Decoding Ancient Scripture with Dr. Yoram Hazony

In this episode…

Yoram: America is becoming less like a nation-state and more like an empire. We are really in a bad period for democracy, because you can’t have democracy if there aren’t, at least, two major parties that each one recognizes the legitimacy of the other.

Interview

Fred: So Yoram Hazony welcome and thank you so much for being here today.

Yoram: Thank you for having me, Fred. It’s a pleasure.

Fred: So, you’re an award-winning scholar, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington. And your work really challenges us to look at religion and politics a little bit differently than we’re used to.

So, as we just talked about a little bit. Many, many years ago, I read The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, and it’s really been a reference point for me ever since. And I’ve realized how much these questions that you raise and that you address in that book and elsewhere are really still very, very contemporary to me.

So, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much for accepting to do this, and it’s a real honour to have you here with me today.

Yoram: Really my pleasure. Especially if you want to talk about The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, then I’m certainly up for that.

 

CHAPTER 1 : The Cultural Revolution in 21^st Century Academia

Fred: Well, a few months ago, I was doing a deep dive on Middle East history on YouTube, and I found some fantastic lectures given at the Shalem College in Jerusalem by Aviv Ti Gour and many others.

And in preparing for this interview, I discovered that you actually founded Shalam College, right?

Yoram: That is in fact true.

Fred: So tell me how, how does one go about founding a world-class, liberal arts school in the 20th and 21st century?

There’s a lot of discussion today around higher education and higher education reform, but you actually pulled off something quite unique there.

Yoram: There’s an awful lot to say about founding a college. If you think about people, people talk about the universities, refer to them as the ivory tower. Which, you know, gives this impression both that they’re removed and that they are kind of inert. I think the experience of, you know, the last couple of generations has made it very clear that the universities are actually much closer to being a radio tower. They broadcast.

The students who come into the university, spend most of their time away from their homes and their families at a very sensitive age. They are presented with a spectrum of opinion, which usually goes from liberal to Marxist. It usually doesn’t include real conservative opinions.

And that spectrum of opinion from liberal to Marxist, that ends up being what almost all of the students who go to university, consider to be, legitimate. That puts us in kind of. If we feel that much of what is true in all sorts of areas, philosophy, religion, politics, law – many other areas. If we feel that what’s taught in the universities probably is misguided, either to a small degree or to a very large degree, then we don’t really have much choice.

We can either try to do an end run around the universities. Many people do this. They, set up these little programs that are kind of adjacent to universities that reaches a small number of students. But its impact is actually quite limited compared to the impact of the universities.

And so, throughout my public life, which is about 30 – 35 years, I’ve worked toward and encouraged others to try to set up new academic institutions. And for most of that time, almost nobody was listening to people like me. But right now, at this moment, you know, after the cultural revolution of 2020, I think more people are listening.

And there’s all sorts of places where the idea of starting new academic institutions or buying an academic institution or commandeering one and making it something special and unique and different. That’s – at this point – catching on.

Fred: I have friends that have taught at Hillsdale College as well in the States, and it’s in a similar vein, I think.

And I’m just curious, why do you pinpoint 2020 as the year of a cultural revolution?

Yoram: Well, it actually happened. Look at the history of ideas in America and Europe. You’ll see that after World War II, there’s a very profound change. A lot of people would say they can see it beginning after World War I, but certainly after World War II. There’s a replacement of the traditional political philosophy, the traditional framework of the United States and Britain and many other countries.

We could very loosely say that the United States before World War II is kind of a Christian democracy. Christian democracy is a European term – Americans don’t use it so much. But if you dig in to try to understand what did the Supreme Court and the political leadership think, you’ll see that F.D.R. and Eisenhower and the leadership class considered America to be a Christian country.

They wanted it to be a tolerant country – they had all sorts of hopes and aspirations for how to improve it. But they didn’t have any doubt that the foundation of the United States was Christianity. So, for example, if you take, F.D.R’s State of the Union address in 1939, he knows that the country may be heading towards World War.

And he’s very clear that the war that the United States is going to fight against the Nazis is going to be a war between God-fearing democracy and atheistic totalitarianism. That’s the way that he understood it and that’s the way that his generation understood it.

After World War II, very quickly in a very different place where, you know, by 1947, the American Supreme Court declares separation of church and state to be foundational in the United States, for the first time. And, you know, by the time you get to the 1960s, the God and the Bible and prayer have been explicitly banned from the schools.

Nobody’s talking about the United States as a Christian country. By the time you get to the – certainly – to the 1970s and/or if there are people who are saying that, then they’re outliers. So, there’s this period that goes – let’s say that it begins in 1947 with the imposition of separation of church and state as a constitutional principle – and I think it comes to an end in 2020.

What happens during that period is that there’s a worldview that today we call it liberal democracy, right? This is not just any old democracy, it’s democracy, which is limited by a set of ideas which are caught in the term liberalism.

And this is a period when both major political parties, Democrats and Republicans – and you see the same thing in the major parties in Britain and in Europe – both of the major parties are liberal parties. I mean, they disagree on all sorts of things, important things, but they’re liberal in the sense that all of them support separation of church and state. All of them support the, the perfect equality and the perfect natural liberty of every individual. And more than that, almost everybody thinks that that’s what you need in order to understand politics and in order to make a good life for the people in America.

And that era – which I think in some ways is very noble and in some ways is very naïve – that era comes crashing to an end in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd riots, which happened in parallel with this cultural revolution that took place, I guess, most prominently at the New York Times, but then very quickly at Princeton University and through most of the liberal institutions in the United States.

That was the summer when the New York Times fired Jim Bennett and Barry Weiss and others, because they were liberals. What do I mean by liberals? I mean that they were supporters of the old way of looking at things, which included the idea that conservatives were legitimate opponents; that conservatives should be allowed to publish their views in the New York Times; that both sides in an argument between liberals and conservatives – that they’re both legitimate and they can, they’re allowed to win elections. All of that ended in the summer of 2020 when the idea that you could be an old school liberal and still be a person of great influence basically ended in liberal America.

I mean, it’s really a generational change. It’s – you can see what is called, “Woke Neo-Marxism” – if that’s a good phrase to use. If you want, we can use another. But that’s the ideology of people under 40 reached a critical mass and started saying: “No, the old liberalism doesn’t work anymore. We don’t believe in your freedom. When you say individual liberties are the most important thing, actually, what you’re saying is that you want to defend a system of racial, white racist supremacy – softer or harder – but that’s basically what you’ve built. And the only way to move forward is going to be by force to overthrow it.”

Fred: It is almost a case of there was something in the liberal era – there was almost something agnostic about it in the sense of it was still very committed to meritocracy. It was very committed to individual rights. As you say, liberalism and conservatism were seen as fair opponents.

There was something almost, you know, we are not predetermining the outcome. So there was something almost beyond – let’s call it electoral politics or particular ideological movement – even though you can say yes, it was a broader ideological movement – and with the cultural evolution, George Floyd and so forth, there’s almost a hijacking on the left of a very particular political ideology, and now it’s about that ideology actually winning. So it’s not about maintaining the old liberal framework of the secular state. Now it becomes about almost like a new religion in the sense that : “No, no, no, no. There’s this very particular movement that is at odds with an enemy movement and that movement must win.”

Yoram: Yeah, I think you’re describing it exactly correctly. I mean there were all sorts of sort of implicit principles in post-war liberalism. And that included an implicit framework.

You can move in the socialist kind of direction up to a certain point. You can move in the Christian and nationalist direction up to a certain point. While we were living through it, I don’t think we really understood the degree to which – you know, if you go back – and I tell my students to watch the debates from that era, whether it’s Kennedy versus Nixon, or whether it’s Reagan versus Carter –it’s not just that they’re polite to one another, although they are, the heart of it is that both sides are constantly emphasizing that the other side is legitimate. Even though they’re mistaken, they’re constantly emphasizing: “I don’t agree with my opponent, but I’m sure that on the crucial issues we’ll be working together regardless of who wins the election.”

That kind of – I think people mistakenly call it politeness. What it really is a constant affirmation that we are in this together, because the alternative is we’re not in this together and we’re at war to destroy one another. And just like you said, I would say the transition is – you can see forerunners of it – but the transition is really in 2016. When, both in Britain where Brexit was and the elites refused to accept Brexit as a legitimate decision by the electorate, and the same thing happened with Donald Trump, where there was this resistance that argued for all sorts of different reasons that Trump was not a legitimate president.

And I can’t, you know – I’m a conservative, I’d like to be able to blame just the left – but if we try to look at it, you know, impartially the truth is that both in 2016 and in 2020, we have this same phenomenon where, first the Democrats and then the Republicans, don’t want to’ recognize that the other side won the election.

If you compare that to Nixon and Kennedy in 1960 – I mean, there’s a famous story, I’m most of your listeners have at least heard of it – that Nixon [did] believe that in Chicago and other places, the election, which was very close, had been fraudulent.

And the decision that he made was to concede the election so that the country wouldn’t tear itself apart.

Fred: Unbelievable. Unthinkable today. Unthinkable that something like that would happen today.

Yoram: Unthinkable, and here we are, we’re people are talking about a national divorce. By the way, this is not just in America. This same kind of talk is in Britain, in Europe, in Israel we had this same disease of the opposition claiming that the Prime Minister is illegitimate [which] began in 2019 and we’ve been in kind of a political crisis since then. We are really in a bad period for democracy, because you can’t have democracy if there aren’t, at least, two major parties that each one recognizes the legitimacy of the other.

Fred Pinto: Yeah. This, this cleavage, it seems much more profound than anything we’ve lived to date in the last 30, 40 years. And, it’s the same. You hear the same discourse on the right as well, right? The people on the left, they’re not really the left. Right? They’re not really the West. There’s something else, right? There’s an intrusion. And then people on the left, well, the West was really about, you know, these universal values and the universal human rights and the separation between church and state and the Christian, right? That’s not really the Western tradition. So there’s this move to sort of exclude each other, and both sides, obviously, with the polarization, we’re seeing both sides being pulled by their extremes.

And what I’m very interested in your work is that, as we kind of experience this cleavage and this fragmentation in the West, and you see it in other places as well, you kind of go back to biblical works and you study them very, very seriously. And you’re informed by these ideas, and you sort of then go back to applying them in the present.

And what I found in your work, one pattern that’s very interesting is that you seem to grant real weight and seriousness to religious ideas, even if you don’t. And I wanna make sure I’m characterizing your view because this is a very tricky distinction and I wanna make sure I get it right as we sort of delve into this topic, even if you don’t see every single letter of scripture as the direct and pure revelation from a perfect being, but not withstanding that, you still see real importance and real weight and real value in the religious ideas that are contained in scripture.

So first of all, is that a fair assessment of your general position?

Yoram: Yeah, I think so. I mean, a lot of these terms are – you know, the discussion about whether God is a perfect being is a medieval discussion, which has its roots in Aristotle, it has its roots in Pagan Greek thought, and so I wouldn’t rush to say that a religious Jew, or any other kind of religious person – a religious Christian, or anyone else – has to be locked into that Aristotelian framework that says “What is God? God is a perfect being.” So, just setting that aside, I think that the thrust of your question is exactly right. I don’t think that the importance of the Bible only comes from the fact that people believe it’s from God. I think that people believe it’s from God because it’s so important. And the tragedy of the West in the last 200 years – let’s say maybe 250 years – is that the West – which was in many respects, shaped and formed by the Bible. And here I want to emphasize, I’m talking primarily about what Christians called the Old Testament, that for Jews, that’s the Bible – Christians call it the Old Testament. A very simple, simplistic even, distinction; The Christian New Testament is primarily focused on the eternal life of the individual and also, to a degree, to the morals of the individual. The Jewish Bible – the Old Testament – is overwhelmingly about politics. I mean, obviously, it’s about morals. It’s about God and man’s relationship with God. All of these things are crucial. But if you’re comparing it to the New Testament, the thing that’s most striking is the Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – is about the political, it’s about this world. It has very little to say about: “What’s the next world going to be like? What’s eternal life going to be like?” It’s mostly focused on: “How do we act properly? How do we live well? How do we ensure the survival of our nation and that our nation is just, that our nation is righteous, that our nation is under God? – as people many centuries later would say – How do we make those things happen?”

Thinking about our country, when ancient Israel – just like every other country in history – was a nation made up of tribes – tribes that were often jealous, resentful of one another, sometimes at war with one another – and then surrounded by neighbors, who are sometimes friends and sometimes enemies. The central question of the Hebrew Bible is: We’re a small people living between big aggressive empires; how do we bring about, um, a, a society that is not only just, but is internally unified so that the people are pulling in one direction instead of a hundred different directions? How do we prevent ourselves from being destroyed from the outside because of the fact that we’re destroying one another, our own brothers on the inside? That’s like the major question. And what’s interesting is that this question is not – you now, I have a PhD in a field called political theory or political philosophy – and what’s interesting is that when you look at the Greek or Roman sources, which are usually taught in programs of political theory or political philosophy, in many ways they evade the central questions that the Bible is thinking about. That the biblical authors, the prophets, the scholars who wrote the Jewish Bible, they’re thinking about certain ideas which are not quite the same ideas.

So, if you begin studying, whatever, Plato, Aristotle and so on, the first thing you’re told is that political thought is about what’s the best regime, what kind of government should we have. And that is characteristic of the tradition going all the way up to modern times.

But the Bible is less interested in what’s the best regime and much more interested in what’s the best political order that is how – forget for a moment, whether you should have a king or you should be a republic, whether you should be federalist or not – set all those things about the regime aside and just ask a much more basic question, what do you need to do in order to bring peace and brotherhood among people so that they aren’t killing each other? You know, that’s a question that’s prior to the question of what’s the best state. The Bible is focused on those questions.

 

CHAPTER 2 – The Old Testament as Philosophy o

Fred: Interesting. And I wonder the degree to which. Because to the degree that we can, I understand the distinction between – it’s true – The New Testament focuses on the life of an individual and things like individual character values. And then the effect – of course – of that on groups. And in the Old Testament, you see very little of that.

But we do still start with – when you look at the revelation of God’s word – we do start with the story of Abraham, which is one individual. And so, I think that a lot of those initial downloads or insights are very pertinent to what comes after that. There’s also something that you wrote about in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.

There’s also a universalist vision in this revelation in the sense that; yes, it’s going to be about Abraham, you and your tribe that’s going to come after that, but in order for the revelation to have its integrality in the words that it’s given, it’s also something where all the nations of the Earth will be blessed.

So there’s also this sense of – it’s not just about the, survival or even the flourishing of your particular tribe. It’s also – through this tradition – all the other nations, all the other tribes will also be blessed. So I wonder, if you see that as very central to the political theory or the political system that’s proposed by the Old Testament and do you see it expressed in everything that comes after the life of Abraham?

Yoram: Sure. Yes. It’s absolutely central in order to understand why it’s such a big deal. For God to tell Abraham, I’m going to – you know, before God tells Abraham through you all the nation, all the families of the Earth will be blessed. Before God says that, the verse right before that, he says, I’m going to make of you a great nation. So he’s saying: “I’m going to make you a great nation, and through you, through meaning through you and your descendants, through your nation, all the peoples of the earth are going to be blessed.” Why is that such a revolutionary thing to say?

Well, you know, certainly there are other gods in the Middle East in those days who think that. Through – you know – through the Egyptians or the Assyrians or the Babylonians, that all the peoples of the world are going to be blessed. But the way that they expect to go about doing it is by conquering all the peoples of the Earth.

You know, I’m not being facetious about this. I’m actually quite serious that in the Middle East, when you dig in the ground here in the Middle East, you pull up records from these ancient imperial states. And they’re very different from one another, but they all have one thing in common, which is that all of them think that what God wants them to do – what their God wants them to do – is to conquer the four corners of the Earth.

And by doing so, suppress all the dissension and hatred and warfare among nations and bring peace and prosperity to the whole world. That’s the theory.

And by the way, that’s the theory of Alexander later. That’s the theory of the Romans all the way up.

Fred: It’s Pax Romana. Yeah, it’s Pax Romana. We talk about the Roman Republic. I mean, that’s what it is.

Yoram: Yeah. That’s exactly what it is. So, it’s not just barbarian and brutal. There’s a purpose to their conquest, their murder, their theft. The purpose is to bring peace and prosperity to all the, all the nations of the earth. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh is a rebellion. That rebellion begins with the assertion: “We don’t need a tower of Babel. In fact, it’s evil. We’re going to have a small nation on a small piece of land, and we’re not going to conquer the whole world. Moses has a direct line to God, creator of heaven and earth, but God tells him, here are your borders and you’re not allowed to cross them.

On the one hand, we’re going to leave all the other nations alone. They’re going to govern themselves, they’re going to find their own way to God. On the other hand, through the way that we live and the things that we teach, and the example that we make, we have the ability to bless all the nations of the Earth.

And, you know, from a Jewish perspective, Maimonides, for example, emphasizes that the fact that the Christians have the Jewish Bible – 80% of their Bible is the Tanakh, is the Jewish Bible – and the fact that they’ve spread the, the knowledge of God’s word, almost to everywhere on Earth, Maimonides saw that as being as an example of us being a blessing to the nations.

We didn’t set out to conquer the world, and still, somehow, in Korea, people are reading the Hebrew Bible, and some of them are even reading the Talmud.

Fred: And also – I was thinking about this recently – if we’re going to look at Christianity, Judaism and Islam as sort of broadly speaking, Abrahamic in their origin. If we add Islam to that as well. I would say it’s perhaps the only way to interpret that statement as having been accurate in the sense of not through the universalism of Judaism per se, as a religion – as we know that’s not even something that is advocated in Judaism – but through, the influence and sort of acting as a building block to, certainly, Christianity and Islam. That vision may have actually come to bear.

Yoram: You know, I think there actually is a universalism to Judaism, but it just doesn’t look like Christian or Muslim universalism. When Solomon builds the temple, he prays to God on behalf of any foreigner who will come to Jerusalem to seek God’s blessing.

Isaiah speaks explicitly about the righteous of the nations will keep the Sabbath – and when he says the Sabbath, he means the Jewish Sabbath – and Ezekiel talks about the Jewish law as a law that if a person, if a man, Adam, lives by it, then he’ll flourish.

I mean, you can just keep going and going. The Tanakh has plenty of texts about the nations coming to Jerusalem to study the Torah. We have it in Isaiah, we have it in Jeremiah, we have it in Zechariah, the vision that the Torah is wisdom for the nations. It is very clear, what is not there, is any kind of mandate or commandment to conquer or force anyone to learn.

And that’s an important part of understanding what Jews gave the world. The idea that – you know – we hear these arguments today about “Do we need borders? Should, should there be independent nations at all? Wouldn’t it be better if we all become rid of our borders and we’re all like some big European Union.” The vision of “all the nations are going to be brothers” is of course biblical. It has no Greek or Roman source, but the other side of it, the flip side that we need good borders in order to be good neighbors, that’s also biblical.

And so both parts of it are – would not exist if you were only looking at Greek and Roman sources.

CHAPTER 3 – Learning through Metaphors

Fred: So, it’s almost like this combination of negative freedom in the words of Isaiah Berlin, so negative political freedom, independence – from another nation dominating you – but also having universal concern.

It’s this combination that I feel that you understand as being a particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible, of the Jewish texts to – let’s call it western civilization – and beyond.

So, you have a line in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture that’s been a little bit controversial. It’s a bit shocking, and I’ve kind of delved into what does it mean.

You write: “The Hebrew Bible is the modern university’s blindside.” And it’s linked to this argument, this kind of split that we have in the West between reason and revelation. Which, you argue, in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t such a thing as this neat distinction. You write that nothing in the principal Hebrew text suggests that the prophets and scholars were familiar with such an opposition between God’s word and the pronouncements of human reason when it’s working as it should.

So this split between reason and revelation is something that came after the Hebrew Bible.

And you also write that, western scholar forgive the Greeks this. Right? They see, Socrates and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and so forth as rationalists, when in reality, we all know they believed in God very clearly and very centrally, but somehow, they don’t do this with biblical figures.

On the flip side of this – and I wonder what you think about this – millions of religious people to this day still claim that Revelation is literal. So prophets literally conversated with God. God told them this. God told them that. They know exactly what the source is and it comes from this supernatural, outside the natural order source.

And they also root their religious faith in a literal belief in miracles. So we’re trying to understand the nature of – We’re trying to understand the nature of reality. We’re trying to understand how the world works. It’s not clear we’re dealing with mystery. We’re dealing with stuff that we don’t understand. We come up with, with metaphors about God. God said this, God said that. But in light of the prevalence of religious literalism, to this day, do we not need to still draw a line and decide which camp do we, do we stand on? Are we in the metaphorical camp or in the literal camp?

Yoram: Well, I do think we need to draw a line, and I do think that the side that I live on and that I believe in and that I teach in is the side where there is a living God and he does speak to human beings.

Not only in the time of the Bible, but today as well. Coming with that is – the Torah is the best way to live and the people who live according to the Torah – you can easily see it in their lives that their lives – are blessed in a way that people who don’t live according to the Torah don’t usually get.

So I don’t have any question. That’s the side that I’m on. But I want to be careful because there’s a great deal of confusion over this question of how metaphors are used in the Bible. And I’ll tell you where the confusion comes from.

Aristotle says explicitly that there’s a difference between reasoning and science on the one hand – and poetry on the other.

He draws a sharp distinction. And he talks specifically about metaphor. He says that a metaphor has no truth to it. That there’s no truth. What we today call, in philosophy departments, they call “truth value.”

The truth value of a metaphorical statement is false. That is if – let’s say that – some poet says the moon is a ghostly galleon. They look at the moon and they, and they use this metaphor, this analogy – the moon is a ghostly galleon.

And Aristotle would say, well, that’s false. The moon’s not any kind of a galleon, ghostly or otherwise. The moon’s not a ship, it’s not sailing, it’s just – it’s a rock. It goes around the right. So this claim that when you speak metaphorically, the things you say are poetically nice and moving and meaningful, but they’re false.

That claim is a claim that the prophets and scholars who are responsible for bringing the biblical texts to us – they would’ve rejected that.

Meaning if – let’s say for example – in the book of Exodus, the people that are on the far side of the Red Sea, they’ve seen the Egyptian army destroyed. And the bodies of the Egyptian soldiers and their chariots are washed up on the shore. And it says – in the text – it says that the people saw ha-yad ha-gedolah, they saw the great hand, like the large hand that God brought down upon the Egyptians.

Now, so Aristotle would look at that, and he would say: “Well, that’s false. Whatever God did, he did it with water and wind. He didn’t have a hand.”

And we’re all – all of us are kind of used to this way of talking about it. Like we tell – I think too many Jews and Christians tell their children – God doesn’t really have a hand. Unfortunately, I think that this way of – this Aristotelian way of – reading the Torah, the biblical text, brings us straight to atheism.

Because by the time you’re done telling your children over and over “well God doesn’t really have a hand and he doesn’t really speak. It’s just a metaphor.” And you just keep telling them all these things. In the end, they go through all of the negative theology and they figure out that, that God is nothing other than the sound of silence.

And then the next step after that is that God is nothing. God; there is no God.

So, I reject this entire train of thought, because the way that the prophets get across truths about God – but not only about God – the way they get across truths about politics and philosophy and morals, the way that they teach is through these metaphors.

And there’s all sorts of techniques. In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, one of the main techniques that I emphasize is that the philosophy of the prophets is taught by contrasts, contrasts between different metaphors.

So if you’re looking for the political theory of the Book of Kings, for example, you need to notice that the Book of Kings is constantly contrasting between the ways of David and the sins of Yarov’am [Jeroboam]. Those are metaphors, right? We’re actually talking about two different kingdoms, the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom and we’re being pushed to take these metaphors and try to understand what is the truth that they’re grasping at.

What do you mean by the ways of David? What do you mean by the sins of Yarov’am?

And if, if you don’t push these metaphors in the direction of truth, and I’m including the metaphor of God’s great hand – well, it’s a metaphor – but it’s describing something that’s really true. And our job is to get at it.

What’s the truth here when it says that, that God spoke? Does that necessarily mean that if you were there with your microphone you would be able to hear God speaking to me? You would hear his voice? It would sound like George Burns or some other, you know, human being speaking, not necessarily.

It doesn’t seem like God’s speech at Sinai sounded like a human voice to the people standing there. But that doesn’t mean that God didn’t speak. God did speak. It’s just that when God speaks, or when God breathes life into something, or when God raises his hand and his outstretched arm against something, it’s not like our speech and our outstretched arm in every way.

But in some crucial, essential way, it is like our speech, and it is like our outstretched arm. And that’s the reason that the Torah is capable of teaching truth. It’s because it’s constantly smashing through the superficial layer of literalist reality and getting into at something that’s absolutely true and real, but it’s a lot deeper.

Fred: It’s very similar to something I read in Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed when he says that, one of the keys to understanding the Torah is to understand this trick that the prophets and the Bible will describe things in metaphorical language and how important it is not to look at it strictly, literally; so as an actual big hand, or perhaps even as a voice.

But if I understand, it’s almost like layers to you. So, it is describing something real. And then the question for us is: In what respects was it similar? But it’s almost – like you see – there are still a lot of people who read it, actually, literally. And then you create this potential opposition with, “Well, there’s no evidence of that.” Right? Because if you refute the metaphorical view completely, and if you don’t combine it with a more sophisticated way of looking at it – like you’ve just described or like as in Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed – then you invite the truth discussion on a very measurable objective metric that folks like the new atheists or folks like, people that are materialistic scientists will look at it and say: “Well, you know, where’s the evidence of that? There’s no evidence of that. Therefore, everything you talk about when you talk about God is not real.”

Yoram: Yeah. And one of the most annoying aspects of the whole new atheist, movement. I read a number of their books and one of the central arguments repeated over and over and over again is: every time that you try to broach a sophisticated understanding, the way of what it is that the prophets actually believe based on what it is that they say and the arguments that they make and the way that they make it – Every time you try to do something that’s sort of a grownup discussion – You know, I don’t mean to insult anybody, but you know they insist that the only thing that religious people are allowed to believe is things that a 10-year-old would believe – And the moment that anyone tries to push them to 15-year-old beliefs or 20-year-old beliefs, they say “No, no, no that’s not real religion. What you’re doing is fake religion.” So, they get to decide thousands of years of Jewish and then Christian history. The most sophisticated and deepest understandings of religion – both in the rationalist direction and in the mystical direction – all of it is illegitimate because you’re only allowed to be defending something that a 10-year-old would believe.

 

Fred: Yeah. And only the fundamentalists understand what real religion is. They look at it in this black and white literal way. And so, it’s like they operate at the same, at the same kind of level of thinking. And anytime you go deeper than that, well, “you’re cherry picking.” My new thing with folks that are like that, I’m like : Yes. You know, I am cherry picking. Yes.

We still have agency; when we look at these texts, we are still allowed to interpret them in light of everything else that we know. In light of other parts of the text. We’re allowed to sort of try to cull what the value is in this text and why it was so central to stories and ideas that came after it, without being a prisoner to this very reductive, as you say, 10-year-old version of looking at the story.

 

Yoram: One of the things that I try to emphasize when I’m teaching introductory courses on how to understand the Bible is that you can – there’s many, many verses and many, many passages, where the metaphors are mixed. You know, it’s almost as often the prophets are mixing their metaphors on purpose.

Like I’m talking about, you’re in a single – within the confines of a single verse – and Isaiah will say “God spoke and it arose. He built it with his hands.” In other words, we’re in one verse, and the first half of the verse claims that God is speaking, and the second half of the verse says that the same exact action is being described with God as a builder; He is using his hands the way that a builder builds.

Now, you can’t – I mean –if it just happened once or twice, then you’d say “Okay, it’s a mistake. An editing mistake. I don’t know.” But the whole Bible is like this. Both the prophets and the later scholars who are composing these texts, their method is to say: listen, when God speaks, when he blows his breath, that’s like saying God builds with his hands. His right hand is very strong. He built the sky.

That’s telling you: “Look – if you want – you can say, wow, Isaiah’s really stupid. He thinks that breathing is the same thing as building with your hand. What a dumb person. Why would anybody want to believe that? Or you can say: well, listen kiddo, Isaiah’s actually quite a lot cleverer than most of these new atheists and he understands that one clear way to teach about things that are beyond the grasp of one simple metaphor is to use multiple metaphors to talk about the same thing.

Seriously. If someone is not willing to give the prophets enough credit to try to understand what they’re doing, and insists that, they’ve just got to be stupid or crazy people. You can’t have a conversation with people who are so closed to something that’s different from what they’re used to.

 

START HERE

 

CHAPTER 4 – The Ethics of Shepherds

Fred: It’s a completely different way of expressing yourself and a different way of bringing ideas together. Another distinction that you bring up in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture is one that perhaps is a little bit more understandable from a general sort of almost like political theory perspective, but it’s the ethics of a shepherd.

So to quickly summarize, farmers in the Bible are not bad people. They’re pious. They obey the rules that have been handed down to them from their elders. They respect their elders. They respect tradition, but somehow God doesn’t give them ultimate favour. Instead, he prefers shepherds. And many of the key figures in the Hebrew Bible are shepherds, right? Abel, Abraham, David, and many others.

And so shepherds resist this almost like this tyranny of the earth and of handed down tradition. And they’re more ingenuous, they’re more daring. They risk the anger of powerful men because they refuse to see men as sort of God incarnate on earth. And they choose a more independent nomadic life on the outskirts of civilization almost. They’ve got one foot in, one foot out. And it’s from this independence that they can forge a true relationship with God, unmediated by human power and influence in the agricultural society perspective of the Man-God and we’ve got these rules and there’s no negotiating with these rules. And it’s this kind of man that God accepts sacrifices from. He’s not impressed with piety and just doing what you’re told blindly, but with people who wrestle with him and who forged their own way.

So, first of all, I want to know, is this roughly an accurate summary of the idea? And if so, is it not almost the opposite of what most people interpret as religious behavior today?

In other words, respect the rules, do what the elders tell you to do – even in Judaism we’ve had, we have this, uh, we will do, and only then we will listen. In other words, submit, comply, and question in only a very narrow way.

 

Yoram: Yeah. I think you’ve described it correctly. I mean, there’s a lot more to say about – Notice that farmer versus Shepherd is one of these metaphors.

Once you realize that they’re being employed over and over again, then you start to understand that the text is not just telling a story, it’s trying to talk to you about two very general kinds of civilization, which stand for two very different kinds of ways of life.

But notice that the Bible is not actually telling people to stop being farmers and become shepherds.

The Jewish Bible is given to a farming society to the extent that in the Book of Jeremiah, there’s actually this scene where the prophet – he’s a city dweller – he’s talking to the people of Jerusalem, they’re city dwellers. They either, make their living from government or crafts or whatever it is in the city and around the city. There’s all these farms that – I mean – that’s where all their wealth comes from. It’s from all this agriculture, and so, there’s this moment where he brings this tribe of like nomadic shepherds, into the city square, and starts giving a lecture about how the people should learn from these shepherds.

What’s going on is the narrative keeps, contrasting farmers and shepherds – later it also gets into hunters, but that’s kind of like a side issue – the main type contrast is between, farmers who – as you say – who accept the authority of men and the kind of totalitarian way in which the big agricultural societies like Egypt and in Mesopotamia, the way they function – And that’s contrasted with the virtues of shepherds who we see – beginning with Abraham and with Moses as well, and later with David – we see over and over again that the shepherd figures are the ones that God loves best, because they’re able to go around what’s accepted. To get around what’s accepted as right and just and pious and get directly to what God wants by making this end run around the lies that civilization is telling people.

Now, that doesn’t mean that all of us need to spend all of our lives acting like shepherds. And in fact, if you study the whole story from Genesis to Kings. The entire first half of the Hebrew Bible, which is like this, this narrative that is a shepherds versus farmers story.

If you study the whole thing in the end, what you’ll see is that the text comes to the conclusion that in order for a nation to survive, you have to have both. The ideal is that the king will be a shepherd type, but his administrators, like farmers, they have to be very good at organization, they have to be very good at obedience, they have to be very, very good at marshalling resources much better than shepherds ever are. And then there’s this other aspect, which is the priestly type. Even though they’re not given land and they’re not allowed to fight, but they’re depicted as being a hunter type. They’re depicted as being people who are extremely zealous and even extremist in their personalities. And so you end up with this very sophisticated picture where the ruler needs to be shepherd like, and to be willing to repent and to seek God outside of what it is that human beings want him to do. But he has to incorporate all the other different types within his rule for the kingdom to be able for society to hold together and for human beings to flourish. So, it’s a very sophisticated set of arguments that are made in favour of how to structure government.

Fred: Very, very interesting. And I think this is also connected – I just saw the connection with the question of truth – you argue there’s a particular theory of truth in the Bible as well, and it’s associated with Jeremiah, the idea that each person is responsible for trying to establish truth for themselves.

So, almost this independence of mind of the shepherd. So, it’s not something that we must just accept that some people have and other people don’t and just blindly trust it. But it’s something that we have to strive to sort of figure out for ourselves and then also connect it to “Aleph-Mem-Tav”.

So, the first letter, the middle letter, and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So, truth as something that is real, that’s reliable, that can hold firm under conditions of stress. So, I think we almost start to see a kind of a spirit there, a recurrent pattern of there needs to be a role for questioning.

There needs to be a very aggressive even form of truth seeking and questioning, which is also something that the modern scientific methodology adopts as well. It’s part of the scientific ethos to not just trust that this is just the blind absolute truth, let’s just accept it.

And so if I understand properly, you see that in the context of a kingdom – or if we look at it in the modern sense of a modern nation state that function needs to be integrated with other functions and needs to be put in its proper place – and so there’s also going to be a role for, let’s call it, more farmer-like behavior, and then a role for hunter-like behavior. And all of this has to be properly integrated in its proper place inside of a harmonious kingdom.

Is that correct?

 

Yoram: Yeah. And a harmonious kingdom, or any harmonious political entity is going is to have to rely on these different kinds of people to work together. The issue of truth and science. You know, at one point, you started to ask me about the Bible being the university’s blindside.

The modern universities are descended from a new kind of university that was invented in 1810, in Berlin – the University of Berlin. And this was the first university that was designed to pursue science instead of being a Christian institution. And you can read in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, I quote from Humboldt who was the founder of this University of Berlin.

He has a story that’s the story of academia. His modern academia. His story is all of the original worthy ideas came from Athens from Greece and went on this superhighway straight to Berlin. And in that story, modern mench have to want to be Greeks. The Jews and the Bible are considered darkness and ignorance.

And that spirit pervades academia. Not every single instructor on every single subject, but it’s almost everywhere. It’s in almost every department. It’s in almost every discussion is this implicit University of Berlin. If it comes from the Bible, it’s darkness and it doesn’t help us. And if it comes from Greece, then it’s brilliant light and that’s what we should be emulating. So there’s a famous, famous paper that was published in the 1940s in which an English historian of science – I think it was actually a refugee – but, a historian of science in England argues that there’s no source for the idea of a natural law of physics –there is no source in Greek or Roman philosophy or literature for the idea that Isaac Newton uses that: God gives laws, he orders, he commands, he gives laws to the stars and the planets and to the heavens and the earth, and the animals and human beings; He gives them laws, and those laws are what we, as scientists, are seeking.

Now, if you’re an Orthodox Jew, then every day you say a few psalms and those psalms include the explicit statement that God gives laws to the stars, and they obey according to God’s word, but our universities are completely ignorant of this.

It’s like almost hermetically sealed against the historical question. Why is it that in the year 1600, suddenly, scientists started talking about the laws of God? When, before then, science had no such concept, and the concept only existed in scripture. It’s sad. It’s just sad.

Fred: It’s a paradox. It’s a paradox at the heart of modern science that it looks at and advocates for a view of the universe as purposeless and chaotic. And at the same time that all it does on a day-to-day basis is study the laws of nature that get more and more intricate. The more you get into the micro, the more you get into the macro, you realize how many different forms of order there are. The very notion of a law of physics or a law of chemistry suggests it would appear to me rationally order as opposed to chaos – Would it not?

Yoram: I mean, it’s almost pointless to emphasize – but it’s still true – that the founders of our science, not just Newton, but Boyle and Harvey and Galileo. What’s the relationship between them and the idea of a chaotic, pointless universe? None of them thought like that.

Many people are beginning to realize that the existing universities do not include a full range of legitimate, reasonable, useful, healthy perspectives on things. And the systematic exclusion of the Bible from academic study – except in religion departments where the goal is to deconstruct the Bible – but the systematic exclusion of the Bible from the way we think about academia and truth and how we study.

There’s a lot of people now quickly reaching the end of their capacity to respect our academic institutions as they’re currently constituted. And that’s a great opportunity for us. That means that we have a chance to rethink this in a way that is more open-minded and allows all sorts of important points of view that have been shut out for, in some cases, for centuries to be considered seriously.

If we work hard enough and we do the right thing, then maybe God will help us a little bit here. And maybe we’ll see the flourishing of remarkable new institutions.

 

CHAPTER 5 – The Virtue of Nationalism

Fred: Yeah, I would strongly, strongly agree with that and I do want to touch a little bit on your work on nationalism and on the proper role for the ethnic tribe inside of the nation.

And so, in your book, The Virtue of Nationalism you argue that nations with their own distinct language, culture history, are best positioned to govern themselves as opposed to being subject to these sort of pan-national imperial globalist projects. I think this is another respect where your thought and your work is at odds a little bit with modern academia.

I remember when I did a master’s in international law in Europe in the early 2000’, and the prevalent ideology there, the vision was that the UN and international treaties and universal human rights and the whole ideal was of these post ethnic states.

Where people from all ethnicities are equal citizens. So, there’s a positive vision as well, a vision of tolerance of people from different ethnicities, everybody’s protected by human rights, almost like the standard liberalism like pre-2020, in pre cultural revolution, right?

And of course, people from all ethnicities have thrived and contributed in Western countries under this kind of framework. At the same time, this does put pressure on the values of certain groups that the nation states are based on to begin with. And you see that everywhere in the conservative movement. Its emphasis on a return to traditional values or the whole debate on immigration and so forth.

Within your general view of nationalism, what’s the proper place for the interests of – let’s call it – the dominant ethnic group within a nation-state, per se? Is it a form of immigration policy? Is it best expressed in a form of cultural policy? I asked this because in some countries, for example, in many Arab states, the state can be explicitly structured in a way that is beneficial to one tribe or ethnic group over others.

And I don’t think that’s what you mean in your argument. So how do you kind of reconcile the interest, the values of a dominant ethnicity within your concept of a modern nation state?

 

Yoram: I don’t believe that there are neutral states, and I don’t believe that there is a neutral international law, whether you’re talking about the laws of a particular, national state, a particular nation state, or whether you’re talking about what’s supposed, what’s claimed to be international or universal law.

By the way, it claims to be based on treaties. International law isn’t really based on treaties. What it’s based on is professors in universities, especially in law faculties – but also in other departments – professors internationally gathering together, coming up with what a consensus is for what they think law should be.

And then they just simply declare that to be the law. And many judges, a very large proportion of judges in many places, simply accept whatever the professors dictate the laws to be.

 

Fred: It’s one of the sources, but there are also treaties, right? So, governments at some point also agree that – okay, we’re going to sign this treaty, even if it’s not going to be sometimes enforceable. But there’s also a political dimension to it.

But yes, it’s true that the opinions of the scholars is actually a source of international law. Yeah.

 

Yoram: I agree with you that there is such a thing as treaties between countries, and I do think that those treaties should be binding under most, if not all circumstances. But somebody needs to interpret the treaties and the people doing the interpreting are professors and judges.

And as the years go on, with every passing decade, those professors and judges are much more confident in ignoring the letter of the treaty and simply arguing. In Israel we have a famous Supreme Court justice named Aaron Barak, who famously declared that the standard for adjudicating any question is reasonableness, that is, whether he thinks something is reasonable. And, you know, as soon as you’re there, the agreements between countries just become more and more window dressing. That’s where I think we’re proceeding.

 

Fred: Reasonableness. The more subjective you get in your standard, the more it actually points to the authority of the person who will deem reasonability, right? So, the less you have objective constraints, the more it’s really about who’s making the decision.

 

Yoram: So, to go back to your question about ethnicities – first I should say – the word ethnicity is a variant of the Greek ethnos. Ethnos just means nation. It doesn’t mean race, it’s not biological.

The Greeks knew there was such a thing as a Greek ethnos, you know, just like the Jews knew that there was such a thing as HaMizrach, as a Goy Kadosh – that was the Jews. The traditional view – like the view of what a nation is, an ethnic group that has been that in most times, in most places in history, certainly in the biblical literature. The view of what makes a tribe allows for mixing. It allows for people to marry out of one tribe and into another. It allows for people to be adopted, allows for people to convert.

The word ethnic, today, it has this post-Hitler kind of biological feel to it as though if you want a country that is English or French or Jewish or Arab as though that means that no one will ever be allowed to participate in this society unless they’re born of pure blood or some nonsense like that.

Okay, so that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the old meaning of nationality where people knew how to identify that the world is made up of different tribes and different nations. You can tell them apart because they have different languages, they have different religions, they have different histories and peoples. A group identity is formed in childhood by being part of a certain tribe and a certain nation and a certain family of nations also. The English speaking peoples, for example.

It simply is a fact about the political world that wherever you see an organized society – Where there are laws and there are traditions and they’re being enforced and some people are rebelling and some people are unhappy, but then there’s some kind of process of either punishing them or compromising – wherever you see an organized society, there’s always some dominant group.

Sometimes it’s a coalition of groups. Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even before it was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were 15 different – 17 – I don’t remember the numbers. 17 different nations officially recognized in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But the Austrians, meaning the Germans and the Hungarians, they were like a coalition. The Austrians and the Hungarians, they were the top dogs. And so Germans were number one and Hungarians were number two, and then everybody else. Look, this is the way all societies are everywhere, okay?

The only place where this doesn’t happen is where people are pretending it’s not happening. So, what I try to get people to do is, first of all, let’s give the people that we disagree with, on the left, let’s give them some credit. When they’re talking about the existence of power structures and social hierarchies and hierarchies among groups that’s not complete nonsense.

America really was governed by Anglo Protestants up until after World War II. Just look at who the presidents were. I mean, that’s true. There were other people – and some of them, like the blacks, were persecuted, but others weren’t so persecuted.

You know, I really don’t think you need to make too big a deal about how awful America was for Jews when the Anglo Protestants were running it. Are there things that I would’ve found offensive? Yes, but that’s beside the point. America was still the best place in the world for Jews to live, you know, for 200 years, even though it was run by Anglo Protestants and only a very small number of Jews could make it up to the highest echelons of society.

So, the critique that says: Look, there really are social groups, and they really do compete with one another, and there really is a dominant group or coalition, and often it really isn’t oppressive or unjust. All these things are true. The question is, once we recognize that it’s true and that it’s always true, that it’s true in every society in the world, do we need to be then become Marxists and say, well, our goal is to overthrow whoever’s in charge and completely, utterly destroy them and hope for utopia, where there’s not going to emerge any new dominant group or coalition of groups?

I mean, that’s just a terrible worldview.

Fred: Yeah. As though this utopia is going to lead to no concentration of power right? I mean, that’s where it doesn’t – especially when you’re talking about large nation states, and you’re not talking about Marxism in a very small, like in the kibbutzs – when you talk about it in the context of a nation state, it’s like you don’t think there’s going to be agglomerations and concentrations of power there. And then how are those going to be used?

Those questions are absolutely paramount.

 

Yoram: Yeah, I was there. I was in the Kibbutz where everybody was equal, but some people made the decisions and everybody else didn’t.

 

Fred: Right. But isn’t it interesting that we’re still trying to work out this tension that the Bible talks about between tribal origin, tribal destiny, and then also a universal vision where there’s room to treat everybody fairly? So the concept that we have universal human rights and so forth.

But the way that you describe it, so having a dominant ethnic group with its values, interests, and so forth is not incompatible with also having equal treatment under the law, human rights and so forth.

You see these things as being best reconciled inside of the nation state. Correct?

Yoram: I don’t think there’s any other – I don’t think there’s – I mean, roughly there’s two choices.

One choice is an imperial choice where you say, the state is simply going to force everyone to be exactly what it is that it wants them to be. That’s, that’s what happens in empires. Empires are never democratic. They’re always about trying to muster enough force to keep, to keep all the different peoples from being free. That’s what empires are about.

So within independent nation states where there’s a dominant ethnic or religious group or a coalition that’s dominant, that’s the arena in which you find different experiments for how can we set up a constitution so that all the different groups in society have some degree of representation. That there’s some degree of fairness and justice you can say that everybody, or most people, are participating in. That only happens in nation-states. We don’t have examples, other than independent nation-states where that happens. It’s the mutual loyalty that binds the different tribes and groups within the national state. That binds them to one another.

That loyalty is what allows peaceful transitions of power to happen. If you don’t have that kind of loyalty, you can’t have peaceful transitions of power. That’s what we’re seeing in America. America is becoming less like a nation-state and more like an empire. And as it becomes less like a nation-state, the different groups allow themselves to hate each other more and more. And in the name of some theory about how we’re going to make everything perfect, they’re actually destroying everything.

Fred:  This utopia and how seeing ourselves as part of a kind of a shared identity and a shared community will kind of lead to a dissolving, hopefully of a war of all against all or this group dominating that group.

And that’s kind of more and more what we’re seeing in the US and in many other places as we kind of devolve into these ideologies that see the other as an enemy that needs to be destroyed.

So yeah, I think we could learn a lot from this concept of nationalism and from the shared vision that we once had in the West, that seems to be waning in the last decade or so.

Fred: Thank you very much Yoram Hazony it was a really, really fascinating discussion. I really appreciate your insights and your depth of thinking, and I really hope we get to talk again and hopefully meet in person one day.

Yoram: God willing. Thank you for the time and God bless you and your audience.