The Way to Calamity, Again

 

by
Samuel Fleischacker

The Jerusalem Report,   July 29, 2002

 

 

God, speaking to Judah through Jeremiah:  "I myself will fight against you with outstretched hand and strong arm, in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath." (Jer 21:5)  Deliberately echoing Deuteronomy 26:8, the prophet equates the Jews with their hated oppressor of old:  God will fight against us as He fought against Egypt.  And we react to this prophecy with fear and repentance, right?  No, of course not.  Jeremiah was beaten and imprisoned.  No doubt the people felt he was in league with the enemy, a contemptible moralizer talking about irrelevancies when he should have been helping his people prepare to fight Nebuchadnezzar.

 

The passage is chilling, as is the entire book of Jeremiah, at this time.  Perhaps we think that of course today we do not deserve this kind of condemnation;  today an enemy, again and again, murders our innocents.  This time we are in the right, whatever may have been the case with the ancient Israelites.

 

But that's what they said too.  And they were wrong.  And I fear very much that we are wrong too.  At the very least, we are wrong to think that pointing out the evils of our enemies counts as anything like teshuvah [repentance].  Imagine Pashhur the priest explaining to Jeremiah, just before he beat him (Jer. 20:2), that Nebuchadnezzar was a very evil man.  Nebuchadnezzar was in fact that, and the Babylonians who sacked Jerusalem, and the Romans who did so five centuries later, were killers every bit as inhumane as the members of the Al-Aqsa Brigades.  But that is irrelevant from the religious perspective.  God was at war with the Jews - or so we are taught - and Nebuchadnezzar was just an instrument of God's will.  Pashhur, and everyone else who despised Jeremiah, was blinded by politics to the duties of religion.

 

We may today be similarly blinded by politics.  I have heard all the arguments about the irredentism of the Palestinian leaders, the inhumanity of their current campaign, and the virulent anti-semitism that many Palestinians, and other Arabs and Moslems, openly preach - and I am convinced by these arguments.  As a secular person, I have no doubt at all that we are more in the right than in the wrong in the current intifada.

 

But as a religious Jew, as someone who is supposed to stand before God, I am not sure that it matters whether we are "more in the right than in the wrong" or not.  We are supposed to be a holy people, and of them a lot is asked.  We can't simply say, "our human rights record is no worse than that of many other countries."  We are not supposed to be so slack with ourselves, and we have no right to pass lightly over the gross humiliations, to say nothing of the social and economic discrimination, the unpunished takings of land, illegal under Israel's own law, and the brutality and torture, that we have inflicted on the Palestinians.  Who would have imagined that a Jewish state would deny building permits to non-Jews, and then destroy their homes for being illegally built?  Who would have imagined that a Jewish state would become known more for its taking of precious water resources from another, weaker people than for its cultural or moral achievements?

 

Yes, all of this may amount to far less than the Serbians did to the Bosnians, than the Hutus did to the Tutsis, or than the Sudanese and the Cambodians have done to themselves.  But what kind of excuse is that?  Do we, religious Jews, who are supposed to be standing before God in a particularly contrite way during these three weeks, really consider this sort of comparative pleading as an adequate way of doing teshuvah? The other peoples committed idolatry too, in Jeremiah's time; we do not consider that an excuse for Jews doing so.

 

In any case, it hardly matters whether we are content to clap ourselves on the back or not.  Look around at the almost daily murders of children, the torn up buses and exploded dance halls and seders, and the Israeli government's utter inability to stop these things from happening.  Does this not look like Biblical destruction to you?  Does it not look like the "outstretched arm" of God coming against us, working for the other side?  Yes, the Palestinians who commit these crimes, and the Palestinians who justify them, are as bad, morally, as the worst human beings who have ever lived.  But that's exactly how our prophets thought of Nebuchadnezzar and our rabbis thought of Titus.  Nevertheless, those monsters were also considered to be the instruments of God's punishment.

 

God's punishment for what?  For idolatry, in the case of the first destruction;  for sinat hinam, "free-floating" hatred of our fellow Jews, in the case of the second.  In the case of the third commonwealth, if it falls, we will eventually blame that on ourselves as well, presumably.  My guess is that we will say our fault in this case was sinat acherim, the blind hatred, or at least contempt, for non-Jews, which has led us to build a nation while caring little for the humanity of the non-Jews affected by our nation-building.  In the end, this is in fact not much different from the traditional great sin known as chillul hashem:  by dismissing the needs of the non-Jews in our midst, we profane God's Name in the eyes of all the world.

 

It is one of the greatest features of Judaism that we have consistently looked inside ourselves and our community for moral flaws rather than focusing on the evils of those who have harmed us.  It is a great shame that we seem now to have lost that art.   If only we could instead, this time, figure out our responsibility for the destruction coming towards us in advance. That would show that the third commonwealth, more than the other two, is truly reshit tzmichat geulateinu.

 

Samuel Fleischacker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and co-founder of Chicago Peace Now.