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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 415
aim of using the small-scale catastrophe to prevent a global-scale
catastrophe from occurring.
13
The only problem here is, to save
themselves from a life of homelessness and to attain redemption,
lives
—
not theirs but others’
—
have to be lost, violence unleashed,
war launched, and apocalypse engineered. Their redemption, in
other words, becomes the doom of their neighbors.
In this narrative of redemption written collectively by the
fundamentalist group, Mendel is initially seen as the very
embodiment of the prophetic project they have anticipated. When
Mendel turns his back on his destiny and betrays the great
expectations of his people, he is disowned and disavowed. Yet, once
the Verbovers team up with the US government, their prophetic
vision and theological passion become fused with the ideology of
American exceptionalism, which is also a nationalism with a
messianic strain.
14
It is this messianic strain that allows their
narrative of Jewish exceptionalism to acquire an additional layer as
it now requires that Mendel be killed off, his exceptionality denied
and forgotten.
Mendel, a messiah-to-be, finds himself used as a pawn whose
presence is needed to legitimize the Zionist narrative. He is the
receptacle of divine messages waiting to be decoded. His untimely
13
Such a mechanism, I’d like to point out, fits very well the immunization
procedures that Roberto Esposito (2008) so eloquently elaborates and develops in
his
Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy
, except his overall endeavors move toward the
articulation of an immunization paradigm that protects life from death and
unwittingly induces self-destruction. Annie. J. McClanahan, also discusses in her
dissertation
Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and the Chance of the Future
the tendency of contemporary American fiction to expose and critique the
emerging discourses of “investing in the future” (2010: 12), especially the logic of
preemption that supports such discourses. In Chapter two of her dissertation, she
analyzes both Roth’s
The Plot Against America
and Chabon’s
The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union
to argue that both novels use the speculative genre to “register
neoliberalism’s violent negation of liberal democracy” (2010: 1).
14
In
American Exceptionalism and Human rights
, Michael Ignatieff defines
American exceptionalism as a “messianic American moral project,” and, in
carrying out this project, America believes it is its divine mission to “teaches [sic]
the meaning of liberty to the world; it does not learn from others” (2005: 14).