Throughout its history, Judaism has been haunted by a dilemma—at whose door shall its troubles be laid? That Jews themselves, the men and women now in the world, or those who perished at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Maidanek, Treblinka, are in any way responsible for its distractions is a proposition too preposterous for any save the fanatics to entertain. No one—I stop short of saying no one in his right mind—any longer believes it. Honesty and experience forbid us to believe that all the sufferings of the Jews are owing to their own follies. Some mysterious agency has been at work, whose doings we cannot fathom, and from which we are estranged. Yet Jews desire, and ardently desire, to think well of that agency, for His might, whatever we may think of His morals, cannot be questioned. They desire to believe in His good intentions toward them and even to worship Him.
Jews, to paraphrase Polybius, have been more religious than God Himself. Surely, Jews think, God cannot be our enemy; they cherish the idea that God above looks down with a friendly eye. But Jews have not been of that opinion at all times. Indeed, a great mass of forbidding evidence raises itself up against the thesis that God was ever kind to Israel. The book of Job, in Israel's own Bible, contains eloquent descriptions of the human lot—its desolation ascribed not to men but to the Lord of the Universe.
When Job's friends, in conformity with Jewish belief and tradition, contend that it is his own sin which has brought upon him the divine displeasure, he breaks out in scornful indignation. He refuses to listen to such sophistries. The sense that he has done his utmost to serve God and do righteousness, and nonetheless has been betrayed and abandoned, is strong in him; the outbursts of the most modern pessimists are matched in his fierce utterances:
I will not restrain my mouth,
I will speak in the heaviness
of my spirit,
I will complain in the bitterness
of my soul. . . .Were I to call, and he answered
I would not believe that he heard
my voice. . . .
He mocks at the despair of the
guiltless.
Job submits because he must, but he is not persuaded either of the benevolence or of the justice of God. With scornful irony he answers his critics:
No doubt ye are the people,
And wisdom will die with you.
But I have a head as well as you;
I am not inferior to yourselves
Yea, who knoweth not such
things as these?
What things? That evil befalls the righteous as well as the unrighteous, that virtue is no shield against the misfortunes and miseries of life.
Throughout the myths and fables of many races runs this theme of the indifference or tyranny of God. And with it, of course, the accompanying themes that mankind has had its champions, who met that tyranny with determined opposition. Interpret the story of Job as you will, at least its critical attitude toward God is sufficient evidence of the profound discordance felt at one stage in the history of Israel between Jews and their surroundings, the inexplicable disharmony between their desires and dreams, the resistances they everywhere encountered.
Disappointment with life in some form or other lies at the root, too, of all religion. Had life contented us, had it been all that we could wish, we should already be in heaven, and in no need to seek happiness here or elsewhere. And to persuade men that the Creator is a God of Love, and their misfortunes of their own contriving, has proved an embarrassing and not too successful undertaking. Yet the desire for a protecting God is written large in Jewish history and thought. And Jews cannot but marvel that the Lord should be blind, deaf, and heartless. Jewish logic and emotion both revolt from that conception and from such a juxtaposition of ideas, magnificence unrelated to wisdom, grandeur divorced from soul. If you have reached the conclusion that the universe is an iron-bound mechanism, you may close your synagogues and temples and put away your books of devotion. To worship a machine, however vast, is no less an idolatry than to do obeisance before a graven image. Most Jews will have it that omnipotence and benevolence should somehow be in alliance. It is the thought of their heritage, and none more natural. Deny, however, that God can be to blame for the Jewish condition, and what alternative offers itself, where look for its explanation?
“Evil,” announces Spinoza in his Ethics, with considerable geometrical flourish, “is nothing positive.” How blue and cloudless is the sky of 17th-century Amsterdam! “A little water,” as Lady Macbeth remarked of the murder of Duncan, “A little water clears us of this deed.” As the medieval exorcist scattered legions of devils with a sprinkling of holy water and a formula, so liberal philosophers put to flight the agonies, the inhumanities, the plagues and cruelties of the Holocaust with a single word. They vanish into the limbo of Spinoza's “negative,” and anxiety is at an end. Every survivor of the camps becomes a prejudiced witness.
“There is nothing either good or bad,” we read in Shakespeare, “but thinking makes it so.” If, then, thought occupies so high a seat, wields a magisterial authority from which there is no appeal, must we not assume it equal to all undertakings, competent to determine all cases and terminate all disputes? Yet when one looks back into the past, or even around in the present, one wonders whether such praise is not overdone, a trifle excessive, whether in fact men can be said to think at all. We talk of reason, our society lays great store by it, but when did reason ever control human affairs, or does it now control them? Revolutions which begin in the name of reason commonly end in wholesale slaughter. Thought of a kind goes on all about us in the world, yet who believes, for example, that where there is universal suffrage there is universal intelligence or that where there is education there is good sense, that where there is religious toleration there is philo-Semitism, that where there is representative government there is also justice?
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If some Jews mistrust rationalism, they have reason for their mistrust. Rationalists are much too simple-minded to act as guides or interpreters in this uncanny and incalculable world. Remember the curious and profoundly interesting story of Balaam in the Bible, a man of great reputation in his day, so great that the King of Moab sent for him in extremity. He saddled his ass and went to meet the king, but the Lord sent an angel to prevent him, and the angel stood across his path. And Balaam, though a man of high intelligence, did not see the angel of the Lord, but the ass saw him.
Still, the Jew who has placed all his hopes in God can expect but little from the rest of mankind. Indeed, the most far-reaching commandments of Torah can have the effect of putting him in a place of solitude apart, where he is separated from the rest of the world by an unbridgeable chasm. This realm of spiritual solitude may even bear a superficial resembance to the “polar wastes” in which Nietzsche places the soul which is homeless and far from God; in reality, however, the solitude of the Jew is a solitude in which he is alone with God, and hence it is a condition of the utmost intimacy and warmth. Without this ideal, many Jews could not act or live. Thus it is that the Jew's activism and his reason must always have a note of incompletion; it is a strange paradox that such a person must always be on the move, like the wandering Jew, and yet never arrive at his goal.
Yet, is there any guarantee that the truth, if it could be ascertained, would coincide with the good, or with what most men would agree was the good, if any such consensus were ever possible? Many philosophies have been built upon the assumption that the true and the good are one and the same. Much may be said for that thesis. Nevertheless, it is an assumption, an essay of faith. The universe of history contains secrets, which, if discovered, would astound both Jew and Gentile alike, but whether with terror or delight, who can tell?
Some Jewish thinkers of the past, like Spinoza, have been driven to the desperate expedient of asserting that the true must be good, however villainous or tragic it appears. Every species of wickedness and folly to befall the carriers of the Jewish heritage, every kind of agony, physical and spiritual, must somehow be called good simply because it exists, it happened. To my mind, however, if Jews propose to use the words “good” and “evil,” they are obliged to use them in a human and intelligible sense. This juggling which merely changes the names, but leaves the pains and anguish, has no validity. Not a few Jewish philosophers have clung passionately to the hope we all share that the nearer to the truth the nearer to felicity, yet how much has the fruit of the tree of knowledge added to human felicity?
Kohelet the Preacher declared that he “who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and that truth is a synonym for disillusion. Other, more ancient Jewish thinkers, quite obsessed with messianic speculation and a vision of what may be termed “circularity,” were of the opinion (and can one assert with conviction that it is not a manifestly absurd belief?) that the happiness of our race would be increased by a return to earlier and more primitive conditions and practices, that Judaism should endeavor to forget its gains of admittedly dubious value, and retrace its steps in time. This notion, that the felicity of Eden lay behind us, has its echoes in Rousseau, and indeed reverberates all through Christian eschatological thought. The miseries of man arose, this argument runs, from eating of the fruit of knowledge. But the peculiar and mysterious fact is that, however poisonous, some Jews continue to crave it, to believe it the healthiest diet, and to consume it with eager appetites; even to be convinced that it is a sovereign, therapeutic remedy for all diseases.
The doctrine of the perfectibility of the world is old. It is not, however, basic to Hebraic or even Christian doctrine; rather, as Schopenhauer observed, it is radically irreligious. Men simply cannot get along without religion. If one is abandoned, another is adopted. And much of modern Jewish humanitarianism, much Jewish welfare work, is an effort to fill the great spiritual void left by the decay of faith, a drab substitute for the older creed. The spirit of Jews after the Holocaust craves a friendly God who knows them, and they are given economics instead. They ask for peace and forgiveness, for they are alive in a post-Holocaust world, and they are told something like: “Since there is nothing beyond the present to be hoped for, let us make the only lives Jews will ever know less pitiably wretched.” As the tide of Judaism has receded, the tide of this secular creed, the only alleged alternative for American Jewry, it seems, has correspondingly risen.
“The soul is naturally Christian,” said Tertullian. Yes, Jews may add, and it is naturally pagan too. It is divided against itself. Judaism, both ancient and modern, knows it well, this double mind; but this division is not of our making. It is from nature, “from the opposites inherent in all being within the world,” in the phrase of Martin Buber, that we inherit this double-mindedness.
If man is good, it has been asked, why does he do evil? If evil, why does he love the good? Nature has decreed that he shall desire incompatible things—to have, for example, the approval of others, and yet go his own unhindered way. He seeks unity and peace with his neighbors, and at the same time to be the controller of their lives. Nature urges him to exert all his powers, and in an instant their exercise precipitates him into a struggle with the interests of others. He is at once the lover and rival of others.
Nevertheless, God's tolerance for the superfluous disgusts many secular Jews. They would contract his spacious universe into a tidy garden of secular saints. In the Laws, Plato becomes very stern with his fellow creatures. In the state he pictures, a fascist state, there is no liberty of opinion, no toleration of disbelief, or interference with the established order. And the penalty for breaking these laws is death, as it was the penalty for heresy in the early Church. Those wise men who know what is best for the world are to be congratulated. To know that you are a prophet of the Lord is a great thing—to have no doubts. It is a great thing to be so deep in His counsels that you can speak ex cathedra, and hand over delinquents to the executioner.
The passion for reforming one's neighbors out of existence, or at least out of the existence they prefer—and the two are often found together—afflicts even more grievously those who have lost their faith in God than those who believe in Him. The seceders to the Judaism of the ethical idealists, the present American Jews of the secular kingdom, having dispossessed God of His authority, are at no loss to replace Him. They mount the vacant throne, deify their own consciences, would have men bow and worship their ideals, and proceed to establish a tyranny more irksome than that of their ecclesiastical predecessors.
Sois mon frère ou je te tue. Who conferred this astounding magistracy? What, one wonders, do our reformers propose to do with men in whom the opposites are in startling evidence?
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There is an old belief which has its source in the Orphic sayings that Zeus created man from his tears. Tears are, indeed, a mark of the human. None of man's efforts can quite bridge the hiatus between existence and ideality. Man is forever doomed to renounce. Knowledge and joy in one direction mean ignorance and pain in another direction. And behind and above all stands the irretrievable phenomenon that is death, mute and sphinxlike, an eternal signpost of man's impermanence. This is tragedy. Yet the visualization of what need not be tragic, a wholehearted activity directed toward removing that suffering not due to God or nature—these are still left to us. If Zeus created man from his tears, Prometheus placed power into man's hands that these be shed not altogether in vain.
