A few days ago my wife and I went to a party and I got a little drunk and charmed the table. Our host had served me two vodka cocktails and then at dinner there was a lot of red wine. On the drive home my wife got upset with me for being obnoxious and I said that I was a talent and needed to express myself. For the rest of the night and the next day or so, she would say, “I get it—you’re a showoff, right, so you need to dominate a conversation? Isn’t that what you told me?”
One thing that set me off is that there were a couple of people at the party who are much more successful than I am in the media field (not to mention the Israel lobby) so my competitive instinct took over. My wife regards this as beneath me. One of the successful people was a writer who my wife wrote off as having no personality and being a suckup and a liar. A liar? My wife had asked her something about social life, and the writer said offhandedly, Oh I never see anyone, I haven't been out in a year. My wife said this was a flatout lie. The writer is a social type, it is completely obvious, and she obviously gets out all the time and just didn’t answer the question maybe because she regards our society as lesser or because her answer seemed clever to her. There was no sincerity, my wife said. And in turn my wife faulted me for a lack of sincerity, in my drunken holdingforthness.
I relate everything to my Jewishness, and I read this conflict in Jewish terms. The writer is Jewish and I am familiar with her manners. I grew up hearing and telling jokes about the value and pleasure of irony and deception. The famous Minsk Pinsk joke, in which one salesman accuses another of lying when he has told him the truth, was told at my dinner table. My wife doesn’t like irony. She grew up going to a Quaker resort where the three words on the dining room wall were Simplicity Sincerity and Service. I’ve come to respect those values. But can I develop them in myself, and do I even want to?
A friend advised me recently that I am struggling with the idea of chosenness. I associate New York success, that thing the three partygoers possess in greater measure than I do, with chosenness, and along with chosenness, spectacle: marketing, branding, performance. I don’t know that it’s altogether a bad thing. But chosenness is a real element in Jewish culture. You hear even secularized Jews mention the Jewish covenant with god; why, in the middle of an academic work called Capitalism and the Jews, author Jerry Muller states in passing that Jews have such a covenant—and I bridle, because the religious language is never interrogated, and neither is the sense of specialness that comes along with it.
RE: “A friend advised me recently that I am struggling with the idea of chosenness. ” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: There are some ads on the progressive/liberal talk radio station in L.A. for an upcoming film festival sponsored by Israel. The 30 second spot ends with the claim that the films being shown aren’t just selected, they are chosen.
RE: “You hear even secularized Jews mention the Jewish covenant with god…” – Weiss
SEE: ‘Dual Covenant’ Christians ~ Christian Zionists and the strangest alliance in history, by Jon Basil Utley, 08/02/06
(EXCERPT) The major internal conflict for the strangest alliance in history is about what will happen to Jews who don’t convert to evangelical Christianity. The Armageddonites, those 30 million Americans who happily see Mideast chaos as hastening their one-way trip to paradise, are being increasingly questioned about the fate of Jews whom they urge to help fulfill the prophecies.
Once their death wish agenda is realized, the end-of-the-worlders believe that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims (of course), other Christians (apparently including Catholics and Orthodox), and all the rest of humanity will be killed. But the born-again will be “raptured” to Heaven.
Now some enterprising Texans have “resolved” the big question. The Jews God kills will go to a parallel heaven, “their” kind of heaven, to enjoy eternity alongside the good Christians. The Jewish heaven will presumably be what “they” would like, perhaps different from the evangelical heaven, where there will be “no booze, no bars, and no need to mow the grass on one’s lawn,” according to a popular Gaither Singers song. (The fact that the Jewish faith has no afterlife at all similar to the Christian one is irrelevant, nor do the faithful Texans probably even know it.) It is called the “dual covenant theory” – the belief that Jews and Christians have separate deals with God. However, Muslims, Hindus, and others have no deal….
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to antiwar.com
RE: “the films being shown aren’t just selected, they are chosen.”
The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, May 8-13, 2010
LINK – link to lajfilmfest.org
FACEBOOK – link to facebook.com
P.S. I just heard the ad again, and I don’t believe Israel was mentioned. However, the website does show the seal/logo for the L.A. Consulate General of Israel (as one of the 2009 sponsors). I should add that I perceive the ‘not just selected, but chosen’ ending as a clever bit of humor (certainly not elitism or arrogance).
I can sympathize to some extent with how pressures and values within one’s cultural group can cause friction with people who group in other settings, and also how one can reflect on the true worth of those values when one internalizes them, for good or for ill. (I would go into detail, but every time I share personal information on this blog, frankly, I get burned. So.)
I think the fact that you are willing to analyze the dynamic of the cultural values you have grown up in, even as you indulge in them, is a good thing. Most people don’t bother with that sort of awareness and, I suspect if they did, it would go a long way toward ending the “clash of civilizations” we’ve been herded into by exploitative persons who ascribe to none of the values involved at all, regardless of what faith they profess to be.
I think you err entirely in running all of your personal issues through Jewishness. It ain’t necessarily so. Hell, even your brothers and sisters have mostly different issues than you. (Not from knowledge.)
Phil,
Something motivated you to seek to go to and excel at Harvard. It took work. You gave up something to pursue that. It was early in your life.
There was some motivation, I would say some vanity, that you chose to adopt.
Both irony and service attitudes are learned.
Irony, thy name is Witty.
Again, you don’t have a clue.
Again, you don’t have a cogent rebuttal.
Its not a matter of whether or not Phil “errs” in analyzing personal issues through his Jewishness.
The point is that Phil admits that he does view many if not all of his issues through a Jewish prism. He’s honest about it, he deals with it, and he tries to cope with it.
This is what makes Phil human.
Phil analyzes the world through his intensely personal window, his own preoccupations. That would be the honest presentation.
Jewish community for example is critical in Jewish thought. Phil is not active in Jewish social or religious community as far as I know, except to evaluate these few political themes. Most of them are of what others think of Jews, or could think of Jews, rather than the perspective of identity as an active and sympathetic part of the Jewish community.
You don’t have to agree nor are bound by any particular social or religious conclusion to be sympathetic. But, you do have to regard the community as important to continue and bear sympathetic understanding even with those that you disagree intellectually.
Ridicule for example does not indicate sympathy.
RE: “I grew up hearing and telling jokes about the value and pleasure of irony and deception…She grew up going to a Quaker resort where the three words on the dining room wall were Simplicity Sincerity and Service.” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: Both have their merits and demerits. Deal with it! Don’t ask me how. (lol)
My late wife was a Quaker, and told very funny jokes, more a life of party than I.
These days, I run everything through I/P, not Jewishness (which I don’t have, whoever my ancestors may have been), and am more a death-of-party. I get told to “cool it, not everyone is as CONSTANTLY CONCERNED with I/P as you are, get it? behave yourself in public, and don’t drink too much”.
As to my reaction to self-consciously Jewish behavior by Jews in public, I think there is a (as I react to it anyhow: triumphant, perhaps dominating) sense of, “Well, at last, one can be Jewish in public, so here I go with both barrels. We can use Yiddish words and tell Jewish jokes in public, AND MAKE THEM LISTEN WITHOUT COMMENT! What fun.” (HOWEVER: Perhaps I only think this is “in public”. Maybe they think of me as a Jew and think they are not “in public”).
Just listen to all the Yiddish on NPR, etc. (Do we ever hear Black slang used as if it were English? Spanish? And most important, do we ever hear any country but Israel spoken of–and spoken of constantly, and implicitly–as the best thing since sliced bread?)
Oh, darn, I’ve offended everyone again. Probably I am not entitled to my feelings.
PHILIP WEISS- So what does Dr. Spielvogel make of all of this? (sorry, but I couldn’t resist). I tingle with anticipation of what Mooser will say on this thread.
People incorporate their past. They are not their past but their response to it.
I’m very English and very undogmatically Anglican. I’d recommend a brief dialogue essay by David Hume, Scotland’s greatest philosopher – it’s just called ‘A Dialogue’ – in which he portrays national and cultural differences as prisms that give different appearances to the same underlying human nature and allow different individual or moral natures to be displayed. So that in the end the national, tribal elements in each of us are means for the expression of our true moral character but do not constitute our true moral character, which is about us as individuals not as English or Jewish or whatever. Most of us are typical to some degree of our background and our past, as Les remarks, but goodness and badness are not typical characteristics of any particular kind of background and past. They’re in all of us.
The minsk/pinsk joke is funny.