This having been said, there is nevertheless something degraded and insufficient in the sober, businesslike manner that has crept into Jewish discourse in the years since the Holocaust, in which all discussion begins and ends with survival, regardless of whether the subject is education, economics, war, or peace; and no word is spoken concerning any greater end, for whose sake we Jews continue to choose survival over the other, all too realistic, option. For sixty years, it is this imperative—to survive for the sake of those who were lost—that has sustained us, whether in the struggle to establish the Jewish state, or in the effort to rescue persecuted Jewry, or in attempting to shore up communities that have been ravaged by assimilation and intermarriage and a reluctance to bear children. But though such a motivation may yet have its effect on some Jews, we must recognize that the day is fast approaching when the banner of survival will no longer suffice. Memory of the Holocaust recedes day by day, and with it the self-evidence that once clung to the need to survive. The younger generation, which did not grow up in the shadow of the death camps, is no longer moved by such an emotional mechanism. For this generation, it is only the degradation that is self-evident: The degradation of a people that once bore a great ideal, but which no longer seems to have an interest in anything beyond formulas for its own continued existence.

I am aware that there are Jews for whom any discussion of that ideal has itself become a kind of sacrilege, and who, whenever they sense that conversation is in danger of proceeding in such a direction, immediately let loose with a torrent of protest, to the effect that no people save the Jews finds need to justify its existence, and that even to admit such questions is to encourage a corrosive self-doubt. And it is of course true that there have been, and always will be, countless peoples that exist unattended by an awareness that they have any special purpose or calling among mankind. Such peoples are born constantly and disappear constantly, leaving no one to grieve for their passing.

But there also exist in history nations that do, at a certain point, awaken to a sense of the unique vantage point from which they regard mankind, and of those traditions, ideas, and virtues that make their destiny different from that of other peoples. Such nations find that they have long ago become a subject of discussion among other peoples, and that their insights and manners have touched the rest of mankind even without their desiring it, at times engendering admiration, at times anger. A truth or virtue that one possesses without knowing that others are in want of it can seem a small thing, and one may not recognize the importance of preserving or strengthening it. From the admiration and anger of other peoples, however, one begins to see with increased clarity those aspects of one’s own inheritance that are of true significance. And with this awareness comes the need to articulate the unique vantage point from which the nation regards the condition of mankind.

Certainly this has been true of England and France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, and, of course, America; and it has been true of others as well. Among such nations, the struggle for survival is not a matter of raw spirit. It is conceptualized, which is to say that an intellectual order is imposed on it, so that it may be understood. I do not mean by this that the character of the nation is invented or imagined, in the sense that it did not exist beforehand and is artificially grafted on. Rather, the existing character of the people is for the first time articulated in clear terms—not in traditional, esoteric, or holy language that speaks only to the nation in question, but in general terms that can be understood by everyone. Very often it is a foreigner, in fact, who first succeeds in rendering the character of a nation in this way: In England’s case, Montesquieu; in the case of America, Tocqueville.

I say this in order to set aside the pretense that other peoples do not engage in discussion of their special purpose or calling, and that it is somehow unseemly for Jews to do so. The truth is exactly the opposite: There are many peoples who have not yet reached a point where they can reasonably see themselves as being of significance to mankind as a whole, and these may well be able to dispense with such discussion; but all great nations—what used to be called the “historic nations”¹⁴—conduct such conversations among themselves with intensity, knowing full well that the future of humanity depends on it.

More than any other people, the Jews have understood themselves as a historic nation—that is, as the bearer of an idea, as a people with a role to play in history. It was this commitment to an idea that was the true strength of the Jews and the secret that kept us alive in the bitter sea of exile, while so many nations around us vanished into the mists of history; it was this loyalty to the ideal of Israel and to the God of Israel that moved so many generations, including a great many Jews who did not understand this ideal or believe in this God, to suffer privation and death for their sake. In other words, what brought the Jews eternal life among the nations was not a preoccupation with survival, whether individual or collective, but rather the opposite. It was the willingness to give up one’s life for an idea, for a historic calling, that saved us.

The Jews are among the oldest of the existing historic nations, and in some respects the most successful, having become aware of our unique purpose more than thirty centuries ago, and having in the meantime influenced the self-understanding of mankind more than any nation. This is not only because of our people’s authorship of the Bible in antiquity, but because it has throughout these centuries devoted its highest energies, often under conditions of great danger and hardship, to the cultivation of an intellectual tradition unique among the nations. This tradition, forged in light of the main currents of Western thought but in conscious and constant contradistinction to them, is for this reason unparalleled as an alternate vantage point from which to address the central questions that confront humanity.

I have already discussed the response of the Hebrew Bible to the dilemma of empire and anarchy, but one may as easily point to many other instances in which there exist independent and, to one degree or another, characteristic Jewish views. I think it is obvious, for example, that the Jewish intellectual tradition is without the towering walls erected in the last few centuries by Western thought, which separate is from ought, prudence from duty, and the ideal state from man’s vision of the good. Similarly, one finds in Jewish tradition an understanding of the world in which man is inclined to evil from childhood, but free to choose the good without need of grace; in which reward and punishment are primarily a matter of this world rather than the next; in which responsibility is not only individual, but collective; in which memory is sacred, and every generation must see itself as if it had lived in the time of its forefathers; and in which love is rejected as the main wellspring of morality, in favor of justice and even honor (as in “Honor your father and your mother”¹⁵). This last, especially, is the reason that law is understood among Jews as the only natural discipline capable of reasonably adjudicating conflicting moral demands.

Moreover, there is in the Jewish tradition a distinct approach to epistemology, in which tradition is recognized as the mainstay of wisdom, and truth triumphs not through “pure” reasoning, but through history. There is also a distinct Jewish view of politics, in which the ways of power and worldly wisdom are not removed from the city of God, but are of it; the goodness of regimes is judged not by the procedures they have devised but by the benefits they confer on men; and no king and no public may be obeyed by the individual in the face of the demands imposed by higher moral law. And, of course, there are many specific moral principles of our tradition that constitute a proposal and a challenge to mankind: The idea that the debasement of the body is sacrilege; that books may deserve the same dignity in death as do men; that hard labor must be limited by an insuperable commandment of rest; that poverty, like celibacy, is no virtue, and achievement no vice; that the material world is not our property, but only in our care; and many others. With regard to theology, I will say only this much here—that in the Jewish tradition, God’s many other perfections are of less significance than this one: That he keeps the promises he makes to man.¹⁶

Not long ago, Jews were still capable of speaking about such matters as though we were a match for other great nations, with much to learn from them, but also with much to teach them. As late as the early eighteenth century, the tradition of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides was still a living intellectual force in the West, borne by our people and informing the worldviews of men such as Hobbes, Grotius, Selden, Milton, Cunaeus, and Newton, in the process making a not insignificant contribution to the development of the European national state and the modern understanding of freedom.¹⁷ Rousseau, too, inquired after the views of the rabbis, and when he published On the Social Contract in 1762, he well understood that it was with the political tradition of the Jews that his own ideas were most fundamentally in conflict.¹⁸ The period of Enlightenment all but closed the door on such engagement between the Jewish tradition and the West, but even thereafter, the Jews continued to see themselves as the bearer of an idea of great importance not only to themselves, but to all humanity. One need only read Moses Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem (1862) to catch a fleeting glimpse of the ancient Jewish message, its grandeur undiminished, still sharply distinct from the understanding of the Christian world around it, yet couched in general terms accessible to all men.¹⁹