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The great classical historian Arnaldo
Momigliano, in his book Alien Wisdom:
The Limits of Hellenization, meditates
on the sense of monolingualism that set Hellenistic culture in
isolation from other cultures in the Mediterranean. According
to Momigliano:
No Greek read the Upanishads, the Gathas and
the Egyptian wisdom books. It was indeed very difficult to
find somebody non-Jewish reading the Bible in Greek even when it
was made available in that language. Greek remained the only
language of civilization for every Greek-speaking man. Even
in the first century AD the author of the Periplus maris Erythaei
cannot find a better accomplishment for a king of Ethiopia —
to counterbalance his notorious greed for money — than his
knowledge of Greek.1
Momigliano sees that non-Greeks had to adopt a
Greek worldview in order to participate in the
"universal" Hellenistic civilization.
The essential challenge of Western
civilization has
always been framed by this sense of
monolingualism; a predication of a deep and rich culture that is
utterly insulated and cut off from other languages and cultures.
Jose Faur, in a particularly trenchant analysis of
Momigliano's text, writes the following:
Eventually, monolingualism resolves itself
into a peculiar form of circular reasoning: Western thought alone
is truly "philosophical," that is, it may evaluate all
other systems but it cannot be evaluated by any other system.2
Monolingualism is a co-opting of a pluralistic
sense of culture and civilization into a hermetically sealed rubric
of univocal thought - speech without multiple meanings, thought
without divergent opinions.
This concept of absolute truth has permeated
Western civilization since the age of Plato.
Rarely has the concept of absolute truth been
conceptualized in contradistinction to a religious framework.
I can think of few other books than Golden Doves With Silver Dots2
that have tried to
analyze Western culture outside of its own
hermeneutical codes and structures. It is quite true that the
movement of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others to examine
and refocus the foundations of Western civilization has permitted
new ways of thinking.3 But these new ways of thinking have
only served to rekindle skepticism and forms of nihilism that
preclude any possibility of active truths and responsibilities.4
Post-modernism has done a tremendous service
to breaching the walls of Platonic "truth," but it has
not been able to set into place an alternative epistemological
system that would account for the manner in which human beings
communicate with one another and create a healthy and strong
society. By and large, post-modern philosophy with its
critique of foundationalism has not been linked to the concepts of
modern liberal democracy. This cleavage between Derrida and
Berlin, Barthes and Rawls, Foucault and Hayek, has been disastrous
for the study of modern political theory.
It is into this void that Jonathan Sacks, the
Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, has published his new and vital
work, The Dignity of Difference: How To
Avoid The Clash of Civilizations.5
Rabbi Sacks has read deeply into the sources of modern political
thought and has created a work that examines all facets of modern
life within the context of religious absolutes.
But rather than merely set religion in
opposition to the modern secular world, as has been done countless
numbers of times in polemical works, Sacks looks for the ways that
religion can complement and extract the positive sense of diversity
within the massive changes that have been inflicted upon our world
by the traumas of globalism:
Religion can be a source of discord. It
can also be a form of conflict resolution. We are familiar
with the former; the second is far too little tried. Yet it
is here, if anywhere, that hope must lie if we are to create a
human solidarity strong enough to bear the strains that lie ahead.
The great faiths must now become an active force for peace
and for the justice and compassion on which peace ultimately
depends. That will require great courage, and perhaps
something more than courage: a candid admission that, more than at
any time in the past, we need to search—each faith in its own
way—for a way of living with, and acknowledging the integrity
of, those who are not of our own faith. Can we make space for
difference? Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a
sensibility, a culture not our own? Can we see the presence
of God in the face of a stranger?6
Thus Sacks does something unique in the way
religious thinkers have presented their ideas in modern times: he
does not assert the finality of any religious construct, but
demands the role of religion in generic terms in our lives.
Rather than proclaim the tenets of an impervious Orthodox
value-system a, Sacks sees that religious orthodoxies can make
space for difference and diversity.
This point is a key in the development of a
post-9/11 world. Religion, coupled with secular nationalism,
has been at the very core of the issues that divide cultures and
civilizations. Going a step past Momigliano and Faur, and a
quantum leap away from the relativism of Derrida and the
deconstructionists, Sacks attempts to piece together and articulate
a religious humanism7 that is predicated upon justice, ethics
and conciliation. In his words: "If religion is not part
of a solution, it will certainly be part of the problem."
Sacks begins his story with the great
conundrum inherent in the liberal project: liberal democracies can
create free markets and personal freedoms but they cannot instill a
sense of moral permanence and obligation within their citizenries.
The capitalist free market, perhaps the great innovation of
the modern economic system, a system that has triumphed over its
socialist and totalitarian foes, permits the individual to exert a
good deal of control over his own private world. But
capitalism is ill-equipped to redress injustice and inequity; in
fact inequity is front-loaded into the system:
The liberal democracies of the West are
ill-equipped to deal with such problems. That is not because
they are heartless—they are not; they care—but because
they have adopted mechanisms that marginalize moral conditions.
Western politics have become more procedural and managerial.
Not completely: Britain still has a National Health Service,
and most Western countries have some form of welfare provision.
But increasingly, governments are reluctant to enact a vision
of the common good because—so libertarian thinkers argue—
there is little substance we can give to the idea of the good we
share. We differ too greatly. The best that can be done
is to deliver the maximum possible freedom to individuals to make
their own choices, and the means best suited to this is the
unfettered market where we can buy whatever lifestyle suits us,
this year, this month. Beyond the freedom to do what we like
and can afford, contemporary politics and economics have little to
say about the human condition.8
This dilemma has been exacerbated by the
seeming lack of ethical dimensions in the thought of Derrida.
Having eschewed any possibility of moral absolutes,
post-modernism has unwittingly linked itself to the intolerance and
moral apathy of the marketplace. When there are no
"right" ways to live a life, then anything goes –
injustice and relativism go hand in hand.
Sacks accepts the salient value of the
marketplace and modern capitalism; but he does not accept the
totalizing nature of the marketplace. He insists that ethical
concerns, truly the provenance of religious thinking, break the
monolingual apparatus that has been constructed by the globalist
phenomenon: our relations to the environment, to the poor, to the
disenfranchised, must rise in import as the imbalances and
imperfections of the new global marketplace take root.
To relate the myriad points of his argument,
Sacks must first set out the construction of the new market-driven
realities. He examines the historical framework of the new
capitalism and contrasts it in temporal terms:
In one sense, then, the world we inhabit is a
logical outcome of the legacy of our ancestors, the latest stage in
a journey begun millennia ago. But there are changes in
degree which become changes in kind. The speed and scope of
advances in modern communications technology have altered
conditions of existence for many, perhaps most, of the world's six
billion inhabitants. The power of instantaneous global
communication, the sheer volume of international monetary
movements, the internationalization of processes and products and
the ease with which jobs can be switched from country to country
have meant that our interconnectedness has become more immediate,
vivid and consequential than before.
What is missing from the new globalism is a language that might
be able to help us account for the massive dislocation created by
the new technologies; technology is a value-neutral language.
Our languages have lagged behind our material abilities to
create new and sometimes frightening realities that empower us, but
also serve to destabilize our inherited realities.
Sacks presents a list of statistics that lay
out the massive inequities that the new global economy has created
for us. The rich are richer; the poor, poorer. Medical
care and other resources are lavished upon the elites while an
ever-growing global underclass seethes with discontent.
Inbuilt into the economic system is an apathy towards the
moral — we might protect our individual concerns for a
personal social ethic, but generally we seek our own good — a
new and totalizing universal monolingualism, a monolingualism that
has been buttressed by rampant materialism and a malignant
political hegemonic system (i.e., the IMF and World Bank).
Not only has the dominance of the market had a
corrosive effect on the social landscape. It has also eroded
our moral vocabulary, arguably the most important resource in
thinking about the future. In one of the most influential
books of recent times, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that
'We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many
of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if
not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and
practical, of morality.' The very concept of ethics (Bernard
Williams called it 'that peculiar institution') has become
incoherent. Increasingly, we have moved to talking about
efficiency (how to get what you want) and therapy (how not to feel
bad about what you want). What is common to both is that they
have more to do with the mentality of marketing (the stimulation
and satisfaction of desire) that of morality (what ought we to
desire).10
In this context morality becomes an adjunct to
the marketplace and has affected the way in which we see ourselves
and others. Religion becomes an admixture of pro-market
forces (what Marx once called the "opiate of the masses")
or anti-market atavistic forces; the forces that set into motion
the primitivism of Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist cadres.
These new cells, created by the failure of ethnic
nationalisms to take root in the global marketplace, a world that
has rejected the particularist identities of the fundamentalists,
utilize the technologies and mechanisms of the new capitalism, are
funded by global market enterprises, but link their cosmopolitan
materialism to an outmoded religious monolingualism that eliminates
pluralism and tolerance.
Religion thus has a tricky role to play in
modern societies: it can unleash forces of hate and intolerance as
we have seen; but without it, the moral lexicon of globalism is
utterly impoverished. This is the paradox of religious
fundamentalisms; on the one hand groups like Hamas and Hezbollah
and the Protestant Evagelicals provide desperately needed social
services and a sense of community in a spiritually impoverished
era. They provide food for the hungry, clothes to the needy
and medical services to those without insurance. On the other
hand, these movements have adopted a hard-line religious
intolerance, an intolerance that was supposed to have disappeared
since the days of the Enlightenment, a philosophical revolution
that envisioned the end of religion as a pillar of civilization.11
Sacks rightly sees a problem in the way that
we have blurred the lines between religion and politics and have
not understood their role in the post-Enlightenment world:
Religion and politics are different
enterprises. They arose in response to different needs: in
the one case to bind people together in their commonality, in the
other to mediate peaceably between their differences. The
great tragedies of the twentieth century came when politics was
turned into a religion, when the nation (in the case of fascism) or
system (communism) was absolutized and turned into a god. The
single greatest risk of the twenty-first century is that the
opposite may occur: not when politics is religionized but when
religion is politicized.12
There is a dialectical interrelation between
the totalizing systems: religion, smarting from its defeat at the
hands of the Enlightenment philosophers, began to remodel itself
along the contoured lines of the new philosophy; religion sought to
make itself that very model of Enlightenment that had previously
been rejected by Descartes and Spinoza.13 But in this
transition, religion absorbed many of the responsibilities of
politics and served to sever religious man from the manner in which
the new system was able to break man's chains of religious
idolatry.
Sacks traces this political and religious
fundamentalism back to perhaps the most controversial figure in
modern thought: Plato.14 Plato, along the lines of
Momigliano's analysis of Hellenistic monolingualism, created a
system that abstracted real life from the ideal life of the
philosopher-kings. Platonic philosophy has been the
metaphysical and theoretical underpinning of Western culture for
thousands of years:
It is a wondrous dream, that of Plato, and one
that has never ceased to appeal to his philosophical and religious
heirs: the dream of reason, a world of order set against the chaos
of life, an eternity beyond the here and now. Its single most
powerful idea is that truth—reality, the essence of things—is
universal. How could it be otherwise? What is true is
true for everyone at all times, and the more universal a culture
is, the closer to truth it comes.15
It is in Platonic thought that we find the
merging of difference into sameness. Once merged with
religious thought, most pointedly into the Christian synthesis of
Augustine,16 Platonic universalism mitigates against
pluralism and tolerance. The world is one, we must all be of
the same mind, thus collapsing the multiple languages and foci of
religious truth as a humanism.
It is here that Sacks presents the model of
Judaism as a counter to Platonism:
Against Plato and his followers, the Bible
argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the
growth of the moral imagination. The world of the first
eleven chapters of Genesis is global, a monoculture ('the whole
world had one language and a common speech'). It is to this
world that God first speaks.17
This world, step-by-step, begins to break down
into tribalisms. With the failure of the universal model,
Adamic civilization, the Bible fixes its sights on the Israelites,
one branch of the human family. God's covenant with the
Israelites becomes a new paradigm of civilization:
The essential message of the book of Genesis
is that universality—the covenant with Noah—is only the
context and prelude to the irreducible multiplicity of cultures,
those systems of meaning by which human beings have sought to
understand their relationship to one another, the world and the
source of being. Plato's assertion of the universality of
truth is valid when applied to science and the description of what
is. It is invalid when applied to ethics, spirituality and
our sense of what ought to be. There is a difference between
physis and nomos, description and prescription, nature and culture,
or—to put it in biblical terms—between creation and
revelation. Cultures are like languages. The world they
describe is the same but the ways they do so are almost infinitely
varied.18
In Sacks' profoundly salient phrase:
"This means that religious truth is not universal."19
As we will see later on, this phrase is not merely a
rhetorical challenge to current religious norms, it is a profoundly
distressing epistemological blow to orthodoxy.
The breakthrough of this knowledge permits
religion to be multilingual as opposed to monolingual. When
religion adopts a monolingualism, inherent to the codes of
scientific thought—a tree is a tree after all—it
predicates its ethics on an morality of exclusion; you are either like
us or you become an unwanted and unassimilable alien.
In this sense, the concept of the alien and
its biblical resonance becomes a major factor in God's teaching to
the Israelites:
Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that this is precisely the reason why the Israelites have to
undergo exile and slavery prior to their birth as a nation.
They have to learn from the inside and never lose the memory
of what it feels like to be an outsider, an alien, a stranger.
It is their formative experience, re-enacted every year in
the drama of Passover—as if to say that only those who know
what it is to be slaves, understand at the core of their being why
it is wrong to enslave others. Only those who have felt the
loneliness of being a stranger find it natural to identify with
strangers.20
The concept of the Other, one who is at the
periphery of things, translates into the philosophical concept of difference, a concept
which does not have to be divorced from the certainty of the
religious moment (as deconstruction does), but can be elevated into
a religious value in itself.21
This concept of difference is hard-wired into
our post-modern existence. The idea of a central
philosophical authority that controls the world and its sub-systems
has been rejected. The factors that once anchored our lives
have become unhinged in a maelstrom of market choices—a
seemingly endless barrage of information and technologies.
This frightening emergence of multiplicity has not been
matched by a concomitant updating of our social network of civic
institutions:
In the past, people were able to cope with
change because they had what Alvin Toffler calls 'personal
stability zones.' There were aspects of lives that did not
change. Of these, the most important were a job for life, a
marriage for life and a place for life. Not everyone had
them, but they were not rare. They gave people a sense of
economic, personal and geographical continuity. They were the
familiar that gave individuals strength to cope with the
unfamiliar. Today these things are becoming ever harder to
find.22
Modern man has gained the opportunity to be
ever freer and make opportunity for himself. But the things
that made life rich and worth living, the things that once made us
happy and secure, the certainties of God and country, are fast
disappearing.
What once made relationships constitutive of
personal identity and self-respect is precisely the fact that they
stood outside the world of contracts and market exchange.
Family, friends, neighbors, mentors, were people to whom you
were bound by moral reciprocity. What was important is that
they were there in bad times as well as good; when you needed them,
not when you could pay for them.23
It is Sacks' contention that we are reliving
the terrors of an ancient time, a time prior to the discovery that
we can transcend the ills of nature by creating communities and
institutions that can permit individuals to work together and
maintain their hope and dignity in the face of the horrors of this
world:
Against just such a backdrop, some 4,000 years
ago, there emerged a different conception of human life. It
suggested that individuals are not powerless in the face of the
impersonal. We can create families, communities, even
societies, around the ideals of love and fellowship and trust.
In such societies, individuals are valued not for what they
own or the power they wield, but for what they are. They are
not immune to conflict or tragedy, but when these strike, the
individual is not alone.24
It was religion and not the marketplace that
created these structures of feeling. It is therefore the job
of religion to inculcate into us a sense of what is just as opposed
to what is right. Justice, a key term in the religious
lexicon, is one step above right or truth, but is beneath yet
another term, compassion, which elevates our morality another step.
Compassion links members of a society to one
another in a pact of grace. There is a layer of
responsibility in this covenant that forces us to see that human
beings, with their vast differences of culture, are linked by a
higher truth, the truth of God (not that of Plato), that helps us
to establish networks of interdependence – this in spite of
our lack of similarity to one another.
If religion is to succeed it must transcend
what separates us rather than force all of humanity to be cast into
a single mold.
This is the logic of our first social
relationship: the interrelatedness of our economic system. Sacks
devotes a chapter showing how Judaism developed its notion of
freedom as freedom from want and need. Objecting to other
systems of thought, particularly the Christian monastic ideal,
which deny the work ethic, Sacks sees that Judaism bequeathed to
the world the sanctity of work:
Labor elevates man, for by it he earns his
food. What concerned the rabbis was the self-respect that
came from work as against unearned income. To eat without
working was not a boon but an escape from the human condition.
Animals find sustenance; only mankind creates it. As
the thirteenth-century commentator Rabbenu Bachya put it, 'The
active participation of man in the creation of his own wealth is a
sign of his spiritual greatness.' Jewish law invalidates
gamblers from serving as witnesses since they are not members of
the productive economy. They do not 'contribute to the
settlement of the world.'25
This Jewish respect for free markets and the
dignity of labor further instills the concept of the "dignity
of difference." While Greek philosophy disdained the
sanctity of work and the commonplace life of the laborer, elevating
the life of the philosopher, a man who did not productively
contribute to society, but lived off of the labor of others (thus
linking Marx's Das Kapital to the parasitic culture of the modern speculator
and the Judaic underpinnings of Marx's thought), Jewish sages
continued to work in trades and professions, forcing themselves to
become at one with the demands and the conflicts of the
marketplace.
But the advantage of the Jewish economic ideal
over its Western counterpart is that it was embedded within a
larger system of ethical morality. The cornerstone of Jewish
ethics is the value of tsedaqah, a conception of charity that is unique to Judaism:
The two words, tsedaqah and mishpat, signify different forms of justice. Mishpat
means retributive justice or the rule of law. A free society
must be governed by law, impartially administered, through which
the guilty are punished, the innocent acquitted and human rights
secured. Tsedaqah, by contrast, refers to distributive justice, a
less procedural and more substantive idea. 2626
Sacks then attempts to translate and explain
the idea of charity in the Jewish tradition:
It is difficult to translate tsedaqah because it
combines in a single word two notions normally opposed to one
another, namely charity and justice. Suppose, for example,
that I give someone $100. Either he is entitled to it, or he
is not. If he is, then my act is a form of justice. If
he is not, it is an act of charity. In English (as with the
Latin terms caritas and iustitia) a gesture of charity cannot be an
act of justice, nor can an act of justice be described as charity.
Tsedaqah is therefore an unusual term, because it means both.2727
The Jewish concept of charity is therefore
alien to modern Western civilization in the age of globalism.
Western culture has, as we have indicated before, drawn
rather stark lines between the public and the private.
Privacy is seen as a cardinal right of Western man.
Public morality is seen as a private option. We can
choose to give charity but we are not obligated to do so.
Hence, our freedom includes the freedom to
live without – there is no exclusively moral guarantee that
we be allowed to have the basic elements to subsist physically— food,
clothing, shelter, medical care and the like.
It is here that the object lesson of Judaism
and other religions comes into play:
Tzedakah is a concept for our times. The
retreat, set in motion by Reagonomics and Thatcherism, from a
welfare state, together with the deregulation of financial markets
throughout the world, has led to increased and increasing
inequalities both in developed countries and the developing world.
The importance of tzedakah is that it does not mean
'charity.' It is not optional, nor does it depend on the
goodwill of those who give it to others. It is a legally
enforceable obligation.28
It is this counterbalance that makes Sacks'
argument so compelling: On the one hand, he affirms his belief in
the bugaboo of the organized Left, the free market. Yet on
the other hand, he affirms the primacy of a welfare system that
makes sure that the wealthy elite has an obligatory stance towards
the underprivileged. This obligation is not the
disinterestedness of the welfare state as practiced in Western
democracies, but is the sense of compassionate interconnectedness
of the Jewish system whereby elites are able to integrate the
have-nots into the system and prevent them from drowning in debt
and need.
This sense of public welfare is linked to
providing not merely for material needs, but to ensure that the
individual has access to the market through compulsory education
and the acquisition of skills basic to economic independence.
It is here that Sacks examines the various
technological revolutions that have undergirded the march of
civilization. We are led through the advances in
communication that have allowed man to develop his culture and
civilization.
These advances are the following:
1. The development of writing
2. The development of the alphabet
3. The development of the printing press
4. The development of the global exchange of
information
Writing first began back in the ancient Near
East when the modes of inscription, cave drawings and the like,
became incapable of representing more complex phenomena.
Sacks sees in the development of writing, an urbanizing
tendency:
The settlement of populations, the development
of agriculture and the birth of complex economies with their
division of labor and growth of exchange, gave writing its earliest
and most immediately practical use, namely to record transactions.
But the power of the system was soon apparent. It could
do more than keep a note of who owed what to whom. It could
capture for posterity the great narratives— myths,
cosmologies and epic histories– that explained the present in
terms of the past, and whose telling in oral form had been a
central feature of ancient religious rituals.29
Writing was far more than an abstraction; it
created a sense of time and history that permitted its exponents to
understand and internalize more clearly a sense of their own
humanity; it created a new sense of consciousness that permitted
man to be reflective, to look at himself in a new manner.30
But the invention of the alphabet took this
consciousness to a new level:
The alphabet created the possibility of
profound social and political change. As already noted, the
pre-alphabetical world was, and could not be other than,
hierarchical. At the apex of Mesopotamian or Egyptian society
was a ruler, king or pharaoh, seen as a god, or child of the gods,
or the prime intermediary between the people and the gods.
Below him and holding much of the day-to-day power was the
cognitive elite, the administrative class. Below them was the
mass of people, conceived as a vast work- or military force.
The cultures of the ancient world were mythological, or what
Eric Voegelin called 'cosmological.' What this meant was that
the divisions in society were seen as mirroring the hierarchy of
the gods or planets or elemental forces. They were written
into the structure of the universe itself.31
Along the lines that he has continued to trace
throughout the book, Sacks sees history as an ongoing process of
forces, created by man, that lead us to breakthroughs and usher us
into a greater insight into who we are and a more precise knowledge
of the world we live in.
The role of Judaism and the Bible is central
to the argument. Judaism is not represented as the initiator
of the discoveries, but is shown to have made some startling uses
of them:
The politics of ancient Israel begins with an
act inconceivable to the cosmological mind, namely that God,
creator of the universe, intervenes in history to liberate slaves.
It reaches a climax in the nineteenth chapter of the Book of
Exodus with an event unique in religious history, in which God
reveals Himself to an entire people at Mount Sinai and enters into
a covenant with them.32
Sacks thus links the technology of writing and
book production with the history of ancient Israel, the first real
history inscribed in a book. With the technological ability
to write down what has happened to them, creating an everlasting trace
of this experience, the Israelites are able to inscribe the fact of
their encounter with the Divine — a Divine presented as
absolutely Other — and allow the meeting its role in the
development of Man's own self-image; the idea that God and Man form
a covenantal bond that grounds the development of science and
culture.
It is the emergence of education as an
ultimate value that destroys the pagan culture of old; a culture
that is marked by its fear of nature and its mythologization of
natural phenomena. Under the covenantal system, Man develops
his rational sense, a sense that is tied to concepts of stewardship
and interpersonal obligation.
Thus:
Education – the ability not merely to
read and write but to master and apply information and have open
access to knowledge – is essential to human dignity. I
have suggested that it is the basis of a free society.
Because knowledge is power, equal access to knowledge is a
precondition of equal access to power. It is also the key to
creativity, and creativity is itself one of the most important
gifts with which any socioeconomic group can be endowed.33
Once human consciousness took this quantum
leap, the idea that interpersonal obligations, obligations that
would in effect mirror the Divine-Human encounter, led men to
create unions that would allow them to share power for the greater
good that the collective could provide over and above the
individual.
And it is here that we run into the paradox
that drives the modern economic system: man must have an internal
impetus, be it greed or something else, that spurs him onto his
economic and social activity. This impetus is encapsulated in
the concept of competition – a world where one man puts his
own interests ahead of others. The paradox is that human
progress and creativity are linked to mankind's selfish impulses.
We have seen the positive aspect of this in our discussion of
labor and work.
How then to create a counterbalance to the
forces of greed and selfishness?
According to Sacks, the market and its
impulses are a necessary good/evil that drives the engine of
progress and creativity, something that Judaism is wholly
supportive of, but how do we evade the brutal circularity of a
world in which difference is obliterated and support networks
eviscerated by an economy of greed and brutality?
Sacks again goes back to the model of Covenant:
It is this conception of personal identity
that lies behind the concept of covenant. Covenant is a bond,
not of interest or advantage, but of belonging. Covenants are
made when two or more people come together to create a 'We.'
They differ from contracts in that they tend to be open-ended
and enduring. They involve the commitment of a person to
another, or to several others. They involve a substantive
notion of loyalty – of staying together even in difficult
times. They may call, at times, for self-sacrifice.
People bound by a covenant are 'obligated to respond to one
another beyond the letter of the law rather than to limit their
obligations to the narrowest contractual requirements.'34
The realization that we are all in the same
boat, the boat of the universe, forces us to come to terms with the
fact that no man can live alone and that no man can be his own
universe.
The destruction of civil society in the wake
of material and technological advances is thus a disaster of the
highest order. This collapse circumscribes the biblical ethos
of altruism, an altruism that is, again, not an absolutism. It is a
carefully calibrated balance of selfish and altruistic tendencies
that man must integrate, tendencies that are leavened by our sense
of difference and multivalence.
We have seen no greater need for this
counterbalancing of human impulses than in the realm of the
environment. Sacks recounts a number of rabbinical statements
that relate to environmental concerns:
One day Honi [ha-Me'aggel] was journeying on
the road and saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked him,
'How long does it take for a carob tree to bear fruit?' the
man replied, 'Seventy years.' Honi asked, 'Are you sure that
you will live another seventy years?' The man answered, 'I
found carob trees in the world. As my forefathers planted
them for me, so I too will plant them for my children.'35
This Jewish sensitivity to the ecological
balance of the world is represented by the startling fact that it
was a Jew, Lewis Gomperz, who founded the RSPCA, the first world
organization to protect the rights of animals.
Religion has a significant and decisive role
to play in this regard:
Every technological civilization faces two
opposing dangers. One is the hubris that says: we have
godlike powers, therefore let us take the place of God. The
other is the fear that says: in the name of God, let us not use
these godlike powers at all. Each technological advance
carries with it the possibility of diminishing or enhancing human
dignity. What matters is how we use it. The way to use
it is in covenant with God, honoring His image that is mankind.36
It is this theme that runs as a constant
throughout this most unique of books: the constant interweaving of
difference(s) to create a plural and variegated – and
enriched – reality. The apotheosis of such a
pluralistic reality is the overarching concept of
forgiveness-conciliation.
At the heart of the concept of forgiveness is
the idea of love– not abstract [i.e. Platonic — D.S.]
love but the real, concrete attachment of one being for another.
Love distinguishes between the person and the deed. An
act may be evil, but since the person is free, he or she is not
inseparably joined to that evil. Wrongdoing damages the
structures of our world. It creates an injustice. It
damages a relationship. But these things are not beyond
repair. Wrongs can be rectified and harms healed.37
It is this sense of forgiveness and
conciliation that ultimately recognizes the importance of religion
in our lives:
Forgiveness is, in origin, a religious virtue.
There is no such thing as forgiveness in nature. The
elements are blind, and the laws of nature inexorable.
Famine, drought, disease, starvation, make no exceptions for
the virtuous or the penitent.38
The ultimate success or failure of humanity is
dependent upon the interaction of forces both secular and sacred.
Modern Western culture, increasingly becoming a
monolingualism, an array of elite forces arrayed against the
concepts of pluralism and tolerance, against the weak who cannot
bridge the material and scientific advances of a progressively
alienated elite, needs to rediscover the power of God and of the
salient aspects of religion.
This does not mean, in Sacks' account, that
religion is to become a part of that sense of elitism – as it
seems to have become in much of Western religion –
particularly that of exclusionary Christianity.39 Religion
must hear that faint voice, qol demamha
daqqah, the voice of the poor, hurt and
oppressed.
Sacks ends the book with an examination of one
moment of conciliation, a moment that has great import for Jews and
for others who look to solve some of the more intractable conflicts
that we face in these troubled and troubling times. The story is
that of Laura Blumenfeld, whose father was shot and seriously wounded by Palestinian
terrorists in 1986 while he was visiting Jerusalem.
Encapsulated in the story of Rabbi Blumenfeld
and his daughter's search for justice is a detail as ennobling as
it is compelling:
She attends the trial [of the suspects] and
persuades counsel – still without revealing who she is
– to let her give testimony. On the witness stand she
finally discloses the fact that she is the victim's daughter and
that she has come to know the gunman and his family so that they
can put a personal face to the family of the injured man and
understand that there is no such thing as an impersonal victim of
violence. In the middle of her cross-examination, she is
interrupted by another voice:
A woman stood up at the back of the courtroom.
She blurted out in English, in a loud, shaking voice, 'I
forgive Omar for what he did.'
Forgive? It was my mother. This
was not about forgiveness; didn't she understand? This was my
revenge.
'And if the Blumenfeld family can forgive
Omar,' my mother continued, 'it's time for the State of Israel to
forgive him.'40
This extraordinary story ties together the
main themes of The Dignity of Difference and provides a coda that
is as rare as it is enlightening: The ultimate fate of mankind will
not be provided by our sense of revenge and its entitlements; our
ultimate fate will be in our ability to distinguish that we are all
different, members of different nations and languages, members of
different classes and socio-economic groupings, members of
different religions.
As Sacks finally puts it:
The test of faith is whether I can make space
for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is
not in my image; whose language, faith, ideals, are different from
mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead
of allowing him to remake me in his. Can Israeli make space
for Palestinian, and Palestinian for Israeli? Can Muslims,
Hindis, Sikhs, Confucians, Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants make
space for one another in India, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Kosovo and
dozens of other places in which different ethnic and religious
groups exist in close proximity? Can we create a paradigm
shift through which we come to recognize that we are enlarged, not
diminished, by the 6,000 languages that exist today, each with its
unique sensibilities, art forms and literary expressions?
This is not the cosmopolitanism of those who belong nowhere,
but the deep human understanding that passes between people who,
knowing how important their attachments are to them, understand how
deeply someone else's different attachments matter to them also.41
The Dignity of Difference is a landmark of the first order in modern
humanistic studies. There have been other works that have
treated individual points discussed in the book, but I cannot think
of another book that has brought together the moral tenets of
religious humanism while keeping at its fingertips the vast and
complex literature of the modern social and biological sciences.
The Dignity of Difference is a masterpiece that teaches us not only who we
are, but how we got here and where we should be going. It is
unafraid to cobble together the pieces of its highly sophisticated
yet elegantly stated argument from varying and not ordinarily
mutually sympathetic philosophies.
As an Orthodox Jew Rabbi Sacks has taken many
chances by appealing to science and history as authoritative
sources. The malignant impulses that have overtaken Orthodox
Judaism at present, be it in its Zionist or fundamentalist variant,
have eschewed the literary and scientific arts — or, worse,
have forced those arts to fit into an Orthodox Jewish mold, abusing
them in the process.42
Rabbi Sacks constructs his argument proudly
utilizing the humanistic disciplines: evolutionary biology,
historicism and the social sciences — disciplines anathema to
others in his position as an Orthodox Jew. And, most
significantly, he has courageously articulated his deeply felt
Zionism by defending the rights of the Palestinian Arabs who too
have suffered in this brutally violent century; a stand that
someone such as Elie Wiesel, a man has espoused the values of
humanism, has yet to really come to terms with.43
For this he has borne the scorn and ire of
Jews in England, America and Israel. Rabbi Sacks has been the
object of a hate campaign that has become all-too-common in the
extremist wing of the Jewish community, but has rarely been aimed
at a fellow Orthodox figure — especially one as prominent as
the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.44
But, contrary to the warped visions of
religious fundamentalists of all stripes, the principal argument of
The Dignity of Difference, a book that should become mandatory reading for
everyone is that we all have a moral obligation to protect one
another and in so doing will bring peace and prosperity to our
universe.
Such a universal message, leavened by the
religious foundationalism that is so crucial to Sacks' prophetic
message, is a radical reconstruction of the way in which we have,
since Platonic essentialism, been taught to think of the state of
humanity. This radical reconstruction is an assemblage of
ideas – from the Bible to Maimonides to Karl Marx to Isaiah
Berlin to Robert Reich and Francis Fukuyama – that focuses on
the essential dissimilarity between human beings and the need for
us to bridge these differences with respect and tolerance.
The final word must come from Rabbi Sacks
himself:
We encounter God in the face of a stranger.
That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible's single greatest and
counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates
difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet
God. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers
into his tent. Jacob meets God when he wrestles with an
unnamed adversary alone at night. The Book of Ruth, which
tells the prehistory of David, Israel's greatest king, reaches its
climax when Ruth says to Boaz (her 'redeemer') 'Why have I found
favor in your eyes such that you recognize me though I am a
stranger?' The human other is a trace of the Divine Other.
As an ancient Jewish teaching puts it: 'When a human being
makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same.
God makes every person in the same image— His image —
and each is different.' The supreme religious challenge is to
see God's image in one who is not in our image. That is the
converse of tribalism. But it is also something other than
universalism. It takes difference seriously. It
recognizes the integrity of other cultures, other civilizations,
other paths to the presence of God.45
Elegantly written for the common reader, The Dignity of Difference will proudly take its place in the rich library of Hebrew
humanism. This library has been made relevant for our own
times by Primo Levi,46 Abraham Joshua Heschel,47 Leo
Baeck,48 Edmond Jabes;49 writers who so deeply
understood and internalized the dignity of difference. It is
in this spirit that I publicly endorse the central ethos of this
brilliant work and recommend it to anyone who respects their place
in the circle of life, a circle that is maintained by the
interaction of all living forms and which has been bequeathed to us
by our Father in heaven.
1Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien
Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 7-8.
2Jose Faur, Golden Doves
With Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 8
3For a discussion of Post-Modernism in a Jewish
framework see Susan Handelman, The Slayers of
Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). A
critique of Faur and Handelman might be found in Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990),
particularly p. xii.
4For instance, the arguments of Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America
Today (New York: Random House, 1999).
5Jonathan Sacks, The
Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Continuum Books, 2002).
6Ibid., pp. 4-5.
7Orthodox Judaism has continually had a problem with
the term "humanism." Jose Faur has written extensively on
the relationship between Sephardic Jewish thought and humanistic ideas,
highlighting the relationship between the Maimonidean tradition and the
thought of the Italian humanist Giambattista Vico. See his classic
formulation of the relationship in "Vico, Religious Humanism and the
Sephardic Tradition," Judaism 27:1 (Winter, 1978) pp. 63-71.
8The Dignity of Difference, p. 11.
9Ibid., p. 28.
10Ibid,. p. 32.
11For a critique of Enlightenment philosophy in a
Jewish context see Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the
World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, originally
published in 1982 by New York: Schocken Books), particularly chapters 2 and
3.
12The Dignity of Difference, p. 42.
13Jose Faur discusses this turn in religion in his book
In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at
the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992). See pp. 142-175 where Faur
discusses Spinoza and modern Jewish thought.
14There is the classic study of Plato by Jacques
Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy" included in his Dissemination (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981).
15The Dignity of Difference, p. 49.
16For a lucid exposition of Augustine and the Platonic
context see George Foot Moore, History of
Religions (New York: Scribner's Publishers,
1941) Volume 2, pp. 194 ff.
17The Dignity of Difference, p. 51.
18Ibid., p. 54.
19Ibid., p. 55.
20Ibid., p. 59.
21The concept of the Other in Jewish thought has been
masterfully explored in the many works of Emmanuel Levinas. See his
book of essays Difficult Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and his
classic essay "Toward the Other" in Nine
Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), pp. 12-29.
22The Dignity of Difference, pp. 70-71.
23Ibid. p. 77.
25Ibid. pp. 94-95.
28Ibid., p. 122.
29Ibid,. p. 129.
30The most insightful discussion of writing in current
philosophical thought comes from Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976). See especially "The End of the
Book and the Beginning of Writing," pp. 3-26. See also the work
of the Egyptian-Jewish poet Edmond Jabes; Jabes speaks extensively about
his poetics of writing in From the Desert to
the Book: Conversations with Marcel Cohen (Tarrytown:
Station Hill Press, 1990).
31The Dignity of Difference, p. 132.
32Ibid,. p. 133.
33Ibid,. p. 137
34Ibid., p. 151.
35Ibid., pp. 169-170, after Maimonides, Hilkhot
De'ot 6:6.
36Ibid., p. 172.
37Ibid., p. 180.
38Ibid.
39For a brilliant discussion of the Catholic Church's
legacy of anti-Semitism see James Carroll, Constantine's
Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2001), particularly his appendix, pp. 547-604, a call for
a "Vatican III."
40Ibid., pp. 188-189.
41Ibid., pp. 201-202.
42It is crucial to
understand that in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the
religious significance of the modern State of Israel has metamorphosed into
an activist and exclusivist ideology that has penetrated the ranks of
Modern Orthodox Judaism. This notion, signified by the Talmudic term athalta di-ge'ulah would have it
that Jews are now in the throes of the Messianic era. This ideology,
promoted by the late Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook and articulated by a militant
political movement following in his wake, the Gush
Emunim, has permeated the precincts of Modern
Orthodox Jewish life the world over. For an incisive examination of
this religious phenomenon see Aviezer Ravitzky's Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) where he states:
"The nationalist ideology of Rabbi Kook and his followers views the
history of Zionism as an inevitable and decidedly messianic process,
leading to the realization of prophetic predictions: 'the State of Israel
as the fulfillment of the biblical vision of redemption.'" (p. 80).
In Ravitzky's trenchant and singular analysis, the Zionist movement
has become linked to a fundamentalist messianism that presents itself in
modern guise in counterdistinction to the more conservative messianism of
the haredim.
For a discussion of the Haredi approach see Daniel Boyarin and
Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer,
1993), pp. 693-726. For an earlier critique of nationalist Zionism
from a Diasporist point of view see Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism (Philadelphia: Meridian Books/The Jewish Publication
Society, 1958), especially the letter "Reality and Fantasy in
Zionism," pp. 155-166. For a Sephardic point of view see Ella
Shohat, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its
Jewish Victims," Social Text 19-20, 1988 , pp. 1-34 and Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
along with the argument in Laurence J. Silberstein, The Post-Zionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (London: Routledge Press, 1999), pp. 47-66.
43See Norman G. Finkelstein's incisive discussion of
Wiesel's approbation of Joan Peters' vicious work against the Palestinians From Time Immemorial in his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine
Conflict (London: Verso Books, 1995), p.
48. Wiesel has consistently maintained his ambivalence towards the
Palestine issue within his larger mission regarding global human rights.
44Prior to the publication of The Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Sacks
conducted an interview with The Guardian of
London and allowed the paper to excerpt
portions of the book. The article appeared written by Jonathan
Freedman entitled "The Prophet of Hope" August 27, 2002.
The controversy has been addressed in two articles, David Landau,
"Will Sacks Stand by his Statements
on Israel?" Ha'aretz, September 2, 2002 and Gerald Kaufman, "The Chief
Rabbi Must Not Back Down on Israel," The
Independent (UK), September 3, 2002. The
controversy centered around Rabbi Sacks' critical remarks concerning the
IDF's occupation forces on the West Bank and Gaza. He states:
"You cannot ignore a command that is repeated 36 times in the Mosaic
books: 'You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an
exile.' I regard that as one of the core projects of a state that is true
to Judaic principle. And therefore I regard the current situation as
nothing less than tragic, because it is forcing Israel into postures that
are incompatible in the long- run with our deepest ideals." Sadly,
Rabbi Sacks wrote a letter to Israel's Chief Rabbi Meir Lau rescinding the
comments and defusing the controversy. But in the opinion of this
writer, the statements originally made in The
Guardian are in perfect consonance with
Rabbi Sacks' ideas of pluralism and diversity. It is thus lamentable
that the monolingualism that we have discussed in this essay has been
carried out with a vengeance in the Modern Orthodox Jewish world by its
vicious behavior toward Rabbi Sacks.
45The Dignity of
Difference, pp. 59-60.
46The Periodic Table, (New York: Schocken Books, 1984).
47Man is Not Alone: A
Philosophy of Religion, (New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1951) and God in Search of Man:
A Philosophy of Judaism, (New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1955).
48The Essence of Judaism, (New York: Schocken Books, 1941)
49The Book of Questions (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1976-1984),
Seven Volumes.
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