Jewish studies and Jewish identity: some implications of secularizing Torah - A Success Story

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Bernard D. Cooperman

It is the academic's job to stop students from uncritically accepting the nostalgic longings for an idealized past through which society promotes its own values. Some years ago, a Harvard student, who had just completed my survey course on modern Jewish history, made an appointment to see me. The young man brought me a copy of the text on which his home-town rabbi had based a Yom Kippur sermon. The text was a maudlin song by an American Jewish singing group in which the Jewish past was recounted in terms of pogroms in Russia, Judaism was represented by an old grandfather, and contemporary Jewry was equated with a family that, after the grandfather's death, had forgotten all. The song, of course, advocated a return to making kiddush on Friday nights, on the grounds that "who will be our zeydies if not we?" The sermon was apparently a big hit; not a dry eye was left in the house. Said my student: "Isn't this just what your course was about?"

I didn't have the heart to tell this student that he had missed the point of my course completely, and that, unlike his rabbi, I am not in the business of advocating nostalgia or a grandfather's religion. In the course, I had tried to make the students understand, and empathize with, the agonizing and traumatic challenges which the modern world presented to the Jewish people. I tried to show them how different Jews responded in radically different ways to the trauma of modernity -- how Orthodoxy and Reform, the Bund and the Zionists, modern literature and the yeshivah -- all represented efforts to rebuild the Jewish identity after an older, "organic" and unselfconscious link with the past had been irreparably shattered. I tried to demonstrate that all of these responses were equally valid and equally tempting for different parts of the Jewish population. To the extent that some failed, it was my task to discover why, but it was not my privilege to dismiss any as inherently illegitimate. It was certainly not my right to equate modernity with pogroms or to advocate a return to an imagined world of the shtetl.

To return to the original question -- is the rise of Jewish Studies at the secular university a positive development? -- the answer is not clear. The rise of Jewish Studies in the university has also meant the rise of a critical approach to Jewish sources and the Jewish past, and it is not necessarily true that this is the best way for the Jewish community to encourage positive affiliation among its young. It can be argued that affiliation is encouraged far better by the yeshivah than the university. Two years ago, Professor Ruth Wisse and I, both on sabbatical in Jerusalem, were remarking about the recently reduced hours of service at the Jewish National Library on the Givat Ram campus. Professor Wisse noted, only half in jest, that each day, as she rode on the bus home after a frustratingly short work day in the library, she passed many yeshivot in whose study halls the lights shone brightly until the early hours of the morning, and whose desks were filled with eager students. Even in the library itself, most of the seats in the Jewish Studies reading room were occupied, it seemed, by very traditional figures in long black coats and broad brimmed black hats eagerly tracing down unknown rabbinic texts, rather than by more "modernized" or "Westernized" university students bent upon critical analysis. Of course, images can be deceiving, and there is some debate, even in Israel, as to the extent or import of these changes in the world of Jewish scholarship. But this contrast between the unquestionably growing world of the yeshivah and the not-so- populous world of advanced Jewish Studies does lead us to question the utility of academe for instilling strong Jewish identity.