LAW, POLITICS, AND MORALITY IN JUDAISM

Vol. 16 No. 11 (November, 2006) pp.883-885

LAW, POLITICS, AND MORALITY IN JUDAISM, by Michael Walzer (ed). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224pp. Paper. $17.95/ £11.95. ISBN: 0691125082. Cloth. $55.00/£35.95. ISBN: 0691125074.

Reviewed by Martin Edelman, Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. Email: me354 [at] albany.edu.

This is a strange and difficult book to review for this journal. It is strange for two reasons. First, the law involved is Halakhah (Jewish religious law), not the law of the state. Its normative rules are derived from the Bible, the Talmud and the works of great Rabbinic decisors like Maimonides. Traditional Jews believe that they are obligated to follow Halakhah. Other Jews feel no such obligation. They are more likely to treat Halakhah as a well developed system of rabbinic morality.

Stranger yet, there is virtually no Halakhah dealing with significant political issues. As the editor, Michael Walzer, and many of the contributors point out, that is the result of Jewish statelessness for roughly 2,000 years. During the long Diaspora, the Jewish people were unable to participate in, let alone control, the political decisions of the states in which they lived. Halakhah, a system of law intended to encompass every aspect of a Jew’s life, never developed legal rules for the very issues with which the authors grapple in this volume. Instead, they are forced to tease out implications for contemporary politics from existing Halakhic rulings only vaguely related to the topics they address. Still, while this volume can not discuss legal rules, it has much to say in the realms of political theory and morality.

The difficulty adheres in the nature of any collection of essays. It is difficult to discern common themes, and some contributions are stronger and more interesting than others. The comments here will focus on those contributions this reviewer deems most noteworthy. Walzer divides the essays into three sections, and the comments here will follow that division.

Part I focuses on political order and civil society. Robert Cover’s essay notes that Halakhah is built upon mitzvoth (commandments; obligations) not individual natural rights. This may weaken ideas of equal human rights, but it strengthens ideas of shared communal responsibilities. Traditional Judaism, he maintains, can thus provide a useful corrective for the all too frequent rampant individualism in Western thought. In the struggle for universal dignity and equality, Cover understands Traditional Judaism as pointing to the obligations we each have to create societies that implement those rights.

In the very next essay, however, Suzanne Last Stone adds a cautionary note. Halakhah was developed as a normative system of a particular nation, a people that was primarily concerned with maintaining its separate existence in the Diaspora. As such it cannot easily be utilized as an authoritative basis for [*884] universalistic norms. Thus the contrast in this volume’s first two essays demonstrates why Jewish Law can be a fruitful source of norms, but it cannot be taken as a legal code for a modern, liberal State.

Part II focuses on issues of territory, sovereignty, and international society. It contains a fascinating essay by Menachem Fisch that will be of particular interest to students of Israeli politics and law. He focuses on what Halakhah requires of Observant Jews in liberal democracies as citizens and as rulers. According to Fisch, Halakhah permits—nay requires—Jewish citizens to push for policies reflecting their tradition’s values and rules, while permitting them to tolerate passively different approaches. Halakhic Judaism recognizes the existence of other value systems but not their intrinsic worth. Halakhic Jews, according to Fisch, can learn to live in a pluralist society so long as they are permitted to refrain from activities violating the obligations imposed upon them by Jewish Law.

But Halakhah distinguishes between passive toleration and active enabling. Therefore, sovereignty in a liberal democracy poses a significant problem for Observant Jews. As rulers they cannot actively and systematically assist violations of Jewish Law. They must insist that their values be embodied in the laws and policies of the state. Observant Jews cannot authorize policies that entail violations of Halakhah. “If they are to abide by their Halakhic convictions,” Fisch writes, “Orthodox Jewish legislators and members of government are powerless to do for others what they would have expected others to do for them. . . . From the administrative viewpoint of [being] the sovereign, liberal democracy and Jewish law are to a large extent diametrically opposed” (p.105). In these few sentences, Fisch has summarized the otherwise puzzling behavior, from a comparative perspective, of the Orthodox Jewish political parties in Israel.

Part III discusses issues of war and peace on which, as Michael Walzer notes, there is no Jewish theory. Jewish thinkers “focused on justice in domestic society, where they had an uncertain and subordinate place, not on justice in international society, where they had no place at all” (p.150). As one of our leading contemporary authorities on these matters, he concludes by stating that “the clearest need in the tradition . . . is to find some way to a comprehensive and unambiguous account of legitimate and illegitimate, just and unjust war making” (p.166).

Yet one may wonder at this point in history whether even an evolving rabbinic tradition can meet that need. The emergence of the first Jewish State in 2,000 years has not changed the authoritative grund norm of Halakhah. As Geoffrey Levey notes, “In Judaism, one’s obligations to the social compact, like one’s obligations generally, are determined not according to political relations or some elaborated theory of the state but according to laws understood as divine commandments or mitzvoth” (p.184). It is conformity to God’s commandments that is the measure of a Jew’s obligations, not any [*885] given political institution, structure, or arrangement. And since there is neither an authoritative text dealing with issues of war and peace, nor a single authoritative interpreter of Halakhah, Jewish Law will yield only a multiple of responses.

Volumes like LAW, POLITICS AND MORALITY IN JUDAISM provide a wealth of insights rather than comprehensive theories. But as Justice Holmes used to remark, such insights are the chief reason to keep reading and thinking.

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