Ritual and Belief in the Military Model

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. 

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.       

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.   

 

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. 

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.  

 

Calvin the Philosophical Child

A common criticism of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is not a plausible six-year-old. There are too many aspects of his character, such as his language and reasoning, that clearly are meant to represent adults. For me, this is not a problem as I do not see Calvin and Hobbes as being about accurately representing childhood (even when it does that better than almost anyone else). I see Calvin as an adult who is depicted as a child in order to explore the childlike nature of adults. Now most explorations of people’s inner childs tend to focus on the positive aspects of childlike thinking such as innocence, or a sense of wonder. Bill Watterson focuses on the dark side of childlike thinking by making Calvin a philosophical child whose worldview is completely ego-centric and founded upon ignorance. This lack of a developed moral sense is made worse by Calvin’s highly developed even adultlike ability to reason. 

In examining Calvin’s thinking, it is useful to consider three different realms of knowledge, facts, morality, and reasoning. Facts are the realm in which Calvin is most obviously a child. He knows little about how the world actually functions and the few facts that he has are riddled with errors. While the particulars of what Calvin knows may mark him as a child, this is not, in itself, a flaw or what marks him as truly a child. All of us are profoundly ignorant about the world and, considering how ignorant we know we are when it comes to things of this world that have credible answers, we must assume that our ignorance only gets worse when it comes to metaphysics. From a divine perspective, the most knowledgeable person on the planet must appear no different than a child like Calvin. Even though Calvin’s ignorance is not, in itself a flaw, it does introduce a legitimate moral flaw in that Calvin’s ignorance is greatly exacerbated by his laziness. 

In terms of morality, Calvin is very much a child in the sense that he is the center of his own universe. He lacks the sense that he is not the most important being in the world. He does not see that he has obligations to those who were here before he was born and to those who will be here long after he is dead. In this sense, he is less obviously a child. Most adults have more information about the world even as they remain moral children. That being said, part of the fun of the character is how unapologetically self-centered he is. He lacks the adult ability to effectively flatter others or to pretend that he cares about them.

Calvin’s self-centeredness can be seen as the foundation for his ignorance. To study means to recognize that one is ignorant. As Calvin is the center of his own universe, he can never acknowledge this. At a practical level, this manifests in his laziness. Paying attention in class or doing homework are literal torture for him as these are tasks that require him to confront his limitations. Better to not do work and continue to bask in one's supremacy. When, inevitably, Calvin gets himself into trouble, he can never acknowledge that the problems in his life might actually be his own fault. Instead, the fault must lie in other people such as his parents, Susie Derkins, or Miss Wormwood, his teacher.

The least childlike aspect of Calvin’s thinking is his ability to reason. Calvin reasons with the full array of tools that we associate with adults. What makes Calvin so interesting, though, is precisely that his sophisticated reasoning does nothing to fix either his ignorance or his self-centered morality. Calvin’s reason only serves his passion to be lazy and not work to lessen his ignorance as well as to flatter himself into believing in his own importance.  

A useful example of the interaction of all three aspects of Calvin’s thinking can be seen in the piece where Calvin asks his father to burn leaves to appease the snow demons.

One might say that Calvin is ignorant to believe that the weather is the product of supernatural beings as opposed to the scientific laws of meteorology. That being said, he is still able to use his reason to construct a narrative of how the world functions on the edifice of his ignorance. He assumes that there are powers out there that affect the weather and he theorizes as to how to best interact with them.

The real problem, as Calvin’s father indicates, is Calvin’s theology. Since Calvin lives in a moral universe that is all about him, his reaction to the existence of higher powers is to construct a magical religion as opposed to an ethical one. The question that Calvin implicitly asks is how does one get a supernatural power like a snow demon to do his bidding. Calvin is not interested in the question of how he can mold his personality to be more in line with that of a supremely perfect being. For Calvin, the supremely perfect being is himself.

Because Calvin has not given himself an education in history or literature which might have given him a wider picture of the world, and lacks the moral imagination to even suspect that such a larger world might exist, he is a slave to momentary pleasures as symbolized by his television set, which he turns into an idol.   

For all of Calvin’s great ability to reason, his rationality, limited by its service to an ignorant self-centered child, ultimately leads him simply to worshipping pleasure and sacrificing his intellect to it.

Calvin’s hope for redemption lies in his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In a sense, Hobbes can be seen as another idol constructed by Calvin. Someone as self-centered as Calvin is incapable of friendship so his solution is to construct a friend for himself according to his own design that he can control. What is interesting about Hobbes is the extent to which Calvin loses control of this relationship. (Perhaps, this is because Hobbes is not simply a figment of Calvin’s imagination.) One thinks of Hobbes tackling him when he opens the front door or his refusal to hate Susie.

Hobbes may be everything that Calvin desires to be, a powerful tiger who is not answerable to parents, teachers, or social conventions. Yet, it is this very wish fulfillment that turns Hobbes against him and stops him from being merely Calvin’s plaything. Furthermore, Hobbes' self-sufficiency makes him rational in a Stoic sense; he does not desire things that he cannot have. Because of that, Hobbes is consistently happy in a way that eludes Calvin. 

This opens Calvin to the possibility that there can be something out there, besides himself, that he should want to imitate. Most importantly, the fact that Calvin can love Hobbes, even though Hobbes acts against him, means that we can truly consider Hobbes to be his friend. With Hobbes, Calvin is given a door through which he might eventually think his way outside of himself.

In keeping with a character named after John Calvin, Calvin is a distinctly Augustinian sort of child. He is trapped by a Satanic love of self that corrupts his reason into digging ever deeper into himself. Calvin is an anti-hero. He is not a good person, but we still like him perhaps because we recognize that his sins are our sins. We are never given a chance to see Calvin grow up. Perhaps, he becomes more like Hobbes, which might lead him to stop being a slave to desiring what he cannot have and instead to love Susie and to try to become the sort of person that she might love in return. But that would be of little interest as a comic strip.  

 

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.     

Public Judaism: Chabad's Outreach Playbook

 

In the previous post, I discussed Charles Taylor's argument that the Protestant notion of privacy led to the rise of modern secularism. Here, I would like to use the example of Chabad as a model of how Taylor's version of secularism can be countered. Once one understands the extent to which modern secularism relies on the privatization of religion, Chabad’s style of outreach begins to make a lot of sense. In essence, the primary goal of Chabad’s outreach is to get Jews to do publicly Jewish things. By taking Judaism out of people's heads, into their homes, and out into the public sphere, it becomes possible to reverse the presumed slide into secularism where every generation is less religious than the last.

Chabad's strategy of bringing Judaism into the public sphere starts with the very idea of sending out shluchim in the first place to cities one would not normally associate with traditional Jewish observance. Back in the 1950s, the Lubavitcher rebbe actually had a difficult time getting his followers to become shluchim. You want me to leave the New York area, a place where I might have a fighting chance at keeping my kids religious to go where? It should be noted that an essential part of Chabad’s success has been that they have been able to keep the children of their shiluchim religious. In turn, these kids have grown up and have gone on to become shluchim themselves. At this point, Chabad has multiple generations of shluchim, making it a family business. None of this was obvious back in the 1950s and it is certainly foolhardy to believe that people are automatically going to be able to do successful outreach simply because they are thrown out into the secular world. I suspect that a large part of Chabad’s success with their own children comes from the fact that, since the parents are doing outreach, they are more likely to apply what they are doing to their own children without falling into the traps of believing that their kids are automatically going to be religious or that it is a lost battle so there is no point in trying. 

In keeping with the principle of "the medium is the message," the bulk of Chabad's message is quite effectively articulated by the mere fact of having someone with a hat, jacket, and a beard setting up shop in a place outside of New York or Jerusalem. By showing up dressed in their distinctive outfit, the Chabad rabbi is demonstrating that they do not accept the premise that Judaism is merely a set of practices relevant only to the privacy of one's home. In fact, they are going on the offensive and believe that a place with little previous association with Judaism can be claimed as a Jewish space. 

This can be effective as it takes away people's excuse to not be openly Jewish. One cannot argue that people over here do not openly do Jewish things. There is a friendly Chabad rabbi here who is doing Jewish things and he is now challenging you to not just claim to be Jewish but actually put that Judaism into practice. This usually involves simple actions that take only a few minutes like men wearing tiffilin and women lighting Shabbat candles. These street corner tiffilin and candle stands have their counterparts in Chabad's efforts to create major candle-lighting spectacles for Chanukah challenging the notion that a public space must be a secular space. What seems like a minor gesture can have large consequences. Human beings are fundamentally influenced by their lived reality; what you do controls what you think. 

It should be noted that, unlike most Orthodox outreach organizations, Chabad's model of outreach is not built around getting people to become Orthodox. Instead, Chabad focuses on small victories while they play a long game by establishing permanent Chabad house synagogues. These welcome all Jews even those who drive on Shabbat. Chabad rabbis are going to spend decades embedded in a community building personal relationships as opposed to looking for a more prestigious and more lucrative pulpit. If Chabad rabbis were looking for respect, in the traditional rabbinic sense, they would not be serving as shluchim in the places that they do. 

By establishing communities premised on Orthodox observance even if most of the people there are not observant, it becomes possible to reverse the expected trend of secular modernity and create a situation where kids are more religious than their parents. By taking their kids to Chabad programs, parents send the message to their kids that it is not just that they are Jewish but that they are part of a Jewish community and, regardless of what they personally do or do not observe, they are striving to become more actively Jewish. Children raised in such an environment are less likely to assume that the march to secularism is inevitable and, therefore, may choose to not follow that script.      

This interpretation of Chabad's outreach is effectively summarized in a far more entertaining fashion than I could ever offer in Benny Friedman's music video Ivri Anochi. 

The story that plays out in the video is someone being blatantly Jewish causing other people to shift their behaviors in subtle ways that add up to make the neighborhood a more Jewish place. 

Protestantism, Privacy, and the Rise of Secularism

Charles Tayor’s Secular Age is one of those rare books that are nearly a thousand pages but demand close reading. At the center of his narrative regarding the rise of secularism is the rise of privacy. Ironically, as with much of the origins of European secularism, privacy was a creation of Protestantism. In contrast to the Catholic model where one was saved by being part of the visible community of the Church and physically entering the local church to confess one’s sins and receive communion, Protestantism held up the individual reading their Bible and discovering that they are sinners who can only be saved through Jesus.

As a matter of practical application, a church service came to mean something different for Protestants. The Eucharist became incidental. Instead, one came to church to reinforce the lessons that proper Bible reading should have provided. One sang hymns that explained the basic message of sin and salvation and listened to a sermon provided by a minister to explain the Bible. This provided our Christian with the proper tools and frame of mind to go home, read the Bible, and be saved.

This focus on the private individual had unintended consequences. If we require this personal acceptance of Jesus as the only source of salvation, what is the use of religious coercion? For that matter, why bother having the state involved with religion at all. If people are not going to be saved as a community, what is even the use of public displays of religion that might provide a sense of a community bonded by faith. Ultimately, once we make the individual alone with their private thoughts deciding what to believe the central player in the narrative of salvation, we are on a straight path to Kant's Enlightenment where each individual is answerable only to their own reason for what they believe.

The ultimate danger of privacy is that it allows for the process of secularization to unfold without people realizing what is happening. One simply decides to take a more private approach to religion, first taking religion out of the public sphere into one’s home and then into one’s head. This is easy to do because all of this can be justified on religious grounds. One can honestly believe that they are not abandoning their faith but, on the contrary, are deepening their faith and becoming more spiritual.

This claim is quite plausible for the individual. The problem comes when we insert children into the equation. Religious belief is going to be of little use if it is not passed down to the next generation. Any break in the chain and it becomes difficult for the faith to be recovered. What happens to a kid raised in a society in which the public sphere is free of religion. At best, religion becomes a quirky hobby that their parents engage in that the younger generation is free to abandon when they grow up and become their “own people.” The parents might believe that they are raising their kids in a religious home and will not realize until it is too late that their faith was something in their heads and not something they ever bothered to seriously share with their children.

Protestantism is particularly vulnerable to this as it fundamentally rejects works and, therefore, cannot demand adherence to ritual practice. All too easily a Protestant can lead a completely secular life except for the hour a week they spend in church and, since that can never be made mandatory, even that can easily be dropped.

Orthodox Jewish religious practices obviously offer their own challenges as they create more head-on conflicts with secular society that children will become conscious of at an earlier time. Judaism does not let me watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat McDonalds; I, therefore, hate Judaism. That being said, the children lost in this fashion will likely be lost anyway. What ritual offers though is precisely the ability to make the conflict clearer and avoid slipping away without realizing, at an early stage, what is happening. The Christian freshman who stops going to church can pretend that they simply are looking for one that fits them. The Orthodox Jewish freshman who starts eating the regular cafeteria food knows that they have crossed a red line.

The process of secularization gains even greater power through people seeing it as inevitable. If parents do not really expect their children to follow them in their faith it becomes all too easy for parents to Pontius Pilate themselves of any blame. If no one’s kids are religious, then I cannot be blamed if my kids are not either. I can do my private religious thing without having to do something out of my comfort zone like actually trying to engage my kids.

Keep in mind that very few people have ever lost their religion because of a book they read. Losing one’s faith to a book would require actually reading a book as well as coming to that book without any preconceptions as to what the book contained. The number of people throughout history who have read through the Origin of Species after innocently pulling it off a shelf has to be somewhere around zero. People who have read Darwin have presumably done so because something caused them to pick up his work. Furthermore, judging by membership, ideological secularists remain a minority even as most people today are assuredly secular. Most secular people never lost their faith. Instead, they, or their immediate ancestors, were raised in homes that were de facto secular without their parents realizing it. As such, they became adults who took secularism as a given and never even needed to go through the trauma of abandoning a faith.  

Orual's Blindness: Understanding the End of Till We Have Faces

 

Years ago, I did a series of posts on C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, but I never really felt happy with how I explained the ending. Essentially, I tried to keep with the idea that Orual is right and the gods acknowledge this fact by offering her salvation even though she is their enemy. I would like to take another pass at explaining the ending and make the case that the ending is worthy of the rest of the book. 

Till We Have Faces, is, I would argue, Lewis' greatest book. What is so impressive about this work is Lewis' ability to create a spiritual anti-hero in the form of Orual. As I have previously argued, part of the difficulty of writing good religious fiction is that it requires one to be able to seriously imagine going "off the derech" and abandoning the faith. Most religious people remain so precisely because they cannot see themselves as following a different path and they want to read fiction that confirms their belief that there is not another plausible option for them. As with Milton's Satan (See Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost), Lewis' point in making Orual intellectually attractive (in contrast to her physical ugliness) is to challenge us. What does it say about us if we find ourselves liking Orual and inclined to give her a pass for the terrible thing that she does, mainly forcing Psyche to violate Cupid's commandment and destroying her happiness?  

Admittedly, the problem with Till We Have Faces is the ending. It is easy to understand the majority of the novel, which is Orual's argument against the gods, mainly that they should either leave us alone or reveal themselves; they should not play games with us, leading us to wonder about them. The gods' answer to Orual is not so clear. It seems that Orual's question of why the gods hide themselves is better than the answer that we cannot see them until we have faces. 

Let us begin with Lewis' most important change from the original story that Orual is unable to see Cupid's palace and therefore does not believe Psyche when she claims that she is now married to a god. On the surface, this makes Orual more sympathetic as her motive becomes a perfectly legitimate skepticism as opposed to jealousy. This fact, though, covers Orual's tragic flaw that she is blind. The fact that Orual is blind to spiritual things like Cupid's palace, raises the question of what other spiritual things is Orual blind to. 

There is Orual's treatment of the Fox and Bardia where Orual does not treat them nearly as well as she imagines. As we shall see, this is important but not simply as a matter of arguing that Orual is not such a nice person. The big thing that is in front of Orual (and us the reader) the entire time was that Psyche is a goddess and had been so even before she was taken by Cupid. (This is meant to parallel the ministry of Jesus where the apostles spend years with Jesus without ever understanding who he was and what he was actually here on Earth to accomplish.) Once we accept that Psyche is a goddess taking on human form then the entire story changes and Orual's argument against the gods collapses. 

By becoming human, Psyche choses to suffer in order to elevate the humans around her with her divinity. Psyche's suffering is caused not by a jealous Venus but by humans like Orual, who never appreciate or love her like another god can. What Orual thinks as the gods' demand that Psyche be sacrificed is the gods coming to save Psyche from the torment of having to live with humans. Even here, Psyche's redemption from her life as a human is incomplete. She is unable to look upon Cupid's face because she is still holding on to a human aspect of herself, mainly her love for Orual. It should be understood that Cupid's commandment to not look at his face was never a trap but simply an acknowledgment, as the gods know the future, that Psyche would sacrifice herself for Orual by looking at Cupid's face simply because Orual demanded that she do it.  

Orual, because of her misguided love, fails to leave things as they are and pursues Psyche but she is unable to even see the palace, the lower truth that Psyche is now married to a god, let alone the higher truth that Psyche had always been a goddess even when Orual changed her diapers. Unable to convince Orual of the truth, Psyche undergoes the ultimate sacrifice of giving up the bliss of her unity with Cupid. The only way for Orual to be saved is for Psyche to suffer for her sake and for Orual to come to see that suffering. Only then will Orual be able to see Psyche for who she really is and become unified with that divinity by having Psyche forgive her. 

It should have been enough for Orual to see that the palace was real after Pysche looked at Cupid's face and know that her unbelief cost Psyche everything. The problem is that convincing Orual that the gods are real simply causes her to blame the gods for Psyche's misfortune. What sort of god hands out random commandments with extreme consequences for failing to keep them? If the gods are the ones in the wrong then Orual was right in opposing them even if she was mistaken in not believing in them. In fact, Orual's unbelief is one more thing that can be blamed on the gods. She would have believed in them if they had only shown themselves to her. As such, curing Orual of her spiritual blindness is going to be a process taking many years.   

It is important to realize the source of Orual's blindness. How is it that she could be the person who knows Psyche best and still not realize that she is a goddess? Orual's problem is that she has been intellectually seduced by the Fox. Whether or not the Fox actually believes the gods literally exist, for him, the gods are theoretical abstractions with no relevance to human existence. What makes the Fox's unbelief so plausible is that he is, by human standards, a virtuous person. If the Fox can be virtuous simply because of his Stoic principles and not because he fears that the gods will send him to Hell then he does not need the gods and can simply ignore them. Furthermore, since Orual lacks the framework of a simple faith where of course the gods exist and she needs to get right with them, Orual naturally comes to try to turn the tables on the gods where she judges them to decide if they are worthy of her belief. (See Lewis' "God in the Dock" essay.) Orual's right to judge the gods becomes all the more plausible once she becomes, by human standards, a good queen, who rightfully and fairly stands in judgment over others. 

Here is where Orual's treatment of Bardia and the Fox becomes crucial. The fact that Orual makes them important people at her court does not really improve their lives. This gives Orual reason to question whether she really is, with all of her godlessness, so virtuous. Furthermore, the fact that her problem in treating Bardia and the Fox is that she clings to them out of a selfish human love for them, raises the question of whether she was wrong to cling to Psyche. Once Orual's belief in her own virtue is challenged, her case against the gods becomes vulnerable. The gods are virtuous in ways that we cannot ever be. One needs to believe in the gods in order to be judged by them because even to be condemned by the gods is better than living in the knowledge that, with all of your flaws, you are the closest thing to true virtue in the universe. (Think of the horror of living in a Lovecraftian universe even if you assumed that Cthluhu was not going to rise up during your lifetime.)     

In the end, the only way for Orual to come to know the truth about Psyche is through this roundabout way where she would cause Psyche to lose Cupid, become queen, fail Bardia and the Fox, write a book against the gods, and demand that they stand trial. It is only then that Psyche is revealed for who she was all along. Orual is able to see how she had wronged Psyche and, despite all that, Psyche loved her so much as to sacrifice everything to allow her to see. The gods had never been hiding from Orual. It was she who had been covering her eyes not to see them all along until they finally backed her into a corner where she could no longer refuse to see them. 

From this perspective, Orual, even though she finds redemption in the end, is the villain of the story. For me though, seeing her as a villain only makes for more interesting as a character. She may be an appealing villain but that simply raises the question of what it says about us that we can find such a villain attractive even to think of her as the hero. Are we freethinking individuals with the courage to stand for our principles even against the gods or are we trying to hide from a world in which the gods are real because we do not want to face the consequences.   

 

Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from the album Journeys Five stands as a useful introduction to a traditional view of Jewish History. To be clear, by history here, what I mean is not so much the particular facts about the past but the narrative framework in which we place those facts. Admittedly, part of the song's charm is that it never explicitly says anything about Judaism. If I had heard this song on a Celtic album I would have simply thought that this was a solid song. What follows is my interpretation. You have the ship of Judaism crewed by the faithful and led by wise captain rabbis. It sails on the Sea of Galus (exile). The goal is at some point to reach the port of messianic redemption, but that is of little day-to-day relevance when compared to living as a religious Jew. The challenge of sailing on the Sea of Galus is that inevitably you are going to run into storms that threaten to destroy Judaism either through physical violence or through assimilation. 

It should be noted that the captain and the crew are fundamentally passive figures as events play themselves out. They have absorbed enough of Jewish History to recognize that storms are on the horizon and take measures, presumably the strengthening of Jewish practice, to give themselves a chance of getting through the storm with the ship intact. That being said, no one on the ship ever tries to stop storms from happening. Such actions are presumed to be beyond their power and, therefore foolhardy to pursue. All that is left is to recognize that they have limited power and seek to act only within their means. 

This view of Jewish History has not been limited to Orthodox writers. For example, Heinrich Graetz's Jewish History is famously an exercise in a lachrymose narrative in which Jews suffer and think. There is a reason why Rabbi Berel Wein was able to so easily take Graetz and give him a more religious spin. Graetz's basic narrative remained a fundamentally traditional one in which Judaism managed to survive outside threats even as, for Graetz, Judaism meant something slightly different from Orthodox writers, mainly nothing involving Kabbalah or Hasidism.    

An essential point to understand about political Zionism (whether secular or religious) is that it rejected our traditional model of Jewish History. One thinks of the example of Benzion Netanyahu's biography of Isaac Abarbanel. Netanyahu could never forgive Abarbanel for having been caught by surprise by 1492 and for having no real solution to the problem of expulsion beyond apocalypticism. If Jews had a state of their own, then Jews would not have had to ask themselves the question of what are they to do if they were faced with expulsion or pogroms as Jews living in a Jewish State would not be under the power of gentiles. Similarly, at a spiritual level, Jews would not have had to worry about making themselves acceptable to gentiles and refashioning Judaism to suit gentile tastes. Instead, Jews could have focused on the development of a genuinely Jewish culture. From this perspective, traditional Jewish History, with its emphasis on bracing to be hit in the hope of being able to stand back up again, was a colossal mistake that needed to be fixed.     

It should be appreciated that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 at a time when the traditional model of Jewish History seemed to have reached a dead end. This was in the wake of the Holocaust when a modern state like Germany decided to invest its full efforts in murdering all Jews under its control. Furthermore, neither the United States and certainly not the Soviet Union could stand as plausible candidates for flourishing Jewish life, particularly when being Jewish now meant facing the possibility of something like the Holocaust. Under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Judaism could survive without a Jewish State that would physically protect Jews and offer them a space to be productive citizens without abandoning their Jewish identity. In judging the State of Israel over the past seventy-five years, it is a fair question to consider to what extent it has offered a legitimate alternative to traditional Jewish History.

In understanding the traditional narrative of Jewish History, it is useful to also pay attention to the song's chorus: "It's our life a journey at sea, a voyage of fate and destiny." What has allowed Jews to even try to survive as Jews has been a belief that there really was no other way of life available to them. To be a religious Jew has meant believing that God has a literal plan for history that requires Jewish survival so he will not allow the Jewish people to disappear. If you are a Jew, you will always be a Jew and God, often acting through gentiles, will never allow you to escape your Judaism no matter how hard you try. Even for those Jews who formally reject such theology, the basic model of seeing the world can be hard to shake.