borowitz, theology of social action

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A Jewish Theologyof Social Action

Eugene B. Borowitz

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EUGENE B. BOROWITZ (C48) is Distinguished University Professor, the Sigmund L.Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought, HUC-JIR,New York. His most recent book (with Frances W. Schwartz) is A Touch of the Sacred, ATheologian’s Informal Guide to Jewish Belief.

Most Jews, reflecting their community’s long-standing dedicationto action over abstraction, are far more concerned with working forsocial justice than thinking about the principles undergirding theirefforts. This concern with the theology of what we have come to call

tikkun olam

, mending the world, may, I hope, awaken in them somesense of the transcendence that often accompanies good deeds. Forthose of us not unfamiliar to a touch of the Sacred in our lives, thepresent analysis builds on our general understanding of Jewish

belief, in my case Covenant Theology, though put here in terms thatI hope those of other theological trends will find reasonably conge-nial.

Previous generations of liberal (i.e., non-Orthodox) Jews sawlittle need for such a statement because it seemed self-evident tothem that, their societies having made them equal citizens, the leastthey could do was behave ethically toward other people and maketheir communities more just and compassionate. For most of them,the (Kantian) Moral Law largely supplanted the rabbinic Oral Law.Indeed, their ethics were more certain than their beliefs and itshaped their (rationalistic) “God-idea” and the religiosity thatderived from it.

The invitation to set forth a brief Jewish theology of social actiontestifies to the changed status of both rationalism and ethics in recentyears. We are no longer confident that the mind, strictly understood,can explain reality or generate a commanding ethics. Today, whatethics properly requires of people is more a problem than acertainty. The quest for a ground of ethics has led much of WesternCivilization to involve itself with a great variety of faiths, mysti-



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cisms, and spiritualities, the Jewish community not excepted. Iunderstand the request for this article as part of that search.

One additional preliminary: I, like many other teachers of reli-gion, know we do not speak with equal certainty to all levels of ethi-cal discourse. We are, I think, most certain of the beliefs that foundour ethics. As we apply these to the human situation and identify thevirtues that characterize the ethical Jew or offer pithy generaliza-tions about ethical living, we speak somewhat more tentatively.And as we seek to delineate the specific ethical duties incumbentupon us today we become more open to debate and discussion, asany reader of classic Jewish texts can verify.

1. God

We know enough about Adonai

to know that we cannot know Adonai

fully, yet what we know and can learn about Adonai

is the mostimportant truth we can know. We therefore need to shape our livesin terms of it.

Adonai

is not neutral, that is, as some religions and spiritualitieswould have it, an Ultimate Reality that requires ethical action as aprerequisite to greater insight but finally transcends good and badwith what they see as a higher, purer oneness. While tov

, good, maynot be the most characteristic description of Adonai in the Bible orour liturgy, the term most likely to have that role, kadosh

, holy, is Jewishly unthinkable without its ethical component; a holiness thatdoes not substantially include goodness violates our Jewish sense of

Adonai

.Moreover, in a manner that strains even our metaphoric

language about Adonai

, the Divine goodness is not static but active,“demanding” that those created in Adonai

’s image do good. Suchdoing is not a private, intellectual, or meditative act, somethingsingle selves may carry out subjectively but one realized amid thecontingencies of human existence. Moreover, while this must beginwith the local folk with whom one lives, it dynamically expands toembrace our communities, tribes, nations, indeed everyone createdin Adonai

’s image. Jewish ethics are as much social as they are indi-vidual. (And that is why I believe a strong case can be made that theprimary religio-ethical problem vexing the authors of the HebrewBible is the sanctification of political power.)

Jewish readers sometimes forget that their tradition teaches that

Adonai has “imposed” this social ethical task upon all humankind.



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What the biblical tales of the generation of the Flood, or the Towerof Babel, or of the errant residents of Sodom and Gomorrah epito-

mized was made part of classic Jewish law. Among the rabbinicdoctrine of the seven basic duties Adonai “

required” of all the Chil-dren of Noah, that is, humankind, was one termed dinim

, literallythe establishment of just courts, but soon expansively understood toinclude just political orders. In the long centuries of Jewish Diasporaexistence, it was this sense of humankind’s sharing in the Jewishunderstanding of what Adonai

“demanded” of all those created in

Adonai’simage that enabled Jews to be true to their faith as they livedin gentile polities.

2. The Jews, the Historic People of Israel

Jewish social ethics are meant to be lived. Hence what actuallyhappened to the Jews in the course of their history has influenced

just how its fundamental teaching was applied. Four major periodsmay be said to have challenged and reshaped how the Jewish peopleresponded to Adonai

’s “behests.”Early in its history the unique anti-idolatry and consequent

monotheism of the Israelites became intertwined with the belief thatthe people’s covenant with Adonai

required it to exemplify how apeople, individually and corporately, should live by Adonai

’s

ethi-cal “demands.” This integrated bi-level nature of Jewish ethics iscaptured in the rabbinic terms used to evaluate Jewish acts.Anything beyond the quotidian was either a chilul Hashem

, a profa-

nation of Adonai

’s name (figuratively, besmirching Adonai’s

repu-tation) or a

kiddush Hashem

, a sanctification of Adonai

’s name. Thussignificant Jewish acts were tightly bound up with the Jewishpeople’s age-old relationship with Adonai

.What happened to the Jewish people as it sought to live by this

involvement with Adonai

decisively shaped the Jewish sense of responsibility. Chief among these life-shaping experiences was thepeople’s belief that they had once been slaves in Egypt and Adonai

led them out of that slave-house. In continuity with that experience,their later social ethics were built on personal identification with theoutsiders, the powerless and the needy among them. The power of this grounding image may be gauged by the fact that today, when

Jewish observance is not widespread, the annual Passover seder

,with its remembrance of servitude and salvation, remains the mostwidely attended Jewish religious event.



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This grand narrative of a people special to Adonai that is thereforegiven Adonai

’s law for its existence as a free people on its own land

is the basis for the harsh judgment of the continual failures of thepeople’s efforts to live up to their responsibilities. The dismal recordof that period is partially relieved by its account of the rise of proph-ecy and the prophetic books with their extraordinary message of calling power to account. Nothing else in Jewish literature so power-fully reminds the Jewish people that Adonai

deems little moreprecious than goodness and that social responsibility is indispens-able to Jewish piety. A generation or two earlier, our teachersclaimed too much when they summoned us to a Prophetic Judaism,for a religious community cannot be built on ethics alone. But thecurrent neglect of the Prophets in favor of rabbinic texts, for all thatan ethically selective reading of them rightly shapes our Jewishduty, will not teach us how to speak truth to power. We whose socialethics is so centrally involved with government can have few betterguides to our duty than these fearless champions of Adonai

’sdemands on rulers and the ruled.

In due course the Jewish social situation radically changed.Instead of independent living on their own land, Jews were dis-persed across the Western world. In much of this pre-modernperiod scarcity was the common economic condition thus encour-aging host peoples to be oppressive and persecutory. Jewish socialethics in these centuries was primarily defensive and self-centered.Nonetheless, the record of this inner turn of Jewish life and its

response to Jewish needs in new if necessarily limited ways reflectsthe inherited social dedication of Jewish religiosity. This social ethi-cal impulse might well express itself in different forms dependingon circumstances. Thus, to give one example, some scholars suggestthat while Sephardic Jews tended to rely more on family ties than onorganized community resources to meet Jewish needs, Ashkenazi

Jews often reversed the practice. Increasingly, it seems, the commu-nity as well as its individual members found varying ways of fulfill-ing their social ethical responsibilities as Jews.

Then, from the French Revolution on, the political emancipationof European Jewry radically changed the context and content of

Jewish social ethics in ways that are difficult to overestimate. After

nearly 1500 years of exclusion and contumely—the last portion of which was marked by increased segregation and persecution—

Jews began to be full citizens in one country after another. As they



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thronged out of the “ghetto” they largely abandoned the inner-directed, defensive social ethics of their elders and embraced an

exhilarating Western universalism and the social imperatives thisgenerated. The revolutionary impact of this changed attitude may

be judged by what, from today’s chastened perspective, seems anearlier generation’s unbridled optimism. Thus mid-twentieth-century liberal Jewish spokesmen (

sic

), looking forward to theeffects of universal education and the spread of high culture,grandly spoke of “the perfectibility of man (

sic

).” Political actionwas now so clearly the realistic means for social transformation thatthe old religious notion of a God-sent Messiah was quickly replaced

by a people-generated Messianic Age. With human social ethics sosalvific, many modernized Jews considered Jewish religiositysuperfluous and drifted away from it while others replaced it witha universalistic ethical group like Ethical Culture or Unitarian-Universalism.

In most Jews, however, the power of the new ethical politics re-empowered the old Jewish emphasis on the deed. On some elemen-tal theological level it roused the old Jewish vision of all the Childrenof Noah, that is, humankind, working together to realize Adonai

‘sgoals in creation. Much of this widely felt eruption of Jewishconscience did not require organizational form to manifest itself, asin the disproportionate number of Jews who very early on partici-pated in the Civil Rights struggle (among them colleagues such asIsrael (Sy) Dresner and Martin Freedman, z”l

, who violated the

segregationist transportation laws as Freedom Riders). The sameimpulse moved many young Zionists to make aliyah

, to immigrate,in the hope of making the Jewish State a model of human decency.And on issue after issue in those post-World War II decades the thenUnion of American Hebrew Congregations gave outstanding lead-ership to everyone who somehow knew that Jewish believingdemanded ethical action to build a better world.

Conscience was not the only motive impelling the Jew’s soul inthose glory days of Jewish ethical activism for Jewish self-interestalso played a major role. Grateful for what the Emancipation haddone for them, most Jews unconsciously realized that only if every-one in our society shared in the fruits of American democracy and

affluence would Jews be secure in their unprecedented equality.Paradoxical as it may seem, the Holocaust seemed to that make thisthesis irrefutable: had Germany been able to provide some real



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measure of fulfillment and hope to its masses, they would not havesupported the Nazi madness. Philosophers and the saintly may

consider such self-concern a blemish on our commitment to thegood but they do not have our experience of surviving suffering.Rather, in a manner reminiscent of the biblical twinning of righ-teousness and well-being, what, in the long run, was “good for the

Jews” joined faith to motivate those decades of extraordinary ethicaleffort.

3. The Messianic Goal

Honesty requires that we recognize that our exuberant involve-ment in social ethical activism has yielded mixed results. There ismuch to be proud of: women, blacks, homosexuals, and other disen-

franchised people are increasingly coming into their own. The aged,the ill, the unlearned are not as destitute and forsaken as they wereyears ago. Extraordinary large numbers of people with highlydiverse points of view and strong differences of opinion manage tolive and work together in relative peace. And despite the inevitabledisappointments with this or that program, many, many peopleamong us are reasonably confident that we can yet do better. Oursis a relatively hopeful society, no small accomplishment indeed inhuman history.

Yet it is difficult to deny the change in tone in our ethical dedi-cation. The simple truth seems to be that what we have seen, indeed,what we have done, has forced us to abandon our old optimism—

or was it, in fact, utopianism? Realistically faced, few of ourprograms for alleviating one problem or another have not, in duecourse, generated new problems of their own. Some of these arisefrom the complexities of dealing with large numbers of quitediverse human beings; others are engendered by the limitations of the human beings who run them. It has been a shock to discover howunrelenting and complex human social problems can be.

Moreover, the agenda of needs, human and natural, keepsexpanding far beyond our ability to deal with them. Most decent,responsible people find themselves overwhelmed by all thatcontemporary existence requires of them only to be continuallyapprised by reliable sources of additional worthy causes deservingof their action, or at least their money. People of conscience must livetoday with the unrelenting stress of more ethical tasks than they canhope to handle. There are more of them than we can work on or give



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to or even, in the interests of sanity, seriously understand. Theresulting retrenchment of our ethical activism has necessarily given

us a new ethical humility. Is that what we are hinting at in trans-lating tikkun olam

as merely “mending the world,” that is, at bestleaving it a thing of patches, when not too long ago we hoped formore grandiose human accomplishment? When this theme ismentioned in our daily prayers—in the last paragraph of the Aleinu

prayers—

Adonai

is being beseeched to finally make the Divinesovereignty fully manifest in this world. The text there is letakeinolam bemalchut Shaddai

, which strongly resists the translation “tomend the world [by establishing] God’s dominion.” The old trans-lations ring truer, “to perfect the world [by establishing] God’sdominion.”

By this broken midrash I mean to suggest that, consciously ornot, our once soaring ethical self-confidence has now given way toa more modest sense of what human beings at their best may hopeto accomplish. If we nonetheless believe that while we cannot doeverything, the social ethical tasks we can and must dedicateourselves to are not futile despite our limitations, it is because we dothem in partnership with Adonai

. Even as we have let Adonai

backinto our hope for healing so we must now acknowledge Adonai

‘srole in tikkun olam

. Though we may fall short of our goals in this orthat project, Adonai

, being good, ultimately will not fail to makegoodness triumph in human history. If this view of messianismsounds suspiciously Hegelian—the God-only messianism suc-

ceeded by its antithesis, the human-only messianic age, only toarrive at the synthesis of a partnered God-human messianism—so be it.

A social ethics that takes Adonai

this seriously leaves us with theproblem of “faith-based politics” in a country that, as the over-whelming majority of Jews see it, has certainly benefited from “theseparation of church and state.” Why am I risking all the gains thatpractice has for so long brought to Jews and many other groups byemphasizing Adonai

’s role in our social ethics? Years ago, when Iwas still editing Sh’ma

, I had occasion to ask Arthur Goldberg, thenan ex-Supreme Court Justice, for some guidance on this issue. Hesaid, in effect, that the American separation of religion and govern-

ment was an ongoing experiment in getting people of potentiallyclashing views to limit the kind of arguments they brought to theirdiscussions of general social policy so that they might then live



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together peacefully. Something like that pragmatic understandingof democracy is also argued by Jeffrey Stout in his book Democracy

and Tradition

(a chunk of which was the Efroymson Lectures hedelivered at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati). Behind such views, I believe,is a strong desire to keep America from the kind of wars of religionthat roiled much of Europe in the centuries before the AmericanRevolution. Liberal Jews can find this approach congenial not only

mipne darche shalom

, for the sake of peace, but also because we canoften make our ethical case clear in terms that have been widelyaccepted as basic to Western civilization. May the years aheadprove that not to be another grandiose ethical expectation.

Afterword

This article was submitted to the Journal before I read Mark Lilla’s brilliant essay, “The Politics of God” in The New York Times Maga- zine

, August 19, 2007. There Lilla thoughtfully presents a history of the West’s intellectual and practical struggles with regard to theproper relations of religion and government. It thus presents thegeneral background that my statement about Judaism took forgranted.

borowitz, theology of social action

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