Nationalism and Rationalism

And synth pop slop

Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin has two topics he likes to write about. Charedim are bad and, just kidding, there aren’t two topics. In his latest missive he puts Charedim on the list with ‘Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Nazis’. This is plainly very unhinged, and I suppose any Charedim still paying attention would find this very offensive. However, there is something much, much worse about this article. Slifkin, who, unlike me, is a well-socialised, conscientious man with strong executive functioning, was driven quite against his character to quasi-profanity by Charedim stealing ‘our song’, a song which he says is ‘immensely powerful’ and ‘particularly meaningful’. Its appropriation made Slifkin feel like he was ‘punched in the gut’. So, here is the song, entitled the eternal people are not afraid of a long path:

Obviously, if you are not suffering from severe brain damage as a result of traumatic head injury, immoderate drug use, living in a country where lead paint was only banned in 2021, or reading Foucault, you will have stopped the song after about 15 seconds, and commenced desperately searching around your house for a sufficiently strong purgative to pour down your ears. I hear, but you should try and stick with it. You can just watch with the sound off.

It’s all there. The kitsch, the outlandish ethno-narcissism, the endless soyfacing over a soldier with a tallis and tefillin, the relentless crassness and ugliness of just everything, the rap interlude. And, of course, there’s the combination of incontinently jubilant jumping around with clips of bombs going off in urban areas. Look, Zionists, if you want to tell me that there’s no choice under the circumstances but to do that kind of stuff, I’m with you. If you want to tell me you don’t have emotional space to sympathise with the civilians who hate you getting their various appendages blown off in the process, then fine. If you confide that actually you’re happy about it, then, OK, it’s not very edifying, but who am I to judge? Just try and keep it to yourself. But at least retain somewhere on your person the awareness that it’s not cool. Don’t dance about it.

We could extend this section of the article for quite some time. My basic point is that what’s so great about being around for a long time if what you have to show for it at the end is degenerate ghetto-tier culture, and spiritual masturbation? Here’s a rough English-language equivalent of this self-congratulatory cryboasting form of quasi-apologetic with added nods to heresy. It doesn’t suck as much because it’s not Israeli, but maybe Yanks will get there one day:

109 countries… Joking. That's not what this article is about.

Rationalism through outlandish race mysticism

Rabbi Dr. Slifkin is the godfather of the Jewish blogosphere. The pamphlets he wrote in the years following his expulsion from Charedi society at the hands of a gang of lowlifes and crooks were important for me personally, and the whole affair was pivotal, one way or another, in the intellectual development of thousands of thoughtful young Jewish men. Slifkin’s brand during this period was ‘Rationalist Judaism’, that is, on his own telling, ‘Exploring the legacy of the rationalist Rishonim’. The idea was this: Charedi Judaism is kind of stupid. I know the world is not 6,000 years old, you know the world is not 6,000 years old, why do we have to pretend that the world is 6,000 years old? Since there were a whole bunch of medieval Rabbis who wrote extensively on how to reconcile the then prevailing scientific orthodoxy with Jewish faith and practice, we can try and draw on them to make something similar today so we are not always walking on egg shells or jamming crayons up our nose.

Slifkin eventually wrote this all up into a book called Rationalism and Mysticism. The book is not good at all if considered as a work of intellectual history or as a polemic. Its central conceit is bundling multiple unlike things into one of two categories. Thus, traditionalist anti-philosophical Judaism - that is the mainstream Rabbinic tradition - is bundled up with esoteric theurgy into something called ‘mysticism’. Similarly, the most important thing about kabbala, namely its radical departure from all previous precedent in the daringness of its theology and reinterpretation of texts, is erased by being lumped alongside things like the heichalot literature or Sefer Yetzirah, with which it has really nothing much in common beyond a vague ‘ooh spooky, I know a secret you don’t know’ vibe. The category ‘rationalists’ also equates those who made the - frankly implausible - claim that the Torah contains thousands of hidden allusions to the Neoplatonic-Aristotelian synthesis of medieval Islamic high culture with anyone who just doesn’t want to be constantly inundated with stories about making cars run on arak, or imprecations to say aleinu seven times standing on your head at 3.30 on the first Thursday of Elul to get a payrise.

The book therefore essentially concedes at the start the basic myth of the kabbalists, namely that they were the bearers of a sacred and ancient tradition battling those who wished to import an alien rationalising philosophy. However, it has some interesting sources in it, and its heart is in the right place. The basic point is that the Zohar is bad ✔️ and there should be a place, at least, for people not to have to be exposed to incessant, tedious drivel as the price for not having a lesbian Rabbi ✔️.

So, in theory, this is called ‘Modern Orthodoxy’,¹ but in Israel there is no Modern Orthodoxy, not really, so Slifkin became a Religious Zionist. We then fast forward to today when without any trace of irony or shame he proudly fesses up to his deep and enduring love of Zionist gutter slop. That’s not even the worst thing, though, because Slifkin shares with us that it’s not the repulsive aesthetic qualities of the song that make it so special to him, but that its message was authored by his son’s Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yehoshua Weizmann.

Now, look, we have the internet, so this is not hard stuff to find. Rav Weizmann is architect of one of the dozen or so current explanations of Kookian theology. His version leans heavily on the dichotomy between the Torah of Eretz Yisrael and the Torah of Galut. The former is national, whereas the latter is private; the former is bold, whereas the latter is conservative, the former is totally awesome and based and just superior in every conceivable way, whereas the latter is the basis of all practical halacha that you are obligated to follow in practice [what?]. An additional big part of the Torah of Eretz Yisrael is that it looks beyond the legal minutiae of halachic discussion to the grand ideas carried within it. What are those grand ideas? What do you think?

Oh look, secrets.

I once went to a shiur by Rav Weizmann. It was interesting both in a ‘he brought interesting sources’ way and a ‘it’s interesting that someone would say that’ way. Basically, he identified a conflict between parallel sugyot in the Yerushalmi and Bavli, explained how these manifest themselves in traditional halachic literature, and then moved on to the deep ideas contained within them, as expressed by the Maharal, and some Chassidic seforim that I don’t care to recall. The point was that while halachic practice follows the Bavli, the sprit of the Torah is found in [ideas hallucinated into] the Yerushalmi.

OK, fine, whatever. Believe what you want; it’s a free country, kind of. But that’s obviously not rationalist Judaism. It’s … nationalist Judaism.

Suggested rebrand. Free of charge.

Every so often, the readers that Slifkin hasn’t banned for being able to make a coherent argument pipe up and say something like ‘we love your incisive posts about why Charedim are bad, but maybe after every 400 or so you could do a post about whether the Jamaican dinglebird is kosher like you used to’. The sentiment that Rationalist Judaism has abandoned its original focus is widespread, and clearly correct, but it really misses the point. It isn’t merely that Slifkin no longer actively promotes rationalism it’s that he actively promotes the most pernicious and energetic form of irrationalism today, namely Kookism.

Rav Kook was a great man, a spiritual titan, an intellectual Goliath. No doubt about that; add as many approbations as you wish. But his theology was very, very crazy. If you don’t want to take it from me, go read it. Doubtless you’ll find lots to ponder, some stirring lines, but it’s nuts! It almost goes without saying that according to strict Maimonideanism it’s all heretical and Slifkin is now obligated to push his son down a well. I’m a moderate though, and don’t believe in doing such things. However, you can’t be a rationalist, or rationalist-adjacent, and into it.

It’s actually worse than that though. Here are some lines from Rav Kook:

We left the realm of global politics from a necessity which contained within it an internal desire, until there should come a fitting time when it would be possible to manage a kingdom without wickedness and barbarity. This now is the time for which we hope. It is understood that in order to realise it, we have to awaken all of our strengths, to make use of all the means which the era brings. All of it is led by the hand of the Creator of the world. However, the delay was a necessary one. The Jewish heart disdained the threatful sins required to manage a state in the age of evil. And behold the time has come, very soon, that the world will be matured and we will be able to prepare ourselves, for it will be possible to manage our state on the foundations of goodness, wisdom, uprightness, and godly, clear enlightenment. ‘Jacob sent to Esau the coat of royal purple’ ‘Let my lord go on ahead of his servant.’² It is not fitting for Jacob to occupy himself with statecraft when it necessitates bloodshed, while it requires skilfulness in the evil arts. We accepted only the bare minimum that was needed to found a nation, and once the race was weaned we desisted from statecraft. Among the nations we were scattered, we were sown in the depths of the earth, until the time of the vintage came, and the voice of the dove is heard in our land.

Was that dreamy and idealistic enough for you? Get a load of this:³

for it is essential to implant the understanding that the purpose of the nationalism of Israel is not our strength for ourselves and the conquest of peoples and similar things that the nations crave as a result of their great self regard. But rather our nationalism brings blessing and completion to the whole world. Therefore, at its base, which is first in thought and then in deed, it is for the rectification and love of the whole human species.

So what happened? Well, a lot of stuff. World War I, Arab nationalism, the conquest of child mortality. Most of all what happened, though, is reality. Rav Kook was a racial supremacist, but not a trashy one. He believed that the settlement of the land of Israel by the Jewish people was the single most important thing in all human history that would, by its essential (albeit hidden) nature usher in an age of universal human liberation and peace. More fundamentally, though, he thought that to be a supremacist, you need to be supreme. You can’t just act like some scummy raghead terrorist and then claim the fate of the universe hinges on where you live. But the message got lost because being supreme is hard, whereas calling yourself supreme is easy. ‘I am supreme’. See.

And for all this Rav Kook is to blame. How could it be otherwise? He should have wargamed out this whole hippy-race-supremacism-mystical-nations-hold-hands-nationalism thing more, but he was too busy predicting an era of universal peace on the eve of WW1. Prediction wasn’t his strongpoint. We don’t have to predict stuff, though. Kookism is reaping its vintage before our eyes. Every day a new blemish, a new obscenity. What does Rabbi Dr. Slifkin have to say about this new politicised strain of mystical Judaism and its escalating descent into lunacy and filth? That is beyond implicitly supporting it?

1. The esoteric secret is that it’s actually called ‘Satmar’.

2. Gen. 33:14. The point here is that Jacob [the Jewish people] granted to Esau [Rome/Christendom] the privilege of worldly power and glory.

3. קעה