Secular Judaism in the XXI Century

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Secular judaism in the XXI Century, Contemplate, The Center for Cultural Judaism,
New York, 2003.
Bernardo Sorj*
Is it possible to be an agnostic or atheist and a Jew at the same time ?
This question that I am asked very often, is based on the idea that Judaism is no
more than a religion. I usually explain that although Judaism is also a religious tradition
with many trends, it has become something different in modern times. Actually, it
diversified and in this diversification, several secular forms of Judaism developed, some
of them based on downright atheistic views. In this way Secular Judaism became
something that certain writers defined as cultural tradition and others called civilization.
This answer, which is undoubtedly correct, allowed me to hide a basic subject
that only nowadays, when the ideologies that helped me to build my secular philosophy
have faded away, seems to be obvious: atheism is always part of a tradition. For my
generation atheism seemed to incarnate universality confronted with the narrowness of a
religious vision. I still believe that atheism, be it from Jewish, Muslim or Christian
origin, meant, at least for several generations, the search of wider horizons of solidarity
and identification with Humanity as a whole. However I also understood that all this
was part of a dialogue within a tradition.
An atheistic view of the world is only possible in a basically theistic culture. It
doesn't make sense in religious non-theistic cultures (like the Eastern traditions) since it
challenges a vision of the world in which divinity has a leading role. Therefore, atheism
places itself as an alternative to a system of beliefs and values connected with a God,
and even when atheism tries to break completely with this system, it exists because a
religious tradition existed before, a tradition that was concerned with the same problems
that are still challenging today for unbelievers.
Since atheism was a common denominator for people who shared values, ideas
and beliefs, it ignored the diversity of origins and the fact that God and the religious
* Professor of Sociology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Director of the Edelstein Center for
Social Research (besorj@attglobal.net).
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traditions were seen in a different way by people who otherwise agreed on non-theistic
views.
We do not want to be unjust and, having the “insight” of a retrospective view
and influenced by contemporary knowledge, to devalue what several decades ago was
the prevailing feeling of a community that challenged the narrowness of religious
beliefs that were associated with institutions that excluded and dehumanized those who
did not share their faith.
But today things changed. History demonstrated that atheism can be just as
inquisitorial and intolerant as religion, and therefore the things that really matter are not
the beliefs of each person about the transcendental extent of life, but the capacity to
accept different views and the will to respect different ideas within democratic
institutions that may provide a common ground for communication and mutual
understanding.
If we want to reconstruct Secular Judaism for our time we must take a fresh
critical look at the old, repressive and obsolete atheism, understand with which God we
are quarreling, with which (frustrated) hopes of redemption we used to fancy ourselves,
what a kind of past we wanted to bury and what treasures of our past, we hurriedly
wanted to abandon. We must reexamine our behavior in the past without resigning an
open-minded approach to the changes in the world.
JUDAISM AND TRASCENDENCY
The crisis of the diehard atheistic views or the atheism that stressed its
universality, is the crisis of the beliefs in which atheism was born and developed since
the beginning of modernity. These beliefs, liberal or socialist, were based on the trust on
mankind and its capacity to dominate nature and organize society, and on the
progressive sense of History and the capability of science to give all the needed answers
to all the doubts of human curiosity.
With the failure of Marxism and of the societies that pretended to be based on it,
we discovered that atheism, at least as it was built by former generations, was very
similar to religion, since it also had its roots in a system of suppositions of
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transcendency or omnipotence ( or as we say today “empowerement”). Today we may
be atheists, but this is a personal belief, a feeling that is unconnected to any ideology
that may offer a general view of society or express the feeling that we have a way to
control our individual or collective destiny.
How can we recover the lost feeling of transcendency ? How can we regain the
feeling of power we had when we thought we knew how to push History in the right
direction? The old atheism had occupied the place of God, but today, instead of
thinking that if God is dead everything is allowed, we remain with the feeling that if
God is dead we are free to think everything, but nothing we want to achieve as a
community is possible.
The feeling of transcendency produced by Secular Judaism was connected with
a strong attachment to prestigious social ideas but never faced directly such issues as the
place of the individual in the universe, the meaning of life, how to face personal
suffering or how to ritualize the great moments of life like birth, marriage, or death. In
our contemporary world, where subjective feelings have such an important role, religion
has the kind of language and the metaphors that are most suited to fill voids and convey
feelings that science is unable to express, in spite of the benefits Prozac or
psychoanalysis (both products of the secular world) may offer.
DEMOCRATIC JUDAISM
Judaism in the Twentieth Century was reformulated by Socialism and
Nationalism, especially in Europe, and by Liberalism, particularly in Germany and
afterwards in America. All these ideologies allowed the renewal of the communities and
gave them the possibility to rebuild their own Judaism and their connections with the
outside world. These solutions seen insufficient today, and owing to the hollowness of
Secular Judaism, we are witness to important advances both of xenophobic Nationalism
and religious Fundamentalism.
First, Secular Judaism revived the messianic message, but when Jews became
richer and more "bourgeois" in the second part of the Twentieth Century, even in Israel,
utopist hopes weakened and became a kind of mysticism without social meaning. The
capacity of Secular Judaism to renew the utopist spirit depends both from internal
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processes within the communities and from larger movements of change within the
larger society, which are not yet clearly defined.
As long as Humanity will not seek new utopias, the challenge for Secular
Judaism will be to rebuild the dialogue with Jewish tradition, particularly with the
Jewish tradition that accepts Modernity and wishes to be a bridge to the world. This
Jewish tradition only will be relevant if it will be a source of wisdom and not of
dogmas, in which Zionism will remain faithful to its origins and will last as a political
ideology and not a theology. In this sense, Secular Judaism has many things to share
with religious traditions, like Reform and Conservative. Everything, but God.
Perhaps there is also another difference between Secular Judaism and the
religious traditions, since the former recognizes avowedly that Judaism has no
monopoly of any truth and therefore should not be considered as the best source of
answers to many of the problems and challenges of the new millenium. The trends of
renewal within the Jewish religion since the ninetieth Century made a "tour de force" to
translate their tradition to the values of Modernity and to demonstrate that Judaism can
be modern while Modernity may be lived as a Jewish experience. These efforts made
sense as part of the cultural battles within the Jewish community, but very often
enlarged the world of Judaism without really contributing with something substantial to
modern wisdom. Perhaps today it would be prudent to recognize that Judaism has no
answer to all the questions and since it came into history many centuries ago, it has
many elements that are incompatible with a true democratic and humanistic vision.
The renewal of Secular Judaism will demand a huge effort to overcome the
cultural impact of the Holocaust because it must avoid its transformation in a tool for
the impoverishment of Judaism, a barrier of separation between Jews or a sterile
dialogue in which we finally may talk with the executioners and not with the victims.
The best way to honor the dead, at least for those who don't want to build a Judaism
based on fear and persecutions, is not so much to find the causes of the Holocaust
(in spite of the merits of the intellectual effort) but to rescue and give a new life to the
world that was destroyed with its enormous richness of different ideas and intellectual
and artistic trends.
In spite of the fact that at the beginning of the new century, Secular Judaism
finds itself in a defensive position, it disposes of a great historical and cultural capital, a
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tradition of participation in the big political challenges of Humanity and its activism and
participation in the struggles for social justice and for a world with stronger bonds of
solidarity. Therefore a dialogue between secular and religious Judaism, when both have
a commitment with Humanism, is needed for both of them: the first may enlarge its
horizons so as not to be limited to a narrow view of life which is unconcerned by
anything but the community, or to become a individualist or narcissist mysticism; the
second, in order to reconstruct its links with the sources of Jewish tradition. This
dialogue has existed, hidden or openly, in the past, but it was destroyed by the
Holocaust or repressed by Communism. Whoever may read nowadays the writings of
great thinkers of Secular Judaism like, for instance, Chaim Zhitlovsky or Echad Haam
will be impressed by their knowledge of the religious tradition, in the same way we are
astonished by the fact that many religious Orthodox young people ignore completely a
whole tradition of solidarity and struggle for a better world that characterised modern
Judaism.
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Dr. Bernardo Sorj is Professor of Sociology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and
Visiting Professor, Maison des Schiences de L’Homme, Paris. This essay was
published in the newspaper Identidad in Uruguay, August, 2002, and reprinted with
permission of the publisher and the author.