The Politics of (Jewish) Revelation

Abstract

The Politics of (Jewish) Revelation Julie E. Cooper Samuel Fleischacker, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 559. Michael Walzer. In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. xxi + 232. Jewish thinkers have long understood that the benefits of equal citizenship in modern, secular states are not without cost. In modern Europe, Jewish emancipation was contingent upon the dissolution of Jewish communal autonomy and the abandonment of Jewish national identity. It is a scholarly commonplace that Judaism—which promiscuously mingled religion, culture, and nationality in the Middle Ages—became a “religion” in modernity.1 When scholars contend that Judaism became a religion, they mean that, for the first time, Judaism was conceived not as a source of authority in all spheres of life but as a practice confined to a discrete sphere (namely, the private sphere of ritual and belief). With this reconceptualization, Jewish thinkers adopted (in some cases consciously, in others not) a Protestant definition of religion. In other words, the transformation of Judaism from an idiosyncratic hybrid into a standard issue “religion” was the price of admission to equal citizenship in modern, secular society. Judaism’s political dimensions had to be jettisoned as ostensible obstacles to the Jews’ civic integration. In recent years, political theorists who study secularism have come to appreciate what Jewish thinkers have long understood about the price of admission to secular citizenship. Secularism’s promise of toleration relies on a distinctive notion of what religion is and how far its jurisdiction extends. The conviction that it is possible to erect a neutral public sphere, [End Page 613] and that norms of public neutrality do not curtail the free exercise of religion, rests on the premise that religion is private, a matter of individual belief. If this premise is not universally shared, however, the secular public sphere begins to look a lot less neutral. Indeed, the claim of neutrality begins to look like a disavowal, a failure to acknowledge that, as one of modernity’s authoritative discourses, secularism exerts formidable power, establishing norms of appropriateness for public discourse, religiosity, and even personhood. Convinced that secularism places unequal burdens on citizens with holistic faith commitments, many political theorists have begun to question the strict “wall of separation” approach. Determined to “take religion seriously,” these scholars argue that secularism must be refashioned . . . allowing greater latitude for religious discourse and symbols in the public sphere, for example—to accommodate a broader spectrum of religious practice and commitment. Relaxing strictures on public religious discourse would actually enrich pluralistic debate, these theorists contend, because it would allow atheists and theists alike to affirm the metaphysical convictions that inform their political views.2 Moreover, in response to projects, such as Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, that ascribe a distinctive (and, from Taylor’s perspective, impoverished) phenomenology to secularity, committed secularists have sought to recast secularism as a spiritually rewarding way of life. For these theorists, secularism is not only a rationalist campaign against mythology and superstition. Secularism is also a positive ethos, and it must be defended as such.3 The books under review—Samuel Fleischacker’s Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion and Michael Walzer’s In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible—demonstrate that, in a moment when scholars are eager to rehabilitate religion, Judaism’s political dimensions still present a stumbling block for certain kinds of secularists. Fleischacker and Walzer ask whether revealed religion can accommodate secular politics, and, if so, whether it must be reconfigured in the process. Each author identifies religious sources for pluralism, liberalism, and secularism—although Fleischacker offers a more emphatic and wholehearted defense of revelation. Denying that fealty to revelation entails dogmatism or authoritarianism, Fleischacker and Walzer are part of the broader movement within political theory to restore religion’s dignity. [End Page 614] Moreover, Fleischacker presents his brief for revelation, colored as it is by “Jewish commitments,” as a corrective to “the strong Christian bias that otherwise dominates most scholarly discussion of religion” (p. 12). As scholars sensitive...