The One and the Many, v2

One day a few years back on the way to work I found myself listening to JM in the AM (Jewish Moments in the AM) on WFMU. JM in the AM is always a quirky listen, as its host Nachum tries to pepper his talk with enough Hebrew words, and his playlist with enough soupy ballads, to lure young secular Jews back into the observant fold. This day was telethon day, and it was pretty striking. Nachum was reading pledges aloud: "Marlene Epstein of South Hackensack donates $25 in honor of her great aunt Esther. Jacob Smithberg of Trenton has given us $20 in loving memory of his dearly departed mother Janet," and so on, and on, and on. Nachum read aloud all the details of every single donation, no matter how small. I heard half and hour of it myself. And at the end, they totalled up the contributions to the exact dollar and cent. And there was great rejoicing and singing, accompanied by the house band. A goy telethon would have rounded and focused on threshhold points: "We've now reached the $100,000 mark." Maybe the MC-Wink Martindale type reads testimony from exemplary contributors, but in general attention is paid to signs of volume: rising collection totals, volunteers in the background busily working phones, lights lighting up, etc. An aggregate view. On the one hand, this is a contrast between, Judaism and Christianity, "this-worldly" and "other-worldly" soterioliogy (theory of salvation), in Weber's terms. On the other, the contrast bears witness to a post-Holocaust mentality. "Every one counts." Like the AIDS quilt. Or, to some extent, the Vietnam memorial. Or, indeed, the coverage of the Iraq war and the growing difficulty of sustaining both casualties and good PR for an offensive. We're a long way from the "human fodder" view discussed here a few days back.