Does identification of the Jews with morality reduce our standing?

Submitted by Rabbanit Leah Shakdiel

In order to understand what the main content of the Sinai revelation was, that is the Ten Commandments, I will set out on a round-about journey, the journey of an English pilgrim of the 17^th century, as described by John Bunyan in his book “The Pilgrim’s Progress”.

 Our hero’s name is “Christian”; he is very miserable because of the heavy burden of sins loaded on his back, and he is searching for his direction in life. He meets a man called “Evangelist”, that is the emissary carrying the message, like the four disciples of Jesus whose words became the four first books, the Gospels, of the New Testament. “Evangelist” points to a distant gate through which, and only through it, he must pass in order to reach his destination, the redemption. This is Jesus, the Cross.  But, alas, amongst the many terrible hardships, that is to say, the challenges he must overcome on his journey, is bumping into a man who tempts him away from the right path. This is “Mr. Worldly Wiseman”, who dwells in the town of “Carnal Policy”. The man sends him to a village called “Morality” in which dwells a man called “Legality”, and if he doesn’t find him at home then his son “Civility” will show him the way. “Christian” tries to follow this direction, going up a very steep mountain which almost collapses on top of him, but, luckily “Evangelist” finds him, and strongly reprimands him for straying from the right way. You are going to Mount Zion, only through the gate of the Cross and Jesus! Why were you tempted to stray to the terrible and dangerous way of Mount Sinai, that only emphasizes life in this world, and so its house of prayer is only to be found in the village of “Morality”?!

In the course of about two thousand years Christianity has been preaching that the only correct way to redemption of every human is through belief in Jesus, that this is the universal way. This theology was intertwined with an anti-Jewish message, accusing Judaism of rejecting “Israel of the spirit” and clinging to “Israel of the flesh”. Judaism has been described as provincial, since its bastion is to be found in the nationhood of one people, that is to say, in physical existence in this world. This is a great sin, and God will punish the Jews severely for their continuing to cling to the old covenant of Sinai after He sent His son to the world to establish a new covenant.

The interesting aspect of Bunyan’s book is his identification of the new liberation ( in the 17th century) from the restrictions of the Church and religion – the attractions of rationality, science, and the exploration of the globe,and of the human possibility of developing a moral society based on “natural law” – the identification of these trends with the approach of Judaism: remaining close to this world, the world of the flesh, while turning the back on the true way to redemption through faith in Jesus. In other words, Bunyan does not identify in morality realized in this world any universalist potential, this is the world of the material, and only the Christian spiritual approach can be universalist.

Unfortunately, even Jews who were not tempted to convert to Christianity often internalized aspects of this Christian worldview (which is by the way similar to other religions that emphasize the universal, such as Islam and Buddhism). Many Jews, indeed, believe that a deep gap exists between faith in the God of Israel, narrowing it down to a self-absorbed ethnocentrism, and the values of universal morality. The attempts to bridge between these two poles over the ages have been too many to enumerate…

After a renewed study of the Ten Commandments, I want to emphasize here a different approach:

“I am the Lord, your God, who took you out of the Land of Egypt”. We experienced God as a people, through the specific history that is uniquely ours, but this paradigmatic opening flows on towards the commandment to see this God as abstracted from all material concreteness, whose entire worship is directed to the spiritual. And from here on we progress to the establishment of a way of life based on the honouring of parents and a weekly day of rest also for slaves and animals, as well as the forbidding of murder, theft, adultery and dishonesty. The specific, unique existence of the Jewish people does not only integrate into it universal moral standards, but is rooted in them, echoing the creation of the first human being in God’s image, as well as the covenant made with Noah after the flood.

This welding together of the national and the universal into one meaning, is expressed also in the welding together of the spiritual and earthly into a consciousness that connects them: Sinai and Zion are linked for us not only as the integration of the national and the universal, but also as  representing  the ultimate goal of filling the material world  with the spiritual, in the sense of Tikkun Olam, healing and improving  this world here and now – without letting go of the vision  of  a future with God’s Kingdom being fully realized on this Earth.

John Bunyan’s book is still very popular, mainly in the USA. Even if it were to be translated some time into Hebrew, it would remain completely foreign to the spiritual world of the Hebrew nation.

(translated by Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann)