We didn’t mean to end up at a Jewish daycare. Originally, we’d enrolled our then four-month-old at the ritzy, organic place, where infants fell asleep in a darkened room to the sound of whale song. But then two things happened.

The first was that our son’s teacher had a nervous breakdown, which she described to us with relish: “What about the children?” she'd apparently cried as they were loading her into the ambulance. “My babies!”

The second was that she asked us to stop holding him so much at home. “We’re working on the self-play,” she said. Because if you give it a fancy sounding term that evokes masturbation, then it’s not just your child lying ignored in some corner.

So we switched to the daycare at our local JCC.

At the time, I hadn’t stopped to consider what it meant to send my child to a Jewish school. I just wanted a place where the teachers didn’t mind cuddling him. But then the challahs started coming home every Friday, along with notes reminding us that no, the JCC did not celebrate Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s. Instead of bringing us paper ornaments and Easter eggs, our son brought home paintings of frogs at Passover and little flags at Simchat Torah. And while the daycare did shut down for Christmas, the literature they handed out referred to this period euphemistically as “the last week in December.”

Still, it wasn’t until I found myself tearing up at the sight of all the children parading around in their Purim costumes that it really sunk in that the Jewish part mattered.

When my family first moved to Michigan from Israel, a girl in my fifth-grade class asked me, “Do you believe in the son of God?” What I heard, however, was “sun of God.” “Of course we don’t believe in the sun,” I told her, indignant. Sheesh. We weren’t pagans.

The thing is, of course, that you can’t grow up in the U.S. without knowing all about Jesus. After a while, my family grew resigned to the Christianity all around us, adopting defensive strategies like turning out the lights whenever Christmas carolers were making the rounds and rolling our eyes indulgently when grocery store cashiers asked us if dreidels were a kind of cracker.

But that was then, when I was secure in my Israeli-ness, before I married a lapsed Catholic and had children who most likely will never know what it’s like to be part of a cultural or religious majority.

My son is two now, and learning to talk. He comes home from daycare singing, “Good morning! Boker tov!” He goes around pretending his toys are miniature shofars. Tonight he will go trick or treating for the first time without any idea of what Halloween might mean, because, you know, they don’t mention it at daycare.

Lately, he’s been screaming the HaMotzi blessing at the top of his lungs.

“Come on,” I told him once in an effort to shut him up. “We’re supposed to be secular.”

He made a face. “No,” he said. “No like secular, Mommy.”

And much to my surprise, it turns out, neither do I.

Steve Chapman has a nice piece at Reason dissecting the flagrant and transparent hypocrisy of Mitt Romney’s call to religious voters to put aside their misgivings about his creed in order to unite behind him in a popular front against godless heathens.

Chapman devotes some space to debunking Romney’s preposterous claim that “[f]reedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” writing

Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored,
oppression in Europe and elsewhere.

Which is all quite right, and explodes Romney’s assertion in the context in which almost everybody has interpreted it. I want to make a small analytic point, though, that there is a tradition of deploying, with terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, a concept or concepts that very few of us would associate with freedom or liberty, but which makes the “freedom requires religion” claim a conceptual truth. For example, you can see in Kant’s claim that “we assume that we are free so that we may think of ourselves as subject to moral laws," and that we "think of ourselves as subject to moral laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of the will,” the potential move to a position that action predicated on rejecting the concept of morality Kant proffers (which is a deduction from the nature of practical reason) also rejects the concept of freedom, “an idea of reason whose objective reality is in itself questionable.”

The upshot would be that an irrational actor cannot be said to be free --- so it is only by accepting the dictates of morality, which may include God on some pictures of morality, that one can be free. (Not that this is necessarily Kant’s position, but it is a direction one could go, and some people have gone; I read Hegel as advancing a view very close to that one, for example.)

This treatment of freedom becomes a bit easier to grasp, and looks all the more idiosyncratic, when viewed on a global and political, rather than individual scale. Kant possibly, and Rousseau definitely, promise a republic of free citizens --- whose freedom consists in assenting to a “general will,” which only reflects their preferences if their preferences reflect the structures of rationality, as construed by Kant and Rousseau. As Julian Sanchez puts it:

What this means in practice, of course, is that the legislator can simply do whatever he thinks is best, and still claim to be following "the will of the people" in some suitably abstract, hypothetical sense. Recall this the next time some pol or flack confidently declares what "the American People" want, demand, value, or won't stand for. There's a fair chance they're referring to the ideal Platonic "American People" in their head—a population that, miraculously, seems always to hold the same views as the speaker.

The parallel to this line of thinking, which incorporates religion explicitly, and therefore touches on the contents of Romney’s speech directly, is the quasi-tradition within Catholic philosophy --- which is essentially a Talmudic approach to reading Aquinas, who in turn was recapitulating Aristotle for a Christian audience, and several other church fathers --- according to which human freedom is parasitic on man’s telos, such that action deviating from that telos cannot be said to be free. And what is man’s telos? Well, medieval philosophy isn’t my specialty, but from what I know it involves being a sincere and devout member in good standing of the Roman Catholic Church.

You can see this view reflected in the premium placed on a religious concept of free will in Catholic teaching, juxtaposed with denunciations of liberal freedom and freedom of choice as we understand them, from Cardinal Ratzinger inveighing against the “liberal-radical ideology of individualistic rationalistic hedonistic character,” to Daniel P. Moloney’s suggestion that “the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally.” [Ed note: Moloney should give Ratzinger an iPod and ask him which venue is more congenial to forgetting about God --- but I digress.] The basic idea is that God gives people free will in order to glory in His commands, so that turning away from God means turning away from freedom too. Deviating from one’s telos can be freely chosen, but in some idiosyncratic sense, by so deviating one ceases to act freely.

Adapting the Ratzinger-Moloney line to Romney’s everybody-but-the-atheists ecumenicism, it’s easy to see what Romney might have been asserting (though he probably wasn’t): Freedom is conceptually contained within religious belief --- any religious belief at all, it doesn’t matter which --- so those who do not submit to God lack a concept of freedom, and therefore can’t experience it.

Or as someone else once said, freedom is slavery.

Good to know Tiv Taam supermarket owner Arkady Gaidamak's decision to stop selling pork at all locations isn't motivated by the sort of fatuous "cultural sensitivity" we've come to expect from the Ken Livingstones of the world. To listen to him talk, you'd bet that was the case:

"I believe that in a Jewish state," he declared, "in which there is a large Muslim minority, selling pork is a provocation.

It's frightening when 21st century citizens who can learn about microbes, neurons, DNA, and black holes worry about what their neighbors eat or about who they fuck. Thankfully (I guess), Gaidamak's just a run-of-the-mill opportunist:

...it is unlikely that Mr Gaidamak has announced his move merely for business reasons. Instead there may be two other factors. One is a possibility floated in Rishon Letzion yesterday by a reflective Mrs Schlinger: "I think he wants to be Mayor of Jerusalem where there are many religious people." You don't have to be ultra-Orthodox to be Mayor of Jerusalem, though the present one, Uri Lupiolanski is, but you do have to take the religious vote very much into account. And the other, more subtle reason may be that if he is to have any kind of political future, he needs to shake off the idea that he is somehow confined to the secular, Russian-speaking immigrant periphery, however big.

There’s a popular article in today’s London Times called How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam by Phyllis Chesler, weirdly subtitled ‘Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?’
Phyllis Chesler: Is Angry
The jist of the article is that Islam itself is racist, and sexist, and if Sharia law isn’t taken on directly and altered to fit modern norms then fanatical Islam is going to take over the world. At the end of the article secularism is proscribed as the only safe and acceptable future for Islam. Chesler writes, “Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.” (Emphasis mine).

I have to say, this makes me really uncomfortable. I agree that sexism, racism, and hatred are bad no matter what context they’re in, but I don’t think waging a “secular war” against Islam is realistic or a good plan. Why? Because when you bring the word secular to the table, what most religious people hear is “heathen.”

My Jewish education was filled with pejorative comments about the secular world, and secular Jews. This was obviously a bad strategy, but I think it’s important to recognize that if you come to a religious leader or a member of a religious community and say, “We think it’s safer, better, wiser and truer to the word of God to live by this secular lifestyle,” you’re not going to convince anyone to join your team. Those communities define themselves by NOT being secular. If you use text study, legal analysis, and serious debate you might get somewhere because to religious people these things matter. But secularism? It’s everything they hate and are afraid of.

This is relevant in the Jewish community as much as it is in the Muslim community. While there are, of course, sects and communities that are completely unwilling to change their stances on any issue, most community leaders want to be able to champion a revolutionary new cause. It makes them look good and important, and it guarantees that they go down in history books. And even the most dogmatic communities tend to go along with what their fearless leader proscribes. Consider the Chafetz Chaim, a prominent rabbi who died only 73 years ago, and who went squarely against a Talmudic statement in Sotah 20b R. Eliezer says: Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity. The Chafetz Chaim explained “Nowadays, in our iniquity, as parental tradition has been seriously weakened and women, moreover, regularly study secular subjects, it is certainly a great mitzvah to teach them Chumash, Prophets and Writings, and rabbinic ethics, such as Pirkei Avot, Menorat Hamaor, and the like, so as to validate our sacred belief; otherwise they may stray totally from G-d's path and transgress the basic tenets of religion, G-d forbid." (I got this translation from a Chabad source, but I think it’s pretty good.)

See, right there the word secular is used AS A BAD THING, even though what’s being promoted is a secular (and good) idea.

If we come charging at the Muslim world saying that they’ve been doing it wrong and the secular lifestyle is the way to go, we’re not going to convince anyone, and we’re going to make people defensive. But if we remind fundamentalists everywhere that the world’s three major religions were based on people coming onto the scene and implementing reforms, and then we find places in their texts and legal documents that can support our humanist claims…then we can get somewhere. Or at least I hope we can.