The Saving Remnant

Albert Jay Nock writes in his essay Isaiah's Job:

One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: "I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?" . . .

So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favorite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.

The first Western "mission to the masses" was Christianity, founded by Jews. A converted Jew also founded another great "mission to the masses," Marxism. Yet beyond the self-proclaimed Apostles to the Gentiles, Judaism has never been concerned with mass conversion and world conquest. That may be part of the reason why many people resent it; unlike Islam and Christianity, which welcome converts with outstretched arms and swords, Judaism seems stand-offish, even elitist.

But since elitism is out of fashion these days, liberal Jews make excuses for their internal contradictions, if they are even aware of them. Nietzsche admired Judaism precisely for its elitism. He wrote, "The anti-Semites do not forgive the Jews for possessing 'spirit' - and money. Anti-Semites - another name for the underprivileged.'" Anti-Semitism replaces the crucified Christ with the crucified white, blind to its own continuation of the Pauline transvaluation of values. Nazism is victim-worship at its most perverse.

Nock continues:

In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

Apparently, then, if the Lord's word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion about that, — the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. . . .

The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak minded and weak willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous.

Judaism's saving grace, and what distinguishes it from the vulgar nationalism (including vulgar Zionism) that proclaims the lowest Frenchman superior to the highest German, is the prophetic tradition. The prophetic tradition is a tradition of self-criticism - so much so that Christian authors later took the words of the prophets lambasting their kinsmen and applied them to all Jews, casting themselves as the prophets' legitimate successors.

Nock notes the universal implications of the Isaiah story:

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord's word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah's testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah's fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah's own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; "there is but a very small remnant," he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character — too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses.

Every society possesses its "saving remnant:" the prophets and philosophers who redeem the bankers and bureaucrats. I'll judge Germany by Bach, not Hitler - even if Hitler's followers judge Judea by Madoff, not Mahler. I believe in quality over quantity, aristos over demos, geist over volk. God is one and they are many - but numbers don't add up to truth.