A Jewish Theology of Social Action

Eugene B. Borowitz

Most Jews, reflecting their communitys long-standing dedication to action over abstraction, are far more concerned with working for social justice than thinking about the principles undergirding their efforts. This concern with the theology of what we have come to call tikkun olam, mending the world, may, I hope, awaken in them some sense of the transcendence that often accompanies good deeds. For those of us not unfamiliar to a touch of the Sacred in our lives, the present analysis builds on our general understanding of Jewish belief, in my case Covenant Theology, though put here in terms that I hope those of other theological trends will find reasonably congenial. Previous generations of liberal (i.e., non-Orthodox) Jews saw little need for such a statement because it seemed self-evident to them that, their societies having made them equal citizens, the least they could do was behave ethically toward other people and make their communities more just and compassionate. For most of them, the (Kantian) Moral Law largely supplanted the rabbinic Oral Law. Indeed, their ethics were more certain than their beliefs and it shaped their (rationalistic) God-idea and the religiosity that derived from it. The invitation to set forth a brief Jewish theology of social action testifies to the changed status of both rationalism and ethics in recent years. We are no longer confident that the mind, strictly understood, can explain reality or generate a commanding ethics. Today, what ethics properly requires of people is more a problem than a certainty. The quest for a ground of ethics has led much of Western Civilization to involve itself with a great variety of faiths, mysti-

EUGENE B. BOROWITZ (C48) is Distinguished University Professor, the Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought, HUC-JIR, New York. His most recent book (with Frances W. Schwartz) is A Touch of the Sacred, A Theologians Informal Guide to Jewish Belief.

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cisms, and spiritualities, the Jewish community not excepted. I understand the request for this article as part of that search. One additional preliminary: I, like many other teachers of religion, know we do not speak with equal certainty to all levels of ethical discourse. We are, I think, most certain of the beliefs that found our ethics. As we apply these to the human situation and identify the virtues that characterize the ethical Jew or offer pithy generalizations about ethical living, we speak somewhat more tentatively. And as we seek to delineate the specific ethical duties incumbent upon us today we become more open to debate and discussion, as any reader of classic Jewish texts can verify.
1. God

We know enough about Adonai to know that we cannot know Adonai fully, yet what we know and can learn about Adonai is the most important truth we can know. We therefore need to shape our lives in terms of it. Adonai is not neutral, that is, as some religions and spiritualities would have it, an Ultimate Reality that requires ethical action as a prerequisite to greater insight but finally transcends good and bad with what they see as a higher, purer oneness. While tov, good, may not be the most characteristic description of Adonai in the Bible or our liturgy, the term most likely to have that role, kadosh, holy, is Jewishly unthinkable without its ethical component; a holiness that does not substantially include goodness violates our Jewish sense of Adonai. Moreover, in a manner that strains even our metaphoric language about Adonai, the Divine goodness is not static but active, demanding that those created in Adonais image do good. Such doing is not a private, intellectual, or meditative act, something single selves may carry out subjectively but one realized amid the contingencies of human existence. Moreover, while this must begin with the local folk with whom one lives, it dynamically expands to embrace our communities, tribes, nations, indeed everyone created in Adonais image. Jewish ethics are as much social as they are individual. (And that is why I believe a strong case can be made that the primary religio-ethical problem vexing the authors of the Hebrew Bible is the sanctification of political power.) Jewish readers sometimes forget that their tradition teaches that Adonai has imposed this social ethical task upon all humankind.

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A JEWISH THEOLOGY OF SOCIAL ACTION

What the biblical tales of the generation of the Flood, or the Tower of Babel, or of the errant residents of Sodom and Gomorrah epitomized was made part of classic Jewish law. Among the rabbinic doctrine of the seven basic duties Adonai required of all the Children of Noah, that is, humankind, was one termed dinim, literally the establishment of just courts, but soon expansively understood to include just political orders. In the long centuries of Jewish Diaspora existence, it was this sense of humankinds sharing in the Jewish understanding of what Adonai demanded of all those created in Adonais image that enabled Jews to be true to their faith as they lived in gentile polities.
2. The Jews, the Historic People of Israel

Jewish social ethics are meant to be lived. Hence what actually happened to the Jews in the course of their history has influenced just how its fundamental teaching was applied. Four major periods may be said to have challenged and reshaped how the Jewish people responded to Adonais behests. Early in its history the unique anti-idolatry and consequent monotheism of the Israelites became intertwined with the belief that the peoples covenant with Adonai required it to exemplify how a people, individually and corporately, should live by Adonais ethical demands. This integrated bi-level nature of Jewish ethics is captured in the rabbinic terms used to evaluate Jewish acts. Anything beyond the quotidian was either a chilul Hashem, a profanation of Adonais name (figuratively, besmirching Adonais reputation) or a kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of Adonais name. Thus significant Jewish acts were tightly bound up with the Jewish peoples age-old relationship with Adonai. What happened to the Jewish people as it sought to live by this involvement with Adonai decisively shaped the Jewish sense of responsibility. Chief among these life-shaping experiences was the peoples belief that they had once been slaves in Egypt and Adonai led them out of that slave-house. In continuity with that experience, their later social ethics were built on personal identification with the outsiders, the powerless and the needy among them. The power of this grounding image may be gauged by the fact that today, when Jewish observance is not widespread, the annual Passover seder, with its remembrance of servitude and salvation, remains the most widely attended Jewish religious event.

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This grand narrative of a people special to Adonai that is therefore given Adonais law for its existence as a free people on its own land is the basis for the harsh judgment of the continual failures of the peoples efforts to live up to their responsibilities. The dismal record of that period is partially relieved by its account of the rise of prophecy and the prophetic books with their extraordinary message of calling power to account. Nothing else in Jewish literature so powerfully reminds the Jewish people that Adonai deems little more precious than goodness and that social responsibility is indispensable to Jewish piety. A generation or two earlier, our teachers claimed too much when they summoned us to a Prophetic Judaism, for a religious community cannot be built on ethics alone. But the current neglect of the Prophets in favor of rabbinic texts, for all that an ethically selective reading of them rightly shapes our Jewish duty, will not teach us how to speak truth to power. We whose social ethics is so centrally involved with government can have few better guides to our duty than these fearless champions of Adonais demands on rulers and the ruled. In due course the Jewish social situation radically changed. Instead of independent living on their own land, Jews were dispersed across the Western world. In much of this pre-modern period scarcity was the common economic condition thus encouraging host peoples to be oppressive and persecutory. Jewish social ethics in these centuries was primarily defensive and self-centered. Nonetheless, the record of this inner turn of Jewish life and its response to Jewish needs in new if necessarily limited ways reflects the inherited social dedication of Jewish religiosity. This social ethical impulse might well express itself in different forms depending on circumstances. Thus, to give one example, some scholars suggest that while Sephardic Jews tended to rely more on family ties than on organized community resources to meet Jewish needs, Ashkenazi Jews often reversed the practice. Increasingly, it seems, the community as well as its individual members found varying ways of fulfilling their social ethical responsibilities as Jews. Then, from the French Revolution on, the political emancipation of European Jewry radically changed the context and content of Jewish social ethics in ways that are difficult to overestimate. After nearly 1500 years of exclusion and contumelythe last portion of which was marked by increased segregation and persecution Jews began to be full citizens in one country after another. As they

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thronged out of the ghetto they largely abandoned the innerdirected, defensive social ethics of their elders and embraced an exhilarating Western universalism and the social imperatives this generated. The revolutionary impact of this changed attitude may be judged by what, from todays chastened perspective, seems an earlier generations unbridled optimism. Thus mid-twentiethcentury liberal Jewish spokesmen (sic), looking forward to the effects of universal education and the spread of high culture, grandly spoke of the perfectibility of man (sic). Political action was now so clearly the realistic means for social transformation that the old religious notion of a God-sent Messiah was quickly replaced by a people-generated Messianic Age. With human social ethics so salvific, many modernized Jews considered Jewish religiosity superfluous and drifted away from it while others replaced it with a universalistic ethical group like Ethical Culture or UnitarianUniversalism. In most Jews, however, the power of the new ethical politics reempowered the old Jewish emphasis on the deed. On some elemental theological level it roused the old Jewish vision of all the Children of Noah, that is, humankind, working together to realize Adonais goals in creation. Much of this widely felt eruption of Jewish conscience did not require organizational form to manifest itself, as in the disproportionate number of Jews who very early on participated in the Civil Rights struggle (among them colleagues such as Israel (Sy) Dresner and Martin Freedman, zl, who violated the segregationist transportation laws as Freedom Riders). The same impulse moved many young Zionists to make aliyah, to immigrate, in the hope of making the Jewish State a model of human decency. And on issue after issue in those post-World War II decades the then Union of American Hebrew Congregations gave outstanding leadership to everyone who somehow knew that Jewish believing demanded ethical action to build a better world. Conscience was not the only motive impelling the Jews soul in those glory days of Jewish ethical activism for Jewish self-interest also played a major role. Grateful for what the Emancipation had done for them, most Jews unconsciously realized that only if everyone in our society shared in the fruits of American democracy and affluence would Jews be secure in their unprecedented equality. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Holocaust seemed to that make this thesis irrefutable: had Germany been able to provide some real

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measure of fulfillment and hope to its masses, they would not have supported the Nazi madness. Philosophers and the saintly may consider such self-concern a blemish on our commitment to the good but they do not have our experience of surviving suffering. Rather, in a manner reminiscent of the biblical twinning of righteousness and well-being, what, in the long run, was good for the Jews joined faith to motivate those decades of extraordinary ethical effort.
3. The Messianic Goal

Honesty requires that we recognize that our exuberant involvement in social ethical activism has yielded mixed results. There is much to be proud of: women, blacks, homosexuals, and other disenfranchised people are increasingly coming into their own. The aged, the ill, the unlearned are not as destitute and forsaken as they were years ago. Extraordinary large numbers of people with highly diverse points of view and strong differences of opinion manage to live and work together in relative peace. And despite the inevitable disappointments with this or that program, many, many people among us are reasonably confident that we can yet do better. Ours is a relatively hopeful society, no small accomplishment indeed in human history. Yet it is difficult to deny the change in tone in our ethical dedication. The simple truth seems to be that what we have seen, indeed, what we have done, has forced us to abandon our old optimism or was it, in fact, utopianism? Realistically faced, few of our programs for alleviating one problem or another have not, in due course, generated new problems of their own. Some of these arise from the complexities of dealing with large numbers of quite diverse human beings; others are engendered by the limitations of the human beings who run them. It has been a shock to discover how unrelenting and complex human social problems can be. Moreover, the agenda of needs, human and natural, keeps expanding far beyond our ability to deal with them. Most decent, responsible people find themselves overwhelmed by all that contemporary existence requires of them only to be continually apprised by reliable sources of additional worthy causes deserving of their action, or at least their money. People of conscience must live today with the unrelenting stress of more ethical tasks than they can hope to handle. There are more of them than we can work on or give

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to or even, in the interests of sanity, seriously understand. The resulting retrenchment of our ethical activism has necessarily given us a new ethical humility. Is that what we are hinting at in translating tikkun olam as merely mending the world, that is, at best leaving it a thing of patches, when not too long ago we hoped for more grandiose human accomplishment? When this theme is mentioned in our daily prayersin the last paragraph of the Aleinu prayersAdonai is being beseeched to finally make the Divine sovereignty fully manifest in this world. The text there is letakein olam bemalchut Shaddai, which strongly resists the translation to mend the world [by establishing] Gods dominion. The old translations ring truer, to perfect the world [by establishing] Gods dominion. By this broken midrash I mean to suggest that, consciously or not, our once soaring ethical self-confidence has now given way to a more modest sense of what human beings at their best may hope to accomplish. If we nonetheless believe that while we cannot do everything, the social ethical tasks we can and must dedicate ourselves to are not futile despite our limitations, it is because we do them in partnership with Adonai. Even as we have let Adonai back into our hope for healing so we must now acknowledge Adonais role in tikkun olam. Though we may fall short of our goals in this or that project, Adonai, being good, ultimately will not fail to make goodness triumph in human history. If this view of messianism sounds suspiciously Hegelianthe God-only messianism succeeded by its antithesis, the human-only messianic age, only to arrive at the synthesis of a partnered God-human messianismso be it. A social ethics that takes Adonai this seriously leaves us with the problem of faith-based politics in a country that, as the overwhelming majority of Jews see it, has certainly benefited from the separation of church and state. Why am I risking all the gains that practice has for so long brought to Jews and many other groups by emphasizing Adonais role in our social ethics? Years ago, when I was still editing Shma, I had occasion to ask Arthur Goldberg, then an ex-Supreme Court Justice, for some guidance on this issue. He said, in effect, that the American separation of religion and government was an ongoing experiment in getting people of potentially clashing views to limit the kind of arguments they brought to their discussions of general social policy so that they might then live

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together peacefully. Something like that pragmatic understanding of democracy is also argued by Jeffrey Stout in his book Democracy and Tradition (a chunk of which was the Efroymson Lectures he delivered at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati). Behind such views, I believe, is a strong desire to keep America from the kind of wars of religion that roiled much of Europe in the centuries before the American Revolution. Liberal Jews can find this approach congenial not only mipne darche shalom, for the sake of peace, but also because we can often make our ethical case clear in terms that have been widely accepted as basic to Western civilization. May the years ahead prove that not to be another grandiose ethical expectation.

Afterword

This article was submitted to the Journal before I read Mark Lillas brilliant essay, The Politics of God in The New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2007. There Lilla thoughtfully presents a history of the Wests intellectual and practical struggles with regard to the proper relations of religion and government. It thus presents the general background that my statement about Judaism took for granted.

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CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly