As a result, especially in light of the recent fracas over abortion rights, incommensurability has become something like the prevailing zeitgeist in the United States. These groups will never and can never agree, but America will nonetheless struggle to find some way to jury-rig an uneasy coexistence between them in order to retain social stability.
In the case of a “Jewish democracy,” the issue of incommensurability is fairly self-evident. For a Jewish state, the destiny of the Jewish people is the supreme value. It judges itself according to the degree to which it realizes the Jewish people’s right to liberation and self-determination, and with them national identity, self-defense, cultural development and numerous other aspects of political and social life. A democracy, on the other hand, judges itself by the degree to which it realizes liberty, equality and fraternity — all, ironically, incommensurable in themselves — for all its citizens.
These two principles cannot be judged according to any universal standard, mainly because both of them are clearly good and right. The Jewish state constitutes the expression of a people’s singular identity; provides them a refuge and a home; gives them a space, a carve-out, in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish world; and provides them the capacity to defend and preserve nothing less than the integrity of their own bodies against violence and oppression. These are all extremely good and just things.
At the same time, democracy provides for the flourishing of human freedom, a sense of unified solidarity and brotherhood, the right of every individual to choose his own destiny and realize his potential, and the right of both that individual and his society to govern themselves without fear of tyranny. All of this is equally good and just.
Both these principles, in other words, have their own singular integrity. They are both expressions of liberation and human freedom, justice and right, yet they are wholly incommensurable. Throughout its history, Israel has pursued what is perhaps the only viable solution to this problem — if it is indeed a problem — which is the aforementioned practice of jury-rigging a constantly shifting arrangement of incommensurables in hopes that they will reach some kind of harmonic coexistence. This means — and it may be more a gift than a curse — that Israel is an immensely dynamic society, because the process requires constant maneuvering, maintenance, change and compromise. Israel can never fully embody one incommensurable or the other without flying apart.
This may be, in the end, why liberals and progressives in the West often find Israel incomprehensible or even offensive: They do not believe in incommensurables. More precisely, they are in denial that incommensurables exist, even though their own societies are riddled with them. They believe with perfect faith that there is a universal metric by which all principles can be judged; and thus, eventually, all contradictions can be resolved, resulting in a homeostatic world of perfect justice and harmony.
This is a messianic delusion, of course, and the source of many of the West’s most egregious mistakes over the last few decades. Moreover, it wholly contradicts one of the most important aspects of Judaism and the Jewish lived experience. The Jews are and always have been a dynamic people; we are not afraid of incommensurables; and our centuries of debate and commentary reflect an acceptance of the fact that any society is a process in which one can never step into the same river twice. And Israel’s other incommensurable — that of democracy — is as essential to Israel as its identity as a Jewish state, since only democracy allows for this kind of ever-shifting struggle between incommensurable principles.
In the end, perhaps, the most important thing is that the Jews have the same right to our incommensurables as anybody else. And this may be to our advantage. It is possible that, due to its insistence on a universal metric, the destiny of the West will ultimately be stagnation. In its embrace of its incommensurables, the destiny of the Jewish and democratic state is likely to be very different.
Benjamin Kerstein is a writer and editor living in Tel Aviv. Read more of his writing on Substack and his website.
