The Jewish Power Blog: Power and Imagination
Yom Kippur, 9/11, October 7: three traumatic, consequential surprise attacks that, it turns out, shouldn’t have been surprises at all. What connects the three is the fact that what now look like obvious warning signs were ignored or suppressed because of a “conception” held by the leaders that the balance of power was such that warnings of danger were simply not credible. A commonly accepted descriptor for this phenomenon is “a failure of imagination:” the failure to be able to imagine alternative scenarios, to imagine that we might have weaknesses, to imagine that the enemy might be stronger or cleverer than we had learned from past experience. Secure in our safe room, we failed to imagine what was outside it. One could blame hubris, but that might not be fair, as the inability to think outside the boxes we have constructed is not evil – it seems to be a universal human characteristic. Today we wonder at the failure to sense that the Holocaust was looming. And it seems there were warnings ignored prior to Pearl Harbor. And then there’s climate change… It was “known” for centuries that the sun revolves around the earth – until, as problematic evidence slowly accumulated, finally Copernicus had the imagination to look at the cosmos differently. But it took centuries (which we don’t have).
And here we are deep in the safe room of another conception. As the election approaches, parties from across the spectrum compete in their attempts to articulate their absolute and unshakeable refusal to even imagine a Palestinian state. Apparently, to even suggest such an imaginary construct is seen as political death in Israel today. We refuse to imagine, because we know “reality.” The reality, it seems, dictates a limited number of possibilities as to the resolution of the conflict inwith the Palestinians: we could kill them (but that would be genocide); we could deport them (but that would be ethnic cleansing); we could keep defeating them until they finally get the message and agree to be ruled by us as less-than-equal citizens (but that would be apartheid); we could naturalize them (but then they’d be the majority); we could convert them (but the chief rabbinate would never agree). Since, for most (but not all) of us these options are not so palatable, we are left with maintaining the status quo: a constant state of conflict requiring that we always be more powerful than they, so that our inevitable ongoing losses will be bearable. And so that is our “conception,” our safe space, what we know about our future. Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall.
It takes imagination to envision a different reality. It takes imagination to be able to see ourselves as others see us, to recognize our weaknesses and the mistakes we have made. It takes imagination to understand the hurts and needs and aspirations of the Other – or even to see the Other as just as human as we are. It takes imagination to “know the heart of the stranger.” (Ex. 23:9) For a nation who pride ourselves on being smart and creative (and even just and merciful), we are not very imaginative. Shakespeare may or may not have been an anti-Semite, but he was able to imagine what it felt like to be a Jew:
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (Merchant of Venice 3:1)
But of course, he was talking about us, and it fits our conception of ourselves as eternal victims to kvell at Shylock’s proud insistence on being seen as a normal human being. The irony is obvious – we know that we are normal human beings (and smart and creative, just and merciful), but we cannot imagine that the Palestinians are – that they bleed and laugh and die – and seek revenge when oppressed.
Actually, zooming out, maybe imagination is necessary both in order to survive in a dangerous world and to be a moral person (or collective). Perhaps it is imagination that makes us human. And maybe the problem is that there is a tension between power and imagination. When the status quo is entrenched, when it is bolstered and dictated by – and seen as essential to the stability of – the power structure, then imagining alternative conceptions is discouraged and even suppressed. Indeed, imagination undermines power – or at least, the unimaginative powerful fear that it does… Note that in Hans Christian Andersen’s imagination, it is not wise men or respected leaders, but a child, wholly outside the power structure, who can question the “conception” and point out the emperor’s nakedness.
So it seems that the Jewish emergence from powerlessness has brought with it the unintended consequence of the Jewish abandonment of imagination. But does it really have to be a zero-sum game?
