Keeping politics out of the pulpit – can we do it and should we even try?

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.