One of the happy effects of light and liberty upon a religious body is to divide it. . . Black night is uniform: daylight shows a thousand hues. Ignorance is a unit: knowledge is manifold. As long as the Jews were persecuted, they clung to ancient usage and doctrine with thoughtless tenacity; their whole strength being employed in the mere clutch. But when the repressive and restrictive laws were relaxed, the mind of the Jews resumed its office; divisions arose among them; and the world began to hear of the Orthodox and the Reformed.
[from "Our Israelitish Brethren," James Parton, 1870]
The Atlantic Monthly (the dead-tree version of which I still get in the mail) has dusted off an old gem from its archive; believe it or not, it still shines after 141 years. It's probably the most perceptive piece I've ever read about Judaism. No, strike that: it's the most perceptive piece I've ever read about how a free society, if officially agnostic towards religion, encourages a proliferation of religious perspective that ennobles all: from the most adamant secular, to the middle-of-the-road heterodox, to the fastidiously devout.
The authour, one James Parton, is an interesting character himself. A cursory glance at Parton's Wikipedia page suggests that he was the most popular biographer of his day in America; he wrote tomes about Jefferson, Franklin, and Voltaire, and also authoured The Life and Times of Aaron Burr. [Full disclosure: I'm a blood relation of Aaron Burr on three different branches of my family tree.] Anyway, when Parton's first wife died in 1872, he married her daughter from a previous marriage. That kind of puts the whole Woody Allen thing in perspective, huh? As is my wont, though, I digress. Parton's narrative, first-person in parts (he describes the voluminous array of Jewish texts spread out on his desk at one point), is of a piece with the other great liberals of his day. In particular, I'm thinking of John Stuart Mill, and his 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." Parton, like Mill, was writing from an outsider-looking-in perspective, and both wrote with amazing clarity, humility, and compassion, and against the grain of the day.
The central character in Parton's feature is the Jew, past and present (present being October 1870). The Jew is the most famous piñata in world history; a thousand desecrations have scarred his body, yes, but if you're receptive, if you seek to understand, you'll find that the greatest suffering comes from humiliation, from being falsely accused. Remember: it's humiliation that creates monsters, and monsters that create humiliation. The iconic Taoist image of the yin-yang is value-neutral, like Taoism itself (some might say like God). Everything contains its opposite, yes, but it also gives rise to its opposite. Engenders it. Births it. Pushes it out of itself. (This is why we're more like our grandparents than we are like our parents, although we don't realize that until it's too late.)
What do I mean by value-neutral? Just that nature itself is profoundly agnostic about the human race. (Note here that the words "diagnosis," "prognosis," and "agnostic" all share the same Greek root.) Cycles are the natural order of things; but man is not entirely a natural creature. We are, in a very significant sense, the product of ourselves; we are artificial. And thus our fate is not dictated for us by social Darwinism or any other crackpot theory. The Jews are what they make of themselves, as are the rest of us. We can choose to continue the cycle of rerererevenge, or we can end it.
I vote for ending it.
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