Jews in Psychology and the Psychology of Judaism 9781593339692, 2008006658, 1593339690

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JEWS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDAISM

Jews in Psychology and the Psychology of Judaism

MELANIE S. RICH

2008

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey ISBN: 978-1-59333-969-2

An Imprint of

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180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rich, Melanie S. Jews in psychology and the psychology of Judaism / Melanie S. Rich. -- 1st Gorgias Press ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59333-969-2 (alk. paper) 1. Judaism and psychology. 2. Judaism--Psychology. 3. Jews in psychology. 4. Jews--Psychology. 5. Jews--Identity. I. Title. BM538.P68R53 2008 150.89'924--dc22 2008006658 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards.

To David and Faye Rich, who gave me my first wonderful Jewish family and Perry, Josh, and Ali Simons, who share with me my second Melanie S. Rich January 2008

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements................................................................................................ ix Introduction............................................................................................................. 1 The Burden of Being the ‘Chosen’ ............................................................. 4 1 How Psychological is the Tanach (Bible)? .................................................. 7 Symbolism in the Bible ................................................................................. 8 Conflict and Ambivalence .......................................................................... 11 Before Psychoanalysis ................................................................................. 12 2 Understanding Ritual................................................................................... 15 Community Building and Identity Shaping ............................................. 15 Ritual and Mourning.................................................................................... 17 Other Life Cycle Events ............................................................................. 19 Ritual and Religious Practices .................................................................... 21 3 The Link between Jewish Spirituality and Psychology .......................... 25 The Origin of Jewish Mysticism................................................................ 25 Mysticism as a Way of Being...................................................................... 27 Buber: The Quintessential Jewish Philosopher....................................... 29 Contemporary Jewish Spirituality.............................................................. 31 4 The Jewish Life of Sigmund Freud........................................................... 35 Anti-Semitism in Freud’s Europe ............................................................. 36 Understanding Freud’s ‘Jewishness’.......................................................... 39 Jewish Influence on Freud’s Theories ...................................................... 41 5 The Phenomenon of Jewish Humor ........................................................ 43 The Meaning of Humor.............................................................................. 43 Humor and Assimilation ............................................................................ 47 6 Max Wertheimer: The Chronicle of a Successful, Assimilated, German Jew .................................................................................................. 49 Wertheimer’s Early Life.............................................................................. 50 A New Life at The New School................................................................ 52 vviii

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The Psychology of Prejudice: A Double-edged Sword ......................... 55 The Irony of Hatred.................................................................................... 57 Minority Group Dynamics......................................................................... 58 Jewish Stereotypes ....................................................................................... 60 8 Abraham Maslow: A Personality of Contradictions............................... 65 Maslow’s Early Life and Sensitivities........................................................ 66 Towards Greatness...................................................................................... 68 9 The Jewish Family: A Cultural Phenomenon.......................................... 71 The Role of the Family ............................................................................... 71 The Most Precious Resource ..................................................................... 73 10 Noam Chomsky: The Controversial Jew ................................................. 77 Chomsky’s Early Life .................................................................................. 77 Emerging Theories ...................................................................................... 79 Chomsky, Zionism, and Politics................................................................ 81 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 85 Bibliography........................................................................................................... 89 Index ....................................................................................................................... 93

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many family members and friends who have been instrumental in helping me develop the ideas for this book through patient listening and truly stimulating conversations. I am especially grateful to Perry Simons, my husband, technology consultant, proof-reader and best sounding board. Thanks also to Ellen and Steve Adelson, Rabbi Charles Sherman, Amy Terkel, Joel and Sheryl Sherman, Rabbi Elana Kanter, Rabbi Darren Kleinberg, Rabbi Michael Wasserman, Mary Anne Lewis, and Melanie Spector. Finally, I want to thank my children, Joshua Simons for his careful proofreading and Hebrew expertise and Alexandra Simons for her humor and interesting suggested readings. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Steve Wiggins at Gorgias Press for his interest in this project, Rabbi Earl Grollman for agreeing to read the manuscript, the volunteer staff at the library of Temple Israel in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Elaine Hirsch at the Bureau of Jewish Education in Phoenix, Arizona.

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INTRODUCTION In Genesis 11:1 the poignant and tragic story of the Tower of Babel is recounted where symbolically, all of humankind is unified in the effort to build a tower that would reach to the heavens so that humankind could ‘know God’. This attempt at elevation in stature is perceived by God as the manifestation of the inherent evil and immorality of humankind. God punishes the builders and architects of the Tower of Babel by causing them to lose all communication by mixing up their native-tongue languages so they could no longer understand one another, and the people are then dispersed all over the world. At first glance, one might think this is simply a story of how Noah’s descendants became multi-lingual and scattered throughout the world, or one might think that it is yet another story of humankind being punished for narcissism, arrogance, and the failure to fear God. However, as significant and prevalent as those issues are in the Bible, additionally, it would seem that these early Hebrews were being deprived of some fundamental connectedness which is essentially human…the ability to communicate through language, which is, from a basic human perspective, a return to the helplessness of infancy. But most important for the purposes of this book is the understanding that in all of the biblical stories which many of us know from childhood, there are multiple layers of meaning that exists between the lines which contain specific and significant lessons as well as sophisticated psychological truths relevant to all human beings. How ironic it seems that in this modern culture where we are asked, “Why Ask Why?” by a popular beer company’s television commercials or told to, “Just Do It” by a well-known athletic shoe company, Jews not only continue to ask why, but are known as a group who have perfected the art of questioning. An old joke from the ‘Borscht Belt’ exemplifies this with a typical conversation between two Jewish people where one asks the other, “Do you always answer every question with a question?” only to have back as the response, “Why do you ask?” So…why do Jews ask? Is this constant search for answers innate to the Jewish people or is there something in the education/family dynamic that promotes the constant questioning and what appears to be a need for verbal connectedness? In classical Talmudic study 11

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there is a continuous dialogue and search for truth between the Yeshiva student and the rabbi/teacher. The eavesdropper in such a dialogue might be struck by the intonation of the conversation. Not only the student ends each statement with an elevation in pitch (as if constantly asking a question) but so does the teacher. It is as if each makes a statement/question only to be truly and ultimately understood and answered by God. In fact, the very act of their study is considered to be elevated beyond that which is a simple learning experience, but rather is the essential learning experience of the Jewish people. So what relevance might this dynamic have for the less observant Jew or in fact for the secular Jew? Clearly this thirst for education is not limited to the scope of those who seek Yeshiva studies, but is an integral part to the identity of Jewish people who were the offspring of those Jews who immigrated to the United States before World War I. It is doubtful to this author that the push towards education was as simple as the key to making a good life in the New Land, but rather was the realization of a collective unconscious towards learning, understanding, and accepting our position vis-à-vis God. So what does it mean to question all the time? There are some who understand child questioners as attention seekers, with the assessment of a ‘squeaky wheel’ personality at the core of the perceived problem. And clearly for any classroom situation in which a teacher is over-burdened with more students with whom to deal than any one individual can handle, a bright or inquisitive student can feel like as much of a burden as the dull student who lags behind or interrupts the flow of the learning process for the average student. But what about that child or individual who is truly urged internally towards greater understanding or truth? Is that child simply a product of his/her own family life where perhaps greater verbal interactions are part and parcel to their home life, and their behavior in school is a representation of that dynamic with which they are most familiar, or is this the expression of something collective and ancient as part of a collective heritage? And most important to this exploration is that child often Jewish…. and if so, why is that? In thinking about this book the author began to ask a large number and somewhat random sample (people with whom the author has social contact) whether he/she thinks that Jews are more psychologically minded than the average individual, and if so, why? It was not meant to be a scientifically conducted experiment which, of course, would have to use such qualities as ‘double-blind’ construction, ‘informed consent’, and other such components essential to methodologically sound research, but rather was just an interesting conversation between old friends or new acquaintances.

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At times there were natural segues into said conversations and at times in a manner that was perhaps perceived as out of context, the questions were asked. One such question was, “Do you understand what I mean by the term psychological mindedness?,” and often the response was that the term is understood as ‘reading between the lines’ or thinking that something deeper lies below the obvious and the mundane. For professionals in the field of mental health there is an understanding that perhaps we are talking about the unconscious or the depth below which everyday life both occurs simultaneously and more deeply, whether it is in or outside of consciousness. The following are among the many responses which were given to the aforementioned question. One dear and closest friend answered the question posed with the question about whether the author had ever been physically attacked for the mere reason of being born Jewish. While the answer was no, an interesting conversation began about the experiential part of living through anti-Semitism. It would appear that many individuals between the ages of 40 and 80 or older have had the first-hand experience of understanding anti-Semitism beyond the intellectual level. It is important to note here that it was only in the middle to late 1960’s that the lawfulness of ‘exclusive’ country clubs, men clubs, garden clubs, etc. was questioned legally as a component of civil liberties. For Jewish people growing up in places other than New York or other large East Coast Jewish communities, anti-Semitism was often experienced as a personal and highly individualized child-hood or adolescent life passage. So then, is this experience a pasteurized version of the ‘shtetl experience’ and therefore, putting the modern day Jewish individual on par with the experiences of our forefathers and fore mothers who grew up in highly and often violently anti-Semitic regions? Is not the experience of a nine or ten year old child who is either threatened or who is actually beaten the same as the adult whose life is at risk? The child experiences this beating as the ultimate narcissistic injury with a plethora of fantasies which we might later understand as part and parcel with post-traumatic stress syndrome. So the ‘victim’ mentality is perhaps a component of this psychological mindedness, is it not? One might lean towards asking, “Why?” or “Why me?” or “What did I do to deserve this horrid treatment,” or perhaps most profoundly, “If there is a God, how can this have happened to me?” Jews have always wondered about the justice in life, the righteousness of consequences, or the deservedness in major life events (generally speaking of course, this would be the negative life experiences). There are some who reduce this phenomenon to the concept of ‘victim mentality’ or the ‘persecution complex’. However, from the Torah we have

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stories such as Job to whom one’s life experiences seem beyond that which a righteous individual should have to endure. Job does not ask, “Why?,” so for thousands of years following we are still thinking about it and wondering about it and even searching for understanding in books such as Rabbi Harold Kushner’s Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. The fact is that identity of a people is in part shaped by such major historical events imbued with suffering such as the Jews expulsion from Spain in 1492, the resulting Inquisition, the Russian Pogroms of the 1800’s, and the Holocaust. The shtetl mentality is not just about a ‘persecution complex’ that comes from the ghetto experience resulting from outside discrimination and prejudice; there is also a security from banding together for safety, or protecting the integrity of the makeup of a people through intensified contact and internal monitoring and institutionalization.

THE BURDEN OF BEING THE ‘CHOSEN’ On the flip side of the issue outlined above is the specialness that comes from being the Chosen People. A number of conversations either began with this concept or were discussed immediately following the previously mentioned minority identity issues. The Jewish emphasis on education was at the core of most conversations that highlighted the ‘chosen’ aspect of the people, which explains a people rising to beyond the minority status even with numbers which are a small fraction of the overall population. In the United States the population of Jews is approximately one half of one percent, and one must never forget that the Nazi occupation and extermination agenda of Central and Eastern Europe depleted the European Jewish population by more than 63 percent and the overall world Jewish population was decimated, as well. And yet, the overall number of college educated and additional graduate or professional education far exceeds the expected number. This phenomenon cannot simply be explained as the refugee reaction to making a better life for one’s sons and daughters, but must on some level also be the expression of a collective drive towards study and pursuit of learning. Jews have not only not benefited from such institutional corrections as affirmative action in educational institutions and professional opportunities but often were further penalized by tokenism and being over represented and resented for taking too many spots in elite educational institutions. A number of individuals while focusing on this special or chosen status also displayed a certain amount of discomfort about it. There were numerous jokes and self-deprecation that accompanied this discourse. One way of thinking about this might be as the favored child in a family or class-

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room who both enjoys the status, favors, and attention while being mindful, if not guilty, about the perceived lesser treatment of peers, or worse, anticipates their retribution, envy, or acts of jealous retaliation. Many people explain part of the world’s worst acts of brutality, such as the Holocaust, as arising out of envy over perceived specialness and resulting in scapegoating or more blatant retaliative animosity and aggression. For many this topic immediately led into the next interesting question which is why Jews are so over-represented in the helping professions such as medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and legal-aide type of law practices, such as the Anti-defamation League, civil rights activists, etc. Most joked about the need to solve one’s own problems and the typical question of what help mental health professionals are themselves searching for when they enter these studies. But perhaps this too goes far beyond the obvious and is also an externalized expression of the pain and collective memory of being the underdog and wishing to help others in that position. The topic of tikun olam was referred to at this juncture in many of the conversations as the Jewish need (albeit commandment) to repair the world. Perhaps Jews not only out of empathy, having once been the target of persecution and hatred, need to help, but also from some of the most ancient commandments and teaching are required to help through tzedakah (literally meaning ‘righteousness’, but commonly translated as ‘charity’). There are many references in the Torah to giving of oneself with the highest level of tzedakah being the anonymous donor to the anonymous recipient. Land owners are commanded to harvest only certain portions of their land in order to leave available food for those individuals in need. There are numerous stories from the Bible indicating one person’s sacrifice to another is deemed an expression of the godliness of humankind, and is not only expected but commanded by God. So, the question arises as to whether Jews are drawn to the helping professions out of a covenant and, if this is the case, how would one explain the non-religious or the secular Jew who may or may not even have had the benefit of the aforementioned teachings who is also drawn to the helping professions. Perhaps in exploring the individual histories of four of the great thinkers in early psychology whose Jewish identity appears to be part and parcel to the biographical substance they leave behind, as well as looking at the individual contributions, we might be able to understand the predisposition that each of these men had towards their life’s work which so influences the world of modern psychology. Sigmund Freud in the development of Psychoanalysis, Max Wertheimer in Gestalt Theory, Abraham Maslow in Humanistic Psychology and Noam Chomsky in Cognitive Theory, are each

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giants in their various fields within modern psychology and have all made contributions which will continue to mark the field significantly past their own lifetime and perhaps well into the next centuries. In addition to the biographical approach to the topic of the psychology of Judaism, an exploration into numerous aspects of Jewish identity and Jewish life will be examined with a lens on the over deterministic tendency of self examination, self analysis, and vigilance or hyper-sensitivity to the outside world. But perhaps more significant than even this self-referential perspective or the opinion of the outside world, there is no question that when one looks to the major achievers in any number of the arts, sciences, business industries, and philanthropies there exists an extraordinarily disproportionate number of Jews who are at the foreground of the innovations, inventions, developments, and mastery in their respective fields. With this occurrence being so far beyond the statistic predictability, it behooves us to ponder what the circumstances and conditions are that have produced such a generative and high achieving people.

1 HOW PSYCHOLOGICAL IS THE TANACH (BIBLE)? “Most people are servants of their passions, but the truly free person is the one who can control his desires. When the sages taught, ‘Only one involved in Torah is truly free’ (Pirkei Avos 6:2), they meant to say that only Torah allows one to free himself from the shackles of desire and to truly exercise free choice. Without Torah, one is not free at all, he is a slave controlled by a master foreign to his better instincts. While intellectually he might have correct ideas of how to live, ultimately his master - his passion - will force him to act otherwise.” Rabbi Moshe Lieber

Without the benefit of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory or Heinz Kohut’s Self Psychology or Margaret Mahler’s Developmental Theory, the Torah does a remarkable job of predicting the adult outcome of a number of family or environmental effects on various individuals in the Bible. In her book Psychoanalysis of the Bible, Dorothy F. Zelig provides an in-depth analysis of seven familiar and known characters from the Bible with the use of a familiar psychoanalytic technique which utilizes an empathic descriptive model for arriving at conclusions about an individual or a situation. Her understanding of Scripture is that innate to the stories of individuals and situations are a universal drama and conflict that has been part of our human condition since antiquity. Whether one sees the Torah as allegorical or the verbatim Word of God, there exists an understanding of human nature, fraught with ambivalence and conflict, chocked full with the opportunity to succumb to or resist temptation thereby allowing the ego and super-ego to emerge victorious over the id. Remarkably, as early as 1914 Mordecai Kaplan, the Jewish philosopher, Rabbi, and founder of the Reconstructionist movement of Judaism, expressed this psychological understanding of the Torah. Mel Scult, editor of Kaplan’s journal, remarked on this attitude in the following, “He made it clear that he accepted the major assumptions of biblical criticism, although he believed strongly that the scientific study of the Torah need not undermine its place in Jewish life: “Traditional belief as to the origin of the Torah is not the sole support of its supremacy. If this is 77

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found to give way, the one derived from its having rendered the instrument of divine revelation is no less effective in maintaining its pre-eminence.” In 1915 and 1916 he published a series of articles in the Menorah Journal that clearly articulated his belief that religion in general and Judaism in particular could be understood best by the use of the new social sciences, especially sociology. He emphasized that religion must be linked to experience; otherwise it would wither and die. In his words, “A condition indispensable to a religion being an active force in human life is that it speaks to men in terms of their own experience. To those who want to find in Judaism a way of life and a higher ambition, it must address itself in the language of concrete and verifiable experience.”1 Scult described Kaplan’s theology as centering on a concept of energy. “The essence of Judaism for him was not found in any particular set of doctrines, beliefs, or values, but in the psychosocial energy that produced those values. In Kaplan’s words, ‘the permanence of Judaism does not necessarily involve the permanence of its moral and spiritual values, but the continued identity of the ethno or sociopsychical energy capable of producing such values’.”2

SYMBOLISM IN THE BIBLE To simplistically think about the original story of humankind in the Torah, one is drawn to the dilemma of Adam and Eve. Critics of formal religion call this story the original symbol to be followed by a litany of stories meant to do the work of ‘crowd control’. By capitalizing on the definitive condition of vulnerability including the absence of humankind’s protection of fur and absence of clothing, Adam and Eve experience the ultimate rejection as they have angered the Father and are cast out of the safety and protection of Eden. The obvious extrapolation from this story of ‘original sin’ is that when one does evil or disobeys, one is punished. This conclusion, however, lacks significant depth and the richness that thinking about this story on multiple levels might provide. For instance, why not attempt to understand the curiosity and the natural tendency to see for oneself what the outcome of any particular situation might be, rather than taking as truth another’s prediction of outcome. In much the same way that there are children who even though warned about the danger of the hot stove, are still tempted to reach towards it to see for themselves what the result might be. Perhaps Eve had to experience the apple for herself. As part of normal human de1 Mel Schult. Communings of the Spirit: The Journal of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume 1 – 1913-1934. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 49. 2 Ibid. 43.

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velopment we understand that there are stages in a child’s life where the need for autonomy, independence, and self-actualization through rebellion and strong statements of self emerge. The ‘terrible twos’ are not called terrible because they are particularly fun or enjoyable for the parents, but nonetheless, they are critical in the development of identity and ego for the child and therefore tolerated and appreciated by the parent. While there is a notable absence of tolerance in the Father’s reaction to Eve’s rebelliousness, it is also clear that this story of misbehavior is crucial to the continuation of the story, for without it there would not be a platform for the existence of humankind in the remainder of the Bible, as progeny could not have occurred. Zelig points out that in contrast to the heroes of other ancient mythologies whose aim was to overthrow the ‘father’, the biblical hero was identified with the father and even to become an extension of the father as a representation of the super-ego. Humankind is represented as statu nascendi - in a state of becoming - which accounts for human flaws. In her commentary about the proclivity of the Bible’s exemplifying human nature Zelig states, “For it is, in large part, through the narratives about its leaders and heroes that the biblical theme is dramatized. That theme is the growth of human conscience, here manifested in the psychodynamics of its leading personalities as they seek new pathways in morality and religion along the lines of ethical monotheism.”3 Evil, then, is not necessarily an external entity ever lurking to do damage to whomever stands in its path, but rather is the conflict between right and wrong which lives in the psyche of every human being. In quoting the Talmud, Alan Morinis brings to the foreground the following observation about human beings vulnerability in this conflict, “First the Evil impulse is like a passerby, then he is called a guest, and finally he becomes master of the house.”4 It is noteworthy then, as one begins to look at Scripture from this perspective of psychodynamics, the number of universally applicable themes which exist within the context of the religious message. In the first personality analysis that Dr. Zelig presents she provides the reader with a new understanding about the life and issues of Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. She states, “The life of Abraham gives indication of the relationship between man’s intra-psychic struggle and the development of an ethical social system based on religion. Freud has stated that cultural progress grows out of instinctual renunciation.”5 3 Dorothy F. Zelig. Psychoanalysis and the Bible: A Study in Depth of Seven Leaders. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1974. XVII. 4 Alan Morinis. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: One Man’s Rediscovery of a Jewish Tradition New York: Broadway Books, 2002. 98. 5 Zelig. ibid.

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Zelig extrapolates that Abraham had numerous conflictual and ambivalent feelings that permeated his life and it was through the resolution of these conflicting intense emotions that he could arrive to the mature and lofty position of Father of the Jewish People. “The biblical narratives about Abraham can be understood as a kind of psychological documentary of his life. They deal with his struggles to grow in emotional and spiritual maturity. His problems mainly involve the basic relationship of family life where man’s most intense emotions are rooted. By overcoming the inner conflicts of jealousy and competitiveness, with their accompanying aggression and fear, the positive feelings of warmth and cooperation were able to find expression.”6 For obvious and less obvious reasons, it was significant in the development of Judaism that the sacrifice of Isaac was diverted both for the sake of providing a maturity potential for Abraham, who as stated above is able to resolve his conflicting feelings and experience the emergence of a healthy ego, as well as the provision of a kind and compassionate God/father rather than a cruel or sadistic image. Time and again biblical allegories or stories reflect recognizable human reactivity and emotional responsiveness to situations that are rather familiar if not in content than in process. Unlike Job, who among us has not during a series of bad luck, or worse, in the midst of personal tragedy asked, “Why is this happening, God?” More important, “Why is this happening to me?” Is the point of Scripture to simply drive home the obvious lesson of faithfulness being rewarded or might there not be other personality lessons being promoted such as ego strength, perseverance, loyalty, etc. While there are many examples from the Torah of disobedience being punished, once again one must question whether it was simply the point of crowd control to negatively reinforce disobeying, or might there be additional traits that are being highlighted such as the negative impact of narcissism, entitlement, and disloyalty. In the story of Joseph there are notable points throughout his life cycle that appear to be highlighted in scripture. Is not the sibling rivalry of which he is the target predictable given his favored position with the father, Jacob, as well as his active participation in a dynamic which makes him superior both in intelligence as well as the position of entitlement? While the brothers are spurred to the point of murderous acting-out and tempered only by the oldest brother’s suggestion that rather than killing Joseph perhaps they could simply sell him into slavery thereby accomplishing the same end which was to have him out of the way; the human condition aspect of this portrayal is self-evident. Given the universal aspect of this dynamic for any6

Ibid. 33.

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one who is not a lone offspring in a family it is noteworthy the ease with which this story can be a theme of identification. Whether one suffers the guilt of being a favored child or suffers the incredible frustration and rejection of being an unfavored child, the story of Joseph is potent and poignant, but most important is a story that embodies one of the strongest and universal dilemmas, that of sibling rivalry. How striking it is that even during those ancient times of total subservience to the father’s authority and wishes, Joseph’s brothers’ painful experience of the preferential status and treatment afforded to Joseph arouses in them enormous hostility and acting-out. This is remarkable in the degree of insight and understanding it clearly expresses about the every day life and psyche of regular human beings.

CONFLICT AND AMBIVALENCE One of the most dramatic stories from the Bible is the story of Moses, who not only had the awesome experience of numerous conversations with God, but also the overwhelming responsibility of bringing God’s chosen people into the Holy Land. In the story there are numerous moments of highly dramatized and ultimately conflictual relationship dynamics between Moses and his followers. Ranging from disappointment to intensive narcissistic injury resulting in the expression of rage when the Children of Israel become disillusioned, anxious, and tempted by peer pressure to forego the ‘One and only God’ for the comfort of idols, Moses reacts in much the same manner as a parent who has over-identified with his children. He is obviously not only frustrated with the ignorance and lack of faith that is being demonstrated by his people, he is obviously outraged and furious about their lack of awareness regarding the degree to which both God and himself have gone to liberate them from not only the confines of slavery but also the confines of the missing Judaic foundation which would be available to them through the Ten Commandments. From the Talmud, Judaism has the wise insight about human frailty and the vulnerability to temptation as stated above. There are numerous stories in the Bible which seem to point out this human trait of susceptibility to temptation which can be interpreted as either cautionary, warning, or threatening depending on one’s view of the origin of the Bible. The most obvious of the temptation stories, of course, took place in Eden, but there are countless other stories which seem to be repetitively attempting to illuminate this point about the imperfection of human-kind. The brothers of Joseph succumbed to their over-whelming envy and jealousy of their younger brother, which resulted in murderous rage. Saul on numerous oc-

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casions dealt with his ambivalence towards David with rage and violent aggression, and the acted-out intention of killing his former object of love. Rebecca colluded with Jacob to deceive his father in order to receive the Eldest Son’s Blessing which should have gone to his brother Essau. But perhaps it is important to note here that the point of these numerous examples does not stop with the personification of imperfection or evil, but rather seems to offer an ever available possibility to redeem oneself in the eyes of oneself, the other humans who have been wronged, and of course, in the eyes of God. In a religion that offers free-will as a part of the gift of life, one is constantly made aware in the Bible the number of times that the famous stories pose to a Biblical character, an opportunity to make a “right or wrong” moral or ethical decision and the consequences he or she faces following that choice. But perhaps of greatest significance here, is the understanding that most of the stories are not about individuals who are categorically all-good or all-evil, but rather are stories about humans and the human condition which includes the admixture of good and bad. There is in this portrayal a level of psychological sophistication that one would not necessarily expect from a culture which has been categorized as an “Eye for an Eye” civilization.

BEFORE PSYCHOANALYSIS Aside from the astute personality analysis one may glean from reading the Tanach, there are numerous statements from the Torah, Talmud, Zohar, and words of the Sages which also comment from a psychologically sophisticated perspective on the complex and complicated nature of humankind. The following are examples of the sophisticated commentary made on human nature as well as the human condition: “In everyone there is something precious, found in no one else; so honor each man for what is hidden within him – for what he alone has, and none of his fellows.” …Hasidic saying “Who is wise? He who can learn from every man. Who is strong? He who can control his passions. Who is rich? He who is content with his lot. Whom do men honor? He who honors his fellow men.”…Ben Zoma in Sayings of the Fathers, 4:1 “Four types of men will never see God’s face: the scoffer, the liar, the slanderer, and the hypocrite.”…Talmud: Sotah, 42a

On self awareness, self-esteem, and perhaps even a reference to the ego are the following:

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“The I is the soul which endures.”…Nachman of Bratslav “Our ears often do not hear what our tongues utter” “The wisest of men can fool himself.” “Those who chase happiness run away from contentment”…Hasidic sayings “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself what am I? And if not now – when?”….Hillel in sayings of the Fathers, 1:14

The following reflections are made on anger: “Observe people when they are angry, for it is then that their true nature is revealed.” …Zohar “When a sage is angry, he is no longer a sage.” …Talmud: Pesahim, 66a “Anger begins with madness and ends in regret.”…Hasdai, Ben haMelekh

Each of these is observational in nature rather than admonishments or judgmental and seems to demonstrate a psychological wisdom that is not generally attributed to ancient times. Rather than commenting that one should not get angry or that anger is somehow bad, one is cautioned that anger as a powerful emotion has power in and of itself. The first observation also comments on the multiple layers that exist within the personality of any individual, and that persona does not necessarily tell the entire story about the being within. Dreams are another curious subject dealt with in the Bible. Leo Rosten comments on the interesting fact that only Joseph and Daniel in the Torah interpreted a dream. “This singular gap was remedied in the Talmud, where one of the longest haggadic sequences, with no digressions, sought to analyze dreams (Berakoth: 55b – 57a). The interpretations are often quaint, often cryptic, often saturated in superstition. One smiles over the fanciful snakes; or the solemn adjudication that if in Palestine you dream you are naked that is a sign of virtue, but if in Babylon, it reveals a failure to perform enough good deeds. Yet, some rabbinical insights about the kingdom of sleep are

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astonishing.”7 The following are a few of the insights about dreams that Rosten includes: “During the night [dream], a man’s soul testifies as to what he did during the day.” ….Zohar (Sigmund Freud referred to this phenomenon as ‘day residue’.) “Men see in their dreams only that which is suggested by their own thoughts.”…Talmud: Berakoth 55a “In bed, thoughts come into your mind so that you may know the thoughts of your heart.”…adapted from the Book of Daniel, 2: 20-3 (Another Freudian concept; wish fulfillment seems to be referenced here.) “A part of a dream may be fulfilled, but never the whole.”…adapted from Rabbi Hisda in Talmud: Berakoth, 55a “In sleep, it is not we who sin, but our dreams”…unknown

These commentaries on dreams not only lack the superstitious magical thinking about dreams which was common at the time, but truly seem to indicate a rich understanding of the psyche’s contribution to the making of a dream. In addition, there is perceptiveness about the wish fulfillment component as well as the tension-release function served by dreams. Most compelling about the insights which are offered in each of the above observations is the sense of hope and redemption that is recognized in conjunction with the understanding that human beings are basically flawed but still God’s chosen creatures, nonetheless. “Without wisdom there is no piety, without piety there is no wisdom.”…Sayings of the Fathers, 3:21*

* All quotes are from Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations. 7

Leo Rosten. Treasury of Jewish Quotations. Bantam Books, New York, London, Toronto, 1972. 170.

2 UNDERSTANDING RITUAL “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight all your paths.” Book of Proverbs 3.5-6

Judaism is a religion that is especially rich in ritual which goes far beyond the rigor of observance in the Synagogue or Temple, and does not limit itself to the remarkable events in life such as birth, death, marriage, coming of age, etc. For those willing to partake in the truly observant way of living no less than one hundred blessings must be uttered per day, which appears to be as much an expression of the commitment to awareness of the awesomeness of God’s Creation as it is an appreciation for the relationship with God. Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin explains, “…there are two types of blessings in Judaism. The first type is a blessing in response to a moment of awe. These moments may be bittersweet, or they may be moments of intense sadness, such as hearing the news of a death or an illness; or they may be an experience of the awe of the natural world, such as seeing a rainbow or upon the birth of a child. When we experience these moments of awe, Jewish tradition has a blessing to be recited. Besides these blessings that respond to awe, there is a second type of blessing, which seeks to conjure up awe. As humans, we seek and settle into a routine that often numbs us to the wonders of the world around us. We may even become inured to the everyday miracles that surround us. Thus, the recitation of blessings can become an emotional prod, a reminder of all that we take for granted.”8

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND IDENTITY SHAPING Milton Malev commented that ritual in any religion serves to alleviate guilt between the unacceptable impulses and appetites and the higher ethical and moral standards. “This constitutes the first though most superficial value of ritual…whatever else the sinner may have done wrong, this (performing the 8

Nina Beth Cardin. The Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life, eds. Kerry M. Olitzky and Daniel Judson Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2002. 130-131. 1155

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ritual) he will do right.”9 There is also a value in the community building aspect of rituals that are performed in a group experiential manner. Malev continues, “In addition to the personal value of ritual, there are also social uses and effects. Religious rituals are community rituals; they are performed by everybody within the religious group and no one outside it. They create a sense of solidarity and belongingness.”10 The next logical step in understanding the community aspect of ritual performance is the acculturation of the offspring of the group. Hector J. Ritey, in commenting on the extreme importance of teaching Jewish children the symbols and performance of rituals, stated the following, “The psychological value of Jewish ritual cannot be overestimated in religious education. The child observes that symbols of Judaism command the respect of the adult, whom he had heretofore considered all-powerful. In this simple way he learns that there are things even more powerful that the adult’s will. He sees the adult light the Sabbath candles and carry the Torah with reverence. In this way the child grows up with the concept that there are things in life that go beyond the power of the omnipotent adult.”11 In a fascinating interpretation of the evolution of a universal ritual, Malev explained the Jewish version of the ‘coming of age’ observance. “The Bar Mitzvah presents particularly interesting features. We have said that Jewish ritual has managed to elevate and utilize for high constructive purposes some of the primitive unconscious human motivations. Puberty rites are part of all primitive pagan cultures; their function is to express and at the same time to overcome the hostility of the grownups of the tribe to the entrance of a new younger group into the privileges of adulthood primarily, of course, sexual privileges. To this end, boys at puberty are frequently tortured, mutilated, and starved; put through rigorous military tests involving bloodshed; and finally threatened with the most severe punishments if they abuse their newly granted privileges. This primitive rite has been converted in Judaism into a joyous social function; the sexual privileges originally contained in the rite have been transformed into social, religious, and community privileges; the test of worthiness in no longer one of military skill and bloodshed, but of educational and intellectual attainment which the candidate displays before the group. The old hostility is almost entirely hidden – and is, indeed, compensated for by showering the candi-

9 Milton Malev, Judaism and Psychiatry: Two Approaches to the Personal Problems and Needs of Modern Man. ed. Simon Noveck. The National Academy For Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogues of America, Inc. 1956. 138-139. 10 Ibid. 141. 11 Ibid. 143.

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date with gifts.”12 He follows this interpretation with a quip he heard about the spear of the primitive tribe being exchanged for a fountain pen.

RITUAL AND MOURNING Many of the rituals, especially in the area of life cycle demarcations, appear to have a wisdom and psychological mindedness that far exceeds the era from which they emerged. For instance, we see in our funeral preparations and the treatment of mourning and mourners an empathy and wisdom that preceded Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychologist who methodologically researched and wrote about the stages of grief in her seminal book On Death and Dying in 1969.13 Long before Judaism had the benefit of Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief which she documented as taking approximately one year from which to emerge, we have the Jewish ritual of the Unveiling of the tombstone, which is a ceremony in which the family returns to the gravesite of their loved one to set the headstone and to end the formal period of mourning approximately one year after an individual is buried. Simon Noveck commented, “Of all the personal problems which confront the human being in the course of a normal life, grief is most explicitly treated in Jewish tradition. Like all religions Judaism has developed specific techniques for meeting the challenge of death and surrounding the end of life with solemnity and dignity. It has, in the course of its development, devised ways of helping the individual to live through the pain and distress, and endure the feelings of guilt and disinterestedness in life that are true of most normal mourning.”14 Jewish ritual in the end of life ceremonies operates under two guiding principles which are k’vod ha-met, the respectful treatment of the dead, and k’vod ha-chai, the honored treatment of the living, specifically, the surviving loved-ones.) As the immediate period of time between the death of a loved one and the burial are carefully prescribed, there is little room for error or ambiguity in Jews treatment of death and grieving. Jewish funerals take place within twenty four to forty eight hours following a death (except in a case when the death is on the Sabbath or other Jewish holidays) because of the requirement to do honor to the person’s body whose soul is no longer present. Interestingly, it is also a relief to the surviving family 12 13

Ibid. 141. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. On Death and Dying New York: Macmillan Company,

1969. 14 Simon Noveck. Judaism and Psychiatry: Two Approaches to the Personal Problems and Needs of Modern Man. The National Academy For Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogues of America, Inc. 1956. 105.

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members to have the difficulty of the disposal of the body over with quickly in order to get on with the next phase of mourning which is sitting Shiva (which means seven in Hebrew and is for a period of seven days). Because Judaism believes that life is first and foremost for the living, one important part of the grieving process is to be mindful that all of life is a gift from God and therefore worthy of living. The grieving family is surrounded by a caring community to support them as well as help them in this mindfulness about life. In describing the Shiva period Simon Noveck observes the following, “On their return from the cemetery, the bereaved begin a seven-day period of mourning during which their behavior is prescribed in detail. A special meal of condolence is prepared by neighbors and friends. Each bereaved person sits on a low chair or on a bench while relatives and friends visit and console him. During this period the mourner deprives himself of his usual daily comforts and abstains from carrying on his normal business routine. During the first three days, when he gives free expression to deep sorrow and lament, he is not allowed to do any work. He is allowed to read the Book of Job, the mournful part of Jeremiah, and the laws relating to mourning; but he is not permitted to study the Torah as a whole since Torah study is considered a source of pleasure to the Jew. Services are held in the home except on the Sabbath when the mourner attends services at the Synagogue. Following the Shiva, the mourner returns to his work and tries to reassume the usual patterns of his life. The first month constitutes a period of semi-mourning, during which some forms of amusement and entertainment are abandoned but the usual pattern of life is continued. Throughout this period and for eleven months, Kaddish is recited and certain forms of entertainment are forbidden.”15 Most striking about Kaddish, this prayer for the dead, is the complete absence of the mention of death, but is rather a prayer of praise to the Almighty about the miracle of life. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the affect around the end of life in the following statement, “For the pious man it is a privilege to die. Hasidic teaching says, ‘there are three ascending levels of how one mourns; with tears - that is the lowest, with silence - that is higher, and with a song - that is the highest’. The lesson is how a man meets death is a sign of how he has met life.”16 Innate to this carefully scripted set of regulations for the mourner is a psychological wisdom that seems to not only understand that there is deep pain in grief, but also other complicated feelings about which 15

Ibid. Abraham Joshua Heschel. I Asked For Wonder New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1983. 67. 16

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the mourner must resolve or work through in order to get back to the highly valued task of living life. Whatever guilt, anger, or other complicated feelings many mourners experience, this period of time along with the prescribed behaviors serves to ameliorate the most difficult feelings, especially those that surround leaving the deceased loved one behind as one is commanded to continue to live every day life.

OTHER LIFE CYCLE EVENTS Because of this preponderance of attention to life, naturally birth is an especially important life cycle event in Judaism, beginning with the command to Adam and Eve as they were created in the Garden of Eden to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28.) It is particularly poignant to think about a people who throughout their history have been hated, persecuted, and ostracized to remain optimistic enough that bearing children remains a hallowed life event, but hallowed it is. Beginning with the name selected for the child there are traditionally important psychological features present. Rela M. Geffen describes this ritual in the following way, “There is a Hebrew folk saying, recorded in the Bible, to indicate that a person’s name can illustrate his or her character. Kishmo ken hu’ – ‘Like his name so is he’ (1 Samuel 25:25.) Names in the Bible can also be seen to predict at birth what the person’s character will subsequently turn out to be.”17 She gives examples, such as the name for Jacob means usurper, so that, “traditionally the name given a child is considered a matter of great importance, having considerable influence on the development of that child’s character.”18 It is interesting to think about the difference in customs of Ashkenazi Jews (of Eastern European origins) versus Sephardic Jews (of Iberian or MiddleEastern origins) in the cultural influences in naming their children. It is common among Ashkenazi to name a new-born after a lost loved one both to honor that loved person’s memory as well as to hopefully imbue the child with positive character traits of the deceased person. Interestingly, in the literature of survivors of the Holocaust, there is some question as to whether children of survivors who are given the same name as previous children who died in the Holocaust having psychological pressure to live up to the image of that child who perished. For the survivor family, it has become a name loaded with sorrow and grief as well as the expectation of

17 Rela M. Geffen. Celebration and Renewal: Rites of Passage in Judaism Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993. 20. 18 Ibid.

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renewal.19 Sephardic parents frequently name their children in honor of a living grandparent which seems to forge a stronger bond among the generations. Most significant here is that the naming of a child is not random nor simply a matter of preference, but rather that names are significant both in the representation of the child and the wished for outcome of that child’s personality and life’s accomplishments. “Considering the importance of a name to the over-all identity and ideals of a child, many Jews feel that it behooves Jewish parents to select names for their children that will strengthen ties to family and reinforce the historical continuity of the Jewish people.”20 Much has been written about the ritual of circumcision which takes place on the eighth day of an infant boy’s life. As a ‘positive commandment’, it is a ritual of such importance that it is performed even on otherwise sanctified days such as the Sabbath or High Holy Days during which other rituals and observances (funerals and weddings) are not. The first circumcision was performed by Abraham upon himself one year before the birth of his son Isaac. It is the enactment of bringing the male child into the covenant of Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. But what does it mean? Zelig provides a psychoanalytic explanation in the following commentary: “It cannot be accidental that it was after the birth of Ishmael, the son which the Egyptian bondswoman, Hagar, bore to Abraham, that God establishes this covenant with the Patriarch. Isaac therefore was the first child born after the rite had been performed. He was the destined heir, the one who was to succeed and displace the father. If we accept the common psychoanalytic significance of circumcision as a symbolic partial castration, the penalty for incestuous wishes, it is understandable why the ritual should have preceded the birth of Isaac, rather than that of Ishmael. Hagar was an Egyptian, a stranger, with whom incestuous bonds would be remote. Sarah was not only the desired woman, the beloved wife, but she was also a kinswoman and therefore much more likely to be an unconsciously forbidden object. The price of a son from her would more clearly involve the submissive act toward the father which circumcision implies.”21 Zelig was basing her theoretical idea of circumcision from Freud’s own work on the topic which appeared in his later life book, Moses and Monotheism. “Circumcision is a symbolical substitute of castration, a punishment which the primeval fa19 Melanie S. Rich, Doctoral Dissertation, “Children of Holocaust Survivors: A Concurrent Validity Study,” 1982. 20 Rela M. Geffen. Ibid., 22. 21 Dorothy F. Zelig. Psychoanalysis and the Bible: A Study in Depth of Seven Leaders. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1974. 31.

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ther dealt his sons long ago out of the awfulness of his power, and whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to his father’s will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice.”22 Lastly, and perhaps most dramatically, is the following commentary by Rosalind Miles: “Most terrifying, however, are those initiation ceremonies which purport to confer manhood through an attack on the source and site of manhood itself, the penis. For thousands of years the amputation of the foreskin has been widely practiced in the magico-mystical belief that it finally detaches the boy from his mother by ‘sexing’ him as a male. Stripped of the soft folds of ‘female flesh’ the ‘real’ penis can burst forth in all its power and glory, proving the unsexed child to be a man.”23

RITUAL AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Aside from the deeply significant and psychologically astute rituals involved in life-cycle events, there are a number of rituals in ceremonies and holidays which are equally compelling. The High Holy Days are particularly interesting from the perspective of the deeper and symbolic interpretation which accompanies the seemingly prescribed order and recitation of the prayers in the service, as well as foods which are traditionally eaten at this time. The blasts of the shofar during services for Rosh Hashanah are followed with the congregation proclaiming that this is the day of the world’s birthday. While actually according to tradition, the creation occurred a few days before; it was on the first day of the seventh month and as similar to the holiness of the Sabbath which is on the seventh day of the week, it is a holy time and it was the day during which God created Adam and Eve. “With their existence, the world as we know it came into being. Rosh Hashanah teaches that it is a world in which humans bear responsibility for their actions but in which they also have an opportunity to look into themselves, take stock of their behavior, and change what they know to be wrong. It is a world formed long before memory, but one that can be renewed each year by each individual through repentance and self-repair.”24 Following the proclamation by the congregation concerning the world’s birthday, three times the congregation chants that it is the day during which all creatures everywhere stand in judgment. Noteworthy here is that absolution does not 22 Sigmund Freud. Moses and Monotheism. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1939. 23 Rosalind Miles. The Rites of Man London: Granfton Books, 1991. 24 Francine Klagsbrun. Jewish Days: A Book of Jewish Life and Culture Around the Year. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. 24.

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come from a designated servant of God or from an institutionalized forgiveness, but rather through the honest introspection, self-evaluation, and admission of one’s own foibles and weaknesses, and then direct communication both to other’s who have been wronged and to God. Klagsbrun continues, “The shofar’s insistent sounds symbolize the holiday themes. Maimonides interpreted those sounds as a wake-up call to stir people towards repentance. To Nahmanides, the thirteenth century Spanish Jewish scholar and mystic, each note has its own hidden meaning. The short quavering sound called the teru’ah represents God’s attribute of justice. The long, plain sound, known as teki’ah, stands for the attribute of mercy. The shofar is blown in sets, with the long teki’ah note both preceding and following the short teru’ah. This, Nahmanides said, is to show that God’s justice is always surrounded by mercy.”25 Another symbolic and interesting custom in which some congregations participate on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah is tashlikh which means ‘to cast away’. As a group they walk to a body of water and empty their pockets, symbolizing the casting away of sins to enable the participants to truly begin anew in the coming year. In psychoanalysis, water has long been perceived as a symbol of the unconscious, which makes even more significant the inclusion of this symbol into the ritual. Other enactments of this custom include the symbolism of casting bits of bread into the body of water for the fish to eat. Fish, whose eyes always remain open, symbolize the all-seeing capability of God, who therefore knows of all of humankind’s sins. The casting away of the bread symbolizes the purging oneself of sins. Apples dipped in honey symbolize the hope that sweetness will come with the New Year, and the round hallah bread represent the continuous cycle of life. There is throughout the day optimism and hope which is followed by the Days of Awe, the ten days of repentance leading up to the most somber of the Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The haunting melody of the Kol Nidre in minor keys, the fasting, and the somber ambience all lead to the soul searching which is required of every member of the congregation on this sacred day in hopes of being forgiven for their sins. Aside from the physiology of fasting during which many people experience not only hunger but ‘light headedness’, one might also be struck by what the experience of fasting can potentially induce in the worshiper. For many people being hungry is not only the unpleasant sensation of emptiness, for some it is the vulnerability that comes from feeling that 25

Ibid. 25.

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emptiness. In this modern culture where being constantly busy, surrounded by noise and distraction is for many a relief which allows them to feel fulfilled, the experiential part of feelings one’s emptiness can be monumental. It is then perhaps predictable that this highly ritualized holiday puts many people into the mood of self examination and atonement, and for some is experienced as melancholic. Klagsbrun is mindful of the relational component of the Yom Kippur dynamic in the following remark, “Most important, in the hours before the holiday, climaxing the days leading up to it, people ask forgiveness of one another for the hurts they may have imposed during the year. One of the most fundamental teachings of this festival is that fasting, repentance, and prayer may effect atonement only for sins against God. For offenses committed against another human being one must ask that person’s forgiveness.”26 Aside from the High Holy Days, Pesach and other major holidays which each have their own significant and important rituals, there are numerous other holidays whose ritual also serves symbolic and important psychological functions. While many enjoy Purim as a party and a time to enjoy humor and a certain amount of frivolity, there is no question that the release of hostility towards Haman also serves the purpose of shouting in defiance the refusal by the Jewish people to be subjugated and persecuted again. There is both the sense of sheer enjoyment and celebration while demonstrating a solidarity that is simultaneously strengthening of one’s sense of security and power as a community. For many religious and/or spiritual people, engaging in rituals is at once comforting, familiar, and an enriching experience of worship. Kavannah, which translates to mean a deep worship of God, for many Jews, is attained through chanting, prayer, and engaging in age-old Jewish rituals and customs in which our forefathers and foremothers participated thousands of years ago. The hope for most Jews is that these same Jewish practices will survive for many more thousands of years.

26

Ibid. 35.

3 THE LINK BETWEEN JEWISH SPIRITUALITY AND PSYCHOLOGY “The Light of Creation is first revealed, then hidden and treasured. When it is hidden, harsh judgment comes forth and both aspects – kindness and judgment – become united and reach perfection.” Zohar

There have been a number of distinct spiritual or mystical movements in Judaism which have spanned several hundred years, and each have a wisdom and psychological acuity that warrants discussion. Entire gifted and erudite lives have been devoted to the study and pursuit of enlightenment in this mystical and complicated philosophy and numerous volumes have been written, but for the purpose here, only a brief discussion relevant to the psychological aspect will be addressed.

THE ORIGIN OF JEWISH MYSTICISM An immediate association most people make between Judaism and spirituality is to the Kabbalah, which literally takes its meaning from the Hebrew root word, to receive. This body of Jewish mysticism dates from the 12th Century and has seen an upsurge of popularity beginning in the 1960’s and becoming even more mainstream in the 1990’s. Daniel C. Matt describes the history of Kabbalah in the following way: “Based on biblical and rabbinic traditions, the Jewish mystical movement known as Kabbalah emerged in the fertile region of Provence toward the end of the 12th Century. Over the next 100 years Kabbalah spread over the Pyrenees into Spain. In 1280 (in Spain) Moses de Leon circulated booklets written in Aramaic. He said he was the Scribe and the author was Rabbi Shim’on son of Yohai – a famous disciple of Rabbi Akiva from the 2nd Century in Israel.”27 But in fact, there is some controversy as to whether Moses de Leon was the actual author, but hoping to lend even more credence to his writings by attributing them to the famous Rabbi Akiva. Edward Hoffman highlights the connection to 27

Daniel C. Matt. Zohar: Annotated and Explained. Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths, 2002. XXIV. 2255

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modern day studies in describing the book of Tanya, which initially dates from the year 1797, written by Rabbi Schneur Zalman, one of the original Kabbalists. “In the Tanya, Rabbi Zalman wrote compellingly on a variety of interesting topics, from metaphysics to human motivation and personality. He emphasized the capacity for inner growth and the importance of freewill in determining individuals’ lives.”28 The founder of Lubavitcher Hasidism also stressed the necessity for activity as an antidote for depression, commenting that, “There is no other way of converting darkness into light except through action.” He continues, “His model of our emotional makeup focuses extensively on our highest nature, which is linked with the divinity. Yet, he also recognized the power of our lower emotions, like fear, anger, and sadness. Such feelings, he declared, must be confronted and overcome through honest selfexamination.”29 The following poem by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is a prime example of this honest self-examination.30 Embarrassing How embarrassing for man To be the greatest miracle on earth And not to understand it! How embarrassing for man To live in the shadow of greatness And to ignore it. To be a contemporary of God and not to sense it. Religion depends upon what man does with his Ultimate embarrassment.

It is fascinating to think about the environmental forces that have led to the development of this type of spirituality given the oppression, violence, and despair the Jewish people must have felt during this period dating from the expulsion from Spain to the pogroms and scape-goating of 28

Edward Hoffman. The Way of Splendor: Jewish Mysticism and Modern Psychology (Northvale, New Jersey, and London: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1989. 33. 29 Ibid. 30 Abraham Joshua Heschel. Ibid. 67.

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Eastern Europe. Isaac Luria, also known as the Great Lion (Ari), spoke of the vision of Tikun (the mending of the world) as being able to occur through intense soul-work and acts of creative love and justice. Interestingly, Kabbalah has much to say about sexuality and the connection between men and women in reaching a higher level of spirituality. On remarking about the Kaballistic notions of sexuality, Hoffman makes the following observation, “Intriguing is the Kabbalah’s venerable interest in human sexuality – as an integral aspect of our life on earth and as a potentially awesome power to transform our inner state of being. It seems no historical accident that many of the great twentieth century trailblazers of the mind and its fiery desires have nearly all been of Jewish heritage. It seems quite consistent that such thinkers have emerged from a religious background that even in it mainstream valued love-making within marriage as a hallowed act. Though Freud, the first researcher of the modern age to scientifically study sex, was not an observant Jew, he was no stranger to the Kabbalah.”31

MYSTICISM AS A WAY OF BEING A great deal of the material of Jewish mysticism concerns itself with the essential quality of human life on earth and the crucial relationship humans have to God. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner remarked, “An important principal that appears again and again throughout the history of Jewish mysticism is that people are assumed to be fundamentally good. They do not need coercion or force to do the right thing; they require only reminding and encouragement.”32 Inherent in such a position is a basic level of optimism and deeply held faith about the Godly potential that each human possesses. Mussar is another form of Jewish Spirituality which originated from teachings from the Tenth Century and was developed into a practice of Jewish ethics, education, and cultural mores in the 19th Century among Orthodox non-Hasidic Jews, primarily from Lithuania. Its two main originators are Rabbi Zundel Salant and Rabbi Yisael Salanter who wanted to pass along teachings that would enable their Jewish followers to live morally and ethically improved lives. Alan Morinis described this principle of Mussar in the following way, “More value is actually placed cultivating the inner resources that will allow us to carry on light in the midst of the bustling market place, but with the kind of strength and insight that will render us im31

Edward Hoffman. Ibid. 66. Lawrence Kushner. The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition, Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001. 32

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pervious to the powerful temptations society inevitably sends our way.”33 In his description of his studies of Mussar, Morinis discusses the concept of midolot or ‘soul traits’ which, without the benefit of modern psychology, manages to describe the ambivalence of human nature in a quite sophisticated manner. Mussar offers the valuable insight that each individual is actually endowed at birth with every single one of the full range of the human traits of character. The whole lot is seeded in us: anger is inborn as are humility and love, worry and regret. In remarking about the astute perception Mussar has into human nature, Morinis states the following, “Remarkably, at least seventy years before Freud, Rabbi Salanter understood that there are forces of what he called the inner dunkel, or darkness, at the very root of our being. And it is these forces or unconscious motivations that give rise to the conscious thoughts that shape the actions we perform in the light of day. He also observed astutely that the intellect is an inadequate and limited tool for excavating in that blackness, which is why he so strongly advised using practices that did not rely on thought – such as emotional chanting and self reproof – as the dynamic tools of transformation.”34 In describing the practices that make up the Mussar discipline (meditation, contemplation, chanting, study, exercise, diary keeping) which Morinis states have been developed and tested throughout the centuries and have been found effective in altering levels of the soul-traits, “A person is meant to assemble their own routine – traditionally under the guidance of a teacher – to custom tune their daily discipline so it focuses on just those middot (character traits) that are felt to need attention, whether because they are too high a level or too low, or because they cause ourselves or others suffering or because we can just see that they are screening the holy light of the ‘neshama’ (soul) from shining through.”35 The depth of the psychological understanding is especially apparent as Morinis discusses in further detail the Mussar view of human character which is made up of body, mind and spirit, and includes the ‘shadowy depth of the unconscious’. It stands in stark contrast to the reductionism found in prejudice and hatred that was so rampant at the time in Eastern Europe and from which the Jews especially suffered, as it asserts that every human being does not just have a soul, but is a soul. “At its core, the soul is pure…habits, tendencies, imbalance (ego) often obscures the inner lights.”36 Morinis makes several references to practices in Mussar 33 Alan Morinis. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: One Man’s Rediscovery of a Jewish Tradition, New York: Broadway Books, 2002. 19. 34 Ibid. 197. 35 Ibid. 59. 36 Ibid. 30.

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which sound extremely similar to various modern day techniques of psychotherapy: “In Mussar, this improvement is called tikun ha-middot, improving or healing the traits of character.” He also states, “Because Mussar tells us everything we do in our daily lives presents an opportunity for this kind of self-improvement, Rabbi Perr sees even a simple chore like sewing on a button etc as doing a tikkun.”37 Just as we understand in modern day psychology that human beings are vulnerable and certain events or traumas can have lasting impact on the development of personality, so does the wisdom of Mussar understand this phenomenon and defines it as timtum ha-lev (stopped-up spiritual insensitivity), which Morisin states is due to the blocked flow of the inner life. “But what is the source of the blockage? With every betrayal, slight, conflict, abuse, or loss the heart can become a bit more hardened and closed as layer upon layer, the anger and hatred built up to wall off our inner core.”38

BUBER: THE QUINTESSENTIAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHER A chapter on Jewish spirituality, in fact, a volume on the psychology of Judaism, could not be complete without delving into the life and work of Martin Buber, one of the most renowned Jewish thinkers and philosophers of all times. Born in Vienna in 1878, he was multi-lingual with fluency in Yiddish, German, Hebrew, French, and Polish. As a young man he studied literature and philosophy and became extremely interested in the Hassidism of Eastern European Jews of the time. He was particularly attracted to the emotional freedom and joy expressed in the Hassidic love of God. “Formal Orthodox Judaism had disappointed Buber. Zionism had, to his mind, concentrated on the end rather than the means. Now he was able seek a vital trend within Judaism which he could accept intellectually and emotionally and to which he could devote his brilliant but free-flowing personality. And, as happened so often in Buber’s life, and as happens to people who refuse the comforts of dogma but follow their own truth wherever it leads them, the next step was in a totally unexpected direction: toward Hasidism, the movement of joyous mysticism which had developed in eighteenth century Poland. Buber’s interest was kindled in childhood summers on the family farm in Bukovina. In Sadaora, the seat of a dynasty of tzaddikim, (righteous men), he watched the Hasidim swaying and chanting in ecstasy around the man they followed because of his spiritual perfection.”39 After an extensive 37

Ibid. 66. Ibid. 70. 39 Aubrey Hodes. Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait. New York: The Viking 38

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study of Hasidic literature, ultimately Buber became disappointed with the organization of Hasidism, but never with the spirit. Buber appreciated the Hasidic belief of the ‘divine spark’ that lives within every human being, and the idea that by living an authentic life that spark can shine through. “Kavannah,” Buber said, “is the direction of the heart. It is the concentration of your will, focused toward the highest Thou, toward God, if you wish. Hitlahavut is fervor, enthusiasm, responding with all one’s heart and soul. It is a total commitment to the particular kavannah you wish to hallow at that time.”40 Buber was also especially concerned and involved with the Zionist movement in the early 1900’s, which reflected the socialist political ideals of equality. While he remained in close contact with Theodor Herzl, his ideas differed from those of Herzl’s in believing that Israel should exist as a bipartite state with co-operation, peace, and equal participation between Jews and Arabs. In 1923, the first edition of his book I and Thou was published which expressed his insightful understanding about the relatedness of all things and the spiritual and elevated manner in which human being are capable of encountering other people, creatures, and even inanimate things. Buber stated this concept as follows: “The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation. Three are the spheres in which the world of relation arises. The first: life with nature. Here the relation vibrates in the dark and remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are unable to come to us, and the You we say to them sticks to the threshold of language. The second: life with men. Here the relation is manifest and enters language. We can give and receive the You. The third: life with spiritual beings. Here the relation is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner.”41 Buber also spoke of love and the elevated communion that takes place in all forms of love, “Love is not a subjective feeling which lies within people, but between them. When a man and a woman are in love, love exists between them, for love is an ‘in between’ attitude. Feelings dwell in man: but man dwells in love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Press, 1971. 49. 40 Ibid. 53. 41 Martin Buber. I and Thou. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: A Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster, 1970. 56-57.

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Love does not cling to the ‘I’ … but love is in between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love.”42 Weinstein refers to Martin Buber as a ‘moral philosopher’ who was regarded as the personification of the loftiest moral and ethical values. He refused to write a system of ethics on the grounds that, “...he did not even know of the existence of such a universal system, and he was an existentialist who believed that all a teacher can do for his students is no more than point the way and merely give direction, but not prescribe the manner in which one should strive for that direction. He believed that each student must personally discover and independently acquire for himself the best moral decision applicable for a given situation at a given time.”43 One familiar with the role of an insight-oriented therapist might be struck by the similarities between how Buber describes the teacher’s ultimate function and that of the therapist. Neither professional is in a position to decide or even presume to know the fate or ‘right’ path of a student or the individual with whom he/she is working, and yet, clearly there is a very important role of guide or mentor. In addition, the very foundation of the ‘I-Thou’ philosophy is based on the ultimate respect and acknowledgement of the other, separate and apart from the role or function he/she serves. The encounter is one of total engagement and absolute appreciation.

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH SPIRITUALITY The Jewish Renewal movement is a new development in Jewish life which has a goal of reconnecting Jews to the vitality in Judaism. It is defined on the website of Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal in the following: “Jewish Renewal is a non-denominational Judaism. It honors the important and unique role of each denomination, but does not seek to become a denomination itself. Its emphasis is on direct spiritual experience and mystical or Kabbalistic teachings. Jewish Renewal is sometimes referred to as ‘New Age’ by people who do not know that meditation, dance, chant, and mysticism have been present in Judaism throughout the ages and not, as some mistakenly believe, patched on to Judaism from other cultures.”44 Others see Jewish Renewal as an interesting example of the influence of the outside culture having a strengthening effect on some individual’s 42 Joshua Weinstein. Buber and Humanistic Education. New York: Philosophical Library, 1975. 25. 43 Ibid. 83. 44 Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. (www.aleph.org).

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experience of their spirituality within Judaism. As an outgrowth of the generalized discontent that many Americans were feeling from their religious experience, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike, as well as a product of the questioning of the status quo and institutionalization of such establishments as education, religion, and marriage that came with the culture of the late 1960’s, the Jewish Renewal movement began in the early 1970’s from the Chavurot (small groups who formed a community and extended family for one another within the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist synagogues) movement. Many of these Jews were searching for something more individually meaningful than they were finding in the organized Jewish prayer and ritual. For many of the Chavurot there was experimentation with Far Eastern philosophies and practices, as well as a new approach to chanting and prayer that included an awareness of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. An example of one practice in the Renewal movement is a new way to pray the Shema, which is the most fundamental prayer, and in fact, the watchword of the Jewish people. The Shema, which has as its first word the meaning ‘Hear’ or ‘Listen’ is broken down into its three most basic sounds: Shhhh, Mmmm, and Ahhh

The ‘Shhh’ reminds the congregation to become very quiet in order to hear deeply within oneself so as to be able to connect to God. The ‘Mmm’ is the enjoyment of the peace and tranquility that comes from the quiet and the connection to God. And the ‘Ahhh’ is the satisfaction and joy that comes from the experience of prayer. The Shema is then chanted in a very long and protracted manner with great emphasis on the ‘breath of life’ going in and out of the worshiper’s being. Whether or not one is a great proponent of this movement, many people feel that clearly the experience of praying in this manner awakens a part of oneself that is most often not touched upon in the more traditional practice of Judaism in the Synagogue. Maimonides said, “What is the way that we should love God? We should love Him with an overwhelming and unlimited love, until our soul becomes permanently bound in the love of God like one who is love-sick and cannot take his mind off the woman he loves, but always thinks of her – when lying down or rising up, when eating or drinking. Even greater than this should be the love of God in the hearts of those who love Him, thinking about Him constantly, as He commanded us, ‘And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul’.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) Yitzhak Buxbaum explains this love in the following, “In Hasidism the

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goal of religious practice is often spoken of as d’vekut. Literally, this Hebrew word means ‘attachment’, ‘cleaving’, or ‘clinging’, the full phrase usually being ‘cleaving to the Shechinah’, the Divine Presence. This most important concept has two main aspects. On the one hand, d’vekut is the intensification of love of God until that love is so strong that you cleave to Him without separation. The other side of d’vekut is that it implies a direct awareness of God. For although sometimes it simply means the most passionate attachment motivated by love, d’vekut usually refers to the mind, the state of consciousness when a person is aware of God and His Presence.”45

45

Yitzhak Buxbaum. Jewish Spiritual Practices. Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aronson Inc, 1990. 4.

4 THE JEWISH LIFE OF SIGMUND FREUD “If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else. He will have to struggle as a Jew and you ought to develop in him all the energy he will need for the struggle. Do not deprive him of that advantage” Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1938) is known as the Father of Psychoanalysis and is perhaps the most famous and controversial of the psychological theorists. His theories on the development of human sexuality, the stages of psychosexual development, and the structural theory of the human psyche composed of the ego, the id, and the super-ego which he developed in the late 1800s/early 1900s revolutionized how humans thought about their own psychological makeup. His ideas were considered genius or heretical depending on the audience to whom he was presenting. He was rejected by many of his own institutions and colleagues, and it was only in the later stages of his life when his theories, by then developed into a school of thought, maintained a following of its own. In a study conducted by Steven Haggbloom and published in the Review of General Psychology, Sigmund Freud was ranked number three in the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the 20th Century. The compilation was based on the quantity of citations in professional journals and psychology textbooks as well as rankings submitted by 1,725 members of the American Psychological Association.46 While many volumes have been written about the life, times, and work of Sigmund Freud, and all give mention to the fact that Freud was a Jew (atheistic however, in actual religious beliefs), very few delve deeply into that aspect of the life experience and influences on Freud. Remarkably, even within the confines of his own denial of religion and sense of personal impact from religion, Freud made the significant statement about himself as holding a place of great prestige as the first son of a Jewish mother. Freud commented about himself, “A man who has been the indisputable favorite 46

[email protected]. 3355

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of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”47 While seemingly an off-handed self disclosure, in fact, the potential for interpretation and conjecture is great especially in light of the other first-born sons of Jewish mothers such as Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah. Zelig commented upon this phenomenon in the following, “Psychoanalytically, this position of the oldest male can be considered as stemming from the ambivalent feelings of the father toward the son who is destined to displace him.”48 She proposes that the special ceremony called Pidyon Ha-ben in traditional Orthodox families in which the father pays a small sum of money to free his first-born son from the obligatory priest-service is actually an expression of the ambivalence and unconscious jealousy of the father towards his son’s exalted position.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN FREUD’S EUROPE Regardless of the fact that he was from a non-religious family, there is no mistaking that the life experience of Sigmund Freud was filled with anecdotes of anti-Semitism. Austria was perhaps the epicenter of the antiSemitism which inflamed the whole of Europe during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries and in fact, can easily be traced back as far as the 8th Century. “Austria displayed dramatically this intolerance and prejudice from the first reliable account of the presence of Jews in the country. An ordinance during the reign of Louis the Child (899 – 911) related to discriminatory practices against Jewish merchants.”49 Throughout the centuries, the Jews of Austria existed in an ever-changing climate which varied from good favor such as the time of Leopold V who appointed a Jew to be the head of the mint to other times, such as in 1267 when masses of people were encouraged by the Emperor to incite bloodshed and massacres. “The Jew was pelted and stoned, spat upon and cursed.”50 By the early 15th Century the climate of intolerance worsened for the Jews with the outbreak of the Hussite Wars (1419 - 1436). “In Vienna as a result of the Hussites, the Jews, the historic scapegoats, were cut down, their property confiscated by the Dukes and their houses given over to the Christians. The synagogue of Vienna was destroyed and its ruins turned over to the university for the construction of 47

Ernest Jones. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Biographies, 1976. 48 Dorothy F. Zelig. Ibid. 55. 49 Earl A. Grollman. Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1965. 4. 50 Earl A. Grollman. Ibid. 6.

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a new building. Many Jews preferred to slay themselves and their families rather than participating in the mass conversions being conducted as a part of the conversion to the ‘Prince of Peace’. Those who were imprisoned were burned at the stake. In Vienna, more than a hundred perished in a single field near the Danube. For a long time, no Jew was to be found in Austria.”51 In the mid-1500’s Jews were invited back to Austria because they were perceived as an asset to the Royal coffer. Earl Grollman refers to Rudolph II, who in 1570 conferred a title of nobility onto a Jew who was the president of the Jewish community and the official Receiver of Taxes. “Not only was Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg given the privilege of residing in sections otherwise prohibited to Jews, he was also instrumental in protecting the entire Jewish community from mercenary soldiers during the Thirty Year War. Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) began his career as an avid supporter and sympathizer of the Jews who was initially appalled by the lack of ‘Christian’ treatment the Jews had received from their gentile neighbors and the Church, and who ultimately turned on them to become an avid anti-Semite who even encouraged the reigning Princes to destroy the Synagogue and to confiscate the wealth of the Jews. This period of time in European history led to the era of the Jewish ghetto of Europe. Jews banded together out of a need for self protection as well as being ostracized and threatened from the larger non-Jewish communities.”52 Grollman asserts that because every Jew could not be a scholar in Talmudic studies nor intellectually capable to pursue the metaphysical studies, a movement in Judaism arose representing the complete opposite of pedantry which served the purpose of enabling the ‘common man’ among the Jewish community an escape from the dankness of their reality. “This new approach followed the uprisings in the Ukraine when more than 100,000 Jews lost their lives in less than a decade. Israel ben Eliezer (1700 – 1760) brought forth an interpretation of Judaism based not on reason but faith, not upon intellect but emotion. In his movement of Chassidism, a man could literally escape his unbearable miseries by immersing himself in a mystical esoteric kindling of the soul with God. To the masses that hungered for a direct, simple stimulating religion which they could follow without any philosophical sophistication, the doctrine of salvation through prayer and humility rather than study, was appealing. The unsuppressed emotions and optimistic Chassidic spirit served as a buffer against the de-

51 52

Ibid. 8. Ibid.

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pressing environment of dissolution and terror.”53 It is against this backdrop of periods of enlightenment to the devastation of Pogroms which was the Europe into which Sigmund Freud was born. Grollman continues with the assertion that many of the pioneers in psychoanalysis were born of parents who had roots in this Chassidic background. Freud’s father was from a Chassidic family and it has been suggested that Freud had been inspired and perhaps greatly impacted by some of his reading of Jewish mysticism as a young man. It is Grollman’s belief that in his reading Freud would have been exposed to such concepts as sexual symbolism, wish fulfillment and word play as elements found in dreams. Additionally ideas such as the “portrayal of primordial man where the divine act of creation was given an erotic character and where sex relations were treated as avenues of salvation may be found in the Zohar (literally ‘brightness’, the mystical writings issued in part by Moses de Leon in the fourteenth century).”54 In an interesting self-disclosure, Freud remembered a story told to him by his father when he was a youngster that characterized the anti-Semitism in Vienna of his father’s youth in the early nineteenth century. His father told a story of being accosted by a Christian and having his beautiful fur cap knocked into the street while anti-Semitic slurs were shouted at him. When asked by Sigmund what he had done in response to this assault, Freud’s father exclaimed he had picked up his hat from the gutter, and walked on. The young Sigmund was apparently rather disgusted by his father’s passive response, and one must wonder if this did not fuel not only his own later militant attitude towards anti-Semites, but also his future ideas about the oedipal struggle and the anxiety caused by either an overly aggressive or overly passive father figure. Peter Gay remarked about this episode in the following way, “Stung by the spectacle of a cowardly Jew groveling to a gentile, Freud developed fantasies of revenge. He identified himself with the splendid intrepid Semite Hannibal, who had sworn to avenge Carthage no matter how mighty the Romans, and elevated him into a symbol of the “contrast between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church. They would never find him (Sigmund) picking up his cap from the filthy gutter.”55 Peter Gay demonstrates Freud’s hostile and aggressive response to anti-Semites throughout different phases of his life by the recounting of several anecdotes either directed at Freud himself or his son 53

Ibid. 20. Ibid. 55 Peter Gay. Freud: A Life For Our Time. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 15. 54

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Martin whereby Freud, with overt action or angry stare, refused to be passively humiliated. “Early on at the University of Vienna Freud encountered the irritant of anti-Semitism, infuriating and memorable enough to find a prominent place in his autobiography half a century later. He made a point of noting that he had responded with defiance, even truculence. Typically, he turned rage to advantage. Gentile fellow students impertinently expected him ‘to feel inferior’ and a stranger to the Austrian people because he was a Jew. But he resolutely rejected this invitation to humility, and commented that he never understood why he should be ashamed of his descent or his race (a term which was becoming in vogue to categorize Jews and perhaps an interesting predilection of times to come). With the same self-respect, and without much regret, he abandoned the dubious privilege of belonging, sensing that his isolation would serve him well.”56 Given the degree to which he felt persecuted, excluded, and rejected by his contemporaries, which was not only in the personal and social aspect of his daily life, but also generalized to the acceptance or ridicule of what Freud knew to be his very important work and contributions, he was in fact, isolated. In a letter to Karl Abraham, Freud commented on his perception that psychoanalysis was being stifled because of anti-Semitism, and the fact that there was an overwhelming number of Jews in the movement. The letter stated, “In my opinion we have as Jews, if we want to cooperate with other people, to develop a little masochism and be prepared to endure a certain amount of injustice. There is no other way of working together. You may be sure that if my name were Oberhuber, my new ideas would, despite all the other factors have met with far less resistance.”

UNDERSTANDING FREUD’S ‘JEWISHNESS’ Michael S. Roth, the curator for an exhibit entitled “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, made the following observation, “Freud turns to the question of how the traumas visited on a people affect their capacity to live in the world. He was, in essence, writing about how the Jews became the Jews.”57 So, what is it about being Jewish that was so important to Freud that he was unwilling even for the purpose of gaining acceptance for his work which was so passionately important to him, to ever consider conversion as did many of his peers in the arts and sciences during his era? Moreover, he 56

Ibid. 27. Naomi Pfefferman. “L.A. Exhibit Analyzes Freud’s Jewish Heritage” in Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. (April 14, 2000). Vol. 52, No. 32. 57

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was willing to endure great injustice including waiting an outrageous seven years to be promoted to a full professor, which was apparently delayed due to his Jewish identity and the controversy of his studies rather than any issue connected to his performance or with his qualifications. “Even though he was not religious, Freud believed that he was a Jew in his deepest nature and that he has maintained a great deal of what being Jewish meant, or ‘probably its very essence’, as Freud remarking about himself described it. He did not clearly define what was meant by the ‘essence of Judaism’ but one might conjecture that there were a number of elements of Jewish life that were deeply appealing to Freud. First and foremost, while clearly he was the academic achiever of the family, he was given great accolades and reinforcement to be the studious genius that the entire family perceived him to be. From an early age his peers were referred to as his study mates rather than as his playmates, and no disturbance to Freud’s studies were tolerated, which included the piano practice of his older sister, Anna. His father Jacob, studied Torah and Talmud, but during Freud’s early life there was little religious observance in the family. Perhaps the essence of Judaism aside from the great respect for learning and careful analytic thinking which is part and parcel to the study of the Torah might also have included the strong family ties, loyalty, and support for the success of the offspring. The Jewish value for the family was clearly an internalized one for Freud, who is noted by a number of his autobiographers for having achieved a rather idyllic home life with his wife, Martha and their children. While not an observant Jew interestingly, and perhaps unavoidably due to the social mores of the times, almost all of Freud’s closest social and professional contacts were Jews. His most avid audience was at the B’nai B’rith men’s lodge which of course was the Jewish community men’s group, and a group with whom Freud apparently felt great affiliation and support as noted in the following quote by Freud, ‘That you are Jews could only be welcome to me, for I was a Jew myself, and it had always seemed to me not only undignified by also quite nonsensical to deny it’. When he was nearly eighty, he said it again: ‘I hope it is not unknown to you’, he wrote to a Dr. Siegfried Fehl, ‘that I have always held faithfully to our people, and never pretended to be anything but what I am: a Jew from Moravia whose parents come from Austrian Galicia’.”58

58

Peter Gay. Ibid. 597.

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JEWISH INFLUENCE ON FREUD’S THEORIES Finally, one must wonder if part of this ‘essence of Judaism’ is the naturalistic acceptance of the importance of love and sex between married couples that is not only acknowledged both in Chassidic writings but in the Torah and the Talmud, as well. It is well understood that in Jewish law sexual relations between husband and wife was considered a mitzvah (one of the positive commandments, in this case) on the Sabbath and an expected happy part of everyday life. For many, The Song of Songs remains one of the all-time beautiful and romantic treatises of love believed to have been written by King Solomon for the Shulamite woman he wanted to make his wife. In his time of Austrian puritanical mores, one can only speculate what a breath of fresh air this naturalistic approach to sex might have been to an individual like Freud, who was beginning to wonder about the nature of human sexuality, and the qualities of universalism which had previously been rarely explored and certainly not discussed in any academic or professional manner. Irrespective of his tendency towards Jewish observance, Sigmund Freud was a Jew both by self proclamation and by the larger society’s need to categorize and identify him for the sake of discrimination and prejudice. Today the Jewish community is proud to claim him as one of our own, and another of the true innovators of the Twentieth Century.

5 THE PHENOMENON OF JEWISH HUMOR “No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you” Sholom Aleichem

Of all aspects of Jewish culture, perhaps one of the most universally familiar and possibly misunderstood is that of Jewish humor. Time Magazine in 1978 reported that while the Jewish population of the United States was approximately three percent, eighty percent of professional comedians were Jewish.59 What accounts for this remarkable over representation by Jews in the field of comedy entertainment? Is it as simple as asserted by some psychological theorists that Jewish humor is simultaneously masochistic and exhibitionistic, or is it that this explanation in and of itself totally misunderstands not only the notion of humor, but that of Jewish sensibilities and psychological determinism as well? Theodor Herzl was obviously very sensitive and offended by the self-deprecating nature of Jewish comedians when he said the following, “Evil and foolish self-ridicule is one of the Slavish habits which we have acquired over centuries of oppression. A free man does not regard himself as ridiculous, nor does he permit anyone else to ridicule him.”

THE MEANING OF HUMOR Sigmund Freud posed the notion that humor is a window into the unconscious, and that humor is a way to say things that people really feel, but cannot openly express either due to external or internal constraints.60 In a 1927 essay on humor Freud wrote, “Humor is a rare and precious gift. In what, then, does the humorous attitude consist, an attitude by means of which a person refuses to suffer, emphasizes the invincibility of his ego by the real world, victoriously maintaining the pleasure principal?”61 Freud tied his theory of humor to his earlier famous structural theory on the human 59

Time Magazine. October 2, 1978. Sigmund Freud. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. 61 Sigmund Freud. “Essay on Humor” 1927. 60

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psyche in the following way: “In humor, the super-ego makes the contribution from the position of a consoling parent to the threatened ego, it repudiates the reality of danger and produces the comforting illusion that the fearful ego is acting like a weak child and comforts with the position ‘Look! Here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children – just worth making a jest about’.”62 Jewish humor, of course, pre-dates the American expression in New York’s famous Vaudeville theatre and the later cultural phenomenon known as the ‘Borscht Belt’, which consisted of a series of resort hotels with entertainment that catered to Jewish clientele in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York particularly in the three decades starting around the 1940’s. Nathan Ausubel summarized this history in the following statement, “For some two thousand years the Jews have been sharpening their wit as well as their wits on the logical grindstone of the Talmud. This may explain why so much of Jewish humor has an intellectual character. But Jews, since the day of the Talmud, have been indestructible moralists and teachers; they have turned the joke, the quip, and humorous characterization into pedagogic aids with which to illustrate, to illuminate and to improve.”63 It is more than cliché to understand that perhaps the Jew was laughing in order not to cry. Ausubel claims that in Jewish humor comedy and tragedy are joined together. “Laughter through tears is what the Jewish folk philosophers choose to call it. You laugh in order to give yourself courage not to grieve. When it is distilled with pathos laughter achieves a certain balance of sanity.”64 Henry D. Spalding describes Jewish humor in the following explanation, “The true Jewish joke mirrors the history of the Jewish people. It is a reflection of their joy and anguish, their aspirations and discouragements, and their all too brief periods of social and economic well-being. It expresses their ages-old yearning for a world in which justice, mercy, understanding, and equality will prevail – not only for themselves but for all people. It portrays their quest for eternal truths.”65 Clearly, humor which dates back to the times of the Eastern European shtetl can easily be understood from this aforementioned defensive strategy as outlined by Freud, who also claimed that humor is not resigned but rebellious. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin gives an amazing example of this type of humor in the following: 62

Ibid. Nathan Ausubel. A Treasury of Jewish Humor. New York: Galahad Books, 1951. XVIII. 64 Ibid. 65 Henry D. Spalding. Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age. New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1969. xiv. 63

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“In the early 1970’s, Brezhnev announces to the Politburo that he is making a State visit to Poland, and that in honor of the trip he wishes to bring the Polish people a momentous gift. It is decided that Brezhnev should bring a large painting entitled Lenin in Poland. After all, what could be a more meaningful expression of Soviet-Polish solidarity than a portrait of Lenin, the god of Soviet communism, visiting Poland? Unfortunately, Lenin never visited Poland, and the ‘great masters’ of the Artists Union, their minds constricted by social realism, can come up with no ideas how to depict Lenin in Poland. Time is running short, and the Soviet leadership is growing desperate. Finally, it is decided to approach Rabinowitz, a dissident artist. ‘We know you have voiced many complaints against your country’, a visiting KGB delegation tells him. ‘But if you perform this service for the motherland, we promise you a large apartment and a lot of work’. Rabinowitz agrees to make the painting of Lenin in Poland. Three weeks later, the day before the trip, Brezhnev leads a delegation of Politburo members into a conference room. There stands Rabinowitz in front of a large canvas covered by a drop cloth, ‘Let us see the painting’, Brezhnev orders. Rabinowitz removes the covering, and everybody in the room gasps. The painting shows a man in bed with a woman. ‘Who is that man?’ someone shouts at Rabinowitz. ‘That’s Trotsky’. Another gasp. ‘And who is the woman?’ another Politburo member yells out. ‘Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife’. ‘And where is Lenin?’ Breznev thunders. ‘Lenin’s in Poland’.”66

In a religion or culture where questioning is not only tolerated but expected, it would only stand to reason that the humor would also creep to the very bounds of the sensibilities over what is sacred. Lawrence Epstein furthers the rebellion concept of Jewish humor in the following: “Jews were permit66

Joseph Telushin. Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews,. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992. 117-118.

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ted, even encouraged, to question. There is no prescribed set of beliefs a Jew must follow. It is a common tradition, for example, to question God’s ways not only to denounce evil in the world but also to search for truth. Truth is the highest value in the Jewish tradition. If God is allowed to be challenged, then it is understandable and even expected that less powerful forms of authority (parents, bosses, societies) can also be questioned. Such a challenge to authority is a hallmark of Jewish humor. Jewish comedians were notable in their willingness to test their audiences’ sense of which subjects and words were acceptable.”67 In this form, not only might the misery of poverty, horrid environmental conditions, and fear of anticipated violence be ameliorated, but it also gave an opportunity for the ‘under dog’ to take jabs at the dangerous enemy in such couched terms that it would not likely bring about retaliation or negative consequences. Additionally, from the perspective of Freud’s ‘pleasure principal’ the use of humor was most likely an enormous release from the tension and pain that the Jews in their situation felt much of the time. “Jews laugh at adversity as self-preservation. By laughing at the absurdities and cruelties of life they draw much of the sting from them. The laughter is rueful and ironic, it hits the nail on the head, lays bare the simple truth.”68 Arthur Berger explained this defensive strategy in the following way, “Jewish humor helped the Jews in the shtetl survive: it was a valuable coping technique. It kept them alert, it taught them how to laugh at themselves, and helped them deal with the anxiety that they experienced.” Berger continues with the idea that while the living conditions were inadequate and even though the Jews lived “on the thin margin of survival, their humor radiates warmth.”69 The following is an example of this type of humorous story: “During the last days of the reign of cruel Czar Nicholas, a Jew fell into the Moskva River and was in imminent danger of drowning. ‘Help! Help! I can’t swim!’, screamed the terror-stricken Jew. A squad of the Czar’s soldiers, loitering on the bank, laughed derisively, making no move to help the doomed man.

67 Lawrence J. Epstein. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. XVIII. 68 Nathan Ausubel. Ibid. XVI. 69 Arthur Asa Berger. “How Humor Heals: An Anatomical Perspective.” In European Journal of Psychology May 1, 2005.

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‘Save me!’, bellowed the poor soul again. But the soldiers only laughed louder. ‘Down with the Czar - up with the revolution!’, screamed the nimblewitted Jew hoarsely as he was going under for the third time. The soldiers immediately jumped into the river and dragged the man to safety. ‘We’ll teach you to defame the sacred name of the Czar’, they roared as they hauled the grinning Jew to jail.”70

Epstein notes that comedians in a general way help audiences laugh at, and thereby, ultimately deal with the difficulties and absurdities in life. “If Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding is correct, humor helps us deal with our fears. Humor is also a form of reconciliation with a world and the people in it who never live up to the ideal we hope for.”71

HUMOR AND ASSIMILATION Perhaps as interesting as the sheer number of successful Jewish comedians in American culture from the Vaudeville years to present is the question of why the greater culture was interested in the material of Jewish comedians. Epstein highlights this acceptance in the following statement, “Jews were proud of the comedians for gaining acceptance in American society earlier and more widely than the general Jewish community. Jewish comedians were pioneers for American Jews; the comedians cleared a pathway to acceptance. They made Americans comfortable with Jews and Jews comfortable with Americans.”72 One must wonder if part of that acceptance was promoted by the very trait of self deprecation that was so offensive to Herzl. Perhaps the wider public was able to put aside some of their fears, envy, and resentments they had harbored towards Jews which were fueled by the anti-Semites’ theories of ‘Jewish conspiracy for world domination’, and able to see that in the jokes about schmucks, schlimazels, and schlemiels there is an element of regular people dealing with the universal ‘human condition’. Perhaps the comedians were able to demonstrate to the general American public that as Jews they were like anyone else with the same inlaw dilemmas, marital issues, and every day life problems, they just had funny sounding words to describe them. ‘Jewish guilt’, ‘Jewish mothers’, annoying Jewish spouses, and disappointing Jewish children are all topics 70

Henry D. Spalding. Ibid. 10. Lawrence J. Epstein. Ibid. 275. 72 Ibid. 276. 71

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which had universal appeal and was perhaps more appealing to the general audience who was not used to publicly airing such topics. As it was being presented in an extreme form and called ‘Jewish’ it became more palatable to the larger audience. Jewish humor most often takes the form of the quip or the witticism which is by definition an intellectualized form of humor. And even in exceptions to this trend, such as the comedy of the Marx brothers, which was simultaneously slapstick and social consciousnessraising when they portrayed characters who mocked the establishment, the humor had an intellectual substrata. Part of what makes something funny, aside from comedic timing, is the shock value of that which borders on the unacceptable. Naturally, with the desensitization that comes from repetitive exposure to most stimuli, the Jewish comedian had to continue to push boundaries and continue to provoke his/her audience to thinking in new ways and often about previously unexplored topics. For many, Lenny Bruce was simply dismissed as profane and unacceptable, but to others, Lenny Bruce was understood as having an agenda to challenge the limits of free speech, a preciously held Constitutional right which is at the core of American freedom. Aside from the intelligence and in-depth thinking that goes into any type of social commentary, one is struck by an additional component in Jewish humor which is the compassion that a once ‘under-dog’ people have for those who remain disenfranchised and oppressed. It is important to remember here that the majority of the early American Jewish comedians were first generation Americans and, therefore, all the more aware of the protection and security offered by American democracy, even if it was not a perfect world free of stereotypes and prejudice. For many Jews, humor stands as a method to recognize one another. Regardless of other differences such as cultural, political, or national, Jews ‘get’ each other’s sense of humor, and are often able to connect at this level in a quite universal way. Whether from the United States, Israel, Europe, or South America, Jews are often able to transcend a language/cultural barrier through humor.

6 MAX WERTHEIMER: THE CHRONICLE OF A SUCCESSFUL, ASSIMILATED, GERMAN JEW “Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.” Max Wertheimer

There are several interesting facets to the anecdote about Max Wertheimer’s initial discovery regarding perception which ultimately led to the introduction of the theory of Gestalt psychology. Morton Hunt describes the story in the following, “On a train speeding through central Germany late in the summer of 1910, a young psychologist named Max Wertheimer stared at the landscape, intrigued by an illusion millions have taken for granted but that he felt, at that moment, required an explanation. Distant telegraph poles, houses, and hilltops, though stationary, seemed to be speeding along with the train. Why?”73 He continues with the infamous narrative of Wertheimer getting off the train at Frankfurt, purchasing a toy stroboscope (which was a toy based on the same principals being utilized by the blossoming motion picture industry) and spending an evening in his hotel room experimenting with the illusions produced by the toy and attempting to explain to himself the perceptual function which accounted for the illusion. “The next day Wertheimer called on Professor Friedrich Shumann, an expert on perception with whom he had studied at the University of Berlin who had recently moved to the University of Frankfurt, told him what he had observed and what he guessed was the explanation, and asked his opinion. Schumann could cast no light on the matter but offered Wertheimer the use of his laboratory and equipment, including a new tachistoscope (a

73

Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology, (Doubleday, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland, 1993), 280. 4499

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more sophisticated version of the toy stroboscope) of his own design.”74 Schumann also introduced Wertheimer to two young psychology researchers in the department who could serve as volunteers for Wetheimer’s experiments. They were Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka, who though younger than Wertheimer were also interested in the higher level mental phenomena that was being ignored by the New Psychology of the Wundtian physiologists. The three remained friends and colleagues for the remainder of Wertheimer’s life, and together through years of careful research and publishing developed the theory of Gestalt psychology which challenged the very foundation upon which rested the predominate theories of modern psychology of their time. Wertheimer described the fundamental formula of Gestalt theory as an understanding that there are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual parts, but where the individual processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. Gestalt theory attempts to determine and explain the nature of such wholes.

WERTHEIMER’S EARLY LIFE But before delving further into additional detail about the work of Max Wertheimer, an understanding about his background, particularly that of an assimilated German Jew is of greater interest here. One detail of the aforementioned anecdote is that Wertheimer was on a train to a vacation destination, and on a whim removed himself from the train and embarked on a six-month foray into an altogether new and unplanned direction in his life. It is intriguing to even consider the pragmatics that would allow for such flexibility and freedom in an individual’s life. Max Wertheimer was born on April 15, 1880 in Prague, the son of Rosa Zwicker and Wilhelm Wertheimer, a business educator. His father became wealthy from the success of his private school for individualized instruction in business and accounting. He was also a government consultant who drafted laws for warehouse practices in Austria and Hungary, was active in the International Order of Oddfellows (a philanthropic and benevolent organization), and was a prominent member of the Jewish community.75 Wertheimer attended a Catholic elementary school and a municipal high school before going to Charles University in Prague to study Law in 1898. After two years of law he changed his focus of study to philosophy and psychology and transferred to the University of Berlin in 1901. In 1904 74 75

Ibid. 281. American National Biography.

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he went to the University of Wurzburg where he obtained his Doctorate in psychology later that year. From 1904-1910, while being fully supported by his father, he worked at psychological and physiological institutes in Berlin, Vienna, Wurzburg, and Prague doing follow-up work to his doctoral dissertation on the detection of guilt with word association techniques.76 At the time of the infamous train ride, Wertheimer had been doing research at the University of Vienna on the inability to read and was on his way to the Rhineland for a vacation. Between 1912 and 1929, Wertheimer worked at the University of Frankfurt and then the University of Berlin. Along with his colleagues Kohler and Koffka, the Gestalt theory became the major rival to the dominant schools of psychology of the time which were Structuralism, Functionalism, Psychoanalysis, and Behaviorism. During World War I, Wertheimer worked as a civilian and developer for the German military on an underwater sound direction finder, a forerunner to sonar, which he patented in 1917 with Erich Von Hornboster.77 It is remarkable to think that just over a decade later; this same individual would be in a position of needing to flee for his life due to hate and anti-Semitism. In 1923, Wertheimer married Anne Caro, his student at the University of Berlin. The Wertheimers had five children (one died at birth) and were later divorced in 1942. In 1929 he was the chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. By 1933, with the rise of Nazism and his obvious understanding as a Jew of how this might threaten his own and his family’s safety, he decided to leave Germany to go to Czechoslovakia where he remained until the situation worsened there as well. Deciding it was necessary to leave Europe altogether, Wertheimer and his family immigrated to the United States where he secured a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. Wertheimer is described as a “poetic, musically gifted, warm, humorous and cheerful individual. He was an exciting and fluent speaker; his ideas brimmed and bubbled over. But reining in his thoughts to set them down on paper was so difficult and painful for him that he was genuinely phobic about writing.”78 Wertheimer never held a major position in the psychological academic establishment either in Germany or later after his immigration to the United States. In Germany his way was impeded by anti-Semitism and ultimately his lack of publications hindered his career, though he is 76

Ibid. Ibid. 78 Morton Hunt. Ibid. 285. 77

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noted in one history of the Gestalt movement as the “intellectual father, thinker, and innovator of the movement.”79 While he had finally been made a full professor at the University of Frankfurt in 1929, it was only four years later that he had to flee Germany with the news of Hitler being made Chancellor, which resulted in his eventual immigration to the United States and his appointment to the New School for Social Research.

A NEW LIFE AT THE NEW SCHOOL The New School proved to be a haven for Wertheimer on multiple levels. The school had been founded in 1919 and was intended to provide a refuge for radical thinkers and boasted a distinguished faculty. By 1922, due to financial problems, the school underwent a massive reorganization. “That year, Alvin Johnson, a gifted and far-sighted young academician took over as director. By the spring of 1933, the New School was primarily an experimental institution devoted to adult education and modern art, with a full-time faculty of only four or five. That April, the Nazis expelled all Jewish and socialist scholars from their university positions in Germany, and Johnson saw an opportunity for the New School. Within six months, he raised enough money to bring a dozen, and later a score, of the most distinguished refugee scholars to the New School. To accommodate them, he established a self-governing research institute with the New School called the University in Exile. Johnson thus transplanted a group of German social scientists to the United States and fulfilled his pledge of a decade before to build the New School into a major institution for social science thought.”80 Max Wertheimer was among the original twelve refugees, and as the only psychologist among them, helped form the New School’s graduate program in philosophy and psychology. To prevent the European faculty from becoming isolated, Johnson established a General Seminar, which was an interdisciplinary weekly meeting attended by the entire faculty. Wertheimer led a second seminar on the methodology of social sciences which continued from 1933 to 1943. “The entire New School faculty attended Wertheimer’s seminar for they respected him as a creative teacher and brilliant scholar.”81 Until his death, Wertheimer taught all levels of psychology and philosophy at the New School including basic Problems in Psychology, The Psychology of Music and Art, Gestalt Psychology of Teaching and Learning, Logic and Scientific Method, and On Better Think79

Ibid. Edward Hoffman. Ibid. 88. 81 Ibid. 89. 80

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ing. Notably, Wertheimer, was considered by Abraham Maslow to be his most inspiring teacher, and considered him to be the personification of the ‘self-actualized’ man. Along with his friend, Albert Einstein, Wertheimer was deeply involved in organized efforts to place refugee scholars from Europe in appropriate position in the United States, which was made more difficult because of the Depression and the anti-Semitism which existed in some higher educational institutions. Wertheimer summarized his work on the Gestalt axiom in a lecture in which he stated that the whole of anything is almost always different from the sun of its parts. “From the outset, Wertheimer saw Gestalt theory as far more than an explanation of perception; he believed it would prove to be the key to learning, motivation, and thinking”82 While neither Wertheimer, Kohler, nor Koffka, held major positions in American Academia, there is no question that the theory of Gestalt psychology changed the nature of modern psychology in the 20th Century.

82

Morton Hunt. Ibid. 286.

7 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PREJUDICE: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD “Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” Elie Wiesel

The fields of social psychology and sociology have contributed greatly to our understanding of prejudice and the effects of persecution, and while many volumes have been written about these effects, no discussion about the psychology of Judaism can really be complete without this dimension. In a classic Woody Allen scene from the movie Annie Hall, the character Alvy, played by Allen, is quizzing his friend Rob about whether he picks up on routine or common anti-Semitic slurs: ALVY I distinctly heard it. He muttered under his breath, "Jew."

ROB You're crazy!

ALVY No, I'm not. We were walking off the tennis court, and you know, he was there and me and his wife, and he looked at her and then they both looked at me, and under his breath he said, "Jew."

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PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDAISM ROB Alvy, you're a total paranoid. ALVY Wh- How am I a paran-? Well, I pick up on those kind o' things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said ... uh, "Did you eat yet or what?" and Tom Christie said, "No, didchoo?" Not, did you, didchoo eat? Jew? No, not did you eat, but Jew eat? Jew. You get it? 83

Jew eat?

What is funny about this exchange is two-fold; first is the supposed oversensitivity to perceived prejudice and the idea that one can hear the implication of prejudice or racial slur wherever one chooses to believe it exists, and the second is that the very perception of a behavior can be induced by believing that person will behave in that way. So, if one with anti-Semitic ideas believes the stereotype that Jews are overly-sensitive and neurotic, Woody Allen’s behavior in this scene confirms it. The worry about a perceived threat made that threat a realistically experienced phenomenon. Scott Plous refers to a 1997 study in which a phenomenon called ‘stereotype threat’ was confirmed. Apparently the threat that one’s behavior will confirm a negative stereotype is so anxiety producing that the anxiety negatively affects performance and tends to confirm the very behavior about which the individual is concerned.84

83 http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a/annie-hall-scriptscreenplay-woody.html. 84 S. Plous. “The Psychology of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: An Overview.” in S. Plous (Ed.) Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. 3-48.

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THE IRONY OF HATRED While there is little in a recent volume by David Mamet with which this author agrees, one especially valid point is made in the book about the ability for anyone to logically confirm even the most unintelligent and unreasonable beliefs about a group if they so choose. His example is that antiSemites will fault Jews for both passive and aggressive behavior and will assign both of those traits as fundamental and intrinsic personality flaws. So, they may claim that Jews in their passive position during the Holocaust brought about their own victimization, but also the ‘aggressive nature’ of Jews is at fault in the recent Palestinian conflicts in Israel.85 Clearly, this irrational projection of the positive/negative traits was also part of why the most talented and intelligent segment of European culture was regularly elevated to positions of status and subsequently slapped back down into an oppressed status and living situation. When the Jews’ talents in finance (as money-lenders) or medicine were needed, they tended to be elevated to even such high positions as Court Physician in Spain prior to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. But when circumstances necessitated, Jews were always readily accessible to be made into scapegoats, such as with the outbreak of the Black Plague in Fourteenth Century Europe when clearly someone had to be blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Hatred is the most virulent of human emotions. It not only sickens the individual who contains this emotional disease, but it also appears to have a contagion factor comparable to any number of physical diseases. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League defines antiSemitism in the following remarks, “Scholars who have studied the subject have developed many definitions. They have distinguished various threads and forms of anti-Semitism, such as theological anti-Semitism (driven by anger over Jewish unwillingness to accept Christian doctrines), racial antiSemitism (regarding the Jews as inherently evil on account of some sort of ‘corruption in the blood’), political and social anti-Semitism (focusing on the supposedly evil influence of Jews in government, business, and culture), and scientific anti-Semitism (using trumped-up Darwinist ideas to demonstrate the biological inferiority of the Jews).”86 Foxman also refers to the disease quality of anti-Semitism, and refers even to the phenomenon of the disease lying dormant in an individual, often for long periods of time and 85 David Mamet. The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. New York: Nextbook Schocken, 2006. 107. 86 Abraham H. Foxman. Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism. San Francisco: Harper, 2003. 41.

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showing symptoms only during a period of duress. “And at times when a community is vulnerable, it can spread rapidly causing an outbreak that is equivalent to an epidemic.”87 Foxman expresses concern that the world may be entering yet another phase during which anti-Semites could seize on a number of world political issues such as the after-math of 9/11 terrorist attack on New York, the Intifada and Palestinian situation in Israel, the over-all instability in the Middle East, and the world-wide unrest that exist on a number of international fronts that could cause a massive resurrection of anti-Semitism. He expresses concern that forty percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel, which is a small country surrounded by avid enemies who would like to see her destruction. Additionally, he is especially concerned about the Internet which is increasingly being used to propagate unfounded and particularly hateful rhetoric about the Jews and other minority groups. Rather than being the personification of such terms as ‘paranoid’, ‘over-sensitive’, or ‘insecure’, perhaps any group who has regularly come under attack, has been the target of hatred and oppression repeatedly throughout history, and who has explicitly been threatened with annihilation, a certain amount of vigilance is not only warranted but perhaps a necessity for continued survival.

MINORITY GROUP DYNAMICS Sociologists often point to the kind of group identity and group cohesiveness that is created when a minority must band together in order to exist. Some people question which tendency is more dangerous for a group attempting to maintain an identity, to be closely associated and therefore a potential easy target, or spread out which has as a risk the possibility of assimilation or acculturation to the degree of possible extinction. “Jewish difference is intricately interwoven with a sense of a unique history – in its sacred form the covenant with God, in its secular form Jewish perseverance and success, the nobility of discrimination and the resulting identification with the oppressed. Indeed, the Holocaust has itself become a cornerstone of the modern secular Jewish identity, giving Jews a continuing sense of uniqueness and conveying that one’s history and one’s people’s history have an epic quality and therefore, are of some universal significance not unlike the Hebrew Bible.”88 In an interesting essay entitled, “The New antiSemitism,” Jack Fischel makes the following insightful observation, “The 87

Ibid. 42. Jack Kugelmass. Key Texts in American Jewish Culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 9. 88

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violence is not limited however, to physical attacks alone. The vehemence of the new anti-Semitism also manifests itself by an insidious effort to deny not only the legitimacy of Israel but Jewish history, as well. This verbal assault rejects the Jewish claims to the territory of Israel as having no basis in history, traditions, or law and demands that the Jewish state either abandon its legal and political status as a nation or cease to exist. Altogether, a position not relegated to the beliefs of the Arabs alone, but shared by many on both the left and the radical right. Indeed, Jewish identity itself is called into question, whereby the descent of contemporary Jews from the Hebrews of ancient Israel is denied.”89 As pointed our earlier in this volume, certainly positive traits such as a sense of humor, helpful for survival, as well as a sense of optimism prevailed even in the most wretched of living conditions for Jews from the Middle Ages through the middle of the Twentieth Century. In minority politics, there is often a drive to both be part of a group and to rise above the group. This often causes conflict for the individual because ‘success’ in the major culture often requires a certain turning away from the minority culture. Obviously, this is perceived as an affront to members ‘left behind’ who will regularly then characterize the ‘successful’ individual as a failure to himself/herself, the identity, and the people. An excellent example of this group dynamic is evident in the following insight by Lawrence Epstein, “In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, very few American Jews intermarried. Jewish comedians, on the other hand, frequently married Gentile women (for example, George Burns, George Jessel, Phil Silvers, all the Marx Brothers, and Bert Lahr). Had the American Jewish community known that Jewish comedians were prophetic in their romantic attachment to Gentiles, perhaps the concerns would have been greater, but interfaith marriages did not rise precipitously until the beginning of the 1960’s; by 1990, more than half of Jews who were getting married chose a Gentile partner. The comedians did not see themselves as romantic Jewish forerunners. They saw themselves as Americans and did not want to endanger their assimilation success by reverting to a traditional pattern of Jewish life. Not always handsome, Jewish male comedians found themselves able to date and wed beautiful Gentile women. The lures of Gentile America were powerful indeed.”90 Another component of minority identification is the expression of what Sigmund Freud characterized as an ego defense called ‘Reaction For89 Jack R. Fischel. “The New Anti-Semitism.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Summer 2005. 224-234. 90 Lawrence Epstein. Ibid. 95.

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mation’. This may be understood as replacing a threatening or unacceptable feeling with a more positive one. So, rather than resenting the majority culture and rejecting it for its exclusivity and intolerance, the majority culture is idealized and embraced even if this means embracing a certain amount of self-contempt and discomfort with one’s own origins. It is perhaps this dynamic that has so often been pointed out as the exemplification of Jewish masochism.

JEWISH STEREOTYPES There are a number of stereotypes with which Jews have been labeled as far back as the reference to Shylock by Shakespeare. There are some who prefer to minimize the issue and even challenge why it is necessary to make something bigger out of a harmless joke. But Plous points out that, “Stereotypes are not only harmful in their own right; they do damage by fostering prejudice and discrimination.”91 Sadly, the initial cultural, racial, and ethnic studies performed by the early anthropologists and psychologists did little more than reflect the ignorance and bias held by the larger culture. So the erroneous image of the childlike naïve ‘Native’ or the less intelligent African actually was perpetuated by these so-called ‘scientific’ studies, and tragically fueled the arsenal of racism. Plous continues with the comment, “Following the Holocaust, several influential theorists came to regard prejudice as pathological.”92 This change in attitude gave rise to a far greater cultural sensitivity in all aspects of studying groups, which included rethinking the language bias implicit in such tests being used for the measurement of intelligence. There are a number of interesting stereotypes some of which have been applied to Jews since the Middle Ages, and some which were more recently relevant to the generation of Americans who had already begun the process of assimilation. The persona of the shrewd businessman who was then metamorphosed into the miserly crooked shyster, has obvious links to the profession of money lending in earlier centuries in Europe. Unlike Jack Benny’s somewhat endearing portrayal of penny-pinching or cheapness, when the phrase ‘Jew down’ is used, it is meant to imply a lack of ethics and a malevolent posture maintained by that individual with a willingness to take advantage of others in business or in everyday dealings. Another infamous caricature is that of the ‘Jewish Mother’ who is most certainly not just a protective loving mother figure. She is an over91 92

S. Plous. Ibid. Ibid.

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involved, narcissistic, and annoying figure who actually thwarts the development of her children by infantilizing them and preventing their healthy separation from her. It seems that this persona is closely linked with the embarrassment that many first generation Americans had with the immigrant parents who too often looked and behaved in ways that was reminiscent of the ‘old country’ and therefore humiliating to the younger generation trying to fit in with American culture. To make matters worse, the stereotypical guilt that was often the main weapon of defense used by the ‘Jewish Mother’, would in fact be rather powerful in this dynamic since the shame one felt for the odd looking/behaving parent would be counterbalanced by the knowledge of how much that parent had sacrificed on his/her children’s behalf and the resulting shame one would feel about those feelings. Is it any wonder that the stereotype has provided so much material for Jewish comedians since the 1930’s? Both the ‘Jewish American Princess’ and the ‘Nice Jewish Boy’ are much more recent stereotypes that result from the circumstance of affluence achieved by the previously mentioned children of the immigrants. These first generation Americans found a way to look and behave like ‘regular’ Americans and achieved notable success in the fields of business, medicine, arts, and entertainment despite a significant amount of antiSemitism that existed in the culture throughout their formative years. For this generation a wish for education, continued assimilation, material success, and commitment to the family were the values most important to bestow upon their children. The ‘Jewish American Princess’ stereotype includes characteristics of being an over-indulged young woman who is selfish, snobby, spoiled, materialistic, complaining, and high maintenance. While often being seen as originating on the East Coast, (New York, Long Island, New Jersey) it is a term that ultimately was aimed at young Jewish women throughout the United States. An interesting example of group dynamics is that for a short while in the 1980’s, the term ‘Jewish American Princess’ was not necessarily experienced as a negative term by some young Jewish women. This may be an example of group identification pointed out by Plous as, “. . .the differences within groups will be minimized and the difference between groups will be exaggerated.”93 One wonders if this is an example of these women being able to laugh at themselves or whether there were aspects of the stereotype that were actually ego-syntonic, such as possessing the accoutrements of wealth and success, and a minimization of those traits that were 93

S. Plous. Ibid.

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less attractive. Unfortunately, whether conscious or not, taking on the persona of the stereotype tends to promote the reality of the prejudice and, as mentioned before, positively reinforces those individuals who are invested in the prejudice. It is intriguing to analyze exactly what defines a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’, and to understand the origins of the persona. Interestingly, this stereotype originated within the American Jewish community as a way of positively describing a young man who would be deemed a good marriage choice. “The qualities of the Nice Jewish Boy are derived from the Ashkenazic idea of edelkeit (Yiddish for nobility) and embrace such qualities as studiousness, gentleness, and sensitivity such as found in a Talmudic scholar.”94 In the secular Jewish world, the ‘Nice Jewish Boy’ would not have leanings towards Talmudic studies, but would instead have high achievement in education, business, and would demonstrate important values towards family, his community, and the greater world. As might be expected though, however greatly this persona differs from the idealized version of masculinity in the greater culture is how negative the stereotype might become. So, if men in the larger American culture are expected to be ruggedly individualistic, physically aggressive, and emotionally restrained, might not the image of the ‘Nice Jewish Boy’ look increasingly like the neurotic, timid, somewhat paranoid image of Woody Allen? In fact, the negative side of the stereotype portrays a Jewish man who is easily manipulated and exploited both by his ‘Jewish Mother’ and his ‘American Jewish Princess’ wife. He is little more than a servant to his mother’s guilt induced apron strings, and his demanding wife’s consumerism, neither which promote a healthy adult identity. Interestingly, to rebel against this stereotype, many Jewish males are seen as ‘fetishing’ non-Jewish women by whom they have been sought out for financial and emotional security, as it is presumed by the larger community that Jewish males achieve financial success, are devoted to their families, do not abuse alcohol, and do not abuse their families. While much of this stereotype has become dated and no longer seen as pertinent, there are still strands of it that exist in the larger community. In a survey by the American Defense League conducted in 1998, it appears that finally some of these stereotypes and prejudices are diminishing in the over-all American public. From 1964 to 1998 the percentage of people polled who believed that “too much power in the business world was held by Jews” declined from twenty-nine percent to sixteen percent. Forty 94

Wikipedia reference to Daniel Boyar in Unheroic Conduct. Los Angeles, Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

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percent of the people polled in 1964 believed that Jews have “lots of irritating faults” whereas only fourteen percent affirmed that notion in 1998. The opinion that “Jews use shady practices” declined from forty-two percent to thirteen percent and finally the attitude that “Jewish business men are shrewd and unfair towards their competition” declined from thirty-five percent to fourteen percent.95 American Jews today continue to struggle with achieving a compromise between maintaining the integrity of their own identity as a people while regularly engaging in and being part of the larger culture. Perhaps there is a balance between being lulled into the complacency of pre-WWII Europe where few Jews believed how horrific their world would become, and a constant vigilance that borders on the paranoid. More intensively than in the past, many leaders in the American Jewish community believe that through frank conversation and a persistent participation by Jews in the world of interfaith dialogues continued understanding and respect will be forged.

95

American Defense League 1998 Survey.

8 ABRAHAM MASLOW: A PERSONALITY OF CONTRADICTIONS “Our spiritual height, our characterological height… is in principle unlimited… I have no idea how far it is possible for the human to develop…[As for the future], what kind of culture would be generated by one thousand self-actualizing people, and their families?” Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow is best known for the development of the school of Humanistic Psychology based on his theory of the hierarchy of human needs and the ultimate potential for human self-actualization. Born in Brooklyn in 1908 of Jewish Russian immigrants, his is a life story filled with both joy and angst and a depth of thought and feelings including perhaps, oversensitivity to the world outside of himself which he often experienced as hurtful and demeaning. Maslow’s account of his early life is especially intriguing because it is filled with horrid memories of his family life, especially memories of his mother who he experienced as a sadistic and small-minded woman. “His relationship with his mother was a different matter entirely. He grew to maturity with an unrelieved hatred for her and never achieved the slightest reconciliation. He even refused to attend her funeral. He characterized Rose M. as a cruel, ignorant, and hostile figure, one so unloving as to nearly induce madness in her children. In all of Maslow’s references to his mother, some uttered publicly while she was still alive, there is not one that expresses any warmth or affection. In this respect, Maslow differs from several major psychological theorist of our times such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who were much more devoted to their mothers than their fathers and who have been referred to by some modern critics as ‘mama’s boys’.”96 While he also had a strained relationship with his father throughout much of his early life, Maslow was able to reconcile with his father in adulthood. It is interesting to note that these relationships are a far cry from the typical close-knit and attached relationships one often expects in Jewish 96

Edward Hoffman. The Right To Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1988. 7. 6655

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families, and it was important to Maslow to have a very different family relationship with his beloved wife and children.

MASLOW’S EARLY LIFE AND SENSITIVITIES Maslow’s parents were uneducated people who enormously valued education for their children. Maslow was the first born son, and as often true of many first born Jewish males, was invested by his parents with great hopes for achievement. While their home life was devoid of ritual observance and was essentially a secular Jewish home, Maslow often felt abused by his mother’s manipulative use of a frightening and punishing God. “Although rarely observant of Jewish religious ritual, she was a superstitious woman who often disciplined the boy for minor misbehaviors by threatening him with God’s relentless punishment.”97 Maslow described himself as a “terribly unhappy boy…my family was a miserable family and my mother was a horrible creature. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends. With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic.” Maslow’s claimed that at his Bar Mitzvah during the traditional speech given by the boy to express love and gratitude for his parents, he became overwrought with feelings of hypocrisy and ran out of the sanctuary in tears. His mother explained to those sitting around her that he had become overemotional by his feelings of love for her. There are a number of stories Maslow recounted of great sadism and aggression that he experienced from his mother including some during which she hurt pets or destroyed items of treasured property. Some of the examples are so extreme that there is some question about whether his memories were accurate or were unconscious symbols of how he experienced growing up with her in that family. Interestingly, none of his siblings were aware of the recounted events, experienced their mother in the same way, nor had the deeply imbedded hatred that he had for their mother. Maslow was acutely aware of anti-Semitism and regularly felt victimized by others’ prejudiced and unjust opinions about him based on predetermined attitudes about Jews. “As an adult, he often referred both privately and publicly to the pervasive and intense anti-Semitism he experienced during his formative years and its profound effect upon his early outlook. He also referred vaguely to anti-Semitic experiences later on, from the 1920’s through the 1940’s. Maslow’s family members and friends generally found such reminiscences puzzling, for he had grown up in predominately Jewish neighborhoods and attended predominately Jewish schools. They 97

Ibid. 2.

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concluded, therefore, that Maslow must have been more emotionally sensitive to prejudice than most of his contemporaries. More than eliciting fear or anger, the hostility he encountered as a youngster concerning his Jewishness bewildered him and made him curious about why people should feel this way about one another.”98 Though Maslow described himself as a miserable child living in the worst family circumstances, his self-esteem seemed not to suffer. While he actually finished high school with mediocre grades, and was not accepted in his first attempt to go to Cornell University, Maslow described himself in the following way, “I am a student at the College of the city of New York. My career through high school was distinguished and now in college promises to be brilliant.” In fact, because of failing trigonometry and making several C’s in required courses including art, chemistry, and Spanish, Maslow was placed on academic probation.”99 After deciding not to study law which was pushed by his parents and instead enrolling in medical sciences, Maslow made the following important and quite sensitive observation during a medical demonstration of a mastectomy being performed by a surgeon, “Finally, he cut off the breast, tossing this object off through the air onto a marble counter where it landed with a plop, I have remembered that plop for thirty years. It had changed from a sacred object into a lump of fat, garbage, to be tossed into a pail. There were, of course, no prayers, no rituals, or ceremonies of any kind, as there most certainly would be in most preliterate societies.”100 Shortly after this brief foray into medicine, Maslow decided to study psychology and earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degrees from the City College of New York. It was after his graduate studies that Maslow became even more acutely aware of the problem of anti-Semitism, “After musing about his future, Maslow reflected at length upon his Jewish background. With the prospect of finishing graduate studies, he was faced with the painful reality of seeking a college teaching position as a Jew in the midst of the antiSemitism that flourished in Depression era academia. Maslow already had been urged by friends and faculty alike to consider changing his name from Abraham to something less ethnic like Axelrod, and in fact, Maslow’s brothers had anglicized their equally Jewish-sounding names.”101 He steadfastly refused to do so, and Edward Hoffman remarked about Maslow’s attitude about his name in the following comment, “In later years, Maslow 98

Ibid. 3. Ibid. 19. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 47. 99

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used to joke that the name Abraham served admirably as a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ filtering out the ‘prejudiced bastards’ from his life but allowing in those who accepted him for who he was.”102 On the opposite pole from feeling somewhat oppressed and persecuted because of being born Jewish, Maslow also held extremely high self regard on such things as his intelligence. “For the rest of his life, he regarded his IQ (reported by his mentor Thorndike to be 195) as a mark of triumph. At parties and social gatherings, he liked to spark conversations by casually inquiring about someone’s IQ and then volunteering his own.”103 One might ponder if this was an expression of high self-esteem, arrogance, or insecurity, but apparently because of his good nature it was not seen as offensive behavior.

TOWARDS GREATNESS Most striking in the innovative psychological theories developed by Maslow is the optimism about the nature of human beings that he believed to be evident. In his introduction to Toward a Psychology of Health, Maslow makes the following assumptions: 1.

Humans have an essential biologically based inner nature

2.

Individuals’ inner nature is both unique and species-wide

3.

It is possible to scientifically study this inner nature

4.

This inner nature is not intrinsically destructive or evil (and in fact the basic needs for life, safety and security, for belongingness and affection, for respect and self-respect, and for self-actualization are on their face either neutral, pre-moral, or positively ‘good’).

5.

Since this nature is either neutral or good it is best to bring it out or encourage it.

6.

If this essential core is denied or suppressed, the individual will become ill in some way.

7.

This inner nature is weak and delicate and subtle and can easily be overcome by habit, cultural pressure, and wrong attitudes towards it.

102 103

Ibid. 180. Ibid. 74.

MASLOW: PERSONALITY OF CONTRADICTIONS 8.

Though weak, this inner nature does not disappear in the normal person and perhaps not even in the sick person…it persists, underground forever pressing for actualization.

9.

This core must be articulated through discipline, deprivation, frustration, pain, and tragedy. These important experiences have something to do with a sense of achievement and ego strength and therefore with the sense of healthy self-esteem and selfconfidence.104

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Most interesting in this view of human nature is the drive for every individual to ultimately evolve into their own greatest potential. Maslow wrote, “The quest for exotic sensations can sometimes wind up in meanness, loss of compassion or in the extreme of sadism…The great lesson from the true mystics (is that) the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends and family, in one’s backyard. To be looking elsewhere is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”105 At the same time Maslow wrote about ‘self-actualized’ people in a highly idealized and transcendent description, “Self-actualizing people, those who have come to a high level of maturation, health, and selffulfillment, have so much to teach us that sometimes they seem almost like a different breed of human beings. But, because it is so new, the exploration of the highest reaches of human nature and of its ultimate possibilities and aspiration is a difficult and tortuous task. It has involved for me the continuous destruction of cherished axioms, the perpetual coping with seeming paradoxes, contradictions and vaguenesses and the occasional collapse around my ears of long established, firmly believed in and seemingly unassailable laws of psychology. Often these have turned out to be no laws at all but only rules for living in a state of mild and chronic psychopathology and fearfulness, of stunting, and crippling and immaturity which we don’t notice because others have this same disease that we have.”106 Maslow believed that self-actualizing people have a sense of mission, and they are able to live in their culture without succumbing to their culture. “They settle down to an accepting, calm, good-humored, everyday effort to improve the culture; usually from within rather than to reject it and fight it from without.” Maslow saw this part of his theory as a ‘positive psychology’ or ‘ortho104 Abraham Maslow. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostand Reinhold, 1968. 3-4. 105 Edward Hoffman. Ibid. 331-2. 106 Abraham Maslow. Ibid. 72.

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psychology’ of the future that deals with fully functioning and healthy human beings, and not alone with normally sick ones. In this way then, it is a psychology of ‘being and becoming’.”107 One might be struck with the similarities between the aforementioned aspects of Maslow’s theory and Jewish mysticism which also highlights the idea and ideals of everyday life, gratitude, and celebration of life itself. In the Torah, some of the most notable figures are regular individuals who were selected by God to fulfill their greatest potential often through the utmost anguish and adversity. Though clearly not a religious man, it is seemingly beyond coincidence that so much of Maslow’s ideas and writing correspond so clearly to the greatest teachings from the Talmud and the Torah. Who might Abraham Maslow have been had he not been born into his family of origin, or if he had been born a non-Jew? Is it perhaps that the most challenging aspects of his life were the very components which made him the best that he could be? It seems more than ironic that a man who came from an environment which seemingly so lacked in nurture or compassion could evolve into a man who produced theories such as Maslow’s. Perhaps Maslow is a testimony himself to the very theory of the goodness and growth potential of humankind that he gave to the world.

107

Ibid.

9 THE JEWISH FAMILY: A CULTURAL PHENOMENON “The presence of God abides in the home in which a husband and wife live up to the spiritual significance of their wedlock” Words of the Sages

The Jewish family has long been an institution of interest from the time of the Torah to its exploration in present day books, films, and sociological research. Certainly stereotypes such as the ‘Jewish mother’, the devoted, highly successful and therefore remote father, the well-educated sons who are to be the future successful husband/father/businessmen, and finally the ‘Jewish Princess’ daughter, destined to be high maintenance but an asset to her future husband, are all part of the stereotypes that go into the Jewish family. Cultural lore has it that Jewish men do not drink excessively, abuse their wives or children, and will be indulgent with their families. Jewish women do not abuse drugs or neglect their children. And of course, Jewish children do not have problems with the law or get involved in destructive relationships, crime, drugs, or the other myriad of serious problems which can potentially trouble our youth of today. In fact, one might believe from the stereotypes that the Jewish family is ‘perfect’. While of course, there is no such thing as a perfect family and, therefore, the pressure of living up to an unrealistic image for some families causes additional strain and even a reluctance to get help when needed. Nonetheless, it is interesting to understand the historical basis for some of these stereotypes.

THE ROLE OF THE FAMILY For an oppressed people it would stand to reason that the family might serve as a safe haven to provide not only physical security and nurture, but also the place where actual identity and inculcation occurs through the teaching of ritual and the discussion and modeling of values. Judaism is a religion which equally values the observance of the rituals both in the home as well as the synagogue, an example being the importance of the celebration of Shabbat in the home as no less important than the observance or attending Shabbat services in synagogue. Blu Greenberg, an orthodox Jew, 7711

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feminist, and writer commented, “There is an underlying belief that there is a personal God, Who revealed Himself in history, Who gave us the Torah, Who commanded – and commands us – to live in a certain way. That ‘special way’ includes, among other things, observance of the Sabbath and the holidays, daily prayer, kosher food laws, a well-defined code of morality and sexual ethics, and a very high value placed on Torah learning and education of the young. It is these very things, these modes of behavior that make the traditional Jewish household so overtly different from any other.”108 It is purported that when Blu Greenberg, was questioned by the Dalai Lama about how Jews have survived so long outside their ancestral home, her answer stated succinctly was, “the family.”109 Along with the encouragement from God that Abraham should not give up on the prospect of fathering a child with Sarah, came the hallowed role of parent in Jewish life. According to Julie Hilton Dana, “One of the most beautiful and meaningful Shabbat ceremonies is the weekly custom of blessing one’s children. It’s truly indicative of the holiness and importance of family ties in Jewish life. Traditionally done by the father at the Friday night dinner table after Shalom Aleichem, it is now often given by either or both parents. Blessing the children indicates to them in a concrete way that the parent-child relationship is something sacred.”110 In Genesis (48) Jacob, an old and ill man is overcome with emotion that he has now had the opportunity to see his son Joseph once again and more miraculously, the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh. He offers a blessing at the time which appears confusing, as the younger boy receives the blessing generally reserved for the eldest. However, one commentator seems to glean the most significant meaning (rather than that of rights to inheritance) to be as follows: “Every blessing bestowed by man is at the core a prayer, since it asks God to help him accomplish what he by himself cannot. Yet the blessing is more than prayer, for it assigns a decisive role to the one who pronounces it. Placing his hand in the solemn act, the Patriarch sees himself as God’s co-worker and as an essential link between the generations. Man cannot take God’s place; but neither can God take the place 108

Blu Greenberg. How To Run a Traditional Jewish Household. Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aaronson, Inc., 1989. xxi. 109 Yosef I. Abramowitz and Rabbi Susan Silverman. Jewish Family and Life. New York: Golden Books, 1997. 9. 110 Julie Hilton Dana. The Jewish Parents’ Almanac. Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aaronson, Inc., 1994. 157.

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of parents and grand-parents in the shaping of the children’s future. Jacob’s blessing has often served as a classic example of prayer; it begins with adoration, it proceeds to thanksgiving, and only then turns to the petition. Jacob speaks of the God of his fathers; this is his link with the past. God is his Lord because of tradition – but not only because of tradition. He is his God also through personal experience and relationship. This remains the basic nature of Jewish worship: God is approached as the God of history, especially Jewish history, but beyond that each generation has to rediscover for itself the God who was the God of the Fathers. Jacob sees his life spread before him. He is aware of the continued presence of God and acknowledges it with deep feeling. Past and future are now fused. He knows in this moment that his own complex life is crowned with hope, a hope that is represented by the God of his fathers and by the two boys at his side. His life is completed; the blessing of Abraham, which Isaac had bestowed on him, has now passed down to his children’s children.”111

This idea involving the continuity of generations and the legacy of values, ideals, and culture is certainly not limited to Jews, but there is no question that part of the very continued existence of the Jewish people is due to the highly placed value of family and community within the cultural mores. In this vein, David Aronson writes, “We shall never get to the heart of Judaism as a rule of life, nor begin to understand its distinctive individuality as a religious civilization, unless and until we have grasped the great Jewish ethical principle of the holiness of home. Jewish history begins with the family, with the three patriarchs and the four matriarchs of the Jewish people. Thirty eight out of fifty chapters in Genesis deal with the family history.”112

THE MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE Not only is the intense desire to have children often noted in the Torah, but so is awareness of parenting issues as to the outcome of the development of various individuals. Wendy Mogel writes, “The purpose of having children, according to the teachings of the Torah is not to create opportunities for our glory or for theirs. The purpose of having children and raising them to be self-reliant, compassionate, ethical adults is to ensure that there will be 111 W. Gunther Plaut. The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. 305. 112 David Aronson. The Jewish Way of Life. The National Academy for Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogue of America, Inc., 1957. 48.

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people here to honor God after we are gone. So the rules regarding childrearing are not primarily about making children feel good, but about making children into good people.”113 Aronson notes, “Torah and the Jewish way of life were the ideals impressed by parents upon the flexible minds of their children. Their personal attitude and example of the parents were the greatest forces in the preservation of these ideals, and are still their greatest responsibility today.”114 Samuel Rosenbaum discusses this family dynamic from a Talmudic perspective in the following observation that the Bible and the Talmud stress the relationship which should be built between parents and children. Not only are children required to demonstrate reverence and respect for their parents, but parents are required to educate their children from both a secular and religious foundation. “These and many more responsibilities and duties of one generation to the other helped bring order and security into the life of a family, serving to bind the members of the family group together through common ideals, beliefs, and practices. The Jewish people, in spite of its continuous history of harassment and persecution survived chiefly because of the strength and sanctity of its family life.”115 Rosenbaum highlights the importance of this continuity in his comment, “The first people we meet in the Bible are members of a family. As we read on, the family ties grow stronger, its numbers increase as children marry. The family continues to expand, developing a pattern of behavior, a way of life, radically different from that of other families which surround it. Respect, obedience and love of parents, education for the children, sharing of family responsibilities and privileges, all of these helped to unite and to strengthen the ancient family. The role of the wife and mother especially differed from that of other wives and mothers of the time. She was respected, her opinion considered, and she played an important part in the early education of her children. When the family grew to a tribe and the tribe a nation, the basic building block of that nation, the foundation unit on which all of the society was built, continued to be the family.”116 Jewish children have often been characterized as being overindulged, pampered, and over-protected. Interestingly, the same is now being said about the children of middle and upper-middle class children of the baby113

Wendy Mogel. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. 36. 114 David Aronson. Ibid. 60. 115 Samuel Rosenbaum. To Live as A Jew. Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1969. 137. 116 Samuel Rosenbaum. Ibid. 137.

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boomer generation of both Jewish and non-Jewish families alike. In the psychological literature of the Holocaust survivors and their families, the term ‘too precious children’ was coined to capture this idea of children becoming more than the usual valued progeny into the personified symbol of life itself. This preciousness becomes a burden to the offspring who no longer feels he/she is living his or her own life, but instead is living life for their parents and the lost relatives of the Nazi concentration camps, ghettos, and labor camps. Many of the young adult off-spring of survivors expressed feelings of needing to be perfect, and to realize the dreams and aspirations for themselves, their parents, and generations before who perished. They also felt either smothered by over-protectiveness or had assumed some of the generalized anxiety and fearfulness which was the remnant of their parents’ actual and horrific experiences.117 Mogel says much about this tendency of over-protectiveness she has encountered in her work with Jewish families. “The Talmud sums up the Jewish perspective on child-rearing in a single sentence: ‘A father is obligated to teach his son how to swim.’ Jewish wisdom holds that our children don’t belong to us. They are both a loan and a gift from God, and the gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us. The children’s job is to find their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected in the nest of the family, children will become weak and fearful or feel too comfortable to want to leave.”118 Zelig points out that Saul, Samuel, and David all had over-indulged sons who lacked discipline and eventually demonstrated significant lack of character. “Is this a commentary on parenting? Beyond issues of repetitive acted-out oedipal issues it is an interesting point of character strength versus ability to tolerate frustration/resist or delay impulses as well.”119 The Torah is quite clear that being fruitful and multiplying is not enough; creating future generations of Jews who will live moral, ethical Jewish lives, and create Jewish homes for their progeny is all equally essential. Interestingly, the current world situations of political unrest, monumental instability in the Middle East, regularly experienced terror in Israel, and rising world-wide anti-Semitism are not the issues that seem to pose the most threat to the Jewish community or the Jewish family. Ironically, it appears the very acceptance and assimilation that have taken place in the United States during the past forty to fifty years have given rise to an even 117

Rich, Ibid. Mogel, Ibid. 90. 119 Zelig, Ibid. 209. 118

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greater acceptance of intermarriage which is currently the choice being made by approximately 52% of single, marriage-age Jewish adults. Rather than admonishments, rejection, or criticism, more and more Jewish communities, Synagogues, and families are finding tolerant and accepting ways to deal with the reality of intermarriage. Outreach program are generally a manner in which many Jewish communities are attempting to bridge the gap between the traditional ways that Jewish families celebrated holidays and interacted with the larger community and today’s families which might have significantly different demographics than those of the past. An increased sensitivity has been demanded of the Jewish communities to acknowledge the reality of single parent homes, gay and lesbian families, single never-married adults, and mixed marriage families made up of both Jewish and Christian or other non-Jewish members. Each year there seems to be even more public examples in the media around the Chanukah, Christmas, and New Years holidays of families who are attempting to respectfully acknowledge and celebrate holidays in ways that to them feels most honest and fulfilling. The Jewish community is being called upon to support these families which are attempting to preserve some part of their Jewish heritage rather than judging them or making it awkward for them to be a part of the synagogue/community in whatever way they choose. While these families reflecting ‘alternate lifestyles’ may not necessarily fit the traditional picture of the Jewish family, it behooves the community to make the adjustments necessary to enable all families wishing to be involved with the Jewish community to feel comfortable.

10 NOAM CHOMSKY: THE CONTROVERSIAL JEW “Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.” Noam Chomsky

Few modern-day Jews manage to raise the ire of other Jews as much as Noam Chomsky. As one of the key contributors to the ideas and theories of Cognitive Psychology, and as the son of Jewish parents who was raised Jewish, which Chomsky himself characterized as a “Hebraic-Jewish home,” Noam Chomsky, despite his political and religious orientation belongs in this volume. Both his work and political beliefs are of interest here as well as an exploration into some of the ways in which Chomsky’s opinions and words have been understood and misunderstood by his fellow Jews.

CHOMSKY’S EARLY LIFE Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Noam Chomsky was the oldest son of Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky. William Chomsky, born in the Ukraine, had left Russia in 1913 to avoid being drafted into the Czarist army, and achieved a great deal of educational and professional success as a Hebrew Grammarian after receiving his Doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at the Hebrew school of Congregation Mikveh Israel, where he later became the principal. In 1924 Dr. Chomsky was appointed to the faculty of Gratz College where, after eight years, he became President of the college, a position in which he resided for the next forty five years. Chomsky’s mother, Elsie, was also a highly gifted intellectual, teacher, and activist who taught Hebrew at Mikveh Israel, as well. Robert Barsky describes the impact the parents had on Chomsky resulting from being the off-spring of such intellectually gifted parents as well as living in the environment of stimulating conversation, discussion of ideas, and political activism in the following manner, “Carlos Otero notes that shortly before his death William Chomsky described the major objective of his life as ‘the education of individuals who are well integrated, free and independ7777

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ent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all’. It is hard to improve on this as a description of Noam Chomsky as an individual.”120 Barsky continues tracing the parental influence in his discussion about Chomsky’s mother as follows: “Chomsky’s mother, Elsie, was equally important to his development as a thinker, a teacher, and an activist. Her political sensitivity motivated him, from a very young age, to look far beyond his immediate social context and into the realm of political action and involvement.” He again quotes Otero remarking, “The influence of his father on him is easier to trace than that of his mother, Elsie Simonofsky, who was more left oriented than her husband and appears to have made an impression on her son ‘in the area of general concern about social issues and politics’.”121 Barsky characterizes Chomsky has being a combination of his parents’ intellectual and personality qualities. “He is a warm and accessible man who is also reserved, quiet, and even somewhat shy. He is most certainly comfortable speaking to large audiences, but there is no question that his world is, for the most part, one of solitary study, writing, and research.”122 Barsky describes the entire Chomsky family as deeply involved in Jewish cultural activities and Jewish issues. Noam Chomsky is quoted as saying, “I would read Hebrew literature with my father from childhood – nineteenth and twentieth century Hebrew literature, and of course older sources. I spent my time in Hebrew school, later became a Hebrew teacher, and out of all of this my political interests converged to an interest in Zionism.”123 Chomsky described his family in the following statement, “My immediate family, my parents, were normal Roosevelt Democrats, and very much involved with Jewish affairs, deeply Zionist and interested in Jewish culture, the revival of Hebrew, and generally the cultural Zionism that had its origins in the ideas of people like Ahad Ha'am, but increasingly in mainstream Zionism. The next range of family, uncles and cousins and so on, was in part Jewish working-class, or around that kind of social group. A number of them were Communists, or close to such circles, very much involved in the politics of the Depression.”124 Clearly, various members of his extended family ranged in left-wing orientation from the working class Jew120

Robert F. Barsky. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge, Mass. London, England: The MIT Press, 1997. 11. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 12. 123 Ibid. 13. 124 Noam Chomsky (Ed.) David Peck. The Chomsky Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. 11.

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ish activism (sweatshop employees organizing into unions) with ties to communism, to the radical political movements that thrived during the depression. Chomsky is quoted as saying, “Some were in the Communist party, some militantly anti-Communist Party (from the left), some Roosevelt Democrats, and everything else from left-liberal to anti-Bolshevik left (whether the Communist Party fits in that spectrum is not obvious, in my opinion).”125

EMERGING THEORIES Chomsky attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1945 (at the age of sixteen) to 1955 during which he received his Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral degrees studying foreign languages, linguistics, and philosophy. In 1955 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Professor of Foreign Language and Linguistics. In the 1950’s Chomsky was a pioneer of Psycholinguistics which forged a relationship between psychology and linguistics. In 1957 he published his first book, In Syntactic Structures, in which he opposed the traditional learning theory and proposed a new theory of language acquisition. Rather than the mind as a tabla rosa (blank slate), Chomsky suggested that children are born with an inherent structure to acquire language which he called the Language Acquisition Device or LAD. This theory was in direct opposition to behaviorist B.F. Skinner and his ideas on verbal learning theory, and was therefore monumental, as it proved to be the foundation for the later establishment of the Cognitive School of Psychology. Even his most adamant critics must give him kudos for his initial exploration and development of a new theory of linguistics. John Williamson stated, “Noam Chomsky introduced the world to some new and fascinating concepts. He taught us that structures can ‘transform’, words can ‘move’, and affixes can ‘hop’. Invisible elements such as ‘trace’, ‘empty spaces’, and ‘PRO’ were invented in order to explain the ways in which language holds itself together. The strange notion of ‘deep structure’ led to the appealing idea of ‘universal grammar’ – and that in turn led to the theory of a ‘biological basis of grammar’ – the idea that grammar is hardwired into the brain. All of these ideas exist as dazzling variation on the same theme.”126 He continues with the insight that Chomsky’s critically important contribution to linguistics was rejecting the behaviorist philoso125

Robert Barksy. Ibid. 14. John Williamson. “Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me” in The AntiChomsky Reader edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. 233. 126

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phy of B.F. Skinner and restoring a rationalistic approach to the study of linguistics, however the remainder of his critique tends to discredit the following fifty years as being hopelessly circuitous rather than progressive. “The history of Chomskyan theory is a study in cycles. He announces a new and exciting idea which adherents to the faith then use and begin to make all kinds of headway. But this progress is invariably followed by complication, then by contradiction, then by a flurry of patchwork fixes, then by a slow unraveling, and finally by stagnation. Eventually the master announces a new approach and the cycle starts anew. Thus we go from ‘transformation grammar and deep structure’ to ‘universal grammar’ to ‘principles and parameters’ to ‘minimalism’ to…what next?”127 Perhaps more interesting to the current exploration of Chomsky than, “what next?” might be to ponder whether it was by accident that the previously mentioned paradigm shifting theories of linguistics would come from this particular individual, from this particular family, at this particular time. One must wonder if the ground-breaking work of Noam Chomsky can be separated from the nature of the family life which was erudite and intellectual, political and activist, Jewish and Zionistic (this is the Kibbutz/Socialist brand of Zionism). Chomsky addresses this issue in an interview in which he is quoted as saying, “It’s there (influence of Jewish cultural tradition) I mean, it certainly had a good amount of influence on me. For example, the brilliant nineteenth-century Yiddish-Hebrew writer Mendele Mocher Sfarim, who wrote about Jewish life in Eastern Europe, had tremendous instinct and understanding. It cheapens it to call it proletarian literature, but it gave a kind of understanding of the lives of the poor with a mixture of humor and sympathy and cynicism that is quite remarkable. I also read fairly widely in works of nineteenth-century Hebrew renaissance-novels, stories, poetry, essays. I can’t say what long-term effect this reading had on me. It certainly had an emotional impact.”128 “Noam Chomsky is the most cited living person – four thousand citations of his work are noted in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index for the years 1980 through 1992 – and eighth on a shortlist, which includes the likes of Marx and Freud, of the most cited figures of all times. Chomsky is also a vital point of reference in the sciences; from 1974 to 1992, he was cited 1,619 times according to the Science Citation Index.”129 Strikingly, neither the controversy over his brilliant work, nor even his extreme leftist 127

Ibid. 234. Noam Chomsky. Ibid.12. 129 Robert Barsky. Ibid. Introduction. 128

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political views is the issue which has caused Chomsky to be such a controversial figure within the Jewish community. Rather at stake is his highly publicized view of Israeli politics, his anti-Zionist philosophy, and his defense of the freedom of speech of such groups as Holocaust deniers.

CHOMSKY, ZIONISM, AND POLITICS Before assessing any of the current issues around the anti-Zionist views of Noam Chomsky, it is important to understand that Chomsky’s original connection to Zionism was very much reflective of the political and cultural environment of the time; especially of the idealism connected to the socialist experiment taking place on the Kibbutzim following the Russian Revolution. In an interview responding to a question about his undergraduate college experience at the University of Pennsylvania, Chomsky made the following remarks, “At the end of two years, I was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which were then largely political. This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities - or what was then called ‘Zionist’, though the same ideas and concerns are now called ‘anti-Zionist’. I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the Kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to the Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I had always been strongly anti-Bolshevik. We should bear in mind that in the latter stages of the Depression, when I was growing up, and even in subsequent years to an extent, these were very lively issues.”130 Because he was so deeply attracted to the notion of Jews and Arabs working together in a co-operative Socialist setting, the subsequent Statehood of Israel as the Jewish State troubled him from the same perspective that Western democracy and capitalism trouble him, which is because of the marginalizing and selfserving policies which promote the interests of the elite group. Barsky commented, “Like numerous mainstream Zionist individuals and organizations, Chomsky opposed the idea that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. The creation of such a state would necessitate carving up the territory and marginalizing, on the basis of religion, a significant portion of its poor and oppressed population, rather than uniting them on the basis of socialist principles. Opponents of the establishment of a Jewish state will 130

Chomsky. Ibid. 7.

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raise the ire of the many contemporary Zionists who do not acknowledge the principles that underwrote mainstream Zionism earlier this century (1900’s), and who, by extension, fail to recognize the problems created when a state is established according to religious precepts.”131 It is quite apparent why these formerly ‘Zionist’, now ‘anti-Zionist’, principles are so fundamentally unacceptable to many Jews, who saw the creation of Israel, the Jewish Homeland, as a panacea to centuries of oppression and, of course, to the aftermath of the Holocaust. Chomsky’s critics range in affect from the emotional response of outrage to the thoughtfully researched rebuttal. An example of the latter is by Paul Bogdanor, “In Noam Chomsky’s books, essays and public campaigns stretching back for decades, one theme is constant: his portrayal of the state of Israel as the focus of evil in the Middle East, a malevolent outlaw whose only redeeming feature is the readiness of its own left-wing intelligentsia to expose its uniquely horrifying depravity. A Jew whose parents were Hebrew teachers and who was himself a supporter of an extreme left-wing Zionist group in his youth, Chomsky has paraded an anti-Israel obsession since the mid1970’s.”132 Gabriel Schoenfeld addresses his concerns about the antiSemitic flavor of Jews in opposition to the State of Israel in the following observations, “As historical irony would have it, trumpeting their Jewish ‘credentials’ even as they denounce the Jewish state and slur its citizens and supporters makes them much more effective exponents of the dishonorable cause they have made their own. Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, is perhaps the best-known case. His intellectual influence is immense. For years Chomsky has traded in fanatical denunciations of Israel. In his most recent best-selling book, 9-11, he renders the Jewish homeland as a diabolical entity that strives to inflict the maximum amount of suffering on its Arab neighbors. The Israeli objective, he says in an interview wholly characteristic of his tone and approach, is ‘large scale and severe wounding, brutal strangulation of the Palestinian population by closures, impassable barriers, and now trenches around cities and villages. Their calculation is that there is a limit to what flesh and blood can endure’. Needless to say, he offers no proof or rationale for this insight into Israel’s calculation in its desperate effort to protect itself from rampant Arab terrorism.”133 131

Barsky. Ibid. 48. Paul Bogdanor. “Chomsky’s War Against Israel” in The Anti-Chomsky Reader editeds by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. 87. 133 Gabriel Schoenfeld. The Return of Anti-Semitism. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. 131. 132

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Equally inflammatory for Noam Chomsky from the perspective of the Jewish community was his involvement with Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon who asserts that the Holocaust never happened. Faurisson claimed that the key witnesses to Nazi torture chambers and the gas ovens used for extermination, were Jews who simply lied about the events. His work was obviously discredited and he experienced numerous negative consequences as a result of his ‘findings’ which is probably what aroused Chomsky’s sympathy and helped to obtain his signature upon a petition which defended Faurisson’s right to publish his work. “The French press dubbed it ‘Chomsky’s petition’, and although Faurisson’s specific views were not mentioned in the document he signed, Chomsky was accused of holding similar ones. Chomsky then wrote a short memoir on the civil liberties aspects of the case…to clarify the distinction between supporting somebody’s beliefs and their right to express them.” He authorized the use of this piece in any way deemed useful which resulted in it becoming the foreword to a book by Faurisson denying the Holocaust. This of course, opened up a quagmire of criticism and contempt about which Chomsky bitterly complained of being the target of “vicious lies,” and was outraged that the Times Book Review once wrote him back that rather than publish his letter in defense of himself they were going to publish one by someone else who wrote a better letter.134 Barsky commented, “The Faurisson affair has had a harmful and lasting effect on Chomsky. Many people only know about him through his connection to the controversy.”135 However, Barsky believes that Chomsky would still offer his support to Faurisson on the basis of a dearly cherished principle; freedom of speech, regardless of the negative personal consequences it has brought upon himself. Whether one is an idealistic fan or student of Noam Chomsky or a hostile critic, it is apparent that he is a man of his convictions and willing to stand firm even in the face of great denouncement and controversy to defend those principles about which he feels passionate. Perhaps that willingness and ability too comes from the collective experience of being Jewish in a hostile world, as have many generations of Jews before him for thousands of years.

134 Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian. Keeping the Rabble in Line. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994. 142. 135 Barsky. Ibid. 185.

CONCLUSION The psychological mindedness of the Jewish people is no accident, coincidence, nor hyperbole. As shown from the many different perspectives above, the psychological mindedness is cultural, inherent, and selfpreserving. If what becomes normalized for a child within the context of his or her own family is regular searching for a deeper meaning and a belief that multiple levels of one’s experience can co-exist, then that child will grow up believing that this is true for all the world. It so happens that this normalization process for Jews exists far beyond the experiential phenomenon of one’s own home, and is apparently a similar experience for other Jews living in other Jewish homes, normalized by not only culture and ritual, but within the sacred texts as well. Part of becoming an adult is the understanding and acceptance that reality at best is a subjective perception of one’s own experience. It is therefore part of what we include in our choices and decisions about the family life we will create as adults. The experiences of one’s own life and of the outside world are among the factors that are often included by young adults when choosing a life partner. If a shared heritage integrates a several thousand year experience of survival despite persecution, than that awareness and collective unconscious may be part of what makes up that family’s home environment. To take this concept one step further, there are many who propose that the persecution the Jewish people have endured for years has created an identity that includes an empathy towards, or champion of, underdog activism rather than creating a ‘victim’ identity. It is for this reason that Jews are often at the forefront of social activist movements such as the Civil Rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War era protests. Part of the psychological mindedness explored in this volume is easily explained by modeling which takes place in a family’s regular day to day life, and includes styles of communication, humor, approach to conflict, and quality of relationships. Other explanations beyond modeling include a traditionalist’s understanding of the approach to sacred texts such as the Torah and Talmud and belief that this psychological mindedness has been literally taught for thousands of years. The explanation as to why this study would still be impacting families who are non-Orthodox, or in some cases that are altogether secular, is that enough generations were affected by this 8855

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study to impact the collective unconscious of the descendants of these people. Aside from the explanations of modeling and traditional learning is the possibility that a people who have for thousands of years stressed education as a particularly important value and who still, disproportionate to their numbers, continue to engage in advanced education, are impacted in this realm of psychological mindedness by the environment of intellectualism and learning. The environment that promotes questioning and teaches young people to think for themselves is also teaching the cerebral disposition that there is a subtext between the lines and a whole level of experience and meaning that may or may not be obvious at first glance. It is here that one might also begin to ponder; aside from the strict intellectualism of this disposition toward psychological mindedness is a survival strategy in understanding oneself and one’s environment from a more in-depth and sophisticated position. While it is clear that the four theorists highlighted in the previous chapters have numerous dissimilarities regarding the era, part of the world, and family dynamics within which they were raised, one major link among them is their Jewish heritage. Though there are vast differences in the degree of observance within the homes, Freud, Wertheimer, Maslow, and Chomsky were Jewish by identity, if not by strict religious adherence, and there is some element within that Jewish identity which contributed to the theory and body of work each produced. All four were from homes that greatly valued education; though clearly Maslow’s greatest stimulation was outside of the home, whereas Freud, Wertheimer, and Chomsky were raised in stimulating if not erudite environments. The religiosity of the four homes varied as well, ranging from the rather observant and scholarly background of Chomsky’s to the religiously ersatz home which Maslow described. Freud’s home was a highly assimilated Austrian Jewish home, and yet he was obviously exposed to, and later had the opportunity to study, spiritual and intellectual Jewish texts. Each of these great thinkers held a lofty position in their family of origin (i.e. first born Jewish male) and felt a sense of elevated importance their studies and later work held for the family which was then generalized to having a place of importance in the greater world. When considering the chapter on anti-Semitism there is no question that each of the four were affected by the hatred and prejudice the outside world held for Jews during their lifetimes. Freud and Wertheimer literally had the experience of fleeing their countries of origin for the sake of their own and their family’s survival, and there is no question that this experience of being hated as well as the

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disruption a forced relocation would incur had a profound effect on their work. Maslow was clearly very sensitized to the perception of hatred and regularly felt a need to overcome an oppressed position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. As described above, all of the individuals discussed had both a sense of great specialness as well as the issues that come with being the target of hatred, which is part of the dichotomy of prejudice. Both the chapters on humor as well as the chapter on hatred demonstrate that individuals make use of their own life circumstances in ways that fit their personality, the assets and liabilities they contain as a human being, and the actual environmental realities. For many, a victim mentality becomes so ingrained that his/her own circumstances continue to prevail almost as a self-fulfilling prophesy, whereas others by sheer determination and a vengeance to vindicate will overcome whatever constraints and obstacles they have encountered barring their success. Perhaps the most poignant example of this is in the beauty and hope Maslow’s theories contain for the potential of human beings though clearly he experienced numerous affronts to his own dignity both within and outside of his family throughout his life. Humor was described as a defense against the outside world, as well as a defense to protect an ego under attack, or a demonstration of self contempt and disrespect. It is no accident that Freud, who would certainly have been regularly exposed to the ‘Jewish humor’ of Eastern Europe, understood the intricacies of humor rather than accepting the more basic interpretation of self-hatred. In his theories humor is even elevated to the lofty position of being among the higher level of ego defenses. Of striking interest is the psychological astuteness that may be found in Jewish Scripture as well as Jewish observances and rituals. Though Sigmund Freud was first to analyze from a psychodynamic perspective the multiple levels being described in some of the characters, personalities, and stories from the Tanach, there are many who appreciate the depth and layers of meaning so prominent in Judaism. While there certainly did not exist the language of psychology per se in the Bible, there is no question that the early texts make reference to many issues prevalent in the human psyche, including the ability to perform the highest of altruistic and selfless deeds, to some of the ambivalence and darker impulses so astutely premiered in film noir of the 1940’s and 1950’s which highlighted topics of moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. It is that sophisticated perception and demonstration of humankind’s make-up, being the good along with the bad, which gives rise to the thesis of the psychology of Judaism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abramowitz, Yosef I., and Susan Silverman, Jewish Family and Life, New York: Golden Books, 1997. Aronson, David. The Jewish Way of Life, The National Academy for Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogues of America, Inc., 1957. Ausubel, Nathan. A Treasury of Jewish Humor, New York: Galahad Books, 1951. Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1997. Berger, Arthur Asa. “How Humor Heals: An Anatomical Perspective” In European Journal of Psychology, May, 2005. Bogdanor, Paul. “Chomsky’s War Against Israel” In The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Buber, Martin. I and Thou, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: A Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster, 1970. Buxbaum, Yitzhak. Jewish Spiritual Practices, Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990. Cardin, Nina Beth. “Blessings Throughout the Day.” In The Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life, edited by Kerry M Olitsky and Daniel Judson, 130131, Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2002. Chomsky, Noam, (Ed.) David Peck. The Chomsky Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Chomsky, Noam, and David Barsamian. Keeping the Rabble in Line, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994. Dana, Julie Hilton. The Jewish Parents’ Almanac, Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aaronson, Inc., 1994. Epstein, Lawrence J. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Fischel, Jack R. “The New Anti-Semitism” In The Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2005. Foxman, Abraham H. Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, San Francisco: Harper, 2003.

8899

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Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, (orig.1905) In translated volume, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, New York: Random House, 1938. ———. Moses and Monotheism, Cambridge University Press, 1939. Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life For Our Time, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988. Geffen, Rela M.. Celebration and Renewal: Rites of Passage in Judaism, Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993. Greenberg, Blu. How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household, Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aaronson, Inc., 1989. Grollman, Earl A. Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World, New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1965. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. I Asked For Wonder, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1983. Hodes, Aubrey. Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait, New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Hoffman, Edward. The Right To Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. 1988. Hoffman, Edward. The Way of Splendor: Jewish Mysticism and Modern Psychology, North Vale, N.J., and London: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1989. Hunt, Morton, The Story of Psychology, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 1993. Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing, 1976. Klagsbrun, Francine. Jewish Days: A Book of Jewish Life and Culture Around the Year, New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 1996. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying, New York: Macmillon Co, 1969. Kugelmass, Jack. Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Kushner, Lawrence. The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition, Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001. Malev, Milton. “The Value of Ritual.” In Judaism and Psychiatry: Two Approaches to the Personal Problems and Needs of Modern Man, edited by Simon Noveck, 138-139, The National Academy For Adult Jewish Studies of the United Synagogues of America, Inc., 1956. Mamet, David. The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, New York: Nextbook Schocken, 2006. Maslow, Abraham. Toward a Psychology of Being, New York: Van Nostand Reinhold, 1968.

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Matt, Daniel C. Zohar: Annotated and Explained, Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths 2002. Mogel, Wendy. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Morinis, Alan. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: One Man’s Rediscovery of a Jewish Tradition. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Pfefferman, Naomi. “L.A. exhibit analyzes Freud’s Jewish Heritage.” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Vol. 52, No 32, April 14, 2000. Plaut,W. Gunther. The Torah: A Modern Commentary, New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Plous, S. “The Psychology of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: an Overview.” In Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003 Rich, Melanie S. “Children of Hologcaust Survivors: A Concurrent Validity Study.” Doctoral Dissertation, 1982. Rosenbaum, Samuel, To Live as a Jew, Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1969. Rosten, Leo. Treasury of Jewish Quotations. New York, London, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1972. Schoenfeld, Gabriel. The Return of Anti-Semitism, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Schult, Mel. Communings of the Spirit: The Journal of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume 1. Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Spalding, Henry D. Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age, New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1969. Telushin, Joseph. Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992. Weinstein, Joshua. Buber and Humanistic Education, New York: Philosophical Library, 1975. Williamson, John. “Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me” In The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Zelig, Dorothy F. Psychoanalysis and the Bible: A Study in Depth of Seven Leaders. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1974.

INDEX Abraham, 9, 36 Abraham, Karl, 39 acting-out, 10 Adam and Eve, 8, 19, 21 Allen, Woody, 55, 56, 62 American Defense League, 62 American Psychological Association, 35 anger, 13, 19, 26, 28, 29, 57 Anti-Defamation League, 57 anti-Semitism, 3, 36, 38, 39, 51, 53, 57, 58, 61, 66, 75 anti-Zionist, 81, 82 Aronson, David, 73, 74 Ashkenazi Jews, 19 assimilation, 75 atonement, 23 Austria, 36, 50 Ausubel, Nathan, 44, 46, 89 Bar Mitzvah, 16, 66 Barsky, Robert, 77, 80 Ben Zoma, 12 Berger, Arthur, 46, 89 birth, 15, 19, 28 Bogdanor, Paul, 82 Borscht Belt, 1, 44 Bruce, Lenny, 48 Buber, Martin, 29, 30, 31, 89, 90, 91 Burns, George, 59 Buxbaum, Yitzhak, 32, 33, 89 Cardin, Rabbi Nina Beth, 15, 89 Catskill Mountains, 44 Chassidism, 37, See also Hasidism Chavurot, 32 children, too precious, 75

Chomsky, Naom, 86 Chomsky, Noam, 5, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89 Chomsky’s petition, 83 Chosen People, 4 circumcision, 20 Cognitive Psychology, 79 Cognitive Theory, 5 collective unconscious, 2, 85, 86 Conservative (Judaism), 32 d’vekut, 33 Dana, Julie Hilton, 72 Daniel, 13, 14 David, 12, 75 Day of Atonement, 22 Days of Awe, 22 de Leon, Moses, 25, 38 death, 15, 17, 18 divine spark, 30 dreams, 13, 14, 38, 75 edelkeit, 62 Eden (Garden of), 8, 11, 19 ego, 7, 9, 10, 12, 28, 35, 43, 59, 61, 69 Einstein, Albert, 53 Eliezer, Israel ben, 37 Epstein, Lawrence, 45, 46, 47, 59, 89 Essau, 12 Faurisson, Robert, 83 favored child, 4, 11 first-born, 36 Fischel, Jack, 58 Foxman, Abraham, 57, 58 free-will, 12, 26 9933

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Freud, Sigmund, 5, 7, 9, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 59, 65, 80, 86, 87, 90, 91 funeral, 17, 20 Gay, Peter, 38, 40, 90 Geffen, Rela M., 19 General Seminar, 52 Gentile, 39, 59 Gestalt Theory, 5, 52, 53 ghetto, 4, 37 grammar, biological basis of, 79 grammar, universal, 79 Great Lion (Ari), 27 Greenberg, Blu, 72 grief, 17, 18, 19 Grollman, Earl, ix, 36, 37, 38, 90 guilt, 15, 17, 19, 47, 51, 61, 62 Haggbloom, Steven, 35 Hasidim, 29 Hasidism, 29, See also Chassidism Hatred, 57, 90 Herzl, Theodor, 30, 43, 47 Heschel, Rabbi Abraham Joshua, 18, 26 High Holy Days, 21, 23 Hillel, 13 hitlahavut, 30 Hoffman, Edward, 25, 27, 67 Holocaust, 4, 5, 19, 20, 57, 58, 60, 75, 81, 82, 83 Humanistic Psychology, 5, 65 humor, 23, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 59, 80, 85 Hunt, Morton, 49 Hussite, 36 Inquisition, 4 intermarriage, 76 Isaac, 10, 20, 27, 36, 73 Ishmael, 20 Israel, 11, 25, 30, 48, 57, 58, 59, 82 Jacob, 72, 73 Jessel, George, 59 Jewish American Princess, 61, 71

Jewish identity, 5, 6, 40, 58 Jewish Mother, 60, 62 Jewish mothers, 36, 47 Jewish Renewal movement, 31 Job, 4, 18 Johnson, Alvin, 52 Joseph, 10, 11, 13, 72 Jung, Carl, 65 k’vod ha-chai, 17 k’vod ha-met, 17 Kabbalah, 25, 27, 32 Kaddish, 18 Kaplan, Mordecai, 7 kavannah, 23, 30 Kishmo ken hu’, 19 Klagsbrun, Francine, 22, 23 Koffka, Kurt, 50, 53 Kohler, Wolfgang, 50, 53 Kol Nidre, 22 Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, 17 Kushner, Harold, 4 Kushner, Lawrence, 27 Lahr, Bert, 59 language acquisition, 79 Language Acquisition Device (LAD), 79 Lieber, Rabbi Moshe, 7 linguistics, 79, 80 love, 12, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 41, 66, 74 Lubavitcher Hasidism, 26 Luther, Martin, 37 magical thinking, 14 Maimonides, 22, 32 Malev, Milton, 15, 16 Mamet, David, 57 marriage, 15, 27, 32, 62, 76 marriage, interfaith, 59 Marx brothers, 48 Marx Brothers, 59 Maslow, Abraham, 5, 53, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 86, 87, 90 Matt, Daniel C., 25 Menorah Journal, 8 midolot, 28

INDEX Miles, Rosalind, 21 mitzvah, 41 Mogel, Wendy, 73, 74 Morinis, Alan, 9, 27, 28 Moses, 11, 20 mourner, 17, 18 Mussar, 27 mystical, 21, 25, 31, 37, 38 Nachman of Bratslav, 13 Nahmanides, 22 narcissism, 3, 11, 61 Nazis, 52 Nazism, 51 New School for Social Research, 52 Noveck, Simon, 17, 18 oedipal issues, 75 original sin, 8 ortho-psychology, 70 parenting, 73, 75 persecution complex, 3 Pesach, 23 Pidyon Ha-ben, 36 Pleasure Principal, 43, 46 Plous, Scott, 56, 60, 61, 91 Pogroms, 4, 38 positive psychology, 69 prejudice, 4, 28, 36, 41, 48, 55, 56, 60, 62, 67, 91 Psychoanalysis, 5, 7, 9, 20, 21, 35, 51, 91 psychoanalytic, 7, 20, 47 psychodynamics, 9 psychologically minded, 2 puberty, 16 Purim, 23 Rabbi Akiva, 25 Reaction Formation, 60 Rebecca, 12 Reconstructionist, 7 Reconstructionist (Judaism), 32 Reconstructionist movement, 7 Reform (Judaism), 32 refugee, 4, 52

95 Renewal movement. See Jewish Renewal Ritey, Hector J., 16 Rosenbaum, Samuel, 74 Rosh Hashanah, 21, 22 Rosten, Leo, 13, 14 Salant, Rabbi Zundel, 27 Salanter, Rabbi Yisael, 27, 28 Samuel, 19, 75 Sarah, 36 Saul, 11, 75 Sayings of the Fathers, 12, 14 scapegoats, 36, 57 Schoenfeld, Gabriel, 82 Scult, Mel, 7 self-actualization, 9, 65, 68 self-preservation, 46 Sephardic Jews, 19 sexuality, 27, 35, 41 Sfarim, Mendele Mocher, 80 Shabbat, 71, 72 Shechinah, 33 Shema, 32 Shim’on ben Yohai, 25 shiva, 18 shofar, 21 Sholom Aleichem, 43 shtetl, 3, 44, 46 Shumann, Friedrich, 49 sibling rivalry, 10, 11 Silvers, Phil, 59 Skinner, B.F., 79, 80 socialist, 30, 52, 81 Solomon (King), 41 Song of Songs, 41 Spalding, Henry D., 44, 47, 91 stereotype, 56, 61, 62 super-ego, 7, 9, 35, 44 Talmud, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 40, 41, 44, 70, 74, 75, 85 Tanach, 7, 12 tashlikh, 22 Telushkin, Joseph, 44 temptation, 7, 11

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tikun ha-middot, 29 tikun olam, 5, 27 timtum ha-lev, 29 Torah, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 16, 18, 40, 41, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 85, 91 Tower of Babel, 1 tzaddikim, 29 tzedakah, 5 unconscious, 3, 16, 22, 28, 36, 43, 66 unveiling, 17 Vaudeville, 44, 47 Von Hornboster, Erich, 51

von Treuenberg, Jacob Bassevi, 37 Wertheimer, Max, 5, 49, 50, 51, 52, 86 Wiesel, Elie, 55 Williamson, John, 79 Yom Kippur, 22, 23 Zalman, Rabbi Schneur, 26 Zelig, Dorothy F., 7, 9, 10, 20, 36, 75, 91 Zionism, 29, 78, 80, 81 Zohar, 12, 13, 14, 25, 38