Near where I live, there’s a roadhouse where the restaurants always fold after two years. My wife and I actually knew one of the owners. They kept failing, and a long time ago my wife said, That intersection is cursed. For that reason, I sometimes said that she had cursed the place; and out of compassion for the owners, I urged her to lift the curse. She said that the secret of lifting a curse was simple. I begged her to explain this. (My wife has much more religious understanding than I do, she’s been studying "wisdom traditions," as new-agers call religion, since she majored in anthropology). After some resistance, she said that a curse was lifted when the cursed one stopped believing in the curse. They had to stop believing it themselves. All the restaurant owners heard that the corner was cursed–even in casual conversation–and the belief worked like a worm in their minds, and destroyed their efforts. This is why the fans of baseball teams who have been struggling with curses hold up signs saying "Believe"; they want the players to believe they’re not cursed any more. In fact, I think my wife has the ability to curse me; because I ascribe wisdom to her and believe her declarations about me. I thought my father had cursed me too, and I did a ritual to lift that curse.
I thought about this this morning when I was reading Elliott Abrams saying that a !–
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"covenant with God… imposes special obligations upon [Jews]" to their community.
I’ve heard about our covenant with God since I was a kid: We are chosen. And I recognize this as a Jewish belief that I must have, because I was told it again and again by people I trust, as they pounded ancient books of wisdom. It was a mythology but a very powerful one. The other day Netanyahu told 238 Jews who had immigrated to Israel that Israel is the most advanced nation in the world. And New York Magazine just wrote about the monthly email Jews send one another about the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes. (“Remarkably, Jews constitute almost one-fifth of all Nobel laureates. This, in a world in which Jews number just a fraction of 1 percent of the population.”)
The Jewish mythology about these powers is historical. It arose in the late 19th century for psycho-sociological reasons that Slezkine lays out in the Jewish Century (and Kafka laid out in his letters to his father and his Catholic girlfriend). Belief in Jewish God-granted powers is a powerful belief; for the idea of specialness has lifted Jews incredibly. Though today I’d say that exceptionalism has become a curse.
