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5 / Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community
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5 / CrisisTheology and the Jewish Community A dozen years have passed since Irving Kristol, in a savage critique of Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism,1 sought to demonstrate that Jewish thought in America was powerless to answer the great questions—questions about man and his condition, about destiny and the meaning of history —that the war had raised in the troubled minds of so many intellectuals in the West. Kristol’s article challenged Jewish thinkers to face these questions instead of taking refuge in the kind of calm, confident faith that he accused Milton Steinberg, and most American rabbis, of preaching. To this challenge a group of younger theologians—among them Emil Fackenheim and Will Herberg—soon responded, and for a time it seemed that a new Jewish theology, a theology concerned with the crisis of the age, was in process of being born. But the effort miscarried . Aside from a few articles and one book, perhaps two, the promise of these first few exciting efforts remained unfulfilled. Now that over a decade has passed, it may be useful to ask why this new Jewish theology failed to develop. To do so we must return to Kristol’s argument and set forth its basic thesis. What disturbed him was the relative indifference of American Judaism to the extent and complexity of the problem of sin. He wrote that “the spiritual distress of the modern world does not arise merely because man perversely chooses to do evil rather than good. If it were as uncomplicated as all that, presentday Judaism—even Rabbi Steinberg’s Judaism—would have the answer right at hand. The horror that breathes into our faces is the realization that evil may come by doing good—not merely intending to do good, but doing it.” 59 1961 Jewish theology to be meaningful in the postwar world would have to speak to this problem—to man’s talent for creating evil, to his capacity for deluding himself about the strength and subtlety of his evil inclination . Contemporary Jewish thinkers, of whom Steinberg was the most articulate, lacked the courage or the vision to see the problem, much less to provide the answers. Books, journals, and sermons seemed quite satisfied with the liberal formulas and melioristic illusions of the thirties. To read or hear them was to experience the eerie feeling that their authors had been suspended in time or that in their limited vision they had remained oblivious to what meanwhile had happened to mankind. Thus for men like Irving Kristol who were preoccupied with the ordeal of Western culture, a Judaism without an emphasis on the problem of sin was “still catastrophically narrow,” and was characterized by “intellectual timidity, cultural immaturity.” So went the appraisal and the challenge. It is not difficult to recall the circumstances which engendered this troubled concern with religion and with its failure to take sufficient account of the realities of human evil. By 1948, the mood of which Kristol’s article was only one of many expressions was already prominent in American Protestant circles which were experiencing the same disillusionment that their European colleagues had learned a war earlier. A few years before, everything had seemed so clear. The professors had swept out the dead dogmas of tradition and had confidently pointed the way to a better world. The politicians, particularly the radicals, had been even more convinced that their revelation was truth. Political action, scientific investigation, man-for-himself—such notions became the Messianic hopes, the pseudo-religions, which were shattered by the realities of World War II and the cold war that succeeded it. Once these new idols had been discredited by the tragic complexities of what was now seen to be “the human condition,” religion itself began to appear in a new role and to take on new meaning. If man could not play God successfully , then perhaps God was not dead. If man could not finally stand in effective judgment over his own pride and sinfulness, then God could and would—perhaps, indeed, had. To rebuild his life, to be true to his new view of history, postwar man needed to understand not only his limitations but also his profound capacity for evil even in the guise of doing good. And, with their continuing revelations of both democratic and Communist deceit and treachery, the years since World War II have but made the problem more pressingly relevant. As a result, the theology of sin—and related to it, the...