To the Editor:
Students of English literature have reason to be grateful that David Daiches’s writings on Burns or Stevenson are free of the moral frivolity which he habitually brings to his discussion of Jewish questions. In his remarkable reply to Rabbi Agus’s letter [“Letters from Readers,” Aug. ’64] he notes Rabbi Agus’s failure to define the true tradition in Jewish religious history, and then asks, petulantly, whether “two thousand years of suffering, culminating in the catastrophe of the six million” was not an appalling “price” to pay for the preservation of a tradition so resistant to definition.
When Jewish writers are dealing with cultures other than their own, they seem quite as capable as other people of perceiving . . . that certain endowments of human nature, unless they have some representative among the nations or peoples of the world, tend to be pushed out of sight. But when Jewish writers are dealing with their own culture, they are blinded to this simple truth. . . . I wonder whether, if the notoriously unassrmilable Scottish people were to be decimated, Mr. Daiches would scold them for having desired to preserve a tradition which produced people as “mutually contradictory” as Sir Walter Scott and James Mill.
The simplistic view of the relation between a people and its culture implied in Mr. Daiches’s letter is merely irritating; but the resistance to the awareness of evil which is also implied makes one despair.
Edward Alexander
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
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To the Editor:
Non-believers are like politicians who attempt to oust the party in power by demanding of it the answer to questions which they, too, are unable to answer. . . . David Daiches asks: “Does it require the perpetual, separate existence in the diaspora of the Peculiar People? Two thousand years of suffering, culminating in the catastrophe of the six million, represent an appalling price. Exactly what was it paid for?” . . . Mr. Daiches may not find enough that is distinctive in Judaism to justify survival as a Jew. But there are many who do not need to “darken counsel with words” (Job) to “justify” their will to be followers of Judaism. Its way of life provides them with meaning, sanctity, and joy in life. . . .
The question asked by non-believers exists for all human beings. Rather than leading us to reject what provides most meaning to life, they should lead us to humility about the adequacy of our minds . . . to grasp the total cosmic purpose. . . .
(Rabbi) Nathan Barack
Sheboygan, Wisconsin