This morning C-Span rebroadcast a panel on religion organized by the neoconservative Hudson Institute a month ago. Paul Marshall, a Hudson fellow, explained that Ahmed Chalabi had regained status in Iraq– notwithstanding his collaborationist past with Perle and Feith– not because of his political background but because he came from a family that had for generations supported a Shi'ite shrine. He had religious status because of his "creed" (Marshall's word). He could move back into his old house.
It struck me that People are inherently religious. Of course a few are areligious, but they are the exception. And religion, defined as fundamental beliefs or guiding principles (creed, in Webster's), is an essential component of a society. Secular Jews, the tribe I grew up in, like to say that they are not religious. Typically we have been bar mitzvah'd, and most of us get into a synagogue a couple or few times a year. I would say that is not a trivial connection; and that we also have our Chalabis–people with religious standing whose expressions are chiefly political.
Look at this conference call on Jimmy Carter's new book and Gaza organized by the to-the-right-of-AIPAC Israel Project. The three participants are Alan Dershowitz, former Clinton impeachment lawyer Lanny Davis, and Kenneth Stein, the former director of the Carter Center (who accuses Carter of being a snake, basically). All three men are Jewish, and the audience for their remarks is chiefly Jewish. The reporters who ask questions are Jews, I believe. It is a very Jewish conversation, in which the fundamental beliefs and guiding principles are that Jews are moral people, Israel is a moral nation, Arabs are not to be trusted because they will blow up children on purpose and Jews won't. Dershowitz even trots out the famous Golda Meir quote, without irony: We will forgive you Arabs for blowing up our people but we will never forgive you Arabs for making us kill your children. I.e., we're exceptional.
These beliefs of Jewish exceptionalism are religious in character: They give life meaning even to secular Jews. Lanny Davis will always represent the Clinton Jewish moment for me of ten years ago: meritocratic Jews had arrived in the Establishment, and now an inquisition of a Christian nature had begun against the Jews' leader led by a puritanical prosecutor (Kenneth Starr). Davis was there. Alan Dershowitz grew up Orthodox and tried to lead an Orthodox life, he has said, but he fell away in mid life. Still, there is a religious character to his presence in Jewish life.
It must be emphasized that Davis and Dershowitz are lawyers, and the essence of Jewish religion is the law. They are modern interpreters of a religious creed. If they have fallen away from the strict religious observance, well, that comes with participation in the modern American meritocracy, it's almost impossible to lead a strict religious life. Isaac Bashevis Singer's father was a rabbi in the ghetto, holding court on all sorts of questions in Warsaw at the turn of the century; the boy moved to New York and got laid a lot and offered his own mystical religious understanding in his stories, including gentiles. Leon Wieseltier wrote a whole book about trying to be religious as his (Jabotinskyite) father was dying, called Kaddish. It was filled with citations and interpretations of Jewish law by rabbinical seers going back to Moses, but in the end those words seem to have little meaning to Wieseltier personally.What does hold meaning for him is faith in Israel, faith in the information age and written word (the New Republic), secular Talmudism (criticism), and faith in an idea of the Jewish people. Maybe he's a secularist, but there's a ton of religion in these beliefs. The attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer were essentially of a religious character: almost every negative review was written by a Jew, and invoked the goodness of Israel as well as tropes of the classic critiques of antisemitism. (When Walt and Mearsheimer's book doesn't have a religious character; it's political science.)
The problem in choosing these men as rabbis is obvious: America is too diverse for a creed that holds Jews to be exceptional. In the latest Commentary, John Podhoretz says that the Hebrew bible is the "wellspring" of western civilization, but I wonder how many people can hold on to this creed in the age of Obama, which is about very American beliefs, like the statement in the Declaration of Independence that All men are created equal. Seventy years later, that little statement was the guiding fundamental belief of America's rabbi, Abraham Lincoln, when he took a stand against slavery. It was also the guiding principle for the civil rights movement and the affirmative action movement, and of course the Obama movement. On November 4, I wrote here that the idea of American exceptionalism on that day had surpassed the Jewish idea of exceptionalism. Those words are truer to me now than then, when America is trying to understand the Muslim world.
I'm saying there is an American religion, even in secularism, and it is impossible to reconcile 80-proof Zionism and Jewish exceptionalism with that religion. That is the rub. So if you are Jewish and love America, it is why you will need other rabbis than Dershowitz, Stein, and Davis.
(–Phil Weiss. P.S. Adam Horowitz and I differ on whether Zionism is religious. I think it is. He says it's a nationalist ideology. Some day he and I, and Jack Ross, are going to have that out here.)
Jack Ross responds:
On the one hand, you've seem to be finally getting what I've always
tried to hammer into you, about secular ideology versus religion. But
yes, absolutely, said secular ideology is a religion all its own. That
Arab ex-communist guy you were running a while back had it exactly
right when he said that westerners, for all their professed
rationalism, are the real believing fundamentalists in the world
today.
So indeed, on the other hand, I don't know what to say
to the fact that you're now a bigger believer in ACJism than I've ever
been – with your full throttle embrace of Obama's revival of something
very much like old fashioned "Americanism" and of Ol' Master Lincoln as "America's rabbi". In other words, you're ready to embrace a whole new "civic religion" tonic.
We'll leave aside for the moment that Zionism
and historical messianic Americanism are not at all mutually exclusive,
as Obamaite Americanism may indeed be another matter entirely. And for
that very reason, I'm keeping things in perspective.
At my own lefty shul Martin Luther King
seems to be very much the figure who, as "The Jewish Dilemma" said of
Lincoln, "is far more a force in American Judaism than Saul, the
half-mad first king of Israel". For all that I might find problematic
about this, King was a genuine agent of social protest, and is thus far
preferable in this role to the emperors Lincoln and Roosevelt. I've
already, however, had my first taste of what the merger of the two in
Obama portends, but I'm proceeding with caution.
In any event, your civic religion is still far preferable to Avraham Burg's apparent dreams of a new Roman Empire, that is "a federation of the two states which will be part of a Mediterrainean Union which will eventually merge with the European Union". I am, after all, an American, and an American of Jewish faith to boot.
