Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 3, 2023 23:48:57 GMT
When Torah teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves, who does it mean? If you ask many 21st century liberal Jews living in the Disapora, they’ll say that it means everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike. It doesn’t, though. Commentators throughout the ages discuss what it means to show love to one’s neighbor, but don’t discuss who one’s neighbor is because they all understand it to mean one’s fellow Jew. Does that mean that we should not love non-Jews? Of course not - it’s just that they’re covered by different verses in Torah. In fact, there are actually 36 times as many verses that tell us to welcome and take care of non-Jews than there are verses that tell us to love Jews. But the central verse of Torah is not one that says to love everyone as ourselves but to love our fellow Jew as ourselves. There is particularism at the heart of Judaism.
Why is this important? Over the last few weeks, I believe that many of the existential struggles that many people have been experiencing in terms of how the world responds to the terror attack of October 7th and the subsequent war are rooted in a profound difference in two strongly competing values – those of universalism and of particularism. I would suggest, as many others have done before me, that Judaism is both particularist and universal, and that universalism by itself entirely threatens the future of Judaism. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, explains (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-fracturing-of-liberal-judaism-over-jewish-particularism-opinion-669407). He says that we are witnessing the fracturing of liberal Judaism along the same fault line of centuries ago, which is the fault line of Jewish identity, specifically the question, “Do we belong to the Jewish people?” He asks, “Are we anchored in Jewish particularism – an identity rooted in Jewish peoplehood – and from there, do we pursue Jewish universal values of social repair? Or are we Kantian universalists who pray in Hebrew, and who regard the insistence on Jewish distinctiveness as an embarrassment at best or, at worst, an impediment to and a contradiction of universal values?” I would suggest that many liberal Jews feel exactly the second way but don’t want to say it out loud. Rabbi Hirsch wonders how the founders of Reform Judaism could possibly have said that we no longer consider ourselves a nation but only as a religious community and says that the first person to express that opinion was actually the apostle Paul in the Christian Bible. He says that Christianity divorced itself from Jewish peoplehood by insisting that Judaism was merely a religion, thereby allowing itself to break formally from Judaism. Two thousand years later, Rabbi Hirsch says that liberal Jews voice the same sentiments, even leading to one early 20th-century president of the Hebrew Union College to say that “Zionism is poison instilled in sugar-coated pills” and even going so far as to say that Zionism “is un-Jewish.” Rabbi Hirsch explains that the default position of liberal Judaism is anti-peoplehood and anti-Zionist and he strongly intimates that unless this is addressed and changed, that position will be the end of all liberal expressions of Judaism. He says that instead we need to “straddle the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism” so that we can discuss universal values such as peace, justice, righteousness and mercy while also expressing particular values of solidarity, responsibility, identity and mutuality. He closes his piece by writing that “the future of Judaism is Jewish peoplehood,” and he says that “all those who abandon Jewish peoplehood will be as the leaves falling from the tree.”
And as I read this, I realized that this is what has been so profoundly disturbing me, upsetting me in the last few weeks. Not the hordes of anti-Semites who bark online about Israel being a white colonialist endeavor and who even sought to justify Hamas’ terror attack. Such anti-Semitism, even sometimes expressed online by Jews, does not disturb me at all, especially when it comes from people who have never even set foot in the land, who have never even engaged in the challenge of peacemaking and dialogue, and whose knowledge of the Middle East is from Facebook posts and tweets. As Marcus Aurelius said, “The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” No, what has profoundly disturbed me has been how many Jews have taken on a totally universalist perspective while forgetting the essential Jewish position that should balance it. The moment that Israeli death was mentioned on October 7th, for example, they would add, “But what about the Palestinians?” The very people who said that Black Lives Matter and who rallied against anyone who replied “All Lives Matter” suddenly turned around while we were burying our Jewish dead and insisted that “All Deaths Matter.” Nobody with any sense of decency stands at a funeral and says, “Why are you crying at the loss of your loved one? Other people have died, too.” That would be monstrous, but the rush to turn a particular incident – a terror attack aimed specifically at Jews – the rush to turn that into a universalistic message of how all violence regardless of who experiences it is bad, that has been deeply troubling for me. Our very painful unique experience, that Jewish experience of Jewish terror was immediately absorbed into a universal message of “all suffering is bad” before we could even experience our own trauma. Does that mean that we don’t care about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza? No, of course not, God forbid! But if we cannot all first come together, all of us, to mourn our Jewish dead, then what have we become?
For centuries, there has been debate about the difference between Rome and Jerusalem (see, for example, Moses Hess) or between Athens and Jerusalem (see, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel). Greek or Hellenic thought and Jewish thought has never been the same... and thank God. Many authors believe that Western culture was always framed by the tension between Athens and Jerusalem – between secular and religious thought. It’s what made Western civilization grow. Eisig Silberschlag writes (Jerusalem and Athens: A Tale of Two Cities, www.jstor.org/stable/27908620) that not only Christians but also Jews benefited from a difference in thought. For example, he says that “For the Greek, man is a dual being “with an immortal soul imprisoned… in a mortal body;” [whereas] in the Bible “soul and flesh are not separable but one is the outward and visible manifestation of the other.” … And if you’re thinking, wait a minute, I thought that body and soul were two different things and that after we die our soul goes elsewhere, that’s literally my point. Assimilation isn’t when Jews marry non-Jews, it’s when Jews start thinking and acting like non-Jews. Judaism holds universal ethics while still absolutely valuing Jewish particularism. That’s how the prophet Isaiah can talk of a time of universal peace where “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (Is. 2:4) while the prophet Amos can simultaneously in the Bible talk of God choosing the people Israel, saying, “You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged, and therefore it is for all your sins that I mean to punish you.” (Amos 3:1-2) There is, has and always will be… must be… a specific, unique and essential Jewish experience. For some that’s bagels and lox, for others it’s liturgy, for others it’s Jewish jokes, for others theology, for others it’s values. We are different, and that’s not only good, but essential, because what we have seen particularly in recent academic circles is the attempt to erase all difference to create a universal message of supposed progress. “Universalism searches for what is systematic and tries to impose the rules, laws, and norms on all of its “members” so that things can run more efficiently. Particularism searches for what is different, unique, or exceptional to create something that is incomparable or of special quality.” (Joshua Hoffman, The Power of Jewish Particularism in a World Filled With Universalists, www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-power-of-jewish-particularism) Pure universalism, I would say, has always been coercive. We see that with attempts of other nations throughout history trying to absorb the Jews into their way of thinking, and yet we have always resisted. And we see that in academic dialogue nowadays that brands anyone who disagrees with the groupthink as regressive or even dangerous. Pure universalism tends towards violence, and it always has. It abhors difference and seeks to stamp it out. It also tolerates violence, or excuses violence, as we saw immediately after October 7th. But pure particularism also tends towards violence. It insists that “my way is right and yours is wrong,” or that “we were chosen because we are better.” It divides and seeks no common ground. It becomes tribal and quickly denigrates the other, which is what gives permission for violence.
The only way for society to progress is, I believe, through a balance of particularism and universalism, which has always been the Jewish message, at least until Reform Judaism became embarrassed by particularism. In his essay on the subject, (https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/universalism-and-particularism-jewish-teachings-on-jewish-obligation/), Rabbi David Ellenson, Emeritus Chancellor of HUC-JIR, wrote in 2014 that the Jewish balance between universalism and particularism is expressed in Talmud, Sanhedrin 56, where “the rabbis teach that God established a universal covenant with all humanity through Noah even before a covenant was instituted with the people Israel!” He explains that “the notion of a dual covenant – a [universal] covenant between God and all humanity as well as a [particular] covenant between God and the Jewish people – serves as a cardinal foundation for Jewish religious beliefs and values.” He adds another Talmudic passage, though – that of Bava Metzia 71a, which says that “A member of one’s household takes precedence over everyone else. The poor of one’s household take precedence over the poor of one’s city. And the poor of one’s own city take precedence over the poor of other cities.” On this, he says that “A Jew is obligated to assume responsibility for his or her household, and a Jewish community is required to do the same for its own members when it cares for persons in a time of need. This talmudic passage reflects the ethical concern Judaism has for family and the Jewish people, and it bespeaks the primacy our tradition assigns the Jewish covenantal community in the Jewish hierarchy of values. As Hillel states in the oft-quoted passage from Pirkei Avot 1:14, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” However,” he adds, “Hillel then immediately says, “But if I am only for myself alone, what am I?” The universalism inherent in Jewish teachings on covenant requires Jews to apply the foundational Jewish values of justice and mercy to all humanity. Thus, in Hilchot Melachim (Laws of Kings) 10:12, Maimonides writes, “One ought to treat the resident non-Jewish stranger with civility, humanity, mercy and kindnessjust as one does a Jew, for we are commanded to support them.” All persons are created in the divine image, and Jews must care for and respect all people. Consequently, in that same passage Maimonides states that Jews are required to “bury [Gentile] dead along with the dead of Israel, and support [Gentile] poor among the poor of Israel.” He then justifies this obligation by citing Psalms 145:9, which states, “God is good to all and God’s mercy is on all God’s works.” Our commitments as Jews extend [out from the Jewish community] to all humanity.”
One email that I received a number of times from a person who I know is watching this sermon this evening asked the very difficult and challenging question, “Does God ask us to choose who to pray for?” The answer is yes. It’s in the siddur on page 62. Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisra’el and then the siddur adds afterwards v’al kol yoshvei tevel – may the One who makes peace in the high heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and for all who dwell on earth. The Jewish experience is not totally subsumed into a universal message. Particularism and universalism together.
Universalism is essential in Judaism but it must be grounded in particular Jewish experience and thought. Judaism should not be erased into some generic universalist vision of society. We don’t bring about the specific Biblical vision of the Messianic age by setting the Bible aside and replacing it with commonly shared universal values – that would be literally impossible. And a core problem of universalism as it is usually expressed today is that expresses itself, as Rabbi Josh Weinberg says, as “a moral, holier-than-thou approach that tends to simplify issues, ignore complexity, and see things not for what they are but for what we perceive them to be” (Rabbi Josh Weinberg, arza.org/the-particular-challenge-of-universalism/). In its most obvious expression recently, the previous universalist position of equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians and that vision of their mutual coexistence has now become a horrifyingly intolerant and untrue declaration of Zionism as white colonialism that ultimately rejects the right of the State of Israel to even exist. At their core, as I said, universalism searches for what is systematic and tries to impose rules and norms while particularism searches for what is different, unique, or exceptional. We need both. We need Jews not to reject that which is particular and unique and wonderful about our faith and our culture and our religion and our people in order that it not be assimilated into the groupthink of universal values that, as we have learned, are always guided by political whims and that can end up even ultimately tolerating real evil. The forthcoming festival of Chanukah is essentially based on the need to fight against total universalism that sought to absorb the particular unique contribution of Judaism. Embracing universalism while rejecting particularism causes immeasurable harm to the Jewish community and, indeed, to the global community, by squashing our unique voice.
Particularism is made out to be something embarrassing in modern universalistic thinking. It’s slandered as being tribal and primitive, or ancient and backwards. That, I believe, is a lie that is spread to basically render all difference invisible. But difference is what makes us special. Difference is what leads to dialogue. The story of the Tower of Babel exists to show how important it is that we are different so that we learn to dialogue with each other so that we might grow. We grow more as a human race when we celebrate difference not when we hide it or eradicate it. Ahad Ha’am once said, “More than the Jewish People have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” We don’t keep Shabbat because we’re backwards tribal people, we keep Shabbat because that’s what Jews do, because it’s our thing, because we specifically choose to refrain from work while the rest of the world slaves away, because we choose to create a sanctuary in time while others create sanctuaries in space. We keep Shabbat because in so doing it keeps us. It’s our particular thing.
But Judaism is not just a religion, though, it is also a peoplehood and always has been. You are Jewish whether you believe in the Jewish religion or not. We all know that. Even the term “Judaism” demonstrates our particularistic peoplehood, coming from the Greek term Ioudaismos which, according to Christian scholar James Dunn was “initially coined to describe the religion of the Judeans in their opposition to the Hellenizing policies of their Syrian overlords.” In other words, he says that “the term emerged in opposition to a policy intended to obliterate [both] national and religious distinctiveness.” Being Jewish has therefore always meant being opposed to total universalism.
So, what does that mean for us today? I think that there is a terrifying violent right-wing threat that all Jews as individuals face around the world, a violent anti-Semitism that seeks to destroy every individual Jew. I also believe that there is simultaneously an insidious existential left-wing threat that Judaism in its entirety faces that seeks to erase Jewish particularism and peoplehood. And I think that we have witnessed expressions of both in the last few weeks. So, I believe that we have to help society balance universalism and particularism.
Abraham Joshua Heschel explains something which many modern universalists have forgotten – that “religion is more than a mood or a feeling. Judaism,” he says, “is a way of thinking, not only a way of living. Unless we understand its categories, its mode of apprehension and evaluation, its teachings remain unintelligible.” (God in Search of Man, p.35) I believe that this means that we as a global Jewish community also have to change the way that we learn and teach. Jewish education can no longer be just about facts or how to decode letters, it has to also be about how we think as Jews. We think differently, not because we are better but because we have a different experience to any other people on earth, so the way that we in particular think is valuable… it’s essential. It’s not something to be embarrassed of. It’s something to be embraced. We have a particular message, our particular message, about universalism. And I think it needs to be heard.
“Aren’t we all fundamentally the same?” asks the universalist. Judaism says, Yes and No. Yes, we are all created in the image of God but no, we are all unique with our own unique challenges and own unique contributions. If we were not unique, there would be no point in us existing. To pretend that we are all the same is to ignore everything that makes us special and everything that can help us appreciate the Other more. Leo Strauss says that a person cannot hold at one and the same time a passport for the City of Athens and a passport for the City of Jerusalem. I think he is profoundly mistaken. Sandu Frunzã (Jewish Philosophy and the Metaphor of Returning to Jerusalem) suggests instead a paradigm of exile-redemption that allows us to start our philosophical journey “from Jerusalem to Athens but never forgets to take the return path to Jerusalem, taking with it the entire experience of thinking that it acquires through the complex encounter with philosophical thinking.” In other words, if we are to engage with the world, we have to start from our particular Jewish position, not from a universal one. We then use that particular Jewish position, including Jewish pain as well as Jewish hopes and dreams, to help create a shared universal vision. But then we return essentially to the particular Jewish experience. That is essential for the survival of Judaism. So, I believe, is the recognition of Jewish peoplehood and thus the right to self-determination in a land that is the right that all other peoples must have as well. And if two people both claim the same land, then the recognition of their right to exist on that land, which we in our particular community call Zionism, must also include the other’s right to exist on the land. In other words, to get very particular to one issue, I believe that contemporary Zionism must include the insistence on a two-state solution and must include not just the vapid almost meaningless statements that all war should cease but instead must include concrete ways to achieve that two-state solution. Balancing particularism with universalism with regards to the Middle East must therefore mean having rally challenging conversations, painful but essential conversations about what is necessary to achieve long-term peace.
Today, we need to call out the moral failure of blanket universalism for the good of all Jews. I believe that we need to recognize that it has failed to protect Jews and that it continues to fail to address the unique experience of Jewish suffering. And I believe that we also have to call out the moral failure of blanket particularism that leads to racism and violence, including calls to violence from elected representatives in the Jewish state. For the good of the Jewish community, for the good of the global community, I believe that we have to learn how to embrace our own unique Jewish contribution to the universal dialogue that can only exist if it celebrates difference instead of erasing it. That, I believe, has actually always been our sacred task, a task that I believe is more pressing now than ever before. So, may we be up to that task as individuals and as a community, and let us say, Amen.
Why is this important? Over the last few weeks, I believe that many of the existential struggles that many people have been experiencing in terms of how the world responds to the terror attack of October 7th and the subsequent war are rooted in a profound difference in two strongly competing values – those of universalism and of particularism. I would suggest, as many others have done before me, that Judaism is both particularist and universal, and that universalism by itself entirely threatens the future of Judaism. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, explains (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-fracturing-of-liberal-judaism-over-jewish-particularism-opinion-669407). He says that we are witnessing the fracturing of liberal Judaism along the same fault line of centuries ago, which is the fault line of Jewish identity, specifically the question, “Do we belong to the Jewish people?” He asks, “Are we anchored in Jewish particularism – an identity rooted in Jewish peoplehood – and from there, do we pursue Jewish universal values of social repair? Or are we Kantian universalists who pray in Hebrew, and who regard the insistence on Jewish distinctiveness as an embarrassment at best or, at worst, an impediment to and a contradiction of universal values?” I would suggest that many liberal Jews feel exactly the second way but don’t want to say it out loud. Rabbi Hirsch wonders how the founders of Reform Judaism could possibly have said that we no longer consider ourselves a nation but only as a religious community and says that the first person to express that opinion was actually the apostle Paul in the Christian Bible. He says that Christianity divorced itself from Jewish peoplehood by insisting that Judaism was merely a religion, thereby allowing itself to break formally from Judaism. Two thousand years later, Rabbi Hirsch says that liberal Jews voice the same sentiments, even leading to one early 20th-century president of the Hebrew Union College to say that “Zionism is poison instilled in sugar-coated pills” and even going so far as to say that Zionism “is un-Jewish.” Rabbi Hirsch explains that the default position of liberal Judaism is anti-peoplehood and anti-Zionist and he strongly intimates that unless this is addressed and changed, that position will be the end of all liberal expressions of Judaism. He says that instead we need to “straddle the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism” so that we can discuss universal values such as peace, justice, righteousness and mercy while also expressing particular values of solidarity, responsibility, identity and mutuality. He closes his piece by writing that “the future of Judaism is Jewish peoplehood,” and he says that “all those who abandon Jewish peoplehood will be as the leaves falling from the tree.”
And as I read this, I realized that this is what has been so profoundly disturbing me, upsetting me in the last few weeks. Not the hordes of anti-Semites who bark online about Israel being a white colonialist endeavor and who even sought to justify Hamas’ terror attack. Such anti-Semitism, even sometimes expressed online by Jews, does not disturb me at all, especially when it comes from people who have never even set foot in the land, who have never even engaged in the challenge of peacemaking and dialogue, and whose knowledge of the Middle East is from Facebook posts and tweets. As Marcus Aurelius said, “The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” No, what has profoundly disturbed me has been how many Jews have taken on a totally universalist perspective while forgetting the essential Jewish position that should balance it. The moment that Israeli death was mentioned on October 7th, for example, they would add, “But what about the Palestinians?” The very people who said that Black Lives Matter and who rallied against anyone who replied “All Lives Matter” suddenly turned around while we were burying our Jewish dead and insisted that “All Deaths Matter.” Nobody with any sense of decency stands at a funeral and says, “Why are you crying at the loss of your loved one? Other people have died, too.” That would be monstrous, but the rush to turn a particular incident – a terror attack aimed specifically at Jews – the rush to turn that into a universalistic message of how all violence regardless of who experiences it is bad, that has been deeply troubling for me. Our very painful unique experience, that Jewish experience of Jewish terror was immediately absorbed into a universal message of “all suffering is bad” before we could even experience our own trauma. Does that mean that we don’t care about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza? No, of course not, God forbid! But if we cannot all first come together, all of us, to mourn our Jewish dead, then what have we become?
For centuries, there has been debate about the difference between Rome and Jerusalem (see, for example, Moses Hess) or between Athens and Jerusalem (see, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel). Greek or Hellenic thought and Jewish thought has never been the same... and thank God. Many authors believe that Western culture was always framed by the tension between Athens and Jerusalem – between secular and religious thought. It’s what made Western civilization grow. Eisig Silberschlag writes (Jerusalem and Athens: A Tale of Two Cities, www.jstor.org/stable/27908620) that not only Christians but also Jews benefited from a difference in thought. For example, he says that “For the Greek, man is a dual being “with an immortal soul imprisoned… in a mortal body;” [whereas] in the Bible “soul and flesh are not separable but one is the outward and visible manifestation of the other.” … And if you’re thinking, wait a minute, I thought that body and soul were two different things and that after we die our soul goes elsewhere, that’s literally my point. Assimilation isn’t when Jews marry non-Jews, it’s when Jews start thinking and acting like non-Jews. Judaism holds universal ethics while still absolutely valuing Jewish particularism. That’s how the prophet Isaiah can talk of a time of universal peace where “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (Is. 2:4) while the prophet Amos can simultaneously in the Bible talk of God choosing the people Israel, saying, “You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged, and therefore it is for all your sins that I mean to punish you.” (Amos 3:1-2) There is, has and always will be… must be… a specific, unique and essential Jewish experience. For some that’s bagels and lox, for others it’s liturgy, for others it’s Jewish jokes, for others theology, for others it’s values. We are different, and that’s not only good, but essential, because what we have seen particularly in recent academic circles is the attempt to erase all difference to create a universal message of supposed progress. “Universalism searches for what is systematic and tries to impose the rules, laws, and norms on all of its “members” so that things can run more efficiently. Particularism searches for what is different, unique, or exceptional to create something that is incomparable or of special quality.” (Joshua Hoffman, The Power of Jewish Particularism in a World Filled With Universalists, www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-power-of-jewish-particularism) Pure universalism, I would say, has always been coercive. We see that with attempts of other nations throughout history trying to absorb the Jews into their way of thinking, and yet we have always resisted. And we see that in academic dialogue nowadays that brands anyone who disagrees with the groupthink as regressive or even dangerous. Pure universalism tends towards violence, and it always has. It abhors difference and seeks to stamp it out. It also tolerates violence, or excuses violence, as we saw immediately after October 7th. But pure particularism also tends towards violence. It insists that “my way is right and yours is wrong,” or that “we were chosen because we are better.” It divides and seeks no common ground. It becomes tribal and quickly denigrates the other, which is what gives permission for violence.
The only way for society to progress is, I believe, through a balance of particularism and universalism, which has always been the Jewish message, at least until Reform Judaism became embarrassed by particularism. In his essay on the subject, (https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/universalism-and-particularism-jewish-teachings-on-jewish-obligation/), Rabbi David Ellenson, Emeritus Chancellor of HUC-JIR, wrote in 2014 that the Jewish balance between universalism and particularism is expressed in Talmud, Sanhedrin 56, where “the rabbis teach that God established a universal covenant with all humanity through Noah even before a covenant was instituted with the people Israel!” He explains that “the notion of a dual covenant – a [universal] covenant between God and all humanity as well as a [particular] covenant between God and the Jewish people – serves as a cardinal foundation for Jewish religious beliefs and values.” He adds another Talmudic passage, though – that of Bava Metzia 71a, which says that “A member of one’s household takes precedence over everyone else. The poor of one’s household take precedence over the poor of one’s city. And the poor of one’s own city take precedence over the poor of other cities.” On this, he says that “A Jew is obligated to assume responsibility for his or her household, and a Jewish community is required to do the same for its own members when it cares for persons in a time of need. This talmudic passage reflects the ethical concern Judaism has for family and the Jewish people, and it bespeaks the primacy our tradition assigns the Jewish covenantal community in the Jewish hierarchy of values. As Hillel states in the oft-quoted passage from Pirkei Avot 1:14, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” However,” he adds, “Hillel then immediately says, “But if I am only for myself alone, what am I?” The universalism inherent in Jewish teachings on covenant requires Jews to apply the foundational Jewish values of justice and mercy to all humanity. Thus, in Hilchot Melachim (Laws of Kings) 10:12, Maimonides writes, “One ought to treat the resident non-Jewish stranger with civility, humanity, mercy and kindnessjust as one does a Jew, for we are commanded to support them.” All persons are created in the divine image, and Jews must care for and respect all people. Consequently, in that same passage Maimonides states that Jews are required to “bury [Gentile] dead along with the dead of Israel, and support [Gentile] poor among the poor of Israel.” He then justifies this obligation by citing Psalms 145:9, which states, “God is good to all and God’s mercy is on all God’s works.” Our commitments as Jews extend [out from the Jewish community] to all humanity.”
One email that I received a number of times from a person who I know is watching this sermon this evening asked the very difficult and challenging question, “Does God ask us to choose who to pray for?” The answer is yes. It’s in the siddur on page 62. Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisra’el and then the siddur adds afterwards v’al kol yoshvei tevel – may the One who makes peace in the high heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and for all who dwell on earth. The Jewish experience is not totally subsumed into a universal message. Particularism and universalism together.
Universalism is essential in Judaism but it must be grounded in particular Jewish experience and thought. Judaism should not be erased into some generic universalist vision of society. We don’t bring about the specific Biblical vision of the Messianic age by setting the Bible aside and replacing it with commonly shared universal values – that would be literally impossible. And a core problem of universalism as it is usually expressed today is that expresses itself, as Rabbi Josh Weinberg says, as “a moral, holier-than-thou approach that tends to simplify issues, ignore complexity, and see things not for what they are but for what we perceive them to be” (Rabbi Josh Weinberg, arza.org/the-particular-challenge-of-universalism/). In its most obvious expression recently, the previous universalist position of equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians and that vision of their mutual coexistence has now become a horrifyingly intolerant and untrue declaration of Zionism as white colonialism that ultimately rejects the right of the State of Israel to even exist. At their core, as I said, universalism searches for what is systematic and tries to impose rules and norms while particularism searches for what is different, unique, or exceptional. We need both. We need Jews not to reject that which is particular and unique and wonderful about our faith and our culture and our religion and our people in order that it not be assimilated into the groupthink of universal values that, as we have learned, are always guided by political whims and that can end up even ultimately tolerating real evil. The forthcoming festival of Chanukah is essentially based on the need to fight against total universalism that sought to absorb the particular unique contribution of Judaism. Embracing universalism while rejecting particularism causes immeasurable harm to the Jewish community and, indeed, to the global community, by squashing our unique voice.
Particularism is made out to be something embarrassing in modern universalistic thinking. It’s slandered as being tribal and primitive, or ancient and backwards. That, I believe, is a lie that is spread to basically render all difference invisible. But difference is what makes us special. Difference is what leads to dialogue. The story of the Tower of Babel exists to show how important it is that we are different so that we learn to dialogue with each other so that we might grow. We grow more as a human race when we celebrate difference not when we hide it or eradicate it. Ahad Ha’am once said, “More than the Jewish People have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” We don’t keep Shabbat because we’re backwards tribal people, we keep Shabbat because that’s what Jews do, because it’s our thing, because we specifically choose to refrain from work while the rest of the world slaves away, because we choose to create a sanctuary in time while others create sanctuaries in space. We keep Shabbat because in so doing it keeps us. It’s our particular thing.
But Judaism is not just a religion, though, it is also a peoplehood and always has been. You are Jewish whether you believe in the Jewish religion or not. We all know that. Even the term “Judaism” demonstrates our particularistic peoplehood, coming from the Greek term Ioudaismos which, according to Christian scholar James Dunn was “initially coined to describe the religion of the Judeans in their opposition to the Hellenizing policies of their Syrian overlords.” In other words, he says that “the term emerged in opposition to a policy intended to obliterate [both] national and religious distinctiveness.” Being Jewish has therefore always meant being opposed to total universalism.
So, what does that mean for us today? I think that there is a terrifying violent right-wing threat that all Jews as individuals face around the world, a violent anti-Semitism that seeks to destroy every individual Jew. I also believe that there is simultaneously an insidious existential left-wing threat that Judaism in its entirety faces that seeks to erase Jewish particularism and peoplehood. And I think that we have witnessed expressions of both in the last few weeks. So, I believe that we have to help society balance universalism and particularism.
Abraham Joshua Heschel explains something which many modern universalists have forgotten – that “religion is more than a mood or a feeling. Judaism,” he says, “is a way of thinking, not only a way of living. Unless we understand its categories, its mode of apprehension and evaluation, its teachings remain unintelligible.” (God in Search of Man, p.35) I believe that this means that we as a global Jewish community also have to change the way that we learn and teach. Jewish education can no longer be just about facts or how to decode letters, it has to also be about how we think as Jews. We think differently, not because we are better but because we have a different experience to any other people on earth, so the way that we in particular think is valuable… it’s essential. It’s not something to be embarrassed of. It’s something to be embraced. We have a particular message, our particular message, about universalism. And I think it needs to be heard.
“Aren’t we all fundamentally the same?” asks the universalist. Judaism says, Yes and No. Yes, we are all created in the image of God but no, we are all unique with our own unique challenges and own unique contributions. If we were not unique, there would be no point in us existing. To pretend that we are all the same is to ignore everything that makes us special and everything that can help us appreciate the Other more. Leo Strauss says that a person cannot hold at one and the same time a passport for the City of Athens and a passport for the City of Jerusalem. I think he is profoundly mistaken. Sandu Frunzã (Jewish Philosophy and the Metaphor of Returning to Jerusalem) suggests instead a paradigm of exile-redemption that allows us to start our philosophical journey “from Jerusalem to Athens but never forgets to take the return path to Jerusalem, taking with it the entire experience of thinking that it acquires through the complex encounter with philosophical thinking.” In other words, if we are to engage with the world, we have to start from our particular Jewish position, not from a universal one. We then use that particular Jewish position, including Jewish pain as well as Jewish hopes and dreams, to help create a shared universal vision. But then we return essentially to the particular Jewish experience. That is essential for the survival of Judaism. So, I believe, is the recognition of Jewish peoplehood and thus the right to self-determination in a land that is the right that all other peoples must have as well. And if two people both claim the same land, then the recognition of their right to exist on that land, which we in our particular community call Zionism, must also include the other’s right to exist on the land. In other words, to get very particular to one issue, I believe that contemporary Zionism must include the insistence on a two-state solution and must include not just the vapid almost meaningless statements that all war should cease but instead must include concrete ways to achieve that two-state solution. Balancing particularism with universalism with regards to the Middle East must therefore mean having rally challenging conversations, painful but essential conversations about what is necessary to achieve long-term peace.
Today, we need to call out the moral failure of blanket universalism for the good of all Jews. I believe that we need to recognize that it has failed to protect Jews and that it continues to fail to address the unique experience of Jewish suffering. And I believe that we also have to call out the moral failure of blanket particularism that leads to racism and violence, including calls to violence from elected representatives in the Jewish state. For the good of the Jewish community, for the good of the global community, I believe that we have to learn how to embrace our own unique Jewish contribution to the universal dialogue that can only exist if it celebrates difference instead of erasing it. That, I believe, has actually always been our sacred task, a task that I believe is more pressing now than ever before. So, may we be up to that task as individuals and as a community, and let us say, Amen.