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The Battle on America’s Campuses
By: Tzvi Freeman
For at least two and a half thousand years, virtually all educated people believed that knowledge was the savior of humanity. Even Maimonides wrote in his “Guide for the Perplexed” that once all of humankind had knowledge, the world would be at peace.
Then came the 20th century. The most educated nation in world history—a land to which all other nations looked for science, psychology, culture, philosophy, reason, and ethics—applied its knowledge to commit crimes against humanity that no barbarian could have imagined.
Knowledge was put to the test. It blew up on the launching pad.
Now we are in late autumn of 2023. Academics of America and Europe and their students have been denying, excusing, justifying, and even celebrating a barbaric massacre and despicable mass rape of Jews by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce asked the presidents of three of America’s flagship universities a simple question: “Does calling for the genocide of the Jews violate your institution’s code of conduct concerning bullying and harassment?” Not one was able to answer an unqualified “yes.”
As I watched that interaction online, I shuddered, perhaps even more than when I first heard of the events of October 7th. I don’t know if my non-Jewish friends can understand how chilling this was. Jews share a common memory, and this awakened a very traumatic one.
I asked one academic if this was representative of the world in which he worked. He kindly explained that the presidents of universities are not the serious thinkers and researchers. He wasn’t certain, but he felt that most serious academics are not delivering in their classes vitriolic diatribes against the colonialists (an Orwellian doublethink term for Jews) or morally justifying massacring families, abducting children, and gang rape within the framework of insurgence.
But then, he agreed they were not protesting against those who are.
I reminded him of the Talmudic dictum, “Silence is consent.”1 When students are exposed to a climate of hatred and inverse morality on campus and see that their professors have not a word to say about it, that itself speaks loudly. He was forced to agree.
No, the academy has not gone mad; it has simply retained its status since Germany of 1933.
Shadows of 1933 Peter Drucker relates:
Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.
Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced … and every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. I had never before attended a faculty meeting, but I did attend this one.
The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud anti-Semitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the barracks and never before in academia…
[He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.” There was silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist-physiologist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?”2German academia didn’t settle for acquiescence and a passive role. Many of its most brilliant minds were active supporters of Hitler.
It’s important to understand how crucially enabling this was to the Nazi cause. Academics in pre-war Germany had the status of nobility. The princes of that nobility were the philosophers. A German would have told you that in all of history, philosophy had only truly spoken in two languages—the Greek of Athens and the German tongue of their days.
The most celebrated luminary of these neo-Athenians was Martin Heidegger. As soon as the Nazis came to power, Heidegger began to argue that freedom of inquiry and free expression were negative and selfish ideas. In May of 1933, he officially joined the Nazi Party. He told his students: “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know; from now on, all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Heil Hitler!”
After the war, Heidegger never recanted. He is still regarded by many as the 20th century’s most brilliant philosopher. And yes, it’s undeniable. He was head and shoulders above his colleagues in insight, originality, and sheer breadth of scope.
That same May, Carl Schmitt, a brilliant legal philosopher, also joined the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He immediately went to work, helping to draw up a legal system for a totalitarian regime. He welcomed “the genuine battle of principles between the Jews’ cruelty and impudence and Germans’ ethnic honor,” while praising Nazi leaders’ calls for “healthy exorcism.”
Like Heidegger, Schmitt never recanted and is regarded as “possibly the most-discussed German jurist of the 20th century.”
Is There Hope Today?
As it turns out, all those very wise people of history, from Plato to Kant, were gravely mistaken. Knowledge could be a good thing; it can also be a horrid device of social collapse and ruin.
Plato himself not only justified but idealized the world of his Republic, which Karl Popper rightly characterized as cruel. In the first half of the 20th century, if you were a thinking person, you were most likely a Marxist. Marxism became Leninism, which became Stalinism, starving millions of Ukrainian farmers to death for the collective ideal, resettling some six million Tatars, Koreans, Chechens, and many others for the overt purpose of homogeneous ethnic cleansing and genocide, and exiling entire populations to the hardships of the Gulag—all for the sake of a Marxist utopian idea.3
In every society there have been wise men stroking their beards to rationalize and enable every form of perversion and cruelty, from misogyny to infanticide, from ruthless warfare to brutal slavery, from lobotomy to euthanasia.
Today, some 90 percent of the planet’s population has access to almost all the knowledge of humankind. In many ways, that has proven beneficial. In many other ways, it has proven destructive.
Knowledge has not been our savior. The question we need to answer: How could so many great minds have been so wrong? How could it be that the supreme faculty of humankind not only could fail us so badly, but can drive human beings to depravity such as no beast could commit?
The answer is vital because there is still hope. America of 2023 is not Germany of 1933. Neither are any of the countries of Western Europe. Most of the populace and their representatives continue to despise hatred and prejudice and value free speech without deluding themselves into accepting doublethink jargon as liberal values. Yes, it affects all of us in some way or other. Yet, in general, this madness has remained mostly quarantined to higher-tier campuses.
We can still get back on track. But we first need to understand where we made the wrong turn.
The Ongoing Battle of Chanukah
In Chabad literature, this is called the Battle of Chanukah. From this perspective, the Chanukah lights commemorate much more than an event many years ago in the Judean hills. They speak of an ongoing war that spans millennia without abate.
In every generation, learned Jews have struggled to align two forms of wisdom: the divine wisdom of our Torah and the human wisdom of foreign nations. Most prominent in this story are the philosophers of Ancient Greece, whose legacy continued to inform brilliant minds in Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, and yes, German and English as well. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the father of the Chabad school, was himself well-versed in mathematics, astronomy, and other facets of secular knowledge.
The pure oil of the Temple represents divine wisdom, which was contaminated by the human wisdom of the Hellenizers. The victory of the Hasmoneans culminated in the discovery of a hidden flask of untouched, pure oil. That oil was lit and shone miraculously for eight days. Divine wisdom not only prevailed but rose to new heights.4
It’s easy to pigeonhole this homily into the pedestrian storyline of “faith prevails over reason.” Then you can tell me that faith is the dogma of fools and reason is enlightenment, so it would have been better had the Hellenizers won. But no, the literature discusses not faith, but two planes of wisdom: an outer plane and an inner one. Because to think about anything requires that you work on two distinct planes at once.
On one plane, you digest information. You chew on it and assimilate it, seek how it relates to everything else you know, and, most importantly, determine what can be done with it. This is the outer plane of wisdom. In Hebrew, it is called binah, which is related to the word boneh, meaning “to build, structure.”
But truly original thought requires you to enter an entirely different plane. You must stare quietly into the face of reality without disturbing its waters, remain void of any bias, accept whatever is as though you were not there. To begin to truly think, you must first transcend yourself. This is the inner side of wisdom, called in Hebrew chochmah. Chochmah, R. Schneur Zalman writes, is koach mah—Hebrew for “the potential of what is.”5
When the outer wisdom is dominant, you deal with what is, what was, and what might come to be. When you pay attention to inner wisdom, you deal with what should be and what you should do to achieve that. On yet a deeper plane, inner wisdom speaks of the meaning of all things, why they are here, and what they are moving toward.
To realize that your existence must have some meaning or purpose, you must be able to perceive something that transcends it. But what if you can’t let go of your ego and personal agendas? Void of any notion of higher purpose to lift it upward, your reasoning begins to sink downward until it is no longer reasonable. There is nothing it can fail to justify. And whoever will challenge it will be taunted as ignorant, stupid, and insane.
That’s the story of Chanukah: It is a redemption of Athens as much as it is of Jerusalem. It is about restoring the inner light so that the outer light can function in full health once again.
This is an entirely different conflict than that of faith and reason. Those two traditional foes play a zero-sum game: If faith wins, reason must be compromised, even spayed. If reason wins, faith is, at best, banished from the sciences to its secluded magisterium of mystic experience and personal values.
But here the struggle is for wisdom to find its core—a sense of wonder before the unknowable. A knowledge that my mind cannot contain the universe, but the universe contains my mind—indeed, from it, my mind emerged like a child from its womb. And within that context, I must ask, “Why am I here? What is the meaning? How do I fit within the greater whole? What does this Mind from which I emerged want from me?”
Hellenistic Mud
Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of Chabad and known universally as simply “the Rebbe,” studied physics and mathematics at the University of Berlin from 1928-1932, completing a degree in engineering at the Sorbonne. His academic records reveal that he attended the lectures of some of the most prestigious minds of the time: Erwin Schrodinger, John von Neumann, Hans Reichenbach, Walter Nernst, Wolfgang Köhler, and Paul Hofmann, among others.
He also witnessed first-hand the almost total surrender of German academia to the Third Reich, which he discussed publicly on several occasions.6
In a note in his diary while in Paris, dated Chanukah, 1935, the Rebbe provides an answer to our question, an explanation of this paradoxical effect of reason.7
Reason, he wrote, provides your only hope as a human being to recognize your failures and guide you from their snare.