Unity Is a Common Goal, Often Abused

The October 7 atrocities took place on a holy day in the Jewish calendar. Like the German Nazis, who often scheduled roundups and slaughters on Jewish holy days, the Middle East Nazis carry on psychological warfare by staining Jewish sacred time with Jewish blood. This was true of the Yom Kippur War, this was true of countless other smaller incidents — and plans that Israel thwarted as well. 

The goal of these new Nazis is unity, to be established by the extirpation of a whole group who would maintain its independence politically and religiously. Like the jihadists of other times, like the Crusaders, like the Inquisition, like all the different religious players in Europe’s spate of religious wars after the Reformation, unity is the common goal.

The peace of Europe after those post-Reformation battles was shaped by a concept that arose in the peacemakers’ minds from a classical Jewish source. Jewish law has stated centuries ago that the 613 commandments found in the Five Books of Moses bind only the people of Israel. Everyone else is bound only by the Seven Noahide commands. World order was conceived without requiring religious uniformity.

There is a common human drive for unity. How that unity is conceived makes a difference.

The divine imagination portrayed by the Bible is that both the universe and humanity start from a single point and then diverge into rich variegation. The Psalmist cries out in admiration How manifold are Your works, O Lord! You have made them all in wisdom. The world is filled with Your creatures.

Human genius has often preferred the simplicity and the apparent convenience of a pared-down nature. 

Consider the domesticated potato. The South American home of the potato features a dizzying variety of potatoes that vary in color, size, and taste. But by the time the potato became established in Ireland as the staple of the poor man’s diet, there was no variety left. Ireland employed a monoculture instead of holding on to the wide natural variety. Most of Ireland was sown with the Irish lumper variant, and they were clones — genetically identical.

That monoculture offered its advantage of simplicity. But its single genetic code meant that when a disease would strike it, there was no reserve defense in its DNA. When the potato blight hit, it was a complete knockout, and Ireland was devastated by starvation which killed about a million souls and drove another two million to emigrate to survive.

Genetic variety goes a long way towards protected species from such devastation. The varieties of genetic code within nature offer a broader coordination to resist disease and other hazards than mere uniformity. We seek to conserve ancient subspecies as well as help raise new ones, all genetically conversant, to create a coupling of flexibility and robustness.

Political conservatism opposes the totalitarian thrust towards monocultures of the mind and spirit. It is distrustful of investing everything in a one-and-done political battle, for it knows that the thrust and parry of various ideas is natural and healthy. Conservatism prefers a constitution that preserves the free give and take of ideas to an all-encompassing political catechism that proposes definitive conclusions to end the debate. As the conservationists of the old Sierra Club used to put it, we want not a blind opposition to progress but opposition to blind progress.

For the world constantly changes, even as the unity underlying it, the personality of the cosmos, as it were, does not. As conservatives, we, too change, but we realize if change is to be coherent, it must preserve the coherence that has expressed itself through time. We realize that coherence requires our active participation, and know that the liberals’ proclivity to think it will take care of itself robs us of freedom’s dignity and leads to denial of lasting meaning in our lives.

Our political battles are not, then, to define life. Conservatism believes that politics does not provide the deepest organizing principles of our lives, that both define our individuality but conserve our underlying unity. Rather, for politics to be fruitful and benevolent, it requires us to come with those deep principles already in hand. We conserve religion through putting religious freedom in the first place, politically. We know that politics that acts as a religion will not respect the differing religious views that our religions themselves teach are necessary to understanding the nature of the divine unity. Instead of uniformity, the traditions stemming from the Bible teach of the pre-eminence of love — and love requires difference to make its own oneness sublime and triumphant.

The brittleness of the Left comes from its inability to adequately encompass difference. It has rejected vast swaths of Americans as deplorables, bitter clingers, and weird, even as rightists in another American age did so of those who did not conform to a certain canonic set of sensibilities. To a degree, they are right, inasmuch substitute our kind of uniformity for theirs. To the degree that our goal is an increase of freed thought and discussion to go along with the conservation of meaning, we occupy the high ground. 

The shrill accusations of racist heresy sound like the rantings of modern Cotton Mathers and Grand Inquisitors. Their hollowness exposes how far short of useful truth their politics has fallen. Fewer and fewer are fooled by it.

If we hold high the banner of freedom and do not strive for uniformity ourselves, this year could see a lasting victory for what we have held dear through trying times. It will be worth it.

The multiplicity does not contradict the divine oneness, but is evidence of its astonishing goodness and power, much more so than a uniform universe would be. The very fact that difference does not compel conflict is evidence of a robust unity, one that is not fractured or endangered by difference.

On the basis of Scripture, our religious traditions would have us emulate God’s ways. The uniformity that totalitarians seek to enforce results in a sclerosis of the spirit. The enriching differences of a free society are replaced with conformity. Instead of welcoming the variations of human experience into the societal conversation, a single person or small group authors a claim of exclusive truth which they do not allow to be tested and to which they allow no amendment.

The Jewish holiday on which the October 7 atrocities took place is set by a lunar/solar calendar that varies with respect to the common Gregorian calendar much as Easter does. This past Thursday, still a day in the future as I write this, is the first recurrence of this holiday, in which we rejoice with the Torah. I will celebrate the distinctiveness of its gift to me and all Israel — and I will celebrate as well as its universal message. That is a message of freedom, the message that our unity is strengthened by the uniquely varied ways we stay true to the deepest reality of life and the universe, to the God whose story runs through each of our lives and every particle and wave of Creation.

May we celebrate freedom, triumphant in a unity worthy of the One in whose image we are all created.

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