Learning from our Failures
Daniel J. Elazar
Peoples as well as individuals
can learn at least as much, if not more, from failures as
from successes. Successes are usually just enjoyed; rarely
are they analyzed to see what made them work. Failures, on the
other hand, if we are aware of them (and we are not always aware
of them), bring us up sharp and lead us to learn what we can do
to do better next time. The real test of a successful community
or polity is whether or not it has self-correcting mechanisms,
not whether it always gets things right the first time out. In
order to develop those self-correcting mechanisms, it must learn
from its failures.
Failure to Establish and Maintain Standards
For the Jewish people as a polity, there are at least four areas
of failure from which we can learn. One is our failure to
establish and maintain standards now that we have both power and
pluralism. Like it or not, we have returned to power from
powerlessness, and we have pluralism and are living with it. Now
we have to face the problems that both bring, including the
problems of establishing and maintaining standards of how we
utilize power and of how we harness pluralism.
Pluralism by itself is no more of a self-justifying activity than
is power. Pluralism is a reality, a necessity for human
development in democratic societies. None of us would wish to do
without it, just as we do not wish to do without the power that
is necessary to achieve control over our own destiny. Morally,
however, pluralism is more of an instrument than an end in
itself, a means to reach some higher goal.
Failure to Practice Prudence
Second is our failure to practice prudence in what we do. Our
tendency is to be absolutist in our public positions. This may
be a habit we acquired when we were powerless and, having no
responsibility, could dream undiluted dreams. Our visions could
be absolutist visions because we were never called upon to carry
them out. But the failure to practice prudence now that we can
and must take action within the new world of power and pluralism
in which we live moves us to adopt "all or nothing at all"
positions which are impossible to achieve in the real world.
This affects us in every one of our activities -- in our
politics, our religion, and our community activities -- in all
too many ways. It is especially dangerous whenever issues of
real importance are at stake.
The great success of the Zionist movement in our time has been
the degree to which it managed to overcome this absolutist
proclivity of Jews in favor of greater pragmatism. That is how
we finally got our state. But even though we have been able to
be pragmatic, we still have not learned to be prudent. Until we
have prudence as well as pragmatism, we are going to be the
authors of many of our own problems.
Failure to Settle in Eretz Israel
Our third failure is the failure of the Jewish people to settle
in sufficient numbers in Eretz Israel. We would not be concerned
about the situation in Israel the way we have to be now were there
one or two million more Jews in the land, if 10 or 20 percent of
those Jews now living in the diaspora would have chosen to settle
in Israel.
Not that we lacked opportunities that challenged us to do so.
First we were given the Balfour Declaration which, along with the
British conquest of the land, opened a window of opportunity
after World War I before the Arabs turned hostile, and we did not
come. Then we achieved the establishment of the State and the
opening of the doors to all Jews freely and we did not come.
Then we won the Six-Day War and established ourselves in the
entire land west of the Jordan, and we still failed to take
proper advantage of our opportunities. Now we are going to have
to make hard decisions that we would not have to make if we had
taken proper advantage of the reestablishment of the Jewish
homeland.
Failure of Judaism to Adapt without Splintering
A fourth contemporary area of Jewish failure is that we have
failed to adapt our traditional religion without breaking it into
denominations. In other words, we were not able to show
sufficient flexibility within a basically very flexible religion
to create the necessary adaptations that would have kept us from
having to break into what at first were branches of Judaism and
now seem to be hardening into denominations. There is a
congregation in Philadelphia that prides itself on being named
and insists on being referred
to as "Reform Temple Knesset Israel." At
one time its denominational emphasis was an anomaly. Reform,
Conservative, and Orthodox Jews considered themselves part of a
common Judaism, however different their interpretation. Today we
are finding in more and more cases that the movements are
defining themselves as denominations. They ask: What is good for
our movement? What is the ideology of our movement; not what do
we add to the common understanding of Judaism? This is the
common failure of all Jews no matter what their religious
persuasion. Maybe it was inevitable under contemporary
conditions, but it is still a failure.
A Basic Underlying Consensus
If one looks closely at Israel since the start of the Arab
uprising in December 1987, one sees that in fundamental matters
there has been a wall-to-wall closing of ranks. There has
been an overwhelming diminution of confrontation, for example, in
the religious sphere. Ultra-Orthodox demonstrations on Shabbat
and extreme secularist retaliation provided Israel's hottest
area of conflict until early December of that year. We then saw
a setting aside of differences for the period of the crisis.
We have even witnessed a similar phenomenon in the attitudes of
"hawks" and "doves." For example, when Ted Koppel visited Israel
with his Nightline television program, we heard Haim Ramon, a
noted "dove," take on and reject the extremist position of the
Palestinians, even though he believes that a proper negotiated
settlement should include a Palestinian state alongside of
Israel. When he spoke, he sounded like any member of the Likud.
This is not because he was retreating into an atavistic shell
under Arab pressure; he was showing the basic underlying
consensus that Israel has in matters of its survival that the
Jewish people shares, that we can fall back on when necessary.
We have to learn from that reality and not let surface divisions
-- expressed at a high decibel level -- delude us about our basic
oneness.
Another example of this basic shared consensus could be seen at
the last meeting of the annual symposium held on the anniversary
of the death of former Chief of Staff David Elazar. Every year
his friends and comrades hold a study day at Tel Aviv University
devoted to defense and security issues -- a secular but very
Jewish adaptation of the religious tradition of studying sacred
texts in memory of the deceased. Those who come are the top
brass of the army, half of the government, and the retired
generals who led Israel's forces to victory in five wars. When
the closing speaker, Yitzhak Rabin, failed to arrive on schedule,
Mordechai Zippori, director-general of Israel's Social Insurance
Administration, a retired senior IDF officer and former cabinet
minister, got up and led community singing. All those generals,
including five or six former chiefs of staff, and all those
senior officials from across the political spectrum all sat and
sang the old Zionist songs together for twenty minutes until
Rabin appeared. In a different age they might have davened
together; singing together had some of the same character.
To take another example, anybody who closely observes our
soldiers in the territories sees them struggling with the moral
problems that are inherent in such an indeterminate situation.
They know that they must do their duty, but they also have the
moral scruples we would expect of Jews and they must somehow
reconcile these. One young soldier, a medic in the tank corps,
was serving in northern Samaria where he and his comrades were
the daily target of stones, bottles, metal bars, and molotov
cocktails. Their basic orders were not to respond unless their
lives were actually in danger. The Arab response to their
self-restraint was not to show similar restraint but to consider
it a sign of Jewish weakness and to redouble their efforts.
One day this soldier was hit by a molotov cocktail thrown by one
of the Arabs. Fortunately it failed to explode but the bottle
cut his leg severely. In the process of this assault by hundreds
of Arabs against a relatively small number of Israeli soldiers,
the soldiers fired back and one of his buddies shot the Arab who
threw the molotov cocktail. The wounded soldier, as a medic
bound by his oath to save lives, then proceeded to literally save
the life of the fellow who had just thrown the bottle at him. He
administered first aid, took him to the closest hospital (a
Jewish hospital in Afula), and stayed with him until he was out
of danger. Only then did the soldier, this writer's son, go down
to have his own leg attended to.
What upset our soldiers was not the job they had to do but
feeling that they were being vilified by certain circles in
Israel, in the American Jewish community, and by the foreign
press at a time when they were struggling hard to do their duty
and also to keep their moral standards.
Some Positive Trends
There are a number of other positive trends which seem to be
emerging as we learn from Israel's current crisis. First, it now
appears that we are witnessing the emergence of a reasoned debate
with regard to the future of the territories. We are moving away
from messianic arguments one way or another. The messianic voice
of Gush Emunim does not carry much weight among many people
anymore, even among those who believe we should stay in the
territories. By the same token, those who believe that giving
the Palestinians a state will automatically bring peace also have
little credibility. Both arguments -- for unilateral evacuation,
on one hand, or annexation, on the other -- are still heard along
with various other proposals. However, the debate is now
beginning to be conducted in a more reasoned and prudential
manner to ask what is most likely to secure the very difficult
aims of Israel and the Jewish people.
Reasonable people can differ as to what Israel's best course of
action is. The real problem is that we have not been able to get
to a reasoned debate. If this change becomes a precedent,
encouraging us to have reasoned debates about other issues,
including pluralism issues, it will be a very positive thing.
Second, the last few years have seen an upsurge of concern for
Israel's Arabs on the part of Israel's Jews who have hitherto
neglected them, by and large. The Arab citizens of Israel were
an unseen people, not so much discriminated against but
unnoticed. Now there is emerging a new recognition of the
presence of Israeli Arabs and for dealing with a kind of
pluralism that most Jews both in Israel and the diaspora did not
want to acknowledge existed.
Third, we have witnessed the establishment of higher standards
of constitutional rights and procedures for a nation under siege.
The constitutional discussion that has been going on in the
country and the Israeli Supreme Court's expansion of its powers
of judicial review are also part of this trend.
Between 1967 and 1977 there were thousands of Arabs deported from
the territories by the Labor government. Compare that to the few
dozen who have been deported so far during the Arab uprising.
Not more than a few dozen were deported in the whole time since
1977 when the Likud took power. Why? Because in the early days
then-Defense
Minister Moshe Dayan made deportation a clear instrument of
government policy and there was no one to stop him. Then
Israel's Supreme Court stepped in and ruled that there had to be
hearings and this made it impossible to just whisk people across
the border. The whole policy was changed by judicial review
since it could no longer be conducted in the same way. (In this
writer's opinion, deportation is a more humane way of punishing
offenders than shooting or incarceration,
but that is another question.)
Fourth, there have been similar developments in other fields.
The fact is that the national unity government
has functioned rather well on most issues, even though on one big
issue they cannot see eye to eye at all. The national unity
government is really Israel's "Odd Couple," like the Neil Simon
play. The two partners are very different but circumstances
require them to live together because they have no alternative.
Here again we see where Jews have the capability of reaching
pragmatic solutions, but the way they function together, with the
noise, the confrontations, and the leaks, is disappointing, to
say the least.
The Expression of Neo-Sadducean Judaism
One of the lessons we can draw from all this is the realization
that we are seeing struggles for expression of what may be
termed "neo-Sadducean" Judaism. Classical secular Zionism wanted
the reestablishment of a Jewish state to make the Jews like all
the other nations. The great step toward Jewish normalcy in our
times brought about by the revival of Jewish statehood has not
been to make its Jews normal in that sense, but has been to
restore the possibilities of a principled and systematic
pluralism in Jewish life.
In the days of the First and Second Commonwealths, when we also
had states, there also were different approaches to the
fundamental questions of being Jewish. In the Second
Commonwealth, the groups reflecting these approaches became known
as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Pharisees
founded what we know as the halakhic system. They are the
fathers of the line of traditional Judaism that is now expressed
in Orthodoxy in its various forms and in authentic Conservative
Judaism -- those groups that seek to build a Jewish life rooted
in the continuity of halakhah (Jewish law).
The Essenes were those who went off into the desert. They saw
the larger society as inevitably corrupt and believed it was
necessary to build a new society in the desert,including only
those capable of true holiness, that is to say, the saving
remnant. With one important difference, the
Israeli kibbutzim were an Essenic movement. Only because they
were in the vanguard of the resettlement of the land did they
entertain hopes of building the whole society in their image.
The Sadducees were those whose Jewish benchmarks were the polity
and the Temple, in other words, the organized structures of
Jewish political and religious life. They were no less
"religious" than the other two groups, but understood their
religious obligations differently -- less comprehensively or
punctiliously and more oriented toward the public dimension of
Judaism.
With the destruction of the Second Commonwealth, the Essenes were
no longer protected by a Jewish political entity so they were
overrun and disappeared. The Sadducees had no state and no
temple, and they disappeared. The Pharisees survived because
through halakhah they had developed a brilliantly portable
Judaism. For 1800 years, Pharisaic Judaism was the only viable
Judaism that we had. There were differences of opinion on
halakhic development within the Jewish community and within the
Jewish people, but basically we were all Pharisees. We accepted
and lived within the binding framework of halakhah.
The restoration of the state, the culminating feature of the
modernization of Jewish life, has meant that it is possible once
again to have Essene and Sadducean expressions
of Judaism. We see
this new reality echoed not only in the state of Israel, where
what has been described as Israel's civil religion is essentially
Sadducean, the concern with the protection, economic and social
advancement, and moral improvement of the state. Neo-Sadduceanism
has spread to the diaspora as well. We see it in the new
community leadership which has taken over in the diaspora in the
last thirty to forty years.
The issues just discussed, the confrontations in Israel from
which we should be learning, reflect the issues of the
neo-Sadducean agenda. The way they have to be addressed
suggests that we are dealing with a Judaism which is now
different, which is one reasons why pious moralities do not ring
true. They do not confront the gut issues.
Sadducean Judaism has to confront the gut issues. Confronting
those issues raises serious problems, but also brings real
benefits. As we have discovered, at least since the Holocaust we
have no choice as Jews but to confront those issues. Now that
this neo-Sadducean Judaism has emerged as a way to be Jewish, it
is up to the neo-Sadducean Jews to start thinking through the
questions of power and pluralism that its very existence raises.
One paradox has developed in the wake of the emergence of
neo-Sadduceanism. Neo-Sadducean Judaism emerged out of Zionism
and reflected the political culture of several generations in
which Zionism was the main source of ideological energy for the
Jewish people. Too many of the reporters and correspondents who
have come to Israel to cover the troubles in the territories have
no knowledge of basic Zionist history. Human memories are very
short and many who come to Israel fresh and see the lush
landscape, think that we drove the poor Arabs out of that lush
land. They are simply unaware of the fact that there was no lush
land here until we came. So periodically we must remind
ourselves of our foundations in order to remember our successes.
Unfortunately, Zionism today is no longer the principal source of
ideological energy for the Jewish people. The dilemma of the
future of the territories is a reflection of this. Many of those
who are prepared to relinquish them do not do so reluctantly, in
the name of prudence and comity with our Arab neighbors, but act
as if we have no rights in the land. Even those who see in
Zionism the impetus and impulse for ideological energy today come
up against other forces which also strike strong chords in the
Jewish people. These are the problems of living in a world with
a state that is no longer a state-in-the-making. Zionist
ideology alone is not quite capable of dealing with those
problems.
It is imperative for the Jewish community to come to grips with
the divisive elements, to bring the Jewish people together once
again. To do this we must consider the failures that have
accompanied our return to power and our embrace of pluralism.
