http://www.israpundit.com/archives/40099
The New Replacement Theology
By Daniel Greenfield
In the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, a story asks; ‘Judaism
without God? Yes, say American atheists’. You can have Judaism without
G-d, much as you can have an “On Faith” section without anything to
have faith in.
It’s all a matter of definition. If you define Judaism by its
covenantal document as a binding agreement between a people and the
Creator of the universe, then an atheistic Judaism is a contradiction
in terms. But if you define it as a cultural experience that calls us
to social work and spirited debate, then it makes no real difference
what you believe, so long as you volunteer at the Tikkun Olam soup
kitchen.
What goes for Judaism, also goes for Christianity. The issue is not
atheism, it’s the nature of religion and what it is and what it isn’t.
Either religion is a specific belief in a deity accompanied by textual
revelations, or it’s the Democratic party with its own pulpit.
The issue comes up every time the left tries to insist that its
version of Christianity and Judaism, where the worst sin imaginable is
not driving a hybrid is the right one, because it’s compassionate and
spiritual. A spirituality that consists wholly of compassion and a
compassion that consists wholly of following a left of center ideology
while claiming that their grab bag of the welfare state, anti-war
activism and environmentalism is highly spiritual.
Take Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, please. Waskow, a left-wing activist
and a member of a non-theistic movement, and his disciples, are
usually found wherever Israel is demonized and the mass murder of Jews
by Islamic fanatics is promoted with the beatific smile of the hazed
out humanistic fanatic.
The paradox of a paragon of a humanistic un-religion making common
cause with men who believe that their specific revelation entitles
them to commit genocide is baffling. Or it would be if Waskow really
was a humanist. In reality Waskow is a socialist with a pulpit. Even
if it’s only an imaginary one.
Waskow’s idea of Judaism exists only as a metaphor for left of center
ideology. The bible is only relevant to the extent that it can be used
as a mythological connection to civil rights, nuclear war or global
warming. The civil rights movement is just like Passover, nuclear war
is just like Noah’s flood and Judaism becomes a lens for giving depth
to left-wing causes. There is no god but Das Kapital and Waskow is its
prophet.
This replacement theology often goes unremarked upon, even as it has
become a base for Waskowites to call for Jewish genocide in the name
of Jewish values.
The Waskowites, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s bastard spawn, support Hamas,
denounce Israel and join hate groups such as J-Street and Jewish Voice
for Peace. Rabbi Phyllis Berman was affiliated with J-Street and a
former member of Jewish Fast for Gaza. Rabbi Rebecca Alpert sits on
the Rabbinic Cabinet of J Street and the Rabbinic Council of JVP.
And because there’s always something worse than worse, there’s Jewish
Voice for Peace, an organization which supports a boycott of Israel
and its destruction through a One State Solution. Its Rabbinic council
includes Rabbi Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, Rabbi Brant Rosen,
who can never decide if he hates Israel more than he hates the
Republican party, and Rabbi Brian Walt, along with plenty of others.
As Rosh Hashana comes along, many of them will mount pulpits to
explain why Israel is the enemy and why it must be destroyed in the
name of Jewish values. They won’t say it in quite so many words, they
will dwell on checkpoints and blockades and bring up apartheid and the
civil rights movement. They will hardly mention Hamas, except to sigh
that it hasn’t chosen the path of non-violent resistance, but that
won’t stop them from supporting its goals anyway.
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan certainly did not mean to found a movement of
genocidal apologists and activists. In 1958, at the Rabbinical
Assembly of America, he sounded positively hawkish as he warned that
Israel might be becoming the Czechoslovakia of this era.
He warned that Western countries would scapegoat Israel through a
“futile policy of appeasing Arab nationalism” and that Zionism was the
force best qualified to “reconstitute the continuity, spirituality and
structure of Jewish life.”
Could he have foreseen that Israel would become a scapegoat within his
very own movement, which would view Zionism as its sworn enemy? Kaplan
sought a larger Jewish unity through Israel, but his divisive
disciples are only interested in unity with the agenda of the far left
and serve as the public relations arm of the murderers of the Jewish
people.
Where Kaplan had envisioned a Jewish rebirth, his movement instead
became another vector for the left’s replacement theology, hijacking
it as thoroughly as its Muslim allies were hijacking planes. It has
spawned rabbis whose only religion is the left, whose only god is the
left and whose only scripture is the works of the left.
It is entirely possible to be an atheist or a humanist and support
Israel– but what is not possible, is using left wing ideology as your
scripture and being anything other than an enemy of Israel and the
Jewish people. The Waskows, Alperts, Bermans and Barenblats prove
that.
It’s an old lesson taught by the Jewish Communists who cheered pogroms
as the will of the oppressed peasants and workers, who served the
Bolshevik takeover and lined up to turn synagogues into cultural
centers and send Rabbis and Zionists to the gulags– only to eventually
end up there themselves when their red masters no longer had any use
for them.
As Lenin wrote; “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis
and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies.”
“Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish
“national culture” is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy
of the proletariat… he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the
bourgeoisie.
On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian,
Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist
organisations, and make their contribution… towards creating the
international culture of the working-class movement… uphold the best
traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of “national culture”.”
This position is still virtually indistinguishable from that of the
Jewish left on Israel today. The Jewish nation is the enemy of the
proletariat of “brown people” and the accomplice of extremist Rabbis
and the middle-class. Only those Jews who join in an international
working class movement uphold the “best traditions of Jewry” as
determined by V.I. Lenin.
The modern Jewish left uses “tribalism” or “ethnonationalism” in place
of Lenin’s “separatism” and “national culture”. It uses “materialism”
in place of the “bourgeoisie” and “solidarity” in place of the
“proletariat”, but the “best traditions of Jewry” slogan remains
unchanged.
What are the best traditions of Judaism? We have the Lenin and Waskow
interpretation. The one that says the best tradition of Judaism is to
destroy it, to boycott Israel, join hands with the murderers of Jews
and make war on the Jewish people. Anyone who wants to see where that
interpretation leads can take a tour of the gulags, where the
Yevesktsia’s own members ended up, after they were done collaborating
in the Communist genocide of Russian Jews. Or they can take a tour of
J Street’s offices.
The ideological space between them isn’t that great. Listen to a JVP
speech and you hear echoes of a Yevsektsia (Jewish Section) member
ranting about Zionism chauvinism and outmoded religious fanaticism,
and the rise of a new generation of Jewish youth committed to the
struggle for the working class.
The end of that ideology is a retired gentleman whom I met, with a
Jewish last name, who was a former member of the Soviet military
establishment, and spoke proudly of training suicide bombers. He was
rather disappointed in his grandchildren for moving to Israel, and
thought that young people today just don’t have the same principles
that they once used to when he was a young man. He would have fit in
perfectly at Jewish Voice for Peace.
On the other end of the spectrum is Rosh Hashana, the beginning of a
new year. To much of the Jewish left, it is a mere cultural event, or
a chance to reflect on the traditions of social justice. But though it
is a new year, it is not actually the first month of the calendar.
That honor belongs to Nissan, the month of the Jewish exodus from
Egypt.
Even within the Jewish calendar, the peculiar separatism of the Jews
places the month of the redemption from Egypt as its start,
recognizing that there is no Jewish peoplehood without the exodus.
Rosh Hashana is the beginning of a personal and communal new year, but
the era of the Jewish people always begins with their national
liberation and the beginning of a national covenant with G-d.
This is not a metaphor for the civil rights movement or the oppressed
farm workers of Belize or any of the other nonsense that the
replacement theology of the left tries to jam in. Their old shell game
of covering everything up and then replacing it with a trojan horse
that has nothing but left wing ideology inside doesn’t work here. The
Jewish people begin here in the trackless desert, in the sacks of
unleavened dough and the long journey to the promised land. Not an
idea of it, but the reality of it.
Abstraction is the left’s game, it turns everything into a metaphor,
removes the context, replaces it and dares you to identify whether
you’re drinking coffee or crystals. But Jewish history is very much a
concrete thing. As is Jewish identity. It is simply the history of a
people. Jewish civilization is not about working class solidarity or
the highest ethical traditions, it is the sum total of our
achievements and failures. Our theology is the way that our history
has paralleled our relationship with our G-d.
This is who we are. This is how we have survived. The left may try to
replace us, but it can never succeed no matter how many collaborators
it recruits and how many warped ideas it puts forward.
Lenin was right. Jewish national culture was the slogan of his
enemies. And we are his enemies. As we are the enemies of the Waskows.
The old Cain and Abel struggle has never ended. But what the Cains
always forget is that while they are throttling Abel, Seth will come
to take his place. The Cains of the left may think that they have
their hands around our throat, only to rise baffled from the corpse to
see that the Jewish people still live.
The Yevsekstias and Kapos did their damnedest, only to turn around and
witness the rise of Israel. Their spiritual descendants are now
desperately hammering on Israel, venting their full fury on the Jewish
state. But even if Israel is destroyed, the Jewish people will still
go on. And the left will not.