Walking A Mile In One Pair of Jewish Shoes
Some Musings on Ruth R. Wisse' "If I Am Not for Myself"
Just walk a mile in his moccasins,
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way,
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.
-Judge Softly by Mary T. Lathrap 18951
An agnostic Jew, an atheist Jew, and a Christian Gentile walked into a podcast…Have you heard this one? Do you know what happened?
The Gentile believed more in the traditional religious stories of the Hebrew people than they did. How could this be?
“The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” -Isaiah 2:1-4
This was my experience as a podcast co-host. The biggest difference between me and the co-host and guest was that I, as a non-Jew, had chosen to call myself a follower of the Jewish Jesus and, as a result, I could never call myself an agnostic Christian or an atheist Christian. It wouldn’t make any sense. The two Jews in the podcast, however, were Jewish by birth. They could call themselves agnostics and atheists and still consider themselves Jewish. As a result, they had identified deeply with the Jewish people while not trusting fully in the God of the Hebrew Bible.
This experience shifted an important assumption. It was too much to assume that my being grafted to the vine 2 of the Jewish story in Christ would enable me to see the world the way my Jewish friends and relatives did. My heritage, even as a Christian, created a different psyche in me than in someone who was born Jewish. This may seem obvious, yet the world is again quick to judge Jews based on the non-Jewish view of the world. It struck me that it would be important to walk a mile in at least one Jewish pair of shoes and see what I learn. So I read “If I Am Not for Myself,” and learned how different the experience of life on our planet can be. Here are a few things I learned:
1-Though I am not convinced, as her second chapter suggests, that anti-semitism is the most durable ideology of the twentieth century, I also realize that this is a less personally pressing issue for me as a Gentile. Whatever my feelings, however, it is the experience of many Jews who lived through the 20th century. 3 From their point of view, no matter how they change, scapegoating of the Jewish people continues.
2-Wisse points out, for example, that many Jews are not religious Jews.
“Moses Hess…could not accept religious election as the continuing source of Jewish morality because he no longer believed in a God of revelation or in a God Who mattered. At the same time, his respect for Jewish civilization - for the consequences of the Jewish contract with God through the millennia - made him eager to preserve his people’s historical mission. The Jews mattered even if God did not. So he tried to identify the moral core of Jewishness with the emergent socialist faith in an egalitarian, responsible state that would be a new earthly example to the nations.” 4
As a result, they jettisoned their own distinctive ethics and joined different majority Gentile ideological movements.
“The Jewish revolutionaries, Communists and pro-Communists, who justified expropriation, violence and murder in the name of higher egalitarian ideals, should disabuse us once and for all of the notion that Jews are innately more moral than other people. The readiness of so many individual Jews to serve and to vindicate the most repressive political system in the world exposes the false claims of any ‘Jewish’ morality apart from the morality of Jewish Law.” p. 84
Nevertheless the anti-semitism continued. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish captain in the Third French Republic (from 1894 until its resolution in 1906) was wrongfully convicted of treason and served 5 years in the harsh environment of Devil’s Island for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. But this was only the beginning of his troubles in what became known as the Dreyfus Affair.5 Over the next 12 years the Dreyfus Affair became what it continues to be today, one of the most notable examples of a miscarriage of justice and antisemitism in the Francophone world.
3-Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, tried to eliminate anti-Semitism in a way that Jewish assimilation into the liberalism of French culture had not.6 He hoped that the creation of Jewish state would resolve the problem.
It is clear in our day that his efforts, while successful in the creation of the Jewish state, have ultimately failed to stop anti-semitism.
4-I reflected on what Weiss had written thus far:
a) I have chosen to place the teaching of a Jewish man who, while not recognized as the Messiah by the Jewish people as a whole, taught directly out of the stories and mindset of the Hebrew Bible.
b) But what if I experienced faith, not simply as a choice, but as an ethnicity? What if I had been born a Jew, identified with it, but found that my very identity was laden with problems for many other people of the world to the point that I might even be unsafe? Such an experience is far different than any push back I have received for choosing to become a follower of Jesus.
“Israel is the only modern country still rejected by all but one of its neighbors after five major wars and almost fifty years.7
5-Wisse discusses the psychic disturbance that the experience above causes many Jews.
a-There is a division between Jews living in Israel and Diaspora Jews, but also between the many, especially among Diaspora Jews.
b- Many of the Diaspora Jews work to prove that they are caring and compassionate by supporting politics on the left. This, however, is problematic in those moments, like the time we are living in today, where the Left is increasingly against the actions of the Jews who live in Israel and, by ethnic stereotyping, the Jews of the diaspora living in that country.
c- Many Jews agree with the liberal hopefulness about human nature. Yet they still run into the hatred and violence of the countries around Israel:
"When liberal optimism is confronted by determined aggression, either it admits the reality of aggression and suspends its belief that the world is liberal for long enough to help make it so, or it maintains its liberal optimism and denies the reality of aggression."8
She cites many Jewish writers making a name in the West by expressing compassion in their portrayal of Arabs while often over-stigmatizing descriptions of fellow Jews. She points out that it is difficult for those writers to understand the internalized experience of Arabs as they do their experience as Jews. As she puts it:
"The danger of solipsism arises only when writers ascribe their own vision to others and mistake the reality of others for their own." 9
6-When I read of the “man of sorrows” in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, I think immediately of Jesus on the cross.10
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.11
But before Jesus, many interpreted the “man of sorrows” as the Jewish people. Reading this book made me wonder if, though Jesus’ death was the ultimate individual embodiment of the scapegoat for the sins of the world, the Jewish people were, even today, a communal embodiment of this same theme. There is no reason to believe that the two interpretations can both be true in different ways.
A few notes on the shortcomings of the book. The introduction and conclusion are odd. The author says as much. The conclusion is rather disconnected in making a point unclear from the argument that has gone before. Also, it is the opinion of one Jew, which is not nearly enough for a people who self-describe highly opinionated. For example, we get a clear sense of Wisse’ opinion of Jews and Western liberalism in the following quote, which, I am certain, many of her fellow Jews would have a lot of problems with:
"Were modern Jews now to engage in the kind of acute soulsearching that Jewish religious practice encourages, they would have to confess not, as they falsely do, for Arab crimes against them but for consequences of their 'idealism,' for their readiness to sacrifice their fellow Jews to the ambitions of other peoples, for their slowness in reclaiming full political autonomy in Zion, and for their failure to bring to its fullest potential the Jewish civilization into which they were born."12
Nevertheless, I have taken some important steps forward in my understanding of the Jews as “other.” This helps me to challenge and sharpen my point of view, and to engage more knowledgeably with Jewish people on issues that matter most to them. For though I follow a Jewish man and read the traditional stories, wisdom, and songs of the Jewish people more intensely than any other group of humans on the planet, including my own, this book has shown me that I will always remain other. I am a Gentile. I experience the world as a Gentile. I suppose I always will.
“Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps,
Or stumbles along the road.
Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears,
Or stumbled beneath the same load.
There may be tears in his soles that hurt
Though hidden away from view.
The burden he bears placed on your back
May cause you to stumble and fall, too.
Don’t sneer at the man who is down today
Unless you have felt the same blow
That caused his fall or felt the shame
That only the fallen know.
You may be strong, but still the blows
That were his, unknown to you in the same way,
May cause you to stagger and fall, too.
Don’t be too harsh with the man that sins.
Or pelt him with words, or stone, or disdain.
Unless you are sure you have no sins of your own,
And it’s only wisdom and love that your heart contains.
For you know if the tempter’s voice
Should whisper as soft to you,
As it did to him when he went astray,
It might cause you to falter, too.
Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.
I believe you’d be surprised to see
That you’ve been blind and narrow-minded, even unkind.
There are people on reservations and in the ghettos
Who have so little hope, and too much worry on their minds.
Brother, there but for the grace of God go you and I.
Just for a moment, slip into his mind and traditions
And see the world through his spirit and eyes
Before you cast a stone or falsely judge his conditions.
Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins
And remember the lessons of humanity taught to you by your elders.
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives, our kindnesses and generosity.
Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.”
The book was written in 1992.
p. 81
It is well worth reading about the Dreyfus Affair but the details are not the focus of this article.
p. 86-87)
p.111-112
p. 135
p. 172
Isaiah 53:3
p. 188
This is above my mental capabilities but not above my heart capabilities. It takes a brave and intelligent Gentile to study and be at peace with coming to a place of ‘not really knowing’ and yet believing - a mysterious miracle for the modern Christian of any stripe.