Is the reason for Jewish conservatism that the figure of oppression has been replaced with evil?

The left fears and hates oppression; the right, evil. Oppression is a possibility of authority and bosses; evil one of those subject to authority, that of bosses or an imagined absolute boss, God.

The Jewish world is conservative today because Jews mostly no longer fear or face oppression. It was a dominant paradigm in Europe until after the war. It still is a reality, but it is no longer the paradigm, not how things are thought of.

Opposition to oppression and a great sensitivity to it, wherever it be found, whoever is its victim, is of course a deeply rooted Jewish value. But the figures of evil and oppression are distinct.

The principal markers of Jewish identity today besides Judaism itself, which includes only some Jews, are the Holocaust and Israel. The idea of the destruction of the Jewish people and the idea of the Jewish state. The Holocaust is not thought of as a consequence or part of a system of oppression. It is instead thought of as an exemplar of evil. This is neither necessary nor entirely correct.

It is said to be evil because it was a mass hate crime. (Note that the use of mass murder has been used widely to associate Stalin and Mao with Hitler, but Stalin's and Mao's crimes had more to do with ideology and ideas of social necessity, however monstrous, than with hatred of the Nazi kind, though class hatreds did play a role them.). This makes it a variant and consequence of anti-semitism generally and a form of 'prejudice'. It is hatred of the Other, rooted in misunderstanding and psychological mechanisms like projection.

The roots of the Holocaust are now thought to lie not in modern history, in industrial capitalism with its mass production, nationalism, the modern state, and the prison (the camps were prison camps of a particularly extreme kind), but in a mystically absolute difference: 'they' hate us for reasons that ultimately have no explanation, since evil does not. (Thus, one prominent liberal rabbi I know of has repeatedly said that anti-semitism is a 'disease' or 'virus'; it cannot be unlearned, nor refuted by arguments, and so can only be combatted militarily. Moreover, as its causes lie in a mystical void (that is, they must be regarded as having no cause, apparently because evil itself has none), by this logic, the Jewish people will always be at war against non-Jews who want to destroy them (as a people). That rabbi is in effect blaming both anti-semitism and the Holocaust on the mystical figure of original sin (as well as an apparent inability of non-Jews to appreciate Jews being the way they are or seem to be; the key here is that this, I know not why, apparently cannot be argued, shown, or taught). There are two errors here: one is a psychological reduction that ignores the questions of a sociology; the other is the mystification that results from that reduction to the psyche. It apparently has in it a Lucretius-like tendency to deviate or swerve at random, a figure that Lucretius, a materialist philosopher, used to argue that the way things are in the world results from chance. Unfortunately, most rational and causal explanations in social science and theory have been metaphysically based on necessity rather than chance, and in a conservative sociology it is society itself and its social norms, or the state and authority, that are given as principles or causes, and authority and norms, laws, or rules are a form of necessity. (There are interesting similarities here, between the oppositions of chance/necessity, chaos/order, personality/name, sense/reference, style/content, and the classical generic divide in Jewish sacred literature, between aggadah or narrative, which privileges ethics, and halakhah or law, which privileges the norms and rules of morality; privileging the former alone will lead to the antinomian fidelity that was realized in Christianity, and privileging the latter alone would lead to a sterile conservatism; in early modern Judaism this division was realized in the divide between messianic Hasidim and the Talmudic Mitnagedim, a divide that persists today between the “Rebbe’s” (neo-)Hasidism and the “Rav’s” Modern Orthodoxy. In philosophy it is also Plato’s Euthyphro debate: does God will the good because it is good, or is the good good because God wills it? Historically, the greater danger has been that that tends towards legal positivism: the good is just whatever the state and law name or proscribe. Judaism notwithstanding, its classical emphasis quite oppositely weight, the trend to affirm the positivity of law and authority has been the dominant tendency in Western governmentality, though not Western culture, whose greatest strengths are not in its legal codes and their inflexibility (in protestantism and modern republicanism) or applicability (as in Jewish legal hermeneutics), but in the ethical genius developed in certain images, concepts, and stories, along with our ideas of conflict and reason that are both of essentially Greek origin, giving us both science and democracy, and not just moral seriousness linked to faith, obedience, purity, and oracular wisdom.) Deviance as explanation for evil, in intention or effect, in sociological theory is the failure of social normativity; explaining crime by deviance implies that the solution is (suprise) law enforcement. Therefore, the Holocaust happened because too many people in Germany and Europe at that time had bad government, either externally in society or internally in their thinking or both. Which returns us once again to the same tautology, while explaining by refusing explanation or inquiry aiming at one.

Unfortunately, however, sin is disobedience and explaining oppression or social evil by it is calling on people to obey the (legitimate) authority, while we all know that the Holocaust happened because too many people (including most of Eastern Europe's Jewish community leaders) obeyed when they should have disobeyed.

The figure of anti-semitism as a (perhaps inexplicable) hatred is a form of the broad social and psychological figures of violence as crime.

But crime is not the same thing as oppression.

It would be oppression (without, certainly, ceasing to also be a crime) if it were part or consequence of: a colonialist project, modern bureaucracy and/or capitalism, nationalism, biologized racism...

And it is indeed a consequence of all of these things. But this is rarely said. Why? Because the Israel state has chosen to link itself to global capitalism and its project of policing populations? Instead of the national liberation movements that were part of the global decolonization after the war? Why is the fundamental logical similarity of the Jewish and Palestinian struggles for their own political autonomy, now well achieved and fortified in the one case and still denied, opposed, or considered impossible not the other, why is this not widely recognized? Why do so many Jews now care only about Jews themselves and their freedom from being hated? (I do not suggest that they, and the world, not be concerned about that. It is important. Is it the most important problem in the world? Is it the most important thing for anyone to be concerned about?)

The concept of evil is inadequate because in the end it just means disobedience of the authority that does or should rule every conscience and by consequence the just laws of a community or state. What is wrong with that is only the concern of that authority: It is principally with the well-being of the world's living beings and especially its people.

What was Pharaoh's crime? Was it that he did not obey the signs presented to him by the real Boss of It All (perhaps thinking that he was a good enough pretender to being that)? In that case, the story of the Exodus would have began not with an account of slavery but with the ten plagues. Pharaoh's crime was oppressing people.

Who or what opposes evil? Who is concerned about it and how? The state opposes evil as crime. Religion opposes it at the level of private conscience, often amplifying, as in Judaism, the number of things permitted and prohibited. What is a society like that opposes and fears evil but not oppression? How about a police state? A global one, perhaps. It might hate the poor, even most people, fearing that they will commit crimes, including against property. Regimes of rules and sanctions, engaged constantly in a melange of war and policing, offering people little beyond mental health treatments that help them do their jobs while minimizing the risk of transgressions.

The Bible does suggest in the Adam and Eve story that the origin of sin is the will to disobey. That cannot be right. It can only be the failure to love or to be just.

Oppression is an historical and political concept, sin a sacramental one, evil a merely governmental one.

I note that, if the conclusion being reached is at all “Jewish,” it is impurely so, but Jews and Judaism have always paradoxically only become “more” Jewish by being less self-enclosed, not more so. (Just as in Winnicott’s psychology, the “good enough mother” is far better than the perfect one. We need our finitude, source of possibility as much as limit, as we need the mirrored walls surrounding our sense of self to have windows and doors leading to passages unknown. Every habitation should be left with a corner incomplete or missing). The persistence in Jewish culture that Greco-Roman culture essentially lacks, of notions of and desires for holiness and purity, exists at best in tension with all the exilic and defamiliarizing tendencies that have so much driven, through so many encounters with strangers and otherness, the creativity of the West and what was at least until recently its most fruitful cultural minority. In that context it may indeed seem ironic that the literary progeny of European Jewish thought at its most troubling and consequential is now mostly in the hands of scholars planted only in the world of philosophy and the literatures in the European languages, the one intellectual discipline that still, 24 centuries after Aristotle, enables creative minds to connect more or less everything (or at least anything, maybe one anything at a time) from biology to visual art to logic and to the old field of metaphysical theology, and they have a solid sense of a tradition, while they belong like all modern intellectuals to no country, no religion, and only prospectively to any faction or party. To those who condemn certain social prejudices as dangerous parasitical pathogens, I say, there are salutary parasitisms, even among us rootless cosmopolitans who in critical terms have no flag and no rite exactly, but cultivate maximal contact with the traumas of their and our history, not to escape it, impossibly, but in the hope it still can be made fruitful, happy, and just,
and who can only turn to the resources of language and, like the demonic Catholics renounce at baptisms, ‘all its works’. I think Judaism would have a better future if it recovered its old, medieval, conviction that secular philosophy is a necessary concern for all the usefully pious, only now in an age where the old ethical demands that defined ancient and medieval philosophy have been replaced by late modern philosophy’s defining (at least in continental Europe) concern with social theory and the political. Most philosophers and other thinkers and writers working from within Judaism as a religion still have the old orientation to ethics (and politics as the theory for leaders of good government, not of how citizens of a society wondering how to critique and radically transform it), and that is a principal cause of their terminal conservatism, which in the extreme often makes it seem like their morals have a tight link to good manners and an uncertain one at best to politics via concern for the world’s problems. If ethical propriety is just wisdom and good manners with neighbors, then I must ask, does it matter to you, or not, that so many people in every society today are imprisoned, tortured, starving, despised, bored with their jobs and lives, angry at people annoyed at their own, asked to worry whether they are right with a God of normality and health, a middle class and tame deity even if a kindly and gentle woman or man? I think that future would be more assured because it would re-connect merely pious Jews who can see nothing on their horizon that matters fundamentally and centrally besides religion, our chosen people, our past destruction, and our troubled state. It would reconnect them potentially with all the most advanced thinking in the arts and sciences, and could do so through what I believe is still the lingua franca of intellectual life in our (the) world. I see a disconnect where that connection would appear. If I go from a congregation in the art world or that of scholarly discussions of “theory” to a house of prayer, I enter a rarefied place where I could never even be very tolerated (I learned this the hard way) if I kept thinking about what I had been pondering. I leave my world behind as I enter a sanctuary. That fails. Not because there should be no sanctuaries, or no sabbath from working and defining ourselves by social facts and obligations, but because what people in them wonder and think about can only be, precisely, the world and their manner of being in it, and while rites and creeds are still not one but many, the world, of course, is singular. And not only because God is. I find these exclusive enclosures of selves and minds curious indeed; are they not? It is like being in an art museum that has every kind of gallery, but the one you’re in has a set of walls, and people lock themselves inside, as if in some new medieval ghetto. Such strange things I also find curious, don’t you?
But that is another argument. Sometimes I wonder if the world is dying partly because the contented privileged classes too often see little evil. For there is a conservatism of old people just tending their gardens, having long forgot the desire of their youth to redeem and change the world itself, not just save themselves or enjoy their past-times. Is our culture senescent, because its very maturity is an excess? That, which is not an indulgence in evil but an avoidant ignorance of it, I call conservative.