The Religious Thinking of Milton Steinberg
A Believing Jew: The Selected Writings of Milton Steinberg.
Harcourt, Brace. 318 pp. $3.50.
Milton Steinberg, who died on March 20, 1950, at the age of forty-six, was a man of notable gifts. He possessed a penetrating mind and a most varied culture, a warm heart and great capacities for friendship, deep faith, and a wide reading in theology and profound concern with theological problems. A selection from the writings of such a man should constitute a work of real significance.
This volume, which is presented as such a selection, is a disappointment. It by no means does justice to the quality of the mind and spirit of the man. There are some good, even very good things in it, but it does not reflect the full maturity of his thought and insight. Perhaps this was inevitable; perhaps the thinking of his most mature period was not adequately precipitated in the writings he left behind him. However that may be, it still remains that one gets here a most insufficient and, in some cases, even misleading impression of what Milton Steinberg thought about Jewish religious existence in the last years of his life, when its problems preoccupied him with a particular force. Besides which, the editor’s quite incomprehensible failure to give the dates for most of the pieces, which stretch over a decade or more, makes a satisfactory grasp of the direction of his thinking virtually impossible for one who has to depend upon this volume alone.
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In some respects, however, the papers in this book do define fairly well the main lines of Steinberg’s thinking. In his convictions about the status and future of Judaism in the United States, Milton Steinberg remained essentially a Reconstructionist, and his thinking in this area reflects the characteristic strength and weaknesses of that position. The strength lies in its realistic appraisal of Jewish community life in America; its basic weakness, rooted in the hidden secularism of the Reconstructionist approach, is its inability to get to the heart of Jewish existence and therefore to provide a compelling motive for the “survivalism” with which it is so concerned. In the papers, “The Future of Judaism in America,” “A Specimen Jew,” and others, Jewishness is conceived as “religious culturalism,” essentially as a culture brought by immigrant Jews to America. The argument against assimilation is conducted throughout on this level, in terms of the social and psychological consequences of turning one’s back on one’s cultural origins and losing one’s cultural identity. Assimilation, we are told, means on the one hand, “ceasing to be what you are,” and on the other, “the deliberate throwing away of a large cultural tradition.” But it is surely obvious that the whole course of American history has been, for the immigrant, a ceasing to be what he was and a dissolution of the culture he had brought with him into the common stream of American life. Herbert Hoover has obviously ceased to be what he (his Alsatian great-grandfather) was, and Dwight Eisenhower is not engaged in preserving the “large cultural tradition” his German ancestors brought with them.
The Reconstructionist conception of Jewish existence, which Milton Steinberg more or less shared throughout his life, simply overlooks the crucial point that Jewish “survivalism”!—if Jewishness is defined in socio-cultural terms—runs plainly counter to the entire pattern of American life. For whereas all other immigrant groups have constituted essentially transitional phenomena of one or two generations, making their specific cultural contribution to American life and disappearing as separate entities, Jewish existence in America—for the “survivalists” at any rate—seems to be predicated on the expectation of permanence and self-perpetuation. This expectation, which is not merely expectation but insistence, cannot be adequately grounded on a conception which holds the Jewish group to be a cultural entity not radically different in nature from the other immigrant groups that came to our shores in the course of the past three hundred years. In the Reconstructionist analysis, there is no real sense of the uniqueness of Jewish existence because the concept that can alone give meaning to this uniqueness—the divine election and vocation of Israel—is either ignored or rejected. That means that Jewish existence is conceived in an essentially secular manner, and the logic of “secular Judaism” is either total assimilation or else an unreal dinging to yesterday’s particular form of Jewish life. At bottom, what is Reconstructionism but an American adaptation of Dubnow’s “Diaspora nationalism”!?
Milton Steinberg’s continuing involvement in Reconstructionism—he was, after all, one of its outstanding leaders—obscured the better understanding of the “mystery” of Jewish existence that was really his. How vastly different is the conception of Jewishness suggested by his unforgettable novel, As a Driven Leaf, from the Reconstructionist commonplaces that recur in the pages of this volume. Yet even in these pages there is a flash of something better. In a sermon on the establishment of the State of Israel (“Latter Day Miracle: Israel”), Milton Steinberg, quoting Berdyaev and Carl Mayer, insists that “the continued existence of Jewry down the centuries is rationally inexplicable; by every sociological law, the Jews should have perished long ago.” Had he lived to follow up this insight, he would, I am convinced, have broken out of the Reconstructionist confines and said something new and significant about the “mystery of Israel.”
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In a sober assessment, “The Test of Time,” written in February 1950 on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of The Reconstructionist, Milton Steinberg, after giving due credit to the Reconstructionist movement for its “sociological” and community achievement, called attention to the wide differences over theology which compelled him to register “the gravest reservation from the prevailing Reconstructionist position.” In his view, theology was not an academic irrelevancy, a peripheral concern for specialists. In a magnificent essay, “The Social Crisis and the Retreat of God,” he emphasizes that “as a man thinks of ultimates, so he tends to deal with immediates,” and he repeats with approval Chesterton’s remark that the most relevant inquiry which a landlady can address to a prospective lodger is concerning his theology. He was among the first to raise a vigorous protest against “this business of substituting society for God as an object of worship and as the goal of religious activity” (“A Protest Against a New Cult”). To Milton Steinberg, theology—thinking about religion—was in the truest sense thinking about life, one’s own life, and the life of mankind.
It is as a theologian that Milton Steinberg was really most himself as a thinker. Yet it is in the area of theology that this volume is most seriously defective, even misleading, in the picture it gives of his mind. For Milton Steinberg’s most creative work in theology was done in the last years of his life; his entire cast of thought was transformed in this period. Yet the best writings of this period find no place in this volume—some probably because they were not in sufficiently finished form to permit publication, others for reasons that I cannot presume to explain. His memorable paper, “Theological Issues of the Hour,” presented at the 1949 convention of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, is not included, nor is his article on Kierkegaard. But without these, especially without the former, no one can really have an idea of what he thought about God, man, and the world.
His earlier attitude was quite “Hellenic,” as he himself confesses. The first essay in this volume, “God and the World’s End,” attempts to solve the problem of evil in terms of an evolutionary pantheism, recalling Samuel Alexander’s philosophy of emergence, according to which “God as He mounts from level to level [of cosmic evolution] is, like an embryo bursting forth from the womb, still stained and flecked with the stuff of his immersion,” so that “man’s inhumanity to man . . . is, from the religious viewpoint, a caul still firmly fixed to the infant but destined to be sloughed as under the divine impulse mankind grows to fuller stature.” This kind of cosmic optimism ultimately became an abomination to him, as one can see by reading the soberly realistic paper, “The Depth of Evil,” in which he concludes that even “when man is at his highest, he is still a creature irritable and aggressive, proud and vain, selfish and self-deluding . . . he is sinful, and evil inheres in him.”
But there it is, that first paper, with no date and no suggestion that its basic thesis was repudiated by the author in later years. And not only that paper; there are others, too, permeated with a pantheistic immanentism that always ends up in the virtual divinization of man (“Man is in a sense God in miniature”) and a reassertion of human self-sufficiency. Milton Steinberg eventually came to see how thoroughly un-Biblical this Greco-Oriental immanentism was, but there is little in this book to show this. The Rabbinical Assembly paper might have done it, but it is not included. The Rabbinical Assembly paper might also have helped to undo the unfortunate impression produced by the references to Christianity scattered through this volume. These references never rise above the commonplaces which Christians and Jews so often make use of in discussing each other’s religion.
It was apparently found necessary to include the well-known attack upon COMMENTARY in this volume. This is not the place, nor do I think there is any longer the necessity, for an extended comment on this paper. Let me merely say what I said to Milton Steinberg as he was composing it, that even if there were some truth in every one of the charges he made—which I did not take to be the case—the whole would nevertheless not add up to a true bill. The logic of the indictment—though not, of course, its intent—was the condemnation of COMMENTARY for refusing to turn itself into a spiritless houseorgan of Jewish “official” opinion; its net effect would therefore be to encourage the self-important philistines in their hostility to whatever they could not understand or control. All this I said to Milton Steinberg at the time. I did not succeed in dissuading him, but neither am I persuaded after a careful rereading and reconsideration of his indictment.
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It would be hard for me to express adequately the deep regard, love, and admiration that I had for Milton Steinberg in the years of our friendship and in which I hold his memory. It is particularly painful, therefore, that this volume, which for so many will be their introduction to Milton Steinberg and perhaps all they will ever know of him, should be so unsatisfactory. For lesser men it might be a sufficient memorial—but not for Milton Steinberg, the dedicated teacher in Israel, who until his last hour kept on thinking, struggling, and growing in power and spirit.
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