Iconic playwright William Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet” about how plays “hold the mirror up to nature” and “show… the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
Two Milwaukee Repertory Theater productions this season — one of which opens April 8 — have stirred my thoughts about issues roiling in “the very age and body” of this 2014 season in Jewish life: the season of Passover (Pesach, April 14-22), Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah, April 27), Israel’s Memorial Day (Yom HaZikaron, May 4) and Israel’s Independence Day (Yom HaAtzma’ut, May 5). Those issues have to do with the relation between freedom and power.
Last month, the Rep produced “The Whipping Man” by Matthew Lopez, which I saw on March 9. This superb drama set at the end of the American Civil War tells of a wounded Jewish Confederate officer who returns to his ruined house and finds there two of his family’s now free slaves, also Jewish. While before the war, this officer had life and death power over them, they now have that power over him.
Coming up at the Rep is “The History of Invulnerability.” As the playwright, David Bar Katz, told me when I interviewed him on March 11, this plays explores the life of one of the many young American Jews who lived during the Nazi Germany era and who out of anguished feelings of helplessness created superheroes in compensation. (See story on this site.)
Both of these experiences recalled to me an observation attributed (by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in his book “Jewish Wisdom”) to Israel’s first prime-minister, David Ben-Gurion:
“We Jews have been accused of many crimes. Yet our one indictable crime in history has been the crime of weakness. Be assured that we shall never be guilty of that crime again.”
Clearly, freedom is impossible without power. Merely not to have someone forcing you to work for ends and benefits not your own does not suffice. One must also have control over one’s own life, and the ability to oppose others who would exert unjust rule over you.
The whole progression of Passover and the Yamim embodies this truth. In the Bible’s account, it was not enough for the Israelite slaves to escape the Egyptian Pharaoh, enter the land of Israel and live in their little tribes. By the time recounted in the books of Samuel, the Israelites knew they had to create a state — which in that era and region meant a kingdom — through which they could mobilize power to defend themselves against hostile or ruthlessly greedy nations around them (I Samuel 8).
The Holocaust happened to a great extent because Jews did not have power to prevent or resist it themselves, and no power to persuade or compel anyone else to help stop the Nazi genocide effort. Before that experience, Zionism was a minority movement in the Jewish world, regarded with much ambivalence and much opposition. By the end of World War II, the majority of world Jewry had become supporters of the Zionist movement and project.
Israeli journalist Ari Shavit included in his superb 2013 book — “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” — Holocaust survivor Ze’ev Stenhell’s comments about what the creation of Israel meant to him:
“In the world of the Holocaust, Jews had no dignity. Jews were human powder, human dust. They were shot as dogs and cats were never shot. They were treated worse than animals. Animals you could pity. Jews you could not pity. The Jew was subhuman. Nothing. Zero.
“And now, only three years after Auschwitz, the Jew is a human entity. Now, in the Land of Israel, Jews were fighting back… Suddenly, they were human like all humans… They were not creatures one could enslave and hunt down and kill.”
What made the difference was power. Yet, as Israeli historian and diplomat Michael B. Oren pointed out in his 2006 essay “Ben-Gurion and the Return to Jewish Power” (in the book “New Essays on Zionism”), in the past and into the present “Jews… had problems with power. … Shorn of sovereignty, the Jews developed a cult of powerlessness… which developed in time to an actual repugnance toward power” (his italics).
This lingers today among some anti-Zionist Jews, both of the political religious left and the extremist religious right. Worse, and to my increasing disgust, hostility to Jewish power for self-defense has become a leitmotif among non-Jewish enemies of Israel. To the Arab/Muslim world, the proper place for Jews and Judaism is subordinate to Muslims and Islam, and Israel’s existence constitutes a dishonor. Many in the western secular left refuse to believe that Jews and Israelis remain in real danger, and think Israel should stop being a Jewish state in favor of a “one-state solution” that embodies democracy in the abstract.
All of these people would return world Jewry to the past condition of helplessness in which we could potentially again be treated as “powder and dust.”
The problem of power in not just Jewish but all human life is complex and can’t be explored fully in a short article like this. But as our community observes Passover and the Yamim, I urge Chronicle readers to think about the connection between freedom and power — and, if you are so moved, to share your thoughts with the community on the pages of The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. Hag Pesach same’ach.
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