I
n a 1963 article in this magazine called “Writing About Jews,” Philip Roth defended his work from the sermonic attacks of rabbis who claimed that his fiction was not good for the Jews. In a twist of fate, we must now defend our work as rabbis from the attacks of an acclaimed American Jewish writer who decries rabbis’ efforts to preserve Jewish peoplehood.
Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of novels and short stories whose work is characterized by rich language and complex themes including memory, abandonment, fatherhood, and Jewish identity. Chabon set off a controversy when speaking on May 14, 2018, at a graduation ceremony in Los Angeles of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC), the Reform movement’s flagship seminary and training institution.
Chabon attacked Israel’s settlement policy and implicitly its conduct during Hamas’s “protest” along Israel’s border fence with Gaza, which occurred weeks before his address.
I abhor an enclave, too: a gated community, a restricted country club, or a clutch of 800 zealots lodged in illusory safety behind a wall made from the bodies of teenage soldiers, gazing out in scorn and lordly alarm at the surrounding 200,000 residents of the city of Hebron who are manifestly (for this is a fundamental purpose of all walls) Other, and therefore—so goes the logic of the deepest, oldest human evil—less truly human.
He expanded his attack into an argument against Jewish particularism and the boundaries that intramarriage fosters by urging the HUC graduates:
Seize every opportunity to strengthen and enrich our cultural genome by embracing the inevitable variation and change that result from increased diversity.
He emphasized his absolute abhorrence of in-marriage in describing his preferred option for whom his own four children should marry:
So now, today, at this retrograde and perilous moment in history, when ideologues are busily trying to string the world with eruvim of intolerance, were you to ask me if I hope my children marry-in, I would say, Yes. I want them to marry into the tribe that prizes learning, inquiry, skepticism, openness to new ideas. I want my children to marry into the tribe that enshrines equality before the law, and freedom of conscience, and human rights. I want them to marry into the tribe that sees nations and borders as antiquated canards and ethnicity as a construct prone, like all constructs, to endless reconfiguration.
Morin Zaray, a graduate student who attended the commencement ceremony, walked out to protest Chabon’s remarks. The following week, she published an op-ed in the Jewish Journal defending Israel from Chabon’s “black-and-white” attacks:
As I heard Chabon’s simplified takedown of my country, the room began to spin. I turned back to look at my brother, who served in a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces. He looked sick to his stomach. I got up from my seat and approached my family. I wanted to stand up and scream, but my voice wouldn’t come out. I felt ashamed for being part of this gathering, ashamed that many in the audience were just nodding at this reductionist view of a multilayered and complicated country.
The text and video of Chabon’s address appeared online and inspired reactions from a diverse group of academics and rabbis, including Rabbis Yitzchak Blau and Elli Fischer and professors Steven M. Cohen, Sylvia Barack Fishman, and Jack Wertheimer. They criticized Chabon’s selective portrayal of Judaism while defending the moral complexity of Jewish ritual and Jewish thought. They carefully explained how Chabon’s vision of Judaism, like his vision of Israel’s policies, is “curiously binary, judgmental, and bogus,” in Fishman, Cohen, and Wertheimer’s words, in addition to simply getting a lot of details about Judaism wrong. One of these writers called for HUC to apologize for Chabon’s remarks.
HUC leaders Rabbi David Ellenson and Rabbi Joshua Holo have not apologized. Instead, in a Jewish Telegraphic Agency op-ed, they defended their institution’s invitation of Chabon in the name of vigorous democratic debate. They contextualized Chabon’s extremism as a form of “anger,” directed at particularly impenetrable and morally problematic Jewish barriers. They situated Chabon within a historical debate that began in the 19th century among the founders of the Reform movement about the nature of Jewish boundaries, putting Chabon on the “far universalist side of that debate.” Holo wrote:
He can imagine countenancing the erasure of Judaism through assimilation into the universal mingling of cultures—though he would also mourn its loss. “If Judaism should ever pass from the world, it won’t be the first time in history,” he said. “Nor will it be the first time that an ethnic minority has been absorbed, one exogamous marriage at a time, into the surrounding population.” In doing so, he echoed, perhaps without knowing it, one of the founders of Wissenschaft, Moritz Steinschneider. A fantastically learned scholar of Jewish texts and a pioneer historian, Steinschneider rejected religion and, by extension, Jewish survival as a particularistic enterprise.
In our view, even on a universal level, Chabon is wrong. The absence (and vilification) of identity is self-defeating. If you want to be a good universalist, you need to have a solid and particular identity. Judaism has done this throughout its history. Judaism has something to teach the world at a moment when so much political debate surrounds borders and the interface between particular and universal identities.
We are Orthodox rabbis. Yet we see our Conservative and Reform colleagues as allies in our efforts to preserve Jewish peoplehood. In defending our work as rabbis, we speak both to Chabon and to our Reform Jewish communal professional colleagues who heard his message at their graduation.
No matter what flavor of Jew we might be, we are all by necessity partial boundary makers. And, while he pretends to be the contrary, so too is Michael Chabon, and so was Philip Roth, and so is every craftsperson. A great writer draws boundaries between good ideas and bad ones, between good sentences and bad ones. Roth decried his critics’ failure to understand what writing was. For Roth, a writer was not a public-relations operative on behalf of an ethnic group, but someone who spoke to the human condition through characters based on the human beings that he knew best.
Judaism does not see itself as a universal religion, but rather as a particular faith. It does not aspire to convert all non-adherents. However, in accepting their otherness, it does not ignore them. The philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) explained the crucial role of the other in Judaism’s self-understanding thus:
The fact that a man is a stranger should in no way justify treatment other than that enjoyed by brethren in race. This law (Exodus 22:20), of shielding the alien from all wrong, is of vital significance in the history of religion. With it alone, true Religion begins. The alien was to be protected, not because he was a member of one’s family, clan, religious community or people, but because he was a human being. In the alien therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.
Judaism has something to teach the world specifically in this regard. True religion helps people discover the humanity of those on the other side of its boundaries. In an age of resurgent ethno-nationalism and open displays of bigotry that shock the conscience, it can be easy to find refuge in Chabon’s facile diagnosis: All boundaries that distinguish between and among people are artificial and deleterious. Chabon suggests that Jewish in-marriage creates a “ghetto of two.”
An endogamous marriage is a ghetto of two; as the traditional Jewish wedding ritual makes explicit, it draws a circle around the married couple, inscribes them—and any eventual children who come along—within a figurative wall of tradition, custom, shared history, and a common inheritance of chromosomes and culture.
In truth, in-marriage is a battle against a much more restrictive ghetto—the “ghetto of one” that increasingly characterizes 21st-century life, with its associated selfishness, indulgence of narcissism, and concomitant loneliness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed that since 1999 suicide rates across most ethnic and age groups in the United States are up 25 percent. Loneliness, depression, and feelings of despair beset so many people in our atomized world. In our work as rabbis, we care for these ills. Marriage, family, community, and peoplehood (as well as proper medical care) are tools in helping people find meaning and purpose so that they may overcome what ails them. Religion provides the institutional and social structure for a life of meaning and purpose.
As rabbis who work with couples in preparation for their marriages and afterwards, we believe that Chabon fails to understand the true meaning of marriage.
Every marriage, no matter the religious identity of its parts, is a ghetto of two. Ghettos exclude. Marriages exclude. Each couple has its own special memories and its own secret language; this is a feature and not a bug of marriage. Marriages build the souls of those who are supported by loving lifelong companionship. Shared values make this more possible. Marriages are a metaphor for what community can achieve in freeing us from the prison of ourselves—the ghetto of one—in which selfishness and judgment destroy our ability to love and be loved.
Exclusion is central to marriage, but it is threatening to a free society. And we acknowledge that exclusionary visions are rife at every level of our society and government. All of us must stand vigilant in protecting our deepest held values—including respect for the stranger. Yet to cast aside all particularism in pursuit of some utopian one-world identity is to destroy the very foundation of love and social connectivity. It, too, promotes fear.
Chabon worries about how walls and distinctions exclude and distance:
Security is an invention of humanity’s jailers. Anywhere you look it is—and has always been—the hand of power drawing the boundaries, putting up separation barriers and propagandizing hatred and fear of the people on the other side. Security for some means imprisonment for all.
He fails to appreciate how such boundaries also include, provide support, and protect. We understand that walls create risks of racism and exclusion. Judaism addresses these ills, as well. The Book of Genesis speaks of all humanity being created in the image of God, even as the Book of Exodus speaks about those who are uniquely bound together by the covenant of Sinai.
We work to create Jewish communities with thick and positive Jewish identities. We must have content and meaning in Jewish life other than simple perpetuation. Like Chabon, we do not want a closed and “tribalist” Judaism. If the only Jewish value that is important is marrying someone Jewish, then that indeed ought to be questioned. In modern North America, Jewish continuity for its own sake, without any content, will not perpetuate itself—in this, Chabon is right.
In Israel, criticism can be (and is) legitimately directed at the inevitable failures of imperfect people to live up to a religious ideal. The words of prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah reflect the long tradition of social and political critique among our people. By all means, a writer like Chabon should explain how Israel must more carefully respond to the humanity of its neighbors, even if they are its enemies. Such a writer will be far more successful if he or she does not present wildly ungenerous interpretations of Israel’s motives. Such a writer should acknowledge the humanity and present fully-rounded characters in evoking the personages of those he or she criticizes. Sentences like “I have never seen a sorrier and more riotous group of convicts than the Jews of present-day Hebron” are both counterproductive and untrue. Such words are also walls. Chabon says that he wants to break down walls, but he has only replaced one set of walls with different walls.
As rabbis who critique our people’s shortcomings from our pulpits, we have this advice for Chabon: Acknowledge Israeli fears and vulnerability and not just Israeli power. Presume the good faith and good will of the Israeli people, even if you believe its policies may be wrong. People are far more likely to listen to you if you listen to them.
Chabon wrote a novel called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. In the real world, we rabbis are the real Yiddish Policemen. It is our mission to look out for the spiritual safety of our people. With that in mind, we ask Michael Chabon, “Please step away from the ledge and please take your future grandchildren with you.” Judaism is not a game of messianic chess from which one may resign when unfulfilled; it is a life resource that contains wisdom that will make your children healthier and happier people in the here and now—not to mention granting them access to crucial material for their future novels. Don’t deprive your grandchildren. (We say this because, let’s face it, guilt is the only weapon we Yiddish Policemen actually carry.)
Finally, we must decry Chabon’s failure to understand the work of a rabbi or a Jewish communal professional. Pretending that he is Ronald Reagan speaking to Mikhail Gorbachev, Chabon charges a graduating class of Jewish communal professionals with the following:
Knock down the walls. Abolish the checkpoints.…
Allow us to explain the chutzpah in exhorting young leaders that their task should be to preside over the destruction of that thing to which they have committed their lives. The Talmud tells the following parable:
One time, the evil empire of Rome decreed that Jews may not engage in the study and practice of Torah. Pappos ben Yehuda came and found Rabbi Akiva, who was convening assemblies in public and engaging in Torah study. Pappos said to him: Akiva, are you not afraid of the empire? Rabbi Akiva answered him: I will relate a parable. To what can this be compared? It is like a fox walking along a riverbank when he sees fish gathering and fleeing from place to place.
The fox said to them: From what are you fleeing?
They said to him: We are fleeing from the nets that people cast upon us.
He said to them: Do you wish to come up onto dry land, and we will reside together just as my ancestors resided with your ancestors?
The fish said to him: You are the one of whom they say, he is the cleverest of animals? You are not clever; you are a fool. If we are afraid in the water, our natural habitat which gives us life, then in a habitat that causes our death, all the more so.
Chabon has assumed the role of that fox. He asks graduating students to abandon the particular environment that will sustain them in favor of an uncertain and possibly fraudulent future in which he acknowledges that Judaism (and all that it has to teach the world) might cease to exist. Aftselakhis—really?
What then is the task of a rabbi?
Allow us to tell another fish story (This one is from David Foster Wallace):
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The job of a rabbi is not that of the older fish reminding everyone about the existence of water. Our job is to make sure that the water is there.
What is water?
The historian Paul Johnson wrote: “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny…. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of purpose.” This is what Rabbi Akiva was talking about. This is our water.
It is not just fish who need water. All animals (even foxes) need water to live. While we may be employed by our congregations, we rabbis serve our society (Jew and non-Jew), speaking to (and caring for) the human condition by preserving the (Divine) message and mission of the Jewish people through time. We build and maintain distinctions (and support the modern State of Israel) to achieve this goal.
To hold their form, liquids such as water require containers, i.e., boundaries. To break those containers isn’t simply “not good for the Jews.” It’s not good for humankind.
