Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Guest post by Andrew Pessin: (Subscribe to his free substack)

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“I was forced to leave my study group because my group members told me that the people at the Nova music festival deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.”

--M.I.T. student Talia Kahn on her campus environment


1. 2023 and 1948

It may be 2023 but campus responses to October 7 show that, for many, it’s still 1948.

Many campuses exploded in outright celebration of the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes” (in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” etc.) and the legitimacy of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.” Even many who didn’t quite “celebrate” the violence invoked the same by way of explanation quickly bleeding into justification. And many of those who remained silent about October 7, too, were no doubt thinking the same when they said things such as “I need to learn more about this complex situation before rendering judgment.” Now normally after watching armed men tie up a mother and father and three small children and burn them alive you don’t need to “learn more” to determine who the bad guys are, but hey, it’s “complex.” I’ve argued elsewhere that that silence amounts to complicity, to borrow the popular expression many progressives apply everywhere except to themselves: you’re in favor of October 7 or you’re against, in other words, and silence entails the former.

But now this shocking campus response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view the twenty-year-long campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign of lies against Israel combined with the more recent expansion of progressivism (aka Critical Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism, etc.) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not just Israeli Jews but all Jews; and the clear success of that campaign explains why so many are somehow unable to see that the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, women, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly is a straightforward moral atrocity constituting a mass terror attack. If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, then their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim.

So what does this have to do with 1948?

The dehumanization campaign above in fact ultimately rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: if that establishment were perfectly just, then the efforts to prevent it then and the 75 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military, terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust. In turn, many of the measures that Israel has taken over the years that detractors cite as “root causes” above—as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving its “occupation” and “apartheid,” etc.—would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive measures of domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense. Take just two examples, the security barrier along western Judea and Samaria and the blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there by an illegal violent coup. Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of Israel as just these are legitimate defensive measures justified by the unremittent preexisting violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.

If Jewish sovereignty there is legitimate, in other words, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades as need be. But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are simply evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of an unjust occupation. On this view every Jew is guilty and therefore worthy even of the atrocious harms of October 7, including the babies, and Hamas is not a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for “decolonization.”

If 1948 is just, in short, then 2023 is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then 2023 is political liberation.

So 2023 really still is about 1948.

This point has actually been clear for some time. Those who follow the campus scene know that the anti-Israel movement long ago gave up on the demand merely for a Palestinian state alongside Israel in favor of undoing Israel entirely. The popular chant, “We don’t want two states, we want 1948!,” states that about as clearly as can be. But it took October 7 to see how profound and visceral that demand is, as it manifested itself in the celebration of the slaughter. For them, the massive injustice of 1948 means that the Israeli Jews of today have it coming to them, as the M.I.T. student above quoted her antagonists.  

Clearly Israel advocates need to double down on disseminating their “narrative,” the one grounded in the long Jewish history in this land, and on finding ways to do it that will break through the ideological fortress that BDS and progressivism have established on our campuses.

But here I sketch an alternative, complementary strategy.

2. Grant Them (Most of) What They (Falsely) Claim

Let’s for the moment (falsely) grant the detractors what they claim, or most of it, namely that the establishment of Israel was an injustice: per their narrative, that Jews were “settler-colonists,” outsiders who, via “ethnic cleansing,” took over the land that became the State of Israel.

Even if so, I suggest, the campus anti-Israel movement of 2023 is morally objectionable. And once we see that this movement—that aims to undo the Jewish state “by any means necessary,” to “dismantle Zionism,” to remove its supporters from campuses, with events, talks, panels, conferences such as this one numbering in the thousands across hundreds of campuses in recent years—in fact is morally objectionable, then we can begin to see it for what it actually is: a campaign of dehumanizing hate that grotesquely leads its proponents to see the mutilation and mass murder of Jewish children as the moral high ground.

3. The Child As a Metaphysical and Ethical Fresh Start

Let’s start with a repulsive practice that occurred for a while soon after October 7: activists not ripping down the posters of Israeli hostages but instead replacing their “Kidnapped” headings with the word “Occupier.” There was a photo of a sweet little kidnapped three-year-old girl, for example, labeled as an “Occupier.” A three-year old who was born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly stretching way back.

In contrast consider how refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, is a Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated as refugees from Russia to the United States, and my parents, and certainly I myself, feel as American as can be. One or two generations is more than enough, generally, for assimilation and ultimately legitimation. Anyone who claims otherwise—who tells the children or grandchildren of an immigrant that they don’t belong here—would instantly and correctly be branded a racist.

Well, those who put the word “Occupier” on the photo of a three-year old are saying that no matter how many generations her family may have lived in this land, even if her family is one of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she can never belong there.

They may as well put a target right on her head—as Hamas in fact did.

Now what, exactly, is so repulsive about this practice, beyond its obvious racism? It’s that that little girl is entirely innocent, she cannot be blamed, for anything that may have preceded her in this world. She is simply not responsible for the alleged sins of her parents, or of her grandparents, or great-grandparents, any more than the small child of a Hamas member is responsible for his parent’s terrorist activities. Nobody is responsible for what anybody did prior to their own birth. Nor is it her fault or responsibility that she was born when and where she was.

A child, a new generation, is fresh start, a “do-over” in the most profound metaphysical and ethical ways.

Keep this child in mind as we next consider the question of how to rectify large-scale historical injustices.

4. On Rectifying Large-Scale Historical Injustice

Take your pick for an example; there is no shortage of historical injustices. Obviously, unfortunately, we have no time machine, no way to literally undo the event or retroactively prevent it. Uncountably many innocent lives have been lost and shattered in every terrorist act or war, but there’s just no way now to make Sept 11 not have happened, or the Vietnam War, or World Wars II or I, or the American Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the 30 Years War—or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (which, curiously, is pretty much the only major historical event that large numbers of people around the world ever even express interest in undoing).

So that’s off the table.

The next best thing would be to compensate those individuals who actually suffered the injustice. But if the injustice involved their death that’s also impossible; and unfortunately for those who survive the injustice, they die off too as the event gradually sinks into history. If there are ways to identify and compensate any remaining survivors of specific concrete injustices, by all means have at it.

 The most plausible mode of rectification for some large-scale historical injustice, then, is to compensate not the individuals who suffered the injustices but their descendants. And that’s where things immediately get tricky.

First, from whom, exactly, should they get their compensation? Presumably from descendants of those who perpetrated the original injustice. But a child, we just saw, is a fresh start, a “do-over,” who cannot be held responsible for the sins of her forebears. It seems very unjust to demand recompense from someone who is in no way responsible for the injustice in question.

Nor, though it’s more complex, is it obvious that the descendant of the original victim should actually be entitled to anything, period, especially as the generations go on. If a new child is not responsible for the sins of her ancestors, neither is she deserving of any of the merits or blessings of the ancestor; nor is she automatically entitled, by virtue of being born, to restitution of something that may have once belonged to them or compensation for something that may have happened to them. Obviously where there is some concrete property in question and a relevant enduring legal system in place there may be laws governing inheritance and restitution, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. The fact that something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything. I didn’t suffer the loss, after all, and nothing was taken from me; I was born long after, into the new reality created subsequent to the loss—a fresh start.

Of course an objector might imagine here a counterfactual such as, “Well, if the loss hadn’t occurred then I would have been born into a better situation, so I did after all suffer the loss myself.” If so, then she might be entitled to restitution or compensation.

Perhaps, but this objection opens up a whole set of problems. Once you open the counterfactuals then almost anything goes. If the loss hadn’t occurred then many things would have been different, a whole other course of life would have ensued, and who can know what that may have included? Perhaps in this new course of life your grandfather would have been hit by a truck or died of a heart attack and never sired your parent, so you would never have been born—but if you owe your very existence to the loss you can hardly claim that the loss harmed you! Or perhaps if the loss hadn’t occurred you would have ended up far worse than you in fact are, so the loss actually improved your condition. Millions of people have become refugees and ended up resettling elsewhere, where their children, or grandchildren, eventually end up with much better lives than they would have had had the ancestors stayed put. Even if we grant that the historical loss resulted in a negative outcome for you, it’s not clear that that outcome can be blamed entirely or even maximally on the loss itself. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, for example, even where we grant that their contemporary conditions are poor, should we blame those conditions on the 1948 war—or on the 75 years of their mistreatment and mismanagement since, at the hands (for example) of the refugee agency UNRWA and the many Arab states who resisted their rehabilitation and resettlement?

Moreover, why isolate and emphasize only that single counterfactual concerning your grandfather? What if your grandfather himself had acquired the thing in question by some unjust means? Or inherited it from people higher up the ancestral ladder who had done so? As you go up the ladder there are surely many injustices to be found, perhaps in great quantities, particularly given the long history of human warfare across the globe. If you insist that the descendant of the person who stole it from your grandfather doesn’t have rightful claim to it, then what happens to your grandfather’s claim to it if he only had it because one of his ancestors had stolen it from another? Shall we go all the way back to the 7th-century Muslim Arab conquest of the Land of Israel, which took the land ultimately from (say) the descendants of the 1st-century Roman conquest of the Land of Israel, which took it from the Jews? Shouldn’t we in that case give it all back to the Jews, or the descendants thereof? If we insist on “root causes,” shouldn’t we go all the way back to the roots?

So, yes, maybe you would have been born into a better situation had one particular injustice not occurred—but you equally might have been born into a worse situation had all sorts of other older injustices not occurred. If you are contemplating counterfactuals and thus undoing history, justice requires undoing them all.

If your grandparents did something unjust to my grandparents, then, that does not automatically give me a claim against you: you didn’t do anything, and I didn’t suffer anything. More broadly, the fact that one community did something unjust toward another community does not entail that all future generations of the latter have any legitimate claims against all future generations of the former. In fact if we go quantitative and acknowledge the enormous growth in the relevant populations over time, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that demanding compensation from later descendants of the original injustice-doers would end up perpetrating against them an even greater injustice than the original one their ancestors perpetrated. And it could hardly be just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

Let us repeat that point:

It is not just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

5. Still Not Convinced?

Even if you still have some intuition that later descendants of injustice-victims should have such claims, trying to accommodate those claims would literally be both impossible to do and a formula for disaster. If we inherit both the sins and the claims of our ancestors then we will live in a perpetual Hatfields v McCoys world in which everyone ultimately has a claim against everyone else. World history both distant and recent features massive injustices on inconceivable scales; as Arab intellectual Hussain Abdul-Hussain has put it on social media, everybody’s grandfather lost something, so everybody will have various, multiple claims to compensation. Even restricting ourselves to the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict (IPJAMC), even where we’re (counterfactually) granting that the Jews came from outside and took over via ethnic cleansing, who exactly were these perpetrator Jews? In the standard anti-Israel narrative these Jews came from Europe—whence they fled overwhelmingly as refugees escaping the massive injustice of persecution and pogroms. A simple glance at 19th century European antisemitism, culminating in mass-murderous pogroms of 1881 and 1903 among others (not to mention in 1930s Germany and the Holocaust), will easily demonstrate that. In addition to these Jews of course were the hundreds of thousands who fled Arab and Islamic persecution and pogroms across the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many lives and much property behind. These Jews were all victims of injustice, even if, on the anti-Israel narrative, they then victimized the innocent Palestinian Arabs. How can one demand today’s Israelis compensate today’s Palestinian Arabs without also demanding that most Middle East and North African countries compensate the Israelis? Throw in the fact that many Arabs themselves emigrated from those countries to Palestine in the 20th century and they, and/or their immediate relatives, may well even have participated in the persecution of the Jews who fled those countries. So today’s Palestinians also owe something to today’s Israeli Jews!

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. To look backward, to maintain and pursue all those claims, is only a formula for propagating violence and instability.

All the more so when we step a bit closer to reality, acknowledging the actual long history of Jews in the Land of Israel and remembering that at the time of the U.N. Partition proposal’s passing in November of 1947 there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism itself, in other words, displaced no one. There was, in fact, room enough for everyone in Palestine, until the Arabs launched the civil war and then the multi-Arab-army international war. In the process one percent of the Jewish population lost their lives, tens of thousands were injured, Jews were ethnically cleansed from those parts of the land that Egypt and Jordan conquered, and so on. So even if the Jewish immigration into the land (which displaced no one) were itself an injustice, consider the disproportionate injustice then perpetrated against them in the murderous military and terrorist activity that followed. If the Arab descendants of 1948 have a legitimate claim against the Jews of 2023, again, then surely the Jews of 2023 have similarly legitimate claims against their contemporary Arabs.

So there may well have been some massive injustice in the past. But it’s literally impossible to undo that injustice, and any efforts to compensate for the injustice will only perpetrate further, almost surely greater injustices, if not directly sink the region into the pre-modern Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, in which everybody loses.

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. And so unless we accept the idea that every new child is a fresh start, then everybody has a claim against everybody and all is lost.

(part 2)


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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

We've discussed before the strange phenomenon of so many philosophers through history who were also antisemitic. 

It's hard to know why this is, but I pointed out that philosophers often think that they are smarter, better and have more insight into subjects than the dumb masses, and this hubris extends into the idea that they think that anything they come up with must be assumed to be correct.

Brian Leiter is a philosopher and legal scholar who is a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and founder and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. He wrote a pithy post on his blog, which he says is the "world's most popular philosophy blog."
The biggest threat to free speech on campus and academic freedom consistently comes from the pro-Israel interest groups.  They are running scared because they realize that far too many of Israel's actions can not withstand public scrutiny.
He's referring to the Leila Khaled incident, of course. 

Interestingly, any first year student of logic could see that his second sentence is not at all implied from the first. The idea that not wanting a PFLP terrorist to be honored by a university is somehow really a fear that she is going to say something damning about Israel that we cannot read in the newspaper (or philosophy blog) is absurd and doesn't stand even five seconds of analysis.

Not that his first sentence is true either. There is at least as much of a threat to free speech by the Left. Even Leiter writes about cancel culture which is primarily a Leftist phenomenon. How many campus Middle East Studies departments have hosted Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria? If free speech is the goal, then why is the only speech allowed on most campuses so tilted against Israel?

It is undoubtedly true that Jews living in their ancestral homeland are far more likely to have their speech suppressed on campus than Palestinian terrorists. 

Two sentences. The first one has no basis in reality, and the second one does not logically follow the first. That's a pretty bad track record for a philosopher.

Leiter links to an article about the Leila Khaled event from Academe Blog. That article is not as bad, although it incorrectly refers to the incident as "censorship." It isn't.

Censorship is the suppression of speech because it is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Yet the objection to Khaled's talk wasn't about the content of her talk, but about her being an objectionable person - inviting an unrepentant terrorist whose support of violence against the innocent has not changed for five decades is as inappropriate as inviting a proud  racist or rapist on campus. This is obvious because no one I am aware of objected to the other anti-Israel speakers at that webinar. 

Moreover, Khaled has nothing original to say. Her words would have been the same socialist anti-Israel garbage that is said every day among the "woke" - it isn't as offensive as it is boring. 

At least the Academe blog has enough intellectual honesty to point out that progressives engage in censorship as well:
For those on the left who demand that tech companies censor speech they think are wrong or offensive, this is a chilling reminder that censorship is a dangerous weapon that can be turned against progressives. 

Leiter, with all his philosophy and legal credentials, flattens what could be a nuanced discussion of how different groups try to influence discussion into a very one-dimensional assertion of "Zionists bad." 

And for someone who is such an opponent of censorship and advocate of free speech, it is curious that Leiter does not allow comments on his blog. Perhaps he has the fear of truth that he imputes to Zionists. 

(h/t Dan P)



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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

  • Wednesday, March 27, 2019
  • Elder of Ziyon
In the New York Times' philosophy column, Laurie Shrage points out a provocative point: Most major Western philosophers were antisemites.

We commonly assume that anti-Semitism and related attitudes are a product of ignorance and fear, or fanatical beliefs, or some other irrational force. But it is by now well known that some of the most accomplished thinkers in modern societies have defended anti-Semitic views. For instance, several of the major Enlightenment philosophers — including Hume, Voltaire and Kant — developed elaborate justifications for anti-Semitic views. One common thread running through the work of these philosophers is an attempt to diminish the influence of Judaism or the Jewish people on European history....

When the anti-Semitic views of great thinkers such as Kant, Voltaire or Hume (or Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, for that matter) are exposed, one typical response is to question whether these prejudices are integral to their important works and ideas. But this may be the wrong question. A better question is: Should those who teach their works and ideas in the 21st century share them without mentioning the harmful stereotypes these thinkers helped to legitimize?
Shrage then goes on to point out that Western philosophy classes still generally favor Christian philosophers over "non-Western" philosophers and that this bias needs to be corrected.

This is undoubtedly true, but she misses the point as well. Saying "All Philosophers Matter" is as unsatisfying a response to antisemitism in philosophy as "All Lives Matter" is as a response to antisemitic attacks.

For better or for worse, people who are regarded as being at the pinnacle of human knowledge have too often fallen prey to the lowest form or prejudice. How can that be?

Shrage minimizes the problem by calling it mere politics: "The anti-Semitic theories of Hume, Voltaire and Kant show that philosophy has rarely, if ever, been insulated from politics," she concludes.

Hate is much more than politics and Shrage is avoiding the real question.

My guess as to how philosophers could so easily justify antisemitism is related to Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, something taught to all first year philosophy students.

Briefly, the allegory goes like this: Most of humanity are chained into a cave where they face a wall and there is a fire behind them that they cannot see. Sometimes people pass between the fire and the wall, casting shadows, and the people see those shadows and assume that they reflect reality - they make up theories based on the shadows and they are comfortable with their limited knowledge. A philosopher is the only one who sees the truth, who knows that there is a fire and an entire world out there - the only one who sees reality.

It is a very nice allegory. But that doesn't mean that it reflects the truth.

However, built in to this allegory is the hubris that philosophers are uniquely wise and anyone who disagrees with their words are simple and dumb, people who insist that the shadows are reality. When your entire self-perception is one where you are gifted and others are too stupid to see, then you gain a very large blind spot in your thinking. You start to think that everything you say is uniquely brilliant and that those who don't "get it" are inferior anyway and their opinions don't matter.

Bigotry goes hand in hand with egoism. The better you think you are, the bigger the blind spots you have to your own shortcomings - including bigotry.

We see the same thing with academics who spew the most ridiculous garbage freely and public it at will and who don't deign to consider the opinions of those who disagree as not being the "experts" they think they are.  We see it with self-proclaimed "progressives" who are so certain that their moral sensitivities towards some forms of racism do not allow them to possibly hold antisemitic attitudes - and they deride those who point them out as being racists themselves.

One gets the impression that the professor of philosophy who wrote this column is not willing to think about the idea that perhaps a Hume or a Kant's philosophy that includes and justifies hatred of Jews could be entirely wrong in their methodology or their thinking. Or it could be a huge blind spot. Either way, the issue that these philosophers created elaborate justifications for hating Jews, and that these justifications can be seen today to be completely wrong, should take the air out of the balloon of philosophers as wise and beyond reproof.

If institutions of higher learning are interested in their members pursuing the truth without blind spots, perhaps they should invest in courses in humility. These classes that teach how the top people in each field (including hard sciences) have fallen to bias, bias that they were too blind to see because of their hubris and the lack of willingness to listen to other points of view.  If we want to do better we need to learn from the mistakes of those who came before us.

If Kant can screw up so badly, then we all can. But if we know how badly our role models have screwed up, we are closer to knowing how to avoid those mistakes in our own lives and careers. That is the lesson to be learned from the antisemitic philosophers - and from the haters who hide behind morality or "expertise" today.




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Monday, January 14, 2019

The Jewish God Questionby Andrew Pessin, is a very readable compendium that briefly describes the philosophy of dozens of Jewish thinkers over the centuries, from Philo to today.

Over 70 Jewish philosophers are given a short chapter or two (or three). Each chapter is two pages long. Pessin manages to take key points of their thinking and condense them into very few pages.

The book is divided into four parts: pre-Maimonides, Maimonides to Sforno, Spinoza to the 20th century and contemporary Jewish philosophy. Many of the philosophers are within the traditional rabbinic Jewish framework, and many are not.

The Jewish God Question mostly sticks to Jewish thought as a reaction to, or in consonance with, ancient Greek philosophy. Hence, Philo is the first Jewish philosopher who grappled (and tried to synthesize Jewish thinking) with Greek philosophy. There is a large time gap between Philo and the next Jewish philosopher mentioned, Saadia (ben Joseph) Gaon, who similarly tried to make Jewish thinking compatible with rational observation. Pessin shows how Saadia Gaon uses logic to prove that the universe must have had a beginning, as opposed to the prevailing philosophy that it had been there forever, for example.

To give you an idea of what the book is like, here is Chapter 1:



Pessin doesn't only speak about these philosophers' thoughts about God but also about how they look at the Torah, free will vs. predetermination, and the land of Israel.

On the latter theme, for example, he describes the thinking of Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, a 19th century Orthodox rabbi and philosopher who strongly urges Jews to move to Israel, buy land and build farms and communities before the Messiah comes - a proto-Zionism that predates Herzl (also in the book) by some three decades.

But, Pessin notes, he wasn't the first philosopher to urge Jews to return to Israel. That may have been Judah Halevi (12th century CE) where he said that Jews can only achieve our purpose by returning to Israel and rebuilding Jerusalem. One of the chapters on the Ramban (Nachmanides) notes that he also believes that there is a mitzvah for Jews to return to the land.

The book is a fascinating journey through Jewish thought of all stripes. As Pessin points out, it is difficult to read about the German Jewish philosophers of the 19th century who convinced themselves that they were finally being accepted as equals in an enlightened Europe. The founding thinkers of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements are also given chapters.  The modern philosophers' section provide a nice overview of the diversity of the field today, as well as the influence of the Holocaust, the State of Israel and modern liberal thought on today's Jewish philosophy.

Too often I'd read a chapter and think, yeah, that makes sense. Then I'd read another from a bitter opponent of the first and think, yeah, that makes sense too. This book is a toe-tip in an ocean.

The book also introduces Samuel Lebens, a philosopher at the University of Haifa, who writes the afterword and sounds like the kind of guy I'd love to have over for Shabbat. In his afterword he defines two threads that define Jewish philosophy throughout the centuries: the idea of encountering thoughts and ideas and God - not just looking at them as museum pieces but wrestling with them. In fact, I found it fascinating that Lebens describes Jewish philosophers of the past in present-tense terms, which is the way that generations of Jewish yeshiva students have discussed the opinions of rabbis of the past.

The second thread that Lebens describes is the idea of objective truth, which is under assault in postmodern thought. Lebens sees this as pernicious.

I would have loved to have seen a brief biography of the philosophers whose thoughts were detailed here so I could put their thinking in more historic perspective, as well as who argued with them.

But altogether it is a wonderful and accessible introduction to Jewish philosophy, and it will make you think.






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Monday, July 10, 2017

The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture
Yoram Hazony
Cambridge University Press
2012

I was inspired to read this work as I responded to an article by David Hazony, Yoram's brother, on how to keep young Westerners interested in Judaism. Rather than concentrate on importing Israeli values into the West, which I believe is only a stopgap, I felt that there was a lot of intellectual appeal to Judaism that is outside the traditional Orthodox/yeshiva framework that has not been exploited, and I used this book as an example of how Judaism can be made relevant to the next generation.

But of course I needed to read it myself to make sure that what I said was true. And I am very glad I did.

Yoram Hazony's work here is a challenge to many basic beliefs and ideas that are widely held..

First of all, it is a challenge to traditional philosophy. In Hazony's telling, there has been a huge divide in Western culture between Scripture and classical philosophy and , the first being identified with "revelation" and the latter with "reason." For the last several centuries, "reason" has been elevated and "revelation" denigrated in academia.

Hazony demolishes this idea from two directions. He shows how some influential Greek philosophers framed their own ideas in terms of "revelation." But more importantly, he shows how Western thought has mistakenly conflated Christian Scripture, which indeed is revelation, and Hebrew Scripture, which Hazony argues is far more inclined towards reason. He gives many examples of how God punishes people for doing things that they were never explicitly commanded against, and rewarded for things they were never commanded to do, in stories such as Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Sodom, Shifra and Pua and many others. In these cases it is expected by Hebrew Scripture that people would know what the right thing to do is by using only their own logic.

Hazony shows that Jeremiah holds his own against the Greek philosophers and indicates that the only reason he is not studied with the same attention as a philosopher is because of the idea that the entire Bible has nothing relevant to say about reason. He dedicates an entire chapter on Jeremiah's epistemology.

Hazony also writes a tour de force on the differences between how philosophers have understood truth up until recently and how the Biblical authors understood it, in a way that only now the Western world is catching up to. Very briefly, Hazony shows that from Aristotle onwards, "truth" has been defined as a quality of speech agrees with reality (correspondence theory.) But in Hebrew Scriptures "truth" is a radically different idea - "truth" applies not only to speech but to objects and ideas directly.

Hazony postulates that the Hebrew words normally translated as  "truth" and "belief" (emet and emunah) are cognates of each other - something I am not yet convinced of - but he does make a strong case that both words in Hebrew Scripture are different aspects of trustworthiness or reliability. He masterfully hinges his proof that the Hebrew Scripture does not distinguish between word and object with the word "davar" which means both. "Devarim" (plural) are what can be true or false (sheker) , and the only way that a "davar" can be considered true is if it is found to be what it is supposed to be after time and circumstances allow one to see the big picture.   (I hope this oversimplification is not inaccurate.)

Only in the last century has philosophy started ti question the idea of the independence of words and reality - yet Judaism always understood the two to be related if not identical.

Secondly, and in a related fashion, this book is a challenge to Christian thought. Hazony highlights the definition of "faith" created by early Church thinker Tertullian, who not only highlights the difference between faith and reason but exults in it, almost bragging that the basic ideas of Christianity are absurd to men of reason. "...You have discovered what they are will you find anything to be so foolish as believing in a God that has been born, and that of a virgin, and of a fleshly nature too, who wallowed in all the before-mentioned humiliations of nature? ... Other matters for shame find I none which can prove me to be shameless in a good sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own contempt of shame. The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible."

Jewish Scripture does not think like Tertullian. There is no catechism in the Hebrew Scripture that describes everything that must be believed, as Christianity has. On the contrary, the characters in the Hebrew Scripture must work hard to understand the ways of God and even the best of them, Moses, could only glimpse a tiny aspect of them. God's wisdom described in the Hebrew Scripture, or at least a great part of it, is attainable by man through thinking.

Finally, this work is a challenge to traditional Orthodox yeshiva-type thinking. Hazony creates what can only be called a "hiddush" (novelty) in claiming that the Hebrew Scripture makes a distinction between shepherds, who symbolize creativity and even disobedience, with farmers/city builders who symbolize adherence and kingdoms, which the Torah is suspicious of. God instructed man to toil in the fields in his curse after the sin of Adam and Eve, but Abel chose to be a shepherd instead - and God preferred his offering over Cain's. The shepherds, from Abel through Abraham and Moses and David, are not shy about challenging God - and God likes them and rewards them for it. This is not a point that one will be taught in a yeshiva or seminary, but Hazony buttresses his argument well.

Altogether, this is a very important and challenging work. yet it is only meant as an introduction and framework for what hopefully will be a much larger field of philosophy (and, Hazony emphasizes, political theory) based on Hebrew sources.

My point that I made in my earlier article mentioning this book stands: Judaism can offer a great deal of knowledge and wisdom to non-religious Jews. This is, I believe, the key to making Judaism relevant again - the source material from thousands of years ago is relevant today and yet that aspect of it is ignored by most non-religious Jews (and plenty of religious Jews as well.)

For those who like to think, I highly recommend this book.



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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The New York Times has a feature called "The Stone" which is supposed to be "a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. "

Its latest installment bashes Zionism. Philosophically, of course.

Omri Boehm,  an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, starts off the way any good propagandist does, by defining his terms initially in order to come to his foregone conclusion:
Zionism [is] a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.
How so?
To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clinton’s words from the second presidential debate: “It is important for us as a policy not to say, as Donald has said, we’re going to ban people based on a religion. How do you do that? We are a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.” Here Clinton establishes a minimum standard of liberal decency that few American Jews would be inclined to deny. But she is not the incoming president. Trump’s willingness to reject this standard is now a cause for alarm among Jewish communities, along with those of other American minorities.

Yet insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion.
Boehm, knowing his audience is American, purposefully defines American values as the "minimum standard of liberal decency." Which means that any country that favors one religion or national group over another is, if you buy Boehm's  definition of liberalism, indecent.

Yet Denmark, England, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and many other countries have, to varying degrees, state religions.

Many European nations have citizenship laws that favor descendants of those who originally came from their countries over all others. Germany, Hungary and Italy allow people to become citizens after many generations.

Very few nations pass Boehm's test of the "minimum standard of liberal decency."

Moreover, Israel's laws protecting freedom of religion are no less liberal than those of any other nation. While France bans burkinis and Switzerland bans minarets, Israel does neither.

Worse, Boehm's essay at no point acknowledges that Jews are not just a religion - but a nation. And the Jewish people have the same right to self-determination as any other nation.

Of course there is a tension between Zionism and liberalism, but that doesn't mean that a Zionist state must be by definition illiberal, as Boehm claims. Zionism is not by any means "rooted in the denial of liberal politics." It is an obvious lie. Zionism from the outset recognized the rights of all citizens in the Jewish state.

There is a tension between democracy and liberalism as well  - because people can vote for leaders and laws that are not liberal. There is tension between liberalism and patriotism. There is a lot of tension between classical liberalism that emphasizes liberty above all and the type of big-government liberalism espoused by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. You can find tension between liberalism and the actual practices of every nation on Earth if you bother to look. But tension does not mean that any of these other situations are the antithesis of liberalism.  A real philosopher would know that.

In fact, Boehm does know this, but he creates a false definition of Zionism as illiberal at the outset because he wants to claim that US Jews who support Israel must be betraying their liberalism by definition. And Boehm has an agenda that is more akin to propaganda than education.

Boehm, the supposed philosopher, asserts that Zionists are now flocking to support antisemites and racists and bigots, using a startling lack of logic for a philosopher, pretending that any commonality between some Israelis and European nationalist parties or Christian Zionists is proof of Zionism's inherent illiberalism.   Boehm's simplistic proofs could be summarized as "A member of Israel's ruling coalition says good things about someone whose party's origins originally included antisemitic ideas - therefore Israel itself is embracing antisemitism." His flat statements that today's evangelical Zionists are antisemitic, or that people like Geert Wilders are antisemites, are simply wrong, and yet that is a core part of his argument.

Boehm says:
 Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. But if you reject Zionism because you reject the double standard, organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the Jewish Federations of North America would denounce you as anti-Semitic.
In plain English, this means that Boehm holds that his concept of liberalism clashes with the Jewish people's right to self-determination. Since Jews aren't a nation, in Boehm's estimation, they only have religious rights, not national rights. This is arguably far more antisemitic than  anything that today's Right (not the alt-right, that Boehm takes pains to conflate with Zionism) espouses.

Yet is it Boehm's example of what he regards as the "original sin" of illiberal Zionism that proves something a little different than he intends:
[It] is Friedman’s own politics — and the politics of the government that he supports — that’s continuous with anti-Semitic principles and collaborates with anti-Semitic politics.
The “original sin” of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with “Herr Hitler” on “solving the Jewish question” by achieving a “Jewish free Europe.” The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the “settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.” To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German’s “war efforts,” and establish a Jewish state on a “national and totalitarian basis,” which will be “bound by treaty with the German Reich.”

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible. But such tendencies must be rejected. They reinforce the same logic by which the letter itself was written: the sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism. 
When this letter was written, Stern's assumption was that Hitler did not want to systematically exterminate the Jews, but wanted to encourage them to leave Europe.

It is truly obscene to describe Stern's desperate effort to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis as an inherent Zionist affinity with Nazism. In fact, Stern was known to explicitly compare Hitler to Haman.

But  Boehm is even worse than misrepresenting Stern. Stern's offer to collaborate with Germany to save thousands of Jews was anomalous. From the right to the left, the Zionist movement opposed Nazi Germany from the beginning. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote strident anti-German articles. Mainstream Labor Zionists equally abhorred the Nazis. And, of course, the Zionist  Jews of Palestine actually did join the war effort against Germany, and none of them fought for Germany - unlike some other people in the region.

It is instructive that Boehm digs up this little-known episode as the paradigm of Zionism's supposed affinity with anti-semitism.

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on problematic anecdotes about a single member of that group?

You would call him a bigot.

You would certainly not call him liberal.

Boehm doesn't compare Israel's liberalism against that of Western Europe. He doesn't mention the undeniably liberal social policies in Israel. He doesn't mention that Israel, even while being the Jewish state, cannot discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens by law. He doesn't mention that in many ways, the "indecent" Zionist state is more liberal than the US.

Because Boehm is not a liberal. He is a bigot who is using the language of liberalism to attack and insult a specific group of people he finds distasteful, and he justifies his hate after the fact by cherry-picking examples that do not represent the group at all. And his agenda is to shame American Jews into hating the only liberal state in the Middle East and sympathize with Israel's very, very illiberal enemies.

This isn't the first time he has written for the New York Times philosophy column. By sheer coincidence, out of the four columns he has written, all four included anti-Zionist components.

This climactic essay of the series shows that Omri Boehm is projecting his own irrational and pathological hatred of Zionism onto Zionist Jews themselves.

Maybe the New York Times should start a psychology column to evaluate the underlying biases of its columnists. This sort of analysis is needed a lot more than bigotry pretending to be philosophy.




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