Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [73]
“Strikingly true,” Gordon interrupted him. “Now I’ll answer you concerning the scene we witnessed today. That Cossack mocking the poor patriarch, along with thousands of cases like it, is, of course, an example of the most elementary baseness, which should occasion, not philosophizing, but a punch in the nose, that’s clear. But to the question of the Jews as a whole, philosophy is applicable, and then it turns its unexpected side to us. But here I’m not telling you anything new. All these thoughts, in me as in you, come from your uncle.
“ ‘What is a people?’ you ask. Must we make a fuss over it, and doesn’t he do more for it who, without thinking of it, by the very beauty and triumph of his deeds, raises it to universality and, having glorified it, makes it eternal? Well, of course, of course. And what kind of peoples can we talk about in Christian times? They’re not simple peoples, but converted, transformed peoples, and the whole point is precisely in the transformation, not in faithfulness to old principles. Let’s remember the Gospel. What did it say on this subject? First, it wasn’t an assertion: this is so and that is so. It was a naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? And everyone accepted the suggestion, caught up for millennia.
“When it said that in the Kingdom of God there are no Greeks and Jews, did it merely mean to say that everyone is equal before God?13 No, there was no need for that; the Greek philosophers, the Roman moralists, the prophets of the Old Testament knew that before. But it said: in that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.
“You just said that a fact is senseless unless one puts sense into it. Christianity, the mystery of the person, is precisely what needs to be put into the fact for it to acquire meaning for man.
“And we talked about average figures, who have nothing to say to life and the world as a whole, about second-rate forces interested in narrowness, in having the talk always be about some people or other, preferably a small one, that should suffer, so that it’s possible to sit and talk endlessly and thrive on their own pity. Jewry is fully and completely the victim of this element. Its own notion of itself as a people laid upon it the deadening necessity of being and remaining a people and only that over the centuries, during which, by a power that had once come from its own midst, the whole world was delivered from this humiliating task. How astounding it is! How could it have happened? This festivity, this deliverance from the bedevilment of mediocrity, this soaring above the dull-witted workaday world—all this was born on their soil, spoke their language, and belonged to their tribe. And they saw and heard it and let it slip. How could they have let a spirit of such all-absorbing beauty and power leave them, how could they think that next to its triumph and reign they would remain as the empty shell this miracle had once cast off? To whose profit is this voluntary martyrdom, who needs these centuries of