Elliott Malamet is a Professor of Education at York University in Toronto and is the Director of the university’s Jewish Teacher Education program. For many years Dr. Malamet was the Department Head of Jewish Thought at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT).
For many years now, students of widely disparate Jewish sensibilities and affiliations have expressed to me the feeling that somehow Judaism, which should be nurturing and sustaining, does not leave them with a sensation of being filled up, of being inspired and elevated. A culture of complaint has arisen, with several familiar targets: materialism run amok, or pedestrian Torah education with dry information and not enough emphasis on “spirituality”, or superficial piety as opposed to internal kavvanah. From secular Jews come other assertions regarding the dubious relevance of an ancient set of prescriptions in an age far removed from the obedience of the past. Everyone has their own private version of these matters, and they do point to real problems. But rather than being the cause of our present malaise, these complaints may in fact be symptoms of a much larger dilemma about how to construct Jewish identity today. In this paper, after alluding to the challenge that modernity poses, I would like to briefly recount and critique some of the proposals that have been put forward to foster identity among contemporary Jewry and then suggest possibilities for educators in addressing the quandaries that our students face.
Perhaps the primary fact in Jewish education today is that many of the people we teach, of all stripes, are so thoroughly immersed in the modern world and have unwittingly absorbed so many of its presuppositions – from the autonomy of choice to the diversity of truth – that we do not always reflect sufficiently about what effect this has on their ability to live a sacred life. Sociologist Max Weber (1946), in a 1918 essay entitled “Science as a Vocation”, revealed the essence of changing religious attitudes in twentieth century life: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ [Entzauberung der Welt]”. Weber defines “disenchantment” as “the knowledge or belief that… there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”.
More religiously observant students may feel that they do not share Weber’s prognostication, that they are, after all, believers in God and the bearers of a religious heritage. Still, the language of disenchantment pervades far and deep, and is something that nearly everyone expresses, consciously or unwittingly, regardless of religious orientation. We regularly reproach each other for indulging in “myth” or of “giving way to fantasy” – we say that person X isn’t living in our century, that person Y is out of touch with the world, that person Z has a mindset from the Middle Ages, and so forth. Indeed, philosopher Charles Taylor (2007), in a telling and perhaps parallel phrase to Weber’s, argues that what contemporary individuals have fostered is “a buffered self”, not open and porous and vulnerable to the world of the higher powers, but bounded up and guarded against such “foolish” notions as angels and demons. Such buffering takes place for our students even within a purportedly religious context, and manifests in skepticism about whether God is really intimately involved in human affairs. For many, if not most, modern Jews, the “taken for granted” notion that God is utterly in charge of life – my life as well as that of kings and queens – has given way to a more prudent assessment of what, so to speak, is God’s domain, and what is ours.
All of this is an inevitable result, in the wake of the Enlightenment, of the modernizing effects of pluralist choice and the freedom to opt for a vast emporium of lifestyles – in Peter Berger’s (1979) felicitous phrase – “the heretical imperative”. So often buffered against real enchantment, young people attempt to cobble together a life of authenticity and Jewish mindfulness, which is not an easy task by any measure. How then, can Jewish schools and educators assist students in the delicate task of balancing off their allegiances to Western values of autonomy and diversity with the faith commitments demanded by Judaism?
The question of constructing a lasting Jewish identity has, of course, preoccupied various thinkers in the decades following the Shoah. The twin pillars of Zionism and the Holocaust were often cited as possible catalysts for Jewish identity, and arguably the most famous formula came from Emil Fackenheim (1978). His “614th” commandment – “do not hand Hitler any posthumous victories” – was a rallying cry linking Jewish assimilation and intermarriage directly to post-Holocaust guilt. After Auschwitz, one is commanded to maintain Jewish tradition and marry within the fold so as not to trivialize the sacrifice of six million martyrs or ironically help Hitler “finish the job” that he had started. Predictably there were mixed reactions to this ideology. As Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1990) argued logically,
The holocaust did not make Jewish survival a mitzvah. In the holocaust, for example, gypsies too were singled out, but that did not make it a command to be a gypsy. We can imagine a hypothetical Hitler who decreed a final solution against homosexuals, but that would not of itself sanctify homosexuality. Jewish survival has religious significance after the holocaust only because it had significance before the holocaust” (emphasis in the original).
Despite the initial appeal of Fackenheim’s concept, capturing, as David Singer (1982) asserts, from “the sentiments … of Jewish shoe salesmen, accountants, policemen, cab-drivers, secretaries” it is difficult from an educational perspective to forge a continuous and positive Jewish identity simply as a refutation of heinous anti-Semitism. (Or as a secular student of mine once remarked, “the Holocaust makes me anti-Nazi, not pro-halakha.”) Notwithstanding the great amount of resources poured into Holocaust education for both young people and adults, the risk of what Simone Schweber (2006) documents in her article “Holocaust Fatigue in teaching today “ is very real. As Schweber argues, the atmosphere in classrooms where the Shoah has taught has shifted from what she calls “Holocaust awe” to a default position where the Holocaust is seen as interesting but not awesome: “Where I once worried that the sanctification of the Holocaust stifled learning, I now worry that trivialization of the Holocuast impedes its understanding”.
The other major trend in the past twenty-five years has been to respond to the perceived crisis in identity by presenting Judaism itself in ways that would “appeal” or “be marketable” to estranged Jews. Much of the effort in Jewish institutions of every denominational shade has thus been to make Judaism more palatable, the better to try and find a place for each Jew within the umbrella of Torah. The website of Aish Hatorah, an outreach organization with branches in several countries, exemplifies this trend towards non demanding language: “Our classes assume little or no Jewish background, and have achieved a worldwide reputation for making Judaism exciting, relevant and user friendly.” Ostensibly a sensible pitch to non-observant people of little Jewish background, such language betrays anxiety at the spectre of contemporary alienation. The warning that if we do not make it relevant then students will not embrace Torah or even worse, even “identify” as Jews, has been the in the back of many educators’ minds every time they step foot in a Jewish Studies classroom or try to create ruah at a Shabbaton. It is as if Judaism is on trial each moment, pleading its case: “Will you like me if I have expectations of you? Will you accept me if I ask of you things with which you may not be instantly comfortable?”
The trend towards selling Judaism as a system meant to maximize “personal growth” or “human happiness” as opposed to a divinely commanded code of permitted and forbidden behaviors has only intensified in the wake of the well known and disturbing 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, with its spate of statistics warning of massive assimilation and intermarriage among younger Jews. Erica Brown (1996) has noted the challenge that the need to make Torah viable in the Western marketplace of distractions has posed for education. Although she is referring specifically to teaching adults, her comments are a sobering assessment of educating younger students as well:
Torah has had to compete with a myriad of other local classes, leisure activities and hobbies to attract. In doing this, educators and administrators have turned to a device being employed more and more in all areas of communication: entertainment… Classes should be peppered with jokes, witticisms and shtick, to maintain the attention of the student. It is getting more difficult in this media-saturated age to appeal to the mind without the added visual and audio stimulus.
Taken individually, these approaches – to connect students to their roots by invoking the gravity of the Shoah, to present Torah in pleasing ways, to show how Judaism can be an aid in human development – have much that is meritorious. But when taken together, one begins to sense an unsettling pattern, a Judaism that is being shaped and contoured to try and desperately match the precariousness of current Jewish loyalties. It is not that statistical foreboding about the Jewish future is insignificant, it is simply that they do not, in this author’s view, constitute the real heart of the matter. The benchmark for contemporary Jewish identity should not be continuity, but purpose. After we marry our Jewish spouse, then what? After Birthright, March of the Living, kiruv programming, Jewish day schools, havdalah at camp ceremonies, then what? I do not mean to denigrate these things – they are part of a Jewish path and as such deserve our attention and care. But larger existential questions need to take precedence at some point, and these are questions that we should not shy away from sharing with our students, irrespective of their professed religiosity or lack thereof: What is the raison d’etre of religion? What are we meant to do we do with Torah? How do we negotiate our limited time on earth? To what am I prepared to contribute?
One need not agree with the absoluteness of his formulation to sympathize at times with Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s (1992) call to reverse modern Western narcissism: “the question ‘what does religion offer to me’ must be completely dismissed. The only proper question is ‘what am I obligated to offer for the sake of religion?’”. Out of the blistering culture wars of the last three decades, many students have absorbed with unquestioning self-assurance that ethical decisions are slippery and subject to the relativism that informs our age, that what we feel is more important than what we owe, self- expression far superior to self-sacrifice. In contrast, stands the famous response to the Vietnam war of R. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1962), versions of which he would utter repeatedly: “In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible”.
In light of Heschel’s call for social justice and human concern, it is sobering to consider a statement made by Moshe Sokolow about graduates of Orthodox Jewish day schools. Though such day schools have been successful in teaching text and instilling within the students the centrality of mitzvot, the ethos of social awareness and a universalistic outlook is often far less present, as Sokolow (2005) argues:
What are the students of our day schools contributing towards eradicating the evils of slavery, poverty, war, racism, sexism, inequality, and hunger that regularly plague our planet – inhabited, as it happens to be, by creatures created in a zelem E-lohim fundamentally no different from our own? And if they do not actively search for a cure for these ills, do they, at least, bemoan them?
It is this lack of purposefulness that at the end of the day afflicts the souls of our students, who even if they are engaged in Jewish practice frequently do not understand Jewish mission. A stunning example from a recent book on humanitarianism highlights the kind of paradigms we might present to our students regarding a new vision of Jewish identity. On July 3, 1994, on one of the final days of the Rwandan Genocide, in a hospital in Kigali, Dr. James Orbinski was amputating the leg of a 14 year old boy who had stepped on a land mine. There were no instruments available; all the hospital’s surgical blades were broken. The only available tool was a hacksaw. Dr. Orbinski shaved off the boy’s leg above the knee and then stitched and shaped the tissue. The boy’s leg was gone, but he was alive. “It was,” says Orbinski, “an imperfect offering” (Orbinski, 2008). All we have are imperfect offerings, writes Orbinski, with imperfect outcomes.
At the age of nine, living in Montreal, Orbinski had seen a television program on the Holocaust with images of bodies and arms with tattooed numbers. The next day, his mother took him to the Jewish section of the city to buy him new shoes. A very kind old man helped him with the shoes and Orbinski, who is not Jewish, noticed the number on the man’s arm. As Orbinski grew older, he knew that what he wanted to do was to help alleviate the suffering of others. Orbinksi speaks of something he calls “living your question”, which he defines as entering into what really draws you in life, what calls you, that is to live your question. We teach young people many interesting things, but do we teach them to live their Jewish question, to even know what that question of their lives might be? We send them to Israel in the hope that their Jewish fires will be ignited; maybe, over time, we will fund every student to travel to Jewish communities worldwide with the simple task of helping others to better live Jewishly, to lend a hand to these communities in any way required.
How does an ancient religious tradition remain vital and fresh in the face of shifting cultural morals and beliefs? One could prognosticate that it is virtually impossible to “re-enchant” Jews in modernity, touched as they have been by so many of the intellectual touchstones of the past two centuries – the ascendancy and dominance of science, feminism, semiotics and the deconstruction of language, multiculturalism and pluralism. This has presented contemporary Jewish communities with a rather painful quandary. Is the risk of alienation from traditional religious teaching the price that Jews pay for living in an open liberal democratic society? Can one participate in the open society and maintain a strong viable Jewish identity and link to tradition? Even ultra-Orthodox communities face the unenviable task of trying to shut out modernity in order to maintain internal cohesion, with varying degrees of success. The quest for meaning, and the necessity of instilling outer directedness in our students, must be at the centre of what we teach our children about Judaism. We need to think in larger ways about what we offer, and connect all the micro elements of our curricula, from Rashi’s commentary to the vicissitudes of Jewish history to the laws of Sukkot, as part and parcel of this quest. As every corner of the Jewish world is slowly learning, “Jewish continuity” does not produce identity, it is the outcome of such.
References
Berger, Peter (1979) The Heretical Imperative. New York: Doubleday.
Brown, Erica (1996) ”Jewish Adult Education: Creating and Educational Democracy,” in Ten Da’at 9:1, 63-77.
Fackenheim, Emil (1978) The Jewish Return into History. New York: Schocken Books.
Fackenheim, Emil (1982) To Mend the World. New York: Schocken Books.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua (1962) The Prophets. New York: Harper and Row.
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu (1992) Judaism, Jewish Values, and the Jewish State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Orbinski, James (2008) An Imperfect Offering. Toronto: Doubleday.
Sacks, Jonathan (1990) Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought. London: Vallentine Mitchell and Co.
Schweber, Simone (2006) “Holocaust Fatigue in Teaching Today”. Social Education 70:1 (Jan-Feb 2006), 44-50.
Sokolow, Moshe (2005) “Teaching Spirituality in Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools” in Mintz, Adam and Schiffman, Lawrence (eds.). Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law. New York: Yeshiva University Press.
Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weber, Max (1946) “Science as Vocation,” in Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C. Wright. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.