Much as I've come to disagree with Marty Peretz, I admit that I hesitate viscerally before criticizing him. Marty opened the pages of The New Republic to me in the 1990s. So attacking him feels like an act of ingratitude, if not a minor violation of oedipal inhibitions toward a one-time mentor. In his own blog, though, Marty appears to have thrown off all inhibitions. He’s turned obscene in print, figuratively and literally, as in his new screed against J Street. Even stranger, he’s exhibiting a definite ultra-Orthodox tendency in defense of his bellicose version of Zionism.
Peretz attacks Jewish liberals who appropriate Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology and the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam. “Now, JStreet will soon be into the business of quoting Heschel,” he writes. He knows because Ezra Klein has quoted Heschel at The American Prospect in explaining why he supports J Street. In other words, an organization is “guilty” of using every argument that a pundit or other backer uses in support of it.
Marty is sure that Ezra has both Heschel and tikkun olam wrong. Since Judaism forbids using the services of those who speak with the dead, I can't tell you what Heschel would say if we got him on the line. But I have spent a fair amount of time studying Heschel - indeed, being given his book “The Prophets” when I was 15 is probably what started me on the way to becoming Orthodox. In the chapter called “Justice,” he wrote (emphasis in the original):
Why should religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such a stress on justice for man? Does not the preoccupation with morality tend to divest religion of immediate devotion to God?… Did not the prophets overrate the worth of justice?
Perhaps the answer lies here: righteousness is not just a value; it is God's part of human life, God's stake in human history.
Each person who reads Heschel finds his own Heschel, just as each person who reads the Bible or the Haggadah finds his own Bible and Haggadah. For me that sentence is the distilled essence of Heschel. Because he lived by this credo, he marched at Selma and protested against the war in Vietnam, though it meant challenging the rulers of the country that gave him refuge. After Selma he said, “Our legs were praying.”
