The Holocaust No Longer the Foundation of Our Unity
SCHULWEIS, HAROLD M.
ON MY MIND The Holocaust No Longer the During the past 50 years the dominant psychic reality for Jews has been the Holocaust. It has fastened our variety together, staved off serious internal...
...What is at stake is the nature of the Jewish state—whether it retains its democratic character and its open society or whether it turns into a coercive, monolithic society...
...The Holocaust confirms a Jewish metaphysics that finds a fissure in the human species, a primordial cleavage out of the bowels of our ancestors that fatefully divides "them" from "us...
...Nor will it come by imposition of a uniform theology or orthopraxy...
...The Holocaust is but the most recent and most dreadful event in the recurrent struggle between ' 'their" world and ours...
...Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai, in the halcyon days of Rome, warned that the roads, viaducts and statues of Roman civilization were but cosmetic facades of its cruelty and suppression...
...The non-Orthodox must not fall into the split-thinking trap that springs either/or alternatives: either halachah or secularism...
...Jews who belong must be seen as more than solicitors, donors and dues-payers...
...We envied the openness and artlessness of their Jewish dress and dialect...
...He and his son escaped into a cave for 12 years to preserve the purity of the tradition...
...The mirror of God is one...
...According to a recent report in the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, the winner of an Israeli prize in Judaica, stated that he supported "the application of the halachah that a Gentile should not live in Jerusalem...
...But the glue is no longer holding...
...And now that the dispute has blown over, the Jewish establishment, fearful lest the ultra-Orthodox insult affect contributions, argues for a return to the status-quo-ante rhetoric—"we are one...
...Am I commanded to return his lost property, and not stand idly by as his blood is shed...
...The Kulturkampf is reflected in our crisis of definition...
...A battered people that had been screened, separated and lined up by sadistic enemies in rows for life and for death had little heart for drawing new lines of exclusion...
...That excluding definition does not include "them...
...What is relevant is the contemporary influence of Jewish fundamentalism, rooted in a thinking that separates "them" from "us...
...But with the Israeli elections of 1988 and the revelations of the political and monetary clout of the Lubavitcher rebbe and his allies, the Jewish community has been forced to take a second look...
...There is already a growing alienation between Jewish groups who do not speak to each other...
...Is it for him that I may violate the Sabbath, if he needs me to extricate him from the pit...
...That dichotomy is metaphysical, not historical...
...Exegesis in a land where rabbinic interpretations forms the political culture of society is not confined to the private domain...
...The Kulturkampf will affect how we deal with ourselves...
...Definitions are accepted by common agreement...
...It spills over from divisions between "them" and "us" to divisions among "us...
...the ultra-Orthodox sought to appease the protesters by claiming that the issue affects only a few converts or the egos of the non-Orthodox rabbis...
...Behind the proposed amendment to the Law of Return is a challenge to modern Jewry that could create a religious renaissance and a more realistic approach to Jewish unity...
...Their" world is not limited to the arcane universe of idolaters and star-worshippers...
...Some rabbinic authorities today base their rulings on the medieval rabbinic commentaries of Rambam and Rash-bam...
...We can no longer refrain from examining the cultural roots of our agitation...
...Federations and community centers, as well as synagogues, must enlarge their Jewish agenda to include spiritual and cultural concerns...
...it will not be stilled by the tactics that minimize or deny it...
...Moreover, non-Orthodoxy must not simply be anh'-Orthodox...
...They prescribe and they proscribe...
...Jews felt themselves existentially defined: A Jew is defined by what hurts him or her and the Jewishness of a state is defined by what it does to alleviate that hurt...
...In the face of our tragic national homelessness and helplessness, who would cavil about legal definitions that might exclude borderline cases from entering as Jewish citizens...
...If we Jews are to engage in authentic dialogue with one another, each must take the other seriously...
...Is my neighbor the Christian, the Moslem or Arab who lives beside me...
...For decades, Jewish religious, spiritual and halachic concerns have been relegated largely to the Orthodox community or to an academic elite...
...Moreover, the definition of a basic concept like "Who is a Jew" invariably affects a host of corollary definitions...
...If Israel turns its resentment against the Gentile institutions that have betrayed the Jewish people, into contempt for the whole of Western civilization, Israel will become a world without windows...
...Paradoxically, the Holocaust, which for so long functioned as the transcendent Foundation of Our Unity argument for Jewish solidarity, justifies the great divide between Jews...
...Conservative, Reform and Recon-structionist Jews must place theological issues high on their agenda...
...It now spills over to infect and separate "us...
...Jews cannot afford to see themselves merely as custodians of the material culture of Judaism...
...Definitions under normal conditions are conventional...
...The unity of Jewish peoplehood will not be sustained solely by memories of the Holocaust...
...they include and they exclude...
...We must begin to appreciate the multiple modes of halachah, the various, even conflicting interpretations of sacred texts, the richness and diversity in conceiving the character of divinity, and the ways of divine revelation...
...This is not the place to argue about the scholarship of these rabbis or whether their conclusions are correctly based on scriptural (Deuteronomy 7:2) and tal-mudic grounds...
...But when its theology grows teeth, when its rulings threaten the conduct of conscience of the non-Orthodox, its songs and dances lose their innocence...
...Another Ha'Aretz report tells us that the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Mordecai Eliyahu, interprets halachah as forbidding Jews in Israel from selling apartments—"not even one"—to Gentiles...
...As long as Orthodoxy seemed impotent, secularized Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora applauded the quaintness, eccentric charm and enviable enthusiasm of Chasidic groups, as if they were characters out of Fiddler on the Roof...
...We and our perceptions are many...
...we compensated by generously contributing to Orthodox causes we would never follow in our own lives...
...They declare that "thy neighbor" refers exclusively to b'nai amecha, the kinsmen of thy people...
...They" are the perennial persecutors, and "we" the eternal victims, the seed of Isaac bound to the altar...
...they are no longer descriptions of what things are, but prescriptions of what things ought to be...
...Even at the Passover celebration of Jewish liberation, we are reminded: "In every generation they rise to destroy us...
...It has fastened our variety together, staved off serious internal conflicts, kept the lid on the seething cauldron of our ideological divisions...
...It exposed a certain failure of Jewish adhesion that reflects the early signs of the exhaustion of the Holocaust as the binding myth of Jewish unity...
...When 600,000 Jews stood at the foot of Sinai, each was convinced that God addressed him individually...
...The subtleties of theological and halachic definitions were irrelevant...
...That the sources they rely on refer to idolaters who cannot or should not be lumped together with Christians and Moslems (as Rabbi Menachem Hameiri in the 14th century recognized), is not the point here...
...The paradigm that produced that primitive schism between "them" and "us" is contagious...
...It affects who, according to the law, is a ' 'gentile," who, according to the law, is "thy neighbor" and ' 'thy brother" in Scripture...
...It is the mind-set reflected in the advice of former Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, who, when asked what a Jew should do who owns a Bible in which the Old and New Testaments are bound together, replied that the Jew should tear the two apart and burn the New Testament...
...The latter, incidentally, include modern or neo-Orthodox elements for whom the pull between separatism from modern culture and integration within it is particularly stressful...
...either Sabbath, kashrut and festivals according to the reading of orthopraxy (traditional practice), or rejection of ritual altogether...
...That may be one of the gravest conclusions to be drawn from the ' 'Who is a Jew" controversy that erupted with such volcanic force after the Israeli elections and before the so-called unity government was formed...
...At this writing, it appears that the Law of Return will not be amended, but henceforth the depths of the schism will not be easily covered up...
...How, for example, shall we understand that noble verse, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18...
...Ironically, we may have been unable to prevent mixed marriages, but we have won the battle to prevent Orthodox and non-Orthodox from fraternizing and marrying each other...
...Our traumatic kinship of suffering helped form the Law of Return...
...Now, 50 years later, appeals to the memory of that shared suffering failed to form an existential coalition of a people that knew itself as one...
...To confuse theological indifference with tolerance is an obstruction to genuine dialogue...
...Who is my ' 'neighbor" I am commanded to love...
...They" derive from the seed of Cain, Ishmael, Esau, Edom, Amalek...
...But something fundamental and pervasive in Jewish life has been disturbed...
...Who is the "brother" I am mandated to help...
...either the doctrine of Torah revelation from Sinai or no revelations at all...
...What is called for is a renewed theology of peoplehood, with a secure attachment to the sources of our history, that also embraces multiple life-commentaries on the texts of our tradition...
...A highly secularized non-Orthodox Jewry went about its own life, doing good, celebrating life passages, raising money, but abdicating the serious exercise of Jewish practice and theological belief to the "religious...
...either Orthodox observance or nonobservance...
...The controversy no longer commands headlines, but the episode bears further introspection...
...The dupes among us may be fooled as they were in Greek and Roman days...
...Each face and each voice must be respected...
...When the religious right in Israel sought to amend the Law of Return by adding three little words, ' 'according to halachah," to the definition of a Jew, some trivializers denied the seriousness of the conflict...
...Harold M. Schulweis...
...It is no longer surprising to have a priest or minister as a guest speaker at synagogue services, but it is an anomaly to find an Orthodox rabbi speaking at a non-Orthodox synagogue...
...When the world they describe is, however, riven, definitions are challenged...
...we sometimes felt half guilty over our own Jewish diffidence and indifference...
...Beyond the Jewishness of the state, what is at stake in this cultural struggle is the way we understand our own Jewish character and our relationship with our Gentile environment...
...The Pesikla d'Rab Kahana explained this unity in diversity by a metaphor: God is like a mirror...
...The modern followers of Rabbi Simeon similarly dismiss Western civilization as a contaminated and contaminating culture...
...Moreover, exegesis is not simply a theoretical sport...
...Fundamentalism without political power is fascinating to observe...
...Secular Jews should re-examine the alternatives to Orthodox theology they have often cavalierly dismissed...
...Their" world, unfortunately, includes the contemporary world of liberal Western civilization and its seductive sancta: democracy, pluralism, humanism, science, secularism...
...Other rabbinic authorities go even further: They argue that because the neighbor to be loved is "like thyself," therefore a traditionalist has no obligation to love fellow Jews who are not as observant as "thyself...
...The crisis of definition and of exegesis is part of an emerging cultural struggle that will determine what Judaism is and what it ought to be...
...Until the end of history, Jews will be betrayed and will suffer from "their" contempt...
...Observers in the Jewish community sense the beginnings of a Kulturkampf— a cultural struggle over the Jewish character of the state and over the character of Judaism as well...
...This is especially important for the non-Orthodox, for whom pluralism has often served as excuse for our lack of theological self-awareness and sophistication...
...For these modern followers of Rabbi Simeon, today's "assimilating" Jews—who range all the way from the "moderate" Orthodox to outright secularists—betray the purity of the authentic tradition and threaten its continuity...
...According to Rabbi Waldenberg, "In order to apply the halachah correctly, we should have to expel all Gentiles from Jerusalem and purify it completely...
...The Jewish community is dichotomized—between the loyalists to a fundamentalist legal tradition, and the accommodationists who find value in Western culture and style...
...They despise contemporary culture...
...Jews must learn to take their own movements and ideologies seriously...
...It is a catastrophic view that colors our history—past, present and future: Jew-hatred is endowed with an "ever again" immortality...
...A de facto apartheid has segregated Jewish children into denominations that do not play together, learn together and, most assuredly, do not pray together...
...they oppose Jews who seek to harmonize Western culture with our own traditions...
...Like the supervision of kaskrut, the entire realm of Jewish religious law and interpretation has been assigned to the jurisdiction of the Orthodox...
...A thousand eyes look into it and each discovers the reflected image of divinity...
...Again, split thinking is contagious...
...It has flesh and blood consequences...
Vol. 14 • June 1989 • No. 4
