THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
JANUARY, 1922
THE MODERN PHARISEE
BY JOEL BLAU
I
Being hated, despite its obvious inconvenience, is really a high distinction. Philosophers always knew this. Saints were passionately convinced of it. Hence the fierce pride of martyrs. For one thing, the position of the hated becomes automatically one of moral superiority over the hater—which is the subtlest and noblest revenge. And if the hated can but rise to the height of his opportunity, neither returning hatred nor attempting to avert the blows of the hater, he has decidedly solved his problem. He has solved it by not solving it. He has solved it by non-resistance. And non-resistance, though few people are aware of it, is the strongest form of resistance.
There is a curious paradox in the case of the Jew, the classical example of the aristocratic tribe of the hated. Theoretically, the Jew is alleged to be an advocate of ruthless revenge. ' An-eye-foran-eye'—a mere legal formula—has been accepted as the literal phrasing of his life-view. Historically, however, the Jews are the most non-resistant people on earth. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible how a people, admittedly endowed with rare intelligence, could defer the solution of its heart-rending problem for two thousand years. A vast wisdom, it must appear, prompted this millennial inactivity. It was the secret of the Jew's miraculous survival. The Jew lives by the resistless force of his non-resistance.
Tolstoy seems to have understood this strange paradox. He tells us in his Confessions that he was reading the fifth chapter of Matthew with a Hebrew rabbi. At nearly every verse the rabbi said, 'That is in the Bible/ or, 'That is in the Talmud'; and he showed Tolstoy, in the Bible and in the Talmud, sentences very like the declarations of the Sermon on the Mount. But when they reached the verse about non-resistance to evil, the rabbi did not say, 'This also is in the Talmud,' but he asked the count: 'Do the Christians obey this command? Do they turn the other cheek?' And Tolstoy adds to the recital of this anecdote: 'I had nothing to say in reply, especially as at that particular time Christians were not only not turning the other cheek, but were smiting the Jews on both cheeks.'
The unfortunate relation, then, between Jews and Christians simmers down to this: peoples that believe in non-resistance, but practise it not, hate a people that believes not in non-resistance, but practises it.
VOL. 129—NO. 1
