The Theology of the Nation – New Article

In his 1829 essay Reflections on Tragedy, Benjamin Constant insists that there is no more sense in writing plays about the inevitability of destiny or the adversities of fate. What worked for the Greeks would not work anymore. He suggests that playwrights should pit the protagonist against “the state and the action of society.” Constant (d. 1830), a Swiss-French political thinker who was one of the first to adopt the title “Liberal,” suggested that “the social order, the action of society on the individual […] these are the tragic motivations which one needs to know how to manipulate. They are entirely equal to the fatality of the ancients.”

Constant understood that far beyond the lack of belief in the divine Moirai, something fundamental had changed. Entering Modernity, people had become individuals. They would no longer see themselves as part of a wholistic order, a Great Chain of Being stretching from the heavens to the underworld, subjecting them to a preordained purpose into which it was rightful and necessary to fit in. The center of our life is our autonomy, and the threat to that autonomy comes not from the gods but from rulers and courts. The state now holds the power that was once under Zeus or Jehovah.

Modern drama is thus manifested through the slings and arrows of outrageous government. From Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Kafka’s The Trial, we witness the unavoidable friction between the individual and the socio-political complex. And as the heart of art pulsates politics and not theology, so does the heart of religion.

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Where’s the heart of Christianity? Massive White Evangelical support for Donald Trump has long raised doubts about their dedication to the principles they had not too long ago outwardly professed. The insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, sported quite a few crosses and posters of MAGA hatted Jesus. Once inside the Capitol, Jacob Anthony Chansley, a.k.a. “Q Shaman”, led a prayer from the Senate podium, thanking God for allowing him and his co-hooligans to “send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.” Others were Chanting, “Trump is President, Christ is King,” an amalgam of the religious and the political in which the regal title of the Son of God uncomfortably tilts more to the monarchical than the heavenly. A campaign banner read “Jesus 2020”.

To say that this is Christian Nationalism would be a truism. Religion and chauvinistic politics are wedded here, of course, but it’s worth noting that in the process, the place of the religious tradition is minimized. In fact, traditional Christianity, its dogma, ethics, ritual, and customs take a back seat, if at all, in this campaign bus. There is a fundamental unwillingness to get bogged down by traditional beliefs and taboos, and the whole endeavor is not about worship at all. The name of God is vocalized, no doubt, but it emotes less an omniscient transcendental father figure and more a partisan political leader. 

This is tribalism, but it comes not from lack of knowledge or dedication to the faith. Church going does not temper tribalism, it stimulates it. According to Pew Forum data in the months before the election, 77% of white evangelicals who attended church at least once a month said they would vote for Trump. Of those attending church weekly, that answer was given 78% of the time. And only 67% of those who attended church less than once a month said they would vote Trump.

In their Taking America Back for God (Oxford, 2020) Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry bring further data showing that “those Americans who most strongly espouse Christian nationalist beliefs also tend to be the most religious as measured by activities like church attendance, prayer, and Scripture reading.” They also conclude that “the “Christianity” of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion… It is as ethnic and political as it is religious.”

If the Christianity of the gospels is a universal religion, quite removed from tribalism, the religion spreading today prefers politics over the Gospel. Referring to Trumpism as a major manifestation of Christian Nationalism, Philip Gorski comes to a similar conclusion and states that “Trumpism is, amongst other things, a secularized version of white Christian nationalism, and that Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters are actually more nationalist than Christian” (American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump, Routledge, 2020).

What does it take to make a churchgoing Christian more nationalist than Christian? The fact that participation in communal worship is married to political tribalism rather than separated from it means there is something in the way religion functions today that connects it to political passions. Ironically, it is through the church that religion is nationalized.

This phenomenon is not limited to the United States. A 2017 Pew Forum survey found that in Western Europe, “non-practicing Christians are less likely than church-attending Christians to express nationalist views” and “non-practicing Christians are less likely than churchgoing Christians to say that ancestry is key to national identity.” Western European churchgoers also express more anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments.

Nor is this only a Western or Christian phenomenon. In India, the BJP party, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is reshaping Hinduism. A veritable smorgasbord of traditions, some more internally divergent than Christianity is from Islam, Hinduism is pushed into a monolithic mold and given the essence and edges of a nationalistic ethos. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist movement that forms the source and base of the BJP, views India as a Hindu Rashtra (nation), challenging the secular character of the state formed by its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and enshrined in the Indian constitution. Contemporary Hindu nationalism today displays all you would expect from your run-of-the-mill, right-wing nationalist movement, from insistence on “secure borders” and fear of illegal infiltration, through initiating vigilante activity and violently fighting ethnic “defilement” and up to silencing dissent. And it does all this using religious symbolism and justification. There’s a coherent theology here, a tribal, nationalistic Theology of the Nation, meaning a religious framework that takes the nation (and not the divine) as its main theological concern and is flexible enough to modify traditional principles of faith to serve it.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya this January. Built on the ruins of a 16th century mosque, the lavish temple was built after a long and arduous civic and legal battle, which at times devolved into riots in which thousands lost their lives. In what seemed like a national (though solely Hindu) festival in India, the temple was consecrated, with Prime Minister Modi serving as the chief patron of rituals for the event and performing (vegetarian) sacrifices to the main Idol, that of the God Ram. Army Helicopters showered the cheering crowds with colorful flower petals while Modi’s main message in a speech he gave at the event was “Dev to Desh, Ram to Rashtra” – from deity to country, from Ram to nation.

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The theology of the Nation is not to be confused with civil religion. We are witnessing no overarching civic ethos that uses generic religious frames of reference to express the nation-state’s implicit communal values. Civil religion, as in Robert Bellah’s seminal 1967 article, is a state-formed social institution, an ethos shared by citizens working together for their republic, while the Theology of the Nation is a religious need, using explicit religious symbols and holding religious hopes, fostering nationalism and energizing congregations.

Nor is this a case of a state-sponsored and controlled church, in which the state employs a religious system to empower the national movement (such as in Franco’s Spain and Putin’s Russia). On the contrary, here, nationalism is used by religion. As with the American evangelicals, the religious tradition adopts the state as its central point of reference and uses nationalism as a dominant theological context.

Of course, the political powers are more than willing to manipulate faith to their advantage, and of course they do. But in this case, religion needs politics more than vice versa. The tradition finds substantial sustenance in the political sphere and is galvanized by the struggles of the state and the nation. The Theology of the Nation is borne out of the modern crises of tradition.

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For the rest of the article please go to its location at the Nexus site.

The Jewish Question Reopens

Like an onion, the current crisis in Israel is made up of a number of layers. The question of the scope of the authority vested in the Supreme Court is the seed that led to the immediate conflict, but it’s secondary to the two layers that envelop it and provide it with both motivation and fuel: the question of Judaism and the global crisis of liberalism.

The latter is embodied by the rise of populist movements across the world, from India via Hungary to the United States. Liberal democracy, which had appeared to be the last valid political framework after the breakup of the communist bloc (“The end of history”), is being challenged by forces that are exploiting its weaknesses and flaws amid the pursuit of power, money and respect.

Unlike the fascist and Bolshevik waves that the world experienced a hundred years ago, today democracy faces no competing ideology. Populism actually seeks to emphasize that it’s democratic and that it represents “the people” against an educated, affluent or “globalist” elite. In practice, populist governments have so far proven themselves to possess antiliberal tendencies and a lack of skills and competence. Their major achievement takes the form of forging an autocratic leader who is surrounded by a bevy of kleptocratic cronies.

Between the narrowest resolution, namely the question of judicial review and the power of the Supreme Court, and the broadest, namely the worldwide liberalism crisis, lies the struggle that is being waged in Israel over its Judaism.

Here the global crisis is embodied in its local form, and it’s from here that the bulk of the social dynamite has been detonated. In the country’s 75th year of existence, the question of its Jewish identity has been burst open.

It’s easy to see that the present coalition entertains a very specific conception of Jewish identity. It draws a parallel between Judaism and halakha (Jewish law) and between halakha and rejection of the West’s values, that sees the Haredi public as the most authentic expression of the tradition, that sees women as a nuisance and non-Jews as an affront.

Thus, beyond the hairsplitting over the court’s “reasonableness” standard or the override clause, lies the will of a determined minority to make the public space subject to halakha. Note: It’s not adherence to the halakha as such that is significant, but rather the interpretation of it as being in conflict with the values of the liberal West, and the desire to shape the country accordingly.

Despite the hopes of the fundamentalist bloc that even without high tech, foreign investment or the reserve army, “the Jewish people will get along and you can go to hell,” in the inspiring framing of our communications minister, it’s clear to every sensible person that a theocratic Israel is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Jewish hellscape in which both the state and Judaism have collapsed and we are left amid their ruins.

Dread of this outcome explains the intensity of the struggle now underway, but dread is not sufficient as an answer. Facing off against the government is a prodigious bloc whose determination regarding the importance of humanist and liberal values stands in inverse proportion to the degree of its clarity about the character – or even the legitimacy – of its Jewish identity.

This public, most of which is secular but contains also traditional and Orthodox Jews, finds itself perplexed about the question of intertwining Judaism and liberalism. On the one hand it’s clear that it will not forgo either the one or the other; on the other hand, it lacks a way to formulate its Judaism.

The axis of tension lies in the correlation between Judaism and the values of the modern West. Whereas the foundation of the fundamentalist bloc’s Judaism lays in the rejection of humanism and liberalism, the majority of the public in Israel has adopted those values and wishes to hold onto them, but has not come to terms cognitively with their connection to Judaism.

Tragically, many have internalized the fundamentalist notion that a substantive contradiction exists between Judaism and modernity. On one side, then, are those who define their Judaism in opposition to modernity, and on the other side are those who consent in principle to this opposition, and are embarrassed by it.

By an irony of history, the Western world, whose roots lie in the Hebrew Bible and in the idea of the creation of humanity in God’s image, is today being rejected by those who purport to be continuing this tradition and is being adopted precisely by those who hesitate to take pride in that tradition.

At the moment, the liberal bloc is seizing on the flag and on the individual’s contribution to the state as the manifestations of its identity, but is finding it difficult to work these into a rounded vision. If there is a challenge facing us, it is to move from the so-far successful effort to counter the government’s plans to the articulation of a coherent charge that is Israeli, liberal, democratic – and Jewish.

In a speech to the second Assembly of Representatives of the Jewish community in Israel in Mandatory Palestine, in January 1926, David Ben-Gurion asserted that independence would not be attainable without adopting “the moral conception of true Judaism, not the false kind in whose name people and circles that are far from the moral life speak so glibly.” Almost a century later, that is again the challenge we face.

Published in Haaretz

Settler Violence and Two Types of Jewish Fundamentalism

An article of mine has been published in the new issue of Sources of the Shalom Hartman Institute: :

"A Natural Act of Vengeance: Settler Violence and Two Types of Jewish Fundamentalism"

The article explores two types of ascending Jewish extremism, rising from within Religious Zionist circles, presenting fundamentalist interpretations of Jewish tradition and rejecting both the authority of the State of Israel and the notion that the state has messianic significance, which had been the signature claim of Religious Zionists since the 1970s.

Focusing on the post-mamlakhti Hardal group and the anti-mamlakhti Hilltop Youth, I try to show the connections between their political convictions and their religious ideas – the deeper meaning of minister Smotrich’s call to "wipe out" a Palestinian town and Jewish zealots’ vengeance pogroms – and argue that the latter are as dangerous to Judaism as the former are to the state of Israel.

Here on the site, and here in pdf.

Meditation, Philosophy, and the Changing Image of the Person in the Jewish Tradition

A few weeks ago The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation was published, offering, among many other articles, an article of mine headlined “The End of Man: Philosophical Consummation in Jewish Meditative Tradition”.

The article examines the close connection between philosophy and meditation among two Jewish thinkers: Maimonides and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad. Before and after I provide a background on the development of interest in meditation in the Jewish tradition, by examining various human models. I end with a few words on the situation today.

I want to bring in what follows a few passages from the article. These are individual paragraphs, and which have other parts between them, but I think they are interesting enough to bring them that way. The book itself is for sale on Amazon, but as usual with books like this, it costs quite a bit.

Here are the excerpts from the article.

… Ancient (Hellenistic) philosophers had no doubt that their quest for truth is undivided from special exercises which they must perform. Thus, the Pythagoreans, Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics, etc., all had their own spiritual paths, which they considered elemental to their philosophy.

[…]

Meditation, therefore, was directly connected to philosophy in ancient times. What changed with the transition to modernity was that access to truth was no longer contingent on personal transformation, but on intellectual knowledge alone. Foucault posits what he calls “the Cartesian moment” as the juncture through which the “care of the self”, in the form of meditative practice, was no longer required as a prerequisite for knowing the truth, and thus the imperative gnōthi seauton was understood not as a demand for self-transformation, but self-analysis.

In his examination of philosophy and spirituality, Foucault was greatly influenced by the early works of Pierre Hadot, who in his later book, What is Ancient Philosophy (1995), states much the same conclusions, and submits that throughout antiquity philosophy was “conceived as an attempt at spiritual progress and a means of inner transformation”. Theory, in other words, had its original meaning (Theōria): transformative contemplation.

[…]

Christians held a fundamentally different path towards perfection. The Philosopher reaches knowledge through self-transformation, the Saint seeks salvation through imitatio Christi. They also developed (more so as the centuries went by) an altogether distinct view regarding the path to truth: not self-transformation, not knowledge, but faith. While the ancient philosophers perceived the self as a political animal on the one hand and an entity examining itself and evolving on the other, for Christians the self was publicly a part of the Church, the body of Christ, and privately an entity sinful in essence and saved by faith. Moreover, for the Christians there was only one truth and one path to it. Believing it was life, denying it – death. Corresponding to the weight that Christianity attached to truth, Hellenistic philosophy was gradually seen as a collection of mere statements about reality, and its role as a way of life was forgotten. Philosophy schools were not taken as superior or inferior ways towards self-knowledge, but as heresy.

[…]

Rabbinical Judaism was not ancient Hellenistic philosophy, though in a different way than Christianity. It was not concerned with proclamations of faith, nor with the one and only truth, but with a communal commitment to a sacred covenant. Its conception of a commendable person was one that is bound to the word of God, not one that is transformed by meditative practices. It propagated an ethics of obligation, not one of virtue. As the Talmud instructs no less than four times, “Greater is one who is commanded [to a mitzva] and accomplishes it, than one who is not commanded [to a mitzva] and accomplishes it” (Kiddushin, 31a). Obeying God is important, not self-development.

Rabbinical Judaism, through community and Halakha (Jewish Law), gives structure to one’s life not by teaching methods for its transformation but by keeping it stable, that is by placing it rigorously within an elaborate framework of laws, customs, and rituals. For the Hellenistic philosopher, the self is to be cultivated, at times transcended. For the Jewish Sage, the self is to be subjected to God’s will and conquered.

This anthropological conception changed only when Hellenistic thinking was integrated into Jewish thought, beginning approximately in the 10^th century. The study of Jewish mysticism acknowledged from its inception the immense influence of Neo-Aristotelian and especially Neo-Platonic philosophy on Jewish thought. The entire metaphysical edifice of Kabbalah owes its internal logic to Neo-Platonism, and non-kabbalistic Jewish philosophy, such as that of the later Geonim (the greatest rabbinical thinkers until the 11^th century) and Maimonides, who was heavily influenced by Aristotelian thought, accessed through Arabic translations of Greek works and developed by Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1938), Ibn Bâjja (Avempace, d. 1139) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198).

[…]

In the contemporary Jewish world, the developmental anthropological model is ubiquitous, as is the integration of meditation techniques. Philosophy, however, at least in the form of systematic structures of thought, is almost non-existent. While Orthodoxy devotes itself to observing and elaborating the Halakhic code, and while the more progressive denominations have devoted themselves to cultural enrichment and moral activism (“Tikun Olam”), a broad spiritually-inclined public has, since the 1960s, branched out into varied paths of personal transformation, adopting the ancient philosophical conception of human development – albeit without the philosophy.

Rather, what can be found today is an amalgam of simple and all-encompassing axioms that have become obvious truths for today’s spiritual seekers, themes such as personal growth, human potential, inner truth(s), wholeness and oneness, “energy”, “natural” as authentic, the uniqueness of every individual, and the existence of a perennial wisdom. These ideas are not so much articulated as simply presumed, and what’s left for the individual is to base themselves on them and choose the meditative method that they prefer to practice.

[…]

Thus, while in the ancient past Jews had a theological structure but not a developmental model for the person, and in the middle-ages through early modernity prominent Jewish thinkers and movements adopted both Hellenistic philosophical frameworks and the ancient philosophical conception of human transformation, contemporary Judaism, when it does engage in meditation, accepts the paradigm of personal development and transformation, but does this with a bare-bones philosophical structure, if at all. Following the modern divorce of philosophy from spirituality, with some possible exceptions, today’s Jewish seekers prefer the latter and elect to subscribe to a spiritual and meditative path while abandoning any interest in philosophical thought and speculation, itself another broad cultural trend that far exceeds its applicability to its contemporary Jewish adherents.

The Evolution of Atheism

At a certain point in his book “The Great Cat Massacre,” American historian Robert Darnton surveys the diary of the policeman-investigator Joseph d’Hémery, who surveilled intellectuals in mid-18th century Paris in search of atheists. “D’Hémery did not separate impiety from politics. Although he had no interest in theological arguments, he believed that atheism undercut the authority of the crown.”

D’Hémery’s problem with atheism was not that it contradicted the tenets of his own belief. He found atheism dangerous because it undermined the foundations of society. Those who denied the authority of the heavenly king could just as easily deny the authority of the earthly king. Police officers, who were responsible for preserving public order, considered it their duty to root out atheism, and atheists – or at least those who were brave or foolish enough to declare themselves as such – were imprisoned, tortured and executed.

It wasn’t just a problem of over-policing. In 1793, while crushing the world order and shaping a new society on the battlefield of the French Revolution, the leader of the revolutionaries, Robespierre, declared that atheism was dangerous and “aristocratic” (the ultimate insult from his viewpoint). The constitution of the American state of Tennessee, which was signed around the same time, recognized freedom of conscience but nevertheless forbade appointment to public office of any “person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments.” The framers of the document were willing to accept any belief, but not the absence of any belief. Even Abraham Lincoln could declare that were it not for the Bible and the New Testament, “we could not know right from wrong.” Without belief, chaos reigns.

It is difficult for us today to grasp not only how rare denial of God’s existence was, but how frightening it was for our forebears several centuries ago. Atheists to them were what pedophiles are for us: not only repulsive individuals, but in a fundamental way completely unfathomable. How could anyone deny God’s existence? How could anyone reject what was self-evident, what was necessary for life as we know it to be possible? Could an upright, worthy life be lived without God? Atheists threatened not only belief but the entire framework of society. The horror they aroused did not stem from fear for the future of religion, it welled up from anxiety about the moral virtues, about the social fabric itself.

For countless generations, atheism terrified Europeans. How, then, did we arrive at a situation in which atheism is perceived as a legitimate stance, one that according to many constitutes the only realistic, rational and respectable point of view?

In attempting to explain the acceptance of atheism it would be easy to whip out the familiar argument about the scientific revolution and its revelations. It would be simple to explain that after it became known that the Earth revolves around the sun and is not itself at the center of the universe; after it was established that the world is billions of years old and not 5,000; after we discovered that the Torah is comprised of various documents and was not written by Moses; and after we understood that humankind came into being in an evolutionary process and not “on the first Friday” – that after all this, a trans-European process of “disenchantment” occurred, at the end of which was abandoned and non-belief was adopted.

According to this explanation, the Age of Enlightenment effectively marks the the completion of humanity’s maturation, its liberation from the shackles of mythology and fairy tales, and its emergence into rationality. Immanuel Kant, in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” from 1784, called on humanity to “Dare to know!” – and, seemingly, humanity responded to the challenge and truly dared to know. People acquired knowledge, and that in turn enabled them to cast off the “yoke of immaturity” (in Kant’s words) that they had brought upon themselves, and thus transformed themselves into secular folk. The most knowledgeable among them became atheists, of course.

This story, which is no more than the genealogical myth of the Enlightenment (“We were slaves until science released us into freedom with strong rationality and outstretched empiricism”), cannot explain completely the secularization process, nor why the concept of the necessity of God for a life of reason and morality is fading. In fact, the notion that knowledge cancels out belief is superficial even according to its advocates’ points of departure – for those who propose it will be the first to admit that human beings are capable of believing any nonsense, irrespective of what they know or don’t know. If new pieces of information were sufficient to unravel our long-held beliefs, we would switch worldviews in rapid succession.

Nor will it help if we assume that only authoritative and definitive knowledge will alter our views about the world, for knowledge of that sort has been available to humanity since ancient times. The Aristotelian, kabbalist or Buddhist worldviews presented “authorized” knowledge about the world and all that is in it, but it goes without saying that not every person who encountered those approaches has been persuaded and adopted them. Something more is needed to alter our fixed assumptions about reality; a good reason is needed for us to part with old premises and adopt new ones, and that reason cannot emanate from the new premises themselves.

Submission to Tradition

The foundations of the Enlightenment lie in the denial of the authority of tradition and the empowerment of humanity to the point of its becoming the supreme authority in every matter. Even before people turned to other structures of meaning, the self-evident awe of the Church – the inherent submission of Westerners to tradition – had been called into question. At the end of the fourth century, Augustine, one of the Church fathers, asserted that he “would not believe in the Gospel myself if it were not for the authority of the Catholic Church.” And at the beginning of the 18th century, the deist Matthew Tindal stated that “Reason was given to bring them [i.e. humanity] to the knowledge of God’s will” – and that nothing more is needed.

These two important thinkers believed that God’s existence was clear and self-evident, and neither dreamed of becoming an atheist. However, each of them shaped their religious world on the basis of loyalty to a different source of authority. For Augustine, the tradition does not only imbue faith with form and content, but it also validates it. For Tindal, not only are the interpreters of the tradition irrelevant, the tradition itself is of no relevance. God’s will is determined only according to reason, which is viewed as innate and universal.

The preference for reason antedates the loss of faith. Deism – a framework that grounded religion in reason and swept through the educated elite of Europe and North America in the 18th century – severed itself from the tradition and authority of the Church but not from belief in God. “O mighty God, I believe!” Voltaire, the champion of the French Enlightenment cried out – but added, “As to Monsieur the Son and Madame his mother, that is another matter!”

When reason becomes a source of authority, tradition can be called into question, and after reason is adopted as a source of authority, God’s existence can also be called into question. However, it’s important to understand: This additional stage is not a “natural” progression, another step on the path along which all those loyal to reason will tread. After all, for deists like Tindal and Voltaire, reason actually pointed to God’s existence in no uncertain terms. “It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason,” Voltaire wrote. Simple, isn’t it?

To shift from certainty of God’s existence to denial that God exists we need another step, in which reason is directed against God. The question is, what impels reason to deny that God exists. The answer to that question is found not in the factual realm but the normative one.

Reason is God’s Image

The transition from traditional Christianity to deism stemmed from a moral reading: For the deists, rejection of the belief in miracles or in divine revelation was a matter of preserving human dignity. Let us return to Matthew Tindal (1657-1733). An English deist, Tindal was one of the most influential thinkers of the 18th century. In his 1730 book “Christianity as Old as the Creation,” which was accorded the status of a deist holy scripture, he dwells on the universal principles of religion and explains how “true” Christianity is perfectly rational.

For Tindal, human reason “for kind, though not for degree, is of the same nature with that of God’s; nay, it is our Reason which makes us the image of God himself.” Human beings are rational because they were created in the image of God. Otherwise, how could they even think? However, precisely because of this, the debasement of reason is an affront to human dignity: “Without this precedent Enquiry, our Belief… were to overthrow all the Laws of Nature, to Debase the Dignity of Mankind, and to efface the Image of God implanted in us.”

According to Tindal, to cling to reason is to cling to the image of God, and to stray from it is to debase it. It follows that to reject superstition (miracles, the virgin birth, and so on) is to preserve God’s image and therefore also to worship God. Thus, if in the past faithfulness to the image of God inculcated in humanity was achieved by refraining from sin and by obeying God, for Tindal faithfulness to God’s image is achieved by rejecting superstition, which from his perspective include what in the past were considered holy tenets of belief.

Tindal’s book generated a broad controversy in Europe, and more than a hundred essays were written in an attempt to refute his arguments. Of course the Church, which itself was viewed by Tindal as a debasement of rational faith, attacked him. However, notwithstanding his struggle against the Christian tradition, Tindal never for a moment denied that God existed. On the contrary, he thought that without God we would not be rational beings.

Deists as Cowards

Just as Tindal sought to preserve human dignity, the first European thinkers who explicitly advocated atheism thought that belief should be rejected not because it was wrong but because it was an infringement of human dignity. A case in point is Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment. He devoted his life to a struggle against religious belief and to the dissemination of atheistic thought. He financed the translation of essays, wrote more than 50 books, supported artists and young thinkers and established in his home a debating club for the Parisian intellectual elite, which became one of the important social institutions of the French Enlightenment.

D’Holbach was contemptuous of the deists and considered them cowards. From his point of view, they had gone only halfway and had not taken the use of reason as a criterion for examining religion to its logical conclusions. Although they sanctified reason, they did not cast off the final superstition – the source of all superstitions: the belief in the existence of God.

In the last lines of his most important book, “The System of Nature,” D’Holbach urges us to “inspire the intelligent being with courage; infuse energy into his system, that, at length, he may feel his own dignity.” D’Holbach wishes to augment reason and protect its dignity by rejecting all that is in opposition to it. As such, he seeks to preserve our dignity as human beings. Atheism, he maintains, is based on nature and on reason, no less and no more. It’s logical. We need only look at the facts unflinchingly. Regrettably, he notes, this minor condition is sufficient to prevent most people from becoming atheists, as they lack the courage to face the facts.

Unlike Tindal, for D’Holbach human dignity arrives not from protecting God’s image within, but from rejecting the very idea of the image of God and of God himself. Human dignity derives from sheer adherence to reason, from the decision not to surrender to comforting illusions and from mustering the courage necessary to those ends. A person’s reason shows them the truth and they are faithful to it and are not tempted by consoling beliefs. Sheer insistence on the truth imbues one with dignity.

God as a Threat

What leads to D’Holbach’s additional step beyond the deist position? It would be very easy to accept his account: The deists, all their education notwithstanding, lack sufficient courage, whereas he and atheists like him are not afraid to cope with either society’s vilifications (and, in their time, also the concrete danger to their well-being) or with the heartrending separation from the fictions to which they had become accustomed.

However, this answer, which remains popular to this day, misses an important element in the movement from belief to non-belief, an element that also constitutes a deep dimension in the development of the secularization process: the ethical element. This is a story at whose center stands our relationship with reason.

With the advent of the modern era, human reason ceases to be perceived as a reflection of the existing world/divine order (the logos, God’s laws, God’s wisdom) and becomes a private, procedural matter, a mode of thought. Descartes is a pioneering thinker in this transformation. For him and for his successors, to be rational means to think according to certain standards, and not to act according to the rationality that is ostensibly implanted in the universe. In plain words, reason moves exclusively to become located in the individual’s interiority.

However, as with Tindal, at this stage reason remains connected to and dependent on God: For Descartes and others, reason is God’s image in humanity. Only in the course of the 18th century is reason gradually severed from divinity and becomes exclusively a human capability. Reason changes together with the rise of individualism and becomes a human aptitude.

It is here that the significant transformation arrives: Humans’ self-perception as being disconnected from their surroundings and as autonomous, leads to this autonomy itself being morally charged. Reason is not only an efficient tool, but a value. The ability to think alone, precisely, clearly and impartially, is now a virtue to be preserved and cultivated. Our rational autonomy becomes an ideal. In plain words: Autonomous thinking is now a moral action.

In his book “Sources of the Self,” the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains that the next, critical, stage arrives when the connection with divinity is transformed from being a necessary condition for morality into an obstacle to morality. This happens when the dependence on divinity, or even its very existence as a higher authority, threatens human autonomy and humans’ ability to arrive at moral decisions. Not only is the inner imperative crucial, but one must not accept a reality in which that imperative can be overridden by an external authority. Think about it: If autonomy is a condition for morality, and is a value unto itself, everything that undercuts it constitutes a moral wrong and even subverts the basis of morality. This is the precise point at which God is transformed from being the necessary condition for every moral system into being the greatest danger to morality.

“Materialism as it appears in the 18th century… is no mere scientific or metaphysical dogma; it is, rather, a moral imperative,” the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) writes. The individuals forged by the Enlightenment saw themselves as moral subjects only on the condition that their decisions were autonomous and free. They were unwilling to accept a moral authority that threatened their autonomy, or that was above it. Their problem with a supreme authority wasn’t only that it would affront their pride, but also that it would affront their morality, their possibility to be ethical. Thus, from the loftiest motives, human beings reached a state in which it was no longer only possible, but now also morally essential, to reject God’s existence.

The Ethos of Atheism

If for Tindal at the end of the 17th and start of the 18th centuries, our human dignity depends on our rejecting superstitions that debase our reason (which is the image of God), for D’Holbach, in the second half of the 18th century, human dignity is no longer the derivative of a divine gift. On the contrary: Dignity is preserved through the denial of all belief in a divine gift, through not bowing to the temptation of the beliefs, to the illusory consolation of religion.

D’Holbach presents a modern concept of self-respect that stems from the individual and is measured according to human criteria. Human dignity was not bestowed on us by God and does not depend on following God’s precepts. One’s dignity is actually dependent on the preservation of independence (conceptual, practical) and on remaining loyal to one’s principles. Man is not God’s image and is not divine or spiritual at all. However, self-respect can be preserved by acting in accordance with the precepts of morality and reason – which spring from within the individual.

Without a doubt, the increasing popularity, beginning in the 18th century, of the worldview represented here by D’Holbach owed not a little to the scientific revolution – to the proven ability of the scientific method to explain nature and to base technological developments on those explanations, and to the creation of a realm of knowledge that is not religion-dependent. However, those developments themselves, although creating the possibility, did not obligate D’Holbach (or anyone else) to deny the existence of God and to maintain that the source of our reason is natural and not divine. What obligated D’Holbach to do so was the moral imperative he formulated, which rested on the transference of the source of human morality and dignity from loyalty to God, to loyalty to oneself.

D’Holbach rejects God’s existence not because he has proof that God does not exist, but because for him belief in God’s existence is an affront to human dignity. Belief in God, or in any religious dogma, means sacrificing a crucial dimension of what makes us human, of what imbues us with human dignity and enables us to make moral decisions. According to D’Holbach, and according to increasing numbers of people from the intellectual elite of his era, believers have give up their reason and their free choice. More than any specific scientific discovery, it is this stance that undermined religious belief fundamentally.

Control of Control

The Enlightenment sought to facilitate and advance people’s self-control vis-a-vis themselves and their world. From self-control comes also control over knowledge and over consciousness. However, the next stage must be also control over the control. Enlightened individuals want to entrench and ensure their control, and therefore they are compelled in the final analysis to reject the existence of God – for nothing threatens that control more than an eternal father figure with infinite powers. “The first revolt,” asserts the anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin, “is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.” To move from slavery to freedom, it is necessary to deny God’s existence. That is the Exodus from Egypt for modern people.

The thinkers cited above represent an illustration of a general cultural shift, in the framework of which Western humanity turned against the existence of God, and did so out of ethical motives. God’s image, which was internalized and became reason and free will, coalesced as an alternative moral source to God. Reason became an autonomous ethical framework, not dependent on God’s existence. Subsequently, reason, which already makes possible a rich normative system (autonomy, self-respect), must reject the existence of God, on the basis of an ethical stance: God’s existence is not moral, because God is injurious to morality; God sabotages the possibility of being autonomous and possessing self-respect.

The rebel, Albert Camus writes in his book of the same title, “defies more than he denies” God. And Camus is indeed defiant. “The absurd man,” he writes in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” sees only “collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.” The defiance, the courage, the dignity and the transcendence that stem from an uncompromising coming to terms with nullity – it’s all here. A direct line leads from D’Holbach to Camus and from Camus to a contemporary atheist like Richard Dawkins, who writes, “The atheist view is… life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion” (from “The God Delusion”).

Their successors in Israel are columnists like Uri Misgav, from Haaretz, who thinks the problem is lack of knowledge, and thus wrote that “many Israelis believe there is a God, because no one ever offered them an alternative – that there is no God”; or Rogel Alpher, also from Haaretz, who praises directness and adherence to the truth as he writes that belief in God “is such an ignorant mistake, that it partakes of stupidity and mental disorder… It’s necessary to speak truth and stop trying to curry favor. There is no God and to believe in him is stupidity.”

Note well: Among atheists, too, there has been a decline over the generations. D’Holbach and Camus still laud the ethos of atheism, the need for self-transcendence and moral faithfulness, with a lucid vision and with self-respect. Their contemporary successors are so far from the point of conception of the atheistic tradition, that they make the mistake of thinking that the problem with believers is only lack of knowledge or absence of wisdom. They forgot the tenets of non-belief.

Moreover, there’s a limit to the effectiveness of calling religiously observant people ignorant or stupid. What the atheist of the vocal strain doesn’t get is that it’s not knowledge that those who believe in God lack, and that it’s not “mental disorder” that underlies religion. Placing God above humanity gives one direction and meaning – elements that humans need far more than information. Only when the conditions matured for extracting alternative direction and meaning, was atheism able to expand into wider circles. Only when that direction and that meaning required the rejection of God could atheism become synonymous with courage and self-respect. And only if direction and meaning will be provided today, will atheism be able to go on gaining adherents. Making atheism shallow to the point where it mocks the believers misses its essence and diminishes its formative revolution.

The acceptance of atheism, and in fact the entire secularization process, are deeply entwined with the process of the individuation of Western man. From being the source of reason, dignity and goodness, God becomes an external authority that does not enable an autonomous, moral, dignified life. After God’s image, as an idea, was internalized, God himself, this time as a moral source, was internalized. And if God is internalized, there is no longer room for him externally, in the objective field. The kingdom cannot be divided between two Gods. That’s how monotheism works. Faithfulness to the inner moral imperative requires the rejection of an external moral imperative. That’s how secularization works.

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This article, published in Haaretz, is based on a chapter in my newly published book “Man in God’s Image: The making of the Modern World” (Hebrew).

A New Consensus in Israel about What Being Jewish Really Means

Two general elections within a span of five months are a treasure for any researcher, because they bring to light the issues that are most important to each group of voters.

Between the April and September elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not change, the security threats from Iran and the Gaza Strip neither grew nor shrank, and Israel’s population remained almost the same. But a new agenda that was placed at the center of the second election took five Knesset seats from the bloc comprising Likud and the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. The agenda was the relationship between religion and state, and the person who put it center stage also coined the slogan that most accurately summarizes Israel’s social and political center of gravity: “A Jewish state, not a halakha [Jewish religious law] state.”

One could say that this is the amorphous consensus on Jewish identity in Israel as it has emerged and come together in recent decades. In general terms, beginning in the 1990s Israeli Jewish society underwent two deep processes relating to its identity. On the one hand, Jewish Israelis learned to challenge the authority of Orthodox Judaism as the sole authentic representative of historic Judaism. An increasing number of Jews are shaping their Jewish identity through a wide range of alternative avenues, from pluralistic study forums, through Reform Judaism to New Age-y doctrines like the Yemima Method to the various Bratslav Hasidic courts. This is privatized Judaism, shaped by the individual to meet their cultural, social or spiritual needs. This is also a Judaism that fears for its liberty and the possibility of realizing itself in whatever way it chooses.

On the other hand, we also see in Israel the rise of an ethnic-national Jewish identity, which is based on a sense of tribal belonging and whose meaning is derived from the mission of preserving the security and prosperity of the Jewish people. This Jewish identity is ostensibly collectivist and its center is the national-ethnic (not civic) community. But the demands this identity makes on the individual are minimal, and as such it can be integrated — in a manner that is complementary, not contradictory — into the privatization process. This identity is more strongly tied to Orthodox Judaism, which it considers more authentic and “faithful,” but in the end it also undermines it.

Both social trends stem from the same source: rising individualization in the Western world. The processes of liberalization and globalization that the West is experiencing have made it more homogenous. The rules of the market and consumer culture, the discussion of human and civil rights, even popular culture in all its channels constitute a fixed framework that molds local societies into similar patterns. On the one hand, privatization and liberalization have turned people into individuals who scrupulously cultivate their own autonomy; on the other hand, these same individuals also develop anxiety about their identity. Most of them don’t want to be swallowed up into the liberal shredder and spit out as a generic Western individual. Strengthening national or ethnic identity provides a solution in this respect: The individual feels part of a unique collective while making minimal lifestyle changes.

But what happens when the individual is in fact expected to change his behavior? What happens when the government allows and even encourages increased religious influence in the state secular schools, separation between men and women in the public sphere or the closure of grocery stores on the Sabbath? What happens when it threatens to prohibit soccer games on Shabbat or the Eurovision Song Contest? Many who affiliate with ethnic-national Judaism will accept this, and some might even see it as an authentic expression of the heritage with which they identify. But many others will respond to this threat to their autonomy and their lifestyle by turning their backs on the parties that promote it.

Religious antagonism

The fault line between religious and secular is one of the most fundamental in Israel. The socialist Zionism that established the state rejected halakha and saw religion as a relic of the galut, the Jewish Diaspora, which was not only superfluous after the Jewish people returned to the land of its ancestors but was a constant threat to the establishment of a progressive, properly run state. Socialism as a mass progressive vision disintegrated, along with the decades-long rule of Labor Party forerunner Mapai and its ethos, but a fundamental antagonism toward “the religious” is part of Israel’s DNA. Add to this the perceived threat to civil liberties, and this antagonism turns into an electoral force.

The combination of this old antagonism and the insistence on personal freedoms brought Yosef (Tommy) Lapid’s Shinui party 15 Knesset seats in the 2003 election and his son Yair Lapid‘s Yesh Atid 19 seats in 2013. In September’s election it destroyed Netanyahu’s chance of obtaining a coalition of 61 seats without Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party. In my opinion, it also prevented Kahol Lavan from weakening any more than it did. The bottom line is clear: In every election campaign in which the issue of religion and state becomes central, several Knesset seats move from the right-wing bloc to the left or, more accurately, from the right-traditional religious bloc to the central-civic bloc. These seats go not to Meretz, but to parties that offer a clear Jewish identity while also promising to preserve a secular civic space. Both Lapids offered exactly this. Now it was being offered by Lieberman and the four leaders of Kahol Lavan.

Lieberman’s slogan, “A Jewish state, not a halakha state,” precisely expresses this new, all-Israeli combination; on the one hand it emphasizes Jewish identity, while on the other hand it promises to preserve individual liberties. Moshe Feiglin had actually discovered this secret formula earlier, and during the campaign for the April election he used it very successfully with his libertarian party Zehut before he was brought down by campaign errors and Netanyahu’s skill in cannibalizing the bloc. Hayamin Hehadash, whose platform had remarkably similar messages, was hurt as a result of overly cautious wording (for example, party chairman Naftali Bennett stuttered over LGBTQ rights) and  suffered the same cannibalization. Looking forward, we can expect to see this winning combination in every party seeking the votes of mainstream Israelis.

The Haredi parties, in contrast, have maintained their strength, which is based on Orthodox and traditional Jewish voters, for whom personal autonomy and the secular  civic space is less important. The religious Zionist movement is caught in between: Its Haredi minority completed its takeover of the now-defunct National Religious Party (after obtaining similar, if less complete, control of the community’s educational institutions). In the process it alienated a majority of Israelis and even a majority of religious Zionists, who fear for their autonomy no less than secular Israelis do. Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, who in September ran together with Bezalel Smotrich and Rafi Peretz as Yamina, did not gain additional Knesset seats, suggesting that voters recognized that the alliance with the Haredi Zionists would stifle their relatively liberal voice.

Privatized traditionalism

Both election seasons shattered the religious-Zionist dream that secular Israelis wanted a knitted-kippa leadership. It turns out that secular Jews prefer — surprise! — to vote for secular politicians, whether Likud or Kahol Lavan. Beyond that, we are seeing the end of a process that began in the 1990s, with the National Religious Party’s unequivocal affiliation with the right. That move turned religious Zionism, which had always prided itself on being the “hyphen” that brought together Haredim and secular Jews, Torah and science, past and future — into just another right-wing party.

For religious Zionism, the movement toward individualism on the one hand and ethnic nationalism on the other undermined the halakhic dimension. Along with turning the settlement enterprise into a central tenet of faith, identifying with the political right replaced halakha as the fundamental basis of religious-Zionist identity. Bennett and Shaked’s Habayit Hayehudi party accepted secular right-wingers, but would never have accepted religious leftists.

The two components of Yamina represent two opposing responses to this process. Bennett and Shaked are nothing more Likudniks with a twist, and the platform of their party was not materially different from that of Likud on matters of religion or foreign policy. This model won them around a dozen Knesset seats in 2013, and presumably that was their peak. Politicians such as Smotrich, Peretz and Moti Yogev, however, seek to return the topic of religious law to the fore. But in an age when civil liberties and even liberal causes such as feminism and LGBTQ rights are becoming part of the Israeli consensus, such a move will confirm the party’s place as a small Likud satellite.

The combination of Jewish ethnic nationalism and individualistic liberalism has thus become the main intersection of the range of circles making up Israeli society. Likud, which was founded on a blend of nationalism and liberalism, could have been the primary beneficiary of this situation, had Netanyahu not become completely dependent on his alliance with his “natural partners,” which repels his voters. Kahol Lavan gained from Likud’s loss but it now faces a dilemma since in the absence of a unity government it, too, is dependent on the Haredi parties.

But the importance of the current situation goes well beyond the political arena. The evolving Jewish identity represents a sort of privatized traditionalism, grasping on to a heritage that is dependent upon the will of the individual and custom-made to fit. It is a dynamic, creative Judaism, but it’s also egocentric, and the liberalism it demonstrates toward the Jewish direction (from weddings outside of the rabbinate to LGBTQ rights) does not generally extend into the non-Jewish space. This is Judaism in Israel in the early 21st century, and it shows us that most Israeli Jews will not relinquish their Jewish identity, but at the same time they will rise up against religious coercion and insist on individual liberties, at least for themselves.

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Published in Haaretz, Oct. 29

Of White Supremacy and Chosen Peoples – The Turner Diaries and their legacy

“Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’?” Tom Buchanan, Gatsby’s rival, asks in “The Great Gatsby.” “The idea,” Buchanan explains, “is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved… It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1925 masterpiece, knew well why he had his antagonist speak those words. The crux of the tension between Jay Gatsby and Buchanan is the question of truth and authenticity. On the one hand, the source of Gatsby’s wealth is dubious: He’s charming and charismatic, but his life is founded on a lie. On the other hand, Buchanan is a nasty piece of work, arrogant and boastful, but he’s a faithful son of the American upper class of the tumultuous 1920s. For a large slice of American society, the racist calumnies he spews out were the unvarnished truth.

The title of the book Buchanan mentions is a distortion of a real work: “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” published in 1920, which attracted interest in the United States. The author, Lothrop Stoddard, a prolific American thinker, writes of his concern that ineluctable demographic trends will transform the world’s whites into an oppressed minority. As someone who espoused a detailed race theory, Stoddard maintained that the “Nordic race” is superior to all other races and that, for the common good, it should continue to rule the world.

Stoddard’s book is just one link in a long chain, beginning in the early 19th century, all of whose parts are obsessed with the white person’s fear of becoming a minority. By ascribing these views to Buchanan, Fitzgerald marked him as being flesh-of-the-white-flesh of the particular social circle that’s caught in the grip of this anxiety and drawn to such works.

Stoddard has long since been forgotten, and the views he advocated – which, in certain versions, were accepted at the time even by people who considered themselves to be progressive – became the object of condemnation and excoriation. The concrete results that these race theories engendered in the 1930s and ‘40s made the subject taboo; in our time only fringe groups espouse such ideas. However, with the aid of the internet, what was for decades the preserve of the rejected and the ostracized has become the subject of a lively dialogue today. The web connects oddballs and fundamentalists, and it gives extremists the feeling that they are part of a broad movement. A rising, seething wave of toxicity is being ridden by unscrupulous politicians who are aggrandizing the feeling of white victimhood. Those who consider themselves the spearhead in the struggle against the “colored surge” are acting accordingly.

The footprints of these ideas are obvious in acts of mass murder perpetrated in recent years. Anders Breivik, who in July 2011 murdered more than 70 people, most of them teenagers, in and around Oslo, left a 1,500-page manifesto in which he warned against “white genocide” (the preferred term by those in the grip of the anxiety) and against the “Islamization of Europe.” In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, shouting, “You’re taking over our country!” In an essay attributed to him, Roof expressed concern at developments in Europe, “the homeland of White people.”

Brenton Tarrat, who last March murdered 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was fearful of “the great replacement” – a conspiracy theory revolving around the alleged replacement of whites by nonwhites. And Patrick Crusius, who in August opened fire in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, slaying 22 people, purported to be defending his country against a “Hispanic invasion.”

The massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue last year was also carried out by a white supremacist who used slogans such as “Diversity means chasing down the last white person” and accused the local Jewish community of assisting “invaders.” A year earlier, Jason Kessler, speaking at an alt-right gathering in Charlottesville that he helped organize, warned against “white genocide” and “the replacement of our people, culturally and ethnically.” “Jews will not replace us,” the torch-bearing marchers there chanted.

Return of the scarecrow

But how are the Jews actually connected to all of this? According to the widespread version of this white anxiety, Jews are the planners and orchestrators of the takeover by “inferior races” that is leading to the extinction of the white race. The Jews’ status as “whites” is provisional, as everyone knows, and depends on the good will of white Christians. For most of those who fear white genocide (though not all), Jews are themselves an inferior race, and the migration of nonwhites to Western Europe and the United States is a Jewish plot aimed at eradicating the superior race.

Fitting neatly into the picture here is the tendency of Jewish Americans to be on the progressive side of the map and, similarly, the tendency of Jewish organizations and philanthropists to support progressive causes. It turns out that Jews who are fighting racism and working for tolerance are in reality advocating miscegenation and scheming to liquidate the whites. The Jews’ support for minority groups stems not from a moral commandment to love the stranger; it’s a plot against the light-skinned majority. Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist George Soros features prominently in right-wing conspiracy theories, but he also occupies a central place among those who play up white anxiety and even on morning talk shows. Middle East-affairs commentator Dr. Guy Bechor enthusiastically echoed the “replacement theory” in his regular slot on Israel’s Channel 13, and in another context said, “The Jewish progressives will inflict a terrible disaster on American Jewry; and that is exactly what happened in Europe.”

This anti-Semitic narrative is far from marginal. The blood libel according to which Jews are working toward the eradication of the “white man” is in the background of most of the murderous violence perpetrated by white supremacists in our time. As Eric K. Ward, a social activist who has been researching these groups for three decades, writes, anti-Semitism is the “theoretical core” in the conspiratorial schema of the white nationalist and white supremacist movements. According to Ward, anti-Semitism became a central element in white racism in the United States after the successful civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. The racist groups couldn’t fathom how “inferior races” had succeeded in getting the state to eliminate segregation, promote equality for women and gays, and above all also stirred public opinion in favor of those groups. Their conclusion: There must be a secret network of crafty, manipulative agents who pulled the strings and brought about this result. Inevitably, the “Elders of Zion” entered the familiar niche.

For white supremacist groups, Jews thus fulfill their classic conspiratorial role. But this time, the plot does not involve accumulating money or power, or undermining Christendom, the economic order or the nation-state. Now the eternal Jew wants to mongrelize the different races so as to cause the pure whites to disappear. As always, anti-Semites use the Jews as a scarecrow that embodies the threat that they feel to their identity.

‘Shabbos Goyim’

To grasp the narrative framework that renders this conceptual approach accessible, it’s worth delving into the book that Ward calls “the bible of generations of white supremacist groups,” and what the Anti-Defamation League describes as “one of the most widely read and cited books on the far-right” in the United States. They are referring to “The Turner Diaries,” by William Luther Pierce, writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The book, which was written, not by chance, in the 1970s – following recognition of the victory of the civil rights movement – is probably the most widely disseminated and influential anti-Semitic work since “Mein Kampf.”

“The Turner Diaries” is neither a manifesto nor a philosophical tract. It’s a novel. It tells the story of Earl Turner, who is part of an underground organization that is waging a battle against the federal government in the United States. Originally published in 1978, the book is set in the future, the 1990s, when the government, which is controlled by liberals and Jews, is adamantly pursuing racial intermingling and integration, is encouraging mixed marriages and is battling racism and segregation. In fact, it’s apparently doing everything in its power to bring about the disappearance of the white race.

This is not by chance: It’s the Jews who are pulling the strings here. The Christian liberals and progressives are the useful idiots who are helping them (in the book, they’re dubbed “Shabbos Goyim”), while the blacks and Hispanics provide the muscle and the cannon fodder. If the Jews achieve their goal, the white race will be eliminated and they will rule the world.

“The Organization” – the whites’ underground – uses guerrilla warfare and terrorism against the federal government, which is referred to as “The System.” Organization cells carry out terrorist attacks on American soil with the intention of destabilizing the social order. The aim is to awaken public opinion and induce whites to snap out of their pro-equality, pro-pluralism, pro-tolerance indoctrination and ultimately convince them to understand that they, the whites, are superior to all the rest.

The turning point in the book occurs when the government embarks on a campaign to confiscate all the firearms in the public’s possession. Police units, consisting largely of nonwhites, go house to house collecting the weapons, in a scenario that undoubtedly constitutes the worst nightmare of the National Rifle Association. The protagonist, Turner, understands that the time has come to act and he goes into the underground with his associates. They stay in contact with other terror cells, of which there are apparently many.

Turner’s first major act is to blow up FBI headquarters in Washington. The members of the squad park a commercial van packed with explosives below the building and topple it with its personnel inside. If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason: Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, murdering 168 people, drew his inspiration for the act from the book. Pages from “The Turner Diaries” were found in his getaway car.

Indeed, “The Turner Diaries” is not only a novel, it’s also a form of do-it-yourself manual. It teaches readers how to manage an underground cell, manufacture a homemade bomb, and rob and slaughter Jewish businesspeople in order to underwrite the underground’s activity. In its battle against “Jewish brainwashing,” the underground attacks the offices of a newspaper, fires mortars at a gathering attended by the U.S. president, and murders Jews and liberal activists.

Finally, its members seize control of a military base and fire nuclear missiles at New York and Tel Aviv – which have the largest concentrations of Jews in the world.

The Turner Legacy

A reading of the book, aside from inducing a physical feeling of nausea, shows how deeply its ideas have influenced the new right (the alt-right and other variations of the radical right in their American and Israeli versions).

The book inveighs against liberalism (more precisely, “the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague”) but also castigates classic conservatives. The latter are depicted as nerds who don’t understand when it is necessary to dispense with the law and take up arms. (The contempt for conservatives is echoed in the alt-right’s term for them – “cuckservatives” – where “cuck” is short for “cuckold.”)

Feminism, too, is the object of virulent hatred in the book, parallel to the misogyny that prevails today in new-right circles. Women’s lib is a “mass psychosis” that descended on the world before the triumph of the whites, and women who fell prey to it were persuaded “that they were ‘people,’ not ‘women.’” Feminism was actually a plot by The System to turn the white race against itself.

There is a lot of penny-ante Nietzscheanism in “The Turner Diaries,” from the ridiculing of liberalism as a “feminine” ideology to notions of social Darwinism holding that every person and every race must look after itself, and the strongest survive. People who seek equality and pluralism are either cheats (i.e., the Jews) or brainwashed (white liberals). A “healthy” and “sane” society is one of racial purity; it is masculine, militant, patriarchal and heterosexual. That, according to author Pierce, is what a normal people in its land looks like.

Liberals are idealistic but blind. They ignore the crimes of the minorities (blacks, mainly) and always take their side, even when they are clearly guilty. A girl who complains to her mother that African-American children are harassing her at school gets a slap in the face and is accused of being racist. Other liberals allow members of minority groups to rape their wives before their eyes, unopposed, then cover up for them to the police. The parallel to present-day accusations of liberals covering up for crimes committed by minorities – such as the allegation made by the Israeli television personality Avri Gilad that Notre Dame Cathedral was torched by Islamists and that the French police were lying about the cause of the blaze – is clear.

The book was also ahead of its time in the hatred of Muslims it expresses. The narrator, as early as the late 1970s, knows that there are too many “dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners” in the country, and when he and his associates take control of Southern California, they set about murdering them systematically. In later years, fear of so-called Middle Easterners would morph into an outcry that they are “taking control of Europe” – a libelous declaration the new right is disseminating in both the United States and Israel.

Surging anti-Semitism

As J.M. Berger, an expert on extremist movements, found, “The Turner Diaries” is only one text – albeit a very successful one – among a quite a few centering on a “colored” threat to the white man. In the 1920s, publications like “The Rising Tide of Color” earned fame, and were accompanied by a call for “racial hygiene.” However, Berger actually found the genesis of the genre in the 1830s, against the background of the controversy over slavery and ahead of the American Civil War. The anxiety that gripped the white people of the South over the possibility that their slaves would be freed produced at least four dystopian (from their viewpoint) novels, which depict the United States as a place of indiscriminate mongrelization, to the horror of the light-skinned folk. Some of the works portray a war to restore the “natural order.”

The genre’s rise can be tracked through the history of liberals’ achievements. The struggle to free the slaves was the catalyst for the emergence and initial popularity of such literature. The second wave surfaced in the first decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the surge in the number of immigrants entering the United States. Analogously, this period also saw the appearance of the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, which perceived that a threat was posed not only by blacks but also by Catholics, Jews and the intellectual elite. That wave receded in the wake of the defeat of Nazism in World War II. The next surge did not appear until the late 1960s, with the legal prohibition of segregation and the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Here, the Jews played a central role in the conspiratorial structure. Those who chanted “Jews will not replace us” meant to say that they would fight so that Jews would not replace them with Hispanics and Muslims.

It is against this background that one can understand the complexity of the present upsurge in anti-Semitism. President Donald Trump is manifestly fanning the flames of xenophobia. His attitude toward migrants, his warning against an “invasion” of Hispanics and his refusal to dissociate himself from avowed white supremacists such as David Duke are fodder for the extreme right. Steve Bannon, former Trump’s White House Chief Strategist, referred to The Camp of the Saints a few times, hinting to the extreme right that he knows and approves of yet another white-supremacist novel (published 1973). On the other hand, advocates of the “replacement theory” cannot accept Trump’s positive approach to Israel, which is evidence, they feel, that the grip of the “Zionist Occupation Government” – as anti-Semitic, right-wing groups refer to the U.S. administration – is stronger than ever.

The facts, in any event, are clear. A special report issued a year ago by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry found that “supporters of white supremacy in the United States are experiencing a resurgence” in recent years. An FBI report published in 2018 also found a consistent rise in the number of hate crimes since 2015, including a considerable uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes. The reality is that murderous violence against Jews in the United States has reached unprecedented levels. It’s been a long time since every type of racist, homophobic and misogynist lowlife, as well as populists, demagogues and purveyors of conspiracy theories have felt as comfy-cozy as they do now. Anti-Semites drink from the same sources.

The Jewish Religious-Nationalist connection

All countries are different, but the radical right in all of them tends to think along the same lines. Racism is racism, but that is not the end of the resemblance. The story of a Jewish conspiracy operating behind the scenes to persuade good white people to become liberals and pluralists is very much like the “irresponsible attempt to reprogram the human society […] which is being done by ‘white collar’ people who operate behind the scenes.” That quotation is from a pamphlet titled “The Courage for Independence,” published last May by Rabbi Zvi Yisrael Thau, a leader of the yeshivas affiliated with the so-called Hardali community (whose members combine ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, and national-religious beliefs). It’s aimed at those who are inducing the Jewish people to think that, heaven help us, women are equal to men or that gays deserve equal rights.

The similarity between the modes of thought (not of action) between the conspiracy theories espoused by the Euro-American anti-Semites and those of the Hardali yeshivas stems from the premise that the superior person (the white man or Jew) cannot be bad but is at most confused. If he’s liberal, feminist and gay-friendly, it’s not because that’s what he really thinks but because he underwent indoctrination by a small, manipulative group of miscreants. The latter disseminated an “unnatural ideology” (Pierce), but “that is not the nature of the people of Israel” (Thau). Deep down, the Jew or the white is perfectly all right: loyal to himself, his origins and his purpose. He’s an “authentic” white or Jew – in the same way that Tom Buchanan, the antagonist in “The Great Gatsby,” is an authentic Roaring Twenties wealthy American.

The heroes of “The Turner Diaries” try to awaken whites people from their progressive slumber, and in the same way Israeli homophobic groups such as the right-wing Orthodox Noam party or other Hardali movements appeal to the good-hearted but bewildered Jew. Because both movements depend on a far broader public than them, which they consider exalted but which doesn’t think like them – they are compelled to assume that this wider public has been brainwashed and to deny that its members truly think what they say they are thinking. The white supremacists want the whites to open their eyes and understand that they actually hate blacks and Jews; the followers of Thau are asking Jews to open their eyes and understand that they are actually revolted by gays and are superior to Arabs. When these things happen, the world will return to its “natural,” “true” order.

It’s precisely here that the Achilles’ heel of every racist project lies. Simply put: Racism is not compatible with the truth. In “The Turner Diaries,” the author presupposes that people of color are naturally dumb and violent, an assumption that’s a key cog in the plot mechanism.

Liberalism, he maintains, is a lie that’s easily refuted, because nonwhites are “truly” violent and “truly” untalented, and mixed neighborhoods “truly” suffer from crime, despite liberal efforts to cover all that up. Because the government systems, security agencies and military units are “racially mixed,” their operation is faulty, according to Pierce. For this reason it’s easy for the white underground to outsmart them. If the nonwhites were as smart as the whites, the underground would not triumph in the struggle. The book, then, is not only dystopian; it verges on science fiction.

From this perspective, the war on facts that Trump, Thau and certain media figures are waging is understandable. The facts simply are not consistent with the racist theories they’re promoting. “It’s all scientific stuff,” Tom Buchanan says about “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” but that “science” is a ludicrous cocktail of prejudices, anxiety and self-victimization. And even if we ignore the reality on the ground, the one thing that refutes these racist conspiracy theories is the very fact that anti-Semites and Jews, white supremacists and Jewish supremacists, those who believe the Jews are subhuman and those who believe that the Jews are superhuman – ultimately believe in the same clichés.

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Published in Haaretz

Daniel Boyarin on Judaism and “Judaism”

If you ask a member of the Hopi tribe, “What is your Hopism?” you won’t get an answer. You can also ask a Romany (Gypsy), “What, actually, is Romanism?” And then meet a Druze and ask, “Excuse me, what is Druzism?” In each case you will have to suffice with the perplexed look of your interlocutor, as though there’s something very basic that you don’t seem to understand. That something has to do with the form and type of the entities about which you’re seeking clarification. Simply put, they are not ideological or religious constructs, but ethnic groups possessing a particular social-cultural heritage.

It’s hard for us to discern this, because our worldview – deriving from the modern Western approach – makes every effort to deny their existence. We are accustomed to subsume every large human group under two primary categories: nation and religion. The two categories are connected at their point of birth: The modern era introduced the nation-state, a political entity in which a particular people acquires self-determination; and religion, which is separate from the state, and with which people are free to form relations privately. Religion, in the sense of being a conception, a totality of the beliefs that an individual chooses to adopt, was born together with the nation-state, and completed from the private angle what the state provided from the public – which is to say, it conferred affiliation and meaning. But the one has nothing to do with the other. As Jesus proposed, unto Caesar is rendered that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.

Like the Hopi or the Druze, it’s also difficult to associate the Jews with one of the two alternatives. They are not only a nation and not only a religion, nor are they simply a nation that practices a religion. In recent years a number of books have been reexamining the modern (that is, Western-Protestant) perception of Judaism. Leora Batnitzky wrote a brilliant introduction to modern Judaism, titled “How Judaism Became a Religion”; in his book “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,” David Nirenberg discussed the construction of Judaism out of the Christian need for an eternal antagonist; Yaacov Yadgar dwelt on the Jewish anomaly that is expressed in Israeli nationalism in his book “Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism”; and last year saw the publication of Daniel Boyarin’s “Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion” (Rutgers University Press), to which the following comments are addressed.

It is almost superfluous to introduce Boyarin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the greatest living scholars of the Talmud. For the past 30 years he has been a central signpost of contemporary directions in Jewish studies. From the outset of his career he interwove philology with techniques of literary criticism in order to understand the Talmudic text, and beyond that in order to introduce the Talmud into contemporary academic literary discourse. Boyarin possesses the ability of looking at the seminal texts from the scholarly angle and from the traditional angle alike, and with a combination of an astute analytical capability and a sly tendency toward provocation, almost every book he’s published has left a concrete imprint on the research in the field.

If one can distinguish a recurring motif in his work, it is the tension and cross-fertilization between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (with a probing glance at the Hellenistic world as well), both in the Second Temple period and today. He has devoted considerable attention to the point at which these two traditions were born, in the same place and at the same time, amid brotherly rivalry beneath which lay a common biblical origin. In the course of examining the relations between the conjoined traditions, Boyarin devotes requisite space also to an examination of their approaches to gender and sexuality, weaving critical elements from feminist discourse into the fray. The critical gaze at the tension between Judaism and Christianity enables Boyarin repeatedly to dismantle frameworks of modern categorization, such as, in our case, “Judaism” and “religion.”

His latest book thus joins a series of studies that call into question the popular-naive conception of Judaism. Starkly put, Boyarin asserts that until a few hundred years ago, there was no such thing as “Judaism,” in the sense of an abstract category of thought and thus of life. Indeed, the term is not found in the Torah, Prophets or Writings, the Mishna or Talmud, the works of the early medieval Geonim, of Rabbi Judah Halevi or of Maimonides. None of them knew of the existence of such a thing as “Judaism.” The term’s first appearances date from the 12th century (for example, in the “Midrash Sekhel Tov,” by Rabbi Menachem Ben Shlomo), and even then it denotes not a particular culture or a particular religion but a condition – that is, the condition of being a Jewish person.

In his book, Boyarin traces the origin of the term, naturally not confining himself to Hebrew but also investigating the Greek loudaismos, Yiddishkayt in Yiddish, Judentum in German and “Judaism” in English. The author arrives at the conclusion that “Judaism” is not a Jewish term. Jews talk about the people of Israel, about Hebrews, about the Israelites and the Sons of the Covenant and several other collective attributes, but not about any sort of faith-based or theological structure. This notion of religion originates in Christianity, which began as a voluntary framework (after all, one wasn’t born Christian in the first century) and emphasizes correct faith.

Concurrently, the Jewish sages underscored affiliation with the ethnic collectivity and the observance of laws and customs. It was only beginning in the 16th century that the term trickled slowly into use as denoting religious belief – as something that occurs in the individual’s heart. Not coincidentally, all this arrived together with the Reformation, which split the Church and necessitated a reorganization of theological and meta-theological concepts in Europe.

Until the 19th century, Boyarin notes, it is impossible to find “Judaism” as the subject of a sentence. There is no “Judaism” that believes in one thing or another, there is no “the essence of Judaism.” Those attributes emerged only when modern Jewish avenues were compelled to define themselves: namely, when traditional Jewish society in Europe underwent dramatic processes of modernization and when Reform and Orthodox Judaism evolved. The two denominations sought to determine the basic principles of “Judaism,” each for its own reasons.

The Jewish tradition, then, increasingly resembled the Christian tradition, for it set out to integrate itself into the (modern Western) Christian world. For Christianity, this was of course very convenient. Boyarin makes clear how, already from the first centuries of the Common Era, Christianity constructed Judaism as the fundamental “Other,” vis-a-vis which it defined itself. In other words, there is no “Judaism” other than in a Christian context. There are of course Jews, the halakha (traditional Jewish law) exists, and so forth, but there is no abstract and general term other than through the Christian eye and against the backdrop of Christendom.

With the advent of the Emancipation, “Judaism” became the “religion” of the Jews, a development that helped them exceedingly to integrate into the emerging nation-states – thus, for example, a person could be a “German of the Mosaic faith.” The Jews became equal citizens in Western Europe. That process, Boyarin writes, “destroyed Yiddishkayt as a form of life.”

Which is true: The Jews’ traditional way of life was eradicated. In places where emancipation did not occur, Jews continued to maintain “traditionalism” – so it’s not surprising that Jews who immigrated to Israel from Muslim countries had a completely different attitude toward their Jewish identity than their European brethren. The Judaism of the traditionalists, beginning in the late 18th century and today as well, is not “religion” or “nationalism,” but a comprehensive ethnocultural identity.

Of course, Boyarin understands that there is no way back. Even though he is critical of the modern configuration of Judaism, he, like all of us, derives no little benefit from it. Himself an observant Jew, Boyarin is known as a firm critic of Zionism who perceives the Diasporic Jewish existence as a more authentic and worthier form of Jewish life. His vision involves the establishment of Jewish communities in the Diaspora that would take part in a joint national project with other groups and foment communal Jewish life. But this is achievable today only within a liberal democratic framework, namely the Christian-Protestant model that renders Judaism solely as a religion.

Liberal Jews?

In an effort to understand Boyarin better, I met with him for a conversation. I asked him about the Christian – specifically, the Pauline – idea that presupposes that we are all first and foremost individuals, and about the fact that this is not only a potent and highly attractive notion but is also, ultimately, a highly advantageous one. After all, liberalism, which is based on this idea, created a beneficent world in which we, as Jews, can also live a secure, thriving life.

Boyarin said that he is definitely not a liberal. “We, the Jews, maintain that a human being is not monadic: Humans do not exist on their own and are not autonomous to decide personally what they are and who they are,” he explained. At the same time, he noted, “The depiction of Jewishness as a non-chosen condition into which one is born does not theoretically inhibit recognition of equality by the state.”

Nonetheless, I asked, isn’t the idea that all people are equal and have inalienable rights based on the Christian perception of the individual as being endowed with universal reason and free choice, which are situated in a nonmaterial soul? In other words, our conception of human equality is rooted in an inner essence that is considered more meaningful than any external feature (such as skin color, ethnic origin or different sexual organs). It’s only on the presupposition of an inner persona, hidden and autonomous, that we legitimize ethical ideas and institutions, such as the social contract, human rights, feminism and transsexual journeys. I have my own reservations about the modern occupation with inwardness, I told Boyarin, but we are bound to recognize that it has engendered much that we cherish.

“I don’t think I share those views about inner essences,” he said. “Is shared physicality not sufficient for solidarity? We resemble others, we mate with them, even when we don’t pretend we don’t, and we use language like them. They are us.”

Well, I replied, we know that historically, shared physicality was insufficient. We do not look exactly alike, and therefore we can treat others as being inferior to us – or, in rare cases, like the Incas’ encounter with Francisco Pizarro and his bearded white men, as superior to us.

Boyarin replied that he “still thinks that the homogenization of human beings through their supposed soul has done far more harm than good.”

But it seems to me that there is an unresolved point here. The modern, Western-Protestant world demands that Judaism change, as it demands of hundreds of other cultures to change. Given enough time, “Hopism” and “Druzism” will also come into existence. There’s something imperialist about this universalism, Boyarin is right about that, but even so, there’s a reward that comes with making the transition. We get human rights, civil rights and equality under the law, even at the moral and pragmatic level. In personal-psychological terms, the reward is still greater: We possess individuality and a sense of autonomy that are inconceivable in traditional societies. How many of us are willing to live a life that “does not exist on [its] own… not autonomous to decide personally what they are and who they are,” as Boyarin put it.

Regardless of how valid it may be, the liberal temptation captures our heart no less than it transforms our Judaism. Without doubt, the homogenization that Boyarin talks about exists, and there’s also a flattening of depths that once existed and are no longer, and there’s also social fragmentation. Our Judaism is not what it was, and what was will not return. But are we capable of giving up our Western individualism, even if we wish to? And is that in fact what we wish?

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Published in Haaretz

The Absurdity and Malignancy of a Jewish Theocracy

“Israel will not be a halakhic state,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised Monday, and for a change he was right. Israel will not be governed by Jewish religious law, and in fact no government has ever been ruled in accordance with halakha. In the time of King David, not only was there no halakha as yet, but the Book of Deuteronomy had yet to be written.

By the time halakha came about, with the completion of the Mishna in the second century, there was no longer an independent kingdom of Israel. And in the intervening period, the Hasmonean Kingdom absorbed Hellenistic concepts (Aristobulus and Hyrcanus are not Hebrew names), and persecuted and executed Jewish sages.

So when he speaks about Israel “returning to operate as it did in King David’s time,” MK Bezalel Smotrich is denying history. No wonder: Historical ignorance is a prerequisite for any fundamentalist vision.

As with other examples of theocratic ambition, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic State organization and the “Hindu nation” promoted by religious nationalists in India, the attempt to imagine a modern government based on religious law always necessitates the invention of a fictitious past and significant self-persuasion.

With just a few tweaks and minor adjustments, the story goes, we could then copy and paste ideas and institutions from the distant past into our world. This never works, and not just because such efforts are based on mythology to begin with. It doesn’t work because it completely ignores the radical changes that have taken place in the human condition.

Not that there haven’t been rabbis who have tried to sketch a vision of a modern halakhic state. In the 20th century, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli addressed this. Rabbi Naftali Bar-Ilan devoted four volumes to “Regime and State in Israel According to the Torah.” Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg wrote “Hilkhot Medina,” on halakhic issues in the modern state. Justice Menachem Elon wrote extensively on “Hebrew law” and, leaping forward, just last year Rabbi Ido Rechnitz published a book called “Medina KeHalakha: A Jewish Approach to the Challenges of Independence.” Still, no one has ever been able to come up with a framework that anyone but a handful of fanatics would consider realistic.

That’s not a coincidence. The problem with halakha as it is today is not that its laws are bizarre or anachronistic. Yes, the punishment for theft is a fine amounting to twice the value of the stolen item, a ludicrous penalty that would permit people of means to steal to their hearts’ delight. Yes, halakha prohibits women from testifying or serving as judges — an insult to the intelligence of any rational human being. Such details can presumably be modified and updated.

The real problem is the fundamental understanding of humanity in halakha. According to halakha, human beings must obey divine law and cannot legitimately choose to do otherwise.

Simply put, halakha minimizes the significance of individual autonomy. The compulsion to observe the commandments is part of halakha, and it is also no coincidence that halakha permits both slavery and pedophilia. When there is no unequivocal recognition of the individual as an autonomous subject, then enslavement becomes acceptable, and when choice and consent are not a necessary condition for sexual relations, it’s no wonder that it is permissible to have sex with someone who cannot choose (and, on the other hand, consensual sex between people of the same sex is prohibited).

For its time, the Hebrew law was an advanced, enlightened system, and Jewish tradition brought into the world many principles that ultimately contributed greatly to modern humanism and liberalism. Yet today there is a fundamental tension between halakha and modern conceptions of humanity and liberty.

As a personal and communal commitment, a halakhic lifestyle can be deep and meaningful, but one cannot talk about a state operating in accordance with halakha without also talking about religious coercion. In fact, Waldenberg was an avowed supporter of theocracy, and Rechnitz’s book also clearly demonstrates that there can be no freedom of religion in a halakhic state.

Actually, one needn’t go so as far as picturing some future halakhic dystopia in order to understand that Smotrich’s proposal is not a good bet. It’s enough to look at what’s already happening in the Israeli systems that are in the hands of the Orthodox establishment.

The laws of marriage and divorce, over which the Chief Rabbinate holds a legal monopoly, have become a mechanism for coercion and injustice. Nonreligious couples are compelled to marry not in keeping with their beliefs, women are discriminated against under the marriage canopy as well as in the divorce laws and the rabbinical courts abuse many who come before them. Even without the blatant corruption and nepotism that is so rampant in the rabbinate, it would still be despised by the public – simply because the modern conscience rebels against coercion and discrimination.

Smotrich, whose “decision plan,” published two years ago, called for the Palestinians to either agree to live as subjects or to choose between emigration and death, has proved before that democratic principles are of no interest to him. It’s no surprise to find him leading the theocratic charge. Hardalim, or ultra-Orthodox Zionists, account for just 2 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, but intoxicated with the political power given to them by Netanyahu, they mistakenly believe the time has also come for their fundamentalist ideas. Placing them in the centers of decision-making will clearly lead to religious coercion and a shrinking of civil liberty.

“There is also room for democracy in Torah law,” Smotrich hastened to reassure everyone, following the uproar over his comments touting the imminent return of the Kingdom of the House of David. But this is not correct. There is room for Torah law in democracy, but not the reverse. The relationship is always one-way, because one conception is fundamentally tolerant and insists on individual rights and freedom of religion, while the other does not. Should Smotrich and company obtain the kind of power they desire, we will all be made quite aware of this.

Published in Haaretz

How the New Israeli Judaism Was Born

When the image of Srulik, the iconic cartoon character that symbolized Israel, appears on the cover of a book, we know we’d better sit down. It’s a momentous event. Something in us, in our very essence, in our sheer Israeliness, isn’t what it used to be. The sabra image created by Kariel Gardosh (known as “Dosh”) has long since been transformed from the symbol of the young state into the symbol of parting from the young state – a concise representation of everything we no longer are. Usually it turns out we’re no longer young, beautiful, secular and just.

Every society undergoes change, but in Israel the transformations seem especially rapid and, in a particularly reflective culture – the Jewish self-awareness that Woody Allen made a caricature of – there will clearly be a need for an constant introspection. The freneticism accompanying these changes is also understandable: Not enough time has passed since the shtetl for us to feel that we’re comfortable in modernity. Even when what has been repressed isn’t really threatening to burst onto the surface, just the fear that it will can stir anxiety. Accordingly, self-examination and accountability are called for at all times.

Two Hebrew-language studies from the previous decade come to mind in this connection. Their very titles attest to the end of an era: “The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony” (2001) by Baruch Kimmerling and “Farewell to Srulik” (2004) by Oz Almog. Authored by sociologists, these two books marked the transition from denial to awareness, possibly even mourning. Things aren’t what they were, we’re told, and not necessarily for the better.

In his encyclopedic work, Almog summed up the transformations, as he saw them, in the realms of the media, law, women’s status, the family and psychology. The plethora of quotations he generously (at times tediously) offered the reader were intended to illustrate how the Israeli elite (“the veteran Jewish stratum, secular, educated, established”) parted ways from Srulik, who as usual embodies the Israel that is no more.

However, Almog’s explanation for the parting is flawed. In his view, along with the inertia that saps the energy of every revolution, it was the media which reshaped the Israeli consciousness. Supposedly, the media’s control of the agenda caused the Israeli elite to forsake the shared Zionist vision for “globalist consumerism.” Almog concludes by expressing his concern that no new ideological framework will coalesce, and Israelis will gradually be divested of their Jewish identity. Fifteen years on, it’s easy to see that the exact opposite has occurred.

Kimmerling undoubtedly probed deeper than Almog. He eulogized the “Ahusalim” – his acronym for the secular, socialist, nationalist Ashkenazim who founded the country and tried, based on a collectivist “statist” agenda and the social “melting pot” they forcefully forged, to shape the state in their image. The Ahusalim failed, and since the 1970s gradually disappeared from their positions of control and influence.

Kimmerling ascribed most of the responsibility for what he called “the decline of Israeliness” to the Gush Emunim settler movement – something of an Ahusali approach in itself. The messianic spearhead of the religious-Zionist movement supposedly brought to the surface the religious and ethnocentric elements implicit in secular Zionism and hurled them in every direction (though mainly toward Judea and Samaria). The universal humanism in the hearts of the Ahusalim and the civic-republican ethos of the young state were too feeble to resist. Both faded.

But Kimmerling reversed things. It wasn’t Gush Emunim that ruptured the hegemony of the Ahusalim; it was their rupture that allowed the self-confident bullying of Gush Emunim. First, the weakening of the ruling leftist Mapai party in the trauma of the Yom Kippur War – the crisis of faith that seized secular Israelies at the sight of the demigods from the Six-Day War, floundering and humiliated. Second, and more significantly, it was the erosion of socialist collectivism in favor of liberal individualism, that rewrote the Israeli ethos. Both made it possible for Religious Zionism, that admired, almost to the point of worship, not only secular generals but also the state’s leaders, to take the reins and the law into thier hands. . Likud’s rise to power in 1977 completed the process and did much more than religious Zionism to inject what Kimmerling calls “Jewish-ethnocentric categories” into the Israeli identity.

What then brought about the end of Ahusali hegemony? Why did we part from Srulik? Two recently published books reexamine the metamorphoses undergone by Israeli society…

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