When Jews’ Historic Virtues Become Pathologies

Pick
Aug. 19 2021
About Ruth

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

Reflecting on the subject of Jews and power, and the particular discomfort that many Jews appear to have with the military power Israel uses to defend itself from those who would destroy it, Ruth Wisse shares a joke:

Two Jews in a wagon are traveling along a narrow country road when suddenly their horse rears to a stop. A boulder is blocking their path. The Jews begin trading ideas on what they ought to do. As they sit there deliberating, another wagon approaches from the opposite direction and stops across from them. Two peasants jump down, roll up their sleeves, and heave the rock out of the way.

“There’s goyish thinking for you,” says one Jew to the other; “Always with force.”

The joke, which comes from an early-20th-century Yiddish humor collection, is but one example of a whole category of Jewish jokes, which, as Wisse explains, reveal much:

What better way to introduce the thorny question of “Jews and power” than with those who turned the problem into a joke on themselves? These Yiddish humorists had good reason to think themselves more advanced than the surrounding peasantry: they were literate, well-educated, and nonviolent, qualities representing a higher stage of civilization. The premise of both jokes is that, unlike those others, Jews of their kind do not resort to force. Yet in each case they, not the peasants, are the butt of the humor, precisely because they don’t use physical means—not when they’re appropriate to remove the obstacle and not when they’re necessary to confront the threat.

These jokes are wonderfully witty tributes to a society whose learned jokesters were so intellectually agile they could hold contradictory ideas without losing their moral balance or their sanity. They are also insiders’ jokes. In turning the jokes on themselves, the humorists acknowledge that the vaunted habit of talmudic thinking is useless when physical effort is called for; that nonviolence, however praiseworthy, can become contemptible cowardice when others aggress against you. In their own idiom, these Jews pass judgment—affectionate censure—on their unsuitable relation to power.

Read more at Sapir

More about: Jewish history, Jewish humor, Zionism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society