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c98c0d7
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As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name--the --for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher .) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them to think also.
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antisemitism
assimilation
atheism
chabad-messianism
christianity
dialectics
education
enlightenment
ethics
evil
exile
free-thought
germans
haskalah
intellect
isaiah-berlin
islam
judaism
life
menachem-mendel-schneerson
messianism
monotheism
moses-mendelssohn
old-testament
plagiarism
prohibitions
prophecy
rabbis
rebbes
religion
return
rituals
study
thought
voltaire
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c05ceab
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So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
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annie-navasky
antisemitism
arthur-miller
atheism
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
damascus
david-rieff
debate
desecration
eastern-europe
einstein
eritrea
germany
india
iraq
islam
istanbul
jewish-question
jewishness
jews
kurdish-people
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
middle-east
morocco
normality
poland
prague
rabbis
religion
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
salvation
security
shakespeare
spinoza
steve-wasserman
synagogues
temples
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f486b09
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One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
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arrogance
atheism
bible
biblical-covenant
children
christianity
divine-retribution
edith-stein
exile
false-modesty
gentiles
grandmothers
hellenism
hiwi-al-balkhi
holocaust
jealousy
jerusalem
jesus
judaism
martyrdom
masochism
passover
passover-seder
punishment
rabbis
rationalisation
religion
secularism
self-respect
six-day-war
suffering
survivors
theodicy
war
western-wall
will-of-god
wine
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Christopher Hitchens |
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feb70e2
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the disinhibition caused by said brain damage, can also spur the infected individual to seek the pleasure of compulsive, casual sexual activity
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rabbia
rabbis
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Chuck Palahniuk |