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DANIEL
BELL
deal with this twofold treat by the use of instruments [e.g. fusion bombs]
beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's
fwnbling toys, should
be
enough to make us tremble.
"It is essentially for this reason: that the unprecedented, once it has
appeared, may become a precedent for the future, that all trials touching
upon 'crimes against humanity' must be judged according to a standard
that is still an 'ideal.'"
In short, Miss Arendt insisted that the Israelis, in trying Eichmann
in a Jewish court and on specifically Jewish issues, missed a crucial
point of modern history. Moreover, by kidnapping Eichmann in
Ar–
gentina and thus extending the territorial principle of seizure beyond
its borders, a precedent was created for the breakdown of international
law whereby in the future, for example, an African state could kidnap
a segregationist leader in America and try him in Ghana or Guinea
for crimes against the black people. For her, the Israeli mistake was
to
be
parochial at a time when the problem of mass murder had become
universal.
It is this tension between the parochial and the universal that
explains the furious emotions over Miss Arendt's book. For she writes
from the standpoint of a universal principle which denies any parochial
identity.
It
is this which gives her exposition a cold force and an
abstract quality. But one senses, too, a recoil from the fact that Israel has
become one nation among the many, no different in its morality and
vulgarity from all the others; and she is harsh about these features.
But the events concern more than Israel, though Israel conducted the
trial. The Israelis are a nationality, but the Jews remain a people, and
the experiences of the race are the shaping elements of one's identity.
One feels that while many of Miss Arendt's strictures are correct-if
one can live by a universalistic standard-her response to the unbearable
story reduces a tragic drama to a philosophical complexity. Can one
exclude the existential person as a component of the human judgment?
In this situation, one's identity as a Jew, as well as
philosophe,
is
relevant.
The agony of Miss Arendt's book is precisely that she takes her
stand so unyieldingly on the side of disinterested justice, and that she
judges both Nazi and Jew. But abstract justice, as the Talmudic wisdom
knew, is sometimes too "strong" a yardstick to judge the world.
In the Talmudic
Haggadah
(the sections of legends and parables,
as distinct from
Halacha,
or the law) there is a homiletic story, the
"alphabet of creation," which is learned by all youngsters who embark
on the study of the "word." The question is: Why did God begin the
