I am sitting in a small room located about two blocks away from one of the great museums in the United Sates. From my dining room window, I can see the tower which was transported by the Rockefeller family from France to New York for the specific purpose of housing a world-class collection of medieval art. Surrounding this great museum, now called “The Cloisters” (a division of the MET Museum of New York) and its priceless antiquities, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. This is, of course, yet another irony in a time and place filled with great ironies.
There are some people who deplore the mere existence of this museum and suggest that it should be closed and its contents sold, so that the proceeds might be turned over to the poor. But there are many ways of being poor. Most people realize that such a sale would only impoverish every citizen of this metropolis, especially its poorest citizens.
The inescapable presence of that tower in my life has made it into a symbol. Like it or not, I see it every day. So it has come to symbolize, for me, everything I associate with the word “civilization.”
What is civilization?
Well, I remember that the great British art historian, Kenneth Clark, raised exactly this question during the seventies in a PBS documentary, then devoted fourteen weeks and a thick book to trying to answer it. Even more time and effort would be inadequate, of course, to the task of defining civilization. Like American Supreme Court Justice Potter-Stewart seeking to define obscenity, we might just shrug our shoulders and say simply, “I know it when I see it.”
I see civilization in the contents of that museum: in paintings and sculptures, in beautiful buildings, or in films, books in libraries and bookstores, even in jewelry and clothing, in the way fashionable women wear colorful scarves and arrange their hair as they stroll down Fifth Avenue. There is civilization also in the small gestures of civility that make up our daily lives, in the rituals of our meals and forms of greeting. And all civilizations have a history which alone makes them understandable.
All of these things are connected somehow to often unarticulated and unexamined aesthetic and ethical ideals that we assume, that we feel to be present in our lives, without finding it necessary to make them explicit in any way – ideals by which we live our lives, by which we establish, through time, a continuity with the past.
There is no people on earth with a greater experience of the challenge of protecting their civilization, as a legacy to be handed down to their children, than the Jewish people. There is no people that has faced greater obstacles in the effort to hang on to their civilization as a set of ideals that are “defining” even as they are “to be defined by” each generation successively, which may be one way of stating the meaning of Jewish history.
That civilization has been in danger for thousands of years. It is still in danger. Yet it is still with us. I think that it always will be – because of the vitality and richness of its symbols and the beauty and power of its ethical wisdom. Those of us who have had the good fortune to attend a Jewish wedding will recall the symbol of a shattered glass goblet bound in cloth. This is a symbol which gestures (among other things) at the pain of life and at the binding qualities of love within that pain.
A people that inherits such symbols will never be destroyed.
I think that Western civilization is now in danger too. Perhaps the best way to understand what “terrorism” is may be to think of it as the NEGATION of civilization. It is the major threat to both Western and Hebrew civilization. These civilizations, of course, overlap and are mutually reinforcing in the contemporary world. It is difficult to draw a boundary between the two, though they are also distinct in many ways. Israel has been coping with this threat for some time. We are beginning to have a sense of what the Israelis have been up against, after 9/11 and our own adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The word “terror” says it all. A person who is terrorized will not paint a picture, nor create a symphony, nor write a book, nor discover a cure for cancer. Terror itself is a weapon against such efforts; and is, thus, damaging in many subtle ways in addition to the obvious ones. Terrorists kill people. Yet they also kill the climate that makes the peaceful transmission of ideas, of wisdom and beauty from one generation to the next, possible. For this, I detest them; and I will always oppose and struggle against them.
I see the Isareli struggle as increasingly similar to the struggle of the free world against the sort of thing that led to recent bombings in France, to the taking of a school in Russia, and to the flying of airliners into buildings in New York a few years ago. The Israeli struggle is our struggle.
Americans sometimes fail to understand what the Israelis have learned over the past fifty years, and very painfully too: Terror is not an instrument of policy, but is an end in itself. It works. It gets concessions and bribes, though we pretend that it does not. It must not be allowed to work. Terrorists cannot be appeased and they cannot be bought off. Those who use terror and grow accustomed to using it – whether they acknowledge it or not – come to derive PLEASURE from terrorizing others, from the sense of importance they gain as a result of instilling fear and taking lives. There is almost a sexual seductiveness about such evil, for some people, so that the attractions of terrorism will not be negotiated away accross a bargaining table. They must be halted. Terrorists must be stoped now.
It is difficult for some of us to appreciate that the currency of civilized life – rational discussion, tolerance, a willingness to understand a hostile point of view – is not recognized as valid in some social settings, where brutal violence still holds sway. It is diffcult to fathom that such efforts at comprehension, far from being respected, are deemed signs of weakness or stupidity. One has to experience an encounter with a person who is utterly without human compassion or concern for others to fully understand what I mean. Novelist John Fowles writes that inarticulateness …
" …is a symptom of cultural breakdown. it means: ‘I cannot, or I probably cannot, communicate with you.’ And that, not the social or economic, is the true underprivilidge [in life]."
" … I am convinced that the fatal clash between us [criminal and victim] was between one who trusts and reveres language and one … who suspects and resents it. My sin was not primarily that I was middle class, intellectual, that I may have appeared more comfortably well off financially than I am in fact; but that I live by words."
I believe that history will judge individuals and nations – ALL of us – faced with the challenge of coping with international terrorism at the dawn of the twenty-first century by whether we manage to make the world safe for civilization, for those who rely on language as the instrument of reason rather than violence to resolve disputes, and are able to pass these things on to our children.
Those of us on the side of civilization (and yes, there is such a side), must not fail in the task that has been set for us.
