The World According to Hobbes
By Leonard Fein
The world according to Hobbes: "No arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Think Kosovo; think Littleton. Truth to tell, one scarcely needs these grim reminders of how tentative is our emergence from the state of nature, that state which, according to Hobbes, "is a condition of war of everyone against everyone."
Still, there are signs and portents that point in a different and more hopeful direction. I offer two such:
A refugee from Kosovo whom I met last week, a pediatrician, relates that in the Albanian town in which she found herself after fleeing Pristina, the radio broadcast an announcement: "In two hours, 52 buses of refugees will arrive. Citizens, open your doors." And as she wandered the streets, she saw that every door in the town had been opened, and, looking inside the houses, she could see that the tables were being set with the best the townspeople had to offer, and beds and cots prepared. When the refugees arrived, every one of them was taken in by an Albanian family.
And now to a very different and far more familiar corner of the world, to Israel on the eve of fateful elections, to an Israel marked these last years by seemingly rending divisions, as much about the role of religion in the state as about peace. And from Israel, the following glad tiding, in the form of a question: Who is it who recently wrote, "The identity of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is among the foundations of its existence . . . . Coerced observance of commandments via religious legislation has not advanced the Jewish character of the state; instead, it has brought about an alienation from Judaism, a cleft in the people, and a distancing from Torah. The `status quo' is inappropriate for the present reality. It provides a continuing source of friction between the religious and the secular, a friction that threatens the possibility of a shared life."
No, these are not the words of enemies of Orthodox Judaism. They are in fact the words of Meimad, the largely Orthodox political party that has joined with Labor in a common list of candidates for Israel's Knesset. The name "Meimad" comes from the Hebrew initials of the party's central commitment: A Jewish state, a democratic state.
Two of Meimad's leaders came visiting last week, and our conversation offered a useful reminder that Orthodoxy in Israel is not necessarily as dismal as it so often seems, not necessarily as anti-democratic or as benighted or as closed-minded as the actions of some of its leaders and their followers lead us to suppose. In fact, my visitors - Rabbi David Bigman and Rabbi Yehudah Gilad - remind me of an Orthodoxy I once knew, an imaginative and inquisitive and, yes, a progressive Orthodoxy that has long-since been overshadowed by the noisy stone-throwers.
Rabbis Bigman and Gilad, who hail from the religious kibbutz movement, enjoy a warm working relationship with a group of decisively secular kibbutzniks based at Oranim, near Haifa, who deeply believe that Jewish sources and the Jewish tradition are far too important to be deemed the exclusive property of the Orthodox. Accordingly, they come together to study texts, and they work to see to it that the curriculum of the secular schools includes ample exposure to Judaism - and that the religious schools accept responsibility for education in democracy and democratic norms.
The secular kibbutzniks are determined not to permit the war between Israel's secularists and its Orthodox to deprive the secular world of access to Jewish sources and the Jewish tradition. And the Meimad people are as determined that peace - specifically, the Oslo process and the prospect of territorial compromise - and deep commitment to halacha cannot be viewed as opposing positions.
True enough, neither the folks who gather at Oranim nor the Meimad people are strong enough to suggest that they are the wave of Israel's future. They remain, relatively, mere blips on Israel's political and cultural screen. But there are other signs, especially from within the secular community, of a renewed interest in Judaism, specifically in a Judaism that is not coercive, that does not depend on the force of government for its promulgation.
These days, one takes comfort where one can find it. Even if the good news is consigned to a small paragraph on an inside page, far from the grim headlines that remind us of how far we have yet to go, perhaps even especially at times when the weight of the evidence favors Hobbes, it becomes still more important to call attention to the rebutting evidence. In Albania, open doors; in Israel, open minds. And here at home, one hopes, open hearts to both.
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