Nothing is more conservative as a practical matter than Jewish observance. Scripture, and commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries are preserved in a living colloquy among the generations. Communities that adopt specific customs are obligated to preserve them. The reading of the Pentateuch in an annual cycle recreates its revelation at Mt. Sinai: It must be heard and not merely read to evoke the experience of hearing it for the first time. Yet all of this arch-conservative practice with its punctilious attention to the slightest details of the past is there to bring to life a revolutionary event, the irruption of the Creator God into human history. Nothing is more revolutionary than Judaism. The revolutionary-conservative character of the United States of America cannot be understood except by reference to this phenomenon in Judaism.
What passes for Jewish conservativsm has been an abject failure. A group of conservative Jewish funders styling themselves “The Jewish Leadership Conference” today are holding a conference in New York City to promote “Jewish conservatism,” including a few of my friends. I won’t attend; the effort remains immured in the neo-conservative swamp against which I have inveighed these past iyears. Its lead speaker is the former Russian refusenik and Israeli political leader Nathan Sharansky, whom I admire unreservedly a human being, but question as a political thinker. Ten years ago I excoriated Sharansky’s claim that democracy provided a universal antitode to the world’s ills, in a book review entitled, “Nathan Sharansky’s Mistaken Identity.” The other poster-boy for this conference is the late Charles Krauthammer, whose watchword was “democratic realism.”
Sharansky and Krauthammer, both men of high intelligence and good will, helped persuade President George W. Bush to undertake his crusade for world democracy, and thus bring the United States close to financial and strategic ruin. Their influence has been baleful despite their best intentions, and it is a measure of the political immaturity of American Jews that the best we can to by way of conservatism is to advertise the errors that nearly ruined us in our generation. Forcing majority rule on Iraq put a sectarian Shia government in power, allied to its co-sectarians in Iran, vastly expanding Iran’s power in the region, and putting Israel at risk. Of all the stupid and self-destructive things that Jews have done with the best of intentions, the Bush Freedom Agenda promoted by Krauthammer and Sharansky produced the clearest and most urgent threat to Jewish survival. With Sharansky and Krauthammer on the marquee, the “Jewish Conservatism” conference also features Hillary Clinton supporter Bill Kristol. Clearly we have a congnitive dissonance here.
We Americans are conservative but we also are revolutionary. We incorporate English Common Law, the jury system,and the protection of individual rights under English law, but we have created a new people in a new way. We recognize that in our literature: As I wrote about American culture two years ago in Tablet Magazine:
The Old World cultures are fixed in the past; their time is “once upon a time,” the amorphous time of legend. A day, a year and a life are indistinguishable: A traveler chances into a feast at an enchanted castle, and the seven days of his sojourn turn out to be seven years. Washington Irving repurposed the ancient tale: with an ironic masterstroke, he put Rip van Winkle to sleep in the Old World of legend and woke him up in the new time of the American Revolution. With this story, our first national writer declared independence from the literary sources of the Old World, and banished the enchanted world with the clear light of the new era.
In the cited essay and a supplementary article for the British monthly Standpoint, I proposed a theory of American culture as a Christian mode of emulation of Israel, a view quite different than that of Russell Kirk, John Courtney Murray, or Leo Strauss.
The notion of revolutionary change comes into human history at Mount Sinai, and is repeated in Jewish history in the great 2nd century C.E. rebellion against Rome and again in the founding of the State of Israel, an event that evokes parallels with the American Revolution. This was unknown to the pagan world. The intellectual leader of Modern Orthodox Judaism in the 20th century, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, explained it this way in a Passover commentary:
There was a revolutionary message in Rabbi Akiva’s urging his people to revolt against the Romans. The concept of a slow historical process that was popular among the peoples who lived under the influence of Greek philosophy, the endless morphological evolution from matter into form, from a lower to a higher eidetic stage, carries weight and significance so far as time is lived through quantitatively. Then the forces of history move with an extremely slow pace; years, decades, and centuries are nothing but drops in the sea of eternity. … Under the aspect of the minyan ha-shanim, “quantitative years,” any rebellion is a priori doomed to a stillbirth. If a man leaves his fate to the principle of blind, mechanical causality and circumstantial determination, he can never attain salvation and redemption. Redemption is nonexistent for him as chaos and confusion are precluded from the realm of nature. The Jews have inherited from Abraham the alternative to minyan hashanim. The prophecy of the “generations” challenges man, not to live in time, but to mold it, to give to the indifferent chronos news aspects and new interpretation. Time is computed according to man’s own creativity and self-determination. A qualitative time experience enables a nation to span a distance of hundreds and thousands of years in but a few moments. In the seventy years from the destruction of the Temple to the Bar Kokhba upheaval, the Jewish people may have lived through an endless continuum of time, Rabbi Akiva concluded. “Ve-hy-ha Kez – and then will be your Redemption!”
Soloveitchik warned sternly that the creative gesture adopted from Judaism could be perverted and transformed into something terrible. He referred to the German philosophers of the Will, particularly the Nazi Martin Heidegger, although he also might have written about Karl Marx:
This concept of the obligatory nature of the creative gesture, of self-creation as an ethical norm, an exalted value, which Judaism introduced into the world, reverberates with particular strength in the world views of Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Scheler and Heidegger…These ideas, which were pure and holy at their inception, were profaned and corrupted in modern culture. The will was transformed by Schopenhauer into a “blind” will, while for Nietzsche it was embodied in the “superman.” Similarly, the longing for creation was perverted into the desire for brutal and murderous domination. Such views have brought chaos and disaster to our world, which is drowning in its blood.
American conservatives for the most part have responded to the perversion of the idea of creativity by retreating into the bland certainties of Aristotle or Edmund Burke. That is understandable and forgiveable, but not particularly American at the end of the day. It hardly captures the spirit of 1776, or apocalyptic message of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, itself a paraphrase of Isaiah 63. We hear the inspired tones of the Hebrew Bible in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and the voice of the prophets in the call of the Battle Hymn. We eschew political passion for fear of its dark side, and blanche when passion reasserts itself, for example in the movement that swept Donald Trump to the presidency. We have become timid and remote from our forebears who embraced the boldness of the Bible.
Most of what passes for conservatism in the United States, from the followers of Leo Strauss and Russell Kirk, the natural law emphasis of the Catholic Right or the High Tory aestheticism of Roger Scruton, is alien to the inspiration of the Founding. It surely has nothing whatever to do with Judaism, which since ancient times has raised the concept of freedom informed by creativity in opposition to Greek thought. Unless it is exercised in partnership with God, human creativity is a dangerous thing, and it is understandable that mainstream conservatism feels more comfortable with the accretive, empiricist restraint of Aristotle or Burke. Edmund Burke was a fine fellow who supported the American Revolution, but never would he have risked his life, fortune and sacred honor for it. That required the radical Protestant impulse that came from the Pilgrim Fathers.
But there is a great deal to be learned from the Jewish sources that inspired what John Milton and John Selden envisioned as a “Hebrew Republic.” Normative Jewish time is the time of redemption, and it is defined by what Rav Soloveitchik called “the appointed hour” in his essay on the foundation of the State of Israel, Kol Dodi Dofek. The long wait of the centuries with its meticulous recreation of the past and loyalty to tradition is there to prepare the decisive moment in which redemption becomes possible. Human intervention in partnership with God makes redemptive moments possible. Aristotelian time is the plodding procession of moments of the pagan world, driven by the rotation of remote heavenly bodies, and assembled into dreary kyklos of flourising and decay, of democracy giving way to tyranny.
There will be some worthy contributions at the Jewish conservatism confab, for example the exposition of nationalism by my friend Yoram Hazony. I reviewed his recent book in Tablet magazine; it is an important contribution, but it falls short of a robust formulation. On the whole, we Jewish conservatives are too burdened by the baggage of the past, by a compulsion to justify past blunders and by adopted ideology that we should have shed long ago. We have the means to create a political conservatism consonant with traditional Judaism. The elements of this are available in the American past as well as such Orthodox Jewish sources as Rabbi Soloveitchik. For the time being, though, we still are wandering in the desert.
@ yamit82:
Hello Yamit….. You could have said…”Fatwas by Fatheads..”
Between Giving the Torah and Receiving It
by Dr. Israel Eldad Eldad .
. . . Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks) is known as the holiday marking the giving of the Torah, not the holiday marking the acceptance of the Torah. Giving the Torah was indeed a matter for weeks; for it to be accepted, dozens or even hundreds of years had to pass, and some say – it still hasn’t been really accepted.
Giving the Torah was a one-time act, a ceremony. It isn’t a process; it was a miraculous event, an act of Divine grace bringing together the time, the people and the conditions that were right for the gift, the inspiration, the great Heavenly grant, the insertion of spirit into body, of soul to flesh and blood. Theories of history can do no more than go around in circles, explaining the conditions and circumstances of the recipients, but they can never use rationality or explanations to penetrate the revelation, the giving.
Historians are good at explaining a posteriori the necessity in events. But with hindsight they cannot explain the events at Mt. Sinai. And the factual emphasis on the “giving” as opposed to the “acceptance” proves there is no point in talking about a “ripening of conditions” or a “necessity of circumstances” or a “link in a chain of events.”
An act of Genesis is at the basis of the entire description of the giving of the Torah. It isn‚t the continuation of a chain of events but the breaking of a chain, a breaking that that cannot be explained with words from our sociological or historical vocabulary.
All the events of the hundreds of years that followed were no more than an immanent accepting of the previous transcendental giving. The judges and kings and prophets fought among themselves and with their nation for the acceptance of the Torah. This battle is subject to analysis and research and explanation, just as is everything in nature that followed the first moment of Genesis.
The secret of this genesis is also the secret of many other phenomena. It is the secret of the beginning of life, of true poetry, of the birth of ideas. Doctors can see all the secrets of pregnancy and birth but only the secret of the original life of the seed – is still a deep secret.
Therefore one does not decide on ideas. Ideas are given by revelation and they exist. You decide and fight for their acceptance, to spread them or allow them to penetrate. Therefore Mt. Sinai was held over the heads of the nation during the giving of the Torah [in the legend in which Israel was offered a choice between the Torah or being buried under the mountain], because the Torah is not the result of evolution, during which all the right conditions were quietly and calmly prepared till the bodies were ready and eagerly awaiting it. It is always a revolution, meaning something coming in opposition to what the nation is ready for and consciously desires.
Now, from the world of the Torah in general to one part of it: sovereignty.
In the past few generations, only a few extraordinary prophets taught sovereignty, gave the Torah of modern Hebrew sovereignty.
But great is the distance from this new revelation to its acceptance. And apparently it, too, must pass through two stages: first the stage of being forced upon the people from above, and only afterwards, the stage of learning it from below, from inside.
And if you want to know where we stand today on our journey through the desert, let it be told: we are standing before the golden calf.
@ yamit82:
Instead of sitting on society’s welfare, issuing senseless fatwas (oy, halachot) over minute details of Jewish life, and waiting for Messiah, Rabbi Akiva proclaimed one. Akiva wasn’t a fool, far from that. He surely knew that bar Kochba’s chances against Romans are limited. Yet the wise rabbi did not wait for supernatural wonders or try to preserve his yeshiva but proclaimed the war. Akiva chose dignity over life – and even over Judaism itself which he put at stake. Akiva reasoned that he should do his part and let the Almighty care of the Jews. Akiva sacrificed himself and thousands of his students in the revolt, but he established a thing more important than human lives: the will to fight for the truths that we hold self-evident.
For the Gentiles to ask about the purpose of their existence is understandable. They were stuck in paganism’s world of lies. Christianity was supposed to rescue them from this crisis; they wanted to merge Christianity’s abstract ideas with the physical world of the Greeks and ended up painting the Madonna, and so on, creating a Golden Calf of sorts: i.e., Western culture. So such crises are understandable for them. But ours is different.
We entered ours the moment we began to absorb Gentile values. We, the Jews, find ourselves in a crisis that does not belong to us.
Our twofold crisis is actually one: As long as Judaism had not left the ghetto, it underwent no fundamental ideological crisis. So the crisis is not twofold, it is one. It began when we went forth to the Gentile world.
How do we resolve this crisis? Ninety-nine percent of our thinkers say: Because our crisis is that of the entire world, we must solve the world’s crisis, and then ours will be resolved; socialism, democracy, the danger of world war – the resolution of our crisis will come with the resolution of the world crisis. This seems a logical solution. But the solution proposed by a movement of national liberation is different: Resolve the two crises by separating completely from the foreign world, and returning to our own. Thus we can be rid of both crises.
To accomplish this we must initiate a great conceptual revolution: to wipe clean the slate of 200 years worth of Jewish lack-of- Enlightenment. To proclaim a reaction, a great retreat, to the spiritual state we were stuck in 200 years ago. But without giving up Hebrew sovereignty and modern tools. We must find the Archimedean point from which we can hold the entire globe. We must do in our philosophy what Descartes did in modern philosophy. He initiated individualistic European philosophical terms for European thought. “I think therefore I am.” We must find our “I,” the root of our self- consciousness, on which we can build our ideas – in and with our own terms. Not “I think,” which is typically European. Thought is not our ground. Our ground is: “In the beginning God created.”
Maimonides, who tried to build a bridge between Torah and Aristotle, set as the principle of his system the words: “I am the Lord your God,” based on which he expounded the meaning of God and all it obligates. Rabbi Judah Halevy uses the same Biblical verse in his book The Kuzari, but he quotes the full verse: “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt.” This is the fundamental concept of our Divinity. Maimonides cut the verse in half and built his philosophical system on it. Judah Halevy said: History is our philosophy. This is our Archimedean point: God, and national activity in history. This is our starting point.
The Emancipation began an atomization. Single Jews. Detached from their roots. An “objective” examination of Judaism. We have two examples of such objective, examined Judaism: psychoanalysis and Biblical Criticism. They are the same. Not that they are similar, but they are identical in nature: an arbitrary dissection of a whole. Kitsutz banetiot. After slicing away at the soul, and detaching it from its root, they are surprised when that soul then wilts. The Jew who was committed to Torah and observing the commandments had no complexes. Our idea was so strong that it united all the divided atoms of the soul into one higher whole. When you take the spirit of God from man only the dust of the earth is left. When you take the higher spirit from man, you are left with instincts. The resulting crises are natural for Gentiles, but surprising for us.
Limits are a basic concept in a Hebrew liberation movement. In Hebrew, the word for “limit” is gvul, from the root gavel, meaning to give a set form to dough. Historic action and a liberation movement should give form and limits to things. Things in their chaotic origin are unlimited, formless. Man is lost in infinite time and space. What can he grasp? But Judaism gave the world Bereshit, Genesis, the “beginning,” with which the Torah opens. This is the first concept of limits in space and time. Thought is by nature circular, without beginning. The Torah opens with the letter bet, not with a definition of God. We know God only from His creation. The land was chaos, and God set limits: oceans, order, instead of infinity. There is an order and an intention in history. If the world had been created by accident, it would have no meaning. But if it has a beginning, a creation, it is no accident, rather an intention, with purpose. This direction is another basic concept, in addition to limits. No history of any other nation is as clear and defined as ours. Everything that happens to us already appears in regard to our three Patriarchs. Abraham stands under the banner: Lech lecha, “Get thee from thy country…” and under the banner of chesed, charity. Isaac is the passive, tragic image among our Fathers. The Bible refers to the Pachad Itzhak, the “fear of Isaac.” That is also part of our history. Again and again we are bound, and again and again saved.
In this extraordinary deep and -to me-almost metaphysical drasha of Rav Soleveitchik, which I never read before. It is much more than instructive to realise that his fellow participants at Seder obviously understood exactly what he meant. I just struggled to do so, before I got the message..that modern Jews succeed when their enterprises are partnered by G-d, which becomes his achievement of Redemption .
At least that’s what feel it says, and I would be happy to have someone tear it to pieces and explain what it REALLY means…..Torah and philosophy combined with achievable activism.
I echo his thoughts on Sharansky, a brave and noble person, but as I noticed, long ago, not in a political way. I had the good fortune to meet his wife Avital, many years ago during her travels ’round the world, gathering support and funds for the freedom of her husband and others. Her meeting with Margaret Thatcher was her historic moment…