Are the Liberal Movements in Judaism Really Modern?

The liberal movements in Judaism, namely Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist, implicitly hold that they are guided by principles and methodologies that are consistent with what is generally held to be characteristic of the modern period. These certainly include an acceptance of the outcomes of the application of the critical apparatus and the embrace of scientific data that were mostly unknown to Jews in the premodern period. In this article I will argue that, in fact, the liberal movements, while acknowledging the principles and methodologies at work in the modern period, will disregard them when contrary to their overarching ideologies. A closed-minded disregard of new and scientifically supported information in favor of upholding established doctrine is associated with the pre-modern period. Hence, the liberal movements in Judaism are not modern at all. They are little different from the fundamentalism these movements claim to have transcended.

Three initial clarifications are in order. First, the periodization of history is problematic. One can argue cogently that the Middle Ages began long before the last western Roman Emperor abdicated in 476 C.E. or long after. The date is debatable. The same is true with the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. In his 1925 book Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead, ascribed modernity to the "assertiveness of science" which he dated to the previous three hundred years, a date substantially earlier than the French Enlightenment, the date identified by Jürgen Habermas as the onset of modernity. It is also culturally specific. While the Roman Empire was suffering a dramatic decline, Jewish civilization, in contrast, was thriving. Far from the beginning of a period of political chaos and cultural sterility, the usual criteria for characterizing the "Dark Ages," both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud were on their way to canonization and Jewish communities across the Fertile Crescent were flourishing. So whether the modern period universally begins with the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, with enlightenment or emancipation is an open question. In his Modern Varieties of Judaism (1966), Joseph Blau declares that modernity begins in the year 1800. It is more a date of convenience than significance.

My intention is not to advocate any particular date for the "modern" period. The determination of a date or any date is immaterial to my thesis. I am arguing that whenever the modern period begins, the modern period includes certain features that distinguish it from what it replaced. In the words of Peter Osborne, modernity is "qualitative," not "chronological."

There is a wide range of opinion, however, on what the qualitative characteristics of modernity are. Some prefer to focus on the psychological characteristics of modernity. Thus Charles Taylor sees the sense of inwardness and the values of freedom and individuality as the hallmarks of modernity. In other words, modernity is a function of outlook, attitudes, and beliefs. Likewise, Habermas writes that the modern thinker is

. . .changed with the belief, inspired by modern science, in the infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment.¹

For Habermas, while science is the catalyst for the change in attitude, modernity is characterized by what people believe—a function of mind—rather than determined by any event or date. The result is freedom from the traditions of the past. Others see a broader complex of elements that are characteristic of modernity. Thus Volker H. Schmidt identifies the delegitimation of traditional religious and political authority leading to political democracy, the rule of law, a protected private sphere, civil society and freedom as the essential characteristics of modernity. Alan Touraine's "hard" version of modernity similarly includes the embrace of scientific culture, rational legal order, the application of the rule of reason, individual freedom, and historical progress as the essential characteristics of modernity. Michael A. Meyer lists seven components to modernity: scientific empiricism, humanism, relativism, secularism, pluralism, reason, and individual conscience.

Rather than trying to resolve the differences among the various opinions on what constitutes modernity, I will proceed on the basis of accepting what all the theorists hold in common, namely, that modernity entails what Bruno Latour...