In the glutted landscape of Jewish communal life, no institution blusters with greater pomposity than the Organization That Claims To Speak On Behalf Of The Jews (OTCSBJ). What’s most frustrating about the OTCSBJ is that it often speaks not on behalf of “the Jewish People” but of the tiny percentage of Jews who sign up for its email lists. Most notorious in this category is the Conference of Presidents (“American Jewry’s recognized address for consensus policy”), which clamored vociferously for an invasion of Iraq (see its "Daily Alerts" of cherry-picked panic from 2002 and 2003) despite the fact that a majority of American Jews opposed the invasion.

A relatively new OTCSBJ has entered the scene: The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. Chaired by Dennis Ross, the JPPPI seeks to formulate an overarching “Jewish policy” with an eye towards strengthening the status of Israel as the “center of Jewish life.” As a sign of how it views the vitality of Diaspora Jewish life, the JPPPI has on its team the famed Israeli demographer Sergio DellaPergola, who clings to the widely-discredited National Jewish Population Survey of 2001, with its bleak outlook for Jewish life in America. After all, it's easier to promote Israel as the "center of Jewish life" if Jewish life everywhere else is falling apart.
Yehezkel Dror: Modern Day Jewish Prophet suspiciously resembles Larry "Bud" Mellman
Now the Founding President of the JPPPI, Yehezkel Dror, has written a stunning op-ed in The Forward about where he feels “the Jewish People” should head. Essentially, he argues, the "requirements of existence" must trump everything else. In light of Israel's (or "the Jewish People's") interests, Dror characterizes moral considerations as "political correctness and other thinking-repressing fashions." He singles out Jewish activism on China and on Turkey's genocide of Armenians, arguing that Jews must be supportive of China and Turkey, "or at least remain neutral," in light of Israel's strategic interests. Bewilderingly, he then takes the "end to morality" argument to the nuclear level:

Similarly, Jewish leaders should support harsh measures against terrorists who potentially endanger Jews, even at the cost of human rights and humanitarian law. And if the threat is sufficiently grave, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Israel would be justified if likely to be necessary for assuring the state’s survival, the bitter price of large number of killed innocent civilians notwithstanding.

Thankfully, Dror concedes that it's hard to define what constitutes "survival" ("there is much room for debate," he assures us. Gosh, thanks, Yehezkel!). But, he insists:

When important for existence, violating the rights of others should be accepted, with regret but with determination. Support or condemnation of various countries and their policies should be decided upon primarily in light of probable consequences for the existence of the Jewish people.

In short, the imperatives of existence should be given priority over other concerns — however important they may be — including liberal and humanitarian values, support for human rights and democratization.

If nothing else, Dror's outlook -- shared, presumably, by the JPPPI -- represents a remarkable devolution. Yesterday's popular Jewish cant about Israel ran along the lines of "Israel, and everything it does, is by definition moral." How far have we progressed if we no longer even pretend it's moral, instead insisting that morality itself must be relinquished as a vestige of an earlier age? What's more, we must weigh Israel's interests not only in discussions of the Middle East, but in ethical issues that come up anywhere in the world. Whatever the situation, says Dror, we risk imperiling the Jewish People's existence by aligning ourselves purely with morality.

One wonders how the term "survival" will be defined. With the proper argument, it can include not only nuking Iran, but rounding up all non-Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank (and hell, pre-Green Line Israel too) and shipping them off to the other side of the Jordan River. Slobodan Milosevic was interested in his people's survival too. Was he the intellectual and moral forefather of the JPPPI?

It seems almost providential that just last week, Albert Einstein rose from the grave to give us a warning about Jews and power. “As far as my experience goes," he wrote about Jews, "they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.” Dror offers evidence that sixty years into what some people call "the Jewish return to sovereignty," it might be time for some chemotherapy.

Just Say "Sleaze": The JPPPI's Foxman and Kissinger -- Judaism's Moral Compass Just as importantly, with this op-ed, the JPPPI has shown that it has scant knowledge of "the Jewish People," most of whom do not base decisions, moral or otherwise, on the exclusive basis of what David Ben Gurion would wish for. But that won't stop the JPPPI from insisting it speaks on our behalf. In his description of the mission of the organization, Dror has written that "most Israeli policy-makers and also intellectuals and opinion-shapers, suffer from a lack of understanding, as well as ignorance about and misperception of, Diaspora realities, especially concerning the mindset and feelings of the majority of the younger generation." Let's see, how can we bridge this gap in understanding, especially with the "younger generation"? Hey, how about we propose an abandonment of morality whenever Israel is in the picture? That should work beautifully!

At least the JPPPI is consistent with other Organizations That Claim To Speak On Behalf Of The Jews. It's currently enjoying Stage Two of Jewish organizational process:

Stage One: Establish an organization that claims to represent "the Jewish People."

Stage Two: Espouse ideology that the vast majority of Jews would consider to be out-of-touch or morally execrable.

Stage Three: Lament, in limitless policy papers, the fact that so few Jews choose to "affiliate" with the organized community.

Stage Four: Go to Stage One.

For decades, popular wisdom insists that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only the German soldiers had refused to follow orders.  Of course, that naively takes for granted that your ordinary German had some moral objections to persecuting, dragging to ghettos and murdering Jews.

Two summers ago, in Israel, many soldiers were terribly upset by their orders to evict, exile innocent law-abiding Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and Northern Shomron.

Thirty-eight years earlier the world saw Israeli soldiers cry uncontrollably after liberating the kotel, the Western Wall.  What a difference when we saw soldiers crying, in 2005, as they didn't have the guts to go with their morals and feelings.  We saw soldiers breaking down, because they knew that they were obeying evil laws made by immoral politicians.  The Nazi soldiers didn't cry when they murdered Jews.

Many of the soldiers of Disengagement, two years ago suffered the worst of Post Traumatic Stress, and that's why yesterday IDF soldiers from an elite fighting unit refused to evict innocent, patriotic Jews from homes in Hebron.

Today's soldiers are stronger than their elder brothers. Yasher kocham!

Yesterday in the comments to my post about virginity and the fifteenth of Av someone calling themselves Soccer suggested that I “leave HAdar and go study at a yeshiva with Jewish values!”
When you Google Jewish Values: you get a lot of pictures of people looking triumphant
I don’t know anything about Soccer, and I don’t actually care. I wouldn’t have graced his/her hater comment with a link except that it amused me that Hadar was being called out for Jewish values. One might have a problem with Hadar halachically, but the truth is that Hadar does in fact consider itself obligated by halacha, it simply chooses to interpret halacha in a way somewhat different from how Rav Ovadia Yosef, for instance, might poskin. The core value is the same, though, right?
But Jewish law can’t be the only Jewish value, and I bet there are plenty of people who would argue that Jewish laws are completely irrelevant to Jewish values, so where do we go for more ethical direction?

Is it a Jewish value to be Zionist? What do Jewish values say about abortion? Ecology? Women’s rights? Slavery? War? Genocide?

If you were under the impression that any of those are questions answered simply, I think you’re way off base. As far as I know there are conflicting understandings and opinions regarding all of these issues, with people weighing in from around the world and throughout time. Luckily or unluckily the Torah doesn’t say anything that definitely requires you to recycle, or forbids a man from beating his wife. We take a few comments that may or may not seem relevant and extrapolate from them grand and impressive doctrines on, say, slavery and halacha, and how the Torah views slavery as repugnant and an insult to human dignity. But then we’re stuck with the fact that according to the Torah, it’s perfectly acceptable for a Jewish man to own slaves. Even Jewish slaves are allowed, though not encouraged. But today, if you wanted to go to Thailand and buy some girl to be your housemaid, I doubt your rabbi would be on board with the proposal. He’d likely say something about how it doesn’t jive with Jewish values and then lecture you on the mitzvah to rescue the captives.

Today, morality has been pretty much codified by humanistic terms, and most Jews, even Orthodox Jews, live according to a lot of rules and ethical guidelines that are never or rarely explicit in any Jewish texts. Technically, for instance, halacha allows a person to cheat a non-Jew out of money, but I don’t see many contemporary responsa urging Jews to pad their pockets with money they didn’t get fairly, and I can’t imagine any rabbi I know advising someone in business to go through with a shady deal just to make a mint at the expense of a Baptist coworker.

I guess my point here is the same as it was when I wrote about Jewish delis the other day. I wish people would be more specific when they used the word Jewish. It’s becoming something we just clip to whatever’s convenient, never considering whether it will be a good idea to call something with little or no connection to Judaism ‘Jewish.’

Score one for Edward O. Wilson and the commonsensical forces of sociobiology. Chimps and gorillas have sympathy and will sacrifice themselves for others:

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

[...]

“Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned,” he said. “In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when.”

Remember that the next time you don't return Coco's calls. 

 

Peter SingerPeter Singer has made a career out of demanding that ordinary people take responsibility for the great power they wield. In a groundbreaking 1972 essay, Singer argued that when middle- and upper-middle-class people fail to donate their money to prevent children in the developing world from starving to death, they are guilty of a moral atrocity. Singer himself gives 20% of his Princeton professor salary to nonprofits, principally Oxfam. To lead an even minimally moral life, he argues, ...