Page 2 of 2 It's easy for the Jews to
talk about life By Spengler
of
being born, having children, growing old and
dying, is not an attractive proposition. The
desire of all nations is eternal life, to be
exalted above this muddy vesture of decay. A
people that clearly foresees its own end will
crawl into a hole and die like a sick animal, as
we observe so tragically among aboriginal
populations forced into communication with the
modern world.
What makes the Jews
different is their unique belief that the Covenant
gives them eternal life, a belief grounded, to be
sure, by
thousands of years of
history, and survival against all odds against the
depredations of the Egyptian, Assyrian,
Babylonian, Alexandrine and Roman empires, not to
mention more recent unpleasantness. It is not
changing the baby's diapers or changing grandma's
bedpan to which the Jews refer when they speak of
delight in life, but rather the idealized,
perpetual life of a kinship community.
As
for the ordinary sort of life, the Jews tell
nastier jokes about it than anyone else. But even
in the banal sort of jokes that they tell to one
another, the Jews take the perpetuity of their
existence to be self-evident. One joke that
circulates in many versions involves two elderly
Jews deep in conversation. One says, "Life is so
painful, joy is so short, pain is so long, that we
would be better off dead than alive!" The second
Jew says, "You are right." The first adds, "Even
better than to be dead would never to be born!" To
which the second responds, "But who has such luck?
Not one in ten thousand!" Here is an existential
version of Parmenides' paradox, which states that
everything must be part of a giant unity (because
non-being cannot exist: the moment you say the
word "non-being", you refer to a something, and
something must have being, etc). So self-evident
is existence to the Jews that even the wish for
oblivion implies existence.
Even Jewish
humor expresses a faith in Jewish eternity so
vivid that the opposite is unimaginable. That is
the sort of faith that moves not only mountains,
but continents. The enormous influence of this
tiny people, which now comprises barely 15 million
individuals, stems entirely from this unshakable
belief in its own eternity. Paradoxically, Jewish
existence exercises a great gravitational pull on
Christian faith. As the great German-Jewish
theologian Franz Rosenzweig wrote:
That Christ is more than idea - no
Christian can know this. But that Israel is more
than an idea, the Christian knows, because he
sees it. For we live. We are eternal, not in the
way that an idea might be eternal, but we are
eternal in full reality, if eternal we be at
all. And thus we are the one thing that
Christians cannot doubt. The parson argued
conclusively in response to Frederick the
Great's question about the proofs for
Christianity: "Your Majesty, the Jews." The
Christians can have no doubt about us. Our
presence stands surety for their truth ... The
continuing life of Judaism through all time, the
Judaism witnessed in the Old Testament, to which
it also bears living witness, is the unique
kernel, whose glow invisibly nourishes the rays
[of Christianity], which through Christianity
breaks visibly and multiply-refracted into the
night of the pagan world.
The success
of the State of Israel, for that matter, provides
one of the most powerful arguments for Christian
evangelization in the global South. If God
fulfilled his pledge to this tiny and apparently
insignificant nation, restoring them to their
ancient and promised homeland and its capital
Jerusalem, then why should others doubt the same
promise of eternal life to all the nations who
come to him? Given the competition between Islam
and Christianity for converts in Africa, the
humiliation the Muslim world feels at the presence
of a Jewish enclave in what for some centuries was
Muslim territory also constitutes a powerful
argument for Christianity, by attenuating the
claim of Islam to be a final revelation. The more
the Muslims rail at Israel, the more Africans will
admire the potency and faithfulness of the Jewish
god.
As Philip Jenkins, the world's
authority on the subject, reported in his book
The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the
Bible in the Global South, the newest
Christians identify profoundly with the Israelites
of the Hebrew Bible. I reviewed Jenkins' book on
December 12, 2006 (see A new Jerusalem in sub-Saharan
Africa). (Copyright 2007 Asia Times
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