The torah as a suicide pact

Abstract

nlike many critics of Israel and Judaism, Marc Ellis writes exclusively as a theologian. In this he has achieved a certain celebrity, traveling the world to argue against the legitimacy of Israel and declare the moral vacuity of contemporary Judaism. His jeremiads are based on a presumptive prophetic critique of "state power" and its craven religious legitimation. Ellis sees himself as the last Jew standing, the sole moral voice crying in the wilderness of a people's mass dereliction of conscience. Contemporary Judaism is trapped in a cycle of serf-congratulatory "innocence" and delusional, immoral "redemption." The memory of the Holocaust is cynically manipulated by Jewish elites as a moral club with which to silence their opponents, while the wicked enchantment with the State of Israel--born in unforgivable sin against the Palestinians--corrupts the legitimate recollection of the Holocaust. Contemporary Judaism has become a pernicious pseudo-Judaism, a "Constantinian Judaism," as Ellis styles it, feigning victimhood while celebrating a state power and militarization that mimics Nazism. Indeed, in Ellis' portentous prose the Jewish state often sinks to the level of Nazi Germany. Judaism has reached its end and its last men and women of conscience must go into exile and form a new moral diaspora in which the covenant, first enacted by the prophets, can be reborn. The principal focus of this new, salvific covenant will be--glossing (and rejecting) Emil Fackenheim--a 615 'h commandment, "Thou shalt not lessen the humanity of Palestinians." Given the gravity of Jewish criminality against that people, no "peace" process (often in quotation marks) can suffice. Reconciliation requires transcending the fundamental flaw of modem Judaism, the State of Israel, which ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Precisely what should replace the Jewish state is left unclear although a "state of all its citizens," a secular binational democracy, seems to be the top contender. Every expression of Judaism that does not lead to a radical abnegation of all that the majority of Jews consider constitutive and sane is bankrupt and complicit. Jewish history has reached its end. Persons of conscience should no longer choose to be ensconced in it; they must learn to "practice exile." That this is theology is undeniable but whether it should be considered Jewish theology is questionable. Ellis himself often questions the Jewish status or character of his work, sometimes calling for a new covenant community of post-Jews and post-Christians, of "exiles," to replace the old, compromised communities. His talk of the end of Jewish his tory suggests an eschatological anticipation: a new community of "exiles" will inaugurate a new covenant. At other points, he affirms his standing within the Jewish world as it is but insists on marginality, on living at the periphery, as the only morally defensible Jewish option. Although his works are largely repetitive (he says himself that his later books are only footnotes to Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation) there does seem to be a drift away from the belief that his teaching can renew Judaism toward a belief that Judaism and the Jews are incorrigible. In a recent work-which begins with a narration of his nightmare that an Israeli soldier holds a gun to his head and shoots him--his weary disbelief in the possibility of radical Jewish change is palpable. He praises the "courage" of those who, like the late British philosopher Gillian Rose, have converted to Christianity. Although conversion to Christianity as such is not appealing to Ellis insofar as he finds similar problems of moral bankruptcy in it, the radical transgression of boundaries in favor of self-imposed exile has become his raison d'etre. It may be that he has withdrawn entirely from self-definition as a Jewish theologian by this point. It is not clear. It is likely the case that however much he has given up on the Jewish community he continues to struggle with his relation to the Jewish tradition. If so, then it is appropriate to begin with how Ellis defines that tradition, with what he understands Judaism to be. Ellis' radical and alienated judgments, I hope to show, are formed against a background of a oneor at best two-dimensional construction of Judaism. The influences that loom largest in Ellis' thought, the intellectual prisms through which he views Judaism, are Holocaust theology and liberation theology. Much of his work consists of a repudiation of the former, along the lines indicated above, and an articulation of the latter. Other than Holocaust theology, Ellis does not