Funeral elegy for American Judaism

Living in America as I do, and not France, where I might have wished to settle, I find I cannot easily avoid the religion thing. In France, it would be easier to say:

Religion? Of course. It's among the forms of thought and culture in the past.

And the Jewish people? Only the right speaks of them now. In America, to say this is to utter a lament. In France, any minority’s troubles can be a public concern, but intellectual culture is by its nature universalist. In America, a Jewish philosopher must be a kind of Jew, even if he is employed at a university; in France there is Jewish philosophy, and it is a genre of philosophy. That is because ideas are more important than persons, and their communities and identities.

Indeed, there is in France a thought of Judaism and Jewishness that elaborates a style of thinking without the concern for nation, community, family, and identity that occupies American Jews. The dominant tendencies in the American mind seem unable to fathom these possibilities. They have made French and European philosophy vital in ways that religious thought proper rarely is. Maybe the relevant claim is just that particular ‘national’ communities along with families and churches, are not dead but less important than they were in the middle ages, before the revolution, or in America. One might even ask, do you care at all about forms of thought, or only about raising your own family?

But what about the Holocaust? Doesn't it affirm, as Fackenheim authoritatively declared, the necessity of affirming Jewish particularity? Why not the necessity of affirming universal human solidarity, a fraternity of citizens, not members of a tribe, with equal liberty?

The Holocaust is with us, yes. The Zionists have drawn the wrong conclusion by 180 degrees. What they are doing continues the Holocaust in the name of opposing it (in a purely imaginary register).

Religion? Meaning traditions, texts? Good heavens, no one is abolishing the study of the literature of the middle ages, theology included, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologies included, and in all their forms! Jewish tradition, I love it, give me more; I too have a book collection. Preserving the past? That's why we have museums, libraries, books, schools. Maimonides is alive and well but will not be on the ballot and if he is, he gets only a veto. In France, the power of the Church was overthrown with that of the monarchy.

"So, why don't you go to that other place if you want? You can think as you like, but if you don't like the way things are here, go somewhere else." No, I will stay here, freely assert that I hate some things about this place (that I also love, but I take that for granted, and don't have to proclaim loyalty or obey its cheerleaders), and try to change them. That is not only my right but also my duty. This is what the Citizen is; you have replaced this figure with that of the Shopper. The Citizen as Shopper who is free to privately institute his Tastes. No, the Citizen is the resident as quarrelsome.

The Jewish traditions are part of the European ones intellectually, and thus "spiritually" (spiritual in France means intellectual; Americans think that is something special and unnecessary, probably for experts; what makes you think you're special?).

But, if only because I live in America, I still say the prayers, though there is no place in the forest to light the fire, and now, I fear, no one to say them with. All I can really do is tell the story.

But I'm old-fashioned. And so I cling to these remnants of a tradition, fragments. Standing in these ruins, invoking no "God" (American slavery destroyed the credibility of that idea, at least in this country, for it always means the Bosses of It All, with the demand being the Protestant one of simply Obedience; the American idea of God is Christian, anyway, and liberal Jews cannot escape that):

I belong to "the left," or even an idea thereof, though I know that today this tradition absolutely is alive, and its cause as much as ever. Even if the way we were before, often, was distorted, and our adversaries of course have no clue about what we really want. I belong only to the left, though I do so in ways that, for me, are sustained with some borrowings from traditions, some of which are "religious." I have to renounce my affiliation and much of my sympathy for many, perhaps most, of those who claim membership and participation in the religious tradition that most did and does inspire me. I certainly am disgusted by most of that "community's" leaders. So here it is: I am for "appropriation." I read the daily prayers from a fairly standard Reform Jewish prayerbook, and I must do so alone, as I would not be welcomed (as I was not, though partly for reasons I can connect with the larger problem but were not originally articulated with it), and I can only be proud of that, given the current situation. A fascist state built in their name corrupted the Jewish religion and the American Jewish world, much of its people and most of its official leadership. I renounce all identity. I draw on traditions, but I am not "in" them. Origin is not destiny. I believe in exile, willingness to be a pariah (even among theoretical pariahs whose ancestors included actual ones), wandering, and refusing idols. Your nation is murdering people in the name of an idol. The purest and most convincing and motivating idol will bear the closest resemblance to what anyone might say about the deity itself. The new golden calf will be found in the holiest of places, and people kill for it.

I am a man of the left. Religion is dead, long live its memory; may it be well used by some who have studied it. An establishment claims a right to my piety; I refuse. Call me what you will; your calumnies will not surprise me. Call it hatred, but a psalmist with a red flag, called a hater by his jailers, knows things you have no clue of. Those who are religious shall live, except the murderers (I would say, with Hamlet, but, alas, they will probably live on, as most of them do), but we shall have no more religion. It might be enough to have freedom, justice, democracy, peace, and a life.

The demand to be religious in America is a Protestant Christian attitude, and most public thinking about religion, including by religious Jews, is effectively Protestant. Some good uses have been made of politically sometimes, though basically it constricts the mind. Dissident opinions are met with a psychologizing moral disdain. American society and culture are reactionary, and in some ways effectively fascist, and have long been that way. It's a managed society, which is profoundly oppressive if you notice it.

There are resources in religion. It's too bad Americans think they are only accessible if you join a cult. Religions are cults. The place to live is the republic of letters. All of the options in Judaism today are inferior to what already surpassed them in the European enlightenment and the revolution that it gave rise to. Nationalism, including Israel, are the result of a counter-revolution that was waged against the revolution that, among other things, freed the Jews of Europe, or began to.

I just think there are deep problems in American culture, that the American Jewish world was heir to and caught up in, as everyone is in history, and now, in the current crisis created by Israel's latest war of aggression and massacre, there are things in our culture that need to be rethought and contested. This could be arduous. I am just a writer.

Arendt, when accused of not sufficiently supporting the Israeli state and its communitarian project, said that she could not love (or hate) a nation, only her own friends. Maybe the book I want to write would be titled after Buckley’s book on “Liberalism”; my title: Up from Religion. I am not against the world of the fathers, unless someone is trying to institute it. Yes, “Communism” as we knew it is dead, but if so that is truly unfortunate since it is with respect to the idea of the left that it represented that Thatcher’s statement truly applies that “there is no alternative.” Lenin is dead, opposition to capitalist wars is not. What some are saying is entailed as the meaning of Judaism is American military expansionism, and gated communities living in fortress states, armed to the teeth, fighting to the idea for a beautiful idea that is murderous, inclusive in a way that requires exclusivity. The Zionist warfare state is a continuation of one line of thought in modern European culture, particularly a German one; I follow the other path. Universality and a democratic republicanism on one side, nationalism, its romantic enchantments, war and death on the other.