Free Radicals

Shalom Sadik is a religiously observant professor of Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University, but from the outset of his new book, he makes it clear that his ideas are unorthodox. Unlike most religious Jews, he explains, he does not believe in a supernatural God capable of hearing individuals’ prayers and performing miracles. In place of what he regards as crude and dangerously misleading theologies, Sadik wishes to supply another God concept, one that can be traced back to Maimonides and is, he argues, better suited to sustain a traditional way of life in modern times. And he hopes to advance it not only among benighted believers but among liberal, secular-minded fellow Jews as well.

Jeremy Fogel, who teaches Jewish philosophy less than twenty miles away at Tel Aviv University, doesn’t propound any God concept at all. He is not so much opposed to the idea of God as he is distressed by the threat posed by fellow Israelis who think God demands their noxious politics. The author of a recent academic book in English on Jewish Universalisms, he has now written a short Hebrew volume in decidedly nonacademic language, not to propound any specific version of universalism but to undermine increasingly menacing forms of Jewish particularism.

Sadik and Fogel share some enemies, but they are not allies. If either of them were to succeed in convincing their fellow Israelis, the country would be altered in ways that would disappoint the other.

Many Israelis are as distressed as Sadik by the polarization that has taken place within their society, but few are as unhappy as he is with conditions at both ends of the spectrum. He is displeased by the “conservative religious” camp but also by the out-and-out secular Jews. The former have deplorable beliefs while the latter lead deplorable, or at least diminished, lives. All of them, he says, are playing their poor parts in a script written by Baruch Spinoza.

The seventeenth-century renegade sought to expose the primitive and superstitious character of the Bible, while summarily rejecting attempts such as that of Moses Maimonides to locate rational teachings within it. The assault that Spinoza and subsequent Enlightenment philosophers led on revealed religion ultimately fractured the Jewish world. It led to a situation in which, Sadik writes:

Everyone who attempted to develop a religious philosophical doctrine was called upon—by the religious conservatives as well as by the secularists—to be a free and critical man and thus to cease to observe the commandments, or to be a religious man and a keeper of the commandments, and thus to cease thinking critically.

Israel today, in Sadik’s eyes, is dangerously divided between representatives of these two camps. The conservative religious camp is full of people with superstitious conceptions of both God and the world. They are often influenced by Kabbalah (which Sadik regards as systematized madness) and are overly concerned with ritual at the expense of morality. Their vigilant suppression of free inquiry alienates both those members of their own communities who harbor doubts and secular Jews who might otherwise be attracted to their traditional way of life.

And yet, Sadik argues, those attractions are real. In today’s Israel, “most of the social norms among the religious flow directly from the halakhah and the sacred texts,” and the lives they lead are consequently more structured, wholesome, and fruitful than those of secular Jews. They marry early, have stable families, have numerous children who do the same, and by the time they are in their sixties, they have trouble counting their grandchildren. “Secular society in Israel is,” admittedly, “very conservative in comparison to secular societies in the Western nations,” but things are changing fast and for the worse, especially in places like north Tel Aviv.

The fundamental error of the liberal secularists is, according to Sadik, their adoption of the Enlightenment ideal of individual freedom.“ Because liberal society sanctifies the freedom of the individual, it negates the reciprocal responsibilities between members of a family or within a society.” Freedom leads to sexual permissiveness, which paradoxically restricts people’s freedom:

Secular liberal society affords the individual only the opportunity to express his sexuality in multifarious ways at the expense of family stability. In many respects, liberal freedom has turned mostly into the freedom to live a permissive way of life.

And this leads in the end, Sadik maintains, not to individual self-fulfillment but to sadly broken families and a collapsing birth rate. Israel is not Western Europe or even northern Tel Aviv writ large yet, but it will be if secular Israelis don’t change, because that is where secular liberalism inevitably leads.

The problems plaguing both extremes cannot be addressed, Sadik maintains, by any of the compromise solutions developed by liberal Jewish theologians, which are, at bottom, more liberal than they are Jewish or theological. The work of Spinoza must therefore be undone, and the basic approach of his archenemy, Maimonides, the outstanding representative of “radical religious philosophy,” must be restored. Sadik therefore attempts to convey “the possibility of living a religious and conservative way of life and upholding intellectual criticality without any boundaries, and maintaining a naturalist metaphysical conception—to the broader public.” To be precise, Sadik is more interested in advocating a Judaism that hews to the Maimonidean spirit rather than its Aristotelian letter. “Today,” he writes, “it is definitely possible to develop a radical religious philosophical conception on the basis of a different philosophical position (materialism, for example).”

Sadik’s arguments have created something of a storm in Israel’s dati leumi (national religious) sector. Responding to critics, in an interview last year in the flagship dati leumi newspaper, Makor rishon, Sadik spelled out his fundamental ideas even more sharply than he did in his book. Did it really make sense to assume the yoke of the Torah, in all its stringency, even if one does not believe in the existence of a personal God or the divine origin of the Torah, even if one is a complete materialist? “Even if we are indeed only very clever monkeys,” he answered, “the Torah and the commandments enable us to become happy dogs. Even if man is a kind of animal, he is a social animal who needs stable family connections, and this is impossible to achieve without a system of religious laws.”

The God who angers Jeremy Fogel is not so much the one who wants to fill haredi yeshivas as the one who desires “conquest, cruelty, oppression, racism, the subjugation of the other.” He wants to shake faith in this God to undermine the confidence with which believers pursue cruel and ruinous policies in his name.

Although Fogel has celebrated Spinoza elsewhere, and he is the first philosopher he mentions in Philosophers Against God, the primary hero of this book is the man he introduces as David ha-kadosh (David the Holy)—that is, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, a man whom he addresses quite personally. “What great arguments you gave us, David!” If we only internalize them, he writes:

We’ll always know how to obtain a total victory over every fellow who stands in front of a school with tefillin, every cousin at a seder who’s becoming more religious, every female Knesset member who is ready to break into dance at the prospect of red heifers being slaughtered on the Temple Mount.

Fogel proceeds to summarize, in down-to-earth terms, Hume’s arguments against the validity of rational proofs for the existence of God, especially the shlager, the clincher used by baal teshuva hunters, the so-called watchmaker argument. If something as complicated as a watch necessarily points to the existence of a watchmaker, then how much more so does something as complicated as the world point to the existence of a God who created it. Hume’s answer, in Fogel’s words, is as follows:

But a watch and the universe don’t resemble each other at all. What fucking connection is there between a watch and the universe, what? A watch is an object! An object that has a purpose that people made it for. A universe is the premise for the possible existence of all the objects! It’s something altogether different. . . . It’s categorically different, we’re not playing on the same field. In general, it’s really impossible to compare anything else to the universe—it’s altogether unique!

Fogel is especially enamored with the last twist of the argument. Even if we overlook the difference between a watch and the universe, “if we think about it for a minute, the explanation of divine creation doesn’t really clarify the origin of the universe. For if God created the universe, Hume explains, how can we help but ask who created God?”

Fogel is just as streetwise when he recapitulates Hume’s argument against proofs based on the biblical miracles:

Smart Jews of course like to say that all of Israel witnessed the revelation at Sinai, six hundred thousand men no less! Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, but to the best of my knowledge there is only one text that speaks of 600,000. Let’s imagine that archaeologists had found 600,000 diaries, and in each and every one of them we found something like “Woooww, what happened yesterday in Sinai, fuck wow! . . . But there aren’t six hundred thousand diaries, there’s one Bible that reports about 600,000 men who witnessed a miracle. Thus, even in the case of Sinai, it’s more reasonable to assume that that one report is false than that the miracle really occurred.

With this and other Humean arguments, Fogel doesn’t really imagine that he has disproved the most philosophically sophisticated forms of Judaism, but he does think that he has said enough to force open the minds of the believers whose ideas and actions he abhors and paved the way for them to find something better.

But what would that be? Certainly not the “radical religious philosophy” advocated by Sadik (though Fogel’s own book is the product of something called “Radical Press”). After expressing his appreciation of Maimonides’s efforts to read the Bible rationally, he dismisses such attempts as unconvincing in thoroughly Spinozistic terms. “They try to give a belated hechsher to a text that is the product of an early culture that sought no such hechsher and was perfectly okay with a God that had an eye, a nose, a hand, a face.”

Fogel extols not the divine but the human. The miracles he cherishes are sitting on the porch and listening to the birds chirping in the trees and the children frolicking in Hebrew on the streets, meeting a friend for hummus in Kerem HaTeimanim, and more:

Just going on a Friday afternoon to sit by Geulah Beach [in Tel Aviv]! Amazing! How much I enjoy Geulah Beach, God in heaven, how much! . . . What can I say to you, I tell you, how much fun it is for me to be in my corner of the state of the Jews, God will protect! My God, my God, may it never come to an end, Geulah Beach!

You have to read this prayerlike passage in Hebrew to hear in it the clear echoes of some iconic and wistful secular Hebrew songs about a wonderfully peaceful future (with lyrics composed by Hannah Senesh or Ehud Manor). But you don’t have to have a command of the language to note that geulah means redemption.

All of this reminds me of the conclusion of a famous book that Amos Oz published more than forty years ago after the first Lebanon War called In the Land of Israel. After reporting on conversations with the kind of theological-political fanatics Fogel fears, Oz describes a visit to Ashdod:

Noisy birds chatter from the branches of the trees on the avenue. At a distance a large truck passes, its breaks panting, its gears grinding. A woman beats a rug or a mattress. A disco song drifts from the radio, then an Israeli folk song and after that a soft instrumental piece. Ashdod in the morning. A ship bellows from the direction of the port and the birds answer.

“Ashdod,” Oz writes at the end of his book, “is a city on a human scale on the Mediterranean coast. And from her we shall see what will flower when peace and a little repose finally come.”

Like Oz, Fogel rejoices in mundane things, but he is a philosophical activist, not a literary quietist. His book ends with a preview of coming attractions, which include a volume titled Anti-Christ and Anti-Moses:

[It] will celebrate Nietzsche and Spinoza, two of the great heretics who not only negated the value of the religious traditions into which they were born but also offered forms of secular and heretical redemption based on conceptions of eternity. It will be fun!

It’s fascinating to observe from afar how two independently minded and rather unusual Israeli professors of Jewish thought have stepped off campus to try to change their fellow citizens’ minds about the most fundamental questions. Advocates of radical religious philosophy, Sadik writes, have to “emerge from the closet” and propound their views openly. For his part, Fogel has successfully launched an exuberant podcast that matches the tone of his book.

These two thinkers must be aware of each other, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve debated publicly or privately. I’d love to hear them confront each other’s ideas and visions in a debate. Indeed, I’d be happy to report on it (or host it) in these pages or, perhaps, on a podcast.