The Silver Shadow [COLUMN]

There is a circular window where I live, on the western elevation, that lets in a circle of moonlight on some evenings. The fingers of a massive Bluegum, were moving in the cold, restless air outside, making delicate confettied patterns over the dark, hollowy interior.

And while this dance of silvery light was playing off the wooden floor, the small black steel hearth downstairs glowed orange and sent invisible bulging bubbles of heat to the loft bedroom where I was reading.

I started off reading a newspaper article that described how one Jewish family had effectively declared war on another Jewish family. The American parents of a teenager paralysed in a car accident whilst on a trip to South Africa to attend a bar mitzvah were suing the head of Investec Bank, David Kuper, for $24 million.

I will tell you in a moment what I read next, but before I do, a disclaimer. I have tremendous respect and love for George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, I admire the beauty of Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman, I think Ben Stiller and Larry King are excellent. All Jews. I'm going to share a thought I had. This doesn't mean I encourage you to 'believe' or 'buy-in' to the same thought. It also doesn't mean it reflects my beliefs. It is merely something that occurred to me that is possibly worth considering (and possibly not). It may be as wrong as waking up on a Thursday and saying, "Thank God it's Friday." But I am sharing this with you because you may find it illuminating. At worst, you might find it interesting. But I can guarantee you that what I am about to share is 'not nice'. It's disturbing. That said, please don't accuse me of being anti-Semitic or even attempting to be. That would be a shallow response to the many troubling issues that face all people right now.

The line of thought began constructing itself in bed, reading a book on 'How to read the Bible', and my girlfriend lying in bed beside me reading the Bible. Suddenly it occurred to me that these familiar characters, almost as familiar as movie stars, and carrying the fabled significance even beyond children's favorite bedtime stories (Pinocchio, The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel), David, Moses and Joseph are all Jewish characters. They're the ancestors of some of those funny dressed people who walk around on Fridays, whose men-folk have long gray beards, cowboy hats, and funny ropes swaying under their dark suits. Their real names wouldn't have been so different, David ben for David and so on. But let's be clear. My Afrikaans girlfriend and I am reading about a tribe of people who essentially have nothing to do with the etymology of our people. When the Jews were in Egypt, where were the Saxons? Why aren't we reading their stories?

The answer emerges if one takes this question quite seriously. In the very early era the Jews were enslaved by the Egyptians. Evidently the Egyptians found them - the Jews - too valuable to eradicate in the sort of xenophobic holocausts that are all too common throughout human history. So the Jews as a tribe managed a sort of sputtering existence, until they escaped from Egypt. They were then taken to the 'Promised Land' by Moses. Interestingly, this situation has inspired many struggling tribes ever since, including South Africa's blacks during Apartheid, and Martin Luther King spoke about the Promised Land (and not living to see it even though he believed others would) the day before his assassination.

The Jews went on to populate the land of Canaan and were somewhat successful in exterminating the local tribes. They were warned not to give themselves to idolatry, which is the worship of things as opposed to concepts. Some writers say that the gift God gave them, Jerusalem, became like an idol to the Jews. They could not tear their religion away from the thing that God had given them. And nor could others who claimed Jerusalem as their own. And then the Romans (the Saxons - our tribe) came along. By this time the Bible (Judaism - the Old testament) was well underway. It had been written for a people without their own country, without their own land. The word for a worldless group. And it is for this reason, because the Jews were never able to fully conquer their territory, that their religion has endured the way it has for as long as it has. Instead of land, sovereign territory, they needed to collectively belong to a book to be an identifiable, separate group, capable of withstanding the horror or horrors - assimilation with other, lesser mortals.

What followed was enslavement by the Romans, which wiped out any real prospect of a Jewish revolution or independent state (which their Bible prescribed/predicted/prophesied). Jesus came and died, and while some Jews claimed he was the long lost messiah, others, finding their prospects to a homeland diminishing by the hour, rejected the practical unreality of this claim. The Jews became scattered, forming disparate communities all over the world, but especially in Germany, Russia and the USA. It was only after World War II, that they were offered, by their allies, unfettered access back to Palestine/Israel. What is certain is that the entire Middle East region is dominated by Islam/Arab populations, and to this day surrounds the Jewish state on all sides.

On the one hand one can argue that the special treatment the Jews received shows the best of humanity. That even though a people are weak, they ought to be protected. If that's true, why were no special conditions or terms or land set aside for the Bushman of Botswana (now virtually extinct) and a host of endangered tribes all around the world. Well, the answer is probably that Jews in governments in these other powerful states engineered the rescue of their own people; the restoration of Israel as a sovereign state. Non-Jewish Christians obviously helped in this process too, seeing in the Jews some fielty as lost (perhaps misguided) sons and brothers, but sons and brothers nonetheless. Money, owned in abundance by Jewish interests, would have provided the military capability to defend their interests in a way never before possible.

And those same moneyed interests, overseen by the likes of Alan Greenspan, have allowed the Jewish tribe to perpetuate themselves. Money and religion.

My own experience of the Jews is of an intelligent, expressive people who are friendly towards outsiders but suspicious of non-Jews. On the one hand, their history may be the reason why they have maintained their sense of Apartheid, and their religion (we are God's chosen people, not you), or both. What's interesting is the Jewish history that so many Christians read about in the Bible is exactly that, Jewish history. A commandment such as 'Thy shalt not kill' actually meant 'Thy shalt not kill a Jew'. I found it somewhat amusing, somewhat ironic, that my girlfriend (and her clan have been accused of similar Apartheid slights against others) finding reassurance, and comfort, in stories about another 'Apartheid Bunch', the Jews.

Now there are all sorts of good reasons for people of a certain type to associate with one another. Language and culture for instance. Religion. It's simply easier to understand one another, and the chances of conflict and misunderstanding are less. The Koreans exemplify this, and the other extreme. They have the most homogeneous society in the world, and consequently, the most successful and busy online communities. These communities are quite insular in the sense that they don't need American software or search engines to run them. They run perfectly well on their own systems, and they don't have too much to tempt them away when it's in a different language and operated by a foreign (more individualistic) mindset.

But there are also the North Koreans, who exemplify the cautionary tale of insularity taken too far. Insularity that impoverishes an entire people.

I would argue that the high degree of insularity, the painful perfectionism that assures the health and financial success of the Jews may not be that useful in brokering good democracies. Jews have separate basins, sometimes separate refrigerators to wash their milk and meat. The Koreans also have specially adapted Kimchi refrigerators. Jewish families place scrolls (or facsimiles thereof) in their doorways. All of this sort of thing, in every detail, gets very expensive to actually implement, and is it absolutely necessary? Imagine if every household went to these lengths? And if there is one thing I have learnt since my girlfriend has moved in, is that perfectionism and a dogmatic approach to one's individual preferences is a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for heated conflict. Practical versus personal wants and needs.

I want to go back again to my own experience of Jews. I had a wonderful kindergarten life at a Jewish nursery school, and many of my father's friends (then and now) are Jewish. They taught him how to work with money and he has done well for himself. I have found the Jews in my experience to populate the world of advertising, and finance and media and movies. It's possible that they may take care of you and listen to you if you're friends with them or there is some other vested interest. I don't know. What I do know is that they prefer to do business with their own kind. They prefer to form cliques and clubs with their own kind. And for the most part, the women certainly don't like to be seen fraternising with non-Jewish men. Jewish men on the other hand fraternise with both sides, but only marry Jewish women.

Here's where I begin to wonder... You have a group of people who were crushed by successive regimes. They remained separate and invented a religion to maintain both their sense of superiority over other human beings, and also to blame these other human beings for sabotaging their God-ordained success. Christians hijacked this faith, but went further. They imposed this faith not on single tribes, but on all tribes. Yes, you had to follow a few rituals, but they were able to grow it into the world's largest tradition - Christianity.
It occurred to me that the Jewish penchant for detail and slavish attention to rites is great for shackling a family to a tribe whose very existence was under threat (or construed to be) since time immemorial. But at the same time, this belief (exclusive rather than inclusive, superior rather than democratically equal) is guaranteed to isolate any group - for better or worse - from other communities. And worse, as I've said, by virtue of their arrogant boast (we're God's chosen people and you're not) the group makes itself a permanent target for persecution.

It occurs to me then that when we read about Jewish stories, we see them more as iconic tales about the human condition - the search for freedom from oppression, how small defeats big, how divine intervention is interpreted into our history, why we are special. I look at similar insular activities such as this:

Japan’s corporate insularity is a deep-seated trait—and one celebrated by its most successful firms. “I learned very early”, wrote Sony’s co-founder, Akio Morita, in his 1986 autobiography, “never to listen to ideas from outsiders.” Unfortunately, for all Japan’s strengths, such self-obsession stops it making the most of its considerable potential to create world-beating Sonys in a wider range of industries.

If the Jews and Japanese, Koreans and Afrikaners wished to maintain a degree of separation from other people, they achieved it. The Koreans have since shipped in English teachers in order for their schoolchildren to learn the language, to conduct commerce with the West. Korea has stepped forward and risen quickly to become the 13th largest economy in the world (behind India). Afrikaners - I see many of them talking English, and engaging with the world, either on their own terms or on terms that work. The Japanese have adapted their formulas to successful America models before - although it took a war and two atomic weapons to do it. The Jews are different in one crucial respect - if they're God's chosen people they certainly don't need to filthy themselves in the company of lesser heathens. They're content to do business with us, but no more.

I hope that communities will learn to embrace their common humanity going into the future. That does not necessarily mean that communities should merge, but that they should learn, at last, of their common heritage, their common humanity. The story of the Jews is a tragic one. Perhaps they were a people destined to lose, and they have been propped up in part by their faith (which has been a self-reinforcing reality - of faith causing self imposed asylum), in part by finance, in part by sheer stubbornness. It remains to be seen whether such traits can or ever will be rewarded in the grander scheme of things. What we know is that the most Jewish of traits (if one goes by the typification's we find in the average joke), greed, is behind the collapse of the world's financial systems. The perfectionistic counting of money and playing accounting games on and off balance sheets has, we're seeing now, wrecked the prospects for entire countries. It may have seemed incredibly clever to those who started playing these games on Wall Street. Hitler would say that the financial meltdown is the Jew's fault. It's not. Greed became a common cause. If you possess a credit card then you were one of an army of willing participants. Who decided to advertise these credit cards to us, and telling us it was a carefree, no hassle convenience is another question. I think our interest in Jewish interests and their self-obsession is overblown - the reason for this lies in their and (and us borrowing their) religion. Abandon the religion and you recover your common humanity.

Once we can let go of an arrogant belief, a sense of self-entitlement to prosperity and heaven, perhaps we can begin to learn to live like decent human beings, together. Although it is as simple as that, abandoning an arrogant belief about ourselves, the Jews have not done so for millenia, and I don't see the rest of mankind doing much better even in the face of terrible crisis. We may have been programmed to be stubborn, but the more chaotic an environment, the more stubborn inflexible programmes are programmed to fail.

And that night I dreamt I was walking in the rain through the streets of Seoul, South Korea. I entered a dark room and began to urinate. When I woke up, I found the bed wet. The silver circle on the floor was gone, and all I was left with was the unpleasant residue of a dream made manifest, by me. That is to say, our road takes us exactly to that real soggy-in-the-dark place where our dreams, our hearts, our beliefs, dwell. Be careful what you dream my friend, whoever you are. Be even more careful encouraging others to share in your dreams, because they may take you to a place which becomes a prison. A prison of your own desires and dreams, and that is a prison impossible to escape, unless of course you're able to wake yourself - and others - from it.