I was the only contributor to the symposium who stated unambiguously that “the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism arises out of the question of God and the death camps.” I was also the only contributor to state that the question of the “death of God” had meaning for Judaism. Mindful of the Holocaust, I wrote, “the time that Nietzsche’s madman had said was too far off had come upon us.” Nevertheless, I had a word of caution. I wrote that “we live in the time of the ‘death of God,’” but added that “This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God.”

My ideas concerning these issues had been germinating for several years. The philosophical question about reconciling the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God and human evil was not the same as the theological question. The theological question concerned the God of covenant and election, the biblical-rabbinic God of History who was said to have chosen Israel and bestowed upon it a covenant stipulating benefits for compliance and dire punishments for rejecting his commandments. Given belief in such a God, must Auschwitz be seen as a frightful expression of God’s punitive retribution against a sinful Israel? The unreflective traditional answer was almost invariably affirmative. But the idea that Auschwitz could have served any providential purpose whatsoever or that Hitler, like Nebuchadnezzar, could in any sense be regarded as an instrument of divine wrath was to me patently obscene. I saw no alternative but unambiguously to reject the biblical-rabbinic idea of the God of History, covenant, and election.

Nevertheless, it was never my intention to abandon Judaism as a religion. On the contrary, I saw Judaism as having been forged in the crucible of Israel’s this-worldly historical experience. I came to understand that Judaism is about identity, historical memory, and the sharing and commemorating of hallowed times and seasons in the life of the individual and the community. I viewed the Holocaust as largely the result of a single deficit, a deficit of power in the face of our most unconstrained enemies. Although I had begun my serious encounter with Jewish life in the early 1940s as an anti-Zionist member of the Junior Society of New York’s Temple Emanuel, at the time a bastion of militant anti-Zionism, by 1944 as a student at the Hebrew Union College I had come to understand the utter necessity of a Jewish state capable of defending its people. We were, I came to realize, a people both like and unlike all other peoples: Like them in that we were embedded in the immanent vicissitudes of history and power, unlike them in that our history was absolutely unique. My theological program thereafter was to spell out the meaning of Jewish religious existence devoid of all superordinate cosmic significance.

The silence of the symposium participants on the issues of God and the Holocaust and, for some, even the legitimacy of the State of Israel was largely shared by many of the great Jewish thinkers of the time. The trauma of the Holocaust had yet to be mastered in the realm of thought. In the realm of action, a beginning had already been made with the creation of the State of Israel, although as Yoram Hazony has pointed out, there were academic luminaries such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Hannah Arendt, and others who did everything they could to undermine the legitimacy of the state. Theology, like philosophy, is a nachdenken, a thinking after the fact, and during the immediate post war decades, there was little time for reflection. The practical tasks were simply too overwhelming. Moreover, the thinkers with the training best suited for theological reflection were almost entirely men whose world had been smashed. In the face of catastrophic destruction, they were less interested in reformulating the tradition than in making it available, enriched by their own insights, to the next generation.

I have often wondered why I did not follow their example. I suspect that part of the reason was that I possessed both the advantages and disadvantages of having been unencumbered by a traditional Jewish background. My entry point into Judaism only came when I realized that my identity was indelibly Jewish. Both my rabbinic and my doctoral studies were not a quest for a sacred inheritance but a quest for an ever-deepening understanding of my identity in both its communal and its historic dimensions.

Richard L. Rubenstein
Florida State University


JEROME A. CHANES RESPONDS:

I thank Jonathan D. Sarna for his thoughtful comments on my review of his American Judaism: A History, and for his questions and clarifications. Sarna does raise an important question in his letter, that of the boundary between data and interpretation of those data. The boundary is, to be sure, sometimes permeable; moreover, there arise occasionally conflicts between data that surround a particular issue. This appears to be the case in the three examples he has chosen among the many areas in his book about which I raise questions. It is this rather nuanced point that is the key, I believe, to our disagreements.

First, on the matter of the Orthodox-Conservative divide, an issue that is a matter of historical interpretation and judgment, Sarna is partly right—partly right, therefore partly wrong. A full discussion of the events of 1950—beyond what was possible in a telescoped review—is thus called for.

Who filled the parking lots in the 1950s is not the issue; everyone—Conservative and Orthodox—was driving to synagogue in the suburbs. The issue was joined in 1950—a time when Orthodoxy in America was weak, insecure, defensive; and when Conservative was regnant—when the rabbinic leadership of each movement placed the item on its respective agenda. The Conservative movement (to its regret to this day) gave halachic sanction to driving on the Sabbath, and the Orthodox—whatever the practice “on the ground”—said, “We will not sanction a halachically impermissible act, even if we know that everyone is doing it.” The way in which the issue was approached was not about cars in parking lots; it was about how each movement viewed praxis, how each movement viewed the halachic process, how each movement viewed its own present and future. Driving to synagogue had implications far beyond the instant event, and far beyond the mehitza issue at the time. It is very much a “fact” that it was a defining moment.

The visibility of the mehitza was not the defining issue at the time, not the way in which driving was. This is not to say that mehitza and aguna were not important issues; they were, and over the long term may have proved to be more significant than driving, as Sarna avers—although the mehitza issue (played out in the secular courts) was highly nuanced, as Sarna correctly observes as well.

Sarna next raises the question of Jewish communal involvement in the civil rights movement. Much of the historiography of civil rights—a broad arena, to be sure—surrounds the simple question, “What was going on within the Jewish community?” What was going on was an ongoing debate, over a number of years and in many communities, over the question of whether to make common cause with blacks. The issue came to a head at a 1947 Plenary Session of the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC, later the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council and now the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; the national coordinating body for Jewish public policy). In a forum on “Relations with Negroes” a vigorous debate took place, involving many national agencies and numerous communities, on the wisdom of coalition building with blacks. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, an American Jewish Congress and NAACP leader, made the cogent case for broad and deep involvement based on Jewish self-interest. The Wise rationale carried the day, and this dynamic informed the movement, from its very beginnings through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

The “Jewish self-interest” rationale is the key point. “Specifically noting” in passing Jewish self-interest (as Sarna does on p. 308) does not quite do it. Whatever else was going on—and Sarna does us a valuable service in cataloging in a concise manner the many dynamics of the movement—Jewish involvement in civil rights fit the pattern of all issues that were “selected” as priorities by Jews across the decades: The question, “Does this issue implicate Jewish security?” was answered by numerous national agencies and in hundreds of communities with a resounding “Yes!” Sarna either ignored, or did not take the trouble to consult, the records of the various national Jewish “defense” agencies, local community relations councils, and other organizations involved in Jewish public affairs—especially the annual Joint Program Plans and annual Plenum Proceedings of the National Community Relations Advisory Council; nor did he read the memoirs or listen carefully to the interviews conducted of Jewish leadership of the movement. All of these assert that, to a national Jewish polity at that time, it was clear that civil rights was a core issue of Jewish security (right up there with anti-Semitism) and was firmly rooted in Jewish self-interest. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom of many years’ standing, refracted through the prism of a Jewish “liberal” past, has subverted the realities of history.

With respect to Ezrat Nashim, I do know the enabling documents of the group; I know as well each and every one of the original women who comprised the original “layers” of Ezrat Nashim, and who informed its agenda and activities. These women cast a broader net than just the Conservative; they represented everything, including Orthodox, and this to me carries at least as much weight as does the formal documentation. Indeed, Ezrat Nashim first sought out Orthodox, rather than Conservative, institutions as agents of change. The fact is that Ezrat Nashim, almost from its very beginnings, had an impact that was felt beyond the Conservative movement, and this in large measure was a result of its variegated membership. As Sarna suggests, this is a matter of interpretation, about which there can be legitimate disagreement, but it is not about “original sources in footnotes.”

Part of the issue here (as is the case in that of the Orthodox-Conservative divide) is that Ezrat Nashim is one of those areas in which history abuts religion—all the more reason for Sarna to be scrupulous in his own narrative and analysis of religion. It’s a case of “nomen omen”: Sarna’s book, entitled American Judaism, is about American Jewish religion, as he takes great pains in telling us in his opening chapter. But what emerges (especially in his final chapter) suggests that Historian Sarna has little interest in being Theologian Sarna.