SCHOOL OF HYPOCRISY

Published in "The New Jewish school" #13/2004

Weep for the truth and live with the lies
Russian proverb

The great collision of the two totalitarian systems of the XX century – fascism and socialism – ended in the crush of both. Two twin ideologies fought for human soul trying to exterminate from it everything religious and humanistic brought up by millennia of preceding efforts. Like fairy-tale dragons, the world’s destructive forces suffocated each other in a gigantic fight. And on the hearth and home, burnt by their fight, new sprouts of liberal hedonism have taken their roots – neither of culture nor of ideology, but of some unified form of mass conscience – of that very mass conscience to which today almost all national cultures serve.

The heavenly kingdom has now been buried deep under the ruins of earthly kingdoms. In the XX century all the great purposes have compromised themselves irretrievably. The sense of existence of both a particular individual and the society as a whole have returned to the simple and perceivable: earthly well-being, physical and moral comfort, plenty of possibilities and entertainments. What prevents a person from enjoying himself has been removed from his life systematically – and first of all the moral evaluation of these enjoyments. A person is considered happy if he can lead a regular and well-off life, without volition actions, moral and physical sufferings, under the conditions of safety for not only his rights but his vices as well. This is a paradise built on Earth – and there is everything in it but God.

In its upbringing aspect, the modern society creates a pedagogic problem. On the one hand, a teacher cannot but appreciate open access to knowledge and spiritual values in the society where freedom of personality is proclaimed as a basic value. Freedom discovers unlimited perspective for spiritual, creative, moral development of the personality. On the other hand, in practice the teacher sees how permissiveness makes souls dull and cripples them, while mass culture beats up the sprouts of personal individuality, rubber-stamping millions of faceless primitives – less befooled but more corrupted than in a totalitarian society.

Is it that Dostoyevsky’s Great Inquisitor was right in his efforts to curb the ‘dehumaning’ freedom? And what is the fate of the Jew in this world? Shall we hide from it behind the walls of ghettos – hardly breathing, hypnotizing ourselves with words of ancient prayers not to hear screams of Sodom from the outside? Maybe such a teacher’s ideal is possible – but only inside a ghetto, but not here, where nothing except our own attitude towards the world beyond can separate and defend us from it. But unfortunately we have lost our attitude towards this world – due to our grandparents who were eager to leave the ‘repellent Jewry’. We are a nation of marans, homunculi of Stalin laboratories, the “Homo Soveticus” which retains its self everywhere – from the hills of Judea to the snows of Alaska. In the degree to which the soul of a Soviet, as well as a post-Soviet Jew is still open for nationalist propaganda, he becomes Zionist and begins to consider himself Jewish. He does not have more grounds for this than a man from Odessa living now on Brighton-Beach has to consider himself American. The latter is American because he lives on Brighton-Beach. The former is Jewish because there is the State of Israel (in which, by the way, he today prefers not to live).

Are we doomed to getting mixed with the crowd – and do we really have no alternative?

There is an alternative. It is in returning not to the lost Jewish roots, but to the human ones. Our salvation is not in the national or the religious, but in the personal – and in the human grandeur and righteousness, in getting similar to Biblical patriarchs. There are thousands of ways to leave Jewry, but there is only one way to come back; this only entrance is described in the Bible, and it lies in personal communication to the sacrament of human fate in this basically inhuman world.

To be a human – isn’t it a pedagogical ideal for Jewish school?

We are perplexed. We don’t understand any more what it means to be a human – and that is why we don’t any more know what it is to be a Jew. Our persistence and strength have turned into sluggishness and blindness. Inertia has conquered the modern Jewish world: life has changed, but the Jewish ideas about the essence of their Jewishness remain as if unchanged – we say “as if” because there is no reality behind the words any more, notions have lost their meanings. Our Jewishness has become similar to the Russian matryoshka-doll – taking off the shell off one word, we find another one under it and so on and so forth up to complete disappearance of the sense. Replacing reality by verbality – isn’t it true Russian style! Comeliness reigns in our verbal cosmos, peacefully resting are saints in heaven, and the light of the Holy Script is spread everywhere. But in our homes – alas, it’s just spiritual poverty miserably lit by the torch of primitive desires.

There is no brighter example of spiritual poverty than the notion of a “Jew observing commandments”. No, he is not a teacher of righteousness any more. Not a sage, whose prayers are listened to in heaven. Not a holy one by whose side people get ashamed of their sins. Even not a man beyond the money who distributes his property among beggars. Today a “genuine Jew” is the one who differs maximally from a “non-genuine”. Differs by his outlook, clothes, way of life, rituals, gait and speech. It is due to these outward features that the Messiah is to find and recognize him – to save him from the milieu of the perishing spoiled mankind. And all of us non-genuine Jews latently agree with this, even those who hide their superstitious fear under burning hatred towards the Orthodoxes.

Maybe somewhere in the bosom of Orthodox Judaism the understanding of inseparability of the commandments is still alive. There Shabbath is the place of meeting of man and God, from which the man obtains spiritual purification, righteousness, mercy and love. Studying Torah is the instrument making these high feelings into the way of interaction with world and people. Maybe somewhere infinitely far from us all the mentioned is alive – still alive. But what we are facing with is an absolutely different Judaism. It is a Judaism where the observation of Shabbath is primarily the sign of belonging to the “Army of Hashem”, the society of the “loyal ones”. It is a feature which is almost as striking and as pagan as disdain towards the “goyim”.

Of course, it is not the mater of thousands-year old rituals, of the commandments, and of course not of the source of these commandments. An instrument for a surgical operation can be as well used to kill – and these two actions will outwardly look very much alike. It makes no sense to say that fulfillment of a ritual is wrong as it is. But it has no more sense to say that it is right as it is. The thing is, the spirit has gone. And while we are pretending to be alive and teaching children pretense, the miracle which happened to the dead in the desert is never to happen to us.

Looking back we can state: all the “means to be Jewish” we have been given (or forced to accept) don’t work. Their main shortcoming is that being a Jew is not connected with being a human. But shall God care whether we are Jewish if we are not humans?

We have to look for our own ways to righteousness and humanity. Our own ways to God. And only such investigations can make us Jewish again. Because they are exactly what made our Biblical forefathers Jewish. Something that made Vassily Grossman Jewish, his not knowing either Hebrew or Yiddish.

Unfortunately, the modern individual is a weak and coddled creature preferring the easiest way in everything. And religious propagandists are traveling salesmen of this way. It is easier to pretend than to be. It is easier to avoid than to repulse. It is easier to declare devotedness to God being rejecting ‘trefe’ than to love at least one’s own neighbour.

Easy ways usually lead to evil. More and more Russian Jews, having these or those more or less cushy jobs, pretend to be Jewish for money. If those who inspire the fake process of “returning to Jewishness” in the FSU could have realized it, they would have blushed. But maybe the servants of the pantheon of “Jewish identity” are also pretenders? I’d rather not believe this. But there is much which convinces me in it. In the Jewish cultural movement that once began as a collective selfless devotion, there are now almost no devotees. From a commandment (mitzvah) it has become “earnings” (parnasah). But even this wouldn’t be too bad, were the parnasah honest and wouldn’t it require duplicity at least from the educators.

As for the result, it is rather sad, for today “to become a Jew” (that is to pretend being Jewish) is here nothing short of a way of obtaining or ensuring one’s well-being. For a former Soviet person such an acquisition is done by means of some sort of ‘customary and light constraint’ over his sleeping soul, but in reality we pay for it a really high price – the price of loss of our Jewish essence, the price of refusing from the hard labour of the soul seeking for God. Lie, triviality, emptiness send those who could breathe new life into Jewishness away from it. How can we expect in such situation to awake love to Jewish spiritual heritage in children’s hearts? It is with our own hands that we are bringing in the idols and cultivate hypocrisy. Jewish education today is what one should repent of, something what one should make a teshuvah about.

No, the Jewish school does not teach to be either a human or a Jew. Let us imagine an ideal Jewish school-leaver: trained in oriental martial arts, he can overthrow any foe; school contests have awakened his ambitiousness, hardened his will, made him deepen and improve his knowledge. Command of English has made him a citizen of the world; computer literacy has given him gold-bearing trade. Besides he can successfully pretend of being Jewish. And if he wishes he can boast of not eating ‘trefe’. This is the pedagogical ideal of Jewish education: a competitive wolf in the forest of technological civilization. A citizen of the world in sheep's clothing of Judaism.

Jewish school is fortunate of not achieving its aims. It is not capable to change Jewish children into cynic supermen oriented at wolfish success. What it really can is to provide a middling standard education, which can be given by almost every school – and besides to teach children more or less believably pretend being Jewish. And this pretence is destructive both for the human and for the Jewish in all of us.

What could real Jewish education in the FSU look like? If it were easy for me to answer this question, the answer would have been given already. I won’t speak here of curricula and other particular content of education. Instead I will once again ask the questions to which everybody should find his own answer. And on the answer depends whether we have the future – meaning not only Jewish education in the FSU but also something much greater…

What is more important for us, teachers: to bring up our children to be honest people or “good Jews”? And what is more important for our leadership?

Are we capable to love what we try to inspire our children to love? And is what we really love capable to become the content of Jewish education in our schools?

Can Jewish education afford being honest and doesn’t this honesty mean “honest resignation”?

And finally the most important thing: do we believe that if we repent of our sins, cowardice and mistakes, if we face the truth and dare to say unpleasant things to our leadership, if we wish with all our soul to perform our teacher’s work sincerely and honestly – then as the answer from the unbelievable and almost forgotten afar a helping hand will be given to us, and the sea will split for us to break free at last from slavery and to step the road leading to freedom, to the Sinai, to the Tables of Testament, to the Promised Land?