A friend of mine recently critiqued the many Jewish ‘loopholes’ which ease the restrictions outlined in the Talmud. For example, by placing stews in the baker’s oven on Friday afternoon before sundown, Jews can ensure a warm meal on Saturday without lighting a fire themselves. Lighting a fire is prohibited on Shabbat, but a warm meal is not. There are quite a few of these ‘loopholes’ in Jewish law.
Well, these rituals are only loopholes if you think that the reason we perform them is to suffer (that we should not have a warm meal). Generally speaking, Christians follow the rules of their creed in order to suffer like Christ, who walked as a man. Christians, in turn, walk in Jesus’s footsteps when they suffer as their saviour did, experiencing the same moral struggles, the same moral conclusions that he did as they control their own desires to act immorally. There are democratic and empirical elements to Christian obedience, each worshipper needing to suffer for themself in order to convince their corporeal person that their moral and spiritual inclinations are true (Harold Bloom).
Jewish ritual, on the other hand, offers a more direct relationship between power and obedience. The laundry list of divine laws was given to us and we were meant to follow it. There is a great history of negotiation and discord between the Jews and G-d, but our relationship to law (with the exception of abstaining from leavened bread during Passover, which is similar to Christian obedience) is more detached and straightforward: it’s not about suffering. G-d told us not to light a fire on Shabbat, so we’ll simply leave our meal in the already-lit oven–what does any of this have to do with a warm meal on Saturday? These ‘loopholes’ aren’t meant to get around anything–we have a one-to-one, almost face-value relationship to these laws. We perform what is allowed and we refrain from what isn’t.
Again, the Christian prioritization of suffering consequently democratizes and individuates rituals: Christians perform rituals to ‘know for themselves’. The Christian set of morals is internalized, embodied, carried, fostered within the corporeal body of man. Jews on the other hand, perform rituals, simply put, to obey. And so our relationship to these rituals–rituals which are more-often-than-not vessels for Jewish morals, but aren’t always so–is detached. Whereas Christian law (at least in the United States) is indistinguishable from the individual Christian’s person, Jewish law exists outside of the Jewish body, the Jewish spirit, and possibly the Jewish people. And in many respects, this allows for Jews to think more critically about our restrictions and rituals. It is easier to think critically about a power external to yourself than it is to examine a power which is not only a part of you, but a power who you represent yourself, as man in the image of Jesus (Bloom). Some may find the comparison crass, but it’s not so different from the state of labor today: many who feel more connected and passionate about their work and their workplace are more easily susceptible to manipulation from their employer. You have to work and enjoy it (Žižek).
The basis of Christian obedience is a recognition of oneself: the follower walks and suffers like Jesus, sees the moral value in Christian teachings, and only then ‘knows’ for themself. Again, the Jewish follower is more detached. We view ourselves apart from power. Christian obedience views the ‘right to conquest’ (the right to dictate moral values, the right of G-d to govern) from an inverted vantage, where Jesus already exists within each follower and divine law is participatory. Jewish obedience views the ‘right to conquest’ for what it is: a relation of power. And despite Martin Luther’s disparaging of this ‘overly subordinate’ relationship, one which supposedly fetishizes the Word, the Jewish recognition of difference between ruler and ruled is the first condition, in any relationship, to really speak to one another. Power is within every person and between every relationship, and requires negotiation (Jordan Peterson only says the first half of this). If we only accept divine law when we’ve been convinced that our ruler is like us (Christian obedience fashions its believers in the image of Jesus), we’ve already missed the point. You can’t speak between yourself and yourself.
To be a bit bolder–which is to speak in specifics–the Left’s popular adoption of intersectionality follows the same formula as Christian obedience. It’s certainly true that different members of society relate differently to the rest, and are treated differently by the rest. But when this logic of individuation meets political action (how can we form connections when each person carries their own unique assemblage of privileges and social markers?), we are left with a completely atomized base of lonesome individuals. The popular adoption of intersectionality–and, really, it doesn’t matter to me if you think more highly of its original theoretical prose, since intersectionality’s atomized version is the form that we encounter on the street, in ordinary conversation, the popular adoption as its ultimate logic–the popular adoption of intersectionality is less concerned with universal concerns which may link people of differing status and experience, than it is concerned with establishing difference and legitimizing each person’s own relationship to the world.
To be clear: the best way to legitimize our own subjective experience is to embrace our links with others. The fully atomized realization of intersectionality, which understandably places trust in only those with one’s own shared experiences, precisely follows the model of Christian obedience: power is legitimized through oneself. Only trust oneself (the American universalism is one of shared isolation–it’s only fitting that liberalism’s crusade against the John Wayne type has essentially reproduced the same archetype for its believers to emulate today, although today’s form, via identity politics, is possibly more commercialized). The fractured and cold, dizzying and (you knew it was coming) schizophrenic world of the 21st century West fosters this mindset. And it’s quite true, marginal people (Black women, for example) are often punished for trying to find universal bonds between their own experience and people who fall on another side of the intersectional-world-hierarchy. But when we completely forsake the possibility of empathy (a path that the popular Left has trod down, along with the rest of the globalizing world of politics and psyches) we can’t hope to fight the root causes of any of our plights. We each have different interests, of course, but is there no reconciliation between them? If that’s really the case, then our solitary master has finally perfected its tactics of divide-and-conquer after honing its skills for thousands of years. We’re lost.
Let me return to the case for ‘Jewish obedience’. As Americans, we’ve understandably taken on a value set which prizes democratization and individual freedoms. But I’d like to claim that detachment from G-d and detachment from power are not so repressive as they may first appear. There is freedom in limits. The emancipation of man will not come through inclusion: becoming our own masters, stepping into the part of G-d already inside each of us, may not be so liberating after all. And acknowledging the existence of an Other–a brother, a master, or an equal who is separate from you–allows us to have a sense of self in the first place (a sense of our own moral value set which the Christian model of suffering paradoxically stifles). A minimum of two speakers are needed to form a language. Without confusion, the moment when we all speak the same word, we no longer need to speak at all. It takes two to tango.