To the Editor:
Congratulations upon the publication of Dr. Wolf Leslau’s exciting account of his expedition into Ethiopia and his contact with the Falashas. His is a remarkable narrative; I find myself looking forward impatiently to the Falasha Anthology in which his account is to be presented in expanded form.
So great is the intrinsic interest of his material that it tends to overshadow the line of thought which the article evoked and stimulated. It is clear from Dr. Leslau’s description that the religious beliefs and practices of the Falashas are closer to those of the ancient Israelites than are the beliefs and practices of the modern Jew, however orthodox he may claim to be. Not that Falasha Judaism is to be taken as a living fossil preserving intact the religion of Israel; it is, rather, the product of centuries of evolution and of adaptation to the surrounding environment. But the pace of change in Ethiopia must have been slow; the Falashas lived in relative isolation, facing living conditions not too much different from those of Biblical Palestine. The primitive elements of the purity codes stand out vividly in Dr. Leslau’s account of the Falashas, and by means of his description we can read back more easily into the minds of the creators of the Israelitish religion of Bible times—and see in clearer perspective how far even the least progressive forms of contemporary Judaism have evolved from their primitive ancestry in the Temple cult.
Judaism is constantly changing, must change if it is to continue to live. To name the Judaism of any one time or place as “normative” or “orthodox” is to commit religious suicide. The alternative to modification, to modernization, is fossilization. It is for this reason that many of us viewed with horror the silly “excommunication” of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, a few years ago, for his presumption in modifying prayers that had been in need of modification for generations. It is for this reason that we are aghast at the immediate success of the desperate Orthodox attempt to kill Judaism by fossilizing its merely temporary and local East European form—even such transitory phases of that temporary form as the dress and hair-style of East European Jews. Not anti-Semitism, but the literalist self-styled orthodoxy of the Chevra and the Yeshiva, is the death-threat to Judaism. Falasha Judaism is the Judaism of an out-of the-way comer of the world, by-passed by contemporaneity. Can we afford to create other such forsaken remnants in odd corners of our metropolis? Must we not, rather, attempt by all means in our power to avoid becoming American Falashas—fit subjects for research by an ethnographer of the year 3000?
Joseph L. Blau
Department of Philosophy
Columbia University
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