The State of The Jews, 1982

Cohen, Gerson

THE STAIE OF THE JEWS. 1984 Reflections on Jewish normality, agony and glory GERSON COHEN For two hundred years, Jews have obsessively sought to achieve two goals—the collective normality of the...

...Professor Dan Miron, in his remarkable work of scholarship, A Traveller Disguised, shows how modern Yiddish literature was born of two circumstances: First, the intelligentsia considered it futile to attempt to reach the masses in Hebrew, and so they employed the only vehicle they thought might have an impact— Yiddish...
...Withal, there are areas with which we are still grappling...
...Secular Labor Zionism lost its appeal when it proved incapable of attracting Diaspora Jews to migrate to Israel, when it showed itself devoid of any idealistic vision or solution anent the Arab problem, when, above all, it demonstrated its impotence to inspire its youth with the Zionist fervor the Orthodox youth movements were able to communicate...
...Why should all this matter...
...The sovereign Jewish State of Israel may, in 1982, have aroused Jewish anger and/or guilt—but the new Jewish self-esteem that is now 34 years old remained intact...
...Nor are they politically innocent...
...Here, a selection from the one issued to the Jews of Vienna on January 2 of that year: "As it is our goal to make the Jewish nation useful and serviceable to the State mainly through better education and enlightenment of its youth, as well as by directing them to the sciences, the arts and crafts," Jews are encouraged to send their children to German schools...
...It was the consequence of the vision, the courage and determination of the founders of the great Jewish defense organizations of the Diaspora—of the Alliance Israelite Universelle that refused to be quiet about the kidnapping and conversion to Christianity of a Jewish baby in Livorno in 1859, of the American Jewish Committee, whose German Jewish leaders—"yahudim" with silk stockings—decided in 1906 that they could not keep silent about the policies of a czar that had resulted i three years earlier in a little pogrom in ! Kishineff...
...So our scholars are developing an ever-growing common vocabulary, literally and spiritually...
...Gordon to David Ben Gurion— intact...
...Handbook, expressions of derision for Jewish middle-class values, virtually identical in their self-hatred, obscene in their spirit—and authored by Jews...
...Culture Our acceptance as a legitimate component group of Western culture and civilization is not due entirely to those who battled for Jewish equality (as well, be it noted, as for the equality of all minorities...
...Alas, some Jews began to agree that they should dress, talk and even walk in ways appropriate to civilized men...
...One can go from Los Angeles to Toronto, New York, Harvard and Haifa and pursue medieval Jewish history in depth and authenticity...
...III...
...I see it, I hear it, I read it everywhere...
...Now our failure here is not simply an accident, nor a consequence of our preoccupation with other concerns...
...It was the first move on the part of a Christian ruler towards the normalization of the Jews both legally and culturally...
...They would have dismissed the suggestion that Jews would one day be presidents of Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, C.C.N...
...More important still, the fact that it has been commercialized should not deter us from accomplishing that which we have yet to accomplish, the absorption of the Holocaust into our culture in a way that will generate a new Jewish perception of the Jewish experience and of the Jewish role in the world...
...What needs to be said is that the implication is still alive in the minds of many Gentiles and, alas, even Jews...
...And this is why 1982 was a year of both agony and glory, of both moral failure and of moral greatness...
...Witness Judah Leib Gordon's self-hating poetry: "Be a Jew at home, and a mentsch outside...
...Our cultural achievements here are not widely known or appreciated...
...In the same manner, the government has harnessed the appetites of the Gush Emunim, the maximalist annexationist wing of the religious Zionist parties, to its own purposes...
...The civil war that has resulted has paralyzed neo-Ortho-dox Jews, who have been very much a part of the Jewish community and of the Zionist movement since its early days...
...Ultimately, it is this insistent conscience that may, together with classical Zionist idealism, overshadow our obsession with normality...
...There, too, there is a determination to gain acceptance as a normal and legitimate people, and to participate in the shaping of Jewish policy and action...
...In its own way, that, too, is a ] sign of normality, j Although Israel and its safety are ! the central concerns of Jews every-I where, the state of the Jewish people I is determined by far more than what | happens to the Jews of Israel...
...We have come to expect that Israel should have many museums and breathtaking exhibits— but now we have such museums here in America as well...
...Jews differ sharply with regard to the searing events of 1982, and no essay, certainly not by a theologian or historian, is likely to change the reader's point of view or partisan commitments...
...As part of the private sector of North America, we now have a community that is rich with religious and cultural resources as well as with social and communal services that embrace the whole spectrum of cultural life...
...The ba'alei t'shuvah, those young people who have ostensibly returned to the Jewish fold by enrolling in the diverse yeshivot that have been set up to serve them, in fact find their fulfillment in an anti-intellectual study of the Torah, in a rejection of the world, in a hero-worship and ritualism that we easily recognize—and condemn—in others...
...Secularism Still, the eager exploitation of religious polarization, and more, the exploitation of Israel's ethnic polarization, would not themselves have been sufficient to permit the present government to come to power and to keep it...
...Let others determine whether that is normal, whether that is modern...
...In the 18th century, a new attitude began to emerge from both Gentile and Jewish quarters...
...In 1982, not back in the era of the early propagandists for Jewish self-transformation, we can encounter in the finest bookstores of the country, alongside new editions of Marcel Proust and Graham Greene, two paperbacks entitled The Jewish American Princess Handbook and The Official J.A.P...
...They are Jews, to be sure, but they are no source of strength for the Jewish people...
...Jews should walk, talk, dress and work like Gentiles without becoming Gentiles...
...The entire Jewish people was drawn into war, not only in the Middle East but also in London, Paris, Vienna and Rome...
...If they had been written by Gentiles, we would surely have asked the Anti-Defamation League to take action— and with good reason...
...they are highly sophisticated...
...Most of all, it was a year of Jewry's glory because there was shock and outrage throughout the Jewish world in the wake of a massacre for which some Jews may, in some manner, have been responsible—if only by their failure to intervene...
...Theirs was the battle to insure that Jews would be accepted as citizens as Gentiles were...
...Ironically, what they did was to write with such captivating skill that they ended up convincing the masses of Jews that Yiddish was as much a vehicle of beauty and a tool of literature as French, Polish, German or Russian and popular Yiddish, with its great artistic fruits—I...
...For all their passionate devotion to learning and to their sacred literature, they remain a narrow-minded group without a culture and without the normal habits associated with a truly civilized people...
...so it is especially important to remind ourselves that as recently as 32 years ago, there were only two full-time chairs in American universities held by Jewish scholars whose field of instruction was exclusively in Judaica: Harry Austryn Wolfson at Harvard and Salo Wittemayer Baron at Columbia—and no more...
...But we cannot say that we have assimilated the Holocaust theologically or liturgi-cally, as we have every other major turning point in our history, from the destruction of the Temple to the Crusades to the expulsion from Spain all the way down to the modern Zionist secular rebirth...
...So in order to be truly modern, the Jews were required to hold Jewish culture in contempt...
...We are today a people as divided as we are united, and— alas—our divisions are not just about matters political and military, but also on issues that underlie the fundamental political-cultural-spiritual direction of our people as a whole...
...Until modern times, the Jews knew and accepted, in the words of the Gentile prophet Balaam, that they were "A people who dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations...
...Nor, for that matter, is advocacy my purpose here...
...They are not, after all, appeals to return to religion, much less to the healing of breaches...
...There is, to be sure, discrimination still, but what a far cry it is from the kind we suffered until the Second World War...
...My grandparents could not have imagined it...
...More important, the first Yiddish literateurs were all Hebraists at heart, for Hebrew, of course, was not a "jargon," a bastard dialect despised by all Gentiles and by enlightened Jews...
...In their view, the Jews were God's chosen people, elected to carry the gift of His revelation, until He would restore them to a normal existence, gather them from the four comers of the earth and restore them to the Holy Land, under a Davidic ruler, sanctified by a Temple rebuilt with its biblically-prescribed sacrificial worship restored, to work as a people the soil once tilled by their ancestors...
...Zionism, the culture of Israel, Yiddishism, the federations and community councils of the Diaspora, are all secular in their basic orientation...
...We are far from the end of our rebirth...
...More is here involved—specifically, the vacuum created by the bankruptcy of classical Labor Zionism...
...Because culture is indispensable to self-esteem, to the individual's sense of himself as part of a living group...
...That is why history is so important for understanding the behavior of so many Jews...
...No, all's not well...
...I. Normality In 1982, it was not just the State of Israel that was involved in a war with its enemies...
...That is plain...
...If you really want to be gqod to the Jews, they said, help them, pr^ss them to change their face and their character, help them to be civil and normal...
...Some pretenders to authority in academic Judaica still contend that the only aspect of the Jewish experience that deserves a place on the academic agenda is Jewish religion...
...I do not mean here only that the leaders of our institutions have largely ignored Jewish religious injunctions and postures, though that is one of the symptoms of secularization and one of the chief forms the pursuit of normality takes...
...But tens of thousands more embarked on a feverish program of religious and cultural reform...
...Without the historical background, much of Jewish behavior is quite unintelligible...
...The old flame, the age-old Jewish passion for learning, for elevation of the spirit, for translation of the old into new and contemporary terms and forms can be found everywhere...
...The Jews have gained acceptance as bearers of a genuine culture, and that marks a significant change in the attitude of American academia to the Jew and his history—and a major turning point in Jewish history...
...In the ] Diaspora, and especially in those ] countries where there are sizable Jewish populations and significant numbers of Jews committed to collective Jewish vitality and rejuvenation— religiously, culturally, communally, philanthropically—and, above all, imbued with concern for the welfare of Jews everywhere—in the Diaspora, too, the same impulses towards normality and towards control of corporate destiny can be clearly perceived...
...We are still trying to become normal, and the harder we try, the more pathetic we look...
...The Jews are now perceived by many Jews as part of "real" history, not only because they have a decisive say in the direction they take as a people, but also because they play a significant role in shaping world history...
...And still we do not earn affection or esteem...
...It was the year in which yet again, the Diaspora rallied to Israel's support—and, at the same time, made clear its deep reservations about the insensitivity of the Israeli government to the accepted foundations of Zionism and to Jewish solidarity...
...For the past two centuries, we have defined normality and the road to acceptance, both individual and collective, in terms of acculturation...
...In havurot, in synagogues, in kibbutzim, in thousands upon thousands of Jewish homes whose dignity and beauty are visible, particularly on the Shabbat...
...All this—and this is the important point—did not emerge spontaneously...
...it is no longer exclusively a branch of religious studies, to which it had for years been relegated...
...My point is that for all our attainments, we are still not normal even in our own eyes...
...it is our obsession with achieving self-esteem through integration into the family of man that offers the clue...
...Only in the 18th century, roughly about 1750, did a major transformation in this attitude begin to overcome the Jewish intelligentsia of Western Europe...
...We have come to take it for granted that there are chairs of Jewish learning in every great university of this country...
...They may often have failed to achieve all they wanted, and they may have exaggerated the importance of what they did achieve, but they never stopped fighting—and we are all the beneficiaries of their efforts...
...It ought to be, but is not, to make the Jew a proud heir to a living tradition...
...they ordain...
...So we fit, and we are normal, and out of that comes self-esteem...
...And they were strong enough and determined enough to start a renaissance of their own pre-modern and anti-modern way of life, thereby inaugurating a new chapter in the Jewish Kulturkampf...
...By 1982, it has become clear that we have achieved integration without paying the price it was once feared we would have to pay—without, that is, denying our collective reality, without betraying our communal interests...
...above all, we have sought the progressive secularization of our lives, individually and communally...
...Most simply stated, in the psyche of many leaders of the Jewish renaissance of the last two hundred years, religion has its place—even an indispensable place—but it is not the supreme arbiter of proper Jewish behavior or of the collective Jewish orientation to our national identity and mission...
...We fear that to do so would be to retreat from the modernity we have achieved here and in Israel...
...Cultural traffic with Israel has thereby become a two-way street, a street that UJA and other communal leaders should hear of but often do not...
...Our tastemakers and pacesetters, our communal leaders, were determined to be normal—a group with a modern language, education, amenities, free of perceptible medieval and particularistic religious characteristics...
...The great cost to Jewish life, the inevitable loss of life to innocent Christian and Muslim civilians and, in consequence, the temporary abandonment of Jewish morality that followed from this demonstration of normality led to a spontaneous eruption of the Jewish conscience, to a deep split amongst the Jews...
...I have quoted from this edict at some length for several reasons...
...It reflects a total capitulation to the disdainful premises that gained currency in the 18th century and increased in strength and acceptance throughout the 19th...
...This element lay largely hidden until after the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel and the acceptance of refugees into the United States after the war...
...Religion In 1982, the civil war over secularism broke out anew...
...I live close to the subject I am discussing, and that not only causes me to dwell on it at length, but also enables me to see some aspects of it that have not been adequately noted...
...In such a climate, it is difficult, if not impossible, to develop the theology and the religious rituals which alone can enable us to cope with what happened to us...
...At the same time, hidden from the view of most, our people included an intransigent, intractable and religiously fanatical and militant element...
...And still our obsession prevents us from being masters of our own destiny...
...Jewish culture can be no stronger than the self-esteem that impels Jews to support that culture...
...For us, at our best, that is what "normal" must mean...
...Yet 1982 was also the year of Israel's glory and of the glory of world Jewry...
...And resign ourselves to their political exploitation by the Israeli government, with its secular leadership...
...And we, with our smiles and our subsidies, indulge them, indulge these people for whom Bar Ilan University is too liberal, Ye-shiva University too modern...
...Gershom Scholem and Abraham Joshua Heschel, Elie Wiesel and Chaim Nachman Bialik are taught at Stanford and at Princeton...
...For there is no peace with the Moetzet G'dolei HaTorah—the Council of To-rah Sages—except on their terms...
...Instead, it is commonly believed that a normal and modern people is governed by secular values and by the machinery of communal organization...
...it is our ambivalence to Judaism, to Jewishness and to the world at large that provides the key...
...From the standpoint of the government, they are, I believe, a calculated diversion from the betrayal of Yamit and the other concessions in the Sinai...
...But that does not alter its importance...
...Any student of history, especially of American and(Soviet history, knows that no government with the capacity to act on threats to its political and military security regards its security perimeter as identical with its physical boundaries...
...The war of 1982 was different in a number of ways from all earlier wars: For the first time in their history, the Jews engaged in an aggressive war on foreign soil to which they did not even pretend to have a claim...
...I do not intend these observations to suggest an evaluation of the Begin government's behavior in Lebanon, nor a condemnation of the invasion of that country...
...And the recognition by others and by us Jews ourselves that there was a legitimate Jewish culture was late, very late, in coming...
...The events of this past year, and especially of its summer, as agonizing and confusing as they were, are quite intelligible if viewed through the prism of Jewish history, a history that is so alive, that is so much a part of the collective Jewish psyche, that it shapes both our actions and our perceptions...
...They acknowledged our kinship, but insisted that they and they alone were the Jews that mattered...
...I have in mind especially the Holocaust, which has become for many Jews their most sacred point of connection with Jewish identity and education...
...In the current climate, that means that Jewish culture will have to find new sources of support...
...Historically, the most significant aspect of all this is that Judaica has now become an accepted part of the humanities...
...The humiliating implication requires no commentary...
...The guilt of the free world for the Holocaust and the new dignity won for the Jew by the State of Israel—its political democracy, its military skill, its literature and social achievements and, above all, the image of the confident Israeli who bears his or her Jewishness without self-consciousness—have given all Jews new strength and self-esteem...
...in 1982, they have come into conflict with one another...
...Since 1782, these goals have been seen as interconnected...
...Because there is a Jewish state, with its own foreign policy, a state that deals as a sovereign nation with other sovereign nations, the Jews have ceased to be a marginal group whose fate depends largely on their usefulness to, or the whims of, their overlords...
...Whether Jews should behave normally—like the Soviets in Poland, Hungary and Afghanistan, or even like the Americans—is another matter...
...Israel behaved in a way that may or may not be regarded as wise and/or moral, but its action was certainly normal...
...To some extent, the Holocaust has become a cliche, a rather vulgarized industry intended to inspire communal solidarity...
...And yet it is with Jewish public funds that they are supported...
...Israeli scholars come here and leave a deep imprint on our schools of higher learning...
...The determination to change the face and the character of the Jews soon spread all over Western Europe, and from there to Galicia and to all of Eastern Europe...
...For otherwise they will remain a people of corrupt peddlers and sneaky misanthropes, whose diseased character is, of course, reinforced by their non-language, by Yiddish...
...In 1982, many young Israelis were irreparably traumatized by the carnage that the war they had initiated brought on...
...It is that effort, filled with conflict, that helps us, at last, to understand what happened in 1982...
...We have sought to adjust to the dominant culture of the time and the place we have lived...
...The Orthodox, to be sure, did not take this lying down...
...The instruction is offered by scholars who often match in quality and output their European immigrant and American forebears and that of their Israeli counterparts...
...It is symptomatic of our perception of normality and of the spiritual direction that the major leaders of the last two centuries of Jewish cultural expression and national rebirth have given our people...
...They fulminated and excommunicated right and left, west and east, but they were on the defensive, increasingly isolated...
...No, Israel has had no greater success in Jewish education than have we here in the Diaspora...
...Here, too, Jewish culture has become part of the fabric of American life, an enrichment of that life and an enhancement of Jewish identity and of Jewish pride...
...But don't worry—we still 'have' our Jewish identity...
...What accounts for them...
...We can have an army like all the other armies (maybe better), we can consume like all the other consumers (maybe more), we can be as empty of values as all the rest...
...One of the first acts undertaken by the Gentile authorities in order to correct the sorry political, economic and, above all, cultural condition of the Jews was the Edict of Toleration issued in several different versions early in 1782 by Emperor Joseph II of Austria...
...The obvious agony: In 1982,368 of Israel's youth lost their lives on the battlefield, and many more suffered serious injury...
...How could they, from Brest-Litovsk and a one-horse shtetl in the province of Minsk, believe or even dream that their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would fit so well...
...Since this goal required massive military action far beyond the area immediately bordering Israel, the war must be classified as an open break with traditional Jewish values...
...How imagine that we would come to a time when the Chief Judge of the State of Nebraska—Nebraska, mind you—is a Jew who puts on t'fillin at home, who goes to shul every Shab-bat, who has a kosher home...
...The purpose of Jewish education in both settings ought to be, but is not, the salvation of the Jew...
...In other words, Israel decided to become a quasi-imperialist power, for that is what it means for a nation to take upon itself the right to pass on the acceptability of the rulers of a neighboring country...
...When we support those yeshivot, we ignore the alienation from the Jewish people at large that they breed, the hostility to modernism and pluralism, the renunciation of all Jewish thought and literature...
...Look at us: We can be not only a nation like all the other nations...
...Perhaps even more important, it represented an open break with classical Zionist morality, which had repeatedly renounced aggressive war on foreign soil...
...We still carry it with us, and we still express it publicly, and we even consider it acceptable so long as it is we, and not the Gentiles, who display it...
...it is, instead, a rejection of modernity, of normality, of participation in the family of man...
...America has, in short—and it is well worth noting— supplied Israel with more than money, political support and a trickle of aliyah...
...Prejudice and hostility, on the one hand, and ignorance, on the other, die hard...
...Of course, not every university, administrator or teacher of the humanities, Jew or Gentile, is altogether happy with this new turn...
...Here, as with several other deep divisions in Israel, Mr...
...This effort to achieve control over Jewish destiny and to buttress Jewish security, because it broke with classical Jewish moral postures, was bound to result—as in fact it did—in a rupture of the solidarity of the Jewish people, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, with respect to Israeli foreign policy...
...We may yet, with God's help and our own concerted effort, prove to ourselves and to the world that so far as we, the Jews, are concerned, we seek to control our destiny and to enter what the world defines as history with the principles we have inherited from our moral teachers—from Moses to A.D...
...Hence they wrote in Yiddish to show how ugly the language and the popular culture it bespoke were...
...Indeed, one could do "more" than just "remain" Jewish...
...in Goethe's view, it was a "nasal, duck-like quack" (naseweises Nestquaecklchen...
...Those of us who remember American behavior in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and—to go back a bit further—its military and economic aid programs for Greece, Turkey and Israel itself, will not find the Israeli military action of 1982 so puzzling...
...And they do not negotiate...
...And so a faith that had been embedded within the context of a culture, and a culture that had been dependent on a faith, were sundered...
...The narrow-minded notion that Jews have a law, ritual and religion, but no real culture, has at last been overcome...
...In Germany and Austria, thousands of Jews believed that no matter what they did the improvement of their lot was hopeless unless they converted to Christianity, and convert they did...
...The settlements in Judea and Samaria—or, as the world knows the area, in the West Bank—are more the products of religious frenzy than of national security considerations...
...Y. and Queens College, that a Jew from Germany would be Secretary of State of the United States, and so on, and so on...
...The Diaspora began to show that love of and loyalty to Israel are consistent with loving criticism...
...We do not take religion, especially institutionalized religion and ritual, seriously...
...They appealed to the Jews to give up their particular and distinguishing characteristics, but not to give up their Jewish faith...
...one could be a leader in and a spokesman for the Jewish community...
...The simple fact is that today more people are studying Hebrew, Jewish thought and Jewish history at American and Canadian universities than are studying Latin and classical Greek—a situation that could scarcely have been conceived of just 50 years ago...
...And perhaps we have both failed for the same reason—simply, that neither of us is oriented to a transcendent goal that will inspire the student...
...The people in the Diaspora who were dedicated to, and responsible for, our move into the mainstream would have dismissed with a snort and a smirk the notion that the Jews are a pariah people with no influence on the direction of history, and therefore not a normal group...
...And to many, normality means, above all, that the Jewish people, after a lapse of 1,800 years, has returned to the orbit of real history...
...V. Modernity I have been arguing, through all the above, that the diverse crises we have witnessed and been party to in 1982 may be seen as the consequence of the Jewish people's encounter with modernity...
...And now to the crux: "Considering the numerous openings in trades and the manifold contacts with Christians resulting therefrom, the core for maintaining common confidence requires that the Hebrew and the so-called Jewish language and writing of Hebrew intermixed with German . . . shall be abolished...
...Worse, it is a vehicle for the preservation and dissemination of disgusting values and habits...
...And still we are not seen as normal...
...There had, of course, been earlier expressions of skepticism and even rejection, as in the cases of Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza...
...Our agencies, of course, helped them, for they were our brothers and sisters...
...The Jews may not be liked everywhere, but they have ceased to be members of a merely tolerated fringe...
...And among them was our response to the intemperate and unskilled way in which Israel chose to deal with its only real friend in the family of nations, the United States, and its President...
...Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, German neo-Orthodoxy of the Frankfort School and the work of Samson Raphael Hirsch all represented efforts to respond to modernity and to gain recognition for the Jews as a civilized group while still preserving loyalty to Judaism...
...my intention is to describe, to diagnose, to explain, to encourage reflection on the implications of some of the major questions raised by the events of this year, to place them in a historical context and to try to show what they portend for us...
...Wherever the responsibility lay, they—as we—feel sullied by the bloodshed...
...And the Jews have also come to fight a civil war, less violent to be sure, but equally dangerous Gerson Cohen is Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Jewish History there...
...And so, in 1982, a bitter religious polarization that has long been with us emerged forcefully into public view— and not just in Israel...
...So divided, the program and purpose of Jewish education came to be the integration of the Jews into the civil society next to which they lived, and within which they now thought they wanted to live...
...In return, all restrictions on handicrafts and economic pursuits are terminated...
...1984 Reflections on Jewish normality, agony and glory GERSON COHEN For two hundred years, Jews have obsessively sought to achieve two goals—the collective normality of the Jewish people, and the ability to control their own destiny...
...And then suddenly, as it were, it appeared in Boro Park, in Boston, in B'nai B'rak and Jerusalem and every great metropolis where Jews lived...
...But it is precisely the religious zealotry they embody that now threatens to tear the Jewish people apart by changing Israel's Law of Return...
...Begin and his supporters have been ready to exploit polarization to the full...
...Not a good year...
...The Orthodox counterattacked by trying to get the Prussian Kaiser to forbid preaching in German, but they did not succeed...
...I have been arguing that in 1982, the Jews behaved like a normal nation...
...Both in Israel and in the Diaspora we can readily see how much of our life reflects the determination of many Jews—and especially of our communal leadership and intelligentsia—to do two things at once: To retain our Jewish identity, and yet to appear to be totally Westernized...
...One of the men who ultimately championed the emancipation of the Jews of France, Abbe Gregoire, outspokenly denounced and advocated the extirpation of "this kind of dialect, the German-Hebrew rabbinical jargon," for "this dialect is used only to disseminate ignorance and to conceal knavery...
...It should matter, and does, because it reflects the failure of modern Jewish education in Israel...
...the Jewish community was nothing in their eyes...
...And so, like all the other wanderers of our time, they roam in search of something to fill the void...
...L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Sholom Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, among many, many others—was born...
...No longer do Jews feel the need to apologize for their Jewishness...
...This self-esteem, which should not be confused with cockiness or aggressiveness, is expressed in a variety of ways in Jewish j life today...
...it was a prelude to the contemporary battle, our battle, to have our people accepted not merely as individuals with full rights, but as a legitimate corporate group...
...Like any searing spiritual experience, touching on the most sensitive questions, the subject has its great spokesmen—and we have them—and its hacks...
...We even smile indulgently at the mechanized Jewish salvation armies called "mitzvah-mobiles" without considering what they reflect and where they point...
...It was not only Gentiles like Voltaire, but even some Jews who began to assert that Jews are despicable not because of their rejection of Christianity, but because they are a people tied to deep prejudices, to religious intolerance and to rituals that separate them from all other peoples...
...After all, the confrontation was not between Begin and Arafat, but between Israel and Syria, between an American satellite—Israel—and a Soviet satellite— Syria...
...Need I dwell on the importance of this fraternity of spirit, language and cause between American Jews and Israelis, so central to our sense of self, so remarkable for all that it is generally unremarked...
...And yet, for all the kitsch it has evoked, the fact remains that American Jewish memorialization of the Holocaust has had a profound impact on American culture...
...Israel's victory on the battlefield was the consequence of'Israeli skill and morale, and the unflinching readiness of Israelis to give their lives to secure their borders...
...That theology, those rituals, the need to work at them—these things are alien to us...
...Yet today, courses in Judaic studies are offered at more than 250 American and Canadian universities...
...In 1982, we witnessed in theory and in action the implications of Jewish normality and of Jewish control of Jewish destiny, and we have now seen how the achievement of these goals has brought Jews into open conflict with enemies, with allies, and even with each other...
...it is they who seek to become the final arbiters of the legitimacy of conversion to Judaism...
...It was this perception that was placed at the foundation of Jewish visions of collective rejuvenation...
...This new possibility was itself the result of earlier developments that are important to recognize, for they still function within us, they are still at the heart of our deep confusion and ambivalence about our Jewishness...
...In the democracies, we have long since moved beyond the yearning for acceptance as individuals on the basis of merit...
...Moses Mendelssohn had translated the Bible into good and official German, with a commentary in equally stylistic Hebrew, in an effort to break the tradition of explicating the Torah in Yiddish, ultimately to wean the Jews away from their embarrassing jargon...
...So, a vacuum...
...Its underlying thrust was that the Jewish character had to be changed...
...One of the new features of modernity, beginning with the 19th century, was that one could deny the sacred character of rabbinic tradition and/or belief in the promise of messianic deliverance and still remain Jewish...
...And the professors who teach these courses are overwhelmingly native-born and trained, men and women of such quality that every Israeli university has now accepted American Ph.D.s in Judaica as teachers of classical Jewish subjects...
...But it is increasingly understood that the level and quality of Jewish studies in American universities offers the Jewish community a sense of self-esteem, a sense of normality and acceptance that is vital to Jewish morale and clearly connected with the Jewish commitment to Israel and to Jewish rights everywhere...
...That element was outspokenly anti-Zionist, anti-modern Hebrew, anti-modern education and opposed to any change in traditional Jewish education or communal organization, let alone religious ritual...
...Further, the breakthrough has been in large measure the result of Jewish endowments...
...We believe that any characteristic or presumed characteristic aspect of Jewish collective behavior is material for self-castigation...
...How different are they, after all, from the Moonies, the Hare Krishna, the Ayatollah Khomeini or the Moral Majority...
...By now it should be clear to every observer that Israel invaded Lebanon not only to eliminate the PLO, but also to remove Syrian forces and to silence Soviet weaponry and strategic influence—and also to place Lebanon under native Christian control...
...The Jews are not, and in a fundamental sense have never been, a normal people—that is, a nation like other nations, dwelling principally in a territory identified by them and by others as the home of their people, a people with a language, a government and so forth...
...The Jewish conscience is alive—and this, in the final analysis, may be the saving grace of our people...
...And not just in the United States and Canada, but even in Argentina, let alone Stockholm and London...
...They are the products of homes equipped with every technological convenience, but lacking any spiritual meaning and sense of cause, any faith in anything, let alone in God, Torah, Israel...
...It ought to be, but is not, the affirmation of a collective dream...
...And it threatens a very major crisis in Jewish life generally...
...From all corners, there is a quest, not for return, but for renewal, for the reinfusion of Jewishness with meaning and with mission...
...The point is that here, too, as throughout the Diaspora, there was an urge to be normal...
...the position of Jewish culture is no more secure than any area of culture, particularly in the current economic climate...
...they are appeals to magic ritual, to rank anti-intellectualism and superstition, and, above all, to rebbe-worship...
...This means that American Jewry is not, as it is so often caricatured, exclusively concerned with fund-raising, political and economic support of Israel, Jewish swimming pools, weight-watcher programs and, of course, several thousand synagogues...
...Israel came under greater control of forces that were never part of the classical Zionist movement, forces such as the Agudat Yisrael and the Council of Torah Sages, and of a government that found mass support in a Levantine Jewish constituency that has yet to develop the humanistic restraints that have long since become part of the Western Jewish perspective...
...However Fortunately, this is not the whole story...
...Hitherto unacknowledged and unstudied forms of Jewish creative expression are now increasingly acknowledged, and American Jewry has begun to make major inroads in the humanities outside the academic setting...
...If you want to be thought normal, if you want to think yourself normal, you do not have to stop being a Jew—but you have to stop being Jewish...
...And so we are emotionally and psychologically unequipped to propound a fundamental theological perception that has room for God and Israel in a contemporary affirmation that is relevant to the enormity and the uniqueness of the Holocaust...
...This situation is the consequence of careful and patient connivance between the ultra-Orthodox movements and the leaders of the present Israeli government, who saw useful allies in each other...
...For a people that chooses to preserve its genuine identity, arid to extend its culture, and to live with its own history, there is no other way...
...But to give up the Jewish faith usually meant to renounce membership in the Jewish community, to convert to Christianity or Islam...
...The nature of the war indicated Israel's intention to secure its territorial perimeter not only by eliminating hostile forces through military action, but also by passing on the acceptability of a neighboring government...
...They were too suffused with centuries of Jewish memory to allow themselves to be taken in by the American promise...
...Yiddish is not only not a language, it is a jargon...
...For all intents and purposes, here in America we have become a part of the American mainstream...
...Both go home transformed and often uplifted...
...Why is this so very important...
...Ask any educated Jew who has a feel for Jewish history and he will tell you that the Jewish component in Israel's secular schools is so thin, so shallow, so devoid of spiritual content that for lack of anything better, many send their children to Orthodox schools...
...It is time for me to say why I think that so...
...Until modern times, the Jews never ceased to affirm (and many continue to affirm) with perfect faith that "You have selected us from all peoples, loved us and taken special delight in us...
...There are other fruits of our drive for acceptance...
...more important by far, our museums generate new lay interest in the Jewish experience and its expression among people who might otherwise be divorced from Jewish life...
...We smile benignly at the Orthodox revolt of some of our young people who reject their secularist parents of Scarsdale and Shaker Heights and take themselves to yeshivot—and we fail to take account of the anti-intellectualism and the seeds of intolerance that are planted there...
...That they nourished hopes of revenge and restoration should by now be clear...
...It is less obvious that until recently, it never occurred to Jews to be embarrassed by their "abnormality" or to want to change their corporate features...
...We make of Yiddish words a vulgar joke, and Yiddish becomes not only a vehicle for cheap nostalgia, but a tool of self-humiliation, no less in 1982 than in 1802...
...The Emperor, however, was not inhibited from concluding his decree with these words: "Since by these favors We almost place the Jews on an equal level with adherents of other religious associations in respect to trade and the enjoyment of civil and domestic facilities, We earnestly advise them to observe scrupulously all political, civil and judicial laws of the country...
...Among these reservations and concerns was the issue of the Law of Return and our insistence that the matter of Jewish identity be kept out of the hands of clerics...
...For them, as for my parents, it was something that I could go to college at all...
...This is hardly a spiritual revival to be celebrated...
...I mean that these leaders and their institutions have been governed by values, goals and forms of collective expression that they have derived not from Jewish tradition but from their own humanistic perceptions of modernity—and especially from Gentile values and usage...
...American scholars teach Judaica in Israel and leave their mark there...
...to the collective security of the Jews...
...This is an edited version of "The State of World Jewry" address that he delivered at the 92ndStreet Yon October 19, 1982...
...And in 1982, long-suppressed inner tensions of the Jews came to the surface, became political causes...
...The fact is that the world of Jewish learning and critical scholarship today transcends borders...
...It would be a delusion to conclude that with the rebirth of indigenous Jewish culture—Juedische Wissenschaft in Germany, Yiddish and Hebrew literature and theatre in Russia, Poland, America and Israel, great Anglo-Jewish literature in England, Canada and the United States—Jews have overcome that early self-contempt...
...It is time to amplify the term...
...The Edict of Toleration further emphasized that it was in no way to be construed as repealing the bans and restrictions then in force against admitting Jews to citizenship...
...Consider, for example, one of the great aspects of this transformation of Jewish status...
...But instead, Jewish education as we know it is the product of a deliberate effort to transform the Jew by the nonJewish world's canons of normality, of techniques and values that are calculated to make him a part of humanity-in-general...
...The Jewish intelligentsia agreed that the first and indispensable step was for the Jews to give up their own dialect and to begin to speak and write like normal human beings...
...Most of us recognize and resent the exclusivism, the totalitarianism of those who press such claims upon the rest of us—yet we indulge the young whom they recruit, who will grow up as harsh and as narrow as their mentors...
...It was a reminder that we Jews are now, at least for the moment, in a position to act on what we perceive to be our national interest...
...Religious reform in the 19th and 20th centuries everywhere, from classical Reform to neo-Orthodox, reflects this secularizing impulse...
...Yet the Orthodox alternative is abhorrent to the overwhelming majority of Israelis...
...It was a year of religious conflict, of ethnic conflict, of conflict between irridentists and moderates, a year in which the children of the fathers of Israel showed themselves to be ideologically bankrupt...
...Paradoxically, it is reflected ! in the readiness of Jews in high places I to denounce the actions of the Jewish ; State...
...Formerly disdainful art critics now acknowledge the beauty and even respectability of Jewish art...
...Normality requires a Jewish state, an army, a diplomatic corps—in a word, it requires sovereignty...
...To obtain a complete transcript, write to: Education Department, 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10028...
...Yet there was a price that the Jews were expected to pay, and that was to change their ways in the direction of normality—that is, of the Christian majority and the accepted standards of culture and civility...

Vol. 8 • December 1982 • No. 1


 
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