Don’t Let Evil Don the Cloak of Religion

In a recent long-form interview between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. J.D. Haltigan, the conversation turned towards the violence all over the world in the wake of Oct. 7. As the two psychologists were trying to understand this horrible, hateful...

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In a recent long-form interview between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. J.D. Haltigan, the conversation turned towards the violence all over the world in the wake of Oct. 7. As the two psychologists were trying to understand this horrible, hateful phenomenon, Jordan Peterson observed:

And so like when I think of violent religious fundamentalists, I don’t actually generally think of the religion itself as a motivation, even though it can be. I think of the psychopathic, power-striving, narcissistic Machiavellian adopting the cloak of the religious. That’s what the Pharisees do in the gospels, by the way.

Peterson went on to say, correctly, that the Pharisees are described as the greatest enemy of that narrative. They are particularly dangerous because they cloak themselves in religious truth and so conceal their underlying hostility and lack of love, effectively undermining redemption and salvation.

This reading gave rise to both an understanding and a misunderstanding.

As people read this narrative through the ensuing centuries, some translated the censure of the Pharisees into a general censure of the people who held the historical Pharisees in esteem: Jews, including Jewish contemporaries. As a result, Jews were and are tarred as hostile, deceptive enemies, whose religion then is typically seen as merely a cloak of piety. It would only be natural then, having made this identification, to subject the Jews of their day to hatred, discriminatory laws, expulsion, and death.

There is a long and harrowing literature that gives ample evidence of just this happening. But this reading and its consequences are not inevitable. There is evidence throughout the centuries of a better take.

At the dawn of Western constitutionalism, the scholar and Common Lawyer John Selden took a completely different tack, following his intense study of rabbinic literature. Jason Rosenblatt of Georgetown University writes: “Selden, throughout his writings, contrasts the severity of the literal text of the Hebrew Bible with the humaneness of the rabbinic interpretations of the text and of rabbinic law.”

In getting beyond the stereotype embedded in the language, Selden accurately traced the roots of the Common Law tradition of liberty to the same tradition embedded in the ongoing Jewish law tradition, and ultimately to those who preserved that tradition, the Pharisees.

In turn, the American heirs of Selden made the religious persecution that had so befouled European history off-limits for being fundamentally opposed to our constitutional liberties. In our own times, John Paul II’s crusade for political and religious freedom was all of a piece with the humility and love so manifest in his relations with Jews and Judaism, giving vibrant life to the Vatican’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration.

Yet these ideas remained embedded in the culture and were not to be easily removed. After all, the problem that these ideas purport to address is a deep and pervasive one: religious piety can be used as a sophisticated and effective blind to give cover to a predator at work. Peterson in his interview was making the point that just such a problem underlies the Middle East’s troubles: it is not religion but the misuse of religion that is the issue, and we need to identify it.

And any religion can be so misused.

In the self-governing tradition common to the Bible and our Constitution, that means we must see that we are clean of this proclivity. We must not boast of a fake mastery by merely projecting this proclivity onto others, as malefactors and propagandists of every age attempt.

There can be lasting scars from such propaganda. The word “pharisee” in English has a long history of meaning, as Collins Dictionary puts it, “a sanctimonious, self-righteous, or hypocritical person.” That pejorative sense also spread to other words in English. By extension, that negative quality extended to the word “Jew.”

It is hard to imagine (though not quite so hard after seeing Hamas supporters cheering on massacre and rape in our streets and our universities) that such a debasement could happen. But the rabbinic school I attended had been named Hebrew Union College when it was founded after the Civil War because anything deriving from “Jew” was commonly understood as pejorative. Since “Hebrew” connoted then the people of Israel before the Pharisees, it was okay.

What, then, is the solution? How do we put a spotlight on a real problem without becoming hypocritical ourselves? How can we identify a problem so that we can work on it and overcome it?

As the scholarly Selden knew, rabbinic literature in several places also dealt with the word “Pharisee.” It most often used the word to identify someone who behaved with exaggerated or hypocritical piety. But interestingly, those passages date from a period many years after Jews no longer called themselves Pharisees, by which they meant those who teach the oral context of the Scriptural tradition.

Once Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism had triumphed, the word “Pharisee” to Jews already had come to mean various kinds of virtue signalers.

On the other hand, when rabbis applied the word to the era before the Temple’s destruction, the word maintained a positive meaning of that group whom the people most trusted, whose dedication, learning, and piety inspired rather than repelled.

True Religion

One of the most significant of those teachings refers to King Yannai (Janneus) who ruled in the First Century BCE. A text, Sota, reads:

King Yannai said to his wife: Don’t be afraid of the Pharisees, nor of the non-Pharisees, but only of the “dyed ones” who try to appear to be like the Pharisees, whose deeds are like the deeds of Zimri but who demand the reward of Pinchas (Phineas).

This teaching refers to the narrative near the end of Numbers when the tribal leader Zimri brazenly takes a Midianite harlot before the eyes of Moses and all the elders, who were paralyzed by his brazenness. Aaron’s grandson Pinchas, however, took immediate action, for which God rewarded him with His covenant of peace.

Thus, the Talmud has the king saying the problem is not the Godly people, the Pharisees, nor even so much those who disagree with them in points of religion. Rather, it is precisely those who take up the mantle of piety to receive the unearned esteem it offers while their deeds are all the while reprehensible.

This idea cannot be captured forever by one word, no matter how situationally apt, for that word is subject to misuse. We need to use all of our creativity in each age, and with ourselves, to keep ourselves focused on true achievement. We must keep in mind what a chassidic rabbi of a few generations back said: “The Evil Inclination within us likes nothing better than to put on the long black coat of the pious.”

The rebbe who said that wore such a coat.

There is no substitute for our self-governance, especially in matters of religion. The One God wishes us to be united in His image. Self-deception has no place.

Let’s not forget this in this campaign season. We are called upon to be our best.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The Crucial Importance of an Independent Judiciary

Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Neville Chamberlain

Rep. Dean Phillips Is One of What Has Become an Increasingly Rare Breed

The post Don’t Let Evil Don the Cloak of Religion appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.