The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  And who will guide this return to nature? Will there be many attempts to simplify our lives, and do away with pollution, and disease, and poverty, and care and worry, or will there be just the one, that of the State, from which all blessings flow, which never wanes but always waxes in power, and which cannot be wrong?

  And how would the leaders of such a State be chosen? By vote? And how would they raise the money for their campaigns? Or should we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender?

  A man the bulk of whose income is taxed has less incentive toward monogamy.

  A weakening of monogamy will weaken and eventually destroy the ability of the family, any family, to transmit familial values and wisdom. This function will be taken over by the State (to a large extent it has been—see social studies classes in school and identity politics in college).

  School vouchers are a grand idea, if for no other reason than they allow the family choice of institutional tenor and bias. An amusing school in my neighborhood has a billboard upon which one of their staff posts, weekly, ultra-Liberal and diverting messages. This week we find, “What about nationalizing the banks . . . hmm?” We have seen, in the past, also “Leaks—some good, some bad.”66

  This, in addition to brightening my drive time, is perhaps a good idea generally. Consider if each school were allowed, or indeed forced to post on a sign its political bias. It would make the job of parents easier. Well-to-do parents have a choice; everyone should have a choice, if for no other reason than to weaken the power of the State to form good-willed programs of social indoctrination.

  27

  THE ASHKENAZIS

  I am the tag-end of that generation of Jews linked to the Ashkenazi Immigration.

  The Ashkenazi, the Eastern European Jews, were, in the main, unassimilated in Europe. They lived in the Pale of Settlement, banished there by the Tsarina, in 1772, and, save in extraordinary circumstances, were barred from residence in cities. They were poor, they lived apart from their neighbors who, periodically, descended upon them, in Pogroms, notably, in my grandparents’ time, during which over two thousand Polish Jews were killed, 1903-1906. My grandparents left, on my mother’s side in 1918 and, on my father’s in 1922. Those who stayed behind, in Warsaw, and on the Bug River, the Russian-Polish border, died, killed by Stalin or Hitler.

  My grandparents came to the United States. My paternal grandfather, Jack, made a bit of money investing in Chicago real estate with his brother-in-law in the twenties, lost it all in the Crash, and lived as a traveling clothing salesman, on the road throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, gone five days a week.

  My father’s mother was deserted by her husband, my grandfather. She raised her two boys, my father and my uncle Henry, by herself, in the Depression, working at an assortment of jobs, the highest paid of which was as a clerk in the Fair, a downtown Chicago department store.

  All four grandparents came here with nothing—with little or no command of English, and all their children went to college, and, if not on to great success, to comfort and stability. The boys enlisted in the Army, the girls got married young and were—as was then the norm—housewives.

  I and the people I knew, my friends and their families, had a close relationship with the immigrant generation. On Friday nights we went to celebrate Shabbos at the grandparents’ house. We celebrated the Jewish holidays together, we heard their stories of life under the tsar and under Stalin; of pogroms, raids, forced enlistment—dragooning of Jewish males for twenty-five years of military service; of attendance (of my great-uncle) at the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897. Other than that, we, in my own as in many Ashkenazi families, had little or no Family History. Every house had the samovar, which, along with the Shabbos Candlesticks, was all that remained from the Immigration—indeed, it was usually all that came over. By my teenage years, the samovar, in our house and that of our friends, had first been turned into a lamp, and then had vanished. The Shabbos candlesticks remained, but, on the passing of the grandparents, were not used. For we were assimilated Jews.

  What did this mean?

  Arthur Hertzberg in his The Jews in America, writes that religion in the Jewish home was always transmitted through the father. It was he who took the four–or five-year-old boy to shul, wrapped in a tallis, and who insisted upon the child learning Hebrew. In Eastern Europe there were not degrees of observance (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), there were merely Jews.

  And, Hertzberg points out, the deep secret of the Ashkenazi Immigration was the abandonment by the father of his immigrant family. Perhaps as many as one-quarter of the women and children of the Ashkenazi immigration were abandoned. Then who took the sons to shul? No one.

  My father was not raised in an observant tradition. Nonetheless, he, like most of the men in our circle of acquaintance, insisted upon a degree of observance, which, however, was so dilute that it could be described as merely an assertion of connection. This dilute Judaism was brought to America by the first Jewish immigrant wave, the German Jews. These came in the mid to late nineteenth century, mainly, from the cities, where they have been admitted, in some number in Germany, since the mid-century. Now they, in America, looked down upon the unwashed, unlettered, and “medieval” Russian-Polish, the unassimilated “foreign” Jews.

  These German Jews had established their own, assimilationist religion, Reform Judaism, first in Germany, then in England, and then in America, with the founding of the Hebrew Union College in 1875. This was an attempt to blend in, to consider Judaism merely as different in outward expression from Christianity.

  In order to lessen the difference, to increase the possibility of assimilation, all outward show of religious difference was not only frowned upon, but abominated. Not only had Reform Jews, by my bar mitzvah, eliminated the peis (the sidecurls), but also kashrut (ritual dietary laws), the yarmulke, the tallis, the tefillin, the study of the Torah, and the knowledge of Hebrew. What remained? The reduction of Judaism, and Jewish observance, to a dedication to “social justice.”

  What is the difference between “social justice,” and “justice”?

  The central tenet of Judaism is devotion to God’s commandments. The aim is to allow a closeness to the Divine, and an implementation on earth of the Divine Will, which is that we should dwell in harmony and peace. This last is to be accomplished through a devotion to Justice. As per Deuteronomy, “Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” The human capacity for justice, thus, is imperfect; for the Torah does not say justice shall you do, but “shall you pursue.”

  Justice means choice. Justice, thus, essentially must cause pain: to one of two litigants; to the assaulted who sees the assailant go free or to the family of the convicted, et cetera. If the choice did not require adjudication, that is, if it were resolvable through goodwill and compromise, why would it tax the time and energy of the courts? Justice means inflicting pain upon one party. How may one do so in accordance with Divine principles, overcoming one’s human imperfections, one’s desires (for acclaim, for revenge, even for peace), in the lack of absolute certainty as to facts and intent?

  Only, so we are taught, by recourse to law. By recourse to and devotion to those laws made impartially, without respect to individuals, and applied impartially.

  This is the great contribution of the Jews to the world; for Western law is founded upon “Judaeo-Christian principles,” and these are founded upon the Jewish principles laid down in the Torah (for, as much as the beauty of the Gospels inspires, its spiritual commandments can only be implemented through mechanical human actions, which, in the West, are based upon judicial codes deriving originally from the Jewish law—the Torah).

  The ultimate reduction of these codes is the saying of Hillel (the Torah while standing on one foot): “What is hateful to thee, do not
do to thy neighbor.”

  The formation and execution of laws which take into account human frailty, and acknowledge the limits of reason, which cause the judges and litigants, the accused and the accuser to refer to impartial existing statutes in order to allow the least-partial, and so most fair (though imperfect), of decisions, was the essence of that practice which is currently known as Orthodox Judaism, and was known, before Western Assimilation, as Judaism.

  Male Jews historically devoted themselves, if possible, to the study of the Torah and Talmud—of those laws which regulate human behavior. The highest status, in the shtetl, the village of Eastern Europe, accrued to him who was the most learned. Riches, then as now, were prized, but the highest status available to the rich man, was the support of the students of Torah, and the institutions of its study.

  This millennia-old history of reverence for Justice could not be eradicated in the two generations between my grandparents’ immigration and the baby boom. The mechanism at the center of this pursuit, however, was not only lost, but forgotten.

  The assimilated Jews, raised as immigrants, in families, which, for whatever reason, ceased Jewish observance, retained their cultural love of Justice, but were ignorant of the historical methods of its pursuit.

  Judaism became Ethical Culture, or Reform Judaism; its cultural inheritors were the leading population of SDS, American Buddhism, est, the Hunger Project, MoveOn.org, various cults, and the Democratic Party.

  Of this last, how could it be otherwise? The Republican Party of my youth was the party of the rich, of the Country Club (in my youth the South Shore Country Club, scant blocks away on Lake Michigan, was Restricted, which is to say, closed to Jews).

  The Democrats of my parents’ generation revered Roosevelt; my parents came of age in the Depression, and Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to them the benignant socialism which might be the answer to the perennial Jewish quest for Justice.

  Contemporary economic thought67 makes a strong case that the New Deal prolonged the Depression by a decade, and would have extended its unfortunate sway but that it was stopped by the war.

  The National Recovery Act of 1933 set prices and wages, created the inevitable shortages, and drove the small businessman out of business. It was stopped, ironically, by a couple of Jewish poultry merchants, who pleaded with the Republican Supreme Court for common sense (Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States). And the Republican Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Act.

  Jews of my day were Democrats, were Liberals. Everyone in the acquaintance of my parents’ generation supported the NAACP and the ACLU, knew the Rosenbergs were innocent and Whittaker Chambers guilty; no one would cross a picket line; and for a Jew, to vote Republican would have been as for him to endorse child sacrifice.

  The question not asked then—for we knew no Conservatives—but asked now by the Liberal of the Conservative Jew is: “Don’t you care?”

  But we, the Jews, even given our historical dedication to Justice, had, in our assimilation, forgotten that justice could only be achieved through law, and that the application of law meant the necessity of, at the very least, disappointment to at least one and more probably both of the parties involved in dispute. That, thus, the utmost expression of care was not the ability to express sympathy, but the ability to control sympathy and execute justice. Sympathy to the wicked, we were taught, is wickedness to the just. (Meiri, on the Talmud); that the legal codes and procedures were the property of the entire population, which based its actions upon their predictability, and that laws and judges who chopped and changed according to their sympathetic nature, which is to say, according to their “feelings,” were, thus, immoral.

  This expression of “sympathy,” as in the action of most of contemporary Big Government, is the usurpation by the elected (or appointed) of the rights of others. The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, “Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,” who set aside the laws, or who “interpreted” them in a way he considered “more fair,” was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes). He was graciously giving away something which was not his.

  “Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others.

  The literate Jew (or, for that matter, non-Jew) could refer to the very Torah and there find the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, and thus priests. They, overcome by zeal, stole into the sanctuary and burned incense in contravention of the Divine Law, and were consumed by the fire.

  They erred, some say, on the side of Devotion, but they erred nonetheless, for they contravened the law, which is both written and derived from an understanding of the Divine, which, though it may be gainsaid by the atheist, is probably understood by him under a different name, that name being “conscience.”

  Rabbinical thought holds that all sins are the Sin of the Golden Calf: Moses told the Jews to wait, as he was ascending the mountain to talk with God; the Jews did not wait, but, instead, built a golden image, and worshipped it.

  But note that, though we understand their sin, and may accept, indeed, that it is the type of all sin, it was committed while Moses was yet undescended from the mountain, that is, before the Jews even received the Law. That is to say, they held in their heart some conscience,68 some knowledge of the Divine which caused them, on discovery of their act, shame at what they, even uninstructed, understood as a transgression.

  All healthy people have a conscience; those born without it are known as psychopaths, and treated, for all our philosophic sophistication, as monsters.

  “Don’t you care?”

  Well. I am a Jew, and I am an American, and I am a new-minted Conservative. I care about Justice and suffering, and wonder, as has every sentient being in history, about the disparity in society of wealth and happiness, and about the seemingly inevitable corruption of our representatives, and about the imperfection and apparent injustice of many of our laws.

  The revelation, of my latter years, is that all good people care, but that they may be, legitimately, divided as to the means to address and the potential to understand and to correct disparity, sorrow, and injustice.

  I have come to see that disparity is inevitable—that there will always be rich and poor—but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny. The record shows that those same corrupt or corruptible, which it so say, human, individuals we call “the government,” will, as their power to tax and spend increases, become or pave the way for the accession of monsters.

  Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names ensures neither that their intentions are lofty, nor that even, if so, they will or could lead to lofty results.69 A clearheaded review of these caring governmental subsidies, whether called welfare, or aid to Africa, or farm subsidies, reveals waste, subvention, and corruption, and tends to the enervation and the ultimate destruction both of the recipients and eventually of those taxed to provide the officeholders with the mantle of “sympathy.”70

  What is “social justice”? It is not merely an oxymoron. It is, inherently, the notion that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions.
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br />   But “society” cannot implement visions. It will develop along its own lines, the inherent ethos of the time bringing about, unpredictably, change, according to unfathomable laws, which, when adjudicated according to precedent, become the written laws of the land.71

  The great advances in Justice which have made our country not only great but good are essentially the broadening of its definitions of those worthy of protection. This is the attempt to find justice through equality of opportunity. This is antithetical to that equality of result beloved of the Left; one might have one or the other, but they each are the other’s negation, and one must choose.

  I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi–or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)72