## Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today

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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
*A Family Portrait: Jews Today*


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Pesach is a time for families, a time for answering children’s questions and handing on the story of the Exodus across the generations. It was so in biblical times; it is so tonight in David and Miriam Cohen’s house in a Northwest London suburb.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The Haggadah speaks of four children, one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one unable to ask questions. There are four children this evening ranged around the Cohens’ table. They are not precisely the children of the Haggadah*.* For one thing, they are older. For another, words like wise, wicked, and simple sound strange and out of place in our nonjudgmental culture.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But the Vilna Gaon suggested that the four children represent two pairs of contrasts. The “wise” and the “one unable to ask” are cognitive opposites. Perhaps we would call them, today, the intellectual and the nonacademic. The *rasha* and *tam* are spiritual opposites, one a rebel against, the other faithful to Jewish tradition. Today we would not call a rebel “wicked.” He is more likely simply to be the product of a secular culture profoundly at odds with the assumptions of Judaism. Still less would we translate *tam* as simple. The patriarch Jacob is called an *ish tam*, which Samson Raphael Hirsch translates as “a single-minded man.” Single-mindedness is a religious virtue equally at odds with the complex roles and relativities of a pluralistic culture. Thus understood, the terms could well describe David and Miriam’s children.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Intellectual**


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Ruth is 23, dark-haired, attractive, and articulate. An eldest child, she has always carried with her an air of seriousness, perhaps even to excess. She went to Jewish schools and then to a seminary in Israel before returning to take a degree in psychology and a teaching qualification. She teaches at a Jewish secondary school. In August she is getting married. Her husband-to-be is a mathematics lecturer at a London college, an alumnus of an Israeli yeshivah who wears a *kippah serugah* and twice a week attends a *shiur*.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
David and Miriam, Ruth’s parents, have always been Orthodox but in the relaxed style of many of the Anglo-Jews of their generation. Most *Shabbatot* they went to the local synagogue, more often when the children were young, less often now. On Friday nights they lit candles, made *Kiddush,* and ate a traditional Shabbat meal. But they had also been known to switch on a light or watch television. Their home is kosher, but on holiday they allow themselves a fish and salad meal in a non-Jewish restaurant. Neither of them keeps their hair covered except in the synagogue. They know vaguely about the laws of family purity and the *mikveh*, but neither they nor their friends ever seriously considered observing them. They are in their way typical of their local congregation.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Ruth, from an early age, was uneasy with what she saw as their equivocations and compromises. A self-contained child, she did not argue the point. She simply took as her reference group her Jewish studies teachers at school and the friends she made in her youth group and later at the seminary. Her own home, she has decided, will be strictly observant. She tells her friends that she is going, *be-ezrat ha-Shem*, to have five children and that, of course, she will give up her career in teaching to look after them.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The prospect of *mikveh* and the family purity laws do not raise in Ruth any inner conflict. She can see the logic of a discipline of sexual tact and restraint. Nor is she worried by the decision she and her fiancé have taken, that she will wear a *sheitel.* Wigs, these days, are attractive. And besides, she has a strong feeling for that value she has never tried to explain to her non-Jewish friends – she knows they would laugh – namely *tzeniut*, modesty.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Ruth has a clearly ordered set of values. But it would be wrong to think that in arriving at them she has experienced no tensions. Her decision to go to a university after the seminary was frowned on by her teachers and many of her friends. In retrospect she can see their cause for concern, though she does not regret her choice. She found the college environment disturbingly at odds with the protective, monolithic atmosphere of her school and seminary. Its intellectual detachment, skepticism, and, at times, cynicism toward positions she herself held was at first unnerving and led to disturbed nights of conflict and doubt.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It was the first time, too, that she had had non-Jewish friends. What worried her most was that she liked them. Her education until now had led her to take for granted that there were deep distinctions and dichotomies between the Jewish and non-Jewish world. But at college, over coffee, getting to know her fellow students, she found them refreshing and congenial company. She could hardly approve of their lifestyles, but they had an easygoing good humor and a camaraderie that she found relaxing. One or two of them were formidably intelligent, which she admired. Their world seemed free of the nervous intensity and inner constraints that formed an almost tangible atmosphere in her Jewish environment. She was studying in London and living at home. It occurred to her one night that if she had gone to a university in another town, meeting, falling in love with, and perhaps marrying a non-Jewish boy would not have been an impossibility. That frightened her and strengthened her decision to leave no gaps in the protective wall she would create for her own children.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Past that crisis now, her occasional qualms are less serious. She has long since stopped going to her parents’ synagogue. Its vast architectural pretensions seemed to her to be an embarrassing imitation of the Gentiles, a Jewish church, a *chukkat ha-goi.* On Shabbat as a child she used to see one of her parents’ friends arrive at the synagogue by car, which he would furtively park round the corner. This, too, made her smile. It was the women’s gallery, though, that finally drove her to distraction. The show of clothes and the ceaseless gossip seemed to her more appropriate to a coffee klatch than to a religious occasion.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Since then she has transferred he allegiance to a local *shtibl*, a *shul* that is no more than a house with ad hoc extensions. Here, at least, there is no clerically robed minister, no cantor, no choir, no show of grandeur, no social agenda. The members, as she puts it, come to *davven* and learn, not to talk and be entertained. But not everything about it is quite what she hoped for. Behind the thick curtain that screens the women’s section she is conscious that, in synagogue terms, she, a woman, is something of an irrelevance. It occasionally bothers her that she will not be able to attend a *shiur* with her future husband. Once in a while, though not for long, she sighs for the career she will have to abandon. She has read about the apron some American Jewish wives have taken to wearing, with its slogan: “For this I went to college?”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
She is concerned, too, with some of the values of the world she and her husband are going to join. She knows of the fur-coat-and-Jaguar syndrome among sections of the very Orthodox. She has seen some of the one-upmanship and conspicuous consumption at their bar mitzvahs and weddings and wonders whether religious devotion can really be combined with aggressive materialism. She dislikes the factionalism of the highly Orthodox world: there are sixteen different *minyanim* within a mile of where she plans to live, and she does not expect to have close friends from any of them except her own.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
She senses, too, that she and her husband will have to be discreet about certain aspects of their lives: their university background, and their love for Israel. She knows that they will be closely observed, with initial suspicion and reserve, and that the social controls of the group are real and powerful. It is a little frightening, but it is a price she knows has to be paid if she is to be confident of bringing up children who will be as Jewishly committed as she is. Doors have to be closed against an open society.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Ruth keeps her questions to herself. She has made her choice with open eyes, and if her world is not perfect she will live with it. She is used to sacrifice, to closing options. Her whole lifestyle is built on it. She is, all appearances to the contrary, very much of her time. Her deep Jewish commitment is grounded less in theology, which she sees as a typically male abstraction, than in a vivid sense that she does not want the alternatives. She does not want to be pressured into a physical relationship with a boy on her third date. She does not want a marriage to be only as secure as the partners’ compatibility. She does not want to be haunted by the fear that her children will drop out or marry out. She feels the sheer power of the Jewish family tradition and knows – all the more so after college – that modern secular life offers no equivalent. She knows, too, just how vigilantly it must be guarded these days.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Her parents sometimes criticize her for, as they put it, “going back to the ghetto.” That is precisely what she has chosen to do and for compelling reasons. She knows the alternatives, and sees no other way of protecting her values, her marriage, or her future children.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Rebel**


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Richard, younger than Ruth by a year, is just finishing college. His *yarmulka* sits uneasily on his unkempt hair. He is wearing it, under protest, to please his parents. He refused, though, to wear a suit at the table. His clothes – jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket – are a calculated act of aggression. So, too, was his peremptory reading of the Haggadah*.* His Hebrew, remembered from primary school and bar mitzvah training, is still better than his father’s.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
David and Miriam never quite knew what to do with Richard. When he was 4, they knew he was going to be bright. At 7 he was quick-witted and already impatient with his teachers. At 10 he was frankly facetious about the religious instruction at his Jewish school. It was, he complained, boring, juvenile, and irrelevant. He would lie awake, even then, reading science and history books. At 11, by common consent, he went to an English public school. At 18 he won a place at Oxford. He delayed it for a year to go hitchhiking round the world.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Now in his final year at Oxford, he is contemplating a career in investigative journalism. This Pesach evening, with its déjà-vu rituals, he regards as a penance. It is, he tells himself, the price of having parents. Richard spends much of his time being angry: with the Conservative government, cuts in social services, growing inequalities, economic individualism, South Africa, the bomb, ecological exploitation, and the policies of Israel over the last decade. Anger, for Richard, is not so much an emotion as a lifestyle. This evening he has turned its full force onto the Haggadah and its assumptions.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Partly to provoke his parents, partly out of conviction, he has called the story of the Exodus paranoid and racist. “Listen to this tiny people,” he says, “having the *chutzpah* to believe that the history of the universe revolves around it. Plagues strike, the sea divides, all so that the Israelites can achieve their nationalist goals, no matter what the cost to an innocent Egyptian civilian population. No wonder that Jews find themselves the object of animosity in every generation.” Who, he asks, would not resent a minority who claimed to be the elect, the chosen people? Wouldn’t you, he asks his parents, if you were on the other side of the conversation? “Could you honestly invite a non-Jew to the *seder* and carefully translate every word – from Rabbi Akiva’s multiplication of the plagues to ‘Pour out Thy wrath on the nations’ – and *not feel embarrassed*?”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
David and Miriam often ask themselves where they went wrong with Richard. They have not yet found an easy answer. From his mid-teens he out-argued the rabbis they invited to have a word with him. They have tried the tactic of the Haggadah for the rebellious son: confrontation. They said: “If you had lived in Germany in the 1930s, for all your rejection of Judaism, you would have been condemned as a Jew, transported as a Jew, murdered as a Jew. If you had grown up in the Soviet Union you would have had your rights curtailed as a Jew. Even in Oxford or London, if you succeed too well and too fast you will still feel, behind the politeness of your intellectual friends, a suspicion of you as a Jew. You can’t reinvent yourself. In the eyes of the world an un-Jewish Jew is still a Jew.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Part of Richard’s anger is undoubtedly due to the fact that subliminally he knows this to be true. He rages against it. Everything else that he is, he has chosen to be. His school, his university, his opinions, his future career: at every stage he has felt his life to be a matter of exploring the alternatives and making a choice. He was intoxicated by the intellectual and social variety of Oxford. His sense of personal power is built on the feeling that, with enough intelligence and willpower, he can turn himself into whatever he chooses to be.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Except for this one fact. He was born a Jew. Why, he asks, does he have to take on himself the sufferings, the history, the hopes, the guilts, the inhibitions, the unbearable self-consciousness of this tormented people just because of an accident of birth? What does it have to do with him? Yes, he sympathizes with the plight of Jews in Russia. But he feels the same involvement with the blacks of South Africa and the people who live in slums in the inner cities and those others he has seen sleeping in the streets at night.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There was a time when he felt a strong attachment to Israel. He even thought he might try living there one day. That feeling began to disintegrate in 1982 during the Lebanon War and has been declining ever since. He has shocked his parents tonight by saying that if the *seder* story were being written now, the roles would be reversed: Israel would be cast in the role of the Egyptians, and it would be the Palestinians who would see themselves as the Israelites of the Bible. The remark was meant to offend, but it expresses for Richard a profound disillusionment. The one aspect of being a Jew to which he could respond was the passion for justice that came from being part of a powerless minority. To be a Jew was to be an outsider, a social critic, a religious revolutionary. Nowadays he sees his parents and their friends as politically conservative, economically established, and remorselessly middle-class. He sees in the State of Israel the compromise of power, necessary for its survival, perhaps, but not something that compels his ethical admiration.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
He has broken away from his parents’ set of contentments: their Anglican-Judaism, their annual trips to Netanya, their narrow gossip, their ethnic pride. It is all, he thinks, not offensive or objectionable but simply *small*. Judaism was once greater than this, but if this is all it currently has to offer, it does not speak to him. It may be years before he comes to terms with his identity. Ruth, his elder sister, is dismissive of his *Sturm und Drang.* It is, she tells her parents, a typical second-child syndrome. How Richard will turn out, no one knows. For the moment he hates the impositions and presumed attachments of being a Jew and wants to forget them as soon as possible.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Single-Minded Child**


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
To the rest of the family, the child sitting between Richard and David has always been known as Paul. For the past two years, though, he has insisted on being called Pinchas. Paul/Pinchas went to the same school as Richard. But while Richard was extrovert and aggressive, Paul was quiet, inward and solitary, and much given to poetry which he wrote as well as read. It was never easy to tell what Paul was thinking, but no one in the family paid much attention to him. He kept himself to himself.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 30
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
He was scheduled to go to a university. He decided to spend the months between the end of school and the beginning of his college term in Israel. Wandering abstractedly round Jerusalem one Friday, he was invited by a young rabbi to spend Shabbat at a yeshivah in the old city. Having nothing better to do, Paul agreed.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 31
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
He has been there ever since. He is not enjoying this trip home, and wants to be back as soon as Pesach is over. He knows it is a *mitzvah* to honor his parents. But they no longer speak the same language; he has had to supervise the kitchen himself to make sure it meets his newly exacting *kashrut* standards; and he feels that every day in the prosaic atmosphere of home diffuses his religious energies. Paul is a *baal teshuvah,* a religious returnee, one of many in Jerusalem today. His yeshivah and several others in the vicinity are full of young men with a similar story to tell. By now they are an identifiable group with their own distinctive subculture.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 32
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
As Pinchas he is only too happy to speak about what has happened to him, about why this ex-public-school boy now wears a beard, a dark bedraggled suit, and only occasionally a tie. It was, he explains, Divine providence, *hashgachah*, that brought him to that particular spot in Jerusalem at that particular hour. His whole previous life, he now realizes, was a case of mistaken identity. His unhappiness at school was symptomatic of a Jewish soul – a *nitzotz Eloki*, a Divine spark – ­struggling with cultural clothes, *levushim*, that did not fit because they were never made for *him.*


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 33
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
No, he is not going to a university, despite the constant pressure from his parents. What will he do for a living? “I leave that,” he smiles, “to *ha-Shem*.” Does he read secular books any more? No, he says, they are full of *kefirah*, denial. They mistake the world of the senses for reality, pleasure for happiness, reason for truth, subjective choice for the Divine command. When provoked, he says with sudden intensity: “Look at the world out there. Look what a secular society has made of itself. Wars, drugs, casual sex, AIDS, violence, materialism, consumerism, nuclear weapons, doubt, loneliness, and the meaningless pursuit of profit and success: hollow, all of it, and most of it confusion. Is that what you want me to want? When I can live a life of *kedushah*, holiness?”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 34
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Pinchas has told his parents, in response to Richard’s outburst about the Exodus and politics, that the going out of Egypt was not just a historical event with political repercussions. The word *Mitzrayim*, Egypt, means boundaries or limitations. The Exodus, he explains, is something each of us must undergo. We must move beyond our limitations, beyond the roles society assigns to the role *ha-Shem* has cast us in. “You think,” he tells his parents, “that there is something important about living in this neighborhood, going to a university, having a professional career. That is the Egypt I am escaping from. The Torah is above space and time. A *mitzvah* links us to infinity. When I eat this matzah I am affecting invisible universes. Torah, *Yiddishkeit*, is bigger than this room, this suburb, the nice-Jewish-boy scenario you have mapped out for me.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 35
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 35](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20I%3B%20PROLOGUE,_Chapter%201%3B%20A%20Family%20Portrait%3B%20Jews%20Today/r/35)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Pinchas sees his parents’ Judaism as simply superficial and uninformed. Ruth’s way of life, despite its greater consistency and depth, does not appeal to him either. It is too cold, intellectual, and measured. Prayer, he believes, is not a matter of saying the right words at the right time. It is a mystical experience, a fire, a sacrifice of self. Life as a Jew is more than a sequence of *mitzvot*: it is constant *teshuvah*, an endless process of self-transformation. Through the soul, a Jew can reach out to something greater than the world, to the mysterious infinity that surrounds and penetrates it. The political, communal, and institutional dimensions of Judaism matter less to Pinchas than this personal drama of ­self-transcendence. Israel, where he is studying, is less a place or a nation than a state of mind. The imperfections of society, he argues, are mended not through the political process but in the hearts of individuals.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 36
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
David and Miriam have gone through successive phases of reaction to Paul’s metamorphosis. At first they were delighted when he wrote home to say that he was spending time at a yeshivah. As it dawned on them that he was not going to return, they became anxious. When they went out to visit him for the first time they were shocked at the change in his appearance. Gaunt, ascetic, bearded, his facial expressions subtly changed, he reminded David more of his grandfather than his son. Who was this smiling stranger?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 37
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
They fear, sometimes, for his health, more often for his future career. Also, though they do not admit it, he makes them feel a little guilty about their own religious standards, which they defend in his presence with an overcompensating vigor. “You have to live in the world,” they say. “From faith you don’t make a living. Don’t *smile* when we’re angry.” To their friends they say, “It could have been worse. It could have been drugs or the Moonies.” To themselves, Paul remains a mystery.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 38
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Child without Questions**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 39
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 39](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20I%3B%20PROLOGUE,_Chapter%201%3B%20A%20Family%20Portrait%3B%20Jews%20Today/r/39)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
To David and Miriam, Susan, their youngest, is the one normal child in the family. Still at school – Jewish but not religious – she wears jeans, dates boys, likes Michael Jackson, watches *Neighbours* and wishes she were Kylie Minogue. She looks attractive, has a sense of humor, and finds heavy talk about Judaism a bore.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 40
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Of all the four children, she alone is prepared once in a while to accompany her parents to synagogue. She likes looking down at the boys from the women’s gallery and thinks they are altogether smarter and more appealing than the non-Jewish boys she sometimes meets at discos, with their rough clothes, their single earrings, and their passion for beer and football.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 41
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
She wants to marry a Jewish boy, a real estate agent perhaps, or someone in merchant banking. She has decided that they will live in one of the spacious outer suburbs, have two children (Gavin and Caroline, she has already decided), drive a Honda, and belong to the *shul* but not go there too often.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 42
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
If asked, Susan would say that she is not religious but that she feels completely Jewish. She supports Israel and would not mind if her future children decided to live there. She belongs to a young Jewish fundraising group and once in a while demonstrates with her classmates on behalf of Soviet Jewry.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 43
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But her interests in life lie elsewhere. Between her local rabbi and George Michael, between a religious youth group and an evening out with friends, between summer at a seminary and a fortnight in the Mediterranean, there is no contest. Susan is not Ruth. She finds her eldest sister cold and funless. Judaism is fine: she wants to get married in a synagogue and see her son celebrate his bar mitzvah. So long as it does not ask too much of her, she will not ask much of it, except to be there when it is needed.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 44
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
David and Miriam can’t help liking Susan. She is what they were thirty years ago. But thirty years ago is not today, as their other children testify. They wonder, sometimes, whether Ruth might not be right: that Jewish identity now needs stronger defenses. Will Susan meet the right Jewish boy or is there a danger that she or her children will marry out? How strong will her marriage be? How safe, humanly and Jewishly, is her free-floating lifestyle? There is, they have decided, no point in speculating. They will wait and see.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 45
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Fifth Child**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 46
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 46](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20I%3B%20PROLOGUE,_Chapter%201%3B%20A%20Family%20Portrait%3B%20Jews%20Today/r/46)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There is a fifth child in the Cohen family, but he is not present at the *seder* table to share in the story of the Exodus. He has made his exodus already and is living in Israel. Alan, 21, and known to his friends as Avi, was married last summer to an American girl. Together they live and work in a small, isolated, and highly defended settlement in the West Bank territories of Judea and Samaria.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 47
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Avi has no doubts about the meaning of Pesach. It means a willingness to leave exile, the *golah*, and take on the challenge of building a new society in Israel. One year, the last he spent at home, he delivered an impassioned speech at the *seder* table. “What’s wrong with us? The story of the Jewish people begins with Avraham leaving home and traveling to the land. The book of Genesis is about the promise of the land. The other four books of the Torah are about leaving Egypt and traveling toward the land. And yet, when it comes to the land, our nerve seems to fail us.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 48
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
“Why this obsession with *galut*? We received the Torah in exile, in the wilderness. In exile Jews invented the synagogue, wrote the Babylonian Talmud, produced the commentaries of Rashi, the poetry of Judah Halevi, and the philosophy of Maimonides. We have flourished spiritually everywhere on the face of the earth, except as a people in our own land under our own rule.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 49
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
“Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob went into exile. Jacob’s children went into exile for more than two hundred years. When Moses came to take the Israelites out, at first they did not want to leave. They told him not to make trouble. On the brink of entry, the spies lost courage. Moses himself never set foot across the Jordan. When Cyrus allowed the Babylonian exiles to return, only a part of them did. The rest were comfortable and stayed where they were. For eighteen hundred years, between the Roman destruction and the nineteenth century, Jews settled in the most distant, improbable lands, from South America to Siberia, the West Indies to China. The one place they made no serious attempt to settle was Eretz Yisrael.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 50
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
“And yet everything in Judaism points to Israel, our prayers, our festivals, above all the *seder* service. How long can we go on saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ without meaning it or doing anything about it? During this century Jews suffered a worse catastrophe than the slavery in Egypt: six million corpses in the concentration camps. During this century we experienced a greater miracle than in the days of Moses: our own land, a state, Jerusalem rebuilt. How can those be mere accidents of history? They were the hand of Providence, forcing us out of the *golah* into Eretz Yisrael.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 51
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
“This time our nerve must not fail. For thousands of years we have been saying ‘Next year.’ ‘Next year we will be free.’ ‘Next year we will be in Israel.’ ‘Next year the *mashiach* will come.’ And now it is as if God had performed all the signs and wonders and yet the Israelites were still saying, ‘Leave Egypt? Moses, what’s the hurry? Next year.’ To be a believing Jew in London when there is a *medinat Yisrael* is a contradiction in terms. We worship God and yet we turn our backs when He reveals Himself in history. I cannot live in that kind of lie. Next year I *will* be in Israel.” And he was.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 52
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It is a difficult life for Avi. The settlement is windy and exposed. Ringed around it are Arab villages. The land is inhospitable, the buildings rudimentary; there are no luxuries here. Avi must carry an automatic weapon wherever he goes. Six months ago there was a tragedy at a neighboring settlement. Arab infiltrators broke into the *bet ha-midrash* and killed two students. Despite this, he has had no second thoughts. His ideals, formed in his youth group, Bnei Akiva, and inspired by the writings of father and son, R. Avraham and R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, are clear. He is engaged in the highest of all *mitzvot*, *yishuv ha-aretz*, settling the land. He has no doubt that the historical events of the last half ­century, its unprecedented tragedies and triumphs, are part of a turbulent Providential process, the birth pangs of a new and messianic age.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 53
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The penultimate chapter of the Jewish destiny is, he feels, being written here in these desolate hills. It needs courage and faith and a steadfast refusal to be influenced by local or world opinion, which Avi and his friends in Gush Emunim know are against them. Of one thing he is sure on this Pesach night as he thinks fleetingly of his family thousands of miles away. They are telling the story of a journey from exile to a new and holy land. He is living it.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 54
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Avi used to think of the *seder* service in patterns of four: four cups of wine, four expressions of deliverance, four children. This year, studying the commentaries to the tractate of *Pesachim*, he has discovered a reference to a fifth cup of wine. Asking about it, he has found that there are not four but five expressions of deliverance. The fifth? “And I will bring you to the land.” Four cups for leaving Egypt. A fifth cup for entering Israel. Five cups, five redemptions, and after all, thinks Avi, five children. Who is the fifth child? Avi has his answer. The child who does not ask questions about Jewish history, but instead chooses to make it.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 55
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Multiple Identities**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 56
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 56](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20I%3B%20PROLOGUE,_Chapter%201%3B%20A%20Family%20Portrait%3B%20Jews%20Today/r/56)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Five children, fictions all, but each a different answer to the question of what it is to be a Jew in the late twentieth century. There are many others. Our imagined family is Orthodox. Even Richard’s rebellion was formed in his rejection of Orthodoxy of a particular kind. But around the world this Pesach evening are Jews whose Jewishness is expressed in quite other ways. Many of them are telling the same *seder* story, conscious of being part of that unique, shared history that stretches from Abraham across almost four thousand years and an unparalleled series of wanderings to the present. But for each, it holds quite different implications for what it is to be a Jew today.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 57
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There are those who see Judaism as a religion but who are ­nonetheless not Orthodox in practice or affiliation. They are Liberal or Reconstructionist or Reform or Conservative Jews. Then there are those who see Jewishness in terms of ethnicity. Being Jewish, for them, may be a matter of having Jewish parents, friends, memories, and customs without investing these with any religious interpretation. There are others who see Jewishness in terms of nationality, a matter of living in Israel, or wishing to. Yet others see their Jewishness in political, or cultural, or ethical terms. Some, if asked, would simply say that being a Jew is being an outsider, or that Jewishness is an awareness of antisemitism. Many would not know how to answer the question. They are Jews; they feel Jewish; but they could not, and would not wish to, define what that means.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 58
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This, then, is our starting point. Jewish identity – rarely before the subject of questioning and doubt – has become intensely problematic in the past two hundred years. Ruth and Richard, Pinchas, Susan, and Avi and their many alternative archetypes are contemporary figures. But behind each lies a history and a philosophy: a specific past as well as a distinctive present.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 59
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART I; PROLOGUE, Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today 59](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20I%3B%20PROLOGUE,_Chapter%201%3B%20A%20Family%20Portrait%3B%20Jews%20Today/r/59)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The issues that divide Jews today, as they divide the children of our imagined family, have a background. What led to the splintering of the common coherent idea of Jewish existence – an idea that lasted until relatively recent times – into these different and incompatible options? How did a once unified idea of the content and shape of a Jewish life come to be fragmented into these several and multiplying options?