Vikram Seth & the Jews

 
Dear Vikram Seth

• By ELLIOT JAGER


Years ago, following the advice of a mentor, I stopped feeling guilty about all the books I wasn't reading. 'Life is short,' he told me. 'At best you can read a book every two weeks – 26 books a year, maybe. And that's it – for your entire life, so you have to make tough choices.'

Since I can't even manage one book every two weeks, I've had to make some extremely harsh choices. Of course, once you've read the complete works of demised authors Fletcher Knebel and Ben Hecht, for instance, you don't have to worry about keeping up. As for those writers still living, I make sure to read anything new by favorites such as Tom Wolfe, Robert D. Kaplan, John LeCarre, Robert Littell and Caleb Carr.

Over the years, however, I've discovered that some of my favorites have fatal flaws. Most upsetting is when a much-loved writer turns out to be an anti-Semite, anti- Zionist or self-hating Jew.

You, dear Vikram Seth, are none of those.

I got immense pleasure from reading your latest, most personal and pensive book, "Two Lives," which I bought in London over Rosh Hashana. I've now read three of your works: "Two Lives," "A Suitable Boy " and "An Equal Music." You are the least predictable or formulaic of my favorites. Much of the little that I know about India - as well as my eagerness to visit there - comes from "A Suitable Boy." I so raved about "An Equal Music" that a friend bought me the soundtrack (to the book!) for my birthday. And I am giving "Two Lives" to my father-in-law for his 81st birthday.

Telling this touching, extraordinary story - of your great uncle Shanti Seth and your great aunt, the love of his life, the assimilated German Jewess Henny Caro - affords you the occasion to ruminate about the Big Issues of the 20th century: the Holocaust, Nazism, communism, and Zionism/the creation of the State of Israel.

Disappointingly, "Two Lives" adheres to the faddish views that are all the rage on the Euro-Left. You don't seem to question your British, upper-crust Indian, cosmopolitan upbringing - one which offers no frame of reference for, and therefore misunderstands, Jewish civilization.

Writing from the vantage point of a non-practicing, Hindu-born, British-educated, German-speaking Renaissance man, you are naturally influenced by the post-modernist, relativist ambiance of your background.

You have much to teach me about India, and even about pre-WWII German Jewish life, as well as postwar Britain and Germany. Your portrayal of Henny and Shanti's relationship is engrossing, and I was greatly impressed by their courage as individuals - and by yours in portraying them as fully rounded, complex personalities.

However, I respectfully suggest that you still have much to learn about the complexity of Jewish civilization.


YOU WRITE: 'Partly as a result of writing this book, so much of which deals with the question of Jewishness, I have tried to work out my own views on that most salient manifestation of postwar history, the Jewish state.'

Like many a Guardian or Independent reader, you are uneasy about the Jews having carved out their state at Palestinian-Arab expense. 'The eviction over the decades since 1948 of yet more Palestinians from their land, the building of Jewish settlements in the West BankÉ the massacres in the refugee camps under Israeli military control during the Lebanon operations of 1982, the construction of the boundary fence and wall incorporating still more Palestinian land, the assassination of Palestinian leaders, the repeated siege of cities, the razing of entire streets and colonies of houses and the regular humiliation of Palestinian civilians by Israeli troops paint a picture of terror, injustice and arbitrariness either sanctioned or not greatly opposed by the state.'

That's some Bill of Particulars. It reflects so deep, so profound a misreading of existential Jewish reality, so all-embracing an acceptance of the Arab narrative, that its annihilationist conclusions are implicit: We subjugated Jews became Zionists because of European oppression. We then usurped Arab land; oppressed Palestinian-Arabs to retain it, ergo we must go.


YOUR SANCTIMONIOUS analysis reminds me of Richard Grenier's angry and infinitely memorable movie review of the Ben Kingsley film Gandhi in the March 1983 Commentary. 'ÉI feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicideÉ Gandhi was convincedÉ their moral triumph would be remembered for 'ages to come.''

Just as the movie was no place to learn about the real Ghandi, so too "Two Lives" offers a painfully distorted view of the Arab-Israel conflict.

Like you, Gandhi sympathizes with the Jews but stands with the Muslims. In a letter entitled 'The Jews in Palestine 1938,' he expresses understanding for the Jews but, in doing so, exposes his total inability to grasp the very essence of Jewish civilization when he concludes: 'Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.'

He goes on to argue: 'The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. ... Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?'


IN RESPONSE to that, and to your own tunnel-vision perceptions about Israel and Jewish civilization, let me quote Two Lives back at you: 'Once, at the dining-table when Uncle, Aunty and I were together and they had a heated argument about something or other, I even heard Uncle say, astonishingly, 'Hitler had the right idea,' in order to irk her. And that is what it did: it irked, rather than infuriated her, and her reaction had been to click her tongue and say dismissively, 'Ach, Shanti, don't talk nonsense.''

Ach, Vikram Seth, don't write nonsense about Israel. What good is your sympathy for our Holocaust dead if you have so little empathy for those of us struggling not to join them?

M. SCOTT PECK

When your guru has feet of clay


• By ELLIOT JAGER

The death on September 25 of M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who wrote "The Road Less Traveled," barely registered with most Anglo-Israelis. Maybe it was because he died just before the hectic Rosh Hashana period; or possibly no one remembered that Peck essentially created the self-help genre back in 1978.

I belatedly stumbled upon "The Road Less Traveled" in late 1997, at a Jerusalem used-book shop, at a time when my own life was in upheaval. The irony was that I had previously pooh-poohed the self-help 'movement' as being largely shallow and self-indulgent. Still, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, the need to confront spirituality and grow up (regardless of age) can intrude in our lives, uninvited.

Besides, Peck's work was inimitable. His teachings can be summed up in his opening line: 'Life is difficult.' This may sound banal but, as Peck explains, it's because we invest ourselves in escaping from life's intrinsic sufferings – in all the wrong ways – that we end up weighed down by layers of neurosis. And because Peck made no distinction between the mind and the spirit, 'between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth' he concluded that refusing to engage God was just another form of counterproductive pain avoidance.

It was only after he died that I read how Peck's secular father (with whom he had a difficult relationship) had been in denial about being half-Jewish.

The precocious Morgan Scott Peck attended a Quaker school in New York, became a Zen Buddhist at 18, and wound up as a US army psychiatrist during the Vietnam War. He began working as a private psychiatrist in Connecticut and, in 1976, was stirred to start writing "The Road Less Traveled."

Though the book dabbles in Buddhist and Christian theology it is essentially a non-sectarian work which propagates values essentially in harmony with mainstream Judaism. How far, after all, is 'Life is difficult' from 'Es is schwer tsu zein a Yid'?

The book argues for delaying gratification, for accepting responsibility, for dedication to truth, and for 'balancing' (knowing when to compromise). It calls for a distinction between 'genuine' and romantic love, and teaches that discipline is the road to spiritual growth.


BUT PECK also made pantheistic and Christological claims that are not in harmony with rabbinic Judaism - about the immanent nature of God; about our unconscious being God; that each person is born in order that God might be a new life form; and about participating in God's 'agony.'

Yet the thing to remember about Peck is that by the time he died at age 69, his book had spent more than eight years on The New York Times bestseller list, so there was probably something there for seekers of all hues. Even if the book is theologically problematic it is still written in a voice one can only describe as saintly.

Not only did Peck's work offer individual lessons; there are also commonsense applications to the political realm. In Further Along the Road Less Traveled he argued: 'Virtually all of the evil in this world is committed by people who are absolutely certain they know what they're doing. It is not committed by people who think of themselves as confused. It is not committed by the poor in spirit.'


PECK WAS a spiritual thinker of the highest order - even for those, like me, who rejected huge chunks of his philosophy. And what a seeming breath of fresh air he was compared to the shabby holy men whose improprieties make news in Israel as they despoil Judaism for politics and profit.

Alas, the flesh-and-blood Peck was - in his own words - more prophet than saint. He was a womanizer - par for the course in the modern age, but striking for the fact that he dedicated his magnum opus to his wife, Lily, with: 'She has been so giving that it is hardly possible to distinguish her wisdom as a spouse, parent, psychotherapist, and person from my own.'

He also acknowledged being a poor father. Though he sermonized about discipline, he was a heavy gin drinker and a chain-smoker.

In an interview with Andrew Billen for the London "Times," Peck recalled: "A fellow who was thinking of doing my biography once asked me: 'God, man, have you ever denied yourself anything?' And I said: 'Well, I've never smoked or drunk as much as I would like to.' That's about as close as I could come.'"

His ecumenical offerings dwindled as, toward the end of his life, Peck became preoccupied with Satan and The Revelation. Death came from Parkinson's disease and cancer.

Peck's saga spotlights the age-old dilemma about whether seekers can and should separate the sermon from the sermonizer. Can we look beyond the bad things our spiritual pastors and political leaders do while embracing their work in the public sphere?

Adolescents can afford the luxury of dismissing hypocrisy in both the message and the messenger, but the more the rest of us travel along the difficult road of life, the more the world appears full of nuance and complexity.

– First published in the November 21, 2005 Jerusalem Post

Jerusalem Post Editorial, December 12

Unsafe passage


By signing -- under intense pressure from the Quartet -- the post-disengagement Rafah agreement on November 15 with the Palestinian Authority, Israel committed itself not only to an international crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border, but to facilitating the movement of goods and people between the Palestinian territories.


Specifically, Jerusalem promised that by December 15 it would allow bus convoys to transit Gaza and the West Bank. This is not the first time Israel has promised such “safe passage” to the PA. And it’s not the first time the PA has made it impossible to implement the arrangement.


Sure enough, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is having second thoughts about the Thursday deadline -- and for good reason. The daily prospect of some 1,800 Palestinians traversing between Gaza and the West Bank is worrisome in the context of the grim security situation and Israel’s sense that the PA is not living up to the spirit of Rafah.


Israel entered into the Rafah agreement with trepidation. But Washington’s arm-twisting convinced Jerusalem that cameras and computer data streams would give Israeli security personnel capability to monitor what was happening at the Gaza-Sinai crossing.


While the issue is disputed, Israel is convinced that the PA is foot-dragging by not providing the promised real-time flow, and that members of al-Qaida and other Islamist terror groups have been allowed to enter Gaza.


The agreement also requires the PA to prevent the movement of weapons and explosives into Gaza. Yet large amounts of these have flowed in from Sinai, at least before the crossing was formally opened. On Saturday, the IDF uncovered a tunnel near the northern Strip apparently intended for a terrorist infiltration. On Friday a navy patrol boat intercepted the third infiltration attempt by sea, in just 10 days, from Egypt to Gaza.


Part of the problem is the agreement itself -- which does not actually require the PA to stop any terrorist just because Israel insists it do so.


Then there is the overall environment. Can Israel abide by a paradoxical situation in which bus convoys of Palestinians traverse the country even as Palestinian missiles are being launched from Gaza, or as Palestinian attackers stab soldiers at checkpoints outside Jerusalem, or as suicide bombers slaughter shoppers lining up to enter a Netanya mall?


Sharon told US envoy David Welch that if the Palestinians persisted in their violent ways, Israel would not permit the bus convoys and would even cease tariff cooperation at the Karni and Erez crossings, forcing the PA to pay for goods shipped via Israel.


The US is having none of this. Having pressured Israel into a bad agreement in the first place, Washington now insists Jerusalem stick to it. It says Jerusalem is exaggerating Palestinian non-compliance; that the video and data issues are merely technical and anyway on the way to being solved.


The backdrop to the bus convoy issue is the Quartet’s creditable desire to improve the Palestinian economy. The thinking of the US, UN, EU and Russia is that popular frustration, and with it the appeal of Islamist terrorism, could be reduced by improving the lives of ordinary Palestinians.
The World Bank complains that Israel’s repeated closures have made it difficult for Palestinians to do business among themselves and with the outside world. The Bank argues that the Palestinian economy has not bounced back to its 1999 pre-intifada levels, and blames Israel. (In fact, according to its own data prepared in advance of a donors’ conference set for London in the coming days, unemployment in the Palestinian areas is down, to 22 percent in 2005, the gross national product is up and average income rose in 2005 by some 12%.)


But the Bank’s complaint is misdirected. Had the PA fulfilled its road map obligations and dismantled the terrorist infrastructure, the Palestinian economy and population would not be hampered by closures. Like the security fence and checkpoints, closures are self-inflicted by Palestinian violence.


Clearly, the Rafah agreement alone will not stop terrorists from entering Gaza. Israel is depending on its own and European moral suasion to do that. But the Palestinians must understand that the full implementation of the Rafah deal cannot occur in a vacuum, and the US ought to appreciate this, too. Convoys and Kassams cannot flow at the same time.

– December 12, 2005 (The Jerusalem Post)

Without my yarmulke

Caught Bareheaded

A kipa wearer since childhood makes the decision to go without

By ELLIOT JAGER

The thump to my skull came quick and hard. My Manhattan-bound “D” train had been idling in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park station waiting for the Franklin Avenue Shuttle to pull in, when a black youth snatched my yarmulke through an open window behind me just as the train doors closed.

That was the first time I found myself bareheaded – in public.

This mid-1970s memory came back to me a few months ago after I decided to stop being a full-time kipa wearer.

Frum from birth, I wore a yarmulke on the tough streets of the Lower East Side – mostly without thought, or choice, though sometimes defiantly in the face of nasty remarks from my Puerto Rican neighbors.

I continued to wear a kipa for the 23 years I worked in New York City government. I attended meetings on behalf of my agency in some of New York’s worst neighborhoods, wearing my yarmulke.

Only when I began adjunct teaching in New York area colleges, a part-time job I did after work, did I occasionally remove the yarmulke. I told myself that I wanted my students to concentrate on my lectures not my headgear.

It used to be you could fudge matters.

Prior to the 1960s, most men sported hats, like in old Humphrey Bogart movies. Now hats are passé. Still, plenty of Diaspora Jews wear caps of different kinds to enjoy a small degree of anonymity.

Granted there is also a trend in the opposite direction.

Never before – in New York and London – has ultra-Orthodox garb been more ubiquitous. And increasing numbers of non-haredi Orthodox Diaspora Jews are choosing to wear yarmulkes in public. Chalk that up to multiculturalism – acculturation is out, ethnic pride is in.

Had I remained in New York, especially if I had stayed in my old neighborhood, in my old job, inertia would have kept me from goings sans kipa.

Paradoxically, moving to Jerusalem liberated me from my kipa.

Still, it was awkward to go bareheaded the first few days. At work several people asked me what was going on? None got a straight answer. Mostly I made a joke and changed the subject.

SO WHY? “This above all: to thine own self be true,” wrote Shakespeare.

In my spiritual self, I am no longer Orthodox. So wearing a kipa is misleading. I don a kipa when I daven or have a significant meal and on Shabbat. That’s it. Not a perfect solution, but a solution of sorts.

Dropping the kipa is foremost a statement. I often feel God has hidden His face from me and keeping my kipa in my pocket is a form of jejune protest.

It is also belated rebellion against my spiritually wasted yeshiva years. And it is a silent protest against those in my orbit who defame God’s holy name by behaving badly with little thought to the yarmulkes on their heads.

My decision leaves me uneasy. In the Diaspora, yarmulkes are partly intended to identify Jews among gentiles. Here, they are more like bumper stickers. Israelis are defined by whether they wear a head covering or not, and by the style of their kipa – velvet and large for the ultra-Orthodox; knitted for the national-religious; endless variations for the in-between.

IN POST-BIBLICAL times, Jewish custom demanded men and women cover their hair: women for the sake of modesty, both sexes as a sign of God above. The Kizur Shulchan Aruch codified that “a man ought not walk four cubits” bareheaded because doing so “suggests overbearing pride, ignoring God’s omnipresence.”

By the 17th century, Jews made it a point of covering their heads in contradistinction to Christians, who even prayed bareheaded.

Rabbi Isaac Klein’s Guide to Jewish Religious Practice opens with the warning that “The theoretical approach to the regulations regarding the covering of the head will lead us to a controversial field.”

Klein instructs: “Thereare sources that make covering the head by a Jewish male a special practice of the pious, and there are sources indicating that it is mandatory for all.”

While he doesn’t say that going bareheaded is halachically acceptable, he also doesn’t explicitly forbid it.

Klein’s conservative Conservative position – the approach I now embrace – is to wear a kipa in shul, when davening or learning, when performing a ritual and when eating.

Losing the kipa has its complications. Does it seem I am aligning myself with those who don’t give the spiritual sphere a second thought – with Israel’s secular majority? It must seem so to some.

And what about the “D” train Jew-hater? Have I given him a post-facto victory?

I don’t think so.

I’ve cast my fate as solidly as I can with Jewish civilization by living in Eretz Ysiroel.

But what about God?

My hunch is – and it’s just that, because I don’t know God’s truth – the Creator isn’t bothered.

As Carl Jung pointed out, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”

(Originally published in Inside: Jewish Life & Style in Greater Philadelphia, Summer 2004)