A Response to Je?rey C. Isaac

 

Marsball Berman

am glad Tikkun has printed Jeffrey

Isaac?s intelligent and passionate
essay. I?m sorry I missed him while he
was in New York, and I hope we will
all be hearing more of his voice. I am
responding here to only a few of the
issues he has raised.

I share most of Isaac?s values. I be-
lieve, for instance, that ?racial, gender,
and sexual liberation; ecological sen?
sitivity; disarmament and peaceful
coexistence? are vital necessities; that
we must create our own values and
can?t count on the rising tide of history
to lift us up and carry us along; that
no happy endings are guaranteed. The
only problem is that this credo sounds
just like the ?Enlightenment modern-
ism? with which Isaac has no patience.
If ?new social movements? can help to
realize these values in the contemporary
world, more power to them! Spinoza,
Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant, and many
others would be glad. But these move?
ments are likely to ?nd surer footing
and a better sense of direction if they
know where they are coming from.

Unlike Isaac, I don?t think Enlighten-
ment modernism is to blame for any
of the mass murders of the twentieth
century (?traumas for which it cannot
escape culpability?). Alas, mass murder
appears to be one of the most venerable
traditions in the history of the world.
Movements, armies, and states of every
description have engaged in it, some-
times as a clear instrument of policy,
sometimes apparently as an end in
itself, sometimes just for fun. Right
before the dawn of the Enlightenment,
one of the most dreadful mass murders
in all of history took place: the Thirty
Years War, which wiped out as many
as twenty million (though maybe, as
some historians argue, it was ?only?
ten million) of the thirty million people
alive in Germany in 1618. The crusaders
and predators of those days glossed

 

Marshall Berman teaches at City Univer-
sity of New York. He is currently working
on Living for the City (Random House),
a book about New York.

over their murders with old-fashioned
religious zealotry and newfangled razson
d??tat. The Enlightenment strove to
show people that the human emotions
and rationality that they share matter
more than the diverse faiths or nation-
alities that pull them apart. This idea
got through to plenty of people, but
not to the Fuebrers of our century or
their mobs of followers. However, in
the nuclear age, with the specter of
world annihilation haunting us, the
Enlightenment has taken on a new
life; it burns most in the peace
movement that Isaac celebrates. If the
peoples of the world learn to live with
each other rather than blow each other
up, it will be because we have caught
up with that old Enlightenment mod-
ernism just in time.

 

Alas, mass murder appears
to be one of tbe most
venerable traditions in tbe
bz'story of tbe world.

 

Isaac recites a litany of manmade
disasters and asks, ?Why should we
strive to continually remake the world?
Are there no limits to this aspiration??
It is a reasonable question. The trouble
is that our modern technology, econ-
omy, and society are always changing,
whether or not Isaac or I (or any-
body else) wants them to. One of the
paradoxes of modernity is that, even
if we want to impose limits on human
activity?and we certainly should?we
are forced to continually remake the
world in order to maintain these limits,
to keep them from turning into empty
forms, to preserve their human meaning.

Isaac closes with a lovely aphorism
from Camus, ?For he who does not
know everything cannot kill every-
thing.? If only I could believe this!
My problem is that I grew up in the
Kennedy years, when an inner circle
of sophistic'ated liberals, who pro-
fessed a skeptical metaphysics rather
like Camus?s, came very close to blow-

ing up the world. The world didn?t blow
up in 1962 only because Khrushchev,
who professed a totalitarian meta-
physics, pulled back from the brink,
bringing political disgrace to himself
but saving our lives. My point is that
no metaphysics, however agreeable, can
prevent us from becoming mass mur-
derers, because that danger is inherent
in the organization of modern politics
and social life. We simply have to keep
a close watch on each other, and on
ourselves. 

I like Isaac?s discussion of the way
in which ?in the 1970s and 19805 a
generation of radicals nurtured on
Marx, and Freud chase, in
good modernist fashion, to return to
their communal and religious roots
[emphasis in original].? If only Isaac
remembered that this was and is a
modernist Judaism, modernism might
not give him so much grief. This mod-
ernist Judaism supersedes an earlier
mode which believed that we would
have to renounce our Jewishness in
order to become authentically modern.
This weird idea is unique to Jews as
far'as I can tell: can we imagine Joyce
feeling that he had to stop being Irish,
or Stravinsky Russian, or Virginia Woolf
English, or Frank Lloyd Wright Amer-
ican, or Kurosawa Japanese? But so
many Jews, including some of the
most creative ones, have believed that
we are uniquely obliged to make this
human sacri?ce. 

This was never the only, or even the
primary, Jewish modernism. Think of
the modernism of Ahad Ha?am, Martin
Buber, Freud, Kafka, Chagall, Isaac
Babel, Bruno Schultz, Gershom Scho-
lem, Mordecai Kaplan, A. J. Heschel,
the Singer brothers, Grace Paley,
Ozick, Philip Roth, and many
others. But their triumphs, and those
of other people like them, were never
enough to stop the mass of self-in?icted
wounds. Maybe now at last, forty years
after the birth of Israel, we are secure
and grown-up enough to participate in
the modern world, even enjoy it, with-
out leaving ourselves at the door. 

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