Noahide rabbi Sharki praises Jordan Peterson as hero of our generation
Chairman of the World Noahide Centre Oury Amos Cherki (Sharki) with Jordan Peterson.
April 2, 2024
Rabbi Uri Sharki: Jordan Peterson is one of the heroes of our generation and one of the promoters of truth and morality in the world.
Ahead of the publication of Jordan Peterson's new book in Hebrew, Top Value: The Struggle for Meaning in the Age of Embarrassment, Dr. Raphael Ben Levy sat down with Rabbi Uri Sharki for a conversation about Peterson's teachings. "The dialogue between Peterson's ideas and the sages of Israel is a space where The words of a living God become clear".
Rafael Ben Levy (question): Peterson became famous due to his opposition to the law that sought to force the use of new terms invented by transgender ideology. According to Peterson, our ability to speak is the basis of our ability to think and the state must not force society to use the 'correct' terms.
Rabbi Uri Sharki (answers in bold): Today we are experiencing a new edition of George Orwell's 1984, where the dictator's main tool is the coercion of discourse. In this sense, I certainly think that Peterson raised a very significant point that Judaism has already talked about, that man is defined not as having thought, but as having speech, the speaking animal, and if the people of Israel really have any statement in the course of human culture, it is the centrality of speech to the point of attributing speech even to divinity. I think that preserving the freedom of speech is a guarantee for the moral success of the person. So in that sense I definitely agree with Peterson's direction.
Peterson emphasizes that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that there is no price for us to keep our mouths shut and distort the truth because of the threats. This has a very heavy price in the long run.
Without any doubt. I think what is to be admired and appreciated about Peterson is that he is a hero, and heroes are the ones who end up changing the world. It is not enough to be a hero, but if you have a statement, then you have to be ready to pay the price of that statement, because a life in which you are not able to be yourself is no longer a life, in this sense Peterson certainly deserves to be counted among the promoters of truth in the world, the promoters of morality in the world.
Peterson links the requirements for dictating language to a postmodern and neo-Marxist ideology that claims that there is no truth, and if there is no truth then no real dialogue is possible, because any dialogue is actually only the request for power, not the request for truth. And just as they diagnose that there are only power struggles, they also act in this way, for the sake of linguistic coercion and the elimination of voicing other opinions.
We need to be careful of unnecessary connections, it is very possible that the postmodernists started as Marxists but there is also a self-assertion for postmodernism and it needs a discussion on its own. There is an inherent logical fallacy in the postmodernist ideology. The statement 'there is no truth' is a statement that intends to be the truth. So there is an internal contradiction here so that postmodernism does not have a convincing philosophical argument but rather an experience, an experience of what I call multi-narratives. You can say whatever you want as long as you stick the title "My Narrative" on it.
Postmodernism is a type of psychological, subjective experience that needs to be dealt with. A generation that says there is no truth conveys distress. If he broadcasts distress then he needs someone to provide a solution to his distress. If you give mediocre ideologies that actually satisfied the psyche of people at the beginning of the twentieth century, you will not satisfy a soul that is truly thirsty for meaning. The Marxist model is one of the models proposed to try to give meaning. The pattern of lovers and lovers, and oppressors and oppressed, and the like, are just one of the possible patterns to cast the despair of the generation. If we delve deeper into the source of this despair, it is the moral failure of Western culture, which was amply demonstrated by the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the certificate of failure of Western society. And so Peterson's request to infuse meaning is very real.
Peterson goes to the light of Carl Jung who pointed out that there are archetypal motifs that resonate in all human beings because they reflect fundamental truths of the human condition and direct the person how to act in the world. For example, the archetypal hero is one who is willing to leave the comfort and certainty of order, and go deep into chaos and uncertainty to confront the archetypal dragon. The person should look for the place he is most afraid of and try to face it. The hero is the one whose eyes are open, whose words are true, and who is ready to face the chaos of the unknown.
There are two motifs here.
One is the almost dualistic contrast between collectivism and individualism, between the individual and the whole, the danger of the dictatorship of the whole and, if we go further, the danger of the dictatorship of reason over man. And at the same time there is a duality of order and chaos here. There is a binary undertone in this play and in that sense I am a bit more Hegelian, that is, I employ a method of dialectics that leads to synthesis. For example, the contrast between collectivism and the individual. It is true that Peterson loves freedom, he recognizes it in particular and he recognizes the lack of freedom in Koltkiv. But maybe this is true only in the caricature of the collective. In the Jewish tradition, we talk about a rule that needs to be specified and a detail that needs to be a rule. This means that in the ideal sense both the individual is fed by the public and the public should not trample the individual. This thing requires effort. Instead of preferring the individual over the general, a true synthesis must be made that gives meaning to the individual and to the general as well.
The second motif is between chaos and order. But it is precisely the order that can bind a person. Chaos, if we take it as the after all, it is clear that we are going to perish. But if chaos is used as a tool for development, between order and order, when there is a moment of absence that precedes being, there is some ability to question all the beliefs I had until now, in order to reach a more advanced pattern. I think the chaos can be user friendly too. As much as Peterson seeks a balance between order and chaos, and not just the need for order, then in my opinion he has made the very real point that there is a value to perfection and there is also a value to perfection, if we use the concepts of Rabbi Kook's teachings.
There is a perception of the Enlightenment according to which the values of modernity, individualism, the scientific method, fundamental freedoms, are a revolution that came from a break with the world that preceded it, which was dark, religious and primitive. Peterson, on the other hand, says that the modern thinking of the Enlightenment itself is based on an ethos that stems from a much deeper place found in the world that preceded the Enlightenment. Except that these foundations were not formulated in a philosophical way but folded in metaphors, drama, religion, art, and myths and that as we lose touch with these founding stories we omit the infrastructure for modern society itself.
It can be said that the question that has always faced all thinkers of religion throughout the ages, and also in the ancient Greek period with Plato, is the question of whether religion is the clothing of philosophy or whether philosophy is the clothing of religion. I think the question is unsolvable as long as we do not make a distinction between the subjective world and the objective world. The philosophy of the Enlightenment is concerned with the description of the object, or at least an attempt to be objective. In contrast, the experiential religious tradition speaks of a subject. The subject makes room for the self, the self is necessarily unique and irreducible. I think that with Peterson there is actually a revolt against the attempt to make a reduction of the self. We can say that in structuralism, Derrida's for example, we see that there is a loss of speech, a loss of the meaning of the self, it is a dissolution of personality. Surely Peterson is right when he asks to receive resuscitation from the springs of the experiential world.
Continued below:
Peterson attempts to rebuild Western civilization while still incorporating the figure of Christ. But instead of the model in which Jesus died to atone for the sins of humans who are incapable of anything without this act of grace, Peterson says that just as Jesus took upon himself the burden of human suffering, so you, each and every one, should take upon yourself the burden of responsibility that is in life and move on.
This is a deviation towards Judaism, but it is also an expression of the difficulty that exists in the Christian soul to detach from the mystical attraction that Jesus represents for them. If we say that Jesus is the one who redeems the world then it basically means that the world cannot redeem itself. Therefore, according to my understanding, Christianity is not messianic. Because Christianity as I perceive it is the assumption that man has the ability to change the world. The central problem of Christianity is the question of suffering and perhaps sin. I am in a slightly different position. I think that the basic position of a person is optimistic, meaning that the person is basically not guilty of any original sin that hangs over him that makes him guilty from birth. It is a painting of a deity who is hostile to creation and it is hard for me to accept such a thing. But in the sense that you are in charge of the world, I certainly accept that. After all, a person must say, for me the world was created, and a person must take it upon himself to fix the entire world. It certainly is. The question is, does it go through the almost masochistic experience of the need to suffer. I think that here, at this point, there will be a difference between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism is more optimistic.
When asked about the blame for the current war, Peterson replied that Iran and Hamas are building on the fact that the Western left will always identify the Palestinians as victims, on the oppressed side. But the Palestinians share some of the blame for their leadership being a bunch of terrorists. Because they have the responsibility of living according to the truth and confronting the tyranny within them.
The Palestinians must see themselves as a victim, and precisely of Israel. This means that there is no Palestinian identity without an Israeli identity. Allow me to be pessimistic but I think they have already passed the stage of being able to accept responsibility for themselves. They should actually recognize themselves as part of the Arab world and merge into it. Now it is a very powerful struggle between what is represented in the United Arab Emirates and what is represented in Hamas. This is why the military-political decision of the State of Israel against Hamas is very important. As soon as the people of Israel win, then the overall geopolitical value map changes. In this sense, the Emirates need us to destroy Hamas.
There is a green ideology that promotes the idea that there is a climate emergency and it is all the fault of human society. Peterson claims that when you talk about humans as a problem, then it is a poisonous and anti-human ideology that actually wants to destroy humanity in favor of the idol of the earth, of nature.
We see an unholy alliance between the environmental green movements and the anti-Israel movement of the Islamist left. And it's a terrible shame, because if people were free, it would be possible to talk about environmental research without boycotts. Today there are things that are allowed to be said and things that are not allowed to be said. There are things that should not even be investigated. So it's time to really restore freedom to man. It is even in the interest of the green movements themselves to give more academic freedom and not to have cynical use by certain elites of new trends.
Peterson's new book is based on the idea of the struggle between Jacob and the angel and changing his name to Israel. Peterson emphasizes that "to be 'Israel' is to wrestle with God. Those who wrestle with God are called Israel." To make a sacrifice is to sacrifice things now in the name of a higher value, and by doing so you benefit your future self, and this is called walking with God.
This is typical of trying to explain the Bible as metaphors. I'm not against it, obviously there is a metaphorical dimension, but you have to remember that Israel is also the name of an existing nation. In other words, history has made the real Israeli nation, the Jewish nation, to be the bearers of these metaphors. I mean, if you want to be the one who 'served with God and people and you can', you have to remember that there is a nation that is its role, that is its historical destiny. From this nation we can then derive metaphorical moral governments as Peterson does. I think that the dialogue between Peterson's ideas and the sages of Israel is the space where God's living words become clear. If there are such and such then it is the living words of God.
Source: https://noahideworldcenter.org/ru/blogs/news/peterson