Hermeneutics of Resistance

Columbia, 1968

Many, many years ago, when the West End was a student hangout across the street from Columbia University, it hosted gatherings of jaded dropouts from rabbinical school, and they’d pass the time telling Jewish jokes, jokes of a particular type, call them false bottom jokes. If you thought you got the joke first time around it showed your ignorance, because there was another, deeper level dependent on some abstruse matter of Talmudic knowledge.

Sydney Morgenbesser was a master at this type of thing. He’d dropped out of rabbinical school and eventually joined the Philosophy Department across the street where he could give full play to his zeal for putting himself between the sheep and the sheepskin.

Sydney was skilled in the Talmudic tradition of pilpul, the scholarly method of textual analysis that aims to reconcile apparently discordant texts, and by extension the art of talking your way out of a tricky situation with the local priest, or the Gestapo, or your boss, which in this case happened to be Columbia University. These were the days when Columbia didn’t give a hoot about the sensibilities of Jews, meaning any time previous to October 7, 2023.

After the police riots of 1968, Morgenbesser was faced with the age-old quandary of the Medieval disputatio, the refereed exchange between a rabbi and a priest, and the rules are simple: if the Jew wins the argument, he loses; if he loses the argument, he also loses. The trick is to lose the argument, but in such a way that the double bottom is revealed—the subjacent context of bigotry and bullying.

Sydney had been clubbed; the club belonged to the cops; the cops belonged to Columbia; Columbia was Sydney’s boss and objecting to being clubbed by your boss could get you fired for insubordination. On the other hand a close colleague of Sydney, another Jew, was sitting on the Disciplinary Committee—that’s how you get to be Department Chair.

So when Sydney was asked if he’d been treated unfairly or unjustly he pulled that centuries-old trick of Jews who get in trouble in a heads-you-lose tails-we-win situation: he pretended to have misunderstood the question. Not if he’d been treated unfairly and/or unjustly, but whether he’d been treated unfairly, or, instead, unjustly:

 “unfairly but not unjustly. It was unfair because they hit me over the head. It wasn’t unjust, because they hit everyone else over the head as well.”

Thus seeming to drawing attention away from the fact that he’d been hit over the head while shifting emphasis to the widespread violence perpetrated on all; with a subtle reference to Immanuel Kant’s observation that a concern for the welfare of all is of a higher order than the welfare of an individual, Justice over Mercy:

„Wenn dagegen die allgemeine Wohlgewogenheit gegen das menschliche Geschlecht in euch zum Grundsatze geworden ist, welchem ihr jederzeit eure Handlungen unterordnet, alsdenn bleibt die Liebe gegen den Nothleidenden noch, allein sie ist jetzt aus einem höhern Standpunkte in das wahre Verhältniβ gegen eure gesammte Pflicht versetzt worden.“¹

Poor Administration. They never knew what him them. Unlike Sydney, who knew down to a T. The pilpul, united, will never be defeated.

WOID XXIII-49

April 20, 2024

1.  Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Königsberg : Johann Jacob Kanter, 1766), pp. 20-21.