The Disintegrating Language of Humanity

One truth that has been exposed in the Gaza war is the death of meaning for the universal term “humanity.” I remember the blockbuster Family of Man photography show at MoMA in 1955, with its millions of visitors as it later toured the world. A postwar universal meaning was presented: civilization’s diversity within a singular humanity. This year, however, the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations established in June 1945 by the U.N. Charter, is called upon to convict Israel—the nation on behalf of whom genocide was named the first “crime against humanity”—as the first country to be guilty of genocide after having been admitted to the U.N. in response to genocide. That is, Israel will be outside the “family of man” if U.N. antisemitism prevails. Isaiah’s “swords into ploughshares” quotation, etched into a wall facing New York’s U.N. building, will become weaponized against its Jewish author.

From Israel’s opening statement last January in its defense before the court:

The Genocide Convention was a solemn promise made to the Jewish people, to all peoples, of “Never Again.” The Applicant invites the Court to betray that promise. If the term genocide can be so diminished in the way it advocates, the Convention becomes an aggressor’s charter. The attempt to weaponize the term genocide against Israel in the present context does more than empty the word of its unique force and special meaning. It subverts the object and purpose of the Convention itself.

Truthwise, we have only mirrors, especially those of science and art. In themselves, the truths of science (e.g., ophthalmology, to be irreverent) are blind to art as art is blind to science (e.g., virology). Ultimately we are stymied by words, like “communicable,” “antisemitic.” Do their meanings carry an existential threat or simply an argument?

Even if we seem back to “normal” on the disease front, the human psyche may have lapsed into something more jittery. The global outcry against death in Gaza represents it: faux civilized, a veneer of culture scraped away. The unmediated media imagery excites a primitive cry to erase Israel from civilization, and in doing so, be free of the claims of civilization itself.

After Darwin, civilization became a near-religious term defending against the cold truths of evolution, in which no ritual inversion of dream into reality can mitigate mortality. It’s what Adam Phillips has called “the hope in death” that required the birth of Christianity, an inversion of the cadaver. What we’ve substituted for a rational afterlife today is civilization. It survives us, it can evolve—and it has absorbed our fear of mortality into it.

When precivilized life returns we can barely withstand it, as Oct. 7 attests. “All hell broke loose” on that day. “Humanity” and “genocide”—as words or accusations—become emptied out.

Several years ago, my wife, Rhonda, and I had dinner with Adam Phillips in Champaign-Urbana. We were anchoring a translation conference, Adam as editor of new translations of Sigmund Freud’s oeuvre and we as the authors of A Literary Bible. The conversation that followed was a memorable one.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me; Honor thy father and thy mother; Thou shalt not commit adultery. These statements among the Ten Commandments are widely, if not willfully, misunderstood to this day as religious or political proscription. Actually, they are facts-of-life for human consciousness, inverted by fantasy, free will, and the literalizing of words and images into emblems of power.

Yhwh the lover of civilization turns into its poetic punisher—revealing human history in all its primitive regressions into war and cruelty. But the poetry of Jeremiah some centuries after the Decalogue turns it into human history.

Yhwh said to me, “Have you seen what disloyal Israel [the Northern Kingdom] has done? How she has made her way up every high hill and to every spreading tree, and has prostituted herself there? … Her faithless sister Judah saw this. She also saw that I had repudiated disloyal Israel for all her adulteries and given her her divorce papers. Her faithless sister Judah, however, was not afraid; she too went and played the whore. So shameless was her whoring that at last she polluted the country; she committed adultery with lumps of stone and pieces of wood.
[Jer 3:6-10, The Jerusalem Bible (Catholic) 1966. The translation used in this instance for the literal baldness of its faux poetic ear. But what an erotically inverted image of idolatry! “committed adultery with lumps of stone and pieces of wood.”]

The psychic inversion of imagery that we discussed that evening struck me again as I watched the uncut hourslong defense speech against the charge of genocide by the Israeli attorneys at the ICJ. Israel was in the dock for committing genocide; the Jews were in the dock for potential (“plausible”) causing of the Holocaust. This was dramatically pinned down in Israel’s exhaustive testimony as to why the Jewish state was fighting in self-defense. Yet it eerily impugned the interminable self-justifications by the Nazi lawyers at the postwar Nuremberg trials. Would it rise to psychic awareness for the West’s prima donna justices? They seemed just as likely to go with the suggested inversion: the Jew as a new form of Nazi.

When newly liberated survivors of Buchenwald displayed “Never Again!” in various languages on handmade signs, their sanity was unquestioned. Imagine if the signs read “Never Again Again!”—as would be required today. Or if they carried signs reading “Never Again” containing an image of a bombed German hospital.

Probably the greatest inversion in Jewish history was proposed by Freud for the origin of Judaism: the murder of the Homo line’s primal horde father by his sons at the beginning of the evolutionary Homo line. This imagery was echoed much later by the murder of Moses in the Sinai wilderness, at least according to Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation—a repetition inverted in later centuries by the Genesis writers; and then, still later, inverted by religious tradition into Moses’ apotheosis as “the greatest prophet to ever live.” The Prophet Jeremiah was already attesting to this in the seventh century BCE, coupling Moses with Samuel (who came centuries after Moses) as “the first prophets” upon whom Jeremiah relied.

However, Freud is not critiquing Moses but illustrating psychic imagery that is more ironic than literal. Only a coverup of a serious group wishing to murder the leader, Moses (if not actually murdered), might produce such psychic guilt as to centuries later require his idealized image as the man delivering God’s moral law.

Freud was making a reasoned leap back to the history of the human psyche, and contra the outraged literalist readers of his day, he was paying a special compliment to Judaism for enlarging human consciousness—by refusing to keep psychically buried a signal event that could be imaginatively transformed into the moral context of the Torah. So, as we contemplate Jewish origins, and the peculiar moral inversions of today, we may consider similar psychic origins to antisemitism in an untransformed wish to murder God’s chosen people in order to be rid of the burdensome claims of civilization. Although the Ten Commandments partly originate in Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi (18th century BCE) their power was magnified in Jewish and Christian history because it was unlikely any culture could fully live up to them. Yet they aren’t presented as ideals; they’re commands we must continually fail to swallow. And that failure echoes the imperfections in our Homo sapiens DNA.

I’ve written before about the Decalogue as a poem because, as in an extraordinary poem especially, acknowledgment of imperfection is built in. The sublime omniscient voicing of the Decalogue tells us we are imperfect hearers; the Creator’s impossible desires for us confirms our creatureliness.

The Ten Commandments embody our unconscious resentment of civilization’s moral strictures. Poetry harmonizes these 10 within human history, as elaborated in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those prophet-poets manage to evoke the fear and plenitude of living in history, as in their poetic visions of rape and rapine—and imperfect restoration.

Concerning rape and rapine in today’s terms, we saw more of it in the Syrian war than Oct. 7. What we’re witnessing today, however, is a weaponization of justice that aims to put Israel in the dock alongside Adolf Eichmann.

“He values Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives,” said Dearborn resident Abe Taleb about President Biden. Now imagine for a minute the obverse: “Hamas values Palestinian lives more than Israeli lives.” For 10 years Hamas had been preparing for Israel’s reaction to its murder spree with an unprecedented tunnel fortress system funded by Arab and Iranian allies and with a codependence on the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, whose decadeslong global campaign to demonize Israel in the court of world opinion was intended to weaken the support of Israel’s military allies while forcing Israel to destroy large parts of Gaza. Did Hamas value Palestinian lives more than Israeli lives? Or did it in fact do the opposite? One might well argue that the cunning of the Hamas strategy is to enlist the world’s sympathy on anticivilizational grounds, while providing a plausible pretext for arguing otherwise.

It may take many years to know who succeeded, the Israeli dead or the Palestinian dead. Yet it should be obvious by now that the world’s valuing of the appearance of civilization over its essence may drown out the still-living imperfect biblical language that Israel speaks.