Social Justice Idolatry and Jewish Antisemitism
The Bible is very concerned with idolatry. “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” is the very first commandment given directly by God to the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai after He gives His bone fides as “the Lord, your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” (Ex. 20:2). Yet, despite its clear primacy as God’s number one no-no, the Children of Israel waste almost no time casting their valuable gold into a molten image of a calf and do so while still encamped at the base of the mountain where—just days before—they received the undeniable revelation of God and His laws. Nor does the violation of the covenant stop there: the biblical narrative recounts the Jews committing the sin of idolatry over and over again throughout their history, resulting in this prohibition being among the most frequently repeated injunctions in the text of the Torah.
What’s the draw? Did people really believe that a wooden statue was a god that would bless them or curse them depending on how thorough they were in their adoration? Is worshipping a stone representation of a deity really that gratifying of an experience that our ancestors were compelled by its allure again and again? And if idolatry is so addicting, why did it fall out of practice? Did it fall out of practice?
These questions about idolatry arise because of a misunderstanding of what idolatry is and what it is not. Idolatry is not the belief that a human-made object possesses divine power. That’s fetishism. Fetishism can be a component of idolatry and idolatry often manifests itself as fetishism, but fetishism is not the core of what defines idolatry. Idolatry is the compartmentalization of the various constructs that characterize the human condition into separate spheres of influence and the elevation of one distinct sphere as the particular principle around which the idolator structures his or her life. For the Greeks, Aphrodite was the goddess of love whereas Apollo was the god of knowledge. Each god had its own cult of followers who exalted that god’s attribute above all others. False gods are false not because they are not God, but rather because they are “gods of”.
This is why idolatry is so seductive: it’s simple. While the monotheistic God may be singular, He is also omni-faceted and complex. The God of Compassion is the God of Justice: He is one God of seemingly conflicting values. Not everyone is up to the difficult task of wrestling with the notion of a contradictory God. It is much easier to split off each of God’s attributes into an independent idol and not have to reconcile them with each other: just choose one driving force for your life and abide by that cause.
This contrast between idolatry as a conviction that demands little in terms of thought or effort on the part of the idolator and monotheism as a devotion to grappling with a multitude of ostensibly incompatible ideals has many commonalities with the differences discovered by Jonathan Haidt in his studies of people’s political leanings through the lens of Moral Foundations Theory as explored in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt’s research suggests that there are at least six ethical frameworks that are—to varying degrees—innate to all human beings and that these frameworks have evolved in response to various social and environmental challenges encountered by our species throughout the millennia of our existence. The six Moral Foundations he presents are:
Care/Harm
Fairness/Cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal
Authority/Subversion
Sanctity/Degradation
Liberty/Oppression
Haidt and his research partner, Jesse Graham, found a correlation between people’s sensitivities to specific Moral Foundations and their political ideology. Whereas self-described conservatives relied on all six of the Moral Foundations in almost equal measure in constructing their moral matrices, those with a more progressive bent identified primarily with the Moral Foundation of Care/Harm (and to a slightly lesser extent Liberty/Oppression) to the near exclusion of the other Foundations. What this means from a practical standpoint is that—when faced with an ethical dilemma—conservatives often weigh and balance what may seem like paradoxical standards against each other in order to arrive at the best tradeoff possible, whereas—standing as they do on the firm foundation of one foot—progressives engage in a lot less teetering in their deliberations to find a “solution” to a problem.
The simplicity of the progressive moral context leaves those who are inclined to gravitate towards it much more susceptible to indoctrination into dogmas that interpret the world through a single concept. For progressive-minded people in the ancient world, the “of-ness” of the god of their choice from among their culture’s pantheon constituted the nucleus around which all else revolved. For the social justice warriors of the postmodern world, the singular prism from which the entire spectrum of ethical concerns emanates is power. This axis of power, which has on one side those who nefariously harm and oppress and on the other side those who are the victims of said harm and oppression, is the solitary dimension of their universe. Like the residents of Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, postmodern social justice warriors are almost completely oblivious to other planes of moral reality and have difficulty imagining the additional axes that those with a more conservative outlook take for granted as the foundations of their multidimensional moral matrices.
As Jordan Peterson recently said in conversation with Bill Maher on the September 15, 2024 episode of Maher’s Club Random podcast, “There is a drive towards unity in knowledge and something will strive to take the highest possible place. And what you see with the postmodernists, for example—the postmodern Marxists, because they tend to be the same bunch—is that they dispense with God, but they substitute power. And of all the gods you could worship, power might be the worst.” (01:19:10). Power is the idol of the postmodern world. For the social justice warrior, all conflict—be it on a question of economics, race, politics, religion, or any other matter—is fundamentally a struggle of power.
Thus, social justice warriors are predisposed to be receptive to the gamut of antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control over those institutions that are central to a society in which there is a power imbalance. What better target for their opprobrium than the very people who introduced to the world this messiness of monotheism, with its lack of an absolute overarching principle.
Ironically, Jews are no less susceptible to the idolatrous belief system of antisemitism than are gentiles. In her much-praised 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn writes:
Two distinct patterns of Antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumph over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism … the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact. For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agent.
The Hasmoneans were forced to defend Jewish civilization not only from the Hellenists of the Seleucid Empire, but also from those Jews who abandoned their complex monotheistic heritage and adopted the simplistic Hellenistic idolatry of their conquerors. There has always been a small and naïve segment of the Jewish nation who has been swayed to reject their own people and its arduous mission of struggling with the Enigma of Existence to side against their brothers together with the followers of the dominant idol of their age: so it was in the time of Antiochus, so it was in the time of Torquemada, so it was in the time of Stalin, and so it is today. In every generation we rise up against ourselves. Despite their very Jewish-sounding names, contemporary organizations such as J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, and B’Tselem espouse a worldview that is based not on the tripodal paradigm of Shimon the Righteous’ standard model of Judaism (Pirke Avot 1:2), but rather on a universalistic pedestal of “Social Justice” that is bitterly divorced from any countervailing Jewish values.
How, then, are we modern Maccabees to confront this internal division without resorting to the fratricidal carnage of another Jewish civil war, thereby giving the Purim antisemites who are waiting in the wings a fracture to exploit? I propose that, if the essence of Jewish antisemitism is the lure of simplistic idolatry, then the way to combat it is for us to put our complex monotheistic faith into practice by embracing our incongruous values.
Our problem is thus: Jewish antisemites are both Jews and antisemitic.
On the one hand, we must fight their antisemitism. We must stand firm in our opposition to the dangerous disinformation that Jewish antisemites peddle: their blood libels about Judaism, the Jewish people, Zionism, and Israel. To the general population, their falsehoods have the appearance of legitimacy because Jews themselves are expressing them. Their employment of the words, “as a Jew,” give their antisemitic statements a veneer of validity that appeals to their own or others’ authority, though they frequently lack any substantial expertise on Judaic themes that are not cherry-picked from a single branch in the entire orchard of Jewish scholarship. When given a platform by a media (both mainstream and social) that is all too eager to amplify their opinions, Jewish antisemites present a counterfeit version of normative Judaism that is just social justice idolatry couched in the solitary Jewish value of “Tikkun Olam.” In response, we must be the type of Jews who are authentic in our Jewish practice and knowledge. We must be able to reach deeply and broadly into the corpus of Jewish wisdom to communicate well-reasoned evidence in support of our positions that go well beyond the parroted platitudes of these “Tikkun Jews”. We must be engaged, educated, outspoken, and strident in fighting their antisemitism. This is our value of Justice.
On the other hand we must love them as Jews. We must never lose sight of the fact that Jewish antisemites are still a part of the Jewish family. Our brothers may have sold us to the Ishmaelites, but we must always remain open to the possibility of reconciliation. The feeling of betrayal is real (it is one of Haidt’s moral foundations, after all), but the key to repairing the rift is to view the fissure not as treachery, but as a misdirected desire for meaning by Jews who have been fostered by a society that has progressed far from its Judeo-Christian base to a seemingly endless field of relativism where nothing feels true and the only cures that are offered to soothe the ennui are distractions and easy answers. The impulse that drives Jewish antisemites is a yearning for a connection to something greater. In the absence of a serious knowledge of and engagement with the Jewish monotheistic tradition, this urge is corrupted by the appeal of the simplicity of the prevailing idolatrous zeitgeist: social justice. If Jewish antisemitism is espoused—for the most part—by those Jews who were never fully nurtured in the complexities of their Judaism, then we must be there for them as engaged, educated, outspoken, and strident Jews to help them replace their stone statues with dynamic Mosaics that they can build themselves and which they can call their own should they decide to return. This is our value of Compassion.
We must fight them, but we must love them. The solution to the problem of Jewish antisemitism is not a simple one, but then ours is not a religion that is satisfied with easy answers. When faced with a paradox, we persist; actively living our contradicting values and having faith that the place that God will show us will be a place of blessing. “Faith is not certainty,” wrote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.”
References
Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Seeley & Co., 1884
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. First edition., Pantheon Books, 2012.
Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. First edition., W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2021.
Maher, Bill. “Jordan Peterson Part 1.” September 15, 2024. Club Random Podcast, Streaming Video, 1:34:55. https://youtu.be/XJcYde3GQLs.
Sacks, Jonathan. Letters to the next Generation: Reflections for Yom Kippur. Office of the Chief Rabbi, 2009.
