Thursday, December 1, 2005
I am blessed with some really great commenters, emailers and guest bloggers here. Here's an email I thought I'd bump up (with the author's permission) to its own post. Some very good food for thought here, and a view of the internal Israeli debate (and dispora Jewish debate for that matter) that's well worth your time. Don't be fooled by the title. This isn't a topic only of interest to the religious.
Background: This comes as a continuation of an email exchange that also surfaced in the comments to this post: 'Colleges see anti-Semitism rise'.
"Ben-David" writes:
Then the "National-Socialists" (AKA NaZis) came and proved these Jews wrong.
Now the final "substitute Judaism" - liberalism - is turning in on the Jews who first framed its modern agenda of "human rights",
"standing up for the underdog" and "social justice".
All these slogans are now turned against the Jews.
How about trying Judaism?
To which I responded:
I would say my feeling that religion functions in our society as a sort of Constitution of moral behavior, and the consequent great distaste I have for the various and gratuitous attacks on religion I've been seeing going on in American (and European) society is my way of actualizing this realization.
This would all be fodder for another post or two, but in short, I can't practice rituals I don't feel, but I can at least respect them when others practice them. (As far as practicing formal Judaism goes.)
You've expressed your point very well, though, and I'm with you in spirit.
This prompted a very thoughtful email response that you will find included in full in the extended entry.
Whatever your personal take on religion, this leitmotif of "Jewish identity in crisis" is really key to understanding much of what you hear from Israel. Many of us here see this identity crisis at the core of our current political woes and cultural discord.
In the wake of the European Englightenment, many Jews pursued alternate formulations of their identity, often discarding the traditional, covenantal basis for Jewish peoplehood. Modern Israel's founders certainly were intent on throwing off old-time religious Jewish identity - but like their counterparts in the diaspora, that first generation was salted through with ethnic and even religious/moral Jewishness. The motivation for Jewish nationalism was obvious and did not need to even be articulated.
Subsequent generations lost this - a revived language and an army did not stop the exact same trajectory of cultural assimilation that has struck American Jewry. In fact, the secular Yishuv programmatically did all it could to divorce waves of Jewish refugees from their Jewish roots. The result has been an ennervated, rootless Israeli identity that offers little rationale for continued struggle.
That the founders' grandchildren willingly swallow - and cede to - the fabricated Palestinian national identity is directly related to their conflicted, acrimonious relationship with Judaism, the Religion. People who willfully assert that their connection to this strip of land begins in fin-de-siecle Vienna or at a Holocaust museum are at a loss to defend themselves in the salons of the West and in the streets of the West Bank - precisely because they have cut themselves off from the historic/religious sources of a valid Jewish national identity, and the obvious Jewish connection to the land of Israel.
Thus one of the most unique features of our political landscape is the strong correlation between one's place on the Jewish (religious) continuum and one's political views - the peaceniks descend directly from those Zionists who most vehemently severed their connections to Judaism (and still pursue that agenda) while the stereotypical Likudnik is a secular person who respects Judaism and wants its values and symbols to be expressed publicly within the framework of a democratic state (Judaism as Israel's "moral Constitution" in your phrase).
There was always a contradiction at the heart of secular Zionism - a nationalist movement that was simultaneously bent on erasing all markers of that nation's unique identity - best summarized by the old Labor-Zionist slogan "To Be A Nation Like All Others". So an assimilationist vision was wrapped in the mantle of nationalist particularity!
(This slogan could just as easily describe the motivations behind the Reform, Socialist, and Nationalist impulses that have left many American Jews bereft of any authentic Jewish knowledge or moral instruction.)
Our current woes here in Israel flow directly from the dissolution of this paradox. And the loss of nerve by the leftist Israeli elite directly parallels the disintegration of non-orthodox diaspora Jewry. The only significant difference is that the majority of diaspora Jewry is solidly in the assimilated/liberal camp (which is why they are pro-Palestinian!), while the majority of Israelis are "respectful of tradition" and since the 1970s they have been slowly dismantling the socialist elite's hegemony.
A careful reading of Ha'aretz (the Israeli Left's mouthpiece) will reveal constant, barely-concealed traces of this underlying kulturkampf. This was most evident during the expulsion from Gaza, when the lines between political opinion and blind sectarian hatred of "those Orthodox" were completely blurred on both editorial and news pages. And again, there is a direct American-Jewish parallel: the NY Times.
Ha'aretz is a great source for overseas readers, but you will have to apply the same critical take to it that you do to the Times - and overcome any lingering antipathy to Jews more observant than you - if you want to understand what's going on here, and give commentary that breaks out of the closed feedback loop between Israel's liberal/secular elite and the liberal Western media.
Again, all this begs thoughtful "non-covenantal" Jews to reconsider the founding assumptions of their Jewish identity - especially those who (like you) have weaned themselves from the liberal Kool-Aid.
JbD
I apologize, but a good deal of the material below is recycled and reassembled from old comments on other sites, although I have reordered and recast them here. It's just that it would be really tiresome to compose the same thoughts all over again from scratch.
Here we go...
I think that there is a great danger in identifying Judaism as just a religion. You exclude all those Jews who don't believe in God, and you undermine those aspects of Jewish tradition and culture that don't directly derive from religious practice, but rather from the cultural or intellectual heritage of Jews.
There has long been a strain within Judaism that promotes the idea of Judaism as solely a religion. For a couple of centuries, Jews in Germany and in Western Europe as a whole generally emphasized that Judaism was "just a religion" because they wanted to gain acceptance into liberal or liberalizing societies that were beginning to hold out the promise of social mobility. They wanted to be seen as simply Frenchmen or Englishmen.
However, it makes greater sense to see Jewishness as a religion, culture (however diluted these days), and ethnic identity all rolled into one. DNA studies have shown a common descent for all Jews, no matter what country they're from. And in eastern Europe at least, it was obvious that there was a self-contained Jewish community that was based on religion, but also had a distinct culture, cuisine, and language, even a literature. In other words, the Jews there had many of the attributes by which we define a nation or people. But many assimilating Jews in Western Europe and the US wanted to distance themselves from a culture that they regarded as backward and embarrassing.
It is one thing, however, to make the choice as an individual to assimilate totally into another culture, regarding Jewishness as only a religious identity to be left behind at will. It is another to state that this view of Jewishness is the only legitimate one. That amounts to sacrificing the option of Jewish identity and sovereignty on the altar of one's own acceptance in British or French or American societies.
I remember reading in Le Monde several years ago of a meeting between the president of France and representatives of the French Jewish community. (I think the president was Mitterrand). Anyway, the president made a reference to a mutual influences of French and Jewish cultures in France. The Jewish representative corrected him by saying that "there is no such thing as a Jewish culture." More recently, a representative of some British Jewish organization said something to the same effect. I remember his also saying that he was "ethnically English." Maybe culturally he was. As far as ethnically, I don't know.
Anyway, by defining Jewishness as just a religion, two insidious things are accomplished:
The first is that Israel's legitimacy is undermined, since very few people would support a state based on religious exclusivity. I've heard this point made about Israel many times. This also helps to support the view that a state of Israel must by definition be a "theocracy."
The second is that Jewish communities will go into demographic freefall, at least in Europe. Why define Jewishness as only a religion when all religions are in massive decline in Europe? You're asking for trouble. And while the Anglican Church in Britain or the Catholic Church in France and Italy may attract few active adherents, Christianity will always remain strong in some sense because it is such a major part of Europe's cultural and intellectual heritage. But the Jewish religion is too minoritarian to leave much of a mark. In Britain, for instance, I understand that Britain used to have 450,000 Jews and that the number is now down to 300,000. If the only way to be a Jew is to honestly believe in the religious tenets of Judaism, then that decline will continue at an accelerating rate. After several more generations, there will simply be a lot of gentiles (Christians by culture if not confession) who happen to have a Jewish grandparent or great-grandparent. The only full Jews left will be found in small pockets of the very Orthodox.
In the U.S. religious practice is rising, but are they rising among the liberal and well-educated? It is precisely in this group that identification with Judiasm is becoming more problematic.
Here in the U.S., at least, Jews have for several decades been accepted as individuals, but Judaism and Jewishness have been accepted, as well. I get the impression that, in Western Europe (especially in France), Jews are welcomed and accepted as individuals, but at the price of dropping their Jewish identity with the exception of polite religious worship. That is especially true in France, with its republican ideal of one, unified nation with no ethnic or cultural divisions. You may have heard of Comte de Tonerre's statement in the wake of the French revolution. It was something to the effect of "give to the Jews everything as individuals, but nothing as a nation."
Even in the US, the pull of a stronger surrounding culture, and a stronger majority religion can be irrestible when one's own background has become thin gruel. Given the shrinking number of Jews in the US, and their level of assimilation, the meaning of Jewishness becomes ever more distended. There culture that held us together has faded. Aside from religion, all that's left are sentimentality and a smattering of intellectual or cultural interests that will get more tenuous with each generation.
As an example, here is a brief note from a very nice older cousin from the West Coast. I don't want to make her into an object of display. It's only that she summarizes her experience of assimilation to Christianity so well:
"Yes I believe that Jesus is my Savior and know without any doubts he has performed miracles in my life. I have a deep feeling that I would not have accomplished the few things I am proud of without him by my side and have had and still have many brothers and sisters in Christ. I hope this doesn't offend you as it does some people, my mother was one,may she rest in peace. I am not denying my jewish heritage but I know very little about it since my parents did not insruct me in it. However through reading mostly fiction based on Jewish history and stories I am very proud to say I am a Jew who also believes in Christ."
And why shouldn't she evolve this way, with no Jewish culture and minimal identity to fall back on, and living in a time and place when evangelical Christianity is so dynamic?
Admittedly, I don't see a lot of Jews becoming fundamentalist Christians. But many Jews will cease to be Jews in any meaningful way. Perhaps that will always be the problem for diaspora communities: a Hobson's choice between marginality or total assimilation.
OK, I now realize that I should answer more directly the question that was posed: Are secular substitues an acceptible stand in for actual Judaism. I would quibble with the term "actual Judaism." Anyway, I think that neither one can substitute for the other. A truly alive Judaism should be rich in both secular and religious aspects, and it should be up to each Jew which ones to draw from personally.