Introduction: The Edge of the Center

In 1956, in an interview, Chaim Potok said that "Today is the first time in the history of the Jewish people that the Jews actually constitute a fundamental element of our umbrella civilization….Jews are confronted with a situation in which they contribute massively to the general civilization, and at the same time, are central to that civilization." But, he added, "you have a civilization that is ripe with enormous possibilities for Jewish creativity and at the same time dangerously leaning in the direction of assimilation and disappearance."¹

As Potok time and time again explained, "It's a result of being in the cores of two cultures simultaneously and having to fight the battle of how to fuse them…. So we're in a between period today. What will happen in the future is very difficult to discern. But it is something that will come out of our fusion with the best of Western humanism unless we're inundated by the periphery of things Jewish and things secular."²

The periphery of things Jewish, he wrote:

As I pondered the musings of Chaim Potok, of his thought that, as he put it in his history of the Jews, Wanderings, he had a sense of "renewal, a foresharpening of self-identity, a feeling of approaching some distant fertile plain," that pointed to the unfolding of what he called a "third Jewish civilization."³

This unfolding stuck with me. We are in 2009, an African-American is president, the Middle East crisis is still with us, anti-Semitism and racism remain prevalent, and the Jewish religious denominations are struggling with the costs of modernity, Americanization, assimilation, and acculturation. If you're optimistic, you say the Jews have weathered just about everything through more than five thousand years and we will come through this, too; if you are less sanguine, you have to wonder what is the price of Americanization and what the price of "Jewish by choice" means in the 21^st century. In the United States and in the Western World, a great, perhaps increasing, number of people echo Stephen in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church." It is forgotten that the founders of Western secular humanism took from the ancient world its loveliest aspects, forgetting or ignoring the ugliness and brutality of that ancient world, its orgiastic elements, its lust for power, and its crude religions.

We're in a post-modernist phase today. The Jewish tradition has its own aesthetics and its own sense of morality. Our aesthetics are in the service of morality, humankind, and the core of the Commandments. Fusion between the center of our religious thought and Western secular humanism will not be easy, perhaps impossible. At its core, Judaism is a counterculture to the pagan world. Perhaps fusion may be obtained through the inherent ability of the Jewish tradition to confront new civilizations, as it has done for several thousand years, and to renew itself as a result, and also from its ability to pull back when it senses it's about to give up too much.⁴ We have had two civilizations so far: one was biblical and the other was rabbinic. In this sense, what Potok foresaw as the emergence of a third Jewish civilization may come about and even be one of the ways Western civilization will save itself. Hedonism, runaway individualism, indifference to others, and the Jewish ethos are in conflict. We are at the edge of the center. We are in an "in-between" existence now. Our fusion with the best of Western humanism will determine the future. Deo volente!