Modern Jews are not immune to this kind of nostalgia; but as so often happens, the Jewish case is different and more complicated. At the beginning of her superb and thought-provoking new book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton), Leora Batnitzky explains that modern definitions of Jewishness are inescapably divided and partial. She begins: “Is Judaism a religion? Is Jewishness a matter of culture? Are the Jews a nation? These are modern questions.” But there was a time, “prior to modernity,” she continues, when “Judaism and Jewishness were all these at once: religion, culture and nationality.” Until the 18th century, the question of how to define Jewishness never arose, because Jews lived in a wholly Jewish world. A Jewish community was made up exclusively of Jews, lived by Jewish law, prayed according to Jewish ritual, and even had a large degree of political autonomy—it could levy its own taxes, appoint its own officials, and punish lawbreakers. Each community, Batnitzky writes, enjoyed this wholeness, and together they formed an even larger whole: “Premodern Jews imagined themselves as one united people, as klal Yisrael, ‘the collective people of Israel.’ ”

For Batnitzky, too, modernity is the age of fracture, when this ostensible wholeness and unity began to come apart. This began in Western Europe with the French Revolution, which introduced the principle that Jews should not be viewed as members of an autonomous community but as individual citizens in a secular nation-state. As one French statesman put it: “One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation but one must give them everything as individuals.” This principle spread with Napoleon’s rule to Germany, where the substantial Jewish population became a test case for the possibility of true emancipation in an anti-Semitic society.

For these German Jews, who make up the focus of the first half of Batnitzky’s book, the age of lost wholeness was too close to be the source of comfortable nostalgia. It was too close in time—the most assimilated German Jewish families were only a generation or two removed from the ghetto—and too close in space: Just over the German border to the east lay Poland and Russia, the Jewish heartland, where millions of Jews lived traditional lives and labored under bitter government persecution. The only way out, for these emancipated Jews, was forward. But if Jewishness was no longer an all-encompassing identity, no longer the name of a world, what could it be?

Batnitzky’s answer is given in her title. Judaism became a religion, she argues, when it stopped being a civic and political identity. Religion was the name of the shrunken sphere of life that Jewishness was allowed to occupy in the modern world. In particular, Batnitzky argues, German Jews began to think about Judaism in terms borrowed from Protestantism, as a private faith whose most important dimensions were emotional and ethical.

The problem, of course, is that this understanding of religion manifestly clashes with rabbinic Judaism as it had evolved over the centuries. Rabbinic Judaism, as expressed in the Talmud and many later commentaries and codes of law, was above all a religion of practice, of public and communal life. Every area of a Jewish life was regulated Jewishly, from sexual relations to diet to tort law. Yet these were exactly the things that, in the modern world, were meant to be governed by the nation-state and by a common, secular culture. How could Judaism’s all-encompassing legacy be squeezed into the small compartment designated for religion?

The first four chapters of How Judaism Became a Religion are devoted to the ways major German Jewish thinkers tried—and, in Batnitzky’s view, largely failed—to answer that question. She begins, inevitably, with Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century philosopher who is remembered as the first modern Jew, in large part because he was accepted as an equal by Gentile thinkers such as Lessing and Kant. In his 1783 book Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, Mendelssohn, an Orthodox Jew, argued that—in Batnitzky’s words—“Judaism … is not concerned with power and therefore does not conflict with the possibility of the Jewish integration into the modern nation state.” Equally important, as Batnitzky writes of Mendelssohn’s case, Judaism does not possess a creed to which every believer must adhere, the way Christianity does. Instead, it possesses “divine legislation—laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life,” which the Jew can follow without prejudice to his citizenship in the German state.

There is, however, a fairly obvious contradiction between the two premises of Mendelssohn’s argument. If Judaism is a religion of legislation, of behavior rather than belief, how could it not conflict with the legislation and custom of the wider Christian society? Or, to put the question another way: What compels the Jew to keep practicing Jewish law, living a Jewish life, once the possibility of assimilation opens up? “Mendelssohn offers no philosophical or theological justification for why Jews should obey the [Jewish] law,” Batnitzky writes. Personally, he would find it possible to be at the same time an enlightened philosopher and an observant Jew; but all of his grandchildren would end up converting to Christianity.

Continue reading: Zionism arises

Following the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Kant, Voltaire, Bob Dylan—we thought that the notion of God being on any one particular nation’s side was wild or, worse, dangerous, the sort of Manichean delusion that could only drive people to hatred and violence. As longtime advocates of progressive causes—Todd as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, Liel as an activist in Israel’s peace camp in the 1990s—we preferred the porous and inclusive conceits of universal humanism.

And then we sat down to study.

Reading volume upon volume of Jewish and American history and theology, several things became clear to us. The first, and most stunning, had to do with the notion of chosenness itself. Rather than an inherently arrogant invitation to exceptionalism, we realized, the idea of chosenness is a profound and perplexing mystery; and it has long been understood as such in the Jewish tradition.

At the pinnacle of the biblical drama—as the Israelites gather at Mount Sinai, awaiting their transformation from a gaggle of tribes into a nation—God delivers a cryptic command: “You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

The crowds congregated below are left to wonder just what he means. Why, the chosen people may be forgiven for asking, were we chosen? And what are we to do now that we’ve been singled out? How is a holy nation different from any other nation? Is the covenant with God eternal, or must it be renewed with each generation?

God, of course, doesn’t say. He leaves the Israelites wondering, and not only them: As we read the ancient text, we are invited to wonder anew for ourselves. If we’re honest, the one thing we can say for certain is that chosenness binds those who believe in it—or pride themselves on belonging to a people founded on the principle that they were divinely elected—to wrestle with the immense question of what it means to have been chosen.

This is no vicious circle. Wondering what it means to be chosen, we’ve come to believe, can be a noble if arduous path toward moral clarity. Consider the original chosen one, Abraham. A man of no particular distinction, he is so baffled by the divine attention lavished on him that God has to address him no fewer than five times, each time repeating variants of the same promises and assurances. Abraham struggles mightily with the sheer magnitude of his newfound heavenly favor. Eventually, he rises to the occasion, haggling with God to save the sinning cities of the plain. Rather than assume that God’s graces allowed him the right to behave as he pleased, Abraham labors to be found worthy of his singular good fortune. First he is chosen, and later he proves himself worthy. This is the majestic logic of divine election, and it is a powerful engine of compassion, justice, and human improvement.

While we found similar moments of transcendence shining throughout the course of American and Jewish history, we are not naïve about the many examples to the contrary. For every Lincoln, who urged America to live up to its divine designation, there was a Reagan, who emptily boasted of its might, and for every Maimonides—who argued that the Jews were not the chosen people but the choosing people, the people who elected to accept God and his laws—there were handfuls of militant, messianic zealots who considered the covenant a license to kill. Chosenness, we came to understand, could be interpreted in many ways but not ignored; we must learn to wrestle with it because, behind our backs, it is wrestling with us.

Never has it been more urgent for Jews and Americans to consider what we are called upon to do. Both nations, under fire, would do well to look to their fundamental commitments. The majority of Israelis want neither a territorially obsessed theocracy nor an utterly secular state stripped of its Jewish characteristics, just as the majority of Americans reject both mindless chauvinism and vicious, ignorant assaults. The way out of our predicaments is further in. If both nations grapple long and hard with the idea of divine election—as Abraham did, as Lincoln did—they might find a renewed sense of urgency and an invigorated pride.

It won’t be easy, especially for those who, like us, were brought up to look with jaundiced eyes on what happens when the fire of religion burns into the rational realms of democracy. But we believe—devoutly—that the idea of chosenness can serve us well: not as a divine mandate but as burden and responsibility, not just as our past but as our future as well.

Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz are the authors of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. They’ll be speaking at the 92nd St Y on Monday, September 27, with Tablet’s editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse and contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg.

For lunch today I ate a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, and it was delicious. I can already hear you—and my dead grandmother—groaning: oy, what a goyishe deli sandwich. To be honest, it wasn’t my fault. I did it in solidarity with my kids.

Children can do that to a person. One day you’re a nice Jewish boy who knows the proper place of mustard and the next you’re saying “That’s nice, honey,” when one of your kids comes home from her touchy-feely, multi-denominational school and announces, “Poppy, I love Jesus.” Sorry to throw Jesus on top of the mayo-induced indigestion. I guess I’m just used to having him (Him?) around now.

Most people move closer to religion when they have children. Ground them in something solid, you think. Or: carry on the family tradition. And perhaps: make them suffer like I did. At least that’s what I expected to do when my husband and I became parents almost seven years ago. He comes from an Irish Catholic family, and mine is conservative Jewish. On paper, at least, my faith seemed like the way to go for gay parents, seeing how the boys in Vatican City don’t like our type much. I was never super-observant, but I was bar mitzvahed, I went to Jewish summer camp, and I make a mean matzoh ball soup. So the kids would be Jewish.

Then, like Lot’s wife, my faith dissolved. It started slowly, as I discovered that the rituals I’d always wanted to share with my children—seders, Hanukkah, and so on—left me surprisingly empty. As time went on, I found myself feeling, well, kind of hostile. Instead of pulling me back to my roots, becoming a dad actually yanked me away.

I imagine that part of it was my rebelling against my parents and they way they raised me. Also, being a non-traditional father, maybe I didn’t want my kids to be beholden to an ancient set of tenets designed to hand down the values of past rather than embracing new ways of looking at the world.

What happened most, I think, is that my “dad” reflexes kicked in. More than anything else, I felt compelled to protect my babies from a potentially dangerous influence. There is something about Judaism that, after 40-plus years of unquestioning loyalty, now rubs me the wrong way. How could I tell my children to accept the idea that the Jewish God is the only god when I want them to grow up with friends who worship different deities—or none at all? If you go around insisting that your god is better than Mary Catherine’s or Patel’s, it’s a short leap to the whole “my dad can beat up your dad” thing, which I’m pretty sure will never be true. And then “my dress is prettier than yours,” which is in fact true (one advantage to having gay dads) but isn’t something I want them to start gloating about until they’re at least in middle school. Add to that the notion of the “Chosen People,” and Judaism started to seem to me like a terribly arrogant belief system.

What bothers me most about Judaism isn’t anything written the in Bible. It’s the whole Member of the Tribe syndrome, or what I unkindly call The Clan. I know it’s an ugly stereotype, but to me there’s some truth to the fact that Jews band together in exclusionary, even unhealthy, ways. Back in the days when I still had faith in my faith, my husband and I applied to a nice, conservative, Jewish school for our older daughter’s kindergarten. The headmaster was very warm and open and said that gay dads wouldn’t be a big deal on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But by chance, she asked, was our surrogate Jewish? No, she wasn’t, we told her. Now we had a problem. Even though we were raising our daughters Jewish (at the time), and even though our girls don’t really have what you (or they) would call a “mother,” if the woman who gave birth to them wasn’t Jewish, then some parents would not consider them to be Jewish either. That might lead to “social” issues, the headmaster told us—perhaps fewer friends, and certainly later, fewer (if any) dates. In other words, our baby would be treyf.

I can’t say that I was entirely shocked. When I was about 14 and my sister 10, our parents sat us down and explained that we were special, that no matter how much lox they eat, the goyim will never understand Jews or Judaism. (Proof: the cinnamon-raisin bagel.) Some of them actually hate us. Therefore, we were told, we were never to even date anyone who isn’t Jewish, because dating leads to love which leads to marriage, and a mixed marriage is a one-way ticket to disaster. My parents didn’t come right out and warn that if you put a Christmas tree and a menorah in your house the Hanukkah candles will set the pine needles on fire and burn the whole place down, but that was the implication.

(By the way, at that time this mixed-marriage fatwa was issued, our next-door neighbors were a black woman married to a white man. Of course, my liberal Jewish parents would never have a problem with that. People have the right to marry whomever they want! Except Jews.)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not exactly thrilled with Christianity, either. My husband, the lapsed Catholic who didn’t seem interested in religion before we had kids, has discovered it again, only now as an Episcopalian. He takes the girls to church every Sunday, which even in my un-Jewish mode hurts a little. It’s hard to unlearn all those years when my parents, in their tireless efforts to promote Judaism, made Jesus out to be a no-goodnik. In fact, they made him out to be the original “not good for the Jews” no-goodnik. I’d never realized how hostile I’d felt toward Christianity until it joined my own family.

And it’s not that I don’t consider myself to be Jewish in most ways. We still celebrate Hanukkah and Passover at home, and I still fast and go to shul on Yom Kippur. Why? I’m not sure, other than that Judaism is part of who I am, as immutable as my race or my sexuality. I know I still think like a Jew, whatever that means. A few weeks ago when my husband was asked to do a reading at church, I called my mother to tell her about his aliyah. The sermon that day was about Luke 23, the part where Pontius Pilate is trying to figure out what to do with Jesus. “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks. Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit of nakhes at how the king of the Christians was once a Member of the Tribe.

Faith is truly important to my husband, and having agreed to give our children a religious upbringing when I thought they’d be playing for my team, I can’t rightfully deny him that now that I’ve dropped out of the game. So I put the girls in their Sunday-best dresses every week, and I kvell over the colorful wooden crosses they bring home. I’ve even learned to bite my tongue and smile when it’s their turn to bring the stuffed Jesus doll to live with us for the week. Though I must admit I enjoy finding him left in odd corners of the apartment so I can yell things like “Who left Jesus in the bathroom?” I like to think it’s a sign that my girls are already losing their religion, too.

Marc Peyser is a senior editor at Newsweek.

Creating God in One’s Own Image [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

In Israeli Army, Rabbis Deepen Religious Tone. Is that Kosher? [CSM]

Even without its subtitle, there could be no doubt about which group is being discussed in Religion or Ethnicity?: Jewish Identities in Evolution, the new collection of essays edited by Zvi Gitelman. No other people occupies precisely the same ambiguous position between religion and ethnicity as the Jews, or has to wrestle with the many anomalies that result. Historically, for instance, all Greeks belong to the Greek Orthodox church; yet a Greek who converted to, say, Lutheranism could still indisputably describe himself as Greek. On the other hand, if you were born Lutheran but decide as an adult that you no longer believe in any part of the Lutheran faith, you are obviously not a Lutheran anymore.

But what about a Jew who stops going to synagogue and denies the existence of God? Clearly he is no longer a practitioner of Judaism, but does he lose the right to describe himself as a Jew? If so, where does that leave the large secular population of Israel, or the Yiddish socialists of the early 20th century—not to mention the many nonobservant American Jews who take pride in being “culturally Jewish”? Yet what if, instead of simply abandoning the synagogue, a Jew declares that he believes in Jesus and starts going to church? Doesn’t that act make him a Christian, with no further claim to membership in the Jewish people? If it doesn’t, could anything?

These questions could not be more vital to contemporary Jewish life, which is why Religion or Ethnicity is the rare collection of academic papers that deserves a general readership. Gitelman has assembled an unusually eloquent and thoughtful group of contributors, who address the book’s topic from a variety of angles—historical, literary, political, even statistical. They look at the curricula of Yiddish secular schools in the 1920s, the anti-rabbinical polemics of 17th-century Dutch Sephardim, opinion polls from Israel and the former Soviet Union, and anthologies of Jewish American literature, among other subjects. And if they don’t offer any firm answers to the title question, at least they show that it has been part of Jewish life for a very long time.

In the ancient world, Yaron Z. Eliav writes in “Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity,” Judaism was defined by a “shared historical heritage…. Jews identified themselves and were perceived by their Gentile neighbors as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, members of a nation who had been enslaved in Egypt, taken out of bondage with signs and wonders, received the Torah at Sinai, and whose twelve tribes had inherited the land of Canaan.” Yet this historical identity was compatible with any number of different practices and even beliefs.

“It would be unimaginable,” Eliav writes, “for a present-day haredi rabbi to attend a Roman bathhouse,” but in the Second Temple period all kinds of Jews participated in the life of the gymnasium, with its “nudity, sports, and hedonistic fixation on the human body.” Jews sacrificed to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, but also made offerings to the pagan gods at Roman temples, as a standard part of civic life. In the same way, “God-fearing” pagans are recorded as having built Jewish synagogues. Even the first Christians still considered themselves to be Jews—as Eliav points out, the Gospels “confirm the centrality of the mitsvot” in Jesus’s world. Before the development of halacha, Judaism was not so much a religion as “a diversified and porous continuum” of identity.

It was the codification of Jewish law in the Mishnah and Talmud, and the segregation of Jews into self-governing communities in Christian Europe, that simplified the question of religion and ethnicity. From the fall of Rome until the 18th century, most European Jews lived in a wholly Jewish world, where it made no sense to separate Jewish identity from Jewish belief and Jewish practice. Yet this does not mean, as Calvin Goldscheider cleverly argues in “Judaism and Community in American Life,” that the world of the shtetl was in any straightforward sense more observant than our own.

We are all familiar with polls that show declining measures of Jewish observance in 21st-century America. But what if, Goldscheider asks, you conducted the same kind of survey in 18th-century Poland? You would find that “almost no women attend synagogue services (except in a few large cities) and then only a few times a year. Few young boys past the age of Bar Mitzvah, and even fewer young girls of any age, have any Jewish education. Neither do their parents. Many men do not attend services regularly because they do not have a quorum of ten adult men.” Poverty and ignorance could take just as great a toll on Jewish practice as affluence and indifference do today.

The difference, of course, was that even when they did not or could not pray, study, or observe the holidays, Eastern European Jews were in no doubt that they were Jews because they were believers in Judaism, and vice versa. It was not until the French Revolution opened up the tortuous path of emancipation in Central and Western Europe that many Jews had the option, or the incentive, to define Jewishness in different ways. As Scott Spector writes in “Beyond Assimilation,” one of the most theoretical essays in the book, now “Jewish identity was not a starting point … or a stable entity that could be taken for granted, but rather a problematic.”

Notoriously, for German and German-speaking Jews, it was a highly problematic problematic indeed. As Todd Endelman shows in “Jewish Self-Identification and Belonging,” there were several different ways of defining and measuring emancipation, which didn’t necessarily go together. Thus many German Jews were ignorant of Judaism and completely devoted to German language and culture, yet had almost no social contacts with actual Germans; they were acculturated but hardly integrated into German society. Gershom Scholem’s father was an ardent German patriot, yet “no Christian ever set foot in our home,” he recalled. Even Jews who converted to Christianity associated almost exclusively with Jews and other converts. These kinds of contradictions naturally made many German Jews unnaturally self-conscious about their identity. “What have I in common with Jews?” Franz Kafka wrote. “I have hardly anything in common with myself.”

By the early 20th century, the stubborn failures of assimilation gave rise to new ideological visions of Jewishness. In different ways, Zionists and Yiddish socialists tried to instill Jewishness with positive meaning, yet without returning to traditional Judaism. In his essay on “Modern Hebrew Literature,” Shachar Pinsker shows how Chaim Nachman Bialik tried to reimagine Jewish religious texts as a kind of secular literature, sifting the Talmud for the Agadah—the narratives and parables he considered the true “folk literature of the Jews.” “The problem,” he complained, “is in the fact that the Agadah is within the legal, halachic texts, annexed to it like an appendix.”

Wrenching these stories out of their original religious context, Bialik wrote, was like finding “fragments of stones” that could be “joined into layers, layers into walls, a complete fortress in which everything is arranged and installed in its proper place, restoring the ruined palace to its original glory.” Yet in the end, Pinsker argues, Bialik realized that it was impossible to detach Jewishness from Judaism so neatly. In a late poem, Bialik described his work as “digging in graves of people and ruins of spirit/And nothing remains with me and nothing is saved.”

Bialik’s dilemma has never really been solved, as several contributors show in essays about the uncertain place of Judaism in the modern State of Israel. Charles S. Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar use polling data to investigate the relationship of hilonim—as secular Israelis are known—and masortim—as the mainly Mizrahi “traditionalists” describe themselves—to Judaism. Long before 1948 there was a strong anti-religious component to Zionism, and nearly half of Israelis describe themselves as non-religious. Ashkenazim make up the majority of these, thanks in part to the recent influx of non-observant Soviet Jews. Yet even among the hilonim, Liebman and Yadgar find, more than half have mezuzahs in every room of their house, and fully 84 percent want Israel to remain a Jewish state.

Liebman and Yadgar, like other contributors to the volume, are pessimistic that purely secular Jewishness can thrive for long. Without divine commandment or obligation, they seem to fear, Jewishness will eventually dissipate through assimilation, intermarriage, or simple indifference. “Reform Judaism,” Gitelman writes contemptuously in his conclusion to the book, is “a default position of Jewishness, the last stop on the way out of Jewishness.” I am not sure that this kind of anxiety is justified, however. In the modern world, all identities are partly voluntary and constructed, and a Jewishness we choose—however strictly or loosely we define it—is at least as valid and honorable as one we inherit. The simple fact that we still ask what Jewishness means is itself a sign that it continues to matter. Or, as Gitelman puts it, “As long as significant numbers of people debate the issue, the survival of Jewishness is assured.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Maybe Tamburello was just looking to get out of his vow of celibacy, but whatever the explanation, there’s something that feels right about people returning to the religion/culture/community of their forefathers. On the other hand, though, there is something a bit chilling about the idea that a biological marker can “prove” one’s Jewishness. Do Tutillo and Tamburello have more of a claim on the religion than someone who converts for other reasons, or someone raised Jewish who turns out to be descended from some other group? And does a person raised with no other ties to Judaism have an obligation mandated by her genes? Maybe the truest sign of being Jewish is answering an old question with exponentially more new ones.

The Hidden Jews [Daily Beast]
Related from Nextbook Press: The Jewish Body, by Melvin Konner

In 1998, Lauren Sandler began work on a series on youth and religion for NPR. Her research took her to a small church in Seattle that attracted skateboarders, punks and hipsters decked out in vintage fashion – all of whom were exceptionally well-versed in the bible.

Nearly a decade later, Sandler is still tracking an Evangelical Christian youth movement that is fast-growing and nationwide. She talks to us about the people she’s met on her journey, and about the implications of their lifestyle and faith for a progressive, secular Jew like her. Her stories are collected in the book Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.

Eve Grubin has read and written poetry for as long as she can remember. Her interest in Jewish texts and religious observance came much later in life.

In her first poetry collection, Morning Prayer, Grubin seeks to bring these two passions together, with poems that explore her forays into ritual and faith. She talks with us about how poetry circles have responded to her religious strivings, and, conversely, how Orthodox circles have responded to her creative ones.

the eye, the hand,

might beg

corruption;

the ribs are modest

shy crests, ticklish,

an open fan,

not quite sexual, yet not puritan:

delicate accordion

—yawn, moan—

soul breathes through its comb.

Jerusalem

In the dream I walk with my teacher across a field.

It is day, the field

a dying brown.

Lifted by sudden wind we stand

in midair, our wool coats hanging

like heavy curtains.

When we drop back down, our boots in the dust,

I ask, “Why did that happen?”

She says, “Because we saw Christ.”

I say, “I didn’t see him,” remembering

the sycamores at the edges.

She says, “It was because of the resurrection.”

“No,” I say. “It was Jerusalem.”

Keep me close to the flaw,

to the cracked soil. Don’t let me

fly up again; keep me living

inside the laws and the lightning, planted

and learning, leaning

into this difficult field.