RSS Feed | en-us Sat, 25 Oct 2014 15:09:40 -0400 Asking the Wrong Question Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I recently attended two conversations under the aegis of the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions initiative. Both dealt with whether God exists”one directly, the other obliquely, by asking whether science makes belief in God obsolete. Both were so deeply unsatisfying that I have to wonder whether this enterprise should more aptly be named “wrong questions.”





















Alan L. Mittleman
Religion and the Legitimate State Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The idea of a social contract first makes its appearance in Plato’s Republic . Men are naturally prone to commit injustice, and thus injustice is naturally good, Glaucon, one of Socrates’ interlocutors, suggests. They would like to commit injustice constantly toward one another and not have to pay a price for it. But because they typically do have to pay a price, they decide “to set down a compact among themselves neither to do injustice nor to suffer it.”

The social contract on which justice, law, and political society are based begins, on this account, in what the poet William Butler Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” Men, who are naturally evil, jointly decide to curb their barbarity in order to minimize their own risk. Plato, of course, does not accept this explanation of the nature of justice or of the origins of political society. He rejects the low view of justice that it assumes, as well as the sufficiency of contractarianism as an account of political origins.

There is, however, another source for the idea of a social contract, and this one has had far more influence on the development of the idea in the West. That source is the Bible. One of the Bible’s central concepts is covenant, which has both theological and political ramifications. God enters into covenant with all of mankind after the flood, with Abraham and his descendants, and with the ‘adat bnei yisrael , the assembly of Israel, at Sinai. The covenant”an eternal, binding pact”is initiated by God and assented to by humans. God offers his providence and fidelity, while his human covenant partner consents to love and be loyal to the Lord.

The covenant, particularly the Sinai covenant, founds an enduring “vertical” relationship with the divine”and it initiates a proper “horizontal” human political society as well. All of the Israelites who enter into covenant with God retain their fundamental equality vis- -vis one another as bnei brit , covenant partners. Their relations are founded on consent. The goal of their community is liberty: the liberty to worship God and implement his law as the law of their res publica . Even when kingship emerges, the king is drawn into a covenantal relation with God but also chosen by the people and rules as a constitutional monarch, his powers delimited by the covenantal agreement, the Torah.

Biblical covenantalism retained great power among the Jews, who often conceived of their diaspora communities as founded on the agreement and consent of their members. Covenantalism resurfaced among Christians in the Reformation, when Calvinists and other Reformed groups adopted covenanting as the preferred means of founding and legitimating political communities (think, for example, of the Mayflower Compact, or Plymouth Combination as it was originally called). The secularization of the Reformed Protestant concept of covenanting led to social-contract theory among such philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza, where it served purely immanent political ends. The theological-political nexus of biblical covenantalism was severed in favor of a secular, political account of the founding of the ideal form of regime and the philosophical derivation of its moral and political norms.

In his ambitious new book, The Jewish Social Contract , David Novak restores the nexus between theology and politics implicit in covenantalism and social contract theory. As in his earlier study of Jewish political theology, Covenantal Rights , Novak writes both descriptively and normatively. In Covenantal Rights , he provided a comprehensive descriptive account of Jewish social ethics within a ramified framework of rights. In The Jewish Social Contract , he describes how Jewish political experience and legal tradition can be understood in terms of coven anting”and subsequently in terms of social contracts with other communities.

In both instances, he does not merely transpose modern, secular interpretive frameworks onto Jewish, especially rabbinic, texts. Rather”and here is the ambitious part of his project”he argues for the inadequacy of the prevailing secular frameworks and for their reconstitution along theologically informed lines. In Covenantal Rights , he argued that the modern narrowing of rights-claims”first to individuals and then to groups”provides no sure way to reconcile conflicts of rights, so construed. Only a larger context involving God as a holder and guarantor of rights opens a horizon where reconciliation of conflicting claims, true justice, is conceivable. Now in The Jewish Social Contract , he argues that the aspirations of modern democratic republics, founded on social contracts, can only be secured when those contracts originate from agreements between more primal communities founded on covenant. That is, Jews and Christians, the two communities whose origins lie in covenant with the God of Israel, unlike others have experienced what genuine social trust is like”and thus have a genuine foretaste of the Kingdom of God. Their experience of trust, as well as of moral accountability to a power beyond the state, is the necessary warrant for the social trust required to establish a social contract and to sustain the moral responsibility required for its maintenance.

The nub of Novak’s argument is that Glaucon and Hobbes are wrong: Contracting cannot be based on fretful calculation alone. Humans need to have experiences of trust in primary communities before they can feel that it is reasonable to trust the strangers with whom they would enter into a social contract. For Novak, such trust can only be experienced in a community founded on revelation, for that is where promise-keeping reaches its telos: God’s promises of providence and ultimate justice, already experienced proleptically in the Jewish community and the Church, can be trusted.

The modern democratic state should thus be understood as a community of communities, a limited, properly secular enterprise electively stitched together by the primary, revelatory communities that compose it. Those primary communities, the Jewish people and the Church, with their transcendent origins and metaphysical norms of justice, know themselves to be in covenant with God. For their members, belonging to these communities far outweighs the value of belonging to the state, a mere human, contractual artifact. Only because Jews and Christians know themselves to be citizens of the Kingdom of God first, and national citizens second, can modern democracies really protect the rights”the first of which is religious liberty”of their citizens.

The presence of covenanted communities in the midst of the contractual state ensures that the state government will respect its bounds. When the modern state divinizes itself, as has often happened over the past two centuries, all restraint is lost. Jews and Christians can recognize the limited state, so understood, as a legitimate secular construct. They can be loyal and patriotic to it; they can even sacrifice their lives for it. But they will always, as faithful Jews and Christians, recognize its immanent and confected origins and therefore always deflate its pseudo-religious pretensions. Although they are not the only ones who can make good citizens”Novak has an ingenious argument for how atheists, at least in their public role as citizens, are functional believers”they, in a sense, make the best citizens because they, by their mere presence, remind the state of its origins and limits.

Novak’s view is reminiscent of the classic of Reformed Protestant political theory, Johannes Althusius’ Politica . Althusius held that all human associations, from the family to the Holy Roman Empire, were based on compacts ( pacta ). A true covenantal or federal (from foedus , “covenant”) thinker, he envisioned society, both in its pre-political and its fully political manifestations, as a product of negotiated agreements at all levels. Sovereignty was shared and distributed across multiple nodes; power was ground-up; rulers were basically administrators.

This comprehensive, biblical-republican grand design basically lost out in the seventeenth century to Jean Bodin’s statist model, only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century as a precursor to the political theory of European Union. For both Althusius and Novak, the political community is a community of communities; persons remain members of primary units or primordial groups, deriving their self-understanding and worth from their participation in other orders. Althusius also gets to his federal vision through drawing out the implications of biblical covenanting. Unlike Novak, however, he is also indebted to Aristotle. Humans are naturally political, which is to say that they need not learn trust through supernatural means. They learn to trust through their experience of family and friendship.

It is odd, to say the least, that a sixteenth-century Protestant thinker, working in a densely religious culture, should give more play to naturalism in politics than a twenty-first-century thinker. Althusius has no need to advert to revelation in his account of political origins; he references the gospels only in the context of how covenanters should treat one another morally. Novak, by contrast, deprives the secular-liberal project of any basis in natural human sociality: The state needs the ontology of covenant.

There has always been a question, in social-contract theory, as to whether the story of the contract is a descriptive, historical account of origins or a prescriptive, normative account of values. There is no question that in John Rawls, for example, it functions strictly as a normative model with no claims to historical factuality. It is less clear in John Locke, who, in his defense of the probable historicity of contract, cites the Bible as the only clear, factual case.

For David Novak, the matter seems confused. He sometimes writes as if he is describing, out of the wealth of Jewish sources, actual instances of contracting. Sometimes he is describing the propensity of historic Jewish thinkers to view relations in contractual terms. At other times he is clearly recommending the social contract as the optimal perspective on political reality. But is it? If nations have not really been founded by social contracts”if the historical claim is just a fiction”does the normative claim remain compelling? Certainly, if there was no historical social contract we can, as Rawls does, still use the contract model as a powerful normative tool. But is there any reason we have to? Novak seems to assume that, in a democracy, this is the best normative-conceptual framework we have. Surely more of an argument is required at this point.

Moreover, a legitimate state may not be as limited as Novak’s covenantal-contractual model stipulates. On his account, a state must always respect the integrity of pre-political, or at least of pre-state, institutions such as the family, which are grounded”in the case of Jewish or Christian marriage”on revealed law. But democratic states routinely and legitimately intervene to remove abused children from their parents’households or override the free-exercise rights of, for example, Christian Science parents on behalf of their children. Although we are inclined to draw the boundaries of religious liberty quite broadly, we recognize them to be limited by legitimate public interests, which the state represents. Althusius’ account made sense in his own time, an era of city republics, principalities, kingdoms and a thin imperial overlay. But in an era of the highly centralized welfare state, Novak’s account of power (if that is the word for it”he actually says very little about power) delegated by enduring primordial communities makes much less sense.

In early modern social-contract thought, the individuals (in the British tradition) or the groups (in the Althusian, German tradition) who were parties to the contract retained whatever rights or power they did not alienate to the state. Their retention of power effectively limited the state. In Novak’s view, the presence of Jews and Christians, or, more forcefully, their democratic activism on behalf of their abiding, divinely commissioned interests, limits the state. But this is putting the cart before the horse. The Framers, in the American case, were political men who constructed a limited, rights-respecting republic for political reasons. They accepted the imperative of religious liberty and eventually worked out a synthesis to protect it but they did so as political founders, not as religious contractarians. Furthermore, the groups that they knew would limit federal power and retain pre-contractual rights were the individual states, not the primordial religious communities, and these states are no less political than the national government. In short, the complex relation between religious communities and the state, both in historical and in normative terms, cannot be easily captured or definitively described by the ambiguous concept of social contract.

What David Novak’s account in The Jewish Social Contract provides is a rationale for how orthodox religious people might accept the legitimacy of the democratic, delimited secular orders in which they live. Whether it can move our reflection on the grounds of democratic order, the true ambition of the book, is more open to question.

Alan Mittleman is director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies and professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Alan L. Mittleman
Covenant and Civility Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500 For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity
by Irving Greenberg
Jewish Publications Society of America, 274 pp. $20 paper

The title of Irving Greenberg’s collection of essays” For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity ”neatly captures the thrust of the book. Judaism and Christianity must rediscover and affirm one another for the sake of heaven and earth. Each religion is incomplete without the other. Each has been tempted by an excess of otherworldliness (heaven) or this-worldliness (earth), by universalism or tribalism, by the spirit or by the flesh. Judaism and Christianity need one another for balance, criticism, “holy envy,” and a fuller perception of God’s saving purposes. Only in loving partnership can they fulfill their conjoint destinies as God’s strategies for the redemption of the world. These are remarkable assertions for a Jewish thinker raised in, and still in some ways associated with, Orthodox Judaism.

Greenberg’s bold Jewish theological vision grew out of two encounters: with the Holocaust and with radical Christian theologians whose own framework was shattered by the Holocaust. Greenberg’s en-counter with the Holocaust, which began with intense study in the 1960s, led to a profound shaking of his Jewish faith. The son of a noted Orthodox rabbi and a product of the modern Orthodox social and educational system, Greenberg was almost defeated by the Holocaust’s absolute devaluing of life. He did not know how to go on as a Jew until he met such Christians as Roy Eckhardt and Paul van Buren, who modeled for him both radical faith in God and critical fidelity to tradition. Their prophetic judgment on their own tradition’s contribution to the teaching of contempt for Jews showed Greenberg that one can”and must”be both faithful and critical.

Just as these theologians demanded a fundamental reappraisal of Christianity’s evaluation of Judaism, Greenberg, while affirming their program, makes a similar demand on the Jewish side: Jews must rise above their historic fear and dismissal of Christianity and affirm the full spiritual dignity of the Church. This entails more than Jewish tolerance; it requires Jews to affirm that the God of Israel has elected the Church to join gentiles to the people Israel. For Greenberg, this is not a matter of relativism or mere civil pluralism. It is a theological affirmation all the way down. Greenberg’s work in this volume”the distillation of more than three decades of writing and dialogue”lays the conceptual and moral basis for this affirmation.

At bottom, Greenberg’s theology rests on the conviction that the Holocaust was a revelatory event. It revealed God’s presence as an apparent absence. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, neither Judaism nor Christianity can continue with business as usual, lest they betray this new revelation. Faced with the absolute evil of the Nazi attack, first on Jewish life and ultimately on human life per se , Greenberg was tempted to take Richard Rubenstein’s approach and concede that the God of Israel was indeed dead. Instead, Greenberg came to a new understanding based on the biblical concept of covenant and the rabbinic concept of hester panim ”God’s hiding His face. In this view, Judaism is fundamentally about a divine-human partnership, a covenant, in which the divine partner increasingly cedes power and responsibility for creation to the human partner. The logic of covenant, progressively unveiled within the biblical process (compare, for example, Exodus with Esther), works toward the greater enfranchisement of the human for the sake of the redemption of creation. God’s increasing withdrawal is not abandonment but empowerment. Greenberg thus provides a radical endorsement of the epoch of maximal withdrawal, of secular modernity, as an emblem of the human maturity required by the God of covenant.

In Greenberg’s view, secular modernity has done much to affirm and enable the human, to free humans for greater, divinely intended autonomy. But it has also exponentially increased the risk of idolatry, the praxis of evil. Secularism was a necessary corrective to religious traditions, both Jewish and Christian, that had discredited themselves through their mutual hatred, their obscurantism, their spiritualist escapism. But the liberating impulse in secularism soon moved beyond a critique of historic religion to a total repudiation of the divine. Modernity became its own god and both Jewry and the gospel became its victims. The idols of modernity”race, nation, the state”tried to kill the people of God, Jewry in the flesh and Christianity in spirit. In the aftermath of an unfathomable tragedy, both Jews and Christians must do what God requires of His covenanted Israel”work with redoubled effort for the affirmation of life.

Christianity and Judaism must both fully embrace the new possibilities within modernity for human liberation and dignity, but they must also chasten modernity so that it remains a means, not an end. Judaism must shed its diffidence toward history and once again engage with the realities of power, statehood, and universal concern for the other. Christianity must shed its supersessionism, triumphalism, and privileged association with power; it must free the gospel of love from the ancient biases and habits that have compromised it. In Judaism, Christianity can find a correction of its sometimes world-despising spirituality. In Christianity, Judaism can reconnect with God’s saving purposes beyond its own garden. Greenberg roots the distinctive moments of Christianity”the messiahhood of Jesus, the resurrection, the great commission”in Judaism’s own soil. If Judaism does not produce messiahs, he insists, then it has failed because it has abandoned hope. For Jews, Jesus is”Greenberg laments the potential for misunderstanding implicit in this charged term”a “failed messiah.” Not false, but failed. But then, God’s purpose often seems to fail in the world, only to be realized in ironic ways. In his failure, Jesus is at his most recognizably Jewish.

All of the essays repeat this same cluster of ideas, developing their im-plications with different emphases and nuances. What are we to make of the project? I must confess to great ambivalence about it. Its boldness and hope are captivating as a religious vision but disturbing as a utopian politics. In Greenberg we find a theologian who calls on Jews to validate the realities of statehood and power”an almost Hobbesian affirmation of what survival requires in a world where Auschwitz is possible”and who also calls Jews and Christians to revise radically their theologies as the first step in the project of perfecting and redeeming the world as partners in covenantal pluralism. The proximity of sober political theology with intoxicated eschatological anticipation is disorienting.

At first, Greenberg sounds a Niebuhr-like note: power and statehood are necessary to secure the conditions under which Jews and others can flourish. But any sense of the obduracy of human sin is lost in the expectation that fully mature, covenantally empowered humans can bring God’s creation to redemptive perfection. Indeed, Greenberg rejects Christianity’s emphasis on the radicality of human sin. Overemphasis on miraculous salvation, on grace, is incompatible with his covenantal model. It is a stage to be outgrown. When Christians are truly ready to validate Judaism, they will take greater responsibility for the repair of this world, engaging side by side with Jews in the human project of bringing the Messiah. Christians are to be partners in what has become the watchword of the modernist Jewish religious project: tikkun olam ”“repairing the world.”

Greenberg is not satisfied with the view that Christianity is legitimate only insofar as it resembles Judaism. He goes so far as to affirm God’s incarnation in Christ”not, to be sure, as a plausible tenet of his own (or any other Jew’s) belief, but as a possibility for God. He declines to stipulate, on the basis of God’s covenant with the Jews, what God can or cannot do for the gentiles. And yet prescription cannot be avoided. In Greenberg’s view, Christianity acquires full validity only when it acts in ways that comport with his Jewish sense of the redemptive, world-perfecting task of religion”and, crucially, only when it repudiates its anti-Judaism. Christians are only a covenanted people if they cease to despise the Jews. Christianity is falsified by immorality. How do these judgments square with the radical affirmation that he also seems to propose? The problem, I believe, derives from an unexamined equivocation in his concept of covenant: it refers both to historical events of pact-making and, metaphorically, to divine-human relationships. If covenant is only a metaphor for relationship, then poor behavior may be thought to sabotage the relationship. But if covenant also describes a state- ment of historical fact”as Jews and Christians have been inclined to believe”then poor behavior may make for an angry God, but it does not retroactively annul what happened on Sinai or Pentecost.

Here we come to the deep problem with Greenberg’s project, the problem of truth. Greenberg wishes to endorse pluralism without endorsing relativism. Far from a noncommittal relativism, pluralism is “an absolutism that has come to recognize its own limitations.” There is such a thing as absolute truth, but such truth must recognize itself as absolute only within a particular context. The peaceful coexistence of various absolutisms is pluralism; their self-elected partnership as divinely mandated vehicles for redeeming the world is covenantal pluralism. And covenant, recall, entails the assumption of human finitude, responsibility, and enlightened maturity, the sign of which is epistemic modesty. Is this coherent or is it mere word play? How is a context-dependent absolutism different from a nonabsolute absolutism?


Alan Mittleman is Professor of Jewish Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and Director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute on Religious and Social Studies.

Alan L. Mittleman
American Judaism: A History Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400 This year marks the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. In 1654, twenty-three Jews arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, fleeing the Inquisition. Although not the first Jews to set foot in North America, they were the first who intended to settle here. Try as he might, Peter Stuyvesant was unable to keep “these hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” out of the colony. Economic considerations won out over religious scruples. The imperatives of trade and commerce competed with the imperatives of faith and religiously regulated public order. Jews found a promising opportunity for toleration in the shifting gap between these needs. So long as the Jews took care that the poor among them did not become a public burden and so long as they conducted their worship in the privacy of their homes, they were able to secure the rights to trade, to own property, and to participate in the body politic by serving guard duty. Jewish life begins in North America in a milieu not wholly unlike our own: a vigorous, forward-looking commercial civilization that was not disrespectful of the religious traditions of its past but was also not dominated by them. That was good for the Jews. But was it good for Judaism?

Jonathan D. Sarna’s important new history, American Judaism , covers too many themes to be reduced to one central concern. But it is no affront to the scope and detail of the book to suggest that the question of Judaism and freedom lies at the foundation of the history he considers. Sarna begins at the beginning”with Recife and its European antecedents”and proceeds chronologically, with his first chapter, “Colonial Beginnings,” covering the dozen decades of American Jewish life that preceded the founding of the United States. Even before there was a Declaration, a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, the question of Judaism and freedom was fundamental. Keeping in mind that Judaism lives in and is sustained by the organized community of Jews, the earliest challenge for American Judaism was how to constitute community in a new, postmedieval world. Initially, Jews tried to import the compulsory, centralized forms of community that they had known in Europe. Even as they existed in Amsterdam or London, such kehillot , as they were called, were already less capable than their medieval antecedents of exercising power over their members, and in British North America it soon became apparent that the kehillot did not stand a chance. Without effective state support for disciplinary sanctions, voluntary consensus was the only real cement for community. Although communities tried to discipline their members when consensus broke down (for example, over Sabbath violations or eating non-kosher foods), their bans had little effect. Eventually, the reality of a single comprehensive synagogue community broke down as competing synagogues arose. The religious pluralism that characterized much of colonial America became typical for Jews as well. Congregationalism replaced the European ideal of the kehilla . Judaism was constituted as a religion, abandoning any residual claim to defining a public, communal order for Jews.

In the revolutionary period, the wholly voluntary character of American Jewish life would be given a republican interpretation. Judaism was felt to be uniquely compatible with liberty and self-government. The constituting documents of Revolutionary-era synagogues used the rhetoric of popular sovereignty and rights to assert their ideals. In this sense, an “American Judaism” arose that reflected the themes, possibilities, and crises of the American experiment. In every period, the forces shaping the religious life and thought of Christian Americans also played upon Judaism. Sarna, a master of American religious history, traces, for example, the impact of democratic culture upon Judaism during the period of the Second Great Awakening in much the same way that Nathan Hatch did for Christianity. The breakdown of traditional authority, and the emphasis on personal religious experience and free will provided an impetus to competing strategies for the renewal of Judaism.

The antebellum neotraditionalist Isaac Leeser, for instance, exploited the missionary possibilities of the printing press with vigor, translating the Bible for the first time into English, producing a national Jewish monthly, a prayer book, and much more. Leeser “witnessed how effectively Christian evangelicals harnessed the press to spread their gospel.” He created the Jewish Publication Society as an analogue (and defense against) such groups as the American Bible Society. The antebellum shakeup in religious authority also provided the context for the rise of Reform Judaism”a more radical strategy of adapting to America than Leeser’s revitalized traditionalism. The competition between these currents, which persists to the present day, reflects the democratic basis of American Judaism. As Sarna puts it: “The question of how best to secure Judaism’s future would be decided just like so much else was in America: by majority rule.”

While every page of Sarna’s elegantly written narrative yields insights into the development of American Judaism, the book does not confine itself to history alone. The themes that it details”the impact of democratic culture, the rather feckless quest for unity as a concomitant to the affirmation of pluralism, the perplexed status of religious authority, the voluntary option for religious identity and the (also increasingly voluntary) ethnic alternative”press forward into the present reality of Judaism as well. In his conclusion, Sarna brings his analysis of more than three centuries of Jewish life to bear on the dilemmas of contemporary Jews. In this case, the platitude is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In America Jews have been an “ever dying people.” Like Jews in earlier periods, contemporary Jews are acutely aware of dissolution and loss as well as revival and revitalization. Beginning in the postwar years, and increasingly in recent decades, Judaism has been marked by astonishing vitality at the center and unbridled assimilation at the not-too-distant periphery. This “bipolar model,” as Sarna calls it, induces a mood of anxious uncertainty. American Judaism “radiates optimism concerning the future of American Jewish life, as well as bleak pessimism.”

Sarna delineates several challenges that American Judaism must confront, all of which persist from the earliest encounter of Judaism with freedom. Foremost among them is the question of boundaries: determining who is in and who is out is an essential, “if unpleasant,” task of group maintenance. In an individualistic and authority-averse culture, the traditional definitions of Jewishness no longer win the approval of large numbers of Jews: there are movements that regard as Jewish those persons whose fathers but not mothers (the traditional criterion) are Jewish; and there are thousands who profess to be Buddhists and Jews, or evangelical Christians and Jews. Surveys of the Jewish population have to resort to ever more nuanced and imaginative criteria in order to capture the diversity of self-defined Jewish types. How, if everything in a democratic culture is resolved by majority rule, can an even notional Jewish unity be preserved when the members of the voluntary Jewish polity cannot agree on fundamental boundaries? Preserving Jewish unity, such as it is, is another of Sarna’s daunting challenges. Other challenges for contemporary Ju-daism include authority and leadership (who speaks for the Jews both religiously and civically?) and the conflict of loyalties engendered by the clash between contemporary culture and historic Jewish norms (consider the question of gay ordination or marriage).

Does the history of American Judaism provide intellectual and moral resources to meet these challenges? That it does is apparently the faith that underlies this book. Beneath the book’s magisterial scholarship, there lies a passionate commitment to American Jewry. Sarna evidently believes that if American Jews learn their history, they won’t be condemned to repeat it. He closes his book with a personal recollection and affirmation. At the beginning of his scholarly career, he says, he was warned that it would not be worth the trouble to study American Jewish history because the American Jews were doomed. Assimilation and intermarriage were inevitable; the writing was on the wall. It is to our great benefit that Professor Sarna did not heed this dismal advice. He took to heart, instead, a lesson from the history of American Judaism: “that today, like so often before, American Jews will find creative ways to maintain and revitalize American Judaism. With the help of visionary leaders, committed followers, and generous philanthropists, it may still be possible for the current ‘vanishing’ generation of American Jews to be succeeded by another ‘vanishing’ generation, and then still another.”

After 350 years American Jews are poised between hope and anxiety about their future. While both fundamental orientations are justified on the basis of history, this book tips the balance ever so slightly in favor of hope.

Alan Mittleman is Professor of Religion, Muhlenberg College.

Alan L. Mittleman
Fretful Orthodoxy Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400 There is a pamphlet making its way, via the Internet, through the Modern Orthodox stream of the American Jewish community. Written by Gil Perl and Yaakov Weinstein, graduate students at Harvard and MIT respectively, the pamphlet presents itself as “A Parent’s Guide to Orthodox Assimilation on University Campuses” and warns Jewish parents of the moral and spiritual corruption that awaits their children should they send them to elite secular universities. Perl and Weinstein speak as worried insiders, full of observations about how everything, from dorm life to Jewish Studies to the culture of the campus Jewish society, Hillel, holds the potential for subversion of Orthodox views and morals. The authors are clear that, as “grateful products” of secular universities, they do not reject secular education as such. Rather, they want to reveal its inherent pitfalls, as well as the problems rooted in the social environment in which learning takes place. They want the yeshiva high schools, which so many Orthodox students attend, to refrain from making “acceptance into an Ivy League school the barometer of student academic success.”

What really troubles the authors is the ethos of the secular university itself, which may be summed up in Kant’s still arresting phrase, sapere aude ”dare to think! The penchant of the university for “unyielding skepticism” and for Cartesian nostrums about the need to purge oneself of all preconceived notions before pursuing truth is the most potent threat to the well-being of Orthodox youth. As a result, “Orthodox students in secular universities often find themselves attacked simultaneously by a myriad of challenging ideas. From day one Orthodox students often find themselves on the defensive in an attempt to ascertain what it is they believe, why they believe it, and whether they should believe it anymore.” Precisely what practitioners of liberal education would count as success, the authors regard with grave suspicion”as well they should, if their aim is to preserve a traditional culture. But, one might ask, if one’s aim is to preserve tradition, why go through a liberal education in the first place? Why think that you can have it both ways?

The desire to have it both ways, particularly with respect to education, is foundational to Modern Orthodoxy. Modern or “Neo” Orthodoxy, an intellectual product of the nineteenth century, was premised on the belief that one could live both according to Torah, in all of its full traditional rigor, and the “way of the land””that is, the higher culture of modern Europe. The architect of Orthodox modernization, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, was of that Jewish generation that first began to taste university education. Hirsch was confident that traditional Judaism could hold its own against both radical religious reform (as practiced by his classmate and erstwhile friend at the University of Bonn, Abraham Geiger, the architect of Reform Judaism) and contemporary intellectual fashion. Unlike the traditionalist rabbis of Eastern Europe, Hirsch believed that the Enlightenment emphasis on education, religious tolerance, and rights was advantageous to Jews. He did not, as it were, pray for the defeat of Napoleon. He welcomed the unsteady strides toward emancipation in his native Germany. The Jewish future should not be held captive by the Jewish past. Judaism was more than the folkways of the ghetto. Although maximal observance of Jewish law remained the sine qua non of Judaism, the intellectual foundations of Judaism could be articulated anew in the idiom of the present age.

Although Hirsch did not complete his university education, he imbibed its ethos, writing affecting apologetic tracts in excellent German. His literary-theological project draws heavily on the Romantic currents of contemporary German thought to show how the Torah shaped the Volksgeist of the Jewish nation and how archetypal, natural man is completed by observing the Torah. Hirsch armed Orthodox youth with a rather sophisticated theology, which validated their participation in secular life and gave them intellectual tools to parry as well as celebrate its culture.

As Modern Orthodoxy took root in theology-averse America, it became a style rather than a coherent intellectual vision. Orthodox Jews built institutions, entered the professions, and established themselves solidly in the ranks of the middle- and upper-middle classes. As barriers against Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League fell, Orthodox Jews followed their coreligionists into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et al. By the mid-1990s there was already a backlash. A group of five Orthodox students at Yale sought an exemption from the university’s residence policy, claiming that compulsory residence in the dorms would expose them to promiscuity. They filed suit against the university, essentially bringing Yale up on a morals charge.

The present pamphlet focuses little on moral-sexual matters. Rather, its concerns go to the heart of Hirsch’s synthesis itself. On its view, the intellectual values of liberal education as such are invidious to Orthodoxy. Take Jewish Studies, for example. Orthodox students might be drawn to such classes in order to “validate the beliefs with which they were raised or ‘to get credit for learning Torah.’” What they find, however, is a “majority of professors [who] are Jews themselves but may have unorthodox views on the nature of the Torah and the Jewish people.” Given the fact that only about seven percent of the Jewish community is Orthodox, it is not a surprise that the majority of Jewish professors are non-Orthodox. What is surprising, however, is the liberal anti-Orthodoxy of their views. Jewish Studies, far from being a safe intellectual haven from the wild seas of secular education, turns out itself to be a storm center. The authors refer to the most popular course at Harvard University in 1999, Professor James Kugel’s class on the Bible, which enjoys an enrollment of nine hundred students. (The authors refrain from mentioning Kugel, an impeccable scholar and traditional Jew, by name.) The professor, wearing a “large, black kippah,” nonetheless went on to relay the current theories of biblical criticism on the human authorship of the Torah. The combination of apparent piety and troubling heterodoxy “only served to confuse Orthodox students even further.”

How should Orthodox parents and students cope with these alarming temptations? The authors do not rise to a Hirschian solution for their Hirschian problem. Their first line of defense is sociological rather than theological. Throughout the pamphlet they advocate more intensive socialization, partial isolation, and increased distance. “Our first step in preparing our students to successfully meet these challenges must be to redouble our efforts to produce stronger yeshiva high school kids whose eyes have been opened to the beauty of yiddishkeit and who have both an intellectual and a deep emotional attachment to it.” Parents must not take their children’s commitment to a “halakhic lifestyle” for granted; they must deepen the child’s emotional attachment to traditional Jewish life.

Similarly, parents must not view the existence of Hillel houses, even those with provision of kosher food or traditional worship, as a panacea. Where is the kosher food served? Is it close to where students live? If not, they might be tempted to attend the nearest cafeteria when in a hurry. Indeed, the premium that Hillel puts on inclusiveness and the acceptance of all Jewish choices relativizes Orthodoxy, degrading it to just another lifestyle option. The authors relate an anecdote about an observant girl who was active in the Orthodox minyan when she entered college, but graduated “as a Reform Jew and president of Hillel’s JbaGel (Jewish Bisexual Gay and Lesbians) group.” Hillel, in their view, counts this as a “success story.” The organization thus may be bad for an observant Jewish student’s spiritual health.

At the same time, the pamphlet’s authors warn Orthodox students not to go on the offensive and seek to convert other Jewish students to the “beauty of a halakhic lifestyle.” The active recruitment of non-Orthodox Jews (known as kiruv , literally “bringing near”) has “on numerous occasions resulted in disaster.” In an effort to show nonobservant students that Orthodox Jews can be just as fun-loving and “normal” as they, the Orthodox students frequently bend their halakhic practice or introduce illicit innovations, such as mixed seating sections in their prayer groups. Kiruv work may be too dangerous for the average Orthodox student who, lacking answers for his curious interlocutor’s questions, comes to question the adequacy of his own faith. It seems, then, that the Orthodox student should withdraw and leave such efforts to the “trained kiruv professionals.”

A mood of fretfulness thus pervades the pamphlet. The tactics it advocates”emotionalism and disengagement”attest to a failure of intellectual nerve. There is a theological vacuum behind the anxiety. Although the authors gingerly suggest that the yeshiva high schools expose their students to “potentially troubling theories such as evolution and the Documentary Hypothesis,” they also recognize that the high schools might “lack the resources to successfully implement this proposition.” Better, then, for it to be dealt with by the intellectual and spiritual leaders of Modern Orthodoxy. They are the ones who ought to “articulate sophisticated responses to the complex questions” raised by contemporary Bible scholarship, Jewish Studies, and so forth. But who are these leaders today? Modern Orthodoxy has no one approaching the stature of its late leader, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. And does the posture of waiting for authorities to work out strategies really befit people who are products of the modern university? Should they not have learned to think for themselves, especially in an area touching intimately on the quality of their own faith?

There is a cautionary tale here about the neglect of theology. Modern Orthodoxy for too long has relied on sociology”familism, solidarity, youth groups, institutional loyalties”instead of intellectually sophisticated apologetics. It has written off the bolder elements of its own Hirschian legacy, let alone any ongoing engagement with modern philosophy, in favor of an increasingly otherworldly fundamentalism. Its synagogues have jettisoned the hoary Hertz Pentateuch, which, to be sure, was florid in its Victorian prose but also honest in its confrontation with modern scholarship, in favor of the rigidly fundamentalist Art Scroll translation. Likewise, Modern Orthodoxy’s immense success in building up a socially vibrant culture in the American suburbs has distracted it from the requisite intellectual task of providing depth and justification for its way of life.

Perhaps American multiculturalism and postmodernism have blunted the urgency of the need. Perhaps the thunder on the Orthodox right has made adherents of Modern Orthodoxy nervous about the deep engagement with culture that good theology requires. Perhaps durable American optimism has persuaded them that you can have it all, contradictions be damned. Whatever the case, the result is the melancholy dilemma reflected in the “Parent’s Guide to Orthodox Assimilation on Campus””eager participation in the American dream, accompanied by unsettling American nightmares.

Alan Mittleman is Professor of Religion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is also Director of “Jews and the American Public Square,” a project initiated by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Alan L. Mittleman
Spinoza&rsquo;s Project Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500 Spinoza, Liberalism, and the
Question of Jewish Identity

By Steven B. Smith
Yale University Press. 270 pp. $30

Spinoza has had an umistakable appeal for free thinkers-Jewish and gentile-over the past two centuries, and his appeal seems greatest when a rigorous institutionalized faith collides with a secular fervor. Thus, in the tense atmosphere of Israel’s culture wars, Spinoza has emerged as something of a hero figure for secularists. Such philosophers as Gershon Weiler and Yirmiyahu Yovel have claimed Spinoza as the first modern Jew, the first theorist of a secular Jewish state, and the first Jew to intuit the possibility of a wholly secular Jewishness. Insofar as Spinoza worked out his theory of a liberal society in terms of a struggle with the political claims of Jewish law he seems oddly contemporary. At least in Israel. At least for secularists.

For all that, it is odd that even Israeli secularists should embrace Spinoza, since he had such harsh and contemptuous things to say about Judaism. His criticisms are standard tropes in the “recurring pattern,” as Nathan Rotenstreich put it, of philosophical anti-Semitism. At the end of the day, a thorough and truly radical critique of most of what Jews have held sacred should not appear, even to Israeli secularists, as entirely sanguine.

American Jews, with little experience of either the fierce anti-clericalism that Israel inherited from Europe or state-established Jewish religion, can afford to treat Spinoza with the ambivalence he deserves. An uncompromising advocate of freedom of opinion and one of the first of the great modern political theorists to argue for the superiority of democracy, Spinoza offers much to be esteemed. But he also offers much to be deplored, advocating in somewhat encrypted fashion the dismantling of revealed religion and its replacement by a positive, secular civil religion. From Spinoza’s elevated metaphysical point of view, all revealed religions are sects. In the seventeenth century in which he wrote, when the wars of religion were not a distant memory, debunking and controlling sects seemed a small price for a rational, educated, strife-free civil society. At the end of the twentieth century, however, the problems in Spinoza’s settlement of religion and politics are far more apparent.

Steven Smith’s new study of Spinoza’s political teaching reflects more enthusiasm than ambivalence, but ambivalence is not lacking. Smith wants to present a Spinoza equal in stature to his great contemporaries, Locke and Hobbes, and to establish him as a primary figure in democratic theory. He also wants to show that it was crucial to that theory to settle the question of religion in the modern polity, especially for Jews. Spinoza is the truly towering figure here, for (as Leo Strauss argued many years ago) modern Jews have never been able to free themselves from Spinoza’s framing of the fundamental issue.

That fundamental issue is the question of revelation. Spinoza is radically opposed to the concept of revelation-to the idea that reason requires guidance from beyond its ken and to the claim that Scripture is the record of this gracious, divine guidance. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Tractate is an assault on the Mosaic authorship, indeed, the divinity of Scripture.

The first half of Smith’s study is a close and expert reading of Spinoza’s scriptural interpretation. Spinoza was concerned to avoid both what Smith terms a “skeptical” and a “dogmatic” reading. (“Skeptical” in this context means skeptical of reason.) We ought not, on Spinoza’s account, to suspend our rational knowledge of the world and take, for example, biblical miracles at their face value. But neither should we follow Maimonides (a “dogmatist”) and assume that Scripture always conforms to reason if only we interpret it allegorically. Spinoza does not want Scripture to be either a scandal to reason or an encoded philosophical text. He proposes, rather, a naturalistic hermeneutic through which the meaning of Scripture is allowed to emerge in its original setting. This is, essentially, the stand of modern hermeneutics: not truth, but meaning-text-in-historical-context-is what counts.

Convinced that Scripture is not about truth, Spinoza argues that it is instead the cultural product of the ancient Hebrews. Its “meaning” (Spinoza, like Kant who follows him on this score, believes that Scripture has an essential, overriding meaning) is moral: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Almost all the rest is historical-cultural detritus to be jettisoned.

Nearly all the political thinkers of the seventeenth century read Scripture as a political text. But Spinoza went far beyond, for example, John Locke in his First Treatise or The Reasonableness of Christianity . Initiating the project of higher criticism, Spinoza inserted the Bible into the dimension of secular history, and ever since, few Jews, other than the most orthodox of the Orthodox, have managed to regain their confidence that the words of Torah are the words of God. But Spinoza not only framed the problem, but claimed to have found the solution in the liberal Jewish compensatory mechanism: the eternal commands of conscience, the moral law speaking through the text, are, as it were, the voice of God.

One of the merits of Smith’s Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity is that it brings out clearly the political aim of higher criticism in its Spinozist incarnation. Higher criticism is meant to reduce the authority of competing sects and clergies by reducing the authority of Scripture. In place of a scripture, contention over which foments civic unrest, the modern society proposes a rational religion that promotes civic peace.

Spinoza, like Rousseau who follows him, is convinced that civil society requires civil religion. He arrives at this conclusion in part for “Judaic” reasons. His critique of Scripture required a critique of prophecy, particularly of that philosophical version of prophecy promoted by Maimonides and other medievals. Spinoza had to argue that revelation (via prophecy) was not a higher form of knowledge, but an inferior (because imagination-driven) expression of natural knowledge. Revealed religion makes no defensible cognitive claims. Prophecy has more to do with the prophet’s passional psychology than with objective reality. With Scripture thus severed from truth (or theoretical reason), what is left is a connection of Scripture with law and ethics (or practical reason). Scripture’s main purpose was to stipulate moral and civil law for the ancient Israelite polity, and Judaism is thus a religion of law, its faith simply a posture of obedience to law.

By claiming that the emerging modern civil society requires a civil faith whose content is primarily a moral law inculcating obedience to the state, Spinoza turns civil religion into a caricature of Judaism, in effect turning all modern people into Jews: their “faith,” whatever significance it may have for them on a personal level, is in fact merely a matter of obedience to the civil sovereign. This faith, like the faith of biblical Israelites, does not per se bring happiness. It does, however, secure civil peace within which individuals can work out their happiness. For Spinoza, the best civil state is a democratic, commercial republic where citizens have access to education and commercial opportunity against a background of legally secured liberty. And civil faith is a foundation of this civil society.

Spinoza places an extraordinary value on the freedom of the autonomous individual. He is the true prophet of the liberated, modern self. For this reason, as Smith points out, Spinoza endorses democratic republicanism more fervently than earlier contract theorists. Spinozist politics is not simply about the avoidance of civil strife, as Hobbes had argued. Politics has a positive role to play. But insofar as Spinoza has broken with the Jewish political tradition (best represented by Maimonides) and its adaptation of the Greek virtuous republic, what is left to him is an endorsement of the modern commercial republic with its mass society, privacy, and individuality. Spinoza endorses democracy because he believes that it affords the best environment for freedom of thought, and thus for individual perfection.

But because Spinoza breaks with the tradition of virtue, he denies politics a role in the achievement of perfection. Politics creates conditions of freedom such that individuals who are interested in perfection, namely philosophers, can pursue their project of a rational life. As to everyone else, politics creates freedom for them as well, but it also imposes strict limits through a powerful sovereign and the civil religion of obedience to him.

Spinoza’s vision of freedom is thus circumscribed for the masses and unbounded for the philosophers. In the end, his vision of human perfection (as a perfectly rational life focused on a God who is identical with nature) is deeply apolitical. His task was to convince society that it had nothing to fear from those who would pursue such a life.

Toward the end of his book, Smith does for Spinoza’s politics and controverted image of Judaism what the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel has done for Spinoza’s metaphysics, tracing their impact on the great thinkers of the European enlightenment. Smith shows how Spinoza’s construction of Scripture and Judaism, and its role in the economy of the emerging liberal political theory he teaches, both endures in and is transformed by such figures as Lessing, Kant, and Hegel.

Somewhat less successful is Smith’s effort to translate Spinoza into the American context. The influence and utility of his thought as an analytic and descriptive framework for American politics is open to doubt. Spinoza exemplifies a tradition of strong or unified sovereignty that is relatively foreign to American federalism. His distrust of revealed religion as a political force, whatever sense it had in Europe, is also not entirely at home in a country where Tocqueville described religion as the first of political institutions.

On the other hand, Smith makes a good case for Spinoza’s ongoing pertinence. The issue he so powerfully framed-a universal common and civil faith versus competing particular loyalities-has surfaced again in the “identity politics” of modern multiculturalism. Arguing that he would be as critical of the race-sex-gender crowd as he was of the synagogue and the Protestant theocrats, Smith provocatively presents Spinoza as a critic of multiculturalism.

But perhaps Spinoza’s lasting legacy is as a diagnostician of the condition of the people whose midst he left. Modern Judaism has never really escaped the horns of Spinoza’s dilemma. While Jews followed Spinoza’s advice and assimilated to a shared culture, Judaism transformed itself into an Enlightenment artifact that sought to give no offense. But this process of which Spinoza was herald and high priest is now in decline. Those Jews who refused the Spinozist offer seem resurgent. The question remains whether they can pursue a theology and a politics of revelation without the superstition, obscurantism, and theocratic authoritarianism that Spinoza rightly decried. And though Spinoza diagnosed the problem, he cannot provide a compelling contemporary solution. He does, however, offer a clear picture of the issues and stakes involved.

Alan Mittleman is Professor of Religion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.

Alan L. Mittleman
Jews in Multicultural America Sun, 01 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500 For some decades, American Jews have made sense of the relation between their Americanness and their Jewishness through the concept of cultural pluralism. This concept allowed a flexible but expansive Jewish ethnic and religious identity to coexist with an equally normative American identity. The content of both Jewishness and Americanness may have been somewhat protean, but both mattered. Most Jews did not consider their Americanness to be simply a matter of citizenship, of what sort of passport they carried. Being an American implied a set of identity-shaping commitments. Citizenship in a liberal democracy, such as America, bore with it its own myths, history, and fellowship. Pluralism reconciled this complex American identity with an equally complex Jewishness.

Within the last several decades, however, the concept of cultural pluralism has given way to another concept, which, if only superficially, appears to derive from and improve upon it: multiculturalism. But this concept is fundamentally distinct from the pluralism that has well served American Jews. Multiculturalism, if it were to succeed pluralism altogether, would be inimical to American Jews.

The term pluralism was popularized by a Jewish professor of philosophy, Horace Meyer Kallen (1882“1974), shortly after the First World War. Kallen, like most Jews of his day, was extraordinarily proud to be an American, but was troubled by the idea of the American Melting Pot. He did not believe that it was ethical or wise to insist that different peoples entirely efface their differences. He imagined that the various immigrant groups could hold on to some significant portion of their heritage and, precisely because of that distinctive identity, offer a unique contribution to America.

On the one hand, Kallen envisioned Americanness as a substantive, normative cultural identity. America was more than just a place of opportunity. America and its civil faith (which he called “the American Idea”) stood for a distinctive set of moral and political values. Values such as optimism, progress, democracy, individualism, and freedom could and should unite the nation. Yet precisely because America stands or falls on its ideas, we can come to its ideas or articulate its ideas in our own distinctive ways. To be united by the values of America, one did not need to shed one’s ethnic identity. Indeed, one ought not to. Kallen’s favorite metaphor was the orchestra. Distinctive ethnicities, like different instruments, could contribute harmoniously to the whole.

Kallen’s notion of cultural pluralism was an adaptation of the metaphysical philosophy of his Harvard teacher and mentor, the famous American philosopher William James. In 1909, James published his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford under the title, A Pluralistic Universe . James meant by pluralism a philosophical vision that opposed Hegelian absolute idealism. Pluralism was meant to account for reality as we actually experience it in its individuality, vitality, and empirical concreteness. James hoped to refute the modern forms of idealism and monism, stemming from Spinoza and Hegel and their Anglo-American imitators, and return us to the pre-philosophic world of actuality, a “turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.” James prized the individual, the particular, the personal. He rejected, no less than Kierkegaard or Rosenzweig, philosophy’s effort to subsume the part in the whole.

Kallen’s contribution was to take the metaphysical mood of Jamesian pragmatism and apply it to culture. And who better than a Jew striving to be an American to do so? America was founded in an environment of religious pluralism. Religious pluralism, which generally implied the considerable variety of Protestant denominations as well as the Catholics and some few Jews, was a fact that most Americans had come to accept as relatively benign. But cultural or ethnic pluralism, aggravated by the great migrations after the Civil War, was far more challenging and difficult for the older American stock to accept. America had two answers. The first was nativism”the view that only the older American stock could properly understand and maintain distinctive American values. The second answer was the melting pot: the cauldron in which out of many cultures would come one. Kallen rejected both.

Like most Jews of his day, Kallen found an uncanny agreement between the core values of Judaism (or “Hebraism,” as he preferred to call it) and those of America. This, of course, was not surprising, since America was settled, if not founded, by people who took the Bible rather seriously. Furthermore, the way they took the Bible seriously was significantly similar to the way Jews took the Bible. That is, both Calvinists and Jews read the Bible, with its pervasive theme of covenantalism, as (in part at least) a political text.

Covenant was not just a theological idea for the Puritans; it was an eminently political one. They founded their towns and commonwealths as covenantal republics: voluntary societies bound together by the laws of God and the desire to serve Him in freedom. These covenants were later transformed by political theory and practice into the somewhat more secular compacts and social contracts of eighteenth-century thought.

The basic idea remained the same however: societies are originated by free men in order to enable persons to have a common life directed toward the fulfillment of a noble end. Participation in the society requires consent to the founding principles. Liberty within the society is not absolute or negative. It is liberty to work within and to promote the common good.

It is this basically biblical and rather secular vision that Jews such as Kallen found intrinsic to America. Proud of his Jewish heritage and convinced of its affinity with American ideals, Kallen thought it reasonable that the more Jews cultivated their heritage, the more they would contribute to the American whole. Similiarly, the more they discerned the true values (however imperfectly realized) of America, the better they would refine and live their Judaism. Assuming then that the Jewish difference was real and valuable, Kallen also believed that ethnic differences on the whole were real and valuable. At the same time, however, ethnic differences should be negotiable and malleable. They must be directed to or ordered by a concern for an American common good.

To put it somewhat abstractly, primordial identity and the citizenship identity of the liberal society must condition one another. Civil society is not just a blank page on which the ethnic communities write their own stories for their own readership. Civil society has its own demands and requirements. It will and ought to have a transformative effect on primordial groups. The groups must have their liberty, however, and will, in turn, have a transformative effect on the civil society.

It is easy to see how cultural pluralism served as a useful ideology for generations of American Jews who wanted to retain their Jewishness while uninhibitedly affirming their Americanness. But it is easy to forget that this perspective worked only because Americanness and Judaism were conceived to a significant degree as ideals, indeed, as mutually compatible ideals. If we allow ourselves no coherent formulation of what America means or of what Judaism means, then we can obviously claim no link or essential likeness between them. And this is apparently precisely what has happened. Serious thought about the relationship of Judaism to Americanness no longer occurs. It seems terribly old-fashioned now, a relic of Kallen’s time inappropriate to our own. Rabbinic sermons, a good guide to popular Jewish thinking, dealt frequently with the relationship of Judaism to America in the 1950s. But this theme is nonexistent today.

One might explain this absence as caused by a normal coming of age. The theme was crucial for the immigrant and second generations, but taken for granted by the third and subsequent generations. Undoubtedly there is some truth to this. But I think another issue is at stake: the hollowing out of Americanness”the loss of any consensus, however minimal, of what being an American means. Against this background, cultural pluralism is increasingly superseded by the ideology of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism, I would suggest, is a mode of decoupling ethnic and religious communities from some imagined, normative Americanness. Multiculturalism celebrates or affirms difference for its own sake and as its own terminus. The multiculturalist does not see a need to order difference in relation to a common good. If there is a common good, it is a good common only to members of a given group. The common good is a tribal good.

Of the factors that contributed to the rise of this ideology, the most salient one is that America no longer holds any radical or unique meaning for many Americans. After the assassinations and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, after the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate, we are left with no innocence and much reticence about ourselves. We no longer believe that we have a monopoly on the export of ideas. We are no longer certain that we have any distinctive ideas. Nor do we any longer believe that belief in ourselves is the panacea for our own ills. Even the Reagan revolution, for all its cheery boosterism, failed to restore the old confidence in America.

Reaganism replaced Americanness, it seems to me, with a stirring, but not a soul-stirring, ideal: the American Dream. We still talk much in America about this American Dream. We argue about whether it is possible to achieve it, and about who can achieve it. We even argue about what, precisely, it is. Of course, almost everyone agrees it has to do with money, with employment, with security. But beyond the basics of economic opportunity, there is no coherent or accepted vision of the American dream. It is for this reason that the American dream is not a substitute for the bygone ideals of America. Its vision is too narrow. It is the vision of homo oeconomicus , of the consumer, of the private person. It is not really the dream of the citizen, of the defender of a culture, of the aspirant for a good society. It is not a bad dream, but it is not the stuff that great dreams are made of.

Americanness as a civil religion is, to all intents and purposes, dead. There is thus a vacuum where our belief in our own exceptionalism used to be. As the poet Robert Bly once wrote, “The world will break up into small communities of the saved.” This eerie eschatological premonition seems to me increasingly to describe our present. A vacuum has sucked all the pieces of stained glass out of the window of American pluralism. Multiculturalism is the attempt to reassemble them without, as it were, a surrounding frame.

Multiculturalism should not be confused with pluralism or the tolerant and empathetic cosmopolitanism that often accompanies pluralism. Critics of multiculturalism are often mistaken for old-fashioned chauvinists, nativists, or know-nothing advocates of a nasty melting pot, as if they were rejecting pluralism or cosmopolitanism per se. Could any serious intellectual really argue that students at a serious university not study Chinese poetry or African art or Jewish literature, for that matter? This is unthinkable. What critics of multiculturalism criticize is not the cosmopolitan breadth to which educated persons have always aspired, but a certain dogmatic dismissiveness toward the Western tradition.

The Western tradition, as conceived by contemporary academic multiculturalists, is little more than the aesthetic and religious false consciousness of various types of oppressors: the racist, the classist, the heterosexist, the misogynist. Far from being a source of moral guidance, the Western tradition seems more and more like a roadmap of destinations to avoid. It shows you what not to emulate, what not to hope for, how not to live, what not to be. It is this attitude of scorn”which is as little justified in the university as an attitude of boosterism”to which the critics of multiculturalism call attention.

While pluralism affirmed cultural difference on account of its service to a common good, multiculturalism, as noted above, denies the integrity of a common good. It cannot or will not see beyond a tribal good. This disposition is born, it seems to me, less of pride or satisfaction in what is one’s own than in despair of or rage toward the public world. The ideas of the public world, formerly constitutive of Americanness, were not, multiculturalism tells us, truly public, truly shared. They were actually the intellectual property of the reigning elite. The ideal of an open, pluralistic society was a sham.

Consider a typical case, in which American Jews had a considerable role and investment. American Jews, good pluralists that they were, generally endorsed the policy of racial integration. They certainly believed that blacks had a right to their culture, that they had a right to be proud of their culture, both American and African, and that they had a right to a fuller share of economic and social goods. American Jews worked to dismantle racial barriers, to open up greater educational opportunities, to end discrimination in the work place. They imagined that they were acting out of the deepest convictions of the Jewish tradition and in accordance with the high, if as yet imperfectly realized, ideals of America. This was cultural pluralism at its best.

But as the black civil rights movement turned increasingly toward nationalism and black separatism, Jews found that the values they thought were constitutive of the public world, such as equality of opportunity and merit, were now thought parochial and pernicious. Integration was rejected by black nationalists as a malevolent strategy of assimilation. Nationalists such as Stokely Carmichael called it “the final solution to the Negro problem” and “a subterfuge for white supremacy.” Robert Browne, echoing Carmichael’s Nazi allusion, called integration “a form of painless genocide.”

The idea of merit, once considered by liberal pluralists to be a neutral rule for allocating goods, was now assigned a strictly demonic, oppressive character. In fact, an essayist in the leftist Jewish journal Tikkun argued, the entire “rhetoric of reason, neutrality, and objectivity actually constitutes the particular discourse of power that white Europeans employed in order to justify their own privileged status.” When confidence in a morally substantive public world is lost, there are no ideas that rise above race, above primordial loyalties, above the war of all against all.

When the black nationalists of the sixties and seventies rejected the ameliorative agenda of the Great Society, they spoke from the far edge of a radical fringe. But today the political and theoretical assumptions from which they spoke have become a kind of orthodoxy, at least in much of American academia. Our professors of humanities assure us that reason has no universal form, but is merely a set of social practices that ensure one group’s domination over others. Knowledge is not only power, it is nothing but power. This equation of knowledge and power, of truth and politics is deeply entrenched in the academy. But is it not especially malign for a nation constituted by its ideas, such as the United States, and for a people which has lived for its ideas, such as the Jews?

Jews have been able to flourish in the United States because the primary American form of identity is that of citizenship. Jews and others have had the best of both worlds: they have enjoyed a citizenship identity in the national polity and have, without contradiction, enjoyed a more primordial identity conferred by their own historic tradition. Other modern states, of course (or at least the liberal elements in them), tried to base participation in the polity upon citizenship as well. But, in practice, the primordial identity of ethnicity, race, or religion often imposed severe limits on the possibilities of citizenship. In America, by contrast, citizenship has proved more normative than it has in European countries. One obvious reason for this is that America is an immigrant society, without any organic national base. But another reason is that America, the “first new nation,” was built on ideas. Citizenship meant subscription or consent to the ideals and principles of the founding national covenant. Primordial loyalties and identities were in some significant way irrelevant to participation in that covenant.

Multiculturalism seeks to attenuate citizenship identity and to substitute primordial identity as a more radically satisfying, self-sufficient framework. But this can only be done at the cost of forfeiting any shared moral language, any meaningful public discourse, any thick concept of what it means to be an American. The erosion of cultural pluralism and the drift toward the new ideal of multiculturalism pose real hazards for American Jews, because they weaken the citizenship on which Jewish participation in modern society is based.

Multiculturalism also seems to offer some attractions, however, and it has its defenders, both on the right and on the left. As a consciously formulated ideology, it appeals to Jews on the left because it offers a new rationale for solidarity with oppressed and colonialized people around the world. In this version of multiculturalism, what I have called primordial identity must not be thought of as a fixed or stable property. Jewish identity becomes a matter of millennial otherness, of historical marginalization. Devoid of essentialistic or substantive criteria of identity, “Jewishness” becomes another “otherized” (and “otherizing”) social construct, a product of the exclusionary practices by which dominant groups define themselves.

Jewishness is what is left to the losers after the dominant groups distribute the spoils of social conflict. Jewishness is not fundamentally different from blackness, femaleness, gayness, etc. These have no essence, no inner life. They are but names we assign to complex, shifting indices of the power dynamics of social life. The multiculturalist Jews of the left would link the Jew to every marginal and disempowered “other” at the cost of letting nothing but some elusive “otherness” remain.

But multiculturalism also describes an attitude found among those who would normally not speak its name, the Jews on the right. Sociologists of American Jewry have long noted both the resurgence of Orthodoxy and the enfeeblement of that same Orthodoxy’s moderate center. Orthodoxy survived in the modern world in two forms: a sectarian, separatist hard core that resisted modernization and a modernist wing that accommodated itself to secular society. The latter group gave Orthodoxy its public face in America. Associated with Yeshiva University and the teaching of the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “modern Orthodoxy” prized both traditional piety and practice and the values and cognitive norms of modern culture. This modernist Orthodoxy has been severely eroded. The more insular sectarian Orthodoxy, far less concerned with accommodation to the contemporary world, is today far more confident than centrist Orthodoxy. The children of Orthodox Ph.D.s, raised in American suburbia, now spurn their parents’ universities and hope to spend their lives in right-wing Jerusalem yeshivot. Where Orthodox congregants once followed the Torah reading in the Hertz Pentateuch, with its vigorous polemic against the documentary hypothesis, they now read the Art Scroll edition, a volume that has not the slightest interest in establishing any links between Torah and secular consciousness.

To a certain extent, the motivation here is the same as that of the left. The Enlightenment and the values of modernity are thought a kind of sham, an idol. They seduce Jews away from their own primordiality, from their overwhelming intimacy with God. The hyper-Orthodox want to live in an integral, sacred cosmos. The political realm, if it cannot be assimilated to that cosmos (which of course it cannot in the Diaspora), is of marginal significance. The national polity is not an object of care or concern for its own sake. It must simply be dealt with in terms of the crassest interest politics as the need arises. There is no distinctive or normative significance in an American identity.

These Jewish variations on the multicultural theme are born, like their gentile counterparts, out of the conviction that citizenship no longer constitutes a significant or distinctive identity. The balance between the public and the primordial has tilted. Without a renewal of our conviction that being an American implies meaning and confers a distinctive worth, the consensus, however minimal, upon which a free society rests can only weaken. If people revert to more primordial forms of belonging, civil society will dissolve and American Jews might find themselves in what the prophet Ezekiel called a midbar ha-ammim , a wilderness of the peoples. This would be a nightmarish denouement to Kallen’s once admired American Idea.

Alan L. Mittleman is Associate Professor of Religion at Muhlenberg College.

Alan L. Mittleman
The Modern Jewish Condition Sat, 01 Oct 1994 00:00:00 -0400 Autonomy means to live under one’s own law: to discover the norms of a lawful life, a nomos, by or within oneself. Thus it is not, in principle, anarchic or anomic. Autonomy and authority are, as etymology suggests, paired concepts. Autonomy means that the self becomes its own authority, that authority per se is conditional upon the consent of the self. Autonomy takes self-directedness as its governing principle.

How does self-directedness come to have credibility as a moral concept? Its origins lie perhaps in the logic of responsibility; in the conditions under which we can attribute blame or praise to an agent. To be fully responsible, an agent must have freely chosen his course of action. The idea that we are responsible only if we can be said to have chosen or consented willingly to a course of action is certainly an old one. The great German Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, attributes its discovery to the prophet Ezekiel, who, in contradiction to the exiles’ belief that “the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” asserted that every man suffers for his own sin. Ezekiel appears to have displaced the older biblical notion that God will punish the children for the sins of their fathers for several subsequent generations. Blame and punishment are neither collective nor hereditary. They are merited by individuals on a basis of personal desert. If Cohen is correct, the concept of autonomy in the sense of having to take responsibility for one’s own destiny-of having, on one’s own, to recognize what is right and to act accordingly-is not new.


The theme of autonomy has been of defining significance for modernity. Indeed, the major intellectual architects of the modern project have put the individual at the crux of their thought. Modern philosophy begins with the individual. For Descartes, often held to be the first modern philosopher, reality per se is discovered in self-reflection. Being depends upon the solitary, thinking ego for its self-disclosure. The little “I,” which was at best a microcosm of a vast, created (or, for Aristotle, eternal) macrocosm, now becomes the only open window onto the world of being. We cannot know, hence we cannot trust in, anything that is beyond what we can think. The little “I” has now become the arbiter of all that is.




















For Jews to reach a new/old self-representation of their communal reality entails the rediscovery of the Jewish polity . Community is rather too weak a term to describe the sociality of the Jews. Jewish historical being is both chosen, voluntary, consensual and primordial, natural, and transcendent. One is born a Jew and one chooses Judaism. Judaism is found in oneself, not made. Yet one must also make one’s Judaism, that is, one must make oneself into a Jew. The law precedes one, yet one must make it one’s own. The massive, public otherness of the law becomes personal, intimately one’s own.

The resolution of this apparent paradox has been a major concern of modern Jewish theologians. Throughout modernity, Jewish thinkers have been simultaneously drawn to and deeply agitated by Kant. Kant’s stress on ethics, inner purity, and on the dignity and ennoblement of man through righteous will and action seemed like a convincing and a compatible statement of Judaism’s own ideal. Yet Kant’s uncompromising rejection of heteronomy seemed fully incompatible with Judaism’s revealed Law. Indeed, Kant called for a “euthanasia of Judaism” (Judaism represented pure heteronomy for him) as a condition of the moral development of mankind. Thus the Kantian version of autonomy became a persistent challenge to modern Jewish thought.


The primary Jewish reality is not the individual agent but the historic polity in which the individual discovers his or her Jewishness. “Polity” is stronger than “community” because it resonates with the sense of obligation that characterizes the political. It entails as well a sense of continuity, primordiality, and objectivity that community has come to lack. On the other hand, polity must not be confused with “state” or any other political category where the emphasis is on sovereignty and the monopoly of legitimate violence. Polity refers to forms of social life more binding than community yet more decentralized than the modern state.




Alan L. Mittleman
Communal Foundations Sat, 01 Jan 1994 00:00:00 -0500 The Idea of Civil Society
by Adam Seligman
Free Press, 220 pages, $24.95







But returning to Seligman’s main methodological premise, the question arises as to whether he has too quickly excluded religion from any significant role in the support of civil society as an ideal or, even more important, as reality. Not that he is inattentive to the role of religion. As he moves from pure history of ideas to historical sociology, his method is thoroughly Weberian. In his second chapter, he concentrates on “ascetic Protestantism” (i.e., American Puritanism) as the movement that gave the most explicit and enduring historical shape to civil society. Puritanism’s doctrine of grace supported the highly developed individualism that gave credence to the representation of early American society as a voluntary community of the consenting elect. For it was such a society, when secularized, that became the model for civil society. Thus the saints’ experience of enabling the participation of the unregenerate through the halfway covenant serves as a model for the formal right of political participation in society.




But what follows from this? The birth of the idea of civil society in dissenting Protestantism with its notions of covenanting and “federal liberty,” while historically irretrievable, ought to caution us against dismissing the significance of religion to civil society. Seligman admits a continuing salience in the form of American civil religion, but he sees this as vestigial (as it well may be). Nonetheless, between some fundamentalists’ dreams of cultural hegemony and the anomie of secular postmodernism, it is credible to believe that religion will play a role wherever free societies believe in themselves enough to remain free. Seligman seems completely unaware of the work of thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray. Without such a trans-secular alternative, the iron cage of Weber that is here invoked by Seligman may well be our common, if uncivil, future.


Alan L. Mittleman
The Scholar as Polemicist Mon, 01 Mar 1993 00:00:00 -0500 Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
by Hans Küng, translated by John Bowden
Crossroad, 753 pages, $39.50
