Collective responsibility: Gaza, Jesus and Gilad Shalit.

My mother recently met an old friend, they had a little chat, but then the next day she got an e-mail from her former friend saying she couldn't talk to her any more because of what Israel is doing in Gaza.
My mother is 90 and lives in London. She has absolutely no influence over Israeli policy and certainly bears no responsibility for it. You might as well blame her for the death of Jesus.  Yet there is this notion in certain circles that Jews are collectively responsible for the fate of the Palestinians. Fortunately, perhaps, the same people have no such claims about our responsibility for our own fate.  If my mother gets bombed, these same people will consider it entirely her own problem.

The idea of collective Jewish responsibility is not a purely antisemitic thing. A recent article in the New York Times  (A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life by Ethan Bronner) commented on the sense of mutual responsibility that exists in Israel and suggested it was a potential problem in Israeli politics.
Actually I rather like it, its what made our demonstrations in support of the welfare state both highly successful and completely non-violent: the biggest demonstration, with 350,000 (5% of Israelis) in attendance was held in the most expensive square in Tel Aviv, where all the top designer stores have branches, and not a single storefront was broken.   That could never have happened in England. It is also why the Israeli government released hundreds of dangerous men in return for one minor soldier.  Half the country now regards Gilad Shalit as their son. If Hamas didn't give him post-traumatic stress disorder, then the queues of people trying to get a look at him (after years of total isolation) probably will.

I think all this mutual responsibility is related to the Bible. The Jewish God wasn't into individual responsibility. The Jews were chosen to deliver a message and they had to do it as a collective. In the Biblical narrative, if some do wrong, we all get punished. For example, in Exodus 32 (9), the Israelites built and worshipped a golden calf while Moses was up Mount Sinai "I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.”  Moses then argues with God and gets the punishment reduced, thus launching thousands of Jewish lawyers on the world, all well capable of arguing with God.
That's why Jews aren't required to believe in God: Rabbinical Judaism requires you to follow the commandments; we can be atheists so long as we keep the Sabbath, circumcise boys and fast on Yom Kippur. Otherwise we all get it.  Incidentally the converse also applies: maltreat the Jews and God punishes you collectively.

The Christians developed a different system, one based on individual responsibiity.  Christians, especially protestants, can improvise their prayers and are held to account on a personal basis. But all too many fail to apply an individual-based moral system to Jews.

Other People's Language

Two friends of mine had their pictures on the front pages of Israel's newspapers this week! The first was Avi Levy who had a huge photo on the front of Ha'Aretz , he also had a nice sized picture on the inner pages. Haaretz is the Israeli version of the New Yok Times, so being on the front page is serious stuff; all the movers and shakers in Israel read it, except of course that Israel is basically a small place.

 

Avi and I both did fast track training to be English teachers and then found we didn't like it.  Avi decided to make a fuss and contacted the press, he invited me to join him but it was literally the day I decided to quit teaching and I didn't feel ready to discuss what had happened - so I missed out on the front page of Ha'Aretz. I also didn't want my name associated with a failure - which is kind of dumb since here I am putting it in a blog. But so it goes. I would rather not have the world discussing why I quit something and I don't feel like attacking the people I worked with or the children I taught. Avi by the way, is a brilliant man and was perhaps the smartest person on our course.

The next person to get their picture on the front page was Jonathan Sagall, who I have known for almost 20 years. I made friends with him in the gym many years ago and I think what caused him to like me was that I didn't have a clue who he was: in Israel he is a legendary actor who starred in a (the?) cult classic "Lemon Popsicle" which is the Israeli equivalent of American Pie and probably the highest grossing Israeli movie of all time.The movie made so much money that the producers were able to buy an American film studio.  I should add that I see him very rarely and we haven't talked recently.

Sagall enjoys shocking people.  He likes living on the edge and quite often does and says outrageous things (for some reasons I have a number of friends like this).  Anyway his photo appeared on the front page of Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper.  I can't give you the url because the article is currently only in the print version.

The story itself was not a big one, but I suppose that Jonathan's picture on the front page sells newspapers - God knows that's why I bought it.  Basically he wrote a movie script based on his mother's experiences surviving the Holocaust (his mother is a famous actress) and then, for some reason figured it might make a better movie - or sell better - if he located the action in the Palestinian Authority, so he took the Holocaust plot and located it in Palestine. To add insult to injury he then persuaded the Israel Film Board to provide funding for his movie. Today the story has emerged, and there is a scandal. The funding is public money.

The outraged journalist hasn't read the script mind you so we don't know how scandalous this scandal really is, its just that Jonathan sent him some promotional material making the point that he was retelling his mother's Holocaust survival story set in Ramallah and that the public was funding it...

So there you have it.  I'm not famous, though God willing, this blog will make me famous but people I know are all over the front pages. 

What the whole story with Jonathan made me think was that sometimes, we as Jews adopt the discourse of antisemites, rather like Black American men always seem to be calling each other "crazy niggers".  Do African-Americans really talk like that?  Or is it just movie speak? I can't imagine I would talk like that but life often imitates fiction. What struck me was that it was rather similar to Jews always complaining about each other.  We spend so much time listening to the discourse of people who hate us that we end up using it ourselves.  Anti-semites like to compare Israel to the Nazis and almost inevitably many Jews do the same. 

Post Script

(Added a week later) Apparently Sagall's mother spent the Holocaust in Poland pretending to be a Christian and this is a dramatization of a single incident in that period which he has recast in modern Israel.  Sagall has made it clear that no comparison between the Holocaust and West Bank are intended.  See his response in Ha'Aretz.