A Judaism Large As Life: 350 Years of Jews in North America
As we prepare to celebrate Judaism’s most joyous Festival, Hag Ha-Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, we recall and re-enact our ancestor’s wanderings in the wilderness, and their sense of dwelling within God’s protective love – symbolized by the booths we continue to construct at this season. Such an occasion is a fitting time to consider another wandering of historic proportion, the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America, itself noteworthy and a cause for reflection.
In 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees fled from Recife, Brazil. The Portuguese has taken over yet again, and fearing the Inquisition, these Jews fled to then New Amsterdam, an island located next to the Hudson River, now known as Manhattan. The Governor, Peter Stuyvesant was no friend to the Jews, (although it is worth noting that in his argument for rejecting these 23 Jews, he insisted that if he were to welcome the Jews first, then he would have to welcome the Quakers and other Christian undesirables, and that was yet another reason for rejecting our presence!) He appealed to the West India Company, which was the corporation in charge of the fledgling settlement of New Amsterdam, and the officers mandated that he accept the Jews, but their consent to let us stay was rather limited. They were prepared to tolerate Jews as individuals, but their acceptance did not extend to our religion, our observance, or our community. They wrote to Stuyvesant to clarify:
The consent given to the Jews to go to New Netherlands and there to enjoy the same liberties that is granted them in this country, was extended with respect to civil and political liberties without the said Jews becoming thereby entitled to a license to exercise and carry on their religion in synagogues or gatherings.
In other words, the Jews as individuals were to receive all the civil liberties of anyone else settling the new colonies, but as Jews they were to remain invisible. Jews were acceptable; Judaism was not.
In this regard, the new diaspora of North America was no different than any of the other diasporas through which we have wandered. What is remarkable about Jewish history in America is the change that took place from those early and unfortunate beginnings, so that already by the time of the founding of the Republic – almost 150 years later – there was a sense that mere toleration was itself somehow a violation of the United States and the contract that it makes with its citizens. In 1790, then President George Washington penned a letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport Rhode Island that beautifully expresses the American commitment to pluralism and welcome. He wrote:
“All possess a like liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more the toleration as spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
From the time of George Washington on, with many exceptions and bumps along the way, the United States has offered a home for Jews unlike any other diaspora in our people’s history. Here we enjoy unparallel freedom, prosperity, openness, diversity. The benefits of this Nation are quite clear. (I am aware that I am now writing to an international audience, that not all of us come from – or live in – the United States. Nonetheless, the American example is so prominent in the world and so prominent among Jews that it still deserves serious attention. As we prepare to settle in our Sukkot, I want to invite us to look beyond how wonderful that last 350 years have been. I want us to focus on the challenges that life in this diaspora continues to pose for us as Jews.
To frame this discussion I want to use a brilliant essay that was written a hundred years ago, on the occasion of the 250th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America, penned by a Professor Israel Friedlaender, a professor of Bible, who was actually murdered on a mission to try to reach out to an impoverished and persecuted Jewish community in the Old World. He titled his essay, “The Problem of Judaism in America”, and the first thing I wanted to direct your attention to is that from his perspective, Judaism in America constitutes a “problem”.
The problem, he says, starts with a simple distinction, one that is still often not made. He distinguishes between Jews and Jewishness on the one hand, and Judaism on the other. Friedlaender writes, “Jewishness constitutes the body; Judaism, the spirit, or soul of the Jewish people.” For him, then, the worth, the value of Jewish survival is dependent on our ability to maintain a Judaism worthy of the name. The Jewish People are the physical frame to which a new spiritual reality is to be ushered into the world. Again, Friedlaender writes: “Jewry without Judaism is no more than a body without a spirit, a dead inanimate mechanism which may, by sheer momentum, move on for a little while, but must in the end come to a complete standstill.”
Now, Friedlaender does not specify, but I think we need to, that a steady stream of immigrants thus far has provided much of the momentum in American Jewish life. Until fairly recently, American Jewry was constantly enriched by Jews who were more educated, more committed, and more rooted in their Jewishness than the native Jews that they encountered when they arrived here. Those waves of Jews from Germany, from Eastern Europe, from Asia, from elsewhere in the world, and most recently from the Soviet Union, have brought with them tremendous infusion of energy that have to some degree masked the seductive allure of American life, and the challenge of keeping Jews connected to Judaism as their primary identity. This, Friedlaender says, is the legacy of the Emancipation and the Enlightenment. The deal we made with Western Europe was to be Jews at home, and people on the street, so that our public life would in no way present the intrusion of our Jewishness into what ought to be neutral public space. Of course, those of you who have grown up in the United States recognize that their isn’t a neutral space in the world, that the public invisibility of Jewish faith and culture simply leaves room for a different faith and culture to consider itself universal, and for that reason, Friedlander observed, “the dawn of the Jews is the dusk of Judaism.”
I want to repeat that insight, “the dawn of the Jews is the dusk of Judaism.”
None of us would argue but that the political emancipation of the Jewish people – our ability to become citizens, our ability to be active in the political process – has been a tremendous boon for the lives of Jews. We live with unprecedented wealth, we live more or less in any neighborhood we want, we attend, more or less, any schools or universities we choose, we pursue any career that we seek, and – with a vengeance these days – we marry anyone we love. For Jews as individuals, the Emancipation has removed almost every limitation that we faced in the past, but this material liberation has come at the price of the vitality and profundity of our Judaism: of placing of Torah at the center; of serving God as central.
Friedlaender adds I think, what ought to be obvious to anyone reading these words,
“Of what use is it then to boast the achievements of Jewish emancipation and to point to the mental, economic, and social advance of the Jewish people, if purchased at the expense of the Jewish soul without which Jewry is but an empty, and not always attractive, shell. Of what avail is all the material prosperity of our Nation, when bought at the price of our spiritual depth, which must ultimately lead to the physical annihilation of our community.”
Up until now Friedlaender has not, I think, contributed anything unique to the discussion. But it is time to present his essential insight: Friedlaender argues that the mistake we made at the Emancipation was to agree to constrict Judaism to a creed.
We restricted Judaism to be just a religion, (so that the popular perception was of three great faiths of the United States – Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. A bit shocking, by the way: Did you know that Jews constitute 2.5% of the population of the United States? I did an experiment: I asked several Gentile friends and associates what percentage of the population they think Jews are? I deliberately did not include Gentiles in West Los Angeles because the numbers would be skewed. The lowest number I got was 25%, and the highest I got was 40%! I am willing to bet you that if you tried this out with some of your non-Jewish friends, they would respond with similar numbers. In the eyes of our fellow Americans, there are more of us than there are Latinos!.
Reducing Judaism into one of three parallel faiths means that we sever Judaism from the fullness of life. Friedlaender writes:
“It was the fatal mistake of the period of emancipation, and mistake which is the real source of all the subsequent disasters in modern Jewish life, that in order to facilitate the fight for political equality, Judaism was put forward, not as a culture, not as a full expression of an inner life of the Jewish people, but as a creed; as the summary of a few abstract articles of faith similar in character to the religion of the surrounding nations.”
By doing that, he says, we effectively quarantined the Jewish people into the synagogues and into the buildings that were our central institutions. When we would seek the fullness of life, we could no longer turn to Jewish sources because Judaism was just, after all, about faith, about theology, about religion. If one was interested in a question of religion, then once could turn to Judaism for how to bow and when. But if one were interested in living a life that pulsates with holiness and righteousness, if one’s passion was for transforming the world, then by our own reconstruction Judaism no longer had anything to contribute. We had severed Judaism from the fullness of life, from the welter of living.
“If therefore Judaism is to be preserved amidst the new conditions, if lacking as it does all outward support, it is still to withstand the pressure of the surrounding influences, it must again break the narrow frame of a creed and resume its original function as a culture as the expression of the Jewish spirit, and of the whole life of the Jews.”
Sukkot marks the perfect challenge to this procrustean bed. Sitting in a Sukkah, swinging a lulav and etrog – these are actions – reflective of a worldview, yes, but made concrete in behavior. Sukkot is bigger than a creed – it is a moment in a life. What we launch today is a re-engagement, a renewed struggle in an attempt to free Judaism from the shackles of being just a creed. Indeed, the creed is at Judaism’s core. Judaism is centered in faith, but the fullness of Judaism is the concrete expression of the spirit of the Jewish people. We are a people who have been touched by God. We are a people whose core purpose is about living lives of service, gratitude, and holiness. And when we restrict Judaism to the covers of the Siddur once a week (or once a year), it becomes brittle and withdraws. Judaism as creed is incapable of allowing us to encounter life.
Permit me to offer a few different paths that such a commitment will entail:
• Judaism must be first and foremost a way of speaking in the world. And here I mean that at two different levels. Judaism provides a vocabulary through which we make reality visible; through which we understand and direct reality. Our values, our good deeds, our aspirations deserve a Jewish vocabulary to locate them within the millennial strivings of the Jewish people, to permit them to vitalize our dreams, our hopes, and our convictions. Giving Jewish terms and phrases to our living in the world is a key first step toward breaking the shackles of a restrictive creed. On a more concrete level, though, it needs to be repeated that the language of Judaism is Hebrew. Make Hebrew a priority in your studies; make the language of Hebrew your garden and your playground. Franz Rosenzweig, the German-Jewish philosopher who himself found his way back to Judaism, teaches us, “The world of man, and initial word whenever it is uttered by man, joins that which was ultimate from the first – the word of God.” When we speak Judaism, we allow God to articulate Creation, and so the language in which we are home must be a language of Judaism, the language of Hebrew.
• Judaism must be, not only a way of speaking, but also a way of knowing, grounded in faith, rooted in a relationship with the Ribbono Shel Olam (Master of SpaceTime). Our way of knowing the world must be itself a Jewish way. That is to say, our knowledge is rooted in Torah, rooted in our Masorah (tradition), and in the constant flowering of our Tradition as it encounters, shapes, and responds to life. The prophet Habakkuk reminds us, “the righteous lives by his faith.”
• Judaism is nothing if it is not also a way of integration, a way of bringing every aspect of our person, of our passion, of our interest, and of our challenges, into a single focus. That means, among other things, that nothing can remain separate or alien from our Judaism. It also means, then, that all sources of insight – art, and science, and culture – have to be brought to, and made part of, our Torah. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero in the Or Yakar writes: “Nothing is outside of God. This applies not only to the Sefirot, but also to everything that exists, large and small. They exist solely through the divine energy that flows to them, and clothes itself in them.” Is it possible for us to live our lives in such a way that we see the divine pulsating through the most apparently secular, so that in advances in physics or in medicine we can discern traces of the God who hides and desires to be sought? The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes in The Book of Hours:
“I find you, Lord, in all things, and in all my fellow creatures pulsing with your life. As a tiny seed you sleep in what is small, and in the vast, you vastly yield yourself.”
• Finally, Judaism, if it is to be as large as life, must also be a way of being, a way of behaving in the world. Of course at this point everyone expects a Rabbi to say “mitzvot (commandments) and halakhah (Jewish law),” so allow me to gratify you – mitzvot and halakhah! A Judaism that is not a prism for the unfolding of halakhah is an impoverished Judaism that cannot long survive. And a Judaism that is not expressed in countless mitzvot throughout the day remains barren. But Judaism has never just been about halakhah. It has also been about the interplay between the aggadah (Jewish narrative) and halakhah. That is to say, everything, every moment and every person, presents an opportunity to serve, and opportunity for wonder, an opportunity for awe. The Baal Shem Tov, 18th Century founder of the Hassidic Movement, teaches us:
“Whenever you offer your prayers, and whenever you study, have the intension of unifying a Divine name with every utterance of your lips, so there are worlds, souls and divinity in every letter.”
I want to extend that insight beyond the realm of words. There is divinity in every encounter, if it is an encounter of openness and awareness. Our behavior is a conduit for the divine to erupt into materiality. How we treat each other, how we mark the passage of time, how we utilize each precious moment, presents us with an opportunity to translate Judaism into life itself.
So our task for this Festival and throughout the year, our task as God’s servant, as God’s lovers and God’s friends, our chore and our glory, is to take the Judaism that has been quarantined in the synagogue, in the Federation, in the summer camps, and to free it once again, so that it can become as large as life: our way of speaking, of knowing, of integration, and of behaving. And if in all these paths we are successful, if this year can be a year of growth in all of those virtues - and I bless you that each of you shall know only the joy of learning, the joy of observing, the joy of serving - if that is true, then we can return Judaism to the vitality that life alone commands. And then, and then alone, will Jewish life in America be one that is worthy of a 400th year anniversary.
Shabbat Shalom!