The Life of the Ever-Dying People

...This he says in his essay, "Israel, the Ever-Dying People...

...They may have come from a very strict way of life, but their children rarely took up that way of life...

...Israel has indulged so much in the fear of its end, that its constant vision of the end helped it to overcome every crisis, to emerge from every threatening end as a living unit, though much wounded and reduced...

...The luxurious melancholy will paralyze us and make us think we have a power over the future independent of what we do in the present...

...If it is true that we are not dying, and I do not think we are, even though, in this place or in that, there will be drastic changes, then what is happening to us...

...Those great Jews, whom we regard as important inaugurators of Jewish values and ideas...

...And if that is the case—if Judaism is deprived of its centrality as a way of life, so that the simplest Jewish rites are totally alien—then what is left...

...Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up...

...Kimberly in its day, Providence in its day, Afula in its day, no less, no more than the great centers of our past...

...Rawidowicz spells this out: "He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel's chain...

...But what a glorious interval, what a splendid in-between...

...Numbers hide something more difficult to face...

...Then we shall appreciate what we have and so understand how much better we can be...

...Hearing them, we learn that the luxury of melancholy and the habit of self-pity do not withstand examination...

...In anticipating the end, it became its master...

...For if we fear we are dying, we take those protective measures which will secure our future...

...These are the achievements of the elite, of the people in scholarship and in Jewish studies, in political life, in business...

...Each generation grieved not only for itself but also for the great past which was going to disappear for ever, as well as for the future of unborn generations who would never see the light of day...

...Rawidowicz says, "A nation dying for thousands of years means a living nation...

...If, therefore, we look at the Jewish world around us, it is difficult not to engage in that classic and characteristic exercise of seeing ourselves as disappearing...

...Is there not something to place on the other side of the balance...

...What matters is not whether there is, or will one day be, a final resting place...

...We believe it in our small communities and in our large, in Africa, in Europe and in Latin America, in Australia, here in the United States, and, in some ways, even in the State of Israel...

...Why is it that we witness this dread, this foreboding, this sense of impending doom...

...This generally accepted pattern, for all its faults, is something which has endured in America and does endure today...

...American Jews have achieved a capacity to make their wishes known and to persuade the larger political community to take these wishes seriously...

...So Rawidowicz was correct in describing our generation...

...Our task, therefore, is to find a way of living with our own mortality, of accepting what cannot be changed, and of living out our destiny with dignity and maturity...

...But we turn out to be more than competitive, as proved by the numerous appointments of American Jews, and American-trained Jews, in the fields of Jewish learning in Israeli universities...

...In my own community, as in so many others, the Jews grow old, their children have moved to the larger cities, there is no vision, there is no leadership, there is no sense of possibility, there is no energy to build...

...There was a leading poet of the Haskalah, who wrote (cited also by Rawidowicz), "For whom do I labor...

...For while it is true that there will likely be no Jewish community at all in Bloemfontein in the year 2000, and none in Kimberly by 1990, and perhaps none in a half-dozen or so American cities where communities now exist, that obviously does not mean that there will be no communities anywhere...

...I frankly do not know, because the Jews I see find little to sustain their Jewish daily lives...

...That may be natural, but I think there is a price to be paid, and it should be specified...

...Most Jews pay their Jewish dues, both social and psychological, and their philanthropic taxes as well...

...What matters is that in the meanwhile, the people endures, wherever it may be...

...He despaired, because he could not see...

...To be very blunt: in this country, most Jews get little personal satisfaction either out of being Jewish or out of Judaism...

...If we may go back to the premonitions of Jewish dissolution of the 1920's, we gain hope and not discouragement at the achievements even of the 1930'sand 1940's...

...This is an achievement...

...In our own time, for example, we need only look at the small Jewish communities to Jacob Neusner, University Professor, Professor of Religious Studies and the Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Religious Studies at Brown University, is a contributing editor of moment...

...many report that they have never had a "best" or a really "good" Jewish experience...

...we are not happy with the caliber of leadership...

...I mean what is left for those to come...

...Now when you consider the demands that being Jewish makes upon us, the demands to be different from the majority, to marry other Jews, to eat different food and live a different sort of life, you must wonder whether it is worth doing all these things just to participate in a folk culture which cannot yield decent cooking...

...they do not live Jewish daily lives...

...The Jewish people too is dying...

...The point is that the way of being Jewish which we know today is our own way...

...That is, the immigrant generation was a success in the shaping of a generation at home in America, and that was the immigrant generation's highest aspiration, and naturally so...

...When you ask graduating college students "What is your best and your worst Jewish experience...

...Who needs it...

...What matters is not that there are Jews in this place or in that, but that there are Jews...

...There is a sad rou-tineness to being Jewish, a passivity and dependence upon others...

...So Gordon despaired, when Bialik, also Tchernichovsky, and yet others were coming to the fore...

...But if you ask people, "What is it about being Jewish that you genuinely enjoy...

...it was not bequeathed to us by the immigrant generation...

...When you consider that learning to us is the object of labor, that we are not raised in Jewish texts and in the Hebrew language, you realize that even for us to be competitive with the Israelis is an achievement...

...I do not mean to praise it, but I also do not think it is time to bury it...

...Rawidowicz has this to say: "I am often tempted to think that this fear of cessation in Israel was fundamentally a kind of protective individual and collective emotion...

...Here I think we have to point to an achievement so obvious that we cannot reckon with its worth: we have learned how to form and transmit some form of a Jewish pattern of life in this country...

...Who will tell me the future, will tell me that I am not the last poet of Zion, and you my last readers...

...Now when we contemplate the American Jewish community, we follow this same convention, this ritualistic melancholy...

...As much as any prior generation in all of Jewish history, more, perhaps, than most, we believe about ourselves that "with us the great tradition ends...

...Perhaps to be surprised by what we have, we have to fear for the future, so that we may deem remarkable and amazing the small attainments of the hour...

...Yet another achievement of American Jewry is its present political alertness...

...What the children got from the parents, by way of a Jewish way of life, was a folk culture of rather unimpressive character...

...And perhaps to feel that our generation is more genuinely entitled to the premonition of death than any that came before...

...Thus no catastrophe could ever take this end-fearing people by surprise, so as to put it off its balance, still less to obliterate it—as if Israel's incessant preparation for the end made this very end absolutely impossible...

...It did not come from Heaven...

...But the real problem, of course, is not so much numbers, and everyone knows it...

...And a Jewish way of life reduced to aspects of ethnic culture is hopeless...

...I do not mean what is left for the living...

...For one thing, American Jews have shaped that mode of Jewishness which is found useful throughout the Jewish world of the Golah...

...But when you consider that the fathers and mothers and the grandparents of the present generation were entirely unable to transmit their mode of being Jewish to their children, you realize what has been accomplished...

...It was something people did for themselves...

...If we remember the fears of the 19th century rabbis and scholars, we shall be pleasantly surprised at the disproof of those fears...

...We count too few...

...understand its development...

...Indeed, none of the propositions I have laid out is particularly startling...

...If we become persuaded that we are doomed, we shall cease those healthy efforts at self-criticism and those successful efforts at self-improvement which already have made so much difference...

...For . another, there is, at this very time, an extraordinary renaissance of Jewish intellectual life, Jewish thought, Jewish scholarship, Jewish learning, and Jewish teaching, and it is happening in America and Canada...

...There is a sense of ending, of death...

...It is an important question, because so long as our thoughts are melancholy, we shall be paralyzed and find ourselves too tired to do the work of the day...

...Not long ago, I lectured in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of the Republic of South Africa, where within five years a community of 300 families has become one of 195...

...For all the talk of death, there are important signs of life to notice...

...It is clear that five years from now, there will not be 100...

...It is not wise to dwell too much upon the future, as though it were more than what, in substantial measure, we make of it...

...But it has taken a long time and will take a long time to do it...

...But the immigrant generation transmitted nothing, beyond personal example, of a Jewish way of life...

...each comes to the fore, each passes on...

...What shall we say of us all...

...No, no, not only because it ought not be, because it is not...

...One thing is clear: that this mode of Judaism and this expression of Jewishness are something we can transmit to our children...

...the answers are not encouraging...

...Things we could not do thirty years ago we can do today...

...It was in part the second, and in part the third generation of American Jews which found their way to a mode of Judaism and an expression of Jewishness such as we now know...

...What we fear will happen we shall make happen...

...The Jews can go forward as a group, and Judaism as a religion, even if we are not so numerous as we currently are...

...A few have gone to the State of Israel, a few to this country, and many to Johannesburg and Cape-Town...

...And our forefathers and mothers did not create a mode of Judaism and an expression of Jewishness which they could transmit to their children...

...The thing that troubles is the absence, within Jewry, of sizable numbers of people who derive any personal joy and meaning from being Jewish...

...It is not hard to see how such a gloomy perspective has gripped our people...

...But that is the only value I can see in the obsession with "the end of the Jewish people" and with annihilation from within...

...Today, apart from a few European-trained scholars who survive, the State of Israel is second in Jewish scholarship of the creative kind to American Jewry, in most, though not all, of the fields of Jewish learning...

...Why is it that we see ourselves as a dying people, we who look back upon the longest continuous history among all the peoples of the world...

...Why be Jewish in order to get a belly ache...

...So long as a demographic point of no return has not been crossed, the community may endure...

...These traits, more than declining numbers, are deeply disturbing, for they mean that Judaism will soon lose the vitality it still enjoys, that larger number of Jews will lose even the tenuous relationship they currently maintain...

...Some I first spoke of as long as twenty years ago...

...We have lived in many places, and none is holier than the next...

...Do we endure...

...Where is Judaism to find the inner strength, the substance rooted in the lives of people, for the coming generations...

...we find nothing but decay...

...Our incessant dying means uninterrupted living, rising, standing up, beginning anew...

...The immigrants, to name one thing, used Yiddish, but their children did not...

...We have to take into account as well the demographic facts facing American Jewry at large, the State of Israel's loss of one out of every ten of its population to other countries (over 300,000 out of 3 million Israelis live outside the State) and equivalent figures for assimilation, marriage out of Jewry, a low birth rate, and similar, disheartening phenomena all over the Jewish world...

...And we now may be reasonably certain that there will be Jews in America at that time and for some time thereafter...

...And what matters still more is that there be Jews of quality and of character...

...I wonder how many people realize that, two or three generations ago, most people were fairly sure there would be no Jews in America by the end of the twentieth century...

...But during the very time of Y. L. Gordon, who wrote these lines, Haim Nahman Bialik was growing up...

...Nor is the decline of populations restricted to the smaller communities...

...We have to learn how to die, so that, in the interval, we may do a good job of living...

...It is a sin for a Jew to despair...

...But if being Jewish is not an everyday thing, then being Jewish no longer is a way of living...

...These centuries are today considered by us as a kind of flowering of Jewish thought and life...

...And all name "Hebrew school" as their worst...

...Let me return to Rawidowicz, for he stated this point very well: "One often gets the impression that many...

...of the spiritual leaders and spokesmen of traditional Israel in the last centuries saw before them the imminent disappearance of the Sabbath, the end of tefillin, piety, yirat shamayim (fear of heaven) and faith in general...

...The great Jewish philosopher, Simon Rawidowicz, who died just two decades ago, gives us an important insight into ourselves when he says, "The world makes many images of Israel, but Israel makes only one image of itself, that of a being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing...

...This is yet another insight we owe to Professor Rawidowicz, that the self-understanding of the Jewish people is part of its protection...

...Obviously, none of us is satisfied with that pattern, nor can we even be proud of it...

...From the moment of birth we are destined to death...

...Our "ever-dying" community is also a living community, and before we wrap ourselves in a smothering shroud, there are fundamental criticisms of the melancholy perspective that need to be heard...

...Bialik for his part also saw himself as the end of the end, and a convention in the Hebrew writing of the first half of this century—the century which saw the creation of the State of Israel and the renaissance of the Hebrew language—is that these are the last Jewish writers, writing for the last Jews...

...We have to regard everything Jewish and enduring as remarkable...

...It has its faults, but it is surely not a negligible achievement that we have found a way...

...And it seems to me that while there will be changes, even changes we may not understand or approve, still, in the end, we shall be very long in dying, whatever happens in this place or that place, however much it means to us in particular, where we happen to be at some one moment...

...saw themselves as the last guardians of a treasure that would soon disappear forever...

...What we have to learn from our fears for our own future is to look deeply into an unsatisfactory, but not hopeless, present...

...There, too, the evidence is plain—and depressing...

...I think there is a great deal, though we shall not appreciate our accomplishments and gain strength from them if we wish to luxuriate in self-pity...

...So Yiddish died out...