UNIVERSALISM, TRIBALISM & JUDAISM

The balance between a universalistic orientation and a tribal or particularistic one is always a challenge.  It is easy to lean too much to one side or another.  I want to share some reflections on this engendered by two recent experiences.  I listened to an hour long conversation between Danny Gordis and David Ingber lamenting the universalism of progressive Jews.  I also attended a bar mitzvah from my orthodox relatives who are highly particularistic.  

I’ve always been a tribal Jew. I believe in the upside of tribalism.  That upside is a deep connection to a particular place on the earth and to a particular community. My spiritual life completely begins with a connection to the earth and no one can be connected to the earth in general, but only to particular, specific places with specific characteristics. This is a core argument of Wendell Berry’s against globalism.  

I also don’t think that you can love all people.  Sure, that’s the general idea, but some people are going to be more important to you than others, or no one is going to be important at all.  This also follows Berry, but it is also a point that both Ingber and Gordis made.  This is a core argument in favor of concrete connections rather than abstract ones.  “Concrete” here is a bad metaphor, maybe “specific” is a better antithesis to “abstract” or “general.”

One consequence of a tribal orientation is that I’m going to care more about Jewish lives than Palestinian lives or Tutsi lives or Uigher lives or the lives of thousands of tribes that I don’t even recognize.  This doesn’t mean, and here I completely agree with both Rabbis Gordis and Ingber, that I don’t care about Palestinian babies—just that I care about Jews more.  This seems right to me, or else I will be lost in some kind of abstract caring that won’t translate into specific caring which can be actualized in myriad ways.

Now tribalism can easily slip into racism.  We absolutely see that in the current Israeli government which is pervaded by racism from Bibi to the Kahanists in his government led by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.  And, to bring it to something specific, it’s what I experienced in shul at the family bar mitzvah.

The father of the bar mitzvah boy was giving a learned drash on the parsha which was the first parsha of the book of Exodus where Moses is saved by Pharoah’s daughter and then given to his biological mother to be his wet nurse.  That’s text.  Then there is midrash about why Moses was given to his mother to be his wet nurse.  Apparently, so goes the midrash, he refused to nurse from an Egyptian wet nurse in the palace, even though Egyptian breast milk is actually kosher, according to the Rabbis. 

Why didn’t he nurse from an Egyptian wet nurse?  Because of his great holiness, I was told. Now, I can readily believe that a 3 month old baby would resist nursing from a strange woman because she smelled differently, felt different, her milk tasted different etc.  But the idea that her milk isn’t as holy as the milk of an Israelite woman—that’s just racist.  Then I was told that, again, even though the milk is kosher and acceptable, and we aren’t as holy as Moses, this is a message for us to avoid non Jewish breast milk. 

I actually felt myself get enraged.  It’s a baby, I wanted to scream.  Should every baby get to nurse from her/his mother?  Of course, but it doesn’t always work out.  And if there’s a non Jewish woman who can be a wet nurse, how is that anything other than a great kindness and a mitzvah, a good deed by the wet nurse for the baby?  It’s like the famous story about Gandhi. 

At this time a Hindu man came to him crying and feeling hopeless.  He told Gandhi that he killed a Muslim child. Gandhi asked him why he did it. He said because a Muslim man had killed his son. Gandhi told him that to heal his soul [to feel peace inside], the Hindu man must find a boy whose parents had been killed. He told the man to raise the boy he found as his own son.  He told the Hindu man, “Make sure you find a Muslim boy and raise him as a Muslim! Then your soul will live again.” https://www.interesteng.org/our-attic--/biographies-1-4/gandhi-3.html

Nothing like a little racism on Shabbat.

I want to discuss two more elements of the tension between universalism and particularism in Judaism. These are monotheism and the question of being grounded in a place.

Monotheism, by definition, is a universalist vision of the divine. It’s an argument that there is only one God who is everywhere.  That’s in direct contrast to indigenous belief in place based Gods who have power in particular places and for particular people, but not outside of their own territory and people.  So it is rich when thinkers like Gordis and Ingber, coming from very different ends of the political spectrum, complain about universalist Jews who place universal well being above tribal well being, who care as much or more about the well being of Palestinians as Jews. After all, if there is only one God and He (and it is always a male) is the God of all people, why should He care more about one particular people than another?  We are all His children, are we not?  The universalism of progressive Jews that Gordis so vigorously condemns and Ingber mourns, is the logical outcome of the move to the monotheism they so fully advocate (or take for granted). 

We’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood that monotheism is a higher development than the polytheistic, place based beliefs of our ancestors about divinity. Maybe we need to rethink this, if we are going to advocate for the importance of tribal and place based connections.

Tribalism almost always is connected to a particular place.  After all, that’s how we humans have lived throughout most of the history of our species. Being disconnected from our land isn’t the way humans usually live. Judaism occupies this peculiar middle place.  On the one hand, most Jews have lived in exile from the land of Israel for most of Israelite history.  The United Kingdom of David, the Hasmonean rulers and the current state of Israel—none of them have lasted even 80 years, depending upon how you date things.  The kingdom of Judah lasted less than 350 years after the death of Solomon and the Kingdom of Israel lasted a little more than 200 years. Exile from the land is the normal state of Jewish being.

On the other hand, as a people we’ve gone out of our way to stay connected to our ancestral land. Our calendar and holidays are derived from Israelite ecology. There’s a whole series of laws that apply only in the land of Israel and the knowledge of them is kept alive through study in the Orthodox houses of study.  We pray constantly about a return to Jerusalem.  About half of world Jewry lives in Israel now.  So we are both connected and disconnected.  It’s an odd thing.

Being grounded in a particular place is hugely important if we are not going to literally destroy the physical habitat on which we depend for our very lives.  We can strip mine coal, cause millions of species to go extinct, cause global warming,  grow lawns in deserts, live in places where humans should never be in such numbers only because we are disconnected from the land.  Being disconnected from land is a disaster for humans and for the more than human world. Now           if we were more grounded in a particular place, it would be easier to be tribal and maybe too easy.

On a personal note, I’ve chosen to live in an ecosystem that is radically different than the Israelite one.  I could obviously live in Israel, or in Northern California which is the stronghold of earth based Judaism in the United States and has an ecosystem comparable to Israel.  And yet I live in a place where I should properly pray for snow to fall instead of rain come winter time and brown is the color of winter, rather than summer as it is in Israel.

All of us, I believe, are faced with the question of how to resolve this tension between tribalism and universalism.  I don’t think that this is an easy tension, contrary to someone like Gordis or the Kahanists (Gordis is not a Kahanist) in the current Israeli government who don’t seem to see any real issue here. If I think there are some on the progressive wing who aren’t tribal enough, it is equally easy for me to believe that there are plenty on the right who are too tribal. Look at the wars in the history of humanity.  How many of them are caused by or accompanied by the thought that other humans aren’t really human?   Universalism is an antidote to this kind of toxic tribalism.

Above all, I think we need to dwell with this tension. 

Universalism Tribalism