Assimilationism and Assimilation

Jacob Neusner, not an Orthodox scholar himself, poses the fateful question:

When you consider the power of Judaism, realized most fully and profoundly in Orthodoxy, you must wonder why every Jew should not be Orthodox and Judaic – not merely Jewish. The grandeur of the Judaic perspective on humanity, the extraordinary relevance of that perspective to everyday practice, the ineffable beauty of the consequent way of living, a holy way of living, separate and distinct, in full measure congruent with the profound meaning of our mortality and our human striving – what is life without that vision? And how can people turn their backs on it?

He continues, “And yet, the great majority of North American Jews who choose to be religious also choose not to be Orthodox, and a near majority of them choose not to be religious at all.” For this is the paradox. A new and surprisingly widespread set of attitudes has emerged in the last two decades, sharply at odds with assumptions that had ­governed most of Jewish life since the emancipation. We have charted the transformation through a series of unexpected developments that were brought into sharp and revelatory focus around the Six-Day War. That transformation ought to have brought about a turn toward Orthodoxy. But apart from the much publicized but numerically insignificant chozrim bi-teshuvah, religious returnees, the shift has not taken place. Orthodox parents have more children than others, and they are more successful in retaining or even increasing their commitment. What Orthodoxy has not succeeded in doing is generating a large-scale move by Reform, Conservative, or secular Jews to its ranks.

Why not? Jewish thought has, after all, turned inward and particularist, and Orthodoxy was the most particularist of nineteenth-century Jewish identities. Jewish concern has centered on survival, and Orthodox Jews are the virtuosi of survival. Jewish reflection has become more traditional and more textual. It has sought to make connections with the past. All these attributes point to Orthodoxy. Jews have been concerned to establish firm and coherent links between Israel and the diaspora. Again, as we have shown, those links are most lucidly made within an Orthodox perspective. Above all, Jews have found meaningful the concept of Jewish peoplehood, the shared history and destiny that links Jews throughout space and time. That concept, as we have shown, is fraught with ambivalence when stated in terms of radical Reform, transformationist sociology, or secular Zionism. Orthodoxy, with its principled identification – substantive as well as sentimental – with the collective body of Jews, past, present, and future, is the natural vehicle of peoplehood.

Thus Orthodoxy, for almost two centuries militantly or defensively at odds with prevailing Jewish attitudes, has become the most cogent expression of Jewish aspirations. But it has not become the dominant affiliation of either American or Israeli Jews. Figures drawn from the 1980s show that only 13 percent of Jews in New York identify as Orthodox, 11 percent in Miami, 6 percent in Chicago, and 3 percent in Washington. The most recent and thus far unpublished national survey, conducted by Paul Ritterband and Barry Kosmin, shows that 9 percent of Jews across nine cities identify as Orthodox, 30 percent as Reform, and 34 percent as Conservative. To be sure, Orthodox Jews are more likely to join synagogues than others: among synagogue members, the Orthodox percentage rises to 16. Equally important is that the outflow from Orthodoxy, so dramatic in the past, has ceased. A survey conducted in New York in the early 1980s showed that 56 percent of first-generation Americans were Orthodox, 20 percent of the second generation, 10 percent of the third, and 13 percent of the fourth. American Orthodoxy, having lost three generations, is retaining the fourth. But it remains a marginal and minority presence.

America, as the saying goes, is different. In Anglo-Jewry a full 75 percent of Jews are still affiliated with Orthodox synagogues. In Israel there are no official denominational alternatives: no recognized Reform or Conservative rabbinate. Unlike diaspora communities, Jewish identity is not primarily expressed in religious forms and synagogue membership. To be Jewish is to live in a Jewish state. Nonetheless, the broad majority of the population is not “Orthodox” but “traditional.” An increasing number of Israelis describe themselves as “religious,” but in a loose sense that comprises folk customs, observance of the major festivals, and identification with Israel’s new “civil religion.” These vast differences are more institutional than substantive, for it is clear that “Orthodoxy” means different things among the different countries. The average Jew in America, Israel, and Britain might well display a similar profile of religious observance. But in America he would probably be affiliated with the Conservative movement, in Britain, a member of a mainstream Orthodox synagogue, and in Israel he would define himself religiously without reference to a synagogue.

Secularism and Secularization

The situation can be summed up thus: the return to Orthodox attitudes has not been accompanied by a return to Orthodox affiliation or faith or religious practice. Why so? Firstly, the institutional forms that emerged in the nineteenth century have proved surprisingly persistent. Nineteenth-century German and American Reform was universalist, anti-ritual, anti-Zionist, and anti-ethnic. Late twentieth-century American Reform, as described by its leading exponent Eugene Borowitz, is particularism interested in ritual, pro-Zionist, and ethnic. Yet it remains Reform, and its membership is high and rising. Its social function, too, has changed. A critical observer might say that in the nineteenth century it gave a religious legitimation to acculturation and social integration. He might say that in the present it gave a religious legitimation to intermarriage. Reform scholars themselves have said both these things. But a function remains: not one that could ever be acceded to by Orthodoxy, but one that self-evidently meets the wishes of a large percentage of American Jews.

Institutions persist beyond the causes that brought them into being. And Jewish thought in the modern age has tended to be institutional. The irony is that while the aims of radical Reform and secular Zionism – diaspora integration and the State of Israel – have long since been achieved and no longer need to be argued, thought tends to be conducted within the lines of those ideologies. Some of the most arresting modern Jewish thought – the work of Michael Wyschogrod, Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, and Eliezer Schweid, for example – is a conscious attempt to break down the dichotomies between Orthodox and non-Orthodox, religious and secular. But because it lacks an institutional base, it remains intriguing rather than influential.

The institutional persistence of nineteenth-century Jewish forms is one reason for the failure of a return to Orthodoxy. The other is the continued secularization of Jewish life in both Israel and the diaspora. Here we must distinguish between process and intent. There is a difference between assimilationism and assimilation, secularism and secularization. The one signifies a conscious goal, the other an unplanned, even an unwanted tendency.

In the nineteenth century there were significant numbers of Jews who sought deliberately to merge into non-Jewish society. They were assimilationists. There were others – among them culturalists, Yiddishists, Bundists, and Zionists – who sought to eradicate the religious component from Jewish identity. They were secularists. One of the great ironies of that time is that the assimilationists failed to assimilate and the secularists were not secular. As Theodor Herzl noted on the one hand, “We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live…[but] in our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens.” As R. Kook noted on the other, the great East European secularists were often deeply religious figures – one thinks here of Bialik’s love of tradition, Syrkin’s utopianism, A.D. Gordon’s mysticism of land and labor. Many of them came from distinguished rabbinic families, were alumni of the great yeshivot and had their intellectual roots in the traditional learning and literature. They were rebels dialectically related to the religion they rejected.

In contemporary Jewry the irony has been compounded, for the situation has been reversed. Jews no longer seek to assimilate, but they are increasingly assimilated, measured against a whole range of indices: intermarriage, high social and economic profile, low rates of religious observance, a decline in residential clustering, and all the other registers of diaspora Jewish integration. Nor do they seek to be secular. To the contrary, as documented by Jonathan Woocher in America and Liebman and Don-Yehiyah in Israel, even highly secular Jewish contexts – fundraising, political activism, and the symbols of statehood – have become infused with religious symbolism. But this does not mean that they have thereby become religious. To the contrary, what has emerged is “civil religion,” a process whereby a set of symbols, values, and rituals – often borrowed from a religious tradition – is used to integrate and legitimate a social order. The language of civil religion is religious. But its focus is secular. At its heart is not God but society.

Thus process stands opposed to intent. There are few Jews today, fewer still among the young, who endorse a conscious strategy of assimilation or a principled Jewish secularism. Yet assimilation and secularization proceed apace. As religion becomes more marginal to the practical concerns of society and is relegated to the status of one among many leisure-time activities, both processes take place. Thus it can come about that Jewish attitudes grow more Orthodox, while Jewish behavior grows less so.

Institutional Logic

There is a further irony. One word often used to describe the contemporary Jewish situation is “polarization.” The term is misleading. Jewry, as we have seen, was effectively polarized in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It was then that the fierce intellectual battles were fought between protagonists and opponents of enlightenment and emancipation, Orthodoxy and Reform, Zionism and diasporism, between those who saw Jewish identity in religious terms and those who gave it, instead, national, political, cultural, or ethnic interpretations. Those confrontations have to a large extent abated. But what is fought in one generation as a clash of ideas is enacted, a century later, as sociological reality. And one legacy of the past is particularly disturbing.

A tacit assumption of almost all strands of nineteenth-century Jewish thought was that the revolutions that were shaking Jewish life were the equivalent of an ecological upheaval. A Darwinian natural selection was taking place in which only the fittest would survive. The early radical Reformers tended to see Orthodoxy as an archaic survival of the ghetto that would be eclipsed by the forces of modernity. Many Orthodox observers, for their part, saw Reform as a barely disguised form of assimilation that would be the instrument of its own demise. It was too diluted to secure Jewish continuity against the pressures of intermarriage. The early Zionists, with few exceptions, saw the diaspora as doomed, whether as Pinsker and Herzl thought, through ­antisemitism, or as Klatzkin argued, through assimilation. The anti-Zionists were no less negative in seeing Zionism as politically dangerous, religiously subversive, and practically unworkable.

The rhetoric of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish thought, with its internecine hostilities and undertones of selective survival, is distasteful to a post-Holocaust age. More importantly, it has simply proved false. Israel exists. The diaspora survives. There are still Reform Jews. Orthodoxy flourishes. This is a consequence no one had foreseen. The various philosophies and ideologies that animated Jews had been couched in terms of an explicit or implicit negation of alternatives. Each school of thought profoundly believed that only it would survive. As a result, few contemplated the complex plurality that is contemporary Jewry. Coming to terms with the existence of alternatives was not an item on the intellectual agenda of Jewry a century ago. The word “pluralism” has only been heard relatively recently in a Jewish context.

The result has been that the various segments of the Jewish world have defined their futures in terms of institutional logic rather than through sustained reflection on the Jewish people as a whole. From such a narrow perspective, strange and incompatible conclusions can be drawn. Diaspora sociologists, for example, have evolved a concept of ethnicity that allows American Jewry to conclude that it is surviving, even reviving. At the same time, and on the basis of the same evidence, Israeli sociologists have concluded that it is fast assimilating and disintegrating.

Orthodoxy, contemplating its own remarkable growth, has concluded rightly that its future is secure, and wrongly that the future of other dimensions of Jewish life is insecure. For Conservative and Reform leaders in America note that Orthodoxy has made few inroads into their own ranks, and that they remain overwhelmingly the majority affiliations. The Reform movement in particular can take comfort from the results of a recent New York Jewish survey which showed that while only 9 percent of first-generation Americans identify with it, 40 percent of the third generation and 51 percent of the fourth do so. That halakhic doubts exist about the Jewish status of a significant proportion of these members is, from the point of view of institutional logic, of minor concern. For it is precisely Reform’s openness to mixed marriages and other problematic identities that has secured its growth. As for Orthodox delegitimation, Reform scholars have argued that since it is unlikely that Reform would be legitimated by Orthodoxy under any circumstance, no particular policy can make matters worse than they already are.

Once Reform has thus severed its links with halakhic criteria of Jewish identity, it can claim, in the recent words of Norman Mirsky, to be “the only American Jewish religious movement that truly has the religious survival of the Jew and Judaism at heart.” These are sobering words in light of the fact that the policies that lie behind them have been described, by Conservative, Orthodox, and even some Reform thinkers, as threatening the entire structure of Jewish peoplehood. They serve to show quite how differently the same reality can be viewed from different perspectives.

Pluralism

In short, a situation can arise in which Orthodoxy, Reform, Israel, and the diaspora can each claim, within their own terms of reference, that the Jewish future is bright and that they are its inheritors. Each can argue that the others are insecure and under threat. These four ways of interpreting the present are radically incompatible with one another. But they reinforce the reluctance of each to come to terms with the existence of the others. Why should they? They will survive; the others will not. Thus, a way of thinking that had its origins in the nineteenth century still controls contemporary perceptions despite the fact that it has become radically inappropriate.

The situation arises because each group has a different definition of what Jewish existence is. An even more paradoxical phenomenon can occur. Each group can subscribe sincerely to a public rhetoric of Jewish unity, even while making that outcome increasingly less likely. For what Jewish unity means to Orthodox and Reform Jews are two quite different things. One endorses pluralism; the other does not. Each can speak of peoplehood, covenant, revelation, and mitzvah, seeming to have much in common, while differing profoundly in their understanding of those words. Israelis and Jews in the diaspora, for their part, can speak of Israel as home in two radically different senses.

Meanwhile Orthodoxy and Reform, Israel and the diaspora, and the religious and secular publics in Israel itself have simply drifted apart in terms of culture, lifestyle, and intellectual assumptions. Their respective perceptions reinforce the fragmentation. Jewish peoplehood, even as it becomes more important to all four groups, becomes increasingly incoherent. The result is that the mirage of Jewish unity vanishes, the closer it is approached.

None of this would necessarily signal collision were pluralism possible within a Jewish framework. It is not. For Judaism is defined in terms of revelation and tradition. It cannot embrace interpretations that, for example, reject the binding authority of halakhah. The classic beliefs of Judaism are not merely beliefs: they are constitutive of the covenant and thus of Jewish peoplehood. Orthodoxy, faithful to those beliefs, cannot admit a pluralism that would in effect legitimate their denial, secularization, or subjectivization. It is no accident that while there have been Orthodox rabbinic authorities who have placed a high value on tolerance, unity, and Jewish kinship, none since the birth of Reform has been willing to confer on it legitimacy as an interpretation of Judaism.

Specifically, matters of personal status require a global consensus. As Michael Walzer has pointed out more generally, “The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community.” He adds, “Admission and exclusion are at the core of communal independence. They suggest the deepest meaning of self-determination. Without them there could not be communities of character, historically stable, ongoing associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life.” Who stands within and who outside the Jewish community is the criterion on which the existence of the community depends. If there are multiple answers, there are multiple communities, not a single people. The criterion admits of neither ambiguous nor plural answers. Pluralism at this primary level is impossible, even incoherent.

There is, then, an asymmetry between Orthodoxy and Reform. Reform can concede legitimacy to Orthodoxy; Orthodoxy cannot do so to Reform. The same asymmetry exists between Israel and the diaspora. The golah can concede centrality to Israel; Israel cannot do so to the golah. This has nothing to do with secular Zionism, which based its negation of the diaspora on empirical premises: in one sense or another, diaspora Judaism could not survive. Instead it has to do with something deeper than Zionism: the place of the land of Israel in the Jewish imagination since Abram was first commanded to leave his father’s house and travel to “the land that I will show you.” Israel is home. Elsewhere is exile.

Exile is dislocation, not only geographical but spiritual. Though the Jewish people experienced its greatest religious heights in exile – the revelation in the desert, the Talmud in Babylon, the poetry in Spain, the piety of medieval France and Germany – it remained conscious that it was in exile. Not until the nineteenth century did it seek to redefine exile as either mission or home. That was an aberration, tragic in retrospect, even as it is perpetuated in contemporary diaspora ambivalence about the meaning of the word galut. For Jewish peoplehood to be a concept that embraces a continuity of Jewish life, past, present, and future, there must be an asymmetry between Israel and the diaspora: the asymmetry between a permanent home and a temporary dwelling. That Jews have spent the vast majority of their history away from home and that most Jews today do not live there neither compromises nor contradicts the fact that Jewish life is a life lived toward Israel. A pluralism of “centers” of Jewish life is as unavailable as a pluralism of “truths” of Jewish faith.

Identifying Home

We arrive, then, in the late twentieth century at a series of paradoxes. Tradition has become more important to Jewish identity than any time since the birth of emancipation, while traditional behavior continues to decline. Israel is central to diaspora identity, while aliyah continues to decline. Jewish peoplehood is affirmed by all groups, but in different and incompatible ways. Jewish unity has come to seem both necessary and impossible. The various groups in the Jewish world are, by comparison with the nineteenth century, growing ideologically closer and existentially further apart. These are dilemmas which must surely be confronted. But by whom? And in what terms?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionist movement made a fateful decision. Joseph Chamberlain had proposed to Theodor Herzl that a Jewish settlement be created in East Africa. From many perspectives, the scheme had overwhelming merits. Jews in Russia were in desperate straits in the wake of the Kishinev pogroms. Here was a secure refuge, a place where Jews could exercise autonomy and create their own society. The Uganda proposal, as it was called, had the support not only of Herzl but of a secularist like Israel Zangwill and a religious Zionist like R. Isaac Reines.

Had it proceeded, it would have split the Zionist movement in two. It was rejected. The complex politics of the decision are one thing; the collective verdict of the Jewish people was another. Only the land of Israel is home. Not all Jews live in Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Jews live toward Israel. That fact creates mutual responsibilities between Israel and the diaspora, which constrain each, at times, from actions that would benefit themselves but harm the other. It supplies Jewish identity with a content and direction and an overarching unity. Nowhere else would have served this function; because nowhere else has for so long and so universally exercised its hold on the Jewish soul.

In the late twentieth century, Jews face another fateful decision. Jews in the diaspora assimilate, even against their will. They abandon Jewish law. They absorb the ethos of their environment. They develop new conventions of sexuality and role-expectation. They marry out. The proposal, made in varying degrees of radicalism by Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative thinkers, is that a home be found for these behaviors within a redrafted Judaism, one that embodies new conceptions of revelation, authority, mitzvah, and halakhah. The proposal has many merits. It creates a home for Jews who want to be Jews. It creates a religious refuge. It promises to enlarge the Jewish community at a time of demographic crisis. The integrity of those who advocate it is not to be questioned.

But were it to proceed, it would split the Jewish people in two. The complex politics of mending the extant rift is one thing; the fate of knesset Yisrael, the collective entity of Israel, is another. Only revelation and tradition, the line that leads through however many inflections to the Oral and Written Law and Sinai, has the power to unite the Jewish world into a coherent people. Not all Jews live by tradition; but all Jews might live toward tradition. That fact would create mutual responsibilities between Orthodoxy and the non-Orthodox, which would constrain each from policies that would benefit themselves but alienate the others. It would supply Jewish identity with a shape and ultimate destination: a holy, distinct, commanded way of life. Not all would live it, but it would be normative: an endpoint if not an immediate achievement. That most Jews in America live outside Orthodoxy is no more normative than the fact that most Jews in the world live outside Israel. Ultimately only one land is geographical home; only one tradition is spiritual home.

No one making such an assertion can expect it to do other than generate deep controversy. But in this case, it must be all the deeper, for it will come from all sides. Our argument is that convergence toward a common destiny can only come about through a normative reinstatement of Judaism as traditionally understood. There is evidence that, at least attitudinally, the Jewish people as a whole has turned toward tradition in the last two decades. The question is: Has tradition turned toward the Jewish people?

Here we must take up the narrative where we left it in the third chapter: the history of Orthodox attitudes to modernity. What has happened to the visions of Samson Raphael Hirsch, R. Avraham Kook, and R. Moses Sofer in the last two decades?