Two Letters On Humanistic Judaism
“The State of Peace is a State of Spirit”
Mossaf Hasan Yousef
“Ethics is an Optics”
Emmanuel Levinas
Message from Jayme Fucs Bar:
Here I am in Israel, observing day by day all this generalized violence onboard the Navi Marmara, with its dead and wounded.
This never-ending reality here in the Middle-East leave us (sic) more and more alarmed and overwhelmingly preoccupied with this cycle of violence that is increasingly preoccupying, transforming our lives, our normality and our hopes more and more difficult to be reached here in the Middle-East.
We do not want to loose our hopes or even transform our sacred human lives in mere banalities as it occurs here in this agitated little spot of our planet.
We is tiered (sic) of seeing so much hate, of seeing our young Israeli and Palestinian children without a future, without hope.
What is left for us to do is to SCREAM LOUDLY so that someone, aside from the people from the two sides, HEARS US, and understand this desperate human SCREAM as the shrill that will bring our hopes back to us.
NO MORE VIOLENCE FROM BOTH SIDES!
NO MORE DEATHS AND HUMAN TRAGEDIES!
NO MORE OCCUPATION AND VIOLENCE IN THE TERRITORIES AND TO THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!
NO MORE TERRORISM AND PALESTINIAN MISSILE ATTACKS TO THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL!
NO MORE DEATH!
NO MORE FORCEFUL SPEACHES!
NO MORE VIOLENCE, NO MORE WARS!
NO MORE PROPAGANDA AND INCITING HATE!
NO MORE DEMONIZING EACH OTHER!
WE WANT TO RAISE OUR ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN JEW, MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIAN CHILDREN IN A VIABLE WORLD, IN A BETTER WORLD, WHERE THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE CONFLICTS IS THROUGH DIALOGUE AND MUTUAL RESPECT TO EACH OTHER’S RIGHTS TO EXISTENCE AND DIGNITY.
ENOUGH!(BASTA!) HALAS! DAÍ! THE VIOLENCE!
Jayme Fucs Bar
Letter to the Israeli Government
by Silvio Tendler
Sirs who embarrass me:
Jews have been identified with the best humanistic traditions of our culture by the media, and I am deeply ashamed of what successive Israeli governments have been doing to disrupt peace in the Middle East. The initiatives against peace taken by the government of Israel have been making daily survival in Israel and Palestine increasingly unbearable.
For too long, I have felt ashamed of the indecent occupation practiced by Jewish settlers on Palestinian territory. Now to claim the bombing of the Turkish-flagged ship that carries food to our Palestinian brothers was seditious? Shame, three times shame!
I suggest that Simon Peres return his Nobel Peace Prize and apologize for having accepted it after having armed apartheid South Africa.
I believe the current government, all of its members, without exception, are worthy by universal consensus of the Jim Jones Award for leading all parents to collective suicide.
If the genocidal policy of the current government continues, not even the good ones will survive and Israel will perish under the contempt of the whole world ..
Mr, Lieberman, who brought with him his vast experience with native Moldovan pogroms, is firmly committed to apply it against our Palestinian brothers. This deserves justice in a Nuremberg court.
I say all this because a Jewish humanist cannot watch in silence and indifference to what is happening in the Middle East. We need strength and courage, united with the good, struggling for fraternal coexistence between two sister nations.
Down with fascism!
Peace Now!
"When you come to the place
of pure marble stones,
do not say, 'Water! Water!'
Rabbi Akiva’s warning to those
who misinterpret what they see.
The Angel of History
These days, onboard the Navi Marmara ship, Jews, Muslims and Christians clashed once again over Mediterranean waters. History repeats itself, as tragedy. It is a tragedy in which the participants of a mortal dispute pretend not to be aware of the real motivations lurking behind each of the contenders steps. Cries of revenge mix with the appeals of people isolated in their own bodies transformed into vessels of tormented consciousness, craving to make contact. Embittered, though still bearing rests of willingness in their disheartened hopes, they spread their cries for help in e-mails, our modern day bottled messages, imagining that someone will come to their rescue. Although these might end up blocked by firewalls, without ever reaching the right people, or the wrong ones.
It has been a while since I understood manifestos are read by the “wrong” people. In the same way political speeches are attended by people that wouldn’t need to be in the audience. The ones who attend these events wouldn’t need to be in the room, because they already share the same convictions exposed. And the ones who would need to be aware of such convictions would only acknowledge them if these messages could reach them. In the fraction of a moment that precedes a fatal shutting down of the computer these people, could be affected by foreign existences. It is a problem as old as the reasoning that generated the idea of a complete world, without anything external from itself. A wholeness, where isolated ideas and emotions generate the sensation of a secure and inward-looking self. A capital “I” followed by a stop, a full stop.
Could the ideologies that surround us be the social extension of this self-serving “I”? The absence of any external disturbance that could cause the necessity of restructuring if they should ever penetrate those crystallized worlds. Ideology doesn’t know dialogue, ideologies only know themselves. As religious fundamentalism aspires to be Leviathan, a monster, devouring every fact that is capable of provoking a proper way of thought. Ideology embodies truth and cannot bear the possibility of taking one step beyond itself. At the extreme edge of its failure, for not acknowledging change, ideology ends up in an implosion that transforms it into a pile of bricks. Ideologies’ failure leaves a trail of wreckage that the Angel of History stares with mouth agape.
Speechless in horror and helplessness, unable to fly far away, goggle-eyed, the Angel of History cannot believe what he sees. The strong gusts blowing from Eden balloon and paralyze his wings. He might have opened them to embrace humanity when they left Eden. By this thoughtless act, the Talmud teaches us that angels have a much inferior ability to reason than humans, imprisoned in the wind generated by the guardian of Eden.
Stirring his flaming sword, the guardian of Eden stops the humans from disrupting that world in its peacefulness. Without any other options, they live by the sweat of their faces and their work, the sweat of Eve giving birth, the sweat of the palms when primal fears are experienced.
While History’s Angel watch covers the swirl of ruptures and catastrophes that begun in early Eden, we brace ourselves to remains of trueness. Islanded over the floating scrap, we only have a partial awareness of the facts.
While the angel perceives a time with no guarantees, humans imagine the long process full of logic and rationality. This is what we were taught in history classes, in ideological pamphlets, in religious promises, with our parents’ talks, even over psychoanalysis couches. Where the Angel sees ruptures and accidents, we see linear progress.
The Difficulty of Thinking
The human mind cannot deal with the simultaneous existence of contrasting feelings and thoughts. Freud perceived this reality of the mind and proposed it to be named “character”: the result of the effort to nullify opposing feelings that exist in every human being. In Greek, “character” stands for “mark”. As the mark of the chisel that graved the wood and left a furrow in its path.
To admit the simultaneous existence of opposite feelings without denouncing a contradiction implies the effort of embracing diversity within itself. The result of this UNI-fying tendency of thinking is revealed by the facility in which we assume goodness is on our side and evil has been left to our opponents. Is there any possibility to escape the character that molds life in repetitive variationless sequences? If the answer is yes, we admit that the odds of finding a solution to human conflicts require ability to subject the unilateral truth of ideology to the violence of dialogue.
Dialogue comprehends violence for implying the renunciation to the self-serving “I”, that ideologies, fundamentalisms and other theories and beliefs put to sale at the bazaar of certainties. To witness a happening, personal or historic, by different angles at the same time is like admitting that love and hate don’t annul each other and coexist as contemporary forces within one’s self. It is much easier to dictate truths as the watchwords in public demonstrations. One must ask if these words offer order to the protesters or to the ones spectating the protest. However, what is the use for all this reflection when it involves Jews, Muslims and Christians at war over a still Mediterranean, surrounded by History?
The message from Eve and the Detail where Lies the Devil.
"Paulo, where are you? What do we make of all this? Are we organizing a debate on the subject? And the letter, did you receive it? Kisses, Eva "
A day after receiving a cry for help by Jayme Fucs Bar from the Kibutz Nachson, Eva sent me the appeal of a person disturbed by the same storm that Jayme. It was a letter from the filmmaker Silvio Tendler, director of the movie “Utopia or Barbarism”, recently released in theatres. The title reminded me of Rosa Luxembourg’s “Socialism or Barbarism”, from the time it was easy to tell which side was the salvation of the universe and where the sinister world of the devil began.
Days before Eva’s questioning about “all this”, I had been browsing searches in the Internet. On the way back to Israel in an Air France flight in early May 2010, turning Le Nouvel Observateur’s pages entitled “How to Save Israel”, I understood there was a movement organized by European Jew intellectuals named ¨An Appeal to Reason¨. I visited their website as soon as I got home. I really liked those people that didn’t fear to declare their love to Israel while proving a preoccupation for its future.
Among the participants of the manifesto, I saw Henri Atlan’s signature. He is a scientist and coparcener of the so called “complexity thinking”, professor at Tel Aviv and Paris, an author that deeply influenced me. His presence, along with philosopher Bernard Henry Levi provided the manifesto with its urgency that shakes us all, intellectuals or not, who consider ourselves connected to the state of Israel, which we love. In my attempt to understand the manifesto’s repercussion on the online edition of Haaretz, I found out about the organizing flotilla and decided to follow it.
By the second day in the course of the flotilla, I found out about Noam Shalit’s proposal , father of the captive soldier Guilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas four years ago, kept incommunicado until today. Noam made an interesting cooperation proposal to the peace squadron. Guilad Shalit is a public figure today, at the front of a movement that pressures the Israeli government for a swap between his son and all prisoners claimed by Hamas, even the proven murderers. The soldier’s father asked for the peaceful flotilla to take a few letters to his son in exchange of his public support to the squad’s objectives.
A perfect idea. It would gain enormous repercussion, strengthening the pacific arc committed to terminate a war that never stops to begin. At the same time, it would attribute to the sea pacifists a high degree of legitimacy that the Israeli public opinion hadn’t ever shared. Suddenly, the game would spin around. From challengers of Israeli politics, they now would have allies in the Jewish state. A fifth column of the force for good, ready to support a group with whom they disagreed, proving once more that peace could do better than politics. There you have it, external factors scrambling the organization of the mind and providing progress. Exactly what I have learned with Henry Atlan, in “Between Crystal and Smoke”, where he dealt with the auto-organization of living forms.
The external factor entering a system forces you to get out of its crystallized form and reorganizes in a different way. Thus, influenced by events, we are forced to new ways of organizing for the continuity of a process called Life. The same Atlan heading the manifesto that brought me to the discovery of the flotilla was permitting me to think about the importance of what was happening here. After all, as Gilad Shalit wasn’t a prisoner of war and the flotilla was clearly on Hamas’s side, it wouldn’t be considered an enemy. As we already know, he was abducted in Israel and kept isolated ever since Gaza’s invasion.
Not even Red Cross could reach him. Realistically, Shalit’s father did not ask for the flotilla to mediate his son’s release, only asking them to deliver letters. In the next day, I found out the request had been rejected. It got very suspicious.
Humanistic Judaism?
Humanist Judaism is what I witness in both messages I retyped. Both Silvio Tendler’s, here in Brazil, in his demands to the President of Israel, as Jayme’s cry-of-alert/request-for-help in the heart of the conflict use the term Humanist Judaism. Jayme calls his e-mail a “steam off”, which indicates contained thoughts and emotions that suddenly free themselves over the person’s capacity to control the transformation.
They burst out in an unfashionable and sudden way, provoking a discontinuity in a progression that seemed to advance in a logical way. The force of the steam off seems to mean that the personal history doesn’t progress in a linear way. The tempo of the steam off is the sudden angel of a hasty unexpectancy. An emotional force, capable of generating a founding experience in someone’s life, or a revolution in the life of a people. A perception of time as based in Jewish tradition. An anachronic time that takes place when the messianic transformation bursts into History, bringing the upcoming world to an unexpected present.
A force that reflects itself in a text that is careless of grammar, style, a well-reasoned thinking.
Emotion overflows the boundary between speech and writing, until they consummate in capital lettered shriek, as if lowercase fonts tightened in contention Jayme’s eagerness and determination to transmit the will for peace before politics. But knowing that he does not have this messianic power, he forms his desire for peace in a multilingual appeal, calling us to participate.
“Enough/Halas/ Daí Violence!” Using three languages in the attempt to reach the imagined listeners, Jayme seeks to break boundaries by "speaking" the language of those who cannot read what he writes. It is by trying to impose a limit to VIOLENCE that he intends to involve us in the tragedy and in its redemption. And because it does not only depend on those who speak hebrew that we also need arabic speakers taking part in this act, where there are no accusers, merely responsibles.
For the energy of the outburst do give birth to a new condition to erupt in the state of things, we must forget the distinction between good men and bad men. By appealing to the participation of the co-responsibles at a Sulcha, a banquet for making peace among foes he intends to gather, Jayme writes “Halas!”, “Dai!” in bold characters. In the last scream, in “VIOLENCE” he omits a certain punctuation, which means a calling for attention all those who don’t see what is happening. “(Look, look,) Violence is entering through the windows of my home surrounded by flowers in Kibutz Nachschon.”
Daí: It is a word that, according to tradition, consists on the names of God, El Shaddai transformed by tradition in El She Daí, the God who (says) enough! “Dai, this is as far as I go, from now on is up to you.”
This interpretation leads us to Nachshon, a character that gave his name to the kibbutz where Jayme lives. According to a tradition attributed to Rav Tarfon, who lived in the time of the revolt against Rome, Nachshon was the first to trust Moses and, making one step towards the waters of the Red Sea, allowed the miracle to take place.
There is the Jewish humanism in its essence, attributing the final miracle, the human step toward the water in equivalence to the divine acts that would not take place without him. If it wasn’t for Nachshon we would not have witnessed the Parting of the Red Sea, the miracle that freed Hebrews.
Silvio Tendler’s letter
I still remember Zé Eduardo Baeso Basili back in the dictatorship times. Beloved teacher, his students loved him for his history teaching methods, he would draw caricatures of the events and characters he told us about. He used to say fascism is the natural condition of men and it was up to us to fight it, his argument being that is was a question of how to front on life and reasoning that arose in ourselves and in every ideology. The “human animal” always tries to reduce every complexity to the simplicity’s immediate certainty, giving voice to his totalizing fascism. Even after all those years and sophisticated readings, I have never forgotten this lesson from my comrade. All I did was improving it. Years past, I reencountered the same reasoning in a Freud article that I didn’t know back then.
In his text, Silvio Tendler accuses Israel of opposing peace and suggest the Israeli government should receive a Jim Jones award (the man who organized his followers’ mass suicide in the Amazon rainforest in Guyana) and calls it “genocidal”. To say “genocidal” inevitably points to nazism. It is always prudent to alert to the dangers of induction of political propaganda, a weapon mastered by totalitarian thinking. A fundamentalist exercise that we, proactive humans, commit in the name of our difficulty to overcome ideological certainties and the difficulty not to standardize the use of words on behalf of self-elations of truth. Here I refer to “Nazism” and “genocide”. Words that pop out with the same inconsideration of those who claim that the holocaust never happened. If we look at the 20th century, only Germany and Turkey (who slaughtered the Armenians in the same way they annihilate the Kurdish people as I write) are remembered in history for having methodically assassinated a civil population in the quest of its actual extermination.
When, in his righteous zeal, the filmmaker suggests "Nuremberg court" for minister Lieberman, he positions himself to the service of those who hide their real intentions under the protective mantle of a political discussion. If the Israelis are fascists, Nazis reproducing Holocaust and institutionalizing apartheid, it is implied that war is the only way to deal with these people. People here in Brazil should declare what they really stand for.
They need to admit, deep down, they believe that the final solution (beware, these words contain a virus meant to induce and entice the reader) to the conflict is whipping Israel off the map. Evidently, this is not what Silvio defends. Nuremberg, Nazism, Holocaust, Shoah, are words that should be kept safe from loosing its differing true meanings, mentioned along concrete factuality that wouldn’t allow them to be used in verbal bomb raids, capable of destroying facts. We must take care not to induce in an attempt to try to seduce. Seduction is always an abusive form of relationship where the other is a lifeless object deprived from its right to be.
Peace First, Then Politics?
“Ethics are optics”. The author of this idea is Emmanuel Levinas, a thinker of such importance that made Elizabeth Goodwin, teacher at the Tel Aviv University, entitle an article about him by the following words: “If there is any sense to Judaism in the State of Israel, it will be found in Levinas”. This means, in other words, that Israel shall be “levinasean” or it shan’t be Judaic. This Judaism as defined by the Israeli author is far more than the fundamentalist Judaism which is acquiring political strength powerful enough to influence the laic majority. Could this possibly be the Judaism referred to by Goodwin and Levinas?
Judaism doesn’t resume itself to religion; even though every other way of thinking that considers itself Jewish comes from a same source. Tradition always supported the idea that the applied precepts aren’t related to faith, but to what one does with life. A religion in which a God says “Daí, the rest is up to you” says also that life IS yours, and the responsibilities are only yours to be. It is not about a religion for frightened children wanting to do the right thing only for the approval of a superior entity, or some friend. It is about thinking whith Levinas about humanism of the other man. Not for some other, different from the usual one, but for Another who convenes us to a dimension of responsibility. This idea is found in monotheistic religions as in laic ideologies such as Marxism.
The Other, as the one who precedes me in my preoccupations with my own self: that is the core of the issue of the humanistic project, conceived in primal Judaism.
This is how it is for us all, as it was for Cain. When God spoke to Cain asking for Abel, he answered God by saying he was not “his brother’s keeper”. This answer shows us that Cain was aware of the possibility of being responsible for his brother Abel. With this answer, Judaist tradition offers us a teaching that spreads through a thousand pages more.
Yes, I’ll always be responsible for the Other Man’s life, and if I ever eliminate him with my own actions and words, it is because I see in real or symbolic murder the ultimate alternative for denying the face that defies my own will to control the world. This is why there are many biblical references to the widow, the orphan, the stranger, this last being the clearest personification of the Other, perceived as the stranger that I must transform into a close relative, as we learn in many commandments of the Torah. That is fundamentally the main core of Humanist Judaism. The rest is commentary. Those who whish to substantiate their knowledge may commit to the study of other many thousands variations on the same subject. Although, by doing so, one should be aware not to assassinate the beliefs of the Other in the name of ideologies.
The antidote to this risk, as tradition shows us, is to always study in partnership, for the limiting presence of the other impedes us from dictating truths. To study along with a companion is like admitting the concrete presence of the “Daí/Enough/Chalas” by our closeness. The Other will already be encountered within our selves.
This matter brings us back to the question posed in the beginning:
After all, what is the violent remedy that we so hesitate taking?
The Violence of Dialogue
In Hebrew, the word GueR spells the same as GaR. In a language without consonants, the "small dots of Hebrew writing," the two words are reduced to GR. GueR means foreigner, GaR is the present tense to the verb LaGuR: to inhabit.
The resident and the foreigner: what mysteries could have molded such different meanings for so similar spellings? Foreignness percolated Hebrew imagination and originated IVRI/Hebrew: the one that came from the other side of the river. Abraham lived and died as an Aramean, a fact that the prayers and the recital of the Haggadah of Pesach repeat many times: “An Aramean nomad was your father”. His wandering way of life obliged him to many negotiations with kings and estranges and made him a permanent stranger. Different from Ulysses, who wanders over and comes back to his beloved Attica, Abraham estranges himself from his parental home to wander about.
GaLuT, a word translated as “exile” is directly related to LeGaLoT; “to discover”. To be dis-covered, with no protection: this is the Hebrew meaning of emigration without exile. As if Hebraic thinking was tributary of a single founding idea: an ontological state of “discovery” that begins with Adam and Eve and traverses its own history. An idea so present that, according to the cabalistic mystique, god escorts his people through GaLuT-exile under the form of Schiná, its feminine presence. God and his people are equally exiled. This is how cabalists wanted to understand the sacred history combined to men’s History.
Could the exile condition and the “dis-covered” way of life make humans abandon their certainty and create dialogue? Could we be authorized to think like this, by perceiving that the Hebrew people’s nomadism is as prominent as the attachment to a word that could never have its certainty seized? Could this be the violent remedy that we fail taking by doing politics instead? Dialogue turns to violence because we are forced to a self-contraction of an ego that wants to occupy everything. When I constrict my domination desires I am repeating a divine act, cabalists would say. An act of violence that the creator executed by restraining his Self and creating place for there to be a world. Tzimtzum, the constriction of the Self.
It is by this self-limiting experience that we shall excavate in the infant a path full of marks that will lead us, or not, to human condition. A path that takes us from our biological condition to lead us to our humanity. As we are urged to take part in this infinite conversation that precedes us, it is how each one takes his place in this chat that will define how we will be. A painful path in which many will tighten up as crystal while others will dissipate as smoke, but all, with no exceptions, will be assuming a place in this infinite chat. An example of this experience that precedes us is the founding of the dialogue, between Abraham and God.
When god tells Abraham he would destroy Sodom and Gomorra, the patriarch immediately questions God’s divine objective. They never mention any ethnical reason for these intentions. The difference between Abraham and the other inhabitants was not ethnical, it was ethical The implicit factuality of the debate is totally ethical. It is in the name of ethics that God wants to destroy that people. As it is for this reason that Abraham questions by saying that the just cannot perish because of the unjust. A fact that implies the questioning of the legitimacy of God wanting to destroy who ever it may be. They gradually retreat in their intentions until they arrive in a common amount of people. If there would ten justs, the cities would not be destroyed. In other words, there is something greater than God embracing and limiting its power. When Abraham asks Him: "The Judge of all earth will not do justice?" And he accepts the dialogue, justice overcomes the creator.
There is the violence of dialogue that we must accept in order to enter the circle of human life. When we deny it, we risk fascism. The Fachio, a bundle of rods and axe symbolizing the Roman law, which becomes evil when someone incarnates the axe and the rods and permits itself to lashing and decapitation. To make justice on its own is to put oneself above it without bowing to something greater than itself: there is fascism, the materialization of evil. Not even God was given with this power. When I assume violence, I force myself to an act of constriction and the dialogue emerges, peace is present and politics are possible. Politics, the care for men’s city, is only viable after we can assume a state of spirit of peace; presence committed to the Other that is not similar to me.
Peace first, then politics.
Rio de Janeiro, July 4, 2010
JAYME FUCS BAR is former world president of the "Hashomer Hatsair" movement and editor at "Humanistic Judaism" - judaismohumanista.ning.com /. He lives at Kibbutz Nachshon, Israel where he is dedicated to educational projects.
SILVIO TENDLER, filmmaker, is the author of films such as "Jango", "Anos JK", "Glauber o filme, labirinto do Brasil","Meeting with Milton Santos" and the recently released "Utopias and barbarism." Professor of Social Communication at PUC-RJ, an MA in History at the University of Paris, Master of Cinema and History at the École des Hautes Etudes-Sorbonne.
PAULO BLANK, psychoanalyst graduated at the Psychoanalytic Circle of Rio de Janeiro, PhD in Communications and Culture at the Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, founding member of the Society of Friends of Paz Agora/ Peace Now / Brazil. Jewish Humanism teacher, Rio de Janeiro. Author of Cabbala: The Mystery of The Couples/ O Mistério dos Casais (Relume Dumará, RJ,Brasil, 2005) among others available at: http://judaismohumanista.ning.com
