American Jewish theology - Current Theological Writing - Column

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Arnold Jacob Wolf

AMERICA HAS REPRESENTED TO MANY GENERATIONS OF immigrants the possibility of freedom--freedom from oppression, both governmental and clerical, freedom to make one's decisions unhindered by others' laws or by the imposition of merely customary prejudices, or by the will of ancient powers and principalities. America meant liberation from the many kinds of constraint which the Old World had long imposed.

It meant that also for Jews. From our earliest days in the New World, we Jews felt that refreshing breath of the truly new, the possibility of beginning again, of living freely, without conforming to ancient norms or to purely European patterns of thought and action. Freedom beckoned to immigrant Jews whether coming from the Spanish world of the eighteenth century, from the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century or from East European communities at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. A sea change overcame immigrant Jews who escaped to the United States from dangers and discrimination to safety, empowerment, and liberty.

That, perhaps, is why Isaac M. Wise, the great founder of institutional Reform Judaism in America and himself a Bohemian immigrant, believed that the future belonged to Jewish liberalism. (1) European reasons in favor of a dying European Orthodoxy would no longer prevail. New Jews would require a new and improved kind of Judaism, consonant with authentic American predilections. And not only "Hebrews," Wise thought, but all Americans would soon become Reform Jews, surrendering their Christian superstitions brought over from the Old World and embracing a rational Judaism that would fit the American ethos.

But even Wise understood that America was not only a promise but also a threat, that immigrants might throw off not only useless inanities of their former faith, but also the deep and immutable core of true religion and true ethics. America might make people not only less superstitious but also less devout. Wise, Isaac Lesser, his Orthodox counterpart, and their loyal students were deeply afraid that freedom might mainly produce irresponsibility. Therefore, they resisted what they perceived as American extremes of rationalism and indifferentism, precisely as did their Protestant and Catholic colleagues. The paradigmatic problem of American religion was, and is: how can we believe and practice our ancestral faith(s) without surrendering our precious new individualism and autonomy? Or, in reverse, how can we be free Americans with our own personal right to decide and still remain a part of a universal faith-community that is covenanted to God and, hence, constrained by its own traditions?

For American Jews the problem was especially acute. Jews are not required to believe in a creed (according to most traditional authorities, with Maimondes in dissent) (2) but are required to perform a considerable number of commandments that define personal life, business, calendar, ethics and many other crucial aspects of human behavior. It was very difficult to keep the traditional dietary laws on the American frontier. It seemed incongruous to continue to practice mechanically the traditional halakha (Jewish religious law) in a totally changed environment. It did not seem relevant to a generation of tradespeople and professionals to live just as did their grandfathers in Germany and Poland when all the rest of their lives were so different and so new. And, to some perhaps, the traditional God no longer seemed a self-evident reality but, increasingly, a vestige, a deity that had belonged in a ghetto or shtetl but had no place in their American metropolis.

America signified, therefore, both a powerful claim and a considerable threat. It gave the Jews, and especially their intellectuals, scope to theologize anew, and to think about old issues anew (as Abraham Lincoln, America's greatest theologian of the nineteenth century, demanded). America also undermined many traditional views and most traditional practice. In one sense, all American Jewish religious thinking is an effort to deal with the contradiction between autonomy and obedience, between the right (and duty) to think and act for oneself, and the equally binding desire to belong to a religion, in this case,Jewish religion, and to a chosen people of faith. (3)

New forms of Jewish religious life developed in the United States: a Reform Judaism quite distinct from its German antecedents, though always growing in their shadow, (4) an observant neo-orthodoxy that represented a fresh synthesis unparalleled in Jewish history; and a freshly minted Conservative Judaism that expressly tried to mediate between the old and the new, between Jewish law and American opportunity, meanwhile creating an absolutely new version of Judaism with only the faintest of approximate historical antecedents, all the while claiming to be the most authentic of all possible Jewish theologies. Reconstructionism, invented by Mordecai Kaplan early in the twentieth century, did not even pretend to be anything but American Judaism with a new and altogether original form.