Goldberg This is Not the Way

Jews, Judaism and the State of Israel
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27163-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Few subjects invoke such passion as the history and current situation of Jews in Western societies. David Goldberg, a progressive Rabbi with many years' experience of dealing with other faiths and other Jews, takes the most difficult issues of this fraught relationship and confronts them head on. He argues that it is wrong to equate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, that it is far more difficult to be a Muslim in twenty-first century Britain than it is to be a Jew, that Israel is far too often treated sentimentally and that the identification of Israel with the Holocaust - memorializing the latter and sacralising the former - has had baneful effects. His discussion of the perennial question, 'who is a Jew?', is equally trenchant: he rejects all strict rabbinic criteria, proposing that a Jew is simply anyone who insists that he or she is one. Forthright, challenging and witty, This is Not the Way will spark debate, criticism and delight in equal measure.

Rabbi Dr David J Goldberg OBE is minister emeritus of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London. He is the author and editor of several books, including Aspects of Liberal Judaism and The Divided Self: Israel and the Jewish Psyche Today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goldberg, David

Leseproben

Introduction

This Is Not the Way was the title of Achad Ha-Am’s first essay, written in 1889. Achad Ha-Am (‘One of the People’, the pen name of Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927) was a Zionist before Theodor Herzl, his contemporary, ideological sparring partner and rival for public approval, had even heard of the word. The two men cordially detested each other. They were a complete antithesis, Herzl urbane, assimilated, an easy charmer of princes and commoners who could be economical with the truth when it got in the way of his inspiring orations and grandiose promises; Achad Ha-Am prim, schoolmasterly, worshipped by a small circle of acolytes, a stickler for accuracy who instinctively recoiled from flowery words and crowd-pleasing gestures. They hid their antipathy and mutual suspicion beneath exaggerated deference on Herzl’s part and stiff formality from Achad Ha-Am. But the latter’s barbed tribute after Herzl’s sudden passing in 1904, that he had died at the ideal time, recalls Metternich’s alleged response on being told of his adversary Talleyrand’s death: ‘Now what did he mean by that?’

A habitual carper and damner with faint praise, Achad Ha-Am wrote This Is Not the Way to pour cold water over the efforts and methods of the early pioneers in Palestine. The essay made his name and its Hebrew title – Lo zeh ha-derech – became a common figure of speech in Mandate Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel to describe going about things in the wrong way.

That is why I borrowed the phrase as the title for this book. I believe that the Jewish people worldwide, our religion of Judaism and the state that claims to represent the collective Jewish will are going about things in the wrong way.

This is not intended as yet another entry in the field of pro- or anti-Israel polemic. There are many others better qualified than I am to engage in that task. My larger concern, after spending virtually my entire career in teaching, expounding and defending Judaism, is to consider whether there is sufficient resilience and innate worth in our 3,500-year-old traditions and history to ensure the Jewish people’s survival as a distinct culture into the future. Jews today are overwhelmingly secular. The majority might still mumble something vague about ‘believing in God’; but belief comes way down the list when they are asked to say what makes them Jewish. Answers about ‘tradition’, ‘history’, ‘family’, ‘community’, ‘Jewish values’ are far more likely to occur.

In the Western world, where virtually all Jews now live, the level of ‘marrying out’, in the disapproving phrase of previous generations, is around 50 per cent. Previously, Jewish status depended on proof of maternal descent or a demanding conversion to Judaism. Jewish identity nowadays has become increasingly fluid and pick ’n’ mix; yet the Orthodox guardians of the faith are more insistent than ever on observing the strict letter of conversion law. As a consequence, the gap in Israel and elsewhere between the ‘black hats’ bustling about with their seven or eight children in the garb of eighteenth-century Polish noblemen and the ordinarily dressed majority with their 2.1 offspring has steadily widened, until they could almost be two different species of Jew.

With the erosion of belief, God has been replaced by Israel as the credo of the Jewish people, to the benefit of neither. Those ‘Jewish values’ that are always cited as evidence of the special Jewish contribution to civilisation – justice, a passion for freedom, love of one’s neighbour, sympathy for the underprivileged, improving the world – ring hollow when set against the bleak reality of the Israel–Palestine conflict and the constant apologias that Diaspora supporters are required to make on Israel’s behalf; and the harsh military occupation of another people’s land, while fundamentalist settlers annex what they can of it, has coarsened and corroded the moral standards on which the Jewish state was founded.

Excessive reference to the Holocaust and dark allegations about resurgent anti-Semitism are two of the diversionary tactics used in the Diaspora by the Israel Lobby (which denies that any such entity exists, and to say that it does is tantamount to anti-Semitism) to deflect growing criticism of Israel. Is our preoccupation with anti-Semitism in danger of becoming a complex? And has the unique enormity of the Holocaust and its six million victims been trivialised by its exploitation for political purposes? What does it mean – following the decline of faith, the abatement of persecution and the fragmentation of community – still to identify as a Jew?

These are some of the broader issues that I try to explore in this book. I write as a Liberal Jew and perhaps it is appropriate at this juncture to explain a little about the various movements within Judaism, although where they differ on theological principles is made clear in the body of the text. By now, and due to controversies that regularly hit the headlines, non-Jewish readers are probably aware that Judaism is not, any more than Islam, the seamless, unified religion that for so long its advocates tried to present to the outside world.

Jewish life was regulated for over seventeen hundred years, from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce until the first glimmerings of the Jewish Enlightenment, by what is known as Rabbinic Judaism. In Europe it successfully kept at bay any attempts at a Jewish equivalent of the Reformation until the French Revolution. Afterwards, the march towards Jewish emancipation and citizenship was irresistible, and with it the desire to modernise Judaism. Reform Judaism, as it came to be called, began in Germany in the early nineteenth century. It spread slowly in Germany, Central Europe and Great Britain, and most spectacularly in the USA. Those who resisted its innovations were known as Orthodox; that is, conforming to traditional practice.

In the past two hundred years Judaism has further splintered as Jews responded to modernity. There are several variants of Orthodoxy, some not speaking to each other. In the USA, Conservative Judaism developed as a halfway house between Orthodox and Reform, while the Reconstructionist movement took up a position on the left. The Liberal movement in the UK (doctrinally close to American Reform) developed at the turn of the twentieth century, out of dissatisfaction with the slow pace of change initiated by the British Reform synagogues (doctrinally close to the American Conservative movement). In recent years a UK Masorti movement has pitched its tent halfway between United Synagogue Orthodoxy and the Reform movement. To try to simplify the confusion – or maybe compound it – non-Orthodox Judaism in its (American and British) Reform, Liberal and Reconstructionist manifestations – but not Conservative or Masorti – is generically referred to as Progressive Judaism.

Because my theological views have always been radical and my stance about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians one of moral indignation since the early 1970s, inevitably my many critics in Israel, Anglo-Jewry and beyond are going to read this book and react: ‘There goes that self-hating Jew again.’

As ‘self-hating’ is the standard epithet for any Jew who does not toe the party line on any subject from Israel to building more faith schools in the Diaspora, it might interest readers to learn about the book’s genesis and why I did not stick with its original working title of Reflections of a Self-hating Jew.

A few years ago I picked up on the furore following an October 2003 article in the New York Review of Books that called on Israel, ‘a belligerently intolerant faith-driven ethno state’ to transmute from ‘a Jewish state to a binational one’. It was explosive stuff, written by Tony Judt, an English-born historian teaching in the USA; predictably, it caused a storm in Jewish circles, with the usual imprecations against its author for being self-hating and anti-Semitic. Discussing the repercussions en famille one day, a cousin wondered whether the author might be a relative, since on our maternal side the surname was spelt interchangeably as Yudt or Judt. A Google search confirmed that he was indeed kin; our zeide (grandfather) and his had been brothers. Several years before and without knowing of their connection, with an aunt I used occasionally to visit Tony’s grandfather in his Jewish Old Age Home in South London. He was known in the family as ‘Heinech the Communist’, a vigorous, intellectually sprightly man in his late eighties who would always greet me warmly and say, ‘David, it’s so good to have someone to be able to talk to properly. Not like these alters’, gesturing dismissively to the row of bubes in armchairs placidly knitting for their grandchildren and evidently reluctant to engage in seminars with Heinech on Marx’s critique of Capitalism.

I made contact with Tony and we got on well from the start, two outnumbered liberals in a mainly bourgeois extended family that did not take kindly to our opinions about Israel. In fact, he was braver than me. In Anglo-Jewry, critics may say rude things about you and write you abusive letters underlined in green ink and copied to the president of the Board of Deputies and the prime minister, but that’s about it; in the USA, where violence is as American as cherry pie in H. Rap Brown’s notorious dictum, some Jews are ready to resort to it when reasoned argument fails them. And Tony was more radical politically than me. I told him in one of our...