Keeping Kosher and the Salaita Boycott
Since a federal judge ruled on Thursday that the Steven Salaita lawsuit would go forward—and rejected the UIUC argument that Salaita did not have a contract with the university—I’ve gotten a lot of queries from academics wondering whether the boycott of the UIUC is now over. I’ve replied that, no, to my knowledge, it’s not over, since the demand of the boycott is that Salaita be reinstated. Which he has not yet been. Until he’s reinstated, the boycott continues.
Ever since we declared the boycott, I’ve gotten these sorts of queries. From academics wondering whether the boycott has been called off or asking me whether some particular course of action they are considering would violate the boycott. I’m always made uncomfortable by these queries. For two reasons.
First, the boycott is a genuinely grassroots campaign with no formal or recognized leadership. For better or for worse, it doesn’t have any strict or agreed upon rules of engagement. Some signatories to it have declared their refusal to accept any and all invitations to speak at UIUC. Others have declared that they won’t read tenure and promotion files. And so on. So who am I to be denying or granting permission? I usually try to respond to folks by explaining my own position, what I am willing or not willing to do. But I’m not the Pope. Second, and related to that Pope question, I sometimes feel like I’m being asked to grant absolution. The person asking me seems dead-set on breaking the boycott, and merely checks in with me so that I’ll say it’s okay.
But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about. What all this back and forth about the boycott really makes me think about is…being Jewish. Specifically, about all those rules—so cockamamie and obsessive, so picayune and seemingly pointless—that hem in a Jew’s life from the day’s she born till the day she dies. The rule-bound nature of Judaism has long been a source of bemused irritation—and genuine wonder—to Jews and non-Jews alike. It’s also been a source or symptom of a not inconsiderable amount of anti-Semitism. But whether friend or foe, people have often asked of these rules: Why? Why this obsessiveness about the smallest, seemingly most irrelevant, details of life? As I wrote in my recent Nation piece on Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem:
If you stumble upon a bird’s nest, take the eggs to sustain yourself, but not the mother. So says the law. If you build a house, put a railing round the roof so no one falls off. If you lend money to the poor, don’t charge interest; if your neighbor gives you his coat as collateral, give it back to him at night lest he be cold. A king should not “multiply horses to himself”: perhaps to make him and his people stay put, perhaps to keep his kingdom focused on God rather than war. Who the hell knows?
In my Nation piece, I explored one possible answer.
That combination of seemingly antithetical ideas—that we always and everywhere think about what it is that we’re doing, that we always and everywhere think beyond what we’re doing—lies at the heart of a religion so dedicated to the extraction of the sacred from the profane, of locating the sacred within the profane, that it encircles human action with 613 commandments, lest any moment or gesture of a Jew’s life be without thought of God.
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The point is that Judaism imposes a mindfulness about material life—the knowledge that it is out of our littlest deeds that heaven and hell are made—that turns our smallest practices into the peaks and valleys of a most difficult and demanding ethical terrain.
Over Passover, I mooted another: that maybe all the emphasis on rules and regulations reflects the Jews’ experience or memory—real or imagined—of bondage in Egypt. A slave’s life is a condition of subjection to the arbitrary will of another, of permanent lawlessness at the hands of a master. Is it so surprising that a class of men and women who only became a people through their emancipation from slavery, whose every injunction to believe in and obey God is justified via the memory of that slavery and emancipation, would make so much of a muchness of obedience to rules? The prefatory comment to the Ten Commandments reads: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The Ten Commandments—and the other 603—are meant to be the antipode to, the antithesis of, that experience of power unbound. However insane and fetishistic this religion of rules may seem, perhaps it would seem less fetishistic if we recalled that experience of lawlessness, of unbounded and unregulated power, that preceded it.
But today, in the context of a Salaita boycott, I want to explore a different explanation. Perhaps this religion of rules has something to do with the quotidian reality of organizing a collective mode of life. Whenever we initiate a collective course of action—be it for the sake of something as grand as politics or religion or as pedestrian as a road trip—we run into unforeseen circumstances, bumps in the road that force us to rethink the course we have set out on. We declare something as seemingly simple and straightforward as a boycott of UIUC, and suddenly there are a thousand details and unanticipated contingencies that have to be dealt with. Am I allowed to submit an article to a journal that is connected to the UIUC? Can you speak off-campus? What if she pays her own way and refuses to accept any honorarium? Is he allowed to participate in a conference that is being held on another campus but is partially funded by the UIUC? And on and on.
Think about a strike. As anyone who has participated in a strike will tell you, there are all sorts of questions that come up in the course of a strike as to what constitutes strike-breaking. Teachers, for example, have to run a minefield of individualized requests and extracurricular circumstances—the graduating student who needs a letter of recommendation, the test-taking junior who was supposed to receive special evening tutoring, and so on—that complicate the simple injunction to stop work. Or the strikers’ themselves may have individualized needs and requests. Strike leaders have to navigate these requests, maintaining solidarity and discipline while making allowances for these complicating factors of everyday life.
I am just speculating here, but I wonder if something similar is not at play in the development of the Judaic code. From the very beginning, Jews inherited a way of life, replete with ancient and simple rules that possessed, initially, an easy intelligibility and easy applicability, but which, with time, had to be adapted—perhaps even at the moment of their promulgation—to unforeseen circumstances. And because of that memory of bondage, where lawlessness seemed akin to slavishness, the Jews wanted to act rule-fully in the face of these unforeseen circumstances. So they proclaimed new rules. And then new rules. To avoid the very arbitrariness—that feeling of making it up on the fly, which can threaten solidarity—that so often confronts the organizers of any large-scale action.
That is how, maybe, we’ve made our religion—like our boycott—kosher.