2021-04-01 17:22:51
In The Questioning Jew: Israel and the Seek for Jewish Id, Goodman examines how “Judaism, and particularly Israeli Judaism, confronts these profound common challenges.” Realized, lucid, profound and provocative, Goodman’s guide seeks to refute claims that non secular custom calls for certainty whereas secularism generates skepticism.
Jews in Israel and Diaspora Jews, Goodman emphasizes, have distinctly completely different frames of reference about Jews and Judaism. Militantly secular, Zionists felt an aversion to the mechanistic formalism of Judaism and harbored contempt for a lot of of their fellow European Jews. Their purpose was to liberate Jews from the rule of non-Jews. Nathan Birnbaum, who coined the time period “Zionism,” described Jews as an inferior individuals, missing “private braveness, dignity, tact and an aesthetic sense.”
Nonetheless, Zionists insisted on establishing the State of Israel on historic land and reviving the Hebrew language. When their goals got here true, Zionism’s “twin identification fractured into constituent elements…. An identification based mostly on contradictions was changed by a society stuffed with divisions.” Claiming a monopoly on issues associated to custom, Orthodox Jews had the clout to erect cultural limitations and enact a static code of regulation that ruled citizenship, marriage and Sabbath observance. Secularists more and more felt threatened by any contact with custom.
“Very many issues within the inheritance of our forefathers kill our souls and provides them no redemption,” mentioned author and journalist Micha Joseph Berdyczewski, who had been educated in a yeshiva and felt stifled by non secular regulation.
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IN ANALYZING Diaspora Jews, Goodman sticks shut to traditional knowledge. The predictions of Orthodox Jews, he claims, have been appropriate: The fashionable world’s reducing of limitations to assimilation “created a harmful actuality.” The speed of intermarriage of much less observant and secular Jews in the USA has skyrocketed, whereas self-segregated, semi-autonomous Orthodox communities observing Jewish regulation have survived and grown. Exterior Israel, Jews should select between two dangerous choices: change Judaism (by having morals trump rituals and traditions) with a purpose to protect it, or refuse to alter any legal guidelines and practices and danger dropping it. Goodman hopes Diaspora Jews will discover a option to “assure Jewish continuity with out relinquishing their openness and dynamism.”
That mentioned, Goodman signifies that his guide is about Israeli, not Diasporic Judaism. His thesis is that “solely in Israel and due to Israel” (during which many threats to Jewish identification, together with intermarriage, have disappeared) can practices be reformed with out endangering Judaism. And that Jews can forge significant connections to their previous with out compromising their freedom or surrendering their secular identification.
Goodman’s venture is grounded in his view that rabbinic sages of late antiquity had the authority to resume Halacha (Jewish regulation) to replicate altering occasions and occasions, and that the Torah was everlasting as a result of individuals renewed and reshaped it. He describes various “alternate” secularisms which can be, for instance, based mostly on the assumption that Judaism just isn’t the phrase of God, however of the Jewish individuals; Maimonides’s assertion that God had moved farther and farther away from on a regular basis expertise and humanity can not talk about Him; the belief that individuals can observe Halacha not out of obedience however as a private selection (and should reject legal guidelines that discriminate in opposition to girls and homosexuals or regulate Sabbath observance).
Summary and at occasions silent on the challenges of implementation and the impression of “alternate secularism” on the authority and distinctiveness of Judaism, The Questioning Jew is an eloquent and pressing name for Israelis to discover a option to bridge the present divide between its warring camps.
“Between the trail of doubt, which empties the world of that means, and the trail of fanaticism, which lays the world to waste,” he insists, is a “center floor” that may accommodate non secular Zionists, who’re keen to embrace a lifestyle that gives fulfilling alternatives for faith, however no certainty; and secular Zionists, who search to reconnect with custom and religiosity however not essentially with faith.
The author is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Research at Cornell College.
THE WONDERING JEW: ISRAEL AND THE SEARCH FOR JEWISH IDENTITY
By Micah Goodman
Translated by Eylon Levy
Yale College Press
258 pages; $30
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Supply by [earlynews24.com]
