The West is broken. Judaism can fix it.
For the last 40 years or so, the West has thought entirely in terms of individual rights and not in terms of collective responsibilities.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Daniel Saunders who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is an organisation trying to return the West to traditional Western values.
Not all of the speakers and its recent conference were religious, but most of those who are seemed to be Christians. There were some Jewish presenters, but the mindset of social conservatism generally seems to be primarily Christian when it turns to religion, as shown by Mary Harrington’s statement in her write-up of her conference experiences that “you can save yourself reinventing a number of wheels by inviting theologically-minded Christians.”
This got me thinking about what Judaism can offer the return to traditional, small-c conservative, morality in the West.
The answer is: a lot.
Not only does Judaism form the ultimate basis of the West’s morality and not only were its foundational religious texts written by Jews, but Jews, unlike Christians, have long experience living and thriving as a counter-cultural minority inside a very different mainstream culture.
I believe that the West’s return to its traditional values will be the work of generations. In the meantime, social and cultural conservatives are going to have to learn how to live by and propagate those values inside an indifferent or even hostile mainstream culture. There are no better guides to how to do this than Orthodox Jews.
It is true that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, conservatives tended to distrust Jews as having non-Christian and divided identities (loyalties to Jews in other countries) that were at odds with the Christian-nationalist identities that conservatives in countries like Britain, Germany and even to some extent America wanted to promote.
However, the situation in the West now is very different. It is a given for non-extremist conservatives that Western culture has become irreversibly multiethnic and multi-religious and that a return to traditional Western values must encompass people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds while still promoting a shared narrative and shared values
This is more similar to historical American culture, the “melting pot,”1 than to historical European conservatism focused on church and crown. Jewish life in America has proven more successful than in any other diaspora country, albeit now with dangerous levels of assimilation.
The Jewish experience speaks specifically to this need for communities that can thrive without being assimilated or attempting to destroy the Other, communities willing to participate in the marketplace of ideas without attempting to coerce others or be coerced.
I will start by defining my terms. Orthodox Jews are those who try to live their lives according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law, as opposed to Conservative or Masorti Jews, for whom the law is rather more flexible and who sociologically do not behave at all as a conservative counter-culture, but rather as part of the politically left-of-centre cultural mainstream.
Progressive Jews do not see themselves as bound by Jewish law at all in any sense that Orthodox Jews would recognise. The majority of Orthodox Jews are Haredi (generally translated, not entirely sympathetically, as ultra-Orthodox), meaning, they embrace the strictest definitions of Jewish law and attempt to actively resist the encroachment of modernity, particularly the intellectual and social currents of modernity.
Technology not associated with assimilating modernity is generally seen as permitted (they aren’t Amish), so fridge-freezers and cars are okay, TV is not okay, computers and internet phones are on a fraught borderline depending on how different communities weigh their benefits against their costs.
The Modern Orthodox, to whom I belong, attempt to fuse strict observance of Jewish law with an embrace of the positive aspects of modernity and modern thought alongside all modern technology. Modern Orthodoxy hasn’t grappled much with postmodernity yet, typically lagging a couple of decades behind developments in the mainstream culture. Ben Shapiro and Jared and Ivanka Kushner are all examples of Modern Orthodox Jews.
What I am about to describe fits the Haredi world, but also to a large extent the Modern Orthodox world, particularly the American Modern Orthodox world, which is an enormously larger and more vibrant community than my own community in the UK.
I am not talking about Israeli Orthodoxy here, since Orthodoxy inside a predominantly Jewish (if largely less religious) culture necessarily looks less counter-cultural than diaspora Judaism, which takes place against a society that is both secular and non-Jewish and therefore twice alienated from the Orthodox Jewish community.
In addition, because they form about 20 percent or more of the total Israeli population, the Israeli Orthodox population has real political power in a way that it does not elsewhere. Diaspora Orthodoxy is therefore a better model for a counter-cultural conservative culture.
In this essay, I will layout a theoretical framework of core values that I think the wider social conservative movement could learn from. I will start in typical Jewish fashion with a text, in this case from Pirkei Avot (generally translated, not entirely accurately, as “Ethics of the Fathers”), the section of the Talmud (the ancient rabbinic attempt to apply Torah, the Hebrew Bible, to everyday life in late antiquity) that deals with ethics:
Shimon the Righteous was one of the last of the men of the great assembly. He used to say: the world stands upon three things: the Torah, the Temple service, and the practice of acts of piety.
Here, Shimon the Righteous lays out the fundamentals of Jewish life before the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and the loss of Jewish sovereignty in 70 CE: Torah study, Temple service (understood as being replaced by prayer after the destruction of the Temple) and acts of piety (usually understood as acts of kindness). I would argue that we can map these on to three modern core domains that can form a framework of responsible ethical renewal for Western society: education, community and family.
The focus on education as the greatest religious experience is perhaps the most distinctive attribute of the Jewish community, at least in practical (rather than theological) terms. The equation of Torah study with education in a broader sense works because Torah study refers to the education of the young to be comfortable within their tradition, as well as to be educated to have good morals (a form of education known in Hebrew as mussar).
This is not value-neutral. Arguably, little, if any, education is value-neutral. Someone has invariably selected topics to be learnt and topics that are weeded out as unnecessary and that, in itself, is a value judgment.
But the kind of education that Jews understand as Torah is inherently about passing on the values, ethics and traditions of previous generations to the new generation. It is not conceived as value-neutral at all. While many Modern Orthodox Jews would consider serious academic study as being as important as Torah study, it is not something undertaken indiscriminately. There must be moral judgments as to what is a suitable topic of study.
Suitable subjects to ask in planning a curriculum are: “What are the texts that teach our most important, foundational narratives and values?” and “What are the skills that promote lifelong learning?”
Torah study in Judaism is a lifelong religious obligation, not just something for childhood. According to the Jewish medieval philosopher and jurist Maimonides, Torah study is obligatory for males from as soon as they can speak until the day of death. (Women’s rights and obligations to study are less clearly defined, historically, and have varied widely with period and place.)
In other words, formal education from the youngest age must be geared to education in values and core narratives and education must be conceived as unending, a literal life’s work.
The second core domain mentioned by Shimon the Righteous is Temple service, which I understand as a reference to community, based on the idea that the Temple was the place of pilgrimage that all Jewish men had to attend three times a year, as well as a communal centre to which all Jews would flock during the year in order to have religious experiences, to give offerings and to pray.
(Note that, while associated with sacrifice, the Temple is never referred to as a “House of Sacrifice” in the Hebrew Bible, only as “God’s House” and a “House of Prayer.”)
Moreover, after the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis self-consciously moved many of the functions of the Temple to the synagogue, which became not just a place for prayer and Torah study, but also an important communal site, where money was raised for the poor and where travellers could find a host for the evening. We need “Houses of Community,”2 spaces outside government and the market for people to meet and engage with each other as well as to support the vulnerable and needy and promote life-long learning.
For many people, places of worship fulfill this function, but with advancing secularism, there is a need for additional, secular, spaces where people can still engage with ideas and people. Traditionally, libraries fulfilled many of these “secular place of worship” functions, but, in the UK, libraries were cut back in the austerity years following the 2008 financial crisis. There is an urgent need to rebuild and refund them, provided they can be used for the promotion of traditional values and do not refuse to promote them.
I have presented deeds of kindness as relating to the family rather than the community. Obviously, as I mentioned above, the community and the synagogue are indeed centres of kindness and social action.
However, it is the family that is the real locus of kindness in the Jewish imagination. The rabbis understood that, beyond its literal meaning, “Love your neighbour” meant, above all, to love your spouse. The family should be a place of love and giving. It is the fundamental source of practical and emotional support as well as Torah education; the communal structures of care and education are primarily for those who can not receive this from their families. The family is a centre of both reciprocal love and obligation. Without it, wider community would not be possible.
While family is a virtue in many religions, albeit perhaps more strongly in Judaism, where deliberate celibacy is a sin, not a virtue, unlike some religions, what is unusual in rabbinic Judaism is the focus on family, not church or temple, as the centre of religious life.
According to the rabbis, after the destruction of the Temple, the family table became the altar, with hospitality replacing sacrifice. Shabbat (the Sabbath) in particular is a time for the generations to spend time together without distractions and for parents to model good behaviour for children to pass on in their own families in the future.
It is also a time for more direct education with children often being quizzed about what they learnt in the last week or being expected to share an idea about the week’s Torah reading. This takes their studies out of school and embeds them in the home. Families of this kind, loving and reciprocal, need to be encouraged and seen as a social norm, not an exception.
How might these core ideas play out on a wider level? How can we build such a society, focused on education, community and family, even at a sub-cultural level?
To answer these questions, we should turn to the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, one of very few rabbis in the last 2,000 years think about government and society as a whole through a Jewish lens and virtually the only one to do so outside the context of a majority-Jewish state.
In his book “The Home We Build Together” (not an explicitly religious book for the most part), he speaks about three different types of society. There is a society that functions like a stately home, where newcomers might be welcome guests, but are very aware that the house belongs to a small, native elite. This was the model of British society until around the 1950s or 1960s, where a narrow, educated elite ruled society on traditional lines and immigrant communities were expected to assimilate and still to see the country as not entirely their own.
Then there is a society that functions like a hotel, which is how British society has functioned since the 1960s, under multiculturalism. Here, people are left alone to do what they want as long as they don’t harm anyone else, similar to guests who can do what they like in their hotel room, but have no meaningful contact with other guests.
Multiculturalism produced multiple enclaves of religious and ethnic traditions with no common narrative or purpose. This would ultimately have been destructive to society even without the problem of Islamic extremism, which weaponised multiculturalism to promote violence and bigotry.
Finally, there is the model of a home built by everyone in the community, modelled by Rabbi Sacks on the Tabernacle that the Israelites built in the wilderness. Here, everyone has input into the shared project, producing meaningful connections between otherwise different communities. It is not a home built by one family shared with others, but a collective effort, owned equally by all. Likewise, it is not segregated into different “rooms,” but a communal space for everyone.
In his book “Future Tense,” Rabbi Sacks differentiated between the social contract, which governs relationships between individuals and the state, and the social covenant, which governs relationships within society. A contract is an agreement for an exchange between parties, acting in their own interests, for mutual benefit.
The social covenant, is qualitatively different, bringing two or more individuals together in “a bond of love and trust, to share interests … by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone.”
The social contract is essentially transactional, but the social covenant is relational and, unlike a contract, is not easily terminated, if at all, being about loyalty and fidelity even when not in one’s short-term interest.
It is clear that, for some decades now, Western societies have been thinking entirely in transactional, not relational, terms. In this context, Rabbi Sacks spoke about the importance of the third sector, the charitable and communal sector, separate from the zero-sum interactions that occur in the state and the market, where limited power and wealth are divided in a way that always leaves some better-off than others. It is here that the “home-building” can take place, in a zone of positive-sum interactions where everyone gains from cooperation.
Does this responsibility-focused society mean that society should sacrifice the needs of the individual to the collective? No. Rabbi Sacks pointed out the balance in another statement from Pirkei Avot, the statement of Hillel that, “If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?”
Society needs to balance the rights of the individual with the rights of the collective, but for the last 40 years or so, the West has thought entirely in terms of individual rights and not in terms of collective responsibilities. For example, when in the last UK general election then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak suggested introducing some kind of compulsory community service for teenagers (with a choice between military and civilian service), he was widely ridiculed.
I believe that the ethical void at the heart of Western society is not going to be cured by a few election victories for conservatives. It was one thing for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to solve economic problems with economic policies, but social problems are more deep-rooted and resistant to change.
That is why we need to turn to the most controversial and misunderstood idea in Judaism, namely “chosenness.” Far from being an assertion of the superiority of the Jewish People, chosenness is a call to moral responsibility. It is God’s attempt to create an ideal society in the Jewish People as a model to other societies as to what can be achieved in a community based on personal and collective moral responsibility.3
It is not the Jews are inherently better than anyone else, but that they are called to try to be morally exemplars.
Similarly, in states where social conservatives are a minority, those who want a society governed more by personal and collective moral responsibility need to practice what they preach. We need to act at all times as if the world is watching and waiting for us to trip ourselves up, because it is.
We can’t, to use a pertinent example, complain about the decline of civility in the public sphere and then try to “own the libs” on social media. We can’t preach monogamous marriage and stable families and wink at Andrew Tate — or, for that matter, Elon Musk. This means that we may need to prioritise ethics over politics for some time, which will probably work to our short-term political disadvantage.
However, what matters is not just our political behaviour, but our general behaviour. I said we can’t preach civility and engage in vitriol online — but we can’t afford to do it in person either. Anger is one of the most destructive emotions and, if we want to build community, we need to rebuild civil disagreement in non-political contexts too, including when complaining about poor customer service or reacting to bad drivers on the road.
Likewise with every other social virtue we want to promote, including kindness, charity, integrity and fidelity. We need to be witnesses in our lives to the type of society we want to build, because that is the only way to gain widespread imitation and support.
A phrase coined by Jewish writer Israel Zangwill
Beit knesset, the Hebrew term for synagogue, literally means a “house of gathering.”
This, incidentally, is why the land of Israel and the idea of a Jewish state are integral to Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, as the ideal society should be a state to model how to morally exercise coercive state power, not just how to control personal and communal behaviour, important though those are.
Excellent essay-However both the Charedi world and the MO worlds have to deal with their own internal issues and learn to recognize the best elements of each other simultaneously while presenting their way of life to the secular Jewish community as offering the best means of Jewish continuity
The societal model now is not so much a hotel where what people do in their own rooms is their own business but a giant nursery school, where they act out, trash the place, kick and bite the well-behaved pupils and parents and teachers are frightened to discipline them.