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.

What We Learned From the 1970's II

(Sh'ma 10/185, January 11, 1980)

At Sh'ma's annual meeting of the contributing editors last June, a symposium was held on the implications of the past decade on Jewish life. Our previous issue included the first Part of that exchange - Opening, prepared remarks by Nora Levin and Arnold Jacobs Wolf and David Novak and Michael Wyschogrod's comments with which the ensuing discussion began. We resume here with the highlights of that discussion and the closing remarks of the three initial speakers.

Nora Levin

Three points, if I may. One, I'm very troubled by a certain elitism which has communicated itself tonight and I'm disappointed. I don't think we dare set ourselves up as people who know how to live Jewishly while the masses don't. If we're disappointed then perhaps they're also disappointed in us. I think we all have to guard against a sense that we are somehow superior beings who know what a true Jewish life is but that we have only a desert in which to work. That's a very dangerous attitude to have if one hopes to do any constructive work. There are many Jews who have the credentials to be Jewish. In my own very limited experiences as a teacher I have met hundreds of students whom I value very deeply, to say nothing of the large numbers of people I meet in any Jewish organizations. Yes, Jewish bureaucracy is a terribly oppressive and paralyzing thing. Still there are Jews within the bureaucracies who can be reached, and in small ways, perhaps we can even make some changes in those bureaucracies.

Second, if anything, I have been very impressed by the leadership of young Jews, their sensitivity and originality. I have the impression that it's their generation that has really done the important critiques of our institutional life. They have forced some changes and, indeed, the very movements that Gene referred to have been co-opted and are now indeed part of the Jewish establishment. So the challenge now is to create new ways of being Jewish which again may be co-opted by the bureaucracy. Our young people have to keep on generating new ideas and be our leaders in that way instead of looking for inspiration from an older generation. You lead us.

Third as to Gene's challenge, I thought I was paying homage, really, and acknowledging the great contributions to American Jewish religious life in the third and fourth generations when I referred to the proliferation of courses in Judaica in the campuses and the growth of the havurah movement. I didn't say explicitly that it has meant the groping of Jews for faith and authentic traditions but of course that is what the havurah and C.A.J.E. movements exemplify.

Arnold Jacob Wolf

I have no more wisdom to offer so I'll quote from two of my teachers. One, whom I've never met is Yeshi Lebovitz who in an interview last month said half of what Mike Wyschogrod said, namely, "I'm a believing Jew who believes in the covenant and the land;" but he also said - and this is why he's more profound than Mike - "there is also a way to betray that covenant and," he said, "we have done that." Not: we are going to do that - not: we are doing it - but we have done that and we have to be expelled from the land because these are his words, "we Israelis are Fascists!" - that's not from Breira - that's from a very thoughtful, pious Israeli Zionist Jew. I hope to God he's wrong!

But we are going to have to face that possibility next week and next month and next year, and we will not deal with it by saying, with Mike, we shall prevail. There will be no thousand-year old Israeli state. We will either deserve the Land or we will lose it. I do not think we can deserve it by repressing the legitimate rights of our neighbors. I don't care much about Palestinians - I fear I have no interest in Palestinians. But I am tremendously concerned with what Jews do about Palestinians.

The second word is from Heschel. Weeks before he died, he was in Lake Forest, Illinois. He called me over to talk to me for several hours. I don't think I've ever repeated this to anybody in public, but he said he was in Germany in the great last days of years, (this is a Polish Jew speaking) and the German-Jewish community almost succeeded. The renaissance of Jewish values almost made a coherent Galut possible and then Hitler came, and it was too late. He looked at me - I'll never forget this - and he said, "in America we have ten more years." (That was not his usual style.) He didn't say thirty or forty or sixty - he said ten. After that some factors will be irreversible. So while I endorse the enthusiasm of my son and his hope - I think hope is always imposed on a situation and never extrapolated from it - I would also say what I don't think even Gene Borowitz has been saying - namely - we do not have much time. It is not true that we have all the time in the world or even that we have decades; the time is very, very short.

[David Novak's closing remarks will be reprinted next week.]