Interim Judaism: Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis

Conclusion: Judaism Before Theory

CONCLUSION Judaism Before Theory Jewish theological re®ection, like modernist intellectual culture in general, began in the twentieth century with a sensitivity to the alienation and fragmentation of urban society and a desire to articulate some kind of “grand theory” as a response to it. The Jewish life that has emerged in America as we enter the new century is decidedly different. It is very pluralistic, very diverse , and wholly uncertain about the “grand themes” that percolate through Jewish tradition and history. Moreover, the Jewish life that I have encouraged in these chapters is not one consolidated around a “grand theory” or some single, comprehensive understanding of the central Jewish themes of revelation and redemption. In a sense, it is a Jewish life “without clear concepts of revelation and redemption ,” but not because Judaism can do without these notions permanently but rather because Judaism today must continue for the moment without them. In this sense, the Judaism I have in mind is pragmatic, independent of theory, and interim. In the ¤fties, in postwar America, Judaism ®ourished in social and political terms as, in the wake of the war, Jews were given ample opportunities to prosper economically and socially within American society. Synagogues and Jewish community centers grew in size and membership. Jews imitated their Christian neighbors through congregational af¤liation. Jewish country clubs were built, and Jews moved to the newly developing suburbs. The story is well known. American Jews were co-opted into an American economy that was 119 burgeoning as a result of the redeployment of wartime productivity to peacetime commercialism. They became central players in the growth of America’s consumer society, its wealth and its traumas. In this period, theological debate among Jews existed, but it was localized among a relatively small group of rabbinic leaders and Jewish intellectuals. It was nonetheless lively. It led to the creation of journals and magazines like Commentary and Judaism and involved many transplanted European intellectuals and rabbis, among them Jakob Petuchowski, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Eliezer Berkovits , Emil Fackenheim, and Steven Schwarzschild, and a number of young American rabbis, such as Lou Silberman, Samuel Karff, and Eugene Borowitz. Perhaps the most interesting theological debate in those years was between the adherents of Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist naturalism, with its emphasis on Judaism as a culture or civilization, Jewish peoplehood, ritual and myth as social and psychological strategies, and Jewish identity, and the nascent movement of existential Jewish theologians, with their appropriation of Buber and Rosenzweig and their emphasis on faith, revelation, covenant, mitzvot, and God. The central issue might be framed this way: can there be a Judaism without revelation? While the naturalists argued that there certainly could, the existential ¤deists argued that it was impossible. A Jewish life without a rootedness in the relationship with God was merely a matter of fad or fashion, whim or nostalgia. Jewish survival and Jewish purpose depended upon the relationship between the Jewish people and God, between the individual Jew and the Divine Presence. This debate occurred on a foundation that both positions shared. It is that Judaism is a life-conception, a way of seeing the world and living in it, that must be ultimately grounded by some kind of rational argument or explanation. In somewhat different terms, it is a conception that must be justi¤ed in order to be accepted and lived. The key term here is justi¤cation or legitimation. Some contemporary philosophers might put it this way: Jews must have completely basic, foundational reasons for accepting Judaism and living as a Jew. Without such reasons, Judaism is either something irrational or something less than rational, and neither is acceptable, for if Judaism 120 Interim Judaism were either, it would be less worthy or less respectable than it must be. It would also be easily dismissed or jettisoned. One way of responding to this shared foundation is to point out that it is too rational to ¤t the way we regularly live and the way Jews have regularly lived in the past. Much of life is not grounded in basic, foundational reasons for belief and practice. This requirement asks too much, and it is a prejudice to do so (some would say it is a male prejudice or a philosophical or intellectualist one). Such justifying reasons are good to have, and sometimes they are necessary , but they come in different degrees and weights and at times are...