העורך Editor

The Torah Is Not Political – Just Read It!

Quoting the LA Review of Books:

What kind of politics does the Bible teach? The answer, says Michael Walzer in his elegant little book, In God’s Shadow, is: “not very much.” Walzer, a distinguished political theorist, has been exploring biblical and postbiblical Jewish sources for some decades. His book, Exodus and Revolution, was justly hailed as a study both of how the Bible’s exodus tradition has resonated in Western culture and of what it meant in its original setting. He has also been the lead editor of a terrific, multivolume collection of Jewish sources on politics, The Jewish Political Tradition. His latest book is the capstone of these explorations, but its counterintuitive argument may surprise many readers. Against Spinoza, but with no less of a secular orientation, Walzer holds that the Hebrew Bible speaks from a moral or religious point of view, but not from the standpoint of politics. In stark contrast to the central role of politics in Greek philosophy, God as the author of Israel’s history leaves very little room for independent political decisions.

This argument is grounded in certain assumptions about what constitutes politics. Walzer assumes that politics are waged in the realm of the secular. In what is a modern move, he argues that politics ought to involve the mobilization of people to defend their interests or reform society. No such movements can be found in the Bible, nor do any biblical actors try to agitate for them. To be sure, the Israelite kings represent human interests and may therefore be said to defend secular politics against divine law (in fact, Walzer strikingly claims that this Machiavellian principle was first stated in the Bible!), but the Bible is not written from the kings’ point of view, and the so-called Deuteronomic histories (the books of Samuel and Kings) criticize the kings only for religious or moral failings, not for political actions. While much of this seems convincing, it appears to me that at times Walzer allows the Greek definition of politics to dominate perhaps too greatly what politics meant in the very different culture of ancient Israel. So, for example, one would not expect mass politics — itself anachronistic for premodern times — in a monarchic system like the Bible. There is no real biblical analogy to the demos of the Greek polis since the children of Israel never function like a body of citizens.

Much of Walzer’s argument centers on the prophets, who are often taken by modern-day progressives to authorize a politics of social justice. But Walzer points out that the prophets never call on people to act politically in the service of reform; their radicalism is profoundly apolitical in that they never try to mobilize the people against injustice. In fact, the first real political mobilization in Jewish history was not from the time of the Bible, but much later, in the Second Temple period when the Hasmonean family of priests sparked a military uprising against the Jerusalem priesthood and the Seleucid Empire.

The curious apolitical quality of the prophets owes something of its origins to the revelation at Sinai. The law codes said to have been revealed there make the Israelites responsible for their most vulnerable neighbors: the widow, the orphan and the foreigner. Yet, they are never made politically responsible for the social order as such. Israelite law is given by God, rather than legislated by human beings, and this belief system creates a built-in tension between divine and human interests. The human is represented in biblical history by the kings, the divine by the prophets.

In international politics, says Walzer, the prophets’ message is as apolitical as it is in domestic politics. They have given up the idea of Israel as a political agent, viewing the nation rather as the victim of other nations’ agency. In fact, the prophets hold that the nations that oppress Israel — Assyrians, Babylonians — also lack agency, since their actions are dictated by God. In this innovative theology, God now acts through other nations in order to punish Israel rather than acting through Israel itself. The prophets, therefore, demanded an entirely passive foreign policy, because nothing Israel might do could affect its fate once it sinned against God.

The late wisdom literature in the Bible moves even further away from the political. Here, the focus is on the individual who must turn away from evil rather than confront it politically. While Job protests his fate, he does not protest the death of his children, a symbol, Walzer seems to say, of the Book of Job’s profoundly apolitical character. Indeed, Job may not even be an Israelite, so that there is no communal context for political action.

Many have argued that biblical messianism lays the groundwork for social revolution, but Walzer claims that prophetic messianism does not presume mobilization of the masses: the Bible contains nothing like the Italian socialist hymn Avanti popolo. The Bible entertains two views of the messianic age: it will either be a restoration of the kingdom of David or of God’s kingdom. In neither case will this transformation come about because of political action: the prophets condemn things as they are, but they do not tell us to change them, much less how to change them.

As a political activist as well as a theorist, Walzer leaves little to recuperate from the Bible. In an intriguing penultimate chapter, he notes that the “elders” who are mentioned sporadically throughout the text might well have been the vehicles of secular politics, but almost no coherent trace has been left of their activity. Walzer understands that his sober reading of the Bible’s politics goes against the grain of how generations have understood its import. Something in the prophetic teachings has surely spoken to political visionaries of differing stripes, even if he is right that such readings do not pay heed to the literal meaning of the text.

Read the rest here (the second half of the article is Cursedian, so I don’t know what it says and I don’t care what it says).