There was an article in a recent the Wall Street Journal on Pope Benedict XVI. The reporters interviewed Robert Spaemann, a conservative German Catholic philosopher who has known Benedict for years, to discuss Benedict’s vision. Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer asked the question "Where do we fit in?" I addressed his question there but it is an important one so I will address it here too.
For me the one thing that stood out in that article is the following:
“For Benedict, the modern age is defined by growing secularism in the West and the rise of religious fanaticism most everywhere else. In order to fulfill its mission, he believes, the Church needs to shun both forces.”
This is the key statement. I couldn’t agree more with Benedict that... just as he says the Church has to shun both religious fanaticism and secularism, so to do we. Because it is both that have created many of the problems we face macrocosmically and microcosmically.
On a macro scale the entire world has experienced the results of those philosophies taken to its ultimate conclusions. The holocaust is the result of secularism gone haywire. This was greatest crime against humanity and to the Jewish people since the Churban Bayis Sheni. And its perpetrators were secularists, a civilized people who valued science and technology. They were the people of Bach and Bethooven, Shiller and Goethe. When there is no God it is easy to take an evolutionary concept like “the struggle for existence, rename it “the survival of the fittest” and apply it to a master race being the most fit to decide who gets to live in their new world order.
The “holocaust” of our own time, the suicide bomber who kills innocent people in the name of God is the result of religious fanaticism.
On a micro scale we see it in our own backyards. Clearly it is our own religious fanatics that are responsible for acts of violence, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
The secularist extremists are those who would cause the spiritual destruction of the Jewish people. They are represented by the extreme left in Israel who spit on Torah observance. It isn’t that they are totally evil people. They are not. Even if they have some good ideas and programs in non religious areas, their secularist ideology leads them to focus and promote ideas that are completely anti Torah. They are the Tommy Lapids of the world who extol the virtues of counter-culturalism even when it impinges on the rights of others ...as was the case of with the Gay Pride activists. They consider the rights of those activists to march in the holy city of Jerusalem superior to the rights of the religious, irrespective of sensibilities that consider that parade in the holy city a blasphemy.
To a secularist, the word “holy” has no meaning. It does not exist in their vocabulary except to mock those who believe in things holy. They are the ones who agitate for gay marriage and consider all manner of debauchery perfecytly fine as long as there are consenting adults. They have no sense of sexual morality. Of course there are exceptions but the resons for those exceptions are beyond the scope of this post. They see religion as impinging on human rights. They want to destroy any real semblance of sexual morality and regard such attitudes as archaic... belonging to the dark ages and not to an enlightened age, as is our own.
But I am told that historically such attitudes have caused great civilizations to disappear from the face of the earth. I assume that at least in part the reason this has caused civilizations their demise is that when societies begin to indulge themselves in the pursuit of pleasure and all manner of self satisfaction their appetites increase; the time consumed on these activities increases, and important issues get put on the back burner or get entirely ignored. And the society decays.
On the religious side, the only difference between a suicide bomber and a religious fanatic in Jerusalem who burns dumpsters and throws rocks at busses is the degree with which one takes the violence. The motivation of the suicide bomber and the religious rioter in Meah Shearim both stem from the same sense of “serving God”. Both serve God and feel they need to do whatever it takes to achieve God’s goal. If people get hurt in the process, well...it’s God’s will.
And this applies to both people from both Charedi society and the Religious Zionist camp. As I recently pointed out, it was people who idenitifed as Charedim that have been in the forefront of violent behavior. And as I have also pointed out in the past, the right wing element in the Religious Zionist camp certainly have their share of violent people the worst of which were Baruch Goldstien and Yigal Amir. It is the religious Zionist camp that spawned these violent people. It is this camp that agitates the most for use of violent tactics against Arabs regardless of innocence or guilt. (Yes... they do exist.)
And as Benedict said, both secularism and religious fanaticism need to be rejected. Wise man… (at least on this issue).
