I just read "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok, which I never read partially because I thought it was fruit of the propaganda arm of the Black Panthers. (Sometimes associations are no less strong because utterly unfounded: I should perhaps clarify that the book is about the friendship of two Orthodox Jewish boys in Brooklyn during and immediately after WWII.) One of my roommates just loaned it to me and I was enthralled. Partially it seems like a fictional meditation on Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." The main character's father frequently talks about finding meaning in suffering, especially after news of the holocaust breaks on American shores. And ideas about psychology run throughout the book, primarily in heavy skepticism of Freud.
I love Viktor Frankl. But one thing I've been thinking about is that it's true that man must find meaning in his suffering in order to be at peace, but so many times that meaning is very harmful and the peace is only the apathy of despair. The main character's father, an utterly admirable man, is so distraught over the destruction of European Jews that he insists they must make meaning for themselves by making the Messiah come (or at least forcing the good associated with the coming of the Messiah to happen) through Zionism. The other meaning he made for himself was a distinct elevation in the role of teachers and rabbis in the American Jewry, since it was the only one left in the world: this was a good and constructive meaning. But the first was harmful in so many ways, partially in the theological evil of shoving God aside, and partially in the assumption that the only way for the horrific loss of life to be redeemed was through the establishment of Israel, whatever the costs. And I didn't realize that the costs had included terrorism by Jews against the British.
When the state was formed and the Arabs responded with more terror, the people in the book were flabergasted, which fits the hazy impression I'd had of people's actual reaction. But Macchiavelli and the Old Testament have already explained what has to be done to successfully displace another nation: even their newborn babes have to be thrown from the city walls. Macchiavelli pointed out that if you're determined to do evil to someone, you must utterly destroy them, as otherwise they will have nothing to lose and will make it their sole aim in life to destroy you and this state of affairs will remain until one or the other party is quite gone. But who can read that passage from the Old Testament without horror? Commentators from St. Augustine on have agonized over the correct interpretation of the verse: endorsing it as a practical course of action for the present would be unconscionable. Yet that is the choice that must be made when one group desires to usurp (not to rule over, which is much more easily done) another. This desire on the part of the American settlers was the driving force of the long, drawn-out tragedy summed up by the game "Cowboys and Indians."
And we (countries who participated in the vote in the United Nations) should have been able to see that this was the choice we were making, but that would have meant the loss of that "meaning" for the suffering of the holocaust. This is what I mean by a bad meaning: it pushed us into an evil action and fear of losing that meaning kept us from admitting to ourselves how bad the action was. Now it is made and reversing it could well be as bad as making it in the first place. You'd never want to be cruel to the heartbroken Jews who agitated for the state of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust: as Viktor Frankl says, the only normal response to an abnormal situation is an abnormal one. But it was a bad meaning to make for ourselves.
