Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: The Diaspora Moving Away from Israel: Here We Go Again
The relationship between world Diaspora Jewry and Israel (especially American Jewry), has been going downhill these past few years. But that’s nothing new!
Such a cyclical process has been going on for the past 2500 years, ever since the Babylonian exile upon the First Temple’s destruction. The Jews who returned a few decades later with King Cyrus’s permission constituted a minority (mostly lower class) of the overall Jewish population in the Babylonian empire; many middle and upper-class Jews ensconced in Babylon chose to remain behind – mostly for economic reasons. Sound familiar?
The eventual result several centuries later (back then things moved far more slowly than in our modern times): two huge Jewish law books – the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmuds. Only after almost a millennium did the former gain complete primacy.
That wasn’t the only split between them. Whereas the Torah reading cycle among Babylonia’s Jewish community was annual, in the Holy Land it was tri-annual – again until near the end of the first millennium CE, when the Jewish community in the Holy Land ended up as a pale shadow of its former great self.
Far less known is the huge gap that opened between the “Eastern” Jews (Babylon, Iran, Egypt) and “Western” Jewry (Greece, Rome, Spain) during that post-Second Temple, 1000-year period. Whereas the former spoke Aramaic and also were Hebrew literate, the latter knew only Latin. As a result, those Western Jews had no idea about the Talmud and Judaism’s evolving Oral Law tradition – leading to a total disconnect between these two main Jewish communities. (The great biblical commentators Maimonides in Spain, Rashi in France, etc., were all descendants of Eastern Jews who had relatively recently migrated to the West around the end of the first millennium CE.)
One could go through the rest of Jewish history for similar splits in the Jewish world (Karaites, Sabbatai Zvi adherents); suffice it here to mention the 19th century “Judaisms”: Reform, Conservatism, Modern & Ultra-Orthodox, and Reconstructionism. And let’s not forget the Zionists, Bundists, Territorialists (Uganda anyone?), Yiddishists, and a host of other deeply held Jewish theologies and ideologies.
Given such a highly variegated past and present, the central question is this: who is best suited to continue Jewish life into the future? To judge from Jewish history, there is but one answer with two quite different elements. The underlying principle: living Jewish life in as maximal way as possible. Of course, the term “Jewish life” says nothing about its contents (more on that in a minute), but “maximal” is pretty straightforward: when, and only when, Judaism – its values, ethics, life commandments, personal identity, etc. – constitute the core of the individual’s beliefs and daily behavior.
How to do that? 1) By “self-ghettoizing” (e.g., living in Borough Park, Brooklyn, or Golders Green, London) among other “Orthodox” Jews, so that the non-Jewish environment has as small an impact as possible. 2) By living in a Jewish State, where the symbols, holidays, language, etc., are based on, and steeped within, Jewish culture and history.
Why do I put “Orthodox” in quotation marks? Because Jewish history clearly shows that “frozen” Orthodoxy leads to a dead end. When the Second Temple was destroyed, the Sadducees (Temple-centered priests and aristocracy) stood for a blind continuation of Torah Judaism (adhering only to the biblical commandments); the Pharisees understood that revolutionary political and social change demands a parallel transformation in Judaism – and so “Oral Law” Rabbinic Judaism came into being.
Similarly in the 19th century, when Jewish Emancipation freed Europe’s Jews from most legal and social fetters, many Jews sought to adjust Judaism as well. Reform, Conservative, and “Modern Orthodox” (Rabbi Shimshon Refael Hirsch who sought to strictly maintain the Halakha but adapted to the modern world), all evolved out of this need for theological adjustment. Zionism did too, recognizing that “Emancipation” was not a solution for resolving anti-Semitism.
Which approach has proved to be the answer for Jewish continuity? The numbers are clear. Today, Israeli Jews outnumber the rest of the Jewish world combined. And within Diaspora Jewry, the only two denominations increasing in numbers are the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox. Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews are assimilating and intermarrying in record numbers: in the U.S., at about a 75% rate!
Nor is this an anomaly in Jewish history. Getting back for a moment to the first millennium CE Western Jews, they mostly disappeared from the Jewish world through mass conversions to Christianity, given their dearth of knowledgeable Jewish leadership and an adaptable Jewish theology (indeed, we have almost no religious books from there, or even Jewish documentation of their lives). Just like the Sadducees, they tried to adhere exclusively, in blind fashion, to the Torah’s commandments, something impossible outside the Land of Israel. Over several centuries, their communities disappeared – the same process non-Orthodox Jewry is slowly undergoing (some would argue, not so slowly) in Diaspora today.
This should not be taken as an “indictment” of non-Orthodox Jewry; it is simply a mirror that Jewish history places before all of us, one (to mix metaphors) in which the writing is already on the wall. It also explains in great part the growing political gap between Israeli and Orthodox Diaspora Jews on the one hand, and all other Diaspora Jews on the other hand. The former two groups consider Jewish personal life and group survival to be paramount. On the other hand, non-Orthodox Jews outside of Israel are heavily influenced by non-Jewish values and perspectives in their various countries. Without sufficient understanding of Jewish history and its religious values (Jewish Sunday School doesn’t offer a well-rounded Jewish education), they view Israel’s actions through a very different lens. To be sure, some of Israel’s own actions don’t encourage emigrating to Israel (e.g., the government’s latest legislative push to recognize only Orthodox conversions overseas for receiving automatic citizenship upon making aliyah).
All this is nothing to be proud of, or happy about. It’s simply the way it is – and to a large extent, cyclical “divorce and remarriage” have always been a significant part of Jewish history. After all, our nation started out as 12 different tribes, fighting against each other from the start of their life in the Holy Land! (Read the Book of Judges all the way through.) The future almost certainly holds more internal separation and re-amalgamation.
