Was Martin Luther an Antisemite?

Reverend Joel McDurmon has an interesting article at American Vision, entitled, Was Luther Wrong About Modern-Day Israel?". McDurmon is concerned with those Christians who are Zionist and give special place, significance, or concern to Jews living in Israel.

McDurmon deals with their argument that Martin Luther was an antisemite who led to the Holocaust. McDurmon answers, saying,
(1) Luther was famous for having a very loose pen, and unwisely saying things he didn't seriously mean. More than once, Luther got in trouble for seeming to advocate violence, and his apparent antisemitism is no different.
(2) Luther was arguing not against Jews per se, in a racist fashion, but rather, he was arguing against the (supposedly) corrupt Pharisaic tradition that perverts the word of God. In other words, he was treating Jews the way he treated Catholics, and was not being antisemitic as much as anti-non-Protestant Christian. (Cf. Carl Trueman in Luther and the Jews II: The Context, where he says that Luther viewed Judaism as a religious category, not as a biological, racial category.)
(3) If Luther had any real doctrinal shortcomings, it was his radical two kingdoms doctrine, which allowed Christians to believe that Christianity and the Bible were applicable only to the church and private belief and salvation, and that the state was independent. This belief in the independent sovereignty of the state allowed Hitler to convince Germans to unquestioningly obey the state. Luther's contribution to the Holocaust would not be antisemitism, but rather statism. John Ross repeats this argument in A Legacy of Shame: Luther and the Jews, noting also that the Reformed Christians (Calvin, etc.) had a more positive attitude towards Jews than Luther did.

McDurmon then goes on to argue that Christians should not give any special support to Israel, for in the Christian view, the Christians are the new Jews, and there is no Messianic significance to Israel or the Jews, and the only thing of Messianic significance for a Christian is conversion to Christianity.

(For the sake of completeness, I will here link also to parts I and III of Trueman's article: here and here. Part III makes a very interesting argument. I have seen before elsewhere the suggestion that Christianity and Islam alike hate(d) Judaism so much because for the Christians and Muslims, Jews were the People of the Book and of all people, ought to have seen the truth first. If a pagan refuses to convert, then fine, he is just ignorant and blind. But if a Jew - a Jew to whom God has spoken at Sinai and bestowed His glory! - refuses to convert, then this damns and impugns the doctrines of the Christians and Muslims, and provides ammunition for the pagans to refuse to convert as well. In like wise, Trueman, discussing how the Reformation did not go as smoothly and quickly as Luther had hoped it would, says, "In such a context, he looks for those who are responsible; and, among them, he sees the Jews, those who have the Holy Scriptures but who adamantly refuse to see Christ therein. It is this that drives him to write such a bombastically bitter and hateful treatise against them.")

Presented in this summarized form, the article is quite nice, and makes many good points. (By "nice" and "makes many good points", I mean his article is logically sound and well-written, and argues well according to its Christian axioms. But of course, I am not a Christian. Nevertheless, just because I cannot eat a pork chop doesn't mean I cannot admire a well-cooked pork chop when I see one. I dispute McDurmon's axioms, but his use of those axioms meets with my approval.) But McDurmon also makes some errors:
(1) He mischaracterizes passages in the Talmud referring to Jesus
(2) He misunderstands the Jewish attitude towards the Talmud and rabbis, conflating it with the Catholic attitude towards the pope.

To correct these two errors, I wrote a letter to McDurmon, saying,

Reverend McDurmon,

Hello. I read with interest your piece "Was Luther Wrong About Modern-Day Israel?" of 22 October 2010, http://americanvision.org/3640/was-luther-wrong-about-modern-day-israel.

There is one particular matter I wish to discuss with you, but first, I will discuss a few sundry other matters, for the sake of completeness, just to get them out of the way.

Let me also note, that I am *not* a scholar. Everything I say below, I say as a layman of relatively meager learning.

Regarding Luther himself, it would never occur to me to accuse him of being the source of the Holocaust. Besides the arguments you give (that his pen was notoriously careless with invectives, and that his piece was concerned not with Jews as an ethno-national people but rather with the doctrinal shortcomings of Pharisaic Judaism), it seems to me that whatever bona-fide antisemitism Luther may have had, would have been a result of the same antisemitism in Europe at large, the same that motivated all the pogroms of European history. That is, Luther's antisemitism - if he had any - would have been the result of the same antisemitism that led to the Holocaust, and Luther and the Holocaust alike would have been two parallel results of the same general European antisemitism. [I later saw that Carl Trueman makes a similar argument in Luther and the Jews II: The Context. Trueman argues that Luther's antisemitic writings were quite typical for the time, part of an established genre of Christian anti-Jewish literature.] If Luther is at all to blame for the Holocaust, then it is, as you say, due to his radical two kingdoms doctrine that permitted unreflecting and unquestioning obedience to the state, whatever it happened to order (whether antisemitic or otherwise).

Regarding Christian Zionists, I will say, as an Orthodox Jew of the Religious-Zionist persuasion, that I am grateful for their support but do not expect it. Those Christians who do not believe the Jews have any particular right to Eretz Yisrael, It would never occur to me to accuse them of antisemitism. After all, their political opinion follows soundly from basic Christian belief: if the Jewish people is constituted not by a hereditary or lineal peoplehood, but by a spiritual peoplehood of believers, then there is no reason to believe the Jewish people have any special claim to Israel. After all, from this Christian perspective, the Jews are not really Jews, any more than an atheistic child of a Christian is a Christian. I of course disagree with the Christian definition of Jewish peoplehood, but according to their premises (which I dispute), their position on Eretz Yisrael follows perfectly. Antisemitism would be bigotry on purely racial grounds, of the same sort that motivates, for example, white supremacists to view blacks as less than human. But when Christians criticize Jews on doctrinal grounds, I cannot call this antisemitism, any more than a Christian's disagreeing with a Jew on any intellectual topic is antisemitic. Similarly, I am disgusted when people accuse Tea Party members of being racist because they disagree with Obama. Their disagreement with Obama is based on creed, not race, and they would reject Obama's socialism no less if he were white. Likewise, a Christian's so-called antisemitism probably has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with what the Jew believes, and the Christian would disagree with the Jew just as much if the Jew were not a lineal descendant of the Biblical Jews but were instead a member of some other race.

As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik argues at length in his essay "Confrontation" (http://www.bc.edu/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/center/conferences/soloveitchik/), neither Jews nor Christians have any right to demand that the other renounce firmly-held theological beliefs for the sake of satisfying them. Just as a Jew would be supremely insulted if a Christian demanded that the Jew give up cherished Jewish beliefs for the sake of placating the Christians and resolving some grievance, how dare Jews do the same to the Christian, to demand the Christians change their beliefs as some sort of penance for the Christian sin of the Inquisition! Obviously, intellectually sound and authentic dialogue and debate is not criticized, but rather, Rabbi Soloveitchik blasts the arrogant position of asserting that the other side *must* give up some belief for the sake of placation and repayment. For example, Rabbi Soloveitchik would criticize a Jew who asserted that the Christian belief is antisemitic. For the Jew to say the Christian belief is wrong on intellectual grounds, is alright, but it is not alright for him to accuse that belief of antisemitism. What Rabbi Soloveitchik criticized was bartering beliefs as payment for perceived historical wrongs.

Therefore, if the Christians would reject the validity of the modern State of Israel on purely religious grounds, that the Jews today are not really Jews, due to their unbelief, etc., I would not object at all. I would respect your assertion as being based on sound, respectable logic. What I cannot stand is those hypocrites who believe that the Jews are committed apartheid against the Palestinians, or who believe that the Palestinians are the rightful natives of Israel. On a purely materialistic level, the Jews were in Israel before the Palestinians were, and so unless one has a metaphysical reason to dispute the Jews' claim - as the Christians do - then there is no disputing the Jewish claim. Of course, the Christians would not view the Palestinians as having a legitimate claim either. Because Christianity has removed all significance from Israel, in that it says that the people of God is a spiritual peoplehood inhabiting the whole earth, and that there is no expected Messianic kingdom in Israel, I imagine that Christians will be perfectly happy to resort to a materialistic calculus regarding ownership of Israel, and award that land to whoever was there first, the same way that the French own France and the Germans own Germany and the Chinese own China. So too, Jews would own Israel, not because they have any religious claim, but simply because they live there, and it is the Palestinians who came late to the party and are committing murder by bombing restaurants.

With that out of the way, I would like to proceed to the intended subject of this email: I believe you misunderstand the Talmudic/Pharisaic tradition, and the Jew's attitude towards it.

First, it is highly doubtful that the Talmud was even speaking of THE Jesus in the first place. Of the many mentionings of "Jesus" in the Talmud, some seem to refer to a man who lived around 100 BCE, while the others seem to refer to a man who was the son of Pappos ben Yehuda, a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva's (c. 50 - 135 CE), who (viz. Pappos ben Yehuda) would then be younger his supposed son Jesus. http://www.angelfire.com/mt/talmud/jesusnarr.html

Second, even if many Jews did in fact interpret the Talmud as speaking of Jesus, it is unwise to overstate the importance of this. Given the history of the time, i.e. given all the pogroms, it is understandable that Jews would have seized on whatever they could against Jesus. I am not an expert on this, but as best I can recall, Maimonides and other pre-Reconquista Spanish Jews, for example, focus far more on Islam than on Christianity. Maimonides himself was of the belief that Jesus was executed by a Jewish beit din, but other than that, I am unaware of any significant attention Maimonides pays to Christianity. He pays far more to debunking Islam, in his Epistle to Yemen, than he paid attention to Christianity, for Christianity was simply not within his realm of concern. Moreover, in a famous passage, he says at length that Christianity and Islam may very well be God's vehicles to bringing monotheism to the world. So if European Jews were more concerned with Christianity than the Arabic Jews were, then I believe it would merely be due to history, due to the historical experiences of those European Jews.

And soon enough, that attitude would change, thanks to actual interpersonal contact with Christians. As Rabbi Professor David Berger argues (http://www.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/rsrh/Jews_Gentiles_and_Egalitarianism_2.pdf), "Hostile, intolerant Christians attacked Jews for being hostile and intolerant.", and the Christian disputation "assisted, or even compelled [the Jews] to take a further step toward the ideal of religious tolerance." In other words, the rigged disputations and the cruel inquisitions forced Jews to evaluate themselves, to make sure they were not guilty of exactly that which they knew the Christians were guilty. The Jews *knew* the Christians were intolerant, but they were careful to make sure they did not hypocritically accuse the Christians of anything which they themselves were guilty for, and they reevaluated their own Talmudic texts accordingly.

And whatever Jewish hatred of Christianity may have remained, was neither systematic nor universal. That is, it was neither held by all Jews, nor did it constitute an integral cardinal of belief for those Jews who did hold it. See http://web.archive.org/web/20080613162732/http://www.bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/Brill.htm for some views, some negative and some positive. One view there is interesting: " ... [Rabbi] Zevi Yehudah Kook’s exclusivist ideology ... is noteworthy for a staunch anti-Christianity that culls two millennia of sources without acknowledging any of the countervailing traditions. For Zevi Yehudah Kook, the attack on Christianity is motivated by the conflict with the wider Western culture which both threatens the Jewish purity of Israel from within and opposes his messianic settlement drive from without. ... Zevi Yehudah Kook resurrects many of the classic anti-Christian polemics with a vigor not seen for centuries. Among them: Christianity should be dismissed as an internal Jewish heresy; God the creator clearly cannot be a man; the Jewish God is alive whereas the Christian’s is dead. Christianity is the refuse of Israel, in line with the ancient Talmudic portrayals of Jesus as boiling in excrement." I myself spent three years learning in a rabbinical seminary based on Rabbi Zevi Yehuda Kook's philosophy, and I can attest, from personal experience, that many of the rabbis at my seminary seemed to relish any opportunity to bring Christianity down a peg, using whatever means they could, preferably those which cast Christianity in the worst light possible. Then again, these same rabbis did the same to President Obama, saying they preferred to call him "Hussein" in order call forth an association with Saddam Hussein. One suspects that these rabbis were motivated more by a crass, racist, anti-intellectualism than any entrenched historical Jewish opinion of Christianity specifically. (One can hardly blame the Talmud for their pathetic and disgusting treatment of Obama. I despise Obama, but only because of his beliefs and actions, and not because his name is "Hussein" or because his skin is of the wrong color, or whatever.) In any case, however, this opinion of Rabbi Kook's is far from the only Jewish one, and we need look no farther than his own father to find a far more favorable towards Christianity, engaging it not with ad hominems, but with sincere and thought-provoking philosphical analyses of Christian belief. Rabbi Kook the elder specifically argues at length that true love of one's nation must grow to include love of all humanity, and that any love of one's nation that is limited to his own nation, betrays a lack of love for humanity as such, created in the image of God. Rabbi Kook the elder was no fan of Christianity, and definitely criticized it for what he saw as false beliefs, but he criticized it with respect, the same as he might have criticized a rabbi with whom he disagreed, i.e. with intellectual integrity and the respect due a fellow human being.

Reverend McDurmon, your citation of the Talmudic statements about Jesus - and I am charitably assuming they even refer to *the* Jesus in the first place - reminds me of something I saw in the book Judaism: Fossil or Ferment?, by Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits, arguing against Toynebee. At one point, Toynebee brings up a Talmudic discussion of the memra, the logos, and criticizes Judaism for holding by a primitive and materialist and corporeal conception of God. Rabbi Berkovits responds (pp. 162f.) that the whole doctrine of the memra was a bit of mere esoteric speculation by a few peculiar rabbis, and that the vast majority of Jews have never heard of it and would yawn if they ever did. Similarly, you seem to have latched onto a few passages which very Jews every really cared about, and magnified them out of all proportion. As I argued earlier, any Jews who did in fact emphasize these passages about Jesus, probably did so only because of antecedent pogroms, giving these Jews a yearning to find *something* to latch onto to ease their pitiful and morose lives.

So much for that. You have another misunderstanding of the Pharisaic tradition, I believe. You quote the Talmud's saying, "Whoever mocks the words of the Sages is punished with boiling excrement." But you misunderstand just who "the Sages" are. Unlike in Catholicism, Judaism does not have an established hierarchy. Rabbis have never been viewed as having any especial hierarchical significance, except for their occupancy of judicial courts, in which their ordination is akin to a lawyer's certification to practice law. But outside of these judicial courts, rabbinical ordination has never had any significance, and in fact, Jewish learning was quite democratic. You speak of "a secret society, if you will, of the Rabbis and their colleague[s]," but such a thing never existed. The Talmud says that of every 1000 laymen who began the study of the Torah, 100 would complete it and begin to study Mishnah, 10 would complete Mishnah and begin to study Talmud, and 1 would complete the study of Talmud. Thus, 1 out of 1000 men were experts in Talmud and 10 out of 1000 completed the Mishnah and thus were at least basically conversant in rabbinical law. (Completing the Mishnah would probably be roughly equivalent to earning a bachelor's degree, and completing the Talmud would a doctorate.) If we compare this to the literacy of the average gentile until relatively recently, such learning is absolutely astounding, and it smashes to bits any claim that the rabbis constituted some closed sect. On the contrary, the Talmud itself paints a picture of the rabbis being nothing more than learned laymen, coming from all strata of society and not representing any particular sects of society. We have rabbis who owned vast landed estates, and we have rabbis who literally lived day-to-day on whatever pittance they could scrounge up. In the tractate Eduyot, several rabbis argue about something the rabbi Hillel said, and a man came from the Dung Gate(!) and offered his personal testimony, which was accepted. In other words, the rabbis accepted the testimony of a man from the bottom of society, because the rabbis represented all of society and not merely one section, and the rabbis were accepted by the people as the most eminent of laymen. (Indeed, the rabbis refused to accept any payment for their rabbinical services, viewing the rabbinate as a state of learning and responsibility, not as a hierarchical office to fill. A rabbi was quite literally a learned layman.) Jewish learning was truly democratic. And thus, the Talmud Yerushalmi, tractate Horayot, says that one should obey the rabbis only when you are as sure that they are correct as your are sure that left is left and right is right. In other words, the Talmud Yerushalmi assumed that Jewish laymen were learned enough to question the rabbis and disobey them when they were wrong.

Compare the following passage from the 19th-century German Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch ("The Character of the Jewish Community", in Collected Writings, pp. 23f., 47): "It is not the rabbinate or the board of trustees but the community itself that is the focal point of all Jewish communal life. It is from the community that all religious authority must emanate. The office and functions of the board of trustees have meaning only to the extent that they represent the community and carry out its will. Only by virtue of the trust placed in him by the community does the חכם, that expert in the Law, become מומחה לרבים, the public authority, the rabbi in the true sense of the word. Judaism has no "hierarchical authority" that can impose regulations on the community, or appoint religious functionaries, against the community's will or even without consulting the community. Our Sages teach us that אין מעמידין פרנס על הצבור אלא אם כן נמלכין בצבור "one does not appoint a trustee for the community without having first obtained the free-willed consent of the community" (ברכות נה). They cite the example of the appointment of Bezalel, who was first introduced to Moses by the Almighty Himself with the words ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל וגו, and then by Moses to the Children of Israel with these words: ראו קרא ה בשם בצלאל וגו. "See for yourselves" that God has made him worthy of this calling by endowing him with outstanding talent (Cf. Exodus 31,2; 35,30). The Sages further teach us that כל גזירה שבית דין גוזרין על הצבור ולא קבלו רוב הצבור עליהן אינה גזירה "any ordinance enacted by the religious authorities but not accepted by the majority of the community has no binding authority under the Law" (ירושלמי שבת פ"א הל"ד). Even the supreme authorities of religious law, men like Daniel and his council, Shammai and Hillel and their assembly, made the binding, legal authority of their own religious ordinances dependent on their acceptance by the majority of the Jewish community (שבת יד, חולין ו). This is the intent of the unchangeable basic law of Jewish religious communal life as sanctioned in advance by the Supreme Lawgiver, God Himself, when He proclaimed His Law at the time of מתן תורה on Mount Sinai. God offered His holy Law to the entire community for their free-willed acceptance; the eternal binding authority of the Torah is based on a covenant made without coercion. Even with regard to the מצות העתידות להתחדש, religious obligations that were added subsequently, we are taught קימו וקבלו, קימו מה קבלו כבר, the Jewish people carried out only that which they had previously accepted as their obligation of their own free will (שבועות לט). ... We have already seen that the Jewish religious community should be autonomous, that it should be willing and able to direct on its own the functions of all its parts in every aspect of Jewish communal life. The center of power and authority in the Jewish community is not the board of trustees, nor even the rabbinate, but the community itself. The board of trustsees and the rabbi derive their functions only from the election or authorization by the community. The board of trustees can act only by order of the community, and the rabbi is a rabbi solely by virtue of the fact that the community has accepted him as such. Even after the community has delegated part of its authority to the trustees and the rabbi, the community itself must continue to make certain at all times that its authority is being implemented solely for the purpose of helping the community attain its sacred objectives. Indeed, as we have seen, the autonomy of the Jewish religious community has been safeguarded to such an extent that even the Jewish nations' highest religious authorities made the binding force of their own ordinances conditional on whether they were accepted by the nation as a whole."

Rabbi Hirsch goes on to say that a primary reason for every layman to study Torah, is so that he'll know when to reject the rulings of his rabbi as false. In other words, Rabbi Hirsch bases the obligation of learning Torah on the fallibility and sinfulness of man; all rabbis are human, and are liable to speak falsehood, whether accidentally or deliberately. Therefore, Rabbi Hirsch says, a man's trust in his rabbi must always be conditional and probational. In the same essay, Rabbi Hirsch rejects that the civil government has any right whatsoever to involve itself in religious affairs, and that both the Reform and the Orthodox in Germany must be censured for turning to the German civil authorities for assistance.

In our own days, Hakham Jose Faur is notable for insisting on the libertarian nature of Judaism, which he terms a "horizontal society." A student of his, Hakham Aaron Haleva, has put the matter well, discussing the question of whether a woman is permitted to perform the ritual task of reading the Megilat Ester on Purim. Many will argue that women technically may do so, but that that the danger of the "slippery slope" means that we should not let women do this, lest they come to do things forbidden to women. Hakham Haleva writes, "I fail to comprehend 'slippery slope.' The Law is what it is, and it is not always the same as what Jews (especially ones who do not first study the Law) imagine it is. If women may read the meghilla, then they may (as R. Ovadia Yosef has pointed out). If they may read the Sefer [Torah], then they may. If they cannot serve as hazzan, then they may not. All of these issues are well defined and precisely known by anyone who reads the Law (and not somebody’s report of the Law). The 'slippery slope' idea only has any significance if a 'rabbi' has authority to make new law. So then — the thinking goes – if the 'rabbi' 'allows' women to read the meghilla in public to a mixed minyan [congregation for prayer], next he may 'allow' a woman to pray Musaf (what a crying shame that would be, anyway, no?). What women cannot do is truly well defined, and there is nothing to be afraid of in letting them do what they are allowed to do, which is also very well defined and very well known or knowable. Once again, this 'slippery slope' mindset I find to be acutely non-Jewish. Unlike all other religions where the 'clergy' have authority, in Judaism the Law has the only authority. The Law is actually the sovereign. A hakham [ = rabbi] has relevance only insofar as he can guide you to what the Law is. If the very Sanhedrin is moreh [teaches] that X is the Law, and you happen to know that this is hora’ath ta’uth [an erroneous ruling], and really Y is the Law, then you may not listen to them, and you must not follow them. No other nation on Earth ever had such a rule, or such a culture where the People were the true repository of the Law. Imagine! The Tora expicitly tells you NOT to listen to the rabbis in certain cases. I.e., when they are wrong, as you see it (provided you have sufficient knowledge to make the call). Rebel against the authorities — why that sounds like insurrection and blasphemy! Wait — isn’t that just like the Maccabees rebelling against the corrupt kohanim in Jerusalem? Isn’t that something we **celebrate** ? Didn’t God himself even send a sign that He approved, with the oil and all? (or was that just the same corrupt rabbis some 200 years later simply ripping off a pagan Roman holiday? In a time when nobody in Israel or Babylon had anything good to say about Rome("malkhuth harish’a" ["kingdom of evil"]) or its culture.) We should try to preserve this very unique value. It is what makes Am Yisra’el truly a 'horizontal society.' The only one that ever existed. I do not see that it still exists very much, though. It is also what allows free thinking men to reject the 'Jewish Scholars' (our modern day 'authorities' — at least for the 'Modern Orthodox' types) when they are wrong. In a horizontal society it is not who you know, but only what you know. Good practice and training for olam shekullo emeth [a world that is wholly truth]."

So when the Jews said to Luther "that they were obliged to believe their rabbis as we do the pope and the doctors," it is quite obvious to me that they were oversimplifying, trying to find a parallel for Luther, to help him understand something foreign to him. For in truth, Judaism has no parallel to the pope, except for the doctrine of "Da'at Torah", which was invented in either the late 19th or early 20th centuries (according to Professors Jacob Katz and Lawrence Kaplan, respectively), by the Ultra-Orthodox, and is a historically unprecedented view. Some relate Da'at Torah to the Hasidic movement, but that movement's founder lived 1698-1760. No matter how you cut it, Luther's Jews had never heard of Da'at Torah. So when the Jews told Luther what they did, I believe we must interpret their words very loosely, for they were trying to find some parallel to help explain matters to Luther.

But in truth, the Talmud does not carry the same political significance for a Jew that that priests do for a Catholic. For a Jew, the Talmud is significant insofar as it accurately records the Torah She'b'al Pe, the Oral Torah, which is believed by Jews to have been given at Sinai no less than the Five Books of Moses. Now, you, Reverend McDurmon, will surely disagree, and I do not begrudge you this. But if you wish to understand the Jew's opinion of the Talmud, you must look at it from a Jew's perspective, and appreciate the way he sees it. For a Jew, the Talmud is significant insofar as it accurately records what God told the Jews at Sinai. But insofar as it records human opinions, then it has no greater significance than any other human. That is why the Talmud Yerushalmi could itself order Jews to disobey the rabbis when the rabbis are wrong. The rabbis writing the Yerushalmi recognized, as James Otis did, that "The parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5; Omnipotency cannot do it. The supreme power in a state, is jus dicere only;—jus dare, strictly speaking, belongs alone to God. Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is parliament that makes it so: There must be in every instance, a higher authority, viz. GOD. Should an act of parliament be against any of his natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity and justice, and consequently void."

Indeed, there are two Talmuds, the Yerushalmi (Palestinian) and the Bavli (Babylonian). Which one is authoritative in any case? After all, both were written by the rabbis, and both sometimes disagree! In fact, one is to follow whichever one one believes is correct in the issue at hand. Now, due to convention, Jews usually follow the Babylonian, simply because it was the Babylonian Jewish community that had the most influence, and students tend to follow their teachers. The rabbis in Israel were persecuted by the Christians and never got to finally edit the Yerushalmi, and so the Bavli was destined to have more influence, due to the greater security of its own authors and their greater ability to propound its views. But in theory, both of the two Talmuds are equally authoritative, and any Jew today may follow whichever one he personally wishes to, based on his own fancy. If Jews follow the Talmud the same way Catholics do the pope, then this would make no sense. Can you imagine a Catholic priest saying to his congregant, "Meh, if you want to follow the Eastern Orthodox instead, then sure, be my guest, because it's all the same to me."? But for a Jew, the two Talmuds are equally authoritative, and one should follow whichever one he personally feels is more reliable and trustworthy. Usually, that is the Babylonian, but only by habit and convention, and because the Yerushalmi was never completed, making it difficult to rely wholly on it without recourse to the Bavli.

Given this admittedly disputable axiom, that an Oral Torah was given alongside the Written Torah, then the political significance of the Talmud becomes completely different. Unlike the Catholics, Jews would never attribute any hierarchical significance to any humans. In fact, the Talmud says ein shalih b'davar `averah, meaning you cannot say, "I was merely following orders." The Talmud explains that if your human master says one thing and your Heavenly Master says another, you obviously follow the latter. Their attribution of authority to the Talmudic rabbis would rest on the belief that the Talmudic rabbis were merely transmitting traditions received at Sinai, not inventing anything new. Now, again, you, Reverend McDurmon, will surely dispute this. But again, I am asking you to look at the Talmud from a Jewish perspective. The Yerushalmi itself, as I told you, itself tells Jews to disobey the rabbis when they are wrong. Can you imagine the pope standing up and saying, "When I am wrong, I please ask everyone to disobey me." Can you imagine the United States Congress or President saying, "Whenever one of our taxes is unconstitutional, we respectfully ask the American people to withhold from paying that tax." But that is exactly what the Yerushalmi did!

Similarly, only yesterday, I was speaking to a fellow Orthodox Jew about the Calvinist origins of American political culture. I quoted Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to him, the paragraph about, "But some will ask, where is the king of America?". I used this passage to prove to this fellow that for the colonial Americans, the Bible was a binding source of law. My friend argued, "But the Christians don't understand the Torah!" I said to him, that's not the point. The point isn't whether the Christians understand the Bible or not. The point is that however they did understand the Bible - whether rightly or wrongly, exegetically, that nevertheless - they declared that the Bible as such was a binding authority in civil law. To understand the political significance of the Bible in colonial America, one need not have a correct understanding of the Bible. One need only understand that as far as the Christians were concerned, the Bible was binding. So too, I would say to you, Reverend McDurmon, it is beside the point whether the Talmud contains Sinaitic traditions. The point is that as far as the Jew is concerned - rightly or wrongly - the Talmud indeed contains such traditions, and thus, politically, the loyalty a Jew has for the Talmud is no different than the loyalty he has for the Torah.

Again, the key is the word "politically;" for our question is not whether the Jews' understanding of the Talmud is objectively correct, but our concern is only with his own personal understanding of its political nature and authority. Similarly, when Maimonides interprets the Torah in light of the Sabatean documents he wrongly believed were historically accurate, the point for us is not whether these documents were authentic (they were not). [Sic.: should read "Sabean;" the Sabateans were the 17th-century followers of Shabbatai Tzvi. h/t Alex Schindler] Rather, the significance for us is that Maimonides used what he thought were authentic ancient Near Eastern texts to help understand the Torah, and so we should use what we think are authentic ancient Near Eastern texts. We must put ourselves in the other man's shoes, understand matters from his perspective, and not focus on whether he was correct or not, and thereby learn to understand his methodology without concerning ourselves with his actual conclusions. For my part, I can - as an Orthodox Jew - draw inspiration from the fact that the Reformed Christians saw the Bible as a binding text for civil government, and try to apply the same principle in Israel today, substituting my interpretation of the Bible for theirs, but otherwise keeping the underlying political principle completely intact and unaltered. (I am thus a libertarian.) In other words, I can appropriate the form but substitute the matter. In form, the Talmudic rabbis held by the same view of sola scriptura that the Protestants did, only for the Talmudic rabbis, "scriptura" included both the Torah and the Talmud together. In the same way, a Muslim could hold by sola scriptura but substitute the Bible with the Quran. Politically-speaking, the Muslim would hold by the same form of sola scriptura as Protestants, and merely be substituting the matter.

So your assertion is simply wrong when it states the Talmud "is a humanistic tradition that places tens of thousands of pages of Rabbinical lawyering as a judge over and above God’s Word." By your logic, I could say that Reformed Christianity is a humanistic tradition that places the beliefs of Reformed Christian scholars above God's word, because for me, God's word is to be interpreted in a Jewish way, and so if the Reformed Christians interpret it otherwise, it must be because they are trusting man over God. But this would be absurd. From your perspective, you ARE following God, not the Reformed Christian scholars. Politically speaking, you DO put the Bible above man, only your interpretation of the Bible is different than mine. But this is a theological and hermeneutical dispute, not a political one. We each hold by the same political principle of sola scriptura, only for me, the Talmud is part of the word of God, and is binding insofar as it correctly relates to me the word of God.

As an aside, you also misunderstand certain Talmudic passages, when you say, "There is much else in the Talmudic tradition: Adam had sex with all of the beasts of the field before he had Eve; Pederasty with a child below nine is not considered as bad as with a child above that (another Rabbi makes the age of division at three)." Regarding Adam, that is an aggadah (homily), and it has been held since the time of the Gaonim (the immediately post-Talmudic authorities) that the aggadot are not binding, and that any Jew is free to disbelieve them as he wishes. (The technical term the Gaonim use to describe aggadah is "umdena," meaning something that was conceived of by reason and logic, but has not been proven. In other words, a hypothesis. The aggadot are speculations by the rabbis, and often, they are merely allegories that are not meant to be historically true, and they are never any more binding that mere speculation can possibly be.) As for that specific aggadah of Adam, I have not studied it deeply, but I would understand it in this manner, with the notice that again, I have not studied this passage deeply: God first presented Adam with the animals, and told him to name them, so that Adam would try to form a romantic bond with them all see firsthand that none of them was a proper mate for him. God then brought Eve to Adam who, thanks to his prior experience with the animals, immediately recognized her as what he had been seeking all along, his destined soulmate. Remember, Adam had never before witnessed marriage or a female human, and so it was novel for him to discover this amazing thing of two humans of opposite sex forming a union. God wanted Adam to *experience* that a human female offered something no animal could, rather than simply telling Adam this. In fact, this is a pedagogical principle that teachers readily recommend, learning by practice rather than by rote. This aggadah merely takes this to a perhaps absurd extreme, by saying that Adam didn't merely frolic with the animals and name them, but that he even had sex with them. Remember, Adam knew nothing about sex, and so he couldn't have known how disgusting bestiality was. Only when Eve was presented to him, did he realize, in retrospect, how utterly morally superior sex with her was, to sex with animals. By comparing his experience of bestiality with his experience of marriage with Eve, he was able to understand firsthand the grossness of bestiality, and impart that lesson to his children.

As for sex with a child, you completely misunderstand that passage. The Talmud explicitly says there that sex with an underage minor (whether three or nine, according to the opinion) is like poking a person's eye. Now, what does it mean to poke a person's eye? It means you have struck him, and can be brought to court for battery, in a tort case, and collect damages! (If you really want to get extreme, it means lex talionis! If a man rapes a child, maybe the man's punishment is that someone else gets to rape him. I am being flippant and joking, but my point is that it is no small crime to poke a person's eye.) What this means is that sex with a minor is not sex, but is instead an ordinary tort, as if the man had not raped the child but had instead struck and bruised the child (or poked the child's eye). The reason the Talmudic rabbis said this, is that back then, men were so (pathetically) concerned with virginity that no man would marry a non-virgin. (Again, this was pathetic, but the Jews were an ancient Middle Eastern tribe, after all, and old misconceptions die hard.) Given this, the rabbis did everything they could to preserve the raped child's virginity. It would do no good to charge her rapist with rape, if the result was that she would go her life without a husband. (Indeed, this is exactly why the Torah punishes a rapist with the punishment of being forced to marry his victim. Back then, this was to the woman's benefit, because only a husband earned a living, and only virgins got to marry a husband. Nowadays, we do not punish a raped woman in this manner, because her economic need for a husband has changed, and because men are not so reluctant anymore to marry a non-virgin, especially when she lost her virginity through no fault of her own. Nowadays, to treat rape as an ordinary tort is preferable for the woman, than to treat him according to the Torah's punishment. That said, I am not learned in modern rabbinical views of how to punish a rapist, and given that the modern nation-state does not permit rabbinical courts to punish rapists, I am not sure any rabbis have seriously investigated the question as a matter of practical law.) Now, if a grown woman was raped, it was very difficult to claim that she was still a virgin despite her rape, and nothing could be done for her, and the rabbis were forced to declare her a non-virgin, with all the negative consequences primitive society attached thereto. But at least with a minor, the rabbis could credibly argue that sex with a three year old was not really sex. That is, with someone who has not gone through puberty, sex as such is not possible, for both physiological and psychological reasons. And again, the rabbis did this to protect the child from the stigma of being a non-virgin. It was thus for her own good. And once you declare that sex with a female minor is not sex, you must be consistent and say the same of sex with a male minor.

But again, I am *not* a scholar. Everything I say above, I say from the meager learning that I have as a layman. Please do not take any of my words as being more authoritative than they are. (Of course, as I am sure you know, it is rare for a person with political authority to teach a false doctrine of civil disobedience and reserve for himself the true, secret doctrine of absolute fealty and obedience. Rather, things are ordinarily just the opposite, that you teach the masses the false doctrine of obedience and reserve for yourself the true, secret doctrine of disobedience. So no matter how ignorant I am, if my rabbis have taught me that Yerusalmi about my obligation to disobey the rabbis, you can be sure they probably aren't making it up. It is would very strange for my rabbis to invent a doctrine that undermines their own authority. It is far more likely that they are telling the truth.)

Thank you, and sincerely,
Michael Makovi
Jerusalem; formerly of Silver Spring, MD

The Tea Party and the Constitution: A Rebuttal

A few days ago, American Creation posted "The Tea Party and the Constitution" by Joseph Moore, a cross-post of the same at John Fea's The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

My rebuttal to Moore has been posted here by American Creation.

An Orthodox Jew in Israel writing about Calvinist political philosophy, hoo'ah!

"Obama Opposes the Vision of the Prophets," by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed

I found this column by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed to be very meaningful, so I am reproducing it in full, here, unedited.

Obama Opposes the Vision of the Prophets

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed is the Dean of Yeshiva Har Bracha and a prolific author on Jewish Law. Rabbi Melamed is one of the most active leaders amongst the religious-Zionist public. This article was translated from his popular weekly column "Revivim" which appears in the "Basheva" newspaper. According to official media surveys, his column is the most widely read editorial amongst the religious and ultra-Orthodox public in Israel.
Rabbi Melamed's articles also appear at: http://revivimen.yhb.org.il/

The Elections in America

Question: We are immigrants to Israel from America. Should we make an effort to participate in the upcoming elections for the U.S. Senate and Congress in order to strengthen candidates who oppose the policies of President Barak Obama? Is it ethical for us, who live in Israel, to vote according to the interests of Israel, when the elections mainly concern those living in America?

Answer: The subject of discussion concerns the right of every U.S. citizen no matter where they are located, to vote in U.S. elections. Thus, in practice, U.S. citizens throughout the world execute their right to vote according to their personal interests. Why, then, should the rights of Jews who immigrated to Israel be any different? It is well known that that the Jews made great contributions in the fields of the arts, science, economy, and defense of America, and many U.S. immigrants to Israel still pay taxes on assets they possess there. Why should their rights be less than any other person holding U.S. citizenship?

Beyond this, as believers in God, we are sure that the support which America granted the Jewish exiles and the State of Israel is one of the significant merits of this great country. Like in the times of Cyrus, about whom it is said (Isaiah 44:28): "That says of Koresh (Cyrus), He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: and saying to Jerusalem, You shall be rebuilt; and to the Temple, your foundation shall be laid," so too, a number of outstanding Americans merited assisting the Jewish nation to return to its land and fulfill the vision of the Prophets – to plant vineyards in the mountains of Samaria, to return the sons to their borders, to build the desolate cities, and to fill them with “flocks of people.” And as it is written (Genesis 27:28): "Those who curse you are cursed, and those who bless you are blessed", thus America was blessed by helping the Jewish nation.

An Afro-American President

When Barak Obama was elected President, I, along with many others, felt a spirit of rejoicing. Behold, in the country that, at its very beginning, enslaved Africans as servants against their will (for hundreds of year's traders and mercenaries would go out to capture people in Africa, kidnapping them from the lap of their families, in order to sell them to plantation owners in the south and north regions of America, thereby turning them and their offspring into eternal slaves until 150 years ago), and here, an African, married to a woman descended from slaves, was voted by the majority of citizens of the world's most powerful country, to the most esteemed office. I had tears in my eyes when I saw a picture of Afro-Americans standing upright with glorious honor, on the sides of the avenue leading to the White House, accompanying with their gaze the new President, Barak Obama, into the famous office.

What a wonderful victory for the spirit of a man who overcame all the obstacles. Undeniably, friends warned: "We're talking about a man who is hostile to the State of Israel." Nevertheless, there was hope that a man like him would also understand the Jewish nation, which granted the world the message of freedom and the foundations of morality, and concur that after 2,000 years of exile and suffering, it is fitting for the world to help the Jewish nation return to its land, as the word of God to his servants, the Prophets. Regretfully, it has become clear that he is perhaps the most hostile President that Israel has ever faced.
The splendid idea remains, the dream has not faded. However, its implementation by Barak Obama is awful.

They Have Raised Their Hand against Jerusalem and the Land of Israel

Instead of assisting the Jewish nation to build the Land of Israel, he began pressuring to freeze construction in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. The Prophet said (Zachariah 12): "The burden of the word of the Lord concerning Israel. The saying of the Lord, who stretches out the heavens, and lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him; Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of staggering to all the peoples round about" -- that is, anyone who passes the threshold of Jerusalem in order to harm her, will be punished. "And on that day I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all the peoples: all that burden themselves with it (attempt to transfer her to another nation) shall be grievously hurt." "On that day shall the Lord defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem… and it shall come to pass on that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem."

And Zachariah furthered prophesized (14): "And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations who came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths. And whoever does not come up of all the families of the earth to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, upon them shall be no rain (economic blessing)…" And lo and behold, precisely on Chag HaSukkot (the Feast of Booths) when the freeze on construction ended, instead of encouraging the Government of Israel to stop being negligent in building Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, Obama and his team of ministers and advisors pressured the Government of Israel to continue the freeze on building in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. Certainly, this will bring a curse on his country.

Therefore, it is fitting for every American citizen who believes in God and His Prophets, to vote for true friends of Israel, for people who believe that the entire Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish nation, as God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – no matter whether he or she is a candidate from either the Republican or Democratic Party. And if there is no friend of Israel in that state, then one should vote for the candidate who will best hinder Barak Obama from exerting pressure on Israel.

If I may add my own two cents, I would add that not only do I believe libertarianism is the truest political philosophy, and that therefore libertarians are to be preferred, but I would add that their non-interventionist policy, letting Israel (and every nation) practice self-determination, makes them - especially Ron Paul - perhaps the best friends of Israel that America has yet seen.

Rabbi Meir Kahane on Tzedaqa

Tamir Canaan of the Kahanist National Zionist Party group on Facebook has posted what he titles, "Rabbi Kahane discusses charity. Is charity a Choice or an Obligation?" Now, the Kahanist National Zionist Party group is not only Kahanist but also socialistic, and I presume that Canaan's goal here is to show that Rabbi Kahane would endorse socialism. Let us read what Rabbi Kahane wrote, and see if it supports socialism.

“One who refuses to give tzedaka or who gives less than he should, is coerced by the court and is given lashes until he gives what he was estimated to be able to. And they go down to his fields in his presence and levy the amount estimated.”
(Maimonides, Hilchot Matnot Aniyim, 7:10)

By Rabbi Meir Kahane ZT”L
October 14, 1977

There is no Hebrew word for “charity” and the Hebrew word that is commonly used to mean “charity” tzedaka in fact means nothing of the sort. Charity has a connotation to it, a very definite smell of condescendence. The person who gives charity is doing a favor to the pauper. It is not a thing he must do; it is not an obligation; it is a thing that he does out of the goodness of his heart – and the pauper prays that his luck finds him meeting the good man on a day that he had not quarreled with his wife or been cursed at by his employer.

Charity is a favor done by people who are in a good – a charitable – mood. There is no such concept in Judaism. One does not do tzedaka or give tzedaka because one is in the mood to do so; because one feels charitable; because one is touched by the pauper's plight. Tzedaka is not a favor; tzedaka is not a voluntary act; tzedaka is not impelled by the wellsprings of mercy. Tzedaka comes from the Hebrew word tzedek – justice, righteousness. It is just that a person gives to the poor. It is right that he do so. It is obligatory and mandatory because the money that he gives is not his to withhold.

When the giving to the poor is mere charity, a voluntary obligation that sprouts from noblesse oblige, the court cannot whip the one whose feelings of charity are frozen that particular morning. The sheriff cannot levy and execute judgment on a man's field if he merely refuses to be kind. But when the property is not yours to do with as you wish; when title to it lies not in you but in someone else; when your possession and right to use the property are conditioned on an obligation to give it to the poor, then the refusal to obey the condition, the refusal to do what one legally must, brings forth the natural legal consequences – coercion and action by the state to compel the individual to fulfill his obligations.

Unto the L-rd is the land and all that is in it. He is the Creator and the Owner; in Him is the title vested and man is his tenant farmer and tenant property possessor. A hundred conditions accompany this right of possession. Food? Give to the Kohen (priest); give to the Levite; give from your field's corner, from the sheaves that dropped, from that which you forgot – to the poor; make a blessing before eating that which you are allowed to eat, after exempting from your mouth all that which is forbidden. Money? Tzedaka – a minimum of ten percent.

There are a score of ideologies that discuss property and all come down – in the end –to the acceptance of private property. Whether it be the most laissez-faire Ayn Randists or the most communal communists, in the end, that which comes into the hand of the individual through either his own labor or through the blessing of the state is his, to do with what he wants. Torah recognizes no such concept. There is no private property. There is only the property that belongs to its Creator and we are permitted to use it under the most exacting of circumstances.

Let those who steal, those who cheat in business, those who defraud and take that which is in the possession of someone else, those who refuse to hear the needy cry out and to give what is due them – remember all this. Neither their property nor their very bodies are theirs. And in the end, those who take that which is not theirs and those who refuse to give that which is not theirs will see the Great Court come and take back all that belongs to the Judge.

Now, what Rabbi Kahane says is really not so novel at all. He can be summarized as saying:
(1) Tzedaqa is an obligation (tzedeq is justice), whereas charity is optional
(2) God owns everything and gives it all to us on condition. There is no private property, but only property that God has lent to us.
(3) "And in the end, those who take that which is not theirs and those who refuse to give that which is not theirs will see the Great Court come and take back all that belongs to the Judge."

It is the third point that concerns us, and the RambaM as well, for these are dealing with practical, political details.

Now then, we must realize that RambaM is taking a few conditions as givens, and we must make these implicit conditions explicit:
(1) The beit din is a local, communal one, i.e. a local, communal institution
(2) The beit din has authority only because the community has granted it authority

The first point means that this is not some ultramontanistic ("beyond the mountains") government without any familiarity with the people. Rather, it is a local institution, and both it and the people are intimately familiar with each other. It would be similar in this way to a qibutz. Commenting on the RambaM, Rabbi Yosef Karo (the author of the Shulhan Arukh) writes in his Kesef Mishnah that RambaM's source is Bava Bathra, page 8. On page 7b, the Mishnah states (according to the Soncino translation), "How long must a man reside in a town to be counted as one of the townsmen? Twelve months. If, however, he buys a house there, he is at once reckoned as one of the townsmen." This Mishnah and the accompanying Gemara are discussing the sorts of building improvements which a man can be coerced into supporting, such as the building of a protective wall around the town, and the Mishnah is saying that a man must be the inhabitant of a town in order for him to be coerced into supporting its infrastructure. This corroborates my argument that the RambaM is speaking of a local, communal beit din, and not an ultramontanistic national government. Similarly, in RambaM's Hilkhot Sanhedrin, we read (according to the text of Mechon Mamre):

1:1: מִצְוַת עֲשֵׂה שֶׁלַּתּוֹרָה לְמַנּוֹת שׁוֹפְטִים וְשׁוֹטְרִים בְּכָל מְדִינָה וּמְדִינָה וּבְכָל פֶּלֶךְ וּפֶלֶךְ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמָר "שֹׁפְטִים וְשֹׁטְרִים, תִּתֶּן-לְךָ בְּכָל-שְׁעָרֶיךָ" (דברים טז,יח).

My translation: It is a positive commandment from the Torah to appoint judges and officers in every administrative/legal jurisdiction/locality (lit. medinah) and in every region/zone/area (lit. pelekh), as it says, "Judges and offices you will appoint for yourselves in all your (city) gates (lit. sh'ar'ekhah" (Deut. 16:18).

1:3: אֵין אָנוּ חַיָּבִין לְהַעְמִיד בָּתֵּי דִּינִין בְּכָל פֶּלֶךְ וּפֶלֶךְ וּבְכָל עִיר וְעִיר, אֵלָא בְּאֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל בִּלְבָד

My translation: We are not obligated to establish courts of law in every region/zone/area (pelekh) and in every city (ir), except in Israel exclusively.

(Note that RambaM replaced medinah with ir, corresponding with sh'ar'ekhah.)

1:8: וּמַעְמִידִין בְּכָל עִיר וְעִיר מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל שֶׁיֵּשׁ בָּהּ מֵאָה וְעֶשְׂרִים אוֹ יוֹתֵר, סַנְהֶדְּרֵי קְטַנָּה; וְיוֹשֶׁבֶת בְּשַׁעַר הָעִיר, שֶׁנֶּאֱמָר "וְהַצִּיגוּ בַשַּׁעַר מִשְׁפָּט" (עמוס ה,טו).

We establish in every city (ir) of Israel that has 120 or more (male inhabitants?), minor courts (sanhedrei qetana), and they sit in the city-gates (b'sha'ar ha-ir), as it says, "Display justice in your gates" (Amos 5:15).

So the beit din is a local, communal institution, not an ultramontanistic one.

The second point - that the beit din has authority only if the people democratically grant it - means that the beit din has no authority unless the locals grant it their consent. We know that the rabbis in general have no authority except to declare what the Torah says. Therefore, their rabbinic decrees are meaningless and void unless ratified by the people. Now, tzedaqa is a m'd'oraita command (i.e. from the Torah), but the requirement to give precisely 10% is m'd'rabanan, and furthermore, the beit din's discretion that this man who is not giving enough tzedaqa, ought to give his tzedaqa to so-and-so, this discretion is just that - discretionary. As such, it is similar to a m'd'rabanan (Rabbinic command). That is, it is not a simple case of a Torah law that states exactly what must be done. The Torah says one must give tzedaqa to the poor in general, but it is the rabbis who state how much, and that it must be given to this given, specific poor man in the community, or into this, specific communal tzedaqa fund. So while tzedaqa is indeed m'd'oraita, the court's activity in the area of tzedaqa is more like a m'd'rabanan. As such, it works only if there is democratic consent of the governed.

What all this means is that a man who refuses to give tzedaqa, he cannot be punished by just anyone. He can be punished only by the local, communal beit din, one that enjoys broad, nearly unanimous popular consent. A beit din from another town cannot arrogate itself authority, nor can a self-styled gadol, and waltz on in and start coercing people to give tzedaqa. Coercion for tzedaqa works only for a local, communal beit din that enjoys a broad popular consensus that it is legitimate.

We see this in action in Jewish history. I quote Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel's The Jews of Rhodes, where we read (p. 26),

One of the persistent and complex problems associated with haskamoth [communal ordinances] was the question of whether the majority the right to pass an ordinance over the objection of a dissenting minority of the community. Does the majority rule, or is unanimity imperative? Over the centuries this question evoked considerable rabbinic discussion.

It seems the Jews of Rhodes resolved this dilemma by distinguishing between different types of haskamoth. In matters involving an improvement that was needed for the general community, a majority was sufficient to enact a haskamah. But in matters involving taxation, a unanimous decision was required in order to protect individuals from a barrage of levies imposed on them by the majority of the community. In the final analysis, the situation surrounding each haskamah had to be carefully evaluated before determining whether a majority or unanimity was required for its adoption.

Rabbinic law allowed for the institution of herem, excommunication, in order to give communities power to enforce their laws. Yet, herem was more a threat than an actual procedure.

As Rabbi Angel's larger discussion shows, many (if not most) of these haskamoth were regarding tzedaqa. So the community realized that it could not pass a new haskamah, even for the poor and for tzedaqa, without unanimous approval by the community. In other words, the Jews of Rhodes were concerned with the tyranny of the majority no less than Alexis de Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers were, even regarding the issue of tzedaqa.

So RambaM's words are not so easy to apply. They are more applicable to a qibutz than to an entire nation. If RambaM's words express socialism, then it is anarcho-socialism, not Marxism. RambaM speaks not of a dictatorship of the proletariat, forcing the bourgeoisie against their wills to pay. In such a Marxist scenario, with the bourgeoisie presumably denying their consent, the beit din in question would be illegitimate and lack any authority to coerce anyone. Only with consent does the beit din have power, and in the case of Marxist dictatorship, the rich would presumably deny their consent. Only in the cases of anarcho-socialism or laissez-faire capitalism - i.e. libertarianism in general - can RambaM's words apply.

Furthermore, RambaM speaks of a case where a man gives less tzedaqa than he should. But RambaM does not speak of a case where a man gives tzedaqa fully - i.e. 10% - only to someone other than to whom the beit din would prefer he give. For example, if I lived in Meah Shearim, and gave 10% of my income to blacks in Darfur, then the beit din might be miffed and annoyed and frustrated at me, but technically, I am giving the proper amount of tzedaqa, and according to RambaM's words, the beit din cannot do anything to me. RambaM is dealing with a very narrow case. Whereas Marxist socialism would have the government dictate exactly how the collectivization must proceed, with dissenters going to the Gulags, RambaM deals only with the very narrow case of a man who gives insufficiently to tzedaqa; he fails to authoritize coercion in the case of a man who gives sufficient tzedaqa but to a recipient not of the beit din's personal choosing. And on top of all that, RambaM does not speak of collectivization at all! He speaks of giving tzedaqa, but he speaks only of 10%, not the 100% that socialism demands.

In short, RambaM speaks of:
(1) A local, communal beit din, not an ultramontanistic national leviathan
(2) A beit din that enjoys broad, popular consent, not a tyranny of the majority
(3) A man who gives insufficiently to tzedaqa, not a man who gives fully to someone other than to whom the government would prefer
(4) Giving 10% of one's wealth to tzedaqa, not the extortionist tax rates that social democracies today levy, and certainly not the 100% tax rate (i.e. collectivization and abolition of private property) that socialism calls for.

Now, of course, in all honesty, I have explained only the RambaM, not Rabbi Kahane. Who knows whether Rabbi Kahane would interpret the RambaM as I have? But the best I can do is to charitably assume Rabbi Kahane interpreted the RambaM in the manner I believe he ought to have, until someone proves to me otherwise. And in case this interpretation of Rabbi Kahane is forced, then I quote Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner's haqdama to the Dor Revi'i:

From these words one can see how much the pure soul of the Hatam Sofer despised this twisted method of study [viz. pilpul, i.e. casuistry], that just for the sake of upholding the words of some Aharon [post-16th-century authority], would distort the words of the Rishonim [pre-16th-century post-Talmudic authorities] in an absurd way in order that we might say that left is right.

Now his holy words require some explanation, because they seem self-contradictory when he writes that he would accept a reasonable explanation even if it is forced, "because most forced explanations are true." This is an obvious inconsistency, because reasoning is the construct of our intellect. So if it is forced, an explanation is not reasonable. And not only that, but at the end of his responsum he himself complains about the forced reading his interlocutor wanted to impose upon the words of the Tosafot, contrary to their plain meaning.

But, it is must be understood that straightforward reasoning was always the mistress whose sovereignty may not be overthrown. Thus, to uphold unassailable reasoning, the Sages adopted forced readings in early texts that seemingly suggested the opposite. So has it been ever since the days of the Mishnah. So we find that the Sages, of blessed memory, of the Talmud, inasmuch as they had no authority to dispute the text of a mishnah or beraita [textual sources of the Tannaim, i.e. Mishnaic authorities] that conflicted with the dictum of an Amora [Talmudic authority], would instead assert that the text of the mishnah was incomplete (hisurei mehs’ra) or was inexact (na’asseh k’mi she’omeir). They thus imposed forced readings on the text of the Mishnah in order to uphold their straightforward and clear reasoning. This is what the Hatam Sofer meant when he wrote that most forced interpretations are true, that is to say, forced interpretations of old texts that we impose in order to uphold the true reasoning of the later sages are, in most cases, true, that is conventionally true. We do this, however, only in situations in which we have no alternative except to contradict and uproot what is reasonable. But that we should do so just to uphold the opinion of some aharon whose reasoning is not compelling, and that just to avoid the conclusion that he was mistaken we should insert his opinion into the opinion of the Rishonim against the plain meaning of their words, or that we should abandon straightforward reasoning and instead pile assumption on top of assumption just to invent concepts that never before existed just to rationalize the words of the earlier authority, against this the Hatam Sofer poured out his scorn. And he properly said that if this later authority were standing before us, we would certainly reject his reasoning based on the text of the Tosafot or the Rashba. And now just because he has passed on and his words have been set in print, are they sanctified unto us so that we may not contradict them either based on another text or on reasoning? Than this there is no greater confusion.

In other words, Rabbi Glasner says "most forced explanations are true", but only when it is to reinterpret the words of a later authority to fit an earlier authority, or when a later authority knows he is correct and must slightly reinterpret the authority authority. If an indisputable early authority says one thing, then we may slightly reinterpret later authorities to agree with this. Similarly, if a later authority is absolutely sure that he is correct, beyond any reasonable doubt, and that his words are unassailable, he may slightly reinterpret earlier sources to agree with him. But the reinterpretation may only be slight. One cannot twist sources absolutely out of context, to say the clear and obvious opposite of their intentions, nor may one reinterpret a source to agree with someone deceased who, were he alive, we would reject his opinion out of hand. In our present case, I am charitably reinterpreting Rabbi Kahane to agree with what I believe the RambaM says, and I believe Rabbi Glasner would accept my forced interpretation of Rabbi Kahane's words.

Israeli Cabinet Approves Citizenship Amendment

In the New York Times, we find (10 October 2010), Israeli Cabinet Approves Citizenship Amendment:

JERUSALEM — The Israeli cabinet on Sunday approved a contentious draft amendment to the country’s citizenship law that calls for non-Jews seeking to become citizens to pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state.

Many problems with this law could be pointed out, but I just wrote the following letter to a multitude of members of the Knesset, to point one such problem of the many there surely are:

Hello. I would like to please express to you my opinion on the recent Citizenship Amendment. Perhaps one of you might find my argument meaningful, and pass it on to others.

I am originally from Silver Spring, MD, but I am a student learning in Jerusalem, and I fully plan on making `aliyah. I am Jewish - Orthodox, in fact, of the Maimonidean German Neo-Orthodox school (if that means anything to anyone) - but let us suppose for the sake of argument that I am not Jewish.

I would be forced to pledge loyalty to the state as a democracy, yes? But what if I rejected Thomas Hobbes, and instead rely on Johannes Althusius and John Locke? What if I rejected Jean Jacque Rousseau and instead relied on Edmund Burke and Frederic Bastiat? What if I rejected Karl Marx and instead relied on Abraham Kuyper? What if I rejected John Maynard Keynes and instead rely on Friedrich August Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard? What if, having studied the history of theological-political federalism, I "hold these truths to be self-evident", and have my tongue dripping with words of interposition of inferior magistrates and nullification of laws that violate the foedus? What if I sided with Martin Luther King, Jr., and cited Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to uphold the belief that an unjust law is no law at all? What if I followed Heinrich Bullinger and rejected those princes who declare Wir sind das recht, Hoc volo, sic jubeo; sit pro ratione voluntas? (Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades, second decade, seventh sermon, "Of the Office of the Magistrate, Whether the Care of Religion Appertain to Him or No, and Whether He May Make Laws and Ordinances in Cases of Religion", Parker Society translation, pp. 339f.)

In other words, what if I rejected the statism of Hobbes that Israel so cherishes, the majoritarian democracy of Marx and Rousseau that Israel so celebrates? (Of course, in such a Rousseau-ian majoritarianism, a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, even though all animals are equal, it soon happens that some animals are more equal than others. But that's not the point. The original vision was that all men would be equal, and that the "General Will" would permit a tyranny of the majority. Thus, John Quincy Adams rightly rebuked Thomas Paine when the latter enthusiastically lauded the French Revolution; Paine declared that, "whatever a whole nation chooses to do, it has the right to do," and Adams replied, "Nations, no less than individuals, are subject to the eternal and immutable laws of justice and morality." Paine's "doctrine," said Adams, "annihilated the security of every man for his inalienable rights, and would lead in practice to a hideous despotism, concealed under the party-colored garments of democracy.")

Okay, fine, I am a Jew, and so when I make `aliyah, I will not be subject to this law, unless Neeman has his way. But what of a hypothetical non-Jew who thinks as I do? How are we to define "democracy"? What if he rejects Israeli despotic democracy and instead embraces the libertarian-republican democracy of Thomas Jefferson? Will he be denied citizenship? Or shall we follow in the steps of Rousseau's disciple, Robespierre?

I find this whole law so horrifying, precisely because it is so vague. What is this "democracy" that non-Jewish immigrants must pledge allegiance to? Will it be more precisely defined? For it is not more precisely defined, then it will constitute a carte blanche for the government to decide, ad-hoc, what it should mean, for each and every immigrant individually, perhaps depending on the size of the bribe he offers. To quote John Cotton, "This may serve to teach us the danger of allowing to any mortal man an inordinate measure of power to speak great things: to allow to any man uncontrollableness of speech; you see the desperate danger of it. Let all the world learn to give mortal men no greater power than they are content they shall use--for use it they will. And unless they be better taught of God, they will use it ever and anon: it may be, make it the passage of their proceeding to speak what they will. And they that have liberty to speak great things, you will find It to be true, they will speak great blasphemies. No man would think what desperate deceit and wickedness there is in the hearts of men. ... It is therefore most wholesome for magistrates and officers in church and commonwealth never to affect more liberty and authority than will do them good, and the people good: for whatever transcendent power is given will certainly overrun those that give it and those that receive it. There is a strain in a man’s heart that will sometime or other run out to excess, unless the Lord restrain it; but it is not good to venture it. It is necessary, therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited, church-power or other. If there be power given to speak great things, then look for great blasphemies, look for a licentious abuse of it. It is counted a matter of danger to the state to limit prerogatives; but it is a further danger not to have them limited: they will be like a tempest if they be not limited. A prince himself cannot tell where he will confine himself, nor can the people tell; but if he have liberty to speak great things, then he will make and unmake, say and unsay, and undertake such things as are neither for his own honor nor for the safety of the state."

Of course, perhaps my even quoting Cotton would cause my application for citizenship to be denied, were I a gentile. Imagine, quoting one of the founding fathers of American democracy - blasphemy! In Israel, the more "party-colored" one's "garments of democracy" are, the more orthodox is his thought considered. I do believe the word "democracy" has entered the lexicon of Ingsoc's Newspeak. Though I must say, this whole affair is rather amusing. It's like Jefferson and Madison together watching Lenin denounce Trotsky. Imagine, Israel condemning some its Arab residents as being undemocratic! It would be funny if the potential practical, temporal ramifications were not so dire. To quote Judge Richard Posner's article "Enlightened Despot", in the New Republic, a review of Aharon Barak's The Judge in a Democracy, "Israel is an immature democracy, poorly governed; its political class is mediocre and corrupt; it floats precariously in a lethally hostile Muslim sea; and it really could use a constitution." (Judge Robert Bork's review of Barak in Azure is exquisite as well.)

Thank you, and sincerely,
Michael Makovi

Havid Ner-David and the Democratic Nature of Judaism

Shimshonit has a very interesting a book review of Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David’s Life On the Fringes.

In the comments there, an ongoing discussion is occurring, and I reproduce here some of my comments there:

Inter alia, Shimshonit discusses Ner-David's discussion with Rabbi Seth Farber, writing,

After describing her vision of where Orthodoxy might go to allow greater participation by women, she asks Rabbi Farber directly, "Why, if there is no halakhic barrier to women becoming rabbis, are Orthodox rabbis today denying women the right to become rabbis? Why are you against giving s’micha to women who study the same texts as male rabbinical candidates?" Rabbi Farber answers that authority, not a piece of paper, makes someone a leader, and that women must first gain that authority and respect. He tells Ner-David that she is doing a disservice to the Orthodox feminist movement by seeking smicha now, and that in doing so she deflects attention away from the really important issues and giving the opposition easy ammunition to discount the cause. I’m sure many people would agree with Rabbi Farber, and it gives Ner-David pause as well. But on considering this point, I must say I am still not convinced. Does he suggest that women are not currently deserving of respect and authority?

I don’t think that’s what Rabbi Farber meant, that women are not deserving of respect.

Rabbi S. R. Hirsch argues at length, in his essay “Jewish Communal Life” that Jewish polity is essentially democratic, and that a rabbi is a rabbi only because the community appointed him to be one. A rabbi is hired on contract by the community, and in that respect, he is subservient to them. Historically, most Jewish communal affairs were conducted not by the rabbi, but by the parnasim, by the Jewish lay officials of the community. The rabbi was consulted on an ad-hoc basis, and sometimes, he had to ratify any proposals, but for the most part, it was the parnasim, not the rabbi, who were in charge.

Furthermore, any halakhic rulings made by the rabbi had authority only insofar as they agreed with the Torah. The rabbi had no intrinsic authority; his authority was only to correctly declare what the Torah already said. Therefore, says Rabbi Hirsch, laymen must learn Torah so that they can second-guess their rabbis and disobey them at the proper times.

On top of that, says Rabbi Hirsch, we have the principle that a taqana or gezera is binding only if the people accept it. To quote RambaM, Hilkhot Mamrim, 2:6-7 (as translated by Professor Marc Shapiro’s book review of, Jewish Commitment in a Modern World: Rabbi Hayyim Hirschenson and His Attitude to Modernity (Hebrew) by David Zohar):

If the court has issued a decree in the belief that the majority of the community could endure it, and after the enactment thereof the people made light of it and it was not accepted by the majority, the decree is void and the court is denied the right to coerce the people to abide by it. If after a decree had been promulgated, the court was of the opinion that it was universally accepted by Israel and nothing was done about it for years, and after the lapse of a long period a later court investigates the doings of Israel and finds that the decree is not generally accepted, the latter court, even if it be inferior to the former in wisdom and number, is authorized to abrogate it.

The Kesef Mishnah is not sure whether the later court must investigate whether the decree was not accepted at the time of its promulgation, or whether it is enough to find that the present and contemporary generation has not accepted it. (Rabbi Hirschensohn took the second approach, and Professor Shapiro shows that Rav Kook did as well.) Either way, the basic principle stands, that the rabbis have no intrinsic authority to make decrees, unless the people ratify those decrees.

This is all a basic application of the fact that for Jew, the Torah alone is law. No man can take the place of G-d and His law. We have a principle that ein shaliah b’davar `averah, that we must disobey illegal orders. We have an entire mesekhet Horayot to tell us what to do when the Sanhedrin errs.

Hakham Jose Faur is prominent for emphasizing this democratic and "Higher Law" aspect of Judaism. (Hakham Faur is a strict Maimonidean, going so far as to declare Qabala to be not merely wrong, but criminal. He grew up in the Syrian community in Argentina, and on the advice of the Syrian community in New York City and Rabbi David de Sola Pool of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation in New York City, Hakham Faur taught as a professor at JTS. He left when JTS began ordaining women, and he sued for a breach-of-contract, arguing that by choosing to ordain women via an administrative decision, rather than having the Talmudic scholars find a halakhic way to ordain them, JTS was, he said, not only denying women their due rights in halakhah – if any would in fact be found by those Talmudic scholars – but was also violating the terms of his contract with them – presumably because JTS was supposed to be a Jewish institution and function in a Jewish, i.e. halakhic, manner – and forcing him to resign his position as professor.)

Speaking about the "slippery slope" of permitting women to read from the megillah, a follower of Hakham Faur’s, Hakham Aaron Haleva, writes,

I fail to comprehend "slippery slope."

The Law is what it is, and it is not always the same as what Jews (especially ones who do not first study the Law) imagine it is.

If women may read the meghilla, then they may (as R. Ovadia Yosef has pointed out). If they may read the Sefer [Torah], then they may. If they cannot serve as hazzan, then they may not.

All of these issues are well defined and precisely known by anyone who reads the Law (and not somebody’s report of the Law).

The "slippery slope" idea only has any significance if a "rabbi" has authority to make new law. So then — the thinking goes – if the "rabbi" "allows" women to read the meghilla in public to a mixed minyan, next he may "allow" a woman to pray Musaf (what a crying shame that would be, anyway, no?). What women cannot do is truly well defined, and there is nothing to be afraid of in letting them do what they are allowed to do, which is also very well defined and very well known or knowable.

Once again, this "slippery slope" mindset I find to be acutely non-Jewish. Unlike all other religions where the "clergy" have authority, in Judaism the Law has the only authority. The Law is actually the sovereign. A hakham has relevance only insofar as he can guide you to what the Law is.

If the very Sanhedrin is moreh [teaches] that X is the Law, and you happen to know that this is hora’ath ta’uth [an erroneous ruling], and really Y is the Law, then you may not listen to them, and you must not follow them. No other nation on Earth ever had such a rule, or such a culture where the People were the true repository of the Law.

Imagine! The Tora expicitly tells you NOT to listen to the rabbis in certain cases. I.e., when they are wrong, as you see it (provided you have sufficient knowledge to make the call). Rebel against the authorities — why that sounds like insurrection and blasphemy!

Wait — isn’t that just like the Maccabees rebelling against the corrupt kohanim in Jerusalem? Isn’t that something we **celebrate** ? Didn’t God himself even send a sign that He approved, with the oil and all?

(or was that just the same corrupt rabbis some 200 years later simply ripping off a pagan Roman holiday? In a time when nobody in Israel or Babylon had anything good to say about Rome("malkhuth harish’a" ["kingdom of evil"]) or its culture.)

We should try to preserve this very unique value. It is what makes Am Yisra’el truly a "horizontal society." The only one that ever existed. I do not see that it still exists very much, though. It is also what allows free thinking men to reject the "Jewish Scholars" (our modern day "authorities" — at least for the "Modern Orthodox" types) when they are wrong.

In a horizontal society it is not who you know, but only what you know. Good practice and training for "olam shekullo emeth [a world that is wholly truth]."

Regarding women’s suffrage and holding positions of civil authority, Rabbi Benzion Uziel, in his teshuva on the subject proves from the example of Devorah, and rabbinic commentaries thereon, that women are permitted to hold authority. The issue, he says, is that Sifrei says that a king must be man, not a woman. Rabbi Uziel responds that because of the halakhah that a king must be accepted by the people in order to have authority, therefore, he says, a king of Israel had to be a man, in order to ensure that he would be accepted by the people. (I’ll add that Rabb Yuval Cherlow cited the Yerushalmi as saying that as long as King David was king over Yehuda from Hevron, he was not yet a king, until he reigned over all the tribes, because a king must be accepted by all the people.) The way I read Rabbi Uziel is like this: people are sexist: tough; deal with it. The whole nation must accept the king. Back when, if the king were a woman, then the whole nation would not have accepted her. This is unfair, but it is life, and it is what comes with Judaism’s being a democracy. A king requires consent-of-the-governed under the social-contract, and if the men all deny their consent to a woman and demand a male king, then what can we do?

So to return to Rabbi Farber: I believe he is right, at least theoretically. A rabbi must be accepted by the people, and not merely have a piece of paper. Therefore, it is not enough to give Ner-David semikhah, for she must also have authority granted by the people. This is unfair, but it is life. It is what comes with being a Jewish clergywoman rather than a clergywoman of a hierarchical, authoritarian religion.

Now, that does not mean I necessarily agree with Rabbi Farber in practice. I would argue that giving women semikhah would help individual communities choose female rabbis for themselves, even if they are in the minority. Give a woman semikhah, I say, and let everyone do with her whatever they will, and accept her as their rabbi if they want to. But Rabbi Farber’s words do have some truth in them.

Personally, all of this fits in very well with my own libertarianism. In fact, every time I’d pontificate on some political issue, expressing my own libertarian views, my friend would remark that I’d get along great with Hakham Faur. In any case, I cannot help but quote Thomas Paine’s "Common Sense":

But where says some is the king of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

Likewise, James Otis’s "Rights of British Colonies Asserted":

The parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5; Omnipotency cannot do it. The supreme power in a state, is jus dicere only;—jus dare, strictly speaking, belongs alone to God. Parliaments are in all cases to declare what is parliament that makes it so: There must be in every instance, a higher authority, viz. GOD. Should an act of parliament be against any of his natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity and justice, and consequently void.

Honestly, I do not know why so many Modern Orthodox are leftists in politics. For me, Modern Orthodox Judaism and libertarian politics go hand-in-hand as mates that G-d created – quite literally – to be partners.

II.

In the comments, Shimshonit adds,

The risk of having women participate more is that men will show up less. A friend who is a sociologist at Brandeis said once that if the boys aren’t in charge, they don’t show up. I think some of the Protestant denominations, in ordaining women, have dwindled in their male membership tally. If that were to happen, that could well be the highest cost to Orthodoxy of ordaining women.

...

I take that risk very seriously. Women in my shul in Newton, Mass., were accused of splitting the congregation by holding a women’s Shacharit service twice a year. And you’ve seen what happens if they’re allowed to participate WITH the men. Who’s to blame for splitting the congregation if the men stay home? Probably the women again. Blame in itself doesn’t bother me; women are accused of much worse than that. But I don’t like the idea of the kahal being dissolved like that. It does, indeed, stink.

The view of these men, that’s disgusting. You don’t let them (the women) leave, and then, when they stay, you put them into a second-class situation?! You cannot have it both ways. You cannot both heavily regulate an institution, and forbid members to leave. (Don’t get me started on Lincoln and the Civil War.)

Either you let women leave the kehillah and start their own, or else you make them equal within the male’s kehillah. If halakhah forbids the latter, then by extension, I believe, it mandates the former.

And who says the men’s kehillah is the "real" one, and that anyone who leaves it is poresh min ha-tzibur (an antisocial separatist)? If the men’s kehillah is the "real" kehilah for everyone, then women must be made equal within it. And if according to halakhah, women cannot be made equal within it, then it is a blatant lie to say that it is everyone’s kehillah. And if so, why should women be forced to belong to a kehillah that isn’t theirs? How can women be accused of splitting the congregation when they were never bona-fide, enfranchised members of it in the first place?

You know what it’s like? It’s like getting a man addicted to drugs so as to ensure yourself a customer. The men blackmail the women – with the threat of their being no longer observant and in G-d’s good graces – into remaining with a congregation that they aren’t really members of. They tell the women that if they leave, then they are no longer observant, and that they are responsible for destroying the religiosity of the men to boot. Is it any wonder these men frown on women’s Torah learning? After all, the Catholics banned English translations of the Bible, and likewise, women who are learned in Torah are a threat to the men’s political hegemony.

So, I say, tough on them (the men). Should wives bear the sins of the husbands? If the men are so petty as to leave when women enter the congregation, or to feel slighted when women start their own independent congregations, then fine, let them rot.

Furthermore, as it stands right now, the men show up and the women don’t. (I’m oversimplifying.) If having the women show up means the men won’t, well, then we’ll still be at 50%. As far as I’m concerned, men and women are equally Jewish, and 100% of one half is worth as much as much as 100% of the other.

On top of all that, who says a female rabbi has to be a congregational rabbi? Is every man with semikhah a pulpit rabbi? No, so why cannot we grant semikhah to women and tell them (on the honor system) not to become pulpit rabbis? So anyone who says that women cannot be rabbis because it’ll cause the men to leave, or because women should not be pulpit rabbis, is clearly either very myopic and uncreative, or else is completely disingenuous and would actually like to forbid women even if there were no sound reason whatsoever.

I’ll add this: as I noted, no taqana or gezera is binding unless the Jewish people accepts it. So let’s suppose that men accepted it upon themselves not to let women count in their minyanim. Very well. But I ask: did women ever accept upon themselves not to be allowed to count in a women’s-only minyan? Did women ever accept upon themselves to allow only a minyan of men to say Qadish and Qedushah? Even if the halakhah says only a minyan of men may say those, I ask: did the women ever aspect this decree upon themselves?

Libertarian or Libertine?: On "Modal Libertarians" or "Lifestyle Libertarians"

Many times, in arguing my libertarianism, people have confused libertarianism with libertinism. The difference is that whereas the libertarian believes the government has no business in redistributive welfare, but that the lay citizen ought to give charity himself, the libertine will use libertarianism as a smoke-screen for his true desire to be a miser. That is, the libertine really does not want to give charity at all, and he uses libertarianism as his vehicle. The libertarian has positive social values and beliefs, and simply believes it is not the government's job to enforce them; the libertine has no positive values.

For example, a modal libertarian (libertine) will oppose the Civil Rights Act because he likes racism and hates blacks. By contrast, a true libertarian will oppose the Civil Rights Act because he believes that, as hateful is racism truly is, that nevertheless, a private individual has the right of freedom of association, and can bar blacks from his premises. A private restaurant ought to be able to ban blacks, and of course, the local citizens can respond by boycotting him. The only aspect of the Civil Rights Act that he will approve of, is that aspect that banned segregation in *public governmental* institutions, such as public schools. In private institutions, such as private schools, however, he supports the right of private individuals to discriminate, not because he likes racism, but because he believes a man has a right to sin as long as it does not outwardly hurt others. If I want to eat a pork chop in my own house, it might make G-d angry, and it might be a sin, but that doesn't mean the government should do anything about it.

I just saw a nice little essay on this, which I am reprinting here in full, because the original is in an out-of-the-way place that few will ever see. I quote Urban Dictionary, "modal libertarians", by Tex in Tex:

A term coined by Austrian economist Murray Rothbard to describe people who call themselves libertarians defining liberty as moral license (see libertine). They are former Marxists, contemporary liberals, practicing drug-users, homosexuals, self-appointed members of the avant-garde, haters of tradition, anti-religious (especially anti-Christian) atheists, alienated teens and young adults, politically correct leftists, humanitarians who see the established culture and morality as equally or more threatening than an expansive government. They also reject the classical liberalism that the United States of America is founded upon. In fact, many of these people have not read or do not care to read the writings of the Founders of the United States or the philosophers who influenced them. If they do appeal to the Founders, they cite quotes taken out of context to support their leftist views. They also care little for community, culture, or history.

These "libertarians" have taken on the name to justify a nihilistic view of the world, where restraint of any kind is removed so that they can indulge their appetites. Many modal libertarians have an appreciation of the free market because they realize the market can supply their drugs, pornography, and prostitutes more effectively. They confirm the fears expressed by Daniel Bell of the cultural contradictions of capitalism where increased levels of wealth produced by capitalism undermine the traditional values based on self-restraint that make capitalism successful. The same ethic of self-indulgence explains their support for abortion on demand and unrestricted euthanasia. The logic here is to kill anyone who cannot keep up and is deemed to have an inferior "quality of life."

Former *Reason* magazine editor, Nick Gillespie, personifies this anti-social trend. He praises as "Heroes of Freedom" Madonna, Dennis Rodman, Larry Flynt, and William Burroughs alongside such true heroes as Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater. Gillespie epitomizes this brand of libertarianism by posing as the angry young man hipster too cool for the rest of us poor unimaginative slobs.

These so-called libertarians are more interested in civil liberties that undercut law enforcement not because of fear of an abuse of power but because of their rejection of the imposition of pain including just punishment. Instead, they unrealistically believe that if all people are treated as equals and given opportunity to get rich in the market, then there would be no crime.

Although more traditional or paleo-libertarians such as Ron Paul are strict constitutionalists, modal libertarians are all in favor of using judicial activism to further their social goals of removing barriers to self-destructive behavior or placing barriers in the way of law enforcement and national security without regard to precedent or the text of the Constitution.

These bits of meliorism go hand in hand with their non-interventionism in foreign policy. Instead of opposing foreign wars to protect the lives and traditions of citizens of their own country, they believe that if wealth and opportunity can be expanded, then people would live harmoniously together in a peaceful cosmopolitan world. The basic assumptions about human nature and the human condition only differs from the leftist internationalist by replacing a super-statist/socialist order with a super market capitalist order that would transcend the nation state and particular local cultures. The same leftist vision is simply implemented by a different strategy. This line of thinking explains their support of mass immigration. It also explains why one does not hear these libertarians defend freedom of association.

Modal libertarians disdain tradition or any sense of social stability. They relish change for the sake of change. They crave novelty and destruction of anything that they have become bored with. Virginia Postrel, now writing for the *New York Times*, is a prime example of this love of frenetic activity. She misquotes Hayek on the nature of change as a thorough-going, radical process that countenances no constancy or commitment.

Modal libertarianism could be called left libertarianism. There is a variation of libertarianism which stresses voluntary collectivist social and economic arrangements that are still respectful of the right to private property and non-intervention by the State. These libertarians argue for people to choose to pool private property and live communally in various frameworks. This is not modal libertarianism. This type of leftist libertarianism is still consistent with the more traditional libertarian framework because each individual in such communities chooses to participate. There is a long history of such communities in the United States. Modal libertarians are more interested in re-shaping the world to fit their mold and defining the results as achieving freedom. Modal libertarians seem to slip on the term, 'liberty,' moving from what Issiah Berlin called "negative liberty" to "positive liberty." John Stuart Mill fell into this confusion in his writing as he tried to blend liberalism with egalitarianism. Mill is the cross-over figure from classical to modern liberalism. Something similar is going on with modal libertarians.

A lot of people calling themselves libertarians on the internet are teen-agers and young adults who are simply stuck in a mindless rebellion against all authority. Modal libertarians tap into this unrelenting, destructive rebellion in many young people who have been neglected or mistreated by self-absorbed parents. Ayn Rand's writings look especially inviting to these folks.

Even though some of the language and the policy positions cohere with those of Locke, Jefferson, Montesquieu, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, et al., the meanings they pour into the terms and phrases used by traditional libertarians and classical liberals are completely different. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party has departed from their earlier candidates such as John Hospers, Roger MacBride, and Ron Paul and have moved to this liberal/leftist vision. We are now witnessing Bob Barr flip-flopping all over himself to appease these nihilists who have taken over the mantle of libertarianism.

Traditionalist libertarian: "I am looking at the Libertarian Party platform and see mostly a leftist agenda. What is going on here?"
Modal libertarian: "Yes, we modal libertarians have moved away from that rightist repressive model of liberty to true liberty. The real enemy of the people is not the State so much as it is traditional morality, bigotry, Christianity, and nationalism. Conservatives are the real enemy now."