Vengeance in Scripture

Sefer baMidbar ends with the arei miqlat, a stop on legitimate vengeance not unlike the way Sefer Shemot ends with the building of the mishkan, which is a stop on authoritative vengeance. This, in contrast to the way Sefer beReishit and Sefer vaYiqra end, with the promotion of vengeance, either historically or in the future.

The point of life beyond satiation

If the responsibilities of civic membership come down only to the relieving of the burdens of scarcity and threat, then self-interest trumps civic duty and it becomes absurd to engage in self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good. If, on the other hand, the responsibilities of civic membership amount to the fulfillment of the possibilities of abundance and security, then self-interest of course would not trump civic duty and it would become absurd not to engage in self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Such self-sacrifice is the whole point of life beyond satiation.

Too self-serving for comfort

We find ourselves drawn to leave America and to settle instead in Israel because the ruling class in America is showing itself to be too self-serving for comfort. At least in Israel one can speak about the leader's duty for serving the public with a dignity that is becoming less and less plausible in a country like America where the leadership is systematically plundering the commonwealth and justifying such plunder to itself at every turn.

The irony of government by the plunder of others is that it ultimately devolves into self-plunder. It happened in the Soviet Union and it's happening right before our eyes in the United States. We can't stop the self-plunder because our connection to the ruling class is just as devoid of the shared values of civic responsibility as is the void of the rest of them; and we can't stand around and watch it happening as if it were all business as usual.

Dignity trumps democracy

The point is not to favor democracy over any other governmental system; the point is to nurture the values of civil society. If some other governmental form can deliver the values of civil society, then democracy needn't be the only option. The challenge to non-democrats is to see to it that their alternative promotes individual dignity within the broad, general populace.

Satiation vs self-interest

Self-interest as a prime driver of rational behavior evaporates in the face of satiation. Where people govern their behavior on the basis of maintaining their sova point, self-interest might serve as a major detail but surely is not a fundamental criterion for action.

When sacred institutions lose their meaning

The biblical regime allows for maximum flexibility around the type of government or economic structure Israel's sons would adopt. The prime minister's job is therefore hardly specified at all. The institutions for the promotion of national unity however are specified in exacting detail. These are the institutions of shabbat and miqdash – God's sacred institutions.

The unity of the people has at its core the non-material office of the divine. God is not the prime minister but He is the president. The essential measure of the health of Israel's sacred institutions is their ability to maintain national unity and solidarity. When the Talmud says the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinom it is really, though inadvertently, pointing, toward the end of the Second Temple period in the national life of Judea, to the degeneracy of the institutions of shabbat and miqdash. Miqdash bureaucracy had lost its bearings and lost its connection with the people, and so was unable to sustain national unity and solidarity; and Shabbos had become an empty relic, no longer able to set the nation's sova point or to define the nation’s business cycles. Altogether, by the time the Temple was finally dismantled, the meaning of both these fundamental sacred institutions had, for all intents and purposes, simply evaporated.

The world was created on a day of the week, not a day of the year

The difference between the Israelite calendar and the calendar of other nations is the lack of a new year in the Israelite calendar. Typically, the gentile new year corresponds to the ostensible day on which the world was created. For the Israelites, that function is taken by the Sabbath day.

What has come to be called the new year is, in the Jewish calendar, the Memorial Day for a single army, thus uniting the entire nation in the honoring of those who fell in defense of the nation. Yom haZikaron unites the nation behind a single military as Yom haKippurim unites the nation behind a single clergy and a single sanctuary.

The sanctuary was that sacred institution most closely identified with the military.

Creativity and dignity

Creativity and dignity are complementary. Creativity needs the dignity of a nurturing environment in which to function properly; dignity needs creative energy to maintain its freshness.

Creativity is male and dignity is female. The content and the context, the stream and the vessel, the action and the ecology – these are the elements of design and of organizational shape.

Power structures

The issue isn't power; the issue is structures of power. Flashes of power are useful but not all that interesting. Power structures need to establish and retain power over various conditions and a wide variety of circumstances. Power structures need to be resilient and sustainable. Power structures are about creativity and dignity. Power flashes are counterfeit.

The resource curse nourishes the power flash to the detriment of the power structure.

To go from a power flash to a power structure requires the action of mitigating institutions.

Power's structure comes from the sacred.

Caution the ruling elite

That rabbinic teachings work well for the ordinary Jew reflects the bias in miqrah in favor of the values of civil society. That rabbinic teachings work poorly for the Jewish community's leadership reflects the misunderstanding of miqrah's values as they pertain to the ruling elite.

Humility and discipline are reflected in the values of shabbat and miqdash. Both are meant to caution the ruling elite in the administration of authoritative rule. Biblical teachings are meant to give guidance to the rulers so they don't engage in the sort of free-for-all we saw in the Thirty Years' War or WWI.

Decency

The basic values of civil society could best be summarized in the word 'decency.'

Ancient heritage as contemporary destiny

As Christopher Hitchens says, "The only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one."

The trouble is that that American Revolution is winding down. Market capitalism is yielding to a form of state capitalism that extols the authoritarian and comes close to a bland, 21st century sort of fascism.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the next historical revolution would be the biblical one? The problem with the rabbinic regime is that its leaders and its practitioners think too small. A great change is afoot in the world's affairs. The Jewish people could be its victims or its victors. To be its victors the Jewish people need to revive the ancient world's notions of purity and sanctity and love and caring. To promulgate the next great historical revolution the Jewish people need to embrace their own ancient heritage as the contemporary destiny for the world.

A measure of well-being

Happiness = (gratitude)/(gratification).

Gratitude = wanting what you have;

Gratification = having what you want.

The collective cannot engender happiness; it can only create the conditions for those seeking happiness to be able to achieve it.

Well-being depends less on material goods and more on the social context in which the material goods can be enjoyed.

Institutions can create the habitat for happiness.

Actually, the collective can go further and engender a culture wherein people strive to belong to each other, but that would be asking for more than what the present day leadership could imagine.

Unearned

Hubris is unearned confidence the way exploitation is unearned wealth.

Satiation applies to power lust too

Power is the ability to control your environment. The inability to control one's environment is undignified. Desert refers to decency in matters economic; dignity refers to decency in matters political. To go beyond dignity, to insist on controlling the environment of others, is analogous to always wanting more.

Just do it

The thing to do is not to write about how someone needs to start a public relations campaign against the death cult; the thing to do is to start a public relations campaign against the death cult. Just do it.

To stand tall on principle against death

Israel has to stop suing for peace with the Arabs. Israel should demand an utter repudiation of the death-cult as a pre-requisite to its being willing to make peace with any of its neighbors. Israel should define any state unable to put a stop to death-cult activities as constituting a failed state with which it could not arrive at any peace terms.

Which would benefit Israel's international diplomatic standing more, to be willing to engage in a bogus peace process no-one really believes can work or to stand tall on principle against death and to champion Western values with courage and conviction? Which would benefit Israel's sense of self-respect more?

Creativity and dignity

Creativity and dignity correspond respectively to the inner and outer manifestations of self and other. In creativity the question is how much of what has been created can I apportion to my creative power; in dignity the question is how much of my relationship with the environment do I get to control and how much do I need to steward.

To lead, it helps to know where we're going

A proper Jewish leadership needs to have a robust vision of what the meaning and the destiny of the Jewish people really are. The precarious character of Jewish existence makes it a prerequisite for its leadership to have a deeper sense of what the purpose of the people is all about, else the leaders guide the people according to the ordinary values of the contemporary political norms, which might work for empires and vassals but simply doesn't work for the beta-site politics that runs to the heart of the Jewish people's reason for being on this Earth.

Clerical shame

As the priesthood of ancient Israel became corrupted and ultimately came to be deeply discredited, so the rabbinate today has become likewise corrupt and deserving of its own brand of discredit.

Judah and Antoninus

The Romans authorized the rabbis to take over the Jewish people's leadership. The rabbis were politically astute and active both with respect to the Romans as well as with respect to their internal rivals. The rabbis had a vision for the shape of the exilic Jewish people's political character. The question is what was that vision, and what do we think of that vision under today's circumstances.

The rabbinic regime, better known as Judaism, flourished by virtue of its willingness to accommodate Roman rule. By decrying rebellion, the rabbinic regime hitched its future to collaboration with the ruling power, which, at its historical origin was the Roman Empire. Rebbe (R’ Yehuda haNasi) made a deal with Antoninus of Rome, and that collaborationist attitude has defined Judaism ever since.

Why must the Messiah be a king?

That the Messiah is modeled on King David is not so altogether wonderful. It places the kingship and the shape of the kingship at the center of Israel's destiny, and, we would argue, inappropriately so. The Bible's true instructions teach us the shape of the monarchy as well as the shape of the economic order are secondary to the establishment and the maintenance of the two sacred, mediating institutions: shabbat and miqdash.

Dissatisfied with the status quo

When the prime posture is to preserve the past teachings it becomes difficult to adopt a mindset of creativity. To be creative is first of all to be willing to be dissatisfied with the status quo and to believe the status quo can be improved upon. To be preservative is to be always satisfied with the status quo unless circumstances force a change onto the system. So the difference between innovation and preservation is how much it takes to make someone dissatisfied with the status quo.

The sova point is bi-directional. The economics tells you when enough is enough; the politics tells you when what used to be enough is no longer. The status quo is the institutional sova point. The creative impulse transforms abundance into a higher sova point.

The costs of strangerhood's benefits

God is the authoritative counterparty to the civil society. The laws of God temper the rulers and impose on them the self-restraint they need to rule wisely. A democratic political/economy that functions without divine law could try for balance between the ruling classes and the ruled classes. What is more difficult would be for that balance to be achieved with the sort of love and affection that passes between comrades. Without God, people become strangers to each other. All the benefits of strangerhood – mobility, trade, contracts and voluntary transaction, etc. – come at the price of alienation and anomie and addiction.

One sacred hand washes the other

If, as a nation, you don't keep shabbos, then miqdash will be corrupted as well and the ministry will serve not to mitigate the fury of the divine ruler but to intensify that fury. The mullahs of Arabia are an example of what happens to divine rule when people don't have an alternative set of institutions to promote love of one's fellow and of one's neighbor.

Civil society is the legitimate, enfranchised, empowered basis of society

When the prophets spoke out for Israel's poor and downtrodden they were really talking less about the oppressed and more about the civil society. When we think of them as the subject classes, then we think of them from the perspective of the rulers; when we think of them as the civil society, then we think of them from the perspective of the general public as the legitimate, enfranchised, empowered basis of society.

Biblical teachings are there to breathe vitality into the Jewish people

The rabbinic regime was designed to preserve the ancient teachings over the course of the long, suspended animation that was the Jewish Diaspora. Once the program has come out of hibernation and has begun once again to take root and bloom, once the animation is no longer, as it were, suspended, the rabbinic skills become less well suited for the challenges of making vital those ancient, biblical teachings.

The Haredi program of ultra-Orthodoxy is designed to keep that vitality from coming to the fore and to keep the biblical teachings in suspension. Modern Orthodoxy needs a vision that goes beyond the rabbinic regime. The Karraites did not differ from the Rabbinites in that both wished to do little more than preserve the ancient teachings. The only difference was the Karraites wanted to preserve the biblical teachings while the Rabbinites wanted to preserve the rabbinic teachings.

With the establishment of the State of Israel we need to return to the ancient, biblical teachings but not merely to preserve them; rather, we need to harness the biblical teachings to breathe new spiritual vitality into the Jewish people.

Gifts are assets that constitute a flow

A gift refused is a relationship spurned and it registers as an act of hostility, a precursor to aggression. A gift accepted and violated, a gift unappreciated and thus unstewarded, is an insult to the gift giver and presages the cessation of the flow of gifts. The key to gifting is that no gift stands alone.

Gift exchange means the opposite of market exchange. Market exchange implies the elimination of on-going obligation; gift exchange implies the reinforcement of on-going obligation. Gifts are assets that constitute a flow. Gifts engender flows by ratifying relationship while at the same time inculcating obligation. The relationship allows the participants to experience something that fulfills them and gives them some substance in their lives. The obligation defines the social structure. Both the relationship and the obligation make the people feel important.

The creator is the author

The creator is the author, which gives him what amounts to authority on the economic side. Duties are the obligations of authority, the ways in which people are bound when it is they who are calling the shots and it is they who are entitled to direct the behavior and the conduct of others.

The strategy of the biblical regime

The biblical regime presents a democratic ideology as seen from the legitimate perspective rather than, as is usually the case in political philosophy and teachings, as seen from the authoritative perspective. The story of the reign of a God in political covenant with Israel depicts a story of the politics of civil society.

We always presume the lower classes are ungovernable and easily misled, which is true, but it doesn't have to be that way. If the lower classes were infused with dignity, the ruling classes wouldn't have such an easy time of getting the better of the lower classes. That's the strategy of YHWH's biblical regime: to raise the dignity of the lower classes so as to insulate them from the abuses that would otherwise regularly be inflicted on them by the ruling classes.

Goings and comings

"Blessed are you in your goings and blessed are you in your comings." (Deuteronomy 28:6) probably refers to military excursions.

Institutions shape emotions

Desert is judgment based on emotions. Institutions shape emotions. If we wish to train ourselves to control our emotions so as to become better at appreciating deservedness, we need to choose the institutions and the social environment in which we situate ourselves so as to fortify better desert systems.

Ancient world treaties for a modern world nation

Speaking of ceremonies that dramatize rituals, perhaps the most important Jewish ceremony today would be the re-affirmation of the treaties at Sinai and at Moab. What would it take to organize another covenantal ceremony that united the entire nation of Israel and submitted the nation to the rule of YHWH and to His mission of dignifying the least of them?

The legislature is sovereign over the land, not the executive and not the judiciary

An important shaper of 20th century history has been a battle between ideology and politics. Ideology tapped into power's more atavistic side while politics shaped the duties and responsibilities of governance. The strongest ideology of the 20th century has been anti-Semitism; the strongest politics has been market economics.

What makes the biblical regime an important innovation in political design is that the Bible's is a democratic ideology whose focus counters ideological forces more than the political. The biblical regime addresses more the matter of vengeance than it does the matter of proper policy. The attitude of God in the biblical regime is to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. YHWH doesn't really wish to bother with "Ceaser's" stuff.

Judicial courts can know only law; executives must manage the vengeance; and it is the legislature that must balance the policy and the ideology in the shaping of authority's governance. The legislature is sovereign over the land, not the executive and not the judiciary.

A society with a weak popular voice is one that has strong executive authority and strong judicial authority but weak legislative authority. Such a society does not have a firm purchase on its land or on the resources the land contains. Extraction must be managed by the values of the commonwealth and of civil society. Iran or Saudi Arabia would be good examples of such a weak popular voice where civil society is being ground out of existence.

For YHWH to be the divine author of covenantal law is to place the supreme avenging authority into the hands of One Who would dignify civil society's values by using the law to temper the executive. When the judiciary is reluctant to inhibit the prerogatives of the executive, as is most often the case in matters of war and national security, it does so because war requires vengeance more than justice, and so courts, which administer justice and despise vengeance, understand they are not useful in such contexts.

The law and the land

We need to understand Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is the bridging book between the law and the land. Deuteronomy likely understands what it is about the land that informs the law.

Deuteronomy links the covenant at Sinai with the covenant at Moab. The drama at Sinai was principally divine; the drama at Moab was principally mundane. As Israel's sons enter the Land of Israel they reaffirm the covenant.

It would probably be a good thing if the Jewish people today, at this moment of their once again taking possession of the Land of Israel, were to unite to reaffirm the treaty at Sinai and, more important, the treaty at Moab.

The issue of the legitimacy of the Knesset is not whether it is ruled by the Moshiach (Anointed One) but whether it represents a people who have once again reaffirmed the treaty that was cut at Moab and then broken. That treaty delimited the executive and the judiciary and made room for the people and the land to have a voice.

It is in and of and with the voice of the people and their blood and their sex that the land speaks.

Six covenants

The Chumash describes six separate covenants between YHWH and the people of the Bible. The first is with Avram; the second with Avraham; the third is with Israel's sons at Sinai; the fourth is again at Sinai only this time jointly with Moshe and Israel's sons; the fifth is the brit shalom with the offspring of Pinchas; and the sixth is with Israel's sons at Moab. The standard interpretation is to aggregate all these covenants into one single covenantal understanding that amounts to the rabbinic regime. In fact, to be true to the text requires us to appreciate the differences between each of these covenants so that we could differentiate between one kind of covenantal relationship and another. If we would be a people in covenant with a divine ruler, we should have a better purchase on the nature of covenants and how the different styles of covenant might differ from each other.

In the covenant with Avram, YHWH promised him the land; in the covenant with Avraham, YHWH promised him the offspring, tempered by a side codicil with Sarah stipulating that the propagation over time of God’s promise, across the generations, would be Sarah’s prerogative to direct; the first covenant at Sinai defines the direct rule of YHWH over Israel's sons; the second covenant at Sinai defines YHWH's relationship with Moshe and indirectly with Israel's sons; the brit shalom infuses activist fervor into the intermediating hierarchy; and the covenant of Moab comprehends the entire book of Devarim and prepares Israel's sons to take possession of the land under their own responsibility.

Covenant before entering

The direct expression of divine will is frightening to civil society. It was the people who asked the divine ruler to convey His message not directly to the people but through prophetic intermediaries. What most commentaries fail to appreciate is how the interposition of a prophetic intermediary led to the intermediary coming to serve as a partner with the divine ruler, becoming he himself a principal in the covenantal bond.

The prophetic ruler came to serve as the alternative to the 'neck' of the people, which neck the divine ruler had judged to be too stiff for Him to be able to manage a direct and immediate covenant with the people. The final (second) covenant at Sinai was cut between YHWH and Moshe, with Israel's sons there as an adjunct.

On the banks of the Jordan, nearly forty years later at the end of the saga, at the moment of Moshe's leaving Israel's sons to the tender mercies of YHWH and whoever would become Moshe's political descendants, Moshe cuts another covenant with Israel's sons. That covenant at Moab takes both YHWH and Moshe out of the direct performance of the covenanting ceremony. YHWH takes no overt role in the ceremony; and Moshe is clearly about to take leave of the people.

The covenant at Moab is a template for how future generations of Israel's sons will need to affirm or renew the covenant with YHWH, especially when that affirmation or renewal will entail the reclaiming of the Land of Israel, a reclamation that could not have involved Moshe's direct leadership because Moshe was explicitly excluded from the role of leading within the Land of Israel. Moshe is the quintessential diaspora leader: he could not teach us how to lead within the land. For that, the Jewish people tend to be on their own.

The two great catastrophes in the wilderness

The two great catastrophes in the wilderness were the episode of the obstructing chariot and the episode of the pusillanimous spies. Remedy to the former redefined the ruling hierarchy within Israel; remedy to the latter retrained the general populace to do conquering battle under YHWH's command. The former refers to internal affairs; the latter, to external.

Amazed, for good and ill

We've come to live in Israel and we are amazed, for good and ill. We have found the makings of a sovereign nation. We seethe with the courage that shouts its pride from every stone and tree and smile we encounter in the homeland. We are satisfied and bursting with joy at the fullness of this experience of political autonomy.

We have also found a cultural backwater. We have encountered, for the first time in our lives, prejudice against Jews about their religion; and we struggle against an entrenched diaspora-ism that is as deep, and, because it is in the homeland, even more pernicious, than the diaspora-ism we discarded in NYC.

The Jews came into Zion but it seems at first flush what they wanted to do was to carry Zion into diaspora. The Jews were unwilling to leave the diaspora when they moved into the homeland. The Zionists managed to build a homeland but they didn't mean it. Israelites have freedom to make political choices but they have not incorporated that sense of freedom into their self-understanding. Israelis cling to servility even as they try to build a new national home.

To serve YHWH as a Jew is to know freedom in one's soul. We need to unpack the experience of the covenantal ceremony from the point of view of the mundane experience. What was it Israel's sons embraced when they accepted the covenant with YHWH?

Revolutions come after the collapse, not before

Social change comes about primarily through the catalysis of new social structures after the old status quo has disintegrated under its own weight.

Before the collapse there is a lull where the old system is known to be no longer sustainable but where the inertia of incumbency preserves the status quo. This lull is the moment of highest collective self-deception. It is the moment when power is least deserved and most abused. Political theory worries about the chaos of unfettered democracy, the danger of too much leftism. This moment of highest collective self-deception defines the degeneracy of unfettered aristocracy, the danger of too much rightism.

Revolutions are triggered by the latter; they lose their energy under the former.

...and justice for all

When kids invent super-hero personae for themselves they are really playing out their impulses for desert. We want power so that we can right wrongs. Righting wrongs is what there is to do in this world. It's what we want to do; it's what we're compelled to do.

Can we update the ancient wisdoms?

There's little doubt the biblical regime was no more successful in implementing its ideologies and principles than any other form of government. Fascism and communism failed just as decidedly; capitalism and mercantilism did not fail yet, but the jury is still out as to whether their success at proliferating is merely masking their inevitable collapse, as seems to be what the present fragile, brittle state of the world economic order seems to be indicating. So even though God was the architect of the biblical regime He wasn't able to make it stick, ever. It was too complicated for the ancient peoples at the time to understand well enough to make work. Nor did the peoples of the ancient world have the technology and the skill base to pull it off.

How much that biblical regime could be updated and brought into the contemporary state of affairs is still an open question, even on theoretical grounds. Where is the bedrock of Israel, the analogue in the ancient biblical formulation to the tribal structure of the people? What are today's core values, the analogue to the ancient biblical formulation of freedom, dignity and covenant? What does the transformational path from the present to some future Messianic government look like? Etc.

An alliance broken at Sinai

The biblical shift from the ministry of the first-born to the ministry of the priestly caste was more than just a technical restructuring; it was a political act: it removed the divine presence from the government of the people and instituted safeguards as a restraint on the government of the people.

Qadesh li kol bekhor was the expression of an alliance between YHWH and the Israelite ruling class. That alliance was broken at Sinai with the shattering of the first tablets. The ruling structure that replaced that alliance moved the definition of consecrated rule from the first-born to Aharon's sons. The kohanim would not even pretend to be rulers of Israel's sons. They were YHWH's ministers whose primary function was to mitigate the most extreme outbreaks of the exercise of power, be it from YHWH or from Israel's ruling class.

A pity, that

The Christians instituted a new covenant before the world ever truly tried to honor the old one. A pity, that.

Who gains

The irony is that the point of wealth and abundance is the cultivation of the well-being of civil society. Civil society is the true beneficiary of the accumulation of collective wealth.

Hubris and plunder

Extraction is the material manifestation of hubris. The resource curse is really just the most direct instantiation of flying too close to the sun and imbuing in one's own leadership the prerogatives of the immortals.

Two perspectives

Warriors and traders map into politics and economics which maps into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which maps into foreign affairs and domestic affairs which maps into authority and legitimacy.

Covenant, virtue and desert

We have three notions working here at the same time:

(1) the Sinaitic covenant as a subversive alliance between the supreme authority, on the one hand, and the Israelites' civil society operating through the establishment of mitigating institutions of non-material sanctity, on the other;

(2) virtue as the practical, lived authentic experience of the creative or the authoritative shaping of action; and

(3) desert in distributive justice being mitigated by the sova point, and desert in punitive justice being mitigated by the due processes of purification and sealing away.

Now we need to understand how these three notions relate to each other.

Virtue is the positive aspect of desert

Virtue is the positive aspect of desert. When you appreciate what you have done to deserve something you experience it authentically. That lived authenticity comes from the practical, concrete action that gives one a sense of deservedness.

Prudence limits the sense of deservedness on the distributive justice side; temperance limits the sense of desert as vengeance on the punitive justice side. The opposite of this virtuous approach to concrete, practical action is the ethical, moral approach to negotiated, expressed behavior.

The covenant is the symbol of the virtuous path; the contract is the symbol of the ethical, moral path.

When speech ends polemics begin

The objective of terror is to shut minds. If reason is the instrument of modernity, then the way for traditionalists to defend against the incursions of modernity is with the wholesale application of terror. Terror is how you win the meta-argument about having the argument in the first place.

Terror is not the only reason minds shut. Incumbency of power is also a reason for minds to refuse to be open. Age in the life-cycle is analogous to incumbent power. Sometimes the simple need to act requires the cessation of dialogue and the shutting of minds.

Once the minds have shut, further dialogue has the reverse effect. Dialogue hardens the positions and deepens the entrenchment of the fixed thinking. People stop looking for alternatives and seek merely to confirm their established positions. Communication ceases to mediate and serves rather to ratify the separation.

When speech ends polemics begin. The incumbent in power needs to be able to wield polemics to justify the actions of authority no less than they need to wield all the other instruments of the state fir the sake of maintaining order. Freedom of speech does not preclude the ruler from using police power to enforce the law, nor does it preclude the ruling authority from using polemics to drive home the rationale for its policies.

The naïve left doesn't understand this need for incumbency to employ polemics as an instrument of state and as an instrument of power. The cunning left, which is to say, the left that has gone over to the right, very well understands this need of the incumbents, and so it exploits the naiveté of the grass roots left by undermining its hold on reason and by using the instruments of discourse to serve the interests of raw power.

Non-material institutions are civil society institutions

The three destinations for Russian Jewish emigrants in the 20th century were America, Palestine, and the urban centers in Russia, representing, respectively, liberalism, Zionism, and communism. Each of these three movements was fervently grounded in materialist ideologies. A non-materialist ideology would of necessity focus not on the materialist institutions of the society, be they economic or political, market or government. Instead they would focus on the relation between the ruler and the common folk in their civil society. In the economic case, they would be institutions that mitigated the ruler's creative function; in the political case, they would be institutions that mitigated His authoritative functions.

Not the second coming but the second catastrophe

The ghetto walls were confining. They were different from the boundaries of the Israelite encampment. That encampment defined the border between sacred and profane territory. It was nowhere decreed that members of the tribe were prohibited from leaving the tribe. There was no sense in which leaving the tribe would be punished. Membership was a choice, a free choice, open to all members of the nation. In exile that choice was lost. Membership became mandatory. When the ghetto walls began to come down the Jewish people, in droves, cast off the restrictions of those confines. It was a cultural catastrophe of major proportions. For the Jewish people it was a spiritual calamity.

Orthodoxy is what remained after the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people left the fold of rabbinic rule. Orthodoxy became a political movement to stem the exodus out from under rabbinic authority. The threat to orthodoxy was neither Conservative Judaism nor Reform Judaism; it was secularism in the guise of liberalism, Zionism or communism.

The standard story is that the Jewish people suffered the spiritual catastrophe of the Temple's destruction and that the rabbinic regime replaced the biblical regime so as to shepherd the Jewish people through the diaspora. What that story is not telling is that the Jewish people suffered a second spiritual catastrophe with the collapse of the rabbinic regime and the mass transformation of the Jewish people into secular adherents to modernist ideologies.

The schools that came to teach Jewish children the rules of orthodoxy did not just teach them the ways of rabbinic practice, they also brought them under an indoctrination regime that was as ideologically fraught as any modernist political ideology on the scene. Orthodoxy was taught as fanaticism.

Orthodoxy is constantly promoting itself as the preferred path rather than simply presenting itself as a welcome alternative to the other options available. We had always sensed something was the matter with the way Orthodoxy seemed to believe it needed continually to promote itself but we could never figure out what the problem was. Now we can see Orthodoxy for the ideological scam it had become. Orthodoxy and the rabbinic regime it replaced just lost its steam, its vitality. Under millennia of pressure the rabbinic system simply wore out.

As we move our center of operations to Israel we can now focus our attention on what the nation really needs, having lifted the blinders of a lifetime of propaganda and seen clearly what our people truly require of us, and of themselves.

When will we figure it out?

That communism was a folly became clear pretty early; that liberalism is a folly is becoming clear only now; and that Zionism is a folly is a notion that still needs to be clarified. That is the challenge of the post-modern generation in Israel: to learn the folly of Zionism and to adopt the teachings of the ancient heritage.

The covenant with the divine is civil society's constitution

The covenant with the divine subverts the mundane ruler's power. The covenant is a treaty between God and the common folk. The common folk can choose to accept the terms of God's treaty and in so doing can choose, irrespective of the details of the society's government and administration, to shape the conduct of the society in which its members live.

A covenant is thus a failsafe against the power of the society's rulers. A covenant is thus a catalyst to shape the rule of government in a society which can be administered from the bottom up. The challenge for the people is to accept the terms of the covenant and to inculcate them into the life of their society is such a way as to reproduce from generation to generation the adherence to its terms.

A covenant is a civil society’s constitutional document. It governs the conduct of the civil society independent of the behavior of the markets or of the governments. As such a covenant is the most radically democratic form of government ever devised.

What we can learn from the years in the wilderness

The story of the Children of Israel in the wilderness is the story of the challenges the adoption of the terms of the covenant has to contend with. To understand how to implement the terms of the covenant means to understand how the sojourn in the wilderness played out. We need to lay out the stations of the wilderness story to fill in the picture of what exactly happened and how it instructs us about implementation. A Prezi layout might serve quite well here.

From rabbinic regime to covenantal regime

To promote the covenantal relationship is to absolve the Jewish people of the religion of piety. To transform the teachings into terms of civic action is to remove from the meaning of God's instructions the patina of personal submission along with a religious passivity. It means people could fulfill their roles without having to submit to the exactitude a religious ritual would require. It would make the teachings more secular and more widespread. It would be tricky to transition from the rabbinic regime to the covenantal regime. It would require some interim generations that accepted both regimes until the covenantal regime became self-reproducing, at which point the rabbinic regime could be let go of.

When a people's leadership becomes useless

The change in the economic circumstances of the shtetl Jews had profound effects on their livelihoods and their situation and position in the diaspora. The ultra-Orthodox leadership had nary a clue to the course of those effects, and so was rarely able to help the populations to deal with their challenges. As the pace of change in the modern era began to accelerate, the ability of the orthodox leadership diminished and they were less and less able to help ordinary people manage the challenges of adapting to the changes modern life presented to them.

Debt makes the world fragile

Efficiency in corporate enterprise goes against robustness, and the lack of robustness comes at the expense of accountability in the future. The loss of robustness in the guise of efficiency appears as a form of debt. Debt feels like a contradiction to market processes. Market transactions belong to strangers whereas debt transactions belong to familiars.

Turbulence increases when the positive and negative effects of rare events go up. It is not that there is an increase in rare events; it is that the effect of the rare event has increased. Fragility is what is really going on, not turbulence; and fragility goes up with leverage, and leverage goes up through the use of debt. Debt makes the world fragile, where small perturbations can have catastrophic consequences.

For ancient wisdom to inform contemporary life

The ultra-Orthodox approach is to try to re-shape the person to fit the reality of halakha. That approach inevitably removes the person from the stream of the culture in which he is living out his life. An alternative approach would be to reframe each generation's, each culture's apprehension of halakhic teachings so that it could inform that generation's and that culture's take on their reality with the wisdom of the ancient world's perspective.

Propositions versus reality

Financial risk relates to the real economy the way propositions relate to actions. Financial positions depend on truth or falseness rather than making something happen in the world. Virtue depends on deeper values than what can be delivered by the fulfillment of incentives. Contracts force reality into propositions, as opposed to experience. This shift from lived life to propositional position-taking is a deep form of alienation. The ancient world seemed to promote a set of values that led to a more palpable form of existence and experience. Soul could refer to something that is not more ethereal than lived life but rather more deeply experienced than propositional life. If the soul is in the blood, it might be because the blood carries our liminal experiences and not our neuronal images.

Lack of information into decisions

Decision theory teaches how to turn information into decisions. The wisdom of the ages teaches how to turn lack of information into decisions. Information into decisions can lead to hubris; lack of information into decisions comes from humility.

The fragility of modernity

In the modern world we live longer lives but we live more fragile existences. If something goes wrong, we will all be at risk in a way the people living in the ancient world were not.

The commons as helping a lost child

If there were a lost child on the street, people would not be indifferent to its welfare irrespective of whether they did or did not have a personal relationship with the child. They would see to it that the child was well taken care of. Everyone would behave in this way. Such an attitude is at the core of the notion of the commons.

The state as pal

A people's turn to modernity will be marked by at least one generation dedicated to promoting 'youth culture.' That culture could be co-opted by the state, which can demand filial loyalty and dedication to brothers in arms. It could alternatively be enhanced by the encouragement of youth groups for the orderly transfer of power from one generation to the next.

Culture wars happen when ruling elites go into decline

In our analysis of how politics is playing out these days we've been underestimating how important the culture wars are. We've been talking about the "containment theory' approach to social change: wait until the incumbent system begins to collapse and be ready with a well worked out Plan!; or we've been talking about the grass roots approach to social change: redesign institutions that deliver social services so that they operate from the bottom up as well as from the top down. We've been presuming that when the time comes we'll be able to frame a new vision of national purpose for the Jewish people and for the people of Israel and that they will be hungry to hear such a message.

The political landscape both in the US and in Israel might well reveal the operation of a different dynamic. The Tea Party Republicans in the US represent the vestiges of what used to be the governing, center/right, ideological coalition in America. The Peace Now Laborites in Israel represent the vestiges of what used to be the governing, center/left, ideological coalition in Zion. The Tea Baggers, for example, deny the looming danger of climate change; Peace Now denies the looming danger of the Arab death-cult. Both would deny that the international monetary and banking systems have become unworkable. Each deal with their denial by insisting things are more complicated than they seem, by insisting there are two sides to an argument to which any reasonable person would agree there is only one side. Each has stopped seeking the truth and has begun dealing with the facts only in terms of preserving what remains of their waning power. Each is a ruling elite in decline which is insulating itself from their own particular political collapse at the expense of dealing judiciously with the more dangerous general collapse that looms behind them and around them. The Haredi leadership has been insulating itself with respect to the Jewish people for two centuries now. They are a ruling elite in decline and they have been more worried about their own hold on power than they have been worried about the general welfare of the Jewish people who had entrusted in them the management of the people's interests. The Haredi leadership believes their own loss of power represents a greater danger to the people's general welfare than does the danger of any external threat you can name, even Nazi genocide.

We typically get culture wars developing as a symptom of the general decline of the incumbent political power infra-structure. Culture wars are harbingers of a more general collapse. We need to understand better the mechanisms and the logic of culture warfare because that warfare will necessarily define the general climate of ideological discourse in everything we do. An effective hasbara has to know how to deal both with the problems of an internal culture war as well as how to deal with the challenges of an external extraction distraction. General imprudence can take hold of an era and can cast the entire world into a Dark Ages, when the face of God is everywhere eclipsed, and superstition and fear rule the affairs of men.

Fantasy, whether on the right or left, rationalizes unsustainability

The Haredi ultra-Orthodox and the Jewish leftists share an aversion to a Jewish nation-state. Each has their own, separate reasons but the effect is to resist the dictates of the nation-state and to extol instead a vision of Jewish statelessness. Neither the ultra-Orthodox nor the leftists deal with the problem the Genocide poses to their vision that statelessness could well lead to another mass slaughter of the Jews. Each ideology focuses only on the compromises any state must make in the exercise of its ideological purity in order to be able to function as a real world wielder of power and as a defender of the interests of its constituent populations. The problem with the ultra-Orthodox and with the leftists is they don't have a functioning system of purification in their ideological systems so they attempt to deal with their feelings of impurity by subscribing to unrealistically lofty ideologies that are practicably unsustainable but intellectually quite satisfying. The despots and the extractors rule an unsustainable world through hubris and the indifferent application of force. The ultra-religious or leftist ideological supporters of those despots envision an unsustainable world through some messianic or utopian fantasy and an indifferent concern for the practicalities of governance.

They're both right and both wrong

The Jews and the gentiles characterize themselves and each other in comparably positive and negative ways, respectively: Jews see themselves as intellectual, moderate, spiritual, rational, goal- and family-directed; while Jews see the goyim as physical, excessive, instinctual, sexually licentious, and ruthlessly forceful. The gentile sees the Jew as cunning, cowardly, casuistic, unmanly, clannish, and greedy; while gentiles see themselves as earthy, spontaneous, soulful, generous, warrior and honor bound.

Modernity undermines civility

Modernity is that ideological and cultural system which does not respect traditional values. Insofar as traditional values are the ones that preserve the values of civil society, modernity is the enemy of the values of civil society. Modernity undermines civility. Modernity is indecent.

Obstruction

Massakh is part way between pessach and shaar. A pessach is a doorway that is always open so that physical and visual access is always available; a shaar is a gate that can close off the doorway opening so that physical and visual access is cut off; a massakh stands a bit away from the doorway so that physical access is given but visual access is cut off. A masseikha really is a mask that cuts off visual access. An eigel masseikha is a wagon (a chariot) which cuts off the view. An ihr misskenot is a treasure city that allows for people to have access to food but which makes it so that the people cannot tell where the food comes from nor to whom it goes.

The other narrative

The clash of civilizations has two opposing narratives: modernity versus the death-cult.

Death-cult versus modernity

(1) The reason the ordinary citizen has become important in modern day diplomacy is because the leadership of democracies respond to public opinion.

(2) Israel's narrative is all about its own survival when it should be about eliminating the death-cult that is in the process of taking over the Muslim world.

The UN needs to address the metastasis of death-cult organizations throughout the Arab world, not so much because we are concerned about the death-cult's effects on the Arabs but because we are concerned about its effects on the rest of the world. When death-cult action kills innocents in Iraq or Pakistan or Afghanistan or Gaza or Lebanon it should be a concern of the UN's, and Israel needs to be spearheading the program to get the UN to put a stop to it. The death-cult must be eradicated.

Anywhere someone teaches how they love death while the rest of us love life, such death-cult teaching must be stamped out, and Israel must take the lead in getting the world to stamp it out. Were Israel to see itself that way, its existence wouldn’t be about its own survival, it would be about the world's basic values. That would be a more defensible public relations position from which to work.

(3) Assimilation is not about the Jews becoming more like their host gentile populations; assimilation is about the Jews becoming more like secular Jews who have adopted modernity. Modernity is an outgrowth of exile. As the Arabs have developed a death-cult ideology, the Jews have developed a modernity ideology. Jews assimilating are Jews who have moved beyond the exile of their forefathers and have adopted an updated version of being the eternal stranger – better known as the alienation of modernity.

Good Haredis finish last

The Haredi leadership is as intellectually impoverished as it is because the Genocide killed off the best minds and spirits, while the good minds that did survive had about them some low cunning rather than the higher instincts a proper leadership would naturally embody.

The Germans were bad before they were worse

After WWI Germany became a failed state, which means Europe, for most of the inter-war period, had a failed state in its center. Why did Germany have so many problems? Could it have been that its political power wasn't able to keep up with its economic power? Could it be the Germans became too good at exploiting the surpluses the Industrial Revolution enabled and didn’t have a politics that could temper that exploitation?

Inter-bellum instability

In the inter-war period the over-abundance of agricultural produce de-stabilized many national economies that depended on agriculture for their proper functioning. Inflation that resulted from the payment of reparations coupled with the irresponsible use of national currencies also disrupted the economies of many Europe nations. Altogether, market-based systems were unable to adjust to the disequilibrating forces that came from an improper use of future resources relative to present demand. Desert-based apportionment might well have served the post-WWI economic order better than fairness-based market allocations. The basic problem in post-WWI Europe was the sense of vengeance between the former combatants that made the peace merely an extension of the war rather than an opportunity to collaborate toward a more durable peace. Lex talionis is a dubious standard for international relations. The world needs to understand punitive justice at the international level more finely than it presently does. What desert really looks like as between the ruling elite versus the general populations in question is very much an open question.

Pump priming as plunder promotion

The deficit spending governments have to do (ostensibly to 'prime the pump' of economic growth) is a symptom of how it is that market economies are really about the disequilibrium of mining the fertile core. That governments have to unbalance their budgets to get their economies running, that it seems like it's almost never a good idea for government to run surpluses, that market economies seem to lead to consumer demand and higher and higher debt burdens, all that points to a system that doesn't really work. The macroeconomic instability we repeatedly see in large industrial economies is the result of the contradictions implicit in the micro-economics of market driven, price-based allocations.

It takes a long time for the truth to bleed through

So much of secular learning has had about it the stink of untruth; as is the case in traditional learning. We are born into a world of lies and falsehood, and it takes much of one’s youth to figure out how to hew more closely to the truth. It is the knowledge of the truth as true, and the recognition of how the truth sits within the bed of conventional falsehood that serves as the most persuasive of arguments. It is that teaching for which men and women are most hungry. The rest is details.

Super-abundance and fascism

Fascism and the politics of resentment becomes popular near the peak of economic super-abundance when people are beginning to sense that the easy money is no longer available and some hard choices are in the offing. Communism flourishes in a political climate that has become sensitive to injustice while fascism flourishes when the ruling elite needs to alter the rules of the game to adjust the society to the coming, new, harsher realities.

From mass slaughter to ecological collapse

We should take a step back and view the history of the 20th century not as a contest between political ideologies but as the natural outcome of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Europe, its colonies, and its adversaries. The massive, 31 year-long slaughter that stretched from 1914-1945 came out of the inability of the world's leadership to manage the extraordinary power the Industrial Revolution had unleashed in enabling mankind to mine the earth's fertile core without having to pay any dividend for generations. So as the 20th century was an object lesson in violence, the 21st century will become an object lesson in natural catastrophe. None of the daughters of the Industrial Revolution – liberal democratic capitalism, communism, fascism – had any sense of how to manage the problem of working the fertile core beyond sustainable levels. All the daughter ideologies were born of the excess the Industrial Revolution enabled. It was that excess that engendered a new sort of class warfare with a new arena of reward and punishment – the resource curse. The first and most insidious objective of the resource curse is to define the human condition as fundamentally rapacious and self-serving. In a resource cursed world, threats and war and pestilence and hunger and disease are the baseline conditions of humanity. None of the religions has come close to recognizing and framing and addressing and solving the challenges the Industrial Revolution and the attendant resource curse has loosed on mankind. The ultra-Orthodox response is trivial and pathetic and completely misses the point. The ultra-Orthodox define the problem in as narrow a focus as possible whereas the ancient teachings address the matter is as broad a focus as possible. That narrow focus affirms the first objective of the resource curse. It views the world as essentially threatening and it views humanity as basically aggressive. The ultra-Orthodox have fascistic affinities because they, like the fascists, do not place much stock in civil society and its core value: mutual aid.

Capitalism nice

The communist threat from the Soviet Union kept the European and American capitalists honest. The international mutual aid that fueled the post-WWII recovery was little more than a holding action against the socialist threat from the East. The Marshall Plan was really an anti-Communism plan, the first salvo in the Cold War.

Laissez faire versus mutual aid

The ostensible freedom that is embodied in the corporate sector values of laissez faire has as its counterpart the freedom embodied in the civil society values of mutual aid. Laissez faire does not preclude mutual aid, and vice versa. The question merely is which is primary and which secondary.

The sustainability of the dark side

The Cold War provided for a war economy, with the implied scarcity and insecurity behind it, without the war fighting. The Cold War could thus be sustained for decades whereas shooting wars, in the total-war context of modern industrial warfare, could typically not last more than a handful of years. Then, of course, the war on terror replaced the Cold War as the engine for economic demand-creation in an economic system that could only work properly where demand is held constant or is increasing.

Hubris and plunder and war

The American capitalists were better at extracting wealth from the natural environment than were the Soviet communists. That both sides of the Cold War were in effect extractors set things up for the aggression that arose between them. A plundering stance leads easily into a violent stance. If we want world peace, we must pursue a culture of satiation. The entire super-structure of contemporary international relations and rivalry is the outgrowth of the exploitation and hubris that has defined human societies since the dawn of civilization.

It was the Industrial Revolution, stupid

It wasn't the focus on capital or labor or government that made for the problem. The communists were no better than the capitalists; and if the fascists were worse than both of them, it was not a distinction that made all that much of a difference. The labor unions and the government officials and the corporate managers all belonged to an ideological movement that supported a materialist orientation that was defined and shaped by the Industrial Revolution. As far as the ultra-Orthodox were concerned, they focused on the Enlightenment and the Emancipation and shaped their counter-insurgency to deal with the Enlightenment's ideas and the Emancipation's social practices. The real culprit, however, was the Industrial Revolution and the resource curse it had unleashed on the world. That curse the ultra-Orthodox embraced with both arms, becoming avid exponents of its ideological off-shoots and its ways of shaping man's relations with his environment. The problem with the rabbinic tradition is that it doesn't go deep enough. It was the Bible that was truly revolutionary, not the Pharisees. It was the Bible that forewarned against the runaway hubris which technology would unleash. The Tower of Babel is a cautionary tale not about building ziggurats but about using bricks and mortar and bureaucratese. That the contemporary rabbinate focuses on the ethics rather than the politics or economics or ideology is because the contemporary rabbinate is still flogging the Talmudic horse rather than embracing the ancient biblical teachings that reached to a deeper place.

Labor and capital were both wrong

Labor unions were a way of apportioning property rights to laborers as corporations were a way of apportioning property rights to capitalists. The membership in the union corresponded to the contractual relationship of the board of directors and the executive management and the shareholders. Neither the union nor the shareholder held the right answer because both focused on apportioning rights through private property rather than through craftsman's liens.

God's Presence and the fertile core of inert things

The notion that labor as a resource has an ethical dimension which land and capital lack presumes that natural and financial resources are inert systems which lack a living, fertile core whereas human capital must be managed more delicately. The biblical regime imputes a living, fertile core in everything that goes into the creative process. Where the land, the natural resources or the money do not obviously convey a living need for sustainable nurturance God steps in and imbues them with His Presence. That Presence makes for a more vital social universe than would otherwise be the case. God's Presence corresponds to the right hemisphere's holistic way of seeing the world.

When growth slows plunder begins

So long as American productivity was rising faster than anyone could manage, class warfare could be held to a minimum and the middle class could get its fair share. Once the economic system stopped generating wealth as quickly as could be managed, the corporate class began to focus not on productivity but on plunder. Apportionment overwhelmed allocation considerations and the great wealth transfer was underway. In all likelihood, that fateful moment occurred around 1973.

A handbook for the guidance of an enlightened elite

An enlightened elite brought Japan, over the 150 year-long span from 1820-1970, from a sequestered island nation to the greatest growth in GDP on Earth. Most of all, the Chumash is a handbook for the guidance of an enlightened elite. That's the vision: a robust, inspired, young, enlightened elite that would bring the Jewish people into their future and that would ignite the world with an example of sustainable, replicable, beneficent leadership that does not submit itself to the temptations of hubris but who serve instead in stewardship with humility and wisdom. The right model for Israel is not 20th century Singapore but 19th century Japan. Japan's growth over the 19th and 20th centuries was 25-fold, as compared to America's 18-fold, Germany's 15 and England's 10. Japan's system centered on an enlightened industrialist core revolving around the keiretsu families, which identified the nation's welfare with their own; and on a strong-minded government bureaucracy that transcended the pushes and pulls of the elected politicians. The highest authorities in Japan (those in electoral government and in the military) tend to be relatively weak.

Civil society as social capital

The Jewish socialism is shabbos, and the Jewish capitalism is miqdash. Israel must devise economic and political institutions that fit with shabbos and miqdash to shape a Jewish political/economic system as a light unto the nations, and as the foundation of the messianic era. The competitive advantage of the Jewish political/economic system will be not the human capital and not the natural resources and not the financial capital but the social capital built into the culture of the people. Civil society and mutual aid could make the Israelite population the most productive people on the planet.

War and bad debt

Up till the present the sovereigns waged war as a way to advance their interests. In this century the sovereigns leverage and take advantage of the willingness of the general public to pay off the sovereigns' bad debts.

The economics of what's not yours

It could be that the way to counteract Gresham's Law is through proper rules of apportionment. Markets define how people allocate what belongs to them; civil society defines how people apportion what belongs not to them.

The elites of China versus Russia

China moved away from communism in an orderly fashion; Russia moved away in a disorderly fashion. One might say the Chinese had an enlightened elite while the Russians had a peasant elite. Nobler values and a loftier vision informed the Chinese as they tried to shape their societies. The Russians didn't have a comparable venerable perspective. In the end, it mattered. The Russians tried to shift away from communism through the demand side while the Chinese elected the supply side. The Chinese were right and the Russians were wrong.

Life used to be more authentic

What's been missing from most modern cultures since the onset of the Enlightenment has been a certain passionate way of being, a Zorba-like quality that made life feel like it was being lived. Values used to matter to members of traditional societies in a way that was more immediate, more authentic, more heart-felt, more virtuous and more fulfilling than what passes for conviction in modernist societies. Modernity threatens the depth and rawness of life which seems to have come easier in the traditional, spiritual, religious societies of the ancient world.

Diaspora Jews carry modernity

Muslim traditionalists are correct to worry about the establishment of the State of Israel in their midst. Jews are harbingers of modernity. Diaspora Jews personify the ‘stranger’ culture that will, if allowed to spread, dissolve the ethnic foundation of the Islamic nation. These two peoples really are in a clash of civilizations, and the Jewish people have been propelling an intense form of that metastatic civilization of alienation since that civilization began to come into its own with the Enlightenment.

Two kinds of 'why'

What transforms a behavior into an act is justice. A society must uphold some notion of justice in order for its members to be able to conduct their affairs as actors who possess autonomous motivation rather than in behavior that bespeaks servility and exogenous causation. When we seek reasons for conduct rather than reasons for behavior we are seeking justifications and evaluations rather than causes and mechanisms.

Too tolerant can be empty

The radical tolerance that lies at the heart of modern day ethics, the notion that ethics are exclusively formal and can define only processes and not the content of the ethical system, which content is particular to each actor and their desire and so cannot be prescribed by any fixed ethical system, that tolerance might well have the effect of vacating any notion of agency, action or autonomy in the conduct of human affairs. The clash between traditional political ideologies versus Western, modernist, political ideologies could well center on this radical anonymity implicit in the modernist conception, which lodges all the evaluative energy in the isolated individual and strips away the possibility of there being some profound system of values that go beyond the individual, indeed, that go beyond the mundane and the human. It could be modernity inadvertently strips away the possibility of autonomy and agency because radical hedonism cannot comprehend dignity or self-possession.

Action comes from character

When we speak of the cause of human action we cannot ascribe too much power to the cause, be it prior or posterior. To make room for human dignity requires the causes, no matter how proximate to the motivation, not to be entirely dispositive. Some of what's going on with the person needs to be self-generated and not 'caused' by anything other than his own internal impulses. Duty is a prior cause because the command propels; appetite is a posterior cause because the incentive depends on the outcome; character is neither prior nor posterior – it is doing things because that's how it’s supposed to be done. Actions are events that have attached to them the sense on the part of the actor that the action had value: the action had value, not just the outcome or the resultant of the behavior.

Character in the nation

Sovereignty is lodged in authority for foreign relations and in legitimacy for domestic relations. The foreign relations define who one’s friends are and who one’s enemies; the domestic relations define the nation’s character. Both require the state to take a stand and to promote a set of values that define the people’s culture.

Where does character fit in?

Self-interest, duty and character are the three, several, general motivators of behavior. For action to kick in, we need autonomy and agency. Character combines self-interest and duty. Our character has us doing what is right because it is good, because we prefer to do it. When we have strong character we do our duty as if it were our preference. It means we have incorporated what we ought to do into what we wish to do. When we conduct ourselves with good character we live our lives more fully and more robustly. We achieve the good life and not just the lavish life or the proper life. We incorporate the higher values, which permit of creative acts as well as of authoritative acts. The domain of character is where the mitigating institutions of shabbat and miqdash operate. The mitigating institutions of shabbat and miqdash depend on the autonomy and agency of character to delimit the scope, respectively, of self-interest and authority. Where we are alive to the richer possibilities of human agency and autonomy we are able to maintain our societies as both resilient and self-sustaining. With autonomy and agency comes the possibility of desert. When we live our lives as real experiences what drives those experiences is a sense of desert. It's how we evaluate what to do. When we prefer proper desert we are living with character. It is because of desert rather than the fulfillment of duty that we prefer to do what's right.

It is the undeserving who feel the gratitude

Gratitude is the sentiment that comes of acknowledging one's own undeservedness. It is how the undeserving relate to the deserving.