A Jewish Moment Without Parallel

We live in unprecedented times.” It is a phrase that is ubiquitous in geopolitical discussions, and it is almost always incorrect. In 1988, Justice Antonin Scalia served as the commencement speaker for his son’s high school graduation, and he emphasized that the common insistence on the uniqueness of the contemporary moment was a preposterous platitude. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you should not leave Langley High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented….The challenges faced by different societies at different times take different forms.…But in substance they are the same, the forces of nature and the forces of man.”

To those who might suggest that the threat of nuclear war posed an unprecedented challenge, the justice had a ready reply:

If you were a teenager graduating from the Priam Memorial High School, in Troy, about 1500 B.C., with an army of warlike Greeks encamped all around the city walls, and if you knew that losing the war would mean, as it did, that the city would be utterly destroyed, its men killed, its women and children sold into slavery, I doubt that that prospect was any less terrible to you than the prospect of the destruction of the world. It was all of the world you ever used anyway. Your country, your family, your friends, your entire society. The thought that other societies, at least, would go on was of no more comfort to the Trojans—or later, to the Carthaginians, who were also utterly destroyed, or the MacDonald Clan, which was massacred at Glencoe—than it is of comfort to you that if this world is incinerated, well, it’s good to know there may be other ones.