That's funny that the young american writer argues like and old bad soviet "scientific" atheist.
Don't like that kind

Yakov

I think that the most telling statement anyone has made thus far in this conversation, what really gets to the core of the irreconciable difference (because let's not kid ourselves by thinking someone's going to "win"), is where you say "What this all boils down to is that the Jewish tradition is a set of rules."

Is that all we are? 3000 years and all we've got is a bunch of identical scrolls and a few too many volumes of commentary? Instructions on how to live our lives without any justification beyond "G-d said so and I'm better at understanding G-d than you are, so because I said so too?" You're missing the forest for the trees, refusing to glean principle from the written text.

In a context with which I am admittedly more familiar, Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer have been having this argument on the Supreme Court for years. Do we live by words that our forebearers recorded? Or do we live by the principles that they were trying to enshire? When we realize that those principles require stretching the words, what do we care about more - words or people?

Judaism is more than words (to quote my favorite 90s power-ballad). When you pray or wrap teffilin you're being Jewish. But when I work on an antidiscrimination lawsuit, I'm being Jewish too. Because the core of Jews as a people, not just as a religion, are driven by experience and shared ethics that instruct me that it's the right thing to do. Do you think so many Jews are liberals by accident? Because they're mistaken? I'm curious where you think our people's collective ethics come from.

We may not have always known what the right thing to do was. When the torah was crafted as a code of laws, we were a small people concerned with producing children, so we forbade homosexuality. But the principle was never that homosexuality was wrong "because I said so."  So the rule can change. And we can learn. It's time to do so.

Dan - I could have used a better term than rules. That implies that halacha's all there is, and that's not what I mean to imply. Would "norms" be any better?

After 3,000 years, there's little tying together the disparate great masses of Jews together other than the simple statement, "I'm Jewish," and it'd be foolish to say that the rules or norms, or societal building blocks -- or whatever we choose to define the more than 90% of Jewish history until the 20th century -- actually tie us together any more.

If one wanted to argue that social justice is the core of the secular liberal Jewish community in the United States from around 1975 onward, I'd be responding in a very different way (there are still lots of reasons to say that secular Judaism isn't socially just, but the argument would still be very different).

In comparing Judaism to the American legal experience, you're making a very common analogy. The Jewish legal canon and the arguments therein are quite often similar to those that have come millenia later in American jurisprudence. But the similarity is in process, not in results. Both draw subsequent interpretations from original documents, using various hermeneutical principles, with precedent holding a certain amount of weight.

But the foundational documents are immensely different. The Constitution had ten original amendements comprising a Bill of Rights; Judaism has ten original commandments comprising...the Ten Commandments.

If one were to argue that the principles underlying them should communicate with us across the ages, ignoring the intervening years of legal discussion, a contemporary American would be able to come up with a set of values that have some coherence with the way you and I understand our country. Looking at the Ten Commandments, where does one arrive at social justice? In point of fact, one would more easily arrive at an understanding that coheres a lot more with how Judaism was understood for more than 90% of its history.

This comes back to a point I made in my first entry. The "principles that they were trying to enshrine" in the Bible, Talmud, responsa, etc., don't speak a whole lot about social justice. Even Hillel's famous invocation of the Golden Rule was actually only speaking about how to treat other Jews, not other people as a whole.

I'm not going to tell you that you're not "being Jewish" when you "work on an antidiscrimination lawsuit." But I will say that your definition of being Jewish through that means is entirely subjective. That doesn't mean that a lot of Jews won't agree with you; of course, a great many would disagree with you, too. In any regard, the idea that doing so is "being Jewish," no matter how many or few would agree, is an extremely recent idea and one that is certainly of such debatable truth that it could never gain footing as an objective notion of what Judaism is. Donning phylacteries doesn't suffer from the same lack of objectivity, even though the overwhelming quantity of Jews will never put on a pair.

I entirely disagree that the Jewish people as a whole are "driven by [shared] experience and shared ethics," because those experiences and ethics are immensely different for so many groupings of Jews. Take the basic debate between having the Jew and the non-Jew as an object of Jewish concern; you couldn't have ethics that conflict more strongly, and yet both are subscribed to by great quantities of Jews.

There is no collective Jewish ethic. Sure, roughly 75% of American Jews who vote choose to pull the Democratic lever, but that's far short of universal. What's more, those who most often engage a specific notion of Jewish identity -- doing something specifically Jewish, learning a specifically Jewish, performing Jewish ritual -- are, at present, not nearly so often found on our side of the political aisle.

As to the roots of American Jewish political liberalism, I think you'll find a lot of it comes from an express rejection of Judaism. The old Jewish communists weren't just rejecting capitalism, they were rejecting God, Torah, and failure to assimilate completely. Jews who today look back at that as an attempt at creating a Jewish liberalism miss the point; they were trying to create a liberalism by getting rid of Judaism.

It's a whole series of questionable assumptions that gets one to the declaration, "When the torah was crafted as a code of laws, we were a small people concerned with producing children, so we forbade homosexuality." You've got no sourcing to prove that, and you'd have a very hard time finding any. It's entirely possible that anti-homosexuality in the ancient near east, and today, has little to do with fertility. A point often brought up against this line of argument is that marriages and sex acts that wouldn't result in pregnancy were not forbidden.

You assert that "the rule can change" because "the principle was never that homosexuality was wrong because 'I said so.'" What an Orthodox argument you've presented! An argument seemingly far more coherent with your worldview would be that the rule doesn't matter, and that we're not beholden to ancient rules.

Instead of engaging in intellectually-incoherent attempts at reading original intent into the text that you'll reject either way, why not simply reject it outright? Why not simply have your values, no matter what Judaism says?

Just kidding.

I don't have time to respond to all of that. But two of the more glaring problems:

1. Eighty-seven percent of Jews voting in 2006 voted Democrat. Check CNN exit polls. Are 87% of Jews misperceiving thier own identities? Jews are the only group in America to so consistently vote against their economic interest. Is it for values or, as you seem to suggest, because of some warped fascination with the struggles of Leon Trotsky. Why have the Jewish Daily Forward (a socialist newspaper) or the Jewish Bund (a communist organization) if you're rejecting Judaism? You're arguing in circles.

2. You don't seem to understand the basic dichotomy between a rule and a norm. A rule is "slaughter using X knife on Y vein" whereas a norm is a value-laden standard that underlies specific rules: "treat animals humanely." Your reduction of Judaism to a series of rules leaves an open question of what norms underpin them. You never answered my quesiton of whether than is solely "follow the word of G-d." As I said before, you can say that and I'll stop debating. That's an irreducible difference in world-view. But if you think it's something akin to capitalism, xenophobia, and the enduring power of animal-sacrifice, the values you've advanced in this conversation, I think for all of your superior halachic knowledge, you're dead wrong.

But here is an important, fundamental point...
It is nearly impossible to ever make blanket statements about such a large (yes, small in the scope of our place in the overall world population...but still many, many people) and inherently diverse population of people.
Yes, you could probably make the social justice argument as part of an analysis of American, Ashkenazim in the 20th century (and, Sephardit as well..in a way, that would be a really interesting exploration there. How/why American Jews specifically jumped on the HMS Social Justice. A natural response to assimilation? Assimilative guilt perhaps?).  But, are the experiences and perspectives of a middle class Jewish family in Boston going to be the same as that of a member of the Abayudaya? Or a member of the Bnei Menashe?  This is not to make any sort of value judgement for better or worse. Merely that it is much easier to be actively concerned with the plight of others if one's own position in life is a little easier to manage.  
Be careful Dan, it is a really slippery slope from your line of Bund/Forward-centric line of argumentation to the exclusion and ignoring of vital Jewish communites around the world (which, to Steven's point, is a difficult line of argumentation, particularly with the Bundists who did all they could to reject Judaism as a religion).  

Dan - Even if one took CNN's exit polls from a midterm election as showing a true Jewish turnout (and if you talk to the experts, they'll explain why you shouldn't), there's still 13%, and just like the roughly 25% who voted for Bush in '04, those 13% are overwhelmingly represented by what would often be characterized as the most "engaged" Jews -- those who do the most on a daily basis to explicitly engage and express their Judaism.

I'd never suggest that any Jew, or any person, is misperceiving their own identity. If they want to feel that social justice is the soul of their Judaism, that's perfectly fine. But that's a very subjective thing, and something not necessarily rooted in any historical notions.

Take you as a voter. Do you want to work on antidiscrimination lawsuits because you're Jewish, or because you feel it's a good thing? I'm betting the latter. And once that's the case, if you weren't Jewish would you still do it? And do you think it has value outside Judaism? If so, why do you need Judaism at all to inform that decision? I imagine you don't. Now, you might find greater inspiration for those decisions from the Jewish tradition and verses like "Justice, justice, shall you pursue." I don't have a problem with your using that to inspire you. But to suggest that the correct meaning of it was to inform your pursuit of antidiscrimination lawsuits is a stretch, and not one that could reasonably be applied to an objective notion of Judaism.

As to the early history of the Jewish left, a driving principle of the Forward was to acculturate Jews to American culture and away from Judaism. It happened not to do an overwhelmingly good job at that, but it certainly tried hard, throwing Yom Kippur balls and the like. It's not arguing in circles to simply assert the historical reality of these groups. And in any respect, the reality of what these groups represent has no bearing on my overall argument; it's a severe tangent raised to respond to your question of why the Jewish left in America started.

Now, there are countless reasons why Jews vote various ways, just as with so many other groups, and I wouldn't begin to assume that that's the whole of the answer to Jewish voting affiliations; there's a ton of material there. You've clearly got your institutional talking-points down right when you say that "Jews are the only group in America to so consistently vote against their economic interest." There are so many reasons and ways to vote, and so many complexities to "economic interest," and so many groups, that I don't know how one would begin to justify such a claim.

As to the difference between a rule and a norm, don't worry, I've got it. And it just so happens that classic halacha not only delineates a number of rules for slaughter, but has an explicit invocation against harming animals (<i>tzaar ba'alai chayim</i>). The thing is, a lot of times those desired norms are expressed in early Jewish texts, and the underlying principle of so many verses cited by Sieradski and others on this point can't be taken to objectively endorse their political positions. To assert that they could is to ignore millenia of interpretation -- including a wide range of contemporary opinions -- that present different readings.

 I'm not sure what question you're saying I didn't answer, and I don't know what you mean by "You never answered my quesiton of whether than is solely 'follow the word of G-d.'" I think you may be referencing this point of yours from the first day: ***

At the bottom must lie something. Or more precisely some things, many of them evolving norms rather than fixed principals. And one of them is social justice.

***

My response to that is that I don't know why you'd assume that whatever principles underlied a bunch of millenia-old statements and cultures would have to match up with any set of contemporary American political philosophies.

The Judaic tradition contains vast literature on countless tiny statements of philosophy and law. If asked to state what Judaism as a whole teaches us, looking through the tradition, I'd say there's no universal element to Judaism other than the constant of disagreement.