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13 Fully Human, Fully Jewish HE KANTIAN VISION of the mature person as a rational selflegislator provided two philosophically justified rationalizations for disdaining Jewish identity. The one endorsed a self-satisfied individualism; the other, an embrace of only those duties applicable to all humankind. It is to the inadequacies of this latter strategy that I now tum. Modem discourse, by its very logic, places a severe disability on anyone seeking to mandate primary loyalty to a social particular. The self being thefoundation stone of all modem authority, corporate demands can rightly be made only in the name of all selves, the universal, and not the particular. By our accepted standards of argument, then, individuality receives its significance by virtue of being an instance of a valued general class or category. This pattern of assigning value indicates that the particular intrinsically has merely contingent status. To compensate for this loss of quality, one then can try to demonstrate the particular's value as an effective means toward the universal ideal. The reduction of Jewish particularity to merely instrumental significance helped undermine dedication to Jewish duty by subjecting its demands to an invidious cost/benefit analysis: How efficiently do they enable us to attain what reason bids us care more about, namely, our universal human goals? The priority of the universal makes the H!e of Torah that dispensable. As they modernized, Jews happily ignored this difficulty and enthusiastically made general ethics their Torah; before and without Hitler, the lure of the universal threatened an end to the Jews. In Western Europe it took the bourgeois form of an assimilation that found humanism the fulfillment of everything worthwhile to which Judaism had aspired in its cramped and Semitic fashion. In Eastern Europe, socialist and communist doctrines of political universalism flourished luxuriantly. In their parties and later in the Soviet Union, the devotees of these doctrines anathematized Judaism and Zionism for diverting attention from the proper goals of the workers of the world. Particularity: From Subordinate to Partner Personally experiencing the nobility of universal humanhood, emancipated Jews idealistically took on the task of making it the 182 13 Fully Human, Fully Jewish HE KANTIAN VISION of the mature person as a rational selflegislator provided two philosophically justified rationalizations for disdaining Jewish identity. The one endorsed a self-satisfied individualism; the other, an embrace of only those duties applicable to all humankind. It is to the inadequacies of this latter strategy that I now tum. Modem discourse, by its very logic, places a severe disability on anyone seeking to mandate primary loyalty to a social particular. The self being thefoundation stone of all modem authority, corporate demands can rightly be made only in the name of all selves, the universal, and not the particular. By our accepted standards of argument, then, individuality receives its significance by virtue of being an instance of a valued general class or category. This pattern of assigning value indicates that the particular intrinsically has merely contingent status. To compensate for this loss of quality, one then can try to demonstrate the particular's value as an effective means toward the universal ideal. The reduction of Jewish particularity to merely instrumental significance helped undermine dedication to Jewish duty by subjecting its demands to an invidious cost/benefit analysis: How efficiently do they enable us to attain what reason bids us care more about, namely, our universal human goals? The priority of the universal makes the H!e of Torah that dispensable. As they modernized, Jews happily ignored this difficulty and enthusiastically made general ethics their Torah; before and without Hitler, the lure of the universal threatened an end to the Jews. In Western Europe it took the bourgeois form of an assimilation that found humanism the fulfillment of everything worthwhile to which Judaism had aspired in its cramped and Semitic fashion. In Eastern Europe, socialist and communist doctrines of political universalism flourished luxuriantly. In their parties and later in the Soviet Union, the devotees of these doctrines anathematized Judaism and Zionism for diverting attention from the proper goals of the workers of the world. Particularity: From Subordinate to Partner Personally experiencing the nobility of universal humanhood, emancipated Jews idealistically took on the task of making it the 182 FULLY HUMAN, FULLY JEWISH 183 living, historical reality of every human being. Recent history has judgedit to be hopelessly utopian to dream of an imminent Messianic Age that reorders all human relationships on a thoroughly universalistic basis. Looking within, as well, this...

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