Any thorough religious upbringing promotes rejection of those who think otherwise. It is only through general cultural integration, with religion removed to the sphere of private life, that a society can develop in which all its citizens enjoy equal rights.
This was the guiding principle of the Roman Empire, and Joseph II, Emperor of Austria-Hungary in the 18th century, tried to apply the same principle in 1782 with his Toleranzpatent, the “Decree on Tolerance.” This proclaimed the principle of the equality of all the state’s citizens before the law. It is an extremely interesting collection of documents and undoubtedly reflects the influence on the Emperor of Joseph von Sonnenfels. The decree offered Jews the prospect of assimilating without being subjected to compulsory baptism, and opened the way for development of a secular state which integrated all its citizens. Von Sonnenfels himself was a baptized Jew, and his ideas about the structure of the state were not supported by the majority of Jews who viewed the new laws as merely impeding their traditional way of life. It was Joseph II who abolished the self-governing Kahal which allowed Jews to live in a state within the state. He allowed them to engage in trades and agriculture, accorded them freedom of movement, and gave them access to higher education institutions. He introduced conscription for Jews, giving them equality with other citizens in that onerous duty also, made German the medium for teaching in Jewish schools, and Germanized Jewish names and surnames. That is where such surnames arose as Einstein, Freud and Rothschild. Amusingly, I read somewhere that Hoffmann played a part in devising such extravagant German-sounding names as Rosenbaum and Mandelshtam. These laws, which so upset simple people, nevertheless created a community of educated people free from national narrowness who could participate in the overall activity of the state.
Right up to our own days there was an underlying difference between the descendants of the Western, “Austro-Hungarian,” Jews and the Jews of Eastern Europe. The latter, until the end of the war, or more exactly until the Catastrophe, preserved an inward-looking way of life in the stetls. The exception were the Jews of Communist Russia, some of whom were carried away by the new ideology in the early years of the Revolution. For the most part, however, the Jews of Yiddishland—Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland—tended to look back to the old traditions. Even today there is no shortage of Jewish men wearing long-tailed early 19th-century lapserdaks, and women with wigs on their shaven heads.
My redoubtable teacher, Professor Neuhaus, calls modern Hassidism “a glorious victory of the letter over the spirit.” In his criticism he went further, considering all the ultra-conservative trends of Christianity, both Western and Eastern, to be the cousins of Hassidism. National consciousness in our time draws strength not from the veneration of dogma but from recipes, the cut of your clothes, how you perform your ablutions, and also from the fallacious but ineradicable conviction that traditionalists possess the full measure of truth.
28. May 1969, the Golan Heights
L
ETTER FROM
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO
W
ŁADYSŁAW
K
LECH
Dear Władek,
The bus bringing a tourist group to the Golan Heights has broken down. There is an oil leak which indicates lengthy repairs. We have already seen all the sights, I have told them all I have to say, and now we find there will be at least a three-hour delay before another bus can be sent for us.
The Germans from a Cologne evangelical group have gone off for a walk. I am sitting beneath a fig tree, my helper Hilda is asleep, her head covered with a cowboy hat she was given by a tourist from Texas.
It is not the first time I have brought tours here. There is an enormous graveyard of military equipment, Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks, antitank ditches which have caved in, and an enormous quantity of mines. It seems nearly everyone has been planting landmines for several decades, Turks, English, Syrians, and Jews. Several hundred Soviet tanks were destroyed here. You can only walk in areas which have been cleared of mines. The local sappers are goats and donkeys, which get blown up periodically. So do people sometimes, but there are few people here. It is a No Man’s Land, a vast plateau and mountains of volcanic origin. In the crater of one extinct volcano there is a radar station. There are black and gray boulders, thorn bushes, and occasional clumps of trees. There is an almost biblical legend about the trees. An Israeli agent in Syria occupied a prominent post in the government. When Israel was created in 1948, the Syrians constructed a strong defensive line here with underground fortifications. The agent suggested to the Syrian government that they should plant trees by each of these so that soldiers could shelter in their shade from the heat. A bonus was that the soldiers would be invisible from the air. His proposal was considered sensible and trees were planted.
The Golan Heights are a strategic area from which you can fire on the whole of Northern Galilee, and Syrian missiles were sited here. During the Six-Day War the Israelis were able to destroy them from the air within ten minutes. The Jews knew that above each of the secret installations they would see a grove of trees. Over 20 years these had grown to maturity and pinpointed the targets. The agent, Eli Cohen, was arrested and publicly executed in a square in Damascus. The Jews did everything they could to ransom or exchange him, but Syria was adamant. Tourists tend to be far more interested in stories of this kind than in facts from biblical history.
The early Syrian Church was just as ascetic and forbidding as the volcanic plateau here. Perhaps the extraordinary diversity of the scenery in Palestine, so still in Galilee, so harsh in the deserts, so harmonious in Judaea, engendered the diversity of religious schools. Everything was born here.
All these lands conquered in the Six-Day War are to be given back, but you have the impression that nobody particularly wants them. They are not unpopulated. There are 1 million Palestinians in Gaza. Does Egypt really want them with all their problems? There are several hundred thousand Palestinians on the West Bank and these are a great burden on Hussein. The only point of this whole campaign has been to demonstrate military might and there will be a high price to pay in years to come. Such are the local problems as I see them. It is almost impossible to live here without getting caught up in the daily flow of events. Indeed, working as a priest in Poland, are you able to ignore the pressure from the Soviet Union? We know that in every age it has been raw politics which has determined the direction of the life of the Church.
The most important thing for me has been a gradual recognition of the oneness of life. In the past I had a great sense of hierarchy and ranked events and phenomena in terms of their relative significance. That sense is dwindling. “Significant” and “insignificant” prove equal. More precisely, what you are doing at a particular moment is significant, and then washing up the dishes after a lot of people have had dinner becomes entirely the equal of the liturgy you celebrate.
I will finish. My helper Hilda has woken up, seized the binoculars, and immediately spotted a local cliff hare, which actually looks more like a badger. Jewish hares don’t look anything like Polish hares. Even without binoculars the very sight of them lifts your heart.