The Fact Of Jewish Particularity

"You have to read it," a friend in New York informed me by e-mail. "The whole Jewish world here is talking about it. It's a shande far di goyim."

A shande far di goyim, literally, a "scandal in front of the goyim," refers to dirty Jewish laundry washed or exposed in public, and the scandal my friend was referring to was an article by Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman in the Sunday, July 22 edition of the New York Times Magazine.

Very likely, you read it before I did. In it Mr. Feldman, who grew up an Orthodox Jew in Boston, had a Jewish grade-school and high-school education, and is married to a non-Jewish woman, complained — inaccurately, it seems — that he and his wife had been left out of a photograph that was printed in his high school's alumni newsletter because of his intermarriage. In the same article, Mr. Feldman also explained why he still felt grateful for the education the school had given him, which instilled in him a love and appreciation of Jewish tradition while introducing him to the world of secular knowledge, and spoke of the conflict in this tradition between Jewish particularism and universalism.

Mr. Feldman didn't stop there. He then proceeded to give the Times' readers a few examples of what this particularism consists of, such as its rigid enforcement of dietary laws in order to prevent Jews from participating with others in "the common human activity of restoring the body through food;" its prohibiting Jews from violating the Sabbath laws to save a Gentile's endangered life unless this might harm Jewish-Gentile relations (a Jewish life must be saved under any circumstance); and its biblical injunction to commit "the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon," the extermination of the desert people known as the Amalekites.

A shande indeed. A Harvard professor claims to have been ostracized by his high school alumni newsletter and gets his revenge, while piously protesting his love for the old alma mater and the old religion, by clueing the Times' readers in to this religion's barbarous exclusivity. Let the world know who these Jews he loves really are.

One doesn't know whom to feel sorrier for, the professor, the Times, or the Jews. Being left, deliberately or not, out of one's high school alumni newsletter is indeed cruel and unusual punishment. But is it so cruel that the Jews deserve to wake up one Sunday morning to find themselves accused in one of America's most prestigious newspapers of having invented genocide and being commanded by their religion to let Gentiles die as long as this doesn't create interfaith problems?

I must say that my first inclination is to side with the Jews. Cry babies are never endearing. Noah Feldman is also slanting ancient history.

Exterminating one's enemies, particularly when they refused to surrender in a siege, was widespread in the ancient world and hardly a Jewish invention. Mr. Feldman, who speaks fondly in his article about reading Homer in high school and presumably has heard of the sack of Troy, should know this.

More importantly, although some of Mr. Feldman's former classmates and mentors might indeed shun him for marrying a non-Jew, he conveniently forgets in lamenting this to mention a small matter: Had his non-Jewish wife converted to Judaism, and thereby demonstrated her wish to join the Jewish people, no one would be giving him the cold shoulder.

His sin, in the eyes of Orthodox Judaism, was not that he married a non-Jew. It was that he did not care enough about his own and his children's Jewishness to bring her into the Jewish fold.

And yet as far as Orthodox Jews are concerned, just crying shande isn't an adequate response. For all his petulancy, Noah Feldman is quite right: Judaism is a religion with a universalist and a particularist side that do not harmonize easily with one another, and it is alone among the world's great monotheistic religions in having such a conflict. Neither in Christianity nor in Islam does one encounter the belief that God is more interested in one small family of the human race than in all the others combined and that his laws are not meant equally for all.

This belief, called by Norman Podhoretz in a recent article in Commentary "The Scandal of Jewish Particularity," is indeed, intellectually, a shande far di goyim, and while a photograph in an alumni newsletter may not be the best context to discuss it in, there is no point in pretending it doesn't exist.

No serious defense of Judaism can ignore it or sidestep it, and every such defense that has ever been written, from Yehuda Halevi's 12th-century "The Book of the Kuzari" to Franz Rosenzweig's 20th-century "Star of Redemption," in which one finds not easily digestible sentences such as, "Only a community based on common blood feels the warrant of eternity warm in its veins," has had to tackle it head on. You can't blame Noah Feldman for that.

If you don't believe that the creator of the universe would choose to base his entire game plan for humanity on one little branch of it, you are wasting your time by being an Orthodox Jew. And if you do believe it, your time would be better spent in working out and cogently articulating your basis for such a belief than in complaining about Mr. Feldman's silliness. His article will be forgotten in a month. The fact of Jewish particularity will remain and will need to be addressed anew in every generation by Orthodox Jewish thinkers.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.