The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
view of the wide divergence of basic beliefs among Jews, the façade of unity that communal organizations present from time to time is utterly misleading. For example, there are basic differences about such issues as the saying of nondenominational prayers in public schools, the question of federal support for Church-related educational institutions, the morality of artificial birth-control methods, etc. The semblance of unity on these social questions is imposed by “interdenominational” councils within the Jewish community; these organizations were, as a rule, set up originally in order to combat anti-Semitism. In regard to the question of nondenominational prayers in public schools, Rabbi Shnaiurson, head of the Liubavich Hassidic dynasty, was more “liberal” than the “nondenominational” public-relations experts, who are frequently Jewish only in a marginal, ethnic sense. He based his position favoring prayer-assemblies in the school upon the ancient principle of the “Seven Noachide Commandments,” which makes the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being mandatory for people of all creeds.
An analysis of the inner dynamics of Jewish ethics does not reveal a monolithic philosophy of life. It is possible to resolve the tension between the Vision and the Way by choosing any one of many positions within the ethical-religious polarity. Tolerance of differences is a marked characteristic of rabbinic discussions—“these and these are the words of the Living God.”2 A broad consensus on any one issue may emerge at any one time, but we can hardly dignify any one synthesis as being the Jewish, or the “normative” one.
However, some sort of equilibrium between the Vision and the Way is inescapable; the moment the tension is broken altogether, and moral energy is drained into one of the two polarities, then the characteristic dynamics of Judaism cease to be operative. Thus, the portrayal of Orthodoxy as sheer dry legalism, or as unrestrained mysticism, would be a caricature. There is no law in Judaism, either in the relation of man to man or in the relation of man to God, that is not complemented by the surge of creative love, for man as well as for God. By the same token, there is no constructive and enduring love that is not restrained by the laws that emerge out of the structuring of society, and out of earlier crystallizations of Divine Word. Apart from the context of religious tradition, the moral tension is between empathy, or love, and an objective view of the good society; philosophically, the polarity is between the subjective quest of Utopia and the rational laws of right and wrong; socially, there must be tension at any one time between the existing pattern of the community and the Vision of Perfection. And truth is in the tension, or rather in the process whereby personal and social growth is maintained.
BEYOND IDEOLOGIES
In the perspective of Jewish ethics, we develop an immunity to ideologies. Soon after the peoples of Western culture stopped butchering one another on account of their different theologies, they started to use ideologies as fig leaves with which to conceal their collective aggressions. The term “ideology” implies an attempt to focus all the values of life upon one idea or ideal. Manifestly, that one ideal is elevated so high that all other human concerns appear to be inconsequential. The Absolute is transferred from metaphysics and religion to social life and politics; the fragmentary light of one ideal is substituted for the life of the All. This absolutization of politics is essentially a contemporary phenomenom. While liberalism and romantic nationalism competed for the loyalty of European men throughout the nineteenth century, it was only toward the end of that century that the competing ideologies became impassioned and all-embracing. In the twentieth century, this trend was continued with socialism turning into Bolshevism, nationalism into totalitarian fascism, or into nihilistic Nazism, and the ethics of self-realization into individualism, cynicism, or “Social Darwinism.”
For each, the goal was to “transvalue all values,” to restructure the whole of society in terms of a scale of values that is self-contained, hence, absolutely right. In the communist mentality, there is a solid logical structure that begins with a few axioms, explains all history, accounts for all deviations, and leads to the one party line. Its categories are part of a closed system of discourse that is impervious to the facts and arguments of the outside world. In the case of fascism and Nazism, the primitive values of “blood and soil,” power and glory, hierarchy and order, are foisted upon the natural feelings of ethnic kinship. The result is an attempt to imbue the technocratic Utopia of the engineer with the savage pathos of a primitive war of conquest. Modernistic science is placed at the service of an ethic that barely rises above the level of primitive times, when barbarian hordes burst out of the steppe to enslave or to exterminate a native population and to usurp its land. Social Darwinism, glorifying the free individual in his “struggle for existence,” is the secret ideology of most people in the democracies, though it is rarely espoused on public occasions.
Both communism and fascism arose out of the miasma of disillusionment and despair. Philosophy, or man’s search for truth, was to the communists, as to the fascists, an unreal self-delusion, because to the former there were only class-truths, and to the latter, there were only the myths of the “collective unconscious.” Similarly, religion, man’s quest for reality, holiness, and true values, was for the ideologists of both camps a panoply of propaganda, to fool the naive. The Way of Reason had turned into a shambles and the light of Religious Vision had failed. This was the sad experience of millions in the aftermath of the First World War. “God is dead,” Nietzsche announced. Spengler declared that the West was dying, and that only in the blind worship of force can the foundation be laid for the civilization of the future. To G. Sorel, the teacher of Mussolini, violence was the secret of creativity. Camus summed it all up when he spoke of the “cult of the absurd.” In our post-Christian world, Pilate’s question “What is truth?” is on the lips of millions.
Yet, the two ideologies contain a mock-image of the religious philosophy of the West. They substitute an immanent law of history for Providence, a predestination that operates with inexorable force, regardless of “good and evil,” in place of the free individual, and a Utopia in place of the “Kingdom of God” as the goal of all history. They assume that the course of history is driven by a transrational force, which can be sensed truly only by those who have been “converted,” or by those who were “chosen” for salvation. Between the “elect” and the “damned” there is an unbridgeable abyss. People are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They recognize only one satanic force, capitalism, or non-Aryanism, or individualism. This “monosatanism” is a caricature of the Judeo-Christian monotheism against which they rebel.
The communist-fascist ideologies may be considered as “heresies” in terms of the faith of Western man. The rebellion they incite is directed against the dignity of the individual, in both his historical facets, the Hellenic and the Hebraic. In the Hellenic world, the individual asserted himself as a philosopher, a man of reason, and, in the Hebraic world, man was given his charter of worth as the “image of God.” The dehumanization of man, which seems to be the inevitable by-product of the ideologies of the twentieth century, may be traced to the ongoing scientific revolution of our time. Yet, science in itself is neutral, and the humanity of man, his unique worth in the scheme of things, is basically a matter of faith. One aspect of that faith is philosophy, in its original and essential meaning, the quest of wisdom for its own sake. And the other aspect is the assertion of a sense of kinship between man, the Seeker, and God, the Creator.
Does one climb out of the abyss of nihilism by the ladder of reason or with the aid of religion? Both procedures are commonly followed as if they were independent of one another. Actually, there can be no vibrant humanism without the ardor of faith in the unique values of the human personality. Nor can a reassertion of faith be meaningful and relevant in our world today, if it does not accord validity to the rational, ethical, and esthetic ideals of man. We maintain that faith and reason are two phases of the rhythmic beat of life. For all meaning is in essence circular, the relation of a part to the whole and the whole to a part. The core-experience of religion is at once the search for and the assurance of meaning for the individual. It is therefore truth and trust blended together.
In our analysis, philosophy and religion are not antagonistic disciplines, but the two aspects of one endeavor. Religious experience is essentially paradoxical in that it is at one and the same time a feeling of possession