Thoughts on Judaism today

Reform Judaism was the Jewish Protestantism. The limit of its politics was the liberal project, as they wanted, first in Germany and then America, to be accepted as part of the bourgeoisie. Like liberals generally, they are therefore for inclusion and recognition and against prejudices. They champion individual autonomy (and worry about its extension and limits), and regard tradition not as binding but as a resource supplying 'meaning'. Their services therefore are often thought to be 'nice', and this itself is a major selling point.

Since its founding in early 19th century Germany, it has had little or nothing to do with socialist and other radical political projects, and their membership was overwhelming middle-class. Perhaps it is that more than anything that destined them to be not so much of a departure from medievalism.

Nor was it influenced by, or interested in engaging, the more avant-garde ideas in literature and the arts, or in the mostly political, and often left-wing, developments in philosophy. In Reform Judaism as well as the other branches, "Jewish philosophy" indicates that which is narrowly religious. It includes Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and others; it does not include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, or any other major Jewish thinker of the last century who is not explicitly a theologian or philosopher of Judaism. As it happens, most members of the former group are not philosophers by any rigorous criteria, as tended to be recognized only in academia. The singular figure of Emmanuel Levinas is the major exception, as Cohen and maybe Rosenzweig are marginally; they were all academic philosophers. Judaism as such retained an intellectual sterility because of the rather timid forms of the attempts at departure from the medieval model. That, more than intermarriage or failure to attract young people to synagogues, is surely the major reason why the future of the religion can be the object of worry that it often is.

Simply, Judaism did not fully modernize, and was captive of conservative interests.

There is an ancient and medieval idea of the Jewish idea of the covenant (of which the sometimes doubted concept of 'chosenness' is essentially just a restatement, not a claim to privilege), and a modern idea which adds something to it. The medieval idea is that the Jews are a city on a hill of people living exemplary lives morally, and as such a good example to other peoples. The hope then for the future is only that everyone else will one day adopt the same theology or at least the same moral seriousness. The other idea is that of an ethical, political, artistic and scientific avant-garde. Obviously the scope of this idea is larger that any one people or religion. Both ideas are part of Judaism. The traditionalists, and most who are religious, emphasize only the former; some modernists, only the latter. The dispute concerns which is more important at the present time. If there were a branch of modernist Judaism that saw the avant-garde idea as most important, then it would become articulated in some novel and interesting ways. How vital and engaging that could be intellectually! Like the old ideas of God and his morality, this idea could easily be shared with many others; its historical origins are less important than its potentialities. Obviously, this idea is no stranger to messianic notions, but it is to modern Zionism, which imagines the collective redemption as satisfied by the achievement of a modern nation-state. What a limited ideal that is!

Lovers of tradition for its own sake often find appealing Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim's proclamation of a 614th commandment to not give Hitler posthumous victories -- merely by being Jewish and keeping the traditions. But that is not a way to prevent further Holocausts, unless you believe that the essence of the Holocaust was antisemitism. This is false. The Holocaust is partly the product of antisemitism, but also partly a consequence of late capitalist modernity, including such features as colonialism, the modern prison (and concentration camp, a colonialist invention that preceded the Nazi form of it by half a century), and psychiatry, as well as modern racism. The only way to avoid giving Hitler a posthumous victory is to understand how to prevent future holocausts. It is far from clear that today's social order and its managers have the knowledge and sufficient desire to do that.

There are elements of the Jewish experience that were generalized to include some other groups in the Nazi project. Those groups included Gypsies, homosexuals, and the 'mentally ill'. It is interesting to wonder what these groups had in common, in themselves or in Nazi ideology. Is that question not a very vital and still urgent one? There is also a way in which in modern experience aspects of Jewish social alienation and the exilic are generalized. The potentiality for concentration camps or mass imprisonment, the elimination of people deemed not needed, and mass murderous or genocidal practices still exists. The establishment of the state of Israel did nothing to change that.

In making the Jews into both (for the first time) a race and more broadly a bio-political malaise, conceived as innately possessed of infectious and dangerous traits of social and moral significance, the Nazis created new forms of pariah-hood and social exclusion. There is a logic in this that is poorly understood. If it were better understood, surely the result would be to enrich the possibilities of the Jewish religion among other things. But while it once meant an exilic status and identity, Jewishness now is entrapped in the triad of religious traditionalism, xenophobic and redemptive nationalism, and obsession with the status of the victim, falsely monopolized. Gone too largely is the messianic idea that played such an important role in modern political and social radicalism through both Jewish and Christian forms, and in ways partly common to them. Today everyone is supposed to have their own metaphysical home and feel at home in it. And yet there are more migrants and exiles than ever. I wonder if Judaism can be part of the solution or is stuck within the problem.

Nothing in this prevents or diminishes the importance of moral self-examination. Happy New Year.