Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The End of Judaism?
by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser
- New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer. New York University Press, 2005.
What took us so long? Judaism has been wandering in that particular wilderness for over 2,000 years, a religion in exile, a religion in which the center—Zion—was persistently absent. A centered religion without a center—that paradox sums up postmodernity in a nutshell. No surprise that Derrida himself was Jewish.
Ironically, just as the rest of the world was realizing that the center was absent in the late 1960s, Jews finally secured their mythic center in the state of Israel (see: War of 1967). For the next thirty years, Jews imagined that the diaspora quest had been achieved, and that there was now one place in the world where Jews could finally be at home, centered, at rest. People, money, and prayers flowed to the state of Israel.
An odd thing happened on the way to Zion, however. People turned back. This observation is the great contribution of Caryn Aviv and David Shneer's new book. Money kept flowing, prayers kept flowing, but a lot of ordinary Jews realized that Israel was not actually the center of their lives. Diaspora Jews did not want to leave the Diaspora.
In chapters on Russian Jews, American Jews, and queer Jews, Shneer and Aviv argue that many of us prefer an exile that is no longer exilic.
What's more, Shneer and Aviv argue that many Israelis might just as well still be living in exile as far as the hope of Zion is concerned. Living in the Promised Land, they shrug off the promise, refuse the religion, and ignore the God of their ancestors who makes the land holy.
Who are we, if we are not diasporic, if we no longer believe in Zion? Aviv and Shneer call us the "New Jews." They argue that we have finally embraced the hybrid, multiple, unmoored identities that our ancestors were so desperate to give away. "If the concept of 'the Jewish people' means that Jews are all one, that we speak with one voice, that we inherently share a common understanding and vision of the world, then ... yes, this is the end of 'the Jewish people,' and this development is good for the Jews."
You know Shneer and Aviv are on to something when you gauge the reaction of the institutional world to the arrival of the "New Jew." The efforts these organizations are making to encourage what we might call the "Old Jew" are overwhelming. In their second chapter, Aviv and Shneer dissect the "youth tourism" industry, which aims to create Jewish identity by sending youth to Holocaust sites and to Israel. For example, Taglit-Birthright Israel (www.birthrightisrael.com) is so desperate to reinforce the Israel-Diaspora bond that it will send any Jewish teenager to Israel for free—airfare, hotel, the works.
As Aviv and Shneer argue, these organizations mostly insist that being a good Jew outside of Israel means being in exile. They want us to embrace our Diaspora, whether that means pretending we really want to live in Israel; sending a financial guilt-offering to Israel in the form of cash; following the old-time religion that still mandates a prayer for the return to Jerusalem in every service; or, at the very least, celebrating the klezmer and knishes of the old-time Eastern European diaspora culture (see: Heeb).
Needless to say, most Jews aren't paying much attention to all that. We may send money or—in the lulls between suicide bombers—send our kids to Israel; we may listen to klezmer and bravely cry out "Next Year in Jerusalem!" each Passover, but Shneer and Aviv are right: many Jews have no plans to move. Zion is no longer the source of meaning for contemporary Judaism.
Does the end of Diaspora mean the end of Jewish identity per se? Aviv and Shneer argue it does. In an epilogue titled "The End of the Jews" the authors argue that "the only thing that Jews have in common is the fact that they self-identify as Jews."
I find that hard to believe. Perhaps our authors have been drinking a bit too much postmodern tea.
Women are not women because we say so—though that is the case for a small group of transgendered folk. Americans are not Americans because we say so, though of course each year some people become American by taking an oath. Identity categories are not worn lightly.
One is initiated into being a Jew through rituals (both at birth and on conversion) and one remains a Jew by identification with a community, a tradition, and even, yes, a religion. A Jew calls herself a Jew because she feels bound in this way. Identity, rather than being a cloak we put on, is a skin that is hard to shed.
Just because we realize that there is not one way to be a Jew does not mean there is not something cohesive or binding for Jews in their Judaism. Jews share a mythic past in the Bible stories of Abraham and Sarah, Miriam and Moses. Jews share a language, Hebrew. Even if they don't know the tongue, they know that it is their tongue. Jews do share a history, in this case a tragic history that has shaped Jewish communities across the globe.
These shared bonds do not make us "one" in the old-fashioned sense of one people. Jews from different times and cultures have experienced these shared phenomena differently. We are hybrids of different cultures. But the word "hybrid" suggests similarities as well as differences. A hybrid is a composite of the old and the new.
While Aviv and Shneer have a good handle on the cultural hybridity of the Jew, they somehow have managed to produce an entire book on the "New Jew" without once mentioning the tie that binds us most closely together: our shared understanding of God. Judaism was still, last I looked, a religion, and it is the way we approach God that holds us together. By scrupulously avoiding any talk of God, Aviv and Shneer have missed the real potential of their analysis. They miss what is really missing.
For the last 2,000 years, Jews were not just missing a place. When the rabbis lost the ancient Temple in their Diaspora, they also lost the God of the Temple. When Zion went missing, so did God. Don't misunderstand. I am not arguing that Rabbinic Judaism was not a God-centered religion. Of course it was. But God was missing from that center. Rabbinic texts rarely discuss theo-ontologic issues such as God's existence, the nature of God's power, or God's role in human life. Rabbinic Judaism does not have a richly developed language of "faith" or "spirit." Jews were not expected to have a personal relationship to God (though some did). For the rabbis, the knowable God, the God of Moses and the Prophets, was lost with the loss of Zion. God was not dead—but God was absent. Instead of sacrificing to a very real God in the Temple, or forming a personal relationship with God (as post-Reformation Christians had done), Jews were expected instead to fathom what an absent God might desire, based on the traces of God left to us in the Torah and oral tradition.
Building a religion around absence—what a triumph! We must recognize it as a triumph, because Judaism persisted for 2,000 years in this form. This play of signification created by the absence of the ultimate Signifier led to a lively intellectual tradition in which no idea—even the idea that God does not exist—could be excluded per se. Much that we treasure most about Rabbinic Judaism comes from this rich interpretive tradition.
At the same time, the need of the community to define the absence around which it was bound led to an ever-growing set of practices encircling this absent signifier. These practices were explicitly called "a ring around the Torah." Rings are circles, shapes based on a center whose presence is an absence. So the ritual practices of Rabbinic Judaism were bound ever tighter into a circle that might point to the presence of a God that was absent.
As the centuries passed, rabbinic Judaism increasingly strained under the two-fold requirement of a necessary openness to new interpretation on the one hand, and a growing rigidity of practice on the other. By the nineteenth century, European Jews were looking to rest on one side of the equation or the other. Reform Judaism sought a boundless, enlightened play of signification without reference to a commonly invoked center defined by practice; various Ashkenazic Orthodoxies moved to quell the play of signification by drawing the ring of practice and ritual ever tighter.
The twentieth century forced these contradictions to the breaking point. Just as the great Diaspora forced Jews to lay aside their Temple-based practice and develop what became Rabbinic Judaism, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel may well force Jews to lay aside the growing contradictions of Rabbinic Judaism for a new form of Judaism.
The Holocaust not only decimated the centers of Jewish practice and the schools of rabbinic interpretation in Europe—the Holocaust led Jews to begin to ask questions that had been unutterable since the time of the Temple: who is the God of the Jews? What relation does this God have to my daily life? Will this God answer my personal prayers? God had to become a presence after the Holocaust if the survivors were to believe in God's existence. Survivors either abandoned theology or else demanded a personal God at whom they could rage, with whom they could argue, to whom they could pray. Defining a God through practice and ritual was no longer enough.
The God Jews now demand is not the God they had spent so many long centuries trying to fathom. The God of our Fathers was distant, removed; the God we want now is near at hand. We are repeatedly told by the rabbinic tradition that the way to God is through the mitzvot, the deeds of hand and tongue. Now we want to experience God directly through our hearts.
This is a dangerous time for Judaism. If Rabbinic Judaism is indeed dying, we will have to find a new way of being Jews, or else Judaism and Jews will indeed disappear. We will have to find a way to reach out to a God who is personal and yet not a person (that would be Christianity). Instead of circumscribing a possible God who cannot be named, our rituals and practices must be able to open out to our own experience of God—even as they anchor our God experience within our tradition and community (if not so anchored, we would get New Age mysticism and not Judaism).
The good news is that many Jews are looking for a new way to be Jews. Jews who never left Zion—Mizrahim and Sephardim—never felt quite the absence from an imagined center that Ashkenazim felt. For example, the Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, was founded by Sephardim and has become an increasingly important resource for modern Jews seeking a personal relationship to God. So too are the works of Sephardi theologians, which are increasingly being read alongside the work of Ashkenazim in U.S. and Israeli seminaries.
Queer Jews also are doing a considerable amount of theological work in this regard. Many queer Jews have chosen Judaism or are involved in interfaith and/or interracial relationships, so they embody the kind of cultural hybridity Aviv and Shneer admire (the authors' first joint book was an anthology called Queer Jews). Yet, precisely because queer Jews have been so "othered" by mainstream Judaism, many have made it their mission to adapt Judaism to their needs rather than vice versa. The amount of new liturgy and theological work coming from the queer community is overwhelming and promises much for a renewed Jewish future.
Finally, the Jewish Renewal movement, with which TIKKUN is affiliated, has attempted to bridge the Reform/Orthodox split by bringing a personal God and emotional intensity into a traditional Jewish prayer framework. Instead of calling for Jews to act as if they believed in a God whose paths could never be known, Renewal rabbis like TIKKUN's editor Michael Lerner tell their congregants that "The God you don't believe in doesn't exist." This is a God who is not absent, though also not entirely known or knowable.
The Diaspora is over. Rabbinic Judaism may be over too. Institutional Judaism is right to be worried. The answer, however, is neither to restage the old Zionist theology nor to assume that Jews will continue to self-identify as Jews through a love of différence. There is work to do. I think Jews are up to doing it.
Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is TIKKUN's Senior Editor.
Source Citation
Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. 2005. The end of Judiasm? Tikkun 20(6):71.
