It’s obvious the author understands what I’m talking about—he just doesn’t seem to respect it. True—universal love won’t get me “turned-on,” but it does get one up in the morning. And people sacrifice their lives every day for that love—dying for children, fighting for the innocent sufferers, jumping into fires to save schoolchildren, working as social workers in inner-city neighborhoods. These people, sometimes called heroes, are not people who are able to love everyone preferentially, but they are moved by that incredible, tangible connection to man, particularly to innocence, because it confirms unity in its potential to feel all. This is exactly what people “kill or die for”—the imagined conception of shared humanity.

Maghen asks the question, “Why do I get up in the morning?” Answer: Love. Now, Maghen knows that every reader whose daddy didn’t spank him too hard is going to agree with him. He is banking on it. Why? Because he has faith in the universalism of the heart, in the realization that the anonymous reader is human and, therefore, loves. And loves to love. I am not saying that this constitutes an intimate relationship between the author and the reader, but there is a beauty, an abstract love, a potential love, based on the faith he has in the reader, an emotional shared consciousness worth fighting for. And, of course, it is a type of love much different from the love of your girlfriend who unlocks specific emotions because of specific personality traits and specific shared experiences. It is a love perpetuated by the very existence of strangers, a love that grows precisely because you’re not “hanging out” with that person.

Maghen deems the two strands of love—preferential characteristic-based love and the universal potential-based love—mutually exclusive. Either the swami or Jewish particularism. Either Rabbi Akiva in this world or Christ in heaven. I strongly disagree. The two rather exist together, in harmony, side by side, in different realms but in the same individual. People don’t just live in this world. Without imagination, this world is just skin and bones. You need imagination to “feel” the soul and what people may call divinity in all its glory, to make man both animal and God. Indeed. Why do the two types of love have to be mutually exclusive? Because universalism threatens to suffocate preferential love? Because this conception of love is keeping Jews in New York? No way. Every individual is aware that love is also preferential in nature. Jews don’t live in the United States because universalism has drowned their ability to see their distinctiveness and, therefore, go where they can relate to more people, Israel. No, they live in the United States because their conception of preferential love is based on characteristics that have less to do with ethnic and religious qualifications. They are, as Maghen so eloquently put it, more connected to their bowling team.

Which brings me to my next conflict: The characteristics Maghen uses to judge whether one should be able to preferentially love an individual. His vision of various socio-cultural units interacting makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I am just as terrified of the all-red rug and the pixel rug as he is. It’s just that I am not completely convinced that the social group a Jew should be a part of, the distinct socio-cultural unit he should throw himself into, should be the Jewish community. As I was reading, I was waiting for Maghen to explain it to me—part of me was anticipating a mind-blowing revelation. But instead I found the humble, not so reassuring but truly admirable words, “I don’t know.” Yeah, me neither. To me it’s obvious that it should not be the one and only socio-cultural group to belong to—just look at this country of five million Jews and counting. I’ve never seen such a compartmentalized, fictionalized state in my life, save Lebanon, and I have been to many countries (a good twenty-five or so): Secular versus religious, Sephardi versus Ashkenazi, Ethiopian versus Russian. Judaism as an over-arching characteristic that manifests physically the progression of preferential love fails. I am not saying it doesn’t succeed in some ways. But I really don’t know how much it can unify a people or why.

I am not, in fact, Jewish. I am a Lebanese-Egyptian-American-Palestinian-Christian creature. My mother is Greek Catholic Lebanese, and her Palestinian parents lived in Haifa until they were kicked out in 1948. My father is a Copt from Alexandria. My family and I don’t seriously practice Christianity, but I think each of us prays once in a while and thanks God once in a while and we go to church on Christmas and Easter. Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t—depends how many times a day I shudder at the thought of my mortality or feel connected to the insects flying around my face. One of the most transforming events of my life was returning to Lebanon when I was sixteen, after eight years of separation. All I knew of the country were my dark memories of falling bombs and the images of covered women running around southern Lebanon from the numbing television. Lebanon was incredible—destroyed all stereotypes, invigorated me with a new identity, and gave me a homeland and a people. I finally met people who could relate to parts of me that others never could touch. I have the best friends in the world in the United States, but they could never reach, well, my Arabness. In America, I was the emotional one, the outgoing but sensitive to women one, the vain and vulnerable one, but in Lebanon, I was just Lebanese. In the United States, I had to lead the friendships, to teach them what true friendship was—sacrifice, trust, loyalty, and vulnerability—but in Lebanon, they taught me. In Lebanon, you could introduce someone to your mother after knowing them for two hours and she would cook you both dinner and your new friend would feel completely comfortable. In Lebanon, because they related to the personal traits that made me foreign or distinct in the United States, they saw deeper into me, past my Arab uniqueness and into my soul. I met people who laughed when I laughed and cried when I cried.

Maghen is no doubt aware that he wasn’t just writing to American Jews; he was writing to any diaspora community living in the horrifying yet physically liberating vacuum of the United States of America. So maybe he is right. Maybe I should get my Arabic down, find me some Arab friends who have a little American humility and Princeton intellectualism, and date some beautiful Lebanese girl. But I think restricting myself to this narrow ethnic-based lifestyle really limits you to one world. I think it kills you. I think the only real way to live is to recognize and celebrate cultural differences, but at the same time transgress the inherent boundaries that come with recognizing those differences. Maybe I’m just kidding myself, and maybe in ten years, I will look back and laugh at my American friends, and move to Lebanon, but right now, to me, the ethno-religious formula is not the all-encompassing model for maximizing preferential love.

Instead, I offer you a fourth rug: Each thread has at its base a centimeter of red, but then each thread consists of different colors depending on what groups one identifies with, some threads with five or six different colorsׁwhite and blue for Israel, orange for the bowling team, etc. And this is a dynamic carpet, infused with the element of time, so that threads are changing colors with experience, jumping from group to group, all against a faint red background. It is a more complicated rug, with fewer lines drawn purely according to ethnic and religious characteristics, but at the same time creating infinite socio-cultural units that maximize and celebrate preferential love, a dynamic mutuality in unity.

In closing, I should add that Maghen and I now have a “relationship.” I feel somewhat “close” to him because of my ability to completely relate to this literary piece and the philosophical and inevitably emotional struggle for identity that he shares with nothing less than my soul. This relationship has no religious or ethnic boundaries. I bet he didn’t expect a Palestinian to read “Imagine” and become so emotionally involved with it.

George Farah
Princeton University

The Supreme Court

TO THE EDITORS:

Mordechai Haller’s decisive and insightful article, “The Court that Packed Itself” (AZURE 8, Autumn 1999), is a tightly reasoned and convincing call for democratic reform.

Since the Knesset has the power to change the process and since Israel is so deeply committed to democratic government, the obvious question is, why hasn’t the Knesset acted?

Haller does not provide an answer. I believe the key is with the awesome power of the Supreme Court to subpoena evidence and witnesses, to investigate any aspect of the life of a Knesset member, to frighten and intimidate, all based on what might be flimsy pretext. ׂPower corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

If the Israeli government wants its citizens to respect governmental institutions, it has the responsibility and challenge to ensure that they are truly democratic.

Pinchas Stolper
Orthodox Union
New York, New York

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