## Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy

###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 1
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/1)

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


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 2
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 2](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/2)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In 1929 a young American Orthodox rabbi, Oscar Fasman, had just completed his rabbinic training. He and his fellow graduates were about to set out on a career of teaching Torah and ministering to congregations in the Midwest of America. “We were not,” he recalls, “overly optimistic about our chances of success.” Around them, Jews had virtually abandoned *kashrut* and Shabbat. Reform was the dominant presence. Such Orthodox synagogues as there were, were small, poor, and largely comprised of elderly immigrants. Tradition seemed fated to extinction. Even some of the Orthodox synagogues had decided to meet Reform halfway by abolishing the *mechitzah*, the barrier between the sexes, in favor of mixed seating at services. One of Fasman’s teachers at the seminary described his own role as “being available to recite, a generation or so later, the final kaddish for Orthodoxy.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 3
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/3)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
If this was true of the new world, it was true also of the old. At around the same time, the outstanding scholar and saint of East European Orthodoxy, R. Israel Meir ha-Cohen, the *Chafetz Chayyim*, was lamenting the collapse of religious life in the wake of the upheavals of the First World War. “The sanctity of the Holy Torah is declining from day to day at a frightening pace. The new generation is growing up without Torah and faith. They are becoming wayward children who deny God and His Torah. And if, God forbid, this situation continues much longer, who knows to what condition we will fall. The mind compels one to believe that it will not be long before our righteous Messiah will come.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 4
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 4](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/4)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Orthodoxy was in retreat. In Germany it had long been threatened by the Jewish desire for acculturation. In Eastern Europe it was now being confronted by revolution. Young Jews were joining socialist or communist organizations. Jewish girls were involved in the emerging feminist movements. Those who felt their Jewishness most strongly, expressed it in a stridently secular Zionism. In America, Judaism was disintegrating in the pursuit of opportunity. Orthodoxy – everywhere, it seemed – evoked images of an old and outworn order. Such was the prevailing mood in 1933.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 5
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 5](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/5)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
And if before the Second World War, Orthodoxy appeared to be dying, the war itself and its aftermath seemed to seal its fate. The last remaining hinterlands of traditional faith in Central and Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust. An era was ended. From now on Jewish life would be focused on two centers, Israel and America, in both of which secularization had proceeded faster than anywhere else.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 6
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/6)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Since 1912, when the leaders of European Orthodoxy dissociated themselves from the Zionist movement by forming Agudat Yisrael, the momentum of Zionism had been almost wholly secular. There were small enclaves of Orthodoxy in the old *yishuv* of pre-1880 settlers. There was a group of religious Zionists, mainly represented by Mizrachi, who remained in dialogue with the secularists. But the dominant voice belonged to Zionist socialism, which, though it took over some of the language and symbolism of tradition, was either hostile or indifferent to religion.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 7
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 7](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/7)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Nachman Syrkin, one of the movement’s ideologists, had written that “Zionist socialism sees in the applied Jewish religion, which is not a religion but a tragedy, the major impediment confronting the Jewish nation on the road to culture, science, freedom.” The focus of Zionist Socialism was not God but the Jewish people itself. The biblical phrase “who can tell the glories of God” became, in a popular song of the time, “who can tell the glories of Israel.” History seemed to concur in its verdict. The Jews who had faith in Heaven had stayed in Europe and been murdered. The Jews who had faith in themselves had gone to Israel and been victorious in the War of Independence. Orthodoxy was part of *galut*, exilic consciousness. *Galut* was a chapter that had ended in tragedy. Jewish history had moved on.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 8
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 8](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/8)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In America, meanwhile, Jews were on the road to achieving what they had sought in Europe, social integration and economic success. America’s individualism did not sit easily with the disciplines and restraints of halakhah. Nor was there the stabilizing influence of an extant tradition. American Jewry was newborn. It had no institutions carried over from premodern Jewish life. The German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century brought Reform with them, and they developed it in radical rather than conservative directions. By 1883, at the dinner given to honor the first graduating class of the Reform rabbinical seminary, the Hebrew Union College, the menu consisted of clams, crab, oysters, and shrimp. The pursuit of Americanness had become the new faith of America’s Jews. One Jewish writer, recalling his childhood in the 1920s, describes how at the age of five he first asked his mother what his religion was. “If anyone ever asks you that again,” his mother replied, “just tell them you’re an American.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 9
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 9](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/9)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The Orthodox leaders of Eastern Europe advised their alumni to avoid taking rabbinical positions in America. It was a *treifa medinah*, an impure land. As a result, Orthodoxy and its rabbinate lacked organization, authority, and prestige. Jews in the urban ghettos placed their children in state schools. Jewish education, such as it was, came through *chadarim*, after-school classes, remembered by those who attended them for their ramshackle premises, arbitrary discipline, and pedagogically untrained teachers. Yeshivah scholars did arrive in America, but often left disillusioned. One observer wrote in 1910 that parents pay Hebrew teachers “only the going price for the job, which is generally not enough either to live on or to die – and thus schoolmastering has become a low, despised trade…chosen only by a man who has tried his luck at every trade and skill, who sees that his stars of success are extinct and that lifelong darkness awaits him.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 10
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 10](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/10)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The dynamic of congregational life rested with lay rather than rabbinic leaders. Restless with an Orthodoxy that seemed not to understand America, not yet ready for a Reform that seemed Germanic, exclusive, and cold, the second generation created its own pragmatic compromise. The Conservative Judaism that emerged was marked by a sharp divergence between theory and practice. Theory was taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary; practice was dictated by the conventions of Jewish suburbia. The younger members of the congregation observed neither *kashrut* nor Shabbat, but they expected their rabbi to do so. The rabbi’s contract came up for regular renewal, so major confrontations on religious principle were ill-advised. In such an environment, the march of acculturation seemed inevitable. Orthodoxy was for the immigrants, the old, the undereducated, the poor. It was the lowest rung on the social ladder which all were expected to climb.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 11
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/11)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Caught between a secularist Israel and a secularizing America, the end of Orthodoxy was in sight.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 12
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 12](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/12)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Orthodoxy in America**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 13
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 13](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/13)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
So Charles Liebman’s conclusion in 1965 seemed eccentric, if not wishful thinking. For he ended his study of “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life” with the judgment that “the only remaining vestige of passion in America resides in the Orthodox community.” There is, he said, “a recognition and admiration for Orthodoxy as the only group which today contains within it a strength and will to live that may yet nourish all the Jewish world.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 14
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 14](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/14)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
By the 1980s that prognosis had been fully vindicated. Orthodoxy flourishes in both America and Israel. In America Jewish day schools, overwhelmingly an Orthodox phenomenon, had increased from some thirty establishments after the war to 587 by 1986. The Jewish day school had initially been opposed as a barrier to Jewish integration in America. But between 1962 and 1986, the enrollment at such schools more than doubled, from 60,000 to 130,000.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 15
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 15](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/15)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Yeshivot, too, have proliferated and expanded. Prior to the war, the tone of American Orthodoxy had been set by the combination of Jewish and secular study represented by Yeshiva College, now Yeshiva University, and its *bet ha-midrash,* the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). The pragmatic character of American Jewry demanded such a synthesis. An institution devoted exclusively to ­talmudic study for its own sake seemed untenable. Today, yeshivot like Lakewood, Ner Yisroel, Torah Vodaath, Rabbi Chaim Berlin, Telshe, and Mir dominate Orthodoxy, to the extent that the authority of the congregational rabbi has been displaced by that of the *rosh yeshivah*, or yeshivah head. Increasing numbers of students continue their yeshivah studies past marriage, in the *kollelim* attached to yeshivot or scattered, as outposts of learning, throughout the country. The Lithuanian tradition has been transplanted in America.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 16
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 16](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/16)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
So too has the chasidic tradition. Fleeing from Europe in the 1940s, two groups in particular made their home in New York: Lubavitch and Satmar. Under its present Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Lubavitch has grown into a worldwide movement of active outreach to uncommitted Jews. It has changed the profile of American Jewry with its *mitzvah*-mobiles, *tefillin* campaigns, Chabad houses, and its use of cable television, local radio, and international telephone links. Initially almost alone in its program of seeking out the alienated and estranged, it has won widespread support and emulation, and has created a strong presence in many hitherto neglected areas of Jewish life.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 17
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 17](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/17)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Satmar, a more inward and enclosed movement localized in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, is deeply opposed to modern culture and to the State of Israel. But it too has grown rapidly through its own high birth rates, estimated at an average of between eight and ten children per family. There are currently some 28,000 students registered in Satmar educational institutions.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 18
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 18](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/18)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The demographic implications are stunning. Conservative Judaism had seemed likely, in the 1960s, to be the future of American Jewry. But despite its nominal attachments to tradition, it has been weakened by the nonobservance and defections of its members. The chasidic community, meanwhile, has grown apace and through its intense social and educational structures has reversed the current of assimilation among its young. The demographic perspective was put arrestingly by Daniel Elazar: “It may be hard to believe,” he wrote, “but it is important to note that at the late 1984 wedding of two scions of the Satmar dynasty, the number of Jews packed into a single Long Island stadium for the nuptials equalled the whole body of authentic Conservative Jews.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 19
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 19](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/19)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The old equation of social advance with acculturation and de-Judaization has been broken. Today there are successful Orthodox scientists, lawyers, psychiatrists, academics, and businessmen. Talmud classes take place at lunchtime in executive suites. The new Orthodox affluence is channeled into funding for its own educational institutions and their students. Recent surveys have shown that within the American Orthodox community, unprecedentedly, levels of observance increase between the third and fourth generations.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 20
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 20](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/20)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Already by the mid-1970s, non-Orthodox observers were sharing Charles Liebman’s perception. The sociologist Marshall Sklare declared that “in less than three decades Orthodoxy has transformed its image from that of a dying movement to one whose strength and opinions must be reckoned within any realistic appraisal of the Jewish community.” The radical thinker Leonard Fein confessed himself shaken by the turn of the tide. “Look at the astonishing capacity of people who have entered – and conquered – the most modern precincts of the modern world, and who continue to celebrate the ancient tradition. And look also at the degree to which the rest of us have become defensive in the presence of the Orthodox. For now that we see that Orthodoxy cannot only make its peace with modernity, but actually thrive in the modern world, we are bound to confront the obvious question: is not the Orthodox way the authentic way?”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 21
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 21](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/21)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Orthodoxy in Israel**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 22
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 22](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/22)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
A parallel development has taken place in Israel. There are, admittedly, deep differences between Israeli and American Judaism. There is, in Israel, no official Reform or Conservative presence. Orthodoxy exercises a hegemony over the religious establishment, and thus far Israel has resisted America’s split into denominations.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 23
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 23](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/23)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The religious Jews who came to the land in the century prior to the state were Orthodox; the other settlers were secularists. Agudat Yisrael, abandoning its opposition to the state under the impact of events in Europe in the 1930s, eventually came to an agreement with David Ben-Gurion. In return for their support of the state’s proclamation, Ben-Gurion guaranteed that certain religious conditions would be met in public life. Shabbat would be the official day of rest. *Kashrut* would be maintained in public institutions. The state would fund a school system for the religious. Matters concerning personal status would be the province of religious courts.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 24
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 24](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/24)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This, the so-called status quo agreement, has projected religious issues into the political domain where they are often fought with high contentiousness and publicity. Necessarily so, since at stake in Judaism in Israel are issues directly relating to the ethos of the state: among them the allocation of government expenditure, the creation of new settlements, and exemptions from military service. There are recurring tensions between secularists and religious groups. Each new social development – archaeological digs, postmortems, cinema clubs open on Shabbat, immodest advertisements – tends to be assessed against the status quo, with each side suspicious of the other’s incursions across the established boundaries.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 25
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 25](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/25)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Orthodoxy in Israel is itself highly differentiated, between the religious establishment, the *charedi* or ultra-Orthodox community, the religious nationalists associated with Gush Emunim, and the traditionalists who make up the majority of the population. Each of these groups is in turn segmented. The *charedi* community is divided, for example, between the extreme anti-state Neturei Karta, the more moderate Agudat Yisrael, and the various chasidic circles. The religious nationalists are divided between territorial maximalists and a more accommodating wing. The fundamental issue in Israel is not, as it is in the diaspora, religious compromise with or resistance to a non-Jewish culture. It is the shape of a Jewish culture in a Jewish state. Between those who see Israel as the fulfillment of an ancient religious destiny and those who see it as a distinctly new chapter in Jewish history, the argument goes deep. Religion in the diaspora is a matter of private life and personal decision. In Israel it belongs to the public domain and to law.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 26
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 26](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/26)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Judaism in Israel is not Judaism in the diaspora. But the same revival of Orthodoxy has taken place over the same period. The ultra-Orthodox groups have grown through their large families and their ability successfully to resist secularization. In 1947 the *charedi* community was lamenting, as Menachem Friedman has documented, “that the sons do not carry on the traditions of the fathers.” By 1982 it was declaring that “a youth has arisen here, great in numbers and high in quality, with an unprecedentedly erect spiritual bearing and an extremely firm self-awareness.” The number of students at yeshivot has eclipsed Eastern Europe at its height. The growing political strength of the *charedi* community has been evident in Israel’s last two general elections.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 27
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 27](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/27)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Two developments in particular have shaken the assumptions of secular Zionists. The first was the *teshuvah* or religious return of many young and previously irreligious Israelis after the Six-Day War. The numbers were relatively small, but they included one or two prominent figures, and the development shocked parents by its unexpectedness. Janet Aviad, in her researches among the returnees, found that they made repeated reference to disillusionment with secular Israeli society. They criticized its materialism, emptiness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy, its absence of moral standards, and lack of authority. The events of 1967, as we have noted, produced a general awareness in Israel of the long history of antisemitism and its connection with anti-Zionism, and of the failure of the early dream of “normalization.” This too figured in the minds of the *baalei teshuvah.* They criticized Israel for seeking to be “like all the nations” and leveled against Zionism the phrase first coined by Isaac Breuer, that it represented “collective assimilation.” Judaism as halakhah represented an antidote to individualism and amoral behavior. Judaism as historical faith gave positive meaning to Israel’s unique destiny as a “people that dwells alone.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 28
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 28](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/28)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The second development sent deeper shock waves through Israeli society. After the euphoria of the Six-Day War subsided, it became clear that many intellectuals among the kibbutz movement, hitherto Israel’s pioneering vanguard, were suffering from deep self-doubt about war, militarization, and the persistence of the Israel-Arab conflict. Their internal conversations were published in a book, *The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk*, which received widespread attention. At the same time that this soul-searching was taking place, there was an opposite reaction on the part of a group of religious Zionists, many of them disciples of R. Avraham Kook’s son, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook. For them the war marked another stage in the redemptive process by which the whole of the biblical land would return to Israel’s jurisdiction. The Divine hand was once again evident in history. What was called for was courage in resisting any abandonment of destiny, induced by a secular interpretation of events. New settlements should be established in the territories of Judea and Samaria. R. Kook’s mysticism suddenly became actualized as a radical political program. Gush Emunim was born. *Chalutziyut*, the traditional Zionist mantle of the pioneering elite, had moved from the secular kibbutz to the new religious settlement.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 29
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 29](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/29)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These two phenomena, together with the gradually increasing political power of the *charedi* community, have overturned many secular Israelis’ deepest conceptions of the nature of Zionism and the state. Amnon Rubinstein and Yehoshafat Harkabi, among others, have felt obliged to mount extended attacks on religious nationalism: oblique testimony to its power over the current popular imagination. Rubinstein charts the corresponding collapse of an earlier image of the secular Israeli as a new being, indomitable, the product of the soil, unbeset by *galut* hesitations, collectively minded, and courageous. He calls it “the end of the sabra myth.” Amos Oz, Israel’s leading novelist, reflects on the strength of *charedi* life, still resurgent after the Zionist revolution. “In a conversation twenty years ago, my teacher…said that Zionism was nothing more than a passing episode, a temporary mundane phenomenon of history and politics, but that Orthodox Judaism would reemerge, would swallow Zionism and digest it.” Then Oz dismissed the remark; now he can no longer do so. Leonard Fein’s remark that “the rest of us have become defensive in the presence of the Orthodox” applies equally to secularists in Israel.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 30
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 30](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/30)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Leadership and Followership**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 31
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 31](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/31)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Why the transformation? Partly it has to do with the extraordinary determination with which the survivors of the Holocaust set about rebuilding the lost world of Eastern Europe on American and Israeli soil. Here the full irony of Emil Fackenheim’s theology becomes clear. The determination not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory was most evident in those whose commitment to Jewish survival had nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with revelation, command, and religious vision. It was the chasidic leaders on the one hand, and the yeshivah heads on the other, who determined a policy of encouraging large families, building strong communities, and creating the educational institutions to support them.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 32
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 32](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/32)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Their influence on America, in particular, was decisive. Never before had the community experienced Orthodox leadership of this stature. The Eastern European figures arrived determined to make no concessions to acculturation. The transformation of American Orthodoxy was in large measure due to the extraordinary inspiration and dedication of a handful of remarkable figures like R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch, R. Joel Teitelbaum of Satmar, R. Aaron Kotler, founder of Lakewood Yeshivah, and R. Shraga Mendlowitz, driving spirit of the Jewish day-school movement.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 33
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 33](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/33)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In many cases, too, the leaders arrived along with their disciples. A certain community coherence and strength was possible from the outset. The new immigration was quite different from those that had preceded it. The East European Jews who had arrived in their millions after the pogroms of the 1880s had been in search of physical survival. Those who arrived in the 1930s and 1940s were bent on spiritual survival. They, the last to leave, had been the most tenacious in their determination to stay with their religious leaders. When they finally reached America they proved equally tenacious in helping their leaders build the old *heim* in a new land.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 34
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 34](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/34)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
We referred in a previous chapter to the unprecedented and quasi-parental authority of chasidic leaders over their followers and of yeshivah heads over their students and alumni. That authority proved crucial to the strength of their institutions in Europe, and it was to prove no less significant in America. It is most clearly embodied in the development of the concept of *daas Torah*. Literally this means *“a* or *the* Torah view” of a particular problem. It has come to mean, though, something more specific: the capacity of a *gadol* or “great Torah sage” to penetrate unerringly to the heart of an issue and deliver an almost prophetic judgment on it. “It assumes,” wrote one commentator, “a special endowment or capacity to penetrate objective reality, recognize the facts as they really are, and apply the pertinent halakhic principles. It is a form of *ruach ha-kodesh* (Divine inspiration) as it were, which borders, if only remotely, on the periphery of prophecy.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 35
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 35](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/35)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In some respects this idea is at odds with halakhic tradition. Maimonides, for example, sharply distinguished between the prophet and the sage, as did R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes. A famous talmudic narrative describes how R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, though he was supported by a “heavenly voice,” was nonetheless defeated by the majority consensus of his colleagues. For this reason, *daas Torah* in its modern sense tends to be opposed by many within Orthodoxy who see halakhah as a rational discipline operating in the empirical world, open to argument and counter-argument and the development of consensus. They also see the new charisma with which the yeshivah head has been invested as subverting the traditional authority of the *mara de-atra*, the local rabbi.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 36
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 36](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/36)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Argument aside, *daas Torah* has a specific function within the *charedi* community. It replaces the external power which the autonomous Jewish community once had over its members with an internalized equivalent. This too proved crucial in resisting the effects of secularization. To have large families, support children for an extended period in yeshivah and *kollel*, resist the blandishments of secular culture, and stay in close proximity to the Rebbe or yeshivah instead of moving to suburbia involves a massive series of sacrifices on the part of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Only a deep mutual relationship between leader and follower could support such patterns of obedience, and this has been the special strength of these communities. Alongside the gift of leadership, in other words, has gone the art of followership. No religious group which has made concessions to the individualism of contemporary culture and the consequent diffusion of religious authority can mobilize such adherence to the advice of its sages.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 37
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 37](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/37)

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


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 38
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 38](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/38)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These are perhaps the most important internal factors. But there have been external factors as well. Until relatively recently, all Jewish groups – all minority ethnic groups generally – were under social and cultural pressure to conform to a national archetype; in a word, to assimilate. The modern state has tended, more recently, to recognize the value of indigenous cultures. Forcing the pace of assimilation often disrupted family life among immigrant populations and caused more problems than it solved. Most Western societies are today culturally pluralist. The distinctive dress of *chasidim*, for example, is no more exceptional than that of other ethnic groups, let alone of the more outré styles of dress among the young. Ethnic affirmation has become part of the diversity of urban life and has supported, instead of undermining, Jewish differentness.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 39
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 39](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/39)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The residential patterns in the modern city also allow for the physical creation of the voluntary ghetto. In Jerusalem, for example, new suburbs are often religiously self-segregating. In New York, high mobility has meant that previous areas of Jewish concentration have been occupied by other ethnic groups. Only those committed to a particular chasidic community stay behind. The differences between such Jews and their neighbors reinforces their sense of isolation and togetherness which in turn strengthens community ties.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 40
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 40](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/40)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Perhaps the most important single factor has been economic. Welfare provisions, rising standards of living, and the general extension of schooling has meant that families are able to support their children in yeshivah for increasing lengths of time. The availability of work for religious wives as teachers within the *charedi* school system allows them to serve as breadwinners while their husbands continue to study in *kollel*. The strong group loyalties within the community often facilitate the employment of yeshivah alumni in businesses in which there is a strong *charedi* presence, and compensate for the narrowing of career options for those without university degrees. As a Satmar *chasid* put it, “Many of our *yunge leit*, young people, make more money than your college graduates.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 41
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 41](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/41)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Contemporary culture, then, has been more open to the distinctive lifestyle of Orthodox Jews than was the case a half century ago. But these considerations alone do not begin to explain why Orthodoxy has come to have a prominence in the contemporary Jewish world out of all proportion to its numbers. Here we approach the heart of the matter. Jewish survival has come to seem to many Jews – Reform, Conservative, ethnic, and secular – to be a primary value. After the trauma of the Holocaust and the travails of Israel, the Jewish people has gone through too much simply to disappear through its own indifference and slow disintegration.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 42
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 42](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/42)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Charles Liebman has spoken of “the sense of many non-Orthodox Jews I know that the Orthodox are the real Jewish survivors.” That sense is well-justified in terms of the evidence accumulated in this chapter. In this century the chasidic and yeshivah worlds have risen, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Holocaust. Though it is less often noted, the same was true of earlier crises. Hirsch’s Frankfurt, R. Sofer’s Pressburg, and R. Chaim’s Yeshivah of Volozhyn were powerful responses to cataclysmic social change. In each case, after an initial period of defensiveness and disarray, Orthodox leadership evolved survival strategies which, if they did not save a generation, preserved at least a minority intensely dedicated to safeguarding the tradition. The revaluation of Orthodoxy was already taking place in enlightened German circles in the 1920s, and it is taking place today for the same reason. When survival heads the Jewish agenda, Orthodoxy takes on a significance far beyond its own ranks. What, then, is the secret of its endurance in an open society?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 43
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 43](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/43)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Tradition, Marriage, and the Family**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 44
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 44](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/44)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The question takes us directly to the concerns of the previous two chapters. How has Orthodoxy resisted the processes by which Jewish identity is diffused and diluted in contemporary culture? The first factor concerns intermarriage. Running through all the alternatives to Orthodoxy that surfaced in the nineteenth century was a profound desire for “normalization,” whether individual or national, most clearly expressed in the programs of radical Reform on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other. To this, Orthodoxy could not accede, for it went against the fundamental thrust of tradition in which to be a Jew was to be a member of a singular, different, and chosen people.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 45
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 45](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/45)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Reform in particular has paid a heavy price for its accommodation to assimilation, its abandonment of *kashrut* and the disciplines of Shabbat. High rates of intermarriage were the inevitable consequence. There is something approaching bad faith in the pursuit of social integration on the one hand and the disapproval of mixed marriage on the other. Recent surveys of New York Jews have highlighted the importance of the religious factor in marriage decisions. In families with a “high” level of ritual observance, children are one-fifth or one-sixth as likely to intermarry. In those with a “medium” level of observance, they are about half as likely to do so. The highest rates are in those where the level of observance is “low.” No other variable shows as close a correlation. The most effective barrier against intermarriage is the discipline of distinctiveness and distance embodied in Jewish law.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 46
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 46](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/46)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Second is the question of birth rates. Here too we noted a direct correlation between religious observance and the size of family. In America at present, Orthodoxy is the only group that is experiencing population growth. Within Orthodoxy itself the rate varies in direct proportion to commitment. Why should this be so? Here we can only speculate. Part of the answer is likely to be negative. Declining birth rates were a universal phenomenon in the wake of the industrial revolution, urbanization, rising standards of living, and a lowering of infant mortality rates. Jews responded to the times, only more so than others. Low birth rates are a general feature of modern society, due in part to the collapse of the extended family and a change in women’s role and self-perception. To the extent that Orthodoxy resists modernity – particularly in enclosed chasidic communities – it resists the complex social pressures toward small families.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 47
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 47](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/47)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But there is surely more to it than this. *Peru u-revu*, the imperative of having children, is the Torah’s first command. There are halakhic reservations about birth control and abortion. Generational ­continuity – handing on the tradition to one’s children – is a primary religious duty and one that figures largely in the patterns of Jewish life. These are all factors within Judaism that militate in favor of demographic growth.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 48
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 48](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/48)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
No less significant is the degree of importance attached to Jewish concerns when making major choices of lifestyle. To have large families involves couples in economic sacrifice and restrictions of personal freedom and mobility. For the wife, it may interfere with a career. How the choice is eventually made will depend not only on what the couple value, but on the degree of priority some values hold over others. Orthodoxy is predicated not only on a high level of ritual observance, but on a willingness to forgo other considerations in favor of religious demands. In modern societies where religious behavior is voluntary, Orthodoxy has tended to be self-selecting in favor of those willing to make those sacrifices. Inevitably, then, it contains a higher proportion of those willing to place the imperative of raising children ahead of personal, economic, or career goals.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 49
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 49](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/49)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Perhaps, too – and here we approach the unfathomable – part of the explanation lies in the different role of children in tradition-bound and modern societies. In traditional societies, the family was closely tied, economically, politically, and religiously, to the community. It transmitted shared values. It communicated established roles. There was, by modern standards, a close integration between communal and private life. Personal relationships played a less prominent role. As Edward Shorter has shown, “the traditional family was much more a productive and reproductive unit than an emotional unit…lineage was important, being together at the dinner table was not.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 50
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 50](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/50)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Peter Berger has written of the “invention of childhood” as one of the major revolutions of modernity. Philippe Aries has documented the emergence of this new concept of childhood as part of the rise of the European bourgeoisie. As the family was gradually separated from the work environment, it became instead a protected enclave away from the harsh outside world. The family was privatized and, in Berger’s words, “bourgeois childhood became sheltered, tender, even ‘sentimental.’” Berger has also pointed to the effect of the sharp decline in infant mortality. Until relatively recently, most children died. The fact that this shadow of potential anguish has been largely removed has, he argues, freed parents to “invest expectation in their children from the moment of birth that would have been quite unrealistic before.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 51
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 51](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/51)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The impact of these changing patterns on Jewish consciousness was immense. It left its traces on the literature – even the jokes – of several generations. Jews projected their intense expectations of economic, cultural, and social advance onto their children. In some cases, the strain was overwhelming. It is significant that the two major modern assaults on the family have come from within the Jewish world: Freud’s analysis of parent-child relationships as the source of neurosis, and the kibbutz vision of the family as the source of capitalism. Bruno Bettelheim, in his study of communal child-rearing in the kibbutz, *Children of the Dream*, notes that the early settlers feared that the family unit would disrupt the sense of community and would transmit “exilic” attitudes – sentimentality and individualism. There was also, he notes, a deep anxiety on the part of the early kibbutz women that they could not match their own mothers’ example of devotion to children.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 52
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 52](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/52)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These reactions are the obverse side of the preternatural child-centeredness of modern Jewish families, a phenomenon that would take several studies to document. Diaspora Jews are notable not for their number of childless families, but for the preponderance of small families. Might this not be related to the high level of individuation within the Jewish family, and the degree of emotional investment in each child? If so, the greater community-centeredness of chasidic and yeshivah families might represent an important defusion of family stress and a release of some of the anxieties of child-raising. Paradoxically, the larger family size of the extremely Orthodox may be due to the fact that they are in some ways less child-oriented than the Jews of suburbia.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 53
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 53](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/53)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Be this as it may, the Orthodox community represents the one striking exception to a general Jewish demographic decline. The fact is significant in itself, all the more so in light of the accumulating evidence that government pro-natalist policies have no significant effect on fertility decisions in the long run. Again, the religious factor has proved the most decisive.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 54
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 54](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/54)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Orthodoxy and Diaspora Zionism**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 55
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 55](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/55)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Equally striking is the impact of Orthodoxy on the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. As we noted, one of Israel’s continuing concerns has been the low levels of *aliyah* from secure and prosperous diaspora communities. Since the Six-Day War a clear trend has emerged. Prior to that time, research indicated that religious motivation did not play a significant part in the decision of those who chose to leave America for Israel. Since then, it has done so. Calvin Goldscheider found that among those who made *aliyah* in years 1969–1970, 37 percent defined themselves as Orthodox. More recently, Chaim Waxman found that this had risen to more than half of those who chose or were contemplating *aliyah* in 1986. The percentage is remarkable given the fact that Orthodoxy is usually estimated as the affiliation of only some 10 percent of American Jews. Orthodox Jews are, in other words, highly and increasingly overrepresented among those who move to Israel.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 56
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 56](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/56)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Waxman suggests why this has occurred. Orthodox boys and girls, particularly the alumni of Jewish day schools, are likely to spend a year or more in Israel at yeshivot and seminaries. This period in Israel, at an important time for making life decisions, may be one factor. Many of the yeshivot themselves stress the importance of *aliyah* as a religious obligation. In addition, Waxman argues, Orthodox Jews are more likely than others to place Jewishness at the center of their lives and as a result seek a more completely Jewish environment than can be found in the diaspora. Of great importance is Waxman’s conclusion. The secular Zionist argument for *aliyah*, he suggests, has become untenable. It rests on the premise that Jewish life is insecure and unsupportable in the diaspora. This simply conflicts with American Jews’ perception of their own reality. “The Jew who views the state of American Jewry positively and therefore does not subscribe to an imperative of *shelilat ha-golah* [negation of the diaspora] will not view *aliyah* as an imperative without religious backing. The Orthodox Jew, on the other hand, can view the state of American Jewry positively and nevertheless subscribe to *aliyah* as a religious imperative.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 57
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 57](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/57)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Orthodoxy is important to the Israel-diaspora relationship in another way, which became apparent during the Lebanon war in the early 1980s. Israel had hitherto loomed large in the identities of many secular and non-Orthodox Jews in the diaspora. It had been a source of pride and self-respect. The critical reaction of Western media, beginning with television pictures of the bombing of Beirut, and culminating recently in the Palestinian *intifada*, imposed a severe strain on the relationship. To be sympathetic to Israel’s policies, Jews in Europe and America had to discount much of what they read and saw in the media, and to take a stance against the mood of public opinion. It was noticeable that much of the Jewish criticism of Israel came from Reform and secularist quarters, and that Orthodox Jews were generally more supportive.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 58
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 58](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/58)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This is not to suggest that Jews of any denomination or none were equivocal in their attachment to the state and its people. But it nonetheless points to an important dimension of diaspora attitudes. Jews tend to assume, for the most part, a principled harmony between their own and others’ interests. This is a central component of post-emancipation diaspora ideology. Orthodoxy, by contrast, is more ready to assume a measure of dissonance between Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes. It embodies a kind of “hermeneutic of distance” from its surrounding culture. Thus, when public opinion is hostile to Israel, this accords more readily with Orthodox than non-Orthodox expectations. At such moments, Orthodox Jews may find it easier than others to identify with Israel’s plight.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 59
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 59](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/59)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Rethinking Modernity**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 60
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 60](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/60)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Ultimately, though, the current salience of Orthodoxy has to do with a profound reevaluation of the Jewish experience of modernity, a cumulative and revolutionary shift in attitudes away from assumptions that had prevailed for almost two hundred years. The disappearance of Orthodoxy, we recall, was predicted on three different grounds. First, with emancipation, Jews were entering a new era of universalism, tolerance, and enlightenment. The traditions of Judaism, particularist as they were, seemed radically inappropriate to this unfolding world. Second, with the development of secular Zionism, Judaism seemed to represent all that was lamentable about the Jew in exile. Israel would produce a new human type, free of the burden of an ancient and emasculating religious heritage. Third, and more generally, religion was destined for eclipse in the modern world. The commanding past held no resonance for a society turned toward the future. Religious authority was out of place in a culture that encouraged individualism. Religious belief was no longer needed to make sense of a universe mapped by science and mastered by technology. In the last two decades, each of these beliefs has been shaken if not displaced.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 61
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 61](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/61)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The first, belief in the power of enlightenment to enlighten, was broken by the Holocaust. George Steiner and Emil Fackenheim have charted in searing detail the failure of high German culture to stand as a barrier against attempted genocide. “We know now,” writes Steiner, “that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work in Auschwitz in the morning.” The Orthodox critique of secular humanism, evident even in a thinker as positively disposed toward emancipation as Samson Raphael Hirsch, has come to seem tragically justified. The Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz frankly admits that “as long as confidence in human-kind and in Western civilization remained high, devout Orthodoxy seemed out of the question. Entering the 1980s, that optimism has been shattered.” The result has been “Orthodoxy’s emergence as a living option for modern Jews.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 62
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 62](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/62)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The second belief, that a secular Israel would be a radical break from the religious past, has become progressively untenable since 1967. Israel’s isolation, the continued hostility of her Arab neighbors, and the rise of anti-Zionism were inexplicable in the classic premises of Israel’s secular founders. So was the persistence of diaspora Jewry. Nor did American Jewry accord with the archetype of the “*galut* Jew” constructed by Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Syrkin. There was, too, what Liebman and Don-Yehiyah call a “legitimacy crisis” after the Six-Day War as a new Palestinian voice was heard challenging Israel’s right to the land. Increasingly, Israelis turned toward the Bible as the source of the Jewish right to the land of the promise to the patriarchs.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 63
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 63](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/63)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In the new vocabulary of public discourse Israelis rediscovered their links with the Jewish past and the diaspora, symbolized by the opening of *Bet ha-Tefutsot*, the Museum of the Diaspora, in 1979. The connecting factor was Judaism, and its symbols became correspondingly more prominent. Discontent with secularism and materialism, of the kind that lay behind the *teshuvah* movement, also confounded an assumption stated most forcibly by Jacob Klatzkin. “In longing for our land,” he had written, “we do not desire to create there a base for the spiritual values of Judaism. To regain our land is for us an end in itself…living in the land is ipso facto the national life.” By the 1970s this answer was no longer sufficient. Something more was needed to explain the uniqueness of life in Israel. Those who sought “normalization,” anonymity, and material affluence were finding it in *yeridah*, not *aliyah*. As Israelis were challenged to redefine the character of society and state, classic religious terminology increasingly displaced the language of secularism.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 64
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 64](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/64)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The third belief, in modernity itself, has suffered a similar retreat. Liberal individualism, since the 1970s, has seemed an inadequate basis for personal meaning, lasting relationships, stable institutions, or moral coherence. A search for tradition and historical depth has been apparent across a wide range of disciplines, in the cultural critiques of George Steiner and Allan Bloom, the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stuart Hampshire, and Michael Walzer, and the biblical scholarship of Brevard Childs. Belief in the unlimited power of technology has given way to concern for the future of the environment. Belief in the power of political revolution has yielded to the realization that the twentieth century has witnessed tyranny and oppression on an unprecedented scale. The authors of the recent survey of American society, *Habits of the Heart*, conclude that “there is a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us…. Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 65
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 65](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/65)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It was on this point, perhaps more than any other, that Orthodoxy parted company with other Jewish identities in the nineteenth century. The belief in revelation and tradition is belief in the power of the past to command the present. That orientation was profoundly at odds with the Enlightenment assumptions of evolution and progress. Orthodoxy demanded a sense of human finitude, of humility in the face of mystery, of obedience in the presence of the Divine word, that ran counter to a century of confidence in the power of human reason and autonomy. In the late twentieth century these perceptions have acquired a new urgency and relevance.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 66
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 66](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/66)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Coming Home**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 67
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 67](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/67)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
We have argued, in this chapter, two propositions, the first straightforward, the second controversial and contestable. The first is that Orthodoxy is at the height of a renaissance, one that was unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable half a century ago. The second is that Orthodoxy raises questions that must be confronted by anyone concerned with Jewish survival.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 68
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 68](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/68)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Can intermarriage be stemmed other than by a renewal of the disciplines of Jewish law? Can the Jewish demographic decline be reversed other than by relocating the family within the structure of religious community? Can the links between Israel and the diaspora be sustained on a secular base? Can Israel explain itself to itself other than through the categories of tradition?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 69
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 69](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/69)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Implicit in these questions is the judgment that the terms on which Jewish identities have been constructed since the emancipation have become, in the last two decades, increasingly inadequate to the challenge of Jewish survival. The conventional Orthodox view would be that they were in error from the outset. The more mystical view, to be found in the work of R. Avraham Kook, is that they were part of a providential process, necessary to their time, the antithesis to Orthodoxy’s thesis, ultimately to merge in a new synthesis. Either way, retrospective judgment is not our present concern. The future is.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 70
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 70](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/70)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
One word has recurred periodically throughout twentieth-century Jewish thought, in the work of R. Avraham Kook and R. Soloveitchik, the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim, the literature of religious Zionism, and language of modern yeshivot. The word is *teshuvah*, “return” or “coming home.” It has meant many things in different contexts: the return of Jews to their land, language, and political independence, to their sense of peoplehood and particularism, and to their religious tradition.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 71
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 71](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/71)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Our underlying thesis has been that these senses are essentially connected, fused more than linguistically in a single word. The concept of a covenantal people, constituted by the terms of the revelation at Sinai, and bound thereby to a way of life, a land, and a religious destiny, gives Jewish identity a coherence and compelling power unrivaled by any contemporary alternative. Judaism paid a heavy price for the complex set of alienations from that vision induced by European emancipation. Jewish identity became problematic. Jewish survival was questioned. The Jewish people was fragmented.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 72
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART III; PRESENT, Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy 72](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20III%3B%20PRESENT,_Chapter%207%3B%20The%20Reemergence%20of%20Orthodoxy/r/72)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There is no immediate way of undoing the effects of modernity. But there is a path that leads away from it, slow, tentative, and tense though the journey may be. The path is that of *teshuvah*, a renewed dialogue with the terms of tradition and its unified vision of a people, a way of life, and a land. That dialogue, we believe, will be the theme of Jewish post-modernity.