Some people really think that Judaism is the
answer to all of society’s problems. I
once heard Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks argue that if everyone in the world kept
Shabbat, the global warming crisis would be solved. I don’t think he was entirely serious, and
his audience of Jewish social activists certainly pulled no punches in taking
apart his claim. For me, Judaism is not
a panacea. The fact that every Jew makes
something different of the tradition means ‘Judaism’ can never be imposed as a
solution at all. We read our own
ideological predilections into Judaism to such an extent that solutions to problems
are ‘Jewish’ only because Jews happen to have come up with them – not because
they reflect some non-existent essence of Torah.
Having said that, I do think Torah has
something of fundamental importance to say about perhaps the most pressing and
deep-rooted problem our society faces.
There’s a connection between the behaviour of
the people behind all the recent financial scandals, the horsemeat scandal, and
the doping in sport scandal. All three
episodes illustrate what we all know – that in modern society, profit comes
before ethics. The quest for money and
success has pushed all other values – professional ethics, pride in your job –
to one side.
I recently read What Money Can’t Buy by Harvard
philosophy professor Michael Sandel. Sandel claims that economics and the values
of the market have come to dominate our lives.
The principles of the free market have been applied to everything: children
are given cash for achieving good grades, families are incentivised by
governments to have a certain number of children, corporations are allowed to
trade in carbon credits (essentially buying the right to pollute), and people
have come to expect to pay for better healthcare, to drive on faster roads and
to skip queues at the airport.
This
Saturday’s Guardian featured an article William Nicolson called ‘Because I’m worth it: the relationship economist’ which analysed dating – only slightly tongue in
cheek – from the perspective of economics.
Should failure to get a girlfriend be understood as a lack of demand in
the market, to be rectified by restricting supply by means of playing hard to
get? Or should it be solved using the
Keynesian technique of boosting demand by displaying affection, thereby inspiring
confidence? The article ends: ‘Keynesian
economics and love, it turns out, have rather a lot in common: they both work
not by balancing budgets, or reducing supply to increase prices, but by
inspiring trust. Economics did, in the end, provide me with an answer – just
not the one I expected.’
Sandel
writes that the marketization of everything is a problem not only because in an
unequal society it discriminates against those who are unable to pay, but
because it undermines the values traditionally associated with important
activities. Healthcare comes to be seen
as a commodity and a source of profit.
Rather than reading or studying for the pleasure involved, children
understand that learning is no more than a means to a financial end. Ends get mixed up with means and pursuing
profit at any cost – even corruption – becomes not only normal but good.
But there’s
a deeper problem going on here. Money is
only a medium of exchange, by definition a means and not an end. Seeing everything in
economic terms, as a means to the end of money, implies not only that we’re
mixing up means and ends but that ultimately there are no ends, no goals and no
ultimate values. In a world without
goals, we’re reduced to chasing our tails.
In this context, banks and other businesses maximising profits at any
cost – and for that matter students cheating to get better grades – acquires a logic
of its own.
20th century left-wing philosophers
like Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas have critiqued this kind of
‘instrumental rationality,’ a mode of thinking which focuses on what is the
most effective means to a given end, but fails to deliberate on what ends we
should be pursuing. They claim that
instrumental rationality, which is intimately associated with western,
capitalist modernity, leads us in particular to treat other people as objects
to be manipulated in the pursuit of our goals (and where money is the goal, we
end up exploiting others for no ultimate purpose at all).
Judaism makes an important
distinction between performing a mitzvah lishma (‘for its own sake’) –
because it’s inherently the right thing to do – and acting out of ulterior
motives, for example the hope of reward or the fear of punishment – lo lishma. But it’s not always clear whether lo lishma
is always a bad thing or whether it can be a pathway to observance lishma. To continue my habit of quoting Maimonides:
in the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law he says, ‘A person should not say: "I will fulfill
the mitzvot of the Torah and occupy myself in its wisdom in
order to receive all the blessings which are contained within it or in order to
merit the life of the world to come…" It is not fitting to serve God
in this manner’ (Laws of Repentance 10:1).
On the other hand, ‘A person should always occupy himself in Torah
study, whether lishma or even lo lishma, for from lo lishma will
come lishma’ (Laws of Torah Study 3:5).
I find the idea that we
should order our lives not in purely instrumental terms but in line with
ultimate goals, core values and a conception of what is right, to be one of
Judaism’s most potent insights, and a valuable corrective to our profit-centred
and outcome-driven market society. It seems to me that we need to find ways of inducting
ourselves into a purposeful, values-driven mode of existence without going down
the dangerous lo lishma route. In the Masorti movement we do this by trying
to build communities whose role is not to further any practical or ideological
agenda, but in which we learn to value our relationships with each other – as
human beings created in the image of God – as the highest imaginable good. I hope we’re making a small contribution.
THIS WEEK
We ran our annual Yom Masorti day of learning,
with almost 300 people from 11 Masorti communities – and several Orthodox and
Reform communities too. It was an
amazing day – thanks to all the staff and volunteers who took part. Click here for a full report.
Earlier in the week I participated in a fascinating
Jewish-Muslim dialogue group, hosted by the Three Faiths Forum, where we
discussed Zionism, Islamism and the place of Jews and Muslims in British
society. One conclusion: too much of the
tension between our communities over Israel/Palestine has very little – if anything
– to do with the Middle East, which several of the Muslim participants (all with origins on the Indian subcontinent) felt
very little connection to. Ironically,
the clash has more to do with the common ground between us: it’s about Jewish
and Muslim identity in Britain, specifically the need to defend and assert ourselves
as minority groups.
