All those who agree a Jewish state was and is necessary but
occasionally permit themselves to wonder if it might have been better in, say,
Uganda, raise your hands.
Am I being facetious? Of course, and yet beyond the existential
Palestinian problem and the looming Iranian threat, there is the inner threat of
a religious problem. Because the Jewish state is where it is, on land roughly
coterminous with Biblical territories, its thought processes are clogged by an extravagant,
uncompromising and bellicose religiosity based on confusion between the fifth
century BC and today's world. This makes sane solutions to all of contemporary difficulties
hard to come by, and maybe unobtainable.
The problem for Israel is less the reproductive rate of the
Palestinians than it is the reproductive rate of the Haredim. However decent,
even admirable, many are, considered collectively as a growing political force,
the Haredim are nothing less than a disaster.
The Haredim fantasize that they are living in an extension
of Biblical times but they would be no more recognizable to ancient Hebrews
than they are cognizant of today's realities.
The Talmud may have intellectual, historical even literary appeal
when the likes of Adam Kirsch comb through it, as he has been doing in his Dof
Yomi readings, and aspects of it will no doubt continue to be eloquent and perhaps
poetically engaging forever, but the Haredi desire to make Talmudic strictures
and commentaries a blueprint for Jewish and Israeli life, and the weight they
throw behind this impulse, nullifies its value for me.
The most enduring aspects of Christianity are, to my mind, not its articles of faith, or its theologies, or its history,
so often heinous, but in the residues to be found in its sublime art and music.
In his "The Talmud and the Internet" (2000), Jonathan
Rosen compares the great Christian monuments of faith, such as Chartres, to the
Talmud. The cathedrals are empty now, in disuse, he says, but the Talmud is
still functional. This is his rather ham-fisted argument for the superiority of
Talmudic Judaism.
I'd prefer to reverse his argument and say that to the
degree Christian cathedrals are in disuse they are, in fact, superior.
Would that the Talmud, at least as deployed by masses of
Haredi adepts, be emptied out as well.
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