Yesterday, Marc Tracy, a blogger for Tablet, posted a response to Jonathan Neumann’s COMMENTARY article, “Occupy Wall Street and the Jews.” As an aside, he posited that “dissent and heresy” constitute the “other, dialectical half” of Judaism’s obsession with “laws and authority.”
This, in its pithy way –stated as a fact so self-evident that it need not be justified – illustrates well today’s central American Jewish argument over Judaism and Jewish authenticity, revealing how far from the true facts of things a small but well-placed minority of writers, philanthropists, and activists have strayed
and how, by so doing, they have set the latest roadblock to an invigorated American Jewish future.
The basic claim is this: A central aspect of the Jewish tradition (“half” of it, let’s say) is opposition. Figures like Hannah Arendt or Spinoza are cast as the central Jewish protagonists in a supposedly long-arching tradition.
More charitably, the claim is most likely driven by a vague sense of the Talmudic tradition, the great and awe-inspiring discussions that characterized the intellectual life of the long-vanished academies at Sura, Pumbedita and elsewhere.
Perhaps there is justification in casting this tradition as “dialectical,” if one is reaching for the ancient Socratic sense of the word. More likely though in its common usage today it is derivative of the Hegelian tradition popularized by Marx and, especially when coupled with the supposedly sacred values of dissent and heresy, little more than an intellectual club thought to be sufficiently sturdy to batter away all opposing arguments.
This is the central problem with the “Judaism as dissent” meme. Modern terms and ways of thinking about politics are coupled with a thin Jewish veneer to make far-reaching and radical claims about the Jewish past and future. Clothed in supposed authenticity, they are cast as, at a minimum, worthy halves of a Jewish tradition we all must grapple with.
The great intellectual tradition of the Jews has always been based on an expansive conception of truth and obligation, and not just halfway. The fire of the Talmudic tradition is driven by the conviction by interlocutors like Hillel and Shammai that they were in search of eternal truths God had revealed to the Jewish people, not by the postures of dissent or, even less, heresy. The Talmud in fact has its own idiomatic heretic: Elisha ben Abuyah, a brilliant student derided in the text as acher, “other,” precisely because his radical dissent from those truths eventually moved him outside of the community.
Today’s partisans of Jewish dissent likely believe that they are replenishing a tradition stunted in those American synagogues where rituals like responsive English readings are indeed stale and inauthentic.
Glorifying dissent though is simply today’s version of packaging the Jewish tradition in a contemporary box deemed more palatable than the true tradition, whose wonders only reveal themselves through patient and difficult study and are usually not in style on Madison Avenue.
Worst of all, the dissent posture so attractive to this cohort and the world they live in probably does not have nearly the resonance those inauthentic synagogues had for our parents’ generation, and so does not have the resources sufficient to match even their accomplishments. Which means that in the efforts of writers like Tracy, if they cannot be dissuaded from their strange path, we are seeing the emergence of a tiny yet indulged and influential American Jewish generation with little chance of appealing to anyone but itself and therefore doing its part to ensure that another generation of American Jews must pass before we can find one able to grapple honestly with the majesty of its own tradition.
You know the best part about Tablet, is that if you have something real to say or confront them they block you. Tracy has deleted my comments for over a year now. Antisemites, antizionists that is ok, but a conservative-Jewsh-Zionist seems to scare them over there. Even little old me. So take the criticism from whence it comes. It's just his self-important drivel.
Mr. Ackerman, n nYour writing has not disappointed me yet. I look forward to your pieces. n nAs a person who felt I had to seek a wilderness because I couldn't seem to be able to think freely while a practicing Roman Catholic. My formation, though, was very good. I thought it right to leave. The Church made the rules and I obeyed them. n nAnd, from the outside, I found that the verdict on heresy declared by the church fathers was correct. The sin of it is its obstinacy, and the danger of it, is that it raises one point of doctrine above, and almost always to the exclusion of, the sane whole. n nI can't tell you how much I've come to admire my parents and the cornerstone my formation has proven to be.
In the context of the above article I in my own way have tried to make sense of the LEFT JEWISH position and the best I can do is the following: There are False Jews and Lost Jews and the Left group constitutes both. A False Jew would be a person who makes an issue of their Jewishness-say a Rabbi–yet takes positions that are detrimental to the Jewish People–for instance supporting the Flotillas trying to break the Gaza blockade or the Anti-Semitic rants of OWS. The Lost Jew is one who either renounces his Jewishness or Converts to some other religion or has no religion at all. Their religion is Socialism or Communism as in the case of the False Jew.r nIn my parlance: They may be Jewish ( or not ) but they are not Kosher.
There is a story in the Talmud about a student who, with faith in his own calculations, decided that Yom Kippur was a day earlier than scheduled. He told his Rabbi, who ORDERED him to take his staff in his hand, put his sandals on his feet and walk to the Rabbi's house on the day he considered was Yom Kippur…which he did…on the day he had sworn was Yom Kippur… nThe moral? Dissent all you want but be prepared to LIVE your dissent, to be schooled by those who know better; to be so publicly committed to your beliefs that you are prepared to defy the observances of your community… nThose Jews who dissent nowadays are not like this disciple who was ready to give up his own logic and reason because he had more faith in his Rabbi than he had in himself. Dissent only begins when the cowards among us scream that they know better than the 3000 years of wisdom that is available to us!
Jews are called the children of Israel because Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with God (Genesis 32:24-30). Israel means "wrestled God" and Jews have always thought of themselves as a people who wrestled with God. nMoses won a wrestling match with God, according to Numbers 14:11-20. God said he would destroy the Israelites and make the descendants of Moses "a nation greater and mightier than they." Moses answered that the nations (ha-goyim) would say God had killed the Israelites because He hadn't been able to "bring the people into the land which he sware unto them." In other words, Moses was asking "What will the Goyim think?" Moses won the match.
Yes, but in the perpetual debating society view of Judaism that many liberals hold, God is not even a participant in the match.
Jacob didn't wrestle with G-d exactly, he wrestled with Esau's "sar" or angel. It was a divine creature, but it didn't represnt G-ds will, it represented Esau's.
But can we put the label of "dissent" on individuals and groups whose "dissent" is always in agreement with the State Department or the White House? Like jstreet for instance?
Not everything Jews do is "Judaism". Secular theories of dissent or revolution, whether they be Marx's or Hannah's off-the-rail sophistries about evil's banality and the parochial mediocrity of Zionism, are not fated to be contributions to the dialectic of Judaism however prolixly you trick that abstraction out with 25 cent profundities about dissent. Howard Stern does not contribute to the dialectic of tragedy and eros in Judaism; OWS starts as a non-Jewish exercise in thrice warmed over microwaved universalist utopianism and stays firmly in the nothing particularly Jewish camp and so forth. Judaism does not have all the answers, and not all the answers or questions asked by Jews down the ages automatically contribute to Judaism. The Trotsky's indulge in transgressive posturing, the Bronshteins pay the price.