by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

In novelist Michael Chabon’s recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, he argues that we should be unsurprised at the Israelis’ fatal bungling of the boarding of the Mavi Marimara, the ship that tried to run the blockade on Gaza. Because, contrary to the myth of Jewish genius and invincible Israeli military prowess, Jews have just as many idiots and incompetents in their population as any other people. For Chabon, the Mavi Marimara incident is confirmation of the blockhead theory of history: that nations stumble into greatness and then fade stupidly into oblivion; and that we Jews are as blockheaded as anybody else, and should cease our claim to specialness.

I disagree with Chabon, and I’ll tell you why, but first, a linguistic note: his identification of the word seichel (the survival smarts that Jews ostensibly possess in such abundance) as a Yiddish word. Actually, seichel migrated, like a lot of other words, from biblical Hebrew into Yiddish, which is essentially a combination of Hebrew and German. (See Proverbs Chapter 1, Verse 4.)

Chabon contends that Jews are as blockheaded as anybody else, and that their survival down the ages despite exile and persecution is the result of fate or luck, and not due to any special equipment for eternality. By contrast, for centuries Jews and Gentiles alike have marveled at the staying power of the “eternal people” as the transcendental fact of history. That their survival against all odds was prophesied by the Torah some three and a half millenia ago makes it all the more amazing. To Mr. Chabon presumably it was a lucky guess; to his forebears it was confirmation of their Divinely ordained mission, and justified untold suffering.

The fact that there are many stupid Jews is rather beside the point. It’s like saying DiMaggio was a lousy hitter because most of the time he failed to get a hit. Those who have written about the phenomenon of Jewish genius have never denied that only a small percentage of the Jews are Nobel Prize-winning material. What they do point to is the statistically improbable number of Jews who have won that prize: in the first half of the 20th century, 14% of Nobel laureates were Jewish; after the Holocaust, 29%, even though Jews comprise only about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. I do not mean to say that high I.Q. is the reason for our survival. But I would claim that it does indicate that there is something a little bit unusual about us, that we are not just like all the nations, much as some would insist that we are.

Regarding the case of the Mavi Marmara, contrary to Chabon’s sweeping contentions of blockheadedness, the players on the Israel side hardly fit the description. While we don’t know much about the soldiers involved, except that they are counted among the elite units of the Israel Defense Forces, those who sent them into harm’s way are familiar figures. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak reviewed and approved the operation. Whatever their opponents on either end of the political spectrum think of them, both are regarded as men of unusual talent and intelligence. Netanyahu, serving his second term as Prime Minister in one of the most remarkable political comebacks in Israeli history, is also widely respected as a master communicator (an ability notably missing from the sluggish and inept Israeli media response). Barak, a former Prime Minister himself, is a former military chief of staff and the most decorated soldier in Israeli history. They are anything but blockheads, and their failure to foresee the dangers in seizing the ship and providing the commando team with ready fallback options is part of the mystery of the whole incident.

The question is only strengthened: If there was so much skill, intelligence and experience on hand, how did the Israelis mess up so badly? The answer, I believe, is to be found in a phrase from Aramaic, siyata d’shmaya. As any student of Talmud knows, it means Divine assistance. It was because of their considerable and lavishly praised gifts and accomplishments that Netanyahu, Barak and their team failed so grievously. Because they relied on themselves and not on the help of God that they forfeited that precious element of Jewish survival known as siyata d’shmaya.

The Jewish people are a remarkable people. They are blessed, undeniably, with a measure of talent and intelligence that marks them apart from all others. But that is not the secret of their survival. The ancient Greeks and Romans and a long list of others also flashed brilliantly on the stage of history and sooner or later disappeared. The secret of Jewish survival is not a secret at all; it is God’s promise, written plainly in the Torah. Indeed, we praise Him for it every year as we sit together with our families at the Passover Seder, singing, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us—and You save us from their hand!”

You’d have to be a blockhead not to understand that.

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