Last week’s article dealt mostly with Chabad’s history and involvement in fierce resistance to the great Western tyrannies in Russia and Germany.
This resistance was not shallow, and while it was certainly political in that it addressed fundamental political issues, particularly freedom of religion, it always came to the political issues from a religious base.
Politics as religion is disastrous.
Politics that recognizes the sacredness and primacy of our relationship with God is a blessing.
The kind of politics that results in a First Amendment is a blessing we all need.
The state places religion beyond the control of government while simultaneously disallowing religion to enshrine itself at the helm of state power.
The government is a civil authority, and its citizens will bring their religious inspiration and insight to their civil engagement, for good governance is itself a divine concern.
After the bloody wars surrounding the Reformation, and the attempt of all sides to forcibly establish their version of the true religion as supreme, the West brought forth a new view that embraced an ever-stronger concept of religious freedom.
It was powered by thinkers who read widely and found inspiration and practical guidance in many sources.
This was not new.
The very small educated class of medieval Europe engaged in scholarly exploration across the boundaries of the warring faith communities.
The Christian Scholastics knew and valued not only the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, but also Muslim thinkers such as ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Farabi, and ibn Rushd (Averroes) as well as great Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides and Gersonides.
What was new in post-Reformation Europe was the engagement with the rabbinic/Talmudic tradition.
For a thousand years, Christian thought treated rabbinic thought as worthless at best, fiendishly dangerous at worst, so that on several occasions, the Talmud was seized and burnt.
But for Christian thinkers like Pico della Mirandola, Joahnnes Reuchlin, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, rabbinic legal and mystical traditions opened up a new door which they were eager to pass through.
These people and those influenced by them led the way to the First Amendment.
They had stopped looking at those outside their own tradition as caricatures of evil and found that such mythology hindered the development of personal moral accountability that is the cultural sine qua non for self-governance.
And so, when formerly trusted political commentators have suddenly embraced spiritual and political atavism, it is time to show how inadequate that response is to the challenges of today.
The goal here is to continue to contrast Tucker Carlson’s viciously shallow caricature of a Jewish movement with a brief summary of some of its central religious ideas.
The aim is to contrast Carlson’s approach with that of the scholarship that made the West’s greatness possible.
The goal is not to escape from any criticism, much less to censor anyone.
It is rather to allow readers to see for themselves and judge for themselves what criticism is constructive and valid and results from a deep and caring insight into those it criticizes and what criticism is destructive, not in good faith, and unwilling and afraid to see beyond bias and self-serving caricature.
The most important of Chabad’s ideas lie in the deep insights of the....
