Democracy for the Middle East: Strauss and Zionism

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Democracy for the Middle East

December 02, 2004

Strauss and Zionism

(Wherein the editor briefly departs from writing in the third person)

Andrew Sullivan dug up this wonderful 1998 Peter Berkowitz review of the Green-edited Leo Strauss collection of essays. But distracted by the Nietzsche angle, he got the essence of the story wrong. The point isn't that the gymnasium educated Strauss and his secularly trained followers will sometimes characterize themselves as atheists. But rather, that they embrace the creative dialectic between the religious and the rational as vital to a healthy modern society. In truth, it isn't unrelated to the back and forth motion within the fully actualized individual that J. Soloveitchik illuminates in Lonely Man Of Faith, that M. Buber deconstructs in I and Thou, or that our own Emily Dickinson distills in I Think To Live. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to secular liberals who unlike the American-Hebraics, view the resurgence of the religious mode as among the chief threats to modern society and want it confined to the private sphere.

Now if one were sniffing about, like Sullivan, for the irony in the neoconservative-religious partnership, it can more easily be found offshore than here. Neocons, for whom a secure Israel is of great concern, are far more 'religiously positive' than the Jewish nation's political, academic and media elite. Take that for a ride and check out this Berkowitz excerpt on Strauss and Zionism:

As Strauss understood it, the principle of liberal democracy in the natural freedom and equality of all human beings, and the bond of liberal society is a universal morality that links human beings regardless of religion. Liberalism understands religion to be a primary source of divisiveness in society, but it also regards liberty of religious worship to be a fundamental expression of the autonomy of the individual. To safeguard religion and to safeguard society from conflicts over religion, liberalism pushes religion to the private sphere where it is protected by law. The liberal state also strictly prohibits public laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. What the liberal state cannot do without ceasing to be liberal is to use the law to root out and entirely eliminate discrimination, religious and otherwise, on the part of private individuals and groups.

According to Strauss, in Germany in the 1920s, liberalism secured a privacy that protected the autonomy of the individual. But that privacy provided at the same time shelter to the determination on the part of the non-Jewish German majority to view Jews as an inferior people and consign them to second- class status. In response, "a small minority of the German Jews, but a considerable minority of the German Jewish youth studying at the universities" were impelled to turn to Zionism. One of that considerable minority was Strauss.

Strauss declines to report the details of his personal involvement in the Zionist movement. Rather, he analyzes the instability in the strictly political Zionism to which he was drawn as a young man, and he shows how, when its premises are clarified and its aspirations are fully thought through, Zionism reveals the need for a return to Jewish faith. Political Zionism, the Zionism of Herzl, proposed a political solution to what it perceived to be a fundamentally political problem: The failure of the liberal state to secure equality for Jews. Political Zionism's solution was to create a modern nation state -- liberal, democratic, and secular -- for the Jewish people.

Strauss was unstinting in his admiration for political Zionism, both because of its devotion to restoring Jewish self-sufficiency and because of its decisive role in the creation of the state of Israel, which in Strauss's eyes "procured a blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not." But political Zionism, in his judgment, was insufficient because it neglected the moral and spiritual life of the Jews it was seeking to save.

Strauss agreed with the cultural Zionists -- those inspired by Ahad Ha'am -- that the Jewish people could not be defined primarily in political terms on the basis of a common history of exclusion and degradation. Neither could they be rescued by a purely political solution. But when the cultural Zionists contended that the Jewish people were constituted by a common heritage or community of mind, Strauss considered their analysis true but incomplete -- and misleading insofar as it implied that a recovery of Jewish culture, of Jewish art and dance and literature, could solve the Jewish problem.

Cultural Zionism suffered from a failure to reflect on the meaning of its central insight. To understand the heritage of the Jewish people solely in terms of culture is to misunderstand it, because "the foundation, the authoritative layer, of the Jewish heritage presents itself, not as a product of the human mind, but as a divine gift, as divine revelation." The clarification of its core insight transforms cultural Zionism into religious Zionism, a Zionism that takes his bearings from the Torah and Talmud.

But is a return to Jewish faith and devotion to fulfilling God's law even possible for modern, enlightened, and liberal people? Strauss reminds his readers that, according to Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the leading Jewish thinkers in Weimar Germany, a return to Jewish faith was both necessary and possible.

It was made necessary by the realization that liberalism alone could not, even at his best, satisfy man's religious hunger. And it was possible despite the presumption, routinely embraced by intellectuals now as well as then, that modern science and scholarship had once and for all refuted religious faith. Buber and Rosenzweig contended that the trouble with all alleged scientific refutations of faith was not that they inappropriately appealed to empirical evidence but that they were not empirical enough -- blind to religious experience.

This resonates strongly with my own experience as a young biologist at Princeton University when one day, without warning, I was dropped in my laboratory tracks by torrents of irrefutable data points arriving from neither the d/a converter or the oscilloscope but rather from the more rarified and difficult to quantify realm of the subjective empirical.

Home . Posted by Editor at December 2, 2004 04:51 PM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org

Comments on this post:

Great site. I'm just discovering Strauss and DFME will clearly be an excellent resource.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on Abraham Isaac Kook and Zionism. Rav Kook always struck me as being "the road not taken" in a certain sense. Do you think he and Strauss would have had some points in common philosophically?

Posted by: asher at December 3, 2004 09:58 AM

Thanks much. A luminary in the American Hasidic (i.e. Haredi) community confided to me that he thought that in retrospect it would have been better had Rav Kook's way prevailed in Israel.

Notwithstanding his important achievments, the reconciliation that he was attempting - yes - very reminiscent of Strauss' dilemma (although the differences in concerns and aporoaches will prove more illuminating than the similarities) - was largely uninteresting to both the religious and seculars.

To traditional Jews, Zionists looked like uneducated, assimilated hippies trying to recreate secular Europe on sacred ground. With the shechina available round the clock, what need had they for the opera? Kedusha trumps catharsis any day. Entrusting redemption to the children of Voltaire was - to borrow a secular image - like asking Puccini to cast Mimi with a soprano who was tone deaf. You can imagine the confusion in this community when the voiceless girl somehow gained the favor of her Creator and set history on its ear. They're still trying to explain it.

Tradition tells us that no one knows the relative values of the 613 positive and negative commandments. It may be that from the miraculous story of the establishment of the modern state of Israel we learn that the greatest commandment of all is to refrain from intermingling. For it is this Torah commandment, however repressed by Hertzl and his cohorts as such, that formed the essence of the Zionist insight and accomplishment.

Similarly, for secular Zionists educated in European gymnasiums where they were taught that religion was based on myth, Rabbi Kook stood for passivity and ignorance in exile. He looked liked their greenhorn grandparents.

Thank God, there were geniuses like Rav Soloveitchik who could see beyond the limitations of both groups. If only his followers has been better able to keep Hashem's name between their eyes and the glories of the West.

Much like the coming together of litvish and hasidus in the 20th century in response to the secularists, today the haredi and religious zionists (kookniks) have found common ground in opposition to the secular zionists. The joke goes that while it was Ari that sacrificed his blood to forge the Jewish State, it's the grandchildren of Avrumi that dream of living in Jerusalem. Ari's grandchildren dream of living in LA.

That's why Strauss holds as much or more importance for Israel as he does for New Zion (America.) Ari's grandchildren (and Emily's grandchildren) need a path back.

Posted by: editor at December 3, 2004 01:04 PM

Thank you for your illuminating response. Indeed, an exploration of the differences between Kook's and Strauss's approaches would surely provide many insights.

Interesting how the religious/secular split in Israeli society has remained to this day.

I'm a big fan of Soloveitchik too. His 'Halakhic Man' was a main source of inspiration in my decision to explore traditional Judaism some years ago.

Again, thanks for a great blog; keep up the good work.

Posted by: asher at December 3, 2004 05:31 PM