How Jewish piety sabotages Jewish self-defense
by Francisco Gil-White
A well rounded social scientific explanation for why so many innocent Jews have been murdered throughout history, and continue to be murdered today, requires an understanding of the forces that cause non-Jews to kill, naturally, but also an understanding of those forces within the Jewish community that make their self-defense less effective than it could be. This series is concerned with the second set of questions. In Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this series I examined the ways in which a good many Jewish leaders sabotage Jewish self-defense. In this installment and the next I will address certain disadvantages of ordinary Jews themselves when it comes to dealing with anti-Jewish terrorist attacks.
Given that there are many significant differences between religious and secular Jews, it has seemed useful to me to examine them separately, so in this piece I will consider certain negative consequences of Jewish religious piety to an effective Jewish self-defense. In the next piece I will consider how certain ideologies common among secular Jews also have negative consequences to the same. It must be kept in mind, however, that some of what I say here is applicable to secular Jews and vice-versa, to different degrees. After all, the center of gravity of Jewish culture is the Jewish religion, and therefore it affects many Jews who profess no allegiance or interest in the Torah. Conversely, though secular Jews are more easily influenced by the ideologies of the Gentile world, religious Jews are surrounded by this world too, and especially through their exposure to secular Jews, and therefore they are not entirely immune to some of the forces that affect secular Jews more strongly.
Naturally, social science needs to do more work on this question, and I offer what follows as a preliminary exploration. Considering the historical record, and also the contemporary situation, it seems to me that the ways in which Jewish piety sabotages Jewish self-defense can be grouped into the following four useful categories, not necessarily exhaustive (click on each title for the full discussion):
1) Inflexible interpretations of the Law of Moses. This includes a radical aversion to the shedding of blood, which leads many Jews to the ethical error -- committed in tragic good faith -- that self-defense is unlawful. It is not.
2) Innocence. The Jewish laws are designed to produce an ethical civilization, and one side effect of growing up under the influence of these laws is a stubborn commitment to the idea that humans are basically good. This is innocence. It is an error, because humans are not basically good; humans are pliable, and they respond to their environments. The ancient Greco-Roman aristocracies, for example, were entire societies of murderers (the men), because this is what their culture brought them up to be (see point 3 on Messianism, for a description of Roman society). It was not impossible for an individual to rebel against such a culture but the point is that it was not easy, and those who didn’t rebel were not basically good. One may certainly argue that such people were victims of their social system, as was the case also with many Nazis, whose minds were poisoned by propaganda, but that still does not make them basically good. The stubborn belief of many Jews that humans are basically good blinds them to the evil that always waits in ambush for them, and this ‘see no evil’ attitude is deadly.
3) Messianism. The Jewish concept of the Messiah is a beautiful idea, but it can make some pious Jews complacent. It can make them think that everything will be okay because surely the Messiah is coming this time. He will come if we believe it passionately enough. Granted, he didn’t come last time, or the time before that, or the time before…, and millions upon millions of Jews died. Granted. But surely he is coming this time. (Never mind that this is what many Jews said last time around.) Too much certainty about the imminent coming of the Messiah can hurt Jewish self-defense.
4) Fatalism. God is in control of history, so let Him do what He will (He must have a Higher Reason for everything He does). This results from a tendency to read the Hebrew Bible as literal history (God is represented in the Bible as the author of historical outcomes). The same tendency leads to the absurd interpretation that the attacks of foreigners against the Jewish people are deserved punishments from God, which produces a deadly defeatism that once again sabotages Jewish self-defense.
CLICK HERE where I discuss each one of these categories. My hope is that Jews can reflect about these cultural/psychological obstacles to their self-defense before it is too late again.
THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE CAN BE READ BY CLICKING HERE
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