Faith or Fear

...As Abrams rightly puts it: It is, to say the least, morally offensive to see Jewish groups displaying a combination of class prejudice, political intolerance, and real difficulty coming to grips with Christianity...

...In light of the hostility of many American Jews to their Orthodox brethren, it should come as no surprise that they are not kindly disposed to evangelical Christians (especially right-wing evangelicals) either...

...And if Christmas trees in the temple are kosher, why not (you should excuse the expression) go the whole hog and include a cross—not for its religious significance, of course, but simply to honor a great Jewish prophet cruelly murdered by the Romans...

...The answer is no, such things are not at all unthinkable, especially if one agrees with the late, militantly atheistic Sidney Hook, who once explained to me that the Christmas tree in his daughter's home, like an American flag or a Thanksgiving Day turkey, was a national rather than a Christian symbol...

...Abrams cites a number of revealing statistics and telling anecdotes to demonstrate that "liberal politics came, for many Jews, to be the heart of their Jewish identity...

...It is their prophetic faith that mainly explains why Jews, as Milton Himmelfarb once observed, have the income patterns of41...

...It will take a mighty faith indeed to win Jews away from Chinese food and the Democratic Party, but you never know...

...An anti-secular spirit is said to be sweeping the land, and perhaps it is merely a matter of time before Jews get caught up in it...

...17 Episcopalians and the voting patterns of Puerto Ricans...

...Prof...

...Meanwhile, Elliott Abrams is to be congratulated for advancing a powerful and compelling argument that will be publicly denounced, but privately pondered, throughout America's Jewish community...

...According to Abrams, faith is the key to Jewish continuity...

...Anti-evangelicalism might similarly be characterized as the anti-Semitism of liberal Jews...

...In the late 1980's," he writes, "demographers reported that there were 5.7 million Jews in America in 1985, and predicted a drop to 5.4 million in 2000 and 4.7 million in 2020...

...To survive in America, the Jewish community "must shift energy from its efforts to promote a secular society...and focus instead on the goal of maintaining Judaism here...

...But if Reform Jews are increasingly likely to marry Christians and invite them to play a significant role in their religion, they are steadfast in their refusal to marry Orthodox Jews...

...Christians whose faithfulness to their religion, and ability to keep their children faithful to it, should be a model for Jews, are instead seen as bumpkins and bigots...

...Isaiah and Jeremiah came to be seen as the spiritual forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Typical of the general Jewish attitude is Alan Dershowitz's observation that prayer in schools and crèches oncity hall lawns "are simply the tactical stalking horses for a much larger plan to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy in which Jews are actively proselytized and, if they do not convert, are deemed officially and legally to be—at best—second class citizens...

...What, then, should be done...

...Similarly, at a 1991 convention of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, an umbrella organization linking hundreds of local groups across the United States, "of all the items addressed in the Joint Program Plan, it was abortion rights that ignited the greatest enthusiasm among large numbers of Jews—apart from the Orthodox...

...nearly 90 percent of Reform temples now grant membership to non-Jewish spouses...

...black-footed ferret, the American Jew is an endangered species...

...The Law covers every aspect of Jewish life, both serious (how to behave when forced to choose between conversion or death) and not-so-serious (what to eat, how to dress...

...And the Judaism Abrams wishes to maintain is most assuredly not the prophetic variety...

...it had everything to do with the struggle for greater social justice...

...If a Jew committed to social justice wants to marry a Christian similarly committed, there is no reason, from a Prophetic Jewish standpoint, why they should not wage their struggle jointly...

...But a wholesale abandonment of Judaism was morally inconceivable...

...Fifty-nine percent opted for social justice, while 17 percent chose Israel or religious observance...

...Now head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, Abrams has written an important book calling on American Jews to convert, in effect, from their current religion—secular liberalism—to the ancient faith of their forefathers...

...Dershowitz's ascription of dark designs and far-reaching conspiracies to the evangelicals is an eerie echo of the arguments anti-Semites used to make about Jews —and is just as baseless...

...Ai 78 June 1997 The American Spectator...

...Being Jewish, it was now maintained, had little if anything to do with eating kosher food, wearing a kippah on one's head, or abstaining from work on the Sabbath...

...here, they marry them...

...The basic premise of Faith or Fear is that, like the furbish lousewort or the JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...As far as it is concerned, all the commandments contained in the Law are divinely inspired, and any attempt to rank them in order of importance verges on heresy...

...I was his speechwriter at the Human Rights Bureau for about two years, and like everyone else who came into contact with him, was much impressed by the sharpness of his intellect and the intensity of his ambition...

...Religious fervor is being associated with ignorance and lack of education...

...In fact," writes Abrams, "most would be more upset to learn that a child of theirs was to marry an Orthodox Jew and become Orthodox than that their child was marrying a non-Jew and was going to lead a secular existence...

...Thus, almost imperceptibly, the Jewish agenda became indistinguishable from the liberal agenda, and Isaiah and Jeremiah came to be seen as the spiritual forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...So Jews devised a compromise: Instead of repudiating Judaism, they redefined it...

...Thus it has come about that in Reform Judaism, the largest branch of American Judaism and the one that has gone the furthest in recasting itself along prophetic lines, the intermarriage rate currently stands at 6o percent and climbing...

...With the trend for the future clearThe American Spectator • June 1997 77 ly in the direction of an ever increasing number of mixed marriages and with such mixed couples, if they decide to affiliate, disproportionately choosing the Reform ternple as their spiritual home (or as one of their spiritual homes...

...I f Prophetic Judaism has promoted the political liberalization of the Jewish community, it has simultaneously encouraged what can only be called its religious Christianization...

...Undoubtedly, the high rate of Christian-Jewish intermarriage that is largely responsible for this looming demographic debacle is yet another manifestation of American "exceptionalism": In the Old Country, Christians persecuted Jews...

...More recently the sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab of Brandeis University warned that the Jewish community would be reduced to a 'hard core minimum' of one-half its present size in two generations, or about 40 years...

...Where there's a will, there is always a rationalization...

...In addition, they feared that too-scrupulous an adherence to Jewish practice might provoke the very anti-Semitism they had come here to escape...

...Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America Elliott Abrams Free Press / 237 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan lthough best known today for his A leading role in formulating United States policy toward Central America, Elliott Abrams held several key State Department positions during the Reagan era, including Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights...

...I was also struck by how Jewish Abrams was—not religiously (I had no idea what his religious beliefs were), but rather in the sense that the Jews and their problems were obviously matters that greatly concerned him...

...Failure to do so, he warns, will have the most dire consequences...

...In its scorn and contempt for Rabbinic Judaism, Prophetic Judaism has more than a little in common with traditional Christian attitudes—and this at a time when contemporary Christian views have undergone an amazing, and from a Jewish viewpoint, extremely welcome transformation...

...The German socialist leader, August Bebel, once called anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools...

...76 June 1997 • The American Spectator For the East European immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century, the Rabbinic Judaism in which they had been raised proved most inconvenient, interfering with their eager attempts to take advantage of the many opportunities their new home offered...

...Abrams agrees with Rabbi Michael Meyer, who pointed out in 1993 that Despite some opposition, one [Reform] congregation after another has reached out to non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages by taking them in, not merely as welcome guests, but as full members, sometimes also as officers of the congregation, as religious school teachers or as ritual participants...

...The "essence" of Judaism, they declared, was not the numerous laws and precepts that defined Rabbinic Judaism, but rather the high social ideals and thirst for righteousness that, in their view, characterized Prophets' approach to Judaism...

...But according to Abrams, Jewish enthusiasm for intermarriage is also the unanticipated by-product of a fateful theological change —the shift from "Rabbinic Judaism" to "Prophetic Judaism...

...the influence of persons with a directly personal link to Christianity will necessarily increase...

...A 1988 Los Angeles Times telephone survey, for example, asked Jews in that city which among three qualities did they "consider most important to your Jewish identity": social justice, Israel, or religious observance...

...Abrams wonders how far things will go: "Is a lobby Christmas tree alongside the menorah, or a recitation of the Lord's Prayer by the Christian spouse during some religious ceremony in the temple, any longer unthinkable...

...Rabbinic Judaism, which has regulated Jewish existence for over a thousand years, is based upon strict adherence to God's Law as revealed in the Torah, elaborated in the Talmud, and explicated by the rabbis...

...Much water has flowed through the Jordan since the prophets first preached, and quite a few Christians have decided that "doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God" is what religion is all about...

...But is it possible for American Jews, steeped in a secular culture that celebrates radical individualism, to return to a Rabbinic Judaism that even their grandparents found too confining...

...But this distinction—between the vital and trivial elements in Jewish Law—is foreign to Rabbinic Judaism...