During these eight days of Passover, I feel so angry about all the unjust antisemitic acts that are occurring against the Jews all over the world, but particularly, because it is being discussed so much in the news I receive, against the Jews in the United States. And although much of the flow of these acts was precipitated by the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre, one can ask why it is that the horrible acts of violence by the governments in Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar and China never elicit equivalent levels of outrage from outsider groups and international organizations including the United Nations. Particularly when the violent acts by the governments in these other countries are not defensive the way they primarily are with the Israelis, at least in the Israel-Hamas war. Nowadays, the world is exploding with irrational condemnations of Israel for the simple fact that Israel is fighting for its survival. And as for the so-called innocent Gazans, three quarters of them support Hamas and what Hamas has done to the Israelis in terms of the massacres on the kibbutzes and the taking of hostages. And as for the problem being Netanyahu’s leadership, about three quarters of the Israelis support continuing the war until Hamas is destroyed. Most Israelis want to remove Netanyahu from leadership, but not until the war is over and Hamas is defeated once and for all.
Meantime, back in the States, it has become dangerous in many of the prestigious universities like Columbia, Yale, N.Y.U., University of Michigan, U.S.C. Emory, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago, for Jewish students to attend classes. Pro-Palestinian protesters are camped out at many of these schools and are making it practically impossible for Jewish students to move about their campuses without being harassed. The Orthodox rabbi of Columbia advised his students to move back home and to study virtually, because it was getting so dangerous at the school itself. One news commentator on television remarked that all these anti-Jewish activities on university campuses signaled the end of the golden age of the Jews in the United States.
And so it goes. People said that the United States would be the exception to the rule of inevitable antisemitism. That the country that was the beacon on the hill, the exceptional country, would never be ravaged by the horrible disease of antisemitism in the way it is manifesting itself in the States now. There have been episodes of antisemitism in the past in the States, but, to my knowledge nothing like now.
All I can say is “Et tu Brutus”, “Et tu America”. Tradition has it that the Jews are a people apart, a people that will never be fully accepted by its neighbors. So many times the Jews as a diaspora people have been seduced into thinking that they have at last been accepted by the home culture among which they dwell and then what happens. Spain happens. Germany happens. To use a metaphor, after many years of digesting our presence, they start to gag on it. No one seems to know why really, and most Jews just accept the traditional explanation that we are meant to be a people apart. I would say that is an explanation that really doesn’t explain very much. What is it about the Jewish people that ends up bothering others so much? I would say that although Jews make good loyal citizens wherever they reside, there is a large part of them that remains culturally apart. It is like they have done the impossible: create an intellectual grounding from their holy books such that they are protected both from the incredible undifferentiation that occurs from all the organic stimulation that is present in a traditional natural living environment and they have evolved in such a way that they are protected from the sensory distortion created by all the free-floating figures in the experiential vacuum that surrounds them. In the instance of the traditional natural environment, the traditional Jewish religion sets up so many different rules for connecting with their living environment and for the people who inhabit it, that the rules meld together into a cohesive whole. When a person has to follow 613 commandments, it is, in my opinion, too many for the person to even come close to remembering separately, both cognitively and consciously. Rather than remaining defined discrete commandments they meld together into a flowing blendable continual whole way of life where each aspect receives an implicit unconscious direction.
As for being able to survive among all the sensory distortion to be found in a modern technological living environment, the melding together of the rules of life found in the Jewish religious books forms a defined discrete entity that develops a parallel existence to that of external world reality. At this point, I am going to bring in another metaphor that I have used at different times throughout the existence of my column. I’m talking about the use of delimited and nondelimited numbers. The list of all the positive delimited numbers is: 1,2,3,4,5……etc. These are defined discrete integers that never merge with one another. One can never make an effective list of all the positive nondelimited numbers. There are so many nondelimited numbers that they just seem to merge together to form a continuous line. Interestingly, it can be shown that there are more nondelimited numbers between 0 and 1 than all the delimited numbers in the world.
Now if regular law represents all the delimited rules for most people in everyday life, Jewish law represents a special set of delimited rules that are so encyclopedic in scope that they create an artificial grounding as it were. The rules are so tight together dealing with so many of the minutia of everyday life, that they have almost no vacuum holes in the spaces. In effect, the Jews have created more than a set of laws. They have created a grounding. A grounding that exists separate from the everyday grounding of everyone else. And this grounding exists in the back of the minds even of the non-religious Jews. And this separate grounding gives Jews a sense of living separate from everyone else. Such that other people feel they can never really control them. But from the perspective of their separate grounding, Jews are seen as being able to control other people. Which lays the foundation for many conspiracy theories with regard to the Jews. And ultimately a lot of hostile behavior from the non-Jews.
Anyway, all this explains why the Jews are a people apart both in terms of their unusual intellectual grounding and in terms of the reactions of other people to it. This grounding is both an asset and a curse. And it will continue to be present as long as Jews continue to exist.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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