## One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew

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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***The Birth of the Adjectival Jew***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The word “Jew” testifies to conflict. Before there were Jews, there was Israel, the people chosen by God to be the bearer of His covenant. After the death of Solomon the people split in two, into a northern kingdom of ten tribes called Israel, and a southern kingdom called Judah, though it comprised the tribe of Benjamin as well. In the eighth century BCE the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians and its population deported. Rapidly they merged with the surrounding peoples, losing their language, their distinctive faith, and their identity. They assimilated and disappeared from the pages of history, to be remembered as the lost ten tribes. Those who remained were *yehudim,* Judeans, or, as the word gradually evolved from Greek to Latin to English, Jews. The history of the word takes us inexorably back to the first great division in Israel’s memory. It was not the last.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The idea of Jewish unity is not marginal to Jewish self-understanding. Its appearance in the early rabbinic literature is evidence of a long and disastrous series of internal conflicts which at times threatened the integrity and survival of the Jewish people. To take a single example: an early rabbinic commentary contains a remark that sheds light on the rabbis’ understanding of their people’s past. The subject under discussion is the moment when the Israelites prepared to accept the Torah at Sinai, their constitution as a holy people. The biblical verse reads: “They departed from Refidim and arrived at the Sinai Desert and camped in the wilderness; *and Israel camped there* opposite the mountain” (Ex. 19:2). In the Hebrew, the first three verbs are in the plural, the last in the singular. The plural “they” had become, momentarily, a single “Israel.” The rabbis, sensitive to the nuance and sensing that form mirrored content, understood this to mean that it was at this point that a fissiparous collection of individuals was fused into a single nation. Rashi cites the traditional comment thus: “And Israel camped there – *as one person with one heart.* But all their other encampments were marked by dissension and argument.”¹ of Rabbi Yishmael ad loc.

footnotes:
¹ Rashi on Ex. 19:2. Rashi is paraphrasing the Mekhilta


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The interpretation is drawn from the *Mekhilta,* an early rabbinic commentary on the book of Exodus. We cannot date its origin with precision, but we can be reasonably certain of the context in which it was made. Jews in the first and second centuries CE had suffered a series of internal tensions, religious, cultural, and political, which led to and left them unprepared for the two great catastrophes that were to determine the course of Jewish history for centuries to come. There were two ill-conceived rebellions against Rome: in 66 CE and again sixty-five years later under Bar Kochba. As a result of the first, the Temple was destroyed. As a result of the second, all immediate hope of the recovery of autonomous Jewish life in the land of Israel was effectively buried, and remained so for eighteen hundred years. Tradition has handed down to us the memory of rabbinic voices raised at that time in favour of caution, coexistence, and moderation. It seems they were ignored. The Jewish people had proved, not for the first time in its history and not for the last, to be its own worst enemy.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Trying to understand the events that had overtaken them, the rabbis passed a significant judgement. The first Temple had been destroyed, they said, because Jews had been guilty of cardinal sins: idolatry, murder, and sexual immorality. But the second had been destroyed for no other reason than what the sages termed *sinat chinam,* baseless mutual hatred, the simple inability of Jews to live together.² The most searing indictment of those times is contained in the statement of Rabbi Chanina, the prefect of the priests: “Pray for the welfare of the state, for were it not for the fear of it, we³ would have swallowed each other up alive.” Better, suggests Rabbi Chanina, the rule of a tyrannical Rome than Jewish civil war.

footnotes:
² Yoma 9b.
³ Mish. Avot 3:2. Thus the reading in the Kaufman manuscript. Printed editions, however, have the verb in the third-person plural, “men would swallow each other up alive.” The phrase is probably a reference to Ps. 124:3.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The desire for unity comes to the fore at times of conflict. The midrashic comment on the Israelites at Sinai is a telling indication of how seriously the sages took the challenge of unity, and how difficult they knew it was. At critical moments in its history the Jewish people has a tendency to split apart and inflict on itself grievous wounds. Rabbinic consciousness had been forged in an era which had begun with one war of Jew against Jew, Maccabeans against Hellenizers, and had ended with another, the innumerable militant factions who strove with one another as the Romans were besieging Jerusalem. The sages saw internecine friction as a persisting theme of Jewish history, one that could be traced back to the murmurings in the wilderness. But it was not inevitable. When the Israelites agreed to receive the Torah, the disputes that had surrounded them throughout the years of wandering fell away and they became “one person with one heart.” The implication was clear. Were Jews prepared *now* to live by the Torah, unity would once again prevail.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But the rabbinic idea of unity is evidence of more than a divided past. It suggests well-grounded fears of a divided future. The sages of the second century CE were aware that the geographical and political bases of peoplehood had disappeared and were unlikely soon to return. The unity of a people that shares a land and governs its own affairs does not need to be provided with a theoretical base. Manifestly, its members share a fate. But the unity of a people contemplating its own exile and dispersion is far from self-evident. What in the future would link Jews to one another, now that hopes of Jewish sovereignty had been abandoned to a metaphysical end of days; now that Jerusalem, the spiritual centre from which all else radiated, had been reduced to ruins and the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina built in its place? The idea of Jewish nationhood had lost its “plausibility structure,” its concrete embodiment in institutions and palpable reality.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It is at this stage that the concept of Jewish peoplehood began to take on a moral-mystical dimension that was to exercise a hold over the Jewish imagination for sixteen centuries. A striking early expression occurs in the *Mekhilta Derabbi Shimon bar Yochai.* On the biblical phrase “And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” the midrash supplies the following interpretation: “‘A nation’ – this teaches that they are like a single body and a single soul, and thus it says, ‘And who is like your people Israel, a nation one on earth’ [II Sam. 7:23]. If one of them sins, they are all punished, as it is said, ‘When Achan the son of Zerach acted unfaithfully regarding the devoted things, did not wrath come upon the whole community of Israel?’ [Josh. 22:20]. If one of them is smitten, they all feel pain.”⁴ on Ex. 19:6. Texts here are martialled to prove what could no longer be taken for granted: the collective responsibility and indivisible destiny of Israel. A holy nation, even exiled and dispersed, remains a single entity. The covenant binding Jews, not only to God but to one another, remains in force. No longer a political fact, Jewish unity persists as a religious reality.

footnotes:
⁴ In Mekhilta Derabbi Shimon bar Yochai


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It was a mystical vision. But in retrospect it proved to be a surprisingly accurate one. Writing in the tenth century CE, the rabbi-philosopher Rav Sa’adia Gaon pondered the question of what constituted the Jews as a nation. That they *were* still a nation, “one people,” no one doubted, at least not until the late eighteenth century, when the French Revolution redefined the terms of the nation-state and raised intractable questions about the character of Jews as a group. Until then, Jews saw themselves and were seen by others as a single, scattered people. But in what sense? They were dispersed across the world. They had neither land nor political sovereignty. Taken collectively, they spoke a multiplicity of languages, possessed a diversity of cultures, and had none of the conventional bases of nationhood.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Sa’adia’s answer was simple and at the time incontestable. “Our nation, the children of Israel, is a nation only in virtue of its religious laws.”⁵, iii. 7. Jews were a single religious-political entity because they shared the same laws and constitution: the Torah. To be sure, there were different groupings, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, rationalists and mystics, and a host of regional differences in customs and manners. There were periodic serious divisions, the Maimonidean controversy of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and the collisions between Hasidim and their opponents in the eighteenth among them. But they were a single entity, united by Torah and its practical expression, *halakhah* (Jewish law), the architecture of Jewish life.

footnotes:
⁵ Sa’adia Gaon, Emunot Vede’ot


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The story of modern Jewry can be told in terms of the collapse of this idea. Modernity – which here means the two hundred years since the beginning of European Jewish emancipation – has transformed the Jewish world from the outside through a series of epic processes: secularization, assimilation, racial antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. But it has transformed the Jewish world no less deeply from within.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The most striking manifestation of what has changed is that it is no longer possible to be a Jew *tout court.* The noun, to convey anything at all, now needs to be qualified by an adjective, perhaps several. There are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and secular Jews. There are Israeli and diaspora Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists. Each label is further subdivided. Zionists are religious or secular. Religious Zionists are messianic or pragmatic. And so on. Jewish existence has become adjectival existence. There is no longer a common content to being a Jew as such, whether in behaviour or belief. Jews have begun to search, as they did in the second century CE, for an affirmation of Jewish unity. The search itself is evidence, as it was then, of a crisis in the definition of the Jewish people. It signals fission and disintegration. How did it occur? Through two processes, one general, another which had a particular impact on Jews. The first was secularization; the second, emancipation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**SECULARIZATION AND THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION**
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, virtually every social theorist foresaw the demise of religion in the civilized world.⁶ (London: Pelican, 1969); id., *Religion in a Sociological Perspective* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Peter L. Berger, *The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion* (New York: Doubleday, 1967); id., *Facing up to Modernity* (New York: Basic Books, 1977); id., *A Rumour of Angels* (London: Allen Lane, 1970); Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, *The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness* (London: Pelican, 1974); Michael Hill, *A Sociology of Religion* (London: Heinemann, 1973); Charles Glock and Rodney Stark, *Religion and Society in Tension* (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965); Phillip E. Hammond (ed.), *The Sacred in a Secular Age* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Sacks, *The Persistence of Faith*. Under the impact of industrialization, *Gemeinschaft* was giving way to *Gesellschaft:* the small traditional community to urban anonymity. Science was displacing theology as the means of explaining the world. The key factor in decision making was no longer tradition but rationality. Bureaucracy was displacing personal authority. The calculation of consequences was replacing the ethics of obligation. Objects no longer had an essence but a function, and persons no longer a substantive identity given by birth, but instead a set of roles. The social universe was rapidly becoming, in Max Weber’s word, “disenchanted,” stripped of supernaturalism. Religion was in the process of being marginalized and would eventually be eclipsed.

footnotes:
⁶ For the argument of this section see Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The transformation of society was profound and irreversible. It was taking place in several dimensions: through industrialization, economically; urbanization, geographically; the rise of the nation-state, politically; and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, intellectually. Modernization meant secularization, which meant “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”⁷, 107. Twentieth-century humanity was succeeding where the men on the plain of Shinar, after the Flood, had failed: in building a tower of Babel. Nietzsche drew the inevitable conclusion. Man was supplanting God.

footnotes:
⁷ Berger, The Sacred Canopy


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The prediction proved false. In the late twentieth century, religious life is strong and growing stronger – especially, and paradoxically, those strands in Judaism and Christianity which are generically described by their opponents as “fundamentalism,” and which are most antithetical to modernity. The “secularization thesis” has had to be rewritten. The processes of modernity have not dethroned religion. But they have profoundly transformed it. How so?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The liberal democratic state transfers tradition, morality, and meaning from the public to the private domain. It substantively separates church from state, though a nominal connection may remain. The state itself is no longer conceived as the embodiment of a collective morality, which it enforces by law. Instead it becomes the arena of competing interests and makes decisions on the basis of a rational computation of consequences. Individuals – on John Stuart Mill’s influential account of liberty⁸, repr. in H. B. Acton (ed.), *Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government* (London: Dent, 1987). – are afforded the maximum freedom to pursue their own choices consistent with the avoidance of harm to others.

footnotes:
⁸ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Though the modern state vastly increases the scope of individual rights and freedoms, it is not without its discontents. In particular, the absence of a shared moral culture is experienced as a loss of personal meaning: anomie, as Durkheim called it. Instead of experiencing identity as something given by birth, tradition, and community, individuals are thrown in upon themselves, facing a vast choice of educational, career, and relationship patterns. “On the one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory, liable to ongoing change. On the other hand, a subjective realm of identity is the individual’s main foothold in reality. Something that is constantly changing is supposed to be the *ens realissimum.* Consequently it should not be a surprise that modern man is afflicted with a *permanent identity crisis.*”⁹, 74.

footnotes:
⁹ Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It is here that religion re-enters contemporary society. For its great strength is that it offers a content to personal identity. It provides a mode of belonging. It anchors life-cycle events in a scheme of traditional meanings. It offers community in place of the often functional and faceless structures of the state. It is a sheltered space of order away from the open plains of choice. Despite the massive secularization of contemporary Britain or America, a significant majority of the population still declares a belief in God and an interest in religion.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But though religion has not been eclipsed, it has moved from the public to the private domain. Its new setting is the individual, the family, and the local congregation. The distinguishing feature of modern religious affiliation is that it is voluntary: a matter of personal choice rather than external authority. In the traditional community a single vision united its members. In the modern conurbation a vast variety of creeds, ideologies, and lifestyles is on offer. The religious situation becomes a marketplace of competing choices. For the first time, religions are offered not as truth and command but as satisfying the psychological needs of the individual. This, as Peter Berger notes, “represents a severe rupture of the traditional task of religion, which was precisely the establishment of an integrated set of definitions of reality that could serve as a common universe of meanings for the members of a society.”¹⁰, 133. Faith is privatized, pluralized, and subjectivized.

footnotes:
¹⁰ Berger, The Sacred Canopy


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**ACCOMMODATION OR RESISTANCE?**
Two broad strategies are available to religious leadership in the secular situation: accommodation and resistance. Accommodation, going with society’s flow, means a substantial sacrifice of the certainties of the past. It means, among other things, de-emphasizing authority, objective truth, and the value of obedience, and stressing instead “relevance,” personal autonomy, and self-fulfilment. Liberal theologies translate religious terms from the language of the external world into that of the self. “History becomes biography,” and religion becomes a phenomenon of consciousness. Religious groups that accommodate to modernity recognize that “secularization brings about a demonopolization of religious traditions and thus, *ipso facto,* leads to a pluralistic situation.”¹¹ The characteristic mode of religious organization that emerges is the *denomination,* which has been defined as a body that has had to come to terms with the permanent presence and competition of other religious groups within its own territory.¹², 71–97. Reform and Conservative Judaism are the results of two such accommodating strategies.

footnotes:
¹¹ Ibid., 134.
¹² Ibid., 136; see Hill, A Sociology of Religion


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But those whose primary concern is with the conservation and preservation of religion’s traditional contents must opt to resist secularization. This necessarily involves a measure of withdrawal from society. Pluralism, relativism, and individualism run deep in contemporary culture. Since these are incompatible with traditional religion, traditionalists must, as far as possible, exclude that culture and its manifestations. They must construct an enclosed and enclosing alternative culture of their own. This, again to quote Berger, “entails the maintenance of *sectarian* forms of socio-religious organization.”¹³, 163.

footnotes:
¹³ Berger, The Sacred Canopy


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The sociological analysis of sects, which we owe to such scholars as Troeltsch, Weber, and H. Richard Niebuhr, is largely confined to the study of Christianity. But some features, as outlined by Bryan Wilson,¹⁴, 24:1 (Feb. 1959), 3–15; id., *Sects and Society* (London: Heinemann, 1961); id., *Religion in Secular Society*, 207–49. are of general relevance. The sect is marked by its condemnation of or distance from secular society. It is exclusive. It tends to see itself as a small group of the elect. It demands a higher level of commitment from its members than do other forms of religious organization. “The sect provides a total reference group for the individual who belongs, rather as the ghetto community provided such a group for eighteenth-century European Jews.”¹⁵, 211.

footnotes:
¹⁴ Bryan Wilson, “An Analysis of Sect Development,” American Sociological Review
¹⁵ Id., Religion in Secular Society


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY**
Thus far we have spoken of the effects of secularization on religion as a generalized process that has been experienced by all societies that have undergone industrialization and urbanization. The dynamic of Jewry over the last two centuries has conformed to this pattern. But its experience of modernity has been particularly acute – traumatic might be a better word – and the key factors can be identified more precisely. For secularization was not experienced by Jews as a broad and gradual process, but as an exact and sudden change of their position in society, namely, emancipation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Emancipation promised Jews for the first time an equal place in European society. It heralded the end of the ghetto and Jewish exclusion from the universities, professions, and the instrumentalities of government. It meant, in effect, the end of the self-governing Jewish community, with its limited but real autonomous powers, that had been a characteristic of diaspora Jewish life since the fall of the Second Temple. But the prize of civil equality had a price. It involved the end of Jewry as a separate realm within the state, governing itself through the sanctions of fines and excommunication.


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 25](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/25)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This was what the Count of Clermont-Tonerre meant when he delivered his speech in the French National Assembly in 1789 on the eligibility of Jews for citizenship in the new democratic state. “Jews must be citizens,” he said. “It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen; if they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall be compelled to expel them.” The terms of emancipation were made brutally clear, and they were to determine the shape of the debate for the next century. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”¹⁶ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 103–5.

footnotes:
¹⁶ Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 26](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/26)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The transfer of religion from the public to the private domain, which for other religions took place slowly and imperceptibly over an extended period, was demanded of Judaism almost overnight. It was a fateful and in a sense impossible request. Judaism is not a religion in the Protestant sense, the personal religious persuasion of choosing individuals. It is the faith of a people with its own distinctive culture, history, and destiny. This was how Jews saw themselves; more significantly, it was how they were seen by others. The abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its image of universal humanity and its neat dichotomization of public and private spheres, failed to take account of powerful forces of feeling. Max Nordau, speaking a century later at the first Zionist Congress, said in retrospect, “The emancipation of the Jews was an example of the automatic application of the rationalistic method...the emancipation of the Jews was proclaimed in France, not out of fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it.”¹⁷, 236. By then the Dreyfus affair had exposed a deep current of antisemitism in France and had radicalized Theodor Herzl into Zionism.

footnotes:
¹⁷ In Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 27](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/27)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But the demand of Clermont-Tonerre met with compliance. Already in his Preface (1782) to Menasseh ben Israel’s *Vindiciae Judaeorum, a*nd his great defence of religious liberty, *Jerusalem* (1783), Moses Mendelssohn had argued that the Jewish community should relinquish its internal ecclesiastical powers, in particular the right to excommunicate. “Excommunication and the right to banish...are diametrically opposed to the spirit of religion.”¹⁸, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 73. Over the next century, and with surprisingly little protest or debate, Jewish communities ceded the right. The way was open to the collapse of the traditional *kehillah,* the vehicle of Jewish social and political autonomy. Though Jewish law itself remained unchanged, its authority was now to be voluntary. The Jewish public domain had been secularized. The consequences were dramatic.

footnotes:
¹⁸ Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 28](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/28)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**THE ADJECTIVAL JEW**
In 1806 Napoleon convened a group of French Jewish “Notables” to elicit their answers to a series of questions designed to test whether Judaism was compatible with citizenship and civic morality. A year later he summoned Jewish religious leaders to constitute a “Sanhedrin” to give these answers the force of halakhah, binding law. It was during the discussions of the “Sanhedrin” that Abraham Furtado (1756–1817), an advocate of emancipation and enlightenment, described the more conservative rabbis as “Orthodox Jews.” The phrase itself had probably been in circulation for some years, but this is its first recorded use.¹⁹, 2:1 (1982), 25–26. The disjunction, proposed by Clermont-Tonerre, between the Jew as member of a people and Judaism as a religion of individuals, had entered Jewish consciousness. The adjectival Jew was born.

footnotes:
¹⁹ See Samuel C. Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The primary change, of course, was that Jewishness itself had been transformed from noun to adjective. The French Jew had been turned into a Jewish Frenchman. For the first time, Jewishness was no longer the primary mode of identity. Where once there had been Jews who happened to live in England, France, or Germany, there were now Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans who happened to be Jews. But though the “Sanhedrin” concluded, as had Mendelssohn before, that the transformation could be achieved without substantive halakhic change, it was not long before the call was heard for reform.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The reason was this. Jewish law imposes a code of difference. Jews are not to be “like all the nations.” Internally, this was a source of pride, expressed in Balaam’s blessing, “It is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations.”²⁰ Externally it was a source of resentment, caught in Haman’s complaint to Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people.”²¹ This discipline of difference, as even a secularist critic like Spinoza had seen, had been a key to Jewish survival. But for the enthusiasts of emancipation it was now dysfunctional. It was an obstacle to integration.

footnotes:
²⁰ Num. 23:9.
²¹ Esther 3:8.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Non-Jewish opponents of emancipation had argued that the Jewish hope for a return to Zion meant that Jews could not be true European citizens. Their loyalties would be divided. They still had aspirations to independent nationhood.²² (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). When the Reform temple opened in Hamburg in 1817, it diluted those passages in the liturgy referring to the return to Zion.²³ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 53–61. Meyer writes, “Without question the omission and alteration of certain liturgical passages dealing with the messianic return to Zion was the most audacious innovation of the Hamburg reformers. It cast doubt on a central principle of Jewish faith firmly grounded in all layers of Jewish tradition.” Its designation as a “temple” was itself a symbolic gesture. Its members no longer mourned the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. Judaism was henceforth to be seen as a purely religious confession, without ethnic, national, or geographic particularity. A temple could be built in Hamburg no less than in Israel.²⁴ (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963).

footnotes:
²² See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870
²³ For a recent history see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism
²⁴ See W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of its European Origins


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The traditional rabbinate, quick to see the implications, responded with a condemnation: “They have perpetrated a sore evil by removing all references to the Ingathering of the Exiles.... This belief is one of the major tenets of our holy Torah.”²⁵ [Altona, 1819]; trans, in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), *The Jew in the Modern World*, 150–56. But the dynamic of reform could not rest here. Not only Jewish belief but Jewish law stood in the way of acculturation. The dietary laws impeded social mixing. The laws of the Sabbath hindered Jewish entry into certain occupations, and were proving difficult for Jewish pupils at non-Jewish schools. The Jewish laws of divorce seemed to indicate a reluctance to accept civil law and a maintenance of rabbinic authority.

footnotes:
²⁵ Eleh Divrei Haberit


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
German Reform, by midway through the nineteenth century, was to abandon all these areas of halakhah to a greater or lesser extent. The most cogent rationale was given by one of its more radical thinkers, Samuel Holdheim, who argued, as Spinoza had done, that Jewish law had been the constitution of a nation. Now that Jews no longer saw themselves as a nation, all laws that had the effect of segregating Jews were null and void, and were to be replaced by a dramatic extension of the rabbinic rule *dina demalkhuta dina,* “the law of the land is law.”²⁶ (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 110–32.

footnotes:
²⁶ See Gil Graff, Separation of Church and State: “Dina de-Mmalkhuta Dina” in Jewish Law, 1750–1848


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 34](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/34)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Reform thus became a radical movement of accommodation.²⁷, 5 (1965), 117–29; Rodney Stark, “Church and Sect,” in *Hammond* (ed.), *The Sacred in a Secular Age*, 139–49. See also Norman L. Friedman, “Boundary Issues for Liberal Judaism,” *Midstream*, 19:9 (1973), 47–52. To be sure, its early founders had counter-assimilatory as well as assimilatory motives. They sought to recast Judaism in a form that would retain the loyalties of rapidly Germanizing Jews. They hoped to stem the tide of conversion and defection. They believed that a Judaism purged of much of its ritual would not only be less restrictive of social integration, but it would recover, too, some of its pristine spiritual force. None the less, in effect if not in intention, it provided religious legitimation for the acculturating processes Jews were undergoing in early nineteenth-century Germany and subsequently in America. It did so by substituting for halakhah a conception of Judaism as ethics, and later as personal autonomy. It transposed the key term, *exile,* from a word that signified not-at-homeness into one that meant the mission to the gentiles. Exile was turned from dislocation into vocation.

footnotes:
²⁷ Sociologically, the Reform movement is unusual in that it was a schismatic movement that moved from a higher to a lower state of tension with its sociocultural environment. Most schisms produce sects, groups that break away from religious establishments that they see as having accommodated too far to society. Reform Judaism was the opposite. See Stephen Steinberg, “Reform Judaism: The Origin and Evolution of a Church Movement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 35](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/35)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There were other accommodationist movements, some that saw Reform as having gone too far, others that believed it had not gone far enough. Zechariah Frankel, in the mid-nineteenth century, argued for a greater emphasis on tradition. He believed in change, but felt that it should take place slowly and imperceptibly. Reform, he felt, should be so gradual that, in his words, “the forward progress will seem inconsequential to the average eye.” He called his approach “positive-historical,” and it took institutional shape in the form of American Conservative Judaism.


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 36
[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 36](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/36)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Conservative rabbinical school in New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary, had on its faculty in the 1920s a radical thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, who had been deeply influenced by Emil Durkheim’s sociology and Achad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. Durkheim had seen religion not as an expression of the transcendental but as performing the social function of maintaining group identity. Achad Ha’am had seen Judaism not as the word of God but as the embodiment of the Jewish people’s creative genius. Kaplan called his philosophy, and the movement that later emerged from it, Reconstructionism, best summed up in the title of his most influential book, *Judaism as a Civilization*.²⁸ [1934] (Philadelphia: JPS, 1981). This was a Judaism without supernaturalism, which celebrated Jewish culture while eliminating its belief in a personal God. It was an ideological statement of what might best be called religion as ethnicity.

footnotes:
²⁸ Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 37
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**JUDAISM AND DENOMINATION**
Reconstructionism, Reform, and Conservatism were all responses not to secularization as such but to the particular form in which it confronted Jews: economic and cultural integration into newly open societies. Each of them was, relative to tradition, liberal and accommodationist. Each involved a substantive break from traditional Jewish belief and authority, though each argued its continuity with the past. And each was, in the sense described above, a *denomination.* None, that is to say, maintained that it held a monopoly of Jewish truth. Each eventually, if not initially, accepted the *de facto* legitimacy of the others, including Orthodoxy itself.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Which brings us to a central point about the contemporary Jewish situation. The accommodationist strategy, as we have seen, accepts one of the most striking features of modernity, what sociologists have described as the “plurality of life worlds.”²⁹, 62–77. The “urbanization of consciousness” involves the individual in constant awareness that he is surrounded by others whose lifestyles and beliefs are vastly different from his own. They are accessible to him if he chooses to adopt them. He may choose not to; but then his own lifestyle is the result not of necessity but of choice. The denomination is the institutional equivalent of this consciousness. It announces itself as one way, but not the only way, of being religious; in this case, of being Jewish.

footnotes:
²⁹ See Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 39
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
As Will Herberg pointed out in the 1950s, being Protestant or Catholic or Jewish is no longer regarded as making a personal statement about ultimate reality; rather, these are three alternative modes of being American.³⁰ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). Within Judaism itself, Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, and Reconstructionism are regularly portrayed as the four Jewish denominations. Those who think in these terms see such a description as just that: neutrally descriptive. But it contains a momentous hidden premiss. It imports *pluralism* into Judaism. And this itself is an accommodation to secularization.

footnotes:
³⁰ Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Orthodoxy does not, and cannot, make this accommodation. It recognizes pluralism along many axes. It recognizes at least some other faiths as valid religious options for non-Jews. It recognizes, within Judaism itself, different halakhic traditions: Ashkenazi and Sephardi, for example, or Hasidic and Mitnagdic. Beyond halakhah, it legitimates a vast variety of religious approaches: rationalist and mystical, intellectual and emotional, nationalist and universalist, pietist and pragmatic. But it does not recognize the legitimacy of interpretations of Judaism that abandon fundamental beliefs or halakhic authority. It does not validate, in the modern sense, a plurality of denominations. It does not see itself as one version of Judaism among others.


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 41
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**DENOMINATION AND MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING**
There is therefore a systematic mutual misunderstanding between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews about the nature of Orthodoxy. Those outside Orthodoxy allocate it to a category that, within Orthodoxy, does not exist: the denomination. This category-error is embedded in the language of contemporary Judaism, for “Orthodox” is an adjective linguistically on a par with “Reconstructionist,” “Reform,” and “Conservative.” It was just this that led Samson Raphael Hirsch to object to the term “Orthodox.” It was, he wrote, “not the so-called orthodox Jews who introduced the name orthodoxy into the Jewish sphere.” Reform Jews had coined the word as a term of abuse. Against this, Hirsch insisted that “Judaism does not recognise any variants. It knows of no mosaic, prophetic or rabbinic, and of no orthodox or progressive Judaism. It either is Judaism or it is not.”³¹ (London: Mitre Press, 1950), 9. But the term persisted, giving rise to conflicts of understanding.

footnotes:
³¹ Quoted in Hermann Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Non-Orthodox Jews often expect, and feel frustrated by the lack of, Orthodox legitimation. For if Orthodoxy is perceived as a denomination then it must be neither wholly inclusive nor wholly exclusive. A denomination is, by definition, a religious group that accepts the coexistence and legitimacy of alternatives. But Orthodoxy involves, among other things, the denial that denominations exist within Judaism. It is exclusive of other Judaisms and inclusive of all Jews. The expectation that it should recognize other movements as valid interpretations of Judaism is one that in principle cannot be met. For Jewish Orthodoxy to be pluralist in the requisite sense, it would have to accept a degree of tacit secularization incompatible with its most basic beliefs. It would cease, in short, to be Orthodoxy.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
So Orthodoxy is fated to be misunderstood by those who stand outside it. But this misunderstanding works in the opposite direction also. Orthodoxy has an inbuilt tendency to misconstrue non-Orthodoxy. It arises for the following reason. Orthodoxy is committed to a strong conception of Jewish unity. The halakhic system embraces all Jews, not only those who have chosen voluntarily to accept it. For Judaism – though European emancipation sought to deny it – is collective as well as individual. It is the religion of a people. Obligation flows from a fact of birth. To be born Jewish is to be born into the commandments. There is no act for a Jew that corresponds to the act of a convert: a moment of free acceptance of Jewish law. Orthodoxy thus sees itself as the faith not of Orthodox Jews only, but of all Jews.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
From this premiss follow a number of consequences relating to Jewish unity. The subject of the covenantal promises is not the sub-community of pious Jews but *keneset Yisrael,* the collective entity of the people of Israel. All Jews are responsible for one another.³² Israel, as we have seen, was for the rabbis a single body. When one sins, all suffer. When one is injured, all feel pain. The power of the sages to legislate was circumscribed by the need to unite, not divide, the community. No decree may be enacted, they ruled, to which the majority of the community is unable to adhere.³³ (henceforth, Yad), *Mamrim* 2:5. These propositions follow from the fact that, classically, Judaism is neither a denomination nor a sect, but what sociologists call a “church” – in Jewish terms, *keneset Yisrael* – namely a body that claims both unique legitimacy and total inclusivity.

footnotes:
³² Sanhedrin 27b; Shevuot 39a.
³³ Avodah Zarah 36a; Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Yad Chazakah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Rabbinic Judaism contains no terminology that would sustain the existence of denominational alternatives. Jews were either Jews or apostates. True, the either-or was not absolute. There was considerable debate as to whether an apostate still retained his Jewish status. How far, in other words, did the principle that “Although he has sinned, he remains a Jew” extend?³⁴ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 67–76; Gerald Blidstein, “Who Is Not a Jew? The Medieval Discussion,” *Israel Law Review*, II (1976), 369–90. There was the question of the halakhic status of *conversos* or *marranos,* Jews who had ostensibly converted to Christianity or Islam but maintained their Judaism in secret.³⁵, trans. Abraham Halkin, *Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides* (Philadelphia: JPS, 1985), 13–90. There was the significant category of the *tinok shenishbah,* the “child raised among gentiles,” to which could be assigned groups whose apostasy was considered not to be deliberate.³⁶ 3:3. But the existence of these grey areas and borderline cases cannot conceal the fact that to be a Jew and to be a member of the halakhic community were coextensive. There was no third alternative: a Jew whose Jewishness was positive but not halakhic.

footnotes:
³⁴ See Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance
³⁵ See, e.g., Maimonides, The Epistle on Martyrdom
³⁶ See, e.g., Yad, Mamrim


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The absence of this intermediate category can be seen most clearly in a famous ruling of Maimonides. Jewish law had recognized certain circumstances in which a husband could be forced by a *beit din* (rabbinical court) to grant his wife a divorce. This raised an obvious question. A divorce must be freely given to be valid. A divorce given under pressure of a Jewish court of law seemed, therefore, to be a contradiction in terms. Maimonides explains as follows. The concept of coercion applies when a person is forced to do something he is not obliged to do in Jewish law. But when he is forced to do something he is already legally obliged to do, he is not being coerced against his will. For ultimately he wishes to do it. His apparent reluctance is merely the prompting of his “evil inclination,” not an index of his true desires. “Since he wishes to be a Jew [*rotzeh liheyot miYisrael*], and wishes to fulfil all the commandments and avoid transgressions,” his true desire is to abide by the decision of the court and the law on which it was based. The court’s coercion liberates rather than frustrates his will.³⁷ 2:20.

footnotes:
³⁷ Ibid., Gerushin


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 47](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/47)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Such a view of coercion is possible only when a profound coincidence can be assumed between Jewish identity and the acceptance of Jewish law. Maimonides’ transitional “and” is natural and unselfconscious: “Since he wishes to be a Jew *and* wishes to fulfil all the commandments.” It was just this “and” that was called into question by modernity: by the existence of Jews – Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative – who wished to be Jews, indeed religious Jews, without accepting the totality of Jewish law.


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 48](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/48)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Orthodoxy, confronting this phenomenon, is faced with a conflict. On the one hand it recognizes a kinship with and responsibility for all Jews, Jewishness here being defined in terms of birth, not faith. On the other hand, it cannot recognize as legitimate any other interpretation of Judaism that secularizes halakhah into “civilization,” “personal autonomy,” or “historical process.” Charles Liebman has put the dilemma well: “If non-Orthodox Jews were unorganized, the consequences of Orthodoxy’s doctrinal position would not be contradictory. It could simply undertake missions to the non-Orthodox. But when, in fact, about half of the non-Orthodox [in America] are organized in the Conservative and Reform movements, and the remainder are almost beyond reach of any religious group in Jewish life, then Orthodoxy is confronted with two mutually exclusive mandates – to promote faith and observance among non-Orthodox Jews, while giving no recognition and comfort to the only existing institutions which can reach those Jews.”³⁸ (New York: Ktav, 1983), 48–49.

footnotes:
³⁸ Charles Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” in Reuven P. Bulka (ed.), Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Liebman errs in calling this a contradiction. Orthodoxy resolves it thus: Reform Jews are Jews, but Reform Judaism is not Judaism. This is not a contradiction but a statement of the fact that tradition is constructed in terms of a *keneset Yisrael* – the totality of Jews – united by halakhah. From this vantage point it is not Orthodoxy but the existence of non-Orthodox Jewish denominations that is a contradiction in terms. But Liebman is right in identifying it as an irresolvable tension.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For Orthodoxy is faced with two alternatives. It can take Reform Judaism seriously as heresy, or it can regard Reform Jews as *tinokot shenishbu,* Jews whose dissenting views are to be attributed to cultural and parental influence but not to personal conviction. The former strategy writes them out of the fold, the latter embraces them but at the cost of refusing to take seriously the way Reform Jews define themselves. This is a dilemma for Reform Jews too, for they cannot but come to the conclusion that it is those within Orthodoxy who best understand them that most oppose them. The most lenient halakhic rulings *vis-à-vis* Reform are based on a systematic denial of Reform rabbinic legitimacy. Those halakhic authorities who take seriously Reform Judaism’s self-definition as a distinct religious alternative are necessarily those most disposed to rule that it is an alien religion, having the same status in Jewish law as Christianity or Islam.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**THE SECULARIZATION OF UNITY**
Division and systematic mutual misunderstanding are therefore the results of secularization as it has affected Judaism in the past two centuries. Modernity confronted Jews as the sudden, stark demand of emancipation. The pressures of acculturation could not be contained, so it was believed, within traditional parameters of belief and practice. Movements arose to give Jewish legitimation to social change. These were, of necessity, both accommodationist and schismatic. They gave rise to the denomination and to the adjectival Jew. But denominationalism creates expectations of coexistence and mutual legitimacy that cannot be satisfied within the traditional terms of Jewish self-definition. For to be a Jew, traditionally, is to be a Jew without adjectives.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What does this mean for our understanding of Jewish unity? Sa’adia Gaon, we recall, predicated the oneness of Israel as a nation on halakhah. Jews were a people bound together and constituted as such by their shared acceptance of Jewish law. No one from the second to the eighteenth centuries would have contested this definition. Even those, such as Spinoza, who abandoned Jewish law understood that this meant abandoning membership of the Jewish people. The birth of liberal Judaisms thus represented a phenomenon for which there was no precedent in rabbinic tradition: namely, Jews who wished to be Jews without being bound by halakhah. That was the first stage in the birth of a crisis.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But only the first. For at this point the problem was not yet acute. The radical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century, especially Holdheim, willingly accepted the consequence of their position. Jews were indeed not a nation at all, as they had once thought themselves to be. Instead, for them, Judaism was a religion in the Protestant sense, which is to say the private confession of individuals rather than the constitution of a people. Jewish unity was not a value; to think otherwise was to misunderstand what it was to be a Jew in post-Enlightenment Europe. If the loss of halakhah meant the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood, so be it. The new political dispensation demanded nothing less.


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 54](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/54)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The precondition of the problem was created in the nineteenth century, but the problem itself was not. It has been only in recent decades that the idea of Jewish unity has resurfaced with compelling urgency. As we saw in the last chapter, both the Holocaust and the State of Israel have, in their different ways, powerfully suggested to Jews the indivisibility of their fate. The ancient rabbinic texts have recovered their salience. Jews see themselves interconnected as if into a single body. So, at any rate, the logic of modern antisemitism and anti-Zionism implied. The idea that Jews might simply dissolve into a nation-state in Israel and a series of diaspora denominations with no collective bond between them has not materialized. There is a profound desire for unity, but an equally profound uncertainty as to what such unity represents. This, then, is the problem. Sa’adia Gaon had stated that only halakhah, Jewish law, joined Jews together into a people. What then becomes of peoplehood once the majority of Jews worldwide – some 80 per cent, according to Daniel Elazar³⁹ (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 153. – no longer see themselves as bound by halakhah?

footnotes:
³⁹ Daniel J. Elazar, People and Polity


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For at least eighteen hundred years, from the destruction of the Second Temple to European emancipation, Jewish unity was conceived in religious terms. The idea itself was a religious construct, part ethical, part legal, part mystical. Today such an interpretation seems unavailable. Not all Jews understand their identity in religious terms. Even those who do are split in their understanding of Judaism as a religion. The strongest contemporary pressures towards unity are distinctly secular. They come from the arenas of fund-raising, political and financial support for the State of Israel, and the lay leadership of Jewish communal organizations. Halakhah, far from uniting Jews, is now a shibboleth dividing them. The pragmatic consensus called “civil Judaism” – tradition translated into the language of secular Jewish institutions – rests on a deliberate sidestepping of theological issues.


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[One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 56](https://torahapp.org/share/book/One%20People%3F%20Tradition%2C%20Modernity%2C%20and%20Jewish%20Unity/s/Chapter%202%3B%20The%20Birth%20of%20the%20Adjectival%20Jew/r/56)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
One serious attempt to give Jewish unity a theological basis in a secular age deserves, in this context, careful consideration. It comes from the American thinker Irving Greenberg. It provides a vivid demonstration of the extent to which the idea of unity becomes de-traditionalized when applied to the contemporary Jewish situation. Greenberg’s position, in outline, is this.⁴⁰ (New York: Ktav, 1977), 7–56; id., *On the Third Era in Jewish History: Power and Politics* (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1980); id., *The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History* (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1981); id., *Voluntary Covenant* (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1982); id., *The Ethics of Jewish Power* (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, n.d.); id., *Toward a Principled Pluralism* (New York: National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, 1986). The key categories of Judaism – exodus and redemption – are historical. Judaism itself is thus a phenomenon of history. That history can be divided into three great epochs.

footnotes:
⁴⁰ Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The first, the biblical era, was marked by the immediacy of God, intervening in the human situation through miracles and prophetic revelation. In the second, the rabbinic era, God was more hidden. He was found not in prophecy but through study, and not in the Temple but through prayer. The divine presence was less directly but more widely accessible. The prophets were rare individuals; the Temple was a specific place. But in rabbinic Judaism, through study, prayer, and the life of the commandments, every individual and place became open to the divine encounter. With the destruction of the Second Temple and the transition from biblical to rabbinic Judaism, God was experienced less *in*tensively but more *ex*tensively.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The third era, that of modern Judaism, was born in the Holocaust. The Holocaust marked a yet deeper “hiding of the face” of God, so much so that it has become impossible to have any theological certainties any more. But just as had happened in the rabbinic era, this hiddenness meant that the scope of religiously significant activity became wider still. The birth of the State of Israel meant that political action, the building of a society, an economy, and an army, the handling of power, even philanthropic and political support for Israel in the diaspora, have been endowed with religious meaning. To put it more precisely: the meaning of what is “religious” has changed.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
We have entered a period of what Greenberg calls “holy secularity.” In the passage from biblical to rabbinic Judaism, sanctity was transferred from holy people and places to every Jew and everywhere. Halakhah created an environment of holy acts. Now, in the passage from rabbinic to modern Judaism, halakhah itself must broaden to embrace what have hitherto been seen as secular activities. “Every act of social justice, every humane or productive factory, every sport contest in community centers, every act of human socializing and dignity will become a secularized halakhah as Jewish religious insight deepens and the sacred dimensions of the profane are uncovered.”⁴¹, 20–21.

footnotes:
⁴¹ In Greenberg, The Third Great Cycle


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Greenberg’s thought involves a radical secularization of the key terms of Judaism. The idea of a covenant between God and Israel remains, but it has been transposed into a new key. In the first era, God was the senior partner in the covenant. In the second, man and God were more equal. In the third, man has emerged as the dominant voice. Judaism’s key institutional expressions, too, have changed. In the first era, they were the Temple, priests, and prophets; in the second, the synagogue, the house of study, and rabbis; in the third they are the Knesset, Israel’s defence forces, Holocaust memorial centres, politicians, lay leaders, and academics.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Religious pluralism necessarily follows. As long as one could speak of theological certainties, there could be Orthodoxy on the one hand, heresy on the other. But after the Holocaust there are no certainties. The very basis of covenant has become voluntary. Any Jew who chooses to associate with his people demonstrates faith, however that faith is expressed. The traditional opposition of Orthodoxy and Reform must be replaced by a vision which sees both as “aligned along a continuum of attempts to live by the covenant.”⁴², 23.

footnotes:
⁴² Id., Voluntary Covenant


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This analysis is an attempt to give theological justification to secular Judaism’s refusal to discuss theology. Its revolutionary thrust is unmistakable. It is far more radical than, for example, Reform or Conservative Judaism. For while they concede that Orthodoxy is a viable contemporary option, it follows from Greenberg’s premisses that Orthodoxy is strictly speaking impossible in a post-Holocaust world. Religious *certainty* and halakhic *authority*, the key categories of rabbinic Judaism, are cognitively and socially unavailable to the modern Jew.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Greenberg’s analysis, a strenuous attempt to arrive at a pluralistic understanding of Jewish unity, is a vivid demonstration of how far the contemporary search for unity takes us from tradition. The premiss on which all else rests is that “we are entering a period of silence in theology.”⁴³, 16. We can now no longer make statements about God; we can make statements only about the image of God that is man. Were we able to make statements about God, Orthodoxy would be possible. Were Orthodoxy possible, pluralism would be impossible. Here then is the irony. Once the presence of God was believed to make peace between Jews. Now peace is believed to require his absence.

footnotes:
⁴³ Id., The Third Great Cycle


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**ORTHODOXY AND JEWISH UNITY**
What then follows for those who believe that religious certainty and halakhic authority remain available even after Auschwitz; that so long as there is a Jewish people the terms of the covenant have not changed? For some Orthodox thinkers, the division of the Jewish people into Orthodoxy and others, deeply tragic though it is, does not sanction the pursuit of unity at the cost of other values. Creating unity in the short term, if it involved abandoning covenantal imperatives that traditionally constituted Jewish peoplehood, would be both impossible and undesirable: impossible because it would mean abandoning values that are non-negotiable, undesirable because pluralism might result in greater disunity in the long term.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There are precedents. Moses, Elijah, and Nehemiah were willing to engage in confrontation and opposition with a people they believed were abandoning the terms of Jewish destiny. They would have preferred not to. At one point Moses says, “I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me,” and he prayed to die.⁴⁴ Divisive confrontation is undertaken not out of desire but necessity. If Orthodoxy believes that the Jewish world is, for the most part, engaged in an ultimately destructive process of secularization, it might come to the conclusion that it is commanded to take a confrontational stance against the Jewish attitudes of the age. This would be a tragedy, but it would be right, it could be argued, to risk it to pre-empt a greater tragedy.

footnotes:
⁴⁴ Num. 11:14–15.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This is an important line of argument whose roots in tradition need to be taken seriously by any Jewish thinker. There were schisms in the Jewish past which led to irreparable breaches within the Jewish people: between Hellenizers and zealots, Samaritans and Pharisees, Jews and Christians, Rabbanites and Karaites. Unity is undeniably a Jewish value, but not necessarily and in all circumstances a supreme and overriding one.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
One central question of modernity is therefore whether the divisions between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy are inherently schismatic. Does Jewish tradition contain the resources to interpret them otherwise? Are there alternative halakhic strategies that stop short of confrontation and irreparable breach? Is disunity, especially from the perspective of Orthodoxy, an unavoidable tragedy?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But there is a second tragedy in the contemporary Jewish world that cannot be thought unavoidable. That is the fragmentation within Orthodoxy itself. If all Orthodox Jews hold in common the traditional commitment to God, Torah, and halakhic authority, then division between them cannot be justified on the basis of defence of a principle sufficiently crucial to warrant division. Those values that would justify confrontation, they already hold in common.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Orthodoxy *is* divided, and the tensions between its component groups have escalated in recent years. There is a fundamental disagreement between those who take a positive view of secular culture and those who see it as subversive of Jewish values. There is conflict between those who see the State of Israel as part of the process of redemption, those who regard it as religiously neutral, and those who view it negatively as a secularization of Jewish identity. There is dissension between the advocates of tolerance towards non-Orthodox and secular Jews and those who favour a more exclusive and segregated Orthodoxy. There are disputes concerning the degree to which halakhah can be responsive to social change, in particular the transformation of the social situation of women. Old arguments once thought to have expired, like those between Hasidim and their opponents, have flared into new life. Orthodoxy itself is no longer a single entity, but a congeries of communities often denying one another’s religious credentials.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Not only, then, has modernity turned “Orthodox” into an adjective descriptive of some, not all, Jews. More than this: Orthodoxy itself must now be qualified by secondary adjectives – modern and ultra-, left, centrist, and right-wing, Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist, *dati* (religious) and *charedi* (pietistic). Rabbi Louis Bernstein, honorary president of the Rabbinical Council of America, epitomized the condition of Orthodoxy in America as “flourishing but divided.” He drew this picture. “The yeshiva world...flares into verbal conflagration with the chassidic elements.... On occasion (far too frequent) verbal differences are translated to violence.” Concerted action is impossible. “Orthodoxy’s major problem...is itself.”⁴⁵, 36:2 (1987), 174–78.

footnotes:
⁴⁵ Louis Bernstein, “Orthodoxy: Flourishing but Divided,” Judaism


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In fact, the divisive issues of recent decades have usually been trivial when weighed against the transcending value of unity. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, surveying American Jewish Orthodoxy, was moved to write of being “overwhelmed by the impression that the major challenges confronting American Orthodoxy were neither demographic nor ideological, not how to deepen Jewish identity and weld the community, and not how to come to grips boldly with the social and intellectual impact of secular culture. These were, rather, determining the status of metropolitan *eiruvin* [devices to allow carrying on the Sabbath] and finding the right tuna fish.”⁴⁶, 20:1 (1982), 50. Issues of halakhic disagreement, instead of being subjects for debate and resolution by consensus, become emblems of factional division and mutual delegitimation. Halakhah itself, once the basis of a community of action, is drawn into the vortex of strife and adds to its momentum. Faced with such a situation, one must seriously question the current power of Torah to unite.

footnotes:
⁴⁶ Aharon Lichtenstein, “The State of Orthodoxy: A Symposium,” Tradition


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The question is not addressed to Torah itself, but to the fate of Torah in a secular society. For we are confronted here with a phenomenon that has less to do with the inner logic of Judaism than with the culturally fragmenting force of secularization. A second key question of Jewish modernity is, therefore: Does rabbinic tradition possess the resources to prevent the splintering of Orthodoxy? Are its current divisions and the way these are handled consistent with or antithetical to tradition?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**A RELIGIOUS IDEA IN A SECULAR AGE**
These are questions that go to the heart of Jewry and Judaism. The mystical tradition spoke of three interconnected unities. “The Holy One, blessed be he, the Torah, and Israel are one.”⁴⁷, 73a. That is a mystical doctrine, but it can be unravelled into its non-mystical components. Judaism is monotheism. The rabbis, no less than the prophets, fought against the concept of *shetei reshuyot,* “dualism,” or the idea that there is more than one ultimate cosmic power. Fundamental to Jewish belief is the unity of God.

footnotes:
⁴⁷ This particular formulation may be relatively late. For an early version of it see Zohar, Acharei Mot


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But if there is one God, then there may only be one Torah. One of the formative crises of rabbinic Judaism came “when the disciples of Shammai and Hillel multiplied, who had not served [their teachers] sufficiently.” As a result, “disputes multiplied, and the Torah became like *shetei torot,* two Torahs.”⁴⁸ Such division had to be resolved if the integrity of the Torah was to be preserved.

footnotes:
⁴⁸ Sotah 47b, Sanhedrin 88b.


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 75
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The rabbis fought equally against the idea – though they did not use the phrase – of *shetei umot,* two nations. In one dazzling image they said that just as Jews bind themselves to God by wearing tefillin (phylacteries), so God binds himself to Israel. Our tefillin, containing the verse “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” assert the unity of God. God’s tefillin, containing the verse “Who is like your people Israel, a nation one on earth?” assert the unity of Israel.⁴⁹ might be translated as either “a nation one on earth” or “a nation unique on earth.” In choosing to understand it in the first sense, the rabbis were undoubtedly influenced by Ezek. 37:22 (“I will make them a single nation in the land...never again shall they be two nations, and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms”), where it clearly bears this meaning. The sages were concerned to stress the *unity* as well as the *uniqueness* of the Jewish people. The early rabbinic literature is set against the backdrop of a people divided politically, culturally, and religiously. Its insistence on “one people” is therefore a theological affirmation in the face of crisis. The unity of the Jews, like that of Torah, is the counterpart, as it were, of the unity of God. To destroy one is to compromise the others. Rabbinic Judaism rests on these three unities – Israel, the Holy One, blessed be he, and the Torah – themselves united by the covenant at Sinai.

footnotes:
⁴⁹ I Chr. 17:21 and II Sam. 7:23; Berakhot 6a. The biblical phrase goy echad ba’aretz


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Daniel Elazar is surely correct when he writes: “The Jewish people today are in the process of millennial change, the kind of change that has not taken place since the triumph of Pharisaic Judaism eighteen hundred years ago or the emergence of the diaspora nine hundred years before that.”⁵⁰, 475. But do Jews hold enough in common for their shared nationhood to persist through such change? Can we still speak of the Jewish people?

footnotes:
⁵⁰ Elazar, People and Polity


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 77
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jewish unity was, traditionally, a religious idea. My assumption throughout this study is that it remains so. In the past two centuries alternative definitions have been offered: territorial, political, ethnic, and cultural. None of these, I believe, has even the most remote chance of uniting a world Jewry divided between Israel and the diaspora and split into a vast multiplicity of cultures and ethnicities. Only a religious idea can span these divergences of interest and identity. But it is precisely the religious idea of Jews as one people that has become uniquely problematic in modern times. The fragmentation has taken place along two axes: between Orthodoxy and others, and within Orthodoxy itself.


###### One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 2; The Birth of the Adjectival Jew 78
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The question before us, then, is this. Does the rabbinic tradition, which once forged unity out of disintegration, have the resources to do so again? In later chapters we shall consider the relationship between Orthodoxy and others. But first we must consider the divisions within Orthodoxy itself. How did they arise? Are they insuperable? Is Orthodoxy, with its deep religious commitment to Jewish unity, condemned to inflict a defeat on one of its own key values? Is adjectival Orthodoxy unavoidable?