Two ways of dealing with one's heritage - but only one real option.
By JUDY MONTAGUJoseph Cedar 88 224(photo credit: AP)
Figures as diverse as Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Ilan Ramon, Daniel Pearl and Joseph Cedar have been called "proud Jew." It's what comes to mind when one sees footage of Menachem Begin addressing the Israeli nation or foreign leaders. I understand it's how he conducted himself with ordinary citizens he met.
But what does it mean to be a proud Jew? And its opposite, a shamefaced one?
Webster's offers two helpful definitions of "proud": "having proper self-respect" and "marked by stateliness." You could call it standing tall in your Jewishness.
A PROUD Jew needn't be a religiously observant one, but it makes this Jew proud to see Israelis upholding their beliefs abroad, when taking the line of least resistance is so much easier.
On February 27, the Post's Greer Fay Cashman wrote:
"Although he didn't win the Oscar for foreign film at this week's Academy Awards, Israeli director Joseph Cedar won points for being a proud Jew. His black kippa remained in view in Hollywood, and when invited to participate in a panel discussion on the Saturday... Cedar consulted with his rabbi, who told him it would be OK provided he did not use a microphone.
"It took Cedar the best part of an hour to walk to the venue, and the moderator explained that for religious reasons, he would not be using a mike.
"That public display was worth a lot more than an Oscar," Cashman commented.
Ramon, the Israeli astronaut, was not an observant Jew, but he too was a proud one - "a nation's pride," as a Post reader from Wisconsin wrote in 2003. Ramon, who that year crashed fatally aboard the Columbia space shuttle, went into outer space proudly armed with a picture of the Earth as seen from the moon drawn by a Jewish boy in Theresienstadt, a Torah scroll from Bergen Belsen, a microfiche copy of the Bible, the national flag and a kiddush cup.
ALSO IN 2003, journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and slaughtered by Islamists in Pakistan. In I Am Jewish, his father, Judea, wrote:
"A young man... in a moment of extreme crisis, looked straight in the eye of evil, and said: 'My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish. Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chayim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.'"
These unequivocal affirmations of identity were the words of a proud Jew. A contributor to I Am Jewish compares Daniel Pearl to the Ten Jewish Martyrs we read about on Yom Kippur, who died for their beliefs.
IF ONLY we saw more examples of Jewish "self-respect and stateliness" among our current leadership, instead of dodgy dealings at home and a kowtowing to foreign rulers that makes one wince.
Why must our premier act so obsequiously when he visits foreign capitals, including Arab ones, lavishing over-effusive compliments on their leaders while they stand on their dignity?
And if only our leaders didn't shy away from all public mention of the deity, so unlike the US presidential candidates' "God bless you all, and God bless America." Such an invocation here, a recent Post reader's letter conjectured, could jeopardize a political career.
THE WAY I see it, Jews today - whether as individuals in the Diaspora or as a nation in Israel - have two broad choices: They can either claim their Jewishness without apology, or shrug off this awkward "accident of birth" and try to act like good gentiles.
Neither course is easy. Those who choose the first must accept that their position vis-a-vis the world will be marked by the starkness of "being different" rather than the comfort of "blending in." Those who opt for the second must, however assimilated, live with a nagging sense of having denied a part of themselves.
In the 1970s, I worked at the Language Tuition Center in London's Oxford Street, where foreign students came to improve their English. In between classes, we had private students, and one of mine was an Italian businessman, friendly, confident and suave as only Italians can be.
Toward the end of his lessons, our conversation became more personal and I told him I was moving to Israel. He became still.
"You are Jewish?"
"Yes."
Silence. Many seconds passed.
"Now I will tell you something. I too am Jewish. Yes. My wife, my children think I am a good Catholic. Sunday, we attend mass. They do not know, nobody knows."
His face darkened. "We are a cursed people - look what the Nazis did to us. I will never expose my children to the cursed Jewish fate. Never."
His resolve was unmistakeable, yet I sensed his relief at having connected his core self, for a brief moment, to a fellow Jew he would never meet again.
THAT ITALIAN Jew was ashamed of his Jewishness to the extent of hiding it completely. Less extremely, his is an attitude echoed by not a few left-lib Westerners today.
While we aren't in the 1930s or '40s, there's a lot of Jew-hatred around, and a fair amount of it is directed at the "collective Jew," Israel. So obsessive is this negative preoccupation with Israel that it's hard to claim it is free of anti-Semitism.
I see two basic ways of confronting hatred: to repel it or to internalize it; and one might think that we Jews - especially since acquiring the state our Zionist founders held was essential to our salvation - would have become adept at repelling it.
It seems not. People today, including many Jews, find it difficult to believe that "baseless hatred" can exist. If Israel is so reviled, they say, it must have done something really wicked to deserve it.
Into this uncritical view the Palestinians have almost effortlessly slotted their charge of "They stole our land" as the original sin that justifies unremitting enmity and freeing themselves of all ethical constraints in "liberating" that land.
Jews who have let this hatred of Israel infiltrate their psyches find it impossible, "under the circumstances," to be proud Jews. A friend who works for a large Jewish women's organization in New York told me that the first words to her audience of an Israeli theater director invited there to lecture were: "I am ashamed to stand before you considering what Israel is doing to the Palestinians."
Such Jews' way of tikkun olam, of "mending the world," is to adopt the narrative of the "other" in the hope that this will bring absolution and Israel will at last become an ordinary country, and Jews become like everybody else.
BUT - sorry to say - ordinariness is probably out of the Jewish reach, individually and collectively. History shows quite clearly that the world won't allow Israel to be "like any other nation." True, the world can't quite make up its mind where to put us - but it won't be with everybody else.
So if we are fated to be "special," shouldn't we try to gain an understanding of what sets us apart - a covenant which encapsulates the Jewish civilizational journey and its promise of continuity - and be proud of it? It seems the logical thing to do.
Jewish self-respect, however, will be marked by true stateliness only when we make sure that every Jewish child knows where we've come from as a people, and why it is worthwhile for us to pursue a common destiny.
As for our attitude to the "other," when it stems not from self-negation but from genuine Jewish pride, we will be on the right track to achieving what we most desire.
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