Judeophobia

Heidi values fairness above all else, in particular above group loyalty. Since she was raised as a Jew, the Jews are the group to which she must not be loyal.

Heidi’s inability to be indifferent about the Jews undermines the fairness to which she aspires. If Heidi were to chance upon the Republic of Freedonia, a democratic country in a bad neighborhood that had policies identical to those of Israel, she’d have nothing but admiration for the citizens of that plucky little country; she wouldn’t be writing letters to the Times denouncing them. If some New Jersey township were hunting for ways to keep pointy-eared American Vulcans with quaint traditions from flooding into their neighborhood and acting like Vulcans, Heidi would be leading demonstrations against the racists. Pointy earlocks, not so much.

More generally, Heidi’s over-enthusiastic pursuit of equality is bound to result in greater inequality. Enthusiasts are drawn to simple solutions and the simplest method for quickly diminishing inequality is to punish winners and reward losers. But, Heidi’s protestations notwithstanding, not every group that fails is virtuous and not every group that succeeds is exploitative. Love for the underdog is, more often than not, love for the least cooperative and most aggressive and dysfunctional cultures.

Apart from undermining the very fairness Heidi wishes to advance, associating failure with virtue and rewarding it is a sure recipe for encouraging it. Rewarding failure drives a race to the bottom in which all sorts of groups prefer to parade real or imagined victimhood than to actually succeed.

But all this is rather benign stuff compared to Amber’s world. If Heidi is self-conscious about her Judaism and tries a bit too hard to demonstrate her neutrality, Amber is – sorry but there’s no more elegant way to say this – a flaming Judeophobe. Amber lives in a Manichean political universe in which individuals are irrevocably assigned either to the Sons of Light or to the Sons of Darkness according to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, nationality and so on. There are, of course, disagreements about the pecking order regarding individuals belonging to a favored sexual identity but disfavored nationality, or vice-versa. But whatever the fine details of your preferred victimhood hierarchy, one thing must remain sacred if you wish to remain a member in good standing in Amber’s world: by the miracle of some nebulous doctrine called “intersectionality”, you must hate Israel too.

If we hadn’t grown accustomed by now to this bizarre state of affairs, it would strike us as deeply mysterious. Why does Amber, a champion of aggressive sexual ambiguity in all its permutations, identify with gay-lynching Muslims while accusing gay-friendly Israel of pink-washing? Why does Amber, a champion of the weak and downtrodden, identify with a league of large Islamic nation-states that wish to destroy one small Jewish nation-state?

(If you’re thinking that the answer is that Israel is somehow uniquely evil by the usual standards by which countries are judged, please go away and don’t come back. You’re not a serious person and I won’t argue with you.)

We can only begin to entertain the mystery of Amber’s Jew phobia in the context of a broader question. Why have so many different people despised the Jews for so long? As Paul Berman notes, in the Middle Ages, religious Christians hated Jews for rejecting Christianity and in the 19^th century secularized Christians hated Jews for engendering Christianity. When racism was acceptable, the Jews were despised as an inferior race and when racism became disreputable, the Jews were despised for being racist. During the heyday of nation-states, the Jews were hated for persisting as minorities in other nations’ states and in the incipient post-nation-state era, Jews are hated for having their own nation-state.

It might be that the Jews are despicable for all these different reasons, but I think there’s a more parsimonious explanation. In a word, the Jews are Messiah-killers. But not that Messiah.

Think about the vibe the world gets from Shimen – and from Israel. It goes something like this: We Jews have our ways. We eat differently, dress differently, pray differently. We’re a tribe with our own hierarchies and we look out for each other. In short, we have our own moral system, including restraints and loyalties. We hold you in contempt for murdering us or, in the best case, remaining indifferent to our murder, but we’re prepared to live and let live. We won’t treat you like family, but we’ll be fair if you’ll be fair. And we’ll live this way for a good long time until Mashiach comes.

Shimen is making a claim: we can live according to our own distinct moral rules and nevertheless be fair with you.

Almost nobody wants to hear that claim. Not those Christians who wish to bring salvation now through universal acceptance of Christ. Not Muslims who wish to bring salvation now through the restoration of the Caliphate. Not racists who wish to bring salvation now by eliminating inferior races. Not enlightened philosophers who wish to bring salvation now through the triumph of reason over religion. Not post-nationalists who wish to bring salvation now through world government. Not Heidis who wish to bring salvation now through freedom from the persistent demands of their former communities. Not Ambers who wish to bring salvation now through liberation from the responsibility of growing up and maintaining civilization.

They all despise Shimen for stubbornly standing in the way of salvation. They all share an interest in denying the very possibility of reconciling particularist traditions and loyalties with fairness to others. The religious and racial supremacists hate Shimen for clinging to his own traditions and loyalties – and for demonstrating that it is possible to do so while being a tolerant human being. For the enlightened ones, the Heidis and the Ambers, who insist that fairness can only be achieved by abandoning particularist commitments, the opposite holds: they can abide, or at least patronize, Muslim supremacists precisely because they don’t presume to be fair; Muslims are playing to win and they say so. But Shimen – and Israel – reject the very foundation of the enlightened worldview: they arrogantly presume to be fair while simultaneously maintaining their own traditions and loyalties. To the enlightened ones, this is an unforgivable heresy.

The impatient can’t maintain their footing for long on the narrow path that runs between the abyss of fire-breathing particularism and the abyss of starry-eyed universalism. And when they slip off, as they must, they can’t resist pulling at the coattails of the Shimens who stick stubbornly to the path – the path that turns and winds and slowly ascends.

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This is the final post in Part 1 of four projected parts. The next part will shift from the substantive differences between Shimen and Heidi’s moral systems to the methodological differences. We’ll consider the procedures they each use to determine what is right and what is wrong and the platforms they each use to undertake collective action. In short, how does halacha work and what is Heidi’s alternative.

Tradition, Tradition

In the first part of this series, we considered how Shimen lives his life – what he considers right and wrong, obligatory and prohibited – and how Heidi’s understanding of right and wrong differs from that of Shimen. In this part of the series, we’ll consider the procedures through which Shimen determines what is right and wrong.

What does Shimen learn from books and what does he learn from actual practice? When does he decide on his own what needs to be done and when does he consult authorities? When does he follow his instincts and when does he use reason? How does he reconcile his religious commitments and his political commitments? In this post, I’ll address these issues as they appear to Shimen, without yet trying to philosophize much about what is really going on under the surface.

Shimen is committed to the traditions of his family and community. If he ever checks the written codes of Jewish law or consults with rabbinic authorities regarding some course of action, he does so only to ascertain the tradition as it is practiced, not to amend it or bypass it. For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to (possibly semi-lapsed) Gerrer chassidim, extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it gets in Shimen’s calculus.

Since every actual set of circumstances is unique, it is often hard to pinpoint a well-defined course of action prescribed by tradition. Each delicate social situation, each complicated financial transaction, each inadvertent mixture of permitted and forbidden foods, each ad hoc action on Shabbat, requires a judgment, often in the spur of the moment. In situations that call mainly for common sense and decency, Shimen’s first instinct is to conjure what his bubbe (grandma) would do. In situations that call for more technical knowledge of halacha, he’d reason through the alternative arguments and then conjure his zeyde (grandpa).

Sometimes matters require consultation. Shimen knows where to look in the books. For most matters, he’d consult the most widely accepted recent codes, the Aruch Hashulchan and the Mishnah Berurah. (Despite his suspicion of Litvish intellectual types, he prefers the Aruch Hashulchan’s dry and detached style of ruling to the Mishnah Berurah’s cautious piety.) But what Shimen finds in the books is secondary to what he finds when he looks to his left and to his right in the shtiebel. When the Mishnah Berurah writes, as he often does, that “the common practice is so-and-so but this is wrong”, Shimen reads that as “do so-and-so”.

Sometimes Shimen will seek expert guidance. If he needs to make a particularly important personal decision or needs to resolve a dispute with someone else, he’ll consult someone he trusts, usually a wise rabbi. But the truth is that in such cases, he’s not so much looking for a halachic decision as for good advice, a fair compromise or a bit of reassurance. He will also be interested in what the rabbis he respects have to say on matters of communal policy.

The problem is that the rabbis he respects were almost all murdered. There are but a few rabbis among the survivors whom Shimen regards as worthy of being consulted. He considers most American rabbis worse than useless. Their knowledge is from books, not from a living tradition; they are naïve about the world and more immersed in shallow American culture than they realize; their opinions are either too lenient because they are acculturated or too stringent because they are insecure. In short, they are representative of American Judaism, which for Shimen is nothing but a vulgar and superficial shadow of the authentic Yiddishkeit that he recalls with so much love and so much pain.

The truth is that Shimen’s definition of tradition is not strictly bound by what the books say or what the rabbis say or even what his friends do, but rather by what he regards as the common sense of people deeply immersed in the traditional way of life. Shimen often mentions his friends in the Lodz ghetto who died of starvation because they would not eat non-kosher food and there is no doubt that he too would not eat non-kosher food even if his life depended on it. At the same time, Shimen would eat in the homes of those less observant than he is and drink wine poured for him by Jews who are not identifiably observant, in both cases without contemplating asking embarrassing questions. Shimen doesn’t wear the chassidic clothing he wore before the War; under the circumstances, it would simply feel inauthentic, as if he were pretending that the world of Polish chassidus had not been utterly destroyed. Shimen is more comfortable in the company of men and most of the public events he attends are gender-segregated; yet he finds the stringent customs regarding separation of the sexes that have taken hold among Gerrer chassidim as fair game for mockery. More generally, Shimen, like all his friends in the shtiebel, doesn’t have a need to signal his loyalty to the Jews through extravagant piety; he paid his dues up front. If I might indulge in some trifles, Shimen has no patience for baalei kriah for whom the Torah reading is a tedious exercise in hyper-enunciation. If Shimen only had grandchildren, he’d undoubtedly kiss them in shul and God have mercy on the American Litvak who’d point out to him that the Shulchan Aruch forbids this.

Shimen has no interest in justifying his stringencies or his leniencies or in convincing others to accept them. He’s completely comfortable in his own skin. He has no interest in reforming Judaism. In fact, since for him Judaism is defined by tradition, the very idea of “fixing” it is inherently incoherent to him.

In the coming chapters, we’ll consider how halacha plays out in a world of Shimens. How does the definition of tradition converge in a Keynesian beauty contest in which each person looks to the others to determine what the tradition is? If each person uses their common sense to chip at the margins the way Shimen does, will halacha remain stable? How much power do rabbis really have in Shimen’s world? How does halacha survive in the absence of legislation and enforcement?

Before we dive into these questions, we’ll consider an alternative model for determining right and wrong that, unlike halacha, does depend on legislation and enforcement – Heidi’s world.

Heidi Respects Experts

Since Heidi disagrees with Shimen regarding the substance of morality, it is no surprise that she also disagrees with him about the basis on which ethical and public policy questions should be decided, who should be making such decisions, and how they should be enforced.

First of all, Heidi rejects Shimen’s obedience to tradition when modernity presents better solutions to problems solved sub-optimally by tradition. Policy is best left to experts who master the latest research on the matters at hand. If we wish to avoid harmful foods, the modern study of nutrition offers much more efficient ways of doing so than the rules given in an ancient Torah. If we wish to regulate family life (and it isn’t clear to Heidi that we should), psychologists and sex therapists can tell us how to best realize the human capacity for love and sexual fulfillment. If we wish to protect workers’ rights, arcane Sabbath laws can’t hold a candle to the knowledge amassed by labor lawyers, social workers and economists about the most efficient means to prevent human exploitation. One can multiply such examples by the number of laws in the Shulchan Aruch. The principle is the same each time: reason, not tradition, is the key to a flourishing society.

To be sure, Shimen does leave a role for experts – specifically, rabbis – in resolving certain personal and social dilemmas according to the letter and spirit of halacha. This is small solace to Heidi: these rabbis may know halacha, but what do they know about modern science, about history, about psychology and sociology? What tools do they have at their disposal that might help them respond sensibly and sensitively to those with serious personal problems and what relevant knowledge do they have that would permit them to shape public policy in any reasonably effective way? As far as Heidi can tell, the vast majority of rabbis are both deficient in the relevant bodies of knowledge and so socially inexperienced and naïve that they can be easily manipulated by hangers-on and sycophants with agendas that are transparent to everyone but the rabbis themselves.

Reasoning by experts is, as Heidi sees it, to be preferred not only to tradition but to the half-baked intuitions of non-experts. Shimen, on the other hand, readily agrees that his determination of what is right is shaped by the moral intuitions of those committed to Jewish tradition. But for Heidi, if there’s any worse guide to the healthy functioning of society than tradition, it surely must be intuition. As the psychologist Daniel Kahaneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated in a long series of experiments, intuition is hopelessly sub-optimal for making decisions about anything, let alone moral questions. For example, our intuitive preferences between competing lotteries don’t maximize expected winnings and actually depend, quite absurdly, on how the choices are framed and other irrelevancies. In fact, our errors are systematic – we find patterns in randomness, we give more weight to the most salient evidence than to the most relevant evidence, we cling to our prior beliefs even in the face of strong contrary evidence and so on. Such biases were presumably useful in the early days of human development, when snap decisions, even if only crude ones, were better than nothing. But, Heidi argues, many of the problems we face in modern societies can be better solved using the tools of logic and probability than relying on crude intuitions.

In fact, many of our cognitive biases bear directly on moral decisions: we make snap judgments about people based on largely irrelevant physical characteristics, we ascribe negative personality traits to people who don’t share our opinions (even when we know that they were assigned that opinion as part of a debating exercise), we ascribe our own successes to skill and our failures to luck, we judge out-group members harshly even when the definition of our group is random, such as fans of some sports teams or members of a summer camp color-war team. (In some cases, this is justified: Yankee fans are genuinely insufferable.) Heidi is convinced that if, instead of following their misleading intuitions about such matters, Shimen and Jews like him would take a deep breath and reason about their loyalties, they would surely treat outsiders more fairly.

Heidi’s preference is for the decisions that drive public policy to be made by the best and the brightest rather than by tradition and intuition. But she differs from Shimen on an even more fundamental point. Who shall be responsible for implementing the policies determined by experts to be best? It looks to Heidi as if in Shimen’s world there is no institution at all that assumes this responsibility. No central body legislates, resolves disagreements regarding proper practice or enforces the law.

In the very first recorded halachic dispute 2100 years ago, five consecutive generations of rabbis failed to agree on the procedure for bringing certain sacrifices on festivals.  From that point on, the entire corpus of halachic literature is, as every novice student of halacha knows, an unending series of disputes. What is the proper blessing before eating chocolate? What time should one light Chanukah candles? Should synagogue dues be determined by family size or income? Can cooked food be put on a hot plate on Shabbat? What is the minimum age for a rabbinic judge? Is a brain-dead person with a beating heart considered dead? Does halacha recognize intellectual property rights? Ask a rabbi any of these questions and thousands more like them and the inevitable answer will be “it’s a machlokes”, that is, a matter of rabbinic dispute. This is not (only) because rabbis are particularly argumentative, but rather because halacha lacks a mechanism for resolving disputes, at least for the past 2000 or so years. There is no central body for legislating halacha or for enforcing it.

To Heidi, all this is a sign of a lack of seriousness. Heidi prefers to divide social norms into two types: those that are legislated and enforced and those that are simply not obligatory. But, it seems to her, all social norms in Shimen’s world fail to fit into either category. They are all neither legislated nor enforced and yet somehow regarded as obligatory.

Heidi regards this as a double failure. First, as we saw in previous posts, halacha regards as obligatory constraints and duties in areas that should, in Heidi’s view, be left to personal discretion. Second, and more significantly, halacha fails to adequately address issues that are, for Heidi, essential to the functioning of society.

Let’s stipulate that there are many issues, like criminal law, that Shimen concedes are beyond the capacity of current halacha to deal with. In this regard, halacha is self-evidently not self-contained and takes for granted the presence of an exogenous power that deals with matters beyond its scope. This isn’t what bothers Heidi. Rather, what bothers her is the attitude of Shimen and friends who wish to handle at the communal level certain issues that Heidi believes must be addressed by the state.

Compare, for example, how the problem of poverty is addressed by individual and community charity, on the one hand, and the state welfare system, on the other hand. Halacha requires individuals to set aside 10% of their income for charity but doesn’t specify to whom it should be given. What guarantee is there that all poor people will receive sufficient charity? What grounds are there for supposing that everyone will meet their obligations in the absence of any sanctions? Who will take care of those who belong to poor communities or to no community at all? For Heidi, these are serious defects that can be remedied by having the state redistribute wealth by collecting taxes at the threat of imprisonment and doling out entitlements such as welfare, free health care and unemployment benefits. The state can further advance the cause of social justice through regulation, including rent control, anti-discrimination laws and labor laws, all favored by Heidi as means through which the powerful and wealthy are prevented from exploiting the weak and poor.

Heidi is convinced that it is an ethical failing of Shimen and his friends that their moral world ends at the boundaries of their narrow community. It is a mystery to her that after all the suffering they have seen, they remain almost entirely indifferent to the astonishing ability of the welfare state, guided by the best and brightest experts in the social sciences, to engineer a more perfect society.

In the following posts, we’ll consider whether Heidi’s claims about how Shimen’s community operates are factually correct (spoiler: mostly yes) and whether her optimistic view of the ability of experts and bureaucrats to engineer a more perfect society holds water (take a guess).

The Wooden, Blue, Big Box

Let’s separate Heidi’s critique of the way halacha works into factual and evaluative claims. The factual claims regard differences between halacha and modern legal systems. Unlike legal systems, halacha is deeply rooted in entrenched traditions and lacks a mechanism for legislating changes, it relies on the intuitions of ordinary practitioners of halacha and it lacks systematic means of enforcement. As a first approximation, Heidi’s factual claims about halacha are indisputable.

Now Heidi’s evaluative claims. Since halacha fails to overcome old traditions, it becomes stale and outdated. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of a mechanism for legislation, which prevents responsiveness even to acute need for reform. Furthermore, in the absence of legislation, halacha remains poorly defined, lacking both precision and consensus. Since it relies on, often flawed, intuitions, it is vulnerable to systemic bias. In fact, since Shimen’s intuition is rooted in what his neighbors do and theirs is rooted in what he does, the outcome is bound to be unstable and variable from place to place. Finally, since halacha is unenforced, it is bound to fray at the margins and to fail to achieve even its own goals.

Interestingly, even knowing nothing about halacha’s successes and failures, we can prove that Heidi’s evaluative claims do not follow analytically from the factual claims. That’s because there is a phenomenon unrelated to halacha that satisfies every one of Heidi’s factual claims about halacha and yet clearly does not suffer from any of the failures predicted by the evaluative claims. I’m talking about language.

Like halacha, any given language is deeply rooted in entrenched practices and lacks a mechanism for legislation. (Yes, some especially enthusiastic countries have National Academies for regulating the local tongue; they’re about as effective as cat-herders.) Like halacha, every language relies on the linguistic intuitions of the masses of speakers of the language and lacks a systematic means of enforcement.

And yet, languages work just fine. They don’t become stale or outdated. Even without the oversight of august academies, they adapt perfectly well to the needs of speakers and writers. Nameless new phenomena magically get names, like googling or crowdsourcing, both of which you can use to generate a list of many more neologisms. The meanings of many words gradually change over time. Some viewers of TV reruns are startled by the stone-age Flintstones having a gay old time, which just proves they’re not woke. In fact, old words, like well and so, are re-purposed to serve pragmatic roles rather than semantic ones. (Well, maybe that point is a bit arcane, so… let’s move on.) Anyway, if you believe that language is static, try your hand at the Canterbury Tales, allegedly written in English.

All those changes are brought about without any visible hand guiding the development of language. We might say that the development of language is the result of human action, but not of human design. Moreover, the humans doing these actions are just regular people speaking and writing intuitively, not fancy experts who’ve researched the rules.

What is remarkable is how competent we are at using our native languages; we know intuitively much more than we realize we know. To appreciate this point, please look right over there at that wooden, blue, big box. Whoa, that sounded weird. You know why? Because everybody knows that it should be “big, blue, wooden box”. The order has to be size, color, material. The beautiful thing about that is that everybody knows it but almost nobody knows that they know it. Intuition works.

Finally, the rules of language aren’t enforced by the state or by any other duly constituted body that can fine or imprison us for breaking the rules. Such enforcement would be something up with which neither you nor me would put. Nevertheless, most people choose to follow the rules well enough to make themselves understood.

In short, language suffers from all of the “flaws” Heidi attributes to halacha – a certain stodginess, vulnerability to the whims of the great unwashed, and the lack of a parliament and a police force – but it still works fine. Note carefully, though, that this just means that these flaws don’t guarantee failure, as Heidi seems to think. It doesn’t mean that they guarantee success.

In fact, as we’ll see in the next post, halacha is different than language in a number of important respects. First of all, what it means for language to work is different than what it means for halacha to work. Furthermore, halacha is codified, studied, adjudicated and socially enforced, all with considerably greater frequency than is the case with language. We’ll see that these differences, as well as the parallels between halacha and language considered above, contribute to halacha’s viability.