My house is a decayed house, / And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner. (From “Gerontion”) On the Rialto once. / The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. From “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”).
By RABBI STEWART WEISS Stephen Hawking(photo credit: REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud)
As I studied English literature at the University of Illinois, the above lines from the poetry of T.S. Eliot shocked me. So I stayed after the lecture to talk with my professor, a well-known Jewish scholar himself.“How could someone so bright, so talented,” I asked him, “be so filled with such ignorant anti-Semitism?” He gave me a knowing half-smile and replied – with a few short words that I have never forgotten – “Son, never, ever confuse intelligence with wisdom.”I thought back to that sage observation when reading about the latest “intellectual outrage” to strike our country: British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s decision to boycott next month’s President’s Conference with Shimon Peres.Hawking’s office at first blamed the cancellation on his health problems; he famously grapples with a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a degenerative condition that has left him almost entirely paralyzed and able to communicate only through a speech-generating device. But due to inquiries by this paper, his university finally admitted that the real reason he was pulling out of the conference was pressure from Palestinian “academics,” who had convinced him to join the growing BDS (“Bullies Demanding Sanctions”) movement against Israel.Now, no one can deny that the professor is a smart man. He has won a slew of scientific awards, and is even a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given in the United States. But smartness and sechel, alas, do not always go hand in hand.Hawking’s sense of right and wrong, of fair play and the ability to see beyond the hype and hysteria created by the Palestinian propaganda machine, has seemingly vanished into the black hole of anti-Zionism. He has joined the long list of foreign artists and dignitaries – I use the term loosely – who hypocritically single Israel out for condemnation while blithely ignoring the real abusers of human rights and intellectual freedom, including and especially the Palestinians themselves.THE STRAIN of ugly prejudice among the intelligentsia has long confounded social scientists, debunking those who sought to associate blatant anti-Semitism with a lack of proper education. In fact, some of the more virulent Jew-haters of history have been among its most educated citizens, as any examination of literature illustrates.Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tells the story (“The Prioress’s Tale”) of a devout Christian child murdered by Jews who were affronted at his singing a hymn as he passed through the Jewish quarter of a city in Asia.The character of Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta is possibly the first-ever stage portrayal of a psychopath.Shakespeare (Shylock), Charles Dickens (Fagin), Graham Greene, James Joyce, Henry James and so many other literary giants – whose writings have influenced millions upon millions of readers – have cast Jews in the most negative of stereotypes.Nathaniel Hawthorne – one of my personal favorite authors – describes Jews in his novel The Marble Faun as “the ugliest, most evil-minded people,” who resemble “maggots when they overpopulate a decaying cheese.”But non-Jews do not have a monopoly on being brainy yet bewildered. Our own people can be just as capable of this syndrome.Take Ada Yonath, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry, who advocated several years ago that all of the Palestinian prisoners, including the most barbaric murderers, should be let out of Israeli jails, “even if our own Gilad Schalit is not freed in return.” Or Joel Kovel, the Alger Hiss professor of social studies at New York’s Bard College, who calls Israel “a racist state that automatically generates crimes against humanity, and so cannot have that legitimacy which gives it the right to exist.”Trying to figure out just how these people think is, at best, an exercise in frustration.They will not be swayed by facts or figures.They see, but they do not perceive; they collate enormous amounts of data, but they draw all the wrong conclusions. They caustically compile their case against Israel, but I am not convinced in the least. I say to them all – Hawking included – you don’t have a leg to stand on.BUT AS long as we are speaking of the disconnect that can occur between intelligence and wisdom, I feel compelled to comment on the latest controversy in our never-dull society, the clash at the Kotel.Like so many others, I watched with disbelief, followed soon afterward by disgust, as an ugly outbreak of violence occurred last Friday, Rosh Hodesh.It brought back memories of a similar incident a dozen years ago, when I had taken a class of students to the Kotel on the night of Shavuot. After having learned Torah through the night, we walked along the streets of Jerusalem with thousands of others, arriving at the Wall at sunrise to recite morning prayers.During the reading of the Book of Ruth, the story of the quintessential Jewish woman of valor and the paradigm of hessed and high morals, a fight broke out over an attempt by a group of women to read from the Torah in the women’s section. As one black-garbed young man ran past me on his way to the fracas, I grabbed him and asked, “Is this really what God wants you to do now? Where are the ‘darchei noam,’ the ways of pleasantness that the Torah mandates? Where is the ‘derech eretz shekadma l’Torah’ – the civility and good behavior that precede the Torah?” He stopped for a moment and looked at me with a blank, clueless stare that said, “What does God have to do with it?” and went on his merry way.In a split-second, all of the learning he may have amassed over the years crumbled into a pile of dust.Yet having said this, I find the confrontation precipitated by the Women of the Wall’s demand for “equal time” to be unwise and ill-advised. I know that this issue is complex, with powerful arguments on both sides. It seems ludicrous to condemn, rather than commend, anyone who – for God’s sake – wants to pray. It is arrogant, even abusive, to impose our own particular approach to reaching out to the Almighty on anyone else, as if we have exclusive control over what does and what does not constitute spiritually acceptable behavior in prayer.But just as a wise person carefully chooses his battles, he must use the same discretion in choosing his battlegrounds.The Kotel is a holy place. It is a sea of serenity that provides calm and clarity in the frenzied and harried volcano of activity that is the Israel of today. On cool summer evenings, my greatest joy is to sit silently at the back of the Kotel, undisturbed and unperturbed, collecting my thoughts as I stare deep into history. This is a place of unity, of harmony, the seventh-most visited site in the world, bringing together Jews and non-Jews of every bent and background. If there is another refuge of peace like the Kotel, I’m not aware of it.This is the wrong place, the very last place, to turn into an inferno of diatribe, dissension and disunity – no matter how noble the cause may be.I fear we are turning the Kotel back into the Wailing Wall, and it is God who is doing the crying.There are times when it is more important to be wise than to be right. It would be wise to remember what we used to say back in the South: “When you are up to your neck in alligators, it doesn’t help much to remind yourself that you came to clean out the swamp.”■ The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana.www.rabbistewartweiss.com.jocmtv@netvision.net.il
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