When should religious leaders talk about politics – and when
should they keep their opinions to themselves?
Three recent debates have grabbed my attention. The first one is the campaign to get Jewish
organisations to ‘sign on the Green
Line’ – to commit to only using maps of Israel which show the border
between the State of Israel and the occupied (or liberated?) territories. Masorti Judaism was asked to sign up and –
unlike the Reform and Liberal movements – we decided to refuse. The initial feeling was this was a controversial
party-political issue we didn’t want to take a stand on.
But then a member of our Executive made the argument that in
some parts of the world it’s illegal to use the wrong kind of map and he doesn’t
want to live in a society like that. So
our ‘apolitical’ position, while not changing its substance, suddenly found a
connection with an explicitly political, liberal conception of human rights. In contrast, earlier in the year, we had called
on the Zionist Federation to grant membership to Yachad, an organisation which
brands itself ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ and which is commonly perceived as
provocatively left-wing. This was on the
basis of our commitment to pluralism and diversity in the Jewish community; on
reflection, these values are drawn from a Masorti conception of the Jewish religious
tradition, also have unmistakeable political connotations.
Issue number two was the criticism
levelled by 27 bishops at the government’s welfare reforms, which they say
have forced people into food and fuel poverty.
When asked in an interview what policy the bishops would recommend, a
spokesman replied that policy is the government’s job: the Church’s role is to
speak about morality. But the line
between morality and politics is hard to maintain, especially when this
government likes to promote its welfare policies in explicitly moral terms.
Final issue: gay marriage. It’s clear that this is an issue
where religion, politics and morality all overlap. Religious organisations can’t help taking a
position on this and, in so doing, getting involved with one of the more
controversial political debates of our day.
It turns out religion and politics cannot be easily
disentangled. The Torah constantly hints
at this. In dozens of texts, moral,
ritual and social-political commandments are interwoven with no clear
distinction between them.
So if there’s no way of separating religion and politics,
how do we decide what political issues it is legitimate for Judaism to speak
about?
As Masorti Jews who are committed to modern values but also
to bringing Judaism into the modern world, this is even more complex: after
all, alongside progressive social values the Torah contains terrible political
models – slavery, patriarchy, even genocide.
How are we to decide which to learn from for modern politics and which
to abandon because they don’t gel with our values?
In a fascinating but sometimes infuriating article, ‘The
Social Order as a Religious Problem,’ Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz
asks whether Judaism seeks to create a particular social and political system,
or whether it consists of laws which are to be obeyed in whatever system happens
to exist. In essence, is Judaism in
favour of capitalism, socialism or some other alternative, or is it simply not
interested? He lists three possibilities:
“In the first, it is our religious duty, the
religious duty of those who accept the yoke of Torah and Mitzvoth, to strive to
create the kind of system in which the sociopolitical legislation of the
existing Halakhah may be applied.
“We may, in the second alternative, surmise
that the relevant parts of the Halakhah were only used by the Torah as a
paradigm to exemplify realization of its social goal within an historically
given situation. Our task is to clarify the nature of this goal and seek a
social order most adapted to its attainment in our situation as we understand
it.
“The third possible
view is that the sociopolitical legislation of the Torah was intended only for
the specific sociopolitical reality that existed then. With its passing, social
and political life and the Torah were sundered, and we are free today to choose
a social order as we please. All that is required of us is the realization of
"justice and righteousness" in a form applicable to the framework we
have chosen....”
Which alternative does Leibowitz advocate? It’s not at all clear. The first is clearly not the intention of the
Torah, as witnessed by the absurdity of the claim that the prohibition of
ploughing with an ox and an ass yoked together obliges us to return to
primitive agriculture in order to observe the commandment. Both this and the third option, according to
Leibowitz, exempt Jews from any religious duty regarding social and political
questions in the contemporary world. He
goes on to imply that a position which cares about kosher and non-kosher food
but not about Zionism and anti-Zionism or war and peace cannot be reconciled
with the spirit of the Torah.
But the second position is also unacceptable to Leibowitz,
as it makes Judaism dependent on our subjective opinions on the shape of the
idea society and as such deviates from the normative, rule-bound, halachic framework.
Leibowitz’s conclusion, then, is resolutely unclear. Torah Jews can’t ignore political questions,
but neither is there any straightforward way of answering these questions
within the halachic framework. To
reframe the conundrum, we have to choose: we can either step outside halacha
and address politics, or refrain from talking politics, paradoxically one of
the central concerns of Torah, altogether.
But it seems to me that Leibowitz’s position reflects a particular,
Orthodox, conception of halacha, in which Jewish law is inferred deductively
from objective first principles contained in the Torah. A more nuanced, historical understanding of
Judaism would recognise that in every generation people’s subjective views,
conditioned by their social and historical context, come into dialogue with
legal precedents handed down from the past, and that halachic ruling are what
emerges from this encounter. This is
very clear when we look at the legal radicalism of the early Talmudic rabbis
who on many occasions effectively reversed laws they found in the written Torah,
but became less pronounced as Jewish law evolved.
This openness is what enables Judaism – in its halachic form
– to meet new challenges and unprecedented situations (even ultra-Orthodox rabbis
recognise Jewish law’s capacity to meet entirely novel challenges in the area
of medical ethics, for example). Today,
this is the insight which allows people in the Masorti/Conservative and liberal
Orthodox communities to grapple creatively with issues like homosexuality. As a result, we can find ourselves coming to
halachic positions which deviate wildly from what came before.
But the view that genuine, sometimes radical, halachic innovation
is born out of open, subjective intergenerational dialogue, also implies a
challenging responsibility: when taking positions on pressing social, political
and moral questions, we have no Archimedean point on which to stand. We have no choice but to go back to basics
and to deliberate from first principles.
