What Is Judaism?
By Mordecai M. Kaplan
WHAT is Judaism if not an ethical monotheism? The answer is that it is not an "ism" at all, despite the last syllable in its name. It is a living soul or consciousness; it is the soul or consciousness of the Jewish people. We are not interested in names, and we should not quibble about terms; it is reality that we are after. We want to know what is involved in being a Jew and living a Jewish life. The main reason for our finding fault with the usual presentation of Judaism is that it does not enlighten or inspire us. If the term Judaism does not direct our minds at once to the living energy that operates in the Jewish people, if it has not the power to launch us upon the stream of Israel's active thought and spiritual striving, then it is a word without content, and had better be deleted from our vocabulary. We did well enough without it until very recently, and should it prove an insuperable obstacle to the solution of our spiritual problems, we shall have to throw it into the scrap-heap of obsolete terminology. We shall begin to call our religion "Jewishness" instead of Judaism. The former designation has at least the advantage of connoting consciousness, and nothing is so important for understanding the essence of any religion as the identification of it with a form or state of consciousness. If Jewishness will mean to us Jewish consciousness and not merely "gefillte fisch" or some other Jewish dish, it will serve our purpose.
Let us not lose sight of the main issue in these discussions. We Jews refuse to have our life quest confined to the satisfaction of our material needs. Our souls are hungry; and whether we call it Jewishness or Judaism, what we want is religion that will help us get our bearings in the world, that will keep down the beast in us and spur us on to worthy endeavor in the field of thought and action. Under normal conditions we should find all this in the faith of our fathers. But, unfortunately, all that most of us know about that faith is what we acquired from some old-fashioned "rabbi" who taught us when we were small children and who made us recite Hebrew by the page. At home our parents would insist upon our conforming to routine observances and ceremonies which meant nothing to us. When we grew older and occasionally asked questions about the Bible, we met with cold and evasive replies. No wonder that later on, when we entered the academic world, we grew accustomed to look upon Judaism as out of touch with the realities of life, and far removed from the elemental needs that agitate the masses of active, enterprising humanity. We could see no connection between the few humble ceremonies in our homes or in our synagogues with the social, political and industrial problems upon which was riveted the attention of the men of light and leading. To most of us the faith of our fathers seemed little more than a medley of needless restraints, other-worldliness, and hostility to all progress.
Religion Indispensable to the Human Race
BUT a change has come over us. We have begun to realize that Judaism could not have transformed the spiritual history of mankind, as it did, if it were the negligible and insignificant thing we thought it was. We have been unable to discern its true character, because we did not know how to probe beneath the outward and often unattractive surface which it presented to us in the limited circle in which we moved. We have begun to surmise that the Jewish life we are familiar with is nothing more than a devitalized fragment of what, under auspicious circumstances, becomes a life that is spiritually healthful, joyous and invigorating. We have at last learned to take into consideration the inevitable difference in mental scope and outlook that must mark two generations, one of which had its life formed amidst the oppressive atmosphere of Eastern Europe, and the other in the bracing atmosphere of America. This being the case, nothing could be more unreasonable than to expect that the spiritual heritage be transmitted from father to child with ease and naturalness. But who is in a better position to smooth out the roughness and overcome the angularities—father or child? Should we demand of our elders, who are burdened by numerous cares, and whose lives are for the most part hurried and difficult, that they adapt themselves to our attitude of mind? Is it not meet that we, who still retain the plasticity of youth, make advances? Without surrendering an iota of our own individuality we might cultivate that sympathetic insight that would reveal the inestimable worth of our spiritual heritage. Not merely reverence for the past, but a regard for our own future prompts us to achieve a proper understanding of Judaism.
It is well to realize at the outset that the problem of religion is not confined to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. Mistaking them for the final struggle, the believer wrings his hands in despair over the impending doom, and the doubter contemplates a religionless future with a great deal of glee. But both will be disappointed in their reckoning. Religion, as we shall see, is entirely too inherent in human life to be dispensable. The belief that it has served its purpose in the evolution of the race, and that it can only survive as a troublesome vestige in the organism of human society, is based upon a misunderstanding of its function. In view of the deeper insight into human nature that has been acquired of late, as a result of the progress made in psychological and social research, there is good reason to believe that a better understanding is not far distant. These investigations have not merely led to new theories about religion, but have essentially changed the method of approach. They have rendered superfluous the subtleties and refinements of metaphysical arguments. A new reservoir in human nature has been tapped, and discovered to be the inexhaustible fount of religion.
The Adaptation of Judaism to Changing Conditions
THIS new way of looking at the problem of religion gives promise of helping us also to get a better comprehension of Judaism. We shall find by means of it that there is much more substantial nourishment to the faith of our fathers than can be obtained from the tabloid form in which the textbooks mete it out to us. The previous article on "What Judaism Is Not"[G] did not argue that Judaism could forego such doctrines as the unity of God, the brotherhood of man and similar principles, or that it should glory in remaining vague and inarticulate. The main objection to the ordinary way of conceiving Judaism was that it lacked the means of preventing its teachings from degenerating into dull platitudes. But if Judaism is essentially the self-consciousness of the Jewish people, these doctrines will be viewed as some of its characteristic expressions. As such they forthwith become instinct with life. To be a religious Jew, accordingly, means not merely to profess the unity of God in cold philosophical fashion, but to live over again by means of thought and symbol the divine intuition, the backslidings, the temptations, the defiance, the threats, the tortures and the final victory implied in the "Shema Yisroel." The Jew who does not thrill with exaltation when he sings the world's most stirring paean, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!" is either ignorant or has the blood of a fish.
Whether Judaism is an ethical monotheism or the consciousness of Israel is not merely an academic question. These two conceptions represent widely divergent ways of dealing with the practical problems of self-adjustment to the novel situation with which Judaism is confronted. Whether the one or the other view shall prevail will make a difference in the fight for existence. We protest that if Judaism will be armed with nothing stronger than the conventional platitudes, it must succumb. By knowing itself for what it really is, Judaism will muster new heart and strength. The need for self-adjustment is not of today; Judaism has been going through that process ever since it saw the light. But during the past hundred and fifty years, Judaism has been wrestling with the problem of self-adaptation which both the redistribution of Jewry and the incursions of materialistic secularism have called into being. In this comparatively short period of a century and a half, Judaism has lived through all that the other religions have experienced within the last three or four centuries. If we were to compare the different stages in the process of Jewish self-adjustment we should find them analogous to those through which European religion in general has passed. These different steps in the process seem to have been unavoidable because they are the concomitant of the natural development of the human spirit. A review of the salient phases in the self-adaptation of religion to the changing conditions of life and thought will throw light upon the significance of that vital method of viewing Judaism which has of late worked its way into Jewish life—for the most part unawares.
The Storm and Stress Period in Religion
WHEN we refer to the self-adjustment of religion to modern conditions, our concern is not with the vast hinterland of ignorance and superstition that is still inhabited by large numbers of the unthinking of all creeds, Jewish as well as Christian. The destiny of religion is, primarily, in the hands of those who are in the vanguard of intellectual progress, and as long as its place in their lives is a problematic one its future is uncertain. Since the days of the Renaissance, religion has practically been busy adjusting itself to the ever enlarging human experience. It was otherwise during the middle ages, when the men of intellect threw the weight of their influence on the side of tradition and authority. They devoted their mental powers to the support of truths that were accepted at their face value without further scrutiny and analysis. All the resources of intellect were spent in interpreting the few facts they had in their possession. Many centuries elapsed before the cry was raised for more facts; but when, at last, the cry was answered, and new knowledge concerning the world in which men lived began to pour in, the foundations of tradition were shaken. Since then the religion of the intellectuals has no longer been marked by the naiveté and self-assurance of its earlier years. Its existence has been one of storm and stress. It has resisted all attempts to crowd it out from the new world that man has conquered for himself, and in order to be accorded a place in that world it has submitted to considerable change and self-adjustment. We may note three distinct stages in these efforts of religion to accommodate itself to life, corresponding in a large measure with the great thought movements of the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively.
The first stage in the process was the rationalistic. With Copernicus and Galileo defeated by the Vatican, with Descartes having to defend his orthodoxy, it seemed to the English and French philosophers of the eighteenth century that the only way man could save his spiritual nature from falling a prey to animalism or materialism was by consigning to destruction the special forms in which religion existed in the established faiths. The dreamers and the visionaries of that day, who were moved by a sincere desire to further man's higher life, entertained the hope that natural religion would revive with the downfall of revealed religion. But human events have taken a different turn. Life does not adapt itself to preconceived logical systems. The rationalistic method of adjusting religion to life failed because it was based upon a false reconstruction of the rise and growth of religion. However logical and plausible such a reconstruction might have appeared, the fact that it could not be verified by study and observation of religious phenomena invalidated the practical inferences drawn from it.
The Failure of the Rationalistic School
ALTHOUGH by that time science had made sufficient strides to know how futile it was to reconstruct fact by means of reason, the territory of religion was still considered exempt from the need of resorting to experience. The thinkers of the rationalistic age were to a certain extent still under the dominance of the medieval regard for abstract reasoning, and applied it to man's spiritual existence. They reasoned thus: The human being is naturally gifted with an intuition that enables him to discover for himself the truth about God and his relation to the world. If man had only been left alone and had not had the stream of his ideas muddied by outside interference, he would have continued professing a religion that would have been both pure and simple. But human depravity did not permit the natural religion of primitive life to continue. The fanatics with their delusions and the priests with their love of power distorted man's primitive faith in God. They invented dogmas and practices by means of which they could hold the masses in subjection. In course of time these extraneous elements came to be looked upon as the main content of revealed religion. The various established faiths and revealed religions were little more than wilful fabrications that were bound to crumble before the onslaughts of reason. Thus, by bringing the established cults into disrepute, men like Voltaire and Hume hoped to restore religion to its original state of purity and simplicity, bare of all artificialities of forms and institutions.
However superficial the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers of one faith from those of another. Rationalism began to lift the curse of intolerance and persecution which lay heavily upon the human race. No one who values the freedom to live his own life in his own way should cast aspersions upon the influence of that school of thought. Though they argued erroneously about the nature and essence of religion, we must not forget that they emancipated the human soul from the shackles of spiritual bondage.
On the other hand, our gratitude to them cannot blind us to their superficiality and inexperience in the matter of religion. Nineteenth century thought, with its emphasis upon historic development, exposed the fallacies and weaknesses of the method they employed to interpret religious phenomena. The distinction between natural and revealed religion was an arbitrary one, and the conception of priestly fabrications a mere figment of the imagination. Historical research has established that all the great world faiths or revealed religions have followed laws of development that have been in accord with the circumstances and mentality of those who professed them, and in that sense have been perfectly natural. Instead of being the product of fraud and wilful deceit, the established religions were seen to be the outcome of a healthy enthusiasm and deep sincerity. The limitations of knowledge and experience, which marked the earlier expressions of religious life, were, from the historical point of view, more than atoned for by the inner worth and sincerity that had prevailed in former days. In fact, so far did the historical conception change men's attitude that, upon finding themselves sophisticated and torn by doubt, they looked back longingly to former ages, when religion had brought inward calm and serenity. As a consequence of this reaction to the disintegrating tendencies of eighteenth century rationalism, a renewed appreciation for the religion of the past made itself felt among the circles of the cultured, particularly those of Germany and England, and the institutions in which the spirit of the past clothed itself were given a new lease of life.
The Historic Method Is Found Wanting
THE adoption by religion of the historic method thus represents the second stage in its process of self-adjustment. It now appealed to man's natural desire not to allow his past to sink into oblivion. Nothing is so humanizing as memory. He that is engrossed only in the future and would make it the only standard of value, he who has no patience with anything that interferes with practical utility—and memory is certainly a source of such interference—lacks the main ingredient of humanity and has something beaverish about him. Thus taught the historical school during the nineteenth century, and the rationalistic ideal that would have destroyed the established faiths no longer held sway.
But while the historic method stemmed the tide of rationalism, it failed to give back to religion its native vigor. It removed forever the stigma of insincerity that was attached to the origin and development of the dominant faiths; it illumined the past and incorporated it into man's spiritual life; but it was unable to restore to religion its most important function, that of shaping the future. The fundamental paradox which the historic method harbors, and which has prevented it from contributing adequately to the process of adjustment, is the fact that the spiritual experiences of the past, which it asks us to love and revere, were at the time of their enactment not memories, but vital responses to immediate and pressing needs. In the past religion dealt with its own present. That at all times the past did play an important rôle cannot be denied; but in all effective religion it can only be a means to an end. The historic method, on the other hand, succeeds in nothing but in revitalizing the past for its own sake. It provides no guidance for the future. A religion must not only write history—it must make history. This is why the historic method has been found wanting and has had to be supplemented by a new method of adjustment, which for want of a better term we may designate the socio-psychological.
The New Way—the Social and Psychological Viewpoint
BUT little attention has so far been paid to this new method of self-adjustment. Though it is still inchoate and uncrystallized, it forms the best part of every endeavor that makes for the rehabilitation of religion. The remarkable feature about the new mode of adjustment is that it did not come about directly, through a desire on the part of the teachers of religion to make good the inadequacy of previous methods. It was arrived at indirectly from a source that at first seemed hostile, and to some extent is still considered so, namely, social science. Not alone religion, but government and education, as well as history, economics and psychology, have been revolutionized as a result of the new way of approaching the problems of human life. So recent is the change that we have hardly had time to appraise it. The modern point of view toward human society has worked a change in all our thinking, comparable only to the one which resulted when the true purport of the concept "evolution" became apparent. The human race has lived through the forces generated by social existence without having been aware of them, even as it went on living for thousands of years without knowing the numerous forces that were latent in the earth, air and sea. It will probably take a much longer time for man to estimate at their worth the forces that are at work in social life than it took him to perceive the forces that dominate the physical world.
With all that, it is now generally established that the study of any phase of human life, whether for theoretical or for practical purposes, must be based upon the recognition that man is not merely a social animal, as Aristotle put it, but that his being more than an animal is due entirely to his leading a social life. In opposition to the older point of view, which prevailed in the more materialistic schools of thought during the nineteenth century, social science has proved that the forces that operate in human life are not merely those that are derived from the physical environment, but also those which are of a mental character. These psychical forces operate with a uniformity and power in no way inferior to those of the physical world. Social science is gradually accustoming us to regard human society not merely as an aggregate of individuals but as a psychical entity, as a mind not less but more real than the mind of any of the individuals that constitute it. The perennial source of error has been the fallacy of considering the individual human mind as an entity apart from the social environment. Whatever significance the study of the mind, as detached from its social environment, may have for metaphysical inquiry, it can throw no light upon the practical problems with which the mind has to deal—problems that arise solely from the interaction of the individual with his fellows. The individual human being is as much the product of his social environment as the angle is of the sides that bound it.
This new method of studying mental life both in the race and in the individual has revealed not merely the true significance of religion, but the way in which it functions and the conditions which affect its career. We now know that those phenomena in life which we call religious are primarily the expression of the collective life of a social group, after it has attained a degree of consciousness which is analogous to the self-consciousness of the individual. When a collective life becomes self-knowing we have a religion, which may therefore be considered the flowering stage in the organic growth of the tree of social life. The problem of religious adjustment is at bottom that of maintaining in a social group the psychical or spiritual energy which expresses itself in beliefs, ideals, customs and standards of conduct. Accordingly, when a religion is passing through a crisis, what is really happening is not so much that certain accepted truths or traditional habits are threatened with obsolescence, as that the social group with whose life it has been identified is on the point of dissolution. Whatever interest we have in the cultivation of the spiritual life must go towards conserving this kind of social energy. To have roses we must take care of the tree on which they grow, and not content ourselves with having a bouquet of them put into a vase filled with water. This newer conception of the religious life is fraught with far-reaching consequences, some of which we shall have to point out in a later article.
In Judaism we encounter the same three stages in the process of self-adjustment, though less clearly defined, by reason of much overlapping. What is known as the Haskalah movement represents the application of the rationalistic method to the spiritual problems of Jewish life. Having taken place in Russia, it was bound to be delayed in its coming for nearly a century. It received the first setback in its career when the pogroms broke out in the early "eighties," and the Russian Government inaugurated its policy of hounding and repression. The type which the Haskalah movement produced is the "Maskil," a man who curls his lip at ceremony and tradition, who lacks a sense of history and dabbles in cosmopolitanism. Not having had the courage to be thoroughgoing in his principles, or realizing that it was futile to be so, he tolerated what was distinctively Jewish so long as it was kept indoors and withdrawn from public gaze. In practice, however, "Haskalah" moved in the same direction as eighteenth century rationalism which made for the abrogation of the historic faiths.
Judaism in the Rationalistic and Historic Stages
CONTEMPORANEOUSLY with the rise and development of the Haskalah movement in Russia, Jewry in the German-speaking countries tested the validity both of the rationalistic and of the historic method. The Reform movement was at first, like the Haskalah movement, little more than a diluted cosmopolitanism. A typical case is that of David Friedlander and his friends, who began by reforming the worship in harmony with modern ideas and the changed social position of the Jews, and ended in offering to accept Christianity, if they would not be required to believe in Jesus and could be exempted from the observance of certain ceremonies. Influenced by the general reaction against rationalistic tendencies and by the rise of Jewish Wissenschaft, the Reform movement has had to reckon with the historic method of adjustment. But that influence has not been strong enough to overcome its early rationalistic bias from which it suffers to this very day.
The historic method was applied with far more thoroughness and consistency by the advocates of Historical Judaism. Zunz, Frankel, Graetz, Herzfeld, Luzzatto and Joel drew the line between adaptation and assimilation. They laid down the principle that it was fatuous to speak of a religion adjusting itself when it breaks so completely with the past as to be unrecognizable. In our anxiety to have Judaism conform to the needs of the age, we must take care lest we create an altogether new religion and label it Judaism. Intellectual honesty demands that we give due heed to the principle of identity, so that the sameness in our Judaism and that of our fathers be greater than the difference between them. They therefore applied themselves to the task of reconstructing the past by dint not of logic and phrase-mongering, but of patient, plodding search after facts strewn in the most out-of-the-way by-paths of literature, with the consequence that they discovered an impassable gulf between the Judaism of history and the Judaism of the Reform movement. We shall never be able to discharge fully our debt of gratitude to these Jewish scholars and historians who have given us, in place of a few vague and detached memories, a past rich in content and inspiration. But what they did was only to lay the foundation of the Judaism of the future. A foundation affords poor shelter against the hail and sleet of a bleak wintry day. Of what avail is it to keep on forever hugging the cold foundation stones, when we should be engaged in building the house of Israel?
Judaism and the Jewish Soul
AS soon as we begin to experience the need not merely of giving consent to certain abstract truths or of contemplating the past, but of helping to build the house of Israel as a means to our spiritual well-being, Judaism enters through us upon the third stage in the process of self-adjustment. This is the case with all those who rebel against the pulverizing and granulating tendencies of Judaized Protestantisms which ignore the "Kenneseth-Israel" in the effort to mete out salvation to the individual soul. This is true of all who refuse to allow Judaism to provincialize itself by applying for naturalization papers wherever it finds a habitat. To this class also belong those who see in Zionism not what its opponents make it out to be, a sulking, sullen Chauvinism, but a method of regeneration to which Judaism has been led by divine intuition. Dr. Schechter, who has contributed to Judaism the concept of catholicity, has this to say of Zionism: "While it is constantly winning souls for the present, it is at the same time preparing us for the future, which will be a Jewish future. Only when Judaism has found itself, when the Jewish soul has been redeemed from the Galuth, can Judaism hope to resume its mission in the world." How significant the apposition in which the author places Judaism and the Jewish soul! What a pity to spoil a poetic insight of that kind by applying to it so barbarous a term as socio-psychological. Yet in that insight is echoed the modern conception of religion as the self-consciousness of the group, a conception which the very conditions of life have forced the Jew to adopt. Whatever vitality Judaism still displays may be traced to a general presentiment that it is a social mind and not a system of abstract truths. We should not, however, permit such a principle to remain merely a vague presentiment. The task that devolves upon us is to render articulate both in theory and in practice all that is implied in the intuition that Judaism is the soul of Israel.
Editors' Note.—Prof. Kaplan will continue to develop his conception of the true meaning of Judaism in articles to appear in subsequent issues.
FOOTNOTE:
[G] In The Menorah Journal for October, 1915.