In Ian McEwan’s wonderful new novel “Saturday,” a London brain surgeon is pondering how human beings give themselves license to kill and eat other animals even as evidence mounts that they too feel pain. “The key to human success and domination is to be selective in your mercies,” the surgeon concludes.
I don’t know about the success and domination part, but if it weren’t for our abilities to be selective in our mercies, I think we’d all go mad. The panorama of human suffering that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is almost too great to absorb. We’ve all probably played out in our minds the dark fantasy of what we’d do if we had to start from scratch — no home, little money, plunked down in a far-off city. For most American Jews, the immigration era ended around 1925. For the estimated 12,000 New Orleans Jews, it began two weeks ago.
But there I go, being selective in my mercies. There’s no doubt that the human toll of the disaster fell most heavily on the poor, the black, the indigent elderly. The mostly middle-class Jews of the Gulf states fell back on friends and communities in Houston and Atlanta and Dallas, or made it to hotels where they could sit out the worst of the storm before returning to reclaim or rebuild their flooded homes. To pity Chabad or the Jewish federations and synagogues seems almost indulgent when viewed this way, a real-life twist on the famous joke about the Jewish newspaper announcing the apocalypse: “World to end tomorrow; Jews to suffer the most.”
Tribalism does become obscene when carried to extremes. Take a recent decision by Israel’s defense ministry, which declared that the Israeli-Arab families of those killed in the attack by a Jewish gunman on a bus in the Galilee town of Shfaram were not considered terrorism victims under Israeli law. Why? Because their killer was Jewish. Apparently Israeli law defines terrorist acts as those carried out by “enemies of Israel.”
That didn’t go down well with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who earlier had denounced the shootings in Shfaram as “a sinful act by a bloodthirsty terrorist.” Sharon directed the Justice Ministry to amend the law so the families could receive the same government aid accorded to victims of Palestinian violence. Call him a bleeding heart, but Sharon understands that to define terrorism as an attack by Arabs on Jews is to take tribalism to its extreme.
And yet we need the tribal impulse if we are to cope with tragedies like Katrina, because it reduces a vast, impossible-to-grasp event to a human scale. As Primo Levi famously put it, a “single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
So we focus on the pain of those most like us, and trust that other communities of faith and feeling are doing the same for their own.
But if “we could not live” without a focus for our pain, we could not live with ourselves if we addressed only our own people’s suffering. So nearly all of the Jewish organizations accepting donations for hurricane relief — B’nai B’rith, United Jewish Communities, the Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, American Jewish Committee, Mazon — are also pledging to aid non-Jewish victims of the deluge even as they help restore synagogues and
other Jewish institutions lost under the waters.
A cynic will say we do this out of self-interest — that if non-Jews see us supporting them in their time of need they’ll also support us in ours. And community relations are a time-honored Jewish practice. But self-interest doesn’t account for an equally strong tradition of Jewish universalism, a strain that transformed the highly esoteric kabalistic concept of “tikkun olam” into a synonym for global action.
That impulse — particularizing the universal, universalizing the particular — is another gift of the Jews to the wider world. From our place as a tiny minority we understand well what it means to be at the mercy of tragedies natural and man-made. In lean times we turn inward, emphasizing our tribal concerns over those of others. In times of plenty we allow ourselves to reach out.
In times like these, when we can relax the tribal impulse, the notion that we are all created in God’s image is what “exerts the overpowering force” — to do the good and right thing.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News.