A Family Portrait: Jews Tomorrow

We began our analysis with a portrait of an Anglo-Jewish family. It is time to return to them now, sitting around the seder table. How have the Cohens, David, Miriam, and their children, been affected by the long search for Jewish identity whose history we have charted in the intervening chapters?

On the face of it, Anglo-Jewry has been an island of tranquility, far removed from the storms that raged through other centers of Ashkenazic Jewish life. Unlike nineteenth-century Germany and Hungary it had no major Reform presence. By the turn of the century there were still only three Reform synagogues in Britain, and until the Second World War 90 percent of Anglo-Jews were affiliated with Orthodox congregations. There was no sudden collapse of tradition such as occurred in the major cities of Eastern Europe under the impact of Enlightenment. There were no violent confrontations between secularists and traditionalists. The divisions that American Jewry inherited from Germany, and that Eastern Europe brought to Eretz Yisrael, largely passed it by.

English society was tolerant, traditional, and respectful of religion, if not deeply religious. Anglo-Jews acquired these attitudes. They were traditional but neither intellectual nor ideological. They subscribed to a religious establishment that was Orthodox but at the same time broadly inclusive of a wide range of commitments. If we were to ask, hypothetically, how European Jewry might have developed without the undercurrents of antisemitism that gave rise to Reform and secular Zionism, Anglo-Jewry might be one such model.

Even so, that picture is slowly changing. David and Miriam’s children have had to make choices they themselves were spared. The culture in which Ruth and Richard, Pinchas, Susan, and Avi have grown up is less traditional, more individualistic than it was in their parents’ day. They cannot assume as easily as did a previous generation that Jewish and secular values are essentially in harmony. What Judaism has to say about sexual ethics, or the significance of the family, or the role of women is not the same as the message projected by the media and lived out by their contemporaries. The values preached in the synagogue are not the values of the world outside.

Nor do the children of our imagined family carry with them their parents’ memories of bubba and zeida who could hardly speak English, of hard times struggling to make a living, and of the long, slow social journey to suburbia. They have no memory of the Holocaust years or of the tense times that surrounded the birth of Israel. The anxieties and euphoria of the Six-Day War played no part in their lives: the eldest, Ruth, was only a year old at the time. They have no consciousness of being outsiders to British society. As Jews, they may be members of a religious and ethnic minority; but so too are the Moslems, Sikhs, and Hindus, the Indians, Pakistanis, and West Indians around them. There are times when they feel highly aware of their Jewishness – when Israel is being criticized in the media, for example, or when Ruth was approached by Christian missionaries while at college. But for the most part they feel socially secure and at ease.

But for just that reason, while Jewishness was something their parents took for granted, for them it is a matter of a series of conscious choices. Why should they go to synagogue? Why refrain from eating certain foods? Why not go for a drive on Shabbat? Why should they feel bound in some special way to the State of Israel? Why should they mix with Jews? Why should they marry a Jew? They are fully part of a society that sees such behavior as eccentric at best, at worst, clannish and exclusive. They have had to think through their positions more deliberately than did their parents. Their options are wider and their sentimental attachments to Jewishness are less deep.

The Inward Turn

Which is not to say that their Judaism is more superficial. To the contrary, we saw how Ruth, Pinchas, and Avi have chosen to let Judaism play a larger part in their lives than it did for their parents. For Ruth it has meant membership in a more strictly Orthodox community. For Pinchas, the baal teshuvah, it has meant a complete change of lifestyle, a kind of spiritual rebirth. For Avi it has meant leaving England for a lonely settlement in the Judean hills. Each of them has decided that being and remaining Jewish is important to him or her. But each is aware of how fragile that fact has become in a highly secularized and socially integrated diaspora.

They do not want constantly to be making difficult choices. They want their Jewishness to be a complete identity, not a role or an occasional allegiance. What habit and memory gave to their parents, they now seek and find in community: a sense of being securely and unselfconsciously Jewish. They want their children’s attachment to tradition to be beyond risk. Their parents, children of immigrants, sought to make themselves at home in English society. They, at home in English society, have reversed the process. They sense that a certain distance is essential to Jewish identity and continuity. Avi has found it in Israel, Pinchas in his yeshivah completely disengaged from the outside world. Ruth has found it in a strict discipline of halakhah and a community life strong enough to protect her and her husband-to-be from being influenced by the wider society in which they both still participate.

By now we recognize these choices. Avi has adopted the religious Zionism of R. Avraham Kook. Ruth, a product of an Orthodox seminary and an English university, embodies the Torah im derekh eretz of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Pinchas has become a chasid; but in choosing to turn away from the modern world he has aligned himself with the position of R. Moses Sofer. These alternatives were born in the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe. Each was a sharply defined reaction to the breakdown of tradition. Anglo-Jewry at that time was less intense and more conservative. Its Orthodoxy did not have to define itself in conscious opposition to Reform or secularism. There were no Anglo-Jewish equivalents of Hirsch, R. Kook, or R. Sofer. Its Judaism was sedate, establishment, and “catholic.” But by the late twentieth century these choices have come to Anglo-Jewry too.

Yet Avi, Ruth, and Pinchas are products of their time, not of the nineteenth century. In their lives we can trace the developments that have made Torah im derekh eretz and religious Zionism today quite different from what they were in Hirsch and R. Kook’s day. Ruth, though she has had an advanced Jewish and secular education, does not use the phrase Torah im derekh eretz. She does not speak of “synthesis.” She does not seek to be a conspicuous example to her non-Jewish neighbors. She has not read Hirsch’s Nineteen Letters, though if she had, she would probably find it wildly optimistic. It is enough for her that she and her husband lead a Jewish life and bring up Jewishly committed children.

She is not inspired by the thought of a creative synthesis of Shakespeare and Isaiah or even Wittgenstein and Soloveitchik. Her secular involvements are one thing, her Judaism another, and she needs no elaborate theories to unite or divide them. She lives naturally in two cultures. One represents where she is, the other represents who she is. She, and more especially her husband, a mathematics lecturer at a London college, would probably recognize Charles Liebman and Samuel Heilman’s description of their identity as “compartmentalized.” Compartmentalization is what happens to Hirschian Judaism in a more pessimistic age than the early nineteenth century.

Avi, too, and his friends in Gush Emunim are less optimistic than was R. Avraham Kook about the relationship between religious and secular Jews in Israel, and between Jews and Arabs. They still see religious and messianic significance in the state. But they do not understand this in terms of harmony. On the contrary, they see it in terms of conflict, primarily with the neighboring Arab states, but also with international and sometimes domestic Israeli opinion. The images that live most powerfully in their imagination are biblical ones of Joshua and David’s conquest of the land, and of the battle against Amalek, symbol of a world hostile to Jews. Where R. Avraham Kook saw the Jewish revival in Israel in terms of its literature and culture, they see it in terms of its geographical boundaries and military strength. To be sure, Avi is not militaristic by choice or temperament. He would like nothing better than to live at peace with the Palestinians in the nearby villages. But by the time Avi came to Israel the prospect was already remote, and the intifada has made it, for the moment, impossible.

In short, their Judaism is more inward and embattled than Hirsch’s and R. Kook’s. It is less universalist, less concerned with ethical mission and example, and more concerned with the brute fact of survival. Like Pinchas, they have chosen their particular ways of stepping back from the wider world. And in the lives Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas have chosen we can see why phrases like “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy no longer inspire. The word “modern” contains not only a description but also an evaluation. It suggests that what is modern is good, better than what is old. It implies that the future will be better than the past. That word does not fit the way they see the world. For them what is modern is for the most part negative. It suggests a secular society bent on personal success and private gratification. It suggests an economy and technology that threaten the environment. It evokes images of a world of rising intolerance and racial and religious conflict. For Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas, Judaism inspires precisely because it is not modern. It is not old-fashioned either. It is an antidote to modernity, a way of creating an alternative society. And if that means a measure of withdrawal from their secular contemporaries, so be it.

The word “centrist” also holds no appeal. What are they supposed to be centrist between? Between religion and secularism? Orthodoxy and Reform? Israel and the diaspora? Jew and Arab? There is no middle ground here, and they do not understand anyone who thinks there is. Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas do not see themselves as fanatics, though they know their parents think they are. Maimonides understood the “middle way” less as a static center than as a point of equilibrium between opposing forces. An earlier generation of Anglo-Jews found that they could maintain an equilibrium between Jewish identity and English integration by a relatively easygoing Judaism. They went to synagogue, kept kashrut at home, and celebrated Shabbat and the festivals. That undemanding balance is less readily available today. As Maimonides himself noted, there could be societies so uncongenial to Jewish values that, merely to preserve Jewish identity, one had to segregate oneself. That is how Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas read their environment. To maintain their own personal equilibrium they have moved dramatically to what their parents call the right-wing. That, for them, is where the center lies.

They have made tough-minded choices. They have decided to put Judaism first among their priorities and have constructed their lives around that fact. They are, we have to say, a minority within the Jewish world, but they are characteristic of a new generation of Orthodox Jews, the first generation in two centuries to be more Orthodox than its parents. The sociological evidence suggests that they will be a growing force in future decades. Each of them is likely to have a significantly larger family than their less religious Jewish contemporaries. Their children will be many times less likely to intermarry. Divorce will not be unknown in their respective worlds, but they will nonetheless be more secure in their marriages and families than they would otherwise have been. The open society has made them more religious precisely because they recognize that in it, only the most intense commitments survive. Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas will be among the Jewish survivors.

Complications

But so too will be the other children, Richard and Susan and those many others, a clear majority of their generation, who have drifted away from rather than closer to Judaism as traditionally understood. That is the paradox and the source of potential conflict.

Richard, the rebel of the family, is hostile to Jews, Judaism, and Israel. He has already dropped out. It is quite likely that he will marry out. But it is possible that he will continue, perhaps even aggressively, to think of himself as a Jew. For one thing, his very hostility sets him apart from his non-Jewish friends who, whatever they think of Judaism, do not consider it something to get agitated about. For another, his decision to live completely among non-Jews will remind him daily of his Jewishness no less than Pinchas’s decision to spend his life in a yeshivah. He may well identify the inevitable tensions between himself and his non-Jewish colleagues as antisemitism. This feeling may intensify if, for whatever reason, his marriage to – let us say – a non-Jewish girl with an Anglo-Catholic background, fails to work out.

Richard, ten years from now, may find himself reassessing his Jewishness. It is unlikely that he will become religious like his two brothers and one of his sisters. It is even less likely that he will go back to the way of life of his parents. But he may find a whole range of Jewish writers and intellectuals with whom he can identify. He may begin to feel a sense of kinship with Spinoza, Marx, Trotsky, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Einstein, Arnold Schoenberg, and with their struggles to find new languages of expression and new modes of personal, artistic, or social organization. He may be drawn to Kafka or Gustav Mahler. He may recognize himself as one of the characters in Frederic Raphael’s portraits of Oxbridge life. He may be drawn to George Steiner’s vision of the Jew as outsider to all cultures and nationalisms. Almost certainly he will be deeply gripped by the literature of the Holocaust. In short, Richard may well discover what is by now already a tradition of its own: that rebellion is itself a mode of Jewish identity.

What of Susan? Alone among the children of our imagined family she has not made firm choices. Judaism does not play a large part in her life. For her it lies somewhere between a bothersome duty and a leisure activity and its impact on her time, except on major holidays, is minimal. Jewishness, on the other hand, is important to her. She enjoys the company of Jewish friends, with whom she feels at home. But what they have in common has to do with where they live, the kind of clothes they wear, the kind of music they like, and the kind of lifestyle they expect to have. It includes a sympathy for Israel and a commitment to fundraising causes, but beyond that there is little Jewish to her Jewishness.

Susan is a problem for religious thinkers and leaders. For whatever views they hold about Judaism, they find it difficult to have a conversation with someone who approves of it vaguely but believes it simply to be irrelevant to most of life’s choices and pleasures. Yet studies like those of Goldscheider and Steven M. Cohen of American Jewry, together with such evidence as we have of Anglo-Jewry, suggest that Susan represents the majority of contemporary Jews. To use Cohen’s categories, she is neither “observant” nor “activist” but is “affiliated.” She is likely, in due course, to belong to a synagogue, observe the major festivals, and light candles on Friday evenings.

Thus far, from the point of view of Orthodoxy, Anglo-Jewry’s striking characteristic is that figures like Susan have stayed within its ranks. This has resulted in an establishment Orthodoxy criticized by religious purists for its bland, undemanding, and inclusive character. This criticism is, we believe, wide of the mark. It comes from a way of thinking that had its genesis elsewhere, in communities like those of Central and Eastern Europe, where Jewish identities were radicalized into sharply defined oppositions. To be a Jew of any kind was to have made a clear and firm decision that, in effect, cut one off from any further contact with Jews of other kinds. To force such a choice on Susan would not answer to any real feeling she has. It would divide the community, which neither Susan nor most other Jews want. It would probably result in her severing her ties with Orthodoxy; and judging by the assembled evidence of the American sociological studies, she would then be likely to practice her Judaism less rather than more.

But Susan may not stay within Orthodoxy. Let us trace her future through an imaginary scenario. At one of her social groups she meets, likes, and falls in love with a Jewish boy, Michael. He comes from a Reform community, but that does not seem important to either of them. Each is willing to make adjustments. They agree that the marriage will take place in her parents’ synagogue. It turns out, however, that Michael’s mother was converted to Judaism by a Reform rabbi. Susan’s rabbi tells Michael that, halakhically, he is not a Jew. He is willing to conduct the marriage, but only on condition that Michael undergoes a halakhic conversion.

Michael is bewildered and furious. No one has ever cast doubt on his Jewish status before. As far as he is concerned, he was born, raised, and has always seen himself as a Jew. He goes to synagogue more often than Susan. His knowledge of Judaism is better than hers. He is not willing to undergo the conversion, for that would imply that his whole previous life has been built on error. Susan agrees. She does not want to see Michael hurt. She does not want their wedding delayed. She does not want it to be overshadowed by controversy. She knows that she cannot altogether avoid it, because whichever way she chooses, someone will be offended. But she wants to marry Michael. And that means, right now, having the wedding in his synagogue, not hers. After a fierce family row, Susan’s parents eventually agree.

The wedding takes place. Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas are not at the ceremony, though they come to the reception afterwards. Susan and Michael become members of a Reform community. Susan finds it strange at first, but eventually gets used to it. She likes the idea of sitting next to her husband in the synagogue, but she finds the service a little too Anglicized for her taste. They have children. The years pass. Some of their children meet and want to marry non-Jews. Their rabbi suggests that they convert to Judaism. They agree, and he supervises their instruction and conversion. Michael and Susan both know that some of their grandchildren will not be considered halakhically Jewish. But they feel, as did Michael’s father many years earlier, that it is better that they be Jewish in Reform terms than not Jewish at all. Besides which, they have few Orthodox friends, and those they do have also come to terms with the situation. As for Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas, Susan hardly sees them at all except at family simchas. And on those occasions they avoid talking about Judaism.

Family Ties

Let us come back from the future to the present. How do five such different people as our imagined children come to have anything in common at all? The answer is, of course, that they are brothers and sisters, members of a single family. They grew up together. They have memories in common. If one of them was in trouble, the others would feel a duty to help. If one became famous, the others would feel pride. They are bound by ties of kinship and loyalty. That is what it means to be part of a family.

And that, above all, is what it means to be a Jew. Jewish history begins in choice of a family, the Divine election of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their children. “I have known him,” says God about Abraham, “so that he will command his children and his household after him, and they will keep the way of God, doing charity and justice.” The choice of Abraham was the election of a family. Judaism is difficult to define in conventional categories. It is not simply a religious faith, for a secular Jew is still a Jew. It is not simply a nationality, a state, a country or a land, for the Jew who lives outside Israel is still a Jew. It is not a race or a mode of ethnicity, for there are Jews of many races and colors and backgrounds and cultures. Judaism embraces these things, but it is something other than and prior to them all. To be a Jew is to be a member of a family. Perhaps Michael Wyschogrod put it best:

The collectivity that stands before God is thus the people of Israel as the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is not an artificial collectivity, constituted as an interest group or a group sharing common ideas. Interests and ideas change. We drift in and out of artificial groups…. But a family does not change. We may like or dislike our relatives. We may seek their company or avoid it. But we cannot sever the bond that binds us to our blood relatives. A wife or a husband can be divorced. But a child or a parent cannot, and that is the kind of bond that connects the Jewish people with God.

Historically and theologically, though, it is not that simple. What kept the Jewish people as a family in the long centuries between the destruction of the Second Temple and the threshold of modernity was a series of shared beliefs and the unifying bond of Jewish law. Islam called Jews “the people of the book.” George Steiner has spoken of “our homeland, the text.” How far a family extends is a matter of convention rather than biology. The conventions of the Jewish family were defined by Torah. They were clarified in the rabbinic literature in the sages’ famous statement that “all Israel is responsible for one another.” Jews were a family because a book, the Torah, said so.

And experience matched that definition. Throughout the long Christian and Islamic Middle Ages, Jews not only kept themselves, but were treated by others, as a people apart. We can hear both theology and deep personal feeling in the following ruling of Maimonides about the Jewish duty of charity: “All Jews and those attached to them are like brothers, as it is said, ‘You are sons to the Lord your God.’ And if a brother will not show mercy to his brother, then who will have mercy on him? And to whom can the poor of Israel look for help? To those other nations who hate and persecute them? They can look for help only to their brethren.”

That was a high point in the sense of family. But it began to collapse under the impact of emancipation. Reform and Orthodox Jews in Germany, for example, began to feel they had more in common with their fellow Germans than with one another. And when the Ostjuden, Jews from Eastern Europe, began to enter Germany, they were looked on more as strangers than as brothers. Some of the more radical secularists in Israel, for their part, argued that their real kinship was with their Arab neighbors rather than with Jews in the diaspora. They saw themselves as Hebrews, or Canaanites, or at least as Israelis, not Jews.

The history of modern Jewry could, in a real sense, be told in terms of the shifting fate of the idea of Jews as a family. Reform and secular Zionism in their different ways were an assault on the idea that all Jews everywhere constituted a single family. And yet, despite this, racial antisemitism throughout Europe and angry tensions between Jews and Arabs in the years before the state made Jews aware that to non-Jews at least, even if not to themselves, they were still a people apart. And as the Holocaust and anti-Zionism have begun to alter Jewish perceptions, Jews have come to see themselves once again as a family. The passage we quoted from Michael Wyschogrod about Judaism as a family dates from the mid-1980s. It could not have been written much earlier. It is part of the new post-1967 consciousness. Its central feature is an image of Jews throughout the world bound by ties of kinship and loyalty. Their destinies are interlinked even against their will. They are a family.

Or rather, they would like to be. For the picture we have drawn of David and Miriam’s children lets us see in microcosm how that family is breaking up. Twenty years from now, will the generation of their children, first cousins to one another, feel themselves linked to one another in any substantial way? Already the five children have grown apart. Avi in Israel has severed his ties. He believes that the golah has no future. Pinchas has entered a world of his own, a chasidic yeshivah which rejects the way of life of the rest of the family. Ruth is almost certain not to let her children play with Susan’s, for fear of compromising their Orthodoxy. Richard, in rejecting Judaism, has turned his back on the others. And Susan is married to a man her sister and two brothers do not believe to be Jewish.

Families have broken up before. A fair proportion of the Jewish literature over the last hundred years has been devoted to the theme. We recall Fiddler on the Roof and its many variants. But the present situation is different. The older literature was about the collapse of tradition, the generational gap of acculturation, and about the remorseless march of assimilation. Jews were on the way out. The pain was that of farewell. That is not true in our family. Our prediction is that in twenty years from now, all five children will still define and think of themselves as Jewish – but in extraordinarily different ways, some within the rabbinic tradition, others outside. They will all see themselves as in some way part of the Jewish family. But paradoxically, it will be Judaism more than anything else which divides them.

Nonsolutions

What then will keep them together? What can be done now to prevent their drifting apart? Some lines of thought are well meant but simply fail to address the reality. Perhaps – it will be said – Richard should never have been allowed to go to a non-Jewish school. Perhaps Susan should never have been allowed to have Reform friends. Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas, in their different ways, have decided just that for their own children. But Richard and Susan, though they are fictional characters, represent a great many real ones. In both Anglo- and American Jewry, increasing numbers of children go to Jewish day schools. But in both communities an increasing number of children are receiving no Jewish education at all. In both communities, the Reform presence is growing. So too is the percentage of Jews who go to a university, where they meet and mix with Jews of all shades. Segregation is a solution for some. It is not a solution for the Richards and Susans who exist in growing numbers.

There is an alternative way of seeing the situation. It has been implicit in a certain kind of Orthodox thought since the nineteenth century. It comes to the fore more in informal conversation than public theology. But it is this. The situation has to be accepted that Richard and Susan will be lost to the family. This, so the argument goes, is not new. There were many Jews before who assimilated and intermarried. They effectively disappeared from Jewish history. It happened in the early nineteenth century among the acculturated Jews who thronged the salons of Rachel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz. It happened in fifteenth-century Spain. It happened in first-century Rome. Judaism is sustained by the she’erit ha-peletah, the faithful few, the surviving minority. The rest disappear.

There is, on this view, a Darwinian law operative in Jewish history. Only the fittest survive. In an open society, only those who are willing to make sacrifices – and they are sacrifices – to have Jewish children, send them to Jewish schools and then to yeshivot and seminaries, to fulfill to the fullest the demands of a life lived according to halakhah and to separate themselves whenever necessary from the rest of society: only they have a Jewish future. Who is a Jew? Not one who has Jewish grandparents, but one who is certain of having Jewish grandchildren. As for the rest, what can anyone do? Judaism today is for the most part lived out in free societies. Coercion is impossible, persuasion ineffective. There will be Jews who will not make those sacrifices. And whether in one generation or two or three, assimilation will eventually take its toll. The overwhelming likelihood is that somewhere along the line their children’s children will cease to have any meaningful contact with Judaism. They will disappear. In the meanwhile, Orthodoxy must concentrate on its own strongholds among the most intensely committed. They at least will hand the tradition on across the generations.

There is much to be said for this line of thought. In three of its variants, this is exactly what Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas have chosen. But let us be clear what it is and what it is not. It is a prescription for individuals and communities. It is not a prescription for the Jewish people as a whole. There is a clear distinction between individual Jewish futures, and the collective Jewish destiny. And when thought is transferred from one domain to the other, what is highly responsible in one context becomes highly irresponsible in another.

This distinction has been central to the argument throughout the book. I believe that Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas are right. We believe that the evidence of acculturated diaspora communities in prewar Europe and present-day America suggests that – even at the level of survival strategy, let alone at the level of religious conviction – substantive accommodation to secular culture and its ethos makes no sense. It results in high rates of intermarriage, low birth rates, and incoherent identities. It imports into Judaism values that are incompatible with its own deepest assumptions. The same is true, though it is less immediately ­threatening to Jewish continuity, of a highly secularized interpretation of Israeli society. The same is beginning to be true – and this was the point of our family portrait – even of “establishment” Orthodoxy in traditional communities like Anglo-Jewry.

We believe with Maimonides – and here we refer to the whole thrust of his writings, not just to isolated texts – that Jewish life consists in striking a series of balances, a “middle way,” between conflicting values: universalism and particularism, Jewish study and secular study, the community and the individual, law and liberty, defense and the pursuit of peace, Jewish law and the values that underlie the law. But we do not believe that what is the “middle way” in one community and one generation is necessarily so somewhere else or at another time. A synthesis that was available a century ago may not be available today. A mode of social integration that secured Jewish continuity a generation ago may not do so today. Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas have decided that their lives must be Jewishly more intense if their commitment is to be securely passed on to their children. Their “middle way” is, to use an unfortunate but inevitable label, to the “right” of what it was for their parents. We believe that their judgment is correct.

It answers the personal question of how they should lead their lives. But as to the question of how leadership is to be exercised to keep Jews as members of a single family, it is not an answer at all. The Richards and Susans may not be written out of the Jewish fold. Darwinism is no basis on which to conceive the collective Jewish future, for three reasons.

Against Jewish Darwinism

Firstly it is morally unacceptable. After the Shoah we may not make that kind of distinction between Jews. The hatred which sought the destruction of all Jews can only be “redeemed” through a love which seeks the inclusion of all Jews. The “authentic Jew who faces up to his singled-out Jewish condition,” to use Emil Fackenheim’s phrase, recognizes the irrevocable bonds that bind him to a people in its awesome totality across time and space. There is, in post-Holocaust time, no morally acceptable scenario that focuses on the selective survival of one group of Jews while abdicating responsibility for the others. That applies to selective survivalism of any kind, whether it be an Orthodox version that sees Reform and secular Jews as destined for oblivion, or an Israeli version that sees the diaspora as doomed.

Secondly it is sociologically blind. Richard and Susan and their many counterparts are not about to disappear. The central thrust of our argument is that they will continue to identify as Jews, though in ways increasingly estranged from Orthodoxy. That has been the recurring paradox of modern Jewish identities. In the most unpredictable ways, assimilated, alienated, and even deeply self-hating Jews have seen themselves as Jews and have sought to give Jewish expression to that fact. They have reinterpreted Jewishness and Judaism, reconceived the Jewish past, constructed alternative canons of antecedents, and thus created and placed themselves within an astounding variety of Jewish “traditions.” There is no easy parallel here with the Jews in the past who sought a way out from membership in the Jewish people by intermarriage or conversion or willful and deliberate assimilation. To imagine that Orthodoxy alone will be the sole claimant to the Jewish future is to misread the whole thrust of Jewish modernity.

Thirdly it is theologically offensive. The book of Genesis tells the prehistory of the covenantal people. There is Abraham, one of whose children, Isaac, continues the covenant, and one of whom, Ishmael, does not. There is Isaac, one of whose children, Jacob, carries on the promise, and one of whom, Esau, does not. The pain of these separations, Ishmael from Abraham, Esau from Isaac, are among the most affecting in the entire Jewish literature. But with Jacob, history enters a new phase. To be sure, there is still conflict between brothers. Jacob’s other children seek to kill Joseph and eventually sell him into slavery. There is conflict between father and child: Jacob favors Joseph and at the end of his life effectively disowns Reuben, Shimon, and Levi. But these conflicts between human beings are set against an implicit Divine judgment that becomes explicit as Genesis moves into Exodus. From now on there is to be no selection. All of Jacob’s children are chosen. None of them is to go the way of Ishmael and Esau. None of them will be unchosen. From here on, there will be no dramas of selection and rejection. All of Jacob’s offspring, the children of Israel, are children of the covenant. The people Israel embraces all Jews.

Let us put the point more strongly. For at a certain point in history, a dissenting voice was heard. Not all Jews, it was said, were worthy to inherit the Jewish future. Not every child of Jewish parents was, by that fact alone, a child of the covenant. The author of this idea was emphatic in insisting that only some Jews would spiritually survive as the true Israel. As he put it, “Not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children.... It is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.” The language is slightly strange, but the point is clear. There will be selective survival. Israel is a subcommunity of believers, not a total family bound by birth. The author of these words was Paul, architect of early Christianity. The idea of selective survival has no place in Judaism.

Against it we must argue that there is no coherent or acceptable thought about the Jewish future that does not place at its center the idea of knesset Yisrael, the indivisible collectivity of all Jews, righteous and rebellious, committed and indifferent, learned and ignorant, affirming and assimilated. R. Joseph Soloveitchik put the point simply: “A Jew who has lost his faith in knesset Yisrael, even though he may personally sanctify and purify himself by being strict in his observance of the precepts and by assuming prohibitions upon himself – such a Jew is incorrigible and is totally unfit to join in the Day of Atonement which encompasses the whole of knesset Yisrael in all its components and all its generations.”

Judaism’s Public Domain

But it is just this dimension that is missing from the lives of Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas. Why should it be otherwise? They have their own lives to lead. They have acted to secure their own and their eventual families’ future. Why should it concern them that they are drifting apart? Richard and Susan are free agents in a free society. If they choose to move, slowly or rapidly, away from tradition, whose concern is it but their own? Is any one of our five children his brother’s or sister’s keeper?

That question was first uttered by the biblical Cain. And it is a measure of how far we have drifted from the Jewish sense of collective responsibility that, asked at any time before the nineteenth century it would have invited the answer Yes, whereas today it almost certainly invites the answer No. One of the greatest of all Jewish values is dying. Not dead, for Jews still feel deeply involved in the political and economic fate of other Jews. But to feel involved in their spiritual fate breaches the great liberal axiom of John Stuart Mill, that private morality is a private concern.

John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society, coined the phrase “private opulence and public squalor.” That, in spiritual terms, is what has happened to religion in a secular age. It is not that Judaism has waned. To the contrary. Ruth in her strict community, Pinchas in his yeshivah, and Avi in his Judean outpost live private lives of great Jewish richness and intensity. But there is nothing to link them, or even their leaders and mentors, to the collective enterprise of the Jewish people. The very idea of such a thing sounds either mystical or abstract, a subject for sermons but one devoid of empirical content. What has vanished in the process is Judaism’s public domain. The substantive reality of knesset Yisrael has disappeared.

What remains is a highly secularized equivalent: fundraising for Israel or activism on behalf of politically threatened Jewish communities; in a phrase, “civil Judaism.” Were this a stable state, we might lament the secularization of Jewish peoplehood, but rest content that this at least had survived. But it is not a stable state. For in Judaism, religion and peoplehood are deeply intertwined. Most of the major conflicts that have surfaced in world Jewry in the last decade have been over matters of religion. And when Judaism loses its great traditions of the public domain – the ideas of halakhah as the constitution of a people, of collective religious responsibility, and of argument for the sake of heaven – it loses its ability religiously to handle those conflicts. Even the most religious handle them in secular ways: by street fights and demonstrations, burning bus shelters, media-inspired events, and political pressure and manipulation. Thus is Torah shamed.

So our question returns: What can be done now to prevent the Jewish family drifting apart? Religious coercion is impossible. In the diaspora it cannot be done. In Israel it ought not to be done. It was one of the great halakhists of the early twentieth century, R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, who following a suggestion of Maimonides, pointed out that coercion in Jewish law presupposes an underlying assent, on the part of the person affected, to the processes of Jewish law. That assent cannot be taken for granted in a secular society. As R. Avraham Karelitz, the Chazon Ish, pointed out, the concept of “rebellion” against tradition is inapplicable in the modern age. And as R. Nachum Rabinovitch and R. Aharon Lichtenstein have reminded us, human freedom is an essential value of the Jewish tradition itself. The very idea of covenant presupposes free assent. Coercion is no way to bring Jews within the ambit of tradition.

Dialogue with Dissent

What is left are education and persuasion. And this immediately suggests the kinds of Jews there would have to be in a given society to keep the dialogue open with Richard and Susan. There would have to be Jews who could lead Richard to see his rebellion in a Jewish context. There are voices within the tradition with which Richard could identify. Many of the most powerful prophetic passages in the Torah are critiques of the ruling powers in the name of social justice. Some of the most masterful voices in the rabbinic literature are those raised in defense of freedom of argument against authoritarianism, of human dignity against the idea of religion as passivity. In more recent times, the most sustained critique of Israel’s military and political policy since 1967 has come from the Orthodox thinker, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. The work of David Hartman has been a continuing attempt to engage Judaism with the concerns of a secular humanism.

The point we have striven to make is that it is irrelevant whether these views are “correct” or normative or whether we ourselves subscribe to them. It was the vision of R. Avraham Kook that ultimately all such voices would enter into the great collective argument which is the Jewish people in dialogue with its past and future. This, for R. Kook, was what Torah was: the continuing engagement of a people with the covenant. Even atheism and Marxism, he argued, contained within them important critiques of a Judaism which had become routinized and “religionized.” They were destructive only if they led away from tradition. Brought back inside tradition, they would renew it from within.

There are models of dissent within tradition. The great East European secular Zionists were often saturated with traditional values. Several of them, as we noted, were alumni of the great Volozhyn yeshivah. The secularist scholar Gershom Scholem tried to trace an entire revolutionary tradition through the literature of Jewish mysticism. Richard’s discontent could find Jewish expression if there were someone to connect him with tradition.

It is a large “if.” The present American Jewish community, for example, is one of the most highly educated in history. Some 90 percent of young American Jews attend college. Yet it is probably one of the least Jewishly educated of all time. Some half will have had no significant Jewish education at all. The concern of Jewish communities since Second Temple times, that there be universal Jewish literacy, has evaporated in the past century. Instead secular education has seemed a sufficient end in itself. The result is that Richard and the many secularists like him who find no inspiration in institutionalized Jewish life can only drift away. They are not merely Jewishly alienated. They are Jewishly ignorant. Richard could be a force for a revitalization of the tradition of Jewish social criticism if there were someone, or some literature, that mapped his views onto the total landscape of the Jewish imagination. Judaism has paid a heavy price for the alienation of its intellectuals since emancipation.

Extending the Argument

There would have to be Jews, too, who would enter into the dialogue with Susan. Most urgently there must be some who will engage in conversation with Michael’s Reform rabbi and his colleagues, to establish a common standard for conversions and divorces to be performed under halakhic auspices. It cannot be in the long-term interests of the Jewish community as a whole that the problems of individuals be solved non-halakhically at the cost of creating larger problems in the future. For they or their children will be regarded either as non-Jews or as mamzerim, illegitimate, by the majority of Jews throughout the world. That argument must be pursued courteously but relentlessly, for the very integrity of Jewish peoplehood is at stake.

There must be others who investigate ways, within halakhah, that will allow Susan to find greater personal meaning in the Jewish tradition: alternative services perhaps, or women’s groups, or residential retreats, or chavurot, learning fellowships. There must be others again who explore ways of extending the life of Torah beyond the confines of synagogue, school, and home. For Samson Raphael Hirsch’s idea of synthesis has suffered a stunningly premature and ironic defeat. As Jews become more integrated and prominent in society, so the possibilities expand for Hirsch’s ideal of Jewish life as a model to others of the ethical enterprise.

But it is precisely now that the idea has become problematic. What is it to serve God through urban planning, the development of industries, the writing of novels, or the development of political programs? One of the goals of the halakhic system, according to Maimonides, is tikkun olam, a term which includes the building of an economic, social, cultural, and environmental order. The perfection of society is a precondition of the perfection of the soul, he wrote; therefore it is a religious duty. But what is the perfection of society, in terms that are both contemporarily relevant and faithful to the Jewish sources? The exploration of this issue has never been more urgent, in Israel above all, but also in the diaspora.

In short, while Ruth, Avi, and Pinchas have turned inward, there must be others, no less committed to tradition, who turn outward if Richard and Susan are to find a continuing place in Judaism. And here we must reiterate another of our central contentions: Orthodoxy is not a denomination. It is not simply one version of Judaism among many; it is Judaism tout court. The corollary is that there is no one single type of Orthodoxy. It embraces as many types of temperament, cultural style, and intellectual orientation as there are Jews. Halakhah and the framing principles of Jewish faith preserve community while admitting diversity. The greater the diversity within Orthodoxy, the more it approximates to its ideal state, the religion of the Jewish people as a whole.

From History to Destiny

Above all there must be a determined attempt by Jewish leaders and thinkers of all kinds, to rise above the rhetoric of Jewish unity and reinstate the Judaic tradition of argument. The language of Jewish unity is seductive and misleading. It is, by turns, ambiguous and mystical. It can coexist with the unqualified pursuit of sectional self-interest which makes the divisions within the Jewish world progressively more intractable.

We believe that “argument for the sake of heaven” is a more cogent model than “Jewish unity.” Those who wish to enter that argument must recognize that there are preconditions. Argument proceeds through text and interpretation. It presupposes a certain depth of Jewish education. We believe that it is through Jewish education alone that Reform and secularist no less than Orthodox Jews can engage in dialogue with the Jewish tradition and thus with the entire Jewish people. It is the only common language we have.

But “argument for the sake of heaven” has its own ethic. It involves a respect for the integrity of opposing positions. It means exposing one’s own positions to critical scrutiny. It leads to a sense of the pull of conflicting values. It is Judaism’s great public domain of debate. It is the vehicle through which tradition handled conflict. And it is the way in which rabbinic Judaism, after the destruction of the Second Temple, healed the wounds of a nation lacerated by internal strife and kept them as a single people throughout eighteen centuries of dispersion.

Which brings us back to our five children. Tonight at least, along with Jews throughout the world, they are part of a single family. For they are telling the same story of how a people once enslaved emerged into freedom and made their way through an uncharted desert to a covenantal destination at Sinai. They are telling it not as history, but as their story: the origins of a people they affirm as their own.

For this is the miracle: that after all the exiles and exoduses, the pogroms and persecutions, after the unprecedented assault on the people of the covenant in the twentieth century, Jews still wish to make that story their own. They feel participants in a common history. The Shoah and the State of Israel, however interpreted, have led to a renewal of the brit goral, the covenant of fate.

It is our faith that a sense of shared fate is always succeeded by a covenant of common purpose, as Sinai succeeded the exodus from Egypt. But the sages who added the section of the “four children” to the Haggadah made a telling point. Judaism must be made meaningful to many kinds of children: to the wicked no less than the wise, to the child without questions or interest no less than the child of single-minded intensity. Each member of the family, however different, must find the tradition accessible. That is the challenge before the contemporary expounders of tradition.

Each child will interpret the story differently. But that is their argument, as it is ours. So long as they continue to tell the story and make it their own, they will remain in conversation with one another. The past two centuries have witnessed another momentous Jewish exodus: from the enclosed walls of tradition into the open society. But that exodus has no shared story. Jews agreed on what they were leaving, but could not agree on where they were going. Some moved far from Torah; others stayed within. As a result, the Jewish family came precariously close to disintegration.

How then is it to stay together? The people of the book were a people because of the book. In Torah, they read their lives. Each new mode of Jewish living, if it stayed within Torah, became a new commentary to the covenantal text. Jews were different: they lived in different countries, had different customs, spoke different languages, and took part in different cultures. But because they shared a tradition, they could engage in conversation. Because they had texts in common, they could enter the collective argument. Because they kept halakhah, their acts created a cross-cultural community. We see no alternative basis of Jewish peoplehood. The Jewish family is as strong as its shared religious heritage. The renewal of Torah in the life of Jews is the only route to the renewal of the Jewish people.