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).

הרב מרדכי סאוויצקי זצ”ל המקורב לעדה החרדית: אסור להחזיר שום שעל לערבים

אפילו הערבים המתונים מוכנים להשמיד ולהרוג כל יהודי היל”ת

כאשר עלתה על הפרק השאלה אודות ההסכם עם מצרים והחזרת סיני ובארות הנפט, ביקש כ”ק אדמו”ר מליובאוויטש שהגאון הרב מרדכי סאוויצקי [שנחשב מחוגי ‘העדה החרדית’] יחווה דעתו ההלכתית בכתב, ואז פירסם ‘דעת תורה’ בזה הלשון: “החזרת שטחים לערבים, היא שאלה שאינה קשורה כלל בפוליטיקה או בחשבונות אחרים, זה פשוט ענין של סכנת נפשות. נסיגה מטריטוריות תסכן את חייהם של שלשה וחצי מליון יהודים, ועל כן אסור לעשותה, אסור להחזיר שום שעל. אסור לסגת אפילו ק״מ אחד אם יגרום סכנה לישראל. אין לתת אמון בשום גוי, וחס ושלום להעמיד בסכנה יהודי אחד על סמך הבטחה שלהם שרוצים בשלום. אפילו הערבים שמתארים אותם כמתונים, מוכנים להשמיד להרוג ולאבד כל יהודי היל”ת.
“אין הערבים מבחינים בין יהודי מהישוב הישן ובין יהודי מן המחנה החילוני. יתירה מזו הערבי שונא הרבה יותר את היהודי החרדי שומר תורה ומצות, כי הוא יודע שיהודי חרדי מקשר את ארץ ישראל עם התורה והקב”ה – וזה כעצם בגרונו. בשנת תרפ”ט, כאשר הערבים ערכו פוגרום ביהודי חברון הי”ד, לא היה לזה כל קשר עם עניין הציונות, כי אם היה זה ביטוי לשנאה ואנטישמיות. על כך אסור להיתפס לנאיביות ולתת אימון בגוים אלו.
 
“דעתי זו אינה קשורה כאמור לעמדה פוליטית כל שהיא, כי אם לדעת תורה. יש האומרים שאסור לנו להרגיז את כל העולם נגדנו, והריני לשאול אותם איזה עולם, העולם שראה ש – 6 מליון יהודים עולים על המוקד ושתק?!.. וגם הוויתורים שעשו עד עתה בהחזרת דברים חיוניים הרי הם בכלל סכנת נפשות. זהו פסק ברור”.
 
(פורסם ב’אלגמיינער ז’ורנאל’ ניו יורק תשל”ט, ספר ‘גדולי ישראל על החזרת שטחים’ עמ’ 76)
הנה הקובץ המלא:

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein’s “God Versus gods”, a Book Review

What happened to the idolatrous urge?

Whereas the whole world in Biblical times deeply felt a sense of the transcendental, through worship of God or via idols, the Western world following the abolition of idolatry came to believe in man.

Gil Weinreich  Jun 19, 2023, 7:57 AM (GMT+3)

One of the most frequently recurring themes in the Hebrew Bible, from beginning to end, is man’s disloyalty to God via idolatrous worship. Yet the fact that we do not worship idols, nor know anyone else who does so, challenges our ability to fully relate to this foundational text many of us learn daily.

Thanks is therefore due to Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein for his dazzlingly encyclopedic presentation of this topic in “God versus gods” (Mosaica Press, 2018) and for a planned second volume now in the works. Reading this book will not only help better understand the Bible but should deepen our ability to genuinely understand our present world.

Indeed, a midrash dating from the geonic period foretells a comeback for idolatry in pre-messianic times, portraying the last king to rule the world prior to the final redemption as planting idolatrous trees and worshipping Baal. If this seems far-fetched, consider that New Age and neo-pagan cults have made a significant comeback in the past few decades, and that Gaia-appeasing language is nowadays freely mixed into presidential discussions about climate science and environmental policy. (And that is without taking into account the religion of Woke).

“God versus gods” tells the story of idolatry from its inception, from Adam’s grandson Enosh through the time that the Jewish Sages prayed for end to the idolatrous inclination at the start of the Second Temple period, including all of the disasters in between, which made them willing to pay a certain price for idolatry’s demise (see below). Along the way, the author provides an impressive panoply of rabbinic interpretation, including both early and late commentators, and a constant stream of linguistic and cultural contextual information – a feat of erudition requiring very wide learning.

For example, when learning that Abraham started off by worshiping the moon – until daybreak, when he witnessed the sun’s power trumping that of the moon – Rabbi Klein adds that the patriarch’s hometown was also a Babylonian cult center for moon worship, based on contemporary archeological findings. Abraham eventually concluded that the sun was also not worthy of worship, and indeed he and Isaac and Jacob fixed morning, afternoon and evening prayer times in a manner that would discredit the sun as a god.

Readers learn throughout that Jewish idolatry was frequently less bad than one might at first think, involving the deviant worship of God rather than seeking an alternative to God, and often by smaller numbers of Jews than one might at first assume from a non-careful reading of a Biblical passage. For example, the unprecedentedly evil Baal worship under the wicked King Ahab and his non-Jewish Sidonian wife Jezebel was not a populist movement, but rather imposed from the top down. Jezebel did not and could not persecute worshippers of Hashem because they were too numerous; in contrast, Baal worship was centered on one temple in Samaria, and after Jehu destroyed it, the Bible itself testifies to the eradication of idolatrous worship at that time.

The breakaway northern kingdom of Israel was an idolatrous polity throughout its 241-year history, yet it wasn’t each one of its evil kings that precipitated that kingdom’s fall to the Assyrians and the dispersion and loss of the 10 tribes, but a seemingly good deed that sealed the kingdom’s fate: When Hosea ben Elah finally removed the sentries blocking access to Jerusalem (after the Assyrians had carted off the golden calves that the wicked king Jeroboam had stationed in Beth El to divert Jews from pilgrimage to the capital), the people’s failure to take advantage of the access now given them aroused God’s fury.

From this, and other sources developed by Rabbi Klein, we learn a lesson not only about the age of idolatry but about our own times – namely, that one of the repercussions of idolatry and its modern equivalents is a dulled conscience. He cites a midrash about the elders worshiping idols in “hidden places,” which notes that since nobody objected, they shifted their worship to “behind the door.” When nobody objected to this, they moved to the rooftops. Hearing no objection, they brought their idols to their gardens. When nobody protested, they began worshiping on mountaintops. Since nobody protested, they placed their altars upon the furrows of the field. From there, idolatry moved front and center to every crossroad, every street, every urban square, the suburbs and ultimately to the Holy of Holies of the Temple, now ensuring its destruction and the exile of the two remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin to Babylon.

After this entire terrible history, which Rabbi Klein records in colorful detail, when given the chance to return from exile and rebuild the Temple, the Sages of Israel beseeched God to remove the desire to worship idols. There is no free lunch, as the economists tell us, so we lost prophecy in the exchange. The author offers numerous interpretations of this trade-off, which all help to understand the lost formerly powerful attraction to idolatry. One of these interpretations, advanced by Menashe ben Israel, suggests that idolatry conveyed some sort of effective power, parallel to the power of prophecy to foretell the future. Consequently, pagans could use witchcraft or other dark forces to inform them of the future as well. He explains that such contaminating spirits still exist in Eastern lands based on Abraham’s gifts to the children he had with Keturah, even when general access to occult powers was curtailed.

Yet while Easterners apparently still see results from idolatry, its curtailment had a powerful secularizing effect on Westerners. Whereas the whole world in Biblical times deeply felt a sense of the transcendental, be it through worship of God or via idols, the Western world following the abolition of the idolatrous urge came to believe in man. With this dulling of spiritual awareness came an emphasis on physical pleasures and the replacement of idols with various isms. Rabbi Klein promises his forthcoming sequel will offer a comprehensive discussion of the ideas and actions which are modern-day equivalents of idolatry, so now is the time to read this unique and original first volume.

Gil Weinreichis a writer living in Jerusalem. His latest book is A Torah Guide to Personal Finance.

From Arutz Sheva, here.