Dan,

Nachmanides, not Maimonides. Sorry, my bad. It doesn’t matter much for the purposes of this discussion: either one of them would smack you. After all, do you take all of Nachmanides’ dictates to heart? Surely not.

You find the items that fit your political ideology and you embrace them. Where they don’t fit, you reinterpret them to match your political ideology. The liberation of a slave after seven years in ancient Judaism does not indicate support for a liberal political agenda today; you think that it does only because you wear blinders as you wade through the Jewish tradition. Your saying that Judaism's tradition of slavery is consistent with contemporary liberal politics is like someone finding support for affirmative action in the fact that his plantation-owning grandfather allowed the slaves to bathe in the main house.

Which brings up a larger point I’ve been wanting to get to: does Judaism do any good for social justice?

I don’t really like referring to my liberal politics as "social justice." To do so is, I think, fundamentally insulting of the Right in a way that’s not fair or appropriate.

Anyway, as I said in my last e-mail, if I adopted your intepretive permissiveness I could probably draw the same messages from a number of other significant texts from history. And lots of people quote famous texts when making political speeches, certainly. But to my mind, most of those quotes are just intellectual masturbation.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t do anything positive for the social justice agenda to say "if you read the Jewish tradition this way, deny the continuing relevance of these elements, carry the 2 and add the square root of a vengeful God, well, you’ve got the Democratic Party platform."

People can have a real political discussion about morality and the best way to research or institute a given social policy, or they can get sidetracked interpreting Leviticus. The former will lead to some kind of progress, and the latter will lead to arguing about the Bible.

More so, there’s a certain danger to adding the God-approved certitude of religious philosophy to politics. If I support the earned-income tax credit because it works, when it stops working I’ll have good reason to stop supporting it; if I support it because I think God told me to do so, at what point am I permitted to stop?

And of course, religious support of a specific political agenda can have far more disastrous consequences than an element of the tax code.

I mentioned in my first e-mail that the Reform movement is probably the best example of a denomination attached at the hip to the liberal political agenda. And sometimes that’s been a very, very bad thing.

Like when Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the biggest figures in Reform Judaism, was an outspoken advocate
of eugenics in the early part of the 20th century. His liberal politics were grotesque, and any moral person should have said so, though few on the left did. Perhaps they’d have had an easier job doing so if he didn’t claim God was on his side.

Wise also chose to basically ignore the ongoing Holocaust in favor of Zionist advocacy. In advocating for Zionism, he was far from alone on the left. He was also far from alone among Jews.

Today, he’d have lots of company among Jews in supporting Israel, but next to none within liberal political circles. Soon, Jews will have a pretty stark choice: stick with the overwhelming Jewish support of Israel, or subject themselves to wherever liberal politics of the day takes them.

Liberal politics are a somewhat random assemblage of policies that further a malleable agenda. Look at the past fifty years of liberal politics in the United States and try to find a consistent thread on immigration, the death penalty, interventionist warfare, or welfare. It’s pretty tough, because liberal politics have been all over the map on them. At each point, there was almost assuredly some liberal rabbi, somewhere, saying that the liberal position on the issue at that moment was what the Jewish tradition endorsed. And at some point later, a new liberal agenda had a tougher time gaining traction because it had all that theological baggage from before.

There’s a reason why that happens, and it’s not only because some people will always chase after political fashion with their religion. It’s also because religion and politics are both immensely complex, so using one to translate the other involves so many variables that you can’t blame people for coming up with immensely different results.

The Jewish tradition supports certain notions of charity. Does that mean it supports the federal income tax? There isn’t a one-to-one relationship here.

Which is why it’d be so much nicer if the liberal end of the Jewish political spectrum would exercise more theological humility, just as they are always demanding that fundamentalists do.

If God speaks to me in November 2008, which lever will He tell me to pull? I wouldn’t begin to pretend that I know, and I’d find it hard to believe, standing there meekly in the voting booth, that the overwhelming message of the Jewish tradition so obviously leans one way or another. But I do know where my politics take me, and that I can vote any way I think is just without feeling like a heretic.

Steven

Next: Today's standards of social justice would not exist without Torah

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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

The post Day 3: Is Social Justice the Soul of Judaism? appeared first on Jewcy.

But is the quest for social justice truly intrinsic to Judaism? Or is this just the wishful thinking of liberal Jews distorting an archaic and illiberal tradition?

Steven I. Weiss is the bile-spewing iconoclast behind the Canonist blog. Daniel "Mobius" Sieradski is the eccentric true believer behind Jewschool. In this week's Big Question these two deans of the Jewish blogosphere debate the question "Is social justice the soul of Judaism?"

From: Steven I. Weiss To: Daniel ‘Mobius’ Sieradski Subject: Is Social Justice the Soul of Judaism?

Dan,

"Justice, justice shall you pursue." I recently saw a Jewish hipster wearing a t-shirt with that quotation of the famous Biblical passage. I don’t doubt for a second that the guy wearing the t-shirt assumed that the quote advocated social justice. Since it’s straight from the Bible, and seems to advocate social justice, perhaps we can just leave the dialogue there.

Of course, that Biblical passage had nothing to do with social justice—not when it was written, and not as it was interpreted throughout at least 90% of subsequent Jewish history. According to every one of the dozens of citations I found, from the Talmud through medieval commentaries, this quote refers to the types of judges one should use when engaging in litigation. The passage before it tells judges to engage in “judgements of justice,” and then our passage tells the rest of the Jews “justice, justice shall you pursue.”

People fond of quoting this verse might be surprised to learn that it has little relevance to the pursuit of social justice. They shouldn’t be. Social justice as a broad, Aristotelian concept only came into existence many centuries after the verse was written. And only more recently—millenia after the Biblical passage was authored—did “social justice” acquire its modern association with the political left.

We could get into tons of definitions of social justice (I’m looking at the size of the Wikipedia entry on this), but for now let’s just say that two core concepts are equality and redistribution of wealth.

The Jewish tradition clearly doesn’t regard equality as highly as we do. Throughout almost all of its history, it’s been biased against lefties, gays, women, converts, ba’alei teshuva, hermaphrodites, those with ejaculatory problems, wives who’ve widowed three husbands, and those who didn’t observe the commandments or belong to specific communities. Oh, yeah: it’s also biased against everyone in the world other than the Jews.

Nor does it encourage much redistribution of wealth. When Jews were last running the show in the Holy Land, they were required to give some of their earnings to priests and leave some for the poor; they also were expected to give charity, make Temple contributions, and other such things. But from the perspective of America’s current progressive tax system, the notion that ancient Israel engaged in any substantial redistribution of wealth is a transparent joke. And things didn’t change much between then and the modern period.

If these elements of social justice were the “soul of Judaism,” you’d think they’d at least show up at some point.

But “almost all of its history” isn’t the entirety of the Jewish story. There’s the past couple hundred years, after all, which saw the birth of denominational and secular Judaism. Orthodoxy more or less continued the path that Judaism had crafted before it, but Conservative and Reform Judaism went off in substantially new directions.

Conservative Judaism has done a lot to make women equal; give it another ten or fifteen years, and the movement might look pretty well balanced from top to bottom. Gays and lesbians don’t have that equality. Though their status has improved, they’re still not equal; in any case, since their progress comes so long after the left po
litical establishment started pushing for it, we can see that social justice is not “the soul” of Conservative Judaism (though that’s not to say it might not be a part).

Reform Judaism is more likely to have social justice as its “soul,” bound as the movement so often is to the liberal political agenda in America. But here, too, gays and lesbians aren’t fully equal in the sense that they are in, say, Massachusetts.

Those are just the simplest examples of bias in a series of denominations rife with them. And that’s before we even begin to talk about how they treat non-Jews.

What about secular Judaism? Well, it comes with almost nothing by way of mandatory ideology or actions, so saying that anything specific is at its “soul” is a stretch. And yet it still seems to go very much against the grain of equality: for some reason it puts special value on Jewish culture and on marrying other Jews.

As for redistribution of wealth, not a whole lot has changed in the past couple hundred years. People in all denominations discuss tithing and giving charity—and they may at turns advocate for various tax policies and social welfare programs in America—but all of them celebrate the multi-millionaires (and occasionally billionaires) in their midst.

Those who assert that a social justice agenda is fundamentally Jewish tend to ignore all this. Instead, they point to Biblical verses and lines of the Talmud that seem to imply that social justice has been there all along.

But most often haven’t they simply misunderstood those verses and lines just as they have “justice, justice shall you pursue”? And if social justice is the soul of Judaism, how come no one figured it out until recently? How come Jewish history and contemporary Judaism don’t look very socially just?

Steven

Tuesday: Dan Sieradski asks whether conscience is a Jewish invention.

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