August 28, 2014

Jews are often taught that wine is a symbol of joy. Isaiah is not so sure. This “Isaiah” is really the Second Isaiah, who preached to the Jews enslaved in Babylon, and (perhaps knowing that the Persians would soon overthrow the Babylonians), told them of redemption to come:

Rouse, rouse yourself!
Arise, O Jerusalem
You who from the Lord’s hand
Have drunk the cup of His wrath
You who have drained to the dregs
The bowl, the cup of reeling!

Your sons lie in a swoon
At the corner of every street –
Like an antelope caught in a net
Drunk with the wrath of the Lord

Why would the prophet compare oppression to drunkedness? Isaiah is not referencing actual addiction, but rather producing a subtle analysis of oppression. 

Scholars have long grappled with the mercurial idea of power. One of the most important frameworks divides power into three dimensions:

• The first dimension involves a straightforward conflict, with one side winning: A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do what B would not otherwise do.
• The second dimension is sometimes referred to as a “mobilization of bias,” and centers on agenda-setting: some issues are considered and others are not. A has power over B to the extent that A can make sure that no one significant hears B or considers B’s concerns as relevant.
• The third dimension  is the most controversial but potentially the most significant, because it centers on the ability to manipulate symbols and ideology to create quiescence. A has power over B to the extent that B does not even see itself as being manipulated and accepts its own oppression.

In Haftarat Shofetim, Isaiah seems to lean toward the third dimension, compared the oppressed Israel to a drunkard. Someone suffering under the first dimension might be likened to a prisoner in chains; suffering under the second, to someone locked out of a house. Here, the burdens of oppression fall on the oppressed person’s psyche. Isaiah is telling Israel that its enslaver is its own mind, not the Babylonians.

So far, so good. But consider the implications of the third dimension. It threatens many of our more cherished American ideals. Democratic governance presumes that people are best able to judge for themselves what they want; individual rights protect these judgments and allow individuals to pursue their own concept of the good. That is why, in Jefferson’s famous words, every person has the rights to “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness.”

If power can manipulate people into quiescence, however, then democracy based upon individual rights is something of a bad joke. We may think that we know what we want, but in fact we are no better than Isaiah’s Jews, reeling around in a drunken swoon. Little wonder, then, that the third dimension of power is usually associated with leftist ideologies: one of Noam Chomsky’s most famous books is entitled Manufacturing Consent.

Isaiah – no New Leftist he —  has a straightforward answer to the question of how to break through power’s third dimension: follow God, and by implication (at least in this Haftarah), Jewish law. “Turn, turn away, touch nothing unclean as you depart from there; Keep pure, as you go forth from there, you who bear the vessels of the Lord!” (52:11). Thus, Isaiah turns Marx on his head: religion is not the opiate of the masses, but rather its methadone.

But Isaiah’s “solution” makes the cure worse than the disease: Isaiah presumes that there is one way to live one’s life, one set of values – centered on Jewish purity laws – that makes a life well-lived. Our modern commitment to individual freedom for its own sake rejects this argument. This is inevitable; the more that any philosophy sees the third dimension of power as being influential, the more it conflicts with democratic values.

We cannot fully reconcile these competing value systems. Yet we can attempt to use the third dimension of power, and thus Isaiah's prophecy, as a critique of the sort of individualism that simply seeks to maximize individual choice. The point is to maximize the best individual choices. We can engage in practices designed to get at what our most authentic and genuine preferences and values are, instead of those either foisted on us or those that we indulge without really thinking about it.

How do we sober up? My teacher, the late Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, once told a group of us rabbinic students: “Do not confuse the urgent with the important.” I believe that that is a key: we must deal with the urgent, but then deliberately dig deeper to discover the important.

I like to start by journaling, an increasingly popular practice with deep Jewish roots. But not just any kind of journaling: when I am trying disentangle the urgent from the important, I just try to list at the end of the day how I spent my waking hours. That’s it. No great philosophical musings; just a list.  Then, after several days (it should be longer but I never have the patience), I look back at the list and review how I am spending my time. Sometimes it’s not bad; much of the time it is not a thing of beauty. But if it isn’t a thing of beauty, I ask myself: what is not beautiful about it and what would make it more beautiful? Why am I spending time doing things that are not important? Recognizing this problem serves as the splash of cold water to the face.

I then try to go through the day as it occurs, trying to pay close attention to my activities as they occur and do them with the proper intention. Or, if my intention is focused, perhaps I won’t do the activity at all.  Jews are familiar with the idea of kavanah in prayer; our task is to bring kavanah to every facet of our lives.

The early Chassidim mastered this sort of intense self-examination as Yitzhak Buxbaum retells in his magnificant Jewish Spiritual Practices. “A Hasid,” noted the Kotzker Rebbe, “searches and questions himself not only once, but a second and a third time, about everything he does.”  The Kotzker’s student Rabbi Hanoch Henich HaCohen, took this to heart. “From then on,” he wrote,

I spent much time examining and considering all my actions, everything I did. When I . . . went to have something to eat, I picked up the vessel for the hand washing and began to question myself: What will be if I do not wash my hands? And if I do wash, am I then prepared for eating? Let us say I wash my hands and make a blessing over the bread – what kind of blessing will it be? How will I let it out of my mouth, and to Whom will I utter it?

Notice both the power and the limitations of this practice. Because they remained firmly tethered to Orthodoxy, even the greatest Chassidic masters could only imagine self-examination as a way of deepening their religious practice. For modern drunkards like ourselves, we need to fundamentally re-examine our public and private values. That means we must build constructively on the powerful example of the Chassidim.

Our questions should investigate our beliefs, biases, and assumptions – only this has a chance of us resisting the third dimension of power. Perhaps this could serve as an exercise: let us write down not an activity journal, as before, but a belief journal.  Every time I make some sort of value judgment about something or someone – “I like that” “I hate that” — I will write it down, and then after a few days, re-examine the collection of these judgments. Why did I think that? Why do I think that? These could derive from everyday experiences or just unwarranted generalizations that we find ourselves making – “liberals believe that X”, or “that’s typical dumb Southern thing to do.”

We will find that our judgments are colored, or even controlled, by unspoken assumptions about the way the world works, or by getting our information from sources that we have chosen for ourselves, and thus reflect our biases even more. In an age 30% of the public gets its information from its Facebook feed, which depends upon which sites we have “friended,” we are all cocooning ourselves more and more.

Modern social scientists use phrases like “epistemic closure” to describe this phenomena, but were he here, Isaiah would wryly observe that we are all inebriated. Some are drunker than others – polarization is “asymmetric,” which means that conservatives have become relatively more extreme than liberals – but the Torah says that we all must rouse ourselves. If we do not, Haftarat Shofetim might simply herald our culture and our people lying face down in the gutter.