Particularism Before Universalism
[Here is my take, written a number of years ago on the Jewish divide. Be sure to read "It pays to be Jewish" linked to therein]
by Ted Belman
Everyone is familiar will Hillel’s quote, loosely translated,
“If I am not for myself, who am I? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
I have always understood this to mean that an individual must make the case for his particular before making the case for the other. Particularism before universalism. Neither should be to the exclusion of the other, but the former, according to Hillel, comes first. One might add that it is only natural to fight for yourself before fighting for others.
The twentieth century witnessed within the Jewish community a flight from the Jewish particular in favour of the universal. As the Jews came out of the ghetto, they shed religion for secularism. They became Communists in Russia, socialists in Europe and liberal Democrats in America.
The Jewish Right wishes to follow Hillel’s dictum by emphasizing the Jewish particular first and then addressing the “other”. Thus, it chooses a Jewish Israel even if it offends the Western notion of democracy. On the other hand, the Jewish Left wishes to do the opposite. It stresses the rights of the other, particularly the “Palestinians”, at the expense of Jewish rights. A case in point is the fence decision by the Israel’s High Court of Justice. The Jewish Right wants Israel to be a Jewish state whereas the Left argues that Israel should be a state like other states or of all its citizens. Binyamin Netanyahu got it right when he said, “Israel is the state of the Jews and not of its citizens.”
In my recent article “It pays to be Jewish”, I argued that Israel, to be a Jewish state, must give pre-eminence to Jewish Civil Law, which flows from the Torah. I implied that freedom of speech should not protect anti-Israel incitement and that persons not loyal to Israel as a Jewish state should have their citizenship revoked and should not be allowed a Knesset seat.
This raised howls of racism from some. But to deny your enemies certain rights is not racism, because it is not based on physical characteristics. It is self-defense, because it is based on their stated intention to destroy you.
Paul Eidelberg, in his important book Jewish Statesmanship, stands against a loyalty oath as the solution,
“It is the height of impudence, of conceit and even of stupidity to grant equal political rights to Arabs in the expectation that they will renounce their religion and 1,300 year old civilization for a ballot box.[...]From the Torah’s perspective, a people is not a random or amorphous aggregation of individuals. The essence of peoplehood is particularism and not universalism – which is not to say that particularism precludes universal ideas and ideals such as ethical monotheism. A living people must have a revered past and a profound sense of collective purpose, embodied in national laws and literature and vivified by national holidays and customs. Such a people will experience similar joys and harbour similar thoughts conducive to friendship. They will feel responsible for each other and respond in righteous indignation to assaults on their national honour. Therein is the heart and soul of a people and the reason why their government will not bestow citizenship on foreign elements whose goals or way of life clashes with their own.”
Thus, the question becomes, are the citizens of a country entitled to preserve their ethnic or religious makeup or their culture? And who is to decide? The Western model says “no”. Multiculturalism reigns supreme, as does relativism. No one’s values are better than the values of others. Everything and everybody is to be tolerated, even those who don’t tolerate you. It is easy to see that this is the ultimate destination of universalism. It seeks to render valueless the particular, whether religious or national. It is paradoxical that the greatest opposition to universalism comes from Muslims, who are the largest intended beneficiary.
While the Left continually excoriates Israel for falling below a standard imposed by them on Israel alone, it totally ignores the reality of the Muslim world. You would think that since the Muslims are most in conflict with their tolerant world view that they should focus on castigating and reforming them. But no, they pick on Israel instead. Could this be anti-Semitism?
When Jews agonize over the survival of the Jewish people, invariably one asks, “Survive as what?” Obviously, if you give up what makes you Jewish, you, as a Jew, are not surviving. The resistance to assimilation is also often referred to as racism, but it isn’t. It denotes love of self. This is healthy. It is the self-hatred of the Jewish Left who strive to deny the Jewish particular that is to be rejected, or at least recognized for what it is.
The same goes for Israel. If Israel would become a bi-national state, it would die as a Jewish state. Even the name Israel could be changed. The Arab Israelis would argue for the Law of Return to apply to them, also. And so on. It will also die as a Jewish state if it doesn’t take steps to preserve its Jewish character. At a minimum, these should include restoring Jewish Civil Law as the supreme law of the land and creating a constitution that permits only Jews to determine its national purpose, character and defense.
I submit that a nation has not only the inherent right of self defense when its national existence is threatened, but also when its cultural essence is at risk. Israel’s enemies deny it both rights. To assert these rights is not racism. Every nation has the right to determine who can emigrate, who can become citizens and what values in its society are inviolable.
Israel even more so. The Torah defines the People of Israel (Am Yisroel) and the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisroel), and the connection between them and G-d. The People of Israel have a collective responsibility and a mission and a birthright (Israel). Whether or not you believe in G-d, the fact remains that this is the essence of Judaism. This essence has survived for over three thousand years and should continue to survive.
Israel has not only the right to defend this culture, but the duty to do so.
SarahSue, Gary and Ted should listen in particular: It is Germain to the thread and comments above: Describes the practical implications instead of just theory and stated purposes.
The links below,I hope works, is a short podcast by Sara Yoheved Rigler Author and lecturer.
Superior sectarianism
http://torahmedia.com/fetch.php?sid=50si57618h592p4&cid=&dlid=5133051&news=1&source=filelink streaming
http://torahmedia.com/filelink.php?sid=61m465102w624t8&cid=&fid=29137&bw=high&lnk=d download
It’s no matter.
Stalinism flat-lined culture and ethnicity.The Western Nations have slowly transmogrified with the natural consequence of monopolism and an absolutist technology to a Capitalist Stalinism where the elite simply own everything. Individuals and ethnicities will now be swallowed up by the machine.
They will of course live on in the ideal, in the paragons of state propaganda, but not exist in the real.
…
One-quarter of American Jews have rejected watered-down Judaism in favor of full-strength Christianity. Why?
One December afternoon, my precious four-year-old niece Jodi* walked into my mother’s suburban New Jersey kitchen and asked, “Bubbie, are you Jewish?”
“Yes, I am,” my mother answered proudly.
“So am I,” Jodi confided, “but don’t tell Santa Claus.”
I laughed when my mother told me this story, and I chuckled every time I thought of it –for twenty-two years. Last week, Jodi got married, in a Catholic church, kneeling in front of a huge gilded cross. I stopped laughing.
Apparently, Jodi’s perception of Judaism as a liability grew with the years. At the age of four, being Jewish made her a persona non grata to Santa Claus. At the age of sixteen, growing up in a town whose century-old bylaws stipulated, “No Jews or Negroes,” Jewish identity must have been a social non-starter. At the age of twenty, as a sophomore at Boston University, being Jewish must have threatened her budding romance with a handsome Catholic senior.
But was there nothing on the asset side to balance Jodi’s Jewish ledger? After all, her Bubbie and Zeydie were committed Jews. Her Zeydie was a life-trustee of his Conservative synagogue, an ardent check-writing Zionist, a lover of everything Jewish, from Mollie Picon to Bernard Malamud. Her Bubbie spoke Yiddish, made blintzes from scratch, and devoutly attended Friday night services every Shabbat. Was there nothing of nostalgia or Jewish tradition to stay Jodi’s knees from kneeling before the cross?
Was his grandmother’s mince pie more delectable than Jodi’s Bubbie’s knaidlach?
Jews who defect to the religion of secularism are not a shanda, a disgrace. Why couldn’t Jodi and Brian* have celebrated their nuptials in the neutral precincts of City Hall, or at the Botanical Gardens, or on horseback?
Obviously Brian felt strongly enough about his Catholicism to insist on a church wedding. Was his grandmother’s mince pie more delectable than Jodi’s Bubbie’s knaidlach? Were their Christmas dinners more festive than our Pesach seders? Was his catechism class less boring than her Hebrew school? How were Brian’s parents able to transmit to their son an allegiance to Catholicism which washed away Jodi’s loyalty to her own Jewish heritage like a wave dissolving a sand castle on the beach?
SHOCKING DEFECTIONS
Nearly 1.4 million American Jews say they are members of a non-Jewish religion.
The problem is not idiosyncratic to my family. According to the American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, out of approximately 5.5 million American adults who are either Jewish by religion or of Jewish parentage and/or upbringing, nearly 1.4 million say they are members of a non-Jewish religion.
We are not talking here about secularism, not about Jews who opt out of going to synagogue in favor of a baseball game or the movies, but rather in favor of church. Since the vast majority of American Jews are of Ashkenazic descent, this means that 25% of the descendants of European Jews who resisted the blandishments and threats of Christianity for some sixty generations, often at the cost of their lives, are now voluntary apostates.
American Jews have been occupied for four decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). I remember as a teenager in the early 1960s sitting through sermons where our rabbi pontificated on the various solutions to The Problem. Yet exactly what is the Jewish leadership trying to perpetuate? Jewish genes? Jewish culture? A fondness for kreplach and klezmer and Isaac Bashevis Singer?
No one is ready to sacrifice one’s life — nor the love of one’s life — for a culture.
If so, no wonder the Catholics are winning. They don’t strive to inculcate in their children a love for Catholic culture. They don’t try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day nor spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with God and soul and afterlife. We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and lithographs of the Western Wall. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice one’s life — nor the love of one’s life. Against Christianity we have pitted not Judaism, but Judaica.
History shows that substitutes for halachic Judaism have a shelf life of four generations or less. Reform Judaism’s founder Moses Mendelssohn had nine grandchildren; eight of them were baptized as Christians. Zionist founder Theodore Herzl’s children were not only not Zionists, they were not Jews. How many of the grandchildren of the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz married under a chupah? How many of his great-grandchildren know what a chupah is?
To perpetuate Jewish culture, outside of museums and university courses, at the very least you need Jews. But Jews, as all the population surveys prove, are rapidly disappearing. The first step in the multi-million-dollar enterprise of passing Jewish culture on to the next generation is to ensure that there will be a next generation.
A GREENHOUSE ENTERPRIZE
The “cut-flower phenomenon” illustrates the predicament of Jewish culture. Cut flowers are doomed to die in because they are severed from their roots, just as Jewish culture has been severed from its roots in the Jewish religion. The solution is obvious: reclaim the religious roots of Jewish culture. But roots are not the only thing a plant needs to survive.
During the decade and a half I lived in New England, my favorite hobby was horticulture. I particularly loved the arresting fragrance of gardenias; in early spring, I couldn’t resist buying gardenia plants, laden with two or three beautiful white flowers and a dozen buds, usually offered for $3.95 at Woolworths. I would take my plant home, position it in a window with eastern exposure, water it copiously, and wait for the buds to open.
After one glorious, fragrant week, the open flowers would turn yellow and dry up, and the buds, reacting to the dryness in my heated house, would turn brown at their necks. I would labor to rescue them, misting the plant with a green plastic spray bottle every time I passed, a dozen times a day. One at a time, the buds would fall off. I would be left with a plant with shiny green leaves. After about six weeks, the leaves would start to turn yellow. I would run to the local nursery, buy iron granules, and scratch them desperately into the soil in the gardenia’s pot.
In three months, the plant would be dead. Every time.
Not to be daunted, I invested in a small greenhouse, where the conditions would be optimum for growing gardenias. I also grew hibiscus and jasmine. I assiduously fed my plants with a solution of liquid fertilizer, meticulously regulated the temperature and humidity, and valiantly battled white fly and scale. Despite the gigantic expense of heating the greenhouse all through a snowy New England winter, I was proud of my yield: four or five hibiscus flowers a week and a couple dozen sprigs of jasmine in season. (The gardenias didn’t bloom, but they didn’t die either.)
About five years into my greenhouse enterprise, I took my first trip to southern California. There, in Laguna Beach, I saw hibiscus hedges eight feet tall, with solid masses of large red and pink flowers, and sprawling banks of white and yellow jasmine. To add to my envy, no one was lavishing care or expense on them. They were flourishing on their own, in their own natural environment.
Authentic Jewish life is characterized by the study of Torah, the observance of Shabbat and Kashrut, and the thrice-daily worship of God. Not Shabbes leichter as museum pieces, but a generation of Jewish women who light their candles to usher in the holy Shabbat. Not klezmer concerts to evoke nostalgia for the shtetl, but Jewish bands playing Jewish music at Jewish weddings where Jewish communities are celebrating the beginning of a new generation of a Jewish family.
I wish my niece Jodi had had such a wedding.
*Names have been changed for privacy.
The thoughts and writings of Prof. Eugene Narrett
Israel and the West’s Suicidal Progressivism
http://israelendtimes.com/blog/2009/06/09/israel-and-the-west%E2%80%99s-suicidal-progressivism.htm
I loved the third comment.
SarahSue Ted!!!Narvey and of course Gary
The international lecturer and bestselling author on why being everything to everyone means being nothing to anyone
The downside and dangers of ‘universalism’
http://www.jwisdom.com/BLOG/?p=131
8 min.
Yamit, you referenced Sara Rigler’s article. The site is:
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48899257.html
Narvey thanks the name was clipped and every time I try to use edit I get blocked as spam.