My chemical Jew* (amended)

My heritage is Judaism,** and even though I don’t feel Jewish, I realize I don’t feel not Jewish. The chemistry of feelings must be that complicated. There are different sensations in the mix. When I think of Jews, my knee-jerk association is “good,” as in they are good and moral people, probably superiorly moral. This is doubtless an atavistic feeling from my early childhood where I learned the Jews are the “chosen people.” That’s a notion that is laughable to me, but no more laughable than so many other religious conceits in all the other religions I know something about. There’s an ingredient in this felt goodness that is quite perverse, as so: Just as God can’t be good because “the good” is His own fickle invention and therefore changeable by his edict, not an objective standard in the world, and yet He must be “good,” so my sense is that Jews are axiomatically “good” even when they are completely rotten people with odious personalities and rampaging murder in their hearts.

 

That’s one stubborn chemical.

 

I wouldn’t know why “the world” has enjoyed hating Jews throughout history. I can’t see that experts have actually figured this out, either. But I do think that Jews are unpleasant about their religion in a way that Christians are not. Christians are more likely to be hypocrites; Jews are less likely. This is because Jews are thinkers and self-determiners while Christians are followers and therefore prone to slip and unfollow. Christians have a picture of Jesus on their living room wall and they know His simple rules for life, many of which they will never follow well or consistently (see Bertrand Russell’s lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian”). Jews don’t have an image of their God – He is almost entirely just an idea. They don’t really endorse some Old Testament view of Him with His anger, jealousy and revenge. They think, they analyze, they parse old parchments, shove microscope at nuance. But dispassionate thinking and complacent belief in one head seem gauchely contradictory – unbecomingly so. Who are these intellectuals who have blind faith and brotherhood in something so abstract and self-construed? If you’re going to be a sheep (goes my thinking), have a shepherd. You can’t be one and the same. 

What you do doesn't seem to work. And that may be the world's problem.

 

So much for that. I believe that anyone, unimpaired by childhood indoctrination or the neurotic need for a beatific feeling or to be a permanent child of a perfect Father, can be as good and decent as a person can be. I regret that people have needed to fall into belief camps, helping them remain children and giving them a main source of prosthetic self-esteem and fields of victims for their projected anger. As a therapist treating adults, I’ve seen very few adults – individuals with clear eyes and present needs, not past needs that they can’t quit.

 

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* Alternate title: The self-chosen people: How much humble narcissism has this created?

** I have a fancy Jewish great-grandfather. See https://www.academia.edu/36419048/David_Lubin_and_the_International_Institute_of_Agriculture and the Wikipedia article.