The worst idolators are religious. If you want to lie successfully, make it clear you are telling the truth. The worst hypocrites are the most sincere, believing their own lies. Although Judaism is based on ideas of justice, it may be possible to love God without being just. (And of course this is a problem that all religions face: institutions for realizing the good, just like governments, leaders, teachers, prophets, and parents, they can fail us when we trust them when we should be thinking). That faith is not a machine for the production of the good is what the Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai demonstrates in Kadosh. The hero is a Torah scholar who spends his life studying with a group of men. He has a wife and they are childless. The rabbi persuades him he has an obligation to have children and he must divorce his wife who evidently cannot give him one in order to marry a woman who can. Reluctantly, he does so. His wife commits suicide. It is clear he feels for her, and his loss of her devastates him and the filmmaker makes this devastation palpable. He is a religious man, so we have no reason to doubt that he has kept every commandment while devoting himself to a life of study and worship and holiness. Every commandment except one: love your neighbor as yourself. Perhaps that includes the woman one lives with. The suggestion is that the man who devotes his whole life to loving God will indeed be holy, but at the price that he will not even be able to love his own wife. Today, a people who are supposed to be holy have returned to their ancestral land where they speak the language of their antiquity and its texts. This land and this language are both said sometimes to be holy. I am not sure what that could possibly mean. Perhaps the idea of being holy has some value. Does this mean being virtuous and just? The Greeks had virtue and justice without holiness, which was comparatively absent from their religion. Maybe this is why they made justice the consequence of thinking, whereas in ancient Judaism it was merely the consequence of obedience to the law. (But also, of course, with the advent of Rabbinical Judaism, study of it). Is the idea of the sacred a relic of the magic Judaism refused? (The Torah says, “There is no enchantment in Israel.”) Is the sacred the “presence” of the “spiritual”? Or of God, or his grace, or spirit, or presence, of gift? Does it come from the separation of the pure and the impure, which lies at the basis of the kosher laws? Is the pure the familiar and proper, and the stranger impure? In any case, and for whatever reason or complex of reasons, this people has had great trouble recognizing the rights and humanity and suffering of misfortune and injustice of a people living in its midst who individually and collectively are its neighbors, and of course I speak of the Palestinian people. Ironically, these neighbors are of related faiths (mostly Muslim, some Christian) with essentially the same idea of God, speak a closely related language, and have in common with the Jews that they are now a people of exile and diaspora, without a homeland as the Jewish people were for so long, displaced by them after waves of stateless Jewish refugees fled a Europe devastated by the nationalism purifying the imaginary community of strangers and deviants, including the ultimate aliens who were of course the Jews, with a barbarism which has been given the ironic name of a certain type of sacrifice from the ancient Jewish temple, although the Jews of Europe were “not sacrificed but killed with impunity” (Agamben). Jewish culture did not represent this idea of national purity; it represented ideas of justice, which Hitler despised. The refugees landed in what was then called Palestine where their leadership proceeded to create what was in some ways the century’s most nationalistic polity after Hitler’s Germany. They did not regard the people they displaced as subhuman, but they did treat them as enemies and still do. The Jewish state is a contradiction because the nation it represents does not correspond with the populace that inhabits its territory. It would be like if the United States were a nation of white people, or of Christians (some people publically advocate this, of course). In this respect the comparison with Apartheid South Africa is not entirely inaccurate, although it is exaggerated because Israeli society on the whole makes an effort to treat the Palestinians as equal citizens, but of course they cannot be, because the society is Jewish, and its name, its flag, and everything essential to it make this clear. It is a society that excludes a large part of its populace, a territory that belongs to only some of its inhabitants. There are of course aspects of the Jewish religion which render this an injustice; are there others that justify it and have made it possible, and that perhaps, we might hope, are in contradiction with these or that we might regard as inessential, antiquated, and worth abandoning without requiring us to abandon our fundamental commitments (and the fundamental commitment: which is to justice, not holiness)? The mayor of a small city in Israel was profile in Haaretz recently for defending Jewish racism. He made reference to the Book of Joshua. There, in the name of God, the people invaded the land they would again conquer some 30 centuries later, and proceed to exterminate the inhabitants. They were called Philistines. The people they displaced in the recent conquest, now conducted not in the name of a familial God but in the name of the same nineteenth century European ideology of nationalism that drove the second world war and was empowered by the bourgeoisie’s struggle to defeat socialist internationalism, are called by a cognate name. Is Judaism a religion of justice, or obedience to the law and the state, or liberation from oppression, or conquest and genocide? Should those of us who think it still has meaning and value argue and struggle to decide how we will understand our faith and what it requires of us? If the world needs to be perfected, how can we do this successfully by relying on ideas about the good that derive from the distant past?
Posted on: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 05:17:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015