I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" — something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species – not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to – oh, I don't know – Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book — "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by – guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

The post “Don’t Blame Darwinism for Hitler! Blame Christianity!” appeared first on Jewcy.

Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp.

I mention this because you’re soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don’t or don’t want to understand.

Starring comic actor Ben Stein, Expelled is a snarky theatrical documentary about the suppression of American scientists who dissent from Darwinist evolutionary orthodoxy. Controversial stuff. What’s really turning critics apoplectic, though, is the case made in the film that Darwinism inspired the Nazis.

Which, in fact, it did. In Mein Kampf, Hitler used Darwinian language to make his case for racial war against the Jews. He rallied the millions of Germans who bought his bestselling book with an appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature – principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior.

Defy Nature, he wrote, and then “whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow.” The major Hitler biographers – Toland, Fest, Kershaw, Bullock — all agree on Hitler’s debt to Darwinism.

A gentle soul, Darwin himself never advocated genocide. But in The Descent of Man, he predicted that the logic of natural selection made inevitable something like what Hitler attempted against the Jews:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

What you would not readily foresee from reading Darwin’s writings is that the race requiring extermination would turn out to be us Jews. But Hitler perceived an inner logic in Darwinism that even Charles Darwin didn’t.

In the same chapter of Mein Kampf where the Darwinist flavor is most pronounced – Chapter XI, “Nation and Race” – Hitler comments that while his philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature’s laws, the Jews with their “effrontery” say the opposite: that “Man’s role is to overcome Nature!”

Hitler notes with disgust that, “Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature.”

There is, in other words, a Darwinian case for seeing the Jews as the ultimate Enemy. Darwin’s portrait of reality in his books is one where Nature determines all. In The Descent of Man, he explains that even our morality is a product of natural selection just like everything else about us.

The Jews, Hitler wrote, defy nature and call others to do so. This is the characteristic “Jewish nonsense.”

Which bring us to Hitler’s insight into Judaism. He had put his finger on a profound theme in rabbinic literature. The greatest sages of the Jewish past – from the the Maharal of Prague to Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to Samson Raphael Hirsch – taught that overcoming Nature is indeed the Jewish mission.

Practically, this means overcoming our own nature, bending it God’s will. As the Maharal (1525-1609) and others explained, the symbol of this unique Jewish mission is circumcision, a most unnatural thing to do.

We perform the bris specifically on the eighth day of an infant’s life. That’s because in the system of Jewish number symbolism, seven signifies the natural order of the world, which in the Bible’s narrative was created in seven days. The transcendence of this natural order is represented by seven plus one, or eight.

The bris on the male organ became, then, a most logical symbol of Jews and Judaism. A remarkable rabbinic image in the ancient midrashic work Tanchuma tells how the archetypal enemy of the Jews in Scripture, the wickedly nihilistic tribe of Amalek, abused the bodies of slain Jewish males. They would “cut off the circumcised organs and fling them upward,” a sign of contempt for Heaven. (See Rashi’s note on Deuteronomy 25:18.)

Comparing the Nazis with Amalek is common in modern Jewish thought, but some Nazis too saw themselves that way. When Julius Streicher was hung, his last words were to cry out bitterly, “Purim Festival 1946!” It was a reference to the Jewish holiday commemorating the events recounted in the book of Esther.

In the story, a minister in the Persian royal court, Haman, descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, seeks to exterminate the Jews but is executed himself in the end, by hanging. As historian Robert Conot writes in Justice at Nuremberg, this demonstrates Streicher’s “fascination with and knowledge of Judaism.”

Indeed. We could say the same of Hitler.

The post Think About The Connection Between Hitler And Darwin appeared first on Jewcy.

In this week's Jewcy feature, How to Raise an Ideological Warrior, Neal Pollack worries that opponents of evolutionary theory will corrupt his son's education. If Neal's nightmare comes to pass, it'll be in large part due to the efforts of The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). ID holds that the diversity of life on earth is "best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection," and it includes among its backers President Bush, parents and school board members across America, and a growing list of dissident academics.

We've asked David Klinghoffer, a Jewcy contributor and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to tell us "What would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?" Here is David's answer:

No thoughtful, feeling person would find it palatable to live a life without meaning. For many Americans, meaning is obtained primarily through religious faith. For others, through family, career, or politics. For lots of people in the Jewish community, but not only there, life’s meaning is supplied by fear.

Some fear the so-called Islamofascist threat. Many liberal Jews, however, are terrified by the scientific critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

My stake in the matter? I work at the Discovery Institute here in Seattle, which almost single-handedly put the issue Darwin v. Design before the public. For the record, I’m a fellow in DI’s program on Religion, Liberty & Public Life, which is not focused on evolutionary or other scientific questions. What exactly would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about intelligent design?

Paranoia has been running high. The Anti-Defamation League calls ID a “challenge to religious freedom in America.” The group warns that, “Many who believe in intelligent design want to teach this idea as science — either alongside the scientific theory of evolution or in place of it.”

Outside the more fevered precincts of the Jewish community, a few of the Republican presidential candidates would not oppose teaching both sides of the Darwin controversy to public school students. Hillary Clinton affirmed her own faith: “I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying….I am grateful that I have the ability to look at dinosaur bones and draw my own conclusions.”

Setting aside the question of how Senator Clinton could draw a scientific conclusion from gazing at dinosaur bones, one notes her implication that Republicans sympathetic to ID pose a “shocking” threat to her freedom to “draw her own conclusions” about life’s origins.

There are so many misunderstandings here.

ID theory represents an inference from scientific facts, facts agreed to by all scientists, like the nanotechnology in the living cell and the information-rich software of DNA. This is not Bible-based creationism. No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang. The issue dividing Darwin advocates and Design theorists is a question of the interpretation of universally accepted data for the purpose of describing events in the distant past.

The post Teaching Jewish Kids About Intelligent Design appeared first on Jewcy.

And so it goes. I’m taking a bit of a risk, then, in admitting here that—precisely because I’m an Orthodox Jew—I am not a Zionist.

This is the first time I’ve said this publicly, and it may surprise readers familiar with my books or other writing. I call the Jewish community to a more traditional understanding of Judaism, and I remind Jews not to take for granted the friendship of conservative Christians, not least because of their support and love for the state of Israel.

And yet the truth is I believe that Zionism, in making a pedestrian and foreign 19th-century-style nationalism so central to contemporary Jewish culture, has caused us to neglect the higher mission God has in mind for us. If we are ever to take that mission seriously, we must be honest about Zionism and the deleterious effects it has had on Jewish life.

Zealous pro-Israel partisans will say that now is the worst time to make such a confession. A bitter struggle among pundits and activists is being waged about pro-Israel lobbying. If Jews do anything other than cheer for the Jewish state and decry her critics, couldn’t this weaken America’s support?

No. Republicans are Israel’s best friends, and this is not because of Jewish influence. It is because of Christian Zionism in the Evangelical community. I believe that Christian Zionism stands on firmer theological ground than Jewish Zionism, and I doubt that Jewish debate about Israel will change what President Bush and his fellow Evangelicals believe. So why not be frank about Zionism?

Religious Zionists invest sanctity not only in the land of Israel, a cardinal principle of Judaism that I embrace, but also in the idea of a Jewish-led state. But I don’t see any holiness in Jews squabbling and voting in a Knesset that happens to sit on top of the Holy Land.

I am not an anti-Zionist, however, but simply a non-Zionist. If my son Ezra, when he grows up, were to join the Israeli army to protect its citizens, I would be proud. For better or worse, about half of world Jewry lives in Israel. Obviously, their safety is of great concern.

For Jews, though, this practical concern somehow gets translated into a spiritual obligation. I remember the atmosphere that accompanied the yearly Israel Day Parade when I lived on New York’s Upper West Side. In shul, we were solemnly urged to attend the event as if it were a religious commandment. I recall overhearing a conversation at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Conservative rabbinical students were comparing how many of their comrades had attended, versus how many of the “Orthos.” Everything about this—counting heads at a silly parade, as though chanting nationalist slogans and waving flags were sacred Jewish acts—struck me as mundane and demoralizing.

Today, religious Jews seem mostly in agreement about Israel’s spiritual significance, but this has not historically been the case. In fact, a debate about religious Zionism goes back to the mid–19th century, decades before secular Zionism was championed by Theodor Herzl.

The intellectual and religious originator of Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, argued that Jews have a “mission” to humanity. He stressed the Jewish role as “patriots” in their adopted home countries, contributing to the spiritual and physical welfare of their neighbors.

This is the famous idea of tikun olam, repairing the world. In the traditional understanding, tikun olam means acting to lead humanity toward a deeper understanding of God and His laws. Hirsch argued that this is “a God-given destiny which…overshadows the existence of a state.”

The concept is central to Judaism. It is embodied in the famous instruction God gave to the Jews upon their arrival at Mt. Sinai, where they would receive the Ten Commandments: “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6). Jews are literally intended to minister to the world as priests, teaching and inspiring humanity. Merely to have a state, to be like other peoples, is not our destiny.

This is one important implication of a famous passage in the Talmud (Ketubot 111a). Rabbi Zeira explains there that the Jews are forbidden to ascend to the holy land en masse with the use of force until “it pleases” God.

But how will we know when this pleases Him? When mass migration to Israel is unopposed by other peoples living there.

When will that be? In the time of the Messiah. Or so would have been the standard Jewish response up until the last century or so.

Unfortunately, American Jews have mostly abandoned our unique destiny. Today, when we speak as Jews in public forums, it is rarely to apply the insights of our tradition to any of the great problems our nation faces. Much more typically, we discuss Israel, how unfair her critics are, how deserving she is of protection from enemies in her neighborhood, and so on. This is at a time of unprecedented openness in the Christian world to Jews and Jewish wisdom.

As for Jews in Israel, in this post-Holocaust era, just when Gentiles were ready to begin hearing what we have to say, they have retreated to a holy sanctuary where they are cut off, largely irrelevant to any discussion of how the world’s nations should construct their politics and culture. Zionism has tragically distracted us from the historic role of the Jewish people, just when our best opportunity to fulfill that role has presented itself.

Our dereliction of duty doesn’t change the fact that we have a duty. Our mission to the world “forbids us to strive for the reunion or the possession of the land by any but spiritual means,” as Hirsch put it. To return as a people to Israel in the messianic era, called by God, when our mission to uplift others has been accomplished, remains the divine plan.

But why doesn’t any of this concern Christian Zionists? Today, if asked why they seek to protect and defend the Jewish state, and why they see this as a religious obligation, thoughtful Evangelicals point to their straightforward reading of Biblical verses.

When Christian Zionists do this, they find numerous promises made by God to the prophets—on four separate occasions to Abraham alone—about the divine gift to the Jews in the form of the land of Israel. Their plain reading is that these promises still apply in full force.

In his recent book, Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State, David Brog devotes special attention to Genesis 12:3, in which God promises Abraham, the first Jew, “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.” Brog, who is Jewish, finds that Christians cite this verse most often in explaining their Zionist commitment. Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Richard Land, John Hagee, and Jerry Falwell come back to that verse again and again.

Why are Christian Zionists, who read the Bible so conscientiously, not moved by the Biblical vision of a Jewish mission to the nations? The answer is simple. For Christians, Evangelical or otherwise, the special task of the Jewish people was accomplished two thousand years ago, when we produced the Christian savior.

Traditional Jews and Evangelicals share a commitment to reading the Hebrew Bible with integrity. But Jews do not share the Christian belief that the redemption promised by the Hebrew prophets has already arrived. Christians, unlike Jews, believe that Jews have already accomplished their mission in the world.

We Jews must remember our primary purpose of uplifting the world, not retreating from it. The wonderful irony is that we can do this without for a moment abandoning the Israeli Jews who, however prematurely, are already in residence in the Holy Land.

Even as we rethink our historic mission, America’s Christians will continue to make sure that the world’s greatest nation, our own, stands in defense of Israel. They ask only that we refrain from abusing their friendship too much. The paradox is worth savoring. With their own very different concept of why God put Jews into the world, Christians make it possible for us enact our own understanding—the true understanding, I believe—of the Jewish national purpose.

The post Why I Am Not a Zionist (But Christians Should Be) appeared first on Jewcy.

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The Hebrew Bible solves the mystery. The solution can be found in the unexpected context of the Torah's seemingly primitive and bizarre laws of ritual contamination. The relevant material is laid out in dense detail mainly in Leviticus, a.k.a. the stuff most Jews skip over in shul (as Christians do in church).

If you don’t see the mystery, consider the following: Doesn’t it seem equally if not more plausible to imagine a scenario where people’s opinions on the top-20 hot-button political issues formed no patterns at all? For example, there seems to be nothing that links Al Gore–style worrying about climate change with favoring state-sanctioned gay unions. Yet somehow, to us, they go together.

If you meet a partisan of abortion rights, it’s a good bet that person will be for gun control. The converse also applies. Conservatives are equally predictable. Curious, isn’t it?

With this in mind, we can turn to the Bible and so-called ritual “contamination” or “impurity,” which are two common but very dysfunctional translations of the Hebrew, tumah. The corresponding term taharah is translated, again unsatisfactorily, as “purity,”

According to the Torah, here is a list of things that will render you “contaminated” (tameh): Touching a human corpse or the carcass of certain animals; having a seminal emission; menstruating; giving birth; suffering the effects of a supernaturally induced skin affliction, tzaraat—unknown to medicine today but vividly described in Scripture.

It’s all in Leviticus, with amplification across pages upon pages of Talmud, which in turn adds other activities to the list. For example, sleeping contaminates the hands.

In every case, a key to cleansing out impurity is ritualized immersion in water. It all starts to sound hopelessly arcane and backwards, like something out of Frazer’s Golden Bough. Don’t be fooled.

Modern secular Bible scholars, those geniuses, have figured out that contamination has something to do with death. That leaves much unexplained. A fuller illumination of the matter can be found in the famous Torah commentary by Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), a German rabbi celebrated as the chief early representative of Modern Orthodoxy.

Hirsch was a contemporary of Darwin, whose evolutionary theory challenges religion with the claim that material, natural, unguided processes alone account for the development of life. Darwin’s philosophical framework was that of materialism, the view that sees man’s situation in the world as being entirely determined by material forces, not spiritual ones.

Hirsch countered that the Bible, through the ritual-contamination laws, seeks to inoculate us against exactly that spirit-denying, nature-exalting worldview that achieved dominance in the 19^th century—and still afflicts us.

Here’s how that comes out. Every source of tumah, contamination, bears a resemblance to death in that it conveys an illusory message that people are entrapped in nature, their consciousness determined by material forces, rather than their being free to make moral choices. A dead body has been robbed of any possibility of making free decisions. It has been defeated by nature. So a corpse is the source of the most severe contamination.

Hirsch similarly explains all the contaminating experiences. In each—birth, menstruation, seminal emission, the weird disease of tzaraat, sleep—the person temporarily loses control of his body. Any of these conditions could leave the damaging, materialistic, and false impression that we are slaves to nature.

In the biblical view, by contrast, we are free to choose to follow God’s commandments. We’d have to be, otherwise His commanding us to do right makes little sense. Rejecting materialism is essential to the moral life.

Hirsch wrote, commenting on Leviticus (11:46–47): “All these [contamination laws] are truths which, in the face of human frailty and the powers of the forces of nature which the appearance of death preaches, are to be brought again and again to the minds of living people, so that they remain conscious of their unique position of freedom in the midst of the physical world, and remain forever armed in proud consciousness of their freedom, armed against the doctrine of materialism.”

The “cure” for tu
mah is immersion in water because this entails the free and conscious will to cleanse oneself. This is why, in Judaism, ritual hand-washing is accomplished by filling a cup with water and then pouring the water over your hands. Just putting your hands under a faucet would be too passive.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for Democrats.

The understanding of liberalism as the political expression of materialism will be familiar to many political conservatives. I first heard that formulation from Michael Medved, who laid it out in detail in a speech. But the Bible made the same connection millennia ago. Virtually every liberal position on a hot-button issue can be explained this way. Some lefty views emphasize, as Hirsch put it, the “powers of the forces of nature.”

Gay marriage: The implicit justification for this insists that gays are in the grip of nature. They have no choice about their sexual behavior. So let’s endorse their love in civil law.

Abortion: Here it’s women who are supposedly in the grip of nature, specifically sexual desire. The lady made a mistake and got pregnant. Liberals believe she can’t be held responsible for this, as denying her an abortion would do. The solution to unwanted pregnancy is a material one (ten minutes of vacuuming the uterus) over a spiritual one (taking responsibility for the outcome of sexual intercourse).

Gun control: A gun isn't a force of nature, but it's treated as if it were one. If this particular material object is found in the house, we are virtually compelled to abuse it, endangering ourselves and others. The only solution is to restrict gun ownership.

Global warming: We are in the grip of a vengeful, enraged nature! “Angry nature is holding a gun to our heads,” as the magazine of the Sierra Club warns.

Affirmative action: Racial discrimination, whether favoring a minority or not, is based on the assumption that people are trapped by naturally-determined limitations associated with their skin color.

Other liberal views don’t make an issue of nature as such but still implicitly deny what Hirsch calls our “unique position of freedom,” advocating material mechanisms to keep us safe and happy rather than relying on free choice.

Health care: Rather than leave health decisions up to the individual, liberals like Barack Obama would impose government-directed “universal health care.”

Health regulations: Laws banning smoking in public or the use of trans-fats in restaurant cooking take responsibility for one’s health out of the hands of the individual and give it over to the government. So long, “unique position of freedom.”

Education: Conservative education philosophy, expressed in the preference for school choice or home schooling, is all about giving freedom and responsibility to parents. Liberal philosophy transfers responsibility to the state, or to teachers’ unions.

And so on. Liberal views, far from being random, actually form the political expression of a comprehensive worldview—in Biblical terms, tumah-thinking. It was to counteract this perspective that the Bible proposed its system of ritual contamination and purification.

Notwithstanding the Jewish identification with liberalism, God established us as a people to make exactly the kinds of distinctions I’ve tried to highlight here. “For I, God, am He that brings you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God,…to distinguish between the pure and the impure” (Leviticus 11:45–46).

While of course I have simplified a bit, liberalism is the ideological faction that, of the two philosophies in American political life, is easily the more identifiable with tumah.

Which is why, looking to the future, it’s of interest that the Bible carries on with the theme of cleansing tumah. In the words of the prophets who foresaw the End of Days: “Son of Man, the House of Israel dwell on their land, and they have contaminated it with their way and with their acts.”

In the end, however, “I will sprinkle pure water upon you, that you maybe become cleansed; I will cleanse you from all your contamination and from all your idols” (Ezekiel 36:17–25).

Liberals, so it seems, will be in particular need of that shower.

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