Arkush Theocracy, Liberalism, And Modern Judaism

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Theocracy, Liberalism, and Modern Judaism

Allan Arkush

Abstract: The paper examines the efforts of several Jewish thinkers to cope with

the discrepancy between the inherently theocratic principles of their religion and the

modern, liberal ideas with which they wished to bring Judaism into harmony.

It focuses first on Moses Mendelssohns attempt at the end of the eighteenth century

to provide a rationale for the dissolution of Judaisms coercive, collectivist

dimension and to render the Jewish religion fully compatible, in practice, with

liberalism. The next major focus is the recent work of David Novak, who has

sought in different ways to show how one can proceed from traditional Jewish

premises to the endorsement of nonliberal political arrangements that nonetheless

preserve the best of liberalisms achievements. The final focus is on the Israeli

religious thinker Isaiah Leibowitzs widely celebrated but in principle merely

provisional relinquishment of the theocratic idea.

Sometime in the late 1980s, the newscaster Mike Wallace interviewed RabbiMeir Kahane on 60 Minutes. Kahane was then still well known in theUnited States for his leadership of the militant Jewish Defense League, butat the time this program was broadcast, he was living in Israel, where hehad launched a new, extremist political movement.1 A central plank of hisKach Party was the call for the expulsion of all of Israels Arab citizens.He even wrote a book in defense of this idea, which bore the title They

Must Go!2

When he interviewed Kahane, Mike Wallace challenged him to explain and

defend this position. Kahane did so unflinchingly. Wallaces response to hisethnocentric arguments and proposals was to exclaim, But Rabbi Kahane,thats not democratic! Kahane immediately retorted, his voice oozing withcondescension, Mr. Wallace, Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson.

These words must have rung false in the ears of Mike Wallace and most otherAmerican Jews who heard them, but Kahane was making a valid point.3 Thevalues we most commonly associate with the name Thomas Jefferson are not

1See Robert Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir KahaneFrom FBI Informant toKnesset Member (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990).

2Meir Kahane, They Must Go! (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1981).3For an account of the origins of the outlook Kahane was rejecting, see Jonathan

D. Sarna, The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture, Jewish Social Studies 5(Fall/Winter 1998): 5279.

The Review of Politics 71 (2009), 637658.# University of Notre Damedoi:10.1017/S0034670509990726

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in all respects the same as the values of biblical and rabbinical Judaism. To put itvery briefly, Thomas Jefferson stands for religious freedom; traditional Judaism

does not. Jefferson was a proponent of the separation of church and state; tra-ditional Judaism gives rise to no such idea. This does not mean, of course, thatJudaism is Meir Kahane. There is very little warrant in Jewish tradition for hisextreme xenophobia, and there are plenty of texts that militate against it. Still,Kahanes general odiousness does not vitiate the accuracy of his insight.Thomas Jefferson and traditional Judaism are poles apart.

Far from being in essential harmony with liberal democracy, traditionalJudaism is inherently theocratic. Indeed, the term theocracy itself stems fromthe pen of a Jewish writer, the historian Josephus, who used it to describe

the regime prevailing in ancient Israel, where, in his words, all sovereigntyand all authority were in the hands of God.4 From the days of Josephus tomodern times, the Jews lacked a state of their own, and their theocracywas, therefore, more theoretical than real. It existed mostly in blueprintsthe most elaborate of which are found in Maimonides legal compilation,the Mishneh Torah.5 Nevertheless, throughout the ages when the Jews didnot live in a polity governed in accordance with what they took to be Godslaws, they never ceased to pray for its reestablishment.

Maimonides himself explained in his Guide for the Perplexed how these laws

surpassed all others and were uniquely suited to advance people along theroad to human perfection.6 Less philosophically minded Jews attributedother virtues to them. But they were all united in their longing for historyto end with the restoration of Israel to its former condition. The first Jewishthinker to abandon any such hopes was Baruch or Benedict Spinoza, wholived in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. In his Theological-PoliticalTreatise, he expressed qualified approval for the ancient Jewish theocracy asa regime appropriate for a rather low-level populace, but he also consideredit to be altogether defunct, along with the rest of Judaism. In the same book,

he expressed strong support for the idea of religious freedom and set forthone of the earliest arguments in favor of liberal democracy.7

4See Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam. J. Zohar, eds., The JewishPolitical Tradition, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 190, for the textfrom Against Apion. See also Clifford Orwins commentary on this passage on thefollowing page: The very term theocracy (Greek theokratia), which Josephus eitherdevised himself or borrowed from an unknown source (2:165), represents anattempt to subsume the Jewish tradition under a non-Jewish category.

5See Abraham Hershman, trans., The Code of Maimonides, The Book of Judges,book 14, Yale Judaica Series, vol. 3, The Code of Maimonides, Book XIV, The Bookof Judges, trans. Abraham Hershman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).

6See Howard Kreisel, Maimonides Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and theHuman Ideal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

7See Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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The first Jewish thinker who consigned theocracy to the past and, likeSpinoza, endorsed the freedom of religion but without repudiating the Jewish

religion was a man who lived a century after Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn.In this essay, I would like to take a close look at Mendelssohns method of achiev-ing his goal of reconciling Judaism with liberalism. After doing so, I will focus onthe ways in which other modern Jewish thinkers in the Diaspora followed moreor less in his footsteps and then continued further along the same path, affirmingliberalism much more unequivocally than he had. I will also consider at somelength a contemporary Jewish thinker, David Novak, who is much moreambivalent toward liberalism than Mendelssohn was and who has struggledunsuccessfully to devise an alternative to it on the basis of Jewish theocratic pre-

mises, one that would still preserve some of liberalisms key virtues. I will thenconsider some other, more traditional Jews, living in Israel, for whom the theo-cratic ideal remains alive, if not necessarily a guide to immediate action. I hopethat my review of these matters will shed some light on the impact of liberalismon at least one religion.

Since Moses Mendelssohn is a man who may need an introduction, I willsay a few words about him. The product of a traditional Jewish environmentand education, the teen-age Mendelssohn (a name he was only later to selectfor himself) left the small town of Dessau for Berlin in the 1740s solely in order

to continue his Talmudic studies. He soon began to supplement them,however, with the study of ancient and modern European languages and lit-eratures, mathematics, and philosophy. By the 1750s, he was composing hisown philosophical works, and by the 1760s, his writings on metaphysicsand his Phaedon , a Leibniz-Wolffian reworking of Platos dialogue on theimmortality of the soul, had garnered him a European-wide reputation asthe German Socrates.8

In his works in German during the earlier stages of his philosophical career,Mendelssohn sought to steer clear of issues directly related to Judaism,

although he could not completely escape the task of defending his religionagainst Gentiles who wished to convert him. When challenged by the Swissscientist and theologian J. C. Lavater to explain publicly why he was not con-vinced of the truth of Christianity, Mendelssohn sought to evade the question by contrasting Judaisms reasonable ecumenicism with Christianitysirrational exclusivism. His response to Lavater ended with this statement:

I have the good fortune of having for a friend many an excellent man who

is not of my faith. We sincerely love each other, though we suspect that inmatters of religion we hold totally different opinions. I enjoy the pleasureof their company, which benefits and delights me. Never did my heartsecretly whisper to me: What a pity that such a lovely soul is lost! One

8On Mendelssohns life see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A BiographicalStudy (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973).

THEOCRACY, LIBERALISM, AND MODERN JUDAISM 639


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who believes that there is no salvation outside his church is bound toheave a sigh like this very often.

As Alexander Altmann has observed, the contrast between his liberalismand Lavaters pietism could not have been more strikingly expressed.9 AsAltmann has also observed, Mendelssohns conduct on this occasion nodoubt influenced his friend G. E. Lessings depiction of a supremely tolerantJew in the famous play he wrote a few years later, Nathan the Wise.10

Not long after the publication of this play, in 1782, Mendelssohn wentbeyond issuing pleas for tolerance and became the first Jew to argue publiclyin favor of the right to liberty of conscience and the separation of church andstate. He took issue with the proposal made only recently by his friendChristian Wilhelm von Dohm that Jewish communities be enabled to main-tain a certain measure of internal autonomy, including the right of excommu-nication. Elucidating his reasons for opposing the practice of excommunicationaltogether, Mendelssohn briefly set forth some of his own basic ideas about theproper scope of ecclesiastical power. I know of no rights, he wrote, overpersons and things that are connected to doctrinal opinions and rest uponthem, rights that men acquire when they agree with certain statements andlose when they cannot consent to them or will not do so. In general,

Mendelssohn went on to say, true divine religion assumes no authorityover ideas and opinions, gives and makes no claim to earthly goods, norights of usufruct, possession and property. It knows no other power thanthe power to win and convince through reason and to render happythrough conviction. It has need of neither arms nor a finger, but consistsof pure spirit and heart.11

Genuine religion, by definition, involves no coercion. Nor, said Mendelssohn,could any human institutions ever possess the legitimate authority to makepeoples rights dependent upon their convictions. In the state of nature,

individuals have an absolute right to their own ideas and opinions, onethat they do not lose with the signing of the social contract and their entranceinto civil society. Mendelssohn, therefore, saw no way in which any societycould ever acquire the power to connect civic privileges with religiousconvictions.12

Mendelssohn met with unexpected opposition from a man who agreedwith him in principle, a certain August Friedrich Cranz, who published anon-ymously a pamphlet entitled The Search for Light and Right.In commonsense, wrote Cranz, religion without conviction is not possible at all; and

every forced religious act is no longer such. The observance of divine

9Ibid., 220.10Ibid., 29899.11Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubilaumsausgabe (Berlin and Stuttgart-Bad

Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1972), 8:18.12Ibid., 1920.



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commandments from fear of the punishment attached to them is slavery,which according to purified concepts can never be pleasing to God. Yet,

he insisted, Moses connects coercion and positive punishment with the non-observance of duties related to the worship of God. His statutory ecclesiasticallaw decrees the punishment of stoning and death for the Sabbath-breaker, theblasphemer of the divine name, and others who depart from his laws.13

Mendelssohns espousal of liberal principles was, according to Cranz, incom-patible with loyalty to Judaism, for armed ecclesiastical law still remains thefirmest groundwork of the Jewish polity. He consequently considered himselfentitled to pose a sharp question to Mendelssohn. How can you remain anadherent of the faith of your fathers and shake the entire structure by removing

the cornerstones, when you contest the ecclesiastical law that has been giventhrough Moses and purports to be founded on divine revelation?14

Cranz anticipated and ruled out in advance one possible response to thisquery. He warned Mendelssohn not to attempt to solve the problem by claim-ing that the old Jewish theocracy was no longer relevant since it had for solong been defunct. He acknowledged that the regime introduced by Moses

could be carried into practice only so long as the Jews had an empire oftheir own; so long as their Pontiffs were princes, or such sovereignheads of the people, as created princes, and governed them. But cease it

must, as did the sacrifices, upon the Jews having lost territory andpower, and, depending on foreign laws, found their jurisdiction circum-scribed by very narrow limits. Still, that circumscription is merely the con-sequence of external and altered political relations, whereby the value oflaws and privileges, consigned to quiescence, cannot be diminished. Theecclesiastical law is still there, although it may not be allowed to be putinto execution. Your lawgiver, Moses, is still the drover, with thecudgel, who leads his people with a rod of iron, and would be sharpafter anyone who had the least opinion of his own, and dared toexpress it by word or deed.15

In this manner Cranz declared that he would not be content with a responsethat merely obviated in practice the apparent contradiction betweenMendelssohns liberal principles and his ancestral religion. He wanted toknow how Mendelssohn thought he could do this in principle.

Mendelssohn was fully aware of the true importance of Cranzs challenge.It cut him, he said, to the heart, and he wrote his principal work on the Jewishreligion, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, mainly to respond to it.16

13Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (Oxford andNew York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92.

14Ibid., 93.15Ibid., 92.16Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism , ed. Alexander

Altmann and trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover: University Press of New England,1983), 8485.



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This seminal work of modern Jewish thought will concern us only to theextent that it contains a response to Cranz. We will, therefore, skip over

the many pages of ruminations about the nature of revelation, idolatry,ritual, and other subjects that separate Mendelssohns partial restatement ofCranzs challenge (which does not include the warning quoted above) andhis ultimate answer to it.

Although Cranz had not utilized the term theocracy, Mendelssohn went out ofhis way to eschew it, preferring to call the Israelites original constitution, byits proper name, the Mosaic constitution.17 In this constitution, Mendelssohnwrote, state and religion were not conjoined, but one; not connected, but iden-tical. Since God was Israels Lawgiver and Regent of the nation,

civil matters acquired a sacred and religious aspect, and every civil servicewas at the same time a true service of God. The community was a commu-nity of God; its affairs were Gods; the public taxes were Gods; and every-thing down to the least police measure was part of the divine service.18

This general situation had implications with regard to crimes as well. Everysacrilege against the authority of God, as the lawgiver of the nation, was acrime against the Majesty, and therefore a crime of state. Under Israels con-stitution, such offenses as blasphemy and Sabbath desecration (to whichCranz had made specific reference) could and, indeed, had to be punishedcivilly, not as erroneous opinion, not as unbelief , but as misdeeds , as sacrile-gious crimes aimed at abolishing or weakening the authority of the lawgiverand thereby undermining the state itself.19

Mendelssohn then stressed how mild these inevitable punishments actu-ally were. Even the perpetrators of capital crimes like blasphemy and desecra-tion of the Sabbath were treated with great leniency. As a consequence,executions must have been exceedingly rare. Indeed, as the rabbis say, anycourt competent to deal with capital offenses and concerned for its goodname must see to it that in a period of seventy years not more than oneperson is sentenced to death.

Immediately after this sentence, Mendelssohn abruptly announced that hehad effectively refuted his adversaries. This clearly shows how little onemust be acquainted with the Mosaic law and the constitution of Judaism tobelieve that according to them ecclesiastical right and ecclesiastical power areauthorized or that temporal punishments are to be inflicted for unbelief orerring belief. The Searcher for Light and Right was wrong to believe that hehad abolished Judaism by his rational arguments against ecclesiasticalright and ecclesiastical power.20

17Ibid., 131.18Ibid., 128.19Ibid., 129.20Ibid., 130.



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But had Mendelssohn really succeeded so completely in reconciling thetruth of revelation with the truth of reason or did he merely assert that he

had done so? In distinguishing between the ancient Israelite constitutionand an ecclesiastical law armed with power, Mendelssohn seems to havebeen suggesting that, as Eliezer Schweid has put it, the fusion of state and reli-gion is possible and justified only when God himself is the sovereign powerin the state.But as Schweid himself has correctly observed, this is a forcedand inadequate solution of the problem.21 It in no way alters the fact thatunder the arrangements prevailing in ancient Israel, whatever they arecalled, religious offenses were subject to punishment in a manner completelyinconsistent with Mendelssohns principles. It was of no essential importance,

either, that these punishments were rarely inflicted. As Mendelssohn himselfknew, this answer could only soften but not eliminate the criticism to whichhe was responding.22 Punishment, however infrequent and mild, was stillpunishment.

Despite his confident pose and defiant pronouncements, Mendelssohnhimself seems to have recognized the insufficiency of his initial response toCranz. For after recapitulating his main points one more time, he introducesan additional consideration:

Moreover, as the rabbis expressly state, with the destruction of the Temple, all

corporal and capital punishments and, indeed, even monetary fines, insofar as theyare only national, have ceased to be legal. Perfectly in accordance with my prin-ciples, and inexplicable without them! The civil bonds of the nation weredissolved; religious offenses were no longer crimes against the state; andthe religion, as religion, knows of no punishment, no other penalty thanthe one the remorseful sinner voluntarily imposes on himself.23

While this may seem, at first glance, to be something of an afterthought, it isclearly much more than that. It is only here that Mendelssohn actuallyexclaims that he has reconciled Judaism with his own principles and

thereby accomplished what he set out to do.There are, however, two major reasons why even those who are pleased by

what he says should not join Mendelssohn in this cry of victory. For these utter-ances are, first of all, based on faulty history. As Alexander Altmann rather deli-cately put it, Mendelssohns assertion that punitive measures by Jewish courtsceased after the loss of political independence does not fully correspond to thefacts.24 In actuality, as Yirmiyahu Yovel has stated, even in the Diaspora

Jewish religion was not voluntary in the sense in which modern political

theories use this term. It contained an element of coercion, of legal sanc-tion, banning the rebel and subjecting the members of the congregation

21Eliezer Schweid, Ha-Yehudi ha-Boded veha-Yahadut (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974), 173.22Isaac Heinemann, Taammei ha-Mitzvot be-Sifrut Yisrael, pt. 2 (Jerusalem, 1956), 19.23Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 130.24Ibid., 232, note to 130, ll. 2427.



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to rabbinical authority. This was usually done by decree of the Christianauthorities. It was a kind of tolerance, or privilege, which the Jewish con-gregation enjoyed, but within the community it imposed the authority of areligious law and a semi-theocratic government of the kind whichMendelssohn opposed.25

More important, however, than the historical inaccuracy of Mendelssohnsargument is its theoretical inadequacy. For even if it had been true that post-exilic Judaism had entirely abandoned all forms of religious coercion, thiswould not have changed the fact that what Mendelssohn called the old, orig-inal Judaism had indeed condoned the use of force to compel Jews to obeyreligious law. As we have seen, this was a matter of the utmost importance to

Cranz. Even if the ecclesiastical statutory law of Judaism, as he put it, was nolonger being enforced, it is still there; that is, it is present in the Bible andready to be reinstituted. To explain how the existence at any time of such astate of affairs could be reconciled with his rational, liberal principles was pre-cisely the task that Cranz had set for Mendelssohn. How could a God whonever wished for coerced obedience to His will have revealed the laws ofMoses, which called for such behavior? How could He ever have laid thebasis for a state that deprived its inhabitants of their inalienable right to reli-gious freedom?

These are the questions that Mendelssohn sought to dodge. When he restedhis case, at the end of his book, on the fact that the Mosaic constitution had become defunct, he resorted to the very strategy that Cranz had warnedhim (in a passage that is not quoted, we will once again observe, in

Jerusalem) not to deploy. Why, then, did he think that it would work? Heseems to have hoped that his readers would have been thoroughly distracted by all of the other weighty matters discussed in Jerusalem and would notnotice his failure to develop an adequate response to the challenge that hadprovoked him to write the book in the first place.

For all of its theoretical weakness, however, Mendelssohns argument metwith a certain amount of approval. Immanuel Kant, for instance, wrote to himshortly after Jerusalem appeared, commending him for having known how toreconcile your religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience as onewould not have imagined it to be capable of, and as no other religion can boast of.26 Arch-traditionalist Jewish leaders, on the other hand, ignoredJerusalem , which was written in a language that they could not read and in

25Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (University Park, PA:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 198, n. 11. Yovel proceeds to argue thatMendelssohns words on this subject in Jerusalem were intended for the non-Jewishworld and are filled with apologetic imprecision.

26See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn , 517. See also my article Kants View ofMendelssohn, in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. Alfred Ivry, AllanArkush, and Elliot Wolfson (London: Harwood Press, 1998), 413 22, where Iattempt to show the double-edged character of Kants praise.



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an idiom that they could not understand. But for those who wished to havesuch a thing, Mendelssohn had succeeded in providing a rationale for the dis-

solution of what we might call Judaisms coercive, collectivist dimension.He had transformed the Jewish religion into something purely voluntary.Mendelssohn was the first Jewish thinker to declare it to be entirely up tothe individual Jew, and not his rabbi or his communal leaders, to determinewhether he would fulfill his duty to live in accordance with its demands.He thus showed, for the first time, how one could render the Jewish religion basically compatible with liberalism. Judaism could become ThomasJeffersonat the time when Jefferson himself was still a rather young man.

In the course of the nineteenth century, Jerusalem became a popular book in

certain places, particularly in Thomas Jeffersons country. Already in 1838,when there were fewer than 50,000 Jews in the United States, the firstleader of American Orthodox Jewry, Isaac Leeser, translated it into Englishand touted its ideas.27 But neither in Europe nor in the United States didMendelssohns work supply the main foundation for the reconciliation of Judaism with liberalism. What rendered Mendelssohns solution unsatisfac-tory, in the long run, was not its theoretical inadequacy, which was scarcelynoted at all, but its purely provisional character. While consigning theocracyto the past, Mendelssohn by no means delegitimated it. Although he quoted

approvingly the Talmudic passage prohibiting the Jews even to think of a pre-messianic return to Palestine, he never expressed any doubts about the Jewsultimate deliverance.28 In Jerusalem he explicitly reaffirmed that the Mosaicconstitutionmight some day be put back into effect.29 And he continued tomaintain that Jews were duty bound to live in accordance with the law ofthe Torah, even if they had absolutely no right to force their fellow Jews todo so. He acknowledged that this would be difficult, but called upon theJews of his own day to bear the burden as best as they could.30

For steadily increasing numbers of Jews living in Western Europe and the

United States in the century after Mendelssohns death, messianic hopes andritual laws seemed both retrograde and inconsistent with full integration intothe liberal society to which they were quite eager (or in some countries happy)to belong. In response to contemporary philosophy, on the one hand, and agreat deal of pressure to modify or eliminate these apparently unpatrioticand exclusivist aspects of their religion, on the other, they developedReform Judaism. Among the leaders of this new tendency, there was

27See Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1996).

28On the history of the usage of this passage, see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism,Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),21134.

29Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 131.30Ibid., 133.



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a general agreement that the Pentateuch was not literally true in all respectsand that the Law of Moses was absolutely binding.

The Reformers emphatically rejected the idea of theocracy. To quote fromone of their more celebrated statements, the Pittsburgh Platform of theAmerican Conference of Reform Rabbis (1885):

We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, andtherefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worshipunder the administration of the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration ofany of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

These rabbis replaced the old messianic vision with a new one:

We recognize in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellectthe approach of the realization of Israels great Messianic hope for theestablishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.

The Jews task, as the new era drew near, was not to adhere as much as poss-ible to their ancient law, as Mendelssohn had recommended, but to

accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only such ceremoniesas elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted tothe views and habits of modern civilization.31

What we see here is not merely an awkward and inconsistent adjustment toliberalism but the wholehearted absorption of its spirit. The Reformers do notjust put theocracy aside; they reject it altogether in favor of the better, moreliberal society that is already present in many countries and on the horizonin others.

In the one hundred and twenty years that have passed since the publicationof the Pittsburgh Platform, Reform Judaism has changed a great deal. Amongother things, it has reconciled itself to the return of the Jews to their ancestralland, and it has grown much more appreciative of Jewish ritual (if not of

Jewish law). But it is, if anything, more hostile than ever before to the ideaof theocracy. It is strongly opposed to what it sees as the vestiges of it inthe United States and equally determined to strengthen western liberalismagainst the theocratic forces present on the Israeli scene (which we willdiscuss in the second part of this essay).

Reform is the only major movement in American Judaism to break decisi-vely with the idea of theocracy and to incorporate liberalism into its funda-mental creed. The leaders of the other main movements, Orthodox andeven, in some cases, Conservative Judaism, remain in principle at least as

attached to the old-fashioned Jewish messianism as Mendelssohn appearsto have been and just as concerned with the preservation of Jewish law(although they understand it quite differently from each other). At thesame time, they have emulated Mendelssohn in their support for liberty of

31Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 46869.



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conscience. What they have not done is to attempt to explain systematically,as Mendelssohn did, the relationship between their adherence to an inher-

ently theocratic religion and their acceptance of the tenets of liberalism.The neglect of this task is not hard to explain. As Yoel Finkelman hasrecently observed, in America

The Jews have been among the greatest supporters of the complete separ-ation between religion and state, particularly since it has enabled them toguarantee their legal rights and their civic freedoms. They have notrelished the idea of challenging the constitutional status quo, and there-fore Jewish thinkers have not hastened to occupy themselves in a systema-tic manner with political thought or with constitutional structures.32

In view of the general dearth of such thinking, it is of the utmost interest whena traditional rabbi and scholar like David Novak (who served for a time as aprofessor at the school founded by Thomas Jefferson, the University ofVirginia) publishes books entitled Covenantal Rights: A Study in JewishPolitical Theory and The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology.These books, the most elaborate attempts in a long time to grapple with theissues with which we are here concerned, deserve carefulbut separateconsideration.

Like August Friedrich Cranz, Novak is highly cognizant of the tension between Jewish tradition and the modern notion of rights.33 And likemost modern Jews, he is highly appreciative of the benefits liberalism has brought to his people. Only in the world forged by liberal theories, hewrites in Covenantal Rights, have Jews been able to survive, let alone flourish,politically, economicallyand even religiously.Nevertheless, while Novak isquite grateful for all of this, it does not automatically convince him that sinceliberalism is good for the Jews it is also true. It is not even, in his opinion,unqualifiedly good for the Jews (as such). Under its auspices, the needs of

Jews as individual citizens have been seen as taking complete precedenceover the needs of the older Jewish communal tradition. Yet it is that tra-dition that makes Jews Jewish. Anything less than it seems to be a ticket toeither instant or gradual assimilation, whether individual or collective.34

Rejecting modern rights-based political theories as not only subversive ofJudaism but unfounded and ultimately self-destructive, Novak recommendsin Covenantal Rights that we search through Jewish sources for a better basisfor some of the salutary rights they have supplied. But how can what he

32Yoel Finkelman, Religion and Public Life: Exile and State in the Thought of JosephDov Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan, in Dat u-MedinahBe-hagut ha-Yehudit Be-meah ha-esrim, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky (Israel Democracy Institute,

Jerusalem 2005), 369.33David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.34Ibid., 28.



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himself characterizes as the uniquely Jewish covenantal theocracyprovidebetter underpinnings for these rights than it is within the power of liberalism

to supply?

35

This is only possible if one approaches the question of rightsin an entirely new way. It is necessary for Jews to retake rights talk fromliberals, who have supposedly co-opted it,and to direct this talk back toearlier nonliberal ways of thinking, even when they agree with liberalsabout a number of individual rights and even about their precise content.36

I cannot take the time here to review in detail Novaks entire argumentin Covenantal Rights.37 It is important to note, however, that it hinges on thefollowing redefinition of rights in covenantal terms:

The most important rights I exercise as a whole person before someoneelse are rooted in duties to others, which when we fulfill them are goodfor us as well. The most basic right of a person, the right to life, is exercised

because the community of which I am a participant claims that life for itsown life and because God claims all lives are mine (Ezekiel 18:4).Ultimately, such a right is my claim upon others to let me fulfill myduty to my community and to my god, that is, to answer their claimson me.38

Whether they are properly called rights or merely legitimized needs, these

divinely bestowed entitlements enable the Jewish participants in the covenan-tal community to benefit from the good conduct in which the other partici-pants are commanded to engage and to be secure in many respects fromabuse at their hands. Novak thus demonstrates that the covenantal commu-nity provides many of the same important benefactions as todays liberal poli-ties and even some that they do not make generally available. But he still facesa stumbling block.

Novak knows that concern for the rights of individual persons againstsociety should be a major topic in any contemporary political theory. He

acknowledges that liberal democracy has the merit of combining majorityrule with the protection of individual rights, even when those rights are inconflict with the interests and policies of the society, as long as they do notpose a clear and immediate danger to the society itself. This is an achieve-ment he very much wants his Jewish political theory to replicate. Yet heknows how difficult it is to answer positively the question of whether thereis any concept of individual rights against society at all in the classicalsources of Jewish law and theology.39 He regretfully admits that there isno explicit source for individual rights against those of the community in

35Ibid., 30.36Ibid., 133.37I have done so in my article Conservative Political Theology and the Freedom of

Religion, Polity 37 (January 2005): 82107.38Novak, Covenantal Rights, 13132.39Ibid., 204205.



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the Pentateuch.40 Nor can he find any such source elsewhere in the Bible.Fortunately, though, there seems to be a more adequate source for

the concept of individual rights over against the power of the state in theTalmud.41

We can omit Novaks analysis of this particular source and acknowledgethat his turn to the Jewish political tradition yields some support for theidea of individual rights against the state. But he does not show that this tra-dition can be as effective as liberal democracy in upholding individual rights.Novak praises liberal democracy for protecting those rights even when theyare in conflict with the interests and policies of the society, as long as they donot pose a clear and immediate danger to the society itself. He affirms his

own, apparently Torah-based view that individuals have just claims uponsociety in those ordinary circumstances when societys survival is not at allthreatened by the exercise of these personal rights.42 But he does not sayenough about the scope of individuals just claims to reassure us that hissystem of Judaism would necessarily leave them in possession of broad per-sonal rights against the state. He does not say anything that would guarantee,for instance, the perpetuation of peoples right to the freedom of religion.

Far from reassuring liberals that he values this fundamental principle,Novak says things that can only cause them alarm. This is true even of

some of his statements that appear to be designed to appeal to them. It is,then, our task, he writes,

and that of the political authorities to protect these human rights of ourswhich can be justified only when they do not conflict with our prior socialduties, duties that themselves are rationally correlated with our deeperneed for community herself. Nevertheless, in order for individual rightsto be able to truly limit communal duties by denying them any totalizing,collective pretensions, they must only not contradict any prior communalduties. They do not have to be justified as being for the sake of collective

good, as many utilitarians would have it.

43

If they had come from the pen of a thinker who singled out few social duties,these sentences might be thought to promise individuals a great deal of lati-tude for the exercise of their freedom. But Novak is anything but a thinker ofthis kind. The very extensive social duties of the members of the covenantalcommunity include, among a host of other religious obligations, the dutyto engage in public worship of God. This duty, as Novak puts it,

is concerned with the assertion of proper doctrine about God, which

is addressed to the community itself as much as it is directed to God.On this level, worship can be seen as a specifically covenantal claim




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God makes on the community which is that the community express thetruth about God that has been revealed to them, most prominently inScripture.44

Novaks argument in Covenantal Rights thus winds its way back to somethinguncomfortably close to theocracy, however much opposed to it he is inprinciple.

This is not a spot to which Novak has remained fixed, however. In TheJewish Social Contract, published five years after Covenantal Rights , he doesnot reiterate the earlier books main argument. What we do find is an evenmore emphatic rejection of modern social contract theory, both for its lackof any real history and ontology and for its essential inutility. This is fol-

lowed by an attempt to ground the idea of religious freedom in the idealoosely tied to Jewish traditionof a social contract not among individuals but among the religious communities that constitute the true buildingblocks of a civil society.45 These communities, Novak maintains, are rarelyif ever politically, economically, or intellectually, self-sufficient. They, there-fore, need, if they wish to survive, to make alliances with others outsidetheir own cultural domain, alliances in which no one party dominates theothers, or one in which all the parties merge and create a new identity forthemselves.46

44Ibid., 94.45The linchpin of his argument, by his own account, is the well-known Talmudic

principle of the law of the kingdom is the law, or, as he quite aptly updates it, thelaw of the state is law (The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 120). Novak presents an extensive andlearned account of the origins and development of this principle, stretching fromancient Babylonia to late medieval Spain. In diverse locales, he explains, it supplied

the justification for a kind of social contract between the Jews and their hosts. It recog-nized a sphere in which Gentile law is authoritative provided a legitimate authoriz-ation of limited secularity for Jews (121), while it also authorized the Jewsmaintenance of a legitimate secondary autonomy within a given non-Jewish state(123). All in all, this principle justifies the participation of the Jews, as a covenantedcommunity, in a larger, secular polity based on a social contract drawn up betweenthemselves and other religious communities. It also provides, in turn, an examplethat these gentile communities can emulate in their efforts to understand their ownrelationship to the state in which they live.

Yet Novak does not really need the principle of the law of the state is law in order

to explain how a Jewish community ought best to live within the context of a mostlynon-Jewish state. Such a notion would already follow from his conception of religiouscommunities as having ontological and historical priority over any secular states towhich they need, nevertheless, to accommodate themselves. And it is really his argu-ment to this effect, not his recourse to Talmudic precedent, that constitutes the core ofThe Jewish Social Contract.

46Ibid., The Jewish Social Contract, 19.



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It is in all of these groups best interest, Novak explains, to work

for a political order where religious liberty is the most important right that

civil society is obligated to uphold but also a political order where enhan-cing the dignity of human life in its various forms is the raison detre of thesociety, especially the state created by that society. Indeed, the protectionof religious liberty, which is the political right to respond to or turn awayfrom the God who elects us, is the epitome of human dignity by which allother rights are grounded.47

Any individual member of a civil society, Novak subsequently maintains, isentitled to make the democratic claim to be able to convert to a religion ofhis or her choice.48 Religious liberty, he also affirms, entails the right ofreligious conversion for everyone.49 The state must, therefore, respect theprior human freedom of any of its participants to either accept or reject anyhistorical revelation that purports to realize the relationship between Godand humans in the world.50

Thus, without recanting his earlier rejection of liberal, individualistic,rights-based theories, Novak has found a pragmatic foundation for religiousliberty. But it is a very shaky one. For the history of both Christianity andIslam provides ample evidence that religious communities do not need tocut compromises in order to survive and flourish. Throughout the centuriesboth religions have regularly enhanced their ability to do so through the exer-cise of the kind of hegemony that Novak deplores. To demonstrate this point,I will mention only the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews and theMoors and the ways in which these developments strengthened Catholicismin Spain (if not necessarily Spain itself).

Things have changed, of course, since the fifteenth century, and it is easy tosee that in modern times it might indeed often be impractical and self-defeating for any covenanted community to attempt to conquer a religiouslydivided society. But would this necessarily be the case everywhere? Arentthere religiously homogeneous countries such as Poland or Tunisia wherethe members of the dominant religious group could exercise hegemonywithout making alliances with others outside their own cultural domain,alliances in which no one party dominates the others? To be sure, neitherof these states constitutes the kind of multicultural society with whichNovak is most concerned (nor does either one of them any longer contain asignificant number of Jews). But even with respect to societies of this type,Novaks derivation of the right to religious liberty is questionable.

What if a number of religious communities chose jointly to exercise a con-dominium over the religiously diverse society in which they lived, not




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dominating each other but dominating lesser groups? What if they were toestablish a kind of convivencia among themselves but at the same time

outlaw any new religions, prohibit any of their own members from switchingallegiances, and ban any public expressions of atheism? It is at least arguablethat such an alliance would obviate the practical difficulties to which Novakpoints and would strengthen religion more than it would weaken it. What if anarrower coalition were somewhere to be formed, one that consisted, say,exclusively of the Christian denominations constituting the vast majority ofthe people in a particular society (e.g., the United States) and demonstratedintolerance toward all non-Christian religions? It is at least arguable thatsuch an alliance would circumvent the practical difficulties on which

Novak concentrates his attention and would benefit Christianity in thatspecific locale. Even in modern, multicultural societies, the adherents of par-ticular faiths may reasonably conclude, therefore, that the extension of reli-gious freedom to the enemies of a particular religion or religion in generalis not at all in their own best interest. Such considerations should make itclear that one cannot proceed automatically, as Novak does, from thepremise that individual religious communities require religious liberty inorder to flourish to the conclusion that such communities are bound to beadvocates of untrammeled religious freedom.

As we have seen, Moses Mendelssohns assertion of the priority of individ-ual rights in his preface to Menasseh ben Israels Vindiciae judaeorum exposedhim to the accusation that he was implicitly denying the validity of theSinaitic covenant. How, asked one of his adversaries, could he insist uponthe inalienable right to freedom of religion and at the same time affirm thetruth and authority of a revealed law that required the severe punishmentof religious offenses? Mendelssohns best answer to this challenge combineda reaffirmation of the social contract theory on which his belief in religiousfreedom was based with a defense of the historicity of the events at Sinai,

while consigning biblically endorsed theocratic arrangements to the remotepast and, perhaps, the distant future.This does not satisfy Novak at all. In view of what he sees as Mendelssohns

skewed priorities, he disapprovingly characterizes him as someone whosesocial contract theory fails to give the covenant primacy.51 He arguesthat his theory of Judaism is inadequate to the Jewish tradition in partbecause it renders it subordinate to a non-Jewish universe.52 At the endof the day, Novak concludes (correctly, in my opinion), Mendelssohn is amuch better Enlightenment philosopher than he is a Jewish theologian.53

But Novak himself, it seems to me, has only been able to reconcile his

51Ibid., 178.52Ibid., 183.53Ibid., 187. I have expressed my views on these matters in my book Moses

Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 167292.



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Jewish loyalties with modern aspirations by smuggling a little more of theEnlightenment into his thinking than his covenant-based theology ought to

allow.Moses Mendelssohn sought to make Judaism into Thomas Jefferson, bypapering over the deep theoretical divide between a religion that reaffirmedeternal divine sovereignty and a political theory based on inalienable humanrights. Reform Judaism escaped from this difficulty by reducing the scope ofdivine sovereignty to allow for the untrammeled exercise of human rightsand identifying the messianic era with the triumph of liberalism. Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism have been content to enjoy life in asociety that guaranteed the Jews unprecedented freedom without reflecting

too much about the relationship between the foundations of the Jewish reli-gion and the liberal principles on which contemporary society is based.Finally, David Novak, a traditional Jew situated somewhere betweenOrthodoxy and Conservatism, has struggled unsuccessfully to find ways to justify the perpetuation of the benefits of Jeffersonian liberalism withouthaving to endorse what he sees as the fallacious and dangerous theory onwhich it is based. Starting from theocratic premises, he strives but fails repeat-edly to show how they can serve as the foundation for a nonliberal society inwhich the right to religious freedom is nevertheless entirely secure.54

Up to this point, we have been concerned with the impact of liberalismupon Jewish thought in the European and North American world andespecially the United States. We must turn now to an examination ofthe way in which this issue has played itself out in a very different setting,the sovereign Jewish State of Israel. Here Judaism encountered liberalismnot as the dominant ideology of a non-Jewish society to which the Jewswere endeavoring to accommodate themselves but as the outlook of thepreponderant majority of the states Jews, whether or not they retainedsome allegiance to Judaism.

Long before the establishment of the State of Israel, the founder of Zionism,Theodor Herzl, articulated a stance toward liberalism that would be upheldby a long line of secular Zionists throughout the twentieth century. In 1896,in his seminal pamphlet The Jewish State , he inquired, Shall we end byhaving a theocracy? His answer was most emphatic:

No, indeed. Faith unites us; knowledge gives us freedom. We shall there-fore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the partof our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their

temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army withinthe confines of their barracks.. . .

Every man will be as free and undis-turbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should

54For a fuller treatment of Novaks The Jewish Social Contract, see my review essay,Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract , Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (Spring2008): 25571.



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occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to liveamongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality

before the law. We have learnt toleration in Europe.55

Zionists of almost all stripes were in substantial agreement with Herzl onthese matters, but the religious Zionists, members of the Mizrachi movement,saw things differently. They envisioned a future in which, as their sloganwent, the land of Israel would be governed by the people of Israel in accord-ance with the Torah of Israel. Yet throughout the period of Zionist construc-tion under the British Mandate, they collaborated with the secular majorityessentially on Herzls terms and put their optimum program on the backburner.

In 1948, however, as Israel was about to declare its independence, the reli-gious Zionists had to grapple with fundamental questions that they hadhitherto ignored. What is the character of a Jewish state based on theTorah?asked Isaac Halevi Herzog, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine.Is it a theocracy or a democracy?After reviewing Josephuss definition ofa theocracy, he asked again, Does a Jewish state that recognizes the absoluteauthority of the Torah have to be a theocracy? The answer is absolutelyyes. That meant paying a lot closer attention to what Maimonides andother premodern scholars had to say on the subject and figuring out howtheir blueprints could be updated and utilized for the governance of amodern state.

But there was a problem, Herzog acknowledged. The United Nations hadstipulated that the Jewish state would have to take the shape of a liberaldemocracy. This would not really matter very much if the great and decisivemajority of the Jews living in Palestine were loyal to the Torah the way all oftheir ancestors were until roughly fifty years ago. We would then be able tosay to the nations of the world, Give us back our land and well build on it astate based on the Torah. . . . Say whatever you want! Call it a theocracy!Look, heres Saudi Arabia! You all recognize it, and youre all running afterit, on account of its oil, and theyve got a totally theocratic regime there.56

Since, however, the great majority of Jews in Palestine are not totally loyaland believing Jews, Herzog regretfully acknowledged, there is simply nohope of creating a theocracy here and now. The best that one can, therefore,hope to achieve for the present is a sort of blend of theocracy and democracy.

This is the conclusion at which most of the leaders of religious Zionismsoon arrived. Instead of pressing uselessly for the establishment of a theo-cratic Jewish state, they did what they could to import as much of the Lawof Moses into the Israeli democracy as they possibly could. This was not

55Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council,1946), 146.

56I. Wahrhaftig, ed., Techukah leYisrael al pi Torah, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRavKook, 1989), 23.



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too difficult. Despite the presence of some vehemently anticlerical figures intheir ranks, the secular leaders of the new state, led by the ardently irreligious

David Ben-Gurion, were ready to make deals. Both to maintain a nationalconsensus and to sustain a broad coalition with religious parties, theyagreed to such things as the prohibition of public transportation on theSabbath, the provision of exclusively kosher food in all public institutions,and the assignment to religious courts of a wide array of personal statusissues, including marriage.57 The whole issue of synagogue-state relationshas, nevertheless, remained unsettled and has resulted in ceaseless conflictin Israeli political life.58 Rather than investigate the specific bones of conten-tion, however, I want to examine the long-term impact of the Israeli liberal

context on the self-understanding of Orthodox Judaism within the state.Here, too, I will be selective. I will not look at all of the theological justifica-tions for tactical compromise with liberalism elaborated over the years by allsorts of traditional thinkers.59 I will confine myself to a consideration of themost prominent religious Zionist thinker to break with this strategy. Theexample of Yeshayahu Leibowitz illustrates just how far religious Zionismcan move in the direction of Thomas Jefferson without making it all theway there.

In the early 1950s, Leibowitz had been among the leaders of a small group

of religious Zionists calling for an immediate and massive effort to updateand revise Jewish law in preparation for the resurrection of a state basedupon it. Before much time passed, however, he had concluded that such anendeavor was premature and became the most vociferous Orthodox advocateof the separation of synagogue and state in Israel. The demand for the sep-aration of religion from the existing secular state, he argued in 1959,

derives from the vital religious need to prevent religion from becoming apolitical tool, a function of the governmental bureaucracy, which keeps

57See Zvi Zameret, Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurions Private Beliefs and PublicPolicy, Israel Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 6489.

58For a wide-ranging and reasonably current discussion of these matters, see JosephE. David, ed., The State of Israel: Between Judaism and Democracy: A Compendium ofInterviews and Articles (Jerusalem: Ahva Cooperative Printing Press, 2003).

59I cannot refrain, however, from making special mention of the Palestinian-bornAmerican rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn, a religious Zionist thinker who spent thelast three decades of his life (19041935) in New Jersey. Deeply impressed by whathe encountered in America, he developed a Jewish political teaching that stressed

the strengths of democracy and highlighted its full compatibility with traditional Judaism. But he remained cognizant of the profound differences between Westerndemocracy and the kind of democracy, entwined with Jewish law, that he wished tosee take shape in the future Jewish state. He never really reconciled, however, thetension between the constraints of Jewish law and the right to religious freedom.See David Zohar, Mehuyavut Yehudit be-olam moderni: HaRav Hayyim Hirschensohn veya-chaso el ha-moderna (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003), especially 18689.



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religion and religious institutions not for religious reasons but as a conces-sion to pressure groups in the interest of ephemeral power-considerations.Religion as an adjunct of secular authority is the antithesis of true religion.It hinders religious education of the community at large and constricts thereligious influence on its way of life. From a religious standpoint there isno greater abomination than an atheistic-clerical regime.60

Repelled by what he had seen in Israel over the previous decade, Leibowitzinsisted that

the secular state and society should be stripped of their false religiousveneer. Only then will it become possible to discern whether or not they

have any message as a Jewish state and society. Likewise, the Jewish reli-gion should be forced into taking its stand without the shield of an admin-istrative status. Only then will its strength be revealed, and only thus willit become capable of exerting an educational force and influencing the

broader public.61

These and other similar statements turned Leibowitz into something of arenegade in religious Zionist circles and at the same time made him a heroof the anticlerical left. Many people on both sides seem to have failed to

notice the merely provisional character of his separationism. But as EliezerGoldman has observed, in calling for the separation of religion and stateLeibowitz intended to defend what he saw as the interest of religion andnot individual rights or the liberal character of the state.62

Leibowitz was in fact not an advocate of the separation of religion and statepure and simple but of the separation of religion from the existing secular state(the italics are not mine but Leibowitzs, although they were, as we have justseen, omitted from this phrase by the Harvard University Press translator ofthis essay).63 Even as he called for disentangling state and religion, he contin-

ued to maintain that it is necessary to confront the secular state and societywith the image of a religious society and state, that is of a state in which Torahis the sovereign authority. Leibowitz looked forward to the time when Judaism would have recovered from its abominable association with thesecular state of Israel and successfully persuaded the bulk of its populationof the desirability of a state in which the Torah was fully sovereign.A better regime could then be brought into existence.

60Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1993), 176.61Ibid., 177.62Eliezer Goldman, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Beyn Hagut Datit Le-vikoret Hevratit,

in Yahadut Pnim va-Hutz, ed. Avi Sagi, Dudi Schwartz, and Yedidiah Stern (Jerusalem:Magnes Press: 1999), 300.

63Ibid., 176. Compare with the original in Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yahadut, Am Yehudi,u-Medinat Yisrael (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975), 157.



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On closer examination, then, the seemingly Jeffersonian Leibowitz looksmore like a theocrat biding his time, waiting for a sea change in popular atti-

tudes. But it would be a mistake to leap to any such conclusion. Leibowitzclearly states that the idea of a state according to the Torah has neverbeen put into effect in Israel and can in fact never be put into effect, sincethe Torah is divine and the stateevery state!is an institution for the satis-faction of human needs and interests. The state governed according to theTorah has never existed, not in the historical past, not in the present, andnot in any future that the human eye is capable of foreseeing. Yet it is theultimate purpose and goal that religious Jews have to aim to achieve andare obligated to struggle for, in an unending battle.At the very least, it is

something that will go on for generations.

64

Leibowitz can be seen, then, asthe practitioner of a quasi-Jeffersonian strategy in the short run, or rather,in the long run, and a theocrat in the very, very long run.

As mistaken as he was about everything else, Meir Kahane was right aboutone thing: Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson. That is, it wasnt ThomasJefferson, not until fairly recently, when the architects of Jewish modernitystarted to refashion it, or at least to tailor it better to suit the world shapedby the thought of Thomas Jefferson and his peers. Their efforts have beenthe subject of this paper. In focusing exclusively on them, we have overlooked

a camp within modern Jewry that has taken a different tack, not simplydefending itself against modernity but barricading itself from it.Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United States, Israel, and a few other placeshave sought to maintain entirely separate communities, as culturally isolatedas possible from the outside world. They have taken advantage of the free-doms made available to them by regimes they regard as both beneficentand dissolute in order to live in their own Torah-observant enclaves. Whilethey have not entirely succeeded in eluding the impact of modernity, theyhave managed to function well enough without ever having to grapple

with liberal ideas. They do not worry at all about reconciling Judaism andThomas Jefferson on a theoretical level.The Jews with whom we have concerned ourselves here, who have under-

taken such a task, have done so in a variety of ways. Moses Mendelssohnsrather slippery answer to this issue may have been theoretically inadequate,but it did represent one possible way of turning ones back on theocracy andprivatizing the Jewish religion. While there were others who followed himdown this path, the leaders of Reform Jewry preferred a different methodof escaping theocratic principles: unqualified renunciation. Still others have

preferred to have their cake and eat it too, that is, they have surrendered tomodern liberalism without ever coming to terms with the tension betweentheir political philosophy and their essentially unreformed ancestral religion.Then there is a thinker like David Novak, who eschews liberal principles but

64Ibid., 154.



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admires central liberal practices and struggles unsuccessfully to come up witha way to integrate support for them into his covenant-based thinking.

Religious Zionists have for the most part remained, in principle, unrecon-structed theocrats in a movement dominated by secularists. But from thetime of the establishment of the Jewish state onward, they have had to recog-nize the impossibility, under existing circumstances, of creating a polity gov-erned in accordance with the Law of the Torah. Most of them have resignedthemselves to this state of affairs and accustomed themselves to living as aminority in a mixed regime, a liberal democracy with certain theocraticfeatures.65 The most implacable critic of this arrangement, YeshayahuLeibowitz, called for the separation of synagogue and state in a way that

might lead one to mistake him for a disciple of Thomas Jefferson. But evenhe did not relinquish the idea of a Torah-state; he simply postponed its estab-lishment to the far-off time when it would win the support of the largemajority of the Jews in the Land of Israel not through force but throughpersuasion.

All of this indicates how right Kahane really was. Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson. It can, of course, be remodeled into Thomas Jefferson and has been by Moses Mendelssohn and innumerable non-Orthodox thinkers inrecent centuries. And even some of the more traditional Jewish thinkers

who have rejected any attempt to do so have made notable efforts to carveout a place for unreformed Judaism in what is still, however ambivalentthey may be about it, Thomas Jeffersons world. Such efforts will no doubtbe repeated in as yet unpredictable ways for as long as that world enduresand remains the abode of a religion that has been on the scene since longbefore its birth. In the Diaspora, where Jews are everywhere a minority andthose for whom theocracy remains a live issue, a tiny minority within a min-ority, these efforts are not likely to amount to anything more than academicexercises. In the Jewish State of Israel, however, where the theocratic

idea still retains some vitality, they may yet have a significant impact onpolitical life.

65I have not dealt here at all with the exceptions to this rule, the men on the theo-cratic fringes of the contemporary Israeli right, who, like Kahane, have nothing butcontempt for liberal democracy. On this subject see Motti Inbari, FundamentalismYehudi ve har ha bayit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press 2008)


Documents

Arkush Theocracy, Liberalism, And Modern Judaism