The source
In the past two days, I’ve read two articles that examine the liberal approach to religion. The first is Hillel Halkin’s How Not to Repair the World (available to subscribers or for a $2.95 fee); the second is Mark Tooley’s Is God a Liberal Democrat? They were sort of a nice pair to compare to the myriad books in my local library ranting about how conservatives have co-opted religion for their evil agenda.
Halkin’s article is especially good at explaining that (as I’ll discuss more later) conservatives start with the Bible and, perhaps, move away from it (no more stoning gays or adulterers), while liberals start with their political beliefs and then cherry-pick the Bible for support.
Halkin’s article revolves around the Jewish doctrine of “tikkun olam,” a Hebrew phrase the refers to repairing or perfecting the world. You’re probably familiar with that phrase because you remember that, during the Clinton administration, Democratic Jews were made incredibly proud by the fact that the Clintons had as one of their friends and advisors Michael Lerner, a radical campus activist turned liberal rabbi, who founded a magazine called Tikkun. The press was abuzz with this laudable connection, since Lerner’s “religious” magazine was remarkably congruent with the Clinton’s political agenda. “Repairing the World” is now a common demand from the Left, with Barack Obama (the messiah himself) one of the major proponents of the American responsibility to raise the ocean and hang high the moon.
The phrase tikkun olam originates in the Aleynu prayer, one of the thrice daily prayers that religious Jews repeat. In it, they beseech God (not men, but God) to bring about the ultimate messianic redemption, a time in which all people will know God:
We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our God, that we may soon behold the glory of Thy might, when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the earth and when all idolatry will be abolished. We hope for the day when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty and all mankind will call upon Thy name…
Clearly, unless one takes literally the belief that Obama is some kind of messiah, this is not the kind of tikkun olam that liberals seek.
The phrase crops up again in Jewish rabbinical writing, which came about after messianic fervor caused Jews to take on the Roman Empire — and lose, big time. As Halkin carefully explains, this use of the phrase was very narrow. The rabbis understand it to mean “for the civic good of the Jews,” both within their own community and in dealing with the larger world.
One of the perfect examples, and one that liberal Jewish thinkers misuse, is the Gemara’s approach to ransoming hostages. Rabbi Gamliel stated that
For the sake of tikkun olam, hostages must not be ransomed for more than their normal price. Nor, for the sake of tikkun olam, must hostages be helped to escape.
As you can see, these edicts are bad for the hostages, but good for the community. Even if a hostage comes from a rich background, his family cannot offer more money for him — to do so, would drive up the price of hostages and increase the risk that others would be kidnapped. (As an aside, Israel used to refuse to ransom hostages at all, with the result that none were taken, since they were of no value. Now that Israel routinely trades hundreds of Palestinian killers for one or two hostages, Israeli hostages are quite valuable in the market. The result is that more are kidnapped. The commumity, the tikkun olam, has been sacrificed for the individual.) Likewise, the prohibition against aiding escapes was a recognition that, while one might run away, the remaining hostages would be subject to ever greater suffering.
The above is pretty clear. What’s not clear is the use to the liberal Jews submitting essays to a new book called Righteous Indignition put this passage. These essays assure readers that the Bible and the Talmud (and related writings) all harmonize perfectly with the Progressive political agenda.
For example, Jane Kanarek uses the Gemara passage above to conclude that these traditional religous writings “help us to ask the big structural questions, forcing us to focus on underlying causes of suffering and to address them” with “tikkun olam mean[ing] Jewish social justice. It means having a large vision of the world as it ought to be, and working through and with the Jewish tradition to achieve that vision.”
Uh, no. Tikkun olam (a) primarily refers to the coming of the Kingdom of God and (b) secondarily actually advocates individual suffering to keep control over societal norms. (Kind of like doing away with “welfare as we know” it, even though some people will have financial suffering, so as to prevent the destruction of whole communities through the evils of unbridled government largesse.)
Hillel gives example after example of the way in which the liberal Jewish thinkers quote selectively from Biblical and Misdrashic texts to find — voila! — that the Bible and the rabbis were early Progressives. What I love his is conclusion, after discussing the way in which the liberal writers find Biblical support for AIDS research, transgender surgeries, and other liberal causes de jour:
And so it goes. Health care, labor unions, public school education, feminism, abortion rights, gay marriage, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, Darfur: on everything Judaism has a position — and, wondrously, this position just happens to coincide with that of the American liberal Left.
If it is easy to caricature most of the essays in Righteous Indignation, this is because so many of them caricature themselves. They represent the ultimate in that self-indulgent approach, so common in non-Orthodox Jewish circles in the United States today, that treats Jewish tradition not as a body of teachings to be learned from but as one meending to be taught what it is about by those who know better than it does what it should be about. Judaism has value to such Jews to the extent that it is useful, and it isd useful to the extent that it can be made to conform to whatever beliefs and opinions they would have even if Judaism had never existed.
The liberal approach to Biblical exegesis ultimately reminds me of something I used to do to enhance my intellectual chops. When an appropriate moment in a conversation came along, I’d suddenly spout a Shakespeare or John Donne quotation. Mention blood, and I’d start murmuring “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.” and then I’d just fade out, as if I didn’t want to bore everyone with the entire passage. The truth is that, with a few exceptions, I didn’t know the whole body of work. I knew that single quotation, or maybe a verse or a paragraph. Otherwise, I was an ignoramus. So too, I suspect, are they.
Conservatives seem to me to have an entirely different approach to religion. They start with the source material — the Bible (Old and New Testament), the Talmud, even the Koran — and work away from it. First, they accept that it says what it says and means what it means. Then, they recognize that certain religious writings cannot be applied to today’s world, and either politely ignore them or work to give them some metaphorical meaning. The Bible remains the source. This is the antithesis of the liberal approach, which has Progressivism as the source, and the Bible as a well into which to dip occasionally to make a point.
I’ll end with an anecdote. When I grew up, although my family was not religious, we celebrated Passover with a vengeance. We went through the entire Haggadah (which has all the acts, stories and prayers for the celebration) in both Hebrew and English. The Passover dinner in our house took four to five hours, which I guess was okay, since it fulfilled our religious ritual for the entire year. My parents took it very, very seriously.
Years later, when I was in law school, a Jewish friend invited me to celebrate Passover with her family. I was a little worried, because her family worshipped at a conservative synagogue. If my non-religious family spent 4-5 hours on the seder, what the heck would her family spend on the seder — a full day?
As it turned out, my fear was wasted. The family spoke non-stop throughout the ceremony, ignoring the speaker, and the whole thing was over in about an hour and a half.
You’d think I’d have been thrilled, right? Well, I wasn’t. I thought the experience was dreadful. I realized that, if you’re going to do religion, do it right. Otherwise, why bother? The sacred rituals should be sacred — they should be separated from the other areas of our lives.
This is not to say that the lessons from the sacred shouldn’t filter over. It is to say, however, that religion has meaning only if it stands alone, shedding special moral lessons that are entirely separate from our day to day manuverings. Liberals, however, demote religion to just another subset of their political ideology, leeching it of that special separateness that gives it its remarkably power over our moral lives.
