Posted on 09/25/2005 5:38:59 PM PDT by Alouette
On a recent visit to Israel I was asked if I was proud to be a Jew. I found the question absurd, not to say grotesque. "I only feel pride in my achievements, not in the accidents of heredity," I said.
Predictably, my answer obviated further discourse; but it also revived half-digested ruminations about my connection to Judaism ("who" is a Jew) and my penchant for it ("what" is a Jew) – if any.
As a journalist, and lacking the capacity or urge to embrace – let alone champion – any political cause, I am content to agitate against the rigidity of all extreme convictions, whether from the Right or the Left, from Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Character, upbringing and circumstance have protected me from entrapment by irrevocable doctrines.
Patriotism, "the last refuge of scoundrels," is an incongruity, a hideous emotion from which I recoiled even as a child.
Truth is I have never felt the remotest sense of allegiance to any state, prince or potentate. I love France, where I was born, the way a child loves to rummage through a toy chest, with wonderment and anticipation. I adore Paris, my hometown, with every hedonistic fiber of my being. But this infatuation is wholly Epicurean, not tribal. It evokes no special loyalty or sense of indebtedness. France's ingrained anti-Semitism, its spineless surrender to extremist Islamic influences have helped temper my verve. Nostalgia has given way to annoyance and disappointment.
To this day, ancestral Romania, where my parents came from and where I lived for four years, elicits distant and disturbing memories of a vacillating, mercenary nation given to political harlotry.
Israel, where I spent the best five years of my childhood, inspires no feelings of kinship or obligation. I resent its theocratic governance and deplore its leaders' inability (or unwillingness?) to make peace with the long-suffering Palestinian people.
Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, maddening and electrifying, New York, where I meandered for 40 years, has done little more than contribute to an "Americanization" of habit and convenience. Like Paris it fascinates, titillates, captivates and bewitches. Like Paris it excites the senses and stimulates the intellect. But I never fully embraced it, felt a part of it. It can never be home. I've grown accustomed to all of America's comforts and prodigalities, none of its core values.
My late father, who was born in Sighet and wore peyot until the age of 14 or 15, grew to view religion as a travesty – he called it "faith by force and psychological extortion" and nationalism "a heady tonic for the dim-witted and the bellicose." He practiced medicine during Israel's most difficult post-Independence years and later moved to America where, like me, he found ease and plenty, and very little emotional fulfillment.
On those very rare instances when I am asked to disclose my origins (or allegiances), I respond, without affectation, that I am "stateless." No swagger or romanticism is implied, only an admission that I feel alienated from the world's constituent parts. In this self-view is encapsulated a fierce rejection of any form of nationalism. Of all synthetic human emotions, chauvinism – national or spiritual – frightens me most.
Deep inside me linger indescribable and omnipresent sentiments reaffirming a Jewish identity. But I have no religion and the feeling, nebulous, impalpable and unlikely to culminate in some exalted state, must die with me. My sons, born in America, hopelessly assimilated, overwhelmed by life's labors and constraints, will not likely revive it.
I recognize this insensitivity, this detachment from some basic ethos for what it is – a sickness of the soul. I take no pleasure in this infirmity.
As for Israel, one does not make a second aliya at my age. I've thought about it. But I concluded, as have many American and European Jews I know, that only a healthy and preponderant secularism could redeem a nation presently orchestrated by rabbis.
Religion is divisive and exclusionary, despotic, self-absorbed and intolerant. It belongs in the home, and in houses of worship. It has no business in city hall, in parliament, least of all in the shaping of an all-purpose collective psyche.
Until that monstrous symbiosis in which religion and politics intersect, merge and feed upon each other – as they do in Israel – ceases, many among us in the Diaspora will continue to view Israel as little more than a historical eccentricity apt to elicit feelings of excruciating ambivalence and angst.
The writer is a veteran journalist and a former press officer at Israel's Consulate General in New York (1992-94). He is currently on assignment in Central America, where he covers politics, the military, human rights and other socioeconomic themes. He lives in southern California.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
This is one sad Mofro.
Be there a man with soul so dead,
who never to himself has said'
This is mine own
My native Land.
I guess there is--too bad,
I understand exactly why he feels the way he does, and it's easy to explain...
He's a French, secular Jew. The secular, French part hates the fact that he was born Jewish, and his belief that he's tainted from birth makes him both miserable and a real shmuck. On the other hand, his being a shmuck could be from his being French too...
Mark
The fruits of postmodernism
You took the words out of my mouth. It reminds me of my college days, when I regretably had to read Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, and a swarm of other Existentialists, and I wondered why they didn't just pull up their socks and get a life.
"It is enough for evil to triumph that good men do nothing."
Though this writer needs to make bast improvements in both knowledge and ethics to qualify as a good man (who is doing nothing).
Congressman Billybob
Latest column: "The 'Hard Bigotry' of Incompetence at the NY Times"
In other words: He is no loger a jew, if he ever
was one in fact and not just in name and affectation.
Like many NY Jews Nad almost ALL the HollyPuke "Jews".
They aren't reallt jews at all..not and do what
they do. Not and say what they say...Not and believe
what they believe...No...They are no kind of jews at all.
He is partly right--it was a sickness of the soul. But no longer, for his soul is clearly dead.
Because we are just adrift on an angry sea, seeking to survive as best we can as we are blown here and there.
(I used to be able to say that in French)
Regards,
This putz was a press officer at the Israeli Consulate in New York. And people wonder why their public relations suck?
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
So? Without religion, no one has any basis on which to condemn any of these things . . . or mass murder, for that matter.
It belongs in the home, and in houses of worship. It has no business in city hall, in parliament, least of all in the shaping of an all-purpose collective psyche.
Too bad Moses and Joshua didn't think of that. [/sarcasm]
I thought this was a Chuckie SShooomah thread.
I will never figure this out.
Regards,
Pathetic, but very common, unfortunately.
He’s a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land...
Get caught in an Arab Terrorist hijacking or bombing and he'll see how fast he becomes a Jew. In the eyes of the haters.
As he insists that he belongs to no group or owes no allegiance he admits to what worships and where he belongs.
Who was it, Koppel or Jennings, who said he would not warn US soldiers of an ambush?
They all consider themselves the modern Priesthood to the Truth god.
They make and break reality.
They are Journalists.
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