The Dilemmas of Morality and Power -- A Last Word
Morality and Power: Contemporary Jewish Views, Conclusion
Daniel J. Elazar
Ours is a topic that can only be talked about today in light of
the hard realities of the world in which we live and of the
position of the Jews and the Jewish state in that world. Today,
we Jews are confronted with the realities of power, its joys and
curses.
In some respects we Jews have been reveling in the joys of power,
of having power, after such a long period of powerlessness. But
now we also have to come to understand some of the curses of
power so that we can perhaps understand better what the
responsibilities for exercising power are and how difficult these
matters can be. It is a lot easier for Jewish intellectuals in
America to complain about Irish cops than it is when the Jews are
the cops as well. But you cannot have power without having cops.
Pio Baroja, the great Spanish anarchist writer of the beginning
of the twentieth century, defined the ideal commonwealth from an
anarchist point of view as one "without priests, without flies,
and without policemen." Unfortunately, we have since learned
that one cannot have a world without flies and also have a world
without policemen. Somebody has got to make sure that those
people who are basically garbage dumpers do not do it. That is
at the most minimum level of order, which is why Pio Baroja is
now remembered more as a writer than he is as a political
thinker.
Jews were in a situation where, figuratively and often literally,
we had no policemen for almost 2,000 years. It is not that we
were not involved in politics; we were involved in the politics
of powerlessness. It was the politics of maneuver, of doing what
we could with what little we had, what little we could offer in
exchange for a minimum amount of security that enabled us to
survive as a people throughout the long years of dispersion.
In many respects, rabbinic Judaism as we came to know it in its
normative state was a set of prescriptions for how to live in a
world in which we were nearly powerless. The sages did not want
a powerless Jewish people, but understood that under the
circumstances they needed to teach their people how to reconcile
the realities of being in a position of minimal power with their
collective needs and how to adjust accordingly. What they did
was to teach Jews how to channel their political yearnings into
spiritual ones wherever possible. Jews accepted that because
they had no choice. While there was a choice, normative Judaism
was not as normative as it later became. It struggled with other
understandings of how to be Jewish and what being Jewish meant.
But at a certain point because there was no other choice it
became the normative brand of Judaism, with various variations,
but basically that was it.
Approximately 100 years ago, a significant body of Jews founded
the Zionist movement on the premise that Jews had had enough of
powerlessness; that the Jewish people had to make it their
business to get back into a situation where, as a polity, they
could exercise normal political power in the normal world. In
other words, they argued that the Jewish people should seek a
state of its own, one which, whatever special qualities it would
have (and there were a wide range of Zionist visions), would be
normal, with both the trappings and the responsibilities of
sovereignty, with an army, with a police force.
After the Six-Day War, Israel passed from having attained a
politics of power to a situation which Jews began, the truth be
told, to get a little drunk on power, both in Israel and in the
diaspora. Suddenly Jews began discussing Jewish politics in new
terms. While acknowledging that the exercise of power is a heavy
responsibility, basically Jews liked the new situation very much.
We liked being the strong guys on the block for a change. that
is must understandable. When all is said and done, it is still
better to be the strong guy on the block than the weak guy, even
though strength carries with it responsibilities that bring their
own problems. That is where we were for the past twenty years.
Now in the last few years Jews have begun to confront the other
side of power. It is most blatant, of course, in relation to
Israel, but it is not only in relation to Israel. We can see
other facets of it, even in relation to diaspora communities,
particularly in the United States and France. We are learning
that power is like fire. Power is amoral. It is energy, it is
force. It can be used for good; it can be used for ill. It can
be well-controlled; it can be poorly controlled. It can be
well-directed; it can be channeled; if not properly controlled or
channeled, it can be abused.
In my opinion, the Jewish people made the right decision 100
years ago when we decided to go back to seek a politics of power,
to seek the restoration of our own state that would play a role
in the world. We need power, but we must learn how to control
and live with it.
Quite frankly, I have very little patience with those who accuse
Israel of abandoning Jewish values for reasons of political and
military necessity. Statehood is a serious business and the
State of Israel is not a summer camp for diaspora Jews. What are
"Jewish values" held in the abstract and used to lecture others
as to how to behave in dealing with the real difficulties of the
human condition? It is easy to preach "Jewish values" when one
does not have to pay the price.
The real question is: how do Jews preserve, foster and apply
Jewish values when they must take care of themselves. When I
hear my son, a medic in the Israeli tank corps who was serving in
Samaria in February 1988, tell us how he saved the life of an Arab
youth who wounded him in the leg and was subsequently shot in
self-protection by one of my son's comrades, to me that says more
about Jewish values than any number of articles on the New York
Times Op-Ed page. In that connection, survival is also a Jewish
value and it ill behooves the generation that had the good
fortune to survive or not be caught up in the Holocaust to forget
that.
That does not mean that there cannot be disagreements with regard
to Israel's political and military policies. Israelis, like all
humans, make mistakes and need to reassess matters from time to
time. But there is a difference between recognizing human error
and trying to correct it, and bemoaning the loss of Jewish values
which seem to somehow be best preserved in a hothouse by people
who do not bear the responsibility for the lives and security of
others. I happen to believe that there have been few governments
in history which have been so concerned with the moral aspects of
their exercise of political and military power -- in Israel's
case, for clearly Jewish reasons, whether traditionally religious
or not.
The Zionist pioneers reluctantly pursued statehood to begin with.
They were reluctant to establish an army. (Indeed, the choice of
the name Israel Defense Forces was designed to reflect the
Zionist commitment not to have any army.) The IDF that developed
spends extraordinary amounts of time -- appropriately -- in
trying to teach its soldiers Jewish values and their practical
connections with the IDF mission. We have seen some of the
results o that in the IDF's recoiling from the excesses that
developed out of the Arab outbreaks, a situation which by its
very nature provokes excesses.
There are some who are far less attuned to these moral dilemmas
than others. There always are such in every society. And there
are times when even those who are attuned will not live up to
their own moral commitments. But overall, in my opinion, Israel
continues to have an excellent record in this regard, one that
has cost any number of Israeli lives over the years.
Despite media reports to the contrary, Israel has no lost or
basically changed its sense of purpose or vision. ON the most
immediate level, Israel is still a place where Jews can find a
secure home, where every Jew lives by right and not by
sufferance, and where Jews can develop as a people and not simply
as individuals. On a second level, Israel remains committed to
the principle that it should be the place where the dominant
culture is Jewish and where authentic Jewish cultural development
-- good, bad, or indifferent -- is part of the life of everybody
in the state (including the non-Jews), and not merely small
groups of intellectuals or ultra-Orthodox. At the highest level,
despite all the difficulties, Israel is still pursuing the Jewish
dream of striving to become a good society, even as it strives to
become a normal one.
It is this combination that sometimes goes unnoticed among
Israel's critics. To be a society of saints requires that others
be normal and do the saints' dirty work for them. That is the
approach of those who set themselves in ivory towers, of Essenes,
or Christian utopian communities. We Jews have had enough of
that kind of sainthood. For us it has cost too much.
It is true that there is a tension in Zionism between the search
for normality, to be like all the nations, and the effort to
build a special Jewishly-informed polity -- a light unto the
nations. Both sides to that tension have their merits.
Therefore the only way to resolve the tension between them is to
try to achieve a synthesis of both, which is what Israel has been
consciously or unconsciously trying to do. the big change that
has taken place in the last forty years is that we are wiser now
and understand that this is a more difficult task than the
Zionist visionaries and those of us who followed them originally
thought -- in part because of the hostile environment in which
Israel finds itself, in part because of the cultural baggage
which we brought from the Galut, in part because of elements in
the Jewish character which we conveniently could ignore as long as
we were a persecuted minority and could blame them on others, and
in part because of human nature in general. If the task is much
harder than we thought, this only makes the challenge that much
greater.
