The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel

3. Where Judaism Differed: A Call for External and Internal Reform

38 3 Where Judaism Differed A Call for External and Internal Reform Silver identified the “dark glass” approach with the heritage of the Hebrew prophets. In his view, it was precisely man’s cognitive limitations that provided the foundation on which the Hebrew prophets had built their edifice of religious faith (Silver 1954c). Recognition of the prophetic heritage as Judaism’s core message could offer a means of resolving what, in the modern era, was widely regarded as a contradiction between free will and suprarational religious faith. Silver contended that Judaism had turned this apparent contradiction into a major feature of religious-social commitment. It was this idea that he explored in his books Where Judaism Differed (Silver 1956) and Moses and the Original Torah (Silver 1961b). As Silver understood the prophetic ethos, it was the concept of “faith through a dark glass”—recognizing man’s limited ability to grasp divine truth while nevertheless cleaving to a belief in the existence of such truth—that obliged the religious believer to behave as though he had full responsibility for his social-moral choices. Silver believed that the great danger to humanity lay in the attractiveness of the opposite conclusion, namely, that man’s cognitive limitations deprived him of free will and of any ability to change his social environment. Silver associated this pessimistic outlook with social determinism and regarded it as conducive to the rise of totalitarian regimes. It was Judaism’s task to counter this pessimism , especially when it emerged in religious garb: Pessimism is a form of atheism, for it omits God from man’s calculations, and ignored the spirit of God that is in man . . . Judaism admonished Where Judaism Differed | 39 man not to despair of the future . . . nor of mankind’s inexhaustible spiritual resources. (Silver 1957d) Judaism’s call to transform human limitations into a source of moral responsibility was, in Silver’s view, part of a venerable tradition, one that was most evident during its clash with Hellenistic culture, which viewed ethics as a system of abstract values. In contrast, the Jewish prophetic ethos held that the sole means of approaching divine knowledge was through human commitment to moral behavior: Plato speculated long about the nature of the Good, and having found a satisfactory definition in terms of the four cardinal virtues, whose prototype was a heavenly form, he did nothing about this Good. It remained an aristocratic intellectual truth. . . . He did not rush out into the Agora and, lifting his voice like a trumpet, declare unto the Athenians their transgressions and to the House of the Achaeans, their sins, surmounting them to repentance and reformation. Nor can one conceive of Plato, or Aristotle, or Epictetus passionately pleading with the Almighty, in the name of Justice to save the wicked city of Sodom, for the sake of the few righteous men in it. Judaism did not speculate much on the nature of the Good, but it told man what . . . the Lord required of him “to do justly, to love mercy and to walk with God.” (Silver, 1957d) Silver did not set forth this conception of the Judaism–Hellenism conflict for purposes of historical-theoretical scrutiny. He employed it in order to draw a complex comparison between American Jewry and the Christian majority. He began this comparison by underscoring the shared Jewish-Christian insight; he explained that monotheism had diverged from paganism precisely when the recognition dawned that human material terms were inadequate to express the divine. Both monotheistic religions acknowledged man’s inability to fully comprehend the world of which he is a part. Moreover, in all likelihood Silver had found an inspiration for his Jewish “dark glass” approach in the New Testament and St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (13:12): “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” This emphasis on commonality between 40 | The Early 1950s Christianity and Judaism was not coincidental; it indicated the degree to which Silver partook in the contemporary discourse celebrating America ’s Judeo-Christian heritage.1 However, according to Silver, it was precisely this shared JudeoChristian monotheistic approach that obliged him, as a Jewish cleric, to underscore the differences between the two faiths—particularly the divergent conclusions that they drew from their awareness of human limitations. Silver underscored this divergence by focusing on...