Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

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

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Perhaps, too – and here we approach the unfathomable – part of the explanation lies in the different role of children in tradition-bound and modern societies. In traditional societies, the family was closely tied, economically, politically, and religiously, to the community. It transmitted shared values. It communicated established roles. There was, by modern standards, a close integration between communal and private life. Personal relationships played a less prominent role. As Edward Shorter has shown, “the traditional family was much more a productive and reproductive unit than an emotional unit…lineage was important, being together at the dinner table was not.”
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Peter Berger has written of the “invention of childhood” as one of the major revolutions of modernity. Philippe Aries has documented the emergence of this new concept of childhood as part of the rise of the European bourgeoisie. As the family was gradually separated from the work environment, it became instead a protected enclave away from the harsh outside world. The family was privatized and, in Berger’s words, “bourgeois childhood became sheltered, tender, even ‘sentimental.’” Berger has also pointed to the effect of the sharp decline in infant mortality. Until relatively recently, most children died. The fact that this shadow of potential anguish has been largely removed has, he argues, freed parents to “invest expectation in their children from the moment of birth that would have been quite unrealistic before.”
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The impact of these changing patterns on Jewish consciousness was immense. It left its traces on the literature – even the jokes – of several generations. Jews projected their intense expectations of economic, cultural, and social advance onto their children. In some cases, the strain was overwhelming. It is significant that the two major modern assaults on the family have come from within the Jewish world: Freud’s analysis of parent-child relationships as the source of neurosis, and the kibbutz vision of the family as the source of capitalism. Bruno Bettelheim, in his study of communal child-rearing in the kibbutz, Children of the Dream, notes that the early settlers feared that the family unit would disrupt the sense of community and would transmit “exilic” attitudes – sentimentality and individualism. There was also, he notes, a deep anxiety on the part of the early kibbutz women that they could not match their own mothers’ example of devotion to children.
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These reactions are the obverse side of the preternatural child-centeredness of modern Jewish families, a phenomenon that would take several studies to document. Diaspora Jews are notable not for their number of childless families, but for the preponderance of small families. Might this not be related to the high level of individuation within the Jewish family, and the degree of emotional investment in each child? If so, the greater community-centeredness of chasidic and yeshivah families might represent an important defusion of family stress and a release of some of the anxieties of child-raising. Paradoxically, the larger family size of the extremely Orthodox may be due to the fact that they are in some ways less child-oriented than the Jews of suburbia.
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Be this as it may, the Orthodox community represents the one striking exception to a general Jewish demographic decline. The fact is significant in itself, all the more so in light of the accumulating evidence that government pro-natalist policies have no significant effect on fertility decisions in the long run. Again, the religious factor has proved the most decisive.
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Orthodoxy and Diaspora Zionism
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Equally striking is the impact of Orthodoxy on the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. As we noted, one of Israel’s continuing concerns has been the low levels of aliyah from secure and prosperous diaspora communities. Since the Six-Day War a clear trend has emerged. Prior to that time, research indicated that religious motivation did not play a significant part in the decision of those who chose to leave America for Israel. Since then, it has done so. Calvin Goldscheider found that among those who made aliyah in years 1969–1970, 37 percent defined themselves as Orthodox. More recently, Chaim Waxman found that this had risen to more than half of those who chose or were contemplating aliyah in 1986. The percentage is remarkable given the fact that Orthodoxy is usually estimated as the affiliation of only some 10 percent of American Jews. Orthodox Jews are, in other words, highly and increasingly overrepresented among those who move to Israel.
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Waxman suggests why this has occurred. Orthodox boys and girls, particularly the alumni of Jewish day schools, are likely to spend a year or more in Israel at yeshivot and seminaries. This period in Israel, at an important time for making life decisions, may be one factor. Many of the yeshivot themselves stress the importance of aliyah as a religious obligation. In addition, Waxman argues, Orthodox Jews are more likely than others to place Jewishness at the center of their lives and as a result seek a more completely Jewish environment than can be found in the diaspora. Of great importance is Waxman’s conclusion. The secular Zionist argument for aliyah, he suggests, has become untenable. It rests on the premise that Jewish life is insecure and unsupportable in the diaspora. This simply conflicts with American Jews’ perception of their own reality. “The Jew who views the state of American Jewry positively and therefore does not subscribe to an imperative of shelilat ha-golah [negation of the diaspora] will not view aliyah as an imperative without religious backing. The Orthodox Jew, on the other hand, can view the state of American Jewry positively and nevertheless subscribe to aliyah as a religious imperative.”
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Orthodoxy is important to the Israel-diaspora relationship in another way, which became apparent during the Lebanon war in the early 1980s. Israel had hitherto loomed large in the identities of many secular and non-Orthodox Jews in the diaspora. It had been a source of pride and self-respect. The critical reaction of Western media, beginning with television pictures of the bombing of Beirut, and culminating recently in the Palestinian intifada, imposed a severe strain on the relationship. To be sympathetic to Israel’s policies, Jews in Europe and America had to discount much of what they read and saw in the media, and to take a stance against the mood of public opinion. It was noticeable that much of the Jewish criticism of Israel came from Reform and secularist quarters, and that Orthodox Jews were generally more supportive.
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This is not to suggest that Jews of any denomination or none were equivocal in their attachment to the state and its people. But it nonetheless points to an important dimension of diaspora attitudes. Jews tend to assume, for the most part, a principled harmony between their own and others’ interests. This is a central component of post-emancipation diaspora ideology. Orthodoxy, by contrast, is more ready to assume a measure of dissonance between Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes. It embodies a kind of “hermeneutic of distance” from its surrounding culture. Thus, when public opinion is hostile to Israel, this accords more readily with Orthodox than non-Orthodox expectations. At such moments, Orthodox Jews may find it easier than others to identify with Israel’s plight.
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Rethinking Modernity
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Ultimately, though, the current salience of Orthodoxy has to do with a profound reevaluation of the Jewish experience of modernity, a cumulative and revolutionary shift in attitudes away from assumptions that had prevailed for almost two hundred years. The disappearance of Orthodoxy, we recall, was predicted on three different grounds. First, with emancipation, Jews were entering a new era of universalism, tolerance, and enlightenment. The traditions of Judaism, particularist as they were, seemed radically inappropriate to this unfolding world. Second, with the development of secular Zionism, Judaism seemed to represent all that was lamentable about the Jew in exile. Israel would produce a new human type, free of the burden of an ancient and emasculating religious heritage. Third, and more generally, religion was destined for eclipse in the modern world. The commanding past held no resonance for a society turned toward the future. Religious authority was out of place in a culture that encouraged individualism. Religious belief was no longer needed to make sense of a universe mapped by science and mastered by technology. In the last two decades, each of these beliefs has been shaken if not displaced.
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The first, belief in the power of enlightenment to enlighten, was broken by the Holocaust. George Steiner and Emil Fackenheim have charted in searing detail the failure of high German culture to stand as a barrier against attempted genocide. “We know now,” writes Steiner, “that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work in Auschwitz in the morning.” The Orthodox critique of secular humanism, evident even in a thinker as positively disposed toward emancipation as Samson Raphael Hirsch, has come to seem tragically justified. The Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz frankly admits that “as long as confidence in human-kind and in Western civilization remained high, devout Orthodoxy seemed out of the question. Entering the 1980s, that optimism has been shattered.” The result has been “Orthodoxy’s emergence as a living option for modern Jews.”
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The second belief, that a secular Israel would be a radical break from the religious past, has become progressively untenable since 1967. Israel’s isolation, the continued hostility of her Arab neighbors, and the rise of anti-Zionism were inexplicable in the classic premises of Israel’s secular founders. So was the persistence of diaspora Jewry. Nor did American Jewry accord with the archetype of the “galut Jew” constructed by Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Syrkin. There was, too, what Liebman and Don-Yehiyah call a “legitimacy crisis” after the Six-Day War as a new Palestinian voice was heard challenging Israel’s right to the land. Increasingly, Israelis turned toward the Bible as the source of the Jewish right to the land of the promise to the patriarchs.
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In the new vocabulary of public discourse Israelis rediscovered their links with the Jewish past and the diaspora, symbolized by the opening of Bet ha-Tefutsot, the Museum of the Diaspora, in 1979. The connecting factor was Judaism, and its symbols became correspondingly more prominent. Discontent with secularism and materialism, of the kind that lay behind the teshuvah movement, also confounded an assumption stated most forcibly by Jacob Klatzkin. “In longing for our land,” he had written, “we do not desire to create there a base for the spiritual values of Judaism. To regain our land is for us an end in itself…living in the land is ipso facto the national life.” By the 1970s this answer was no longer sufficient. Something more was needed to explain the uniqueness of life in Israel. Those who sought “normalization,” anonymity, and material affluence were finding it in yeridah, not aliyah. As Israelis were challenged to redefine the character of society and state, classic religious terminology increasingly displaced the language of secularism.
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The third belief, in modernity itself, has suffered a similar retreat. Liberal individualism, since the 1970s, has seemed an inadequate basis for personal meaning, lasting relationships, stable institutions, or moral coherence. A search for tradition and historical depth has been apparent across a wide range of disciplines, in the cultural critiques of George Steiner and Allan Bloom, the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stuart Hampshire, and Michael Walzer, and the biblical scholarship of Brevard Childs. Belief in the unlimited power of technology has given way to concern for the future of the environment. Belief in the power of political revolution has yielded to the realization that the twentieth century has witnessed tyranny and oppression on an unprecedented scale. The authors of the recent survey of American society, Habits of the Heart, conclude that “there is a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us…. Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.”
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It was on this point, perhaps more than any other, that Orthodoxy parted company with other Jewish identities in the nineteenth century. The belief in revelation and tradition is belief in the power of the past to command the present. That orientation was profoundly at odds with the Enlightenment assumptions of evolution and progress. Orthodoxy demanded a sense of human finitude, of humility in the face of mystery, of obedience in the presence of the Divine word, that ran counter to a century of confidence in the power of human reason and autonomy. In the late twentieth century these perceptions have acquired a new urgency and relevance.
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Coming Home
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We have argued, in this chapter, two propositions, the first straightforward, the second controversial and contestable. The first is that Orthodoxy is at the height of a renaissance, one that was unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable half a century ago. The second is that Orthodoxy raises questions that must be confronted by anyone concerned with Jewish survival.
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Can intermarriage be stemmed other than by a renewal of the disciplines of Jewish law? Can the Jewish demographic decline be reversed other than by relocating the family within the structure of religious community? Can the links between Israel and the diaspora be sustained on a secular base? Can Israel explain itself to itself other than through the categories of tradition?
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Implicit in these questions is the judgment that the terms on which Jewish identities have been constructed since the emancipation have become, in the last two decades, increasingly inadequate to the challenge of Jewish survival. The conventional Orthodox view would be that they were in error from the outset. The more mystical view, to be found in the work of R. Avraham Kook, is that they were part of a providential process, necessary to their time, the antithesis to Orthodoxy’s thesis, ultimately to merge in a new synthesis. Either way, retrospective judgment is not our present concern. The future is.
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One word has recurred periodically throughout twentieth-century Jewish thought, in the work of R. Avraham Kook and R. Soloveitchik, the philosophy of Emil Fackenheim, the literature of religious Zionism, and language of modern yeshivot. The word is teshuvah, “return” or “coming home.” It has meant many things in different contexts: the return of Jews to their land, language, and political independence, to their sense of peoplehood and particularism, and to their religious tradition.
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Our underlying thesis has been that these senses are essentially connected, fused more than linguistically in a single word. The concept of a covenantal people, constituted by the terms of the revelation at Sinai, and bound thereby to a way of life, a land, and a religious destiny, gives Jewish identity a coherence and compelling power unrivaled by any contemporary alternative. Judaism paid a heavy price for the complex set of alienations from that vision induced by European emancipation. Jewish identity became problematic. Jewish survival was questioned. The Jewish people was fragmented.
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There is no immediate way of undoing the effects of modernity. But there is a path that leads away from it, slow, tentative, and tense though the journey may be. The path is that of teshuvah, a renewed dialogue with the terms of tradition and its unified vision of a people, a way of life, and a land. That dialogue, we believe, will be the theme of Jewish post-modernity.
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Assimilationism and Assimilation
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Jacob Neusner, not an Orthodox scholar himself, poses the fateful question:
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When you consider the power of Judaism, realized most fully and profoundly in Orthodoxy, you must wonder why every Jew should not be Orthodox and Judaic – not merely Jewish. The grandeur of the Judaic perspective on humanity, the extraordinary relevance of that perspective to everyday practice, the ineffable beauty of the consequent way of living, a holy way of living, separate and distinct, in full measure congruent with the profound meaning of our mortality and our human striving – what is life without that vision? And how can people turn their backs on it?
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He continues, “And yet, the great majority of North American Jews who choose to be religious also choose not to be Orthodox, and a near majority of them choose not to be religious at all.” For this is the paradox. A new and surprisingly widespread set of attitudes has emerged in the last two decades, sharply at odds with assumptions that had governed most of Jewish life since the emancipation. We have charted the transformation through a series of unexpected developments that were brought into sharp and revelatory focus around the Six-Day War. That transformation ought to have brought about a turn toward Orthodoxy. But apart from the much publicized but numerically insignificant chozrim bi-teshuvah, religious returnees, the shift has not taken place. Orthodox parents have more children than others, and they are more successful in retaining or even increasing their commitment. What Orthodoxy has not succeeded in doing is generating a large-scale move by Reform, Conservative, or secular Jews to its ranks.
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Why not? Jewish thought has, after all, turned inward and particularist, and Orthodoxy was the most particularist of nineteenth-century Jewish identities. Jewish concern has centered on survival, and Orthodox Jews are the virtuosi of survival. Jewish reflection has become more traditional and more textual. It has sought to make connections with the past. All these attributes point to Orthodoxy. Jews have been concerned to establish firm and coherent links between Israel and the diaspora. Again, as we have shown, those links are most lucidly made within an Orthodox perspective. Above all, Jews have found meaningful the concept of Jewish peoplehood, the shared history and destiny that links Jews throughout space and time. That concept, as we have shown, is fraught with ambivalence when stated in terms of radical Reform, transformationist sociology, or secular Zionism. Orthodoxy, with its principled identification – substantive as well as sentimental – with the collective body of Jews, past, present, and future, is the natural vehicle of peoplehood.
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Thus Orthodoxy, for almost two centuries militantly or defensively at odds with prevailing Jewish attitudes, has become the most cogent expression of Jewish aspirations. But it has not become the dominant affiliation of either American or Israeli Jews. Figures drawn from the 1980s show that only 13 percent of Jews in New York identify as Orthodox, 11 percent in Miami, 6 percent in Chicago, and 3 percent in Washington. The most recent and thus far unpublished national survey, conducted by Paul Ritterband and Barry Kosmin, shows that 9 percent of Jews across nine cities identify as Orthodox, 30 percent as Reform, and 34 percent as Conservative. To be sure, Orthodox Jews are more likely to join synagogues than others: among synagogue members, the Orthodox percentage rises to 16. Equally important is that the outflow from Orthodoxy, so dramatic in the past, has ceased. A survey conducted in New York in the early 1980s showed that 56 percent of first-generation Americans were Orthodox, 20 percent of the second generation, 10 percent of the third, and 13 percent of the fourth. American Orthodoxy, having lost three generations, is retaining the fourth. But it remains a marginal and minority presence.
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America, as the saying goes, is different. In Anglo-Jewry a full 75 percent of Jews are still affiliated with Orthodox synagogues. In Israel there are no official denominational alternatives: no recognized Reform or Conservative rabbinate. Unlike diaspora communities, Jewish identity is not primarily expressed in religious forms and synagogue membership. To be Jewish is to live in a Jewish state. Nonetheless, the broad majority of the population is not “Orthodox” but “traditional.” An increasing number of Israelis describe themselves as “religious,” but in a loose sense that comprises folk customs, observance of the major festivals, and identification with Israel’s new “civil religion.” These vast differences are more institutional than substantive, for it is clear that “Orthodoxy” means different things among the different countries. The average Jew in America, Israel, and Britain might well display a similar profile of religious observance. But in America he would probably be affiliated with the Conservative movement, in Britain, a member of a mainstream Orthodox synagogue, and in Israel he would define himself religiously without reference to a synagogue.
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Secularism and Secularization
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The situation can be summed up thus: the return to Orthodox attitudes has not been accompanied by a return to Orthodox affiliation or faith or religious practice. Why so? Firstly, the institutional forms that emerged in the nineteenth century have proved surprisingly persistent. Nineteenth-century German and American Reform was universalist, anti-ritual, anti-Zionist, and anti-ethnic. Late twentieth-century American Reform, as described by its leading exponent Eugene Borowitz, is particularism interested in ritual, pro-Zionist, and ethnic. Yet it remains Reform, and its membership is high and rising. Its social function, too, has changed. A critical observer might say that in the nineteenth century it gave a religious legitimation to acculturation and social integration. He might say that in the present it gave a religious legitimation to intermarriage. Reform scholars themselves have said both these things. But a function remains: not one that could ever be acceded to by Orthodoxy, but one that self-evidently meets the wishes of a large percentage of American Jews.
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Institutions persist beyond the causes that brought them into being. And Jewish thought in the modern age has tended to be institutional. The irony is that while the aims of radical Reform and secular Zionism – diaspora integration and the State of Israel – have long since been achieved and no longer need to be argued, thought tends to be conducted within the lines of those ideologies. Some of the most arresting modern Jewish thought – the work of Michael Wyschogrod, Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, and Eliezer Schweid, for example – is a conscious attempt to break down the dichotomies between Orthodox and non-Orthodox, religious and secular. But because it lacks an institutional base, it remains intriguing rather than influential.
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The institutional persistence of nineteenth-century Jewish forms is one reason for the failure of a return to Orthodoxy. The other is the continued secularization of Jewish life in both Israel and the diaspora. Here we must distinguish between process and intent. There is a difference between assimilationism and assimilation, secularism and secularization. The one signifies a conscious goal, the other an unplanned, even an unwanted tendency.
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In the nineteenth century there were significant numbers of Jews who sought deliberately to merge into non-Jewish society. They were assimilationists. There were others – among them culturalists, Yiddishists, Bundists, and Zionists – who sought to eradicate the religious component from Jewish identity. They were secularists. One of the great ironies of that time is that the assimilationists failed to assimilate and the secularists were not secular. As Theodor Herzl noted on the one hand, “We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live…[but] in our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens.” As R. Kook noted on the other, the great East European secularists were often deeply religious figures – one thinks here of Bialik’s love of tradition, Syrkin’s utopianism, A.D. Gordon’s mysticism of land and labor. Many of them came from distinguished rabbinic families, were alumni of the great yeshivot and had their intellectual roots in the traditional learning and literature. They were rebels dialectically related to the religion they rejected.
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In contemporary Jewry the irony has been compounded, for the situation has been reversed. Jews no longer seek to assimilate, but they are increasingly assimilated, measured against a whole range of indices: intermarriage, high social and economic profile, low rates of religious observance, a decline in residential clustering, and all the other registers of diaspora Jewish integration. Nor do they seek to be secular. To the contrary, as documented by Jonathan Woocher in America and Liebman and Don-Yehiyah in Israel, even highly secular Jewish contexts – fundraising, political activism, and the symbols of statehood – have become infused with religious symbolism. But this does not mean that they have thereby become religious. To the contrary, what has emerged is “civil religion,” a process whereby a set of symbols, values, and rituals – often borrowed from a religious tradition – is used to integrate and legitimate a social order. The language of civil religion is religious. But its focus is secular. At its heart is not God but society.
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Thus process stands opposed to intent. There are few Jews today, fewer still among the young, who endorse a conscious strategy of assimilation or a principled Jewish secularism. Yet assimilation and secularization proceed apace. As religion becomes more marginal to the practical concerns of society and is relegated to the status of one among many leisure-time activities, both processes take place. Thus it can come about that Jewish attitudes grow more Orthodox, while Jewish behavior grows less so.
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Institutional Logic
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There is a further irony. One word often used to describe the contemporary Jewish situation is “polarization.” The term is misleading. Jewry, as we have seen, was effectively polarized in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It was then that the fierce intellectual battles were fought between protagonists and opponents of enlightenment and emancipation, Orthodoxy and Reform, Zionism and diasporism, between those who saw Jewish identity in religious terms and those who gave it, instead, national, political, cultural, or ethnic interpretations. Those confrontations have to a large extent abated. But what is fought in one generation as a clash of ideas is enacted, a century later, as sociological reality. And one legacy of the past is particularly disturbing.
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A tacit assumption of almost all strands of nineteenth-century Jewish thought was that the revolutions that were shaking Jewish life were the equivalent of an ecological upheaval. A Darwinian natural selection was taking place in which only the fittest would survive. The early radical Reformers tended to see Orthodoxy as an archaic survival of the ghetto that would be eclipsed by the forces of modernity. Many Orthodox observers, for their part, saw Reform as a barely disguised form of assimilation that would be the instrument of its own demise. It was too diluted to secure Jewish continuity against the pressures of intermarriage. The early Zionists, with few exceptions, saw the diaspora as doomed, whether as Pinsker and Herzl thought, through antisemitism, or as Klatzkin argued, through assimilation. The anti-Zionists were no less negative in seeing Zionism as politically dangerous, religiously subversive, and practically unworkable.
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The rhetoric of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish thought, with its internecine hostilities and undertones of selective survival, is distasteful to a post-Holocaust age. More importantly, it has simply proved false. Israel exists. The diaspora survives. There are still Reform Jews. Orthodoxy flourishes. This is a consequence no one had foreseen. The various philosophies and ideologies that animated Jews had been couched in terms of an explicit or implicit negation of alternatives. Each school of thought profoundly believed that only it would survive. As a result, few contemplated the complex plurality that is contemporary Jewry. Coming to terms with the existence of alternatives was not an item on the intellectual agenda of Jewry a century ago. The word “pluralism” has only been heard relatively recently in a Jewish context.
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The result has been that the various segments of the Jewish world have defined their futures in terms of institutional logic rather than through sustained reflection on the Jewish people as a whole. From such a narrow perspective, strange and incompatible conclusions can be drawn. Diaspora sociologists, for example, have evolved a concept of ethnicity that allows American Jewry to conclude that it is surviving, even reviving. At the same time, and on the basis of the same evidence, Israeli sociologists have concluded that it is fast assimilating and disintegrating.
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Orthodoxy, contemplating its own remarkable growth, has concluded rightly that its future is secure, and wrongly that the future of other dimensions of Jewish life is insecure. For Conservative and Reform leaders in America note that Orthodoxy has made few inroads into their own ranks, and that they remain overwhelmingly the majority affiliations. The Reform movement in particular can take comfort from the results of a recent New York Jewish survey which showed that while only 9 percent of first-generation Americans identify with it, 40 percent of the third generation and 51 percent of the fourth do so. That halakhic doubts exist about the Jewish status of a significant proportion of these members is, from the point of view of institutional logic, of minor concern. For it is precisely Reform’s openness to mixed marriages and other problematic identities that has secured its growth. As for Orthodox delegitimation, Reform scholars have argued that since it is unlikely that Reform would be legitimated by Orthodoxy under any circumstance, no particular policy can make matters worse than they already are.
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Once Reform has thus severed its links with halakhic criteria of Jewish identity, it can claim, in the recent words of Norman Mirsky, to be “the only American Jewish religious movement that truly has the religious survival of the Jew and Judaism at heart.” These are sobering words in light of the fact that the policies that lie behind them have been described, by Conservative, Orthodox, and even some Reform thinkers, as threatening the entire structure of Jewish peoplehood. They serve to show quite how differently the same reality can be viewed from different perspectives.
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Pluralism
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In short, a situation can arise in which Orthodoxy, Reform, Israel, and the diaspora can each claim, within their own terms of reference, that the Jewish future is bright and that they are its inheritors. Each can argue that the others are insecure and under threat. These four ways of interpreting the present are radically incompatible with one another. But they reinforce the reluctance of each to come to terms with the existence of the others. Why should they? They will survive; the others will not. Thus, a way of thinking that had its origins in the nineteenth century still controls contemporary perceptions despite the fact that it has become radically inappropriate.
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The situation arises because each group has a different definition of what Jewish existence is. An even more paradoxical phenomenon can occur. Each group can subscribe sincerely to a public rhetoric of Jewish unity, even while making that outcome increasingly less likely. For what Jewish unity means to Orthodox and Reform Jews are two quite different things. One endorses pluralism; the other does not. Each can speak of peoplehood, covenant, revelation, and mitzvah, seeming to have much in common, while differing profoundly in their understanding of those words. Israelis and Jews in the diaspora, for their part, can speak of Israel as home in two radically different senses.
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Meanwhile Orthodoxy and Reform, Israel and the diaspora, and the religious and secular publics in Israel itself have simply drifted apart in terms of culture, lifestyle, and intellectual assumptions. Their respective perceptions reinforce the fragmentation. Jewish peoplehood, even as it becomes more important to all four groups, becomes increasingly incoherent. The result is that the mirage of Jewish unity vanishes, the closer it is approached.
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None of this would necessarily signal collision were pluralism possible within a Jewish framework. It is not. For Judaism is defined in terms of revelation and tradition. It cannot embrace interpretations that, for example, reject the binding authority of halakhah. The classic beliefs of Judaism are not merely beliefs: they are constitutive of the covenant and thus of Jewish peoplehood. Orthodoxy, faithful to those beliefs, cannot admit a pluralism that would in effect legitimate their denial, secularization, or subjectivization. It is no accident that while there have been Orthodox rabbinic authorities who have placed a high value on tolerance, unity, and Jewish kinship, none since the birth of Reform has been willing to confer on it legitimacy as an interpretation of Judaism.
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Specifically, matters of personal status require a global consensus. As Michael Walzer has pointed out more generally, “The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community.” He adds, “Admission and exclusion are at the core of communal independence. They suggest the deepest meaning of self-determination. Without them there could not be communities of character, historically stable, ongoing associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some special sense of their common life.” Who stands within and who outside the Jewish community is the criterion on which the existence of the community depends. If there are multiple answers, there are multiple communities, not a single people. The criterion admits of neither ambiguous nor plural answers. Pluralism at this primary level is impossible, even incoherent.
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There is, then, an asymmetry between Orthodoxy and Reform. Reform can concede legitimacy to Orthodoxy; Orthodoxy cannot do so to Reform. The same asymmetry exists between Israel and the diaspora. The golah can concede centrality to Israel; Israel cannot do so to the golah. This has nothing to do with secular Zionism, which based its negation of the diaspora on empirical premises: in one sense or another, diaspora Judaism could not survive. Instead it has to do with something deeper than Zionism: the place of the land of Israel in the Jewish imagination since Abram was first commanded to leave his father’s house and travel to “the land that I will show you.” Israel is home. Elsewhere is exile.
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Exile is dislocation, not only geographical but spiritual. Though the Jewish people experienced its greatest religious heights in exile – the revelation in the desert, the Talmud in Babylon, the poetry in Spain, the piety of medieval France and Germany – it remained conscious that it was in exile. Not until the nineteenth century did it seek to redefine exile as either mission or home. That was an aberration, tragic in retrospect, even as it is perpetuated in contemporary diaspora ambivalence about the meaning of the word galut. For Jewish peoplehood to be a concept that embraces a continuity of Jewish life, past, present, and future, there must be an asymmetry between Israel and the diaspora: the asymmetry between a permanent home and a temporary dwelling. That Jews have spent the vast majority of their history away from home and that most Jews today do not live there neither compromises nor contradicts the fact that Jewish life is a life lived toward Israel. A pluralism of “centers” of Jewish life is as unavailable as a pluralism of “truths” of Jewish faith.
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Identifying Home
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We arrive, then, in the late twentieth century at a series of paradoxes. Tradition has become more important to Jewish identity than any time since the birth of emancipation, while traditional behavior continues to decline. Israel is central to diaspora identity, while aliyah continues to decline. Jewish peoplehood is affirmed by all groups, but in different and incompatible ways. Jewish unity has come to seem both necessary and impossible. The various groups in the Jewish world are, by comparison with the nineteenth century, growing ideologically closer and existentially further apart. These are dilemmas which must surely be confronted. But by whom? And in what terms?
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionist movement made a fateful decision. Joseph Chamberlain had proposed to Theodor Herzl that a Jewish settlement be created in East Africa. From many perspectives, the scheme had overwhelming merits. Jews in Russia were in desperate straits in the wake of the Kishinev pogroms. Here was a secure refuge, a place where Jews could exercise autonomy and create their own society. The Uganda proposal, as it was called, had the support not only of Herzl but of a secularist like Israel Zangwill and a religious Zionist like R. Isaac Reines.
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Had it proceeded, it would have split the Zionist movement in two. It was rejected. The complex politics of the decision are one thing; the collective verdict of the Jewish people was another. Only the land of Israel is home. Not all Jews live in Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Jews live toward Israel. That fact creates mutual responsibilities between Israel and the diaspora, which constrain each, at times, from actions that would benefit themselves but harm the other. It supplies Jewish identity with a content and direction and an overarching unity. Nowhere else would have served this function; because nowhere else has for so long and so universally exercised its hold on the Jewish soul.
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In the late twentieth century, Jews face another fateful decision. Jews in the diaspora assimilate, even against their will. They abandon Jewish law. They absorb the ethos of their environment. They develop new conventions of sexuality and role-expectation. They marry out. The proposal, made in varying degrees of radicalism by Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative thinkers, is that a home be found for these behaviors within a redrafted Judaism, one that embodies new conceptions of revelation, authority, mitzvah, and halakhah. The proposal has many merits. It creates a home for Jews who want to be Jews. It creates a religious refuge. It promises to enlarge the Jewish community at a time of demographic crisis. The integrity of those who advocate it is not to be questioned.
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But were it to proceed, it would split the Jewish people in two. The complex politics of mending the extant rift is one thing; the fate of knesset Yisrael, the collective entity of Israel, is another. Only revelation and tradition, the line that leads through however many inflections to the Oral and Written Law and Sinai, has the power to unite the Jewish world into a coherent people. Not all Jews live by tradition; but all Jews might live toward tradition. That fact would create mutual responsibilities between Orthodoxy and the non-Orthodox, which would constrain each from policies that would benefit themselves but alienate the others. It would supply Jewish identity with a shape and ultimate destination: a holy, distinct, commanded way of life. Not all would live it, but it would be normative: an endpoint if not an immediate achievement. That most Jews in America live outside Orthodoxy is no more normative than the fact that most Jews in the world live outside Israel. Ultimately only one land is geographical home; only one tradition is spiritual home.
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No one making such an assertion can expect it to do other than generate deep controversy. But in this case, it must be all the deeper, for it will come from all sides. Our argument is that convergence toward a common destiny can only come about through a normative reinstatement of Judaism as traditionally understood. There is evidence that, at least attitudinally, the Jewish people as a whole has turned toward tradition in the last two decades. The question is: Has tradition turned toward the Jewish people?
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Here we must take up the narrative where we left it in the third chapter: the history of Orthodox attitudes to modernity. What has happened to the visions of Samson Raphael Hirsch, R. Avraham Kook, and R. Moses Sofer in the last two decades?
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The Radicalization of Orthodoxy
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The revival of Orthodoxy has not been evenly distributed between the various traditional alternatives examined in the third chapter. The yeshivah and chasidic communities are experiencing rapid growth. Samson Raphael Hirsch’s philosophy of Torah im derekh eretz is currently out of favor. R. Avraham Kook’s religious Zionism has been taken in new and unexpected directions by the Gush Emunim. As elsewhere, so with Orthodoxy: events in the last two decades have been ironic. The two broad movements within Orthodoxy that welcomed modernity – Hirsch’s and Kook’s – have been outflanked by modernity. The strategy that most consciously resisted the spirit of the age – that of R. Moses Sofer – has emerged as the approach that best captures the spirit of the age.
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To be sure, we speak of a mood rather than a majority. In Anglo-Jewry, for example, some 70 percent of synagogue members belong to the mainstream, moderate Orthodox congregations, while only 5 percent belong to the so-called right-wing or ultra-Orthodox communities. In Israel, the charedi presence is somewhat larger and more politically prominent. In America, where Orthodoxy as a whole is only a small section of Jewry, the yeshivah community has a proportionately larger influence on its attitudes. Nonetheless in both countries, the majority of Orthodox Jews are participants in secular society along the lines envisaged by Hirsch. They see religious significance in the State of Israel along the lines suggested by R. Kook. But mood is significant. It suggests a disenchantment with, or a failure of confidence in, the philosophies that inspired an earlier generation.
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That sense was recently expressed by the British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits. “Personally,” he wrote, “by upbringing and by conviction I am deeply committed to the philosophy of Torah im derekh eretz. It is my way of life, my ideology. But I am realistic enough to appreciate that such a religious-secular fusion as a movement is not likely to prevail in our generation for a whole variety of reasons, certainly not by juxtaposition, or in opposition to the rest of the Torah camp…. We must recognize the growing ascendancy of these yeshivah/chasidic worlds and come to terms with them.”
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This view is widely shared. The journal Tradition published a symposium in 1982 on “The State of Orthodoxy.” While most of the contributors agreed that “the vigor as well as the image of Orthodoxy has been completely revitalized,” they were equally struck by what they termed the “move to the right.” The yeshivah and chasidic communities were buoyant. “Modern” Orthodoxy was not. This consensus was all the more remarkable for the fact that its authors were all broadly within the modern or centrist camp, even if they were unhappy with these labels. The journal’s editor, Walter Wurzburger, spoke of the “religious inferiority complex” felt by the moderates or modernists. In another context, R. Aharon Lichtenstein noted that the “right-wing faction has aggrandized even more than it has grown.” Its profound self-confidence and “at times, excoriation of [its] opponents” was having an effect on Orthodoxy as a whole. It was “increasingly dictating Orthodox life-style and axiological norms [even] for many not affiliated with this camp.” Its influence was out of all proportion to its numbers.
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As a result, certain attitudes associated with modern Orthodoxy are in eclipse. They include the idea of a synthesis between Judaism and contemporary culture; a commitment to religious tolerance and to at least some cooperation with other groups; the value of moderation as a religious ideal; and a positive approach to Zionism. Other views, more rejectionist in their approach to secular culture, the non-Jewish and non-Orthodox world, and the State of Israel, are in the ascendancy. How and why has this occurred?
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Torah and Secular Culture
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Hirsch, we recall, believed that Jewish and secular studies should be combined. “We maintain,” he asserted, “that a familiarity with all those elements which lie at the root of present-day civilization, and a study of all those subjects required for such an acquaintance, is of the highest necessity for the Jewish youth of our day as it was in fact in all times, and should be looked on as a religious duty.” Truth, he believed, was unitary. There could be no conflict between history and science on the one hand and Torah on the other. To the contrary: a knowledge of science would deepen religious understanding of creation, while a sense of history would increase awareness of the Jewish role in civilization. Two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, had been the educators of the world. The Greeks had given mankind aesthetics, Jews had taught it ethics. The two cultures were therefore complementary.
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Hirsch formed his views in the 1830s. Common to his and R. Kook’s understanding of secular culture was the view that Torah was sovereign among the disciplines. The secular was in itself neutral. It could be given shape and direction by Judaism. It was not intrinsically hostile to or destructive of Torah. Judaism, for Hirsch, would give the secular ethical content; for R. Kook it would give it unity and sanctity. But by the 1960s, R. Soloveitchik was suggesting that, far from being neutral, the secular approach was now actively infiltrating Judaism and recreating it in its own image. Secular studies actively secularized.
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The implication was that the ultimate harmony of human knowledge assumed by Hirsch and R. Kook did not exist. R. Soloveitchik did not document the thesis in detail. But we can infer something of what he may have meant. Secular history is resistant to the idea of revelation and miracle. Post-Darwinian natural science does not lend itself easily to the idea of purposive creation. Sociology tends to relativize religious belief by seeing it in terms of context and function. Secular ethics tends to be either Kantian or utilitarian, built, that is, on rational rather than revealed foundations. None of these disciplines is incompatible with religious faith, but none is obviously harmonious with it. Each, as R. Soloveitchik pointed out elsewhere, incorporates a different perspective on reality. They cannot be combined into a single unified vision. Just as one cannot view an object from several different points of view simultaneously, so one cannot view the world secularly and religiously at the same time. The most one can do is oscillate between them. This creates tension and ceaseless dialectic, not harmony.
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Hirsch and R. Soloveitchik do not necessarily disagree. They speak to different ages. The idea of a unified body of knowledge with which Hirsch was familiar had been replaced, by the time R. Soloveitchik came to study at the University of Berlin, by a far more complex and fragmented culture. The Galilean-Newtonian view of nature had been supplanted by non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. Philosophy and science no longer spoke the same language. Academic study had split and parceled knowledge into a multiplicity of subjects and methodologies. As Stephen Toulmin put it, “The broad and general questions about ‘cosmic interrelatedness’ which were the focus of earlier debates about nature have been superseded by other, more specialized, disciplinary questions.” R. Soloveitchik’s thought, with its conflicts and disharmonies, mirrors this disintegration. Science did not, as Hirsch hoped, teach one to see nature “with the spirit of David.” Nor did academic study reveal, as R. Kook wished, the essential unity of creation.
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So it became and remains unclear as to what a Jewish approach to secular study might be. The point was made in a significant remark by Rabbi Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University, an institution dedicated to Torah u-Madda, a synthesis of Torah and secular knowledge. Speaking at its fiftieth anniversary, he recalled that as a student he had complained to the president, “Why don’t you tell me how to combine the two worlds?” He was told, “Our job is to give you the materials, your job is to let them interact within you.” Rabbi Lamm added: “I disagreed then. But I agree now.” The synthesis, in other words, could not be made programmatic. It was personal. It did not take place in the curriculum. It took place in the mind of the student. There are numerous institutions which teach both Jewish and secular studies, but none – despite many experiments – where the two are fully integrated. Nor is it hard to see why. Academic study is detached; Torah study involves commitment. Academic study is value-free; Torah study is value-laden. The one is universal, the other particular. These dichotomies do not always exist. Maimonides, for example, was able to integrate science, philosophy, ethics, theology, and halakhah into a single system. But with such dichotomies is how our culture is presently organized.
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Educational Models
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There is more to the eclipse of Torah im derekh eretz than this, however. The retreat from the Hirschian position began in his own community almost immediately after his own death. Torah im derekh eretz, it was argued, had been advocated only as a temporary emergency, or only for the specific circumstances of German Jewry, or only as a means of preparing oneself for a career. Hirsch himself had argued otherwise. But his successor and son-in-law, R. Solomon Breuer, had been influenced by the Hungarian model of Orthodoxy. He had studied under R. Moses Sofer’s son Avraham at the Pressburg Yeshivah. That model, quite different from Hirsch’s, was to exercise its influence over successive generations of German Jews, as it has done more recently to American Jewry.
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The question was not so much intellectual as practical. What, to put it at its simplest, was the best way to train Jewish character? Was it in an institution in which Jewish and secular studies were taught side by side? Or was it in a yeshivah, where secular studies were totally excluded? In a yeshivah the student was immersed, at a critical stage in his identity formation, in an intense, exclusive atmosphere of talmudic learning and piety. Even when he left the yeshivah and entered the secular world, the memory of his days there would be a constant reminder of Jewish authenticity. Having once felt the full intellectual and spiritual grandeur of a complete Jewish environment, he would find the world outside pale and untempting in comparison. His mind and body might be elsewhere, but his heart would still be in the yeshivah.
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Hirsch and those who adopted his educational philosophy believed otherwise. The student had to be prepared from the very outset to meet the intellectual challenges of the outside world. Otherwise he would be overwhelmed. The new culture with which he was confronted would seem to him to conflict with everything he had learned at yeshivah. He would be forced to make a choice. And the secular world was seductive. It offered success and excitement. If the choice was all or nothing – Judaism without secularity or secularity without Judaism – Judaism would be the loser. It was necessary from the very start of schooling to train children to combine rather than make a choice between the two worlds.
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As a practical question, it had a practical answer. Which system worked? In fact, both had their successes and failures. It depended on the individual, the place, and the time. In Frankfurt, Torah im derekh eretz was attractive in the 1860s, less so in the 1930s. In America, “synthesis” was popular in the 1960s, out of favor in the 1980s. When secular culture is highly attractive, the Hirschian model seems appropriate and necessary. When it is less so, the yeshivah model is more powerful. In general, a Jewish sense of isolation – induced by the antisemitism of the 1930s and the anti-Zionism of recent decades – leads to a search for a total Jewish identity which distances the non-Jewish world. That is found, par excellence, in the yeshivah, and it is this that has made it so powerful a presence in contemporary Jewish life.
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It is not, then, that there has been a move away from secular study. To the contrary. Most American yeshivot accept de facto that the majority of their students – 86 percent, according to William Helmreich’s researches – will go on to a university. But secular study is seen as purely instrumental, a career qualification. And, according to Helmreich, yeshivah leaders tend to prefer their students to attend secular colleges rather than a Jewish institution like Yeshiva University “precisely because they believe that the distinctions between the Orthodox lifestyle and that pervading the college are so clear that the student will not be tempted or confused by them.” The important thing, from this point of view, is contrast rather than synthesis. One “learns” Talmud; one “studies” economics or medicine. College teaches a student a technical skill. The yeshivah teaches him who he is.
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Integration or Compartmentalization
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More, though, is at stake than the best way to form character. For the question is: What kind of character does one seek to form? The Hirschian ideal was Mensch-Jissroel, “man-Israel,” an integrated fusion of ethical citizen and religious Jew. The yeshivah ideal tends to be somewhat different. The ultimate aim is “to sit in the house of God all the days of my life.” Perfection is a life of study, unencumbered by the need to make a living. Clearly this is possible only for a few. But a career is not an end in itself. It is a necessary distraction. For Hirsch, just as secular study was part of Torah, so secular involvement was part of the service of God. For the yeshivah alumni, both tend to be seen as bittul Torah, neglect of the primary duty of Torah learning. Hence both, if possible, should be kept to a minimum.
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Both positions have their precedent in Jewish tradition. Indeed Maimonides himself could be cited on both sides of the argument. Again, though, which model is the more compelling depends on the time and place. A number of developments have made the Hirschian paradigm increasingly less convincing. From Moses Mendelssohn onward we find Jewish thinkers of all shades assuming the idea that ethics are universal. “Jews may have a special way of actualizing ethics in their lives, or a special ethical mission, but what is right and good is essentially the same for all humanity.” So long as this is believed, the idea of Mensch-Jissroel makes sense. The “moral revolution” of the 1960s, however, broke this assumption for a generation. Ethics were not universal but individual. “Doing your own thing” became the existential imperative. There were experiments with sex, drugs, and cults. This offended and frightened many Jews. Jewish ethics were not the same as, they were the antithesis of, secular ethics. In the backlash that followed in the 1970s, it became important that Jews should be insulated from, not integrated with, the “new morality.”
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This was the popular expression of a deeper development that has been charted by philosophers and political and social theorists. The liberal state draws a sharp distinction between public and private life. The public domain is ethically neutral. The state does not legislate morality; it merely prevents harm. Ethics becomes the free and private choice of individuals. “Modernization,” as Peter Berger puts it, “has entailed a progressive separation of the individual from collective entities, and as a result has brought about a historically unprecedented counterposition of individual and society.” When this occurs, public involvement comes to seem less close to identity than private life. A job is less who one is than what one does. Relationships become roles. Activities become functions. Meaning is provided by the private, not the public sphere.
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This leads to compartmentalized identities. And as Charles Liebman has noted, “Orthodox Jews, by and large, do not search for consistency between their Jewish and non-Jewish life. On the contrary, they make a virtue of their inconsistency.” This, he argues, is their great strength in contemporary society, their “survival strategy.” They “have retained their ritual tradition and belief system virtually intact and at the same time have acculturated in language, dress and education to American styles because they have been able to separate these two aspects of life so that they impinge on one another as little as possible.” This approach to identity sees only Jewish contexts as “real”; work, socializing, and secular culture are concessions to necessity. This is closer to the yeshivah ethos than to Hirsch. The point is that contemporary culture supports and even demands compartmentalization.
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To be sure, Jews who live in two worlds tend to feel uncomfortable about their lack of integration. Samuel Heilman concludes his study of a modern Orthodox congregation in America, Synagogue Life, with the perception that the members “are forever trying to engage in ‘passing’ behavior.” To their more traditional Orthodox friends “they must appear strictly Orthodox.” To their colleagues at work they must “seem to be completely engaged with the present and with downplaying their Orthodoxy and the anachronism it connotes.” This is the prosaic equivalent of the kind of conflict which R. Soloveitchik elevated to the level of philosophical drama in The Lonely Man of Faith. It was precisely this that Hirsch, and in another way R. Kook, sought to avoid. But what are the alternatives?
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The Vacation Paradox
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One is to follow R. Soloveitchik and see tension, or what Adin Steinsaltz calls “strife of the spirit,” as a religious experience. But, their powerful argument notwithstanding, most modern Jews turn to faith for security, not inner struggle. The other alternative is indeed to search for synthesis. But synthesis in the late twentieth century is not what it was in the early nineteenth. It would have to incorporate, among other elements of “modern consciousness,” the idea that morality is chosen, not given; that religious truth is a function of history, society, or the individual mind; it would have to present within an Orthodox framework what Mordecai Kaplan called “Judaism without supernaturalism.” But “modern Orthodox” thinkers of the 1960s, most notably Eliezer Berkovits and Emanuel Rackman, were controversial. Their successors in the 1980s, David Hartman and Irving Greenberg, are several degrees more radical. The synthesis of two lifestyles may simply not be available.
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An amusing illustration was provided by a recent scholarly exchange in the journal Tradition. Across twenty-five pages of dense argumentation two modern Orthodox thinkers debated whether taking an exotic Club Mediterranean holiday away from other Jews – careful nonetheless to observe the laws of kashrut, daily prayers, and so on – was an example of synthesis or compartmentalization. One argued that it was the epitome of synthesis. What, after all, could be a better example of “the creative blending of the best elements of Jewish tradition and modern culture” than saying Minchah on a sun-soaked tropical beach? The other argued that it could only be considered synthesis if it was evidence of an integrated life and was conducive to spiritual growth. This in the circumstances seemed unlikely.
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The problem is, of course, that the concept of a vacation is a peculiarly modern one, dating from the 1870s. And as Michael Walzer notes, “What is crucial about the vacation is its individualist (or familial) character.” Central to the idea is that vacations are “individually chosen and individually designed.” Walzer notes that the vacation is in a sense the exact opposite of the idea of Shabbat rest which is “enjoined on everyone, enjoyed by everyone.” Shabbat is an institution of law, vacations are a matter of choice. Shabbat is communal, vacations are personal (hence the appeal of “getting away from other Jews”). The vacation is a phenomenon of modern consciousness, part of its rich emphasis on private as opposed to public life.
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Hence the place of a vacation in an “integrated Jewish life” becomes impossible to solve. One side of the argument sees it as synthesis, thus incorporating into Judaism an individualism entirely foreign to tradition. The other side rejects this and instead defines synthesis as a unified life. But what proof-text establishes that “a unified life” is a Jewish value? The author derives his proof from the nineteenth-century Christian existentialist Kierkegaard: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Both sides are driven many miles from tradition.
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Neither scholar quotes Maimonides, who deals with the issue in the fifth of his Eight Chapters as something quite self-evident. All of man’s conduct should be directed to a single goal, the service of God. In this way all his deeds will be “for the sake of heaven.” Since he cannot serve God while exhausted or depressed, he may sometimes need to take a break “by walking in gardens and fine buildings, by sitting before beautiful forms and by things like this which delight the soul.” Leisure is thus dealt with under the rubric of medicine which is part of the perfection of the body which is needed for perfection of the soul. For Maimonides, leisure is part of a unified world. For moderns, a vacation is an escape from a pluralized world.
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Faced with such philosophical conundrums, chasidim take vacations en masse, refusing to admit individualism into the social structure. For the modern Orthodox Jew getting away from it all, it is just another insoluble problem of synthesis, to be agonized over or ignored according to temperament. Compartmentalization is the victory of fact over theory. It is a way of life that seems to work even if it cannot be philosophically justified. Thus, many observant Orthodox Jews live a life that is Hirschian in practice but not in principle. They study both Torah and secular disciplines. They attend yeshivah and university. They keep halakhah and have professional careers. Their dual life is neither a noble conflict nor a creative synthesis: it is just what one has to do in the modern world. Torah im derekh eretz is widely practiced but rarely preached. This is troubling to many modern Orthodox Jews. But that is the dilemma. Orthodoxy cannot be translated without remainder into modern consciousness. This is one of the unsolved problems of contemporary Orthodoxy, and why there has been no clear intellectual heir of either Hirsch or R. Kook.
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Religious Zionism and Wittgenstein’s Ladder
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It was precisely this kind of problem that led R. Kook to believe that a full and consistent Jewish life could only be lived within a Jewish land. He stated his objections to diaspora Judaism in somewhat mystical terms, but we can put the case more prosaically. Judaism is more than a religion. It embraces the totality of life. But if most of life is conducted on non-Jewish terms, there are only three alternatives: segregation, compartmentalization, or “synthesis.” Segregation artificially restricts Jewish life. Compartmentalization artificially restricts Judaism. And “synthesis” is simply not available. Judaism is natural only in Israel, where it can shape a total culture. This, expressed non-mystically, is the core of R. Kook’s religious Zionism.
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However, religious Zionism is currently undergoing the same eclipse as Torah im derekh eretz. In the early 1980s, R. Aharon Lichtenstein noted that “twenty or thirty years ago the overwhelming majority of the Orthodox community, its yeshivah component included, was suffused with pride in the State and identified with its character and symbols.” This frame of mind was today receding. In 1985 Bernard Rosenzweig could write that religious Zionism is “at the crossroads of its existence, threatened with extinction organizationally, or at best with being consigned to a marginal role in the scheme of things.” Reuven Bulka spoke of the growing influence of the extreme anti-Zionist attitudes of Neturei Karta within the yeshivah world and its consequent impact on Orthodoxy as a whole.
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Why? Again the reasons are complex. One way of focusing on the problem is to ask what religious Zionism actually is. The phrase “religious Zionist” can mean two things. It can refer to someone who is two separate things, religious and a Zionist. Or it can refer to someone who is a Zionist on religious grounds: who sees Zionism as an essentially religious phenomenon. R. Kook was a religious Zionist in the second sense. For him, Zionism was atchalta di-ge’ulah, the beginning of the process of redemption. The events that led toward the messianic age began with the ingathering of exiles and the return of Jews to their land. This had been the view, too, of earlier religious Zionists like R. Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and R. Yehudah Alkalai.
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But this was bound to be a highly contested position. After all, surely redemption was something brought about by God, not man. Had Moses not said, “Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and will bring you back.” Moses seemed to speak of a miracle brought about by Heaven, not a political process engineered by man. What is more, the Talmud in Ketubot had spoken about two oaths taken by Israel in exile, not to return en masse to the land, and not to rebel against the nations of the world. In return the nations had agreed “not to oppress Israel excessively.” This seemed to suggest that the task of the Jewish people was to wait passively in exile and rely on prayer and piety to bring the promised return. Hirsch himself had said that “actively to accelerate” the end of exile “is prohibited to us.” Zionist activism looked suspiciously like an attempt to preempt Providence. Moreover, the Zionist movement was led by notoriously assimilated Jews like Nordau and Herzl. Could one associate with non-Orthodox Jews in general, let alone in so sacred a task? Even in the early days of the movement, there were many Orthodox Jews who argued that, if it aimed at bringing redemption, Zionism was heresy.
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In response to this challenge, a new type of religious Zionist emerged. The most prominent figures were R. Isaac Reines (1839–1915) and R. Samuel Mohilever (1824–1898), and they were religious Zionists in the first sense. They were religious and they were Zionists, but they argued that the two were independent. The attempt to create a Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael had nothing to do with bringing the redemption. It had to do instead with pikuach nefesh, the command of saving lives. Jews throughout Eastern Europe were suffering from a wave of antisemitic attacks. They were fleeing in their millions to America. A refuge could and should be built in Israel.
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This approach countered the two objections to Zionism in R. Kook’s sense. Firstly, it separated Zionism from the question of the messianic age. Secondly, it provided a basis for working with nonreligious Jews. As R. Reines put it: religious intention is required only for commands between man and God. But saving life is a command between man and man. If an irreligious Jew gives to charity, he has fulfilled a mitzvah. So too if he helps to rescue Jews from oppression by building a land for them to inhabit. R. Mohilever put it similarly: “Our attitude toward those among us who did not observe the religious precepts must be, as it were, as if fire had taken hold of our homes, imperiling our persons and our property. Under such circumstances, would we not receive anyone gladly and with love who, though irreligious in our eyes, came to rescue us?”
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The movement which emerged from their efforts was Mizrachi. To be sure it did not confine itself to the task of settlement only. It was committed to the idea of “the land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.” But its great strength, in contrast to the views of R. Kook on the one hand and the religious anti-Zionists on the other, was its demystification of the idea and program of Zionism. To create a state, it was necessary to work with nonreligious elements. To create a religious state, it was necessary to influence the Zionist movement from within, rather than criticizing it from outside. But therein, too, lay its weakness once statehood had been achieved. For here we confront a problem common to both religious Zionism and Torah im derekh eretz, what might be called the “Wittgenstein’s ladder” syndrome.

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.