To Mend the Jewish World

We can now draw our long argument to a conclusion. Two alternative futures confront the Jewish people. For there are forces operating on and within it in two radically opposed directions.

The first is convergence. The predictions of the nineteenth century have proved false. Orthodoxy has not disappeared. Neither has Reform. Israel exists. The diaspora survives. What appeared to be mutually exclusive alternatives have each been realized. A new perception has come to dominate Jewish attitudes in the last two decades. The Jewish destiny is indivisible. Jews are implicated in one another’s fate. The Final Solution made no distinction between Jews; neither, for the most part, does anti-Zionism. The nineteenth century was marked by its divided visions of the Jewish future. The late twentieth century has been marked by a fervent desire for a single vision and a shared future.

That vision can be simply summarized. It affirms the unity of the Jewish people across space and time. Jewish unity has ethical implications, in particular the idea that all Jews are responsible for one another. Jewish survival is a primary value and is not to be taken for granted. It is threatened militarily and politically in Israel, and socially, through assimilation, in the diaspora. Israel is a central focus of Jewish identification and concern. It supports and is supported by the diaspora, and their destinies are interlinked. Jewish tradition remains important, for it explains the uniqueness of the Jewish past and strengthens the sense of identity and community. Neither Jewishness nor Israeliness can be divorced from Judaism; nor can Judaism be divorced from a sense of peoplehood.

Such is the consensus that has emerged since 1967. We might call it “folk Judaism.” And it is clear that it differs markedly from the revolutionary scenarios of nineteenth-century Reform on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other. Jewish attitudes have moved far from the longing for “normalization” that dominated these two movements and forced them into a break with tradition. Just as Jewish thought has converged on Israel as its center, so it has converged on tradition as its framework.

Many of the attitudes that characterized the nineteenth century and made tradition so difficult to sustain – universalism, liberalism, humanism, acculturation, an emphasis on ethics to the exclusion of ritual, and a focus on the future to the exclusion of the past – are in decline. In their place has come a new respect for particularism, Jewish distinctiveness, textual study, ritual, and the idea of continuity with the Jewish past. This is a Copernican turn in both Reform and secular Zionist thought, and it offers the possibility for the first time of a reconciliation of these movements with Orthodoxy. Enlightenment and emancipation created a series of fateful rifts within the Jewish people. As the values of the nineteenth century come increasingly into question, those rifts begin to mend.

Conflict

Jews have, attitudinally at least, converged on tradition. But tradition, in the meanwhile, has moved further away from the majority of Jews, for two reasons, which are intrinsically connected. While secularism and assimilationism – the ideologies – are in eclipse, secularization and assimilation – the social processes – are still strong. This results in two phenomena. First, liberal Jewish movements like Reform are driven to provide religious legitimation for an increasingly wide range of behaviors. At its furthest extreme, as we have seen, this includes synagogues for homosexuals and a series of endorsements of intermarriage: officiating at mixed marriages, nominal rather than halakhic conversions, and conferring Jewish status on the child of a non-Jewish mother without conversion.

Secondly and for the same reason, namely that the forces of secularization and assimilation are so strong in contemporary society, Orthodoxy has been forced to define itself increasingly in opposition to the norms and ethos of the age. Its centers of strength have been in its most segregated environments – the yeshivah, the chasidic group, and the exclusively Orthodox neighborhood. The idea that there could be a synthesis, Hirschian or Kookian, between Judaism and diaspora or Israeli culture as a whole has come to seem progressively less plausible. The images that dominated Hirschian Orthodoxy and religious ­Zionism – unity, reconciliation, and harmony – have been displaced by the language of opposition and confrontation: between Orthodox and other Jews, between Judaism and Zionism, between Torah and secular culture, and between Israel and the world.

The paradox, then, is this. The very processes that have brought about convergence have brought about conflict and made more likely the second possibility: a deep and lasting schism, whether between religious and secular Jews in Israel, or between Orthodoxy and liberal Jews in the diaspora, or between Israel and the diaspora itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, the dominant motif of Reform, Orthodoxy, and diaspora and secular Zionist thought was that it exclusively possessed the key to the Jewish future. The alternatives were unviable and would simply disappear in the course of time. Each was spared the task of coming to terms with the survival of the others.

But each has survived. Attitudes have had to be revised. There has been a turn toward Israel on the one hand, tradition on the other. And here the conflict is born. For not all Jews live in Israel, and not all Jews live by tradition. A critical asymmetry then arises. Jews in the diaspora accord centrality to Israel; but Israel cannot confer legitimacy on the diaspora without contradicting its own most fundamental assumptions. Likewise, Reform and Conservative Jews and a majority of Israelis accord centrality to the Jewish religious tradition; but ­Orthodoxy – tacitly acknowledged as the central bearer of tradition – cannot confer legitimacy on Reform or secularism without contradicting its most basic beliefs.

Convergence brings conflict. So long as the various strands within the Jewish world defined their future without reference to the others, Jews might simply have drifted apart. That was the situation a century ago, but not now. It is when the diaspora defines itself by reference to Israel, and when non-Orthodoxies define themselves by reference to Orthodoxy, that a clash of perceptions is inevitable and confrontation becomes increasingly likely. The most bitter arguments are those that take place within the family. For they take place between people who have conflicting expectations and are yet indissolubly linked to one another. As Jews grow existentially further apart and yet increasingly see themselves as the members of a single global family, the more the disputes between them take on the character of a family quarrel. On the one hand this is benign. It signals the current strength of the wish for Jewish unity. On the other, it is fraught with tragedy. For the dissension is real and deep and seemingly insoluble.

Schism

Nowhere is this more clearly in evidence than in the continuing controversy over “Who is a Jew?” Consider the theoretical possibilities. The Law of Return, on which the controversy is centered, might simply be abolished. But the Law recognizes a Jewish arrival in the land as an oleh, someone who has “returned,” and not simply as an immigrant. It is central to the connection between Israel and the Jewish people as a whole. Removing the Law would remove one of the foundations on which Israel stands as the state not only of some Jews, but of the entire Jewish people. It would sever a key link between Israel and the diaspora.

Alternatively, the Law might be amended to include the insistence that a Jew is one born to a Jewish mother or who has undergone a conversion “according to halakhah.” It is this proposal, advocated by many Orthodox leaders within and outside Israel, that has generated the controversy. For while it would affect perhaps no more than some half dozen cases a year, it would imply that the many thousands of conversions performed under Reform or Conservative auspices are invalid from the point of view, not only of Orthodoxy but also of Israeli law. Were it passed, the Reform and Conservative movements might choose to break their connections with Israel on the one hand, or to establish themselves as completely separate religions on the other. But this too would result in schism.

Alternatively, the Law might explicitly recognize any conversion by any Jewish religious authority in the diaspora as valid. It would then be hard to resist the de jure recognition of the Reform and Conservative movements within Israel itself. The religious divisions that fragmented German, Hungarian, and American Jewry would then be imported into Israel. The consequences are frightening to contemplate. The de facto pluralism of the diaspora is one thing; a de jure Jewish pluralism in Israel is another. It would lead, of necessity, to a direct collision between Orthodoxy and the state.

Thus, the desire not to precipitate schism holds the Law of Return in its present state of ambiguity. But the consensus is fragile. It depends on a balance of forces and restraints that cannot be guaranteed to last. The same is true about many other conflicts that lie just below the surface of contemporary Jewish life. The possibility that they might erupt into what might in effect be a civil war within the Jewish world is less remote than it seems. The previous era of Jewish autonomy within the land of Israel, initiated by the Maccabees and ended by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, began and ended with a war of Jew against Jew: a war of zealots against Hellenizers. The parallels between the factionalization of Jewish life at the time of the Maccabean revolt of 166–164 B.C.E. and the revolt against Rome, 66–70 C.E., and the divisions now evident in the Jewish world are uncomfortably close.

There is a common pattern: a revolution against the assimilation or secularization of Jewish life by a small group of intensely religious Jews who see themselves as instruments of Providence in an apocalyptic drama. Bitter internecine conflict is not unknown in Jewish history. In galut, it is kept in check. Rabbinites and Karaites, chasidim and mitnagdim, enlighteners and traditionalists fought their battles, but they were minorities under a non-Jewish power. It is in Israel, where the character of a Jewish society is at stake, that conflict escalates into full-fledged war. In the struggle, the particularists always win out against the assimilated: the Maccabees against the Hellenizers, the Pharisees against the Sadducees. The zealots who initiate the conflict are a minority, but they are supported by the broadly traditional base of the population. But though the result is a religious victory, it is also a human tragedy. Sinat chinam, antagonism between Jew and Jew, led to the destruction of the Second Temple, said the sages. And though the records of that period are unclear, there seems to be a core of historical as well as ethical insight in that remark.

Process and Event

In the present situation, therefore, it becomes important to concentrate not only, or even primarily, on what the various groups within the Jewish world hold in common – which is less than appearances suggest – but on the resources of tradition for handling conflict. Jewish unity is less a fact than an objective. And unless it is a unity that allows for diversity, it will not occur at all.

Two hundred years after emancipation, there is still a multiplicity of answers to the question emancipation provoked: What is a Jew? But because the various sides have come closer, the controversies have become more intense. Jews are faced with a fundamental choice. Will the mood of the last two decades translate itself into convergence or schism? Much will depend on how the many arguments over policy and principle are conducted. They can become part of the “historically extended, socially embodied argument” that is Torah’s application to the Jewish present and future. Or they can be distributed between groups and positions that have no mode of communication with one another.

It has been suggested that argument takes place within a tradition. Judaism did not merely contain argument. It celebrated it as a high, perhaps the highest, form of religious expression. It was in argument that the word of God became real in the life of man. It was in argument that the covenant was continued into the present and future. It was in argument that divergent viewpoints were brought into relationship with one another. It was in argument that the many voices that comprise knesset Yisrael, the collective community of Israel, were orchestrated into the choral symphony called Torah.

That argument began to break down two centuries ago. With the collapse of structures of Jewish community, Jews were set free to pursue their individual or sectional destinies without reference to one another. The result was a series of divisions which are not yet mended, and which subtly and tenaciously perpetuate themselves through all talk of unity and “tradition.” Potential tragedy is in sight on a number of different fronts. It can be deferred, but not forever, by diplomacy and rhetorical ambiguity. The alternative is a candid acknowledgment of what divides Jews and an attempt to locate those divisions within the framework of tradition and “argument for the sake of heaven.”

How is this to be achieved? One thing is certain. It will not be achieved immediately. Divisions that took a century to create will not be healed in a matter of years. Hence our first desideratum: a sense of the importance of process as against event, slow movement toward ultimate objectives, as against a mode that has come increasingly to dominate Jewish political and religious thought: the belief that conflict will either be resolved by a single dramatic occurrence or it cannot be resolved at all.

Perhaps the single most conspicuous lacuna in Orthodox thought is its lack of a sense of historical process. This affected its relationship to the Zionist movement, and it affects today its relations with the State of Israel. Jewish thought is strong on historical contrasts. There is galut and ge’ulah, exile and redemption. There is ha-zeman ha-zeh, “this time,” and there is, by contrast, the messianic age. But on how to move from the one to the other, it is less clear. As we have seen, this results today in two extreme positions, anti-Zionism and messianic Zionism, neither of which have close contact with political and social reality. Either the State of Israel is not messianic, in which case it has no religious significance, or it is messianic, in which case all its acts are holy. It is hard to find, in intensely religious circles in Israel today, a position which avoids these extremes.

And yet, three times every day, Jews recite an Amidah which sets Israel in the context of a historical process. First there is a prayer for the ingathering of exiles; then one for the restoration of “our judges”; then one for “the righteous and the pious”; then one for the rebuilding of Jerusalem; then one for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy, mark of the messianic age. Quite where the present State of Israel stands on this continuum is open to debate. Does it represent the “ingathering of exiles,” or not until all Jews have made aliyah? Is national sovereignty the “restoration of our judges,” or not until the government of Israel is religious? These questions are less important than the fact that Israel is set within a historical process, to be judged not by whether it is or is not now the “beginning of redemption” but by where it leads.

Maimonides described the messianic state in the concluding chapters of his code, the Mishneh Torah. It would be one in which Israel was free of “servitude to foreign powers” and at peace with her neighbors. There would be “neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Blessings will be abundant, comforts within the reach of all.” Jewish family pedigrees, which had become obscured through the course of time, would be clarified. Jews would be “free to devote themselves to the Torah and its wisdom.” They would reconstruct their religious life, and through Israel, the world would come to recognize God. That defines a series of ultimate objectives. And it sets an agenda of religious debate as to whether any given policy of the state advances or impedes them. There is room here for wide-ranging argument on the economy, social justice, political and military objectives, religious freedom or religious coercion, “Who is a Jew?” legislation, and the importance of Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world. But that argument concerns process. It cannot take place if the messianic age is seen as a single decisive event.

The same lack of a sense of process hinders Orthodox relations with Reform. To be sure, Orthodoxy cannot and will never recognize Reform as a legitimate expression of Judaism. But neither Jewish law nor Jewish thought mandates an all-or-nothing approach to tradition. Reform Jews have made affirmations that are significant and positive. They have chosen to identify as Jews. They have chosen to recognize the existence of God and the importance of religious expression. They have chosen, in recent decades, to emphasize Jewish peoplehood and the State of Israel. Process is important. It makes all the difference whether Reform is moving closer to, or further away from, tradition. The view that nothing the Reform movement does short of a complete return to Orthodoxy can have significance is hard to justify by any other than isolated texts. And it encourages Reform to further distance itself from the rest of the Jewish world.

It is important that Orthodoxy, in its relations with Reform, maintains the balance that the sages described as “thrusting aside with the left hand and drawing near with the right hand.” The divide cannot be minimized or conjured out of existence by talk of a “pluralism” that is unavailable within the tradition. But at the same time it must be made clear what brings the two sides closer together and what drives them further apart. The recent interest of Reform in the Hebrew language, Jewish day-school education, and religious ritual are powerful moves back toward the family of faith. Reform has undergone an extraordinary volte-face from the attitudes expressed in the Pittsburgh Platform a century ago. These are signs of convergence. At the same time, its legitimation of homosexuality attacks one of the most basic Jewish values: the essential link between sexuality, marriage, and the family. And its policy on conversions and patrilineal Jewish status may yet completely divide the Jewish world. Here, as forcefully as it can, Orthodoxy must say to Reform, lo zu ha-derekh, this is not the way.

One passage in the writings of Maimonides has always been controversial, precisely because it describes the role of process in Jewish history and law. It took forty years in the wilderness, he argues in the Guide for the Perplexed, before the Israelites could cast off the mentality of slaves and acquire the courage needed to inherit the land. Human nature changes slowly. And God never intervenes to change it miraculously. The Torah did not immediately legislate an ideal society. It made concessions to a people used to idolatry. It adopted the path of gradual education toward a series of ideals. Even Divine legislation must reckon with human realities. Maimonides implies that the process to perfection is slow and beset with obstacles. The legislator must maintain a constant dialectic between ultimate aims and present human possibilities. There is no such thing in history as a sudden redemptive event that changes human nature, and no such thing either as a predetermined messianic process. Halakhah aims at creating an ideal society, but it must always be workable within a real society.

That perspective is a voice within Orthodoxy that needs to be sounded forcibly and often. It would lead to a renewal of religious Zionism. It would give direction, too, to the relationship between Orthodoxy and Reform. It is the single most compelling reason for moderation rather than extremism as a religious ideal.

Recovering the Argument

The second desideratum, we have suggested, is that tradition finds a home for many voices and that many voices find their home in tradition. We have argued that Reform and Conservative Judaism in the diaspora and secularism in Israel are not yet tradition even if they have become “traditional.” But at least some of their concerns can be stated within tradition. It is important that they are. For every cultural crisis that is expressed within the framework of revelation and halakhah becomes part of the “argument for the sake of heaven.” And every one that is not, becomes instead the scene of a divisive confrontation.

Examining the literature of Judaism, we are struck by how many incompatible positions it gives expression to. The Torah is the source of all knowledge; yet one learns astronomy from the Greeks, honoring of parents from the Romans, manners from the Persians, and one makes a blessing over “sages of the nations of the world.” Men are pious when they trust in miracles; but they are pious when they do not rely on miracles. Converts are dangerous to Israel; but Israel went into exile only to acquire converts. The messianic age will be supernatural; but it will be natural, marked only by an end of Jewish subjection to foreign powers. Each of these views finds its place within the tradition. And one could multiply examples almost without limit.

The question is: How is this phenomenon to be interpreted? Does it mean that there is no one right answer to any question of Jewish values? Or that to the contrary, there is, and dissenting sources must be ignored? Or that, in R. Soloveitchik’s imagery, to be a Jew is to be torn by ceaseless conflict? We would argue that it means none of these things. Judaism is best understood not as a set of correct positions but as a set of axes of tension: between universalism and particularism, action and passivity, freedom and constraint, individual and community, equality and hierarchy, past and future, timelessness and responsiveness to time. It strives to maintain a balance between these opposing values. But there is, as Maimonides so clearly saw in his ethical writings, no universal point of equilibrium that can be prescribed in advance. It depends on the person, place, and time.

This structure begins to fall apart when opposing forces and values are no longer linked in a single argument. For example: we noted in an earlier chapter that, according to Josephus, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were divided in their view of history. For the Sadducees, history was made by man; for the Essenes it was determined by God. The Pharisees – precursors of the rabbinic sages – argued that it was a complex interplay between both.

Zionism presents a fascinating parallel two thousand years later. The secularists took the Sadducean view. History is made by man. Orthodoxy in the 1860s, in the writings of Alkalai and Kalischer, had originally taken the Pharisaic position. Redemption is brought by God but initiated by man. But under pressure to distance itself from the secular Zionists of the 1890s and 1900s, it was increasingly driven into an Essene stance. History is made only by God. Therefore any human attempt to build a State of Israel would be heresy. Orthodoxy was driven into an extreme position, not fully representative of tradition, by the opposite extremism of the secularists. The religious argument over Zionism suffered a blow from which it has never fully recovered.

Or again: consider the argument over the role of women in Judaism. The Reform and Conservative movements have argued that there should no inequalities in the religious life. There should be mixed seating in the synagogue. Women should be rabbis and cantors. These provisions clearly breach halakhah. A number of Orthodox authorities meanwhile have argued that women’s prayer groups, even when conducted within the parameters of halakhah, should nonetheless be forbidden, on the grounds that they import Reform and secular values into the sanctuary of prayer. Two extreme positions are thus distributed between noncommunicating groups, and argument comes to an end.

In fact, however, the tradition was more complex. Undeniably the priesthood, paradigm of public prayer, was a male preserve. Yet there is evidence of deep concern for the feelings of women. The biblical narrative presents Eli the priest in an unfavorable light for misunderstanding and mocking the prayer of Hannah. The Talmud records that a peace sacrifice was once brought into the women’s court so that women could lay their hands on it and feel involved, kedei laasot nachat ruach le-nashim, “in order to satisfy women’s feelings.” That there is a pragmatic and religious duty not to let women feel excluded lies behind two important twentieth-century responsa by the distinguished halakhist R. Yechiel Weinberg. Yet such is the sociology of halakhah that when one extreme position is adopted by non-halakhic groups, halakhic rulings tend to move to the opposite extreme in an understandable concern to create a protective fence around Orthodoxy. When this happens, the balance of halakhah is disturbed.

It is important, then, that alternative positions be stated within the parameters of tradition. Not every position can be. Neither halakhah nor the principles of faith are open-endedly flexible. The fact nonetheless remains that, in general, the larger the question about Jewish identity and purpose in a given age, the more rich in alternatives the tradition is. Once the alternatives are stated within tradition, they belong to a single conversation. They provide a home inside tradition for Jews who would otherwise be driven outside. They provide a bridge between Orthodoxy and Jewish secularism and liberalism. They give balance to the halakhic and ideological argument. They allow it to embrace more than one pole in the continuum of Jewish values. For the faith of halakhic Judaism was that tradition provided a framework, not for a section of the Jewish people, but for knesset Yisrael in its entirety and diversity.

The conventions of “argument for the sake of heaven” have broken down within the Orthodox world. Scenes of angry confrontation between disciples of rival chasidic leaders and yeshivah heads, along with mutual accusations of error and heresy, have punctuated the media in recent years. They are, in a double sense, a hillul ha-Shem. They are a “desecration” of Torah, bringing it into disrepute. More profoundly, they are a “secularization” of Torah, a recourse to power, politics, and sensationalism in place of the protocols of argument and mutual respect.

The renewal of the Judaism of argument is, in one important sense, the renewal of Torah in our time. For Torah, being covenantal, faces in two directions. On the one hand, as revelation, it is the voice of God speaking to the people of Israel. On the other, as interpretation, it is the voice of the people of Israel addressing itself to God. The more inclusive Torah is of the Jewish people, the wider the tensions it resolves and the greater the range of the arguments it embraces, the closer it approaches its covenantal ideal. That is the monumental faith the rabbis expressed when they said that “the Torah was only given to make peace in the world.”

From Orthodoxy to Judaism

I have not argued any particular case on any of the questions at the forefront of contemporary Jewish debate. I have argued something different and hopefully deeper. As the Jewish world split apart under the impact of social and intellectual change in the nineteenth century, Orthodoxy began to be seen by its opponents as a kind of denomination, one version of Judaism among many. In principle, Orthodox thinkers resisted the idea. They were bound to do so, for Judaism does not admit of denominations. Yet under pressure of circumstance they increasingly began to act as if it were so. Orthodoxy became a segment of the Jewish people, an embattled minority, defending its own integrity and sectional interests. A mutual alienation gathered momentum between Orthodoxy and what was, in America and Israel, a majority of the Jewish community. At the time, surely there was no alternative. Both communities were in headlong flight from tradition.

The situation is changing. In recent years Orthodoxy has emerged as a force of power and great ideological strength. But it has not yet shed the attitudes, appropriate a century ago, of sectional thinking. In many quarters confrontation still comes more naturally than reconciliation. The search for authority overrides the etiquette of argument. Yet the covenant was addressed to the Jewish people as a whole. And the Jewish people as a whole cannot be identified with the views of any particular group. It lives in the conversation between the various groups. The importance of that conversation transcends any particular statement made within it. It was the faith of rabbinic Judaism that argument for the sake of heaven eventuates in truth, even if one cannot predict in advance what that truth will be. That faith needs reinstatement.

Jewish mystics used to preface their performance of a religious act with a dedication, le-shem yichud: “For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His Divine Presence.” Their acts “mended” a “broken” world. A similar dedication is needed now: “For the sake of the unification of the Jewish people with Torah.” A religious act should seek to mend a divided Jewish people. No one strand within tradition can do so. Only the tradition as a whole has that power. But we believe it does have that power.

If Orthodox Jews are to mend the Jewish world, they must rise beyond sectional thinking to a position where they can recognize alternatives within the tradition. Some will formulate new alternatives within tradition. The tradition of argument calls for respect for positions with which one does not agree. It leads one to admire stances one does not seek to imitate. These are values powerfully implicit in the rabbinic texts. And not accidentally. For rabbinic Judaism emerged from the ruins of one disastrous division within the Jewish world. We face another. What mended divisions then has the power to do so now. For whether the future translates into convergence or schism depends less on the chimera of Jewish unity than on how conflict is handled.

There is no sudden, decisive, and miraculous event that will renew the covenant of purpose and reunite Jews with Judaism, just as there is none that will overnight bring all Jews to Israel. But there is a process, slow, arduous, and fraught with risk though it is. In this process, many kinds of Jew have many different parts to play: some by being living examples of religious intensity, others by being courageous advocates of religious reconciliation, some by rejecting secular culture, others by imaginatively appropriating it, some by building yeshivot, others by building society, some by their courage in war, others by their advocacy of peace. Tradition speaks with many voices and is enacted in many kinds of lives. It lives precisely in the extended argument over what it is to be a Jew. To see this is already to have begun the transition from Torah as the faith of some Jews to Torah as the constitution of the whole Jewish people.