The Evil of Unpleasant Realities - Why "Liberal" Jews are Turning Against Israel

I recently came across an article by a Rabbi Brian Walt, titled "Affirming a Judaism and Jewish identity without Zionism." Rabbi Walt obviously comes from a fundamentally different religious and theological perspective than I. That being so, I usually wouldn't even bother writing about such an article. However, I believe that Rabbi Walt's article expresses views that are, amazingly enough, at conflict with my own at an even more basic level than theology (which shouldn't even be possible). The differences touch upon the most basic issues of all, the role of rationality in human life and arguably even the basic nature of reality. Moreover, I believe that the kind of thinking underlying Rabbi Walt's article is becoming increasingly common, even in (perhaps even especially in) those circles that ostensibly celebrate rationality.

The article is a near-perfect illustration of the superficial romanticism that underlies much of what goes by the name "liberalism" nowadays, and helps explain why "liberal" Jews are increasingly finding themselves feeling like they have to chose between their identity as "liberals" and their support for Israel. By "superficial romanticism", I am referring to a worldview in which one's "feelings" have absolute moral authority. I am not addressing the various political and ideological positions commonly associated with liberalism (of any stripe), nor am I addressing the the fact that our emotions inevitably color our moral judgments. I am addressing the increasing tendency to see  superficial feelings, i.e. one's immediate gut reaction to an idea, image, or story, as having sufficient moral authority to render any further thought irrelevant. While such thinking certainly exists in all circles, my observation has been that this kind of thinking is increasingly seen in ostensibly "liberal" circles as not only respectable but as "deep" and "profound", and that much of what passes for "liberalism" today is simply advocacy for and celebration of such a worldview.

Thus, in Rabbi Walt's world, the emotional impact of images and stories reigns absolutely supreme. That which is ugly or unpleasant is inherently immoral. Necessity and survival are ugly concepts and are completely ignored. Context is a distraction. In this world, I need only look at an isolated image - such as a child's toy lying in the ruins of a demolished home - and my gut emotional reaction tells me everything I need to make a moral judgement. Similarly, if an image or story evokes an unpleasant association in my mind, that evoked association is morally conclusive in of itself.

Thus,  Rabbi Walt describes seeing soldiers demolish a home while the owners stand by "wailing." This is an ugly and unpleasant scene, and that is all he needs to know. Why were the soldiers doing this? What events had led to this scene? Not important, not even relevant. Soldiers=bad. Bulldozers=bad. Wailing=bad. All bad. (Oh, and toys=good!)

The underlying idea here is that the fact that the state of Israel is doing something that is ugly and unpleasant inherently means that what they are doing is wrong. Not because it is unnecessary, not because it won't work, not for any rational basis, but simply because it is ugly and unpleasant. No necessity can justify that which evokes unpleasant emotions in my mind. There are no hard choices, there are no necessary evils, there are no justifications.

Similarly, Rabbi Walt describes how the separation between Arabs and Jews in Israel is "very evocative of scenes" of Apartheid from his childhood in South Africa. Apartheid is, of course, a very bad thing, and therefore, in  Rabbi Walt's mind, anything that superficially resembles Apartheid is equally bad. No further thought is necessary.

And so on...

Uprooted trees = evil.

Arabs being processed at a checkpoint (evoking ugly images: "processed like a group of animals") = evil.

It is a sad irony that of all the Israeli "violations" of human rights described by Rabbi Walt, almost none of them go much beyond property damage, inconvenience, and bureaucratic red-tape. Yet, he sees these "violations"  as a justification for supporting the side of those who regularly engage in violence and murder not only against random Israelis, but even against other Palestinians! The moral scales are completely skewed, mainly because of another negative emotion: guilt. While I'm sure (or I hope) that Rabbi Walt feels just as horrified about the deaths of innocent Israeli civilians due to Palestinian rocket attacks and terrorism as he does about the bulldozing of an Arab house, he only feels guilty about the actions done by Israel. When Israel does something ugly and unpleasant, i.e. inherently unjustifiable, Rabbi Walt feels "implicated" in the crime, and he can only free himself from that guilt by opposing what Israel does. When an Arab terrorist blows up a bus, or a Palestinian rocket kills an Israeli civilian, Rabbi Walt does not feel implicated and therefore his emotional reaction is less severe. In the logic of Rabbi Walt's world, the fact that Israeli actions create more unpleasant feelings in his mind than Palestinian actions automatically means that Israel is the bad guy. Arguing that this is a subjective and illogical judgement would be missing the point.

Many aspects of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians commonly evoke such irrational reactions. In the mind of many modern "liberals", when they set the state of Israel, with its "white men in suits", uniformed soldiers, military hardware, factories, technology and emphasis on law and order, against the ragtag, hooded, "Che Guevara-esque"  "freedom" fighters of the "indigenous people", it is simply self-evident who the bad guy is. Israel is obviously the "Western imperialist power" oppressing the innocent natives.

That is the established narrative (despite the fact that that narrative developed in a very different context and has little relevance to the actual situation in Israel) and in that narrative the "liberal" knows which side he is supposed to support. There is no need to look for alternative narratives, there is no middle ground, and there is no ambiguity. All of these would require setting aside one's subjective feelings and dispassionately studying reality, and in this worldview that would be missing the point.

As long as Zionism was nothing more than the utopian dream of  Rabbi Walt's youth, it was fine. Like him, many of the early Zionists had utopian hopes for the  Jewish state. But then Zionism ran into reality, and reality is messy and ugly and has little tolerance for utopian fantasies. The founders of Israel thought they would be able to found a country where Jews and Arabs lived side by side in peace. They were fools and the Arabs quickly showed them that they were fools. The Jews in Israel found themselves in a fight for survival which has continued, with ups and downs, to this day. And, yes, its not fair, not to anyone, and yes, many Palestinians have suffered as much as the Jews, and that's terrible and sad and irrelevant.

Should the state of Israel have been founded? Perhaps not. (I am not a Zionist myself.) But that is also irrelevant. Like it or not, Israel exists, and the millions of Jews in Israel are not leaving. If peace could be negotiated on those terms, then Israel would jump for it (it actually has already, more than once), but the Palestinians have never accepted the continued existence of the state of Israel as acceptable, and continue to preach an ideology of irreconcilable hatred for the Jews.

In many ways, the issue I am addressing here is much bigger than Israel (although, from the point of view of Israel, it may well be a matter of existential survival). This kind of thinking underlies almost of all of the major political issues of our time, which is one of the reasons why it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold a civil conversation about politics. It also has a major impact on people's religious thinking. It is closely related to the issue of so-called "simple faith" (i.e. believing in God because you want to believe in God) that I discussed recently as well as the phenomenon of the pseudo-Chareidim I discussed some time ago. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum (well, the perceived opposite end), the so-called "argument from evil", which is commonly viewed as one of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God, is almost entirely an exercise in this kind of thinking. The reason that the "argument from evil" is seen as such a knock-down argument in favor of atheism is not because there are no rational solutions to the problem (there are, in fact, lots of such solutions), but because the underlying basis for the argument does not allow for a rational response in the first place. The real issue in the argument from evil is not that we can't explain why God allows or causes bad things to happen, but that we don't want bad things to happen regardless of the explanation. A rational response to the argument from evil would be missing the point.

The long-term consequences of this kind of thinking are very frightening. As the founders of the state of Israel discovered, reality doesn't change to suit our feelings. In the real world trade-offs are always necessary, difficult choices must be made, and ugly realities will always exist. Attempting to ignore reality never ends well, and our civilization's current attempt to do so will only make things much worse for us down the road. And, as has often been the case, the Jews are the canary in the coal mine, and may well pay the price long before the rest of Western society.

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Emuna Peshuta - The Misuse of "Faith"

I frequently encounter people who claim that their basis for belief in God is "faith" or, if they are religious Jews, "emuna peshuta" - "simple faith". You're most likely to hear this when a religious person is confronted with a challenge to his belief in God by modern atheists, who claim that modern science and philosophy have eliminated any basis for belief in God. (This is not true, but that is a topic for another time.) To this, the response of many religious people is that they believe out of simple "faith"

I recently received an example of this kind of reasoning in an e-mail, which presents a fictional dialogue between an atheist professor and his religious Christian student:

Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?

Student : Absolutely, sir.

Professor : Is GOD good ?

Student : Sure.

Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?

Student : Yes.

Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?

(Student was silent.)

Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Is satan good ?

Student : No.

Professor: Where does satan come from ?

Student : From … GOD …

Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD did make everything. Correct?

Student : Yes.

Professor: So who created evil ?

(Student did not answer.)

Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, who created them ?

(Student had no answer.)

Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?

Student : No, sir.

Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard GOD?

Student : No , sir.

Professor: Have you ever felt GOD, tasted GOD, smelled GOD? Have you ever had any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?

Student : No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.

Professor: Yet, you still believe in Him?

Student : Yes.

Professor : According to Empirical, Testable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?

Student : Nothing. I only have my faith.

Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem Science has.

Student : Professor, is there such a thing as heat?

Professor: Yes.

Student : And is there such a thing as cold?

Professor: Yes.

Student : No, sir. There isn’t.

(The lecture theater became very quiet with this turn of events.)

Student : Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.

(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)

Student : What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?

Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?

Student : You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?

Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man ?

Student : Sir, my point is your philosophical premise is flawed.

Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?

Student : Sir, you are working on the premise of duality. You argue there is life and then there is death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are viewing the concept of GOD as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing.

Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?

Professor: If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.

Student : Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?

(The Professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going.)

Student : Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a scientist but a preacher?

(The class was in uproar.)

Student : Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?

(The class broke out into laughter. )

Student : Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelled it? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?

(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable.)

Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on faith, son.

Student : That is it sir … Exactly ! The link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things alive and moving.

This little "dialogue" is a good example of what is, in my opinion, a fundamentally erroneous approach to religious belief. While the "student" makes a one or two minor points that are valid (or at least defensible), his core argument is simply absurd.

The essential problem here is that the word "faith" is used to mean different things, and the essay improperly lumps them together. The primary definition of "faith" is trust, in that we take something "on faith" from a person or authority that we trust. (This is the definition of faith being used by the professor, towards the end of the dialogue, when he says that we should accept what he teaches in his lectures on faith, even if we have not (yet) confirmed them with our own senses.) Of course, such faith has to be earned, in that there must be a reason why we trust a given authority figure sufficiently to take his statements on faith. Assuming that we have good reason for trusting the authority, then such faith is perfectly rational.

However, there is another, deeply problematic, understanding of faith, which is to believe something without any rational basis. This is the definition being used by the student, when, in response to his professor's challenge that there is no rational basis for belief in God responds that he has no answer, "...I only have my faith." Fundamentally, what this means is that the "student" acknowledges that the argument against his belief in God is valid, yet he believes in God anyways, simply because he wants to (which actually means that he doesn't really believe in God at all, since, in principle, he acknowledges that he could just as easily choose not to believe in God). This kind of faith has become increasingly popular amongst religious people in the modern world, who see it as the only answer they can give to the arguments made against religion by atheist "professors", but the answer is self-defeating because it is essentially a concession to the intellectual superiority of atheism. By claiming that their belief in God is based on nothing but "faith", they have openly surrendered the intellectual battlefield to the atheists.

If you only believe in God because of
your "faith", then your God is nothing
more than a figment of your imagination.

This mentality may be understandable with Christians (such as the author of the dialogue printed above) because many core elements of Christianity are, in any case, fundamentally irrational. However, this is not an acceptable approach within Judaism. Our belief in God is not based upon an irrational "faith"; rather it is based upon the objective historical experiences of the Jewish people. When the Jewish people stood at Mt. Sinai, they didn't believe in God just because they had "faith", their belief was based upon direct, objective knowledge. While we, today, no longer have that degree of direct knowledge, we do have the historical tradition of that experience, which (among other things) provides a rational basis for our belief in God and the Divine origin of the Torah. With that basis, we can then have faith, of the rational kind, that even when we do not understand why God does something, there must be a good reason for it.

It is only in this context that the concept of emuna peshuta - simple faith - comes into play. We trust God because we have simple faith in Him. But before we can trust him, we must first know that He exists. That initial knowledge cannot be based upon "simple faith."

This distinction is not always made clear in many seforim (classical Torah works) when they discuss emuna (belief), and in some cases, as when one comes across sources that are critical of philosophy (of which there are many), one might come away with the impression that the author is arguing in favor of an irrational faith. However (while there may be some exceptions), in almost all cases, these sources are only talking about using philosophy as a means to reinforce one's belief, and are not addressing the core basis for belief in God (a distinction which I discussed in the previous post). To my knowledge, almost all of these sources would acknowledge that, when it comes to one's basic belief in  the existence of God, this must be based upon an actual rational conviction that God exists, and not simply on an irrational "faith."

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The Moral Consequences of Atheism

As a general rule, modern "atheists" are more accurately termed "materialists", in that they deny not just the existence of "god" but of anything outside of or independent of physical reality. (There are atheists who do not believe this and there are also religions, such as Buddhism, that, while "atheistic" in the sense of denying the existence of an all-powerful Creator, certainly recognize the existence of non-physical realms, entities, and phenomena. Some ancient pagan religions may have also fallen into this category. The manner in which the issues raised in the following discussion would apply to these intermediate cases is unclear, and would probably have to be resolved on a case-by-case basis.)

One of the inevitable logical conclusions of such a denial is that it means that there can be no purpose for the existence of the universe. A materialist universe does not exist for any purpose, it just exists. And the same is true for everything that exists within that universe. In the materialist universe, life, like everything else, is the result of various physical phenomena operating without purpose. A human being is simply a temporary arrangement of matter and energy, of no more inherent significance than any other arrangement.

This is a conclusion that is often unrecognized, or even denied, by many atheists, for the simple reason that human beings are "designed" (whether by God or Natural Selection) to see purpose and meaning in the world around them and to feel a need for purpose and meaning in their own lives. The fact that many atheists do not recognize that the denial of "god" inevitably means a denial of any kind of inherent meaning and purpose in existence is the result of human psychology, not logical reasoning.

Of course, many serious atheists do recognize this fact. They argue that the fact that humans are predisposed towards perceiving and desiring purpose and meaning does not prove that such purpose and meaning actually exist in any objective sense. For these more rigorous atheist thinkers, the honest atheist must simply accept that his existence, like the existence of the universe as a whole, has no objective meaning or purpose, and that the only way one can satisfy the human desire for meaning and purpose is to create one’s own subjective meaning and purpose.

One of the problems that these thinkers run into, however, is that the concepts of purpose and meaning are inextricably tied up with the concepts of morality and ethics. Every moral and ethical system is based upon a system of values, and "value", as a concept, is basically synonymous with purpose. (Thus, certain things are said to have "intrinsic value", i.e. they are valuable "for their own sake" - meaning they are purposes in themselves, whereas other things have only "extrinsic value", i.e. they are valuable only as means towards other purposes.) If we eliminate the possibility of objective purpose from the universe, we are also eliminating objective value. Nothing can have value without purpose and if the only purpose we can give something is subjective, then the only value it can have is subjective as well. This is true for all values, including the value of human life itself. If the only purpose for my own existence is that which I choose to give it, then the only value my life has is that which I choose to give it. This also means that the only value/purpose that the life of another person has is that which I choose to give it. (The fact that the other person chooses to give a different value to his own life is irrelevant. In order for that other person's judgment to matter to anyone other than himself, there would need to be some objective moral authority that obligates me to respect that person's opinion. Of course, I could choose to respect that other person's values, but that would be purely my choice, and would have no more moral significance than my choice of salad dressing.)

No matter how elegantly crafted it may be, no ethical system can have more inherent meaning than that of human beings themselves. If there is no inherent value to human life, then even the most sophisticated ethical system has no more authority than the rules for a board game. Even worse, for board games exist within a broader ethical system that discourages cheating, whereas an ethical system that denies the existence of objective purpose/value exists only in the mind of the human being who imagined it. Breaking the rules of one's own self-created moral system would be akin to cheating at solitaire or using "God mode" in a video game, in that the only downside is that I lose the personal sense of satisfaction that I would get from following the rules that I made up to satisfy values that I made up because they happened to please me at the time.

What we are discussing here are the philosophical consequences of atheism/materialism, not its validity. The fact that, by definition, atheism denies the possibility of any kind of objective meaning and purpose in life does not mean, in of itself, that atheism is wrong.

Moreover, while this may be the unavoidable philosophical consequence of atheism, it doesn't mean that atheists are automatically self-serving nihilists. As any sincerely religious person can testify, the fact that one intellectually recognizes a "truth" does not mean that one will automatically fall into line with all of the necessary implications of that truth. The mere recognition of a "truth" does not free us from the bonds of human psychology. Human beings are "hardwired" for good traits (e.g. love, compassion, loyalty), as much as they are for bad traits (e.g. self-centeredness, greed, pleasure seeking). Religious people are constantly struggling with the conflict between what they believe and what they desire. While the situation is different for an atheist (in that atheism does not obligate one to do or not do anything), it is not at all surprising that the vast majority of atheists generally conform to the moral norms of the society in which they live.

The bigger question is what the long term effect of such a worldview can have on the society as a whole. (I believe that, in of itself, the long term influence of atheism on society is certainly negative. Nevertheless, the world is a complicated place, and in relation to other societal factors, atheism may actually serve a positive role in some ways. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook argued along these lines, saying that, among other things, atheism served as a corrective for overemphasis on the negative aspects of religion (e.g. fear of punishment).)

At this point, many atheists will counter by arguing that, even if what we’ve said is true, theism doesn’t really solve the problem either. While it is true that, in a theistic universe, the universe exists for a reason, nevertheless, that reason is the Creator's, not ours. Is there any fundamental reason why we should accept His purpose in creating us as our own purpose for living? 

For most religious people, the first response to this question would be that the fact that we owe our very existence (and the existence of everything we value) to God creates an obligation of gratitude towards Him that requires us to conform to His will and obey His commands. However, gratitude alone doesn't fully answer the question. There are limits to the obligation of gratitude. Gratitude cannot obligate us to do that which would render the benefit we have received from the benefactor meaningless. Our gratitude to our Creator for our existence can only extend to that which would not fundamentally undermine the value that we attach to that existence. To the degree that obedience to God's will would diminish the value we attach to our existence, our debt of gratitude to God would be diminished as well. If proper obedience to God is perceived, as it often is (even, tragically, by some religious people), as a slavish, mindless abandonment of all human dignity, then it is difficult, if not impossible, to argue that any degree of gratitude could impose such an obligation.

The key to this question is in our understanding of the nature of God. If we perceive God as a being with needs, wants, and desires (even if those needs are far beyond human comprehension), then we have to entertain the possibility that God created us for some self-serving purpose and that the laws He has imposed upon us are intended to direct us towards serving that purpose. If this were true, then the concerns discussed above about the limits of gratitude would come into play and the case could certainly be made that the demands made by most religions significantly exceed the moral obligation imposed by gratitude.

The traditional perception of God in Judaism, however, is completely different. Seeing God as the source of all existence, God is perceived as being entirely independent of creation, needing nothing whatsoever. From this it follows that the purpose of Creation cannot be self-serving, as God has no needs to serve. The purpose of Creation can only be understood as being purely for the benefit of the created beings. The same would also apply to the laws revealed by God. These laws do not direct us to serve God (in the sense of serving to satisfy some kind of Divine need or desire), rather they direct us towards achieving the ultimate good for which He created us. From this perspective, to reject God's purpose in our creation would be fundamentally irrational as, by definition, it means that you are turning away from the ultimate good (for both yourself and for the world as a whole) in favor of some far lesser, and arguably detrimental, purpose.

It is at this point that gratitude comes into play. Once we recognize that God brought us into existence and gave us His laws for our own benefit (even if we do not understand what that benefit is), then obedience to God's will is not demeaning at all but the result of rational assessment of our own best interests. In such a case, to refuse to obey God's will is not only irrational and self-destructive, but also ungrateful.

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