Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy: and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy

5. Conclusion

Conclusion P eter Berger has observed that the orthodox of all classical Western religious faiths regard themselves "as living in a tradition." For such people the tradition requires neither defense nor explanation. It provides the contours within which reality is experienced. Life in accord with the beliefs and practices of the tradition is perceived as the only proper way in which an authentic and meaningful human religious existence can be attained. The "very nature of tradition" is thus "to be taken for granted."l Yet, for the acculturated Jews of the West-including the Orthodox -this notion has been compromised over the last two hundred years. For them, Jewish identity must accommodate itself to elements of consciousness and culture derived from a larger non-Jewish world in which Jews freely reside. "Jewishness" is experienced as part of what might be labeled a "hyphenated identity." Berger concludes , "This taken-for-grantedness [of tradition] is continually falsified by the experience of living in a modem society. The orthodox must ... present to [themselves] as fate what [they] know empirically to be a choice. This is a difficult feat."2 It is not, however, an impossible one. For if it were, then Jewish identity, practice, and belief would have atrophied and died when confronted with the ubiquity and power of Western non-Jewish culture. Although almost a century has elapsed since Esriel Hildesheimer lived, his personal and institutional responses to the task of forging a hyphenated German-Jewish identity retain a significance that transcends the German-Jewish world in which he lived. His lasting achievement is that he created a viable Orthodox Judaism for ac· 166 culturated central European Jews. They, like most Jews of the modern world, confronted the challenges of constructing a meaningful Jewish life and faith in the face of a transformed social, religious, political, and cultural environment. Hildesheimer did achieve a German-Jewish symbiosis. This analysis of Hildesheimer's particular accomplishments thus not only provides insights into the nature of one variety of modern Jewish Orthodoxy but contributes an ecumenical model of modern Jewish identity as well. An anecdote related by Rabbi Anton Nobe13 illustrates Hildesheimer 's synthesis of the contemporary and the traditional. Recalling his own student days at the Rabbiner-Seminar, Nobel wrote that he was asked to deliver an address at the founding ceremony of Dibbuk Haverim, the seminary's student association, in 1894. At the conclusion of his talk, he offered a student toast, a "salamander," in honor of his teacher Rabbi Hildesheimer and the other members of the Orthodox rabbinical school's faculty. According to Alexander Altmann, who remembers similar toasts offered during his student days at the Rabbiner-Seminar in the 1920s, the German student custom of the salamander, Teutonic in origin, "consisted in everybody standing up, circling their beer glasses on the table, and draining them to the last dreg."4 We can only speculate as to Hildesheimer's reaction to this toast. As the scion of a traditional European rabbinic family, who had been educated in the yeshiva of Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger and at the universities of Berlin and Halle, how did he feel as he sat there? He was seventy-four, and these students studying for the Orthodox rabbinate in his modern rabbinical seminary represented the culmination of his life's dreams. How did he assess his achievements as he witnessed them saluting him and the colleagues he had assembled, not with "LeHayyim-To Life," as tradition (Shabbat 67) would have it, but with the custom and rite of the German university? Was he elated or perturbed? We shall never know. It may be that Hildesheimer simply felt that such compromise was the price that his milieu exacted for Orthodox Judaism to survive . Seen as graphic testimony to the acculturated nature of German Orthodoxy and the hyphenated nature of German-Jewish identity , however, another interpretation of the episode is more likely. For the incident bears witness to the symbiotic nature of German Judaism itself and to the consciousness of a man like Hildesheimer who shaped and lived it. After all, why should the scene have struck Hildesheimer, the product of German Bildung, as dissonant with Conclusion 167 tradition? The man who sang Heine to his children on Shabbat afternoons must have been pleased with the fruits of his labors. Indeed, it represented the successful synthesis between Jewish tradition and German culture. Synthesis is here understood as a syncretism between...