Jewish religious thinking has been no exception in feeling the impact of modern existentialism—a fact to which COMMENTARY’s own pages bear witness. Here Judd L. Teller, a regular contributor, enters a strong dissent, both as a secularist and a Jew, from what he calls the “new American theology,” best represented, he believes, in the writings of Will Herberg, also well known to our readers.
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The widespread, although perhaps not too deeply entrenched, anti-secularism in vogue in America today is not only promoted by such things as Billy Graham’s revivalism and the TV performances of Bishop Sheen; it is also vigorously fanned by a number of former Marxists turned religious. One obvious explanation for the duplication of this anti-secularism inside the American Jewish community is the tendency, noted long ago, for the Jewish world to reproduce inside itself developments in the general world. Another is that the disillusionment produced by the events of the past several decades has hit the Jew, with his early faith in the Enlightenment’s promise of full equality, harder perhaps than other liberals and radicals.
The American Jews Who have progressed from Marxism to Judaism in recent years may be divided into two general categories. There are the “vulgar” but not necessarily anti-secularist ba-alei t’shuvah (returners), the Samuel Ornitzes and Michael Blankforts who produced lachrymose fictional atonements for having broken with parental piety in their youth. And then there are those penitents who required a complete refurbishing of their psyches and a new “system” to replace the one that collapsed. These latter are the “wrathful” prophets, anti-secularists to the hilt. Their mentor on the way to t’shuvah and Judaism has been, perhaps to his own surprise, a Christian theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, the chief exponent of American Christian existentialism.
But Dr. Niebuhr has influenced more Jews than just those who were once Marxists. The rabbis seem the most addicted. Today nearly all American rabbinical periodicals in English manifest some kind of preoccupation with Niebuhr. Judaism, a quarterly largely devoted to Jewish religious writing, published an essay last year by Rabbi Levi A. Olan of Texas that forcefully opposed to Niebuhr’s position the traditional Hebraic one. The next issue carried an equally vigorous defense of Niebuhr by one of Judaism’s contributing editors, Emil A. Fackenheim, who proclaimed that “Niebuhr’s interpretation of the Hebraic view of history, whatever its shortcomings, is vastly superior to that of his critic.”
Centuries ago Jewish religious thinkers debated, modified, and absorbed Greek philosophy. But these same thinkers always avoided encounters with Christianity—not only out of prudence but also because they did not deem theology itself worthy of polemic. Maimonides, when coerced into debate by the Church, restricted himself to challenging the contention that the Messiah had come and to refuting in general terms Christianity’s claim to be a continuation of Hebraic tradition. That a Christian theologian should become an operative influence in Jewish religious writing is an unprecedented development. And that some of those disillusioned with Marxism should find solace in a Judaism refracted through the prism of a Christian theologian is of special significance.
I believe myself typical of a great many Jewish secularists in my attitude to the new American Jewish theology. Its appreciable reliance on a version of Christian theology offends the strong emotional commitment I still retain to Jewish religious history. Its anti-liberal and anti-secular attitudes seem to me to be as menacing to my secular freedoms as they are inconsistent with the essence of What I have been taught to regard as Judaism. Let me explain.
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My grandfathers on both sides were Talmudists by endowment and by training, and Hasidim by family conditioning. These qualities were not always compatible. They rarely journeyed to the Hasidic rebbe, and then only when their wives nagged them about soliciting a blessing for a sickly infant or some such matter. But when they did, they chose their rebbe with discrimination, always for his learning, never for his reputation as a ba-al ness (miracle worker). My father, who came to America in his twenties, recalled to the end of his days his several visits as a youth to the “old Tchortkover” rebbe whose days had been spent “in Torah.” Torah, to my father, was Talmud first. Maimonides was a name uttered in awe: “From Moses to Moses there had arisen no one like Moses.” The Mishneh Torah was more often on his table than on the shelves, and for discourse with his “perplexed” son he would produce the Moreh N’vuchim. There was no question I dared not pose to him, however heretical its intent.
My father’s household was conducted in strict accord with the Shulchan Aruch. If I gradually discarded most of the observances it enjoined, it was because they had worn out their relevance for me personally as a Jew, not because I had come to regard them as the mad maiden aunt in the attic, an embarrassing parental legacy of superstition. The last thing my father demanded was blind obedience to the Word; insisting that na-aseh v’nishma did not mean what it had been assumed to mean, he explained: naaseh, we shall live, experience, acquire the capacity for judgment, and only then v’nishma, shall we deliberate and decide—the Jews wandered forty years in the wilderness not to atone but to discover. Every din (law) was pertinent to daily living, every mitzvah self-sufficiently good, and none presented itself in the nimbus of fear of an “above,” a “beyond,” a “hereafter.”
Dr. Yosef Dov Soloveichik, the distinguished Orthodox authority, explains this attitude in an essay “Ish Halachah” (The Legalist), in the April-September 1944 issue of the rabbinical quarterly Talpiot. Jewish law is so wonderfully intertwined with the physical world that a field or a brook recalls to the “legalist” a vast area of jurisprudence, and the new moon, as he blesses its appearance, recalls the cycle which “determines the months, the seasons, and the holidays for Israel, and which is verified by exact astronomical calculations.” The Halachah is rooted in the realities of the physical world.
Thus, hypothetically at least, it is possible for me as a nationalist Jew to go through life not believing in God, yet observing most of the Halachic prescriptions. One of the great forebears of Dr. Soloveichik, the famous 19th-century Reb Chaim Wolozhiner, heir of the Gaon of Vilna, allowed for just such a circumstance. “Continuous prosperity,” he wrote, “comes only through the practical mitzvot, and hence it is imaginable that a man who sits in the succah all seven days, roasts the Passover offering, and tastes of the matzah shall have done God’s will even though he may, God forbid, deny the existence of God.”
It was the ethical intent of Halachah that was central in the kind of Jewish home in which I was brought up. Fasting was required only several times a year, but performing a mitzvah always involved charity and regard for others. Words like erlichkeit (honesty) and orentlichkeit (uprightness) were pivotal in the “ethical culture” of my father’s house.
Although a secularist myself, I have generally opposed those restrictive and parochial forms of Jewish secularism which raised a single, sometimes very transient episode or motif in Jewish history above all others and hailed it as the substance of Jewishness. Yiddishism has been a very obvious instance of this. Also Jewish socialism, which assumed that the basic conditions prevailing in the general community were duplicated point for point in the Jewish Pale; and finally the Ethical Culturists, who tried to separate Jewish morality from its historical-national context.
The restrictive secularists of an earlier day were wrong in branding Judaism as anti-secular; the Jewish religious existentialists today are wrong in declaring secularism out of bounds to Jews. History, as I read it, shows traditional Judaism to have been in steady evolution toward secularism. Judaism is debate, not dialogue; monologue and often even dialogue are the manner of faith; debate is the manner of philosophy and jurisprudence. Judaism combines both philosophy and jurisprudence, and that is the essence of Halachah. By impeaching secularism and exalting theology, the Jewish existentialists impugn the basic elements of my Jewishness, as well as those elements in American society that have made it possible for Jews here to live a more decently human life than in any other golah.
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Two names come most readily to mind in connection with the new American Jewish theology: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Will Herberg. Heschel is not a ba-al t’shuvah; he has long taught in Hebrew religious seminaries; whatever his private spiritual travail, he has never strayed. He can claim his role as a re-interpreter of Hasidism by the right of natural succession, as a descendant of one of the great dynasties. For this reason Heschel’s neo-Hasidism is authentic in a way that Buber’s, whatever its merits, could never be. There is a strong element of volkstimlichkeit (“folk feeling”) in his presentations, so that the secular Jew can receive them almost like Halachah, delighting in the parts but not accepting the whole. A contemplative religionist, Heschel offers one his religious philosophy but he does not attempt to impose it.
Herberg, Who most typically expresses the new American Jewish theology, is quite different. Like Niebuhr, he wields sociological weapons to impugn liberalism, humanism, and secularism; he is active and assertive and wants to change American society. For this reason he is of immediate concern to me as a secularist American and Jew.
What are the roots of Herberg’s theology? His book Judaism and Modern Man, an Interpretation of Jewish Religion (1951) lists few sources that would indicate familiarity with the latter-day anshei halachah (legalists) or, for that matter, with Hasidic volkstimlichkeit. The major influences on him have been, in the order in which he himself gives them: Reinhold Niebuhr, Solomon Schechter, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. Schechter’s writings afforded him his “first appreciation of how vital and relevant, how contemporary rabbinic tradition can be”; “I have almost without exception followed his interpretation of that tradition.” “To Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig I owe not only my basic ‘existentialist’ approach but also . . . my understanding of how to establish my religious existence in Jewish terms in the modern world.”
But “what I owe to Reinhold Niebuhr in the formation of my general theological outlook,” he states in the Foreword to Judaism and Modern Man, “every page of this book bears witness.” In an appreciation of Niebuhr in the Union Theological Seminary Quarterly Review of May 1956, Herberg calls his own book on Judaism “avowedly Niebuhrian in temper and thought.” He goes on to say:
My first encounter with the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr came in the later 1930’s. I was then at a most crucial moment in my life. My Marxist faith had collapsed under the shattering blows of contemporary history. . . . I was left literally without any ground to stand on, deprived of the commitment and understanding that alone made life livable. . . . What impressed me most profoundly was the paradoxical combination of realism and radicalism that Niebuhr’s “prophetic” faith made possible. Here was a faith that transferred the center of its absolute commitment to what was really absolute—the transcendent God—and was therefore able to face the real facts of life unafraid, with open eyes. . . . What I do know is that this “meeting” with Niebuhr’s thought—I did not yet know him personally—quite literally changed my mind and my life. Humanly speaking, it “converted” me, for in some manner I cannot describe, I felt my whole being, and not merely my thinking, shifted to a new center. I could now speak about God and religion without embarrassment, though as yet without very much understanding of what was involved.
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Here then is a Jewish theologian who became a ba-al t’shuvah through the agency of a Lutheran clergyman whom some fellow Christian theologians have labeled “neo-orthodox”—a Protestant who, although indisputably philo-Jewish in his conduct and preachments, nonetheless insists, doctrinally, that “it was the Roman law, the pride of all pagan civilization, and Hebraic religion, the acme of religious devotion, which crucified the Lord,” and that “the record is pretty plain and the fact that the Jewish elders rather than the Roman soldiers were the real crucifiers is supported not only by evidence but by logic. The prophets of religion are always martyred by the religious rather than by the irreligious. The Romans, being irreligious, were not sufficiently fanatical to initiate the crucifixion.”
The essential affinity between Herberg and Niebuhr was from the outset sociological. Like Niebuhr, Herberg was at one time drawn to Marxism. Like Niebuhr, he still subscribes to some of its insights, and resorts, for his own purposes, to its dialectical method. Repudiating the whole of Marxism while still appreciating some of its parts, Herberg, like Niebuhr, also repudiates the Enlightenment and all of humanistic liberalism. The latter he lumps together with Marxism as “utopian” and dangerous because it encourages man, with his “sinful nature” and “diseased reason,” to overrate his own limited capacities for good and strive for the perfection which is God’s alone. In short, the humanistic liberal deems himself capable of establishing heaven on earth by his own sovereign efforts and without the interposition of “grace.” In Herberg’s own words, man must invest his “faith in the true Absolute” and “commit himself to God without qualification and reservation.”
Clearly, he is not an ordinary ba-al t’shuvah, but a seeker after a specific kind of Jewishness and Jewish doctrine. Judaism must replace for him a “man-made true Absolute” with a “truer Absolute” that will not disillusion him as Marxism did; because this “truer Absolute” is God, it cannot be tested by man-made history, but only by God-graced time.
Although Jewish tradition has not downgraded man while upgrading God as the existentialists have done, it has never quite believed that man had the capacity for discovering the “true Absolute,” and only on occasion has it demanded kavanah of him, commitment “without qualification and reservation.”
“The dinim [laws] of the Torah have been called halachot,” wrote Rabbi Chaim Wolozhiner, “because the principal thing is observance of the mitzvot, and not the clinging to the Living God.” How closely the kind of religious commitment Herberg desiderates resembles the demands of a secular absolutism is evident from a passage he quotes from Rosenzweig, stating that there are truths a man “cannot prove true except with the sacrifice of his life, and finally . . . those the truth of which can be proved only by staking the lives of all the generations.” Kiddush ha-Shem, as I read Jewish tradition, has less often meant the sacrifice of one’s life than demonstrative action, the offering of an example. Jews died at the stake less often because they sought to bear witness (prove the truth) than because they would not bear false witness. Truths that require for their verification the “staking of the lives of all the generations” seem closer to the medieval Christian and the contemporary totalitarian tradition. That Franz Rosenzweig should have embraced this concept was not surprising, because this ba-al t’shuvah to a personal Halachah was, like his antipodal predecessors, the early German Reform rabbis, intent on some sort of reconciliation between Judaism and the Lutheran environment in which he lived.
This Lutheran environment was, for religious and ethnic reasons, sin-obsessed. Marxism too is sin-obsessed, in an intensely secular way that nevertheless smacks of the Inquisitorial and thus has its own medieval reminiscences. It is from Lutheranism and Marxism that Herberg’s obsession with sin derives. With ardent appreciation he writes of “Niebuhr’s rediscovery of the classical doctrine of ‘original sin,’ which religious liberalism and secular idealism combined to deride and obscure.” And elsewhere he has written: “. . . the perfectionist has no sense whatever of the depth of evil and unreason in sinful man”; “. . . sin is a frantic attempt at self-absolutization”; “. . . sin is one of the great facts of human life. It lies at the root of man’s existentialist plight. In the last analysis it is sin and the fruits of sin from which we require to be saved”; “. . . this sense of guilt is the mark of our human condition.”
Guilt is obviously used here in quite another sense than the psychological one, although Herberg likes to point to the fact that depth psychology has confirmed these theological insights. And though Herberg does emphasize the traditional Jewish t’shuvah, how differently from Heschel he does so!
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Although Hasidism has been, in certain aspects, a sin-conscious movement, Heschel takes a far more qualified position on “sin.” “The absence of the awareness of the mystery of evil is a tragic blindness of modern man,” Heschel writes, yet when Niebuhr “characterizes evil as an inevitable fact of human existence,” it is “difficult from the viewpoint of Biblical theology to sustain Niebuhr’s view, plausible and profound as it is.” “It is profoundly true,” writes Heschel, “that goodness may turn to cruelty, piety to fanaticism, faith to arrogance. Yet this, we believe, is a perpetual possibility rather than a necessity, a threat rather than an inevitable result.”
Yosef Dov Soloveichik, expressing the “legalist’s” displeasure with the habit of “poking one’s finger at the painful spot of sin,” denies the inevitability of the chain reaction of sin, because man, by exercise of moral choice, can in his present and future conduct transform into mitzvah what has been conceived in sin. He also tells us that when his renowned forebear, Reb Chaim Brisker, was requested by the great Rabbi Yitzchak Blazer of Petersburg to introduce the sin-obsessed, ascetic musar into his yeshiva’s curriculum, he replied: “Castor oil is prescribed for those who need it; to prescribe it for the healthy would be disastrous.” Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook warned of “occasions when the inner morality stirs so fiercely in man” as to “upset the harmony of life.” He counseled that “the most important thing is spiritual wholeness [perfection], and that man should not be depressed if he has sinned, but should seize the Torah,” because “the world is full of harmony; the reverberating echoes of its internal morality penetrate all creation, and never has the soul of man been completely sinful.”
Neither Herberg nor even Niebuhr asserts man’s “complete sinfulness.” Nevertheless, the difference between their emphasis and that of traditional Judaism is unmistakable, even though one may discover, as Herberg has, passages in the Talmud that in isolation convey the impression of a sin-preoccupied culture. It remains that Judaism, or Jewishness as lived, has disproved Herberg’s contentions; a guilt-ridden people would have been unable to survive inwardly the constant censure and intimidation to which they were subjected in the Christian world.
Herberg habitually introduces categories into Jewish history that are foreign to it, on the assumption that what happened outside Jewish history had also to happen inside it. This often leads to serious misreadings of Jewish history—misreadings that show the extent to which he has carried prejudices of his Marxist days with him into the Noah’s Ark of his t’shuvah. “Neither the Synagogue nor the Church,” he writes, “can deny its share of responsibility for the fateful schism between religion and the movement for radical social reform that has come to be known as socialism.” Under both Synagogue and Church, “institutional religion became more and more identified with the upper classes of society,” and “the religious spirit became increasingly permeated with a life-denying otherworldliness stemming from sources far removed from Hebraic spirituality.” Conceding that the Jewish community “was itself outside the bounds of official society and at the very best maintained a precarious existence,” he argues that, nonetheless, “in its own way and under its own conditions,” the Synagogue, too, was guilty of “sanctifying existing forms of economic exploitation and political privilege.” Calvinism and British Puritan radicalism admittedly contributed importantly to humanitarian reform, yet among Jews
hardly a trace of the radical activism of the prophets was to be discerned in conventional religious life. Legalistic conformism and otherworldly quietism met and sustained each other. Forces of innovation and discontent could find only peripheral expression, further and further removed from the center of official religion. Amorphous lower-class revolt is to be detected in the various Messianic movements and emphatically in Hasidism, while bourgeois reform interests came to the fore in the Haskalah. But none of these impulses could find either understanding or adequate room for development within the established religious order. The breach became open and irreparable when labor socialism appeared on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For Judaism, far more than Christendom, socialism came into being as a deep schism within the religious community, which had hitherto been virtually identical with Jewish society. The Synagogue, no more than the Church, proved able to find place for the new social forces that were coming to the fore and claiming their rights in community life.
But is it not misleading to balance a capitalized Synagogue, as Herberg does, with a capitalized Church? The Church was indeed a state, forced to relinquish its authority in temporal matters, yet still retaining tremendous holdings and power. The synagogue was merely a place for study and worship. New synagogues sprang up wherever a dissenting individual or group could gather a minyan about them. Religious authority was vested in the rabbi, who belonged with the economically dispossessed. His legal opinions, based on a long tradition of Halachah, eventually reached rabbis throughout the world. The local kehillah oligarchs, who formed a temporal body, could exercise no religious coercion except through the agency of the rabbi, and he alone was the instrument of the Halachah. The threat of repudiation by his rabbinical peers usually sufficed to check any rabbi who in the weakness of his flesh might have yielded to the commands of the parnassim (local notables).
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As feudalism declined, the rabbinate became preoccupied with the application of Halachah to the new social and economic problems presented by modern times. The great 17th-century legalist, Rabbi Mendel Krochmal, produced on this subject a whole volume of Responsa, which included his invalidation of a poll tax by which the rich had hoped to affect the result of kehillah elections. In the 19th century, Rabbi Moshe Sofer (called the Chasam Sofer), Rabbi Akiba Eiger, and Rabbi Meyer Leibush Malbim pronounced decisions that reflected a deep social awareness. When asked to define a rabbi’s function, Chaim Brisker, who lived into the 20th century, replied: “To speak out against the humiliation of the lonely and rejected, to assert the dignity of the underprivileged and to protect the exploited from their exploiters.” These utterances were not “peripheral expressions”; these men were at the very center of the Jewish religion.
On information from indignant balebatim, the Chasam Sofer was twice arraigned before the authorities, once on a charge of subversion that was punishable by death. The Malbim, on a similar charge, was prevented from preaching for a year by governmental edict, and ultimately banished from Russia. In every century rabbis resigned their positions and moved from kehillah to kehillah rather than surrender to pressure and distort the social intent of Halachah. Herberg’s equation of Church and synagogue reflects the persistence in him of an obsolescent Jewish radicalism that rejected the synagogue’s ritualism as an “opiate” and denounced its nationalist orientation as incompatible with working-class solidarity.
We have seen how Herberg finds the synagogue equally guilty with the Church of indifference to the problems of the social order. How does his existentialist theology interpret the roles of Church and synagogue in the religious order? He bases himself on Rosenzweig, who defined
the twin vocations of Israel and the Church as covenant-communities: “Israel·to represent in time the eternal Kingdom of God, Christianity to bring itself and the world toward that goal.” So defined, the functions of Judaism and Christianity in the divine economy are seen to be organically related—part of one vocation—and yet irreducibly different in their orientations: Judaism looking inward to the Jew; Christianity looking ever outward to the Gentiles, who, through it, are brought to the God of Israel.
Herberg qualifies this by adding that “even for the outgoing function of the conversion of the Gentiles, Israel remains indispensable, though now indirectly so.” He then quotes from Ignaz Maybaum, one of the last anti-Zionist ideologues of the Reform rabbinate: “Church and Synagogue, conscious of their election, know the difference between their places in the world. . . . The mission of Judaism is to endure till the end of the world as the people of the King to whom one day all nations will bow down. The mission of Christianity is to preach to the heathen, to Christianize the countries of the world and the soul of the people.”
To assign Christianity a role complementary to Judaism, as Herberg does, suggests an involvement with Christian theology that not even the most radical of the early Reform rabbis sought or would have welcomed. The Reform rabbis were concerned solely with the status of the Jew in Christian society, at no time with the status of Christianity in Jewish history. They tried to win new dignity for the Jew within Christian society in the best way they knew how—by stripping the “esoteric” from Jewish ritual and by elevating the Dispersion from a penance and a humiliation to an election and a vocation.
But Herberg’s new American Jewish theology interprets the most tragic schism in Jewish history as predestined by the design of the Jews’ “mission.” This brings him very close to the Niebuhrian equation of Sinai and the crucifixion, and invests with anti-traditional and preternatural significance something that from the Jewish viewpoint was an accident of history and politics. The crucifixion of Jesus in Palestine some two thousand years ago might have had considerably less effect on the fate of Jews if, at a certain juncture in world history, Islam had not lost out to Christian arms, thus surrendering large sections of Jewry to Christian domination. The present emergence of Israel and the immigration into that country of Jewries from the East, coupled with the fading away of European Jewish communities, may in the future rescue the Christian-Jewish relationship from theological history and restore it to ordinary history.
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In reviewing will Herberg’s latest book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, James V. Mullaney wrote as follows: “Mr. Herberg’s piety is of the will—love, obedience, fidelity. By selecting the existentialist approach to the Biblical Jewish tradition and excluding all other sources, Mr. Herberg has cut himself off from that uncomplicated love of truth which rejoices in every articulation of the truth.” Herberg has always sought one truth: the Messianic. “Hebraic religion,” which he, like Niebuhr, describes as the “fundamental religious affirmation and commitment held in common by Judaism and Christianity,” has been singled out by Herberg to achieve, not only theologically but also secularly, the Messianic aims that socialism has so far failed to achieve. His one and only truth remains the Messianic truth, which, though a part of Judaism, is hardly its core:
. . . whatever the immediate future may bring, it seems clear that there is now emerging for the first time in two centuries a real basis for the reconciliation of the ancient foes [religion and socialism] a real possibility for the end of a schism that has wrought such havoc in our civilization. . . .
In order to preserve itself as a humane and democratic force in the present-day world, socialism has found it necessary to abandon also the prophetic urgency of its calls and its apocalyptic appeal. . . . [However] men cannot engage in any great and enduring work, involving frustration, hardship and sacrifice, without some sense of vocation and urgency, without some conviction of the lasting significance of what they are doing and without some promise of fulfillment beyond their own limited powers. The social movements of our day, disoriented and deflated by the horrors of the past three decades, do not possess such an ultimate standpoint and are therefore in constant danger of degenerating into vision-less opportunism and futility. . . .
[Consequently] it now remains as the task of our time to reintegrate the socialist idea, the idea of militant action for social justice, into the transcendent eschatology of Hebraic religion. In the eschatological passion of the Prophets, the social radicalism of our time can find the power and the vision to work within history for the fulfillment of history, while realizing that it is not in the time of man or by his hand that the work can be accomplished.
All this seems to indicate that Herberg’s interest in the Jew is in his redemptive-theological dimension. He seems hardly to notice the great contemporary events in Jewish life that exhilarate and frighten, the terrible uncertainties that menace millions of Jews. With his attention riveted on the larger Messianic design, he is inclined to see the individual living Jew as only incidental to it.
Like 19th-century Reform Judaism, which claimed a special “mission” for the Jews to the nations, Herberg is obsessed with salvation and the redemptive role of Jewry—paradoxically enough, seeing how he otherwise wrathfully renounces the Enlightenment and the religious liberalism it gave rise to, which the Reform movement preeminently embodied. “The history of salvation, which is the authentic form of Hebraic faith,” he writes, “is the story of the gracious effort of God to bring a perverse and rebellious world back to the intent of creation through an elect community set apart for that purpose.” However, the very concept of salvation is new to Judaism. As Rabbi Robert S. Gordis has recently pointed out:
The idea of salvation . . . is, to be sure, central to Christianity. It is, however, so far from basic to Judaism that no Hebrew term for the concept exists in the vast expanses of Jewish religious literature, from the Bible through the Talmud and Midrash to the medieval philosophers, and even modern writers have yet to find an adequate Hebrew term for the idea.
The parallelism of Herberg’s existentialist Judaism with 19th-century Reform Judaism is also apparent in his attitude to Israel. His emphasis on galut (exile) as a vocation is in direct succession to the onetime anti-Zionist ideology of the radical Reform rabbinate. Herberg’s position must, of course, take account of the fact that the Jewish state is no longer an idea but a reality. He concedes that in Israel, within the framework of her “national life,” the essential ethics of Judaism “can be given some measure of concrete embodiment.” But he stubbornly argues that
the antithesis between the Jew as the Son of the Covenant and the Jew as citizen of his secular community that gives rise to the peculiar tension of Jewish existence, is basically no more overcome for the Jew in the State of Israel than in the United States, for the secular society of the State of Israel is no more to be simply identified with the covenant-community than is any group of Jews elsewhere in the world.
He even dissents sharply from one of his mentors, Martin Buber: “But it is necessary also to remember what even Buber sometimes tends to forget, that there is an ‘unperformed task’ for the Jew in the Galut as well, and will continue to be throughout history”; and this “unperformed task” devolving upon every Jew individually is “to ‘sanctify the Name’ and to help redeem the evil time.”
But this concept of the “unperformed task,” which was the rationale of the Jewish political and theological radicalisms of an earlier day, appears in a macabre light after the Nazi horrors visited on Jewry in Poland, the center of the various Jewish movements for cultural autonomy, and after the terrible fate of the Jews under Soviet Communism. Nevertheless, Herberg’s words are not without point in the context of the contemporary American Jewish environment.
American Jews today are in many ways in the same position as Germany Jewry was in the 19th century. They have only just emerged from the ghetto of their immigrant condition. They are still in the process of acquiring position and status in the general society. Only in the past few decades have they begun to set their impress on American letters, to enter industries and professions once shut tight against them. However, decreasing economic discrimination only underscores the problem of social exclusion, which must, at least hypothetically, threaten their advance in all the other areas. The radical religious reformers in Germany claimed their right to participate freely in German society, on the ground that the synagogue was as authentically German as the Church. This is precisely what Herberg claims for American Jewry today: that Judaism is as authentically American as Protestantism and Catholicism, the three forming the “triple melting pot.” But the test of his doctrine of the triple melting pot is whether Protestant America is ready to accept an antithetical faith, Judaism, as another denomination like Catholicism, and whether the synagogue can accommodate itself fully to the American scene without sacrificing its authenticity. This remains to be seen.
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Why has Herberg’s new theology gone so largely unchallenged among American rabbis? Primarily because it responds to the needs of that same rabbinate in the crisis that it is at the present undergoing. Many Americans feel guilty because of their relative well-being in a chaotic world, and American Jews in particular are inclined to feel guilty about the exceptional fate that has been theirs in a time that saw six million Jews perish in Europe, and further millions undergo persecution and worse in the USSR. And the rabbinate is all the more vulnerable to these guilt feelings because it now finds itself without a vocation.
At the turn of the century the American rabbinate interpreted its traditional vocation in keeping with the demands of the times: the rabbi ceased to be the judge and interpreter of the Law, and became a prophet. Stephen S. Wise and Judah L. Magnes gave us the prime examples of the embattled prophet-rabbi denouncing wrongs wherever he saw them and joining with his Christian colleagues in preaching the social gospel to an age of “robber barons.” And they also spoke for the harassed among their own people and for the Return to Zion.
But the social gospel has since been embodied in the humanitarian legislation of a welfare state. Israeli ambassadors speak for the Restored Zion. The American Jewish community in its second and third generation does not require the intercession of its rabbis in public affairs. Yet the American rabbi, although now wholly identified with the complacencies of his prosperous community, still maintains the prophetic posture. The result is that he is left without a real vocation. The ensuing discomfort, which would be hard on any man, is all the harder on those whose tradition dictates concern with morality and ethics.
Yet the American rabbis are not truly without a vocation. Rabbinical ordination prescribes that the Jewish pastor is “to teach and to judge”; it prescribes Halachah, not prophecy. The American rabbi needs only to find his vocation by embracing it. American Jewry does not require admonition about “sin,” but instruction in its own traditions. The rabbi can serve, instead of perform, if he turns his face from Christian existentialism and prophecy (which in Jewish tradition has never been independent of Halachah), and sets it toward the Law and the examples given in the works and lives of such men as Rabbi Chaim Wolozhiner and Rabbi Kook.
The attraction of Herberg’s thought for some members of the American rabbinate can also be explained by the factors that account for the attraction Niebuhr has for the Christian clergy. The new theology, rabidly anti-secular, confuses secularism and paganism with a plausibility which draws its apparent justification from the Nazi and Soviet attack on religion, although freedom of religious opinion and expression is one of the cardinal principles of authentic secularism. The new theology also tends to confuse the humanist faith in mankind with the apocalyptic utopianism of the totalitarian movements.
Jewish existentialist anti-secularism runs counter to the plain historical truth that the Jews knew their greatest social, economic, and civil advances after the Enlightenment, under the spiritual influence of secular humanism. The destruction of the medieval ghetto, the emergence of Yiddish literature, and the renascence of Hebrew literature, were direct results of the growth of liberal secularism. The State of Israel itself owes much to the awakened conscience of a secular humanist society shocked by the tragedy of the Jews. The great gains of the Jews in American society are the fruit of American secularism. Herberg has moved so far in the other direction that while he concedes that “the reintroduction of religion into public education in any significant way” may be “no longer practicable, or indeed desirable,” he quotes with approbation à statement by Henry P. Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, that “unless religious instruction can be included in the programs of the public school, [Protestant] church leaders will be driven increasingly to the expedience of the church-sponsored school.” These views are set forth in an article in the Jesuit magazine America, “Justice for Religious Schools” (November 16, 1957). The sociologist Herberg agrees that the reintroduction of religion into the public schools would not be within American “historical tradition,” but the theologian Herberg chooses to describe this exclusion of religion as a “historical prejudice.”
This is another of the many paradoxes of Herberg’s new theology. It is custom-made for the United States, and yet its anti-secularism is, by his own admission, contrary to American “historical tradition.” Its Judaism, cross-fertilized with Christian existentialism, is contrary to Jewish tradition. Judaism, if it is to have any meaning for the secular, or even for the religious Jew, must justify its existence in terms of its own traditions, without seeking parallels or affinities in Christianity.
American society is not the first and not the only one in which the Jew has been pressed to identify himself exclusively as a member of a religious community. Jews have felt this pressure since the French emancipation. Napoleon established a Sanhedrin and instructed it to produce a Franco-Judaism. Later this became the major issue for German Jewry. History would seem to indicate that all Jewish communities which in modern times tried to limit themselves to an exclusively religious identification lost their virility and declined. The new theology does not seem to have learned the lesson of the past, that the Jews have survived through maximal perseverance and minimal accommodation.
And yet the new theology, and Will Herberg’s specifically, has contributed appreciably to the growth in self-awareness as Jews of the American Jewish community, by advancing challenging theses which compel the American Jew to study the basis and essence of his Jewish affiliation.
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