Babylonian Lessons for Liberals : Jews have historically relied on collective responses to society’s needs, but compassion must be reciprocated.

I got a lesson in Jewish history the other day from, of all people, Newt Gingrich--and a new sense of the American political tradition as well--when I watched, on cable television, the new House Speaker’s two-hour class in American history at Rinehardt College in Waleska, Ga.

When I tuned in, Gingrich was drawing a huge circle signifying Big Government swallowing up a smaller circle defined as the Community. The problem, he said, was that after four decades of liberalism, there is now almost nothing but government programs where once there was a whole slew of vital institutions, including private charities. “Why should the government do for people what they can do for themselves?” he asked, and this, it seems, is the question for the ages.

Jewish tradition has been dealing with questions of social organization for more than 2,000 years, analyzing and describing basic rights and responsibilities and how to keep a people intact. But it comes up with a very different model than Gingrich’s. Where Gingrich sees government as dangerous, a firebreathing big circle oppressing individual and community, the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam says quite the opposite: The government and the people are not adversaries, fighting for power one against the other; they are one unit, each striving to act out the community’s sense of its own purpose.

Why is this notion important? Because those who regard government as the enemy are bound to think it can’t possibly help in resolving intractable problems. But those who consider that government operates by, of and for the people are bound to consider government an option, so long as it works efficiently.

This explains a problem that has been bothering American political observers for years. Why are many Jews liberal? Why are they so committed to collective solutions? Long after they have left their status as discriminated minority, Jews alone among American immigrant groups retain a loyalty to political liberalism, to governments of compassion and justice.

For a Jewish response to Gingrich, we can look not at the Roosevelt-Truman era, in which the domestic liberal agenda was formulated, but back to the Jewish experience of a 2,000-year diaspora. When the Jews were first exiled to Babylon, Israel’s social organization was in ruin. Driven from their homeland, their temple in ruin, the defeated Israelites would most likely have died out were it not for leaders who devised a farsighted scheme of social responsibility still practiced in Jewish communities around the world. These communities, or kehillath, are organized in concentric circles of obligations. Jews are mandated to tithe to support their community and to maintain agencies that take care of the poor, dispense justice, educate children and bury the dead. It was there, in ancient Judea, that we find the first free public-school system, paid for by the voluntary taxation of the Jews. And it is there that the philosopher Hillel formulated his famous equation of mankind’s obligations: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

Over centuries of wandering, as the Jewish people were shunted from place to place, the tight weave of responsible community grew even stronger. They developed an intricate system of tzedakah, or payments to do justice, starting with one’s family, extending to the beggar on the street and the world at large.

Clearly, the concept of an activist government saved the Jewish people then, and it can ennoble Jews and non-Jews today, if only we look at tradition and history with clear eyes.

But in their rush to create a government of compassion, liberal Jews typically forget that charity is not one-sided. In the sage Maimonides’ eight levels of giving, several of them define the responsibility of those who receive alms: They too must do justice, act compassionately, comport themselves as members of the community and be above all menschen, or people of self-worth and dignity. The highest form of charity, Maimonides taught, is not to give a person a handout, but a job. And even the poor have an obligation to tithe, to help those further down the ladder.

Gingrich is not the only one who can find solutions in history.