הלכה ולאומיות: Some Musings on Contemporary Jewish Identity

(I apologize if I've written a version of this introduction before.)

Thursday afternoon I attend a seminar at the Shalom Hartman Institute on the topic of הלכה ולאומיות (nationalism). Academics' Thursdays in Israel are like Fridays in the U.S. - very few people have classes. So Hartman uses Thursdays as the day to gather all sorts of intellectuals together for seminars like the one which I attend.

Participants in my seminar include: Yoske Achituv, Ariel Picard, Zvi Zohar, Noam Zohar, Iris Bar-On (Brown?), Orit Kamir, Tamar Ross, David Dishon, Noam Tzion, and Jason Rubinstein.

Today we talked about the issue of conversion through the lens of Professor יחזקל קויפמן's גולה ונכר.

The following musings were inspired by today's session.

Kaufmann asks the question: Why not the Jews? I.e., why is it that, of all the groups that were absorbed into one another during the history of the world, how did the Jews resist? What prevented assimilation?

My answer:

The innovation of henotheism. In the ancient world, my pantheon was your pantheon. This meant that, as far as we can tell, in metropolitan areas or along trade routes where religious groups interacted with each other, religion was something to share. In a polytheistic world, my god can be your god and vice versa - nothing prevents us from sharing ideas, cultures, et c. Maybe you like the sun and I like the moon but we both wouldn't want to upset the god of the other. Maybe you're an Isis freak and I'm partial to Ba'al - so what?

Along comes the theological idea at the core of Judaism - one God, supreme, no others. (N.B.: People too often like to couch this in pro-Jewish language that this was "our" great חידוש and it's why we're awesome. All of that is hogwash. We could never prove that no one else had the idea - we may have survived with it [and because of it, to a degree] but that doesn't mean that other didn't also have the idea who didn't survive.)

Now, here's the fascinating rub (as I step into my evolutionary anthropologist shoes): Human beings are essentially social beasts, and we can all understand how, within reason, the ability and want to make friends, share conversations, et c. helped to create safe environments (also known as alliances), provide for mental stimulation (culture), and diversify the gene pool (falling in love with the exotic other). Therefore, I suggest, the social model of polytheism, allowing for all sorts of sharing, intermarriage, cultural synthesis, et c., is essentially human. Yet, somehow, Jews resist it, perhaps due to particularly strong family allegiances or, in an ironic move, the development of the human mind to a point at which it learns to stand on principle for an abstract idea. So we refuse to play at people's block parties, observe their holidays, work on their schedules, even [and this one sucks] eat their food.

The Jews resist assimilation, but they do something else as well. We incite in our friends the "you're either with us or you're against us" reaction, and we're quite clearly not "with" them. Thus, the birth of anti-Jewish feelings, policies, et c. For the next 2500 years (2000 years? Whatever - a long time.) we are defined as other by the rest of the world, and we end up succeeding in what we had wanted all along, the protection of our sacred idea. This all comes to a head in the unfortunate events of the first half of the 20th Century (though, really, unfortunate is a relative thing in the wake of two millennia of Catholicism's institutionalized anti-Semitism) at which point, somewhere in the last forty years (I bet Steven Cohen has an idea when), things change.

You see, at some point in Western history - perhaps in 313 in Milan, 732 at Tours, or 1519 in Wittenberg, you get the idea - the polytheistic luxuries of the ancient world disappeared and we moved into the compartmentalized, me-against-you religious dynamics emerged. Recently, at least in the United States (and Western Europe, I think), these dynamics have begun to (rapidly) unravel, and we are returning to the mix-and-match state of affairs. This, of course, poses big, bad problems for the Jewish community. We made a stand on our separateness and that allowed us to survive (though the millions who were killed might challenge that notion) through the religiously "segmented" world, but can we make another one now?

Thus we live in an America where religion still matters but, for increasing percentages of Jews in the United States, a mix-and-match approach, complete with mix-and-match families and mix-and-match clergy and mix-and-match holiday celebrations - often devoid of belief but rich with cultural significance and personal meaning (wasn't that polytheism in the ancient world too) - is becoming the norm.

Now, this doesn't have much to do with issues of conversion in Israel (because, let's be serious, I'm just not that into הלכה), though these concepts are closely related to questions of Jewish identity in Israel (my favorite suggestion from today was for rethinking the stupid move to leave the conversion courts in the hands of the רבנות and, instead, to create בתי דין for חילוניים where absorption of Israeli culture could make one a Jew). But this has everything to do with the great question facing the Jewish world, one that was the center of the Wexner Foundation-sponsored מפגש at the GA in Jerusalem last November, where I articulated the following response to the question posed by someone in my dialogue group of "Why do we care that the Jewish community survives anyway?":

We survived for 2000+ years because everyone hated us. We stayed together because we had to - there was no way out. We survived Rome like that, and the Muslim conquests, the Crusades, the Inquisition, ghettoes, pogroms, Chmielniki, and the Holocuast. Now that the rest of the world (or, if you're a particular kind of Zionist, we) is no longer placing us in that box (well, big chunks of the Western world), wouldn't it be a shame if we couldn't survive this newfound acceptance, if our very survival were intimately bound up in the shame and pain of our history?

Looking through this lens, I am not so optimistic that, should the liberalizing tendencies continue, we have a very good chance in the long term.