On Religiosity and Libertarianism: A Response to Persico (Column 208)

Your article is worthwhile, but it’s beyond me why a Torah scholar like you would bother responding to Persico at all, a man who never writes anything worthwhile…

Zvika, you’ve gone completely overboard.
Persico has written many sensible things over the years, and in my view he is a very intelligent person. What he says here is not absurd either. It’s not accurate, but criticisms like these are heard often, and therefore it’s important to address them.

You write about the outcry the secular public would raise if the state were to shrug off its religious responsibility. Can you give an example of what that would look like?

Besides, Tomer Persico spoke with Feiglin about exactly this at the end of December 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbJeuIHyTnI
So he already knows that there is no contradiction between the views. So either he’s looking for headlines, or he fell in love with his own analysis and forgot that conversation.

As I said, the article is worthwhile and responds to claims that have already been heard, as you said, and it has its place. But with Persico personally, I’ve found logical inconsistency so many times, accompanied by great hostility toward religious Zionism, that as far as I’m concerned he’s marked as unworthy of discussion.

There is something to the claim about self-interest – liberty is a good solution to many problems of religious coercion that modern religious people are uncomfortable with. For example, if there were no more public transportation run by the state, we could stop “imposing” a ban on public transportation on Shabbat.

A very important post.
I feel that the matter of civic identity is very strong even among the old National-Religious public (where it is woven in a strange way into Jewish identity).
When I see the daily attacks against identity from rabbis of that public, when they write that dismantling the authoritarianism of the state is essentially the destruction of the identity of the Jewish people,
I understand much better what R. Elchanan meant when he accused religious Zionism of idolatry in partnership.

*daily attacks

In my opinion you left out several more factors:

1. The Disengagement. That move undermined the absolute faith in the deterministic redemption of Rav Kook’s school (at least according to the Rav Tzvi Yehuda). At last the penny dropped that the state can also be a tool in the hands of the Sitra Achra.

2. More voices began to be heard in the public, such as Rabbi Soloveitchik, who sanctify the state and the nation less.

3. Those of us who were exposed to the journal Tekhelet and the Shalem Center understand that liberalism has roots in Judaism and in the Bible. Maybe there isn’t a glorious democracy there, but certainly there is opposition to unlimited, centralized rule that pushes aside the kingdom of Heaven.

I don’t know how to demonstrate it. I’m not really sure I understand the question. Some of them would probably oppose these proposals, and some others would later regret not having opposed them.

Accusing your opponent of holding two contradictory positions (or of hypocrisy) while the accuser holds precisely their opposites is a phenomenon so common as to be despair-inducing, and it’s time to coin a name for it [a name helps streamline discussion and also helps with generalization and comparison]. I once saw someone (whose surname was “Hominer”) propose the name: “the de-hominer fallacy,” and I am honored to spread the good news.

Maybe “ad hominer” would be better.

Rabbi Michael, I respect and appreciate you and your writing, and I am glad for the polemic. Nevertheless, this post is full of insults directed at me, and beyond those, also baseless personal accusations resting on mistaken prejudices. Simply slanders that have no place in a dispute between two grown men. I am interested in ideological or principled discussion; I have no interest in mudslinging. I would be happy if you corrected your words, and an apology would not hurt either.

Still, a few points:

1. The contradiction between libertarianism and conservatism is not my invention, and you yourself admit that “Feiglin himself senses this tension.” There is therefore an unresolved tension that also cannot be resolved in principle. It is no accident that modern conservatives were wary of capitalism (I mentioned Irving Kristol in my article), whereas libertarians and major thinkers of capitalism (Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek) were wary of conservatism and supported individual rights (abortion, LGBT, etc.). That is the history, what can one do.

2. Another historical fact is that the Founding Fathers of the American nation were not “Puritan Protestants,” as you say, but liberal deists. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, etc. etc. A quick check on Wikipedia would have spared you that mistake. I would not mention this if it were not one of several bases for personal attacks on me. “If Persico has claims of inconsistency, it amazes me that he picks on Feiglin, who merely wrestles in the dust of the feet of those great men of the nation.” – Well no, Feiglin is not at their feet. He is in fact much closer to the Puritans than to the Founding Fathers of the American nation, and indeed encounters the same inner tension they encountered (see the life story of Roger Williams).

3. “Of Feiglin’s opponents on the left who advocate equality and individualism, that is, freedom but socialist centralism, he has not a word of criticism.” – This is simply worthless as an argument (if I am a hypocrite, does that change anything about Feiglin and religious Zionism? What does that have to do with it?) Second, factually too you are wrong. I wrote about this contradiction when Haaretz asked me for an article on the history of liberalism (https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/the-edge/.premium-1.6335675), when I wrote about Nadav Eyal’s book (https://7minim.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/mer-3/), when I wrote about lottery culture (https://www.facebook.com/tomer.persico/posts/10153331622774065), and when I criticized Merav Michaeli’s proposals regarding the family (https://www.facebook.com/tomer.persico/posts/10155122047434065). Those are four examples from recent times. There are more, but I’m not sure you care. You already wrote your slander. Without checking.

4. You criticize me for being a socialist or anti-capitalist. Well, that too is not true. Neither this nor that. I am not a socialist, I have no problem with capitalism, and I have written about that too. Again, how easy it is to stick on ad hominem accusations. I get this every day from right-wing trolls whose whole business is defamation. From you I expected more.

5. Finally you get to the heart of the matter, the main point of my article in Haaretz, and then it turns out that you actually agree with me completely. “I am inclined to accept the analysis he proposes for the phenomenon. The desire to be fresh and relevant to contemporary discourse is definitely part of the explanation for the phenomenon.” Nice. But that is exactly what I argued: “This is the background (though not the only one) out of which the adoption of neoliberalism and even libertarianism among religious Zionism at this time grows.” – And note that I emphasized that this is not the whole explanation, only part of it.

“Persico is right that a religious public really will not tend to hold a conception of complete freedom” – again, agreed. It’s just a pity that you don’t understand that here lies the internal, principled contradiction that you tried earlier to deny or soften.

“The religious person too is a pattern of the landscape of his birthplace. The influences of today’s individualistic discourse of freedom do not pass over the religious public. I emphasize that in my view this is a phenomenon of genuine identification, and not merely a psychological desire as Persico describes it.” – Fine, although what is the difference between “genuine” identification (whatever that means) and “merely psychological desire”? I don’t know. But if the phrasing matters to you, I’m willing to replace it.

“Beyond all this there is the interest. As a minority group, the religious public in Israel has suffered from secular coercion” – and here, unintentionally, you explain the strange union between religious conservatives and libertarians: lack of choice in the face of other forces. A cooperation between the rejected. This connection comes about – historically, and conceptually too – only after the regime is already democratic and when socialism is the next hot thing. Then the conservatives retreat to their communities and only ask to be left alone. Before the democratic era (and of course also afterward in non-democratic states like Franco’s Spain or among our neighbors to this day), religious people and authoritarian forces saw no problem whatsoever in governmental intervention. And if they thought they had the ability to shape society in their own image, they would not hesitate to do so today either (and the moment he has power, Feiglin will not hesitate). But they cannot, and are even threatened by progressive forces, and therefore they retreat to the above position. But there is no internal logic, no coherence, between a desire to strengthen the community and capitalism. Again, Irving Kristol formulates this well, and one can bring more quotations from dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who understand that there is a contradiction here.

6. “Feiglin in fact does not deliver the goods because he insists on leaving national identity in the hands of the state and even coercing certain elements of it” – good morning. Too bad you didn’t write that in your previous post about Feiglin.

That’s all for now. And again, it is so regrettable that one cannot conduct a high-level discussion without insults and without false slanders.

Hello Tomer.
I’m glad you responded here in detail, because it allows us to clarify things.
First, let me say that I am very surprised that you see my words as slander, insults, mudslinging, or lies. To the best of my judgment, all my claims were substantive, even if written with irony (which in my opinion is entirely legitimate). I do not see in my words even a single line that can be called by any of those labels. If it turns out that I was mistaken, I will gladly apologize.
Second, I expressed my appreciation for you in a reply to a talkback above, and so it is even stranger to me that this is how you see my words. I am flattered by your appreciation of me, and the appreciation is certainly mutual.
As for your actual points, I disagree, and I will explain why according to your numbered sections.

1. I did not say that you invented the contradiction under discussion (quite the contrary, I wrote that this is a common claim). As you wrote, I explicitly wrote in my post that there is clearly such a tension, but my claim was that there is no problem solving it, and Feiglin indeed does so, and not once but at every turn, both in his platform and outside it. Therefore quotations from this one or that one will not help here. Tension is not contradiction. Identifying the two is a fallacy.

2. True, I am not an expert in the history of the U.S., but what you say here seems strange to me. Here is a passage from Wikipedia under “Founding Fathers of the United States”:
About 9 of them were members of the Freemasons, about 49 Protestants (including 28 Anglicans, about 8 Presbyterians, about 7 belonging to independent churches, about 2 Lutherans, about 2 belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church, and 2 Methodists), about 3 Catholics, “and the few remaining had some sort of deistic beliefs.”
Your sentence that the Founding Fathers were “liberal deists” does not really square with that. And I’m not even talking about today’s American conservatives, the Republicans, many of whom are certainly in the same boat/contradiction as Feiglin. Therefore this (entirely marginal) claim of mine against you still stands.

3. My claim about your tendentiousness was not meant to defend Feiglin, so I do not understand why the claim belongs here that if you are a hypocrite that changes nothing regarding Feiglin or religious Zionism. By the way, I did not write anywhere that you are a hypocrite (only that your words are tendentious). I would appreciate it if you did not put words in my mouth, especially when talking about lies and slanders.
Nor did I write that you never accused the egalitarian-individualist left of contradiction. Have I read all your writings? With all due appreciation, I hope I may be forgiven for not having done so. Therefore I do not see the point of bringing other sources in which you addressed this. In the article here you accuse one side of the map without mentioning the other side, which suffers from the same problem. In my view, intellectual honesty required mentioning that here, and that is all I was talking about.

4. Again, through my sins I do not know your general positions and therefore I did not address them either. I dealt only with your words in this article. I went over my words again and verified that I did not write anywhere here that you are a socialist. Again you are putting words in my mouth though I did you no wrong. I addressed your arguments, and they clearly expressed such positions here. For example, when you quote Kristol saying that capitalism (and libertarianism) creates souls emptied of moral content. Or when you criticize Bennett for deleting socialist legislation from the Jewish Home platform, and lament the change religious Zionism has undergone. It is very hard to read your words as a neutral description of the process. There is clearly a critical statement here about it.

5. Here there is a serious missing of my point and taking my words out of context. After all, I explained again and again that you are making a psychological reduction because in your view the position itself is contradictory. Therefore it cannot have an essential basis (that is, that it is indeed these people’s substantive position). Against that I write that in my opinion there is no contradiction here, and therefore the psychological explanation you offer can only be partial. When you write that “this is the background, though not the only one,” you surely do not mean a real ideological background, for in your view that ideology is contradictory. Therefore it is clear that you mean the description is entirely sociological-psychological, only not exhaustive or complete (you did not conduct a sociological study here). But it is clear to you that the whole explanation lies on that level, for there is no non-contradictory substantive level to this position. By contrast, I claim there is a substantive explanation, and therefore the whole sociological plane, with which I agreed as stated, is partial by definition. That is exactly what I argued, and again you present things inaccurately.
By the way, I did not arrive at your Haaretz article “at the end.” My whole post dealt with it. I remind you again that I did not conduct, here or elsewhere, any study of your general thought. Everything I wrote in this column refers only to what you wrote here.

When I wrote, “Persico is right that a religious public really will not tend to hold a conception of complete freedom” – I wrote, and not by accident, “will not tend to hold a conception,” but this is only a tendency. There is definitely no contradiction here, only tension, as I wrote throughout my remarks. Therefore my principled position still stands, and you should not see in those words an admission beyond what I explicitly stated in my post (I wrote that I partially agree with your analysis. The dispute is only over the totalization/reduction).

In the next quotation from me: “The religious person too is a pattern of the landscape of his birthplace. The influences of today’s individualistic discourse of freedom do not pass over the religious public. I emphasize that in my view this is a phenomenon of genuine identification, and not merely a psychological desire as Persico describes it.” Again you thought that here I was conceding your claim, but I was not. Again you missed the entire idea of my remarks. My claim against you concerns the psychological-sociological reduction you make, that is, your ignoring the substantive level (which in your view is contradictory and therefore does not exist. This is not an accidental omission or for the sake of brevity). That is the difference between “genuine identification” and “psychological desire,” and I think I explained that well in my remarks. So how can you now propose replacing the wording with “genuine identification” instead of “psychological desire”?! You can of course admit that you were mistaken and adopt my thesis instead of yours, but I am not under the impression that that is what you meant to do here. Astonishing!

The next quotation you brought from me: “Beyond all this there is the interest. As a minority group, the religious public in Israel has suffered from secular coercion,” does indeed intentionally (and not “unintentionally,” as you wrote) explain the union (not a strange one, even if tense – tension is not contradiction) between religious conservatives and libertarians. I did indeed write that part of the explanation is lack of choice. But in your account the whole explanation lies on the psycho-sociological plane (for there cannot be a substantive level; it is contradictory), and that alone is the dispute.

6. Here you quoted me: “Feiglin in fact does not deliver the goods because he insists on leaving national identity in the hands of the state and even coercing certain elements of it,” and again you saw in this an admission on my part of your point. That is why you also expressed regret that I did not write this in the previous column. But here too you are mistaken. In my previous post I wrote about the advantages of his platform and also about several disadvantages, and here I added more disadvantages, those relevant to the discussion taking place here. Moreover, I wrote here that my concession regarding this part of his platform was not made for the reasons on which you rely, but for entirely different reasons, in fact the opposite ones. Therefore it seems strange to me that you see in this an admission of your point.

To conclude, I must say that the first section of your response here, which was initially published by itself on Facebook (someone emailed it to me; unfortunately I do not have Facebook), was really an unargued slander by you against me, and that was all the more puzzling to me because in that very section you accuse me of slanders and lies against you.
In your response here you elaborated more and gave reasons, and I thought perhaps here I could understand what you meant. But I still did not see in your words even a hint of the slightest slander, lie, mudslinging, or insult that you claimed were in my remarks. My assessment that all my words and arguments were substantive therefore remains unchanged.
Moreover, beyond your misunderstandings of my claims (and perhaps that is my fault if I did not explain things properly, although to me they seem perfectly clear), I showed in my reply here that your words also contained several distortions of my remarks. In addition, you attributed to me claims I did not write. Again I say that this seems very strange to me when it comes in the framework of claims against me about slanders and lies supposedly found in my words. I must tell you that I am truly embarrassed by all this.
In any case, unfortunately for the time being I do not see any place for apologizing, until you clarify for me where I sinned. I do not say this sarcastically or mockingly, but in complete seriousness. I am truly puzzled and even surprised by the offense you felt, and even more by your claims against me. I would be more than happy if you showed me where in my remarks there is anything of these ugly things, and I would apologize for it immediately.

A beautiful and enlightening column, thank you!

I would be glad if the rabbi could expand more on resolving the tension between “liberality” and “right-wingness” or “religiosity.” At first glance it seems that the left places the individual at the center (like communism, which cared for the individual), whereas the right and religion place the collective at the center (“nation,” etc.).

How then can the liberal value that sees the individual as autonomous be reconciled with a right-wing religious conception?

R. Abraham, hello,

Thank you for the response.

Look, regarding the personal matter. I’m really not talking about compliments like “nonsense,” “so that he won’t have to exert even slightly the wheels of complex thinking,” or “childish thinking,” which I don’t think are appropriate but which really can be taken in good spirit. But when you claim that “but socialist centralism, on that he has not a word of criticism,” that is simply defamation. Either it is a conscious lie, or it is just slander without checking the facts. Because the facts are otherwise. When you claim that my words are driven by tendentiousness (“wondrous are the ways of tendentiousness,” “tendentious nonsense”), you base this on the assumption that I have some principled opposition to capitalism, an assumption that is mistaken, and you also attack ad hominem instead of dealing with the argument. When you write “Yes, Persico, there is such a thing” about non-piggish capitalism, you assume that it is not clear to me that there is indeed non-piggish capitalism, whereas that is perfectly clear to me. These are either mistakes born of negligence or deliberate smears. It is both writing something untrue and slander against the person. Unacceptable.

1. Not a contradiction but a tension? Fine, tension. What is so, however, is that Feiglin does not resolve it. At least that is how one can understand your words later on; I will get to them.

2. The expression “Founding Fathers” usually refers to the seven principal figures: Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Jay. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States One may also include all the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The seven held deistic positions, even if they belonged to some church. Even among the dozens of signers of the Declaration you will not find a Puritan (that is, not in the sense of the founders of Boston, and certainly not in the sense of those fighting in the English Civil War). That is a mistake. In any case, these were not conservatives, and in any event the attack on me in this case is empty.

3. Apparently I did not understand you correctly. And apparently your other readers, judging by the responses here, did not understand you correctly either.

4. Here you did not understand me correctly. Sorry, I did not write what you read.

5. One hundred percent, I don’t see much difference between us. Look, in a 600-word opinion piece one cannot go into too much depth. That is of course why your posts here are much longer. I completely accept that here, at the broadest and most general level, this is not a purely psychological matter. Absolutely. In fact I recoil from psychological explanations for social trends. There is here a broad adoption of a general cultural ethos, an ethos of individualism and of freedom defined as autonomy (and this as distinct from rabbinic-halakhic freedom, which is certainly not defined as autonomy!). In this sense there is indeed “genuine identification.” I definitely accept that.

As for the psychological maneuver, it is more limited to what Feiglin himself is doing: Feiglin enables commandment-observant Jews to hang their restrictions on the state rather than on Halakha, and to “go free” by opposing the state. That is why I wrote there:

“Feiglin offers them a sophisticated trick: by hanging the oppressive external authority on the government, and by promising to remove it from their backs, he creates a discourse of freedom that they are happy to adopt. It turns out that it is not tradition that restricts us, but the state. It is the problem, and we are the ones bringing the gospel of complete freedom. Suddenly they are the knights of individual rights and freedom. Suddenly they are the ones proclaiming that ‘everyone should do whatever they want,’ as if they were hippies in the 1960s. The temptation is great and the relief immense. They are no longer the ones saying forbidden; they are the ones saying permitted.”

That is, the psychological maneuver here (which by the way you did not address at all, if I am not mistaken) *rides* on the “genuine identification,” with which I certainly agree with you, and is entirely secondary to it.

6. Here I return to point 1. For according to you, Feiglin does not resolve the tension, since he “does not deliver the goods.” And why? Because he “insists on leaving national identity in the hands of the state and even coercing certain elements of it.” You may think that this is incidental. It just so happened that this particular libertarian does not deliver the goods. I think this is entirely a matter of principle with him, since he is not really a libertarian, or at the very least that well-known tension between libertarianism and conservatism is always resolved in his case in the conservative direction. I wrote about this here: https://tomerpersico.com/2012/12/13/feiglins_peoples_democracy/ . Feiglin does not believe that the state truly should not determine for us what is good and what is bad. He is far from libertarianism, also from liberalism, and anyone seeking to find these in “Zehut” is mistaken.

Hello Tomer.

Regarding the “compliments,” indeed I wrote them in mere irony, and as I understand it there is criticism here only of the content of the remarks and not of the person (=you), but I understand that they can also be understood otherwise. For that, my apologies. Everything else that appears in the first section of your words here I explained in my previous message. After all, I already explained that when I wrote that you have no word of criticism, I meant only with regard to the article here, and therefore I wrote that it was tendentious. I did not refer to your many other writings and articles (which are fine ones). Nor did I write that you have something against capitalism, but against Feiglin. That is what you explicitly write here. Again, I do not know your general view on this issue and did not address it. Therefore, as I understand it, there are no mistakes here, and certainly not “deliberate” ones, as you put it.

1. Not contradiction but tension. This is the most important point of my response to you. It is not a marginal matter but the core of my argument. After all, in my column I too spoke about tension, so there is no novelty and no disagreement in that. The discussion is whether there is a contradiction. In my view, Feiglin does indeed offer a solution to it (by the way, he didn’t invent this either, as I wrote. It is the standard tension among many conservatives).

2. Regarding the expression “the Founding Fathers,” there is a mismatch between us in the extension of the term (whether it means the seven or the whole group). But no one disputes that there was Protestant religious belief there and there was Puritanism there (not in the sense of the group that emigrated to New England to establish the kingdom of Heaven, but in the sense of their way of life and outlook). I assume you know very well that the term “Puritanism” is used today in a much broader sense than as a description of that group. I brought from there an example of religious belief going together with libertarianism.

3. My words were very clear, and I saw no one who failed to understand them. Did anyone understand from my words that you are a hypocrite?

4. Perhaps. That’s what I understood.

5. Here lies the main point of my claim and of our dispute, and therefore I will explain it again. In your article there is a clear description of a contradiction between conservatism and liberalism. Regardless of the article’s brevity or length, that is the main point, not some marginal matter that you omitted or failed to elaborate on. I argue that when someone sees a certain position as contradictory, he cannot explain it on its own terms (its substantive, intrinsic logic), and therefore he needs psychological reductions. From his point of view psychology is a full explanation (that is the reduction), not a partial one, because on the substantive plane there cannot, in his view, be an explanation. Against that I argued. I claim there is no contradiction, and therefore it is wrong to see the psychological explanation (with which I agreed, at least partially) as a reduction, that is, as a full explanation. Therefore brevity and length have no relevance here, because this was the essence of your remarks there and not a marginal point that was insufficiently developed.
If, as you write, in your view the psychological explanation is not complete and you recoil from such explanations, why did you not offer a broader explanation but only the aspect from which you recoil? And if there really is a contradiction here, how can there be any explanation beyond psychology? Perhaps stupidity (adopting a contradictory thesis without noticing) is the only option besides that.
Forgive me, but in your remarks you did not explain Feiglin and his tricks, but the process that the religious-Zionist public in general is undergoing. You explained that too by a psychological reduction. So your words here really do not describe what is written in your article.

6. I repeat and say that in my view Feiglin did resolve the tension (not he, but others before him; he merely adopts it). What I wrote, that he “does not deliver the goods,” was only from my perspective as someone opposed to religious coercion by the state. He does indeed provide the settlement of the above contradiction, and I wrote that both in the column and in my previous response to your remarks. This is explained well again and again in my words, and I do not understand why you return to this once more.

Nice to see real discussions at last…

Rabbi Michi (and anyone else who wishes), what about my question?

The very fact that Feiglin generates such an intellectual discussion here is a reason to vote for him; when was a philosophical discussion ever held in connection with any politician? The only intellectual discussion was why we need politicians at all…
Besides, I didn’t understand Tomer: Feiglin offers a significant reduction in coercion and an expansion of individual freedom, something no party offers (or in any case does not actually intend to implement). So despite the built-in contradiction (supposedly), he still has enormous advantages over the others.

Sorry, I hadn’t gotten around to it until now.
After all, I explained these things at length in the previous column and in this one and also in the comments. You are assuming an identity between liberalism and the left, but that is not so. There is a right-wing liberalism (indeed, at least in the economic sphere liberalism is identified with the right and not with the left). Feiglin argues that a person’s freedom is composed both of personal freedom and of his national identity. It is the freedom to live as he wishes within the framework of the collective to which he belongs. What is inconsistent here? As I wrote to Tomer, there may perhaps be tension here, but definitely not contradiction.

Sorry, I’ve now answered above.

The only point Tomer raises that Feiglin voters need to ask about is what his scale of values is. He keeps claiming (with something of a messianic tone) that in any case, once freedom is granted in Shushan, Orthodox religion will win and the Reform will lose; maybe even the LGBT community will decide to close up shop once they realize they no longer have anything to fight for. The question that needs to be asked is what he will do and what he will advance if the Reform become the dominant stream. What will he legislate if it turns out that the people have no desire to remain Jewish in the way he thinks a Jew should be. I’m pretty sure that in all his 300 pages he didn’t write even once what is more important in his eyes, religious values or liberty. He escaped that tension again and again by predicting a utopian world in line with his own values.

Rabbi, I didn’t understand your distinction between tension and contradiction. As I understand it, tension is between foundational values—for example, between freedom and equality there is tension, which I think is a fruitful tension. But contradiction comes afterward—if I support freedom but also slavery, that is a contradiction and not tension. Do you see this contradiction as stemming from two different foundational values, and therefore define them as tension, or do you disagree with my definition of the difference between tension and contradiction?

I didn’t understand, in your view, the difference between tension and contradiction. What I meant was this: clearly a libertarian will tend to remove as many restrictions as possible. Therefore, if at the same time he wants national identity, there is tension between that and his libertarianism (which means that statistically it may be that many libertarians will not want national identity). But this is not a contradiction for two reasons: 1. What I called the practical plane – because libertarianism need not be absolute. 2. And according to Feiglin (and again, he did not invent this) it even complements it – a person’s freedom includes a national component (Rav Kook assumes this all the time).
So, for example, someone who opposes coercion does not necessarily have to oppose coercing a person not to use hard drugs, for those same two reasons: 1. There is a limit to freedom. 2. Complete freedom is when a person controls his actions, that is, without narcotic influences.

> Another thing that seems strange to me in Persico’s criticism is that he points to a contradiction on one side of the map, but the other side, which disagrees with that side and adopts the two opposite conceptions (which are of course also contradictory), does not receive similar criticism. For if party A advocates a combination of X and Y, and party B opposes it on both fronts (advocating “not X” and “not Y”), then one who criticizes party A for contradiction in its positions (X contradicts Y) should also criticize party B for that same contradiction itself (“not X” contradicts “not Y”).

This is simply not correct. Not every logical relation is an if-and-only-if relation. If X implies “not Y,” but the implication in the opposite direction (“not Y” implies X) does not hold, then one cannot hold both X and Y (without reaching a contradiction), but one certainly can hold both “not X” and “not Y.” By way of illustration, when X = “I am a human being,” Y = “I am immortal,” then X implies “not Y,” but the implication in the opposite direction does not hold. Indeed X and Y contradict one another and cannot both obtain simultaneously (I cannot be both human and immortal), but “not X” and “not Y” can coexist side by side – I can be a mortal alien.

Wonderful. Truly wonderful. A pleasure to read.

I’ll note that the fallacy according to which religious people more easily accept authority is very common (in the army, for example, they assume that a religious recruit will treat orders with reverent awe, which only happens if he belongs to certain study halls).

Maybe it would be worthwhile to expand more on the areas of tension among different aspects of liberalism. For example: there are rabbis who do not believe in authority and therefore rule stringently according to all opinions, as opposed to others who are very lenient in halakhic rulings, but that forces them to believe in very strong rabbinic authority – and when this is perceived as a liberal position, perhaps it is because they deny that authority to others (who are more stringent)

Mevaker, may he live long. Even I, the small one, did not fall into so trivial a fallacy. I am speaking about equivalence and not implication.

With God’s help, 27 Adar 5779

To David, greetings,

Man’s freedom of choice – it is what enables him to choose the good out of genuine desire, and therefore religious Judaism has never aspired to descend into a person’s private life and compel observance of the commandments upon one who does not believe. We seek to bring near those who have strayed from the path of Torah by pleasant ways, through explanation, with a welcoming countenance, and through personal example.

What the representatives of the religious public have stood for and achieved to a considerable degree is the preservation of Torah in public life: that the state and its institutions conduct themselves as befits a Jewish state, through observing Shabbat and kashrut and the like. The individual may do as he wishes, but the state, in its actions as a state, should behave according to Halakha and fulfill the “commandments of the public” as a Jewish state.

Beyond that, the state’s actions influence its individual citizens. There is a small minority on either side that has a firm personal outlook. Most of the public is “in the middle,” and what the state does, what its leaders say, what the intellectual and media figures say – all this influences the wavering public.

We saw this, unfortunately, in the early days of the state, when hundreds of thousands of observant Jews who immigrated from Eastern countries were, for the most part, sent by the secular government to places where the education and culture were secular, and the top-down education brought about a significant undermining of their traditional spiritual world. And from the possibility of corruption we may learn about the possibilities of repair. To the extent that Judaism is taught, as much as possible, even in “general education,” a generation will grow up here to whom Judaism is not entirely foreign.

Likewise, there is an influence on individuals in the fact that Shabbat is the general day of rest of the economy. After all, both the 40 percent who are traditional and many of the secular prefer that on Shabbat they not have a regular workday, but rather be able to spend it with their family. When one allows businesses to open on Shabbat, economic competition creates a situation in which most workers and business owners will be forced to work on Shabbat; otherwise they will not be able to compete or to find work.

Therefore, one must be careful about situations in which absolute freedom to violate religion becomes a situation of coercion against religion. We should not reach the situation of America, where only a well-off person who is determined in his outlook can observe Shabbat and give his children a Jewish education.

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

With God’s help, 27 Adar 5779

To Eliyahu – greetings,

The Rav Tzvi Yehuda himself opposed “religious coercion,” and even joined the “League Against Religious Coercion,” until he realized that this “league” was against religion and not only against its coercion. The Rav Tzvi Yehuda’s conception is founded on the words of the Gemara in Berakhot, that “accepting the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven” – faith – precedes “accepting the yoke of the commandments,” and the people and its individuals will arrive at faith only by way of understanding through profound study of Jewish thought. The Rav Tzvi Yehuda labored to train a generation of students who would be able to delve into the thought of faith and explain it to the wider public.

See above in my response “Freedom – Between Public and Individual” the distinction between the public, upon whom the “commandments of the public” are imposed, and the individual, who will find his way to Judaism דווקא through freedom. And even regarding the “commandments of the public,” the Rav Tzvi Yehuda demanded keeping “a finger on the pulse” as to how much the public is ripe and ready to stand behind the ideals we aspire to lead. Hence the demand for “statism,” and the caution regarding “honor of the kingdom,” both because it realizes the public destinies of the people of Israel, and because in practice it represents the will of the public “wherever he is.”,

There is an inherent and healthy tension between the fact that faith brings us to aspire to great things and to demand more than what is seen “here and now,” and the faith that what exists “here and now” is the opening of hope for the great things to come, and from that we patiently bear with the public “wherever he is” in order to cultivate the longing for that wonderful future.

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

S. Tz. L., you’re back.

With God’s help, 28 Adar 5779

The idea that one can create a situation in which the state maintains complete libertine neutrality in matters of religion and culture may exist in the “world of ideas,” but not in reality. God forbid, we may find ourselves in the situation that exists in a good many countries today, where out of liberalism they decree decrees against circumcision, which constitutes “religious coercion” against the poor child, and against ritual slaughter, which supposedly constitutes “cruelty to animals,” and they forbid wearing a kippah in a public institution because it harms religious “neutrality.” And who knows what other decrees they may yet bring down upon our heads in the name of the “sanctity of liberal neutrality” 🙂 There is no escape: when there is no sympathy for Jewish heritage, there is a struggle against it!

We will not be able to satisfy the extreme liberals. They will always find some imagined “religionization” against which they must wage holy war. Better that we find ways to cooperate with the public that has a national and traditional inclination, and together find the “golden mean” between preserving the Jewish character of the State of Israel and genuinely respecting individual freedoms.

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

To Rabbi S. Tz. L., I have to respond.
He apparently lacks awareness of the hatred these laws arouse among secular people. And this is from many conversations I’ve had with friends my age.
The law does not recognize civil marriage? Then people do it deliberately and get married in Cyprus. There’s a law prohibiting the sale of חמץ? People go to an Arab and buy it. Deliberately. A fine is imposed for opening stores on Shabbat? No problem. The municipality will absorb the fine and the stores will keep selling “against the law,” except that now the buyers will also have a very harsh feeling of revulsion toward the religious.
The path to the golden mean (so that the state, which unites the Jewish people within it, will not be devoid of Jewish content) is simply to leave religion as a symbol, not as a “law” involving coercion.
P.S. Libertarianism is not a religion (except perhaps among atheists). It is simply a political position holding that violence and coercion are not the way to solve social problems. There is nothing anti-religious in this, and to think otherwise is simply a distortion (and as mentioned in the post, throughout the world it appears mainly among believers).

With God’s help, 28 Adar 5779

I don’t need to walk on tiptoe so as not to anger those who act “to provoke.” There is always an extremist minority that will run to an Arab to buy חמץ, something no law has prohibited and no law will prohibit him from doing, and yet he will cry out about the terrible coercion that nobody is imposing on him.

Thank God that today they make do with “complaining,” and do not do what they did when their political power was strong, when they forced hundreds of thousands of religious immigrants to give their children a secular education and cut off sidelocks and beards. Did they hate the religious any less when the religious were politically weak?

Thank God they did not succeed. About forty percent of the people of Israel define themselves as traditional, another twenty percent as religious and ultra-Orthodox, and the percentage of the religious and traditional is steadily rising.

And even most secular people have a respectful attitude toward Jewish tradition. They understand that refraining from selling חמץ in stores on Passover is a minimal gesture of respect toward the heritage of Israel of thousands of generations, by whose merit we preserved our identity. Most residents of Israel, including the secular, will not eat חמץ on Passover even in their own homes, without any law forcing them to do so.

As for Shabbat, there are stronger impulses: both from business owners who think opening on Shabbat will bring them large profits, and from people who exploit the fact that Shabbat still serves as a day of rest and therefore want to use it for “shopping,” without thinking that every commercial branch that opens on Shabbat forces tens of thousands of business owners and workers to make their Sabbath into a weekday, not out of choice but from economic necessity.

In short:
Torah-observant Jews and those who cherish it do not live here by the grace of the extremist secularists. Most of the public values Israel’s tradition and observes it somewhat or greatly, and it is our right and duty to work so that the social agreements established in law be preserved: that the state operate with observance of Shabbat and kashrut, that Shabbat be the economy’s day of rest, and that the system of personal-status law be according to Halakha.

The extremist secularists can continue to behave as they wish and still complain; that is their right in a democratic state. We will not deny them the double pleasure 🙂

With b
lessing, S. Tz. Levinger

Paragraph 6, line 3-4
… the social agreements established in law…

With God’s help, 29 Adar II 5779

On the complexity in the approaches of Rav Kook and Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who on the one hand advocated drawing people near through understanding and willingness, and on the other hand worked for “religious legislation” that would determine the Jewish character of the public sphere of the Yishuv and the state – see Rabbi Avraham Wasserman’s article, “Who Led the Religious Legislation,” on the Arutz 7 website.

With blessings for a peaceful Sabbath and a good new month, S. Tz. Levinger

Regarding the personal exchange between Tomer and R. Michi: it is important for me to reveal to Tomer – whom I have followed for years – that Rabbi Michi writes substantively and not out of contempt. Quite the opposite. I remember that more than a decade ago, when Persico’s site was in its infancy, I approached Rabbi Michi after a fascinating lecture on liberty and freedom before Passover (it was at Nefesh Yehudi in Jerusalem), and there I asked him something touching on what Persico had written. Rabbi Michi surprised me in that not only did he already know him back then, but he said that he held him in esteem and that his words were wise. Years have passed, and indeed the rabbi continues to appreciate and respect him. Substantively. And this despite the change that may have occurred in his attitude toward religion/religiosity. I have no idea about that matter. Therefore it saddened me to read the offense Tomer felt from Michi and the attack that resulted from it. Had he known about the long-standing appreciation, untouched by the ravages of time, perhaps he would have felt the tone of the remarks differently. To my mind, the greatest compliment that can be is to be struck by a logical bear-blow from Rabbi Michi’s palm—a blow that would crush my dogmatic skull. Good for Tomer if he got such a slap. For him they would be like the slaps of Rabbi Ovadia, of blessed memory.

🙂

I didn’t understand (as a religious libertarian influenced by the political discourse of the United States) why there is a tension—certainly not a severe one—between a libertarian position and a conservative religious position.
The libertarian position accepts the freedom and autonomy of the individual to do whatever he pleases even when that conflicts with my conservative values. I can establish communities with shared conservative values; whoever wants can join, and whoever doesn’t, good for him.
This can also be understood as a religious value: religious behavior should be autonomous.
Also, the accusation that the libertarian position is derived from a need so that I won’t be harmed is reading things with an evil eye. One could also say that a person understands things after experiencing them in his own flesh—I do not want harm done to my values, and thus I understand that others also want to protect their values.
There is also nothing wrong with following the spirit of the times; one should discuss things on their merits.
However, regarding Jewish tradition, I think that here there is indeed great tension. The Sanhedrin is supposed to issue halakhic rulings for all Israel, even for one who does not like it. There are punishments that a court can impose on Sabbath violators and the like. Even the hope for the Davidic monarchy or for a king in general is problematic in this context.

The tension is not with conservatism as such, but with the conception of conservatism-nationalism as something that requires and justifies state intervention in the life of the individual.

A person who truly believes sees no other possibility. There is no such thing as relative truth or “my truth.” Consequently, talk about suckers who preserve the religious character is irrelevant. From the standpoint of a person who believes in values, he will impose them on the other exactly as he imposes them on himself, just as a person does not allow his fellow to steal or murder.
The more we try to understand the lack of contradiction between conservatism and liberalism, the closer we come to understanding that we do not truly believe in what we uphold for ourselves.
What Feiglin is doing is an injustice to the believing public, because he lowers the level of religious discourse to something vague and non-binding.

Absolutely not true. See for example here:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%AA/

I was looking for references to capitalism and got here. You write, “Capitalism advocates giving fishing rods while the left advocates giving fish.” In other words, only a pragmatic argument. But what is your view regarding the “essential” argument, about what is the right thing to do? I, for example, think the idea that the fruit of a person’s labor “belongs” to him is not correct, and that the proper distribution of resources at any given moment should not be influenced at all by the past—“justice, not charity,” as they rightly cry on the squares as a matter of principle. That is, absolute socialism. But in practice, what keeps supermarket shelves full is soft capitalism, and therefore that is what should be done. And socialism should be reserved for smaller groups with whom I actually want to live together and from whom I do not feel a general threat. Admittedly, I personally am not willing to stand behind my principles and distribute the money I have equally to the needy, because it is too hard (I would try to prevent a thief by force from stealing my money even though presumably it is more fitting that some of my money be with him than with me), but flowery principles are one thing and actions another. For some reason this column gave me the scent of an argument as though on the “essential” side the economic left is correct, but on the practical side it simply doesn’t work. Is that indeed your view (and in this you would gladden me in honor of the upcoming festival)?

I’m not sure what to answer here. Clearly there are capitalists whose outlook is built on outcomes, but ideological capitalism advocates this irrespective of the outcomes.
As for myself, I’m not a socialist in disguise. I believe in capitalism on principle, beyond its better results.