In Search of Soul

TO THE EDITORS:

What sort of state should Israel be? Reading the rich and thought-provoking collection entitled “The Jewish State: The Next Fifty Years” (AZURE 6, Winter 1999) brought to my mind the folk narrative in which a Jew is deeply unhappy with his soul. It feels too tight, it doesn’t sit right; in short, he can’t get along with it and complains to God.

Suddenly, he is “beamed up” to the heavenly storehouse, and told: “Take your time—look around. Pick a soul you like.” So the Jew spends the day trying on souls of every size, shape and hue. Finally, he exclaims: “This one! This is the soul I want.” Comes the response: “That’s your soul.”

In the complex quest for Israel’s soul, with all the tearing questions attendant on it (religious? secular? Zionist? post-Zionist?), this simple motif carries a profound message. Many of our leftist intellectuals have shrugged off a Jewish soul they find old-fashioned, constricting and burdensome. Some are busily trying on other, gaudier souls labeled “Made in the USA,” Made in the Far East,” or elsewhere. With feel-good and instant gratification such strong motivational factors in modern society, the painstaking struggle to achieve wholeness and integration and become one’s “true self” can seem almost foreign—and yet untold sums are spent on therapy by people needing to do just that.

At day’s end, the Jew in the narrative is faced with the revelation that the soul he sought to cast off as wearisome and outmoded is the one he jubilantly chose as new and fresh and suiting him the best. How long will it take us to realize that the pursuit of alien souls, cut from un-Jewish cloth, is doomed to frustration, or worse?

Judy Montagu
Jerusalem

Cultural Decadence

TO THE EDITORS:

I offer the following considerations in reaction to the symposium on “The Jewish State: The Next Fifty Years.”

Contrary to the views of both Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, and also in a completely different vein from Ahad Ha’am, the State of Israel’s survival as a Jewish state is independent of its economic or scientific successes; nor is it contingent upon its military successes or its being a spiritual center detached from all material foundation. Rather, it depends on the force of its Jewish spirit. In other words, the State of Israel will stand or fall on the quality of its original, independent culture and its willingness to accept this culture as the spiritual principle orienting all of the nation’s material and spiritual actions. Martin Buber, in his essay “The Face of Man” and his pamphlet “Three Letters on Judaism,” accepts in principle the truth of this claim, which also is not inconsistent with the views of R. Abraham Isaac Kook.

While most of Israel’s problems—economic, strategic, political—offer hope for solution, in only one sphere does the future appear to be without a solution, and perhaps even hopeless: The cultural sphere. Encroaching technology, alienation from religion, misunderstanding of religious values, lack of knowledge and understanding of humanity and civilizations, aspirations to mythical, false and egotistical humanism, and the myths of a twisted version of democracy, of a utopia of greatest individual liberty devoid of all human values or sacred gods, all couched in a hyper-rational, techno-barbaric language, will shape a man who is half, if not entirely, a robot. To understand this problem, we should note two fundamental facts.

First, no individual, even the most educated, can significantly develop national civilization single-handedly. Even a genius, the greatest writer, thinker or artist, can at most make a small contribution to culture, with a slight impact, such as only prophets or great Hasidic leaders were able to make in our history. The fundamental principle of any civilization is the collective consensus of the individuals who comprise it. Excessive emphasis on individuality and liberty only undermines civilization, creating post-modern chaos.

Political leaders coming from command positions in the military will not be able to cure this ill. Leaders from civilian backgrounds offer no particular cultural and spiritual promise for addressing the state’s problems, and this is even more true of leaders from the ranks of the military. This may not be a source of difficulty for the economy or the army because these spheres do not require men of culture. The state, however, dealing as it does in social and educational issues, certainly does need them.

Second, one must note that national culture is never universal. The great civilizations, whether ancient China, ancient India, Communist Russia, or the democratic United States, only appear to be unified cultures. In fact, each is an amalgam of cultures and religions, whose differences are much more significant than their common denominators. Unfortunately, trying to separate a culture into its elements is like creating anew the Tower of Babel, a process characterized not only by a “confounding [of] their languages” (Genesis 11:7) but also by a confusion of leaders, of their feelings and their worldviews. In such a situation, one cannot speak of values at all because the deconstruction causes not a single value to remain which is common to all members of the nation.

Clearly if there is no consensus on values, there is nothing to be said of education in morals. The result is that many books are written in the vein of Moshe Kroy’s Life According to Reason which praises extreme egotistical individualism, and Moshe Kaspi’s Tomorrow’s Education, in which education is transformed from a values-nurturing discipline to something which provides skills training and preaches nihilism. From his book, it seems that Kaspi is willing to relinquish all past achievements in favor of some “future” devoid of human content, such as has never existed and is doubtful ever will.

Anyone with even a minute knowledge of culture knows that it consists of millions of values, customs, habits, opinions and writings representing positions on philosophy, education, religion, law, literature and art. One can speak of “culture” only when this immense totality is controlled by a spiritual principle which creates a unifying consensus among infinite numbers of individuals. In the absence of such an organizing bridge, culture becomes only chaos, and in chaos nothing can be said of values or of education. Kaspi and others all over the world have blamed education for favoring indoctrination, but they dismiss the fact that even chaos works by coercing thought.

Education that is indoctrinated unifies individuals, unlike chaos-driven or supporter-driven indoctrination, which separates individuals and erodes unity. In chaos-driven degeneration, everyone loses the benefits of past achievements and the added value of unified forces. The result is that one can find no common language with others, and the opportunity to live in harmony is lost. Perhaps, instead, everyone will act like the disassociated techno-barbarians of Max Frisch’s Homo Faber and Stiller, Victor Perkiss’ Technological Man, or the isolated citizens of Neil Postman’s technopolis. Perhaps the world will organize into an annihilative economy, as portrayed in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or an existence of empty, debilitating sex, as in the short stories of Philip Roth and John Updike. It may be that a chaotic common denominator will direct us into lives like those of the characters in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, David Fogel’s Marriage Life or Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain. Or perhaps we will attain that combination of great love between man and ape, the last “human” survivors after destruction by an “advanced and enlightened humanity,” as portrayed in Bernard Malamud’s famous God’s Grace—not a common past with the apes, then at least a common future.

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