Dilemmas of Modern Orthodoxy
In 1982 Tradition, the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America, published a symposium entitled “The State of Orthodoxy.”1Tradition 20:1 (Spring 1982). For a summary and response, see Jonathan Sacks, “Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis,” L’Eylah 2:7 (Spring 1984), 20–26. It came at a time of reassessment. Since the 1920s the demise of Orthodoxy in America had seemed inevitable. The current of acculturation was too strong. Tradition could not adapt itself to suburban accommodations. It was questionable whether any form of Judaism would survive. But it seemed certain that if it could, it would not be a Judaism based on the non-negotiable premises of tradition: belief in revelation and the binding force of Jewish law.
As we saw in the last chapter, that prediction – like many others in Jewish history – proved false. Charles Liebman’s judgement in 1965 that “the only remaining vestige of Jewish passion in America resides in the Orthodox community”2Charles Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, edited by Reuven Bulka, New York: Ktav, 1983, 96. had turned out, seventeen years later, to be triumphantly justified. Jewish day schools and yeshivot were flourishing and multiplying. Jewish learning had become a passion. Many communities that had evinced only a sporadic interest in study hitherto now had active groups following the Daf Yomi daily Talmud programme. In New York it could be followed by telephone, through the hour-long Dial-a-Daf service whose several hundred lines were fully booked throughout the day and night. Orthodoxy in America had developed a prolific literature of books and periodicals, well-organised youth movements, mikvaot and an extensive kashrut network.
The Tradition symposium reflected this new reality. But the note of exhilaration was muted. Many, perhaps most, of these achievements had been instigated by groups and individuals closer to traditionalism than to the modern Orthodoxy represented by the symposiasts. Tradition’s editor, Walter Wurzburger, reflected that “Modern Orthodoxy…is ridiculed by the right wing as an illegitimate hybrid issuing from the union between Orthodoxy and a basically incompatible modern culture.” So deep was the note of self-doubt that he included in the agenda to be addressed by contributors the question: “Do you regard modern Orthodoxy as a philosophy of compromise or as an authentic version of Judaism?”
The question provoked an extraordinary outburst from David Singer. “I am (may God have mercy on me),” he wrote, “a modern Orthodox Jew, and thus a man without a community. Having crossed a bridge into the modern world, I now find myself stranded there together with a handful of Orthodox intellectuals while the Orthodox community as a whole goes marching off in a traditionalist direction.” As an undergraduate at Yeshiva University in the 1960s he had envisaged an altogether different outcome. Modern Orthodoxy was a philosophy whose time had come. “Who in his right mind would spurn a form of Orthodoxy which held out the promise of a successful integration of Judaism and Western culture, tradition and modernity, Jewish and American living?”
A generation later, he looked back with unmistakable bitterness at the betrayal of a dream:
What went wrong? Why did the dream of a modern Orthodox utopia turn to ashes? For a time I was convinced that modern Orthodoxy had failed the acid test: it had been tried and had been found wanting. Now I know better: modern Orthodoxy did not fail, it never happened. With few exceptions…the spokesmen for the movement had been engaged in an elaborate charade. While they talked bravely about modern Orthodoxy representing the true ideal of Torah…they really regarded it as a survival strategy – this was America; in America one had to compromise; and that compromise was secular studies. In their heart of hearts, most modern Orthodox leaders felt guilty about what they were saying and doing. Their model of authentic Jewishness remained that of the East European yeshivah world – a total absorption in Judaism’s sacred texts. Hence, when Orthodox traditionalism reared its head, the spokesmen for modern Orthodoxy immediately retreated.3Tradition, ibid., 69–70.
None of the other contributors put it quite this strongly, but most shared Singer’s self-doubts. Modern Orthodox Jews felt “a sense of uneasiness” in the presence of the “superior religious devotion” of the traditionalists, according to one. According to another, modern Orthodoxy “has largely turned into a philosophy of compromise – a way to maintain an institutional affiliation without taking seriously the spiritual and intellectual demands which that affiliation entails.” It has failed, many argued, to produce its own leaders. For some the problem lay at the grass-roots. “The modern Orthodox produced many Jewish intellectuals, but not primary and secondary school teachers for the day schools to which they send their children.” For others it lay at the top. It “has almost no indigenous gedolim [outstanding authorities], neither in the narrower sphere of halakhah nor in the broad realm of public leadership, and no first-rank creative thinkers or artists.”
PROBLEMS OF LEGITIMATION
These comments came from leading representatives of modern Orthodoxy itself. Nor was this simply self-criticism. It was an inner echo of the increasing tendency on the part of a resurgent traditionalism to delegitimate modern Orthodoxy. The relationship between modern and traditionalist Orthodoxy is asymmetrical. The former recognise the validity of the latter; the latter deny it to the former. The modernists argue for an Orthodox pluralism, while the traditionalists frequently argue that theirs is the only valid interpretation of the rabbinic heritage. Modern Orthodox thinkers are therefore at a psychological disadvantage, since their views are often discredited by authorities whom they respect.
This was evident in the Tradition symposium itself. The editor invited traditionalists to take part in the discussion. All refused. Elsewhere, they made their objections to modern Orthodoxy clear. One reported, in the name of his yeshivah teacher, that “We no longer have to fear Conservatism – that is no longer the danger. Everyone knows that it is avodah zarah [idolatry]. What we have to fear is modern Orthodoxy.”4Chaim Dov Keller, “Modern Orthodoxy: An Analysis and a Response,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, op. cit, 253. Another spoke of the need to wage an ideological war against what he saw as “a trend of pseudo-Orthodoxy.”5Shelomoh Danziger, “Modern Orthodoxy or Orthodox Modernism?” The Jewish Observer (October 1966), 3–9. The implication was clear. Modern Orthodoxy in attempting to create a synthesis between rabbinic Judaism and contemporary thought was headed toward, if not already at the point of, heresy.
Nor is the problem confined to the higher reaches of faith and intellect. It translates itself into social terms, as a vacillation between discrepant roles and reference groups. In their lifestyles, it has seemed to some, modern Orthodox Jews are trying to combine the incompatible: an easy modernity and a faithful Orthodoxy. This makes for an awkward division of identities. An acute observer, the sociologist Samuel Heilman, concluded his study of American synagogue life with the remark that “As modern Orthodox Jews, the members stand between two sources of stigmatisation: the contemporary world, which considers their Orthodoxy a stigma, and the traditional Orthodox community which looks upon their modernity with disapproval.” Since they internalise the standards of both, their identity is fraught with ambivalence. They are “forever trying to engage in ‘passing’ behaviour.” To the traditionalists “they must appear strictly Orthodox” while “to their contemporary colleagues” they must “seem to be completely engaged with the present and with downplaying their Orthodoxy and the anachronism it connotes.” Heilman concludes that “rapid, and often sudden, shifting” between roles is an “integral part” of modern Orthodox behaviour. “Whether these dual foci of identity can continue to coexist without destroying each other remains to be seen.”6Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, 266–267.
Another sociologist, Charles Liebman, has pointed to the problem modern Orthodoxy has in legitimating its positions. “Modern Orthodoxy was not a left-wing movement because it was not a movement; it was to some of its adherents a state of sin, and to the remainder a condition of schizophrenia. It represented an uncritical affirmation of the American experience without evaluating either the quality of the American experience or its relationship to the Jewish tradition.”7Charles Liebman, “Left and Right in American Orthodoxy,” Judaism 15:1 (Winter 1966), 104. It had no difficulty in legitimating its stances on the basis of contemporary secular values – democracy, self-fulfilment, the dignity of the individual, liberalism and sexual equality. What it could not do was to derive the same conclusions from the source it took as primary, namely, Jewish law. As a result, modern Orthodoxy could not but seem to be more modern than Orthodox, and it was bound to lack the endorsement of major halakhists. “One is hard pressed to think of rabbis with any standing in the Orthodox world who seek to legitimate those behaviour patterns that distinguish the modern Orthodox of the left wing from the right.”8Charles Liebman, “Orthodox Judaism Today,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, op. cit., 111.
These are formidable criticisms. To a considerable degree they represent the particular dilemma of Orthodoxy in America. There Orthodoxy is not the only, or even the major, institutionalised expression of Jewish religiosity. Conservative Judaism, which in the early twentieth century had still been roughly within the parameters of tradition, has since moved radically toward accommodation with secular and non-halakhic norms, from mixed seating in the synagogue to the ordination of women as rabbis. Reform Judaism has moved further still, to the point of accepting homosexuality and mixed marriages de facto and de jure counting as Jews the children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, so long as the children choose to identify as Jews.
In nineteenth-century Germany, where Reform and Conservative – or as it was then called, “positive historical” – Judaism originated, the distinction between these movements and Orthodoxy was relatively clear. Orthodoxy necessarily saw Reform as a heretical deviation from Jewish law and faith. Reform, in turn, saw itself as a revolutionary response to radical social change. Contemporary American culture, in contrast, blurs the either/or of tradition or revolution. It sees religious alternatives in terms of pluralism. They are related, that is to say, not in terms of truth and falsity or orthodoxy and heterodoxy but as competing products in the free marketplace of affiliation. The concept of an orthodoxy of any kind is almost impossible to translate into this conceptual scheme.9Peter Berger points out that “It is instructive to recall that the literal meaning of the word haeresis is ‘choice.’ In a very real sense, every religious community in the pluralistic situation becomes a ‘heresy,’ with all the social and psychological tenuousness that the term suggests.” Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels, London: Allen Lane, 1970, 62. In the Jewish context, the various strands in Jewish religious life come to seem simply denominational alternatives, each equally legitimate as an interpretation of tradition. Between them, the choice of affiliation seems personal and subjective, a matter of choice, not truth.
American Jews, as a result, are highly mobile in their institutional allegiances. Recent surveys have repeatedly shown that while first generation Americans tend to be Orthodox, their children switch overwhelmingly to Conservative synagogues as part of their integration into American life.10See, for example, Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 151–169. Orthodoxy represents the attachment of a bare five percent of the American Jewish population, rising to eleven percent in Miami and thirteen percent in New York.11Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, 121. In such a minority situation the project of modern Orthodoxy – attempting to mediate between tradition and secular culture – is fraught with implausibility. Those who seek an accommodation with American values can find it carried through with greater vigour in the non-Orthodox movements. Those who seek instead to pass on the tradition undiluted to their children will inevitably prefer a non-accommodating Orthodoxy which maintains, ideologically and institutionally, a conscious isolation from the general environment. There seems to be a choice. A consistent modernity leads away from Orthodoxy. A consistent Orthodoxy leads away from modernity. Modern Orthodoxy is the excluded middle. Such is the present American situation.
MODERN ORTHODOXY IN ISRAEL
But not the American situation alone. Israel too, though it lacks American Jewry’s denominations and de facto religious pluralism, has witnessed a similar phenomenon. “The most dramatic development in religious life in Israel during the last decade has been the apparent retreat of modern Orthodoxy and the strengthening of neo-religious tendencies.”12Charles Liebman and Elizer Don-Yehiya, Religion and Politics in Israel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, 122. There have been conspicuous moves on the part of the younger Orthodox generation toward an increasing rigour of halakhic interpretation and practice. Previous standards with respect to kashrut, agricultural laws, mixing or separation of the sexes and modesty in dress have been called into question and replaced by more demanding norms. The impact of yeshivot, nationalist youth movements, and the heightened authority of religious leaders has led to a breakdown of family customs in favour of a more monolithic conception of halakhic behaviour.13See 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, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987, 235–256.
There has been a tendency, too, to negate the complex cultural syntheses associated with modern Orthodoxy. Orthodox schools and yeshivot have taken an increasingly negative view of secular studies, especially the humanities. The pragmatic accommodation with secular politics once characteristic of Mizrachi, the religious Zionist movement formed by R. Isaac Reines in the late nineteenth century, has been replaced with a more direct and unyielding application of religious categories to the political arena. There has been a move away from the alternation between roles that Heilman found typical of American modern Orthodoxy toward a more strenuous and zealous search for personal consistency. The Israeli term for the young affected by this mood is nisrafim, “burned.” The word is graphically descriptive of the new style of religious passion as against the more detached and tolerant manner of a generation ago.14Ibid., 125.
The attitudes associated with religious moderation have been in decline. In Israel these involved a positive attitude toward the state, a willingness to work with secular groups, and a conciliatory stance toward non-religious Jews on the one hand and the Arab population on the other. Religious moderates have generally favoured persuasion over legislation, dialogue over confrontation, and the “ways of peace” over the “wars of the Lord.”
In the pre- and early state period there had been many distinguished rabbinic authorities – among them Rabbis Kook, Isaac Herzog, Zvi Pesach Frank, Isser Yehudah Unterman, Moshe Avigdor Amiel and Shlomo Yosef Zevin – who took a highly positive view of the religious significance of the land and state of Israel. Recently, however, there has been a marked decline in the influence of religious Zionism as an ideology.15See, for example, Aharon Lichtenstein, “The Relationship to Israel of Jewish Religious Groups: Orthodoxy,” in Morasha 1:1 (Fall 1984), 18–26; Bernard Rosenzweig, Walter Wurzburger and David Levinson, “The Changing Attitudes of Orthodox Jews to Religious Zionism: A Symposium,” Morasha 2:2 (Spring-Summer 1986), 15–29; Reuven Bulka, “Israel and the State of the Religious Mind,” ibid., 30–34. This is not always or even predominantly expressed in terms of direct opposition. The majority of yeshivot simply ignore such celebrations as Yom ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, and an ever-growing number of students prefer to continue their talmudic studies rather than serve in the army. But in some yeshivot, notably those for baalei teshuvah, religious returnees, the anti-Zionist polemic is overt. Janet Aviad, for example, documents one speech by a yeshivah head on the theme of “Why we should mourn on Independence Day.” “As a faithful religious Jew,” he told his students, “I am more anti-Zionist than I am anti-Christian.” While non-Jews sought to harm Jews, he argued, Zionism sought to destroy Judaism itself.16Janet Aviad, Return to Judaism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 63–68.
Negative or neutral attitudes toward Zionism had been a feature of traditionalist Orthodoxy since the birth of Agudat Yisrael in 1912. But with the growing impact of yeshivot on Israeli religious life, and a general disillusionment with secular Zionism as a solution to Israel’s internal and external problems, the mood has spread outward. Modern Orthodoxy, explicitly or implicitly, was generally predicated on monistic concepts that favoured unity and harmony. Traditionalism, by contrast, is more dualistic, viewing the world in terms of oppositional categories and conflict. The growing rift between secular and religious attitudes on the one hand, Israel, the Arab states and international political opinion on the other, has made dualism a more cogent way of explaining immediate realities for many Israelis in the past two decades.
THE FAILURE OF SUCCESS
There have been sporadic attempts to restate the case for religious moderation. In the summer of 1986, following clashes between religious and secular Israelis, a group of Orthodox yeshivah heads and academics published a call for “a candid dialogue between the religious and secular communities,” an end to “indiscriminate public battles over any and all religious issues,” and an emphasis instead on “basic principles of justice and responsibility, honesty and decency, concern for the unfortunates in our midst.”17The group published its views under the banner of Hagut. A review of their platform is contained in my editorial in L’Eylah 22 (Autumn 1986) and in Ben Mollov, “Hagut: An Analysis,” Morasha 2:3 (Winter/ Spring 1987), 28–30. At around the same time the religious youth movement, Bnei Akiva, declared itself committed to “the struggle for human dignity” and opposed “enmity and hatred between Jews and gentiles.”18See Yochanan ben-Yaacov, “Bnei Akiva Youth and Educational Direction,” Morasha 2:3 (Winter/Spring 1987), 20–27. Several political parties, among them Oz ve-Shalom, Netivot Shalom, and more recently Meimad, have asserted the inner connection between religious values and moderation, diplomacy and tolerance. None of these initiatives, though, has generated a significant base of support or a continuing momentum.
There are, in short, deep problems facing the constellation of values implicit in the phrase “modern Orthodoxy.” They are evident in two communities as dissimilar as American and Israeli Jewry. They cannot therefore be attributed exclusively to processes occurring in the one and not the other. In Israel, religious issues tend to be fought in the public arena and have a political dimension. In America they have more to do with private life, personal religious observance and synagogue affiliation. In both situations, however, the religious voice that has commanded attention has spoken in the accents of confrontation rather than mediation. Orthodoxy has come to be characterised by its opposition to, not its attempt to engage in dialogue with, secular culture, non-religious Jews and the non-Jewish world. Traditionalism rather than modern Orthodoxy has emerged as the authoritative voice of rabbinic Judaism. Why has this happened?
One point should not be underestimated. Modern Orthodoxy has been the victim of its own success. All legitimating ideologies tend to suffer the fate of Wittgenstein’s ladder, that of being cast away once the climb has been made. The great paradox of contemporary Orthodoxy is that Torah im Derekh Eretz and religious Zionism are systematically in evidence as empirical reality and in eclipse as religious ideology. There are Orthodox Jewish university professors, scientists, doctors, judges, economists and sociologists. Each of these presupposes advanced secular education, and thus the de facto reality of Torah im Derekh Eretz. Orthodox Jews too have emerged, especially since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as the most unconditional supporters of the state of Israel. In terms of American aliyah, Orthodox Jews are five times more likely than those of other affiliations to make the decision to leave and live in Israel.19Chaim Waxman, “American Aliyah: Dream and Reality,” Morasha 2:3 (Winter-Spring 1987), 1–7. The reverse also seems to be true, though we lack precise quantification of the numbers involved: secular Israelis are more likely to leave Israel and live elsewhere than their religious counterparts.20See Moshe Shokeid, Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Torah im Derekh Eretz and religious Zionism were primarily legitimating ideologies. They sought religious justification for states of affairs that had not yet been realised: cultural integration in the diaspora and a Jewish state in the land of Israel. The direction of religious thought necessarily changes when anticipation is succeeded by achievement. Orthodox Jews no longer need specific justification for their decision to pursue higher secular education or participate in Israeli life. These have become self-evident, taken-for-granted realities. The burden of justification is now reversed. How, having decided to enter the professions or live in a secular state, can one defend the fact of one’s Orthodoxy? Necessarily, in this new statement of tradition-in-modernity, secular knowledge and the state of Israel come to be seen as instrumental rather than essential goods. Neither possesses religious significance in itself. Each is merely a condition and context of something else that had intrinsic value. When a new state of affairs is sought, it must be justified de jure. When it has been accomplished, it can be accepted de facto. The demise of modern Orthodox ideologies is part of the failure of success. Its goals have been achieved. Other values now need to be stressed.
PROGRESSION OR REGRESSION
But this is only part of the story. The word “modern,” as we noted in the last chapter, has carried a specific implication since the early nineteenth century. It has been not only descriptive but evaluative also. It has implied not only that something is new, but that the new is better, more evolved, sophisticated or compelling than the old.
Neither Samson Raphael Hirsch nor Rav Kook described their programmes as modern Orthodoxy. But the phrase accurately captures the mood of their writings. Behind their visions lay different but identifiable optimisms. They welcomed modernity. For Hirsch it promised a new richness of Jewish life in the diaspora, freed from the artificial privations of the ghetto. For Kook it heralded a renaissance of Jewish peoplehood in Israel, a convergence of people, land and language, religion, culture and landscape, in a messianic process of sanctification. Each was heir to that specific post-enlightenment, pre-Holocaust sense of history as progress, time as evolution. The future would be better than the past.
In retrospect we now see that this was by no means the only, or even the primary, interpretation of time and its processes that could be inferred from tradition. An inner history of Judaism could almost be written in terms of its deep dialectic on the subject of time. On the one hand, the very concept of tradition, Jewish or otherwise, presupposes that the past is a source of wisdom. In Judaism, the past, as revelation, is the sole source of religious knowledge and authoritative command. The primary justification of prophecy or rabbinic insight is not that it is new but that it is old. “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted to it Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly.”21M. Avot 1:1.
Reception and transmission link the generations, not innovation and evolution. The new, if true, is merely a disclosure of the old. “Bible, Mishnah, Talmud and Haggadah, even what a senior disciple is due to teach in the presence of his master, was already stated to Moses at Sinai.”22J.T. Peah 2:6; see Megillah 19b; Berakkot 5a; Exodus Rabbah 28:6. Each new generation marked a further move away from the pristine force of revelation. Time was a process of decline. “If our predecessors were human beings,” said the rabbis, “then we are as donkeys.” From the perspective of revelation and knowledge the present is inferior to the past.
Against this, and in constant tension with it, is a distinct future orientation. This is implicit in the ideas of the messianic age, the world to come and the resurrection of the dead. Judaism, like other religious systems, faced times in which reality seemed to contradict belief. Individual suffering conflicted with the idea of Divine justice. Jewish degradation conflicted with Jewish chosenness. Persecution seemed to contradict the Divine protection promised in the covenant. But in Judaism, these conflicts are to be resolved not by metaphysics but by history, specifically by the future.
Biblical and rabbinic thought both veer away from abstract or mystical resolutions to theological dilemmas. What ought to be is not what is, once the veil of illusion has been removed from the world of the senses. What ought to be is what will be, once the future comes to pass. Gershom Scholem has written that “the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.”23Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken, 1971, 35. One can agree with this analysis while dissenting from its evaluation. The messianic idea dictates a life lived toward the future, just as the concept of revelation dictates a life lived toward the past. Judaism is defined between the twin poles of memory and anticipation.
For most of the period between the first and nineteenth centuries, between the rise of rabbinic Judaism and the dawn of emancipation, Jewish thought had been strikingly ahistorical. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has drawn attention to the fact that, given the importance of history to biblical thought and memory to Jewish religious practice, it is “all the more remarkable that after the close of the biblical canon the Jews virtually stopped writing history.… It is as though, abruptly, the impulse to historiography had ceased.”24Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982, 16. The rabbis neither wrote history nor did they devote religious attention to the seminal events of their own time. They tended to subsume new Jewish tragedies previous archetypes as if the new were a recurring manifestation of the old: “the acts of the fathers are a portent for their children.”25See, for example, Genesis Rabbah 40:6. See also Yitzchak Heinemann, Darkhei ha-Aggadah, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970, 32–35. On the use of this exegetical device in the biblical commentary of Nachmanides, see Ezra Zion Melammed, Meforshei ha-Mikra, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975, 950–952. The rabbinic conception of the present is dominated by an undifferentiated ha-zeman hazeh, “this time,” stretching between the destruction of the second temple and the messianic age.26See Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, New York: Behrman House, 1961, 26.
It is as if, for eighteen centuries of Jewish consciousness, the historical clock had stopped and time was suspended. Jews were poised between a distant past and a remotely imagined future: between revelation and redemption. Their present situation was neither one nor the other. No change held religious significance. Even the most catastrophic event of that period – the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion – produced only a temporary historical consciousness. Its lasting effect was to drive Jewish spirituality further in upon itself and away from external reality, in the form of Safed mysticism. The profound social changes taking place in Jewish existence from emancipation onward called, therefore, for a major new evaluation. Jews and Judaism were being caught up in the processes of history. Ahistorical stasis no longer described the Jewish situation.
One response – a reaction of qualified pessimism – was readily available within the tradition. The new circumstances were a threat to Jewish continuity, and were therefore to be seen as yet another one of the trials of exile. The classic expression of this view had been given by Maimonides in his Epistle to Yemen: “These trials are designed to test and purify 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.”27An English translation is available in Abraham Halkin and David Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985, 91–207. On this view, emancipation was a catastrophe that was nonetheless to be seen as providential. Many would defect from Judaism, convert, intermarry or otherwise assimilate, but the few – the “true Israel” – would survive. This formed the heart of the traditionalist response to modernity.
It was Samson Raphael Hirsch’s achievement to see that an alternative and more positive interpretation could be given. Judaism is, on this view, ahistorical but is nonetheless enmeshed in the history of other nations. “Israel,” in this sense, “is a historical phenomenon.”28Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters on Judaism, translated by Bernard Drachman, New York: Feldheim, 1960, 30. Its function is to serve as a constant counterpoint to the rise and fall of other civilisations by the force of its religious and ethical example. It “became necessary that one people be introduced into the ranks of the nations which, through its history and life, should declare that God is the only creative cause of existence.”29Ibid., 54. The task of the Jewish people is to show the world “the sanctity of humanity by the example of its own life.”30Ibid., 60. On this reading, emancipation offered a significant and constructive challenge to Jews, to live their own tradition in closer proximity to the peoples and cultures among whom they had been dispersed. Thereby they would more fully fulfil the religious mission of exile. If “the dispersed of Israel were to show themselves everywhere on earth as the glorious priests of God and pure humanity…what a mighty force we would constitute for steering mankind to the final goal of human education.”31Ibid., 65.
Hirsch remained within the ahistorical rabbinic tradition. Emancipation had significance in his thought not so much for the inner as for the outer development of Jewish destiny. For Hirsch a, perhaps the, crucial element of the Jewish vocation was its impact on other civilisations and the developing conscience of humanity as a whole. But the rise of European nationalism in the 1840s, the persistence of European antisemitism, and the continuing attritions of assimilation combined to turn later nineteenth-century Jewish thought in another direction: religious Zionism. Emancipation, on this view, provided the context and impetus not for a new Jewish role in the diaspora, but for a revival of the Jewish nation in Eretz Israel. Yehudah Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and later Rav Kook were all to see the transformations of modernity in terms of inner Jewish history, as the prompting of Providence to a human response to the messianic challenge. The process of redemption is completed by Heaven, they argued, but begun by man. Emancipation points to the end of exile.
THE ECLIPSE OF OPTIMISM
Behind these two quite different projections lies an optimism about the immediate implications of history. To be sure, neither Hirsch nor Kook were naive meliorists. They were both fully aware that their time had witnessed unprecedented defections from tradition. This fact occupies a major part of their writings. But neither saw modernity as simply a trial, in which all change is necessarily for the worse. In Hirsch we find a powerful idealisation of the diaspora. In Rav Kook we find an equally powerful idealisation of Zionism as the herald of a national-religious rebirth. If the future offered greater dangers than the past, it afforded greater religious opportunities likewise.
Neither of their specific visions is readily available to Jews in the late twentieth century. The Holocaust bars any return to a celebration of diaspora existence as such. Indeed, A. B. Yehoshua has called the Holocaust “the final decisive proof of the failure of diaspora existence.”32B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, New York: Doubleday, 1981, 12. “If anyone,” he argues, “had illusions about our ability to find our place in the world as a people scattered among the nations, the Holocaust provided the final proof of where this form of existence is likely to lead us.”
Not only is this a matter of safety and survival. The Holocaust mocks the idea of the Jewish ethical mission to humanity, which Hirsch shared with many other early nineteenth century Jewish thinkers. It was, we remember, Hitler who remarked that “conscience is a Jewish invention.” To be sure, the idea of the Jewish ethical mission had not been completely eclipsed. It has been revived by, among others, the secular Jewish writer George Steiner. But there is a dark abyss of difference between Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle and Hirsch’s Nineteen Letters.
For Steiner, the Holocaust is the culmination of the Enlightenment. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche had pronounced the blasphemy that man had murdered God. In the Shoah, man attempted to murder the people of God.33George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, London: Faber and Faber, 1971, 29–48. For Steiner, Jews must continue to be the moral critics of humanity, but in return they must expect not admiration but victimisation.34Steiner has expressed this view in a number of essays. The fullest statement is contained in his “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (Winter/Spring 1985), 4–25. This is not to say that Hirsch’s theology is refuted; but we will not easily recover the innocent optimism with which he wrote. Jewish thought has, for the time being and the most part, turned inward from universalism to particularism, from “mission” to survival.
Nor have Rav Kook’s hopes for the sanctification of Jewish life in Israel proceeded as he envisioned. In place of the symbiosis between religion and secular culture there has come a widening rift and a deepening tension. An essential part of Rav Kook’s imagined future was a vision which anticipated that Israel’s national rebirth would lead to greater harmony between Jews and other peoples, Judaism and other faiths. The continued hostility between Israel and her Arab neighbours, the internal issue of the Palestinians, and Israel’s growing international isolation have all been movements in the opposite direction.
To be sure, Rav Kook’s mysticism has not been the only casualty. Far more deeply affected has been the secular Zionist premiss that Israel would lead to a “normalisation” of Jewish existence. In any event, optimism has been succeeded by a more sombre interpretation of history, one which sees Jewish-gentile relationships as inherently hostile and in which Israel is destined to be “a people that dwells alone.”35See Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 123–166.
There has been, in other words, a perceptible shift in Jewish attitudes in both Israel and the diaspora from optimism to pessimism and from a future- to a past-orientation. Tomorrow is unlikely to be better than yesterday. One can almost precisely date the transformation. The turning point was Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur War. Until then, Israel’s high international prestige had seemed to enhance both Hirsch’s and Kook’s faith in history. Since then, more dismal images have prevailed.
So deep has the mood gone that contemporary Jewish thinkers are now reluctant to use the word “modern” to describe themselves. One non-Orthodox scholar, for example, writes that “The period of Jewish history that began in late eighteenth-century Germany has ended. We whose identities were formed after 1933, 1945, 1948 and 1967 are no longer modern Jews. After 1933 we no longer believe in the possibility – or attractiveness – of assimilation. In the face of 1945 and the realisation of what had happened in the death camps, we surely no longer worship at the temple of human progress.”36Arthur Green, Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, xv. “Modern” Orthodoxy is no longer described as such. Instead its protagonists have recently preferred the time-neutral phrase “centrist” Orthodoxy.37Norman Lamm, “Some Comments on Centrist Orthodoxy,” Tradition 22:3 (Fall 1986), 1–12.
A guarded neutrality, tinged with suspicion, had been traditionalism’s response to modernity all along. Many of its reservations about emancipation, western civilisation and the aspirations of Zionism seem to have been justified by the events of the past half-century. It will take time and much change before the adjective “modern” regains a positive resonance in the Jewish vocabulary.
AGAINST MODERNITY
Undoubtedly though, the primary reason for the decline in modern Orthodoxy has been sociological rather than historical. Jews and Judaism have been so deeply affected by the Holocaust and the state of Israel that one may be forgiven for seeing these as the primary determinants of Jewish religiosity in the last forty years. The facts, however, suggest otherwise. For the same developments that have been evident in Judaism have occurred elsewhere, in both Christianity and Islam.
In all three cases religious traditions were confronted by the intellectual and social impact of modernisation. This involved, among other things, a historical consciousness which saw religious truths and institutions not as timeless mysteries but as products of their time; a weakening of communal structures of authority in favour of individual liberty and personal choice; and a rejection of traditional hierarchies, in particular a revaluation of the role of women in society. In all three religions an attempt was made to reformulate religious doctrine and practice to accommodate these changes and show that they were not incompatible with traditional teachings.
To some extent, despite their very different inner logics, the three religions adopted similar tactics in embracing modernity. Classic texts were to be understood in new ways that broke with the literalism of the past. Religious behaviour was to be divided into the timeless and essential on the one hand, and accretions and superstitions on the other. Religious thought moved from the metaphysical to the moral. Reason gained primacy over tradition. Values such as tolerance, democracy and individual dignity came to be stressed over truth, authority and religious discipline. Jewish, Christian and Islamic modernism are each composed of a myriad of variations that differ substantially from one another as well as from modernisms in other faiths. But this should not hide the broad patterns that all religious strategies have in common when they seek to translate tradition into a secular modernity.
At some stage, however – and this seems to have been reached in all three religions some two decades ago – a reaction gathers force. Tradition, it is now argued, cannot be stretched this far. Religious liberalism, which had until then been seen in terms of intellectual openness and ethical concern comes to be seen negatively as “secularisation” in Christianity, “westernisation” in Islam and “assimilation” in Judaism. Traditionalism, which had all along opposed the liberal strategy, emerges from its minority status, shakes off the epithets by which it has hitherto been stigmatised – “dogmatic” and “obscurantist” – and commands attention as the voice of religious authenticity.
The emphases of the new traditionalism are different in the three religions. In Christianity it focuses on the literal inerrancy of Scripture. In Islam its form is political, sometimes domestic, sometimes international, as a war against the West and its influence on Islamic life. In Judaism it concentrates for the most part on a strict interpretation of halakhah, though in a movement like Gush Emunim it takes political form as well. In all three religions the new mood is described by its opponents as “fundamentalism.”
The relatedness of these phenomena is too striking to be dismissed. The revival of traditionalism was unpredicted by most theologians and sociologists. Prior to the 1960s it was generally assumed that modernisation was a linear process. A deepening secularisation was inevitable. Religious institutions, if they were to survive at all, would have to make their peace with it. The reverse now seems true. Why has it happened? The situation is too new for there to be any consensus among sociologists. We can only speculate. One point, though, seems certain. What has happened is not a general return to tradition. The evidence, certainly among Western societies, still points to the continuing decline of traditional religious observance and the marginalisation of religion in society. The traditionalist revival is paradoxical. It is a distinctively modern phenomenon. It is a symptom of religious life in a profoundly secular world. How then are we to explain it?
Modernity – that complex of processes that includes industrialisation, urbanisation, Enlightenment thought and the disjunction between individual and state – has produced its own discontents. The citizen of the modern city is surrounded by a bewildering variety of faiths, commitments and lifestyles. The culture he inhabits casts the individual loose from the constraints of birth, ethnicity, class and family tradition. There are few, if any, features of his life which he experiences as given. What he is, he is because he has consciously so chosen, out of the midst of many alternatives. At work, in social life, and at home, he may have to play a variety of only loosely connected roles. Technological, economic and even ethical structures seem to be in a state of flux and change. “A world in which everything is in constant motion is a world in which certainties of any kind are hard to come by.”38Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind, London: Penguin, 1974, 165. The felt incoherence of personal meaning is one of the prices exacted by modernity.
The authors of a recent study of American society put the dilemma simply. “If it is to provide any richness of meaning, the idea of a life course must be set in a larger generational, historical and probably religious context.” The division of most American lives between work, conceived of as self-responsibility, and leisure, conceived of as self-fulfilment, tends to focus on a self without a context, a self-made self. While this has its satisfactions, “a life composed mainly of work that lacks much intrinsic meaning and leisure devoted to golf and bridge does have limitations. It is hard to find in it the kind of story or narrative, as of pilgrimage or quest, that many cultures have used to link private and public; present, past and future; and the life of the individual to the life of society and the meaning of the cosmos.”39R. Bellah, R. Madsen, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler and S. Tipton, Habits of the Heart, London: Hutchinson, 1988, 82–83.
It was just this “narrative” that was traditionally provided by religion. Here were the ultimate certainties, the eternal truths and directives that rose above the shifting ground of the human situation. But it is just this that is threatened by the entire constellation of values of modernity. At a certain point, therefore, religion cannot accommodate itself to modernity without compromising its most basic character. To the extent that religions “go through the modern experience” – favouring choice over truth, autonomy over authority and self over society – to that extent they replicate rather than resolve the problems of contemporary individualism.
RELIGION AS DISENGAGEMENT
Added to the crisis of the modern self is a growing scepticism about the social transformations that modernity was to have heralded. Liberal optimism about the end of tyranny has been succeeded by the knowledge that the twentieth century has seen unprecedented examples of political oppression. Enlightenment promised an end to superstition and intolerance; instead it has led to frightening examples of fanaticism and racial hatred. Science and technology, as well as extending and enriching human life, has given man the power to destroy the world. Economic progress has not prevented – indeed it has at times seemed to be dependent on – increasing disparities between rich and poor, individually and nationally. “Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.”40Ibid., 277. These are the global equivalents of Jewry’s own disillusionment with the twentieth century.
They amount to a situation in which religion, to address the anxieties and discontents of a significant number of individuals in contemporary society, must be counter-cultural. It must seek to restore what modernity threatens to destroy: personal identity, the coherence of a life, generational continuity and an objective moral order. It must allow the individual to break through the prison of the self into a wider framework of meanings. It must restore a sense of kinship with the past to balance the sense of headlong rush into an uncharted future. These are the common factors of traditionalism, and they explain its power in an uncertain world.
They are not secured easily. Traditionalism is not the same as tradition. Traditionalism is tradition in an untraditional age. It is acquired at the price of disengagement from contemporary culture, building strong, supportive and enclosed communities and establishing structures of authority which are at odds with the assumptions of liberal individualism. These certainly are the features of charedi, or Jewish traditionalist life, and they are not accidental to it. They are built on the perception that contact with secular culture and society undermines the certainties on which religion depends to provide history, the universe and personal life with meaning.
The question is: Is there an alternative? How much of modern consciousness can religion admit without destroying its own certainties? Contemporary individualism is destructive of the idea of community. Pluralism threatens the idea of objective religious truth. A culture of shifting, transitory allegiances endangers key institutions like marriage and the family. Autonomy – the idea that each person is the author of his moral commitments – is hostile to the Jewish idea of halakhah, namely that we are born into obligations. Can a synthesis be created between tradition and a culture so fundamentally at odds with it? The presumption must be that it cannot. If it cannot, then the choice lies between a religious modernism that breaks with tradition, or a religious tradition that disengages from modernity.
The sharpness of this either/or is often underestimated by religious modernists, who tend to see traditionalism – or “fundamentalism” – as an escape from reality into the refuge of naive certainty. One of the contributors to the Tradition symposium, for example, spoke of “the preference of our generation for black-and-white absolutes rather than grey hybrids admitting doubts, questions and innovations.” Another argued that “in an insecure world, many crave security and, without a doubt, blind faith provides more security than does the travail of the intellectual.” But such implied criticism ignores the deep undermining of religious certainties by the scope of choice and pace of change of modern societies.
The search for integrity, security, meaning, “absolutes,” authority and community is part of the classic religious quest, and any religious system that does not provide clear signposts is in danger of abdicating its most basic responsibilities. Many theological liberalisms reached a reductio ad absurdum in the 1960s in their attempt to give religious endorsement to an opposite cluster of values. Modern Orthodoxy was not immune to the temptation. There were calls for Judaism to adjust to the “changing American ethic,”41Irving Greenberg, “Jewish Values and the Changing American Ethic,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, 284–309. and to emphasise “human adequacy” as against the “psychologically repressed and inhibited” personality type of tradition.42David Hartman, A Living Covenant, New York: Free Press, 1985. There was an emphasis on Judaism’s compatibility with, rather than its critique of, the values of an individualistic age. The danger in this strategy, as a Christian scholar has pointed out, is that “To gain a hearing in our culture, theology has often assumed a voice not its own and found itself merely repeating the culture’s platitudes in transparently figurative speech.”43Jeffrey Stout, “The Voice of Theology in Contemporary Culture,” in Religion and America: Spirituality in a Secular Age, edited by Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton, Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, 249.
Undoubtedly the search for cultural synthesis was well motivated. The 1960s was a decade in which old behaviour patterns seemed to be breaking down. There was, particularly among the student population, a search for religious experience that went hand-in-hand with a rejection of conventional behaviour. Avant garde religious thinkers felt challenged to push liberalism to its limits. But in so doing they under-emphasised the contrary values within the tradition: certainty as well as doubt, external truth as against inner consciousness, halakhic norm as well as individual fulfilment.
Religious thought has since had to step back from this precipice. The mood within society has changed. The 1960s were succeeded by a decade of disillusionment and came to be seen, in retrospect, as a time of excess. The religious modernism associated with that period has suffered an eclipse and the religious voice now sought is one which speaks in tones of authority, discipline and ethical certainty.
THE FENCE AROUND THE FAMILY
But the changing mood of Orthodoxy cannot be divorced from a final and perhaps the most pressing consideration: the specific threat to Jewish continuity posed by an open society. Judaism is a faith. But it is the faith of a particular people. It is more than a set of truths and commands. It is a people to whom those truths and commands are addressed and in whose lives they are embodied. The future of the covenant depends on the future of the people of the covenant. Theology, in Judaism, is dependent on demography.
It was in the 1960s that a series of social phenomena began to give rise to alarm. The Jewish family, which had hitherto been a model of stability, showed signs of stress. There was a sharp rise in the rates of divorce. In addition it emerged that Jews were increasingly marrying late, or not marrying at all. Those who married were having smaller families. Most significantly, the intermarriage rate, which had hitherto been minimal, began to accelerate. Recent statistical studies have shown that the rates vary significantly from city to city within America, but they converge on the figure of one in three. That figure accords with the experience of other diaspora communities, pre- and postwar, that have undergone advanced acculturation.
These phenomena are directly related to secularisation. A culture that stresses individualism is one in which the institution of marriage is inherently fragile. It is also one in which the instinctive restraints against intermarriage are virtually impossible to sustain. Religion in a secular culture is only one of a series of commitments of private life. The individual is prior to and independent of his or her religious persuasions. The marriage of two people of different faiths comes to seem no more unlikely than the marriage of two people of different economic, class, racial, cultural or educational backgrounds. One of the crucial transitions from traditional to modern societies is the replacement of birth and role by personal compatibility and romantic love as factors determining the choice of marriage partner.
These facts threaten Jewish continuity at its roots. They are not unprecedented, and biblical Judaism contains many safeguards against too close an interaction with non-Jewish society. These were extended by rabbinic law in the behavioural “fences” constructed by the sages. Explicitly or implicitly they were protective of marriage and set up barriers against intermarriage. They included the powerful group of laws clustered around the concept of taharat ha-mishpachah, “family purity,” laws of modesty, restrictions on the social mixing of the sexes, and laws directed against eating and drinking in non-Jewish environments. They amounted to a discipline of self-imposed segregation, and they are among the Jewish laws most at odds with the assumptions of a liberal, open society.
Here too the traditionalist response has been effective, for it has developed its own contemporary equivalents of the classic rabbinic strategy of social engineering. It has created its own “fences” with which to shelter the institutions of family life. It has developed increasingly strict conventions on modesty of dress, mixed bathing and the separation of the sexes at social gatherings. It has excluded television and other carriers of the secular ethos. It has stressed its segregation from secular society.
Modern Orthodoxy, by contrast, has emphasised its integration within contemporary life. Its approach to the defence of Jewish institutions is quite different from that of traditionalism. In place of “fences,” authority, submission and social sanction, it has travelled the characteristically modern route of personal autonomy: through the educated choices of educated minds. It has used the methods of instruction, explanation and persuasion. Whether these are strong enough to counter the pressures acting against the Jewish family remains to be seen. More than by its philosophical sophistication, modern Orthodoxy will be judged by its capacity to safeguard Jewish continuity which is, in the last analysis, the continuity of the Jewish family.
So the eclipse of modern Orthodoxy has been part of a fundamental transformation of attitudes, both Jewish and universal, that has been evident in the past two decades. To be sure, the two centuries that have passed since the dawn of emancipation have been dialectical rather than linear. There have been pendulum swings before. A shift from modernism to traditionalism took place in Hirsch’s own Frankfurt community in the decades after his death. The drift from optimism to pessimism is evident in the development of R. Soloveitchik’s work from the 1940s to the 1960s. The phenomenon of teshuvah, the religious return of the alienated, that seemed unprecedented in the 1960s, had indeed taken place before in pre-war central Europe and had included such figures as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Jiri Langer. It is too early to tell whether the last two decades are one more swing in the ever-moving pendulum or whether they represent the first signs of the end of Enlightenment and the birth of an era of “postmodernity.”
But the change is deep. In part it has been born of the specific Jewish experience of the Holocaust and the recent fate of Israel. In part it is dictated by fears about the institutions of Jewish continuity, fears which have focused on birthrates, family stability and intermarriage. In part it is symptomatic of a global pessimism about the disintegrative effect of secularisation on culture, community and morality. The future is no longer bright. The past, therefore, has recovered its force. Religiously, this has meant the revival of traditionalist as against modernist forms. What, then, remains of modern Orthodoxy?