The Tower of Babel
Jewish thought has passed through a crisis, one of the most serious in its history. The story we have told has been of a religious tradition in a state of fragmentation. Despite the fact that we have spoken of “modern Jewish thought” as if it were a single entity, we have found little common ground among the various contemporary approaches to the Holocaust and the State of Israel, the diaspora and Jewish peoplehood, halakhah and the authority of Judaism’s sacred texts.
To be sure, modern Jewish thinkers have something in common. They have reflected on the same set of subjects in the light of Judaism’s classic themes: exile and redemption, covenant and peoplehood, revelation and interpretation. Perhaps, then, the current diversity of Jewish thought is no more than a continuation of the longstanding “argument for the sake of Heaven” which has historically characterised Judaism in its philosophical moments. If so, the disagreements between Jews today are not unique. They echo those between Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, Maimonides and Nachmanides, and the eighteenth-century Chassidim and their opponents. On this interpretation, Judaism has always been constituted by debate and dialogue rather than by dogma. Its unity is not to be found in a list of propositions agreed by all. Rather, it is to be found in a shared set of themes to which the various philosophies of Judaism are the multifaceted and open-ended commentaries.
There is some truth in this approach, but not enough. There is no precedent for the depth of disagreement that currently characterises Jewish thought. To be sure, there were profound intellectual disputes in the past. But they took place within clearly defined boundaries. Premodern Jewish commentators and philosophers shared a cluster of commitments that made them recognisably participants in the same tradition, adherents of a single faith, speakers of a common language. That cannot be said today. It would not have occurred to any Jewish thinker prior to the nineteenth century that there could be Jewish faith without belief in the divine revelation of Torah, or that there could be Jewish identity that was not religious identity, or that there could be Jewish peoplehood in the absence of the unifying bond of halakhah. Even the events which more than any other have shaped modern Jewish consciousness – the Holocaust and the State of Israel – have given rise to a bewildering variety of interpretations. For some they have confirmed religious faith. But for others they have refuted it.
For some time, Jewish thought has been in a state of disarray to find an adequate parallel for which we would have to travel back to the second Temple period, some 2,000 years ago. The question is why. Some modern thinkers – most notably Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg – have argued that the cause lies in the Holocaust. Its disclosure of radical evil shattered all previous paradigms of faith. Its unredeemed tragedy “ruptured” the covenant. Religious belief, once engraved on tablets of stone, has been broken. Today’s Jews and their conflicting beliefs are the fragments that remain.
It is a powerful image but, I believe, a wholly mistaken analysis. The fissures that mark modern Jewish thought have their origins in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. They preceded the Holocaust and were not produced by it. If anything, the Holocaust and the State of Israel have given rise to a renewed search for tradition, a search which has led to a tentative re-engagement on the part of non-Orthodox thinkers with the concepts of revelation, halakhah and the meaning of Israel as a covenantal people. But the ghosts of the nineteenth century still haunt the Jewish imagination, and they have not yet been exorcised.
In the first chapter we explored the social background to the crisis of the nineteenth century. In this last chapter we must confront its intellectual dimension. More than Jews were dislocated by the massive changes which swept across Europe. So too was Judaism. Let us now attempt to say why. To do so we must take one stage further the argument of the previous chapter about the connection between revelation and language. And we must consider them both in the context of the idea that modern thought, Jewish and non-Jewish, has found more problematic than any other: the concept of a chosen people.
Genesis and pluralism
One of the most striking facts about the Hebrew Bible is that though it focuses almost exclusively on the history of Israel, it does not begin with it. Instead it opens with two prototypes of humanity as a whole: Adam and Noah. One might call them natural and civilised man respectively. Each signifies a universal religious order, both of which fail. Natural man reaches his nemesis in the generation of the Flood, when the world is filled with violence. Civilised man is guilty of the opposite failing, hubris or overreaching ambition, symbolised by the tower of Babel. The story of Babel, set as it is immediately prior to the choice of Abraham, is crucial to an understanding of Judaism. In it, mankind is depicted as “one people with one language.” Harmony reigns. But humanity sets itself the project of ousting God. The city and its tower designed “to reach to heaven” represent a man-made universe to rival creation. The tower of Babel is a perennial metaphor for all secular utopias, from Plato’s Republic to the Communist Manifesto and the Third Reich.
The divine response is to divide humanity into a multiplicity of languages, peoples and cultures. To be sure there is the promise, implicit in Genesis, explicit in the prophets, that one day mankind will be restored to its original harmony. But not yet: not until a metaphysical “end of days.” In the meantime and for all historical time, human civilisation is irreducibly plural. Cultures are distinct and cannot be translated into one another. There is to be one great symbol of this fact: Abraham and his family, later to become the children of Israel, eventually to become the Jews. They will be marked by their non-universality. They will be holy, meaning separate, distinct, “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.”1Numbers 23:9. They will have no natural basis of continuity. Instead, their survival and history will be peculiarly tied to the terms of their divine covenant. They will be “God’s witnesses” in their victories and defeats, their land and their exiles. They will be the exceptions to every universal rule. “You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord your God am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine.”2Leviticus 20:26.
Judaism embodies a unique paradox that has distinguished it from polytheism on the one hand and the great universal monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, on the other. Its God is universal: the creator of the universe, author and sovereign of all human life. But its covenant is particular: one people set among the nations, whose vocation is not to convert the world to its cause, but to be true to itself and to God. That juxtaposition of universality and particularity was to cause a tension between Israel and others, and within Israel itself, that has lasted to this day.
Had Israel believed in a tribal god – one nation among others, with one god among others – there would have been no tension. The nation and its god would have risen or fallen together. But because Israel’s God is God of the universe, there are times when He stands apart from His people and calls them to account for their sins. Through Amos He says “You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.”3Amos 3:2. Through Malachi He declares, “From where the sun rises to where it sets, My name is honoured among the nations…but you profane it.”4Malachi 1:11–12. When the first Temple is destroyed, Jeremiah explains that this is not the defeat of a nation and its god, but a defeat of a nation by its God. God is not for His people right or wrong. Israel’s relationship with God is continually dependent on its fidelity to the covenant.
Had Israel been a universal faith, again its existence would have been simpler. The world would have been divided into believers and infidels, the saved and the unredeemed. Against this, the Torah insists that God is the God of all humanity, not only of the saved elect. Such is the burden of the book of Jonah. Such, more fundamentally, is the message of exile and exodus. Man is called on not only to love his neighbour, the one who is like himself. He is called on to love the stranger, the one who is not like himself. Israel knows this from the core of its being, for it, more than any other people, has suffered the experience of being strangers in a land not its own. A Mishnah comments on the verse, “Let us make mankind in Our image, after Our own likeness,” that when we make many coins from the same mint they are all alike. But when God makes many people in the same image, they are all different.5Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5. Meaning: we are called on to recognise God’s image in those who are not in our image.
Israel thus testifies in its very being to the oneness of God and to the plurality of man. It furnishes a protest against tribalism on the one hand, and universal solutions to the human situation on the other. For neither does justice to the human “other,” the “stranger” who is nonetheless in the image of God. Tribalism denies rights to the outsider; universalism grants rights if and only if the outsider converts. Tribalism turns the concept of a chosen people into that of a master race. Universalism turns what may be the absolute truth of a single culture into the measure of all humanity. The opening chapters of Genesis describe the recurring outcomes of such visions: violence on the one hand, hubris on the other. Against this, Abraham is to become the father of a single family whose children are to be taught “to keep the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just,” and through whom “all the peoples of the earth will be blessed.” He prays and goes to war on behalf of his neighbours, the people of Sodom. But he dwells alone, a “stranger and sojourner” among the nations.
There can be little doubt that, historically, Israel has paid a high price for its religious destiny. Refusing to assimilate with its neighbouring tribes and nations or to convert to one or other universalist faith, it has experienced the full force of hatred of the “stranger” in the form of persecutions, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms and attempted genocide. Granted a glimpse of the future of his children, Abraham was overcome by a “deep dark dread.” Nonetheless, with or against its will, Israel has repeatedly born witness to Genesis’s statement of the human situation: that it is the stranger no less than the brother who bears within him the image of God, and a world that cannot live with strangers is a world not yet redeemed.
The biblical juxtaposition of the tower of Babel and the choice of Abraham signals, I believe, one of the great theological truths: that in an unredeemed world there are no final solutions, no universal utopias. The tower, eternal symbol of a world of “one people with one language,” is destined to remain unbuilt, however much blood is shed in its name. To be sure, Judaism stakes its faith on belief in a messianic age when the harmony with which creation began will once again return. But equally it stakes its faith on the belief that the messianic age is not yet. The world is redeemable but not yet redeemed. Until then humanity is divided into a multiplicity of languages under the sovereignty of one God.
Implicit in Judaism is a deep analogy between faith and language. A language is spoken by a people; there is no such thing as a private language or a universal language. We are born into a linguistic community; we do not choose to be born to English- as against French-speaking parents, and yet that fact has the greatest significance in shaping our sensibilities. By speaking any natural language we are participants in the history of a civilisation: its nuances of meaning and association were shaped by the past and yet persist into the present. And to speak a language is to internalise its rules of grammar and semantics; without these rules we cannot express ourselves articulately.
Applying these ideas to Judaism: faith is neither private nor universal. It is a phenomenon, in the first instance, of a particular people. Just as we can be born into a linguistic community so we can be born into a faith community and its obligations. By speaking the language of faith we are in constant dialogue with the past: this is what we described in the previous chapter as the midrashic view of revelation and tradition. And faith has rules, its own grammatical structure – in the case of Judaism, the halakhah – without which there can be no religious expression. It was just these aspects of Judaism which, as we shall see, were uniquely difficult to translate into modern Western thought.
Faith, after Babel, is covenantal, and one covenant does not exclude another. Isaac and Jacob are chosen, but Ishmael and Esau are also blessed. God rescues Israel from Egypt, but – He asks through Amos – did He not also bring the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir? Is the God of Israel not also the God of the Ethiopians?6Amos 9:7. There can be truth which is absolute and yet particular. There can be covenants which bind a people without negating the other covenants of other peoples. Because there are many faiths but only one God, we are called on to love the stranger who is unlike ourselves no less than the brother or neighbour who is like ourselves. To be sure there is a covenant which is universal – for Judaism, the covenant with Noah – which sets the minimum threshold for different peoples to live together in justice and peace. But beyond this lies the intrinsic plurality of human meanings and the distinct integrity of different faith communities. To this truth Judaism, with its code of difference, is an eternal witness.
Enlightenment and universality
Against this, one of the great beliefs of the Enlightenment was that there exists in the realm of human meanings some universal truth or at least some detached perspective (what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere”) from which all claims to truth can be universally judged. It was, after all, universality that marked the two outstanding models of Enlightenment knowledge: science (based on observation) and mathematical logic (based on reason). The kind of truth which promised progress was truth which held under all circumstances and which could therefore be tested without reference to factors which varied from one culture to another, such as authority, tradition or revelation. Such truth was “scientific.” And since science had yielded such spectacular results in explaining natural phenomena, there was every reason to suppose that it would do likewise in explaining human phenomena as well.
In ethics, for example, from the eighteenth century onward we find attempts to ground the norms of human behaviour in reason (Kant), emotion (Hume), social contract (Hobbes, Rousseau), the consequences of action (Bentham, Mill), the structure of history (Hegel), human will (Nietzsche) and existential decision (Sartre). Not all of these were rationalist approaches, but what they have in common is that their subject matter is man-as-such, not particular human beings set in specific traditions, each with its own integrity. There is a vast chasm separating those like Kant and Mill who believed that there are universal principles of ethics, and those like Nietzsche and Sartre who argued that there is nothing beyond individual decision and will. But despite this, they share the same fundamental either/or: either there is ethical truth, in which case it applies to all men equally, or there are only the private decisions of individuals, in which case there is no objective ethical truth. Ethical principle is universal or it is private: such is the axiom of the Enlightenment’s heirs.
This seemingly self-evident proposition had one fateful consequence. It excluded Judaism. For, as we have seen, Judaism was and is predicated on the conviction that there can be truth which is absolute and yet particular. Behind the Judaic belief in revelation, halakhah and the religious interpretation of history is the idea that God enacted a covenant with a particular people, thus endowing it with a unique sanctity and destiny. That truth might be covenantal, revealed, particular to those who witnessed that revelation and agreed to be bound by its terms; that it might therefore be opaque to the universalist disciplines of science and logic; that the structures of human meaning might be true without being universal: these were the principles on which Judaism depended and which the Enlightenment systematically denied.
In the previous chapter we considered one example at length: the concept of Torah min ha-shamayim. What was ultimately at stake between the Judaic concept of revelation and biblical scholarship from Spinoza onwards was the issue of the universality or particularity of meaning. What made critical scholarship appear “scientific” is that it seemed to involve no faith commitments. The meanings it sought were those that could be uncovered by methods that could be used by anyone: philology, archaeology, comparative history and so on. Recently, as the shortcomings of these methods became clear, there has been a move in some circles toward “reader response” approaches in which the meaning of the text is invented by the reader: roughly analogous to the transition, in ethics, from Kant to Nietzsche. Again the same dichotomy has held sway: either meanings are universal or they are private. Against this, Judaism insists that meanings are like languages, neither universal nor private but the property of a particular community extended through time. Since religious truth is absolute but not universal, it cannot be arrived at through (universal) reason but only through (particular) revelation. And since revelation is to be applied to the concrete human situation it must contain within itself the rules of its own interpretation, namely an oral as well as a written law. These ideas made no sense to Enlightenment thought with its implicit assumption that either (religious) truth is universal or it is not truth but subjective decision.
The intellectual crisis through which Judaism has passed and from which it is only slowly recovering is, I believe, this. Cultures can collide. Not all modes of thought are compatible with one another. In their encounter with Enlightenment, Jews met a culture into which Judaism could not be translated. Two systems of thought, each opaque to the other, met in headlong confrontation. One – Judaism – broke into fragments as soon as the attempt was made to transpose it into the language of the other. The history of the modern Jewish mind has been the record of the attempt to hold together two conceptual systems which fundamentally exclude one another. Jewish philosophy has burned brightly these past two centuries, more so than at any time since the days of Maimonides. But it has not been the light of the bush Moses saw in the desert, which burned and was not consumed. Instead it has been the light of a meteor as it enters an atmosphere and begins to disintegrate. Because the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment still exerts its power, it is important to spell out some of the ways in which Jewish faith takes issue with its fundamental assumptions.
Religious knowledge
The history of modern philosophy begins with the moment in the early seventeenth century when Descartes raised the question. What can I know with absolute certainty? What can I not doubt? Descartes’s famous answer – “I think, therefore I am” – is less important than his objective, to ground knowledge on the foundation of certainty. For three centuries thereafter, philosophy was to be driven by the quest for demonstrable knowledge whose two paradigms were science and logic.
The consequences for religious faith were immense. To be sure, Descartes himself still retained God at the centre of his system. But this could not last for long. It soon became evident that if everything was open to doubt, so too was religious faith. Immanuel Kant established that existence – even God’s existence – could never be the subject of logical proof. Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested that there were other ways of explaining the apparent order of the universe than by purposeful creation: the operation of chance and necessity might produce the same result. Within a century, Kant and Darwin had overthrown the two most powerful theological “proofs” of the Middle Ages: the ontological argument and the argument from design. Neither reason nor observation led inescapably to God; and these were, it seemed, the only reliable sources of knowledge. Theology suffered a blow from which it has not yet recovered. At worst, the positivists concluded, statements about God were unverifiable and therefore meaningless. At best, they were private expressions which lacked objective reference. Faith became, as H. L. Mencken put it, “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
Judaism was not unaffected by this revolution. Medieval Jewish philosophy, most notably in the case of Maimonides, had offered metaphysical “proofs” that now bear the mark of their time. But what is fundamental and in retrospect deeply significant is that philosophy as such was always a marginal Jewish undertaking. In the first century it was undertaken by Philo of Alexandria, but not by the rabbinic sages. In the twelfth century it was subjected to a fine critique by Judah Halevi. The philosophical work of Maimonides has remained controversial for eight centuries despite his unquestioned pre-eminence as a halakhist. In the modern period Samson Raphael Hirsch, Samuel David Luzzatto, Abraham Kook, Joseph Soloveitchik and Michael Wyschogrod all expressed sharp reservations about Maimonides’s Aristotelianism. Judaism has consistently had an uneasy relationship with philosophy. Why so?
At the core of Judaism is faith in God not as a concept but as a person. This is an idea impossible to translate into philosophical categories, ancient or modern. For if God is the Platonic, timeless source of all being, how can He be involved in the shifting contingencies of the human situation? How can He be moved by human pain or prayer? How can He be present at some times, and at others “hide His face”? How can He have a will expressible in finite commands? How, above all, can God love – not in the abstract, but in a way significant to human beings as individuals. How can God love not just man-as-such, but particular persons and peoples in their uniqueness and individuality? That God does love, care, command and choose is Judaism’s most monumental claim. For Judaism God is more than the cause of causes or necessary being, concepts explorable by science or metaphysics. God is a person, for only if God is a person does the universe hold objective meaning for human beings as persons.
For Judaism, the search for religious certainty through science or metaphysics is not merely fallacious but ultimately pagan. To suppose that God is scientifically provable is to identify God with what is observable, and this for Judaism is idolatry. To suppose that His existence can be logically demonstrated is to make God the subject of necessity – that which could not be otherwise – and this too is a denial of Judaism’s ultimate beliefs. Nor is this twentieth-century apologetics. It is a consistent theme of the Bible itself. God cannot be represented, imaged or conceptualised. He is “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be.” Even Moses, greatest of the prophets, is granted a glimpse only of God’s “back” for “man may not see Me and live.”
The idea that God might serve as an explanatory hypothesis is sharply parodied in the book of Exodus. The Egyptian magicians, unable to reproduce the plague of lice, declare, “This is the finger of God.”7Exodus 8:19. God here becomes a quasi-scientific hypothesis. Such, so the Bible suggests, is how He appears to a pagan culture. Even Maimonides, who more than anyone else in the history of Judaism saw science and metaphysics as routes to the love and fear of God, explicitly reversed the conventional relationship between philosophy and faith. We philosophise, he wrote, because we are commanded.8Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah, 1–4. See Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1987). The first command, for Maimonides, is to know that God exists; therefore we must pursue knowledge, for all truth leads to God. But the command precedes the pursuit. “Hearing” and “obeying” precede philosophical “knowing.” Philosophy for Maimonides is not what it was for Plato or Aristotle: an independent discipline with its own self-sufficient justification. It is a religious duty, a means to an end. Even Maimonides’s conclusion is stunningly minimalist. Philosophy can tell us only what God is not, not what God is.
Because God is a person, we can know God only as we know persons: through relationship. The key categories of Judaism are all relational: hearing, obeying, covenant and command. None designate God in Himself. All speak of God in His relationship with man. God, as Martin Buber put it, is a being who can be experienced only as a Thou, never as an It. This, Judah Halevi wrote eight centuries earlier, is the difference between the God of Abraham and the god of Aristotle. God cannot be known, comprehended or compassed through magic or myth, philosophy or science. At most, argued Halevi, one can through such means arrive at knowledge of that aspect of God that the Bible describes by the word Elohim, meaning the cause of causes or the force of forces. But one cannot thereby arrive at knowledge of God as a person, the bearer of a proper name, God as He acts in history and reveals His will for the human situation, the God who loves and evokes love. Such knowledge arises only through revelation, “hearing” and prophecy. Greece, says Halevi, had philosophers. Israel had prophets.
As a result, the word “faith” in Judaism does not signify a mode of knowledge or belief. It is, above all, a form of moral commitment. To have faith is to trust that God will honour His word, and to be loyal in honouring the word given by man. The Bible sets out in the sharpest possible way the contrast between cognitive certainty yielded by logic or the senses, and moral certainty that the word, once given, will not be retracted. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are promised as many children as the stars of the sky, the dust of the earth and the sand of the seashore. But each must live with the childlessness of their wives. They are promised the land of Israel, but must endure as strangers and exiles. Moses is charged with bringing the Israelites to the promised land but must die on the far side of the Jordan. The prophets have faith in divine justice but must live in a world where evil reigns, the righteous suffer and power is the hands of the oppressor. Faith is the ability to live with moral certainty in the face of cognitive uncertainty. To have faith is to have the courage to resist the two great spiritual temptations of wishful thinking on the one hand and nihilism on the other: the illusion that the world is at it should be, or despair that the world – this world – can ever be as it should. It is to have trust in the promise and loyalty to the covenant. It is to believe that the word spoken will come to pass, but not without trust and effort on the part of man.
Halakhah and autonomy
This was not an idea that made sense in terms of the post-Cartesian philosophy of knowledge. But of yet greater consequence for Judaism was the philosophy of ethics. Here the seminal figure was Immanuel Kant. For it was he who shaped the modern conception of ethics to the extent that, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes, for many “who have never heard of philosophy, let alone of Kant, morality is roughly what Kant said it was.”9Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 190. But Kant was a devastating critic of Judaism. He saw it as an antiquated system of law and ritual which was opposed, to religion and ethics as he understood it. It was a criticism that could not be ignored, for many Jews had the same admiration for Kant that Maimonides had for Aristotle. Much of modern Jewish thought is, explicitly or implicitly, an attempted reconciliation between Kantianism and Judaism. Therein lies its tragic failure, for it too cannot be done.
Kant’s most revolutionary idea was that of autonomy. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he argues that all previous efforts to discover the “principle of morality” have been mistaken. Morality was seen as a set of laws external to the agent, and the question therefore arose: Why should one be moral? But any answer to this question is self-defeating. For if one has a reason to obey the law – hope of reward or fear of punishment – then one’s action is not moral but pragmatic, a matter not of principle but of self-interest. The fallacy lay in seeing morality as externally imposed (heteronomous) law. Instead it is imposed by the agent himself. Morality is necessarily autonomous. In so far as we are moral, we are each legislators of our own morality. It is this principle which more than any other lies behind liberal arguments on homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia, namely that we have an inalienable right to determine what we will do with our bodies and lives. More specifically, it rules out absolutely a central concept of Judaism, that there can be a revealed morality in the form of commandments and the halakhah. Judaism was, for Kant, a prime example of an externally legislated and thus heteronomous and impure moral system.10For a translation and exposition of Kant’s Groundwork, see H. J. Paton, The Moral Law (London: Hutchinson, 1948).
Judaism rejects the Kantian argument because it sees morality, like language, as an essentially shared enterprise, a phenomenon not of individuals but of communities and societies. It cannot be reduced to private moralities made by autonomous decisions. Judaism’s central virtues – justice, compassion, righteousness and the pursuit of peace – are concerned with collective rather than individual beatitude. A society of autonomous moralities would resemble the state of affairs described at the end of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel: everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”11Judges 21:25. That is a description not of moral law but of moral chaos.
Indeed in the absence of divine law, it is likely that a civilisation will arrive at the condition of humanity before the Flood: corrupt and full of violence. Eichmann, chief executor of Hitler’s Final Solution, stated at his trial with unmistakable sincerity that he had been guided throughout his life by Kant’s moral precepts.12Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 135–37. Judaism views law as the essential vehicle of righteousness; but it cannot be mere human law. During the Third Reich the greatest German philosopher of his time, Martin Heidegger, declared that “The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and law.”13See Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York: Schocken, 1980), 217. Against this Judaism insists that human law is always subject to divine law, and that since God desires righteousness, law is His single most important revelation to man. It is divine law which binds commoner and king, which bids the rich to attend the cry of the poor and the powerful to heed the needs of the powerless; a law which must sometimes be enforced, for not all men are moral but morality binds us all.
To be sure, the rabbis valued autonomy in the sense of moral action as an end in itself. One might perform a command “not for its own sake,” but the ideal was to do so “for its own sake.” Maimonides defined the proper service of God as being “impelled by no external motive, neither by the fear of calamity nor by the desire to obtain benefit.” It is instead to “do what is truly right because it is truly right.”14Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 10:3. In one remarkable passage the Talmud suggests that when God gave Israel the commandments, He suspended Mount Sinai over their heads and warned that if they did not accept the covenant, they would die. On this Rabbi Acha bar Yaakov commented, “This constitutes a strong objection to the Torah.”15Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88a. The heteronomous character of revelation threatened to undermine its binding force. Nonetheless, continues the Talmud, the Israelites later accepted it in the days of Esther and Ahasuerus.
What Judaism rejects is the simple either/or of heteronomy or autonomy. Instead it sees moral development, both for a nation and for individuals, as a gradual transition from one to the other, from externally to internally imposed law. So seriously, indeed, did Judaism regard the requirement of autonomy that it held that a Jew is duty-bound to study Torah all the days of his life, until its imperatives became part of his personal vision and character.
So Judaism was sensitive to the claim later raised by Kant and included it within its system of values. But this does not imply that Judaism is compatible with Kantian moral philosophy. It is not. For while both systems recognise the claim of autonomy they assign different priorities to it. Kant takes it to be determinative of morality. Judaism does not. Instead it insists on the primacy of divinely revealed command over morality as self-legislation. It believes that like language, moral behaviour has objective rules (in the case of Jews, the halakhah) which are progressively internalised by the individual in his course of moral education. Neither Torah as revealed command nor halakhah is translatable into the terms of Kantian ethics. Kant himself was in no doubt about this. Here was one conflict between Judaism and modern ethical thought.
Universality and covenant
But there was another. For Kant added a further stipulation to his definition of morality. A moral judgement must be universal in scope. We must, says Kant, “be able to will that a maxim of our action should become a universal law.” This was the rational requirement of moral consistency. I may, for example, be tempted to break a promise. But I cannot consistently will that all people should break their promises, for if so, no one would trust anyone else’s undertakings and the institution of promising would collapse. Thus stated, the doctrine has self-evident logic. But it rules out most of Judaism’s commands. For many of them relate specifically to Jews. Judaism is not a universal faith. It is the religion of a particular people. Its commands do not apply to everyone. Seen from a Kantian perspective, therefore, they fail the test of morality.
As with autonomy, the rabbis had long before accepted the thesis of universalisibility. To the rules which applied to man as such, they gave the name of the “seven Noachide commands.” Indeed, according to the eleventh-century sage Rav Nissim Gaon “all commands which are dependent on reason and human understanding have been obligatory for all humanity since the day man was created on earth.”16Introduction to commentary to Berakhot. It is possible that Judaism might recognise a distinction on Kantian lines, between commands that are “moral” and thus universal, and those which are, in Saadia Gaon’s term, “traditional” (i.e. dependent on revelation), for which no complete rational explanation could be given and which were binding only on Jews. Moses Mendelssohn seems to have argued along these lines, distinguishing between “revealed legislation” which applied to Jews and “universal propositions of reason” which applied to humanity as such.17Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, translated by Allan Arkush (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1983).
A more convincing account of Judaism, however, is that it takes a quite different view of morality. Morality is rational, but reason is not the source of moral obligation. That lies in covenant, the agreement on the part of humanity to be bound by certain laws. There can be a hierarchy of covenants, not all of which are universal. The covenant between God and Noah creates duties towards all mankind as “the image of God.” The covenant between God and Israel imposes further duties, between Jews and God and between Jews and one another as members of a community sharing bonds of collective responsibility. Morality, then, is grounded in formally binding relationships, some of which are universal, but not all.
Kant’s theory is only one, and not necessarily the most plausible, account of the moral life. For it fails to explain why certain duties which we regard as moral are not universal but highly specific. Michael Wyschogrod provides us with one case which merits reflection.
In the devastating 1976 earthquake in Communist China there was a report of an incident in which a father insisted on rescuing a local Communist officer rather than his child, whose moans he heard but ignored in order to save the official, whose social value he placed above that of his son. By the time he returned to the wreckage in which his son was buried, he found him dead. The Chinese Communist press pointed to this incident as an example of proper Communist behaviour.18Michael Wyschgrod, The Body of Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury, 1983), 215–16.
Here was an act that was justified on Kantian and, as it happens, utilitarian grounds. The father made no distinction between persons in favour of his son, and he acted to secure the most beneficial consequences for society as a whole. Nonetheless one might legitimately feel that the father was deficient in some important moral sense.
Judaism suggests a different account of morality, according to which the sense of obligation is born in primary relationships – within the family, for example – and gradually extended to the community as a whole and beyond that, to those who lie outside the community. On this view, it is perfectly intelligible that members of a covenantal community might owe special duties to one another. The moral crux, however, would be how the community treats the outsider, the one who is a “stranger,” not a “brother.” The Torah itself consistently emphasises the duties to love and not oppress the stranger “because you were yourselves strangers in the land of Egypt.” Rabbinic law extended the obligation of charity and compassion to non-Jews, regardless of race or faith, on the grounds of “the ways of peace.” Judaism, then, is not an abstract moral system grounded in reason, but rather a revealed moral tradition grounded in covenantal relationships and the historic experience of powerlessness and suffering. Its universality grows out of its particularity. This was not a view that recommended itself to Kant. But it is difficult to see how Kantian theory can give a satisfactory account of actual moral traditions and communities.
Historicism and the modern self
One could multiply almost indefinitely the conflicts between Judaism and post-Enlightenment thought, but two in particular are worthy of attention. We touched on one in the previous chapter, namely nineteenth-century historicism: belief in “the uniqueness of all historical phenomena” and the idea that “each age should be interpreted in terms of its own ideas and principles.”19Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass (eds.), The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (London: Fontana, 1983), 285–86. The essence of historicism is its sense of the pastness of the past. What happened then has no necessary authority now.
Historicism went hand in hand with the Enlightenment assault on tradition. Edward Shils notes that “the time through which we have just lived has been one in which what was inherited from the past was thought of as an irksome burden to be escaped from as soon as possible.” From the French Revolution onwards, “Traditionality became the ubiquitous enemy to every critic of the ancien régime.”20Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 2, 6.
The effect of historical consciousness on Judaism was to erode, indeed disintegrate, the idea of an authoritative Judaism or Jewish destiny. From a historicist perspective, Judaism is simply its own history, and there is no normative direction in which the future ought to unfold. It is made afresh as each generation individually, communally or nationally decides what to accept or reject from tradition in the light of its experience of the present. There is no Judaism beyond the decisions of Jews. There is no meaning in history beyond that which we choose to impose upon it. Nor do ancient texts speak to us with the immediacy of revelation. The past cannot command. At most it can be entered as a foreign country, somewhere else and long ago.
Against this, the concept of covenant implies that we can be obligated by the past. The Israelites’ assent to the words of God at Sinai binds their children for all generations. This is not a mysterious idea. The citizen of a state may be bound by laws enacted many centuries before his birth. A judge may be bound by precedents he had no share in making. The fact that history can be studied descriptively does not imply that it has no prescriptive force, that covenants or laws have no duration over time. To study history is one thing; to conclude that a tradition is nothing over and above its own history is something else, a conscious revolution against the past. Nathan Rotenstreich has rightly noted that “A concept of tradition that testifies to the changes that have taken place within Judaism and opens the way for further changes by denying the norms that provide men with imperatives is, in the end, destructive of tradition as a vital governing force.”21Nathan Rotenstreich, Tradition and Reality (New York: Random House, 1972), 112.
Equally destructive, and closely related, has been the modern concept of the self. Traditionally, Jewish identity was a given. Converts excepted, one did not choose to be a Jew. One was born a Jew and thus entered, unasked, a history and set of obligations. A born Jew is, according to the Talmud, “already foresworn at Sinai.” One is obligated without any need for a formal act of assent to the duties of Jewish life. But this traditional concept of Jewish identity offends against two of the most powerful axioms of modern thought. One is David Hume’s insistence that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” a moral judgement from a descriptive statement. The other is Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “existence precedes essence,” that there is no morally significant role into which we are born.
Against this, Judaism maintains that the “is” of birth entails the “ought” of the commandments and that “essence precedes existence,” in that one can be born into a covenantal role. Again the crucial analogy is with language. We are born into a linguistic community. This is a fact we did not choose, but it has the greatest consequence for our modes of self-expression. Fundamental to modern thought and the common feature of historicism, Hume and Sartre, is a sharp distinction between facts and values. The past cannot command. Birth cannot create obligations. What is cannot disclose what ought to be. This distinction arises from and reinforces the basic dichotomy of post-Enlightenment thought between what is true and universal on the one hand, and what is private and subjective on the other. Facts are true and can be agreed on by everyone. Values are not facts and are therefore private and subjectively chosen. Judaism sees this as a false dichotomy. Values are indeed not facts. But neither are they private or subjective. They are created by covenant: by a revelation of the part of God of what is just and right, and by an agreement on the part of a community to be bound through time by that revelation. As a result, a covenant in the past can command the present and one can be born into a covenant that one did not choose.
Untranslatability
The crisis of Jewish faith in modernity, then, has been of a singular and special kind. It was not that some new set of discoveries called into question the premisses on which Judaism rested. It was, rather, that a new mode of thought took hold, complex in its ramifications but simple in its basic dichotomies, which systematically excluded Judaism. No more compelling image exists for Enlightenment universalism than the tower of Babel, the search for “one language” that would comprehend the human situation. But every concept of Judaism presupposes that, before the end of days, this search is misconceived and will end in tragedy. Instead the unity of God coexists with and finds expression in a plurality of languages, cultures and faiths. God communicates to man through language. Faith therefore is neither universal nor subjective but, like language, a phenomenon of communities and their rules, traditions and histories. Judaism bears witness to this fact in the covenant by which it agrees to yield to neither tribalism nor universalism but to live as a distinctive people, different from others, while yet remaining faithful to God, the creator of all mankind.
As soon as the attempt was made to translate the concepts of Judaism into Enlightenment thought, they disintegrated. Cartesian philosophy of knowledge left no space for a personal God. Kantian autonomy excluded Jewish ideas of revealed command and halakhah. Kantian universality excluded the concept of a divine covenant with a particular people. Historicism excluded midrashic consciousness, the idea that through tradition and interpretation the past commands the present. The self of Sartre excludes the very idea of Jewish identity as a set of moral obligations conferred by birth. As a result, Jews were thrown into one of the great intellectual crises of their history.
We have traced the effects throughout this book. The Cartesian revolution is evident in widespread Jewish secularism. Kant’s conception of autonomy is present in liberal Judaism’s rejection of halakhah. His principle of universality left its mark in the early Reform abandonment of Judaism’s particularist commands. Historicism undermined the idea of “Torah from Heaven.” The Sartrean self has led to unprecedented confusion about modern Jewish identity. Despite the bold attempts of Jewish thinkers to effect a synthesis between the classic terms of Judaism and post-Enlightenment thought, the effort was bound to fail.
It is no accident that almost all the great continental philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – delivered sharp attacks on Judaism as an anachronism. Voltaire described it as a “detestable superstition.” Kant called for its “euthanasia.” Hegel took Judaism as his model of a slave morality. Nietzsche fulminated against it as the “falsification” of all natural values. In the twentieth century, Sartre could see no content to Jewish existence other than the defiance of antisemitism. Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his time, became an active Nazi. Modern Western philosophy, promising a new era of tolerance, manifestly failed to extend that tolerance to Judaism and the Jews. Against this background, the transition from Enlightenment to Holocaust is less paradoxical than it might otherwise seem.
The Enlightenment was one of the great universalist movements in human civilisation, more so even than Christianity and Islam. Its promised salvation lay in the power of science to control nature and of reason to resolve conflict. It presupposed no revelation, tradition or faith. In liberalism it offered a simple solution to the conflict of religions, namely a new dichotomy between public and private domains. The public domain was to be neutral, governed only by universal reason (Kantian principle or the utilitarian maximisation of consequences). Religion was to be private, the subjective persuasion of individuals. It was a brilliantly abstract answer to a series of resolutely concrete human dilemmas. And yet one fact stands out in retrospect. The Enlightenment did not end antisemitism, but gave added impetus to it in a new and more systematic form.
Enlightenment thought consistently focused on man-as-such, humanity in the abstract, the self divorced from all tradition, particular histories and accidents of birth. Jews were to be accorded rights, but not as Jews; instead as abstract individuals. But Jews testified to the concrete particularism of human identity. They were not atomistic selves. They were, both in their own and others’ eyes, members of a people, participants in a history, bearers of a revelation, adherents of a tradition. Neither Jews nor Judaism fitted into the remorseless logic of philosophical abstraction. As always in their history they found themselves separate, distinct, “not reckoned among the nations,” now singled out by the philosophers of modernity no less than by the Christianity and Islam of the Middle Ages.
For Jews bore witness to the particularity of the human situation in the presence of God. Nowhere was this more manifest than in the sensed differentness of the Jews. But it has been precisely the differentness of the Jews that has, throughout history, been the moral refutation of each successor to the tower of Babel, each “final solution” to the human predicament. For if the other cannot be affirmed in his differentness, then the world is not yet redeemed.
A crisis of identity
But one haunting question remains. Why did Jews embrace Enlightenment as they had, for the most part, not embraced Christianity and Islam? The short answer, surely, is this. To convert to another faith, though it carried advantages, was to betray a people and its history. This at most times Jews were unprepared to do. But Enlightenment offered a challenge of a quite different kind. Here was a new universal order that was not religious but secular. To embrace it did not involve conversion. To Jews, having suffered for 1,800 years for their differentness, the prospect was overwhelming.
One case is particularly illustrative. Time and again in our analyses of modern Jewish thought we have come across a lonely figure at the eye of the storm: Benedict Spinoza. It was Spinoza who first naturalised revelation, dissolved the bonds of halakhah, separated Jewish history from providence and the land of Israel from special sanctity. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, and indeed his thought argued the end of a distinctive Jewish existence. Nonetheless, as the later inspiration of the two diametrically opposed movements of radical Reform and secular Zionism, Spinoza stands as the archetypal modern Jew. The question of his identity is therefore peculiarly emblematic.
Spinoza was the descendant of Marranos, Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in the wake of the Spanish inquisition and expulsion. Only recently have scholars given significance to this fact.22Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury, 1983), 40–52. Marranos represent a paradigm of conflicting identities. Outwardly Christian but secretly practising Judaism, they were held in suspicion by both communities: by Christians as covert Judaisers and by Jews as public betrayers of the faith. Spinoza’s thought is an extended attempt to construct a world liberated from this double-bind. His hero is Euclid, his model, geometry, and his aspiration is for a metaphysical and political order where there are no traditional and particular identities, only universal reason and the abstract individual.
Spinoza, followed in turn by such figures as Marx, Durkheim and Freud, testifies to a fact of fundamental significance: that modernity was experienced by Jewish intellectuals as a crisis of identity. As in fifteenth-century Spain, Jews were called on to undergo a kind of conversion, this time not to Christianity but to secular citizenship. But now as then, they found themselves regarded by European society as outsiders. They became secular Marranos, inwardly Jewish, outwardly westernised, viewed by both sides with suspicion, carrying the burden of double alienation.23For a study of this general condition see Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). There was one solution. If one could arrive at a world free of the lingering traces of religion, whether by reason (Spinoza), revolution (Marx) or the cure of neurosis (Freud), if one could stand outside the givenness of religious meanings, then alienation could be cured. There were Jews therefore who not merely embraced the universalism of modern Western thought, but became its most active shapers.
Seen in the full perspective of hindsight, Enlightenment constituted an assault on Jewish particularism more subtle and powerful than medieval Christianity and Islam. Some saw with absolute clarity that two mutually exclusive civilisations were about to collide. Spinoza was one, and was prepared to draw the consequence that Jews should now abandon Judaism. Others, especially traditionalist Orthodoxy, drew the opposite conclusion, that Jews should decline the offer of emancipation and continue to live segregated lives. For the most part, however, Jews believed that Enlightenment and Judaism were compatible. Thus was born an unprecedented Jewish ambivalence about identity. Jews continued to be Jews, but became at the same time passionate universalists. They denied that they were different, but were continually reminded that they were.
The new Judaisms that emerged in the nineteenth century were, each in its own way, attempts to escape the singularity of the Jewish situation. Reform offered universal ethics in place of distinctive ritual. Secular Zionism offered a Jewishness of nationhood in place of religion. Each spoke of “normalisation.” Both rejected the idea of a chosen people. It is impossible to understand the crisis of modern Jewish thought without appreciating the extent to which Jews saw in secularism a deliverance from eighteen centuries of unparalleled and unabated religious persecution. Enlightenment thought, hostile though it was to Judaism, was passionately embraced, for it seemed to promise the triumph of reason over prejudice and universal citizenship over religious identity. American Reform’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 summed up a mood that could be found in many sectors of Jewish life: “We recognise in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect the approach of the realisation of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among men.”
That secularism might not end anti-Judaism but instead transform it into racial antisemitism; that even the Holocaust and the State of Israel might not end antisemitism but instead transform it into a fundamentalist anti-Zionism: these, for the Jews of modernity, were the unimaginable disillusionments. The history of Jewish thought since the Holocaust has been the response to this second crisis, coming as it did so soon after the first. Its central theme has been the slow realisation that the pursuit of normalisation was neither possible nor ultimately admirable. Seemingly inexorably, Jews are cast in the role of a singular people bearing witness to a universal God.
Arthur Green has noted that “The period of Jewish history that began in late-eighteenth-century Germany has ended. We whose identities were formed after 1933, 1945, 1948 and 1967 are no longer modern Jews.”24Arthur Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), xv. The modern Jew had placed his faith in the universalist thrust of Western civilisation. The postmodern Jew has a more sombre awareness – born of his knowledge of the Holocaust and anti-Zionism – that universalism has its darker side and that Jews are called on to testify to the plurality of faith and to the religious right to differentness. There is no clearer evidence of the recent transformation of Jewish consciousness than the fact that, in the 1960s, Jews began to describe themselves once again as “the people that dwells alone.” Alongside the fragmentation of Jewish thought and life has gone a new awareness of collective fate and what Emil Fackenheim calls the “singled out” Jewish condition. The turning point was the worldwide Jewish response to the threat to Israel in the weeks prior to the Six-Day War. Twice within a quarter-century Jews had faced the threat of genocide. West and East, Christianity and Islam, had left a legacy of hatred that, in Europe and now the Middle East, threatened the covenantal promise with destruction. Jews were agreed on this, that they would survive and in surviving show that they were an eternal people. This is the leitmotiv of Jewish postmodernity.
The “new Jewish stand”25A.Roy Eckardt, Jews and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 37–61. manifests itself in many ways: an understanding of the State of Israel as a response to, though neither an explanation or redemption of, the Holocaust; a resurgent Jewish ethnicity; a return within liberal Judaism to previously discarded forms of particularism such as religious ritual, the Hebrew language, Jewish schooling and even a fresh assessment of halakhah; and the new interest of secular Jews in the Bible. Perhaps the most notable phenomenon has been the renaissance of Orthodoxy as the most vigorous sector of contemporary Jewish life. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century it had been seen as destined for eclipse, but against all predictions, Orthodoxy has risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust.26See Reuven Bulka, Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1983). Its newfound strength is evident in its large and relatively stable families, in the growth of intensive Jewish day schools, the proliferation of yeshivot, and the many thousands of ba’alei teshuvah, Jews who have found their way back to traditional styles of study and life. Intellectually too, most of the leading thinkers of recent years have worked broadly within the Orthodox tradition: Soloveitchik, Leibowitz, Wyschogrod, Berkovits, Greenberg and Hartman. Even the most significant current non-Orthodox thinker, Emil Fackenheim, has dedicated his work to an engagement with the rabbinic tradition as did his precursor, Franz Rosenzweig. Collectively this represents a marked turn from the universalist, rationalist and historicist mood of the nineteenth century.
Does this crisis of identity, from which Jewry is only slowly emerging and of which Jewish thought still bears the signs, have some religious meaning? One biblical passage above all others has seemed, at times of trauma, to epitomise the Jewish destiny. Not surprisingly, for it is the passage in which Israel receives its name. For the sages of the second century CE it described the confrontation between Jews and Rome. For Nachmanides in thirteenth-century Spain it foreshadowed the persecution of Jews at the hands of medieval Christianity. It is no less evocative in the wake of the Jewish encounter with Enlightenment. It is the narrative of Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel.
Following a suggestion of the eleventh-century exegete Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir,27Commentary to Genesis 32. let us offer this commentary. Jacob had his own crisis of identity. For he had received the blessing not as Jacob but dressed in the clothes of Esau. Now, after a long exile, he is about to confront Esau again. There is no alternative but to be Jacob. Jacob is afraid and tries to run away, but now he finds his way blocked by an angel. He wrestles and wins, but not without facing the risk of death and the actuality of injury. But he is now Israel: he who knows the inescapability of his identity, though it involves struggling with God and man.
It is a scene repeated many times in Jewish history. The burden of chosenness, of being singled out by God, is heavy, and man tries to flee from it. The Israelites in the wilderness try to return to Egypt. Jonah seeks to escape his prophetic mission. Ezekiel predicts a time when Israel will “want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world.” The nineteenth century was such a moment. Jews sought in normalisation a release from the destiny of differentness. But in the Holocaust, their way was blocked by the angel of death. We will never fully understand those dark biblical passages in which God turns His people towards life by the threat of death. Why must Jews endure suffering to remain a people? That, like the Holocaust, remains a mystery no prophet has ever fathomed. Like Jacob after his struggle, the Jewish people limps, still scarred by that encounter. But those who remain have like Jacob taken up the journey again, no longer seeking flight from fate but instead determined to survive as Jews. The State of Israel, diaspora Jewish activism and a renascent Orthodoxy all express this fundamental affirmation. The Jewish people has returned to its perennial vocation: to be Israel, the people of the covenant, though this means struggling with God and with man.
Covenantal fate
The historian Barbara Tuchman, reflecting on the course of Jewish fate, writes:
The history of the Jews is…intensely peculiar in the fact of having given the Western world its concept of origins and monotheism, its ethical traditions, and the founder of its prevailing religion, yet suffering dispersion, statelessness and ceaseless persecution, and finally in our times nearly successful genocide, dramatically followed by fulfilment of the never-relinquished dream of return to the homeland. Viewing this strange and singular history one cannot escape the impression that it must contain some special significance for the history of mankind, that in some way, whether one believes in divine purpose or inscrutable circumstance, the Jews have been singled out to carry the tale of human fate.28Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword (New York: Ballantine, 1984), ix–x.
Paul Johnson, at the end of his A History of the Jews, comes to a strikingly similar conclusion. Jews were, he writes, “exemplars and epitomisers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of mankind in a heightened and clarified form… It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatise these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral.”29Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 586.
Perhaps, then, the story of modern Jewish thought has some larger significance. Subject like other peoples to secularisation, Jews experienced it in a uniquely traumatic way. Emancipation and Enlightenment contained a hidden premiss. Jews were to be tolerated and granted rights to the extent that they became instances of man-as-such, humanity in general. Socially, this meant assimilation. Intellectually, it meant the disintegration of those values and beliefs by which Jews had pledged themselves to be bound since Sinai. Many Jews believed this process to be benign, for who in the early nineteenth century could foresee the consequences and recall the story of the tower of Babel? But what began as the promise of a new era of equality and tolerance ended in the ovens of Auschwitz.
And yet out of this tragic process something not unremarkable has occurred. Jews have not ceased to be Jews. In the diaspora, for the most part, they have found freedom. In Israel they have found themselves, after 1,900 years of exile, gathered once more as a sovereign people in the land of their beginnings. There has been a slow mending of the wounds, physical and spiritual, of the past two centuries. There is a renewed search for peoplehood and tradition. Above all, there has been a recovery of the sense of Jewish singularity, as if the epic events of the twentieth century contained intimations of that larger design called providence, summoning Jews to continue the covenant across the discontinuities of time.
The dilemma faced by the great religious and philosophical attempts to understand the human situation is the conflict between the unity of truth and the plurality of man. Sir Isaiah Berlin once wrote:
One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals… This is the belief that somewhere…there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another.30Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 29–30.
No finer statement has been given in our time of the project of the tower of Babel. In a century which has witnessed totalitarianism, fascist, communist and religious fundamentalist, on an unprecedented scale, it remains a still urgent moral.
If the role of Jews is, as Johnson argues, to “turn their particular fate into a universal moral,” then Judaism’s truths have not lost their wider relevance, even if they have recently lived a hazardous life among Jews themselves. Faith belongs to particular covenants with a universal God. There are universal requirements of morality, but beyond this minimum our moral and spiritual lives are as plural as languages, neither private nor universal but bound by the rules preserved by faith-communities in their dialectic between revelation and interpretation. Each of us carries the inescapable burden of duality, of being true to our faith while recognising the image of God in, and being a blessing to, those who are unlike us. Any attempt to reduce this duality to a unity results in either tribalism or universalism, both of which end in human sacrifice.
Between Babel and the end of days, the unity of truth cannot be purchased at the cost of the plurality of man. For the world, though redeemable, is not yet redeemed. Truth, though absolute, is not yet universal. Indeed, to paraphrase Johnson, the universal moral is the particularity of fate. The challenge of unredeemed time, one that has lost none of its force in an age of mass destruction, is to work through the religious and moral implications of differentness: of the fact that one God has created one world in which many faiths, cultures and languages must live together. Judaism stakes its being on faith in the religious integrity of difference.
These are difficult truths, and modern Jewish thought is in part the story of attempts to find alternatives that would end or at least mitigate the burden of differentness. But after its fateful, almost fatal, encounter with modernity, Jewry’s dialogue with destiny has been taken up again. The covenant has neither altered nor ceased but continues to unfold in the strange, paradigmatic story of a singular people and its relationship with God.