Tradition as Resistance
All three thinkers we have considered, Hirsch, Kook and Soloveitchik, were conscious inhabitants of modernity, aware that with emancipation a radical transformation had overtaken Jewish identity. It had become, in Europe at least, a divided identity, split between the Jew’s participation in a secular culture and his roots in the Jewish religious, national and ethnic tradition.
Hirsch was convinced that this dualism was viable. Once a solid, enduring basis had been laid for Jewish identity by the institutional structures of a Jewish school, the synagogue, and ongoing adult education, the Jew could enter a secular world, contributing to it as a model citizen. He would find it possible to select the elements of the wider culture that were compatible with Judaism and reject the rest.
Rav Kook, coming at the problem more than half a century later, and from an Eastern European perspective, was less sanguine. A Hirschian solution might work for a minority of Jews, but it would not protect the Jewish people as a whole against assimilation. Moreover, even at its best, it preserved an artificially restricted Judaism, a religion and its laws, rather than a total and environing culture such as had existed in the ghetto and shtetl. Judaism could only flourish and be creative in the context of a people and its culture. And this could happen only in the land of Israel.
The passage of yet another half century brought an awareness of the still deepening impact of secularisation. Israeli society had not yet undergone the sanctification of the secular in the way envisaged by Rav Kook. Nor, whether in Israel or the diaspora, was the Hirschian synthesis easy to maintain. The religious Jew who participates in a secular society finds, unwittingly and despite his various defences, that his consciousness is moulded no less by the latter than by the former. It is this awareness that pervades the writings of R. Soloveitchik and gives them their conflicted and ambivalent character.
All three, though, began with an optimistic view of modernity. In none of their works do we find a nostalgia for the ghetto. None sought to deny or resist the transformations taking place in the conditions of Jewish life. Each, in their different ways, saw emancipation as making possible and necessary a reconstruction of Jewish life and thought. Their work has one detail in common, and at first sight it is a strange one. All three were critical of the philosophy of Moses Maimonides, in particular of that section of the Guide for the Perplexed in which he had explained the reasons for the commandments.1Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters on Judaism, translated by Bernard Drachman, New York: Feldheim, 1960, 118–121; Abraham Isaac Kook, translated by Ben Zion Bokser, London: SPCK, 1979, 303–305; R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, New York: Free Press, 1986, 91–102. Each argued that Maimonides had translated Judaism into alien categories, approaching it from the perspective of Greek thought.
Against this, each insisted that Judaism was to be understood from within. It is as if all three saw modernity as offering Judaism the chance to be itself. It was no longer surrounded by a unified, dominant Christian or Islamic culture. It could enter the world of modern thought on equal terms, asserting its own autonomy and integrity. Not only Jews, but Judaism also, had been emancipated. The open society posed a threat to Jewish faith, but it delivered a constructive challenge as well, one from which positive religious achievements might emerge.
MODERNITY AND TRADITION
There is, though, another way of viewing modernity, one which from a religious perspective is deeply pessimistic. Most sociologists of the nineteenth century saw secularisation as an inexorable process. Society was becoming industrialised, urbanised and rationalised. Traditional communities were being uprooted. Even the concept of tradition was on the way to being eclipsed.2See Edward Shils, Tradition, London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Prior to the nineteenth century, the word “modern” bore a generally unfavourable sense. The sources of wisdom lay in the past. The new was generally inferior to the old. It was in the nineteenth century, under the impact of social and intellectual change, that “modern” began to become a term of praise.3Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Flamingo, 1981, 208–9. Across several disciplines – history, philosophy, anthropology and biology – time began to be reconceived as a current of progress and evolution from the primitive to the increasingly civilised. The past was now not a model for emulation but a burden to be escaped. It no longer possessed authority over the present. In such a culture, the very idea of tradition is under threat.
Jews were “latecomers” to modernity.4See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Emancipation invited them to join societies in which these processes were already well advanced. Hirsch was well aware of some of the shortcomings of the world Jews were about to enter. Much of the Nineteen Letters is devoted to a critique of the situation in which man is the measure of all things and each individual is the creator of his own ethical values.5See Eliezer Schweid, “Two Neo-Orthodox Approaches to Modernity – Part I: Samson Raphael Hirsch,” Immanuel 19 (Winter 1984–5), 107–117. Nonetheless Hirsch believed that it was possible to absorb the best in Western culture and discard those elements that were incompatible with Judaism. This response, as Marion J. Levy has pointed out, is characteristic of the encounter between traditional and non-traditional cultures: “The members of a relatively non-modernised society see before them many and various results of the process in which they are, or are about to become, involved. These appeal to them in varying degrees, and almost inevitably the popular leaders, the influential persons, or the society’s members in general are obsessed with the belief that they can take what they please and leave the rest.6Marion J. Levy, Modernization and the Structure of Societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 752, quoted in Cuddihy, op. cit., 180.
This, Levy argues, is a mistake. “The myth of easy independent selectivity from among the social structures of highly modernised societies must be recognised for what it is and has always been – a hybrid of wishful thinking and sentimental piety.” The impact of modernity on tradition is, he argues, pervasive and undermining. It exercises what he calls an “explosive subversion.” Was there, then, an alternative strategy to that adopted by Hirsch for the preservation of Orthodoxy in the modern age?
RESISTING THE NEW
There was. It was to reject the entire process of emancipation and Enlightenment. Participation in Western society might or might not be materially beneficial to Jews, but it would be disastrous for Judaism. Such, at any rate, was the view of many traditionalists as they saw its impact on Jewish life. They had witnessed the conversions, intermarriages and assimilation that had already begun to affect the more wealthy and acculturated Jews of Germany by the late eighteenth century. In 1817 they saw the birth of Reform Judaism, in the form of the Hamburg Temple, with its deletion from the prayer book of all references to the ingathering of exiles and the return to Zion. Judaism could not accommodate to modernity without a gradual loss of most of its traditional substance. It must therefore develop the opposite stance. It must resist all change.
The first leader clearly to articulate this position was R. Moses Sofer (the Chatam Sofer, 1762–1839).7See Jacob Katz, “Contribution towards a biography of R. Moses Sofer,” in Studies in Mysticism and Religion presented to Gershom G. Scholem, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967, 115–148. Born in Frankfurt, he had seen some of the early effects of haskalah, Jewish enlightenment, at first hand. It was on his move to Hungary as chief rabbi of Pressburg in 1806 that he began his defence of tradition in earnest. He sharply opposed the new educational trends that were then beginning to emerge amongst Jews. Parents were sending children either to new state schools or to Jewish schools where secular studies were being taught alongside Torah on the model advocated by Naftali Herz Wessely (1725–1805), one of the earliest protagonists of Torah im Derekh Eretz.
R. Sofer’s objection was not so much to secular study in itself, for which he conceded a need, as to the subtle transformation of Jewish studies in the new curriculum. Torah was being taught in translation. Emphasis was being placed on its plain sense at the expense of the rich, many-layered midrashic interpretations. Judaism was portrayed through rational and ethical categories that laid little emphasis on mystery, authority and revelation. He was a tireless critic, too, of Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible into German. Rightly, he suspected that a major intellectual upheaval was under way even if, for the time being, it endorsed traditional conduct.
Although R. Sofer did not formulate his position in these terms, we can best understand it in terms of a novel understanding of the phrase Torah im Derekh Eretz. Derekh eretz, “the way of the world,” carried a wide spectrum of senses in the rabbinic literature. It meant, variously, a worldly occupation, mores, etiquette, and civilisation.8See Encylopaedia Talmudit, vol. 7, Jerusalem, 1956, 672–706. It represented an area of practical wisdom outside of Torah but complementary to it. “Culture” in its various nuances is probably its nearest equivalent. Often, rules of derekh eretz were derived from what was perceived to be admirable behaviour in the non-Jewish world. Table manners, for example, could be learned from the Persians;9Berakhot 46b. honouring of parents from the Romans;10Kiddushin 31a. astronomy from the Greeks.11Pesachim 94b. Derekh eretz, the virtues and conventions that bound society, preceded Torah.12Leviticus Rabbah 9:3. Some of its rules one could infer simply by observing nature. We could have learnt, said the rabbis, modesty from the cat, honesty from the ant, chastity from the dove and good manners from the cock.13Eruvin 100b.
Culture, whether understood as ethics or economics, or arts and sciences, was wider than Torah, though it was subject to Torah’s endorsement or disapproval. In the middle ages Jews wrote poetry in the Spanish manner and philosophy in the Islamic neo-Aristotelian style. Their vernacular languages, Yiddish and Ladino, were Jewish adaptations of German and Spanish respectively. Jewish cuisine, habits of dress, music and folklore were a series of local borrowings, naturalised and woven into the fabric of Jewish life. Derekh eretz in its broadest sense was the field of interaction between Jews and their host societies.
But prior to emancipation, this interaction was limited. To be sure, Jews mixed with gentile society, primarily in the course of business, but their religious, judicial, welfare and educational institutions were autonomous. As long, too, as gentile culture was predominantly religious, there was a natural as well as halakhic barrier to Jewish participation. It might contain quasi-idolatrous motifs. Even if it did not, Jews were forbidden to “walk in the ways” of gentiles. Any mode of non-Jewish behaviour that held religious significance was prohibited to Jews.14M.T. Avodah Zarah 11: 1-3.
Emancipation took place against the backdrop of a secularisation of both state and culture. Increasingly Jews found themselves able on the one hand and required on the other to become involved in the non-Jewish intellectual and moral environment. The scope and substance of derekh eretz was transformed. Jews were expected to speak an unaccented standard German, acquire new forms of manners and civility, make themselves masters of a European cultural heritage, and mix socially as well as pragmatically with non-Jewish society.15See Cuddihy, op. cit.; George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, edited by Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, University Press of New England, 1985, 1–16. To this development, Samson Raphael Hirsch and the Chatam Sofer gave diametrically opposed reactions. Each was justifiable on the basis of Jewish tradition, for the tradition had not faced quite this possibility before.
CULTURE AND CONTINUITY
Hirsch saw that Torah was distinct from derekh eretz. Jewish law was one thing, Jewish culture another. Jews had – whenever they were allowed to do so – interfaced with other civilisations. They had borrowed and they had given back in return. One should not confuse Judaism itself with the culture of the ghetto, which had been only one historical manifestation of Jewish life, and a narrow one at that. It was the task of Judaism to apply its religious values and norms to any milieu in which it found itself. There was, one might say, the body of Judaism, and there were the various clothes it wore. Jewish life could undergo a change of cultural clothing so long as the body – Jewish faith and law – remained intact.
There is no reason to suppose that the Chatam Sofer would have dissented from this analysis. But his perspective was different. To be sure, Jewish derekh eretz had evolved differently in different times and places. But what was at stake now, as it was not so long as Jewish law had coercive power, was Jewish continuity. The direction of assimilation was being reversed. Instead of assimilating local customs into Jewish life, Jews were being assimilated into local gentile society. The old barriers between Jew and non-Jew were breaking down. Jewish survival had been, since biblical times, predicated on a code of differentness. Jews were a people apart. Their laws were “different from all other peoples.” In the middle ages that had been reinforced by the deep differences between Jews and their Christian or Islamic neighbours. Now the removal of Jewish autonomy and the secularisation of culture meant that the “fence” behind which Jews had preserved their separate existence had collapsed. A new code of differentness had to be found.
It lay in derekh eretz itself, understood as premodern Jewish culture. Traditional habits of behaviour and dress, and especially the Yiddish language, were now to be seen as sacrosanct – not because they had been specified by Jewish law or even seen as matters of religious significance but because, in the new social context, they fulfilled two vital functions. They emphasised Jewish continuity with the past, and they vividly embodied the fact that the Jew was different, unintegrated and at a distance from his environment.
It was this that lay behind the Chatam Sofer’s most famous principle, an adaptation of a talmudic rule which had originally referred to the consumption of agricultural produce, and which was now applied to all symptoms of modernity: chadash assur min ha-Torah, “the new is biblically forbidden.”16M. Orlah 3:9. For the new, even in its most innocent guises, was a harbinger of Jewish disintegration. Derekh eretz could no longer be regarded, as it had been hitherto, as halakhically neutral. In the specific circumstances of the nineteenth century, all change was a carrier of secularisation.
This ultra-conservative position was in fact a radical extension of halakhah. It was especially carried through to the synagogue. Developments for which some halakhic justification might have been given were now seen – not without cause – as accommodations to non-Jewish mores. They were symptoms of Reform. Introducing choirs into the service, moving the bimah (the raised platform on which the reader stood) from the centre to the east end of the synagogue, conducting weddings in the synagogue instead of in a courtyard or communal hall, and rabbis who wore canonicals and preached in German instead of Yiddish, were all proscribed by Hungarian halakhists who followed in the tradition of the Chatam Sofer.17See, for example, Responsa Ktav Sofer, Even ha-Ezer 47; Responsa Maharam Schick, Orach Chayyim 71.
The underlying logic of this approach to Jewish law was that “anything which in itself is permitted, but which has become a symbol of religious disintegration, is ipso facto turned into something which is forbidden.”18I owe this way of putting it to R. Zvi Schachter, “Tze’i Lakh be-Ikvei ha-Tzon,” Bet Yitzchak 17 (1985), 133. If halakhah was to exercise its role as the vehicle of Jewish continuity it must erect new fences to replace those that had broken down. It must preserve the past for the sake of the future, even in respect of details of the past which had not previously been endowed with religious significance.
Behind this strategy lay a view of modernisation that has received, as we have seen, the endorsement of at least some contemporary secular sociologists. Modernity, Marion J. Levy argues, cannot be selectively embraced. Once admitted, even in part, it rapidly undermines the entire structure of tradition. The alternative to accommodation is resistance, and this was the route consciously chosen by R. Moses Sofer. Jews could not participate in secular culture without ultimately placing Judaism at risk. The new derekh eretz would endanger Torah. Torah must be surrounded with a culture of its own, one that was as close as possible to the modes of premodern times. The terms of emancipation were to be clearly and firmly declined.
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF RESISTANCE
If this had been the whole of the Chatam Sofer’s response, it might have been a prescient critique of “modern” Orthodoxy, but no more. The walls of separation between Jewish and gentile culture were crumbling. Mere protest was powerless to arrest the rapid changes in Jewish existence. Religious beliefs, as Peter Berger reminds us, require a “plausibility structure.” To carry weight they must be mirrored or “objectified” in the patterns of social life.19See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York: Doubleday, 1967; Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, London: Penguin Books, 1971. Resisting modernity was one thing; providing a social setting in which traditional patterns of behaviour and belief could be preserved was another.
One sector of Jewry, though, did have powerful structural defences against the inroads of secularisation. This was the Chassidic movement, which had spread throughout Eastern Europe during the eighteenth century. Organised as it was around a charismatic religious leadership – the figure of the Tzaddik or Rebbe – it was a populist and pietist movement stressing devotion, joy and prayer against the more traditional value of Torah study. The rich internal culture of the Chassidim, their strong communities and their powerful focus on single figures of authority, created something approaching a self-sufficient and total Jewish environment. The Chassidic group represented, one might say, the first voluntary ghetto of the modern Jewish world.
Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, opposition to Chassidism, led by R. Elijah b. Solomon Zalman (the Vilna Gaon, 1720–1797), had been intense. R. Moses Sofer belonged to the anti-Chassidic school, the mitnagdim. But by the nineteenth century it had become clear that the battle had moved to another front, assimilation and its Jewish manifestations: haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and Reform. The opponents of Chassidism would be forced, if they were to succeed in halting the disintegration of tradition, to adopt their own equivalent of the Chassidic strategy. They would have to create enclosed communities with their own internal cultures and charismatic leaders. A new institutional base was needed. It came in the form of the yeshivah, the school of talmudic study. R. Moses Sofer founded a yeshivah on his arrival in Pressburg, and it became the largest since the great academies of Babylon.
Other seminal yeshivot, too, were founded at around this time, the most influential being the one created in 1802 by R. Chayyim of Volozhyn. Though the yeshivah had been, since mishnaic times, a vehicle of Jewish education, the new yeshivah differed from its predecessors in a number of respects. It was independent of the local community, supported by funds raised by emissaries who travelled throughout Eastern Europe and occasionally even America for the purpose. Its students were for the most part not local either. They travelled great distances to be able to study at a particular institution or under a famous teacher. As a result the students were separated from their families for most of the year. The yeshivah became a total environment and its head a figure of quasi-parental authority.20See Menachem Friedman, “Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultraorthodox Judaism,” in Judaism viewed from Within and from Without, edited by Harvey Goldberg, State University of New York Press, 1987, 235–255.
The great yeshivot of the nineteenth century, Volozhyn, Mir, Slobodka, Telz and others, were far more than centres of learning. They became the bases of an intense battle to screen tradition from the inroads of secularisation. There was strict supervision to ensure that neither secular studies nor haskalah literature penetrated the yeshivah’s walls. A decision was taken to let the Volozhyn yeshivah close in 1892 rather than accede to the Russian government’s insistence that it include elementary secular tuition in its curriculum. The negative safeguards were not always sufficient, and after initial resistance the devotional and ethical disciplines of Mussar – the movement popularised by the disciples of R. Israel Salanter – were introduced into the Lithuanian centres. The yeshivot, R. Sofer’s among them, were the training ground of an elite group of students, many of whom became religious leaders in their own right. Traditionalism had created its own equivalent of the Chassidic Rebbe in the person of the rosh yeshivah, the yeshivah head. The yeshivah itself became an instrument of socialisation comparable in intensity to the Chassidic circle. Tradition-as-resistance had found its institutional base.
DECLINE
The traditionalist strategy had its successes, particularly in Eastern Europe where the impact of Enlightenment and social change was delayed until the early twentieth century. But it was rooted, as we have seen, in a pessimistic reading of modernity. It tacitly accepted that a sizeable number of Jews, perhaps the majority, would choose the path of acculturation and assimilation. These, it did not address.21See, for example, R. Israel Meir ha-Cohen (Chafetz Chayyim), Chizzuk ha-Dat, ch. l, where the author compares contemporary alienation from tradition to a cholera epidemic. The task is to save those who can still be saved. Those who have already succumbed must be left to perish. The Chafetz Chayyim (1838–1933) was a figure of outstanding saintliness, and this diagnosis is eloquent testimony to the sense of helplessness which many traditionalists felt in the face of secularisation. Instead it aimed at salvaging a she’erit ha-peletah, a saving remnant who would keep the fire of faith alive until there was a more favourable turn in the cultural climate.
In R. Moses Sofer’s Hungary the Reform, or Neolog, movement proceeded apace.22See Michael Silber, “The Historical Experience of German Jewry and its Impact on Haskalah and Reform in Hungary,” in Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, edited by Jacob Katz, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987, 107–158. Thirty years after his death, the Hungarian government convened a General Jewish Congress to determine the basis of Jewish communal organisation. Already the reformers were in a majority, fielding 126 delegates as against the 94 of the Orthodox. The Orthodox insistence that community regulations be in accord with Jewish law was rejected. The Orthodox representatives then left the Congress and petitioned Parliament for the right to be exempt from the regulations, and to form a separate community structure of their own. In 1870 this was granted.
The Hungarian Orthodox secession set a pattern that was increasingly to become the norm governing Orthodox relations with the Jewish community as a whole. In 1876 the Prussian parliament passed a similar law, and Samson Raphael Hirsch waged a fierce and controversial struggle to persuade his own congregation in Frankfurt to secede from the local Jewish community board.23See Hermann Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany, London: Mitre Press, 1950; Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. In 1912, alarmed at the growing secularist ambitions of the Zionist movement, Orthodox leaders from across Europe joined forces to create Agudat Yisrael, the organisation that marked their formal separation from the official institutions of Zionism.24Schwab, op. cit., 115–126. At each point in this sequence there were major sections of Orthodoxy who refused to disengage from the wider community. In Hungary they were known as the status quo communities; in Germany as Gemeinde Orthodoxy; in the Zionist movement they were represented primarily by Mizrachi, the religious Zionist movement founded by R. Isaac Reines. But the weight of rabbinic authority lay behind secession, as Orthodoxy throughout Central and Eastern Europe began to see itself as a minority, unable significantly to influence wider communal trends and best engaged in securing its own strongholds.
Throughout the early twentieth century, secularisation took its toll among the communities of the East. It had a less assimilatory, more collectivist cast than in the West, but it was no less destructive of tradition. Socialism, Communism and Zionism, all revolutionary future-oriented rather than traditionalist ideologies, exercised a powerful attraction. The writings of the rabbinic leaders of this period are heavy with laments over the empty houses of study, the rebellious young, the satanic influences of the new modes of schooling, and the loss of the old order. A sense of powerlessness pervades their reflections.25A number of these reflections are collected in Bernard Maza, With Fury Poured Out, Hoboken: Ktav, 1986. A new generation, formed in the crucible of the First World War, was declaring its independence of religious authority. Had there been time, traditionalism might have staged a recovery. A distinctively East European neo-Orthodoxy might have emerged. But the Holocaust intervened, reducing the last remaining fortresses of tradition to ashes.
REBIRTH
By midway through the twentieth century it would have been a reasonable inference to conclude that, as a response to modernity, traditionalism had failed. The momentum of Jewish life lay elsewhere. In Israel it lay in a secular nationalism which, under leaders like David Ben Gurion, had aggressively shaken itself free of both rabbinic Judaism and diaspora history and which sought its Jewish links directly with the Bible. In America it lay with movements of radical accommodation –
Conservative and Reform – which had either abandoned or introduced substantive modifications into Jewish law. Orthodoxy, in both communities, was in a minority. The only forms in which it seemed to exist as a compelling alternative were as religious Zionism in Israel and Modern Orthodoxy in America, the forms, that is to say, that had been pioneered by Rav Kook and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Here at least Orthodoxy seemed to be attuned to and in dialogue with the modern world. The terms of contemporary existence – secular culture and participation in the open society – could not be resisted other than in small, self-reinforcing enclaves. These had existed in Eastern Europe in Chassidic circles and the yeshivot. But they had been destroyed in the Holocaust. A chapter in Orthodoxy seemed to have ended.
The past forty years have, therefore, witnessed one of the most remarkable reversals of recent Jewish history. For it is traditionalism that today represents the most rapidly growing, and in some senses the strongest, section of contemporary Jewry in both Israel and America. In both communities there has been a stunning growth in the number of yeshivot, to a point which already exceeds nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry at its height. It is traditionalism too, rather than religious Zionism or Modern Orthodoxy, that seems to speak most compellingly and directly to the situation of many contemporary Jews.
One of the crucial factors in this transformation was undoubtedly the fact that the Eastern European yeshivah, if it did not exercise a decisive impact on its wider Jewish environment, was nonetheless a unique training-ground for a particular style of leadership, self-sacrificing and single-minded. A handful of yeshivah heads and Chassidic leaders arrived in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in flight from the destruction of European Jewry. There they consciously set about reconstructing their communities and institutions. American Jewry, by now the largest remaining Jewish population, had never experienced Orthodox leadership of this stature before.
R. Aaron Kotler, a Lithuanian rosh yeshivah, arrived in America in 1941 and set about creating a yeshivah on the European model. He sought a location that would isolate the students from distracting interactions with American life and allow complete concentration on talmudic study. He chose a site in Lakewood, New Jersey, and its success turned it into a model for others to emulate. Under the influence of R. Aaron, R. Shraga Mendlowitz and R. Jacob Kamenetsky, a massive programme was undertaken to create Orthodox Jewish day schools. Immediately after the second World War there were only 30 such institutions in the United States. As of the early 1980s the number had risen to 522.26See Reuven Bulka, “Orthodoxy Today: An Overview of the Achievements and the Problems”; Charles Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” and “Orthodox Judaism Today,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, edited by Reuven Bulka, New York: Ktav, 1983, 7–120.
R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, leader of Lubavitch Chassidism, turned his own movement into an active organisation of outreach to the unaffiliated, establishing centres throughout the Jewish world and utilising the entire spectrum of modern techniques of communication and influence. R. Joel Teitelbaum, head of the Satmar Chassidim, arrived in New York as a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. An extreme opponent of Zionism, he established his community in the New York suburb of Williamsburg and by a combination of personal authority, cultural seclusion and the large families and high birth rates of his followers, Satmar rapidly established itself as a community of considerable size.27Valuable information on the contemporary Satmar community is contained in George Gershon Kranzler, “The Voice of Williamsburg,” Tradition 23:3 (Spring 1988), 53–59.
The seemingly iron law of American acculturation had for the first time been resisted. Hitherto this had yielded a pattern of progressive Americanisation, a movement of Jews from immigrant ghettoes in the inner city toward outer suburbia, a rapid climb up the educational and occupational ladder and, in the process, an attrition of traditional behaviour and belief. Orthodoxy was associated with the first or immigrant generation, Conservative Judaism with the second and Reform with the third, as Jews sought less demanding and separatist forms of religious identification. Now, however, the nexus of the Jewish day school, yeshivah and separatist Orthodox community seemed fully capable of retaining, indeed intensifying, the loyalties of new generations. Why, then, has traditionalism, with its negative view of secular culture and the open society, emerged from its relative failure in the early twentieth century to its contemporary prominence and success?
THE FRAGMENTATION OF CULTURE
Unlike the syntheses of Hirsch, Kook and Soloveitchik, traditionalism was not a new philosophy of Judaism. To the contrary, it reserved its strongest criticism for the enterprise of philosophising and the attempt to marry Orthodoxy with modernity. It was, rather, a social strategy, and it is to social developments that we must turn by way of explanation.
Early nineteenth-century Germany, to which Hirsch’s writings were a response, confronted Jews with a relatively coherent secular culture, a palpable public morality and a code of civility that governed social interactions. The secular derekh eretz of which Hirsch, and before him Wessely, spoke had identifiable content. To claim to be participants in the wider intellectual milieu Jews had to internalise and formulate their responses to such thinkers as Lessing, Kant and Hegel. This dominates a whole chapter of modern Jewish thought, from Moses Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century to Franz Rosenzweig in the early twentieth. The Orthodox rabbi of Frankfurt who so captured Rosenzweig’s imagination, Nehemiah Nobel (1871–1922), was so intense a devotee of Goethe that Rosenzweig wrote of him that it was only in his sermons, as opposed to his lectures that “the Jew in him came to the fore” and only then “did he believe himself able to manage without loans from the Christian and pagan cultural spheres, and even there one was never sure one wouldn’t be handed a quotation from ‘the master’ [Goethe].”28Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, New York: Schocken, 1961, 107.
By contrast, the increasing impact of secularisation has, by the late twentieth century, meant that culture itself has become fragmented as coherent systems of meaning have increasingly moved from the public to the private domain. In the most influential recent survey of contemporary American attitudes, the authors invoke a phrase of John Donne to characterise the present state of culture: “tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”29Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed, London: Hutchinson, 1988, 276–277. In a pluralised culture of separate specialisations, an integrated vision, whether in science, philosophy or the arts, is a present impossibility. Already in 1944, in The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik had noted that a confrontation between Judaism and science was no longer possible since science itself was no longer a unified framework of thought but instead a loose collection of diverse disciplines, each independent of the others. In his recent jeremiad on the state of American universities, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom concludes that “the university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person…there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.… There is no organisation of the sciences, no tree of knowledge.”30Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, London: Penguin Books, 1987, 337.
The Hirschian vision emerged specifically as a way of negotiating between two substantive and coherent identities, the Jew as participant in modern society with its intellectual canons and universalist ethic, and the Jew as citizen of the faith community with its own history and laws. He was Mensch-Jissroel, both man-in-the-abstract and Jew. But the former has since disintegrated into a state which is value-neutral, contenting itself for the most part with reconciling competing interests and matching means to ends, and a series of semi-private associations, religious, ethnic or cultural, which have no ambitions to universality. Necessarily, then, Hirsch’s synthesis is inapplicable to societies of the late twentieth century which have undergone advanced secularisation.
Rav Kook’s programme, too, fails for the same reason. For it was precisely the task he envisaged for Jewish spirituality that it would sanctify all secular specialisations by teaching each its place within a single harmonising vision of the unity of creation. Judaism would be a kind of meta- discipline revealing the interconnectedness of all knowledge. It would thus correct what Rav Kook saw as the besetting sin of all secularisms, their tendency to see themselves in isolation as a self-sufficient way of interpreting reality. It is just this meta-discipline which the contemporary organisation of knowledge and culture renders impossible. The point was well made by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont: “In the modern world each of our particular viewpoints or specialised pursuits does not know very well – or does not know at all – what it is about and the reason for its existence or distinctness.… Our rationality manifests itself within each of our neatly distinct compartments but not in their distribution, definition and arrangement.”31Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, 20; quoted in Habits of the Heart, op. cit., 278.
No grand cultural synthesis of the kind attempted by Hirsch and Kook is presently available: not because of the state of Jewish thought but because of the state of secular thought. This, as we saw, was already manifest in the work of R. Soloveitchik which consciously disavows any aspiration to public philosophy and focusses instead on the individual and his private experiences. But if this is so, then the integrated world-view of tradition comes to seem, by contrast with secular culture, to have coherence and power. Certainly there is no compelling ideological alternative, as there was when socialism and secular Zionism were exercising their attractions over Eastern European Jewish youth and when Enlightenment liberalism held a similar sway over German Jewry. The dialogue with modernity, which had produced the phenomena of Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism, has come to a halt, for modernity itself no longer speaks with a single identifiable voice.
THE REINSTATEMENT OF TRADITION
This development in the intellectual world has consequences for the social world as well. Jews in the nineteenth century, newly emerging into European and American society, found themselves regarded as lacking in the refinements and sensibilities of the middle-class culture to which they aspired. By the 1960s, the deepening impact of liberal individualism was graphically symbolised in the youth cultures of drug-taking, sexual promiscuity and civil disobedience. The moral revolution seemed to many Jews – not only to Orthodox Jews who took their standards from biblical and rabbinic law, but even to acculturated Jews who took their standards from the civil ethos of a generation earlier – to be less an ethical advance than a retreat into neo-paganism. There was a reaction, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, away from liberalism toward the values of authority, restraint, discipline and community. These were the very values represented by traditionalism, which gained in stature as a result.
The liberal ideal of public neutrality and private morality, with its resultant ethical pluralism, represents a crisis, too, for personal identity. “The pluralistic structures of modern society have made the life of more and more individuals migratory, ever-changing, mobile. In everyday life the modern individual continuously alternates between highly discrepant and often contradictory social contexts. In terms of his biography, the individual migrates through a succession of widely divergent social worlds.”32Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind, London: Pelican Books, 1974, 165. See also Peter Berger, Facing up to Modernity, London: Penguin Books, 1979, 101–112. This can come to be experienced as alienation and what sociologists call anomie, the sense of directionlessness that Emile Durkheim identified as the symptom of a society in which a common moral code was in the process of disintegration. This has had implications for the development of Jewish consciousness since the 1960s.
First it gave rise to a search for roots and a resurgent ethnic consciousness. This was something of a global phenomenon in the 1960s, and Jewishly it meant the end of assimilation as a conscious strategy. Many of the three million Jewish immigrants to the United States between the 1880s and 1920s had arrived with a positive desire to be absorbed in the American melting pot. As late as the mid-1950s Will Herberg, in his classic study of American religious identities, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, argued that ethnicity was still declining as a factor in identity. By 1963, however, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan concluded that “the point about the melting pot is that it did not happen.”33Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, quoted in Charles Silberman, A Certain People, New York: Summit Books, 1985, 167. The new ethnic affirmation meant that for the first time in modernity the traditionalists’ distinctiveness of dress, manners and language was no longer strange and counter-cultural. It was the Jewish way of doing one’s own thing. Particularism – anathema to the Enlightenment – had re-entered secular culture. A major re-evaluation of the roots of identity was under way.
Second, the search for identity led many Jewish students back into a direct experience of tradition, observing Hansen’s law that the third generation strives to remember what the second generation laboured to forget. The late 1960s and 1970s saw a significant movement of teshuvah, religious return, as alienated American and then Israeli youth turned to traditionalist yeshivot for a sense of meaning and purpose. The early returnees had often been through various stages of the search for the supernatural – drugs, meditation, and some of the many new sects and cults that developed at this period – before finally seeking a traditional Jewish spirituality. There was though, throughout the teshuvah movement, a general sense of rejection of the values of middle-class suburban America. Janet Aviad, in her study of returnees,34Janet Aviad, Return to Judaism: Religious Renewal in Israel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. came across repeated references to the “emptiness of life,” “lack of values,” “illusions,” “looseness of society” and the “decadence” of secular life. Students found their parents’ Jewish lifestyles empty, dishonest, hypocritical, superficial, materialistic and assimilatory. They came to the yeshivot in search of community, absolute values, Jewish authenticity and a framework in which personal identity had clear content and direction. Again traditionalism, with its long-standing rejection of the relativities of modern culture, was the beneficiary.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC IMPERATIVE
These factors served to enhance the prestige of traditionalism in the wider Jewish community: to “normalise” it, as it were. But there were other factors that had a more direct impact on its inner life. Menachem Friedman has charted the impact of postwar economic and social change on the charedi or traditionalist community.35Menachem Friedman, “Charedim Confront the Modern City,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry II, edited by Peter Medding, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 74–96. The growth of the modern welfare state has allowed individuals to spend more extended periods in education. This has meant, for traditionalists, that students are able to spend longer in yeshivot, often remaining after marriage in the school for mature students, the kollel.
The need for teachers to staff the increasing numbers of Jewish day schools provides an ideal career opportunity for the wives of such students, enabling them to support their husbands during their extended studies. The men themselves often find means of earning a livelihood through the provision of religious services, as teachers, rabbis, kashrut supervisors, suppliers of religious accessories, and in Israel as army chaplains, judges in religious courts, and teachers within the yeshivah system itself. These occupations require a minimum of interaction with the secular world. So too do those branches of international trade –
diamonds, for example – which have become dominated by traditionalists. Increased mobility and the postwar concentration of Jewish life in large urban centres have made the strong sense of kinship within particular charedi groups a powerful framework for these avenues of trade and international co-operation.
Business success has been an important compensation for the closure of other career routes: the professions, management, scientific research and other roles requiring advanced secular education. The remark of one Williamsburg chassid is characteristic of the new economic situation: “Many of our yunge leit, our young people, make more money than your college graduates.”36Kranzler, op. cit., 57. Contemporary urban life reinforces traditionalist separatism in other ways, too. The modern metropolis reveals secular life at its worst: in the form of drugs, crime, consumerism, hedonism and interethnic tensions. This heightens the sense traditionalists have of alienation from their environment. Residential mobility allows the creation of the ethnic or religious ghetto, in which social interaction with other cultural groups is at a minimum. Here a lifestyle which in a mixed neighbourhood might be conspicuous is supported by a surrounding and homogeneous community. Close residential concentration also allows for strong internal social controls, essential to the maintenance of religious authority.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, traditionalism had survived longest and most successfully in the context of the small Eastern European township, the shtetl. The large city had been the locus of cosmopolitanism, haskalah, secularisation and the breakdown of religious disciplines. By the late twentieth century, the “secular city” has paradoxically become the setting of a traditionalist revival. As Friedman notes, it combines “togetherness and isolation: ideal conditions for charedi life.”37“Charedim Confront the Modern City,” 91.
Undoubtedly, though, the key factor in the traditionalist revival has been its high birth rates. For Jews, accommodation to the modern world often went hand in hand with diminished fertility and smaller families. Indeed in America Jews had had lower birthrates than either Protestants or Catholics since the beginning of the century. In the 1970s, however, even this low rate declined sharply to an average of 1.2 children per family.38Samuel Heilman, “The Jewish Family Today: An Overview,” in Tradition and Transition, edited by Jonathan Sacks, London: Jews’ College Publications, 1986, 179–208. This was well below replacement level, and led to a series of pessimistic demographic projections, one of which estimated a reduction in size of the American Jewish community from six million to tens or hundreds of thousands in the year 2075.
The rate has since risen, but recent research by Samuel Heilman and Steven M. Cohen has shown that family size is directly related to religious affiliation.39Samuel Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, “Ritual Variation among Modern Orthodox Jews in the United States,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewish II, 164–187. It found that as against the average non-Orthodox family of 2.0 children, the corresponding size for the “non-observant” Orthodox was 2.1, for the “centrist” Orthodox 2.9, and for the “traditional” (= fully practising) the figure was 4.2. Even this understates the situation, for among some Chassidic groups, notably Lubavitch and Satmar, the average is far higher still. More than one estimate has placed the average Satmar family at between eight and nine children. Current figures, for example, show an enrolment of 28,000 students at Satmar educational institutions in New York.40Kranzler, op. cit., 55. Given the total current enrolment in Jewish day schools throughout North America of 130,000,41Alvin Schiff, “The Jewish Day School – The Next Half-Century,” Judaism 36:2 (Spring 1987), 220–225. the demographic impact of traditionalism is enormous.
The reasons underlying this trend are simple. Traditionalists place a high value on the family, early marriage and on a home-centred and child-rearing role for women. Birth control is generally disapproved. Above all, the Chassidic and yeshivah communities acutely felt the ravages of the Holocaust. Religious leaders stressed the need to repopulate decimated communities. Their internal authority and the strong social sanctions within the circle of their followers meant that they were able to influence the behaviour patterns of their followers as few other leaders could in more diffuse religious settings. One distinctive feature of charedi religiosity is its high consistency between belief and practice and the willingness of its adherents to place principle over economic progress. Clearly, the decision to have a large family involves considerable sacrifice, and as the figures show, no other group in Jewry has responded similarly. Outside of Orthodoxy, the individualism of contemporary culture has taken its toll of the family in the form of delayed marriages, non- and out-marriage, family planning, and an increasing incidence of divorce.
The high birthrates of traditionalists and their success in resisting assimilatory trends contrast strongly with the small families and high attritions of contemporary non-Orthodox Jewish groups. Although Orthodoxy, for example, is estimated at only some ten per cent of the American Jewish population, eighty-five per cent of all children enrolled at Jewish day schools are Orthodox, and the day school has proved to be a uniquely powerful vehicle of Jewish continuity. Professor Daniel Elazar recently drew attention to the significance of numbers when practice as well as affiliation is taken into account. Noting that though Conservative Judaism is the largest institutional grouping in American Jewry, only a small percentage of its members “live up to the standards of observance set by the Conservative movement,” he calculated that “at the late 1984 wedding of two scions of the Satmar dynasty, the number of Jews packed into a single Long Island stadium for the nuptials equalled the whole body of authentic Conservative Jews.”42Daniel Elazar, “Who is a Jew and How? The Demographics of Jewish Religious Identification,” Jerusalem Newsletter, 24 September 1986. The argument is summarised in Jonathan Sacks, “Ideas in Circulation,” L’Eylah 24 (September 1987), 21–25. It is clear that a major demographic reversal is in progress, one that will transform the religious life of Jewry and become yet more pronounced in the coming decades.
THE PARADOX OF MODERNITY
So we arrive at a stunning and paradoxical conclusion. The section of Orthodoxy which has most successfully negotiated modernity has been the group that took the most negative view of modernity and most strenuously resisted it.
No outcome seemed less likely in the aftermath of the Second World War. The preceding decades had witnessed the breakdown of tradition in its previous strongholds of the Eastern European townships. In 1930, R. Israel Meir ha-Cohen (the Chafetz Chayyim, 1838–1933) could lament: “The sanctity of the Holy Torah is declining from day to day at a frightening pace. The new generation is growing up without Torah and faith. They are becoming wayward children who deny God and His Torah. And if, God forbid, this situation continues much longer who knows to what condition we will fall.”43Quoted in Maza, op. cit., 51. The faithful who remained were destroyed in the Holocaust. The future of Jewish life lay in an aggressively secular state of Israel and in a rapidly assimilating America, stigmatised by previous rabbinic visitors from Europe as the treifa medinah, an unholy land. Modernity, whether benign in emancipation or brutal in the Shoah, seemed to conspire to eclipse tradition.
Its re-emergence in late modernity is an extraordinary vindication of R. Moses Sofer’s strategy, one constructed on the longest of long-term expectations. Throughout nineteenth-century thought, Jewish and non-Jewish, we sense the finality with which the door had been closed on the past as a source of wisdom. A new social and intellectual order had emerged and there was no turning back. R. Moses Sofer evidently believed otherwise, that “this too will pass.” So long as a remnant could be saved, and around it a fence created through which the corrosive acids of secularisation could not pass, eventually it would inherit a world more congenial to its values. It seemed at the time an unlikely scenario, a century later still more so. But a further half century has reversed all expectations. Traditionalism thrives.
But this poses a critical question. What of Modern Orthodoxy? Has it exhausted its function in the century and a half since Samson Raphael Hirsch published his Nineteen Letters? Is a dialogue between Orthodoxy and modernity no longer necessary? In the widening abyss between secular and Jewish values is it even possible? Modern Orthodoxy is currently in eclipse. We have seen some of the reasons why this is so. Is that eclipse permanent or desirable? To this question we now turn.