Chapter XII

Immersed in his dreams of world-liberation, the Sensitive Rabbi was of course sympathetic to the socialist movements, which were dedicated to the same cause. Sympathetic—but no more than that. To join them—as mentioned above—was impossible: their Marxism was too dry a dish for his palate. He appreciated the “socialism of the heart,” but not the “socialism of numbers.” The literature which depicted, on one hand, the sorrowful life of the impoverished cobbler, the way he sits in his dank basement quarters at midnight, his eyelids drooping, bent over a leather sole by the light of a kerosene lamp, groping dimly for his awl; and on the other hand, the formidable luxury, the wine and song flowing freely, just across the street in the large, brightly lit rooms of the banker’s house—this literature, whose aim was to awaken compassion for suffering and disgust for depravity and selfishness, spoke to the sensibilities of the Sensitive Rabbi. This sort of literature was familiar to his soul; it was similar to the Jewish musar-tradition, ^{2 2}Musar: literally, “chastening” or “discipline.” The name of an extensive body of Jewish literature, and later a religious movement, dedicated to ethics, moral discipline, and self-improvement. from which his soul drew its nourishment.

But the literature that attempted to calculate the true worth of the shoe-sole, awaken the cobbler’s awareness of the “others” who live off his labor, and inflate his self-image so that he prances around believing that without him, the world will stop turning—this sort of literature was less to his taste. The compassion-oriented literature was designed to liberate those who were suffering, whereas the shoe-sole-appraising literature was designed to relocate despotism to a new headquarters. The money-magnates would be replaced by the shoemaker-magnates, who would cry, “No one but we deserve anything and no one but we have the right to live in this world!”

Indeed, the Sensitive Rabbi knew quite well that in addition to the vagaries and tragedies of war, there was no shortage of misfortune and exploitation even in peacetime. But nevertheless, the horror of war—the sheer notion of wresting people from their homes in order to line them up opposite cannonfire—dominated his consciousness. In his opinion, war stood at the head of all worldly horrors and required a dedicated counter offensive; therefore, he was bewildered by the socialist press, which failed to dedicate the necessary attention to the subject.

“If you throw a stick into the air, it will come back down,” as the Talmudic saying goes. ^{3 3} See e.g. Bereishit Rabbah 53:15.
The Sensitive Rabbi could not tear himself from his little town, from the forests and fields he had known since childhood—and so too, the battlefield painting that had hung in his neighbor’s house, and the weeping of the neighbor-woman over her slaughtered son, had imprinted themselves on his mind’s eye and remained perpetually at the forefront of his consciousness.

His belief that war was the matter that demanded the freedom fighter’s most urgent attention, further strengthened his conviction that the Jewish people was called to serve as the vanguard of world liberation, for who else is more averse to war, more attuned to the horror of bloodshed, than the Jew?

The story of himself, the little Jewish boy, mourning with the Gentile woman over her son the war casualty, now served for him as a symbol of the international Jewish mission to awaken in all peoples the fitting sentiment of condemnation toward war. For it is the free, delicate Jewish spirit, woven of exile and Torah, which feels most acutely the horror of bloodshed and the disgrace of coercing a person to serve as a stadium-ox. ^{4 4} i.e., an instrument of someone else’s will to violence. See Mishna Bava Kamma 4:4, “An ox from the arena is not liable to be put to death [for goring], for [it is not that he decides to gore, but rather] he is made by others to gore.” In contrast, the goy, the Esau, is more likely to defend his lentil-bowl, his mess of pottage—that is, to react to an offense against his pay envelope—than to resist being dragged like a sheep onto the battlefield, to shoot at others until he is shot dead . . .

Chapter XIII

In 1914 the European war broke out, and the ignominy of the Gentile world unfurled itself before the eyes of the Sensitive Rabbi. He did not know what astonished him more: the slavish acquiescence of the goyish masses, who allowed themselves to be carted off to the slaughterhouse (the Jewish conscripts were exempt from this critique, considering that they were powerless to change their fate—if they had resisted the draft, they would have been branded “enemies of the fatherland”), or the falsehoods spun by the goyish intelligentsia, who went so far as to glorify the whole debacle. And glorify they did, without exception—even the greatest humanitarians among them, the sentimental writers who used to lament the suffering of the poorer classes and bemoan the tragedy of life, now turned into enthusiasts who spoke of war as a path to global redemption. The Sensitive Rabbi concluded from this that any talk of “compassion” coming from the mouths of goyim was nothing more than a superficial affectation.

But more than anything, he was shocked by the discovery that even the socialists in every country (including the Russian socialists), who had been quarreling so bitterly with their governments a moment before—as soon as the latter cried “War!” and invited them to the party, they were suddenly quite pleased, and started to bray “Patriotism, hurrah, patriotism!” and returned to the national fold in order to play their part in the farce of “going off to liberate the nations” . . .

“European Civilization,” already long suspect in his eyes, had now been caught red-handed. He was distraught over the opprobrium of the war, but he was also prone to a sneaky sense of satisfaction: European culture, which had humiliated and spit upon the Jew, now took off its mask and showed its true colors—and the Jew could hold his head high again.

His disgust for depravity and his stormy temperament allowed him no rest; they prodded him to respond to the current debacle in some manner. But how? It was dangerous to unveil the charade in the press, and besides, there was no press to speak of—the press had given itself over to the task of glorifying and sanctifying the whole fiasco. Truly, what was to be done?

So he sprayed disinfectant in his vicinity, orally and in writing, as far as he could reach. Anytime he had a conversation, he found a way to point out the current fraudulence and distortion. Anytime he wrote a letter, he slipped in a few jabs at the present-day Golden Calf. He couldn’t resist including such barbs even in correspondence with officials, for whom “patriotism” was a matter of self-interest . . .

For example, the local Russian priest appealed to him to collect donations from amongst the Jewish community for the Red Cross. He fulfilled the request the first time, but when the priest approached him a second time, he answered him saying, “In my opinion, the entire population that lives in the war-torn regions is already under great pressure, and it is therefore unfair to ask them to shoulder any of the additional costs of war. There is even an adage: ‘It is not the rich man who foots the bill, but rather the guilty party.’ And our unfortunate population is not guilty in the slightest with respect to the pandemonium that the high and mighty have inflicted on this land . . . ”

In answer to the zemskii nachal’nik ^{5 5} Highest-ranking local Russian official. who invited him to a conference concerning the welfare of the wives and children of the reservists, he sent his regrets, explaining that his state of health did not permit him to travel. “However,” he concluded, “if the conference were to address the topic of how to avoid tearing husbands and fathers away from their families in the first place, I would draw upon my last reserves of strength in order to attend.”

Around that time, a group of Jewish leaders in St. Petersburg sent a couple of wagons to the Front, laden with various goods to distribute among the soldiers without regard to national identity, with the inscription, “A gift from the Jewish people to the heroes of the battlefield.” One of the main organizers was the well-known Jewish lawyer S-g. ^{6 6} Probably Genrikh Sliozberg, 1863-1937. In a letter that the Sensitive Rabbi sent to S-g around that time concerning a local community issue, he added as a postscript (despite the fact that at the time, letters were generally inspected by the postmaster) that he would have deeply approved of the mission if the inscription had read, “A gift from the Jewish people for those suffering, without regard to national identity.” That would have been a true sanctification of God, an expression of Jewish compassion. In contrast, an inscription that conveys adulation for ‘good brawlers’ cannot serve as a consecration of the Name of Israel . . .

His alarm only increased when he realized that the epidemic of war-acquiescence had spread even to the Jewish community. He had no way to assuage his own anger, except by keeping a private “blacklist” of Jewish public figures, especially Jewish writers, who were carriers of the disease. He methodically examined every word that emerged from a writer’s pen. One single contaminated phrase was enough to earn a writer a place on the list.

Chapter XIV

The newspaper HaTzefirah was one of the first to be infected, as far as the Sensitive Rabbi could tell from the newspaper’s appeal to readers, in which it attempted to drum up support by mentioning that “many of our members have gone off to fulfill their duties to the Motherland . . . ” Of course, he needed this piece of evidence only at first. Later on, it was quite obvious that HaTzefirah, like all of the Russian newspapers, was besmirched with the prevailing putrefaction. When Z. Epstein ^{7 7} Probably Zalman Epstein, 1860-1936. wrote an editorial in HaTzefirah scolding the readership for allowing the only extant Hebrew newspaper to waste away, the Sensitive Rabbi replied with a letter to the effect that in an era in which the press is being debauched by the military Asmodeus, it is preferable for a respectable newspaper to go to its eternal rest, rather than surviving only to fall into disgrace.

As far as the Sensitive Rabbi was concerned, when a writer uttered an expression like “Indeed, we are living in momentous times,” it was enough to earn him a designation as a fool at the very least, if not a downright villain. Needless to say, when a writer bemoaned the “Jewish tragedy”—that a “Jewish soldier should have to shoot a brother, a Jewish soldier from another land,” or (as the Hebrew poet Y.C. ^{8 8} Ya’akov Cohen (1881-1960), in the poem “Kinat Em” (see Luz p18 n18). put it) that “a Jewish mother does not know to what end her only son was slaughtered in the war”—the Sensitive Rabbi naturally sensed that the Zionist Fatherland’s “pimp” was speaking through his mouth. ^{9 9} Because the poet imagines that the mother of the slain soldier would not have felt that her son had died in vain if he had died for the Jewish homeland (see Luz p18 n20).

But no one disgusted the Sensitive Rabbi more than the Zionist leadership, who not only spoke like war-pimps, but also acted as such. Anyone with a sharp mind and a clear conscience necessarily developed an aversion to the slogan “Fatherland” at the outbreak of the global orgy of destruction, given that it was the banner under which the Destroyers rushed headlong to light the world on fire. In contrast, our Zionist “romantics” scrambled over to warm themselves at the flames. Their beady eyes began flashing with wolfish sparks, in hopes that the time had come to manifest their lofty dream of a “Fatherland.” And to that end they began hobnobbing with the Chief Arsonists of the World, and danced before them on their hind legs, garlanding them with praise: “Oh ye Liberators of the Peoples . . .”

Even some most unpleasant facts did not deter their hymns of praise, such as the tens of thousands of Jewish victims who were afterward slaughtered in Ukraine, Hungary, and the rest of the little countries who relied on the gang of “Liberators” like son-in-laws af kest ^{10 10} i.e., newly married men living with their wives’ families during the early months or years of marriage. and received a bellyful of provisions from them, not to mention armaments—and who served as their vassals, instruments of their will. They were similarly undeterred by the merciless anti-Semitism that flared up beginning after the “War of Liberation” in all the lands under the aegis of the “Liberators,” anti-Semitism which oppressed and tortured Jews to death. Like Wilhelm II’s “true statesmen,” who are ready to sacrifice their entire people for the sake of one clod of earth from the “Fatherland,” our Zionist leaders forgave the world powers all the tortures that they had inflicted upon Jews in the lands of exile, in return for one small favor: that they speak up on behalf of the “Jewish National Home”; i.e., that they shout, “Accursed Jews, beat it—make yourself scarce here, onward to Palestine . . . ”

His distaste for Zionism was augmented by the interpretation of the World War that was embraced even by the likes of Max Nordau. For even Nordau, the Zionist hero, earned his place on the list of writers whom the Sensitive Rabbi suspected, based on a single impure statement, of war-pimping. That particular “hero” made it onto the blacklist when at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, he was heard to state the following: “In the name of the seven hundred thousand Jewish soldiers who fought on every front, the Jewish people has the right to appeal to the Nations and make its claim upon the Land of Israel.”

This so-called Zionist prophet, who had so enchanted the Sensitive Rabbi and captured his heart for Zionism with his charismatic harangues against the oppressors of the Jews which he had delivered at the early Zionist congresses (because the Sensitive Rabbi was a young man at the time and was not yet acquainted with the lingo of politicians, not yet able to discern between freedom and “freedom,” did not know that even the greatest despots take the liberty of ranting about the abstract idea of an “enslaved people” and an “enslaved land,” while simultaneously oppressing the real live people under their power)—in short, this “prophet” who had once upon a time helped to draw the Sensitive Rabbi into the Zionist movement, now did his part to ensure that the Sensitive Rabbi would utterly reject that movement, which had revealed itself during the world-Bacchanalia to be a blood relative to all the world’s monstrosities.

Chapter XV

But the Sensitive Rabbi could not quell his dismay about the war by means of such trifles as branding one or another writer as a carrier of the war-lackey pestilence, or throwing a barbed comment into a letter to this or that war-opportunist. No—he could not rest until he had immortalized his reaction in some kind of printed work. In fact, he had already prepared a manuscript of a poem in Hebrew, entitled “The Day of Reckoning is Here,” ^{11 11} “באו ימי הפקודה,” see Hosea 9:7. which he had composed during the summer of 1914 in response to the mobilization proclaimed by the Czar (whose minions came in the middle of the night to drag the reservists out of bed and ship them off to the war). In the poem he assigned each sector of society its portion of guilt for the war-fiasco, and justified the consequences which each had suffered as a result. However, he was unsure whether the poem would be able to pass the inspection of the current censor, so instead he undertook the task of composing his book The Assembly of Israel and the Wars of the Nations. ^{12 12}Keneset Yisrael uMilhemot HaGoyim, Warsaw, 1920.

He wrote the book in a serene tone, without turbulence, because it chiefly expressed the secondary feeling that the events of the war had evoked in the author: satisfaction about the bankrupting of European civilization, the chief agent of the persecution of the Jews. In the book he carried out a scientific analysis of the reasons for the war, and came to the conclusion that the war was no coincidence, but rather an unavoidable result of the entire corrupt, crippled, hypocritical lifestyle led by the so-called “civilized peoples.” In a serene tone but with sharp humor, he ridiculed both the leaders who herded masses of people to the slaughter, and the masses who allowed themselves to be herded. He also awakened self-appreciation among Jews—awareness of the dignity of yidishkeyt, which stood above the swamps of war, above the bloodbaths into which all peoples were sinking. He did this with full confidence, despite the fact that, to his disappointment, no small number of Jews had already revealed themselves to be war-pimps. He was convinced that these swindlers did not nurse at the breast of Judaism, but rather had been infected by the Gentile neighbors to whom their souls were enslaved.

At first, one thing troubled the security of his pride in the uniquely Jewish attitude toward war, namely, a rumor that not all Gentile socialists had submitted to their governments and lent their energies to the war-Bacchanalia. Rather, a number of socialists (called Bolsheviks) were in fact opposed to the war. By chance, however, a Bolshevik book entitled Against the Current fell into his hands, and from reading it he discovered that the Bolsheviks were also quite comfortable with mass murder—they merely gnashed their teeth over slaughter carried out for the benefit of the “capitalists.” They called upon the “world proletariat” to redirect the bloodbath toward the objective of the Marxist ideal—that is, to fight as long as it takes to establish the Socialist World Order, i.e., to decimate the entire world for the sake of establishing the socialist “paradise” for the next generation . . . The Sensitive Rabbi knew that a movement whose struggle for freedom stems not from any moral-ethical principle, but rather from “special interests” (and whose entire body of “freedom-propaganda” lacked even the smallest shred of heart, but rather was filled with a hard, dry accounting of the percentage of the laborer’s profit that ended up in the boss’s pocket), was unlikely to reject war as a means to an end, as long as it was advantageous to the state of the worker’s wallet—but he was nevertheless shocked to find such sentiments written in black and white by the supposed elites of the freedom movement.

After that, it was clear as day that not a single sector of the goyish world was untouched by Esau’s vocation, “and by thy sword thou shalt live,” ^{13 13} Genesis 27:40. and that the one and only people capable of true insight into war, and an appropriate feeling of hatred toward it, was the Jewish people.

By then he had given up entirely on the idea that mankind in its sickly state could expect to receive any relief from the socialists. “What a movement you have,” he thought to himself about the socialists. “It’s so dull-witted as to be entirely insensible to the horror of war; it lacks the insight to assign that horror its unique status as the zenith of human evil; and it confuses the horrific and universally unjustifiable disgrace of despoiling a man of the freedom to carry his head on his shoulders with the convoluted problem of labor and capital. You postpone the cure for the atrocities of war until after the wage for the leather shoe-sole has been regulated, and you even consider making use of the gruesome war-cudgel as a means to effect that regulation . . . May your befuddled minds thrive,” he continued to himself, “in corresponding proportion to the likelihood that you’ll manage to overthrow your tyrants, considering that you count yourselves among the backers of their very worst deed: warmongering.”

At that, he sat down with ironclad confidence to write the book The Assembly of Israel and the Wars of the Nations, in which he invested all his hopes for human redemption in the Jewish people, that is, in the techniques of improving the human heart and uplifting the human spirit—techniques which have forever stood at the center of Jewish culture, and which comprise the historic mission of the Jewish people. He published the book in 1920, and thereby immortalized his impressions of the period during which European civilization went bankrupt and showed its true face.

In 1923 he published a book of insights into Torah entitled The Hand of Aaron, ^{14 14}Yad Aharon, Piotrkow, 1923. Although this is the last of his books that Tamares lists here (and probably the last book he had composed at the time of writing), he did also ultimately publish a sixth book: Sheloshah Zivvugim Bilti Hagunim (Three Unsuitable Partnerships), Piotrkow, 1930. with a literary introduction about the importance of studying Torah.

In 1926, the Zionist leadership decided to demonstrate yet again that their tendency to cozy up to the great powers of the world was not merely a stratagem motivated by their fetish for a “national home,” but rather reflected the deepest inclination of their careerist souls . . . They cooked up a big celebration in honor of the “flag of the Jewish Legion,” which they dragged all the way to Jerusalem to stick into the ground of some holy site. ^{15 15} For more on this incident, see e.g. “A Winter in Palestine,” Abbi Samuel, The Jewish Transcript, Seattle, WA, 19 Feb 1926.
Even though the Sensitive Rabbi was already estranged from Zionism, Zionists were still Jews, and it irritated him that they were ruining his holy dream about the Jewish people which he had elaborated in The Assembly of Israel and the Wars of the Nations. So he printed a protest article in the Vilner Tog, in no. 37 and five additional installments. ^{16 16} Original article published Feb 1926. Additional articles in No. 41 (17 Feb), No. 43 (19 Feb), No. 44 (21 Feb), No. 47 (24 Feb), and No. 49 (26 Feb).