Encore Archive

Welcome to Encore, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on topics of the moment. Each week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

To access the CLAL Encore Archive, click here.

To join the conversation at CLAL Encore Talk, click here.

At the Beginning

Eugene Borowitz (Sh'ma, 1/1, November 9, 1970)

In self-certain eras magazines were inaugurated with declarations of principle. Sh'ma is the child of troubled times so it has a different character. For example, its contributing editors differ radically on many matters: belief, politics, duty, social values, to mention a few. They probably could not agree on a substantive program this magazine ought to foster. If they are unanimous on anything, it is on their individual freedom. They do not want me or anyone else to presume to speak for them. They will speak for themselves and then, attach their names. Otherwise, they take no responsibility for opinions expressed in Sh'ma's pages.

I too speak only for myself. Yet I think it may be of help to say what brought me to start Sh'ma. I feel called by a problem and commanded to do something about it.

The problem,is society. It always has been, as the Bible and rabbinic literature indicate. Yet only a few years ago men of culture sought to ignore its ugly realities and, by retreating to a rich inner life, save their soul. What was then psychologizing and romanticism, The Power of Positive Thinking and Franny and Zooey, has now shown its degenerate tendency in the ego-centricity of psychedelic faddism and drug abuse.

Man's emotions need expression. His consciousness needs expansion far beyond what technical reason has shrunk it to. But psychology can no longer claim priority in fostering human welfare. What society projects upon the individual has clearly become the single greatest source of continuing, changeable evil that we know. We must do something about it not because we cannot ignore the many problems, once so carefully hidden from us, nor even because the suffering has intensified in recent years. The degradation is intolerable because it is unnecessary and we cannot, Eichmann-like, be morally content to do the bidding of the old order.

Were we cowardly enough to ignore what is happening, we would be denounced by our students or our children. Radicals, liberals, conservatives, they keep wanting to know what we are doing about mankind. They will no longer give much respect or confer significant leadership upon people without a social concern. They prefer honest error in the service of man to selfish wisdom. They are making harsh demands and they are right.

But what shall we do?

In the New Deal days men were confident they could solve most social problems. Most men today, I among them, are not. We do not even know how much amelioration is possible without creating new difficulties. But that humility is not to be identified with a retreat to depending on God for everything. We wrong each other in a thousand ways but we are also capable of changing cholera from a plague to a problem. There is much we can do. At the least, we can talk to one another and, by showing such humanity, make what is insoluble less terrifying. if we could also learn to listen to one another, particularly when we are in fundamental disagreement, we might thereby give a sign of how society can become community.

An equally powerful drive bringing me to this magazine is my trust in the Jewish tradition. In all its variegation it taught our forefathers how to face life realistically and yet ennoble it. As I see what my Jewishness has meant to my life, I know it has something fundamentally significant to say about what man and society ought to be today. I think I have always believed that but as I have seen the growing collapse of the old, accepted value systems in America, that feeling has become more intensified and self-conscious. In a world where espousing pagan a-morality is almost a pre-requisite for status, the virtues of being Jewish have become very precious. So I would like to see what my Jewish set toward things discloses about m), duties in contemporary society.

Surprisingly enough here too there are few certainties. However. two of the dogmas of my youth seem quite shattered. The first was that Judaism was really only ethics and the second, that modern Jewish social responsibility was essentially liberal politics.

The identification of Judaism with Kantian style ethics is not so much false as obsolete. I do not feel I have to prove to society that Jews have universal human concerns. I am rather quite concerned to understand what it means that I and many others still want to be Jews. Had we not learned from the neo-Kantian teachers of previous generations how deep the universal ethical passion was embedded in Jewish practice, I doubt that a magazine of this sort could have been conceived.

Finding a greater sense of commandment

But if the effective range of our Jewish duty has been shaped by the old ethical emphasis, it nonetheless far transcends it. My loyalty to the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition is of the essence, not secondary in my Jewishness. They certainly do not require continual ethical apology. So my concern with the affairs and failures of the Jewish community is as natural to me as is my involvement with the problems of mankind. I imagine that the precise implications of these commitments, when they conflict, will often be argued about here. And that is a good indication of the fragmented sort of existence most Jews lead today.

Yet even the ethical aspect of Judaism is by no means clear or well-defined. Despite a century and a half of boasting about the superiority of the ethics of Judaisrn, not more than two or three serious books have been written on the topic. With regard to social ethics, we are even poorer. Only the second volume of Moritz Lazarus' Ethics of Judaism deals with it but in a way that is of such minimal continuing interest that it has never been translated.

We are in a somewhat better situation as far as specific issues are concerned. Here, though we must generally work by analogy or extrapolation, there is often direct halakhic material available. Yet full-scale, modern studies of the range and development of Jewish opinion, like Feldman's on birth control, are quite rare. Other journals exist for such scholarly work. Sh'rna will confront the issues rather than study the sources. But each author will bring his own Jewish learning and experience to bear on his theme. In that living confrontation all of us can learn a good deal about the modern scope and content of Jewish duty.

That leads to the other aspect of our uncertainty. We cannot simply identify liberal politics as the social imperative of Judaism. For some Jews the old liberalism is an excuse for procrastination and an evasion of the root difficulties. For other Jews the primary obligation of our community is to keep health), and stable that democratic process upon which our existence in America depends. Today Jewish values imply different social strategy to different people. Instead of a relatively widespread, unlegislated but conventional agreement as to what modern Jews ought to do, the best guidance Judaism might offer to us is a vigorous dialectic of opinion.

Creating a dialogue in difference

Such a clash of views might be useful if it does not remain sporadic and private rather than continuing and public. If we can draw thoughtful people to this forum they will learn as well as teach the community. If we cannot have common answers, if we must live with the anxiety of alternatives, then let us at least know what the various views entail and what seem their major drawbacks. There is something quite traditional in encouraging such a dialectic as the instrument for fostering Jewish wisdom.

As I see it, then, Sh'ma is more identifiable in method than results, in approach than conclusions, in process than outcomes.

Some simple corollaries would seem to flow from that: a concern for realism and criticism.

To speak only about what is good and positive about us, worse to confine oneself to the conventionally acceptable topics and rhetoric is in effect, to protect the old patterns of inequality. Modern conservatism like modern radicalism is most effective when it stops trying to be nice and helps us face the realities. It is important to talk freely about what actually moves men and institutions: sex and money, ego and power. I believe it would help the Jewish community greatly if for a change we could speak about our leaders and organizations by name and not by suffocating euphemisms.

Criticism is the life-blood of modern thought. It is our only strong genre of ethics. But not in the Jewish community. Neither books nor ideas are permitted to be strongly contested, institutions and their leaders are always beyond public judgment. We must not give aid and comfort to the anti-Semite, Jewish or not. One who does not wish to join the conspiracy has little place in Jewish things -- and then we wonder why intellectuals, who are nothing if not critics, have little use for our community style. We need public criticism if only so that honest men will feel more at home among us. That must include not only criticism of the opinions expressed in these pages but of the enterprise as a whole. Candor need not mean cruelty; bluntness does not require boorishness, yet they are the risks. Despite them we must dispense with the old, protective etiquette of Jewish communal discourse.

Founding an unestablishedment

That is why I have created this journal as a private project, unbeholden to any established institution. Writers may say what they wish here, from whatever point of view they believe is valuable. Articles will be accepted-and letters are welcomed from those who wish a shorter format-solely in terms of whether, within this broad purview, I believe they make a contribution to the ongoing debate. I am therefore particularly grateful to my friends in Port Washington and elsewhere, and to those of Arnold J. Wolf in Chicago, whose contributions have made Sh'ma possible. They have not sought control or kavod. They have only asked me to do what intellectual Jews always said they wanted to do. By such trust, they have increased the sense of high responsibility with which this venture begins. I do not know whether it can succeed. I know it has to be tried. As the utterly realistic Psalm 90 puts it: Be pleased with us, Adonai, our God, and give our work more lasting value than we have. Yes, make it of some lasting worth.