...Which is why the identification and captivation with Jewish and Zionist ideas that Obama expressed to Jeffrey Goldberg recently came so naturally to him. No self-aware person with Obama’s background could have failed to notice the harmony between his experience and the experiences of the Jews. But more importantly, he augmented that harmony by living a life deeply informed by Jewish influences and profoundly if not uniquely Jewish in the shape it took. Though not a Person of the Book, he is a person of books, of philosophy and literature, in a richer sense than any president (excepting Lincoln) since the early days of the American republic — with all the baggage as well as the benefits attendant upon a commitment to a life of self-reflection. The otherwise inexplicable angst, hesitation, and “on the other hand”-ism he frequently displays in answering what ought to be straightforward questions are a direct product of the time he spent in latter-day Talmud study in a particularly philosophically-inclined law faculty at Chicago.

If elected, Obama will be the first president to demonstrate so many symptoms of what Joyce called the agenbite of inwit (from ME, meaning “remorse of conscience”), a soul-sickness carrying the potential both to debilitate and to creatively free the introspective man or woman. For Joyce, the concept of the agenbite is expansive enough to cover nearly all those in the modern age grasping for and unable to find concrete, stable concepts of identity and historical progression by which to gain a foothold on their world—- a universal concept.

But at the same time, it is no accident that the paradigm case of the agenbite, Joyce’s autobiographical projection Stephen Dedalus, is called a “jesting jew jesuit.” The condition is both a blessing and a curse the Jewish people have bequeathed onto the societies in which they have dwelt in their nomadic wanderings, and a bridge that links any “stranger in a strange land” to each other and to Jewish history...