Are we morally obligated to "affirm" our culture? Tablet magazine’s idea of culture and its consequences

(For Kathy.)

An apparently somewhat liberal (as far as that goes in their world) Zionist magazine, Tablet, has a banner quote I find interesting and worthy of comment, below.

“It is essential to realize that any group’s ethical, religious and cultural traditions are not fossils or historical curiosities, to be retained or discarded at a whim; they are precious possessions that may spell the difference between choosing life and death. Thus, all men and women have a moral obligation to understand and uphold the positive, life-sustaining values of their particular culture and to transmit them to those who come after them—as well as to respect the different values of their neighbors. There are lessons for survival, whether physical or moral, which only a knowledge of one’s past, one’s traditions and history, can teach.” Yehuda Bauer

I take issue with the opening sentence. True, a tradition, which by definition is culturally (and more importantly, linguistically) specific, is not a mere fossil nor a curiosity; but this is rhetoric, and a straw man. Culture is curiosities to cultural tourists, like, for many New Yorkers, choosing a restaurant, to get the taste of some local flavor. But culture is also the subject of serious study, which indeed implies first of all the affirmation at least of interest, though affirmation itself only goes so far, because it ends not with difference, but with critique. And critique begins when there are any real problems, and one starts looking at the culture and history that they know or “are part of” (the model here is obviously ethnic nationalism, itself modeled on ideas of the family, abstracted sufficiently to make up the stuff of patriotic enthusiasms and declarations of allegiance and loyalty, another way to think of “affirmation”), — when one takes this up, or takes up any of the boundary-crossings that cause one definable and thus territorialized culture, considered as essentially a bounded and more or less closed set, to interact with traces, images, texts, discourses, sites including geographical ones, and even persons, crossings that can involve borrowings and other kinds of influences and that always are partial and fragmentary, and depend on that, as do texts and discourses and many exchanges in the modern world, which certainly are facilitated by migrations and diasporas. When I write about film from Italy, Poland, China, Palestine, or any place else, I think I am doing something more than cultural tourism, if only for the reason that can be put simply by saying that I ask myself, what does this artwork say to me, even and also where I am, in the different place and/or time that I live in, or that I am from? And if I suppose that I am also being asked to care in some way about the world and people the artist is describing, is the condition of understanding that they are “persons like us,” or is it conditioned rather on my empathy and perhaps also the filmmaker’s art? Anyone can limit empathy to their family, and a nationalist state, founded on an ethnicity, as Germany and Japan still are and France and the United States are not, may ask its citizens to think of the nation as a family, though that is ideological.

More straw man rhetoric: Works of culture are not to be retained or discarded at whim? Oh, so if I buy a book, I had better keep it, and, if I read, understand that I basically am supposed to affirm and not reject it, or what is essential to it? This may be one way of defining a canonical work, though it’s as thin as pushing a “like” button, or buying a book because you are a member of a Party and the Party boss said you should. It is easy enough to see that the absurdities involved in thinking this way derive from the nonsense at its root. Apparently, someone here thinks something is in danger. And what is that supposed to be, Jewish tradition? Now, see, Jewish texts and traditions are “for” Jews, so that they can feel at home, and they interpret for them their own experience, but don’t have or need neighbors in any essential way. They may welcome them, when they find that doing so doesn’t upset their basic digestion and constitution. That’s really nice of them, isn’t it? They will be generous when it’s convenient for them.

Imagine if a thousand white people were killed in a black riot in an American city, and then the entire ghetto is displaced — say, half the Bronx has its population forced to leave, while those who remain - or who cannot easily go anywhere else - are murdered in their sleep, along with their entire extended family and all their friends, including professionals who help other people, and many mothers and children. And this number is not a thousand but tens of thousands. A Biblical verse takes on a new meaning, perhaps: “Saul had his thousands, but David has his tens of thousands?” My example is a fantasy, a nightmare some white reactionaries might have; I am confident neither of these things will happen, and partly because I am confident that if the first thing happened, the second would not; our leaders and enough of our people have just enough good sense that they would never allow anything approaching that. But it’s obviously rather similar to what was done, and as of this writing is still being done, to the people of Gaza. Americans would not tolerate something like this. If our government moved to do that, there would be so much protest that government would be in serious trouble.

I do collect and read books; its an occupational trait and need of us writers, and it is also a taste I happen to share with many “intellectuals,” many of whom have been Jewish, though, certainly, they needn’t be, and today of course there is no real essential connection between these two “manners of being,” if that is what they are, since, unfortunately, the nationalism thing has more or less replaced this. Israel doesn’t need a great many intellectuals, but it does need a lot of soldiers, and weapons supplied by American money. And now that communitarianism, that collective identity thing is what is essential, and nationalists will have to resign themselves to selling “culture” on its far simpler and more narrowly profitable grounds, which is what the Yehuda Bauer quote makes clear. And this is of course presented as an enforceable social norm.

I am involved in literature, reading and writing. But may I permit myself, you may ask, to “retain and discard at whim” any of the books I read? Indeed, I am generally loath to dispense of books, though I’m not sure I have any need any more for, say, Eugene Borowitz’s Liberal Judaism or Norman Podhoretz’s My Love Affair with America (in somewhat less danger with me are books by Salo Baron, Yesheyahu Yovel, Zygmunt Baumann, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Georges Blanchot, Shlomo Sand, Edward Said, Franz Kafka, and many other works in “Jewish studies,” if they can be called that (this makes sense in certain contexts, while in others it is horribly reductive and wrong), none of whose paper jackets I would fly on a flagpole, but then authors rarely ask that). But what Bauer and Tablet clearly mean here is that some set of books (they have a canon, I suppose, though it’s not simply the famous rabbinical one?) is so fundamental that I am supposed to recognize that they somehow exhibit a culture I’m supposed to acknowledge that I belong to.

I reject this very idea. It’s awful. Culture moves forward because people read things “belonging to” (what does that mean?) “each other’s” supposedly proper culture. I have no proper culture that I am willing to acknowledge as such. The very idea is reactionary. I don’t read “Jewish” writings because my identity calls for it, nor because I owe it to those of my neighbors who “count,” while others don’t. It has not exactly escaped my notice who does and does not count today in the official Jewish world, particularly in Israel/Palestine. 1200 dead Israeli Jews “count”; twenty times as many Palestinian “Arabs” clearly do not count - it would be putting it politely and ironically to say, “quite as much.”

The quote says that “all men and women have a moral obligation to understand and uphold the positive, life-sustaining values of their particular culture and to transmit them to those who come after them—as well as to respect the different values of their neighbors.” Look closely: our values are “life-sustaining,” and that is an apparently accidental fact of their particularity (they are ours; indeed, every nation at war affirms the lives of its own people), and we must “respect the different values of their neighbors.” They aren’t accorded (necessarily, anyway) the attribute of “life-affirming.” That is “Jewish”; is it only or mostly Jewish? Of course not. (There are few modern pagans, but paganism itself, the Jewish world’s ancient enemy, did affirm life; it died out partly because it did so in inconsistent ways). In any case, we have our values, or whatever gives value and importance to our culture, and they presumably have some “values” (a philosophical quibble could be, what does that mean, really? Isn’t this metaphor economic?), but whatever values they have, whatever they care about (it’s reassuring to remember they must care about something, including no doubt the lives of their children, making them far more like than unlike their enemies in this situation — of course Zionists will argue that the others value life less, but the evidence we have is only that Hamas was callous about 1200 Jewish lives, an insult Israel is returning to the entire Palestinian people; or do the Zionists who say this mean that they are entitled to murder people to whose particular culture they can attribute, somehow or other, a deficient value of life when judged by their own cultural standards, though not of course their military, and for that matter, not the effective standards of the State of Israel and its supporters in general, as far as the unwanted Palestinians are concerned - for let this be said: Israel now is a war apparatus, that seems to be its essence, and it is engaged in a full on assault on lives that are in the way of its own ambitions, and those who profit from their realization), — so then by the logic of this argument for difference, should they be — perhaps, as was said in Jim Crow America, “separate but equal”?

That’s the logic. You have your territory (in theory, anyway!), we have ours. Nonsense. There is one globalized world today and the Jews of Israel do not have a culture that is separate from that of the rest of the world. It is the opposite of separate: intertwined. In Western Europe after 1792, the Jews were not really separated, just different; the livelihood of Jewish philosophy and literature in the German language in particular was a consequence of that interaction, the denial of which, performed at Auschwitz, was a lie. And the Jewish world returned to that lie, was determined to enforce it, and it still is, and that is the problem facing the middle east, and the Jewish people and religion, which has been corrupted as a result.

I make what I prefer to do with the things I read. In this sense, as a reader, as well as a writer, I am free. I refuse the subjection that Tablet and its like would urge on me. And I say to my friends who are “Jewish Jews” (those who count, obviously Zionists, who are supposed to recognize that that identification is ethically mandatory), that you should do likewise. It is intellectually dishonest, immoral, and serves ultimately murderous ends to think otherwise. Yes, I can reject a book, or a canon of writings. True, it’s often more interesting to reread them and interpret them anew, as an old Jewish tradition tends to do.

There is no culture or identity that anyone has the right to say to anyone else is mandatory. The ideas that matter matter because they do and not because they belong to certain people, or because those people are obligated morally to see themselves as belonging to it.

Long live texts, “Jewish” and otherwise. I use the word in quotes merely because the term ultimately cannot be defined. That is a good thing. It is a true property of cultural meanings, especially the ones that most matter. Commentary is not definition. It’s true that Judaism itself is a religion, and notably has its “laws.” They often notoriously escape definition as well, but Tablet is not concerned with interpretive discussions of Jewish law; it’s a modern literary and political magazine whose terrain is “culture.” Long live Jewish texts, but as to calling for the victory Tablet speaks of (their recent email starts with a summary account of various subjects, suggesting their open-mindedness, up to a point, and then ends with the declaration “we will win,” in Hebrew as well as English just in case anyone was in doubt — “the Jews” will win, is what they mean)… that obviously means in fact the IDF in Gaza, and if they win, who loses? Or does Tablet magazine not care enough about that question that they would even pose it?

Unfortunately, when matters are made thusly clear, as to what really is at stake, we know the answer. And it is very sad, horrifying, and an outrage.

What can literature and those who love do in this context? Crawl into your foxhole? Yes, if literature is a weapon of war. Art is normally not a weapon at all but something else. But then Tablet and I have different ways of using art to affirm life. Theirs passes through death; its logic is mass murder. And with what positive result? I see none on the horizon.