It’s better for Jews to live in a state of boredom
ISUPPOSE THAT this column should be about whether or not Boris Johnson will be good for Jews, but honestly I’m Johnsoned out. Let’s just say that this is the first time in what is beginning to turn into a longish life that I’ve honestly thought that I might make a better prime minister than the actual prime minister. And forgive me too if I refuse to endorse the idea that if I don’t want Jeremy Corbyn and his dubious chums then I have to put up with whatever the Tory party has dished up for me.
Even so I was thinking about the circumstances under which Jews — both as Jews and as ordinary people — do best and do worst. And it seems to me that they tend to thrive when life is unexciting. When great institutions are not crashing to the ground and civic life is a little dull. When change is incremental and the great arguments are about whether taxes are too high or too low.
I may have said before that one of my favourite stand-up comedy sequences — right up there with Richard Prior’s monkey (YouTube it) — is Jackie Mason’s “Why Don’t Jews Do Rodeo?” In it Mason notes all the daft Darwin Award-winning antics that gentiles indulge in and concludes that by contrast if a Jew wants to sit on something dangerous he chooses a rocking chair. Because, he says, ordinary life can be dangerous enough for Jews, so who needs to add to the risk?
This month, and again in September, there is a series of musical events in London commemorating the art and culture of the Weimar Republic, founded 100 years ago. The organisers argue that this is timely because some of the same uncertainties and loss of confidence that eventually brought about the Republic’s downfall are evident again today. Paradoxically (or not)
a golden period for artistic expression in music, theatre, cinema, literature and pictorial art, was followed by a time of relentless philistinism and artistic suppression. Jews contributed hugely to the former and were then exterminated in the latter.
The parallels that the organisers had in mind were between the way in which Weimar era Germans lost trust in each other and the institutions that mediated between them. Lost trust and then watched as those institutions were destroyed. What then ran rife was violence, incivility, demagoguery and racism.
When I was younger and more revolutionary than I am now, I had little regard for institutions as such. In fact I had a sort of contempt for them. I never really thought much about long they’d taken in evolving and was impatient at the idea that the best way of changing them was by reform. Then, in my 20s, I helped run one — the National Union of Students — one of the very few youth organisations in the world actually run by youth. And all of a sudden I was a reformist — someone who wanted this flawed but intensely valuable association preserved. I got an idea of how hard it is to build and maintain things and how easy it can be to destroy them.
Gradually I’ve seen that this applies to many if not most of the institutions around us: marriage, the independent judiciary, the BBC, the largely unarmed police force. The European Union. Sorry, but that too. Hard to create, difficult to maintain, slow to reform, but worthy of support.
Now we seem consumed by impatience and incivility. Our political parties have been hijacked by extremists, people who were previously sensible have become self-radicalised, everybody has a grievance against somebody and that grievance brooks no contradiction.
Jews tend not to do well under such circumstances. In the minds of the temporarily unbalanced Jews uniquely become both the self-serving pillars of the corrupt establishment and the underminers of the natural order. The Jews are simultaneously the Rothschilds and the Jews are George Soros.
Incidentally, when the forces of disruption are at work, don’t be seduced by some of their leading voices being friendly to Israel. Friendly to Israel does not always end up as friendly to Jews. Ask Poles.
Finally Jews should be suspicious of charisma. Charisma is about not thinking, not arguing and Jews do better when thought and argument are regarded as valuable. I think this is one reason why we should give thanks for our many boring rabbis. As Jackie Mason says, if a Jew wants dangerous he can sit on a rocking chair. This week let us wish for less interesting times.