Why is there no left-wing in Judaism today?

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Perhaps the question of what is wrong with Jewish conservatism comes down ultimately to this:

Is modern bourgeois society based on a republican and representative democratic nation-state such as those of Europe and America in the 19th century and most of the world (including Israel) today, is this the realization of the messianic idea?

The debate is a political one, that can be clearly formulated entirely, and only, in the terms of modern Western political philosophy and history. The question is the Hegelian question of the end of history. Two different answers can be given. The most exemplary figures on both sides are Kant and Marx.

The bourgeois liberal imagination cannot think that there is any fundamental flaw or 'contradiction' in a society that has political liberty, the equality of citizens in status and dignity as well as economic and social opportunity, in short a modern liberal and egalitarian republic of the kind initiated in the American and French revolutions.

But there is another position. It is that of, broadly, the anarchist and (theoretically, small 'c') communist tradition in political thought. It holds that the messianic/utopian society that can reasonably and realistically be posited as the endpoint of history as the world has known it is something other than capitalist society, something that is above all more free than it is.

This position has, theoretically and practically, roots in what ultimately is a shared tradition among Jewish and Christian sources in medieval and modern Europe.

It is not only correct, but precise, to say that the line of thinking that almost everywhere triumphed is that of bourgeois liberalism. In this line of thinking, the principal goals of Jewish messianism are the achievement of a Jewish state, and of an assimilation that basically grants Jews equal opportunity to participate in the parliamentary republican though historically Christian societies of America and Europe after 1776/1789. These options are exactly the same as those facing these societies themselves. Reform Judaism and Zionism both subscribe in the main to the bourgeois idea.

There is no political cause in the modern world specific to the Jews. The Jewish left, center, and right are intelligible as forms of the left, center, and right as such.

The field of philosophy was once central to Jewish thought and Judaism. This was the unambiguous position of Maimonides, the greatest religious Jewish philosopher, in the middle ages, but it was broadly shared. Jewish kabbalistic mysticism was not an alternative to philosophy, but an implementation of certain philosophical ideas (largely neo-Platonism) in which a form of private devotion took the place that otherwise could be taken by political engagement.

The decisive late modern shift in the theoretical (philosophical) world was taken by Marx. Based on some themes in Hegel, Marx shifted the stakes of philosophy so that its central concerns were no longer with ethics but with social theory. The West entered an age of the primacy of the political, an age we are still in. Most philosophy in Europe that has been vital in the years since Marx's early writings has been focused on questions of social theory and politics, and not on the wisdom conducive to the good life as a private matter.

But that is what was defined Jewish philosophy not only in the middle ages, but in the modern period and even today. Rabbinical Jewish philosophy and theology still operates in that paradigm.

In the ethical paradigm, Jews and the Jewish people are the exemplary ethical/moral subjects. They are called upon to live lives that are models of ethics and justice. Keeping the ritual as well as moral laws is seen as the way to do this. The Jews are to be a shining light on a hill, to use a metaphor from the New England Puritans, and others will admire them and learn from them. This idea is not false, and it has a Biblical basis. But there is another possibility. It only emerges as such after the Jewish emancipation that begins in Europe with revolutionary France in 1791. A Jewish philosophy appropriate to our time must be, like philosophy itself, a political philosophy oriented by the vague but defining image of a society without labor as we know it, without policing and war. It is not just an image of a society where everyone obeys the law and does what they should and does not do what they should not.

To the image of Jewish particularity and its relationship to universal hopes as that of the exemplary or model, may be counterposed the image of avant-garde. These are two distinct models of what originally or ultimately was or is Jewish chosen-ness, a concept that certainly does not mean Jewish privilege, though in today's world it does seem to mean that to many Jews. It is a material privilege linked to the moral noblesse oblige that explains why so many people are apt to reproach the Jews for their injustice, since this contradicts the popular notion of the Jews as exemplarily ethical and just. An avant-garde does exist today, and it is both intellectual and cultural, and social and political. This avant-garde is not in itself Jewish, which is a good thing since this fact is greatly facilitating, though Jewish religious observance both in no way contradicts and may well facilitate it. It is in any case an idea that, along with its corollary, the notion (in its suitably secular forms) of the messianic age, owes the better part of its genealogy to Judaism.

Thus, Judaism today in principal divides politically between those who just want to be religiously observant while being free of being objects of prejudice in the larger society (the Zionist version of this makes the second condition freedom from the fear of political violence with the goal of abolishing their national society and its state; clearly these are two forms of the same thing) -- and an avant-garde political project that aims at a different society than the capitalist one that we have. What would that society give us that bourgeois liberalism does not? To begin with, it would give people freedom from a life organized around toil, and so freedom for study and creative pursuits, and from oppressive governments. Politically, Judaism is either a way of being a successful bourgeois (or trying to be) or a way of being on the left. The failure of Reform Judaism like every other conservative liberal project is not that it only managed to be the former, but that it never much questioned that.