Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he
believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor.
He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes...furious
and...spiteful...when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity
whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx
himself.
---Bakunin, 1872
As an orthodox Jew in pre-war
Poland, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, found himself captivated by a
passage in the Midrash about Rabbi Meir, the great disciple of Rabbi
Akiva. The passage described how Rabbi Meir took lessons in theology from a
heretic called Akher (“The Other”). On one particular Sabbath, as
Deutscher recalled, “Rabbi Meir was with his teacher, and as usual they became
engaged in a deep argument. The heretic was riding a donkey, and Rabbi Meir, as
he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by his side and listened so intently to
the words of wisdom falling from his heretical lips that he failed to notice
that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not
allowed to cross on a Sabbath. The great heretic turned to his orthodox pupil
and said: ‘Look, we have reached the boundary -- we must part now; you must not
accompany me any farther -- go back!’ Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish
community, while the heretic rode on -- beyond the boundaries of Jewry.”[1]
Deutscher was fascinated with the
story. “Why,” he wondered, “did Rabbi Meir, that leading light of orthodoxy,
take his lessons from the heretic?...Why did he defend him against other
rabbis?...Who was he? He appeared to be in Jewry and yet out of it. He showed a
curious respect for his pupil’s orthodoxy, when he sent him back to the Jews on
the Holy Sabbath; but he himself, disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the
boundaries.”
In the figure of the heretical
stranger, Deutscher saw a paradigm for his own radical career. The Jewish
heretic who crosses boundaries and transcends their limits -- Deutscher wrote --
is the prototype of the modern revolutionary. By way of defining the
revolutionary tradition to which he himself belonged, he identified its
exponents: Spinoza, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky. These famous revolutionary
heretics “found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting,” and
therefore “looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond it.” In the secular world
they entered, they were outsiders as well: “They lived on the margins or in the
nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and
yet not in it, of it and yet not of it.” Living beyond invisible boundaries,
made them almost god-like: “It...enabled them to rise in thought above their
societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike
out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”
Isaac Deutscher was my teacher, and
Akher -- the heretical stranger -- is a figure with whom I came to identify in
my life as a radical. I was the scion of socialists and Communists, of Jews
estranged from Judaism who pursued ideals beyond the limits of its community and
traditions, of revolutionaries who pursued fulfillment in a liberated future
beyond the confines of the societies and nations that defined the human present.
When I was nine, I remember marching with my parents in a Communist May Day
Parade in New York City. The year was 1948 and Communist political forces
directed by Moscow and backed by the Red Army were taking control of Eastern
Europe. In February, the Communists had overthrown the government of
Czechoslovakia. In March, President Truman went before Congress to mobilize
America’s forces for the anti-Communist battles that loomed ahead. It was the
beginning of the Cold War and our May Day parade was conceived as an act of
political defiance.
My parents and I were already on the
other side of invisible boundaries -- boundaries that separated us from the
nation on whose margin, and in whose nooks and crannies we lived. And yet, as we
chanted our slogans -- One, two, three, four/We don’t want another war...
-- we felt anything but homeless. In marching in these ranks, we had crossed
another boundary into a realm of our political imaginations, where the
revolutionary future was already here. In our hearts we felt an immense,
reassuring pride to be part of the vanguard of progressive humanity, marching
towards a world in which war and injustice would be only memories of a distant
past.
Along the route down New York’s
Eighth Avenue, gray wooden barriers with black stenciled letters “N.Y.P.D.”
lined the sidewalks to hold back the crowds of hostile onlookers. The fear I had
tried not to feel was held at bay by the pressure in my lungs from our chants
and songs. At one point our ranks fell silent as we stopped to let the cross
traffic pass. As we waited to resume our march, a group of street kids, some no
bigger than I, leaned over one of the barriers and began to chant back at us:
Down with the Communists, up with the Irish! The taunt wounded and
confused me, as though an actual blow had been delivered. A hurt stuck in my
throat: it was so unjust. I wanted to cry back, You don’t understand!
We’re doing this for you. For Irish and non-Irish alike. For the
day when there won’t be any wars and there won’t be any nations, just one human
family. I wanted to respond, but I didn’t. All day I had been chanting into
the air with the others to an invisible audience, whom I was sure needed to hear
the truth we were telling. Now I was confronted by real people who heard what we
had to say and who despised and hated us for saying it.
This is the only clear memory I have
of that entire May Day in 1948. For the next twenty-five years I remained in the
ranks of the political Left. I was a soldier in an international army fighting
on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. In my mind I had taken on the cause of
all the communities of the dispossessed. It was only much later that I came to
realize that in becoming part of the Left I had really taken on the cause of no
community at all. Though we were in society, we were not of it. Except for the
Party rulers in Moscow from whom progressives took their cues, we represented no
one, not even ourselves. In all those years of championing the oppressed, it
would never once have occurred to me, for example, to shout out, like those
Irish kids: Up with the Jews!
I did not identify myself as a Jew.
I was a revolutionary and an internationalist. To see myself as a Jew -- a
member of a real community in all its human limits, with all its human faults --
to identify with the claims of such a community, would have been a betrayal of
the revolutionary Idea. In all those years, I never allowed myself to explore
what it might mean to have a real sense of myself as a Jew, just as I never
really felt myself to be an American, or to identify with any community less
extensive than humanity itself. In this attitude, I was typical of the Left. It
was only after I finally gave up the revolutionary fantasy, that I began for the
first time to experience my own reality and the reality of the communities to
which I belonged, only when I had left the ranks of the political vanguard whose
mission it was to change the world.
When I had left the Left, the moral
I drew from the Midrash story of Rabbi Meir and the heretical stranger
that so impressed Isaac Deutscher, was no longer his moral. In fact, it
was quite opposite. The moral, for me, is the importance of boundaries -- the
religious boundaries that separate the holy from the profane, and also the
secular boundaries that separate the uncharted from the familiar and durable,
the apocalyptic from the mundane. Among the conservative lessons my heretical
life has taught me about boundaries are the costs incurred in crossing them.
When I was starting out as a radical
in the 1960s, Deutscher was already a celebrated cultural figure as the Marxist
biographer of Trotsky and Stalin. Forty years earlier, when the Bolshevik
Revolution was still young, Deutscher had been a political activist in Eastern
Europe. As a mentor to New Leftists like me, Deutscher was always ready with an
instructive anecdote about those intoxicating times. One of his amusing parables
concerned the two most important leaders of the Communist International, Karl
Radek and Grigory Zinoviev, who had come to Germany in 1918 to stoke the fires
of revolution. Like many other leading Bolsheviks (Sverdlov, Kamenev and
Trotsky, for example) both Radek and Zinoviev were Jews, as was the foremost
figure of the German Revolution -- Rosa Luxemburg -- and the head of the new
revolutionary government in Hungary, Bela Kun. And, of course, the inspirer of
all their revolutionary exertions, Karl Marx himself had come from a long line
of famous rabbis in Trier.
Radek was addressing the crowd. “We
have had the Revolution in Russia and the Revolution in Hungary, and now the
Revolution is erupting in Germany,” he roared, “and after that we will have the
Revolution in France and the Revolution in England and the Revolution in
America.” As Radek worked himself into a lather, Zinoviev tapped him on the
shoulder and whispered, “Karl, Karl, there won’t be enough Jews to go
around.”
The story is apocryphal, but the
point is telling. For nearly two hundred years, Jews have played a
disproportionate role as leaders of the modern revolutionary movements in Europe
and the West. To these socialist revolutionaries, the bourgeois freedom
established by the French Revolution was only half-freedom. The universal Rights
of Man had created a unity of mankind in the political realm, but had left the
citizenry divided and unequal in civil society. Only a socialist revolution
could make whole the defect in the human cosmos. By carrying the revolution to
its conclusion, socialists would usher in a millennium and fulfill the messianic
prophecies of the pre-Enlightenment religions that modern ideas had discredited.
Through this revolution, the lost unity of mankind would be restored, social
harmony would be re-established, paradise regained. It would be -- to employ the
language of Lurianic Kabbalism -- a tikkun olam, a repair of the
world.
If the revolution was a secular
faith, its Moses was a deracinated Jew whose father had changed his name from
Herschel to Heinrich, and converted to Christianity to advance his government
career. The young Marx grew into a brilliant but rancorous adult, consumed by
hatred not only for the society that disdained him, but for the community that
had raised him. Internalizing the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes, he
incorporated them into his early revolutionary vision, identifying Jews as
symbols of the society he wanted to overthrow: “The god of the Jews has been
secularized and has become the god of this world,” he wrote in one of his early
manuscripts. “Money is the jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may
stand.” In a catechism for revolutionaries he took on the voice of his people’s
timeless persecutors: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need,
selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular
god? Money...Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence: this
essence dominates him and he worships it.” Salvation for the Jews lay in the
revolution that would destroy the foundations of the social order itself. For
once the revolution succeeded in “destroying the empirical essence of Judaism,”
Marx promised, “the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will
no longer have an object.” The revolutionary equation was thus complete: “the
social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”[2]
For secular Jews, like Marx, the
radical idea that the bourgeois revolution had somehow been incomplete carried
irresistible appeal. The bourgeois bill of rights had emancipated Europe’s
ghettoes, granting civil freedom to individuals, but refused to recognize the
people itself which stubbornly rejected assimilation. As a result, even
secularized Jews like Marx were looked on as members of an alien nation. To
them, the socialist revolution promised a true restoration of their own humanity
and general liberation -- a society freed from religious illusion and national
division; a world made whole; a tikkun olam. Communism, as Marx put it,
was “the riddle of humanity solved”-- as though the problem of human alienation
and suffering was nothing more than an intellectual puzzle.
Anti-Semitism was an animating
passion of the founders of socialism (Fourier and Proudhon, as well as Marx),
but throughout the 19th Century its poisons emanated principally from
the Right, while Jews found their defenders on the political Left. After 1914,
the First World War and its barbarities shattered the expectations of civil
progress and revived the passions of revolt. Out of the ashes of the cataclysm,
two destructive radical movements emerged.
Fascism and Communism were both
rooted in the messianic ambitions and gnostic illusions that the Enlightenment
had unleashed;[3] both invoked the
salvationist claims of the socialist promise; both looked to a historical
transcendence, proposing final solutions to what had been timeless problems of
the human condition. Both set out to create their socialist futures by first
destroying the bourgeois present, and erecting their utopias on its smoldering
ruins. Both intended to restore the lost unity of mankind by first dividing
humanity into opposing camps: the politically saved and the morally damned, the
children of light and the carriers of darkness, Us and Them. Fascism proposed to
build its utopia on the volk, the purity and solidarity of the tribe.
International socialism proposed to build its utopia on class foundations -- the
creation of a morally purified, proletarian ubermensch, the “new man” and
“new woman.” The means of purification, for both messianisms, was political
terror. “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, beginning with the firing
squad,” explained the Bolshevik Bukharin, later a victim of his own
prescription, “is...the way of fashioning the communist man out of the human
material of the capitalist era.”[4]
After 1917, these movements declared
political war on the liberal orders of bourgeois Europe. In Germany, the
Communist Party ordered its activists to collaborate with the Nazis in political
violence designed to cause the collapse of the democratic governing coalition.[5] In 1933, they
succeeded in destroying the Weimar Republic, an act which settled the fate of
European Jewry.
Deutscher was a soldier on one side
of that political battle. In a moment of intimacy we shared as teacher and
disciple, he confessed to me his guilt at having been wrong on an issue which
spelled life and death for millions of Jews. Along with other Jews active in the
Marxist Internationals during the inter-war years, Deutscher had argued
relentlessly in behalf of the self-determination of all nationalities -- except
Jews. In becoming revolutionary internationalists, these Jewish heretics
curiously adopted a tenet of the Biblical faith they had rejected. As a people
without a land, they argued, Jews were endowed with a special mission in
humanity’s march towards the revolutionary future. Their mission was to be a
revolutionary “light unto the nations,” to point to the redemption of man in a
united world where nations themselves would no longer exist.
As Lenin’s right hand in power, the
Jew, Trotsky (ne Bronstein) had turned a deaf ear to the pleas of his own
people, dismissing Soviet Jews as creatures of the despised petite-bourgeoisie.
In the second year of Hitler’s war, Trotsky pontificated from his Mexican exile
on the fate of his fellow Jews:
The attempt to solve the Jewish
question through the migration of the Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what
it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people....Never was it so clear as it is
today, that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the
overthrow of the capitalist system.[6]
Thus Trostky and Deutscher and the
other internationalists argued within the Jewish community in the Thirties that
its salvation lay in the overthrow of capitalism, that the solution to the
“Jewish problem” was the Marxist revolution -- in other words, the destruction
of liberal society in Germany and elsewhere. They argued against those Zionists
in the socialist movement who urged Jews to emigrate to Palestine and the
nascent Jewish state as a place of refuge and an ark of survival; and they
argued against all those non-socialists who struggled to shore up the liberal
democracies of the capitalist West, as bulwarks against the barbarian threat.
By working to destroy these liberal
societies and to undermine their bourgeois rights, radicals like Deutscher and
Trotsky helped to remove the life supports of European Jews. The revolutionary
salvation they promised never came. Only the handful who disregarded their
appeals and went to Palestine to build a Zionist state survived; the multitudes
who heeded them and their comrades, and stayed to fight for socialism, perished
in the Nazi holocaust.
In Russia, itself, hardly a single
one of the Bolshevik Jews survived the Stalinist terror: Radek, Zinoviev,
Kamenev, Sverdlov, and Trotsky all were murdered by the revolution in which they
had placed their faith. The bulk of Soviet Jewry survived the Nazi invasion, a
fact which fed the illusion that socialism might still offer the Jews hope. But
as soon as the war was over, Stalin began preparing his own “final solution” to
complete the job that Hitler had started. In 1948 the arrests and murders of
Soviet Jews began, and only Stalin’s death prevented the new holocaust from
running its course.[7]
Stalin’s campaign against the Jews
was inspired by his own paranoia, but its rationale remained well within the
parameters of the socialist project. Lenin himself had written: “Whoever,
directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of a Jewish ‘national culture,’
(whatever his good intentions may be), is an enemy of the proletariat, a
supporter of the old...an accomplice of the rabbis and the
bourgeoisie....’”[8] Or, in Marx’s own
formula: “In the last analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation
of mankind from Judaism.” Stalin’s anti-Semitic heirs continued their cultural
and religious assault on the Jewish community, as on all minorities within their
socialist empire, training the terrorists and supplying the arsenals with which
the Arab enemies of Israel threatened the survival of the Jewish state.
Before 1917, the locus of
international anti-Semitism was on the Right; today it is on the Left. The two
havens of post-holocaust Jewry, Israel and the United States, are the two states
that have been under assault by the international Left almost since the end of
World War II, “US imperialism” and “Zionist racism” the Great Satans of leftist
imaginations. Within the United States, the PLO and other Arab terrorists have
struck alliances with racist and anti-Semitic black “nationalists” like Louis
Farrakhan, while allies of Farrakhan have become part of the “progressive”
rainbow of the Democratic Party. And prominent, still, in this broad movement of
the contemporary Left are Jews laboring under the same illusion as the Jewish
radicals of the past: that they are a light unto the nations; that their
revolution will bring about a messianic transformation of communal hatred into
socialist harmony, human evil into social good; that it will mean a tikkun
olam.[9]
What accounts for the persistence of
this self-destructive commitment to the messianic ambitions of the revolutionary
Left? Why -- in the face of its practical catastrophes -- does the Left continue
to attract so many idealists, and Jewish idealists in particular, to its
political cause?
An answer frequently given is the
ethical affinity between socialism and Judaism. In this view, socialism is the
fulfillment of the moral teachings of the Jewish prophets; socialists are the
compassionate angels of the secular world. But what is moral or angelic about a
movement that aligns itself with anti-Semites and racists, and advances its
agendas behind a veil of deception? What is compassionate about a cause that
gave the world the gulag and the politically instigated famine; that
spawned the generalized misery of the socialist world? To say that the
revolutionary promise of social justice is what attracts Jews to the radical
cause is only to identify a self-delusion. It does not explain why Jews continue
to feel at home in the Left, despite the grim record of radical practice. To
explain this, one must first understand the nature of their secular faith. For
to sustain belief in the face of such contradiction requires, above all, an act
of faith.
As others have recognized,
revolutionary hope is a religious gnosticism.[10] It is the belief
in a world possessed by evil and an earthly redemption achieved through
knowledge. The Left is impervious to its own catastrophes because the perception
of catastrophe is the very premise of its faith. The religious foundation of its political
beliefs is the idea of history as a fall from grace. If a socialist experiment
proves to be corrupt, it has merely failed to escape the existing corruption.
The Left is not about reforming particular institutions through a program of
social reform. It proposes, instead, to rectify the general catastrophe of
existence itself. Until the general redemption is achieved, the potential always exists for a particular
lapse.
To the secular messianists of the
radical Left, the world we know is a social illusion, mankind alienated from its
“true self.” Likewise, to the religious gnostic, reality is a delusion of false
consciousness. The religious revolutionary believes that humanity creates its
own reality. There is no limit, therefore, to what humanity may become.
Alienation and suffering can be ended by a revolution that restores humanity to
its authentic being. Reactionary religion, by contrast, reconciles humanity to
its unacceptable reality with a dream of divine intervention and other-worldly
hope. It is the opium of the people, projecting humanity’s own power -- the
power to redeem itself -- onto a supernatural being, God. The revolutionary
faith rejects the illusion of divine grace and proposes itself as the
messianic force. The revolutionary answer to the religious question is the
demand to change the conditions that make religion necessary. The revolutionary
prophet proclaims a liberation theology: You shall be as gods, creating the
conditions of your own redemption.
“Alienation” is the Marxist name for
the catastrophe that has befallen human existence, for the fact that there are
not merely particular injustices to be remedied by specific reforms, but that
there is injustice in the very structure of mankind’s being in the world, that
no mere reform can heal. Jews have a name for this catastrophe of existence,
too, and it is the same name: Exile. In Marx’s Communist Manifesto
the proletariat is identified as a people in exile like the Jews: “Proletarians
have no country....Proletarians of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but
your chains.”
The political prelude to the First
World War refuted Marx’s proclamation. When war was declared, the socialist
parties aligned themselves with their respective nations, proving that
proletarians did have a patria and thus more to lose than their chains.
Exile was not the real condition of proletarians, but it was the real
condition of Jews like Marx. Self-excluded from his own community as a religious
expatriate, excluded from German society as a Jew, self-excluded again as a
socialist revolutionary in bourgeois England, Marx conceived his
internationalist dream to solve this riddle. Socialism was the wish to free
himself from his personal exile by destroying the very idea of nations, by
uniting mankind in a Marxist Zion.[11]
It is the paradigm of exile that
links the fate of the Jews to the radical left. The same paradigm forges the
false bonds between Jewish faith and revolutionary fervor. And it is the
paradigm of exile in the Jewish tradition that warns us of the dangers of such
messianic hopes – of hopes that are gnostic and apocalyptic, that propose a
self-transformation of men into angels, and that promise the establishment of
paradise on earth.
* * *
In the Jewish tradition, an exile
stands at the threshold of all human history: the expulsion of the first couple
from the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were our parents, but they did not know
good and evil, shame and suffering, labor and death. They are our parents and
our innocence; we are of them, but we are not like them. They are what we dream
of being.
Genesis is a cautionary tale of who
we are. In its Garden only one fruit was forbidden: “Of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it
you shall die.” To eat from this tree was to lose innocence and thus the
very paradise that had been given. But after God had warned them, the serpent
came to Eve and, in words which are almost exactly the words of the Marxist
promise, urged her to disregard what God had commanded: “For...when you eat of
it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,...” So Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and
God punished them, causing them to bear children in pain and to toil all the
days of their lives, until death.
There was a further penalty -- expulsion from paradise:
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the
man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth
his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” --
therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the
ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the source the
garden of Eden he placed an angel, and a sword of the spirit which turned every
way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
In this parable, the possibility
of redemption is symbolized by the flaming sword that points the way back. But
the sword also symbolizes that return is possible only through a divine grace.
In the Biblical tradition, the
expulsion from paradise is the threshold of human history. God’s curse -- to
live in exile from paradise, to labor in pain, to suffer and die -- can be
translated thus: You shall be human. The moment that our common parents
eat from the tree of knowledge, mixing good and evil, we are human: permanently
exiled from our origins, perpetually estranged from ourselves.
The theme of exile recurs through
Biblical history. Not long after the first couple were banished from Eden, the
Bible relates that God was again so provoked by the spectacle of human mischief,
that He decided to expel His creation from the earth itself. (“The Lord saw that
the wickedness of man was great in the earth...So the Lord said, ‘I will blot
out man whom I have created from the face of the ground,...’”) But one man,
Noah, found favor with God for his goodness, and God relented, deciding to spare
Noah, saying “I will establish my covenant with you;...”
After the flood that God had sent to
destroy the world, Noah built an altar and made an offering. When Noah had done
this, God was ready, as a wise if rueful parent, to reconcile himself to His own
creation: “When the Lord smelled the pleasing odor [of Noah’s offering], the
Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for
the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again
destroy every living creature as I have done.’”
Here, in the first of those
remarkable self-bindings of the divine power in Jewish tradition, God sets the
boundaries of human existence, declaring that He will live with His creation,
destined though His creatures are to disappoint Him and to do evil. This is the
first covenant which, in the course of the exodus from Egypt, becomes a covenant
between God and His people, Israel. Later, in the Sinai wilderness, God tells
the Israelites: “You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
But even though they are chosen, the Israelites remain children of Adam, in
whose hearts good and evil are confused.
Because they are chosen, God
provides the Israelites with a path back towards the source. This path is the
Law that God first gives to Moses at Sinai. In Eden, before the Fall, there was
but one commandment. Now there are many. Lest their essential meaning be
forgotten, God tells His prophet: “Speak to the children of Israel and tell them
to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their
generations, and to put on the fringe of each corner a blue thread.” The fringe
signifies the boundary they must observe to keep their human hearts in check:
“You shall have it as a fringe so that when you look upon it you will remember
to do all the commands of the Lord, and you will not follow the desires of your
heart and your eyes which lead you astray.” Human beings are still the children
of Adam and Eve -- creatures prone to evil through the desires of the heart.
God’s covenant is two edged, like
the sword which guards the gates of Eden, both blessing and curse:
See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in His ways, and by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear,... you shall perish;... [I will] scatter you among the nations...the land of your enemies shall eat you up.[12]
Exile is God’s curse for
breaking His covenant, for choosing evil over good. But because God is bound by
His own covenant not to destroy his creation, this exile is also the ground of
hope. To those whose hearts are open to God and who keep His commandments, there
is the promise of a return to the source.
Throughout the early exiles of the
Israelites, this hope of redemption is bound up with the coming of a
messiah, one anointed by God, like David, to lead the return of God’s
people to their home in Zion. But as the exile from the Land of Israel becomes
more and more permanent, an apocalyptic strain develops in Jewish messianism,
which no longer conceives the event as a restoration of the good of a previous
time. Before, the vision of the messianic future was summarized by a saying in
the Talmud --“The only difference between this eon and the Days of the Messiah
is the subjection [of Israel] to the nations.” But now the prophets begin to
speak, instead, of an “End of Days,” whose coming will be miraculous and sudden,
in which God Himself will reign and establish His Law, and which will signal an
end to historical time.
Even this apocalyptic messianism,
however, did not forget the meaning of history: In God and His covenant lie the
sole hope of man’s redemption. Thus, the cornerstone of the prayer service of
diaspora Jewry, the Amidah, is a paean to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, which celebrates the covenant and its promise: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel....Blow the Great Shofar for our freedom, and lift up a
banner to gather our exiles, and gather us from the four corners of the earth.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who gatherest the banished of Thy people Israel.”
The humility of defeat, the
suffering of exile teaches us who we are. It is no coincidence that the great
formative periods of the Jewish religion -- the time of the Patriarchs, of the
revelation at Sinai, of the compilation of the Talmud -- are all periods of
Jewish exile. But there is a danger in exile too. Its sufferings can become so
terrible that we forget the truth behind the covenant: We are children of Adam,
destined by what we are to confuse good and evil; condemned by who we are to
dwell far from the source in Eden. Forgetting who we are, we no longer struggle
within the terms of the condition we have inherited to make ourselves better and
more just; instead, we rebel against the condition of exile itself. In search of
an entirely new kind of redemption, we turn to mystical knowledge and miraculous
faiths, to false gods and self-anointed messiahs.
After the destruction of the Second
Temple, as hundreds of years of Israel’s persecution and exile grew to be
thousands, Jews in the diaspora began to ask themselves unthinkable questions:
How could God have chosen the Jews and then abandoned them? How could God’s
chosen people deserve such punishment? How can God be God and yet such
evil exist? These questions were really one question: How can our exile be
explained?
About the time of the Renaissance in
Europe, a group of Jewish mystics, living in Palestine, formulated an answer. In
so doing, they developed a view radically different from traditional views of
the Jewish exile, and the messianic redemption as well. In the Kabbalistic
teaching of Isaac Luria and his disciples, God Himself became part of the exile
of His people, and God’s self-exile the explanation for how evil entered the
world.[13]
Before Eden, according to the
Lurianic teaching, there was a primal act of creation. God withdrew into
himself, creating the nothingness -- the non-God -- out of which the world was
created. Thus in Lurianic gnosticism, there was no longer one divine creation,
in which God’s children chose freely between what is right and what is wrong,
but a creation dominated by warring forces of good and evil. The elements of
this creation are the Sefirot or vessels of emanated light radiating the
plenitude of the Divine influence. According to Luria, during the primal act of
creation only the first three levels of Sefirot could adequately contain
the primal Divine Light. When the radiation reached the six lower
Sefirot, their capacity failed and they were shattered by the radiance.
Sparks of the Divine Light were trapped in the fragments of these vessels, and
some mounted aloft, while others descended and sank. Those that sank, the
Klippot or husks were transformed into the forces of impurity and evil,
whose strength derives from the sparks of Divine Light that are still trapped
within them.
This is the Lurianic Exile -- the
light entrapped within the broken vessels and subjected to evil. No longer is it
an exile merely of the children of Adam, but of God Himself; no longer are the
Israelites alone in their exile: the Shekhina, the Divine Presence dwells
in exile with them. For in the course of its creation, the universe itself has
become flawed. Its flaw is a flaw in man and God, in creation itself. To
heal the wound in creation requires a tikkun olam -- a repair of the
world.
This tikkun olam is the new
Lurianic doctrine of redemption. The Shekhina must be reunited with God.
The task of reunion is given to the people whom God has chosen. Redemption takes
place through the holiness of the Chosen whose observances and prayers are
performed with a mystical intensity that deprives evil of its power. By
redeeming the Divine Light, they perfect not only the soul of the Jewish people
but of the whole world. For when the sparks that are trapped in the broken
vessels are liberated and returned to their source, the Exile of the Light comes
to an end, and the human and cosmic redemption is achieved.
What has happened in this
Kabbalistic re-vision of the meaning of exile is the transformation of the
religious teaching into a gnostic creed: Redemption is no longer a divine
release from the punishment of exile, but a humanly inspired transformation of
creation itself.[14] The concept of
human exile has become divorced from the realities of history, the attempt to
restore a covenant broken through humanity’s continuing capacity for evil. It
has become instead a mystical Idea: the liberation of the divine light that will
make the cosmos whole. In the gnostic view, the evil that men do emanates not
from their own flawed natures, but is the result of a flaw in the cosmos they
inhabit, which can be repaired. Man is his own redeemer.
Thus the meaning of human exile is
dramatically -- and demonically -- transformed. It is no longer a punishment,
but a mission; no longer a reflection of who we are, but a mark of our destiny
to become agents of salvation. In this gnostic vision, Israel is dispersed among
the nations in order that the light of the whole world may be liberated. In the
words of the Kabbalist Hayim Vital: “this is the secret why Israel is fated to
be enslaved by all the Gentiles of the world: In order that it may uplift those
sparks [of the Divine Light] which have also fallen among them... And therefore
it was necessary that Israel should be scattered to the four winds in order to
lift everything up.”[15] The Israelites
are the first revolutionary internationalists.
Gnostic messianism is a precise echo
of the serpentine voice that seduced Eve and led Adam to his Fall: You shall be
redeemers; you shall be as God.
In the years following the expulsion
of the Jews from Spain in the time of Columbus, and other cataclysms of the
Jewish diaspora, the new doctrines of Isaac Luria spread rapidly. Then, in 1648,
the year of the Chmielnicki massacres, a tormented mystic named Shabbtai Zvi
appeared in Smyrna, claiming to be the true Messiah. For seventeen years, no one
paid attention to his pathetic claims. An eccentric, manic-depressive, Zvi was
given to blasphemies in his ecstatic states, pronouncing the forbidden name of
God, violating Jewish law and holding a mystic marriage with the Torah under a
wedding canopy. He often invoked the benediction “To Him who allows the
forbidden.”
For his heresies Shabbtai Zvi was
expelled in turn from Smyrna, Salonika and Constantinople and would have been
forgotten, except that, finally recognizing that he was sick, he decided to seek
the help of a brilliant young Kabbalist in Jerusalem, hoping the scholar would
be able to exorcise the demons that afflicted him. This Kabbalist was Nathan of
Gaza.
Nathan of Gaza was the prototype of
the Jewish revolutionary gnostic whose tradition culminated in Karl Marx.
Instead of attempting to cure Shabbtai Zvi, he reinterpreted his dementia and
disobedience as signs that the messianic hour was indeed at hand -- the point at
which human history passes beyond good and evil. In 1665, Nathan of Gaza
proclaimed the madman Shabbtai Zvi to be the true Messiah, and devised a new
doctrine to justify his choice.
According to the new doctrine,
during the process of creation, when some sparks of the divine light fell into
the abyss following the breaking of the vessels, the soul of the Messiah,
embedded in the original divine light, also fell. Since the beginning, the soul
of the Messiah had dwelt in the depth of the great abyss, held in the prison of
the Klippot, the realm of darkness. Drawing on the fact that the Hebrew
word for serpent (Nahash), has the same numerical value, in Kabbalistic
doctrine, as the word for Messiah (Mosiach), Nathan identified the
Messiah as the “holy serpent” of this darkness. When the historical process of
perfection was complete, the soul of the Messiah would leave its dark prison and
reveal itself to the world. Only to the degree that the process of the
tikkun of all the world, liberated the good from evil in the depth of the
primal space, was the soul of the Messiah freed from its bondage.[16] Shabbtai
Zvi’s violation of the laws far from disqualifying him as one anointed by God,
were the sure signs that he was engaged in a messianic mission.
There had been other messiah
claimants before Shabbtai Zvi. But they had no prophet, like Nathan of Gaza, to
anoint them, and no dialectical science, like the Lurianic doctrine to sanctify
them. Shabbtai Zvi, who had been previously dismissed as a man deranged, now was
endorsed by the rabbinate, becoming the repository of messianic hope for Jewish
communities from Frankfurt to Jerusalem. No one now believed in Shabbtai Zvi
more than he himself. He announced the very date of Redemption for June 18,
1666, proclaimed the imminent deposition of the Turkish Sultan and sailed for
Constantinople. But when his ship reached Turkish waters in February 1666, the
Messiah was arrested and put in chains. Brought before the Sultan and given the
choice of death or conversion to Islam, the Jewish Messiah renounced his faith.
After the apostasy, the betrayed
communities of diaspora Jewry were overcome with confusion and despair, and the
institutions of orthodoxy drew a veil of silence over what had transpired. But a
hard-core of believers remained unshaken and undaunted, and the rump of the
Shabbatian movement survived. Nathan of Gaza explained the apostasy of the
Messiah in dialectical fashion as the beginning of a new mission to release the
divine sparks scattered among the gentiles, to redeem the light entrapped in
Islamic darkness: it was the Messiah’s task to take on the appearance of evil in
order to purify others.
* * *
In the gnostic messianism of Nathan
of Gaza and Shabbtai Zvi, in the antinomian belief in redemption through sin, in
the arrogant ambition to transform human nature and remake the world, and in the
self-anointing presumption of a messianic party lies the true ancestry of the
revolutionary Left.
The gnostic vision of Exile -- the
Light entrapped and subjected to Evil -- is precisely the Enlightenment vision
of human oppression, which Marx and the socialists inherited, and developed: Man
is born free, but is everywhere in chains. Men are naturally social beings and
equal, but everywhere they are in conflict and unequal. Mankind is benevolent
and angelic, but is everywhere alienated from its true self. No vision of human
potential could be further from the realities of the sons and daughters of Adam:
confused in their hearts between right and wrong, whose exile is the reflection
of their disobedient wills.
Just as religious gnosticism sees
evil as a flaw in the cosmic creation, so secular gnosticism sees evil as a flaw
in the social cosmos, as a force external to humanity itself. For the secular
gnostics of the socialist Left, this flaw in the cosmos is private property. It
is private property that creates alienation and inequality, irrationality and
social conflict, and condemns humanity to perpetual exile from its own freedom.
To set mankind on the path back to an earthly paradise, it is only necessary to
abolish property. Thus redemption does not lie in the fulfillment of moral
covenants and the adherence to law, but in the abolition and “transcendence” of
both. Its path is not disclosed by a divine grace but by a human reason which
is, in fact, not reason at all, but a mysticism of liberation. This mysticism is
at the heart of every movement that seeks a revolutionary transformation of the
world we know.
In this revolutionary mysticism, the
messianic liberator is imprisoned in capitalist darkness; it is a force without
property, that is in society but not of it; a force that is revolutionary
because its revolt is not against the particular injustices of man’s social
existence, but the injustice of the existence itself. The messianic force is a
class of people dispersed among the nations, but not of the nations, who in
lifting the yoke of their own oppression will lift the yoke of all.
This class is the proletariat, the
Chosen People of the Marxist faith. The proletariat, as defined by Marx, is a
class “which has a universal character by reason of the universality of its
sufferings, and which does not lay claim to any specific rights because the
injustice to which it is subjected is not particular but general....It cannot
liberate itself without breaking free from all the other classes of society and
thereby liberating them also... It stands for the total ruin of man, and can
recover itself only by his total redemption.”[17]
Here we see the mystical core of the
Marxist faith, and of all the faiths of the revolutionary Left: a class
representing the “total ruin of man” will bring about the “total redemption” of
man. This is a logical absurdity. But, as gnostic heresy, it is theologically
precise: light from darkness.
The analytically specific
“proletariat” has been replaced in the liberation theology of the contemporary
Left by the generic “poor” and “third world oppressed,” by exploited races and
downtrodden genders. But the formula has not changed. From total ruin,
redemption; from oppression, liberation; from evil, good. From the fallen
children of Adam and Eve, self-creating gods.
Thus in his notorious preface to
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the French radical Jean-Paul
Sartre extols the path of revolutionary redemption which will restore humanity
to its paradise lost: “this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury,
nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it
is man recreating himself....The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by
thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he
rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself
creates his self.”
You shall be as God.
Here we see the sinister, seductive
spell of the gnostic illusion, and its tikkun olam: You, Nathan of Gaza,
shall no longer be a youthful divinity student, but a prophet, a “holy lamp”
unto the nations; and you, Shabbtai Zvi, shall no longer be a misfit and
outcast, but a Messiah. The gnostic doctrines of Nathan of Gaza and Karl Marx
are doctrines of self-loathing and self-exaltation, the enthronement of man in
general and of mankind’s self-anointed redeemers in particular. To eat from the
tree of radical theory will make you gods. This is the socialist delusion, the
intoxicating fantasy that makes the socially alienated into political saviors:
not the compassion of angels, but the arrogance of the Serpent -- the belief
that revolutionary ideas can confer the power of self-creation, the power of
gods.
And this is what makes radicals so
dangerous and destructive. Since (for the revolutionary) the End of Days is at
hand, the rejection of the law -- of the old prohibitions -- is the sign of
election. The benediction of all revolutionaries is “To Him Who Allows the
Forbidden.” Redemption through sin. Thus Sartre: “When the peasant takes a gun
in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one
forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the
proof of his humanity....to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one
stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there
remain a dead man, and a free man...” Out of darkness, light.
Here we see the murderous,
dehumanizing, passion of the Left in all its gnostic splendor. Here is the voice
of Pol Pot ordering the extermination of educated Cambodians in order that
Cambodia might be free of oppressive culture. Here is the voice of Winnie
Mandela praising the necklacing of black South Africans burned alive in order
that South Africa might be liberated. Here is the voice of Marx proclaiming the
emancipation of the Jews through the emancipation of mankind from Judaism
itself.
As Deutscher wrote, Marx was indeed
the prototype of the radical “non-Jewish Jew,” much as my parents and I were, as
we marched down Eighth Avenue in that May Day parade when I was nine. We were
Jews who had turned our backs on Judaism, but who belonged to no other real
community or place. We were in America, but not of it. We had embraced a cause
that set us against it. We had puffed ourselves up into thinking we were saviors
of humanity, but we did not really identify ourselves with any particular part
of the humanity we intended to save. If we had the courage to be truthful, in
fact, we would have admitted that, in our own eyes -- like Shabbtai Zvi -- we
were really nothing at all. We had taken up a messianic cause in behalf of all
humanity, especially black and poor humanity, and the third world’s oppressed.
But we had no cause that was our own. Those we championed hated us as Jews, as
middle class people who had made a modest success, and as Americans too.
The international socialist creed
that Marx invented is a creed of hate and self-hate. The solution that Marxism
proposes to the Jewish “problem” is to eliminate the system that “creates” the
Jew. Jews are only symptoms of a more extensive evil that must be eradicated:
capitalism. Jews are only symbols of a more pervasive enemy that must be
destroyed: capitalists. In the politics of the Left, racist hatred is directed
not only against Jewish capitalists but against all capitalists; not only
against capitalists, but against anyone who is not poor, and who is white; and
ultimately against western civilization itself. The socialist revolution is
anti-Semitism elevated to a global principle.[18] From darkness,
light.
A former radical, a heretic and
stranger -- what I have learned through my own exile is this: respect for the
boundaries between the profane and the holy, between man and God; distrust of
the false prophets of a tikkun olam. Marxism and liberation theology are
satanic creeds. There can be no return from our exile by any path other than the
moral law; no redemption that takes us beyond the boundaries of who and what we
are.
[1] Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew, Oxford 1968
p. 25
[2] Karl Marx “On the
Jewish Question.” On the relation between Marx's Jewishness and his Marxism, see
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and
the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, New York 1974; Julius Carlebach, Karl
Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, Boston 1978; Paul Johnson, A
History of the Jews, New York 1987
[3] On the
revolutionary roots of modern German Anti-semitism and Nazism, cf. Paul Lawrence
Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner,
Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1990. On the socialist roots of fascism,
see Ze’ev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton
1994
[4] Cited in Mikhail
Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man, New York 1988.
p.3
[5] Cf. Jan Valtin
(pen-name of Richard Herman Krebs), Out of the Night, NY 1941 Krebs was a
Comintern official: “Those who objected were threatened with expulsion from the
Party. Discipline forbade the rank and file to discuss the issue. From then on,
in spite of the steadily increasing fierceness of their guerrilla warfare, the
Communist Party and the Hitler movement joined forces to slash the throat of an
already tottering democracy.”
[6] Quoted in Robert
S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, NY 1976
[7] Louis Rappaport,
Stalin’s War Against the Jews, NY 1990.
[8] Wistrich, op.
cit.
[10] Eric Voegelin,
Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Chicago 1968; Irving Kristol,
Reflections of A Neo-Conservative. On Marxism’s roots in Christian
mysticism, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Volume I The
Founders, Oxford 1978.
[11] Cf. Cuddihy, op.
cit.
[12] Deuteronomy 30,
28; Leviticus 26:38.
[13] H.H. Ben-Sasson,
Ed. A History of the Jewish People, Cambridge, Mass. 1976, pp. 695ff;
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York
1961
[14] Gershom Scholem,
The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York 1971, p.87
[15] Scholem, Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism, op. cit., p. 284
[16] Scholem, op.
cit., p. 297
[17] Marx,
Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Cf.
Kolakowski, op. cit. pp. 127ff
[18] Cf. Paul Johnson,
op. cit. pp. 352-3
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