When asked at a recent public appearance in Israel if he would consider making aliya, Jewish-American pundit Ben Shapiro responded, “Because the fundamental principles of the United States are good, eternally good and worth upholding, and my fight to do that as a Jew is deeply important … my Jewish mission does not conflict with my presence in the United States.”
Shapiro’s response is indicative of a deep colonization – a sickness we might call a “Galut (exile) Syndrome” that has infected much of the Jewish Diaspora since the beginning of the Jewish Emancipation in Europe following the French Revolution.
This illness is exactly the spiritual rot that the founder of Ḥabad Ḥasidut, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, feared so much that he sent one of his followers to spy against Napoleon’s armies for the Tzar.
But where does Galut Syndrome come from? On its surface, Ben Shapiro clearly sees the United States as a deep expression of Hebrew values. When he refers to values as “eternally good,” as a “religious” Jew, we must assume that he means Torah values, since any human morality not derived from an eternal source probably can’t be considered eternal.
So what Torah values does Shapiro see as “the fundamental principles of the United States?”
From Shapiro’s book, “The Right Side of History,” it’s clear that these “fundamental principles” are what he construes as “Judeo-Christian values.”
But what values are shared between two seemingly diametrically opposed traditions?
A layman’s glance at the Christian Bible’s “sermon of the mount” makes it abundantly clear which parts of the Torah the Christians accept and which they reject. Augustine, one of the most central and influential early figures in the Christian church, referred to this sermon as containing “the highest morals, a perfect standard for the Christian life.”
The sermon opens with a series of blessings, praising those who suffer in this world and promising compensation in heaven, and a call to be a moral example to the world. The crowd is assured that the commandments of the Torah are eternal, and then the sermon immediately asserts a new moral standard – to be more righteous than the rabbis.
The rest of the sermon is an explanation of what it means to be more righteous than the rabbis. Some examples include putting out one’s own eyes to avoid licentious thoughts, turning the other cheek when someone attacks you, not marrying divorced women and only praying in private.
It is very clear from this sermon that the Christian understanding of Torah and its eternity is entirely detached from Israel’s Torah and its proscriptions for building an ideal world. Rather, the Christian appropriation of our teachings focuses on the more amorphous morality of the prophets, who demand general moral behavior as a necessary basis for the performance of the Torah’s rituals and laws.
This detachment of the five books of Moshe, the central body of our Torah, from the prophets, considered to be the students and successors of Moshe, is one of the central tenets of Christian thought.
So what Judeo-Christian values make up the “fundamental principles of the United States” that Shapiro holds so dear?
These are the values of individual morality, based loosely on the vision of the Hebrew prophets for an ideal world, but divorced completely from the mitzvot that exist as an extensive practical guide to creating that ideal society.
When Shlomo instructs, in the book of Kohelet, “Do not be overly righteous,” he is speaking directly to the human ego that often thinks it knows better than the rabbis, better than the Torah, better than HaShem even, what it means to be righteous.
It is this private morality that stands at the center of Shapiro’s worldview in general – and his view of the United States in particular.
Shapiro believes that, as a Jew, who is intrinsically connected to Torah (even the parts that Christianity reject), he can personally strengthen the aspects of American society while adhering to the vision of our prophets and returning the West to a moral path. The problem is that, in doing so, he blurs the lines between Torah and human morality, as well as between Am Yisrael and other peoples.
It’s possible that Ben Shapiro isn’t even aware of how confused his theology is.
Since US Jews gained broad social acceptance and inclusion following World War II, the “Modern Orthodox” camp that Shapiro belongs to has struggled to justify its continued existence in the United States through reorienting the centrality of Israel from a reborn national homeland to a temporary stop along the way to becoming an ideal American Jew – one that learns in an Israel-based yeshiva for a year before college and travels to Israel for the ḥaggim while donating money to AIPAC.
This reorientation has been strengthened by the general liberalization of American politics, which disguise the “Judeo-Christian” values of individual morality as “progressive” and “enlightened.”
Ben Shapiro, who has lived his whole life in this intellectual bubble, might be incapable of seeing the deep contradictions within this worldview.
But for those of us who see Western civilization (the civilization that once destroyed our own and several others) for what it truly is, it is truly confounding to hear an otherwise intelligent man declare, “my Jewish mission does not conflict with my presence in the United States.”
Shapiro appears to be genuinely unaware of the deep tensions between the ideological paradigm of Western civilization and that of the Jewish people. His not wanting to make aliya should be understood as merely a symptom of a deeper problem – the fact that he psychologically lives in the ideological paradigm of another civilization – ironically one built on the foundations of replacing Israel and deeply threatened by our return to national independence after centuries of exile.
Precisely because of the influence he holds over so many right-wing Jews due to his erroneous image as a “proud Jew” representing our people and values, it’s crucial we point out how deeply colonized Shapiro is, looking at the world through the lens of ideological liberalism and mistaking conservative Western values for those of our Torah. It’s important we make clear that Jews shouldn’t look to him for political or moral answers to Israel’s current challenges.
By fighting to strengthen American values – the values of Western civilization/the fourth empire (often cynically labeled “Judeo-Christian”) – Shapiro is actually hindering THE Hebrew mission, which isn’t the individual mission of any one Jew, but rather the collective historic mission of the Jewish nation as a whole.
