Jews Observing Jews

...Jews Observing Jews Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without Anthropological Studies Edited by Harvey E. Goldberg SUNY Press, 1987 352pp $4450 hardcover, $1695 paperback Reviewed by Samuel C. Heilman A story is told about Edward Sapir, the American Jewish anthropologist known for his many studies of North American Indians...

...and Tsili Doleve-Gandelman finds in the parallels between Zionist ideology and Israeli kindergarten rituals an analogy that accounts for the emergence of the sabra as an ideal...

...The articles shed light on a wide range of topics: interpretations of the Jewish laws of mixture [sha'atnez (the prohibition against mixing linen and wool), basar be-chalav (meat and milk) and kil'ei hakerem (grape and wheat/barley)], the sabbatical (shmita) year and the symbolic aspects of reproduction...

...studies of a Jewish senior citizen center in California, a chavurah celebration' of .Simchat Torah and a Bobover Chasidic Purim play...

...Tradition, after all, eschews changes and breaks with the past, which are more a part of what we have come to call "modern" society and culture...

...Indeed, for most of the early years in the development of the social sciences, even as Jews became some of the foremost social scientists, the one group that was conspicuously overlooked in the growing literature was the Jews...

...diminished religiosity was all around...

...Zvi Zohar looking at the laws of shmita sees an analogy between the biblical sabbatical and the experience of Jewish communal life...

...The current volume, Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without, edited by Professor Harvey Goldberg, an anthropologist from Hebrew University, and containing contributions by some of the best contemporary social anthropologists of Jewish life, is an important addition to this growing literature...

...Such interpretation is less like doing science than it is, to quote Clifford Geertz, "more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke or . . . reading a poem than it is like achieving communion...

...These days, ironically—perhaps fed by contemporary trends which encourage ethnic pride and the search into one's own roots and cultural heritage— it is only Jews who seem to be interested in studying Jewish life and culture...

...The yeshiva became a kind of religious ivory tower outside the domains of the lay Jewish world (the world of the balebatim), a place where time could be stopped and its direction reversed so that the pages of the Talmud and codes could describe a reality more real than the world outside...

...They—like their Reformist counterparts—are engaged in a contest for the choices made by the voluntary community...

...All this opened the way -for voluntary communities to compete for the hearts and minds of the observant...

...While a condensation of his analysis would do it injustice, a brief outline of its main points is possible...

...The development of the yeshiva further nurtured the dynamic of haredi life...

...Only in the last three decades has the gap been filled by a number of important studies and researchers...

...As sociologist of religion Peter Berger has put it, what was once a matter of fate is now a matter of choice...

...the late Barbara Myerhoff sees in the behavior of the Jewish aged in Venice, California a symbolic recreation of life...

...Among these were the Shoah and the breach with the past that it created...

...But the Orthodoxy that Friedman describes is changed and affected by history...

...Another factor was the rapid and dislocating nature of Jewish social and cultural change in the twentieth century, which meant that Jews (and indeed all parochial groups) who chose to survive as a group would be bound in a "voluntary community...

...analyses of Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy, Zionist indoctrination in Israeli kindergartens and the emergence of shrines for holy men among Moroccan Jews in Israel...

...The immigrant son of a German Orthodox rabbi, Sapir had in his later years, perhaps in reaction to the growing Nazi threat to Jewish life in Europe, come to the conclusion that students of society should turn their attentions to the examination of Jewish culture...

...If successful, as many of the papers in this book are, the result is a sense of the poetry and complexity of Jewish life as well as an understanding of the sweep and depth of Jewish culture...

...Long known as one of the most perceptive analysts of what has come to be called "haredi" Orthodoxy, Friedman here explains the evolution of a new Orthodoxy replete with chumrot or stringent interpretations of Jewish law and observance...

...Thus Samuel Cooper, discussing the laws of mixture, sees in them a metaphor for the opposition between life and death...

...The erosion and existential crisis that confronted observant Jewry in the face of these two dislocating realities necessarily undermined tradition, which thrives on the unbroken handing-down of patterns of behavior and custom from one generation to the next...

...Having said all this about the general thrust of this book, I would be remiss if I did not focus briefly on one of the chapters which provides one of the most trenchant and penetrating analyses of Jewish life and culture that I have read in a long time...

...Still, while increasing attention has been paid to Jewish life and culture—whose contribution to world civilization is at least as important as that of the Samoans, Trobriand Islanders and the Kwakiutl Indians about whom so much has been written—there are still many aspects of Jewish life that remain unexamined and uninterpreted...

...To make these sorts of interpretations, these ethnographers have to have a capacity for analogy and a sensitivity to metaphor—a literary more than a scientific talent...

...Shifra Epstein discovers inversion and escape as an embracing metaphor for the strictly bound framework of a Chasidic Purim play...

...Like other modern Jews, the haredi are absorbed in an effort to recreate Jewry and Judaism in the aftermath of the profound changes through which they have passed...

...Although parts of the book will not be easily read by people unschooled in the terminology and technique of the social sciences, it offers thought-provoking insights into the meaning and significance of Jewish life...

...This break with the past and the dynamic that drives certain elements of Orthodoxy toward greater stringency and isolation from mainstream Jewish culture and life, Friedman suggests, became possible because of a number of crucial events...

...I refer to Menachem Friedman's extraordinary reading of the development of ultra-Orthodox Judaism...

...To begin with, Friedman points out that haredi Orthodoxy is not really traditional in that it has made far-reaching changes in central areas of Jewish life, extending and establishing norms that are "consciously different from those prevalent within the homes and communal world of the previous generation...

...they look for deeper meaning and significance, moving from observations to analyses mainly by means of analogy and metaphor...

...For analyses like this one, as well as Goldberg's useful glosses on all the excellent papers in the collection, this book is worth reading Though the going may be tough in spots, the reward is the chance to grasp firmly a piece of the fabric of Jewish life in America and Israel...

...Sapir tried to persuade some of his Jewish students and colleagues to take up the task, but he could find no one interested in pursuing this field...

...Foremost among them were those in the yeshiva world...

...Menachem Friedman shows how ultra-Orthodoxy challenges tradition even as it claims to protect it...

...Like much of the best work of ethnography, they try to capture the meaning of human actions and to tease out the patterns of culture embedded in everyday life...

...Like their teachers, the Jews who in increasing numbers were filling the ranks of anthropologists and sociologists were interested in turning their analytic eyes on cultures and societies other than their own...

...Eastern European Jewry was no longer...

...Such interpretations—sometimes called "thick descriptions" because they are packed with meaning—imply that there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture...

...While most Jews, following the break with the past, went outward toward general society and the host cultures among which they found themselves, some went in the other direction...

...Seeing heaven in a grain of sand," Geertz (and along with him the contributors to this book) concludes, "is not a trick only poets can accomplish...

...Here, separated from the community and family and led by rabbis who were trying to deal with the twin traumas of the Holocaust and haskala (Jewish enlightenment), a young cadre of purists came to the conclusion that, to quote one rabbi whom Friedman cites, "the opinion of the balebatim is the reverse of the opinion of the Torah...

...Friedman's description and analysis suggest that even those long considered by outsiders to be the most steadfast protectors of Orthodox tradition, isolated in B'nai B'rak, Mea Shearim or Lakewood, New Jersey, are in the situation of modernity...

...What all these articles share is a capacity for interpreting culture...

...They discover the essence of Jewish life writ large in the tiny details of human behavior...

...it represents a new vision...

...Into this stepped such imposing figures as the Chazon Ish, Rabbi Avraham Karlitz, who led the movement toward isolation from the mainstream and greater stringency...

...A rupture with living tradition was born...

...Harvey Goldberg discovers an analogy between the way the Torah scroll is treated and the treatment of young children...

...Samuel C Heilman is a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York He is the author of Synagogue life, The People of the Book, The Gate Behind the _ Wall, and the winner of this year's National Jewish Book Award, A Walker in Jerusalem...

...Orthodoxy, after all, implicity and explicitly claims to be true to the original vision and faith of the founders, a truth that remains unchanged and unaffected by the vagaries of history...