In his philosophical dialogue Kuzari, the poet Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi portrayed an imagined series of talks between a Khazar king and religious representatives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as with a philosopher who did not identify with any of those traditions.
The king had had a dream in which he had been informed that his intentions to serve the highest good were fine but that his actions were not acceptable. Accepting the experience of the dream as genuine, the king sought out the religious communities to see what they had to say. But first, he met with a skeptical philosopher, perhaps because, as a man of the world, he thought it best not to seek supernatural solutions before he had explored the wisdom the natural world had to offer. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: This Evil Will Not Stop With the Jews)
The philosopher was predictably skeptical of the king’s dream and treated it as unimportant. The king knew by his experience this was not true, and that the philosopher’s knowledge had limits the philosopher didn’t admit. The king challenged the philosopher to explain why, if rational philosophy were so right, so many people are willing to put their life on the line for the truth of their religion.
The ones who raise their children to murder Jews … are the ones who accuse Israel of genocide.
The philosopher gave a classic answer, one that still challenges everyone who is a member of a religious community: “The philosophers’ creed knows no manslaughter, as they only cultivate the intellect.” We don’t murder each other and rationalize it by a religious creed.
Halevi makes a powerful case for the need for religious commitment, a commitment to a reality larger than the world of the rational mind. But he also never withdraws this deep indictment of the behavior the communities that dominated the religious life of the Western world in his day. He was going to make a case for super-rationality, not irrationality.
He hints this in the name of his book in the Arabic in which he wrote it. Translating it closely into English gives us not Kuzari but The Book in Defense of a Despised Faith. Judaism was despised because it was tiny and its members were dispersed as vulnerable minorities in both Christian and Muslim countries, where they always knew they were, at best, second class citizens. They were despised because of their powerlessness but they were not guilty of the powerful charge laid against religion by the philosopher. They were without the ability to win a battle, yet they defended their people and their religious mission nonetheless, and this book was part of that defense.
After the end of the Middle Ages and the religious wars that followed the Reformation, political thinkers in Christian Europe found inspiration in the Bible and Jewish law sources to support religious freedom. They acted in consonance with the message of Halevi’s book and with his argument that as long as religions depended on force to establish their claims, they would never be free of the charge he put in the mouth of his philosopher.
The founders of our American democracy and the framers of our Constitution both respected religion but feared the combination of faith and state power. They sought the sweet spot where religion and philosophy would not be in conflict. And at least one among them may have known about Yehuda Halevi’s championing of just such a confluence.
Thomas Jefferson was a skeptic of received religion. Though he used its rhetoric when it suited, he let through his more candid feelings during his long correspondence with John Adams. In one letter, Jefferson made some disparaging remarks about Judaism.
Adams was as much a scholar as Jefferson, but unlike him, an admirer of Judaism. Adams deemed the Jewish “doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe” as “the great essential principle of morality and all civilization.” (READ MORE: Those Espousing Evil Must Be Defeated)
Jefferson much admired the French Revolution, which treated religion poorly, and, at least in the Jacobin era, murderously as the enemies of rationality. Adams was not so taken with the French model of liberty, and more easily saw through its terrifying excesses. It was as part of his defense of his own vision of democracy that he took up his pen to defend Judaism against Jefferson’s criticism. He wrote down a lengthy list of great Jewish books that he told Jefferson he wished only that he could read. He told Jefferson that he yearned to study those books because he believed they contained corrections to errors that Christians had made. Among the books on his list was Halevi’s Kuzari.
let us start today to teach our children the significance of religious freedom, how the lack of it turns religions into evil empires.
America no longer allowed the imperial Roman version of a state religion. America would not settle religious differences through governmental force. Instead, it became the first nation since the fall of Jewish independence to offer Jews citizenship on equal terms. George Washington made this clear in a letter he wrote to the Jewish congregation of Newport during his presidential visit to Rhode Island in 1790. The congregation had inquired of him what were to be the terms under which the Jews would live under the new Constitution.
Washington made this reply:
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
This was something stunningly new in world history. It would have amazed and gratified Halevi to find his fellow religionists no longer despised but welcomed. This attitude predictably excites the contempt of those who use God and religion as cover for a murderous love of power.
For those who still wish to settle religious difference with murder still exist and they hate any restraint. Today’s leading advocate of traditional religion by force, the bloody handed mullahs of Tehran, deem America the Great Satan and regularly call for our death. They believe us fools for our constitutional approach and offering of freedom. To them, it is weakness, a symptom of decadence. They believe they will win.
They call Israel the Little Satan. For after nearly 2,000 years of statelessness, the people of Halevi’s despised religion re-established political independence. They forged a state in which Jews could not only defend themselves with books and ideas, but also stand valiantly against those who hate freedom and wish to return the Jews to being the despised sub-citizens that they had been under the old, idea-fearing moribund empires. (READ MORE: We Are All for Decolonization)
The war against Israel is a war against the Jews, an attempt to reassert the power of a now-dead empire. It is a war devoid of sense, devoid of compassion, devoid of truth. All have fallen wherever Iran and Hamas gain control. The ones who wish to reimpose the imperium accuse Israel and America of being the imperialists. The ones who expel and murder every Jew they can lay their hands on, whose provinces in Gaza and the West Bank, in Lebanon and in Syria are utterly rid of any Jews at all, call Israel an apartheid state. The ones who raise their children to murder Jews and who leap to do that themselves the moment Israel’s guard is down, the ones who openly espouse their love of Hitler and who embrace his exterminationist aims, are the ones who accuse Israel of genocide, even as their population grows.
It is an assault on reason and an assault on sanity. In the name of religion, of course.
America, let us start today to teach our children the significance of religious freedom, how the lack of it turns religions into evil empires and politics into an evil religion.
And think of the insight of a Jewish poet in Arab Spain nearly a thousand years ago.
