Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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The Name We Dare Not Speak

By Michael Gottsegen

In this space two weeks ago a column appeared that was bold for daring to speak about something that only seldom receives mention even in the Spirit and Story section of the CLAL Webzine. In “On God, Sea Ice and the Triumph of Life,” Walter Ruby focused our attention upon a question that most Jews would rather not consider, the question of God and of belief in God in our scientific era. That this issue arises so seldom does not owe, I would suggest, to the fact that belief in God is taken for granted as something that our authors and our readers share in common and that, as such, need not be explicitly considered. Rather the opposite seems more likely.

The discussion of God is in effect treated as taboo by our authors because it is taboo in Jewish life more generally. It is taboo because of the widespread – albeit generally unarticulated -- anxiety that an honest discussion of God might undermine the foundations of Jewish life and cause the edifice as a whole to collapse. At once it is intuitively understood that “God-talk” is central to traditional Jewish self-understanding and that most modern Jews find the traditional understanding of God to be utterly implausible. Sensing this, the arbiters of Jewish communal life seem to have collectively concluded that it is better then to pass over the question of God in silence and to emphasize other elements in our quest for Jewish continuity – as if Jewish continuity can be secured without attending to this element in particular.

Indeed, a clear-eyed look at the dominant approach to securing Jewish continuity suggests that we are engaged in a bold experiment that would attempt to secure the Jewish future by building it upon “surer” grounds than belief in God and covenant. Sociology and social science, more generally, are regarded as offering us the key to constructing this future. We have placed our faith in sociologists and social workers in the hope that their mastery of the intricacies of the socialization process can establish the Jewish future on terra firma. The approach they espouse would rely upon the mechanisms of socialization to impart a minimal set of Jewish values and Jewish behaviors that has been identified by a cadre of sociologists as likely to produce feelings of Jewish belonging, solidarity and a commitment to a Jewish future.

Those who resist this approach to securing continuity dispute the presupposition that there is some timeless core set of Jewish values and behaviors that ought to be imposed from without. Rather than imposing Jewishness from without, there is an alternative approach to Jewish continuity (which has gained some favor at CLAL) that seeks to help Jews to experience as Jewishly meaningful the values and behaviors with which they already happen to identify. If individuals can be helped to identify and experience their existing values and commitments as Jewish values and commitments, it is argued, Jewish continuity can be secured in a manner that respects the truth of individual experience.

While these two approaches to Jewish continuity differ in important ways, these differences should not obscure what they share in common. The approach that would facilitate the articulation of Jewishness from the midst of the individual's experience is in its essence as sociological as the approach of the continuity educators who would inculcate some normative Jewish essence from on high. Both are attentive to the values and behaviors of the social group and treat the group as a self-enclosed whole. Both proceed as if Jewish continuity might be secured without explicit attention to the question of God and to the question of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Historically speaking, this attempt to detach the Jewish future from the question of God, and the question of the relationship between God and Israel is without precedent. For millennia, the coordinates of Jewish self-understanding were mapped in terms of the relationship among God, Torah and the people (and land) of Israel. Among these three elements, God was first and foremost. It was God who chose the people of Israel, who gave the Torah and promised the land of Israel to the people of Israel. The authority of the Torah and of the commandments moreover was understood to derive from the authority of the God who gave the Torah and commanded accordingly. (The word mitzvah [= commandment] itself comes from the root metzaveh [= commander = God].) The holiness of the land of Israel, moreover, was not intrinsic but a consequence of God’s having declared it so. The same can be said for the holiness of the people of Israel. It too could only be construed in relation to the God who chose it.

My point in invoking the traditional terms of Jewish theology is not to suggest that Jewish continuity might be more effectively secured through a return to a pre-modern Jewish theology than by an approach that relies upon modern understandings of identity formation and of the socialization process. The proponents of the latter approach rightly grasp that for most fully modernized Jews a return to the former path is inconceivable. Pre-modern theology speaks in an idiom that presupposes a cosmology and world-view that are utterly foreign to the modern point of view. But it should not be inferred from this that “theology in a new key” could not speak to the modern Jew in a meaningful way. It could if it were conversant with modern science, philosophy and contemporary intellectual culture. Such a theology would necessarily set aside many of the assumptions and understandings of pre-modern Jewish theology, but it would be in continuity with the classical coordinates of God, Torah and Israel and with the age-old task of enabling the individual Jew to construe the meaning of his own life, his values and practices in relation to these essential (and existential) coordinates. Proceeding in this manner would have a good chance of securing Jewish continuity on the deepest and most meaningful level. It would also invite the individual soul to participate in a quest for meaning that pays true honor to God and human freedom.

At its most effective, the intelligent employment of the mechanisms of socialization might be sufficient to produce a conditioned form of Jewish continuity. But if this outward continuity is not matched by a Jewish self-understanding that employs the coordinates of God, Torah and Israel, then the continuity of practice and progeny will be belied by a deeper and most profound discontinuity that will signal the end of the Jewish project, even if it does not signal the end of Jewish ethnicity. For me at least, ethnicity, or cultural continuity, is not enough. Ethnic continuity, for what? Cultural continuity, to what end?

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