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17 / The Autonomous Jewish Self
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17 / The Autonomous Jewish Self Questioners commonly challenge me with a Jewish version of the fallacy of misplaced confidence. For generations now, liberal Jews have made Western culture their surrogate for Torah—with disastrous results. While one might have accepted some Jewish sacrifice as the necessary accompaniment of a seismic shift to living in a new and better world, thinking in such other-directed terms in our situation seems ridiculous. Western civilization itself ails desperately. It not only does not merit being our religion, it seems likely to escape paganization only by the rebirth of the sort of moral devotion which faith in a commanding God can alone provide . Why then do liberal Jews not stop asking first what our society demands from them and attend instead to the claims that Judaism makes of all who wish to be authentic Jews? Socially put, why are liberal Jews so half-hearted about their welladvertised return to traditional practices? Do we not know, no matter to what depth of conscious pride or embarrassment have caused us to repress it, that genuine Jewish piety means living by traditional Jewish law? If we are not ready to accept the whole law, then for the sake of the unity of all Israel, can we not now immediately move in one limited but critical area: to follow Orthodox Jewish law, in all its diversity, as our basis for Jewish marriages and divorces? On rare occasions these challenges sound a metaphysical tone. Questioners cannot understand why Jews who acknowledge that religious duties are largely of human origin cannot simply accommodate those who know their standards are not their own but God’s. How can liberal Jews utter an occasional absolute “no” when they proudly boast that all authority is substantially human and therefore open to revision? 215 1984 My sort of liberal Jews will want to begin a response, I think, by carefully distinguishing between the failures of Western civilization and its lacking any value whatsoever. Many of the vital and creative aspects of contemporary Jewish life arose as a result of our emancipation. Jewish aesthetics has moved beyond ritual silver, manuscript illumination and synagogue music to embrace arts and styles that greatly enrich our Jewish lives. Jewish scholarship is not only fecund beyond our fondest expectations of but twenty years ago, it excites us intellectually through its use of a Western hermeneutic applied chronologically to texts examined critically . American Jewry exhibits an activism unique in the Diaspora Jewish experience. Zionism was the first great fruit of the fusion of the Western notion of social responsibility and the Jewish commitment to life. By now we consider it a premise of Jewish duty that we should help determine the course of our society and take political action for the State of Israel or Jews in peril. And—limiting this list to four examples—by adapting ourselves to America we have created a Jewish style which shows signs of being a worthy successor to other great amalgams of Jewish life and a host culture, such as Spanish and Polish Jewish life. These and many other smaller triumphs exist because many Jews, against the advice of their leaders, believed that the spiritual survival of the Jewish community would never be assured by seeking to preserve Jewish life as isolated as possible from the newly opened up Western world. Rather, they knew that Jewish well-being depended on accepting the risks of entering the general society and actively seeking to benefit Jewish life from it. In the mid-nineteenth century—and even now in some quarters—this commitment to energetic involvement with Western civilization was seen as the death knell of Judaism. Today, a century or so later, the overwhelming majority of Jews, including a very substantial number of Orthodox Jews, is determined that they and their children shall have the best of both heritages. Liberal Jews like myself see in this historic transformation of Jewish community values a validation of our general sense of commitment to modern civilization and some of its central values. The very most significant idea the Emancipation taught us, I venture to say, is the notion of the autonomous self. As we emerged from the ghetto, shtetl and mellah, we encountered a view of human nature that radically extended ideas which we had occasionally seen mentioned in our traditional texts. The Western world gave these old Jewish notions an emphasis and power the admittedly high Jewish sense of self had not come to. For the Enlightenment...