Introducing the Military Model of Religion

In the previous post, I started blogging my dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. In this post, I wish to begin outlining the military model of religion. A fair criticism of the dissertation is that, arguably my dissertation was never really about Jewish messianism. What I am really writing about is the military model of religion, with the missionary and esoteric models as foils. Furthermore, not only do I go for long stretches without talking about messianism, but I am often not even talking about Judaism at all. As readers of this blog can appreciate, this is the product of my rather eclectic manner of thinking. It certainly did not help matters that I was forced by my advisor to attempt to write large-scale history, including Christianity and Islam. In essence, instead of making sure I stayed focused on something narrow, he pushed me to follow my tendencies that were most likely to cause me to fail.  

In the military model, your religion is obviously right because the armies of your religion are crossing borders and defeating other religions. Imagine that you are an early medieval Muslim. It is obvious to you that Islam is true. How could a band of tribesmen from Arabia have defeated both the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empire, conquered the Near East, and marched all the way to Spain unless this was the will of Allah? Obviously, Allah wanted to spread pure monotheism so he used his beloved Arab people, who were the first to embrace the divine teachings of the prophet Mohammed, to accomplish this. The promise of a heavenly reward for Muslims can already be glimpsed by the fact that Arab Muslims, in this world, have achieved such political power. If you want to be rewarded in this world and in the next, you need to become a Muslim. On the flip side, much of the story of modern Islamic thought comes down to the question of how is it that Islam stopped being successful. This only serves to underscore how important Islam's early military success was to its self-understanding.  

Behind the armies leading the military model to victory, lies a political entity such as a state. The religion’s political sponsor will come to dominate other religions and their respective political sponsors, presumably through military means, causing competing religions and politics to fall away. In the ancient world, this was understood in very literal terms with the god (or gods) of one people defeating a rival god.  Underlying this worldview is a sense of being on the right side of history. Even if the hoped for final victory has yet to come, the political victories scored by the religion, even small ones, indicate the inevitability of that victory. Military model religions have little need to engage in apologetics or even develop a complex theology. The argument for the religion is the observable fact of the existence of the community of the faithful and its political success. Such a religion contains little in the way of universalizing ethics. On the contrary, its only concern is the advancement of the community so that it dominates all others, regardless of how unjust such a state of affairs may be. 

It is important not to overemphasize the role of physical violence in the military model. The military model of religion might also be labeled the community model in that it starts from the perspective of a community and not, as we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, individuals. It should be understood that the military model does not have to use a literal threat of force to achieve its aims. On the contrary, it is most powerful in the form of a warm surrounding community, full of friends and family. There is a close connection between the coercive power of overwhelming armed might and that of a community in that overwhelming armed might in its most extreme forms (like in the relationship between a state and an individual) can paradoxically appear as if no force is being used.  Such force is so obvious that it can pass unmentioned and become part of the unchallengeable reality surrounding a person. Thus, the person being subject to such force may come to “willingly” comply out of the sense that this is the only “reasonable” option. It is hard to distinguish it, particularly for those subject to it, from the soft pressure of the social expectations on the part of a surrounding community. Thus, community pressure and the threat of physical force merge together. The most powerful sorts of communities will be established states with the ability to exert social pressure that is not so incidentally backed by physical force.    

Considering that the military model works best when it can use a perceived sense of reality rather than physical force, its chief weapon is ritual. This creates a perceived sense of communal reality in which a body of individuals performs the same action.  The ritual act allows the community to conquer physical space. By integrating ritual into the calendar, the community can also conquer time and extend itself to both past and future generations.  In this sense, the ritual community consists not only of those living in the present but also of past generations, who performed these same rituals and passed on their traditions to the present. Of particular importance here are rituals performed for the sake of the dead. Beyond possibly aiding those who have passed to the next world and gaining their aid in return, rituals for the dead strengthen the sense of the community existing through time. Similarly, rites of passage use ritual to extend the community into the future as a new generation embraces the identity of the community. 

Ritual also serves a practical purpose of gaining the aid of supernatural beings. Thus, military model religions tend have strong magic components, offering the direct physical aid of a god, as opposed to ethical religions, in which a god offers moral teachings that allow one to live a better life. There is something distinctly amoral about magic in that its sole purpose is to subvert normal cause and effect. Thus, it allows the practitioner to gain things they did not work to earn and have no just claim to. As we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, one of the primary criticisms of the military model, in addition to the fact that it lacks theological depth, is that it does not encourage ethical behavior. As such, military model believers can be attacked for caring little about god or man. 

A classic book that I recently read that does a fantastic job of encapsulating what is essentially the military model is Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. The first part of the book gets us into the lived experience of late medieval Catholics in England before this world was destroyed by the English Reformation. Catholicism was built into people's daily lives. For example, the calendar was dominated by saints' days and the cycle of Jesus' birth and passion. While I am skeptical about Duffy's claims as to how well lay Englishmen actually understood the particulars of the Catholic theology that lay behind such holy days, Duffy is a valuable voice in that he is sympathetic to popular religion. It is easy even for scholars who are personally religious to look down on such religion as superstition. (I am often guilty of this myself.) As intellectuals, we are going to be naturally inclined toward the missionary and esoteric models. These are intellectual models of religion. Their criticisms of the military model, essentially any popular religion, are going to be our criticisms. As such, instead of simply pointing out the obvious problems with the military model, our job becomes to understand why the military model has not simply been conquered by its critics. On the contrary, as we shall see, it is the military model that generally manages to convert its critics.       

Blogging My Dissertation

Having written about my ill-fated attempt to write a doctoral dissertation, a deeply painful topic even after all these years, I find myself returning to that dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. I am going to attempt to edit selections from the dissertation, stripped of their footnotes, to be used as blog posts. I readily acknowledge that this was not a suitable topic for a dissertation. That being said, I still strongly believe in the ideas presented in the dissertation. As such, I wish to present them to my readers. Hopefully, you will find what I have to say useful for understanding the underlying logic of messianism in its political and spiritual forms. Perhaps one of my readers will turn out to be a university administrator, who is so impressed with me as to wish to offer me a doctorate. This is a dissertation about messianism, the willingness to hope against all evidence that history will suddenly and miraculously turn out in one's favor so a failed doctoral student has the right to dream. 

The problem that drew me to this topic of political messianism is that there are two basic kinds of messianism, the political and the spiritual and they are fundamentally at odds with each other. What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish when he comes? Perhaps he is supposed to bring back the not so golden biblical age of David and Solomon on the assumption that this time we are going to get things right. In this political messianism, the natural order of things, particularly the existence of politics remains intact. This is essential as this will finally allow us Jews to rule over the gentiles as we were always "meant" to. Alternatively, we can imagine the Messiah ushering in a spiritual era that will transcend the physical world, leaving no room for politics. When Jews, for thousands of years have prayed for the Messiah, it seems that they were simultaneously asking for political power and for the end of politics. Keep in mind that political power is something deeply materialistic, the sort of thing that pious people should abhor. How could such contradictory impulses have survived in one religion without tearing it into factions?  

My essential argument is that both political and spiritual messianisms should be understood as the product of a discourse between three different models for a religion to relate to the political. The military model relies on community and ritual. Opposing the military model are two anti-community models, which rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking outside converts to create a new purer community. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. One thinks of Leo Strauss style philosophers, but this can apply to conventional believers as well. Understand that most people, operating within the military model with its focus on lived experience, do not even think in terms of trying to put together a coherent theology. 

Judaism is primarily military in its orientation. That being said, it has taken on the esoteric and missionary models, despite the theological difficulties, as a response to certain political realities. This mixture created a certain level of tension as the different models contain contradictory principles. Messianic doctrines serve both as a reflection of this tension within Judaism and as an attempted solution. Messianism has thus served an important role in Judaism in that it is precisely its contradictory political and spiritual poles that have allowed Judaism to mediate the conflict between the three ideological factions. 

Forgiving My Advisor (Part II)

(Part I)

I do not think it was a coincidence, that it was precisely when I started dating Miriam in 2011 that I made my major breakthrough that messianism, with its contradictory political and spiritual elements, is the product of a dialectic between what I had come to think of as the military, esoteric, and missionary models of religion. Military model messianism is fulfilled through the success of a political state. The esoteric and missionary models of messianism look forward to the elimination of this very political state that the military model clings to. Messianism, as we find it in Judaism, is a marriage between these different sides with the different parties wanting contrary things and simply talking past each other. This has allowed Judaism to function as a united religion. Granted, the topic I was working on was still not something that I was qualified to work on but at least I had a coherent argument to make.

Even though I was now living in California, I remained in regular correspondence with my advisor and sent him drafts of the chapters I was writing. He eventually agreed to allow me to drop the parts about Christianity and Islam to focus on Judaism. Furthermore, recognizing that what I had written was now significantly longer than a conventional dissertation, he allowed me to hand in only the first four chapters of my project. Chapter one laid out my general theoretical framework for the different models of religion and how they relate to messianism. Chapter two dealt with the biblical period and the fact that the messianism of the prophets required the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Chapter three dealt with the Second Temple Period and focused heavily on the Dead Sea Sect and its messianic rejection of the political establishment. Chapter four dealt with the post-Temple rabbis and their development of a spiritual messianism that took political activity off the table in the present by placing it in the forever-distant future.

While my advisor had his criticisms, particularly when it came to how my arguments were organized, he strongly praised my work. He was impressed with my research and found my arguments to be brilliant. He made it clear that he was on board with what I was doing and wanted to make sure that everyone else who read my work was as impressed as he was. Judging by his comments, his favorite section was the Second Temple chapter. For the Rabbinic chapter, he expressed some reservations as to whether I was really writing about messianism, but he made it clear that he thought that I was doing fantastic work. 

Spurred on by my advisor's support, I put my heart and soul into improving the dissertation to make my arguments clear to anyone reading them for the first time. By May of 2013, I had a coherent dissertation that came in around three hundred pages. My advisor now felt that what I had produced was good enough to start showing it to other scholars who might wish to serve on my committee. It was here that disaster struck. Readers started to respond that this was not a dissertation.

The right thing for my advisor would have been to go to the department and acknowledge that this was his fault and I deserved the doctorate. I was in this mess precisely because I had listened to him and did my best to do what he told me. Either I should be given an honorary doctorate, or I should be given funding to write a new dissertation, with him agreeing to pay any penalty to make that happen. Instead, my advisor decided to pretend that, for all of these years, I had simply been going off on my own instead of doing my best to follow his specific instructions. When emailing me, he pretended to still be on my side, telling me that he would speak to people who might be able to help me while bad-mouthing me behind my back, giving them every excuse to dismiss my work without giving it serious thought. This included the Second Temple chapter. As far as I can tell, he did not show them what he had written in praise of that chapter. If he had done so, those scholars might have had to rethink their dismissal or acknowledge that my youthful failure to write a successful dissertation paled in the face of my advisor's professional malpractice. Ultimately, my advisor made the decision to sacrifice my hoped-for career as an academic in order to protect his reputation.

His actions clearly involved falsehood. I am uncertain whether he actively lied about me to members of the department or if he simply allowed them to assume that I had gotten into this mess on my own. It is even possible that it was understood that he was the one at fault but, as there was no formal mechanism for penalizing advisors who failed in their duties to their students, the other members of the department protected their own and took the stance that this was my fault as a convenient belief that allowed the whole affair to be tied up in the most convenient fashion for them.

The final nail in my dissertation's coffin came in an email that reached me while I was at the Fuller Theological Seminary Library. By then I knew that the dissertation was likely not going to be accepted but I wanted to keep fighting for it as long as there was any hope. I had put so much of my emotional self into the dissertation that it felt to me almost like my child. One does not give up on a child no matter the odds. I was so focused on my work that I did not see the email for several hours until I stopped for lunch. My advisor forwarded me an email from a professor who dismissed my work while clearly not having read it carefully. From his response, it was clear that my advisor had been speaking ill of me to this professor. 

One would have thought that something like this deserved at least a phone call. My advisor knew that I had a history of depression and that the dissertation situation had put me in a bad place. What sort of person sends information that he knows would negatively affect someone he cares about without following up to find out how they are doing? Clearly, by this point, my well-being was no longer his priority.   

If I were to be charitable to my advisor, I can imagine that, from his perspective, he had been doing me a favor by agreeing to take me on as his student in the first place. As such, any advice that he offered me should have been taken with a buyer-beware attitude, much as if I were to take advice from any other academic I might have spoken to. From this perspective, the fact that my dissertation failed after years spent following his bad advice was really my fault. I should have known better than to listen to him.

Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.   

 

Advice to My Younger Self

From 2006 to 2013, I worked on a doctorate. In the end, things did not work out for reasons that are deeply painful to me. After many years, I have finally decided to directly discuss what happened. This will take multiple posts. Let me start by acknowledging that, at that point in time, I was not ready to work on a doctorate. Here is what I wish my younger self would have known. There may be a doctoral student out there who would benefit from my experience.  

If I could go back in time to when I was about to start work on my Ph.D., I would give my younger self the following advice. In college, you got by simply by being smart. When you get to a doctoral program, everyone is smart. The question then becomes, what else do you bring to the table. Writing a dissertation is not simply a really long research paper that you spend several years on. You are not simply being asked to produce a coherent bit of writing but to make an original argument about a highly specific topic that will be presented to scholars who are experts in this field. With a term paper, you need to convince a professor that you are a decent student who paid attention to lectures and followed that up by reading some of the relevant literature. With a dissertation, you need to convince a committee of scholars that you are someone close to being their equal. With a research paper, your task is to follow the teacher’s instructions and as long as you have made a good-faith effort to do so, the worst they can do is give you a B. If they did a bad job explaining the assignment, that is on them. With a dissertation, no one owes you anything. If the committee does not want to accept what you have written, you are out of luck and all your work will have been for nothing.

Considering the fact that a dissertation requires a different mindset from a research paper, it is important to not jump straight from college to graduate school. Instead, you should take time off to do something else. Spend a few years teaching high school, get married, and start a family. Stay in the Washington Heights neighborhood near Yeshiva University where you have a solid group of friends and one of the few places on the planet where you do not need to justify being an observant Jew who likes secular studies.

One should not think of this as putting your academic career on hold. On the contrary, start developing contacts within academia so that there will be professors who think of you as an adult and a colleague instead of as an eager student. When you are thirty or so and find an attractive offer in a good program that has plenty of funding with an advisor who knows what they are doing and honestly wants to work with you, then you can start your doctorate. By then, you will understand what you need to do and have the personal maturity and support network to succeed.  

The fact that I did not understand this, at the time, left me vulnerable to being given bad advice from none other than my advisor. He told me that I needed to write on a big topic and that I should only bother putting together a committee when I was nearly finished writing. I was not prepared to take what he said in the proper spirit of skepticism because I assumed that my job was simply to do what he told me. The possibility that I could be made to pay for his mistakes never occurred to me. That is not how school is supposed to work. School is supposed to be a safe place where the adults are in charge but also carry responsibility.      

Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

The Moral Question of Gaza

Imagine if, on October 6^th, Benjamin Netanyahu had called you with the following dilemma. The wall surrounding Gaza, despite looking impressive, has the value of the French Maginot Line. Israeli intelligence knows that Hamas is planning a major assault but cannot say when. For all we know, it might happen tomorrow. The only way to stop this attack is for Israel to launch a preemptive invasion of Gaza and kill, take your pick, ten thousand, one hundred one-hundred-thousand, or a million Palestinians. Failure to commit such an atrocity means that Hamas will send thousands of fighters into Israel, kill twelve hundred people, and take 250 hostages. At what point do you say: “Prime Minister, I understand that this is difficult to hear, but there are certain things that civilized people cannot stoop to doing no matter the cost. You must hold back even though it will lead to an unimaginable tragedy for Israel.

This is the fundamental question that has faced Israel since the attacks of October 7^th. On October 6^th, it was a matter of debate as to whether Hamas could pull off an October 7th-style attack. On October 7^th, they proved that they could. As such, any agreement that Israel makes that allows Hamas to remain intact as a military force, inevitably means that October 7^th will happen again at some point. It does not matter that Israel will learn from its mistakes, so will Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Most importantly Hamas knows that it can commit large-scale terrorist attacks without losing sympathy in the Muslim world or even with the Western left. As such, Hamas is not going to be held back by the main practical consideration that usually keeps terrorists in check, the concern that killing children will make the enemy more sympathetic.

Let us be clear about what the consequences of repeated October 7^th attacks will be. A state that cannot stop invaders from crossing its borders will cease to have the confidence of its people and will collapse. There will be a mass exodus of people fleeing Israel seeking safety. Refugees are a vulnerable group under the best of circumstances. Combine this with traditional anti-Semitism and the fact that much of the world already thinks that Israel is the equivalent of Nazi Germany and you have the making of a second Holocaust.  

Presumably, there is some moral outer limit to what Israel can do even if the alternative is the Holocaust. The anti-Zionists have a point when they argue that having a State of Israel in the face of Arab opposition requires being willing to do terrible things to the Arabs. At what point do we say that it is not worth it even if we say that it is the Arabs who have brought this calamity upon themselves? To kill people, even bad people, means to be a murderer. This applies to the soldier who pulls the trigger as well as Jewish civilians outside of Israel like me in whose name this killing is being done.  

What if the only way to save Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people was to launch nuclear weapons in a first strike against Arab capitals? I can imagine not pressing that bottom and agreeing to be passively led, along with the rest of those Jews deemed not sufficiently anti-Zionist, to the gas chambers. Better a Final Solution to Judaism than Judaism being responsible for nuclear Armageddon, maybe.

Part of the dream of Zionism is that, in a world in which people want to do bad things to Jews, we should be able to plausibly threaten to do bad things in retaliation. It is a fair question whether the moral cost is worth it. What should not be in doubt are the real-world consequences of not having the power to do those bad things. Part of what I admire about Tolstoy’s pacifist writings was how honest he was about the consequences of his ideas. He was open about his willingness to set murderers free to repeat their crimes. Tolstoy did not believe that one should care about this world, certainly not at the price of destroying one's soul through violence. Like most people, I am too much a pragmatist to follow that path, but I can respect people who do as long as they are being honest about it and are willing to apply this principle to everyone and not just Israel. If oppressed people have the right to resist their oppressors then Israel has the right to storm Gaza.    

Thinking in terms of preventing the next October 7^th, allows us to have an honest conversation about Israel’s actions. A common argument against Israel is that Hamas cannot be destroyed and that Israel has no plan for what to do the day after in Gaza. These arguments sidestep the critical point. Israel certainly can wipe out Hamas. It is less obvious that it can do so without killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. As for a day after plan, it is the international community that lacks a plan for allowing two million Palestinians to remain in Gaza while guaranteeing Israel that October 7th will not happen again. If you believe that Israel should allow another October 7th in order to save Palestinian lives, be honest about that. Make no mistake. The choice is between tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths as well as their likely mass expulsion and another October 7th.  

One of the things that shock me about the pro-ceasefire crowd is how open many of them are about wanting another October 7^th. It is not that they want to save Palestinian lives, they want Israelis to die. The charge of genocide serves a similar role. If Israel is guilty of genocide then the Palestinian people have the right to resist with October 7th-style attacks. Obviously, saying that you want a ceasefire to protect Palestinian children from being slaughtered in an Israeli genocide sounds a lot more humanitarian than you want to butcher Israelis.  

Confessions of a Pharisee

 

Underlining the Christian doctrine of depravity are the simultaneous notions that one is a sinner and that it does not matter because God has already forgiven you. For some mysterious reason, God loves you despite your sins. In fact, God has chosen you because he desires to save the worst of sinners. You can take comfort in the fact that you are not capable of being truly righteous as that would open the door to God actually expecting you to live up to that standard. An advantage of this worldview is that it allows a person to be honest about their sins. As long as you try to “earn” salvation by being a “good person,” you fall into the trap of the theological Pharisee, who believes that they are righteous or at least “better” than those “sinners” out there. To be clear, nothing that I say should be taken as a criticism of historical Pharisees, who were a Second Temple-era religious/political faction.  

The Pharisaic attitude inevitably leads to hypocrisy. In order to claim that you are a righteous person, you need to put one’s thumb on the moral scales and claim that the same action when done by you is a minor failing at best while a demonstration of the utmost depravity when committed by others. Even the exceptionally pious person does not escape. The very thought that one is pious is a grievous blasphemy as it credits man with the righteousness that belongs to God alone. This naturally creates its own hypocritical defense mechanism. It is the other people who are such Pharisees and think that they are righteous. By contrast, I only act from pure motives.

Another manifestation of the Pharisee mindset is an inability to forgive others. If one’s claim to having a connection to God is dependent upon being righteous or at least better than other people, then others must be held to their sins. If I am going to make it into heaven, it is going to be because others have been sacrificed as scapegoats on my behalf. They were the ones who caused and are therefore responsible for any sins that I might have appeared to have committed. One thinks of Eve blaming the snake and Adam blaming Eve. At the very least, their relative wickedness should mean that God should count me as righteous in my generation. One thinks of Noah, who was righteous relative to everyone else in the flood generation. He built an ark for himself and his family and shut the door on everyone else. This is in contrast to Abraham who prayed for the sinners of Sodom.

Considering this, I would like to confess to being a Pharisee. As the son of a rabbi, I was raised to assume that I was a good person. My father praised me for going to synagogue early and staying for the entire 2.5-hour service. The logical conclusion of my father loving me was that God loved me as well. I was more observant than the other kids in my class, so I was better than them. Of course, I knew of kids in larger Jewish communities who did not watch television but those were crazed fanatics.  

This religious pride, a far greater sin than any ham sandwich, had its parallel in my intellectual pride. My mother praised me for my reading and my teachers seemed to appreciate how I was able to talk about all sorts of historical facts. It was this academic pride that got me into trouble when I went away to middle school in Pittsburgh. The kids in Columbus had grown up with me and accepted me as the oddball rabbi’s kid. My new classmates simply saw me as someone socially isolated and insufferably full of myself and, therefore, an easy target for bullying. My response to this bullying was to call them bozos and sink further into myself. Not only was I religious and smart, but I was also the victim of all of these lesser people.

There is an irony to believing that you are religious and smart and then building your self-esteem around these assumptions. You find yourself simultaneously needing to believe these things and fighting off doubts. It is hard to ignore all the evidence that one is neither a saint nor a genius but if I am not religious and smart then what am I? One of the implications of this dilemma is that I am terrible at accepting criticism. I cannot disassociate the particular points being made with the macro question of whether I am special. As such, I have a compulsive need to respond to even minor criticisms. To make matters worse, I am smart enough to be a decent lawyer for myself and come up with reasons why I am right even as I lack the far more important good sense to let certain issues lie.  

When my keen intellect is not devoted to defending myself, it seeks out reasons to find fault with others and never forgive them. I bear grudges against people who did things to me years ago, whether ex-girlfriends or academic advisers. As readers of C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce can appreciate, I created a hell for myself that was locked from the inside. The more I suffered for what they did to me the more I was the righteous martyr and they were my sinful tormentors. The fact that my life did not play out as a suitable theodicy narrative and the "villains" got to go on with their lives while ignoring me made me feel even more depressed. This, in turn, fed a negative emotional cycle. I needed to cling to the belief that they would get what was coming to them and I would be vindicated as their moral superior. As such, I could never forgive them as long as they refused to come to me on bended knee and ask for forgiveness, acknowledging my moral superiority. To forgive them would mean to throw away my heavenly trump card as the victim of such horrors, which should force even God to deem me righteous.

I am blessed to have friends and family who love me despite my flaws. If they can love me, despite my flaws, one can hope that God loves me and has forgiven my sins. If God is willing to forgive the worst of sinners, perhaps that includes the most self-righteous of Pharisees. 

The Exodus: Past, Present, and Future

The Passover Seder tells the story of Passover through three different time frames. We see the Exodus from the perspective of those who left Egypt, but also from the perspective of the Patriarchs and the Rabbis. This is essential for understanding the Seder as the Seder is designed to transcend time. It is not simply about commemorating an event that happened in late Bronze Age Egypt but connecting us to it.

As to be expected, the Seder talks a fair amount about the Exodus from Egypt using verses from the Book of Exodus. The logical way to organize the Haggadah would be to have the child ask the Ma Nishtana questions, followed by Avadim Hayinu. We could then proceed to tell the story of Passover in a straightforward linear fashion, focusing on Moses telling Pharoah to let the Israelites go, Pharoah saying no, and Egypt getting smitten with the Ten Plagues. Instead, we take a confusing side detour to the Rabbis of the Tanaitic period. We soon find ourselves jumping back in time before the Exodus to learn that Abraham’s family were a bunch of idolaters and also that Laben tried to kill Jacob. Later, we find ourselves jumping forward in time again to the Rabbis making acronyms for the plagues, calculating how many plagues there actually were in Egypt and then during the crossing of the Red Sea, and telling us that we need to talk about the Passover lamb, matzoh, and maror. After completing the other biblical commandments of the night, eating matzoh and maror, we then go back to the Rabbis to Hillel’s sandwich.

The Seder is not simply the story of the Exodus. In a “post-modern” twist, it is the story about the telling over of the story of the Exodus. The Patriarchs are not simply the background as to how we ended up in Egypt, but the promise of the Exodus. The Patriarchs had to accept, on faith, that God would eventually, after hundreds of years give their descendants the Land of Israel. Along the way, they had to endure tremendous difficulties. For example, Abraham left Haran even though he was prosperous to travel to Canaan and then was hit with a famine that forced him to go to Egypt. Centuries before the Exodus, it was already something that people needed to relate to.  

In the Midrash, Abraham is depicted as celebrating Passover when visited by the angels. The cakes he served them were matzah. Why would Abraham celebrate something that had not happened yet? The Exodus is not simply something that happened at a specific time but the event that connects Jews across time. Abraham had just circumcised himself, joining himself to a promised Isaac who had yet to be born but who would be the first person circumcised at the proper age of eight days old. Abraham was also joining himself to all the Jewish people throughout history who were also yet to be born. As such, he joined them in celebrating Passover.  

Already, at the time of the Exodus, Moses commanded the Israelites as to how they should respond to their Wicked, Simple, and Unable to Ask Sons. (The Wise Son does not appear until Deuteronomy.) This was an act of faith. The Tenth Plague had not yet happened and Pharoah was still refusing to let them out. The Children of Israel needed to believe that they would get out and have children for whom this was all history. That first Passover in Egypt was still a celebration of God’s promise that had yet to be fulfilled.

The Rabbis exist on the other side of time to the Exodus. Living after the time of the Bible, they represent us. Passover was something that they commemorated as something happening in the past. But they also connected back to the Patriarchs. They were the ones who lost the Temple. Remember, Hillel's sandwich was supposed to contain the Passover lamb. Despite all this, the Rabbis had the courage to allow Judaism to continue even if that meant lambless matza sandwiches. They made the decision to be satisfied with God’s promise of a messianic redemption. In honor of that, we put the cup out for Elijah, celebrating a redemption that has not yet happened. It does not matter that it is not yet “next year in Jerusalem.”  

As Jews, we exist across time. At the Seder, we are joining Abraham and the angels in the fields of Mamri, Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, the Rabbis in Bnai Brak, and our future descendants who will share a fifth cup of wine with Elijah. All occur in God's ever-present now. No matter where and in what century you celebrate Passover in, you get to join the one and only Seder.      

Community Building and Sexual Morality

Years ago, I wrote about sexual morality from a Kantian perspective, arguing that sex outside of a relationship such as marriage violated the categorical imperative to see others as ends and not as means. I have also written about community building in the contexts of the Ender series and the Twilight series. More recently, I have written about the musical Rent and its depiction of community being built out of individuals whose very morality renders them incapable of being part of a community in a meaningful sense. In my most recent post, I wrote about Calvin existing in his own head without the moral sense that he is obligated to parents and future generations. In this post, I would like to explore sexual morality from a community perspective.

For a community to meaningfully exist it cannot simply be a collection of individuals cooperating together at a given moment but must also operate within time. A community that does not produce a next generation will not survive. As such, how this next generation comes into being is a central concern to the community to such an extent that each individual’s attitude toward this question serves as a useful means to measure their commitment to the community as a whole. Since sexual intercourse is the primary means by which human beings come into this world, there can be no community that can survive in the long run that does not take some interest as to who people are sleeping with. To be clear, a healthy community is likely to recognize that, considering the fact that reality is messy, there is often a need to play ignorant and not go kicking down the doors of people violating the sexual norms of the community.

There are many plausible strategies for trying to ensure a future generation for the community. If you are the Shakers, you forgo physically reproducing children and rely completely on outreach. This has proven to not be an effective strategy for the Shakers and they have just about all died out. To their credit, the Shakers were a victim of their success at getting their adherents to actually follow the tenets of the faith. If only the Shakers were a little more “accepting of human weakness,” they might have survived.

If you are the Catholic priesthood, your celibacy is one of the main things that tie you to the wider Catholic community and stops you from breaking away from those “sinful” lay Catholics and creating a “purified” Catholic Church. You are relying on all the non-celibate Catholics to be fruitful and multiply so there can be a next generation of priests.

On the other extreme, cults will often allow for a surface sexual liberation. This is something that makes them attractive to potential believers. The irony of such sexual liberation is it comes to serve as one of the primary means of cutting people off from any sort of traditional morality that lies outside of the cult. This opens the door for the cult leader to become a tyrant as there is no outside standard by which to judge him. Furthermore, even the supposed free love turns out to be illusory. Instead, what you get is a hierarchy where those at the top are liberated to prey on others and those at the bottom will find sexual norms enforced upon them. It is precisely this ability to brazenly abuse others and get away with it that becomes the mark of their place in the hierarchy. As such, they are incentivized to become sexual predators and everyone else must “humbly” accept this.

Traditionally most societies have operated on a system of polygamy and slavery founded upon male covetousness. One has the male lord with his property such as cattle. This creates a political system where people submit themselves to the lord of the household as his bondsmen in order to eat the food he provides. This logic of lordship extends to women and the lord is able to have relations with those women under his domain. This allows the lord to produce lots of sons to continue his line, with the favored son becoming the next lord and his brothers serving under him. Daughters can be sent to neighboring households to cement alliances with other lords.

This order is further reproduced through the servants. They do not have access to the lord’s harem so they do not have women of their own. This is solved through warfare. The lord leads his servants against neighboring households. Upon victory, the servants take male members of the defeated household to be their slaves and help themselves to the women as well. Thus, the servants become minor lords themselves under their lord. The most successful practitioner of this sort of politics was Genghis Khan and a significant percentage of the world’s population are his descendants.   

We can see this sort of thinking in the Bible with Abraham even as Abraham was, perhaps, a less evil practitioner of these norms. He owned herds of animals and with that came servants. When he was unable to produce a son with Sarai, she agreed to allow him to take up with Hagar. This produced Ishmael. When Isaac was finally born, this created a problem as it was not obvious which son was going to inherit the leadership role from Abraham. Abraham made war upon the four kings after they took Lot and the people of Sodom into captivity. Clearly, it would have been Abraham’s right to take all of these people as his slaves, but he returned them to the king of Sodom without accepting any gifts in return. (Note that taking a gift from the king of Sodom would have indicated that Abraham was submitting to the king of Sodom as his lord.)

Later in the Bible, we are introduced to the concept of the Captive Woman (Yifat Toar). The Bible places limits on what can be done to her, but one cannot ignore the brutal reality that this law underscores. One of the purposes of going to war in the ancient world was to gain captives, including female captives. Similarly, in Judges, we have the Song of Deborah where she imagines Sisrah’s mother wondering why he has not come home and assuming that he has been delayed because he is dividing up the female captives. When one hears of the horrors of what was done to women on October 7^th, it is important to recognize that, historically, such behavior has been the norm in war.

I would argue that the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile radically changed Judaism. Among other things, it may have given rise to the beginning of what we might think of as the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In a world in which Jews did not have power, being the lord of a household and spreading one’s seed through slavery and warfare stopped being practical. As members of a minority religion faced with the twin threats of extermination and assimilation, Jewish survival depended on a father’s willingness to not only have lots of offspring but to invest in raising them as Jews. This meant that Jewish men were going to need to be made to settle down and marry Jewish women. Note that it is precisely when we get to Ezra that we see Jewish men being denounced for taking non-Jewish wives not as a matter of this leading to idolatry but because intermarriage itself suddenly became a problem.  

Women leaving Judaism were not nearly as serious a threat. A man might want to leave Judaism in order to move up in society and become someone with power. This did not apply to women as we are still dealing with patriarchal societies. A woman who left Judaism would simply be exchanging the relatively mild Jewish patriarchy for a gentile patriarchy enforced through explicit violence. 

Since it was primarily men who needed to be kept in line, the key feature of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic became the regulation of male sexuality. In Judaism, this has manifested itself in taboos against looking at women dressed in a manner deemed immodest or listening to women singing. This has the practical purpose of setting up no-go spaces for men. This serves as a useful proxy for avoiding places and the sort of people who are not practicing a similar sexual ethic.  

Furthermore, the rabbis cleverly made use of the ban on sexual relations with a menstruating woman to render all sex outside of marriage to be sinful. Unmarried women are kept from using the mikvah. As such, all unmarried girls above the age of puberty are legally in the state of niddah and men cannot touch them let alone sleep with them. As strange as this sounds, it has been worth it for Judaism to allow its members to fall into grievous sin by engaging in pre-marital sex without immersing in the mikvah rather than allow unmarried girls to use the mikvah. If unmarried girls were allowed to use the mikvah, rabbis would no longer have a coherent argument as to why pre-marital sex should be regarded as a sin.

To be clear, the main problem with sex outside of marriage is not that it harms individuals but that it harms the community. As such, the community needs to greatly limit such behavior and inculcate in its members a deep loathing for such behavior. The problem is that people are not likely to think in terms of the needs of the community and sacrifice for it. As such, the solution is to simply label pre-marital sex as sinful by the legalist workaround of making unmarried girls ritually impure.

Admittedly, the main tool for regulating male sexuality has been regulating female sexuality. If women face a stigma for sex outside of marriage they will insist on marriage. As more women take themselves out of play men will conclude that their only hope is to get married.  As long as men are not supposed to be looking at women dressed in a certain fashion, it becomes the implicit obligation of women to dress in a manner that will allow men to look at them. To be clear, this still requires the Jewish community to come after men who sleep with gentile women. 

At first glance, the lord of the household and the Judeo-Christian sexual ethics will appear similar. Somewhat counterintuitively, the former will usually enforce stricter modesty codes on women. The reason for this is that the consequences of female infidelity are greater. A woman who is unfaithful calls into question the paternity of her children and their future claim to rule, thus undermining the entire system. From this perspective, honor killings of women on the mere suspicion of infidelity become a reasonable response. This demonstrates that the men are in charge and can guarantee the parentage of their children. By contrast, Jewish survival is far more threatened by male indiscretions than female ones as this would create a situation where men stopped being committed to raising their kids as Jews.   

The practical distinction between the two models is what they mean for male sexuality. In the lord of the household model, restrictions on female dress or their ability to leave the house do not mean restrictions on men. On the contrary, restrictions on women are meant to demonstrate that they are the property of a man. This divides women into those within the community. They are the property of a husband lord and are not to be touched by bondsmen. Then there are outside women who are fair game. By simultaneously being willing to kill women within the community for walking in the street dressed immodestly and assaulting women who are not part of the community simply for walking in the street, one demonstrates that the community is powerful and that everyone should submit themselves to it. (On the implications of this sort of thinking for Muslim men in Europe, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey.)

By contrast, the primary purpose of the Judeo-Christian ethic is to restrict men. Men are the ones who are easily tempted and need to be kept in line. As Jews lacked power, they did not need to demonstrate that they had power over their women. On the contrary, Jewish survival has relied on keeping men within the community and not assimilating into the wider society despite Jewish lack of power.  

 

Three Body Blood Libel Narrative

 

Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem is one of my favorite works of science fiction. I have just started watching the Netflix adaptation so I do not yet have a firm opinion of it. One of the things that I admire about the book is its exploration of the insidious power of propaganda. At the beginning of the novel, we are treated to a mob of Cultural Revolution students calling for the blood of a professor for teaching the "heretical" theory of relativity. This raises the question of how one goes about creating such fanatics. We are given a possible answer later in the story with the Trisolaran video game. 

(Spoiler Alert)

The alien Trisolarans, in order to prepare the way for their invasion of Earth, are recruiting human followers. Their method is through a video game. The game appears innocent at first. What players do not realize until they are well advanced into the game is that they have been learning the history of the Trisolarans and that these Trisolarans are not fiction. Having absorbed Trisolaran propaganda, the human players come to believe that the beauty of the game indicates that the Trisolarans must be virtuous and that it would be a good thing if they took over the Earth. To be clear, what makes the Trisolarans so interesting as villains is that, throughout the series, the reader is repeatably tempted to believe that the Trisolarans actually are good at heart, despite what they do, because of their artistic talent. 

The obsessed game players come to form a society to help the Trisolarans, the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Having come to completely identify with the Trisolarians, members of the ETO turn into utter fanatics in their desire to betray humanity. They hate humanity and believe that the only way they can redeem themselves and become truly Trisolaran is by destroying the human race. As such, members of the ETO have this schizophrenic view of the Trisolarans. Much like Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, they simultaneously believe that the Trisolarans will bring about a golden age where both species live in peace together and that the Trisolarans will wipe out humanity because humans do not deserve to live.         

Considering this idea that you can create fanatics by surrounding people with a propaganda narrative, I was struck by the Time review of the series. Normally, you would think that a review of a show based on a book written in Chinese nearly twenty years ago would find no need to bring in contemporary Western politics. Instead, we are treated to the following paragraph:     

What resonates most about the series is its ambivalence about the prospect of an alien civilization annihilating humanity. The Oxford Five’s debate on the matter does seem timely, in a world where, in a state with anti-trans policies, a non-binary teen dies a day after being beaten at school; and the massacre of 1,200 people in one country is answered by the killing of 30,000 people and counting next door. Even without extraterrestrial meddling, scientists’ decades of warnings about the climate crisis didn’t prevent 2023 from setting a record for carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

One is struck by the dishonesty of the claims being made. The student in Oklahoma did not die from injuries sustained in a fight that it seems they started so it is absurd to fault State officials (or, for that matter, Chaya Raichik). Israel is not simply killing people out of revenge. They are attempting to go after members of Hamas who carried out the massacre even as the fact that Hamas has embedded itself among Gazan civilians guarantees that many innocent Gazans will die as well. The main reason why carbon emissions continue to rise is that people outside of the West, particularly in China, have been making economic progress and can now afford cars. 

The point of throwing these comments in the middle of a review is to serve a narrative that closely parallels that of the ETO. There are these terrible people, religious Christians and Zionists, who are out to murder trans-kids and Palestinians. They are also responsible for global warming. Clearly, if we do not form mobs and murder these people, the whole Earth is going to be destroyed. As with all good propaganda, the point is not to make arguments as arguments require evidence and can be countered. What you want is a narrative as you cannot argue with a narrative. It is simply what “everyone” already knows to be true  

In Search of the People (Part II)

(Part I)

The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as shorter hours and better working conditions. They did not suffer alienation in the sense that the very idea of being under the authority of a capitalist did not bother them as long as that capitalist could provide them with ever greater prosperity.

One solution to this problem was Fascism. While we tend to think of Fascism as a right-wing movement, it is important to keep in mind that Mussolini started as a socialist. He then made the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could make socialism palatable in a country like Italy by embracing nationalism and using it to show that the Italian people, as Italians, really did have a revolutionary consciousness. This then led to the acceptance of the Catholic Church as part of the consciousness of the Italian People and even of the bourgeoise, who willingly embraced state control once it was made clear to them that, as Italians, they were not being placed as the villains and their property was not going to be expropriated. (It should be noted that the early Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semitic. Jews had been Italians since the Roman Empire so they were welcomed into the Fascist Party.) From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Mousellini maintained a high degree of acceptability within leftist circles during his early years. He offered a plausible model for achieving socialist aims by avoiding conflict with the right.  

Marxism's only success in the early twentieth century was Russia, a country that was still transitioning out of an absolute monarchy and still trying to figure out the Industrial Revolution. On top of this, the Czar had managed to bring the entire country to ruin through his disastrous involvement in World War I. So the Bolsheviks managed to seize power by promising basic land reforms to improve the lot of citizens. In the 1920s, it was still plausible to imagine that Marxism would allow the Soviet Union to leapfrog the West and give workers more of the cars and electric appliances that Western workers were beginning to take for granted.

The problem for the Soviet Union was that it was unable to deliver on these economic promises. Furthermore, even trying to outproduce the West in consumer goods would betray the revolution. A worker with a truly revolutionary consciousness would rather labor under the worst horrors of the nineteenth-century factory system as long as it was an agent of the party who was his boss than to enjoy the blessings of Western capitalism if it meant being subjected to a capitalist boss. As such, one had to conclude that the vast majority of Soviet citizens were counterrevolutionaries. Even the seemingly loyal Soviet citizens who honestly believed that the Communist Party could deliver the full abundance of consumer goods had already betrayed the revolution in their hearts. They demonstrated that they did not believe in Communism as a matter of principle. If tomorrow they could be convinced that capitalism could offer more benefits, they would gladly betray the revolution and replace it with capitalism. (Note that this is what essentially happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.)   

This Soviet dilemma explains the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The attempt to collectivize farms was a failure and led to the deaths of millions, mainly in Ukraine. If you are a good Communist, the explanation for this was that the Ukrainian Kulaks were greedy and sabotaged the plan so they deserved to die. Furthermore, now that we have established that the move toward actual socialism cannot happen unless the population truly develops a socialist consciousness, something most of them lack, the only solution is to declare war on the non-socialist masses in the name of the People. It should be emphasized that, under Stalin, to be guilty of treason, did not require malicious intent. Everyone, particularly those born before 1917, was, by definition, a traitor in spirit. How could it be otherwise if you were born into a capitalist world and instinctually thought in terms of personal benefit? The mark of a traitor was, upon being accused of treason, to deny guilt. Such a person demonstrated that they lacked the proper socialist mindset and still thought in terms of individual actions instead of accepting that they cannot be anything but guilty. The mark of a true socialist believer was to confess and accept any punishment in the hope that this will lead the next generation to develop the necessary socialist consciousness.

Mid and late twentieth-century leftist revolutionaries faced a dilemma. As knowledge of Stalinist atrocities became more widespread, it became harder to openly defend the Soviet Union as any kind of ideal. (This was distinct from taking money from the Soviet Union and working for Soviet interests during the Cold War.) At the same time, Western economic successes made it less likely that urban workers would be willing to risk their unions, pension plans, and welfare benefits on some revolution. As such, leftist revolutionary thought developed along two streams that looked to different groups of discontented individuals to serve as revolutionary classes. These were third-world peasants and members of minority groups in the West.

While classical Marxism had rejected the peasant as a revolutionary class, in the twentieth century they came to be reevaluated. Peasants had the advantage of never being seduced by a capitalist consciousness of individual striving and still maintained a group ethos. Furthermore, while peasants maintained traditional beliefs, outside of Europe and the United States, these were not Orthodox Christian beliefs. Even in Latin America, the Christianity on the ground could assumed to be far enough from Orthodox Christianity that such beliefs could be held up as manifestations of a revolutionary consciousness.

Much as religion suddenly became acceptable when taken out of its Western context, so did nationalism. For example, the nationalism of the North Vietnamese was acceptable as it manifested itself as opposition to imperial powers such as the French and later the Americans. As such, the North Vietnamese demonstrated a revolutionary consciousness and could be counted as a manifestation of the People. Obviously, nationalist movements that were not hostile to the West such as in Poland or Zionism remained illegitimate. Their existence demonstrated that Poles and Israelis lacked a revolutionary consciousness and did not count as part of the People.   

This embrace of nationalism and even religion, despite the fact that these were the things that were supposed to mark someone as a Fascist, eventually led Western leftists to embrace the Arab cause. This started by accepting Arab nationalists such as Nassar but then eventually came to include Islamic fundamentalists such as Khomeini in Iran. From this perspective, the Palestinians became the ultimate “oppressed people.” They combined Arab nationalism with Islam and struggled against Western "Imperialism" by opposing the State of Israel. The destruction and its replacement with Palestine would be the elimination of the Jewish false consciousness of itself as a people and allow for the manifestation of the true Peoplehood of the Palestinians.  

Opposing the Ceasefire in Pasadena Before Purim

 

Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people. 

I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.

Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.

Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side, it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating Jews when so many of them are Jewish.

Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is what I said:

It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7^th. (This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.

My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally, and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.   

There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

In Search of the People (Part I)

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are justified in using violence against you.

Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for the masses than even Plato.   

Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be satisfied through a complete revolution.

Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants. 

This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian, Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness, they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.

One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total revolution of society.

The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People. 

The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God. Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class, a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists, Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People. 

One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.     

Chabad and the Benedict Option

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the culture war and are now living in a society that is not only not even formally Christian but is outright hostile to Christianity. His basic model is of fourth-century pagans. They still believed that they controlled society, regardless of what god the emperor worshipped, and could never imagine that Christians really would seek to eliminate them. Recognizing that, culturally if not politically, they are being ruled by members of a hostile religion that is coming for their children, Christians, instead of focusing on getting Republicans elected, need to turn inward and focus on saving their kids. This is done by buildings self-consciously counter-cultural communities. A critical aspect of this is the value system you give kids. You can no longer raise kids on the model that they are going to college to enter a respectable profession. The reality is that becoming a doctor or a lawyer will require kids to do things that will go against their faith. For example, in my own professional life, I refuse, on principle, to give my pronouns because that would imply that I believe in the metaphysics of gender. Even something as innocent as this carries risk and has likely harmed my career. Kids need to know that their parents would rather that they be religious than be successful or they will never summon the courage to make such sacrifices. 

The term “Benedict Option” is a reference to St. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He could not change this fact, so, instead, he established a monastery. If your goal was to save Christendom, St. Benedict’s actions might have seemed counterproductive. You are taking your best and brightest and taking them away from society where they might actually do some good. The genius of St. Benedict was that he recognized that the Christianized Roman culture he grew up with was beyond saving so there was no point in trying. What he could do was establish a monastic culture that would, after several centuries become the basis for medieval Christianity.

What is really interesting about Dreher, is that he points blank tells his Christian readers to imitate Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews know that they are not going to win over society so the focus then becomes turning inward to family and community. On the surface, one could make the argument that Chabad, with its focus on outreach, serves as a counter-example to the Benedict Option. Outreach is central to Chabad and the Benedict Option is skeptical of outreach. From the perspective of the Benedict Option, outreach all too easily becomes an excuse to stay within society. It is “selfish” of Christians to send their kids to private schools. They should keep their kids in public schools in order that they should have a positive influence on all the non-Christian kids.   

I would argue that Chabad should be seen as a kind of Benedict Option. One might even go so far as to consider it one of the most successful Benedict Option communities in existence. Keep in mind that the Benedict Option is not against outreach per se but recognizes that it can only be possible once there is a functional community to serve as a base of operations. Furthermore, Dreher is clear that forming a Benedict Option Community does not have to be living in a monastery, as was the case of St. Benedict, or even to head to the countryside. The key idea is to be consciously counter-cultural and reach out to other people with similar values in the hope that, by working together, they can keep each other’s kids in the fold.  

Chabad is fundamentally counter-cultural. Chabad has no interest in accommodating themselves to the outside world. For example, despite Chabad being active on college campuses, Chabad has little interest in sending their own kids to college or in giving them an advanced secular education. One of the great ironies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was that, despite the fact that he had a university education and spent years living outside of the Hasidic community, he opposed college. Contrary to post-Vatican II Catholic priests who tried to present themselves as basically regular people despite their vows of celibacy, often going so far as to drop clerical garb, Chabad rabbis present themselves as being from a different planet with their hats and beards. Despite Chabad’s friendliness, they make no bones about the fact that they are in opposition to modern society and do not simply wish to give it a more spiritual veneer.

One might think of Chabad as setting up Benedict Option communities and inviting people to join them. Keep in mind that Chabad does not simply do outreach in the sense of dropping people in for a brief mission to give a few classes. Chabad embeds themselves within communities with emissaries going out to places on the understanding that this is going to be their lives’ work and not simply something to put on their resume as they seek something better.   

Can Chabad’s particular version of the Benedict Option be replicated by Jews or by Christians? I am skeptical of this as Chabad benefits from a number of specific features. One is the incredible charisma of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that inspired his followers to build their little communities at great personal sacrifice. Two, Chabad possesses a distinctive ideology that allows them to thread the needle between turning into a sect that is simply hostile to the world along the lines of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Neturai Karta and accommodating themselves to the world to the point of becoming Tikkun Olam progressivism.

In one sense, Chabad’s theology can be seen as rooted in conservative Kabbalah. Rather than seeing commandments as pedagogic exercises to aid spiritual development or tools for building the sort of "Benedict Option communities" that are likely to pass on monotheistic beliefs, Chabad assumes that commandments serve a mystical function. This places commandments outside of any rational analysis and forestalls any attempt to reform ritual practice to better allow Judaism to function. Most importantly, the fact that commandments affect the metaphysical realm means that people who violate Jewish law are not just misguided sinners but agents of cosmic evil. In itself, this sort of thinking can easily lead to justifying assaulting women in the street or even executing them for the “crime” of wearing pants. For Chabad, this theology is balanced by a belief in the intrinsic spiritual value of Jews. Chabad’s theology of Jews having special souls is also rooted within this conservative Kabbalistic tradition and is connected to a view of Gentiles as manifestly evil found in Tanya. Historically though, Chabad has viewed non-observant Jews as worse than Gentiles as their Jewish souls allow them to gain access to various spiritual forces and parasitically feed off them in order to maintain the forces of evil.  

To be clear, Chabad, under the leadership of the Lubavitcher rebbe, came to downplay its early rhetoric against gentiles and non-observant Jews. This is likely connected to Chabad’s messianism. Messianism opens the door to holding that a belief is true while simultaneously accepting a contradictory claim on the grounds that the new truth represents a new dispensation. Standing in the doorway to messianic redemption but not yet in a fully realized messianic age, Chabad can believe that non-observant Jews are manifestations of evil and yet also the key to completing the redemption and fully entering the messianic age. 

C. S. Lewis argued that it is essentially impossible for a human being to fully comprehend the reality of sin while perfectly loving the sinner at the same time. Inevitably, one is going to end up sacrificing one spiritual truth in order to maintain the other. This was why it was important for Jesus to dine with tax collectors and other sinners. Anyone else would have fallen into the trap of flattering such people while telling themselves that they were doing "outreach." It is the strength of Chabad that they have come closer to this ideal than mere mortals have any right to expect.