Remarks (that I would make) to some Jewish progressive activists

You were talking about “spirituality,” which I believe is a confused concept. Which is not the same thing as saying what you intend to be referring to when you use the concept is not something important. But confused concepts of things we believe are important (and are trying for whatever reasons to assert the importance of) mislead us, and confuse some things it makes sense to desire with others that it does not.

There is good reason to believe that liberation from forms of oppression needs, actually, no concept of an inner self, soul, or spirit distinct from what thinking bodies do in the world using language, a recognition, and renunciation perhaps in terms of certain ideals and images of a form of life that are not needed, with concern and talk about them only getting in the way of useful work, that in no way adversely prejudices the noble projects of studying and drawing inspiring motivation from classical texts, all the more as our reasons for returning to them now may, and should, be, partly the urgent need to question certain idealistic and communitarian notions that have been claimed upon their basis and yet are in fact very much the intellectual genealogy of the religious and quasi-religious nationalism that lies at the basis of this horrible dénouement of Jewish identity politics as, with all the historical ironies this entails, a project of the genocidal annihilation of another people.  

We should instead be talking about the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, and the modes of thinking, as well as the social and political forms, that led to it and made it possible.  On one reading, which seems to be Elie Wiesel’s, honoring the remembrance of the Holocaust and our own notions and traditions of practices of liberation regrettably permits Israel’s war of destruction as it did the settlement of the land in an inclusive manner that was equally exclusive.  On another, which is certainly Primo Levi’s, the opposite conclusions follow necessarily.  To build a better collective self and be true to it is an idea fully compatible with modern nationalist state-building projects including those colonialist ones that had origins partly in the national liberationist form of the anti-colonial project.  However, the laws of justice we honor that connect to it notions of holiness were not given in order to build a homeland but to improve the world by making it more just and free, and we agree on that.