however, mean a rejection of the State of Israel. Far
from it. Instead, a self-con?dent return to the Haskala
will not only strengthen the Diaspora, but it will also

PAPER: RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM

The Whole Truth

aid the forces of Enlightenment in Israel?s permanent
Kulturkampf. El

 

Anne Roz?pbe

undamentalism, the oh~so-sweet certainty that

your truth is the truth, that the word has been

given and must not be changed, that law and
order will follow the revealed truth??-this fundamental-
ism, the tranquilizer of ambivalence, the amputator of
doubt, is with us again. If the Enlightenment, if Newton
and Darwin, Einstein and Freud, cut off the Medusa?s
head, look how it has grown again and turns all our old
endeavors to stone.

Today we are talking of religious fundamentalism,
but perhaps the adjective confuses us. In reality there is
only fundamentalism; and all fundamentalism even if it
does not speak of divine revelation is religious, or
uses our religious natures, our desire to believe and
believe absolutely, our temptation to remove those who
differ from us, who threaten our convictions with their
opinions, their ways of life. Communism can be funda-
mentalist. The commissar who has a purpose, who knows,
who knows without a shadow of a doubt what is good
for humankind, can be as dangerous for all living things
as was the crusader who believed that his own salvation
was worth your death. Capitalism can be fundamentalist.
The followers of economic theory who can watch with
calm as the numbers of homeless multiply across the
nation and the infant mortality rates rise from county
to county; those capitalists who believe in the system
and not in the details of human experience, who are
willing to tolerate the torture of children in jails in
Chile, in Argentina, in Honduras for the sake of ?ght-
ing communism or saving capitalism?they too express
a form of fundamentalism. There are feminist funda-
mentalists who know how society was formed and whose
fault it is that we?ve gotten ourselves into this mess.
There are fundamentalists who know that women were
not meant to hold the Torah, who have likened women

 

Anne Roip/Je is the author of Lovingkindness (Summit, 1987)
and Season for Healing: Re?ections on the Holocaust (Summit,
1988). She is a contributing editor of Tikkun.

86 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

who hold the Torah to pigs. There are nationalistic
fundamentalists who believe, either because it was writ-
ten in the Bible or because their Zionism demands it,
that territorial compromise is impermissible. There are
fundamentalists who know who is a proper rabbi and
who is an impostor. The quality that they all share is
certainty.

The human being has a way, an unfortunate way, of
assuming the powers of divinity in many writings, con-
victions, and attitudes. If a position is believed absolutely
enough, it takes on the quality of divine revelation. It
slips, as it were, from the human mouth to the burning
bush of political, nationalistic, economic, or racial
assumptions. The things we want to believe tend to get
codi?ed and become scripture, such as the little book
of Mao?s sayings, or our own Old and New Testaments,
or the papers of Freud, or the writings of Adam Smith.
Then the scripture must be taken literally. It must be
defended against all doubt, all attempts to revise, to
reason, to adapt. The rigidity of the belief re?ects the
fear that if anything is altered the entire structure will
fall. If the window is opened the hurricane will enter.
The religious fundamentalists, the baredim and the
born-agains and the Children of God and the followers
of Allah who can produce a crowd as quickly as a
writer can produce a metaphor, who can create visions
and speak in tongues, who know what is the right thing
to wear for all occasions, what is the right thing to do
with sex, what is the right thing to do with women,
when to send little children into the mine fields and
where to transfer the Arabs and how exactly to control
the people?s impulses and desires?these fundamental-
ists are multiplying in this day and age despite the fact
that a CAT scan can Visualize the inside of a human brain
and a neutron can ?ssion itself into our mass death.

Reason, Darwin counting the slow changes in the
skeletal structures of turtles; reason, the faculty of
thought that demands evidence and deduction, that
exercises individual discretion, that looks for truth

through testing and observation, that unites human
beings as a species rather than dividing them into tribes
of warriors with different totems to lead them into
battle?reason has been overwhelmed.

The Holocaust did it. The development of technology
beyond human morality did it. The failure of reason is
everywhere apparent in this century, and what does
that leave but passion, nationalism, religious fervor?
- convictions that are deeply felt, convictions for which
one might kill or be killed. Reason has proved a false
comfort, a false friend, an inadequate companion. Reason
said that the Germans could not possibly be planning
a Final Solution. Reason said that harmony was natural
and would ?nd a way. Reason said that bombs would
not be dropped for the sake of destruction alone. Reason
said that if the ozone were in danger people would ?nd
a way to preserve it. Reason, Plato?s broken promise to
the Western world, is the Siamese twin of freedom;
freedom of choice, freedom to speak and think and act
in a myriad of ways, has its dif?culties. It makes the
galaxy appear cold, indifferent; it makes our lives seem
small and possibly meaningless. It makes us lonely; it
makes us responsible for our individual actions but leaves
us without absolutes to guide us, to soothe the conscience
and redeem the guilt. Most terrible of all, reason allows
us to die, die our own individual, permanent deaths. It
is this that so much of the world ?nds intolerable.

ithout the golden keys to paradise, little

i  children might not be able to go out into
the mine ?elds. Holding their keys, they

march forward, soldiers of God. Fundamentalist religious
groups believe in the resurrection of the individual
body, and they also believe in what is called end-time,
the end of history as we know it and the beginning of
God?s reign on earth. This promise of paradise, personal
and communal, is one we all understand. No one wants
to die. The fundamentalist positions protect our immor-
tality, and with that, they promise control of impulses,
control of choice. Belong and you will not die. No
wonder fundamentalists are so militant. They are pro-
tecting their very lives, their immortal lives. Of course
political fundamentalists?nationalists and Maoists and
Marxists and Khmer Rougists, and so on?are not
offering immortality, but they are promising an end-
time. There is a utopia, a promised land of milk and
honey. The end-time they believe in, the one that comes
after the revolution, the one that may bring as much
chaos as the wars of Gog and Magog, will bring the
people, the nation, into a perfected and eternal happy
state. Political fundamentalists are just like religious
fundamentalists avoiding death. They do so by merging
themselves with the group, the nation, the common
good. They too will do anything to preserve their eternal

life, to further the group as it moves toward utopia.
Having placed their future with the future of the group,
they too avoid death.

It is important that, as we remaining nonfundamen-
talists wander about and as we champion those who
offer reason and doubt and freedom, we remember
that we are also selling individual death; and that makes
our view most unpopular, putting us at a disadvantage
compared to those who will empty the graves when the
Messiah comes or who will welcome the nation into the
Paradise of ever after. Until men and women can come
to terms with their own deaths we will always have a
fundamentalist force on this globe. Until then, the
fundamentalists will be strong, stronger than we are?
because we offer no way around dying.

 

Fundamentalism answers a need,

a modern need; it ?lls a yawning hole
in our spirits, the one left
when the Enlightenment

exploded on us.

 

Freedom brings responsibility; it requires that we
make choices, that we ?nd our way among the con?icts
of the world and hold our minds and our bodies steady.
We in this century are burdened by freedom; we are in
?ight from freedom even in America where our rhetoric
tells us otherwise. How hard it is today to preserve the
Bill of Rights in the face of forces in this country that
would tear it up if they could. We want certainties; and
certainties, if they are to be certain, must be imposed
on others. A certainty that can coexist with its opposite
certainty is no certainty at all.

We are so tired of freedom. Look at what it brought
us: death and destruction, poverty and pain, choices
beyond tolerance, the chaos of the sixties, the failure of
the Vietnam War, the loss of faith in America the good,
the loss of conviction that the white man is the best
man, that Adam is white and still the boss of Eve.

Fundamentalism answers a need, a modern need; it
?lls a yawning hole in our spirits, the one left when the
Enlightenment exploded on us, when we stood in the
rubble of the Second World War and found Satan. The
Satan we found was called Hitler; it was called Stalin;
it was called colonialism or imperialism or anti-Semitism.
The evils were really evils; and they had triumphed
over humanism, over morality, over decency. We saw
evil everywhere but in ourselves, where it was almost
unbearable for us to admit its strength, its power to
destroy. The Satans became someone else?the gooks,
the Blacks, the whites, the Jews, the imperialists, the

THE WHOLE TRUTH 87

Catholics, the Protestants. Today many believe in devils
again and burn them, burn them without trials, and in
the name of Allah or Adonai or the White Race or the
Military or the economic doctrine of choice. When
Ben-Gurion allowed the religious parties a place in the
Israeli government, he clearly thought their power would
wane. He was wrong, because Zionism?which was his
religion, his fundamentalism, his way of avoiding death?
lost its fervor, lost its clear path to utopia. A normal
state, like other normal states, could not be an end-
time, a spiritual fountain, a place to avoid death. The
ultrareligious have become more numerous in Israel
because fundamentalism ?lls the need, carries on an

PAPER: BLACKS AND JEws

Black-Jewish Relations:

ideal, keeps the chosen people from death, keeps them
alive forever.

We nonfundamentalist people have doubts about
our truths. We have positions, but not positions for
which we would harm or silence others. We have opin-
ions, but opinions are not the same as truths; and
for the most part we are people who know we are going
to die, and we are able to live anyway. There is some
honor in that stance but no immortality; and it looks as
if we will be abandoned, with only our honor to defend
us as humankind raises its communal ?st against the
blasphemers. 

A New Vision

 

Cherie Brown

we should recognize that the romanticization of

the civil rights movement as the era of strongest
Black ?Jewish cooperation may keep .us from seeing the
signi?cant headway being made today between Blacks
and Jews. We can do effective coalition building only
with true partners. And now, maybe for the ?rst time,
Blacks and Jews are coming to each other as partners
in the dialogue. Coalition building is not always easy. It
often involves painful expression of tough emotions
and issues.

When the Jewish Theological Seminary calls, as it
did last week, to invite me to train rabbinical students
in Black?Jewish coalition building, I realize that there
is for the ?rst time an increased desire for more effective
alliance building between Blacks and Jews.

Twenty years ago, I spoke at synagogues in Los
Angeles, trying to encourage Jews to speak out against
systematic attacks on the Black Panther movement, but
many Jews would not listen. Ten years ago, I tried to
launch an initial Black?Jewish dialogue in the Boston
region, but the leadership links between the Black and
Jewish communities were nonexistent. The dialogue
failed. Many of those leadership links now exist, and
Black ?Jewish dialogues are taking place in cities through-
out the United States.

I looking at the history of Black ?Jewish relations,

 

Cherie R. Brown is the executive director of the National
Coalition Building Institute in Arlington, Massachusetts.

88 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

The media have played a role in sensationalizing the
dif?culties between Blacks and Jews, convincing many
of us that the tensions are insurmountable. Four years
ago, the Evening News? with Dan Rather decided
to run a short segment about Blacks and Jews. The
American Jewish Committee, in cooperation with the
National Coalition Building Institute, had just produced
a videotape of our work between Black and Jewish
college students at Brown University. We had the only
documented material about Black and Jewish young
people. When the CBS producers arrived in Boston,
even as they were getting out of their car they said to
us, ?The kids hate each other, don?t they? You have
scenes of Blacks and Jews throwing oranges at each
other, don?t you?? When the producers viewed a scene
of two Black students participating in a role play,
practicing how to dispel the in the Black com-
munity that Jews own all the power and wealth, the
producers said to each other, ?We know those kids
really think that.? As it became clear that the producers
were going to distort all the positive efforts presented
in the dialogue, I refused to let them use the video
material. They threatened me, claiming that I was just
like the Israeli censors, trying to hide the truth. I am
aware that the producers visited ten to fifteen cities
where cooperation efforts between Blacks and Jews
were being undertaken, but the ?nal story that was
broadcast on national television did not include any of
these efforts. All that the report showed was a clip of