Journey of the New York Yid

I read it in that interview with Woody Allen in the latest issue of New York, the one I’ve been raving about – “My old neighborhood became Hasidic. Which is, for me, the kiss of death.”

I thought about it afterwards, and figured that I agreed with what he was saying, because as much as I respect orthodoxy and Hassidism, I can’t help but feel that it also represents an insularism that separates Jews from understanding, and more importantly, contributing to the greater society. All those Jewish Nobel prize laureates, those writers and philosophers and artists that have made Jews, in proportion to their numbers, the biggest contributors to the world’s knowledge and culture than any other group, they weren’t orthodox or Hassidic. They were secular Jews, either those who bucked against the religiosity of their immediate elders or those who were several generations removed from that religiosity. Like Allen, I figured that as more Jews become polarized into orthodoxy, the less we can expect the genius of these people to offer anything of value to the rest of the world.

I brought it up on Saturday, during my irreligious jog in Central Park with a friend. I mentioned the interview, the statement from Allen, and offered the noncommittal comment that “I don’t disagree with him.”

“So what you’re saying,” blurts my friend between breaths, “is that you agree with him.”

I smile, my literal, lawyer’s mind sparking into attention. “No, I said I don’t disagree with him. That’s not,” I inhale, “the same thing.”

Then I launch into most of what I’ve already mentioned above. I offer my observation that more Jews seem to be drawn either to orthodoxy and Hassidism or to pure, disconnected assimilation, that the “middle class” of Jewish thought is disappearing. It’s this “middle class,” middle of the road, secular but Jewishly interested center, that can be credited for most, if not all, direct Jewish contributions to world progress. Orthodoxy will destroy how much of a difference we make in the world, as Jews, just as readily as assimilation will. The assimilated Jew might still change the world, except that, sadly, he won’t be seen or think of himself as a Jew when he does it. Meanwhile the Torah scholar won’t change the world at all. He’ll sit in his modern shtetl and pore over ancient texts, maybe produce 5-15 children who will follow in his footsteps, removed and disconnected from progress.

“But what would Jews have been if not for the orthodox, if not for the religious core that has kept us Jewish?” he asks.

“Well, we have our values. That’s our core, that’s what matters most. We don’t need the religiosity of our elders to stay Jewish or to remind us of what it means to be Jewish. We can recreate Judaism in our own image (as sacrilegious as that sounds) based on culture and history, and without blind faith that a text was written with Godly inspiration.”

This idea is reinforced by a Times interview with Edgar Bronfman Sr. who, when asked what is left of Judaism after you take the spiritual element out of it, responds that “what we have left is our ethics, our morals. It was our people who developed the Ten Commandments. Whoever wrote that — and we assume it was Moses — had a great deal of wisdom.”

“But every religion has an ethical system,” the interviewer asserts.

“Well, they do now. But we were the first.”

I read the Times interview on Sunday, by the time the rest of my conversation with my friend already revealed how flawed this thinking is.

How do you divorce the Jewish value system from the underlining religiosity? I think Bronfman contradicts himself in saying that Judaism can continue as a set of ethics and morals, without the spiritual element. And yet it was this spiritual element that made the Ten Commandments more than just something that Moses might have written. If we take that spiritual element away, and we’re left just with some system some guys thought up a few thousand years ago, why should that make me want to be Jewish? Because our ethical system might have come first (which I also factually question), doesn’t make it the best. Surely there have been ethical and moral creations since Judaism was formed that are better at addressing the world’s issues. For instance, we have moved past the idea that executing people for breaking the Sabbath is a good thing, and no I’m not looking forward to Messianic times when this law might very well, once again, be enforced.

My friend argued that it was precisely because of our adherence to scripture and our stubborn clinging to religiosity that Jews became what they are today. Torah study sharpens the mind, the tongue, the whole thought process. Our value system would be long forgotten, we would be long forgotten, if not for the adherence to faith still practiced by so many Jews. Somehow the Judaism of a few million people would have survived the chaos of centuries, millennia, even with all of the spirituality stripped away? Judaism would have survived the Romans and the Babylonians and the pogroms and the Nazis and the Communists even without that spirituality? Hard to imagine.

He sees it as a pent-up energy, my friend does. The process of Jewish contribution to the world follows a pattern where the Jewish mind hibernates within the insular religious world, fine-tuning its musings, its invention. And then, inevitably, not everyone stays within the community, and decides to throw him/herself into secular society. It is there that the Jewish mind, nurtured by that same religiosity, has an explosion of creativity that represents the Jewish contribution to the world.

I have seen it happen, the way people who have studied nothing but scripture their whole lives, transition relatively easily into school and work in the secular world, destroying the LSATS and MCATS and GMATS and whatever other test is out there. I don’t necessarily get how it happens, but it does. The Jewish creative energy is a little harder to explain, because it’s not as directly linked to the analytic mind that Torah study seems to develop, but perhaps the creativity sprouts from the spirituality, or otherwise the angst that comes with trying to reconcile that spirituality with the secular world, or trying to balance the past and all those millennia of responsibility and burden with the dissociation that modernity offers. 

This is a theory that is sort of advanced (albeit not as directly) by another New York article, the one by David Samuels titled “Assimilation and its Discontents: How Success Ruined the New York Jew.” Samuels argues that the New York Jew archetype, in all its gloriously stereotypical forms, came about specifically because society forced our hand. Kept from the top jobs and the top schools, constantly facing discriminations and barriers to advancement, the New York Jew created his own set of parallel institutions and his own set of ideas.

“The exclusion,” says Samuels, “allowed the brightest minds of the tribe to gain a sharper angle on the received wisdom of the wider culture and turn it upside down.” The Jew as outsider, with his “Talmudic irony, psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo, disenchanted Marxism, the symbolic language of modernism, the bitter ironies of Yiddish humor, sexual openness, and aggression, downed with a wry, European-style shrug,” became the genius of our time. With time, as the barriers fell away, “so did our connection to shared communal values and the traditions of intellectual work that formed the common cultural inheritance of our grandparents.”

And so today’s Jews are, according to Samuels, just another set of wealthy, well educated white people. With the “outsider” moniker gone, there’s little that makes us different than anybody else. Today’s Jews fear to be considered outsiders or to be deemed insular, and so they assimilate to such a degree that they strip themselves of everything that made them who they are.

Samuels points out that one strike against this general movement is the Hassidism in the Chabad movement. I think that Chabad, perhaps more than any other orthodox Jewish group, concurrently reinforces one style of old-school adherence while, necessarily, realizing that the rest of the world outside of their little community happens to matter a lot also. There are plenty of Hassidic sects that could care less about what goes on three streets from them, but meanwhile Chabad has sent emissaries to all corners of the world, proclaiming that “where there are Jews, there will be a Chabad House.” There’s some incredible about that. It’s this desire to be active in the greater world that will keep that necessary interchange between secular and religious fluid, and, I think, help to feed the engine of Jewish thought for at least some time to come.

The theory, of course, also assumes a lot, particularly about the continuity of this process. What guarantees do we have that it is something that will continue, that the interchange between the Jewish religious and secular worlds will remain open, contributing that Jewish middle man that becomes the writer and the scientist who transforms the world? Part of me thinks that maybe modernity makes this interchange less likely than it might have been before. Today it seems a lot easier to be orthodox and Hassidic than it might have been in the past. The luxuries that even the orthodox and Hassidic enjoy make it less likely that people will just get up and throw their lot in with the secular world as they might have done in the past, in the face of feeling too removed from the rest of society. And yet the slip and fall between religiosity and secularism has always occurred, so why should it suddenly cease to occur now that we have the Internet?

I would also take an extra step and consider the community being built by Birthright Israel alumni. Here is a program that pulls people out of their secular indifference and makes Judaism matter, at least on some level. I don’t say that this translates directly into recreating that “New York Jew” that seems, according to Samuels, to be slipping away, but it does add a little fuel to the fire of Jewishness which was ebbing in the 90s. Birthright pulls people up into that important Jewish middle ground that I talked about, although it remains to be seen how rich of a Jewishness these people will partake in, as well as how sustainable their Jewishness will be. I would venture to say that a Chabadnik who “falls” into secularism is likely to continue to connect to his Jewishness and to pass it on to future generations, even if that Jewishness is not as orthodox as the one he came from. At the same time, will the Birthright alum care enough to pass anything on? Will his own Jewishness be something of significance in his life or will it stay as merely a sweetly superficial coating which can be worn or removed depending on the situation and its demands?

The thing about really being Jewish is that you always have to represent. You don’t get to pick and choose when it does and does not work for you. And by the way, we're not done. Not by a long shot.