Judaism and Christianity between ethical negation and affirmation

(Written in response to a post stating what I here argue against):

I do not agree that Jewish culture lacks empathy. The truth is more the opposite of that. The dominant culture in the West is driven by technology or technique, whose subject is a monistic self that excludes the other. Openness to the other and her or his strangeness and the revelation that may be associated with this is very much a Jewish theme, especially in recent philosophical thought, though it is by no means an exclusively Jewish one, since this and other theoretical inventions took place largely in the language of philosophy and related discourses in the arts, by their nature universal in scope and address. But it is a very Jewish theme, and it could easily be seen that it is more of a Jewish than a Christian one.

One of the problems of European Christian culture is that the Jews were often figured in (negative) terms that derive much more from Latin than Hebraic sources. Indeed, the two were arguably assimilated by the original Christians, writing in Greek, and looking at a heretical or at least heterodox movement within Pharaisiac Judaism, but in a general context that politically was given by the Roman empire's blatantly oppressive domination of Jewish Palestine.

There is a very strong tendency in modern European thought to look for ways to figure its own redemptive outside. Notions of 'spirituality' and ethical dicta like 'empathy' or some Kantian kingdom of ends as an alternative to the dominance of thinking in accordance with utility, these and various romanticist notions belong in this category. In Germany in particular, Jews and Judaism were often associated, mistakenly, with tendencies that really are far more intrinsic to the dominant Latinate culture.

This is the fundamental problem with Heidegger's critique of modernity and his very mistaken notions of the role of Jews in it. This was a legacy of German romanticism, which, though it looked to Greek and not Jewish antiquity for alternatives to the fallen modern world, would eventually prove fertile ground for much of the most creative modern Jewish thinking, which took place in the German language and its philosophical tradition.

The mistaken figuration of Jews as concerned with money and power and disregarding of humanity, perhaps because their religion is associated with an idea of justice that is seen, in a Gnostic legacy, as excluding that of love and thus divine goodness, rather than configuring it, which is the more monistic Jewish view, can be compared to the 'white' racist problem of figuring Africans as dangerously libidinous, transgressive, and lazy: it is a figuration of anxiety on the part of a dominant culture that was deeply concerned about the forms of propriety that these excluded and denigrated terms figure the lack or failure of.

In any case, Judaism cultivates empathy, and does so much more characteristically and with more determination than Christian culture including that of Protestantism. Do you think white Southern evangelicals are driven by great empathy? They are much more driven by anxieties about their own sinful temptations to give in to their desires and inclinations rather than 'divine' demands for obedience.

Christianity took from Roman culture an overtly 'political' (governmental) concern with authority and obedience, its first great philosopher, Augustine, taking from the emperors the name 'Dominus' for God. That God dominates, rules, and controls the world and what happens in it, and demands obedience and submission of the will is an idea that was central in both Christianity and Islam (where this concept gives it its name), including in self-abnegating mysticisms, femininely erotic and otherwise, and that is really quite absent from Judaism. Its not rising to the level of Christianity's figuring God as tyrannical father also explains why Judaism was only able to accommodate the dualist tendencies that Christianity so much struggled with by finding in them a hidden monism (in Kabbalah). There are no religious orders demanding obedience, a Catholic virtue, and there is also no idea in Judaism as there is in Islam of an incipient force of divinely inspired justice and happiness that must make war against the world as ruled by an evil power, the Christian Satan, who is impossible in Judaism, and the world dominated by him being one that can and must be overthrown. Christianity always figured God as in principle identified with the authority of the state and in practice perhaps identified and perhaps opposed, so that there could be both absolutism and the inquisition and 'revolutionary' movements.

There is really none of this in Judaism, its messianic tendencies being rather less polemical. Empathy is seeing the divine in the Other person. That is a very Jewish idea that Christianity has sometimes shared.

The religion that was most troubled by the Jews was the one that was closest to theirs. That religion was open to many of Judaism's insights, but it organized them in terms that are Latin and reflect the legacy of empire. The differences included some things that would prove fatal. Christianity always regarded the relationship between God and the faithful as contingent in a way that made faith and belief obligatory and enforceable. So Christians, like Muslims, whose religion was also one of faith and empire, could be troubled by the possibility of people among them not sharing the faith, threatening to corrupt or contaminate the purity and innocent goodness of those with it, and thus endangering their own fragile commitments to the good made possible by their identification with an authority that represented it.

Both Christianity and Islam were religions of authority and so of war and policing. Those secular consequences are still with us, including in an America that is essentially non-religious (and often pseudo-religious) and Protestant. Judaism gave its deity a character that in some ways at least was quite different from the more governmental religions it emerged out of, and remained fated to live among.

The concept of empathy is a not irrelevant one because it presupposes the goodness, not badness, of the Other person as such, even in her or his strangeness. It presupposes the goodness of Being, which is a Jewish idea, expressed philosophically. God, having created the world, saw that it was very good. Failures of the good, like sin, are always possible but never necessary. Injustice is not the starting point for a thinking of the good. The Gnostic and Manichaean tendencies that the daughter religions never broke entirely free from dispose those who are faithful, good, and just to war and domination, or policing. The primacy of power, in the sense of domination, is not a Jewish idea, though it was often a Roman one. That worldly existence is evil, a notion that was prevalent in a number of Indo-European cultures, including in India and Persia, also is not.

One could refuse and refute that idea without developing a very robust alternative. That would produce a dualist critique of dualism. Logically, that may be what the negation of negation and refutation by reduction to the absurd lead to, at least if one indulges much in this. This gives us the figure of the warrior or police man for whom the good is not acknowledgement of a world or Being in its presence but a troubled and angry war against evil. The good man in this figuration is the hero who defeats the bad men. A form of this in psychoanalytic theory is perhaps the theory of Melanie Klein. She imagined aggression as primary in the motivations of persons, and analysis would lead one to acknowledgement and love, through acceptance of ambiguity in lieu of ambivalence, but along the way the people targeted for therapy would be sick because of destructive impulses. Another form of this problem is the critique of ideology popular among some leftist academics; it supposes that culture is a mask of power, and so needs its critique. What this leaves out pointedly is the association of culture's objects, artworks, with the beautiful as revelation of Being in its goodness. Christianity does something else because it is a religion of salvation and evangelism. So it seeks out evil to convert it into good. Judaism follows a different path; it is more directly affirmative.