The unfinished task, in the path not taken, of Reform Judaism today: Notes towards a manifesto

Surely a Judaism that is vital in the modern world will necessarily be formulated in relationship to things it finds useful in the arts and sciences broadly, “secularly,” and I think these can come from anywhere.  A Jewish thought is by definition something of a hybrid because since the Greek conquests of the 4th century BC the Western world and the Jewish world along with it has thought in Greek terms, yielding the necessity of philosophy to religion.  The openness of the Jewish mind to influences in the surrounding world, once they were no longer based on the paganisms whose world view it both transformed and opposed, has never been a barrier but only an opportunity.  I also think there is a shift that takes place at some point in the modern world, and in philosophical terms, maybe beginning with Machiavelli and ending with Marx.  It is a shift from the centrality of ethics in philosophy to that of politics.  It is acutely clear in Marx and in ways that obviously owe some debts to the previous centuries of modern European thought, that prophetic motifs now drive philosophy away from the centrality of ethical preoccupations and towards that of social theory and a politics driven by a project of human liberation towards greater freedom, equality and justice, in ways that cannot be reduced to the moral propriety of persons.  When Marx says that the philosophers have interpreted the world, but the important thing is to change it, this marks a shift that took place in modern European philosophy, including among Jews, but not within Judaism, as Reform was only concerned with the bourgeois ambitions of attaining equality of status in a society based on liberty for Jews whose ambitions were those of the bourgeoisie.  Later the world saw Jewish socialism, but religious Jewish philosophy largely remained untouched by the shift, since all of the major 20th century Jewish philosophers remain concerned with ethics and morality; Jewish political philosophy and social theory (including sociology and psychoanalysis, both of which have been called a “Jewish science”) became a major force by the late 19th century in the German speaking world in particular, but this philosophy, often left-leaning, remained external to Judaism.  This division remains even today.  Judaism even today, including in all its more progressive forms, is not very open to its proximate outside intellectually; it develops in a theoretical field that still largely excludes that, and there has been and still is no major movement in Judaism today that addresses this lacuna.  But doing so is easily done in fact, and the means are at hand.  They are the same as those availed by Maimonides and the other medieval Jewish philosophers.  Now, as then, Jewish thinkers live in a broader milieu whose best choices they can eagerly share.  The only problem is that, unlike then, today religious Jewish philosophy and thought does not make the vital connections that alone could salvage Judaism as of continuing relevance, since that would mean making some link between Jewish sources proper (study of the written Torah and whatever else) and whatever might render it stronger, more fruitful, more useful, within the admittedly large field of contemporary thought bearing upon questions of social problems as well as ethics.  Of course that is ultimately a huge field, if one includes everything of possible relevance in the arts and sciences.  But there is a field of inquiry and knowledge that would manageable enable the needed linkages, and that field is, as always, philosophy.  Philosophy is the field of knowledge that enables religion, science, art, and politics to all be linked in systematic ways, and since one of these terms is religion, it can be argued that the lacuna today in Judaism is that it is not philosophical.  This keeps it more conservative and it means that the many Jewish radicals will mostly continue to see themselves as secular while the religion excludes them and what they do.  It is important to see that the solution I am proposing would not prejudice religious Jews necessarily towards any particular politics, but it would make available richer ways of thinking about the political.  

Reform Judaism largely replaced Talmudic study and traditional medieval Torah interpretation with modern methods of literary scholarship, opening up new ways of reading the classical texts.  These methods do not reduce to historical contextualization; since all literature is by nature ethical in its concerns, they instead, at their best, illuminate the ethical character of the Pentateuch and Bible.  Midrash, traditional Torah commentary, and Talmud remained important for their suggestive character.  Reform Jews appreciate appeals to their ethical intuitions, and the norm of much commentary is now what might be called “the nice,” which is what appeals to our ethical intuitions in an artful way that therefore seems satisfying.  The approach to synagogue music and rituals generally is similar; these provide an experience which is valued as “meaningful.”  Discussions often take place like in American schools and democracy, where a good discussion just is a sharing of opinion by those present, without need for argument or a robust and exclusive idea of truth.  Absent Talmudic halakhic argumentation, there is no basis for the kind of debate that would suppose that while all opinions are valid, some are more true than others, and the purpose of the discussion is partly to get at which ones are, and not just feel enjoyment of an illumination or revelation that is validated by intuitional recognition.  That could today be supplied by the field that was central to some medieval Jewish thinkers but ceased to be as the semi-centrality of philosophy was replaced in the later medieval period by mysticism and later by normalizing anxieties of assimilation that essentially posed the question whether and how Judaism might be adapted to modern republican societies with a social equality extended to the people Christianity had most pointedly excluded, since it saw its own faith as rivaling and supplanting theirs.  In these discussions, Judaism remained what it was in late antiquity; Reform did not transform Judaism so much as it compromised it, seeking an accommodation between religious traditionalism and a secular modernity.  Recently, some proponents of a return to religiosity, often resting philosophically on the phenomenological tradition, have sought to remedy this by once again linking ethics and metaphysics (now a Heideggerian metaphysics rather than the old Aristotelian one), but still avoiding (it make little effort to refute) the late modern concern for the political.  

Admittedly, some of the interest in social theory in the modern German and French worlds was driven by Jewish exclusion, as a critique of the society itself that they were not just imperfectly but ambivalently positioned as part of; it is easy for a group of pariahs or outsiders to want to criticize the society they are struggling with belonging to.  This is undoubtedly part of the reason why such critical social thought did not arise of its own account in the United States, though it did become imported from Europe after WW2.  Today it seems the institutional Jewish world is largely conservative, and more so than much of its populace; the leaders of this world have evidently mostly not seen any cause to confront Jewish religious traditions with those forms of modern secular thinking that are closest to it, but linked by threads that are more political than ethical.  This must be both cause and consequence of the fact that most Jewish radicals are not religious, a fact that has been true throughout the history of Jewish political radicalism, no doubt partly because the terms of radical politics were not merely secular but hostile to religion.  I am tempted to conclude that Reform Judaism is, as Ghandi once said of Western civilization, something that would have been an excellent idea.  

If there is another path, it would depart from Reform Judaism today in being wholly at home in contemporary forms of Jewish religious practice and study, while modernizing its approach to the world of ideas, and finding connections between them.  Medieval philosophy did not think so much about the good society; medieval Jews were effectively conservative since they had no opportunity to participate in determining the direction of the societies in which they lived.  And those societies themselves, under the sway of a religious thinking allied, as Christianity essentially was, to state, monarch, or empire.  The modern world is political in a way that the medieval world was not.  It is very political, have you noticed?  There is even something today of a primacy of the political. 

The difference between the primacy of ethics and metaphysics versus that of social theory and politics can be correlated with a distinction between two forms of avant-gardism that have defined the Jewish idea of a special historical function or task, which is the much misunderstood meaning of “chosen-ness” (it does not mean a privilege, but only a task and orientation): conservative Jews want to be what they could only be in the Middle Ages, exemplary in living ethically and morally rigorous lives.  The other way of being (part of) an avant-garde (obviously this latter in particular is not and cannot be exclusively Jewish but is only one that is of interest to many Jews on solid Jewish grounds), which is to actively engage in efforts to improve the world as a whole.  A political form of orientation of modern Jews only risks no longer being Jewish if it abandons the former for the latter, so that its ethics have in them nothing particular to Jewish tradition any longer.  The other possibility is one of a retreat, and it is what most of the official Jewish world today is about: just living ethical lives that both are exemplary testaments to the larger world and valuable intrinsically in the relationship of the Jewish people to “God.”  Of course, the existence of a Jewish state that objectively oppresses a neighboring people who had the bad luck of occupying lands that the Jews of that state understandably did and do covet (or have appropriated) renders in an acute form the potentially critical (in the sense of constituting a crisis) character of this limitation to the ethical and exemplary.  The question, what should be our relationship, including what obligations, to our neighbors is bound up with that of Judaism’s relationship to the world and its people as a whole.  Today, both the exilic character of identity and the concern to improve the state of things in the world as a whole are, certainly, in no way exclusive to the Jewish people; however, they did always also define it.  (Jews have had no problem intrinsically with finding that some of their values are ones they share with many non-Jews; the problems have only emerged when some of the others claim to define those things for us and in ways that we may find too narrow, or too simplified; this is the problem that a Jewish left may have with the left internationally).  Since medieval exclusion was the context of the limitation of the covenantal chosenness (or better perhaps, calling, or responsibility) to the exemplary character of the ethically rigorous life (including its ritual character), there is no good reason today to limit our ambitions to that, or worse, to do so while only adding that we value our own survival (and, let’s admit, prosperity) so highly that our neighbors’ concerns do not matter, or they themselves are expendable if they are in our way.  A Jewish politics is a rigorous approach grounded in universal principles of justice and happiness that is in no way exclusive (others can share it on common terms whether already established or to be decided), but merely demanding in its rigor, to the problems of the world as a whole.  Judaism politically is a particular approach to addressing universal concerns.  (That is the meaning of the idea that there is one God of all humanity and the Jews have a special relationship to this God.)  Thus, Judaism is in its essence both ethical and political, and the heart of its politics lie in something outside of and larger than (though not necessarily excluded by) any form of nationalism, however redemptive or liberatory.  Given that, what is to be said about that the fact that the broad and interesting field of liberatory political thought that exists today is considered by Judaism’s spokespersons to be something wholly external to it, not among the things it needs to concern itself with?  .                        

Of course, the consequences for the problem of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people are real enough and severe.  Jewish nationalism solved one problem and created another.  To the extent that the contemporary Jewish world has its sensibility and politics defined by the triad of religious observance, memory of catastrophic destruction and evil, and the nationalism that once was and no longer is the consequence of a national liberation movement, the conservative character of Judaism today and, ostensibly, the Jewish people, is a serious problem.  As is usually the case, such related problems are both cause and consequence of others that are correlative with it.  There may be no solving the one problem without addressing the larger one of which it is a part: the question of what should Judaism today be?