The Maccabaean

Poor Bobbie Burns, among his various shortcomings, must have been plagued with a neuralgic conscience to have prayed so fervently that we might “see ourselves as others see us,” as if that were, indeed, a “giftie” from God.

As it is, sensitive people are apt to be afflicted with a foolish habit of seeing themselves too often as others are supposed to see them. Every one of us has his silly moments of self-torture when he mirrors himself, with useless agony, in hundreds of inconsequential minds and bruises himself all over his extravagantly imaginative soul, as he fancies himself the object of universal contempt for some trifling mistake or other over which he is draining the wormwood cup of mortification.

To see ourself as others see us is to reflect ourselves in a lot of distorting mirrors the pictures of which, overlaid to form a joint-image, may convey a vague resemblance to the original, but which are certain, taken separately, to fall wide of the reality. If there are difficulties in the way of self-knowledge, the task of correctly sizing up other people is surely no less easy. In the one case we have an abundance of material, but we cannot trust our impartiality; in the other case we have less to go upon and may not be any more competent to judge without bias. The man who analyzes correctly and follows sympathetically the soul-life of his fellowmen is not likely to be deceived about his own worth or lack of worth. Why others should see us better than we do ourselves is not at all clear, except as they have the dubious advantage of observing us from the outside. Granted that no man has ever heard the actual sound of his voice, that no man can have a correct idea of his own looks, gestures and bearing; yet, just as we do hear our voice from the inside, so we know our own words, opinions, motives from their births, we are aware of our unborn deeds, unspoken wishes, unfulfilled purposes, our memory is apt to be faithful chronicler of our experience, that which we have had with ourselves, as well as that had with others; the wise man registers his own mistakes and suffers from his own faults, where outsiders may not be cognizant of them. One cannot even be sure that it would be a "God's gift" to see ourselves as the Divine Omniscience sees us; we often stand in dire need of all our self-ignorance, of all our self-flattery, to summon the courage for fighting on and emerging out of them.

I will go so far, however, with the Ayrshire ploughboy, as to admit that, now and then, there is some amusement to be gotten out of "seeing ourselves as others see us." In the theatre it may be annoying to have the yokels all around you missing the jokes and guffawing at the pathetic passages; but in life, when one has arrived at a degree of self-possession, it is diverting to observe how awkward many people are at interpreting us, how stupidly and perversely they will misread our motives, how absurdly they will read white for black and black for white. When many a blow and many a rude setback have taught us patience and forbearance. we can afford to smile at conceits of shallowness, to be amused over the blindness of those who are wise in their own eyes, to identify, as interesting species, the bigot liberal, the hide-bound Reformer, the cold-hearted philanthropist, the prejudiced humanitarian, the anti-Semitic Jew and other sincere or hypocritical humbugs, we simply reverse the process; we see others, not as they reveal their true inwardness to us by their actions, but as they see themselves, living one role and dressed for another, themselves dwelling on the mere costume, where the deeper eye penetrates through guise of manner as well as though the vanity of self-delusion.

The convinced Zionist whose intercourse throws him

with anti-Zionists of every sort, is bound to have many such experiences, at least at this interesting stage of the game, while Zionism is still so fortunate as not to be in the fashion, while it is still enjoying the enviable distinction of being looked upon as a bit of freakishness, as an odd eccentricity, by all the vast throng of the smug bourgeois who rejoice in the comfortable blessing of wholesome, normal, commonplace dull-sightedness. The man who is too sensible to do his own thinking, who has been properly reared to know on which side his bread is buttered, the man who is to good a citizen to pass beyond the doctrine which his teachers instilled into him, who knows that the great mass of humanity must spend one-third of the average life in digging a deep, narrow rut and the other two-thirds in not looking to the right or to the left of it, such a man, naturally, has most amusing notions about us Zionists and our ways of reasoning, notions which, very prettily and effectively, unveil his own mental status.

I was very much amused, for instance, some time ago, when a young colleague (in my absence, unfortunately) had descanted to a number of the like-minded on the timidity and cowardice of the Zionist. It seems a rather perplexing statement, at first, which one might be excused for suspecting of ironical intent; but with a little effort of imagination and some sympathy with inverted intellectual processes, one can follow up the curious reasoning which will lead to that sort of deduction. Zionism, according to this diagnosis, is the cowardly answer to anti-Semitism; the anti-Semite says to the Jew: get out, you are a foreign body; to which, if we believe our unfriendly critic, the Zionist shrinkingly replies: Right, my master, only give us our country back. Now the anti-Zionist, according to this curious reading, is the brave soul. No, says he, we are as native here as you are; we stay on the ground and fight you to the bitter end. Presumably that is the attitude which our mission as world-converstionists forces upon us.

The only puzzling part about this theory is that in the face of it, so many fearless spirits should be found in the Zionist ranks and so many cowards who don't dare to speak their minds, among their opponents; the idealist, the dreamer, the visionary, as a rule, is not much of a coward, while the hordes of the "safe-and-sane" furnish the material for "constitutional conservatism," a good name for inherent cowardice, by the legion. But then, you see, the Zionists now and then will concede this or that contention of the anti-Semite; that's cowardly, isn't it? And the Zionist proposes in some way, to recognize the stern logic of unalterable conditions, of indisputable facts; the hard-shell theorist who has a petrified dogma to stand by, denies the right of cold fact and ingrained condition to disturb his geometrical circles; he dies at his post—from sclerosis of the reasoning powers.

I have also been told by more than one of my alarmed and worldly-wise friends that in embracing Zionism I have delivered myself over to the engulfing clouds of pessimism. How I can dare to do that, against their cocksure labeling, they cannot understand. In our pulpits, to the delight of the prosperous merchant in the pew, who believes in whistling to keep his courage up, we have been explaining to the world that Judaism is optimistic, as borne out by countless quotations, episodes, national characteristics; and if we are asked to define optimism, why nothing can be easier; you simply must persist in seeing everything couleur de rose. Your enterprising business man is the pattern of undaunted, incorrigible optimism; he clamors for boosters and denounces