AN UNABASHED SECULAR JEW

Yair Tzaban

First of a two-part series

The Orthodox-Secular Divide Now Has Primacy

The dramatic rise of the Orthodox-Secular divide to the top of the Israeli public agenda has provoked some highly diverse responses. One of the most outstanding is a movement of sorts promoting Orthodox-Secular dialogues, some motivated by an overly pretentious desire to draw up a new social contract between the two camps. After all, what self-respecting humanist, democrat and advocate of the spirit of tolerance and pluralism can refuse an outstretched hand extending an invitation to participate in a dialogue?

But, as the famous anecdote has it, it often turns out that we end up with not a dialogue but two monologues. And equally often, especially when the participants of the dialogue are young people, there is a striking lack of symmetry between the two monologues. In most cases, the Orthodox partner to the dialogue comes equipped with a very structured and circumscribed monologue (without judging the nature of that structure and circumscription at this time), while that of the secular interlocutor is cracked and frail. His Jewish identity is unclear to him, his secular identity a mystery; and the combination of the two to form a Jewish-secular identity confuses him no end. A bridge will hold strong only if both its support-towers stand firm. With one shaky tower, even a bridge built with the best of intentions will collapse. I do not expect a single uniform secular monologue, but rather that there be sufficient common ground to allow all sections of the secular public to work together to consolidate their common identity, foster their culture and hold a dialogue that is a serious meeting of minds, with neither arrogance nor self-effacement, but one that is conducted at eye level.

In the following pages I will propose the fundamental premises and main conclusions for any presentation of secular Jewish identity.

The academic debate – and even more so the public-political debate – on the broad array of issues related to Judaism suffer from an overload of hazy generalizations, an exaggerated tendency to metaphor and, on occasion, embarrassingly florid language. What is needed now is a thoughtful and penetrating debate over basic definitions. Only on this basis can we then proceed to a more general picture. Disagreement over these basic definitions and starting premises is to be expected, and not only between the many types of secular Jews, on the one hand, and the religious Jews of varying kinds, on the other, but also within both of these great and diverse communities. However, it should be noted that consensus in day-to-day life does not necessarily require a consensus on the ideological plane. Sometimes consensus in practical life helps to make ideas clearer and narrow gaps in attitudes. However, because the subject under discussion here is of such import to all engaged in its exploration and the tensions surrounding it so acute, it would be best to get as near the root of the matter as possible and formulate our questions and answers as precisely as we can.

Historicity and Existentiality

What then is this secular Jewish identity that so many profess to have and yet so few can explain? This is no doubt a complex question on which each individual has his/her own slant – a slant determined both by personal choice and individual biography. The two are mutually dependent. My point of view is that of an unabashedly secular Jew – to be precise, of an unabashed Jew who is unabashedly secular. Thirty to forty years ago that clarification would not have been needed. Today, many, particularly among the younger generation, who find the burden of defining their Jewish identity too taxing, tend to convert it into an Israeli identity, as though the two were mutually exclusive. Among secular Jews too, the number of those who refrain from defining their secular identity is growing: some prefer a traditional self-definition, others a term that they are convinced has a better ring to it, such as a ‘free’ or ‘free-thinking’ Jew. However, they are charging the term ‘secularism’ with exactly what the anti-secular Orthodox ascribe to it: that it is the direct antithesis of all that is sacred and hence its value is confined to the temporal and earthly.

What does it mean for me to be a Jew? For the moment I shall remain content with defining the point of view upon which I shall elaborate later. To be a Jew, in my mind, is to stand at the intersection of two lines, one vertical, the other horizontal. The vertical line is the historical continuum of Jewish life, one generation after another. I too have my place on this continuum, here and at this point in present time. The second, horizontal, line is the ethnic-demographic-cultural continuum of Jewish life and existence today. On this continuum are Jews in New York, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Paris, Johannesburg and Tehran; on this continuum, I too stand – at a most unique point on it, here in Israel. To stand at the intersection of these two lines, the intersection of historicity and existentiality, at a here and now interwoven and bound up with what is not here and not now – that for me is what it most fundamentally means to be a Jew.

Not a Vacuum but a Constantly Renewed Fullness

What does it mean to be secular? Asked what secularism is, most people will usually begin their reply with the word ‘not’: “not religious,” “not a believer,” “not mitzva observant,” and so on. According to a prevalent metaphor, there was once a complete, sealed vessel, filled with faith – of the purest quality need I add – when one day it was punctured and all the faith evaporated away as though it had never been. And the vacuum, the emptiness left in the vessel – that is the essence of secularism. What a shame that such a striking metaphor fails even the first, most elementary test of compatibility with the actual history of Europe over the last eight hundred years. No vacuum could have caused the growing momentum of retreat of the power and influence of first, the Catholic church, and subsequently every other.

Secularism is both a cultural-intellectual worldview and a socio-cultural standpoint. True, it is indeed the antithesis of the religious establishment’s practice of enforcing its beliefs, values and compulsory norms on the whole of society. However, in positioning itself as the antithesis to religious coercion, it represents not an emptiness, but rather a constantly self-renewing fullness of intellectual and social life.

Secularism is inseparable from the general historical background that precipitated its creation and development. From the humanist revolutionary transformation represented by the Renaissance, through the crisis in the Church, the Reformation, the great scientific discoveries of the 17th and 18th centuries, up to the French Revolution: these historical developments gave secularism its form and character, not only by what it repudiated and discarded but also, and especially, by what it fostered and embraced. In this respect, the rise of secularism is closely and profoundly interrelated with the founding concepts of modern society – humanism, rationalism, democracy and sovereignty.

The test of modern secularism came not in establishing the legitimacy of a secular domain and dominion – that had been achieved back in antiquity – but, first, in establishing a real separation between the religious and the secular. The second came in establishing the precedence of secular authority over religious authority, not as the incidental effect of some power struggle between Emperor A and Pope B, but as a fundamental and commonly accepted premise of the power and authority of the state.

But the essence of secularism extended far beyond the political domain. At this conjunction of an internal crisis in the Church and growing tensions in its relations with secular rulers, Europe was undergoing a vast cultural upheaval, overturning almost every area of human creativity. The flowering of the arts, the major inventions, in particular the press and the great geographical discoveries, created a socio-cultural climate of change which eroded not only the pillars of the Church as an institution but also the dogmas and doctrines upon which the entire ecclesiastic edifice rested.

A brief journey through the pathways of history – of humanism, rationalism, democracy and sovereignty - will demonstrate the deep and ramified interconnectedness of these developments and those that shaped the rich and varied plenitude of the secular cultural experience. It is hoped that such a journey will lend a hand to those of wavering conviction and faltering knee who find themselves floundering in confusion when their identity as secular Jews is questioned. True, the sources of the secular experience in history are insufficient on their own to guarantee the fullness of its content, and the huge creative achievement of secularism has been accompanied by numerous contradictions and crises. But the brief description of its history given here will clearly refute the absurd claim that secularism and cultural vacuity are one and the same. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Two conclusions should not be drawn from what has been said so far:

It is not being claimed here that the secular humanist culture of our day can completely disassociate from the religious cultural heritage of the past. One test of modern culture, indeed, is its ability to extract the best from the humane, moral and aesthetic values of the past in order to integrate them into the renewed intellectual and cultural endeavor.

Nor is it being claimed, of course, that a religious person, no matter what his persuasion, cannot be a humanist, democrat or advocate of tolerance, just as being secular does not in itself necessarily make one a humanist or democrat.

Two things are being claimed, and are sufficient in and of themselves:

The first is that the development of humanism, rationalism and science and the acceptance of the principles of human sovereignty, democracy, pluralism and tolerance would be inconceivable without a strong and self-confident secularism.

The second is that it is equally inconceivable that a society completely dominated by religious dogma will protect and foster the above four values. Not that a secular society guarantees these values' predominance, but at least in a secular society there is a good chance that the struggle to nurture these values will be successful.

Zionism as Alternative Basis for Identity

Why are we so preoccupied with the question of our identity? Why aren’t the French or the Dutch concerned with the question of “Who is a Frenchman?” or “Who is a Dutchman?” Is it the Talmudic urge for probing an issue ever deeper and splitting logical hairs beyond reason that is driving us or are more deep-seated, more trenchant motives at work?

Indeed, the essence of the problem is rooted in a phenomenon unique to the Jewish people – the formation, in a certain point in history, a full and bidirectional congruence of its religious and national identities. To the believing, devout Jew, this congruence is eternal, immanent to the Jewish people’s very existence and to the very reason for its existence. Judaism, he believes, was born embodying that congruence and with it will march on to the end of time. In his mind, this absolute congruence is not merely a historical fact, but is rather an article of faith, and one of the most important there is.

However, a critical examination of history disproves this thesis. A careful reading of the Bible, and certainly of Biblical research, shows us how long and tortuous a road Judaism traveled until this full correspondence between religious and national identity came into being. Even more glaring is the spuriousness of its claim to eternality in view of the secularization of Jewry over the last two hundred years, and especially since the rise of the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment]. And this secularization has run in tandem with two other historical developments of great significance – emancipation and national reawakening – both of which were for the most part direct products of Europe’s secularization.

Only in the context of these processes can the advent of Zionism be correctly understood. Just as the survival of the Jews as a people and the preservation of their bond to the Land of Israel as a homeland are incomprehensible without appreciating the function that religion filled in their history and evolution, so the phenomenon of Zionism cannot be properly understood other than in the context of the revolutionary transition that occurred within Judaism. This transition from anticipation of divine redemption in the form of a Messiah of the House of David to self-redemption and self-emancipation could not have come about without a process of secularization.

The advent of Zionism required that Jews break free of their religious heritage and find a non-religious expression for their profound bond to Jewish history, Jewish culture and the Land of Israel. It was therefore only natural that the leaders of ultra-Orthodoxy should be so intensely opposed to Zionism that they called on the civil authorities to ban all activity of the Zionist movement. One of the reasons for this alarm is well known – the Orthodox leaders’ fear of a recrudescence of false Messianism, a new Shabtai Zvi. Less well-known, but no less alarming to the same minds, was another prospect, one that directly concerns the issue under discussion here: the fear that Zionism could offer Jews the option of a new Jewish identity, one that could replace the identity that the Jewish religion had provided in generations past.

Indeed, what would turn out to be immensely favorable for the national survival of the Jewish people, the extremist ultra-Orthodox could only perceive as a terrible scourge. Zionism rescued many Jews from the deep crisis brought on by secularization and their disillusionment with individual emancipation. The host society would accept Jews as citizens with full and equal rights as individuals, but at the same time refused to recognize the rights of the Jews as a people. Zionism offered Jews a new option out of their crisis – a self-sufficient Jewish national identity, free of dependence on religious identity – and in so doing gave secularization yet another push forward. Hence, these two phenomena bolstered one another: Secularization created the conditions for Zionism but at the same time created a crisis as to Jewish identity, inextricable till then from religious identity. Along came Zionism and extricated Jews from this identity crisis by grounding Jewish identity on its national basis alone, distinct from its religious one, and in so doing further accelerated the process of secularization.

It was this unique aspect of Zionism that infuriated the Lubavicher Rebbe of the time (not the Messiah from Brooklyn, but his father-in-law’s father, Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn (1860-1920). The leader of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement warned that Zionists were even worse than the Maskilim. With the Maskilim [Jews who embraced the Haskalah-Enlightenment], cautioned the rebbe, there is still hope that if they really want to save their Jewish identity they will realize that they have to return to their religion, fear of God, and observance of His commandments. But with a Zionist, there is no such hope: “…even if you pound him with a pestle in a mortar, he will never return to Orthodoxy because in his estimation, being faithful to the national idea makes him a proper and kosher Jew” (Or Yesharim, 1903). The Lubavitcher indeed hit the nail right on the head! He penetrated the very core of the fundamental contrast between the ultra-Orthodox position, which made total acceptance of a Jewish religious identity the only gateway to national identity, and Zionism, which by its very essence and the very circumstances of its birth could never reconcile itself to such totality, having entered into a historic alliance with secularism.

Zionism is indeed by its very essence a secular movement. Not that a movement’s secularism is a matter of its membership or leadership being religious or secular. A movement that is republican, monarchist, liberal or social, or a national liberation movement may have substantial numbers of religious members, even religious leaders without this affecting their definition as secular movements, and rightly so. For what is a religious movement? It is one in which the fundamental premises of its ideational structure are religious, faith-based and dogmatic, and whose supreme declared goals are clearly religious ones, or it is a movement whose membership is exclusively restricted to religious individuals. In general we find that religious movements fulfill all three of these conditions, indeed regard them as one. Zionism never has and still does not fulfill a single one of the three: Its fundamental premises were formulated in historical, rational terms; its supreme goals were defined as human-social and national-political ones; and it of course never occurred to anyone to restrict membership to religious believers.

This analysis serves to increase our respect for the advent of religious Zionism, part of the general Zionist movement from its inception, and also for the religious Jews who were among the first heralds of the new vision and among the members of Hovevei Zion, active for twenty years before the formal establishment of the Zionist movement. It must have taken considerable courage for rabbis to rebel against convention and side with the new vision. They also had to develop a religious-intellectual rationale to support their decision to join the Zionist movement and to bridge the gap between the traditional religious reliance on deliverance from on high and the Zionist vision of self-redemption. What was begun by Rabbis Alkalai and Kalisher was continued by Rabbis Mohilever, Pines and Reines and completed through the intellectual breakthrough of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook (1865-1935). According to his mystical-Kabbalist worldview, the national essence of the Jewish people, unlike those of any other nation, in and of itself represents a spiritual-divine essence, springing as it does from a covenant between the nation and God. Hence, Zionism was nothing less than the outer, earthly expression of that inner, spiritual quality. The Return to Zion movement (Shivat Tzion) had been from its outset totally suffused with the idea of a tshuva, a return to God, and now, in the era of secularization, the idea became more vital than ever. According to Kook, the secular Zionist realizing a national dream, the settler pioneer in the Land of Israel, was in the depth of his soul a potential ba’al tshuva, a returnee to the bosom of the sacred faith. This explained the source of the Zionist movement’s sanctity, notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of the founders and followers were secular in outlook and lifestyle. The religious Zionists could therefore act as pathfinders, a vanguard leading the entire camp, in their capacity as bridge-builders between the essential holiness of the Zionist movement and its secular outer character. Even if one utterly rejects Rabbi Kook’s conception, both as theology and for its mystical Messianism, one cannot but distinguish him from his epigones, whose actions and pronouncements are far-reaching vulgarizations of their master’s teachings.

Escaping from Orthodoxy’s Trap

The fundamentally secular character of the Zionist movement was imprinted into its ultimate product – the State of Israel. It is only natural therefore that the Declaration of Independence, the new state’s founding document, should be drawn up in preeminently secular language. Nonetheless, the semantic compromise Ben Gurion agreed to by including in the Declaration’s concluding words the phrase “trusting in the Rock of Israel,” reflected not only his desire to conciliate Israel’s religious leaders and the willingness of the leaders of the state’s secular majority to reach a modus vivendi with its Orthodox minority but something more, the vestiges of the religious heritage in the people’s new lifestyle.

Then as now, similar compromises of substance and principle have been a feature of the mutual relations between Israel’s secular and religious citizens and between the state and the Orthodox establishment. The most prominent retreat from the state’s secular standpoint came in an area of paramount importance, the wording of the Law of Return, a piece of legislation intended to imprint the newly-founded state from its inception with its unique status as the state of the Jewish people.

The law, which provided the judicial-legal formulation for the Zionist principle that formed the cornerstone of the State of Israel, was drafted from the outset in decisively secular-national terms. Supreme Court Justice Moshe Zilberg, an observant Jew, laid down in a 1962 ruling that the Law of Return, “for all its enormous historical importance, is a secular law” and that the term ‘Jew’ as used in the Law “is used in its secular sense.” In 1970, however, in the aftermath of the High Court of Justice ruling in the case of Major Binyamin Shalit’s children, Orthodox forces succeeded to some extent in undermining the Law’s preeminent secularism by amending it, as they are still trying to do today, both by changing the Law itself and by influencing its interpretation and application.

For this reason, it is to be expected that the controversy over the all-but-eternal question of “Who is a Jew?” will continue to reverberate in Jewish public life. One of the reasons, it seems, why considerable numbers of secular Jews unquestioningly accept the Orthodox position in this controversy is that many of us have allowed ourselves to be trapped in the trenches dug for the dispute by our Orthodox opponents. “Who is a Jew?” poses the question in terms of the identity of the individual as an individual. For an Orthodox Jew this creates no difficulties. He is prepared with the definition of an individual as dictated to him by halakha: A Jew is one born to a Jewish mother or who has undergone a halakhic conversion. Pure and simple. Hence, any attempt to answer the question within the closed circle of the individual as an individual at once lands us in Orthodoxy’s trap, and the way out of the trap takes us to the very core of the issue under discussion here – the issue of the individual’s national identity. The only way to escape the trap is to point out that an individual is uniquely and necessarily linked to the collective that he/she belongs to. This is a form of identity that can only be defined in terms of affiliation to a group, a body of persons, a collective and is known as affiliative identity. There is no definition that can, in terms of the individual as an individual, answer the question “Who is a Swede?” and incorporate within it every Swedish individual. To the question “Who is a Swede?” there is but one valid answer: A Swede is an individual who is a member of the group known as ‘the Swedish people’, or, more concisely, a member of the Swedish people. And now, all that remains is to describe the essence and particularity of the Swedish people. The same goes for defining a Jew’s national identity. To the question of “Who is a Jew?” there is but one answer that meets the criteria as stated: A Jew is an individual who is a member of the group known as "the Jewish people", or, more concisely, a member of the Jewish people. And now all that remains is to describe the essence and particularity of the Jewish people.

It is certainly true that no description of the essence and particularity of the Jewish people would be complete without reference to the phenomenon that marked it as unique for generation upon generation – the full bidirectional congruence of national and religious identity. This congruence left a profound impression on our culture and on every aspect of our lives not only while it existed but even beyond, after it had ceased to be so. For all that, it cannot detract from the validity of the definition of the Jewish identity as a national one.

At this stage I am accustomed to hearing the challenge: And just who is going to define who is a member of the group known as "the Jewish people," or, more concisely, of the Jewish people? To which my reply is that the question itself is contrived and spurious. Is there anyone in the world who would think to pose a similar question about the tens of millions of members of the French or Spanish nations? Bear in mind that we are not talking about citizenship in the nation-states of France, Spain or Sweden, but about belonging to a nation! The objectors ignore a straightforward sociological-historical fact: a state is an organizational framework, and like any organizational framework it sets conditions for admission (rules for obtaining citizenship) and conditions for membership (rules of citizenship). A church is also an organizational framework: it too sets conditions for admission (conversion rules) and conditions for membership (articles of faith). No people, no nation anywhere, was, is or can be an organizational framework. And for this reason no people sets conditions for admission or membership. The processes by which individuals or groups join a people, or for that matter leave it, are usually extended cultural-demographic processes that are the result of war and occupation, migration coming in the wake of war or natural disaster, cultural assimilation or individual self-affiliation. And please do not confuse joining a nation or assimilating into it with joining or obtaining citizenship in a nation-state.

As long as that complete congruence of the domains of Jewish religious identity and Jewish national identity existed, it was impossible to enter the latter without also entering the former. And to enter the former, one had to fulfill conditions of admission (conversion) and membership (mitzva observance), as is the practice in any religious community, which, as noted, is also an organizational framework.

However, once the two domains of identity were no longer fully congruent, the rules for joining the Jewish collective changed. Today, we have to distinguish in principle between three kinds of joining and identifying with the various aspects of Jewish life. There is the person who wishes to join Judaism’s religion – he (or she, of course) will have to meet all the binding criteria set out by halakha or the interpretation of halakha as practiced by the denomination of Judaism he wishes to join. Then there is the person who wishes to join the State of Israel as a citizen – he must satisfy all the laws for obtaining citizenship in our country. And then there is the person who wishes to join the Jewish people. He will generally realize this in practice by joining a Jewish family and through it, a Jewish community. This is a process of identification and affiliation that may often take many years – a generation or more – and is not dependent on a single binding act of any kind. No conversion ceremony will determine whether the new Jew’s integration into the Jewish people or that of his children has succeeded. This rather will be determined by a complex array of educational, cultural and social factors.

If Israeli society wishes to return to its Zionist, humanist, democratic and pluralist roots, then it can no longer be content with opposition to the incorporation of “halakhic conversion” into the Law of Return, as demanded by the ultra-Orthodox. It must restore the Law of Return to the preeminently secular foundation on which it first rested.

The full significance of the controversy surrounding the issue of Jewish identity cannot be fully understood without an examination of the way in which Jews perceive their place in the world and the unique nature of Jewish nationality. Traditional Jewish thinking holds that a clear line divides the human race into two sections, with Jews on one side and all those who are not Jews – Gentiles, called “goyim” (nations) or “nokhrim” (foreigners, strangers) – on the other. This traditional view of course recognizes the existence of different and various peoples, but merely as a subdivision of those on the other side of the dividing line, i.e. the Gentiles. The grave consequences that this view of humanity engenders stem from it having acquired the status of an article of faith, one of the most important there is, with veritable mountains of religious laws and rulings turning this belief into substantive daily reality. This reality, aided by objective forces of great influence, has rooted this divisive concept – which views the Jews as standing on one bank of a river with all the other nations standing on the other – deep in the Jews’ collective consciousness. Generally speaking, Jews believed that despite having to live as the most despised, degraded and persecuted of peoples, nonetheless, in the world’s “real pecking order,” it is they who stand alone on the high bank of the river looking across and down on all the other peoples of the world standing on the lower bank. How could it be otherwise? Were the Jews not “the chosen people?” True, the concept of a “chosen people” found diverse interpretations, some even of a truly noble character, understanding them as singling out the Jews not for exceptional rights but for exceptional obligations, as in the words of the prophet Amos: “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth – that is why I will call you to account for all your iniquities.” (Amos 3:2) Other interpretations, however, took the direction of ethnocentricity, even of extreme nationalism, and these were more widely embraced among Jews.

The very appearance of Zionism on the scene posed a challenge to this perception. Zionism deliberately erased this dividing line, both in reality and in the Jews’ mind, in the belief that it would correspondingly, albeit slowly, fade from the non-Jew’s mind too. Zionism took on itself the ambitious task of carrying the people from the one bank to the other, not in order to assimilate and disappear there, but to enable them to realize their national uniqueness as other nations realized theirs – by having their own homeland, territorial sovereignty, language and culture. That was the essential intention of the basic Zionist demand that the Jews “be a free people in our land and a nation with full and equal rights among the family of nations.”

What a sad paradox. This view of our national uniqueness and the place of our people in the world along with the aspiration to normalize Jewish existence is now perceived as non-conformist, almost heretical. What was once the foundation and core of the Zionist enterprise has turned into a false hope, a delusion. We are now witnessing a new type of Zionism, neo-Zionism as it were, that embraces the Jewish anomaly, clinging with all its might to anachronistic and outmoded endeavors to halt the wheel of history, presuming even to proclaim that the complete congruence of national and religious identity in Jewish life is still as valid as ever. And most of all, it in effect builds on the eternal confrontation between the Jews and all the other nations and on the perpetual existence of anti-Semitism. This pseudo-Zionism represents a complete distortion of the original spirit of Zionism because it is founded entirely on the presuppositions of Jewish existence current among Jews before Zionism appeared and which Zionism sought to utterly transform.

To this regression from Zionism's original principles as understood by all the major streams of the movement must be added the recent rise to prominence of two other trends, both dangerous - religious fundamentalism and national-religious Messianism. Both provoke anxiety and criticism not only among secular Jews but also among significant portions of the religious and mesorati (traditional) communities.

Yair Tzaban, former Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption and a member of the Cabinet for Security under the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is Israeli co-chair of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. He has been active in the struggle for peace and social justice in Israel for more than 45 years, and has been deeply involved in the fight against religious coercion, for pluralistic approach and for granting equal status to the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel. He now serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Meitar College of Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem and as the head of the Academic Board of the Lavon Institute for Research of the Labor Movement.

This article was originally published in a book of essays entitled We, The Secular Jews, edited by Dedi Zuker, Miskal Publishing, Israel, 1999. It is reprinted here with permission of the author and publisher. It was also published in Contemplate, Issue Two/2003 by the Center for Cultural Judaism.

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