It's easy for the Jews to talk
about life By Spengler
The better one gets to know the Jews, the
more peculiar they appear. "Remember us unto life,
O King who delights in life," they pray on the
solemn occasion of their New Year, which this year
fell on September 13. Unfeigned and spontaneous
delight in life is uniquely Jewish; the standard
Jewish toast states, "To life!" while the most
characteristic Jewish gibe admonishes, "Get a
life!" We are not dealing here with so-called lust
for life that involves a pile of broken dishes and
a hangover the next morning. Instead, the
Jews
evince a liking for life as such. That is not only
unusual; it is almost unnatural.
Life as
such is not that likable. As Mephistopheles
taunted Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's
tragedy, life in its totality was fit only for a
god, too hard a cracker for ordinary humans to
digest. That seems to be the prevalent opinion
across epochs and cultures. Socrates told us to
despise life and instead to view death as the
highest good. Buddhism teaches us to regard it as
an illusion to inure ourselves from its attendant
pain. From the Spartans to the Vikings, the
martial cultures of the pagan world showed
contempt for life, for they often fought to the
death. Pagans aspired to a glorious death; I can
think of not a single instance in the history of
the Jews, whose wars of antiquity were frequent
and ferocious, of the mention of a "glorious
death". The very notion is repulsive to Jewish
sensibilities.
Christians die to this
world to attain the Kingdom of Heaven; they
aspire, that is, to a life that is abstracted from
our travail in this vale of tears. Sigmund Freud
warned that psychoanalysis offered no consolation,
and at best could proceed from hysterical misery
to ordinary unhappiness. The ubiquity of
self-destructiveness led him to posit a death-wish
as a fundamental human drive.
On the
strength of the evidence, we would have to say
that life at best seems an acquired taste. Most
people dislike life, at least their own lives,
judging from the cult of celebrity and the
universal passion for spectator sports. The
average man or woman rather would live vicariously
through the glamour of actors or athletes than
dwell upon the failure and humiliation of their
own lives.
Even in their most abject
moments of celebrity adulation, though, ordinary
folk well know that the lives of the rich and
famous are just as miserable as their own. That
accounts for the universal fascination with the
feckless Diana Spencer, who combined in one person
the attraction of a fantasy princess with the
repulsion of a horrible example. Goethe's Mephisto
knew all about this, of course. Unlike the
biblical Satan of the Book of Job, who took from
ancient man what he required, the up-to-date devil
offers modern man what he desires - with just as
deadly effect. The fantasy life of ordinary folk
does not evince a liking for life as such, for
even the life of celebrities is tainted.
What we observe about the mass of
individuals applies a fortiori to the vast
majority of peoples, who dislike their national
existence as much as individuals dislike their own
lives. Between half and nine-tenths of the
6,000-7,000 languages now spoken on this planet
will disappear during the next century, linguists
believe, and with them the sentience of the
peoples who formerly spoke them. Given that none
of these peoples faces the threat of physical
destruction, their imminent extinction must be due
to distaste for their ethnic life. They do not
like their national life, in short, sufficiently
to continue living it. Extreme cases include the
Innu of Labrador Bay in Canada, who in 2001 asked
the government to take away their children because
the adults were too debilitated by alcoholism to
care for them; today's Europeans represent a less
extreme case, of auto-extinction by attrition.
Are Jews the only ethnicity that delights
in life? Professor David Layman of Elizabethtown,
Pennsylvania, observes that the Jewish outlook is
not quite unique. In correspondence with this
writer, he notes, "There is one prima facie
exception: China. The stereotypical vision of
popular religion (the 'folk' customs and
traditions that underlay all Chinese practice) is
summarized as 'prosperity, progeny, and
longevity': wealth, descendants, and long life.
But I am not sure that exception carries the full
weight of the Jewish formula. In my reading of
Chinese religious development, the primal Chinese
formula is no different from the Deuteronomic
dictum in 30:19: 'This day I call heaven and earth
as witnesses against you that I have set before
you life and death, blessings and curses. Now
choose life, so that you and your children may
live.'"
Professor Layman adds, "However,
at that point [the] Chinese and the Jewish
traditions diverge. Deuteronomy 30:20 continues,
'and that you may love the Lord your God, listen
to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord
is your life, and he will give you many years in
the land he swore to give to your fathers,
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.' What intervenes, of
course, is the supernatural event of the
Covenant."
It's easy for the Jews to talk
about delighting in life. They are quite sure that
they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at
the prospect impending extinction. It is not their
individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant,
but rather the notion of a covenantal life that
proceeds uninterrupted through the generations.
Mephistopheles is right: life as such, the
run-of-the-mill business
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