The Wicked Son

by David Mamet

  Aware of the longing for monarchy, the conscious member of modern democracy is free to dispute, to embrace or reject, pronouncements of government without feelings either of self-aggrandizement or treason. The assimilated Jew does not realize that he is in a similar position. He is involved in a monarchial proposition: Moses has been interposed between him and God, to rid him of shame, to allow him to diffuse the terror of the Almighty. In so doing, he is not only required but free to participate in the life of his people.

  The Chumash is the story of the rebellion against the Divine. Moses dies, but the Jewish people has not yet resolved its problem. Here we are like the unfortunate family, enmeshed in an ongoing, communal neurosis. The supposed authority figure (Moses, the parent), the person understood as cause or arbiter of this trauma, dies—the trauma, however, continues. As we see today, where the naked uncle in the palm frond, the Jewish champion of the PLO, the proudly ignorant Jew reenacts, daily, compulsively, interminably, the Korah Rebellion, the sin of the golden calf, the sin of the spies.

  This person, in the shame of his own self-knowledge, in the shame of his knowledge of his own self-sufficiency, must and will create false gods, as does the electorate. Only the recognition of the actual sovereignty of Another will set him free to reason.

  * * *

  Neurotics

  What is it that drives some intellectuals in free countries to hate their native land and wish for its annihilation? In a Western democracy the adversary intellectual is not only against his country…but he sides with animals against man, with the wilderness against the sown. Predictably, an adversary intellectual who is a Jew sides with the Arabs against Israel….

  One who hates what most people love probably savors his own uniqueness. The adversary intellectual cannot actually wreck a society, and he cannot seize power, but by discrediting and besmirching a society he undermines the faith of its potential defenders.

  —ERIC HOFFER, In Our Time

  My friend the bookseller had just come from what in previous times would have been known as a roadhouse. The roadhouse was on a two-lane blacktop in northern New Hampshire, and frequented by a rather hard-drinking crowd.

  There my friend ran into an unfortunate fixture of the neighborhood, a logger who had, among other things, been convicted some years earlier of manslaughter. He was now returned to the community a murderer and a confirmed wife beater and drunk.

  “He bought me a drink,” said my friend the bookseller, “and I was so proud.”

  On the one hand, my friend is and had been an absolute mainstay of the community for over forty years. He and his wife had raised two boys and put them through college. The entire family worked at the bookshop year-round and was involved in every aspect of the community.

  Why was the bookseller proud to be drinking with a thug and a felon?

  Because the bookseller was a Jew.

  I would call this pride self-loathing, but Mr. Hoffer suggests that it is self-aggrandizement. I believe both understandings are correct.

  The bookseller had, for years, been the main mover in a free-form, yearly community celebration that was called a “seder.” It was not, however, a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt nor a feast of matzah. It was, year to year, an expression of enlightened liberal sentiment (usually outrage) on the issue of the day. That issue was, again as per Mr. Hoffer, always some enormity perpetrated either by the U.S. government or by the State of Israel. My friend, additionally, wrote a column for the local paper in which he frequently took the side of the Palestinians.

  Karen Horney wrote of neurotics that one must take into account their real, and understandable, pride—that they have each crafted a strategy for getting through the day and that the strategy works. This pride of achievement, she continued, compounds the difficulty of unraveling a neurotic behavior—it is not only that the behavior works faute de mieux, but that it offers the practitioner a true sense of accomplishment.

  Perhaps this is the meaning of “pride” as applied by the bookseller to his relationship with the wife beater and murderer. Perhaps he was taking pride not in that he, a vile Jew, had been singled out for friendship, but that his grand scheme allowed him to deal with an unorthodox social situation by simple interjection of his incipient anti-Semitism—that he had crafted a tool so good that its use could be applied to a multiplicity of problems.

  Offered companionship by a true enemy of the community he and his family had worked so hard to serve, he dealt with his unease by recurring to the known and tested: “I am a Jew, and Jews are vile,” and found, to his delight, that it served.

  In the Economist of 5 June 2004, I find the obituary of Roger Straus Jr.: “He was born into oodles of money, to a mother who was a Guggenheim heir, and a father whose family owned Macy’s department store. Yet, as he revealed two years ago in an interview in The New Yorker, his Jewishness often worked against him. Mr. Straus felt victimized at his Episcopalian private school.”

  I read this thumbnail history somewhat differently: it was not his “Jewishness” that worked against him, it was the Episcopalian private school; else one might say of a rape victim, “Her femaleness worked against her.”

  But the remainder of the paragraph has a happier twist: “In later years he proudly called himself ‘a New York Jew’ but it had taken time.”

  Good for you, Mr. Straus, and rest in peace.

  I’ve never understood the idea of the “tough Jew” as anomaly. The only Jews I knew, growing up, were tough—children of the Depression, soldiers or wives of soldiers in World War II, my grandparents’ generation, who came here with nothing and built lives for us.

  Why would an individual, or populace, the heirs to not one but a hundred generations of dedicated, tough, resourceful Jews, desire to posit and then join an imaginary passive group? For, in my experience, any person or group so identifying itself will absolutely attract a raptor.

  It is not “the Jews” who are other-than-tough but this or that individual Jew. And it is helpful, indeed, to note Mr. Hoffer’s perception, that their harm comes not from outright action, but from the demoralizing influence of their neurosis upon the group.

  Such influence must be recognized and be resisted.

  It is, I believe, unlikely that any self-professed antagonist to Israel, and so to the Jew, can be brought by force of outside reason to recognize and correct this self-serving apostasy—but I think understanding of such as self-serving, rather than self-loathing, may aid an observer to a more useful understanding.

  * * *

  The Wicked Son

  The costs of assimilation are many. They include fatigue, sorrow, loneliness, and self-doubt.

  Ignorance leads the troubled to ascribe their anomie to their heritage rather than to their rejection of it. Their efforts are not unlike the political pronouncements of those who have, through faith, “cured” themselves of homosexuality—if those efforts were, in fact, a sham, and their only reward the knowledge of hypocrisy, they must, of course, be defended all the more vehemently.

  In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Walter Scott writes that the nonpatriotic soul “goes back to the dust from whence he sprung, unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”

  These words, though perhaps problematically applied to the nonpatriotic, are curiously true of the apostate, who would not stand with those who would stand with him.

  This is the wickedness of the wicked son. He feels free to enjoy his intellectual heritage, the Jewish love of learning, and reverence for accomplishment; he enjoys, aware or not, a heritage of millennia of Jewish Law and values; he enjoys his very life, which would have been denied him and his ancestors in the Europe they suffered to leave; he enjoys the right to protection from the community he disavows and, through it all, parrots, “My parents were Jews, but I do not consider myself a Jew.”

  This is certainly wickedness.

  Were we to find such behavior in our children, we would weep. I believe we should weep when we discover it in our peers.

/>   There is, of course, a certain commonality or collusion of apostasy, but see the fallen-away Jews, nonobservant, dismissive of their people as a people, opposed to the State of Israel, and yet clubbed up with their like, autonomically formed into that community alone wherein they enjoy life: that of their fellow Jews. Can this be accident? These enclaves of the rational?

  For Jews feel most comfortable in the community of Jews. Who can deny it? Freed from either the scorn or the “understanding” of the non-Jewish world, the Jew can be himself. Are six thousand years of cultural and genetic and religious affinities to be abrogated by the brave individual embrace of secularity? Demonstrably not. Examine the elective affinities of the apostate Jew—the communities, the clubs, the professions, the resorts—all the inhabitants are Jews.

  But such affinity stops at the temple door—while the assimilated, again, confects prodigies of ad hoc and essentially religious observances and traditions, one of which is the ritual proclamation of secularity. For “I am Jewish, but I do not practice” is as much of a ritual as the Shema. Both are protestations of faith in a superior power—in the first case, assimilation; in the second, God.

  But the sad truth is that the world hates a turncoat.

  Our American language, indeed, has no value-free term for one who turns against any organization (even the criminal) to which he belongs: turncoat, whistle-blower, stool pigeon, informer. Even the most high-minded and courageous acts performed by a member against an organization malignant to the community in general cannot be characterized free of opprobrium.

  Jews may, of course, convert, in complete good faith, to other religions, but that good faith convert, having found and chosen his own path to God, is not likely to identify himself (primarily) in terms of what he has rejected. The wicked son must guard himself against fear of a, in fact, inevitable scorn from those to whom he proclaims his freedom from his despised heritage.

  What company does he seek out to lessen the threat?

  That of his fellow Jews.

  * * *

  Jacob and Esau

  Esau was a hunter, while Jacob dwelt in the tents. He wanted to be close to his mother, Rebecca.

  She felt that her son could achieve his rightful due only through trickery, and she so schooled him. Jacob was attracted to the family of Laban, his uncle. Laban was a cheat and cheated Jacob of his promised wife, Rachel, and, further, reneged on the bargain of Jacob’s rightful wages.

  Jacob resorted to trickery to extort his due from Laban and took with it a bit extra, a profit beyond that promised to him, for his trouble—a form of revenge, mischief, or reparations.

  Jacob reencountered Esau at Peniel and prepared for war. In the night before the expected battle a man came to Jacob. And Jacob wrestled with the man all night long, until the man smote him on the hip joint, which is to say, the genitals. The man then blessed Jacob but told him that his name would thereafter be changed.

  The name “Jacob” derives from the Hebrew word for “heel”—as, in the Torah, Jacob, at birth, caught Esau’s heel in an attempt to deprive him of the benefits of primogeniture.

  The lowly, despised Heel is transformed by his combat with the man into the new thing, the new name, the new man, Israel, which means “He will fight with God.”

  The man of the tents, the heel, the boy tied to his mother, the deceiver (and thus deceived) is given a new struggle. The fact of strife remains, but the struggle is no longer ignominius but noble.

  Jacob and Esau are, of course, one. We might say two sides of the same being, or two aspects of human nature, or of the human being caught at the moment of transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer.

  Esau-Seir means “red” and is connected to Adam, whose name also means “red” and “earth.”

  Eric Hoffer writes in In Our Time, “The age-old enmity between the warrior and the trader becomes particularly interesting when seen in the light of recent events which indicate a kinship between the two as close as to make possible an interchange of roles. We have seen the German and Japanese warriors become the world’s foremost traders, and the Jews the foremost warriors.”

  And yet. Some Jews seem to delight in a miching and confused attraction-repulsion to power. Are we Jacob, the boy who stayed in the tent, or Esau, the great hunter?

  Hoffer writes elsewhere of the, unfortunately, well-recognized phenomenon of the Jewish lover of his enemies—that Jew who takes staunch pride in supporting, for example, the Palestinian cause. This neurotic behavior he understands as the urge to feel special—not content with being a member of a group and race (or even a nonmember), the so afflicted wish to gain power and status at the expense of the group.

  With whom, however, does this deluded soul think to stand? As I drive to synagogue on the Saturday before Easter, I see a church festooned with a banner advertising a film.

  The film is The Passion of the Christ, and the banner looks to have been manufactured by the film’s distributor.

  I am filled with awe and envy. How wonderful it would have been to have invested in the film, I think, in the name of my synagogue.

  Would not a smarter man have foreseen the film’s phenomenal success? How much better for the Jews to profit from than to decry a dramatic treatment which is but another manifestation (along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Final Solution) of that Jew-hatred engendered by the Gospels. For if you cut us, we will most certainly bleed, but weep and one weeps alone.

  What a burden, to be of a despised race.

  Some have been forced to resort to arms, in Eretz Israel, some to lamentations, some to apostasy, and some, like Jacob, to chicane. (Recall my fantasy of film investment.)

  How is one to walk the straight and narrow between a desire simply to get on with one’s life and the fear of cowardice, between Jacob and Esau?

  The bookseller will identify with the murderer, in a hidden wish for protection. The more fortunate, braver, or more self-aware will pose the question (which is the struggle with the Man): Who am I? Am I the lowly and despised Heel, or am I that person who will wrestle with God? The question’s answer will not bring an end to strife but will recast the battle for identity, offering the combatant the option of struggle with dignity.

  * * *

  Belonging

  To me, real life consists in belonging.

  I’ve spent most of my life in show business, and I never have walked through the stage door or onto a movie set without the thrill of belonging. On the stage or set, one is surrounded by like-minded people speaking a common language, having a common goal. This group is not opposed to the world but a world-within-the-world—small, contained, cohesive, mutually responsible.

  I never served in the military and regret it. Dr. Johnson wrote that every man thinks more meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. I attest to his observation but have always felt graced in the other hermetic groups to which I have belonged.

  What have I found in them? Filial piety, humor, language, a responsibility to learn and to instruct, a sense of timelessness and history: “So-and-so’s father was one of the key grips on Love in the Afternoon—his father worked for D. W. Griffith—do you know what happened on the set yesterday?” (this introduction followed by an anecdote which may or may not have happened yesterday and, equally, could have been set—as it was equally likely—on the first day of the silent era).

  This vertical and horizontal community creates incredible solidarity. On the shoot, everything is taken away or is about to be taken away: sleep, health, family, comfort—everything except a sense of shared purpose.

  Show-business people share a soft pity for those who would like to join but cannot or have not. For we have, in the dream of the ten-year-old child, run away to the circus, and the poor wistful reasonable souls on the outside stayed home.

  The Talmud compares the love of the Torah to that of a “wife with a narrow womb”—a fairly graphic description.

  Life on the set eschews wealth and position as beside
the point. The powerful may, mistakenly and unfortunately, exercise prerogatives, but those actually involved in moviemaking understand that such behavior deprives the offender of the chiefest joy of participation, which is immersion in the community.

  Knowledge, courtesy, goodwill, stoicism, wit, these moral acts and observances enlighten and spiritualize the set. Each day the involved, which is to say, observant, goes home having learned a lesson. It may be in mechanics; it is, at least as often, in ethics: how to behave in a difficult situation, how to control fear, anger, sloth—indeed, lust or greed. These lessons—in the larger world, difficult—are made salutary by the respect and approval bestowed by the group on their mastery. Small acts of helpfulness, forbearance, or even silence, are powerfully endorsed.

  It is, to me, that tribe of which one dreams, which many seek in this or that confected enterprise: sports bar, sports rooting, paintball, “bonding” expeditions. The opposite of this tribal life is a life of anxiety, loneliness, and loss.

  Analgesics include consumption, power and the quest for power, envy, grievance, and hatred, as we, in each case, compare ourselves and our state to that of others, and end the comparison either in arrogance or loathing. Or in grief.

  This love of belonging, as does the love of the wife with the narrow womb, impels one to service, attention, and consistency. It prompts one to greater understanding. How wonderful to have such an object of devotion.

  When I was a child, I played the piano. How good, I thought, to know all one could know about the instrument: how to play it, how to write for it, how to repair it, how to build it. And some, in life, are lucky to have such a love. One fellow collects pocketknives. He finds romance in collectors’ magazines that are mere columns of figures: “Case, folding hunter: 6265/1.” Ah, he says.