Neither Fear nor Pride
America in 2022 suffers from a surplus of gunrunners and a deficit of faith.
What do you do when you’re praying and someone tries to kill you? Growing up, I prayed every morning in school, but I can’t recall ever hearing this asked, even in a suburban Jewish community just across the bridge from the World Trade Center’s smoldering ruins. Yes, there were lockdowns and active shooter drills, policemen at the school doors, pervasive anxiety. Still, it was a different time. It was not like this.
In the last four or so years, like many American Jews, I’ve found myself preoccupied by a new sense of vulnerability that I did not expect. There is a part of me, bigger, perhaps, than I was willing to admit, the part of me raised in the naïveté of the Obama years, that can’t quite grasp how it is possible that there have been at least five major assaults on Jewish communal centers since 2018. Yet I also bristle at the easy explanations and the pablum that passes for analysis and proposals about what to do. The more I turn over the circumstances of the different attacks in my mind—Tree of Life, Poway, Monsey, Jersey City, Colleyville—the less they form a coherent, whole narrative about antisemitism in America, its prevalence, and its sources. The difficulty of making sense of the current moment is that the societal backdrop of this violence is distinct from past conditions, it defies reflexive analogies; historical events may sometimes rhyme, but history does not work through formulae. Those who claim with absolute certainty to know the precise etiology of this violence seem, at least to me, to be selling something. We must look elsewhere, and for different kinds of answers.
Jewish tradition, of course, has a lot to say about the demands of piety under lethal threat. Over the last few months, I have been reading with my close friend Maya Rosen Sefer Hasidim, a sprawling medieval compendium of religious instruction, ethics, and biblical interpretation attributed to the twelfth-century rabbi Yehuda HeHasid; in a kind of morbid coincidence, last week we were studying what it has to say about martyrdom. Unsurprisingly for a text composed at a time when regular violence was a feature of Jewish life, Sefer Hasidim is unequivocal about what happens when someone tries to kill you during prayer: a righteous person does not stop praying, even—or rather, especially—if their life is at risk, “even if a snake is wrapped around your ankle.” On its surface, this sounds absurd, suicidal to the modern Jewish ear. It was, after all, this religious passivity that the Zionist revolution against traditional Judaism sought to eliminate.
But there is more here than that. The subtext is that faith fights fear, that faith makes possible living on, even in the face of death. In our modern, disenchanted world, one need not believe in God to have faith. Working outside the Jewish tradition, with Hume and Kant, the philosopher Annette Baier uses the term “secular faith” to describe a belief “on grounds other than deductive or inductive evidence of its truth.” Faith, she writes, “is the evidence of things unseen.” Her argument for secular or moral faith—a faith in the possibility of a just society, comprised people who choose to act justly—is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is no alternative. To give up on the belief that people can, and will, be good—which, again, cannot be reinforced by any purely rational exercise, certainly not in a world as manifestly unjust as ours—must, she writes, “lead eventually to an outcome disastrous to all, although those with a taste for gun-running may make a good profit before doomsday dawns.” America in 2022 suffers from a surplus of gunrunners and a deficit of faith.
What would it mean to respond to an event like Colleyville with faith, as hard and even counterintuitive as that may be? It would mean resisting the attempts to sow mutual suspicion between communities of different creeds and ethnicities, and trying to slow the seemingly inexorable grind toward Schmittian enmity. It would mean rejecting the offers of the gunrunners and the counsel of those who call to retreat into a fortress of belligerent particularism. It would mean believing in our neighbors and looking to them first with compassion rather than suspicion. It would mean choosing to live with the uncertainty that faith requires instead of the easy comfort of familiar yet false “solutions.” America is closer to a society of total surveillance, its people more heavily armed, than ever before. Years ago, many American synagogues and community centers imported TSA-style metal detectors and security guards. I can see no militarized way out of this—that way, only more militarization.
Too often, communal leaders exploit fear. They embrace the gunrunners and invite them into the sanctuaries. At times, they seem to relish in the antagonism, in the ability to point at others who “hate us,” and give license to us to hate them too. Whether consciously or not, they see fear as useful for shoring up communal allegiance, making it more fervent. One use of what Corey Robin calls “political fear” is as a tool by elites who see in the cultivation of fear an opportunity for passionate recommitment to particular ideas or political projects. It’s no surprise, then, that at rallies nominally against antisemitic violence in the U.S. like the one in New York in January 2020, or in D.C. last summer, the overwhelming emphasis was on defending the state of Israel. It's also why, whenever there is an attack on American Jews these days, the chorus of responses encourages greater Jewish visibility, exhorts us to militant self-presentation, to more nationalistic pride.
Yet traditional Judaism abhors pride. Much more than with martyrdom, Sefer Hasidim is obsessed with avoiding the sin of pride. And this not, as some might argue, to avoid drawing the ire of the goyim, but about how to behave among our neighbors, our teachers, and our friends, sometimes suggesting lengths of modesty that today would seem absurd. So opposed to pride is Sefer Hasidim that it warns, a person should not stand in a place where they might be praised, because there is no way they can avoid enjoying it, and “any good deed that a person might do, if done without humility, is like a dish without salt, any humility without awe of God, like food without spices.” The danger of pride, the text says, is so great that we must avoid even putting ourselves in a position that might tempt us to feel it. Again, one need not take this literally to understand the message, that traditional Judaism recoils from pride and, by extension, from the acts of strength and force that pride often leads to—a message that echoes from the Talmud through centuries of rabbinic writing.
The authors of Sefer Hasidim lived in dark, difficult times. They faced forced conversions, anti-Jewish riots, attacks during the crusades. We face different, and, thankfully, less severe, although still-serious challenges today. But the narrow path that Yehuda HeHasid and his students propose to walk seems to me the only viable one: to reject the dyad of fear and compensatory pride, to choose faith instead. On Saturday night, Raphael Magarik, a learned friend and teacher, reminded me of how, at the end of Shabbat, Jews sing “Do not fear, my servant Jacob,” God’s command to Jacob on his departure from Canaan to exile in Egypt. “This is the temptation for the Jew in Diaspora,” he wrote, “but also the absolute prohibition: the politics of fear.” As Jews in America, we make our lives here. We must do so with our neighbors, of all kinds, not against them. We must believe that this is possible. There is no other way.
Our pain is ours, but it is not exceptional. One of the perils of the politics of fear is that it invests us in the uniqueness of our own suffering, and blinds us to what we share with others. But there is no way to look at the last six years and conclude that Jews are the sole or special victims of the rash of anti-social violence—in both its stochastic and systemic forms—that seems to have engulfed the U.S. The gunrunners and their prominent supporters tell us to arm-up, to prepare to fight. Yet to do so is to give in to the escalatory logic of fracture and to the idolatry of force. We must act in a way that attests to the possibility of a just society, however unlikely its realization may seem. Otherwise we cannot expect others to do the same.