which he is himself, that is one of the aspects of the great chassidic revolution. Man leaves the collective anonymity and becomes a subject in the strongest sense of this word. We may quote here a famous saying of rabbi Menachem Mendel from Kotzk: “If I am I because you are you, then I am not I and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then am I I and you are you”.

In chassidism, Martin Buber wrote, every human being represents something new that has never existed before. Everybody has to recognise that this particular person is unique in this world because of his particular character and that there has never been somebody like him, for, if there had already been somebody like him there would have been no need for him to come in the world. Every person is a new creature in this world called to fill it with his particularity. Every person has the task to realise his unique, unprecented, never replicated possibilities, not to repeat things done already by others be they the greatest of all. Rabbi Sussja from Hanipol illustrated this idea shortly before his death saying “In the other world I won’t be asked: “Why haven’t you become Moses?” but I will be asked: “Why haven’t you become Sussja?”" . The difference between the kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the chassidic doctrine is the difference between the ontological-metaphysical and the psychological and personal. In this way the kabbalistic concepts became meaningful for individual life and accessible for everybody without distinction, whereas in rabbinic Judaism the kabbalah was reserved for the few elected, in Hebrew yechidei seguld, who had fulfilled the strict requirements for access to the esoteric aspect of the Torah considered extremely dangerous.

Chassidic mysticism seeks to make man take part in the divine life become history and to shorten the distances between heaven and earth. For God who has put limits upon himself in order to make room for the created man has the task to free the sparks hidden in all aspects of life. In this way simple and insignificant acts also become fundamental and universally relevant. Chassidism puts an ethics of the deed into practice that has to do with the human faculty to start things, to undertake things, to take initiatives. Chassidic action is the opposite of repetition, of lack of innovation. Chassidic ethics of the deed is interruption of the flow of life that leads to death, it’s continuous being born anew. It is freedom. Because we were born we are doomed to be free. Life ought, moreover, to be lived in the sign of concrete love for all human beings including those at the bottom, the am ha-aretz, the simple minds and the sinners. Rabbi Jakob Jizchak from Lublin [Poland] used to say: “I prefer a sinner admitting he is one to a saint conscious of his saintness. The sinner admitting the truth passes his days in Truth. And Truth is God. So, the sinner lives in God too. But he who thinks he is a perfect saint lives in untruth, and God hates untruth. Nobody is perfect”.

The chassidic word is also an ethics of the word, the rejection of the instituted word, of what has been said already. The chassidic word laughs, dances, it’s joy, the opposite of the prefabricated language of the cliché, of publicity, of politics. The reasonings of the institutions and of public opinion correspond to prearranged models. They are incomprehensible because the institutions are committed to creating opinions, i.e. non-words and non-thoughts. As Marc-Alain Ouaknin says: chassidism is against the “we-all-say-the-same-and together”. Chassidic people are people of the Chidush, of the new, they have the task to seek freedom, to invent other forms of life. Chassidism is doing things every day but not just repeating the things done the previous day, in the language of rabbi Nachman: “it’s forbidden to be old”.

Historically, chassidism was a critique of the official rabbinic institutions of the time but this criticism can very well be extended to institutions in general. But the greatest contribution of chassidism is the democratisation of study, the possibility for everybody to start interpreting. As says rabbi Nachman: “a simple person who takes the time to read, to look at the words of the Torah can also see new things, new meanings; if one looks at the sayings intensely they begin to “make light”, to blend, to combine (Yoma, 73b) and one can see new combinations of sayings, new words, things of which one hasn’t thought at all. All this is also possible for simple people, without effort…”.

This subjective relationship with the text existed already in the talmudic tradition but later on study became reserved for an elite and the thinking became dogmatic and ideological. The changes introduced by chassidism can be seen in the following story, that can be considered a paradigm of the cultural and existential revolution brought by chassidism: “A disciple sees his teacher, who asks him: “What have you studied?” The disciple answers: “I’ve gone three times through the Talmud”, whereupon the Teacher says: “But has the Talmud gone through you?”". Study is a political act because the freedom to interpret is also a freedom that affects life. In this sense study is revolution, an attitude of contestating tradition and the main obstacle to accepting the stereotypes of ideological thinking. But – a point on which rabbi Nachman insists repeatedly – one should not innovate with new laws that reinforce institutional thinking. Integrative laws are rejected because they strengthen the institutions and the custodians of ideologies instead of weakening and destroying them. As the individual affirms himself continuously by interpretation his task is not to repeat or to paraphrase verses [e.g. of the Torah] but, as Emmanuel Lévinas would say, to go beyond them, to go from the text to one’s own text. This is, so to say, the whole political dimension and function of chassidism, its anti-ideological and revolutionary aspect “in respect of an order in which nothing, neither words, nor people, nor people’s bodies or looks are allowed to communicate directly, but as values they have to go through models that generate and reproduce them in total “estrangement” of each other… Revolution is wherever there is a beginning of a change that makes models meaningless – whether that change is a minute change in appearances, a change of syllables in a poem, or the fact that thousands of people talk to each other in an insurgent city”.

Chassidism showed again what Jewishness is basically about: lived religiosity, a religion of doing free from precepts. Life, man, community became supreme again in Jewish life. Unfortunately, this libertarian movement has turned into a despotic power. Singing, dancing, sacred gestures have become ceremonial acts and a reactionary spirit has taken the place of democracy. But in spite of the abuses and the degeneration of the movement, writes Gershom Scholem, the chassidim “as mystic moralists have found the way to social organising”, which is their main contribution.

I would like to end my essay with a chassidic parable of rabbi Uri from Strelice that seems most appropriate: “When I was still a boy and my teacher started teaching me how to read, he once showed me two minute letters in the book of prayers, which looked like square dots, saying: “Uri, do you see those two letters one beside the other? They are the monogramme of the name of God, and each time they appear together in a prayer you should pronounce the name of God, although the name is not written in full”. I read on together with the teacher till we found the two letters at the end of a sentence. They were also two square dots, yet not beside each other but over each other. I thought they were the monogramme of God and pronounced his name. But the teacher said: “No, no, Uri, this sign doesn’t indicate the name of God. Only where the dots are beside each other, where each sees the other as a friend equal to himself is the name of God; where one dot is under the other and the other dot is over the former, there the name of God is not”…”.

thanks to A pinch of Salt

Isaac is rather famously sacrificed (22) and Lot attempts something similar with his two daughters (19:8). He politely requests that the people of Sodom rape his two young daughters rather than his guests. We know that his daughters are young because they are both virgins. Hagar, although not sacrificing her son, turns away from him when death seems inevitable (21:15) but not, it would appear, when Ishmael is about to die. In some sense she gives up on her son. However, Abraham has already sacrificed him. Sarah tells Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael, God advises Abraham to listen to Sarah’s voice in all that she says and Abraham throws out Hagar into the wilderness with a small amount of bread and a bottle of water (21:12-14). We know Abraham is a rich man, to wit the episode with Abimelech (21:20). It is well within his power to adequately equip Hagar and Ishmael with food, livestock and a household.

When it comes to incest Abraham and Sarah are wife and husband as well as being siblings. Lot and both his daughters have sex and start two families. The incest motif will be repeated in the marriage of Rebecca and Isaac and the marriages of Jacob to Leah and Rachel.

What to make of it all? I have very little to say about the incident with Abimelech. This is doubly shameful because structurally it seems to be the central moment of the parsha. But I suggest that the parsha sees nations as a result of incest, incest as selfishness and in some sense the ultimate in immorality. But don’t worry, this is not going to be a rant against Zionism (Ben Bag Bag is a Zionist).

Well what is wrong with incest? It is a form of self-love. Joyce, paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas, describes incest as “an avarice of the emotions… the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it”. (Ulysses, episode nine). In other words, incest is a jealous love. It is the selfish love of a mother that places the needs of her own family before the needs of others.

And the link to nationhood? I suggest that a nation must recognise itself as other, as separate. There is the distinction between my nation and your nation; between self and other. And moreover, one draws that distinction and then places oneself above the other. This is why incest is wrong; in excess it stops us seeing the world around us.

Something interesting happens when we see other people and place their needs before our own — we see God. It happens to Abraham twice (18:2-3; 22-23) and to Lot (19:2). It happens ambiguously To Hagar (21:16-18). Another interesting thing happens when we defy God — we get to converse with God. Have a look at the second of Abraham’s meetings with God in chapter 18, and Lot at 19:18. But also Abimelech’s argument (20:3-7). Here Abimelech manages to overturn the degree of death by arguing his innocence. But my personal favourite is Sarah who tells a barefaced lie by denying that she laughed but is rewarded with a direct communication from the Almighty (20: 15).

So, is the moral of the story that what we need to do is place others before ourselves and stand up for righteousness? That would be a little too convenient. As we have seen, by that policy the Jewish people would never have come into existence. It would be odd to read Beresheit as a story of the world continually falling away from God. It would also miss another interesting feature of the text. To wit, each time someone acts altruistically someone innocent suffers. A calf is slaughtered so Abraham can feed his guests (18:7). Perhaps you think this is some Jewdas vegan reading. Of course it is, but if you’re going to say that the moral of the story is that we need to put others first, how can we possibly ask a cow to stand in our place. Sacrificing yourself in the place of others seems impossible, but sacrificing animals in the place of others must be doubly impossible. Lot, as we have seen, is for the stranger at the expense of two young girls. A miracle is required to save them from rape.

Perhaps you might reply, the problem here is ownership. We have not yet transcended self and other. Perhaps Abraham has erred in thinking that the calf is his to give up. Lot has made the same mistake. If only they realised that there was no self/other distinction. They would realise how futile it was to try and sacrifice “their property”. After all, property is something you can’t have without the self/other distinction.

Too quick says Ben Bag Bag. You have forgotten Abraham’s final test. Here Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son. The simple reading says that Abraham should refuse. He has to recognize the needs of other human beings and that he can have no claim over them. But instead, Abraham fails. He places his own selfish desire to serve God unquestionably (and thus reap his reward?) before the needs of his son. It has been the raison d’etre of Abraham’s whole life to respond to the call of lech lecha. He can’t give up now. But note, if Abraham does follow the call, that is the end for Abraham. He won’t have more children now. He has already killed one son (ok, Ishmael is still alive but we have to read 21: 21 as informing us that Abraham doesn’t know this). Abraham has seen something that other people have not seen. Roughly, he has recognized that the good applies universally. If he accepts the law now, that insight is lost forever. Abraham’s life becomes pointless if he kills Isaac. It is the ultimate in altruism for Abraham to make the sacrifice. But by the same reasoning to kill Isaac, is to deprive the world of Abraham’s insight, what a selfish thing to do. But not to kill Isaac is to place himself above the law, one can hardly envisage a more selfish act. Merely giving up on the self/other distinction does not rid the world of these problems.

We seem to have reached an impasse (an epoche if you like). We cannot accept that incest is right and yet sometimes it would be wrong to give the love to another. It is important that recognizing one’s own nationhood embodies the apparent contradiction of recognizing oneself as other. It seems that this is inevitable because without it morality is impossible (I appreciate that line of reasoning is far too quick, but it’s not my job to think for you). Yet it seems to carry with it contradiction. It is as if we need to find a way of being nationalist without being selfish. This, I rather lamely suggest, was and is the challenge to all those of us who would rather not sacrifice our children. L’shana Tova.