THE RABBI WRITES
A non-Jewish friend recently confided in me certain feelings and observations that he was afraid to articulate in public. He revealed that during the past year he had been consumed by an irresistible desire to discover the source of Jewish intellectual distinctiveness and creativity. Fascinated by the liberal and anti-authoritarian character of most of the Jews he encountered in the academic and political world he was intrigued by the origin of this phenomenon. In his intent to be a serious student he took the suggestion of every interfaith institute rabbi he encountered and proceeded to investigate the ‘sacred’ literature of the Jewish people. He spent many hours reading and rereading the Bible, and patiently supplementing the classic with selected passages from the Talmud in English translation. Nevertheless, the more diligently he studied, the more puzzled he became. While he discovered many statements that were ethically significant and many stories that were aethetically precious, he very quickly noted that the mood of the literature was conservative, pedantic rather than intellectual, and decidedly authoritarian. The Jew of the Bible and the Talmud seemed to have absolutely no relationship to the urbane and humorful American Jew he so frequently encountered.
If I had been on my proper ‘interfaith’ toes I would have assured my friend that his reading of the ancient literature was superficial and without profound insight. I would have showered him with effusive complements about the earth-shaking influence of both the Bible and Talmud. I would have reminded him that the entire structure of contemporary Western religious civilization rests on the pronouncements of this sacred literature. I might even have tossed at him the observation that human moral sensitivity depends on the insights of the ancient Jewish writers. But I didn’t have the heart – because he was right.
It is simply an observable fact, obvious to any reader that can transcend his interfaith defensiveness, that the ‘ancient books’ of Judaism do not correspond in mood and temperament to the reality of the modern Jew. While a certain ethical continuity prevails, the chief characteristics that philo-Semites find so admirable in present day Jewry are totally absent. The distinguishing marks of internationalism, intellectuality, liberalism, humorful skepticism, and urbanity which earn the ecstatic praise of Jew lovers and the passionate denunciation of Jew haters are quite alien to the solemn and pious temperament of the writers. With the exception of the pseudo-sophistication of Ecclesiastes, temperamental identity between ancient past and modern present is essentially non-existent.
This reality points up the problem that the study of Jewish history presents. If, in our attempt to understand the nature of contemporary Jews and Judaism, we concentrate on the verbal utterances of famous authority figures, we shall achieve no more insight into the nature of the Jewish personality than my diligent Gentile friend. To concentrate our investigation on the famous or less than famous sayings of prophets and rabbis is to pursue the kind of naive historical study that gives no indication of how we got from Jeremiah to Freud. It is to assume that the major forces influencing Jewish life arise out of the conscious instruction of official teachers, while the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. For the chief historical factors in Jewish development have been ‘unconscious’ and completely unarticulated by the prestige figures of the past. We are what we are in many cases – not because of our sacred literature but in spite of it.
An honest Judaism is always more interested in the nature of the Jew than in the verbalizing of official spokesmen. The problem with much of modern Jewish education is an overemphasis on what Jews said they were and an under-emphasis on an objective and critical study of Jewish history. Since religious institutions are notoriously conservative, they are the last ones to reflect social change. Their creeds and pronouncements often take many centuries to articulate the operating beliefs of a culture. To explore the reality of what it means to be Jewish by tasting the spoken words of famous ancient Jews is to eat cake by simply licking the frosting.
A few observations may clarify the thesis.
(1) The overwhelming majority of modern Jews tend to be internationalist in their outlook. While antisemitism and the Hitler holocaust have made them passionate defenders of Israel; and while social insecurity often turns the small-town American Jew into a verbal superpatriot, fanatic chauvinism is largely absent from the operating ideologies of the western Jew. Most Jews are identified with political and social movements that subordinate nationalism to international cooperation and view racial and cultural differences as less significant than human unity. The epithet ‘the international Jew’ with which the antisemite assaults his enemy, is, in reality perceptive. Although the bigot views internationalism as a sin, he rightly observes that the contemporary Jew tends to regard national boundaries as less significant than others.
To explain this phenomenon by picking odd quotations from the Bible and Talmud is irresponsible. The sacred scriptures exude a mood of passionate nationalism and Zionistic fervor which back up the eternally sacred character of Palistine for the Jew with the firm endorsement of a universal deity. Even the Messianic dream involves the vindication of the superiority of Jewish insight and the return of all Jews to their land. If it is true that Jahveh punishes our people and complains about them, it is also true that he has chosen us, and us alone, as his priests.
The internationalism of the Western Jew finds no congenial home in the old texts. It finds its source and inspiration in the often unrecorded experiences of the Jewish dispersion. The Jew, the most passionate of ancient chauvinists, acquired the potential for universalism through the pain of his ‘exile’. Dispersed to the four corners of the earth and regarded as an outlawed pariah by the Christian world, he became by necessity the first internationalist. Although his daily study introduced him to nationalistic fantasies, his daily experience divorced him from the intensity of local patriotism. To be a Jew required the mentality of the wanderer and the world citizen. His prayers may have been filled with devotion to Zion, but his realistic encounters made him wary of patriotic fervor. National chauvinism and antisemitism were too often companions. When the Emancipation came, the Jew had been transformed. Although he might verbally pose the superpatriot, his histrical memories resisted the role. By his fears and not by his study he had been temperamentally converted.
(2) The image of the modern Jew is that of the intellectual. Although the claim is a bit pretentious, it is certainly true that the European Jew, once exposed to the delights of university education, swallowed the experience more zealously than others. Jews today are noted for their penchant for secular education and the high value they place on the academician.
Yet nothing in their official literature would suggest such a bent. The Talmudic rabbis railed against the Greeks and denounced their style of inquiry. Neither the Bible nor the Talmud is structured in the logical way that would meet the minimum standards of a competent abstract thinker. Although literacy and Torah study were widespread among Jews, neither suggested intellectuality. For the character of the intellectual is not determined by the ability to read or by the amount of study. It is always determined by how one reads and studies. The curriculum of the Polish heder or yeshiva was no more intellectual than the study program of an Algiers Koran school.
The proverbial verbalness of the modern Jew is a much better clue to the origin we seek. For intellectuality and abstract thinking always starts with a fascination with words. Verbal people enjoy words and the manipulation of words; and this disposition leads inevitably to logic and analysis. Verbalness is not the product of abstract thinking. The reverse is true; manipulating words is the mother of abstraction. If Jews are intellectual, it is because they became verbal.
The Jewish fascination with words is not the product of Bible study or prescription. If that were the case, the Muslims in their devotion to the Koran and the Protestants in their devotion to the Scriptures would be equally verbal. The Jewish attachment to words is the result of the indispensability of speech for Jewish survival. In the post-Talmudic period, when Jews were stripped of any form of physical defense and when they were thrust into the nascent professions of the middle class, the only weapon of survival the Jew possessed was the persuasion of speech. If words hold a special charisma for Jews, it is with good reason. By their power alone did Jews meet the assault of the outer world. The verbal finesse of the Polish Jew is not something the Talmud gave to the Jew; it is something the Polish Jew gave to the Talmud. With the opening of the secular schools to his participation, the European Jew brought the same precision to the social and physical sciences.
(3) Jews, in the modern world, are notorious anti-authoritarians. They feature a skeptical humor that deflates the pompous and shatters pretense; where others tend to be accepting of obedience, Jews resist it and find it emotionally necessary to question and challenge. Jewish creativity in the arts and sciences has largely been due to the Jewish willingness to resist conformity and defy established theories.
A free and healthy society requires a reasonable resistance to authority. And yet historic Judaism, no less than historic Christianity or Islam was an authoritarian culture in which a scholar class posed itself as the guardians and interpreters of God’s truth. While rabbis might disagree among each other, every rabbi in his own baliwick, demanded obedience. And, while Jews might grumble and complain, they accepted the authority of the scholar class and did not resist. Within the community, the Jew was an obedient conformist and the temper of the Bible and Talmud reinforced this attitude.
But the Jewish attitude toward authority was not determined after the dispersion so much by the inner community as by the outside world. Away from the comforts of ‘home’, the Jew found himself placed in a general environment where the Gentile rulers were invariably hostile. The princes might talk a great deal about justice and mercy but the Jew was never the recipient of these ideals. As the centuries advanced, the Jews developed a well-deserved skepticism to outside authority. While within the framework of their own community, they remained loyally obedient, their attitude to the more powerful rulers that dominated their lives was one of severe reservation tinged with the revenge of laughter. When the trauma of the Emancipation destroyed the structure of the ghetto community, the free Jew then directed his long-acquired healthy scepticism to the authorities of the inner community. The rabbis and the sacred literature now received the critical grilling the Jew had repeatedly used against the commands of the Gentile world.
(4) Jews today are generally regarded as liberals. Although the bigots of Wayne, New Jersey may find the quality reprehensible, philosemites adore it. By the label ‘liberal’ we simply want to indicate that an individual finds social change desirable, as opposed to a ‘conservative’ who prefers to retain the status quo. The Jew of today is often a pioneer of change. If fashions alter, if new ideas are to be tested, the Jew is emotionally susceptible to try the new. Even in the promotion of social experiment, the Jew is conspicuous by his presence.
Why? Certainly, Jewish literary indoctrination is conservative. The sacred texts promote the immutability of the law and the eternity of the Torah. If changes are allowed, they are justified as painful necessities not as desirable events. While conservatives initiate change, they do so with sadness and reluctance. The mood of rabbinic Judaism is pervaded by this regret.
The contemporary Jewish mood owes little to this religious conservatism. If Jews are easily amenable to change, their adaptability is a function of their history not their official literature. Against their will, the Jews were compelled by the necessities of persecution to adapt to new environments. Although their indoctrination denied the value of change, their experience affirmed it. Moreover, early in their dispersion Jews abandoned the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of their Biblical era and became reluctant devotees of city living, urbanized as a people long before other groups, they abandoned the stable patterns of agrarian living for the more dynamic style of bourgeois existence. While their religious literature made heroes our of patriarchal shepherds with dispositions for simplicity and stability, the Jews assumed a new pattern of living within the city culture. It is a supreme irony that while the Jews have been among all European peoples, the most addicted to urbane living, the sacred literature is supposed to define the Jewish personality is utterly divorced from it. Liberalism is a by-product of the most significant Jewish social experience an experience which Sabbath study and Sabbath reading never reveal to any congregation.
The conclusion is clear. If an effective Judaism must describe what Jews are and not what they were, a revamping of the history program in most temples is indispensable. One will never discover the origin of the significant modern Jewish personality traits by studying the official texts of ancient times. Contrary to public belief, the Biblical and Talmudic periods are less significant in understanding the nature of the modern Jew than the almost unrecorded centuries of the Dispersion. The unconscious social forces that do not speak must be spoken for.