Maybe you saw David Brooks’ personal faith essay this past week?
I think the paragraph that got the most people upset was this one:
Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.
It made me think of this sermon, “Three Tables,” by Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, delivered at The Jewish Center, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in 1969. Rabbi Lamm writes on how the Egyptians, Joseph, and his brothers (who did not yet know his true identity) sat down to eat.
They served him and them separately, and Egyptians who were eating with him separately, for the Egyptians would not eat bread with Hebrews, as it was abhorrent to Egypt. (Gen. 43:32)
For Rabbi Lamm, this verse illustrates the tragi-comic limits of assimilation. Joseph was too Egyptian to eat with the Hebrews, but was still not accepted by the Egyptians. So he was forced to eat alone.
And yet, this assimilated Jew, who will not break bread with his own brothers, who will not share a table with those too-Jewish Jews -- is still unaccepted by the Egyptians. How galling!
He is not invited to sit at the same table by these Egyptians who are, after all, his subjects, his subordinates, his employees!
They will obey him, they will flatter him, they will do his bidding -- but they will not let him eat with them, for they consider him, no less than those Jewish-Jews, a to’evah, an abomination!
For Rabbi Lamm, the message is about the dignity of being oneself.
The authentic Jew and the authentic Gentile can practice brotherhood with dignity, and both can only be amused by the inauthentic Jew who shuns the table of his brothers and will not be invited to the table of the others.
“Can practice brotherhood” - meaning, I think, across camps, not just within camps.
Perhaps ironically, it may be easier to reach out to others from a place of strong identity and connection than from a place of universalism and rootlessness. Lamm talks about the tragedy of the third table-for-one, but the importance in general of having two tables where each group can eat together in the same room, yet be fully present.
Again, this is similar to Rabbi Shai Held in Judaism Is About Love talking about partiality and particularism v. universalism:
Strict impartiality would undermine my individuality - and the individuality of those dear to me. Having family and friends to whom we are partial is part of what makes us individuals rather than abstract, generic members of a species…who I am as a person is irreducibly shaped by the people I care about and who care for me, by the people whose well-being I feel responsible for and who feel responsible for me…. (142-3)
For most of us, the consequence of claiming to love all of humanity (or all of creation, for that matter) equally is that we will end loving no one at all…if we don’t allow people to care about someone in particular, they will likely end up caring about no one at all…. (143)
As [Bible scholar Jon] Levenson observes, “Those who think outsiders can have a proper relationship with God as they are will feel less of an impulse to make them into insiders.” Jews have therefore tended to allow others to remain other. As Daniel Boyarin wonderfully puts it, “The genius of Christianity is its concern for all the people of the world; the genius of rabbinic Judaism is its ability to leave other peoples alone. (325)
There is more a bit of irony in David Brooks trying to articulate a sort of spiritual universalism - he believes in it all - when in his day job he is (still) a conservative commentator, who tends to believe in the value of maintaining the integrity of particular heritages, traditions, and national ways of life.
As Lamm would put it, Brooks may be on path where he winds up eating alone.
Part of my own project here is showing how democracy works best when people respect each others’ dignity and integrity, not when they try to overcome (paper over) their differences. Maybe the point is having enough tables for everyone, keeping the tables in the same room.
This is also a good thing to be thinking about at Chanukah time, one framing of which is all about the clash between an intolerant universalist regime and a beleaguered group that would have been very happy to have been left alone.
Came here b/c of Liz Dye. Thanks for this. Not that I care at all about David Brooks, but I do care about the lesson.
Too many think that loving the stranger as oneself means that strangers should be just like you or they're doing it wrong, and that you should be forcing them to assimilate for their own good.
But that's not loving the stranger as oneself. That's loving yourself so much you can no longer see others. It drives me batty when people claim to be taking their lessons from the Torah or the Bible when they're really taking their lead from Ovid's Narcissus.
I appreciate your reflection on this. I come at this from the opposite direction—as a Christian seeking greater understanding of the Jewish faith tradition. But it is a respectful curiosity about the tradition from which mine sprang.