Rethinking Judaism, the challenge that I see as the meaning of Hanukkah today.
Hanukkah just passed, but one thing I want to say is that as far as I am concerned nothing is more important right now for anyone with any connection whatsoever to what is called "the Jewish people" than to do what is necessary to oppose this genocide.
It is inevitable that non-Jews will expect this of them; it is worth admiring those Jews who expect this of themselves, though the truth is also an American genocide being conducted with the aided of its cowardly leadership excessively mired in the kind of self-interest (such has caused even ‘moderate’ congregations to effectively oppose the new city administration in New York because its popular leader has dared to speak uncomfortable truths) in the name of this privileged people who became the model white minority in America after 1967.
Many of these cowards have been busy complaining, especially now as they have been during this genocide some of them called for, about the specter of antisemitism, while not even deigning to speak the obvious truth to their most foolish enemies, which is: “If you hate us because you blame us, we understand, especially since we have been doing so much to try to stop it.” But they cannot say that because it isn’t true; the contrary is. If there were ghetto riots in which black people were being shot down en masse by the police while a handful threw stones at synagogues, would they stand by as their neighbors blood is shed while only crying “please don’t hurt us?” And then making false comparisons to Kristallnacht, which was organized by the state, and misleadingly exaggerated ones to the history of pogroms? This is what I think of people who started saying during this war that now we must talk about antisemitism. If a group of starving peasants had massacred the Jewish bill collectors of absentee Polish landlords who cruelly exploit them, would it have been right for the leaders of the local Jewish community to mention, as they now routinely do, the one without the other? You could call it justified, provided the operative ethic is to defend one’s self-interest alone. They should instead mention both, and carefully disconnect them. The wrongs disconnected, only then is it clear they are wrongs, each singularly because all equally, neither subordinated but all glaring in the harsh sunlight of equal liberty of freedom from injustice. Jews who are into being Jewish have this tendency to retreat into particularism, abandoning concern for the larger world they are part of. Israel goes further than that: it is dedicated to the proposition not only that a Jewish life is worth an incomparably large and perhaps unlimited number of non-Jewish lives if they are in the way, but when they are imagined as in the way, they worth less than nothing, worth being turned into nothing, into shit, worthy of annihilation. The way in which the fascist Israeli imagination has imaginative constructed this possibility as is horrible in itself as the German one that has for generations been the object of universal judgment, but it is also ominously reminsicent of it. Imaginatively projecting its idea, evil realizes itself, and the uniquely morally privileged people are elevated to the status of the agency of this evil. Any person with any humanity entertaining this idea must reject it as an abomination and the obvious first principle of commanding moral certainty is that if this is what it means to be Jewish, or a part of consequence of it, than that identity must be refused. Just as Israel is now rightly becoming globally a pariah state, it is now to be considered universally as historically refuted. Not all and any idea of what it means to be Jewish, but this one. No sane person can deny this, and no form of belonging, whether identified with body and nature or history and the legends of a theology, can justify it. The Zionist idea of Judaism as it exists today as is insane as any of the notions of German national socialism. Since no external national force is positioned to defeat it, it must be dismantled from within. This is now the preeminent task of the Jewish people. A capacity for evil has been revealed as never before, a kind of innocence, which always claims propriety of the good/evil boundary and the corollary executioner/victim it mistakenly believes it can manage. To act as if confidently assured that one is within the sanctified good in opposition to an excluded evil to be annihilated, as in the dream of a final solution, is to become insane by pretending to possession of a power we humans lack, because we are subjects to moral law and cannot merely act as masters of it. Colonialism under anxious mortal threat will imagine the colonists as existentially threatened by the (real) possibility that the colonized might want to destroy them, and will then announce simply: our governmental institutions represent the people in their right to be while in this place and to be in this place while being. The tragedy is that, understandable as this stance certainly is, since everyone values their own life and forms of life, it fails to grasp the reality of the conflict that makes this project tragic. American Jews who express similar thoughts are deserving of our pity, and of course the solidarity of fellow citizens and protection by the state’s police authorities if and when their personal safety is threatened, as has happened to me. But if their leaders talk too much about this and not enough about the world we live in and the problems not only that other peoples face but that their community bears responsibility for, much as the German people did for Nazism, responsibility partly because of opportunity, then that we are despised in this context begins to seem less of a crime than a tragedy. Jewish religious and political leaders do not have, it must be said, an extraordinarily bright historical record when it comes to responding to tragedies and evils in which their people were involved, whether as victims, as in Europe generations ago or as agents, as so massively from 1948 and especially 1967 until now. The French government has recently declared that it recognizes its own historical colonialism as an evil. Why can’t more of the Americans do this, and why can’t their Jews, as the governmental leaders of neither has remotely approached the task of doing. The German government honors its nation’s own victims, while Jews continue to mourn their unique vulnerability, as if that were what sanctifies them, justification by sacrifice, which ironically is what the unfortunate word holocaust suggests. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, victimology may be the path to that moral damnation which has often figured as the mirroring image of the destruction it perpetrates. I insist on the uniqueness historically of the emergence of this new figure of the Jew as agent of a terrorist state project. It is as much a lie as the idea that European societies could understand and constitute themselves as freed of influence of the language and culture associated with the religion that once rivaled both Christianity and philosophy as possible claimants to the ethical heart of the Latin and Greek continental empire. The trouble with such lies is not so much that their effectuation might become completed, which must be at least a near impossibility, as that it can be attempted with such horrible consequence. Zionism is Jewish modernity’s great lie. I am delighted to have learned that, indeed, many religious and secular Jews today believe they can do quite well without it, only I doubt that is enough, and I don’t know what is, though I do know that most anything that might interestingly be said in sociological and thus ethical, if not doctrinal or ritual, terms of what it means to be Jewish points to conditions that are becoming increasingly widespread, a fact I think is happy, and that does not obviously point to any form of Christianity or anything else we presently know, though all such attempts at theoretical construction of possible ethics or ways of thinking about a form of life are interesting and should be welcomed. I am sure that future thinkers with such projects will do interesting things with some available texts. But if someone tells me they are solving the problems implicit in the current historical debacles by affirming that rabbinical Judaism does not entail an Apartheid nation state that is a belligerent fortress and prison, I think all I can say about that is, how nice. I mean it is nice. It is not a response to the present crisis if that means meeting it head on, though perhaps it can help as many things might.
Thus, among the things that must be done is, certainly, to ask every difficult question about what "we" are committed to and what it means and entails.
Something in this tradition is certainly worth affirming. Hanukkah has at least this meaning. I know now with certainty what this affirmation must not include.
In philosophy, there are conditions of thought. These can include the meaning as best formulated conceptually and theoretically (which is something philosophy does) of historical events. This imposes on philosophical thought the necessity of determining what causes, which can and should be formulated by us as theoretical propositions, must now be rejected as having entailed an unacceptable consequence. All thought about the possible meanings and uses of Judaism and of the concept “Jew” and its adjectival form “Jewish,” are irremediably thrown into crisis. Some claim that historical Judaism never had this present debacle as a possible consequence, but the trouble with this is that while it is obviously the case in the history of ideas events often have multiple possible consequences. none of which is certain, it is also the case that genealogical antecedents identifiable as having causal effectivity necessarily come into question when the consequence is one that must be refused. It is interesting to note that in European thought after WW2 the conviction is widespread indeed that the Holocaust is one event (colonialism, to which it bears some, albeit complex, relationship, is another) in recent history that has necessitated responses and shifts in self-understanding which may be far-reaching. A great deal of the best thought in France and elsewhere after the war is impossible to make sense of otherwise. Something similar did not quite happen in the United States because its sole international military defeat in recent times, that in Vietnam, was not, widely and officially, acknowledged as a moral rather than practical failure, though this happened throughout Europe as a result of the collapse of colonial imperialism and in Germany after the end of the two wars. And of course nothing similar has ever happened in the Jewish world. And now it must.
Axiom: If a belief or commitment has as possible consequence this genocide, that belief must be denied any and all legitimacy, pending that it is possible to find something we can affirm that does not have this genocide, and its legitimation, as one of its possible consequences.
Proposition: The very idea of a Jewish people as such, no matter how constructed theoretically, is a mistake that must be rejected. To those provoked to reaction by such a remark, I ask, at least must it not be questioned, and ‘radically’, by which I mean not only what does this given notion mean but also do we want to still maintain it? An almost baroque irony is introduced by the thought: might not ‘we’ ask ourselves if we might dispense with ‘our idea’? Indeed. Existence may not entail an essence, such that to be is to be this or that. ‘God knows’ that this is the case, which is another way of saying it is true of the divinity of Being if not every being, but perhaps that is true as well, for persons are identified by proper names and pronominally as the one speaking or being spoken to, and the descriptions that may be said or used to characterize them name qualities and not essences. Existential threats are declared by governmental authorities when particular qualities are said to be inalienable properties of the persons, but that is often not true but only usefully apparent. It is also far from clear that the famous Siniatic covenant defines a community with an identity, at least in anything like the manner the Jewish identity political ideology takes for granted. It is not hard at all for me to imagine a group of people who share a set of texts and religious practices who do not understand themselves as constituting any sort of community beyond the commonality of these practices. In fact, I would suggest that in the modern world there have emerged other pariah forms of social life and identity that not only share some features with the Jewish condition, at least as it came to be understood in modern Europe, but that in some ways have succeeded it as a possibility of social life whose subjects or participants play related social roles, and these groups are basically artists and intellectuals, and the left as a formation of them that identifies with the cause of the poor against the claims of the powerful. Such persons and groups have existed in various societies, and Jews are only by historical accident somewhat privileged in this regard, because of the uniquely exilic character of their history at least as developed in the literature of antiquity. A philosophical inquiry based on appreciation of such possibilities will, as is proper to the practice of this mode of thought, abstract from and aim to conceptually theorize them in the most useful way. This project, which I obviously aim to engage in my relatively amateur way, depends on no particular practical involvement necessarily however much experiences may facilitate reflection, which is what it involves primarily. This is way scholars of Spinoza mostly do leave in the margin the question of his Jewishness, which is a question in his case since the authorities that did define this excluded him (and these are the same ones universally accorded the only recognized privilege of such definition today, which may suggest the possibility that a modern way of being Jewish somehow escapes the character of bounded sets where membership is a function of the possession of a property common to all members and defining of the set). This suggests the possibility of a dispersion that does not mean being Jewish persons living Jewish lives in broader social contexts but being subject to a condition that does not allow characterization either as possessing the property of belonging and identity nor as not possessing it; could such a possibility be intelligible? (What it would mean for practioners of the religion is a separate, if subsidiary, question.) This is one of several ways in which today we might conceptually understand the possibility of abandoning and ethics and politics of identity, a concern of numerous philosophical and literary writers now for some time that is perhaps one more urgent than ever. The religiously observant have in common their observance, but the texts, I note, are, today especially, as was not the case before the rise of printed books, quite literally shared by whoever chooses to read them, since they are available to all, and literature in any language requires at most literacy in it, though the nationalist idea prefers to ground all literacy in oral culture in order to affirm a universal particularism, a possibility that perhaps interestingly undermined by the rise of arts like cinema whose language, like instrumental music, is less particular since its forms are perceptual more than linguistic. The film world has become increasingly international, along with much of culture. As a viewer and writer on film, I very definitely do not need to belong to a people, country, culture, whatever, to appreciate its objects, which logically may be an extension of the privilege all artistic expression can provide of an audience understanding the experience of persons who may be, at least otherwise than as presented in the image, quite utterly outside of and foreign to their own. If I meet someone who tells me he is going to the Arcadian film festival because he is an Arcadian from Arcady, I know immediately this person is seeking to confirm a desired and imaginatively precarious identity, doubtless to be comforted by the familiar, but they are not curious about what they are seeing. They don’t consider that the pleasure of the visible is an index of the desire to understand and make sense of what is seen. Which is what curiosity impels. The contemporary world does have various settled social arrangements, and of course the very closed ones that American society encourages identification with are now a memory. Any social project aiming to be at all progressive must surely desire not stronger and more bound and binding corporate or collective social identities but weaker, less binding, more open ones. A movement once again to dispersion rather than concentration? A salutary eventuality. What is an ethno-state anyway than a kind of positive camp in which are concentrated person whose privilege is to want to be there because its contents are their own proper to them, enjoyed as property, the only trouble then being its outside and how its policing involves less salutary concentrations?
Corollary 1: Judaism is not dependent on that peoplehood idea. This at best gets it backwards.
Corollary 2: Something at the core of that identity no doubt was and is valid, as must be true of any worldly entity or social formation. Jewishness may be an existential condition calling for a form of life proper to it, but then of course anything you might say about the former at least is much broader (and more interesting) than anything specifically religious. This religion was never particularly modern, and its principal textual sources are not, and it must be said that efforts to change this achieved far less than those who promoted them might have wished. It persists of course all the same, and may be not incompatible (I presently think not) with much modern thought and politics, but as basis of the latter it is an idiocy at best and a set of atrocities at worst, and, now, in fact.
Something about a people of exile, faithful to a text, or better, to the study of poetic, narrative, legal and theoretical literary texts? I'll take that. So did Edward Said. So did Jean Genet. When I meet people who want to associate with members of their tribe, I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing and walk away. If they are fighting for that tribe based on what is really little more than an enchanted idea, then I want nothing to do with their kind.
They are not fighting for the lives of their family and friends, they are fighting to kill people who do desire the survival not just of a form of life but of themselves, their friends, their neighbors, their parents and brothers and sisters and children. The ideologists are calling for this murder and carrying it out. The next time I sit at a Seder, I will make certain that no supporters of murder are welcome. I do not argue with them. I would say we have nothing in common, and this statement is a decision, which is the marking of a cut, the marking of a boundary, this time separating the friend, who is desired as such and thus loved, from the one who is not only entitled like all persons to respect but poisonous because his message is an invitation to share a sense of community based on an exclusion that I recognize as implicit in a project of murder. I admit it troubles me that my own thought in such matters is mimetically reactive and thus can only reproduce in a hopefully non-violent manner what is at least similarly an exclusion of an other. But I cannot accept the idea of a community with those whose idea of their community and identity is based on the violent exclusion of people whose crime is to be in the way of their enterprise while wanting to live. But then maybe what I need is not to imagine some even more pure community but forget the very idea involved. It must be that being-together is a possibility better developed without the ideas of commonality that have involved not just sharing meals with friends but constructing massive social projects involving borders that must be policed to rule on the decision of who properly belongs and who is to be excluded.
The Jewish Gemeinschaftgefühl (love of community because it makes you feel good) Heimat (homeland) ideology, a formation of modern identity political nationalisms, is fascist. I study among other things Jewish texts, and I have separated myself irremediably from all and any persons who subscribe to this. It is an idol. It is the opposite of who we are.
This fascist ideology, now affirmed by most of the Jewish world, with the murderous consequences we have seen, is one of the causes of the Holocaust. And this is how and why Judaism is continuing to effectuate the ongoing global one that our military state and corporate capitalism has been waging for quite some time. Judaism is not irremediably corrupt; it is remediably corrupt, along with the polity with which so much of it is so closely allied.
Appendix I. The typical claim, and a response.
It is commonly argued that the commitment of Jews to Zionism is justified as a consequence of something fundamental to which Jews are necessarily committed, and that either includes (modern political) Zionism as one of its parts, or has it as a necessary entailment.
What this rests upon is of course an appeal to an identity claim that apparently is meant to be beyond possible contestation for the simple reason that “this is who we are.” “We are committed to this because this is who we are.” Or, as Martin Luther famously put it, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” The supposition is you cannot argue with a claim if it is entailed by an identity. This idea is tacitly linked to the American idea of an individual property right of opinion, which confuses the freedom of persons to assert opinions with an additional claim that they must be granted that whatever they “believe” is at least “true for them” because it is made true by something like a confession of faith or assertion of will. Will is a metaphysical concept of a force attributed to persons that causes their behavior as intended actions, and so can also be identified with the modern market society’s idea of choice, which of course must be “free” and uncoerced. This underlies the common claim that if you tell someone they’re wrong you are a fascist uttering a threat to compel their obedience as if you were master of their imaginary looming involuntary servitude. Americans are often like that, contemptuous of authority when it is someone else’s and of the disobedient, who are obviously only insulting their identity-based pride and hard work becoming members of the establishment, when it is their own. Recognition of this is good reason to follow Spinoza’s advice and be cautious in public life. But I digress; my point is: these people are claiming that their practical commitments are undeniable (which is not the same exactly as claiming they are true or right) because, in effect, “we can’t do otherwise,” which is the common complaint of administrative personnel when one of their subjects cries injustice. It entails they need not consider the matter.
Then is the proper answer to this to look elsewhere to find “who we really are” and “what we are necessarily committed to”? One downside of following this tack is that you will never know if the thing being proposed, and perhaps even the thing being referenced as basis, are correctly affirmed. No truth about a factual state of affairs nor any moral truth can be derived from a prior commitment unless that commitment’s validity has been established. What is really going on here is that the audience is being pandered to in that infantile manner that befits a social group that is a kind of identity club. Identity clubs meet as support groups. They believe in themselves, and together their anxieties, moral and otherwise, are quelled, and their confidence validated. They feel good together, a kind of ‘brotherhood’ or something like it. Community.
It is often said, rightly, that it has always been the case that some Jews have are on the side of the oppressors and some on the side of the oppressed. Is that, or is it not, a sufficient reason to reject any political claim or project that represent this people as a whole? The sole grounds for not doing so are the demands of liberal tolerance for everyone, which out of decency we must grant. Jews who approach this question will tend to do so thinking of what they have in common, treating as secondary the decisive matter at issue at this time. This is irresponsible, and by definition an injustice, rendering them virtually accessories to crime. For what can it mean to have in common moral commitments that are indifferent to questions of justice when the matters in question are decisive? Faced with a choice between focusing on that and on stopping the genocide, I say we must take the risks of denouncing positions taken and actions performed by people whose safety we must cherish as much as our own. And this is the difference between them and us. By that I mean not what the anti-anti-semitism industry hysterically assumes is always the issue and the only one that could matter (a will to collective existential crisis as media spectacle driving support for the military state), but the two relevant categories of political decision, which are left and right, as Jewish identities like all others are distributed across them. Where identificatory commitments are possible, decisions are relevant as to the priorities. Being Jewish today is not the interesting political concept (and whatever else it is, it is also that) that it is often claimed as, since it becomes relevant only as right or left, the claims of the rulers, and we their implacable, irreconcilable, adversaries.
Religious authorities who mention concepts can validate their use by pointing to textual commentary but they tend not allow the concept itself to be called into question. The concept of community is one. It is a very tainted and problematic one in modern political philosophical thought, which is its principle domain. (I note that a minyan is not a community and it makes no sense to go to one planning to kill foreigners.) The ‘argument’ is one of feeling good together. The Israeli national anthem opens by declaring exactly that. The German national socialist project had a vocabulary for this. Jewish identity cultists are content to say, like so many nationalists, but our nation is different, our culture is unique. Such claims can always easily be validated. In the end, it is irrationalism pure and simple, which is always useful for repressive dictatorships and war. We also know that many Jews will suffer from this, though this time, even more than during the American Cold War, not only will it be mainly those who are on the left, but their own community’s leaders will, as the Jewish religious and community leadership did in Europe, participate actively in this destruction, their concern being with their monetary donor base and the political project that defines them above all, which of course is this lynchpin of American foreign policy. We also know what how this identity politics led to the massacres of WW1, and the fascism that followed. Is Judaism a form of fascism? Isn’t that what the Jewish establishment has been asking you to accept, sad or perhaps enthusiastic, compliance with? Of course the real problem is capitalism.
Appendix 2. Personal principles and maxims, and a thought about the possible aftermath of the nationalist project.
1. Community as a model of social life having been replaced by social networks, no assumptions of given affinity entertained, but elective affinities engaged in exclusively.
2. If someone asks what ‘kind’ of person you are, especially if this ‘kind’ is a demographical category, a fortiori if the question is, ‘are you Jewish’, first listen to ascertain if their question seems suspicious or friendly. If they seem suspicious or hostile (meaning, are you one of them?), say, ‘excuse me, but what is your problem (e.g., with ‘the Jews’)?’ More difficult is the affirmative case. If they seem encouraging welcoming, perhaps hopeful, even a bit anxiously expectant (meaning, are you one of us?), should you say with a faint smile, ‘I would hate to disappoint you, but what is it you are really after?’ Or walk away with a mild but noticeable, indifferent shrug? Or should you say, this time with not a frown as before but a smile, ‘excuse me, but what is your problem?’
Who knows but that it might be an interesting one? What if there were a ‘Jewish question’ that was not about establishing or defending an idea and its referential correlate of bodies and territory, by a theoretical definition based on historical legend, where events function as myth, but about what this given ‘thing’ does or might really mean? A ‘thing itself’, la cosa, not as obvious given whose that-ness so infinitely exceeds its possible what-ness one may ask if it means anything at all, but that is interesting as a question. Alas, I fear here I am once again on a metaphysical and not religious ground. These became separated after the end of the middle ages and the rise of the modern national state, at its origins involved in colonial expansion and constituting itself ideologically as a racial entity seeking its own purification. Since then so much of the fields of thought and action have been occupied by the most reactionary forces. Even when it sought firm establishment of its collective self through settlement aided by conquest, Jewish history remained tragic. American Jewish life from 1967 until now has been this, often enchanted if perfectly anodyne at least to itself, identity cult. It will be interesting to see how this will change, as its mainstream seeks mainly to defend its foxholes.