Kesher Talk

Intellectual masturbation on the Upper West Side, cont. I went to a shiur by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller on Saturday afternoon. It was free, unlike the Shabbat dinner the evening before. I politely but firmly challenged Rabbi Seidler-Feller a few times, and after reading this news item today I'm glad I didn't sit in the front row. Although he got a bit defensive and didn't really respond to what I said, he kept his cool. On the other hand I didn't call him a kapo, which is a pretty low blow. I wasn't the only one who challenged him, but the pervasive tone was respectful and subdued, perhaps in reaction to the heated arguments of the dinner the night before, or reports of the scuffle in LA.

Rabbi Seidler-Feller seems to be one of those folks who speaks the truth as they see it without pandering to any particular party line. He has confronted Edward Said and pro-Palestinian Muslims in public (scroll down and onto the next page). He has led Arab-Jewish dialogue groups. He has spoken out against the divestment petition. He has called for an international force to enforce a 2-state solution. He was a founder of Americans for Peace Now. He has written critically and perceptively about conflicted secular Jewish academics (such as Tony Judt), and in fact at the talk on Saturday he praised Leon Weiseltier's response to Judt.

This is the kind of person I most admire (sans the poor impulse control, a characteristic he shares with fellow iconoclast Christopher Hitchens), whether I agree with any of his specific positions. However, if one didn't know any of that - and I didn't; I vaguely knew who he was, but I only googled these articles while writing this post - one could easily assume from his presentation Saturday that his primary approach to the existence of Israel is one of guilt and apology. We worked from texts ranging from the usual gemara and Rambam to some early Zionist Hebrew poetry to newspaper reports. I felt that Seidler-Feller cherry-picked his sources to drive a particular thesis, and - claiming time limitations - was going to avoid engaging with any arguments that would take him off-message. This is a legitimate way to handle having too much text, not enough time, a very controversial topic, and an urgency about bringing the audience to a particular realization (which wasn't going to happen anyway). But Seidler-Feller is an experienced teacher and lecturer, so why did he create that dilemma for himself in the first place?

His thesis wasn't novel: Jews now have political power but we still want to cling to victim status because we haven't yet internalized the idea that we are powerful. This is a venerable Leftist pop-psych variation on "you Jews are just paranoid." But our sense of our own power and vulnerability is mixed, as is the factual evidence of both. He wove the Jewish sense of specialness into this; I don't remember exactly how but I do remember my response: 1) one way in which Jews (and privileged Westerners in general) act like we are special is that we don't hold others to the same moral standards with which we castigate ourselves. And the world willingly obliges: If Jews will agonize over our lack of moral perfection, the UN will happily spend 25% of its time on Israel and ignore the truly oppressive and terrorist states which don't wear a "kick me" sign around their necks. The solution is not to lower our expectations of ourselves but to have the guts to hold others accountable.

My other comment was that these discussions always take place in a bubble where nothing exists except our texts and our consciences. As Joanne put it: "There is of course a sense in which this is all masturbatory anyway -- it's not as if what's said in a shul basement can affect someone determined to strap on a Semtex belt." In this shul basement there are no real Palestinian extremists (and international enablers of same), and we can fantasize that everyone who disagrees with our right to exist can be reached if we are only contrite enough. Or we (in a different shul basement) engage with a few selected Palestinians who constantly go on the offensive, let the Jews do all the soul-searching, and who have no influence on Arafat's thugocracy anyway. (Seidler-Feller responded to my comments with an anecdote about Sari Nusseibeh, which proves my point. Yawn. For the past 20 years, whenever the Israeli Left wants to produce moderate Palestinians who will "dialogue" with Jews, they trot out philosophy professor Sari Nusseibeh. Like I've said before, my money is on banker Omar Karsou.)

So I was disappointed in Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller's presentation. If we had started with the same Jewish texts (plus a few), and actually tackled a thorny case study - perhaps how to render ineffective a terrorist leader surrounded by civilians (yes, I know what the Geneva Convention says, but what do our tradition and law say?) - and argued it through, it would have been a worthwhile Shabbat afternoon of study.

UPDATE: Israel is finally taking the UN seriously enough to hold it accountable.

posted by Judith @ 11/03/2003 05:33:10 PM