## One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, Chapter 6; Inclusivism

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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Inclusivism***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
We now come to the most sensitive stage of the argument. I have argued that Jewish tradition contains the resources to prevent Orthodoxy’s disintegration into conflicting sects. But does it have the resources to span the quite different and vastly greater divide between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy? Here schism – the division of Jewry into two peoples – is a real possibility. Can diversity coexist with unity even across the abyss of disagreement on fundamentals of faith and practice?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Let us first specify the terms in which we are to address the question. Firstly, it applies to all groups that lie outside Orthodoxy – to the various forms of liberal Judaism (Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist), and equally to the several modes of secular Jewish identity, from diaspora Jewish ethnicity to Israeli secular nationalism. The contours of the problem differ in each case, so in this and the next chapter we shall consider only the most difficult: the relationship between Orthodoxy and Reform, in particular radical Reform as it has developed in America. If this problem is insoluble, it does not imply that the others are. But if some resolution can be found here, it should be readily applicable elsewhere.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Secondly, what kind of solution do we seek? The Orthodox-Reform rift is readily bridged if certain conditions are fulfilled. Reform Jews might decide, in the present climate of the search for tradition, to become Orthodox Jews. Orthodoxy might discover a hitherto unsuspected possibility of halakhic pluralism. Reform Judaism, less dramatically, might reformulate its doctrinal position in ways that could allow its accommodation within an Orthodoxy broadly conceived. More modestly still, some shared procedure might be arrived at, agreeable to both sides, for at least the most basic halakhic determinants of personal status: conversion and divorce. A sufficient structure of Jewish unity might be built on the narrow base of consensus on who is a Jew and who may marry whom.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Practical solutions of this nature need constantly to be articulated, in the faith that at some stage some formula or development will emerge that will generate substantive convergence towards a common conception of Jewish peoplehood. That faith is not wishful thinking. It is in large measure what it is to have faith in *keneset Yisrael,* the covenantal community; and faith in the covenantal community is an essential element of Jewish messianic belief. I shall have more to say about such proposals in a later chapter. However, they are not the immediate concern. Instead, in this chapter I consider the worst-case scenario: that nothing changes in either Reform or Orthodox attitudes. Again, this minimalist strategy has advantages. If, with this initial assumption, we fail to make progress, then nothing is ruled out by way of faith that attitudes will change, or in terms of proposals to generate change. If, on the other hand, some reconciliation is possible even within present positions, we shall have achieved a small gain on which others might be built.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The problem, thus stated, seems insoluble. Orthodoxy, as I have argued throughout, does not recognize the possibility of denominational pluralism. It cannot concede legitimacy to Jewish interpretations that deny or secularize the fundamentals of faith. This is, indeed, what is meant by Orthodoxy, and why this particular term was chosen by its opponents. To use the metaphor of the previous chapter, Orthodox Jews are related to one another as speakers of a common language, though they speak different sentences and use different dialects. That language is determined by the ground-rules of halakhic authority and the fundamentals of faith. Those who do not share those rules necessarily speak another language. The several languages may have words in common, but they will not mean the same thing.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Orthodoxy parts company with Reform as it did with Samaritans, Christians, and Karaites. Judaism, as has often been noted, does not attach the same significance to creed as it does to deed. Few of the Talmud’s thousands of pages are devoted to doctrine. Instead, overwhelmingly, they are concerned with the clarification of law. But, as is less often noted, Judaism’s great schisms have occurred over matters of belief: the authority of the oral law, the inception of the messianic age, and the divine, unmediated authorship of revelation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That dogma should be rarely debated, analysed, and codified yet none the less definitive is not a paradox. The principles of Orthodoxy are its boundaries. Boundary disputes are generally rare but bitter. For the most part, borders are taken for granted; life proceeds unreflectively within them. Reform, though, in its gradual abandonment of halakhic norms, halakhic authority, and belief in revelation, was necessarily judged to have crossed the line separating the Judaism of revelation and tradition from another country, another language.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Our initial expectation of Orthodox-Reform reconciliation must therefore be low. My argument, however, will be that this is a false interpretation of the facts. A traditional strategy is readily available to prevent schism. The problem is not the lack of a resolution but the *perception* of that resolution from two different perspectives. For, deeply rooted as it is in tradition, it runs directly contrary to modern sensibilities. We shall discover a deep conceptual gap between tradition and modernity. We face what sociologists call a collision of consciousness. In this chapter, we shall examine the solution. In the next, we shall consider how it is perceived.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**HALAKHIC INCLUSIVISM**
In 1861, Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger, one of the foremost halakhic authorities in Germany, was asked the following question. One who desecrates the Sabbath in public is regarded as having placed himself outside the community. According to some, he is regarded as a non-Jew and it is forbidden to drink his wine. Does this apply to contemporary Jewish transgressors? Ettlinger divides his answer into two sections, legal and factual. The law, he believes, is in accordance with those who rule strictly, that one may not drink the wine of one who publicly breaks the Sabbath. But the facts of contemporary Jewish life call for careful evaluation. “I find it difficult,” he writes, “to know how to judge the Jewish sinners of our time. So far has the plague [of religious laxity] spread that the majority think it permissible to break the Sabbath. Perhaps, then, they are to be treated as one who believes, wrongly, that an act is permitted – who is regarded as almost, but not quite, a deliberate sinner. Some of them recite the Sabbath prayers and *kiddush* [sanctification said over wine], and then proceed to desecrate the Sabbath by doing work that is biblically and rabbinically forbidden.”¹, NS 23.

footnotes:
¹ Binyan Tzion


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The reason why one who publicly desecrates the Sabbath is regarded as an apostate, continues Ettlinger, is that he denies creation and, by implication, the Creator. But in this case the individual has acknowledged God and creation in his prayers and *kiddush.* As for the children of such transgressors, they are to be regarded more leniently still, for they belong to the category of “merely following their fathers’ customs” (*minhag avoteihem beyadeihem*) and “a child brought up by gentiles” (*tinok shenishbah*). Rabbi Ettlinger’s conclusion is that it is halakhically defensible to drink the wine of a contemporary Sabbath-breaker, though “he who wishes to be strict will receive blessing.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The responsum touches on fundamentals. Judaism is the religion of a particular people. From this, two consequences follow. It is *inclusive* towards Jews, and *pluralist* towards other faiths. All Jews are embraced by the covenant of Sinai. But the covenant is not addressed to other nations, so that there is no equivalent in Judaism of the doctrine of *extra ecclesiam non salus.* One does not have to be a Jew to merit eternal life. These views would suggest a Judaism of extreme religious tolerance. But there are limits. Tradition maintains that there are Jews and non-Jews who have no share in the world to come. For Jews the most obvious exclusion is heresy, denial of one of the fundamentals of Jewish faith.² 3:6–14. For non-Jews, it is denial of monotheism.

footnotes:
² Yad, Teshuvah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Was it possible to be lenient, even so? It was. As far as non-Jews were concerned, the Talmud had recorded the dictum of Rabbi Jochanan that “the gentiles outside the land [of Israel] are not idolaters. They are merely following their fathers’ customs [*minhag avoteihem beyadeihem*].”³ This principle was used by Rabbenu Gershom,⁴, 24–36. along with other considerations, to defend the medieval Jewish practice of trading with gentiles on their festivals, something which the Mishnah had forbidden.⁵ In relation to Jews, the Talmud had used the concept of “a child brought up by gentiles [*tinok shenishbah*]” to describe a situation in which a Jew might transgress Jewish law without being in a position to know that what he was doing was forbidden.⁶ Maimonides had invoked the idea to rule that Karaites, other than those of the first generation, were not deliberate rebels against rabbinic Judaism. One should not shun them, but instead “draw them with words of peace” so that they repented and returned to the ways of Torah.⁷ 3:3.

footnotes:
³ Chullin 13b.
⁴ See Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance
⁵ Mish. Avodah Zarah 1:1.
⁶ See Shabbat 68b, Shevuot 5a.
⁷ Yad, Mamrim


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The strategy in both cases is similar. It involves seeing the heresy concerned as inherited, not chosen. It represents habit, not conviction. It applies to belief systems the idea of duress (*ones*). One who acts under duress lacks the requisite intention. He is not the true author of his acts. So, too, there is a concept of cultural duress. One who is brought up in a tradition of erroneous beliefs is not the true author of those beliefs. In this case, heresy is due to outside influences and cultural conditioning, not to a personal act of rebellion against divine law. Rabbi Ettlinger applies both strategies to the Jewish transgressors of his day. They are acting out of habit and misguided parental influence. They are sinners, but not heretics. They remain within the halakhic community. One may therefore drink their wine. Following this precedent, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann ruled that one may count them in a quorum for prayer.⁸, i. 29. Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathansohn, author of the responsa *Shoel Umeshiv,* concurred.⁹ Rabbi Chayyim Ozer Grodzinski included Ettlinger’s reasoning in ruling that Sabbath-breakers might be counted in certain circumstances as valid witnesses.¹⁰, iii. 25. Other authorities, among them Rabbi Abraham Karelitz¹¹ on *Yoreh De’ah* (Bnei Brak: Greineman, 1973), 2:16. and Rabbi Kook,¹², i. 138. ruled that the category of heretic was inapplicable today.

footnotes:
⁸ Melamed Leho’il
⁹ Cited ibid.
¹⁰ Achi’ezer
¹¹ Chazon Ish
¹² Igerot Harayah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
No more powerful inclusivist strategy could be conceived. These rulings provide a halakhic basis for seeing all Jews – Conservative, Reform, secular, and atheist – as still within *keneset Yisrael,* the covenantal community. It is a traditional solution to the problem of Jewish unity across even deep ideological divisions. But before we consider its implications, we must ask a more fundamental question.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There is a difference between halakhic possibility and halakhic actuality. There is a difference, in other words, between a legitimate halakhic opinion – based on the appropriate sources and inferences derivable from them – and ultimate halakhic ruling. Most arguments within the Talmud, for example, presuppose this distinction. Each side of the argument may be warranted, but only one becomes normative law. In the present instance, that inclusive rulings *could* emerge with regard to contemporary transgressors is a tribute to the scope of halakhic possibility. That they *did* emerge is evidence of something else, a series of evaluative judgements that have more to do with what we have called aggadah than halakhah. For it is clear that there was an alternative possibility. A person publicly desecrating the Sabbath had placed himself outside the community; so had a heretic. Against each of the inclusive rulings I have cited, an exclusive alternative was possible. Indeed the direct, uninterpreted application of text to circumstance would have favoured exclusivism. Reform, Conservative, and secular Judaisms were, in so far as they involved a denial of one or several principles of faith, halakhically to be regarded as heresies. Why then were individual adherents of these ideologies not regarded as heretics? Why was the line of inclusion not only available but actually chosen?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**INCLUSIVISM: THE RATIONALE OF COVENANT**
Here we can only speculate. The halakhic literature, like other legal literature, generally hides its underlying evaluations. It is concerned to demonstrate that its conclusions follow from the antecedent sources, and that apparently conflicting texts neither contradict nor compromise the judgement reached. As Nachum Rabinovitch observes, “The purpose of a responsum is not primarily to explain why the law holds in a particular case. It is rather to prove that no matter how we look at a particular issue, the decision could not be otherwise…. Naturally when it comes to explaining the real motivations for the decision, the responsum may be downright misleading because the positive reasons for the law may not be adequately stressed.”¹³, 1:4 (1979), 18.

footnotes:
¹³ Nachum Rabinovitch, “A Halakhic View of the Non-Jew,” L’Eylah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Let me say immediately what this does *not* imply. Reform thinkers have pointed to it as evidence of the “subjectivity” of halakhic decision making.¹⁴, 13 (1964), 211–19. Conservative ideologists interpret it as evidence of halakhah’s historicity.¹⁵, 28 (1979), 263–82. A halakhic authority, they argue, is the product of his time, environment, and culture, and his rulings reflect the fact. Some Orthodox thinkers have been misrepresented as denying the phenomenon altogether, as if halakhic conclusions followed deductively from textual premisses and there were no “hard cases” in Jewish law.¹⁶ (New York: Ktav, 1977), xiii–xviii, and “Halakhah as an Absolute,” *Judaism*, 29 (1980), 30–37 – have been understood this way. See, e.g., David Singer, “Who Are Today’s Modern Orthodox?,” *Sh’ma*, 13:257 (Sept. 16, 1983), 112–15, and the ensuing debate.

footnotes:
¹⁴ Eugene B. Borowitz, “Subjectivity and the Halakhic Process,” Judaism
¹⁵ See, e.g., Robert Gordis, “A Dynamic Halakhah: Principles and Procedures of Jewish Law,” Judaism
¹⁶ Some of J. David Bleich’s presentations – e.g., his “Introduction: The Methodology of Halakhah,” Contemporary Halakhic Problems


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
All three interpretations, I believe, are wrong. There *are* hard cases in which the antecedent sources allow of more than one answer to a halakhic question. The question under review, the status of non-Orthodox Jews, is one. But in deciding which answer to adopt, the *posek,* the halakhic judge, relies neither on subjective considerations nor on values drawn from contemporary non-Jewish culture. He relies, instead, on his understanding of the entire thrust of the antecedent tradition.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Ronald Dworkin, speaking of law generally, has made the point well:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Any judge forced to decide a lawsuit will find, if he looks in the appropriate books, records of many arguably similar cases decided over decades or even centuries past by many other judges of different styles and judicial and political philosophies.... Each judge must regard himself, in deciding the new case before him, as a partner in a complex chain enterprise of which these innumerable decisions, structures, conventions, and practices are the history; it is his job to continue that history into the future through what he does today.... So he must determine, according to his own judgement, what the earlier decisions come to, what the point or theme of the practice so far, taken as a whole, really is.¹⁷, 159.

footnotes:
¹⁷ Dworkin, A Matter of Principle


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Applying this to the case in hand, what “point” or “theme” of Judaism, taken as a whole, sanctioned an inclusivist ruling in the case of modern non-Orthodox Jews?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The first, surely, is this. Halakhah is intrinsically inclusive because its object, *keneset Yisrael,* is a community of birth as well as faith. Michael Wyschogrod puts clearly a proposition that lies at the heart of classic Jewish self-definition. “The foundation of Judaism is the family identity of the Jewish people as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Whatever else is added to this must be seen as growing out of and related to the basic identity of the Jewish people as the seed of Abraham elected by God through descent from Abraham. This is the crux of the mystery of God’s election.”¹⁸, 57. Wyschogrod draws this conclusion: “The house of Israel is therefore not a voluntary association defined by acceptance or rejection of a set of propositions.”¹⁹

footnotes:
¹⁸ Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith
¹⁹ Ibid., 175.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This is a slight overstatement. It is possible, in traditional Jewish thought, to place oneself effectively outside the community by the rejection of a set of propositions, namely the principles of faith. But the fundamental point is valid. A Jew is born into obligations. There is no formal moment of acceptance of the commands. The born Jew is, as the Talmud put it, “already foresworn as from [the revelation at] Mount Sinai.”²⁰ The presumption of Jewish law is therefore that the Jew remains within the halakhic community, without any need to demonstrate acceptance of its laws or creed. This remains so even if the individual systematically transgresses Jewish law.

footnotes:
²⁰ Yoma 73b, Nedarim 8a, Shevuot 21b.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Maimonides accordingly wrote that when a person belongs to *klal Yisrael*, the faith-community of Israel, “it is incumbent upon us to love him, to care for him, and to do all for him that God commanded us to do for one another in the way of affection and brotherly sympathy.” He continued: “And this is so even if he were to be guilty of every transgression possible, by reason of power of desire or the mastery of base natural passions. He will receive punishment according to the measure of his perversity, but he will have a portion in the world to come, even though he be one of the transgressors in Israel.”²¹, Sanh., ch. 10, Intro.

footnotes:
²¹ Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The principle was put to the test in an acute form in the Middle Ages. At various times and places, great pressures were put on Jews to convert to Christianity or Islam. Economic and political sanctions were used, including, on occasion, the threat of death if Jews did not comply. Some did. Many of those who did remained practising Jews in secret, *conversos* or *marranos* as they were called. The question arose whether they were still halakhically to be considered Jews. Did the Jewish acts they performed covertly still count as *mitzvot,* the religious deeds of members of the covenantal community? Were they to be admitted to or excluded from the synagogue?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The question came to Maimonides in the wake of the invasion of Spain by the Almohades, an aggressive Muslim sect that sought forced conversions to Islam. Maimonides’ family had left Spain for this reason. Of those who remained, some chose to die. Others converted. A rabbi had ruled that the *conversos* were henceforth to be regarded as gentiles. Any Jewish religious act they now did would be not a *mitzvah* but an additional transgression. Maimonides, shocked by this ruling, wrote his *Epistle on Martyrdom* in reply. It remains one of the classic texts of halakhic inclusivism.²², 13–90.

footnotes:
²² The text is available in English translation in Halkin (trans.), Crisis and Leadership


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Maimonides quotes a long series of texts and rabbinic interpretations to show that at various times in biblical history the people of Israel had been collectively guilty of cardinal sins, especially idolatry. Yet in each case, when the prophets complained of Israel’s corruption they were rebuked by God. “If this is the sort of punishment meted out to the pillars of the universe – Moses, Elijah, Isaiah and the ministering angels – because they briefly criticized the Jewish congregation, can one have an idea of the fate of the least among the worthless who let his tongue loose against Jewish communities of sages and their disciples, priests and Levites, and called them sinners, evil-doers, gentiles, disqualified to testify, heretics who deny the Lord God of Israel?”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
He goes further. Idolatry is less grave than heresy, and conversion undergone through duress is less grave still. None the less, even in the case of undoubted heretics – Maimonides cites Ahab, Eglon king of Moab, Nebuchadnezzar, and the biblical Esau as seen through rabbinic tradition – they were rewarded for the good deeds they did. “The Holy One, blessed be he, does not withhold the reward of any creature,” says Maimonides, quoting an aggadic axiom.²³ “If these well-known heretics were generously rewarded for the little good that they did, is it conceivable that God will not reward the Jews, who despite the exigencies of forced conversion, perform commandments secretly?”

footnotes:
²³ Pesachim 118a, Nazir 23b, Bava Kama 38b, Horayot 10b.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Maimonides concludes that Jews should leave and travel to a place where they will be free of persecution. Those who remain are sinful. Duress is a defence; but to choose to live under it rather than leave is culpable. None the less, whoever ignores his advice and decides to stay “must bear in mind that if he fulfils a precept, God will reward him doubly, because he acted for God only and not to show off or be accepted as an observant individual.” As for the community’s relation to the *conversos,* he rules: “It is not right to alienate, scorn, and hate people who desecrate the Sabbath. It is our duty to befriend them and encourage them to fulfil the commandments. The rabbis regulate explicitly that when an evil-doer who sinned by choice comes to the synagogue, he is to be welcomed, not insulted.”


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The essay strikes a masterly balance between criticism and encouragement. Throughout we are reminded of Rabbi Meir’s reply to Rabbi Judah on the meaning of the biblical phrase “You are sons of the Lord your God.”²⁴ Rabbi Judah had argued that “when you behave as sons, you are called sons; when you do not, you are not called sons.” Rabbi Meir insisted: “In either event, you are called sons.”²⁵ The covenantal relationship was biological and unbreakable. Jews remained the children of God whether or not they acted accordingly.

footnotes:
²⁴ Deut. 14:1.
²⁵ Kiddushin 36a.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Some such perception undoubtedly informs the rulings of Rabbi Ettlinger and others. The weight of Jewish values lay on the side of inclusion. If by a formal halakhic device the person publicly desecrating the Sabbath could be kept within the community, then it should be invoked. But this rationale, though powerful, is not enough. An analogy could not be drawn between idolatry and heresy. Idolatry was a sin. Heresy was a rebellion. One could worship idols and still be counted within the covenantal family. But heresy, wrote Maimonides, was an act of self-exclusion from the family.²⁶, Sanh., ch. 10, Intro. In his code he had written that “the Torah is very solicitous for the lives of Israelites, whether they are righteous or wicked, *since* all Israelites acknowledge God and believe in the essentials of our religion.”²⁷ 13:14. The “since” was crucial. How then could one go further and include secular or liberal Jews, who did not accept “the essentials of our religion,” within the scope of Jewish peoplehood, halakhically conceived?

footnotes:
²⁶ Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah
²⁷ Yad, Rotze’ach


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**THE COGNITIVE IMPACT OF SOCIAL CHANGE**
It was here that the deeply negative view of contemporary culture taken by a number of Orthodox authorities had positive halakhic consequences. Rabbi Moses Sofer and Rabbi Kook were, in their different ways, convinced that a diaspora synthesis of Judaism and secular culture – the model proposed by Samson Raphael Hirsch – was unworkable. The former advocated Orthodox seclusion; the latter, a total Jewish culture in Eretz Israel. But both agreed that emancipation threatened diaspora Jewish continuity at its foundations. Jews would be exposed to social and intellectual pressures that would prove irresistible. It was just this negation that was to prove the basis of a remarkable re-evaluation of the phenomenon of heresy.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Talmud, as we have seen, had used the idea of cultural duress. It had spoken of a *tinok shenishbah*, a child brought up among gentiles and who could not therefore have been expected to know the law. But the concept meant what it said. It spoke of an exceptional occurrence: a child raised outside the Jewish community, lacking all knowledge of Judaism. Rabbi Moses Isserles had defined a *tinok shenishbah* as *eino yode’a mitorat Yisrael kelal,* one who “knows nothing at all of Jewish law.”²⁸ on *Yoreh De’ah* 159:6. The generalization of the concept to a broad spectrum of Jews who knew what Jewish law was and had chosen not to follow it was a radical halakhic stroke. The reasoning of Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Karelitz – an authority broadly within the school of Rabbi Moses Sofer – is illuminating in this context. Kook uses a closely related idea, that of passion considered as duress. The Tosafists²⁹ on Sanhedrin 26b, s.v. *hechashud*; Gittin 41b, s.v. *kofin*. had employed this idea specifically in the case of sexual passion. To apply it to a cultural context is a daring generalization. But this is what Kook does. “The same [reasoning adopted by the Tosafists] applies to the “bad maid,” the mood of the times, who has been permitted by the will of Heaven to exercise sway prior to being totally vanquished, and who has seduced many of our young children with all her many charms to whore after her. They were fully under duress, and God forbid that we judge them as acting voluntarily.”³⁰, i. 138. Kook does not predicate his defence of a rebellious generation on a lack of knowledge of Judaism. He bases it instead on the powerful counter-attractions of the secular culture to which they have been exposed.

footnotes:
²⁸ Rema
²⁹ Tosafot
³⁰ Igerot Harayah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Rabbi Karelitz uses two arguments, one social, the other spiritual, to render the concept of heresy inapplicable in the modern age. The first is this. Jewish law permits one to hate the wrongdoer.³¹ But this is so only after he has rejected rebuke.³² 13:14; *Hagahot Maimoniyot* on Yad, *De’ot* 6:3; *Sefer Hachinukh* (Venice, 1523), 245. Rebuke is impossible nowadays.³³ Therefore, one must love the wrongdoer.³⁴ on *Yoreh De’ah* 2:28. The reasoning is cited here and elsewhere in the name of the Maharam of Lublin, citing his responsum 13. That ruling, however, though it deals with the subject of rebuke, does not make the point advanced by the Chazon Ish. It can, however, be inferred from the sources cited above. This is essentially a sociological argument, based on the demise of traditional structures of religious authority. Though it rests wholly on talmudic and medieval sources, the inference it draws is characteristically modern. Indeed, on the basis of the same sources, a medieval authority had come to precisely the opposite conclusion: in the face of widespread transgression one should redouble one’s efforts to rebuke, even beyond the limits laid down in the Talmud.³⁵ on Beitzah 30a. The Talmud there had formulated the principle “Let Israel go their way. Better that they sin unwittingly than that they sin deliberately.” This placed a limit on rebuke. Under certain circumstances, where one’s words would not be heeded, it was better to be silent than to speak. The medieval authorities debated the precise location of this limit. Ritva, however, in the name of “a distinguished Ashkenazi rabbi,” cites the view that “this principle was intended only for those times. In the present generation, however, when people are lax about many matters, one should rather make a ‘fence around the Torah.’ Even when the transgression is only of rabbinic law, we should protest and impose penalties so that people sin neither unwittingly nor deliberately.” Ritva adds that this seems to him to be correct. Rabbi Karelitz is writing in an age in which coercion and persuasion lack power. The concept of rebellion is intimately related to that of authority. When authority wanes, there ceases to be rebellion as traditionally understood.

footnotes:
³¹ Pesachim 113b.
³² See Yad, Rotze’ach
³³ See Arakhin 16b.
³⁴ Chazon Ish
³⁵ Ritva, cited in Shitah Mekubetzet


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The second argument is the most radical recorded in the literature. The severe punishment meted out to the heretic belonged, he argues, to a world in which divine providence was evident to all. Not only was heresy under such circumstances an unpardonable rebellion, but its punishment was perceived by the community as contributing to its own welfare. People knew that a community which left heretics unpunished would itself be punished by sword and pestilence. Nowadays, however, the ways of providence are hidden. Far from contributing to social order, the punishment of heretics would seem, to the majority of Jews, to be an unwarranted act of destructive authoritarianism. Instead of mending the breach of observance, it would widen it. Therefore we must try instead to draw back unbelievers not through punitive sanction but through “the bonds of love.”³⁶ on *Yoreh De’ah* 2:16.

footnotes:
³⁶ Chazon Ish


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These lines of argument are unprecedented prior to modernity. To be sure, some traces of them can be found in the talmudic literature. Rav Ashi, about to expound on King Manasseh’s exclusion from the world to come, is visited by a dream in which the king assures him, “Had you been there, you would have caught up your cloak and run after me.”³⁷ Biblical and rabbinic legislation is shot through with the perception that Jewish conduct is influenced by social contact. One of its central motifs is the need to maintain a distance between the Jew and non-Jewish cultures. But it was just this “fence” around Jewish identity that emancipation threatened to remove, and the halakhic authorities had renounced or been deprived of the power to enforce it. Precisely the awareness that halakhic observance had, in modernity, become voluntary led to a corresponding realization that *lack* of observance had in a certain sense become *in*voluntary.

footnotes:
³⁷ Sanhedrin 102b.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The rulings of Rabbis Ettlinger, Kook, and Karelitz reveal a finely honed insight into what in a secular context would be called the sociology of knowledge. The religious beliefs of Orthodoxy were no longer objectified in the structures of Jewish social reality. In the traditional situation, “the world as defined by the religious institution in question was *the* world, maintained not just by the mundane powers of the society and the instruments of social control, but much more fundamentally maintained by the ‘common sense’ of the members of that society.”³⁸, 134. See also Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, *The Social Construction of Reality* (London: Pelican, 1987). Heresy in such an environment is necessarily deviant, a rebellion against a self-evident world order. But emancipation had broken the congruence between Jewish belief and external reality. Tradition lost “the quality of self-evident intersubjective plausibility.”³⁹, 151. As Ettlinger and Hoffmann put it: how could Sabbath-breaking be evidence of a denial of faith when most Jews regarded it as permitted? As Kook and Karelitz argued, in the contemporary cultural context heresy itself could no longer be regarded as culpable, even if it remained heresy. The leniency of these rulings is directly related to the seriousness with which Orthodoxy took the assault of modernity. Those like Samson Raphael Hirsch who were more inclined to take modernity in their stride were, as we shall see in the next chapter, dramatically less sympathetic to doctrinal deviance.

footnotes:
³⁸ Berger, The Sacred Canopy
³⁹ Berger, The Sacred Canopy


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**INCLUSIVITY AND THE DESIRE TO BE INCLUDED**
So behind halakhic inclusivism lay covenantal consciousness on the one hand, sociological insight on the other. But these two factors might not have been enough without the presence of a third, perhaps the hardest to define halakhically. It was noted in an earlier chapter that Maimonides, in discussing the law that a court may coerce a husband to grant a divorce, had used a significant phrase: “since he wishes to be a Jew [*rotzeh liheyot miYisrael*] and wishes to fulfil all the commandments.”⁴⁰ 2:20. The disjunction of these two clauses was inconceivable prior to modernity. To wish to be a Jew *was* to wish to fulfil the commands. To cast off the yoke of the commands was to wish to leave the Jewish community. The liberal and secular Jew thus raised a question never before confronted in quite this form. Did the wish to remain a Jew, severed from the desire to keep the traditional commands, carry halakhic significance?

footnotes:
⁴⁰ Yad, Gerushin


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The authorities so far cited do not refer directly to the issue, though Rabbi Ettlinger was struck by the existential contradiction of the Sabbath-breaker who before setting out to work on the day of rest sanctified it in his prayers. He wished to remain within the community of the Sabbath without obeying its laws. It is not surprising that Rabbi Ettlinger confesses that it is “difficult to know how to judge” such conduct. But there are suggestions here and there in the literature that lead us to conjecture that the wish to remain a Jew was a fact possessing independent religious dignity. Once again, it is Maimonides who points the way.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Talmudic literature had distinguished between “an apostate with respect to one law” and an “apostate with respect to the whole Torah.”⁴¹ Maimonides’ treatment of the two concepts is theologically masterful. In Jewish law, both had forfeited their share in the world to come. What then was the need for the idea of an “apostate with respect to the whole Torah” if apostasy in respect of a single one of its laws had the same effect? Maimonides’ answer is that they represent two different kinds of rebellion. The apostate with respect to one law – sinning not out of weakness but out of defiance – acts as if part of the Torah has ceased to apply to him. He offends against the ninth principle of faith, that the Torah is eternal. The apostate with respect to the whole Torah, by contrast, may perhaps not commit a single transgression. Instead he is one who “at a time of persecution converts to another religion, allying his fate with theirs, saying, ‘What advantage is it to me to remain part of the people of Israel, seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join my destiny to those who have power.’” He offends against the eleventh principle of faith, belief in reward and punishment and the ultimate justice of humanity under providence.⁴² 3:9. See the excellent commentary of Nachum Rabinovitch, *Yad Peshutah*, ad loc. (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1977), 55–60.

footnotes:
⁴¹ Chullin 5a.
⁴² Yad, Teshuvah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Maimonides, in other words, regards desertion of the Jewish people as a religious offence independently of any transgression committed in the process. This is more strikingly evident in his interpretation of another passage. The Talmud speaks of “sectarians, informers, scoffers, those who reject the Torah and deny the resurrection of the dead, and those who separate themselves from the community [*shepirshu midarkhei hatzibur*].⁴³ Rashi is puzzled by the last phrase, for he understands it as a generic description of the preceding cases. To separate oneself from the community is, for Rashi, to be guilty either of a cardinal transgression or of heresy. Maimonides, however, regards it as a quite distinct offence. It refers to one who “even if he does not commit any transgression, none the less separates himself from the congregation of Israel, does not fulfil commands together with them, is indifferent to their distress, does not share in their fasts, and goes his own way as if he were a member of another nation, not theirs.”⁴⁴ 3:11.

footnotes:
⁴³ Rosh Hashanah 17a.
⁴⁴ Yad, Teshuvah


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These negative rulings imply a positive corollary. If leaving the Jewish people, regardless of transgression, is itself a fundamental sin, a determination *not* to leave the Jewish people must in itself be a fundamental virtue. This proposition was never explicitly formulated in the classic literature, but how, prior to modernity, could the question have arisen? To be a Jew was the paradigm of an involuntary state of being. One was born a Jew. One was defined as a Jew by the internal and external reality-- definitions of Jewish minority existence in a Christian or Islamic culture. There was what sociologists call “a total identification of the individual with his socially assigned typifications.”⁴⁵, 108. Being a Jew was an identity, not a role. It was given, not chosen. Virtue presupposes choice. Since Jewish affiliation was not chosen, it was not a virtue but a state.

footnotes:
⁴⁵ Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But Jewish law recognized one instance of choosing to be a Jew, namely, the case of the convert. It is here that identification with the Jewish people emerges as a significant motif in its own right. In a remarkable passage, the Talmud describes the procedure by which the court interviewed a prospective convert. “If at the present time a person wishes to become a proselyte, he is to be asked, “What reason do you have for wishing to become a proselyte? Do you not know that Israel at the present is persecuted and oppressed, despised, harassed, and overcome by afflictions?” If he replies, “I know, and I am unworthy,” he is accepted immediately.”⁴⁶ Conversion, to be sure, also involved acceptance of the commands. But the passage bespeaks a deep awareness that becoming a Jew is, not least, an act of identification with a people and its destiny,⁴⁷, 43–48. and that – given the tragic nature of its history “at the present time” – such an act is a moving gesture of faith. In this the rabbis were doing no more than mirroring the biblical archetype of the convert, Ruth, whose words of affiliation were both national and religious: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”⁴⁸

footnotes:
⁴⁶ Yevamot 47a.
⁴⁷ On this see Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut Veha’arakhah
⁴⁸ Ruth 1:16.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Which brings us to the crucial transformation of Jewish identity under emancipation. To be a Jew, for one born a Jew, is not a matter of *halakhic* choice. But there are situations of cultural crisis when it becomes an *existential* choice. Jews throughout Europe were invited to submerge their identities in a neutral, enveloping secular citizenship. Overwhelmingly they resisted the terms of that transaction. There were periods, it is true, when significant numbers of Jews converted to Christianity, especially in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, especially, too, among the upper strata of wealth and culture. In 1799 a leading Berlin Jewish intellectual, David Friedlander, put forward a general proposal. Jews should join the Protestant church. They would be baptized. But they would not confess Christian dogma in its entirety. They would subscribe only to the religion of nature.⁴⁹, esp. 115–23. That this proposal gained little assent, that the early wave of conversions subsided, and that Jews, liberal or secular, remained Jews and sought ways of expressing their Jewishness, are facts of monumental significance.

footnotes:
⁴⁹ See Katz, Out of the Ghetto


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For the most part, Jews did *not* say, “What advantage is it to me to remain part of the people of Israel, seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join my destiny to those who have power.” They declared their willingness *liheyot miYisrael*, to be counted among Israel. The Reform movement, despite its legitimation of assimilatory modes of conduct, was at the same time, in the minds of many of its theorists, a consciously counter-assimilatory force.⁵⁰, 3–74. Secular Zionism, with some exceptions, was even more avowedly particularist: from Moses Hess onwards it displayed a ferocious national pride. Such were the complex interplays of emancipation and antisemitism in the nineteenth century that even assimilatory gestures had dissimilatory consequences. The “Science of Judaism” movement, whose purpose, according to Moritz Steinschneider, was “to give the remains of Judaism a decent burial,”⁵¹ (New York: Schocken, 1972), 307. produced among other things a rise in Jewish historical consciousness which lent impetus to Zionism. The children and grandchildren of assimilated European Jews – among them Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Jiri Langer – discovered, in their encounter with the Jews of Eastern Europe, an integrity and vitality that produced further variants of the dialectic between acculturation and Jewish affirmation.⁵² and German Jews,” in Reinharz and Schatzberg (eds.), *The Jewish Response to German Culture*, 195–211.

footnotes:
⁵⁰ See id., Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation
⁵¹ Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism
⁵² See, e.g., Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These were not facts that could be regarded as evaluatively neutral, as if once religious faith and halakhic authority were abandoned it was a matter of indifference whether Jews converted, assimilated, or found alternative modes of Jewish identity. But here was a dilemma for which rabbinic thought provided no clear precedent. On the one hand, liberal Judaisms and secular Zionism were Jewish affirmations in an age of real and seductive alternatives. On the other, they were revolutionary deviations from the only terms in which tradition had defined the Jewish vocation and destiny. The former fact called for positive recognition. The latter called for negation. How to give religious expression to the value of Jewish identification *per se* without at the same time legitimating a secularization of Jewish identity is the problem that exercised many of the leading Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I surveyed several of these approaches in the chapter on Orthodoxy and Jewish peoplehood. Rabbi Reines solved the problem by distinguishing acts between man and God from those between man and man. The former required religious motivation; the latter did not. Secular Jews, working as they did for the amelioration of the Jewish condition, were thus fulfilling a religious command regardless of their intent. Rabbi Hirschensohn accorded an independent significance to Jewish peoplehood even as secularly conceived. Rabbi Soloveitchik, through his concept of the two covenants, those of the Exodus and Sinai, history and destiny, was able to locate feelings of Jewish solidarity and collective responsibility on the map of biblical and rabbinic values.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Perhaps Rabbi Kook went furthest in his distinction between the two components of Jewish consciousness, *nefesh* and *ruach,* “soul” and “spirit” respectively. “The *nefesh* of those Jewish transgressors who, in this pre-messianic era, join themselves lovingly to matters of collective Jewish concern – Eretz Israel and national rebirth – is more developed than the *nefesh* of the wholly pious ones of Israel who do not have the same inner feeling for the collective good and the rebuilding of the people and the land. Those who fear God and keep his commands have, though, a more developed *ruach*.”⁵³ (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1983), 11. Here was inclusivism transfigured into mysticism. But the thrust is unmistakable. There is a sense in which those who identify with Israel’s collective identity, even if they do so on secular premisses, have a religious virtue that many of the religious do not possess. Kook, of course, believed that the paradox would be resolved in a messianic synthesis. The dynamic of Israel’s national renaissance would lead to a new symbiosis. The secularists would give of their *nefesh* to the religious, who in turn would endow the secular with *ruach*, spirituality.

footnotes:
⁵³ Abraham Isaac Kook, Arpelei Tohar


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Each of these philosophies is an attempt to accord religious significance to the phrase *rotzeh liheyot miYisrael*, to the mere wish to be a Jew, even when severed from its nexus in the life of the commands. For in modernity the wish was not “mere.” It represented a choice in the felt presence of alternatives. The dialectical tensions in these Orthodox readings of peoplehood are acute and inescapable. To affirm the covenant of Exodus without that of Sinai, or *nefesh* without *ruach*, or commands between man and man without those between man and God, was impossible. But to affirm that, in each case, the former was nothing without the latter was also impossible.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The inclusivist strategy resolves the tension by valuing the desire to participate in the Jewish destiny while devaluing liberal and secular interpretations of that destiny. This is the essence of Rabbi Ettlinger’s responsum on the Sabbath-breaker, as it was of all subsequent inclusivist rulings. The contemporary Sabbath-breaker presented the halakhic system with an apparent contradiction: he wished to be part of the Sabbath community without obeying its laws. An exclusivist ruling would take the second fact as definitive. Since he rejects the law, he in turn is rejected by the law. An inclusivist ruling takes the first fact as decisive. Since he wishes to be included, he is still part of the community. The fact that he rejects halakhah is to be explained away as a culturally conditioned error. And what applied to the Sabbath specifically applied to the covenantal community generally. Those who manifested a wish to be included within Israel, by their affirmation of Jewish identity, were to be included. But the construction they placed on that inclusion – liberal, secular, ethnic, nationalist, or cultural – was not to be legitimated. It too was an excusable error, but an error none the less.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**INCLUSIVISM AND POST-HOLOCAUST THEOLOGIES**
Inclusivism, then, uses classic halakhic strategies – variants on the themes of *minhag avoteihem beyadeihem* (habit, not belief) and *tinok shenishbah* (excusable ignorance) – to include within the covenantal community those whose beliefs and practices would, if taken at their face value, place them outside. It is an extraordinarily powerful device, capable of neutralizing the schismatic impact of almost any Jewish ideology at odds with tradition. Its method, considered as a formal halakhic device, is to isolate the liberal or secular Jew from his beliefs. The beliefs remain heretical but those who believe them are not heretics, for they do not ultimately or culpably believe them. Liberal and secular Jews remain Jews, even though neither liberal nor secular Judaism is Judaism.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Deviant belief is to be attributed to the impact of a secularizing culture, the collapse of religious authority, and the absence of compelling religious role models, rather than to willed and conscious rebellion. Needless to say, the halakhic authorities so far considered did not *endorse* any departure from tradition. What they did was to search for ways to *excuse* it.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I have argued, though, that the *availability* of formal halakhic devices in no way explains their actual *application.* Exclusive rulings were at least as readily available as inclusive ones. Behind the decision to include rather than exclude, I have suggested, lay three perceptions: one of principle, two of empirical assessment. The principle was that Judaism classically favours inclusion rather than exclusion since *keneset Yisrael* is a community of birth as well as faith. The born Jew remains a Jew and the onus of halakhic argument is to try to continue to see him as such.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The two empirical assessments amounted to a shrewd evaluation of the impact of modernity on Jewish identity. On the one hand, so overwhelming were the combined intellectual, social, cultural, and political assaults on tradition that individual abandonments of Orthodoxy could no longer be judged by normal halakhic criteria. Halakhah generally focuses on the individual and his intentions, but here was a phenomenon that could only be understood against a vast historical backdrop. On the other hand – once the initial shock of Reform had subsided – it began to be seen that deviant modes of Jewish identity were none the less defiant modes of Jewish affirmation. They were a refusal to accept conversion or total assimilation. Not only *could* heresy be excused; there were grounds for thinking that it *ought* to be excused.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Here, then, was tradition contemplating the phenomenon of its collapse among large sections of the Jewish population that had undergone the experience of modernity. The response was complex: necessarily so, given the deep conflict between the desire to maintain Jewish unity and the equally passionate desire to maintain Jewish belief and practice uncompromised. So inclusivity went hand in hand with a fierce Orthodox battle against all dissenting ideologies and an increasing tendency to follow the German-Hungarian model of secession from organizations that included the non-Orthodox. Preserving Jewish unity and Orthodox integrity seemed existentially incompatible. The triumph of inclusivism was to show that theoretically at least they were compatible.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Inclusivism, though, is a classic strategy of tradition. It embodies an Orthodox view of Jewish unity. In contrast to it we must set a contemporary version of unity which likewise attaches religious value to the desire of Jews to remain Jewish, but which does so from the non-traditional perspective of *pluralism.* This has been a leading theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology. In what way does it differ from inclusivism? Early on in the argument we considered the position of Irving Greenberg, itself a variant on the work of the most influential theologian of the Holocaust, Emil Fackenheim. To these two thinkers we must now briefly turn.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Fackenheim is most famous for his statement that after Auschwitz, “the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory” by failing to survive as a Jew. Reminding us that according to tradition Torah issued the Jew with 613 commandments, Fackenheim calls this a new, 614th command. It is this that unites the secularist and the religious Jew. Not only does each hear the imperative of Jewish survival, but each hears it in a strikingly similar way. Hitherto the believer was conscious of both *mitzvah* and *metzaveh,* the command and the commander, while the secularist rejected both. Now, however, even the secularist hears a “command” while even the believer finds it impossible to hear the “commander.” The Holocaust resists religious interpretation, and yet from it emerges a kind of fragmentary revelation that the Jewish people must survive, for not to do so would be, as it were, passively to accede to the Final Solution. “It may well be the case,” argues Fackenheim, “that the authentic Jewish agnostic and the authentic Jewish believer are closer today than at any previous time.”⁵⁴ (New York: Schocken, 1978), 19–24.

footnotes:
⁵⁴ Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Fackenheim’s understanding of contemporary Jewish unity is based on three premisses. The first is that “a Jew today is one who, except for an historical accident – Hitler’s loss of the war – would have either been murdered or never been born.”⁵⁵, 295. All Jews today share the same defining knowledge of post-Holocaust existence, that of being “an accidental remnant.” Second, religious faith is no longer possible as it was before the Holocaust. Faith in the covenant presupposes “an unbroken historical continuity from past to present.” That continuity has been decisively “ruptured” by the Holocaust in which the covenantal people came face to face with the possibility that it might cease to be.⁵⁶ Third, the secular Jewish response to the Holocaust, especially as evident in the State of Israel, is a defiant commitment to Jewish survival that can only adequately be described as religious: “For this commitment is *ipso facto* testimony that there can be, must be, shall be, no second Auschwitz anywhere; on this testimony and this faith the secular Jew no less than the religious stakes his own life, the lives of his children, and the lives of his children’s children. A secular holiness, side by side with the religious, is becoming manifest in contemporary Jewish existence.”⁵⁷, 54.

footnotes:
⁵⁵ Id., To Mend the World
⁵⁶ Ibid., 260.
⁵⁷ Id., The Jewish Return into History


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The old dichotomies between secular and religious are therefore inapplicable. Religious Jews, their faith “ruptured,” have to that extent become secular. Secular Jews, forced into acknowledging their “singled-out” condition, have to that extent become religious. It is this shared domain of what Fackenheim calls “secular holiness,” and what Greenberg calls “holy secularity,” that constitutes the substantive common ground of contemporary Jewish life.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Irving Greenberg, we recall, builds on these premisses to argue that, after Auschwitz, the covenant itself has become “voluntary.” The covenant called Jews to be witnesses to the divine presence in history. The Holocaust made Jews witnesses to a divine absence in history. “What then happened to the covenant? I submit that its authority was broken but the Jewish people, released from its obligations, chose voluntarily to take it on again.”⁵⁸, 17.

footnotes:
⁵⁸ Irving Greenberg, Voluntary Covenant


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Greenberg, like Fackenheim, takes as his affirmative starting-point the fact that Jews have decided to continue to be Jews. But they do so on radically new terms. “As long as the covenant was involuntary, it could be imposed from above in a unitary way.... In the new era, the voluntary covenant is the theological base of a genuine pluralism.... [This] is a recognition that all Jews have chosen to make the fundamental Jewish statement at great personal risk and cost.”⁵⁹ Orthodoxy can no longer refuse to recognize other interpretations of Judaism, for religious authority has been shattered by the Holocaust. Instead, all forms of Judaism must be seen as legitimate variants on the attempt to live by the covenant.

footnotes:
⁵⁹ Ibid., 22.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
How much of this analysis is or could be shared by Orthodoxy? In one respect, a great deal. As we have seen, *before* the Holocaust halakhic authorities had already come to similar conclusions. Emancipation and secularization had made Jewish commitment existentially, if not halakhically, voluntary. The authority of faith and halakhah remained, but its *Sitz im Leben*, its traditional social setting, had been transformed and, for many, destroyed. Against this backcloth, the affirmation of *any* Jewish identity was to be taken as ground for inclusion within the covenantal community. The secular Jew’s rejection of Judaism was not to be taken at its face value. He had chosen to make “the fundamental Jewish statement” of remaining a Jew, and in so doing had made a religiously significant commitment. Orthodoxy confronted the covenantal crisis prior to the Holocaust, and in this respect Fackenheim and Greenberg’s argument for the sanctity of even secular Jewish survival had already been anticipated by Rabbis Ettlinger and Kook.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What Orthodoxy cannot share is the argument that the Holocaust has decisively changed the terms of Jewish existence. Neither theologically nor empirically is this so. Empirically it is refuted by the fact that the same patterns of assimilation and counter-assimilation evident before the Holocaust are evident today. As Arthur Hertzberg has pointed out, “a generational clock has ticked over and over again in the open society. Whether in New York and Philadelphia in 1840, in Paris and Bordeaux in the 1850s, in Budapest around the turn of the century, in Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s, and now in the United States in the 1970s, it tells the same frightening time.”⁶⁰, 1:1 (1981), 48.

footnotes:
⁶⁰ Arthur Hertzberg, “The Emancipation: A Reassessment after Two Centuries,” Modern Judaism


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Holocaust has not changed the trends of diaspora Jewish life, its rates of affiliation or attrition. Nor has it changed its institutions and ideologies. As Jacob Neusner has noted: “The twentieth century has produced no important and influential Judaic systems. The Judaisms that flourish today...all took shape in the nineteenth century.”⁶¹, 101. It has been implicit in my argument throughout that the fragmentation of Jewry is best understood in terms of social processes, not historical events, even those as decisive as the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel. It is a phenomenon of the nineteenth century no less than the twentieth. This is not to deny the significance of Holocaust theology, but to insist that its intellectual force is symbolic rather than explanatory.

footnotes:
⁶¹ Jacob Neusner, Understanding Seeking Faith


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In particular, one phenomenon in contemporary Jewish life is unintelligible on Greenberg and Fackenheim’s theology. For it is just those Jews who maintained that the covenant is neither “ruptured” nor “broken” who have most flourished in the post-Holocaust world. Institutionally and demographically, the strongest and most rapidly growing group in the contemporary Jewish world is Orthodox Jewry itself. It is they who overwhelmingly fulfilled Fackenheim and Greenberg’s criterion of commitment to Jewish survival, by having Jewish children and demonstrating the faith to bring new generations of Jews into a hostile world. This suggests an opposite conclusion to that drawn by the theologians. For the Holocaust – more seriously than its threat to faith in the covenant – shattered faith in the benign, humanist, and universalist assumptions of the Enlightenment.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It is not that “the commanding voice of Auschwitz” issued a 614th imperative that the Jewish people should survive. That command had always been implicit in the other 613, and had been seen as such even by anti-religious thinkers from Spinoza to Jacob Klatzkin. What had happened, rather, is that during the nineteenth century the universalist thrust of the Enlightenment made an unprecedented assault on the particularism of Jewish survival. It was naive faith in the Enlightenment that was called into question at Auschwitz. In the ensuing search for meaning, the commanding voice of Sinai could once again be heard.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Theologically, too, the argument does injustice to tradition. This is not to deny that the Holocaust represents an extraordinary crisis of faith. Historically it may be, as Fackenheim has argued, “unique.” Theologically, though, it is not unique. At rare but identifiable moments, a terrible question comes to the forefront of Jewish consciousness. Why continue to be Jewish? Why be bound by a covenant sealed long ago in an ancient wilderness between a redeemed people and its redeeming God? Can the obligations of covenant persist when its terms appear to be refuted by history? Does it survive the exile and persecution of the covenantal people?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The question was asked by the prophet Ezekiel confronting Babylonian exile.⁶² It was asked again by the sages in the wake of Roman destruction and oppression.⁶³ It was asked again by Judah Halevi and Nachmanides at the beginning of the medieval religious persecutions.⁶⁴, 4:20–3; Nachmanides on Gen. 32:26, Lev. 18:25. It was asked, most searchingly, by Isaac Arama and Don Isaac Abarbanel in the midst of the fifteenth-century Spanish oppression and widespread Jewish conversions to Christianity.⁶⁵. There was a time when the Talmud itself came to the conclusion that “by rights we should issue a decree that we should not marry and have children, and let the children of Abraham come to an end.”⁶⁶

footnotes:
⁶² Ezek. 20:32–35.
⁶³ Sanhedrin 105a – a midrashic amplification of the passage from Ezekiel above.
⁶⁴ See, e.g., Judah Halevi, Kuzari
⁶⁵ Akedat Yitzchak, and Isaac Abarbanel on Deut. 29:12–14 in Mirkevet Hamishneh
⁶⁶ Bava Batra 60b.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
On each occasion, however, the terms of the covenant were reaffirmed by those who survived and remained Jews. For it bound not only those who “stand here with us today” but also those who are “not here with us today.”⁶⁷ The covenant was *in*voluntary – such is the thrust of the response from Ezekiel to Abarbanel – and spans all generations. There is, in Isaiah’s phrase, no “bill of divorce.”⁶⁸ There will be moments when a rational theologian will conclude, as Greenberg puts it, that “we are entering a period of silence in theology”;⁶⁹, 16. the Torah itself puts it more strongly: “Many disasters and distresses will come upon them and they will then ask, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not among us?’ And I will surely hide my face on that day.”⁷⁰ But this (such is the prophecy) will lead not to a desertion but to a renewal of the covenant.

footnotes:
⁶⁷ Deut. 29:13–14.
⁶⁸ Isa. 50:1.
⁶⁹ Greenberg, The Third Great Cycle
⁷⁰ Deut. 31:17–18.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Post-Holocaust Jewish existence – the “new Jewish stand” of Israel’s rebirth and the diaspora’s persisting ethnicity – can be interpreted as a miraculous confirmation of covenantal history no less than as a radical discontinuity with the past. Tradition, therefore, is strengthened in its inclusivism. Those who choose to make a Jewish affirmation in the late twentieth century, in whatever form, make a covenantal gesture of heroic proportions. Above all, the Holocaust makes *ex*clusivism morally invidious. Attempted genocide binds Jews, a generation later, in an indissoluble covenant of fate. Precisely because the Final Solution was addressed to the biological, not the theological, community of Jews, it reinforced the traditional understanding of *keneset Yisrael* as a community of birth, not faith alone. If the covenant of hate did not distinguish between religious and secular Jews, believers and heretics, neither can its only possible redemption, the covenant of love. Halakhic inclusivism predated the Holocaust and is independent of it. But the Holocaust lent it overwhelming emotive force.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Pluralism rests on the dethronement of tradition. Fackenheim and Greenberg predicate Jewish unity on the fact that religious certainty and authority are no longer available. All Jews stand on the common ground of a merely fragmentary faith. But inclusivism rests on tradition. It rejects the rewriting of the covenant in the language of uncertainty, and has cogent reasons for doing so. The covenant cannot be philosophically renewed at the cost of its essential destruction. Tradition views a lack of faith in the post-Holocaust situation as excusable, intelligible, even the most logical inference from the facts of history, but as none the less wrong. Faith is not invulnerable to historic crisis; but it survives it through the strength of its own counter-factual, even obstinate, loyalty. The two ways of understanding Jewish unity are opposed and incompatible.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Tradition sees unity in terms of inclusivism. And therein lies the problem. For inclusivism is in direct conflict with the dominant mode of contemporary thought on the question of the relationship between different interpretations of faith. That mode is pluralism. The question before us therefore is: Can the inclusivist vision be translated into a pluralist consciousness? Does the traditional solution to schism founder on the conceptual ground of modernity?