by David Mamet
PROSPECT: It’s a thousand dollars too high.
SALESMAN: If I could knock a thousand dollars off the price…[etc.]
The reluctant, assimilated, disaffected Jew, in my experience, is similar to this sales prospect. He will explain or excuse his apostasy with an unthought (as never challenged) blanket statement, in effect, a peremptory challenge—for example, “Zionism is criminal.” We may note that this is a late-twentieth-century rendition of the historical “All Jews are business cheats” (cf. “to Jew someone down”).
Here the indicted Jews are accused not of the theft of a wallet, as Fagin, or of a stock exchange, as Trollope’s Melmotte, but of an entire country. We may note, further, that Columbus “discovered” America, but Herzl “stole” Israel. Gustav Klimt’s painting of Adele Bloch Bauer, stolen from her family and heir by the Nazis, was eventually returned to her niece, Maria Altman. From the Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2006: “The painting is now the costliest artwork known in the world, a sensuous Gustav Klimt portrait of Altman’s aunt that the family peddled for more than $104 million.” The italics are added; but, lest any reader miss the point, the article was titled “Yours for a Price.”
SALESMAN: But wait, is it a criminal act to wish to house and care for the victims of the pogroms and the Shoah?
PROSPECT: That’s not why the state was formed.
SALESMAN: Why was the state formed?
PROSPECT: More important, how was it formed? Through theft of the lands from the Palestinians.
SALESMAN: If I could prove to you that those lands were, in the main, purchased, or won in wars, just as we find in the formation of any other state in history, would you relent in your indictment?
PROSPECT: But the Jews “base their claims” on a mythological document—the Bible.
SALESMAN: Well, let’s wait now. Did they want the land because they are thieves, or because they are zealots? And might not your constant change of field indicate an underlying, unthought sales resistance? What might that be?
PROSPECT: I have no objection to the Jews, just to their actions.
SALESMAN: Oh. All of their actions? The actions of all Jews?
Wherein those who have participated in the exchange will remember, the argument defaults, on the part of the prospect, generally, to an indictment, not of the Jews, but of reason—that unfair advantage that the canny Jew will always take of the honest but simple “regular human being”(i.e., that imaginary Christian with whom the assimilated assumes to have thrown in his lot and who, magically, seems to have accepted it).
Here we may see the shift from the political, “Zionism [the quest for a homeland for the Jews] is a crime” to the more generally racially malevolent “all Jews are Thieves,” which is a social indictment, and on to the blanket, and nonspecific, therefore universally applicable “you Jews are like that.” This, again, is the unstated conviction that the Jews, beyond desiring land and property, desire—for some unstatable reason—the overthrow of the right thinking. In this apriority we find that we are, in fact, the Devil.
I say that all objections to the race and religion, as race or religion, by Jews are examples of anti-Semitism and traceable back, as above, to the common and effective proposition “Jews are evil.”
But how has the individual apostate Jew escaped this assumably ineradicable and universal racial taint to which he refers? Through magic.
The emancipated Jew has said “abracadabra,” here formed as a statement of absolute renunciation, by which utterance he considers himself self-absolved of the racial taint. He has, in effect, been born again. And much good may it do him, he who may now brave the scorn of a notional “majority,” while suffering from his obdurate and hurtful abandonment of his own race and culture. This obduracy is born, perhaps, in ignorance and the understandable wish for safety but allowed expression, it is matured into an arrogant treason.
* * *
You Can Just Be Nothing
If sanity, if mental balance, as we now know depends upon the facing of reality, upon the acceptance of necessity, it is no wonder that neurotic symptoms and ill-organized lives are found among those Jewish liberals, often brilliant and cultivated persons, who withdraw from the hard fact of Jewish uniqueness into the hiding places of analogy, into the refuge of false alikeness and a hopeless community effort with other groups.
—LUDWIG LEWISOHN, “The American Jew” (1950)
In the film Boys Town (1938), Mickey Rooney, the new boy, is shown the ropes by an oldster. Rooney asks about religion at Boys Town. His mentor tells him, “You can be anything, a Catholic or a Protestant.” “What about if I’m nothing?” Rooney says. “Then you can just be nothing,” he is told.*5
Why would anyone who possessed a heritage, racial, cultural, or otherwise, prefer to “just be nothing”? Can one simply choose to embrace a negative, and must not such a choice be, effectually, a repudiation? Why would assimilated Jews (Jews by race or cultural heritage) choose to repudiate a culture, a history, and a religion about which they know nothing? For the last thing to go, the last vestige of identifiably “Jewish” characteristics is, I believe, a sense of the need for social justice—this seems to remain, self-interpreted as “humanism,” or “doing good,” after all other identifications with the tribe have gone.
The protest movements, from the days of civil rights to the environmentalism of the present day, are disproportionately peopled by Jews and, in fact, by lapsed Jews. But the racially engrained mitzvot persist, in their observance, as do-gooderism and, in their nonobservance, as guilt and anomie.
The assimilated or lapsed Jew understands the commandment (e.g., Do we oppress the stranger?) correctly as awakening anxiety in its nonperformance. He correctly associates the commandment with Judaism—his dilemma, unfortunately, consists in his prescription: escape from Judiasm, and the sense of anomie will vanish.
But since he does not understand the anomie’s source, he cannot understand its cure. For “Jewish guilt” is not a side effect of being Jewish but of being insufficiently Jewish. Buddhism will not cure it, self-help will not cure it, good works will not cure it, A Course in Miracles will not cure it—all of these, ranging from religion to nostrum, cannot eradicate the lapsed Jew’s sense of being lost. For he is lost.
Perhaps five or ten more generations of nonobservance may eradicate the Jew’s need to belong. Perhaps some future being may say, “You know, we have Jewish blood in our family,” in the same way that a contemporary Anglo may brag “My great-great grandmother was a Cherokee” but today we are too close to five thousand years of observance, too close to the immigrant generations, too close to the Shoah for any lapsed Jew to feel anything other than self-loathing or its Doppelgänger, arrogant assurance of his escape.
What is this specter, from which the fallen-away shrinks as from defiling a corpse—a specter so loathsome it may not be examined? It is intimacy. And let us note: Who is the new community with whom the unaligned, nonobservant, anti-Zionist ex-Jew shares his brave feelings of freedom? It is invariably a community of like-minded Jews.
The Jew will not swap tales of his own anti-Semitism with the non-Jew, as he knows that to air such beliefs is shameful. Not that it is a “shanda fun dem goyim” but that it is racism. The only protected area in which he may air his enlightenment is a Jewish one.
Here we may find the proud inheritor of millennial traditions, happy to announce that he is ignorant of all observance, happy to indict the State of Israel in ignorance of its tragic trials, and blind to the fact that it is a country and, like any country, will make mistakes. This ex-Jew, like the member of any hermetic or oppressed group—gays, veterans, the disabled, etc.—will unerringly and autonomically seek out his own, with whom he may share his fantasy of individuality. This person, who likely has never felt the warmth of Shabbos, the purity of Yom Kippur afternoon, the beauty of “Eishet Chayil,” who will not marvel at the courage of his immigrant grandparents, or weep at the death of his cousins in the Shoah and of his cousins
on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv, confuses the ideal with the real.
He feels that, rationally, a person, as the boy in Boys Town, may be free to choose, to opt out of any inconvenient association, free of debt, and so of guilt. But he may not and is pursued by an unquenchable sense of loss. He may identify this loss as a desire for justice, for redress, for equality, for freedom. The sense of loss will persist. His guilt and anxiety are not for the unfortunate state of the world but for his identity.
This identity cannot exist outside the tribe. He is insulated from his desire, and the shame that his confession must entail, by identifying the tribe itself as that which must be shunned.
* * *
Sins of the Jews
Nothing is more dangerous, either for an individual, or for a people, than to confess to sins of which one is innocent.
—AHAD HA’AM
They brought it on themselves,” the disaffected Jew said to me, “by the nature of their myth. The Passover myth is corrupt. It is a myth of chosen subjugation in the face of a greater power.”
“This,” I said, “is a rather inventive interpretation of a story which, arguably, supports the opposite view. Historically, it has signified an endorsement of self-liberation.”
Nevertheless, it is an interesting diagnostic, the fellow’s drash. And, indeed, a few moments later, he, this disenchanted Jew, was berating Israel, the state, for, in his words, its aggressiveness. So, here we have two universally distributed (if, arguably, inapposite in these cases) human capacities: hope and ambition. Each capacity by him is indicted by the disaffected as applied to the Jews; they are disprobative epithets—the Jew is criminally passive, the Jew is criminally aggressive. The Jews are thus, not by proof, but by the mere process of indictment, excluded from the family of humankind.
This fellow, in ignorance of the tradition, and blind to the beauty of the Passover myth, concluded his diatribe by a condemnation of the victims of the Shoah (stupid sheep). But, I asked: Were the victims of Stalin’s murders sheep? The Armenians under the Turks? The Sudanese? Is there not such a thing as a “victim”? That is, a guiltless, if luckless, sufferer? Or is this state available only to gentiles?
“And let us return to Israel,” I said. “Do these same Jews alone possess the sinful stain of (somehow) conspiratorial passivity? Are these the same who have incited your loathing by the opposite course? By hubristically desiring, and then building, a state?”
Conjoined in a state, or stateless, the Jews are wrong. Sufficiently vile as to forfeit claim to that most perfect award of the West—the mantle of victimhood. As true victims, they are, nonetheless somehow, guilty; involved in an ongoing war, their aggressiveness is crime, their losses are their just deserts.
In the West, particularly in America, there is no higher status than victimhood. Victims are the noble savages of our day, possessing, in their innocence, no qualities other than good. We love victims.
We do not, however, pity them. For pity, as Aristotle laid it down, is based upon a recognition of a shared, irreducible humanity, of community with the sufferer. Our sententious love of the victim, however, treats him as an object and his woes as a special, protected subspecies of entertainment.
Just as police and military stories (presented both as fiction and as news) allow us to indulge fantasies of vengeance, so sob stories (again, of both categories) give rein to the preadolescent fantasy of impregnability. The mawkish “walks for,” the wearing of bracelets and ribbons indicating affinity for a particular woe, each reveals a sentimentality that could not be further removed from pity (cf. the Jewish proverb “The rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich”).
These are not celebrations of concern but, rather, carnivals of gratitude in which, rather than condoling with, we effectively thank the victim (the poor, deluded but useful unfortunate, the sufferer of famine, tsunami, genocide, cancer, etc.). We will note that actual loss awakens observances different in kind. Ceremonies after September 11 were brief and, in the main, spontaneous outpourings of communal grief, devoid of that atmosphere of self-congratulation that characterize “walks for…”
But the Jews…the Jews…
Our problematical longevity taxes the world. How may we be victims if we refuse to die? How may we be pitied if we belligerently display self-sufficiency? Must not, then, historical instances of Jewish suffering be themselves discounted? Hence, the Shoah, recast as (a) a devilish conspiracy of fantasy, (b) a harsh but just sentence upon the criminally passive, (c) a deplorable ad hoc event that, in the use made of it by conniving opportunistic Jews (the formation of the state), must forfeit any consideration other than as a sick stratagem.
Perhaps, though, the deplorable Western love of the victim must be eradicated, first, in the self. Perhaps a beginning would be the resurrection of the ability to recognize race treason.
* * *
Lies, or Teshuva
To whom is it that these Jewish apostates appeal? For surely there is an element of performance in their protestations of nonalignment. Absent from this mime of disaffection, from criticism of things Jewish, is the recollection—present in all men not self-involved—that all men recognize a lie.
That shame and awkwardness each feels when he lies is discernible; indeed, it cannot be hidden except by the truly depraved. This shamefacedness is a tribute to and a reminder of conscience. We recognize this mawkish falseness in the lies of others; no one has ever lied his way out of an obligation without being aware that his falsity was apparent.
We gauge our lies not to the understanding but to the social position of the recipient. That is, we do not craft them according to their probability but according to the necessity on the part of the hearer to accept them. To those to whom we are truly indebted, or whom we wish to placate or propitiate, we seldom lie at all. Not, perhaps, from good manners but from the (reasonable) fear that the price of possible discovery far outweighs any potential benefit of success.
When we are lied to by our superiors, we feel shame for them, as they have forever diminished themselves in our eyes. How much better, we think, for them to have spoken the truth, whose inconvenience, to them, however great, could never, if they knew it, compensate them for their forfeiture of our esteem.
There are societies founded on lies: the incestuous family, for example, is bound by and, in fact, defined by the constant necessity for maintaining a fiction. More benignantly, various amateur groups, of writers, painters, poets, coalesce around an unbreakable devotion to the fiction that their work has worth—adopting, by turns, the persona of the devoted student hungry for correction and the wise preceptor full of respect for the devotee of the arts. Many Reform synagogues I have visited, and whose services I have attended, share this pervasive feeling of shamefacedness.*6
Formal worship may be empty of awe, but, if so, it had better be heavy on tradition. When both true reverence (yirat shamayim) and historic ritual are lacking, the mind of the individual worshipper, deprived of any legitimate outlet for devotion, must revert to doubt and self-protectedness. When he perceives this same reversion around him, he has but two choices: to retire or to assert.
His perseverance in the empty service, his asseveration of its worth, is, like the acceptance of a miserable marriage, the end not only of spontaneity but of any awareness of dissatisfaction that might possibly lead to a betterment of the situation.
These empty ceremonies are not the continuation but the death of Judaism, for even if the parents mime their devotion, the children are aware of the sham; they will endure as they must, but most will be reluctant to impose the tax upon their offspring, which next generation might and likely may turn against all things Jewish.
At Passover it is taught that the way to glory leads through shame. Shame begins with confession, and the first confession of the apostate Jew must be “I am a fraud.”
For should the Jew recoil and flee, to what group can he run? Who are these enlightened creatures who would value a bold assertion of one’s
independence from one’s race? Imagine them.
How, please, are the self-absorbed, deceitful, busy-unto-death, distracted, irreverent, and unschooled (according to your and my constant gossip) mob who make up the totality of humankind suddenly transformed into a wise council of the Just, waiting to embrace the quondam Jew who has seen the light?
What a poor, pitiable, imitation of the Christian notion of being “born again,” this fantasy of the kind world, happy to embrace the repentant Jew. And even were it true, even if the world we decry every moment as thoughtless and wrong were to reform itself according to some fantastical ur-Christian notions of inclusivity, would it, could it, be so constituted as to somehow accept not only the truly repentant sinner (Jew), but the counterfeit penitent we each know ourself to be?
No, this longing to belong cannot reasonably be the desire to belong to any human group—that group does not, cannot exist; and its appearance—the semblance of complete mutual acceptance among prevaricators—can be mimed only by the cult, the dysfunctional, and the shamed.
That group, then, “the group of the unaligned” to which the brave disaligned Jew burns to belong, with which he wishes to share and from which he desires admiration of his individualism, his freedom of thought, can exist only if its devotion is not put to the test: it is, essentially, a group of strangers; and I suggest the true measure of its possible reciprocal loyalty may be determined simply by the removal of the idea of “special circumstances.”
The confederation of the shamefaced can function only through a special-case definition. Members of the “writing group” may praise each other’s efforts, but would not, when the meeting’s done, curl up with one of their comember’s books. Members of the spiritually inert shul may praise each other’s monetary contributions as “true Judaism,” but would they bear arms and risk life in mutual defense, God forbid, in a pogrom? And the unaligned Jew, the Jew only by an interesting quirk of heredity—that Jew who refers to his forebears much as a wealthy man might allude to an ancestor who was a horse thief—whom might he expect, whom desire, at his bedside to give and receive comfort, to hold his hand, in mutual awe, silent before the mystery?
