The Dignity of Difference by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Dignity of Difference was written in 2002, but I only became aware of Rabbi Sacks about a year ago. Now I’m a regular reader of his weekly drash at his website, and I own a few other of his books. One of my professors highly recommended this book in particular, and the copy I got from the HUC library is personally inscribed “To Gene Boworitz – in admiration of your outstanding work – wishing you a New Year of blessing, healthy and fulfillment.” Dr. Eugene Borowitz is alive and well, thank God, (and still teaching at HUC) in New York, so I’m not sure why he went ahead and gave away this copy to the HUC library. Ah well, glad I got my hands on it, at any rate.

            The book was written mainly as a response to 9/11 and the problem of a “clash of civilizations.” Rabbi Sacks argues that, globally, the gap is growing between the haves and have-nots, that we do not properly accept and understand other cultures. These problems are what lead to fundamentalism and terror. These arguments have been made elsewhere, and seem to end up placing the blame for jihad terror attacks on us – and I don’t agree. Poverty does not cause terrorism, and Western pluralism surely surpasses anything in the Muslim world, anyway. When I read these premises in the first chapter, I actually put the book down because I thought it was going to be a boring rehash of leftist idealism. A rash of snow days combined with a lack of new reading material led me to pick it up again, and I’m very glad I did. Rabbi Sacks definitely does not do the usual lefty-liberal routine, once you get past the introduction.

I found that Rabbi Sacks includes an amazing variety of writers and thinkers. Not every author would use quotes from George Soros and Roger Scruton within just a few paragraphs of each other, and both to support the author’s point about free markets and tzedakah. Sacks does, and very smoothly. Sacks’ familiarity with an incredible number and variety of thinkers and writers - and his ability to incorporate them into his own arguments – is a major part of his appeal for me.

            I also enjoy when Sacks compares Greek/traditional philosophy to Jewish thought. This is something that Leon Kass frequently does in his commentary on Genesis, too. p. 51 “Against Plato and his followers, the Bible argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the growth of the moral imagination….” This is part of Sacks’ discussion on how universalism can only be understood or apprehended through particularism. Another noteworthy quote from this part of the discussion is this: “Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though its two daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, took much else from it, they did not adopt this: it is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind.” (52)  I thought this was a wonderfully succinct statement about a complicated idea.

            Rabbi Sacks discusses the value of particularity and diversity because he seems to think that we (his readers) aren’t quite tolerant enough of cultural differences. Not long after the above mentioned quote on Israelite particularist monotheism, Sacks describes how we might be if we were more tolerant: “What would faith be like? It would be like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places…it would be like being fluent in English, yet thrilled by the rhythms and resonances of an Italian sonnet one only partially understands…” (65) Except that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get much deeper than those differences, and the unfortunate reality is that one of the main religious differences between my culture and that of fundamentalist Islam is not about food or music preferences but over my right to exist. Tolerance has to work both ways and that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.

            But Rabbi Sacks himself is one of the most bi-partisan, pluralistic writers I’ve seen, and he walks the inclusive talk. He even seems to contradict himself across parts of the book. Here’s an example: In his chapter on “environmental sustainability” (yes, I dreaded getting through this one – but there was nary a mention of global warming in it!) he writes, “Most significant of all is the pressure on he environment by the growth of the human population…” and proceeds to quote Jared Diamond on the subject. So he buys into Jared Diamond on this theory of overpopulation. But earlier in the book, he seems to refute what I thought was a major premise of Jared Diamond’s main book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Sacks writes: ““One of the questions he [David Landes] raises, for example, is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe, not China…Landes answer’ is broadly this: that culture, not natural resources, climate or other material factors, makes the difference. Europe had what China did not: a Judeo-Christian ethic…” If I remember correctly, Diamond was of the opinion that culture didn’t play so much as a part as did the presence of a few certain microbes or the fecundity of the soil here versus there. There isn’t anything wrong in disagreeing with some things that an author writes and agreeing with others – but it is interesting to see it played out in so subtle a manner.

            In describing that “Judeo-Christian ethic” that played such a part in the rise of Western civilization, Rabbi Sacks addresses civics: “First is the biblical respect for property rights…The brief answer is that the Hebrew Bible is an extended critique of what we would today call big government. At one extreme is the biblical portrait of ancient Egypt, a nation which builds extraordinary buildings at the cost of turning human beings into slaves. At the opposite extreme we have the justly famous eighth chapter of I Samuel…Even constitutional monarchy, in other words, will involve a sacrifice of rights of property and person…

…Long before Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson, biblical Judaism is a theory of limited government…God, in the Hebrew Bible, seeks the free worship of free human beings, and two of the most powerful defences of freedom are private property and economic independence.”

            But before you put Rabbi Sacks on the invite list to your next Tea Party, you might wonder at this statement which comes in a different chapter on tzedakah: “Tzedakah is a concept for our time. The retreat, set in motion by Reagonomics and Thatcherism, from a welfare state, together with the deregulation of financial markets throughout the world, has led to increased and increasing inequalities both in developed countries and the developing world.” Rabbi Sacks certainly defies easy categorization.

            This reminds me of another author I wrote about recently – Lionel Trilling. I thought it intriguing how Sacks and Trilling both identified the Victorian Age as one of “confidence.” Sacks mentions the Victorians in a discussion about the rapid changes that our society has witnessed:  “The nineteenth century was also a time of immense change…Writers from Dickens to Disraeli spoke of child labour, poverty, the bleak urban landscape, and new forms of social division (Disraeli’s ‘two nations’_. Urban crime was so widespread that it was unsafe to walk city streets at night. Yet these problems, though they gave rise to social criticism and political activism, did not generate the kind of uncertainty we feel today…It was, in ways that seem remote to us now, an age of confidence.”

And here’s Michael Kimmage, on Trilling’s thesis: ““To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians.”

            Rabbi Sack’s insight into actual biblical analysis, and comparisons to Greek philosophy or other Western secular ideas, is always brilliant. I was disappointed that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get into more profound differences of the “clash of civilizations” than preferences for worship styles or opinions on birth control, but the diversity of various writers and thinkers that he includes is inspiring and makes for a very good read.

 

 

 

Wave Sensing of Complexity

By chance, I picked up a collection of scientific essays today collected as a tribute to Leopold Felsen, a physicist, electrical-engineer, and theorist involved in numerical modeling of electromagnetic waves and fields. The book was published on the occasion of his being bestowed with an honorary degree from the Technical University of Munich. As a Jew growing up in Germany in 1924, he claims that the degree has a special significance for him. (His acceptance speech is included as a preface to the collection.) He emigrated to the US in 1940 and eventually served in the US Navy from 1943-1946. Quite a remarkable story.

What makes the preface truly stand out are the poems included. From "Wave Sensing of Complexity" :

When waves meet with complexity,
The modelers feel perplexity.
The options one can choose abound,
But how can those that work be found?

Statistically irregular,
Or smoothly scatters specular?
A blend of both? If not, why not?
We ponder, and then chuck the lot.

The Conservative Turn

Thoughts on The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

-for reference - check out http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-illiberal-imagination

The book reviews that I’ve read on Michael Kimmage’s book, The Conservative Turn, have mostly focused on Kimmage’s premise itself: that Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, despite their different backgrounds, had similarities in their political journeys, and that both of them were fundamental (though neither one consciously) in the development of neoconservatism. That’s not really what I thought was most interesting about the book, and it wasn’t my initial reason for picking it up in the first place. I just wanted to learn more about Lionel Trilling.  Kimmage wrote about Trilling in very admiring terms, and I enjoyed that.

Trilling was an ex-Communist, and Kimmage describes in detail how both Trilling and Chambers each had their “Kronstadt” moment, when they saw that Stalinism, the Soviet Union, and Communism itself were all inextricably tied together by horrific violence, and suddenly and definitely turned away from the movement. Both Trilling and Chambers then, of course, subsequently wrote a great deal attacking the American left over its affinity or neutrality toward Communism.

            What is always striking to me is how sympathy for Communism is still treated as something benign, amusing, or even “interesting” by my classmates and professors. It is disquieting how prescient and relevant Trilling’s declarations against progressive leftism (whether that’s specifically how he identified it or not) are today. The quotes that Kimmage provides seemed directly relevant to my experience so far with the progressive leftism that is too often identifiable with liberal Jewish leadership – that is, Reform and Conservative clergy who use a very elastic definition of tikkun olam to encompass any current agenda of the Democratic party. In response to more than a few sermons or emails from the RAC that I’ve gotten over the past few years, exhorting us to raise the minimum wage or vote for universal health care coverage or “do the Jewish thing” and promote gay rights, I wish I’d been able to quote Trilling:

 •”…liberals serve no good end at all when they cease to look for truth and, in the name of ‘action…’ substitute wish-thinking and rationalization for the functions of the critical intellect.” (1937) (82)

 •“Trilling concentrated on the psychological roots of the Popular Front, eschewing any simple equation of progressivism with a longing for social justice: ‘the ‘social consciousness’ of the Thirties which flowered in Hemingway and Steinbeck, in Odets and Irwin Shaw, which millions found so right, proper and noble, did indeed have a kind of passion, and perhaps it had the virtue of being better than nothing. But how abstract and without fiber of resistance it was, how much too apt it was for the drawing-room, how essentially it was a pity which wonderfully served the needs of the pitier.’”

  Or in response to the endless classes I’ve had to taken on “learning styles” and educational theory:

• “if the Victorians too much disregarded Rousseau and Wordsworth and thought of children as adults manques, we today are perhaps too often tempted to think of adults as children manques.”

  Trilling seemed to identify with a liberalism that invited open, serious critique, in which the questions were posed without assuming the answers beforehand. He valued tradition, morals, manners (which he linked with morality), and evaluation of art and writing according to aesthetics and morality. Already he was worried that the liberalism of his time was embodying not the open-minded serious critique but rather an orthodox adherence to predetermined assumptions. This was making liberalism, once the dynamic and engaging intellectual front, into something stagnant and prone to blindness of various types.  I feel like I’ve seen this in liberal Jewish leaders who not only confuse their Jewish liberalism with political and cultural leftism, but also simply assume that all the principles of the Democratic Party/contemporary leftism are correct and obvious, without further consideration. This is not a helpful method of thinking – and it could lead to a real decline in many ways: in affiliation, relevancy, moral and intellectual engagement, etc.

 In a sentence reminiscent of the patter song from Patience – ‘If you want a receipt” - Trilling himself described his liberalism: ”you take the best ideas of [Jeremy]Bentham – I mean Bentham as he really is, not Bentham as most people represent him – and John Stuart Mill, and [John] Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and involve them with the temperament of the English romantic poets, and connect them with Montaigne…and much of Rousseau, and much of Stendhal, you will get some notion of the intellectual constellation to which I refer.” (186) I certainly haven’t read all of those guys. Nevertheless, Trilling and his work have been inspiring to me as a model of an “old-school liberalism.”

I favor Trilling’s approach instead when discussing contemporary issues of liberal Judaism (though maybe I’d leave out the T.S. Eliot): “Trilling ushered in conservative ideas into his essays and books with the aim of expanding the liberal imagination and widening the parameters of American intellectual culture…he wrote appreciatively about the (reactionary) politics of T.S. Eliot, about the moral vision of the Victorians, about the merit of hierarchy, and of stable ethical values.”

What if, instead of simply assuming that all Reform Jews somehow instinctively know that the moral thing is to be pro-choice and pro-gay (in every respect), we had serious discussions in which the pros and cons of each position were critically evaluated? What if opinions about being pro-life and against gay religious marriage were actually considered or allowed discussion in an open atmosphere?

  Trilling consistently resisted being identified with either the conservative movement as it was being formulated under Buckley et al or the official Republican party. I found it disappointing that Kimmage didn’t go into much detail of why this was so, other than Trilling was just so committed to his ideal of liberalism – though it seems Trilling allowed his definition of liberalism to fit many ideas labeled as “conservative” today. Perhaps it was also that Trilling saw that the solid identification with one party or another, or with one defined set or another, defied his true commitment, which was to liberalism.

I am personally intrigued by Trilling’s desire to remain flexible in his political and social affiliations. Orthodox Jews may have an easier time of identifying with contemporary cultural/political conservatism and being accepted by fellow Orthodox Jews for affiliation with the Republican Party. But I am committed to becoming a rabbi, and to the liberal Judaism that has developed uniquely in America. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Orthodox Judaism has all the easy answers or is problem-free, either. I think that there are plenty of opportunities in that lifestyle to fall into just the kind of unthinking adherence that defies Trilling’s liberalism. I certainly disagree with the mantra of “progressivism” that all change is progress, and good. But I also disagree that simply because something is new and different that it must not be good. I don’t think that the practices of liberal Judaism necessitate its being linked with the political left; at the same time, I think that orthodox Judaism might do well to acknowledge that it has changed much (and for the better, in this American environment) since an older style of Judaism that resisted secular studies, Zionism, or careers for women.

            So, perhaps like Trilling, I can maintain the freedom to maintain my flexibility, resisting blind acceptance of the doctrines spouted by either party or camp. This freedom can be invigorating and, maybe someday, even an ‘intellectual catalyst:’

 • “To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians, who had tasted Arnold’s despair without succumbing to it. For both Trilling and Chambers, despair was a powerful intellectual catalyst and not simply a mood to be indulged.” (18)

 

I think Rabbi Levi Olan, a longtime spiritual leader of the synagogue where I grew up in Dallas (although he was a good bit before my time) was an old-school, Trilling-style liberal. Here’s what he wrote in 1969:

 “In biblical times the Prophets were certain liberals. They called for a change in the social order; they denounced the rich and championed the poor. But they were also conservatives who bid the people to ‘remember when they came out of Egypt.’….It is not an either/or situation, either conservative or liberal. Both are essential in any healthy existence, whether personal or social…The clash between the liberal position and that of the conservative resounds noisily and at times without charity. It would appear at the outset that these positions can never be reconciled. In all probability they cannot. What is important is that religion needs the best of both if it is to be alive and vital for man. The conservative becomes the guardian of the great truths which the tradition has preserved – the accumulated experience of the race and a resource for wisdom and hope…The fact is that even the conservative changes, for not even he brings sacrificies as the Bible commands. The liberal gives the old a chance to live by clearing out the accretions which stop up the well of living water. His danger is that he may in the end totally forsake the well of his father and wander aimlessly after new water which he cannot discover…The liberal has not found an answer to the authority for his faith. The conservative is doing no better. He formally acknowledges the revelation of God but he does not really live by the word…Wisdom in this hour would dictate the recognition that there are virtues and weaknesses in both positions. What is needed most is a concerted and united effort against the secularism which threatens our very existence today.”

Rabbi Olan is also connected to Trilling (in my view) in that he consistently quoted from great literature – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Coleridge – in his sermons. Trilling was obviously committed to the idea that classics of literature help us see and appreciate the complex variety of life. Olan apparently agreed. I haven’t seen a single sermon of his in which he quotes Bob Dylan.

 And this is an interesting postscript that didn’t fit anywhere else:

•“Chambers does not write [in a 1957 National Review essay] about Islam as a political factor, except as it might alienate Arabs from the Soviet Union, which was ruling over millions of Muslims, suppressing their religious freedoms just as it suppressed those of Christians and Jews. Chambers wonders whether ‘those wretched Arabs heard, too, that in Soviet Siberia several million of their co-religionists exist in a misery not much different from their own?” p. 287