When the newly-elected MK Ruth Calderon, a secular Israeli, stood up in the Knesset to make her first speech, she delivered a learned discourse on the Talmud which drew worldwide attention. 

Why did she choose a cornerstone religious text as the topic of her address? The answer, to her, was obvious: this is part of my heritage, too; this is a fundamental element of Jewish identity and I choose to study it and share it.

People in the Diaspora probably thought that this was a one-off, that she was the exception that proves the rule. Not so. The internationally-acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, a  historian, have written a book titled Jews and Words. In it, they demonstrate the same attitude toward Jewish religious source texts as  Calderon. The co-authors repeatedly inform the reader that they are atheists and do not believe in the books they discuss as sacred in any way.

Yet, they discuss in depth talmudic aggadah (stories), Bible, Prophets and other texts elegantly, passionately and knowledgeably. For them, the modern Jew stands “on the lonely shores of tormented modernity”, between “the old synagogue and the new wide world, between authority and uncertainty, between Enlightenment and Holocaust.”

They, however, feel comfortable as Hebrew-speaking Israelis in the land of Israel, reading and studying texts in their own language – Talmud is written in Aramaic, accessible to Hebrew speakers  – because these texts represent memory, culture and identity which shaped them and their ancestors throughout history. It may not be holy writ to them, but it does record their people’s unbroken chain of thoughts, words and debates throughout the millennia.

They exhibit awe at the survival of a people who used words, in the form of stories at the youngest age “when words can be magical and the stories spellbinding” to transmit the legacy from one generation to another. 

They examine the presence and role of women in the Jewish canon and bring to light women who were “strong, assertive, brave, wise and vocal” and who entered history only because their voices were recorded for posterity in Jewish literature. 

In their view, words of Torah are “palatial”: “Genesis, Isaiah, and Proverbs are our pyramids, our Chinese Wall, our Gothic cathedrals. They stand undemolished in the flow of time. They have fed a plethora of offspring: from Mishnah to Haskalah, from medieval Sephardi poetry to modern Hebrew literature, from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to William Faulkner, all were able to drink from those deep wells.” Jewish writing, then, is a gift to the world, intellectual not physical, nourishing thoughts and writing both religious and secular, a legacy which they enthusiastically embrace. 

The authors point out the fallacy of the idea that history is written by the winning side. Jews are unique in recording their history even when they suffered terrible and humiliating losses, taking “great care to tell the stories themselves,” in their own way, in their own voice.

They conclude that Judaism is a civilization and one of the few that have left their mark on all mankind: “And I see myself as one of the legitimate heirs.”  Oz declares himself free to decide “what I will place in my living room and what I will relegate to the attic…and I also have the right to ‘import’ and combine with my inheritance what I see fit.”

I find this point of view to be a truly extraordinary development. Diaspora Jews, not living in Israel, not speaking or reading Hebrew as their native language, largely either adopt Judaism as a religion or turn their back on it. And the percentage of those who are alienated from Judaism or indifferent is terrifying.

However, Israeli Jews have a Third Way  – not religious Judaism, not alienation, but a healthy and enthusiastic embrace of Jewish literature, religious and otherwise, as an integral part of their culture and identity. They read it, study it and live it. Only in Israel, it seems to me, does a culture exist where the citizens consider their religious texts as an indispensable part of their legacy, a proud foundation stone of their civilization. 

Clearly, secular miracle is not an oxymoron. 

Paul Socken is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, Ont.