Every Hundred Years, All New People

Wisdom from My Father(s)

(Two Old Men Disputing, Rembrandt, 1628)

“You know what they say,” my father used to tell me, “every hundred years, all new people.”

Technically speaking, he’s wrong – there are still a few centenarians with us.

But spiritually speaking, he is correct.

Everyone who lived to witness the 1920s is dead.

Just as, in 1925, everyone who lived to witness the 1820s was dead.

And so on and so forth, throughout eternity.

Herein lies the problem of history, so often misrepresented as, “those who misunderstand history are doomed to repeat it.”

The problem is not that those who misunderstand history are doomed to repeat it; the problem is that everyone misunderstands history because we did not live through it.

Even the most astute scholars of history have an almost impossible time trying to comprehend history, both its sheer magnitude, but also its simple foundations in human nature.

Our human biology, our hardware, has not changed since we began recording history. Neither our biology nor our psychology has changed as a result of technological progress and, as clear as that has been throughout history, we have never been able to understand that most basic of facts.

Human nature, in its broadest sense, is fixed.

The same thing that drove the most technologically advanced and socially progressive states to fall before the idols of Fascism and Marxism in the 1920s will drive our modern states to the same end in this decade.

The only nations which are able to avoid those pitfalls are those whose people are rooted in a tradition that is far older than its people.

The only European nation which was able to fend off the double scourge of Marxism and Fascism in the early 20th century was England, and that is the result of the English Common Law and their commitment to their ancient customs, strange as they may be.

The only European nation which was able to fend off the revolutionary fervor of the 1820s and its strange aftermath was, once again, England, again due to their strange and ancient customs.

And many of those customs still exist today, like the fact that British barristers still wear powdered wigs.

The only nation which has ever shown a greater commitment to tradition than the English is Israel – not the modern nation-state, but the ancient nation.

Because we have a Mesorah, a tradition.

And even when there are elements of that tradition which we do not understand, we still hold fast to it because, simply put, our ancestors did.

What most people understand about the Jewish tradition they get from Fiddler on the Roof, which is, at best, a poor caricature of what our tradition really is.

When Tevye explains that he behaves as he does because of “tradition,” he fails to explain what following that tradition has done for our people.

It has given us a way to escape from the problem which my father so elegantly put, “every hundred years, all new people.”

Although there are no living Jews who remember Europe’s silent march towards destruction, our people have a tradition that teaches us, many times a year, that in every generation, they rose up to destroy us, and, in every generation, those who tried found themselves facing the very same destruction they intended to inflict.

But our tradition is so much more than a reminder of how to avoid destruction – our tradition is a handbook for how one can live a good and meaningful life despite the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune.

Our tradition is the collection of wisdom from hundreds of generations of Jews, encoded and passed down, father to son, mother to daughter, and no piece of wisdom is considered to be too small or too irrelevant to be excluded.

There is no problem that you could have, no quandary you might find yourself in, that is not discussed somewhere in our tradition.

As our great rabbis said in Pirkei Avot (The Wisdom of the Fathers),

“Turn it over, and turn it over [again], for all is therein.”

(Pirkei Avot 5:22)

Two thousand years have passed since those words were first spoken, twenty centuries of human lives have been lived and lost, and yet its wisdom remains unchanged.

As we live through these days of historical illiteracy, these days in which we have so much information technology, yet so little understanding of information, the value of our ancestors’ wisdom only grows.

As the great King Solomon once wrote, “there is nothing new under the sun,” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), and he wrote that 3000 years ago.

The great wisdom of Solomon is as true today as it was then.

“He who keeps company with the wise becomes wise,/

But he who consorts with dullards comes to grief.”

(Proverbs 13:20)

Of course, there are modern day scoffers who would have you believe that the man called Solomon never lived, men who are historically illiterate, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and everyone else who denies the past.

But, as Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun.

And so, sharing the wisdom of my father, I have come to remind you that, every hundred years – all new people.

But, if one thing remains true in our time, as in all others, it is that he who keeps company with the wise becomes wise, but he who consorts with dullards comes to grief.

Take faith and trust in your tradition, it has outlived everything else – it will outlive this century too.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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