The source of my morality

The Soviet Union's roots in Christianity

I want to get away from nihilism for a second and talk about what I guess is its polar opposite — the belief in something bigger than you. 

The last year or so, ever since Israel’s genocidal response to October 7, I’ve noticed Jews have been getting more religious — or at least some have been moving more towards religion. The reasons vary depending on where people stand on The Issue.

To people in the zionist camp, my sense is that getting tighter with Judaism serves as a binding ritual…a way of doubling down on their identity and keeping up their resolve that “we” need to do whatever it takes to “protect ourselves”…do whatever we need to keep Israel for Jews by Jews. The thing is that all moral and legal claims this camp makes on the Holy Land come straight from the Torah. It’s a fundamentally religious claim, no matter if it’s made by secular or religious Jews. Secular zionists, going all the way back to David Ben-Gurion, based their political legitimacy and the legitimacy of a Jewish state on promises that the Jewish god made to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses — as written down on parchment a few thousand years ago. So it makes sense that I’m seeing zionist Jews, who perhaps weren’t so interested in their religion, turn much more seriously to the foundation of their identity in this moment of crisis for them…or at least what they perceive as an existential crisis.

The anti-zionist camp, on the other hand, has been searching for a system of beliefs that allows them to keep their Jewish identity without having to adopt a genocidal helicopter nationalism. And some of them have turned to a pre-zionist Judaism, where the dream of resettling Israel is abstracted to an ideal and/or relegated to the perpetual messianic future that people with a nod and wink all agree will never come…

I’ve been getting into Judaism, too — or trying to get into it. I’ve been reading the Torah and the various commentaries, including the Talmud. I’ve been doing it because I’m genuinely interested. And I’ve been open to being inspired — to having the spirit of YHWH seize me. But it hasn’t happened. I’ve gotten no gut reaction, no spiritual sensation, no transcendental feeling out of the stories and parables and the rituals. I appreciate some of the texts from a historical and literary perspective. Judaism gave rise to two of the most popular religions in the world. Like it or not, the ideas and stories preserved in the books form a big part of global culture. Some of it is in fact very funny and makes for great comedy — I even translated a bit of it. And yet, spiritually, for me it’s inert. It gives me nothing. I get more out of a Buddhist meditation.

It shouldn’t be this way. The religion — at least one sect of it — should’ve appealed to me. If not reform, then conservative. If not conservative, then orthodox. And if not orthodox, then some hasidic sect…there are plenty to choose from. There are even non-zionist ones, like the Satmar, that could attract an anti-zionist like myself. And my whole personal history has driven me to embrace Judaism. My family was “saved” from the Soviet Union by America and American Jews…saved from cultural assimilation by a bunch of godless Jew-hating communists. As soon as we moved to America, my family got taken in by a synagogue in San Francisco. I got my bar mitzvah there…got confirmed from the once-a-week religious school attached to it. It should have created some attachment to the faith — to help me define myself in terms of it. But it didn’t. Not at all. The religion feels very alien to me. It evokes no cozy feelings…no transcendental sense of awe and connection to something greater than me.

I think a lot of it has to do with the Jewish god and the morality that this god represents. He’s abusive and jealous. He demands total obedience, is constantly threatening transgressors with destruction, dreaming up insane arbitrary OCD rules to follow. Even worse, he’s constantly overpromising and underdelivering — he’s a braggart. And then there’s the constant us vs. them thinking — a view of the world that is fundamentally supremacist. To me, the main themes in the ancient stories in the Torah are that might makes right — that as long as god stands behind you, everything you do is holy. Theft, deception, genocide…even killing of “enemy” babies is fine because god’s on your side.¹ And there’s a connected theme that runs through it all, too, in which success is seen as holiness. If you’re a winner, that means god is on your side, regardless of whether you’re a scoundrel or a monster. So in the end, god is with power — god is with the winners.

If you zoom out and look at the religion as something that was concocted to legitimize the ruling class (which is one theory of how ancient Judaism emerged…to strengthen the rule of Josiah in the 5th century BC), this “might makes right” mindset makes sense. Power is its own justification. There is a primitive logic to it, too. It helps explain the randomness of the world — why someone was lucky enough to be born into a kingly family that can trace its lineage to King David while you’re forced to dig in the dirt for survival. How to explain it? It has to be divine providence — god is with the winners. This view might help make sense of the world. But it just doesn’t appeal to me as a religious creed.

Why not? I guess what appeals to me in a religion is idealism, utopianism, and universalism. To me, it seems obvious that the world is interconnected and whole, and that people, while all born different in various ways, have a basic core equality. I can’t really be down with a spirituality that worships power like that.

But then this begs another question: Why am I so drawn to universalism and idealism? Why am I so against authority? Why do these things seem “natural” to me? Why is this my core moral rootedness that does not require explanation? I’m not sure. I thought about it a lot. The best explanation that I could come up with comes from my upbringing.

I was born in the USSR and spent almost nine years before my family moved to America. I feel like I absorbed the best values that that place had to offer, and the values stuck because my parents are generous and kind people who in my childhood never divided the world into “us” and “them,” even if they did reject ultimately Soviet society…

What are these Soviet values? Well…I guess they’re in many ways Christian.

Yeah, Soviet culture pushed a very crude atheism — the idea that all religions are nothing but systems of oppression and domination. But deeper down, Soviet culture was itself very Christian — a type of Christianity that replaced metaphysics with materialism and the idea of heaven with the inevitability of utopia right here on Earth. It didn’t kill Christianity but updated it for the Enlightenment, transmuting religion into ideology. And yes, while the metaphysics disappeared, a lot of the other values remained: universalism, brotherly love, the historic certainty of redemption/utopia… There were probably more than a few non-Christian things about the USSR — chief among them was the execution and jailing spree that took place early on in the revolution and then under Stalin. Not much redemption offered there…and very little turning the other cheek being done.

But that aside, there is a continuity between Christianity and Soviet society. This isn’t my idea. I’m not voicing anything unique here. There were early Marxists who understood this about Marxism/Communism. The most famous was Nikolai Berdyaev. He was a Russian philosopher and a member of the Russian nobility, and was also both a Marxist and a practicing Christian. He wrote on this very subject, and argued that Marxism is more than just an economic theory — that it is basically a religion, a kind of secular Christianity.

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Here is Berdyaev from his book The Origins of Russian Communism:

Communism carries on a persecution of every church, and above all of the Orthodox Church, on account of the part that it has played in history. Communists profess a militant atheism and they are compelled to carry on anti-religious propaganda. Communism in actual fact is the foe of every form of religion and especially of Christianity, not as a social system, but as itself'a religion. It wants to be a religion itself, to take the place of Christianity. It professes to answer the religious questions of the human soul and to give a meaning to life. Communism is integrated; it embraces the whole of life; its relations are with no special section of it. On this account its conflict with other religious faiths is inevitable. Intolerance and fanaticism always have a religious origin. No scientific, purely intellectual theory can be so intolerant and fanatical, and communism is exclusive as a religious faith is.

And here he is in The Russian Revolution on the religious nature of Marxism:

“…the brilliant future is inevitable, the realm of freedom is pre-determined. In the future the elemental economic principle will have no more power over the life of human societies, which will be determined by social reason in its victory over every other element. The dialectics of the material process lead infallibly to the Kingdom of God on earth (but without God), to the realm of freedom, justice and power. By itself the theory of economic materialism would be unable to enlist enthusiasm; it would merely remain one out of many scientific hypotheses. What does rouse enthusiasm is Marx's messianic faith. It finds its complete expression in the idea of the proletariat's messianic vocation. The aspect of Marxism which looks forward to the future Socialist society and to the great mission of the proletariat has nothing in common with science — it is a faith, "the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not." Marx's "proletariat" and his perfect Socialist society are "invisible things," an object of faith. Here we are in contact with a religious idea.”

Although Lenin kicked Berdyaev out of the Soviet Union on a ship with a bunch of other intellectuals deemed not supportive enough of the Soviet project, and the Bolsheviks waged a war on Christianity (and all other religions) inside Russia, cutting down crosses and turning churches and synagogues into warehouses and dairy factories, Berdyaev still supported the Soviet project…supported it from a Christian perspective.

In fact, he blamed the Catholic and Orthodox churches for the emergence of Marxism, a virulently “anti-religious” religion.² To him, the larger Christian world had abandoned the teachings of Jesus and sided with power and sought power itself, betraying the original teachings of Jesus. The church had sold its soul — and if organized Christianity backed abuse and exploitation and murder, it was inevitable that something like the Bolsheviks would emerge as a reaction. Berdyaev even reiterated his support for the Soviet Russia towards the end of World War II because it was based on Christian ideas and values. “The Russian messianic conception always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity. …recent changes in Russia, the changed attitude to religion and to the country’s traditions, make it not only possible but right for Christian Russians to rally to the Soviet government,” he said in 1944.³

The Bolsheviks also went the way of the organized church, though. They sought power and wielded power for power’s sake and turned their back on the communist promise, even as they continued to broadcast its utopian values. Berdyaev predicted that the USSR would collapse in part because of this, and it did.

I bring up Berdyaev to illustrate that the idea that Marxism/Communism is a type of Christianity that’s been stripped of god and metaphysics isn’t a novel idea. The two aren’t a contradiction, even if people think of them as such. There’s a whole rich Marxist-Christian European tradition outside of Russia that I only know very superficially…but it exists. Plenty of people have made the claim that early Christianity, based on Jesus’ teachings, was communist in nature: no private property, a condemnation of wealth accumulation, the idea that the poorest are the holiest, the focus on social justice. Terry Eagleton even has a book on it.

I’ve known about Berdyaev’s writings for years, but I never really connected myself to his ideas — never connected my own values and morality to Christianity, an idea that I would have scoffed at until very recently. It was only when I started getting deeper into trying to understand Judaism that I realized how alien Judaism is to me. And when I did, the realization hit me hard: I’m a product of the Soviet Union…and ultimately of a Christian morality.

I can’t say the Bible hits me like a ray of light or anything like that or that I’m about to be a trad cath or an ortho trad or whatever. I’m not about to get baptized (although getting baptized was a Jewish thing). It’s more that I realized the core of Christian morality reflects my innate sense of how things should be much more than anything I’ve come across in Judaism…and that this morality ties back to the Soviet Union.

I believe in universalism. I believe that all people are brothers and sisters, that we share a common fate, that we are deserving of a fulfilling and good life, that the weakest among us should be protected, that illegitimate power should be challenged, and that we have the ability to make the world a better place if we work together. Those are the ideal values of Soviet society — ideals that were not realized in practice and in fact were degraded and bastardized, causing people to turn against the whole thing. But still they were there. And so…in that sense, it seems I’m much more Christian than I could ever be Jewish. I don’t see these values reflected in Judaism. I must admit that it is a bit strange for me to write this — after we immigrated, I thought of myself as spiritually Jewish. But it does make sense.

Thinking bigger here, I don’t think I’m alone. Soviet Jewish immigrants like me might think of themselves as Jewish — but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t go deep at all. Most, like me, have not turned to any sort of deep practice of the faith. Aside from getting a rabbi to officiate weddings and funerals and doing the basic minimum so their kids can have a bar mitzvah, they’re aloof from the rituals and from the morality that goes along with it. What most have done, though, is to turn to zionism — to Jewish nationalism. But the religion itself, beyond serving as a superficial signifier to their ties to the Holy Land, is alien to them, too. That’s at least my experience in immigrant circles.

It’s also why I think Soviet immigrants fit so well into America. America is also an utopian Enlightenment project — an Enlightenment project that came out of and wanted to transcend Christianity, and yet was also deeply enmeshed with Christian morals and culture. Instead of communism, the path to this utopia is through capitalism — through individual rather than communal action. And yet this capitalism is also universal. In its utopian ideal, anyone is able to succeed if they do the work and put in the effort… In that sense, USSR and USA are more alike than people realize.

—Yasha

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1. On killing babies — here is just one example from David Sheen.

2. To Berdyaev, the emergence of Marxism/Communism in Russia was also tied to what he saw as a powerful messianic Christian strain that’s a part of Russian society. There’s a great book on it you’re interested: “The Origin Of Russian Communism.”

3. The “Russian Idea” of Nikolai Berdyaev, Hoover Digest.