A sense of uncertainty about the future of the Jewish people seems to be all-pervasive among Jews. The problem of Jewish survival is uppermost in our mind. There is little doubt that the people of Israel is passing through one of the most perilous periods in its long history. It is involved in a three-fold crisis. As part of the Western world Jews are affected by the crisis of Western civilization, which, before anything else, is a crisis of the spirit. The West is spiritually exhausted. Its value foundations have been eroded. This decay has, of course, invaded the Jewish communities. It has undermined Jewish value standards; it has played havoc with the spiritual health of wide sections of Jewish youth.
There is also an internal crisis to contend with, due to our own spiritual exhaustion. The genocide perpetrated on the Jewish people by the Western world did not only sweep away one third of Israel, but destroyed its most important spiritual reservoir. It is very likely that in the holocaust of European Jewry eighty per cent, or more, of the creative vitality of the Jewish people was strangled. We have survived, but in a state of biological as well as spiritual weakness. It is the tragic aspect of the Jewish situation that it has to contend with the eroding forces of Western spiritual disintegration while in a condition of great weakness, itself brought about by the moral bankruptcy of that civilization, as it became manifest in the ghettoes, in the concentration camps and the crematoria. It is because of this sapping of vital strength that we seem to be unable to come to grips with so many of our internal problems.
Finally, there is the ultimate crisis, that of Jewish survival. With the rise of Nazism, something entirely new entered Jewish history. Until then, the threat to Jewish existence had been usually local. Individual Jews, single communities, were attacked and often destroyed. The eclipse of Western conscience permitted Nazism to conceive the idea of the total destruction of the Jewish people. Ever since, the crisis of Jewish survival has been total. Since the end of the Second World War this total crisis has never disappeared from the agenda of world history; only its modes have varied and our understanding of it was occasionally obscured.
Naturally, the problem of Jewish survival has been intensified as a result of the deepening demoralization of Western civilization under pressure from oil-rich Arab sheiks and potentates. We, therefore, have all the more reason to put our own house in moral and spiritual order and to gain an adequate understanding of who we are and what we stand for in the story of man’s struggle and striving on this, not all-too fortunate, globe of ours.
We shall attempt to deal with this threefold crisis of our existence. I am fully aware of the fact that whatever I may be able to say in this volume derives its life and ultimate validity from the faith of Judaism that has sustained our efforts all through history, that has accompanied us in our defeats, that has inspired us to our triumphs, and that is leading us to the realization of the goal that God intended for us, and through us, for the human race.
ELIEZER BERKOVITS
Skokie, Illinois, July 1975