The Jew as an Outsider

David Grossman, the Israeli novelist and essayist wrote this piece in the book I am Jewish:

Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl. You might recall that Grossman lost his son in the last hour of this summer war with Hezbollah. This is an exquisite expression of Jewish identity through defiant alienation. I personally relate to this description even though my rabbinic training has made me a Jewish collectivist. This piece will be one of the study texts of the "Why Be Jewish" forums Panim Hadashot is holding on Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur afternoon. For more information go to www.panimhadashot.com.

For me, to be a Jew is to be an outsider. An outsider in relation to human situations in which a collective of any sort comes into being, composed of many who speak (or roar) in a single voice;

an outsider with that slight suspicion of whatever makes that collective possible;

with that sense of loneliness that takes hold of the individual in the presence of such a collective, even if he does not want-or is unable-to be part of it; with the feelings of uniqueness and election that accompany that loneliness;

with that trace of (not entirely comprehensible) pride that accompany those feelings, pained incessantly by the fact that that uniqueness and election place an invisible but real barrier between him and the others;

with the constant skepticismthat lies-or ought to lie-within regard to those feelings (which have turned, for the Jewish people, into the concept of "the chosen people"), because all too often it seems as if those feelings are nothing but a scab that has formed over the wound of loneliness, of the Jews tragic distinctiveness;

with the knowledge that this distinctiveness-and who knows whether it was imposed from the start on the Jews by others or whether the Jews chose and refined it-has made "the Jew" into an almost universal symbol of the absolute alien;

with pain at the fact that this attitude has caused the Jew and his history to become, in the eyes of humanity, a story that is larger than life, and therefore something that is not really part of life itself, something detached from the course of nature and history experienced by other nations.

To this I must add the sense of profound, instinctive, familial identification that I feel toward Jews throughout the generations. I share their fate, their way of thinking, their culture, their language, and their humor. But perhaps what I really identify with, more than anything else, is precisely that sense of loneliness, injury, and persecution, the feeling of being foreign in this world, ever anxious about the tenuousness of existence. But whenever I feel that by identifying this way as a Jew, I become part of this particular collective, the Jewish collective, I take a step back, and have some serious (and very Jewish) doubts about belonging to it.