Programmatic Jewishness

A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem.

by Milton Steinberg.

New York-Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1946. 308 pp. $3.00.

The problem Rabbi Steinberg discusses in this volume is, basically, how the modem Western Jew can best achieve and express identification with the tradition and destiny of his people and how Judaism can best be preserved in the contemporary world and perpetuated for the future.

The author thinks that we ought first to clear up the question: What is Judaism?, His answer to this is that Judaism is the culture of the Jews. But that, of course, at once raises the further question: What are the Jews? The answer to that one is that the Jews are a people—not a religion or a nation, but a people.

Having thus settled these issues, Rabbi Steinberg next proceeds to solve the question of how the Jews can preserve their identity and perpetuate Judaism in modern times. And here comes the partisanship.

His answer to this last enigma is an open and forthright advocacy of the Reconstructionist program, with especial emphasis on the focal or pivotal character of Palestine as a center of Jewish culture and on the local Community Council as the most effective instrument for uniting and coordinating the necessarily diverse ingredients of an active Jewish society. Reconstructionism, he claims, offers at once a creative program for Jewish living and a means of establishing order in the present chaotic house of Israel. To support his thesis, the author constructs a series of stereotypes representing various current approaches to the problem from both the religious and the secular angle. These he proceeds to take apart, cursorily but succinctly, in order to demonstrate their inadequacy and to vindicate his own position.

Rabbi Steinberg writes with all his accustomed vigor, verve, and persuasiveness, but fluency of style is small compensation for marked deficiency of rigorous thought. One cannot resist the impression that the author has committed his philosophy to print before he has properly thought it through. The conclusions do not follow from the premises, while the latter, as often as not, consist of formulations contrived for the express purpose of avoiding precision and evading disciplined definition.

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Take, for example, the author’s initial definition of the Jews as a people, rather than a religion, race, or nation. I submit that this has absolutely no meaning, for the simple reason that the term people, as here employed, really designates nothing more than an identifiable group, and that is where we came in. What we want to know, and what Rabbi Steinberg should really be defining, is just what makes that group clearly identifiable. To say that the Jews constitute a distinct entity simply because their ancestors shared the same destiny and therefore bequeathed to them a history and set of traditions which they share in common, is to evade the issue; for this “explanation” merely restates the fact of Jewish existence without providing a criterion by which its continuance can be validated. Indeed, by defining the Jews as a people, Rabbi Steinberg achieves nothing more than to hit on a neutral and colorless name for something which obviously becomes neutral and colorless if it is not further defined.

Take, again, Rabbi Steinberg’s definition of Judaism. It is the culture of this Jewish people. That means that it is projected out of a Jewish society, and that any collective expression of that society will, ipso facto, be Judaism. So far at least we have a logical position. But what does Rabbi Steinberg do with it? For purposes of argument, he abandons it altogether, and proceeds to speak of Judaism as if it were a bundle of traditional mores and institutions which have somehow, willy-nilly, to be conserved and perpetuated. To this end, in fact, he goes to considerable lengths to explain how Jewish traditions are reconcilable with the American heritage and how (I quote his own example) an American Jew can very naturally sing both Hebrew and American folk songs without any impairment of his cultural integrity.

Now these two conceptions simply do not jibe. If Judaism is the living expression of a Jewish society, then so long as that society exists, any collective expression of it will be Judaism, no matter whether it conforms to traditional patterns or not. Accordingly, the insistence on the preservation of ancient mores as the sine qua non of Jewish survival becomes meaningless; those mores are themselves nothing but previous forms of self-expression, and the superseding of them will be but a natural process.

Rabbi Steinberg is caught on the familiar horns of the Reconstructionist dilemma. The Reconstructionists insist that Judaism is simply the civilization of the Jewish people, yet they spend a great deal of their time trying to urge Jews to keep up traditional folkways as if that, and not their own collective self-expression today, were the indispensable requirement of Jewish survival. I cannot see why the singing of Hebrew folk songs (which do not really emanate from my society) should make me any the more a Jew than singing of hula-hula tunes would make me a Hawaiian. You do not become a Jew by conserving Jewish folkways; you become a Judaist, just as a man who imbues himself with ancient Greek traditions becomes a Hellenist, not a Greek. It is the failure to see this that is the basic fallacy of the Reconstructionist, and Rabbi Steinberg’s position.

What the Reconstructionists are doing is to try to create a society to fit a given culture, instead of letting that culture live or die naturally with the life or moribundity of the community. If they succeed in their program, they will have created a Society of Judaists; they will not have galvanized the Jewish people.

This, and this alone, is the real Jewish problem. Given the definition of Judaism as the culture of the Jewish people, and given also the very evident demise or moribundity of distinctive Jewish society at the present day, is it any longer possible to be a Jew in any living sense, and not simply a conserver of ancient Jewish mores? Is it possible, in other words, to be anything today but a Judaist? Is it possible to be anything other than an intellectual and/or spiritual adherent of a Judaism which is now, in fact, a thing of the past, the expression of a society now defunct? That is the problem which shapes itself upon Rabbi Steinberg’s own definition of Judaism and upon his own diagnosis of the Jewish situation in our times. That is the problem which should have formed the theme of his volume. And until that problem is met squarely, all other discussion of the Jewish problem is futile.

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Nor is this the only sin of omission in Rabbi Steinberg’s volume. Equally serious is his irritating tendency persistently to reduce the Jewish problem of our day to those particular difficulties and perplexities which, in his view, his own philosophy seems capable of resolving. It is, indeed, as if he were framing the problem to fit the solution. In his series of stereotypes, especially, he leaves out what is perhaps the most significant—certainly the most tragic—of all, namely, the man who is trying desperately and passionately to think his way through the Jewish problem, but who finds that his thinking runs counter to the forms and patterns that govern the formal institutions of the Jewish community as they have come to be accepted by acquiescence rather than by conviction. Such a man is forced constantly into an agony of isolation and despair, which Rabbi Steinberg’s somewhat facile philosophy does little to relieve. But it is such a man who, in this reviewer’s submission, really embodies the, Jewish problem. He is represented in his thousands by the younger survivors of the European cataclysm—a rising generation of Jews and Jewesses whose experiences are leading them to new formulations, new patterns, new mores, of what is indeed an emergent Jewish society. Rabbi Steinberg has failed to answer the question whether the civilization and culture which they will evolve, but which may differ radically from that of traditional Judaism, will not also be Judaism, since it will be the expression of a Jewish society.

Because he fails to touch fundamentals, Rabbi Steinberg’s volume, for all its manifest sincerity and scintillation, can be regarded only as a document of partisanship, scarcely as a guide to the perplexed of our time.