"Rabbi on a narrow bridge" tries to throw the great Shlomo Sand into the boiling cataract, but only adds strength to Sand’s argument. Rabbi’s argument that We are a people is politically based (he is trying to anchor Israel’s sources of strength in the diaspora) and yet his actual personal account hardly shows that Jews are a people. What connection does he really demonstrate to the Moroccan Jew? in the story below. What his story does underline is that we are a great religious civilization, just what Sand said. I did just what Rabbi did when I visited Cairo recently, I visited the synagogue, and bought trinkets and books. But peoplehood, nationality, as Sand demonstrates, are political definitions, in a world of nations, drawing on unifying identity sources such as language, food, culture, and geography.
Here’s Rabbi on a narrow bridge, helping me out (he writes poetically, in short paragraphs, but my software didn’t let me import the paragraphs)(oh and hat tip to Alex):
Two years ago Josephine and I visited Tangiers for a day, popping over from the South of Spain on a speeding hydrofoil for a couple of days away from Carmi who was quite happy playing on the beach with his grandfather. What did we do? We looked out for the Shul, the Jewish trinkets in the market, we went looking for the notions of kinship. I wasn’t trying to touch people who had the same ‘Jewish gene’ as I do. Because I don’t believe that Judaism exists in the genes. I wasn’t even trying to find a minyan or a kosher butcher I could use to fulfil various religious requirements of faith, as important as religion is in my Jewish identity I was trying to connect to people who connect to Jewish peoplehood the same way that I do. People who wanted to stand in the same edah, People who wanted to be part of the same kehillah. In many ways I was doing exactly the same thing Binyamin MiTudela was a thousand years previously, though my journey from Morroco to Spain would have been speedier than his. And I know this sort of tourism, This sort of seeking out connections, to our past, our present, our future, is at the heart of the identity of so many of us here. And has been part of the identity of Jews for, not hundreds, but thousands of years. So what is the point? Sand is wrong, factually misleading and blinded by his desire to strip from Israel its Jewish nature. But he’s not the first person to try and write off the Jewish people, he’s not even the first Jew. So what? The point is this. We ARE part of a people, a great and mighty people with an extraordinary great, mighty and LONG history.
“We are a people a great and mighty people with an extraordinary great, mighty and LONG history.”
So Rabbi, why should we fuck that all up with a cheap colonial gambit? And if we’ve lasted this long without an Israel, why do you think it’s so necessary? Maybe cause they give Rabbis temporal powers?
You are so right, Rabbi, we are a great people and a great religion, so why throw it all away on Israel? And you know what Rabbi, I’m probably not half the good Jew you are, but I’ll trust to God to protect me, and if He doesn’t care to, well, that’s the breaks. Of course, I see that He really has no place in your calculations.
I’m not Jewish.
As a ‘people,’ I guess I emerged from the froth of the sea and just recently: since I’m not Jewish, I guess I don’t have a part in the rootstock of humanity.
Or maybe there are TWO roots of humanity, one Jewish, the other All Other.
The rabbi seems to have no interest in the rest of humanity and its history. His world is occupied only by Jews.
Me, I’m just one of the herd. If anybody wants to listen.
“Or maybe there are TWO roots of humanity, one Jewish, the other All Other.”
The Talmud quotes should start pouring in. There’s probably some Hebrew buzz-words involved, but you might have it just about right.
Love it, Mooser.
Mooser, you oughta’ take a look at that rabbi link Phil gives. For all the rabbi’s stated education, he suffers from a serious logic deficit taking Sand’s book apart. Did he even read the thing? If he did, and this is the best he can come up with denigrating the book, he’s delusional.
RE: “…I’ll trust to God to protect me, and if He doesn’t care to, well, that’s the breaks. Of course, I see that He really has no place in your calculations…” – Mooser
MY COMMENT: “G-d” certainly had a place in “Reverend” John Hagee’s calculations when he said that “G-d” sent Hitler (the great hunter) to herd the Jews into Israel!
A fine sermon indeed – put me to sleep after only a few lines. I’ve bookmarked it under “soporifics” (despite a couple of distracting errors at the very beginning).
Shmuel, I call it the rabbi’s playing with his short and curlies.
Yup, with Zionism as your pharmocopia one is never short of soporifics or emetics.
ANd as far as logic goes, ZIonism works pretty much like modern advertising. First they determine what gives them the reaction they need, and only then do they try to fit the facts to it.
RE: “And I know this sort of tourism, This sort of seeking out connections, to our past, our present, our future, is at the heart of the identity of so many of us here…” – Rabbi on a narrow bridge
MUSICAL INTERLUDE (courtesy of the caring folks at Ziocaine™:
I did my best to notice
When the call came down the line
Up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
And sometimes I get nervous
When I see an open door
Close your eyes
Clear your heart…
Cut the cord
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I’m on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human?
Or are we dancer? ….
The Killers, Human (04:19) – link to youtube.com
P.S.
“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” [by Friedrich Nietzsche] pronounces explicitly the superiority of the dancer over the higher men: “You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance—dancing away over yourselves! The dancer has his ear in his toes.” That is, the dancer—as both described and exemplified by Zarathustra—recognizes the intimacy by which he is bound to life and earth, and his body is willfully attuned to receive their teaching. – from A Dancer’s Virtue: Human Life in Light of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence
PDF, 18pages – link to publications.villanova.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: he was the spirit of gravity–through him all things fall…Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I learned to fly: ever since, I do not want a push before moving along. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.” – from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (trans. W. Kaufmann), p1 s7 ON READING AND WRITING ”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.III, On Old and New Tablets, §23, p. 322
On the subject of Sand’s book, I haven’t read it yet (hope to pick it up in Israel), but I’m fine with Jews (or anyone else) believing they are a people – and I think valid arguments can be made either way. The problems begin when such definitions result in chauvinism, discrimination and worse. As for debunking the returned-people-in-exile basis for Zionism, that particular argument is legal, moral and logical crap, whether Jews constitute a people or not.
When you do pick it up, Shmuel, dont be put off by the first few chapters, assuming the Hebrew version is like the US version. He spends an inordinate amount of ink/time declaring his definition of a ‘people’ and the derivation of its meaning. Then you’re off to a rollicking romp. If you go to the website for the book, there’s a vid of his appearance at NYU last October. About 90 minutes. He’s a great character, so if you’re cleaning up your desk or doing some boring manual work, bring it up and listen.
I found the very beginning to be the heart and soul of the book. By that I mean the rather lengthy introduction, with its short biographies of various Israelis, living and dead, all with some tie to Sand, whether as a relative, a friend or a student. While all of them are Israelis, they all share an exclusion from the created nationality of Jew that defines Israel. Some are Palestinian, some are Russian immigrants, some are those who don’t consider themselves Jews, although Israel defines them as such.
I see Sand’s book as a reasoned cry for Israel to accept the idea of an Israeli nationality and peoplehood, and forego its insistence on a “Jewish” nationality that excludes and isolates those of its citizens who do not fit this construct.
TREE- I would also love to see Israel become a state of its citizens, at peace with its Arab neighbors. A home for the Jews who choose to live there, but not a Jewish state. Alas, this would have profound consequences for Zionism, the ideological underpinnings of the Jewish state, as well as for American Zionism and its network of U.S. organized Jewry (Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, etc). Additionally, even among non-Zionist Jews there appears to be a strong emotional attachment to Israel as a Jewish state. Add in U.S. Middle East geo-strategy and you have an extremely volatile mixture. The interrelated dynamics of Jewish identity, Jewish kinship, and Zionist ideology and how they relate to Israel is a subject of inquiry I have tried to broach in other threads, but to no avail. It will be interesting to see how the situation resolves itself. The first priority should be to end the Gaza blockade. Perhaps the next step could be for Israel to recognize the Palestinians’ right to exist in their historic homeland.
” his definition of a ‘people’ ”
I’m glad someone has got a definition for it. I’m struggling to work out what it is supposed to mean. Up to now I have to agree with Shmuel.
” As for debunking the returned-people-in-exile basis for Zionism, that particular argument is legal, moral and logical crap, whether Jews constitute a people or not. “
I completely agree, Shmuel. Sand’s book might be very interesting – I hope it is – but Jews are entitled to feel like a people. When I’ve met Jews while traveling in Australia or Mexico, I felt some sort of kinship and would be dismissive of someone who challenged my right to those feelings. I would never criticize someone who felt it stronger than I do or not at all. But my perceived ethnic heritage, whether authentic or not, does not entitle me to rights or privileges over others, which is the very essence of the Jewish State.
Shmuel, the point isn’t that Jewish people aren’t a people, the point is that any people shouldn’t lie about the facts of their own history.
There’s no doubt that the Jewish people are a people. But if that definition ends up predicated on the same sort of mumbo jumbo that fueled “Aryan” mythology in Germany, what does that leave you?
Truth matters.
To the best of my knowledge, all peoples, nations, religions etc. lie about their histories. Jews would be no exception.
Just so long as people acknowledge what’s a fairy tale, and what isn’t.
Just so long as people acknowledge what’s a fairy tale, and what isn’t.
That would take all the fun out of it now, wouldn’t it ;-)
Normally, I’d agree with levity like that Shmuel, and you’ll forgive me for being morose, but… people are being murdered for the sake of Israeli mythology.
RE: That would take all the fun out of it now, wouldn’t it ;-) – Shmuel
MY COMMENT: KAOS is such an unrepentant ‘party pooper’!
RE: “…people are being murdered for the sake of Israeli mythology.”- Chaos4700
I REPEAT (FACETIOUSLY): KAOS is such an unrepentant ‘party pooper’!
FROM URI AVNERY (VIA BERNARD AVISHAI): …Herzl passed from the idea of individual assimilation to what may be called collective assimilation: if there is no place for the Jews in the new nations, then they should define themselves as a nation like all the others, rooted in a homeland of their own and living in a state of their own. This idea was called Zionism.
BUT THERE was a problem: a Jewish nation did not exist. The Jews were not a nation but a religious-ethnic community…Herzl had to ignore this difference. He pretended that the Jewish ethnic-religious community was also a Jewish nation. In other words: contrary to all other peoples, the Jews were both a nation and a religious community; as far as Jews were concerned, the two were the same. The nation was a religion, the religion was a nation.
This was the white lie. There was no other way: without it, Zionism could not have come into being. The new movement took the Star of David from the synagogue, the candlestick from the Temple, the blue-and-white flag from the prayer shawl. The holy land became a homeland. Zionism filled the religious symbols with secular, national content… The first to detect the falsification were the Orthodox Rabbis. Almost all of them damned Herzl and his Zionism in no uncertain terms….
….When the State of Israel was founded and the Zionist dream realized, there was no further need for the white lie. After the building was finished, the scaffolding should have been removed. A real Israeli nation had come into being, there was no further need for an imaginary one….
…LIKE MOST of us at the time, David Ben-Gurion believed that Zionism had supplanted religion and that religion had become redundant. He was quite sure that it would shrivel and disappear by itself in the new secular state….
….BUT THE white lie of Herzl had results he did not dream of, as did the compromises of Ben-Gurion. Religion did not wither away in Israel, but on the contrary: it is gaining control of the state. The government of Israel does not speak of the nation-state of the Israelis who live here, but of the “nation-state of the Jews” – a state that belongs to the Jews all over the world, most of whom belong to other nations.
The religious schools are eating up the general education system and are going to overpower it, if we don’t become aware of the danger and assert our Israeli essence. Voting rights are about to be accorded to Israelis residing abroad, and this is a step towards giving the vote to all Jews around the world. And, most important: the ugly weeds growing in the national-religious field – the fanatical settlers – are pushing the state in a direction that may lead to its destruction….
SOURCE – link to tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com
Chaos,
This is an inherently depressing blog. Without a little levity, it would be unbearable. Behind my levity however, was a serious point. All peoples, nations, religions and ideologies have mythologies and fairy tales, which are the raw material of human culture. Sometimes (far more than most of us would care to admit) we mistake them for truth and sometimes we actually do find truth in them. Unspeakable crimes have also been committed in the names of these mythologies, but we really can’t live without them. I’ll leave it to VR to explain the consequences of the contemporary myths and fairy tales (the myth of “progress”, to name but one) that ensure our belief and support for the very system that is killing us.
My apologies, my capacities to be polite, whimsical, bellicose or dour are not under conscious control, so in terms of emotional state, I tend to be a bit of a craps shoot. :)
At any rate, and not to get all serious again, thank you for the linking this article. It’s very astute.
The problem is when people begin to kill in order to defend their lies.
Chaos,“Just so long as people acknowledge what’s a fairy tale, and what isn’t.”
Ha. Try getting certain Americans — especially hyperventilating anti-immigrationists — to acknowledge that this country was under 75% Spanish rule from 1514 until 1803; actually, it more like 82% rule for the first 200 years. Most Americans believe the fairy tale of the Pilgrims coming to the US and running it. The Pilgrims were a bunch of religious fanatics and criminals who got here a century after the Spaniards and wanted to build churches. The Spaniards had huge sailing fleets and were trading up and down the western seaboard and buying/trading pelts with the Indians as far up as Vancouver Island and Campbell River BC before going over via Russia to trade with China. The myth of the cowboy riding his horse and herding cattle wouldn’t have been possible without the Spaniards: they brought the horse and cattle to the US.
Shmuel-
“As for debunking the returned-people-in-exile basis for Zionism, that particular argument is legal, moral and logical crap, whether Jews constitute a people or not.”
I assume you mean by “basis” and “argument”- the basis of the argument for the rights of Jews to displace indigenous (Palestinians), in which case I see your point. And given the conflict that Zionism has created it is appropriate that the displacement aspect of Zionism is foremost on your mind. Yet Zionism does contain another aspect- that of keeping the Jewish people alive both physically (more relevant before WWII than it is today) and spiritually. In those terms the returned-people-in-exile is not crap.
(I understand that the “exile” aspect implies a conscious exiling regimen which did not exist in strict terms for the 1820 years from Bar Kochba until Ben Gurion, but I consider the term “exile” to still be relevant.)
WJ: I assume you mean by “basis” and “argument”- the basis of the argument for the rights of Jews to displace indigenous (Palestinians), in which case I see your point.
That is correct. To the extent that there ever was another kind of Zionism, it no longer exists. Furthermore, Zionism has usurped and instrumentalised Jewish mythology (including the themes of peoplehood, exile and eventual return) to the extent that even that hardly has separate relevance today. If the point was “keeping the Jewish people alive both physically and spiritually”, Zionism has failed miserably. And I take that failure very personally.
I’ve been wondering about the concept of Ummah, if there are any Muslims, Arabic-speakers or others here who can elaborate on the subject. Is there more to it than simply all members of the Islamic faith? Is there an aspect of “peopleho0od” to it? How does it compare to the Christian concept of the Church as the “body of Christ”?
regarding the ‘body of Christ’ concept, I think that’s pretty specifically religious and has no ethnic or national connotation at all. In post-Vatican II Catholicism, it is my perception that the doctrinal notion of body of Christ got a little squishy and a lot humanistic. We used to sing several hymns around the theme of body of Christ, and the gestalt seemed to be, we are all one human family.
Now that I think of it, those hymns were typically sung at Communion time, and Communion was an exclusionary sacrament: you had to be ‘one of the tribe,’ in good standing, even, to approach the Table of the Lord. So maybe the “we are all one human family” idea was just a figment of my longing, but not of the Church’s intent.
Growing up, I was taught that you couldn’t go to Commuion unless you were sinless–this meant you had to go to Confession, honestly tell the priest all your sins, and then
do penance, prayers for forgiveness. It meant you then were in good standing with God, as an individual human being–tribe had nothing to do with it at all. Certainly
ethnicity was irrelevant, as was citizenship. Catholic does mean universal if memory serves. I left the Church forever mentally when I was an altar boy, when adults knelt down and stuck
their tongues out to receive the cardboard wafer, “the host,”, the “body of our Lord.”
Katholikos does mean universal, but I think that was just an early example of branding and marketing. Both Benedict XVI and John Paul II, for example, have referred to the Crucifix as a “universal symbol” – whether you like it or not. As a non-Catholic living in a society with a deeply Catholic majority – in a cultural more than a religious sense – I can tell you that Catholicism certainly has its tribal aspect. A Polish, Irish or French Catholic – “lapsed” or otherwise – is a member of the tribe in a way that I will never be. Fortunately for me, tribes intersect, and I have plenty of planes on which to relate to my fellow man.
Yeah, but Shmuel, if you wanted to be a Catholic, all you have to do is convert. Then you’re part of the tribe. But, if you lived in Berlin, you couldn’t be a German Catholic because you weren’t born in Germany; at one time the Germans very finicky about this. Same with France. And this is the point that Sand makes. Those countries have a sense of nationhood that excludes you from that definition because you weren’t born there. You can be a Catholic all you want, but you can’t call yourself a German or a French one. (Sand’s point is that people who are born in Israel, or who grew up there from childhood, should be Israelis, whether they are Jewish or Christian, Druze or Muslim. And he says that being Jewish is not enough, even if it is based on biology and (now) dirt, because Jews around the world come from different cultures and languages and food choices and world experiences and it is not sufficient to call them a ‘people’. He says at the very least, a ‘people’ speak the same language, and have a common culture.)
On the other hand, you can come to America and be an American Catholic in short order. All it take is US citizenship and your previous conversion to Jesus and the Pope, and eating fish on Friday.
I don’t know. I do know that, as far as I know, just because your mother is or was a Christian or Muslim
doesn’t automatically make you one too. Am I wrong? I was raised Christian, and my mother was a devout Roman Catholic, but neither I nor anyone I know considers me a Christian today. My Father went along for the Christian ride with my mother; but I think in his heart he was agnostic–he said a few things indicating so near the end of his life, after my mother had passed away. I think it’s only natural to feel some immediate warmth, and to assume some values/ethics when meeting people who
you know very likely appreciate some of the same things you do, whether that feeling relates
to ethnicity, place of birth, of upbringing, of schooling, of socio-economic class, of style, of cuisine, of shared comfort foods, etc. Religion is one more area of
such “instant” familarity (or Not, as also with all the other attributes).
Isn’t the Christian concept of the Church as the “body of Christ” taught as a metaphor? Is the Ummah similar? Mabye I’m wrong but, e.g., that egg donor law
in the Israeli parliment seems to clearly identify Jewish mothers as the sole, indisputable carriers of Judiasm. And doesn’t the Jewish law of return appear similar? Although even that’s problematic, as some Jews consider themselves “Jewish” even though they are avid atheists or consistent agonstics. I can’t think
of a closer analogue to being “Jewish” than being “Aryan”–is that view misguided?
It can’t possibly all come down to a preference for matzo balls versus sauerkraut, can it? When “Israel” is simultaneously a metaphor and a state with nuclear weapons and a vaunted millitary force, and that state’s declaration of existence
says its citizens rights and state activities will be governed by the prophets of Israel–
what are to make of that? I’m sure nobody here wants to see a repeat of the Crusades, no matter what form such activity takes in the present world.
The comparative Christian concept is “Christendom,” which has been a long time obsolete.
But rather than defining “a people”, the Umma and Christendom represent a space which includes a wide variety of different peoples; it is a unifying concept, based on diversity and difference, not sameness.
Potsherd: But rather than defining “a people”, the Umma and Christendom represent a space which includes a wide variety of different peoples; it is a unifying concept, based on diversity and difference, not sameness.
I could make a very similar argument about Judaism. There will however (in all three cases) always be those who are in and those who are out – otherwise such distinctions would be meaningless (the strongest argument against Vatican II, by the way).
I’m not Muslim but several members of my family are due to conversions to Islam (it is a popular religion to convert too according to my “demographic”).
I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time living in a few Middle Eastern countries and visited several Muslim majority countries in Africa and South Asia.
From what I’ve gathered about the concept of the “Ummah” is that it refers to the Islamic identifying community and to a broader sense all of humanity.
The word Ummah comes from the word “Um” meaning mother in Arabic.
Now this doesent mean that all Muslims are in agreement with this ideal. Many Muslims believe that all of humanity is included in the Ummah while some Muslims believe that only Muslims can be considered to be a part of the Ummah.
Either way the concept of Ummah isint something that is discussed on a daily basis, at least amongst the Muslims I know. Its not a litmus test that one must pass to be considered superior or inferior despite what people like Daniel Pipes would like us to believe.
Likewise other inclusive and exclusiveness concepts such as “Dar-al Harb (House of War)” and Dar-al Islam (House of Islam) are phrases I’ve never ever heard a Muslim mutter, yet virtually every neocon think tank insists that the Muslim world views the world through these dialectal lenses.
See, these are the sort of conversations I really like to come to Mondoweiss to read.
Thanks, Mr. Bradley, Shmuel, Citizen, potsherd and PG.
Thanks, James. Are you sure that the Arabic ummah comes from um-mother? The Hebrew cognate ummah (and ithe var. le’om – Ar. laam) means “nation”, and probably comes from a root meaning “to group”, unrelated to the Hebrew em.
I sense something similar in the concept of Ummah and the Christian concept of the Church (or body of Christ), in that there is both a narrow, “tribal” aspect to it and – especially in liberal circles – a universal aspect, embracing all of humanity. That is not to say, of course, that humanity actually wants to be embraced by the body of Christ or the Ummah.
James Bradley, did you read Nir Rosen say the same thing about Dar-al Harb and Dar-al Islam; actually, he sneered at the supposed usage.
It’s a rollicking quick read.
link to thewashingtonnote.com
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I think it is relevant to ask whether Americans are a nation based upon definitions of this sort. Food choices- obviously not. Language- parts of Flushing Queens are exclusively Chinese speaking and Spanish language choices are obvious exceptions to this rule. Even land- in what way are Hawaii and Alaska related to the “lower 48″ except by arbitrary sovereignty and a flag.
WJ – America is different. You’re American as soon as you get your citizenship. Period. The US and Canada are the only places I can think of where you become that ‘people’ instantly by virtue of your citizenship.
Food choices, language, common culture were offered as part of the definition of a “people”, not as part of the definition of a “nation”.
Americans are not a nation.
The U.S.A. is a nation. That is, it is a political organization of a particular type. Americans are the citizens of that nation. And all the citizens together are the American people.
The Commonwealth of Australia is a similar sort of political organization. Australians are citizens of that nation. All of the citizens together are the Australian people.
On my passport it says “Nationality: Australian.” As far as I am concerned, that is the only sensible way to think of nations and nationality.
Now tell me why it matters whether or not Americans, or Australians, or any other group you care to mention, are a “people” in the Sand sense.