The State of Survival

The last chapter surveyed the good news about contemporary Jewish affirmations. But there is bad news too. The Jewish people, both in Israel and the diaspora, face a present and future crisis. Jewish continuity is far from assured. Jewish observance continues to decline. There is the possibility of demographic disintegration. Jewish identities are tracing out conflicting paths. The possibility of schism, deep and wounding, is real.

It is important to confront these issues openly but without despair. Jews are used to crisis. As we have seen, the literature of the nineteenth century was dominated by it. Some of it was justified. On antisemitism, the fears early expressed by Moses Hess and Leon Pinsker were all too accurate. Had they been heeded, there might have been fewer Jews in Europe in 1940, and fewer lives lost in the Holocaust.

Other fears proved unfounded, particularly those which related to the survival of Jewish identity. Even so, this does not imply that the sense of crisis was unjustified. It may simply be that exaggerated fears for the Jewish future are part of what it is to take Jewish survival seriously. The transition from one generation of Jews to the next can and may never be taken for granted. It needs a massive self-sacrificing effort of education and commitment – unprecedentedly so in the modern age – to ensure that the tradition is handed on.

Kabbalah and mesirah, receiving from the past and transmitting to the future, are the essential covenantal acts. Judaism is less a set of truths to be discovered than it is a set of commands to be learned from parents and handed on to children. Judaism therefore has much to fear from any break in generational continuity. The language of crisis may be a symptom of how deeply modern Jews took their responsibilities toward an uncertain future. It may have energized them into creating a Jewish future against the probabilities. It may, in short, have been a “self-refuting prophecy.”

Raising the alarm is part of the function of those who see beyond the present. As the sociologists Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner amusingly describe it:

If we take our minds back many millennia, back into the dawn of history, we may imagine the appearance of the very first intellectual. After centuries during which people did nothing but rhythmically bang away with stone implements and keep the fires from going out, there was someone who interrupted these wholesome activities just long enough to have an idea, which he or she then proceeded to announce to the other members of the tribe. We can make a pretty good guess as to what the idea was: “The tribe is in a state of crisis.”

But there is a Jewish approach to impending crisis, one that marks the difference between prediction and prophecy.

In telling the story of the Jewish past – in relating the Haggadah on Pesach – the sages laid down the rule: Matchil bi-genut u-mesayyem be-shevach, “Begin with the bad news; end with the good.” In thinking about the Jewish future the opposite rule applies. We begin with the good news and only then contemplate the bad. The good news is that both Jewish survival and revival are certain. That is promised in the last chapters of the book of Deuteronomy. Faith in the messianic age is, Maimonides ruled, one of the essentials of Jewish belief. “The Torah has already promised,” Maimonides further explained, “that ultimately, at the end of their exile, the people of Israel will return to God and immediately they will be redeemed.” The sages interpreted the biblical phrase “the God of faith” to mean “the God who had faith in the world He was about to create.”

Precisely because he shares this ultimate faith, the prophet is able to look on future crisis with open eyes and without despair. He knows it can be averted. He speaks in order that it be averted. A prediction is successful if it comes true. A prophecy is successful when it proves false, when it has alerted the community to avoid catastrophe. The task of prophecy is to be self-refuting.

The point is important. An emphasis on prediction over prophecy can lead individuals and institutions to see trends as inevitable. The only available policy is then accommodation, adjustment to what is certain to happen anyway. That approach, which has in one way or another marked most Jewish responses to modernity, is unjustifiable by Jewish sources. Fate is a concept that figures in Greek, not biblical and rabbinic, thought. Providence, by contrast, rests on the interaction between Divine promise and human choice. Whatever the present trends in Jewish life, their future direction is chosen, not given. What, then, are those trends?

Intermarriage

Perhaps the most serious trend in the diaspora relates to intermarriage. Jewish history is the story of the covenantal family, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ramified and extended across time. Jewish continuity depends critically on the strength of the Jewish family. Intermarriage is therefore a direct threat to Jewish survival and was seen as such from earliest times. There are biblical prohibitions against marriages between Israelites and their idolatrous neighbors. Ezra and Nehemiah, on their return from Babylon, instituted drastic measures against those who had “been unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us.” The rabbis enacted protective decrees against behavior that might lead to too close a social interaction between Jews and Gentiles. Their explicit concern was to prevent intermarriage.

It worked. Until the modern period there were internal and external forces keeping Jews and non-Jews socially apart. The laws of ­Shabbat and kashrut and the alien quality of other faiths preserved Jewish distinctiveness. So too did the confined space, territorial, political, and economic, allocated to Jews by Christian and Islamic states. Jews saw themselves as a chosen people. They were seen by others as a pariah people. Benign or malign, these factors created boundaries between Jews and their neighbors that were hard to cross or to want to cross.

With modernity, much of this changed. Jews were now participating in all aspects of non-Jewish society. Traditional observance was being abandoned. So too was the traditional Jewish self-image. Jewishness, from being a source of pride, was becoming a sense of stigma. In the opposite direction, where there was Gentile tolerance, Jews were welcomed where once they had been shunned. The barriers were down.

More than this. The very conceptions of religious identity on the one hand, marriage on the other, were changing. In traditional society, Jewishness was what one was. In secular society, Jewishness might be a fact of birth, a set of memories, or a religious affiliation, but it is merely one aspect of a complex identity, not its totality. In traditional societies, too, marriage is firmly set in a wider social matrix. Its function is to transmit the shared values of the community to the next generation. The kind of person one may marry and the subsequent roles of husband and wife are highly circumscribed by law, custom, and social control. The scope of individuality is relatively small.

Only in the early nineteenth century, after the American and French revolutions and the rise of Romanticism, did love and personal compatibility become the main grounds for marriage. The shift in consciousness is encapsulated in a famous scene in Fiddler on the Roof. One of Tevyeh’s daughters wants to marry for love. The idea astounds and then intrigues Tevyeh. He asks his wife, “Do you love me?” She replies, “For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, and milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”

In 1908 Israel Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot. It was performed before large and appreciative audiences throughout America and in London. It captured the imagination of a generation. It was a latter-day version of Romeo and Juliet without the tragic ending. In it two Russian-born immigrants meet in New York and fall in love. The boy is Jewish, the girl Christian. They discover that the girl’s father, a colonel in the Tsarist army, had been responsible for the murder of the boy’s family in the Kishinev pogrom. But the bitterness and prejudice of Russia disintegrate in America’s freer air. Love and tolerance triumph over religion and hate. Marriage across the divide is here portrayed as an ethical achievement. The social consequences were to follow.

Intermarriage came relatively late to America. The immigration from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 was sufficiently large to maintain its own subculture for two generations. For the first two decades of the twentieth century the rate was 2 percent. By the midcentury it was 6 percent. In the early sixties it rose to 17.4 percent. By the late sixties it stood at 31.7 percent. Since then it has stabilized somewhat. A precise figure is difficult to determine. The rates differ from town to town and vary according to educational levels and degree of Americanization. Most, though, would put it at between one in three and four in ten. By 1980 research yielded the proposition that some 350,000 Jews were or had been married to non-Jewish partners. If their children are taken into consideration, almost a million individuals have been directly involved in intermarriage.

The current American situation merely recapitulates the experience of two earlier waves of Jewish immigration, Sephardic and German. European Jewry, too, had undergone the same process in the pre-Hitler years. By 1929 three Jews in ten were marrying out of the faith in Berlin and Bohemia. In 1927 the intermarriage rate in Trieste was 56.1 percent. “A generational clock has ticked over and over again in the open society,” Arthur Hertzberg has written. “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. The third generation in the open society intermarries and erodes out of Jewry at a rate of one in three.”

The Jewish Family: Size and Stability

But intermarriage is not the only problem confronting Jewish survival. Low birth rates are another. The Jewish people has not repopulated itself after the Holocaust. Immediately prior to their encounter with ­emancipation, Jewish communities, especially those of Eastern Europe, generally had higher fertility rates than the surrounding non-Jewish population. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were periods of rapid Jewish demographic growth. Arthur Ruppin estimated that the world Jewish population grew from 1.5 million to 10.5 million in that period.

Emancipation suddenly and sharply reversed this pattern. Jewish fertility declined to a level below the general rate. In France, for example, Jewish women aged 26–30 had an average of 2.88 children in 1808. By 1872 the figure for the same group had dropped to 1.78. Between 1926 and 1930, births per thousand in Poland were 32.3 among non-Jews, 19.6 among Jews. In her study of Jews in a German village community, Alice Goldstein has traced a similar trajectory, a sudden drop in Jewish reproduction rates around 1880 from above to below the general population.

American-Jewish demography is typical in this respect. Since the 1880s the Jewish birth rate has been consistently below the national white non-Jewish average. Jews have the lowest birth rate of all the major religious and ethnic groups. Even from this low level there was a dramatic fall in the 1970s, to an average family size of 1.2 children, a figure that suggested a rapidly shrinking and aging Jewish community. The rate has since risen, but the fear remains. Acculturation even without intermarriage leads to a Jewish population in decline, in absolute and relative terms.

Simple explanations fail. Jews are more highly educated than other groups in America, and education in general has a depressing effect on fertility. But research by Calvin Goldscheider on the Boston Jewish community shows that the better educated expect to have larger families. Samuel Heilman suggests that Jewish women became increasingly reluctant to bear the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker as households changed from extended to nuclear families. But though this may be true of contemporary America, it fails to account for similar falls in family size in rural European communities. Others have argued that low fertility is a measure of Jewish dislocation and insecurity. If so, it should have risen as Jews became more established. Instead it has fallen.

Most analysts, though, are agreed that a fall in birth rate is a feature of all societies that pass from tradition to modernity. Jews have simply been like everyone else, only more so. Peter Berger has pointed to the fact that in modern societies, people tend to see their future in terms of a “life-plan” in which the “biography of the individual is apprehended by him as a designed project.” Jews have become master-practitioners of this art which involves a high capacity for “delayed gratification.” They go to college more widely and for longer periods than other groups. They enter careers that call for high levels of prior training. The small size of Jewish families is not a function of nonmarriage, nor is it the case that childless or one-child families are particularly common among Jews. It is, instead, that they marry later than non-Jews, and are less likely to have four children or more. It seems, then, that they are adept at planning as such, and this includes birth control and family planning.

There is by now evidence of a direct correlation between Jewish religiosity and family size. Samuel Heilman and Steven Cohen discovered that as against an average family size of 2.0 among the non-Orthodox, the figure for the “nominally” Orthodox was 2.1, for “centrist” Orthodox it was 2.9, and for “traditional” Orthodox it was 4.2. Similar correlations have been observed by Calvin Goldscheider and Paul Ritterband. The same pattern, incidentally, obtains among Catholics. This suggests another factor. As we saw in the last chapter, Jews in America are more secularized than other groups. They are less likely to attend religious services or cite religion as an important factor in their lives. Low birth rates, then, may be another symptom of the rapid flight of Jews from Judaism.

The Jewish family used to be a symbol of stability. But this too has changed. Rates of divorce have risen generally in Western societies, and as Jews have become more like their neighbors, they too have been affected. In 1971, for example, the National Jewish Population survey in America revealed that among the 25–29-year-olds, 15 percent of households were separated or divorced. In Anglo-Jewry, the divorce rate doubled between 1965 and 1980. One child in six can expect to experience family breakup by the age of 16. Here, even the Orthodox community is not immune.

There are two special causes for concern, apart from the tragedy itself and its impact on the institution of the Jewish family. Firstly, Jewish divorces occur more frequently among the 35–44-year-olds, at a time when children are most likely to be affected. The effects of divorce on children are now known to be significant, negative, and lasting, often not revealing themselves until many years later. Secondly, the American Jewish community has been relatively slow in adjusting to the problem. It does not yet have a strong support network of parents-without-partners groups, single-parent organizations, and a marriage market for the divorced. There have been problems in rabbinic counseling skills, and in the provisions made by congregations. As a result, the divorced often feel alienated from the Jewish community and its representatives and tend to seek non-Jewish partners when remarrying.

Israeli Dilemmas

These patterns were, however, expected. They form the very heart of the secular Zionist case against the diaspora. Jewish life could not long survive an exposure to an open society in which it was an increasingly indistinct minority. In Israel, the Jewish future would develop naturally without fear of either cultural or social assimilation. Since 1948, or at least since 1967, this explicit argument has become tacitly accepted in the golah as well. “A young state,” as Hillel Halkin put it, “is taking over the burden of Jewish history from an old diaspora.” Israel would discharge the duty of Jewish survival, while the diaspora would perform a supportive and enabling role.

This is, surely, as it should be. While some philosophies of the nineteenth century, secular, Reform, and modern Orthodox, idealized the diaspora and the Jewish mission within it, this was hardly the mainstream of Jewish thought since biblical times. Jewish life is lived towards Israel, at once a land, a society, and a destiny. The Hebrew term galut is far less neutral than the words diaspora or dispersion. It signifies exile, punishment, alienation, dislocation. Nachmanides even raised the question, as had the sages before him, of how the covenant could still be in place and the commandments binding outside the land. Israel was where Judaism became lucid, where Jews had a direct relationship to Providence. In the sixteenth century, the Maharal, R. Judah Loewe of Prague, saw exile as a precarious imbalance. The order of nature itself was disturbed and would remain so until Jews returned to their land. Until the nineteenth century no thinker saw the Jewish future as anything other than directed toward Israel. Secular Zionism and the negation of the diaspora therefore have deep roots in the Jewish tradition as well as their support from recent Jewish demography.

Three features, though, remain disturbing from the perspective of Jewish survival. The first is that birth rates in Israel itself, though they remain well above replacement levels, have also declined. This is particularly noticeable in the Sephardic population, who had generally arrived in Israel without first going through the modernization process that had been experienced by the European and American settlers. Initially they had had large families, but by the second generation their fertility patterns had rapidly approximated those of other Israelis. Birth control was only part of the problem. The high rate of abortion was another. The issue is acute because of the sharp disparity between the birth rates of Jews and Israel’s Arab population. In the late 1970s, for example, the fertility rate for Jewish Israelis was 3.4, for Israeli Arabs, 7.7, and among Arabs in the territories, 8.0.

The second is the continued failure of Jews outside Israel to undertake aliyah. Of the 1.4 million immigrants from the birth of the state to 1970, the overwhelming majority were in flight from persecution in Eastern Europe and Arab lands. Only one in nine came from Western Europe, the United States, South Africa, or Australia. The paradox of diaspora Zionism is seen most clearly in the case of American Jewry. There Israel is the most widespread focus of Jewish identity, to the extent that some have called Israel the religion of American Jews. At the same time, its aliyah rates are proportionately among the lowest in the world. The Lakeville study, conducted before the Six-Day War, showed that while 91 percent of the respondents approved of fundraising for Israel, only one percent would consider living in Israel or encouraging their children to do so.

Aliyah from the United States reached a peak in 1971 and has been progressively declining since. Equally problematic has been the fate of South African Jewish émigrés. The South African community has been signally Israel-oriented in its communal attitudes and educational structure. Nonetheless, many Jews who left South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s settled in Australia and Canada rather than in Israel. The phenomenon that has most disturbed Israelis has been the choice of a large number of Soviet Jews to settle in America, not Israel. The revival of Jewish consciousness among the Jews of Russia had largely been inspired by the events of 1967, so that the preference for America seemed to indicate a significant reversal of attitudes. These are, hopefully, temporary trends, the result of a period of external and internal turmoil in Israeli life. But for the first time it has seemed not only as if Israel was failing to attract Jews from free societies but that it was also being displaced as the first point of refuge. There were safer and easier places to be a Jew.

Undoubtedly the most psychologically traumatizing, though not numerically the most significant, has been the third phenomenon: yeridah. Israelis have chosen to leave Israel. The significance of yeridah is that it runs directly counter to the assumption that has dominated both Israel and the diaspora since the state’s foundation. Israel is a place one moves toward, not a place one leaves. So disturbing is yeridah that there has been a deep reluctance to recognize, quantify, and analyze it. Estimates of the number of Israelis living in the United States vary from a half to a quarter of a million, although Paul Ritterband has argued that the figures are an exaggeration. He suggests a figure of some 40,000 in New York, with perhaps another 20,000 elsewhere.

Moshe Shokeid has recently published a full-length study of yordim in New York, and it makes salutary reading. Israelis leave Israel to pursue higher education or professional advance, or to start small businesses. What is unique about them, in sharp distinction to earlier generations of Jewish immigrants, indeed to all other ethnic groups, is that they have established no voluntary organizations, no social meeting places, and no economic enclaves. For the most part, they avoid contact with American Jewish institutions and with official Israeli bodies. Their contact with one another is sporadic and ambivalent. They are perhaps the first Jews since the lost ten tribes to have no strategy for survival in the diaspora.

The reason is that in terms of the secular Zionist orthodoxy which they have internalized, they do not exist. The term yeridah carries with it a profound stigma. Israeli public opinion has frequently denounced those who leave as traitors, deserters, and mercenaries. In 1976, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin described them as “the leftovers of weaklings.” The yordim themselves, if they are secularists, see Jewish identity in strictly geographical-national terms. To be a Jew is to live in Israel. Living outside Israel creates an identity crisis which cannot be solved. The American Jewish community is organized primarily along religious lines. But this, to yordim, is a mode of Jewishness they have rejected. As a result, they cling tenaciously to the idea that they are in America only temporarily – though often their economic and social situation suggests otherwise – and they make no provisions for establishing a group identity or for educating their children.

In the meanwhile, in Israel itself there has been deep soul-searching among a small group of writers on the implications of the “wandering Israeli.” The sabra, the native-born Israeli, planted in his own soil, was to have ended a millennial history of the “wandering Jew.” The figures explored by novelists like Aharon Megged, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua are not the yordim of the public image, materialists in search of a more affluent society, but spiritually restless individuals driven to leave Israel through a sense of claustrophobia. They feel constricted by the pressures of apparently endless war and Arab-Jewish hostility and by the ideals of the early settlers which now seem impossible to fulfill. One of the characters in Amnon Jackont’s Borrowed Time says, “Anyone who stays here has to choose between a war that will eventually end up in disaster or a peace that will lead to assimilation and make all these wars that we’ve fought and will fight totally meaningless.” In these novels, leaving Israel does not solve the problem. The characters are as plagued by doubts abroad as they are at home.

Renewing the Dialogue with Destiny

Political and military considerations aside, therefore, new thought is needed about the character and destiny of Israeli society and of the relationships between Israel, the diaspora, and Jewish survival. The question that drove Jews in the wake of emancipation was: What place could be carved out for Jews and Judaism in a world order that seemed to welcome neither? That place now exists, both in Israel and the diaspora.

A new question has become suddenly urgent. Given that place, what next? Why and how shall Jews survive? In modern times this has become the ultimately unanswerable question, yet the one most ­frequently asked. A consideration of the future of the Jewish people cannot avoid it.

We do not live in the nineteenth century. Yet contemporary Jewish thought seems locked in nineteenth-century terms. Liberal and neo-Orthodox philosophies were concerned about the modes in which Jews might become integrated into open diaspora societies. Zionism, religious and secular, was preoccupied with the question of creating a Jewish state. Both have been achieved. The question “What next?” has become imperative. But it has thus far generated no new and larger visions.

Jewish thought in the late twentieth century has been marked by its attention to the immediate. How to resolve the problem of the Palestinians? How to create a momentum for peace in the Middle East? How to encourage aliyah? How to reduce the rate of intermarriage and divorce? How to increase the size of Jewish families? These are undeniably pressing concerns.

But Jewish thought was traditionally marked by its attention to the ultimate. Paradoxically its present was secured by a deep conviction about the future. If there is a crisis in the contemporary Jewish world, it lies at the level of thought no less than at the level of pragmatic strategy. Jewish survival has rarely been more prominent on the agenda of discussion. But Jewish survival has rarely before been so difficult to define or flesh out with substantive content. Its meaning and purpose seem to vanish as soon as attention is turned toward them.

Paul Johnson ends his recent History of the Jews with the question a historian must ask in reflecting on Jewish survival across almost four thousand years. Does it reveal the guiding hand of Providence? A believer would say Yes. But the historian is bound by the terms of his craft to “beware of seeking providential patterns in events.” There are, then, two ways of interpreting the Jewish past.

On the one hand there is the perspective of faith. “If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it…. That the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed.” On the other hand there is the perspective of history, which sees human events in terms of human acts and their human consequences. “The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves.”

But this either/or is, from a traditional perspective, a false dichotomy. Providence cannot guarantee the Jewish future without the free, unconstrained, and unpredestined assent of Jews. Nor, surely, could Jews have willed their own survival without a deep, even obstinate, faith in Providence. The concept of covenant is mutual. God takes Israel as His people. Israel takes God as its destiny. Israel believes in the one God in heaven. God chooses goi echad ba-aretz, “one nation on earth.” Jewish history is their interactive relationship. Divine revelation commands human response. Human action creates a providential reply. Mutuality lies at the heart of the Jewish religious-historical drama.

Josephus tells us that this idea became problematic in the last days of the Second Temple period. The Sadducees, he says, believe that there is no such thing as Providence. History is made by man. The Essenes believe that there is no such thing as free will. History is made by God. The Pharisees, however, maintain that there is an interaction between man and God, a complex dialectic of decision and destiny. “It was God’s good pleasure that there should be a fusion and that the will of man…should be admitted to the council-chamber of fate.” The Sadducees and Essenes disappeared. The Pharisees survived and shaped the Judaism that persisted to modern times.

Johnson is surely correct in suggesting that it was Jews’ faith in their own destiny that led them to write their unique story, and merely wrong in assuming that this is a secular interpretation of events. That faith, lucid and enduring, was itself the clearest expression of the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, that accompanied them in their exiles and returned with them to their land. A sense of their own identity – ­historical, personal, collective, above all covenantal – was crucial to Jews’ survival. They kept the Torah. The Torah kept them. That reciprocity of faith and endurance, Divine command and human commitment, is the very pulse of the body of Israel as a people.

Doubts, dissents, and indecisions about Jewish identity are therefore no mere intellectual quandary. They threaten Jewish continuity at its most fundamental level. To be sure, the Divine Presence will bring it about that there will always be a Jewish people. But only to the extent that the Jewish people always continue to believe in the Divine Presence. In Jewish history, identity and endurance are inextricably linked.

The question posed by Judaism in the late twentieth century therefore is: Can there be Jewish survival without a clear sense of how and why Jews should survive? Strategy begs the question of meaning and purpose. What answer shall we give to the question: What is a Jew?