One of my closest friends in this life and the hereafter is Tony Schmitz, a writer I met in 1976 in Minnesota. At the time, he was my first German-Catholic.
From a very small town in the German-American zone, surely a hotbed of isolationism. It blew my mind that a German Catholic could be as evolved and intelligent, more, than most anyone I knew. And maybe it blew Tony’s mind to meet a Jew so up close and see he didn’t have horns. Gosh, I’ve never asked. We’ve both grown a lot since. Right now he’s in Bolivia working for a public health project (and designing a cool website to register people’s great regrets).
Do I have a point? Yes. Schmitz read David Samuels’s statement about American culture yesterday–
Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each individual has the capacity for finding God’s grace within him or herself, and can only find it by being born again — independent of family history and ties. While you don’t have to be a Christian to accept historically peculiar American ideas about the
individual, the past and the future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in their history and, I would argue, in their essence.
and found it, well, not very Christian:
It struck
me as standard issue American Studies claptrap, and deeply wrong, if
the intent is what this guy seems to be saying — that everyone in
America except for Jews is living in the Now or the future, and has no
particular connection to the past. Our native brothers? What are they
doing at pow-wows? Why do the ancestors of slaves want reparations?
American Catholics (trust me on this) feel a connection to the martyred
saints, to the thousands of years of New Testament tradition, and to its basis in the Old Testament,
and to a global spiritual family. Which is to say nothing of all the
nuts running around doing family histories, which is itself a cottage
industry for the many historical societies scattered across the
country. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems to me this guy is
driving an argument that doesn’t have wheels.
My old friend’s comment reminds me that this blog comes out of my interactions with many other kinds of people than the kind I grew up with, out of how much I’ve learned from them and my own tradition about what it is to be human. Kumbayah meets luftmensch, that’s the spirit here… Anyway, I don’t think Jews can talk about the issues surrounding Jewish identity right now completely on our/their own. The next great Jewish Question is really about what it means to be an elite in western society: what are the implications for Jewish history, continuity, and of course for militant Zionism. Many other Americans will have helpful things to say…
