Studies in the Meaning of Judaism (JPS Scholar of Distinction Series)

A GLIMPSE: WHEN AGNOSTICISM AND RATIONALISM COULD NO LONGER GROUND OUR VALUES

A GLIMPSE: WHEN AGNOSTICISM AND RATIONALISM COULD NO LONGER GROUND OURVALUES 3 Perhaps the most direct impetus to thinking is dissatisfaction with someone else’s statement of the way things are or ought to be. Young writers generally claim a place in intellectual discussion by their critiques of certain established figures in their field. What passed for Jewish theological thinking at mid-century was generally a watered-down version of Hermann Cohen’s conception of Judaism as religion of reason par excellence . A minority preferred Mordecai Kaplan’s more-science-thanphilosophy -based sociological understanding of Judaism, particularly because it, unlike Cohen’s view, had a strong ethnic component. Most Americanized Jews had never heard of either Cohen or Kaplan but they shared the rationalistic, optimistic ethos of those post-Depression days and believed that people, at their best, were rational beings and hence had a strong ethical impulse in their lives. Two difficulties with the dominant rationalisms caused me and some other young thinkers to seek a radically different mode of conceptualizing Judaism. First, with human reason primary, God and the Jewish tradition—the truths on which we based our lives—were superfluous to being simply a worthwhile person, a goal more directly attained via rationality and ethics. Agnosticism, therefore, became the standard if covert belief of those who, for whatever reason, stayed Jewish; the commandments that now spoke to many others in our community mandated politics and social betterment causes, not Jewish piety. Second, the link between thinking logically and a demanding ethic (of some recognizable Judeo-Christian substance) was broken by two concurrent challenges . Practically, how people actually behaved in the first half of the twentieth century belied the essentially rational-ethical nature of human beings. Theoretically as well, Marx, Freud, anthropology, and the advocates of scientific-mathematical philosophy denied the Kantian insistence upon the imperative ethical quality of pure reason. These were not purely abstract issues for me and my friends; Judaism was surely more interested in how one lived than how exactly one thought about it. So, as God became a living reality for us, prayer and classic Jewish texts became critical to our lived Judaism, a direction that only toward the end of the century became more common among modernized American Jews. The intellectual issues underlying Jewish life must have been troubling other rabbis because in 1950 the Reform rabbis’ group, for the only time in its history, invited its members to a special conference on “theology.” There was no significant suggestion—in either the call for that meeting or in its major addresses—that the founding of the State of Israel or the post-war definitive evidence about what later came to be called the Holocaust demanded this rethinking of belief. What brought people to the meeting was a vague sense that the older philosophic ways of talking about God and relating to the Jewish tradition were no longer adequate. No new understandings of Judaism emerged in that conference —theology rarely if ever can be done by committee or by plenum votes—but I was encouraged to discover in the Reform rabbis’ group rabbis who shared my sense of unhappiness with the established ways of understanding Judaism and who were seeking something substantially different. My first major article (paper 1 in this volume) described that meeting and, by being published in the leading Jewish intellectual journal of the time, encouraged me to try to write more. A sense of the truer, richer Judaism that animated me began to surface in the following years, though I had little awareness of it at the time. Nonetheless, the focus of two of my papers in the following years reflects it. My 1956 address to the assembly of educators, a group that went on to found the National Association of Temple Educators, was directed to “Creating Commitment [sic] in Our Religious Schools” (paper 2), a concern utterly foreign to the rational-ethical or ethnic interpreters of Judaism. In 1957 I was invited to give a paper to the Central Conference of American (i.e., Reform) Rabbis CCAR, on the classic topic, “The Idea [sic] of God” (paper 3). Rather than provide what the rationalists anticipated of such a presentation—namely, a new philosophically validated conception of God—I sought to radically change our theological frame of reference. I asked, instead, how we would recognize a Jewishly authentic notion of God, and—my systematic sense of theologizing...