The most difficult question in contemporary Jewish religion, of whatever variety, is what shall be done with the Law, that elaborate code of ritual and action which, in the course of centuries, came to define Jewish religion almost completely. The Reform Jews have discarded it, the Orthodox Jews preserve it, the Conservative Jews select from it—and there is a whole range of positions between these positions. As for the individual Jew, for some decades now he has been at a loss as to what attitude to take; and now that there is a movement of reattachment to Judaism, the question has become a matter of concern to many newly “returned” Jews. Hans Joachim Schoeps here states some of the dilemmas in which modern man becomes involved when he tries to find a suitable approach to the Law, and attempts an answer. The present translation, from the German, is by Martin Greenberg.

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We Jews of the mid-20th century live today in what might be called a post-Jewish situation. That is to say, the reality of each day’s living is such that it is no longer possible for most of us to experience our Jewishness simply and directly. This is true for both America and Europe—it may even apply to the secular State of Israel—and must be fully appreciated by anyone who hopes to say something about the present situation of Judaism that will be to the point.

It is time for us to renounce all fictions of the “as if” kind. We can not act as if we were still living in the ghetto and as if it were possible artificially to keep alive the way of life that flourished there; we can not act as if the laws of the Torah still signified for most of us the rules of conduct; as if fear of God and not self-aggrandizement were the common fact; as if the sermon’s conventional opening words, “Worshipful congregation,” really applied to those seated beneath the pulpit, who may be ready to listen to their rabbi’s opinions only if he is a “good speaker.” There is no point in deceiving ourselves: the Jew of today may be the grandson or great-grandson of a pious man, but he himself is completely a man of his age. The newspaper has more interest for him than the Bible, and he prefers the movies to an edifying Midrashic (not to say Halachic) discourse.

And, really, there is a question as to whether he is not perhaps right, after all, in his preference; for the events enacted on the movie screen probably have more meaning for him in the concrete circumstances of his life than an exposition of a problem in the Law or in the ritual regulations of cleanliness. Law and ritual are often something he no longer even understands, or at least can no longer regard as meaningful and apposite to the problems of his daily living. It is of little help to the Jew of today to ponder the problems his fathers racked their brains about, for the circumstances out of which the problems sprang have disappeared or grown incomprehensible. What a friend of mine wrote in connection with the Maimonides memorial year has a general validity: “On the whole it is impossible to make an alien existence one’s own; the best one can do is . . . to coexist with it. But there are already great stretches of time for which this is no longer possible. The eight hundred years that separate the Jews of today from Maimonides are not to be rolled back. There is only the hope that—if we genuinely inquire in our own time as to the meaning of Judaism—we shall somewhere, sometime, light upon Maimonides. . . . True studying, however, means first of all not Maimonides, it means ourselves.”

The question, then, is: how shall a modern man reconcile the Judaism that was with the Jew that he is?

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As the Jew of all previous centuries understood it, the great turning point in Jewish history, the real breach of the historical tradition, was the destruction of the Temple by the Romans under Titus in the year 70 C.E. It is generally agreed that we have the Pharisaic theologians of the time to thank for the fact that this rupture of the historical tradition did not prove fatal and put an end to Jewish history altogether. It was the sages of Jabneh, of Lydda, of Caesarea, and Bene-Brak who were the first to develop the concept of the “as if” into an enduring principle of Jewish history. The theocracy no longer existed, but its constitution remained in force as if it did. The Temple no longer existed, but Jews the world over bowed in prayer in its direction as if it did. The High Priest no longer made his expiatory sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, but the ritual formula was learned and recited on that day as if he did. Meanwhile, other things took the place of the actual sacrifice: study of Torah, good works, prayer—the fulfilling of these commandments counted as much as the animal sacrifice of ancient times.

This disregard of the actual facts, this abstracting of Judaism from every reality of the here and now, was a huge accomplishment. It did indeed “save” Judaism—that is to say, by means of the “as if,” Judaism was adapted to exile and was removed to the plane of the timeless. The faith of the Jews proved more real than reality and overcame it. The sages of Jabneh assumed, as the most self-evident thing in the world, that the royal decrees of God the King as set forth in the constitution of the Covenant (the Torah) were as valid in their day as before. Hence they strove, by putting up “a fence around the Torah,” to preserve Judaism in isolation from time and space. From Johanan ben Zakkai to Joseph Caro, law was heaped on law, and in defiance of all reasonable expectation Judaism was successfully translated to the timeless, the Jews learning to live their lives more or less alongside time.

This was a greater feat than Alexander’s conquests or the empire of the Caesars. For it effected a paradoxical retroactive annulment of historical fact: the Jewish state turned out not to have fallen at all in the year 70, but was preserved in its laws and lived on, metamorphosed, in the ghetto. It was Johanan ben Zakkai, the betrayer of his country to the Romans, who became its savior, and not the nationalist Bar Kochba, whose reaction to his country’s disgrace was only—a patriot’s. The sages of Jabneh proved more farsighted than the Zealots, with a farsightedness that reached seventeen hundred years into the future. During this time they reigned supreme—because the laws they had clung to did not remain mere fictions but became a reality through faith. It was only in an age of disbelief that they became fictions—that is, about the beginning of the period of Western European emancipation.

It is therefore the Emancipation that is the most fateful breach in the continuity of Jewish history, for this time there was no bridge improvised to span the abyss. Where the Tannaim of the 2nd century had succeeded in making over the Law to suit the new historical epoch, the Reform rabbis of the 19th century signally failed. Now the thread was really broken, and the great question that had lain hidden, all these years, in the heart of the year 70 first revealed itself for what it really was: the question of Judaism’s destiny. The Emancipation for the first time shattered the inner historical coherence of Judaism and put an end to the legislative power of the Jewish state, which thanks to Johanan ben Zakkai had maintained a fictitious existence-through-faith seventeen hundred years beyond its actual end. With the disappearance of the ghetto, faith as a collective phenomenon and the all-inclusive regulation of life according to the Mosaic law ceased to exist.

Moses Mendelssohn’s generation was the last to hold completely with the sages of Jabneh, regulating their lives according to the unabridged Mosaic law as fixed by Moses Isserles and Joseph Caro. Since then the number of families remaining faithful to the Law—of whom Samson Raphael Hirsch was a representative spokesman in the 19th century—has steadily declined. For a host of others, whose numbers increased generation after generation as the observance of the Law fell off (until only a pure distillation of the ethical element—little more than the Ten Commandments—remained), the ancient Law was but a fiction, because faith was lacking.

Once the fence was torn down, and once the Jews had established themselves in the new reality of the modern world, all further need of the “as if” became superfluous. However, from Michael Creizenach and S. L. Steinheim to Leo Baeck, Jewish thinkers have been sensible of the void that had arisen within, and now began to pose more and more urgently the question of the “essence of Judaism.” Their question, in short, was: what now was left of Judaism?

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What is it, in a Law suffering a gradual loss of all authority, that is worthy of surviving? What is the Jewish faith today? Wherein is it to be found and how can it be established?

There is nothing in the Jewish tradition to countenance the asking of such questions; and because such questions were never asked before, no earlier answers exist to guide us today. All those who have not perceived the belated manifestation, commencing about 1800, of the fatality concealed in the year 70, who have not perceived the growing un-tenability of the “as if set down by the sages of Jabneh, will never recognize the right to ask these questions. But it is vital for us that we ask them, for it has ceased to be apparent why the body of the Jewish people should still maintain its separate identity if the individual Jew is going to know as little as he does about the origin (election) and end (God’s supremacy) of the Covenant, and its constitutional obligations (Law).

It is therefore legitimate to ask what are the basic tenets of the Jewish faith—on this question the Further existence of Judaism depends. If one has a deep enough understanding of the question, deeper at any rate than the 19th century’s, one must ask oneself if it is possible for men today to realize the Covenant in their lives. The man of today, no longer feeling any need to justify himself before God, answerable only to himself for his observance or non-observance of the Law, will no longer countenance God, faith, Law, and the Covenant of Israel as the a priori of his consciousness or the whole content of his life. Jewish Orthodoxy has nothing to say to him. For it to speak to modern man, it would have to be able to divorce itself from its presuppositions, and its very inability to do so is what constitutes its greatness; if it could really make itself comprehensible to him, it would cease being Jewish Orthodoxy. The Levitical laws of purification, or the concept underlying the application of most of Jewish law—that man, by the correct fulfillment of these laws, from time to time becomes yotseh (perfect) before God—are now as incomprehensible as the well-reasoned Halachic belief that the turning on of an electric light or talking over the telephone on the Sabbath is against the will of God. The direct and unbroken connection of civilized life in the 20th century with the will of God manifested four thousand years ago can no longer be perceived.

The factum brutum confronting us today is just this apparently ineradicable disharmony which has arisen between life under the Law and the modern secular scientific and technological understanding of reality.

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Yet to almost every living Jew for whom the Bible is not an entirely closed book, the answer that men had once made with their lives to God’s summonses can never be lost. Even in periods most distant from the primal source, these constitutive events of Judaism will be understood, and Jews must willy-nilly hear the words by which Scripture declares their eternal election and preservation. For Jewishness—which is not merely the experience of anti-Semitism but also the sense of an eternal pattern and recurrence—is an ineluctable destiny, as we in the mid-20th century are coming to recognize. Events have prompted us once again to discover ourselves as Jews. It is no longer the case today that the Jewish teachings instruct us in our destiny, but rather that our Jewish destiny recalls us to the forgotten Jewish teachings. Thus our way to Judaism lies in a direction clean contrary to tradition’s: our way is that of a modern, historically conscious Jewish theology.

If a modem Jew who has blithely accepted the life he leads as a citizen of contemporary America or Europe or the State of Israel comes to question the meaning of his Jewish origin, which even in the 20th century causes him to surfer the fate of the Jew, then Jewish theology has a real answer to give to his question. The answer goes something like this: our sufferings have their origin in the denial or forgetting of something that goes back three and a half millennia and which has nothing at all to do with our being “for” or “against” it, an event that befell our fathers, was reported in the Bible, and so has been handed down through all history. God elected Israel to receive His Covenant, out of His free will He chose one people among the many on earth. To understand the essence and the destiny of the Jewish people, one must understand its origin as being spiritual yet real: God took one people for His own, calling it to represent His royal will. “. . . ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation” (Ex. 19: 5-6). Or as Buber has translated it, giving a sharper accent to its meaning: “And ye shall become unto Me a realm of priests, a nation singled out from amongst all the others.” Israel, by the unfathomable will of God, was chosen as the object of His intention to conclude a compact with His creation. The terms of this Covenant, ever since the event on Sinai, is the Law of the Torah, by which the Jews shall be placed under God’s will. Taken, therefore, in the legitimate Jewish sense, the Covenant is an objective matter that has nothing to do with the will, wish, or allegiance of the individual Jew and thus is not dependent on whether a modern Jew can comprehend it or not. At Moriah, and in the promise made to Abraham, all the seed of Israel were chosen—everyone born of a Jewish mother since that time has a share in Abraham’s election, becomes with Isaac a son of the Promise, and by his birth acquires membership in the Covenant. The external symbol of this is circumcision, marking the Jew as a sharer in the Covenant of Abraham. This is circumcision’s “sacramental” meaning—it is not a hygienic measure, but a means to annihilate the historical distance dividing the Jewish child from the primal father Abraham; through circumcision a Jewish child becomes contemporaneous with Abraham.

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Today we see how this sacrament has lost its efficacy, how it seems no longer possible to achieve this contemporaneity, because our being, as determined for us by Jewish destiny, and our consciousness, as modern men, gape apart. This schism of being and consciousness is the crisis in which we find ourselves today. The modern-minded Jew no longer acknowledges his original Jewish destiny, abandons that law of his origins which separated him from the world, and tries to dwell in the world a man like other men. But the destiny of his being, that being which his membership in the Jewish collectivity willy-nilly gives him, does not change because his consciousness has changed; the schism between the two is the Jewish fate as we know it today. There is no variety of assimilation that permanently succeeds, neither the assimilation of individuals nor that other assimilation which wants to place the Jewish nation under the laws of other nations. It has never failed, in all the centuries that lie behind us, that an Israel wanting to free itself, to throw off the yoke of its separateness, has been compelled to resume its life apart, its “sanctificatíon.” “And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever. . . . And the Lord shall scatter thee among all peoples, from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth. . . . And among these nations shalt thou have no repose, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot; but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and languishing of soul” (Deut. 28: 46,64,65).

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Now these are all things which a modern man without faith can very well see for himself, for they are part of a history that continually repeats itself, and which those generations, in particular, upon whom the punishment is visited learn to understand. In every case this is what we are left with: the responsibility of reflecting on the underlying causes of our Jewish destiny in order to arrive at a true understanding of it. This indeed is not yet Jewish faith, but taking thought in this way may lead to it. By this historical-theological approach, by coming to know the continuity of Jewish history, we catch sight of a part of the Jewish reality which otherwise would be concealed from us. It can, indeed, inspire a man with a truer adherence to the Jewish reality than all the so-called “positive” approaches, which in the last analysis are for the most part merely unreal and anachronistic attempts artificially to reconstruct the past.

But the historical-theological approach by itself can do no more than teach the modern Jew a historical lesson; it cannot make a believer out of him, change the reader of a “sacred hieroglyph” (Ranke) into one who beholds the revelation of the living God. It can only lead him to the threshold, confront him with the Jewish reality; all the learned study in the world cannot do more than this. To go further—for the person who has been led to acknowledge the spiritual truths of Jewish history to become a believer—he must turn from the general and abstract to the personal and concrete; the historical truth of the election of Israel that he has perceived must pass out of his abstract understanding and be realized in his personal existence. And this brings us to the last possibility of contemporary man. The laws recorded in the Bible must be felt not only as commandments to the generation of the wilderness, but to oneself, God’s word spoken to oneself, to which one makes answer with one’s life. How this happens it is impossible to say, because it is one of the secrets between God and man. One can and must, however, speak of what it leads to, for everything leading to the reality of the Covenant leads to the charter of this Covenant—the Law.

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When a modern Jew thinks of the Law, it is of a series of “fine old customs” whose practice was an important part of the life of his parents or grandparents. A Jewish theology which simply insisted that these “fine old customs” were the “real” Judaism he was seeking, would be a deception. It is of course possible in every age to experience God’s will in forms and customs too; yet one must first have felt it at a deeper level of one’s being.

A man who has grown aware of Judaism’s importance to him is not helped appreciably by a theology that sends him to the ritual precepts of the book of Leviticus without at the same time telling him that he will only understand their meaning after he has read the books of Genesis and Exodus. He will not then, as he reads, pass lightly over the account, at the beginning of the Bible, of Adam’s disobedience to God. He will not fail to see the exemplary character of this first man’s disobedience (sin), endlessly repeated in the lives of all the sons of Adam (particularly of the great ones of this earth). God, however, it is shown to him, keeps faith with the faithless, and in mercy makes his Covenant with one people whom he has called from among the peoples of mankind. This Covenant is based upon the promise and the Law. The Law points out to each man, and each generation, who are forever backsliding anew, the right path to what is “good” in the eyes of God. The generation that was vouchsafed the revelation, the generation of the wanderings in the wilderness, handed down as Law what for them had been their answer to the divine summons. However, each subsequent generation faces the task of distinguishing, amid the precepts and prohibitions recorded for the most part in Leviticus, God’s commandment to it—that is, through the Law it must come to understand the revelation.

Martin Buber once wrote as follows to Franz Rosenzweig on this point: “I don’t believe that revelation is ever lawgiving; and in the fact that lawgiving is always its result I see the fact of human contradiction, the human factor.” God’s pure word is changed in Moses’ mouth into human words and dogma, God’s pronouncement veils itself in the Law of Torah, the Word vanishes behind the word. But this insight of Buber’s does not lead to a flat rejection of Law. He does not doubt that the generation receiving the revelation perceived truly the will of God; there is only the doubt that God’s will as handed down—the Law as fixed in the Torah—can be taken over wholesale in later times by generations not vouchsafed the revelation. To make it truly one’s own, to “believe,” it must first have been experienced as commandment; it must first have been heard as the answer to the questions of one’s own life—or as Buber puts it, “only so much of it (the Law) must be acknowledged as I can acknowledge as having been said to me.” In this way, to be sure, the universal validity of the Law is lost; but this loss of the unchanging and universal Law is precisely what defines the modern situation.

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Despite this loss of a universal and timelessly valid Law, I feel certain things can be asserted with confidence. The first and foremost religious possibility for the individual is and will always be through the ethical. Though in the Bible the moral commandments go hand in hand with the ritual, sacrificial, dietary, and marriage laws, they are nevertheless separable from them. Tradition was well aware of this, but had no reason to attribute any great importance to the matter. Today, however, the preeminence of the ethical is plain, for the moral law is an elementary demand whose insistence every human being can feel (hence the primacy of the Decalogue for all men), whereas this is not at all the case with the dietary laws or the sacrificial regulations.

Thus, for example, the force of the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” can be felt by everyone in every age for the very reason that man does not love his neighbor, does not keep his neighbor’s good in mind. But here it can happen that one feels one’s offence, and in the distress of this feeling can come to see one’s behavior for what it is, a falling away from the will of God. In the moment that a man acknowledges his guilt the word of God has found its way to him. In discovering that God’s will and man’s wish are not the same, the primal wound of life is opened in him, and he is driven by the pain he feels to seek that help which human hands can no longer give him. In this divergence of the human and the divine, God’s sovereign claim upon mankind is recognized and man’s faith in his supposed self-sufficiency dwindles to nothing. For in the claim that God asserts upon us by His commandments we feel our helplessness, we realize that everything we are and have is held in fee from Him, is a sign of the creature whom his creator has summoned to do His will. Where this original disparity between the Almighty God and creature man is made to live again, there is always the possibility of God’s drawing near to us out of His remoteness, His will coming to guide our life, His commandment passing into our life as “Law.”

Life is not a pursuing of necessarily brief and infrequent encounters with the Divine, but a continual living and doing of what in these encounters we have been called upon by the Divine to do—a living of the Law. Yet it is also true that the Torah can never become the law of man’s life today without his discovering it for himself in this encounter with the Divine, for modern skepticism forbids his accepting his forefathers’ laws save if he has learned them with his own life. Today the realization of the Law is only possible to a post-skeptical attitude of faith that has weathered every doubt.

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At this point, to be sure, a host of questions confronts us. How many and which of the laws is it possible to realize today? Will it be possible eventually to realize all the Torah laws, or is it not the very nature of this modern religious attitude to bar us from realizing the majority of them? At what point will a halt be called, or will the modern man of the Torah go on to make the law of the red cow a constituent part of his life? What implications are there in this approach for adult religious education?

Merely to ask these questions, however, shows how impossible it is to fix a new objective standard of the law. No new Shulchan Aruch can be truly derived from the modern sensibility—to try to do so, as many Reform and Conservative Jews would like, would merely bring on a schism. The way of all those who, in our time, have seen the Star of the Covenant and have gone forth to make the Law once again an effective reality in their lives, lies through the same old countryside but no longer along the same road. For, Franz Rosenzweig once wrote, “there has been no road there these one hundred and fifty years. Its prolongation into modem times, to be sure, ‘is still there,’ but under the best of circumstances this is only one among innumerable roads, no longer the road. So we shall have to content ourselves with the unity of the countryside. Let us hope that the day will come when there will be a main road running through it once again. And I believe that that day will come. Or rather not some one road surely, but a system of roads perhaps. But this can only be guesswork today. It isn’t time yet for systems. Building our individual roads, however, is the right way to go about it.”

Franz Rosenzweig himself found such a way, a way to recapture and reintegrate Jewish law with one’s personal life; he returned to the observance of kashrut, to respect for the Sabbath, and to daily prayers. He achieved all this step by step, and by himself. He championed “something,” his “something,” against Orthodox Jews who wanted “everything” and atheist Jews who wanted “nothing.” In a letter to Rudolf Hallo, dated November 27, 1922, he wrote:

“Here, as everywhere else, I reject this Everything-or-Nothing politics. Neither the Everything nor the Nothing belongs to us; the Something does. The Something is given to us. We have to settle ourselves down in the Something. I don’t say that my particular Something is an example for anyone else. What may be taken as an example is that I have the courage—just as much against the idealists of the Nothing as against those of the Everything—to live in my Something. This cannot be exemplary as regards detail. I’m really only beginning. I don’t know what will come out of it, and don’t want to know. I hope and know that others are beginning, too. Something exemplary will develop out of the whole. I, we, all those who don’t say ‘Everything or Nothing,’ are today trying once more to do what Jewish liberalism tried to do a hundred years ago and failed in. It failed because it tried to set up principles first and then act according to them. These principles remained, like the ones they opposed, officers without soldiers, hence fathers without children. We begin with the act. Let the principle for it be formed in time to come, by ourselves or by others. I silently hope that, some day, in decades, I shall know the principles, the laws, ‘the Law,’ at last, and that I shall once again be able to open my mouth and teach. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s I or others—the best would be: I and others.”

A deep insight into the nature of the Law is at the bottom of this: Judaism is not Law. It creates Law, but is not Law itself. It “is” being a Jew.

What Rosenzweig again and again came back to was living experience, not the dead appropriation of stores of knowledge, forms of tradition, or even the imitation of lives lived by others, but the realization of Biblical law in one’s own life out of inner necessity. The Law, which as written in the Bible stands for everyone, should in this hour become a living command precisely for me. And anyone who studies Torah in the right frame of mind can, like me, come upon this re-transformation of Law into commandment. Rosenzweig experienced what had been experienced in ages past: the priority of revelation over Law, the priority of God as Lord over God as Lawgiver. “Only man in his sluggishness changes the commands into Law—by the way in which he carries them out—changes them into something systematized, capable of being obeyed without fear and trembling.”

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Franz Rosenzweig’s way has been an example for many people of our era; but neither his way nor another’s can serve us all in common. All of us today must go our several ways—ultimately, we feel sure, to arrive at the one goal where all our ways shall meet. That goal lies beyond all our individual lives. We have no authoritative Judaism of our own to set over against that of earlier times or against the Judaism of those among us who still represent that earlier time in their lives, and we may look ashamed on all our miserable efforts bespeaking, it would seem, no more than the weakness of our faith. Yet such as it is, we must stand by it as our life’s reality, and seek to realize so much of the Torah as we individually can, according to our living faith. We may feel ashamed and self-conscious at setting aside Friday evenings for quiet conversation with friends, instead of going to the synagogue and lighting candles at home. But if that is all we can do—that is what we must do.

So long as every one of us today strives to make real the possibility that is his, we can be certain that our contemporary Jewish faith, for all its inability to realize the Law in full, has not yet ceased to be part of the tradition.

And should we meet up, as we go our way, with those figures standing at the beginning of post-Biblical history, I am confident that the great rabbis will indeed smile in astonishment at the appearance of their descendants, but they will surely never despise us. They, who have handed down sayings that all our ponderings shall never exhaust, will surely stand in awe before the mystery of God’s ways. Ben Azzai said: “Despise no man and deem nothing impossible for there is not a man that has not his hour, and there is not a thing that has not its place” (Aboth, IV, 3).

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