So equality is imperialism? That's a new one.
I said cultural imperialism. The notion that because a person can deem there to be problems with a culture not their own, regardless of whether the culture itself finds there to be anything problematic occurring, and to use that supposition as a moral justification for undermining or exterminating the culture in question. And it is entirely applicable here.
The issue isn't with Judaism per se; it's with indoctrination and denial of freedom. It may very well be that Jewish children will grow up to decide to be Jews themselves and choose to be circumcised, but when you decide for them, you deny them a choice...the question is entirely about whether you have the right to impose your beliefs upon him.
You are ignoring the fact that cultures-- any cultures-- are dependent upon acculturation. People don't grow up in a vacuum and then make decisions about which culture they shall join, and what values of available cultures they shall see fit to adopt. We are acculturated by being raised as participants in a culture, by members of that culture. People may, later in life, make decisions that lead to deculturation and adoption of a different culture or set of values than what they were initially acculturated into. But this is inevitably a very difficult process, and many who do it find that it takes a very long and hard time indeed before they are as successfully acculturated into their culture of adoption as their culture of nurturance.
We have seen that the children of secularized Jews, who have not been immersively acculturated into Jewish society and tradition, are apathetic to it, and become lost to us. Not because they made reasoned choices to depart from Judaism, but because in never having been made part of it, they have never learned to value it. And any other threatened culture can show parallels to this. Native American cultures, other indigenous cultures in other areas, immigrants from strongly cultured lands who are transplanted into deculturated Western societies and pressured to assimilate-- all have similar stories.
Telling Jews that they cannot raise their children as Jews is absolutely cultural genocide. The same as making Native American children give up their tribal identities and native languages and suchlike; the same as forcing Australian Aborigines to hand their kids over to white folks to acculturate as Westerners instead of in their native cultures.
There is no excuse for this. There was no excuse for it when the conquistadores and French and British did it to the Native Americans. There was no excuse for it when Europeans did it in Africa. There was no excuse for it when Americans did it to immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe and Italy or now to Mexicans and South Americans. There is no excuse for Europeans doing it to Muslim and African immigrants today. And there is no excuse now, nor has there ever been an excuse, for doing it to the Jews.
The argument that you should be able to do this is one rooted in the idea that cultures and groups have rights independent of their individual members.
Yes, that cultures are to some degree greater than the sum of their parts. It's an outgrowth of a communitarian social ethic. Judaism is a culture-- like many other cultures-- that places a very high value on communitarianism. The notion that the rights of the individual are supreme of the supreme in all but the most exigent circumstances is a very new concept, really only a couple of hundred years old, and it is extremely American, and to a lesser degree, French and Dutch. Its adoption by the rest of Europe is incomplete, and to the degree that it is complete, is a matter of decades.
Most other cultures are far more communitarian, and far less individualistic.
I'm not saying that the rights of the individual are a bad thing, or should always be subject to the needs of the community. I would never say that.
But part of the ethics of Jewish society-- a social ethic certainly shared by most Muslim societies, and by many other societies as well-- is that while it is an excellent thing for the individual to have many rights, well-protected, it is also to be expected that membership in a society involves responsibilities, and duties, and commitments to things outside oneself.
Sometimes these involve duties that non-Jews seem to find more sympathetic, such as caring for the poor, or encouraging and supporting universal education. Sometimes the duties are those that non-Jews find less sympathy for, because they are unlike the responsibilities of non-Jewish society, and so engender discomfort or fear or derision: circumcision, endogamy, shechitah (ritual slaughter), kashrut, or strict observance of Shabbat or holidays.
These are duties that we either have collectively to God, or we all have to one another, in order to maintain and preserve Jewish culture and tradition, so that we and all our descendants may enjoy its benefits and learn from its rich history and use it as the very successful way of life that it has always been for us. And we are taught to expect that, while it is a duty of the arbiters of tradition to ensure that its responsibilities do not overburden us, it is also our responsibility to sometimes prioritize what is best for the Jewish People over our own inclinations and whims, or over what non-Jews tell us would be "better" ways for us to live our lives.
Part of what makes a society is that its members are expected to contribute to it, in part by obeying and preserving its paradigmatic structures and rules. And, at least IMO, there is something wrong with expecting that individuals should have limitless rights and privileges, but never have to fulfill demands upon themselves for the good of their society if they find those demands at all irksome. Such a conceit is the product of an extremely privileged and somewhat narcissistic worldview.
Would you say the same for a culture that doesn't allow tribal scarification? Or what about a culture that doesn't allow parents to tattoo their children even if the parents consider the tattoos very, very meaningful?
Cultures have different modes of identification and acculturation. I have not done enough research into cultures that embrace scarification to know what proportion of their society is happy with their traditions as they stand, and whether there are any significant numbers that feel oppressed by their traditions. If it were convincingly demonstrated that most members of such a culture embraced scarification, and it was a core part of their cultural and religious identity, and if such scarification were done in such a way as to be reasonably safe, without undue permanent loss of function, then I would say yes, such a thing should be protected, and externally imposed attempts to eliminate it would be wrong.
I have a friend who is Maori, whose family are traditionalists, and strong proponents of the movement to breathe life into Maori traditions and languages which have been driven to the brink of extinction by Western imperialism (both literal and cultural). His adolescent children are tattooed, and I could not support that more strongly. His culture deeply integrates the narrative and spiritual patterns represented in their tattooes. Such things are potent expressions of identity and selfhood within the culture. I applaud his and his family's dedication to instilling the traditions and values of their ancient people into the new generation, helping to save something tremendously old and precious from becoming yet another example of anthropological uniqueness forced onto the ash-heap of history by Western arrogance and self-righteousness.
Who's saying that the law needs to embody respect of any religion, tradition or culture?
I had been under the impression that generations of American and European political, legal and social philosophers had said so. It seems to have been of concern to the Framers of the Constitution, and to the legal and political leaders of the French Revolution. It was certainly being taught as a social value in law, politics, humanities, and social sciences classes when I was in college.
IMO, if a culture's traditions aren't compatible with reasonable, secular values, then it's entirely appropriate for the law not to respect them.
Which is precisely the same kind of intolerance and oppression that secularists and atheists got at the hands of the Church when Rome was in power, except in reverse this time.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The thing that you're advocating is the right to inflict unnecessary physical suffering on a child in order to attempt to define his identity for him. IMO, this is very devaluing to the individual on several levels.
No, the thing that I'm advocating is the right for parents to include their children in their culture, in one of the most central and meaningful rites we have, and to participate fully in the covenant the Jewish People have with God. The very minor suffering that the child may experience from circumcision is not, in our view, unnecessary, but an entirely worthwhile sacrifice, greatly ameliorated by the fact that it is done when the child is young enough that they will not remember the pain, but will only enjoy the benefits of being covenanted.
Your concerns are not shared by the vast majority of Jews. Therefore they are your concerns. Which means that you have truly excellent reasons not to become a Jew, or to raise your child as a Jew. And that is as far as it goes.
