Readings for Passover: Rousseau on Moses and the Jews
As we head into the Passover season, I’m on the lookout for readings. This past weekend in shul, I was struck by the following passage from Jeremiah 22 (I tend to read around the prayerbooks):
Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages; and giveth him not for his work.
I was struck not only by the passage’s sense that injustice, in the form of uncompensated labor, is a wrong for which one will be punished but that one will be punished because it is a wrong sown into the building, the very foundation, of one’s construction. It’s that sense of the inseparability, the inseverability and indivisibility, of an edifice and the labor that goes into its creation that seems so archaic. We live in a world, pace Arendt, where the labor that goes into the construction of our material objects is nearly invisible; we have hardly any tangible sense that one can build our chambers by wrong because we have so little sense of how our chambers are built, that they are built at all.
On the flip side, there’s a whole literature, in Nietszche among others, denying that this moral proposition of Jeremiah can even meet the condition of possibility; slavery and domination are intrinsic not only to the construction of material things but to life and culture as such: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation and at least, at it mildest, exploitation,” as Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil.
What if we were to read the entire Haggadah from the perspective of the slaveholder? Might be an interesting exercise.
But then, in working on this piece on Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem, which should be out in May, I was pointed by Bonnie Honig to this passage about Moses in Rousseau’s Government of Poland, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read. (Note to self: sponsor a discussion among political theorists about which of the canonical texts we’ve never read. And why.) The passage also seems apt for the holiday, albeit for very different reasons from the ones discussed above:
I look at modern nations: I see many lawmakers among them but not a single lawgiver. Among the ancients I see three principal ones who deserve particular attention: Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa. All three devoted their principal cares to objects which our learned men would consider laughable. All three achieved successes which would be thought impossible if they were not so well attested.
The first formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of instituting as a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives who had no arts, no weapons, no talents, no virtues, no courage, and who, since they had not an inch of territory of their own, were a troop of strangers upon the face of the earth. Moses dared to make out of this wandering and servile troop a body politic, a free people, and while it wandered in the wilderness without so much as a stone on which to rest its head, he gave it the lasting institution, proof against time, fortune and conquerors which five thousand years have not been able to destroy or even to weaken, and which still subsists today in all its force even though the body of the nation no longer does.
To keep his people from being absorbed by foreign peoples, he gave it morals and practices which could not be blended with those of the other nations; he weighed it down with distinctive rites and ceremonies; he constrained it in a thousand ways in order to keep it constantly alert and to make it forever a stranger among other men, and all the bonds of fraternity he introduced among members of his republic were as many barriers which kept it separated from its neighbors and prevented it from mingling with them. This is how this singular nation, so often subjugated, so often scattered and apparently destroyed, yet ever idolizing its rule, has nevertheless maintained itself down to our days, scattered among the other nations without ever merging with them, and how its morals, its laws, its rites subsist and will endure as long as the world itself does, in spite of the hatred and persecution by the rest of mankind.
Some interesting things to note about this passage.
First, and most obviously, Rousseau’s insistence that Moses gave the Jews a sense of peoplehood without a territory, and that even without a territory, that sense of peoplehood endures over the millennia. Not only without a territory but scattered across many territories.
Second, the poignancy that Rousseau notes of the tension between the Jews’ constant subjugation, the denial of their sovereignty, and their “ever idolizing [their] rule.”
Last, the seemingly bizarre idea of creating a nation out of fugitives and strangers on the earth. There are many ways to conceive of a nation, and often they reside in a glorious past or the recovery of that past. (Consider Machiavelli’s connection between the recovery of ancient glory, particularly of Rome, and the creation of an Italian nation.) Likewise, do they draw on a sense of being at home, rooted somewhere. Yet Rousseau claims that the key to the sense of peoplehood among the Jews is precisely the opposite of both notions: no glorious past, no rootedness anywhere.
For more on Rousseau and the Jews, check out this interesting article by Jonathan Marks.