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Edward Bernard Glick is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia, and author of "Between Israel and Death". His email is
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By Edward Bernard Glick
February 25, 2007
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There is a new Jewish sociology in America today: Consumed with gratuitous guilt, more and more Jews are preoccupied with Tikkun Olam (the Repair the World). As proof, they cite Hillel's apothegm in Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?" However, while they quote Hillel incessantly, they do not really understand him.
Hillel purposely chose "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" as the first sentence in his triad of thoughts. However, by inverting Hillel's first two sentences, these Jews demonstrate their politically-correct relationship to the universe: For them, every single issue is a Jewish issue. Traditional Jewish concerns, like group survival, are passé. Instead, Jews must now concern themselves with conservatism, capitalism, racism, sexism, feminism, imperialism, hegemonism, pacifism -- Rabbinic ethics reject pacifism as meaningful a response to violence -- multiculturalism, universalism, environmentalism, and what can be called Darfurism.
Darfurism is an excellent example of their confusion over word and deed.
With some 200,000 people dead and some 2.5 million displaced, made possible in large part by Chinese arms and material shipments, genocide is occurring in Darfur. But what, besides sermonizing on pulpits, writing letters to editors, and demonstrating in the streets, do Jews want America to do about it? Do they want Washington to break relations with Beijing, which is America's second largest trading partner and which supplies Americans with the well-made, low-cost goods they crave?
Since political pressure, economic sanctions, and moral suasion do not work in such a place (as they did not work in Nazi Germany), do they want the United States to send troops? Do they want to volunteer for military service in Darfur? Do they want other people to volunteer? Do they want America to revive conscription so that it can have enough soldiers to respond to future Darfurs? Do they want NATO to send troops? Do they want the UN to send troops? Do they want Israel send troops?
But so many young American many Jews loath the military. They claim that "war is never an answer," and that there are no military solutions to anything. Unversed in history, they forget that soldiers, not sermons, stopped the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in the seventeenth century, that soldiers, not sermons, freed the Americans from British tyranny in the eighteenth century, that soldiers, not sermons, emancipated America's slaves in the nineteenth century, that soldiers, not sermons, liberated the remnants of Hitler's Holocaust in the twentieth century, and that soldiers, not sermons, protect and defend the Jewish state in the twenty-first century.
In short, besides rhetoric, do the Jewish Darfurians have any practical suggestions for stopping the slaughter in the Sudan?
As for Jewish parochialism, one-world Jews often make the case against it in noble terms: "As universalists both in spirit and in ethics, and as a world-scattered people who, except in Israel, always live simultaneously in two cultures, why shouldn't we Jews take the lead in erasing and eliminating narrow national and sectarian differences?"
The Hebrew concept of hemshech -- the continuation of the millennia-long Jewish journey -- is foreign to them. Saving the larger world is much more important than saving the Jewish world, and that includes Israel. While they may not want to see the Jewish state perish, many of them, especially in the professoriate, will not sit shiva if it does.
At a time when intermarriage is rife, when even Jews who marry other Jews have the highest negative birthrate of any subgroup in the United States, when U.S. Jewry is declining in number, percentage, prestige, and power, when Islam seeks to subjugate all other faiths, when the Koran still preaches that "The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies," when Iran threatens Israel with nuclear destruction, when European Jews face levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the days of Adolph Hitler -- what are the present priorities of so many of our spiritual leaders and their congregants?
One rabbi or professor says that his chief concerns are affirmative action, abortion-on-demand, the rights of illegal Mexican immigrants, and the "grave threat" posed by the Christian conservatives, who support Israel passionately, but whom Jews are supposed to shun because these Gentile Zionists are also anti-abortion, anti-gay, and partisans of both President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.
Another believes that global warming is a greater threat than is Islamic terrorism. Still another urges Jews to rush out and buy a Toyota Prius. A fourth wants them to use longer-lasting light bulbs and to become active in COEJL, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, whose catchy slogan is "Protecting Creation, Generation to Generation." COEJL's website proclaims that it "represents 29 national Jewish organizations spanning the full spectrum of Jewish religious and communal life and serves as the voice of the organized Jewish community on environmental issues in Washington, D.C. and around the country." It proclaims as well that it "has put environmental protection on the agenda of the organized Jewish community."
But this is precisely the point: The environment is a problem, but it is not a Jewish problem. It does not belong on the Jewish agenda. As the Israeli Hillel Halkin has written, "there are Jews who care -- as we all should -- about the physical health of the planet we live on. But for that, you don't have to be Jewish." By contrast, Jay Michaelson's article in The Forward, called "Spiritual Pioneers See a Different Shade Of Judaism: Green," rhapsodizes "eco-Judaism."
Eco-Judaism is irrelevant to Judaism and to the Jewish condition. Since American Jews are free to participate in already-existing environmental groups, is it really necessary for them to create another variant of Judaism and to establish, staff, and fund a copycat organization like COEJL?
Pursuing Hillel's vision is a virtue. But any virtue carried to an extreme becomes a vice. One misinterprets Hillel if one concludes that he taught that saving the owls, the trees, the whales, the salmon, the frogs, or even the total environment is more important than saving the Jews. Hillel preached prioritization: Before the Jews can save anything or anyone, they must first save themselves.
By definition and domicile, Diaspora Jews live in two societies simultaneously: their own and the larger one of which they are a part. They take stands every day. But when they pick and choose their stands, they must remember that not every issue is a Jewish one. For if everything is a Jewish issue, then nothing is a Jewish issue. And if nothing is a Jewish issue, who will worry about the Jews, who will fight for the Jews, and who will, when they are bloodied, weep for them?
Views expressed by the author do not
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