A colleague wrote the following in 1999:
surely this is the vocation and destiny of Jews -- as individuals and as a people -- to insist that life is not either/or but rather both/and, to straddle incompatible categories. Jews carry 5000 years of memory into an uncharted future and bind together people of every background, language, culture, and heritage. It seems clear to me that we are not a faith community, not a religion, not an ethnicity, not a class, not a polity, not a school of thought - and yet we are all of these, at least sometimes.
This reminded me of some public comments by Robert Pinsky,
Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000, at a recent Jewish benefit dinner. Pinsky's words echoed the following comment he made in an
interview in the Atlantic:
The identity of the Jewish-American poet, say, or of any American poet of any racial or ethnic stripe, it seems to me, adheres in the hyphen. My identity is quintessentially American because of its impurity, its mongrel status—the fact that it's pieced together from a wide variety of histories that are informed by an even wider and more heterogeneous variety of histories.
At the dinner, Pinsky made the point that Jewish life in America in general is and ought to be about impurity and mongrel status.
Pinsky and, to a lesser extent, my colleague speak with some authority. Their appeal to "mongrel status" and "straddl[ing] incompatible categories" is powerful and appealing.
Appealing, but worthy of inspection. Briefly, why is a pursuit of impurity to be valorized over against the pursuit of purity? One might argue that purity is an illusion and that its pursuit is a tilting after windmills. Or that purity eludes. In either case, the pursuit of purity neither eludes nor 'illudes.' One might also contend that the "mongrel" is not really impure, but actually the pursuit of a sort of American purity.
Be that as it may, we may observe that an association is made by my colleague and Mr. Pinsky between being Jewish (or "Jewish-American") and being impure. This is remarkable. Surely the opposite case could be made, namely, that being Jewish is wrapped up in concepts of purity. Historically, have not Jews sought to maintain the purity of their food (Kashruth), of their marital lives (Taharath haMishpachah), of their speech (the laws relating to Leshon haRa), of their lineage, etc.? The very notion of a holy day (Shabbath), a holy land (Eretz Yisrael), a holy city (Yerushalayim), and so forth, strengthens the point. A mongrel Jewishness has no room for the Biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, or for the works of Maimonides or the Hassagot/השגות/strictures that inspire this blog, those of R. Avraham ben David (RaAVaD), for starters.
It is a wonder that one could argue in the face of such a literary record. But it is not a great wonder. I close with a quotation from one wiser than I, Kohelet/קהלת/Ecclesiastes:
מקום המשפט, שמה הרשע, ומקום הצדק, שמה הרשע Alongside justice there is wickedness, alongside righteousness there is wickedness (3:16).
I paraphrase: alongside the tradition of purity, there is an impulse towards impurity. And I extend the argument homiletically: It is precisely within a tradition of purity that one may look to see a counter-impulse. Could it be that our people has a special predilection towards undermining itself? The Sages appreciated such a paradox when they described how the impulse towards wickedness is greatest where righteousness is most highly prized (see the end of Talmud Kiddushin). Is it for us to show the world how to pursue the impure?
--H. A. Massig המשיג