The Crisis of Contemporary Jewish Thought

Alasdair MacIntyre begins his revolutionary diagnosis of contemporary moral theory, *After Virtue,*¹ (London: Duckworth, 1981). with a chilling parable. Imagine, he says, that there is a widespread revolution against science. There is a series of ecological disasters. Science and technology are blamed. There is public panic. There are riots. Laboratories are burned down. A new political party comes to power on a wave of anti-scientific feeling and eliminates all science teaching and scientific activity. A century later, the mood subsides. People begin to try to reconstruct what was destroyed. But all they have is fragments of what was once a coherent scientific culture: odd pages from old books, scientific instruments whose use has been forgotten, bits and pieces of information about theories and experiments without the background knowledge of their context. These pieces are reassembled into a discipline called science. Its terminology and some of its practices resemble science. But the systematic corpus of beliefs which once underlay them has gone. There would be no unitary conception of what science was about, what its practices were for, or what its key terms signified. The illusion would persist that science had been recovered; but it would have been lost, and there would be no way of discovering that it had been lost.

footnotes: ¹ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

What is conjectured in this parable is, MacIntyre argues, what has actually happened to moral thinking. The Enlightenment and the social processes which accompanied it succeeded in destroying the traditions to which the key terms of morality belonged and within which they had lucidity and coherence. The words survived – good, right, duty, obligation, virtue – but were now severed from the context which gave them sense. For they had belonged to coherent social orders in which people were shaped by a collective vision, in which there were social roles not chosen but given by birth and tradition, and in which there was a narrative continuity between generations and within individual lives. Those socially given shared meanings have now gone, to be replaced by a Kantian conception of morality as autonomous choice or a Nietzschean world constructed by individual will. The language of morality survives, but without the systematic corpus of beliefs which underlay them. “What we possess,” says MacIntyre, “are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”²

footnotes: ² Ibid., 2.

For morality, read Judaism, and we have before us a precise description of the problem confronting contemporary Jewish thought. The momentous dislocations of modernity – social, intellectual, and geographical – have proved in retrospect and were indeed recognized at the time to be as disruptive of Jewish continuity as the series of catastrophes that forced rabbinic Judaism into being: the cessation of prophecy, the collapse of national autonomy, the destruction of the Second Temple, the end of the sacrificial system, the loss of priesthood, the termination of collective national history, and the beginning of a long, seemingly open-ended exile; in short, the “hiding of the face” of God.

The processes that have shaken Jewry from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries have been no less revolutionary: emancipation, the belated confrontation with enlightenment, acculturation, assimilation, the metamorphosis of religious anti-Judaism into racial antisemitism, the transformation of Jewish existence into “the Jewish problem,” and the attendant crises of Jewish self-definition. From these traumas emerged a bewildering variety of ideologies: religious reform, from Conservative to Liberal to Reconstructionist; Zionism in its various constructions, secular, religious, utopian, pragmatic, restorative, or revolutionary, each with its own inner diversity of shadings; secular Jewish identities, intellectually, culturally, politically, or ethnically conceived; and the various Jewish exorcisms of Judaism, neo-Spinozist, Marxist, or Freudian.

It is neither necessary nor appropriate to wax nostalgic about the premodern Jewish past, with its partially enclosed culture, autonomous community governance, its ghettos and Gemeinschaft. None the less, and without yearning for temps perdu, we recognize to our disquiet that questions that have become unanswerable now were unaskable then. Who and what is a Jew? What is Torah? What is galut (exile), and what is the Jewish hope that lies beyond exile? The substantive daily content, metaphysical significance, and historical context of a Jewish life were bedrock data. They were given, not chosen. They were part of the world into which one was born. They carried meanings which every social interaction, whether with Jews or non-Jews, tended to confirm. There may have been fierce argument over the details of Jewish life but not over the framing fundamentals. Within this context the language of Judaism was coherent, consistent, and designated a palpable objective reality.

The language has survived but its context has not. The key words remain – terms such as Torah, mitzvah (commandment), galut (exile), ge’ulah (redemption), am Yisrael (the people of Israel), eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel). But the meanings attached to them differ systematically from group to group within the Jewish world. What is a mitzvah? Is it an act performed in response to the divine command? Or from loyalty to historical tradition? Or as an act of group participation? Or as a blend of ethnicity and nostalgia? Or as a freely chosen act of autonomous Jewish self-expression? What is galut? Is it a geographical term meaning “outside Israel”? Or a cultural term meaning “a sense of not-at-homeness”? Or a religious term meaning “a time not yet redeemed”? Is America galut? Is Israel?

BABEL INVERTED The problem that threatens to render all contemporary Jewish thought systematically divisive is not the absence, but paradoxically the presence, of a shared language. Jews use the same words but mean profoundly different things by them. The point was dramatically illustrated by an utterance delivered at a, perhaps the, key moment in modern Jewish history.

The issue was the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The moment was fraught with meaning. But which meaning? Conceived religiously, the people of Israel were returning to their land after an exile of almost two thousand years. The hand of God was once again manifest in history. The period of the “hiding of the face” of God was, said Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,³ (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979), 34–39. at an end. The biblical resonance of the ingathering of exiles was unmistakable. “Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers, and you will take possession of it.”⁴ It was the fulfilment of a prophecy, the consummation of an ancient religious hope.

footnotes: ³ Abraham R. Besdin, Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought Adapted from the Lectures of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik ⁴ Deut. 30:4–5.

Even that father of modern Jewish heresies, Baruch Spinoza, had predicated his abandonment of Judaism on the fact of exile, and had envisaged a possibility that would overturn his analysis. “I would go so far as to believe,” he wrote of the Jews, “that if the foundations of their religion have not so emasculated their minds they may even, if occasion offers, so changeable are human affairs, raise up their empire afresh, and that God may a second time elect them.”⁵ [1670], trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 56. Even for Spinoza, then, the rebirth of a Jewish state in Israel would have vindicated a religious interpretation of history.

footnotes: ⁵ Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

But Spinoza had added a rider: “if the foundations of their religion have not so emasculated their minds.” Here was the crux. The Zionist movement involved a radical secularization of Jewish history. Redemption was to come by human efforts. The return to Zion was to be brought about not by a submission to Providence but by a determined effort to take active control of the Jewish destiny. The first formulations of Zionism in the 1860s tried to avoid the split between faith and action. The religious thinkers Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Yehudah Alkalai argued that the process of redemption began by human initiative. The secular thinker Moses Hess was inspired by the religious roots of Jewish nationalism. But by half a century later, the intellectual schism was almost complete. The religious thinkers of Agudat Yisrael were by now arguing that political Zionism was an attempt to “force the end” by pre-empting divine deliverance and thus usurping the role of Providence in history. The secularists were beginning to see religion as their primary obstacle, a sustained tutorial in passivity, an emasculation of the mind.

The point was made with passion by Joseph Chayyim Brenner. “In their prayers, their liturgy, and sacred books the Jews complained to God for not redeeming them, for not restoring them forever to their homeland.... At the same time, however, they were always quite content to remain where they were, among the wicked gentiles, so long as the latter allowed them to remain.”⁶ (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 310. Nachman Syrkin, the theorist of Zionist socialism, described religion as “the major impediment confronting the Jewish nation on the road to culture, science, freedom.” Ber Borochov chose to identify with the “wicked son” of the Passover text, the Haggadah, because he refused to accept a freedom given by God but instead insisted on creating it for himself. For Borochov, it was the “wicked sons” of the present generation who were creating “the foundation for the construction of new Jewish life.”⁷ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 36–37.

footnotes: ⁶ In Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea ⁷ Quoted in Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State

How then was the culminating moment of these conflicting visions – Israel’s Declaration of Independence – to be described? Religious groups were insistent that the declaration should contain a reference to God. The secularist groups were equally insistent that it should not. The final draft read: “Placing our trust in the Rock of Israel [tzur Yisrael], we set our hand and testimony to this Declaration, here on the soil of the Homeland, in the city of Tel Aviv, on this day, the eve of the Sabbath, 5 Iyar 5708, 14 May 1948.” To the religious, the phrase “Rock of Israel” signified God. It was to the “Rock of Israel” that they daily prayed for deliverance and salvation. To the secular it meant not God but the Jewish people and its indomitable national will.

Nor was this all. Translated into religious and secular frames of reference, the whole sentence reverberated with multiple evocations and associations. Did “Homeland” signify the Holy Land of the covenantal promise to the patriarchs, or was it merely the geographical-historical locus of the Jewish people that Spinoza described as “a certain strip of territory”?⁸, 46. See Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 59–90; Arnold Eisen, “Off Center: The Concept of the Land of Israel in Modern Jewish Thought,” in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 263–96. Was “the eve of the Sabbath” to be understood in its secular, modern sense, as Friday? Or was it meant in its religious usage as the threshold of the day of rest, the gateway to Israel’s sanctuary in time, the Sabbath? Beyond this, did the phrase “the eve of the Sabbath” carry its traditional metaphorical significance as the period penultimate to the messianic age? If so, was this the religious-redemptive vision of the Bible or the secular utopia of Zionist socialism? And in which framework of time was the declaration signed? In religious time – Iyar 5708 – or in the secular twentieth century – May 1948?⁹ (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 79–96; Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Religion and Politics in Israel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 17–18.

footnotes: ⁸ Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ⁹ See Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution: A New Perspective

The sentence, a triumph of diplomatic ambiguity, is a paradigm of the fate of the contemporary vocabulary of Judaism. Jews are, to use Bernard Shaw’s phrase, divided by a common language. Our condition is an ironic inversion of Babel. “Behold, here is one people speaking the same language.” Yet despite this, “they cannot understand one another’s speech.”¹⁰

footnotes: ¹⁰ Gen. 11:6–7.

INTERPRETING THE HOLOCAUST This helps to explain the extraordinary history of the impact on Jewish consciousness of the two decisive events of the present century: the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel. No event in Jewish history since biblical times has so nakedly disclosed the shared fate of Jews as Hitler’s Final Solution. The gas chambers at Auschwitz made no distinction between assimilators and traditionalists, believers and heretics, atheists and Jews of faith. Every Jew after the Holocaust knows that he or she is in some sense a survivor – in Emil Fackenheim’s phrase, part of an accidental remnant.¹¹ (New York: Schocken, 1982), 308. We have become acutely conscious, to use Rabbi Soloveitchik’s terminology, of the berit goral, the “covenant of fate,” that unites all Jews, willingly or against their will.¹² (Jerusalem: WZO, 1981), 32–48.

footnotes: ¹¹ Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought ¹² Joseph Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut Veha’arakhah

Yet, though the Holocaust has made its impact on every group within the Jewish world, it has pointed, like a compass gone wild, in all directions sequentially.¹³ (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1990), 139–60. For some, like the late Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the leader of the Satmar group of Hasidim, it represented the God of history taking retribution for the sin of Zionism. The Zionist movement was an unprecedented rebellion against the terms of Jewish history in exile. As a result, the nations into which Jews had been exiled rose as terrible instruments of divine vengeance. For others the Holocaust represented the God of history taking retribution for the sin of anti-Zionism. Since emancipation, for the first time in eighteen hundred years of exile, Jews had ceased to wish for a return to their land and had instead sought to make their permanent home in Europe. The Holocaust was the hand of Heaven signalling that exile is not home. For both these schools of thought there was, in the catastrophe, a divinely ordained punishment. But for which of two contradictory sins? A third school, equally Orthodox, rejected this approach and instead saw the Holocaust as the ultimate “hiding of the face” of God. A fourth, throwing off religious categories altogether, saw it as the decisive refutation of the God of history.

footnotes: ¹³ See “The Holocaust in Jewish Theology,” in Jonathan Sacks, Tradition in an Untraditional Age

For some Israeli thinkers, the Holocaust refutes diaspora existence and delivers the imperative of living in Israel. For some diaspora intellectuals it argues against the geographical concentration of Jews and demonstrates the necessity of dispersion. For some, the Final Solution proves the impossibility of escaping from Jewish identity. For others it proves the urgency of so doing.

Why is the Holocaust so given to multiple explanations or to the insistence that there can be none? The answer is not to be found – and here I differ from most interpreters – in features of the Holocaust itself, its uniqueness, inexplicability, or over-explicability. It lies elsewhere. Manifestly, we have not yet learned how to integrate the Holocaust into Jewish consciousness as we once integrated the exodus or the destruction of the Temples. The reason is not to be sought in the Holocaust itself but in something that preceded and still survives it. Namely, that since emancipation, there is no such thing as a common Jewish consciousness for any Jewish experience to be integrated into. Each of us relates to the Holocaust in our own way; but there is no longer a collective way, as there was when the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning for the loss of the Temples, was instituted. We are no less fragmented after Auschwitz than we were before it.¹⁴

footnotes: ¹⁴ For these last few sentences see ibid. 153–54.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ISRAEL The same applies to the State of Israel. Not only has identification with Israel become a primary axis of Jewish identity in the diaspora,¹⁵ (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change: Emerging Patterns in America (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). but the events surrounding the 1967 Six Day War catalysed a revolution in Jewish sensibilities the like of which had not been seen since the beginnings of emancipation. For many Jews, Israel represented a defiant “Never Again” to the Holocaust. It transformed the tragic sense of kiddush hashem, sanctification by martyrdom, into an affirmative kiddush hachayim, sanctification by refusing to suffer martyrdom.¹⁶, the sanctification of life, and not for kiddush hashem, the holiness of martyrdom. Previously the Jew’s enemy sought his soul and the Jew sanctified his body in martyrdom; now the oppressor demands the Jew’s body, and the Jew is obliged therefore to defend it, to preserve his life.” Quoted in Shaul Esh, “The Dignity of the Destroyed,” in Y. Gutman and L. Rothkirchen (eds.), The Catastrophe of European Jewry (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 355. It stood, as Irving Greenberg diagnosed, for the Jewish emergence from powerlessness into an ethic of power. It embodied, as Emil Fackenheim argued, a determination to survive, experienced as a religious imperative, a “614th commandment.” It symbolized what the Christian theologian A. Roy Eckardt has called “the new Jewish stand.”¹⁷ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 37–61. Israel more than any other component of contemporary Jewish life evokes the recognition that “We are one.”

footnotes: ¹⁵ See Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews ¹⁶ This transformation was born earlier, in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum declared: “This is a time for kiddush hachayim ¹⁷ A. Roy Eckardt, Jews and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting

But Israel, the concept, is a concatenation of ambiguities. What does “Israel” represent to the contemporary Jewish imagination? Does it signify the land, the nation, the people, the state, or the government? Is it, in Eliezer Schweid’s open question, a homeland or the land of destiny?¹⁸ (London: Associated University Presses, 1985); see also his Israel at the Crossroads (Philadelphia: JPS, 1973). Does Israel support or refute the diaspora? Is it the culmination or the conscious rejection of Jewish history in exile? Is it the normalization of Jewish existence or a breathtaking demonstration that Jewish existence cannot be normalized? Is it a Jewish state or merely a state populated by Jews? Does it have religious significance, and if so, how? What is the implication of Israel’s existence for the present connotation of the word galut, exile? And where, above all, does Israel stand on the road to the messianic age, secularly or religiously conceived?

footnotes: ¹⁸ Eliezer Schweid, The Land of Israel: National Home or Land of Destiny

To these questions every conceivable combination of answers is possible and actual. Israel’s centrality in current Jewish self-definition rests precisely on its conceptual ambiguity and on a tacit agreement, pragmatically justified, not to push clarification too far. As David Vital put it recently, writing about the terms in which Israel is discussed by Jews, “Obfuscation, hidden agenda, double-talk and, commonest of all, double-think are still very much the order of the day.”¹⁹ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), viii. What contemporary sociologists term “civil Judaism,” the new public consensus of Jews, rests on a subtle investiture of the traditional language of Jewish destiny with secular meanings and the tolerance of a high level of indeterminacy with regard to all the potentially divisive issues of Israel’s relationship with the diaspora.²⁰; Woocher, Sacred Survival.

footnotes: ¹⁹ David Vital, The Future of the Jews ²⁰ Liebman and Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel

The fate of Israel in current Jewish philosophy is the reverse of that of the Holocaust. While the latter has been subjected to massive and conflicting theological treatment, the former has been largely neglected. Yet Zionism had been the concept into which thinkers of all kinds, from the most avowedly secular to the most incandescently spiritual, had poured their visions of the Jewish vocation from the late nineteenth century up until the creation of the state. As Steven Katz notes, “It is all the more remarkable given the richness of pre-state Zionist literature that there is not even one major post-1948 work emanating either from the diaspora or Israel, which offers a satisfying Jewish philosophical account of Zionism and Jewish nationalism.”²¹ (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 94. Or as Jacob Neusner put it, rather more acerbically, “The creation of the first Jewish state in two thousand years yielded nothing more interesting than a flag and a rather domestic politics, not a world view and a way of life.... The rise of the State of Israel destroyed a system, the Zionist one, but replaced it with nothing pertinent to Jewry at large.”²² (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1986), 101–2.

footnotes: ²¹ Steven T. Katz, “An Agenda for Jewish Philosophy in the 1980s,” in Norbert M. Samuelson (ed.), Studies in Jewish Philosophy ²² Jacob Neusner, Understanding Seeking Faith

UNDERSTANDING PEOPLEHOOD The same phenomenon has afflicted the third component of contemporary Jewish thought, the concept of peoplehood. Enlightenment thought had stressed the idea of universal humanity on the one hand, and the abstract individual on the other, freed from the constraints of tradition to make his own world of meanings through his choices.²³ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991). This was a language into which traditional Jewish identity could not be translated, and the sense of Jewish peoplehood suffered accordingly, especially in Western Europe. The terms of emancipation liberated Jews as individuals, not as a collectivity. John Murray Cuddihy has defined “assimilation in the diaspora” as “seeking status-enhancement for yourself alone, not for your group.”²⁴, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), x. Social advancement at the price of denying, disguising, or diluting Jewish origins was, in Norman Podhoretz’s phrase, the “brutal bargain” of emancipation.²⁵ (New York: Random House, 1967).

footnotes: ²³ See Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith ²⁴ John Murray Cuddihy, “Introduction,” in The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi- Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity ²⁵ Norman Podhoretz, Making It

The new Jewish political-ethnic assertiveness since the 1960s has therefore been a stunning transformation. In part it belongs to the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish consciousness, an awareness of the “singled-out” condition of the Jew. In part it emerged in response to the sense of Israel’s vulnerability in the weeks preceding the 1967 war and its subsequent international isolation. Jews in Israel and the diaspora had, it seemed, only one another. In part, too, it is a symptom of the general revival of ethnicity since the early 1960s. The modern state turned out to be less of a melting-pot than nineteenth-century thinkers had envisaged. Rather than a single overarching culture into which minorities assimilated, it has evolved into an arena in which ethnic variety and pluralism flourish.

Jewish peoplehood emerged as a key component of identity. Daniel Elazar has called this a “neo-Sadducean Judaism.” Its adherents are “Jews who seek to be Jewish through identification with the Jewish people as a corporate entity, its history, culture and tradition, but without necessarily accepting the authoritative character of halakhah [Jewish law] or the centrality of halakhah in defining their Jewishness.”²⁶ (Aug.–Sept. 1978), 20–25. The most potent phrases of American civil Judaism and its fund-raising rhetoric are “We are One” and am echad, “One people.” Jonathan Woocher has described Jewish unity as the primary article of the civil Jewish faith.²⁷, 67–71.

footnotes: ²⁶ Daniel J. Elazar, “The New Sadducees,” Midstream ²⁷ Woocher, Sacred Survival

Solidarity between the Jews of the West, Israel, the Soviet Union, and threatened diaspora communities has become more than the object of activism. It has become a carrier of identity. “At the very heart of the mystery of Jewish survival throughout the ages, in magnificent denial of the normal laws of history that decree the death sentence on peoples that lose their homeland, is the idea of community...the sense of a profoundly shared destiny, a shared purpose, a shared history and customs, a shared responsibility.”²⁸ Thus declared one American lay leader, articulating the new consciousness. Twentieth-century Jewish history seemed conclusively to refute the universalism of the Enlightenment. Particularism has returned to Jewish thought.

footnotes: ²⁸ Ibid., 70.

But though the idea of a single Jewish people dominates contemporary Jewish awareness, it has never been more problematic ideologically, halakhically, and existentially. Ideologically, the issue is most acute in terms of the conflicting modes of Israel’s and the diaspora’s definition of Jewishness. Though the sharp conflicts between diasporists and Zionists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have softened, the abyss remains between those who see Jewish identity in geographical, political, and national terms, and those who see it as an essentially religious construct.²⁹. Living testimony to the conceptual impasse is the unprecedented phenomenon of yoredim, Jews who have left Israel for the diaspora, of whom there are an estimated three hundred thousand in the United States. Alienated from the diaspora’s religious institutions of Jewish continuity, regarded as betrayers of Zionism by Israel itself, they are Jews whose identity is wholly defined in terms of living in a land from which they are absent. They appear to be almost the first group since the lost ten tribes to have no theoretical basis for their Jewish survival.³⁰ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

footnotes: ²⁹ See, e.g., Eisen, Galut ³⁰ See Moshe Shokeid, Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York

Halakhically the problem is dramatized in the political-religious battles over the question “Who is a Jew?” Orthodoxy had long refused to grant halakhic validity to conversions performed by Reform and Conservative rabbis. Some or all of the requisites were lacking: acceptance of the commandments, circumcision in the case of males, and immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath). But the issue has been heightened by two factors. First was the official acceptance, in 1983, by the American Reform movement of the “patrilineal principle” which accords Jewish status to a child either of whose parents is Jewish, on the basis of “appropriate and timely acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.” Jewish law, by contrast, recognizes only the child of a Jewish mother as a born Jew. Second has been Orthodoxy’s unexpected return to demographic and political power, and hence the increased likelihood of confrontation. Some writers have warned of an impending schism that would resemble the rift between Judaism and Christianity and divide Jews irreparably into two peoples.³¹ (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1984); Irving Greenberg, Will There Be One Jewish People by the Year 2000? (New York: National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, 1986).

footnotes: ³¹ Reuven P. Bulka, The Coming Cataclysm

Existentially the issue is best seen through an argument currently raging among American Jewish sociologists and demographers. The question is neatly posed in the title of a book by Steven Cohen, *American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?*³² (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). Judged by traditional indices of Jewish continuity, the American Jewish community – along with other diaspora populations – is undergoing rapid disintegration and decline. The rate of increase of intermarriage and divorce, which accelerated sharply in the 1960s, has slowed, but it continues on its upward path. Jews are marrying later than other ethnic and religious groups and having fewer children. The doom-laden prediction of the 1970s, that American Jewry would be reduced within a century from six million to one hundred thousand, is being revised, but no one disputes that the community is shrinking. Religious behaviour, hitherto the one vehicle of diaspora continuity, continues its downward trend. Increasing numbers neither attend nor affiliate with a synagogue and receive no form of Jewish education.

footnotes: ³² Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?

On the other hand, a number of observers – most notably Charles Silberman³³ (New York: Summit Books, 1985). and Calvin Goldscheider³⁴ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change; id., The American Jewish Community (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1986). – have recently argued to the contrary, that the American Jewish community is undergoing unprecedented revival. Against expectation, Jews are not disappearing as an identifiable ethnic group. Jews remain Jewish in their social reference groups and political affiliations, most notably in their support for Israel. Their peculiar modes of educational and career mobility have, in the very course of their integration into American society, tended to make them more like one another and less like other Americans. More than any other religious or ethnic grouping, they go to university and pursue academic, managerial, or other professional careers. Work, neighbourhood, cultural background, and economic status tend to reinforce intra-Jewish interaction. Even intermarriage might not be seen as a net loss to the Jewish community, since those who have married out no longer wish to be dissociated from the community, and a proportion wish to raise their children as Jews. Increasingly they are being accommodated, especially by the Reform movement.

footnotes: ³³ Charles Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today ³⁴ Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews

At stake in this argument is the very definition of what it is to be a Jew and how Jewishness is to be measured. Goldscheider has argued that “the definition of the Jewishness of the family in terms of biology (or halakhah) is becoming less important for American Jews than it was in the past and less relevant to Jewish communal continuity than how people define themselves behaviourally, communally, and culturally, and how the community defines them.”³⁵, 19. Needless to say, others have argued that predicating Jewish revival on criteria that have no basis in halakhah, tradition, or commitment is both complacent and methodologically unsound. Arthur Hertzberg has argued that mere ethnic difference “hardly seems worth suffering for,” and that Judaism cannot be semantically reduced to “no more than a triumph of adjustment to suburban life.”³⁶, 118. Charles Liebman has put the problem well. “The major categories for the expression of and determination of Jewish authenticity have always been legalistic, but the primary modes of Jewish expression today simply do not fit these categories.”³⁷ (Philadelphia: JPS, 1973), 182.

footnotes: ³⁵ Goldscheider, The American Jewish Community ³⁶ Quoted in Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? ³⁷ Charles Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew

Again, a shared language divides. Almost all Jewish groups in Israel and the diaspora express a commitment to Jewish survival, peoplehood, and unity. But the interpretation of those concepts differs systematically from group to group. Along religious, ethnic, cultural, and national axes, there coexist two deepening senses, of kinship with, and estrangement from, other Jews. Ideology conflicts with empirical reality, and the global vision of peoplehood fragments as soon as the attempt is made to specify it with any precision.

STRATEGIES OF JEWISH THOUGHT The language of contemporary Judaism, in other words, bears all the signs of collapse that Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed in post-Enlightenment moral discourse. The vocabulary has persisted while the universe of shared meanings has collapsed. Communication between Jews, when it attempts to cross the boundaries of subcommunities and address the Jewish condition as a whole, depends on the tolerance of a high level of ambiguity and the prior knowledge that key words and sentences will convey different and incompatible meanings to different groups of listeners. At the very moment, therefore, when the Holocaust, Israel, and peoplehood stand at the forefront of Jewish identity, they do so in bewilderingly multiple ways. The same is true of the central terms of traditional Jewish self-understanding. Each has been appropriated by the various segments of the Jewish world and given new and revisionary senses.

It is hardly surprising, given the impact of enlightenment and emancipation on Jewish thought, that much of the most powerful work of nineteenth-century Jewish self-definition was explicitly confrontational and built on negation. Reform thought was constructed in terms of liberation from an antiquated and dysfunctional tradition, redolent of the ghetto, still embodied in the few vivid outposts of anachronistic Orthodoxy which would be swept away on the tide of modernization. Orthodox traditionalism for its part sustained a fierce rhetoric against Reform, as it did against the entire secularization of contemporary culture. Samson Raphael Hirsch, architect of Neo-Orthodoxy, waged a battle on both fronts – against traditionalists who bore Judaism in their hands “as a sacred relic, as a revered mummy, and fear to awaken its spirit,” and against Reformers who saw Judaism “as a lifeless framework, as something which should be interred in the grave of a past long since dead and buried.”³⁸ [1836], trans. Bernard Drachman (New York: Feldheim, 1960), 126–27. The same affirmation-through-negation marked the Zionist and anti-Zionist polemics of the half century prior to Jewish statehood, the former seeing diaspora Judaism as lifeless, equivocating, and doomed to extinction, the latter seeing Zionism as a secularization of Jewish history and a route to collective assimilation.

footnotes: ³⁸ Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters on Judaism

Nor is it surprising that in an effort to heal the wounds caused by this divisive cast of thought, some of the most resonant Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century – Martin Buber, A. J. Heschel, and Rabbi Avraham Hacohen Kook among them – wrote in poetic, enigmatic, and aphoristic prose whose precise meaning is almost impossible to determine. Their language is a curious hybrid of theology and diplomacy, hovering above the inevitably fragmenting ground of referential precision. Nor, in this context, is it hard to understand why another central thinker, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, forswore any aspiration to universality in his most famous essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” and chose instead the route of philosophy as conceptualized autobiography. “My interpretive gesture,” he writes, in a remarkable abdication of authority, “is completely subjective and lays no claim to representing a definite halakhic philosophy…. I shall not feel hurt if my thoughts will find no response in the hearts of my listeners.”³⁹, 7:2 (1965), 10. Jewish thought, it seems, is caught between being denominational and divisive, or global and ambiguous, or determinate and private.

footnotes: ³⁹ Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition

There is a pragmatic issue here, and an intellectual one. The intellectual one was put fairly by Menachem Kellner in an essay in which he argued that contemporary Jewish philosophy has now become impossible. “The first task of the thinker seeking to recreate Jewish philosophy as it is classically understood is the examination of Judaism: What is unhyphenated Judaism? Since I personally believe that what holds Jews together in the modern world is a kind of un-reflective nationalism and not shared theology, I am not too optimistic about this project. But it ought to be undertaken, even if only to show that it cannot succeed.”⁴⁰, 20. There is, for Kellner, no longer any substantive single entity described by the words Judaism, Jewish identity, or Jewish peoplehood. The philosophical enterprise, which was to give systematic and rigorous content to these ideas and their interrelationships, can therefore not be undertaken except, perhaps, from a partial and denominational perspective.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ Menachem Kellner, “Is Contemporary Jewish Philosophy Possible? – No,” in Samuelson (ed.), Studies in Jewish Philosophy

The pragmatic point is that not only is Jewish thought impossible; it is undesirable. The very attempt to press into precision the loose congeries of ideas that frame contemporary Jewish life is likely to prove splintering. A semblance of Jewish unity is necessary to the various practical projects that bring Jews together in collaborative undertakings. Diplomatic silence on the key questions of meaning and identity is preferable to divisive articulation. Jonathan Woocher’s recent study of the civil religion of American Jews contains this telling passage:

For the civil religion, Judaism is very much a matter of concern; God is not. This does not, however, imply that civil Judaism is atheistic. The existence of God is never questioned, much less denied.… Rather, the civil religion is by and large simply silent on the matter.… The watchword of civil Judaism is unity. Theology, except at the most rudimentary formulaic level...is inherently divisive in contemporary Jewish life.… By remaining silent on the nature or role of God in human life and Jewish destiny…it also avoids having to deal with potentially difficult, even embarrassing theological issues.… Such assertions, vital, we have seen, to the civil religion, are perhaps better left as incoherent statements of faith rather than being subject to theological examination. It is then not so much God who is missing from civil Judaism as it is any serious theological discussion.⁴¹, 91–92.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Woocher, Sacred Survival

The civil Jewish consensus rests on a tacit agreement not to try to shape into coherence a substantive vision of Jewish purpose or belief.

BEYOND PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM The starting assumption of this essay is that these diagnoses are simultaneously too pessimistic and too optimistic. They are too optimistic in assuming that halakhic or theological debate can be endlessly deferred. To be sure, diplomacy is always to be preferred to war, actual or ideological. But it is not always robust enough to resist it. It is difficult to predict where, and on what issue, the next schismatic confrontation will take place, whether between Israel and the diaspora, Orthodoxy and Reform, or different groups within Orthodoxy itself. But the levels of tension within world Jewry have been perceptibly rising in the last decade, and the task of reconciliation cannot be forever delegated to a messianic tomorrow.

But it is a pessimistic fallacy to infer that, because a unified presentation of Jewish belief is at present impossible, a first step cannot be taken in that direction. The following chapters aspire to neither a practical nor a philosophical programme for Jewish unity. Instead they attempt to address two questions. Firstly, how did our contemporary fragmentation arise? Secondly, does the Jewish tradition itself contain resources for handling diversity without disunity? Jewish thought can at least undertake to ask how we arrived where we are, and where we might go from here. If this is not Jewish philosophy in any traditional sense, it is none the less a prolegomenon to it.

Though neither a historian nor a sociologist, I have been driven to these disciplines in an attempt to delineate the problems under review. Alasdair MacIntyre conjectured the possibility that a traditional mode of thought might be lost even while its vocabulary remained. The argument of this chapter has been that this accurately describes the condition of contemporary Jewish thought. The loss of traditional meanings is rendered invisible by the persistence of traditional terminologies. The attempt therefore has to be made to get behind the languages of theology and halakhah, and this can only be done through the use of alternative disciplines.

The subject before us, then, is the effect of modern consciousness on Jewish self-definition. How did a coherent tradition come to be fragmented, presenting Jews with radically incompatible ways of conceiving themselves, their faith, and their people?