The case for untidiness

...The new archbishop in New York, the most pluralistic city in America, John J. O'Connor (clearly a man of goodwill, who wants good relations with all non-Catholics) invokes "natural law," which supposedly teaches what is good for everybody...

...This is not an ,easy question, and I know no clearcut answer...

...If we attempt to make a godly kingdom, it always becomes an engine of oppression...

...In the United States, these days, several varieties of Christian fundamentalists are campaigning, with official support from the Republican patty, to pass a constitutional amendment against abortion and to change the law so as to foster prayer in the public schools...

...In Israel, the head of the ultranationalist Tehiya Party, Professor Yuva...

...To keep civil peace, a state had to arise in a Europe that did not foster Christianity as its avowed primary purpose...

...Is capitalism or communism (take your choice, depending on your ideology) to be defined as inherently a form of stealing by one class from another...

...Jews are obligated to all of the 613 positive and negative commandments that the rabbis found in the Five Books of Moses...

...To the right of him, the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane regards it as his divinely appointed mission to push, or even shoot, Arabs out of the West Bank...

...Biblical religion makes no distinction between the civil and religious order...

...B IyI" IS THERE a natural law which defines truth for all people...

...In the West, even in an unbelieving twentieth century, what we tend to define by consent does bear relationship to the biblical roots of our common culture, and yet we cannot stretch this too far, to force the conscience of one or another branch of society...

...Jewish teaching is itself not exempt from the same criticism, that what it teaches as universal truth applicable to all is really a I , s THERE A limit to tolerance and to relativism...

...President Reagan has produced a further permutation: he has based his support for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion under almost all circumstances not even on natural law, at least not directly...

...The liberal Western state, with its commitment to individual human rights, is under attack in all three countries...

...He is former president of the American Jewish Congress, and author of numerous books including Being Jewish in America...

...To its present enemies the Western liberal state is not a neutral traffic cop trying to insure the maximum amount of rights and freedom for all its citizens...

...He was the first important figure within Jewry to assert that the Bible contained many historical errors, and that even its morality was human and imperfect...

...rarified version of its own principles...

...If the anti-abortion amendment passes, in the name of natural law, I would therefore be in the position of having to give moral instruction to Jews which would be illegal in the law of America...

...This concept exists also in rabbinic Judaism...

...What we have learned, painfully, in recent centuries is that we can live best only in untidiness, with a decent concern for the opinions of all people, even as this costs many of us as believers something very precious to our own soul...

...In favor of the secular state, one can indeed quote John Courtney Murray, that pluralism is against the will of God but that it is the only way to keep peace in the city of man...

...The Western liberal state is indeed more secularist than it perhaps need be...

...Against this dictum, there stands the prospect, awful to many, that all the principles, including those of basic ethics, which bind a pluralist society together are based on consent alone, and that having been so made, they can, similarly, be unmade...

...Maimonides may indeed have been fight in insisting there is no sure foundation for ethics unless they are grounded in the revelation of a personal God, but this issue has been argued for centuries, before and after his day, without ultimate resolution...

...Biblical religion, in all its forms, has indeed been removed from its centrality in America by the separation of church and state...

...So Maimonides's version of the "seven commandments given to the children of Noah" includes among them as basic to all the rest, the belief in a God who rewards the righteous and punishes the sinners...

...Any state which enters the realm of our souls had better be one that God himself makes at the end of days...

...The Mullahs in lran, the fundamentalist preachers in America, and the fundamentalist rabbis in Israel are, for the most part, the leaders of elements in their various countries of the lower bourgeoisie and the proletariat...

...Commonweal: 656...

...There was a "natural law" more certain even than any injunctions that could be derived from the Bible...

...Even many heretics from biblical religion could not abandon the belief in a moral law that was true for all...

...it is really, so he has told the country, a defense of the constitutional principle of the protection of all human beings...

...Those who are attacking represent constituencies which have felt themselves outside the political process...

...In the history of Jewish theology and thought, Baruch Spinoza was the arch-hgretic...

...Certainly I must confess, again as a rabbi and not with any pretense that I am basing myself on some universal values, that I find wholesale abortions, in the hundreds of thousands, morally revolting...

...As a rabbi, I am not prepared to believe that Catholic theologians or fundamentalist Protestant ones have superior understanding of the moral laws which derive from the Bible...

...Obviously, this roles out believers in non-theistic religions, even the most virtuous of humanists, and most believers in philosophic ethics...

...Nonetheless, there are at least two threads which tie together all of these different events...

...II I and the liberals are wrong...

...There is, supposedly, agreement everywhere on such basics as the prohibition against stealing and murder but, even so, there are quarrels, and not only about abortion...

...We have, for example, outlawed polygamy, which flourished in the Bible and exists to this day in Muslim societies...

...He who would make laws for all of society on the basis of Maimonides's definition of what is true, even for non-Jews, should at least know that he is really enacting a version of Judaism...

...This state can only protect our bodies...

...ANOTHER VIEW OF CHURCH & STATE The case for untidiness ARTHUR HERTZBERG I N KHOMEINI'S Iran, the state exists as an instrument of Islam: Christian and Jewish nonbelievers are tolerated, and heretics from Islam, such as the gentle believers in the Bahai faith, are murdered...

...Spinoza, the arch-heretic, thus remained within the biblical religious tradition in one fundamental respect: he refused to believe that ethics were simply a matter of consent...

...The annexation of that territory is held to be a sacred purpose, and the government which stands in the way is itself "illegal...

...Neeman, has announced several times that he will disregard any limitation by the Israeli government on further settlement of Jews in the West Bank...

...even as he devastated biblical morality, Spinoza nonetheless insisted that there was an absolute ethic that could be demonstrated with the exactness of mathematical proof...

...Some unabashed right-wingers have, therefore, been arguing baldly and boldly, that America must return to being a "Christian nation...

...Can it be invoked to command the assent of rabbis, and even of Buddhist monks...

...The problem of church and state is all the more difficult because, theologically speaking, the conservatives are right ARTHUR HERTZBERG is Rabbi of Temple Emanu El, Englewood, New Jersey, and adjunct professor of history at Columbia University...

...Religious or ideological absolutists may sometimes succeed, even today, in imposing their wills on society in the name of their God...

...Iran, Israel, and the United States are, of course, not the same...

...In Western thought the Roman Catholic tradition has held fast to the notion that this cannot be so...

...On the vexed question of abortion, rabbinic Judaism teaches that the fetus is not a person until it is born...

...I think not...

...Nonetheless, Spinoza did not relativize ethics...

...Maimonides, basing himself on Talmudic sources, defined the "seven commandments which were given to the children of Noah" as constituting a basic moral code for all humanity...

...The Western state has, historically, been run by the educated middle class which, in its majority, is everywhere, East and West, this-worldly and nonbelieving...

...In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, society in all its parts must be ruled titeocratically to enact the will of God...

...and that, as a child of the Jewish version of the biblical tradition, I find such action morally defensible only in specific cases when the reason is compelling and where the case has been decided on grounds other than the mother's subjectivity...

...Its only rationale is the one that was given by the Founding Fathers of America: the government exists as a traffic cop so that we may do one another the minimum amount of injury, either physical or spiritual...

...It is an instrument of domination by a secular humanist bourgeoisie, which imposes its nonbelief through its control of public life...

...there were rules of Conduct which applied to everyone...

...There is some truth to the assertion that the liberal state tends to teach nonbelief...

...There is, at the same time, consensus in American society on matters which are not against "natural" or biblical law...

...there is natural law which obligates all people, believers and nonbelievers alike...

...The modem Western state is not a creation of biblical religion but rather of the splintering of Christianity into so many factions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

...They must be reminded that this opens the door to having exactly that happen to them in places where someone else's absolute is in control...

...Under analysis, "natural law" thus tends to become the teaching of an individual tradition, with some universalist face-lift...

...Those who would stop all abortions in the United States, where major traditions believe that abortion is at least occasionally permissible, must remember that they cannot complain of the persecution of heretics by Khomeini, in the exercise of his belief that he must purge his society of harmful elements...

...But that is not the way of the more sophisticated...

...On the famous moral question of whether to save the mother or the child in the birth process, Jewish teaching is unequivocal: under such dire circumstances, one is commanded "to hack the fetus to pieces in the womb" to save the life of the mother...

...It is that state which is now increasingly under attack, and the issues are not quite as clearcut as the most passionate protagonists on both sides of the argument would have it...

...What I cannot do is to battle for a law in which I universalize for everybody my own anguish both for thousands of fetuses whose right to be born should be protected and over the occasional one which should in fact be denied that privilege...

...Those right-wingers in America today who are arguing for a 30 November 1984:655 constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion or to permit prayer in the public school, no matter what may be the merit of their arguments on specific issues, are not without a case...

...Are some forms of passive euthanasia, where help is withheld in hopeless medical situations, to be regarded as murder...

...The separation of religion and the state inevitably suggests that the nonreligious, public realm which all citizens hold in common is more important than the sectarian private differences which divide us from each other...