In the history of every religion there are periods of dynamic growth, when the faith is open to developments originating from within and to accretions from the outside. In such periods—as, for example, the formative age of Pharisaic Rabbinic Judaism—we find very little systematic theology and even less dogmatic fixing of creed. But these periods of dynamic growth alternate with others of theological stocktaking and creedal formulation, when the attempt is made to view the totality of inherited religious notions from a single perspective, and to bring them into a unified system. Such stock-taking becomes particularly important when a religious community or church has to compete for the loyalty of its erstwhile adherents against the attractions of outside influences and alien philosophical or religious teachings. Thus we find St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century not merely listing the doctrines of his church, but presenting them as a summa contra gentiles. In Judaism, too, whenever we come upon a creedal formulation or an attempt at systematization, we shall not go far astray in looking for overtones of either contra gentiles or of contra haereses.

The present is obviously one of those periods in the history of Judaism that call for a summa of this kind. The earlier dogmatic formulations of Judaism have been found wanting by a generation born and raised in this scientific-pragmatic-psychologic age. The absolute rule of Jewish law—which in itself had been instrumental in insuring Jewish survival—broke down more than a hundred years ago, while the possibility of reconciling certain prevalent notions in philosophy and religion with the somewhat nebulous content of what passes as “Judaism” has, to say the least, become problematical.

Abba Hillel Silver’s Where Judaism Differed is one of the more noteworthy attempts recently made to meet this need for a summa. The general effect of Rabbi Silver’s book is bound to be disturbing, if only because it injects a note of discord into the current harmonious symphony of what is known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition”—a very popular concept by which both Jews and Christians stand to profit. For Christians, the idea of a continuous tradition with Judaism provides a respectable pedigree, making Christianity no mere newcomer on the scene of religion, but simply the legitimate heir of the old (pre-Christian) covenant with Israel. For Jews the hyphen which links “Judeo” to “Christian” provides a hope of gaining acceptance: something of the taken-for-granted-ness of Christianity is likely to rub off on Judaism as a result of their collocation.

Dr. Silver does not deny the “underlying unity” of Judaism and Christianity—and Islam, for that matter—and he points out that there are wide areas of common interest in which all religions can cooperate in mutual helpfulness and respect. But the bulk of his book is devoted to an analysis of the far-reaching differences which are fundamental and serious enough to make us pause before we again consider either Judaism or Christianity as mere appendages of each other.

But if this emphasis is bound to have a disturbing effect in some circles, it will also be reassuring in others. For speak as we may of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” the fact remains that Jews have always been a group apart, and the search for the raison d’être of this separate Jewish existence gives more than an occasional headache to the poorly informed Jew. Does Judaism merely mean Christianity minus the Christ? Is the Church perhaps right in maintaining that the true “fulfillment” of the “Old Testament” is to be found in the New, that Judaism became fossilized with (or some time before) the appearance of Jesus—so that ancestral loyalty rather than personal conviction is the force that keeps Judaism alive? Or is Judaism inherently worthwhile—not only for the Jew, but for the world as a whole?

Dr. Silver’s book is written out of a profound conviction that Judaism is intrinsically valuable, and his eloquent arguments can do much to dispel the stereotyped image of Judaism which Christian polemicists have produced, and which Toynbee has recently attempted to foster. This book may also be the sympton of a new birth, of self-respect and self-confidence on the part of Jews, the emergence of a Jewry willing to share rather than to hide, to teach rather than to submerge.

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Where Judaism differed is, then, a work of Jewish apologetics. It has become fashionable to sneer at apologetics and to treat of religious problems as if they existed in a vacuum. But apologetics is nothing more than the defense of Judaism against the dominant intellectual climate of the surrounding world, and as such it has formed the basis of great Jewish literature throughout the ages. The Bible itself can be read as Judaism’s answer to Palestinian paganism. The Rabbis of the Mish-nah, Talmud, and Midrash had to reckon first with Hellenistic-Roman influences, and then with nascent and rising Christianity. The great Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages—including, of course, Maimonides—aimed at defining the superiority of Judaism to Christianity, Islam, and the various Greek philosophical systems that had been re-interpreted to suit the theological needs of the day. Franz Rosen-zweig himself, for all his sneering at apologetics, cannot be understood outside the context of the Hegelian Idealism to which he opposed his philosophy of Judaism.

It is only to be expected, therefore, that a Jewish writer today should address himself to the confrontation of Judaism with 20th-century Christianity in general and the existentialist trend in Christianity in particular—all the more so since several attempts have already been made to carry the concepts of Christian existentialism into the heart of Judaism itself.

But though Dr. Silver spends so much time in polemicizing against “what was excluded” by Judaism, he is far from implying that Judaism is mere negation, nothing but the rejection of non-Judaism. A whole chapter of his book is given over to the subject of “Being Receptive [to other cultures]”: “Jews never sought to isolate themselves intellectually or spiritually behind an iron wall except in periods of persecution, when isolation was forced upon them, or when the surrounding culture was deemed morally noxious and threatened to submerge their own values.”

To set the record straight, Dr. Silver also has to account for the Jewish “rejection” of Jesus and Christianity. The chapter “On Rejecting Treasures” is a variation on the old Jewish quip about the New Testament: “It is both good and new; but what is good is not new, and what is new is not good.” What the Jews rejected, says Dr. Silver, “was the Messianism of Jesus, Paul’s onslaught on the Law, his gospel of redemption through the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus, and the doctrine of God incarnate in man. How could it have been otherwise?” And again: “Judaism rejected nothing in the teachings of Jesus which, if accepted, would have added one cubit to its stature or in any way reenforced its monotheism or its moral code.”

The rest of the book is an elaboration on this theme. What emerges is a Judaism which neither despises reason nor attempts to suppress human instincts. This Judaism is vitally concerned with social progress, and it does not regard itself as superior to man’s material needs and to their satisfaction. It can take in its stride Aldous Huxley’s condescending reference to “humanistic meliorism,” or T. S. Eliot’s finicism about “devising the perfect refrigerator and working out a rational morality.” Man’s reaching out for mastery over nature, his enterprise, his prosperity, and his belief in his high destiny were never judged by this Judaism to foe haughtiness or pride, the kind of sin on which Christian existentialism harps so continuously. This Judaism knows of no Fall or Original Sin, and consequently it needs no “saviours.” “Pessimism is a form of atheism, for it omits God from man’s calculations.”

Similarly, this Judaism sees no religious virtue in shunning the enjoyment of life. What asceticism there arose in Judaism was always confined to the fringe sects, and never entered the mainstream. Judaism believes in the equality of men as well as in man’s freedom of moral choice. True enough, we cannot overlook the definite limitations of environment and heredity, “but these are not ironclad, absolute, or unalterable. While man is not all-powerful, he is not powerless either.”

Nor, with all its emphasis on the blessing of peace, does Judaism stand for absolute pacifism. The commandment that we “resist not evil” (which finds its classic formulation in the Sermon on the Mount) can be understood only in terms of Jesus’ mystical conception of the “end of the world.” Not only could this not appeal to his Jewish contemporaries, longing for liberation from the Roman yoke, but the Church itself “pushed it far into the background.” Judaism, per contra, while it hates war and the shedding of blood, nevertheless “summoned men to resist all evil—the evil in themselves and the evil in society.” Finally, Judaism, as Dr. Silver sees it, rejects the view that “death is better than life,” and—though doctrines of resurrection and immortality did gain admission from the outside—the main emphasis of Judaism remained this-worldly, believing that “there is a blessed immortality in the echoing renown of one’s life on earth.”

Of particular importance within the climate of contemporary theological thought is Dr. Silver’s chapter on “Avoiding Alternatives.” “The teachers of Judaism almost instinctively rejected a formula of Either/Or in assaying religious values.” Rather can it be said that they were not afraid to face a paradox with an answer of “Both!” This applies to such problems as the conflict between Divine Justice and Divine Love, between the individual and the community, between God and man, faith and reason, social justice and private property, loyalty to the original Torah and evolution of the “Oral Law,” halachah and aggadah, divine omniscience and man’s free will. “Judaism frankly confronted the paradoxes which exist in theologic and philosophic thought. But while its Sages wrestled with them on the plane of inquiry, they did not for a moment slow down the pursuit of their moral objectives.”

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If, then, we drop all the beliefs and ideas from which Dr. Silver’s idaism “differs,” we are left more or less with the doctrinal content of what (rightly or wrongly) has come to be known as “classical” Reform Judaism—a theocentric humanism, liberal and optimistic in its outlook, and broad in its sympathies. Dr. Silver’s awareness of the historic continuity which links the modern Jew spiritually as well as physically to the Israel of the Bible, his mastery of the sources of Rabbinic Judaism and his use of them in the presentation of doctrine, no less than his firm conviction of the permanent character of Jewish separateness, all make it impossible to accuse his statement of “classical” Reform Judaism—as other statements of it have on occasion been justifiably accused—of representing nothing but a form of Unitarianism. It is only to be expected, of course, that a Zionist leader like Abba Hillel Silver would modify the “classical” platform at least in one of its planks. “Judaism,” he tells us, “saw no inconsistency between religious universalism and nationalism”; and, in the face of earlier one-sided interpretations of “Prophetic Religion,” he argues that “the prophets of Israel were strong ‘nationalists.’”

This may help to disarm those critics whose opposition to Reform Judaism was called forth by its early anti-Zionist bias. But Dr. Silver does not significantly modify any other planks of the classical platform, and traditionalists who give top priority to what is so un-Jewishly called “customs and ceremonies,” or even “folkways,” will find no reinstatement of the centrality of the mitzvot in his book (though Judaism as he conceives it would be able to go along as easily with a maximum of ritual observance as with the barest minimum). In this Dr. Silver is pretty much at one with the official Reform position today. For even the modern revisions of early Reform (such as the “Columbus Platform” of 1937), which encourage a greater amount of ceremonial practice, have provided no more adequate theological basis for such practice than did the “classical” formulations. Despite the recent increase in “ceremonial pageantry” among Reform Jews, it cannot truthfully be said that official Reform Judaism has yet revised its theological stand on the matter of mitzvot.

Where Dr. Silver—like classical Reform itself—is most fundamentally at variance with the theological temper of the day is in his optimism and his faith in human capacities; in short, his liberalism. It is only too obvious to the fashionable neo-orthodox school of theology (both Protestant and Jewish) that liberalism “did not work,” that its irrelevance and shallowness are amply demonstrated by the evidence of 20th-century political floundering and the general state of “anxiety” and “estrangement” that marks the private life of modern man. The fact, is, however, that all this evidence of the “bankruptcy” of liberalism can no more impugn the attachment of a man to the values of liberalism than similar evidence of the human authorship of the Bible can impugn a belief in the divine origin of Scripture. An espousal of the cause of liberalism is as much a “commitment” as the “leap of faith” on which a Reinhold Niebuhr and a Will Herberg base their own religious philosophy.

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Dr. Silver, however, does not offer his book as a restatement of classical Reform Judaism; he wants to be taken for an exponent of Judaism as a whole. “Judaism’s spiritual message remained one and the same through the ages,” so that “while numerous inconsistencies may be found in it which should neither be ignored nor exaggerated unduly, there is clearly visible in Judaism a steady and dominant coherence, a self-consistency, which links together all its stages of change and development and gives it structure and unity of tone and character. It possesses the unity not of a system but of a symphony.” We are particularly warned against the “temptation to exploit a stray quotation which may be found in some corner of Jewish literature and to make it carry more than its weight in order to establish some major deviation from normative Judaism.”

Here we get into dangerous territory. George Foot Moore, in his monumental work on the Judaism of the first centuries of the Christian Era, established a general consensus of opinion from among the various utterances of the Tannaim, and, discounting the views of apocalypticists and other sectarians who were by-passed in the future development of Judaism, he was able to define the nature of “normative Judaism.” But to determine what has been “normative” in the subsequent seventeen centuries is no easy task.

“Judaism,” the late Dr. Leo Baeck recognized in his Essence of Judaism, “did not affix itself to any particular period so as to finish up with it; never did it become complete. The task abides, but not its solution. The old revelation always becomes a new revelation: Judaism experiences a continuous renaissance.” The practical consequences of this are apparent in the courageous way in which Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism handled the adaptation of Biblical law to the changing conditions of the times.¹ But what about the doctrinal content of Judaism? This became a real problem from the 18th century on.

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Moses Mendelssohn, trying to reconcile his Deistic philosophy with traditional Judaism, had claimed that Judaism was “revealed Law,” but that the revelation was not given in order to teach Israel the “truths of religion.” These latter were universal,-and human reason their source. In other words, what is “normative” in Judaism—to paraphrase Mendelssohn—is the mitzvot or obedience to the divine law—a law which will remain in force until such time as God Himself sees fit to abolish it as publicly and unmistakably as He originally promulgated it.

Curiously enough, though Mendelssohn appears as the “father” of Reform Judaism in so many popular presentations of modern Jewish history, the early Reformers actually turned his philosophy upside down in order to arrive at their own position. Distinguishing between the “temporal” and the “eternal,” they relegated the whole system of Jewish law and mitzvot to the former sphere, and declared that the essence of Judaism was precisely its doctrinal content, those “eternal verities of Israel’s faith” for which Mendelssohn had been unable to find a specifically “Jewish” classification. As far as the Reformers were concerned, therefore, the “normative” in Judaism lay in the realm of belief rather than in practice.

Now, it would have been ludicrous if the Reformers, of all people, had shown themselves unaware of the changes to which the doctrinal content of Judaism had been forever subject. They themselves, for example, rejected the traditional belief in an ultimate Jewish return to Palestine, as well as the belief in a personal Messiah, reinstating instead the concept of the “Mission of Israel” which, while not altogether novel, had lain dormant for a number of centuries. Change, therefore, had always taken place, though perhaps, as far as the early Reformers were concerned, less so in the realm of doctrine than in the realm of the Law.

Would it, then, be correct to say that the “normative” in Judaism, in both creed and deed, has been open to continual change, never representing any fixed or final form? To answer in the affirmative would tell us about Judaism only that it is a living organism, subject, like every vital thing, to the law, the “norm,” of change. If, however, we wish to understand the nature of the constant substratum on which any change takes place, we must become aware of the twofold meaning of the term “normative.” Where, for example, “normative” means a statistical average, “normative Judaism” would be determined authoritatively only by means of statistical inquiry.

An illustration will make this clear. That “the righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come” was the opinion of one rabbi in the Talmud. Another rabbi disagreed. Since it was not a legal discussion which prompted the expression of these views, no vote was taken to decide the issue once and for all. But what came to be the prevalent view of Judaism as a whole? The famous 19th-century master of Jewish bibliography, Moritz Steinschneider, actually went through the totality of Jewish literature available to him, carefully counting the number of authors who had adopted the positive view as against the negative. Thus Steinschneider discovered that the overwhelming majority of authoritative Jewish writers, through the ages, believed that “the righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Here, then, in the face of anti-Jewish attacks based on the assumption that Judaism denies the possibility of salvation to Gentiles, it can be stated unequivocally that the “normative” Jewish view on this question has been universalistic and not exclusivist.

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To speak of “normative Judaism” in terms of the “average,” is to espouse, either intentionally or unwittingly, the statistical approach. It is, however, extremely doubtful that our sources are ample enough to permit a statistical examination of all aspects of Jewish belief and practice. It is far more likely, therefore, that the phrase “normative Judaism” is usually meant to convey the “norm” in terms of law and standards. The “normative” in Judaism would in this case be the law of Judaism’s very being, that aspect of it which makes Judaism what it is, and distinguishes the “mainstream” from heretical and schismatic extremes as well as from alien religious systems. From this perspective we know, without recourse to statistics, that notwithstanding all change and development certain basic Jewish beliefs have remained fairly constant for at least two thousand years—whether or not they are retained in modern restatements of the essence of Judaism. The modern writer on Judaism who purports to relate what has always been “normative Judaism” would have to take these beliefs into account, even though, as an individual thinker, he may see fit to advocate their rejection or reformulation.

It is, therefore, surprising to find Dr. Silver—who is attempting to define “normative Judaism” in this latter sense—quoting the 15th-century philosopher Joseph Albo in support of the statement that “Judaism does not stand or fall with the belief in a Messiah,” without referring to the polemical context (a Christian-Jewish “dialogue,” medieval style) in which Albo’s statement has to be read. Again, Dr. Silver’s invocation of the 4th-century Amora, Hillel, who denied the coming of the Messiah altogether, is a misuse of precisely the kind of “stray quotation” against which he himself warns us. And, considering that every single traditional Jewish service contains a reference to the coming of a personal Messiah, is it really fair to say that the “Jews sensed that the idea [of a Messiah], inspiring as a hope, was hopeless as a reality. An actual Messiah is always unfulfillment. . . .” True enough, Reform Judaism got rid of the belief in a personal Messiah, but it changed its liturgy accordingly (“redemption” instead of the “redeemer”) and emphasized the “Messianic Age” in place of the Messiah. It did not, however, deny that it differed from traditional Judaism on that score.

And even more surprising is Dr. Silver’s treatment of chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Genesis, the chapters which Christians read as the “Story of the Fall,” and on which they base their doctrine of Original Sin. Modern Christian existentialism, with the help of the process of Entmythologisierung, has been able to salvage the essential “truth” of that story, even if its historicity has had to be abandoned under the impact of the “higher criticism” of the Bible. Will Herberg (in Judaism and Modern Man) looks at the story through the same Christian spectacles for the benefit of the modern Jew. “Both ‘original sin’ and ‘original perfection,’” says Herberg, “are aspects of the existential moment, true of every point in history but not themselves historical.” Jewish tradition indeed knows of “the sin of the first man,” and of the loss of Paradise as its consequence. But it was left to Christianity to work out in detail the doctrine of the “Fall” with its universal human implications. And it was left to Will Herberg within the framework of Judaism to relate this to the cardinal sin of “Pride,” and (with an assist from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”) to tell us that the original perfection of Paradise is the perfection of the idea; the fall occurs in the transition to action. “In idea, the self is capable of achieving a position in which its own anxieties and interests are transcended, but when the idea gives way to action, the self always manages to insinuate itself again at the heart of the enterprise.” This interpretation is perfectly in line with the famous words of the Apostle Paul in the seventh chapter of Romans: “The good I would, I do not, and the evil I would not, that I do. . . when I would do good, evil is present with me.”

Dr. Silver is right in pointing out that the doctrine of Original Sin has no place in “normative Judaism.” But he goes further than this in his rejection of that doctrine. Even without their Christian interpretation, the chapters in Genesis which Christians take as the basis for their doctrine of Original Sin arouse Dr. Silver’s dissatisfaction because these Biblical chapters themselves reflect views which he cannot accept as “normative” Jewish doctrine. (Since he feels the need to throw out the text as well as the interpretation, he almost makes it appear as if the text would lend support to the Christian and Herbergian interpretation, after all!)

“The myths of chapters two to eleven of Genesis,” Dr. Silver writes, “filtered and reworked ethically and monotheistically though they were, do not escape the inevitable tragic denouement characteristic of all ancient mythology.” On the other hand, “the creation account which is given in the first chapters of Genesis (1-2:3) represents the final Biblical recension and is entirely purged of all mythological elements. It knows nothing of any Garden of Eden, of any tree of life and tree of knowledge . . . of any beguiling serpent, of any disobedience . . . of any divine curse or of any expulsion from Eden.”

Now this may all be very true, but the fact remains that in “the final Biblical recension” the “offensive” chapters were left intact alongside the more “refined” or “purged” ones. As such they have formed part of “normative Judaism” since the canonization of the Bible—and the Rabbis did not refrain from commenting on them. Whatever Dr. Silver may feel personally about the value of such “mythological” trappings, his researches into origins should not allow him to carry the “fallacy of primitivism” to the point where he is unable to regard two of the first three chapters of the Bible as a constituent part of “normative Judaism.”

The same criticism applies to Dr. Silver’s views on resurrection and immortality. To maintain that these doctrines came into Judaism from the Persians and the Greeks, that their acceptance was at first resisted, and that early (Biblical) Judaism knew nothing of them, is Dr. Silver’s prerogative. Yet the important fact is that these disputed doctrines did ultimately gain admission, and for well nigh two thousand years they have been a relatively conspicuous part of “normative Judaism.”

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All this raises the question of whether it is possible to write the kind of book Dr. Silver has meant to write, a book reflecting his own deeply felt convictions, while at the same time laying claim to an unbroken continuity with the “normative Judaism” of the past. In 1903, the Englishman Morris Joseph wrote his Judaism as Creed and Life in which he set forth what in England might be considered a moderate version of Reform Judaism, and what in America would definitely be classified as Conservatism. He, too, took all of Jewish letters for his province. But in his preface he makes the following point: “From what has been said it will be evident that what I am here presenting is only one view of Judaism. As a consequence, I have left out of account certain doctrines and prescriptions which are irreconcilable with that view.” Such an admission may leave an author wide open to criticism, but probably less so than Dr. Silver’s confident assertion that the Judaism he is describing has been the Judaism of all the ages. A great deal of thinking still needs to be done by other writers to determine the precise relation between modern Jewish thought and the Judaism of the past.

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¹ See my article “The Pharisaic Tradition Today,” COMMENTARY, February 1956.

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