Earlier this month, Melanie Phillips argued that “liberal universalist values” are an existential threat to Jewish life, especially in America. The only recipe for a flourishing Jewish life, she believes, is to confine it to its most Orthodox practitioners. The “progressive denominations” (the lower-case “p” is a giveaway), to which most Americans belong, are pagan moral-relativists “teetering” on a “cultural precipice”.
Judaism, to be sure, is a wonderful religion — both spiritual and pragmatic, its textual basis is open to philosophical and intellectual interpretation. But it does not, and cannot, endow its adherents with perfection — they are humans not angels. They have flaws.
Melanie Phillips seems to think this can be overcome by obedience and conformity. If you follow the prescribed rules, social as well as scriptural, you are guaranteeing the future of the (necessarily severely reduced) worldwide Jewish community. If you don’t, you are fragmenting it, ensuring its eventual disintegration.
Sometimes, however, the tightly knit character of the Strictly Orthodox sphere can be over-protective of its members’ human failings. A few years ago in Stamford Hill, it was alleged that two young Charedi males, babysitting for a family within the community, sexually abused the children in their care. The parents reported them to the police. For this, the family became outcasts. The community took the side of the abusers not the abused, who were persecuted by a chanting, stone-throwing “Orthodox” mob outside their home.
More recent instances of purportedly Orthodox morality clashing with that of the reasonable man on the Clapham omnibus include the refusal of two Israeli chief rabbis to recognise as a synagogue the Tree of Life building where the slaughter of 11 people took place in Pittsburgh in October, and the similarly trenchant refusal of members of a Strictly Orthodox community in London, having carried a potentially dangerous measles virus into the country, to have their children vaccinated.
Thus, however strong the Orthodoxy, it does not mean all its followers will be moral exemplars. Conversely, however faint the echo of tradition within Progressive or cultural Judaism, not all of their subscribers are renegades. Judaism has a variety of faces.
Rabbi Hillel said that the words, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man,” encapsulated the whole Torah. Sigmund Freud, after confessing his unbelief in religion and abhorrence of all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, wrote: “It may be asked of me, therefore, what is left that is at all Jewish, to which I would reply: ‘a very great deal and probably its very essence.’”
Taking pride in being a Jew can extend well beyond the world of frumkeit. Who, for example, cannot feel uplifted by the massive Jewish over-representation in the pantheon of Nobel Prize winners? Or by the sheer weight of numbers of Jewish benefactors of humankind — scientists, inventors, philanthropists, writers and artists etc — among whom the non-Orthodox presence is heavily dominant?
The most humane kind of religious observance does not shut out the world but takes on board acceptable secular values. As in the present United Synagogue chief rabbi showing sympathy for gay Jews, and in his predecessor’s love of Beethoven. And in the many, completely kosher Jewish schools offering an all-round education and not deliberately keeping their pupils cocooned in ignorance of the world.
I have long admired Melanie Phillips and can understand her alarm at the seemingly inevitable shrinking of Jewish identification in America and to some extent here in the UK. But I fear she has allowed her rejection of her former liberalism to unbalance her thinking.
I would still broadly describe myself as a Western liberal but I do not subscribe to any of the so-called “liberal causes” that she borrows from Commentary writer Jonathan Neumann’s presumably satirical list in order to endorse his disdain. And her jeering at young people for adopting the cause of Tikkun Olam — repairing the world — is intemperate. However naïve, they only want to do good, not evil; build, not destroy.
She implausibly appears to have espoused a world-view so narrow that, in its strictest manifestations, it tolerates institutional anti-secularism but not idealistic young people reaching out to others; perpetrators of crimes and misdemeanors but not their victims; male authority but not female.
In short, she wants to see Jews back in the ghetto.
Gerald Jacobs is the JC's literary editor
