Segregation?

“If you once saw someone cross a deep ravine while walking on a tightrope, would you or any of the many people watching him think to cross the high wire on your own because the tightrope walker is doing it?”

So asks a member of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox community in the course of Samuel Heilman’s recent book, Defenders of the Faith (1992). He thereby issues the first great challenge to global Jewish continuity by questioning the attempt on the part of modern Jews to live in two worlds, Judaism and secular society. His view is that it cannot be done. Those who try to live in both worlds walk a tightrope, and most fall off. There are rare exceptions. But they are not, and cannot be, the rule.

Many observers take a dark view of the Jewish future. Noting the rising rates of intermarriage and disaffiliation, they have seen only one group resist these trends: the ultra-Orthodox. They alone have large families and minimal rates of defection. While other sections of Jewry have declined, they have increased in numbers. The reason is simple. While other Jews have integrated into secular society, the strictly Orthodox have segregated. They have built high walls against the world outside, and perhaps only those who do so are immune to assimilation. This suggests a pessimistic conclusion. Whatever we do as a community, the majority of Jews will disappear, leaving only the most committed. A strategy designed to address all Jews is bound to fail. Is this really so?

The challenge is a powerful one: any attempt to sustain Jewish identity while at the same time participating fully in a secular society is doomed to failure. Sooner or later, those who choose this route will find themselves or their children compromised by the culture around them. They will adopt, first its manners, then its values and eventually they will cease to be Jews. There is an iron law of assimilation, first articulated in the nineteenth century: the grandfather prays in Hebrew, the father prays in English, the son no longer prays, the grandson is no longer Jewish. There is only one way of avoiding this: segregation.

The proof is that those who have chosen the path of integration are now leaving the Jewish community at the rate of more than one in two, while segregated ultra-Orthodox communities are thriving, whether in Manchester or Williamsburg, Bnei Brak or Jerusalem. A secular society is not a neutral society. It is deeply antithetical to Jewish values. It is sceptical of religious belief, authority and tradition. Its attitudes to marriage, adultery, promiscuity and homosexuality are profoundly un-Jewish. Jews who are open to the society around them are inevitably affected by it. As Jewish and secular values grow further apart, it becomes harder to stay Jewish. Sooner or later, Jewish integration leads to Jewish disintegration.

Only those who are willing to pay the price of segregation will survive as Jews, and, they argue, there are historical precedents to support their position. There have been many other instances of mass assimilation: the ten lost tribes, the wave of intermarriage which confronted Ezra and Nehemiah on their return from Babylon, the period of Hellenisation after Alexander the Great, and the forced conversions to Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Indeed, Rashi, following rabbinic tradition, finds the phenomenon earlier still. The Torah says that the Israelites went up “armed” [chamushim] out of Egypt. Rashi, however, gives an alternative translation: when the Israelites left Egypt they were “reduced to a fifth.” Four-fifths of the people had become so acculturated that they refused to leave, and they perished in Egypt.

PRINCIPLED INTEGRATION I respect this argument, but I cannot subscribe to it. Segregation is one path, but not the only path, to Jewish continuity.

At the very outset of emancipation, there were those who feared that social integration would lead to attrition in Jewish life. The late Yaakov Herzog once related this telling episode:

It is told of Baron Nathaniel Rothschild that, after winning his battle of many years to have the disabilities to members of the Jewish faith removed from the House of Lords, he slipped away from the hierarchy of Britain congratulating him on the achievement and was to be found prostrate in prayer in a small synagogue in the Whitechapel ghetto of East London, his lips murmuring, “Would that this freedom shall not mean the diminution of our faith.”

Some nineteenth-century Torah sages, particularly in Eastern Europe, believed that the risks were simply too great. The ghetto had restricted Jews but preserved Judaism. Now that the walls were crumbling, the ghetto would have to be recreated in the form of voluntary close and closed Jewish communities: either Hasidic sects, grouped around a charismatic leader or Rebbe, or scholarly enclaves, built around yeshivot.

In Britain, France, Italy and Germany Jews responded differently. Emancipation seemed to them to be a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. They were aware of the dangers of integration but they knew also that it heralded the beginning of the end of the long exclusion of Jews from the life of the wider society, as aliens, outsiders or pariahs. Moreover, emancipation was a fact, and one which called for a religious advance, not a retreat. Such was the response of Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler in England and Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Azriel Hildesheimer in Germany. What Judaic insights lie behind the idea that segregation is not the only way?

First, as Samson Raphael Hirsch pointed out, exclusion from Western culture was not something Jews had chosen. It was something forced upon them. In all periods when they were allowed to participate in society, Jews did so. In talmudic times, there were sages who admired the Greeks for their astronomy, the Romans for their respect for parents and the Persians for their table manners. They said: “If you are told that there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it. But if you are told that there is wisdom [chokhmah] among the nations, believe it” Jews had and have a unique heritage: Torah and its way of life. But wisdom (the natural and human sciences) is universal. Maimonides admired Aristotle. Hirsch taught the Greek and Roman classics. Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote his doctorate on neo-Kantian metaphysics. One of Judaism’s great insights is that there are two sources of knowledge, one which comes from Heaven through revelation, another which comes from earth through reason and the human imagination. When they conflict, the first takes precedence. But they do not always conflict. There is no greater testimony to the sages’ love of knowledge from whatever source than that they coined a special blessing to be said on meeting great non-Jewish scholars.

Second, we have always believed that Jews are duty bound to contribute to society as a whole. In his first words to Abraham, God said, “through you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” When Jews were exiled in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah sent a letter urging them to “Seek the peace of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Only rarely were they given the chance to enter into the mainstream of public life. When they were, they did so as conscientious citizens. Wherever they went, they enriched the life of the nation. Whenever they were expelled, the country concerned suffered a decline.

Thirdly, a religious principle is at stake. As Jews we are bidden to engage in tikkun olam, “perfecting the world” under the sovereignty of God. Judaism is not a world-denying faith. We believe that we are commanded to become “partners with the Holy One, blessed be He, in the work of creation.” Human dignity, wrote Rabbi Soloveitchik, consists in “man’s capability of dominating his environment and exercising control over it.” When we help to make society’s laws more just, its economy more productive, its education more intense, its medicine more effective and its welfare more humane, these are not religiously neutral acts. They are part of the Torah’s imperative to perfect society as the arena of righteousness and justice.

Fourthly, the Torah itself is concerned with the impact Jews make on the world around them. At the end of his life, Moses told the Israelites: “Observe [the laws of the Torah] carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” Whether or not there is a Jewish “mission” to the world, there is certainly a Jewish responsibility to act in an admirable and exemplary fashion. This idea is at the heart of Judaism’s two great concepts of kiddush ha-Shem and chillul ha-Shem, the sanctification and desecration of God’s name. Jews have undertaken to be, in Isaiah’s phrase, God’s witnesses. When they are admired, that is a sanctification. When they are justly criticised, that is a desecration. Samson Raphael Hirsch rightly sensed that Enlightenment, despite its many risks, opened the way for a new admiration for Judaism among non-Jews. It duly came: from Goethe, George Eliot and Tolstoy. Even their bitterest critic, Nietzsche, could write that Europe owes to Jews, “the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands.”

Last but by no means least, the open society was where Jews were. The Torah is given to Jews where they are, at all places and times. The sages emphasised that “the Torah was not given to the ministering angels,” meaning that it was meant not for utopia but for the real world with its conflicts and temptations. The majority, by choosing integration, had not rejected Judaism. Therefore Judaism could not reject them. Samson Raphael Hirsch once asked whom Abraham might have had in mind when he asked God to spare Sodom if it contained ten righteous people? What would it have been like to be righteous in such a corrupt civilisation? He answered that such a person would not be “one who keeps to his own four walls.” He would instead be one who “is to be found ‘in the midst of the city’ and in lively connection with everything and everybody.” Even in Sodom, to be righteous is not to be segregated. It is to be a participant in society, challenging it where it needs to be challenged, but not abandoning it.

So in the East religious Jews chose segregation, while in the West they chose integration. More than a century has passed. We can now ask with hindsight: Which side was right? And what was at stake in the argument?

THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE Segregation is a counsel of despair, a strategy of last resort. The Torah sages were correct in their assessment of Central and Eastern Europe. More perceptively than their liberal contemporaries, they saw that for all their enlightened rhetoric, the societies around them were hostile. They were demanding the virtual dismemberment of Judaism and offering only the semblance, not the reality, of tolerance in return. Antisemitism exploded in Russia in the 1880s, sending millions of Jews into flight. Integration had never been a real possibility.

But Chief Rabbi Adler and Sir Moses Montefiore were also correct in their judgement of England. In the Middle Ages it had been the first country to mount a Blood Libel and the first to expel its Jews. But modern England was a place of genuine tolerance. In 1837, Montefiore wrote in his diary: “I am most firmly resolved not to give up the smallest part of our religious forms and privileges to obtain civil rights.” But he suspected that he would not have to, and he was right. Adler, for his part, believed that if halakhic Judaism were projected in a dignified and decorous manner, it would retain the allegiance of most Jews, and virtually to the present day he has been proved right as well.

One sage, however, was proven wrong, and that single failure has loomed disproportionately large in the minds of post-Holocaust Jewry. The most passionate exponent of integration was Samson Raphael Hirsch. His great work was achieved in Oldenburg, Moravia and Frankfurt between the 1830s and the 1860s. Hirsch could not have foreseen that Germany – the birthplace of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe and Kant – should become in the 1870s the source of racial antisemitism and in the 1940s the perpetrator of the greatest crime ever committed against humanity.

German-Jewish integration ended in Auschwitz, and we are still living with the trauma engendered by that fact. It has convinced many Jews, in Israel and outside, that the gentile world is incurably hostile to everything Judaism represents. There is no possibility or point in trying to live in the larger stream of human civilisation, for it has proved to be neither human nor civilised. The best we can do is to withdraw into our citadels of the heart and the mind – the Hasidic sect or the yeshivah – and wait, if necessary for centuries, for better times. Then, perhaps, we can emerge, but not before, and certainly not now.

It is this fact more than any other which has lent immense power to the Jewish segregationist vision of the world. Let us recall that it is only in recent times that ultra-Orthodoxy has been triumphalist. Before the Holocaust, its own most fervent protagonists believed that they were fighting a desperate and losing battle. The greatest of them all, the Chafetz Chayyim (Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, 1838–1933), wrote in 1930: “The sanctity of the Holy Torah is declining from day to day at a frightening pace. The new generation is growing up without Torah and faith. They are becoming wayward children who deny God and His Torah. And if, God forbid, this situation continues much longer, who knows to what condition we will fall.”

After the Second World War the Enlightenment was called into question, not only by Jews but by non-Jews as well. Political emancipation had led to antisemitism on a scale never before witnessed. High civilisation had singularly failed to civilise. Kantian ethics was powerless in the face of attempted genocide. Science has proved to be not the dreamed-of answer but the nightmare problem: from nuclear destruction to environmental damage to genetic manipulation. Robert Bellah, one of the great social commentators of our time, notes that “Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.” That is precisely the segregationist case.

Yet, in the final analysis, such a view is simply too pessimistic. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the great talmudist, once declared his belief that “This is the worst possible world in which there is still hope.” In that marvellously rabbinic aphorism lies the clue to the mainstream (though not the only) Judaic vision of history. Things are bad. But they are not unredeemable. Antisemitism exists. But so does philosemitism. There are aspects of contemporary culture that are pagan and destructive. But there are others that inspire individuals to rediscover faith and the religious life. To see only the bad but not the good in what is around us is neither Judaic nor even realistic. It is the safe option to insulate ourselves from all contact with the outside world. But when has Judaism ever been the safe option?

Faith involves risk and courage. A midrash contains a most profound commentary on the act of creation. It interprets the phrase, “the God of faith” as “God who had faith in the world He was about to create.” In creation, God gave humanity freewill. Ever since, the world has been a place of conflict, violence and injustice. Yet, God took the risk that from human freewill would emerge not only bad but good, not only injustice but compassion, not only war but peace. That was God’s faith, and it is ours.

The segregationist who spoke to Samuel Heilman was correct. To attempt to live as a Jew in the secular world is like walking a tightrope. However, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav saw that this was the inescapable condition of human existence as such. “Know,” he said, “that a person walks in life on a very narrow bridge. The most important rule is never to be afraid.”

A JEW IN THE STREET The argument between integrationists and segregationists, though it lives on, belongs essentially to an age that has passed. The structure of society has changed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Hirsch was championing integration and the sages to the East were opposing it, European culture was still strongly Christian. To acculturate, Jews had at least partially to assimilate. Heinrich Heine felt the need to convert. So did Moses Mendelssohn’s children. So too did Gustav Mahler. Today, Western societies are pluralist, in fact and in principle. What Hirsch could only dream of is now reality. Jews participate in all political, ethical and cultural processes as equal members. So, more significantly, does Judaism itself.

The nineteenth-century equation was: “Be a Jew at home and a man in the street.” Some believed that Judaism could survive on these terms, others did not. Thus the argument, “Integrate or segregate,” was born. Today, when every other religious or ethnic group wears its badges of identity openly, the challenge is to be a Jew at home and in the street.

There has never been a time when Judaic virtues have been more admired by society as a whole. We are envied for our strong community life, our family traditions, our passion for education, our commitment to welfare. We are praised for our charity, our individual achievements and our collective energy. Our views are sought on social, medical and business ethics. If ever there was a time when Jews could feel confident that they have something unique to contribute to the common good, it is now. What a tragedy it is that at the very time when others are turning to our teachings, we ourselves are deserting them.

The challenge to contemporary Jewry is not segregation but education. We believe that we live in two worlds. But we do not. We live in one: the world of secular culture. The overwhelming majority of Jews in today’s diaspora know history but not Jewish history. They know literature, but not Jewish literature. They discuss ethics but not Jewish ethics. They know other languages, but not Hebrew.

We have made a fateful error, one which every historical instinct should have guarded us against. We believed that Jewish identity could be sustained in an open society by occasional gestures of affiliation: attending synagogue on High Holidays, contributing to Jewish charities and eating ethnic Jewish food. Jewish identity, we believed, is something like English or American identity: given, taken for granted, and not in constant need of expression or reinforcement.

It was Matthew Arnold, that great Victorian moralist, who most clearly saw that what was unique to Judaism was its insistence on translating identity into action. “No people,” he wrote, “ever felt so strongly as the people of the Old Testament, the Hebrew people, that conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.” In the thirteenth century the Sefer Ha-Chinnukh expressed the same truth in slightly different words: “The heart is drawn after the deed.” That is one of the central truths of Torah and halakha. We are what we do. To be a Jew requires an ongoing programme of Jewish learning and Jewish doing. Without this, our Jewish consciousness atrophies, our Jewish pulse grows weak. It revives at times of crisis. But no one who is truly alive needs a crisis to convince him that he is alive.

The Judaic challenge of the open society has not ended. It has hardly yet begun. We have mastered the art of being Britons in Britain, Americans in America. Yet, we have not yet mastered the art of being Jews in the public domain. The Jewish public presence tends to be either anonymous or self-critical. Today, when Jewish intellectuals speak, they are more likely to attack Judaism than to expound it, to criticise Israel than to defend it. Of no other faith community is this true. Nor do they speak with any knowledge of what they dismiss. I once remonstrated with a leading Jewish intellectual, a polymath who has written distinguished books on literacy, language and translation. I asked him how in intellectual integrity he could be literate in every culture but his own and be fluent in half a dozen languages but unable to read Hebrew. I had taken the trouble to read each of his books. Why had he not taken the trouble to read Jewish books? He did not reply. The question remains unanswered.

The challenge is education. We have paid a painful price for two centuries of alienation between Judaism and many of the finest Jewish minds. Halakhic scholarship has continued to thrive, but essential areas of Jewish thought remain in their infancy. We know the rules governing relationships between Jew and Jew, but our understanding of relationships between Jew and non-Jew in a plural and interdependent world is far from clear. Only recently have scholars begun to evolve Judaic responses to macroeconomic, political, environmental and scientific questions.

The consequence is that we have an artificially narrow sense of what constitutes a Jewish deed. We know that going to synagogue or keeping kashrut is Jewish. Yet, we are not sure that there is a Judaic way of being an academic or a journalist or an artist or an architect or a politician. When Jews speak as Jews in the public arena, they often confuse Jewish self-interests (or the general interests of minorities) with Judaic principle. Nor, ironically, is it any different in Israel. There, the religious voice is identified with sectarian politics and sectional self-interest rather than societal ideals in the tradition of the prophets and the sages.

Never has living Jewishly in an open society been more possible, more rewarding and less demanding of assimilation. For it to succeed, though, a Jew must know what it is to be a Jew. Our grandparents knew, but they had to learn what it was to be an Englishman or American. We know what they did not. But we do not know what they knew, and we must make sure that we and our children learn.

It is not true to say that living in two worlds has failed. It is fairer to say that it has not seriously been tried.

NEW CHALLENGES Segregationist Jewry lives under the shadow of the Holocaust, by which it was almost destroyed. For the past fifty years its imperative has been survival, and it has achieved little less than a miracle. It has rebuilt Hungary in Williamsburg, Lithuania in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem. But time moves on, and challenges change.

Integration and survival were extreme reactions to exceptional circumstances. The one involved too little attention to Judaism, the other too little to the world outside. The coming era will pose problems for both sides. Integrationists face the challenge of recapturing a compelling sense of the Jewish mind and deed. The segregationists, too, will face dilemmas. They already do. Their communities have grown too large to be self-supporting. They have already been touched by the consumer ethic and by divorce. In Israel they have entered the political arena. Ironically, each side has expertise the other needs. Much will depend on whether the relationship between them is one of dialogue or confrontation.

Far from being the sole survivors, ultra-Orthodox Jews have an essential role to play in the continuity of the Jewish people as a whole. Like the kohanim of biblical times, they form a religious elite within Jewry. Like them, they spend their days in the precincts of the holy while others engage with the world. Relations between the priests and the rest of Israel were sometimes strained in biblical times. So too are relations between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of the Jewish world today. Nevertheless the ideal was set out by the prophet Malachi: “The lips of a priest guard knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction.” That remains the intriguing possibility.

Whenever the yeshivah and Hasidic communities have attempted this role they have met with success. In the past quarter century, they have been Jewry’s greatest practitioners of outreach. They have revitalised dying congregations and created centres of Jewish learning where none existed. They bring to Jewish continuity what it most needs: Judaism as an intense and total experience. Theirs cannot be the way of all Jews, any more than the life of the kohen was the way of all Israel in Bible times. Relations between them and the rest of Jewry will continue to be tense. But there is great potential for cooperation if both sides can lessen their suspicion of each other.

The segregationist challenge to global Jewish continuity is mistaken. Jews are leaving the Jewish people today not because they are involved in society but because they are uninvolved in Judaism. This is not because they have rejected religion, but because they have never learned its complexities, as difficult for the untutored ear to understand as the late quartets of Beethoven, but surely, at the very least, as rewarding.

Samuel Heilman, one of the most perceptive of contemporary Jewish observers, comments at the end of his study of ultra-Orthodox Jewry: “Their extraordinary success in surviving and growing, in holding on to their children, must make the rest of us take notice.”

The segregationists succeed not because they are segregated, but because they adopt precisely the strategy I have advocated in this book. They put the Jewish needs of their children first. They build schools and intensive Jewish communities. They make education their first priority and deepest love. If they, who live secluded from secular society, feel the need to do so, can we who have chosen to live in the heart of society, do less? Certainly we need it more.