The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education

Part III: Between "K’lal Yisrael" and Denominationalism,1940–1965

pa r t i i i Between K’lal Yisrael and Denominationalism, 1940–1965 325 I n order to appreciate the chasm between Jewish educators and rabbis during the postwar years, and their competing visions of American Jewish life, one need look no further than the discourse surrounding K’lal Yisrael. For the Benderly boys and their circle of educators, K’lal Yisrael—the Community of Israel—was a core concept, a ‘‘basic ingredient of Jewish existence.’’ In a 1952 article, Benderly acolyte Samuel Citron called it ‘‘the essence of Jewish life today.’’ Its emotional valence was profound and ‘‘charged with meaning. It brings to mind the flow of Jewish history through the ages.’’ K’lal Yisrael, he added, ‘‘motivates the Jew so strongly that it has become the major aim and emphasis in Jewish education . All that we teach is geared toward developing within our children a sense of identity with our past and a feeling of belongingness to K’lal Yisrael.’’∞ Rabbis and movement leaders in particular also recognized its conceptual power. However, they greeted its ascendancy with ambivalence and skepticism. ‘‘The term K’lal Yisrael is, to the best of my knowledge, not found in our classical or medieval literature,’’ the president of the University of Judaism, Simon Greenberg , cautioned at a 1962 conference of Conservative Jewish educators. ‘‘If it has been used somewhere by someone before modern times, its use was so rare and so unimportant that no dictionary of the Hebrew language, no anthology of Jewish thought and literature, deems it su≈ciently significant to be listed as a separate item or even to include it under the rubric k’lal or yisrael.’’ Greenberg was correct. Indeed, the English equivalent of K’lal Yisrael, ‘‘Jewish peoplehood,’’ was only coined in 1942 by Mordecai Kaplan, although the concept was arguably in the air during the 1920s and 1930s. But Greenberg’s philological interest in the derivation of the term was hardly academic. He hoped to deflate the term of some of its emotional and rhetorical power. With the Conservative movement ascendant on the postwar landscape, Greenberg was interested in fostering denominational loyalties . Orthodox and Reform leaders, likewise, were intent on shaping distinct approaches to Jewish living, and particular responses to the challenges of modernity . A community-centered ideology was an unacceptable force for attenuation that blunted the movements’ edges.≤ The Conservative movement, in particular, was struggling with a laxity of religious observance among its growing laity. Greenberg and other Conservative leaders worried that the widening gap between elite and folk threatened to undermine the movement from within. It seemed that K’lal Yisrael was being used by 326 Between K’lal Yisrael and Denominationalism many to derogate any activity that did not command the support of an overwhelming majority of American Jews. Greenberg imagined it as a ‘‘powerful battering ram’’ that was being used ‘‘to break down standards, to level down values and undermine all criteria of judgment.’’ K’lal Yisrael Judaism, Greenberg concluded bitterly, was a Judaism of lowest common denominators: combating antisemitism , safeguarding Israel’s security, maintaining social welfare institutions, and cultivating Jewish pride, especially among the young. Shunted to the side were such ‘‘denominational activities’’ as ‘‘intensive Hebrew education, Sabbath observance and participation in the religious life of the Synagogue.’’ The synagogue, in particular, was disparaged by some as an ‘‘an anti K’lal Yisrael institution,’’ in contrast to the Jewish community center, which provided programming and recreational activities for the entire Jewish community.≥ Greenberg recognized that the early-twentieth-century leader of the Conservative movement, Solomon Schechter, had played an important role in laying the groundwork for the popularization of K’lal Yisrael with his promotion of ‘‘Catholic Israel’’ as a substitute for, and antidote to, Am Yisrael (the Nation of Israel), which had taken on uncomfortable nationalistic overtones in the age of political Zionism. ‘‘However,’’ Greenberg countered, ‘‘like every tool of the hand or the intellect,’’ the concept of K’lal Yisrael ‘‘can be used properly or improperly.’’ He implored Conservative educators ‘‘to teach that there are standards of conduct in Jewish life and some ways of living as a Jew are to be preferred to other ways, even though these ways may in some manner divide us o√ or separate us from large sections of the Jewish people. . . . We must resist the imputation that because we have standards we are violating the concept of K’lal...