When “We Jews” Becomes Too Simple

There is a sentence one hears more and more often: we Jews will manage. Let them talk. Let the world condemn. Let the newspapers write. Let the campuses scream. Let the diplomats perform their little ceremonies of concern. We Jews have survived worse.

At first, the sentence sounds strong. It has the tone of historical endurance. It carries something ancient in its posture: we have crossed deserts, ghettos, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, camps, borders, languages, and graves. We are still here. The world may speak; Jewish existence will continue.

There is truth in that. But there is also something in this sentence that should make a Jew rub his eyes in astonishment. Not because Jews should panic before every accusation. Not because every critic of Israel deserves respect. Many do not. Some critics of Israel are simply old antisemites with new vocabulary, wearing the recycled costume of universal justice. Others discovered Jewish suffering only after discovering that it could be used against Jews. The moral theater is not subtle. One does not need a doctorate in political theology to smell the incense.

Still, the problem remains. When someone says “we Jews will manage,” the question is not only whether Jews will manage. The sharper question is: which Jews are speaking through this “we”?

This question matters because the contemporary “we Jews” is not innocent. It often pretends to be older than it is. It speaks as though it carried the whole weight of Jewish history, yet it frequently gathers around figures, institutions, and political styles that many older Jewish worlds would have recognized as deeply dangerous: contempt for liberal restraint, contempt for institutional limits, contempt for the separation of powers, contempt for the fragile discipline of law, contempt for criticism, and contempt for internal distinction.

One begins to wonder: around what, exactly, has this “we” now assembled? Around Jewish learning? Sometimes. Around memory? Often, though memory is increasingly used as a shield rather than a measure. Around Israel? Certainly. Around Jewish survival? Yes, but survival has become a strange word. It no longer means only the continuation of Jewish life. It increasingly means loyalty to whatever claims to protect Jewish life, even when that protection begins to deform the very measure by which Jewish life once judged power.

The old Jewish seriousness was not simply a politics of survival. It was a discipline of distinction. It did not believe that force becomes pure because necessity invokes it. It did not assume that law is innocent because it wears the robe of order. It did not trust rulers because they spoke loudly about destiny, security, borders, enemies, or sacred inheritance. If anything, Jewish history should have trained Jews to be specialists in the suspicion of sacredized power.

Yet here we are. A part of the contemporary Jewish world now speaks as if the highest form of Jewish maturity were to stop being disturbed by the weakening of democracy, the humiliation of liberal norms, the attack on judicial independence, the erosion of the separation of powers, the cult of executive decision, and the transformation of politics into a permanent emergency.

One is expected to applaud hardness as seriousness. One is expected to confuse institutional destruction with courage. One is expected to treat contempt for restraint as proof of authenticity. One is expected to believe that because the world is often hypocritical toward Jews, Jews are therefore released from the burden of measuring what is done in their name.

This is a remarkable achievement. After centuries in which Jews were vulnerable to arbitrary power, some Jews now cheer when arbitrariness wears a friendly uniform. It is not exactly progress. It is more like a historical nervous breakdown with flags.

The irony is severe. Jews know better than most peoples what happens when law becomes an instrument of exclusion, when courts are weakened, when public language prepares figures of suspicion, when emergency becomes permanent, when the state begins to divide the world between those fully inside protection and those available to exceptional treatment.

Jews know what happens when a population is treated as a problem before any individual act has been judged. Jews know what happens when power says: trust us, the situation is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)