All this talk about democratizing Jewish institutions (and, for that matter, my obsession with HBO’s miniseries John Adams) has given me a thought…
It is often held by Jewish historians that the Torah is the Constitution for Jewish civilization (just like the Constitution is the foundational document of these United States).
Though I am grateful to have a Torah, and a profound exegetical tradition from which I have drawn many of my personal values and from which we as a community have derived our shared values, I have difficulty accepting the Torah as the final revelation of God. I cannot see it as a perfect document, whereas the 13th century Jewish philosopher Nachmanides noted, one may be a disgusting person “with the Torah’s permission.” By this, Nachmanides meant that the Torah sets the bare minimum for what’s required of a person. Ie., it is the least we can do. He further affirms that one should always strive to excel above and beyond the level of piety that the Torah puts forward.
In consideration of the Torah’s perspective towards women, homosexuals and the intermarried, let alone genocide, the conquest of Israel, and so forth, I can’t help but believe that we can achieve better than that which the Torah itself asks of us. After all, if HaKadosh Baruchu can cry with delight at the Tannaim’s inversion of Torah law for an inferior principle (see the trayfing of Achnai’s oven) it would seem only logical to further extend the principle of reworking or of outright overturning Torah law for the sake of upholding superior principles, such as saving a life, or making Torah accessible in every generation.
Thus it would seem that, in this era — one in which we have benefitted from advances not only in science, but in our understanding of human and civil rights — the Torah, as is, is an inferior constitution.
So let’s say that we, the Jewish people of the modern era, were to have our own Constitutional Convention, to draft for ourselves a new constitution which upholds the values and principles which we, in our current paradigm hold dear, and one which acknowledges the differences in belief between the observant and secular, the Orthodox and the Reform, the Zionist and the anti-Zionist, the Israeli and the Diasporist, and so forth, what would it look like? What are our Articles of Confederation, for this generation?
Let’s say the Torah is our Declaration of Independence. Given the opportunity, how would we, as a Jewish people, constitute ourselves today?
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Isn’t this a call for a new Mishneh?
I love the idea. We can create the “constitution” or new Mishneh and then continue out with cases which elaborate with the plurality of voices you have identified above. All of this seems to be like creating a modern Talmud. I have brought this up to my Rabbis. They thought the idea was out there.
I would be into this. Could we compress 600 years of the Mishneh and Talmud development down to maybe 60 years using the internet?
Go for it.
As a starting point, instead of the American constitution, why don’t we take some other more constructive constitutions as models.
The Great Law of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy has lasted over 600 years, creates a bicameral government with checks and balances, effectively governs a diverse confederation of six nations and at one time controlled an area several times the size of Israel. And it runs by consensus!
The Free Republic of Fiume, under Gabriel D’Annunzio, in its brief life in 1919-20, created a wonderful constitutional document in cooperation with anarcho-syndicalists.
Talmud and the records of Jewish beit dins can give excellent precedent for our judicial branch (better than the British system!!) and halacha can certainly be a guiding principle in building the rest of government.
One of the nice things about this debate is that there’s very little about the current Israeli system of government that’s worth keeping!!
Matthew you’ve gotten me interested. Where can I read/learn more about these constitutions?
Nahmanides lived in the 13th century, not the 11th.
Also, I am a bit surprised at your calling out the Torah as you have here. The Jewish people haven’t read the Torah as commanding genocide or the conquest of Israel for 2000 years now.
As for issues regarding to women, queer folk, and the like, why assume that the Torah can’t be a basis for answering our questions to those things too?
I don’t mind the energetic call for change and evolution — but I do think we should be careful about the extent to which our language sounds like it’s trying to sever ties with the past. It’s an impossible task and an undesirable one.
sam–
i was tired when i wrote this post. i recalled the 1200s and i thought, “the century is the one before or the one after?” i have these slips of the mind sometimes.
also, i believe torah can inform our positions on those things; it just shouldn’t be the final position on those things.
as per severing ties with the past, i didn’t intend to come across that way.
matthew–
i think before we presuppose the need for things like a judicial system, we need to figure out what’s needed in our current paradigm.
for example, why would a secular jew submit to a beit din?
Good point Dan– but why would anyone, religious or secular, submit to ANY court system whether it’s a jewish beit din, a secular-based-on-british-precedent court, or a military tribunal?
Submitting to any sort of ‘justice’ implies some minimal level of respect for authority, or respect for law. A libertarian or anarchist ideal might sound good, but what happens when someone steals from someone else, let’s say? How to deal with it? There needs to be SOME mechanism which would have teeth, that is to say, would be effective in some tangible way.
Current court systems of course give different degrees of access and respect to different people. Women have less weight in religious beit din; Palestinians have less weight than soldiers in IDF tribunals; and all of us ordinary citizens can feel pretty helpless when we encounter even small claims court, much less a real issue with civil or criminal charges. And we know that the super-rich or politicians tend to get away with, literally, murder.
Chillul, Michael Ledeen’s “The First Duce” is a good source on D’Annunzio and Fiume’s constitution, as well as on the alternate league of nations he tried to create which would have had a voice for non-state ‘nations’ including colonized or stateless people. He even included Jews in that– in 1919!
The Iroquois have explicitly kept their official constitution oral rather than written, but many details are available at wikipedia, or in Howard Zinn’s work, just for starters.
Matthew, I’d suggest people deliberately subject themselves to a court system, and effectively a legislative that way, is the realization of homo homini lupus.
Why all this obsession with making the Torah relevant? Why does it not suffice to be culturally Jewish and be done with the tortuous process of attempting to rescue a man-made document from the bawling infancy of our species that reflects the utterly warped values of that time period and which supports slavery, rape during wartime, genital mutilation, genocide, etc.? When will you realize that the “Orthodox” part of your appellation is entirely inconsistent with everything else in which you purport to believe, and is nothing more than a remnant from an earlier age in which you were searching for meaning in a superficial world, but which now has outlived it’s usefulness?
Dan, you’re an intelligent guy. It hurts to read this shit.
-David
David, it hurts to witness such intolerance. Among those who value the Torah are those who value it for perfectly logical reasons, completely in tune with the values of an enlightened age.
I’m reminded of Joseph Campbell who deconstructed the whole notion of myths in civilization. The point of the Torah is that it’s old and preserves snapshots of our history and moral evolution, helping us link a mythic past with a present that is always heroic, potentially. Attemps to simply start over and discard the past simply don’t work. Witness Cambodia, the USSR, and China.
I embrace Torah as a starting point, not an as end point.
That being said, Mob, I wouldn’t want it as a constitution or the basis of one. While I have strong opinions about how things are supposed to be done in the world, I’m happy that other ideas and systems get to compete for my allegiance. One of the points of a constitution is to freeze our understanding at a moment in time, declare that certain rights and procedures are now the status quo, with very limited ability to make changes.
I’d rather see a Jewish progressive manifesto, or mission statement, that doesn’t bother to set itself up over and above others. This has a parallel in the progressive political world in the US, where a variety of entities proclaim various policy messages as being ‘essential’ for a candidate to win endorsement.
A progressive Jewish manifesto would articulate an ideal more than a litmus test, and it would hold some power by representing our faith in what we could be. Constitutions are slightly darker instruments, in that they start off by assuming the worst about rulers and governments, and then proceed to limit them.
Some hazalnik, can’t remember who, admonished that we should work really hard to see the ‘zchut’ or justification for others behavior, as opposed to the ways in which they must be wrong. Let’s do some declaring of what we’d like to see as the ‘zchuyot’ in each other, and in our institutions.
How’s this for a starting point, (or a manifesto): Love the stranger as yourself, for you were once strangers in Mitzrayim.
How about for a starting point the stoning of homosexuals, or the forced marriage of a raped woman to her rapist, or the long chapter on slavery (including, of course, all the cruel acts you may perform on your gentile slave in contrast to the Jew, or the death penalty for those who conjugate with a woman during her menstrual cycle? Those are the “values” of the Torah. Any person today could come up with a more moral book than the bible if he spent just ten minutes to think about it.
The Torah is valuable only insofar as it is a historical record of some sort. We’d all be a lot better off if we treated religion with the contempt that it deserves.
I drink your milkshake!
I drink it up!!
Any democratic constitution of the Western world bases its general values on the decalogue. “An eye for an eye” already was a huge advancement in jurisdiction in an environment where vendetta was the norm. The Sabbath laws in one version of the decalogue (Exodus or Deuteronomy; anybody know it at heart?) state that you should not let a stranger in your city work and a slave for you on the Sabbath, which is considered the first mentioning of workers’ rights; the only perversion of that is the shabos goy when the basic idea is that you should not let anybody work on your behalf on the Sabbath. The later ruling of non-Jews being subject to death sentence if they observed the Sabbath is one example of how Judaism gradually was turned from a “religion of the book” to a “religion of the rabbis”. Small wonder the focus at yeshiva education seems to be the Talmud and the pericopes it discusses, not the Torah.
So my comments from earlier were directed more at David, even though he hadn’t written yet. I saw some David traces in Dan’s writing, and addressed myself to those…
…basically, what David is exhibiting is typical of post-17th century epistemological arrogance. David thinks he can read the Torah and know its meaning, that those meanings are socially harmful, that he has a good standard for deciding what constitutes social harm, and that it is both possible and desirable to sever ties with “a man-made document from the infancy of our species.” Note the evolutionary theory behind this… societies, and not just biological organisms, “evolve.” Everything is getting better! Progress!
I would have thought the 20th century gave the lie to this line of thinking, but you still see it pop up sometimes.
Nice straw man, if you keep working on it, it’ll be ready by halloween. I didn’t get any of that out of David’s post, all I got was that bad old book is made of bad. (I do disagree on the historical record part of it though, there’s a lot of bad information.)
Dan, there’s a wonderful book called “American Aurora” about the John Adams presidency and about the Philadelphia newspaper and its editors (esp. Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of BF) that put newfound liberties to the test. The editors were jailed for daring to criticize Adams and his monarchical/dictatorial tendencies. It’s also about the miracle of the peaceful transistion to Jefferson– the parties hated each other so much it was almost civil war.
Many countries with american-style constitutions, in latin america and in africa, didn’t make it past that first transition of power. a constitution is just a piece of paper unless it actually works and is respected. i wouldn’t have much confidence that someone like Olmert, for example, would step down peacefully under a new constitution…
I have been thinking about the same thing a couple of weeks now. I came to the conclusion that while even a 6 years old could come up with a better document on paper in practice nothing come close to the Torah’s perfection. Remember, even christians like to pat themselves on the back, obsessively, for the fact that their book says “turn the other cheek”. Sounds geat in theory, looks great on paper, but it’s never been practiced.
Likewise marxism promised heaven on earth and instead we got hell. And that too looked great on paper. Remember that the Torah was given by an all knowing G-d, one who knew the consequences behind every action. The proper response would be to say, like the Jews at Sinaii, we will obey and we will listen. Trying to invert this formula has caused untold suffering to the Jews and humanity.
Oh, turning the other cheek has been practiced, just by a racist hindu, not a christian. Later practiced by MLK, who was inspired by Ghandi, and not christianity.
Ray, there’s a long list of Christian martyrs that “turned the other cheek”, starting with Stephanus to Christian clergy, friars, nuns, social workers, peace workers etc. these days of which a few all too frequently get killed doing what they think is their duty in many developing countries.
I was trying to stay semi current. I find that a lot of the people in developing countries cause more harm than good.
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