We've Won; So What?
Neusner, Jacob
we've won; so what? We asked the federations to be instruments of Jewish survival, instead of engines of assimilation-ism, and they are. We demanded that the U.J.A. build the Jewish loyalties of...
...I should guess that the intermarriage rate will now level off and perhaps even decline slightly...
...We wanted to see the Holocaust remembered, and so it is...
...What is it all about in that terribly critical time and place...
...Keep in mind that, in this same period, the great and orderly polity of antiquity came to an end...
...In those days we used to analyze the allocations of federations and demonstrate how the money of Jewry is used to starve institutions and organizations which make Jews Jewish and to support those which are non-sectarian...
...And it is insufficient...
...Consider that the first seven centuries of our era saw the rise of the three great religions of the West: Christianity, Islam, and the form of Judaism we have known...
...There were jokes about the three religions of democracy: Catholicism, Protestantism, and non-sectarianism...
...We sought to focus on Zionist perspectives as the center of Jewish community discourse, with the issue of Israel at the heart of our collective life...
...All the words we proposed as fighting slogans are now cliches, because our slogans have become programs...
...Then you realize that it was in a time of revolutionary change that the classical definitions of what we want to sustain and the reasons for sustaining it took shape...
...I have been a false prophet, and I know it now...
...Now that we have done all that we can do to insure our endurance as a distinct and distinctive people on earth, so what...
...Its holy books also say why they should do so, and, still more important, what they should do as an enduring people...
...build the Jewish loyalties of younger people, rather than relying on the Jewish loyalties of the older generation, and it does...
...What I have in mind is not complicated...
...There it stands, at the very center...
...I suspect the reason is that those who wanted out have gotten out...
...But I should be able to tell people what lay at the center and heart of Jewish existence for times past, and even suggest what may find a place in the heart and soul of Jewry now...
...We have won...
...But why do I feel a sense of distance and emptiness, incompletion, when I should perceive fulfillment...
...Why is it that God should be portrayed as a master—not merely revealer—of Torah, and that the angels in heaven should be described as disciples of Torah...
...We have been heard...
...When we have done our Jewish thing, how are we changed...
...I have a sense that we have come just about as far as an ideology of Jewishness-as-survival can take us...
...We appealed to the memory of the Holocaust...
...What is the meaning, in its setting, of that extraordinarily influential document...
...Its effects are laudable...
...For I have the unhappy sense that the things I laid before all who would listen twenty years ago were not the right things...
...Our agendum has been adopted...
...Now I do not suggest for one minute that the next stage in our collective adventure in North America consists of building more yeshivas or (among the modernists, like myself) going off and getting Ph.D.'s in Judaic studies...
...Lo, we have havurot, and some even call themselves "fellowships...
...Among the doers and makers of Jewry, what to us was fresh and important has become the norm—and even normal...
...The ideology of peoplehood-and-history, whether expressed in fund drives or in classrooms, calls forth the giving of money and the learning of historical facts...
...As I reflect on the work of nearly two decades, I find in it some continuing themes, of which the most important is this: How is it that the inner life, the life of the mind and of people learning, should have come to the fore as the single most important (though not the only) expression of piety and faith in Judaism...
...It is only that the things we repeated in articles in obscure places and in important ones, in speeches in every Jewish setting, began to make sense to many people...
...And they listened to us...
...I could not tell people why they should be Jewish, but somehow, it is clear, they know the answer...
...For two decades I was a minor prophet of this Judaic renaissance...
...What is it that we want to sustain and why...
...the document is the Talmud...
...But they do not mean what I thought they would mean...
...But what have we won...
...These things which twenty years have brought into being are what I wanted them to be...
...In virtually all important universities at which sizable numbers of Jewish students are located it is possible to take many worthwhile courses in Jewish subjects...
...We were the first to say what, in time, many would be glad to hear, what would, in time, become an almost conventional wisdom...
...We evoked the achievements of the State of Israel...
...What I prophesied and preached has come to pass, but what has come to pass is not really very important...
...That ideology is necessary...
...All over the country, federations take a hand in the revival and improvement of Hillel on the campuses...
...How are our lives more serene, our inner beings more whole and complete...
...Jacob Neusner is University Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and the Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies at Brown University...
...We looked for means of achieving meaningful social relationships within Jewish community structures, and, in my case, I called for the re-creation of the ancient havurot, which I translated, "fellowships...
...There are large gaps in our inner lives as Jews which are yet to be filled...
...But I wish I now might hear the question, "Now that we are Jewish and plan to stay that way, so what...
...And I find all that I have described above accurate—and disappointing and empty...
...I am only pointing out that there must be more of an answer than we have yet found to the question of what we do when we have succeeded in securing a fair measure of continuity...
...We called forth recognition of the meaning of our own historical experience—Holocaust, rebuilding...
...The measure of true prophecy, we recall, is that what the true prophet says will be comes to be...
...I don't hear that question anymore...
...But did we ask the right question...
...We wanted Jewish learning to percolate upward to the campuses...
...Jacob Neusner We wanted more help for Hil-lel...
...Obviously, we have yet much progress to make along the paths we currently travel...
...Why is it that Moses should be described as a rabbi, a man who learns Torah...
...I am not sorry that we no longer ask, "Why be Jewish...
...I have spent my scholarly life asking these questions of the most influential period and document in the history of Judaism...
...The period is Judaism in late antiquity, from the destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Islam...
...We pleaded for the improvement of Jewish education and for attracting talented young people to careers in that field, for greatly increasing the support of Jewish education on the part of federations and welfare funds...
...learning how to be Jewish, asking "why" became pointless...
...I remember in the 1950's and 1960's the one question I would hear wherever I lectured was, "Why should I be Jewish...
...The list is very long...
...How so...
...Now it is time for us to ask the next question, and to pursue the next answer: for what...
...It is to answer that question that Judaic scholarship in all its forms, historical, theological, literary, is brought into being...
...For Judaism not only says that the Jews should continue as a distinctive group...
...How are we deeper people and wiser people...
...I do not think we can be more of a Jewish Jewish community than we are now...
...We did not want to be the last Jews on earth—in North America, at least—and we are not...
...And all of the positive programs and policies have not really attended to those inner questions which await attention...
...What does it mean to us to be Jews and part of a continuity of Jews...
...Shall I continue...
...In seeking to answer that question, we stumbled across ways of Jewishness that satisfied, for a time...
...That is not to say any one of our small number was heard...
...Back in the 1950's, twenty years ago, a handful of lonely voices, taking seriously the religious revival, the "return of the third generation," yet concerned at the same time with "the vanishing Jew," wanted the Jewish community to become both Jewish and Judaic...
...For I perceive, in all this success, this resurgent Jewishness and even rediscovered Judaism, an inner space, an emptiness that cannot and should not be filled solely by saving Soviet Jews, remembering the Holocaust and learning from it, making pilgrimages to the State of Israel, working for the federations, even by regular participation in synagogue life...
...We asked, and we were answered...
...His most recent books include Invitation to the Talmud and From Politics to Piety...
...But it is difficult to think of any goal we envisioned twenty years ago which is not by now part of the institutional routine of the organized Jewish community...
...I am moved by the renewal of Jewishness and the resurgence, even, of Judaism...
...How shall we remember and invent a Judaism that speaks not only to the necessity of survival of this great historic people, but that speaks also to the compelling needs of each individual Jew, of each of us who searches for meaning, for life, for understanding, for self...
Vol. 2 • September 1977 • No. 9
