The True Genius of Jewish Survival: A Doctrine and a Credo (In Two Parts)

(Part 1)

Confronted by a pseudo-academic, high-falutin’ title like that, you would be justified in expecting a mature and considered examination of Jewish history, culture, religion, and values.

Well, life is full of surprises and disappointments. Read the next paragraph and disabuse yourself of that notion.

People who hate Israel and/or Jews, i.e., Anti-Semites, are reprehensible and ignorant bigots, who mouth hate-filled platitudes and slogans, but will not take the trouble to educate themselves. One of the things that has sustained our existence over the centuries has been our acute awareness of the deficiencies of our most implacable and strongest enemies, and our corresponding certainty that even when they had the power to harm us, they lacked any moral authority to condemn us. One of the things that sustains us now is the certainty that our State has the absolute right and obligation to oppose them in our own defense. Screw them all.

Maybe someday I will try to write the mature and considered version, but right now, when idiots are marching in the streets in support and under the banner of a terrorist organization; pictures of kidnapped babies are being torn down because they are offensive to delicate sensibilities; so-called diplomats are urging Israel to make concessions and more concessions to a gang of terrorists, rapists, and kidnappers whose policy is to annihilate Israel and whose truly disgusting strategy for doing so is the wholesale slaughter of their own citizens; the United Nations can mount an exhibition on terrorism and fail to even identify a single act of Arab terror against Israel; “elite” university professors are urging “virtuous” boycotts against the only enlightened democracy in the Middle East; Israel is being slandered as an apartheid, racist, colonizer; and various governments around the world (some of them actually colonial and racist entities themselves) are recognizing a State of Palestine, notwithstanding its lack of responsible leadership, democratic institutions or governance, recognized borders, merit, or historic justification– the only appropriate response is disgust and revulsion.

Which I nevertheless plan to express in as mature a manner as possible.

“You have enemies? Good,” said Winston Churchill. “That means you have stood up for something sometime in your life.”

This probably holds true for all manner of despised individuals and groups, but not necessarily for the Jews. We have enemies not because we stand up for something (though, at our best, we do), but because, apparently, we stand for something ugly and hateful in the minds of our enemies, who are, it becomes increasingly evident, ugly and hateful themselves, and project their inadequacies upon us.

As has been widely noted, that “something” about Jews, Israel, and Judaism that antagonizes people is an evanescent, mutating, shape-shifting, chimerical set of characteristics that is impossible to define and reveals more about our enemies than about ourselves. The only thing that you can be relatively confident in assuming about the catalog of reasons anti-Semites despise Jews is that they are guilty of everything of which they accuse us. Depending on their own ignorance, bugbears, obsessions, fears, prejudices, and superstitions, they have hated us because we are poor and because we are rich; because, somehow, we are both capitalist and communist; because we are insular and universalist, believers and non-believers; because we have a state of our own and because we are stateless wanderers. Most remarkable of all is the deranged notion that we are heartless imperial colonizers because we have returned to our tiny ancestral home, to which we, and only we, are indigenous, and to which we, and only we, have a valid historic and legal entitlement as a state.

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai propounds a most troubling postulate (cited in Rashi to Genesis 33:4): “Halacha Hi B’Yadu’a She’Eisav Soneh L’Yaakov.” ”The principle is known–Esau [the paradigmatic gentile] hates Jacob.”

How tragic, but how prescient, is that sobering dictum, spoken over 1,900 years ago, in the second century C.E., when Judea was under Roman rule (Judea–not Palestine; there has never, never, never been an independent country, state, nation, kingdom, republic, empire, confederation, commonwealth, or polity of Palestine). Even then it was a postulate that could be described by its proponent as widely known and universally accepted. One would think that by now the predilection of our adversaries to hate us would lose its power to surprise or shock.

Yet, despite millennia of supporting evidence, rivers of blood and tears, numerous expulsions and exiles, killing fields, and concentration camps, we continue to be astonished when otherwise rational and educated people (as well as a bunch of irrational, miseducated people; see, e.g., The Squad) display their Jew-hatred in public. And, notwithstanding all that history, hope springs eternal. When conditions are relatively favorable, the pogroms less frequent, and the hatred not quite so intensely apparent, we delude ourselves that we can live with our fellows in harmony and comity, perhaps even in what was once laughably described by dream-addled idealists as two adjacent, peaceful states. We put aside our suspicions and we try to believe the best of our neighbors and compatriots. We engage in our natural instincts to help others in times of trouble, and we dare to harbor the fantasy that they will somehow reciprocate.

They keep disappointing us. What a bitter irony that some of the most ardent proponents of peace and cooperation with the Arabs of Gaza lived in the kibbutzim that were overrun and massacred on October 7.

The Syrian-Greeks tried to erase our religion. The Romans subjugated us and exiled us. The Spanish and Portuguese subjected us to forced conversion, public burning, and expulsion. The Crusaders slaughtered and raped Jews on their divine mission to restore the Holy Land–our land–to Christianity. The Muslims, who are recent additions to the cavalcade of haters, since Mohammed only appeared on the scene 1400 years ago to propound his own version of Jew-hatred, viewed us as enemies and, when they could, treated us as dhimmi, inferiors. The Eastern Europeans–Poles, Russians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Serbs–institutionalized and facilitated our slaughter. The Gallican Church and the French people were, and perhaps remain, the vilest of anti-Semites. The odious Nazis were different only in scale and efficiency, not in character or intention. And, even though late to the game, our Ishmaelite cousins seem determined to outdo them all in hatred, violence, cruelty, and terror.

Trigger warning: putting aside the maturity again, but, at the risk of repeating myself, “Screw them all.”

Because we have survived. And we have persevered. And we have excelled. We became court physicians, financiers, lawyers, Nobel laureates, writers, poets, trusted advisors, and loyal citizens. We established Jewish centers of learning. The Talmud itself was written while we were mired in the Babylonian exile. Under constant stress and conditions fraught with danger, over thousands of years, against all odds, we developed a culture, an unmatched body of national literature, a way of life, and a community. As Tolstoy said of us, we became “the bearers of the prophetic message.” Over and over again, we proved ourselves the moral superiors of our oppressors.

Most recently, we built a modern, successful, prosperous, democratic state in the most hostile of neighborhoods under the most adverse conditions. And they hate us for it, because the contrast to their own benighted existence and their paucity of accomplishments is so stark.

As noted, until now, to this very day, we never gave up the illusion, the delusion, the hope, that our adversaries would someday become more civilized and start acting like human beings. In such belief, our chiliastic visions foresaw a day when the nations of the world would travel to Jerusalem to benefit from the teachings of the Messiah (Isaiah 2:4). Always aware that this sense of our own grandeur might appear ridiculous, given our small numbers, our weakness, and our travails at the hand of the nations, we nevertheless saw ourselves as a light unto the nations, a model, a beacon of hope. We never gave up the dream. Perhaps some day they would overcome their arrogance, hatred, ignorance, and stupidity. Perhaps some day they would put into effect the teachings of the “religions of peace” to which they hypocritically paid lip-service. Perhaps, as predicted in the prophet Zecharia, some enlightened people among the nations would say “we will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

Yes, it is ridiculous, laughable, that we have persisted in this prophetic delusion, even though some genuine Christians see through the fog of mindless antagonism and express their love for Israel. Clearly, we are aware that we have fallen short in our mission as “a kingdom of priests and a Holy Nation.” In our annual confession on Yom Kippur, we say “Ashamnu mikol ahm”–we are more guilty than any other nation. But that is because we hold ourselves to a higher standard. We look at the nations that have mistreated and abused us, and, even if we have missed the mark, we know that we are better than our oppressors. Look at the crowds outside the Democratic National Convention. If you have a strong stomach, listen to what they are saying. Hear the rabble call for the massacre of “Zionist pigs.”

Even now, isolated, hated, reviled–we survey the scene and know that they are wrong and we are right. And that is both a gift from God and, in my view, the secret to our survival.

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(Part 2)

We don’t need Mark Twain to tell us that the Jewish people are unique and eternal. But one can never go wrong quoting Mark Twain (or, for that matter, one of his greatest characters, Pudd’nhead Wilson), because he can always be counted on to use his exquisite insight and literary gifts to express even an obvious truth in a memorable way.

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

“His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages: and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

“The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

What, indeed?

For our own community of believers, the answer relates to the covenants that God made with us and our forefathers that rendered us unique and eternal. For us, it’s as simple as that. After a process that lasted millennia, God concluded that mankind, left to its own devices, would always fail to fulfill His aspirations for them (viz., Adam and Eve, the generation of the flood, the people of Babel). He was determined to choose a people to carry His message to the world.

We believe that He chose us for this task. Regrettably, we have also disappointed Him. Repeatedly. And paid the price. Repeatedly.

I recognize that there may be some among you who will decline to accept an explanation based upon promises in the Old Testament. That’s OK. We all have our blind spots.

So let me propose a less parochial answer to Mark Twain’s question, one that is more inclusive, focusing on certain attitudes and methods that assured the eternal existence and survival of the Jews in the face of implacable hardship and enmity. Putting aside the question of whether or not it was divinely ordained, let us examine the measures that either God or history (take your pick) employed to accomplish this marvel. What prevailing sets of facts and attitudes enabled us to survive?

Mirabile dictu, the answer resides in a few passages from the holy texts of the Jews: the Torah and the Prophets. And it’s not the parts that you might imagine. Not the Ten Commandments. Not the Sh’ma, that glorious, pithy statement of the unity of God. Not the stories of the Exodus or the splitting of the sea or the striking of the rock. Not the madcap adventures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their sometimes amusingly wayward families. Not even the covenants established with those forefathers.

Nope. The genius of the Jewish people and its survival against all odds is guaranteed by the horrific, bloody, nightmarish description of the punishments to be imposed on the Jews if they fail to keep their promises, honor the covenants, and observe God’s law with appropriate appreciation. That Biblical message is repeated endlessly in the prophets, who warn the Jews of future disaster.

Why are those descriptions, known in the Pentateuch versions as the “tochachot” (reproofs or admonitions), so important, so vital to Jewish survival? Is it because the Jews will be scared into compliance? Because the alternatives occasioned by transgression are so horrific?

No. Because it was inevitable that the Jews, being a stiff-necked and rebellious nation, or, perhaps, simply being human, would, periodically, fail. No warning would assure sufficiently good behavior or insulate us from the depredations of an inimical world. We would fall short of the mark. We would be conquered by alien nations. And since one of the customary accompanying features of failure and conquest is assimilation and susceptibility to alien beliefs, the possibility always existed that we would view the disasters that might befall us as the victory of alien, foreign gods over the God of the Jews, or, on a less theological level, the victory of other, superior cultures and ideologies over our own. And that would be a disaster. That would be the end.

Here is what saved us. We never saw those who defeated us as superior in any way. We never saw their gods as superior. We never acknowledged their culture as superior. They did not defeat us because they were better in any shape, manner, or form.

No, because it is so vividly foretold, our serial catastrophes had to be seen as vindications of God and His law. God didn’t fail. We failed. The other nations didn’t prevail over us. God delivered us into their hands. That belief sustained us.

The prophets imagined third parties viewing the destruction and exile of the Jewish nation and asking, “What happened to cause this?” And the answer is, “Look at the tochacha; it happened exactly as foretold.” The answer was always, “Because they abandoned the ways of the Lord and He punished them.” Never, for a single second, did the Jews believe that Astarte, or Baal, or Moloch, or Jupiter, or Zeus, or Ahura-Mazda, or Jesus, or Allah defeated us or our God. The Jews always believed that whatever terrible consequence befell us, it was caused and administered by God as punishment for our own actions. A simple perusal of the Jewish liturgy confirms this.

Why? Wouldn’t it be natural to assume that we lost because their gods and/or cultures, were superior to ours? Yes, in the absence of the admonitions, it would be. But the tochacha makes clear, in the most graphic, unforgettable, and terrifying detail, that any horror we could imagine, and some that we could not have imagined, came as a result of our failure to comply with the covenants we made with God. God tells us in the tochacha, in excruciating detail, what will happen if we fail to comply. Therefore, whether or not the reader thinks we were correct in our belief, we understood that it was our God, not Nebuchadnezzar’s or Titus’s, who destroyed the Temples.

And it didn’t hurt that some of the conquering religions were so laughable. Jupiter assumed the body of a swan to assault Leda. The adherents of Moloch used to kill their children. Some religions believe it incumbent on their followers to blow up airplanes, buildings, and themselves. Astarte had a ridiculously huge behind. Given current sensitivities, I decline to comment on some of the more absurd features of other religions and cultures that may, at one time or another, been able to defeat us in battle, but never were able to persuade us that they should be taken seriously. Were we really going to abandon our religion, that has bestowed so many literary and moral gifts on humanity, for Greek mythology and graven idols?

As a result, despite the most catastrophic history imaginable, we never accepted any other deity as greater than to ours. We have never accepted any other culture or religion as superior. The prophets were always there to remind us who we were, and always there with promises of a brighter future if we never abandoned our identity and we never stopped dreaming of Jerusalem, our home.

And so the Jews survived in exile, always believing that we were chosen to live in accordance with a superior code that would, ultimately, be a light unto the nations, when those benighted nations became sufficiently enlightened to perceive it. As long as we acknowledged God and our own shortcomings as the sources of our destiny, accepted the wisdom and distinction of our traditions and morality, and dreamed of one day returning to our greatness and our land, we were not about to surrender our identity to alien cultures that we evaluated as deficient.

[It is worth noting that God made only one unconditional promise to the Jews, irrespective of our behavior, and He never made that mistake again. He promised the Land of Israel (or, as it was then known, Canaan) to Abraham. Period. No reciprocity. No conditions. And because of that, when He really wants to destroy the Jews in the desert, He can’t, because Moses reminds him of His promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.] [Biblical reference setting forth the immutable eternal promise that God will never abandon that covenant on request. Hint: check the end of Leviticus.] [Both the Koran and the Bible say that God gave the land of Canaan to the Jews, and they lost it because of their sinful ways; but in the Bible, the loss is only temporary.]

We could be exiled. We could suffer. We were always susceptible to the risk that we might question the source of our travails and give up hope. But all we needed to do was look back at the punishments that had been threatened. There is literally no horrible consequence that is not described. Whatever happened to us, or happens to us, was explicitly described as something that God did or is doing to us.

That, I would argue, is the genius of Jewish survival. No matter how low we fell, no matter what horrible things happened to us, no matter what terror we experienced–we were always able to say, “Our God did this to us and it was our fault.” And we were always able to say that the appalling instruments of our punishment–the barbarians, the pagans, the Crusaders, the Nazis, Hamas–did not prevail because of their superior values.

On the contrary, even when they terrorized and brutalized us, we still found them appalling and disgusting specimens to be reviled. So we rejected them.

We continued to believe in our quality and our mission. We never gave up hope that we would be restored to our previous glory, when we deserved it. We became the ultimate strivers, succeeding in society after society that placed obstacles in our way and burdens on our back. We triumphed over quotas and discrimination. Excellence in all our endeavors became the hallmark of our existence. We looked at the civilizations that belittled us, we remembered our former grandeur, and we dreamed of its renewal. We succeeded in any civilization that was prepared to recognize merit, even among society’s disfavored.

How could we surrender to the inferior entities that “conquered” us? Look at the people who poured through the fence on October 7, and consider their actions and their glee. Can anyone imagine any sentient Jew believing that these are noble adversaries who deserved their moment of triumph? So it was with the Nazis, the Cossacks, the inquisitors, and all those who enjoyed transient military dominance.

When Benjamin Disraeli was contemptuously called a Jew by another member of Parliament, he responded, “Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.” That is the attitude that sustained us and sustains us.

Let me be clear. My survival hypothesis requires no religious belief, even though the attitudes I describe may originally have been derived from religious texts. I am not advancing a religious argument. I am advancing an argument that is self-evident and verifiable by simple observation of Jewish attitudes and accomplishments.

Consider the achievements of the Jewish people throughout history, as described by observers who have no reason to be anything but objective.

Our contributions to every society in which we sojourned have been considerable. John Adams famously said “I will insist the Hebrews have contributed more to civilize men than any other nation.” Tolstoy said “What is the Jew? What kind of unique creature is this whom . . . the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed . . . and who despite their anger and fury, continues to live and to flourish? . . .The Jew is the symbol of eternity . . . He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.” Winston Churchill said, “Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.” Paul Johnson wrote, “To [the Jews] we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

Note that none of the sources quoted were Jewish. [Disraeli’s parents were Jewish until they weren’t–they became Anglican and had him baptized when he was 12.]

So now, having explained why we are still here, let me suggest how we propose to conduct ourselves going forward, based on historical precedent and current evidence and conditions.

We gave the world the concept of social justice being bandied about in the streets by philistines wearing keffiyehs. We will not surrender our moral ascendancy to those who justify rape, kidnapping, and slaughter of innocents. We will not apologize for having a state of our own or for defending it. We will proudly trumpet our accomplishments and vehemently deny the spurious charges leveled against us. We will not turn away from, or excuse, or recognize any false equivalency in, the violent savagery of our adversaries. We will not pretend that the moral vacuum that inhabits the United Nations, the universities, and the woke governments that have abandoned their basic obligations to their citizens has any validity. We will demonstrate with facts that there were more refugees from Arab lands to Israel in 1948 than refugees who left Israel, and that the former have not been considered refugees for 75 years. We will insist that an Arab population that has greater civil rights than in any Arab country and has grown 500% in “historic Palestine” since 1948 is not enduring apartheid or genocide at our hands, no matter what lies the haters choose to tell or believe. We will confront aggression with strength and try to defeat it both because our cause is just and because we have no other choice. To anyone who extends his hand in peace, we will reciprocate. But “Never Again” is now and forever.

The Nazis were destroyed. The Germans now purport to be our friends. The so-called “Palestinians” have defined themselves by hatred and have doomed themselves to three generations of poverty and beggary. Who knows what might happen after the Ayatollahs fall, the Lebanese tire of Hezbollah’s occupation and brutality, and the residents of Gaza wake up to the reality of who bears responsibility for their suffering? The haters on the campuses will gradually expose themselves as shallow, contemptible, and ignorant and will proceed on their path to ignominy and, probably, government jobs. Or maybe they will grow up.

But we, as always, will carry on, doing our best to fulfill our role and our destiny, to endure and to prevail. And if they hate us for that, let them, like their predecessors, bear their shame.