Samuel Sandler, an aeronautical engineer and head of the Jewish community in Versailles, France, announced a few weeks ago that he’d had the local synagogue registered as a national landmark. “My feeling is that our congregation will be gone within twenty or thirty years,” he told friends, “and I don’t want the building demolished or, worse, used for improper purposes.”

Once the seat of French royalty, Versailles is now among the tranquil, prosperous, and upscale suburbs of Greater Paris. Among the townspeople are executives employed in gleaming corporate headquarters a few miles away. They and their churchgoing families inhabit early-20th-century villas and late-20th-century condominiums set in majestic greenery. Among the townspeople too, are a thousand or so Jews of similar economic and social status who have made their homes in Versailles and nearby towns. In addition to the synagogue and community center of Versailles itself, a dozen more synagogues dot the surrounding area.

So what makes Sandler so pessimistic about the future?

One answer might be thought to lie in the personal tragedy that befell him last year, when an Islamist terrorist shot and killed his son Jonathan, a thirty-year-old rabbi at a school in the southern city of Toulouse, along with Jonathan’s two sons, ages six and three, and an eight-year-old girl. But Sandler had faced his grief with uncommon courage and self-control. Both at the funeral in Jerusalem and in later media appearances, he had made a point of defending democracy, patriotic values, and interfaith dialogue.

Personal experience, then, may play a part in explaining Sandler’s grim diagnosis of the prospects of French Jewry, and by implication of European Jewry at large; but it is far from the whole story. Nor is that diagnosis unique to him. To the contrary, the more one travels throughout Europe, the more one confronts an essential paradox: the European Jewish idyll represented by Versailles is very common; so is the dire view articulated by Samuel Sandler.  Read more . . .

Every now and then, people who in the grand scheme of things look and sound more or less like me voice opinions that make me wonder whether I’ve been sucked through the rabbit hole. Often these opinions have to do with freedoms they would like to sacrifice to government bureaucrats. All too often, those freedoms are of the religious kind.

Once, when I was helping to draft a constitutional proposal for the state of Israel, a prominent rabbi urged me to include a provision that would require judges on rabbinical courts to be God-fearing. When I suggested that this kind of language was likely to prove ineffective in a constitutional context—and that it might be better if judges on rabbinical courts weren’t appointed by the government in the first place—he gave me an odd look and asked, in all sincerity: who, then, would pay for them if not the government? The possibility had never occurred to him that Jewish communities and not the state should support Jewish institutions. Read more . . .

The central event in the national founding of the Israelite people is the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. The “Ten Commandments” (Exodus 20: 1-14), pronounced there by the Lord God to the assembled and recently liberated children of Israel, constitute the most famous teaching of the book of Exodus, perhaps of the entire Hebrew Bible. Prescribing proper conduct toward God and man, the Decalogue embodies the core principles of the Israelite way of life and, later, of what would become known as the Judeo-Christian ethic. Even in our increasingly secular age, its influence on the prevailing morality of the West is enormous, albeit not always acknowledged or welcomed.

Yet, despite its notoriety, the Decalogue is still only superficially known, in part because its very familiarity interferes with a deeper understanding of its teachings. This essay, in aspiring to such an understanding, intends also to build a case for the enduring moral and political significance of the Decalogue—a universal significance that goes far beyond its opposition to murder, adultery, and theft.

We can begin by correcting some common misimpressions, starting with the name “Ten Commandments.” Although most of the entries in the Decalogue appear in the imperative mode (“Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not”), they are not called commandments (mitzvot) but rather statements or words: “And God spoke all these words.” Later in the Bible we hear about the ten words—in the Greek translation, deka logoi or Decalogue— but whether the reference is to these same statements is far from obvious.  Read more . . .

In the last of our highlights, Aryeh Tepper introduces the jazz-fueled piyyut of the New Jerusalem Orchestra; first published June 17, 2010.  Rejoin us on Monday for Mosaic‘s inaugural essay: Leon Kass on the Ten Commandments.—The Editors

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On May 25, a new sound was heard in Jerusalem. Combining the soulfulness and optimism of Moroccan Jewish liturgical music (piyyut) with the syncretistic and improvisational spirit of American jazz, the New Jerusalem Orchestra (NJO) made its triumphant debut at the 2010 Israel Festival. 

Arrayed onstage in a crescent, the seventeen-piece orchestra featured a wide selection of instruments ranging from a cello, viola, and violin to two ouds, a three-part brass section, a Turkish nay (flute), and three kinds of Arabic drums. A twenty-man choral group encircled the orchestra from behind. Matching the variety of tone colors was the diversity of the vocalists and musicians themselves: men and women, religious and secular Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and a celebrated tenor saxophonist from New Orleans. Center stage was occupied by the great singer and performer of Moroccan piyyut, Rabbi Haim Louk.

The performance consisted of piyyutim taken apart, recast, and propelled by Omer Avital, the orchestra’s arranger, conductor, and contrabassist.  A critically-acclaimed fixture of the New York jazz scene during the 1990s, Avital has spent the last decade intensively exploring Middle Eastern and especially Moroccan Jewish music; the NJO is one of his first fruits.

Fusing the basic musical elements of Moroccan piyyut and the blues, Avital employed the original melodies as motifs, around which he and his troupe added layers of harmony and improvised solos. The result was a sensuous and sometimes raucous exercise in contrasting textures. The improvisations at the May 25 concert weren’t overly daring, but they didn’t have to be. The sustained elation of Avital’s extended grooves powered the weird and wonderful mixture of tone colors splayed in and around Rabbi Louk’s vocal arabesques. And just when the music seemed on the verge of bursting, the orchestra would drop out to give various instrumentalists their say.

The American tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy ended one piyyut with a bluesy solo so strange and so right that one could fairly imagine what it sounded like when Duke Ellington first transformed Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” into “Sugar Rum Cherry” stomping her Christmas-time blues. In another highlight, the blind, Moroccan-Israeli poet Erez Biton vigorously intoned two of his verse tributes to Rabbi David Bouzaglo, a monumental figure of 20th-century Moroccan piyyut. Biton’s recitation was a reminder that poems don’t always have to be whispered, let alone mumbled. “Pursuing myself,” he chanted, “I came after you, Rah-bee Dah-vid Bou-zaglo!”

Including intermission, the show clocked in at an imposing two-and-a-half hours, but the crowd was ready to let the NJO do its thing until the authorities turned off the lights. Fully conscious of the cultural import of their performance, Avital and the NJO’s artistic co-director, Yair Harel, had penned a one-page manifesto for the program: a dissent from David Ben-Gurion’s notion that forming an Israeli Jewish identity requires erasing all traces of the Diaspora. In the words of Avital and Harel:

After the hard trial of the melting pot, and the attempt to uproot the exile from the Jew, . . . we seek . . . to connect the past with the future, tradition with contemporary creativity, . . . [and] to ingather the exiles of the Jewish soul that were exiled in, of all places, the Land of Israel.

But Omer Avital is a musician, not a polemicist, and his true goal in bringing the exiles home is only to get them to swing together. Thanks to the expansive spirit of New York jazz, Avital knows how to do his job; thanks to his own expansive spirit, jazz is now part of the Jewish musical tradition.

While its military capabilities enable the U.S. to be patient with Iran, for Israel the window for military action is rapidly closing.

In 1963, Melita Maschmann published a memoir of her Nazi youth.  Fifty years later, she is remembered by her best childhood friend—and first victim.

Jewish law rescues man from unrealistic dreams, replacing them with dreams that are viable.

According to respected Orthodox rabbis, the prohibition against reporting Jewish suspects to secular authorities rarely applies in the modern Western world. 

“The tallit [prayer shawl] hides the person we are and represents the person we would like to be, because in prayer we ask God to judge us, not for what we are, but for what we wish to be.”

In an essay first published December 17, 2010, Yehudah Mirsky examines a defense of Jewish secularism and finds it—and Jewish secularism itself—wanting.—The Editors 

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The transformations of Jewish life in the last two-and-a-half centuries still boggle the mind. Deep ruptures opened to separate the present from the past, modernity from tradition, setting terms that have defined the contours of Jewish life until today. How did people try to think their way through the change? 

That vital question is central to a new book, Not in the Heavens, an investigation of what has come to be known in shorthand as Jewish secularism. In it, the accomplished historian David Biale sets out “to investigate the ideas of those who chose an ideological path to the secular.” Deeply researched and thoughtfully written, the book is a valuable attempt to start rethinking a familiar category. It is also ultimately unsatisfying, and ends by begging the difficult question it has set out to answer.

In his preface, Biale writes movingly of the secular Jewish revolutionaries of Eastern Europe, whose “generational revolt against a world in which Jewish religion, economic plight, political impotence, and cultural backwardness seemed wrapped up together in one unsavory package” was accompanied—and this is crucial—by a powerful desire to remain within and even to renovate Jewish life. Writing less a definitive history of Jewish secularization than an inquiry into a number of interesting and important thinkers, he proceeds to walk us through their relationship to Judaism and the Jews in order to discern, as his subtitle puts it, “The Tradition of Secular Jewish Thought.”

The word “tradition” is key to Biale’s project. For him, a major narrative thread is the observation that many modern secularists have wittingly or unwittingly reworked ideas drawn from the traditional Jewish canon, which itself contains important elements of proto-secular thinking—above all in the more radical speculations of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). This was very much the case with Baruch Spinoza, the enigmatic and alluring converso heretic with whom Biale’s story naturally begins and perhaps the first thinker to fuse God with nature, redefine religion as ethics and subjugate it to the state, and make a life for himself outside the bounds of any religious community. Since a slew of modern Jewish figures have looked to Spinoza as their touchstone and culture hero, we find ourselves savoring the irony of generations of secular Jews who, in Biale’s reading, are also inheritors of a set of ideas refracted from the towering mind of the greatest Jewish medieval religious philosopher.

Following the classic triad of “God, Torah, Israel,” Biale divides his book into three sections devoted to modern secular Jewish thinking on, respectively, the divine; the Bible; and the cluster made up of nation, state, language, and culture. After Spinoza, he re-visits a roster of mainly familiar figures, offering focused discussions of, among others, Moses Mendelssohn, Solomon Maimon, Ahad Ha’am, Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Mordecai Kaplan. Also making an appearance are certain political figures (Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion), whom Biale reads, interestingly, for their conceptions of Jewish identity. While most of his choices are obvious, some (like Albert Einstein) are peculiar, while some of his omissions are truly perplexing. Among the latter are Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, perhaps the first to put forward a unified conception of secular Jewish linguistic and political nationalism, and A. D. Gordon, who more than any other fused the ideas of kabbalah and Hasidism with a vitalistic philosophy of ethical Zionism in which God simply disappears. Few novelists and poets feature in Biale’s pages, and, aside from Scholem and Simon Dubnow, he scarcely mentions the historians who labored to provide secular understandings of Jewish religion and experience. For the most part, his survey pre-dates the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

But what sort of tradition is Biale trying to construct here? In fact, and contrary to his subtitle with its definite article—the tradition—there is no one tradition of Jewish secular thought, as there is no one tradition of Jewish thought, period. Above all, the very terms “religious” and “secular” are far more complicated than is allowed by the volume’s framing and Biale’s own narrative. In what way, for example, can many of the thinkers he discusses truly be called secular? Take Bialik: can one really think of the man behind Sefer Ha’aggadah (“The Book of Jewish Legends”), a monumental work of cultural retrieval and reconstruction, as a genuinely secular figure?  And what of Scholem, who said that “I consider religion the center of everything—more so than, say, the social sciences”?

Of course, there is such a thing as Jewish secularism, and one key element in it is the abandonment of halakhah (traditional Jewish law) and rabbinic authority. This is a point of radical division between Maimonides, who saw himself as renovating and ultimately strengthening Jewish law, and Spinoza, who deliberately aimed to dissolve it. But Biale largely ignores this element, as becomes painfully clear in his chapter on Torah. There he largely devotes himself to biblical criticism (and yet another discussion of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism) rather than to the lived reality of religious practice and study in which so many of the thinkers he discusses grew up and which they were seeking to refashion, less to find substitutes for Jewish belief than to create new grounds for Jewish obligation. Throughout, Biale also neglects the foundational insight of the late Jacob Katz that the religious ideology we call Orthodoxy is in its own way no less a product of modernity than the secularism it sought to oppose. In other words, secularism and Orthodoxy can hardly be understood apart from one another, and both are more dynamic and internally more nuanced than simple antinomies suggest.

When it comes to the crucial question alluded to at the beginning, Biale punts. “[O]ne might legitimately ask,” he writes at one point, “whether the search for a [secular] Jewish culture in the past was an optical illusion of those in the present or whether it was a real object that required modernity in order to reveal it.” Well, which is it? He continues: “Either way, secular Jewish thinkers found reflections of themselves in the past, even as they blazed new trails.” Therefore?  

This equivocation on the very heart of the matter may be admirable as historical circumspection, but it undermines the existential stakes of Biale’s enterprise.  To argue that the search for a usable secular past was and is an optical illusion is to open an unbridgeable gap between past and present, and to mark an end to Jewish experience as anything but one more set of tiles in the mosaic of contemporary multiculturalism. To explore the second possibility—that a secular past “was a real object that required modernity to reveal it”—is to force oneself to think of certain large ideas and sensibilities exerting and expressing themselves in and through history but ultimately free of the confines of time and space. It is, in other words, to jettison materialistic versions of secularism and to reengage with the search for the deepest structures of reality, with theology, and thus perhaps with God.

In his introduction, Biale rightly criticizes the clichéd assumption that “secularism” represents a simple, triumphal march of reason and goodness over stupidity and injustice. But that recognition scarcely shapes his work as a whole, and neither does the necessarily paired awareness of how very Western are the terms in which “secularism” is conventionally understood. Totally absent from Biale’s book are any figures from the Sephardi world.

Western secularism has several dimensions: political (entailing the subordination of traditional religion to state authority); epistemological (defining knowledge as what we can derive solely from our senses and from reason); and cultural or spiritual (captured in the sociologist Max Weber’s phrase, “the disenchantment of the world”). Like the term “religion,” “secularism” in the modern sense is the product of a period in which the truths of various traditions came to be viewed as no longer self-evident but rather as historically contingent and as sharing the stage with those of other traditions. Varying in form and content according to time and place, secularism—as a growing body of scholarship asserts—was not a transparent alternative to traditional theological understandings but a reworking of religious ideas of salvation, transcendence, and the sacred into a new key, and just one of the multiple forms of modernity.

And Jewish secularism? What is that? Some purchase might be gained by asking: how do you say “secular” in Hebrew? The current term is hiloni. (Roughly 45 percent of Israelis characterize themselves as hiloni, while another 25 percent call themselves, intriguingly, masorti/lo-dati, traditional/nonreligious.) The term appears to have been first used by Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, the enfant terrible of modern Hebrew letters, and was intimately connected with the rise of Zionism. Yet it didn’t become part of Israel’s lingua franca until the 1950s; for decades, the reigning term had been hofshi, free—free, that is, of the law.

The shift is significant. As the historian Yochi Fisher points out, the “free” person is still tied to the law from which he is trying to liberate himself; the hiloni is one for whom that struggle is over. The latter word suggests, literally, an empty space: the space of disenchantment.

In a suggestive and muted Epilogue, Biale notes that most Jews today define themselves as secular, but less in the ideological than in the sociological meaning of the word. “In one sense,” he observes, “this means that the ideologues of Jewish secularism won their battle, but in another sense, they did not, since the secular culture that they had in mind was one intentionally chosen.”

And yet perhaps it seems that way to him because “secular” is too narrow and dimly-lit a category for the galaxy of fascinating and creative thinkers who populate his volume.  Or perhaps it is because of the very palpable failures of the project of disenchantment. After all, the most compelling figures discussed by Biale were not hiloniim but hofshiim, struggling to articulate (in terms made famous by Isaiah Berlin in another context) both a “negative” freedom from traditional authority and a “positive” freedom to realize their deepest aspirations as Jews and human beings. This is a struggle they shared with many self-described “religious” thinkers; and the two camps together, in the dynamics of their disagreement, constitute the Jewish meanings disclosed by modernity. 

Can Judaism endure in a world in which, as Spinoza might have said and Wallace Stevens did, God, if He exists at all, “must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking”? No.  Can it endure without accepting the precious and perilous freedoms awakened in modernity? No.  Can it endure without a commitment to the Jewish people? No. Those are the paradoxical terms of future Jewish thought, if it is to have one.