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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