Scholars' Corner
The Institute for
Christian & Jewish Studies
presentsIslam and the Jewish-Christian Encounter Response by
Rabbi Charles L. ArianI guess the Soviet model would have been: "Don't dance at all." Which reminds me of Yakov Smirnov. Perhaps the major negative effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union is the demise of the career of Yakov Smirnov. He used to talk about the Russian Express Card: "Don't leave home."
I want to make a couple of brief comments about what Sulayman said and then some comments of my own. One thing that struck me, both tonight and two weeks ago, in listening to you talk about the diversity of Islam is that I always tell people that whenever a speaker says, "The Jewish position on ‘X’ is . . . ," the rest of the statement is a lie. There is no "the Jewish position" on anything, and it becomes clear to me that there is really no "the Islamic position" on anything either.
One of the things that you said that struck me as having some echoes in the Jewish political tradition is the ac-ceptance of a pluralism, but a pluralism of a limited kind, and that Islam had a much easier time accommodating Jews and Christians than in accommodating Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and so forth. I think that that's true in Judaism as well in a kind of parallel way, where you can make a strong halakhic [legal] case for the ac-ceptance of Christianity and Islam as legitimate religions. It is much harder to make a halakhic case for the accep-tance of Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on.
You mentioned the Milet system, and you also pointed out how in some countries there's a ministry of religion and in others not. In Israel there is also a ministry of religion, as well as a chief rabbi; and, ironically, the chief rabbinate is a remnant of the Milet system. If you've ever seen the chief Sephardic rabbi, who wears a very distinctive sort of get-up, that is the uniform that was worn by the hakham bashi, the chief rabbi appointed by the Turkish sultan. That institution continued. It's not an authentically Jewish institution; it's an institution that was created by the Ottoman empire and, I think, has been kept on because of political convenience. You also spoke about the fusion of spiritual and religious leader-ship that had been represented in early Islam and then separated, and I think Judaism has a lot to say about that as well. So let me launch into my prepared remarks.
I think that for contemporary Jews the whole question of the interplay of religion and politics, religion and democ-racy, is a tremendous challenge. David Hartman, who's a friend of many of us, has said repeatedly that the major moral issue for Jews in the contemporary era is the exercise of power. That for almost two thousand years our political muscles have kind of atrophied because we haven't had the ability and, therefore, the necessity to grapple with dealing with power. While there is a strong tradition, it is kind of atrophied, and I think it's a real challenge for us to develop thought in that way.
There are certainly a lot of aspects of the Jewish tradition that tend towards democracy. Certainly the founders of this country saw themselves as influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures -- ideas like the ultimate value and dignity of every human being, the sense that every human being is created b'tselem elohim, "in the image of God." So, while that's not necessarily a democratic idea per se, it tends towards democracy: If everybody has equal dignity, then everybody should have a say, and everybody should have some level of equality before the law.
Less well known is the idea within the Jewish tradition of the separation of powers. The late professor Daniel Elazar wrote quite a bit about the Jewish tradition, and he really focused in on that. In Jewish thought there are three ketarim. Keter means "crown," and there are three crowns: the keter Torah, the "crown of Torah," which is the authority to mediate God's word to the people; the keter kekhunah, the "crown of priesthood," which medi-ates the people's access to God. I find it really interesting that in Judaism that is separated: There is one chanel of God's word to the people, and then a dif-ferent chanel of the people's access to God. The third keter is the keter malkhut, which is the civil authority.
Tonight is Hannukah, and if you read Maimonides, he cri-ticized the Hasmoneans. Why? Because they fused the keter kekhunah and the keter malkhut. The Hasmonians were a priestly family and they made themselves kings. Maimonides criticizes them very strongly for fusing what should be two separate powers. As we know, of course, the way that Hannukah is celebrated now, we don't focus on the Maccabees; we focus on the miracle of the oil, which -- heresy alert coming up -- probably never historically happened. I think that the reason that we do that is because the later tradition grew very uncom-fortable with the Hasmoneans and did not want to overemphasize their role precisely because they violated this idea of the separation of powers, with disastrous results. The Hasmoneans invited the Romans in to settle an internal dispute, rather naively thinking that once the Romans helped out they would leave again. Somehow it didn't work out that way. So there's a real tension, a real ambiguity within the Jewish tradition around the Hasmoneans.
Now the question of pluralism, which is an important element of democracy. The Jewish tradition has always recognized the legitimacy of regional and communal differences of practice -- Hasidim and Misnagdim, Se-phardic and Ashkenazic. In fact, Israel, as you know, has not one chief rabbi, but two chief rabbis: a Sephar-dic chief rabbi and an Ashkenazic chief rabbi. There are also many other groups that do not recognize the authority of the chief rabbinate at all. So there's always been a legitimacy of a diversity of practice. Within Jew-ish thought, as I said before, non-Jewish religions are O.K., as long as they (a) are monotheistic and (b) lead to moral behavior. Even in messianic times, the vision is that all of the other nations will maintain their distinc-tiveness and their distinctive ways of worship, but they will be monotheistic. This is a real distinction between Judaism on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other hand, where the Christian and Muslim escha-tological views are that in the end of days everybody else will see the truth, and that everybody will become Christian or everybody will become Muslim. In Judaism that's not at all the view; everybody will become mono-theistic. All people will worship the God of Israel, but they will not necessarily worship the God of Israel as Jews in the way that Jews do so.
However, the pluralism is not unlimited. There is no freedom for Jews to reject the Torah. So there is a legitimacy of different ways of practice, but there's no legitimacy within the Jewish tradition of not practicing at all. And there is no acceptance of idolatry for non-Jews. You want to follow a monotheistic non-Jewish religion? Great. You want to be an idolater? Not acceptable. Of course, this is in theory. We haven't had much of an ability to enforce these ideas, but in theory this is the way it should be.
Now I want to move really quickly to the contemporary situation. The two largest Jewish communities, of course, are in Israel and in the United States. In Israel we see a curious conjunction of the far right and the far left: Both the far right and the far left agree that there is a contradiction between Judaism and democracy. The far right and the far left agree that it is impossible for Israel to be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. That's as far as the agreement goes. The far right says, therefore, "Let's get rid of democracy." The far left says, "Let's get rid of Judaism." Everybody else agrees that Israel must be both a Jewish and a democratic state. Do you know what that means? I don't know what that means. And I agree that Israel needs to be a Jewish state and a democratic state. How Israel does that is a tremendous, tremendous difficulty because there is no agreement about what that means, and even the ques-tion is perhaps not really on many people's radar screens.
In the United States we also have the question of what is the religious content of our citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen? If you go to the synagogue where I go on Saturday mornings, you will hear a prayer for the government. You perhaps may not understand it be-cause it's said in Hebrew, but this prayer asks God to have the rulers of this country be good to the Jews. That is an entirely appropriate prayer if you're living in Tsarist Russia. It is not an appropriate prayer if you're living in the United States. We expect more than simply not being persecuted too much. We haven't really grappled with what that means. When my grandfather was a boy in Lithuania, he didn't worry whether he was a Lithuanian Jew or a Jewish Lithuanian. He was a Jew; the goyim were Lithuanians. We have this dilemma. We're not just Jews who happen to live in America. We are American Jews. What does that mean? I think we have to really grapple with that.
It's very clear that, if you ask yourselves, "Is religion compatible with democracy?" on a certain level the answer is "yes." Judaism and Jews have flourished in this country because of the First Amendment, which does protect our rights. There's no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority of Jewish religious creativity is happening right here in the United States. It's not happening in Israel, I think, because of the stultifying effects of a state-imposed religious monopoly that im-pedes any sort of creativity. The flip side of that is that in the United States we have this tremendous boom in religious creativity, we have these huge synagogues that are filled with people learning and studying, and we also have huge numbers of people dropping out of Jewish religious life altogether because they have the freedom to do that. A hundred years ago, if you wanted to stop being a Jew, you became a Christian; or, if you lived in the Muslim world, you became a Muslim. Today you just stop being a Jew. The challenge for us is to develop a kind of creative response to freedom that allows us to develop a commitment where Jews love their tradition and want to practice it when it's not forced on them by the other side. So these are, I think, some of the chal-lenges that face us.
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