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Title: We Jews: Who Are We and What Should We Do
ISBN: 0787979155
Author:
Adin Steinsaltz
Publicate Date: 2005-03-30
Publish: 2005-03-30
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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1: thought provoking, many deep insights
Steinstalz is the greatest living Talmud scholar, an Israeli born into a secular family, and a mystic and Kabbalist.
The two things that stick with me most from this book - or perhaps I'll expand that to a few things:
-he makes the argument that from the supposed 5 million Jews of the beginning of the CE, there should be 300 million from natural increase. Therefore the surviving 15 million descendents have undergone a tremendous selection pressure, both physical and mental, including those with the inner character and abilities to allow them to choose Judaism and survive. He then tries to list these inherited Jewish character traits. I will try and list them all below, but the one that struck me most was Individualism.
He has a whole chapter on the Messiah complex that leads Jews to try and save the world, which I certainly recognize within myself.
And he has very harsh words about the attempt to survive and continue as Jews for its own sake, if it is empty of Judaism and the Jewish mission to be a holy nation. His description of the Biblical injunction to be a nation of priests and a holy nation is stronger than anything I have read on the subject. He truly believes the essence of Jewish character, expressed or not, is to be a servant of God, and if we don't want to do this, we might as well give up.
one other point he made that I found very convincing: jews are not a race, nation or religion but a family. From a family, you can be estranged, you can betray...but you are never anything but a son or daughter. Jews are the children of God and of the patriarchs and matriarchs. We can betray our inner essence as well, but our inherited heritage cannot be erased either.
Some things from the book:
His list of Jewish intrinsic traits:
All murders of Jews and all the difficulties of being Jewish resulted in a constant winnowing out of people who remained Jewish. Those who remained Jewish and passed it on to their children had to possess character traits, "a combination of qualities that allows them to withstand such difficulties, and also to transmit the message to their children."
1. high survival capacity: adaptability, flexibility, will to live, belief in life, talent for imitation and simulation/to create a false self/to believe in one's false self, to be a wanderer/an alien/a cosmopolitan
a. negative expression: pushiness, materialism, loss of values in materialism. Flexibility and adaptability can result in spinelessness, loss of self-respect, pandering, aping with no self-esteem.
2. stubbornness. Persistence. Can be directed towards remaining Jewish, or towards other pursuits - business, science etc.
3. individualism. Main spiritual and religious duties of a jew are as an individual. No priest or imam does religion for you. "most of his duties are between himself and God alone."
a. Also, no organizations in civil life required Jew limit his individualism. No guilds, army, church, state jobs, corporation jobs...the opposite, each Jew had to make his economic survival alone, on private initiative (why didn't Jews organize themselves economically?politically?)
b. Negative side: weak in teamwork, cooperation, even when Jewish survival at stake. Can result in selfish egotism.
4. buoyed by faith. Deep need for faith. "It is not possible to follow God as a Jew should do...except on the basis of a deep core of faith." "Whoever does not have faith -the ability to construct his life on the basis of concerns other than real and immediate materialistic considerations - is incapable of continuing to live as a Jew. Such ability and compulsion to believe are, perhaps, what has most distinguished essential Jewishness since its formation. The very first choice of Israel was the choice of belief and this choice strengthen over the generations, because it is impossible to be a Jew without it." (elsewhere, he argues being a Jew is to be born into the Jewish family, is impossible to stop being!)
a. Messiah complex universal jewish psychological `complex'. The need to `redeem reality, to reform it, to improve it. No one can continue a life of distress and insecurity, in which he is sometimes despised and humiliated by others, unless he feels a deep sense of mission....the individual Jew may lose his messianic faith, but he is incapable of losing his need to hasten the redemption."
b. Connected to the search for redemption is Intellectualism
c. Readiness to join cults and messianic movements such as Communism
"...a Jew may distance himself from his cultural heritage and even leave it entirely...but a person cannot escape his essential self....A person can observe anything in world, either close or distant, but every subject he observes or deals with...he can only see with Jewish eyes, and he can only think about it with the mind of a Jew." P158
Rabbi Judah Halevi, Book of the Kuzari: "Israel exists among the nations like a heart among the limbs."
"Imagine that someone has a document that can open the Gates of Heaven. He takes this document and runs with it to the ends of the earth. When he finds he is unable to reach Heaven in his lifetime, he gives the document to his children. And his children go on running with it and keeping it safe, generation after generation.
But with time the words...are rubbed away. The people who carry the document are no longer able to read it....Later still it is reduced to a mere piece of paper, and even this piece of paper starts to rot.
...Eventually, however, the people ...will discover they are running very hard and very fast but carrying nothing. And so they will stop running." P184-5
Jews have lost our meaning, our mission, our message. We are an empty shell, not even an intact shell. Loss of `inner sense'. "People cannot go on living in the past, even if the past was pleasant - and ours was not." We must have a living jewish culture that will create a heritage for generations - not `indulgence money. People paid to get rid of the guilt that came from discarding their Jewishness." Survival with hope requires an investment of life.
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2: Disappointment
If I was disappointed by this book, it was only because the bar was set so high. Rabbi Steinsaltz is a legend and this book was far from legendary. The rabbi argues that Judaism is not a religion, nor a nation nor an ethnic group, nor a race. Well then what are we? According to the rabbi, we are a family. This immediately raises the question, are we a dysfunctional family? The rabbi declines to provide an answer, saying only "I'm not sure." In a previous chapter he hints that we are, but this question deserved deeper treatment, particularly in view of the rabbbi's gloomy conclusion that Judaism is in deep trouble, both in Israel and in the diaspora. I prefer to see the glass as half-full.
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3: interesting but uneven
This book is a collection of a dozen essays, each of which can easily be read without reference to the others. The essays fall into three categories:
1. Some essays were, I think, very well thought out. I was especially impressed by his essay on Jews as a family, in which he points out that Jews are far too racially diverse to be a "race" in the conventional sense of the term, are too geographically scattered to be a conventional nation, and too ideologically diverse to be a conventional religion. Jewish ties are blood ties: one cannot easily leave the Jewish "family", and Jews say awful things to each other but can unite in response to threats. His essay on money explains why Jews were perceived to have money in Christian Europe; because Jews were often not allowed to be farmers, they were pushed into finance and thus handled money more than a farmer would.
2. Some essays were just preaching to the converted: reassertions of religious dogma that believers will agree with and skeptics will ignore (such as his essay asserting that Jews must be "priests to the world.")
3. Others didn't fit into either category but just weren't that persuasive: for example, he complains that Jews should somehow be more unified- but today, the most unified religion (Catholicism) appears to be stagnating in much of the world, while a bitterly divided Islam has the flexibility to mutate and to adapt to local conditions. If Judaism had a pope, would there really be more Jews? I doubt it. His essay on Jewish character traits is flatly self-contradictory: he asserts that Jews survive due to "flexibility" yet two pages later writes that Jews are "a stiff-necked people."
His pessimism in the last essay seems to contradict traditional Jewish theology: the tradition holds that a Messiah will set the world aright at the end of days, yet Steinsaltz despairs of Jewish survival.
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4: We Jews
We Jews is an excellent read . Rabbi S. has distilled Jewish thought and life both religious and secular.
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5: The Jewish situation incompletely addressed
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is one of the great Jewish scholars and teachers of our generation. His monumental translation of the Gemara into Hebrew and then English and French has been a fundamental tool in spreading the learning of Torah. His teaching of Torah, and outreach work have made a major contribution to the Jewish world of learning in our time.
In this book Rabbi Steinsaltz makes the admirable effort of attempting to assay the Jewish situation and reality. He tries to define who the Jewish people are through essays in collective psychology and sociology. He writes about specific characteristics of the Jews , about the ability to assimilate, about the infighting which has prevented Jewish unity, about the notorious difficulty of defining a group which is neither a nation or a religion or a an ethnic group solely. He also writes about stereotypical views of the Jews in regard to Money, about the Jewish Messianic complex, about Jews being excessively Warm or Cold emotionally, about the tendency of the Jews to Idolatry, about our role in the world, about the idea of unification and how it has effected great Jewish thinkers, and finally ` about what will become of the Jewish people'.
The work also contains questions at the end of each chapter asked by Steinsaltz's faithful student and long- time editor Arthur Kurzweil. These questions aim to refine and sharpen some of the major points made in the text.
With all my great respect for Rabbi Steinsaltz, and with all my understanding that his aim is only to help the Jewish people better serve God, I found myself deeply disappointed with this work. For one thing Rabbi Steinsaltz writes of the Jewish condition almost as if the State of Israel had not existed for the past fifty- seven years, and is not a growing and central part of Jewish history and the Jewish people. Secondly, I was dismayed at the lack of factual matter involving the actual transformations in the Jewish situation which have taken place in the past twenty or thirty years. For example Rabbi Steinsaltz writes at great length about the importance of understanding the Jewish people as a family. There are great insights in his writing on this subject. However the Jewish family today in America is often a family with non- Jewish members inside it. It is not the traditional, historical Jewish family. The degree of intermarriage and assimilation occurring among the Jewish people are a central element in any assessment of our situation now. I would have expected Rabbi Steinsaltz to address this, and provide suggested ways for the Jewish people to act now. After all, the book says it is going to address the Jewish situation and tell us what we are to do.
I was deeply dismayed that the worldwide Anti- Semitic attack on the state of Israel is not considered in the book. The survival of Israel is , in my judgment anyway, the most important item on the Jewish agenda. To write so much about Jewish history and character without writing even one word about the longing for Zion, the longing for Redemption, the miraculous ingathering of Exiles is to deprive Jewish history of its heart. It is all well and good to talk about Jewish Messianism way up in the air but for the people of Israel the Messiah has always been connected with the return to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. How could Rabbi Steinsaltz not consider this, not take into account in doing so , the thought of Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Ha- Kohen Kook Z"ts"l. Rabbi Kook's idea of return to the land as connecting with worldwide redemption is a central strand of Jewish thinking and action today in Israel.
It seems to me that anyone who wishes to write a true and realistic work about the situation of the Jews today has to confront the very difficult realities the Jewish people are facing. These are in one sense demographic realities, relating to an aging, assimilating Diaspora. They are existensial problems relating to the efforts to destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel. Rabbi Steinsaltz in this work does not even mention the divisions within Israeli political life, the fact that so many Jews have in some way turned against their own people. In this regard I would think that any `psycho-social analysis' of Jewish collective character would certainly make much more of the theme of ` betrayal' than Rabbi Steinsaltz has done.
Nonetheless for me the greatest omissions come from the other side. Nothing is said about those Jews who miraculously came and transformed a land of desert into a modern society. Nothing is said about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Nothing is said about the heroic struggles of generations of Jewish soldiers who fought and fight to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile environment. Rabbi Steinsaltz's total ignoring of these kinds of Jews makes his overall assessment of the Jewish people and their character seriously flawed.
We need today a Jewish thinker or thinkers who can really look at our situation, and strive to understand the directions we must take both for survival and for increased sanctity in serving God.
We need to face the hard realities of our situation so that we can hopefully struggle for a better Jewish future.
We need more books on this theme, and more relevant ones.
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