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May 26, 2006
The troubles that Jews face
Leading Israeli thinker maps changes needed for survival.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
Jerusalem
In a week in which author A.B. Yehoshua caused shockwaves around
the Diaspora for suggesting that a genuine Jewish life could only
be led within Israel, Rabbi Prof. David Hartman did not mince words
while holding forth on his countryman.
"I think he's a meshugenah," Hartman, author, philosopher
and founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute, told a group of international
Jewish newspaper editors in Jerusalem May 9.
"I think he's totally wrong. He hasn't got a clue. His understanding
that Judaism is what Jews do is a total mistake. Judaism is not
what Jews do. Judaism is a critique of what Jews do. It is an aspiration
of what Jews should do."
Hartman is well-equipped to make such pronouncements. He has made
Jewish education and identity his life's work. He established his
institute in 1976 after making aliyah from the United States. (He
also once led a congregation in Montreal.)
The institute, which receives funding from within Israel and around
the world (the Jewish Agency and the Bronfman family are among its
contributors), offers courses based on "religious pluralism"
to rabbis, lay leaders and Jewish educators. Also on site is the
Charles E. Smith High School for Orthodox boys. The mandate of the
entire campus is to "foster pluralism, reinvigorate Judaism,
strengthen Jewish identity and respond to the central challenges
facing Judaism within contemporary society" – something
Hartman has also essayed in his many books, including A Heart
of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices Within Judaism and
Israelis and the Jewish Tradition: An Ancient People Debating
Its Future.
Yehoshua's speech, made at a gathering of the American Jewish Committee
in Washington, D.C., also sparked considerable debate within the
Israeli daily press. Was he right to say what he did, commentators
asked. Were his American hosts right to be offended?
The truth, according to Hartman at least, is that Jewish life in
the Diaspora is generally more earnest than in Israel itself.
"Most of my congregation who were educated in Montreal made
aliyah the same time I did and they became goyim when they came
here!" Hartman declared. "They were far more Jewish in
Montreal than they were when they came here. Israeli children don't
receive a Jewish education. It's the equivalent of a meagre day
school education in America. Their knowledge and understanding of
Talmud, Jewish culture and Jewish collective identity is minimal.
"Alef Bet Yehoshua, he's still haunted by normalcy and abnormalcy.
He sees the Diaspora as a manifestation of a sick Judaism. He sees
Torah and Sinai as causing us to become a neurotic people. I wonder
what his normal people look like? It sounds like a modern version
of Canaanite culture, which started in Israel as well. There's no
substitute for grounding identity in the large drama of Jewish history.
The question is how you understand that drama. Who mediates the
story? The ones who mediate the past will control how Jews are going
to be in the future. It's not just becoming the People of the Book;
[it's] who reads that book? Who interprets it? What parts of the
tradition should remain? What parts should we change? To what degree
is literalism a Jewish option?"
Hartman believes there is, "A deep identity crisis in the Jewish
people as a whole. People thought that Israel, or the Holocaust,
could fill up that identity crisis and be the organizing principles
of Jewish identity. That was a horrible, tragic mistake. Because
of the Holocaust, we cry, we mourn – but we don't celebrate.
And Jewish identity should be a celebration, rather than a weeping.
Jews like to say, 'oy, neb'ech (alas!),' but that's not necessarily
characteristic of Judaism. I believe it is really important to take
Jews off the victim psychology, in which to see themselves as victims
is what characterizes the Jewish experience.
"The Jew is a permanent other, a stranger wherever he goes,
the most vulnerable ... all those metaphors, we have to in some
way rethink what those metaphors mean. You can't think that you
can bring up Jewish children and breed a Jewish culture on the hatred
of the goyim. It doesn't work. The issue is not Jewish continuity,
the issue is Jewish content. What characterizes a Jewish mensch?
What characterizes a Jewish society? And what should characterize
Israel as a Jewish society?"
He did concede that, "We are all committed, which is an important
phenomena, to the continuation of Jewish history. I think that's
the deepest impulse of Israel – the decision to continue Jewish
history in spite of the Holocaust. There's a very deep religious
meaning behind that – the decision not to check out of history
as a result of the Holocaust. It's a decision to be visible in a
very vulnerable world. That's what Israel is: a very profound, heroic
statement.
"What the Holocaust did is it destroyed a naïve belief
in universal humanism. We can't anymore think that literature, art,
music, philosophy are sufficient conditions to create a human culture.
The culture of Bach, Beethoven, Kant ... I mean, German Jews felt
a unique sense of pride to be part of Germany. They would not make
a shidduch (match) with people from Poland. That was considered
a kind of sub-Jew, who didn't go to the opera. The idea of culture
as a sufficient condition for humanity has been destroyed completely
by the Holocaust. Therefore Jews began to reject humanism universally
and developed this very, very polarized view: we have to worry about
ourselves, and who cares about the goyim. That polarization, which
is not intrinsically Jewish, it's fundamentally non-Jewish –
it's a result of the sense of abandoment that we felt in the Holocaust."
There's a direct link, Hartman believes, between that sense of abandonment
and the ebbing away of an intuitive notion of Jewish community.
After the Holocaust, "We turned inward and choked on our impotence,"
he said. "And we have young people growing up and they're cast
into that polarization, and they find that being a Jew is claustrophobic.
In other words, they're sent to the universities, they're exposed
to universal culture, they meet any different type of person, but
they should only marry a Jew. Why should they? That's what people
don't understand, that instinctive 'no' to the world is not part
of the younger generation.
"In our parents' generation or earlier, the idea that you should
marry a Jew was intuitive. You didn't have to justify it. It's not
as if the earlier generation had a deeper Jewish identity. The previous
generations didn't consider [intermarriage] as a live option. They
were not culturally integrated into the larger world. The social
frame of reference was certainly much more restricted, so not intermarrying
was considered a normal response. It was not necessarily a philosophically
articulate commitment to Jewish continuity or content or history.
It had nothing to do with a value commitment. It had to do with
more of a visceral frame of reference.
"That visceral sensibility is gone. So what we do is we try
to go on trips to Auschwitz, we have Birthright, we try to create,
again, visceral Jews. I appreciate the effort and I applaud all
philanthropists who are trying to do that. But I think it's a total
failure. Visceralness doesn't come via some sort of program. You
shmeck it, you drink it, you breathe it from the time you're born.
And to think that we're going to reinstitute visceral Judaism is
the great illusion of modern Judaism. And as a result of that, assimilation
is inevitable."
Israel, he said, is not a panacea. "In Israel, the problem
is that we thought identity could be grounded in nationalism. We
thought the Hebrew culture, the army, the pride, could provide sufficient
meaning to our Jewishness. This is the mistake. Nationalism cannot
fill content."
Hartman said he was troubled by the zealotry he witnessed in Gush
Katif on the part of evacuated settlers. "The exclusive-sovereignty
people saw in Yamit and saw in Gush Katif a rebellion against their
whole messianic dream. When I went to Gush Katif, I met people saying,
'This is not going to happen. God will not allow it to happen. This
land was promised to Abraham.' The land now is lived, practically,
concretely, by two people. That's a reality we came into. [Ariel]
Sharon was motivated by pragmatic considerations and who can judge
what is the best pragmatic solution? Did it require negotiation
before withdrawal or you had to create a reality of withdrawal?
That's a pragmatic, functional argument, but I can understand both
sides. The issue is not immoral laws. It's a very serious political
decision trying to break the stalemate. To stay in this situation
is to expose Israeli soldiers to protect 20 Jewish families. It
was unfeasible, unwarranted and fundamentally a total disparaging
of what the resources of our country should be providing in comparison
to the Palestinian population."
Still, Hartman is not without hope for the future.
"My view is that Israel is the greatest opportunity to rethink
Judaism," he said, "to rethink the tradition. So far all
we've done is we've gone farther back into eastern Europe and the
rabbinates who control this country have no understanding about
the Zionist revolution.
"Any real change in Judaism is going to have to come from the
community, from people who have confidence in their Judaism –
not from the top, but from the grassroots. Judaism survived because
it was constantly being reinterpreted. We always reinterpreted to
suit the conditions in which we were living. There were ways in
which the tradition was never literal. It was always interpreted,
always open-ended. It always had possibilities of living in the
world.
"I'm not advocating change for the sake of change. I'm asking
it to retool so it becomes a living Judaism that people can identify
with. I'm not trying to take the passion away from the tradition,
I'm trying to revivify it. The issue is the Jewish people have to
wake up to who they are as a people. What is the content of their
Jewishness? What do they want to become?
"That was for me, Israel. That's why I made aliyah. The challenge
of Israel is, for me, to rethink the whole tradition; to see which
laws are appropriate for a modern people or not. How do you have
a modern state and observe the Shabbas? What's the fire department
going to do? 'Sorry, we're off until an hour after Shabbas, then
call us.' Are you going to have a foreign ministry that doesn't
answer the phone? Clearly, the whole thing had to be rethought.
What's the attitude towards a non-Jew? What's the attitude towards
a minority? What's the attitude towards minorities that are enemies?
These are serious issues.
"There's a whole different mindset towards the non-Jew in the
talmudic culture. Can you use that frame of reference for a modern,
integrated society? These are daily issues. Where do you get the
resources for the aged, the young, prenatal care? What do you invest
in? How do you deal with poverty? These are the burning issues that
require Jewish content, which require study, which require thinking,
which require the Jewish people to start thinking about their tradition.
This is what the Jewish world doesn't understand, because they're
not learning. They say, 'Let's be Jewish.' They say, 'That's not
Jewish, that's not Jewish, because everything Jewish is nice.' "
Ultimately, what Hartman wants to see is, "a Jewish people
awake, alert to where we need to go. I don't think that we can avoid
returning the People to the Book. We have to become the People of
the Book again. I want [Jews] to think. I want them to be able to
discuss it intelligently. I want them to be able to think about
Jewish ideas in intelligent terms. I want them to talk about serious
issues in Israel. I want them to talk about American or Canadian
Judaism in a serious way."
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