Last summer my parents and I drove north from Tel Aviv along Route 65, a highway that follows the coastal plain up through Hadera and Afula toward Tzfat. As we sped along in our tiny rental car, we passed a junction with Route 66, which shoots off to the east and ends up in Jenin. Close by this crossroads, our guidebook informed us, is the site of the future battle between good and evil—Armageddon, an ancient mis-transliteration of the Hebrew name for Mt. Megiddo. Driving past on a sunny day, it was difficult to imagine doomsday was going to take place here or anywhere else anytime soon.
A few months later, when New Voices held a seminar for Jewish students at Hunter College, a woman stood up and asked to make an announcement. She wanted to tell the students about a new class in which they’d receive credit for regularly visiting with a Holocaust survivor. Trying to sell it to them, she insisted that the program had little to do with the Holocaust and was simply about enjoying the company of an older person. But listening to her admonish the students that they were the last generation with the opportunity to know a survivor, it was clear that, however commendable, the program was not about helping the old but instilling a Holocaust-based identity in the young. Her shiny postcards informed us that while American life expectancy is 77 years, the average Holocaust survivor is now 82. Bright red letters at the bottom read, “IT CAN’T WAIT.”
American Jews are frequent purveyors of such panic: about anti-Semitism, about assimilation, and about Israeli security. These three are symbiotically linked in our communal consciousness: Israel and Diaspora Jewry each insure the other against their worst-case scenarios—American Jewish activism providing Israel with American security, and Israel providing us with identity—while simultaneously giving each other more to worry about. Nowhere is this clearer than in our attitude toward the campus, where the community’s goal seems to be ensuring that younger generations continue the fight against assimilation, anti-Israel sentiment, and anti-Semitism. Campus groups that fight assimilation use Israel’s vitality as an engagement tool, apparently fearing that American Jewry is not engaging enough in and of itself. Groups that advocate for Israel use fears about truly apocalyptic scenarios—terrorism, nuclear war—to instill in young Jews the belief that they must protect Israel by protecting its reputation on campus. By helping stave off Israeli apocalypse, the theory goes, they become “engaged” Diaspora Jews.
Why is fear apparently the only emotion that can galvanize Jews into investing in Jewish life? Is identifying an ultimately scary scenario, a physical or emotional apocalypse, the only way we can form a Jewish identity anymore? If that is what we base our community on, then it probably is. We’re afraid because we make ourselves afraid, because we have built our very identities around defense and disaster. We obsess over doomsday scenarios and impress them on younger generations because that is how we relate to Judaism. Today, young Jews become engaged not with Judaism, but with the preservation of Judaism.
Of course, there are historical precedents, political factors, population statistics that can be called in to justify these worries. But I don’t think we would give them such weight if being apocalyptic didn’t also give us pleasure—perverse pleasure, but pleasure nonetheless. That’s not something we’d be unique in: Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, and the major motion-picture industry all know the satisfaction that comes from subscribing to an end-times scenario—it’s just that their apocalypses constitute joyful rewards for the righteous, rather than paranoid extensions of problems in the here-and-now. Religious Jews fetishize apocalypse as the eradication of their worldly struggle and the confirmation of their deepest beliefs. Secular Jews, meanwhile, fetishize survival–the constant need to avert disaster. The need to keep being Jewish gives us a reason to keep being Jewish. It infuses the community with purpose and heroism; Jewish professionals in desk chairs are not simply engaged with Judaism but with the vital struggle to keep Judaism alive.
There’s nothing wrong with apocalyptic fantasies, neither paranoid terrors nor messianic fervor. Fantasies are exactly that—ways to live out visions that aren’t a part of our real lives. The problem is when we make them the basis for reality. In the case of the religious, the pending Messianic age implies that there is no need to care about the world we are living in now. In the case of the secular community, the apparently pending doomsday puts us in a Catch-22, in which we will never be able to create a vibrant, self-sustaining Jewish community because we will be passing on a legacy of stultifying, apocalyptic fear.
There’s one way, though, in which apocalyptic fantasies should be applied to the here-and-now: every doomsday scenario is an idyllic vision in reverse. By observing what our end-times scenarios envisage the end of, we can see what it is that we value most. Are those things birthrates, victimhood, the synagogue as the center of Jewish life? Is that what Jewish community means? If so, the most valuable elements of Judaism—inquisitive thought, vibrant culture, biting humor, and spirituality—suffered their own apocalypse long ago.
