[Avodah] Liberal vs Conservative Value System

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 10:44:39AM +0200, Moshe Zeldman via Avodah wrote:
: Is anyone familiar with works that discuss Torah representing a liberal vs
: conservative value system (re social welfare, individual rights,
: affirmative action, diversity, social justice)?

No answers, just thoughts for others to work with / critique.

I often say that O Jews today are caught without a spot on the spectrum,
at least how the spectrum lines up in the US.

Liberalism has come to embrace post-modernism, in which there is really
no objective truth. (True post-modernists would say that even science
is a construct; I don't think the popularist version has gotten that far
outside liberal arts departments on campus.) Just his truth vs her truth,
my truth and your truth.

And when one lacks belief in objective values, there ends up
being one thing that gets treated as an objective value: maximizing
autonomy. Letting people find their own meaning and pursue their own
values. As long as that doesn't involve stepping on others' attempt to
do the same -- that wouldn't be maximizing.

Meanwhile, the western conservative is drawing from Xian values. (Assuming
one is willing to include the Prosperity Gospel in that umbrella.) They
have objective values, but there isn't really a Judeo-Xian ethic, no
shared belief in what those values look like. We don't even frame them
in the same terms -- can a religious Xian relate to the very idea of a
religious law? That such details can make or break the appropriateness
of an action?


As for social welfare, what speaks of social justice more than using
the shoresh /tz-d-q/ (tzedeq tzedeq tirdof) for tzedaqah?

As for individual rights... Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh stands in
distinct opposition to "live and let live". Halakhah demands heteronomy
for most of us -- we defer to posqim.

We're just not in any one place on an axis made for a different culture.

I canot think of any mention in halakhah about conscious attempts to
balance the workforce with diversity initiatives and affirmative action.
There is fostering of diversity in a set-up that tried (until Sancheirev)
to insure there be 12 distinct ways of being Jewish. But aniyei irekha
qodmin would mean your family, sheivet, or friends and neighbors are
supposed to get first attention -- not fostering diversity.

Choshein Mishpat does not have the same notion of worker's rights as
liberals or unions. And that's just one example where "social justice"
can't have the same meaning. I would take it for granted that Yahadus
teaches social justice and even teaches us to be the world's exemplars
of social justice. See RSRH's take on what it means to be a mamlekhes
kohanim. But that doesn't line up with everything non-O Jews might term
"tikun olam".

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Education is not the filling of a bucket,
micha at aishdas.org        but the lighting of a fire.
http://www.aishdas.org                - W.B. Yeats
Fax: (270) 514-1507