THE MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH
SURVIVAL *
by WALTER S. WURZBURGER
Rabbi, Congregation Shaarei
Shomayim, Toronto , Canada
CURRENT Jewish, thinking is
plagued by an almost obsessive preoccupation with the problem of survival. The
| agonizing uncertainty surrounding our position in the modern world is
reflected in the sense of urgency with which we search not only for new
instrumentalities, but even for a rationale to insure continued Jewish
existence. It is commonly accepted almost as an axiom, that the problem o f
survival has arisen as a result of the Emancipation, which, in bringing to the
Jew the blessings of freedom and opportunity, simultaneously shattered the mold
in which I the Jewish people has been cast and solidified for so many
centuries. With the collapse of the Ghetto walls, the Jew emerged from the
self-enclosed enclaves of segregated and separated Jewish existence. The
manifold opportunities to participate in the social, political and economic
life of the larger society deprived the Jew of the natural immunity which in
the pre-emancipation era had : afforded him protection against the disease of disintegration.
Since in their new setting, so conducive to assimilation ': and the loss of
Jewish identity, Jews formed a purely "voluntary " community, it
became necessary for the first time to find a rationale for Jewish survival
based upon commitment to Jewish national or religious values. What this
analysis overlooks is the blatant fact, that even before the Emancipation,
Jewish survival, at least insofar as the individual was concerned, rested upon
an act of choice. Conversion to the dominant faith presented the ticket of
admission to all the economic and social privileges and opportunities available
in the larger society. If the individual Jew, in spite of all handicaps and
limitations, remained within the Jewish community, it was because his religious
commitment to the faith of Israel made his membership in the Jewish community
a supreme religious duty. What renders Jewish survival so precarious in the
modern era are not so much the social or political upheavals of the
Emancipation, but the intellectual revolutions wrought by the Enlightenment.
Our problem does not derive so much from what we have gained in terms of newly
found social or political opportunities, but rather from what we have lost in
terms of faith and commitment. It was the secularization of modern thinking,
with its challenge to the very premises upon which Jewish existence is
predicated, that necessitated the groping for philosophies of Jewish survival.
After all, survival of the Jew and of Judaism was in question in
many Eastern European countries, even long before the Emancipation reached
there. Historically, and I am following here in the main Professor Packenheim's
1 brilliant analysis, until the Enlightenment the duty to survive as a Jew was
accepted as a religious imperative. It derived from the belief that Israel Mount Sinai and had become a people of the covenant, a "chosen people."
But the "acids of modernity," to use Walter Lippmann's expression,
have corroded the very basis of such a religious commitment. The categories of
modern rational thought that had led to what Buber terms "the eclipse of
God," show a definite bias towards naturalism. A t the very best, they
can tolerate a remote abstract deity. They might accept what Pascal called the
"Go d of the philosophers, "but they cannot accommodate themselves
to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Sinaitic covenant.
Divine revelation represents a "scandal of particularity" that jars
with the operation of the broad, universal categories of the rationalist
temper. When modern Jews began to question this faith, the foundation of Jewish
national existence crumbled. For Judaism, as the eminent historians Yehezkel
Kaufman and Salo Baron never tire of pointing out, is essentially a
"religious ethnicism." Since the Jewish people was founded upon the
bedrock of a religious faith, the question had to be faced whether, without
this faith, Jewish existence could amount to more than what sociologists label
a mere "survival. "Could the Jewish people be preserved as a people
by some operation of functional autonomy, where ethnic components could
function independently of the religious ones? Or, since a faith founded upon a
divine encounter with a particular people was regarded as incompatible with the
modern mind, could Judaism perhaps be redefined as just another "religion" which could perhaps provide even the Jew with a raison d'etre as the
bearer or custodian of certain values or ideas? The many proposed redefinitions
and solutions to the problem of survival overlooked one essential feature of
the very hallmark of the Jew. " Religious ethnicism" is not just a
mixture in which two distinct components, i.e. ethnic loyalty and religious
commitment, can be isolated. They form a compound, or perhaps, better still, an
organic whole that cannot be broken down into its constituent parts without
destroying the very life of the organism involved. It might be objected that
when we question the possibility or meaningfulness of Jewish survival without a
concomitant faith in the Sinaitic revelation, we are, in fact, guilty of what
Raphael Morris Cohen termed the "genetic fallacy." Could not Jewish
survival, though originally nourished and sustained by a religious faith, be
accounted for in purely sociological or cultural historic terms, such as ethnic
group loyalties, Jewish stubbornness in clinging to an outmoded form of
existence, and all sorts of other sociological or psychological pressures? Yet,
is it really plausible to treat the sense of duty to remain Jews, which is
experienced by so many modern Jews, merely as a residual trace of a religious
commitment that has lost its meaning? Would not that render Jewish group
loyalty basically a manifestation of a "fossilized existence," a relic
of a bygone era that could not adjust itself to new realities? In the frantic
search to find a surrogate for the religious faith that previously had
guaranteed Jewish survival, the "survivalists" have proposed all
sorts of ingenious theories, which are as bold as they are fallacious. After
first inventing the myth of a collective will to survival, which Tehezkiel
Kaufman denounced as a sheer "figment of the imagination," they
embarked upon a radical re-interpretation of Jewish history which transformed Judaism
into a "handmaiden of survival." Accordingly, the Jewish national
will to survive cloaked itself in the "exilic garments" of religious
observance, which enabled the Jew, through the creation of a so-called
"portable state," to maintain a sense of national identity even in
the absence of a common territory or language. Because Judaism was so eminently
successful in preserving the Jewish people, Jean Parkes has gone so far as to
label it a "religion of survival." Perhaps, the most extreme case of
the application of biological criteria to the evaluation of religion is
Professor Kaplan's formulation of Judaism as a religious civilization, in which
religion, to borrow Arthur Cohen's felicitous expression, is transformed into a
"gelatinous preservative" of national survival. Bertrand Russell once
observed that God has become an annex to church promotion. In the Kaplanian
reconstruction, His scope has been somewhat broadened. He has been promoted to
an appendage to—group survival! Apart from the repulsiveness of a notion which
reduces the highest religious goal of a people into a mere instrument for group
survival, the very concept of a national will to survive rests basically upon a
logical fallacy. It ascribes to the group as a whole the characteristics
belonging to its individual members. The will to live or the instinct towards
self-preservation are notions that prima facie apply to biological entities. A
good many totally unwarranted assumptions have to be made before we can even
conceive of a possible analogous application of the concept to social groups.
The secret of Jewish survival cannot be fathomed by postulating some mysterious
collective will to survival. What preserved the Jewish people through the ages
was neither an overpowering group loyalty, nor an overwhelming sense of
tradition that allegedly produced fossilized attitudes. It was out of a sense
of personal religious commitment that individual Jews remained within the fold.
They persevered in remaining Jews not because they opted for Jewish values or
because they preferred as a matter of taste the Jewish style of living, but
because theirs was the faith that, in Heschel's words, "belonging to the
Jewish people is a sacred relation. .. . It is the living in the spiritual
order of the Jewish people. " Though the theological foundations of this
commitment are no longer consciously affirmed, the typical Jew till this very
day accepts his Jewishness not so much as a right or privilege but a duty. This
points to the essentially religious character of Jewish survival. There is no
stigma attached to leaving one's ethnic group. One suffers no guilt feelings
about changing one's cultural milieu or assimilating completely to another
social group. But, somehow, leaving the Jewish fold is looked upon as a
disgraceful act of apostasy—a shirking of one's duty that induces all sorts of
recriminations or guilt feelings. This, perhaps, accounts for the fact that
when asked to identify the nature of his Jewishness, the American Jew, as a
rule, will define himself as a member of a religious rather than an ethnic
community. One may, of course, entertain serious reservations about the quality
of a religious identification which, generally, represents more a superficial
act of affiliation rather than a genuine
commitment. The average Jew
can hardly be said to subscribe to the theological presuppositions and
practices of the various denominations with which he is not even familiar, let
alone committed to. One may even dismiss his so-called religiosity as a
pragmatic accommodation to the prevailing sociological structure of the
American community which favors classification along denominational rather than
ethnic lines. One may be hard pressed to define precisely the nature of the
supposedly religious character of the American Jewish community. The
theological differences among the religious groups
(Orthodox—Conservative—Reform) are so pronounced that a so-called common
religious denominator is nothing but a myth. Symptomatic of the cleavage is the
recent statement of a prominent spokesman for the Reform group who acknowledged
that, theologically speaking, his views were much closer to the position of an
outright agnostic such as Huxley, than they would be to the beliefs of an
orthodox Jew. Whether one considers the sharp denominational differences as a
syndrome or as a manifestation of the health of a religious pluralism, one
certainly cannot realistically speak of a common religious basis upon which
Jewish unity can be achieved under present-day conditions. There is, however,
one sense in which we are justified in speaking of the basically religious
character of the Jewish community. The very act of belonging to the Jewish
community is regarded not just as a voluntary expression of group loyalty. Most
Jews vaguely sense that their attachment to "Kelal Yisrael "
transcends purely ethnic considerations and possesses religious overtones. It
is perhaps an unconscious identification with the "covenantal community." As Professor Fackenheim put it, "the Jew of today who persists in
regarding Jewish survival as a duty, either posits something unintelligible, or
else he postulates, however unconsciously, the possibility of a return to the
faith in the living God." But our insistence that membership in the Jewish
community ultimately makes sense only in terms of a relationship to a
"covenantal community" need not lead to a disparagement of the value
of the sociological or what Arthur Cohen has called the "natural "
Jewish community. The more one is committed to Judaism (the faith of the Jewish
people), the more one appreciates "Jewishness"— the expression of the
folkways, manners and cultural historic idiosyncrasies of the Jewish community.
The late Rabbi Kook regarded every genuine manifestation of Jewishness, no
matter how secular its external garb, as an incomplete (even if defective)
manifestation of a deeply rooted basically religious urge. One need not be a
Jewish mystic to appreciate that any form of positive Jewish identification
represents a spiritually meaningful act. We may disassociate ourselves from
secular Judaism; we may even claim that secular Judaism is a self-contradictory
term. And while we may deplore with Maurice Friedman that in "so many
communities Jewish belonging and culture are made ends in themselves, divorced
from the primary religious commitment to become a holy people," we must
recognize that there is some potential religious value even in the
identification of the secular Jew with the Jewish community. Even the most
irreligious Jew—so the Talmud informs us—is as saturated with Mitzvoth as the
pomegranate is with seeds. To the extent that the secular Jew participates in
meaningful Jewish activity, he contributes, no matter what his avowed theological
position, to the fulfillment of his Jewish destiny. This, of course, does not
imply that there is any value in the artificial stimulation of Jewish activity
as such, the kind of activity which is designed not for its intrinsic value but
solely as an opportunity to express one's Jewishness. Regardless of what we may
or may not do, segments of our people will in all probability survive as Jews
forming a community of fate, welded together by a combination of internal or
external pressures. But, insofar as Jewish survival is to be an achievement, it
must be the result of a deliberate effort to instill within the modern Jew a
sense of duty to survive as Jew. But this can never be generated or even
sustained on the basis of synthetic activities that have no other purpose but
to serve as an outlet for Jewish self-expression or Jewish self-identification.
Jews have survived not because they lived by a philosophy of survivalism, but
their survival was the by-product of an existential commitment to something
transcending sheer survival. It can hardly be expected that a rationale for
survival can be found in the satisfaction of what has been termed by the
Janowsky report' ' supplementary cultural needs. " For is the American Jew
really in need of a supplementary culture? Are not the vast resources of the
American culture adequate to his requirements ? The cravings for Jewish self-identification
are prompted not by supplementary, but fundamental, existential needs. What
must be satisfied is not purely a socio-cultural need, but an ontological one,
arising from the very core of Jewish being. It is generally agreed that
swimming in a Jewish swimming pool will hardly, by itself, make a significant
contribution towards strengthening the Jewish will to swim against the currents
of assimilation and disintegration. But will Jewish dancing as such, counterbalance
the centrifugal forces tending towards dissolution of the Jewish community in
the American melting pot. Just as a
Jewish gymnasium cannot supply us with the strength of character to wrestle
successfully with the problem of disintegration and attrition, so will Jewish
art by itself be unable to fashion a meaningful image of Jewish identity. Can
vulgar jokes, even if told in Yiddish, enhance the chance of a Jewish survival?
In our quest to develop artificially some synthetic forms of Jewish content or
activity to serve as pegs for possible Jewish identification, let us heed the
admonition of Arthur Cohen, in The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: "There
is no future to a civilization which must, at this moment in history, begin to
equip itself with the habiliments o f secular culture, to acquire arte and
music which are indigenous, to define folk liturgies and folk pageants, to duplicate
and complement the subtler and more developed patterns of historical nations and peoples. "
Indeed, there is nothing more tin natural than the supposedly completely
natural Jew who, having repudiated all supernatural elements of Jewish
existence, finds himself under a compulsion to engage self-consciously in all
forms of activities, not for their intrinsic value or meaning, but simply in
order to perform a secular ritual of Jewish self-identification. Jewish
survival, as such, hinges upon many diverse factors, largely beyond the control
of the organized Jewish community. There is only one area in which the outcome
can be significantly affected: the cultivation of the will of the Jew to
survive as a Jew. This obviously represents one of the most important positive factors
in making for Jewish survival amidst the blandishments of a relatively free and
open democratic society. Yet, this all-important will must be grounded not
merely on a vaguely sensed superficial desire in competition with many other
desires, interests or wants, but upon experience of a sense of obligation. This
is why, in the final analysis, only such activities as can reinforce an
individual's sense of duty with respect to his belonging to the Jewish people,
will have any real bearing upon Jewish survival. It is, therefore, the quality
of Jewish survival, rather than sheer survival as such, that should command our
primary attention. Little can be gained from providing a basically pointless
and meaningless outlet for marginal desires for self-identification. Instead of
permitting such desires for Jewish self-identification to be dissipated into a
fragmentary "contextual Jewishness" or peripheral "Jewishness b
y association, " we should channel them into meaningful Jewish activities
that aim at whole-hearted commitment rather than mere "Jewish
togetherness." It is only b y striving for meaningful Jewish survival that
we can make any appreciable contribution to the very survival of our people. W
e should be wary of the pitfalls of what might be called Jewish
"collective existentialism" a philosophy of life that would be
willing to discard the very essence of Judaism in its attempt to preserve
Jewish existence at any price. For, as our historic experiences amply
demonstrate, it is the essence of Jewishness that must provide a raison d'etre
for Jewish existence. Hence, our primary aim should not be just the retention
of some spark of "Jewishness, " lest the individual become completely
lost to the community. Our efforts should rather be concentrated on helping the
individual to find himself as a Jew and thus make his survival as a Jew more
meaningful, creative and purposeful. Our stress upon meaningful Jewish survival
assisting the individual Jew in coming to grips with his existential problems
will help resolve one of the most delineate and sensitive problems involving
the conflict between communal and personal needs. If our ultimate goal is sheer survival of the group, we, in a
sense, tend to sacrifice the individual to the welfare of the group. But can a
Jewish social agency, charged with the responsibility of helping the
individual, really subscribe to the proposition that "every Jewish
communal activity should be engaged in building Judaism? " * Do we have a
moral right to treat the individual merely as a means to the perpetuation of a cause
? Is it compatible with the belief in the dignity of the individual to reduce the
human person to an instrument of group survival ? It is usually taken for
granted that considerations of Jewish group survival transcend the needs of the
individual, Thus Professor Baron, in his Social and Religious History of the
Jews, contends! that insofar as the classical Jewish position is concerned, the
individual as such hardly matters, since "the nation overshadows the individual." And Professor
Kaplan, leaning heavily on Achad Ha'am's glorification of the group, demands
that the policies of Jewish social |agencies must be guided by the needs of Jewish mass survival, even though, "helping the individual Jew may be entirely
compatible with the gradual disappearance of the Jewish people. " But
since there is obviously no "pre-established harmony" between
individual and communal needs, one might seriously question the propriety of
subordinating the welfare of the individual to that of the group. It ought to
be borne in mind that, significantly, Jewish normative thinking as crystallized
in the Halakhah, never assumed the primacy of the group or community as such.
On the contrary, Jewish law stipulates that not a single innocent person may be
surrendered to an attacking group of gangsters, even at the risk of the
destruction of the entire community. One human life, so the Halakhah rules, has
infinite value; it is the equivalent of the entire world. Hence, an
individual cannot be sacrificed even to save a large number of people. As Dr.
Samuel Belkin formulated the Rabbinic view so succinctly, In His Image,
"Nowhere .. . do we find acceptance of the concept that the group, by
virtue of its numbers, can create an abstract society which has authority over
the individual." Judaism revolves around the rights and duties, the needs
and wants of the individual Jew rather than such abstract notions as
"communal needs " or "group values." One has, therefore,
every right to challenge the view that Jewish agencies should serve as
"instruments of group survival." It would appear that on the
contrary, the function of the Jewish social agency would be to help the
individual Jew meet his total existential needs as a Jew which include the need
for a meaningful Jewish experience and commitment. Any contribution to Jewish
group survival as such would be merely a function, or a by-product of the
effort to help the individual Jew as a Jew. To avoid serious misunderstanding,
it is essential to add an important premise. Any assessment of human needs
invariably and inevitably contains elements of subjectivity. No matter how none
directional a counselor may fancy his [approach to be, he does not operate within
a cultural or ethical vacuum. It should be axiomatic that a Jewish social)
agency should help clients by developing • rather than stifling their Jewish
potential. There certainly is no justification for a Jewish agency to treat
Jewish belonging in such a completely neutral manner, as, for example, to
assign Jewish children to non-Jewish foster homes. A committed Jew looks upon a
Jew's loyalty to his people not merely as a desideratum subject to personal
whim or fancy but as a supreme and inescapable duty. Hence, he will obviously
include this factor in the evaluation of the personality needs of another Jew
and regard it as his responsibility to guide his fellow Jew towards a more
meaningful Jewish experience. Jewish social agencies need not have any
compunctions about grounding their policies on a sense of duty governing the
relationship of the individual Jew to his people. For were it not for the
experience of some specific Jewish needs, the client, in most instances, would
not be involved with a Jewish agency to begin with. If the Jewish social agency
is to make any contribution towards a more meaningful Jewish experience, it
must reflect a wholesome approach of Jewish ethical and cultural and religious
values. For this purpose, the social group worker requires not merely a passing
acquaintance with the socio-cultural background of his clients, nor merely a
factual objective knowledge of Jewish values, but a positive affirmative
commitment to his Jewishness, so that all the activities of the Jewish social
agency can be directly and organically linked to the pursuit of authentic
Jewish ideals. There is no reason why, for example, their social actions
program should not consciously reflect the quest for Tzedakah, The guiding
principles of our so-called secular agencies need not be divorced from the
religious idealism embedded in the Jewish heritage. Would not our philanthropic
agencies become far more potent instruments for creative survival if their
operations would reflect a deliberate attempt to express not merely aspirations
of a secular philosophy of social justice, but to exemplify the religious
philosophy of our people which regarded the practice of loving-kindness as the
tell-tale mark of its identity and as its hope for ultimate national
redemption? Would not the cultural program of Jewish centers or Y's become more
relevant if a determined effort were made to provide not merely some
"Jewish content " but to relate the experience of one's Jewishness to
the perplexing dilemmas of our time? If Jewish centers are to enable Jews to
meet their needs as Jews, they must offer not merely facilities for
"Jewish togetherness," but opportunities for Jewish "meetings
" in Buber's sense of the term, who, in his espousal of the life of the
dialogue, defined all genuine living as a " meeting,' ' Heinrich Heine, in
an often quoted aphorism, once said, "Judaism is not a religion but a
misfortune." We might accept that statement with some slight modification.
If Judaism is not a religion, if to be a Jew is not charged with religious
significance or meaning, then it is only a misfortune. And there is really no
point in maintaining facilities for Jewish identification, let alone in worrying
about Jewish survival, unless we make "Jewish belonging"
existentially meaningful, by treating it not as a vacuous leisure time
activity, but as a fulfillment of a sense of vocation and destiny. There is
nothing to prevent even a so-called Jewish secular agency from functioning as a
creative partner in such an enterprise. Judaism was never synagogue-centered. As
Dr. Soloveitchik put it, "Halakhah, which draws divinity into the physical
world, does not revolve around congregations or synagogues. They are its minor
sanctuaries; its true sanctuary is the realm of life within which the realization
of Halakhah takes place." To claim
for the synagogue a monopoly in the continuum of Jewish survival is to deny the
organic unity of Jewishness and Judaism, to renounce the uniqueness of our
people, and to emaciate the body politic of our people b y turning it into a
purely religious denomination— a mere shadow of its full and vibrant self. Yet,
Jewish secular agencies, in turn, must abandon their last vestiges of militant
secularism and allow themselves to become exponents of a positive Jewish
survival that rests upon a religious commitment to the "Kelal Yisrael"
and the organic unity of Jewishness and Judaism. When Jewish social agencies
will not be merely Jewish-sponsored, but Jewish in aim and commitment, they
will be able to contribute to a growing recognition of the indivisibility of
Jewishness and Judaism which reaches into every phase of private and social
activity. Jews and Judaism have been joined together from the very beginning of
our history and no amount of historic scholarship, theological sophistry,
sociological jargon or plain unadulterated arrogance can rend them asunder.
Unless the two components reinforce each other, there is little hope for creative
survival. As Chaim Nachman Bialik put it so convincingly, a wholesome Jewish
orientation is compounded of a mixture of "Chibah" (love) and
"Chovah" (duty). We must provide for our children an atmosphere in
which they can develop loving attachment to "Mother Israel" and
fondness for everything Jewish, together with a sense of responsibility and
duty towards the ethical and spiritual obligations of Judaism. It is out of
this union of love and duty, of Jewishness and Judaism, that there will be born a generation
which will be able to keep its rendezvous with Jewish destiny and thus make a
contribution to creative Jewish survival.
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