For 30 years Leon Wieseltier served as literary editor of the New Republic magazine, presiding over a forum for book reviews and essays. Educated at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard universities, Wieseltier also attended Flatbush Yeshiva in Brooklyn. He is the author of Kaddish, based on the journal he kept after his father died in 1996. Wieseltier was in Montreal recently to address the Flegg Annual Lecture at McGill University on the topic, “A Passion for Waiting: The Strangely Unexcited Messianism of the Jews.” He spoke via telephone to The CJN.
Let’s talk about the topic of your presentation in Montreal. What do you mean by the strangely unexcited messianism of the Jews?
I mean that the history of messianism in Judaism is the history of false messianism, and I wanted to explain why the people who invented the idea of the Messiah never accepted one.
Why are there so many false messiahs and why have Jews not accepted any of them?
I think that in my interpretation of the sources the reluctance to accept a messiah was actually intrinsic to the Jewish idea of the Messiah itself. It wasn’t just that the right guy didn’t turn up. We’re set up to protect the reality that exists. Even though it’s imperfect, it’s sufficient for some of our purposes.
Where did the idea of messianism come from in the first place?
The figure of the Messiah originates in the Bible, but then it’s developed in various ways, first by the rabbis of the Talmud and then by the thinkers of the Middle Ages.
Is it relevant to us today? Are there many people in the Jewish community waiting for the perfect circumstances to bring the Messiah here?
I think it’s relevant in three ways. One, I think it’s just damn interesting. Two, I think it’s relevant to peoples’ expectations of history. The theory of the Messiah is really the theory of what to expect from history, how much to hope for, and how to hope, and this is especially important for people who find themselves in adversity and need hope for a change. It’s a way of thinking about change in the world and the various types and degrees of changes. In that sense, it’s always relevant.
And thirdly, there still appear Jews with strong messianic inclinations, who either believe that the Messiah has arrived, as some of the Chabad Chassidim did, or who believe that the Messiah is imminent, as certain forces on the West Bank and in Jerusalem believe.
You’ve written a lot about Iran and come down pretty strongly against the nuclear deal. Israel is against it. America’s Sunni allies are against it. Many people see it as a bad deal. Why do you think the Obama administration was so dead set on negotiating it?
The administration thought it was not a bad deal. They thought it was the best deal they could get under the circumstances, and some of them thought it was actually a very good deal, including the president.
The president has a personal obsession about doing something about nuclear proliferation, and like many people who have that obsession, he looks at it outside its larger political and strategic context. So, for example, we are very proud that we confiscated all of [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s chemical weapons, which was a great triumph of arms control, except it has had no impact whatsoever on the war in Syria. None.
You have to look at arms control in various political and strategic and historical contexts, and they don’t do that. The president believes there are certain countries in the world toward which the United States has a certain prior guilt. Two of those countries happen to be Cuba and Iran.
The president is obsessed with the fact that in the 1950s, the CIA overthrew the leader of Iran, and in the 1970s, we allied ourselves with the Shah, who had his notoriously cruel secret police. He is less concerned about the fact that the regime that he is now doing business with is worse than the regime we did business with earlier and that the democrats and dissidents in Iran look to him and the United States for support in resisting that regime.
Why do you think it’s a bad deal?
I can see why people would think that if you buy 10 years of respite from their enrichment of uranium, you accomplished something. My own view is that you could have bought more and that the price we paid for what we did get was too high.
How is the Jewish community in the United States responding to that deal? Are they behind it?
It’s accepting the verdict and attempting to move on. The Jewish community knows that America’s relationship with Israel is one of the pillars of Israeli security, and I think that it’s looking to the future.
They lost. It wasn’t a catastrophic loss. I don’t believe it will affect Israel’s relationship with the United States. I don’t think it was a catastrophic loss even for AIPAC. AIPAC lobbied for a certain cause. Sometimes lobbies win and sometimes lobbies lose, and you move on to the next fight.
In Canada over the last few elections the Jewish vote moved from the Liberals to the Conservatives, in part because of their policies on Israel. Is something similar happening in the United States?
The largest Jewish vote any Republican president ever got was Reagan, and I think it was 30 per cent or under. I think American Jews do not vote solely on Israel. I think on many of the domestic issues they care about, they’re solidly liberal. I think on foreign policy questions, a large number of them are solidly pro-Israel.
On more general foreign policy questions – such as what our policy should be, should America intervene in certain places, should we cut or increase the defense budget – I think that the community probably is more with the president than against him.
On the broader U.S.-Israel relationship, it seems that under the previous two administrations, relations with Israel were better, but that changed under the Obama administration.
It’s well known that defence co-operation has never been better. That’s uncontroversial.
Obama in his very correct attempts to find some solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in his very correct opposition to the Israeli settlement of the West Bank, I think he was very heavy-handed in his approach and rather insulting to the Israelis in a whole variety of ways.
And I think [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu returned the favour by becoming insulting to Obama in a whole variety of ways. One has to separate the question of the Israeli-American relationship from the question of the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, which is poison.
But both countries are bigger than the people who lead them and longer-lasting, so I think it will be a good day for relations between the countries when the Netanyahu-Obama soap opera is finally over.
What about America’s relations with its allies in the region. They turned on Mubarak in Egypt, they supported the Muslim Brotherhood against him. The Sunni regimes are angry over the Iran policy…
We have been totally inconsistent in the Middle East. We say Assad should go, and then we renege on our word to do something about it. We support the democratic rebellion in [Cairo’s] Tahrir Square, but turn our backs on the dissidents in Tehran in 2009.
It’s kind of a skill, but in the early years of the Obama administration, he found a way to alienate virtually every state in the region. Then along came the Iran talks and then the Iran deal, and if you take that, coupled with our continued stubborn and indefensible refusal to do anything consequential about the Syrian disaster, if you couple those things together, it looks like we’re more tolerant of Shiite depradations than of Sunni depradations.
I think the president’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been baffling to a great many people. He’s disappointed many of our allies. He’s been nasty to allies and friendly to enemies, and he sometimes acts as if our enemy, and I’m referring to Iran, may not be our enemy, which I think is ludicrous.
What he’s left is a mess. His overriding concern is to leave office without us being militarily involved in a war in Iraq or Afghanistan. That really is an obsession. And he will try to arrange it so that will really be the case. But all that means is that as of inauguration day 2017, the next president is going to have to deal with a lot of issues that Obama just kicked down the road.
In Canada the niqab became an election issue, specifically whether women can wear it when taking the oath of citizenship. What’s your view of that?
What’s wrong with that? My own view is that that’s entirely legitimate. I think it’s a colossal mistake to approach a multicultural reality with anything but a multicultural spirit.
I think citizenship must never preclude difference. In fact, one should actually welcome difference, including its external manifestation.
From the standpoint of security and public identity, it’s not too much to ask that a picture be taken for a driver’s license.
I think if they wish to walk around with their faces covered, it’s creepy in the extreme, and to people like ourselves it looks extremely dehumanizing… but it’s not the role of the state to tell people how to practise their religion, unless the religion actually breaks the law.
This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.
