INTRODUCTION
Probably the single greatest
challenge confronting contemporary American Jewry is the
challenge of being Jewish, fully, deeply, actively and
rewardingly Jewish in the Gentile world in which we live.
It is true that we Jews have always lived in a non-Jewish
world even from our earliest history. Abraham and Sarah
themselves, as soon as they arrived in Canaan, were faced
with the difficult task of maintaining their identity and
integrity as they sojourned among the native population of
what was to become the Land of Israel. Early in their
careers, they had to deal with Egyptians, and warring local
potentates, and Gerarites. And when Abraham was to bury
Sarah, negotiations for a burial site had to be held with
yet another people, the Hethites (inaugurating what would
be a long history of involvement in the real estate
business).
And so it has been throughout our most ancient
history...time and again...we have been obliged to deal
with non-Hebrews (biblical and post-biblical Gentiles often
called us Hebrews), non-Jews, throughout. So it was with
our Patriarchs and Matriarchs. So it was with every one of
our monarchs, no matter how self-sufficient, no matter how
autonomous they thought they were. We had, in an ongoing
way, to deal with other nations, other cultures, other
civilizations. It has been the fact of our life from the
very beginning that the world-at-large was not Jewish and
that even in our own land, we were never free of complex
multi-cultural interrelationships.
Many do not realize that even during the Golden Age of
Solomon, a time of unparalleled national expansion and
prosperity, our lives were deeply intertwined with the
lives and fates of the non-Jewish world. Tyrians helped
build the first Temple, Solomon married a pharaonic
daughter, Lebanese sailors manned Jewish ships and Jewish
sailors took shore leave in many distant and alien lands
(that did a lot for multicultural interaction!). In all our
long history, whether living in our own Eretz Yisrael or
living in the Diaspora (and there was always a Diaspora),
we were never totally free in our decision-making, in our
cultural expression, in our statecraft, or in our pursuit
of our national and personal destinies. And one would
think, from more than 3500 years of experience, that we
would finally have gotten hold of the matter, to make a go
of it in a world which is not all Jewish (much to our
never-ending amazement!).
But
there is something about our modern condition, about being
a Jew in America, that we have never before had to contend
with. In all our long and glorious history, we have never
had the sustained experience of living in an open,
pluralistic democracy.
For Jews, for a people who rely upon experience and
precedent to make sense out of our existential reality,
this fact and this fact alone presents the greatest
challenge we have ever known. In terms of physical
continuity, we have always done passingly well. We have
built up (not necessarily because we wanted to) a vast
backlog of experience of getting through pogroms, forced
conversions, mass expulsions, social degradation and all
the other manifestations of the "love" extended to us. We
have learned to live with poverty and with wealth. We have
learned to live with success and failure. We have learned
to live with advance and retreat. But we have not yet
learned to live with the freedom to live any way we wish!
Now we find ourselves well-integrated into the life of
America and America, for all its faults, is undeniably the
single greatest sustained experience ever, for the Jewish
people. But, it must be observed, that all the more we
become integrated into American life, we come ever so much
more to identify with American values, American ideals and
American thinking. Overwhelmingly, these values, ideals and
thinking are precisely what make America as great and as
wonderful as it is and which make it, for most of us, a
home like no other in the world, past or present.
But we are a special people, a people with a unique
history, a unique culture and a unique outlook on life. We
have come to recognize that, for all its freedom and
benevolence and accommodation, there are aspects of
American culture which threaten the survival of many things
we hold dear. The threat we are encountering comes, not as
so often in our past, from malevolence or repression but,
quite ironically, from liberty and from openness. Now, so
unlike long centuries of our past, we have the choice to
define who and what we are and where we wish to go. Now for
perhaps the first real time in history, we have the freedom
to maintain and even enhance our Jewish identity or —
to dispense with it altogether. Now it is no longer a
question of "to be" but "what to be?"
Nathan Glazer, sociologist of
the American Jewish community pointed well to this: "The
Jewish religion, Judaism, has become the religion of
survival. It has quite lost touch with other values, other
spiritual concerns. None has to argue in favor of survival;
there is nothing more important. That is the first law of
life, for a nation, for individuals. It is not however
nonsensical to ask why the corporate community of Jews in
the United States wants to survive, and why it wants to
survive in the form of a religion, when the traditional
content of that religion has been quite reduced. It has
been replaced, on the one hand, by the common content of a
universal ethics, which has nothing distinctively Jewish
about it, and, on the other, by survival — remember
the Holocaust and save Israel. That is what Judaism comes
down to if we question Jews about it...[it] has become the
chief workhorse and ally of national survival: good enough
if one has a purely instrumental attitude toward religion .
. . but a religion does not survive on instrumental value
alone."
Correct, "not on instrumental value alone" but also on
something that speaks to our hearts and souls, on something
that answers to the "why" of surviving, to those things in
life which make life truly worth living. This book is
something like trail maps and mall directories and fire
exit diagrams that mark plainly "You Are Here." This book
is a spiritual and intellectual survival guide not only
because it indicates how we might go but also because it
indicates clearly where we are; not so much because it has
all the answers but rather because it asks the right
questions. It is through a lucid portrayal of where we are,
that I believe, serious Jews will come to understand where
we can yet go and what we can yet be.
This book operates on the assumption that Jewish men and
women will find great meaning and satisfaction in Judaism
if only they can come to see that Judaism for what it
really is and not the pallid, wornout irrelevance we
somehow have come to believe it is. My experience in
teaching and lecturing throughout North America has
convinced me, beyond any doubt, that there exists within
our community today a large number of people waiting to be
shown that Judaism can be compelling and gratifying. Over
and over again, I encounter in my work enlightened men and
women who have put together for themselves successful lives
and careers, people whose achievements have enabled them,
essentially, to have and to do anything they wish. And yet,
I find it is these very people who are asking themselves
"Is this all there is?" and meaning, by this question, that
after all the education and all the accomplishment, after
having "made it," there remains something unfulfilled,
something incomplete. Something is missing — what is
that something, they want to know, and somehow they manage
to visit a class or attend a lecture or read an essay about
serious Jewishness, for grownups with brains. They are
astonished to find that there is substance to this thing
called Jewish which is enormously compelling and vital. For
many, the chance discovery that Judaism is intellectually,
emotionally and spiritually satisfying, in a dimension
never imagined, is, in effect the discovery of the Jewish
identity component, the component that makes for a whole
person, the component without which, somehow, all the parts
just don't seem to cohere. The discovery (for some, the
re-discovery) of that missing component is the key to huge
leaps in self-understanding and, I might say, satisfaction
in being!
This
is the marvel I see so often, in fact, it is because of
such people and the joy they evince in finding their
Jewishly integrated selves, that I have come to write this
book. The essays here are the very ones which seem to "turn
on light bulbs," to speak to the hearts and minds of people
who never thought that much about being Jewish. It is these
students who are the never-ending source of my conviction
that Judaism, when presented clearly, honestly and without
embellishment has the astonishing power to satisfy the
deepest intellectual and spiritual quests. My students have
taught me that the satisfaction of such quests is one of
the great pleasures of maturity. My contribution, however
modest, to that satisfaction is one of the great pleasures
of my life.
