Walzer - Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism

LAW, POLITICS, AND MORALITY IN JUDAISM

The Ethikon Series publishes studies on ethical issues of current importance. By bringing scholars representing a diversity of moral viewpoints into structured dialogue, the series aims to broaden the scope of ethical discourse and to identify commonalities and differences between alternative views.

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Michael Walzer, ed.

Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism

LAW, POLITICS, AND MORALITY
IN JUDAISM

EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE
BY Michael Walzer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2006 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Law, politics, and morality in Judaism / edited and with preface by Michael Walzer.

p.cm. (Ethikon series in comparative ethics)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-720-6

1. Jewish lawMoral and ethical aspects. 2. Public law (Jewish law)

3. Judaism and state. 4. LawIsraelJewish influences. I. Walzer, Michael.

II. Series.

KBM524.14.L39 2006

296.3'6dc22 2005051468

British Library Cataloging-in Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Michael Walzer

POLITICAL ORDER AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order

Robert M. Cover

Judaism and Civil Society

Suzanne Last Stone

Civil Society and Government

Noam J. Zohar

Autonomy and Modernity

David Biale

TERRITORY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Land and People

David Novak

Contested Boundaries: Visions of a Shared World

Noam J. Zohar

Diversity, Tolerance, and Sovereignty

Menachem Fisch

Responses to Modernity

Adam B. Seligman

Judaism and Cosmopolitanism

David Novak

WAR AND PEACE

Commanded and Permitted Wars

Michael Walzer

Prohibited Wars

Aviezer Ravitzky

Judaism and the Obligation to Die for the State

Geoffrey B. Levey

I

Preface

MICHAEL WALZER

THERE ARE TWO MODERN ANSWERS to what used to be called the Jewish question. I mean, two humane answers; we wont be talking in this volume about the other kind. The question itself might be phrased as follows: What political space is there for Jews in the modern world? The first answer points toward citizenship in inclusive democratic states; the second answer points toward sovereignty in the land of Israel.

Both of these answers have now been realized; the process of emancipation brought Jews into the democratic state as equal members; a vote at the United Nations and a war for independence brought Jews a state of their own. These two achievements now require the revision and renewal of Judaism generally and of Jewish legal and moral dis-course (halakah) in particular. For Judaism and its halakah are essentially the products of exile and exclusion. They reflect the experience of being ruled by the others. They are shaped by a long and difficult adaptation to the harsh realities of homelessness. Now they must be reshaped to accommodate two different ways of being at home in the political world.

It is the normative system, the halakic order, that most requires revision and renewal. The resources available for this work are manifold: first of all, the long tradition of legal interpretation and controversy, and then the history of the Jews, the practice of ethical storytelling (aggadah), theological reflection, and, finally, secular philosophy. Interpretation has always been the dominant strategy of Jewish legal innovation, and many of our authors explore its uses here, but it is important to insist on the other possibilities also. In this volume, David Novak argues for the importance of theology, and Menachem Fisch for secular philosophy. As Maimonides appropriated Aristotle, so Fisch appropriates Karl Popper, it is a useful model.

The stress in all these essays is more on making the tradition usable (though some of our authors insist on the difficulties of doing that) than on learning from the tradition. There is, indeed, a lot to learn from the Jewish experience of sustaining a national identity and a common law without territory, sovereignty, citizenship, or, most of the time, coercive power. Some of that learning is visible here, but what is mostly on display in these essays is the effort to find features of Jewish experience that might be useful in thinking about how to live as citizens and sover-eigns. The point is not to negate the exile, as the first generation of Zionist writers wanted to do, but rather to pull exilic Judaism into the world of modern democracy. Whatever the value of medieval and early modern communal life, it was a sharply segregated life, and it did not prepare the Jews for two crucial features of modern citizenship and statehood. The first of these is voluntary association, where Jews and non-Jews coexist in civil society, with Jewish groups operating side by side with Christian, Muslim, and secular groups, all under the same set of rulesand where individual Jews and non-Jews often join together in the same association for some common purpose. The second feature of modern politics for which exile did not prepare the Jews is democratic responsibility: the sense of being committed, along with non-Jewish fellow citizens, to the well-being of the commonwealthresponsible for the others as they are for you. The kahal, the semiautonomous Jewish community of the exile, was radically homogeneous. In it, Jews were responsible only for their own well-being. They were denied any share in the larger political community and any role in its decision-making; there were a small number of Jewish ministers and even generals (in medieval Spain, for example), but the Jews generally were a pariah community. The common good belonged to the others, who of-ten looked after it very badly, but who had at least some sense that it needed looking after. Jews today, in Israel especially, but also in every democratic setting, need to revise exilic law and moral sensibility so as to accommodate the idea of an extended common good.