Here is a second recent posting from Leonard Fein's blog, on a difficult and hard-to-talk about topic in Jewish life.
The issue of what we expect — and of what we can realistically expect — of Israel by way of its performance gets more complicated all the time. In early Zionist doctrine, “normalcy” was the ideal, an end to the distortions imposed on the Jews by the discrimination they’d suffered in Europe. “Normalcy” took many specific forms, such as a return to the soil, an end to the “luftmentsh,” the “conquest of labor.” With statehood, there was an explicit focus on creating a “new Jew,” one healthy, self-reliant, civically engaged, freed of the diverse complexes of life in a largely punishing exile. (The critique of Jewish life in East Europe, and what it had done to the Jewish psyche, was often brutal.)
As to the intellectual and/or moral superiority of the Jews, instances of Jewish exceptionalism, my favorite articulation of what lay behind this comes from Max Weber, who wrote of “the theodicy of disprivelege.” How, Weber asked, do persecuted (i.e., “disprivileged”) people explain their circumstance? Why, by asserting their moral superiority to those who persecute them. The choice to persecute inherently establishes the moral superiority of the persecuted, and that sense of moral superiority becomes a critical consolation to the persecuted.
My strong impression is that many Jews, in Israel and outside it, and even after all these decades of evidence that the fact of being Jewish does not immunize one against humankind’s propensity for moral lapse, retain at least a residual (and often an active) sense of moral superiority.
To the extent any such sense does exist (I agree with Fein that it does), can it be utilized to energize more moral behavior, rather than special pleading?
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