Jack Ross on the debate over chosenness and Israel:
I'm crazy to be taking time to do this while I'm spending my last night
in the house where I grew up, but here goes. The discussion goes to
the very heart of my foremost criticism of where you're coming from,
and that is to frame the whole problem as a religious issue. I.e.,
when you use terms like "religious left", I find that extremely
misleading.
In sum, the motivation for problems of dual loyalty
and the like is not religious per se, but secular ideology. It is not
the Boro Park settlers who bother with niceties about a bond between
America and Israel.
It is the more secular types who believe in the ideology of global
democratic revolution, which includes but is not limited to
neoconservatism.
I agree with your statement of a while back
that Israel is the "royal road to neoconservatism". But they are
committed first and foremost to their ideology, and while it is very
often motivated by initial Jewish parochialism, the embrace of Zionism
follows ideology, not religion. In the vast majority of cases,
religion only comes in as a convenient excuse after the fact.
Witness
the rather recent case of the (barely at this point) left-neocons like
Stephen Schwartz and Bernard Henri-Levy, who only embraced religion as
an afterthought to their ideological turn, and in so doing pontificate
about it with deep ignorance.
As to how my beloved rabbi [Ellen Lippmann] came
into this discussion, I do not know and can not directly comment on the
sermon which was referred to, but I suspect that it mostly focused on
the prophetic idea of "a light unto the nations", which exists
independently of any debate over whether the Jews are a nation or a mere
religious community or something in between.
So in short,
while I agree in principle with the protest that "chosenness" is a
theological concept that should not be part of a political discussion,
context is everything and it came down gravely against this poor
woman. This is exactly what is fundamentally wrong with Zionism, that
it introduced such theological concepts into politics.
Weiss again: Jack, that woman's conflation is very conventional in Jewish life. And in Jewish leadership. If Islam is being tested by its failure to honor free speech and women's rights, and Catholicism by its celibacy/pedophilia problem, why shouldn't Judaism be tested by the near-absolute affiliation of religious institutions with a state practicing apartheid? Isn't this a religious crisis? I'm not anti-Jewish. For me Jewishness is Jewish secular culture, my inheritance. Oh well, I'm tired.
