Reflecting on Jewish Ethics
I don’t know what my point is with this post, so bear with me.
Last night, one of my amazing peers in my rabbinical seminary cohort did a great presentation on the ethics of the Reform movement during our Ethics course. It prompted me to do my own reflection on family history and how we’ve related to both Orthodox and Reform Judaism, and Zionism. While my family members were founders of Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s Orthodox community, my grandmother grew up at Shaarai Shomayim, Lancaster’s oldest synagogue, which at the time was Classical Reform.
I’ve always found the history of Reform in America very fascinating. In many ways, it represented a geographical pivot for the center of the Jewish world in Diaspora from Europe to the United States. The assimilation of Jews, i.e. participation in secular education and Jewish moral/ethical authorities siding with non-Jewish governments, was overwhelming. With the near destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust, and the immediate near-term generational shifts that took place as Jews from the Pale came to the US, any competing movement seemed to disappear.
Returning to where my family history fits in this: The first generation, including my Feldser relatives, founded in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, several independent congregations, representative of their point of origin in the Pale. That dissipated quickly, as the gentiles and the extant German Jewish community quickly lumped them all together as “Russian Hebrews.” My Litvak great-great-grandfather married a Galitzianer, and three separate congregations coalesced into one. My great-grandmother left that community as soon as she had agency and raised my grandmother in the Classical Reform community. Within 60 years, the first American-born generations of Eastern European Jews founded the city’s first Conservative congregation. Tired of being pinioned between the stark choice between old world stodgy and new world excess, they forged a middle path forward.
Reform in Europe gave birth to two competing movements which even an outside observer like Max Weber picked up on: Judaism as an independent, ethical/religious identity, and Zionism. The lack of consistent political emancipation in Europe made Zionism very attractive to European Jews, but so, too, did the comforts of assimilation and rejecting the quaint superstitions of our people. To Weber, Judaism as an ethical peoplehood was far more attractive and noble than Zionism, which to him seemed like it would inevitably drift towards nationhood rooted in the barbarity of our sacrificial cult past.
For American Jews, I gather assimilation was less about survival and more about living in a (comparatively) free and open society where there were fewer restrictions on social mobility, no significant historical burden on Jewish political participation, and low bars to entry into prosperity. Many blame Reform for the loss of Jews to assimilation. Most of my family married out, including my grandmother. But Reform wasn’t a stop along the way for the majority of those folks. If anything, they left the old-world Orthodoxy and went straight into secularism and eventually Christianity. They weren’t heavily persecuted for being Jewish (one of my family members was the first Jewish graduate of Franklin & Marshall and was an early Jewish graduate of Yale in 1896), so there was nothing driving them deeper into that identity. I think many left because it held nothing for them and, well, they could.
I don’t think it’s disconnected from those circumstances that Zionism, prior to the Balfour Declaration, did not find many takers among American Jews.
Obviously, World War II and Shoah changed our minds. I think it forced us to confront that while 1776 represented the first durable emancipation of Jews in modern history, our living memory of Jewish life in post-Enlightenment Prussia/Germany and France informed us that if it could happen there, it could happen here.
I think that sense was exacerbated by 1948, 1967, 1973, and every act of terror from that point forward. I was born a few years after the Yom Kippur War, but I was still born early enough to see TV movies depicting Entebbe, or watching Leon Klinghoffer be tossed overboard. For my two older children, they still had the benefit of hearing from Leah’s then living Auschwitz survivors firsthand. For my youngest, October 7th was her wake-up call. For my second oldest, the hostility to Jews they have faced on campus post-October 7th is also instructional.
I think where I’m getting at, is that the ascendance of Zionism as a unifying identity, and the shift of the center of the Jewish world to where it should be, has also come at the expense of our collective ethical identity. The defining principles behind Reform and even Conservative Judaism can feel moot, because an independent religious identity within host nations is obsolete.
The Jewish state has its own internal struggles between theocratic forces, liberal Zionism, and a host of others that make it being central to an ethical identity troublesome. The survival of the Jewish nation comes with ugly moral and ethical compromises, and that permeates life for us in Diaspora as well. It becomes the defining tension for both Israel and Diaspora.
Friends who recently became Jews by Choice showcased this, as did an elective on conversion at our seminary. In two cases, converts expressed an interest in the Law of Return. Suddenly the implications of a conversion process as it relates to aliyah are front and center! If you’re not able to demonstrate a year or x number of hours in study prior to conversion, followed by a demonstrable commitment to a Jewish community, folks are getting hemmed up in the process of moving to Israel. I think we all remember even RCA conversions were in question in recent memory. Zionism is a factor in who we are as Jews.
And as I urge folks in my congregation to vote for the MERCAZ slate in the upcoming World Zionist Congress election, I think there’s something in there, too. So many of our concerns as Jews in Diaspora relate back to that dichotomy between a peoplehood outside of a nation, and a peoplehood within a nation.
Where I think this new reality hits me the most with Judaism centered on Zionism is the absence of esteemed religious-ethical figures in the generations that followed 1948. Where are the new Heschels, Kaplans, Soloveitchiks, heck, even the Schneersons? I know there are profound scholars and poskim doing great work, but none of it resonates.
Look at the overreliance on Heschel as the requisite stand-in for Jewish participation in social justice. How often is “praying with my feet” cited when it comes to contemporary civil rights issues? We have thousands of activist rabbis, if every open letter about this or that with a who’s who signatory list tells me anything, but we don’t have central figures presenting ideas even non-Jews want to coalesce around. Social justice is appealing, and I think we glom on to it because we seek a substitute, but it’s generic and very often driven from secular ideologies, a poor substitute for Jewish ethical motivation.
We have Boteach and we have Wolpe, both suited for and obviously craving of secular, pop culture attention, more than advancing a Jewish ethical cause. To my mind, they’re a poor substitute for the defining figures of previous generations.
The loss, to me, as we pour over Judaism’s rich ethical history going to back to antiquity, is that we no longer have that as an export product. Max Weber, in “Science as Vocation”, correlated rational academics with the Jewish ethics emerging in Haskalah and realized in Reform, because it divorced moral and ethical conduct from messianism. For everything I love about Zionism, preserving a national identity runs in close parallel to messianism.
I don’t think, in the here and now, because of antisemitism in academia or because of the current activist approach to Jewish studies, that our contemporary theological ethos is a satisfactory, formative model for scholars. It’s a tragedy.
I don’t think the door is closed on such things. There are positives. I think we’re gaining back lost ground in terms of Jewish identity. We’re creating a fuller, richer audience for what is to come. We’re also building out a far less silo-like and far more diverse scholarly base from which to draw upon. I fully believe that an Israel that gets to exist without constant existential regional threats will once again see Jewish ethical scholarship flourish.
For now, I feel like we inhabit a very transitional space in Jewish history. If nothing else, we’re really practiced at exercising generational patience.
