For 2,000 years we were like dreamers. What now?

Moving from dream to vision

The focus of PostKahanism is learning from the mistakes of Kahanism. Because the ideals of Kahanism were far and away the best thing about it, and because Kahanism in practice was such an omnishambles, Baruch’s writing focuses quite properly on the practical side. However, that doesn’t mean the ideological side is good to go. Baruch has been kind enough to let me write some guest posts about filling in the details of a practical Jewish messianism.

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The Jewish faith, as originally established, was only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state

Kant שר’’י

You have been conditioned to ignore these kinds of observations on the grounds that they are ‘anti-semitic’, but sometimes you need a goy to point out what’s right under your nose. Canonical Jewish thinkers held incompatible views about the ‘fundamentals’ of ‘religion’, such as ‘what is God?’ or how providence works and yet all remained indisputably Jewish. Equally, it is obvious that if any of them had equivocated about, let alone opposed, the ingathering of the exiles, the reconstitution of the Sanhedrin, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the establishment of a Davidic monarchy, or the Third Temple, they would have placed themselves outside the club. It is not even possible to say the obligatory daily prayers without repeatedly affirming these principles. The simple act of saying these words links you to hundreds of generations of Jews who have done the same, and divides you from the nations of the world which do not share these dreams. By contrast, if you take a course on ‘Jewish ethics’, ‘Jewish spirituality’, ‘Jewish mysticism’ or Jewish anything-else and dig a little, you will quickly find that most of the content goes back barely a few hundred years, and all of it has close parallels, and more often than not a direct source, in one or another gentile culture. 

So far, so obvious. But even those of us who do not squirm at the essentially political nature of Judaism are loath to pursue its implications. Here is the most critical: to the extent that Judaism is political, Judaism is a dream.  Out of the political concepts of Judaism, precisely zero exist today or have existed in two thousand years. Indeed, Judaism is not just a dream but a vague, impressionistic dream, short of detail, and with much of what detail there is having a surreal, characteristically dreamlike quality.

Search as long as you like, you will not find anywhere in our vast corpus of holy texts anything even approaching a political doctrine, a theory of sovereignty, a plan for the Jewish state, or a roadmap for getting there. The closest you will get is the Hilchot Sanhredin and Hilchot Melachim u’Milhamot of Rambam’s Mishneh Torah. For that reason, all Kahanists, regardless of their spiritual proclivities, are by default Rambamisten to some extent. But what do we really have even here? A collection of halachot describing certain aspects of a Jewish court system and monarchy respectively. It is instructive to learn these carefully and to look up the scattered sources for each halacha. What you will see is just how unsystematic the political vision of Judaism is, the herculean efforts the Rambam had to go to impose any kind of order on this material, and, to put matters delicately, the extent to which even this highly limited kind of political vision entailed going beyond the source material.

Let us now state another implication: to the extent that Judaism is political, Judaism is, by the ordinary meaning of the word, a failure. We will not dwell here on how successful the First and Second Temple periods were. The more pressing consideration is that Judaism has been a dream for twice as long as both of them existed put together. We are all familiar with the dictum that ‘since the mikdash was destroyed, The Holy One, Blessed Be He has no place in the world except the four amot of halacha’. The true meaning of this statement, the only one that doesn’t carry any trace of blasphemy, is that, in the absence of all the institutions of Jewish political existence, Judaism exists only through the political regulation of individual behaviour through the mechanisms of halacha. G-d’s near homelessness, so to speak, on the earth He created for his glory is our ongoing failure.

Finally, let us point out yet one more practical implication: to the extent that Judaism is political, the substitution of another political vision constitutes an act not just of deviancy, but fundamental heresy. It is at least as serious as the denial of Torah miSinai or any of the other theological crimes that form the borders of orthodoxy. The only belief that attacks the core of Judaism more radically is denial of the existence of God. This is why life and vigour exist in contemporary Jewish movements to precisely the degree that they refuse to cooperate with the Zionist project, which simply is the substitution of the political content of the Torah for another one. It is true, of course, that these movements have achieved this by having for all practical purposes no political vision, and doubling down on their surreal dreamworld conception of the Torah’s political content. This is hardly ideal, but it is better than nothing, and nothing is what you get the second you believe that the State of Israel represents a fulfillment of Judaism  in any respect. Moshe Feiglin has talked at length, and with much truth, of the unprecedented rejection of the core Jewish belief in our ownership of the land that was inherent in the Oslo process. This act of national apostasy, however, was only possible because the same act had already been committed about the Temple, the Sanhedrin, and Malchut Beit David, just barely disguised by the mizrochnik with a token reishit tzemichat geulateinu. 

To sum up: Judaism is political. As a result, Judaism is mostly a dream. A dream which most of our people have abandoned. A dream that has become distorted beyond recognition in Religious Zionism. A dream which, where it is still sincerely held, is the fanciful and unserious dream of a child. 

That being said, what do we do about it?

We must first admit that we are asking this question because we have given up on what most Jews have historically believed, namely that this dream will be achieved by miraculous means, and that our contribution to it is to hasten its coming through prayer and good deeds. ‘Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves’. We have given up on this belief  because it’s been a long time and our patience has snapped. We may still be wrong: תשועת ה’ כהרף עין. For the sake of argument, though, let us assume we aren’t. What do we do with this dream? We could start by willing it, but first we have to understand what it is that we are willing. 

In short, we need to know three things: where we are, where we want to be, and how we get from one to the other. Our topic for now is the second of these. It should go without saying that  the single most important source here is our repository of sacred texts, but, if the above argument is true, this is not enough. There is not enough material to make the Jewish political vision real. So long as it is not real, we cannot move beyond wanting it in a way that is itself unreal. 

What we have to do, then, is to fill in the gaps with our understanding of how a political system can work. This understanding can only come from history and political theory. This is in actuality what every Kahanist does already without thinking about it. The less he is aware of doing so, the more transparently he does so.

While filling in the gaps, we will come across problems where our understanding of how a just or effective political system is supposed to work contradicts our understanding of how the Jewish political system is supposed to work. When this happens, we have a number of options at our disposal, all of which boil down to revising our understanding of one or both elements of the contradiction. In so doing we will undoubtedly make mistakes; if we do a bad job these mistakes will be numerous and grave. The inevitable and worse result of not doing this, however, is that we subconsciously reinterpret every part of the Jewish vision to fit with our existing political beliefs. 

We all laugh at the Jewish Leftist who preaches Tikkun Olam. We cringe when Ben Shapiro says that Jewish values correspond to the American constitution, or when Yoram Hazony amends that to include only the bits written by the Federalist party. We know, too, that Feiglin’s claim that Yahadut = Herut is not only wrong, but stupendously, overtly wrong. But if some of these people are dishonest or simply dumb, not all of them are. The real source of the inexhaustible tendency to make statements about Judaism’s political content that are patently wrong is the extreme psychological difficulty the typical believing Jew has even considering the possibility that his deeply felt and somewhat well articulated moral beliefs are not actually the same as the religion he abstractly believes in. When we take a step back and observe Kahanism, broadly conceived, we find the same phenomenon that exists throughout the Jewish spectrum, mostly less egregious, but sometimes even dumber than usual.

There is only one remedy for this: a combination of serious, intensive, and systematic study of the full corpus of Jewish texts that have political content (and, here, reading some perakim of the Rambam is only the first step) and an equally serious, intensive and systematic engagement with political theory. Then, we can begin to study both sides of this equation and look for commonalities and conflicts. After that, we can begin an open, honest and conscious process of reconciliation to build a complete political vision that we can meaningfully work towards.

This is a massive project, which will require the involvement of many serious people. One major obstacle is that all of us who grew up in ‘the empire of lies’ have heads filled with political concepts that are either meaningless or false, and whose function is to obscure political reality. This is true not just for Left-Wingers, but also Right-Wingers, whose belief systems are cargo cults constructed out of obsolete versions of leftism. Trying to construct a state out of these principles is like trying to build a car by hunting down the goblins and fairies who make the wheels turn. To help get this project off the ground, I will write a series of introductions of the following concepts for Jewish fundamentalists:

The Iron Law of Oligarchy
The Political Formula
The High-Low Alliance
The Cathedral
The Managerial State
Inter State Conflict
Human Biodiversity
Overproduction of Elites