Pluralism1The Jewish Quarterly, Autumn, 1991.
Pluralism is a compelling idea, but it is not a simple one. In my Reith Lectures I strongly defended a plural society – what I called a “community of communities.” At the same time I pointed out that pluralism is a more complex doctrine than is usually realised, and can rise to contradictory or unacceptable positions. Consider, as an example, Joseph Raz’s award-winning exploration of pluralism, The Morality of Freedom.
Raz values the principle of autonomy, the right of individuals to make their own choices. But he notes that this poses a problem in relation to “communities whose culture does not support autonomy” such as immigrant communities or religious sects. The problem is this: “Since they insist on bringing up their children in their own ways they are, in the eyes of liberals like myself, harming them. Therefore can coercion be used to break up their communities, which is the inevitable by-product of the destruction of their separate schools, etc.?”
To this question, Raz is prepared to answer in the affirmative. He writes: “The perfectionist principles espoused in this book suggest that people are justified in taking action to assimilate the minority group, at the cost of letting its culture die or at least be considerably changed by absorption.” In practice, to be sure, it should be done slowly. But if it should become clear that the religious or ethnic minority is not assimilating, merely dwindling, then “assimilationist policies may well be the only humane course, even if implemented by force of law.”
Raz has the great virtue of honesty. He is a liberal pluralist, but as a philosopher he recognises that liberalism is not, as is often claimed, a value-neutral public policy. It has, he says, a “cultural imperialism” of its own. To me, those words have a chilling ring. They recall the demands of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European liberals who argued that if Jews were to be admitted to society as citizens, they would first have to abandon the Yiddish language, the dietary laws, the Jewish Sabbath and religious divorce, and assimilate into the dominant culture. On this, Samuel Heilman’s judgement seems to me to be correct, that “These changes brought about, in a sense, a new version of the age-old Christian efforts to convert Jews. Now instead of demanding conversion to Christianity, the Christians were demanding a Jewish conversion to secular citizenship.”
Raz’s argument was brought home to me recently. In the course of a Desert Island Discs programme, Sue Lawley asked me what I would say to my son if he was thinking of marrying a non-Jewish girl. I said that I would try to discourage him. I would hope that Judaism and its continuity would mean enough to him to wish to create a Jewish family and raise Jewish children.
This, as I thought, uncontroversial proposition brought an extraordinary response from a journalist on the London Evening Standard. He wrote that “The closed nature of the Jewish faith must be one of the reasons for its frequent persecution,” and went on to say that the Jewish opposition to intermarriage explained the Nazi accusation of a “Jewish conspiracy” (the text was modified between earlier and later editions of the paper).
I was not inclined to see the article as antisemitic. It was a sincerely voiced expression of the view that if Jews are to be part of a multi-cultural Britain they must be prepared to be indifferent to intermarriage. That view has been expressed by Jews as well, most famously by Israel Zangwill in his play, The Melting Pot. It was at the heart of Napoleon’s questions to the Assembly of Jewish Notables in 1806, and the notables were forced into a tortuously diplomatic reply.
It is important to remember that the demand for Jewish assimilation, from the nineteenth century to today, has come not from conservatives but from liberals. The argument of the Evening Standard journalist was essentially that of Joseph Raz, namely that for the sake of an open, pluralist and autonomy-supporting society, “people are justified in taking action to assimilate the minority group, at the cost of letting its culture die or at least be considerably changed by absorption.” Yet it was precisely this approach that led Martin Buber to lament, on the eve of the Holocaust, that emancipation had failed because it emancipated Jews individually, not collectively. Jews, to become citizens, had to relinquish the structures of group-identity. It was just this problem that pluralism was intended to address.
Pluralism, unlike the liberal individualism that preceded it, focused not on the individual but on the group. It recognised the integrity not only of persons, but also of the cultures, ethnicities and religious traditions to which they belonged. Horace Kallen, the first philosopher of pluralism, recognised that individuals are not abstractions. They have identities, forged by history, ancestry, religion, culture and ethnicity. The matrix of identity is the group. Therefore if the individual is to be respected in his or her individuality, so too must be the group of which he or she is a part. As a Jew, I believe this to be true. That is why I am a pluralist rather than a liberal individualist.
But political pluralism is a complex idea. It designates not a solution but a range of problems. What happens when the integrity of the group conflicts with the integrity of the individual? The Salman Rushdie affair illustrates the problem, as does the demand for state support for certain denominational schools. Both sides to both disputes defend their stance by reference to pluralism. In a plural culture, argues one side, all religions, not just Christianity, should be protected by the law of blasphemy. In a plural culture, argues the other side, no religion should be protected by the law of blasphemy. In a multi-faith society, argues one side, each religion should have its own schools. In a multi-faith society, argues the other side, no religion should have its own schools: every child should learn a little of every faith. When both sides to an argument invoke the same concept to justify opposing views, that is a clear sign that the concept is problematic.
The liberal individualist is at least lucid and consistent. I understand his view and oppose it. It rests, I believe, on a mistaken view of the individual, identity, morality and society. Philosophically, I take my stand alongside such recent critics of liberalism as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Stuart Hampshire, Robert Bellah and Peter Berger. Jewishly, I am committed to a continued group identity against the arguments and pressures for assimilation. That is why I am a pluralist. But intellectual integrity forces me to recognise and articulate the problems.
My argument in the Reith Lectures was that there is no neat solution. Instead, there is a delicate interplay between our second languages of identity and our first language of common citizenship. If we recognise only the first language, we are in effect calling for the disappearance of minorities. If we insist on second languages to the exclusion of a common culture, we risk moving to a society of conflicting ghettoes. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities describes a New York that has reached this stage. Two recent critiques of American society, Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America and Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint, reinforce the same concern. Neither alternative does justice to the subtle problems of creating a society that is both cohesive and diverse.
Jews are used to living with the tension. For the past two centuries we have negotiated an equilibrium between Jewish and British identities. We know what it is to speak two languages, to strive to be true to our traditions while contributing to the common good. It is not easy, but it can be done. In a plural society, the modern Jewish condition becomes the human condition tout court. What is needed is a balance between the conflicting claims of the individual, the group and society as a whole. What I reject as cultural imperialism is any approach that takes one of the three to be determinative and to cancel out the claims of the other two.
The Judaic Case for Pluralism
The other error against which we must guard is the claim that a plural society must necessarily be a secular society, one where religion is banished from the public domain. The argument is this. Religions cannot tolerate diversity. Each claims exclusive access to the truth. The public domain is plural, religious truth is not. Therefore religion must be confined to the private domain. This dogma deserves to be challenged. Pluralism can flow from a religious vision. In the case of Judaism it does.
Judaism is pluralist with respect to the claims of other religions. Crucial to an understanding of Jewish faith is the fact that God’s first words to Abraham, setting the destiny of Israel into motion, do not appear until the twelfth chapter of the book of Genesis. They are prefaced by chapter eleven, which recounts the story of the Tower of Babel. That narrative is the classic text of pluralism. It defines our this-worldly situation as one of an irreducible multiplicity of languages and cultures. Therein lies our diversity and our occasional tragedy, that we “do not understand one another’s speech.” Judaism is predicated on this, that prior to the end of days there is no universal religion or language. Or as Mary Midgely once put it: the thing about universal languages is that no one speaks them.
Consistently throughout its history, Judaism has understood the relationship between Jews and God to be covenantal. A covenant is inherently pluralist. It does not negate the possibility of other covenants with other peoples. There were times when the prophets strove to remind Israel of this fact. Malachi declared, “From where the sun rises to where it sets, My name is honoured among the nations” (1:11). Isaiah spoke of the day when God will say, “Blessed be Egypt My people, Assyria My handiwork and Israel My inheritance” (19:25). Israel has no monopoly of virtue or God’s love. These remain radical and important statements.
To be sure, Judaism is not open-endedly tolerant. It opposes idolatry. It imposes obligations on Jews. But it sets severe limits on what Jews might demand of non-Jews. The Torah opposes the sexual conduct of the Canaanites and the Egyptians, but it nowhere prescribes norms other than for Israel itself. Maimonides recognised in Islam a legitimate monotheism. The Tosafists denied that their Christian contemporaries were idolaters. The fourteenth-century Talmudist, Rabbi Menahem ha-Meiri, ruled that all members of cultures “governed by the ways of religion” had the halakhic status of ger toshav, meaning that they were to be accorded full equality of rights.
Nor does the existence of many faiths relativise them all. That mistake was made recently by Sir Hermann Bondi in The Times. How, he asked, could religions claim absolute truth when there are so many of them, each believing in something else? The question confuses absoluteness with universality. To give an analogy: I am absolutely bound by marriage, but not universally bound. To the contrary, marriages are inescapably particular. The opening of Anna Karenina notwithstanding, no two marriages or happinesses are alike. As a moral descendant of those who stood at Sinai I am absolutely bound by its continuing claims. But that is not to deny that others whose relationship to God is mediated by other texts, traditions and languages may experience the same absoluteness in their own way. Like a marriage, a covenant may be both absolute and particular.
That is a distinctively Jewish way of understanding the plural character of faith. For it flows from Judaism’s distinction between universal and particular covenants, the covenant with Noah and humanity on the one hand, and with Abraham and the children of Israel on the other. Zvi Werblowsky notes that the universal monotheisms that came in the wake of Judaism had “a fundamental unwillingness to accept, let alone respect or appreciate, the specific individuality and integrity of other religious groups.” A particularist faith such as Judaism, by contrast, contains “possibilities of a pluralistic respect for…other religious configurations.” Perhaps each religion has to arrive at pluralism in its own way, through its own beliefs and categories. Nonetheless, Jews have an important statement to make in the contemporary world: that pluralism can be a religious orthodoxy.
What, then, are the ethical and political implications of such a view? The rabbis made a fundamental distinction between the 613 commands of Judaism and the moral requirements of mankind as such – the “seven Noachide laws.” They distinguished between the ethical system of Judaism and the shared morality of a religiously plural world. There is, in other words, a first language of citizenship whose minimum requirements are set by the Noachide laws. And there are diverse second languages of religious identity: in the case of Jews, the language of Jewish law and faith. That distinction, central to Judaism, is essential to any society which values the integrity of a multiplicity of faiths.
Freedom of expression, too, has a religious value. Rabbinic Judaism encouraged what one writer has called a “culture of argument.” Truth, especially religious truth, is multi-faceted. Its pursuit requires the freedom to articulate alternative and sometimes dissenting perspectives. The one rabbi of Mishnaic times who sought to limit freedom of argument – Rabban Gamliel II – was temporarily deposed from his position as head of the Jewish community. “Argument for the sake of heaven” is one of the oldest Jewish traditions.
Three centuries before John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Rabbi Judah Loewe (the Maharal) of Prague, wrote:
It is proper, out of love of reason and knowledge, that you do not summarily reject anything that opposes your own ideas, especially so if your opponent does not intend merely to provoke you, but rather to declare his own beliefs. And even if such beliefs are opposed to your own faith and religion, do not say: “Speak not, close your mouth.” If that happens, there will take place no purification of religion…. For one who causes his opponent to hold his peace and refrain from speaking, demonstrates thereby the weakness of his own religious faith. This is therefore the opposite of what some people think, namely that when you prevent someone from speaking against religion, that strengthens religion. That is not so, because curbing the words of an opponent in religious matters is nothing but the curbing and enfeebling of religion itself.
This testimony of one of the great masters of the rabbinic tradition is still germane. But it is not unique. It echoes Maimonides’ dictum, “Accept the truth from whichever source it comes,” which in turn recalls Ben Zoma’s aphorism, “Who is wise? He who learns from all.” The point was made earlier still. Asking why the views of the school of Hillel gained acceptance over those of the school of Shammai, the rabbis answered: “Because the disciples of Hillel were kind and modest, and studied not only their own teachings but those of their opponents, and recited the views of their opponents before their own.”
Lastly, there is the religious value of religious liberty. The Torah, with its radical opposition to paganism and mythology, rests on the existence of a free God who desires the uncoerced worship of free human beings. The principle of free will, says Maimonides, is the foundation of Torah. Without it there would be no point to the commandments and no justice to punishment and reward.
Religious freedom is not a matter of metaphysics alone. It is striven for in history. It determines economic and political structures. The definitive event of Jewish history, the exodus from Egypt, is a journey from slavery to liberty. Biblical legislation restricts slavery, and rabbinic law comes close to abolishing it. Shabbat is a weekly exercise in liberation. On it, all hierarchies are suspended. No one – not a slave or an employee or even an animal – is subject to a master’s command.
But what, then, of law? Laws are enforcible constraints, and Judaism is a religion of law. Central to the Hebrew Bible, though, is the proposition that the covenant between God and Israel is only binding because it was voluntarily accepted and repeatedly re-affirmed. Two centuries ago Moses Mendelssohn added a further observation in his classic defence of religious liberty, Jerusalem. He distinguished between the law of the state and religious law, or commandments. “The state,” he said, “prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and beneficence.”
Religion, he argued, was an essential component of society. It was a “pillar of civic felicity.” Its task is to teach people “the truth of noble principles and convictions; to show them that duties toward men are also duties toward God, the violation of which is in itself the greatest misery; that serving the state is the true service of God; that charity is His most sacred will; and that true knowledge of the Creator cannot leave behind in the soul any hatred for men.” But it cannot avail itself of civil law and its sanctions. “Religious society lays no claim to the right of coercion, and cannot obtain it by any possible contract.” Mendelssohn’s example was Judaism. Since the destruction of the second Temple, Jewish courts had relinquished the power to enforce punishments and fines. For seventeen hundred years Judaism had been, in effect, a voluntary allegiance. To be sure, Jewish communities still had the right to excommunicate dissident members. But Mendelssohn urged them to give it up. Within a century, throughout Europe, they did.
Equally significant is the halakhic argument against religious coercion cited by the great Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk. Maimonides had ruled, in accordance with talmudic law, that there are circumstances in which a Jewish court can coerce a recalcitrant husband into granting his wife a divorce. How so? One of the conditions of a divorce is that it be freely given. In this case, apparently it is not. Maimonides answered as follows. Since the husband wishes to be a Jew and to fulfil the commandments, he genuinely wishes to do what rabbinic law requires, namely that he divorces his wife. Underlying the power of coercion is a presupposition of voluntary assent to the law. But this, so a nineteenth-century rabbinic scholar argued, cannot be assumed in the case of someone who has relinquished Judaism. Coercion, in short, presupposes but cannot produce assent. Just such an argument, transposed into secular terms, was later used to fine effect by Sir Isaiah Berlin in his “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Sir Isaiah is a secular Jew. But the libertarian conclusion had already been arrived at in religious thought.
In my introduction to The Persistence of Faith I quoted John Plamenatz’s remark that “Liberty of conscience was born not of indifference, not of scepticism, not of mere open-mindedness, but of faith.” Nonetheless, we have tended to believe that pluralism, freedom and the right to dissent are secular ideas. It is not so. The absolute dignity of otherness is a spiritual proposition. Religious commitment may yet prove to be its best defence.