Above The Fray

In 1940, the German-born rabbi and scholar of Jewish liturgy Joseph Heinemann published a fascinating little pamphlet, entitled Torah and Social Order. Just twenty-five years old at the time, the young rabbi had been studying at the University of Manchester, and Torah and Social Order grew out of his work there, applying Torah thought to the great economic question of the first half of the twentieth century: Was socialism the answer?

Theopolitics

Heinemann, in a word, thought the answer was yes. Without embracing every last Marxist doctrine, he argued “that the capitalist system is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Torah.” Perhaps the Torah does not teach socialism per se, but as a program of social and economic organization, it was the “nearest approach… which is feasible in our times” to the values put forth by Judaism. From there it followed that “Today, therefore, the Torah leads us to join in the struggle for socialism.”

Heinemann’s views were hardly the last word on the matter. Sixty years later, the ex-Trotskyite, Irving Kristol, groused about what he called the “political stupidity of the Jews,” for their historic lack of enthusiasm for conservative politics. Norman Podhoretz, his fellow traveler on the socialist to neoconservative route, later puzzled at the same phenomenon, and wrote a book about it: Why Are Jews Liberals? 

The debate goes on today. Is the Torah liberal or conservative? How are Jews supposed to vote? You can hear it at any bar mitzvah reception, Friday night dinner, or—have mercy— from the pulpit. Judaism is a vast and varied tradition, so there is always fodder to be found for either side, and plenty of enthusiasm for flinging it. So it is a fun question to ask and, one hopes, a good opening teaser for a magazine article. But these questions also have some deep flaws, and in our increasingly frayed political climate, a potential for harm.

Communication Breakdown

Has life ever been this politicized? Over the past four years, political discussions, purity tests, and relentless opinion have become near inescapable online and in regular life. The recent presidential election has hardly settled things—and how could it? The next race has already begun.

Is this just the way things are now?

My mother-in-law has been a Chabad representative in her Southern Californian community for four decades, and she tells me she has never seen anything like it. Jews have always liked to disagree, but you don’t need to be a sociologist to see that something has changed. Their Shabbat table has always been open to political discussion, lively, divided, and sometimes rancorous. Somehow the guests managed to keep on talking, to stay in their seats, and to meet at shul together the next day. In the past five years or so, that has become impossible. She has since banned political talk from the table. 

A recent article from Reuters, published just before the election, documented the sad and often shocking ways that political disagreements have ripped so many families apart.

One Californian voter said that her brother had disowned her after she refused to support his preferred candidate. When their mother—who lived in the same California city as the brother—suffered a stroke and later died, her brother declined to tell her.

“I was excluded from everything that had to do with her death,” she recalled. “It was devastating.”

Another son declares, “You are not my mother,” when he learns of whom she has voted for, and then “cut her out of his life.” A daughter recalls getting into an argument with her mother when she defended the wrong candidate while on a drive someplace. “She stopped the car and told me not to disrespect her politics. And if I don’t want to respect her politics, I can get out of the car.”

Can this be healthy? Is it normal? Is it reasonable to let this, important as it surely is, destroy our primary relationships? 

There is something cultic about this subordination of familial and social bonds to political or ideological affiliations. This is not to accuse either of our major political parties of being cults—only to say that we ought to stop acting like they are. 

And when the dust and debris from the presidential election finally settles, we have a choice to make. Will we let this downward spiral carry on unspooling, just to meet again four years hence, a little more divided, a little more angry, a little more degraded? Or is there some way to turn back this gradual fraying of the social fabric, of friends, family and communal life—and to rise above it?

Dignity in Difference

We Hebrews, it is true, have always been a disputatious bunch. You know the old saw: Two Jews, three opinions. The Talmud, centuries of responsa literature, and our many internecine disputes—from antiquity, throughout the Middle Ages, and until the modern era— offer ample evidence of that. 

But the Talmud does more than just provide us with precedent for passionate disagreement. One well known passage, from the tractate of Bava Metzia, illustrates the extraordinary depth of conviction that Sages brought to the Study Hall. It concerns a dispute regarding whether an “Oven of Achnai,” a brick oven with layers of sand separating its parts, could become ritually impure. After failing to convince the Sages by rational means that he was right, and that the oven was pure, Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hyrcanus turned to supernatural methods to prove that he was right.

“If the halachah agrees with me,” he said, “let this carob tree prove it!’ Instantly, a nearby carob tree was ripped from the ground and flew a hundred cubits in the air. But halachah can’t be decided by a neat trick.

A stream of water reverses its course, then the walls of the study hall threaten to collapse, and finally a voice from Heaven declares that Rabbi Eliezer was right. Still, the Sages stand their ground: “The Torah is not in Heaven,” they say. Since Sinai, Torah law must be determined by mortal minds, using a simple legal principle—the majority rules. The oven was impure.

The first part of the story already has much to teach us in our present moment. We have two parties—one man against a majority—with both absolutely confident of their views. And yet, in some way, although there can only be one final halachah, there is merit on both sides: “These and these are the words of the Living G-d,” is how the Talmud puts its pluralistic epistemology elsewhere.

But the next stage in the confrontation between Rabbi Eliezer and the Sages is less well known.  

Adherence to traditional rabbinic authority and majority rule are bedrock principles of Torah law; the entire system of Jewish jurisprudence falls apart without them. Now, as brilliant and as well-argued as Rabbi Eliezer’s position was, his adamant refusal to accept the Sages’ ruling threatened to undermine both of those principles, and thus presented a serious problem. If such disagreements were left unresolved, the fear was there would be more, that the rift would only widen, and “strife would multiply in Israel.” So, having established their position on the firm principle on firm ground, the Sages had to move to enforce the integrity of Torah law.

It was said: On that day all objects which Rabbi Eliezer had declared clean were brought and burnt in fire. Then they took a vote and excommunicated him. 

Here the story takes a turn. Excommunication is a serious thing, perhaps the most severe penalty in the Talmudic Sages’ correctional arsenal. Think of it as an extreme form of cancellation, to borrow a modern term. At the same time, Rabbi Eliezer himself was one of the most respected scholars of his day. Who would have the temerity to inform him that he had been rendered a persona non grata?

Said they, “Who shall go and inform him?” “I will go,” answered Rabbi Akiva, “lest an unsuitable person go and inform him, and thus destroy the whole world.” What did Rabbi Akiva do? He donned black garments, wrapped himself in black and sat at a distance of four cubits from him. 

“Akiva,” said Rabbi Eliezer to him, “what has particularly happened today?” “Master,” he replied, “it appears to me that thy companions hold aloof from thee.” Thereupon he too rent his garments, put off his shoes, removed [his seat] and sat on the earth, whilst tears streamed from his eyes. 

Not only Rabbi Akiva; the excommunication of a Sage was a disruption of the natural order, and now it was as though the world itself was crying along with him. 

The world was then smitten: There was blight in a third of the olive crop, a third of the wheat, and a third of the barley crop. Some say even the dough in women’s hands swelled up.

A tanna taught: Great was the calamity that befell that day, for everything at which Rabbi Eliezer cast his eyes was burned up. 

The excommunication was justified, but it came at a cost all the same.

Discussions of this kind sometimes try to float a vague kind of kumbaya ecumenism as a way of getting past our impasse: Every politician is just trying his or her best, and isn’t Brexit wonderful, and so is the Green New Deal, and so is fracking—or just fill in the blank—and so why can’t we all just get along? No. Not everybody has to agree, but disagreeing with a loved one doesn’t mean you need to love them any less. Certainly the Sages thought Rabbi Eliezer was wrong, but what worried them was the damage and discord that his intransigence threatened to cause, and it was for that reason that they banned him from the community. Nor did Rabbi Akiva have much doubt that he deserved to be ostracized. So where’s the unifying message there? 

Very simply: Despite all that, Rabbi Akiva and the other Sages revered the man. None of that took away the profound respect he felt for him, or the pain of losing him as a colleague. To my mind, the hard line that the Sages adopted towards Rabbi Eliezer is precisely what makes the honor and dignity they still accorded him so remarkable. 

Playing the Ball

Consider, for a moment, the mental hop, skip, and jump one has to make in order to unfriend someone for a voting decision. We tell ourselves that, (1) the politician with a bad policy preference or some bad character trait is a bad person, (2) to vote for someone—no matter the motive—is to embrace the candidate him or herself, so that (3) it only follows that the voter who chooses the candidate is as bad as he or she is. 

This is a muddled way of thinking about the world, to say the least. It presupposes a terribly reductive account of the process of ballot-casting, collapsing a decision into an opinion, into a worldview, into a statement of character. Collapse, collapse, collapse. The result is barely two-dimensional—a caricature, not a person. 

But people are complicated. The truth is that we contain multitudes: We can like someone for one reason, or dislike them altogether, and still recognize the good he or she can achieve. Each of us identifies a different set of interests, ranks them, and attaches varying weights to each. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. I humbly submit that there are plenty of regular folk walking around while chewing gum and holding on to all kinds of contradictions and dissonances. There’s nothing remarkable about that. It’s we who forget this fact who are the fools. 

Politics as Identity 

Conflating opinion with identity is bad enough when we do it to other people, but the real tragedy is when we do it to ourselves. 

The political scientist Lilliana Mason tells of an insight that dawned on her while researching her book on polarization in the U.S., Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. People often say the electorate has been getting more polarized, but the hard evidence for that isn’t all there: Traditionally, academics use the term “political polarization” to describe people “disagreeing with each other more about policy.” And, although the tenor of political discourse in the country was quite evidently getting worse, she found that people are not actually more divided on the issues than they used to be. The real trend was a rise in what’s termed “affective polarization:” People dislike members of opposing political parties more, and are increasingly uncivil, angry, and distrustful of them—without actually being all that more engaged in actual political objectives. 

As it turns out, many partisans aren’t actually all that interested in policy. Study after study has shown that people’s opinion of a specific policy or action can be heavily influenced simply by describing it as either Republican or Democrat—the objective details aren’t really the issue. It struck Mason, then, that political partisanship can really be understood as any other tribe, or group identity.

This phenomenon should not be confused with the notion of identity politics. In a sense it is its reverse: Rather than advancing the interests of a particular identity group by political means, one’s political grouping itself turns into its own identity. Being a conservative, or a Democrat, is not just a disposition, or a voting record—it is who I am. Little wonder this thinking ends up making us more emotionally invested in politics: when someone disagrees with my position, they are attacking me.

Treating politics as a social identity can kick off a vicious cycle. The stronger this impulse, the more likely we are to surround ourselves with members of our political in-group, and to avoid others outside, which of course only leads to more of the same. The pressures of online life, constantly exposing us to other people’s political opinions, while prompting us into developing our own political personae, only accelerates this process. 

The way to counter this trend, says Mason, is by strengthening those areas of identity that cut across party lines. I might generally vote one way, but if some of my friends, work colleagues, bowling lane buddies, or fellow shul-goers don’t, then my political identity is unlikely to figure as prominently in how I think of myself; it’s just one facet of who I am. 

And so, it comes down to a matter of identity. Who are we? If I am defined by my political positions, then so is everything else I do. Politics fills the airwaves, and then leaches into every area of life, onto the street, your front lawn, at the dinner table. Every sporting event, every film, every social and cultural institution is pressed into taking a political stance, one way or the other. Wearing a mask becomes a political statement, as does the car you drive, and the clothes you wear. If unchecked, it seeps into schools, friendships, families, and your community. The end result is a hollowed out religious and socio-cultural scene, a landscape turned into a battlefield for someone else’s fight, made desolate, and impoverished.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Room to Breathe

Some say that the notion that certain areas of our lives can be kept apolitical is only ever illusory. The personal is political, they declare. But the two words are not coterminous. While it is of course true that politics and power relationships do impinge on our personal lives, too often this slogan is used as though politics is all there is to the person. A Pew Research poll from a few years ago found that nearly 80% of Trump and Biden supporters said they had few or no friends who supported the other candidate. Well, if opinions and voting records really are the measure of man, then choosing friends based on whether their favorite color is red or blue does have a perverse logic to it. If you try to reduce the personal to the political, eventually there will be no person left at all. No more friends, only allies; not a spouse, but a strategic partner; every relationship boiled down to transactional ties with other right-thinking citizens. 

This is a totalizing, near totalitarian approach to politics, and it must be resisted. It’s time to burst out of this suffocating mindset and let a little air into the room. We don’t have to let politics subordinate every domain of life, or to let it colonize our own values and sense of the world, so that we end up thinking like the rest of the party does, loving what it loves, and hating what it hates. Once we do, we let the same toxic divisions plaguing Washington and elsewhere into our lives and our communities. 

With a firm sense of ourselves and a value system independent of the news or electoral cycle, there is no vacuum for politics to rush into. At least one way to turn back this tide, then, is to have an answer to the question of identity. As Jews, we already have one. 

This is why that question asked at the beginning—the question of how Judaism intersects with politics—is so important. One answer to the question comes to us by way of a story once told by the Rebbe about his father-in-law and predecessor:

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn was once traveling on a train to St. Petersburg, with some noblemen, clergy, and a group of Chasidim, all in the same car. In time, they fell to arguing about some of the ideologies swirling about in those turbulent years of the early twentieth century: socialism, communism, capitalism, pacifism, fascism, and so on. In an attempt to examine the matter from a Jewish perspective, each individual tried presenting various proofs from the Torah pointing to the virtues of a particular approach to government.

When they reached an impasse, the Chasidim asked the Rebbe—who had hitherto kept his silence—for his opinion. The Rebbe responded:

“You are all correct. The Torah is the source of all good in Creation. The positive elements within each of these systems are derived from Torah; their failings stem from the man-made additions to the Torah values.”

This story reveals the flaw in our starting premise. Of course, Judaism is neither liberal, nor progressive, nor conservative. It is Judaism. It precedes all of these categories, cuts through them, and floats above them. The wisdom of an eternal Torah, given by an infinite G-d, and articulated by 3,000 years of organic tradition can never be contained by any man-made ideology or party platform. 

This does not mean that the positions of traditional Judaism, those espoused by the Torah, will never coincide with a particular political position. Nor does it mean that we are supposed to remain detached from all temporal matters and from politics of the day. It only means that we can’t let ourselves be defined by them. 

At Chanukah gatherings, the Rebbe would frequently discuss the symbolism of oil, in light of the central role in the story of the holiday. On more than occasion, he pointed to two contrary attributes of oil. Oil has a tendency to permeate other substances—even from a halachic standpoint, fatty foods are more readily absorbed—but it will also invariably rise above any liquid it has been mixed into. The same is true of the Torah, which is often compared to oil in Midrashic and Chasidic literature: The Torah outlook implicates every area of life, infusing it with meaning, and elevating it with divine purpose. And at the same time, it rises and raises us above it all.

We already have an identity, one that is thick with meaning, rich in color, and suffused with purpose. It is nourished by deep wellsprings of faith, a profound intellectual history, and transcendent values. But our Jewish identity needs some breathing space, and some time to grow, if it is going to flourish. 

Maybe that means expending some intellectual energy on a page of Talmud, or at a Tanya class, rather than on Twitter, or the latest tortuous twist in some endless political scandal coming out of Ukraine. Certainly, it means not viewing a fellow student, community member, Hebrew School parent, or synagogue seat-mate as a benighted political foe—but as a fellow Jew.

To forsake any of this for the sake of political horse-racing, or for some ephemeral firefight in the culture wars, would be a tragedy beyond words. We cannot let any of this determine who we are, the people we love, the shul we pray in. If it means banning politics from the Friday night table, or from the shul—so that instead we can sing Shabbat melodies, or share words of Torah and inspiration—then so be it. There is so much more that unites us, and we already have so much else to argue about.

This article appeared in the Lubavitch International Winter 2021 Magazine. To subscribe and gain access to previous magazines – click here.