UTJ Viewpoints

My teacher of modern Jewish history, Rabbi Professor Arthur Hertzberg, taught every imaginable course in modern Jewish history except the Holocaust. I overcame this lacuna by studying Holocaust history with Prof. David Engel, [another master teacher] after which I realized that for Prof. Hertzberg, Jewish history in modern times takes place between two poles, Baruch Spinoza and Adolph Hitler. The former wanted both Christianity as well as Judaism to disappear, in order that Jewry enter the brave, new, free and disenchanted modern world, and the latter, at some point, wanted to erase Judaism by erasing the Jews. These words are dedicated to my “rabbi” of Jewish history, Professor Arthur Hertzberg

Spinoza wrote what he did as a modern, secular man, whose world was disenchanted, who replaced the God of the Scripture with “Substance,” the notion that God is no more and no less than everything that happens to exist. He was attacking the medieval legacy of Christendom even though he frontally debunked the Scripture of the Jews. Attacking Judaism is a safe enterprise; complaining about the Church is another matter.

Following Aristotle and medieval Christendom, medieval culture believed in the “Great Chain of Being,” a theoretically hermetically fixed order with God at the top of the hierarchy of being, the human king his mortal CEO, with a rule of one God, one king, one Church and one fixed, static hierarchy. Peasants were preached to by priests paid by the nobility and were told that the three pillars of their world were “pay, pray, and obey.” Pay the nobleman, who was a warrior with a monopoly on coercive power and the threat of violence, who was girded with mail, lived in a castle and would ride upon a horse. The nobleman collected taxes, charged for the use of the mill, demanded payment for the right to use his feudal property, and on occasion demanded the sexual favors of his female peasant population. Pray to God and to the saints, now and at the moment of death, because in the Christianity before Luther and Calvin, faith without works is dead. One must believe correctly [orthodoxy] and behave correctly [orthopraxy] in order to be saved, i.e., merit salvation and the world to come, by belonging to and maintaining membership in the Church, the body of Christ, which is the corporation that grants the dividend called salvation, because the Jesus of John 14:6 announced a theological monopoly of “justification,” i.e., “no one comes before the father except through” the Church. Even though Throne and Cross came to conflict on occasion, as with the schisms East [with the Orthodox Church splitting in 1054 CE] and West [the 14th Century saw the Church’s “Babylonian exile,” 1309-1374 and the Great Schism, 1374-1417], the Church legitimated the secular powers and the secular powers paid worldly rewards in return for the legitimating theological propaganda.

In this [theoretically] whole world of one God, one king, one religion and One Great Chain of being, Jews, Moslems, and gypsies were dissenters, who made the ‘αἵρεσις, the willful choice not to adopt the world view of the Great Chain of Being. Living off land owned by kings, the gypsies denied royal claims, by serving Allah, who is “neither born nor is given to being born,” Moslems denied the basic social glue of society and, with the sword, sayyif, tried, sometimes successfully, to advance din Islam, the religion of submission to Allah.

By dint of their Torah, the Jews did not buy into the pagan/Christian Chain of Being and its hierarchy that put first first and last last, [as opposed to Jesus the apocalpytic preacher, who claimed that in the end time, the first will be last and last, first] and that authority flows from God above to the temporal powers that be. Armed with a Book that every Jewish male was religiously obliged to read, the Jew learned that every person carries God’s image and therefore possesses Divine dignity. Alternatively, Jewish society flows from individual up, to family, community to state. This phenomenon was noted by the Israeli Prof. Shalom Albeck of Bar Ilan University, who demonstrated that Jewish fiscal law is no more than a reified individual social ethic. And the Jews, armed with dignity of a God Who did not claim sovereign immunity as God, will not accept the claims made by a self-serving Church or rapacious throne, chose to be dissidents, rejecting the ideological truth claims of Church, throne and sword. The Church proclaimed a Bible that should not be read; the Jew read the same Hebrew Scripture with a hermeneutic code that mandated rather than forbade the questioning of authority that contradicted Scripture. The Church will tell the fated faithful what, when, how, and if to think. Because the Jew read the Bible, the Jew, like the Protestant Puritans, saw a disconnect between the religion as recorded in the canon and the religion as promulgated self-servingly by prelates. Even Martin Luther, who first questioned and subsequently broke from the Roman Church, asked probing, annoying, and embarrassing questions. The Jews of Luther’s moment in history kept reading the holy words, were for sure scandalized by the Lutheran doctrine, borrowed from Augustine, that God made humanity without dignity, that salvation is by faith and not works, lest humans be boastful. The Jew read a Bible that commanded commandments and presented precepts, that works really work because of the dignity implicit in the image of God implanted in humankind as the eternity of God in the human person. Such a person, this kind of Jew, regards God alone as absolute and judges judges when they act badly, when the judges are worthy and are deserving of being judged.

The Jew was to be humiliated by the Church for the arrogance of dissent, for affirming dignity when humility is demanded by those who selected themselves to be of superior rank on the Chain of Being. The Jew may not own a Christian slave or hire a Christian worker, so that the Chain of Being hierarchy of value and person be maintained and Jews not exert authority or rule over the social Body of Christ. On the sacred days of Easter and Christmas, the Jew may not contaminate the street with her or his impure presence; the iconic god incarnate of the Church and the devil’s minions may not travel the same thoroughfares at the same moment. Since Christians may not lend money for profit [ribbit], Jews were allowed to enter this trade, which will serve as the source of credit on one hand and degrade the creditor on the other hand. It is a little known fact that rabbinic law that Jewish law in its Oral Torah—as opposed to Ashkenazi Middle Ages version of Jewish culture—actually disallows lending money for profit.

With the waning of the Christian Middle Ages, Church authority began to erode. The New World and new wealth, the rebirth of learning and literacy, especially with the invention of the printing press, Machiavelli’s prudent but amoral Prince, and the Reformation challenge all converged to create the Absolute Monarch of early modern Europe outside of Germany, whose politics remained somewhat feudal and futile until Germany united. This Absolute Monarch did not want to share power or purse with Church prelates. And religious dissent is precedent for the heresy that is treason, political dissent. The Absolute Monarchs of England, Spain, Portugal, and France all expelled their Jews.

Unable to accept the political claims of divine right Absolute Monarch, the Jew is viewed the trouble maker, the Hitlerian disease that infects and decays by its defiance the absolute claims of the Absolute Monarch. The Jews do not give up; they maintain their piety, which is treasonous disloyalty, even when bereft of power to enforce their claims.

The Jew rejects icons and displays of pageants, realizing that fantasies beget bigotry and bigots beget brutality. When the masses cannot read, they can be told what to think. Because the Jew is commanded by God to read the Bible, the book of human dignity, the Jew learns how to think and because the Jew refuses to reside within the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being, the humiliated Jew was alone among Europeans truly free, praising God every day for being made free and not a Gentile, with the beneficent benchmark book called Torah.

Adolph Hitler wanted to establish a Third Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was not holy, Roman, or even an empire, but it was the nominal successor to Rome. Hitler exploited the nostalgic culture that was Rome, which conquered Greece but was taken by Hellenic intellect. Hitler forgot or perhaps never realized that the Romans conceded that while Rome conquered the Greek lands, the Greek mind conquered Roman culture. And like the Absolute Monarchs of early modern Europe, the world was Hitler’s for the taking, he would share power with no one, destroy if the need arose anyone, and violence is the sacred wonderful wand of conquest, submission, surrender, and subjugation. The Jew is a parasite precisely because the Jew takes sustaining material from the host culture but does not surrender to and allow him/herself to be conquered by that culture. The ungrateful Jew will not bend the knee before human authority, rejecting hierarchy and its attending state propaganda of illegitimate legitimating lies. The Führer, or leader, may not be challenged and the Jew challenges everyone, from Pharaoh to Caesar to the Holy Roman Emperor. The Israelites debased monarchy, the rule of the one [μονο + αρχη] by positing a God that gave dignity to all and not just to the over-man, the Übermensch. At first, Hitler expelled the Jews from Germany and Austria, where many fled to Poland. Upon conquering Poland, Hitler encountered his former Jews with no place on the face of the earth to send them. Hence the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem,” the nation that problematically will not bow the knee, that proclaims “justice” and not “just us,” whose King is the King of Kings, who reigns forever and not for the 1,000 years of the Third Reich, must be removed from the earth. For Hitler, the state, which is the Führer, the leader incarnate, is everything and the people nothing. The people are subjects to be subjugated, not citizens who have a right to an opinion, and who are manipulated, lobotomized, and browbeaten to believe that their enemy is the Jew, who preaches the treasonous Torah of human dignity, that threatened Pharaoh and Amaleq in antiquity and the Absolute monarchs of Europe in modernity.

Pharaoh spoke to “his people,” telling them that Israel is to is too numerous and great to be tolerated, Xerxes was told by Haman that there is a dispersed people with its own distinct and implicitly dissident laws, and it is not worth it to the king to tolerate their presence, and Hitler preached to his people, the Volk, the common people, what Elias Canetti calls “the Crowd,” that Israel, being anti-crowd, endangers the body politic. In an obscene sense, Hitler is right. Any crowd that thinks like Israel will depose the despot, deny the dictator, and demand the God-given claim to human dignity, frustrating and infuriating the Führer, the illegitimate tyrant.

The Third Reich did not last 1,000 years. It did not last the sixty-one years of the State of Israel, the stick pulled and saved from the crematoria fires. Hitler’s spiritual descendants, threatened by the claim made by Israel’s existence, also advocate a final solution to what they believe is a Jewish problem. Khomeni and Ahmadinijad, bin Ladan and Nasrallah, realize that Israel represents the Horizontal Society of equals, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, for whom intimidation is blasphemy, oppression idolatry, and privilege impiety; for whom questioning is a command and not treason or heresy, a politically incorrect wrong choice. What for some is a Jewish problem is in fact a Jewish promise; human dignity is within our grasp if we become intolerant of tyrants.

Sifre Deuteronomy 40 teaches that the sword or sayyif and the book or sefer came down from heaven together. Smokestacks notwithstanding, the Reich without understanding is no longer standing. The book conquers the sword, the Jewish people lives, am Yisrael Hai.

The Scripture’s heroes embody Torah values. One learns a great deal about the Torah’s anti-heroes, as well. The background, behavior, and fate/lot of Lot teaches a lot of learning. Before we do good, asei tov, we must remove ourselves from wrong, sur me-ra.

God first commands Abraham to leave his land, his birth place, and his clan, his bet av. Abraham hears the command but misunderstands the command. He must leave his family, and not take his family with him. Sarah, like Abraham, gets a covenantal name change; Like a leopard, Lot cannot change his spotted past.

In Babylonia, there is a hierarchy of order, the king is on the top, then the aristocrats, the unfortunate free people, and the slaves, the low people, in Akkadian, wardum, related to the Hebrew word “to go low.” One’s moral worth is measured by one’s monetary worth. Now, God blessed Abraham, whose name means blessing. Although later rabbinic commentary understood Lot’s name to be “veil,” the Aramaic word lot means “curse.”

Only when Lot, whose ethic was a curse, an addiction to what was mistaken to be the “good life,” separates from Abraham does [1] Abraham fully prosper and [2] events unfold that leave Lot, the man who covets everything, with nothing but two daughters impregnated by himself.

Dr. Nehama Liebowitz taught that when he came from Mesopotamia to Canaan, Abraham came with [1] Sara his wife, [2] Lot his nephew—against the Divine edict! And [3] his property. But when leaving Egypt, Abraham, enriched by Pharaoh who could not tolerate Abraham and his God besting him, with wealth. Lot’s leopard spots are manifest.

Abraham leaves Egypt with [1] his wife, [2] his property, and [3] Lot! And Lot’s shepherds argue with Abraham’s indicating that Lot’s eyes and ambitions are greater than Abraham’s. While family may be important, business is business. Lot chose to split with Abraham, taking the fertile fields of Sodom, with its lust for the life of pleasure.

On one hand, Abraham undertakes expense and risk to save his n’er do well nephew. But Lot, who chose to live in Sodom for wealth lives to leave Sodom with his daughters, whom he offered to the Sodomites but were made pregnant by him, and with absolutely nothing else.

Lot came from a Mesopotamian society where possessions possessed people. For Lot, people and property are to be possessed and exploited. His lot/fate, was a curse and he had to be removed from Abraham. And Abraham received the blessing when he was rid of the last vestige of Mesopotamia’s curse, its inability to appreciate moral worth and impulse of kindness.