Judaism and the Jews, or, On Jewish Apostasy

“People generally say: the Torah before anything else. I, however, would say: Jews are holy, and they come first.” [Seder Eliyahu Rabba 14.2]

This is the history of how Jewish thinking became enslaved. Jewish thinking was the creation of the writers of the Talmud, the ancestors of all kinds of rabbis in the Jewish world. They had no power, but they interpreted the words of the prophets with authority and turned a people into a sect with one intellectual system, a sectarian Judaism-organization. These creators of our Judaism had no other choice; they took it upon themselves to create a spiritual fatherland in place of the desolate Land of Israel. In place of the real Jerusalem they gave the people an ethereal Jerusalem. And this spiritual land, Judaism, had to be as firm and secure as the real land of Judea. No individual ideas or ideologies were to shatter the spiritual building: a Jew was allowed to feel only within certain limits. The body was bound within the limits of the Sabbath, and the soul was bound within the limits of the week as well. Relinquishing the intellectual system of the community, transgressing the borders of the established limits of the spiritual fatherland was equal to heresy, denying the faith, national treason. Human sacrifices had to be made on the altar of spiritual patriotism—freethinkers were martyred.

And since Jewish Exile, the wellspring of rabbinic Judaism, Jewish apostasy is tied tightly to Jewish redemption.

It is hard to understand the power of the rabbinic shtrayml,¹ and therefore it is easy to make fun of it. The power of the shtrayml does not come from soldiers, uniforms, and epaulets; maskilic mockery has nothing to fear. But can maskilim, satirists, hope and wait for victory? The old-fashioned maskil certainly cannot [win]. Criticism and satire, pure theoretical reasoning will not suffice here, because the rabbinic shtrayml is fed by Jewish troubles; thus, whoever wants to triumph over the rabbinic Judaism must triumph over the Jewish Exile. And that is not so easy. The problem of free Jewish thought is the problem of a free Jewish people, and the question of knowing becomes a question of doing.

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Our maskilim did not understand this, and that is why the shtrayml triumphed over them. In the end all of them returned to tradition. Peretz no longer laughs like he used to. He immersed himself in the deep symbolism of the shtrayml and revealed to us the secret of its national significance. The maskil turned into a Hasid; he abandoned joyful and amusing critical inquiry (science) for the sake of quiet, beautiful Hasidism. And beauty is not so far from piety. Don’t we want to bow to the ground in reverence in the Temple built by our longing for beauty? Don’t we worship our ideals? In the past we heard Peretz whisper prayers and plead quietly—now he prays out loud. Together with his Hasidic-maskilic heroine Leah,² who, back in the olden days, had carried the light of Haskalah to the uneducated masses he, too, returned to tradition and linked himself into the golden chain. “The light is cold for him, very cold, and his heart feels regret. . . .” True, Hillel Zeitlin is right in this regard: Peretz does not have a God, he only has heaven. But Peretz most certainly does not have a real land, and that is why he invites us to heaven. It is a magnificent heaven, he depicted it with all the beauty of Jewishness, but it is still heaven. Where is free Jewish thought, and where is solid Jewish ground? [ . . . ]

And the traditional rabbis keep repeating that the Torah comes before anything else. We, modern heretics, think that Jews come first, and we don’t care if the commandments are abandoned as long as . . . and here we have to remember that the commandments are the religious expression of our national freedom, and that they can be abandoned only in a Jewish land. In the great historical debate of Jewish life, in the struggle of Torah and Jews, rabbinism and secularism, divine and worldly, every Jewish thinker must choose one of two ways: either a mystical union with the Jewish faith, or a living connection with a Jewish land.

Critical inquiry and morality, theoretical and practical reason cannot dwell together peaceably in Exile . . . [ . . . ]

Modern Yiddish literature . . . how many hopes have the nationalists placed on it in a worldly, secular sense . . . and how Yiddish literature has fooled them. . . . A Hasidic aesthetic, religious romanticism has become its fundamental tone, the poetic core of all new literary creations; and if our senses weren’t numbed, our ears would be deafened by the cries of Yiddish literature, “we have sinned.” We have absorbed this religious ideology to such a great extent that it has become one of our senses, an organic part of our aesthetic taste. [ . . . ]

They have attempted to secularize our Judaism disguised as “historical consciousness.” But in this consciousness our faith still occupies the main place. And when we are not striving for new historical achievements, when we are only proud of our history, then we also have to be proud of our religion. The creators of Jewish historiography, our Western European coreligionists, understood this very well, and together with Jewish history they also created the theory of Jewish religious mission.

But what really remains of our freethinking, while the crown of our diaspora Jewishness, the central star of our nationalism, remains the rabbinic Sabbath-and-holiday ideology, which has become a sacrosanct plank in the most radical programs? Like the cloud at Mount Sinai, this ideology has surrounded us, and we cuddle at the rabbinic breast and breathe in the poetry of Jewish national harmony. This entire Sabbath-poetry of do-nothingness and weakness, which comes from not feeling any responsibility for the maintenance of the world and of our own people, this Hasidic-feminine beauty and Hasidic-feminine desire to negate our will only in order to achieve a feeling of inner happiness, this whole pessimistic Jewish aesthetic has intoxicated our souls and allows us to go around in an unreal world, allows us to trade a national life for national symbols, commandments, and customs. In this respect the mystical Shabbetai Zvi movement was even more radical than we are. They had the courage to bring to the Jewish masses the heretical-revolutionary idea that in the oylem ha-tikn, in the restored world, which has begun now, there will be no more talk of “permitted” and “forbidden,” what people may and may not do. [ . . . ]

What could help the development of Jewishness? The various reforms with a religious or national core that periodically emerge within Jewry with the intent of making [the Jewish people] a bit more secular cannot do much about Jewry’s assimilation to the other nations of the world primarily because they are destined to come too late. The individual, the revolutionary, the spiritual wandering Jew constantly moving forward, and the Reform rabbi too cannot catch up with him. And secondly, none of these Jewish reforms reaches the core, the rabbinic spirit of the Jewish nation. Is there an essential difference between the rabbis of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the rabbis of “enlightened Jewry”—Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich Graetz—who still considered Uriel Acosta and Spinoza enemies of the Jews? There is also no difference between R. Morteira of Amsterdam, who ordered Uriel Acosta to be whipped, and the gabbai of Ahad Ha-Am’s kloyz [synagogue], [Menaḥem] Ussishkin, who [though ostensibly a secular Jewish nationalist] behaved like some traditional synagogue functionary [ . . . ] when he withdrew his support from Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir³ because of one of [Yosef Haim] Brenner’s freethinking articles.⁴ And just imagine that those notions propounded [recently] by a Bundist publicist about the significance of the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays were to be adopted by Jews as a new customary law, as a sign of national unification—wouldn’t that too contrive to turn the freethinker into a national traitor? The contradiction between freethinking and Jewish communal life is inherent in the essence of spiritual rabbinism and in the sectarian character of the Jewish people in exile; and thus, reforms, assimilationist adjustment, and national adaptations can be of no use here—never mind that due to their intellectual rationalism their success has always been very limited anyway. And that is why the center of Jewish philosophy must itself be shifted. The question is now not about the essence of Judaism, but rather what is the essence of the role of Jews. Today our interest does not revolve around the history of rabbis and scribes, but around the history of the Jewish folk masses. (It is a telling characteristic of our times that we are no longer looking for Jewishness in our scholars’ books, but in movements linked to the spirit of the folk [and] in “stories in a folk spirit” [folks-shtimlekh geshikhtn, the title of an influential collection of stories by Y. L. Peretz]. What, then, comes first? What is more important: the Torah or the Jewish People? Those who are satisfied merely with Jewish philosophy ask only whether this or that is correct according to the Torah, and whether modern scholarship agrees with the Judaic system or not. And when those philosophers of Judaism find creative powers in themselves, they spin the thread of Judaism further and show us the treasure and light that Judaism offers. But when they find that Judaism is decrepit and frozen, they soon start to think about abandoning Jewish life itself. And exactly because for them the Torah comes before anything else, they are wavering between remaining Jews and converting.

For the critically thinking Jewish heretic, however, the question about the essence of Jewishness, about the value of its individual pieces, is not the main question and not a question of national continuity at all; it is only a scholarly problem whose importance is restricted to the realm of theory, and not an urgent question that needs to be answered right away. Because the essence of his apostasy is exactly that he completely rejects Judaism as it has functioned until now, and [rejects the notion that Judaism] is the beginning and end of the Jewish people. Israel and the Torah are not one and the same, for it is the people Israel that created the Torah, not the other way around. [ . . . ]

In Judah Leib Gordon’s famous poem “Zedekiah in Prison,” the unfortunate Jewish king argues with God: “What kind of injustice have I committed? Have I fought for freedom with my people? What is my sin? Have I not bowed my head to the Prophet Jeremiah, this dejected, softhearted man who ordered us to live like slaves and had only one solution to our misery: not to carry packages on the Sabbath? His new behest to the people instructed everyone, young and old, peasant and ruler alike to immerse themselves in Torah study, become a student; heroes should discard their shields, bows and arrows, wrap themselves in scrolls instead, and fight with their pen until the time comes when there will not remain a single worker in all of Judah. Oh, my soul can foresee the sad future: the Torah will survive, and the kingdom will be destroyed; the people will be learned, they will study the holy books, but they will be tormented and they will crumble to dust and ashes.”

Here you have the problem of a secular and rabbinic Jewish nation in its classic form, as well as the historical problem of liberated Jewish thought. Jewish apostasy is closely linked to Jewish redemption, and Jewish redemption cannot come without Jewish apostasy. “Had the spirit of the Jewish faith not made the Jewish soul soft and feminine, Jews would be able to rebuild their Land and become a chosen, divine people.”

Note from the Editors [of Di yudishe velt]:
The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article. See the article Likht un shotn (Light and Shadow).

The Editorial Board