Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

Sefaria · Jewish Thought > Modern > Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks · 920 sections

Publisher's Preface.1
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l possessed and shared profound learning, moral depth, and sheer eloquence, expressed in his many published works. These made him a leading religious figure not only within contemporary Judaism but among people of all faiths (or none). Each meeting and conversation became a shiur, a lesson in how to look at the world and how to experience our relationship with the Creator.
Publisher's Preface.2
It is a great privilege for us, paraphrasing the talmudic adage, “to return the crown to its former glory” by presenting these new editions of Rabbi Sacks’ earliest publications. The earlier volumes were written by Rabbi Sacks as a professor of philosophy, as a thinker, rabbinic leader, and Principal of Jews’ College, and are truly masterworks of exposition of contemporary Jewish thought. The later volumes represent Rabbi Sacks’ thinking as he became Chief Rabbi, set out his perception of the challenges facing his community of Anglo-Jewry at that time, and articulated his vision for the path ahead. All of these works certainly stand on their own merit today and are as relevant now as they were when first written.
Publisher's Preface.3
We wish to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to Becky and Avi Katz for their critical support of and partnership in this project. Becky and Avi are longtime communal leaders and supporters of Jewish education in North America and Israel, and on behalf of all of us at Koren, together with those who will cherish this new opportunity to be inspired by Rabbi Sacks’ writings, thank you.
Publisher's Preface.4
We wish to add our thanks to our colleagues at Koren who have worked on this series: Ita Olesker, Tani Bayer, Aryeh Grossman, and Rabbi Reuven Ziegler. The proofreading team included Debbie Ismailoff, Ruth Pepperman, Esther Shafier, and Nechama Unterman, and Marc Sherman updated the indexes of the volumes. We extend deep gratitude to our friends at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy for their continued partnership, together with Lady Elaine Sacks and the rest of the Sacks family for their continued support for our work.
Publisher's Preface.5
May Rabbi Sacks’ memory and Torah continue to be a blessing for future generations.
Publisher's Preface.6
Matthew Miller
Publisher's Preface.7
Koren Jerusalem
Preface.1
In Pirkei Avot, that classic tractate of rabbinic ethics, Akavya ben Mehalalel advises Jews to reflect constantly on three questions: Where have you come from? Where are you going? And before Whom will you eventually be accountable? The present book tries to do this from the vantage point of the Jewish people as a whole over the past two centuries.
Preface.2
The idea for the book had its origin in an international symposium convened by Jews’ College, London, in May 1989. The title of the gathering was Traditional Alternatives: Orthodoxy and the Future of the Jewish People. What lay behind it was an accumulating sense of rift and conflict throughout the Jewish world. I felt then, and still do, that Orthodoxy faces a considerable challenge of leadership in this situation. Our aim in the symposium was to bring into dialogue a whole series of Orthodox voices. For when there is no immediate solution to problems confronting the Jewish people, the most important religious imperative is to engage in what the sages called “argument for the sake of heaven.” One of the themes of the present study is a plea for recovery of what I call “tradition as argument.”
Preface.3
As I reflected on the controversies we were to confront, it became increasingly clear that they could not be understood without first setting them in context. I decided therefore to sketch the broad historical and sociological background against which they had arisen. What emerged was a study of modern Jewish identities, the conflicts among them, and the way these might be minimized if not immediately overcome.
Preface.4
The book was published in England prior to the symposium under the title Traditional Alternatives, and I was delighted when Arthur Kurzweil of Jason Aronson Inc. suggested the possibility of an American edition. The themes of the book are as much American as British, and I welcomed the chance of a wider discussion of its ideas. I have made some minor changes, and I hope that American readers will recognize some of the dilemmas faced by the fictional Anglo-Jewish family with which the book begins and ends.
Preface.5
Several debts of gratitude must be recorded: to Lord Jakobovits, the British Chief Rabbi, for his advice in planning the original symposium; to Mr. Stanley Kalms, then chairman of Jews’ College, for the restless questioning that was the impetus of this and many other initiatives; to the staff of Jews’ College for their support and stimulus; to Ezra Kahn and Marilyn Redstone for help in obtaining the books needed for the research; and to my secretary Adele Lew for deflecting the distractions while the book was being written.
Preface.6
Special thanks are due to Arthur Kurzweil for suggesting this edition and for his help and encouragement throughout. Above all I owe an incalculable debt to my wife Elaine, and our children, Joshua, Dina, and Gila. Without their patience and encouragement, neither this nor any other of my activities would have been possible.
Preface.7
The book touches on sensitive and controversial topics. I therefore end with the prayer of R. Nechuniah ben ha-Kaneh, one that was very much in mind as I was writing: “May it be Your will that I do not err in a matter of halakhah, declaring pure that which is impure, or impure that which is pure.”
Preface.8
Jonathan Sacks
Preface.9
London
Preface.10
24 Shevat 5750
Preface.11
19 February 1990
Introduction.1
Since the early 1980s a series of tensions has been evident throughout the Jewish world.
Introduction.2
One, the growing rift between Orthodoxy and Reform, particularly in America. Reuven Bulka, for example, has warned that “if present trends remain unchecked, the policies which prevail within Reform Judaism and the commensurate reactions which they will surely evoke within the Orthodox camp” may well “result in a cataclysmic split within the North American Jewish community.” This could eventuate in “the total renunciation of a significant number within the Jewish community by another group.” America’s Jews might become two distinct and noncommunicating peoples, differing on the most fundamental issues of who and what is a Jew. To some extent this has already occurred.
Introduction.3
A second has been the parallel conflict between religious and secular groups in Israel. Some years ago President Chaim Herzog warned that the greatest danger facing the State of Israel was not external but internal, the clash of cultures between secularist Israelis and two kinds of religious Jews, the non- or anti-Zionist charedim and the “national religious” Gush Emunim. Tensions reached a height in the summer of 1986, when bus shelters carrying swimwear advertisements were burned by groups of charedim, and in retaliation a synagogue was set on fire, a yeshivah vandalized, and vehicles attacked by groups of militant secularists. Concern has been voiced on both sides of the divide, by secular analysts like A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Amnon Rubinstein, and Yehoshafat Harkabi, and by a range of religious thinkers, among them David Hartman, Shlomo Riskin, Yehudah Amital, and Nachum Rabinovitch.
Introduction.4
The third has been the increasingly tense relationship between Israel and the diaspora since the 1982 Lebanon War. Prior to that, especially in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel had been a primary focus of diaspora Jewish identity. Jews in the golah were internally divided between secular, ethnic, denominational, and Orthodox expressions of identity. They were united by their concern and support for and vicarious pride in the State of Israel. Recently, though, Israel’s international isolation and the widespread criticism of her policies in Western media has made at least some sections of diaspora Jewry increasingly uncomfortable, sometimes publicly critical. Attitudes toward Israel – the government, if not the state – have become among the most contentious and divisive issues facing diaspora Jewry.
Introduction.5
This too took on a religious dimension when, in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s 1988 general election, greatly increased support for religious parties made it seem likely that the Law of Return would be amended to recognize only halakhic conversions to Judaism. Orthodox opinion was divided on the tactical wisdom of insisting on the amendment, which in any case would have had only a marginal impact on Israeli society. Its immediate effect would have been on the diaspora, for it would have implied a formal delegitimation by the Israeli government of the Reform and Conservative rabbinate. The protests, especially in America where these movements constitute a majority of synagogue affiliations, were instant and vociferous.
Introduction.6
None of these tensions has as yet proved fatally divisive. They flare sporadically and then die down in a subsiding murmur of diplomacy and reassurance. But for none is a substantive resolution in sight. And there is a disturbing sense of impending crisis, as if they were mere preludes to a volcanic eruption that will shake the Jewish world and irretrievably change its contours.
Introduction.7
Orthodoxy Resurgent
Introduction.8
At the heart of all of them has been the revival of Orthodoxy. As late as the 1960s, Orthodoxy had been seen by some observers to be on the brink of eclipse. In 1967, the French sociologist Georges Friedmann published a book entitled The End of the Jewish People? in which he diagnosed world Jewry as poised between an assimilating diaspora and a secular Israel. The prediction began to prove itself false almost as soon as it had been uttered. Since then, the renaissance of traditional Judaism has been astonishing, evident in the proliferation of Jewish day schools and yeshivot, their success in resisting the forces of secularization and acculturation, and the high birth rates of Orthodox families.
Introduction.9
This, though, has taken place against the backdrop of a still deepening secularization of Jewry as a whole, in both Israel and the diaspora. In the diaspora this is relatively easy to monitor. It takes the form of an overall continuing decline in religious observance and synagogue affiliation and an increase in the number of those who receive no Jewish education. It can be measured in terms of low birth rates and high rates of intermarriage.
Introduction.10
In Israel the markers are less clear-cut. In several respects the religious factor has become more prominent in Israeli society in recent years. The charedi community has grown through its own birth rates. There have been highly publicized cases of chozrim bi-teshuvah, alienated Jews returning to their religious heritage. In the political arena, religious groups have adopted a higher profile. In terms of national culture, religious motifs have been increasingly prominent, as against the aggressive secularism of the early years of the state. Nonetheless, as Daniel Elazar has observed, “The rise of a generation of nontraditional Jews whose links with Judaism are tenuous in the extreme has increased the gap between the religious quarter of the population and the other three-quarters.”
Introduction.11
So the paradox of an Orthodox revival on the one hand and the progressive secularization of Jewry on the other has brought confrontation and conflict. But not only between Orthodoxy and others. The same high levels of tension are palpable within Orthodoxy itself. There have been fierce antagonisms and a growing sense of distance between charedi and dati, the so-called traditionalist and moderate or centrist Orthodox. The two major forms of the latter – Modern Orthodoxy in America and Religious Zionism in Israel – have been undergoing a period of demoralization and decline. A cluster of associated attitudes has been in eclipse: the “synthesis” between Judaism and secular culture; a degree of tolerance and pragmatic cooperation between Orthodox and non-Orthodox groups; a positive religious attitude toward the State of Israel; and a tendency toward political moderation and a concern for world opinion. In their place has come an identification of religious authenticity with extremist positions.
Introduction.12
Nor is the charedi world itself unitary and united. There have been angry, even violent, confrontations between different groups of chasidim, divided in their attitudes toward the State of Israel. There has even been a revival of the eighteenth-century hostility between the chasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim. This led, in the last Israeli general election and before, to division within the ranks of the major charedi political organization, Agudah. One past president of the Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi Louis Bernstein, has argued that Orthodoxy’s greatest contemporary weakness is its fragmentation. “Minute differences metastasize into insurmountable obstacles. These differences, viewed in retrospect, are almost comical, but they open wide and painful wounds in their contemporary context.”
Introduction.13
The Underlying Questions
Introduction.14
These conflicts, painful in themselves, may nonetheless be a sign of the intense vitality of the contemporary debate about the Jewish identity and destiny. As such, though, they call for serious and sustained reflection rather than sloganizing, confrontation, and mutual delegitimation.
Introduction.15
And they point beyond their immediate causes to deeper questions about Jewish continuity and responsibility. Does the growth of the charedi community and the relative decline of other groups point to a need for all Jews to reconsider their survival strategies? Is the diaspora destined to self-destruct through assimilation, intermarriage, and a failure to create its own future generations? Does Jewish survival in an open society require a self-imposed segregation from non-Jewish associations and culture? “Modern” Orthodoxy, since the days of Samson Raphael Hirsch, has assumed that a secular-Jewish synthesis is possible. In the late twentieth century, is this intellectually plausible? Is it pragmatically wise? Does not all secularization threaten the disintegration of Jewish loyalties and the stability of Jewish families? These questions have implications for the future development of Orthodoxy.
Introduction.16
Are the social processes at work in Israel and the diaspora likely to generate a general return to tradition or an increasing polarization between a secularizing majority and an intensely religious minority? Can there be dialogue across the divide? Does Orthodoxy carry the responsibility for the religious fate of all Jews, or must it focus on its own survival? These questions have implications for the relationship between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodox Jews.
Introduction.17
What is or should be the relationship between Judaism and the development of Israeli society? Should religious groups be represented by parties in the political process? Should they be involved, apolitically, in shaping education, collective sentiment, and national culture? Are the key religious issues “religious” – safeguarding Shabbat, standards of modesty, and the dignity of the dead – or are they social and economic too? Is Israel a place in which Jews can live among Jews or is it the context of a Torah society with specific approaches to social justice, compassion, and minority rights? What is the relationship between the State of Israel and the messianic process? These questions concern the relationship between Orthodoxy and Zionism.
Introduction.18
What, too, is the relationship between the Jewish people and humanity as a whole in the wake of the Holocaust and the rising international tide of anti-Zionism? Jewish concerns have turned markedly inward in the last two decades, from universalism to particularism, from “example” to survival. Is concern for world opinion part of Israel’s ethical imperative, or is it instead a failure of moral courage? How far should Jews in the diaspora be involved in the moral and social issues of their wider society? Is this a religious duty or a form of assimilation? What are the contemporary implications of the command of kiddush ha-Shem, to “sanctify God’s name” through conduct that inspires admiration? These questions concern the relationship between Judaism and its wider environment.
Introduction.19
The Covenantal Conversation
Introduction.20
Currently there is no available consensus on these dilemmas for which different groups and individuals offer different answers. This fact is not significant in itself. Of greater importance is how we approach the conflict of judgment and evaluation.
Introduction.21
The classic Jewish response was to seek guidance from the sources, from the canonical texts of revelation and interpretation, the biblical and rabbinic literature. Nor was this an individual and subjective process. It involved finding a teacher, one who was versed and immersed in the tradition and could give an authoritative judgment that carried the weight of many centuries of rabbinic deliberation.
Introduction.22
But there was not always a definitive answer. Maimonides distinguished between halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai, “a law transmitted [orally] from Moses at Sinai,” and the wider ambit of the Oral Law. The former represented judgments and imperatives on which there was no recorded argument in the tradition. The rest of the Oral Law comprised matters on which there was argument. That is one of the great characteristics of the rabbinic tradition. The classic sources of rabbinic thought – Mishnah, Gemara, and Midrash – are essentially collections of arguments. Few religious literatures have so celebrated dialogue, debate, and dialectic. The very process of argument was a central feature of the religious life.
Introduction.23
There is a reason for this, and it goes to the heart of Jewish spirituality. Judaism begins with and is constituted by a covenant. And a covenant is a binding relationship which, however unequal the parties, respects the integrity of each. Throughout the biblical period, the mode through which the Divine will was known was revelation. But throughout the rabbinic period, it was interpretation. Through interpretation the sages applied Torah to their time. And because the entire covenantal community – the congregation of Israel – was involved in this process, argument was of its essence.
Introduction.24
In revelation, there is no room for argument. There are true prophets and there are false prophets, but there is neither dialogue nor consensus between them. But in interpretation, there is always room for argument. An application of the sources to the unfolding challenges of history is rarely unchallengeable. There are ways of reading the classic texts differently. There are ways of characterizing the present situation differently. In the covenantal situation, process may be more important than product. The fact that the entire community of sages is engaged in dialogue with Israel’s destiny is itself the ongoing activity called Torah.
Introduction.25
To be sure, there were large areas in which the sages insisted on normative rulings. Roughly speaking these make up the entire territory known as halakhah, Jewish law, and for the most part they were arrived at through consensus and the rule that “one must follow the majority.” But there were equally large areas in which no consensus was sought and in which the argument was allowed to continue open-endedly. These were the domain of, in its broadest sense, aggadah: the literature in which the sages explored Jewish values, attitudes, and ideals.
Introduction.26
By and large, the issues which have confronted Jews in modernity have been questions of aggadah. How shall a Jew live in an open society? How is Jewish identity to be combined with participation in a secular state and its culture? How, in this environment, is a Jew to be educated? Against the backdrop of nineteenth-century emancipation and nationalism, how was the Jewish destiny to be continued? If it meant Jewish nationalism and a return to the land of Israel, how was this to be reconciled with traditional Jewish quietism and a patient waiting for Providence? Where is the State of Israel to be located on the Jewish map of history between exile and redemption? What is the contemporary meaning of galut: exile or dispersion?
Introduction.27
These are not questions to which a definitive answer can be reached through the classic sources of Jewish tradition. Nor are they the kinds of questions on which we would expect a normative consensus. Yet they fatefully shape the lives Jews lead and the relations that exist among them. Supremely, they are the covenantal questions of the last two centuries, for they raise in the most acute form the question of which route the covenantal people should take through history in response to the mandate of Sinai.
Introduction.28
Yet the traditional response of interpretation and argument has broken down. So long as Jews were held together by halakhah, there could be disagreement on matters of aggadah. Jews were a people, said Saadia Gaon, by virtue of their laws. Those laws constituted Jews as a community, and on that foundation there could be individual differences on larger issues. But the most momentous fact of modernity is that Jews have ceased to be a people held together by halakhah. Today they are linked, if at all, by more tenuous bonds: a common vigilance toward antisemitism, a sense of shared history and ethnicity, concern for the State of Israel, and a feeling of collective responsibility for the safety and welfare of other Jews.
Introduction.29
Whether Jewish peoplehood can survive on so slender a base is an open question. Certainly there is room to doubt whether Jews can chart a common future if they lack a shared language with which to discuss that future. In such a situation there is an overwhelming need to recover as far as possible the tradition of interpretation and argument, in which the covenantal community engages in dialogue on its historical vocation.
Introduction.30
The sages called this process machloket le-shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven. The phrase roughly meant Torah is truth. But at times we must uncover that truth through serious exploration of the Torah’s words. This is a collective rather than an individual process, and it calls for a critical listening to a multiplicity of voices. In this way argument, rather than being confrontational and divisive, becomes part of the texture of community and its ongoing covenantal conversation.
Introduction.31
Argument for the Sake of Heaven
Introduction.32
In illustrating what they meant by an “argument for the sake of heaven,” the sages contrasted the arguments between Hillel and Shammai, which exemplified it, with the arguments of Korach and his followers, which did not. The difference between them is worth restating in an age in which Jewish argument has often degenerated into controversy and from there to mutual hostility and delegitimation.
Introduction.33
R. Menachem Meiri explains the distinction thus. There is a difference between argument for the sake of truth and argument for the sake of victory. Hillel and Shammai argued out of a desire to discover the truth. Korach argued with Moses out of a desire to win a personal victory. Whoever argues for the sake of truth wins a kind of immortality: his words are destined to endure. Whoever argues for the sake of victory merits a kind of oblivion: his words are not destined to endure.
Introduction.34
The two kinds of argument are readily distinguishable. The one focuses firmly on the subject itself and avails itself of reason, inference, and the resources of tradition. The participants know themselves to be engaged – even as they disagree – in a collaborative rather than confrontational enterprise. To lose the argument is as enlightening as to win it, for truth is the outcome, and truth transcends the person who first uttered it. It is said of R. Nachum ha-Amsoni that when he found a counter-example to his theory of biblical interpretation, he retracted his life’s work with the words: “Just as I received a reward for the exposition, so I will receive a reward for the retraction.” There can be no more inspiring example of the primacy of truth over subjectivity. To be defeated by the truth is to experience the one defeat that is also a victory. This is argument for the sake of heaven.
Introduction.35
The other kind of argument fails to focus on the subject, for the subject of the controversy is not, so to speak, its agenda. It is marked by rhetoric and abuse. It frequently becomes ad hominem. Its aim is to defeat the opponent. Therefore its ends are served as well by attacking the person holding the contrary position as by attacking the position itself. The Korach rebellion – the rabbinic paradigm of argument not for the sake of heaven – is, from one point of view, an obscure narrative. Read the text carefully, and one finds not one but several different and incompatible positions being advanced. From another point of view, though, the rebellion is all too lucid. It aimed not at truth but at victory. Crucial to its strategy was a delegitimation of Moses. In such an argument, victory for either side is defeat for both. Had Korach won, the religion of revelation would have been defeated by the politics of power. Moses won, but only at the cost, uniquely, of invoking a miracle and his opponents were destroyed, and of provoking the subsequent reaction of the people: “You have killed the people of the Lord.” In this kind of confrontation there is no benign outcome. One can only aim at minimizing the tragedy.
Introduction.36
The History of Jewish Identity
Introduction.37
My aim in the present study is therefore twofold: to explore the “arguments for the sake of heaven” that currently divide the Orthodox world, and to defend the endangered etiquette of “argument for the sake of heaven” itself. The concept does not imply a pluralism that sees all interpretations as legitimate and all truth as relative. The argument between Hillel and Shammai was in fact decided in favor of Hillel. But it does imply a willingness to engage in reasoned dialogue with views with which one disagrees. It stands alongside another monumental rabbinic conviction, that “scholars increase peace in the world.” Through intellectual conflict comes resolution and, eventually, reconciliation. These are values that need restating in a fragmented Jewish world.
Introduction.38
But that task cannot itself be done without also examining the wider issues that led to the collapse of halakhah as the unifying framework of Jewish existence as a whole, and the intractable conflicts to which this has led in the present. Orthodoxy itself needs to be understood in the context of Jewish peoplehood in its widest sense. And that too I have tried to do. The present volume, then, sets the background of current intra-Jewish debates while suggesting how these might be conducted less divisively in the future. It is offered as a personal perspective, from the vantage point of one who sees halakhah as the constitution of the Jewish people and the only viable framework for Jewish unity. It is, too, an informal presentation. I have tried to avoid loading the text with footnotes and academic digressions. Some of the issues touched on are explored in a more scholarly way in my forthcoming books, Tradition in an Untraditional Age and One People? – Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity.
Introduction.39
The central questions that currently divide the Jewish world flow from the clash of a series of very different perceptions of what it is to be a Jew. Those perceptions cannot be fully understood without a clear sense of their history. How did it come about that the relatively unified idea of Judaism and Jewish identity that existed prior to the eighteenth century broke apart in modern times? That is the issue explored under the heading “Past.” In “Present” I examine the current state of Jewish identity and the several unexpected developments that have taken place in Jewish consciousness since the 1960s. In “Future” I consider how the currently tense relationship between Orthodoxy and the rest of the Jewish world might develop, and how I believe it should. The sections headed “Prologue” and “Epilogue” bring the argument from a global perspective to its impact on a single imaginary Anglo-Jewish family.
Introduction.40
This then is my attempt to set the scene for the tense and intense drama of Judaism’s contemporary dialogue between its commanding past and its as yet uncharted future.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.1
A Family Portrait: Jews Today
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.2
Pesach is a time for families, a time for answering children’s questions and handing on the story of the Exodus across the generations. It was so in biblical times; it is so tonight in David and Miriam Cohen’s house in a Northwest London suburb.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.3
The Haggadah speaks of four children, one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one unable to ask questions. There are four children this evening ranged around the Cohens’ table. They are not precisely the children of the Haggadah. For one thing, they are older. For another, words like wise, wicked, and simple sound strange and out of place in our nonjudgmental culture.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.4
But the Vilna Gaon suggested that the four children represent two pairs of contrasts. The “wise” and the “one unable to ask” are cognitive opposites. Perhaps we would call them, today, the intellectual and the nonacademic. The rasha and tam are spiritual opposites, one a rebel against, the other faithful to Jewish tradition. Today we would not call a rebel “wicked.” He is more likely simply to be the product of a secular culture profoundly at odds with the assumptions of Judaism. Still less would we translate tam as simple. The patriarch Jacob is called an ish tam, which Samson Raphael Hirsch translates as “a single-minded man.” Single-mindedness is a religious virtue equally at odds with the complex roles and relativities of a pluralistic culture. Thus understood, the terms could well describe David and Miriam’s children.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.5
The Intellectual
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.6
Ruth is 23, dark-haired, attractive, and articulate. An eldest child, she has always carried with her an air of seriousness, perhaps even to excess. She went to Jewish schools and then to a seminary in Israel before returning to take a degree in psychology and a teaching qualification. She teaches at a Jewish secondary school. In August she is getting married. Her husband-to-be is a mathematics lecturer at a London college, an alumnus of an Israeli yeshivah who wears a kippah serugah and twice a week attends a shiur.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.7
David and Miriam, Ruth’s parents, have always been Orthodox but in the relaxed style of many of the Anglo-Jews of their generation. Most Shabbatot they went to the local synagogue, more often when the children were young, less often now. On Friday nights they lit candles, made Kiddush, and ate a traditional Shabbat meal. But they had also been known to switch on a light or watch television. Their home is kosher, but on holiday they allow themselves a fish and salad meal in a non-Jewish restaurant. Neither of them keeps their hair covered except in the synagogue. They know vaguely about the laws of family purity and the mikveh, but neither they nor their friends ever seriously considered observing them. They are in their way typical of their local congregation.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.8
Ruth, from an early age, was uneasy with what she saw as their equivocations and compromises. A self-contained child, she did not argue the point. She simply took as her reference group her Jewish studies teachers at school and the friends she made in her youth group and later at the seminary. Her own home, she has decided, will be strictly observant. She tells her friends that she is going, be-ezrat ha-Shem, to have five children and that, of course, she will give up her career in teaching to look after them.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.9
The prospect of mikveh and the family purity laws do not raise in Ruth any inner conflict. She can see the logic of a discipline of sexual tact and restraint. Nor is she worried by the decision she and her fiancé have taken, that she will wear a sheitel. Wigs, these days, are attractive. And besides, she has a strong feeling for that value she has never tried to explain to her non-Jewish friends – she knows they would laugh – namely tzeniut, modesty.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.10
Ruth has a clearly ordered set of values. But it would be wrong to think that in arriving at them she has experienced no tensions. Her decision to go to a university after the seminary was frowned on by her teachers and many of her friends. In retrospect she can see their cause for concern, though she does not regret her choice. She found the college environment disturbingly at odds with the protective, monolithic atmosphere of her school and seminary. Its intellectual detachment, skepticism, and, at times, cynicism toward positions she herself held was at first unnerving and led to disturbed nights of conflict and doubt.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.11
It was the first time, too, that she had had non-Jewish friends. What worried her most was that she liked them. Her education until now had led her to take for granted that there were deep distinctions and dichotomies between the Jewish and non-Jewish world. But at college, over coffee, getting to know her fellow students, she found them refreshing and congenial company. She could hardly approve of their lifestyles, but they had an easygoing good humor and a camaraderie that she found relaxing. One or two of them were formidably intelligent, which she admired. Their world seemed free of the nervous intensity and inner constraints that formed an almost tangible atmosphere in her Jewish environment. She was studying in London and living at home. It occurred to her one night that if she had gone to a university in another town, meeting, falling in love with, and perhaps marrying a non-Jewish boy would not have been an impossibility. That frightened her and strengthened her decision to leave no gaps in the protective wall she would create for her own children.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.12
Past that crisis now, her occasional qualms are less serious. She has long since stopped going to her parents’ synagogue. Its vast architectural pretensions seemed to her to be an embarrassing imitation of the Gentiles, a Jewish church, a chukkat ha-goi. On Shabbat as a child she used to see one of her parents’ friends arrive at the synagogue by car, which he would furtively park round the corner. This, too, made her smile. It was the women’s gallery, though, that finally drove her to distraction. The show of clothes and the ceaseless gossip seemed to her more appropriate to a coffee klatch than to a religious occasion.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.13
Since then she has transferred he allegiance to a local shtibl, a shul that is no more than a house with ad hoc extensions. Here, at least, there is no clerically robed minister, no cantor, no choir, no show of grandeur, no social agenda. The members, as she puts it, come to davven and learn, not to talk and be entertained. But not everything about it is quite what she hoped for. Behind the thick curtain that screens the women’s section she is conscious that, in synagogue terms, she, a woman, is something of an irrelevance. It occasionally bothers her that she will not be able to attend a shiur with her future husband. Once in a while, though not for long, she sighs for the career she will have to abandon. She has read about the apron some American Jewish wives have taken to wearing, with its slogan: “For this I went to college?”
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.14
She is concerned, too, with some of the values of the world she and her husband are going to join. She knows of the fur-coat-and-Jaguar syndrome among sections of the very Orthodox. She has seen some of the one-upmanship and conspicuous consumption at their bar mitzvahs and weddings and wonders whether religious devotion can really be combined with aggressive materialism. She dislikes the factionalism of the highly Orthodox world: there are sixteen different minyanim within a mile of where she plans to live, and she does not expect to have close friends from any of them except her own.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.15
She senses, too, that she and her husband will have to be discreet about certain aspects of their lives: their university background, and their love for Israel. She knows that they will be closely observed, with initial suspicion and reserve, and that the social controls of the group are real and powerful. It is a little frightening, but it is a price she knows has to be paid if she is to be confident of bringing up children who will be as Jewishly committed as she is. Doors have to be closed against an open society.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.16
Ruth keeps her questions to herself. She has made her choice with open eyes, and if her world is not perfect she will live with it. She is used to sacrifice, to closing options. Her whole lifestyle is built on it. She is, all appearances to the contrary, very much of her time. Her deep Jewish commitment is grounded less in theology, which she sees as a typically male abstraction, than in a vivid sense that she does not want the alternatives. She does not want to be pressured into a physical relationship with a boy on her third date. She does not want a marriage to be only as secure as the partners’ compatibility. She does not want to be haunted by the fear that her children will drop out or marry out. She feels the sheer power of the Jewish family tradition and knows – all the more so after college – that modern secular life offers no equivalent. She knows, too, just how vigilantly it must be guarded these days.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.17
Her parents sometimes criticize her for, as they put it, “going back to the ghetto.” That is precisely what she has chosen to do and for compelling reasons. She knows the alternatives, and sees no other way of protecting her values, her marriage, or her future children.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.18
The Rebel
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.19
Richard, younger than Ruth by a year, is just finishing college. His yarmulka sits uneasily on his unkempt hair. He is wearing it, under protest, to please his parents. He refused, though, to wear a suit at the table. His clothes – jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket – are a calculated act of aggression. So, too, was his peremptory reading of the Haggadah. His Hebrew, remembered from primary school and bar mitzvah training, is still better than his father’s.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.20
David and Miriam never quite knew what to do with Richard. When he was 4, they knew he was going to be bright. At 7 he was quick-witted and already impatient with his teachers. At 10 he was frankly facetious about the religious instruction at his Jewish school. It was, he complained, boring, juvenile, and irrelevant. He would lie awake, even then, reading science and history books. At 11, by common consent, he went to an English public school. At 18 he won a place at Oxford. He delayed it for a year to go hitchhiking round the world.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.21
Now in his final year at Oxford, he is contemplating a career in investigative journalism. This Pesach evening, with its déjà-vu rituals, he regards as a penance. It is, he tells himself, the price of having parents. Richard spends much of his time being angry: with the Conservative government, cuts in social services, growing inequalities, economic individualism, South Africa, the bomb, ecological exploitation, and the policies of Israel over the last decade. Anger, for Richard, is not so much an emotion as a lifestyle. This evening he has turned its full force onto the Haggadah and its assumptions.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.22
Partly to provoke his parents, partly out of conviction, he has called the story of the Exodus paranoid and racist. “Listen to this tiny people,” he says, “having the chutzpah to believe that the history of the universe revolves around it. Plagues strike, the sea divides, all so that the Israelites can achieve their nationalist goals, no matter what the cost to an innocent Egyptian civilian population. No wonder that Jews find themselves the object of animosity in every generation.” Who, he asks, would not resent a minority who claimed to be the elect, the chosen people? Wouldn’t you, he asks his parents, if you were on the other side of the conversation? “Could you honestly invite a non-Jew to the seder and carefully translate every word – from Rabbi Akiva’s multiplication of the plagues to ‘Pour out Thy wrath on the nations’ – and not feel embarrassed?”
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.23
David and Miriam often ask themselves where they went wrong with Richard. They have not yet found an easy answer. From his mid-teens he out-argued the rabbis they invited to have a word with him. They have tried the tactic of the Haggadah for the rebellious son: confrontation. They said: “If you had lived in Germany in the 1930s, for all your rejection of Judaism, you would have been condemned as a Jew, transported as a Jew, murdered as a Jew. If you had grown up in the Soviet Union you would have had your rights curtailed as a Jew. Even in Oxford or London, if you succeed too well and too fast you will still feel, behind the politeness of your intellectual friends, a suspicion of you as a Jew. You can’t reinvent yourself. In the eyes of the world an un-Jewish Jew is still a Jew.”
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.24
Part of Richard’s anger is undoubtedly due to the fact that subliminally he knows this to be true. He rages against it. Everything else that he is, he has chosen to be. His school, his university, his opinions, his future career: at every stage he has felt his life to be a matter of exploring the alternatives and making a choice. He was intoxicated by the intellectual and social variety of Oxford. His sense of personal power is built on the feeling that, with enough intelligence and willpower, he can turn himself into whatever he chooses to be.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.25
Except for this one fact. He was born a Jew. Why, he asks, does he have to take on himself the sufferings, the history, the hopes, the guilts, the inhibitions, the unbearable self-consciousness of this tormented people just because of an accident of birth? What does it have to do with him? Yes, he sympathizes with the plight of Jews in Russia. But he feels the same involvement with the blacks of South Africa and the people who live in slums in the inner cities and those others he has seen sleeping in the streets at night.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.26
There was a time when he felt a strong attachment to Israel. He even thought he might try living there one day. That feeling began to disintegrate in 1982 during the Lebanon War and has been declining ever since. He has shocked his parents tonight by saying that if the seder story were being written now, the roles would be reversed: Israel would be cast in the role of the Egyptians, and it would be the Palestinians who would see themselves as the Israelites of the Bible. The remark was meant to offend, but it expresses for Richard a profound disillusionment. The one aspect of being a Jew to which he could respond was the passion for justice that came from being part of a powerless minority. To be a Jew was to be an outsider, a social critic, a religious revolutionary. Nowadays he sees his parents and their friends as politically conservative, economically established, and remorselessly middle-class. He sees in the State of Israel the compromise of power, necessary for its survival, perhaps, but not something that compels his ethical admiration.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.27
He has broken away from his parents’ set of contentments: their Anglican-Judaism, their annual trips to Netanya, their narrow gossip, their ethnic pride. It is all, he thinks, not offensive or objectionable but simply small. Judaism was once greater than this, but if this is all it currently has to offer, it does not speak to him. It may be years before he comes to terms with his identity. Ruth, his elder sister, is dismissive of his Sturm und Drang. It is, she tells her parents, a typical second-child syndrome. How Richard will turn out, no one knows. For the moment he hates the impositions and presumed attachments of being a Jew and wants to forget them as soon as possible.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.28
The Single-Minded Child
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.29
To the rest of the family, the child sitting between Richard and David has always been known as Paul. For the past two years, though, he has insisted on being called Pinchas. Paul/Pinchas went to the same school as Richard. But while Richard was extrovert and aggressive, Paul was quiet, inward and solitary, and much given to poetry which he wrote as well as read. It was never easy to tell what Paul was thinking, but no one in the family paid much attention to him. He kept himself to himself.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.30
He was scheduled to go to a university. He decided to spend the months between the end of school and the beginning of his college term in Israel. Wandering abstractedly round Jerusalem one Friday, he was invited by a young rabbi to spend Shabbat at a yeshivah in the old city. Having nothing better to do, Paul agreed.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.31
He has been there ever since. He is not enjoying this trip home, and wants to be back as soon as Pesach is over. He knows it is a mitzvah to honor his parents. But they no longer speak the same language; he has had to supervise the kitchen himself to make sure it meets his newly exacting kashrut standards; and he feels that every day in the prosaic atmosphere of home diffuses his religious energies. Paul is a baal teshuvah, a religious returnee, one of many in Jerusalem today. His yeshivah and several others in the vicinity are full of young men with a similar story to tell. By now they are an identifiable group with their own distinctive subculture.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.32
As Pinchas he is only too happy to speak about what has happened to him, about why this ex-public-school boy now wears a beard, a dark bedraggled suit, and only occasionally a tie. It was, he explains, Divine providence, hashgachah, that brought him to that particular spot in Jerusalem at that particular hour. His whole previous life, he now realizes, was a case of mistaken identity. His unhappiness at school was symptomatic of a Jewish soul – a nitzotz Eloki, a Divine spark – struggling with cultural clothes, levushim, that did not fit because they were never made for him.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.33
No, he is not going to a university, despite the constant pressure from his parents. What will he do for a living? “I leave that,” he smiles, “to ha-Shem.” Does he read secular books any more? No, he says, they are full of kefirah, denial. They mistake the world of the senses for reality, pleasure for happiness, reason for truth, subjective choice for the Divine command. When provoked, he says with sudden intensity: “Look at the world out there. Look what a secular society has made of itself. Wars, drugs, casual sex, AIDS, violence, materialism, consumerism, nuclear weapons, doubt, loneliness, and the meaningless pursuit of profit and success: hollow, all of it, and most of it confusion. Is that what you want me to want? When I can live a life of kedushah, holiness?”
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.34
Pinchas has told his parents, in response to Richard’s outburst about the Exodus and politics, that the going out of Egypt was not just a historical event with political repercussions. The word Mitzrayim, Egypt, means boundaries or limitations. The Exodus, he explains, is something each of us must undergo. We must move beyond our limitations, beyond the roles society assigns to the role ha-Shem has cast us in. “You think,” he tells his parents, “that there is something important about living in this neighborhood, going to a university, having a professional career. That is the Egypt I am escaping from. The Torah is above space and time. A mitzvah links us to infinity. When I eat this matzah I am affecting invisible universes. Torah, Yiddishkeit, is bigger than this room, this suburb, the nice-Jewish-boy scenario you have mapped out for me.”
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.35
Pinchas sees his parents’ Judaism as simply superficial and uninformed. Ruth’s way of life, despite its greater consistency and depth, does not appeal to him either. It is too cold, intellectual, and measured. Prayer, he believes, is not a matter of saying the right words at the right time. It is a mystical experience, a fire, a sacrifice of self. Life as a Jew is more than a sequence of mitzvot: it is constant teshuvah, an endless process of self-transformation. Through the soul, a Jew can reach out to something greater than the world, to the mysterious infinity that surrounds and penetrates it. The political, communal, and institutional dimensions of Judaism matter less to Pinchas than this personal drama of self-transcendence. Israel, where he is studying, is less a place or a nation than a state of mind. The imperfections of society, he argues, are mended not through the political process but in the hearts of individuals.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.36
David and Miriam have gone through successive phases of reaction to Paul’s metamorphosis. At first they were delighted when he wrote home to say that he was spending time at a yeshivah. As it dawned on them that he was not going to return, they became anxious. When they went out to visit him for the first time they were shocked at the change in his appearance. Gaunt, ascetic, bearded, his facial expressions subtly changed, he reminded David more of his grandfather than his son. Who was this smiling stranger?
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.37
They fear, sometimes, for his health, more often for his future career. Also, though they do not admit it, he makes them feel a little guilty about their own religious standards, which they defend in his presence with an overcompensating vigor. “You have to live in the world,” they say. “From faith you don’t make a living. Don’t smile when we’re angry.” To their friends they say, “It could have been worse. It could have been drugs or the Moonies.” To themselves, Paul remains a mystery.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.38
The Child without Questions
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.39
To David and Miriam, Susan, their youngest, is the one normal child in the family. Still at school – Jewish but not religious – she wears jeans, dates boys, likes Michael Jackson, watches Neighbours and wishes she were Kylie Minogue. She looks attractive, has a sense of humor, and finds heavy talk about Judaism a bore.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.40
Of all the four children, she alone is prepared once in a while to accompany her parents to synagogue. She likes looking down at the boys from the women’s gallery and thinks they are altogether smarter and more appealing than the non-Jewish boys she sometimes meets at discos, with their rough clothes, their single earrings, and their passion for beer and football.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.41
She wants to marry a Jewish boy, a real estate agent perhaps, or someone in merchant banking. She has decided that they will live in one of the spacious outer suburbs, have two children (Gavin and Caroline, she has already decided), drive a Honda, and belong to the shul but not go there too often.
PART I; PROLOGUE.Chapter 1; A Family Portrait; Jews Today.42
If asked, Susan would say that she is not religious but that she feels completely Jewish. She supports Israel and would not mind if her future children decided to live there. She belongs to a young Jewish fundraising group and once in a while demonstrates with her classmates on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023. Via Sefaria (sefaria.org), Sefaria-Export. Version source: https://korenpub.com/products/arguments-for-the-sake-of-heaven Licence: CC-BY-NC. Source.