Are You Utterly Insane?!

Stupid question, or maybe not: Are Jews incapable of self-governance? Do we have it in us?

I wish it were a stupid question. But I could not help asking myself when I saw the reports on TV of hundreds of Jews, some in kippot and tallitot, having a 1960s style sit-in at the US Capitol, waving placards that said "Jews for an Immediate Ceasefire" and the like. My first thought, as Israel wages war against the genocidal Hamas terrorists was, I love you, but are you utterly insane?

Yeah, I get that we are a humanitarian bunch, we Jews. Arguably, the Torah gave the (western) world its first universal moral code, one that didn't do away completely with slavery, but it did treat slaves, for the first time in human history, as more than just conquered property. According to one story, the great sage Hillel was once asked to summarize the Torah ('on one foot' as he put it) and he recited the famous Golden Rule, "Love thy neighbour as thyself... That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbour." But later another sage, Ben Azzai, disagreed with Hillel. He said that the essence of the Torah is best summed up in the line, "This is the book of the generations of Adam." The reason? Because that line demonstrates explicitly that we are all connected, part of the same family tree. While he viewed Hillel's preferred dictum as a principle for moral guidance, Ben Azzai felt that the Golden Rule was not sufficient enough to establish the universal underpinnings of morality, one that is more fundamental and less ephemeral than a person's idea of love (or what is hateful). And so we have a tension in our moral tradition between universality and individuality.  

So I completely get the Jewish impulse to want to see in our fellow, especially in our Abrahamic kin, a common humanity. But are we supposed to extend our sense of common humanity unconditionally? Even to those who want us dead? Even worse, to those who consider it the ultimate achievement of their brief time on earth to be martyred in the act of killing us? There is a very well known precedent to that 'turn the other cheek' approach, a delusional Jew who became revered for sacrificing himself for the sins of humanity at the hands of the Romans two thousand years ago. To my fellow Jews with the Jesus complex - please just stop! 

There's a reason you've never heard of Ben Azzai, but you may have heard of Hillel. Hillel understood that there are limits, even to morality. He proposed a corollary to unconditionality when he said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Yes, the basis for morality as determined in heaven is universal. We’re all the children of Adam (and Eve). But in practice, in this world, those who refuse to acknowledge the sanctity of all life effectively remove themselves from the human family. With those people we have to be for ourselves, as a means of preserving the sanctity of life. To apply the universal moral standard to those who don't acknowledge it themselves is tantamount to suicide, which is forbidden in our tradition.

It's obvious that the Jews who are responding to the crisis in Israel by sitting in Washington DC (or Paris, or London) waving “Jews For An Immediate Ceasefire" slogans don't face the daily danger of a rocket landing in their living rooms. I still have to wonder if they are suffering from a messiah complex too, one that’s stitched deeply into the Jewish subconscious like old scar tissue. When you've depended on the kindness of strangers for as long as we have, with gruesome results, you'd figure at some point we’d eventually come around to the realization that life isn't just a gift, it requires defending. And now that we finally have the chance to run our own affairs in our ancestral homeland we have the means of doing so. Hillel's dictum is also a good slogan to prove that Jews are capable of self-governance, despite our self-destructive impulses. It takes hard moral choices to be a self-governing people, and if we aren't willing to make those choices we don't deserve it.