The Future of a People
Twice before, the people of Israel came apart. After the reign of Solomon the nation was divided into two, a northern and a southern kingdom. Eventually the northern kingdom was conquered and sent into exile, where, lacking the inner means to survive as a distinct group, its population assimilated and disappeared from the script of Jewish history: the lost ten tribes. After the Babylonian exile, a second struggle took place over several centuries between secular and religious, syncretist and particularist tendencies within Jewry. A period of political autonomy, beginning with the Maccabean revolt and ending with the destruction of the Temple, opened and closed with what in effect were wars of Jew against Jew.
The Jewish people, forged in exile, gaining its purpose in the wilderness, has been able to survive dispersion and powerlessness, passivity and persecution. What it has not been able to negotiate without massive self-inflicted injury is freedom and empowerment. In the modern era, emancipation offered the first, the State of Israel the second. The result has been that the Jewish people is coming apart again.
The present study has focused on only one axis of that disintegration, the intractable differences between Orthodoxy and Reform. This is a problem primarily of the diaspora. But there are at least two other axes that should be considered. One is between religious and secular groups in Israel. This is far more fraught with direct and ugly confrontation: the burning of bus shelters and stoning of cars travelling on the Sabbath by charedim (pietists), retaliatory acts of vandalism against yeshivot by secularists, and an escalating war of words.
Admittedly, these clashes paint an exaggerated picture. For the most part, religious and secular publics live in relative peace. Newsworthy incidents mask the underlying reality of coexistence. None the less, the project of the return to Zion contained, almost from the beginning, deeply opposed expectations. For one group it signalled the return of Jewry to Judaism. For another it meant the liberation of Jewry from Judaism. For the former Israel was a place where the Jewish people might reconsecrate itself away from the assimilatory forces of Europe. For the latter it was the arena within which Jews could develop a national life freed from the “abnormality” of minority status and the need for religion to provide a basis for identity and continuity.
There were and are more moderate views on both sides. But the nature of the state forces the argument into political and cultural conflict. In the diaspora, different groups of Jews can coexist without their lives impinging on one another. In a Jewish state, when all groups are party to the political process, a direct contest can hardly be avoided. For what is at stake is the character of the public domain, and given the nature of the ideologies in contention, the state cannot be neutral between them. Each specific case raises issues of global principle, between religious coercion and individual freedom as the secularists see it, or between the Jewish character of the state and secularization as the religious see it. For both sides a war of cultures is already in progress. A survey in Jerusalem in 1988 revealed that while 23 per cent of those questioned saw the city’s most serious problem as Jewish-Arab relations, 58 per cent identified it as the religious-secular divide between Jews.1Liebman, Religious and Secular, xi. In Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s judgement, “Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two nations...each going its historic way imbued by intense hatred [of the other].”2Quoted in Huppert, Back to the Ghetto, 40.
The second line of fracture lies between Israel and the diaspora. Here too the argument has escalated in recent years, though its roots lie in the nineteenth century. One strand within Zionist thought, itself composed of many shades and nuances, has always been that the diaspora is scheduled for extinction. Jews survived in exile, albeit tenuously, so long as social and religious forces preserved them as a people apart. That no longer applies in the free and open societies of the west. Diaspora Jewish survival is threatened whether the surrounding environment is benign or malign. If the former, it is endangered by assimilation; if the latter, then by antisemitism. In different hands the argument becomes by turns sociological (attrition by intermarriage), cultural (the impossibility of an authentic Jewish creativity in a non-Jewish milieu), or political (the vulnerability of Jews as a minority). What these have in common, though, is clear: shelilat hagolah, a “negation of the diaspora” as a viable locus of Jewish continuity.3See Eisen, Galut.
The argument on the other side is more complex. There is the religious anti-Zionist case that the State of Israel represents a presumptuous, premature return to sovereignty before the messianic age. There is the secular anti-Zionist proposition that statehood is a betrayal of the Jews’ historic role as exemplary exiles, iconoclasts of nationalism and power.4This is the case argued consistently by George Steiner. There is the case, mounted with vigour by Jacob Neusner, that America rivals Israel as a place of Jewish freedom, security, and intellectual fertility.5Jacob Neusner, Who, Where and What Is Israel? (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989). And there is the view, argued by Arthur Koestler and Georges Friedmann, that the two Jewries are simply drifting apart, the diaspora into individual assimilation, Israel into collective assimilation.6Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment (London: Macmillan, 1949); Georges Friedmann, The End of the Jewish People? (London: Hutchinson, 1967). Inevitably, as Israel develops its autonomous culture, and as Jewries elsewhere become more integrated into their surrounding societies, each will have less in common with the other until they are no longer recognizable as a single people.
David Vital’s recent analysis is simpler still. The interests of Israel and American Jewry cannot forever coincide. This of itself will force them apart. The process, he claims, has already begun. His conclusion is that “the Jewish world...is now coming apart. Where there was once a single, if certainly a scattered and far from monolithic people – indeed a nation – there is now a sort of archipelago of discrete islands composed of rather shaky communities of all qualities, shapes, and sizes, in which the Island of Israel, as it were, is fated increasingly to be in a class by itself.”7Vital, The Future of the Jews, 147.
It is not my concern here to analyse these other conflicts. I have done so elsewhere.8Sociologically in my Arguments for the Sake of Heaven (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991); theologically in Crisis and Covenant. The question before us in this final chapter is simply this: Given that Jewish unity is a value for many Jews, what sort of value is it? Not, surely, a unity of culture, for there is no common cultural denominator between the Jews of Cochin, Cincinnati, Manchester, and Madrid. Nor is it a unity of interests, for, David Vital’s analysis notwithstanding, Jews have shown themselves capable of sacrifice of interest for the sake of threatened Jewries elsewhere. It is not a unity of race, as the merest glance at arriving Russian and Ethiopian Jews in Ben-Gurion airport will demonstrate. Nor is it a political unity, for Jews outside Israel live under a variety of governments, none of them Jewish. Unity is, as it always was, a religious value: a fact of covenant, a mutual commitment and faith. That it has become problematic should therefore occasion no surprise. It is a symptom of the tenuous hold of religion over the modern Jewish mind. But that it remains as a value is perhaps the most telling evidence that Jewry has not yet abandoned its religious roots. Habits of thought, senses of obligation, and gestures of action can persist long after the beliefs which gave them cogency have lost their hold. The concept of Jewry as “one people” is a religious idea; surviving in a secular age, it is in need of resuscitation.
As an Orthodox Jew, pained by the conflicts and contradictions in contemporary Jewish life, I want in this concluding analysis to set forth the idea of “one people” as I understand it, and spell out its implications for those still moved by its vision, still summoned by its call.
THE REJECTION OF REJECTION
Jewish self-understanding begins with the book of Genesis. For eleven chapters it sets out the prehistory of mankind. For the rest it chronicles the lives of the patriarchal families, the prehistory of Israel. One of its recurring themes, perhaps even its leitmotiv, is sibling rivalry, fraternal conflict. Cain and Abel, Lot and Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers: the scene recurs in seemingly endless variations as if to say that this above all would haunt the future, repeatedly threatening the threefold harmony of the divine design, between man and God, man and man, and man and nature.
Genesis establishes the nature of human existence in the presence and under the sovereignty of God. Neither God nor man is as portrayed by paganism in antiquity or science in modernity. They are not forces of nature, subject to deterministic laws. Instead, God is free and personal and desires the worship of free, morally choosing human beings. The two are linked not through nature but through the free choice of mutual, moral commitment: in a word, through covenant. The “law” which is to occupy so central a place in the religion of Israel is not the law of mythology or science, a law of description, explanation, and thus manipulation. Instead it is the law which links a free God to free human beings through their common commitment to justice and compassion: a law of ethics and sanctification, issued in commands and consummated in human response to those commands.
But because humanity is granted free will, the divine design is repeatedly subverted. Disobedience is possible and soon becomes actual. However, the world is not to be abandoned to chaos. Repeatedly, God is called on to intervene to redirect and reinstruct humanity. The conflicts of Genesis are, from a human point of view, all too understandable. Homo sapiens, that unstable mixture of “dust of the earth” and the “breath of God,” is prey to desires, envies, rivalries, and violence which threaten social, even cosmic, order. Less understandable, though, is the sequence of divine interventions as they concern a particular kind of act, namely choice.
A free God is one who chooses. Throughout Genesis, God chooses those who best respond to and thus exemplify his call. But this has consequences, quite different from those which might have occurred had humanity responded to its vocation as the image of God. Rather than directing man to God’s presence and purpose, divine choice renews human conflict. What then is the divine response?
The two sections of Genesis, the prehistory of mankind and that of Israel, are symmetrically structured. Each is told in a sequence of three choices in which the third reverses the pattern of the previous two. Implicit in this narrative is a theological proposition of immense significance which, thus far unstated, has animated and shaped the argument of this book.
The first choice takes place after the exile of Adam and Eve from Eden. Cain and Abel, the first human children, each bring offerings to God. Abel’s is accepted, Cain’s is not. Cain is angry. Though warned by God, his resentment grows until, alone in the field with his brother, he attacks and kills him.
The spirit of Cain haunts humanity until “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.” This time a second choice takes place. Not an individual, but almost everything that lives, is now rejected. Noah alone finds favour in God’s eyes, and only he and those with him in the ark survive. There is a flood, and the universe is momentarily returned to its initial chaos: waste and void and darkness over the face of the deep.
In these two narratives, choice implies rejection. The third, however, is quite different. After the flood, God vows never again to reject and thus destroy mankind. Humanity sins again, this time by building the tower of Babel. God frustrates the plan but does not punish the perpetrators. Human language is confused, mankind is scattered, and civilization splits into a multiplicity of cultures. God now chooses again: this time Abraham and his children. But in this third act of choice there is to be no rejection. Instead, in and through Abraham, “all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
With Abraham, the whole focus of the Bible shifts from humanity as a whole to a single exemplary family. Again there are to be three choices. In the first, Abraham has a child, Ishmael, by Sarah’s handmaid Hagar. Twice Ishmael is displaced: once before he is born, when Sarah treats Hagar harshly and she runs away; a second time after Isaac is born, when mother and son are sent into the wilderness and nearly die. Abraham is attached to Ishmael. When first told by God that another son would be heir to the covenant, he says, “Would that Ishmael might live by your favour!” Later, when Sarah demands that Ishmael be sent away, “The matter distressed Abraham greatly.” None the less, God affirms that Isaac has been chosen, not Ishmael.
In the second generation, Isaac and Rebecca have twins, Esau and Jacob. Isaac loves Esau, but already before the children had been born an oracle had announced to Rebecca that the choice would lie elsewhere: “The older will serve the younger.” Twice Jacob uses cunning to obtain the signals of special favour, the birthright and the blessing. Isaac is distressed. Jacob, he says, has used “deceit.” Isaac had intended to bless Esau. None the less, the choice is confirmed. It is Jacob who will carry the covenant.
It is crucial to understand that in these two episodes choice does not imply rejection: such is the post-Babel equation. Isaac and Jacob have been chosen, but Ishmael and Esau have not been rejected. Three times the Torah stresses that Ishmael will be blessed. He will be “too numerous to count.” He will be “the father of twelve chieftains.” He will be “a great nation.” Esau too is thrice blessed. Isaac promises him “the fat of the earth and the dew of heaven above.” When the brothers meet after long estrangement, Esau has grown powerful, declaring “I have much.” Later, when Moses leads the Israelites towards the land of Canaan, God tells him not to wage war against the descendants of Esau: “I will not give you of their land so much as a foot to tread on; I have given the hill country of Seir as a possession to Esau.” The Torah details their genealogies, as if to say that Ishmael and Esau have each acquired the dignity of destiny. Here is the origin of Judaism’s pluralism towards other nations and faiths.
But choice is experienced as rejection. In two extraordinary portrayals of the other side of choice, the Torah sets forth its human cost. The scenes of Ishmael, left to die under a bush in the desert, and of Esau, entering Isaac’s tent to take his blessing and discovering that Jacob has received it, are among the most emotionally moving in the entire Bible. There is no choice without tragedy and without giving rise to conflict. Ishmael is destined to be “a wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him.” Esau and Jacob, who “struggle in the womb,” are fated to rivalry. Isaac, blessing Esau, tells him that “when you grow restive you shall break his [Jacob’s] yoke from your neck.” Divine choice and fraternal conflict, the two great themes of Genesis, are interlinked.
The scene is now set for the culminating drama, one whose significance can be measured by the fact that it occupies almost half of the book of Genesis: the story of Jacob and his children. As with the first triad, so with the second: the third episode reverses the direction of the previous two. Until now, the father has favoured the older child, while God has chosen the younger. Now Jacob favours the younger. He loves Rachel, the younger sister. He loves Joseph and Benjamin, the youngest sons. Consistently, however, his choices are frustrated. He works seven years for Rachel, but is given Leah in marriage. He loves Rachel, but it is Leah who has children, and Rachel who dies prematurely. He loves Joseph, but Joseph is taken from him, leaving only a bloodstained coat.
An equation, thus far implicit, is now spelled out. The love which is choice is experienced as rejection by the unloved. In two key passages, the biblical text highlights the inexorable transition from love to hate. The first concerns Jacob’s wives. Jacob “loved Rachel also, more than Leah.… And God saw that Leah was hated.” The second concerns Jacob’s children. “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his other sons.… When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak to him in peace.” The less loved feels unloved, and thus hated; and thus hates.
Despite its thematic complexity, the story of Jacob and his children is a dense cluster of reversals. Jacob chooses his youngest sons, but in fact all his children will be chosen. The fraternal rivalry which leads the brothers to plan to kill Joseph leads instead to the exile of the whole family to Egypt, where they become a single nation. By the beginning of the book of Exodus, all of Jacob’s children are called God’s firstborn, “Israel.” The book of Genesis ends on a note of reconciliation which momentarily reverses all of its earlier discords. Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge that they might be like God; but Joseph tells his brothers, “Am I in place of God?” Cain had killed Abel, the brothers had sought to kill Joseph, but Joseph assures them that there will be no more strife: “You planned evil against me, but God meant it for good.” In the days of Noah, human civilization had been threatened by rain. In the days of Joseph it is threatened by lack of rain. Both the flood and the drought strike “the face of all the earth.” But Joseph does what Noah did not do: he “saves many people alive.” The symmetries are exact.
Cain and Abel, and Noah and the flood, set forth the thesis of choice and rejection. The story of Babel and the call to Abraham are the antithesis: choice without rejection. This is embodied twice, in Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. But choice without rejection is none the less perceived as rejection: not only by Ishmael and Esau but by Leah and Joseph’s brothers as well. Genesis ends with a new and final thesis. From here onward there are to be no more choices. There will be no more dramas of chosen sons. When, at the time of the golden calf, and again after the episode of the spies, God threatens to destroy the people, leaving only Moses, Moses reminds him of his covenant with the patriarchs. For now there is a chosen family, none of whose members may be unchosen. God and Israel have entered a binding covenant. The choice, once made, cannot be unmade. God has joined His destiny with all of Israel. All of Israel has pledged itself to God. The concluding thesis to which the whole of the book of Genesis is the argument is the rejection of rejection. Here is the origin of Jewish inclusivism. Israel is henceforth to be one indivisible people, the collective firstborn child of the One God.
AN IDEA IN CRISIS
It is a crucial thesis which, as an axiom of faith, governs Israel’s understanding of its own history. The covenant cannot be broken. Rejection is at an end. None the less, the covenantal relationship suffers horrifying vicissitudes. Israel rebels and is sent into exile. There it experiences the full desolation of a life outside God’s protection. Israel is an unfaithful wife, says Hosea, therefore she has been sent away.9Hos. 1–3. But, insists Isaiah, the covenantal partners, though separated, are still married. “Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce with which I sent her away?”10Isa. 50:1. God and Israel are still bound to one another. God hides his face, but he still watches. The people are disobedient, but will one day repent and return. Israel, though it suffers and seems vulnerable, is as eternal as the covenant. In spite of its rebellions and exiles, pledges God, “when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them.”11Lev. 26:44. But here an epistemological crisis occurs. From Israel’s rebellions and dispersions, not all return. Individuals, communities, and tribes vanish. Of Solomon’s united kingdom, only the confederation of Judah and Benjamin ultimately survives. Ten tribes, the northern kingdom, are conquered and disappear. Thus begins a series of secessions and assimilations, some forced, others voluntary, that persist to the present day. Of each generation, only a fragment endures to beget the next. So, in the prophetic literature, we meet the concept of she’erit Yisrael, the remnant of Israel. “A remnant will return,” says Isaiah, “the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God. Though your people, O Israel, be like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return.”12Isa. 10:21–22. How is this fact to be understood? How can it be that all Israel is chosen, yet not all survive as Israel? This is the crisis.
There are two possible answers. Those who survive are either an accidental remnant or a chosen remnant. If those who endure as Israel are an accidental remnant, then Jewish history bespeaks the ravages of life under the hiding of the face of God. Unprotected, the righteous and the innocent suffer alike. The enemy strikes arbitrarily. Individuals are lost, but the people survives. Those who live are not specially chosen, not necessarily more righteous than those who die. The divine promise is that some will remain, and from them a people will be rebuilt. “As a shepherd saves from the lion’s mouth only two leg bones or a piece of an ear,” says Amos, “so will the Israelites be saved.”13Amos 3:12. The remnant of Israel will be like “a brand snatched from the fire.”14Amos 4:11; Zech. 3:2.
The idea of an accidental remnant dominates prophetic thought. Israel suffers grievously for its sins. The people are scattered, threshed, beaten, refined. But those who, bruised and injured, return represent the people as a whole. Rabbinic midrash, and later Nachmanides, describe this history in an image drawn from Genesis.15Genesis Rabbah 77:4; Commentary on Gen. 32:26. Israel in its trials of survival is Jacob wrestling with the angel. Jacob must struggle with an adversary through the long night until the dawn of redemption breaks. He is tenacious; he survives. But afterwards, he limps. The persecutions, crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms all leave their mark. Yet “Jacob returns whole.”
But here and there an alternative model surfaces. According to this, those who survive are those who are truly chosen. The real Israel is only a part of the apparent Israel, the grain that remains after the chaff is blown away. The decimations of history are not random but retributive. The wicked die; the righteous live. “Shall I not avenge myself on such a nation as this?” asks God through Jeremiah. “Go through her vineyards and ravage them, but do not destroy them completely. Strip off her branches, for these people do not belong to the Lord.” 16Jer. 5:9–10.
This view might seem to run against the argument of Genesis, that all of Israel is chosen and cannot be unchosen. But at this point we notice a curious omission. The prophets frequently had recourse to metaphors drawn from the Pentateuch. In a process known to rabbinic tradition as midrash, described by modern scholars as “inner biblical exegesis,” the later literature of Judaism is an extended process of reinterpretation of themes already present in the Mosaic books.17Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). In the present instance, a perfect metaphor for the idea of a chosen remnant lay directly at hand, in the narratives of Genesis. For not all the children of the patriarchs were children of the covenant. Surely, then, those who vanished through Israel’s catastrophes and attritions were Ishmaels and Esaus, whilst those who survived were the true Isaac and Jacob. In fact, however, the prophets systematically avoided this image: a telling indication of how deeply Genesis argues against it. After Jacob, no child of Israel lies outside the covenant. When the prophets search for a metaphor of Israel’s infidelity they find it, instead, in Sodom and Gomorrah,18See, e.g., Isa. 1:9–10, 3:9; Jer. 23:14, 49:18; Ezek. 16:46–56; Amos 4:11; Lam. 4:6. or the rebellious generation of the wilderness.19Ezek. 20:30–38. But both comparisons invite consolation, for Abraham prayed on behalf of Sodom, and the children of those who perished in the wilderness were destined to enter the land. Thus the covenant survived its first crisis. The inclusive interpretation of “one people” was preserved.
AGAINST COVENANTAL DUALISM
But the exclusivist concept of a saving or righteous remnant, a “true Israel” amongst the mixed multitude, appeared with disruptive force during the second covenantal crisis: the long period of internal strife from the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE to the destruction of the Temple and the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE. A fundamental dualism between the saved and the condemned appears in the apocalyptic writings, the documents of the Qumran sect, and the literature of the Gnostics. In the Dead Sea Scrolls it takes the form of a cosmic struggle between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness.” Dan Jacobson sums up the tendency thus: “One can guess that at all times during the historic periods covered by these texts, particular groups must have cherished the belief that they were in fact more chosen than others among the chosen people.... In all these [early post-biblical] texts one finds sects which believed passionately that they represent the worthy remnant of which the prophetic literature of their ancestors had spoken: a small, truly chosen group surviving precariously but decisively within a counterfeit Israel, a nation composed of sinful leaders, evil priests and misled masses.”20Dan Jacobson, The Story of the Stories (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1982), 123.
One development in particular was to have fateful consequences. For the metaphor so conspicuously avoided by the prophets finally made its devastating appearance. Not all Jews are children of the covenant. “Not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children.” The proof? Ishmael was not chosen, though he was Abraham’s child. Nor was Esau, though he was born to Isaac and Rebecca. God is free to choose and unchoose. Prophetic texts – including Isaiah’s “only a remnant will return” – are reinterpreted to show that not all Israel will be saved. “It is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.”21Rom. 9. On modern interpretations of this passage, see Hyam Maccoby, Paul and Hellenism (London: SCM Press, 1991), 155–79. Not every Jew is chosen. The author of these words was Paul, architect of a Christian theology which deemed that the covenant between God and his people was now broken. Torah as law had been repealed. A new Israel had been elected to replace the old. Those within Jewry who did not accept the new dispensation were unsaved. No doctrine has cost more Jewish lives. Pauline theology demonstrates to the full how remote from and catastrophic to Judaism is the doctrine of a second choice, a new election.
What, then, was the response of the Pharisees and the emergent rabbinic mainstream? They too faced epistemological crisis. Until the collapse of Jewish autonomy in Israel, the doctrine of “one people” had a natural plausibility. To be sure, there were Jewish diasporas, and there were deep divisions within Israel itself. But a nation, territorially concentrated and to some extent self-governing, conspicuously shares a fate. When it is attacked, oppressed, or suffers setbacks, all its inhabitants suffer. It has focuses of national unity. Kings, priests, Jerusalem and its aura, the Temple and its rites all served to remind a population that the nation had institutional embodiment. The collectivity had its visible symbols. But by the second half of the second century CE all these were in ruins. With the brutal suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt, the rabbis were aware that, for the foreseeable future, there were to be no more Jewish kings and no speedy rebuilding of the Temple. The messianic hope remained. But in the meanwhile a long dispersion was beginning, one that had no parallel in Jewish history. How then, deprived of the formal structures and institutions of national unity, were Jews to remain “one people”?
Jews still had a faith, of course. But a faith community is not a people. It is not the family of Abraham, the children of Israel. One becomes a member of a community of faith but one is born a Jew. It was at this point that the sages articulated an idea implicit in the covenant from the beginning but which had not, until now, needed to be spelled out. Israel is, according to the Mekhilta Derabbi Shimon bar Yochai, “a single body and a single soul…when one is smitten, all feel pain.”22Mekhilta Derabbi Shimon bar Yochai on Ex. 19:6. They are united not by the institutions of monarchy or the Temple but by the covenant itself. In the famous principle set out in the Sifra, “All Israel are sureties for one another.”23Sifra on Lev. 26:37. The covenant is more than a series of vertical commitments linking individual Jews with God. It is also a set of horizontal bonds linking Jews with one another in collective responsibility. Thus the concept of nationhood survived the collapse of Israel’s central institutions and the dispersion of its population. It rested on Torah as the constitution of a people.
Jewish peoplehood was never an absolutely inclusive idea. One could place oneself outside the community by idolatry or heresy. There was even a benediction against heretics in the liturgy. But the sages construed peoplehood in such a way as to rule out its restriction to an exclusive elite. All Israel, they said, has a share in the world to come.24Mish. Sanhedrin 10:1. A fast which does not include transgressors is not a fast.25Keritot 6b. The “four species” of Tabernacles – the palm-branch, citron, myrtle, and willow – refer to the four kinds of Jew, those with and without learning, with and without good deeds. “The Holy One, blessed be he, declares that they should all be bound together as a single bunch so that they may atone for one another.”26Leviticus Rabbah 30:12. In these and other statements the sages cast the idea of peoplehood as widely as possible within the parameters of faith.
Admittedly, not everyone agreed. Commenting on a classic “chosen remnant” text – Jeremiah’s prophecy that God will take “one of you from every town and two from every clan and bring you to Zion” – Resh Lakish declared that the verse was to be understood literally. Only the righteous few would survive. But Rabbi Jochanan dissented. Instead, Jeremiah meant that one individual would, by his merits, save a whole town, and two an entire clan.27Sanhedrin 111a. On the phrase “You are sons of the Lord your God,” Rabbi Judah said, “When you behave as sons you are called sons; when you do not behave as sons you are not called sons.” Chosenness is thus conditional. It must be earned and can be undone. But Rabbi Meir demurred. “In either case [however Israel behaves] you are called sons.”28Kiddushin 36a. Chosenness is ontological, written into Israel’s being. Rabbi Meir’s and Rabbi Jochanan’s view prevailed. “Even though they [the Jews] are impure, the divine presence is among them,” affirmed the Sifra.29Sifra on Lev. 16:16. “Even though they have sinned, they are called Israel,” said Rav.30Sanhedrin 44a. This last aggadic statement was to have halakhic ramifications. Even an apostate – so ruled Rabbenu Gershom and Rashi – remains a Jew.31For a history of these rulings see Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 67–81; Blidstein, “Who Was Not a Jew?”
There are few suggestions in early rabbinic thought that those who survive are the chosen few and those who rebel are not the true Israel. The idea does occur. Whoever is not merciful, said the sages, is not a child of Abraham.32Beitzah 32b. Whoever is shameless, his ancestors were not present at Sinai.33Nedarim 20a. Those who act without compassion are children of the “mixed multitude” who left Egypt with Israel.34Beitzah 32b. But such statements are rare and marginal. The majority view was that “even the emptiest of Israel is as full of mitzvot, religious deeds, as a pomegranate is of seeds.”35Berakhot 57a; Eiruvin 19a; Sanhedrin 37a; Song of Songs Rabbah 4:5; Genesis Rabbah 32:10. Indeed, in a breathtaking interpretation, Rabbi Zera drew the same lesson from the moment when Isaac blessed Jacob, who was wearing Esau’s clothes. The text reads, “Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him.” Rabbi Zera comments: “Read not ‘his garments’ [begadav] but ‘his betrayals’ [bogedav].”36Sanhedrin 37a. The message is clear. Though Israel wears Esau’s clothes and bears the aroma of betrayal, he is still blessed.
There is, however, one fully developed instance of the “chosen remnant” theory in the rabbinic literature. It occurs in Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen of 1172. The Jewish community of Yemen was under threat of forced conversion to Islam. Some of its members had succumbed. Those who had not were anxious and confused. They turned to Maimonides for advice. His reply is a monument of reassurance. “As it is impossible for God to cease to exist, so is our destruction and disappearance from the world unthinkable.” What then of the Jews who have yielded to threats and converted? Maimonides here advances an idea that will strengthen the resistance of those who have not. The repeated persecutions of Jews, he says, are trials “designed to purify and test us, so that only the saints and the pious men of the pure and undefiled lineage of Jacob will adhere to our religion and remain within the fold.” God has promised that the children of those who stood at Sinai would have faith until the end of time. “Consequently, let everyone know who spurns the religion that was revealed at that theophany, that he is not an offspring of the folk that witnessed it.”37Translation taken from Halkin, Crisis and Leadership, 102–3.
Here, unmistakably, is theological Darwinism: the survival of the religiously fittest. Those who convert to Islam are not now, nor ever were, true Jews. But we cannot separate the statement from its context. For Maimonides himself, in another context – the Epistle on Martyrdom – had delivered the most powerful of all statements of inclusivism. There he had declared the conversos to be true Jews. The religious deeds they did in secret would be doubly rewarded. The difference between the two epistles is simple. There he addresses those who have converted; here he speaks to those who have not. Isidore Twersky is surely correct in his judgement that “she’erit hapeleitah [the surviving remnant] is a consolatory concept but it is not an ideology which one consciously and resignedly embraces ab initio.”38Isidore Twersky, “Survival, Normalcy, Modernity,” in Moshe Davis (ed.), Zionism in Transition (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 350.
Against a sectarian dualism which divided Israel into the saved and the condemned, the sages insisted that the covenant addressed a people, not an elite. The sinning Jew may be punished and may lose rights within the halakhic system, but he remains a Jew, a child of the covenant, beloved of God. Those who disappear in the course of history are not the “counterfeit Israel” who are being punished and whose loss may go unmourned. On the contrary, the liturgies of lamentation in the Middle Ages express the fact that it is the righteous who suffer. Those who survive are an accidental remnant. The covenant is inclusive. For it was made with a people, the entire “congregation of Jacob.”
THE THIRD CRISIS
This faith disintegrated in modernity. Michael Wyschogrod reports that Martin Buber once declared that keneset Yisrael, the Jewish people as a single entity, no longer existed. They were too fragmented, too divided over fundamentals. Keneset Yisrael had “come to an end sometime around the Enlightenment, which undermined classical Jewish self-understanding. From then on, the concept of the Jewish people as one entity standing before God was problematic.”39Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 239.
In a sense, Buber was right. The many Jewish visions of the nineteenth century were neither inclusivist nor pluralist, but exclusivist. Each saw itself as the only route to a Jewish future, and confidently foresaw the demise of the alternatives. Reform Jews saw Orthodoxy as an anachronism of the ghetto, a vestige of an earlier age that would not survive exposure to the open air of an open society. Orthodoxy saw Reform as another name for assimilation. It was a halfway house to intermarriage, and its adherents would disappear as Jews within three generations. Zionists, both secular and religious, saw the diaspora as fated for extinction by assimilation or antisemitism. Critics of early Zionism saw it as a quixotic gesture destined to failure, meanwhile threatening the situation of diaspora Jewry by the spectre of dual loyalties. Religious critics added that it was even worse than Reform, for it threatened collective assimilation and the complete secularization of Jewish life. Each group saw itself as Jewry’s saving remnant.
The language of Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has no precedent since Second Temple times. Quite apart from the Jew-hating literature of such lapsed or ex-Jews as Ludwig Borne, Karl Marx, Walter Rathenau, and Fritz Mauthner,40See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). even the writings of affirming Jews is dualistic, built on oppositional stereotypes between “good” and “bad” Jews. The enlightened Jews of Germany in the 1830s, embarrassed by their Yiddish-speaking brothers, said that they “create a sense of disgust in their correligionists.”41Ibid., 160–61. By the 1880s, as Jews from the East began to enter Germany, a Jewish newspaper could write, “The Russian Jews have multiplied in Germany like frogs.” They “evoke the justified German hatred for the Jews.”42Ibid., 284.
The most virulent rhetoric came from the secular Zionists. In 1905 Jabotinsky outlined his plan for a new “Hebrew” identity that would negate what he called the yid of exile. The yid is “ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum.” He is “trodden on and easily frightened,” “despised by all,” and has “accepted submission.”43Quoted in Amnon Rubinstein, The Zionist Dream Revisited (New York: Schocken, 1984), 4. Earlier, Theodor Herzl had drawn a yet more savage caricature. Mauschel, the exilic Jew, is “a distortion of human character, unspeakably mean and repellent.” He “feels miserable fear,” is “impudent and arrogant,” and pursues “only his own dirty business.” It is, added Herzl, “as if in a dark moment of our history some mean strain intruded into and was mixed with our unfortunate nation.”44Quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 239. The racist slurs of pre-state Zionism led Yechezkel Kaufmann, himself an ardent Zionist, to accuse the movement of a “vocabulary of abuse” that was “paralleled only in overtly antisemitic literature of the worst kind.”45Yechezkel Kaufman, “The Ruin of the Soul,” in Michael Selzer (ed.), Zionism Reconsidered (London: Macmillan, 1970), 117–30.
Seen in the full perspective of Nazism and anti-Zionist Islamic fundamentalism, the fact that Jews could use such language about each other is little less than shocking. Clearly there were extenuating factors. In an age of antisemitism, Jews had internalized gentile perceptions of the Jew to devastating effect. What is therefore doubly chilling is that the vocabulary persists today. A recent survey of the charedi (Orthodox pietist) press in Israel, for example, revealed a sharp dualism between “Jews” and “Israelis” (secular Jews). “Israelis” were seen as Jewish gentiles, even antisemites. One newspaper spoke of a conflict between the “sons of the light of Torah” against the “sons of secular darkness.” Another asked, “Which is worse, Zionism or Nazism?,” and answered, “The Nazis burned the bodies of the community of Israel and the Zionists burned the souls of the community of Israel, and one who leads another to sin is worse than one who murders.”46Amnon Levi, “The Haredi Press and Secular Society,” in Liebman (ed.), Religious and Secular, 21–44. A parallel survey of the secular press disclosed equally brutal stereotypes. Charedim are “evil, primitive, mindlessly brainwashed.” They are bent on extortion, opposed to democracy; they are embodiments of “khomeinization” or fanatical religious rule.47Samuel Heilman, “Religious Jewry in the Secular Press: Aftermath of the 1988 Elections,” in Liebman (ed.), Religious and Secular, 45–66. One recent book, Uri Huppert’s Back to the Ghetto, portrays Israeli religious groups as totalitarian enemies of a free society.48Huppert, Back to the Ghetto, 40.
Few observers of contemporary Jewry have failed to note the deep bitterness that periodically surfaces between secular and religious Jews in Israel, Orthodox and Reform Jews in America, diaspora and Israeli Jewry, and within Orthodoxy itself between “modernists,” Hasidic groups, and yeshiva leaders. But with this, we come to the crux. There may have been a time, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when such estrangement was inevitable. Today it is not. The early struggles to establish a Jewish state are over. So is the battle to secure Jewish admission to the societies of the West. The forces which gave rise to fragmentation lie, for the most part, in the past. Israel is not threatened by the diaspora, nor the diaspora by Israel. Reform is not endangered by Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, through its powerful structures of education, is secure against assimilation. A rhetoric of negation brings neither strategic advantage nor psychological security. No group gains by the injuries it inflicts on others. Each wins adherents by its own vision and power, not by the denigration of alternatives.
The time has come to call a halt to the sectarian dualism of the saved and the condemned, and to the Darwinism which calmly contemplates the extinction of some group of Jews. For four reasons. If, after the Holocaust and the attacks on the State of Israel, gentile antisemitism is morally unacceptable, so too is Jewish antisemitism. Secondly, Jewish Darwinism is sociologically unrealistic. Within its own criteria, no major grouping within Jewry is about to disappear. Thirdly, it is historically blind. The modern era has recapitulated the disastrous divisions of two earlier crises in Israel’s past, and it would be folly indeed, in the rabbis’ phrase, “to have seen [what happened before] and not to learn the lesson.” Fourthly and above all, the idea of “one people” forms the very core of Jewish faith in the covenant between God and a chosen nation. That idea has been assailed by crisis before. But it survived. If, in an age of freedom and sovereignty such as Jews have only rarely experienced in three and a half thousand years of history, it were to collapse, the tragedy would resound through all future Jewish generations.
The idea of “one people” is a religious commitment that cannot be given coherence in any other frame of discourse. Jews are not linked horizontally across continents and vertically through time as a community of culture, interests, race, or ethnicity. They do not share a political system, a territory, or a language. Nor, though this is often taken for granted, is it self-evident that Jews share a “history” and a “fate.” The narratives of the Jewish past told by, for example, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, Rabbi Abraham Kook, Simon Dubnow, Gershom Scholem, and David Ben-Gurion are not the same history. Nor is the fact that, say, British Jews feel implicated in the fate of Soviet and Ethiopian Jewry merely instinctual. It is an instinct born of an essentially religious commitment: that Jews are responsible for one another and are thus bound to come to one another’s aid. That idea belongs not to nature, race, or politics, but to covenant. Jews might have decided, as did the late Arthur Koestler on the founding of the State of Israel, that henceforth their history and fate would diverge. That for the most part they did not is testimony to the power of faith over even the most secular Jewish imagination.
But the paradox of modern Jewry is that religion, which historically united Jews, today divides them. The axiom on which Judaism was predicated was the inseparability of Torah and the people Israel. But they have become separated. That was a possibility uncontemplated in the rabbinic literature.49See Akedat Yitzchak, Gate 29. There might be individual secessions from halakhah, even large-scale defections as in Spain and Portugal in Inquisition times. But these were conscious departures. All concerned knew that a line had been crossed, an exit taken. That a majority of Jews might define themselves as Jews without reference to religious belief or halakhic practice would have seemed, until a century ago, a contradiction in terms.
PLURALISM, EXCLUSIVISM, INCLUSIVISM
How, then, is this fact to be responded to? We have argued that an internal Jewish pluralism that would de jure acknowledge different religious denominations is ruled out by the classic terms of Judaism. Precisely because Judaism is the religion of a nation, one of its central terms is halakhah, law. Law translates faith into the structures of common life. It turns the Sabbath from a time of private recreation into a day of public rest. It turns the ethical imperative from a chaos of individual choices into a shared code of righteousness. The immutable nature of the commandments joins each Jew not merely to God but to God as responded to by generations of Jews in every place of their dispersion. Seemingly fragile, unenforced by political power, halakhah united Jews across centuries and continents and gave them identity as a nation. A pluralism that would formally recognize the obsolescence of halakhah (Jewish secularism) or its subjection to the autonomous self (Reform) or the local ethic of time and place (Conservative) would not be a proposal to unite Jewry but, instead, to announce its dissolution.
I have argued, too, that exclusivism, though it has had advocates in the Jewish past, runs against the main thrust of Jewish tradition. Its power cannot be denied. Israelis who negate the diaspora, diaspora Jews who see statehood as a betrayal of Judaism, secularists who regard religion as a force for evil, religious Jews who see secularists as pagans and idolaters, Reform Jews who believe Orthodoxy to have been refuted by the Enlightenment, and Orthodox Jews who see Reform Jews as gentiles – all have the great virtue of intellectual purity. History, on this view, is a war of truth against falsehood, and we can be certain that we are the sole possessors of truth. The Dead Sea Scrolls testify to the attraction of this idea, and it has hypnotic potency in confused times. But the chronicles of human tyranny tell how much blood has been shed in its name, and Jewry has not been without its own internal wars. When God was about to create man, said the rabbis, the angels of truth and peace objected. God then took truth and threw it to the ground, bidding it spring up from the earth.50Genesis Rabbah 8:5. At most, so the midrash implies, we can aspire to truth as it is on earth, not as it is in Heaven. Only by acknowledging this are peace and coexistence possible.
The alternative is inclusivism. My reading of the Jewish sources, which may of course be faulty, suggests that God, in choosing Israel, made a covenant with an entire people. This was not his only choice. Before the flood, he chose a single righteous individual, Noah. After the flood, he made a covenant with all humanity. But in choosing Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s children, he chose to link his name with a particular family. In Rabbi Akiva’s words: all mankind is in God’s image, but Israel are called God’s children.51Mish. Avot 3:18. Israel in turn, by accepting the covenant at Sinai, agreed to be bound for all time to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Like most relationships between fathers and sons in the Bible, that between God and Israel has frequently been tense. There is no suggestion in the Torah that it would be otherwise. A covenant, like parenthood or marriage, involves risk. God accepts the risk that Israel will be unfaithful. Israel faces the risk that God will hide his face. But they are bound to one another by the unbreakable force of mutual undertaking. Jewish history is the record of that relationship. Its epic drama, stretching from Abraham and Sarah to the Holocaust and the return of Jews to the promised land, is still unfolding.
Inclusivism is the belief that the covenant was made with a people, not with righteous individuals alone. One may leave or enter the people by apostasy on the one hand, conversion on the other. But the normal mode of faith is through birth, community, and the transmission of tradition across the generations. That is why the central institutions of Judaism are the family, the kehillah (community), and education as induction (chinukh) into a people, its past and laws. Western modernity, by contrast, has given peculiar weight to the individual and the state, a dichotomy into which Judaism cannot be translated. This either-or was internalized in Jewry’s two most striking innovations: Reform (the individual) and secular Zionism (the state). Neither, I believe, if pursued with consistency, represents continuity with the Jewish past or a formula for “one people” in the Jewish present.
Inclusivism understands the present alienation of many Jews from Torah as neither a mandate to fragment the covenant (pluralism) nor justification for a clash of competing exclusive truths. Instead it is evidence of the overwhelming force of a secular culture in which many of Judaism’s truths are unstatable. It does not accord this culture the status of revelation. But neither does it regard it as non-existent. Judaism demands of Jews, now as always in the past, that they go against the current of the times. But it understands that those who go with it are not necessarily acting out an individual renunciation of Judaism. The Talmud describes a dream in which Rav Ashi meets King Manasseh, one of the Bible’s great idolaters. The king teaches the rabbi a halakhah he did not know. Why then, asks the rabbi, did you worship idols? Had you lived in my time, answers the king, you would have caught up your cloak and run after me.52Sanhedrin 102b. Rabbi Jochanan taught: whoever denies that Manasseh has a share in the world to come is guilty of demoralizing those who would return.53Ibid. 103a.
This perception lies behind the inclusivist ruling that Jews today who abandon halakhah are for the most part to be judged tinokot shenishbu, subjects of cultural duress. In one form or another this was the view advocated by Rabbis Jacob Ettlinger, David Zvi Hoffmann, Abraham Kook, Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, Joseph Saul Nathansohn, and Abraham Karelitz, and was based on a ruling of Maimonides about second-generation Karaites. I have suggested in this chapter that its roots are to be found much earlier in Jewish history, in the argument of the book of Genesis. Inclusivism involves a denial of truth to secular and liberal Judaisms (much as these Judaisms involve a denial of truth to Orthodoxy). But it insists that secular and liberal Jews are part of the covenant, participants in Judaism’s bonds of collective responsibility, to be related to with love, dignity, and respect. This offends the modern self, which demands to be respected not for what it is but for what it believes and does. It is, in terms of modern consciousness, an imperfect solution. But perfect solutions are not to be found this side of messianic time.
Inclusivism is not another name for Modern Orthodoxy. Modern Orthodoxy is a statement of Jewish ideology. Inclusivism is a statement of Jewish ecology, of the complex totality of Jewish peoplehood. I have argued that Orthodoxy is not a denomination. It is instead a boundary, defined by halakhah and the principles of Jewish faith, within which many types of philosophy and piety are possible. Modern Orthodoxy is one of them, but not the only one that lays legitimate claim to the attentions of the modern Jew. There are differences of evaluation, style, and orientation that have not in the past received, nor do they in the present call for, halakhic resolution, despite their deep religious significance. There are forms of behaviour (self-imposed stringency, “beyond the letter of the law”) which have religious dignity but are not to be confused with the halakhic norm itself. The Judaism of halakhah and faith is a language within which many sentences are possible. There is an open-ended number of ways and contexts in which God can be served and his name sanctified, and inclusivism does not seek to decide between them. There are inclusivists within the yeshiva tradition and the Hasidic world as well as within modern Orthodoxy. Common to them is a deep love of and reluctance to divide the Jewish people.
INCLUSIVIST IMPERATIVES
What, then, would an inclusivist advocate in the present? Firstly, a deep sensitivity to the language in which we speak of other Jews. The Jewish tradition attached the highest significance to speech. God spoke and the universe was: the world was created by words. Human beings, too, create or destroy social worlds with words. Language, for Judaism, is the medium of revelation. Indeed, the Targum translates the phrase in the second chapter of Genesis, “and man became a living soul,” as “and man became a speaking soul.”54Targum Onkelos on Gen. 2:7. For Jewish consciousness, words are life. In this context we can understand the rabbinic insistence that lashon hara, evil speech, is tantamount to the three cardinal sins of murder, immorality, and idolatry combined.55Y. Pe’ah 1:1; Yad, De’ot 7:3.
We may not speak of other Jews except in the language of love and respect. Rabbinic tradition taught collective solidarity and the prophetic obligation to speak well (lelamed zekhut) of the congregation of Israel. When Moses declared of the Israelites, “They will not believe in me,” God, according to the Talmud, replied, “They are believers, the children of believers, but you ultimately will not believe.”56Shabbat 97a; Exodus Rabbah 3:12. The Talmud states that when God said to Hosea, “Your children have sinned,” he should not have agreed, but instead should have said, “They are Your children, the children of your favoured ones.… Be compassionate to them.”57Pesachim 87a. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught: Even when a generation curses its father and does not bless its mother [when it rejects God and Jewish tradition], “slander not a servant to his master.”58Ibid. 87b. See also Song of Songs Rabbah 1:6. On the general theme see Urbach, The Sages, 554–64. There is a covenantal obligation to search out and articulate the good in fellow Jews. To be sure, Jewish law recognizes exceptions to the rule against “evil speech.” Heresy is one. But the inclusivist, by insisting that non-believing Jews today are tinokot shenishbu, has ruled out this clause in almost all cases.
There is, admittedly, a biblical obligation to reprove wrongdoing.59Lev. 19:17. On the subject generally see Jonathan Sacks, “Rabbinic Conceptions of Responsibility for Others: A Study of the Command of Rebuke and the Idea of Mutual Suretyship,” Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1982). But according to many authorities it does not apply when it is certain that reproof will not be heeded.60Tosafot, Shabbat 55a, s.v. Ve’af al gav; Hagahot Maimoniyot on Yad, De’ot 6, n. 3. According to talmudic principle it does not apply when a person, originally acting in ignorance, is likely to continue to transgress, now knowingly.61Beitzah 30a, Shabbat 148b. There were mishnaic teachers who maintained that the whole institution of reproof was at times impossible to sustain. A generation might be unworthy: either it lacked the will to respond to criticism or it lacked individuals who could administer criticism persuasively.62Arakhin 16b. In any event, rules Maimonides, reproof must be delivered “gently and tenderly” and must not put the other person to shame.63Yad, De’ot 6:8. To be sure, there are circumstances in which, according to Maimonides, one is allowed to put others to shame. But this presumably only applies if there is reason to suppose that such a strategy will be effective in securing repentance. See the literature cited in Sacks, “Rabbinic Conceptions of Responsibility for Others,” 304–78.
Secondly, the inclusivist would not seek to use coercive means to bring Jews back to tradition. Admittedly, the halakhic system recognizes coercion. Maimonides speaks of the messianic king using it to enforce religious law.64Yad, Melakhim 11:4. But its valid use implies underlying public assent. In the one passage in which the rabbis suggested that the commandments were given to Israel against their will (according to which God suspended Mount Sinai over the Israelites and told them that if they did not assent, they would die) Rav Acha bar Yaakov responded: “This constitutes a strong objection to the Torah.”65Shabbat 88b. Rabbi Abraham Karelitz argued that at the present time coercive punishments would be seen by a secular population as unwarranted. They would therefore not improve but worsen the religious environment.66Chazon Ish on Yoreh De’ah 2:16.
In the Middle Ages, Gersonides contrasted Torah with the laws of the nations in that while the Torah invites assent, the laws of other faiths “do not conform to equity and wisdom...so that people only obey them because of compulsion, fear, and the threat of punishment and not because of their essence.”67Gersonides on Isa. 42:1–4. In the nineteenth century Samson Raphael Hirsch welcomed an age of religious freedom.68Hirsch, Nineteen Letters, Letter 18: “I rejoice that the scales hang free, held by God alone, and that only intellectual efforts mutually balance each other, but that no temporal power can interpose the sword to check the freedom of the swinging.” Hirsch believed that a free society would lead to the purification of religion. More recently, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch has argued that the sages “perceived in every reduction of the power of coercion a step forward in preparing the world for the Heavenly kingdom.” The whole thrust of Judaism is, he suggests, of a gradual society-wide education towards the uncoerced acceptance of halakhah.69Nachum Rabinovitch, “Darkhah shel Torah,” in B. Brenner, O. Kapach, and Z. Shimshoni (eds.), Ma’alei Asor (Ma’aleh Adumim: Ma’aliot, 1988), 8–42; for an abridged English trans. see “The Torah Way,” in Shubert Spero and Yitzchak Pessin (eds.), Religious Zionism after Forty Years of Statehood (Jerusalem: WZO, 1989), 277–308. The inclusivist, sensitive to these arguments, seeks to draw Jews back not by legislative or political means but by “words of peace”70Yad, Mamrim 3:3. and “cords of love.”71Chazon Ish on Yoreh De’ah 2:16.
Thirdly, the inclusivist understands the supreme importance Judaism attaches to education. For it is through constant study that Torah is transformed from external law to internalized command. Knowing that Torah is a law not of nature but of revelation, he is aware that acceptance of it does not come naturally.72See Cynthia Ozick, “On Living in the Gentile World,” in Nahum Glatzer (ed.), Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1977), 167–74. God seeks not only the deed, but also the heart. But that means an informed heart and instructed emotion. The inclusivist recognizes that education must speak to the cultural situation of the student; as the Bible puts it, it must answer the questions asked by the child. He knows that “learning leads to doing,” that education is Judaism’s classic alternative to coercion, and that secular culture can only be confronted – as it was by the sages in Greek and Roman times – by an intensification of Jewish learning.
Above all, he believes that only through universal Jewish education can Jews satisfy the first requirement of a people: that its members share a language of discourse.73See Hartman, “Halakhah as a Ground for Creating a Shared Spiritual Language,” in his Joy and Responsibility, 130–61. He agrees with Alasdair MacIntyre’s statement: “An educated community can exist only where there is some large degree of shared background beliefs and attitudes, informed by widespread reading of a common body of texts which are accorded a canonical status within that particular community” and when there is also “an established tradition of interpretative understanding of how those texts are to be read and construed.”74Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of an Educated Public,” in Graham Haydon (ed.), Education and Values (London: Institute of Education, 1987), 15–36. Throughout their dispersion Jews were linked by texts. Heine called the Torah the “portable fatherland” of the Jews. It was their shared territory, their central point of reference. Their arguments and speculations were all couched in the form of concentric commentaries to its words. Without the acquisition of a shared textual heritage it is difficult to see how Jews can begin to communicate as “one people with one language.”75On the general state of Jewish literacy see Ruth Wisse, “The Hebrew Imperative,” Commentary (June 1990), 34–39; Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 413–23.
Fourthly, while not advocating halakhic change along the lines argued by Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn or Eliezer Berkovits, the inclusivist seeks to apply halakhah to its widest possible constituency. To the extent that precedent and consensus allow, the inclusivist is mindful of the metahalakhic principles recorded in the Talmud: that Jewish law should, as far as possible, not be beyond the reach of the poor; that it should be sensitive to the needs and rights of women; and that it should not bar the way to religious return.76I.e., the principles of hatorah chasah al mamonam shel Yisrael, hefsed merubah; mishum agunah; shakdu chakhamim al takanat benot Yisrael; takanat hashavim, etc. He recalls one of Maimonides’ principles of rabbinic authority, that it be used “to bring the many back to religion or to save the many from stumbling in other transgressions.”77Yad, Mamrim 2:4. Where judicial discretion is available, he uses it to “open the doors to those who wish to perform mitzvot,” 78Rashba, 581. and to preempt Jews being driven away from Judaism (tarbut ra’ah). 79See the summary of positions in Chajes, Kol Sifrei, 1021–27. He seeks to create an environment in which Jews will bring their problems to halakhah rather than to some other system for solution, and he is mindful of Maimonides’ statement that “the ordinances of the Torah were meant to bring upon the world not vengeance, but mercy, loving-kindness, and peace.”80Yad, Shabbat 2:3.
Fifthly, the inclusivist seeks a nuanced understanding of secular and liberal Jews. He refuses a dualism that divides Jewry into unmixed categories of good and evil. He is aware that there are some authorities who maintain that even the good deeds of those who reject halakhah have no religious value.81Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes argues that even though we have a rule that mitzvot ein tzerikhot kavanah, “the fulfilment of the commands does not require intention,” this applies only to the specific intention to fulfil a particular command (kavanah peratit). For an act to count as the fulfilment of a command, it must none the less be accompanied by the general intention (kavanah kelalit) which comes from religious belief. If this belief is lacking, the act lacks halakhic significance as religious behaviour. See Chajes, Kol Sifrei, 1012. A similar conclusion was arrived at independently by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman (Kovetz Ma’amarim, 67). Wasserman invokes the halakhic category of mitasek, where the agent is unaware of the nature of his act, to characterize the religious behaviour of Jews who deny the fundamentals of faith. None the less, he interprets this as applying to heretics in the past, not to the Jews of today. In so doing, he relies on the general inclusivist argument that secular and liberal Jews are not to be judged as deliberate rebels but as unwitting (shogeg) or coerced (anus)82See in this context Radbaz, 1258. products of their environment. Or he maintains the distinction argued by Rabbi Isaac Reines, that halakhic intent is required only for commands between man and God, not for those between man and man.83Isaac Reines, Shenei Hame’orot (Pietroków, 1913), 19.
More strongly still, the inclusivist follows the argument of Maimonides in the Epistle on Martyrdom. There Maimonides invokes the talmudic principle that “the Holy One, blessed be he, does not withhold the reward of any creature”84Pesachim 118a, Nazir 23b, Bava Kama 38b, Horayot 10b. to show that Jews who, under duress, convert to Islam still gain merit by performing Torah commandments. Maimonides cites aggadic texts which show that God recompenses the greatest wrongdoers – Esau, Ahab, Eglon, Nebuchadnezzar – for the smallest good deed they do. “If these well-known heretics were generously rewarded for the little good that they did, is it conceivable that God will not reward the Jews who despite the exigencies of forced conversion perform commandments secretly?” 85Trans. in Halkin, Crisis and Leadership, 23. Maimonides goes further. Even one who could escape religious persecution but chooses not to is still rewarded for his good deeds. “If he fulfils a precept, God will reward him doubly, because he acted for God only, and not to show off or be accepted as an observant individual.”86Ibid., 33.
With these principles in mind, the inclusivist shares the judgement of Rabbi Abraham Kook that secular Zionists and Israelis are engaged in fulfilling the command of “settling the land” which the sages and Nachmanides regarded as “equal to all the other commands combined.”87Sifre on. “Re’eh,” 80; Nachmanides, Hasagot on Maimonides, Sefer Hamitzvot, positive command 4; see also his commentary on Lev. 18:25. On Kook see Yaron, Mishnato shel Harav Kook, 231–84. He respects the fact that most Jews worldwide retain a high commitment to charity, another act to which the sages attached the highest value. To this he adds Maimonides’ comment that one who performs even a single precept, for its own sake and out of love, is promised a share in the world to come.88Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Makkot 3:17.
The inclusivist attaches positive significance to the fact that liberal Judaisms have played their part in keeping alive for many Jews the values of Jewish identity, faith, and practice. These are not identity, faith, and practice as he understands them, but he recalls Maimonides’ ruling that even Christianity and Islam had served “to prepare the whole world to worship God with one accord” by spreading knowledge of the messianic age, the Torah, and the commandments, even though these were not as Judaism understood them.89Yad, Melakhim 11. The passage is censored in standard printed editions. An English translation is given in Isidore Twersky (ed.), A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 226–27. How much more does this apply to movements which have served to retain Jews within Jewry who might otherwise have drifted into another faith or no faith at all.
Sixthly, believing as he does in divine providence, the inclusivist strives to recognize the positive consequences of Jewish liberalism and secularism even as he refuses to recognize their truth or ultimate viability. He recalls the statement of Rabbi Kook, quoted in the last chapter, that “when the light of prophecy is screened” good [tikun] sometimes comes about through means which one would not have chosen ab initio. As a result of the many reforming or secularizing movements of the nineteenth century, Jews negotiated the traumas of social change and antisemitism without mass conversions to Christianity or widespread abandonment of identity. Within each of these movements there was a complex dialectic of assimilation and counter-assimilation, a desire for “normality” alongside fierce pride in religious or national difference. Even the “Science of Judaism” movement, conceived by some of its founders as a means of “giving the remains of Judaism a decent burial,” led to a renewed interest in Jewish history and texts, and thus indirectly to the revival of the love of Zion and Jewish scholarship.
Each of these groups, while dissenting from tradition, none the less gave new life to some aspect of tradition. Secular Zionism reminded Jews that political activity, not only passivity, was part of Judaism. Indeed, Maimonides had written to the sages of Marseilles that Jerusalem had fallen because the Jews of the time neglected “the art of martial defence and government.”90English version in Twersky, A Maimonides Reader, 465. Other secularists and liberals revived the Hebrew language, the Jewish national idea, and the prophetic passion for social justice. Some strove to reach a new “hearing” of the biblical text. Others renewed interest in rabbinic aggadah and in medieval Jewish thought and poetry. Where such movements did not exist, Jews estranged from tradition either passively abandoned Judaism altogether or actively joined secular revolutionary causes.
Even on the most negative view, that the new forms of Jewishness hastened the flight from tradition, none the less they kept alive the future possibility of return. Nathan Glazer, an acute critic of the secularization of Jewish life, noted that the mere fact that Jews had remained Jews meant that “the Jewish religious tradition is not just a subject for scholars but is capable now and then of finding expression in life. And even if it finds no expression in one generation or another, the commitment to remain related to it still exists. Dead in one, two, or three generations, it may come to life in the fourth.”91Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 144. Glazer wrote those words in 1957. Since then the religious return of thousands of children of the fourth generation has proved the accuracy of his insight. In short, even as the inclusivist is pained by the fragmentation of Jews and Judaism, he recognizes its part in the divine design. He says, with Rabbi Akiva, “This too was for good.”92Berakhot 60b–61a. In retrospect, halakhic Judaism might say to its opponents what the biblical Joseph said to his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”93Gen. 50:20.
Seventhly, the inclusivist, because he sees the shadings, not just the black and the white, in contemporary Jewish life, calls on liberal and secular Jewish leaders to act responsibly in the context of the totality of Judaism and the Jewish people. He does not judge their decisions indifferently. He values modern Reform Judaism’s partial return to religious practice, Jewish education, a sense of peoplehood, the Hebrew language, and a love of the land of Israel. He respects secular Israelis’ new interest in the Jewish history and literature of the past eighteen hundred years, the softening of early Zionism’s negation of rabbinic Judaism, and the discovery that Israel is not called to be – perhaps can never be – “like all the nations.”
At the same time, he discerns and is bound to warn against conflicting tendencies. Within Reform, the laxity of conversions, the decision on patrilineal descent, the endorsement of homosexuality, premarital sex, and abortion on demand are fateful breaks not only with the letter but with the whole spirit of Jewish law. They increase the likelihood that at some time Orthodoxy will see Reform as it saw Christianity: as a separate religion. Within Israeli secularism the growing hostility to Judaism, the resurrection of Spinoza as a hero of Jewish thought, and frequent acts of provocation towards the religious public all intensify the force of confrontation over that of reconciliation. The inclusivist welcomes those such as Jakob Petuchowski within Reform and Eliezer Schweid within secularism who argue that no Jewish movement can or may sever its links with Jewish tradition or the rest of the Jewish people.
The inclusivist understands in advance that Jews outside Orthodoxy will find his position “patronizing” or “imperialistic.” That is the fate of inclusivism in the modern world. The Reform or secular Jew wishes to be respected for what he is, not for what potentially he might become. Indeed, extremists on all sides prefer extremist opponents, because each reinforces the other’s prejudices. The inclusivist knows that his refusal to accept pluralism or dualism will find favour with no side. None the less, his decision to view non-Orthodox Jews as tinokot shenishbu flows from his deep love of the Jewish people, his respect for the sanctity of every Jew, and his sensitivity to the covenantal imperative not to divide where division is avoidable. He asks non-Orthodox Jews at least to make the effort to understand the logic of his position, and why no other is available within the terms of a tradition which he believes to be true, revealed, and binding. That is what I have tried to do in this book.
Eighthly, the inclusivist makes a parallel plea for understanding to exclusivist Orthodoxy. He does not stand midway between Orthodoxy and Reform, halakhah and the rejection of halakhah. On the contrary, he is committed to the same principles of faith and law as the exclusivists. His God is their God, his halakhah their halakhah, his reverence for the sages, past and present, the same as theirs. Moreover, he acknowledges in the yeshiva and Hasidic movements one of the great miracles of Jewish history. Over the past two hundred years, their resistance to secularization, their renewal of Jewish learning and piety, their succession of sages and saints, above all their astonishing reconstruction of Jewish life after the Holocaust are, for him, models of religious heroism before which he stands awestruck in admiration.
But he recalls with pain that during the same period the great inclusivists were judged by their rabbinic contemporaries with suspicion, disdain, and sometimes worse. The Hasidic movement, which spread piety to the masses of East European Jewry, aroused the deep hostility of rabbinic leaders. So did the efforts of Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer in Eisenstadt and Rabbi Isaac Reines in Lida, to create seminaries to train rabbis for a new age. So did the willingness of Reines and other Orthodox rabbis to work with the non-religious in the Zionist movement. So did Rabbi Abraham Kook’s attempt to bridge the abyss between secular Zionists and Judaism. Religious hostility towards inclusivism has not ceased. The recent attacks on such diverse figures as the leader of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the talmudist and mystic Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, and the leader of modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Norman Lamm, all fall within a by now lamentably predictable pattern. Inclusivism – the desire to bring Jews back to one another and to Torah – is seen as compromising religious purity, mixing with heretics and transgressors, and the thin end of a wedge of reform.
While respecting the deep integrity and halakhic provenance of such a view, the inclusivist defends his own position. He is obeying one of Judaism’s most famous imperatives, Hillel’s advice to “love peace, pursue peace, love people and bring them close to Torah.” He recalls Maimonides’ responsum on the Karaites, where he rules that one should behave towards them with respect, humility, honesty, and peace so long as they do not speak disrespectfully of Israel’s past and present sages.94Maimonides, Responsa, ed. J. Blau (Jerusalem: Mekitze Nirdamim, 1958), 449. He heeds Maimonides’ statement that “it is not right to alienate, scorn, and hate people who desecrate the Sabbath. It is our duty to befriend them and encourage them to fulfil the commandments.95Maimonides, Epistle on Martyrdom, end.
The inclusivist adds that, historically, the fears of contagion by association proved unjustified. The Hasidic movement did not break with halakhah. The Judaisms of Rabbis Hildesheimer, Reines, Kook, and others did not degenerate into secularism or reform. Indeed, in an instructive responsum, the fifteenth-century halakhist Rabbi Elijah Mizrachi ruled that one should allow Karaites to enter Jewish schools. Despite the fact that he had forbidden Jews to marry Karaites, Mizrachi insisted that their admission to the academies raised standards even among the Jewish students, and that the misplaced zeal which had led rabbis to exclude them had had a catastrophic effect on both sides.96Rabbi Elijah Mizrachi, Responsa, 57. I am indebted for this reference to Nachum Rabinovitch, “Kol Yisrael Arevin Zeh Bazeh” – a superlative example, incidentally, of halakhic inclusivism. That view surely applies today. Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg requested those opposed to efforts to draw marginal Jews back to Judaism to recall that those who engaged in such efforts were also driven by the same love and reverence for Torah.97Seridei Esh, iii, 93, end. It is that effort of understanding that the inclusivist calls for from his Orthodox critics. He does not ask exclusivists to become inclusivists. He merely asks them not to destroy what he is labouring to build.
Ninthly, the inclusivist calls on all Jews to respect the sanctity of the Jewish people, collectively and individually. There is a prayer Jews say at the beginning of the morning service. “Not because of our righteousness do we lay our prayers before you.... What are we? What is our life? What is our kindness? What is our righteousness?” It is a litany of human worthlessness, followed by a transfiguring “but”: “But we are your people, the children of your covenant.” We may be without value, achievements, or good deeds, but we are beloved of God. Such is the message of the prayer. And if it applies to one Jew it applies to all. That is the irreducible minimum of a sense of covenantal peoplehood.
Each Jew must know this: that those others of his people with whom he disagrees carry with them the indivisible history of generations of Jews who survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and yet chose to remain Jews. Every Jew is heir to a succession of tragedies and deliverances, trials and affirmations, unparalleled by any other nation. The Talmud rules that we must rise in respect for age, whether the elderly is wise or unwise, because the mere personal accumulation of history accords dignity to its possessor.98Kiddushin 33a; Yad, Talmud Torah 6:9. That, metaphorically if not halakhically, applies to the Jewish people as a whole. Every Jew today who, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, the attacks on the State of Israel, and the ravages of assimilation, chooses to stay a Jew and have Jewish children is making a momentous affirmation that may not be dishonoured. Even if we must sometimes reject the beliefs and deeds of an individual Jew, none the less he or she is a fragment of the shekhinah, the divine presence which dwells in the midst of Jews wherever and whatever they are. For the inclusivist believes with perfect faith that the covenant binds all Jews to one another, and that a Jew who remains attached to the chosen people cannot be unchosen.
Lastly, the inclusivist calls on Jews to hear the divine call in history. The Final Solution made no distinctions between religious and secular, affirming and assimilated Jews. If Hitler scheduled all Jews for death, may we do less than affirm all Jews for life? Communist and anti-Zionist assaults made no discrimination between traditional and atheist, diaspora and Israeli Jews. May we? May we protest against gentile antisemitism without practising Jewish philosemitism, ahavat Yisrael? May we ask the nations of the world to live at peace with Jews without first learning to live at peace with one another? After the self-inflicted divisions of the nineteenth century, tragedy in the twentieth century has brought Jews to the knowledge that they are involved inescapably, each in the fate of all. If history is a commentary on the covenant, can we avoid the conclusion that the past unspeakable century has been summoning Jews to return to one another and to God?
Twice before, at times of crisis, the people of Israel has split apart. Today it is threatening to do so again. But it has not yet done so. None of the current tendencies in Jewish life is on the verge of disappearance. Orthodoxy is resurgent. Reform is growing in numbers in both America and Britain. Religious groups in Israel have achieved prominence and power. The secularization of Israeli society proceeds apace. The State of Israel has survived the many attacks upon it, and has become the focus of diaspora life. The diaspora has shown a remarkable persistence, and has even witnessed a cultural and religious revival. Each, within its own terms of reference, can claim to be an heir to the Jewish future. The possibilities of fracture are immense.
And yet, among many Jews of all kinds there is a genuine desire for unity even if it is expressed in incompatible ways. Inclusivism and pluralism, let us recall, are both ways of stating that aspiration, despite the fact that they are destined to collide. Far more than in the early years of the state, Jews in Israel and in the diaspora are likely to see their fortunes as interlinked. Orthodoxy and Reform, Israel and the diaspora, religious and secular, despite their fierce antagonisms, have thus far held back from the final step of separation. There are centripetal as well as centrifugal pressures in contemporary Jewish life, driving together as well as forcing apart. The future, then, is peculiarly open, tense with conflicting forces of breaking and mending.
The primal scene of Jewish history is of the Israelites in the wilderness, fractious, rebellious, engaged in endless diversions, yet none the less slowly journeying towards the fulfilment of the covenantal promise. No image seems to me more descriptive of contemporary Jewry. There is no agreement on the route. But unmistakably, Jews are returning: some to a faith, others to a way of life, some to a place, others to a sense of peoplehood. For eighteen hundred years of dispersion, Jews prayed for freedom, the ingathering of exiles, the restoration of sovereignty, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Today they have them. If faith implies anything – faith in God, or the Jewish people, or the covenant that binds one to the other as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” – it implies this: that Jews having come thus far will not now disintegrate, so advanced along the journey which Abraham began nearly four thousand years ago. The inclusivist faith is that Jews, divided by where they stand, are united by what they are travelling towards,99See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Emunah, Historiah, Ve’arakhim, 112–18. Leibowitz argues persuasively that Jewish unity is not a fact but a task of Torah. the destination which alone gives meaning to Jewish history: the promised union of Torah, the Jewish people, the land of Israel, and God.