Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy

Published in Tradition, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 1994). Reprinted here with permission.

Haym Soloveitchik teaches Jewish history and thought in the Bernard Revel Graduate School and Stern College for Woman at Yeshiva University.



This essay is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred within my lifetime in the community in which I live. The orthodoxy in which I, and other people my age, were raised scarcely exists anymore. This change is often described as “the swing to the Right.” In one sense, this is an accurate description. Many practices, especially the new rigor in religious observance now current among the younger modern orthodox community, did indeed originate in what is called “the Right.” Yet, in another sense, the description seems a misnomer. A generation ago, two things primarily separated modern Orthodoxy from, what was then called, “ultra-Orthodoxy” or “the Right.” First, the attitude to Western culture, that is, secular education; second, the relation to political nationalism, i.e. Zionism and the state of Israel. Little, however, has changed in these areas. Modern Orthodoxy still attends college, albeit with somewhat less enthusiasm than before, and is more strongly Zionist than ever. The “ultra-orthodox,” or what is now called the “haredi“1 camp is still opposed to higher secular education, though the form that the opposition now takes has local nuance. In Israel, the opposition remains total; in America, the utility, even the necessity of a college degree is conceded by most, and various arrangements are made to enable many haredi youths to obtain it. However, the value of a secular education, of Western culture generally, is still denigrated. And the haredi camp remains strongly anti-Zionist, at the very least, emotionally distant and unidentified with the Zionist enterprise. The ideological differences over the posture towards modernity remain on the whole unabated, in theory certainly, in practice generally. Yet so much has changed, and irrecognizably so. Most of the fundamental changes, however, have been across the board. What had been a stringency peculiar to the “Right” in 1960, a “Lakewood or Bnei Brak humra,” as—to take an example that we shall later discuss shiurim (minimal requisite quantities), had become, in the 1990’s, a widespread practice in modern orthodox circles, and among its younger members, an axiomatic one. The phenomena were, indeed, most advanced among the haredim and were to be found there in a more intensive form. However, most of these developments swiftly manifested themselves among their co-religionists to their left. The time gap between developments in the haredi world and the emerging modern orthodox one was some fifteen years, at most.

It seemed to me to that what had changed radically was the very texture of religious life and the entire religious atmosphere. Put differently, the nature of contemporary spirituality has undergone a transformation; the ground of religiosity had altered far more than the ideological positions adopted thereon. It further appeared that this change could best be studied in the haredi camp, for there it takes its swiftest and most intense form. With this in mind, I read widely in the literature of the haredim, listened to their burgeoning cassette literature, and spent more time than was my wont in their neighborhoods. I tried my best to understand what they were doing in their terms and what it meant in mine. And the more I studied them, I became convinced that I was, indeed, studying myself and my own community. I uncovered no new facts about them or us, but thought that I did perceive some pattern to the well-known ones. As all these facts are familiar to my readers, the value of my interpretation depends entirely on the degree of persuasive correspondence that they find between my characterizations and their own experiences.

* * *

If I were asked to characterize in a phrase the change that religious Jewry has undergone in the past generation, I would say that it was the new and controlling role that texts now play in contemporary religious life. And in saying that, I open myself to an obvious question: What is new in this role? Has not traditional Jewish society always been regulated by the normative written word, the Halakhah? Have not scholars, for well over a millennium, pored over the Talmud and its codes to provide Jews with guidance in their daily round of observances? Is not Jewish religiosity proudly legalistic and isn’t exegesis its classic mode of expression? Was not “their portable homeland,” their indwelling in their sacred texts, what sustained the Jewish people throughout its long exile?

The answer is, of course, yes. However, as the Halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life-covering not only prayer and divine service, but equally food, drink, dress, sexual relations between man and wife, the rhythms of work and patterns of rest-it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school.

Did these mimetic norms—the culturally prescriptive–conform with the legal ones? The answer is, at times, yes; at times, no. And the significance of the no may best be brought home by an example with which all are familiar—the kosher kitchen, with its rigid separation of milk and meat—separate dishes, sinks, dish racks, towels, tablecloths, even separate cupboards. Actually little of this has a basis in Halakhah. Strictly speaking, there is no need for separate sinks, for separate dishtowels or cupboards. In fact, if the food is served cold, there is no need for separate dishware altogether. The simple fact is that the traditional Jewish kitchen, transmitted from mother to daughter over generations, has been immeasurably and unrecognizably amplified beyond all halakhic requirements. Its classic contours are the product not of legal exegesis, but of the housewife’s religious intuition imparted in kitchen apprenticeship.

An augmented tradition is one thing, a diminished one another. So the question arises: did this mimetic tradition have an acknowledged position even when it went against the written law? I say “acknowledged”, because the question is not simply whether it continued in practice (though this too is of significance), but whether it was accepted as legitimate? Was it even formally legitimized? Often yes; and, once again, a concrete example best brings the matter home. There is an injunction against “borer“—sorting or separating on Sabbath. And we, indeed, do refrain from sorting clothes, not to speak of separating actual wheat from chaff. However, we do eat fish, and in eating fish we must, if we are not to choke, separate the bones from the meat. Yet in so doing we are separating the chaff (bones) from the wheat (meat). The upshot is that all Jews who ate fish on Sabbath (and Jews have been eating fish on Sabbath for, at least, some two thousand years2) have violated the Sabbath. This seems absurd, but the truth of the matter is that it is very difficult to provide a cogent justification for separating bones from fish. In the late nineteenth century, a scholar took up this problem and gave some very unpersuasive answers3 It is difficult to imagine he was unaware of their inadequacies. Rather his underlying assumption was that it was permissible. There must be some valid explanation for the practice, if not necessarily his. Otherwise hundreds of thousands, perhaps, millions of well-intending, observant Jews had inconceivably been desecrating the Sabbath for some twenty centuries. His attitude was neither unique nor novel. A similar disposition informs the multi-volumed Arukh ha-Shulhan, the late nineteenth century reformulation of the Shulhan Arukh.4 Indeed, this was the classic Ashkenazic position for centuries, one which saw the practice of the people as an expression of halakhic truth. It is no exaggeration to say that the Ashkenazic community saw the law as manifesting itself in two forms: in the canonized written corpus (the Talmud and codes), and in the regnant practices of the people. Custom was a correlative datum of the halakhic system. And, on frequent occasions, the written word was reread in light of traditional behavior.5

This dual tradition of the intellectual and the mimetic, law as taught and law as practiced, which stretched back for centuries, begins to break down in the twilight years of the author of the Arukh ha-Shulhan, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The change is strikingly attested to in the famous code of the next generation, the Mishnah Berurah.6 This influential work reflects no such reflexive justification of established religious practice, which is not to say that it condemns received practice. Its author, the Hafetz Hayyim, was hardly a revolutionary. His instincts were conservative and strongly inclined him toward some post facto justification. The difference between his posture and that of his predecessor, the author of the Arukh ha-Shulhan, is that he surveys the entire literature and then shows that the practice is plausibly justifiable in terms of that literature. His interpretations, while not necessarily persuasive, always stay within the bounds of the reasonable. And the legal coordinates upon which the Mishnah Berurah plots the issue are the written literature and the written literature alone.7 With sufficient erudition and inclination, received practice can almost invariably be charted on these axes, but it is no longer inherently valid. It can stand on its own no more.

Common practice in the Mishnah Berurah has lost its independent status and needs to be squared with the written word. Nevertheless, the practices there evaluated are what someone writing a commentary upon Shulhan Arukh would normally remark on. General practice as such is not under scrutiny or investigation in the Mishnah Berurah. It is very much so in the religious community of today.

One of the most striking phenomena of the contemporary community is the explosion of halakhic works on practical observance. I do not refer to the stream of works on Sabbath laws, as these can be explained simply as attempts to determine the status, that is to say, the permissibility of use, of many new artifacts of modern technology, similar to the spate of recent works on definition of death and the status of organ transplants. Nor do I have in mind the halakhic questions raised by the endless proffer of new goods in an affluent society. I refer rather to the publications on tallit and tefillin, works on the daily round of prayers and blessings in synagogue and home, tomes on High Holiday and Passover observance, books and pamphlets on every imaginable topic. The vast halakhic corpus is being scoured, new doctrines discovered and elicited, old ones given new prominence, and the results collated and published. Abruptly and within a generation, a rich literature of religious observance has been created and, this should be underscored, it focuses on performances Jews have engaged in and articles they have used for thousands of years.8 These books, moreover, are avidly purchased and on a mass scale; sales are in the thousands, occasionally in the tens of thousands. It would be surprising if such popularity did not indicate some degree of adoption. Intellectual curiosity per se is rarely that widespread. Much of the traditional religious practice has been undergoing massive reevaluation, and by popular demand or, at the very least, by unsolicited popular consent. In Bnei Brak and in Borough Park, and to a lesser, but still very real extent, in Kiryat Shmuel and Teaneck, religious observance is being both amplified and raised to new, rigorous heights.

Significantly, this massive, critical audit did not emerge from the ranks of the left or centrist Orthodoxy, some of whose predecessors might have justly been suspect of religious laxity9, but from the inner sanctum of the haredi world, from the ranks of the Kolel Hazon Ish and the Lakewood Yeshivah. It issued forth from men whose teachers and parents were beyond any suspicion of ritual negligence or casualness. Moreover, it scarcely focused on areas where remissness had been common, even on the left. Indeed, its earliest manifestations were in spheres of religious performance where there had been universal compliance. The audit, rather, has encompassed all aspects of religious life, and its conclusions have left little untouched. And the best example and, also, one of the earliest ones, is shiurim (minimal requisite quantities). On Pesach evening one is obliged to a minimal amount of matzah—a quantity equal to the size of an olive. Jews have been practicing the Seder for thousands of years, and no one paid very much attention to what that shiur was. One knew it automatically, for one had seen it eaten at one’s parents table on innumerable Passover eves; one simply did as one’s parents had done. Around the year 1940, R. Yeshayahu Karelitz, the Hazon Ish, published an essay in which he vigorously questioned whether scholars had not, in effect, seriously underestimated the size of an olive in Talmudic times. He then insisted on a minimal standard about twice the size of the commonly accepted one.10 Within a decade his doctrine began to seep down into popular practice, and by now has become almost de rigeur in religious, certainly younger religious circles.11

This development takes on significance when placed in historical perspective. The problem of “minimal requisite quantities” (shiurim) has been known since the mid-eighteenth century, when scholars in both Central and Eastern Europe discovered that the shiurim commonly employed with regard to solid food did not square with the liquid-volume shiurim that we know in other aspects of Jewish law. The ineluctable conclusion was that the standard requisite quantity of solid food consumption should be roughly doubled. Though the men who raised this issue, the GRA and the Noda Beyehuda,12 were some of the most famous Talmudists of the modern era, whose works are, to this day, staples of rabbinic study, nevertheless, their words fell on deaf ears and were without any impact, even in the most scholarly and religiously meticulous circles.13 It was perfectly clear to all concerned that Jews had been eating matzot for thousands of years, and that no textual analysis could affect in any way a millennia-old tradition. The problem was theoretically interesting, but practically irrelevant.

And then a dramatic shift occurs. A theoretical position that had been around for close to two centuries suddenly begins in the 1950’s to assume practical significance and within a decade becomes authoritative. From then on, traditional conduct, no matter how venerable, how elementary, or how closely remembered, yields to the demands of theoretical knowledge. Established practice can no longer hold its own against the demands of the written word.

Significantly, this loss by the home of its standing as religious authenticator has taken place not simply among the modem orthodox, but first, indeed foremost, among the haredim, and in their innermost recess—the home. The zealously sheltered hearth of the haredi world can no longer validate religious practice. The authenticity of tradition is now in question in the ultra-orthodox world itself.

* * *

This development is related to the salient events of Ashkenazic Jewish history of the past century.14 In the multi-ethnic, corporate states of central and Eastern Europe, nationalities lived for hundreds of years side by side, each with its own language, its own religion, its way of dress and diet. Living together, these groups had much in common, yet at the same time they remained distinctly apart. Each had its own way of life, its own code of conduct, which was transmitted formally in the school, informally in the home and street—these are the acculturating agencies—each complementing and reinforcing one another. Equally significant, each way of life seemed inevitable to its members. Crossing over, while theoretically possible, was inconceivable, especially when it entailed a change of religion.

These societies were traditional, taking their values and code of conduct as a given, acting unselfconsciously, unaware that life could be lived differently. This is best epitomized in the title of one of the four units of the Shulhan Arukh. The one treating religious law is called Orah Hayyim—The Way of Life. And aptly so. In the enclaves of Eastern Europe, going to shul (synagogue) in the morning, putting on a tallit katan (fringed garment) and wearing pe’ot (side locks) were for centuries the way of life of the Jew. These acts were done with the same naturalness and sense of inevitability as we experience in putting on those two strange Western garments, socks and ties. Clothes are a second skin.

The old ways came, in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth, under the successive ideological assaults of the Socialist and Communist movements and that of Zionism. In the cities there was the added struggle with secularism, all the more acute as the ground there had been eroded over the previous half century by a growing movement of Enlightenment. The defections, especially in urban areas, were massive; traditional life was severely shaken, though not shattered. How much of this life would have emerged unaltered from the emergent movements of modernity in Eastern Europe, we shall never know, as the Holocaust, among other things, wrote finis to a culture. There was, however, little chance that the old ways would be preserved by the “surviving remnant,” the relatives and neighbors of those who perished, who earlier had embarked for America and Israel. These massive waves of migration had wrenched these people suddenly from a familiar life and an accustomed environment, and thrust them into a strange country where even stranger manners prevailed. Simple conformity to a habitual pattern could not be adequate, for the problems of life were now new and different.15 What was left of traditional Jewry regrouped in two camps: those who partially acculturated to the society that enveloped them, and those who decisively turned their back on it, whom we, for lack of a better term, have called haredim. They, of course, would define themselves simply as Jews- resolutely upholding the ways of their fathers.

They are that indeed. Resolve, however, is possible only in a choice, and ways of life that are upheld are no longer a given. Borough Park and Bnei Brak, not to speak of Riverdale and Teaneck, while demographically far larger than any shtetl, are, as we shall see, enclaves rather than cultures. Alternatives now exist, and adherence is voluntary. A traditional society has been transformed into an orthodox one,16 and religious conduct is less the product of social custom than of conscious, reflective behavior. If the tallit katan is worn not as a matter of course but as a matter of belief, it has then become a ritual object. A ritual can no more be approximated than an incantation can be summarized. Its essence lies in its accuracy. It is that accuracy that religious Jews are now seeking. The flood of works on halakhic prerequisites and correct religious performance accurately reflects the ritualization of what had previously been routine acts and everyday objects. It mirrors the ritualization of what had been once simply components of the given world and parts of the repertoire of daily living. A way of life has become a regula, and behavior, once governed by habit, is now governed by rule.

If accuracy is now sought, indeed deemed critical, it can be found only in texts. For in the realm of religious practice (issur veheter), custom, no matter how longstanding and vividly remembered, has little standing over and against the normative written word. To be sure, custom may impose an added stringency, but when other wise at variance with the generally agreed interpretation of the written law, almost invariably it must yield.17 Custom is potent, but it true power is informal. It derives from the ability of habit to neutralize the implications of book knowledge. Anything learned from study that conflicts with accustomed practice cannot really be right, a things simply can’t be different than they are.18 Once that inconceivability is lost, usage loses much of its force. Even undiminished, usage would be hard pressed to answer the new questions being asked. For habit is unthinking and takes little notice of detail. (How many people could, for example, answer accurately: “How many inches wide is your tie or belt?”) When interrogated, habit replies in approximations, a matter of discredit in the new religious atmosphere.

There is currently a very strong tendency in both lay and rabbinic circles towards stringency (humra).19 No doubt this inclination is partly due to any group’s need for self-differentiation, nor would I gainsay the existence of religious one-upsmanship. It would be unwise, however, to view this development simply as a posture towards outsiders. The development is also immanent. Habit is static; theoretical knowledge is dynamic and consequential, as ideas naturally tend to press forward to their full logical conclusions. “Only the extremes are logical” remarked Samuel Butler, “but they are absurd.” No doubt. What is logical, however, is more readily agreed upon than what is absurd. When the mean is perceived as unconscionable compromise, the extreme may appear eminently reasonable.

It is one thing to fine-tune an existing practice on the basis of “newly” read books; it is wholly another to construct practice anew on the exclusive basis of books. One confronts in Jewish law, as in any other legal system, a wide variety of differing positions on any given issue. If one seeks to do things properly (and these “things” are, after all, God’s will), the only course is to attempt to comply simultaneously with as many opinions as possible. Otherwise one risks invalidation. Hence the policy of “maximum position compliance,” so characteristic of contemporary jurisprudence, which in turn leads to yet further stringency.

This reconstruction of practice is further complicated by the ingrained limitations of language. Words are good for description, even better for analysis, but pathetically inadequate for teaching how to do something. (Try learning, for example, how to tie shoe laces from written instructions.) One learns best by being shown, that is to say, mimetically. When conduct is learned from texts, conflicting views about its performance proliferate, and the simplest gesture becomes acutely complicated.20

Fundamentally, all the above—stringency, “maximum position compliance,” and the proliferation of complications and demands—simply reflect the essential change in the nature of religious performance that occurs in a text culture. Books cannot demonstrate conduct; they can only state its requirements. One then seeks to act in a way that meets those demands.21 Performance is no longer, as in a traditional society, replication of what one has seen, but implementation of what one knows. Seeking to mirror the norm, religious observance is subordinated to it. In a text culture, behavior becomes, inevitably, a function of the ideas it consciously seeks to realize.

No longer independent, religious performance loses then its inherited, fixed character. Indeed, during the transitional period (and for some time after), there is a destabilization of practice, as the traditional inventory of religious objects and repertoire of religious acts are weighed and progressively found wanting. For many of those raised in the old order, the result is baffling, at times infuriating, as they discover that habits of a lifetime no longer suffice. Increasingly, they sense that their religious past, not to speak of that of their parents and teachers, is being implicitly challenged, and, on occasion, not just implicitly.22 But for most, both for the natives of the emergent text culture and its naturalized citizens alike, the vision of perfect accord between precept and practice beckons to a brave new world. And, as ideas are dynamic and consequential, that vision beckons also to an expanding world and of unprecedented consistency. The eager agenda of the religious community has, understandably, now become the translation of the ever-increasing knowledge of the Divine norm into the practice of the Divine service.

So large an endeavor and so ambitious an aspiration are never without implications23. Translation entails, first, grasping an idea in its manifold fullness, and then, executing it in practice. This gives rise to a performative spirituality, not unlike that of the arts, with all its unabating tension. What is at stake here, however, is not fidelity to some personal vision, but to what is perceived as the Divine Will. Though the intensity of the strain may differ between religion and art, the nature of the tension is the same, for it springs from the same limitations in human comprehension and implementation. Knowledge rarely yields finality. Initially, thought does indeed narrow the range of interpretation by detecting weaknesses in apparent options, but almost invariably, it ends with presenting the inquirer with a number of equally possible understandings, each making a comparable claim to fidelity. Performance, however, demands choice, insistent and continuous. Whatever the decisions, their implementation is then beset by the haunting disparity between vision and realization, reach and grasp.

A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for “perfect fit”—faultless congruence between conception and performance—is the hallmark of contemporary religiosity. The search is dedicated and unremitting; yet it invariably falls short of success. For spiritual life is an attempt, as a great pianist once put it, to play music that is better than it can be played. Such an endeavor may finally become so heavy with strain that it can no longer take wing, or people may simply weary of repeated failure, no matter how inspired. The eager toil of one age usually appears futile to the next, and the performative aspiration, so widespread now, may soon give way to one of a wholly different kind, even accompanied by the derision that so often attends the discarding of an ideal. Yet this Sisyphean spirituality will never wholly disappear, for there will always be those who hear the written notes and who find in absolute fidelity the most sublime freedom.

* * *

In all probability, so arduous an enterprise would not have taken so wide a hold had it not also answered some profound need. “The spirit blows where it listeth” is often true of individuals, rarely of groups. The process we have described began roughly in the mid-nineteen-fifties,24 gathered force noticeably in the next decade, and by the mid-Seventies was well on its way to being, if it had not already become, the dominant mode of religiosity. The shift of authority to text, though born of migration, did not then occur among the immigrants themselves but among their children or their children’s children.25 This is true even of the post-Holocaust immigration. Haredi communities had received a small, but significant, infusion after World War II, which had strengthened their numbers and steeled their resolution. Unlike their predecessors, these newcomers came not as immigrants but as refugees, not seeking a new world but fleeing from a suddenly beleaguered old one. And they came in groups rather than individually.26 However, equally unlike their predecessors, they did not hail from the self contained shtetl or the culturally isolated ghettos of Poland and the Pale. Few from those territories escaped the Holocaust. These refugees came from the more urbanized areas of Central Europe, especially Hungary, and their arrival in America was not their first encounter with the contemporary world.27 The rise of the text culture occurred only after a sustained exposure to modernity, in homes some twice removed from the shtetl.

This exposure finally made itself felt, as the century passed its halfway mark, not in willful accommodation, God forbid, but in unconscious acculturation, as large (though, not all28) segments of the haredi enclave, not to speak of modern Orthodoxy, increasingly adopted the consumer culture and its implicit values, above all the legitimacy of pursuing material gratification.29 Much of the haredi community took on an increasingly middle class life style. The frumpy dress of women generally disappeared, as did their patently artificial wigs. Married women continued, of course, to cover their hair, as tradition demanded, but the wigs were now fashionably elegant as were also their dresses, which were, to be sure, appropriately modest, but now attractively so. Elegant boutiques flourished in Borough Park. Ethnic food gave way to culinary pluralism, and French, Italian, Oriental and Far Eastern restaurants blossomed under the strictest rabbinic supervision. Dining out, once reserved for special occasions, became common. Rock music sung with “kosher” lyrics was heard at the weddings of the most religious.30 There had been no “kosher” jazz or “kosher” swing, for music is evocative, and what was elicited by the contemporary beat was felt by the previous generation to be alien to a “Jewish rejoicing” (yidishe simche). This was no longer the case. The body syncopated to the beat of rock, and the emotional receptivities that the contemporary rhythm engendered were now felt to be consonant with the spirit of “Jewish rejoicing.” Indeed, “hasidic” rock concerts, though decried, were not unheard of. The extended family of the old country (mishpokhe) gave way considerably to the nuclear one. Personal gratification, here and now, and individual attainment became increasingly accepted values. Family lineage (yikhes) still played an important role in marriage and communal affairs, but personal career achievement increasingly played an equal, if not a greater one. Divorce, once rare in religious circles, became all too familiar. The divorce rate, of course, was far lower than that of the surrounding society, but the numbers were believed to be sufficiently large and the phenomenon sufficiently new to cause consternation.31

Even the accomplishments of Orthodoxy had their untoward consequences. The smooth incorporation of religious practice into a middle class lifestyle, meant that observance now differentiated less. Apart from their formal requirements, religious observances also engender ways of living. Eating only kosher food, for example, precludes going out to lunch, vacationing where one wishes and dining out regularly as a form of entertainment. The proliferation of kosher eateries and the availability of literally thousands of kosher products in the consumer market,32 opened the way to such pursuits, so the religious way of life became, in one more regard, less distinguishable from that of others. The facilitation of religious practice that occurred in every aspect of daily life was a tribute to the adaptability of the religious and to their new mastery of their environment; it also diminished some of the millennia-old impact of observance.

Not only did the same amount of practice now yield a smaller sum of difference, but the amount of practice itself was also far less than before. A mimetic tradition mirrors rather than discriminates. Without criteria by which to evaluate practice, it cannot generally distinguish between central and peripheral, or even between religious demands and folkways. And the last two tended to be deeply intertwined in Eastern Europe, as ritual, which was seen to have a physical efficacy, was mobilized to ward off the threatening forces that stalked man’s every step in a world precariously balanced between the powers of good and evil (sitra ahara). The rituals of defense, drawn from the most diverse sources, were religiously inflected, for the Jew knew that what lay in wait for him was not goblins, as the peasant thought, but shedim, and that these agents of the sitra ahara could be defeated only by the proven weapons of traditional lore. Prophylactic ritual flourished as it served the roles of both religion and science. Its rites were thoroughly intertwined with the normative ones and, to most, indistinguishable from one another. Joined in the struggle for health, for example, were amulets, blessings, incantations, and prayers.33 In the world now inhabited by religious Jewry, however, the material environment has been controlled by a neutral technology, and an animistic, value-driven cosmos replaced by a mechanistic and indifferent one. Modernity has thus defoliated most of these practices and stripped the remaining ones of their significance. People still gather on the eve of circumcision, but as an occasion of rejoicing, not as a nightwatch (wach nacht) to forestall the forces of evil from spiriting away the infant.34 A Jewish hospital differs from a Catholic one in the symbols on its walls and in the personal religion of its staff, but not in any way in the procedures of health care. As religion ceased to be called upon to control directly the natural world, many vital areas of activity lost their religious coloration, and, with it, their differentiating force.

It would be strange, indeed, if this diminution of otherness did not evoke some response in the religious world. They were “a nation apart,” and had lived and died for that apartness. Their deepest instincts called for difference, and those instincts were not to be denied. Problems of meaningful survival were not new to religious Jews, and they were not long in evolving the following response:

If customary observances differentiated less, more observances were obviously called for. Indeed, they always had been called for, as the normative texts clearly show, but those calls had gone unheeded because of the power of habit and the heavy hand of custom. The inner differences of pulse and palate may well have been leveled, and the distinctive Jewish ideals of appearance and attractiveness may equally have been lost. This was deplorable, and indeed our religious leaders had long railed against the growing pursuit of happiness.35 But small wonder, for people had failed to take stock in the New World. They had turned to habit and folklore for guidance rather than to study, and despite the best of intentions, their observances had been fractional. Even that fraction had been less than it seemed, for superstition had been confused with law, and, on occasion, had even supplanted it. Religious life must be constructed anew and according to the ground plan embedded in the canonized literature, and in that literature alone. While this reconstruction was going on, the struggle for the inner recesses of the believer would continue, as before, only now it would be bolstered by the intensification of religious practice. And there was hope for the outcome, for our moralists (hakhmei ha mussar) had always insisted that “the outer affects the inner,” that constantly repeated deeds finally affect the personality. As for the so-called stringency, some of it was simply a misperception based on the casual attitude of the past, much only legal prudence. As for the remainder—if there was one—that too was for the good, for there could not be too much observance when dwelling amid the fleshpots of Egypt.



An outside spectator, on the other hand, might have said that as large spheres of human activity were emptied of religious meaning and difference, an intensification of that difference in the remaining ones was only natural. Moreover, the more pervasive the influence of the milieu, the more natural the need of a chosen people to reassert its distinctiveness and to mark ever more sharply its identity borders. As the inner differences erode, the outer ones must be increased and intensified, for, progressively, they provide more and more of the crucial otherness. In addition, the more stable and comprehensive the code of conduct, the less psychologically threatening are the subtler inroads of the environment. The narrowing of the cultural divide has thrust a double burden on religious observance, as ritual must now do on its own what ritual joined with ethnicity had done before. Religious practice, that spectator might have added, had always served to separate Jews from their neighbors; however, it had not borne alone that burden. It was now being called on to do so, for little else distinguished Jew from Gentile, or the religious Jew from the non-religious, for that matter.

But then, there always is a dissimilarity between what is obvious to the participant and what is clear to the observer.

Both participant and observer, however, would have agreed that it was the mooring of religion in sacred texts that enabled this reassertion of Orthodoxy’s difference. And for those who sought to be different and had something about which to be genuinely different,36 the Sixties in America were good years, as were the decades that followed. The establishment lost much of its social and cultural authority.37 Anglo-conformance now appeared far more a demeaning affectation than part of the civilizing process by which the lower orders slowly adopt the refinements of their betters. The “melting pot,” now seemed a ploy of cultural hegemony, and was out; difference, even a defiant heterogeneity, was in. Not only in, but often it even told in Orthodoxy’s favor. The repugnance in many quarters with the emergent permissive society stood the religious community’s difference in good stead, and Orthodoxy’s dissent from contemporaneity gained stature from the widespread disenchantment with modernity and with the culture that had brought it to pass.38

Not that the collapse of the Wasp hegemony led to Orthodoxy’s resurgence; rather, the new climate of inclusion reduced the social and psychological costs of distinctiveness, and, in the new atmosphere, the choices of their parents seemed ever more problematic. What had appeared, at the time, as reasonable adjustments, now appeared as superfluous ones, some verging even on compromise.39 This only strengthened the new generation’s quiet resolve that in the future things would be different, which, together with a respectful silence and a slightly bemused deference, often accompanies the changing of the guard in a traditional society, or in one that still takes its reverence seriously. To the children and grandchildren of the uprooted, the mandate was clear; indeed, it had been long prefigured. Judaism had to return now, after the exile from Eastern Europe and its destruction, as it had returned once before, after the Exile and destruction of the Second Temple, to its foundational texts, to an indwelling in, what the Talmud had termed, “the four cubits of the Halakhah.”40

* * *

As separate as religious Jews may feel themselves to be from their irreligious and assimilated brethren, and as different as they may be from them in many of their ways, nevertheless, they are, historically, part of the larger American Jewish community, and their reassertion of difference was one facet of that community’s wider response to the conjunction of third generation acculturation with the civil rights movement and with the decline of the Wasp ascendancy. The rapid emergence of the text culture in the late Sixties and Seventies, and its current triumph, should be viewed alongside two parallel developments: the sudden centrality, almost cult, of the Holocaust, an event that had prior to the late Sixties been notable by its absence in American Jewish consciousness,41 and the dramatic rise in intermarriage that occurred in these same years. Intermarriage which, until the mid-nineteen-fifties, had been extraordinarily low and stable for close to a half century (4-6%), quadrupled in a dozen years (1968) to some 23%, and within the next two decades approached, if it did not pass, the fifty percent mark.42

Most of the children of the immigrants had decisively turned their backs on the old ways of their parents. Many had even attended faithfully the chapel of Acceptance, over whose portals they saw inscribed “Incognito Ergo Sum,” and which, like most mottoes, was both a summons and a promise.43 Whether that promise was more real than illusory may never be entirely known, for only rarely could the summons be fully met. Most Jews had imbibed from their immigrant parents’ home far too many culturally distinctive characteristics for them to be indistinguishable from the rest, not to speak of being joined with other ethnic groups in so intimate an enterprise as marriage. For the second generation, this sense of otherness was reinforced by the social and career exclusions they experienced at home and the growing crescendo of persecutions they witnessed abroad.

In the late Fifties and the Sixties, however, otherness collapsed from both within and without. A third generation raised in American homes came of age just at the time when the civil rights and Black Power movements were discrediting racism in many circles. With this uprising, America discovered that it had been born, indeed, had long lived in sin, and the establishment’s sudden awareness of its centuries-long unawareness shook its confidence in its monopoly of virtue, a necessary illusion of any ruling class. Its agony and confusion over foreign policy, long an area of special establishment accomplishment, induced a further loss of nerve. The center ceased to hold; meanwhile, ethnic barriers were crumbling among the grandchildren of the immigrants, as were the enforced solidarities of discrimination. This was especially true on the campuses, where young Jews were found in inordinate numbers. Many of them no longer saw nor found any bar to intermarriage. Others sought now their uniqueness outside of themselves, in the unspeakable deeds of the Nazis. What had been previously known as “the destruction of European Jewry,” became simply “the Holocaust,” a word that now resonated with new and singular meaning. Admittedly, the astonishing victory of the Six Day War may have had to occur before Jews could dwell on their past victimization without fearing that it might be seen as a congenital defect. And, probably only a new generation, unburdened by the complicity of silence, could bear aloft the memory of a frightful and premonitory past. But what is memorable, even inviolable, is not necessarily unique. The sudden, passionate insistence that the suffering of one’s people was sui generis and incomparable with that of any other nation in the long and lamentable catalog of human cruelty betokens, among other things, an urgent need for distinctiveness which must be met, but cannot be satisfied from within, from any inner resources. Finding one’s inimitability in the unique horrors that others have committed against oneself, may seem a strange form of distinction, but not if there remains a powerful urge to feel different at a time when one has become indistinguishable from the rest.

One can respond to a loss of identity borders by intermingling, by finding a new source of difference or by recreating the old differences anew. And much of American Jewish history of the past generation has been the intertwined tale of these conflicting reactions. People respond to situations according to their temperaments and backgrounds. At the time, they appear divided by the different positions they adopt, as indeed they often deeply are. In retrospect, however, they also appear united by the shared burden of the need for response, and by their common confinement to the solutions that lay then at hand.

Just as the religious response of difference should be seen not only in its own terms, but also, horizontally, as part of wider, contemporary developments, so too should its acculturation be viewed vertically: plotted on the long curve of the history of Jewish spirituality. The growing embourgeoisement of the religious community, repercussive as it was in itself, was also a final phase of a major transformation of values that had been in the making for close to a century, namely, the gradual disappearance of the ascetic ideal that had held sway over Jewish spirituality for close to a millennium.44 While there was sharp division in traditional Jewish thought over the stronger asceticism of mortification of the flesh, the milder one of distrust of the body was widespread, if not universal.45 The soul’s control over the flesh was held to be, at most, tenuous, and without constant exercises in self-denial, there was little chance of man’s soul triumphing over the constant, carnal pull. Certain needs and propensities had, indeed, been sanctioned, and, in the instance of marital relations, even mandated, by the Law. Sanction and mandate, however, do not mean indulgence, and the scope of what was seen as indulgence was broad indeed.46 Natural cravings, if not closely monitored, could turn easily into uncontrolled desires, and while they need not be negated, they should be reduced to a minimum. To be sure, states of joy were encouraged by some, appropriate moments of rejoicing advocated by all; but joy, unlike pleasure, is preeminently a state of mind, for unlike pleasure, it reflects not simply the satisfaction of a natural impulse, but of a coming together of such a satisfaction with the experience of a value. Through a millennium of ethical (mussar) writings runs a ceaseless warfare between will and instinct, as does the pessimistic feeling that the “crooked timber of humanity” will never quite be made straight.

Little of all this is to be found in the moral literature of the past half century.47 There is, to be sure, much criticism of hedonism; restraint in all desires is advocated, as is a de-emphasis of material wellbeing. However, what is preached is “plain living and high thinking,” rather than any war on basic instinct. The thousand-year struggle of the soul with the flesh has finally come to a close.48

The legitimacy of physical instinct is the end product of Orthodoxy’s encounter with modernity that began in the nineteenth century, as the emergent movements of Enlightenment, Zionism and Socialism began to make themselves felt in Eastern Europe, and the current, widespread acceptance of physical gratification reflects the slow but fundamental infiltration of the this-worldly orientation of the surrounding society.49 This metamorphosis, in turn, shifts the front of religion’s incessant struggle with the nature of things: the spiritual challenge becomes less to escape the confines of the body than to elude the air that is breathed. In a culturally sealed and supportive environment, the relentless challenge to the religious vision comes from within, from man’s bodily desires. In an open but culturally antagonistic environment, the impulses from without pose a far greater danger than do those from within. On the simplest level, the risk is the easy proffer of mindless temptation; on the deeper level, the risk is cultural contamination. The move from a self-contained world to a partially acculturated one engenders a transformation of the religious aspiration, as the quest becomes not so much to overcome the stirrings of the flesh as to win some inner deliverance from the osmosis with the environment. Purity, as ever, is the goal. However, in a community that chooses, or must choose, not flight from the world, as did once the monasteries and as do now the Amish, but life within the larger setting, the aspiration will be less to chasteness or thought than to chasteness or outlook, more to purity of ideology than of impulse.

Religion has been described as “another world to live in.” Of nothing is this more true than of the enclave, with its inevitable quest for unalloyed belief and unblemished religiosity. And the other world in which the religious Jews seek now to dwell, and whose impress they wish to bear, is less the world of their fathers than that of their “portable homeland,” their sacred texts, which alone remain unblighted by the contagion of the surroundings.

* * *



But could the world that was emerging from these sacred texts be seen as differing from that of their fathers, whose ways the haredim so strove to uphold? Such a perception would have undermined the entire enterprise of reconstruction. Memory now came to their aid, as did, unwittingly, the Holocaust. The world of their fathers had left no history, for like any traditional society, it had seen itself as always having been what it was, and, when little has changed there is little to tell, much less to explain. Of that world, there were, now, only the memories of the uprooted and the echo of those memories among their children; and memories are pliant, for recollection comforts as much as it recounts. Memories are our teddy bears no less than our informants, treasured fragments of an idealized past that we clutch for reassurance in the face of an unfamiliar present. The strangest and most unsettling aspect of the world in which the haredim now found themselves was its relentless mandate for change. Memory filtered and transmuted, and the past of haredi recollection soon took on a striking similarity to the emerging present. Nor was there, after the Holocaust, an ambiguous reality to challenge their picture of its past. The cataclysmic events of the Forties gave a unique intensity to the reconstruction of the haredim, as no one else was now left to preserve the flame; it also gave them free reign to create a familiar past, of which the present was simply a faithful extension.

Among the immigrants, especially those of the post World War II wave, this new past was, in many ways, the creature of recollection,50 but not among their offspring. Nor could the memory of the parents now be transmitted, as in the past, by word of mouth, for the children had acquired alien ways of knowing, even in the most sacred of all activities, the study of the Torah. Halakhic literature, indeed, traditional Jewish literature generally, has no secondary sources, only primary ones. The object of study from childhood to old age was the classic texts the Humash (Pentateuch), the Mishnah and the Gemara (Talmud). For well over a millennium all literary activity had centered on commenting and applying those texts51 and every several centuries, or so, a code would be composed that stated the upshot of these ongoing commentarial discussions. Self-contained presentations of a topic, works that would introduce the reader to a subject and then explain it in full in the language of laymen, did not exist. There were few, if any, serious works that could be read independently, without reference to another text which it glossed.52 Indeed, the use of such a work would have been deeply suspect, for its reader would be making claim to knowledge which he had not elicited from the primary texts themselves. Knowledge was seen as an attainment, something that had been wrested personally from the sources. Information, on the other hand, was something merely obtained, passed, like a commodity, from hand to hand, usually in response to a question.

Study of primary sources is a slow and inefficient way to acquire information, but in traditional Jewish society, the purpose of study (lernen) was not information, nor even knowledge, but a lifelong exposure to the sacred texts and an ongoing dialogue with them.53 Lernen was seen both as an intellectual endeavor and as an act of devotion; its process was its purpose. The new generation, however, obtained its knowledge in business and daily affairs, in all its walks of life, from books, and these books imparted their information in a self-contained, straightforward and accessible format. They saw no reason why knowledge of the Torah should not equally be available to them in so ready and serviceable a fashion, not as substitutes, God forbid, for the study of primary sources, but rather as augmentation.54 Learning groups (havrutot) and classes in Talmud were now flourishing in the “new country” as never before, and the resurgence of these traditional modes of study could only gain by such a natural supplement. In response to this widespread feeling, the past twenty years have produced a rapidly growing, secondary halakhic literature, not only guides and handbooks, but rich, extensive, topical presentations, many of high scholarly caliber/55

In Israel, these books are in modern Hebrew; in America and England, they are in English. And this constitutes yet a greater break with the past. Since the late Middle Ages, Ashkenazic Jewish society was “diglossic,” that is to say, it employed both a “higher” and “lower” language. Yiddish was used for common speech and all oral instruction; Hebrew, for prayer and all learned writing, whether halakhic, ethical or kabbalistic56. The only halakhic works published in Yiddish were religious primers, basic guides written, ostensibly for women, in reality, also for the semi-literate, but viewed by all as “woman’s fare.”57 Even hasidic tales and aphorisms, concerned as the writers were to preserve every nuance of the holy man’s Yiddish words, were, nevertheless, always transcribed in Hebrew.58 Things have changed dramatically over the past twenty-five years. Admittedly, the revival of the Hebrew language in Israel, and its attendant secularization, has diminished some of Hebrew’s aura as the “the sacred tongue;” nevertheless, the emergence of a rich and sophisticated halakhic literature in English stems less from the fact that Hebrew has been desacralized than because English is now the mother tongue of the Anglo-Saxon haredi society, as is modern Hebrew to their Israeli counterpart.59 The contemporary Jewish community is linguistically acculturated, unlike the communities of Eastern Europe, eighty percent of whom, in Poland, for example, still gave, as late as 1931, Yiddish rather than Polish as their first language.60 The flood of works on halakhic prerequisites and the dramatic appreciation of the level of religious observance are proud marks of the haredi resurgence. This flow and swift absorption are possible, however, only because that community has unwittingly adopted the alien ways of knowing of the society in which it is enmeshed and whose language it now intuitively speaks.

With this acculturation came also the discovery of “the historicity of things.” The secular education of many of the haredim was rudimentary, but it was enough for them to know that the record of the past is to be found in books. Any doubt of this was put to rest by experience. In life, one had to anticipate in some way the future, so as better to get a handle on it. The only way to do that was by knowing the past one’s medical past, the past performance of a stock, of a business, or of a politician. There could be little memory of such pasts, but there was information, written records, and from these documents, a “history” could be reconstructed. If all else had a history, they too had one. To be sure, theirs was not ‘History,’ in the upper case, the sacred, archetypical record of the Bible and Midrash, with its “eternal contemporaneity,”61 but the more mundane sort, “history” in the lower case, replete with random figures and chance happenings. Hardly paradigmatic for posterity, still it was sufficiently significant to its immediate successors to merit their pondering its lessons. So alongside of the new genre of secondary works in Halakhah, there has appeared, in the past generation, a second genre, equally unfamiliar to their fathers, that of “history,” written accounts of bygone events and biographies of great Torah scholars of the recent past, images of a nation’s heritage that once would have been imparted by the vibrant voices of home and street, but now must be conveyed, like so much else in the “new world,” by means of book and formal instruction.62

These works wear the guise of history, replete with names and dates and footnotes, but their purpose is that of memory, namely, to sustain and nurture, to inform in such a way as to ease the task of coping. As rupture is unsettling, especially to the traditional, these writings celebrate identity rather than difference. Postulating a national essence which is seen as immutable, this historiography weaves features and values of the present with real and supposed events of the past. It is also hagiographic, as sacred history often is. Doubly so now, as it must also provide the new text culture with its heroes and its educators with their exemplars of conduct.

Didactic and ideological, this “history” filters untoward facts and glosses over the darker aspects of the past. Indeed, it often portrays events as they did not happen.63 So does memory; memory, however, transmutes unconsciously, whereas the writing of history is a conscious act. But this intentional disregard of fact in ideological history is no different from what takes place generally in moral education, as most such instruction seems to entail a misrepresentation of a harsh reality. We teach a child, for example, that crime does not pay. Were this in fact so, theodicy would be no problem. Yet we do not feel that we are lying, for when values are being inculcated, the facts of experience-empirical truth appears, somehow, to cease to be “true.”

For if a value is to win widespread acceptance, to evoke an answering echo of assent in the minds of many, it must be experienced by them not simply as a higher calling, but as a demand that emerges from the nature of things.64 When we state that honesty is ‘good,’ what we are also saying is that, ultimately, this is what is best for man, what we call, at times, “true felicity,” to distinguish it from mere “happiness.” We believe that were we to know all there is to know of the inner life of a Mafia don and that of an honest cobbler, we would see that honesty is, indeed, the best policy. The moral life makes claim to be the wise life, and, the moral call, to most, is a summons to realism, to live one’s life in accord with the deeper reality.65 A statement of value is, in this way, a statement of fact, a pronouncement about the true nature of things.

When we say that crime doesn’t pay, we are not lying; we are teaching the child the underlying reality that we believe in or intuit, rather than the distorted one of our fragmentary experience. Just as moral instruction imparts the lessons of a reality deeper than the one actually perceived, so too must sacred history reflect, to the believer, the underlying realities of the past, rather than the distortions arising from the contingencies of experience coupled with the haphazardness of documentation.

And the underlying reality of Jewish history to the haredim, has been the Covenant that they had sealed with the Lord long ago at Sinai and which alone explains their miraculous continuance. There had been backsliding enough in their long and stiff-necked history, for which the foretold price had been exacted with fearful regularity. But when they had lived rightly, they had done so by compliance with that pact, living, as it were, “by the book-abiding fully in their “portable homeland” and living only by the lights of His sacred texts. How else could the People of the Book have lived?

So alongside of its chiaroscuro portrait of the past the unremitting struggle between the sons of Light and Darkness common to all sacred history, comes the distinctive haredi depiction of the society of yesteryear, the world of their fathers, as a model of text-based religiosity, of which their own is only a faithful extension.

The past is cast in the mold of the present, and the current text-society emerges not as a product of the twin ruptures of migration and acculturation, but as simply an ongoing reflection of the unchanging essence of Jewish history.

And before we reject out of hand this conception of the past, we would do well to remember, even if it be only for a moment, that at the bar of Jewish belief and, perhaps even, over the longer arc of Jewish history, it is the mimetic society “moving easy in harness” that must one day render up an account of itself.

* * *

Though born of migration and acculturation, and further fueled, as we shall see, by the loss of a religious cosmology, the current grounding of religion in written norms is well suited to, indeed, in a sense, is even sustained by the society in which orthodox Jews now find themselves. Religion is a move against the grain of the tangible, but only for the very few can it be entirely that. As deeply as any ideology may stand apart from, even in stark opposition to, its contemporary environment, if this outlook is to be shared beyond the confines of a small band of elite souls, who need no supportive experience to confirm them in their convictions, its beliefs must in some way correspond to, or at least, somehow be consonant with the world of people and things that is daily experienced.

The old religiosity of prescriptive custom fitted in well with, indeed could be seen as a natural extension of the East European pattern of authority, of compliance with accustomed ways and submission to long standing prerogative. Authority came with age in the old country. The present received its empowerment from the past, so it seemed only right and natural to do things the way they always had been done.

The world now experienced by religious Jews, indeed by all, is rule-oriented and, in the broadest sense of the term, rational. Modern society is governed by regulations, mostly written, and interpreted by experts accounting for their decisions in an ostensibly reasoned fashion. The sacred world of the orthodox and the secular one that envelops them function similarly. While sharing, of course, no common source, they do share a similar manner of operation. As men, moreover, now submit to rule rather than to custom, the orthodox and modern man also share a common mode of legitimacy, that is, they have a like perception of what makes a just and compelling claim to men’s allegiance, a corresponding belief in the kind of yoke people should and, in fact, do willingly bear. Religion can endure under almost all circumstances, even grow under most, but it flourishes more easily when the inner and outer worlds, the world as believed and the world as experienced, reflect and reinforce one another; as did a mimetic religiosity in a traditional society, and as does now, to a lesser but still very real extent, a text-based religiosity in a modern, bureaucratic society.66

* * *

The shift of authority to texts and their enshrinement as the sole source of authenticity have had far reaching effects. Not only has this shift contributed, as we have seen, to the policy of religious stringency and altered the nature of religious performance, but it has also transformed the character and purpose of religious education, redistributed political power in non-Hasidic circles, and defined anew the scope of the religious in the political arena.

A religiosity rooted in texts is a religiosity transmitted in schools, which was hardly the case in the old and deeply settled communities of the past. There the school had been second by far to the home in the inculcation of values. Basic schooling (heder) had provided its students with the rudimentary knowledge and skills necessary to participate in the Jewish way of life, while reinforcing and occasionally refining the norms instilled in the family circle. The advanced instruction (yeshivah) given a small elite was predominantly academic, cultivating intellectual virtuosity and providing its students with the expertise necessary for running a society governed by Halakhah. Admittedly, underlying all study was the distinctive Jewish conviction that knowledge gave values greater resonance, and that in the all-consuming intellectual passion that was called love of ‘learning’, as in mundane love to which it was compared, the self was submerged, and one fused with that toward which one strained: understanding, the truth the Torah.67 And indeed, more was demanded of those who knew more. Useful as this cultural expectation may have been in tempering both behavior and character and in moderating, perhaps, the prerogatives of a clergy, it only intensified the emphasis on study in traditional education. The affective powers of knowledge were held to be so great that the need of schooling to concentrate on its acquisition seemed ever more essential.

Now, however, the school bears most of the burden of imprinting Jewish identity. For the shift from culture to enclave that occurred in the wake of migration means precisely the shrinkage of the religious agency of home and street and the sharp contraction of their role in cultural transmission. This contraction became ever more drastic in recent decades. Indeed, it verged on elimination, as a result of developments in the larger community, where, with the full advent of modernity, the sense of right and wrong was no longer being instilled at the hearth. The family in America, indeed, in the West generally, almost ceased to serve as the inculcator of values, and the home lost much of its standing as moral educator. While the religious home was generally stronger than the one of the host society, nevertheless, it too suffered from the general depreciation of parental authority and from their rapidly diminishing role both as exemplars of conduct and as guides to the true and the proper. As the neighborhood will not and the family now cannot adequately instill fealty to a way of life different from the one that envelops them, formal education has now become indispensable for imbuing a religious outlook and habituating religious observance. The time spent by all in school has also been immeasurably lengthened, for convictions must be ingrained and made intimate, proprieties of behavior need to be imprinted by the deliberate enterprise of teaching, and for the impress to be durable, the individual must be kept in the mold during his formative years. So youth, and early manhood too, are now spent within the “walls of the yeshivah,” for the current purpose of that institution is not simply higher education, but also, indeed, predominantly an apprenticeship in the Jewish way of life.68

Having stepped into the breach left by the collapse of the traditional agencies of Jewish upbringing, the yeshivah has become a mass rather than elite establishment, more a religious institution than an academic one. To be sure, contemporary yeshivot seek to produce great scholars now no less than in the past, and often successfully so, but currently their major function is molding the cadres of the orthodox enclave, people whose religious character and countenance are a product not of home breeding but of institutional minting. Sensing this shift in the educational imprimatur, intuiting that the new source of religious identity entails changes in the old religious model, the enclave has already coined a distinctive term for the new, emergent exemplar, namely, the “ben Torah,” the young adult who will bear the yeshivah ethos throughout his life, despite continuous exposure to the invasive culture of the surroundings.69

So great is this transformation in the traditional role of that, at the outset, very few perceived it. Nor, for that matter, was it immediately felt. It is remarkable just how scant a number of educational institutions were erected by the immigrants or by their children. And not for lack of energy or dearth of organizational impulse. No sooner were the new arrivals off the boat, then they created free-loan societies, burial societies, immigrant aid associations, and landsmannschaften. Synagogues, lodges, and ladies auxiliaries were formed, hospitals established, networks of social services instituted, and charities of every sort erected for local needs, for overseas kin, and for the nascent settlements in Palestine. Temples, community centers and YMHAs soon dotted the residential landscape70. Jewish schools, however, were scarcely to be found. True, Hebrew schools were established in abundance, but attendance there ended with the onset of adolescence, and the education received was, at best, rudimentary. These were Americanized versions of the hedarim that the immigrants had known in the old country, imparting the basic skills of reading and writing Hebrew, only here they bore the additional burden of preparing boys for their Bar Mitzvah.

Nor did Orthodoxy present a much different picture. At the end of World War II, only thirty day schools of any sort existed in the entire United States, with a total student population of some 5,800.71 Yeshivot were far, far fewer, and the population of these institutions was minuscule.72 Seminaries for the training of rabbis had, of course, been swiftly erected by each and every religious stream—Orthodox, Conservative and Reform.73 For the need for rabbis was perceived by all, and all equally realized that rabbis were made rather than born. Jews, however, were seen as simply being born—for Jewishness was something almost innate, and no school was needed to inculcate it. And if there chanced to be some Jews who thought they had eradicated their Jewishness, one could always rely on the goyyim (gentiles) to remind them that they hadn’t. To be sure, the ideology of the “melting pot” played a very significant role in this educational passivity, as did equally the natural aspiration of immigrants that their children receive native certification and imprimatur. Yet, it would be a mistake to view this inaction solely as surrender or default. It stemmed also from the conviction that their children’s yidishkeyt (Jewishness), as their own, was something deep in the bone, and that schools need—not and, in all probability, could not—instill it. Certainly, there was nothing in their own experience nor in the rich educational past of their East European forefathers that could, in any way, have led them to think otherwise. Until mid-century, the children of the immigrants on the right imbibed their religiosity primarily from home and ethnic neighborhood, much as the children of their far more numerous brethren on the left and center imbibed their Jewishness from much the same sources.

And for a while, this sufficed. So palpable the heritage of the past, so primary and non-negotiable in this period was the sense of Jewish otherness that intermarriage was a rarity; and so self evident was then Jewish identity, that it was seen as concordant with the widest variety of views. Indeed, this identity dwelled in vigorous harmony with what, at least in retrospect; seem to be the most incompatible ideologies. Jewish intellectuals and activists passionately advocated Jewish Communism, Jewish Socialism, and even “secular Judaism,” though the same people, one suspects, would have been the first to smile at a similar claim of “Protestant Communism” or “secular Catholicism.” These ideologies may well have been confined to a small and articulate minority, but large segments of the population shared their underlying assumptions- that the essence of Judaism lay not in law or ritual, but in a social vision (yoysher) and a moral standard of conduct (mentshlikhkeyt), that Jews, almost innately, shared this vision,74 and that in the still moment of truth these values would rise to reclaim all allegiances.75 To the immigrants and to those raised in immigrant homes, identity was fixed; it was ideology that was variable. The next generation, the first one to be raised in American homes, found identity to be anything but a given, and ideological identification a necessity. The mimetic religiosity came to an end soon after the twentieth century rounded the halfway mark, at approximately the same time as “secular Judaism” was fading from the horizon, as were the low intermarriage rates.76 Their common disappearance marked the end of the East European heritage of self-evident Jewishness, the close of an age in which religious and irreligious alike, each in their own way, were Jewish by virtue of what they were rather than by virtue of what they thought, were, in other words, still Jews by upbringing rather than by education.

Then—around mid-century—the hour of education arrived. Within the last fifty years, the number of day schools has leapt from 30 to 570; its population skyrocketed from under 6,000 to well over 160,000, while the count of advanced yeshivah students has increased more than fifteenfold.77 The religiosity of the culture gave way to that of the enclave, and the mimesis of home and street was replaced by the instruction and religious apprenticeship of the school. Just how essential this instruction and apprenticeship are, even in the haredi world, indeed, even for its most insulated sector, may be seen in the numerous hasidic yeshivot now in existence and almost all of recent origin. For close to two hundred years, hasidism lad looked askance at the institution of yeshivot, viewing them not only as competing sources of authority to that of the hasidic rabbi (rebbe), but also as simply far less effective in inculcating religiosity than the hasidic home and local hasidic synagogue (shtibel), not to speak of the court of the rebbe himself. To be sure, several dynasties with a more intellectual bent had founded their own yeshivot.78 These, however, were the exception and not the rule. Moreover, these institutions addressed a tiny, elite body only, and their role in the religious life of the community was peripheral. Within the past thirty years, hasidic yeshivot have become a commonplace and attendance is widespread, as hasidim have decisively realized that, in the world in which they must currently live, even the court of the holy man may well fail without the sustained religious apprenticeship of the school.

This apprenticeship is long and uncompromising, but it has proven surprisingly attractive. The prevalence of higher education in modern society makes the time now spent in the yeshivah quite acceptable, but it does not, in itself, make yeshivah attendance alluring. The draft exemption in Israel does, indeed, provide strong inducement; but this leaves unexplained the same resurgence of the yeshivah in the United States and England. Unquestionably, the new affluence of the religious plays a major role in maintaining the new and growing network of schools. Wealth, however, enables many things, and massive support of higher, non-career-oriented education need not necessarily be one of them.79 The yeshivah has won its widespread support, and young men now flock to its gates, not only because it has become the necessary avenue to religious perspective and behavior, but also because it holds forth a religious life lived without the neglects and abridgements of the mundane environment. Resolutely set off from society, yet living in closest proximity to the ideals to which the larger community aspires, the yeshivah has, to some, all the incandescence of an essentialized world. Institutions of realization, such as monasteries, kibbutzirn or yeshivot, where the values of society are most uncompromisingly translated into daily life, often prove to be attuned to youth’s recurrent quest for the authentic. When the tides of the time do flow in their direction, their insulation from life appears less a mark of artificiality than a foretaste of the millennium, when life will finally be lived free from the pressures of a wholly contingent reality. Needless to say, such institutions have generally exercised an influence on society wholly disproportionate to their numbers.

What animates the yeshivah in so intensive a form, also works its effect on the daily life of the enclave. One of the most striking phenomena of the religious resurgence is the new ubiquity of Torah study and the zeal with which it is pursued, something which had not characterized the previous generation, even in haredi circles. Classes in Talmud and Halakhah, at all hours of the day, have sprung up, numerous small study groups (havrutot) dot the religious community as never before, scholarly secondary works on halakhic topics are snapped up and read, and the institution of daf yomi (literally “daily page”) has become widespread. And the latter is emblematic of the wider developments. In 1923, an educational reformer in Poland, R. Meir Shapira, seeking to establish a national curriculum, as it were, of Talmudic study for those outside of yeshivot, established a uniform “page a day” of the Talmud to be studied by Jews the world over. Its pace was rapid, and if scarcely conducive to profundity, nevertheless, it enabled the Talmud to be studied from beginning to end within seven years. For close to half a century, the institution languished, as both the pace and quantity were far too much for most. The past twenty years has witnessed its dramatic resurgence. The twenty thousand people who thronged Madison Square Garden in spring of 1990 for the festive conclusion of the seven year cycle,80 were, even after all allowances are made for the inevitable sightseers, still only a portion of those actually engaged in this enterprise. To meet the growing demand for Torah study and to further ease access to it, modern technology has been mobilized. Tapes of classes of Halakhah and of Talmud are widely distributed. These are played at leisure moments and when traveling to and from work. In the United States, there are toll free lines, where a record of that day’s lesson is available for those either too busy to attend daf yomi classes or who have occasionally missed them. The traffic is so great, at times, that some communities have several lines operating simultaneously. Nor is this service restricted to the daf yomi. In major cities, there is now dial a mishnah, dial a halakhah, dial a mussar (ethics) and more.81 To be sure, the level of instruction often leaves something to be desired, as might be expected of any mass enterprise; however, the broad based aspiration and widespread effort are new and noteworthy.

To the religious, this is only proof again of their supernatural continuance and of the Divine assurance that regardless into what new and alien world the Torah may be cast, Jews will always return to it as their predestined home. The will to survival of any group, its determination to maintain its singularity and transmit it undiminished to the next generation, eludes, indeed, full explanation. However, the different guises that this will assumes and the reason why one form is more effective at certain times than another do lend themselves to analysis.

For at least two millennia, Torah study (talmud Torah) had been axial to Jewish experience. Indeed, it was believed by Jews the world over to be necessary for their very existence as a people. As central as talmud Torah may have been to national identity, it had not been essential for the Jewish identity of the individual. That had come automatically with birth. Imbibed from infancy first in the family circle, then from street and school-cultural identity is primordial. Coeval with conscious life, it is inseparable from it. In contemporary society, however, Jewish identity is not inevitable. It is not a matter of course, but of choice: a conscious preference of the enclave over the host society. For such a choice to be made, a sense of particularity and belonging must be instilled by the intentional enterprise of instruction. Without education there is now no identity, for identity in a multicultural is ideological. Once formed, this identity requires vigilant maintenance, for its perimeter is continually eroded by the relentless, lapping waves of the surrounding culture. Assaulted daily by contrary messages from the street and workplace, enclave identity needs ongoing reinforcement: its consciousness of proud difference must be steadily replenished and heightened. Identity maintenance and consciousness raising are ideological exigencies, needs that can be met only by education. Not surprisingly then, does the still mysterious impulse for Jewish survival-for the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness-currently translate itself into a desire for Jewish instruction, into an avidity for Torah study in all its varied forms. The necessity of talmud Torah to Jewish existence, which in the traditional society of the old country had been only a metaphysical proposition,82 at most a religious belief, has become, in the enclaves of the new world, a simple, sociological fact.

* * *

If religion is now transmitted to the next generation by institutional education, small wonder that the influence of the educators has increased dramatically, especially the sway of the scholar, the one most deeply versed in the sacred texts. For the text is now the guarantor of instruction, as the written word is both the source and the touchstone of religious authenticity. This, in turn, has entailed a shift in political power in non-hasidic circles.83 Authority long associated in Eastern Europe with the city rabbi, who functioned as a quasi-religious mayor, has now passed, and dramatically so, to Talmudic sages, generally the heads of Talmudic academies—roshei yeshivah.84 Admittedly, the traditional European rabbinate, urban, compact and centralized, had no chance of surviving in America or Israel. It was ill suited to the United States with its sprawling suburbs and grass roots, federal structure of authority. It was no less redundant in Israel where the state now provides all the vital religious and social services previously supplied by the community (kahal), of which the rabbi was the head. However, the power lost by the rabbinate did not have to accrue necessarily to the roshei yeshivah. It is their standing as the masters of the book par excellence that has given them their newly found authority. In Eastern Europe of the last century85, the rosh yeshivah was the equivalent of a head of an advanced institute, distinguished and respected, but without significant communal influence. He was appointed because of his mastery of the book, and to the book and school he was then confined. This mastery now bestows upon him the mantle of leadership.

And that mantle has become immeasurably enlarged, as the void created by the loss of a way of life (the orah hayyim), the shrinkage of a culture, manifests itself. Social and political issues of the first rank are now regularly determined by the decisions of Torah sages. Lest I be thought exaggerating, the formation of the 1990 coalition government in Israel hinged on the haredi parties. For months, Shamir and Peres openly courted various Talmudic scholars and vied publicly for their blessings. Indeed, the decision to enter the Likud coalition lay in the hands of a ninety-five-year-old sage, and, when he made public his views, his speech was nationally televised—understandably, as it was of national consequence.

Admittedly this need for direction and imprimatur is partly the product of the melding of hasidic and misnaggdic ways of life, as the two joined forces against modernity. The hasidim have adopted the mode of Talmudic study and some of the ideology of misnaggdim. In turn, the misnaggdim have adopted some of the dress of the hasidim and something of the authority figure who provides guidance in the tangled problems of life. This blending of religious styles is, to be sure, part of the story, but the crisis of confidence in religious circles is no less a part.

This new deference is surprising, as political issues generally lie beyond the realm of law, certainly of Jewish law (Halakhah), which is almost exclusively private law. When politics issues do fall within its sphere, many of the determinative elements—attainability of goals, competing priorities, tradeoffs, costs—are not easily reducible to legal categories. Yet the political sphere has now come, and dramatically so, within the religious orbit.

Political reactions are not innate. Opinions on public issues are formed by values and ways of looking at things. In other words, they are cultural. What had been lost, however, in migration was precisely a “culture.” A way of life is not simply a habitual manner of conduct, but also, indeed above all, a coherent one. It encompasses the web of perceptions and values that determine the way the world is assessed and the posture one assumes towards it. Feeling now bereft, however, of its traditional culture, intuiting something akin to assimilation in a deep, if not obvious way, the acculturated religious community has lost confidence in its own reflexes and reactions. Sensing some shift in its operative values, the enclave is no longer sure that its intuitions and judgments are—what it has aptly termed—“Torah-true.”86 It turns then to the only sources of authenticity, the masters of the book, and relies on their instincts and their assessments for guidance. Revealingly, it calls these assessments “da’as Torah”– the “Torah view” or the “Torah-opinion”.87

To be sure, shifts in power are rarely without struggle, and authority that appears, from without, as total and monolithic is only too often partial and embattled when seen from within. And da’as Torah is no exception. Much of the current politics in some religious organizations in America88 and, certainly, the rivalry between certain Haredi parties in Israel (Agudat Yisrael and Degel Ha-Torah) reflect the clash between the old order and the new power of the roshei yeshivah. This, however, is never stated publicly, indeed, can never be stated publicly, for in the religious atmosphere that now prevails, especially among the younger generation, the primacy of da’as Torah is almost axiomatic.

One could hardly overemphasize the extent of the transformation. The lay communal leadership had always reserved political and social areas for itself. Even in the periods of maximum rabbinic influence, as in sixteenth-century Poland, political leadership was firmly in the hands of laymen.89 Indeed, as there is no sacerdotal power in Post-Exilic Judaism, the structure of authority in the Jewish community is such that the rabbinate has social prerogative and deference, but little actual power, unless the lay leadership allows them to partake in it. Lacking the confidence to decide, that leadership now shares its power with rabbinic authority to an extent that would have astonished preceding generations.90

Losing confidence in one’s own authenticity means losing confidence in one’s entitlement to power, that is, delegitimation, and a monopoly on authenticity swiftly becomes a monopoly on governance. It is the contraction of a once widely diffused legitimacy into a single sphere, and the change in the nature of authority that this shrinkage entails that is the political tale told by the shift from culture to enclave.

Authority was broadly distributed in traditional Jewish society, for the Torah, the source of meaning and order, manifested itself in numerous forms and spoke through various figures. It was expressed, for example, in the home where domestic religion was imparted, in the shul (synagogue) where one learned the intricacies of the daily Divine service and was schooled in the venerated local traditions, and in the local beys medrash (study hall) where the widest variety of “learning” groups met under different local mentors, to engage in various ways in the study of the Torah (lernen). These and other institutions were linked but separate domains. Each had its own keepers and custodians who, in authoritative accents, informed men and women what their duties were and how they should go about meeting them.

The move from a corporate state to a democratic one, and from a deeply ethnic to an open society, meant a shift from a self-contained world to one where significant ways of thinking and acting received some of their impress from the mold of the environment. This acculturation diluted the religious message of home and synagogue, compromised their authenticity, and, finally, delegitimated them. Only the texts remained untainted, and to them alone was submission owed. As few texts are self-explanatory, submission meant obedience to their interpreters. The compartmentalization of religion, typical of modern society, shrinks dramatically religions former scope and often weakens its fiber. But where belief still runs strong, this constriction of religion means its increasing concentration in a single realm and a dramatic enhancement of the authority of the guardians of that realm. The broad sway of their current prerogative stems from the shrinkage of the other agencies of religion, and it is the deterioration of these long-standing counterweights that gives this newly found authority its overbearing potential.

Thus modernity has, in its own way, done to the non-hasidic world what the hasidic ideal of religious ecstasy had done to large tracts of traditional Jewish society in the eighteenth century.91 This consuming aspiration marginalized synagogue, school and family alike, for they could, at most, instill this pious ambition but scarcely show the path to its achievement. This, only the holy man, the zaddik, could do. It also delegitimated the rabbi and the traditional communal structure whose authority and purposes were unlinked to this aspiration. Then, in the eighteenth century, the intensification of one institution depreciated the authority of the others; now, the devaluation of other institutions has appreciated the power of the remaining one. The end result is the same: a dramatic centralization of a previously diffused authority. This centralization is now all the more effective because modern communications—telephone, newspaper and cassette—enables the center to have ongoing contact with its periphery as never before.92

This concentration of authority has also altered its nature. Some nimbus attends all figures of authority, for if one did not feel they represented some higher order, why else submit? Yet, when authority is broadly distributed among father and mother, elders and teachers, deference to them is part of the soft submission to daily circumstance. There are, moreover, as many parents as there are families, and every village and hamlet has it own mentors. Their numbers are too large and the figures far too familiar for them to be numinous.

Concentration of authority in the hands of the master Talmudists shrinks drastically the numbers and creates distance. Such men are few and solitary. Moreover, they now increasingly validate the religious life of the many, as acculturation undermines not only authority but also identity. Even partial acculturation is a frightening prospect for a chosen people, especially for one that was bidden “never to walk in the ways of the Gentiles,” and, faithful to that mandate, had long “dwelt alone.” Threatened with a loss of meaningful existence, the enclave’s deepest need is for authentication. Those who answer that need, who can provide the people with the necessary imprimatur, are empowered as never before. True, a divinity had always hedged great scholars in the Jewish past. Now, however, they validate religious life rather than simply embody it, and their existence is a necessity, not simply a blessing. To a community of progressively derivative identity, these guarantors of meaning appear unique and wholly other, as if some chaste and potent spirit “inhabited them like a tabernacle.” Though grounded in verifiable, intellectual excellence, their authority has become ever more charismatic. Proof of that spiritual singularity, of their religious election, is now provided by the growing accounts of their supernatural power. The non-hasidic culture, in which the mockery of the miraculous doings of holy men had been, in the past, a comic leitmotif,93 has currently begun to weave its own web of wonder stories around the figure of the Talmudic sage.94

The increasing fusion of the roles of rosh-yeshivah and Hasidic rabbi is, then, not simply a blending of religious styles, as noted before, but flows also from a growing identity in the nature of their authority. For religious Jews sense that in the modern world, which they must now inhabit, unblemished knowledge of the Divine mandate is vouchsafed to few, and that religious authenticity is now as rare and as peremptory as was once the gift for Divine communion in the old, enclosed world, in which they had long lived.

* * *

I have discussed the disappearance of a way of life and the mimetic tradition. I believe, however, the transformations in the religious enclave, including the haredi sector, go much deeper and affect fundamental beliefs. Assessments of other peoples’ inner convictions an always conjectural and, perhaps, should be attempted only in a language in which the subjunctive mood is still in vigorous use. I can best convey my impression—and I emphasize that it is no more than an impression—by sharing a personal experience.

In 1959, I came to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holiday period—from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur—at a famous yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet, there was something missing, something that I had experienced before, something, perhaps, I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom were Israeli born.95 Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over the subsequent thirty-five years, I have passed the High holidays generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England, attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among the native born in either circle. The ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Noraim—Days of Awe or, more accurately Days of Dread –as they have been traditionally called.

I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community, and prayed in a synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from Eastern Europe, largely from shtetlach, like Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their religious observance, however, had been washed away in the sea-change, and the little left had further eroded in the “new country.” Indeed, the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn’t know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet, at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne’ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.

What had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur, and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered (in the words of the famous prayer) “who for life, who for death, / who for tranquility, who for unrest.”96 These people did not cry from religiosity but from self- interest, from an instinctive fear for their lives.97 Their tears were courtroom tears, with whatever degree of sincerity such tears have. What was absent among the thronged students in Bnei Brak and in their contemporary services and, lest I be thought to be exempting myself from this assessment, absent in my own religious life too- was that primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.98

To what extent God was palpably present on Yom Kippur among the different generations of congregants in Boston and Bnei Brak is a matter of personal impression, and, moreover, it is one bout which opinions might readily and vigorously differ. The pivotal question, however, is not God’s sensed presence on Yom Kippur or on the Yamim Noraim, the ten holiest days of the year, but on the 355 other—commonplace—days of the year: To what extent is there an ongoing experience of His natural involvement in the mundane and of everyday affairs? Put differently, the issue is not the accuracy of my youthful assessment, but whether the cosmology of Bnei Brak and Borough Park differs from that of the shtetl, and if so, whether such a shift has engendered a change in the sensed intimacy with God and the felt immediacy of His presence? Allow me to explain.

We regularly see events that have no visible cause: we breathe, we sneeze, stones fall downward and fire rises upward. Around the age of two or three, the child realizes that these events do not happen of themselves, but that they are made to happen, they are, to use adult terms, ’caused.’ He also realizes that often the forces that make things happen cannot be seen, but that older people, with more experience of the world, know what they are. So begins the incessant questioning: “Why does . . .?” The child may be told that the invisible forces behind breathing, sickness and falling are “reflex actions,” “germs” and “gravitation.” Or he may be told that they are the workings of the “soul,” of God’s wrath” and of “the attractions of like to like” (which is why earthly things, as stones, fall downward, while heavenly things, as fire, rise upward). These causal notions imbibed from the home, are then re-enforced by the street and refined by school. That these forces are real, the child, by now an adult, has no doubt, for he incessantly experiences their potent effects. That these unseen forces are indeed the true cause of events, seems equally certain, for all authorities, indeed, all people are in agreement on the matter.

When a medieval man said that his sickness is the result of the wish of God, he was no more affirming a religious posture than is a modern man adopting a scientific one when he says that he has a virus. Each is simply repeating, if you wish, subscribing to the explanatory system instilled in him in earliest childhood, and which alone makes sense of the world as he knows it. Though we have never actually seen a germ or a gravitational field, it is true only in a limited sense to say that we “believe” in them. Their existence to us is simply a given, and we would think it folly to attempt to go against them. Similarly, one doesn’t “believe” in God, in the other explanatory system, one simply takes His direct involvement in human affairs for granted.99 One may, of course, superimpose a belief in God, even a passionate and all-consuming one, upon another causal framework, such as gravity or DNA. However, a God “believed” over and above an explanatory system, functioning through it as indirect cause, in brief, a God in a natural cosmology, is a God “believed” in a different sense than way we now “believe” in gravitation or the way people once “believed” in God in a religious cosmology, a God whose wrath and favor were the explanatory system itself.

God’s palpable presence and direct, natural involvement in daily life—and I emphasize both “direct” and “daily”—, His immediate responsibility for everyday events, was a fact of life in the East European shtetl, so late as several generations ago. Let us remember Tevye’s conversations with God portrayed by Sholom Aleichem. There is, of course, humor in the colloquial intimacy