The balance between faith and modernity

The author in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, 2009.

The late Israeli philosopher Ernst Simon often told the story of the last time Franz Kafka visited Berlin – in 1924, not long before the writer died, a month short of his 41st birthday. Walking through a park, Kafka came upon a little girl crying her eyes out. When he asked why she was in such distress, the girl sobbed that she had lost her doll.

Kafka was touched and saddened. He told the girl not to worry, that her doll had merely gone on a trip. In fact, he assured the girl, he knew the doll, having recently seen her as she was about to depart on a journey. Kafka promised that if the little girl returned to the park the next day, he would bring her a letter from her doll. And so each morning, over the next several weeks, Kafka brought a letter from the doll to his new friend, ostensibly written while on her trip.

During those weeks, Kafka grew more and more ill. He decided to return to Prague, but not before buying the girl another doll.

Accompanying the new doll was a letter written by Franz Kafka in which he insisted that, appearances to the contrary, this was indeed the doll that had belonged to the little girl. Admittedly, he told her, this doll looked different, but she had to understand that her doll had been on a long journey, had witnessed many remarkable sights, and had endured many difficult experiences. Life, Kafka wrote his young charge, had changed the doll’s appearance.

Ismar Schorsch, former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, says that while there are various possible meanings to the Kafka parable, he prefers this one: “That a transformative experience alters us externally, as well as internally.” I suspect that Schorsch had Jews in mind here.

Schorsch’s observation explains a good deal about us: who we are as Jews today and how circumstances have radically changed us over time, transforming not just our religious culture but, more profoundly so, ourselves. Like the doll in the Kafka story, we might wish we were the same, but we are not. Not at all. 

I don’t so much mean the externals of dress and language, where and even how we live. Or even this remarkable statistic (more than 20 years old now): approximately 98 per cent of Jews no longer reside in the place in which at least one grandparent was born. I refer to the deeper, the more telling metamorphosis: how we as Jews think, how we think about the Jews, how we think about other people, how we wish others to think about us.

* * *

Kafka famously wrote in Letter to His Father:

“You really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village community; it was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during your military service, but still, the impressions and memories of your youth did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life… Even in this, there was still Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all dribbled away while you were passing it on.”

I was no different from Kafka, really, and perhaps neither were you. Off I went to rabbinical school, not to be a rabbi but hungry for knowledge and in search of the Jews. Over the next couple of years, I was enthusiastic to learn – yet also confused. Truth to tell, quite disappointed.

I loved learning Jewish texts and ideas. But where were they in the liberal synagogues? They just weren’t there – not the ideas, not the rituals, not the Hebrew, not even more than a faint smell of Peoplehood. 

Many Reform rabbis were knowledgeable, pious and interesting. But the Judaism in Reform synagogues was emptied out, remedial and thin. The gap was disturbing, and because I was then actually thinking of becoming a rabbi, I was more than a bit beside myself.

Bewildered – this is the fall of 1979 now – I approached my teacher, Rabbi David Ellenson, then a newly minted professor of Jewish thought (later to become the president of Hebrew Union College).

“David,” I remember asking more than a bit plaintively, “where is the ‘there’ there in Reform Judaism? I understand Reform and Conservative Judaism as effective strategies for keeping Jews within the fold. These movements, from the beginning, have understood that modernity causes the withering away of tradition – hence the liberal movements recognize that Jews need the help of synagogues in remaining Jewish. But I can’t find the content in the liberal approaches. I hear the words – they’re nice – but where are the ideas, the learning and the guts behind the words? Is Judaism just confined to a private pursuit that rabbis engage in and that’s it?”

As he listened, Rabbi Ellenson at first frowned, and then as I concluded, he smiled. “You’ve named the problem exactly. Our way is more of a social strategy to keep Jews within the fold than it is a religious tradition. 

If by the word ‘there’ you mean Judaism or its lack in the liberal Jewish world, you are correct.”

“Great,” I recall saying, “so what do I do now?” 

“Go read Joseph Soloveitchik and then read his student, David Hartman.”

I did as Rabbi Ellenson said. I read those two leading rabbinic thinkers again and again. That wholeness/hunger of mine was gradually replaced by learning, ideas, and intellectual and religious satisfaction. I had a core now – a Jewish one that allowed me to remain thoroughly modern all the while.

Love for the Jews and Zion, Hartman’s especially, and awe of and curiosity about God, Soloveitchik’s especially, have changed me as a Jew and as a rabbi. Year after year I revelled in the intellectual verve of both Soloveitchik and Hartman. Their thinking helped me create my personal Jewish ballast – an interior religious sensibility that has proved satisfying and sustaining.

What I learned from them went way beyond me. I began to believe that the best way to respond to what modernity had emptied out was for liberal Jews to be challenged and changed and solidified by traditional and engaging Jewish ideas. You don’t have to accept them all, but you do have to know them. I believe that more than ever today, and much of what I have done as a rabbi has been to make this happen for other Jews.

Over time, I’d come to understand that the course I had set off on in the mid-1970s, one clarified by Rabbi David Ellenson and then inspired by rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and David Hartman, was a kind of latent response to the hollowing out of the core of the Jews, first by assimilation and then by massive murder. The world of our grandparents and their parents had been vanquished. A rebuilding and refashioning of Jewish life – more than in numerical terms – was required. I wanted to be part of that.

If in our liberal precincts, we could steady ourselves internally with ideas and learning, buttressed by a deep and meaningful attachment to Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) and Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel), then we might help steady and provide strength to the larger Jewish People.

Am I tribal then? Of course, I am! We have been decimated, we Jews in this 21st century. Much of our world, internal and external, has been destroyed in our lifetimes. Our Israel now is threatened as it hasn’t been in decades.

Of course, I’m tribal. But that hardly means I’m illiberal, either in spirit or in deed. And so synagogues must be open communities, treating well and taking seriously every member, whether a part of us for 10 days or for 10 decades, whether known to us or not, whether recognized in our social milieu or not, whether strong of body or weak of spirit. Every Jew in our midst and beyond is worthy of our full regard. A religious community that does not honour this, in word and in deed, is neither religious nor a community.

This, too, is essential to cultivating a strong and transformed interior – to steady us personally with small acts of decency, to steady our people with inclusion of all in our midst, including those not Jewish who may wish to join the Jews. And, as much as anything, to strengthen ourselves with the literary and intellectual sustenance of the tradition.

* * *

Let me return to the story of Franz Kafka, the little girl, her doll and the inner transformation of the Jews. Ernst Simon, in telling the story, does so to demonstrate what he calls a “second naïveté” – that is, the sense of innocence necessary “to regain faith after having experienced the purgatory of secularization.”

I understand this second naïveté as a chance to start over, to begin again without pretending you don’t know what you do, without pretending what has happened hasn’t happened. It’s a chance to revive Kafka’s experience and our own: to ensure the thriving of our own spirits and the survival of our own people. It’s a way to provide necessary coherence, even as we understand the world is not necessarily coherent.

Kafka tried to do that for the little girl with a new doll. It is ours to do with learning, with ideas, with peoplehood and the love of Zion. Ours is an extraordinary inheritance, a great gift. It belongs to every one of us, every Jew. It’s ours for the taking, and take it we must – for our sake, more than we can possibly even understand. 

Edited and excerpted from Evolution of an Unorthodox Rabbi, by Rabbi John Moscowitz, published by Dundurn Press.