Well, in the words of a million literary rejection slips, "It's been done!" While living lives of Penitence, Prayer, and Charity is an unquestionably noble ideal, these words would look downright silly were they to be engraved on the gates of Auschwitz. Nor would putting out a brand-new edition of the Book of Job prove to be any more effective this time than the last.
2. Win Over Every Anti-Semite as a Friend
Jews have become so used to persecution that they have come to accept the idea that simply "being tolerated" represents a significant improvement in their condition. Well, grudging toleration may have represented a triumph of sorts to our ancestors, but it is not what I want for my children and grandchildren. The sacrifice of dignity inherent in such a process diminishes the quality of life itself. "Ecumenism" simply perpetuates the images of a groveling mendicant and a beneficent bestower of human kindness. The idea of sitting around and hoping for another crumb of such humanity from a future clone of kindly old Pope John XXIII, itself represents the antithesis of dignity and self-respect.
Despite its grudging and belated recognition of Israel, even a half-century later the Vatican still finds it difficult to acknowledge the claim of Jews to the major portion of the legacy of suffering endured at Auschwitz; while it took almost two thousand years for them to declare the Jews free of communal guilt for the death of that Jewish "savior"; the one whose sermons on brotherly love seem to have fallen on the deaf ears of most of those who pay lip service to them.
Similarly, the idea of cultivating the favor of the powerful - an equally self-degrading enterprise - can only succeed up to the point where the imperative of the Pecking Order again reasserts itself. Emperors and popes have always had their toadies and boot-lickers, but unfortunately even the best of such eminent personages are mortal themselves, necessitating that a new round of groveling must begin all over again, with each change of leadership.
3. Rely on the Ultimate Triumph of Law, Morality and Reason
Law can be defined as a code created by the powerful to keep the weak in their place. Because Jews have only rarely received a cordial - much less a civil - welcome among the ranks of the powerful, for them to believe that a mere legal code will forever grant them equal rights despite the power games that run the world, constitutes a foray into self-deception that debases the realities of their history.
Likewise morals, which are simply codes created by the weak that are intended to lay enough guilt on the powerful to constitute a countervailing force to their laws. Morals have always been brushed aside when expediency dictates. Certainly they have never interfered for a moment with the smooth operation of the Pecking Order.
In any test of strength, Jews can survive as an identifiable entity only if and when that survival is linked inextricably to that of the major players in the power game. Given the intransigiency of the world powers in coming to grips with their own Anti-Semitism, I question whether the Gentile world would seriously consider backing away from a practice with which they have lived so comfortably for so long, even if faced with the unimaginable abstract horror of a nuclear Armageddon.
After all, even the crushing weight of the brutality they have endured has not deterred the Jews from continuing to engage in the lemming-like practices they have always followed. Why, then, should such an abstraction prove any more persuasive to the rest of the world? At any rate, the effrontery of someone at the bottom of a Pecking Order trying to negotiate his own survival, is too preposterous to discuss.
