In Search of the Jewish People
In the tenth century, Saadia Gaon – the greatest polymath of the geonic period – wrote a simple but memorable sentence: “Our people, the children of Israel, is a people only in virtue of torateha, its religious laws.”1Saadia Gaon, Emunot ve-Deot, 3:7. English version, Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, translated by Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 158. This, for Saadia, was self-evident. The whole of the biblical literature pointed to it. So did the thrust of rabbinic thought. It was one of the few indisputable axioms of Judaism.
For Saadia, it provided the answer to an important question: How can we be certain that the laws of Judaism are binding for all time and not subject to abrogation? Christians, for example, had argued that the covenant with Israel had been repealed. It had been superseded by a new dispensation: a new covenant and a new Israel. How do we know that this is not so? After citing the various biblical verses that spoke of the Torah’s laws as applying “throughout their generations” and thus forming “an everlasting covenant,” Saadia adds a further proof. God had promised through Jeremiah2Jeremiah 31:35–36. that the Jewish people would be eternal. But “our people, the children of Israel, is a people only in virtue of its religious laws.” Therefore those laws must themselves be eternal.
Saadia thus mentions the equation between peoplehood and law merely as an aside on his way to proving another point. It was too obvious to need stating in its own right. But in retrospect it has taken on a different significance. For it answered another question, not formulated in Saadia’s day but asked often since the end of the eighteenth century. In what sense were and are Jews a people?
Throughout the long period of exile between the fall of the second Temple and the threshold of Jewish modernity – between the years 70 and 1770 – we find no expression of doubt that Jews did indeed belong to a people; indeed to a nation. But it was a nation of a most unusual kind. Jews were scattered throughout the civilised world. They were united by neither land nor (except for liturgical purposes) language. They had no overarching political or communal organisations. They had adapted to many different local cultures. Since conversion to Judaism was a theoretical possibility and a historical actuality, they were not a single race. How then did they constitute a nation?
Saadia’s answer is the classic statement of tradition. Jews were a nation in virtue of their religious laws, or more broadly, the Torah. Precisely because all Jews everywhere were bound by the same legal system – set forth in the Torah and oral tradition – one could speak of them as a nation in exile rather than as a geographically dispersed group of believers of the same religious faith. Jews were more than a faith community. They were a people. For the revelation at Sinai constituted them as a people and provided the laws that governed it both in its land and in dispersion. The Torah, of course, did more than promulgate laws. It provided the theological and historical context of those laws. Jews had been a nation, forged out of the shared ancestry of the patriarchs and the collective experience of Egyptian exile and exodus. They had a land – the land of Israel – to which Abraham, Moses and the wilderness generation had travelled. In that land they had lived, and to it they would one day return. Their history was not a mere chronicle of happenings but a dialogue between God and people, interpreted by the prophets. In short, no disjunction was possible between history and theology or between Jews as a people and Judaism as a religion.
This was no mere abstraction. Throughout most of those seventeen centuries, it mirrored the historical experience of Jews. The semi-autonomous kehillot, Jewish communities, of the Middle Ages had the power to enforce religious law and to fine or excommunicate offenders. Jewish law governed most of Jewish life, domestic and public. To be sure, Jews had contact, commercial and cultural, with their non-Jewish neighbours. But it was limited. Christian and Islamic societies saw Jews as a people apart, and so Jews saw themselves. Sociology, theology and law came together to reinforce traditional Jewish self-definition. To be a member of the Jewish community was to be politically, culturally and behaviourally distinct. Ethnos and ethos merged. The ethnic and religious dimensions of Jewish existence were inseparable. To leave one’s people was to abandon one’s religion. To abandon one’s religion was to leave one’s people.
There were, of course, grey areas. Was a Jew who had converted to Christianity or Islam still a Jew? Yes and no. As far as the laws of marriage and divorce were concerned, most authorities said yes. As far as the laws of inheritance and the taking of interest were concerned, most said no.3See Gerald Blidstein, “Who Is Not a Jew? – The Medieval Discussion,” Israel Law Review 11 (1976), 369–90; Aharon Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel and the Jewish Fraternity,” Judaism 12:3 (Summer 1963), 260–80. More perplexing still were those conversos or Marranos who had converted through coercion or political or economic pressure, but who remained secretly loyal to Judaism. Had they, or more especially their descendants, forfeited their status as Jews? Opinions were divided.4See Encyclopaedia Talmudit, 2, 63–65, “Anusim.” But these were problems at the margins. The heartlands of Jewish life remained defined by Saadia’s conjunction of peoplehood and law.
The end of the Jewish people?
It was subsequent to emancipation that the problem arose, for three reasons. Firstly, emancipation meant the disbanding of Jewish ecclesiastical power. In one country after another Jewish communities gave up the right to excommunicate recalcitrant members. Without significant argument or resistance, the Jewish community became a voluntary association. Modernity for Judaism meant the end of substantive powers of religious coercion. Secondly, secularisation and the effective, if not always formal, separation of religion and state meant that for the first time in many centuries a Jew might leave the Jewish community without having to become, religiously, anything else. Benjamin Disraeli is reputed, on being asked whether he was a Jew or a Christian, to have taken out a Christian Bible and opened it at the blank page between the Old Testament and the New. “I,” he said, “am that blank page.” It symbolised the new neutral space between being a Jew and converting to Christianity. Thirdly, it was only in the modern period that a significant range of alternative Jewish identities – cultural, political or religious – opened up.
This third phenomenon was a direct consequence of the other two. External and internal forces played their part. There were Jews who, faced with the prospect of an open society, still wished to maintain Jewish continuity while at the same time arguing that Jewish law was now socially and intellectually dysfunctional. There were others who, having tried to assimilate into Gentile society, found their way blocked by an old-new antisemitism. Throughout Europe and America they proposed new formulae for Jewish identity. Religious liberals founded Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaisms, religious systems which proposed revolutionary or evolutionary changes in Jewish law. Jewish socialists, Bundists and others, found Jewish expression in political activity. Yiddishists and the pioneers of a new Hebrew literature, found it in culture. Some, like the historian Simon Dubnow, argued for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. The secular Zionists insisted that an autonomous Jewish society could now only be built in the land of Israel, and that nationalism was the necessary vehicle of Jewish identity in the modern age. Each of these developments was possible because of the secular disjunction between religion and other facets of identity, and because the Jewish community as a self-governing entity with coercive ecclesiastical powers no longer existed. The link between Jewishness and Judaism, people and law, had been broken.
In the 1950s, Martin Buber drew the harsh conclusion that in the traditional sense the Jewish people no longer existed. Knesset Yisrael, “the congregation of Israel,” the covenantal people as a single entity before God, no longer referred to any coherently describable group. There were still Jews, but since the Enlightenment, they had become too fragmented to be described as a people. There was too much disagreement between them on fundamentals.5See Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury Press, 1983), 239. In 1967 the French sociologist Georges Friedmann published a book with the arresting title, The End of the Jewish People?6Georges Friedmann, The End of the Jewish People? (London: Hutchinson, 1967). It argued that Israel and the diaspora were drifting apart and each, in its way, was enacting the end of the Jewish destiny. Israel was too secularised to be called a Jewish state. The diaspora was too little threatened by antisemitism to prevent the widespread disappearance of Jews into their local environments. The choice lay between collective assimilation in the one and individual assimilation in the other. It was the last of a long line of obituaries for the covenantal people.
The new Sadducees
By one of those ironies in which Jewish history is rich, no sooner was the book published than its central contentions were proved false. As we have had cause to note before, 1967 was the turning point for Jewish consciousness in the modern era. The Arab threat of the destruction of the State of Israel evoked long-suppressed memories of the Holocaust. Worldwide, Jews were determined to resist: in Israel, by fighting; outside Israel, by political and financial support. The crisis revealed Jews to themselves. Israel and the Jewish diaspora were indeed a single people, linked by the bonds of shared memory and collective responsibility. Their multiple and divergent destinies evaporated in the face of external threat.
It was a seminal moment and ever since, the idea of “one people” has been a powerful force in folk imagination. As we have seen, the diaspora has taken Israel as its focus. Israeli society, for its part, has begun to establish connections between itself and the history and present reality of diaspora Jewry. The Holocaust, for example, had long been regarded by Israelis as the shameful closing chapter of exilic Judaism. It now began to be seen as part of an ongoing Jewish isolation which persisted even into the relations between contemporary Israel, the Arab world and the United Nations.7See Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 123–66. A new museum, Bet Hatefutsot (“The House of the Diaspora”) was opened on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, allowing Israelis to re-establish connections with their past. Israeli novelists turned from their preconception with the new Israeli, the sabra, to searching explorations of their historical roots.8See Amnon Rubinstein, The Zionist Dream Revisited (New York Schocken, 1984), 127–55. In a major and still ongoing cultural transformation, secular Zionists have had their confidence shaken in the idea that Israel is a radical break with the exilic past. Religious voices began to be heard with a confidence and authority they had never before held in the state.
American Jews, meanwhile, adopted “We are One” as their campaigning platform. Israel’s isolation prior to the Six-Day War convinced many Jews that the diaspora was her only unconditional ally. American Jewry’s secularisation mean that, as its thoughts turned from integration to survival, an Israel-centred ethnicity seemed the most viable axis of its own future development. Once the centre of gravity of diaspora life moves from the synagogue to more secular organisations, a sense of Jewish unity can emerge which seems to transcend the fierce divisions between religious denominations. But as Jonathan Woocher has noted, this is a unity that cannot be explored too closely, for any effort to invest it with religious content would expose its inner contradictions. Concepts like unity, chosenness, tradition and destiny, resonant with religious meaning, are left undefined, for it is precisely over the interpretation of these terms that Jews have been divided for the past two centuries. The resulting belief system, which Woocher terms civil Judaism, is therefore a “religion without theology.”9Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 63–103.
And here lies the problem. For what has emerged over the past quarter-century is a fateful evolution in the idea of the Jewish people, a development unprecedented since the contours of rabbinic Judaism were determined in the first century CE. Perhaps the most suggestive analysis of what has occurred is that offered by the political theorist, Daniel Elazar.10Daniel Elazar, People and Polity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989). Elazar reminds us of the divisions that existed in Jewish life in the Second Commonwealth period. There were Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. The Essenes were pietists who lived in small collectivist communities. The Sadducees were Jews whose Jewishness was primarily expressed through the institutions of the state: monarchy, the priesthood and the Temple. The Pharisees, by contrast, emphasised Jewish law as the sanctification of personal as well as public spheres, and valued a life of study as the progressive internalisation of its norms. With the destruction of the second Temple, Pharisaism quickly became the dominant pattern of Jewish existence, and there were few serious contenders for its primacy. Pharisaism became rabbinic Judaism, which in turn became Judaism tout court.
Elazar suggests that what has happened has been the re-emergence after almost 2,000 years of a neo-Sadducean Judaism. “Today’s Sadducees include Israeli Zionists [and] diaspora Jews who seek to be Jewish through identification with the Jewish people as a corporate entity, its history, culture and tradition, but without necessarily accepting the authority or centrality of halakhah in defining their Jewishness.” They are “firmly committed to the Jewish people, either as a whole or as it exists in Israel, seeing in the expression of peoplehood or nationhood what can be termed a religious obligation, though often in the sense of a civil religion.”11Ibid., 162.
To understand how striking a development this is, let us recall how unpredictable it was according to the three dominant views of Jewish existence that emerged in the nineteenth century. The first was Orthodoxy, the continuation of the classic terms of rabbinic Judaism into the modern age. For Orthodoxy, Saadia’s definition remained normative. There could be no Jewish people without Jewish law. This was precisely why it regarded the other two developments – Reform Judaism and secular Zionism – as fundamentally threatening to Jewish existence. They were, it argued, more dangerous to Judaism than Christianity. The Jew who converted to Christianity at least knew that he was abandoning his people. The Jew who chose Reform or secular Zionism believed that he was still part of his people. But a Jewish people that defined itself without reference to Jewish law was a contradiction in terms. The laws set forth in the Torah were the constitution of the covenant. And without the covenant there was no Jewish people. The present reality – a majority of Jews worldwide who see themselves as bound to a people but not to its laws – neither was nor could have been contemplated by Orthodoxy.
Nor could it have been foreseen by radical Reform as it reached expression in Germany in the 1840s and America in the 1880s. For this had evolved specifically as an attempt to present Judaism as a religion with all elements of peoplehood removed. The aspects of Judaism to which radical Reformers objected – the dietary laws, circumcision, Jewish as opposed to civil divorce, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath and the hope, expressed in the liturgy, for a return to Zion – were precisely those which served to keep Jews a people apart. These must now be abandoned, the radicals argued, for Jews had now become “integral elements of other peoples and states.”12The words are those of the radical reformer, Samuel Holdheim. See Gil Graff, Separation of Church and State (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 122. Radical Reform objected to all expressions of ethnicity and proposed a highly universalised interpretation of Judaism. What has emerged is precisely the opposite: peoplehood without religion in place of religion without peoplehood.
This had been secular Zionism’s contention all along: that nationalism would replace religion as the bond of Jewish life. Nonetheless it too has been confounded by the turn of events. For secular Zionists tended to assume two things that have not occurred, the eclipse of the diaspora and the “normalisation” of Jewish life in Israel. The events of 1967 and their aftermath have refuted both predictions. Jewish life in the diaspora has been resurgent and Israel has become internationally isolated, recapitulating on a national scale what had been the Jewish experience in exile. Far from becoming “normalised,” Israelis since 1967 have found their situation best expressed in the biblical phrase “a people that dwells alone.”13Numbers 23:9. The phrase was particularly associated with the late Yaacov Herzog. See Yaacov Herzog, A People that Dwells Alone (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1975). A secular peoplehood embracing both Israel and the diaspora was therefore the one thing that Orthodox, Reform and secular Zionist thinkers were agreed in believing to be impossible. It has come to pass. This, then, is the theological dilemma. Can an account be given of the late twentieth-century survival and revival of the Jewish people which does justice to its religious significance without overlooking the secularity and palpable diversity of its members? Saadia’s definition conflicts with what most Jews perceive to be their present reality: a Jewish people unconstituted by Jewish law. Can any other definition of Jewish peoplehood be found? Four contemporary thinkers stand out by the boldness of their approach to this question: Emil Fackenheim, Irving Greenberg, Michael Wyschogrod and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.
Emil Fackenheim
Emil Fackenheim is a thinker of great subtlety and depth, primarily concerned with the relationship between Judaism and philosophy in a post-Holocaust age. But he is best known for his thoughts on the Holocaust itself and its implications for Judaism. We recall his remark that Auschwitz had addressed an imperative to those Jews who lived after it, a “614th commandment” over and above the 613 commands of the Torah: “the authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another posthumous victory.”14Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978), 22. This is the command of Jewish survival as such. Hitler had made it a crime to be a Jew. Therefore simply existing as a Jew became an act of defiance against the force of evil.
Fackenheim goes further and directly addresses the question of Jewish peoplehood. Once again the Holocaust is the starting point of his reflections. The effect of the emancipation was to make many Jews wish to “normalise” the Jewish condition. In Israel they would become a nation like all others. Outside Israel they would become citizens like all others. After Auschwitz a full-blooded desire for normalisation has become impossible. Jews were singled out, not for what they believed or did, but for what they were. The authentic Jew, reflecting on this, must accept his “singled-out” condition.
This “command” addresses all Jews regardless of their faith or lack of it. The ovens of Auschwitz made no distinction between religious and secular, assimilated or segregated, Orthodox or heterodox Jews. If the Holocaust has altered the terms of Jewish existence, as Fackenheim has argued it has, we would expect him to argue that the past divisions within Jewry fade into insignificance in the present. And so indeed he does. But how can this be so? The abyss separating religious and secular Jews is surely no less profound now than it was in the early part of the century.
Fackenheim’s answer is this. In the past, the Jewish believer heard both the Metzaveh and the mitzvah, the Commander and the command. The Jewish unbeliever heard neither. But now, even the unbeliever hears the command; and even the believer fails to hear the Commander. God is in eclipse. We cannot use traditional theological categories like “punishment for sins” in relation to the Holocaust. There is no way of understanding how God was present at Auschwitz. This is what Fackenheim means by saying that the believer no longer hears the Commander. And yet, though there was no redeeming presence at Auschwitz, there was nonetheless a commanding presence. The Jewish secularist no less than the believer hears the command that “above all this must never happen again.” He testifies to it by his commitment to Jewish survival. That commitment cannot be justified as the product of reason. For it addresses him not as man in the abstract but as Jew in full particularity. It comes to him as “an abrupt and absolute given, revealed in the midst of total catastrophe.”15Ibid., 23. This is what Fackenheim means by saying that even the unbeliever hears the command.
The old dichotomies between Orthodox and heterodox, believer and unbeliever, therefore fall away in the light of this shared and transfiguring experience:
Once there was a sharp, perhaps ultimate dichotomy between “religious” and “secular” Jews. It exists no longer. After Auschwitz, the religious Jew still witnesses to God in history, albeit in ways that may be revolutionary. And the “secular” Jew has become a witness as well – against Satan if not to God. His mere commitment to Jewish survival without further grounds is a testimony; indeed Jewish survival after Auschwitz is neither “mere” nor without grounds… For this commitment is ipso facto testimony that there can be, must be, shall be, no second Auschwitz anywhere; on this testimony and this faith the secular Jew no less than the religious Jew stakes his own life, the lives of his children, and the lives of his children’s children. A secular holiness, side by side with religious, is becoming manifest in contemporary Jewish existence.16Ibid., 53–54.
The State of Israel lies at the very centre of these reflections. It represents that which has decisively changed in Jewish consciousness. Israel, if not the end of galut, is the end of galut Judaism, which Fackenheim defines as “the faith by which the Jew, while lamenting the exile is able to bear it in patience and confidence; he can bear it, for it is meaningful.”17The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim: A Reader, edited by Michael L. Morgan (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 301. This faith, applied to the Holocaust, is no longer tenable. Instead Israel symbolises the Jewish determination no longer to suffer evil but actively to resist it. Thus for Fackenheim, though the state and the majority of its population are secular, there is something intrinsically sacred in both. Israel is a real, if fragmentary tikkun, a “mending” of the “rupture” caused by Auschwitz.18Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982). Fackenheim uses the kabbalistic term tikkun to attach religious significance to ways in which evil can be partially redeemed by becoming the springboard for a new affirmation of the good.
Undoubtedly Fackenheim has touched on a deep chord in contemporary Jewish sensibility. His statement that the Holocaust yielded the command “Never again” precisely defined the popular mood, articulating, as one reviewer noted, “the sentiments…of Jewish shoe salesmen, accountants, policemen, cab drivers, secretaries.”19Ibid., 299. But there is a central problem in his writings in so far as they touch on the subject of peoplehood. The intellectual strategy Fackenheim adopts is that of inclusivism, an approach taken by some Christian writers like Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner to suggest that one who thinks of himself as a non-believer may, without knowing it, actually be a believer. Inclusivism has a significant place in traditional Jewish thought. But it always encounters this problem: that it imputes beliefs or intentions to individuals against their own self-description. It speaks of others as they would not speak of themselves. In Fackenheim’s case inclusivism runs in both directions: the religious Jew is held to believe less than he claims, and the secular Jew more. The religious Jew believes less, because traditional faith has been “ruptured” by the Holocaust. The secular Jew believes more, because post-Holocaust Jewish survival is itself a testimony of faith. Thus religious and secular Jews have more in common than they imagine.
As a description of contemporary Jewry, this is untenable.20A critique along similar lines is to be found in Steven Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 205–47. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Orthodox thinkers have charted many different responses to the Holocaust, but they have one thing in common. They refuse to admit to a “rupture” in traditional faith. Whether the Shoah was, as R. Joel Teitelbaum argued, a punishment for sins, or as others argued, a “hiding of the face of God” or a result of the space left by God for human free will, they approach it in the language of earlier Jewish responses to suffering. Some draw their imagery from the book of Ezekiel, others from Job, others from Lamentations. These are significant differences. But more significant is the fact on which they do not differ: that Auschwitz has eclipsed neither the command nor the Commander. Fackenheim makes a move that no Orthodox thinker would follow in implying that a novum in Jewish history is a novum in Jewish spirituality. That pious Jews went to their deaths in Auschwitz reciting the words “I believe with perfect faith” is itself a datum with which Jewish theology must come to terms.
Secular Jews for their part have responded with equal consistency. The Shoah, they have argued, was a human catastrophe to which there must be a human response. It was possible because Jews had no capacity to defend themselves and because they had nowhere else to go. The State of Israel represents the necessary acquisition of home and power after the terrible consequences of homelessness and powerlessness. But these are secular imperatives with no religious undertones. There has been, in other words, no theological convergence between religious and secular Jews of the kind that Fackenheim’s thought leads us to expect. The attempt to find unifying substance and significance in Jewish survival as such remains problematic. For there is too little agreement on what that survival means and demands.
Irving Greenberg
Perhaps the closest modern Jewish thought has come to a full expression of what Daniel Elazar calls neo-Sadduceanism is to be found in the writings of the American thinker Irving Greenberg.21Greenberg’s argument is set out in three papers published by the National Jewish Resource Center, New York: On the Third Era in Jewish History: Power and Politics (1980); The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History (1981); and Voluntary Covenant (1982). See also his The Jewish Way (New York: Summit Books, 1988). Greenberg’s thought bears a close resemblance to that of Fackenheim, but it is set against a larger historical backdrop. Instead of invoking images of catastrophe and rupture, Greenberg argues that the Holocaust and Israel have initiated a historical development in Judaism comparable to that which occurred at the time of the destruction of the second Temple. That event marked the transition from biblical to rabbinic Judaism. The last half-century has witnessed the birth of a new phase in the unfolding of the covenant: the third great era in Judaism.
The two transitions have a similar pattern. If we compare biblical and rabbinic Judaism, Greenberg argues, we find a distinct theological transformation. For the rabbis, the presence of God was more concealed than for the prophets, but it was more widely experienced. Sages took the place of visionaries; the synagogue replaced the Temple; argument and interpretation succeeded prophecy. The divine presence, as it were, became more secularised, which is to say, more opaque but also more diffused. The divine retreat from history meant that human action became more significant, human responsibility for the covenant became greater, and man became, as the sages put it, “a partner in the work of creation.” Through the extension of education and ritual, ordinary life was suffused with religious meaning.
The second era was initiated by a tragedy, the destruction of the Temple, and so was the third, by the destruction of European Jewry. As a result, God has become more hidden still. “We are entering,” says Greenberg, “a period of silence in theology,”22Greenberg, The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History, 16. for any attempt to use traditional categories like divine providence or punishment in understanding the Holocaust is a blasphemy against the innocent victims. The third era is to the second as the second was to the first: a move towards greater human responsibility and a more universal if more concealed divine presence. For Greenberg as for Fackenheim, the State of Israel is the decisive model of the new “secular” holiness. “The revelation of Israel is a call to secularity; the religious enterprise must focus on the mundane.”23Ibid., 17.
A new constellation is emerging, of a new Jewish situation (power), a new theology (secularity and the God of silence), new institutions (in Israel, the Knesset and the Israeli Defence Forces; in America, fundraising and politically activist organisations) and new leadership (politicians, Jewish academics and lay-leaders). The key to this configuration is an emphasis on human initiative, on taking the Jewish destiny into one’s own hands. Although the new mood is seen in its purest form in Israel, it has affected the Diaspora as well. Jewish communities in America and elsewhere are more politically active than in the past, a sure sign of the end of the exilic mentality. The clearest symptom of the transformation of values is the fact that the noblest concept of the second era – martyrdom – is no longer tenable. The virtues of the new Jewish age are active, not passive.
Which brings us to Greenberg’s most controversial claim. The covenant, he says, was broken by the Holocaust. If Judaism testifies to the infinite value of human life, the concentration camps were the ultimate devaluation of human life. More specifically, the covenant which had promised redemption instead became a mute witness to destruction. Greenberg quotes Elie Wiesel’s remark that during the Shoah the Jewish mission had become a “suicide mission.” Such a sacrifice cannot be morally commanded. The Jewish vocation had led to a fate too dangerous and cruel to bear. “Morally speaking, then, God can have no claims on the Jews by dint of the covenant.”24Greenberg, Voluntary Covenant, 15.
Jews today who identify do so voluntarily, knowing how much they risk by so doing. “In the age of voluntary covenant, every person who steps forward to live as a Jew can be compared to a convert.”25Ibid., 21. One who comes to convert to Judaism, says the Talmud, is told that the Jews are driven, tormented and persecuted.26Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 47a. Conversion means a willingness – despite everything – to identify with such a people. Every Jew today, says Greenberg, is in such a position. Whoever chooses to remain Jewish has voluntarily renewed the covenant.
A voluntary covenant differs from a covenant imposed from above in that it is inherently pluralistic. The various Jewish groups now active, each in its different way, testify to a fundamental choice to carry on the Jewish enterprise. In the silence of Heaven, we hear only the varied voices of Jews, and we have no authoritative criterion to choose between them. The two things we cannot aspire to after Auschwitz are theological certainty and exclusiveness. Jewish existence as such has become imperative and holy: not one particular mode of existence as against others. We no longer have access to authoritative standards of what is a correct covenantal response.
Greenberg’s thought, then, is an attempt to translate Judaism into a language of secularity. Unlike Fackenheim, who uses the strategy of inclusivism to suggest a kinship between religious and secular Jews, Greenberg takes his stand on the principle of pluralism. But pluralism in the sense in which he intends it – conferring equal validity to religious and secular modes of Jewishness – is unprecedented in Jewish tradition, and to vindicate his claim Greenberg is forced to very radical theology indeed. His views have a close affinity with contemporary Reform Judaism in placing choice at the heart of the religious system. His argument is that we are each free to choose our way of being Jewish, since we no longer hear the divine voice and the claims of the past are, after Auschwitz, silenced. It is difficult to see, in this scheme, what sense could be given to the central term of Judaism, commandment; or indeed what is left of the covenant itself. For the covenant meant this if it meant anything: that a Jew is born into a destiny with associated obligations, the terms of which reach back to Sinai. Judaism, that is to say, is experienced as given, not chosen.
To establish the centrality of choice, Greenberg must argue, as he does, that the covenant is broken. But having gone this far, it is difficult to see why it should be voluntarily taken up again. Unlike Fackenheim, Greenberg offers no convincing explanation of the significance of Jewish survival. To be sure, he is aware of the problem. At one point, he suggests that “the Jewish people was so in love with the dream of redemption that it volunteered to carry on its mission.”27Ibid., 17. At another he writes that “One may opt out by refusing to live as a visible Jew, by trying to escape the fate of a Jew.”28Ibid., 22. The language of these two sentences suggests that Greenberg is reluctant to carry the idea of voluntary covenant to its conclusion. The first invokes the religious idea of redemption, still apparently intact after the Holocaust. The second is a Sartrean appeal to the “fate” of the Jew which it is inauthentic to try to escape. Greenberg’s use of these ideas, at odds with the central thrust of his argument, gives us early warning of the difficulties of importing pluralism into Judaism.
Greenberg’s significance lies in the fact that, more than any other thinker, he has responded to the shifting centre of gravity of Jewish life. His thought is a conscious attempt to formulate a “post denominational” Judaism, and explicitly reflects the fact that the symbols and contexts of Jewish life have changed. The focus of Jewish experience is no longer the synagogue but, in Israel, the state, and in America, the philanthropic organisation. The public expression of belongingness has replaced the private experience of commandedness. Greenberg notes that this transformation must radically alter our idea of what constitutes religious behaviour. “Every act of social justice, every humane or productive factory, every sport contest in community centres, every act of human socialising and dignity will become a secularised halakhah as Jewish religious insight deepens and the sacred dimensions of the profane are uncovered.”29Greenberg, The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History, 22–23. This is precisely what sociologists call civil religion, and Elazar, neo-Sadducean Judaism.
Michael Wyschogrod
An altogether different approach is taken by Michael Wyschogrod. In 1983 Wyschogrod published one of the very few systematic attempts this century to offer a full-scale theology of Jewish existence, and a most fascinating and unusual one it is. The title gives a preliminary indication of the book’s central theme. It is called The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election.30See note 5.
One of the most perplexing concepts for Jews in modernity has been that of the chosen people. The theme of the election of Israel is central to the Bible. It was a definitive component of Jewish consciousness throughout the rabbinic period also, emphasised repeatedly in the liturgy. To be sure, throughout the Middle Ages the situation of Jews hardly accorded with what might be expected of God’s “special treasure,” and Christian theologians made much of the fact. But Jews were unmoved. Judah Halevi reminded them of Amos’s famous prophecy, “You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins.”31Amos 3:2. Israel among the nations, said Halevi, was like the heart among the other limbs of the body. It was more sensitive; therefore it suffered most.32Judah Halevi, Kuzari 2:36–44. Jewish suffering only reinforced the sense of special destiny.
It was in the modern period that the idea was first called into question. Spinoza was the first iconoclast. Chosenness, he argued, did not signify that Jews had any singular endowments, that they were specially favoured by God, or that they had more than their share of miracles. It referred to nothing more than “temporal physical happiness and freedom, in other words, autonomous government, and to the manner and means by which they obtained it.”33Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, translated by R. H. M. Elwes, (New York: Dover, 1951), 48. It followed that with the loss of national autonomy in the first century CE, the Jews had ceased to be chosen.
Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published in 1670, and caused a scandal in both Jewish and Christian circles. Spinoza had already, fourteen years before, been excommunicated by the Jewish community. It was more than a century and a half before his views came to be reconsidered in radical Jewish circles and eventually had a significant influence on both Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. The problem was this. Jewish chosenness had its “plausibility strucure” in a social context in which Jews were a people apart. That is precisely what both reformers and secular Zionists did not wish to be. Each sought “normalization,” whether as citizens among citizens or as a nation among nations.
In 1844, the Reform congregation in Berlin published a prayer book which eliminated references to chosenness. Its authors explained that “the concept of tribal holiness and of a special vocation arising from this has become entirely foreign to us.” Instead they urged “true humanity and brotherly love.”34Quoted in Arnold Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 19. From then on in Reform circles chosenness was reinterpreted as mission, and mission in turn universalised to relatively contentless ethical ideals. Arnold Eisen has devoted a book-length study to the ways in which the idea of the chosen people was neutralised in twentieth-century American-Jewish thought.35See previous note. Mordecai Kaplan, the most radical but most folk-oriented of American rabbis, categorically rejected it. For him the idea was theologically unsound and socially dysfunctional. Instead he called on Jews to “live with a sense of vocation or calling without involving ourselves in any of the invidious distinctions implied in the doctrine of election.”36Eisen, The Chosen People in America, 81. In contemporary Israel meanwhile, A. B. Yehoshua has argued that “the demand to be different, singular, unique, set apart from the family of nations” is a neurosis of galut, to be cured by Zionism.37A.B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 21–74. Once one is a majority, the sense of differentness disappears.
In reinstating the idea of election, Wyschogrod was thus confronting directly the ambivalence of modern Jewish thought. A brief survey cannot do justice to his subtle and far-reaching work. But it is clear that to reach a full-blooded particularism he was bound to have to reject the classic terms of Jewish philosophy as represented by Moses Maimonides, and to turn directly to the Bible. “Maimonides’ demythologisation of the concept of God,” he writes, “is unbiblical and ultimately dangerous to Jewish faith.” Philosophy searches for the universal. But the God of Israel “enters space by dwelling in the Tabernacle and the Temple in Jerusalem.”38Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, xiv–xv. He lives in particularities, among them a particular people.
To understand the mystery of Israel we must rescue the idea of God from depersonalisation and incorporeality. God, in the Torah, is a person; He has loves; He expresses emotions; He dwells in holy places; He chooses a particular people. Here is the crux. Two things had made Jewish thinkers underemphasise this cluster of ideas. The first, in the Middle Ages, was Christianity. Jews had been scandalised by the idea of incarnation and had, in reaction, gone to the opposite extreme of stressing the abstract spirituality of God. The second, in the modern period, was assimilation. Jews had sought a theology that would legitimate their striving for normalisation. They found it in the universalistic ideas of the Enlightenment, which they retrospectively attributed to the prophets and the sages. “Ethics,” writes Wyschogrod, “is the Judaism of the assimilated.”39Ibid., 181.
But this is to rob Judaism of its essential foundation, the idea of a chosen people. Here is how Wyschogrod summarises his belief:
The election of the people of Israel as the people of God constitutes the sanctification of a natural family. God could have chosen a spiritual criterion: the election of all those who have faith or who obey God’s commandments. The liberal mind would find such an election far more congenial. But God did not choose this path. He chose the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There are, of course, religious and ethical demands made of the elect. When they do not live up to those demands, they are punished. But the essential belonging to the people of election is derived from descent from the Patriarchs. The election of Israel is therefore a corporeal election. One result of this is that a Jew cannot resign his election. Were election based on faith or ethics, a change in belief or conduct would terminate the election and the responsibilities connected with it. But because the election of Israel is of the flesh, a Jew remains in the service of God no matter what he believes or does. The Jewish body as well as the Jewish soul is therefore holy.40Ibid., xv.
In the book’s closing sentences he puts the proposition more strikingly. “Salvation is of the Jews because the flesh of Israel is the abode of the divine presence in the world. It is the carnal anchor that God has sunk into the soil of creation.”41Ibid., 256. This is language altogether unprecedented in Jewish philosophy, an exotic synthesis of influences which include Judah Halevi, Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. It stands in an obvious dialectical relationship to Christian theology. The intellectual underpinnings of the analysis are important in their own right but will not concern us here. What follows, however, is that Wyschogrod can directly confront the question of how there can be Jewish peoplehood at a time of profound conflicts of belief. Jews are united not theologically, ideologically or culturally but ontologically: in their very being. They are members of a family. They are chosen. They are a holy people. This applies even when they rebel against the terms of the covenant. Wyschogrod takes with ultimate seriousness the rabbinic dictum with which he prefaces the book: “Even though they [the Jews] are unclean, the Divine Presence is among them.”42Sifra to Leviticus 16:16.
Wyschogrod spells out the implications of this sentence for the contemporary Jewish situation.
God appears in history as the God of Israel and there can therefore be no thought about God that is not also thought about Israel. And if a large portion of the Israel of our day no longer thinks about God, this fact, too, must find its way into the Jewish thought of our day… Each one of us as a Jew is a replica of the consciousness of the whole people. If we are believers, somewhere in us also lurks the nonbelief of our nonbelieving brethren, and if we are non-believers, the belief of the believers is also in us. It is to this complex and fragmented consciousness that the Jewish thought of our time must speak.43Wsychogrod, The Body of Faith, 175.
The Holocaust plays no part in Wyschogrod’s argument. Necessarily so, for as a traditionalist thinker he is bound to reject any suggestion that history can alter the terms of the covenant. Elsewhere he has written penetrating critiques of the Holocaust theology of Fackenheim and Greenberg.44Michael Wyschogrod, “Faith and the Holocaust,” Judaism 20:3 (Summer 1971), 286–94; “Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?,” Tradition 16:5 (Fall 1977), 63–78. The Shoah is a crisis for faith, but the promise of redemption survives. “Faith has always clung to a trust that was not warranted by the standards of plausibility and the givens of the observable world… Fundamentally, God is a redeemer. His anger is fleeting. Once it passes, His love which had never gone out of existence but only out of sight reasserts itself and the reality of redemption returns.”45Wyschogrod, “Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?,” 70–71, 75. Nonetheless, The Body of Faith is a post-Holocaust work and could not have been written earlier. We are reminded of R. Isaac Nissenbaum’s speech at the start of uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. Previously the enemies of the Jew had sought his soul: now they sought his body. Like Fackenheim and Greenberg, Wyschogrod is haunted by the theological resonance of the sheer physical survival of post-Holocaust Jewry. Unlike them, however, he is determined to place this fact in a traditional religious framework. Where Fackenheim has recourse to inclusivism and Greenberg, pluralism, Wyschogrod turns towards mysticism.
The Body of Faith has not had the attention it deserves, for it is an idiosyncratic work that stands outside the main currents of modern Jewish thought. But it is a book that will challenge liberal and Orthodox Jews alike. Liberals will be disturbed by its fierce particularism and anti-rationalism. Orthodoxy will be troubled by its insistence that peoplehood takes precedence over halakhah. “Separated from the Jewish people, nothing is Judaism,” Wyschogrod insists. “If anything, it is the Jewish people that is Judaism.”46Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 174. To be sure, the early rabbinic literature had speculated on which of the two terms of the covenant took priority: Torah or the people of Israel. But the halakhic as against the mystical tradition had seen holiness not as a predicate of objects and persons but of acts and intentions. A Jew was holy not in what he was but in what he did. Hence Saadia’s insistence that Jewish law constituted the Jewish people. It did not merely regulate a people whose defining characteristics lay elsewhere. Wyschogrod writes within the halakhic tradition, but argues that peoplehood is religiously prior to that tradition. It was left, therefore, to the fourth of our thinkers, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, to articulate the most that could be salvaged of modern Jewish peoplehood within the terms Saadia had laid down.
The two covenants
Rabbi Soloveitchik’s great essay on the themes of Holocaust, Israel and Jewish peoplehood is Kol Dodi Dofek (“The Sound of My Lover Knocking”), written in 1956.47R. Joseph Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakhah (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1981), 9–56. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Soloveitchik draws a distinction between two modes of existence, those of goral and ye’ud, fate and destiny. Those who experience goral live as a passive object of other people’s actions. They see their personal history as a series of things that happen to them. When they search for religious meaning in suffering, they ask, “Why has this happened to me?” This is a question which has no definitive answer. It presupposes a totality of perspectives which human beings cannot attain. Those who live at the level of ye’ud, however, see themselves as active subjects. When they search for religious meaning in suffering they ask, “To what does this summon me?” Suffering brings man to religious crisis out of which comes repentance and a determination to right wrongs. This is the halakhic approach to the problem of evil. Halakhic man asks not “Why did this happen?” but “What then shall I do?” Suffering is the last warning which Divine providence gives humanity. Like the beloved in the Song of Songs, we hear the lover knocking at the door. Our task is to respond without delay or we will find, like the beloved, that the moment has passed and the lover has gone.
Soloveitchik does not speak directly about the Holocaust, which he regards as hester panim, “the hiding of the face” of God. Instead he speaks about the State of Israel, whose birth and early years are an intimation of the Divine presence in history. He enumerates several aspects of this period which might be heard as “the sound of my lover knocking.” First, the United Nations vote which brought Israel into being united Russia and America, otherwise enemies. Second, Israel’s War of Independence recalled earlier miracles of Jewish history: “the many were delivered into the hands of the few.” Third, the Christian indictment of the Jews – that they would remain homeless until they converted – had been refuted. Fourth, Israel had awoken Jewish consciousness in the hearts of assimilating Jewish youth. Fifth, the era in which Jewish lives were at the mercy of others had ended. Sixth, Jewish wandering was over. Jews could now find refuge in the land of their ancestors. These events were pregnant with religious implications.
But the analysis should not be misunderstood. There is no unambiguous Divine meaning in history. Covenant involves relationship. Providence sends signs which may be recognised and responded to or ignored. The entire sequence of events to which Soloveitchik refers could be seen as mere incidents in secular time. They could be fate or destiny, happenings or beckonings, depending on how Jews interpreted and reacted to them. What, then, had been the Jewish response? Here Soloveitchik prefaces his answer with a further, and important, conceptual development.
Judaism, he argues, recognises two covenants: a brit goral and a brit ye’ud, one of fate and another of destiny. The covenant of fate is biblically represented by the exodus. The covenant of destiny was enacted at Sinai. The same distinction in modes of being which applies to the individual applies also to the life of the people. The exodus was experienced as fate. Without choice on their part, the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and brought out by God to freedom. But the covenant at Sinai involved the consent of the Israelites and summoned them to a life of choice and dedication, to an active shaping of their history in response to the divine command. These are the two dimensions of Jewish peoplehood. Soloveitchik refers to them respectively as am (“people”) and goi (“nation”). An am is a people formed by a shared history and fate. A goi is a nation joined by a common purpose and vision. By way of illustration, Soloveitchik relates the distinction to the two processes which a convert must undergo before admission to Jewry, circumcision and immersion in a mikvah, the ritual bath. Circumcision symbolises that the convert has become a child of Abraham, a member of a people with a particular past and future. But immersion represents the assumption of Israel’s spiritual purpose, the acceptance of the commandments.
The implication was clear. The Holocaust and the State of Israel had led secular and non-Orthodox Jews to a renewal of the covenant of fate. The brit goral expresses the solidarity of a people that perennially finds itself alone in the world. It has four dimensions. First, individual Jews find themselves unable to escape the fate of their people. Mordecai’s words to Queen Esther still hold true: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house, you alone of all the Jews will escape.”48Esther 4:13. Second, collective fate leads to collective consciousness. When one Jew suffers, all Jews feel pain. This leads in turn to a third dimension, collective responsibility. All Jews, said the sages, are sureties for one another. The fourth dimension follows: collective action. Jews were commanded to help one another through acts of charity, welfare and rescue. Historically they had always done so. The biblical commands which set out these obligations are couched in the language of brotherhood. Jews act out of a sense of kinship born of the covenant of fate. But now came the crucial qualification. Modern Jewish history had led to a renewal of the brit goral but not of the brit ye’ud. There had been no religious reaffirmation of the covenant. The former now summoned Jews to the latter. In the Holocaust and the State of Israel, Jewry had undergone another exodus but not yet another Sinai.
Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks for and from the rabbinic tradition. His analysis is, however, both audacious and characteristically modern. Neither the biblical nor rabbinic literature speak of the exodus as a separate covenant in its own right. The concepts of brit goral and brit ye’ud are original to Soloveitchik. They are strongly reminiscent of a distinction proposed, for similar reasons, by the equally daring Rabbi Abraham Kook. Kook saw religious significance in the work of secular Zionists. They had a love for their people. They were leading the return. They were settling the land and building a nation. Nonetheless they rejected Judaism and the religious interpretation of Jewish destiny. Religious Jews, for their part, were sustaining the tradition and leading lives of great spirituality. But they were not devoted to the Jewish people as a whole and its national rebirth. Kook therefore distinguished between nefesh and ru’ach, two words meaning “spirit.” The secularists had a more highly developed nefesh, a national and practical spirit, while the religious had a more perfect ru’ach, a personal and God-centred sensibility.49R. Abraham Isaac Kook, Chazon ha-Ge’ulah (Brooklyn: n.p., 1974), 139.
What led both men to these conceptual innovations was the phenomenon which has concerned us throughout this chapter. Rabbinic tradition from the days of the Mishnah to the nineteenth century had to deal with only two kinds of deviation: the sinner and the apostate. The sinner broke Jewish law; the apostate rejected it. The apostate, by placing himself outside Jewish law placed himself outside the Jewish people. How far and final that departure was, varied. But it was a departure: of this no one had doubts. The revolution begun by Reform Judaism on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other, and culminating in the new Sadduceanism, had no precedent. For the first time tradition was confronted by Jews who saw themselves as Jews, identified with their people, contributed to its welfare either by sharing in the building of Israeli society or, in the diaspora, by philanthropic support, and yet who rejected Jewish law as the basis of their self-definition. They broke Saadia’s rule which had been the self-evident basis of Jewish identity for 1,800 years, that there is no Jewish peoplehood without Jewish law. How then were such neo-Sadducean Jews to be seen? One option, taken de facto by several strands of Orthodoxy, was to see them as in effect non-Jews. They were Jewish Gentiles, or they were Israelis, not Jews. They were “other,” not “brother.” The response of Rabbis Kook and Soloveitchik was therefore far from being the only one available. It represented a maximal inclusivism within the parameters of tradition. It drew the boundaries of peoplehood as widely as possible. It searched for a way of regarding the neo-Sadduceans as within rather than outside the Jewish community.
But a contrast between Soloveitchik and Fackenheim, Greenberg and Wyschogrod immediately reveals the vast gap between even the most liberal exponent of the halakhic tradition and the viewpoints outside. Each of these other three thinkers focuses almost exclusively on what Soloveitchik would term the covenant of fate. For Fackenheim the brit goral is announced in the “commanding voice of Auschwitz.” For Greenberg it is enacted in the new dispensations of power, activism and secularity. For Wyschogrod it is discovered in the biblical election, understood as a state of being rather than of doing. For R. Soloveitchik these three analyses exclude half of Judaism: brit ye’ud, the covenant of destiny. At most they amount to am, not goi kadosh: a people rather than a holy nation. The recovery of a sense of Jewish peoplehood in the last half-century therefore remains at best a partial and as yet deeply flawed achievement. Jews, secular and religious, in Israel and outside, have re-established a kinship which competing ideological visions in the nineteenth century had driven underground. But they have not yet renewed the shared religious destiny that alone in the past gave it substance and sense.
It is hard to avoid R. Soloveitchik’s conclusion that it has been external fate rather than internal vision that has been the most powerful force for Jewish unity in modern times. In the great covenantal speeches of Moses, Joshua and Ezra, history and destiny merged. Memories of a shared past led to commitment to a shared future. That perception lay behind the rabbinic understanding of the “counting of the omer,” the counting of the forty-nine days between Pesach and Shavuot, the festivals respectively of exodus and Sinai. The two were linked. Fate and purpose, Jewish identity and Jewish law, people and holy nation, were inseparable. At the present juncture in Jewish history, they are separated. That, from a religious perspective, is the tragedy and the challenge.