The roots of the totalitarian elements in Israeli
politics and culture lie not only in a historical genealogy that is
familiar to every member of the Israeli radical Left, but also in modern
Western culture. Thinkers and scholars have addressed in one way or
another the existence of a totalitarian potential in Western thought. Some
of them propound an alternative of embracing the Christian tradition,
viewing the dissociation from this tradition, and the struggle waged
against it by the followers of the different totalitarian trends, as the
source of Western totalitarianism.
This outlook is also manifested in classical
conservatism and in the neoconservative ideology of today, and though it
certainly has strong positive features, a Christian alternative will not
withstand the test. When Christianity and totalitarianism are compared,
not in terms of their explicit ideas but in terms of their modes of
thought, it emerges that the roots of totalitarianism lie precisely in
Christianity itself. On the other hand, it is precisely in authentic
Jewish modes of thought that there lies a real alternative to Western
totalitarianism. Therefore, the definition of Western civilization as
"Judeo-Christian" is fundamentally erroneous.
However, how can the well-known fact of the
disproportionate participation of assimilated Jews in the totalitarian
experiments be explained? The article tries to prove that this
resulted from the phenomenon of the Jews' flight from their Jewishness,
in the course of which the fleeing Jews bring about the realization of the
latent totalitarian potential in Western culture.
It should be noted that the very intellectual codes
that, in their authentic form, constitute a Jewish alternative to Western
totalitarianism, become in themselves a destructive factor that brings out
the totalitarian potential once they are entered into a foreign cultural
context¾that is, the context of a
Western culture that is based on Christian tenets. Thus, the Jews' flight
from their Jewishness becomes a threat both to Jewry itself and to the
non-Jewish world. And perhaps, here, an inverse conclusion may be drawn:
namely, that it is precisely the Jews' return to themselves that
can free both the Jews and the non-Jews of the totalitarian threat.
Nevertheless, providing a Jewish answer to
totalitarianism is not a simple matter. Such an answer is rooted in
Judaism as it was for generations, but the problematic aspect involves
the Jewish encounter with Western culture. There have been, of course,
encounters between Judaism and a foreign cultural environment in every
period of the thousands of years of the Jewish people's existence,
fluctuating between high and low points. To be sure, in the modern era the
encounter engendered not a few positive results. But we are also forbidden
to ignore the tragic encounter that was manifested in the Holocaust
and in the spiritual apostatization of Communism. Although the factual
results have perhaps been well learned, we are still evading the difficult
and painful question of the Jews' participation. We need to cope with it
and begin to rebuild the encounter, from a standpoint of awareness
of the risks entailed, together with full consciousness of
the Jews' responsibility.
It is commonly believed among us that the
conservative ideology, like the liberal ideology as well as the
intellectual underpinnings of the Israeli judicial system, can be sought
only outside of the Jewish framework, and in this regard "left-wingers"
and "right-wingers" are no different from each other. Indeed, how many are
even capable of conceiving that it is precisely in our "primitive" Judaism
that a real and perhaps sole alternative to totalitarianism can be found?