A Cybernetics of Judaism

A word on the title—“cybernetics” is essentially the same word as “governance,” and since I want to reject philosophically implicated terms like “theology” and “anthropology” and foreground the centrality of governance in constituting the human, I thought to take advantage of the centrality of “cybernetics” to technological displacements of philosophy. Judaism is intrinsically and ambivalently tied to governance, and since there are already countless books on the Jewish relation to God, to man, to law, to morality, etc., I will offer a rethinking of Judaism along governance and cybernetic lines—which is already implicit in the centrality of law and covenant to Judaism. I’m following up on my argument for understanding Judaism as a continually renewed title deed with ever increasingly complicated terms, conditions and provisos. It’s a kind of doubled title deed—taking on board Bernard Lamborelle’s assertion that Abraham’s covenant was actually made with an earthly lord, some near eastern emperor, I also see Judaism in the erasure but also preservation of that memory as the “lord” is, through a series of conquests and exiles, elevated into a deity standing above all earthly lords, with the only trace of the original covenant being the attachment to a particular territory. I won’t review the entire argument here but will simply remind you of the clear historic link between the Jewish covenant with God and near eastern covenants between imperial and vassal states.

So, the Jews were (self) created as a people serving imperial interests, as is already implicit in the self-titling as a “nation of priests”—priests serve a king. No reader of the Hebrew Bible can fail to notice how pervasive this theme is—Abraham’s encounters with Pharoah and Abimelech; Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt; Moses’s origins in the royal family, Mordechai’s (not so clear) role in the Book of Esther, Ezra’s mission to re-establish the Jews, etc. There is no contradiction between the continuity of these affiliations with power, which continued up into modern times, on the one hand, and the assertion of the Jews as a people who dwell alone, in a special relation to God, their ultimate protector. Serving as high level bureaucrats is a precarious business, as hostility is easily directed towards such intermediaries, and if the Pharoah confers his favors upon one generation the next generation may confront a Pharoah who knows them not. Only the delegation from God remains in the passages from regime to regime. Ancient Jewish history (or legend, if you prefer) is filled with stories of rulers who turned their face away from the Jews, along with the occasional ruler who saved them. Oppression, resistance and salvation from God is certainly a prevalent theme, as a reading of the Passover Haggadah will confirm. This framing continues through modern times, as the inclination is to tell Jewish history as a series of welcomes and betrayals by one ruler or nation after another. Judaism has many differences from Christianity, but one critical one is Judaism’s willingness to express resentment toward all these oppressive rulers and preserve the memory of persecutions. And there has always been a theology to this narrative form, as the persecutions are taken to be a scourging of the Jews, punishment for their sins—even modern Zionism, which rejected traditional theological frameworks, had in some of its most influential strands a similar view of Jewish persecution as corresponding to and in some accounts caused by deformations in Jewish social and economic development.

My proposal is that this narrative approach be furthered and deepened. Jews should retain all the memories and all the resentments towards their persecutors while also insisting that all the persecutions were God’s punishment, chastisements for us to learn from (we can retain the resentments because the teaching was from God, not his instruments). Punishments for what? Here I will depart from Jewish tradition, which sees the punishment as directed at deviations from God’s laws, in favor of a cybernetics that focuses on the ways Jews have managed our affairs as managers of others’ affairs. A nation of priests became a nation of scribes which means a nation of ledgerers—one way or another, we find ourselves keeping the books and managing the transactions of the powerful. A very risky business. Traditional Judaism and modern Jewishness alike have had very good reasons for avoiding this lightning rod, in favor of victimary narratives that in modern times became fantasies of joining with the oppressed in revolution. The existence of the State of Israel was intended to short circuit such narratives, and to some extent it has done so. The current spillover of the Israel-Gaza war into American politics, which has figures like Bill Ackman (haunted, perhaps, by the possible fate of his wife had she been in her. homeland somewhere down south on October 7) fairly nakedly asserting something we’d have to call “Jewish power” makes some rethinking especially urgent. Models for Jewish relations to governance, a Jewish cybernetics, are essential, and should, assuming Israel continues to become the center of Jewish life, eventually inform and even revise Jewish law and ritual.

The initial step toward a Jewish cybernetics is to counter-balance the “evil” rulers with “good” ones, even if only hypothetically. Symbiotic relations between Jews and rulers must become as ingrained in the “grammar” of Judaism as persecutory, doomed ones are now. For one thing, that would make Jews a much brighter light to the nations, a light needed now more than ever when solutions advanced to every problem include all possibilities but that of making governance good, or even normal. If we sin, it is in obscuring succession relations, in touting outside options, in intensifying the hold of the outside spread on chains of command. This doesn’t change the fact that the Jew’s primarily relation is to God (i.e., the signifying center)—God’s voice is whatever tells us when and how to defer violence, or when and how we are failing to do so. When Jews undergo persecution we should assume that part of it is in our failure, to some degree, to defer violence. And we should consider and contemplate that part, even if it is painful to do so. Jews are more than anyone else responsible for deferring violence—therein are we “chosen,” at first by some king who thought someone who came to be called “Abraham” was best suited to manage some land in the Middle East, but subsequently by our own ongoing role as mediators between power and its subjects. This is the significance of Israel, which is filled with “dirty,” this-worldly” agency through and through, from the initial Zionist settlements, to the further legitimation and defense of those settlements, to settling more in response to attacks on those settlements, etc.—it is an exemplary platform from which try out modes of deferral: part of the hatred of contemporary Israel (which can really be a wonder to behold) is that Israel displays the irreducibility of power, of the intrinsic limitations of all the modern discourses grounded in rights in order to fill imperative gaps with authorized complainants. Jews and Judaism are never outside of the give and take of power exchanges, acquiring power to supplement insecurity and being made insecure in new ways by the contingency of that power and therefore needing to invent deferral over and over. Needless to say, Jews fail in this mediating task regularly; about as often, probably, as humans in general fail at the many things they attempt. But it’s a position from which we can’t extricate ourselves, and, in fact, any attempt to do so fastens us even more firmly. This is also the voice of God.

The voice of God is also in mimesis and its resentments, and I don’t think contemporary Jews, even observant ones, need to shy away from the Biblical scholarship I have been alluding to here (and in my aforementioned post), which show fairly decisively how derivative the Hebrew scriptures are—from, as already mentioned, vassal treaties, but also ancient Babylonian and Egyptian sources and no doubt from Greek philosophical, mythical and poetic sources as well; and this to be factored in with later mimetic rivalries with the Roman empire. Let’s say none of the Hebrew scriptures are “original,” “authentic” documents of the true history of a real people; let’s posit the most unflattering claim, that “Judaism” begins with some elite Judeans returned to Judea by Cyrus to manage that territory (the original Abraham?), and the scriptures written afterward are a hodgepodge of plagiarisms and justifications for this or that section of the ruling elite (imposed, then, upon some native population). At least some of contemporary scholarship documenting this “plagiarism” is either written or received with a triumphant debunking air which seems to me itself enslaved to longstanding reverence for the sacrality of scripture—as if once the scriptures have been completely saturated with the literary productions of the surrounding nations we will finally be free of its grip and, not incidentally, for some, we will have confirmation of various other things we kind of assumed about the Jews all along. But this complete saturation will still leave the Hebrew scriptures a qualitatively different text, a series of revisions animated by an unyielding resentment toward the deification of any human and the human sacrifice such deification inevitably entails. This is an Axial Age inheritance still be reckoned with, even if transforming Axial Age assumptions and institutions involves moving beyond the “naked human” towards forms of “investiture” in some way we can’t quite imagine yet. Jews will continue to be markers of some unfinished business (there are still contested borders, still irreconcilable interests, still resentments intractable before the human rights world view…) here and taking on the role I’m attributing to scripture here of imitating with a difference so as to display before “the Nations” the evasiveness and ultimate violence of their representational political categories is a worthy task for a more mature Israeli culture. Nor, for that matter, need we be concerned about whether we are what might be called “Theseus Jews,” which is to say the result of a process of the Judeans and then Jews exiting and Gentiles entering the Jewish community such that not a single trace of, say, the inhabitants of Judea circa 250 BC remains—this process of movement, replacement and revivification via transmission of the covenant will itself track cybernetically the relation between larger sovereignties and whatever roles Jews played in their governance. In fact, I would hypothesize that the minimal role of tragedy in Judaism, along with its consequent privileging of continuity and life, is due the need to revise earlier stories that might, in fact, have led to a (tragic) dead end in such a way as to maintain and create lineages that weren’t exactly “natural”—with the most obvious example being the revision of the binding of Isaac story from an original version in which Isaac is slaughtered to one in which God restrains Abraham, presumably to create a line from Abraham to Jacob (originally in another storyline altogether) and thereby two branches of “Israel.”

The conversion of a fairly routine land deal into a covenant with the creator of the universe, i.e., the landlord of everything, is an achievement and responsibility not be abandoned (if it could be abandoned). It requires a cadre of elites continuous across several empires, a scribal class mimetically reworking legendary, ritual and legislative material, issuing in the narrative framework posing the possibility of a conflict between the ruler and that elite which is in turn singularized in the persecution of an exemplary member of the elite associated with the people, producing a highly replicable form of martyrdom and therefore sacrality. This entire configuration is to be rendered cybernetic, with Jews specializing in the detection of fractures across rulers, auxiliary elites and larger popular groupings—surfacing the training materials, we might say. Direct attacks on Jews must be confronted head-on, while beyond that a commitment to strengthening the juridical order and eschewing all mob rule is to be installed—indeed, part of the purpose of directly confronting attacks on Jews is to elicit data regarding the formation of vendetta-based mobs, of which vendettas against Jews tend to be leading indicators.

None of this implies any immediate changes in Jewish liturgy or ritual that I can think of, but Jewish cybernetics could contribute to transforming Jewish law into a body of law suited to governance on the contemporary technoscene. Discussions of Jewish law (Halacha) have always been international, with opinions circulating around the world even going back to the Middle Ages—the internet further facilitates these circulations of rulings, and, while no expert, it’s hard to see why “contributes to good governance” couldn’t readily be integrated as a criterion into Rabbinic decision making. Perhaps bringing speculation regarding Messianic conditions and possibilities would help. Such speculations have remained merely speculative, focused on questions like whether an increase in sin (in Israel, in the world) or virtue is more likely to solicit his arrival. But maybe the one who will turn out to have been the Messiah will be the one who set in place a chain of succession that remained intact, in which case Jewish law could take an interest in creating the broader institutional, intellectual and pedagogical conditions that might contribute to the emergence of such an individual. This would be a way of acknowledging the at one time heretical “activism” of the Zionist movement while accepting the possibility of and need to develop concepts such as “Messiah” with greater precision. The first person designated as “Messiah” was apparently the Persian monarch Cyrus, who allowed the Jews (probably those elites who had been carried off in the Babylonian exile) to return to and govern Israel. Maybe the question of whether the Messiah even has to be Jewish, or whether the concept can become plural rather than singular, can be opened. “Messiah” can be something like a measuring rod for the state of governance, a measuring rod in whose use Jews might specialize but which could be useful to anyone.

One very specific issue where a Jewish cybernetics could weigh in with some effect is the undoing of the post-Nuremberg international legal order which privileges the rights of the individual over the sovereignty of states thereby legitimating all kinds of interventions. Of course, this human rights principle is only honored when it suits the interests of powerful states but if powerful states are to intervene in other territories they should give better reasons than preventing war crimes, human rights violations, etc.—it should have something to do with preventing misgovernance in one territory from spilling over into others. Even more important, the “human rights worldview” is the basis for media-generated frenzies, both domestic and international, and was an important driver in the installation of civil rights law. This juridical order ultimately derives, or at least credibly refers back to, the Axial Age construct of the sacrality of the individual, positing God as the super-sovereign over the ancient empires. So, the Jews are clearly present and function as a kind of knot holding these orders together (which is why as resentment of these orders intensifies so do fantasies of disappearing the Jews). It is fitting, then, that Jews contribute to their overcoming by placing the sacrality of the individual (which should itself perhaps undergo translation into something like a hypothesis regarding the interoperability of all beings) in the imperative gap, where the various ways of fulfilling a command present themselves as an event unfolds and a kind of correction towards the enactment of the command best enabling singular succession is always possible. Rather than calling upon some fantasized outside force to right wrongs within an imperial setting, the possibility of adding increments of agency within the system becomes the “check” on power. There are existing Jewish traditions (like Joseph helping save Egypt from famine) that can be mobilized here and, more generally, this approach follows from the insistence on preserving remembrance and gratitude toward good rulers along with resentment toward bad ones and commemoration of their victims. Maybe bad rulers can even be made a bit better. The world attributes a lot of agency to Jews, often inflated to the point where abolishing it would heal the world but rather than simply denying it and trying to shuffle it around we can claim it within a recognizable set of reference points and exercise it transparently. It’s better to be obnoxious than appear to be hiding.

I don’t know how interesting any of this will be to my fellow Jews, but I would like these reflections to resonate because one thing on which I think we will have broad agreement is on the need to rethink the Jewish position in the world, which can’t help but involve a rethinking of Judaism. The post-WWII moratorium on publicly expressed Jew-hatred in the West has been fraying for some time, albeit mostly on the margins (where such expressions have long been allowed, within some limits, by minorities deemed to have no guilt for the Holocaust), but I think is now entering a period of dissolution. In other words, overt resentment toward Jews is likely to return to what we might call “normal historical levels.” In the US, I certainly don’t think things will come anywhere near legal measures against Jews (much less expulsion or mass murder), which, under the US Constitution, would be extremely difficult to manage. (I’m leaving out of consideration the implications of a more drastic political breakdown, the results of which are impossible to predict in a meaningful way.) But I certainly think that people will feel freer to point out where they think Jews are deploying power in ways that conflict with the interests of others and in general charges of antisemitism will carry less and less weight. (And this might coincide with more “parrhesia” by and towards all recognizable groups. (It’s also worth mentioning that anyone who pokes around a bit behind the scenes will find “the Jews” appear as a convenient placeholder explanation on occasion. (Of course no one is obliged to give an inch to cultists who think they have an archaic right to interrogate Jews.))) Sometimes they will be right, sometimes wrong, but either way Jews will themselves have to get into the habit of seeing themselves as acting with power—and perhaps we’ll get better at identifying exactly when it makes sense to speak of “Jewish power,” and maybe conflicting forms of Jewish power, when the power of Jews fuses with power exercised by other groups, institutions, etc. The kind of thinking I’m proposing here can help Jews think through these new conditions, with a focus on enhancing the coherence and consistency of power and the strengthening and extension of juridical orders—which goes against the grain of many (not all) uses of Jewish power since emancipation. Jews were set free in the West just as some of the new mediating and most subversive institutions—mass media, mass political, especially revolutionary, parties, mass education, entertainment, etc.—were taking hold and the newly emancipated and untethered Jews were well positioned to rush into them. Now those institutions seem to be reaching their limits and showing very significant signs of decay while the sole remaining Jewish diaspora population of any significance (that of the US) is undergoing both shrinkage and a kind of purge of its assimilatory left wing, so it might be possible to create more pro-social Jewish professional and commercial classes. Israel, meanwhile, has long been on the side of order, closely aligned with European countries like Hungary and supported by populist right-wing politicians and parties throughout the West. Israel has no interest in seeing the Islamic subversion of Western countries, and represents the first line of resistance to victimary resentments laundered through the Palestinians, ultimately to subvert the US-led order (an order which needs substantial rebuilding but not subversion, which it does enough of itself). It might then become possible to generate new forms of thick-skinned Jewish responsibility for the world—then we could speak of Jewish cybernetics. Ultimately, forms of hostility to Jews tip over into orgies of irresponsibility, as all agency is vacated to make space for Jewish machinations, creating villains like those uncannily represented in Hebrew scripture, like Haman in the Book of Esther, so Jewish cybernetics can counter this by becoming a kind of laboratory of responsibility and increments and delegations of agency.

A final word on a feature of my discussion here that will seem anomalous, even outrageous, to some—my minimizing of the concept of the nation, which, with very good reason, is often seen to originate with the formation of the people represented in the Hebrew Bible. I seem to be replacing the Jewish nation with something like the Jewish auxiliary caste, which further raises questions about how the modern nation of Israel (also often seen as an exemplary form of nationalism and even “ethno-nationalism”) can serve as the center of Jewish life. I would say I’m raising questions less about Israel than about the nation and nationality, which seems to me very fragile as a concept. Nations are in the first instance little empires, composed of a centralized government—first of all a monarch—who has suppressed tribes and the honor system governing their relations and replaced them with a system of justice, however rudimentary. Nations appear as such against the background of larger empires and take on their shape and mythology in defending their independence from those larger empires. In the end, though, they function within those empires, taking on some kind of “specialty” more or less formally integrated into it. The defense of the nation is therefore a defense of that specialized role and the relative monopoly it represents, and that’s something that may or may not be worth defending. I would also mention that the Jewish people has, at least from the Babylonian exile, always maintained a substantial diasporic population (I don’t know what the numbers are for what is perhaps the most “nationalistic” Judaic formation of the ancient world, the Hasmonean regime, but there were large Jewish populations in Alexandria and elsewhere at the time) up until this day, of course. If the American Jewish population were to shrink through assimilation and migration to Israel so that the Jewish population of Israel were to become, say, 80% or more of world Jewry, that would be the anomaly. But in this as well the Jews are only exemplary and not unique, as many if not most major and many minor nations have substantial diasporas and, therefore, most “successful” nations (as at least mini-empires) host diasporic populations themselves, often offering “specialized” services. This is also part of the nation, nationality and nationalism. An Israel specializing in various high-tech industries, weapons production, intelligence gathering, distinctive forms of entertainment and media, etc., would be as “nationalistic” as any other nation.