Envy; or, Dogmatism in America
In his recent biography of the great Depression-era boxer Barney Ross, Douglas Century suggests why the champ became such a hero to his fellow Jews: “Barney Ross was everything the Diaspora tradition had warned Jews not to become, but a fulfillment as well of its secret fantasy.”
If you grew up in the suburbs, and have few memories of Israel before the Six-Day War, you probably have a hard time understanding the lionization of the “muscular Jew.” Ross was a rebuke to the gentile — and, if truth be told, Zionist — slur that Jews were physically weak and emotionally passive.
Every generation gets the hero it deserves. By the 1970s Jews were confident enough to make a sort of hero out of Woody Allen, or at least the character he created on screen. Frail and neurotic as he was, the glasses-wearing Allen, thanks to the force of his intelligence and wit, proved irresistible to women — yet another Jewish fantasy fulfilled.
Lately I’ve noticed another sort of Jewish fantasy-fulfillment, or at least envy of those traits that the writer or speaker finds among others and missing among his fellow Jews. Call it “dogma envy.”
I first noticed it in David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, who after 9/11 seemed to write almost wistfully of the religious zeal of America’s enemies and wondered if perhaps Americans — the Evangelicals excluded — aren’t dogmatic enough.
I see it sometimes in the debate over the future of the Conservative movement and the remarks of “traditionalists” who worry that the movement’s new leaders lack doctrinal vigor.
I ran across it again in a column by Michael Medved, the movie reviewer and conservative pundit who writes frequently on Jewish affairs. Medved was writing about a recent Gallup poll that asked Americans how they felt about various religious groups. Surprisingly, Jews were the most popular of the 10 groups rated, not only scoring higher than Muslims and atheists, but higher than Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Evangelical Christians, or Fundamentalist Christians (their categories).
I thought this was pretty good news and thought Medved would think so too — especially since conservatives frequently accuse liberal Jews of exaggerating the threat of the Christian Right.
But Medved worries that the Jews score high on the poll not because of who we are, but who we aren’t.
When it comes to politics, Medved suggests, folks feel positively toward Jews because we are not politically monolithic. “In a bitterly divided nation it’s easy to think positively about Jews because everyone — liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat — can claim (with some justification) that Judaism agrees with his or her point of view.” Fair enough, although you can hear a twinge of rebuke when Medved adds that a “religious group with no unified point of view can achieve popularity by appearing to offer all things to all people.”
But the meat of Medved’s argument is that we remain popular because — wait for it — we are not offensive enough!
“Jews may draw high ratings in a poll like this one because Judaism in the United States isn’t dynamic or aggressive enough to represent a threat to anyone,” he writes (my italics).
On the one hand, Medved is talking about our reluctance to proselytize, which many Jews and probably many gentiles consider a good and neighborly thing. But he’s also talking about dogma, and our lack thereof. “People across the country rate Judaism positively not because the messages of our faith come across with so much strength and influence in our society, but because those teachings seem so confused, uncertain, and obscure.”
Or because we refuse to pretend that there is only one way to think, practice, and act on our Judaism? Like Brooks before him, Medved seems to take exactly the wrong message from the Clash of Civilizations, or whatever you prefer to call it. I’m guessing that most Americans are getting a little tired of religious communities that speak with “so much strength and influence,” or who display “the sort of dynamism and ambition capable of drawing numerous new adherents,” to use another of Medved’s phrases.
(It is conservative commentators, by the way, who tend to get upset when liberal groups say they are speaking in the voice of religious tradition when they call for reproductive rights or a high wall between church and state. The frustration among Jewish conservatives is that Jews are too often assumed to be liberal — not that they are wishy-washy.)
Perhaps the respondents to the Gallup poll were entertaining their own sort of envy — envy of the Jewish model of ideological pluralism. That in a time when our biggest enemies are religious fanatics with distinct ambitions, it is refreshing that there is one group that seems tolerant of its own diversity. Perhaps Americans appreciate that the maximalist Jewish dream is not that the rest of the world come around to Judaism, but that the rest of the world leave us alone to practice our faith and establish our homeland.
In his new book, Yearnings, Rabbi Irwin Kula, my old boss at CLAL, celebrates the very opposite of the dogmatism that some in the Jewish community are now advocating. He calls it “messiness,” or the humility that acknowledges that while “not every view is equally true…, the intrinsic worth of every human being means every idea has some sort of claim on the truth.” It sounds like relativism, but it’s not. It means being firm in your convictions, but not so firm that your “truth” turns into “arrogance or domination.” (To read an excerpt from Kula’s book, see page 6.)
These are times that call neither for muscle-bound he-men nor nebbishy intellectuals, and especially not pundits with ayatollah-envy. The times call for the kinds of leaders who are both firm in their convictions and humble in their beliefs.
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