From an essay that appears for the first time in English in Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: A Spiritual Reappraisal, 1946–1955, a collection of his pseudonymous essays for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts that was published in March by White Goat Press. Translated from the Yiddish by David Stromberg.
There are some concepts that modern society believes to be thoroughly unscientific and vague. Among them are the concepts of the righteous and the wicked.
For our grandparents these concepts were both clear and concrete. Haman was wicked and Mordecai was righteous. Informers in the shtetl were wicked, and Jews who prayed, studied, fasted, were honest, and gave to charity were considered righteous. These two concepts were as clear for the older generations as day and night, summer and winter, the heavens and the earth.
Then came a sort of spiritual attack that was supposed to nearly erase these two words from the dictionary and relegate them to the archive where old words and concepts lie and rot, dead and forgotten. First, people showed that wicked and righteous were relative concepts. Someone who is righteous in one country is wicked in another. What was considered holy at one time was considered impure in other epochs. This meant that wicked and righteous depended completely on circumstances and had no absolute value.
Additionally, these concepts were above all antiscientific. In every creature’s struggle for existence, there’s no room for such designations. Can we call the wolf wicked and the sheep righteous? And aren’t humans subject to the same biological laws as animals? Isn’t all of human progress the result of bitter struggles for life and death? Then who are the righteous and who the wicked? What value do the concepts of good and evil hold in the jungle? Modern thinkers stopped using these concepts altogether except in quotation marks, with a wink, a smirk, and a glance backward toward the unscientific past.
Freeing us from these concepts was not easy, and people had to come up with many, many substitutes. They started using words like “progressive” and “reactionary,” “positive” and “negative,” “yea-saying” and “nay-saying,” “useful” and “harmful,” “creative” and “destructive,” and many other such types of words, all of which were supposed to express the elementary concepts of good and bad in a way that’s more appropriate for current times and circumstances. In Soviet Russia, you no longer say that people are wicked. Instead you call them Trotskyists, saboteurs, fascists—all words that arouse horror the way the word “wicked” did in the past. In democratic countries, too, there are plenty of words to express that certain people are self-serving, harmful, destructive, corrupt. One word that’s quite close to the concept of wicked is “outcast.”
But there’s one big difference between the old concepts and the new ones that have replaced them. The words “righteous” and “wicked”—tsadik and roshe—were very clearly defined for Jews, very precisely delineated and determined. But the modern words that have replaced them are vague. During elections one group calls the other by all kinds of bad names that no one takes too seriously, neither those that do the name-calling nor those called by such names. The same is true of words of praise. You may read that people are “noble,” “positive,” “useful,” “creative”—then writers turn things around with a “but,” and it turns out that they’re “bothersome fools,” “losers,” or “swindlers.” The thousands of words that have replaced “righteous” and “wicked” somehow have no substance—they’re far more relative, far more vague and blurred. When you called someone a tsadik, you could not add a “but.” But words today, both good and bad, have lost almost all meaning. First people praise someone to the skies, and then they sling mud at them. Very often this is done together by the same writer using the same pen.
Words no longer count for anything. Opinions have become so loose, so slippery, that no serious person can make heads or tails of them. You can read that someone is a pariah and realize that they are a highly moral person. You hear a thousand good things about certain people and then discover that someone is petty or a complete scoundrel. The gold coins of “righteous” and “wicked” have been exchanged for a bunch of inflation-ridden banknotes with big numbers and little value, or ones that are altogether worthless.
If this were merely about a confusion of words, it wouldn’t be such a tragedy. In reality, it’s about a confusion of concepts, judgments, values. It’s not only in literary journals and political brochures that words are being violated and people are being judged without ceremony. The confusion has entered the hearts and minds of middle-class people too. Even your average person on the street has learned to speak in two voices at once, saying “yes” and “no” about the same thing. People today are completely confused by all these babelized phrases, hearing all these ambiguities and equivocations. The general public has learned to spin things as well as any shystery lawyer or shameless politician. “Yes” and “no,” “big” and “small,” “brilliant” and “boring”—they’ve all become strangely similar. All this word confusion comes together with a kind of moral chaos.
Isn’t it time to take another look at the old concepts of the righteous and the wicked? Are they really as outdated and stale as people would like us to believe?
The truth is that without these words the human species cannot exist. It’s true that these words were interpreted differently by different religions. But it’s also true that, in moral terms, all major religions had roughly the same ideas about good and evil. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev would have been considered a tsadik by Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. Gandhi would have been seen as a tsadik by Jews as much as he is by Hindus. When it comes to moral values, all religions clearly delineate what is good and what is evil. They all accord with the framework of the Hebrew Bible’s classifications. All religions and all classical ethical thinkers of all kinds would sign their names to the chapter of Psalms that says:
God, who will live in your tent? Who will dwell on your holy mount? Those who walk upright, do justice, and speak truth in their hearts. They do not use their tongues for slander, they do no evil to friends, and they do not insult those closest to them. They despise the disgraceful and honor those who fear God. They keep their promises even when it hurts them. They do not lend money for profit and do not take bribes against the innocent.
These words are clear and even scientific. They classify good and bad as precisely as possible. No “but” can follow them to turn them on their heads. Many generations lived with these concepts. Many great people learned from them.
The jargon used by today’s so-called intellectuals is often a mask that covers up a lack of spirit and a kind of cannibalism—a way of coping with criticism. Equivocation has always been and is still today a symptom of the wicked. Here they praise someone and there they insult them. Here they lift them up and there they knock them down. What’s kosher today is unkosher tomorrow, and what’s unkosher today is glatt kosher the next day. The same confusion is taking place in courts of justice. There too the question of who’s a criminal and what’s a crime becomes less and less clear. The rules and principles there have become very loose and slippery.
Words themselves are not a sickness but a symptom. Behind words lie actions. In our current times, when words play such a colossal role, when the world is literally filled with typewriters and printers, when billions of words are disseminated daily at the speed of light, the tragedy of words cannot be waved aside. The world cannot be redeemed as long as words remain a tool of the wicked.
