Alan Wolfe - At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews

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At Home
in Exile

Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews

ALAN WOLFE

BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

For Enid

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
Well Rot till We Stink

CHAPTER 2
Defenders of Diaspora

CHAPTER 3
The Secularization of Particularism

CHAPTER 4
A Tale of Two Rabbis

CHAPTER 5
The Lost Jews, the Last Jews

CHAPTER 6
Anti-Anti-Semitism

CHAPTER 7
The End of Exilic History?

INTRODUCTION

In the years after World War II, the most important development in the more than two-thousand-year history of the Jewish people took place. I am not referring to Israels birth in 1948, significant as that event was. I mean instead that a vibrant, successful, and above all else, secure life has, for the first time ever, become possible in states in which Jews are, and always will be, in the minority. In the diaspora, proclaimed the Economist in the summer of 2012, Jewish life has never been so free, so prosperous, so unthreatened. That Jews can live among gentiles without living in fear is an epochal accomplishment, as much testimony to the perseverance of those who have made the Diaspora their home as it is to the willingness of their compatriots to overcome centuries of prejudice. Most remarkable of all, it is rarely remarked. Of course, that the Jews should live with freedom and equality, most, if alas not all, of their fellow citizens in this day and age would be the first to acknowledge, failing to appreciate how radical and unsettling their grandparents would have found such a sentiment.

It is time for the Diaspora to have its due. Living at the mercy of Now that they have become so much safer in non-Jewish lands, Diaspora Jews are in a stronger-than-ever position to transform the passion for justice that so moved the Hebrew prophets into ideals of human dignity desperately needed in an age of rising domestic inequality and overseas instability. This, unfortunately, has not been happening, at least not enough. The Jewish Defense League is a violence-prone organization rightly condemned by Jews around the world. But defensiveness is widespread among all those Diaspora Jews who remain reluctant to accept the fact that at long last they belong where they have long chosen to live.

It is not difficult to grasp why contemporary Jews have failed to appreciate the blessings that exile has conveyed to them. For the past seventy-plus yearsthe same years in which I, born in 1942, have been aliveJewish life has been marked by the shift, in the course of a mere decade, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the haven offered by statehood. Both events are therefore inevitably linked, and not just because Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) occurs just a week before Yom Haatzmaut (Israeli Independence Day). It is often said that there exists within Judaism a tension between particularism and universalism, one of those dichotomies that on the one hand dramatically oversimplifies but on the other contains a great deal of truth: particularists believe that Jews should be primarily concerned with their own, while universalists insist they are under a special obligation to spread the light of reason to as many people as possible. The twin events that have dominated contemporary Jewish life created an environment especially conducive to particularism: the Holocaust, after all, singled out Jews for extermination, while Israel singled them out for expansion. Statehood promised a final solution to the Final Solution: now that they had achieved it, Jews would finally constitute a nation like the others, able to speak in its own name and defend its own interests.

Finality, alas, was not to be. Because it was built on land occupied by others, the Jewish state has been unable to satisfy the need for security that gave rise to it. Nor, despite a dynamic economy and numerous efforts at outreach, has it been able to appeal to all Jews: roughly half of world Jewry has made aliyah (ascent), the Hebrew word that characterizes the decision to leave the Diaspora for Israel. (Worse than that, at least for those who consider Israel the only appropriate home for the Jews, a significant number of Israelis in recent years have made yeridah, or descent into the gentile world.) As it increasingly becomes clear that the Diaspora is not a disaster and that the security offered by statehood has proven to be precarious, the lost universalism that has been so much a part of Jewish tradition may well be prepared for a comeback, and this time on firmer ground than in the past. This will be good for the Jews no matter where they live, Israel very much included. It will be just as important for the non-Jews with whom they live, Israel, again, very much included. That, in a nutshell, is what this book aims to demonstrate.

As important as it may be to achieve, no one should expect that a revival of diasporic universalism will prove easy. There are four intimately interconnected reasons why so many Jews are determined never to forget the events of the 1930s and 1940s, no matter the cost to the universalist element in their own tradition.

The first is the feeling, strongly believed if rarely explicitly stated, that honoring the living somehow insults the dead. Six million Jews, from this perspective, did not die so that another six million could lead the good life in New York, Toronto, London, or, God forbid, Berlin. Since Hitler was determined to kill each and every one of them, any Jew who is now alive must be so through sheer chance: by the decision of ones grandparents to leave Europe before it all began, for example, or by the fact that they boarded one train rather than another, or because they had the right connections to obtain an ever-elusive exit visa. When survival is the result of individual fortitude, pride in longevity follows. When it is a roll of the dice that determines who shall live, the winners ought to have the good sense not to brag. Every living Jew must understand that he or she is taking the place of another who never had the opportunity. Guilt that pervasive is not easily overcome. More important, at least to those who think this way, it should never be overcome. Best keep satisfaction with ones diasporic experience muted lest the ghosts of the Shoahs victims be stirred.