"Shivat ha'chata'im: reshima chelkit" ("The Seven Sins: A Partial List") by Aviad Kleinberg, Aliyat Hagag Press, Yedioth Ahronoth / Hemed Books, 202 pages, NIS 78

Prof. Aviad Kleinberg's new book is an unusual document for the Israeli publishing scene. On the one hand, it is a scholarly work about Jewish and Christian conceptions of guilt and sin, over the centuries and today; however, it is also an almost confessional text, in which Kleinberg, a historian, examines his own "sins" and "guilt." In a conversation we had, we tried to touch on all of these fault lines: views of sin in Judaism and Christianity, then and now, and the link between universal morality and private guilt.

In the book you examine questions of morality and ethics by discussing the seven deadly sins as the Church defined them in late antiquity: sloth, greed, gluttony, lust, envy, pride and wrath. What meaning do these sins have in our world?

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Kleinberg: "We are actually not talking about concrete sins, such as murder, theft or adultery, but about passions. These seven passions are to a large extent universal. There are others, of course, but this list is a good starting point for discussing the urges that drive us. Attitudes toward the passions, or sins as they are called, are subject to change, of course. For example, in the 12th and 13th centuries greed, the sin of the rising merchant class, became more important than pride or wrath, which were associated with the old warrior elite.

"Or, to cite a modern example, most Westerners do not consider lust to be wrong in its own right. The pangs of conscience that used to accompany every form of sexual pleasure, the hundreds of texts denouncing masturbation as the ultimate expression of lust - all these suddenly became 'irrelevant.' In general, the theology of sin, which used to be so important, has gone out of fashion along with hell. The fires of hell used to be the most important part of any religious preaching. Now their role is marginal. The Church's attitude toward the passions has become less legal and more psychological.

"I did not choose the Church's list because it is canonical, certainly not to me, but because I wanted to have a dialogue with this tradition, to use it as a springboard for addressing essentially modern dilemmas and questions."

So what happens to the idea of sin in the modern world?

"I think we are less certain of our lists. The Church had a solid list of sins. Not everyone managed to avoid them, but those who sinned knew that they were sinning. Today the standards are more vague. Religions try to make everything subject to moral judgment, but in the modern, secular world not everything can be judged. There are large areas we conceive of as neutral, just as there are passions that are only considered reprehensible if they cause harm to others, not as a matter of their own essence.

"The interesting process in the West regarding the passions is the rehabilitation of the body. We no longer think of ourselves as souls trapped inside the prison of the body. The body is not an enemy. Sometimes it is even a master. We nurture rather than suppress it."

Thinking of the body as leading to sin and interfering with spiritual life is typical of Christianity; but you write in the book, for example, that the discovery of sexual desire caused you unhappiness as a young man, because until then you had been proudly riding on the "intellectual horse." Does Judaism share this conception of the body?

"Christianity, as part of its neo-Platonic heritage, is dualistic; it tends, as I have said, to consider the body an enemy that must be vanquished. The Jewish conception is more holistic. The body and its pleasures are part of the human totality, and as long as they are not given an excessive importance, there is nothing wrong with them. A man should enjoy the world, not renounce it.

"The feeling I described in the book did not have a philosophical basis. I was not ashamed of my physicality, but I experienced a sudden loss of control, a disruption of some inner equilibrium I had previously had. Suddenly the body took over most of my emotional world. Suddenly I could think of almost nothing else. I felt that the hormonal surge threatened to drown me.

"But, if we go back to Judaism and Christianity, then Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not require a person to reach perfection, but rather balance. A man has good impulses and bad ones, and both are necessary. A man must eat and drink and accumulate assets and be happy with his wife. Christianity wants us to reject the world and to take from it only what is necessary. The world is a deathtrap to those who are not careful. On the other hand, the Christians did not enclose themselves in an ivory tower. They wallowed about in the world, torn by conscience and inner conflict. The internal conflict creates a whirlpool; I study whirlpools."

And in this book you also study yourself; you wrote a lot about yourself, exposing your own passions and weaknesses.

"I believe that a scholar should immerse himself not in the academic purification baths but in the world. I don't want to create the sense that I am a bodyless spirit hovering in some superior moral sphere and looking down on the little people. I am a man, and human weakness is a part of me. The goal of this book is not to scour my conscience or to preach. I try to understand, out of empathy. The passions, the sins, do not discriminate between classes, races and levels of education. The decision to desanitize this text is part of a broader stance I am taking, about the role of intellectuals in society. We have things to teach, but we also have things to learn. Society needs us and we need it. I don't want to make myself an exception."

You once said in an interview in Haaretz that, "Ten years ago, it seemed as though religion was an obsolete phenomenon. This has proved to be wrong." How do you see things now?

"There is still no substitute for religion. It provides a system of beliefs, of moral principles, of rituals. It is a very good tool for preserving tradition and communal solidarity. When group identity becomes unstable, religion gives people meaning, hope and a set of rules to act by. Consider, for example, how non-believers cling to the religious rules of mourning when someone close to them dies.

"Religion disappeared from the modern world because [modern man] does not need hope beyond the consumer world in which he exists, because he believes in heaven here and now, and because he has waived communal solidarity and traded it in for the virtual solidarity of the television audience. What troubles me about this culture is the way it has abandoned the conception, represented strongly by religion, that morality is not just a matter of rights, but of duties as well."

Reward and punishment

Can a secular person who is aware of the finality of life, but who does not believe in a kingdom of heaven or in some broad narrative that gives meaning to life even commit to an ethic of obligations?

"I think so. In the book I talk about the Stoic view that vehemently rejects any idea of reward and punishment after death; man does good because it is good, not because it pays off. And, no less importantly, a person is committed to the community in which he lives, because man is a social creature and reaches the full expression of his humanity only in society. Then there is French Existentialism, an interesting heir of Stoicism. Because the Existentialists perceived the world as a place devoid of God and absolute rules, they could see doing good not as an act of obedience, but rather as an act of freedom, a total embracing of responsibility.

"Like the people of both these schools, I believe that morality is possible only where there is freedom. To do what is good in God's eyes because God said so is obedience, not morality. To do good in exchange for heaven is a trade, not morality. Secular morality is possible. In fact, only secular morality is possible."

It is interesting to consider how religion could even be defined today. You write: "The free market (not Christianity) is the true religion of the modern West." By this logic, is anything that everyone believes in and which has its own practices a religion? Is democracy a religion?

"No, but when a system of beliefs becomes sanctified, immune to criticism, when those who do not share the faith are defined as irrational or dangerous, then we have something resembling a religion. The free market has a sacred doctrine, a priesthood, rituals and even a vision of heaven: the consumer never-never-land of the American dream. Western capitalism crosses cultures and religions. If baptism was once the way into the world of Western culture, now the free market serves that function.

"Democracy is a bonus, not a precondition. China and Singapore, like Bahrain and Dubai, are part of the global culture even without democracy. The West's complete faith in capitalism is very similar to a religious faith. That's also how the cultures threatened by the West perceive it. It demands a complete change of values, just as religion used to demand in the past."

Today there are people who are not affiliated with any particular religion. They have a God whose identity is not exactly clear. Maybe the familiar religious distinctions don't mean as much anymore?

"It seems to me that the dichotomous 'either-or' thinking typical of the West is not typical of other cultures. There are places in Africa where you can be both a Christian and a Muslim, a combination that the Western mind finds inconceivable. In China it was always possible to be both a Buddhist and a Confucian Taoist. The interesting process of the 20th century is the privatization of religion in the West. Religion used to serve as a social adhesive, creating and preserving community; religion constituted the public sphere. Nowadays this no longer exists. Religion has become a private matter, part of the leisure culture, yet another component of an individual's identity. If in ultra-Orthodox Jewish society religion still exists according to the old model, seeping into every element of life, dictating the daily routine, creating the social arrangements, in other social settings it is simply part of the leisure culture.

"Think about the [practice of visiting] graves of holy men: You come when you want to come and leave when you want to leave; it's your private affair. This arrangement makes it possible for secular people to take part in the 'spiritual,' not necessarily religious, activity surrounding these sites. Are these people believers? Yes and no. The process in which the price of religion drops, since you no longer have to change your life to be a believer, is a fascinating one. The religious sphere used to be a sellers' market, now it is a market of consumers."

You add to the Christian list of deadly sins an eighth one, very local and very Jewish, according to your thinking: the sin of self-righteousness. In this chapter you lash out at everyone: secular liberals who have lost their moral pretensions; religious people who do not dare to confront what is happening within their own communities; the beautiful left of "political correctness" that speaks academic jargon.

"Self-righteousness exists everywhere, of course, but we have a dangerous fondness for this quality, in part because we are certain that we, the Chosen People, are better than others, and in part because the gentiles inflicted so much wickedness on us that we deny their right to serve as a moral compass for us.

"My favorite self-righteous line is Golda Meir's claim that she would never forgive the Palestinians for what they were forcing us to do to them. We manage to be victims even when we are the ones doing the injustice. The intellectual self-righteousness of the left is not based on a sense of victimhood, but it, too, involves an utter faith in your own rightness, a faith that allows you to judge everyone and which gives you immunity from judgment and true moral reckoning."

Unique phenomenon

And, another local matter: you write that "Secular Zionism declared a rebellion against God and took upon itself to fulfill the messianic vision." At the same time, Jewish nationalism is also strongly tied to religion. How would you define the link between Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism?

"Judaism is a unique phenomenon. There is no such thing as a secular Catholic; it's a contradiction in terms. But there are secular Jews. I am a secular Jew who does not feel as though anything is missing. Religious tradition is part of my heritage even if I don't live by Jewish law, just as the ritual sacrifices at the Temple are part of the religious Jew's heritage although he does not make sacrifices and cannot visit the Temple. But I think that the success of the Zionist secular project, the creation of Jewish sovereignty on the land of Eretz Israel, forced Judaism to grapple seriously with questions of nationality and sovereignty for the first time since the Jews went into exile.

"Here, again, we see those whirlpools I am so fond of. You have to remember that the Jewish religion was formed in exile, and it has the characteristics of a minority religion living within a hostile, or at least suspicious, society. Zionism attacked religion not because it denounced the religious terminology, but because it held religion responsible for creating the 'Diaspora' Jew, which Zionism saw as passive, cowardly and feminine. Suddenly, after 'two millennia' of weakness in exile, the Jew discovers his own strength, the ability to use violence for his own ends, and it is intoxicating - like taking your first shot of vodka.

"In the past, when Judaism confronted questions of power, rule and land, it was as part of an anachronistic or utopian way of thinking. When Maimonides stated that in a Jewish sovereignty a gentile would not be allowed to oversee even an aqueduct, he did not need to deal with the practical ramifications of this claim.

"I think that Judaism is currently undergoing a reorganization of which we are only partly aware. I think that the Ashkenazi [East European] responses were problematic, both the self-enclosure of religious scholars and their society in a ghetto and the messianic thinking of Rabbi Kook's students. Mizrahi Judaism [originating in Middle Eastern countries] actually offered more flexible and promising solutions. The clash of these solutions in the same space, a clash that did not exist before, creates a form of existence unique to Israel, an existence that is unstable and very fertile. I am trying to understand this move by studying one of the more interesting new religious centers in Israel: Netivot. That will be the subject of my next book."