Izgad is Aramaic for messenger or runner. We live in a world caught between secularism and religious fundamentalism. I am taking up my post, alongside many wiser souls, as a low ranking messenger boy in the fight to establish a third path. Along the way, I will be recommending a steady flow of good science fiction and fantasy in order to keep things entertaining.
Welcome Aboard and Enjoy the Ride!
In the previous post, I argued for the importance of ritual for the military model. Here I would like to explore the contrast between ritual and belief. Since the military model does not operate with a complex set of beliefs, it requires ritual to stand in its place. Ritual creates a kind of social ideology. One believes in the community of believers, mainly that one is part of a community with true beliefs. What the community of believers actually believes in is beside the point.
Like all forms of socialization, the military model works best to the extent that it can sell itself not as something to be intellectually accepted, but as something so obvious that it is simply impossible for there to be another way. Much of the power of this social ideology is that it can sell itself as not being ideological at all, but the simple unbiased reality accepted by all “reasonable” people. Such “non-thinking” is effectively accomplished through ritual, which serves to “remind” people of that which they should never need reminding of. Instead of discussing ideas, in the hope of building a community upon the foundation of an ideology that everyone actually agrees on, ritual uses a “false consensus effect” to create the illusion for the believer that all other participants are like them. The superficial act of a ritual, such as waving a flag or eating unleavened bread, allows a community to exist, despite the fact that members of the community might actually have little of substance in common with one another.
Using people’s heart-of-heart beliefs, as opposed to the motions of a ritual, as the basis for a community is simply impractical. Humans are not equipped to read minds to decipher other’s true intent. Even if they could, belief is something so particular to each person that no large group of people could ever truly agree about anything of substance. It is much better to simply use the acts of ritual as a substitute. Ritual has the virtue of keeping things very simple. One can see thousands of people practicing a ritual and know that every one of them is part of a common religion of practitioners of that ritual
Ritual should be seen as the
counter to belief with the two locked in a zero-sum game in which what benefits
one must, by definition, harm the other. Ritual obviates the need for belief
and, by extension, any attempt to insist on the importance of belief, certainly of the monotheistic kind, is
implicitly a rejection of ritual. For example, the God of monotheism, who is perfect, has no need for the flesh of animals to be burned on an altar. As such, belief in one God implicitly means to reject the sacrificial cult. Clearly, it is man, whether as an individual or as a collective, and not God who needs sacrifices.
Because it is the community that needs ritual, the best way to demonstrate a
commitment to the community above all else is through ritual. On the
other hand, a commitment to a purely intellectual belief can be demonstrated
precisely through the antinomian violation of ritual. This serves to declare that the community is not of absolute importance. Thus, the practice of ritual demonstrates a
willingness to place community before belief and a statement of belief implies
a willingness to turn against the community for the sake of that belief. Either
the commitment to community or the belief in a god must come first and trump the
other. They cannot both be first and, since they regularly come into conflict
with each other, one is forced to make a very stark choice.
I mentioned earlier that it is impractical for communities to seriously push belief because, unlike the practice of ritual, which is readily visible to all, personal belief is something beyond the evaluation of others. There is a further problem because the very attempt to consider what people in the community might believe actually undermines that very community. To value belief implicitly raises the specter that, in the absence of the ability to closely question all of one’s co-religionists, not all practitioners of the religion are believers and that one’s true community is not the same as one’s visible community. One thinks of the example of the Protestant Reformation, which was brought about by a crisis of faith that the visible Catholic Church really was the community of people saved through their faith in Jesus. The problem was not whether Jesus saved but whether people baptized as Catholics actually believed that Jesus saved.
The fact that ritual stands in
opposition to doctrinal beliefs does not negate the fact that military model
religions might develop catechisms. Admittedly, this will be under the influence of the other models. While catechisms may, on the surface,
appear to be statements of beliefs, their real purpose is just the opposite. By
transforming beliefs into a series of statements to be repeated by members of
the community, members are saved from actually having to believe in anything.
Such a catechism serves as a password to indicate membership, no different from
any other ritual or for that matter from a secret handshake used to gain
admission into a club. Like messianism, catechisms are a useful means for the military model to absorb the other models into itself and use them for its own ends.
Social ideology provides an
effective means of holding on to believers. There is no need to write works of
theology to educate believers. There is not even a need to argue with believers
to convince them that the religion of their birth is the true one. Furthermore,
the believer will serve as their own guard to keep themselves in the “faith.” Having
already identified themselves from birth with the religion, to reject the religion
means not just to reject some outside community, but their very being. Having
absorbed this military model thinking, they will fear that their doubts do not just
make them heretics, but also insane. They will therefore drown their doubts by redoubling their commitment to fortifying their communal reality through ritual.
With the number of religious leaders caught in some kind of sexual impropriety, it should be clear that antinomianism stands as one of the major threats to religion today. Antinomianism provides a spiritual blank check to violate any religious practice and say that not only is it ok but that is a mitzvah. In this, antinomianism should be seen as a virus that turns sins into commandments, hijacking religious faith against itself. Since antinomianism is not a rejection of the faith but its very affirmation, antinomians can piously perform all other commandments. This makes them hard to catch and increases the scandal when they are.
Antinomianism does not require any conspiracies of underground sects with sex rites as in the case of the Frankists. The logic of antinomianism is simply too obvious to anyone who has seriously thought about monotheist religious practice. A perfect God has no need for to you to keep his commandments. (The commands of an imperfect God can be completely ignored.) If I ate the Ultimate Traif Sandwich, God would still be perfect. Furthermore, God could command me to eat such a sandwich without sacrificing an iota of his perfection.
Does God want me to eat kitty stew? The fact that Leviticus and Deuteronomy imply that it is a sin does little to help me. Retreating into legal formalism simply makes the matter worse as it concedes the theological high ground. Since God is infinitely beyond human comprehension, it is impossible to truly fulfill his will by keeping any commandment. In reality, all food is traif as no person could ever eat in a way that replicates God’s perfect will. By eating kitty stew one at least has the virtue of not committing the blasphemy of pretending to fulfill God’s will.
Either I do not understand God’s will or I do. If I admit that I do not understand God’s will then I must remain neutral as to his opinion on kitty stew. If I do understand God’s will than I must be some kind of divine being myself and could never be held to words on a scroll. For a being so divine as me, could we even call it eating? Should we not rather call it the releasing of sparks of holiness trapped in the kitty stew?
The Maimonidean solution is not to challenge these arguments but to change the question. Instead of asking what God wants, a question that no honest monotheist could ever answer, we can ask what actions will benefit Judaism. Assuming that it is a good thing that a Jewish nation and religion continue to exist as vehicles for less false ideas about God, does my eating kitty stew make it less likely that I will be able to pass Judaism on to Kalman and Mackie? Here we are no longer operating in the realm of the divine, but the very human field of sociology. Jewish history offers a fairly convincing case that a Judaism that does not take “kitchen Judaism” seriously will not survive long in a meaningful sense.
I can eat kitty stew and make bracha on it without it negatively impacting my theology. How could kitty stew be more likely to mislead me about the nature of God than some kosher salami? Both are manifestations of materialism and thus both must either inhibit godliness or provide a means to find godliness with equal likelihood. In fact, the kitty stew would more likely benefit me spiritually by helping me get past my concerns about what other people think about me as well as trying to earn brownie points with God so I can make it into his Good Place. The problem with such a religion is that, while it may be incredibly meaningful to an individual, there is no way to pass it on to one's children.
Kitty stew could only be spiritually valuable to someone imbued with a deep love of kosher. It is only someone who honestly believed that his salvation depended upon keeping kosher could, upon reaching a higher spiritual state, realize that it is the exact opposite and then force himself to eat what remains truly repugnant to him. For someone not raised with an absolute commitment to kosher, there is no struggle and no act of keeping kosher, whether in its traditional or antinomian forms. A child raised in such an environment and taught to scorn legalism might appear, at first glance, to be spiritually enlightened. On the contrary, he never even reached the level of keeping kosher let alone transcending it. Without a foundation in the physical law, talk of the spirit is meaningless. A "true antinomian" must struggle with his violation. Anything less is simply discarding the yolk of heaven.
Much as Maimonideanism can neutralize an academic criticism of Judaism by absorbing its premises into itself, Maimonideanism can, similarly, counter antinomianism not be refuting it but by accepting its premises and offering a different conclusion. One can accept that God is not a being that you can score points with by trying to fulfill his will and still find spiritual fulfillment in Jewish practice enough to try to pass it along to the next generation.
There is a common misunderstanding about libertarians that we worship the market. We are supposed to believe that market solutions are perfect and if only the government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. Someone must have assumed that Adam Smith was not being ironic when he compared the market to an "invisible hand" and (foreshadowing Darwin) argued that it is possible to have an intelligent process without any kind of intelligent designer. The market is not providence. Libertarianism is a distinctly secular (in the classic sense of being neutral about religion) anti-utopian doctrine. We do not believe that anything resembling a perfect world is possible. Human beings are flawed, both intellectually and morally; any human creation, including markets, will inevitably inherit those same flaws to some degree. This anti-utopianism is balanced by an anti-nihilism. If a perfect world is not possible, a significantly better world can be fashioned through the use of reason.
It is because libertarians are such anti-utopians that, more than we have confidence in any Smithian hidden hand, we fear government. (Whether or not I can come up with a good alternative to government licenses, I do fear that the Trump administration will use them to round up opponents. Forgive me for taking liberal concerns over Trump seriously and not as mere political rhetoric.) It is government, particularly the kind that is willing to compromise on the checks and balances means for its own ideological ends, that possesses a utopian streak. Who but a utopian would be unable to imagine a day when the very institutions they created might be turned against them? If government means to use force, even murder, how can one justify committing such violence unless one is supremely confident that each specific government action would either lead to a significantly better world or at least to prevent a worse one from coming about? Furthermore, to agree to pay taxes means buying guns for anonymous people, who will then use them to kill people for reasons that you will never be told. The only way it can be morally justifiable to agree to such a deal is if you believe there is some moral guidance protecting government officials from ever making a mistake (something akin to nineteenth-century Catholic beliefs regarding papal ex-cathedra statements). Note that this is particularly true regarding democratic governments as monarchies and aristocracies deny that personal choice is even relevant to government decisions and claim no moral authority from them.
I would go so far as to say that those who claim that libertarians worship the market are revealing something about their own worship of government. They are so enraptured with government as the solution that they cannot imagine someone questioning the legitimacy of government as an instrument of violence and therefore considering an alternative. They, therefore, attribute their own utopian faith in government to libertarians and accuse libertarians of being market worshipers.
A useful test as to whether someone tolerates government simply on pragmatic grounds or worships it as the key to man's salvation is if someone is inclined to accuse libertarians of market worship. It should follow naturally for government pragmatists, who believe that government is an inherently flawed institution, that a better solution is hypothetically possible and that other people will wish to pursue it. Such people might be wrong in regard to their proposed alternatives, but there is no reason to assume that they are motivated by a blind faith in markets.
Alternatively, we can examine if a person is willing to accept Max Weber's (not a libertarian) definition of government as a "monopoly on violence." A person who feels the need to dance around the issue that government is an act of violence is presumably doing so because they are so wrapped up in government worship that they cannot think outside of it. If government is people coming together for the sake of civilization, peace, and love while everything else is darkness, then government cannot be violent. On the contrary, it is those who reject government who must be violent as they are opposing civilization, peace, and love.
For all of my talk about hating government and that taxation is theft, I do believe it is important to recognize the limitations of such a position. A libertarianism whose hatred of government is not matched by a love of liberty will fall to nihilism and eventually authoritarianism. The rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump should make this obvious. Part of the blame for the alt-right and Trump lies within the Rothbardian libertarian tradition as embodied by figures such as Ron Paul, Walter Block, and Tom Woods. (To any Rothbardians out there, much as part of the problem with government worshipers is that they cannot imagine how anyone in good faith could think of them as violent, your inability to imagine how someone in good faith might think that you are enabling the alt-right is a big part of the problem.) I supported Ron Paul for president and highly recommend Block's Defending the Undefendable as a gateway into accepting the more radical implications of libertarianism. The Rothbardians deserve a lot of credit for keeping the libertarian focus on the immorality of government. Without them, it would be too easy to fall into making pragmatic compromises that would endanger the soul of the movement. Rothbardians are an important part of libertarianism and need to be kept as part of the family. That being said, the Rothbardian habit of focusing on opposition to the government to the exclusion of almost anything else led to the development of a certain blind spot for angry white men, who hate the government and even the Federal Reserve, ignoring whether such views came from a genuine love of liberty.
Ideally, there should not be any laws against private discrimination. This does not mean that libertarians should not be extremely wary of those whose main objection to government is that it bans discrimination. It very well may be that Donald Trump was not worse than other Republican candidates and that the liberal media hated him the most. This does not mean that one should form a Libertarians for Trump group.
This also has implications for dealing with terrorism and authoritarianism. There are good reasons to oppose US policy in the Middle East. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud are not libertarians. I would even go so far as to say that a large part of the Israeli-Palestinian problem has been caused by thinking in terms of states as opposed to private property owners, whether Jews or Muslims, coming to personal agreements, likely leading to some kind of multi-political entity peace plan. That being said, this does not mean that one should not actively be more against Hamas, Assad, or Putin than Israel. As libertarians, we should not support intervention in Syria even if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. To go out on a limb to argue that he did not use such weapons and is merely the victim of a neo-conservative conspiracy (possibly true) is to signal that you are motivated by something other than liberty, likely a willingness to think well of anyone the CIA hates. That is an apology for authoritarianism and defending oneself by saying that libertarianism opposes tyranny, while true, simply means that one has completely betrayed libertarian ideals to the extent that libertarianism has become a dead letter ideology whose chief value now is to serve as moral cover for what libertarians should abhor.
You can justify supporting Trump on libertarian grounds (just as it would not be a contradiction for a libertarian to "feel the Bern.") There are also arguments to be made in favor of Hamas, Assad, and Putin. That being said, if, out of all the issues in the world you could have chosen, you go for one of these, I cannot take you seriously as being a libertarian in good faith. This issue is important precisely because libertarianism really can be used to justify anything in practice. Therefore, a libertarian movement requires that certain positions, a priori, render a person unacceptable for membership. Note that such a person might still be a righteous libertarian at heart even as I exclude him but not others who are ideologically less pure.
If one takes a step back to look at the Rothbardians, there is a deeper problem than Trump and other kinds of authoritarian apologetics. One is always going to have a lot of latitude in who to attack and who to defend when analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Inconsistencies are only going to appear when you compare who someone attacks with whom they defend. One of the curiosities of the Rothbardians is the paradox of both demanding strict ideological purity to the extent of attacking other libertarians with a willingness to tolerate figures from the alt-right. This apparent contradiction begins to make a frightening amount of sense if you take a party approach to ideology. If you assume that the point of libertarianism is to fight the government, you are going to have a problem in deciding between all the different ways of doing so. If you wish to maintain the pretense that your system is complete then you are going to need some kind of party to make decisions as to which of the many possibilities is the one true path. This means that party loyalty becomes the ideology. Under such circumstances, it becomes necessary to demonstrate party loyalty in an antinomian fashion by doing things that would otherwise appear to go against one's ideology. Rothbardians believe more in their party's strategy of courting angry white men, who hate the government than they believe in liberty. In the end, their libertarianism devolves into promoting non-libertarian ideas like "blood and soil" and claiming to be all the more libertarian for doing so.
A libertarian hatred of government needs to be matched with a love of liberty as an ongoing dialectic. For me, loving liberty means that each person has value as a narrative that they control through personal choices. People's choices matter all the more when we think that they are making a mistake. If it is not a mistake, then the choice has no positive value as a choice. Considering the limitations of human beings with their finite knowledge and lifespans, if people only remained individuals, their lives could have little meaning. Thus, the central choice of any human narrative is which society (if any and when) should a person submit themselves to. (Note that even Ayn Rand's heroes in Atlas Shrugged join a society.) To initiate aggression is to negate a person's choice, their very meaning in life. As government is the monopoly on violence, government stands as the de facto primary threat to choice. To equate government with society is to deny humans that most critical choice of all, what society to join and under what terms.
In loving liberty and not just hating government there is a challenge. If that love is expressed just in market terms, then it is going to look awfully like market worship. What is needed is an embracement of the full range of human choices, including ones that we do not approve of. It should be noted that just as this model celebrates the rights of individuals to defy society, it takes it as a given that there can be such a thing as something society disapproves of. Hence the celebration of choice has the paradoxical requirement of opposing the action. There can be no such thing as celebrating a choice you approve of. For example, I can celebrate the liberty of gay marriage precisely to the extent that I mourn the loss of traditional values. Similarly, I can celebrate the liberty of bakers refusing to bake gay wedding cakes as manifestations of intolerance. In both cases, I have paid the necessary "blood price" to allow liberty to have meaning. Note that this is not some utopian faith in liberty as leading to an ideal world. On the contrary, such liberty is founded on its tragic implications, one that ought to be avoided, human life having meaning be damned, if it were not for the fact that the government alternative is simply too horrific to accept.
Libertarianism is not some dangerous cult that encourages people to worship the market and be paranoid about the government. On the contrary, it accepts the sobering reality that government is an act of violence. The libertarian walks out from the ruins of his utopian dreams that he has abandoned with his rejection of government and seeks to learn to love the hard road of liberty. Hating the government is easy. Loving liberty, with all of its imperfections, is a challenge worth embracing.
With the recent rash of shootings has come a renewed debate over the distinction between a terrorist and a lone wolf. (Clearly, both whites and non-whites can be terrorists.) With Islamic terrorism and the Israeli-Arab conflict always in the news, there is the debate as to what is terrorism and what is a war crime. These issues tend to bog down into polemics so there is a benefit to offering specific definitions for the sake of clarity. Imagine three criminals standing before you, an SS officer, an angry white man and a member of ISIS. All three of them have murdered a classroom full of children so there is no doubt that they are all very bad people, who deserve punishment. The question becomes how they may be treated. The SS officer and the white man, as a war criminal and a lone wolf, have rights while the ISIS terrorist does not.
The SS officer is in uniform and a member of the German armed forces. As such, though he is a war criminal, he is protected by the social contract your country has with Germany. We must accept that he has rights and cannot simply be tortured to death. There is a benefit to declaring him a war criminal in that the German government, by putting him in uniform, has placed its entire leadership and population as guarantors of his good conduct. Ultimately, they are the ones truly responsible for his conduct; the fact that he is the immediate cause of the crime is incidental. Think of the uniform as a loan contract in much the same way as a paper currency that can be called in. The government can disavow the soldier; at which point the uniform becomes null and void. This would render our war criminal an out-of-uniform combatant and thus a spy/saboteur. As such he has no rights and can be tortured or killed at will without trial. Alternatively, his government can choose to acknowledge the soldier, but this would force them to make some kind of restitution to the satisfaction of the victim's government (or social contract insurance agency). Failure to do so would allow the government to take to seek satisfaction in blood. This would allow for the bombardment of German civilian populations and, afterward, the execution of German political leaders.
The lone wolf shooter is not protected by any uniform but, even though he is a criminal, he is still a citizen with rights. His crime does not imply a larger rejection of the social contract so the social contract continues to protect him. As such, he must be given a trial. To be clear, what makes him a lone wolf and not a terrorist is the fact that he lacks any larger material and ideological support structure. This, admittedly, can make it difficult to tell the difference between a lone wolf and a terrorist. It is quite possible that the entire distinction may rest on the discovery of a pamphlet in the person's possession or a history of visiting a terrorist website.
This brings us to the terrorist. The most important thing about a terrorist is that he is an out-of-uniform combatant just like a spy/saboteur. This means that not only is it permissible to not grant him any rights, but it may also be necessary. Consider that the distinction between soldiers and civilians is crucial to the maintenance of civilized order even and especially in a time of war. This distinction requires that soldiers be easily identifiable with uniforms. Unless the penalties for violating that distinction are severe no country would ever bother to hold them.
Not only is the terrorist, by definition, guilty of endangering civilization by undermining the social contract, but the so-called human rights activist who attempts to grant the terrorist rights is also guilty as he has rendered the line between soldier and civilian meaningless. Thus, we must recognize an antinomian "true" human rights, which involves torturing the terrorist. The very act of torturing the terrorist, regardless of the information he might provide, is protecting civilians from harm. The belief in the principle that terrorists do not have rights is precisely what is giving civilians rights. The person who objects to this is himself the real violator of human rights and it is as if he personally tortured innocent people. (To be clear, what is necessary is the belief in the moral rightness of torturing terrorists, which likely requires the occasional literal fulfillment. This acceptance allows for demonstrations of mercy in individual cases. Just because the Law is righteous does not mean it is always right to fulfill the Law.)
As you recall, the distinction between a terrorist and a lone wolf killer is the existence of a material and ideological support system. What differentiates the terrorist from a war criminal is that the terrorist's support structure is not one with which we have any kind of implied social contract relationship. We need to respect the rights of the war criminal in order to demonstrate that we were true to the social contract and justify placing his country's leadership and people outside of it. By contrast, we never had any kind of social contract with the terrorist organization. Furthermore, terrorist organizations, while they may possess a leadership and funders, lack a clearly identified civilian population to pay the price for their crimes. For example, while it was morally permissible to bomb German cities for Nazi war crimes, bombing Afghani cities in retaliation for Al-Qaeda terrorist crimes would have been far more problematic. Since there are no civilians to pay for terrorist crimes, we are justified in pursuing the leadership in a more aggressive fashion. Since terrorist leaders may prove more elusive than war criminal political leaders, this leaves the captured terrorist to pay the full weight of the crime. This is despite the fact that ultimately his role was only incidental as compared to the terrorist leaders who planned the action and provided the physical and ideological support to make it possible.
A large part of the debate over who counts as a terrorist revolves around the implied assumption of a support structure. For example, if you already accept the existence of an entity called "radical Islam" or that Islam is an inherently violent religion then you will be inclined to see any violent Muslim as a terrorist. On the other hand, if you believe that complaints about Islamic extremism are simply cover for "Islamophobia" then you will dismiss any charge of terrorism. Similarly, in regards to white supremacists, if you believe that there really is something racist underlying white American culture then you are going to be more likely to see someone like Dylann Roof, who massacred a black church bible study group in Charleston, as a terrorist instead of simply as a misguided and disturbed young man.
Keep in mind that the distinction between a lone wolf and a terrorist lies completely within the realm of intention; was the crime committed as part of a larger conspiracy by a non-social contract organization to pursue their political goals. It is not just the individual terrorist that we need to make assumptions about but a wider network of people to the point of even calling them a group. Therefore, as none of us can read minds, we can never prove whether someone is one or the other; it is simply a judgment call. This has become even more so in recent years as the line between the terrorist support structure and its perpetrators has become more tenuous. For example, the 9/11 hijackers received direct material support from Al-Qaeda so it is very difficult to pretend that they were just some guys who decided on their own to crash planes into buildings. Contrast this with ISIS terrorists where ISIS merely has to operate a website and angry Muslims draw inspiration to engage in ramming and knifing attacks. It is hard to say that someone who happens to read an ISIS website before committing murder is an ISIS terrorist.
The consequences of who gets the terrorist label are literally a matter of life and death and demand caution. If Islamic terrorism exists. than someone operating a pro-ISIS website calling for jihad is a terrorist and can be shot on sight without the benefit of a trial. (As per the Julius Streicher principle, such speech is not really speech but a conspiracy to commit murder.) If we are wrong, then we have a martyr for free speech on our hands. Before you give the go-ahead to kill radical Islamic bloggers consider that, by the same logic, we should probably recognize that white supremacists exist as a movement and not just disturbed individuals, then the government should have responded to the Charleston shooting by going door to door and executing white supremacist bloggers and radio show hosts, particularly those that directly influenced Roof.
While we can never prove anything in any particular case, we can demand intellectual consistency. If you are quick to condemn Islamic terrorism but bend over backward to deny that there can be white supremacist terrorists there is a problem. Similarly, if you refrain from using the terrorist label unless they are white men, you are not being hones either.
(Part II) The vampires attack Uman on Rosh Hashanah knowing that they would find many Jews with a demonstrated predilection for the dark side of idolatry and antinomianism. Rebbe Frost quickly converts the class to vampire Judaism. The only survivor is Chananya Yom Tov Lipa Katznellenbogenstein. (I know that he is a Shmuel Kunda creation, but bear with me.) Because of the events of the Magic Yarmulka, Chananya has become an excellent punchball player and a committed rationalist. He no longer believes in magic (yarmulka or otherwise) and strives to improve himself by working hard enough to match his God-given intelligence. He had refused to go on the class trip to Uman, saving his soul twice over. Chananya is left in a deep spiritual crisis. How could it be that his rebbe and the entire class would so easily abandon halakhic Judaism? Does not the existence of vampires prove that magic exists and refute science? Chananya decides to follow in the rationalist footsteps of the spy Caleb, who resisted the call of the antinomian spies by visiting the Cave of Machpelah to pray. He refuses to go to Rachel's Tomb because he found the Abie Rotenberg song to be idolatrous. God forbid that a monotheist Jew like Chananya would even think of praying to the patriarchs. On the contrary, Chananya only wishes to better contemplate their pious example so that his faith in reason (and the source of all reason) can be rectified. It is therefore to Chananya's great surprise that he meets the patriarch Jacob, who had been living his undead existence in the cave for more than three-thousand years. Chananya expresses his ambiguous feelings in joining Team Jacob with "I Want to Know." I want to know if I should care I want to know if there is cause to fear Chananya wants to know if there is any point in continuing to struggle against vampire antinomianism. He also wants to know if he should be afraid that a vampire like Jacob might bite him. I've searched for days And thought for nights Chananya has searched for spiritual daylight to help bolster his intellectual rejection of vampire antinomianism that he has thought through. Could my whole life been a meaningless plot Could it be true, I am only half a man Using post-modern meta-narrative, Chananya questions whether this whole musical is ridiculous and whether he is simply a screeching Jewish kid. Then I met him, he brought me the signs How blind I have been not to see the light Show me the way, the only way I've waited long for this day Chananya met Jacob, who offers to instruct him in the Guide for the Perplexed and its esoteric vampire fighting secrets. (As a patriarch, Jacob has the chronological defying power of knowing literally all of Torah.) Chananya laments that he was never taught actual rationalist monotheist Judaism in yeshiva. He begs Jacob to instruct him in this one true religious way that allows for so many different ways. And now I now that I should care And now I now that there is cause to fear But I would like to know what can I do Now Chananya knows that there is objective truth known to reason that he should care about. He also knows that there really is a God worth fearing. This leaves Chananya, though, with a dilemma. What can he do against the vampires? He does not know the location of their secret headquarters nor does he know how to defeat such powerful enemies. The first problem is solved when Chananya realizes that it is pashut p'shat in Dracula that the town of Klausenberg, a city with a strong historic Jewish presence, is close to Castle Dracula. This must be the place where antinomian Jews and vampires first made their unholy alliance to take over the world. Though Chananya is eager to slay his rebbe and all his former classmates, Jacob cautions him to take heart as to the true way to defeat vampires. Together they sing "Sunshine." The song mixes their two distinct pains of loneliness, Chananya's recent and raw loss of his rebbe and classmates with Jacob's long-enduring agony of thousands of years of being a vegetarian vampire cut off from both the Jewish community and philosopher's heaven. Though the world's astray And has slowly lost its way With the goal of virtue fading
The world has been led to follow vampirism, abandoning any sense of Aristotelian virtue ethics, with its sense of objective good and bad action, in favor of brute power. There's a steady light That has kept away the night With the brightness it's creating Can we bring the world it's only sunshine Only Torah yields the hope for mankind Let the beauty of our song Find the good in everyone Through the darkness shines our faith in our times At a practical level, it is only the rationalism of the Mishnah Torah that can defeat the vampires. Being a Maimonidean frees you of superstition and allows you to recognize that there is nothing supernatural about vampires. They are nothing but a virus that can be eradicated. Even at night, they can be defeated with UV lights. The supposed superhuman strength of vampires is no match for a philosopher on the Maimonidean diet. At a spiritual level, Maimonideanism is a necessary antidote to vampirism. As long as people think of religion in terms of power and becoming immortal, they will inevitably be seduced by the allure of vampires and their offer of power and immortality. Though we number just a few We radiate the truth Through the darkness shines our faith for all time Maimonideans have always been a very small minority even within the Jewish community. It is really hard for them to even put a minyan together. But the moral power of their positions is so great that it radiates outward keeping idolatry in check. Even pagan Jews have to pretend to believe in God. Chananya journeys to Klausenberg and enters the secret underground vampire crypt. He quickly finds himself surrounded by Rebbe Frost and his former classmates. Rebbe Frost mocks philosophy as the destroyer of faith and asks Chananya what he believes in now his position is so clearly hopeless. Chananya confounds the vampires with the Averroesistic hymn, "B'siyata D'shmaya." These lyrics appear to endorse superstition while really being an ode to science. Have you ever felt there is nowhere to turn Things feel confused No one's concerned The times we live in are o so dark
The faith alights a spark There is a vision, eases pain Hope arises again, hope arises again Everyone feels confused on occasion by the mysteries of the universe. A philosophical diety seems to lack the personal touch of mysticism with its idols and antinomianism. One might even turn to the darkness of vampires at a time like this when they appear to dominate. Faith in reason is a spark that protects you from the pain of a vampire bite. The philosopher, with his hope that his consciousness will become part of the eternal mind, will arise even after death, unlike the vampire who will not arise once properly staked but will turn to dust. B'siyata D'shmaya, whatever I do When I need him to help me, he always comes through Never will I feel alone Without him who can stand on their own The Truths of physics, as embodied by the movements of the heavens, will never let a rationalist down. Chananya, even by himself, is never truly alone and has no need for the vampires' achdus hivemind. Prayer after prayer, tear after tear Begging for help, for heaven to hear When Hashem at his side Every door is open wide Our only hope is to look to the sky Where he waits for our cries What else produces tears like praying over some especially dense philosophical prose? One needs to open one's mind to hear the rational music of the heavens. When you place yourself on the side of universals, you can understand anything. There is no hope in looking to mysticism for understanding, but only in looking at the manifest laws of the universe seen in the heavens, which wait for us to cry out eureka.
What follows is the bloodiest, most elaborate, and coolest fight scene in the history of Jewish musicals.
Next, comes a punchball duel with Simcha Stark, which explains why it was only rational for Chananya to want sunglasses in an underground crypt. Rebbe Frost is shocked that the best boy in the park could lose at punchball. He pretends to do teshuva, singing the song from the Marvelous Middos Machine. Chananya responds that he always thought Abie Rotenberg was an idolater and performs the quadruple Death by Bais Din combo needed to kill senior vampires. The musical ends with "Kumt Shoin." These are the last lines of the Mishnah Torah, indicating the importance of Maimonides. They also are a rejection of the kind of apocalyptic political messianism that can only lead to antinomianism and ultimately vampirism. The rabbis as opposed to the "true tzadikim," never desired the Messiah to take over the world and rule over the gentiles. On the contrary, they honestly wished to be left alone to study God's Torah.
(Part I) The counter to the Jews' naive hopes for the future is revealed in the song "Klal Yisroel Together," which takes the perspective of a new Jewish vampire.
Quiet shul a foreign land
sits and davans an older man
What kind of shul is quiet with no talking? This must be a shul in which vampires gather to listen to their gadol hador. The vampires take the words of their sages very seriously and kill anyone who defiles the sanctity of their synagogue. In this context, davaning does not mean praying, but preying. An "older man" is a vampire, who is older than mortal men.
You're amazed at his life of simplicity
A vampire's life of drinking blood is very simple (besides for the fancy clothes and seducing women). This makes a vampire much holier than those "fake tzadikim," who need extravagant luxuries like bread and salt.
How his words reach you with sensitivity
And your eyes recognize as never before
That the dream that he preys for is yours
The newborn vampire is struck by the telepathic communications he is receiving from the vampire collective. He suddenly realizes that he too dreams of preying upon humans and drinking them dry.
Miles apart
Close at heart
Feel the bound as one from the start
All the mountains and oceans are in our way
We are joined from the time of that wondrous day
When at Sinai we learned the path we would take
That the chains of our past will never break
Through the power of the hive mind, vampires can feel as bound and close at heart even from miles away. Mountains and oceans do not matter because vampires are joined by the day they were converted. Furthermore, antinomian Jews look to the gathering of Sinai when they worshiped the Golden Calf. It takes a very special kind of Torah scholar to hear "I am the Lord your God" and conclude that one should bow down to an idol. (If you donate gold to our charity, tzadikim will melt it into a calf and worship it for three weeks straight over the course of the auspicious time between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av. This proves that, in fact, we do believe in one God, money.) By rendering themselves immortal, these Jews are guaranteed protection against the threat of modernity as they will have no need to try passing on their values to the next generation.
Together we dance together we sing
Throughout the world how our achdus does ring
Klal Yisroel together today
Even though we seem so far away
Together we cry we hope and we prey
Let's bring each other closer each day
Klal Yisrael sharing the dream
Sheves achim gam yachad
Because of their hivemind, the vampires are the masters of achdus (unity). Unity is an intrinsically vampire doctrine as what it really means is that I will bite you and you will now do things my way. This is how Jews can be brought closer each day until all Jews can become brothers of one blood, together as one mind.
All assembled dressed in white
With awe and fear this Kol Nidre night
Kol Nidre is a highly antinomian concept in which a person is released from their vows. The antinomian is freed from his promise to refrain from biting pigs and save them from the forces of the klipot. The vampire is freed from his promise to not bite people and save them from the Angel of Death.
There is a feeling here
When Neilah is near
That we'll all be inscribed with another year
A vampire can very confident at the end of every Yom Kippur that he will still be alive the following year.
And when Simchas Torah brings that joyful harmony
We are ever bound in stronger unity
If regular Jews got the idea that the point of Simchas Torah was to get drunk, you can hardly blame vampire Jews for turning Simchas Torah into a joyful feeding frenzy that brings new converts in harmony with the hive mind.
It will now be revealed that the rebbe, who taught the class the "Torah Today" song is actually the "older man," one of the head vampires. He has been priming his students to accept vampirism, the true message of his song.
For the past forty years, Yerachmiel Begun has led the Miami Boys Choir, one of the most successful musical groups in the Orthodox world. It will come as a shock that all of this has been cover for Begun's lifelong dream to write a vampire musical. Many of his beloved songs have really been describing scenes for this musical. The key for reading these songs has been to recognize that references to the night are really about vampires and daylight has been the rejection of vampirism in favor of a non-antinomian Torah lifestyle.
The musical opens with the singing of "V'he Shamadah" in the background as the narrator explains that the great enemy of the Jewish people has always been the vampires, who, as immortal beings, have been able to survive from generation to generation to try to destroy us. This war goes back to vampire Laban, the Aramean who "destroyed" our father Jacob by turning him into a creature of the night. This, though, was part of the divine plan to allow Jacob to survive the bite of vampire Esau. Jacob's neck became sparkly rock hard (like a Twilight vampire) and cracked Esau's fangs. The righteous Jacob was unique in history in being able to become a vampire and not lose his soul. (He did not even need a gypsy curse to put it back.) This is indicated by Rashi's comment that Jacob lived the life of a vampire like Laban, but still kept the commandments. Jacob survived as a vampire, which explains the rabbinic statement that "Jacob never died." Who else, besides for a vampire, does not die even after they are buried?
Down through the centuries, Jacob has guided his children in fighting vampires. The vampires, seeking revenge against Jacob, have waged a never-ending campaign to destroy the Jewish people by inventing anti-Semitism. It was a vampire intelligence that came up with the idea that Jews need blood for their matzah. The vampires' efforts culminated in the Holocaust. (As we know from the novels of Dan Simmons and Guillermo del Toro, the vampires were allied with the Nazis.)
With the defeat of the Nazis and the near destruction of the vampires, the Jewish people appeared safe. The following decades saw enormous growth within the religious community. Unfortunately, a new phase of the vampire campaign was about to arise as the vampires realized that contrary to their original experience with Jacob, Jews made particularly effective vampires. For one thing, Jews are immune to crosses. (See the example of vampire Fagan in the novel Artful.)
These sentiments are expressed in the song "Torah Today." A rebbe leads his class in this song of Jewish success, but, in an ironic foreshadowing of the horrors to be revealed, their statements hint at the true connection between Judaism, antinomianism, and vampirism. The fact that the children do not appreciate the true meaning of what they are saying demonstrates how spiritually unprepared they are for the vampire onslaught.
Distant memories of a time not long ago
Vibrant shadows of an era we would want to know
In our minds an image glowing true tzadikim in every town
And the sounds of learning were ever growing
All has vanished never to be found
Somehow slowly the sun is rising once again
Building boldly can we recapture what was then
The Jews in this period of vampire free sun rejoice even as they mourn the loss of pre-war Europe. What they fail to understand was that, even then, there existed the spiritual rot of antinomianism indicated by the term "true tzadikim." Whenever you see a seemingly superfluous adjective in front of some virtuous position, you know that you are dealing not with the virtue but with its antinomian rejection. For example, why would anyone use the term "social justice?" Is there a kind of justice that is not social? The reality is that justice, with its claims of property and individual rights, often does not satisfy certain people as it does not allow them to redistribute property as they see fit and force people to comply with their utopian blueprints. The solution is to reject justice in the name of a higher ideal of doing whatever you happen to feel is right at the moment. Advocates of social justice believe that the only way to truly be just is to commit injustice and reject individual liberty. From their perspective, they are the ones who are truly just and defenders of justice are really the ones who are unjust.
Similarly, how can you talk about a "true tzadik?" Is there a "fake tzadik?" As with social justice, a conventional tzadik is held back by keeping to the letter of Jewish law. A "true tzadik" understands that Torah itself holds up the world and negates the actual practice of halakha. So the only "true" way to learn Torah is to do so while eating a ham sandwich. Such learning makes a particular sound that grows as the tzadik takes pleasure in contemplating this righteous paradox. Any Torah scholar who balks at such a "holy" deed is simply a "fake tzadik."
These secretly antinomian Torah scholars so beloved by the Jewish people, realizing what lay behind the Nazis, embraced the vampire ideology as the true fulfillment of everything they ever wanted to get out of Judaism, power, and immortality (in this world no less). This explains why their bodies vanished and were never found. These rabbis, having come to their vampire maturity, are now set to bring about their version of the messianic End of Days by turning the Jewish people into a vampire army and destroy the world. This is indicated by the lines:
We've set our hearts to form a plan
Unrelenting so much to regain
Can see the future from where we stand
Let's move closer we can build the flame
Who but a vampire can be unrelenting in plotting for the future?
In describing the transition from rabbi to vampire we are told:
Their life is learning they strive with great intensity
Others advancing each day a daf devotedly
On that night they gathered to show what matters
The Torah world stood as one with pride
In silent reflection with one direction
We could feel that time was on our side
These antinomian rabbis in life only cared about Torah and not about morality. In fact, rejecting morality served to demonstrate their superior commitment to Torah. So, on a certain night, they gathered together to reject morality in the clearest way possible and became vampires. This allowed them to stand together with a unified hive mind knowing that, being immortal, time was on their side and they will be able to take over the world.
I wrote a post over at the Modern Torah Leadership blog on the travails of my son, Mackie, from a Maimonidean perspective. I even managed to work in antinomianism.
I thank my mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law and modern medicine that my son is still alive. Hopefully, soon I will be able to report that he is out of all danger.
In the previous post, I argued that Haredi Judaism, to the extent that it accepted charismatic authority in the form of Gedolim, must be seen as an anti-halakhic movement. Charismatic authority is implicitly antinomian in that the only way for someone to demonstrate their absolute loyalty to the charismatic authority figure, as opposed to some textual authority, is to violate the law as interpreted through text. For example, Sabbateans were known to secretly eat a cherry on the fast of Tisha B'Av to demonstrate that they did not really need to fast on account of the coming of Sabbatai Sevi. On the contrary, the way to now truly fulfill the commandment of fasting was to eat. The real purpose of fasting was to signify faith in the coming of Sabbatai, the Messiah. So by showing such faith in Sabbatai, as to do what might look like a sin, you are the one who is really fasting, as opposed to the fasting non-believers, who are really the ones eating. Similarly, if you believe that it is impossible to know the law through one's own intellectual efforts, but require the aid of Gedolim, then the logical way to demonstrate this faith is to commit a sin like taking a bite out of that traif sandwich at the command of the Gadol.
In a post-Enlightenment world, there are good reasons to be tempted by charismatic authority. It very neatly solves the challenge to authority both from potentially heterodox methods of interpreting the world (such as science) and, most importantly, from non-believing clergymen, working to bring down the faith from within. Charismatic authority, if we accept it, clearly trumps science and offers an a priori religious authority that makes liberal clergymen irrelevant. We see this logic at work within American Protestantism as well, where the Evangelical use of charismatic authority has beaten the text-based authority of the mainline denominations.
Let me suggest an approach to religious authority that might redeem text-based authority in the modern world, making use of John Locke style social contract theory in which everyone is free to follow their own understanding of Judaism and free to reject other opinions as demonstrating that the person is not serious about their Judaism, all the while being subject to everyone else having that same power. Here is another thought experiment. As a scholar of Jewish history, I have just made an important discovery in my university library, a set of Gemarah and Shulhan Arukh. Our parents and grandparents were all committed socialists, who raised us on kibbutzim. So despite the fact that we all strongly identify as Jews, none of us know anything about halakha. Even after we started believing in God again, we felt that there was something missing in our relationship to him. Observing the laws in these books look like the perfect solution we have been praying for.
We are going to start a club called the LOJS (Local Orthodox Jewish Synagogue). We will gather together on Saturdays to engage in Jewish worship, as set forth in the books I found, and to listen to lectures on how to observe the many strange laws found in these books. (Can you believe it, but we are going to have to baptize our dishes.) Sessions will be presided over by a Jewish studies professor, whom we will call a rabbi. There is nothing special about him and people should feel free to ignore him. It just makes sense to have someone in charge to be officially not obeyed.
Word of the LOJS club is spreading and soon we will have chapters in many different cities. Now, in trying to recreate some form of traditionally observant Judaism, we will face a number of challenges related to authority. We are trying to create a religion based on what we read in a set of books. These books say a lot of things, much of which is blatantly contradictory (do we listen to Bait Hillel or Beit Shammai) or simply difficult to understand, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and reasonable disagreement. So even if everyone was totally committed, we would have people wanting to practice different versions of Judaism. Since we are all baalai teshuva trying to figure things out, none of us carry any real authority that others should listen. To make matters worse, all sorts of people are applying to join our club with different levels of observance. Most people are more in the market for a few rituals to give some spirituality to their lives, but not to refashion themselves with a complete set of laws that must be accepted in totum. Furthermore, everyone is coming to Judaism with previous social and ideological commitments, which they are not about to give up now that they are joining their LOJS. For example, we have the nice gay couple who want to be married in the club, the feminist studying to be a rabbi, the libertarian-anarchist who has no intention of praying for the restoration of any Davidic monarchy and the Christian who believes that Jesus is his Jewish Lord and Savior. Different LOJS clubs are going to make their own decisions about where to draw the lines and who can be members, but no one is in a position to force their views on anyone else.
The sensible solution to these problems of authority would be for every individual person and LOJS club to proceed with creating their own standards all while showing the spirit of charity for all those other clubs setting their standards. God did not speak to me and I am not the heir of any special tradition. I am just a scholar trying to read and apply a manual like anybody else. Furthermore, we have to accept that everyone is coming to Judaism with some kind of previous ideological baggage, which sets boundaries on how they will interpret laws. For example, classical liberal Jews might refuse to kill homosexuals and Amalekite children. We have to accept this for the simple reason that we have no greater divine authority than they do. Just as we need our opponents to accept us even when they disagree with our interpretations and look askance at our ideological commitments so too must we be consistent and accept them despite our disagreements.
There is one limitation I would place in order to keep everyone honest; we are free to reject anyone, who does not appear to us to be acting in good faith and seems to be using Judaism as cover for some other ideological agenda. A greater level of personal observance should be a cause to give the benefit of the doubt over those who are less observant. That being said, overzealousness in rejecting other LOJS clubs should serve as prima facia evidence of using Judaism as cover for another agenda, much as a lack of ritual observance would. For example, even as I, much like Chabad, welcome people who drive on the Sabbath, are intermarried or even gay, I would reject the membership applications of members of Jews for Jesus and Jewish Voices for Peace, finding that they perform little in the way of Jewish practice and their Judaism consists mostly of using their Judaism to castigate other Jews for failing to believe in Jesus or make suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. Clearly, their agenda is simply to call themselves Jews in order to convert us to their actual religion. Similarly, I might reject applications from Satmar on the grounds that despite their meticulous observance, their eagerness to denounce other Jews and place themselves on some kind of moral platform indicates that they are less interested in Judaism as a way of practice and to relate to God than they are in setting up an anti-modernist cult. In making these decisions, I recognize that I make myself vulnerable. Not only should I not expect any tolerance from those who I have rejected, but reasonable people might also come to question my motivations in the particular lines I draw and decide that they cannot accept me.
Clearly, there would be nothing to stop a Jews for Pork group beyond our ability to reject their application as a Jewish organization. (I would make a point in distinguishing Jews who incidentally did not practice kosher in their homes and ideological traif eaters.) That being said, we should be able to avoid the problem with antinomianism. There are no hard hierarchies let alone charismatic authorities so there is no reason why there should be any antinomians in our midsts, particularly if we do our job in rooting out those trying to use Judaism as cover for other agendas.
Social contract theory is often criticized for being ahistorical. There was never a moment when non-civilized men came together and agreed on any kind of social contract, whether the Hobbesian, Lockean, or Rousseauean versions. This criticism misses the point that the social contract was never something that happened in history, but is happening every day. The United States government stands because every day the vast majority of Americans, not me, get up and agree that the government has moral authority over themselves and their neighbors even to the point of killing them. The moment that even a small percentage of the population begins to question this then you get the Bastille and the Berlin Wall.
Similarly, many people might question the applicability of my scenario as it lacks any FFBs (frum from birth). What you have are some Jewish Studies majors deciding that they are really interested in halakha and getting other people to listen to them. (Granted that no one would ever take us seriously.) For me, this is precisely the point. Living post-enlightenment and emancipation, there are no people truly born religious. Being observant Jews is something that we decide every day. Furthermore, there is no power of tradition to give anyone any inherent authority over anyone else. My father might be an Orthodox rabbi, but I grew up in Columbus, OH as a product of American culture. Just as a genetic test would demonstrate my utter lack of racial purity, even a casual reading of this blog should be enough to demonstrate that my ideas are hardly pure of gentile influence. I do not claim to be anything more an American with classical liberal values and conservatives politics, who grabbed onto the Judaism he found around him, trying to give himself a community and some meaning to his life. I challenge anyone to demonstrate that their Judaism is any purer.
There are many Jews out there, who lack my Jewish education. I am not smarter or more virtuous than them and claim no intrinsic authority over them. I am sure, if they wish, they could study the same texts that I studied and surpass me. There are certainly many Jews who are more learned than me. I am sure that, if I applied myself, I could remedy that. Such people may be compared to my in-laws, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and younger brother, who all, unlike me, have medical degrees. It may be prudent that I take their medical advice seriously, but none of them can claim any kind of authority over me; I remain free to shop around for medical advice. Most importantly, I deny that any of them are intrinsically smarter or virtuous than me (besides for my mother-in-law). If I wanted to, I could go to medical school and become a doctor as well.
Let us do away with charismatic authority and even the hierarchy of tradition. Let us be the People of the Book.
A prominent feature of Haredi society today is the belief in the infallibility of their rabbinic leaders, the Gedolim. These Gedolim are supposed to be miracle workers, whose knowledge supersedes that of ordinary mortals like you and me. In essence, Haredim took halakhic Judaism, premised on textual authority, and replaced it with charismatic authority in which religious leaders are assumed to receive some kind of divine revelation. There was a good sociological reason for this. It was charismatic authority, ironically, that was best suited to defend religion against modernity's challenge to religious authority. As a simple Jew, why should I not listen to the Conservative rabbi, who says that it is ok to drive to a synagogue on Shabbat if I live far away and would otherwise not be able to celebrate Shabbat as part of a Jewish community? Even to make a halakhic argument against driving on Shabbat will be counter-productive. You might fail to convince me and I will, therefore, go drive. Even if you succeed this time, you will have implicitly conceded to me the premise that, in the absence of any religious authority with coercive powers, I am my own ultimate halakhic authority and am free to rule however I wish.
The Haredi solution was to declare that there was a body of men whose opinions, a priori, cannot be challenged. It is not just that these Gedolim are really smart and have good arguments for their positions. I like to think that I am a smart person too so tomorrow I will come back with even better arguments, at least to my mind. The Gedolim must not just be smarter than me, their intelligence must be of such a different kind that I could never imagine being in the right against them.
A large part of the Haredi success has been due to its ability to claim for itself the mandate of being the defenders of Jewish Law; are not Haredim the strictest in terms of religious observance? This is in large part due to the Haredi world's clear lines of authority. But as with any Faustian bargain, the price to be paid is high. Part of what of I find fascinating about the Haredi use of Gedolim is that their practical use in the defense of ritual orthodoxy does not change the fundamentally antinomian implications of charismatic authority and may come to serve as the perfect cover to destroy halakha.
For those who would defend the absolute authority of Gedolim and also claim to be loyal to halakha, I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that the Gedolim were to call you into a secret room and order you to eat the ultimate traif sandwich. Would you listen to the Gedolim or would you, in your "arrogance," dare to place your limited understanding that there is such a thing as kosher over their wisdom and refuse to eat it? Some simple Jew, who recalls that, according to Leviticus, a pig is not kosher as well as stories about Maccabean martyrs, is going to think he has the right to lecture the Gedolim about kosher and accuse them of not following the Torah? Does he not know that without the Gedolim we would all be lost like sheep without a shepherd, prey to Reform and Conservative Judaism with their women rabbis?
Note that there may be a very good reason for the Gedolim to want you to eat traif. Eating traif is a useful signaling device as to who really is loyal to Haredi Judaism. A person who is not willing to listen to the Gedolim and eat traif, but prefers to follow his own understanding of Judaism today might turn around tomorrow and not accept that Judaism opposes women rabbis. Alternatively, a failure to eat traif on the command of the Gedolim might endanger Judaism by opening up the possibility that some Jews might, at some future point, question the rulings of the Gedolim regarding kosher and refuse to eat in the homes of other Haredi Jews. An Orthodox Judaism in which members are not united in eating each other's food is liable to fall apart. Such a divided community would lack the moral standing to defy the liberal denominations on women rabbis. Clearly, it is better to eat a pig than to accept women rabbis. (Or at least that is the impression I get from the OU.) We can even add "who made men and women in their places" in addition to the traditional blessing for traif: "who permits the forbidden." Only a godless heretic could be against saying more blessings when we all know that a single amen has the power to change worlds.
One might take support from the story in Rosh HaShanah in which R. Gamliel forced R. Joshuah to violate the day of Yom Kippur as he calculated it. Allowing there to be two Jewish calendars risked destroying the religion and needed to be stopped at all costs, even violating the religious consciousness of R. Joshuah. (Perhaps the Dead Sea Sect supported women rabbis in addition to their solar calendar.) I should note a distinction between R. Joshua violating his Yom Kippur and our traif case. R. Joshuah had every reason to believe that R. Gamliel was acting in good halakhic faith, adhering to the principle that one is not allowed to travel with a stick and a money belt on Yom Kippur. R. Gamliel might be wrong in his astronomical calculations, but he made his mistake as part of a legitimate halakhic process based upon textual analysis and not charismatic authority. In our traif case, the Gedolim want you to eat what they acknowledge to be a pig on the assumption that they are not bound by any text-based halakhic process. In fact, their goal is to destroy the practice of text-based halakha as a heresy that would allow any person with a Judaica library to become their own halakhic authority.
A Judaism in which every person is free to do what is right in their own eyes as long as they can point to a Jewish source cannot be called Haredi. A Judaism in which it might be ok to eat traif, even in secret antinomian rituals, cannot be called Orthodox. Take your pick, text or charismatic authority. I vote for there to be such a thing called halakha even if that puts me in charge of my own religion.
The wife, child and I spent this past Shabbos in Flatbush, NY with one of my Haredi cousins, who is an elementary school rebbe. As he is someone who uses the internet, I asked him what his school's policy was regarding web access. He responded that in general they were hostile, but allowed homes to have it as long as they had a filter. As I am sure regular readers appreciate, behind my mask of moderation lies an extremist. I am primarily interested in consistent principles as opposed to practical policy and it is usually the most extreme principles that are consistent. That being said, while I may personally choose one extreme due to my personal tastes and values, I maintain a high degree of respect for the opposite extreme, as opposed to the moderates that are superficially closer to my camp, as I recognize them as kindred spirits in consistency. In the case of the internet, I can empathize with those who wish to ban the internet from their community and are intellectually honest enough to endorse the sort inquisitorial practices necessary to give the ban teeth.
I asked my cousin to imagine that somewhere out there on the internet lies a video of the ultimate traif sandwich, designed by the world's greatest apikorsim, who made sure to precede every step with an antinomian declaration that they were motivated not by any material desire for food or money, but only to anger their creator and demonstrate their non-belief in him. The bread was owned by a Jew and made during Passover from new grain so it is both chametz s'over alov Pesach and chodosh, but no Jew turned on the pilot light so it is pas akom. The bread has also been flavored with the finest yayin nesach and cholov akom. And we have not yet gotten to what is inside the sandwich. Perhaps the people at the Williamsburg restaurant Traif could do us the honor of making the sandwich. The important question here is not whether we want kids watching a video of this sandwich, but how far should we be willing to go in stopping them. There are a number of reasons to treat any non-extreme method, that does not place keeping kids from watching this sandwich as the central purpose of Judaism and place the full resources of the community into this task, as deserving of scorn.
There is the problem of moral hazard. The ultimate traif sandwich filters may not be particularly effective, but parents think they are. Because of this, parents choose to engage in more risky behavior by ignoring other forms of protection such as a heart-to-heart conversation with their children about what kosher means to them. The end result is that, rather than protect our children, the filters will actually increase the risk and we would have been better off with no filter. There is an even larger issue at stake here than simple internet traif. If parents believe that their kids are safe in a general society that holds traditional values then they will drop their guard and stop protecting their kids. Thus, a religious society needs to keep parents scared and vigilant. If the internet is not overrun with traif sandwiches then perhaps we need to make sure it is. Make no mistake, Haredi society owes a great debt to the 1960s left that destroyed any sense of a common set of values. If "traditional values" ever came back into fashion then it would be the end of Haredim.
Which kids are we worried about? If it is a matter of all kids equally being at risk of looking at traif sandwich websites then a broad educational effort backed by a general fence, designed to serve more as a warning than an actual barrier, might be effective. What if we are dealing with hockey stick statistics where the vast majority of traif is being watched by a small number of kids? If this is the case then your entire strategy needs to change. Filters, even good ones, are pointless as these obsessive traif watchers are likely willing to go to extreme measures, such as using a computer in a public library, to get their daily fix of traif. Furthermore, such people clearly have far deeper problems than a desire to watch traif. We need to confront how they relate to food and until we do, stopping their internet access is going to be merely a Band-Aid to a knife wound.
Perhaps you might say that you want to protect regular kids from accidentally seeing traif on the internet. A child's mind is like cement and everything they see makes an impression that will last a lifetime. Granted, you are likely to find ads for traif on the internet, but are they worse than the traif ads that will catch the eyes of the casual viewer walking down the street? Unless you are willing to raise your children permanently on a sealed-off compound (something that anarcho-libertarian policies will make more plausible), you have to accept the fact that your children will be exposed to traif. Will they be affected? Certainly, but here is the good news; everything you experience affects you, but in ways that are difficult to quantify. It seems to me to be the height of cognitive dissonance for any teacher to seriously worry about their students being corrupted by casual exposure to internet traif. If our ability to influence students after twelve years into becoming good Jews, who love to study, is questionable at best, what are the odds that even an afternoon spent ogling traif will cause them to join Darth Chazor, no matter how delicious those sandwiches might appear?
