Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church

Preface

Preface The following study grows from a long-standing interest in Russian Orthodoxy . I came to my fascination with the Eastern Church through Russian literature, as did so many of the individuals interviewed here. Russian culture, even modern Soviet Russian culture, is suffused with a worldview that I began to realize is in many ways fundamentally different from my own. When Feodor Dostoevsky wrote of the individual, of the collective, the earth, and, yes, of God, he in fact meant something very different from what I, an American, understand of those terms. A heroic individual is not that praiseworthy fellow in cowboy boots who strikes off on his own into the new world of the frontier. Dostoevsky's hero, rather, goes to the crowded and filthy Haymarket and bows down to kiss the dusty earth. Only in this way might he reunite with Russia, with his fellow human beings, and with the past. I began to study the history, doctrine, and ritual of the Orthodox Church in graduate school at Columbia University and as a special student at St. Vladimir's Seminary, where I learned about the early cult, about its institutionalization in Byzantium, about it transformations in the land of Rus', in Muscovy, and in the Russian Empire. I read the thinkers of the Russian religious renaissance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along with the better-known poets and prose writers of the Silver Age, and learned how the ideas of Vladimir Solovyov were taken into emigration after the Bolshevik Revolution by Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and a host of other religious thinkers and socalled Sophiologists. And in Russia I witnessed first hand a flood of recovery of those thinkers, beginning underground and then openly during zyxwvutsrqp IX X zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Preface glasnost and in the immediate post-Soviet society.zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVU Sobornost\ Sophia, bogochelovechestvo, and vseedinstvo became household words for me. At the same time, through the very same years, my own Jewish practice intensified. The dual inquiry into Russian Orthodoxy and Judaism, into inherent Russian and Jewish values, into two worlds with highly developed rituals, highlighted for me deep questions of identity. What makes me a Jew? An American? A Jewish American? Or am I rather an American Jew? How am I connected to the people of Israel? To the land of Israel? To the history of Israel? On the other hand, how am I connected to Kiev, the original home of my grandmother, who spoke Russian and Ukrainian, but no Hebrew or Yiddish? What scholarly, or other, fascination did I find in the icons and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church? Was this an occupation, after all, for a good Jewish girl? The prospect of a sabbatical in Jerusalem provided the impetus to write this study that looks, specifically, at the interface between the Russian and Jewish worlds about which I have thought so much. The coincidence of several conversations with Russian Jews who were baptized in the Orthodox Church led me back to Russia to interview other baptized Jews, then to New York, where many had immigrated, and then on to Israel, where still others had made a new home. When common themes about identity began to emerge from the interviews, I knew I had found, if not answers, then at least fresh perspectives on the questions I had posed about identity. As I began to speak about my conclusions, I met equal parts of skepticism and fascination from other Jews and other Americans, confirming my sense that a study of this albeit small group of baptized Jews had its place in our larger questions about Jewish, as well as Russian and Soviet identity. More and more individuals I met admitted to knowing Soviet Jews who had flirted with the Church, often suggesting that their knowledge was intimate indeed. In fact, the phenomenon is not at all obscure, and by no means esoteric. It has not, however, been studied before, whether because of a misplaced Soviet legacy of secrecy, a desire on the part of Russian Jewish emigre Slavists to establish a new identity as American scholars, or general squeamishness toward the topic of conversion. I am often asked about my own squeamishness toward the subject. Would I have preferred that these Russian Jews did not seek baptism? Am I uncomfortable with their talk of Christ and Resurrection? Yes, as an American Jew committed to the Jewish tradition, I would rather that all Jews marry Jews, that all Jews bring up their children as...