American Academy of Political and Social Science
Judaism and Jewishness in the Jewish State
Author(s): Charles Liebman and Bernard Susser
Source: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 555,
Israel in Transition (Jan., 1998), pp. 15-25
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of
Political and Social Science
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ANNALS, AAPSS, 555, January 1998
Judaism and Jewishness
in the Jewish State
By CHARLES LIEBMAN and BERNARD SUSSER
ABSTRACT. While Israeli Jews would appear to be divided into asecular and a religious sector, a more appropriate division would be
into three population groups. First is the majority of religiously
observant Jews, who subscribe to a religiopolitical culture and who
represent roughly 20 percent of the population. Second, there is a
radical secular public, representing about 10 percent of the Jewish
population, who define themselves as totally nonobservant religiously
and who favor not only separation of religion and state but
the dejudaization of the state. They are sometimes referred to as
post-Zionists. Finally, there is the vast majority of the Jewish population,
who are somewhat observant of religious custom and who
continue to favor a Zionist-that is, a Jewish-state. This segment of
the population lacks political and cultural leadership; it is subdivided
into distinct ethnic and political segments; and it appears far weaker
than it is in practice.
Charles Liebman and Bernard Susser are professors of political science at Bar-Ilan
University. They have collaborated on a number of articles and recently coauthored a
manuscript titled "The Challenges to Jewish Survival: The View from the U.S., the View
from Israel." Liebman's primary research has been in the field of Jewish religion and
politics in both Israel and the United States. Susser's primary research efforts are in
the field of political theory and contemporary nationalism.
NOTE: This article is a revised version of an article to appear in Modern Judaism.
15
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16 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
NGLISH distinguishes rather
neatly between Judaism and
Jewishness. The former relates to the
Jewish religion with its theological
credo and prescribed practices; the
latter describes culture, ethnicity,
and a historical sense of belonging to
the Jewish people. English speakers
have no trouble in speaking of Jewishness
as a personal or communal
sense of identity that does not necessarily
entail Judaism, with its specifically
religious denotations.
Strange, then, that Hebrew does
not allow for such distinctions to be
easily made. One can speak of Yahadut,
which is normally rendered
into English simply as "Judaism."
One can construct indeterminate adverbial
phrases such as betzura
yehudit ("in a Jewish way"). But one
cannot-not without resorting to ungainly
neologisms such as Yehudiyut--capture
the meaning of "Jewishness"
in its straightforward
English sense. Hebrew compels the
modern speaker wishing to differentiate
between Jewish life as culture
and Jewish life as religion to invent
convoluted, unfamiliar linguistic
forms.
The paradox is indeed arresting,
but, on second thought, its resolution
is rather obvious. The lack of nuance
in Hebrew accords with Jewish civilization's
self-understanding for two
millennia and more. It reflects the
inextricability of the Jewish religion
from Jewish culture prior to the Enlightenment
and Emancipation. Hebrew
accurately reflects the Jewish
status quo ante in which Jewishness
and Judaism were, in fact, much the
same thing. Contemporary Israelis,
who wish to convey the idea of Jewishness
that is not religious in character,
are, therefore, linguistically
challenged by the weight of an uncomprehending
past. The task of conceptualizing
ethnocultural Jewishness
in modern Israel begins with a
telltale linguistic handicap.
Strangely, the same blind spot to
Jewishness as an ethnocultural identity
can be found in the stereotypes
that dominate the contemporary debate
over contemporary Israeli society.
Here, too, ethnocultural Jewishness
is a phantom presence. The
media image, often adopted by academic
social analysts, is familiar and
insistent: there are two Jewish societies
in Israel-the one religious, the
other secular-and they glare at each
other across an unbridgeable cultural
chasm. Israel is portrayed as a
country riven into two camps, religious
and antireligious, with nary a
third alternative to moderate the
standoff. They occupy distinct and
incompatible worlds of moral axioms
ideological imperatives, and life patterns.
The only question that appear
to remain unresolved is whether coexistence
and conciliation are possible
or, for that matter, even desirable.
For the radicals on both sides of
the divide, there is simply nothing to
talk about. Secular and religious Israel
represent two irreconcilable cultures,
and all the warmed-over pieties
about Jewish unity cannot put
them back together again. One mordant
secular polemicist reminded the
religious that there is a biblical precedent
for dividing the land in two
(Judea and Israel) and proposed that
the religious take Jerusalem-where
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JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS 17
they can sacrifice animals a
Palestinians-and allow the secular
to have Tel Aviv, where they can enjoy
the beach and pursue the peace process.
From the haredi (ultra-Orthodox)
camp as well comes a steady vituperative
stream of excommunications
and maledictions against the
"enemies of Israel," who brazenly
desecrate the faith for the sake of
which the Jewish people endured
through the centuries. The God-fearing
are warned to keep their distance lest
they be contaminated by these blasphemers
and fornicators.
Although these sentiments are not
entirely new, the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin released a volcanic
eruption of animosities, of charges
and countercharges. For parts of the
Israeli secular Left, the lesson to be
learned was clear: there can be no
dialogue between those intent upon
"saving lives and ending the conflict
[with the Arabs] through rational instrumentalities"
and those whose actions
derive from "a few Biblical
analogies and halakhic decisions intended
for other times and places."'
The religious educate to "fanatical
racist fundamentalist slogans" and,
hence, Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir,
was no "black sheep" but rather fully
a product of the yeshiva world from
which he came.2
This barrage was often met with
an equally charged and embittered
retort on the part of the religious.
Rabin's assassination, they charged,
was only a flimsy pretext for these
secular recriminations. The secular
community's hatred of everything
traditionally Jewish long preceded
the murder, only it was then not bon
ton to indulge in cleric baiting and
religion bashing. Their unrestrained
condemnations of the religious world
after the assassination are only Jewish
self-hate with a hypocritical good
conscience.
Although this two-culture perception
was said to receive further reinforcement
in the May 1996 Israeli
elections (more on this later), we believe
it to be fundamentally misleading,
not to say dangerous. There are,
we contend, three major cultural orientations
and three major publics
that can be distinguished within the
broad setting of Israeli society. Moreover,
the public that is ignored by the
two-camp theory is, arguably, the
largest and most important in Israeli
society.
Jewishness, as we noted before, is
not simply a form of Judaism; it focuses
its concerns on history, culture,
and ethnicity rather than upon religion
per se. Jewishness, therefore,
connotes a secular identity, even
though many of its sources and practices
may overlap with those of Judaism.
Wanting to preserve powerful
and immediate ties to the Jewish people
and to Jewish history, many Jews
turn to the Jewish heritage, to the
practices contained in the Jewish religious
tradition, and adopt them as
their own. (Although the term "secular
Judaism" has a distinctly oxymoronic
character to it, there is,
nevertheless, an important heuristic
message that rises from the
phrase.) In this way, religion is trans-
1. Menachem Brinker, "Rabin after Rabin"
(in Hebrew), Haaretz: Sefarim, 29 May 1996,
pp. 1, 14.
2. Naomi Riftin, "Who Killed Yitzhak
Rabin," Kibbutz RTends, 21:21-22 (Spring
1996).
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18 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
muted into folkways, theology into
cohesiveness-enhancing family observances,
and Orthodox devotion into communal
solidarity. Secular Jews of this
kind share a great deal with those conventionally
spoken of as religious in
terms of both practices and collective
commitments to Jewish continuity. We
shall return to this third public after
briefly describing the other two.
The easiest of the publics to describe
is the one that operates within
the religiopolitical culture. Although
there are a number of subcultures
that fall under this rubric-the national-religious,
the haredi, even
Ashkenazi and Sephardi religious
communities can be distinguishedthese
cleavages can be bracketed for
the purposes of our argument. At its
heart, the religiopolitical culture is
driven by the belief that halakha
(Jewish law) is divine and eternal,
that it ought to pervade all aspects of
public as well as private life, that
learned rabbis are the arbiters of this
system, and, by extension, that the
rabbis-in an ideal world, at least--
ought to be the ultimate authorities
in all significant private and public
concerns. Of all the communities, it
is by far the most self-enclosed.
At the other pole, secular Israeli
culture tends to be indifferent to Jewish
tradition. Conventionally described
as postmodern (in the consumerist,
permissive, individualist
sense), this cultural community is
Western before it is Jewish; indeed, it
tends to grasp its palpable civic bond
with the religious community as
somewhat perplexing, if not actually
quite embarrassing. In its more radical
forms, secularism evinces deep
hostility to the religious community,
scorn for religious practice, and a dismissive
attitude toward religious belief.
Although they are surely no more
than a tiny minority even within the
secular community, those who go under
the name "post-Zionists" press
this antitraditional animus to the
point of rejecting the very idea of a
Jewish state.
There can be little doubt that the
consumerist, permissive, individualist
style is becoming increasingly
dominant in Israeli society at large.
Yet there is an important distinction
to be drawn between the radical secularists,
for whom postmodernism entails
a deliberate effort to dissociate
Israel from Judaism, the Jewish people,
and the Jewish past, on the one
side, and those-a far, far larger and
more amorphous cohort-who are
merely concerned with creature comforts
and private needs and whose
ties to Jewishness can take many
forms, ranging from the indifferent to
the warmly traditional. For the radicals,
democratic pluralism is the banner
under which Israeli society is to
be dejudaized, that is, liberated from
the constraints of Jewish tradition in
general and from Zionism-centered
Jewish nationalism in particular.
Amos Elon, for example, concedes
that
as a measure of, if you will, "affirmative
action," Zionism was useful during the
formative years. Thday, it has become redundant.
There is a need to move ahead
to a more Western, more pluralistic, less
ideological form of patriotism and citizenship.
One looks with envy at the United
States, where patriotism is centered on
the Constitution; naturalization is conferred
by a judge in a court of law; idenThis
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JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS 19
tity is defined politically and i
law, not on history, culture, race
nationality or language.3
Gideon Samet, another prom
exponent of this position,
that postmodern lifestyles a
repressible wave of the futu
possible," he writes buoyant
we are ridding ourselves of that old
bother: clarifying our national identity. In
the past, so many efforts were made to
examine what it is, what happened to it,
how it was formed, whether it exists at
all, and if it exists, why isn't it visible ...
it now appears that just as this old question
threatened to bore us to death, it has
begun to be resolved.4
Resolution has come through "normalization,"
that is, the "move from
nationalist slogans to simple individualism."
Young people, Samet believes,
are turning to "Madonna and
Big Mac" as part of a worldwide revolution
in styles of cultural consumption
and leisure activity. This universal
pursuit of "popular music, movies,
trips abroad, dress, even modes of
speech" is, thankfully, taking the
place of antiquated anxieties about
national character and values.5
As is so often the case, each of the
two clashing cultures relies upon the
other to sustain its own sense of
righteousness, its conviction that it is
the one that occupies the moral high
ground. After all, a showdown scenario
in which it is only one's own
steadfastness that prevents the other
side from triumphing has a self-serving
benefit: it renders the struggle all the
more freighted with consequence
and allegiance to the embattled com
munity all the more imperative.
Through secular eyes, the traditional
world-pictured preferably in its
most obscurantist ultra-Orthodox
form-provides decisive proof of just
how primitive Judaism can be. Visions
of haredi thugs exhuming halakhically
questionable Jews from
their graves or assaulting policemen
who try to keep the roads open on the
Sabbath become the prototypical representation
of religiosity in action.
For the religious, scenes of homosexual
exhibitionism or of young people
with tattoos and nose rings, glassyeyed
on drugs and alcohol, constitute
the preferred cautionary tale. Both
sides urge us to believe that they
represent the exclusive alternative to
the medievalism or decadence of the
other.
This Manichaean picture may
serve the battling sides to shore up
their cohort's allegiance, but it does
not accord with what we know about
Israeli society. There is a third public
and a third culture-encompassing
the majority, perhaps as much as 70
percent of Israeli Jews-that is neither
religiously observant in a rigorous
way nor yet secular in the sense
of eschewing all religious practice,
much less wishing to dissociate Israel
from the Jewish tradition. This very
disjointed, intellectually incoherent,
and motley public selectively observes
religious rites without being
concerned with their theological import
or the halakhic consistency of
their actions. Jewishness is fundamental
to their identity perceptions,
and the idea of disengaging Israel
from the Jewish people and its his-
3. Amos Elon, "Israel and the End of Zionism,"
New York Review, 19 Dec. 1996, pp. 27-
28.
4. Gideon Samet, "The Nation Goes up a
Grade" (in Hebrew), Haaretz, 28 July 1995.
5. Ibid.
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20 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
tory is, for them, unthinkable. The
rubric most often utilized to describe
this amorphous community and its
behavior is "traditional," even though
some of them may well define themselves
as secular. But they are traditional
in the sense of being effectively
and communally bound to the Jewish
tradition while lacking either the
theological intent or the legal rigor
that is conventionally associated
with religiosity in Israel's dominating
Orthodox Jewish context. Terms
like "civil religion" and (in a somewhat
different key) "folk religion" are
alternate designations to characterize
this novel form of Jewish identity
and practice.
Not surprisingly, neither the religious
nor the radically secular are
happy to acknowledge the existence
of a traditional public mediating between
them. Here they stand then,
roughly 20 percent of Israeli Jews on
the religious side and about 10 percent
on the radical secular side, raging
at each other over the heads of the
great majority of Israelis, whose existence
they prefer to disregard. For
the religious, nonhalakhic Jewishness
has no religious significance
whatever and its practitioners must
be counted as betrayers of Judaism
and as allies of the secular enemy.
Traditionalism is, at best, only misguided
quaintness; at worst, it is a
fraudulent and cynical exploitation
of religious practices for alien
purposes.
For the radical secularists, traditionalism
is little more than religiosity
manqu6, and hence its practitioners-even
when they describe
themselves as secularists-cannot be
counted upon in the coming showdown
with the religious world. If they
have mezuzahs on their doors (96
percent of Israeli Jews do), Tom
Segev declares, they cannot be considered
real secularists, and "without
enough real Israeli secularists, there
is no hope of halting the influence of
the religious."6
Notwithstanding the desire to
deny its reality, traditionalism patently
exists as a form of Jewishness
apart. Although it is disdained and
dismissed by both religious and radical
secular elites, we are convinced
that traditionalism constitutes the
dominant form of Jewishness in contemporary
Israel. It is here, in the
evolving and distinct forms of traditionalist
Jewish culture, that the future
of Israel as a Jewish state will be
determined.
The religious and secular communities
are already known, determinate
quantities. Precisely because
they are far more systematic, articulate,
and fervent in their views, they
are also relatively fixed in their positions.
Barring events of truly traumatic
magnitude, it is as unlikely
that the religious will abandon their
faith as it is that the secular will be
overpowered by it. Traditionalism, by
contrast, is soft, malleable, and possessed
of many uncommitted resources-a
source of potential surprise.
With the larger part of Israeli
Jews best described as traditional in
one way or another, this is the social
group to watch.
It is not difficult to understand
why traditionalism is given such
6. TIbm Segev, '"Who Is a Secularist?" (in
Hebrew), Haaretz, 25 Sept. 1996.
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JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS 21
short shrift. It tends to be overlooked
because, given its folk-religious,
practice-centered, inarticulate character,
it rarely justifies itself in principled,
creative, or rebellious terms.
There are no traditionalist manifestos,
no traditionalist intellectuals,
no traditionalist political parties.
Neither is it ideologically outspoken
or, indeed, even determinate on the
right-left continuum as are religiosity
and secularism. As widespread as
traditional Jewishness may be, it
tends to elude the ready categories of
the analysts. That it is, as often as
not, prevalent among Sephardi Jews
of lower educational and economic
status does not add to its salience.
Neither does traditionalism understand
itself as presenting a combative
alternative to Judaism in its
dominant Orthodox mode. It does not
distinguish itself in the Israeli public
sphere by assaulting or even disparaging
the regnant religious establishment.
Since tradition is their focus,
its practitioners have little
desire to break ranks with tradition
and create a new form of Judaism,
such as that created by Conservative
and Reform Judaism. As opposed to
the socialist-egalitarian movements
of the heroic age of Zionism that
strove to create a "new Hebrew person,"
a revolutionary, explicitly antireligious
conception of the Jewish
mission and of Jewish values, traditionalism
is quite content to live in
the prosaic world of communal solidarity
and routine practice. It is to be
found in the myriad quotidian observances
and conventions that densely
organize the texture of everyday Israeli
life. For example, life-cycle
events are overwhelmingly organized
within the Jewish context. A
recent survey of the attitudes, behavior,
and beliefs of Israeli Jews, undertaken
by the Guttman Institute,7
reports 92 percent observing circumcision,
83 percent bar mitzvah, 87
percent marriage, and 90 percent
mourning rites in a traditionally
Jewish fashion. Seasonal rhythms,
vacations from work and school, public
and private celebrations and memorials,
media programming, and so
on are determined by the contours of
the Jewish calendar. Kashrut is recast
into a kind of normative national
cuisine (two-thirds of Israelis report
bringing only kosher food into their
homes, while half keep separate
utensils for meat and milk). Passover
Seders, candle lighting on Hanukkah,
Purim celebrations, and so forth
are so overwhelmingly widespread
that even those who think of themselves
as entirely secular are likely to
observe them in one form or another.
Street names celebrating Jewish personalities
or recalling the Jewish historical
and religious heritage are omnipresent.
(Getting directions in
some parts of town will sound something
like this: turn right at Rabbi
Akiva Street, left on Maimonides,
continue straight past Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising and Redemption
Streets to ....)
Although traditional observances
do not make sense halakhically, this
does not mean they are random, individual,
or unsystematic. Traditional
7. The survey highlights are described and
the survey analyzed in Charles S. Liebman
and Elihu Katz, eds., The Jewishness ofIsrael:
Responses to the Guttman Report (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1997).
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22 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
behavior is entirely coherent and intelligible
if its underlying intent is
taken into account: a conscious commitment
to the continuity of the Jewish
people. It is the intent of an ethnically
loyal Jew rather than of a
pious and devout one. Traditional
Jews seek to communicate and consolidate
cultural identities rather
than express worldviews. Moreover,
as opposed to the common Orthodox
conceit, traditionalists do not understand
their deviations from halakha
as laziness, dereliction, or negligence.
There is method here even if it
is not the method of halakha. They
understand themselves-if their unspoken
assumptions were to be
articulated-as participating in a
patterned form of observances that is
not halakha-observances that they
have transformed into the folkways
of a Jewish civilization.
For traditional Israeli Jews, halakha
and its rabbinic arbiters are
not relevant, or at least not decisive,
in determining their ideological postures
and policy preferences. Much
like their casual bearing toward halakhic
Judaism, they relate decorously
to rabbinical opinions regarding
politics but do not see them as
obligatory or authoritative. One kind
of traditionalist, well characterized
as "synagogue back benchers," are
deeply respectful of religion but
"have difficulty in dismissing the dictates
of their own conscience and
their own logic when confronted by a
halakhic decision."' Jewish history,
they might say, can be understood
without resort to divine intervention-although
such intervention
should not be ruled out as a matter of
principle. These traditionalists are
swayed by what they understand to
be Jewish values and categories
without any felt need to attribute
these to a patently divine origin. If
religion in its more conventional
forms focuses on the ultimate issues
of cosmic meaning and human transcendence,
the objects of traditionalist
sentiment and practice are closer
at hand, to wit, Jewish communal
solidarity, ethnic self-identification,
and historical continuity.
Traditionalist ideas are often formulated
in what is unmistakably religious
terminology. Nonetheless,
these are not to be taken as straightforward
affirmations of faith. The vehicle
of delivery and the substance of
the message must be distinguished.
Like the rhetoric of much American
politics with its generous dose of God
talk, traditionalist public discourse
in Israel resorts to religious rhetoric
not because it is God centered at its
core but because religious language
is uniquely charged, poetic, and resonant
with the grandeur and tragedy
of Jewish history. The language of the
sacred is employed because it embodies
picturesque and dramatic images
that are uniquely designed to convey
the anguish of national traumas, the
jubilations of triumph and of deeply
stirring moments, the sense of dedication
and constancy. The airlift of
Ethiopian Jews to Israel, for example,
prompted some very hardened
nonbelievers to utilize some very
glowing religious rhetoric. Traditionalism,
in a word, possesses the protean
character of popular, ethnocul-
8. Yaacov Levi, "A Vanishing Breed" (in
Hebrew), Meimad, no. 8, p. 25 (Dec. 1996).
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JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS 23
tural folkways that derive
gious sources; often utilize
symbols, practices, and l
and yet is fundamentally n
gious phenomenon. It is,
form of national self-identification
expressed through the immemorial
language of the Jewish tradition.
Traditionalism exists, but does it
have the viability and self-possession
to resist the unrelenting inroads of
the global village, pluralist liberalism
in the intrusive Western mode,
post-Zionist pressures, and, perhaps,
the coming of peace to the Middle
East? Can traditional Jews transmit
their admittedly nebulous values to
an increasingly westernized younger
generation? If traditionalism does
not possess these capacities, the Jewish
character of the state of Israel is
surely fated to wear thinner and thinner
in coming years.
The findings of the Guttman Report
are reassuring in regard to the
solidarity and prevalence of traditional
behavior and identity. They are
less encouraging when the subject is
their long-term continuity. We simply
do not know how deep or significant
these observances are for their performers,
not to speak of how attractive
they will be to a new generation
of Israeli youths further removed
from traditional lifestyles. Indeed,
there is evidence, some of it from the
Guttman Report itself, that we are
witnessing a gradual dissolution of
the traditionalist Sephardi population.
A social centrifuge seems to be
distancing them from their erstwhile
traditional center; some are spinning
off to the religious (including the
haredi) world, many more to the postmodernist
culture of consumerist
affluence.
At present, therefore, traditional
Jewishness is alive, even if it is not
entirely well. One striking indication
of its vitality came to the fore in the
May 1996 elections. Benjamin Netanyahu
did all he could to minimize
his territorial and foreign policy differences
with Shimon Peres (it came
down to Labor's "peace with security"
versus the Likud's "security with
peace"). He appealed instead to the
traditional majority, claiming to be
the guardian of Jewish values, a bulwark
against the secular cosmopolitans
of the Left. The latter, he
taunted, are more at home in a Jewish
neighborhood than they are in a
synagogue. He peppered his language
with "blessed be the Lord,"
"the Lord willing," and other dutiful
religious formulae (even though his
past gives no indication of a significant
relation to the Jewish tradition).
The Lubavitcher movement, as if
catching the import of Netanyahu's
appeal, closed the campaign with an
advertising blitz under the slogan
"Netanyahu, he's good for the Jews."
The haredi and national religious
parties also directed their messages
at the anxieties of the broadly traditional
populace who were concerned
that under the Labor-Meretz coalition,
Israel's Jewish character was
withering away. Although many of
these voters were themselves immersed
in the postmodern culture
(perhaps precisely because they fe
somewhat abashed at their departure
from traditional ways), they sup
ported the parties that promised t
safeguard the legacy of the past. Th
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24 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
religious parties appealed explicitly
beyond the religious community,
identifying themselves broadly with
traditional concerns and apprehensions.
They made every effort to
stress their cultural Jewishness as
opposed to their narrowly religious
character. With 55 percent of the
Jewish vote going for Netanyahu,
there can be little doubt that this
Jewish-centered message hit its
mark.
Were the conception of a culture
war between the religious on the one
side and the non- and antireligious on
the other even vaguely accurate, the
secular camp would have easily prevailed
at the ballot box, where they
outnumber the religious by four, perhaps
even five, to one. But the Israeli
electorate clearly saw the issues differently
from what the conventional
wisdom would have us believe. Many
perceived the campaign as pitting a
secular, highly westernized elite with
little interest in Judaism or Jewishness
against a tradition-preserving
coalition of parties-and they voted
accordingly. Netanyahu's victory is
properly understood, therefore, less
as a rejection of the Oslo peace process
(two-thirds of Israelis consistently
report supporting the peace
process) and more as the protest victory
of a Jewish identity coalition
that felt its traditional and communal
values threatened by the forces of
dejudaization.
Clearly, traditionalists can be mobilized
when challenged. It is odd
therefore that they nonetheless fail
to recognize themselves as a group
apart, a group with its own distinct
vision of a Jewish Israel and its own
very unique manner of sustaining a
Jewish civilization. Neither do they
recognize their potentially decisive
effect on Israel's public life. Herein
lies their most serious weakness:
they have not risen above the level of
habitual practice and basic irritabil
ity to a conscious expression of their
ideas and a deliberate defense of
their values. Like the nonexistent
term for "Jewishness" in Hebrew, th
Jewishly traditional do not lead a
clearly defined existence. Because
they lack a clear sense of self, not to
speak of a high culture, their hold on
the future may turn out to be tenuous.
The future of Jewish Israel is
likely to ride on the outcome of their
spiritual odyssey.
One sign that secular Jewishness
is making its mark on the public is
the fact that it has been subject to
recent attack by dejudaized secular
elements. We can do no better than
quote from a recent article by an
Haaretz columnist. Aryeh Caspi
writes as follows:
In the last few months, the press has been
filled with favorable articles concerning
secular programs for transmitting Judaism.
One mustn't leave Judaism to the
haredim, argue the religiosecular.... In
this country, a culture war is being
waged, partially under the table. ... In a
culture war, like any other conflict of
power, the one who determines the playing
field will win. "The study of Judaism"
is a code name for concern with rabbinical
literature. Judaism is the playing field of
the religious whether we like it or not....
The declaration that the secular are returning
to the Jewish bookshelf is a victory
for religious propaganda. The public
who has heard this in the last few months
from sources of all kinds gets the message
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JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS 25
that secularism is interior. . . . It is difficult
to understand what some secularists
who learned something in their lives in
addition to the shulkhan arukh [the Jewish
law code] are doing in this barren
field. ... The secular Jewish preachers
remind one, to a great extent, of the
haredi missionizers. They all share the
desire to determine the spiritual world of
other people. It is easier to understand
the motivation of the religious propagandists.
It is hard to understand what motivates
the secularists.9
Caspi's column, and others like it,
suggest that the Jewish secularists
are having more of an impact than
one otherwise might have thought.
9. Aryeh Caspi, "To Whom Is He Faithful"
(in Hebrew), Haaretz: Sefarim, 11 July 1997,
pp. 14-15.
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