David Klinghoffer asks whether God is a Republican (via Hirhurim). He begins the piece by describing the rituals surrounding tum’ah and taharah (ritual purity and impurity, respectively), as explained in Vayikra. There nothing particularly remarkable about his treatment of the subject. He correctly explains that “a key to cleansing out impurity is ritualized immersion in water.” He also points out a common gloss on ritual contamination - tum’ah resembles death and taharah, life. So far so good. Then Klinghoffer starts talking about the great 19th-century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Charles Darwin. It’s all downhill from there.
Hirsch was a contemporary of Darwin, whose evolutionary theory challenges religion with the claim that material, natural, unguided processes alone account for the development of life. Darwin’s philosophical framework was that of materialism, the view that sees man’s situation in the world as being entirely determined by material forces, not spiritual ones.
Hirsch countered that the Bible, through the ritual-contamination laws, seeks to inoculate us against exactly that spirit-denying, nature-exalting worldview that achieved dominance in the 19th century—and still afflicts us.
The use of R. Hirsch as a contrast to Darwin is disingenuous in light of R. Hirsch’s well-known thesis that evolution is wholly compatible with traditional Judaism. In fact, he took this stand even before evolution was accepted as fact in the scientific community. Yet, the caption under R. Hirsch’s picture reads: “The Anti-Darwin.” As R. Hirsch himself explained about belief in divine creation:
This will never change, not even if the latest scientific notion that the genesis of all the multitudes of organic forms on earth can be traced back to one single, most primitive, primeval form of life should ever appear to be anything more than what it is today, a vague hypothesis still unsupported by fact. Even if this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the scientific world, Jewish thought, unlike the reasoning of the high priest of that notion, would nonetheless never summon us to revere a still extant representative of this primal form as the supposed ancestor of us all. Rather, Judaism in that case would call upon its adherents to give even greater reverence than ever before to the one, sole God Who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus and one single law of “adaptation and heredity” in order to bring forth, from what seemed chaos but was in fact a very definite order, the infinite variety of species we know today, each with its unique characteristics that sets it apart from all other creatures. (See here.)
The next part of the article addresses a few hot-button political issues that Klinghoffer uses to show how the liberal-conservative divide is really grounded in the debate over materialism.
Gay marriage: The implicit justification for this insists that gays are in the grip of nature. They have no choice about their sexual behavior. So let’s endorse their love in civil law.
Abortion: Here it’s women who are supposedly in the grip of nature, specifically sexual desire. The lady made a mistake and got pregnant. Liberals believe she can’t be held responsible for this, as denying her an abortion would do. The solution to unwanted pregnancy is a material one (ten minutes of vacuuming the uterus) over a spiritual one (taking responsibility for the outcome of sexual intercourse).
Gun control: A gun isn’t a force of nature, but it’s treated as if it were one. If this particular material object is found in the house, we are virtually compelled to abuse it, endangering ourselves and others. The only solution is to restrict gun ownership.
Global warming: We are in the grip of a vengeful, enraged nature! “Angry nature is holding a gun to our heads,” as the magazine of the Sierra Club warns.
Affirmative action: Racial discrimination, whether favoring a minority or not, is based on the assumption that people are trapped by naturally-determined limitations associated with their skin color.
The justification for same-sex marriage has absolutely nothing to do with anybody “in the grip of nature.” It has to do with equality. Regarding abortion, Klinghoffer drags out the stereotype of a “lady [who] made a mistake and got pregnant” and must “be held responsible for this.” First of all, this is not the only abortion story. Women choose to abort their pregnancy for dozens of other reasons. Secondly, and in this case more importantly, the image Klinghoffer conjures up is one of free choice, not in-the-grip-of-nature-determinism. The woman here makes a free choice to terminate her pregnancy rather than let nature take its course automatically. Klinghoffer’s other three analogies (gun control, global warming, and affirmative action) are similarly tenuous. He seems to be tossing and phrases like “material objects” and “naturally-determined” just so it vaguely resembles the point before it.
After Klinghoffer continues to address heath care, health regulation, and education policy, he concludes with this.
While of course I have simplified a bit, liberalism is the ideological faction that, of the two philosophies in American political life, is easily the more identifiable with tumah.
Simplified a bit? I believe that’s being very generous.