IN THE WILDERNESS OF THE NATIONS
Shavuot, 5702—May, 1942
WORDS which seem to apply very closely to the present situation of the Jewish people were once proclaimed by the prophet Ezekiel: **Ezekiel XX, 34-35.“And I will bring you out from the people, and will gather you out of the countries wherein ye are scattered, with a mighty hand, with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out. And I will bring you into the wilderness of the nations, and there will I plead with you face to face”. The future of Judaism may depend on our willingness to grasp fully the implication of these words.
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God will bring His people out of the countries in which they have been scattered, and He will lead them not to salvation, not back to their Home-land—this will follow later—first He will lead them from all the countries of Jewish settlement into the Wilderness of the Nations. In other words, Jewish settlements as they have emerged in the various countries of the world, Jewries as they have taken shape in the course of the long centuries of our history in exile in all corners of the world, will be broken up and dissolved; Jews and Jewries will be driven out into the Wilderness of the Nations.
To-day, we have reached this stage in our history. The exiles have been exiled anew. Jewries all over the world have been uprooted. Those compact enclosures of Jewish life, each with a history of its own, each with a religious culture of its own suited to its environment, each almost a separate Jewish nation of its own, with distinct traditions and institutions, have been forced open and their contents poured out, spread out all over the world.
Think of Russian Jewry, of Polish Jewry, of German Jewry—they are no more. There are only former Russian, Polish, German Jews uprooted and wandering about in the Wilderness of the Nation.
Our whole people is in this situation. All of us. We like to think that American Jewry and English Jewry have been spared the tragedy of living in the wilderness. This is a misinterpretation of Jewish history. This would be true if the breaking up of the great historic Jewries were only a matter of migration, a matter of geography, of “whither”, where to go, where to find a new home. Thank God, these questions and problems do not exist for the English and American Jewries. Materially at least and for the time being they are settled. And yet they too live in the wilderness. In fact, this tragic process of the breaking up of historic Jewries, of the disintegration of Jewish settlements, of banishment from the homes which Jews have found in the countries of the world and which in some cases they have inhabited longer than the present occupiers, into the homelessness of a new Exile, into the Wilderness of the Nations, started with the ancestors of those Jews who to-day constitute the bulk of the American and English Jewries. The tragedy began sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago, with the great migrations of Jews from Russia, Poland, Rumania towards the West; it has culminated in our days in the breakdown of all the continental Jewries.
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It is true that the material position of the Jewries in the Anglo-Saxon world is, thank God, much sounder than that of their brethren elsewhere. But this process of disintegration of the historic Jewries presents not only a problem of migration, of Jewish politics and economics; it involves a spiritual crisis of the first magnitude.
The disintegration of individual Jewries means in fact that Judaism is disintegrating. The shifting of the “Jewish Geography” brings in its wake the disorganisation of the spiritual structure of Judaism. It is a mistake to think that Judaism can be transported—as it were—from one country to another. Judaism is not a book or a library which you may carry with you from one place to another. Judaism is not a mere theoretical system, a compilation of ideals and beliefs. Judaism is life lived by Jews, it is a system of purposes and intentions, carried into realisation by living Jewries. The great Russian Jewry, with its own history, its own traditions, its Russo-Jewish propensities and idiosyncrasies, it was Judaism. In its dissolution Judaism also dissolves. Polish Jewry, German Jewry, in all their activities, their communal organisations and religious-cultural institutions, their particular style of thinking and living, represented various historic shapes of living Judaism. In their disintegration Judaism goes under, in their disappearance Judaism disappears.
One cannot replant the Judaism of one country in the soil of another. Every Jewry is unique. The shape that Judaism takes in the various Jewries is always “locally” determined. The Jewish emigrant always carries with him only the ruins of his former spiritual existence, the ruins of Judaism as lived in his own native Jewry, just as he carries in his little bundle the miserable remnants of his former material existence.
As soon as the Polish or Lithuanian Jew leaves his country he ceases to be the Polish or Lithuanian Jew. He becomes the former Polish or Lithuanian Jew. He becomes the shadow of the Polish or Lithuanian Jew, the shadow of a historic Jewish type.
This is the real tragedy of the Jews who are forced out of the countries of their historic sojournings into the Wilderness of the Nations.
Let it be understood that we do not treat here only of the recent refugees from the Continent. We deal with the Jewish situation in this country and in America. For what else are the Jewish communities in the United Kingdom or in the U.S.A., or South Africa, but the ghostly shadows of great Jewries, what else but the debris of the former Russian, Polish and Lithuanian Jewries. Stop talking of English or American Jewry. There is no such thing as yet. There are Jews in these countries, but these countries have not yet become homes to new Jewries; they are still part of the Wilderness of the Nations into which Jews have been driven. There is no positive manifestation of Jewish life which could be called Anglo-Jewish. What is still Jewish with us is Russo-Jewish, Polish-Jewish or Lithuanian-Jewish; and what English, is not Jewish, is often anti-Jewish, often the jettisoning of Judaism. Jews in the Anglo-Saxon world either vegetate on the remnants of former Judaisms imported by the emigrants, or else throw even such remnants overboard. “Anglo-Jewish” is an accident in Jewish history, not yet an achievement, as Russo-Jewish, Polish-Jewish, or German-Jewish was.
This, of course, is a hopeless situation which must lead to ultimate dissolution and extinction.
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What can we do to avert the catastrophe that menaces us?. This is not the place for developing a detailed plan of action. But we may try to indicate the goal towards which we must direct our endeavours.
The first epoch in the modern history of Jews in Anglo-Saxon countries has reached its conclusion. It was the epoch of economic settlement in the new countries of Jewish emigration. While the struggle for proper economic conditions and social security lasted, the emigrants had to subsist on those remains of spiritual capital which they were able to save from the breakdown of the Jewries to which they originally belonged.
No longer are they emigrants to-day. Economically and politically they are settled in quite normal conditions. Materially they are already the children of a new age; spiritually, however, they live in a void. All they have are the fading memories of Vilna and Warsaw, of Kovno and Lodz. This is an impossible situation. The material re-settlement of the remnants of former Jewries has been completed, as far as the Jews in the Anglo-Saxon world themselves are concerned. Now must follow the spiritual re-settlement of Judaism in the cultural sphere of the English-speaking nations.
Now has the time come to create Anglo-Jewry as a new manifestation of a living Judaism; a Jewry that is Anglo-Jewish not because of the mere accident of geography or owing to its language, but in the sense that in it Judaism has found its own adequate expression in the midst of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
At the present crisis in Jewish history it will not do merely to follow the traditions of the past. It is our duty to create traditions for the future. Jews cannot forever continue to live in London, New York, Sydney, according to the “Minhag Polin”; the time has come when the “Minhag Britanya” or the “Minhag America” must be moulded, or else we are lost. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I emphatically reject Reform or Liberalism. What I preach is historic Judaism.
The style of living of the new Jewries which are to be formed must be based on the foundations of the Jewish past; it must retain the intentions of our great religious culture, but it must relate Judaism to the rest of the world in the midst of which we have to live.
In other words: Our task is not to imitate former Jewries, but to make Judaism real to-day; that is, with the help of the knowledge and the experience of the past to hammer out the religious-cultural shape of a new Jewry which shall emerge from the contact of Judaism with Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
Only when this task is performed shall we be redeemed from the Wilderness of the Nations.