I’ve had two refuges at the present phase of my life. To both I’ve repaired for weekly shelter from the main lines of my work, its thinking and varied obligations.
So what for me constitutes the Life Obligation from which I’ve welcomed these time-outs? It’s the Jewish Calling. What is that? People, whether Jewish or not, describe it differently, but one time, long ago, I was vouchsafed a clear and unmistakable vision of the thing, as it applies in my own case.
I was standing on a New York subway platform, changing from a West Side train, waiting for an East Side train to take me home from a talk I’d gone uptown to Columbia University to attend. The talk was given by a philosopher who’d been hired in midcareer at the initiative of my father. Since then, he’d become a family friend and as such had spoken at my father’s memorial service.
That being the background, I’d been amazed at the tenor of his presentation at Columbia. It had been salted with anti-Jewish sentiments. The views he expressed were simplistic and ignorant, yet delivered with a faux “childlike” simplicity, as if he’d no suspicion that anything coming from a good-hearted giant like himself could conceivably be taken in ill part.
The subway platform seemed as good a place to pray as any, so I asked, looking up at the cavernous darkness overhead,
Lord, what is a Jew?
The answer, soundless but unmistakable, came to me in these words:
A Jew is someone
who has a passion for God.
I pressed the question:
What sort of God?
The answer was more discursive, so I’ll give it as it came to me – as a kind of explanation. It’s the God who sees us as we live and make our choices on the timeline of our lives: how we decide what to wear in the morning or what to eat, how we form and express opinions, how we meet the specific, concrete challenges from day to day. Not the God of transcendent pole-vaulting above and over our earthly condition. It’s the God who is our Witness, the One who sees who, where, and how we are.
And what, I asked next, is an anti-semite?
An anti-semite is someone
who hates that God.
The definitions I was given that afternoon in the New York subway have proved surprisingly useful. On one occasion, they even gave me advance warning that someone was about to turn anti-semite before the person had given any outward sign of doing so.
Now for an update. No doubt because life on the timeline — the historical life – can be burdensome, I’ve particularly valued opportunities to get vacations from it. For respite, I’ve looked to providers who deal expertly with innocent Nature. In recent days, chief among these have been my acupuncturist and a young woman with a rare skill in interpreting communications from a horse I’m riding. I express a concern personal to me, the horse whisperer walks alongside and, by the horse’s gait or choice of pathway, she transmits what seem like apposite responses. With both of these providers from innocent Nature, the protocol has been that I give voice honestly to whatever’s really been on my mind.
At the last session I had with the acupuncturist before we left for California, I spoke of my concerns about the Israel/Gaza war.
He is usually very tactful so I was surprised to hear him ask me, “Aren’t Jews [essentially] wanderers?”
Of course, the “Wandering Jew” is a myth-figure, a cartoon-like denizen of the anti-semite’s imaginary world. I haven’t read much about this caricature, but I assume the anti-semite’s picture is of a figure who is deprived of a homeland as punishment for the imaginary crime of being a Jew. The wandering would be a punishment – one that Israel-haters are super-eager to impose, of course.
By way of reply to my acupuncturist, I started to fill in the chronology for what I supposed must be an honest mistake about empirical history. The scholarly consensus about dates for the Exodus, the First Temple period, the Second Temple, its destruction, the Bar Kochba rebellion, and so on till Israel’s post-Holocaust 1948 Declaration of Independence and U.N recognition.
Perhaps you will be less surprised than I was to face the wall of resistance – of non-listening and non-hearing – that this otherwise kind and well-intentioned man was putting up as I cited these widely-accepted facts of empirical history, ancient and modern. I don’t think he heard a word I said. Certainly he didn’t take it in.
And the horse-whisperer? She was at pains to tell me of her “neutrality” as between Israeli women who had their babies ripped from their wombs and the jihadi killers of babies. Between innocence and manifest evil – evil that bragged about itself to the whole world – she was proudly “neutral” and wanted to make sure I got the message.
And by the way, what was the message? I had taken Nature to be a refuge from History. But now it’s coming to seem that there is no such refuge.
As the old spiritual has it:
I went to a rock to hide my face,
The rock cried out –
No hiding place –
It’s really too bad. Hiding places have been some of my favorite places.
Related Content: Friends in the Teeth of History
