## Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 4; Testing the Hypothesis

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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Testing the Hypothesis***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The hypothesis before us is this: that Jewish continuity in the diaspora depends on Jewish education. This, for most Jews at most times, was an item of faith. How shall we submit it to critical evaluation? What would constitute a test? There may be others, but let me suggest two: the test of history, and the test of the latest available research. First, history.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Jewish people has survived. But at significant moments that survival lay in doubt. Catastrophe struck and there was no obvious route to a secure future. The prophets had declared that Israel would be an eternal people. But there were times when this seemed desperately unlikely. There were moments *when it might have been otherwise*. These critical junctures repay close attention. What saved the people and faith of Israel from the might-have-been of oblivion? Consider three such turning points.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The first came in the fifth century BCE. Several centuries earlier, the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. Its population was dispersed and rapidly assimilated into the neighbouring cultures. Ten of the twelve Israelite tribes disappeared from history. In 586 BCE the southern kingdom of Judah, comprising the two remaining tribes, was also overcome, this time by the Babylonians. The Temple was destroyed and the elite of the people taken into captivity. There they might also have disintegrated as a group, were it not for the insistent message of the prophets that hope was not lost.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Under Cyrus, king of Persia, a new and more benign regime took shape and some of the exiles were allowed to return. Eventually, under the leadership of Nehemiah, the statesman-governor, and Ezra, the priestly scribe, a Jewish renaissance began. It faced formidable difficulties. On their arrival in Israel, the two leaders found chaos. Those Jews who had remained had lost their identity. They had intermarried. The Sabbath was publicly desecrated. Religious laws had fallen into disuse.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The book of Nehemiah describes the event which was to prove the turning point. The people gathered in Jerusalem where Ezra, standing on a wooden platform, read to the assembled crowd from the Torah. A group of Levites acted as instructors to the people, “reading from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that people could understand what was being read.” The population entered into a binding agreement to keep the Torah. The covenant, which had been in danger of being forgotten, was renewed. A new era of Jewish history began. From then on, for the next five centuries, though there were crises when significant segments of the population became acculturated and Hellenised, there was always a nucleus of Jews who remained loyal to Judaic principles.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Ezra represented a new kind of Jew, one who was to shape the character of the Jewish people from that time to this. Not a lawgiver or a prophet, a king or a judge, neither a political nor a military leader, Ezra was the prototype of *the teacher as hero*. Under his influence, the ancient ideal of the people of the Torah became institutionalised. Public readings and explanations of the sacred texts became more widespread. By the second century BCE a system of community-funded schools had developed. Mass education, the first of its kind in the world, had begun.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The might-have-been is clear. The two tribes might have gone the way of the other ten. They too were conquered, sent into exile and exposed to the dangers of assimilation into a larger empire. But they resisted. They remained distinct, intact, a singular people. How was the might-have-been avoided? The lesson of the lost ten tribes had been learned. If the Jewish people was to survive, it needed to create a set of institutions through which its character could be sustained against the attritions of other cultures. It sought and found the structures of continuity. Judaism discovered a fundamental truth, one that has remained its unique characteristic among religious civilisations. *The best, indeed the only, defence of an identity is not military or political but educational.*


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**SURVIVING DESTRUCTION**
In the first century CE a second crisis struck with devastating force. An ill-advised rebellion against Rome brought savage retaliation. The Roman forces led by Vespasian descended on the centres of Jewish resistance. In 70 CE Vespasian’s son Titus brought the campaign to its climax with the siege of Jerusalem. The city was captured. The second Temple was destroyed. It was a fateful moment, though few of those who lived through it could have known for how long Jews would suffer its consequences. It was the beginning of the longest exile Israel had ever known. Not until the twentieth century would Jews again experience what it was like to be a sovereign people in their own land.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The disaster, completed sixty-five years later with the suppression of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, was almost total. The bases of Jewish life lay in ruins. The Temple, symbol and centre of the nation, was gone. There were to be no more kings or prophets, serving priests or sacrifices within the foreseeable future. The loss of the first Temple had been accompanied by hope. There were prophets who foretold return and reconstruction. This time there were no such visions, at least none that carried immediate promise of fulfilment. The loss of the second Temple brought in its wake the danger of hopelessness.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jewish tradition has rightly identified one moment as a symbol of the turning point. The Talmud relates how the sage Johanan ben Zakkai stood out against the Jews of his day. During the siege of Jerusalem, leaders within the city believed that they could prevail against Rome. Johanan knew that they were mistaken and argued unsuccessfully for surrender. Others believed that they would be saved by Divine intervention. The Messiah was about to come. Against them Johanan taught: “If you have a sapling in your hand, and people say to you, ‘Behold, there is the Messiah’ – go on with your planting and only then go out and receive him.” Johanan was a religious realist in an age of dangerous military and apocalyptic dreams.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Johanan, according to the Talmud, had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem and was taken to Vespasian. He made a simple request: “Give me [the academy at] Yavneh and its sages.” Johanan predicated Jewish survival not on military victory or on the messianic age but on a house of study and a group of teachers.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Few decisions have had more lasting effects. For seventeen hundred years Jews became a people held together by study of Judaism’s holy texts. In place of the Temple came the synagogue, the *yeshivah* and the *bet midrash*. In place of sacrifices came prayer, learning and the performance of good deeds. The mantle of leadership passed from kings, priests and prophets to the sage, the teacher who “raised up many disciples.” Exiled, dispersed and deprived of power, a shattered nation was rebuilt through one instrumentality: education. Jews had lost their land, but they would not lose their identity. Physically scattered, they remained spiritually joined.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
We are in an unusually good position to test Johanan ben Zakkai’s strategy because his was not the only version of Jewish life. We know from Josephus and other sources that there were several Jewish tendencies in the late Second Commonwealth period. Johanan represented the group known as the Pharisees, who gave rise to the rabbis of the Mishna and Talmud. There was a second and more powerful group known as the Sadducees, who were in general wealthier and more closely associated with the Temple and its priesthood. Josephus calls the third group the Essenes. They lived quasi-monastic lives in small separatist communities of which the Qumran sect, known to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls, may have been one.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For the Sadducees, the central dimension of Jewish life was the state and its institutions: the Sanhedrin and the Temple. For the Essenes it was the messianic age: they lived in imminent expectation of an apocalypse which would shake the foundations of the world. For the Pharisees, as we have seen, it was education. Their key institution was the school. Their figure of authority was the scholar. Their touchstone of Jewish identity was individual learning and observance of the Torah.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Neither Sadducees nor Essenes survived. Of their memory, only the most fragmentary traces remain. There was a time when both groups flourished and when each was convinced it held the key to the Jewish future. But history ruled otherwise. Once again, education proved the only route to continuity.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**JEWISH CONTINUITY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST**
The third crisis brings us to the present century and to what, in human terms, is the greatest tragedy ever to have struck the people of the covenant: the Holocaust. At the beginning of the twentieth century, four out of every five Jews lived in Europe. By the end of the Second World War the vast heartlands of European Jewry had been destroyed. The great powerhouses of rabbinic learning – Vilna, Volozhyn, Ponevetz, Mir – were gone. The citadels of the Jewish spirit had been reduced to ashes. Jewry’s religious leaders and the communities from which they came had been murdered. At most, the survivors were “a brand plucked from the burning.” Rarely has Judaism’s everlasting light come closer to being extinguished.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What, spiritually, was left? Russian Jewry, the largest surviving Jewish community in Europe, lived under political and religious repression. America, though it was tolerant of Jews, had proved disastrous for Judaism. One wave of Jewish immigrants after another – first Spanish, then German, then East European – had acculturated, assimilated and disappeared. The new State of Israel, though it meant everything in physical and political terms, was aggressively secular. Ben Gurion had granted concessions to religious groups, but was confident that within a generation they would have disappeared.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What happened next will one day be told as one of the great acts of reconstruction in the religious history of mankind. A handful of Holocaust survivors and refugees set about rebuilding on new soil the world they had seen go up in flames. Rabbis Menahem Mendel Schneersohn, Aaron Kotler, Jacob Kamenetzky, Shragai Mendlowitz, Joseph Soloveitchik and others like them refused to yield to despair. While others responded to the Holocaust by building memorials, endowing lectureships, convening conferences and writing books, they built schools and communities and *yeshivot*. They urged their followers to marry and have children. They said: “Our world has been shattered but not destroyed.” They said: “Hitler brought death into the world, therefore let us bring life.” Within a generation Mir and Ponevetz, Lubavitch and Belz lived again, no longer in Europe, but in Israel and America.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Within a half-century, traditional Jewry has risen from the ashes to become the fastest growing and most influential force in Jewish life. It has achieved what all observers had hitherto thought impossible. It has shown that Torah can flourish in a secular Israel and an open America. It has proved that Jews in today’s diaspora can experience demographic growth. It has brought about a revival in talmudic study that has no precedent since the great days of Babylonian Jewry. But it has done more. It has demonstrated in our time that the classic Jewish response to crisis remains the most powerful. Like Ezra, the *yeshivot* and Hasidic leaders concentrated on teaching. Like Johanan ben Zakkai they devoted themselves to raising up disciples.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Theirs, to repeat, was not the only response to the Holocaust. Other groups reacted differently. They built museums and monuments, funded chairs and periodicals, wrote Holocaust theology and sponsored visits to Auschwitz. A generation of young Jews, those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, has been liberally exposed to literature, films and lectures about the Holocaust, *and it is this generation which is choosing to marry out of Judaism at the rate of one in two*. The reason is not hard to find. As one Holocaust historian, disturbed by the obsessive interest in the Shoah, put it: our children will learn about the Greeks and how they lived, the Romans and how they lived, and the Jews and how they died. Unlike traditional Jewish education, Holocaust education *in itself* offers no meaning, no hope, no way of life. Unaccompanied by faith, it recapitulates the error of Lot’s wife. The Holocaust is a black hole in human history, and if we stare at it too long we will turn to stone.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jews never forgot the destruction of the first Temple, or the second. We mourn them on the Ninth of Av, and at every Jewish wedding we still break a glass in memory. It is 2,500 years since the first event and 1,900 since the second. So too, as long as Jews live, we will remember Auschwitz and Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor. But there is a Jewish way of remembering. For every tragedy, there is the promise of redemption. Every nightmare is succeeded by hope. We were never paralysed by our past, because we lived toward the future. That is why the Jewish response to catastrophe was to build schools and have children and create a Jewish future. The children of the *yeshivah* and Hasidic communities are their Holocaust memorials, made not of stone but of new life.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These three moments are seminal to an understanding of Jewish history. At each of them, the Jewish people confronted its own mortality. In none was the response that eventually proved successful by any means the obvious one. Who in his right mind would have suggested that the answer to the Babylonian conquest, the might of Rome or the devastation of the Holocaust lay in schools, teachers and houses of study? Yet Judaism’s great visionaries, the architects of its survival, said just that.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Alternatives were tried. They failed. The ten tribes of the Northern kingdom disappeared. So did the Sadducees and Essenes. So, too, in our time are those diaspora communities that have failed to place Jewish education at the centre of their lives. In each case the survivors were ostensibly the weakest group. The southern kingdom of Judah was small in comparison to the kingdom of the north. The Pharisees were poorer and less powerful than the Sadducees. The Hasidic and *yeshivah* communities were, after the Shoah, a tattered remnant alongside the secular Jewries of America and Israel. In each case, however, the hypothesis of the sages was proved true. *So long as “their mouths did not desist from study,” the angel of death had no power over the Jewish people.* Those who set as their first priority the education of future generations were rewarded by Jewish continuity.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**RECENT RESEARCH FINDINGS**
Thus far the test of history. What of current research? Can we quantify the impact of Jewish education on Jewish identity? The answer is that we can.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) in the United States is, as we have noted, the most comprehensive study of a diaspora community undertaken in recent years. Its results are still being analysed. In March 1993 the first findings emerged of the effect of education on Jewish commitment, using the survey data. The study, by Sylvia Barack Fishman and Alice Goldstein, divided educational experience into four categories: (1) no Jewish education, (2) minimal education (less than three years of Jewish school or up to five of Sunday-only classes), (3) moderate education (three to five years of supplementary or day school, or six years of Sunday-only classes) and (4) substantial education (six or more years of supplementary or day school).


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The findings were as follows: In the 25–44 year-old age group, those who had a substantial Jewish education are between six and ten times more likely to observe Jewish ritual than those whose Jewish education was minimal or non-existent. They are nearly three times more likely to belong to a Jewish organisation, three times more likely to be members of a synagogue and 20 percent more likely to contribute to Jewish causes. They have more Jewish friends, are more opposed to intermarriage and are significantly less likely to marry out. *Of those with no Jewish education, only three out of ten are in-married. Of those with substantial Jewish education, the figure is eight out of ten.*


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The authors conclude:


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The 1990 NJPS data show us the strong correlation of Jewish education and enhanced Jewish identification. The mere fact of having received some Jewish education in childhood has little impact on Jewish attitudes and behaviours during the adult years. However, extensive Jewish education is definitively associated with higher measures of adult Jewish identification. Its impact is demonstrated in almost every area of public and private life.


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[Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 4; Testing the Hypothesis 30](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Will%20We%20Have%20Jewish%20Grandchildren%3F%20Jewish%20Continuity%20and%20How%20to%20Achieve%20It/s/Chapter%204%3B%20Testing%20the%20Hypothesis/r/30)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Here then is further confirmation of the thesis that *the fate of the Jews in the diaspora was, is and predictably will be, determined by their commitment to education*. This proposition has been subjected to two tests, one against critical moments in Jewish history and the other against the most up-to-date research. Together, they demonstrate that Jewry’s triumphs are triumphs of education. Our strategy for renewal is education. Our traditional strength, our greatest gift, our highest value is education.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 4; Testing the Hypothesis 31
[Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 4; Testing the Hypothesis 31](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Will%20We%20Have%20Jewish%20Grandchildren%3F%20Jewish%20Continuity%20and%20How%20to%20Achieve%20It/s/Chapter%204%3B%20Testing%20the%20Hypothesis/r/31)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Why then do we face a crisis of continuity? The sages said that when King David slipped, he momentarily stopped studying. In that instant his heart stopped beating. There is no more powerful metaphor for what has happened in the diaspora. For once, ancestral instinct has deserted us. We let education slip in our scale of priorities. Jews stopped studying. Three generations later, the Jewish heart is failing.