## Community of Faith, PART III; The Future of Faith, Chapter 11; Jewish Discontinuity

###### Community of Faith, PART III; The Future of Faith, Chapter 11; Jewish Discontinuity 1
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Jewish Discontinuity***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The United Synagogue came into being on 14 July 1870, and today the world to which it belonged seems almost impossibly remote. The term “antisemitism” had not yet been coined. Neither had the word “Zionism.” Ninety percent of world Jewry lived in Europe. In Britain Queen Victoria was on the throne, the Empire was at its height, and it was said that “To be born English is to draw first prize in the lottery of life.” Within Jewry the controversies of the first part of the century had subsided, and the mood was calm. In the summer of 1870 there were no intimations of the storms that were to break over Jewry and continue to break until the entire landscape of Jewish life had been transformed.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Little of what seemed secure then remains. In 1871 the first pogrom of modern times took place in Odessa. Ten years later they broke out simultaneously in more than a hundred Russian towns, sending millions of Jews into flight. By the mid-1890s Theodor Herzl was convinced that Europe was no longer safe for Jews. A half century later, three quarters of European Jewry had been murdered or burnt to ashes in perhaps the greatest tragedy of human, let alone Jewish, history. We still live in the shadow of that event.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Today Jews inhabit a world in which the State of Israel has come to birth and grown to maturity. The British Empire has disappeared. Two totalitarian leviathans, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, have risen, taken their terrible toll of human lives, and gone, and in the process, Jewry was shaken to its foundations. Its old home in Central and Eastern Europe – the synagogues, houses of study, yeshivot and Hasidic circles through which its inner life had flowed for centuries – was no more. Fragments remained, “brands plucked from the fire,” but nothing else. Where once nine Jews in ten lived, today there are fewer than one in five. Jewish life has moved from Europe to Israel and the United States.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For the last half century the great energies of Jewry have been spent on reconstituting itself as a people after the long night of destruction. Zionism was no longer a utopian dream. It was an urgent necessity. In Israel, in the land of their beginnings, Jews have begun life again as a sovereign independent power after a lapse of two thousand years, a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in human history. Less dramatically, but perhaps in the fullness of time no less significantly, the vestiges of East European Orthodoxy have been transplanted and begun to flower. Today in Israel and America yeshivot and Hasidic groups flourish unprecedentedly, the remarkable result of the work of a handful of survivors. The Jewish world has changed but it survives, and that, in this traumatic century, is no small miracle.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But today it confronts a problem which deeply affects the future of the Diaspora. If we were to identify a moment at which its dimensions became clear, it would be the publication of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey in the United States, which showed that amongst young Jews, fifty-seven percent were marrying outside the faith. Intermarriage, which had stayed at low levels throughout the first half of the twentieth century, has since accelerated rapidly to the point where the very viability of American Jewry has begun to be called into question. Nor is the problem local to America. To a greater or lesser extent it is true of all Diaspora communities in open, liberal societies. The challenge has been given a name: Jewish continuity. Like many new names it testifies to the sudden appearance of its opposite. What has emerged is Jewish *dis*continuity on a massive scale. Jews are ceasing to do what their parents and ancestors had done for millennia: create Jewish homes, have Jewish children, and continue the faith. The irony is overwhelming. Jews fought the battles of emancipation and Zionism for the right to be free to be Jews. Having won that fight, many are ceasing to be Jews.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Much has been written about Jewish continuity. I have done so myself in my book *Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?* But the problem has not always been set in its full perspective. Intermarriage has long been a problem in the post-enlightenment Diaspora. There was a wave of it in late eighteenth-century Germany. In nineteenth-century Russia under intense anti-Jewish pressures as many as eighty thousand Jews may have converted to Christianity. In pre-World War Austria thousands of Jews annually declared themselves *konfessionslos,* “without religion,” as a means of separating themselves from the community. In the United States, on the three hundredth anniversary of Jewish settlement, an investigation revealed that only one of the twenty-three original families of 1654 still had Jewish members. Todd Endelman has told a similar story about long-established Anglo-Jewish families in his book, *Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History.*


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Two things make the present concern with intermarriage different from the past. The first is its visibility. Previously, as older immigrant families disappeared their place was taken by new arrivals. The Sephardim in America and Britain were succeeded by Jews from Germany and Poland, and then by the large numbers who came between 1880 and 1914 from Eastern Europe. Jewish communities were growing. Though they were losing some of their more acculturated members, they were being reinvigorated by the influx from elsewhere. Western Jewry was being sustained by energies whose origins were far away. As long as this continued, there was little urgency to create local sources of Jewish inspiration. It takes foresight to see a spiritual crisis on the horizon several generations away, and communal will to act on it in time. Not until after the Second World War did American and British Jewry begin in earnest the task of building day schools and yeshivot. Today most Diaspora communities know that they will not be replenished from elsewhere. If there is to be renewal it must come from within themselves. Such movements of Jewish population as there are, are primarily to Israel. Intermarriage therefore means decline.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The more significant difference is that it can no longer be explained by external forces. The Jews who left the community a century ago did so under considerable, if sometimes subtle, pressure. The corporate state of the Middle Ages was in the main content to let Jews be Jews. They were self-governing, self-sufficient, and formed an important sector of the economy. Jewish existence was often hazardous, but it rarely posed questions of identity. But the modern secular nation-state had no space for self-enclosed autonomous groups. It offered equal citizenship to all, but it demanded in return exclusive loyalty not only to the state but to its culture. Even in the United States, a nation composed of immigrants and dedicated to religious liberty, the strains of being different were considerable, and they were deeply felt by Jews. As John Dewey once remarked, “For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are thousands to offer thanks that they are sufficiently like other men to escape attention.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote perceptively about the Jewish passion for anonymity, for what he called “humanity without race.” It lasted for two centuries, and with good reason. But it did incalculable harm to Jewish self-respect.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Few who left the community were as candid as Daniel Chwolson, a Russian archeologist in the nineteenth century who converted to Christianity. Asked whether his decision had been based on pragmatism or conviction, he replied, “I accepted baptism entirely out of conviction – the conviction that it is better to be a professor in the Academy in St. Petersburg than a teacher in the *heder* in Vilna.” But there can be no doubt that behind the many defections, conversions, mixed marriages and religious reforms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay a profound sense of Jewishness as a stigma in cultures still Christian though nominally secular. It is a palpable mood in all the writings of the period. No one put it more bluntly than Mordechai Kaplan in the opening sentence of his *Judaism as a Civilization*: “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.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Today that has changed. There has been a profound transformation in the cultures of the West, partly as the result of the Holocaust itself. Societies have become self-consciously plural. Compared with a century ago there is immeasurably less pressure on minorities to conform. Jews are no longer the most conspicuous non-Christian group. In Britain they have been joined by Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others. These groups, together with a determination on the part of society as a whole to guard against racism and cultural hegemony, have brought a new variety to religious life and ethnic expression. Jews, especially those born since the 1960s, know that they are not outsiders. They have scaled the heights in every field: academia, the professions, business, politics and the arts. If anything, they are part of the establishment. Today, when the religious roots of western civilisation are spoken of, they are referred to not as the Christian, but the Judaeo-Christian heritage. There are no longer external causes for Jews to see Judaism as a burden, nor outside forces sufficient to explain assimilation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Why then the sudden rise in intermarriage? There are obvious reasons, and I set them out in my earlier book. Young Jews marrying today are three generations removed from those who came to the West from Eastern Europe after the pogroms. Jewish identity can be sustained by habit and memory, but only for a limited period, generally for as long as we can remember grandparents who led a conspicuously Jewish life. The fourth generation has no such memories, and if it is to acquire a strong sense of identity it needs a powerful Jewish education. Jews survived the dislocations of the past because they invested in schools and made the transmission of tradition their highest priority. The ancient command of the *Shema,* “You shall teach these things diligently to your children,” was Judaism’s central value and its guarantor of continuity. For a century, driven by the desire for social integration, Jews lost the habit of Talmud Torah. They neglected Jewish education while pursuing secular studies with a passion. The result was that by the fourth generation, as memory faded, there was nothing strong enough to take its place. Jews no longer knew why they should remain Jews.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That was the argument as I set it out two years ago, and I believe it to be true. But there is a deeper and more disturbing factor. It is that Jews have lost touch with faith.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
When American sociologists began studying contemporary religious behaviour, they made an unusual discovery. They found that Jews ranked lower than almost any other group on the standard indices of religious belief. As long as forty years ago Will Herberg noticed that Jews were less likely than either Catholics or Protestants to say that they believed in God, or that they had recently attended a place of worship. In answer to the question, “Is religion very important in your life?,” 83 percent of Catholics replied in the affirmative, 76 percent of Protestants, but only 37 percent of Jews; 88 percent of Catholics saw the Bible as the revealed word of God, 85 percent of Protestants, and 45 percent of Jews. Of all religious groups in the United States in the mid-1950s, Jews were the furthest removed from the “beliefs and attitudes usually associated with religion,” and many studies conducted since have shown that they still are. In Britain, where patterns of religious behaviour are very different from those in America, a survey carried out for the Independent Television Commission in 1994 showed that Jews were less likely than either Christians or Muslims to describe themselves as “very religious,” to attend a place of worship at least once a week, or to say that religious beliefs affected their everyday life.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This is an astonishing fact and one that defies simple explanation. It cannot be because modern societies as a whole have become less religious. In fact, in the case of the United States, religious beliefs have held up surprisingly well, and the Jewish community is the exception rather than the rule. Nor can we attribute it to antisemitism or to the lure of assimilation, for they are far less powerful now than a century ago. It has been suggested that Jews have been the victims of their own success: higher educational and economic achievements are associated with lower levels of religious belief. Again, though, careful statistical analysis shows this not to be the case. The correlations are either non-existent or too small. In his *History of the Jews,* Paul Johnson hazards a larger speculation. Jews, he says, have always been iconoclasts and opponents of myth. Abraham broke his father’s idols and the prophets waged war against paganism. In the modern world Jews have simply gone one stage further and attacked their own beliefs. But though this may be true of estranged intellectuals, it can hardly apply to the majority of Jews, who attend synagogues, pray to God, and make sure that their children receive religious instruction, but do so with measurably less frequency and conviction than members of other faiths.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The loss of Jewish belief is one of the most unexpected phenomena in contemporary religious life. There are faiths which suffer an eclipse. Communism is one. In a generation from now, New Age mysticism will be another. But Judaism is not something which, like Jonah’s gourd, grew up overnight and vanished in a day. It is a faith twice as old as Christianity, three times as old as Islam. No religion and no people has survived longer and in more arduous circumstances. Even its most impassioned critics saw in the persistence of Jewish faith something awe-inspiring and inexplicable. Luther was angry that Jews did not convert. Nietzsche was furious that they kept disturbing the conscience of mankind. Toynbee notoriously described Judaism – present so long after in theory it should have disappeared – as a fossil. But to each of them Jewish continuity was undeniable, even majestic.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Not until the modern age did anyone have any doubt that Jews were a religious people. It was their faith for which they lived and at times were prepared to die. When they rose up against the Greek and Roman empires, it was in defence of religious principle. Throughout the Middle Ages, in Christian or Islamic lands, they resisted the threats and blandishments of absorption into the dominant culture. At all times they sought one thing – freedom to practise their sacred way of life. Even those who suffered conversion under the threat of death often practised their Judaism in secret and seized the first opportunity to move elsewhere where they could become Jews in public again. Whether they were admired or demonised, Jews were seen to be the bearers of an unusual, powerful faith. In one country after another, Moses’ prophecy rang true: “Then all the peoples of earth will see that you are called by the name of God.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The debate about Jewish continuity has been frustrating because of the deep reluctance of participants to see it for what it is: ultimately, a spiritual crisis. For more than a generation, Jewish life has been construed in primarily secular terms: ethnicity, antisemitism, Israel as a secular society and state, political activity, gifts to Jewish causes, Jewishness-as-culture rather than Judaism-as-faith. Where once at the heart of Jewish life there were synagogues, today there are fundraising organisations. Jews have become an *am* while ceasing to be an *edah.* Under the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Zionism they have defined themselves as a community of fate, not of faith.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Not only religious leaders, but the most acute sociologists – figures like Will Herberg, Nathan Glazer and Charles Liebman – have understood that Diaspora Jewry cannot survive on such a base. There is no Jewish ethnicity, or rather, there are as many ethnicities as there are Jewish communities, each an amalgam of borrowings from the surrounding culture. Nor are they durable. The image of the *heym* which governed the lives of an immigrant generation, became for their children a handicap to be forgotten, and for the grandchildren something to be recalled with nostalgia. But for the fourth, it is no longer there. As Arthur Hertzberg puts it: “Ethnicity will no doubt last for several more generations, but it is well on the way to becoming memory. But a community cannot survive on what it remembers; it will persist only because of what it affirms and believes.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Most importantly, ethnicity does not command. It tells me where I come from, but not what I should do or refrain from doing. It supplies me with no reason other than familiarity for preferring one way of life over another. Still less does it provide me with an obligation to ensure that my past should be my children’s future. Only a faith commands. It alone speaks to me not only of memories but also of aspirations, in the case of Judaism perhaps the most profound a people has ever carried in its midst, to shape a society dedicated to the sanctity of life and the sanctification of daily living. The most salient comment in the continuity debate was made by Professor Barry Kosmin, director of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. He wrote: “Organized American Judaism has largely failed to create a substantial body of true believers willing to sacrifice for their faith.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jewish continuity is to the 1990s what Zionism was to the 1890s. Both are central to the Jewish people and its survival in the modern world. The difference is that while Zionism addressed itself to hostility outside, continuity focuses on indifference within. Zionism was about the saving of Jewish lives. Continuity is about the saving of Jewish life. Zionism was about Jewry as an *am.* Continuity is about Jewry as an *edah.* A century ago Jews had faith but not a land. Today we have a land but we are beginning to lose the faith.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
If *emunah* in Judaism were what faith is in other traditions there might be little we could do other than to wait for the culture of the age to change or for sudden illumination to light the souls of a new generation. The burden of my argument has been, however, that this is not the nature of *emunah.* Faith lives in communities where the great Judaic vision becomes tangible reality. Judaism does not ask us to wait passively for the experience of faith to strike. It asks us to join together, like the Israelites in the wilderness when they made the sanctuary, and create in our midst a space for God. “We will do and we will hear” – Judaism is about the doing which leads to hearing the still small voice of God that whispers in the breath of life itself.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The single greatest challenge of continuity is to reverse the process initiated by Mordechai Kaplan whereby religion became ethnicity, the *edah* an *am,* the synagogue a secular Jewish centre, and Jewry itself a people that no longer worshipped God but group survival. What makes this still possible is the paradox noted by all observers of Jewry since the 1950s: Jews may no longer believe, but for the most part they wish to belong. Nathan Glazer called this the “stubborn insistence on remaining a Jew, enhanced by no particularly ennobling idea of what that means.” By the 1990s this is beginning to fade, but while it exists so too does the possibility of continuity – if and only if the synagogue is at its heart. For it is in the synagogue that belonging becomes believing. In the *beit knesset* ethnicity is transformed into something altogether more spacious and inspiring. In it the Jewish people is both *am* and *edah.* It becomes *Knesset Yisrael,* the Jewish people standing in the presence of God.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A traveller in Eastern Europe once found himself in the legendary town of Chelm. He was lost, and asked one of the locals the way to Minsk. The Chelmite contemplated the matter and replied, “You want to go Minsk? I do not know the route, but this I know. You shouldn’t start from here.” Renewing faith when so many Jews have lost touch with it is not simple. Given the choice, we would not start from here. But one fact deserves attention. Despite the epic changes since 1870, the United Synagogue still survives. So too does the model it created. Almost alone in Ashkenazi Jewry, the communities once influenced by Anglo-Jewry – Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Britain itself – still preserve at their centre communities which embody the classic terms of Jewish faith. Their synagogues are predominantly Orthodox and their memberships are high. As individuals, Jews there may be no more observant than their counterparts elsewhere. But as communities they have made one decision which may yet prove fateful. They have remained loyal to *Knesset Yisrael.* They have not abandoned, modified or ethnicised Jewish life, nor is Orthodoxy confined to separatist enclaves. *Emunah* is guarded in the public domain where it must stay if renewal is to move not just individuals but the community as a whole. If we had to choose a place to start the journey to continuity, it would be here.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Anglo-Jewry is not what it was in 1870. It no longer stands at the forefront of Jewish life. It has neither the centrality of Israel nor the numbers of the United States. But the United Synagogue still dominates the landscape of our communal life. This is more than a historic achievement. It is a precious resource for the future. It means that we can still talk of Anglo-Jewry as a community of faith.