Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers

By Stephen Stern and Steven Gimbel

Reclaiming the Wicked Son takes the ideas of six well-known secular Jewish philosophers from Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler and views them through a wide range of Jewish lenses from the Talmudic tradition and prophetic Judaism to Kabbalist approaches, thereby understanding the twentieth-century secular thinkers as on-going elements of a living Jewish intellectual tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839986161

Book preview

Reclaiming the Wicked Son

Reclaiming the Wicked Son

Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers

Stephen Stern and Steven Gimbel

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Stephen Stern and Steven Gimbel 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936465

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-614-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-614-X(Hbk)

Cover image: Bryan Johnson-French

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Esau.

Contents

Introduction: Reclaiming the Wicked Son

1. Karl Marx and Materialistic Messianism

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Neo-Talmudic Thought

3. Ayn Rand and the Hassidic Courts

4. Peter Singer: The Amos of Animals

5. Judith Butler and Orthopraxy

6. Noam Chomsky, Kabbalist

Conclusion: Re-Membering the Tribe

Bibliography

Index

Introduction: Reclaiming the Wicked Son

The writers of the Passover Haggadah brought together four passages from disparate portions of the Torah to frame the allegory of the four sons:

The Torah describes four children who ask questions about the Exodus. Tradition teaches that these verses refer to four different types of children. The wise child asks, What are the laws that God has commanded us? The parent should answer by instructing the child in the laws of Passover, starting from the beginning and ending with the laws of the Afikomen. The wicked child asks, What does this Passover service mean to you? The parent should answer, It is because of what God did for me when I came out of Egypt. Specifically ‘me’ and not ‘you.’ If you had been there (with your attitude), you couldn’t have been redeemed The simple child asks, What is this Seder service? The parent should answer, With a mighty hand God brought us out of Egypt. Therefore, we commemorate that event tonight through this Seder. And then there is child who does not know how to ask. The parent should begin a discussion with that child based on the verse: And you shall tell your child on that day, ‘We commemorate Passover tonight because of what God did for us when we went out of Egypt’ (Schneerson, 9)

We can appropriate this passage for another use. The story of the four sons illustrates the four tasks of Jewish Studies.

The wise son’s question represents Jewish Studies scholars hashing out matters related to Jewish law, Jewish custom, Jewish history and Jewish thought among themselves. This son is wise because he is one of the learned scholars discussing Jewish matters at a high level with other learned scholars. Like any proud Jewish family, we love to put our wise children in front of company. One can find Ruth Wisse, for example, not only on the pages of prestigious academic journals, but on radio and television. Jacques Derrida made no secret of the Talmudic influence on his deconstructive methodology which spread to secular philosophy, literary theory and throughout the social sciences. The wise siblings own their Jewishness and it informs their questioning.

The youngest son’s version of the question refers to the role of pedagogical engagement of Jewish Studies scholars. We must not only talk among ourselves but teach those eager to learn and write textbooks to facilitate that teaching by our colleagues. While it is true that the reward structure of academia privileges those who make the splashiest contributions to the internal discussions within the discourse community, that is, the wise speaking to the wise, we are also teachers. The wise siblings were once young and it is our duty to the community to teach the next generation, to speak with those who have not yet had the chance to acquire the learning to speak at the highest levels. It is incumbent upon us to provide this training.

The simple child’s asking is that of our colleagues outside of Jewish Studies, scholars whose research touches on matters related to Judaism for which they have not been formally trained. Their lack of knowledge makes them ignorant, but their enquiry into Jewish tradition is authentic. We must not keep our discussions completely within our own ranks; rather, there must be a robust Jewish voice in the larger Religious Studies/Sociology of Religion/History of Religion/philosophy discourse communities. We live in a time when there is not only political dismissiveness of all things Jewish from both ends of the partisan spectrum, but also when scholars of Jewish matters are having their voices intentionally muted. It is too easy in such a time to turn inward and restrict discussion to one’s safe insular intellectual community. But we cannot surrender the meaningfulness of our tradition and thereby must continue to inject ideas and insights from the Jewish discourse in the larger conversation as we continue to respectfully and open-mindedly listen to and consider those of other traditions.

Finally, there is the wicked son. The adjective wicked strikes the modern ear as strange, if not problematic. Tuned by Enlightenment rationalism, it sits uncomfortably with us that someone would be deemed wicked for merely choosing an alternative set of beliefs for which there can be perfectly reasonable grounds. This son is entitled to his opinion. He has hurt no one by adopting his own viewpoint. Indeed, we are the wicked ones for being so closed-minded as to deem him wicked for merely expressing his intellectual and spiritual autonomy.

This designation may make more sense to the contemporary thinker if we frame it in terms of Emil Fackenheim’s 614th mitzvah. In addition to the 613 commands in the Torah, Professor Fackenheim contends that history has given us one more. In light of assimilation in the shadow of the Shoah, he implored the Jewish world to not step away from Jewish life, for doing so would give Hitler a posthumous victory.

No one wants to deny anyone the freedom of thought, but the fact is that if you are a Jew, you are a part of a people whose hateful enemies have long sought, and continue to seek, our eradication. Such bigotry-based desires for elimination are surely evil. To assist evil in accomplishing its task is to engage in evil acts, even if unwittingly. As such, self-alienation of the sort engaged in by this son is helping those anti-Semites seeking the destruction of our People and is, in this way, wicked.

The fourth project for Jewish Studies, and the one to which this book is dedicated, is redeeming the wicked sons, daughters and siblings who deny the gender binary. Is there a way to bring these wicked siblings back into the fold? Can we understand their way of being, their way of thinking, their contributions to the world as not alienating them from Judaism, but rather as emanating from Judaism? Can we do what Jews do best, interpret texts creatively to gain insight so that the works of these thinkers, these famous secular Jews who have contributed to the broader intellectual project, can in some way be understood as embodying some element of Jewish thought?

To do so would be to re-Judify them. The claim is not that they were Jewish in their thinking to begin with, or in any way seeking locate themselves within the Jewish tradition, or even subconsciously pulling from a Jewish conceptual or methodological background. It is not a causal or historical claim at all. Rather, it is merely an analogical move. Yes, such a reed is a weak one upon which to hang a black hat. We are relegating them at best to the fringes of the Jewish intellectual community. All we are seeking is a way of seeing their work as fitting in comfortably with some mode of Jewish thought, some current or element of the larger Jewish discourse. We do not want to hold these secular Jews to be rabbis; we just want to designate a seat for them at the Seder, even if it is down on the end, on the rickety card table with the kids. No, they will not be belting out Chad Gad Ya with the rest of the group. But by demonstrating the way that their thought can be seen as stylistically Jewish, even in the most tenuous of ways, we can bring them back into the tradition. We can use their work to re-member the Tribe. No, it may not be much, but we claim it is at least grounds for saying, dayenu (It would have been enough).

What makes this project possible is that the notion of Judaism itself is wonderfully multifaceted. Add to that the great breadth of concepts, ideas and approaches to thought taken within the discourse tradition and there are many handholds to grasp onto in such a project. For each of the figures we seek to reintegrate into the Jewish intellectual realm, we will seek a completely different sense of Jewishness. In this way, we not only re-member the Tribe, but also pay homage to its intellectual fertility. We have cognitively bought into the command to be fruitful and multiply, often multiplying interpretations, meanings and approaches.

The risk, of course, is that by over-emphasizing this breadth, we are trivializing the very notion of Jewishness we seek to augment. That is a fair concern. But the quality of the work depends on the quality of the fit. These chapters should be judged the way one judges a pun. The tighter the analogy, the better the job is done. And like a pun, quality does not necessarily breed the deepest of insights, but brings a smirk in appreciation of the cleverness. That cleverness of association, that mode of associative thought, is very much at the heart of the Jewish intellectual tradition. So, if these essays succeed, they should be thought of as being meta-Jewish in Judaically attributing Jewishness to places we usually do not see it. But in disclosing it where we do, we are able to now justify in some sense the claim we often make with pride of these great thinkers, You know they’re Jewish. We are defense attorneys arguing that our clients technically did not violate Fackenheim’s law. We are trying to deny Hitler the posthumous victory, indeed, we are seeking to seize on the works of these great secular Jews as posthumous defeats for our adversary. And what could be more Jewish than that?

Chapter 1

Karl Marx and Materialistic Messianism

Karl Marx has long been held up as the archetypal self-hating Jew. On the one hand, Marx’s family was (before his father’s conversion) very Jewish. Both his father and mother’s sides included many rabbis going back generations. On the other hand, Marx was baptized at the age of six, received no Jewish education and is infamous for quotations such as What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Marx’s contempt for Jews could not be clearer. Yet, despite this, we argue here that Karl Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker.

Scholars like Nathan Rotenstreich and David Nirenberg have distinguished anti-Semitism, that is, bias against Jews, from the separate notion of anti-Judaism, that is, the intention to remove Jewish thought from a full understanding of the development of the Western intellectual tradition. We will, on the one hand, follow other scholars in contending that while the anti-Judaism of Friedrich Hegel contributed to the anti-Semitism of many Young Hegelians like Marx and Bruno Bauer, Hegel was anti-Jewish, but not anti-Semitic. We contend that Marx, on the other hand, can nonetheless be reclaimed. A case can be made that he was anti-Semitic (although not in the usual way); but, when understood properly, Marx turns out not to be anti-Jewish. To the contrary, there is a meaningful sense of the concept of Jewish in which Marx can be very much thought to be a Jewish thinker.

Jewish, Greek and Christian Thought

To support the claim that Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker, it must be made clear what we will mean by the term Jewish thinker or Jewish thought. There are certainly straightforward examples that all would consider uncontroversial. Writers of Talmudic commentary, for example, would have to be considered Jewish thinkers on any reasonable account. But surely, the appellation should extend beyond religious writing. Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophical works surely are examples of Jewish thought, even those passages and elements that may be understood from a context that is not explicitly Jewish as they are a part of a larger, coherent project in which Judaism plays a significant role. The broadened term Jewish is therefore meaningful beyond intra-Judaic discourse, so then, what exactly does it mean when applied to intellectual contribution?

The complexity of this question, of course, derives from two sources. First, different Jews think different things. If we simply take any thought by any Jew to be Jewish thought, then the notion becomes too trivial to do any real work. For the notion to be helpful, it must point to something in terms of essential or at least a subset of typical properties. There has to be some underlying common element within some collection of thoughts by Jews to make the category worth considering.

Second, Jews do not think alone. Cultures interact with each other and one effect of this intellectual interplay is that thoughts jump between traditions, sometimes maintaining integrity, sometimes getting tweaked to make sense in the new worldview. Thinkers from different backgrounds read, digest, reinterpret and reimagine ideas and concepts from other cultures. This is healthy cross-pollination and is to be appreciated. One cannot, for example, read Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed without noting its Aristotelian influence. But Maimonides is not merely being an Aristotelian. He appropriates the Hellenic concepts and deftly works them to fit into his Jewish worldview.

So, is Maimonides’ work an example of Jewish thought or Greek thought? The answer, of course, is all of the above. We should see his great work as a critical juncture in which Jewish and Greek thought synthesized to create something new and rich. There are other such syntheses. Philo, for example, also creates a Jewish/Greek hybrid, as do the thirteenth-century Kabbalists in pulling from the neo-Platonists. But they make use of quite different Hellenic ideas and use them in their own ways, giving rise to very different worldviews. In each case, what gets borrowed, how it is altered, and how it is incorporated will differ giving rise to different tools, different insights, and new discussions. That is the value of intellectual cross-fertilization.

But to speak of the combination of two elements, say Jewish and Greek thought, we must know what those elements were before being combined. We could only abandon the Aristotelian chemistry that held water to be a basic substance when Joseph Priestly had isolated oxygen and hydrogen. It was not until we understood what oxygen and hydrogen are, that could we say that water is the molecular combination H2O.

If we are to speak, then, of the history of thought as integrating ideas, concepts and approaches of different backgrounds, we must set out the atoms of cultural thought. For the purposes of the argument here, we will need to purify three elemental approaches: Jewish thought, Greek thought and Christian thought. With these basic conceptions set out clearly, we can see how different thinkers partook of them in creative, distinct and insightful ways.

This sort of essentialist move is, of course, fraught with all the oversimplifications and misrepresentations that immediately jump to mind. Of course, traditions are intellectually intricate with