The preceding sections of this essay explored two aspects of the ideal of Jewish guardianship, which is the purpose of the Jewish state—the first, according to which Israel offers diplomatic and military assistance to Jews everywhere in times of need; and the second, which sees in Israel a natural shelter under which a unique Jewish way of understanding and living may be brought into being. In the last part of this essay, I will examine a final aspect of Jewish guardianship: The aim of raising up Jewish men and women of a character sufficient to these ends. As the early Zionists were sharply aware, the idea of a Jewish state cannot be divorced from the question of individual character, both because character is a precondition for maintaining political and cultural independence over time, and because this quality of personality is more readily cultivated under conditions of national sovereignty. In the discussion that follows, I will argue that these claims are, if anything, even more relevant today than when they were first made a century ago.

Character is not a subject much discussed these days, and this is no surprise. The more one is preoccupied with equality as an ultimate political end—and such a preoccupation is no less visible in the Jewish state in our time than in any other Western society—the more difficult it becomes to admit of the existence of qualities such as honor, virtue, or character, which are usually recognized from the fact that some individuals possess them in a greater degree than others. In other words, these are qualities that are distributed unequally in any given population, so that in praising or otherwise seeking to encourage them, one becomes vulnerable to the accusation of harboring illicit republican or even aristocratic sympathies. And if it is in a Jewish context that one insists on raising such issues, the discussion is all the more difficult. For by now, any discussion of Jewish character is immediately said to recall all the old talk of the “new Jew” who was supposed to spring into being in Israel, and especially the calls of Brenner and others to reject the inheritance of our fathers who lived in the diaspora. At times the mere mention of the need to develop a more resilient character is enough to provoke accusations of “negation of the diaspora,” or even of anti-Semitism.

Such hesitations may be justifiable, but they have also had an increasingly baneful effect on our public discourse. Because of them the Jews have become a people expert at juggling abstractions such as “justice” and “rights” and “independence,” while avoiding any treatment of the concrete qualities that may be required for such political ends to be possible in practice. All these high ideals are presumed to be obtainable out of thin air, or else because we sincerely want them and frequently express ourselves to this effect. The possibility that our society may not be comprised of the kind of individuals who are capable of securing these things, and that some change in ourselves may be required if we are to attain and keep them, is seldom mentioned.

To my mind this reticence is ill-considered. We live in difficult times. And while there are things that are not in our hands, it may also be that if we are dissatisfied with conditions in the Jewish state we have built, it is because the materials with which we have been building are not what they might be. If so, a fundamental improvement will not be possible until we ask if we are the kind of men we need to be, given the tasks ahead of us. In this I do not propose that we necessarily adopt the severity of Rousseau writing of the French, Dostoyevsky of the Russians, Nietzsche of the Germans. But we must be able to point to our failings, not only with regard to this or that person, but also with regard to our people more generally. We Jews excel in pillorying every individual who takes the reins of power among us. But we are impatient when it comes to making an accounting of our collective faults. These are habits of mind that are not only imprudent but also dangerous when one lives under a democratic form of government, in which the qualities of the public, as much as those of any elected leader, may well determine the course of events. For these reasons it seems desirable that we revisit a question that was of such great concern to the founders of our state.

 

The point of departure for this inquiry has to be a discussion of what is meant by character, as contemporary usage has stripped this term of much that was once essential to its meaning. Character, as I will use this term, refers to a steadiness of spirit in the face of adversity, where the meaning of “steadiness” is the absence of tremors or fluctuations of the spirit.¹ This is an oversimplification, of course. No one is exempted from experiencing fear; it is impossible to live without it. It is the first twinges of fear that warn us of the presence of danger, and it is the subsequent onrush of emotion that permits us to rally our resources in the effort to improve our condition. But there is a great difference between a man who experiences fear as a whisper of foreboding, which he subsequently transforms into a more penetrating understanding and a more resolute course of action; and one in whom fear is a river that habitually overflows its banks, destroying everything before it, including much that was not originally in danger. These are two very different experiences of fear, and in innumerable ways a life lived with the one is very different from a life lived in the shadow of the other. In particular, the quality of the fears we experience has a profound effect on everyone around us: It is fair to say that a person whose fears are under tight rein is one who can be relied upon to uphold his responsibilities and commitments even under conditions of severe duress, and thus can be a true partner in all life’s enterprises; whereas an individual whose personality is periodically washed away by fears is one who, whatever he may seem to be here and now, will become something entirely different in the moment of duress.

Discussed in such abstract terms, the subject of character may seem an unfamiliar one. But when we examine the concrete particulars of life, whether in our daily affairs or in distant history, we find that the question of character is present everywhere, animating virtually every drama that succeeds in arresting our attention. It is, to mention one obvious example, the very heart of the story of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt. In the books of Moses, the enslaved Hebrews are depicted as having been robbed entirely of the spiritedness that had characterized their forebears in Canaan. Moses, upon returning to Egypt from the desert, finds a feckless people, which exultantly embraces the dream of liberation he presents, only to turn against him at the first sign of Pharaoh’s anger. “May the Eternal look upon you and judge,” they cry against Moses, “because you have made us abhorrent in Pharaoh’s eyes, and in his servants’ eyes, putting a sword in their hands to slay us.”² Moses proceeds to fill Egypt with blood, and the Jews in their thousands eagerly seize the chance to flee the country. Yet when Pharaoh determines to pursue them, they are again beset by fear, losing all capacity to take responsibility for the path they have freely chosen. Again they turn on Moses, crying: “Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the desert? What have you done to us, carrying us out of Egypt? Is this not what we told you in Egypt, saying, Leave us alone, that we may serve Egypt?”³

Nor do the Jews improve in this regard after leaving Egypt. In the wilderness, this same inability to stand before adversity appears time and again. Unable to face hunger, the Hebrews constantly demand to be returned to the comforts of enslavement in Egypt, and accuse Moses of seeking to starve them to death;⁴ when they see that Moses has been delayed in returning from Horeb, they panic and seek to allay their fears with an idol of gold.⁵ And when at length they reach the gates of the promised land and hear the report of the spies sent to survey it, they are again overwhelmed with fear, and decide to replace Moses and return to Egypt:

This recurring depiction of the Jews as a people unable to stand firm before adversity reflects an understanding that a generation growing up in slavery would be bowed not only in body but in spirit; and that neither political independence nor an independence of mind could be attained before the coming of a man such as Moses, who, having been raised among the princes of Egypt, would have the strength of personality to lead the enslaved in revolt. On this view, the quality of one’s character cannot be separated from the experiences under which it has been tempered and tested. A spirit forged under conditions of chronic weakness is not permitted to be equal to the challenges that face it; its principal recourse has been submission, and the skill of mastering duress through confrontation and independence of posture remains unlearned. Under conditions of genuine duress, such a spirit is always found to be either limp or bloated, tending to collapse like a paper cup or else to billow forth with foolish arrogance. In either case, it becomes the seat of uncontrolled and uncontrollable fears such as are visited upon the Hebrew slaves with every new hardship. And throughout, they are implicitly compared to Moses, whose personality is marred by neither fear nor arrogance, and can meet unimagined hardship with steadiness of the heart and of the hand. Indeed, Moses’ temper fails him only once in his years as leader of Israel, by the waters of Meriba; and it is because of this one tremor of his spirit, so we are told, that he does not merit to enter the promised land.⁷ It is this steadiness of the heart and hand, which our tradition associated with Moses, that we call character.