A People that Dwells Alone: The Dangers of Universal Ethics for Jews
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, Vermont
January 3, 2025 ESSAY
A People that Dwells Alone: The Dangers of Universal Ethics for the Jews
Universalism is the parochialism of the Jews - Cynthia Ozick
This essay is based on a sermon I wrote for Yom Kippur but decided not to give. As I’m finishing writing this, it is the last night of Hanukkah. For some Jews, Hanukkah is a lovely celebration of light in the darkness, a candlelit Jewish version of the universal human response to winter. For other Jews, it is a celebration of Jewish military strength, Jewish survival and Jewish sovereignty. Of course, at its best, Hanukkah is both, and we hold these layers of meaning as we light the candles each night. American Hanukkah and the way we celebrate is in many ways a perfect example of the tension in Judaism between universalism and particularism, between assimilation and tribalism. This has been particularly true this year, as the events of October 7 and their aftermath continue to challenge the Jewish community and divide us. This divide is often expressed as between universal human rights versus Jewish rights, or international law versus Jewish law, or social justice/tikkun olam versus tribalism. As American Jews, we have long had to straddle these tensions, and so Hanukkah seems like a good season to share some thoughts about the appeal and the danger to Jews of universal ethical claims, and to reframe some of the discussion away from Israel and toward more fundamental questions of ethics, loyalty and Jewish identity.
Universalism is the Parochialism of the Jews
The great Jewish American writer and intellectual, Cynthia Ozick, repeatedly stated that “universalism is the parochialism of the Jews.” She did not mean this as a complement. Instead, in talks and essays such as “Toward Yavneh,” she was criticizing the many ways in which Jews in the diaspora often fetishize universalism and the fight for universal values. She is particularly troubled by American Jewish literature’s (particularly Philip Roth’s) fixation on Jews who long to escape Jewish particularism by chasing after assimilation into the universal. It is a form of messianism, one rooted in a visceral disgust with Jewish particularism.
I thought of Ozick recently when I had a Jewish man in my office to discuss my High Holy Day Sermon this year. The man, who self-identifies as a “mystic” and a “seeker” who receives spiritual teachings from a range of new-age mystical movements where beings from another dimension send teachings through spiritually elevated beings here on earth. I have personally always had a rather profound allergy to gurus and the people who love them, but since this man was coming to me out of interest in reconnecting with Jewish mystical teachings, I listened. He said he loved my sermon when it was talking about how much this past year had been hard for the Jewish heart, but when I turned toward the idea of Jewish peoplehood as a key balm for our broken hearts. “I found that it vibrated at a much lower frequency,” he said and that tribe always had a lower spiritual frequency than universal values like love and peace.
Perhaps he is right. However, if I believed in such vibrations, I am quite sure that bumper-sticker universalism hums at such a low frequency even elephants can’t hear it.
Reform Judaism would never have used the language of mystic vibrations, but it nonetheless agreed in the light of American freedom and acceptance, particularism should be a vestige of an ugly tribal path, and Jews should lead the world to embrace universal ethics and justice.
Here are two points from the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the first statement of American Reform Jewish belief:
4. We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.
5. We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
In other words, only those parts of Judaism that spread universal values should be kept, and all other practices, ethics, beliefs and culture should be discarded in the name of a universalist mission to spread ethical monotheism. This was a heady time of progressivism, when science was surely going to show us the way to messianic future of justice and enlightenment for all. Of course, world wars, the Holocaust, and the A-bomb showed us that science could be morally neutral, or at least overestimate humanity’s ability to manage its tribal nature in the face of unimagined power.
Still, the Reform Judaism I grew up in was still largely true to the Pittburgh Platform, and this was reflected in the little black Union Prayer Book, and in the sermons of rabbis all across America. The dream of a Messiah was replaced with the promise of a Messianic Age in which “all would sit under their vine and fig tree and none would make them afraid.”
Of course in the 70’s, as many other minority groups rediscovered and celebrated their particular cultures, liberal Jews also began trying on some of the “old traditions,” like wearing yarmulkes, or making your own tallit, or creating new Passover seders that combined the universal with the particular. It was not so much a return to tribalism, as it was an exercise in the newfound freedom to be Jewish and privileged in American society. Antisemitism was down. Jews attended Ivy League colleges in large numbers. We served at high levels in government. We could relax enough in our striving to be American to try own a new tallit and see how it fit. Still, as we embraced more tradition, our ethical sense was still firmly universal and focused on a new usage of the Hebrew term tikkun olam, or repairing the world, one that now was code for social justice rooted in ideas of universal justice and freedom. Tikkun Olam remained the leading edge of what it means to be a good Reform Jew, and some rabbis quip that we raised a generation of tikkunistas, whose main connection with Judaism are progressive social and economic values. At the same time, Reform Judaism following the leadership of great leaders like Rabbi Steven Wise, embraced Zionism and Israel as a central aspect of the movement’s Jewish identity. Young Reform leaders attended long programs of study in Israel. All Reform rabbis spent their first year studying in Jerusalem. The campus of Hebrew Union College was expanded so that it is now one of the most beautiful and expensive areas in Jerusalem, just a few doors down from the King David Hotel, and overlooking the Old City walls.
For decades, there was little tension between the Zionist and social justice arms of Reform Judaism, but as Israel policies under an increasingly right-wing and religious ruling coalitions moved further and further away from liberal American norms, a split began to emerge between those who saw universalism as core to their Jewish ethical (and politically speaking, tribal) identity, and those who saw their connection to the Jewish people as the core of their Jewish ethical identity. The events of October 7 inflamed that divide so that the media and activists tended to portray it as an almost even split in our community, or that it was all the young verses those who are older. While there is certainly a change in attitudes toward Israel as you move down the age range, the majority of young Jews (around 70% before October 7) still say that a relationship with Israel is central to their Jewish identity. We do not yet know how the events on campus and the rise of antisemitism since October 7th will shift those numbers. Just as during the time of the Maccabees, it is likely that the large majority of Jews fall somewhere in the middle. While much is made of the participation of young Jews in college encampments, there is also a countervailing narrative among Jewish leadership of “The Great Return,” as many Jews of all ages return to Jewish community spaces and synagogues in the face of rising antisemitism and the demonization of Israel. Time will tell, but certainly the events of October 7 have given most Jews an occasion to reflect on what it means to be Jewish, particularly during such a frightening rise in antisemitism.
A People that Dwells Alone
This summer, I studied for two weeks at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and one of the faculty there is Dr. Tal Becker. Dr. Becker is an international lawyer and diplomat and was one of the chief negotiators of the Oslo Accords, the Abraham Accords, and the main defender of Israel at the International Criminal Court this year.
Dr. Becker focused on a text from the Book of Numbers, from Parashat Balak when the pagan prophet Balaam is paid a fortune by the King of Moab to curse the Israelites that have gathered near his border in the desert. Balaam, after a humbling adventure with a talking donkey and flaming sword, arrives, looks out from a mountain plateau at the Jews gathered below, and instead of a curse, the words that come out of his mouth are a blessing. Mah Tovu is from that blessing, but it starts with this:
How can I curse whom God has not cursed,
How doom when יהוה has not doomed?
As I see them from the mountain tops,
Gaze on them from the heights,
There is a people that dwells alone,
Not considered among the nations.
הֶן־עָם֙ לְבָדָ֣ד יִשְׁכֹּ֔ן וּבַגּוֹיִ֖ם לֹ֥א יִתְחַשָּֽׁב
There is a people that dwells alone, not considered among the nations.
The key word l’vadad’ or ‘boded’ means isolated or alone. I won’t go through all the examples in the Bible, but let’s say it’s almost never a good thing. For example, lepers live apart. “Apart” usually means you are exiled and therefore not safe, without allies or support. So what does Balaam mean here? How can it be a blessing to be a people that dwell alone? Apart? Separate from the other nations?
The Orthodox rabbis at Hartman read it as written. It is a blessing to live separately from the rest of the world, to live in a closed community, with a divine purpose. That’s what the laws are for. To them, dwelling apart is a key to their way of living, to what it means to be a Jew.
For Reform rabbis at Hartman, this was much more challenging. Our identity, our values, and our world view is rooted in the idea of being part of mainstream society, of being Americans who also happen to be Jewish. We have come to know the blessing and the safety of not having to live apart and alone. We count as one of our great blessings the degree to which we have integrated into the societies we are part of. So much American Jewish literature, as Ozick pointed out, celebrates assimilation, even if it is tinged with guilt.
We have made universal values and rights a key part of our ethics. We support frameworks like the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international efforts that stand for what we view as justice, equity and tikkun olam.
Central to our values is the need to stand with other minority and marginalized groups and support their fight for acceptance and respect. Jews have disproportionately been leaders and activists in the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement. As Dr. Becker put it, “we believed that by advocating for others, we will be accepted, but we don’t need to advocate for our own distinctiveness.”
This is why October 7 and what has followed has been so disorienting for Reform Jews in particular. Groups who have been allies, communities for whom we worked and advocated, have turned on us – or even more eerie, remained silent – as antisemitism and denial of October 7 has gone mainstream. This year has reminded us that our acceptance is limited and conditional. The actions against Israel from many of the international organizations and protocols we have supported strike many of us as profoundly biased and rooted in some very old antisemitic tropes that are now being turned toward the Jewish state. They seem to ignore who and what Israel is fighting and their tactics that make avoiding civilian death impossible. “The selective outrage is unbearable,” as Dr. Becker put it.
Universalism and the Jews
In considering the tension of universalism and particularism in Judaism, it is worth noting that the tolerance of Judaism in Christian and Muslim societies has been possible in part been because Judaism itself does not aspire to be a universal religion. Judaism’s ideal world is not a world in which everyone is Jewish. Even in some of the most beautiful inspiring passages from the prophets, the universal impulse is still attached to very particular practices. Here is an excellent example from the prophet Micah, one that has made its way into the liturgy of our Torah services:
In the days to come,
The Mount of GOD’s House shall stand
Firm above the mountains;
And it shall tower above the hills.
The peoples shall gaze on it with joy,
And the many nations shall go and shall say:
“Come,
Let us go up to the Mount of GOD,
To the House of the God of Jacob;
That we may be instructed in God’s ways,
And that we may walk in godly paths.”
For instruction shall come forth from Zion,
The word of GOD from Jerusalem.
Thus [God] will judge among the many peoples,
And arbitrate for the multitude of nations,
However distant;
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not take up
Sword against nation;
They shall never again know war;
But every family shall sit
Under its own vine and fig tree
With no one to disturb them.
For it was GOD of Hosts who spoke.
Though all the peoples walk
Each in the names of its gods,
We will walk
In the name of the ETERNAL our God
Forever and ever. Micah 4: 1-5
Even in this messianic vision of the ideal future, each nation still uses the names of its own gods, while God’s word comes from Zion. Even in our most universalist texts, the particular, the tribal abides.
This is in strong contrast to mainstream Christian and Islamic traditions that view a perfect world as one in which everyone become part of their belief and faith system. If Judaism had aspired to a community in which everyone should be Jewish, we might not have been as tolerated in Christian and Muslim societies as we have been, and that is a very low bar. It may be that advocating for what we believe to be universal goods might carry with it particular dangers for the Jews.
Universalist world views tend to reduce the world into binaries: those who agree and those who don’t, those who see the ‘great truth’ and those who can’t. Those who do are the righteous and good, and those who can’t are heretics, infidels, or the enemy of humanity. Such binaries have never been good for Jews as we do not fit easily into those categories. Whenever society at large passionately divides into two teams, Jews should be concerned as we often become the enemy that unites groups that don’t agree. Dr. David Nirenberg of the University of Chicago has brilliantly argued in his book “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,” that Judaism became whatever the universalist movement de jour saw as the impediment to progress. For Christianity, Jews were those who refused to accept the truth of Jesus and insisted on being different thus keeping redemption from coming to earth and all humanity. For the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Jewish particularism was an emblem of the old superstitious and tribal ways of thinking that Europe had now evolved past but could too easily revert to if Jews have their way. For Marxists, Jews became the very symbol of capitalism. For Capitalist thinkers, Jews became the very symbol of Marxism. For people who find colonialism and apartheid the greatest threat to redemption, Jews are now the epitome of both, even if it means erasing history and redefining the terms so Jews, or the one Jewish nation, can be the poster child of all that standing in the way of progress and peace.
Dara Horn, author of PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS, divides antisemites into two types: Purim antisemites and Hanukkah antisemites. Purim antisemites are the ones who openly say they hate Jews and want to kill us. We know what they think and that they are coming. In contrast, Hanukkah antisemites say they love Jews and Judaism, as long as it sheds any of its distinctive beliefs that are no longer palatable to the larger enlightened culture. The Greeks were fine with Jews as long as they didn’t do anything too “Jewey.” Progressives welcome Jews as long as they publicly denounce any support for or connection to Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. If Jews don’t agree with the portrayal of Israel as the very symbol of colonial oppression and supremacy, then we are traitors to the larger progressive cause of universal social justice. We are allowed into progressive spaces only to the degree to which we accept the catechism of criticism of Israel and denounce other Jews who don’t.
This is not an aberration, but part and parcel of how antisemitism works. As much as Jews repeatedly embrace universal movements, universalism doesn’t seem to work in our favor over time. It seems instead to turn on us, starting with rewriting or erasing our actual history.
Nowhere is this more evident in the way the Holocaust has been taught for decades, as a universalistic morality tale about humanity’s best and worst traits. Organizations and curriculum stressed that not only Jews were killed, but lots of other people including black, disabled, and LGBT people.
This past spring and summer, Temple Sinai partnered with the Vermont Stage to bring the play, And Then They Came For Me,” to over 20 schools across the state. I led almost all of the discussions with the students after the play, and I found that all knew that the Holocaust targeted lots of groups, but they didn’t seem to know that the overwhelming majority of people who died were Jews, and that antisemitism was an organizing principle of Nazism. Jews had become a symbol; the messy reality of actual Jews pretty much disappeared from the narrative.
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Dara Horn, shared this concern. With the rise of antisemitism, she found herself being asked over and over by experienced Holocaust Educators, what had they done wrong? How had they failed? Why had antisemitism gotten worse?
Horn argues that they failed because they reshaped the Holocaust from an event rooted in antisemitism into a universal morality lesson about human evil. American Holocaust education has minimized the focus on antisemitism and Jewishness. Anne Frank is universally taught because she is every girl. She doesn’t require that we confront that the vast majority of those Jews who died in the Holocaust were Eastern European observant shtetl Jews. Many who were not observant were avid Zionists, who organized much of the resistance so many admire.
Anne Frank allows us to avoid Jewish particularity. Horn writes:
What I observed in my deep dive into American Holocaust education, I now realize, was a massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia. This appropriation was entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: claim that that experience happened to “everyone,” and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the “universalism” of their own experience—for refusing to be just like everyone else.
She traces this through history and then focuses on the Soviet Union. She writes,
“the Soviet Union popularized a new form of universalism rooted in appropriation. Announcing on the official memorial for the 100,000 people, mostly Jews, massacred at Babyn Yar that Nazis had simply murdered “citizens of Kiev,” the Soviets declared themselves—not the Jews, who went unmentioned—to be Nazism’s chief victims. The regime positioned the Jews, in fact, as perpetrators of evils like those of the Nazis. By the late 1960s, the KGB was pumping out enormous amounts of propaganda trumpeting a new value: anti-Zionism. Around the world, endless Soviet-sponsored publications and broadcasts proclaimed, without evidence, that Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism, and Zionism is genocide—all while the Soviet Union armed its Arab client states for their repeated invasions of Israel. And even as they endlessly repeated that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, the Soviets continued to mercilessly persecute Soviet Jews.”
This universalizing of Jewish experience, coopting and then denying we had it is very much alive since October 7. According to Horn, it provides
“the permission structure for anti-Semitism: claim whatever has happened to the Jews as one’s own experience, announce a “universal” ideal that all good people must accept, and then redefine Jewish collective identity as lying beyond it. Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity.
The current calls for banishing “Zionists” from American public life follow the same ancient pattern.
We are like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey. We have become sotted with the opium of acceptance and universalism that we did not fully see the danger approaching.
What Judaism Offers
Back at the Hartman Institute, Tal Becker suggested a reading of that passage from Balaam in a new way.
Instead of reading “l’vadad” negatively as “apart” or “alone”, we read it as meaning “distinctive.” Here dwells a people that is distinctive, that celebrates its distinctiveness, it’s differences, that doesn’t feel a need to be the same as its neighbors.
In other words, part of the universal message of Judaism is that distinctiveness matters, that particularism can have profound value. That is the blessing Balaam sees.
Judaism values the universal, but it gets to the universal through the particular.
God might be one, but humans are not. We need to feel part of more distinct smaller groups. As much as we might love the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine, even if there weren’t countries or religion, humans would find a way to divide ourselves into tribes and fight.
Judaism leans into the particular. Just as in great literature, the most universal truths are told through the most particular, personal stories, Judaism seems to teach that the truest way to find a productive balance between our humanity and our groupishness is to embrace the tribal in service of the universal.
In Judaism, all humans descend from Adam to show that we are all one human family and no one is better than another. But our people are also descended specifically from Abraham and Sarah, and that we have practices that others don’t and others don’t have any reason to follow them. Yet, they are an inseparable part of who we are.
There is no idea in Judaism that the world would be a better place if everyone kept kosher. Jews keep kosher. There is no need for non-Jews to do so. This is true of Shabbat, and tefillin, mezuzahs, and our holidays and holy days. Judaism revels and sees deep value in our tribal customs, our particular history, our distinctiveness. But these very distinctive particular customs and history are also a pathway to universal values like the value of each individual, the need to create a just society, and the need to support the most vulnerable. Why? Because we were the most vulnerable. Our universalism grows out of our particularism; they are inseparable.
I believe Jewish tradition offers us a great roadmap for getting back on track to a healthy balance of particularism and universalism. Reform Judaism itself has been rebalancing this for decades, embracing more traditional practices and more Hebrew. I admit I was surprised when at the most recent CCAR convention in Jerusalem, about half the rabbis were laying tefillin during morning prayers.
In our most recent Statement of Principles, adopted in 1999 in Pittsburgh, and seen as the centenary update to the original, there is a clear move toward Jewish particularism. Here are a few of the defining points:
· We affirm the importance of studying Hebrew, the language of Torah and Jewish liturgy, that we may draw closer to our people's sacred texts.
· We are called by Torah to lifelong study in the home, in the synagogue and in every place where Jews gather to learn and teach. Through Torah study we are called to (mitzvot), the means by which we make our lives holy.
· We are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of (mitzvot) and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community. Some of these (mitzvot), sacred obligations, have long been observed by Reform Jews; others, both ancient and modern, demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our own times.
And this from the section on Jewish Peoplehood:
· We are committed to strengthening the people Israel by supporting individuals and families in the creation of homes rich in Jewish learning and observance.
· We are committed to (Medinat Yisrael), the State of Israel, and rejoice in its accomplishments. We affirm the unique qualities of living in (Eretz Yisrael), the land of Israel, and encourage (aliyah), immigration to Israel.
· We affirm that both Israeli and Diaspora Jewry should remain vibrant and interdependent communities. As we urge Jews who reside outside Israel to learn Hebrew as a living language and to make periodic visits to Israel in order to study and to deepen their relationship to the Land and its people, so do we affirm that Israeli Jews have much to learn from the religious life of Diaspora Jewish communities.
There is another danger of universalism to the Jewish future; young Jews don’t need to be Jewish to be universalists, and the siren song of blending in and being part of the majority culture is always somewhere in the modern Jewish ear. How many of our families raise their children as culturally Jewish or as progressive Reform Jews only to find they don’t carry on the tradition to their children. My father really stressed universalism, and particularist Jewish practices were not part of our house. I became a rabbi. But my brother and sister don’t really identify as Jews, and their children, and grandchildren don’t. I think that is a pretty common story. It is very challenging for young people to understand why it is so important to stay Jewish when we don’t embrace some of our tribal customs as important parts of our lives at home.
At times like these, these customs can also be deeply comforting as well as a powerful statement of resistance and Jewish pride. They are keys to our resilience. When the Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am wrote, “More that the Jewish people have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people” this is what he meant.
We are a people called to our own path through the wilderness of being human. We don’t know where we are heading. But we know where we come from, and we know that the people we come from survived against all odds because of their strength. And some part of that strength came from being part of a people, a tribe, and many of us are being reminded of that in a painful way since October 7.
There is great beauty in tribe, in being held by the particular, in holding on to the particular even as we strive for the universal and find the universal in our very particular history and our rituals. We find the universal in Israel’s struggles to be both Jewish and democratic, and in its all too human failures to live up to our expectations.
The Particular is the Universal
A courageous leader for decades in the fight against antisemitism on campus, Dr. Rachel Fish wrote an essay entitled, Say Yes to Tribalism: The Need for Solidarity in an Atomistic Age, to be included in JEWISH PRIORITIES: SIXTY-FIVE PROPOSAL FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR PEOPLE, edited by David Hazony. In it, she includes this quote from the great literary critic and teacher Leon Wieseltier’s speech at Hebrew College in 2005:
There is no choice between particularism and universalism. Nobody comes from nowhere and nobody goes nowhere. There has never existed a perfectly particular individual or a perfectly universal individual. Absent the reality of the universal, we could not speak to people unlike ourselves, and they could not speak to us…And when we understand each other, it is also because of the reality of the particular. For it is the concreteness of our lives that makes it possible for us to imagine the concreteness of other lives. If we ourselves did not suffer, we would not know how others suffer; but we suffer in our specificity. Our sympathy for others is not a feeling for the general; it is a feeling for a different particular. So, the particular, too, is a universal condition.
We do not need to sacrifice our longing for the universal in order to also embrace the particular. Judaism holds out the idea that way to the universal must be carried in the particulars of a people, and among the most profound of universal values is the affinity and connection we feel to our family and by extension, our people. When we try to embrace the universal outside the messiness of real people and real tribes, we far too easily veer into absolutes, into dogma, into dehumanizing language about the other.
Judaism embeds this idea in our most fundamental statement of Jewishness: the Shema. “Hear Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.” Said at services morning and evening, upon rising and going to bed, and at times of death, the Shema reminds us that God is at once the one God of all creation, and also “our God,” with a particular history and relationship with the Jewish people. Judaism’s gift is that it challenges us to sit with the truth of both.
Shabbat Shalom.
David
