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I believe it is
time for a revolution in the Jewish arts. I do not mean specifically religious,
though I feel that religious Jewish artists should be in the vanguard. The Jews are intended as a "light unto the
nations" and a light is meant to illuminate and guide the way. The world
is at a cusp, staring down into abyss. Unspeakable evil is being encouraged to
flourish. The Jewish nation, as the receivers of the torah, must take its place
as the moral compass of the world. Dialectic is the way to influence the mind
but artistic expression is the way to influence the heart and soul.
Just before World
War II, there was a revolution in Yiddish literature. I believe it came as a
reaction to World War I, which was, in many ways, more shocking to humanity than
World War II. It was the first time chemical warfare was used, airplanes flew
into battle, and automatic weapons were seen. War was no longer a battle of
brute force, man against man. A team of two men could kill dozens with the
press of a single trigger. A plane could kill practically with immunity. A
soldier could die just by walking into the field of battle without a gasmask.
Trench warfare was horrific, killing a larger proportion of Europe's population
than WWII. The world had gazed into the darkness of its own soul and seen
horrors that had never even been dreamed of before. It reacted strongly, creating the Geneva
Conventions, a previously unheard of concept to limit mankind's ability to
destroy itself. The League of Nations was created, and one of its first acts,
The Mandate for Palestine in 1922, was moving towards returning the Jews to
Israel. The Balfour declaration came, not as a reaction to the Holocaust, but
as a reaction to the non-Jews nearly destroying civilization in WWI. Theodore
Herzl wanted a Jewish homeland as a refuge for the Jews against non-Jewish
aggression. The non-Jews wanted to return the Jews to Palestine as a prelude to
the Messianic Age which, after the horrors of WWI, was a desperate, illogical attempt
at self-preservation from the darkness in their own collective soul.
The role of the
Jews in the world had changed. The Jew had gone from being the nefarious stranger
amongst them, the shylock, to being the biblical figure, the keeper of the holy
flame that would bring redemption and save the world from its own evil and
ability to self-destruct. Religious Jews had the traditional role f building
walls and being insular as a means of protecting torah from foreign influences
and the Jews from assimilation and destruction. A few enlightened Jews, with
one foot inside the locked, hidden, world of torah Judaism, and the other foot
in the secular world, understood the need for change in the Jews
self-perception of their relationship with non-Jews. This changing role was
epitomized when Napoleon offered Jews citizenship in France after the French
revolution. The French Revolution was,
in essence, an attempt to create an idealized state. This drive towards social
idealism brought into the French Christian mind the desire to emancipate the
lowly and despised Jew and make him a brother. Religious Jews almost
universally rejected the offer because it required lowering the walls that had
protected Judaism form outside influence. After WWI, the world held out its hand
again, and Judaism was again challenged to lower the walls and go out into the
world as an equal and not as a stranger.
This time, the
challenge was met with a different response. Jews, at least some of them, seemed
ready to leave the ghetto. I understand I. B. Singer's Gimpel the Fool
and Peretz's Bontsha the Silent to be challenges to the Jewish role in
European society as the perennial victim. Non-Jews were seeing Jews in a different
light, as a necessary guide to save them from self-destruction, and the Jews
were intrigued by the offer. After WWII, the non-Jews saw themselves as having
no choice. With fingers twitching on buttons that could make Hiroshima and
Nagasaki look mild, with human bodies still smoking in ovens, the world was considering
the possibility of instantaneous self-annihilation. It required a solution, a
safeguard against its own desire for evil, so it naturally looked towards the children
of Israel.
I believe that
situation has arisen once again. I prefer to state the evils that anyone can
view at the touch of a button anywhere on the internet. A death cult is
sweeping the planet. Righteous anger threatens to return the world to the dark
ages and wipe away any advances that have been made in human rights and civil
kindness. The world wants Israel to return to the borders of 1967. The date
seems random, irrelevant to the plight of the Palestinian people it is intended
to help. It would seem more fitting to demand a return to the UN instituted borders
of 1948. I believe the world wants to return to 1967 when, for the first time
in over two-thousand years, the Jews stood on the Temple Mount. In 1967, we had
the opportunity to take our proper, God given role in the world as a priestly
nation, creating a bridge between God and man. We would serve the nations, and
not just perform a measly percentage of the commandments that pertained to
dietary laws and the Sabbath. Prayer as practiced by Jews today is a pale
compromise meant to remind us of the Temple service. It was never intended as a
replacement. The Jews stood at a crux, a moment of great potential, and chose
to walk away from their spiritual role and responsibility to the world. The
non-Jews were disappointed and have not forgiven us. They want us to go back to
the '67 borders and try again.
I feel that the
Jews must make a change in how they see their role in the world. Torah Judaism
is designed to prevent change in order to preserve torah from being influenced
by a world in which the majority is non-Jewish. That reality no longer exists.
At least not in the state of Israel. Torah Judaism used to have a one-way door.
Jews left but never came back. In most places in Europe, it was illegal and
even suicidal to convert to Judaism. The present practice by the Rabbis of
pushing the potential convert away does not have a halachic source. Judaism used to actively proselytize. The present
system for converting Jews is a mess because for two thousand years, the precedent
has been set by a fear-based reaction to relating to non-Jews. It was an
anomaly for a Jew to want to return to Torah and it was a threat to bring a
non-Jew into the fold. Converting Ivan's daughter today meant a pogrom
tomorrow. Rabbis are befuddled by the flood of baal tshuva and converts. They
should be. They had nothing to do with it. The baal tshuva movement began right
after Jews conquered the Temple mount. Being on The Temple Mount brings with it
a spiritual power. We have partial ownership, so the baal tshuva/ger movement
began. It certainly did nt begin due to a rabbinic structure based on
Christianity and priests. For two thousand years the rabbis have turned torah
learning and torah law into something it was explicitly never intended to be; a
process of contraction and stringency based on "we don't know". The
only basis for a surrogate in the Torah is the priestly class. The function of
Rabbi has no precedent in Judaism until it went into the Diaspora. In the land
of Israel, the Sanhedrin was a legal body that required dynamic innovation,
based on meritocracy and scholarship (mostly).
When I first went
to yeshiva, I was fascinated by tchelet, the blue thread in tzitzit the fringes
on our four cornered garment. I asked my teacher a question. It is a mitzvah that
is mentioned in the shema, which we say twice a day and figures so prominently in
our service to God. How could it be that for two thousand years, this twice
daily reference was ignored by Jews who were passionate about their service to
God? Men who worked at making the dye and garments suddenly and collectively
stopped showing up to work? Are we, in our present day ignorance, suddenly aware of something they were not
aware of? My teacher answered me. He said, tchelet is the color of the ocean,
which is the color of the sky, which is the color of God's throne of glory. The
spiritual and the physical are so closely related that you cannot change one
without changing the other. When the temple was destroyed, the color of the sky
changed. Tchelet, that specific shade of blue, ceased to exist. Our desire to
return tchelet to the world is a precursor to building the temple. It is the
beginnings of desire that have no name or focus. I began to wander around with my eyes gazing
skyward. I was searching for a new shade of blue that I had never seen before.
I would like to
establish a publishing group that will focus on a new type of Jewish fiction
that explores the changing role of Jews in the world and their relationship to
non-Jews, through literature and fiction.
