What Makes a Liberal? Plus, the Ugly Separation of Religion and Morality

Continued from page 1

Happy Birthday, Moses
March 7, 2006 5:35 p.m.

Today, interestingly, happens to be the anniversary of both the birth and the death of Moses (1393-1273 BCE). This is according to Biblical tradition, which teaches that the greatest saints have the merit both of being born and of dying on the same calendar date--in this instance the 7th day of the Hebrew month of Adar.

So while we’re at it, a thought on the two tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses famously brought down from Mount Sinai.

I’m wrapping up a book now on that subject: Shattered Tablets: What the Ten Commandments Reveal About American Culture and Its Discontents (Doubleday). One theme of the book is supplied by an ancient teaching, from the rabbinic work Mechilta, that God gave the Decalogue on matching twin tablets, instead of on one (which would have been just as easy--use a smaller typeface), to show the correspondence between the commandments on the first with those on the second. What’s more, the correspondence is linear, matching each commandment with the other on the facing tablet. My spin is that when a culture disregards those first five it will also disregard the second five, and I back this up from other very old works of Biblical tradition.

Reading the Decalogue this ways produces a series of if-then statements, reading across: If a culture neglects the First Commandment it will neglect the Sixth. If it neglects the Second, it will neglect the Seventh. And so on.

I’m writing about the Tenth Commandment now, which forbids coveting. The corresponding commandment on the first tablet is the Fifth, about honoring your father and mother. How does dishonoring parents lead to coveting?

I’d love to get your thoughts on this. Here’s one morsel for your consideration, which occurred to me while I was reading Helmut Schoeck’s fascinating book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.

Coveting or envy doesn’t mean simply wanting luxuries that you can buy at a store. It means resenting the privileges of others and wishing to see their wealth or other gifts taken away or ruined. As Schoeck argues, one measure of envy is taxation levels so high that it’s obvious the purpose is to take the privileged down a notch or two by redistributing their wealth. The death tax, on estates, is a great example of this. That money was taxed a long time ago already, when it was earned. The only reason to tax it again is pure envy.

Those who have the money are eager to go along with such a tax scheme because there is an ancient fear, in almost every culture, of envy and its baleful effects. Often this is called the evil eye. The wealthy and gifted often seek to appease this sinister spiritual force by actively supporting socialism.

What’s this got to do with honoring mom and pop? Everything. In a redistributionist tax system, we take people’s money and give it to strangers--the more, the better. This is socialism in a nutshell. It’s also the exact opposite of the way generosity and charity are supposed to work. In the Biblical model, which the great medieval sage Maimonides codified, there is a clear scale of priorities for charitable giving.

First, you give to those in your family who are in need, starting with your parents. Then those in your city, assuming there’s anything left over. Then those in your country. Then finally, in the very unlikely case there’s leftovers, those in other countries. But the priority is parents.

The Fifth Commandment is defined primarily as a matter of taking care of your mother and father in their agedness and their infirmity, caring for their material needs. It also directs us to honor our parents, not other people’s parents.

In a welfare state, or a state like ours where billions are handed out overseas yearly, this whole Biblical hierarchy is turned on its head. Taxes are farmed, our money is seized, and then handed out with no consideration to the relationship between giver and receiver. The members of our family have no priority to receive the money taken from us.

So you see that an envy-based society, one that discards the Tenth Commandment, is predicated on first having discarded the Fifth Commandment. A true welfare state can never take root in a culture that truly honors parents.

Happy birthday, Moses!

In the intra-religious wars over homosexuality, the really interesting question is what drives those clergy who--having inherited a conservative and Bible-based tradition--avert their eyes and through force of will

that their tradition is far more “progressive” than it is.

By way of illustration, the

informs us that Tuesday and Wednesday of this week the Jewish Law and Standards committee of “Conservative Judaism” is meeting to decide whether to embrace gay matrimony. Now, for those who don’t know, Conservative Judaism is the shrinking middle-of-the-road Jewish denomination that’s forever trying to triangulate a position between left-wing Reform, which is utterly cut loose from the ancient mooring of the Hebrew Bible, and Orthodoxy, which maintains that God actually gave the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Conservative Judaism isn’t conservative at all, it’s political, always defined by a look over the shoulder at what the other guys are doing.

Before long, Conservative Judaism will gave way to cultural pressures, abandon the Hebrew Bible’s crystal clear viewpoint on the question of homosexual relations (the famous

and bend itself into the necessary pretzel to make gay marriage kosher for Conservative synagogues.

I liked the comment of one Conservative rabbi and professor at the denomination’s Jewish Theological Seminary, Burton L. Visotzky: “There are so many laws in the Torah about sexual behavior that we [Conservative Jews] choose to ignore, so when we zero in on this one, I have to wonder what’s really behind it.”

Good question!

It’s not as if gay people of Jewish or any other ethnic background have no place to go in the event that they wish to get married before a clergyperson. Plenty of men and women with beautiful robes and sonorous voices will be delighted to bless their union in a building that looks exactly like a church or a synagogue. No problem! So why must Conservative Judaism, or the Episcopal Church--or fill in here the name of the latest once-traditional denomination that’s blowing in the wind on the gay issue--now join the mad clerical rush to ol’ Brokeback?

Get us to the pup tent on time! But why?

Is it simply and purely compassion at work? Is there just absolutely no way to adhere to the integrity and truth of the plain-as-day Scriptural text while simultaneously maintaining an attitude of kindness, empathy, understanding, and love for Jack and Ennis and all others born with an inclination to homosexuality?

I don’t believe so. And

--very compassionate and very understanding--from a distinguished Orthodox rabbi, Aharon Feldman, to a Jewish gay returnee (

) to Jewish tradition proves it. The subject is repentance (

). I love, especially, Rabbi Feldman’s citation from Isaiah 56:4-5. (Thanks to Rabbi Adlerstein at

for the link.)

So if it’s not necessarily pure love and compassion that drives liberal clergy, what is it?

Cynicism about Biblical tradition? That’s part of it. Cowardice? Certainly: a fear of what others will say if you stand up to secular culture, which right now has a lot more prestige than religious culture does. However the

, the

, to applaud homosexual relations isn’t fully explained this way.

What I just said about the

of the matter may come closer to the truth. In liberal clerical circles, just like in Hollywood, there is a hunger for respect. After all, the key point about liberal churches today is that they are dying. They can barely fill their pews. Indeed, Conservative Judaism shrunk from 43 to 33 percent of America’s religiously affiliated Jews between 1990 and 2000. This is a denomination on the ropes.

Nobody gets less respect than a Conservative rabbi--who theoretically has the job of instructing his congregation about Jewish observance but who is rarely listened to. In many a Conservative synagogue, the rabbi is the only one who keeps kosher or even minimally keeps the Sabbath. He doesn’t dare admonish his own employers (the members of the synagogue) on such matters.

Like a Hollywood actor, the liberal clergyman, Jewish or Christian, wishes to seem serious, at the cutting edge on important social issues. For reasons beyond the scope of today’s post, secular culture attaches prestige to the opinion that gay sex is great and condemnation to the view that it may not be so great.

To be a liberal rabbi or minister today is to be continually chasing the sense of respect that you thought you’d been promised in seminary or divinity school but that the members of the congregation you serve simply don’t give you. It’s all very sad and pathetic. Poor guys and gals! They deserve our sympathy no less than gays and lesbians.

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus
March 7, 2006 4:40 p.m.

Excuse the shameless personal plug. My current book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, comes out today in paperback. Buy it here.

In brief, what I do is distinguish the comparatively weak reasons for rejecting Jesus (especially what I call the "resume" issue that one hears about from groups like Jews for Judaism, i.e. Did he do what the prophets say the Messiah will do?) from the irrefutable reasons (which get less attention).

For me, the top three reasons are:

1. Jesus’ and Paul’s voiding of the terms of what the Bible presents as an eternal covenant, centered on the 613 Biblical commandments that Paul, in particular, rejected;

2. What Jesus and Paul offer that’s positive--and of course there’s a lot--is something Jews already had, which renders the Christian message superfluous to us; and

3. The Bible explicitly gives Jews a mission as a priestly kingdom to educate the world about God, and this assumes an eternal and separate people of Israel -- on whose existence, however, Christianity acts as a powerful solvent or acid. Historically, Jewish families and communities that accept Jesus have invariably disappeared from the community of Israel. They erase themselves from history. This last point is particularly painful for culturally Jewish “Messianic Jews” to hear, but there are 2,000 years of empirical evidence behind it.

There’s more information on my website. If you get a chance to read the book, please give me your feedback, attempted counter-refutations, etc.

War on Woody?
March 6, 2006 3:45 p.m.

Thank you, Beliefnet, for the opportunity to offend the tender sensibilities of your liberal readers from today through the end of the week! Let’s get down to business with an appreciation of what a deeply and subversively right-wing book the Bible is - taking as our occasion a line in Woody Allen’s underappreciated "Match Point," which last night failed to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.

The movie is excellent and edge-of-chair suspenseful, notwithstanding a very unfortunate culture war message. In "Match Point," a struggling London tennis pro marries a sweet-but-boring upper-class girl for her money while carrying on a dangerous affair with a sexy American actress. Woody Allen’s basic concept is that all of life is governed by luck. In the opening shot, a tennis game is won or lost based on whether the ball, hesitating on the edge of the net for a moment, falls in one direction or other. The film’s climax, involving a murder investigation, is also determined by which way a small object balanced on the edge of a railing falls. Nothing but chance!

Says the adulterous protagonist in a restaurant scene where Woody Allen defines the whole message he’s trying to articulate: "Scientists are confirming more and more that existence is here by blind chance, no purpose, no design."