Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

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

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This conflict of perceptions has led to a series of ironies and paradoxes since 1967 that have shaken the axioms of secular Zionism. First, Israel was to be the “sole secure refuge” for Jews in flight from persecution. In the light, though, of Israel’s recent wars and inner turbulence, Yeshayahu Leibowitz has argued that Jews who seek safety could find it more effectively in Australia and Canada. Eliezer Schweid calls Israel an “embattled fortress.”
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The sharp dichotomy between the security of a homeland and the insecurity of the diaspora has been ironically inverted. For to the extent that Israel is a safe refuge, it makes the diaspora safer too. Mordecai Kaplan, one of the architects of American Zionism, defined the sense in which Israel was home using words taken from the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Home thus understood is not where one lives. But it is what makes exile endurable.
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Second, Israel was to be the sole context of a distinctive Jewish identity. The choice, as Arthur Koestler put it, was either “emigration to Israel or gradual assimilation to their host nations.” What was not foreseen was the extent to which the existence of Israel, far from negating the diaspora, in fact revitalized it. Throughout the Jewish world as we have noted, there was a sudden flowering of Jewish self-expression in the wake of the Six-Day War. Much of it was focused on Israel, but not all. There was religious self-discovery also, and a renewed contact with the texts and practices of tradition. Israel, far from hastening diaspora assimilation, has counteracted it.
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These conflicts and ambivalences become exposed when phenomena arise that are impossible to explain or respond to on extant assumptions. What, for example, should be the diaspora reaction to the many Soviet Jewish emigres who have chosen to live in America rather than Israel? What should be its response to the yordim who have chosen to leave the promised land for the “land of promise”? Should it be supportive or critical? Both groups confound established archetypes. Israel, not America, is the natural refuge for Jews fleeing oppression; and Israel is not a home one leaves. To that extent, Russian and Israeli arrivals in America are often regarded as disturbing anomalies. Yet both groups have chosen what American Jews themselves have chosen: to live outside Israel. To that extent they regard local reaction as hypocritical.
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Is Israel supported or compromised by a strong and self-sufficient Jewish life in the golah? Is the diaspora to be educated toward its own survival, or to the view that only in Israel is there complete Jewish fulfillment? The conventional wisdom, at least in the diaspora, is that in practice there is no conflict between these objectives. As one American lay leader put it, “We must recognize that the future of the generations that follow us is inextricably linked to Israel as a source of deepening commitment to our own sense of Jewishness and spiritual identification.” But, he continued, “It is not and cannot be a substitute for our own increased commitment to creative Jewish continuity at all levels in our own communities.” But between these two sentences is a latent conflict that is not always avoidable.
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Identification with Israel does not ease the burden of diaspora Jewish self-definition. On the contrary, it heightens it. It has meant, in recent years, taking a political stance sharply at odds with the image of Israel projected by the media. It has meant, for Jewish students at universities, running the gauntlet of anti-Zionist propaganda. It has disturbed rather than supported the harmony between diaspora Jewry and its environment. Here again we are confronted by the failure of “normalization,” the project by which Israel would make Jews “like other nations.” Israel, no less than the Holocaust, testifies to the Jewish “singled-out condition.” But it does not of itself explain it. On secular Zionist orthodoxy, Israel and the diaspora should have gone their separate and divergent ways, the one toward integration in the family of nations, the other to disappearance through assimilation. Yet they have remained obstinately linked to one another in a state of mutual tension.
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The stark alternatives of secular Zionism, between a disintegrating diaspora and a secure and normal homeland, have given way to a complex and fraught interdependence. Israel has made all Jews, both its own and those of the diaspora, feel more at home in the world. At the same time, under the impact of Israel’s political isolation, it has served to emphasize the “not-at-homeness” of the Jew. Israel and the diaspora have grown markedly closer in the last two decades while at the same time holding strikingly different perceptions of one another. Out of these paradoxes it is difficult to draw a coherent picture of a diaspora identity focused on a place in which one chooses not to live.
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Jewishness and Judaism
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The author has suggested that a Jewish identity built around the Holocaust and Israel, the two defining symbols of diaspora Jewishness since 1967, is not in itself sufficient to give meaning and content to Jewish life. They are, to be sure, the most momentous events in Jewish history since the destruction of the Second Temple. No contemporary Jewish thought can avoid confronting and being shaped by them. But they do not in themselves yield meaning. They presuppose a prior set of meanings, a framework of interpretation. In themselves, and especially in the diaspora, they mask and to some extent embody ambivalence about being a Jew.
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But there have been some American sociologists who have argued that this kind of analysis is misconceived. There is, they suggest, no such thing as a specifiable Jewish identity. As we noted in an earlier chapter, Charles Silberman, Calvin Goldscheider, and Steven M. Cohen have argued, in effect, that Jewishness is what Jews do. They grant that in America, Jewish observance continues to decline. So too does affiliation with synagogues and other Jewish organizations. They speak of “ineffective, inadequate, and unsuccessful Jewish education…pervasive ignorance…decline in temple and synagogue participation, empty synagogue schools, and unused community facilities…emphasis on and acceptance of minimum Jewish commitments.” They concede that “mobilization of energies for fund-raising devoid of Jewish content as a goal in itself” has become a substitute for “creative Jewish commitments.”
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But this, they argue, does not of itself entail a decline in the vitality of Jewishness. It represents a transformation in the nature of Jewishness. And this is only to be expected. For there is no essence of Jewish identity. As Jews change, so does the character of what counts as “Jewish.” At one time it might have been adherence to halakhah, at another, membership of a synagogue, at yet others, supporting Israel or Jewish welfare causes, or perhaps simply having Jewish friends. Jewishness persists so long as Jews see themselves as Jews and so long as they are measurably similar to one another and different from everyone else.
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We recall Calvin Goldscheider’s definition of Jewishness in terms of group cohesion: “The strength of the Jewish community reflects the number and intensity of ingroup interactions. The more the bases of interaction and the greater its intensity, the more cohesive is the community.” The implications of this statement are striking. For example, as Goldscheider himself points out, Jewish education is usually evaluated in terms of success or failure in communicating Jewish knowledge or commitment. But it has another dimension. “Parents bring their children to school, have contact with other Jewish parents and with Jewish teachers and other Jewish children. The ramifications are extensive. It is clearly what community is all about.” Schools are places where Jews meet. They are a setting for “ingroup interaction.” The street outside the school, where parents meet, may be as important as the classroom, where children meet. As long as Jews meet, mix, and have attitudes and lifestyles in common, we need not ask about the content of Jewish life. Instead we must concede the fact of Jewish life, which changes in form from generation to generation.
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These sociologists are responding to a fact best analyzed over thirty years ago by Nathan Glazer. What has happened to American Jewry, he suggested at the time, was less significant than one thing that had not happened. “This negative something is the strongest and potentially most significant religious reality among American Jews: it is that Jews have not stopped being Jews…. It is not that most Jews in this country submit themselves to the Jewish law; they do not. Nor can they tell you what the Jewish heritage is.” Their sense of Jewishness might consist in anything from Zionism to a love of Yiddish or Jewish food or Jewish jokes. But it persisted. There was, he found, “a stubborn insistence on remaining a Jew, enhanced by no particularly ennobling idea of what that means.”
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There is, though, one profound difference between Glazer and the contemporary “transformationists.” Glazer distinguished between Jewishness and Judaism. Judaism represents a religious faith and a holy way of life. It is not what Jews actually do, but what they ought to do, what they are religiously called on to do and what, traditionally, they did. The significance of Jewishness, for Glazer, is that it keeps Jews at least potentially in touch with Judaism. So long as Jews remain identifiably Jewish, “they are capable of being moved and reached and of transcending the pedestrian life that so many of them live in company with other Americans.” So long as Jewish ethnicity is actual, Jewish religiosity is possible, for were there no Jews there could be no Judaism. The persistence of Jewishness “means that the Jewish religious tradition is not just a subject for scholars but is capable now and then of finding expression in life. And even if it finds no expression in one generation or another, the commitment to remain related to it still exists.”
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Goldscheider, by contrast, is more interested in Jewishness than Judaism. “Religiosity,” he argues, “is only one of the ways in which Jews express their Jewishness.” And it is this move that is open to argument on two different grounds. The first concerns the future. Can Jewish ethnicity, rooted in no more than the fact that Jews tend to have similar education, careers, lifestyles, and political attitudes, survive? The second concerns definition. Is this Jewish survival? Is there not some point at which Jewishness must be measured against Judaism? Is there not some point, indeed, at which Jewishness ceases to have any connection with Judaism? Arthur Hertzberg brings the two arguments together when he writes that “Judaism is neither authentic, nor can it survive, if it amounts to no more than a triumph of adjustment to suburban life.”
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Behind every sociology there is a theology. And behind the transformationists lies a view of Jewish life which owes much to Mordecai Kaplan, who defined Judaism as the evolving civilization of the Jewish people. Kaplan’s Reconstructionism recognized that while Judaism as traditionally understood had “practically become inoperative,” there was nonetheless a secondary cohesive force that bound Jews, namely “the will to maintain and perpetuate Jewish life as something desirable in and for itself.” On this view there is no “essence” of Judaism. The primary function of Judaism is to express and sustain group cohesion, and there is no way of specifying in advance the forms it will take. To the extent that Silberman, Goldscheider, and Cohen evaluate rather than simply describe; to the extent that they see in the changing patterns of American Jewry not decline but a new kind of vitality, they tacitly endorse something like a Reconstructionist interpretation of Jewish life. Indeed, almost two decades ago, Charles Liebman had already described the beliefs that underlay Reconstructionism as the “folk religion of American Jews.”
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Who Is a Jew?
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Is there anything that stands in the way of this minimalist conception of Jewish identity, which sees it in terms of Jewishness rather than Judaism and which attaches no normative content to Jewishness? Jews, after all, do survive as Jews in the diaspora, against all expectation. They have widely different conceptions of what Jewishness means, or perhaps no clear conception at all. Yet they identify, with surprising passion and sometimes self-sacrifice, as Jews. Why should this not be sufficient? A Jew is one who identifies as a Jew. Beyond that, no clarification is possible or necessary. We can measure the shifting patterns of group solidarity. What we cannot do is describe some as more “authentic” than others.
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Without at this stage invoking theology or halakhah, there are nonetheless two formidable problems, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical issue is this: The word “Jew” has a reference that is extended over space and time. Part of what it means to be a Jew is to be a member of a people that spans millennia and continents. Existentially that sense of peoplehood lies close to the heart of modern Jewish identities. To feel Jewish, as many recent observers have noted, is less to feel bound by Jewish law and belief than to feel a sense of kinship with the Jews of Israel and the Soviet Union, the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, the Jews who enacted their unique drama through the echoing centuries of exiles and wanderings, hopes, and persecutions. Presupposed in the use of a single word to describe a people divided by time and space, land and language, custom and culture, is some common content designated by the word “Jew.”
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That content is not given by the analyses of contemporary diaspora Jewish ethnicity. Upward mobility, advanced education, residential or occupational clustering, a taste for certain kinds of food or humor or political positions – these tell us what is American about American Jews, or English about Anglo-Jews, not what is Jewish. Jewish ethnicity has long had this character. Even in their most segregated, ghetto-bound periods, Jews borrowed manners and motifs from their surrounding culture. In large measure this is what marked the difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between the Jews of Rome and Rizhin, Manchester and Mezeritch.
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What was improbable, striking, and decisive is that despite these differences, Jews constituted a single people. They saw themselves and were seen by others as having a direct horizontal continuity with one another and a vertical continuity with the people of the Bible and the rabbinic age. What they held in common was definitive; what they held distinctively in their various localities was not. What they held in common was, as Saadia Gaon noted, Torah. That bound them to a shared life, a shared history, and a shared destiny. That was the “essence” detectable beneath the variegated cultural forms in which it was clothed.
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Jewish peoplehood cannot survive the dissolution of that “essence.” This theoretical concern comes to the fore in one burning and practical question. Who is a Jew? The answer given by tradition is unambiguous. A Jew is one born to a Jewish mother or one who has undergone a halakhically valid process of conversion. Several things have happened, especially since the 1960s, to make that answer seem out of step with the social reality of Jewish life in the diaspora.
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First is the rapidly accelerating rate of intermarriage. American Jewry, as we have seen, has now reached the state of Western and Central European Jewries between the two world wars: an outmarriage rate of approximately one in three. Precise quantifications are not available for Anglo-Jewry, but it seems likely that the rate here will also rise to, if it has not yet reached, that level. Second is what we have called the new Jewish ethnic affirmation. Intermarriage was hitherto seen as both a real and symbolic exit from the Jewish community. Today a significant proportion of those with non-Jewish spouses wish to remain identified as Jews and wish their children so to be identified. Third is the rapidly growing acceptance of intermarriage as a fact of Jewish life, even among those who do not endorse it or wish it for themselves. The 1975 Boston survey, for example, showed that while 43 percent of the over-60s held strongly negative views about it, only 5 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 did so. Fourth, the lifestyles and attitudes of the intermarried and non-intermarried are growing more alike. The former are more likely to have Jewish friends and values and live in a Jewish neighborhood. The latter are less likely to have a high profile of Jewish observance and synagogue attendance. Sociologically, the two groups are becoming harder to distinguish.
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This has led to the most controversial claim of the “transformationists” – that intermarriage does not significantly weaken, and may in some ways strengthen, the Jewish community. The argument mounted by Silberman, Goldscheider, and Cohen is complex and points in more than one direction. In part it is defensive. Outmarriage rates, they argue, are lower than have been estimated. The rate of increase is slowing. Only the more marginal section of the community is affected. But in part it is evaluative. If the couple stay within the community, outmarriage represents a demographic gain. If the non-Jewish partner converts, the couple is likely to be more Jewishly active than average. Acceptance of the outmarried by the Jewish community will tilt the balance from loss to gain.
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But it is here that sociology and halakhah part company. Gold-scheider is explicit. “The definition of the Jewishness of the family in terms of biology (or halakhah) is becoming less important for most American Jews than it was in the past and less relevant to Jewish communal continuity than how people define themselves behaviorally, communally, and culturally, and how the community defines them.” Those who see themselves and are seen by others as Jews, are Jews. But historically it was in just such circumstances that schisms arose within the Jewish world. Hellenists, Sadducees, the early Christians, and the Karaites saw themselves as Jews. They did not, however, stay within the Jewish mainstream. Though the question of what is a Jew may, at certain times, be indeterminate and open-ended, it tends to converge on the highly specific question, who is a Jew? That is not a question that tolerates a multiplicity of answers, a measure of vagueness or diplomatic disattention. To the contrary, it is a question that precipitates crisis.
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Religious Legitimation and Social Process
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That crisis, in the context of American Jewry specifically, diaspora Jewry generally, has an additional dimension. It can be expressed thus. Already in the mid-1950s Will Herberg and Nathan Glazer were commenting on an unusual feature of Jewish life. Jews were deeply secularized, far more so than either Protestants or Catholics. Yet there were signs of what was ostensibly a religious revival. There was a stunning increase, in the postwar years, in the number of synagogues, schools, and community centers. Books and periodicals appeared on religious themes. Yet Jews did not participate in great numbers in synagogue services. They did not see Judaism as having a significant bearing on the conduct of their lives. They did not turn to rabbis for personal direction. The rabbi, indeed, was seen at this time primarily as a religious functionary and a representative figure to the non-Jewish world.
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What had happened, argued Herberg and Glazer, was that Judaism as a religion had itself become secularized. For Herberg it had become a “culture-religion” celebrating not the Mosaic faith but “Americanism.” For Glazer the change had taken place when Jews moved from urban to suburban settings. There, experiencing for the first time a predominantly non-Jewish neighborhood, Jews felt the pressures of conformity and “respectability.” Church-going and Sunday school were the norm, and Jewish equivalents had to be created. They were to be “Jewish, but not too Jewish.” Both writers pointed to the fact that in the emergent American Judaism, what dominated the agenda were human needs, not Divine commands; American integration, not Jewish “chosenness.” Religion, when it spoke to the individual, was expected to provide “peace of mind” and enhance the power of positive thinking. When it spoke to the community it was expected to serve the cause of group solidarity and ethnic survival. No longer did Jews exist to serve Judaism. Judaism existed to serve the needs of Jews.
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It was this phenomenon that led, a decade later, to one of the most powerful religious statements to have emerged from American Jewry, R. Joseph Soloveitchik’s long essay, The Lonely Man of Faith. Judaism, he argued, did not bring peace of mind. To the contrary, it brought deep inner conflict between the secular and religious sides of the human personality, what he termed, respectively, “majestic” and “covenantal” man. Now, however, secularism had invaded the sanctuary. Modern man “comes to a place of religious worship. He attends lectures on religion and appreciates the ceremonial, yet he is searching not for a faith in all its singularity and otherness, but for religious culture.” He wants an aesthetic, not a religious experience. He seeks community, not command. “Western man diabolically insists on being successful. Alas, he wants to be successful even in his adventure with God. If he gives of himself to God, he expects reciprocity.” He thinks in terms not of covenant but of commercial transaction. He insists that “faith adapt itself to the mood and temper of modern times.” The grandeur of faith – “aboriginal, exploding with elemental force” – could not, argued Soloveitchik, be reduced to a suburban sedative and a leisure pursuit.
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But it was happening, and R. Soloveitchik could offer no more positive prospect than that the man of faith should withdraw from society and experience “ontological loneliness” and “social isolation.” Religion was being pressed into the service of a secular culture. And here was the paradox. In America, Jews preferred Jewishness to Judaism but insisted on giving it a religious expression. The institutions of ethnicity were the synagogue and the rabbinate. Theology had become the handmaid of sociology. Judaism had become the legitimator of Jewishness.
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Mordecai Kaplan had given the process its intellectual basis. But it affected not only his Reconstructionism, but American Reform and Conservative Judaism as well. This meant that, in varying degrees, all the non-Orthodox denominations had to accommodate themselves to the ethos of contemporary American Jewry, an ethos only tangentially related to classic Jewish values and beliefs. It meant, among other things, mixed seating in synagogues, an abandonment of the prohibition against a kohen marrying a divorcee, and the ordination of women as rabbis and cantors. These have been endorsed even by the most traditional of the denominations, Conservative Judaism.
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In addition, the Reform movement has accepted the creation of synagogues for homosexuals. One Reform writer, Norman Mirsky, recently noted that “the Reform rabbi has to be both gyroscope and weathervane, for while throughout the Jewish world the weather is always changing, never before has there been a Jewish clergy whose pledge to its laity has been so overt in integrating rapid social change into a recognizable Jewish liturgical and institutional framework.” Reform, in short, has fulfilled the function of giving religious legitimation to the changing boundaries of Jewishness.
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Issues of Status
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So the tension between Jewishness and Judaism exists not only as a personal issue for individual Jews, nor as an intellectual argument among sociologists, but as a religious argument between Orthodoxy and others, Reform in particular. Inevitably the most intractable issues turn on the question of personal status. One relates to divorce. Since the 1840s, radical Reformers in Germany, Samuel Holdheim in particular, had argued that a civil divorce was sufficient to terminate a Jewish marriage, under a radical reinterpretation of the idea that “the law of the land is law.” This view had been adopted, at least de facto, by the American Reform rabbinate.
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By Jewish law, however, termination of a marriage requires a halakhically valid divorce, get, and without this the partners remain bound to one another. Should the woman remarry on the basis of a civil divorce only, the relationship is halakhically adjudged to be adulterous and any children born from it are mamzerim, illegitimate, and unable to marry legitimate Jews. The issue was acute enough to lead R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes, in 1849, to propose a formal excommunication of Reform Jews and a ban against marriages with them. But the issue remained on the sidelines until recent rising rates of divorce and remarriage and the continued prominence of Reform in American Jewry made it a numerically significant phenomenon.
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Sociologically, though, the central issue has been intermarriage. It is here that the religious legitimation of secular survivalism is most potentially explosive. The tacit acceptance of mixed marriage, or at least the desire on the part of Jewish parents “to keep their children Jewish, no matter how,” has led to some 40 percent of American Reform rabbis officiating at marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Half of those who refuse will refer the couple to a colleague who will perform the ceremony. Norman Mirsky adds that “there is enormous pressure placed on Reform rabbis to officiate at mixed marriages. It is rumored that some congregations will not hire rabbis who refuse. Personal correspondence seems to bear this out.”
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The question then arises as to the religion of the spouse. In some cases the non-Jewish partner converts to Judaism. The figures are elusive, but Steven Cohen estimates that some 23 percent of non-Jewish wives do so, and some 11 percent of non-Jewish husbands. One reliable estimate places at 10,000 a year the number of converts to Judaism in America. Most of these are performed under Reform auspices. Halakhically, conversion to Judaism requires immersion in a mikveh, circumcision in the case of males, and kabbalat ha-mitzvot, “acceptance of the commandments.” In the case of Reform conversions, one or other of these criteria, possibly all, will standardly not have been fulfilled. Orthodoxy, too, sees the Conservative movement’s relationship to halakhah as ambivalent, and thus questions the validity of its conversions.
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But if almost a quarter of non-Jewish wives are willing to convert, more than three quarters are not. In the new climate of affirmative ethnicity, though, often the husband wishes and the wife is willing to raise the children of the marriage as Jews. This led to the notorious decision of the Central Conference of American Rabbis – the Reform rabbinic convention – in 1983, which declared “that the child of one Jewish parent is under the presumption of Jewish descent. This presumption of Jewish status of the offspring of any mixed marriage is to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.”
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The decision signaled a willingness to defy the millennial criteria of Jewish status. Henceforth, a child might be deemed Jewish without a Jewish mother or an act of conversion, on the basis of “patrilineal descent” and personal identification. Indeed, as a number of perceptive observers, among them Shaye J.D. Cohen and Manfred Vogel, noted, the resolution subtly changed the whole basis of Jewish status. For while it included children of Jewish fathers, it also excluded children of Jewish mothers who did not choose to identify as Jews. In effect it “Protestantized” Jewish status, shifting it from a biological endowment to a personal religious choice. The irony was overwhelming. In its pursuit of “peoplehood” American Reform had thoroughly “religionized” Jewish identity.
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The shock waves were deep and immediate. A host of scholars and religious leaders outside Reform warned of what Reuven Bulka called “the coming cataclysm.” Irving Greenberg posed the question, “Will there be one Jewish people by the year 2000?” The patrilineal decision had focused attention on the cumulative effect of Reform policies on divorce and conversion. Greenberg suggested that within the foreseeable future, between 15 and 20 percent of the American Jewish community would be “socially and halakhically separated from traditional Jews.” Self-ascribed identity was in headlong collision with halakhic norms. The prospect was real of the greatest schism since Judaism and Christianity parted company. As Lawrence Schiffman’s timely study Who Was a Jew? pointed out, that schism too had eventually turned on the question of personal status: “The ultimate parting of the ways for Judaism and Christianity took place when the adherents to Christianity no longer conformed to the halakhic definitions of a Jew.”
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Israel and “Who Is a Jew?”
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The problem sharply illustrates the proposition that the word “Jew” presupposes criteria that span time and space. That continuity of definition is the basis of the continuity of Jewish peoplehood. Jakob Petuchowski put the point well: “It is…the halakhah dealing with ‘personal status’ which guarantees the underlying unity of the ‘holy community.’”
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Sociologists on the one hand, the Reform rabbinate on the other, may propose new criteria of Jewish identity that accord with the contemporary American experience. But Jewish status cannot be localized without fragmenting Jewish peoplehood. An American consensus might emerge that ran counter to standards that obtained in the past, and to the way Jewish status is understood elsewhere. But it would have no effect on the meaning of the word “Jew” as determined by tradition and by other Jewries. Indeed, the precipitating point of crisis is almost certain not to come from within America itself, but from Israel where the Orthodox rabbinate exercises a monopoly of Jewish religious authority.
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Several major controversies have already arisen in Israel. In 1958 the question arose of how children of mixed marriages should be registered in the national registry. The interior minister recommended a position not unlike that of the patrilineal principle: if either parent were Jewish, the child could be registered as Jewish if both parents agreed. The National Religious Party resigned from the cabinet over the issue. In the ensuing cabinet crisis Ben-Gurion temporarily revoked the decision and took the views of an international group of Jewish scholars. In the light of their responses the government voted in favor of retaining the halakhic criteria.
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Similar results followed in a series of test cases. The Shalit case, for example, established that a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could not have their children registered as Jews in nationality only. To be a Jew nationally involved being a Jew religiously. The attempts to separate the two identities have thus far failed. But continuing tension surrounds the Law of Return, under which any Jew who decides to live in Israel can automatically become a citizen without undergoing a naturalization procedure. The law is central to Israel’s self-definition as the state of the entire Jewish people. But, as amended in 1970, it defined as a Jew someone born of a Jewish mother or one who had been converted to Judaism. Since then there have been sporadic but intense efforts to have the phrase amended to specify conversion “in accordance with halakhah,” the most recent following the November 1988 Israeli general election.
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The issue has significance far beyond its immediate concern. The number of Reform and Conservative converts in America is large; the number of those directly affected by the Law of Return – those who choose to live in Israel – is small. In Israel itself the Reform and Conservative rabbinate has no official status. An amendment to the Law would therefore have direct repercussions on perhaps no more than half a dozen individuals a year. But it would, by implication, delegitimate all conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis anywhere in the world. Its significance for the Conservative and Reform movements is potentially immense, given their deep attachment to Israel on the one hand, and the unity of the Jewish people on the other.
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Not all Orthodox authorities are in favor of the amendment. The British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, argued as long ago as 1974 that “the religious character of the Jewish state will be determined not by legislation or coercion, but by persuasion.” The criteria of who is a Jew should in any case be determined not by secular legislation but by the religious courts. This view was recently echoed by Rabbi Norman Lamm who stated that “a secular body such as the Knesset is not the right forum to determine halakhic issues.” Rabbi J. David Bleich has suggested that the Law of Return be restricted to naturally born Jews. Converts would then apply for naturalization, and there could be no objection if “State officials, without in any way passing on matters of halakhah, use objective judgment in considering even technically invalid conversion as evidence of a convert’s sincere desire to identify with the aspirations and common destiny of the citizens of the State of Israel.”
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These are attempts to defuse the crisis, and ultimately to take it out of the purview of legislation. But the substantive issue remains. No Orthodox authority disputes the invalidity of non-halakhic conversions. The problem persists, erupting occasionally, smoldering continually, threatening to shatter the fragile coalition of world Jewry and splitting it between Orthodoxy and the non-Orthodox, religious and secular, Israel and the diaspora.
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Identity and Survival
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In this chapter we have considered only a few of the leading themes of the contemporary debate on Jewish identity, its content and criteria. We have argued that neither the imposed identity created by antisemitism, nor the vicarious identity lent by Israel to the diaspora, represent coherent visions of a Jewish life. They embody latent conflicts and ambivalences. They hover awkwardly between a desire for normalization and an assertive singularity. They focus on Jewish survival without giving inner meaning to that survival.
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We then turned to the minimalist identity traced out by a school of contemporary Jewish sociologists, and given religious legitimation in some of the policies of the American Reform movement. We raised the question of how far Jewishness could be divorced from Judaism, and how far Judaism could be subordinated to Jewishness. The issue came to the fore in the question of Jewish status: Who is a Jew? Here the possibility of eventual schism remains disturbingly real. As diaspora Jewish ethnicity is increasingly evacuated of traditional religious content, what is local in Jewish life becomes more prominent than what is universal. Whether a shared concept of Jewish peoplehood can long endure such a process is open to doubt.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 6; What Is a Jew?.88
We have argued that the problems of Jewish survival outlined in the previous chapter cannot be divorced from the problems of Jewish identity surveyed in this. Both are symptoms of the secularization of a religious tradition. The question that arises, therefore, is: What has been the fate of that section of the Jewish world that has held tenaciously and on principle to the classic terms of the tradition? What has been the fate of Orthodoxy in the last two decades?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.1
The Reemergence of Orthodoxy
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.2
In 1929 a young American Orthodox rabbi, Oscar Fasman, had just completed his rabbinic training. He and his fellow graduates were about to set out on a career of teaching Torah and ministering to congregations in the Midwest of America. “We were not,” he recalls, “overly optimistic about our chances of success.” Around them, Jews had virtually abandoned kashrut and Shabbat. Reform was the dominant presence. Such Orthodox synagogues as there were, were small, poor, and largely comprised of elderly immigrants. Tradition seemed fated to extinction. Even some of the Orthodox synagogues had decided to meet Reform halfway by abolishing the mechitzah, the barrier between the sexes, in favor of mixed seating at services. One of Fasman’s teachers at the seminary described his own role as “being available to recite, a generation or so later, the final kaddish for Orthodoxy.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.3
If this was true of the new world, it was true also of the old. At around the same time, the outstanding scholar and saint of East European Orthodoxy, R. Israel Meir ha-Cohen, the Chafetz Chayyim, was lamenting the collapse of religious life in the wake of the upheavals of the First World War. “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. The mind compels one to believe that it will not be long before our righteous Messiah will come.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.4
Orthodoxy was in retreat. In Germany it had long been threatened by the Jewish desire for acculturation. In Eastern Europe it was now being confronted by revolution. Young Jews were joining socialist or communist organizations. Jewish girls were involved in the emerging feminist movements. Those who felt their Jewishness most strongly, expressed it in a stridently secular Zionism. In America, Judaism was disintegrating in the pursuit of opportunity. Orthodoxy – everywhere, it seemed – evoked images of an old and outworn order. Such was the prevailing mood in 1933.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.5
And if before the Second World War, Orthodoxy appeared to be dying, the war itself and its aftermath seemed to seal its fate. The last remaining hinterlands of traditional faith in Central and Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust. An era was ended. From now on Jewish life would be focused on two centers, Israel and America, in both of which secularization had proceeded faster than anywhere else.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.6
Since 1912, when the leaders of European Orthodoxy dissociated themselves from the Zionist movement by forming Agudat Yisrael, the momentum of Zionism had been almost wholly secular. There were small enclaves of Orthodoxy in the old yishuv of pre-1880 settlers. There was a group of religious Zionists, mainly represented by Mizrachi, who remained in dialogue with the secularists. But the dominant voice belonged to Zionist socialism, which, though it took over some of the language and symbolism of tradition, was either hostile or indifferent to religion.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.7
Nachman Syrkin, one of the movement’s ideologists, had written that “Zionist socialism sees in the applied Jewish religion, which is not a religion but a tragedy, the major impediment confronting the Jewish nation on the road to culture, science, freedom.” The focus of Zionist Socialism was not God but the Jewish people itself. The biblical phrase “who can tell the glories of God” became, in a popular song of the time, “who can tell the glories of Israel.” History seemed to concur in its verdict. The Jews who had faith in Heaven had stayed in Europe and been murdered. The Jews who had faith in themselves had gone to Israel and been victorious in the War of Independence. Orthodoxy was part of galut, exilic consciousness. Galut was a chapter that had ended in tragedy. Jewish history had moved on.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.8
In America, meanwhile, Jews were on the road to achieving what they had sought in Europe, social integration and economic success. America’s individualism did not sit easily with the disciplines and restraints of halakhah. Nor was there the stabilizing influence of an extant tradition. American Jewry was newborn. It had no institutions carried over from premodern Jewish life. The German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century brought Reform with them, and they developed it in radical rather than conservative directions. By 1883, at the dinner given to honor the first graduating class of the Reform rabbinical seminary, the Hebrew Union College, the menu consisted of clams, crab, oysters, and shrimp. The pursuit of Americanness had become the new faith of America’s Jews. One Jewish writer, recalling his childhood in the 1920s, describes how at the age of five he first asked his mother what his religion was. “If anyone ever asks you that again,” his mother replied, “just tell them you’re an American.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.9
The Orthodox leaders of Eastern Europe advised their alumni to avoid taking rabbinical positions in America. It was a treifa medinah, an impure land. As a result, Orthodoxy and its rabbinate lacked organization, authority, and prestige. Jews in the urban ghettos placed their children in state schools. Jewish education, such as it was, came through chadarim, after-school classes, remembered by those who attended them for their ramshackle premises, arbitrary discipline, and pedagogically untrained teachers. Yeshivah scholars did arrive in America, but often left disillusioned. One observer wrote in 1910 that parents pay Hebrew teachers “only the going price for the job, which is generally not enough either to live on or to die – and thus schoolmastering has become a low, despised trade…chosen only by a man who has tried his luck at every trade and skill, who sees that his stars of success are extinct and that lifelong darkness awaits him.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.10
The dynamic of congregational life rested with lay rather than rabbinic leaders. Restless with an Orthodoxy that seemed not to understand America, not yet ready for a Reform that seemed Germanic, exclusive, and cold, the second generation created its own pragmatic compromise. The Conservative Judaism that emerged was marked by a sharp divergence between theory and practice. Theory was taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary; practice was dictated by the conventions of Jewish suburbia. The younger members of the congregation observed neither kashrut nor Shabbat, but they expected their rabbi to do so. The rabbi’s contract came up for regular renewal, so major confrontations on religious principle were ill-advised. In such an environment, the march of acculturation seemed inevitable. Orthodoxy was for the immigrants, the old, the undereducated, the poor. It was the lowest rung on the social ladder which all were expected to climb.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.11
Caught between a secularist Israel and a secularizing America, the end of Orthodoxy was in sight.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.12
Orthodoxy in America
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.13
So Charles Liebman’s conclusion in 1965 seemed eccentric, if not wishful thinking. For he ended his study of “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life” with the judgment that “the only remaining vestige of passion in America resides in the Orthodox community.” There is, he said, “a recognition and admiration for Orthodoxy as the only group which today contains within it a strength and will to live that may yet nourish all the Jewish world.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.14
By the 1980s that prognosis had been fully vindicated. Orthodoxy flourishes in both America and Israel. In America Jewish day schools, overwhelmingly an Orthodox phenomenon, had increased from some thirty establishments after the war to 587 by 1986. The Jewish day school had initially been opposed as a barrier to Jewish integration in America. But between 1962 and 1986, the enrollment at such schools more than doubled, from 60,000 to 130,000.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.15
Yeshivot, too, have proliferated and expanded. Prior to the war, the tone of American Orthodoxy had been set by the combination of Jewish and secular study represented by Yeshiva College, now Yeshiva University, and its bet ha-midrash, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). The pragmatic character of American Jewry demanded such a synthesis. An institution devoted exclusively to talmudic study for its own sake seemed untenable. Today, yeshivot like Lakewood, Ner Yisroel, Torah Vodaath, Rabbi Chaim Berlin, Telshe, and Mir dominate Orthodoxy, to the extent that the authority of the congregational rabbi has been displaced by that of the rosh yeshivah, or yeshivah head. Increasing numbers of students continue their yeshivah studies past marriage, in the kollelim attached to yeshivot or scattered, as outposts of learning, throughout the country. The Lithuanian tradition has been transplanted in America.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.16
So too has the chasidic tradition. Fleeing from Europe in the 1940s, two groups in particular made their home in New York: Lubavitch and Satmar. Under its present Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Lubavitch has grown into a worldwide movement of active outreach to uncommitted Jews. It has changed the profile of American Jewry with its mitzvah-mobiles, tefillin campaigns, Chabad houses, and its use of cable television, local radio, and international telephone links. Initially almost alone in its program of seeking out the alienated and estranged, it has won widespread support and emulation, and has created a strong presence in many hitherto neglected areas of Jewish life.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.17
Satmar, a more inward and enclosed movement localized in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, is deeply opposed to modern culture and to the State of Israel. But it too has grown rapidly through its own high birth rates, estimated at an average of between eight and ten children per family. There are currently some 28,000 students registered in Satmar educational institutions.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.18
The demographic implications are stunning. Conservative Judaism had seemed likely, in the 1960s, to be the future of American Jewry. But despite its nominal attachments to tradition, it has been weakened by the nonobservance and defections of its members. The chasidic community, meanwhile, has grown apace and through its intense social and educational structures has reversed the current of assimilation among its young. The demographic perspective was put arrestingly by Daniel Elazar: “It may be hard to believe,” he wrote, “but it is important to note that at the late 1984 wedding of two scions of the Satmar dynasty, the number of Jews packed into a single Long Island stadium for the nuptials equalled the whole body of authentic Conservative Jews.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.19
The old equation of social advance with acculturation and de-Judaization has been broken. Today there are successful Orthodox scientists, lawyers, psychiatrists, academics, and businessmen. Talmud classes take place at lunchtime in executive suites. The new Orthodox affluence is channeled into funding for its own educational institutions and their students. Recent surveys have shown that within the American Orthodox community, unprecedentedly, levels of observance increase between the third and fourth generations.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.20
Already by the mid-1970s, non-Orthodox observers were sharing Charles Liebman’s perception. The sociologist Marshall Sklare declared that “in less than three decades Orthodoxy has transformed its image from that of a dying movement to one whose strength and opinions must be reckoned within any realistic appraisal of the Jewish community.” The radical thinker Leonard Fein confessed himself shaken by the turn of the tide. “Look at the astonishing capacity of people who have entered – and conquered – the most modern precincts of the modern world, and who continue to celebrate the ancient tradition. And look also at the degree to which the rest of us have become defensive in the presence of the Orthodox. For now that we see that Orthodoxy cannot only make its peace with modernity, but actually thrive in the modern world, we are bound to confront the obvious question: is not the Orthodox way the authentic way?”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.21
Orthodoxy in Israel
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.22
A parallel development has taken place in Israel. There are, admittedly, deep differences between Israeli and American Judaism. There is, in Israel, no official Reform or Conservative presence. Orthodoxy exercises a hegemony over the religious establishment, and thus far Israel has resisted America’s split into denominations.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.23
The religious Jews who came to the land in the century prior to the state were Orthodox; the other settlers were secularists. Agudat Yisrael, abandoning its opposition to the state under the impact of events in Europe in the 1930s, eventually came to an agreement with David Ben-Gurion. In return for their support of the state’s proclamation, Ben-Gurion guaranteed that certain religious conditions would be met in public life. Shabbat would be the official day of rest. Kashrut would be maintained in public institutions. The state would fund a school system for the religious. Matters concerning personal status would be the province of religious courts.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.24
This, the so-called status quo agreement, has projected religious issues into the political domain where they are often fought with high contentiousness and publicity. Necessarily so, since at stake in Judaism in Israel are issues directly relating to the ethos of the state: among them the allocation of government expenditure, the creation of new settlements, and exemptions from military service. There are recurring tensions between secularists and religious groups. Each new social development – archaeological digs, postmortems, cinema clubs open on Shabbat, immodest advertisements – tends to be assessed against the status quo, with each side suspicious of the other’s incursions across the established boundaries.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.25
Orthodoxy in Israel is itself highly differentiated, between the religious establishment, the charedi or ultra-Orthodox community, the religious nationalists associated with Gush Emunim, and the traditionalists who make up the majority of the population. Each of these groups is in turn segmented. The charedi community is divided, for example, between the extreme anti-state Neturei Karta, the more moderate Agudat Yisrael, and the various chasidic circles. The religious nationalists are divided between territorial maximalists and a more accommodating wing. The fundamental issue in Israel is not, as it is in the diaspora, religious compromise with or resistance to a non-Jewish culture. It is the shape of a Jewish culture in a Jewish state. Between those who see Israel as the fulfillment of an ancient religious destiny and those who see it as a distinctly new chapter in Jewish history, the argument goes deep. Religion in the diaspora is a matter of private life and personal decision. In Israel it belongs to the public domain and to law.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.26
Judaism in Israel is not Judaism in the diaspora. But the same revival of Orthodoxy has taken place over the same period. The ultra-Orthodox groups have grown through their large families and their ability successfully to resist secularization. In 1947 the charedi community was lamenting, as Menachem Friedman has documented, “that the sons do not carry on the traditions of the fathers.” By 1982 it was declaring that “a youth has arisen here, great in numbers and high in quality, with an unprecedentedly erect spiritual bearing and an extremely firm self-awareness.” The number of students at yeshivot has eclipsed Eastern Europe at its height. The growing political strength of the charedi community has been evident in Israel’s last two general elections.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.27
Two developments in particular have shaken the assumptions of secular Zionists. The first was the teshuvah or religious return of many young and previously irreligious Israelis after the Six-Day War. The numbers were relatively small, but they included one or two prominent figures, and the development shocked parents by its unexpectedness. Janet Aviad, in her researches among the returnees, found that they made repeated reference to disillusionment with secular Israeli society. They criticized its materialism, emptiness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy, its absence of moral standards, and lack of authority. The events of 1967, as we have noted, produced a general awareness in Israel of the long history of antisemitism and its connection with anti-Zionism, and of the failure of the early dream of “normalization.” This too figured in the minds of the baalei teshuvah. They criticized Israel for seeking to be “like all the nations” and leveled against Zionism the phrase first coined by Isaac Breuer, that it represented “collective assimilation.” Judaism as halakhah represented an antidote to individualism and amoral behavior. Judaism as historical faith gave positive meaning to Israel’s unique destiny as a “people that dwells alone.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.28
The second development sent deeper shock waves through Israeli society. After the euphoria of the Six-Day War subsided, it became clear that many intellectuals among the kibbutz movement, hitherto Israel’s pioneering vanguard, were suffering from deep self-doubt about war, militarization, and the persistence of the Israel-Arab conflict. Their internal conversations were published in a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk, which received widespread attention. At the same time that this soul-searching was taking place, there was an opposite reaction on the part of a group of religious Zionists, many of them disciples of R. Avraham Kook’s son, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook. For them the war marked another stage in the redemptive process by which the whole of the biblical land would return to Israel’s jurisdiction. The Divine hand was once again evident in history. What was called for was courage in resisting any abandonment of destiny, induced by a secular interpretation of events. New settlements should be established in the territories of Judea and Samaria. R. Kook’s mysticism suddenly became actualized as a radical political program. Gush Emunim was born. Chalutziyut, the traditional Zionist mantle of the pioneering elite, had moved from the secular kibbutz to the new religious settlement.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.29
These two phenomena, together with the gradually increasing political power of the charedi community, have overturned many secular Israelis’ deepest conceptions of the nature of Zionism and the state. Amnon Rubinstein and Yehoshafat Harkabi, among others, have felt obliged to mount extended attacks on religious nationalism: oblique testimony to its power over the current popular imagination. Rubinstein charts the corresponding collapse of an earlier image of the secular Israeli as a new being, indomitable, the product of the soil, unbeset by galut hesitations, collectively minded, and courageous. He calls it “the end of the sabra myth.” Amos Oz, Israel’s leading novelist, reflects on the strength of charedi life, still resurgent after the Zionist revolution. “In a conversation twenty years ago, my teacher…said that Zionism was nothing more than a passing episode, a temporary mundane phenomenon of history and politics, but that Orthodox Judaism would reemerge, would swallow Zionism and digest it.” Then Oz dismissed the remark; now he can no longer do so. Leonard Fein’s remark that “the rest of us have become defensive in the presence of the Orthodox” applies equally to secularists in Israel.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.30
Leadership and Followership
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.31
Why the transformation? Partly it has to do with the extraordinary determination with which the survivors of the Holocaust set about rebuilding the lost world of Eastern Europe on American and Israeli soil. Here the full irony of Emil Fackenheim’s theology becomes clear. The determination not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory was most evident in those whose commitment to Jewish survival had nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with revelation, command, and religious vision. It was the chasidic leaders on the one hand, and the yeshivah heads on the other, who determined a policy of encouraging large families, building strong communities, and creating the educational institutions to support them.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.32
Their influence on America, in particular, was decisive. Never before had the community experienced Orthodox leadership of this stature. The Eastern European figures arrived determined to make no concessions to acculturation. The transformation of American Orthodoxy was in large measure due to the extraordinary inspiration and dedication of a handful of remarkable figures like R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch, R. Joel Teitelbaum of Satmar, R. Aaron Kotler, founder of Lakewood Yeshivah, and R. Shraga Mendlowitz, driving spirit of the Jewish day-school movement.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.33
In many cases, too, the leaders arrived along with their disciples. A certain community coherence and strength was possible from the outset. The new immigration was quite different from those that had preceded it. The East European Jews who had arrived in their millions after the pogroms of the 1880s had been in search of physical survival. Those who arrived in the 1930s and 1940s were bent on spiritual survival. They, the last to leave, had been the most tenacious in their determination to stay with their religious leaders. When they finally reached America they proved equally tenacious in helping their leaders build the old heim in a new land.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.34
We referred in a previous chapter to the unprecedented and quasi-parental authority of chasidic leaders over their followers and of yeshivah heads over their students and alumni. That authority proved crucial to the strength of their institutions in Europe, and it was to prove no less significant in America. It is most clearly embodied in the development of the concept of daas Torah. Literally this means “a or the Torah view” of a particular problem. It has come to mean, though, something more specific: the capacity of a gadol or “great Torah sage” to penetrate unerringly to the heart of an issue and deliver an almost prophetic judgment on it. “It assumes,” wrote one commentator, “a special endowment or capacity to penetrate objective reality, recognize the facts as they really are, and apply the pertinent halakhic principles. It is a form of ruach ha-kodesh (Divine inspiration) as it were, which borders, if only remotely, on the periphery of prophecy.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.35
In some respects this idea is at odds with halakhic tradition. Maimonides, for example, sharply distinguished between the prophet and the sage, as did R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes. A famous talmudic narrative describes how R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, though he was supported by a “heavenly voice,” was nonetheless defeated by the majority consensus of his colleagues. For this reason, daas Torah in its modern sense tends to be opposed by many within Orthodoxy who see halakhah as a rational discipline operating in the empirical world, open to argument and counter-argument and the development of consensus. They also see the new charisma with which the yeshivah head has been invested as subverting the traditional authority of the mara de-atra, the local rabbi.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.36
Argument aside, daas Torah has a specific function within the charedi community. It replaces the external power which the autonomous Jewish community once had over its members with an internalized equivalent. This too proved crucial in resisting the effects of secularization. To have large families, support children for an extended period in yeshivah and kollel, resist the blandishments of secular culture, and stay in close proximity to the Rebbe or yeshivah instead of moving to suburbia involves a massive series of sacrifices on the part of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Only a deep mutual relationship between leader and follower could support such patterns of obedience, and this has been the special strength of these communities. Alongside the gift of leadership, in other words, has gone the art of followership. No religious group which has made concessions to the individualism of contemporary culture and the consequent diffusion of religious authority can mobilize such adherence to the advice of its sages.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.37
The Environment of Orthodoxy
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.38
These are perhaps the most important internal factors. But there have been external factors as well. Until relatively recently, all Jewish groups – all minority ethnic groups generally – were under social and cultural pressure to conform to a national archetype; in a word, to assimilate. The modern state has tended, more recently, to recognize the value of indigenous cultures. Forcing the pace of assimilation often disrupted family life among immigrant populations and caused more problems than it solved. Most Western societies are today culturally pluralist. The distinctive dress of chasidim, for example, is no more exceptional than that of other ethnic groups, let alone of the more outré styles of dress among the young. Ethnic affirmation has become part of the diversity of urban life and has supported, instead of undermining, Jewish differentness.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.39
The residential patterns in the modern city also allow for the physical creation of the voluntary ghetto. In Jerusalem, for example, new suburbs are often religiously self-segregating. In New York, high mobility has meant that previous areas of Jewish concentration have been occupied by other ethnic groups. Only those committed to a particular chasidic community stay behind. The differences between such Jews and their neighbors reinforces their sense of isolation and togetherness which in turn strengthens community ties.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.40
Perhaps the most important single factor has been economic. Welfare provisions, rising standards of living, and the general extension of schooling has meant that families are able to support their children in yeshivah for increasing lengths of time. The availability of work for religious wives as teachers within the charedi school system allows them to serve as breadwinners while their husbands continue to study in kollel. The strong group loyalties within the community often facilitate the employment of yeshivah alumni in businesses in which there is a strong charedi presence, and compensate for the narrowing of career options for those without university degrees. As a Satmar chasid put it, “Many of our yunge leit, young people, make more money than your college graduates.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.41
Contemporary culture, then, has been more open to the distinctive lifestyle of Orthodox Jews than was the case a half century ago. But these considerations alone do not begin to explain why Orthodoxy has come to have a prominence in the contemporary Jewish world out of all proportion to its numbers. Here we approach the heart of the matter. Jewish survival has come to seem to many Jews – Reform, Conservative, ethnic, and secular – to be a primary value. After the trauma of the Holocaust and the travails of Israel, the Jewish people has gone through too much simply to disappear through its own indifference and slow disintegration.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.42
Charles Liebman has spoken of “the sense of many non-Orthodox Jews I know that the Orthodox are the real Jewish survivors.” That sense is well-justified in terms of the evidence accumulated in this chapter. In this century the chasidic and yeshivah worlds have risen, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Holocaust. Though it is less often noted, the same was true of earlier crises. Hirsch’s Frankfurt, R. Sofer’s Pressburg, and R. Chaim’s Yeshivah of Volozhyn were powerful responses to cataclysmic social change. In each case, after an initial period of defensiveness and disarray, Orthodox leadership evolved survival strategies which, if they did not save a generation, preserved at least a minority intensely dedicated to safeguarding the tradition. The revaluation of Orthodoxy was already taking place in enlightened German circles in the 1920s, and it is taking place today for the same reason. When survival heads the Jewish agenda, Orthodoxy takes on a significance far beyond its own ranks. What, then, is the secret of its endurance in an open society?
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.43
Tradition, Marriage, and the Family
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.44
The question takes us directly to the concerns of the previous two chapters. How has Orthodoxy resisted the processes by which Jewish identity is diffused and diluted in contemporary culture? The first factor concerns intermarriage. Running through all the alternatives to Orthodoxy that surfaced in the nineteenth century was a profound desire for “normalization,” whether individual or national, most clearly expressed in the programs of radical Reform on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other. To this, Orthodoxy could not accede, for it went against the fundamental thrust of tradition in which to be a Jew was to be a member of a singular, different, and chosen people.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.45
Reform in particular has paid a heavy price for its accommodation to assimilation, its abandonment of kashrut and the disciplines of Shabbat. High rates of intermarriage were the inevitable consequence. There is something approaching bad faith in the pursuit of social integration on the one hand and the disapproval of mixed marriage on the other. Recent surveys of New York Jews have highlighted the importance of the religious factor in marriage decisions. In families with a “high” level of ritual observance, children are one-fifth or one-sixth as likely to intermarry. In those with a “medium” level of observance, they are about half as likely to do so. The highest rates are in those where the level of observance is “low.” No other variable shows as close a correlation. The most effective barrier against intermarriage is the discipline of distinctiveness and distance embodied in Jewish law.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.46
Second is the question of birth rates. Here too we noted a direct correlation between religious observance and the size of family. In America at present, Orthodoxy is the only group that is experiencing population growth. Within Orthodoxy itself the rate varies in direct proportion to commitment. Why should this be so? Here we can only speculate. Part of the answer is likely to be negative. Declining birth rates were a universal phenomenon in the wake of the industrial revolution, urbanization, rising standards of living, and a lowering of infant mortality rates. Jews responded to the times, only more so than others. Low birth rates are a general feature of modern society, due in part to the collapse of the extended family and a change in women’s role and self-perception. To the extent that Orthodoxy resists modernity – particularly in enclosed chasidic communities – it resists the complex social pressures toward small families.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 7; The Reemergence of Orthodoxy.47
But there is surely more to it than this. Peru u-revu, the imperative of having children, is the Torah’s first command. There are halakhic reservations about birth control and abortion. Generational continuity – handing on the tradition to one’s children – is a primary religious duty and one that figures largely in the patterns of Jewish life. These are all factors within Judaism that militate in favor of demographic growth.
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No less significant is the degree of importance attached to Jewish concerns when making major choices of lifestyle. To have large families involves couples in economic sacrifice and restrictions of personal freedom and mobility. For the wife, it may interfere with a career. How the choice is eventually made will depend not only on what the couple value, but on the degree of priority some values hold over others. Orthodoxy is predicated not only on a high level of ritual observance, but on a willingness to forgo other considerations in favor of religious demands. In modern societies where religious behavior is voluntary, Orthodoxy has tended to be self-selecting in favor of those willing to make those sacrifices. Inevitably, then, it contains a higher proportion of those willing to place the imperative of raising children ahead of personal, economic, or career goals.

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.