Posts
Day 3: Is Social Justice the Soul of Judaism?
By Steven I. Weiss / January 17, 2007
From: Steven I. Weiss To: Daniel ‘Mobius’ Sieradski Subject: Why Maimonides Would Beat You, and Your Woman
Dan,
I’ll certainly agree with you that Jews didn’t invent morality, though I’m not sure how this reinforces your argument that social justice is the “soul” of Judaism.
Anyway, in my opening letter yesterday, I explained how Judaism has never produced a society that looks a whole lot like what social justice types call for. I left off with three questions: why, if this message has been around all along, nobody noticed it until now; why has no Jewish society ever come out socially just; and whether citations of chapter and verse from Jewish texts is just cherry-picking. You didn’t respond to them.
You cite Kook and Maimonides as discussing a sort of continual revelation meant to guide Jews in the proper direction. This, you say, is your proof that Judaism is guiding you to your own moral notions of social justice.
The thing is, if you’re going to take Kook and Maimonides as your teachers of how to live a proper life, there won’t be much room for a social justice agenda. Both Kook and Maimonides laid out rather strict definitions of what a proper life includes. Maimonides’ taught men how to properly beat their wives; for Kook, notions of essential Jewishness (pintele yid) place you and I on a higher plane that our fellows of other religions can’t reach.
You’ll probably claim that you’re only taking from Kook and Maimonides their models of inspiration. That may well be, but then you’re only citing a couple sentences from among the lifetimes of work they put together. As much as you’d like to hitch your social justice wagon to them, if they were here today they’d smack you upside the head and tell you to go re-read their work.
And this gets at something you wrote yesterday. You suggest that at each point in Jewish history, its laws and thought were “a radical departure from the mainstream behavior of the time,” and “incredibly progressive in the context of its creation.” That’s not true. As the simplest example, the Chanukah story was about a bunch of fundamentalist Jews taking on Hellenism and all it represented—art, science, athletics, and philosophy.
Your examples of progressiveness are particularly laughable. Yes, you acknowledge, Judaism traditionally condemned gays to death—but how progressive that rabbinic courts refused to slaughter them! It's also worth noting that this allegedly progressive movement still puts murderers and gays on the same footing.
“For every example you brought, I can find a counter-example which states the very opposite,” you wrote. I’d say you need some book-learning on the definition of “opposite.” Failing to slaughter gays isn’t quite the opposite of intolerance.
These last three paragraphs and the Kook/Maimonides discussion all indicate that you’ve conceded the broader thesis: social justice isn’t the soul of Judaism. The best you can muster are isolated instances where a social justice agenda may find a perch.
What this all boils down to is that the Jewish tradition is a set of rules. That’s why, whenever a new social justice cause arises, even the most liberal movements debate whether specific interpretations of Judaism can find room for supporting it.
You want to say, based on relatively few passages amidst the libraries of text, that the Jewish tradition has come down to you today with an essential message that magically coheres with your political principles. Maybe, but I’d likely be able to find the same kind of instruction from the works of Shakespeare or Fitzgerald, if granted similar interpretive permissions.
While I’m sure there are plenty of literature professors who’d shout me down from such an attempt, I’m not going to say that you may not read the Jewish tradition as you choose; I’m just not that much of an asshole. But to assert that a tradition that overwhelmingly rejects many of your political principles is actually, at its heart, all about your political agenda, is plainly ridiculous.
Now, as I said yesterday, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for social justice in Judaism. I’ve argued in the past that even based on Orthodox principles, Jews should advocate for gay marriage in the United States. And when the Jewish tradition doesn’t tell you what to do about certain policies, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re any worse of a Jew for taking your own approach. Indeed, there are some instances (charity comes most prominently to mind) where a social justice agenda coheres pretty well with a Judaic one.
There are some areas of the social justice agenda, however, that I think make one a worse Jew, and a foul human being. When I was at Yeshiva University, Peter Singer was moral enemy number one. His idea that
the value of animal life is greater than that of impaired humans struck many students as profoundly repulsive, and wholly antithetical to what we’d been taught all our lives—both in Judaic classes and everywhere else.
Sure enough, his basic arguments about the value of life resting in its owner’s intelligence came up with the social justice crowd recently, as the liberal end of America advocated Terri Schiavo be starved to death. Her lack of brain function was said to render her life worthless, and the inherent value of human life—a Jewish notion throughout all time—was rejected as chauvinistic.
And therein is part of the danger of conflating Judaism with social justice. I might suggest that finding the social justice agenda at the heart of Judaism is intellectually dishonest, but I’ll state clearly until my dying day that turning Judaism into an endorsement of that brand of social justice is an absolute crime.
Steven
Thursday: Liar, Liar, Soul on Fire
POST A COMMENT
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.
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.
That’s funny that the young american writer argues like and old bad soviet “scientific” atheist.
Don’t like that kind
Yakov
Wanna post your own comments? Gotta log in first!