The Limits Of Collectivity
Martin Kavka,
Florida State University
As usual, John Kelsay does us a great service in
reading these Qur'anic verses into their religious
context. It is a mistake to read them simply about
statecraft, although that's certainly an important
part. Rather, we should read them "in connection with
God's drive throughout history to form a people
willing to walk the straight path" of shari'a. Note
that contextualization, for Kelsay, never means the
same thing as universalization; to understand these
verses means to understand them in the context of the
Islamic view of history. The kinds of reasoning about
war in which Muslims engage is always shari'a
reasoning: one mode of reasoning that has its own
particular sets of premises and which also lays out
possible moves from those premises to various
consequences, moves which are accessible to
non-Muslims. Attending to this is part and parcel, I
think, of the goal of the movement of scriptural
reasoning to break out of what Peter Ochs has
described as the dialectic between secularism and
orthodoxy into which religious reasoning has been
straitjacketed in modernity.[1] For Kelsay, once we
attend to shari'a reasoning - and only when we attend
to shari'a reasoning - can we begin to compare
religious traditions, "us" and "them." As he stated
in a wonderful response to Jeffrey Stout from 2005,
comparative religious ethics does not have conflict
resolution as its aim; this would be a universalist
move that we should reject precisely because it does
not solve the problems of thinking of religion only
through the context of modernity. Instead,
comparative religious ethics might perhaps be "a way
of engaging in healthy conflict."[2]
I find this phrase tantalizing, and I have long
wanted to know more about what is at stake in the
distinction between healthy and sickly conflicts. But
instead of asking John whether, or how, his paper is
an example of this, I would like to try and perform
this engagement in healthy conflict, and then ask him
whether I'm getting it right.
Let me start by citing one of Kelsay's theses
about what it means to read texts about warcraft into
their religious contexts: we must read them as part
of a set of statements "about the various disciplines
that constitute Muslims as a community." At this
point, he turns to Durkheim in order to say something
about Islam. What "catches the drift of the Qur'an's
view of salvation history" is Durkheim's presentation
of religion as an "eminently social thing" in The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.[3] But if
this is the case, how do we then talk about the
concept of social stratification in a community? How
do we talk about the various ways in which
individuals relate to the larger social group (or how
sub-communities relate to the larger community)? For
it is the case that while religious forces are
everywhere collective forces for Durkheim, there are
texts about war in the Jewish tradition which seem to
acknowledge other forces in play.
In my mind, this is most apparent in the various
texts in the Jewish tradition about exemptions from
the obligation to fight, texts that have been
analyzed in scholarship for at least two decades now,
but which have gained renewed force in the context of
the movement of Israeli soldiers' conscientious
objection to serving in the occupied territories.The
relevant verses in the Bible are Deuteronomy
20:5-8:
Then the officials shall address the troops as
follows: "Is there anyone who has built a new house
but has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his
home, lest he die in battle and another dedicate
it. Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard but
has never harvested it? Let him go back to his
home, lest he die in battle and another harvest it.
Is there anyone who has paid the bride-price for a
wife (i.e. betrothed her), but who has not married
her (i.e. taken her into his home)? Let him go back
to his home, lest he die in battle and another
marry her." The officials shall go on addressing
the troops and say, "Is there anyone afraid and
disheartened? Let him go back to his home, lest the
courage of his comrades flag like his." [This is
the Jewish Publication Society translation; a more
literal translation of the last clause would be
"lest he not melt the heart of his brethren like
his heart."]
There are two basic points to make about this
text. First, it seems that at least from these
verses, the community structured as a people of God
seems, in an important respect, not to be the
fundamental unit of consideration here. While it
would not quite be precise to say that the family, or
the homeowner, or the individual is primary -- or
even that the community exists for the sake of the
any of these -- what one can say is that the agency
that exerts force in ancient Israelite religion is
not simply a collective agency in the sense that
Durkheim understands it. After his definition of
religion as an eminently social thing, Durkheim goes
on to claim that "religious representations are
collective representations that express collective
realities." However, here we have a religious text
that is the sacred text for a collective, but which
speaks to a reality in which the entire collective
does not take part. Warcraft is a religious act in
Deuteronomy 20: "in marching to battle, it is the
Lord your God who marches with you to bring your
victory" (20:4). But this presence of God is denied
to certain members of the Israelite community.
Secondly, the Bible seems to recognize that there are
some men in the community who are constitutionally
not fit for battle. For them, fighting is not a
measure of faithfulness.
Now if one were to remain simply with these
points, my response to John would become a depressing
conversation about communitarianism vs. liberalism,
and I would argue that this text proves some kind of
inherent liberalism to Judaism, because it
acknowledges multiple conceptions of the good life,
or multiple "rational plans of life," to use John
Rawls's language in A Theory of Justice to
speak of that framework from which judgments of value
are made.[4] But to do this would be
to imagine comparative religious ethics as unhealthy
conflict. Part of what would make it unhealthy would
be to claim some kind of essential status for those
verses from Deuteronomy 20 in thinking about the
Jewish tradition. This would be false on historical
grounds (as well as simply impolite). Just as the
verses in the Qur'an are historically diverse with
regard to the conduct of war, so are texts in the
Jewish tradition. The rabbinic writings of the first
six centuries CE seek to limit the range of the
exemptions that Deuteronomy offers. Accordingly, we
read in tractate Sotah in the Mishnah, after a
citation of Deut. 20:9 ("And when the officers finish
speaking to the nation, they shall appoint leaders of
legions in front of the people"), the editorial voice
adding, "And to the rear of the people!" These
warriors in the back of legions exist in order to
stop those in the rear of the army from fleeing when
defeat seems to be at hand. They are rear guards, if
you will. Still, the power given to them by the
Mishnah is immense: they have "iron axes in their
hands. And anyone who would try to turn around, the
authority was given (the guard) to sever his
legs.[5] Furthermore, the
Mishnah and the predominant current in the Talmud
limit the exemptions from the obligation to fight
only to the case of discretionary or optional wars
(milhamot reshut), which the tradition
understands as wars fought to expand territory or to
enhance the greatness of the king. These exceptions
are not valid in the context of obligatory wars
(milhamot mitzvah), which the tradition
understands as defensive wars against immediate
threats. In obligatory wars, says the Mishnah in a
famous passage, "all go out, even a bridegroom from
his chamber and a bride from her bridal
canopy."[6]
The tradition becomes more complex from this point
onward. Later authorities are unclear whether the
exemption of the soldier who is unable to display
courage applies even to discretionary wars. This is
clearest in a strange passage from Moses Maimonides's
Mishneh Torah, written in the late twelfth
century.
What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted?
(Deut. 20:8) This is to be understood literally,
that is, the man who is not physically fit to join
the ranks in battle. Once, however, he has joined
the ranks, he should put his reliance upon Him who
is the hope of Israel, their Savior in time of
trouble. He should know that he is fighting for the
oneness of God, risk his life, and neither fear nor
be affrighted. Nor should he think of his wife or
children, but, forgetting them and all else,
concentrate on the war. Moreover, he is accountable
for the lives of all Israel. If he does not conquer
because he did not fight with all his heart and
soul, it is as though he had shed the blood of all,
as it is said, "Lest his brethren's heart melt as
his heart."[7]
The reason why this text is so strange is that
although Maimonides is saying that this text is to be
understood literally, he is not understanding the
text literally at all. In the Mishnah, R. Akiva
understands the person who is fearful in a way that
appears to me indeed to be literal, as referring to
the person who is terrified of battle, i.e. "unable
to stand in the battle phalanx and gaze upon an
unsheathed sword."[8] Maimonides refuses to
see this as a constitutive aspect of a personality;
fear of battle is something merely temporary. For
this reason, he elides analysis of that part of Deut.
20:8 in which the fearful warrior is commanded to go
back home, and immediately goes on to talk about what
the fearful warrior should do when in the
ranks, viz. think about the nobility of his
mission. So while the biblical text talks about the
fellow warrior's heart melting because the fearful
warrior's faintheartedness has a certain kind of
contagious aspect to it as a rationale for the
fearful warrior to go home, Maimonides takes this as
a rationale for the fearful warrior to work even
harder at extirpating his fear on the battlefield.
(Maimonides here reads the verb translated as "melt,"
masas, as "dissolve." For a heart to melt - to
lose heart - is to die.)
What we see in the Maimonidean text is something
that seems not unlike what Kelsay claims Qutb
describes as "training in the virtues associated with
submission." Nevertheless, while to stay with this
point--and to move away from the surface sense of the
text from Deuteronomy--is to move from conflict to
resolution with the predominant strand of Kelsay's
reading of the Qur'anic texts, it is also to move to
from health to sickness. For one cannot say that the
Maimonidean text - or any of the rabbinic texts about
warcraft - speak to real situations. The elucidation
of the laws of warcraft in the Jewish tradition are
developed at a time when there is no Jewish army,
much less a sovereign Jewish nation. And so the
Jewish view of salvation history cannot be
encompassed by Durkheim, for Jewish texts know
nothing of what it means to think of religion as an
eminently social thing. The rear guards must produce
this social signification of Judaism for those
warriors who want to flee; Maimonides must produce
this social signification of Judaism for the
fainthearted warrior (whom he does not let go home).
It is true that Durkheim expresses something
important about the communal aspect of Judaism, but
with reference to these texts on warcraft, the truth
of Durkheim speaks to how the Jewish community is
imagined in Jewish texts. Jews must
learn to be Durkheimians, and the study,
expansion, and application of the laws pertaining to
war are techniques by which communitarian habits and
communitarian thinking can be ingrained. But the
rhetoric of peoplehood which Jews should aspire to
embody - in which each Jew sees himself (or herself)
as "accountable for the lives of all Israel" -
implies, by virtue of its very aspirational status,
that for some individuals in the community this is
difficult. And this difficulty is acknowledged openly
by various texts in the tradition: by those
authorities who see the exemptions for the terrified
as extending to commanded wars, by current scholars
who point out that even commanded wars need to have
their validity grounded in the urim ve-tummim
(the stones of the high priest's breastplate, which
no longer exist), and by the Hebrew Bible in the very
verses of Deuteronomy under discussion.[9] This
suggests that communal thinking is an aim, and not
something that suffuses all of present reality. In
some respects Jews form a community, and in others,
some will say, quoting Monty Python's The Life Of
Brian, "we are all individuals." Negotiating the
boundary between those two concepts is the function
of individuals' giving and taking of reasons in the
Jewish tradition; it is only in and through these
acts of individual reason-giving that it makes sense
to speak of Judaism as "eminently social." And it is
perhaps in exposing that religion as an eminently
social thing does not speak to the most fundamental
stratum of a religious tradition that we can have
something like "healthy conflict" in scholarly acts
of comparison - conflictual because the difference
between traditions cannot be extirpated, and healthy
because the proprieties of our norms are always
revisable by individual interpreters of a religious
tradition who judge others' commitments to be
improperly held.[10]
ENDNOTES
[1] Peter Ochs, "The Rules Of
Scriptural Reasoning," Journal Of Scriptural
Reasoning 2:1 (2002), sections 3 and 4.
[2] John Kelsay, "Democratic
Virtue, Comparative Ethics, and Contemporary Islam,"
Journal of Religious Ethics 33:4 (2005),
698.
[3] For the phrase, see Émile
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free
Press, 1995), 9.
[4] John Rawls, A Theory of
Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 358ff. Also see 79-80.
[5] M. Sotah 8:6.
[6] M. Sotah 8.7; see also B.
Sotah 44b. See also Geoffrey B. Levey, "Judaism and
the Obligation To Die For The State," AJS
Review 12:2 (1987), 175-203, Noam J. Zohar, "Can
A War Be Morally 'Optional'?", Journal of
Political Philosophy 4:3 (1996), 229-41, and
Elliot N. Dorff, To Do The Right and The Good: A
Jewish Approach To Modern Social Ethics
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002),
161-83.
[7] Moses Maimonides,
Mishneh Torah, Melakhim 7:15. Cited in A
Maimonides Reader, ed. Isadore Twersky (West
Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1972), 220.
[8] M. Sotah 8:5. See also B.
Sotah 44a.
[9] For the extension of the
exemption of the fainthearted from fighting even to
commanded wars, see Rabbi David ben Abi Zimra
(Radbaz), Hilkhot Melakhim 7:1, cited in
Levey, 188. For the place of the urim
ve-tummim, see Levey, 194ff.
[10] See Robert B. Brandom,
Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing &
Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994), 643-49.
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