Parochialism has become untenable

CONTINUING ON with Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay, No Religion Is An Island starting with two paragraphs I gave yesterday because what follows depends on them.  Heschel's thinking and writing is such that you need to observe the meaning in overlapping ideas.

The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian-but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living God. The crisis engulfs all of us. The misery and fear of alienation from God make Jew and Christian cry together.
 

Jews must realize that the spokesmen of the Enlightenment who attacked Christianity were no less negative in their attitude toward Judaism. They often blamed Judaism for the misdeeds of the daughter religion. The casualties of the devastation caused by the continuous onslaughts on biblical religion in modem times are to be found among Jews as well as among Christians.
 

On the other hand, the Community of Israel must always be mindful of the mystery of aloneness and uniqueness of its own being. "There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations" ( Num. 23:9 ), says the Gentile prophet Balaam. Is it not safer for us to remain in isolation and to refrain from sharing perplexities and certainties with Christians?

I have written before that one of the most disturbing things I've heard in this area in the post WWII era, with the most serious and sustained attempt to murder the entire Jewish population of Europe is how often Jewish People in the English speaking world, at least, say "we're Jewish but we aren't religious."   To me that sounds, first, like an apology for being Jewish and an assurance that they're not TOO Jewish, a requirement of admission into wider, upper-class, white-collar, academic, professional respectability.   I think it was always the deal that the post-religious "enlightnement" made with Jews, that they could give up their religion to become respectable members of secular society.*  I can't see how that doesn't directly relate to the perhaps still often discussed issue of assimilation, something I knew was very widely discussed during the 1960s and 70s, enough literature based on that theme or impinging on it was written that it was inescapable unless you never read contemporary writing.   

I cannot but think that the adoption of that reassurance is related directly to the coercive conformity to secularization among the white collar class in the 1950s till today.   Secularism and fashion seem to do the work of the antisemites more efficiently than overt discrimination did.  It has also had a devastating effect on authentic Christianity in much the same way.  The future of the two traditions are bound together and I believe their future status depends on what happens to either of them. 

Our era marks the end of complacency, the end of evasion, the end of self-reliance. Jews and Christians share the perils and the fears; we stand on the brink of the abyss together. Interdependence of political and economic conditions all over the world is a basic fact of our situation. Disorder in a small obscure country in any part of the world evokes anxiety in people all over the world.
 

Parochialism has become untenable. There was a time when you could not pry out of a Boston man that the Boston statehouse is not the hub of the solar system or that one's own denomination has not the monopoly of the holy spirit. Today we know that even the solar system is not the hub of the universe.

I am indulging myself to point out here that it was the odious father of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. who coined the phrase, a  cold-blooded  19th century aristocrat as you might think of but whose son, the mistakenly lauded and revered Supreme Court Justice thought him overly sentimental.   I confess, I'm no fan of the Holmeses or the Supreme Court tradition that stems from jr.  
 

The religions of the world are no more self-sufficient, no more independent, no more isolated than individuals or nations. Energies, experiences and ideas that come to life outside the boundaries of a particular religion or all religions continue to challenge and to affect every religion.

Horizons are wider, dangers are greater ... No religion is an island. We are all involved with one another. Spiritual betrayal on the part of one of us affects the faith of all of us. Views adopted in one community have an impact on other communities. Today religious isolationism is a myth. For all the profound differences in perspective and substance, Judaism is sooner or later affected by the intellectual, moral and spiritual events within the Christian society, and vice versa. 

I would agree with this entirely, taking into account that much of religion, Christian, Jewish, etc. is in the hands of thugs and gangsters, with whom the opportunities of cooperation are often going to be non-existent or, if attempted, fruitless if not counter-productive.  The definition of that inauthenticity will well, I'd think, be able to be made on the basis of a willingness to cooperate for the common good and the sustainability of life and egalitarian common wealth.  It was one of the catastrophes of Christianity that it became mired in the European feudalism and the worldly politics of emperorers, kings, etc.   It is being recapitulated in the "white evangelical" and "traditional Catholic" service to Republican-fascism as embodied in the neo-pagan Hollywood idea of an emperor, Trump.  

That should be the definition of religious authenticity,  the pursuit of the common wealth, the common good, the pursuit of universal social and economic justice and the entirely important and vital goal of saving the biosphere on which all of us ultimately and first off depend.

This  truer than this section of the essay would seem to indicate because the problems the entire world faces today is the decisive choice that will be made between materialism and spiritual transcendence, vulgar materialistic indulgence and moral responsibility,  ruinous consumption or self-sacrificing sustainability,  illusions of parochial superiority and dominance or egalitarian common-wealth and that is a choice that will decide if the human species survives itself and its enlightenment delusion that nature can both be maximally exploited to our ends - and let's get this clear, that means the ends of a gangster elite of some kind which enforces its privilege with violence, oppression and death, first those it exploits uses up and disposes of and, in the not too distant future, the entire biosphere.  And that choice cannot be informed by the STEM subjects and fields alone, no matter what minor efforts are made in science to address the horrors materialist secularism and its more overt form in vulgar materialism inevitably leads to.  

That Abraham Joshua Heschel was writing this in 1966 strikes me as genuinely prophetic, as prophetic as what his friend and colleague Martin Luther King jr. was saying.   There were also a few environmentalists who had gone this far, a few religious figures who were horrified by the prospects of nuclear extinction and who were among the most seriously reformed by the witness of the genocides of WWII and the Stalinist and, then, Maoist regimes.  Secularists were more interested in keeping prayers out of public schools, keeping manger scenes off of town squares and generally making themselves obnoxious with trivia and invitations to talk shows on TV and radio.  Materialists tend to be trivial thinkers, in my experience, there, I said it.  Materialism is as anti-intellectual as it is anti-spiritual.

*  Which strikes me as a worse deal than they got through conversion to Christianity because Christians had at first retained the Jewish Scriptures (all most all of the first "Christians" being Jewish, including Paul and James and even some of the first Popes) or, if they were not Jewish to start with, through adoption of the Scriptures.   

Of course when science entered into it, Darwinism from the start of it, and being Jewish was decided to be a matter of biological inheritance, including immutable and inevitable "traits" "Jewishness" became just another sub-species and was as liable to the scientific superstition of eugenics and the programs of eradication so as to have an imaginary salubrious effect on the survivors.  The rise of Darwinism and the rise of eliminative antisemitism are  bound together by what was taken as the reliability of hard science.   While there was an unofficial precursor of that among a faction of the Spanish hierarchy of the 16th century, resentful of how some of the conversos had gained high office in the Catholic Church, it was not the official position of the Church as a whole and it was not expressed in the same eliminative, quickly developing to genocidal character that I've traced from the eminent British geneticist Karl Pearson, through his collegial contacts with Eugen Fischer directly into the very center of Nazi eugenics and race science as well as having influence elsewhere in science.  His work certainly would have informed the developing American and, almost as certainly Canadian, etc. scientific-legal laws to exclude "undesirables."  That cannot be separated from any of the other eugenics nor from the earlier death camps that the pre-Nazi German military set up in Africa, nor the body parts that a younger Eugen Fischer collected from victims of that genocidal campaign to be sent to his scientific colleagues in Europe.  When you look at human beings as material objects, you end up treating them like objects for use and disposal and to be mounted specimens, no more significant than the moths you find in scientific collections.