Why is Judaism today so conservative?

Judaism and the Jewish world today is substantially corrupted by the desire for power and success for their own sake and alignment with wealthy and powerful interests who want mainly that. This would be more readily defensible if we still lived in a world that for Jews at least is more medieval than modern.

Jews in the middle ages mostly were only concerned like everyone else with some mixture of prosperity and piety, as the religious mind that dominated all thinking in ethics and morals was essentially closed, and rulers found that they can make use of Jews as sources of income first by inviting them to finance business and government projects, and alternately as sources of wealth that could be confiscated followed the pogroms driven by Christian prejudice. This world allowed individuals to only pursue their own well-being and worry about their survival and that of their families and communities. This left us with a figure of the Jew that is still dominant today, and in every synagogue you find many people whose lives are defined by wanting to succeed in their professions, raise their children with the right and proper ethics and morals, and defend themselves collectively against attacks on their corporate identity.

Reform Judaism's innovation in the Germany and America of the 19th century was to claim that Jews should be accepted among the bourgeoisie as having similar values socially and distinguished by a religion that could also have the same relationship to the broader society that the various Protestant Christian denominations and churches had. This was a political project, and was formulated and pursued in a way that was characteristically bourgeois. What distinguished the conservative liberalism of these Jewish liberals was not the will to defend those Jews who were socially prominent or disposed of some social authority or power from attacks on them as Jews, a matter to which few Jews and modern republican citizens can observe without opposing. Rather, it was just that they envisioned nothing more than this. Much of Judaism and the Jewish world today remain organized in a similar way ideologically and politically.

Zionism only adds to this nationalist passions, while the riches of the late modern intellectual worlds in the European languages that have been so fertile for both the Jewish mind and the modern Western mind generally remain utterly marginalized and usually excluded altogether from Judaism and any notion of Jewish identity that has any broad institutional and therefore also popular support.

Judaism itself, including Reform Judaism, is intellectually backward and relatively stale because its intellectual focus outside religious literature proper remains what it was in the middle ages: concerned with ethical and moral questions, and otherwise just broadly assimilated to the dominant thinking in the larger society. Philosophy itself is a terrain of some interesting differences, that do not usually enter into disputes: the rabbinical canon of "Jewish philosophy" is concerned with morals and ethics, not social theory and political thought, which moved to the center of European philosophy after the French Revolution, the central event in the history of both modern Europe and the Jewish people since the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The official Jewish world is a rear guard at best with regard to the more interesting developments among its people. One reason for this is surely that the achievements of the modern Jewish mind mostly have occurred in practical and intellectual milieux that no longer can be said to be Jewish in a sense involving not only difference but separation, and those achievements are part of the larger culture, and when they are taken up outside their own professional fields, such as in academia and the art world, they belong most clearly not to any social group at all but to something that can at most be amorphously defined as "the left."

Sadly perhaps for enthusiasts of religion or some social particularly giving Jews a pride of place that they probably do not need to bid for, being on the left today cannot be said to point one in the direction of Judaism, but an understanding of Jewish thought, ancient and modern, can well direct one to being on the left. This left is not defined by the now mostly sterile debates of the 19th century including the ideas then prevailing about class conflict. Attacks on Jewish lives or livelihood in the name of combatting forms of domination or even privilege will go nowhere if they succeed and will by a necessary logic be opposed and probably, and hopefully, defeated. But if the question of attacking or defending Jews on this basis is the only one that is asked, then it is a sure sign that the Jewish world has largely lost all initiative and its ideas most of their relevance. Early Zionism had in it a mix of ideas, some quite optimistic and noble. Too much attention has been given to what we should do because it is necessary, and not enough to what is possible.