The Torah According to a Social Democrat

...and referred frequently to God's messages to Moses...

...A discussion of meritocracy in Spheres of Justice, for instance, takes him back to the examinations for government posts that prevailed for many centuries in China...

...For the Liberation Theologians of Latin America, Walzer says, Exodus is a "privileged text.' Since Walzer's title might accurately be amplified to read "The Israelite Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land as Paradigm and Inspirer of Western Revolutions," his book obviously closely parallels Steffens', with one emphatic difference...

...Prime Minister Men-achem Begin of Israel, Carter writes, saw himself "charged with the future of God's chosen people...

...God opens up the earth miraculously and Korah, his followers and their wives and children "went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them...

...namely, theHittites, and the Am-orites, the Canaanites, and the Periz-zites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites...

...So were the American clergy whose sermons supported our colonial wars with the Indians and the Revolution of 1776...

...The question of Israel as a holy nation and of the relation of priests to laity within that holiness, though it was probably raised long after the Exodus, is one of great religious interest...

...Walzer similarly slights attempts to place the Exodus events within the context of Middle Eastern history as known from archeology, Egyptology and the Ugaritic texts...

...Walzer writes so clearly, engagingly, commonsensically, and he has read so widely, that he is informative and stimulating even when inconclusive...

...The account of the fall of Jericho in Joshua, "when," as a joyous spiritual phrases it, "de walls come tumblin' down" and all the inhabitants, men, women and children, according to the Lord's command, were put to the sword, is generally believed to be a fiction...

...Shock at Moses' sternness turned the youthful Walzer permanently against bloody Jacobinism and Stalinism...

...Walzer, who was troubled as a boy by the Le-vites' slaughter of their comrades, does not mention God's own climactic action against the first born of Egypt...

...As a devout Baptist, the President knew Palestine was "ordained by God" to be a permanent homeland for the Jews...

...At Sinai, God set conditions, made demands: "If ye will obeymy voice indeed, andkeepmy covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure to me above all people: for all the earth is mine...

...Like the revolutionaries who preceded him, Walzer finds the Exodus story paradigmatic, a never-to-be-forgotten "first...

...Walzer admits that the Exodus experience as a whole is equally susceptible to a Leninist interpretation...

...If the five books of Moses plus Joshua are literally the Word of God, and if we restrict our Bible reference to them, clearly the Fundamentalists are right and so are the ruthless Bible-reading revolutionaries whom Walzer is attempting to refute...

...as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee: that they teach you not to do after all their abominations...

...At the talks Carter always kept his annotated Bible close by, predicting—"accurately, as it turned out"—that it would be much needed...

...But if the Biblical text is accepted "as given," fictions are as influential in later history as facts...

...Exodus and Revolution is the fourth book with a boldly comprehensive title (the preceding were Just and Unjust Wars, Radical Principles, and Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality) that Walzer has produced in relatively quick succession in the last eight years...

...In his devotion to democracy, consensus and the social contract, Walzer declares the convenant at Sinai the crucial event of the Exodus...

...In trying to draw political lessons from what the followers of Moses went through over the course of their 40 years in the desert, Walzer consciously continues an argument he began with his teacher at the time of his Bar Mitz-vah...

...He can do so only by denying or minimizing a preponderance of Mosaic events on which his ideological enemies can much more readily seize...

...Here he differs markedly from Martin Buber's classic Moses, the Revelation and the Covenant, which parallels his own discussion at many points...

...But when he abandons history for homily and uses a narrative full of wondrous and terrible events of varying degrees of credibility to support his own current political position, his uncritical approach to the text threatens the seriousness of the whole undertaking...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University When Jimmy Carter convoked the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks at Camp Davidin 1978, hewasmoved, he says in his memoir Keeping Faith, by an "unshakable" commitment to the security of Israel...

...Unfortunately God and Moses are not social democrats...

...One night of that terror and the Lord won His victory and the labor slaves of Egypt were freed...

...Actually the Canaanites, who had a superior culture, taught the Israelites a great many valuable things as well...

...If Walzer himself does not believe that the God who spoke to Moses is the God who is worshipped today in the churches and synagogues, does not believe He gave the harsh decrees quoted in Deuteronomy, what authority then do these texts have as guides in contemporary politics...

...To restrict oneselfto the Pentateuch, orTorah, and use these highly mythologized accounts of late Bronze Age migrations and tribal wars as a warrant for present-day political attitudes, seems to me, in the light of the situation in the Middle East, as risky an undertaking as the attempts of Christian Fundamentalists, some of whom have had President Reagan's ear, to apply the prophecies of Revelation to the prospects of nuclear confrontation with the Russians...

...Bu-ber, for instance, thinks the role of the Levite and Aaronic priesthoods in the revolts against Moses is quite unhistori-cal, a backdating from the time of the kings...

...Biblical fundamentalists, both Christian and Judaic, tend to be hawkish, nationalistic, intolerant...

...The earlier covenants with Noah and Abraham were promises offered by God...

...Richard H. Pells, in his newly published The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, says of Walzer's early writing for Dissent heartily supporting the gradualist and nonviolent Civil Rights movement: "It proclaimed that wholesale social change invariably brought purges, dictatorship, the 'corruption of culture,' and 'the brutal manipulation of human beings.'" All these undesirable things occurred within the Israelite community during the Exodus...

...Lincoln Steffens, in his chapter "The Red Ter-rorofGod," commends the final plague on revolutionary grounds, calling it quick, decisive and, since it was equally distributed among all classes, just...

...Still they longed for the fleshpots of Egypt, worshipped the golden calf, committed whoredom with the daughters of Moab...

...God destroys 250 other recusants by fire...

...Hebegins JustandUnjust Wars with the famous Melian Dialogue from Thucydides' History of the Pelopon-nesian War, a philosophic conversation between the Athenian generals and the people of Melos, whom they are about to attack, and which, despite the fine reasoning, sounds rather like a conversation between a wolf and a lamb in one of Aesop's fables...

...The portion of the Torah to be read on that occasion was from Exodus, and it contains the story of Moses ordering the Levites in the name of God to "slay every man" who had worshipped the golden calf...

...His is a nationalist approach, restricted to the interior history of Israel, and to an exclusively Jewish God...

...Walzer slights most "form" and redaction criticism of the Bible, most questions of when and by whom these accounts were first written down, and what transformations they probably went through before and after that first writing...

...He is primarily a moral philosopher, using the case study method to tackle afresh such universal problems as criminality in war, ethnocentricity, wealth amid poverty, and the insolence of office...

...This is especially true if we include God's methods in Egypt and Canaan, although Walzer says little about them...

...Before his disastrous end as theocratic reformer in Florence, Savonarola preached a series of sermons on Exodus...

...And at what cost...

...He is arguing a thesis with only one sustained example to apply his case study method to, the 40-year Israelite travail in the desert, and he is arguing it from a Jewish nationalist rather than a universal perspective...

...At the end he quotes God's command to Moses to wipe out whole peoples in the Promised Land: "But thou shall utterly destroy them...

...He tries to judge humanely, pragmatically, without dogma...

...The covenantal grant of individual responsibility, which to Walzer is pivotal, was used by an Israelite named Korah, supported by 250 "princes" of the assembly, as an argument against what they regarded as dictatorship by Moses and Aaron: "Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them...

...Walzer, professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a contributing editor to both the New Republic and Dissent, is anti-Leninist, a pluralist, a social democrat...

...Anachronis-tically, however, Walzer tries to politicize this issue, make it a matter of benign social democratic politics, as against totalitarianism both of the Left and the Right...

...And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation...

...Cromwell was constantly conscious of Mosaic precedents...

...And Walzer is no more enthusiastic about the Marxist-Leninists, who would end history on His behalf...

...In an act of radical voluntarism the entire people committed itself, not through representatives or proxies, but each individual in his own voice: "All that the Lord has spoken we will do.' To covenant theology, which implies for him a morally responsible man-made history with continuing advances and retreats, Walzer opposes millenar-ianism and apocalypticism, so dominant among Christian fundamentalists today, wherein God Himself, in the most sanguinary fashion, puts an end to history in His own good time...

...Yet perversely, or at least quixotically, he tries to make the total Exodus experience serve his moderate, nonviolent social-democratic purposes...

...What laws and modes of organization have or have not worked...

...His task was not easy, because the Israelites were fractious...

...Whatever Steffens' reservations, he was a committed Leninist...

...Is Moses to be Cromwell, Lenin or George Washington...

...In Exodus and Revolution Walzer is less detached...

...The "smiting" of the first born in Egypt, commemorated during the Passover, raises a similar question about the suffering of another nationality...

...We confront a new nation, Israel, with a strong new leader, freed from all previous institutions, and strug-ling to develop in the desert some new mode of self-governance...

...In The Great Code, on the Bible and literature, Northrop Frye takes the Biblical text pretty much as given because that is how the poets and symbolists he is studying took it...

...In 1926, after proclaiming that he had seen the future in the Soviet Union and it worked, Lincoln Steffens wrote a really terrible book called Moses in Red, the Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution...

...No less than 10 times did they "murmur" against Moses, a remarkable fact, considering that the voice of Moses was consistently the voice of God, their own God, and a God who was not slow to punish disobedience by violent means...

...Citing medieval commentators who insisted that the Holy War "ban" applied only to the peoples named, who would no longer be found there when Jews ultimately returned to the land, Walzer argues that Judaism (the kind he favors, at least) is "not found in the text so much as in the interpretation of the text" and that Right-wing Zionists who want to invoke a Mosaic "ban" against Palestinian Arabs practice a fundamentalism alien to Judaism...

...Walzer, who several times cites Frye, also accepts the Exodus story as the Bible tells it because that is how the past revolutionaries he is studying took it...

...Korah," Walzer writes, "is the first Left oppositionist in the history of radical politics...

...This was hardly the first time in history, as Michael Walzer reminds us in Exodus and Revolution—though he does not mention Carter—that a Bible-reading Christian reponded in specifically political ways to the commands and promises God gave Moses around 1250 B.C...