The Jewish People?

Protesters in downtown Jerusalem, including my brother, this week. "A job in the government that costs the hostages' lives" and "Your conscience is dark"

Dear friends, 

In a famous exchange between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt following the publication of The Banality of Evil, Scholem accused Arendt of having no love for the Jewish people. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ some nation or collective,” Arendt answered. "The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love.” 

Arendt’s appealing response touches on a bigger and more difficult question, which my rabbi, Jim Ponet has been asking me and many others for years: what is the Jewish people, and does it really exist? In a political landscape in which different entities claim to speak for “the Jewish people,” and others say “not in my name,” Rabbi Ponet’s question comes to life.  

My friend and study partner, Yoni Kretzmer has at times suggested a radically different idea of what this people is, which follows a certain elitist strand of Medieval Jewish thinkers. Jews are those who truly follow the Torah. This would exclude vast numbers of so-called Jews, beginning with the ultra-nationalist thugs who blatantly profane every biblical law of decency to fellow human beings, even as they tout their religious garb. Jews, according to this strand of thought, are those who love others as themselves, and are committed to the constant self-examination and self-improvement that the Torah demands. According to this logic, the Jewish people, for example, could have nothing to do with a morally flawed institution such as a state, beyond perhaps being citizens of it if they happened to live in one. 

However attractive this view may seem at times, there is no doubt of its vanity. The Jewish people cannot be sanitized into some ideal. Like any person, it includes beauty and filth, wisdom and ignorance, peace and war. If I have an answer to Arendt, it is that a nation is very much like an individual person. What makes a friend a friend begins with the fact that you know them well. Like it or not, we, as Jews, know the Jews. We know the loud Jews and the quiet ones, the hateful ones and the incredible ones. We know which Jews we’re like, and which we’re not like, and which Jews we like and which we don’t. Some of us end up falling on the side of friendship with the Jewish people, and others on the side of discomfort and enmity. Most of us find a way to combine the two.

I write this in the context of our preparation for the High Holidays, and my inescapable feeling that the Jewish people, more than ever before, need to make Teshuvah. We – whoever that means – are in dire need of the elements of the Days of Awe: probing self-examination. A settling of confusion through the return to the fundamental value of care. Remembering that we will die and that could happen any time. A real attempt to see how deaf, dumb and blind we have been, and the consequences this wrought upon us. 

I cannot shake the thought that this Jewish people that we are a part of is in need of something new and different. A continuation feels insufficient. Even renewal feels like too soft a word. We need to begin again in some fundamental way, and we need to think deeply about what that means. 

On Tuesday I began posting the daily offerings of Soul-Math, or self-examination that Rabbi Bahyah Ibn Paquda wrote in the 11th century. So far he's asked us:
How often are you in touch with the miracle of the fact of your being alive – and of your still being alive?
What is the state of your relationship with your body?
What is the state of your relationship with your mind?
What is the state of your relationship with being Jewish?
These are great questions for each of us to ponder individually. Perhaps we should think about them on a national level as well. To paraphrase his questions to a national level: 
Maybe our national relationship with continued survival is all wrong?
Is something sick in our collective body?
Maybe we are feeding our collective mind garbage instead of nourishment?
Maybe we are misunderstanding what we mean when use the term “the Jewish people?” 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha