Stars of David (21 page)

“And similarly, philosophically, this tradition gives me the words and the instruments to break into the universal questions. And that's one of the things I tried to show in my turgid tome. You take this highly specific, highly particular thing, this concrete tradition, and you use it to break open the universal questions. That's what our tradition is for. It's not there to be smugly particular or to keep one in love with oneself. If the Jewish tradition is beautiful, it's not because it's
my
tradition. It's a great human tool. And everyone needs a tool.”

One crucial implement, Wieseltier believes, is the Hebrew language. “On the question of Jewish literacy, of the need for—and the beauty of— Jewish languages, of Hebrew, I'm an evangelist. I speak to American Jews about Hebrew till I'm hoarse. The first words my little son heard were Hebrew and I sing Hebrew songs to him and he got his first Hebrew books with his first English books.” Wieseltier's son is fifteen months old at the time of our meeting.

Why is the language itself so important? “Because I think to be a Jew is not to be an American or a Westerner or a New Yorker,” he replies. “To be a Jew is to be a Jew. It is its own thing. Its own category, its own autonomous way of moving through the world. It's ancient and thick and vast and it's one specific thing that is not like anything else. And though it converges with other identities and other traditions and other ways of going through the world, it's not them. And one of the ways Jews should go through the world is in the Jewish language. You cannot really know what Judaism is if you drop the Hebrew; it just can't be done. And the joke is: We have Jews who couldn't care less about this but would be absolutely scandalized if you suggested that they go to a performance of
Die Walküre
in English. They'd think you're accusing them of loving kitsch. They'd be absolutely outraged. And if you suggest that the drawing that hangs over their sofa is a reproduction, they'd get really offended. But their Judaism, at least from the standpoint of literacy, is a reproduction. And that's okay with them. It would be comic if it weren't tragic.”

It's implicit in our discussion that most of the accomplished Jews I'm talking to for this book wouldn't meet Wieseltier's standard of Jewish “competence.” I suggest that maybe it's because the most successful are kind of hyper-assimilated, and for various reasons dispensed with rituals along the way. “The question is does their assimilation have any integrity?” he asks. “I don't mind assimilation—we're all assimilated. In fact, assimilation is a good thing. It's about, what are the grounds for their Jewishness? What have they decided to be and not to be? What are their reasons? And the scandal is, they often don't have reasons. It's very lazy. They just don't care. And this is not worthy of respect.

“I can respect heresy, I can respect alienation, I can respect Karamazovian rebellion, even Oedipal rebellion (up to a certain age, when the statute of limitations on childhood rage runs out); there's some grandeur to all of that. Say you hate it. Say you hate your parents so much, you can only eat pork. Or deny that there is a God. Or say the Jews are stealing the air from your lungs and if you don't get out, you're going to die. Just say it and then we can talk about it . . . I don't mind renegades or apostates. Again, I really have a lot of respect for the renegades and the apostates and the angry ones and the bitter ones. Jewish history is full of such people. And there are good reasons to be angry and alienated. Sometimes I think that the synagogue is Judaism's lead bulwark against spiritual life. There are many reasons to be angry. And Hebrew school is a halfhearted effort that led to a halfway house that alienated more people than would have . . . but we're not talking about that. My point is that most American Jews are not renegades; they are slackers.”

So if someone says,
I go to High Holy Day services; I sit there, but the words
mean nothing to me?
“I say: Then don't go,” Wieseltier replies, “or learn the words. But what you just described is what I can't stand. If the words mean nothing to them, they shouldn't go. They don't go to Chinese opera either. But they're not prepared not to go, because that would involve accepting the responsibility for their tradition. Instead they want to inherit something passively, like all inheritance. So I say to them: Don't go, and deal with the paltriness of your Judaism. Or, if you're sincere in your complaints, take two weeks out of your busy and sophisticated year and
learn the words
. That's all. And then come back and tell me that it's still so boring.

“The truth is that anger is a form of connection. So anger's fine. The great freethinkers in modern Jewish history were people with whom believers always talked and debated. Because they
knew
what it was that they turned away from. You can spend hours arguing with someone who completely rejects what you completely accept because you both know what you're talking about and it's a primary discussion.”

But if someone who values their Jewish identity yet doesn't practice its traditions says,
My Jewishness is just a part of me—it's who I am, it's in my blood
, why doesn't that count for something?

“Then I would say to them, ‘That's fine; but you have just admitted that your Jewishness is a trivial fact about you. And you won't be insulted if I consider it a trivial fact about you.'”

Wieseltier's bottom line is clear: His disappointment is not that Jews are marrying out of the faith or assimilating beyond recognition, but that their Jewishness is flimsy. “Basically there are two questions,” he says. “The survival of the Jews and the survival of Judaism. I don't worry too much about the former.”

Why not? “Partly because history gives me a paradoxical hope, and partly because I have a mystical confidence in the eternity of our people. When I regard all the things that have happened to Jews and to Judaism in all of Jewish history, I come away bitter, of course, and angry, of course, but also astounded by our perdurability. And we've been in much worse shape than we are now. Many, many times. I don't like Jewish hysteria. In fact, I think hysteria is sometimes used as a way to avoid having the toil of Jewishness. Some American Jews think if you want to be a good Jew, all you have to do is worry. Worry will do the work of your Jewishness. There's this game that Jews play: Who worries most? And whoever worries most wins. Whoever is the most hysterical is the most faithful. It's stupid.”

But even if he's not himself worried about Jewish survival, does he understand the obsession with Jewish continuity? “Of course. There should be an obsession about continuity. But there's something even about the word ‘continuity' that's so cold and formalistic. It's sort of a kind of real estate term or something. Continuity of what? The fashion for klezmer: That's continuity, too. But as far as I'm concerned, that's also discontinuity. Because the Jewish tradition is essentially a verbal tradition, and no amount of clarinet playing—or Carlebach singing, or John Zorn screeching—is going to disguise that fact.

So the question remains: continuity of what, exactly? What matters more and what matters less? In American Jewry, what matters more tends to be the aspects of the tradition that are less intellectually taxing and more emotionally immediate. I understand why our leaders and rabbis worry about the rate of intermarriage. But let's say that more Jews start marrying more Jews. Then what? There's still the question of the happy couples' relationships to the tradition. Is it enough that Epstein married Rosenblatt? I guess that's something. But then what do Epstein and Rosenblatt do next as Jews? I don't like tribalism. I don't like tribal definitions of identity. Jews should not think the way Serbs do. The sick joke about tribes is that all tribes think that they are chosen people. Too much of our talk about continuity and too much of our anxiety is tribal anxiety.”

Wieseltier also bemoans a phenomenon he calls “Jewish self-love.”

Which means?

“The smugness that Jews feel about themselves as Jews. They're in love with themselves.”

I propose that maybe this self-congratulation has something to do with Jewish survival—the fact that Jews had to build themselves up over the centuries because they were in danger of being wiped out.

“Yes, but it has to be earned. The love has to be earned. We're taught that the highest form of love is unconditional love, but that's wrong. The highest form of love is conditional love, because if you're still being loved, that means you're earning it. It has a foundation in what you really are. I don't want to be loved no matter what I'm like. Such love is insulting, except from parents. Which is to say that unconditional love is a form of infantilization. No one should ever want to be loved the way their parents loved them. Except by their parents. That's a working rule of adulthood. So do Jews want to love themselves? Fine, but it has to be a conditional love.”

I wonder if Wieseltier thinks anti-Semitism has, in part, been born of that perceived smugness and what he labels self-love?

“No. I don't think that one seeks the cause of anti-Semitism in anything that Jews are like or not like. I think that's a basic mistake. I think if you want to understand anti-Semitism, you study the non-Jews, not the Jews. If you want to understand racism, you study whites, not blacks. The idea that you study Jews or blacks is itself an expression of prejudice.”

But he must have encountered Jews—most of us have—who felt ashamed of other Jews.

“I know. I understand it psychologically, though of course I don't take kindly to it (except in certain cases: We have our villains, too). It has to do with immigrant communities, it has to do with the memory of immigrant parents. There was a writer in New York in the 1950s called Harvey Swados. He has a story—you should find it; it's so painful—about a young Jewish man whose father is a peddler and has a pushcart on the Lower East Side. I forget the story exactly, but the young man finally convinces this really swell chick from a well-to-do Jewish family to go out with him; and they have dinner and it's all fine, and they go for a walk, and suddenly, to his increasing horror, the young man sees that at the end of the street where they're walking is his father with his pushcart. And he doesn't know what he's going to do. And when they get to the pushcart, he walks right by his father and doesn't acknowledge him. It's excruciating to read. But I understand it psychologically; status anxiety is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon. The status anxiety of the children of immigrants we know a lot about. The Muslim communities in America are about to start experiencing this, and good luck to them.”

This reminds me that he was married to a Muslim—a Pakistani woman—for eight years; not an obvious match for someone whose Judaism has been so central. For the last three years, he has been married to a Catholic woman, Jennifer. “My wife's a convert,” he explains. “Orthodox. The advanced degree. Often I'm envious of converts because they made a decision; the rest of us were just born Jewish. A lucky accident, a lucky honor. But when you make a decision, you must have reasons, and when you think about your reasons, they deepen. Kierkegaard somewhere said that it is harder for a Christian to become a Christian than for a non-Christian to become a Christian. The same may be said of Jews.”

So, despite what he describes as his “erotic relationship with Judaism,” he never married a Jew?

“No. Jennifer converted. So I guess I never did.” Isn't that surprising? “Well, my mother once said, ‘Don't you feel that you have to marry a Jewish woman?' and without being at all ironic and without missing a beat, I looked at her and said, ‘If I hadn't been given the finest Jewish education in the world, I might have had to marry a Jewish woman.' I don't need anyone to be Jewish
with
, and I have no interest in making love to myself, if you see what I mean. I don't need two of everything. And so I tell all my Jewish friends looking for love and marriage, ‘If you can't find a Jew, make a Jew.' I mean, it's a big, wide world. Conversion is a very beautiful thing. And I take personal freedom and democratic life very seriously. (Anyway, I never hold myself up as a model of how to live.) It happens that you fall in love with someone you're not ‘supposed' to marry. That's called living in an open society. I understand why the Jewish community and the Jewish tradition want me not to marry such a person, and when I married such a person, I never told my parents that I was right. I always said to them that I recognized that by the standard of our tradition, of our law, I was wrong. But that is not the only standard by which a rational and democratic person lives. So what was by their lights a betrayal was by my lights a collision of principles. It's a very complicated thing.”

But he didn't fret about it?

“No. I didn't fret about it because if I was the only Jew on the planet, Judaism would still survive. I mean, it would survive as long as I survived. And any child I would have made would have been taught to know Jewish words and ideas and customs well. I don't have any doubt about my competence as a Jew. I have a princely confidence as a Jew. This is not vanity—I know how much I don't know and I know who knows a lot more than I do and I know where they are and I ask them questions all the time. But I took the trouble of acquiring the knowledge I would require to live thickly as a Jew in the entirety of my tradition. And I do so not least because I wanted to acquire this confidence, this authority.”

And his and Jennifer's plans for this new Wieseltier?

“He will go to a Jewish day school. No question about it. Many years ago a wise and lively man, a liberal judge in Boston named Charles Wyzanski Jr., remarked to me over a lot of brandy that the only people who have freedom in matters religious are people who were indoctrinated in one as a child. And I think he's right. So I want my son to be completely fluent in Hebrew, in Judaism. And when he grows up he can decide for himself what he believes and how he wishes to live. If he leaves, it won't be ignorantly. If he stays, it won't be dilettantishly.”