So many journalists yield to the temptation to play prophet. I have generally been able to resist that urge. The results of the recent elections in the U.S. and Israel reinforce my reluctance.
Many columnists on the conservative Townhall Web site confidently foretold that President Barack Obama would be a one-term president. On the day after the election this past November, one could practically see an illusion of the whole site turning red with embarrassment as the writers tried to understand how they could have been so wrong.
Similarly, many journalists thought the Israeli electorate was going to make a hard turn and give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a solid right wing mandate. To pick just one example, in the Jan. 21 issue of The New Yorker magazine, David Remnick justified his long profile article about Naftali Bennett, leader of Israel’s Jewish Home Party, by calling him “the central story of this political moment” and asserting that the election would reflect “the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right.”
Then to seemingly every observer’s surprise, “the central story of this political moment” in Israel turned out not to be Bennett, a religious Zionist who campaigned on “I will do everything in my power to make sure they [the Palestinian Arabs] never get a state” (quoted in Remnick’s article). Instead, that story was Yair Lapid and his centrist Yesh Atid (There is a Future) Party, which in its first election came in second with 19 seats in the 120 member Knesset (Parliament).
True, Netanyahu’s Likud Party, combined with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) Party, took first place; and Netanyahu appears likely to remain prime minister in the next coalition government. But it did so with a loss of 11 seats, down from 42 in the previous Knesset to 31. The Labor Party finished third with 15, and Bennett’s party finished fourth with 12.
Naturally, the story is just beginning in both cases. Obama faces a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and fights over various issues have already begun.
In the even more complex political system and situation in Israel, it seems likely it will take a few weeks and perhaps a month or more for someone, most probably Netanyahu, to put together a coalition that will form a government. News commentators mull publicly over the possible permutations of party alliances.
I do not wish to opine on whether these results will be good for the U.S. or Israel in the short or long term. But I think there are some lessons in humility that journalists and readers should draw simply from the fact of these election surprises.
There are reasons that the Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Baba Bathra (12b) states, “Since the [Second] Temple was destroyed, [the power of] prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to fools and children.” And while it is true, as the Yiddish proverb says, “In life, each of us must sometimes play the fool,” one way of at least postponing the role for a time is to beware of trying to prophecy.
Above all, one should beware of trying to proclaim with certainty that certain results, good or bad, will result from following certain policies. One should even eye warily evidence marshaled by experts.
Graphs of trends may be useful; but they always show the past, not the future. No one can tell whether or when unforeseen developments will shift the trends.
History may demonstrate what is possible or even probable, but history never exactly repeats itself. Moreover, what looks like inevitable results in historical hindsight — for example, that the southern U.S. states were bound to lose the Civil War, or that the Nazi German government’s actions in the 1930s foretold that this regime would seek to murder all of Europe’s Jews — did not look that way at the time.
No one said it better than the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell. “I think nobody should be certain of anything,” he said in the 1960 book “Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind.” “If you’re certain, you’re certainly wrong, because nothing deserves certainty, and so one always ought to hold all one’s beliefs with a certain element of doubt, and one ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt.”
The great Renaissance-era French essayist Michael de Montaigne, whose mother came from a Spanish Jewish family, inscribed on his library’s rafters such wise reminders as “The for and against are both possible,” and “It may be and it may not be.”
Perhaps a dose of such thinking may help to promote some much-needed civility in both the U.S. and Israeli political atmospheres. Whatever our views on specific issues, we are likely to be at least a little wrong, and our opponents a little right; and both probably have things to teach each other.
And perhaps the coming festival of Purim, which begins the evening of Feb. 23, exists in part to remind us of how things at almost any time can flip upside down, with expectations overturned, plans and views confounded, and surprise the order of the day.
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