Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [86]
It was probably inevitable that the evolution of human mind and skill would bring existence to the point of being wholly subject to the conduct of this unique creature, the human being. Now as never before in our planet's history the fate of everything—all higher plant and animal life, at the very least—depends on actions taken or not taken by a single species. While this reality has grown to be increasingly true over centuries, fueled by human population growth and rapid technological advances, only in this new era, beginning in the late twentieth century, has it become apparent to us. This new consciousness dawned with the nuclear age, the sense that we were indeed capable of destroying everything. But it quickly turned to the much more participatory need to change human actions because of the greater threat of environmental self-destruction, the overwhelming urgency of our time.
Our age is also different in being a time when Jews, a tiny fraction of humanity, live in highly privileged and powerful circumstances, having some real influence regarding crucial decisions that face us all. This is true of Jewish leaders in the political sphere, in communications media, business, the academy, and lots of other areas. Because of the role of religion in American life, our society would be happy to learn that views which influential Jews hold on major issues are in part shaped by thoughtful study of their own traditions. This is a situation for which our prior history never trained us. Because of our great drive toward success and status in the postemancipation world and the special circumstances of life in America, Jews are now the most highly educated subgroup within our society. In many cases economic and political influence follows that level of educational achievement. By coincidence, providence, or whatever you choose to call it, we American Jews happen to play important roles in the United States, where some of the most difficult choices about our planet's future have to be taken. In Israel, Jews have attained independent statehood, which also places them in a position of responsibility for the future of the land and sets them in power over a significant non-Jewish minority.
How do we hear and preach God's word in this very different age? Through most of our history, oppressed Jews seem to have lived by a narrowly crafted version of the principle of Rabbi Akiva, loving and caring for “our own” while paying greater or lesser lip service to Ben Azzai's universal human values. Most later Jewish legal authorities suggest that we should treat Gentiles as well as we do Jews for the sake of “the ways of peace,” which essentially means “in order to avoid anti-Semitism.” We recognize the full humanity of Gentiles, that is, so that they will, one hopes, recognize ours. Much of this in-group thinking can be attributed, of course, to the long centuries of persecution Jews suffered, when those in power neither saw nor treated us as fully human. Our natural response was self-protection, a turning inward to our own moral “neighborhood,” as it were, and living on a moral island.
In our day this self-isolation will no longer do. There is no threat of persecution that requires it. The time calls out for a Judaism appropriate to the new reality. The defensive medieval or shtetl reflexes no longer speak to the reality of our current situation. Naturally, the terrible experience of the Holocaust reawakened these reflexes, and all too