Remedies

III. All that I have been trying to say can be summed up in a simple statement: we need pride. An able young revisionist corrected me one day: we need a fierce pride. Perhaps. It is better surely than the other extreme of inner servility to which we have been brought by degradation and hate. For let us not be deceived: degradation degrades and hate may render the object hateful. But I am afraid of the element of fierceness in our re-awakened pride as being of the nature of an over-compensation for an inner servility of spirit and hence subject to all the unsureness and the vagaries and the possibility of sudden collapse of all such mechanisms.

Nor do I mean the well-known kind of pride that apes humility nor must we (though this is a council of hopeless perfection under the circumstances) be proud of our newly-won pride. This was meant by Arnold Zweig, himself an uncompromising Jewish nationalist, when one day he castigated the “Zionist snob.”

I am humbler in my expectations; perfection is far from my hopes; I would give much, infinitely much to see many, many of the younger Jews whom I have recently met attach their notions of what is distinguished and of good repute and, if you like, even swanky, to the cause of our people rather than to the glow and glitter, the superficial distinctions and unworthier rewards of the world. For the things of the pagan world that they long for are always the trivial and the unworthy things, since (strange fate of a strange people) we always have the high and noble things.

In Every generation Jewish names are numerous among the true benefactors of all mankind and in every community where Jews dwell in any number all but the blindest anti-Semite admits (and even he knows) that among the most honorable and beneficent citizens there are more Jews than according to the number of Jews in that community there need by ordinary measures to be.

Thus it is clear that the things of the world to which our servile-minded younger and older people attach their desires are the trivial and utterly perishable things, the things that the true Christian too wholly condemns: membership in clubs and fraternities, dwelling among those who quite properly desire to remain among themselves and other false and vain and negligible shows of a world the fashion of which will pass away like the shadow of a dream.

I have come so far from these things that I no longer know how to deal with them even when I meet them in their defensively-inverted form of “we don’t care to go where we’re not wanted” in which, alas, that negative remains a mere woeful negative and does not flower into affirmative and happy Jewish solidarity and its works and ways. I no longer imaginatively grasp these antics of a hurt servility of spirit.

Many of my best friends are Gentiles and I believe that the affection which unites us will last our lives. But the greater number of those who are very close to me in life are Jews. And I cannot imagine it otherwise and I should be unhappy were it otherwise.

For we are united by character and fate, by faith and memories, by common joys and sorrows, by our own way (even in our differences) of apprehending men and nature and human life. And with whom should a man—any man—feel happy and at ease except among those whose ancestors and his own stood together in good and evil days and prayed together and at need died together for the same good eternal cause?

In the company of such there is—again for every man of any kin or clan—a contentment and wealth of relationship which, without aught but perfect good will to the rest of mankind, he can find nowhere else.

And so I regard it as infinitely right and proper that certain groups of my Gentile fellow-citizens desire to remain among themselves. For I have the same feeling concerning my group. I know certain Gentiles whom I would gladly admit into the closer circle of my friends and indeed I do so. But if there came into that circle a group of Gentiles whose chief interests, as is natural and proper for them, given their back-ground and ancestral friends, were in competitive sports or in hunting or in war or in the manufacture of material things as ends and not as means or else in their ancestral memories and their just pride therein of border-chieftains or march-raiders or valiant fighters in all the wars of the world—if such came in too great numbers into the group of my friends and fellows, would we not be, while sincerely respecting the other-ness of those others, stricken quite dumb and desolate and be cramped and ill at ease? So truly I no longer understand either intellectually or emotionally the attractiveness of that world of pagan ways and pagan values which still so strangely lures so many.

We need the pride that is in the free play of our natural loyalties and instinctive tastes. It is the release of these from false and foolish fears that is our great necessity. It is in that release and in it only that we shall find both freedom and sustaining pride.