The davening on Yom Kippur is so intense and so lengthy that is has been my habit when going to services to take with me a book or two of interesting and challenging Jewish content for those times when I need a break. About ten years ago, the book I took with me was Daniel Gordis’s 1997 Does the World Need the Jews?: Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity.
I was captivated by his introduction which retells the story of “The Little Mermaid,” both the original version by Hans Christian Andersen, and Disney’s They-All-Lived-Happily-Ever-After version. His 
point was how Jews have encountered American society and found themselves faced with the choice between maintaining a separate identity as Jews, or foregoing their distinctive Jewish identity in favor of becoming Americans. I love stories and his introduction, with its use of Andersen’s fairy tale, did a beautiful job of elucidating the complexity of confronting the “melting pot” attitude in American society, as well as the challenges of maintaining one’s identity in an inclusive society. By contrasting the two versions of the mermaid’s tale, Gordis effectively illustrates the fantasy of abandoning one’s Judaism to join a world that is more attractive, but to which we do not entirely belong, and the pain and foreignness of abandoning what we truly are as Jews.
For a host of reasons, that was where I stopped ten years ago. But after reading Gordis’s most recent book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (which I will review later) in which he seeks to answer the question, “Why be Israeli?”, I was interested to go back and finish the earlier book.
Does the World Need the Jews? tackles a similarly complicated question, i.e. “Why be Jewish in America?” There’s been plenty of ink spilled over the issue of Jewish continuity and fears about intermarriage, assimilation, and simple drifting away of young Jews from the faith of their fathers. Rabbi Gordis meets this issue head-on and explores the many sources of discomfort of American Jews, the attempts made by rabbis in the 19th and 20th century to adapt American Judaism in order to slow the drift, and the deep relevance, wisdom, and value of Jewish ways of thinking, learning, and debating that make it worth holding on to.
Gordis, who writes “Dispatches from an Anxious State”, is the author of many books, founding dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and currently Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He writes compassionately about Jews in America and Israel, and from his experience living in both countries, understands their unique challenges and strengths. This is of particular value to me, since living in Israel I sometimes feel as though I’ve lost a sense of American Judaism and its worth. This book outlined for me some of the potential for good in Diaspora life.
Gordis’s central argument is that Jews have a unique mission in the world—a mission to share their wisdom, their belief in the worth and dignity of all people, and their love of freedom. He points out, however, that over the years, American Jews have become confused between Jewish values and secular, liberal, American values. Because the struggle to become real Americans often conflicted with the education of young Jews, the desire to be American often won the day at the expense of Jewish education. Without spending the time learning what is Jewish, Jews only learned what was American. This is what has created the sense in many American Jews that Judaism is liberalism. Gordis writes, “In this scheme, Jews internalized the commitment to individualism and autonomy that often characterized liberalism in America. The more Jews equated Judaism with liberalism, the less law in their religion made sense. If American life is about freedom and autonomy, Jews wondered, why should they care about a constraining religious tradition that erodes their autonomy? …And Jews are discovering that without law at its core, Judaism will not be very different from Christianity” (p. 144).
The confusion between Judaism and liberalism takes many forms. Gordis describes the toll political correctness and multiculturalism have taken on Judaism’s unique voice. He validates the discomfort many liberal-minded Jews feel as a result of hostility from those in the Black, feminist, and academic world (where the role of Jews in the slave trade is sometimes wildly exaggerated, Jewish law is rejected categorically because of its sexism, and Jewish institutions host speakers who deny the Shoah). In one of my favorite discussions, he criticizes the phrase “Judeo-Christian ethic,” which he says really “‘just means Christian.’ It pays lip service to Christianity’s Jewish roots, but little more. After all, what is ‘Judeo’ about the Judeo-Christian ethic that is not also Christian? What, in other words, is distinctively Jewish about that tradition? Why is it not simply a ‘Christian ethic’?” In the fullness of his discussion, he points out that Christian texts (i.e. those texts foreign to Judaism) are viewed as part of this ethic, but Jewish texts foreign to Christianity are not. He writes, “The bottom line: in America, ‘Judeo-Christian’ is a polite way of saying ‘Christian,’ and American Jews so desperately wanted to be included that we never noticed” (p. 176).
Perhaps the most dramatic example he gives of Jews abandoning their own particularism in the search for acceptance and universalism is the inscription on the wall of the $65 million Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which not only leaves out any indication of its Jewish nature in the name of the building, but also offers a very stripped-down translation of a displayed Torah passage. The translation of Genesis 12:1-3 offered is, “Go forth … and be a blessing to the world.” What the Torah passage says in its entirety is something quite different:
The Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.”
A rabbi at the Skirball Center said the intention behind the ellipsis was to appeal to unaffiliated Jews, to give them the impression that the people at the Center were not “dogmatic” (pp. 50-51). It is presumably this same desire to appeal to non-dogmatic Jews that informs the Reform decision to cut out part of the Havdalah service in which we bless God who has separated the light from darkness, the Jews from the other nations, and the Sabbath from the six days of Creation.
The book has many strengths. Gordis carefully avoids pointing fingers at, or even mentioning, specific Jewish movements. I believe he is right to do this, since the movement with which one affiliates is not necessarily an indicator of one’s practice of Judaism. He believes that the answer to the fears about Jewish loss of purpose are applicable to Jews of all ages and movement affiliations: study of Hebrew and Jewish texts and incorporation of traditional practice in the home. He sets out to make Jews feel comfortable again with the notion of chosenness, examining texts, holidays, and liturgy to extract a Jewish message for Jews left ignorant by their upbringing. He distinguishes Judaism from American liberalism, revisiting Jewish sources to emphasize Judaism’s stress on the community rather than the individual. And he urges Jews to rededicate themselves to Jewish education, both for children and adults who were abandoned educationally after becoming bnei mitzvah. “Our leaders,” he writes, “feared that by placing too many demands on Jews, it would force us to flee. They imagined that in an era in which Jews could easily decide not to remain Jewish, the logical step was to raise as few ‘obstacles’ to Jewish identification as possible. …If we are to be honest, American Jews will need to acknowledge that Jewish tradition speaks if and only if it is lived; there is no way to appreciate it from the sidelines” (p. 244). Gordis’s book is a clarion call for American Jews to educate themselves and take up their mission.
I find his message inspiring, and see potential for it to revitalize young Jews in America, especially those who are still trying to define themselves and develop their Jewish identity. I think perhaps he is overly optimistic in his encouragement of Jews to participate as Jews in public, political debates including those over abortion, capital punishment, teacher tenure, flag-burning, and family size. Americans who populate the extremes in those debates are usually secular and focused entirely on individual rights, or fundamentalist Christian Americans for whom those are black-and-white issues determined by a literal reading of the Bible. I can’t imagine either set of combatants being interested in Jews getting involved, especially if that would involve introducing ambiguity, multiple opinions, and uncertainty about the truth into the fray. In short, I think even if Jews were to raise their unique voice over these issues, there would be few interested in listening.
In addition, at the beginning of his book, Gordis stresses that his message in this book is for all Jews, including those uncomfortable with God, who are not interested in embracing traditional practice. Yet in the rest of the book he calls for all Jews to return to traditional (not necessarily Orthodox) practice. While I know that for Conservative Jews (of which Gordis is one, at least through rabbinic ordination), Judaism is seen as a culture rather than merely a religion, I still saw this as a contradiction, and one which might not appeal to people for whom practice has no meaning without some belief in God or sense of religious obligation.
Despite my critiques, reading Gordis’s books gave me a new perspective on Diaspora life and its potential for contributing to American society—if American Jews heed his call.
Read Full Post »
Shimshonit 