The major real estate devoted to Michael Chabon’s “chosen people” piece in the New York Times reminded me that, like myself, many Jews stumble into Jews. As historian Michael Meyer said, for today’s Jews being Jewish is only a part of their total identity. But Jews are often more aware of this aspect of themselves than any other.
Chabon’s article addresses that fractional but loud part of his and our identity, but it is so unsatisfying. What claptrap. Maybe that is why it has generated so little heat in the blogosphere. Peter Beinart’s article launched a thousand posts. Chabon’s died. And no wonder. There is something about its self-consciously high-minded tone, its heart-on-its-sleeve beseeching plea (“Let us” “Let us not”) for a more charitable view of our ragged humanity, its facile lets-face-it assertion that peoples survive thanks to dumb luck that just makes you want to say, as an older generation did, “Tell it to the Marines.”
In other words, give me a break.
After I read Chabon I was hungry for something satisfying about the chosen people idea, and I went to my bookshelf for Stephen Whitfield’s In Search of American Jewish Culture. Granted, I reach for it often. But I remembered that he actually had provocative things to say about it, that it is a great story that improves Jewish lives. The Jews’ “self-definition as participants in a majestic and eternal destiny” is a powerful force in Jewish lives and Jewish history. And Whitfield quotes Freud on the effect of that story. It makes Jews “proud and confident.”
But I’m going to give the last word to Saul Bellow, who in his introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories wrote about the enormous value of a great story.
“For there is power in a story. It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual. For a short while all the strength and all the radiance of the world are brought to bear upon a few human figures.”
The chosen people story does the same for the Jews.
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