Instruction, Law, and Nation: A Critical Historical Inquiry into the Essence of Judaism

IV

Since Judaism is law, the doubts of the Jewish youth are not an evil, at least per se they are not an evil. If Judaism were only instruction, the doubts raised by the instruction would fundamentally endanger the doubter’s belonging to Judaism. Indeed, if the instruction were the prerequisite of the law, the doubter’s continued obedience to the law would be nothing but hypocrisy, pure weakness of character.

The more unconditional, indeed, the more absolute the obedience demanded by the law, the more room there is in Judaism for the soul struggling to attain understanding and truth. The soul, in particular, belongs, when she [the soul] is honest and filled with a pure will, intimately to Judaism, so that Judaism can perform on her the law’s educational work. Are not the Psalms filled with the confessions of just such a soul fighting and yearning for unity with God and unity with God’s instruction? And in Psalm 119, how infinitely moving, and at the same time deeply significant, are the striving soul’s heartfelt outbursts of love for the law, her teacher and pedagogue, for whom with great tenderness it [she] constantly invents new names, names of endearment!

2. As in all legal systems, the obedience that must be accorded Jewish law does not require the conviction of obedience. But what motive propels obedience, if not conviction? This question is easily answered for the period of The Jewish State: like the law of any state, Jewish law produced obedience through enforcement by the state. The state lent its authority to the law and thus ensured its realization.

But what happens after the state has long been lying in ruins and the exiled members of the people are increasingly dispersed across the entire globe? Isn’t it conviction alone that can uphold the law today? And hasn’t therefore the law, dependent as it now is on the conviction and consent of those it subjects, ceased to be law in the legal sense? The state lies in ruins, the people are dispersed: what good is the law? Should hope of the future restoration of the state, of the ingathering of the dispersed [exiles], should that hope alone guarantee the continued existence of the law?

3. The question posed here is of fundamental importance for Jewish constitutional law in exile. The question of the legal character of Judaism is identical to the question of the nature of the Jewish people. And therein the fundamental opposition of law and instruction is being exposed.

We already saw that the law, which by definition is independent of the nature of the will of the subjects and of the entire complex of their motivations, demands absolute obedience. We saw that instruction, in contrast, addresses itself to the individual and wants to wrest from it its innermost possession, its conviction. The law, in absolute independence, places the will of the community above the will of the individual. Instruction does not transcend the will of the individual. The law connects. Instruction isolates. Even a group tied by shared instruction and identical conviction does not evolve beyond the individuals into a higher unity. This is because instruction, as the conviction of each individual, is dependent on the nature of the individual’s will, and the serendipitous agreement of the nature of several wills is an inadequate basis for a specific kind of social synthesis. Only the law, which completely ignores the nature of the individual will and obligates the many to act in unison by imposing on them a will that is not their own and stands above them, only that law creates, on account of an autocracy imposed on the many, an amalgamated entity, a society.

The Jewish State is destroyed, the Jewish people dispersed, but the law stands, and its autocracy, which spans the globe, creates the amalgamated entity, the society of the Jews.

4. In all of human history this is an unprecedented, unique development: Jewish law survived The Jewish State, and the will of the collective reigns over the exiles in unbroken force.

The law is independent of state coercion—the characteristic of coercion by the state is not part of the definition of justice and its primary representative, the law. The law is the absolutely binding regulation of the community supported by the collective will. The collective will must uphold the law, and it must be strong enough to bend the will of the individual. But this bending force of the collective will does not have to manifest itself in absolute coercion by the state; it may manifest itself in a compelling psychological power to which the individual, caught up in a complex of motives, succumbs.

The Jewish people did not want to disappear, despite the destruction of its state and despite its dispersion. Even after the national catastrophe, it regarded the continued existence of the law as legitimate. The enemies’ might did not succeed in breaking its collective will. And just as the individual lives as long as it still has willpower, so too do the Jews continue to exist as a people because, throughout the course of its misfortunes, it preserved its willpower and wanted the law even after the catastrophe.

Neither race nor culture, neither hate nor history, but the will alone, the collective will, as it expresses itself in the system of justice, in the law, constitutes the community and preserves the nation.