Judaism vs. Neo-Paganism and Neoconservatism
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The always sharp Leon Hadar has just posted to @TAC the new grand theory of the noted anti-Straussian Shadia Drury, that monotheism itself is responsible for birthing both communism and world-saving revolutionary liberalism.
As a practicing Jew following the examples of Isaac Mayer Wise and Will Herberg, I have to take exception to cavalierly lumping Judaism into this mix. As Philip Rieff argued, against the cant of both “Athens and Jerusalem” and “Judeo-Christian values”, the greatness of Hebraic civilization was that it placed man squarely under the authority of death, the most powerful reproach imaginable to immanentizing the eschaton.
Even in the case of Zionism, it is narrowly nationalist in the extreme and therefore can not be considered “world redemptive” in any sense. As such, it is exuberantly pagan, as yesterday’s blood-and-soil oration by Netanyahu should make abundantly clear.
In the ideal, therefore, Judaism stands for rationalism over paganism and for humility before the infinite over the redemption of the world by man.
But Drury is on to something, which is that beyond the narrow nationalism of old-school Zionism, in neoconservatism we have the attempt to project that nationalism, or at least a related parochialism, into a universal world-redemptive idea of global democratic revolution. I do not believe this to be merely a cancerous outgrowth of Zionism, but rather I find that it is the outcome of the whole crisis of the Jews in modernity going back nearly four centuries.
Indeed, Drury’s crude laying of the blame on monotheism does not hold up to much scrutiny at all. We have only historical Protestantism and its analogs in Islam which have existed only for the last century or so in support of her thesis (though both, of course, hearken back to the idealized early church militant). Catholicism, it should be noted, adopted both pagan and universalist motifs which, in practice, seem to have historically canceled each other out.
But given, then, that Zionism is a narrow nationalism and not a world-redemptive idea, only since World War II has a fully realized version of anything remotely approaching a world-redemptive analog in Judaism existed. How this came to pass is a fascinating and woefully neglected question.
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Wait…what does this have to do with neo-Paganism? Oh right…nothing. There is barely any Pagan presence in Israel at all. The title is deceiving.
I thought Strauss was influenced by gnosticism, trying to find the secret meaning in ancient writings.
Drury’s critique of monotheism as a linear progression with a beginning and a glorious end does remind me of modern ideologies and presidential elections. I read once that the pagans were looking for a messianic figure to save them at the time of Christianity. Christianity was the religion that sought to spread itself everywhere. I never read anything about such a desire in Judaism.
I’d like to know how Drury rationalizes the fact that before the spread of Christianity most empires were pagan countries. They had war gods and found glory in battle. I think primatology probably has better answers for this aspect of human nature.
[...] of the neoconservative grand narrative, Jack Ross at TAC’s Post Right blog begs to differ that Judiac monotheism should be lumped in with Drury’s criticisms. “As a practicing Jew following the examples of Isaac Mayer Wise and Will Herberg, I have to [...]
This is nothing short of comical.
I am delighted you have managed to find no place for Zionism in your Judaism. I guess you sit down when Ark is open and everyone sings “ki mitzion taytze Torah” (Translation for those non-Hebrew speakers : from out of Zion will come the Torah).
Seriously, Israel is reparations for 2000 years of discrimination and brutality against the Jewish people by the Christian and Islamic world.
Zionism neither lays claim to huge tracts of the earth nor demands all knees bend to the Jews. It is simply one uncompromising point- Israel is the Jewish homeland. For those who despise Israel, tough noogies. A daily dose of news from Israel will send the snakes in your head spinning in every which direction.
Finally, Zionism can be world redemptive- if a people can be displaced from their land and return to rebuild it, continue their traditions and build a great nation that seeks nothing but to be a blessing to its people and its neighbors, I say that is global redemption at its best and an example for any and every nation to follow.
Just out of curiousity, which Rieff book was that authority of death bit in?
I cribbed everything on Rieff from the TAC article by Jeremy Beer.