Anti-Semitism is a social, historical even a religious phenomenon; and it may seem presumptuous for a psychoanalyst to address the subject. The analytic method deals not with groups, but with individuals, through free association and the development of an intense relationship, called transference, in a two-person setting. Psychoanalytic hypotheses about group behavior are extrapolations from individual psychology. Yet groups are associations of individuals, and though one must avoid the error of assuming that the group is the individual writ large, some clues about group behavior may be drawn from the understanding of individual motivation. So while I am not historian, sociologist or theologian, I shall dare to hypothesize about anti-Semitism with one deed of entitlement: we are all dealing with the human psychological experience. I will proceed, then, with the hope that there is then some common ground where we can meet to make sense of each other's data.
Anti-Semitism is a very old phenomenon, appearing in the classical world among the Greeks and Romans. Dispersion of the Israelites in the Mediterranean world begins in the 9th century B.C. but anti-Semitism proper is recorded first in the 3rd century B.C. among the Alexandrians (Flannery 1965). Hecatus of Abdera asserts that Moses, “in the remembrance of the exile of his people, instituted for them a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life.” Manetho, an Egyptian priest and historian, continues the theme: in addition to revising the Exodus to say that Jews were expelled because they were lepers, he avers that Moses has taught them “not to adore the gods” or “have anything to do with those not of their faith.” Numerous authors repeat the charges of aloofness, disdain and non-participation in the common religious practices. A few, such as Apion of Alexandria in the first year of the first century and Tacitus in the last, become veritable founts of hatred and vituperation. Apion repeats the Alexandrian version of the Exodus but adds far more: “The Sabbath originated because a pelvic ailment, incurred as the Jews fled Egypt,
forced them to rest on the seventh day … . Jews are held under oath ;not to assist strangers, especially Greeks … . The Jews are reproached for not adoring gods of the city, and for sedition; they are ridiculed for sacrificing animals, abstaining from pork and practicing circumcision. Jews adore the golden head of an ass. They practice ritual murder. They fatten foreigners for ritual sacrifice and cannibalism…”
Almost all the elements of the anti-Semitism of the medieval and modern world are present in these early writers. How does this happen? Is humanity invariably evil? Are Jews invariably perverse? What are the ingredients of the noxious brew, the taste and smell which seem to repeat so reliably?
Psychoanalytic theories may help us out. Recent study of the clinical phenomena of “narcissism” has given rise, especially in the work of Heinz Kohut (Kohut 1971, 1972), to certain ideas about the vicissitudes of the development of self, its maintenance and pathology. Arrogance, intolerance, insensitivity, prejudice, bigotry and relentless revenge are phenomena associated with a traumatized self and its frequent accompaniment, narcissistic rage.
Though not always precisely defined, the self can be understood in simplified terms as the central organization of personality which consists of two poles, the mirroring pole, on the one hand involving conscious and unconscious ambitions and the idealizing pole on the other hand involving conscious and unconscious ideals. The generation of the self occurs in the two-person matrix of parent and child, in which the parent must perform essential psychological functions which both permit and are part of the child's development of self. For example, the very earliest tensions of the child can be soothed only by an appropriately cognizant parent. We believe that the child does not feel the early experience of tension and soothing as a two-person phenomenon; even the soothing response of the parent is experienced as part of the child's own self, and helps create the framework of all psychological structure. The early differentiation of self as a coordinated mind/body unit which has continuity in space and time and some degree of cohesion and coherence can occur only through the child's experience of the parent's pleasure in that whole self. The self is born in the gleam of the mother's eye. The response, the gleam, is essential to the generation of the structure and
is experienced as part of it. The child expects to have the same control over such responsiveness as over his or her own body: a control absolute and unquestioning. In the average expectable developmental milieu, the responsiveness is good enough; the pleasure and investment the parent is able to provide mesh reasonably to allow the child to experience the self as whole, loveable and powerful a self-perception exaggerated still more in the adult's recollection of the childhood self. Gradually the self matures to realize its aims and ambitions through work, and to get the gleam from inner satisfaction and from the earned responses to achievement or the loving responses in a relationship of mutuality.
If, however, development is thwarted by delays, absences or peculiarities of response, or by the child's inability to perceive appropriate response, the subsequent adult structure is both brittle and infantile. The apparently arrogant demand for affirmation of perfection or lovability, irrespective of the appropriateness of such a demand or the capacity of another individual to meet it, betrays archaic origins. The frustration of such a demand is the stimulus for narcissistic rage. The lack of desired affirmation is a wrong, which must be righted and avenged at whatever cost. There is no empathy for the offender because he or she cannot be seen as a separate individual, but only a necessary function to complete or maintain the self. The sense of the entitlement of the injured is proportional to the insensitivity to the perpetrator.
Though I have discussed the importance of the affirmation of perfection in the one pole of the self, the mirroring pole, even more pertinent to our subject are the vicissitudes of the idealizing pole. As much as perfection and power may reside in one's self, in a narrow sense, it also resides, whether simultaneously or subsequently, in the other, that is, in the parent. The capacity to experience the parent as an assuring source of omnipotence and protection at the appropriate developmental time, enables the child also to feel strong and secure. Again, this two-person interaction is experienced as part of the self, because it serves crucial internal regulatory needs. The gradual phase-appropriate discovery of imperfections in the omnipotent other results in an internalization of strength and in self-regulating standards and values which become guiding ideals and give power to the conscience. Perfection then resides in one's own personal ideals and values, and as one participates in the larger culture these personal values may become related to the larger systems of values which constitute philosophies or religions.
Damage in the idealizing pole can give rise to the threat of depletion or disintegration and to narcissistic rage, at the discovery of weakness or imperfection in the person or institution which is to supply the inner strength and solidity. Furthermore, arrests and derailments in the mirroring pole can be compensated for by absorption into the idealizing pole. When the two aspects of self-development are telescoped into one, the likely outcome of disappointment in the idealized other is catastrophic disintegration or narcissistic rage. The patient in analysis is likely to show narcissistic rage as the human limitations of the analyst become evident in the therapeutic process. Assassins of public figures and some kinds of revolutionary leaders often act out of the rage engendered by what they experience as traumatic disappointment in the perfection of the person or system they then need to destroy.
Self-development leads naturally into the public sphere, rather than into self-sufficiency or self-enclosure. Ideally, the maturation of our ambitions leads to fulfillable goals which bring us satisfaction and render us less needful of the responsiveness of others, while the internalization of ideals renders us independent of our strength of others; nevertheless, our equilibrium depends on our place in a social matrix. The mutuality of our close relationships derives from early needs for confirmation, while the need for perfection now reposes in work, sports, politics, philosophy and religion rather than in the childhood experience of the parent.
The point of intersection between individual psychological development and the group is the shared ideals or ideology. This is a matter that Freud (1921) merely mentions in addressing himself to the phenomenon of the human group. For the most part he describes the group in terms of its identification with the leader. The members of the group remain bound to each other by their common possession of the leader, acting in a group according to the leader's wishes, even if these conflict with what has been their own conscience, for the leader takes the place of their own egoideal. Freud describes the importance of group ties in the violent and chaotic effects of their dissolution, still assuming that integrity is dependent on the leader. When Freud discusses the Church, here too he emphasizes the relationship of the believer to Christ as leader.
Yet human groups exist over time as identifiable entities which can change leaders and still retain their characteristics. Though leaders are
essential, enduring groups also require enduring organizing forces. The sharing of language or history constitutes one such organizing force, but the most powerful appears to be the common ideology. Group ideology lends itself very well to individual psychological needs, offering the opportunity for expansion and stability of the self. It also confers strength and cohesion on the group as a whole, indicating the achievement of a structure perhaps analogous to that found in the mature individual.
However, there is a dynamic within the group which is universally analogous to the development of the individual. For the latter the development of the mirroring pole requires the gleam, the validation of the self by the parent. For the group, the ideal requires validation by the members.
The fury which may then be unleashed is proportional to so dire a threat. The narcissistic rage of the group, like that of the individual, by definition precludes empathy: the offender appears not as an individual or group with needs, motivations, and goals which arise from quite separate or different concerns, but only as a malevolent force whose sole purpose is to destroy one's most precious asset, so the proper response is the obliteration of the danger. All manner of evil is then perceived in the dissenter. Such a phenomenon has often been explained as the projection by the offended party of its own disavowed evil, but in this framework that would be a secondary rather than a primary cause. More pertinently, the malevolence attributed to the dissenter has to do with the narcissistic injury to the group.
In the case, then, of Manetho and Apion, the anti-Semitic rage appears to spring from what they see as the insult of the Jewish group. “They were taught not to have anything to do with those not of their faith”; “they will not adore the gods.” They will not, in other words, bear witness to the binding ideal of society, and hence they became seditious. But there is also a slur, specific to this time and not repeated in later expressions of anti—Semitism, that the Jews in Exodus did not flee an oppressive Egyptian Pharaoh, but were expelled from Egypt as lepers. Apion adds that there was something rotten in their pelvis, possibly alluding to venereal disease.
Why this particular form of insult? In the Jewish account of the Exodus, it is, of course, the Egyptians who were the villains, and the final
punishment God wrought on them was the death of their firstborn sons. But here is the Egyptian denial of the insult and the reversal of the slur. It was not Pharaoh who was defeated and degraded, but the Jews . It was not the fruit of the Egyptian, but Jewish loins that was damaged.
The ingredients of the brew become distinguishable. The Jews are seen as a cohesive group living within a host nation, refusing to bear witness to the local gods, but having their own god, a God of gods. The devaluation of perfection of Egyptian ideals could not be more complete. Even the accusation of ritual murder makes a kind of sense, partially as a reference to the insult of the Jews eating separately, but more seriously as symbolizing the threat by alien religious ideology to consume and destroy Egyptian identity.
The distinctiveness and the strong cohesiveness of this alien group is to be explained in large part by the nature of their group ideal, that is, monotheism. Though obviously the content of an ideal, itself, cannot determine its power, some ideals lend themselves better than others to participation in group experience and transformation through time. Monotheism is particularly suitable for both individual and for group needs. Monotheism proclaims that a unitary perfection exists; that one can participate in it; and that it encompasses everything. The very abstractness of the oneness lends itself to the expression of perfection, inclusiveness and absoluteness, and the One by definition includes all others. Hence it establishes for members of the group both a oneness with each other and a superiority over all others. For individuals it offers a haven for developmental needs that require systems of perfection for the maintenance of the personal ideal. For the group which collectively acknowledges such Oneness, the understanding confers a special stature and, hence, the group considers itself chosen. By its abstractness and comprehensiveness, monotheism may constitute a kind of ultimate statement of human ideals. It embodies the essential elements out of which all ideals select parts. In the moral universe it functions like a good theory in science in that it includes all others.
The evolution of monotheism from a primitive desert tribal God took place in an unlikely group, obscure and small by every temporal measure. The magnitude of the insight held by the group led it to notions of itself that were preposterous by any objective measure of its significance
in the ancient world. Nonetheless, the early Biblical Jews expected that the power to which they laid claim would be translated literally into temporal glory. We know the vanity of those claims. In addition to the perennial difficulty the Jews had in governing themselves, they were crushed and scattered by the Babylonians in 597 B.C.E. With the frustration of these illusions of temporal greatness and tribal supremacy, the further evolution of monotheism in the prophets expanded its ethical dimensions and requirements, and further distanced and transformed the expectations of temporal fulfillment.
When the prophets proclaimed that it was not God, the perfection, which was imperfect or defective, but the people, they heightened the ethical demands. Though they have been seen as requiring a masochistic submission to a punishing parent, the prophets manifested the inspired capacity to retain a unifying and dynamic ideal.
Further, they proclaimed that if Israel was stricken now, it would be great in the future. In that period there was forged the Messianic character of Judaism, with its expectation of future redemption and perfection. The Messianic expectation was for an end time, in which there would be political freedom, moral perfection and earthly bliss for the people of Israel in its own land and also for the entire human race. While some prophets spoke of Israel's political power at that time, the majority saw the aim of redemption as the establishment of conditions of peace and security for all nations. Other nations would exalt Israel not because of its superior political power, but because of its superior spiritual and ethical qualities.
Thus the prophets transformed the aspirations of the Jews from those of a politically ascendent national power to a morally distinguished beacon in an increasingly participant world, and led monotheistic Judaism through a crucial step to a universal faith. By this transformation, the national boundaries toward a definition of its evolution to a people were freed from themselves in terms of their Ideal. Both mobility and cohesion were provided by the new definition of the essence of the group in terms of its relationship to its God.
For all the universalist vision and comprehensive scope, this ideal was made in Israel, and the particular stamp that the Jews imprinted made its availability quite limited in practice. The path to God which was an
essential aspect of God himself, and the means of bearing witness to him lay through Torah, through the observance of His law and participation in His nation Israel. One had to practice circumcision and observe the many customs prescribed in Leviticus to be a member of the group. Further, one had to belong to the people and identify with their history. Belief alone was not enough.
Thus the emergence of monotheism and its evolution in Jewish history redefined the nature of the group ideal and increased its binding power, but also raised tension between ethical, universalist and the particularist, nationalist expression. This is the God of all, but he dwells in the house of Israel. The centuries before and after the birth of Christ saw a continuing movement toward universalization with the inclusion of even greater numbers of proselytes and converts and an increasingly metaphorical and spiritual interpretation of Torah and prophets. All in all, Judaism flourished in the Roman Empire, a religio licta, the only religion accorded official status outside the state religion itself. Jews lived throughout the Empire and were involved in all walks of life, though there were occasional outbreaks of popular anti-Judaism for the general reason mentioned. Even in the Islamic world, Jews had the opportunity for broad participation, despite periodic restriction and discrimination. The violence of Apion's hatred was to recur only in Christian Europe, and only in the succeeding Christian centuries would Jews be subjected to a sustained and relentless oppression.
The anti-Semitism of Christianity originated in the theological ferment and the crisis of truth and witness in Judaism in the same centuries preceding and following the birth of Christ and the destruction of the Temple (70 C.E.). Within the proliferation of Jewish thought one tendency, the so-called Hellenistic, sought actively to convert the Gentiles and offered a universalist vision of Judaism deemphasizing its nationalistic character. Codified by Philo, it interpreted the Torah as the embodiment of a universal ethical relation to God. The Hellenists attracted large numbers of converts and even more proselytes.
Another important group, the so-called Sectarians, arose from messianic trends in prophetic Judaism. In response to the oppression of the Roman rule and the obvious impotence of Palestine, these true believers prepared for the imminent apocalypse and the arrival of the Messiah by
a call to repentance. In their view, the established Judaism was unredeemed; only the “true Israel” would be saved by entering anew into the covenant and following the way which established continuity with the past. Baptism, their ritual of initiation, deriving from the mikvah bath, indicated that all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, needed purification in order to enter the covenant and become true Jews. The messianic sects included Essenes, the Zealots, and of course, the Christians.
The Christians allowed far easier access to Judaism than did the Pharisees. Baptism was surely less formidable than circumcision, and belief in Christ more accessible than identification with the national past of the people. Ultimately the great success of Christianity was to lie with the proselytes and Gentiles. It is all the more necessary to remember then, that Christianity arose within Judaism: the teachings of Jesus were consistent with the prophetic tradition, and the Christians were not the only Jewish sect to expect or announce the arrival of the Messiah. Christian Jews proselytized, but the main thrust of their activity was towards their own people, seeking confirmation of their own vision of the transformation of Judaism.
After the fall of the temple in 70 C.E.,1 the Pharisees moved to consolidate Judaism and by 90 A.D., the daily liturgy of the eighteen benedictions, the Shemoneh-Esreh, included a curse against the dissenting groups, invoking their destruction unless they returned to the convent. This was a definitive rebuff to Christians and other messianic groups, as well as groups such as the Sadducees who rejected the Pharisees' development of oral law and denied the validity of resurrection. It was a rejection of the Christian vision of the meaning of Judaism and the Christian way to Israel's God through belief in Christ rather than the observance of Torah.
Judaism would not transform itself; it would not bear witness to the Christian truth. Christians could not be Jews; Jews would not become the Christian version of what it was to be Jewish. In the Christians' rage
I am indebted to the Catholic theologian, Rosemary Ruether (1974) whose work has formed the basis of my information about the origins of anti-Semitism and whose account I have paraphrased in this summary of the vicissitudes of Judaism and Christianity in the Roman Empire.
and disappointment, Jews became the very embodiment of opposition to the Truth; i.e. they killed Christ. Ruether, searching for the basis of the traditional Christian charge of deicide against the Jews, finds that basis in an alienated and angry Jewish sectarianism which believed it was founded on the true cornerstone of God's people, but found itself rebuffed and rejected at every stage by the synagogue… The anti-Judaic tradition in Christianity grew as a negative need to legitimate its revelation in Jewish terms… It continues on in the Church Fathers even to this day, as an on-going expression of this same need by the Church to legitimate its Christiological midrash by insisting that this actually represents the true meaning of the Jewish Scriptures and is the divinely intended fulfillment of Moses, the Psalms and the Prophet.
Modern scholarship has ascertained marked change in the tone of the Gospels after that confrontation. In John, for example, the Jews are named more frequently and in more and more pejorative contexts. The Johannine version of the trial of Jesus is the most inflammatory of the Gospels. Here the Jews—named angrily as Jews—clamor for Jesus' crucifixion, and significantly their rage is roused precisely by Jesus' claim of divinity: it is for the blasphemy for saying he is the Son of God that he must die. Thus the depiction of the Jews as killers of Christ begins in response to Jewish rejection of the Christian vision.
We can certainly understand the Jews reasons for that rejection, when accepting the Christian version would have meant a drastic change in their relationship to their identity as a people. The religious structure would have been radically altered, for belief in Christ would have replaced the way of the Torah, and that was tantamount to superseding the Jewish truth with a superior one. The Christian demand meant a dismantling of the Ideal and hence was a threat to the cohesion of the group. If the group was threatened even more by the destruction of the Temple, the literal dwelling of the Lord, it closed ranks against all other traumatic disturbances of the equilibrium.
For the Christians, however, this was an even greater trauma. They failed in their bid for validation from the group from whom they issued and toward whom they turned: the most significant, indeed the only worthy witnesses to their truth, deemed them apostates. Theologically secure, the Jews turned their back upon the illegitimate issue and continued
remodeling their religious structure along the lines laid down by the Pharisees. The Christians, however, from then on, had to devote a significant part of their apologia to rejecting and anathematizing the Jews and elaborating on the Jewish rejection of Christ.
The epithet, “killer of Christ,” that became a battle cry for Jewish massacre from the Roman world to the Crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the Russian pogroms of the nineteenth—that epithet was born with Christianity itself, and its origins lay in the traumatic injury to the nascent ideal. Throughout Christian history, the Jewish presence would be a necessary one, since only the Jews could validate the Christian Ideal, and the conversion of the Jew was to be one of the essential signs of the Second Coming and Christianity's historical fulfillment. So the Jewish presence must remain; yet, so long as it remained and so long as the Jews refused to validate the Christian truth, Christian existence was bound into a struggle with the Jew for possession of the same ground—the same Ideal. Thus in the formation of Christianity there recurred the same narcissistic rage as Egyptian was evident in in Apion, the Egyptian. Two other factors would be duplicate to the Egyptian situation: Christianity would become dominant ideology and the Jews would be resident within the Christian culture. In 323 C.E. with the conversion of Constantine, Christianity established itself as the official religion of the Roman Empire. If a universalist ethical monotheism was required for the rejuvenation and transformation of the ancient world, Christianity was far more suitable than Judaism. For with the former there was no conflict of temporal identities. The Roman world could retain its history and believe in Christ. The temporal grandeur of Rome could be matched by the spiritual and religious grandeur of a universalist faith in a man, Jesus the Christ, whose nationality was trivial. But Rome could not bow to Israel.
Momentous consequences flowed from the Christian conversion of the Roman Empire: transformed from a persecuted minority to the dominant majority, the Christian group could translate its ideology into custom and law. Christian rage and narcissistic injury matured in progressive restrictions on Jews, with the purpose of defending Christian truth, avoiding further narcissistic injury to the Christianity or inflicting similar injury on the Jews. The Codex Theodosianus, completed in 438, retained official protection for Jews in the Empire, but forbade them to
proselytize. They could not own Christian slaves or convert their own slaves to Judaism. The decree was the first to strike significantly at the economic and professional status of the Jews: without slaves they could not continue in agriculture and industry. Moreover, they were now barred from public office and from the legal profession.
After the fall of Rome, the fortunes of the Jews varied with the political and social climate of the area. Everywhere they were accorded second-class status, and in some places were subject to forced baptism and/or exile. With the consolidation of the Christian world in the Middle Ages, the Jews' position deteriorated even further.
Bands of Crusaders in the eleventh century slaughtered communities of Jews in France, Germany, Bohemia and finally Palestine, and the Crusaders' violence was continued by the mobs. Though the Jewish communities recovered somewhat in the succeeding century, the provisions of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 set the stage for their social and cultural decline: usury was restricted; Jews were forbidden to appear in public at Easter and were still barred from public office; Jews and Saracens were to wear distinctive dress. From then on, as badges were imposed in various parts of Europe, the inferior and alien status of the Jews was progressively entrenched in law, custom and culture; and they were periodically taxed, attacked, expelled and slaughtered. Eventually, they lost all status in feudal society and became the property of the local ruling prince. Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council made the Inquisition inevitable, for they insisted that Jews must not rise above a deeply subordinate position in European society. Eventually Christianity would have to rectify the ascendency the Jews had won in Spain in a culture initially Islamic, and the violence of their fall would be proportionate to their previous height.
It may appear paradoxical that the medieval persecution of the Jews was set on by Christianity not in one of its more vulnerable periods but in a stage of resurgence and expansion. The Crusades were organized by a newly militant faith to reconquer Jerusalem from Islam. By the time of the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church was at the height of its power. Innocent III was one of the most powerful and effective Popes ever to hold office, and he moved with utter ruthlessness to exterminate the heretical Albigensians in Southern France. The Church could then more
definitively impose on the Jew the inferior status that prior injury and the historical process demanded. But at the same time, the need to put down Jews was all the more urgent. The Christian world, in a period of expansion which brought it into conflict with the other major religious culture, Islam, found it imperative to maintain the internal integrity of its Ideal.
As a dissenting religion, Judaism was unique, in that it could not be confined within a territory of its own. Islam and Christendom, Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism, all constituted groups with conflicting versions of monotheistic truth which could not live together in the same space, but had each its own territory. Even the later upheavals of the Reformation finally regrouped Protestant and Roman Catholic ideologies in separate regions. But the Jewish-Christian conflict could not permit such a resolution. Had they the means to defend themselves, the Jews might have engaged in a holy war and established security for their ideology within their own territory, but without that power, obliged to live in the midst of a group whose cohesion was bound to an antipathetic version of the universalist ideal, the Jews remained an irritating and sometimes frightening presence. The periodic expulsion of Jews from one or another part of Europe and their eventual enclosure in ghettos might be understood as spasmodic attempts to accomplish separation, but all these efforts were likely to make the Jews' alien presence more concentrated, and do little to relieve the Christians' sense of being invaded.
Behind all Christian complaints about specific Jewish offences, such as their activity in usury, behind the use of the Jew as the convenient scapegoat for social and economic ills, their lay the deeper religious injury—that the Jew had “killed Christ.” Their presence was necessary to Christianity, and, at the same time, an unavoidable threat to Christian truth and Christian civilization. It was not an accident that the Jews became second-class citizens in the Christian world, condemned to the same exclusion and inferiority they had inflicted in another way on Christianity. Though the social and historical injury to the Jews was far greater than the comparable Christian experience, the narcissistic injury done to the Christians made them unrelenting avengers.
In the long history of western Christendom, the Jew became the very
symbol of the invalidator of the Ideal-questioner, free-thinker, dissenter. It did not matter then, when Nietzsche pronounced that God was dead. When primary investment shifted from religious to secular ideals, the Jew now became the threat to the body politic. Hitler's view of the Jew as the destroyer of German power and glory resonated all too clearly the age-old view of Jew as killer of Christ. Traditionally the target of narcissistic rage from the injury to Christianity the Jew was the suitable object of the German's rage over their shattered national pride. The German Reich, adhering to an Ideal both post-Christian and pagan, was, however, willing to annihilate the offending separatist: it had no further need for Jewish witness.
Anti-Semitism is a symptom of a historical process in which humanity's reach for a universal binding ideal has failed. That the attempt has caused suffering and hardship to western civilization is demonstrated unequivocally. Does that mean that the attempt to find the universal Ideal is fad and should be given up? Now, more than ever, humanity needs the capacity to bind its members to each other in recognition of interdependence. Our very survival depends on mutual identification. Can the understanding of the human need for the creation of the Ideal enable us to reconstruct and maintain a vision which does not coerce or victimize? Perhaps the recognition of the need for unity and an understanding of the human dimensions of our ideals would make that possible. When the Messiah will come, no one knows. But if we don't create him, the Angel of death will come in his place.