MIDDLE ISRAEL: The Jewish neurosis
| By Amotz Asa-El |
|
March, 21 2002 |
(March 21) The war left her shorn of her husband - liquidated by Stalin while visiting Russia - and her native Romania scarred, torn and bankrupt, but even so, viewed from Bucharest in 1947, the future was all Ana Pauker's.
After having spent years in jail cells and torture chambers, she became the world's first female foreign minister, and soon enough Time magazine named the former Hebrew teacher the world's most powerful woman.
Yet life at the top was short. In '52 the woman who was born and raised as Orthodox Jew Hanna Rabinof was stripped of all her powers and placed under house arrest, where she later died destitute, forlorn and forgotten.
Thus, yet another promising Jewish career ended tragically, thanks to a violent bug that since the Destruction has repeatedly lifted Jews to euphoric heights only to plunge them into depression's abyss.
Its name was tikun olam, and its gist - whether for medieval kabbalists, fiery communists, naive capitalists or New Middle East strategists - was a pretentious, irresistible, and ultimately destructive quest to assume God's responsibilities and set out to mend the world.
There were so many like her that historian Jacob Talmon wondered in his Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution whether one could find "a 'Jewish' common denominator" among radicals from Karl Marx and Lazar Kaganovitch to Rosa Luxemburg and Ana Pauker.
Talmon suggested that theirs was "a Jewish neurosis," a response to centuries of the Christian neurosis concerning things Jewish. Yet the tikun olam virus attacked also in the Muslim surroundings where Jewish mysticism developed in the late Middle Ages. Back then, Jewish scholars concluded that the Jews were suffering because the Creation itself had gone awry, and that it was the Jews' task to repair it.
That theory's damage came in the form of the Shabbetai Zvi psychosis, whose damage to that messianic impostor's followers, to Jewish observance, and to the messianic idea itself is tangible until today. As kabbalistt Gerschom Scholem has argued, that affair shook the ghetto walls from within even before secular forces dismantled them from without. In any event, once out of the ghetto some Jews set out to change not only themselves and their relations with gentiles, but the world itself.
The Jewish-socialist urge to mend the world became a major anti-Semitic axe to grind, not only for Westerners like Henry Ford, but also for communists like Stalin. That Leon Trotsky's Jewishness played a major role in Stalin's pursuit of his arch-nemesis is well-known. What's incredible is that besides their personal differences the two really had a genuine ideological dispute: Stalin made do with the revolution's initial gains, while Trotsky wanted to spread communism to the entire world.
Did Trotsky seek to mend the world because he hailed from a nation of believers who suck with their mother's milk the axiom that God's world has fallen into disrepair, and it's a Jew's task to repair it? And was Stalin disparaging of this cause because his Christian upbringing assumed the world had already been redeemed?
God only knows, but what's clear is that the world-mending circle of Jews who surrounded Lenin, along with ones beyond Russia, like Hungarian and Czech leaders Bela Kun and Rudolph Slansky, were ultimately killed by Stalin, one by one.
Surely, the purges were irrational and their victims were usually non-Jews, but the fact remains that communist world-menders were often Jews and their enemies were not.
The same goes for the Jewish nation's capitalist world-menders.
WALTER RATHENAU, an amateur philosopher who inherited industrial behemoth AEG, sought a planned society and a ban on luxury production so that private capital could be freed to spur spiritual wealth. Ultimately, the man who ran the German economy during the Great War - and later became foreign minister, throughout it all calling on the Jews to assimilate - was assassinated, as a Jew.
Today, financial whiz George Soros emulates Rathenau. Though not born rich, he too is an amateur philosopher and likes to shed crocodile tears over capitalism's wrongs. And like Rathenau, he too set out to mend the world. First, he financed democratic groups like Poland's Solidarity and Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, and then he helped spread management values in the post-communist world and began financing infrastructure projects in the Third World. This multi-billion-dollar effort is so vast that Soros has become the world's second-largest foreign-aid provider after Japan and before (!) the US.
Sadly, while widely appreciated, Soros's world mending also provokes anti-Semitic fantasies, such as Malaysian leader Mahtir Muhammad's. Worse yet, the day is near when today's amorphously described "anti-globalization rioters" will embrace conspiracy theories linking Soros's excessively high profile tikun olam with that of other global Jewish economic players, like the IMF's Stanley Fischer, the World Bank's James Wolfensohn, or the US Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan.
We Israelis have also been plagued by world mending. Like the founding fathers of the Reform movement, who believed the spiritually stimulating Jews' dispersal was God's blessing to the gentiles, we were foolish enough to think the Middle East would dance to our world-mending tunes. And like the Jews who had just emerged from the ghetto, simply making peace with our enemies wasn't enough for us - we wanted to change them. And so, like previous Jewish world-mending efforts, this one, too, ended in major-league failure, depression and bloodshed.
Tikun olam sounds great, but actually is an affront to God. Apparently, a Jew's duty is first and foremost to supervise his own morality, and then his immediate society's. Sailing beyond these is like building a Tower of Babel, even if the intention is "merely" to substitute for rather than challenge God. Had God wanted us to mend the world, He would have left our ancestors in Egypt so they'd change it, rather than deliver them to the wilderness.
Zionism, too, sought to shun rather than mend the world that rejected the Jews. It's time to restore that mindframe.
amotz@jpost.co.il
