Before October 7, 2023, the anti-Semite was a type I seldom encountered. I can remember the very first time the phenomenon came my way in an academic setting. A philosophic colleague of my late father was scheduled to give a talk at Columbia University. My father had facilitated his transfer from a philosophy department at a pampered suburban college to the more real-world department at Hunter College of the City University of New York. The colleague’s Columbia talk was to address some issue in the philosophy of religion.
I planned to attend because Roy had become a family friend. From time to time, he and his wife would come to dinner at my parents’ New York apartment and, at least once in summer, they visited my parents where they had a home in Maine. More recently, Roy had given one of the eulogies at my father’s memorial service.
Most who attended were likely as appalled as I was by Roy’s talk at Columbia. What he did was lift certain incidents from the dense and varied pages of Hebrew Scripture (the “Old Testament”) to paint a portrait of Biblical people – and Jews by extension – as blind bigots. Seen from the current state of Biblical scholarship, Roy’s speech was crudely unsophisticated. But it made a virtue of its scholarly weakness, delivering its findings as if the speaker had approached his text naïvely and was now trusting us, seated with him at the seminar table, to share his astonishment at all he’d just found out.
One thing I knew:
It was not a speech
he would have delivered
had my parents been alive.
Likely, it was a trial run. Soon he’d be giving that speech, or one like it, all over town. Roy got to be well known for the speech. And he seemed not one wit deflated – energized rather – by the anger and disappointment voiced by Jewish professors at the event I attended.
On the trip home, I had to change from the west side subway to the east side line. While waiting for the Lexington Avenue express, I took the opportunity to ask God a few questions.
First, looking upward to where my eyes met the dark, shadowy, recessive ceiling of the lower platform where I stood, I asked,
What is a Jew?
Though the response that came to mind was silent, it was detailed and precise. A Jew is someone who has a passion for God. But for a God of a certain kind. Not the One in whom one gets absorbed, homogenized and blended. Rather, the Jewish passion is for a God separate from the Jew who loves God. It’s that separation – that very distance – that allows God to see us. We become visible precisely because not everything is One. God can see the sorts of things we need (like toothpaste, for one example) and how we meet our needs. In the separation opened up by our non-homogeneity with the Creator, there is space and time sufficient for all the surrounding beings and people. In that setting, our choices unfold, step by step, one after another, chronologically. It’s the narrative of us. Our stories unfold visibly.
Oh, I see.
Well, if that’s the Jew,
what is an anti-Semite?
An anti-Semite is someone who hates God – in God’s historical aspect. And of course hates the Jew for reminding the hater of the storied reality of the human self.
That revelation, if such is what it was, fitted my personal experience. Often I’ve been able to sense when someone, a friend say, was about to become an anti-Semite. Not always of course, since Roy did surprise me. But I’ve sensed when the pieces of that person’s life were ceasing to cohere, or to impart a reason to go on. The hatred of the God who sees that and, so to speak, has allowed it to happen, can easily be deflected onto the Jew whose relation to God presupposes human visibility.
The anti-Semites now swarming over campuses like Columbia’s, wear masks, often as not. No doubt they share the fond belief that, if their faces are hidden,
God can’t see them!
All I can say is, shrewd move, fellas. You’ve really got God fooled now!
