Of course, I well remember this extract from the Acts of the Apostles, when “tongues like as of fire” came down upon the apostles and they began speaking with other tongues and every man out of every nation under heaven heard them speaking in his own language. Daniel seems to be endowed with that tongue of fire.
Although, one time when we were expecting Romanians, I bought him a Romanian textbook. He had it on his table for two weeks and used to take it away with him in the evenings. “It’s very beneficial to put a textbook under your pillow,” he told me. “You wake up in the morning and all the lessons have been learned.”
Looking at him, I recognize that language is not that important. All that really matters is what the language is expressing. I feel there is something of a contradiction here. If it doesn’t matter which language you conduct the service in, why make so much effort to translate everything into Hebrew? I am forever making new copies of the liturgy with variant translations because he believes every word has to be comprehensible. I do occasionally notice contradictions in his views. He will sometimes says one thing and sometimes another. I can’t always keep up with him.
27. 1959–83, Boston
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ANTMAN’S NOTES
The problem of national consciousness here, in America, is to some extent subsumed by the problem of self-identification. Although close in meaning, these are different things. National consciousness, at least among the Jews, has both internal and external constraints. Declaring themselves the People of the Book, Jews have programmed themselves to master, assimilate, and implement the Torah. It is an ideology. It establishes the chosen nature of the Jews, their exclusiveness and preeminence over all other peoples, but also their isolation in the Christian and any other communities. Needless to say, there have always been individual representatives of the Jewish people who have demurred from the overall fixed programme and not fitted into the mainstream of the national life.
The hermetization of Jewish society led naturally to the legend of “the Secret of the Jews,” which developed over many centuries into the notion of the “global Jewish conspiracy” against everybody else. The last exposure of such a plot, already within living memory, was the Doctors’ Plot in Russia shortly before the death of Stalin. In our secular age the blow fell not on the traditional Jewish community but on professionals, the majority of whom, if I understand correctly, were not religiously inclined. They were no more than the remnant who had survived the Catastrophe. It is probably the same “remnant” spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah. It is not the first time in history that this kind of destruction of the majority of the people has occurred. The Babylonian Captivity, of course, reduced them to slavery but did not take lives. The same occurred in Russia during the Stalin period.
European Jewry as it had existed for the last three centuries has been destroyed. I do not think it is capable of regeneration. A few hundred Hassids who have removed themselves from Belorussia to New York with their charismatic Lubavitch tzadik and several hundred yeshiva students led by Orthodox Mitnagdim rabbis are unlikely to prove viable in the modern world. The children of Orthodox Jews who wore tallit prayer shawls are taking Hollywood by storm, and also the Arabs in Palestine. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that after the Catastrophe, the Jews have lost the rigorous skeleton which supported them. As an atheist, I encountered, both during the war and in the postwar years, many Jews who had suffered a crisis of faith. Our people turned into a collective Job sitting in ashes, having lost their children, their health, their property, and the very meaning of their existence. They had also lost to a large extent the treasure they most prized, their faith itself.
My wife’s unfortunate niece, Tsilya, at the age of six stood in a village street, in a crowd, a Polish peasant woman holding her by the hand as all the local Jews were locked in a shed which was going to be set on fire. The little girl prayed to God to save her mother but they set light to the shed and 80 people, including her mother and sisters, burned to death. Tsilya was hidden by kind Catholics, survived the war, and emigrated to Israel. She was from a very religious family but since then has never once been inside a synagogue. “If He exists,” she says, “He has wronged me and I will not forgive Him; and if He does not exist what is the point of talking about Him?”
That is logic. I do not suppose Job was placated by the new children he was given in place of his earlier ones. And those innocent children killed by a collapsing roof purely because of a questionable wager between the Creator and some monster known as the enemy of the human race, is he supposed to have forgotten them? The book of Job is very poetical but lacks logic. As was demonstrated to us by that delightful and intelligent man, Professor Neuhaus in Jerusalem, the reading of Jewish texts is a great art which I have scarcely approached—only enough to understand what it is that Jewish thought ponders.
I have found that to be a cosmogony of the most abstruse nature, entirely divorced from reality, a grand Glass Bead Game. Over the course of the 2,000 years during which boys from the age of five have studied at this school of logic, Jewish brains have been trained to a very serviceable level. All those Jewish mathematicians and physicists, Nobel prizewinners and unsung inventors are byproducts, people who renounced the royal road of the Kabbalah , which considered the same problems as all the other esoteric sciences of other times and peoples. It was, however, the Kabbalah which became suspected of being a kind of intellectual terrorism extending over half a millennium. It is pointless to seek to disprove this craven idea: all intellectual activity can be seen as terrorism against established canons, whether in science, culture, or sociology.
Ultimately, any attempt to establish identity, to provide a rigorous definition of one’s personality, is based on a particular hierarchy of responses taking in gender, nationality, citizenship, educational level, professional affiliation, political affiliation, and the like.
My own identity derives from my profession. I am a doctor, and this is the foundation of my life and activities, as it was even in the ghetto and the partisan unit. In all contexts I remained a doctor. The most unsettling time of my life was after the war when I was required over a period of many months to provide a medical assessment of evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. With the threat of physical annihilation no longer present, I lost my inner bearings, my equilibrium, and the ground shifted beneath my feet. It was not living in the ghetto or our uncertain existence in the forests, but the sum of the knowledge about what happened to the Jews from 1939 until 1945 which changed my outlook. My self-identification as a doctor became irrelevant. As far as the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws were concerned I, as a Jew, was subject to the 1935 “Law for the Preservation of German Blood and Honor.” The law forced me, an atheist who had consciously repudiated Judaism, to resume my national identity. I readily rose to the challenge and the outcome was my illegal immigration to Palestine.
For almost ten years I lived in Israel. I was there when the United Nations declaration creating it was signed, and I hope the Jewish state will continue to exist far into the future. I have never shared the ideals of Zionism and have always believed that the modern world should be organized not along lines of religion or nationality but on a straightforward basis of territorial citizenship. The state should be organized by citizens living within the borders of a particular territory and that is what its legislation should ensure. Few people agree with me, not even Esther. I had no hesitation in accepting the Boston offer. From a professional point of view, I could find no better place to work anywhere in the world. Having lived several years in the United States, I have concluded that it is the US which most closely adheres to the principle, which I believe optimal, of organizing the state on a basis of territorial citizenship. In other respects, it is the same cesspit you find anywhere else in the world.