Will Jews on the left rebuild Judaism?

Thoughts after reading Benjamin Balthaser, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Left (Verso, 2005):

As evidenced by the revitalized Jewish Currents, it seems there is now a Jewish new new left in the process of formation, and the news is this time it is religious. The religious departure now is in different terms than those of previous movements like Reform Judaism in the ninteeenth century and Jewish Renewal in the 1970s. This time it is provoked by the need to reject Zionism, perhaps narrowly, perhaps involving dramatic changes in theology, which I am a partisan of. The ground for such a shift has been prepared theoretically and there are people working in this direction. Concepts like “diasporism” are put forth. One unresolved question certainly is that of the idea of the Jewish people: is it to be be rejected or radically reconfigured? Both of these possibilities are on the table.

Balthasar recounts a history of Jewish leftism in America. Philosophical concepts can be traced in the discussion, like “relationality,” where they seem to be mostly tied to some form of Hegelianism in its Marxist form, or perhaps its Derridean rewriting, itself rightly not a topic here, since its effects in America were mostly on academic literary criticism. (I found it sad recognizing how much the American left differs from that of France in not being informed by philosophical debates, since that not a part of American popular culture in the way it is in France.) The divide, and the question, now seems to be posed as: should Jewish leftist organize as Jews whose leftism is based on religious traditions, or just as leftists? The historical form the latter has taken is represented as largely Marxist, though Balthasar said in a discussion form open to Verso Book Club members that the American Jewish left has tended to draw on fruitful exchanges between Marxist and liberal traditions. He reminds us of a much-forgotten history of working class radical politics as well as the student New Left of the 1970s. He also makes much of sixties radicals’ use of memories of the Holocaust and anti-semitism in motivating their moral opposition to the war. He discusses the rise of a religious Jewish left, questioning a bit less than I would like how much it really is a left, and what are the motives of its participants. I met some people in JVP and was struck by their identity-political preoccupations, reminding me of all the “progressives” I knew in college who basically wanted to based their politics on a good conscience, often with almost desperate indiscriminateness appropriating everything that might apply, which is of course still true of middle-class American liberal “progressives,” whatever one thinks about the importance, and not mere moral necessity, of welcoming deviance in gender and sexuality, which are welcome among modern Israeli Jewish liberals also and of somewhat less concern, to say the least, in Palestine, whose people tend not only to be culturally conservative but also more concerned with other things, including now staying alive, or living with an ongoing genocide. That does seem to render the possible political response of American Jews on the left essentially moral. Or do we have more personal reasons for opposing the American corporate-military-governmental apparatus? I do, because it has targeted me. I think that was because I was an uprooted “intellectual” with obvious left-wing inclinations, among which my being visibly pro-Palestinian (and having published translations marking me as such) is simply something they could easily use. In fact, I know now I was targeted for surveillance and harassment by a network of “friends.” I have also been targeted for (what I consider to be) harassment as a supposed “mentally ill” person who has always been susceptible of being so identified whenever anyone positioned to do so finds grounds to consider my behavior annoying enough to want me to be officially diagnosed as someone who may be targeted for exclusion “from society” or monitored by those professionals social control who are said to be those of “mental health.” It has long caused me personal despair just knowing that this is a thing of which many are those Americans apt to believe and few apt to doubt. That is outrageous, and it feels so. Now does that mean that I do or should recognize myself as belonging to some or other oppressed minority? True or not, what would claiming that get me? I could use it as an excuse to convince myself to disappear into the bowels of a religious grouping of some kind. My, is that attractive. Many are those who will insist that your (hidden, latent, inner, etc.) identity is the truth about who you really are, and isn’t it your desire, awaiting joyfully realized liberation, to claim it and live it in unfettered freedom? When the social history of the 1970s and the years before and after that threshold era is finally written, we may understand better how the identity political culture of the time developed and what its meaning will eventually seem to have become. To me some of this points to the centrality of the French social theorist Michel Foucault as the central political thinker of an era that is no longer driven by classical Marxism in the way the left was internationally until somewhere around 1970. What this leaves unthought is perhaps just how to think today about capitalism. Something in Marxism has been recognizably dead for decades, but something else must not be; or, which is probably a quite similar claim, what we need today is the most clearly formulated, and hopefully practically useful, critical theory of the form of capitalism we have today. In all of this, the situation of the Jewish people, historically and in terms of how they might figure themselves politically, is, surely, ‘in’ but not definitive of whatever center this problematic has. That means a Jewish leftist politics is a component of a larger leftist politics, and that means that if it has any theoretical consistency, which would surely entail a unity, and a global one unless it maintains some separate property right for the Jewish people or the idea thereof, which is so plainly reactionary a notion as to be impossible here (for any formation calling itself a political left), that consistency, formulable theoretically since it cannot rest on foundations that are outside philosophy and found instead in concrete particularities of a history, tradition, language, text, etc., let alone territory, it follows that Jews who think they are on the left or should be need to be such as leftists. Perhaps it is even better to more simply state that being Jewish and being on the left are distinct and logically independent conceptual variables. And if the question then becomes what can Jewish leftists draw from their own particular traditions, I at least find it hard to see how any sense could be made of any proposition derived thereby that would have particular and not universal status at least in principle, unless it is about some obligation that Jews should want to consider themselves uniquely, and not just in a quantitatively special sense, bound to answer to. That would surely be about what pertains to their socially recognized position or property, which might only mean in the present context a duty of disavowal (of Israel and its status as a state which belongs to the Jews, perhaps as distinct from one where many happen to reside). In that case, there is not strictly speaking an anti-Zionist Judaism, but an anti-Zionist politics (accessible to everyone) and a non-Zionist Judaism. A non-Zionist Judaism is not a politics, but it is one that does not entail Zionism and is fully separated from it, acknowledging it as incompatible. Jews then can be leftists not as Jews but while being Jews, and with no contradiction, just as they can be doctors, lawyers, or scientists. The different status of politics (and the arts) with regard to religion is just that of the ways in which the intellectual traditions out of which the political possibilities available to us have developed have some basis in religious traditions, though they are independent of them, and must not be tied to them. What are the consequences then if Judaism or being Jewish refers to some other things that do not refer to it? I think these consequences are precisely liberating, and liberation is not suppression (nor supersession) of the first element. I think the most important consequence is just this: Jews who want to be on the left must seek to find a way of being religious that is freed of political unacceptable consequences, and politically they should act for common purposes, working together if it facilitates their working, on something like the principle that you play a better game or hand if your team members or partners are people you are accustomed to being with and so work well together. There is no left wing politics that is a department of being-Jewish, an idea that might make sense within Zionism (think Jewish-exclusive labor unions in Israel), but there is ample reason for Jews to be on the left, and they should be religious if it helps them just as they should study and enjoy anything else that might. If this is a non-problem, the leftists in the rabbinate have less work to do than one might otherwise have thought, and the current problem only really faces the practical obstacle of institutional resistance based on conflicts of interest. As for Jews on the left organizing as part of the working class, I find that an interesting bit of history; it has similar status to the larger problem, in terms of how anyone might think, happily enough. Maybe what is needed is just a kind of clearing away. Jewish life in America was skewed for generations far to the right of what the left prefers and what is indeed possible, and the possibility that this could shift again is inspiring and bracing, whether likely to prove true or not. Judaism remains a question, and its promoters have perhaps new causes for hope, along with familiar ones for worry, while the left has its own problems. The good news for the religious today is that the left is able to welcome them. So -

Does Judaism possess the resources to understand and stop the horror? It has moral resources that may contribute to anyone’s living a good life, but little political theory. And much of what passes for it is now manifestly in the way. Good then indeed that some people within it are seeking answers, or ways of posing the questions needed, with their tradition’s own resources. The largest obstacle here is surely the religious fundamentalism and obscurantism to which the religion is not immune, as none is. If you believe that divine authority stands behind any statement, descriptive or prescriptive, rendering it impervious to criticism (though not of course interpretive elaboration that depends on it), then your practical political judgment today is at the mercy of what you are able to find in the available texts ascribable in some manner you are able to regard as credible to that divine authorization. This was disproved philosophically in the work of Kant, “the philosopher of the French revolution.” I learned finally that Judaism is not the set of beliefs that are property of the Jews and either true on a divine authority American protestants can well appreciate, or “true for” this particular nation of people (the modern state of Israel) because this truth represents their "interests,” which must be defined, since the factual historical existence as event of the Holocaust, supposedly, proves that “the Jewish people” are uniquely endangered, the privileged victims today of history, a history that the exceptional American state is uniquely authorized to prosecute and realize according to its ideas and plans, which means that those interests are of the continuance of a form of life that must be defended and that of course, is also identified with the being life as such of this specially privileged people, so that their “interests,” which are by definition a matter of property defined by the laws and armies of territorial states, “must be defended.” But Judaism is not that; only Israel today is that.

What is Judaism? It is a religion of a text. That text is not the Bible but the Talmud. This is a religion not of a land or a people but a text and a practice. That practice is study. It is true that that text involves arguments in discussions that, while themselves open and at least temporally undecidable, always ultimately reference the authority of an origin, an original text said to be given by a divine authority whose existence in Jewish tradition is mysterious enough that it is inadequate to suppose that this is the mystery of one who hides himself, since that itself is an imaginative figure. There is in fact no actual authorial origin, the origin the text references being an artefact of itself. (The question here of an origin that is necessarily posited but exists only as a mysteriously inaccessible ‘outside’ is partly what was at stake in Hegel’s argument against Kant’s notion of the “thing-in-itself.” This problematic is related to Kant’s demonstration of the impossibility of conceiving a totality with an origin that can only be, since it exists in relation to the totality of what is, posited with the irresolvable question as to whether it lies outside or inside what it grounds. Kant says the outside is unattainable and posited as limit; Hegel that the outside is actually inside it.). This circularity is of the kind that only sophistical thinking can regard as sufficient in itself to authorize its maintenance by way of the arbitrary choice of a sovereign individual (reading, originally listening) subject to accept it upon “faith.” That is the sophistical, dogmatic, and obscurantist supposition of all traditional theology, Jewish and otherwise. As it is philosophically untenable, this is precisely where Judaism and philosophy normally, though not necessarily, part company. They must part company unless philosophy is granted epistemic priority.

That priority is a fact, and an historical consequence of a revolution in thought that first took place in Greece, and that the Talmud was developed partly by absorbing. Judaism as we know is unimaginable otherwise, though a Biblical religion is not, and most Judaism remains epistemically in service of a dogmatic theology, rendering adherence to its textual claims, which practically are normative ones concerning justice and the obligations pertinent to living a good life, founded upon an untenable ground, which only fails to bother people who are satisfied, which is possible in premodern circumstances, with those ethical and moral prescriptions and the study of them. I take all this to mean that a fully modern Jewish culture would continue to value its tradition’s texts, while refusing every dogmatic belief. Reform Judaism made some efforts in this direction in the same period in which a modern philosophy influenced by the enlightenment and the French revolution was developing in Germany, but its intellectual creativity was weak indeed and the subsequent modernity of thought in Germany and all of Europe continued to escape it as it had the Jewish world largely.

Reform was the religion of the German and then American Jewish bourgeoisie, not very different from protestantism; its virtue was that it remained intellectually open to developments in modern thought, though certainly the cultural and intellectual achievements of modern Jewish life continued to be overwhelmingly outside religion. The fatal fault of Reform in my opinion is that it was based ultimately on nothing, beyond a vague will to continue some involvement in the religious tradition’s practices, and that meant that beyond this all it could offer people was the same sense of community that churches offer, and a sense of cultural and social identity that in fact is the one thing that unites most American Jews today, as is well recognized.

Should then the religion be salvaged by a better philosophy? Probably not, because philosophy today is most vital addressing topics that are of interest to much broader audiences, and largely within the tradition that developed in Europe after Rousseau and Kant, and largely because of the political events leading to and following the French revolution. The American experience is different, and that of most American Jews is, like that of most European settlers, of finding refuge in this country and enjoying its liberties. A very different experience, leaving most American Jewish thinking that of a conservative liberalism. It suffices to look at the terrain of philosophy in Europe after the war, and even after the industrial and French revolutions, to see a different terrain. The theoretical resources that can help us understand the current civilization barbarisms are, I am convinced, in the European philosophical tradition, and that is indeed partly because it is part of the culture that brought us both modern colonialism and its violence (of which the Holocaust is an effect and variant instance) and modern liberal, democratic, socialist, egalitarian, political and social thought, which are among the world’s people’s best available resources for getting us out of this mess. We philosophers should look at contemporary expressions of experience and thought in the arts, as well as textual resources within our shared traditions. Jewish traditions are in a non-bounded sense (intersecting with and thus also exceeding it) a component of European one, culturally and intellectually. This is my tradition. I don’t claim to impose it upon anyone, and I don’t believe in a European or American cultural project that excludes some set of population groups that supposedly are outside it. There must be openness to the outside, and to those who might be (or have been) excluded. I reject identity as a member of an ethnic or national people. I affirm, as minimally as possible, in accordance with a preference for the minimal state, my legal citizenship in a country whose other citizens and government have certainly not been uniformly friendly to me (I recall many real experiences of the contrary, not attributable solely to my own deviance, however theorized - and my hatred endures against its psychologization or medicalization, profitable and readily, if unthinkingly, invocable as I have seen it to be, in a popular imagination driven by the dictates of school authorities and media information sources). I am an American by law, and by identity a person, who lives in a place and wishes to open to learning about the world. My neighbors are my neighbors wherever they are “from”; insipid is the idea of properly belonging in any place; one must always: proper to the place I am here and now is the fact of my being here, and the question is always how can I/we best assess the situation, which when defined becomes a practical question, in study a “problematic” (formally this means how a practical problem is figured and modeled conceptually).

Therefore, I am not a member of an ethnic identity group, or a sexual one, or a gendered one. (Is Judaism possible without this? Yes, if the famous covenant either establishes some other kind of community, which is one interesting problem of a philosophy of Judaism, and certainly also if it does not presuppose one, a notion which is racist since it supposes the unaccountable genetic superiority of some demographics.) Only under a tyranny is one obligated to answer to any authority other than one’s own conscience. Perhaps one form of the question of God is just what does that mean? Related to this is the philosophical question, what does it mean, to be ‘commanded’ by God or ‘the divine’? It may mean that conscience is not arbitrary, which may depend on the possibility that there are truths and not just opinions, and thus actions that are just as distinct from those to which one might choose by affirming an inclination. The question of the supposed outside and its status reemerges here as that of heteronomous versus autonomous determination of the will and the dependence of autonomy on reason, the traditional form taken by a self’s determination of what is right to do by a form of thinking that is distinct from consulting an authority of any kind, all determination of what to do being rational by definition since one always says “I shall do x because y,” where y is either some statement validated by the authority of the speaker, or some principle that as such is seen to justify the thing in whose relationship it is mentioned. Such given authority would include texts treated as if they were themselves a commanding voice, which, being outside the text, must be a fiction. I think what emerges from this line of inquiry is the relegation of the text to a literature to be studied subject to the authority of reason, although on the charitable interpretation that makes it defensible still, that is what Talmudism was, as on any other interpretation it is a scholar antiquarianism to be replaced, surely, by the study of ethics and moral philosophy. If this Kantian argument is valid, religion may well aid your efforts to be moral but anything in it that justifies and explains what you should do and why is not in the province of religious texts or institutions but philosophy, and since philosophy is universal, so is morality. That is what it is to be modern and a Judaism that fails to grasp the necessity of this move is not modern. Religion becomes less important in the modern world. (Replacing it by nationalism is of course another problem.)

In a total tyranny everyone is enlisted in the government’s war, and that has the implication that we are also its potential targets, since the governmental figures of war are the friend and enemy subjects of the sovereign power, subjected to it, obligated to have faith in it, not capable of being trusted by it, since its interests may not be ours and indeed to be properly subjected is to have no autonomous desire. America is already a police state in part because having no active class-based resistance to the capitalist form of political economy, our culture has no common sense that the governmental authority exercised by bosses of whatever kind is necessarily and essential hostile at least in a strongly visibly marked potentiality, since the boss’s interests are not yours, and capital is always in conflict with labor power and potentially in a violent repressive war against it. Jewish tradition has in it some wonderful elements contributing to the culture of any useful political activism in resistance, as do various other religious and cultural traditions. Politically, I think that’s about it. Its religion is not a politics, though in corrupt forms it seems to make as wonderful a support for fascism as it did in Germany. Small difference in my opinion this matter of the historical configuration of the Jews in Europe and Germany then and in America today. There is little interest right now in defending the interests of Jews in America (or Israel) as such; they are well defended, celebrate that if you like, since of course it is better than it has been elsewhere. When I hear so many Jews whine about history and their ancestors, I find something cowardly about this, especially as it is so contrary to fact, at least presently. Of course we have ample grounds to imagine that this could change or be very different in some other time or place. But this is the paranoid logic of scared people. I find it annoying enough when it is said and done in the context of not much, beyond the now frequent acts of violence in American life that affect lots of people. It is horrifying when used as an excuse to support genocide.

The American left is intellectually almost bankrupt. The Jewish left was once Marxist, and otherwise defined itself by the realities of American history and politics. Most activists derive their thinking from the newspaper, not the philosophy seminar. I am turning to philosophy. I satisfied myself in studying the matter that nothing in Judaism if understood right validates this American and Israeli idea of the Jewish people as a social identity being at the basis of either the religion or anything else that is normative. And those claims can in fact only be made sense of in terms of the tradition of political thought developed in the modern Western philosophical tradition, since all of the relevant ideas and questions derive from that tradition and not the earlier ones of literature in Hebrew and Aramaic. The only Jewish modernity that has ever existed to my knowledge, so far, is the one that developed in modern Europe beginning with the Renaissance, out of a philosophical tradition that was developed in Europe and the Mediterranean in the middle ages. This can certainly be found in Israel, though it is there by an accident of history, since the political, economic, and social forms of that state are almost entirely independent of it. That state is destined to be eventually transformed from within into one that is no longer an Apartheid state resident to more than one nationality but the legal property of only one. This will happen peacefully, as war could not achieve it. It will happen peacefully when enough Jews no longer want it, perhaps because they can no longer tolerate the consequences. There will still be a Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine or whatever bounded territorial name is given with a governmental apparatus serving its residences as citizens without discrimination. This is an historical necessity, and if it does not happen, there is surely no future for the Jewish people in that land, but only outside it, and that would be sad in many ways. I would like this presence to be maintained, but the cost of genocidal war is far too high, and the exclusionary practices that led to it, inevitably perhaps, were already unacceptable. They are horrifying, rendering Israel an armed camp, a military state, a Sparta, whose ultimate reason for being is only that all its ‘proper’ citizens are scared to death. It is even more horrifying if the world is becoming like that, and in some ways it is. Jewish tradition does provide plenty of prophetic authorization for wanting to stop that and create something much happier, for its adherents and the world. The resources for thinking about the way the world is today and what can be done to get out of this mess are in a larger tradition widely shared, and I find it funny and strange that most American Jews I have met know nothing of it just as American liberal culture is outside it, perhaps because this country is so militarized and ultra-capitalist, a model Israel exemplifies in extremis, at least the military part, though it is also true simply that American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. I was pondering the question of a leftist Jewish politics versus the involvement of Jews in a renewed leftist politics. I vote for the latter, because the intellectual resources of such a politics (and the cultural ones, which are in modern art, including cinema, which today is quite international, American hegemony in this field also now happily in decline) are outside it. I also affirm the primary of philosophy. It is only a matter of opinion in the banal sense that the reader is not obligated by force of arms or boss of a company to compliantly consent to the propositions argued. Philosophy is primary over religion at least in its domain, and it has a domain. Religious thought as such must not be granted political authority, as publicly its claims always have only the status of opinions that people are authorized to maintain privately, and that means that claims in the public sphere may be tacitly informed by one’s religious views and other personal inspirations, but claims thereto are, as claims, perfectly irrelevant. ML King and others were admirably inspired by their religious thinking, but their public political claims derived their urgent appeal from actual realities intelligible on the perfectly ‘secular’ terms in which they were articulated. Everything else is religious fascism at worst, dogmatic obscurantism at best. Religious people on the left should find all the inspiration they can from their particular traditions and texts, but the discussions we ought to have that most matter depend little upon them (at least pending work by religious scholars that has not yet been done - is there more?) and much on traditions of thought that are not even on the map of American activists. Contemporary radical political philosophy is studied in American when at all by university scholars studying to be historians and critics of one or more of the arts. At least until now.