THE RABBI WRITES
A discussion group was recently established in a local Jewish women’s charity society. Considerable reflection was devoted to the topics and literature to be studied. Although there was a vague feeling that something contemporary would be most appropriate to the interests and of the membership, the overwhelming sentiment confirmed the decision that “since they were Jewish, they ought to know more about their Bible’. The inevitable consequence was that another Bible study group with a sense of patriotic devotion to the past was added to the endless roster of Scripture classes that fill the landscape of Jewisksuaboarban culture.
Now a decision to study the Bible or any lamas bank out of the Jewish past is most commendable. Certainly, it would be difficult to understand the origins and early development of Jewish customs and institutions without a familiar use of this early literature. The overwhelming commitment of Jewish piety in the years before the Emancipation was, with good reason, to Scriptural commentary and its derivative legal literature. In a cultural milieu where the Torah reigned supreme in more than a figurative sense no other procedure was morally possible.
But, today, the obsessive interest of the Jewish, religion school and adult education programs with Bible heroes, Scriptural Interpretation and Biblical archeology is an almost absurd affectation. In a secular environment where this Hebrew anthology has ceased to function in any realistic way as the supreme arbiter of thought and behavior, the choice to commit the limited amount of time available for religious study to the unraveling of Biblical “mysteries” is to exclude the possibility of getting to know alternative literature. Countless hours are devoted by talented clergymen to demonstrating how texts which appear to be both historically mythical and ethically irrelevant are, in reality, earth-shakingly significant. Why modern literature which expresses their sentiments more directly is less desirable for immediate study appears initially puzzling.
Liberal Jewish study programs are, to a large extent, unimaginative. They are the function of inertia and the guilt—feeling that allows the opposition to define what is religiously important. They also operate within the environment of a Protestant culture which regards the Bible as the greatest of all possible books and as representative of the only significant episodes in Jewish history. Whatever Jews did and said before the advent of Jesus is gigantic in import and worthy of a cinema cast of thousand; whatever they became afterwards is religiously irrelevant unless, like the State of Israel, the scenery has to do with the Holy Land. The fascination of Jews with the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be justified either by their inspirational content or their historical wonder. (They are intellectually comparable to the religious pronouncements of some of the more bizarre sects of southern California). It can only be explained by an American Jewish desire to identify with historical moments which small-town Christian culture deems important.
We are to a large extent the prisoners of our interfaith goodwill. Eager to please and to find acceptence in an American culture that worshiped the Bible, we have insisted on passing ourselves off as the People of the Book, and the devotees of Biblical piety. Our defense mechanism against antisemitism is to plead the endorsement of the ‘Old Testament’ and to identify the modern Jew with all those simple patriarchs, Bedouin figures, and shepherd kings that Christians adore. One of the supreme ironies of American religious life is that the one group who through urbanized sophistication are most divorced from the belief framework and behavior patterns of the Scriptural milieu are the most eager to plead Biblical virtue. To the liberal American Jew, the Bible is not merely a record of how early Jews felt and believed; on that level it would not deserve one-half the concern lavished on it. Nor is it the major source of the contemporary Jew’s religious information or inspiration; if that were so, rabbis would not have to devote lecture after lecture, book after book, and class after class to “proving” its significance. Its power derives from its social setting. It happens to be the Jewish book the Gentile world likes most. It is, therefore, our supreme ego defense and our passport to religious respectability. The American Jewish concentration on Biblical study to the virtual exclusion of contemporary Jewish literature has certain harmful effects that prevent a viable and effective Judaism from emerging. These effects are itemized in the following observations.
(1) Contemporary official Jewish publication is still overwhelmingly apologetic, geared to convince Bible-believing Christians of Jewish worth and significance. American Judaism has a defensive quality that devours the easy ‘compliments’ of a James Michener and Max Dimont and resists the sober reality of modern Jewish belief and behavior. So long as Jews deem it socially necessary to indicate that they and the Pilgrims are religious twins, so long will organized Jewish religion of the liberal variety condemn itself to a wilderness of arid Biblical scholarship and the amused indifference of the secular and scientific world that claims our Jewish youth. Platitudes about the whole Bible being summed up in the Ten Commandments may give our behavior a tenuous connection with Levitical and prophetic teaching; but it only sums up the basic ethical irrelevance of the rest.
(2) A proper understanding and appreciation of the Bible is not possible until one is able to divorce it from Jewish ego needs and view it as an historical document that need not reflect our own beliefs and attitudes but did express the collective and often opposed views of our ancestors in the days of the First and Second Temples. In order to understand what we Jews are in the twentieth century we ought to thoroughly study our origins and to be aware of the early experiences that helped to mold the character traits of our social personality. But no objective study of these Biblical origins is possible if we feel compelled to defend the Bible or to prove that what the writers really meant to say is what we believe today.
(3) Most post-Biblical literature is indeed Bible oriented. The Midrash, the Talmud, and the medieval philosophic writings rely heavily on Biblical quotations and perpetually explain and clarify Scriptural verses. No other dependence is conceivable in an age which deemed the Torah a revealed constitution. But the connection is deceptive. In reality, the Biblical quotations are mere pretexts, twisted out of their historical contexts to justify change, innovation, and popular custom. What is most interesting about post-Biblical rabbinic literature is not its artificial connection with Biblical law and history, but its natural connection with the contemporary environment out of which it emerged. Biblical authority was important to the rabbis who preached; but, in reality, it was not something to be learned from; it was something to be used, a power to be invoked for the justification of conclusions the social environment had already dictated. Undue concentration on the Bible hides the true source of rabbinic decision and ethics.
(4) An appropriate Judaism must deal with the Jew as he really is, not as ancient literature conceived him. Since the modern Jew is the supreme product of urban living, his most significant religious literature ought to reflect this fact. Post-Emancipation Jewry, along with most of Western culture, underwent a revolutionary change in its almost total identification with the industrial city. This trauma is reflected today in the obvious truth that socially, economically, and technically our European great-grandfathers were closer to Rabbi Akiba eighteen centuries earlier than to us. Undue emphasis on the Bible distorts the nature of Jewish identity and living in the twentieth century. Shepherd patriarchs, Bedouin sheikhs, and country prophets are incongruous authority figures in the age of the urban technician and professional. If the Jews like the Amish were still identified with rural ‘virtues’, the Biblical emphasis might be tolerable. But the contrary is true. Of all things, the Jew is most identified with the citified professional. In contemporay America, the Bible becomes nothing more than charming nostalgia; it cannot help the Jew deal with his social reality. The economics and social relations of the East European, shtetl might have had some remote connection with the Biblical setting. Modern New York has none at all.
(5) Religion school curricula in liberal synagogues and temples ought to expose the student to important Biblical figures. But they ought to avoid making these personalities the supreme examples of Jewish virtue and intelligence. Like the Christian churches, Sunday School has too often turned into Bible story time. The child is exposed to a continuing series of personalities and events that bear little relationship to his own experience. Unless the genuine character of the ‘hero’ is distorted and violence is done to historical truth, the herdsman patriarch of Genesis is no real competition for the T.V. scientist and the shepherd soldier of Samuel runs a poor second to the astronaut. It may very well be true that if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with all their embarrassing ‘newness’ can serve as contemporary heroes for little children, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Theodore Herzl might even do better ethically ad emotionally than Jephtha and Samson. Little Signumd at least lived in a city despite his Oedipus Complex; and Little Albert hated war even as a child.
Historically, the Bible has dominated the lesson parts of the Sabbath and holiday liturgy. Year after year the continuous Torah cycle repeats itself in synagogues committed to liberalism with no apparent signs of relief. Talented little Bar Mitsva boys arise to recite to Reform congregations the recipe for incense or the requirements for priestly ablutions. Even if the consecutive weekly readings are abandoned and the lessons are chosen by topic from the Bible, the range of lesson literature is confined to a set of documents edited and censored by Levitical priests, and expressive of a dogmatic world view that for all practical purposes died with the rise of rabbinic Judaism. No historical nostalgia can justify that perpetual waste of a congregation’s time. A creative liturgy would select ethical and philosophic lessons, both ancient and modern, that are both lucid, directly applicable, and intellectually respectable. Why is the pedestrian work of a fifth-century Jerusalem priest to be preferred as a Sabbath lesson to the poetry of Martin Buber?
The alternative to Biblical lessons is not rabbinic literature. In many respects the observations of Talmudic and medieval writers are considerably more sophisticated than the perceptions of Biblical authors; but they are no more expressive of the thought patterns and world outlook of the modern Western Jew than their Bible predecessors. Since Jewish identity in European and American culture is no longer a function of belief and ritual commitment but rather of birth and historical memory the criterion for Jewish literature cannot be conformity to a certain set of ideas or loyalty to a particular linguistic tradition. In a society which cherishes the basic necessity of free inquiry Jewish writing is the literary product of anyone who is born into the social identity of being Jewish. The self-awareness that arises from this condition, whether articulated or not, is the single factor that unites this body of writing and identifies it.
The literary works of Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Isaiah Berlin and Sidney Hook, for all their apparent topical diversities and universal relevance, are products of persons who share the Jewish social “fate”; and, therefore, are as expressive of the twentieth-century Jewish reality as Isaac Singer or Agnon. A religious society that purports to reveal the role of the Jewish people in the modern world will prefer their words to merely ancient ones. To the Jew of the post-Emancipation world the Bible may serve his need for historical pride; but a viable Judaism must help him relate effectively to the real flesh and blood people who share his ‘destiny’. Erich Fromm may indeed be a better object of study for a Jewish study group than the Book of Genesis. Outside the romance of venerability he is a much more effective expression of what we are, feel, and really desire to be.
Our conclusion is simple. The ‘sacred’ literature of Judaism must reflect the reality of Jewish life and belief. It must be a faithful record of the social and scientific revolution that has transformed the Jewish mind and made the Bible a book of primarily historical interest.