Rethinking Zion and Modernity

I recently read two seemingly dissimilar books: Jerold Auerbach's Are We One? Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel, and Adam Seligman's Modernity's Wager. The first of these volumes deals exclusively with the predicament in which the world's largest Jewish communities now find themselves, and the second consists of far-ranging ruminations on the destiny of humankind in modern times. After I had finished reading both books, however, I slowly began to perceive that they have more in common than I had initially realized.

The authors of both volumes are residents of the Boston area who trace the origins of their latest projects back to Jerusalem. Auerbach has spent a lot of time there. "Where, after all," he asks, "was there a better place . . . to excavate the buried layers of my own Jewish self?" ¹ Seligman, for his part, describes his book as the closing of a chapter "that began eighteen years ago in Jerusalem," where his work as a sociologist commenced. ²

Both Auerbach and Seligman distance themselves from the United States in other ways as well. Auerbach, a professor of American history at Wellesley College, appears to retain little fondness for his country. Not only is he disgusted by "the moral relativism that has infused American culture since the 1960s," but he does not seem to have any higher regard for an earlier, uncorrupted America either (13). Few things irk him more than the fact that Israelis in the 1990s became what "American Jewry had been in the 1950s" (181). Discussing Herman Wouk's best-selling novel of that decade, Marjorie Morningstar, Auerbach belittles the way in which its author validated his readers' "yearning to reconcile Jewish continuity, as they defined it, with American freedom" (99). No less than he despises their shallow Jewishness, it seems, he deplores their seduction by what he elsewhere calls "the modern siren song of freedom" (49).

Seligman's book is also concerned with the harmful effects of certain modern notions of freedom. Together with the rest of the people in the Western world, this Boston University professor complains, Americans "seek the core of the self in the image of the self-actualizing agent who realizes his or her autonomous will." ³ This view of the individual "makes for a certain politics . . . the politics of liberalism . . . of the public sphere as a more or less neutral arena where individual interests can be maximized without impinging on the rights (i.e., interests) of others." ⁴ Nowhere, says Seligman, is the politics of liberalism more advanced than in the United States. ⁵ And nowhere, it seems, is the ensuing moral bankruptcy more evident. ⁶

Both of these men seem to be much more troubled by the moral inadequacies of the society in which they live than pleased by the bounties it provides. And both of these inhabitants of the American Athens look to Jerusalem for solutions. Auerbach, a religious Zionist, has his eyes on the earthly Jerusalem, the State of Israel. For Seligman, Jerusalem represents only one of the religious traditions with which Westerners must reconnect themselves if they are to emerge from a dehumanizing moral vacuum. He does not exactly affirm that Judaism is truer than any of these other religions, but he is quite certain of its relevance to our contemporary situation. And, to judge from some of the examples he brings, the earthly Jerusalem is very much on his mind.

It is on my mind a lot too. My right hand is in no greater danger of losing its cunning than either Auerbach's or Seligman's. I spend much of my time reading and writing about some of the same issues that concern them and about Israel in particular, and now I have a few things I want to say about their two new books.

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Are We One? is as much about Jews in the United States as it is about Israel. It is indeed, Auerbach tells us in his bibliographical essay, something of...