WHAT is Judaism if not an ethical monotheism? The answer is that it is
not an "ism" at all, despite the last syllable in its name. It is a
living soul or consciousness; it is the soul or consciousness of the
Jewish people. We are not interested in names, and we should not
quibble about terms; it is reality that we are after. We want to know
what is involved in being a Jew and living a Jewish life. The main
reason for our finding fault with the usual presentation of Judaism is
that it does not enlighten or inspire us. If the term Judaism does not
direct our minds at once to the living energy that operates in the
Jewish people, if it has not the power to launch us upon the stream of
Israel's active thought and spiritual striving, then it is a word
without content, and had better be deleted from our vocabulary. We did
well enough without it until very recently, and should it prove an
insuperable obstacle to the solution of our spiritual problems, we
shall have to throw it into the scrap-heap of obsolete terminology. We
shall begin to call our religion "Jewishness" instead of Judaism. The
former designation has at least the advantage of connoting
consciousness, and nothing is so important for understanding the
essence of any religion as the identification of it with a form or
state of consciousness. If Jewishness will mean to us Jewish
consciousness and not merely "gefillte fisch" or some other Jewish
dish, it will serve our purpose.
Let us not lose sight of the main issue in these discussions. We Jews
refuse to have our life quest confined to the satisfaction of our
material needs. Our souls are hungry; and whether we call it
Jewishness or Judaism, what we want is religion that will help us get
our bearings in the world, that will keep down the beast in us and
spur us on to worthy endeavor in the field of thought and action.
Under normal conditions we should find all this in the faith of our
fathers. But, unfortunately, all that most of us know about that faith
is what we acquired from some old-fashioned "rabbi" who taught us when
we were small children and who made us recite Hebrew by the page. At
home our parents would insist upon our conforming to routine
observances and ceremonies which meant nothing to us. When we grew
older and occasionally asked questions about the Bible, we met with
cold and evasive replies. No wonder that later on, when we entered
the academic world, we grew accustomed to look upon Judaism as out of
touch with the realities of life, and far removed from the elemental
needs that agitate the masses of active, enterprising humanity. We
could see no connection between the few humble ceremonies in our homes
or in our synagogues with the social, political and industrial
problems upon which was riveted the attention of the men of light and
leading. To most of us the faith of our fathers seemed little more
than a medley of needless restraints, other-worldliness, and hostility
to all progress.
_Religion Indispensable to the Human Race_
BUT a change has come over us. We have begun to realize that Judaism
could not have transformed the spiritual history of mankind, as it
did, if it were the negligible and insignificant thing we thought it
was. We have been unable to discern its true character, because we did
not know how to probe beneath the outward and often unattractive
surface which it presented to us in the limited circle in which we
moved. We have begun to surmise that the Jewish life we are familiar
with is nothing more than a devitalized fragment of what, under
auspicious circumstances, becomes a life that is spiritually
healthful, joyous and invigorating. We have at last learned to take
into consideration the inevitable difference in mental scope and
outlook that must mark two generations, one of which had its life
formed amidst the oppressive atmosphere of Eastern Europe, and the
other in the bracing atmosphere of America. This being the case,
nothing could be more unreasonable than to expect that the spiritual
heritage be transmitted from father to child with ease and
naturalness. But who is in a better position to smooth out the
roughness and overcome the angularities--father or child? Should we
demand of our elders, who are burdened by numerous cares, and whose
lives are for the most part hurried and difficult, that they adapt
themselves to our attitude of mind? Is it not meet that we, who still
retain the plasticity of youth, make advances? Without surrendering an
iota of our own individuality we might cultivate that sympathetic
insight that would reveal the inestimable worth of our spiritual
heritage. Not merely reverence for the past, but a regard for our own
future prompts us to achieve a proper understanding of Judaism.
It is well to realize at the outset that the problem of religion is
not confined to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences
nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. Mistaking them
for the final struggle, the believer wrings his hands in despair over
the impending doom, and the doubter contemplates a religionless future
with a great deal of glee. But both will be disappointed in their
reckoning. Religion, as we shall see, is entirely too inherent in
human life to be dispensable. The belief that it has served its
purpose in the evolution of the race, and that it can only survive as
a troublesome vestige in the organism of human society, is based upon
a misunderstanding of its function. In view of the deeper insight into
human nature that has been acquired of late, as a result of the
progress made in psychological and social research, there is good
reason to believe that a better understanding is not far distant.
These investigations have not merely led to new theories about
religion, but have essentially changed the method of approach. They
have rendered superfluous the subtleties and refinements of
metaphysical arguments. A new reservoir in human nature has been
tapped, and discovered to be the inexhaustible fount of religion.
_The Adaptation of Judaism to Changing Conditions_
THIS new way of looking at the problem of religion gives promise of
helping us also to get a better comprehension of Judaism. We shall
find by means of it that there is much more substantial nourishment to
the faith of our fathers than can be obtained from the tabloid form in
which the textbooks mete it out to us. The previous article on "What
Judaism Is Not"[G] did not argue that Judaism could forego such
doctrines as the unity of God, the brotherhood of man and similar
principles, or that it should glory in remaining vague and
inarticulate. The main objection to the ordinary way of conceiving
Judaism was that it lacked the means of preventing its teachings from
degenerating into dull platitudes. But if Judaism is essentially the
self-consciousness of the Jewish people, these doctrines will be
viewed as some of its characteristic expressions. As such they
forthwith become instinct with life. To be a religious Jew,
accordingly, means not merely to profess the unity of God in cold
philosophical fashion, but to live over again by means of thought and
symbol the divine intuition, the backslidings, the temptations, the
defiance, the threats, the tortures and the final victory implied in
the "Shema Yisroel." The Jew who does not thrill with exaltation when
he sings the world's most stirring paean, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is
our God, the Lord is One!" is either ignorant or has the blood of a
fish.
Whether Judaism is an ethical monotheism or the consciousness of
Israel is not merely an academic question. These two conceptions
represent widely divergent ways of dealing with the practical problems
of self-adjustment to the novel situation with which Judaism is
confronted. Whether the one or the other view shall prevail will make
a difference in the fight for existence. We protest that if Judaism
will be armed with nothing stronger than the conventional platitudes,
it must succumb. By knowing itself for what it really is, Judaism will
muster new heart and strength. The need for self-adjustment is not of
today; Judaism has been going through that process ever since it saw
the light. But during the past hundred and fifty years, Judaism has
been wrestling with the problem of self-adaptation which both the
redistribution of Jewry and the incursions of materialistic secularism
have called into being. In this comparatively short period of a
century and a half, Judaism has lived through all that the other
religions have experienced within the last three or four centuries. If
we were to compare the different stages in the process of Jewish
self-adjustment we should find them analogous to those through which
European religion in general has passed. These different steps in the
process seem to have been unavoidable because they are the concomitant
of the natural development of the human spirit. A review of the
salient phases in the self-adaptation of religion to the changing
conditions of life and thought will throw light upon the significance
of that vital method of viewing Judaism which has of late worked its
way into Jewish life--for the most part unawares.
_The Storm and Stress Period in Religion_
WHEN we refer to the self-adjustment of religion to modern conditions,
our concern is not with the vast hinterland of ignorance and
superstition that is still inhabited by large numbers of the
unthinking of all creeds, Jewish as well as Christian. The destiny of
religion is, primarily, in the hands of those who are in the vanguard
of intellectual progress, and as long as its place in their lives is a
problematic one its future is uncertain. Since the days of the
Renaissance, religion has practically been busy adjusting itself to
the ever enlarging human experience. It was otherwise during the
middle ages, when the men of intellect threw the weight of their
influence on the side of tradition and authority. They devoted their
mental powers to the support of truths that were accepted at their
face value without further scrutiny and analysis. All the resources of
intellect were spent in interpreting the few facts they had in their
possession. Many centuries elapsed before the cry was raised for more
facts; but when, at last, the cry was answered, and new knowledge
concerning the world in which men lived began to pour in, the
foundations of tradition were shaken. Since then the religion of the
intellectuals has no longer been marked by the naiveté and
self-assurance of its earlier years. Its existence has been one of
storm and stress. It has resisted all attempts to crowd it out from
the new world that man has conquered for himself, and in order to be
accorded a place in that world it has submitted to considerable change
and self-adjustment. We may note three distinct stages in these
efforts of religion to accommodate itself to life, corresponding in a
large measure with the great thought movements of the eighteenth, the
nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively.
The first stage in the process was the rationalistic. With Copernicus
and Galileo defeated by the Vatican, with Descartes having to defend
his orthodoxy, it seemed to the English and French philosophers of the
eighteenth century that the only way man could save his spiritual
nature from falling a prey to animalism or materialism was by
consigning to destruction the special forms in which religion existed
in the established faiths. The dreamers and the visionaries of that
day, who were moved by a sincere desire to further man's higher life,
entertained the hope that natural religion would revive with the
downfall of revealed religion. But human events have taken a different
turn. Life does not adapt itself to preconceived logical systems. The
rationalistic method of adjusting religion to life failed because it
was based upon a false reconstruction of the rise and growth of
religion. However logical and plausible such a reconstruction might
have appeared, the fact that it could not be verified by study and
observation of religious phenomena invalidated the practical
inferences drawn from it.
_The Failure of the Rationalistic School_
ALTHOUGH by that time science had made sufficient strides to know how
futile it was to reconstruct fact by means of reason, the territory of
religion was still considered exempt from the need of resorting to
experience. The thinkers of the rationalistic age were to a certain
extent still under the dominance of the medieval regard for abstract
reasoning, and applied it to man's spiritual existence. They reasoned
thus: The human being is naturally gifted with an intuition that
enables him to discover for himself the truth about God and his
relation to the world. If man had only been left alone and had not had
the stream of his ideas muddied by outside interference, he would have
continued professing a religion that would have been both pure and
simple. But human depravity did not permit the natural religion of
primitive life to continue. The fanatics with their delusions and the
priests with their love of power distorted man's primitive faith in
God. They invented dogmas and practices by means of which they could
hold the masses in subjection. In course of time these extraneous
elements came to be looked upon as the main content of revealed
religion. The various established faiths and revealed religions were
little more than wilful fabrications that were bound to crumble before
the onslaughts of reason. Thus, by bringing the established cults into
disrepute, men like Voltaire and Hume hoped to restore religion to its
original state of purity and simplicity, bare of all artificialities
of forms and institutions.
However superficial the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing
but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service
it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is
indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the
impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers
of one faith from those of another. Rationalism began to lift the
curse of intolerance and persecution which lay heavily upon the human
race. No one who values the freedom to live his own life in his own
way should cast aspersions upon the influence of that school of
thought. Though they argued erroneously about the nature and essence
of religion, we must not forget that they emancipated the human soul
from the shackles of spiritual bondage.
On the other hand, our gratitude to them cannot blind us to their
superficiality and inexperience in the matter of religion. Nineteenth
century thought, with its emphasis upon historic development, exposed
the fallacies and weaknesses of the method they employed to interpret
religious phenomena. The distinction between natural and revealed
religion was an arbitrary one, and the conception of priestly
fabrications a mere figment of the imagination. Historical research
has established that all the great world faiths or revealed religions
have followed laws of development that have been in accord with the
circumstances and mentality of those who professed them, and in that
sense have been perfectly natural. Instead of being the product of
fraud and wilful deceit, the established religions were seen to be the
outcome of a healthy enthusiasm and deep sincerity. The limitations of
knowledge and experience, which marked the earlier expressions of
religious life, were, from the historical point of view, more than
atoned for by the inner worth and sincerity that had prevailed in
former days. In fact, so far did the historical conception change
men's attitude that, upon finding themselves sophisticated and torn by
doubt, they looked back longingly to former ages, when religion had
brought inward calm and serenity. As a consequence of this reaction to
the disintegrating tendencies of eighteenth century rationalism, a
renewed appreciation for the religion of the past made itself felt
among the circles of the cultured, particularly those of Germany and
England, and the institutions in which the spirit of the past clothed
itself were given a new lease of life.
_The Historic Method Is Found Wanting_
THE adoption by religion of the historic method thus represents the
second stage in its process of self-adjustment. It now appealed to
man's natural desire not to allow his past to sink into oblivion.
Nothing is so humanizing as memory. He that is engrossed only in the
future and would make it the only standard of value, he who has no
patience with anything that interferes with practical utility--and
memory is certainly a source of such interference--lacks the main
ingredient of humanity and has something beaverish about him. Thus
taught the historical school during the nineteenth century, and the
rationalistic ideal that would have destroyed the established faiths
no longer held sway.
But while the historic method stemmed the tide of rationalism, it
failed to give back to religion its native vigor. It removed forever
the stigma of insincerity that was attached to the origin and
development of the dominant faiths; it illumined the past and
incorporated it into man's spiritual life; but it was unable to
restore to religion its most important function, that of shaping the
future. The fundamental paradox which the historic method harbors, and
which has prevented it from contributing adequately to the process of
adjustment, is the fact that the spiritual experiences of the past,
which it asks us to love and revere, were at the time of their
enactment not memories, but vital responses to immediate and pressing
needs. In the past religion dealt with its own present. That at all
times the past did play an important rôle cannot be denied; but in all
effective religion it can only be a means to an end. The historic
method, on the other hand, succeeds in nothing but in revitalizing the
past for its own sake. It provides no guidance for the future. A
religion must not only write history--it must make history. This is
why the historic method has been found wanting and has had to be
supplemented by a new method of adjustment, which for want of a better
term we may designate the socio-psychological.
_The New Way--the Social and Psychological Viewpoint_
BUT little attention has so far been paid to this new method of
self-adjustment. Though it is still inchoate and uncrystallized, it
forms the best part of every endeavor that makes for the
rehabilitation of religion. The remarkable feature about the new mode
of adjustment is that it did not come about directly, through a desire
on the part of the teachers of religion to make good the inadequacy of
previous methods. It was arrived at indirectly from a source that at
first seemed hostile, and to some extent is still considered so,
namely, social science. Not alone religion, but government and
education, as well as history, economics and psychology, have been
revolutionized as a result of the new way of approaching the problems
of human life. So recent is the change that we have hardly had time to
appraise it. The modern point of view toward human society has worked
a change in all our thinking, comparable only to the one which
resulted when the true purport of the concept "evolution" became
apparent. The human race has lived through the forces generated by
social existence without having been aware of them, even as it went on
living for thousands of years without knowing the numerous forces that
were latent in the earth, air and sea. It will probably take a much
longer time for man to estimate at their worth the forces that are at
work in social life than it took him to perceive the forces that
dominate the physical world.
With all that, it is now generally established that the study of any
phase of human life, whether for theoretical or for practical
purposes, must be based upon the recognition that man is not merely a
social animal, as Aristotle put it, but that his being more than an
animal is due entirely to his leading a social life. In opposition to
the older point of view, which prevailed in the more materialistic
schools of thought during the nineteenth century, social science has
proved that the forces that operate in human life are not merely those
that are derived from the physical environment, but also those which
are of a mental character. These psychical forces operate with a
uniformity and power in no way inferior to those of the physical
world. Social science is gradually accustoming us to regard human
society not merely as an aggregate of individuals but as a psychical
entity, as a mind not less but more real than the mind of any of the
individuals that constitute it. The perennial source of error has been
the fallacy of considering the individual human mind as an entity
apart from the social environment. Whatever significance the study of
the mind, as detached from its social environment, may have for
metaphysical inquiry, it can throw no light upon the practical
problems with which the mind has to deal--problems that arise solely
from the interaction of the individual with his fellows. The
individual human being is as much the product of his social
environment as the angle is of the sides that bound it.
This new method of studying mental life both in the race and in the
individual has revealed not merely the true significance of religion,
but the way in which it functions and the conditions which affect its
career. We now know that those phenomena in life which we call
religious are primarily the expression of the collective life of a
social group, after it has attained a degree of consciousness which is
analogous to the self-consciousness of the individual. When a
collective life becomes self-knowing we have a religion, which may
therefore be considered the flowering stage in the organic growth of
the tree of social life. The problem of religious adjustment is at
bottom that of maintaining in a social group the psychical or
spiritual energy which expresses itself in beliefs, ideals, customs
and standards of conduct. Accordingly, when a religion is passing
through a crisis, what is really happening is not so much that certain
accepted truths or traditional habits are threatened with
obsolescence, as that the social group with whose life it has been
identified is on the point of dissolution. Whatever interest we have
in the cultivation of the spiritual life must go towards conserving
this kind of social energy. To have roses we must take care of the
tree on which they grow, and not content ourselves with having a
bouquet of them put into a vase filled with water. This newer
conception of the religious life is fraught with far-reaching
consequences, some of which we shall have to point out in a later
article.
In Judaism we encounter the same three stages in the process of
self-adjustment, though less clearly defined, by reason of much
overlapping. What is known as the Haskalah movement represents the
application of the rationalistic method to the spiritual problems of
Jewish life. Having taken place in Russia, it was bound to be delayed
in its coming for nearly a century. It received the first setback in
its career when the pogroms broke out in the early "eighties," and the
Russian Government inaugurated its policy of hounding and repression.
The type which the Haskalah movement produced is the "Maskil," a man
who curls his lip at ceremony and tradition, who lacks a sense of
history and dabbles in cosmopolitanism. Not having had the courage to
be thoroughgoing in his principles, or realizing that it was futile to
be so, he tolerated what was distinctively Jewish so long as it was
kept indoors and withdrawn from public gaze. In practice, however,
"Haskalah" moved in the same direction as eighteenth century
rationalism which made for the abrogation of the historic faiths.
_Judaism in the Rationalistic and Historic Stages_
CONTEMPORANEOUSLY with the rise and development of the Haskalah
movement in Russia, Jewry in the German-speaking countries tested the
validity both of the rationalistic and of the historic method. The
Reform movement was at first, like the Haskalah movement, little more
than a diluted cosmopolitanism. A typical case is that of David
Friedlander and his friends, who began by reforming the worship in
harmony with modern ideas and the changed social position of the Jews,
and ended in offering to accept Christianity, if they would not be
required to believe in Jesus and could be exempted from the observance
of certain ceremonies. Influenced by the general reaction against
rationalistic tendencies and by the rise of Jewish Wissenschaft, the
Reform movement has had to reckon with the historic method of
adjustment. But that influence has not been strong enough to overcome
its early rationalistic bias from which it suffers to this very day.
The historic method was applied with far more thoroughness and
consistency by the advocates of Historical Judaism. Zunz, Frankel,
Graetz, Herzfeld, Luzzatto and Joel drew the line between adaptation
and assimilation. They laid down the principle that it was fatuous to
speak of a religion adjusting itself when it breaks so completely with
the past as to be unrecognizable. In our anxiety to have Judaism
conform to the needs of the age, we must take care lest we create an
altogether new religion and label it Judaism. Intellectual honesty
demands that we give due heed to the principle of identity, so that
the sameness in our Judaism and that of our fathers be greater than
the difference between them. They therefore applied themselves to the
task of reconstructing the past by dint not of logic and
phrase-mongering, but of patient, plodding search after facts strewn
in the most out-of-the-way by-paths of literature, with the
consequence that they discovered an impassable gulf between the
Judaism of history and the Judaism of the Reform movement. We shall
never be able to discharge fully our debt of gratitude to these Jewish
scholars and historians who have given us, in place of a few vague
and detached memories, a past rich in content and inspiration. But
what they did was only to lay the foundation of the Judaism of the
future. A foundation affords poor shelter against the hail and sleet
of a bleak wintry day. Of what avail is it to keep on forever hugging
the cold foundation stones, when we should be engaged in building the
house of Israel?
_Judaism and the Jewish Soul_
AS soon as we begin to experience the need not merely of giving
consent to certain abstract truths or of contemplating the past, but
of helping to build the house of Israel as a means to our spiritual
well-being, Judaism enters through us upon the third stage in the
process of self-adjustment. This is the case with all those who rebel
against the pulverizing and granulating tendencies of Judaized
Protestantisms which ignore the "Kenneseth-Israel" in the effort to
mete out salvation to the individual soul. This is true of all who
refuse to allow Judaism to provincialize itself by applying for
naturalization papers wherever it finds a habitat. To this class also
belong those who see in Zionism not what its opponents make it out to
be, a sulking, sullen Chauvinism, but a method of regeneration to
which Judaism has been led by divine intuition. Dr. Schechter, who has
contributed to Judaism the concept of catholicity, has this to say of
Zionism: "While it is constantly winning souls for the present, it is
at the same time preparing us for the future, which will be a Jewish
future. Only when Judaism has found itself, when the Jewish soul has
been redeemed from the Galuth, can Judaism hope to resume its mission
in the world." How significant the apposition in which the author
places Judaism and the Jewish soul! What a pity to spoil a poetic
insight of that kind by applying to it so barbarous a term as
socio-psychological. Yet in that insight is echoed the modern
conception of religion as the self-consciousness of the group, a
conception which the very conditions of life have forced the Jew to
adopt. Whatever vitality Judaism still displays may be traced to a
general presentiment that it is a social mind and not a system of
abstract truths. We should not, however, permit such a principle to
remain merely a vague presentiment. The task that devolves upon us is
to render articulate both in theory and in practice all that is
implied in the intuition that Judaism is the soul of Israel.
EDITORS' NOTE.--_Prof. Kaplan will continue to develop
his conception of the true meaning of Judaism in
articles to appear in subsequent issues._