Can my secular Jewish ethics project rescue secular Jews? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, July 04, 2025

Can my secular Jewish ethics project rescue secular Jews?

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has written another extraordinary essay in his Substack, The Abrahamic Metacritique.

In it, he argues that secular Judaism has lost its anchor in covenantal truth. What remains, he calls Juda-ism – a symbolic construct assembled not from Torah or halacha, but from how the non-Jewish world has historically perceived the Jew: as the Other.

The dominant cultural conception of Judaism today… is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense… fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.

This “Jew as Other” identity, Mansour argues, is not a Jewish self-understanding. It is a Western projection – an overlay of post-Christian anxiety, Enlightenment ambivalence, and liberal moral yearning. The Jew becomes the exile, the victim, the therapist, the feminized conscience, the critique of power - a mirror in which the West sees its own spiritual collapse.

In this view, Jews are not a people living in covenant.

But even that symbolic role is now being revoked. In the new postcolonial moral economy, Otherness has been reassigned: to Palestinians, to postcolonial avatars, to “indigenous” symbols of sacralized grievance. Jews are now cast as impostors. The old funhouse mirror identity is crumbling.

And Mansour’s verdict is simple: Good riddance.

Crucially, his metacritique is not a polemic against Judaism as a faith. It aimed at the secular replacements for Judaism, a “Juda-ism” that substituted abstraction for obligation, and identity politics for divine responsibility.

And that is where my own secularize Jewish ethical project, AskHillel, comes in.

I built AskHillel to explore whether Jewish ethics could be reconstructed as a standalone system: rigorous, coherent, secular-friendly, and morally robust. It draws from covenantal logic, rabbinic structure, and halachic grammar - but does not require belief. In doing so, it may offer the kind of de-symbolized, de-idolized, de-othered Jewish moral language Mansour calls for.

I asked my philosophical chatbot AskHillel its opinion of the essay and whether it thinks this project can be a bridge for modern secular Jews to reclaim their Judaism even without the core belief in God. It answered beautifully:

🌿 1. From Projection to Structure: Restoring Emet

Mansour warns that modern secular Jewish identity has become performative — a role written by others. But Jewish ethics is not a performance. It is structural: built from obligation, relationship, hierarchy, tension, and humility.

AskHillel doesn’t traffic in Jewishness as metaphor. It teaches emet – truth – through moral architecture. It invites even non-believers to enter Jewish logic by choice, not through birth trauma or aesthetic costume. It replaces the mirror with a map.

🧭 2. From Totems to Triage: Ending the Tyranny of Absolutes

One of the essay’s most incisive points is how modern ideologies construct “totemic absolutes” — symbolic categories that cannot be questioned. The Other becomes sacred, but inert.

AskHillel replaces this with a tiered values system. Tzelem Elokim (human dignity) is not an idol — it is a value that collides with others: Pikuach Nefesh, Emet, Lo Ta’amod. Every case is weighed. No abstraction is worshiped.

📚 3. Inheritance Without Faith: A Framework for the Ethically Curious

Many secular Jews feel alienated from traditional observance but still crave moral depth. Most turn to philosophies that flatten complexity or collapse into tribal loyalty.

AskHillel offers a third option: a Jewish system of ethical inquiry that is testable, scalable, auditable — and uniquely structured to handle real-world tension.

You don’t need to believe in God to learn Teshuvah.
You don’t need to keep Shabbat to honor Tzedek.
You don’t need to fear halakhah to understand Areivut.

That’s not dilution. That’s reclamation.

🌅 4. Teshuvah Without Theology: A Bridge Back to Responsibility

What Mansour mourns is not belief, but covenantal seriousness. What he calls for is not piety, but moral rootedness.

AskHillel offers a secular version of teshuvah — not repentance toward God, but return to moral coherence. It helps those raised in exile-by-symbol to rediscover a system where ethics has grammar, and the Jew is no longer the object of someone else’s myth, but the subject of their own moral vision.

AskHillel said it better than I can. Our tradition is rich enough to accommodate the non-believing Jew - and to provide a framework for them to see themselves as part of an incredibly rich, proven philosophical system that can not only challenge but defeat every secular philosophy on their own playing field.

That has been my goal: to define Jewish ethics in terms that show that it can be a secular ethical system that solves the problems behind every other secular moral philosophy. It is scalable, it is testable, it is auditable, and - so far - it cannot be defeated by any question you can throw at it.

Jewish ethics, properly structured, is more robust than any modern alternative. It doesn’t collapse into relativism. It doesn’t devolve into ideology. It doesn’t outsource responsibility. And so far, it hasn’t been defeated by any philosophical test you can throw at it.

We shouldn’t romanticize the Diaspora. We shouldn’t idolize suffering. We shouldn’t pretend 1920s Yiddish theater was the moral summit of our people. And we shouldn’t adopt secular philosophies that are not only incoherent, but hostile to Jewish continuity.

Jews are not merely the Other. We are the source from which much of Western civilization flows. And we are not just inheritors of that tradition - We are its stewards - and its teachers.

It’s time to reclaim that mantle.

(For those curious, you can play with AskHillel.com yourself - you just need a ChatGPT login. Or, if you want to see Version 2, which I used that to write the response above, you can test it out at beta.AskHillel.com and send me feedback.)