“Social Justice” and Jewish Liberalism
I begin with a statement that will raise, perhaps even sear, eyebrows among my Jewish co-religionists: Jesus of Nazareth, the 1st-century rabbi from Galilee, was the noblest example of someone devoted to “social justice,” tzedakah in Hebrew.
How many really dare to emulate him in this role? A few have. Francis of Assisi, for example. Like Rabbi Jesus, he gave himself completely to God — and to a suffering humanity.
Unlike the Galilean rabbi, Francis came from great wealth and in his youth lived the life of a wastrel. But he had a spiritual awakening. He gave all he had to the poor; and when he had parted with his last shirt, he turned to a friend and exclaimed gleefully, “Today I am married!” “To whom?” asked his companion. “To Lady Poverty” [an abstract personification, the "bride of Jesus," husbandless for eleven hundred years until wooed by Francis; described in Dante's Divine Comedy, Canto XI].
Francis then began an extraordinary life of service to the needy. (After the Wikipedia biography of St. Francis, read G.K. Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi.) Less than two years after his death in 1226, Pope Gregory IX proclaimed him a saint.
He knew the meaning of tzedakah even if he didn’t know the word. Mother Teresa of Calcutta was another magnificent practitioner of tzedakah.
As Lawrence H. Fuchs pointed out in The Political Behavior of American Jews (1956), tzedakah, translated as “charity,” derives from the same root as the word for “justice” and also signifies “righteousness.” Integrating these, tzedakah has come to mean ”social justice.”
Jews have always known its meaning and have adhered to it throughout their long and difficult history.
For nearly two thousand years, Jews, beginning with Rome’s death blow to Jerusalem in 70 CE followed by centuries of being a people without a country, have had to pay the price for being powerless.
Whenever relief or help did come, it came from what we would consider the Left. But since 1967, the time of the Six-Day War, support has been coming not from the Left but from the Right. Sad to say, but most American Jews do not see the change.
In a 1999 Azure magazine essay, “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews,” an exasperated Irving Kristol wondered how Jews manage “to combine an almost pathologically intense concern for politics with a seemingly equally intense inclination toward political foolishness, often crossing over into the realm of the politically suicidal…”
Kristol, the original godfather of neoconservatism, gave us the memorable definition of a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
Another founding father of neoconservatism is Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor of the liberal magazine Commentary, until he underwent a gradual political conversion of his own.
He, too, scratches his cranium as he ponders that, despite the obvious changing socio-political milieu, American Jews continue to adhere to liberalism and remain glued to the Democratic Party.
Podhoretz concurs with Irving Howe, who labeled liberalism the “secular religion of many American Jews” (Commentary, January 1980).
In Why Are Jews Liberals? Podhoretz lays it on thick: “To most American Jews, then, liberalism is not… merely a necessary component of Jewishness: it is the very essence of being a Jew…it is a religion in its own right…”
Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, founder of the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, like so many voices from intellectual Jewry, stresses social justice: “…social justice is the primary mandate of Judaism” (quoted from Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice).
I am not at odds with the rabbi’s call for social justice, but I am uneasy with his use of the word “mandate” (from L. mandare, to put into one’s hand; manus, hand).
Let me turn to what those who gave us the Faith consider the essence of our religion: Judaism is the mystery of Mt. Sinai, where God put into Moses’ hands His Ten Commandments.
The Hand of God cannot be overlooked, or ignored, in human events. Jewish liberalism manages to do just that. We either believe in salvation history or we do not. We are either living in God’s time or we are not. Judaism says we are.