In the Beginning Was the Revolt

 “There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden” (“Gates of Eden”). The revolt begins in the Garden of Eden. The first human being staged the initial revolt. As if he wanted to say that revolt was created in the likeness. Starting at the deliverance from the Paradise, it runs like a red thread through the mythological stories of the Tanakh and Jewish intellectual history. At the latest with America’s Constitution and the French Revolution, it has merged into a universalism that knows many originators and influences.



“If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war” (“With God on Our Side”). Adam’s disobedience, Abraham’s objection, Jacob’s protest, Moses’ outburst, Israel’s recalcitrance and desert revolution, Esther’s deceit, the uprisings of the Maccabees, and the Bar Kochba Revolt: Revolts run through the writings. And they find their continuation in the texts by Maimonides, Spinoza, Heine, Freud, Luxemburg, Einstein, Arendt, Leibowitz, Popper and Dylan. With so many others, they have enrolled in the consensus that strives for justice, fights the authorities, and humanizes the individual. These goals ultimately become the postulates of the American civil rights and the European human rights movements, the Indian or South American freedom movement for liberating the people from the clutches of the authorities, systems, or ruling families that they had not asked to have imposed upon them.

 “Come gather 'round people / Wherever you roam” (“Times They Are A-Changing”). Many freedom movements have suffered from nostalgic glorification through the retrospective view. The battles for freedom, the civil wars, and the revolts were bloody. The ideologies often prevailed instead of the ideals. And not every revolt, not every revolution was a good one. Not all of them were about human beings. Not all of them were on the path to the citoyen – the political citizens who participate in commonwealth and are simultaneously protected by it. What Jean-Jacques Rousseau planned in the social contract – the civil society and the individual within it – is still considered to be irreversible to this day in its constantly changing form. However, the social contract of human beings is not inherited but can only be achieved through reason and therefore acquired anew from generation to generation.

“And I’ll stand o’er your grave / ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead” (“Masters of War”). That the 20th century of all times was not the consummation of civil societies but witnessed the rupture of civilization is not a paradox; instead, it is the logical consequence that the Enlightenment contradicts logic, that reason contradicts nature, and that equal rights instead of the right of the stronger contradicts human nature. Human beings have made the laws to protect the people from themselves and other people. Laws that guarantee protection for the differences between people and that their equality is not dependent upon ethnicity, culture, or religion. Nations are not rooted in blood but in values. But these laws contradict the archaic laws of human nature, which ultimately arose from the Earth and not the mind. As long as racism, defamation, and anti-Semitism are stronger than the laws, the evil in human beings has prevailed and the Enlightenment has failed.

“Where the people are many and their hands are all empty” (“A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”). The revolt is one of the minorities: the slaves, the farmers, and the poor. The revolt is that of the individual through perception. The first was the human being entering into worldliness on the path to the law of people without divinity who were protected in turn by the laws. In Albert Camus' work The Rebel, the author summarizes newly founded ethics far from ideologies and religions with the formula of “I rebel, therefore I am!” Each individual revolt is always in relationship to and in solidarity with the community. In the allegorical, literary, or metaphorical sense, Adam’s rebellion established the birth of the free individual in the community of the world, which human beings would otherwise never have achieved and which led to the civil rights movements of the last century and the present.

Yves Kugelmann is the editor-in-chief of aufbau and the JM Jüdische Medien AG. The quoted song lines are by Bob Dylan.