Thursday 12 February 2015

Things that Matter - Charles Krauthammer

Some books are winners the instant they are published by virtue of their authors. Charles Krauthammer’s latest title, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, is one such winner. Still, the book is a let down in two small but significant ways: as a collection of Krauthammer’s commentaries, a good portion of it is a re-read; and his essay on Jewish destiny is just plain wrong. More on this latter minor irritant later.
Krauthammer, the most influential political commentator in America – so says the Financial Times – is one busy, high achieving conservative pundit. A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Harvard-trained medical doctor, Krauthammer – from his permanent wheelchair – pens a wildly popular weekly column syndicated to more than 400 newspapers worldwide. A brilliant nightly panelist on “Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier,” the Montreal-born genius frequently turns up later in the evening as a guest on Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” Krauthammer, who made groundbreaking discoveries in manic depressive disease before starting his writing career, continues as a contributing editor for the Weekly Standard. For 23 years, until PBS’s “Inside Washington” stopped airing in late 2013, he was a regular on that show too.
     Things That Matter reminds us of the many passions that vie for space in Charles Krauthammer’s crowded yet superb mind. Indeed, famous as an uber-political analyst, he nevertheless finds time to write about his multifarious interests, everything from medicine, math, baseball and chess to religion, canines and the proper uses of the F-word. Yes, that F-word. Each of these subjects is fascinatingly dealt with in one or more chapters in Things.
     In truth, he is only primarily a political pundit because, as he relates in the introduction, politics precedes, super-cedes and subordinates absolutely everything else on earth: “Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything… lives or dies by politics.” He adds: You can be among the most enlightened, open-minded and sophisticated of nations: “Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”
     To drive the point home, three pages later, he intones: “The only power comparably destructive belongs to God.”  Thus, like countless thinkers throughout time, he is compelled, nay coerced, to study, analyze, monitor, delineate, brainstorm and somehow comprehend politics, the most intriguing of all subjects.   
      Speaking of God, Krauthammer’s nearly 6,000-word essay titled “Zionism and the Fate of the Jews” – originally published in 1998 in the Weekly Standard – is, I am afraid to say, error-based. It is hard to imagine a stronger or brighter mind than one that insists on completing Harvard Medical School following a diving accident in first year that left him paralyzed for life, which is Krauthammer’s story. But even great minds make mistakes, and in this essay, he makes a humdinger.
     Academically and sentimentally pro-Israel, he takes on the profound and unfathomable question: After 4,000 years, whither the Jewish people? The answer, he explains, depends on the fate of Israel. Small and seemingly destructible, Israel makes the Jewish nation vulnerable. He writes: “It is my contention that on Israel – on its existence and survival – hangs the very existence and survival of the Jewish people.” He is wrong.
   When I first read this opinion in Things, I almost dropped my delicate Kindle onto the backyard concrete patio. It seems like such a short-sighted and shallow prediction for Krauthammer. His is not an unheard of theory, but it is roundly rejected by the Orthodox community, the only section of the Jewish world that counts when it comes to addressing the issue of Jewish continuity. His argument focuses on all the usual canards: inter-marriage, dropping fertility rates, the horrific loss from the Holocaust, weakening ties to tradition, all  ancient issues, and all of which of course concern the Orthodox community, but only peripherally.
     Krauthammer makes the additional mistake of lumping secular Jewish trends in with Orthodox behavior. Though there is and always has been attrition from the Orthodox community, these are the prevalent facts: Orthodox synagogues are filling up and new ones are being created, while secular congregations are losing members; Orthodox Jews continue to have large families, while the birth rates of the secular Jews mirror those of the wider community; and Orthodox Jews virtually never marry non-Jews.
     There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, that is, to rewrite the correct, solid and succinct answer to Krauthammer’s question, an answer which I produced in 1996.  On Jewish continuity, I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen: “Slowly, inevitably, I came to realize that only the observance of Torah rituals gives the Jews their uniqueness as a people and ensures their continuity as a nation. These Torah rituals – such as  eating only kosher food, studying the Hebrew Bible, lighting holiday candles and observing the Sabbath, which, sadly, most Jews ignore completely – are numerous and often complicated.” But they are absolutely mandatory and indispensable in ensuring the continuity of the Jewish people.
     “Paradoxically,” I continued later in the article, “it is only those Jews who are not observant – who do not adhere to what makes them uniquely Jewish – who actually exacerbate this threat of assimilation. Orthodox Jews are not preoccupied by their children being overwhelmed and subsumed by the larger society because they are raised to know that Torah observance is inseparable from their personal identities as Jews.”
     Israel, a secular country, is a great place and the Jews are lucky to have it. We’d miss it for sure if anything destroyed it. But in the tragic event that Israel did disappear, secular Jews everywhere in the world would continue to be secular, perpetuating their decline. And Orthodox Jews would continue to study Torah and adhere to its prescribed rituals, thus ensuring Jewish continuity, Israel or no Israel.
     Aside from this mistake, Krauthammer’s book is superlative.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.

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