What does it feel like to be a Jew? Pomerant’s reading of Dostoevsky

There is no more frightful fate than to awake within a state of total unintelligibility. Locked into one’s own body. Fastened deep within one’s skin. The movement on the screen beside the hospital gurney indicates to the observer that you are alive. The scans, too, reveal that you can feel and hear and see. Truly, consciousness coupled with the impossibility of being understood remains the most acute terror conceivable. The struggle to communicate the personal experience of the universe concerning the truth of what is real forms the subject of this article.

For Jews, the sense of existential alienation echoes this locked-in syndrome. As “God’s chosen people,” their unique relationship with the divine—one of covenant, exile, and return—has historically been gravely misunderstood by those outside the faith. Judaism’s deep engagement with the question of chosenness, rather than denoting superiority, signifies a unique burden: a struggle to reveal the truth of God and the human condition while constantly being misread by the world. This existential isolation mirrors Dostoevsky’s characters, who stand on the precipice of the abyss, caught between knowing the truth and being unable to fully share it.

For Grigory Pomerants, such a conviction of the supremacy of the personal paradigm over and against the totalitarian vision of the world forms the basis of his recognition that within Dostoevsky resides the grounds for overcoming both a skepticism that induces epistemological paralysis and a solipsism that renders existential enquiry exponentially regressive. There is no greater terror than when one’s experience of the world can no longer be expressed.

In this void, where meaning is swallowed by the inability to share, Dostoevsky’s characters emerge like silhouettes on the edge of the abyss. Each of them grapples with the unbearable weight of being misunderstood, with their thoughts and feelings locked away in the impenetrable chambers of their own minds. This is the Jewish experience across millennia—a community tasked with communicating divine law and moral imperatives, yet perpetually encountering resistance, hostility, or indifference from the outside world. The Jews’ role as covenant bearers marks them apart, leading to either reverence or resentment. To be a Jew is to dwell in the liminal state, where the nuances of their religious experience and historical suffering are either obscured or caricatured.

To confront Dostoevsky is to meet figures like Ivan Karamazov or Raskolnikov, whose internal division mirrors our own unspoken fears. They face the torment of knowing the limits of language, of expression, and of the profound isolation that comes when one’s paradigm of the world remains uncommunicable. Similarly, Jews find themselves grappling with the tension of explaining their chosenness without invoking the inherently divisive notions of exceptionalism or exclusivity. The paradox: a call to be separate and yet fully integrated into the human experience, to uphold a divine covenant in a world that often negates or distorts.

For Dostoevsky, the abyss is not merely external. It lies within each person, a chasm separating self from self, an ontological dissociation. His characters straddle this boundary between connection and isolation, their psychological landscapes marked by fragmentation and contradiction. Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, descends into madness as he attempts to rationalize his inherent proclivity to moral evil. In Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual rejection of divine justice becomes a mirror for a world without meaning, where human suffering has no rationale, no redemptive purpose. Both wrestle with the unbearable inability to escape the human condition. This parallels the Jewish experience of wrestling with God (as Jacob did), continually questioning the meaning of suffering and exile while retaining hope for ultimate redemption.

To Pomerants, these figures are not merely trapped in solipsism; they confront, head-on, the tyranny of systems that reduce human life to a mechanical or ideological framework. For Dostoevsky, totalitarianism was principally metaphysical, as the relegation of the human person. His work illustrates the existential revolt against these totalities. Dostoevsky’s world is filled with systems of belief that attempt to offer total solutions, only to find that they collapse under their own contradictions. Similarly, the Jewish people are a bulwark against any and all ideological systems—whether paganism, secularism, or totalitarian regimes—that sought to subsume their distinct identity. The survival of Jewish consciousness is, in itself, a form of revolt against the imposition of totalizing worldviews.

The act of grappling with the abyss is not to retreat into solipsism, then, but to confront the shared human struggle. Even as they teeter on the edge of isolation, Dostoevsky’s characters are compelled to reach out, to confess. Hence: “Taking a new step (in the face of the ontological paralysis wrought by the fear of never being understood), uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” This fragile hope for restored communion is the sole bulwark preventing Dostoevsky’s universe from slipping entirely into nihilism. For Jews, this hope is embodied in their ongoing dialogue with God through Torah and prayer. Even when faced with overwhelming isolation or persecution, they reach out—through study, through ritual, through communal life—in pure trust in God.

The abyss of unintelligibility, as Pomerants suggests, is ultimately a recognition of that the human person is made in the image and likeness of God. When speech fails, silence itself, albeit a greater silence, becomes a form of communication. For Jews, the hiddenness of God in acute suffering, the silence of exile, and the mystery of divine providence reaffirms the promise—that the covenant endures.

Here, then, is Dostoevsky’s offering: openness to the abyss does not mean surrender to it. To stand on its edge is to recognize both the terror and the beauty. It is also a declaration that, despite the limits of language, despite the failures of systems, beyond the very real fear of being lost in our own subjectivity, there lies the possibility of reconciliation. Through Dostoevsky, we glimpse not only the terror of isolation but also the possibility of redemption in the mere act of striving to be understood. To be a Jew, in this light, is to live in the tension between divine election and human misunderstanding, between isolation and the hope of reconciliation.