Page 1 of 2 Sharansky's mistaken identity
By Spengler
Natan Sharansky defied Soviet tyranny during the Cold War and thereby earned
the gratitude of free people everywhere, including the United States, which in
2006 awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After enduring years of persecution in Russia, Sharansky emigrated to Israel
and became a political leader. In his new book, Defending Identity [1],
he sets out to defend Jewish national identity by asserting that national
identity as such is a good thing. We must belong to cultures and nations,
Sharansky asserts, rather than to the insipid soup of global citizenship. The
trouble is that some identities are hostile to other identities by their
nature. Democracy should solve this problem, Sharansky argues, except
that some identities are by their nature anti-democratic, and so on.
A worthwhile thought was gestating in Sharansky's mind, but was stillborn in
the present volume. Sharansky wants to say that the particularism of Jewish
national identity offers universal benefits for humankind. But he does not want
to say so in religious terms, and cannot find a clear way to say so in secular
terms.
Jews often are loath to make theological claims for their own importance, which
sound megalomaniac to secular ears. But the Jews might as well resign
themselves to being hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb. Except for its
religious implications, the world has
little use for Jewish nationhood, and considers the presence of a few million
Jews in the Middle East an inconvenience at best, and a danger at worst. That
is why the only true friends of the Jewish state are American and some other
evangelicals, and a few leaders of the Catholic Church.
Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish theologian, asserted that the history
of Israel was the history of the world. Expansive as this claim may appear, it
is well grounded in Rosenzweig's sociology of religion. What Rosenzweig meant
is that Israel's existence forever transformed human identity. From Israel,
Western Asia and Europe first heard the promise of eternal life, and afterwards
looked at themselves differently. The pagans of the ancient world knew their
days on Earth were numbered, and that their time would come to die out and be
forgotten. But the promise of eternal life that the nations heard from the Jews
undermined their ancient fatalism.
Reasonably, or not, we want to live forever. The first people to believe that
God promised that it would endure forever became the standard against which all
nations must measure their condition. From Ireland to Afghanistan, the
identities of all tribes and nations became a response to Israel: Christianity
offers a New Israel, Islam a competitor to Israel, neo-paganism a Satanic
parody of Israel. The trouble is that Jewish national identity is not one
national identity among many national identities. There is only Jewish
identity, and a set of responses to Jewish identity. Jewish national identity
has a radically different character than all other national identities, for the
Jews uniquely believe that their nation was summoned into being to serve the
sole creator God of the Universe.
It is somewhat uncomfortable for the Jewish to insist on the point, and it is
understandable why Sharansky would wish to take refuge behind the notion of
"identity" in general, but that simply doesn't work, and the Jews really have
nothing to lose.
It is tricky to discuss human identity in other than religious terms, for our
identity often implies continuity. With what do we identify that makes our
existence more than a random occurrence? Our ties of culture, language, faith
and kinship make us heirs to the past and participants in the future, and it is
the future, the vanishing-point at the horizon, that defines the composition of
the other images. Societies that reject religion also appear to reject the
future, for example, by declining to have children.
Sharansky takes to task utopian secular thinking, which claims that peace
requires the extinction of all passionate attachments, national, religious or
whatever. His antagonist is "post-identity" theory, for example, the head of
the Modern Language Association who said, "Cosmopolites not only or even
principally owe an allegiance to their place of birth but also to a broader,
more worldly, supra and transnational world view," as opposed to the "negative
consequences of resurgent nationalism, ethnic separatism, and religious
fundamentalism".
Eliminating all passionate attachments, Sharansky might have said, is a fool's
errand. A rabbinic tale of antiquity reports what happened when God decided to
eliminate the ''evil impulse", by which the rabbis meant the competitive and
sexual instinct among men. The next day not a single egg was laid in the land
of Israel, and God was obliged to restore the impulse. Europe may have
succeeded in eliminating nationalism, or rather, nationalism burnt itself out
in two hideously destructive World Wars. As a result children no longer are
born to the Europeans. The problem is self-liquidating.
On the other hand, the two countries considered most suspect for their
nationalism by the supposedly enlightened Europeans, the United States and
Israel, are the only ones in the entire industrial world to reproduce at above
replacement level. Sharansky is beating if not a dead horse, then a sterile
one. All that secular enlightenment can say to humanity is what that exemplar
of the enlightenment, Frederick the Great of Prussia, barked at his fleeing
soldiers during the 1757 Battle of Kolin: Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs,
do you want to live forever?).
Countries subject to communist rule, the most atheistic and internationalist,
also show by far the lowest birth rates.
Projected population in formerly communist countries
Population
(Thousands)
2005
2050
% Change
Ukraine
46918
25514
-46%
Georgia
4473
2575
-42%
Belarus
9795
5746
-41%
Moldova
3877
2330
-40%
Source: United Nations
Russia itself is not far behind Belarus and Moldova in the race to national
extinction.
A great deal of violence has been perpetrated in the name of religion; the most
violent of all supposedly religious wars, the Thirty Years War, had very little
to do with religion. It is wrong to blame religion for war. Exterminating one's
neighbors was the norm for human behavior from the dawn of man until early in
the first millennium BCE, when the prophets of ancient Israel first spoke of
universal peace under the reign of a single God.
The modern critique of religion emerged out of the 16th and 17th century wars
of religion. Secular critics blame religion for the tempted as we may be
tempted to dismiss as happenstance the way in which the idea of universal love
came to humankind, but the peoples of the Earth did not dismiss it at all. The
peoples of the Earth heard the message of God's love in the particular way in
which it was told to them.
The Election of Israel as Franz Rosenzweig put it:
It was more or less
through Christianity that thoughts of Election have spread among the individual
peoples, and with them, necessarily, a pretension to eternity ... On the
foundation of love for one's own people, there lurks the presentiment that at
some time in the distant future, this people no longer will exist, and this
presentiment lends a sweetly poignant gravity. But in any event, the thought of
the necessary eternity of the people is there, and, strong or weak, it has an
effect. [2]
Rosenzweig makes the striking observation that
precisely because the Christian peoples have come to believe in their own
eternity, and cannot accept the idea that they will be exterminated, as the
ancient peoples did, their concept of war changes radically. War raises the
possibility of the destruction of the people, continued Rosenzweig, and for
just this reason it becomes a religious event. The ancient peoples fought wars,
but the center of their civic life was the official cult, with its rites and
sacrifices. For modern Christian peoples convinced of their own Election, war
itself becomes the supreme act of collective religion.
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little use for Jewish nationhood, and considers the presence of a few million
Jews in the Middle East an inconvenience at best, and a danger at worst. That
is why the only true friends of the Jewish state are American and some other
evangelicals, and a few leaders of the Catholic Church.
