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September 2000 Issue, Volume 2

Lieberman. Interesting.

By Leonard Fein

It turns out to be even more interesting than it is exciting, "it" being, of course, the Lieberman candidacy. So:

* It would be nice if the journalists, in an effort to explain what being an Orthodox Jew means, would stop saying that Orthodox Jews observe all 613 commandments. With all due respect to Orthodoxy, and to Lieberman, no one comes close. Number 30 through 91 of the 248 mandatory commandments, for example, deal with sacrifice. Number 181 commands that "When a person is found murdered and the murderer is unknown, the ritual of decapitating the heifer must be performed." And so forth.

* Notice how Lieberman is usually described as "the first person of the Jewish faith to be . . . " That's a formulation that is readily understandable in America, which has long since confirmed this nation's tri-partite division into Protestant-Catholic-Jew. (It would be an interesting exercise to ask people to estimate the percentage of Americans who are Jews. My hunch: 95 percent would inflate our numbers by five-fold or more.) Jews hardly ever use the "of the Jewish faith" construction. We say either "he's a Jew" or "he's Jewish," reflecting our understanding that one's status as a Jew is independent of what one believes. But go try to explain Jewish peoplehood to an outsider; we hardly understand it ourselves. "Of the Jewish faith" is a way of keeping it simple. Similarly, Lieberman describes himself as "a Jewish American," as distinguished from our more typical usage, "an American Jew." (The usual explanation: We've been Jewish longer than we've been Americans.) But for all other Americans, America is the noun, religion or ethnicity the modifier. Welcome to the mainstream.

* In the case of Lieberman, who wears his faith on both sleeves, "of the Jewish faith" fits. Hindsight is a remarkable phenomenon. After the fact, we all understand that an Orthodox Jew is a more effective barrier-breaker than a secular Jew. But ask us a month ago what kind of Jew would be the first to be nominated for national office, and most of us would surely have described a more "typical" Jew--a sometime synagogue-goer, "proud" of his/her heritage but hardly observant. Ask us a month ago, and we'd surely not have predicted that the first Chosen Jew would be chosen because of his/her Judaism rather than in spite of it. Are there other elements of our conventional wisdom that warrant re-examination?

* Yes, "because he is a Jew." A Christian moralizer would have been alienating, too reminiscent of either Dan Quayle or even Jimmy Swaggart. And yes, this does raise the issue of a double standard. Put the same frequent references to God and the same denunciation of Hollywood in the mouth of a Republican, and most of us would be aghast. But while there may be some discomfort with Lieberman's invocation of the Deity, and some concern that he is too much the scold when it comes to the media, we (most of us) swallow and support. Why? Not just because he's a Democrat, and not just because he's Jewish, but because we know that he is not a run-of-the-mill ranter of the right, and we expect that his views, whether on Hollywood or on other matter where he is more conservative than we'd prefer, are nuanced.

* More: Many of us share Lieberman's distress, even his anger, at the media's exploitive behavior and at the media's incredible denial of responsibility for shaping popular taste. (Alas, sex and violence are merely the handy targets. There is a vulgarity that is not connected to sex nor to violence. It is the vulgarity of sheer stupidity, which contributes not to the coarsening of the culture but to its dumbing down. But that is another matter.) Just as we expect his religious convictions will not lower the wall of separation between church and state, we expect that his critical views of the media will not lead to censorship.

* If we are wrong about either, if Lieberman does not fully share contemporary understandings of the First Amendment, then watch ethnic and/or religious pride go "phhht." Which is to say that a major reason for the widespread euphoria that has characterized the Jewish response to Gore's selection of Lieberman (as in, "Oh, how I wish my parents were alive to see this day!") has to do with a general approval of Lieberman's politics. Had the one to break the barrier been a genuine conservative, there'd have been much grumbling. As it is, he skirts the boundary. In a neat little irony, Lieberman makes Gore seem liberal.

* What Lieberman's Orthodoxy will mean to America's Jews in the long term obviously remains to be seen. It comes as an implicit rebuke to all those who have supposed that in order to "make it" in America you had to WASPify yourself, but the fact is that we have no idea how large a cohort that is. More than that, it asserts the centrality of Judaism-as-faith at a time when, for diverse reasons, faith is in the ascendant.

* Lieberman has made one major mistake so far. He says that some might claim Gore's selection of him was an act of chutzpah. Nope. It was, say we--and on balance--an instance of mazel.

Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher, having published two books, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America's Jews and Israel: Politics and People, and more than 700 articles and essays which have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentar, Commonweal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He writes a syndicated OpEd column for the Forward.

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