Our generation has formulated some seductively shining slogans: self-fulfillment, personal freedom, liberation from the taboos of the past, from an absolute law, the new morality and situation ethics, etc., etc. They all sound extremely progressive. And who among us–and especially among us Jews living in the twentieth century–would not like to be known as a liberal. Thus, instead of setting an example for our youth, we thought that there was no safer path to the future and to a happy life, free of hangups, than to let our children lead us. For some time now, a change has been afoot, imperceptibly, gradually. A growing number of Jews are no longer as confident as they used to be that we are really progressing, that we are moving toward some glorious future, indeed toward a future of any kind. Many among the most liberal-minded Jews are no longer as comfortable with the slogans of this new age as they used to be.
We have started feeling ill at ease. We have become rather doubtful whether our former expectations will ever come true. We hardly know what to expect for the future of American Jewry and the future of Judaism in America. We are perturbed by the increasing divorce rate, by the erosion of the quality of Jewish family life, and by the high percentage of intermarriage. Some of our best young people are drifting into alien worlds and alien lives. An inordinately high number of them have been involved in the so-called “drug culture.” They seem to have been an easy prey for every fad in vogue. Many others are just drifting aimlessly, living without a purpose. We sense that something is wrong somewhere. A system which promised human progress seems to have rendered only disintegration and loss of substance.
Survival may be threatened from without, by outside enemies–and God knows Jews the world over have enough of those–but, even more by the enemy within, by the disintegration of Jewish identity. When identity is caught up in a process of erosion, there can be no hope for survival. Of course, whereas in the past survival has been a uniquely Jewish problem, today it seems to have deepened into a universal concern. When properly understood, the reason for it is neither political nor material, but spiritual. The most striking feature of our times is the spiritual exhaustion of Western civilization. The problem of Jewish identity and the erosion of Jewish values result partly from the crisis of Western civilization, of which modern Jewries have been an intimate part and in whose disintegration they now share.
Of course, ever since the holocaust of European Jewry, Jews ought to have been on their guard against being taken in by “modernism” and “progress.” What happened to the six million Jews in Europe was not the work of the Nazis or of the German people alone. Neither the Nazis nor the Germans were a race different from the generality of mankind. Only because human kind is what it is could what happened happen. All over Europe there were the collaborating nationalities, the collaborating churches, the encouraging silence of the Vatican. All over the world there were the barbarously indifferent governments, whose absence of concern, and often determined refusal to help the persecuted, actually encouraged the European executioners. It is enough to think of the refugee ships, which could find no single free port willing to admit them, and which were ultimately forced to return to Europe and Germany, in order to realize that Western civilization is morally bankrupt. We usually speak of the Jewish tragedy of the holocaust. In fact, the tragedy of mankind was greater by far than the specific tragedy of the Jewish people. The Jews were shattered and broken, but did not collapse morally and spiritually because of inner rot. In the ghettoes and the concentration camps Western civilization revealed the bankruptcy of the spirit at its very heart.
We should have been on our guard and were not. But now that disillusionment has become the lot of Western man in general, now that the signs of the exhaustion of this civilization are all around us, we shall be well advised to take cognizance of some of the telling features of this eclipse of modern man.