IN THE COMPANY OF THE LONELY ONES
December, 1940
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ON the words of the Bible: “There is none like unto God, O Yeshurun**Deuteronomy XXXIII, 26.,” the Midrash remarks: ††Bereshith Rabbah, 77, 1.“Rabbi B’rachyah said in the name of Rabbi Simon: ‘There is none like unto God’, and yet who is like unto God?—Yeshurun, Old Israel. For what is said of the Holy one, blessed be He? ‘And the Lord is exalted yet He is alone’. Similarly is it said of Jacob And Jacob was left alone’ ”.
This Midrash may be understood as trying to define the historic role of Israel in the world as a Mission of Loneliness.
What is the rightful place of the Jew in the world? Where do we Jews belong?
There are various Jewish replies to this most controversial question.
We are, of course, the loyal citizens of the State in which we live. There are Jews who even maintain that in England they are English, in America American, in Ireland Irish, just like any of their non-Jewish fellow-citizens, differing from them only in the matter of religious persuasion. However, if we are sincere we must admit that there is one important condition to our loyalty to the State, a condition that has been sharply illustrated by the Jewish experience of the last few years. We are loyal citizens, if the State deserves loyalty. Nobody had a right to expect loyalty of Russian Jewry to the barbarous regime of the Tsar, which endeavoured by means of pogroms and persecution to divert to the Jews the popular wrath aroused by its mismanagement and corruption. Has anyone the right to expect of German Jewry loyalty to the gigantic gangster organisation that calls itself the Third Reich?
We are loyal, but as Jews we cannot accept such a maxim as “right or wrong, it is my country”. However patriotic Jews may be, they must never allow the difference between right and wrong to be blurred by slavish subservience to the egoism and egotism of the State. Whatever the flag which we may wish to serve in loyalty and devotion, for a Jew right must remain right and wrong must remain wrong. This is but one aspect of the complicated position of the Jew. In spite of his patriotic duties, which he may wish to discharge to the best of his abilities, he cannot but recognise certain moral standards which at all times remain independent of the State. In reality, of course, the only way of serving the true interests of a State is by adhering to independent moral standards, be it even by denying loyalty to the forces temporarily in authority. But centuries will pass before the nations will have realised and acknowledged this principle. Until then our loyalty as citizens must remain conditional. As a consequence, the Jew, however conscientious a citizen, will remain an outsider. Citizenship does not give the full reply to the quest for the rightful place of the Jew in the world.
Another and more radical answer is that of a Jewish nationalism, which at least has the merit of a delightful simplicity. Like others, it says, we are a nation. Like others, we have a place in this world—Eretz Israel. We have lost it owing to misfortune and the superior force arrayed against us at a certain moment of our history. But misfortune and force are not valid arguments against the right of a nation. Once more we are claiming our own “place in the sun”.
This certainly sounds most reasonable. But is this all we have lived and suffered for during two thousand long years of exile and persecution? Can this be a justification for the misery of our life in Exile? Let us assume we shall be very lucky. One day, who knows, we may get our own independent Jewish State. What then? How far shall we be then? If we are not careful, we might be striving for the kind of “happiness” under which all mankind is crushed to-day. One day we too might be in the position of poisoning our youth with the curse of nationalism. The time may even come when we shall be a “proud” and warring nation, driving along victoriously with our own mechanised armies. Naturally, never wanting war, but always prepared to defend the frontiers of our sacred heritage.
If so, if the Jewish happiness of the future lies in such or similar conditions, I say “No” to this future and this happiness. If this be the place allotted to us in the world, let us rather have no place at all.
I say this in no pacifist mood towards the present conflict in the world. After human wickedness on the one hand and human stupidity on the other have pushed mankind into the abyss, there is nothing else left but to fight the struggle out to the bitter end. But Jews should not be blind to the facts. It is enough for us to suffer from human wickedness and stupidity, but what reason can we have for identifying ourselves with them by planning the Jewish future on lines that have led the nations into the present chaos?
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Solutions of the problem that overlook the basic feature of our existence are doomed to failure from the outset. “And Jacob was left alone”: this is the burden of Jewish history. We are alone, this is the basic fact of our life. The first condition of any dignified way of living for us Jews is the recognition of our loneliness and the courage to accept the fact.
We are living in the world, but we do not really belong to it. Wherever we may be, we are strangers. The system of living by which we are surrounded has been devised without us. Of course, use has been made of the conceptions of the Jewish genius, but in a non-Jewish way. We Jews are like the remnants of a species that, according to all scientific reasoning, should have completely died out long ago, but which in some mysterious way still manages to survive. We have no part of our own in the realities of life. We are admitted to a share with the nations in what is theirs. We are allowed to help them, or even to give our lives for the kind of world which they have built, but nowhere in the world is there a piece of life of which we Jews can say that it is ours, over which we as Jews have control. We do not belong here.
This has been the Jewish tragedy of the last two millennia, put in a nutshell. We have been pushed about all the time. We have always been in the way of somebody. There has been no place for us. But there has been one great advantage in this. If there has been no place for us, then of course we bear no responsibility for what has been going on in the world.
For thousands of years human history has been an incredible spectacle of cruelty and stupidity; we Jews have no share in it. All the time we have suffered incredibly; thank God, we have not inflicted similar sufferings on others. We have been slaughtered and killed; thank God, we have been no murderers or killers. Like our father, Jacob, we have often prayed to God: **Genesis XXXII, 12.“Deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau”. Thank God, people never had reason to pray: “Deliver me from the hand of Jacob”.
We are alone. There is no place for us in this world. But great is our compensation that our hands are clean. We have no share in the abominable crimes of human history in the course of the past two thousand years.
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We paid a heavy price for the cleanliness of our hands. We have had to live like the relics of some forgotten past; alone in a world that had no use for us. But sometimes I feel that it was worth while if only for the sake of our clean hands.
It is true, the strain that such a life involves has often been almost unbearable. There have always been Jews who, overawed by the prospect of a life in loneliness, try to break out of the isolation by all kinds of assimilation, be it religious, national, cultural, or social. But surely, the culmination of Jewish history, the purpose of the Jewish tragedy, cannot lie in fraternisation with the world as it is.
We are an old nation; we have seen much of human history. Much of what we have seen was utterly contemptible. We are not impressed by the kind of civilisation the nations succeeded in establishing. We are the onlookers. We are waiting in our loneliness and in our solitude for humanity.
We are no relics of a past. We are the future. We have been alone not because we belong to a race that cannot die, but because we started to live too early for a world that cannot yet live, that is still forming itself in the womb of time. We are alone because—in the sphere of western civilisation anyway—we are the only grown-up nation, having done with most of the futilities of national existence thousands of years ago.
We are lonely in the world but we are not alone in our loneliness. A greater one than we is lonely too: God. Mighty and exalted is He, but He is alone. We Jews are alone in our misery, so is He in all His might and Glory. There is no place for us, neither is there any for Him. The system of living in the world has been devised without us, neither has God had much say in it.
God in all His Might and Glory is patiently waiting for the New Man to deliver Him from His loneliness by making Him the corner-stone of human life. God is waiting for the company of a mankind to come. Can it be our task to-day to go out and fraternise with life as it is, to accept life as it is, and thus to augment the solitude of God?
We are lonely, and it is hard to bear loneliness. But let us not forget that there is a great company of the lonely ones. There is God who is lonely, there are Justice, Truth, Freedom, Goodness—they are all very lonely. Let us remain faithful to their company.
Only after we have delivered God Himself from His loneliness, only after the great human ideals break through their present splendid isolation and are realised in the everyday life of men, shall we Jews be redeemed from the prison of our solitude.
We are sharing in the fortunes of God among men, as He is sharing in our fortunes. Thank God for it….