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What We Learned From the 1970's

(Sh'ma 10/184, DECEMBER 28,1979)

At Sh'ma's annual meeting of the contributing editors last June, a symposium was held on the implications of the past decade on Jewish life. Opening, prepared remarks were made by Nora Levin, Arnold Jacob Wolf, and David Novak. A lively discussion followed. As we now wind up the 1970's and move forward into a new decade, we would like to share with you the highlights of last spring's exchange. Although recent world events have been such that if the symposium were held today it would undoubtedly include additional material, the contents of the June discussion remain current and provocative.

We will present the symposium in two issues. This issue features the three initial presentations as well as the first part of the discussion which followed, remarks by Michael Wyschogrod. Further discussion by Balfour Brickner and Eugene Borowitz, and the concluding remarks of the three speakers will appear in our following issue, 10/185.

Arnold Jacob Wolf

I want to be rather more personal than Nora, if I may, and I guess even less optimistic. When I looked over the things that I have written and thought about in the last ten years, I was surprised and frightened to see how often I was right. Twenty years ago I started a project on the Holocaust which was the first in the country - also the first project in the havurah movement-and we memorialized and studied the Holocaust for a weekend every year. It was one of Elie Wiesel's first appearances and a very important break-through. I have now come out the other end. Having been one of the first to believe in the importance of thinking about and experiencing the Holocaust, I am now convinced that most of what has been done about it has been the wrong thing, the wrong time, by the wrong people for the wrong purpose. Again I was right about Cambodia when I said that Nixon and Kissinger were not only mistaken but criminal. I think if nothing else the Shawcross book proves that to be right. I was right about the college students. I wrote about them so early that I could publish the same article in the New York Times three years later and still be accurate if depressing. I was right about the peace initiative from Egypt about which I published in Sh'ma just days before Sadat came to Jerusalem. I felt this partly because I'd been in Egypt and it seemed obvious to me that this had to be coming soon though my correspondents didn't think so.The real question is not so much whether I was right but why. I think there are some answers, one of them not being that I'm more brilliant than most of the people who didn't agree with me, but that I had better teachers than they did. From birth I had Felix Levy as a teacher, from the age of eighteen, I had Abraham Heschel as a teacher, and from very little after that I had Martin Buber as a teacher -- mostly through his books but also on several important occasions in person. And one of my fears for the next generation is that you don't have teachers like that because there aren't any. The influence of these people was simply over-powering in my life as it cannot be for anybody who comes at a later time in history. And if you see what they said, you will see where I got it.

Our Starting Point Is Our Teachers

The agenda of Martin Buber is still absolutely current. Every issue that Nora mentioned is in his book and treated presciently. Heschel was little more restrained but talked about these things where he didn't write about them. He certainly knew as very few people did what was going on not just in the civil rights movement but in Jewish circles themselves and in intellectual life in general. And my uncle and teacher, Felix Levy, who was of course much less well known, was at least a generation ahead of his time. And it is from these people that I learned. I said nothing that was not simply an extrapolation of what they had taught me.

I was also very fortunate in colleagues, particularly Gene, and Steve Schwarzschild who have been my intimate friends for over thirty-five years now. With them everything that is said between us is often in an exchange of letters which cross in the mail. We are saying the same thing about the same issue even when we haven't talked about it before. That doesn't mean we always agree or disagree. But what we have learned from each other is, again, exceedingly precious and I think almost unheard of in this century. And I have also had the benefit of my family who argue well and constantly. We often come out at very different points but they keep me from making some bad mistakes. I take all of these three very seriously teachers, colleagues and family. I do not think without them it is possible to be right about things, whatever that means.

The question then for me is, since I am vindicated by history, why don't I feel better about it? And I don't. Why is there no satisfaction, even grim satisfaction, if nothing else at having over and over again been ahead of other people in pointing out what was going to be important to our community? I'm not sure that I know the answer to that except that it's very definitely the case. I happened a few days ago to I read a letter of Heinrich Mann's in which he says the same thing.Having been right about Hitler, and the whole period of the Nazis, having had the world come over to his view he reached a state of what he called in French -- the letter was in Frenc -- indifference. Something very much like that is happening to me. There is no pleasure, no elan in being right. It does not lead to anything. It is in some ways the most discouraging of all possible outcomes. I do not mean reward, you understand. It is not that I wasn't recognized as a prophet. If your teachers are Buber and Heschel and Felix Levy, you don't expect reward. You know in advance that's not in the cards. In fact, you'd be very frightened if there were any organizational honors forthcoming. It's something deeper than that. It is not something that people have not done, but that I have not done.

Judaism and Humanism Increasingly Clash

What for the future, is a terrible collision between what we have believed and what the Jews believe - what we Jews believe. Between what may be called humane values and what are now construed almost everywhere as Jewish values. I'll give you a few symptoms of this terrible conflict which I see on the horizon and of which Nora has already spoken about in some particulars. It is no accident that on the same Sunday there is an anti-nuclear demonstration. and a parade for Israel; or that different people go to those two; and will increasingly drop one of these two issues. Those of us who have tried to keep together particularism in universalism or our concerns as Jews and our concerns as human beings, and, in some way, still try to validate one with the other, are finding it technically impossible to do and increasingly difficult to assert.

The leader of the student struggle for Soviet Jewry at Yale, a brilliant young man named Matthew, had the very good idea of becoming a leader also in Amnesty International, which is very important for the Jewish Soviet movement as well as the whole Soviet dissident movement. He went to a meeting and he found, as he came back to tell me, almost in tears: the Israelis are supporting Somoza -- is that true? For two or three hours I tried to defuse him and tried to explain away a terrible fact, "Yes, probably because the Americans want them to; I don't know why else." Here was a young man deeply concerned with Jewish values being confronted with the fact that the Jewish issue throws him into the wrong camp on some very important occasions, Somoza being only the least of them.

I was in Israel the very week that they raised the South African mission to an embassy while all the world was doing something else. Affirmative action is another relevant case. It is not simply that the Jewish organizations were on the side of Bakke. It is, I believe, technically true now that almost all the Jewish organizations and almost all Jewish individuals, on "Jewish" grounds are against any useful affirmative action. That's the kind collision which frightens me terribly.

Can We Balance Both Sides Much Longer?

I could give many other examples, but the attempt which I think was characteristic of Sh'ma perhaps more than anywhere else, of balancing both sides, is now coming apart. The great tragedy of Breira was not that we were prematurely right - and I think we were right - I think now we seem to everyone to have been right. The tragedy is that it was impossible even to think about those issues for almost all American Jews, on "Jewish" grounds. What I foresee in Israel is that they cannot ever accept perhaps even for good reason - the possibility of a Palestinian state, and that refusal means increasing terrorism, increasing repression and a replication in detail of the South African experience. That is what is coming. How does one who believes what I believe possibly reconcile himself to that? What do you do about that?

Perhaps that is what leads to indifference. You simply cannot deal with it coherently and keep your sanity. The representative Jew of the present day for me is Yeshia Lebovitz, an Orthodox Jewish scientist at the Hebrew University who has seen the inhumanity of the Jews and is furious and prophetic - perhaps more like Cassandra than like Isaiah. To read him is to experience again the terror of being a Jew in a world in which being a Jew often means being what you don't want to be. Humanism and Judaism, humane values, liberal values and "Jewish" positions are increasingly at odds. About this tragedy I welcome your advice and your consolation.