From Philosophy To Psychology Poem by gershon hepner

Wisdom emerges from philosophy,
and folly from a loss of e-
quilibrium when leaving home,
which is when we begin to roam
to realms ruled by psychology,
providing an apology
for all the rules a person breaks
with philosophical mistakes.

Inspired by Leon Wieseltier’s review of Norman Pdhoretz’s (“Why Are Jews Liberals? ” (“Because They Believe, ” NYT Book Review, September 13,2009) :

“There are four types of people, ” teaches an ancient rabbinical text. “The one who says: What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours — this is the common type, but there are some who say that this is the type of Sodom. What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine — this is a boor. What is mine is yours — a saint. What is yours is mine — a villain.” Brothers and sisters, is this liberal or conservative? The legitimacy of private property is certainly championed, but that is both a liberal conviction and a conservative one; and the tradition sees fit to record also the remarkable opinion that this elementary and uncontroversial norm — a scholar many years ago called it “possessive individualism” — was the custom of the most wicked city on earth. Moreover, legitimacy does not confer sanctity: the rabbis entertain the prospect of different distributions of wealth, and prudently contemplate the extremes of selflessness and selfishness. So liberals and conservatives, and socialists too, and even the Club for Growth, will all find a use for this text, which is to say that the text is useless, I mean, for establishing the liberalism or the conservatism of the Jewish tradition. It is only what it is: a terse rabbinical discussion that, historically but also conceptually, exists antecedently, and in sovereign indifference, to modern politics. Judaism is not liberal and it is not conservative; it is Jewish. But this is the beginning of the matter, not the end. For Judaism is immense and various: it holds within itself an oceanic plenitude of opinions and tendencies, developed over 2,000 years of philosophical and legal deliberation, and they do not all go together. To say that a view is Jewish is to claim a provenance more than an essence….
Norman Podhoretz loves his people and loves his country, and I salute him for it, since I love the same people and the same country. But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write. The veracity of everything he believes is so overwhelmingly obvious to him that he no longer troubles to argue for it. Instead there is only bewilderment that others do not see it, too. “Why Are Jews Liberals? ” is a document of his bewilderment; and there is a Henry Higgins-¬like poignancy to his discovery that his brethren are not more like himself. But the refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.” He has a philosophy. They have a psychology….
There is something a little risible about the solemnity with which Podhoretz presents encyclopedia articles as evidence of his erudition (“I relied most heavily on one of the great works of 20th-century Jewish scholarship, the Encyclopaedia Judaica”): there is even a reference, slightly embarrassed, to Wikipedia. From his footnotes you would think that the most significant Jewish historian of our time is Paul Johnson. And there is a decidedly insular reliance upon the pages of Commentary, the magazine he edited for 35 years. His parochialism can be startling: Samuel ha-Nagid, the astounding poet, warrior, statesman and scholar in Granada in the 11th century, reminds him of Henry Kissinger! Podhoretz seems to be living the Vilna Gaon’s adage — maybe he can find it in some encyclopedia — that the best way for a man to preserve his purity is never to leave his house.


9/13/09