## Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations

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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
*Contemporary Affirmations*


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
On the threshold of modernity Voltaire delivered a prediction. “When the society of man is perfected…the number of Jews will necessarily diminish. The rich among them are already beginning to detest their superstitions; theirs will be no more than the lot of people without arts and laws who, no longer able to enrich themselves through our negligence, will no longer be able to sustain a separate society, and who…ignorant even of their own books, will assimilate among the scum of other peoples.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
One cannot evaluate the impact of modernity on Jewish life without coming to terms with the harsh implications of Voltaire’s remark. Delivered in 1761, it was a secularized equivalent of an ancient Christian belief. Jews, in that theological perspective, would ultimately disappear as a separate people through their conversion to Christianity. Samuel Heilman has noted that emancipation was, in a sense, a “new version of the age-old Christian efforts to convert Jews.” Now, instead of demanding a religious transformation, “Christians were demanding a Jewish conversion to secular citizenship.” The effect would be the same. Through enlightenment, cultured Jews would be cured of their primitive religious beliefs. The others would lack leadership, knowledge, and, in the new commercial order, an economic base. They would simply disappear.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Visions of the End**


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It is impossible to read the literature of the nineteenth century without sensing how deeply this perception had, in one way or another, been internalized by Jews. Jews were in flight from Judaism. There were the systematic attempts of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud to exorcise Judaism by curing mankind of religion in general. Rational thought in the case of Spinoza, social and economic revolution in the case of Marx, and the cure of neuroses in the case of Freud would free humanity from the grip of religion and bring Judaism to an end.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There was the drive to assimilation, felt throughout Western Europe and the early Jewish settlement in America. Liberal Jews shared the conviction that antisemitism was, as Arthur Hertzberg has put it, a “chastisement for the sin of imperfect assimilation and the goad toward the messianic day when the Jews, by completely refashioning themselves in the image of proper Westerners, would have won the acceptance that they would then merit.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There was the alienation that Thorstein Veblen saw as the essence of the modern Jewish intellectual. “It is by loss of allegiance, or at best by force of a divided allegiance to the people of his origin, that he finds himself in the vanguard of modern enquiry.” And there was the complex psychology of Jewish self-hatred from Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine to Otto Weininger and Theodor Lessing.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Mordecai Kaplan began his analysis of twentieth-century Jewry with the sentence, “Before the beginning of the nineteenth century all Jews regarded Judaism as a privilege; since then most Jews have come to regard it as a burden.” It was a burden they sought, where possible, to escape. The early Reform literature is pervaded by a sense of crisis. A generation of Jews was growing up with little knowledge of and still less sympathy for their religious heritage. Judaism was disintegrating, and there was a desperate need to salvage something, however reduced, of its essence.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The literature of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy is still more fraught. It has an overwhelming mood of pathos. The old structures were collapsing and religious leaders were powerless in the face of change. After the First World War, even the last refuge of tradition, the East European *shtetl*, was beginning to dissolve. In the year that the modernist Kaplan was diagnosing the fate of American Judaism, a traditionalist in Eastern Europe was lamenting, “At one time…the benches in the *Bet Midrash* in every town were full from corner to corner and the echo of the voice of Torah reached distant places. And now! The benches of the *Bet Midrash* are empty, the sound of Torah is stopped, a terrible stillness hangs over the *Bet Midrash*.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Even those who sought to create new forms of Jewish expression were haunted by the fear that their own work would prove quixotic and futile. One architect of the new “Science of Judaism,” Leopold Zunz, declared that it was now possible to study rabbinic literature with academic detachment because the genre was at an end. The living tradition of Hebrew study had been carried “to its grave” and one could now examine it as a “sealed” historical phenomenon. Another member of the movement, Moritz Steinschneider, declared, “We have only one task left: to give the remains of Judaism a decent burial.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
That was in Germany. In Eastern Europe secular Jews were creating a literary renewal. But here too there was a mood of fated failure. The poet Y. L. Gordon wrote, “For whom do I labor? Who will tell me the future, will tell me that I am not the last poet of Zion and you my last readers?” As he was writing, a new poet was emerging, Chaim Nachman Bialik, who described himself, too, as “the last of the last.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The early Zionist theoreticians, for their part, were convinced that Jewish survival in the diaspora was at an end. Pinkser, Nordau, and Herzl saw the problem in terms of the dangerously high and rising current of antisemitism. Jacob Klatzkin believed that the Jewish people would disappear of its own accord even without persecution. “The hold of the forms of our religion, which have served as barriers between us and the world for about two thousand years, has weakened and there are no longer any strong ghetto walls to protect a national entity in the *Galut*.” Even if some attenuated Judaism were to survive, it would not, he declared, be “worthy of survival.” Jews would be condemned to a “rootless and restless wandering between two worlds” and would become “individuals diseased by ambivalence, consumed by contradictions, and spent by restless inner conflict.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
If there is one leitmotif running through Jewish and non-Jewish responses to emancipation, it is that Jewish existence, especially in the diaspora, had reached its final chapter. Here and there Jews might remain. But Judaism, or some affirmative Jewish identity, was beyond recovery. These are not the stray perceptions of individuals afflicted with more than usual melancholy. They embody a mood that dominated several generations and ran across the entire ideological spectrum. One writer, Alan Miller, has described the nineteenth century as a collective Jewish nervous breakdown. Not since the Book of Lamentations had there been such bleak and unrelieved pessimism about the Jewish future.


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


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The obituary was premature. Surveying the contemporary Jewish world two centuries after the French Revolution and the destructive and self-destructive forces it set in motion, a Jew surely feels moved – even as he remembers the ovens of Auschwitz – to recite the ancient words of the *She-hecheyanu* blessing, “Who has kept us alive, and helped us to survive, and brought us to this time.” For the first time in almost two thousand years there is again a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Jews flourish in the diaspora. There is an unprecedented revival of Jewish learning. There are more Jews studying in yeshivot than at any time since the days of the Babylonian academies. In America, there are more than a thousand Jewish studies programs in universities. The literature of Jewish self-hatred is at an end. The fact of Jewish birth is no longer viewed as a burden, a stigma, a misfortune. All this seemed improbable in 1789, impossible in 1939. A half century after the Final Solution, young Jews sing in the streets of Jerusalem, *Am Yisrael chai*. The people Israel lives.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Why has it happened? Why did Jewish identity not simply evaporate during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as had been predicted by the most informed observers? There are no simple answers. But this at least is clear. The social processes that were generally believed to be moving in a single direction turned out to be more complex and multifaceted than was recognized at the time. Against the current of assimilation there were reactions and resistances. In part, these had to do with the unique Jewish experience of modernity. In part, they parallel more general trends in the secularization of society.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Assimilation is a two-way process. It implies a willingness on the part of a minority to be absorbed. But it also implies a willingness on the part of the majority to absorb. The liberal theorists who first propounded the social and political programs of emancipation had inordinate faith in the power of reason to dispel prejudice and superstition. They tacitly assumed that hostility to Jews in the majority society was a relic of Christian attitudes. Once culture became predominantly secular, tolerance would follow. The disappearance of anti-Jewish discrimination would open the way to the absorption of Jews into the social mainstream.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
They reckoned without the persistence of prejudice. As Max Nordau was to say in his speech to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, “In order to produce its full effect, emancipation should first have been realized in sentiment before it was proclaimed by law.” It was not. Suspicion of Jews remained. Law and theory were in advance of the public mood. The liberals were guilty, he said in retrospect, of trying to impose “creations of pure intellect [on] the world in reality.” The result was a rebellion of popular sentiment and the mutation of Christian anti-Judaism into its secular equivalent: racial antisemitism.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Jews found themselves being excluded, as Jacob Katz has documented, from supposedly secular meeting grounds such as the Masonic lodges. Unless they converted and were baptized, they found avenues of professional advancement closed to them in the civil service, sciences and arts, and in the universities. There were many tragic cases of Jews who had made every effort to cast off their Jewish heritage and yet who found themselves rejected by the Gentile society of which they had tried so assiduously to become a part. Again, Nordau went to the heart of the problem. The emancipated Jew, he said, “flees from his Jewish fellows, because antisemitism has taught him too to be contemptuous of them, but his Gentile compatriots repulse him as he attempts to associate with them. He has lost his home in the ghetto, yet the land of his birth is denied to him as his home.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But if conversion was to be the only route to social acceptance, it was not a price most Jews were willing to pay. This was not an attitude of Orthodox Jews only. Across a wide range of commitments, the act of baptism seemed to Jews to be dishonorable, a form of betrayal. Even converted Jews, like Heine, were ambivalent about what they had done. Heine himself wrote to a friend in 1826, “I am now hated by Christian and Jew alike. I am truly sorry that I permitted myself to be baptized. I do not see that my lot has improved; rather, since then, I have had nothing but ill-luck.”


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


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The combination of antisemitism and persisting Jewish loyalties led to a paradoxical development. It was precisely those who had been most inclined to assimilation who were most affected by, and sensitized to, anti-Jewish attitudes in the host society. Within the traditional community, an increasingly tolerant approach to Christianity had developed from the seventeenth century onwards, and this was sustained during the nineteenth century. It was the reformers, among them Abraham Geiger and Ludwig Philippsohn, and later Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, and Leo Baeck, who developed a systematic critique of Christianity and set out to prove the superiority of Judaism.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
At a later stage it was a succession of deeply estranged Jews – Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Max Nordau, and Theodor Herzl – who were radicalized by antisemitism into a new affirmation of Jewish identity in the form of secular Zionism. The dialect of Jewish courtship and Gentile refusal led, in other words, to new Jewish affirmations among those who were least disposed to maintain a traditional Jewish identity.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The same process had been at work in more recent times among secular Jewish intellectuals. The model here is Franz Kafka, and the group includes writers and critics like George Steiner, Leslie Fiedler, and Lionel Trilling. For them the very feeling of marginality, of belonging nowhere, becomes the content and basis of a new mode of Jewishness. The paradox was best expressed by the writer Frederic Raphael who declared, “I feel myself alien from everyone. This is my kind of Jewishness.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The dialectic was to have a further turn. For it was to those who had experienced these schizophrenic identities that the completely non-Westernized Jew had made a powerful impact as a figure of wholeness, vigor, and authenticity. Already in 1862 the secularized Moses Hess was contrasting German Jewry unfavorably with the *chasidim*, whom he held up as models of Jewish vitality. The process became more marked during the early decades of the twentieth century, partly because East European Jews were beginning to arrive in Germany in increasing numbers, and partly because the First World War took Jews serving in the German army eastward, where some encountered the *shtetl* for the first time. The *Ostjude,* or Eastern Jews, became a powerful symbol in the imagination of assimilated Jews, as an antidote to the rationalized, diluted, acculturated Judaism they saw among their parents and peers.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Among those who were affected by this mood of ­anti-Westernization were Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Jiri Langer. In Rosenzweig’s case it led to a partial return to tradition; in Langer’s yet more so. But it generated a more fundamental intellectual turn, away from the rationalism and universalism that had held a previous generation captive, towards a reassessment of the Jewish mystical tradition and the value of an unapologetic assertion of Jewish differentness. In Buber and Scholem it led onward to Zionism.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The religious history of European Jewry between the First and Second World Wars has been insufficiently studied, dwarfed as it was by the cataclysms of the nineteenth century on the one hand and the Holocaust on the other. But it was a period of Orthodox revival, one in which many new yeshivot were opened and in which the Orthodox community became more self-confident and politically active. The circle around Franz Rosenzweig was not the only one in which *teshuvah* – a return to Jewish roots and sources – was in the air. Had the Shoah not killed the movement in its infancy, a major shift of sentiment might have gathered momentum. As it was, in the wake of the destruction, Jewish life shifted to Israel and America, two relatively new Jewries institutionally and demographically. The *teshuvah* movement did not make its appearance there until the 1960s, where it took observers by surprise.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In retrospect, though, this now appears to be part of the inner dynamic of modernization, in which assimilatory forces are countered in later generations by the search for authenticity. Sociologists have formulated this elegantly as Hansen’s law: the third generation seeks to remember what the second generation labored to forget. Earlier gestures of acculturation now come to be seen as compromises. Jews who had avoided or resisted the modernization process now stand out, not as anachronisms but as archetypes of integrity and wholeness. Counter-assimilation as well as assimilation is part of the dynamic of modernity.


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


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But the revival of Jewish identity has been part of a more widespread phenomenon. Sociologists, until the 1950s, had widely held to a cluster of assumptions about the effects of modernization on religious and ethnic behavior. The “secularization thesis” predicted a gradual decline of the role of religion in society. The growth of scientific knowledge meant, or so it was assumed, that religious beliefs would no longer be needed to explain the universe and the place of the individual within it. As industrialization and bureaucratization changed the face of the economy and government, decisions would be increasingly taken on rational grounds, with tradition playing a diminishing role. The very notion of human progress which so dominated the nineteenth century implied a revolution of thought from a tradition-bound to a future-oriented society. These and other factors combined to signal the marginalization of religion and its eventual eclipse.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
What no one predicted was that by the late twentieth century, religion would continue to dominate political conflict in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, other parts of the Middle East, and Latin America. Nor was it foreseen that there would be a resurgence of conservative or what is sometimes called “fundamentalist” religiosity in both Christianity and Islam. The strength of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is particularly striking in the United States, a society that has undergone advanced secularization. The same is true about another feature of American society: the growth, especially since the 1960s, of new sects and cults, some utopian, some concerned with the search for mystical experience.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Sociologists are divided as to how to interpret these phenomena. Do they signal the return of religion to a place of prominence, or are they its last death throes? Both cases have been argued. Indeed, Will Herberg, in his *Protestant-Catholic-Jew* (1955) argued that both were true. American society was becoming more religious and more secular at the same time. Religious affiliation and observance was rising but religious belief was declining. Churches and synagogues now had less to do with traditional faith than with social belonging and a celebration of the American way of life. This trend has since been labeled “civil religion,” and long before it was identified as such, it had its Jewish theoreticians.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), the son of a rabbi and one of the fathers of modern sociology, argued that the function of religion was to create group solidarity. Achad ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927), the proponent of “cultural” Zionism, applied this to Judaism. Jewish faith and practice were to be reinterpreted as expressions, not of the Divine but of the national will. One of his famous remarks was that “more than the Jewish people has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jewish people.” Judaism could in effect be rewritten with the word “God” deleted and in its place the phrase “the Jewish nation.” Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1982), influenced by both Durkheim and Achad ha-Am, proposed a new definition of Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization” of the Jewish people. Religion could fulfill its social function without reference to a supernatural God. He called his philosophy Reconstructionism, and it has organized its own synagogues and rabbinical seminary in America.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 34
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Achad ha-Am and Kaplan, in their drastic secularization of Judaism, reveal how traditional forms persist even in the absence of religious belief. But belief itself has not been dethroned to the extent that was once foreseen. The secular state leaves a vacuum in the lives of its citizens. John Stuart Mill foresaw a situation in which the state did not attempt to legislate morality but left it to the private choices of individuals, insofar as they did not harm others. To a large extent this has occurred in Western societies. What he did not foresee was the deeply unsettling effect of the collapse of a shared public morality. Again it was Durkheim who first charted the personal disorientation that ensued. He called it “anomie.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 35
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The loss of community, moral absolutes, and a sense of personal meaning have been among the major discontents of secular society. Peter Berger notes that “modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear.” Here lie some of the roots of the unexpected present strength of religious movements – among them Orthodox Judaism – that emphasize authority, discipline, and objective truth. To the extent that they refuse to admit “modern consciousness” and its pluralism, relativism, and individualism, they become compelling alternatives in a society marked by alienation, confusion, and personal anonymity. They offer clear moral guidance. They give direction to personal life. They allow the individual to inhabit a meaningful universe. They recreate the institutions – above all, the local community and the family – in which life can be lived with a sense of continuity, purposefulness, and historical depth.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
To be sure, sociology is not theology. The truth of religious beliefs is unaffected by their attractiveness or otherwise in a given age. But the Jewish believer may well feel that there is a more than accidental relationship between a religious life, personal fulfillment, and the strength of community. Revelation and creation proceed from the same source: therefore, there is an inner connection between the life of the commands and human flourishing. The discontents of secularization, seen from this perspective, point to the impossibility of constructing a social order on human values alone. To say this is, of course, to have made a leap of faith. But even without it, the available evidence points to the striking persistence of religious institutions, some highly secularized, others resolutely not so, long after a previous generation of social theorists had predicted their extinction.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 37
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Enduring Ethnicity**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 38
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The same is true about ethnicity. Just as the secularization thesis envisaged the eclipse of religion, so the “melting pot” theory of the modern state assumed that within three or so generations, the distinctive subcultures of immigrants would be lost as the children and grandchildren progressively acculturated. This process was particularly poignant for Jews, for whom ethnicity and religion are closely intertwined.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Early on in the nineteenth century, French Jews had observed this happening to their own society. “The grandfather believes, the father doubts, the son denies. The grandfather prays in Hebrew, the father prays in French, the son does not pray at all. The grandfather has remained Jewish, the father is assimilated, the son no longer identifies.” The problem was compounded by the unique ambivalence many Jews had and still have toward social integration. On the one hand, they wished to retain their group identity. They opposed conversion and intermarriage. On the other hand, they did not seek to be publicly identifiable. Charles Liebman remarks that “Jews incessantly demand that they be treated as if Jewishness does not exist. Nothing pleases most Jews more than to be told that they don’t look Jewish or behave Jewishly.” The comedian Jackie Mason, who specializes in Jewish ethnic humor, comments on the ambivalence of his audiences. They laugh loudly, then complain at the end of the performance: “Too Jewish.” Sidney Morganbesser formulated the axiom of diaspora Jewishness in a memorable phrase: *Incognito, ergo sum.*


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Jewish acculturation took place in all societies that opened the doors of emancipation. In America, Jews relentlessly pursued an upward path on the social ladder. The process occurred three times over, first to the early Sephardic immigrants of the eighteenth century, then to the German Jews who arrived between 1815 and 1880, and then to the vast wave of Eastern European immigrants – more than 3 million of them – between 1880 and 1920. Their desire to be Americanized was passionate. Some of the best-known anthems to the American dream were written by Jews: Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” The route involved a progression from small to larger businesses and from there to management and the professions; a university education; a move to the outer suburbs; and often a change of name. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some 50,000 Americans each year made court applications to change their family name. Eighty percent of them were Jews.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Part of the process, perceived as such, was an abandonment of Judaism. Religion was a barrier to social mobility. To the second generation, parental piety was part of an Eastern Europe they had left behind. The very secularity of America and its rigid separation of church and state was integral to its openness as a society. Jews became and remain measurably the most secular of all ethnic groups. In a Gallup survey published in 1984, in answer to the question, “Is religion very important in your life?” 61 percent of Protestants and 56 percent of Catholics, but only 25 percent of Jews, answered in the affirmative. A succession of surveys has showed synagogue attendance among Jews to be markedly lower than church attendance among Christians.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
If there was one proposition on which the several nineteenth-century approaches to the Jewish future were agreed, it was that there could be no such thing as secular Jewish survival in the diaspora. Jewish identity might be religious in the *golah* or secular in Eretz Yisrael, but these were exclusive alternatives. There could be no persisting ethnic identity outside Israel. This view was expressed well into the second half of the twentieth century by Jewish secularists like Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper, and Georges Friedmann. For the Jew who was not religious, there was a choice between individual assimilation in the diaspora and collective assimilation in Israel.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Recently, however, evidence has been accumulated by American-Jewish observers like Charles Silberman, Calvin Goldscheider, and Steven M. Cohen to show that Jewish ethnicity survives in surprisingly vigorous forms. Jews, argues Cohen, “may indeed represent the single white refutation of the universality of the melting pot thesis.” To be sure, the conclusion depends not only on the evidence but on a particular way of interpreting it. Traditional indicators of Jewish continuity – synagogue affiliation, religious observance, and resistance to intermarriage – show a steady decline. This, for sociologists like Charles Liebman, points toward the undeniable fact of American-Jewish assimilation. The “transformationists,” though, argue that new modes of Jewish ethnicity are emerging and it is by these that the community must be judged.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The question, Goldscheider insists, is: Do Jews hold together as an identifiable group? If ethnic strength is to be measured by “the number and intensity of in-group interactions,” then the answer is Yes. What emerges from his studies is the paradox that Jews have been so successful in their pursuit of Americanization that they have become more like one another and less like everyone else. They go to college, pursue postgraduate studies, and enter the professions more than any other religious or ethnic grouping. The educational and economic gap between Jews on the one hand, and Protestants and Catholics on the other, has grown larger over time. “The growing occupational similarity among Jews,” he argues, “implies greater similarity in lifestyle, residence, values, schooling, family, and economic and political interests. These patterns mesh together in ways to reinforce Jewish cohesion and distinctiveness.” If Judaism no longer unites Jews, overachieving does.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 45
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Jewish identity, in this analysis, has no definitive content. But it persists. It is measured by relatively loose associations: Jewish friends, Jewish attitudes – in particular, support for the State of Israel – and an occasional religiosity on major Jewish festivals and life-cycle events. There is also evidence to show that the major upheavals associated with assimilation stabilize by the fourth generation, at which point children tend more closely to resemble their parents’ behavioral patterns. These newly optimistic forecasts are very recent: they date from the 1980s. As late as 1976, a report of the Harvard Center for Population Studies was predicting a decline of the American Jewish community within a century, from 6 million to 944,000, or in another estimate, 10,420 Jews. The newer perception suggests that just as contemporary urban and suburban culture does not extinguish religion so it does not eliminate ethnicity. Instead it leads to a subtle dialectic of accommodation and resistance, to new modes of Jewish expression, and to the revival, after an initial period of adjustment, of an affirmative Jewishness.


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


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These are sociological factors. But perhaps the most notable change that marks the late twentieth century as a significant turn in Jewish modernity lies at the level of consciousness. Throughout the nineteenth century, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, Jews were profoundly affected by the universalism of Enlightenment thought. This was the intellectual equivalent of the social process of assimilation, and it left little room for Jewish particularity. Humanity, ethics, and religious truth were universal concepts, arrived at by reason and accessible to all. Where, in this scheme of things, was there room for the ideas on which Judaism and Jewishness rested: revelation, a chosen people, and a code of conduct that embodies Jewish singularity and the desire *not* to be like everyone else?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 48
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Almost all Jews who entered into an inner dialogue with these Enlightenment assumptions were deeply affected by the conflict. At one level it led to the many visions of the disappearance of Judaism and of Jews as an identifiable people, with the possible exception of a “saving remnant” in the small enclaves of the yeshivot and the chasidic circles. At another level it led, in Reform Judaism, secular Zionism, and among Jewish immigrants to America, to a profound desire for the “normalization” of Jewish existence.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In Reform it led to a negation of religious differentness in favor of a universal ethical mission. In the newly emancipated European Jews and immigrant Americans, it led to a kind of strategic social invisibility. Jews learned not to speak with a Yiddish accent, wear head coverings in public, or display the indiscreet familiarities of the ghetto. John Murray Cuddihy described this as “the ordeal of civility,” and Maurice Samuel reflected that “the Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has been promised that their historic destiny is – to be nice.” In secular Zionism it led to a negation of the whole ethos of the Jewish past and a desire to be *ke-khol ha-goyim*, like all the nations. The Israeli secularist Amnon Rubinstein put it bluntly: “‘To be a goy’ was…the dominant theme of Zionist philosophy in its formative period.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Though these attitudes persist, two seminal events in Jewish history have brought about a revolution in Jewish sensibilities. The first, the Holocaust, was a murderous assault on the Jewish people in its irreducible singularity. Regardless of their faith or lack of it, their nationality, their degree of acculturation or their utility, Jews as such were scheduled for destruction. The second, the birth of the State of Israel, was marked not by harmony but by conflict and immediate war. Israel has not been normalized within the international political arena, and increasingly the phrase that seems to encapsulate her destiny has not been “like all the nations” but *am levadad yishkon*, “the people that dwells alone.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The shift in consciousness was not immediate. But it came with stunning force in the weeks surrounding the 1967 Six-Day War. Isolated and under threat, Israel seemed in danger of the unthinkable: a second holocaust. It was then that the trauma of the Shoah, long repressed, came to the surface both in Israel and the *golah*. The sudden and unexpected victory, and especially the reunification of Jerusalem, seemed to many to be a moment of almost messianic significance. A long-accumulated burden of self-doubt and stigma was lifted. Throughout the world Jews walked with a new pride. Head coverings, especially the *kippah serugah* or knitted skullcap associated with religious Zionism, reappeared among the young.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Deep connections were made where there had previously been dissociation. American Jewry, which until then had been somewhat passively Zionist, was energized into political and fundraising support for Israel. In Israel itself there was a new consciousness of the diaspora. Hitherto almost all Zionist thinkers had seen Israel as *shelilat ha-golah*, the negation of the diaspora. Israel would end antisemitism. As Ben-Gurion argued, hostility to Jews was purely the result of statelessness, of “our peculiar status that does not accord with the established framework of the nations of the world.” In the early years of the state, memories of the Holocaust had been deliberately suppressed as a shameful episode of Jewish passivity.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Now many of these attitudes were revised. Diaspora Jewry became suddenly prominent as Israel’s sole unconditional ally. Gentile hostility began to be seen as an enduring feature of Israel’s existence. The words of the Haggadah came to mind: “In every generation they rose up against us to destroy us.” Memories of the Holocaust, which had been stirred by the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, surfaced in 1967 in the form of the imperative, “Never again.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 54
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**The Return of Jewish Particularism**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 55
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The Six-Day War was a unique moment which gave dramatic focus to trends that had been slowly forming before: the emergent ethnicity of Jews in the diaspora and a search for identity among a new generation of Israelis. In retrospect it may yet emerge as the most significant catalyst of Jewish identity since the events of 1789. A period of history was over. Jews had passed through the fires of emancipation. In America they had acquired acceptance and social standing. In Israel they had achieved statehood. The battles of the nineteenth century no longer needed to be fought.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The Jewish people had survived the lure of assimilation and the onslaught of attempted genocide. The Shoah taught that Jews could not hide their singularity. After 1967 it seemed that Israel too was being forced into a special destiny. Writing in the wake of the Six-Day War, Milton Himmelfarb perfectly described the mood that came over Jews throughout the world: “Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable…. The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers. Big things seem to happen around us and to us.”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
A. Roy Eckardt has described the change as the “new Jewish stand,” a determination to stand up to the world, assertive and unashamed. Its most significant feature is a revival of particularism. Jewish concerns have turned inward, toward Israel and Jewish survival. Jews in the diaspora have become more activist and high profile. Though the religious meaning of the Holocaust and the State of Israel remains elusive and much debated, their existential impact has been clear. Israel is the affirmation of life over Auschwitz’s shadow of death. Jewish survival has become charged with a vast resonance.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Emil Fackenheim, again writing in 1967, gave these ideas their most famous formulation: “I confess I used to be highly critical of Jewish philosophies which seemed to advocate no more than survival for survival’s sake. I have changed my mind. I now believe that in this present, unbelievable age, even a mere collective commitment to Jewish group-survival for its own sake is a momentous response, with the greatest implications.” It translates itself, he said, into a 614th commandment. “The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” Whether frustrating Hitler is an adequate or healthy basis for Jewish continuity is open to question. But the quest for normalization was over. The concern was now for the survival of the *am segulah*, the people that with or against its will has singularity thrust upon it.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The effects have been evident in several directions. In American Reform Judaism there has been a gradual turn back toward traditional forms. Bar mitzvah ceremonies have reappeared in place of or in addition to “confirmation.” There has been renewed interest in halakhah. Hebrew plays a larger part in the liturgy. The Reform movement has begun creating its own day schools. Hitherto it had insisted that religion, not peoplehood, was the essence of Judaism. But in its latest major statement, the “Centenary Perspective” of 1976, it declared that “the survival of the Jewish people is of the highest priority.” In 1885 it had been frankly anti-Zionist. By 1976 it was asserting that “we consider the State of Israel vital to the welfare of Judaism everywhere.” Collectively, these represent a Copernican revolution when compared with the universalist and anti-ritual Pittsburgh Platform of 1885.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In Israel too, as Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah have documented, the new “civil religion” has reversed many of the assumptions of the Zionist-socialist founders. Religious symbols and concepts are more widely used. There is a convergence of Israeli and Jewish identities. In part this had been due to the increasing demographic impact of the Oriental Jewish immigrants, more traditional than the East European secularists who constituted the majority of the pre-state *yishuv*. But the politics of the last twenty years have also been significant. Surrounded by enemies, in a world perceived to be hostile, Israelis have found traditional images of the tense relationship between Jacob and Esau more relevant than Zionist-socialist universalism.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 61
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The destinies of Israel and the *golah* have become more closely interlinked. Far from negating the diaspora, Israel has provided it with a focus of identity. The either/or of the nineteenth century – either Judaism as a religion in the diaspora or as a nation in Eretz Yisrael – has been transcended. They have emerged not as two exclusive alternatives but instead as a complex symbiosis, each supporting the other in a variety of ways. Perhaps the single word that best describes the new Jewish focus is not religion or nationalism but *peoplehood*, understood as an identification with Jews throughout the world and their shared history, culture, and traditions. This is not necessarily expressed in terms of religious belief. Still less is it reflected in a widespread return to halakhic observance. But it marks the end of the chapter opened by emancipation, and the beginning of what one might call Jewish post-modernity.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 62
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Prediction and Promise**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 63
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
A new era in Jewish history, one that we have charted in the last three chapters, began with Voltaire’s prediction of the disappearance of the Jews. Emancipation posed a fateful choice for Jewish identity and initiated a series of redefinitions which deeply fragmented the Jewish people. It induced widespread doubts about the internal capacity of Jews to survive. There were external fears too. Racial antisemitism was rising throughout Europe. It exploded in the Russian pogroms of the 1880s. There were Jews who were aware that this was only the beginning. In Leon Pinsker’s *Auto-Emancipation* (1882), one of the seminal documents of the nineteenth century, the shadow of death already hangs heavily over the Jewish people. Jews are “ghosts,” “no longer alive, and yet moving about among the living,” a chosen people only in the sense of the people chosen for universal hatred. “For the living, the Jew is a dead man.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 64
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Voltaire, a man of enlightenment, had believed that Jews would disappear of their own accord. “We ought not,” he said, “to burn them.” That was in 1756. By 1833, a German writer using the name Dominicus Haman Epiphanes was less patient. After contemplating several alternatives for making the world *Judenrein*, he concluded that “the total extermination of Jewry would be incomparably easier.” Jews, he wrote, could be turned into “tallow candles, iron medals, or pretty milk-white glass.” Next, “a competition in the field of economics would be announced, whose subject would be according to which principles the total massacre of Jewry could be used to improve the soil.” The unthinkable had been uttered. A century later it began to be planned. Enlightenment ended in Holocaust. Jewish children were burned to the music of string quartets.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 65
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
By its close, the Central and Eastern European Jewries, who had given the Jewish world its revolutionary new identities and its most spirited defenses of tradition, had been reduced to ashes. The Reform Temple in Hamburg, the Russian centers of the “Lovers of Zion,” Hirsch’s Frankfurt, the great yeshivot of Pressburg and Volozhyn were ruins populated by the ghosts of a murdered dream. The great experiment of European humanism, Jewish emancipation, died in the ovens of Auschwitz.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 66
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The new Jewish affirmation – the determination after the Holocaust to survive, to defend, to face the world as *Jews* – is therefore a momentous response and one that must evoke religious wonder. Whether our vision is secular or religious, we stand in the presence of a miracle, human or Divine. It is difficult not to feel beneath the surface of contemporary Jewish peoplehood the touch of the *Shekhinah,* the Divine Presence. And it is hard to avoid that sense of a prescripted destiny which lies at the heart of the Jewish idea of providence. For pre- and post-Holocaust Jewish existence has traced out the oldest and most haunting theme of the Bible: the improbability and yet the certainty of the survival of the covenantal people.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 67
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The first Jew was almost the last. The first promise to Abram was, “I will make you into a great nation.” Immediately thereafter Abram ­experiences exile, a family quarrel, and a war, events that were to become continuing motifs of Jewish existence. There then follows the most poignant motif of all. Abram’s first recorded words to God are, “O Lord, God, what will You give me if I remain childless?”


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Judaism is the story of the covenantal family, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Torah begins with humanity as a whole, with man made in the image of God, and with Noah with whom God makes a covenant. From then on it narrows its attention to one family singled out to keep the way of God, doing charity and justice. In its history and inner life God makes His Presence known in a peculiarly manifest way.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The survival of the Jewish people is therefore a continuing paradox. On the one hand, as bearers of the Divine Presence, the people of Israel is eternal as God Himself is eternal. As Jeremiah was to prophesy: “Thus said the Lord, who established the sun for light by day, the laws of the moon and stars for light by night.... If these laws should ever be annulled by Me – declares the Lord – only then would the offspring of Israel cease to be a nation before Me for all time.” Israel will last as long as the sun and the stars. But on the other hand, its survival from one generation to the next is never assured or natural. It exists in and by a faith in the supernatural. It suffers exiles and wanderings. As a nation in its land, it is always surrounded by larger and hostile empires. In dispersal it is a fragile minority, not knowing whether more to fear oppression or assimilation. Its continuity is never mere survival. It is a miracle, repeatedly taking both Jews and non-Jews by surprise.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations 70
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The first words of Abram to God thus announce a recurring theme. Abram has no children. He can see no future generation. The end of the covenantal people is in sight. The text continues: “God then took him outside and said: Look at the sky and count the stars. See if you can count them. He then said to him: Thus shall your descendants be.” Why “outside”? The rabbis interpreted the word to mean that God took Abram outside the laws of nature and historical process. The driving tension of the Jewish people would be the conflict between the prediction and the promise. On the basis of prediction, the family of Abram would come to an end. On the basis of promise it would revive and be as eternal as the stars. That, too, has been the story of Jews and Judaism in modern times.