While some Jews of the twenty-first century may put wealth before everything else, the first century Tanna Hanina ben Dosa, who was the Talmudic Hasid par excellence stated, "What is mine is yours, and what is yours is your own."
According the extra-Biblical literature of the Greco-Roman period, the sect of Hasidim (not connected with modern Eastern European Hasidim) were opponents of the Seleucids and joined the Maccabean rebellion. This Hasidic tradition may have survived into the late Geonic period, and the letters of the Gaon Solomon ben Yehuda (11th century CE) suggest an interaction between Rabbinic Jewish descendants of Talmudic Hasidism and Muslim ascetic pietism or Sufism.
Developing Muslim ideas of ascetic theology are then borrowed back into Rabbinic Judaism via authors like Bahya ibn Pakuda, whose book entitled The Duties of the Heart belongs almost completely to the Muslim pietist heritage. Traditional Jews were retranslating and studying Bahya's work as part of their practice of Judaism at least until 1919.
Geonic ascetic pietism was already in competition with social-economic developments that brought pre-Rabbinic communities of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages into the slave trade. This highly profitable business remained an important source of Jewish riches during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. (See Followup: Origins of Modern Jewry, Les origines des juifs actuels, and The Origins of Modern Jewry.)
Eastern European Hassidism developed in the eighteenth century as a reaction to domination of Polish Jewish society by the combined merchant-scholar class, whose rapacious use of communal taxes increased as the collapsing Polish government tried to extract ever larger amounts of money from the Jewish community through the communal leaders.
Eventually, the Hassidic communities developed their own wealthy class while the draft of Jews into the Czarist army opened up new fissures in Jewish society when Jewish communal leaders began to employ kinderkhapper (kidnappers of children) to force the children of the poor into military service in lieu of those of the rich.
Among traditional religious Jews the Musar (Ethics) Movement took a leading role in fighting such outrageous exploitation of the poor by the rich, but the decline of religious faith led an increasing number of community dissenters into Marxist, socialist and revolutionary radicalism as more Jews became Russianized without full acceptance into Russian society. Radical Jews, who were a minority among Jews in the Czarist Empire and among Russian Jewish emigrants to the USA, focused on social justice instead of wealth.
Marxist radical Jews made it possible for the Russian Communist Party to steal the Russian Revolution and to consolidate the Soviet Union. American radical Jews produced a tremendous legacy in social activism and civil rights in the USA.
The Soviet government began to treat Soviet Jews with suspicion after the creation of the State of Israel while American Jewish radicalism was a victim of the Red Scare and the Rosenberg Trial.
The collapse of American and Russian Jewish radicalism did not necessarily mean that American Jews had to elevate wealth to the primary Jewish value, but the Israeli government and Israel advocacy groups seem to have made an effort since the 1950s to pick winners in media and other industries. Probably criminal collusion between wealthy American Jews, Israel advocacy groups, and the Israeli government has created a hyper-wealthy transnational elite Zionist Jewish political class that simultaneous intimidates American national political leaders and keeps them in a state of dependency. Because this political class needs foot soldiers, it is providing funding to the organized Jewish community to indoctrinate American Jews to serve the elite's interests in the mistaken belief that they are acting to save Israel from all sorts of existential threats.*
Hazony's article, which Phil mentions below, seems to be part of this effort to rewrite American Jewish history through an attack on Heschel, who serves as the official Jewish "hero" of the Civil Rights Movement.
The campaign constitutes poetic justice because Heschel's extremist bigotry against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and Christians (Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation, Israel, An Echo of Eternity) should really have put him beyond the pale of acceptability as any sort of a positive American Jewish historical protagonist.
Note
*) In other words Jews that would disdain a political program if the Bronfmans, the Krafts, Wexner, or Adelson proposed it fall over themselves in obedience if "profession Jewish leaders" from the organized Jewish community advocate the selfsame program as necessary to the survival of the Jewish state.
'Commentary' Says Wealth Is a Jewish Value
Anyway, I noticed the following in David Hazony's attack on Rabbi Heschel in Commentary:
Heschel wound up advancing naïve or even harmful public positions, frequently echoing the most worn clichés of the universalist Left.
One example concerns his inveterate suspicion of well-earned wealth, a suspicion ungrounded in Jewish sources. Once, in a classroom discussion about whether a disused synagogue in New York City should be sold to a church or to a bank, he said: "If it is sold to a bank then it will become a temple of capitalism; if sold to a church, it will continue to be a temple of God." Thus did Heschel dismiss the one institution that had probably done more than any other to preserve Jewish economic life through centuries of persecution and deprivation—in favor of an institution whose record with regard to his people was, to say the least, more complicated.
The great spiritual challenge to my people, and to Commentary, is what role those gifts ought to play when we are not living "in persecution and deprivation" but are principals in American society.
1 comments:
wealth is a human value -- people value wealth -- i don't find anything particularly jewish about it. Jews have always valued wealth because they are human. I can't think of a single Jewish literary source that praises wealth, certainly not an ethical one. Job, perhaps -- but the message of that book, according to Maimonides, is that the worldly goods he enjoyed are not real goods.
I can't believe that Phil Weiss has the stomach to read Commentary, much less Hazony. Yuk.
Happy Purim. Remember, "Amalek" and "Haman" are personifications of the evil in this world -- and I think we could pretty much agree on what that is.
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