Must Read: Future Tense – Prologue
Sub-title: FUTURE TENSE: JEWS, JUDAISM, AND ISRAEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Author: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
It was the Holocaust survivors who taught me. I have read hundreds of books about the Shoa. I made a television programme from Auschwitz. To this day I cannot begin to imagine what they went through, how they survived the nightmare, and how they lived with the memories. Many did not. In my first career as a teacher of philosophy one of my academic colleagues committed suicide. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed to me a quiet, gentle, loving man. It was only when he died that we discovered he was a Holocaust survivor. I knew, even from the Bible, what happened to Noah after the Flood, and Lot’s wife when she turned back to look at the destruction. There are some memories that do not let you live.
But the survivors I came to know in the past twenty years were astonishing in their tenacious hold on life. Perhaps it’s how they survived. Some believed in God, others didn’t, but they all believed in life — not life as must of us understand it, something taken for granted, part of the background, but life as something to fight for, as a consciously articulated value, as something of whose fragility you are constantly aware. They had, in Paul Tillich’s phrase, the courage to be. Slowly I began to think about a phrase, not one that exists in the traditional literature but one that was articulated in fateful circumstances and constituted a kind of turning point in modern Jewish history: Kiddush hachayim, the sanctification of life.
I had expected that trauma would turn the survivors inwards, making them suspicious of, even hostile to, the wider world. It didn’t, at least not those I knew, and by the time I came to know them. Many of them had undertaken, 50 or more years after the event, to visit schools, talking to children, especially non-Jewish children. What amazed me as I listened to them telling their stories was what they wanted to say. Cherish freedom. Understand what a gift it is to be able to walk in the open, to see a flower, open a window, breathe free air. Love others. Never hate. Practice tolerance. Stand up for others if they are being picked on, bullied, ostracized. Live each day as if it might be your last. They taught the children to have faith in life. The children loved these elderly strangers from another world. I read some of their letters to them; they made me cry. Their courage kept me going through tough times. I count myself blessed to have known them.
Victor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz who spent his time there helping people to find the strength to live. On the basis of his experiences in the death camps, he created a new school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, based on ‘man’s search for meaning’. He used to say, in the name of Kierkegaard, that the door to happiness opens outwards. By that he meant that the best cure for psychic pain was to care more about other people’s pain. That too I learned from the survivors.
Many had lost their families in those years, so they became a kind of extended family to one another, supporting each other through the bad nights and haunted days. And somehow — I found this the most awesome fact about them — they were still capable of joy. In one of my books I had written about the Italian film director Roberto Benigni, who had made a comedy about the Holocaust and called it Life is Beautiful. I said that though I understood the thesis of the film I could not agree with it. In essence it argued that humor kept you sane. Humor may have kept people sane, I said, but sanity was not enough to keep you alive.
‘You are wrong,’ one of the survivors said to me. Then he told me his story. He and another prisoner, about his age, were in Auschwitz, and they had reached the conclusion that unless they were able to laugh, eventually they would lose the will to live.
So they made an agreement. Each of them would look out, every day, for something about which they could laugh. Each night they would share their findings and laugh together. ‘A sense of humor,’ said the survivor, looking me in the eyes, ‘kept me alive.’ That night I wept at the thought of this man who had entered the gates of hell and not lost his humor or humanity.
Then I took out the book that contained the speech from which I had learned the phrase Kiddush hachayim, the sanctification of life, it was made by a rabbi, Yitzchak Nissenbaum, at the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. That was a turning point in history, one of the first moments since the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion more than 18 centuries earlier, when Jews fought back, refusing to die quietly on the altar of other people’s hatred. It was a physical revolution, but it was a spiritual one as well. Rabbi Nissenbaum reminded his listeners that for centuries Jews had been faithful to the call of Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of God’s name. They were willing to die rather than give up their faith. kiddush Hashem was the Jewish name for martyrdom.
That concept, he said, was no longer adequate. In all other persecutions, Jews had faced a choice: convert or die. In choosing to die, Jews gave witness to their faithfulness to God. The Nazis were different. They did not offer Jews a choice. So the Jewish response had to be different too. They had to fight back. They had to refuse to die. These were his words:
This is a time for Kiddush hachayim, the sanctification of life, and not for Kiddush Hashem, the holiness of martyrdom. Previously the Jew’s enemy sought his soul and the Jew sanctified his body in martyrdom. Now the oppressor demands the Jew’s body, and the Jew is obliged therefore to defend it.
Facing almost certain death, the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto made a momentous affirmation of life. That same spirit moved the builders and defenders of the land of Israel. ‘I will not die, but I will live,‘ says the psalm, and continues, ‘and I will declare the works of God.’ Sometimes the refusal to die, the insistence on the holiness of life, is itself the work of God.
The time has come to summarize the argument of this book. Jews today face clear and present dangers. Antisemitism has returned in a 4th mutation, using the new media to globalize hate. The state of Israel faces relentless hostility on the part of its enemies, not to this policy or that but to its very existence as a non-islamic, liberal democratic state. Neither of these phenomena is as yet a mass movement; they are confined to small groups of extremists. But the extremists have learned how to use the new media to inspire widespread fear, and that is what Jews feel today.
At the same time the Jewish people are internally weakened, by assimilation and outmarriage on the one hand, divisions and factionalism on the other. It is hard not to feel the weight of history bearing down on contemporary Jewry, for our people have been here before. Assimilation and factionalism marked Jewry in the late Second Temple period, as well as in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Antisemitism has been a recurring feature of Jewish history. Jews are no strangers to danger.
But Judaism is a religion of history and freedom: history so that we can learn from it, freedom so that we can act differently next time. History is not inevitability: if it were, Judaism would be false and the tragic vision of the Greeks would be true. My argument has been that something must change in Jewish hearts and minds: the sense of isolation, sometimes proud, sometimes fearful, that comes from seeing yourself as ‘the people that dwells alone’. That highly ambivalent phrase, uttered by one of Israel’s enemies, the pagan prophet Balaam, should be called into question. It is not necessarily a blessing. It may be a curse. As a self-definition, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jews will find themselves alone.
The truths of Judaism were not meant for Jews alone. They were meant to inspire others. They do inspire others. They admire the strength of Jewish families and communities. They respect Judaism’s commitment to education, argument and the life of the mind. They value its practice of tzedakah, charity-as-justice, and the idea of tikkun olam, healing a fractured world. They appreciate the clarity of Jewish though as it applies to the ethical dilemmas of our time. Most of all they respect the fact that Jews do not try to convert anyone. In Judaism, you don’t have to be Jewish to be good, to relate to God or to have a share in the world to come.
That delicate counterpoint between the particular and the universal is the music of the Jewish soul. But it also represents a human reality. George Orwell described it well when he differentiated between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, he said, is ‘devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people’. Nationalism, by contrast, ‘is inseparable from the desire for power’. The abiding purpose of every nationalist, he said, ‘is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality’. Judaism is patriotism, not nationalism.
Sot it must be for every faith and civilization if we are to safely negotiate the 21st century. The problems faced by Jews today are faced by everyone who believes in freedom, democracy and the dignity of the individual. the idea that Jews alone are threatened by terror, hate and the attrition of identity is simply misplaced. In the battles that lie ahead they have allies, but only if they seek them and are willing to work with them, with humility and a sense of global responsibility.
Nietzsche, as I argued in the first chapter, was right: either the will to power or the will to life. Nationalism was the 20th century expression of the will to power. Today it is more likely to be religiously based holy war. No one — no nation, culture or religion — is immune to the temptations of the desire for power. But these temptations must be resisted if humanity is to survive and build societies based on respect for difference and the integrity of the other. Jews have historically been cast in the role of the archetypal other. Therefore they must join with other others, wherever they see minorities persecuted, or populations reduced to poverty, wherever and whenever they hear the cry of the oppressed. Jews must learn to universalize their particularity.
The will to life is not easy or automatic. The human heart is weak and easily frightened into fear, aggression and demonization. That is especially true in ages, such as the present, when humanity feels itself dragged, against its will, into a vortex of change. That is when people, fearing chaos, begin to divide the world into the children of light and the children of darkness and prepare themselves to fight holy wars in the name of this god or that, ‘Jihad versus McWorld’ as Benjamin Barber characterizes one of the central conflicts of our time. At such historic junctures, in Yeats’ famous words, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
I came to know the late Sir Isaac Berlin towards the end of his long and distinguished life. He was one of the 20th century’s greatest defenders of freedom, but there was one thing on which we disagreed. At the end of his most famous essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, he quoted Joseph Schumpeter: ‘To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian. Together with others I asked: if one’s convictions are only relative, why stand for them unflinchingly? If no truths are absolute, why choose to be civilized at all, rather than a barbarian? Barbarians, ‘full of passionate intensity’, tend to win the battle when their opponents’ convictions are merely relative.
In Judaism, freedom is not a relative value. It is the gift of God who created the world in freedom. Jews believe, with the late John F. Kennedy, that ‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. Life is holy. So is liberty, the value Jews celebrate on Passover as they tell the story of the journey across the wilderness to the Promised Land that, as we saw in the first chapter, inspired George Eliot and Martin Luther King Jr. Jews must join with others in what will be in the 21st century, as it was in the 20th, the defining struggle of our time: on the side of the will to life against the will to power.
That will mean engaging with the world, not disengaging from it. Wherever I see strong commitment in Jewry today — in Israel, in orthodoxy, in religious Zionism — I see an inward turn. Wherever I see an outward turn — among secular or non-Orthodox Jews — I see a weakening of identity and an abandonment of the classic terms of Jewish faith and life. I see, in other words, a continuation of the rift that began 2 centuries ago, between the particularists and universalists. It weakened Jewry then and is no less dysfunctional now.
Jews have lost touch with their soul. When Jews are in the news today it is almost invariably because of antisemitism, or some Holocaust-related issue, or the politics of the Middle East. I want to say to my fellow Jews with all the passion I can muster: Judaism is bigger than this. A people that has survived, its identity intact, for 4000 years, that reaffirmed life after the Holocaust, that rebuilt its ancestral home after 2000 years of exile and oppression, has more to say to the world than that it has enemies. Everyone has enemies. It has more to its identity than ethnicity. Judaism is the sustained attempt to make real in life the transformative power of hope. And the world, in the 21st century, needs hope.
Judaism is, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, a sustained transvaluation of values. It is the code of a nation that would be called, through its history, to show that civilizations survive not through strength but through the care they show for the weak; not by wealth but because of the help they give to the poor. Nations become invulnerable by caring for the vulnerable. these are deeply paradoxical propositions, and the only thing that can be said in their favor is that they are true. The people of the covenant were never numerous. The Holy Land was never large. The Israelites, later known as the Jews, were attacked by the greatest empires ever to have bestrode the narrow world like a colossus, and they outlived them all. The superpowers of history disappeared into the pages of history, while Jews continue to sing Am Yisrael Chai, ‘the Jewish people lives’. None of this, I believe, was for the sake of Jews alone, or Judaism alone, but to give hope to the hopeless, dignity to humanity, and moral meaning and purpose to the human story.
Jews staked their existence on the will to life, the sanctity of life, and the transcending beauty of a life lit by hope. And yes, they had faults and doubts, they were obstinate, they had arguments they couldn’t resolve and conflicts they couldn’t contain, and they fell short time and again. Jews still do. The state of Israel still does. But a people driven by an ideal carries within it the renewable energy of self-criticism and rebirth. Strength fails, wealth diminishes over time, but ideals remain. The stars burn no less brightly because we have not yet reached them.
Jews had faith that the few can defeat the many and the weak outlive the strong if they are moralized and driven by high ideals. The ‘war of all against all’ exists. Hobbes called it the ‘state of nature’ in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, the condition of many parts of the world today. Societies can transcend the nature by wy of covenant—a supremely biblical idea. Covenant creates civil society, the perennial alternative to the tyrannical, totalitarian or theocratic state.
And that is the eternal choice, as salient now as at any other time in history: Nietzsche or Abraham? Al Qaeda or Isaiah? Which will prevail, the will to power or the will to life? That is a battle in which, in strange ways, Jews have often found themselves on the front line. It will continue to be so in the 21st century.
So there is work to do, work that begins within the Jewish soul. For something has changed. A people that can survive the Holocaust can face the future without fear. So can Israel, having survived every assault by its enemies and given back to the Jewish people a space within which it can defend itself and begin to create the kind of society Jews were commanded to create. The Jewish people today should not doubt its strength. Nor should it doubt the courage it gives to others, or the hope it kindles in vulnerable nations and communities who feel themselves threatened and outnumbered. Now when every instinct is telling Jews to turn inwards, to fear and be defensive, is the time to do precisely the opposite.
Jews should have enough faith not to fear, enough strength of mind to fight for the rights of oppressed minorities wherever we happen to be. They should be at the forefront of fighting poverty and disease in Africa, and among the leading campaigners for environmental responsibility. They should do so not to win friends or the admiration of others, but because that is what a people of God is supposed to do. Israel must prevail over its fears and not see every criticism as a form of antisemitism or Jewish self-hatred. Jews must stop seeing themselves as victims. They should remember that the word chosen means that Jews are called on to be self-critical, never forgetting the tasks they have been set and have not yet completed.
Religious Jews should have enough faith not to fear a confrontation with the world’s wisdom, for if it is false they will not be led astray by it, and if it is true they will be enlarged by it. They should have enough self-confidence not to brand every novel thought a heresy, every question a danger, and every Jew who does not believe as we do an enemy. Judaism is stronger than some of tis defenders have allowed it to be.
Once, after having spoken about some of these ideas, someone came up to me and said, ‘I appreciated your words. But don’t you think you are fighting a losing battle? It was a good question. When I see the isolation of Israel, and the demonization it suffers, and the return of antisemitism especially to university campuses; when I saw people marching in London under the banner of “We’re all Hizbollah Now’; when I see how little people learn from history, making the same mistakes time and again, I am almost tempted to agree, yes, perhaps this is a losing battle.
What I replied, though, was this: ‘Yes, the Jewish fight is a losing battle. It always was. Moses lost. Joshua lost. Jeremiah lost. We have striven for ideals just beyond our reach, hoped for a gracious society just beyond the possible, believed in a messianic age just over the furthest horizon, wrestled with the angel and emerged limping. And in the meanwhile those who won have disappeared, and we are still here, still young, still full of vigor, still fighting the losing battle, never accepting defeat, refusing to resign ourselves to cynicism, or to give up hope of peace with those who, today as int he past, seek our destruction. That kind of losing battle is worth fighting, more so than any easy victory, any premature consolation.’
I do not believe that Jews have a monopoly on wisdom. Yet I was born a Jew, and I cannot betray the hundred generations of my ancestors who lived as Jews and were prepared to die as Jews, who handed their values on to their children, and they to theirs, so that one day their descendants might be free to live their faith without fear and be a source of inspiration to others, not because Jews are any better than anyone else but because that is our story, our heritage, our task, to be a source of hope against a world of despair.
I find it moving that in all the centuries when they were considered pariahs by others, Jews never internalized that perception. They were, they believed, a people loved by God and though that knowledge could sometimes make them think themselves superior to others, at least it spared them from the worst excesses of self-hatred, that peculiarly modern Jewish affliction. On the festivals they remembered the past and hoped for the future. On Shabbat, however poor they were, they sat at the Sabbath table like free men and women, and sang. And though they could be wracked by poverty, still they built houses of study and sat learning Talmud and cultivated the life of the mind. And though they were poor they knew there were others poorer than themselves, and they gave them aid, and invited them to their festive meals, and considered themselves bound by a covenant of mutual responsibility.
To have come through the Holocaust and still believe in life, to live through what Israel has lived through and still strive for peace, to have experienced the degree of hate poured out against them by some of Europe’s greatest minds and remain undefiled: that is a people of which I am proud to be a part.
I know that not every Jew is Orthodox, and not all believe in God, and some find aspects of our faith unintelligible at best, and many find fault with Israel, and others with Diaspora Jewish life, and we give ourselves great heartache, and we can sometimes be, to others and to God, an exasperating people. Yet every Jew who stays loyal to her or his people, and contributes to it in some way, thereby adds something to the story of the Jewish people, and becomes an agent of hope in the world, God’s partner in redemption.
Even if no victory is final, and for each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross, yet this small, otherwise insignificant people has, with surprising consistency, been a blessing to the families of the earth. And though ti has fought a losing battle for 4000 years, it still lies and breathes and sings, refusing to despair, still bearing witness, without always knowing it, to the power of god within the human heart to lift us to achievements we could not have reached alone or without the faith of our ancestors. Jews are a small people. Everyone of them counts. And the Jewish task remains; to be the voice of hope in an age of fear, the countervoice in the conversation of humankind.