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July 28, 2006
To Be, or Not To Be, Chosen
In the Corner Jonah put up an intriguing quote about chosenness from Leo Strauss, that relates both to history and the current troubles, reconstituting the spiritual notion in historico-political terms.
Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions. From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem insofar as it is a social or political problem.
It garnered an interesting reply from a Corner reader: Jews and the Gnostics
From the point of view of Christians, the Jews are indeed the chosen people, and Gnostics hate that because they hate history. History is free, meaning that it is the arena of human freedom and responsibility. Creation is a free act of God, and being created in the image of God is being created in freedom, and one has to freely accept that freedom & the responsibility that goes with it. Gnostics, like pagans generally, believe that freedom is irrational and history is meaningless. They can't stand the idea that God is free, that he has freely chosen the Jews, that through them he has taught us that human responsibilty matters- in fact, that everything matters.Gnostics (and a great modern example is Yale University's Harold Bloom-
Omens of the Millenium) cannot accept that the evil in the world comes
from free human actions under the judgment of God. Their attitude is:
It's not my fault- it's the Demi-urge's fault, it's the government's
fault, it's that people are not enlightened, etc. So they seek one of
two solutions: either they escape from history through various mystical
practices, or they attempt to stifle freedom by the imposition of some
kind of totalitarianism.
This piece, at Drink Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War, also has an interesting resonance with the original quotation.
Drawing from the Romantic notion of the 'noble savage' uncorrupted by modernity, German volkisch thought idealised the simple peasant farmer who in some mystical sense shaped the landscape and was in turn shaped by it. This married easily with traditional anti-Semitism, for who else could serve as the very incarnation of this ideal's antithesis as the eternal wandering Jew - cosmopolitan, secular, and - perhaps above all - landless? Yet today we are being told that the only problem anyone has with the Jews is that they now have land - because it was taken from another. So different, yet the same. For many, but by no means all, there is an underlying theme that echoes down millennia and not merely centuries: the common denominator is the question of existence itself.
Alcibiades | 07/28/06 at 10:29 AM | Categories: - Comparative Religion
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Comments
Yes, well, true, but every Jew I know (and I assume my co-bloggers) would rather just get to be a human being than have to be a symbol.
But it has recently been born in on me that the two overarching values of Judaism are:
1) making discriminations (i.e. not conflating things which are different just out of laziness) which means using discernment and wisdom (which is why we pray for it 3x/day)
2) personal responsibility (a corollary to #1 - you must finely discern to figure out where responsibility lies, and be responsible in doing so.
All the rest is commentary.
Judith | July 28, 2006 11:48 AM
I don't see how choice comes into it, though.
It's either BS or true on some plane of ill understood theological necessity.
In neither case is choice really operative.
As to your second point, a great deal of halakhah is about making extremely fine distinctions between things that otherwise are very easy to bunch together. And which effects the way you categorize your your sphere. So I agree.
Though speaking of not wanting to be made a symbol, I read a very odd book about the Holocaust earlier this month, which was an attempt to do just that; even, in extremis, at the concentration camp, the protagonist refused to become a symbol.
Did I say it was odd? It was very odd - made odder still by the fact that I reading it while floating on top of a pool on one of those raft thingies - but that is just a dislocating aside.
The book was Fatelessness, by Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize. Essentially the thesis is the polar opposite of the Last of the Just by André Schwartzbart. Which tells you the difference in the temper of the times between now and then.
Alcibiades | July 28, 2006 06:30 PM
"I don't see how choice comes into it, though."
True, but we can still protest being made into symbols!
Judith | July 28, 2006 07:11 PM
The Corner reader may be interesting, but I think you'll find a lot of straw in his Gnostic man, a shame it seemed as I was thinking about Gnosticism in the history of development of our expectations.
michael | July 28, 2006 11:12 PM
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