Let’s start with a particularly long, 850-word quote in itself from Isaiah Berlin:
The
history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of
morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant
models. Whenever you look at any particular civilization, you will find that
its most characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a
particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings –
or paint these paintings, or produce these particular pieces of music – are
dominated by. And in order to identify a civilization, in order to explain what
kind of civilization it is, in order to understand the world in which men of
this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to try, so far as
possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which that culture obeys. Consider,
for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you
read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a
geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on
lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are certain axiomatic
truths, adamantine, unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to
deduce certain absolutely infallible wisdom by a special method which he
recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge to be obtained in
the world, and if only we can attain to this absolute knowledge, of which
geometry, indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, this
knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner,
needing no further change; and then all suffering, all doubt, all ignorance,
all forms of human vice and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.
This
notion that there is somewhere a perfect vision and that it needs only a
certain kind of severe discipline, or a certain kind of method, to attain to
this truth, which is analogous, at any rate, to the cold and isolated truths of
mathematics – this notion then affects a great many other thinkers in the
post-Platonic age: certainly the Renaissance, which had similar ideas,
certainly thinkers like Spinoza, thinkers in the eighteenth century, thinkers
in the nineteenth century too, who believed it possible to attain some kind of,
if not absolute, at any rate nearly absolute knowledge, and in terms of this to
tidy the world up, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy,
vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at
last be avoided by the use of carefully acquired information and the
application to it of universally intelligible reason.
This is
one kind of model – I offer it simply as an example. These models invariably
begin by liberating people from error, from confusion, from some kind of
unintelligible world which they seek to explain to themselves by means of a
model; but they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people, by
failing to explain the whole world of experience. They begin as liberators and
end in some sort of despotism.
Let us
look at another example – a parallel culture, that of the Bible, that of the
Jews at a comparable period. You will find a totally different model
dominating, a totally different set of ideas, which would have been
unintelligible to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and
Chrstianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the
relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one
another. Such fundamental relationships – in terms of which nature and life are
explained – as the love of children for their father, the brotherhood of man,,
forgiveness, commands issued by a superior to an inferior, the sense of duty,
transgression, sin and therefore the need to atone for it – this whole complex
of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is explained by those
who created the Bible, and by those who were to a large extent influenced by
it, would have been totally unintelligible to the Greeks.
Consider a
perfectly familiar psalm, where the psalmist says that ‘When Israel went out of
Egypt . . . the Sea saw it and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains
skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs’, and the earth is ordered
to ‘Tremble . . . at the presence of the Lord.’ This would have been totally
unintelligible to Plato or to Aristotle, because the whole notion of a world
which reacts personally to the orders of the Lord, the idea that all
relationships, both animate and inanimate, must be interpreted in terms of the
relations of human beings, or at any rate in terms of the relations of
personalities, in one case divine, in the other case human, is very remote from
the Greek conception of what God was and what his relations were to mankind.
Hence the absence among the Greeks of the notion of obligation, hence the
absence of the notion of duty, which it is so difficult for people to grasp who
read the Greeks through spectacles partly affected by the Jews.
For seventeen-hundred years, the majority of the Western World has
attempted to read Greek through Jewish spectacles. Before Classical Greece,
consideration and skepticism were not often considered virtues. And before the
Davidic court, the idea of sublimating one’s will a singular godhead was
considered far too indirect. In a world before monotheism and scientific
inquiry, there could be no explanation grounded in verifiable fact. One
civilization had certain gods, its neighbors had others, and since no God was
omnipotent, people generally worshipped whatever gods they wished whenever they
wished to at whatever moment they wished to – an historical fact on which
Christianity would later capitalize by creating patron saints out of local
pagan gods.
By establishing science and the accumulation of knowledge as the
goal of a society, the Greeks instilled a universal standard for truth. By
doing so, they created the foundation stone of all societies which anteceded
them. By establishing God (or Yahweh) as a final authority to which all people
must answer, the Israelites created the bricks on which all societies could
enforce those universal truths the Greeks insisted upon. In our age, the idea
of singular universal truths may be considered constricting, perhaps even
authoritarian. But the idea that there is a universal truth which must be
enforced is precisely what spurred civilizations to greater achievement. It may
have created Holy War, but it also created the entire basis for all the
verifiable knowledge we hold unto this day.
Athens and Jerusalem are as fundamental to what we perceive as our
right and left eyes. The Greek part of us, the scientific self, tells us that
knowledge and truth will guide us – and all means which we must employ to
arrive at greater reserves of knowledge are necessary and justifiable. When
taken to an extreme, it results in a rationalist tyranny of knowledge. It
stifles free inquiry with its dogmas and insists upon pseudo-truths that would
easily be disproven in a free society. Such is the world one finds under
Communism and Fascism. The Hebrew part of us, the irrational (and perhaps
creative) self, tells us that knowledge will never suffice to create an
understanding of the world, and we therefore must put our trust in the fact
that the forces which guide the world will always be beyond our understanding.
All that matters, therefore, is the immediate concerns of the world before us,
and faith that all authorities from our family patriarchs to our God know what
is best for us. When taken to an extreme, this worldview results in an
autocracy of the mysterious, in which only a priestly class who swears fealty
to the One True God is allowed the privilege of the World’s knowledge and is
therefore prohibited from increasing it. Such was the source of Christendom’s
Middle Ages, and continues to this day to be the tyranny in place for Radical
Islam.
In the world of bestial tyranny, the root of tyrannical belief is
irrelevant. It is not the belief itself but the fervor of belief that causes
people to act as they do. But when these two sides of contemporary thought are
considered together – the rationalist with the romantic, or the stoic and the ecstatic
– they represent the divided self that keeps us in check; allowing us both an
unquenchable desire to improve our understanding the world, and the humility to
realize that our understanding is never good enough. At humanity’s best
moments, these two poles of civilization mingle with one another in reasonably
consonant harmony. It is in those moments that we fitfully begin the work of
reconciling what we believe with what we know. And when we finally turn a
belief into a verifiable fact, humanity finally achieves another step toward
progress.
The Jewish world is the contemporary world in its original
division. It was the first (perhaps the only) civilization to be destroyed by
the Roman Empire yet survive. It survived in a manner very different from its
previous incarnation, but survive it did. And it survived by being the first
civilization to combine the rational and the mysterious as a means of
self-improvement. From Talmudic times onward, the Jewish world was maintained
by a series of irresolvable contradictions. Among themselves, Jews deferred to rabbinical
authority, but no rabbinical authority was ever final. In matters of the larger
world, Jews differed to their country’s rule of law, but in matters between
Jews they did everything they could to keep their affairs in Jewish courts. In
matters of God, they were the first religion to believe in a God whose laws
were final and absolute. Yet it was man’s duty, not God’s, to interpret these
laws for practical application.
The ability to establish this balance between two irreconcilable
worldviews was hard-earned. For
three-hundred-fifty years, Judeans raged against the encroaching influence of
classical civilization. The Maccabees (or Hasmoneans) waged and won a war to
throw out the Seleucids (the Syrian Greek Empire) from Judea. The Seleucids
were much like modern imperialists – some of what they tried to achieve for
their subjects was quite progressive for its time, but they often went about
trying to do it in the most tyrannical way imaginable. Much like 20th
century Zionism, the Hasmonean Kingdom began as a movement that combined
militancy with idealism – but the idealism with which it achieved its birth
quickly soured into the realities of the present. Much like modern Israel, the
Judea of the Hasmonean dynasty was a country like any other country, whose good
and bad qualities were brought to the forefront by the fact of its existence in
a very dangerous neighborhood. Like Israel, its very existence seemed like a
miracle, but the reality of government was earned through gumption and blood.
The kingdom went through decades of constant threats to their survival, in
which towns were continually massacred and soldiers continually ambushed. Throughout
their existence the Hasmonean Kingdom required a military apparatus that would
equal enemies with far larger population and resources. Just as Israel clung to
the leaders of their founding generation, the Hasmoneans went through three
brothers from the family that led the Maccabean Revolt – first Judah Maccabee,
then his brother Jonathan, then their brother Simon.
I have no idea what the future of Israel holds. But when their
enemies declined, the first King of their new generation – John (Yochanan)
Hyrcanus, seized the opportunity to conquer much of the Middle East and force
his new subjects to convert by the sword. Over the next century, Judea would
begin a slouching decay from political intrigue. As the intrigues worsened, the
ideological conflicts grew exponentially between two parties: the Pharisees
(those who believed in the authority of modern-day prophets to reveal Jewish
law to the masses) and Saducees (those who believed in the authority of the
High Priest and the priestly class to interpret Jewish law for the masses). Soon thereafter, Judea was torn apart completely
by Civil War and the Pompey the Great (Julius Caesar’s rival) invaded the
country to restore order. Within twenty years, Hasmoneans were duly replaced
with the Herodians, who ruled Judea as a Roman puppet. Many times, Judeans
attempted to resurrect the miracle of the Maccabean Revolt by casting off the
mantle of Roman (and Herodian) tyranny, only to be crushed by Rome in every
attempt. By 70 AD, the Romans considered the Judeans so troublesome that they
removed the Herodians, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and installed a Roman
authority who had no autonomy from the Roman Emperor. Indeed, the only time the
Judeans successfully overthrew Rome was during the Bar-Kokhba Rebellion around
132 AD. For three years, Judea was ruled as an independent Jewish state. But
Rome returned, and its slaughter is estimated by some to be roughly 580,000
Judeans, and that does not include those citizens of Judea who were deported to
Babylon as slaves.
There was no telling how Judaism was to survive past this
apocalyptic ending of life in Israel. There was already a thousand years of
religious tradition and scripture, but never were Jews so scattered that they
required any interpretation but those which authorities could recite orally to their
followers. A new age required a new body
of law. By 220 AD, the first book appeared in which a council of Rabbis
interpreted law in a binding way for the lay public – called the Mishna
(literally meaning: from secondary – as in sources). Much like Supreme Court
decisions, each tractate in the Mishna is written about a case that appears in
front of a Rabbinical court in which the problem is described and why the Rabbi
ruled in the way he did.
The Mishna is a rather terse book, with not much more elaboration
than in the Torah. Even at the time of its publication, Rabbis felt the need to
issue a second book, the Tosefta, which was a compilation of the oral
traditions of Jewish law. However, during the next three-hundred years, many
Rabbis from both Judea and Babylon felt that as far as practical application
went, the Mishna was incomplete. These Rabbis therefore wrote their own
commentaries and clarifications for the book. These commentaries became known
as the Gemara. Together, these two books comprise the Talmud – which to this
day is the foundation for how Jewish law is interpreted. However, there are two
Gemaras, filled with writings separately collected – one from Jerusalem around 400
AD, and the other from Babylon around 500 AD. So there are in fact two Talmuds
– the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud – both of which contain much content
that is completely different from one another.
And then came seven-hundred more years of Talmudic commentary, Rabbinic
homilies, and general Jewish wisdom literature – collected from Rabbis around
the Jewish world who consulted and published in Aramaic in much the same way that
theologians from around Christendom published in Latin. Around 1170 came the
Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, published in Egypt. The Mishneh Torah
attempted to tell its readers what the best Rabbinic interpretation was of
every theological issue on which Rabbis have ever had to rule. After Maimonides’s
achievement, Rabbinic literature was revolutionized; Rabbis thought bigger. A
century-and-a-half later came the Four Rows (Arbah Turim) of Rabbi Yaakov ben
Asher which attempted to trace the entire history of Rabbinic law from the oral
tradition down to the present day. Two-hundred years later came the Beth Yosef and
Shulkhan Arukh by Rabbi Yosef Karo. For the Beth Yosef, Karo operated like
Yaakov-ben-Asher and exhaustively examined all the known Rabbinical literature from
antiquity until his own time. For the Shulkhan Arukh, Karo operated as a
later-day Maimonides, and codified the best interpretations until his own time.
In the late eighteenth century came the ‘Life
of Man’ (Chayei Adam) in which Rabbi Avraham Danzig dealt with Jewish conduct
on the holidays. And none of this even begins to cover the parallel and controversial
world of Jewish mysticism provided in the Zohar and the Kabbalah, or the
special commentaries directly about the Torah or Halakhic Law (laws given from
the Torah); or the compilations of Rabbinic commentary made throughout the
ages, or the entirely separate books Rabbis wrote on Jewish philosophy and
ethics; or how the Jewish prayer book (Siddur) was made, or the Responsa
literature which comprises more than two-thousand years of Rabbinic debates.
There is no religion which takes theology more seriously than
Judaism. In Catholicism, the need to answer theological questions is not particularly
paramount, because God commands Catholics through his chosen vicar on Earth in
order to have a final interpretation. But in the entire history of Judaism, no
Rabbi’s authority has been so central that his ruling holds up as the
definitive one against all arguments – even in his own time. Judaism has
survived for so long because it never takes anything but the hardest
conceivable road. It is much easier to live one’s life through a monist view –
in which one explanation suffices to explain the existence of the entire world.
It is much, much more difficult to reconcile practical thought with irrational
belief. This is the great achievement of the Jewish people. It is also why
being Jewish, frankly, sucks.
It is not uncommon to feel as though growing up Jewish is a prison
from which there is no escape. When given the chance to assimilate, many Jews
throughout history tried so hard to do so that they abandoned their Jewish
identities completely – renouncing everything from culture to friends to family.
To many Jews, Judaism is a pernicious mixture of a community in which the rules are truly
suffocating, and a worldwide community who views Jews as a demonic force
hellbent on world destruction that must be stopped by all means necessary. What
sane person would not shake off this inheritance if given the chance? How
insane would a person have to be in order to convert and take on this
inheritance themselves? What lack of conscience must we Jews have in order to
bring children into a world with such a terrible inheritance in store for them?
But the irony is that in precisely this way, Jews are like every
successful community the world has ever seen, thus far at least. Every
functional community is a community of laws that cannot be broken, and every
great civilization has people within it – rational and irrational – who view their
society as a terrible prison whose walls must come down at all costs. It was
true for the Romantics against the 18th century society of the
Enlightenment, it was true for liberals and totalitarians alike against the
aristocratic rule of the great European powers in the early-20th
century, and it was true for the hippies against the liberal American society
of the mid-20th century. All great societies enable people to pursue
their personal vision of happiness, but none of them guarantee that the vision
may come to fruition – and all too often, these non-mainstream personal visions
of happiness are viewed by others who live in great societies as threats to
their fragile security, however rightly or wrongly. The difference between the
2000-year Rabbinic society of Judaism and the great secular societies is that
the great societies of the world are open societies, privy to a great panoply
of forces, secular and religious, any one or combination of which can break
their fragile social contract all too easily. There is far more latitude
allowed within secular society for following one’s bliss, but just as far more latitude
is allowed, far more damage can be done by the misunderstandings inherent in a
diverse culture. But Jewish societies are closed societies, privy to only as
many forces as they allow into their communities. The freedom to follow a
personal vision of bliss is far, far narrower for anyone who wants to live as a
Jew. It is an unbreakable society in which mystery and rationality have been
held in near-equal balance for thousands of years. But it demands a near-total
subordination of a person’s free will to its many, many laws. It demands that
its people exist at the tolerance of larger societies, and if necessary, endure
all taunts, assaults, and murder at the larger society’s hands. To be a Jew is
to be the custodian of a long prestigious inheritance, but to do what it takes
to uphold that inheritance is more than any person should ever be asked to do
in this life.
And still, Judaism will remain.
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