Author: Sherwin Wine

So What Is A Jew?

The question is eternal. Its latest dramatic appearance was in the Supreme Court of Israel. The judges had to decide whether the two children of a Jewish papa atheist and a Gentile mama atheist were really Jewish. The Court decided 5-4 that they were.

And then the fireworks.

The religious leaders of Israel threatened insurrection – Arabs or no Arabs. The decision, they implied violated not only the halakha, the orthodox rabbinic law (which decrees that only the children of a Jewish mother are Jewish), It also subverted the unity of the Jewish people. Israel would end up with two kinds of Jews – “Supreme Court” Jews and “kosher” Jews – and neither would be able to marry the other. Is this the time, said the rabbis, to arrange for disunity? The action of the judges was less than patriotic. It should be reversed.

The secularists, in turn, threatened counter-insurrection if the government yielded to orthodox demands. They hailed the decree of the judges. After all, a modern nation like Israel should enjoy the separation of church and state. It should be free of the medieval regulations of medieval rabbis. Let the religious play their religious games among themselves without imposing their silly rules on everybody else. The decision must be sustained.

Poor Golda Meir.

With at least eighty million fanatic Arabs surrounding the country and crying for its destruction, the time was the wrong time for an internal fight. The Prime Minister knew that national unity was indispensable. Although she approved the Court decision, she did what she thought was the patriotic thing. She sponsored a new law in the Knesset which would clearly spell out the right of orthodox rabbis to decide who was Jewish. The orthodox cheered; the farbrente secularists swore resistance; and the military defenders gave a sigh of relief. As for the Ministry of Interior (which registers all citizens) it could continue to do legally what it had always done.

So did Golda do the right thing?

Before we can answer the question, we have to clarify the issue. So much has been written on the Shalit Case (it was the two children of Navy Commander Benjamin Shalit and his Scottish bride who were involved); and so much uninformed discussion has taken place, that the real question is obscured.

Here is some relevant information.

The issue is not whether the Jews are a religious group or a nationality.

Both the orthodox and the secularists agree that the Jews are a l’om, a nationality. The religious authorities have never maintained that being Jewish is primarily a matter of religious belief. How could they? The rabbinic criterion for Jewishness is neither cultural nor religious. It is racial and familial. As long as a person is the child of a Jewish mother, his religious beliefs and cultural habits are irrelevant to his Jewish status.

The religious authorities in Israel know full well that most Israelis repudiate rabbinic law and that thousands are opposed to all forms of organized religion. They also know that a high percentage of the population are announced atheists and agnostics. The founders of modern Zionism were, to say the least,secular humanists who believed that the Jewish people must be rescued from their rabbinic past. The heroes of the Israeli state, from Theodore Herzl to David Ben Gurion, resisted clerical intrusion. But the Jewishness of all these people has never been called into question. Even if all Israeli Jews decided overnight to become Buddhist monks, don saffron robes, and chant Hebrew sutras every Friday night, their Jewish Status would be unaffected. They might be bad Jews. But Jews, nevertheless.

In fact, the Orthodox criterion is broader than the official state standard. Several years ago when a Catholic monk, Brother Daniel, who was born a Jew, demanded automatic Israeli citizenship, he was denied it. Although, by orthodox law he was still Jewish and, therefore, entitled to immediate naturalization, the state authorities improvised. They stated that formal conversion to another religious community removed all Jewish privileges. But they left the matter ‘up in the air’. It was never clear whether the state was saying that Brother Daniel had ceased to be a Jew, or whether they were punishing him with a kind of secular excommunication for not being a Jew in good standing. Certainly, had he formally joined the Communist Party, which publicly rejects the validity of all kinds of organized religion and publicly ridicules all forms of religious ritual, his Jewishness would never have been called into question. It is obvious that conversion to Catholicism is unforgivable for other than religious reasons. Perhaps, hostility to historic enemies is the real reason. If so, vengeance is hardly a respectable amendment to the orthodox law.

Regardless of this state exception to the rabbinic standard, both the pros and cons agree that the Jews are, first and above all, a nationality (like the Irish, the French, the Arabs, etc.). But they disagree on how an individual, who is not born a Jew, can become one. The secularists insist that any person who wishes to identify with Jewish culture and Israeli citizenship should be entitled to become a Jew. The traditionalists insist that only a person who is willing to undergo the orthodox ceremony of conversion is entitled to become a Jew. The practical implication of the orthodox stand is that no individual can acquire Jewish nationality unless he is willing to pass a test conducted by orthodox rabbis. It would be as though a person could not become an Irish national unless he passed a test conducted by Catholic priests, although thousands of native-born Irishmen are non-believers.

The issue is not religious belief.

Neither the Shalit children nor their mother have been refused orthodox conversion because they are avowed atheists. No orthodox authority is asking the Shalits to believe in traditional Judaism. They are only being asked to participate in a brief and perfunctory religious ceremony. The boy must have blood drawn from his circumcised penis and be dunked with appropriate prayers in a ritual pool. The girl only has to be dunked in a mikveh. Once the ceremony is over, they can all go back to their atheism. Having undergone the national unitiation ceremony, they are now entitled like any native-born, to be “bad” Jews. The ritual – not the commitment – is the thing.

The whole situation is ironic. In ancient times the Jews refused to worship the Roman emperor as an expression of their loyalty to the state. Sophisticated Romans deplored this obstinacy, after all, they said, no intelligent Roman really believes that the emperor is a god. It’s just a matter of patriotic courtesy. It’s just a matter of subordinating your individual integrity, for a moment, to an expression of national unity.

Now the orthodox Jews who hail the Akibas and the Bar Kochbas for their stubborn faith, are proceeding to recommend the same kind of public cynicism. Many Israelis are angry at the Shalits for their lack of subtlety. All the Shalits have to do is let their children be dunked for a moment, endure an instant’s worth of mumbled prayers, and then go happily ever after living as atheists. Why make such a fuss? Why be so selfish? Why cause-such a national furor over two minutes in a mikveh?

The upshot of the protest is that sophisticated ‘liars’ never get into any trouble. An atheist with an ‘intelligent’ conscience does his little orthodox thing and never gets harassed. Only the akshan, the stubborn man with integrity, gets burned.

The issue is not the complete separation of church and state.

If only it would be!

As you may know, control of marriage and divorce is entirely in the hands of the Israeli rabbinate. The only valid civil wedding ceremony for Jews is an orthodox one. No other ceremonies, reform, conservative, or secular, possess any legal power. If you are Jewish and you want to get married, you must fulfill the rabbinic requirements for marriage. If you are Jewish and you want to get divorced, you must do ‘the orthodox thing’ for divorce. Your personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Even if the Knesset did not pass a law to override the Supreme Court decision, even if the Ministry of Interior did not forbid an individual who was not born of a Jewish mother to list his religion as none and his nationality as Jewish, the practical benefits would be minimal. The only practical result would be eligibility for the draft, since only Jews can serve in the army.

When this individual went to get married, he would be treated as a non-Jew. He would not be allowed to marry a Jew born of a Jewish mother, even if his bride detested all forms of organized religion, and even if he had been wounded in the service of his country. His civil Jewish status would be of no avail in the religious courts. Only his willingness to play the game of orthodox conversion would give him his bride. But at the price of his integrity.

The issue is not Israeli citizenship.

The Shalit children are not being denied Israeli citizenship. They are not even being denied automatic Israeli citizenship. According to the new Knesset law, the children of non-Jewish mothers who are married to Jews, and the non-Jewish spouses of born Jews, are entitled to instant naturalization. They don’t have to apply and wait for citizenship like immigrating Arabs or non-Jews. Like born Jews, they get it right away. They suffer, however, four disabilities when they do become citizens. They cannot be registered as Jews even if they regard themselves as Jews. They cannot serve in the army. They cannot marry a Jew in Israel. And, most humiliating of all, they are classified as being of “foreign” nationality.

The distinction between citizenship and nationality is a difficult one for Americans to understand. Since there is only one permanent language community in the United States, we have made no provision for minority status. But in Canada and the Soviet Union where there is more than one major ethnic community with a persisting language difference, a legal distinction between French and English, Russian and Ukrainian, is necessary.

Israel is like Canada and the Soviet Union. There is a minority linguistic group which cannot be (and does not desire to be) absorbed into the Hebrew-speaking majority. The Arabs are one of two major nationalities in Israel. Although Israel is a Jewish state in which the Hebrew speakers are the overshelming majority, being of Jewish nationality is not equivalent to being an Israeli. Many Hebrew-speaking Jewish nationals live outside of Israel and are not Israeli citizens; and many Arab nationals are Israeli citizens without losing their identity with Arabs in other countries.

Therefore, to grant the Shalit children Israeli citizenship without Jewish nationality is to deny them the dignity of a status that almost every one of their friends will have. Since they do not want to be Arabs, they will remain part of a growing caste of ‘mongrels’ who hang in a kind of racial limbo, classified as ‘foreign’ and eligible to marry only each other.

There is no united opposition to the orthodox. The supporters of the Supreme Court decision are not united in their reasons and in their goals. There are three different groups actively supporting the orthodox tyranny.

(1) The reform and conservative Jews in Israel to not necessarily object to religious officials handling initiation or marriage. They would prefer a secular state. But they will settle for the inclusion of reform and conservative rabbis as civil officials for conversion and weddings.

(2) There are the ‘Canaanites’. They are represented in the Knesset by two flamboyant parliamentarians, Uri Avneri and Shalom Cohen. They want a secular state in which all distinctions between Jewish and Arab nationality are abolished. The only relevant civil status would be Israeli. The national language would be Hebrew. And all familial connections with the Jewish diaspora and the Arab hinterland would be severed. An Israeli nationality, which is neither Jewish nor Arab would be created. (How a nation in which everybody ended up speaking ,Hebrew would be regarded as non-Jewish – and would be acceptable to the Arabs – is a mystery to met)

(3) There are the ‘secularists’ who wish to retain the concepts of Jewish nationality and Arab nationality. Any Israeli citizen who wishes to identify with the Jewish people, to participate in its culture, and to use the Hebrew tongue as his everyday language should be registered as a Jew. He should also be free to marry anyone he desires in any ceremony he desires, without the interference of religious officials.

The issue is only internal and does not affect Jews throughout the world.

The decline of interest in religion, (whether orthodox, conservative, or reform) in the diaspora and the rise in intermarriage will produce thousands of secular Jews without orthodox credentials. The two largest Jewish communities in the world are in America and the Soviet Union. Shall young people who regard themselves as Jews and who have a positive interest in Jewish identity and secular Jewish culture, have to view themselves as non-Jews because of the current Israeli criteria. Can Israel afford to treat so cavalierly the only sources of potential immigration? In twenty-five years there may not be a Russian Jew who will be able to qualify for rabbinic Jewish nationality and in fifty maybe also American.

And what about idealistic non-Jews who are attracted to kibbutz living and Israeli idealism – and would like to become part of them. Shall they be denied Jewish status if they desire it – only because they refuse the Hebrew version of baptism?

The issue is not the unity of the state in time of danger.

Since the prospect of peace with the Arabs is unlikely for many years to come, the orthodox can postpone any rational change in the law forever. Anytime a reform is recommended they have only to threaten to take to the streets and they win surrender from the opposition.

The orthodox in Israel wield a power that their numbers do not justify. Only some 12 percent of the Israelis vote for the clerical parties. The ultra-religious Agula party, whose children rarely serve in the army, refuse to participate in a trade government. And the more ‘liberal’ Mizrahi party is not necessary for Golda to have a safe legislative majority.

Secular morale is equally as important as orthodox morale. After all, the heart of the military defense has come out of the kibbutz – not out of Mea Shearim. The defeat of the orthodox would not threaten the efficiency of those elements of the population who are most responsible for the defense of the country. It would most likely improve it.

It sometimes appears that the socialist and liberal indulgence of the orthodox parties is more a function of residual guilt than of political astuteness. If it is, the leadership is spending too much time dealing with dead ancestors than in attracting live immigrants. Israel does not need more yeshiva students committed to pious studies. It needs scientific professionals like Renjamin Shalit.

So did Golda do right?

No.

The Supreme Court decision provided an excellent opportunity for removing the orthodox shackles on Jewish nationality. The opportunity was lost.

Brotherhood Week Is A Bore

It’s February. And mutual expressions of mutual respect are in the air. Interfaith cliches vie with the propaganda of the American dream to decorate a thousand banquets in a hundred cities. Hordes of citizens are advised to ‘love’ everybody. And the most beautiful of human emotions is trivialized into some vague affection for anonymous strangers.

The anarchist legend is abroad in the land. If only good people could be free of wicked rulers who manipulate them to evil ends, if only the ordinary man could respond to the deepest needs of his authentic self, then brotherhood would be possible and all men would live happier ever after. Human nature craves brotherhood. But social institutions distort it.

To feel at one with humanity is as natural as eating and sex. It requires no intense self-discipline; it demands no immense self-sacrifice. The ‘real’ person liberated from the fear of social punishment, will prefer universalism to tribalism, human solidarity to family unity.

Is brotherhood natural?

It all depends on what you mean by ‘brotherhood’. If you mean a love and devotion to those you know intimately, the answer is yes. If you mean an attachment and loyalty to all mankind, the answer is no.

Desmond Morris is most likely right. In his latest book The Human Zoo he points out that, for most of man’s evolutionary history, he has lived in groups smaller than the clan. While it is true that man is disposed to cooperation, his cooperative instinct extends no farther than the hunting group. In an underpopulated world, loyalty to mankind was both inconceivable and at unnecessary. It had no survival value.

Without planned conditioning, a man will lay down his life to save his family and his ‘buddies’. A million years of adaptation to living through hunting guaranteed that instinctive sacrifice. But the human environment has radically changed. Ten thousand years ago the discovery of farming revolutionized the human condition. Surplus food and surplus wealth created the opportunities of trade, urban living, and technology. In ten thousand years man has so altered the scenery and props of daily activity that a million years of patient evolution is irrelevant to his survival. All the behavior patterns that are good for hunters are bad for computer age urbanites.

We cannot voluntarily return to the environment where our instincts are comfortable. To accomplish this feat, we would have to discard our present technology and kill off seven-eighths of the people on this planet. Only nuclear madmen would find the program attractive.

Unless man can reject his nature and feel empathy for people he does not know, he will be destroyed. Without world unity, and without a sense of primary loyalty to the mass of strangers called mankind, disaster is inevitable.

So what is the answer?

The answer, strangely enough, is to be found in the one existing institution that is the greatest enemy of universal brotherhood. It is called the nation-state.

Although the nation-state is the sponsor of the nationalism and chauvinism that subvert all rational attempts to control weapons, population, and pollution, it is ‘artificial’ – in the same way that world brotherhood will have to be ‘artificial’. As Desmond Morris aptly demonstrates, the modern nation-state is too large for the intimacy the cooperative instinct requires. It is a deliberate attempt to forge a unity among men that that transcends their natural empathy.

Unlike the hunting group, no Member, of any nationality can know all the individuals in his tribe, his loyalty is derived from no face-to-face encounter, no personal friendship, no continuous dependence. Once you get beyond the closeness of the family and clan, the national government is as impersonal as a world government – and nationalism is as ‘unnatural’ as universalism.

Then why is nationalism so popular and the nation-state so successful?

The answer is conditioning. If, as a child, you are conditioned to the illusion of intimacy, (even when it does not exist) – as a citizen, you can be led to imagine that the members of your nationality group are just like the members of your family, the age-old instinct for cooperation can be extended beyond the small clan.

After all, most nation-states were the deliberate creations of energetic rulers who, sought to mold a unity where none had existed before. Israelite, nationalism was the end-result of the state policies of David and Solomon. Twelve quarreling tribes and two confederations were subjected to the relentless propaganda of a fictitious common ancestry, a new national god, and the splendor of a national shrine. Later rulers introduced a common set of holidays, shared ritual, and a uniform external appearance of beard and ear locks. Even though one Jew did not know another Jew, the identities of language, clothing, hairstyle and ritual behavior were sufficient to create the illusion of intimacy. The stranger Jew was as familiar as father or cousin.

France and French patriotism were the conscious creations of the Valois and Bourbon kings, who centralized culture. They suppressed regional dialects and elevated the Parisian style to national eminence. Improved roads and trade enhanced their power and made uniformity more feasible. In time, the citizen of Rouen and the merchant of Toulouse spoke the same language, saluted the same flag, sang the same songs, and preferred the same fashions. If they met each other, even though they were strangers, they saw each other as familiar. By the days of Napoleon, every Frenchman believed that he had thirty million brothers, most of whom he had never seen. Such patriotic fervor may seem ‘natural’. But it isn’t.

The illusion of intimacy is the key to unifying groups of people bigger than the prehistoric clan. Without the uniformity of external appearance, speech, and behavior, such oneness would not be possible. Where personal friendship is no longer possible as a bond of brotherhood, easily Visible signs of identity are necessary. If the man cannot be my friend, he must, at least, look like my friend.

One of the purposes of group ritual, even something as trivial as the greeting ‘how are you?’, is to enable people who are strangers to each other to communicate and cooperate. Without these procedures, without these substitutes for intimacy, human relations in an urban society. would collapse. Awkwardness would produce fear and fear would promote aggression.

To be spontaneous at all times, to ‘do your thing’ in any situation, is to subvert social unity. It is to demand the privileges of family and friendship in an impersonal environment that can provide neither. Where the behavior of strangers is, in no way, familiar, loyalty and empathy are not possible.

Nations whose governments Only talk about patriotism, but whose leaders pay no attention to shared language, costumes, flags, and diet, have very little future. In fact, nations that encourage wide differences in language, symbols, and personal appearance, have very little future. They destroy the illusion of intimacy by which they alone survive.

There is a lesson for the advocate of world brotherhood in this reality. If the universalist missionary intends to build human unity. by promoting love, he is destined for failure. He is making a demand on the human nervous system that violates its evolutionary nature. How many people can one person genuinely love, even in friendship? How many people
can one man feel sincerely intimate with? Without intense closeness over long periods of time, human relations are shallow. And that means that most human relations, in an overcrowded, urbanized world, are shallow. Unless they can be formalized by familiar ritual, they cannot exist.

The current cult of pluralism which exalts diversity and difference is an attractive doctrine. It would be nice to live in a world where, every group could ‘do their thing’, where they could paint their bodies anyway they wanted to, dress in whatever costume suited their fancy, use whatever private language they were in the mood to utter, employ whatever public gestures they felt like displaying – and simultaneously bind the people of the world together through openminded toleration. The history of man denies this vision any reality.

The illusion of intimacy demands a certain minimum of visible uniformity. Men must be able to see their unity before they can feel it. There must be something that all men wear, all men say, all men sing, all men publicly respect, if they are to respond to each other as brothers. In the struggle for human unity (which is also the struggle for human survival) wide differences of external appearance and manner are subversive of the intended goal.

Differences of opinions and ideas are not the issue. These are internal, and are, ironically, more trivial. Where strangers must be united, the cliche must be reversed. What is on the ‘outside’ is more important than what is on the ‘inside’. A campaign for world unity starts with the visible. It seeks to establish certain clearly seen patterns of behavior and appearance that allow people of different cultures 1t0 view each other as alike. It avoids the pleasant fantasies of current democratic propaganda and does not try to make compatible what is incompatible. It simply accepts the reality that you cannot maximize individual and group differences and simultaneously foster world brotherhood.

World unity will only be possible if the following conditions prevail. Although they are less important than the issues of disarmament and nuclear disengagement, they are still necessary.

(1) The greatest barriers among the people of the world, are linguistic. Men who cannot talk together cannot live together with any real sense of identity. Ironically, language, which is intended to promote communication among people, frustrates its own goal. The defense of linguistic uniqueness is the most effective way one group shuts itself off from another. Most national governments insist on the exclusive use of the national language for all business and education. Even India is trying to replace universal English with parochial Hindi.

African countries, which are economically the most primitive, are linguistically the most progressive. Since they are often nothing more that collections of diverse tribes with diverse cultures, they are forced, for national purposes, to use either English or French, as their unifying language. The educational result is a more cosmopolitan citizen than the Arab to the north.

Without a world language, mankind lacks the audible substance of brotherhood. Right now, English seems the most likely
candidate for that role. To encourage the use of English in all international communication and as a second language in all countries may be simply a form of underhanded Anglosaxon imperialism. But it is also an act of world citizenship.

(2) There is a surprising unity of appearance among all people in the industrialized nations. International trade and easy communication have reduced the old differences between London, Moscow, and Tokyo. The fashionable housewife walking the Ginza looks very much like the suburban matron shopping Fifth Avenue. Contrary to current public opinion and the intrusion of the hippie style, the dress and decor of all classes in the wealthy nations are becoming increasingly more uniform.

The ‘rub’ comes in the have-not countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The material level of the local peasants and urban workers make their appearance and manner strikingly different from the affluent Western. If the prosperity difference between the rich and poor nations of the world continues to increase, the appearance difference will also increase. The American of the year 2000 will find it very difficult to identify with the contemporary Chinese farmer if his living style is as different from the Chinese as electronics is from night-soil. Compassion and empathy will surrender entirely to contempt.

Only if industrial countries are willing to inhibit the rise in their own standard of living, and share with the have-nots can this division be avoided.

(3) Goodwill missionaries usually deny the importance of race differences. They advise their listeners that race IS only skin deep and quite trivial. All men, they say, must learn to love each other, regardless of physical appearance.

But physical appearance is not trivial. The human nervous system is so constituted that it responds readily to what can easily be perceived. Skin-color, facial structure, and hair texture are more visible, and therefore, in the case of strangers, more significant than personal character. The races of the modern world are still essentially segregated and mutually hostile. Only widespread mescegenation can reduce this hostility. Only the reduction of visible differences can effect a sense of brotherhood. A world in which there is less racial variety is more desirable than a world which exalts group uniqueness at the price of human unity.

Praising visible differences is ideal for the sermon at interracial banquets. But it has little effect on human response. Reducing visible difference is more difficult. But it strikes at the guts. Without more and more interracial offspring, the illusion of intimacy will be hard to achieve.

(4) In a world of strangers, individuality will require good judgment. It will concentrate less on personal appearance and language and will turn to the less visible realm of ideas and values. The socially conscious individualist will be less concerned with personal flamboyance and more concerned with autonomous judgment. He will sometimes even cultivate-conformity of appearance, and ‘good manners’, while he seeks to change and improve the environment around him.

The socially responsible individualist will never underestimate the power of his appearance, manner, and language. He will seek to use them to express his unity with other ten – and not merely to indulge his personal whim.

So what will happen?

I don’t know. All I know is that a society that underestimates the amount of external sameness required for social togetherness will pay the consequences of a short-run individualism. We have to live in a world unrelated to our evolution. Only immense self-discipline will enable -us to survive.