The End of Modernity

Is It Good for the Jews?

Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach

Temple Anshe Hesed

Erie, Pennsylvania

Item: In Muslim countries throughout the world, and in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the grisly ancient practice of female circumcision continues almost unabated despite laws banning it in many countries, with its practitioners solidly certain that destroying all women's ability to enjoy sexual intimacy is the key to reining in the wanton, libidinous passion of the flesh, and preserving fidelity in the home. Modern protests against this practice are branded as interference and cultural imperialism, and the sense of outsiders dictating morality from afar is used to unify a community, and belittle the questions that native women are starting to ask.

Item: In Oakland, California, a school board grapples with using Ebonics as a tool to teach English, and sets off a firestorm of protest in which unified standard education is subsumed under the hidden agendas of competing group interests.

Item: In the universities across our nation, individual departments decline in a rush towards the new Holy Grail of Interdisciplinary Studies. Multiculturalism is the word of the day, bringing diverse perspectives to all subjects. Physicists cite poetry; Literary Critics formulate methods in the light of Quantum Mechanics. Everyone is talking to everyone else, but is anyone saying anything?

What do these three items have to do with one another? What do any of these developments have to say about our lives as Jews towards the very end of what Christians call the twentieth century?

The answer is... they have everything to do with each other. They are all linked. And the stakes in seeing how they are different plants flowering from the same soil are high indeed.

On February 7th and 8th, Jews around the world read from Parashat Mishpatim, the detailed and diverse laws which come after the Ten Commandments. The word "mishpatim" means "judgements." Later rabbinic interpretation distinguished between "mishpatim" and "chukim," the former being those laws in the Torah which could be derived by human reason, the latter those laws, such as not combining wool and linen in a single garment, which are beyond the ken of human understanding, and had to be obeyed solely because they were given by God. This is an important distinction, used later by Jewish philosophers to defend the need for the Revelation at Sinai. It is a distinction sometimes oversimplified as a contrast between the ethical laws and the ritual regulations.

But my interest in the distinction between mishpatim and chukim has to do with the fact that the ancient rabbis believed that the mishpatim, given enough time and thought, the laws which were derivable by human reason, are derivable by reasoning people everywhere. That mishpatim are, in other words, the Jewish version of what would later come to be called Universal Law.

Universal Law. The idea is that there are some ethical standards that hold sway everywhere, in all times and all places, through all centuries, in all cultures and on all continents. But it is the very idea of the universal, the assumption of any shared vantage point for all human beings, that is being called into question in these waning years of the twentieth century. In some places it is examined. In other circles it is attacked. But the trends are the same. And the stakes are high. Our lives will change as a result of this debate. In some ways, I believe, they will change for the better.

We are poised at a monumental turning point in the history of ideas. We are at the end of an era. It is an era that began with Descartes and Kant, with Voltaire and Locke and Hobbes, with rationalism and reason, forged in revolutions in America and France, with the scientific method applied in all fields seeking to produce universal truth, and a sweeping sense of human history as moving inexorably forward in progress towards an inevitable climax of common good. Few notice its passing. Academicians write of its end in onerous tomes that are hard to follow. But the era called Modernity is over. The next stage in human intellectual thought is in full bloom. It is, paradoxically, called Postmodernism. And, whether we know it or not, it effects every one of us.

If we understand something about Postmodernism, we will understand much of what is going on around us, the surge of fundamentalism, the search for easy answers, the rise of the religious right, the perseverance of nationalism, the return to tradition, even the OJ Simpson trials, to mention just a few things.

What is "Postmodernism?" It began in the art world as an eclectic trend, a mixing of styles, a revolt against any single style. But it has spread from art to the academy, from science to sociology to sexuality. It is hard to define, but I will share with you one person's definition, that of Steven Kepnes, editor of the new book Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age. Kepnes writes: "By the term ‘postmodern' I mean to designate a number of philosophical, social and cultural transformations that have come together in the contemporary period, and that include a movement away from the modern ideal of a universal rational culture and toward a multicultural reality that celebrates the value of the local and particular and attempts a new openness to premodern forms and motifs."

Kepnes puts his definition another way several pages later. "The specifically postmodern step involves a movement beyond the ontological gap established in the modern world between science and humanities and between ‘objective' and ‘subjective' forms of knowing. From the dawn of the modern age in seventeenth-century social science through Enlightenment philosophy to nineteenth-century social science, the dream of modernity has been to use technical and calculating reason to subsume all reality under objective universal laws..." Law was the goal. That, and "truth." Marx saw himself discovering economic laws, Freud psychological ones, Newton physical ones. If we could just reduce anything to its basic, common ingredients, we could understand. And what we could understand, we hoped, we could control.

But what, indeed, has this reductionist quest for control wrought in our time? For Modernity has failed us. It has failed us philosophically. And it has failed on a social and political level as well. Philosophically, because of the failure of our attempts to develop objective methods to reveal single meanings and undisputed truths, whether of a sacred text or of a single particle. Socially and politically, because our hope in the shining light of progress has been shattered by the events of this century.

Rabbi Eugene Borowitz writes of this failure of modernity, and its consequences, that "suddenly our society's accepted, unbounded faith in human accomplishment began to seem ludicrous... The disillusionment touches us in ways as local as the threat of drugs, violence or the loss of meaning, and as global as pollution, terrorism or nuclear destruction.... People, institutions and ideologies have so regularly disappointed us," he continues, "that hope, the driving force of a prior generation, has become rather a luxury, and cynicism and depression far more common."

To Borowitz, the term "postmodern" arose to "describe the diverse movements that stemmed from our disillusionment with the modernists' messianic humanism." We attempted to figure out everything, to understand everything, to control everything, and we failed. Figuratively and literally, we made a mess of the world. So now, we are trying a different approach. Not everything all at once. But each thing, in its own terms. Each group, it its own reality. My story -- and your story. It is the search... for partial truth.

To put the matter starkly, universalism did not work. We are witness, in our age, to a giant swing of the pendulum, from universalism... to particularism.

This new particularism puts us on new ground in so many areas of our lives, in the study of science and scripture, of sociology and identity, of society and history. But there are lessons for us here. In this new emphasis on the particular, we Jews are presented with new tasks. And new opportunities.

I will try to address some of these implications in my column in the weeks to come. For now, however, I return to the question at the beginning of this column. What do the question of female circumcision, Ebonics and university curriculum have in common? It is this: all are the result of the triumph of the moment, the return to particularism. For without universal law, what grounds do we have to express our group's utter revulsion at the practice of another? If your truth is as good as my truth, your morals as good as mine, then how can we Westerners tell another society, another culture that what they are doing is wrong? If every group is as authentic in what it does as any other, how can we claim that one expression of the English language is superior to another? Finally, if all approaches to all subjects are equally valid, then why can't there be a class about how Moses was really black, and calculus is really a form of colonial imperialism?

Postmodernism has much to offer. It opens up new possibilities of meaning, and has led to an invigorated, revived spirituality amongst American Jews. But there are limits as well.

There is a reading in the Gates of Prayer that gives a good summary of the potential -- and the pitfalls -- of Postmodernism. "Once we learned one truth," the reading says, "and it was cherished or discarded, but it was one. Now we are told that the world can be perceived by many truths; now, in the reality all of us encounter, some find lessons that others deny. Once we learned one kind of life, and one reality; it, too, we either adopted or scorned. But right was always right, and wrong was always wrong. Now we are told that there are many rights, that what is wrong may well be wrong for you, but right for me. Yet we sense that some acts must be wrong for everyone, and that behind the many half-truths is a single truth all of us may one day grasp. That clear way... is what we seek in coming here, to join our people who saw the eternal One, when others saw only the temporal Now."

A pendulum swings. A world turns. Philosophies come. Philosophies go. The universal yesterday. The particular today. May we remember that there is truth to be found... at both ends of the spectrum.