AN UNCERTAIN PEOPLE

In the eyes of the American Jewish establishment, Jewish survival has always meant one thing: defending against anti-Semitism and the policies that foster it. The strategy has been to raise the wall separating church and state and to bring down the wall separating Jews from Christian America. But while pursuing these goals single-mindedly, the establishment has remained blind to the fact that the unwavering secularism of its means stands opposed to the single most distinguishing feature of the Jewish people: the Jewish religion. Now that secularism has become entrenched in American Judaism, it has brought with it a new crisis of Jewish survival for which the Jewish establishment has been caught wholly unprepared.

The new threat comes from within the Jewish people — declining birthrates, declining religious affiliation, declining Jewish identification, and increasing assimilation. Jewish survival no longer means protecting individual Jews from acts of antiSemitism; it means saving the entire Jewish people from self-wrought extinction.

According to a study by the American Jewish Congress, Jews here are past zero population growth. Where they once lived together in close-knit communities, they are now dispersed throughout the country. In his new book Faith or Fear, Elliott Abrams points out the astonishing fact that “12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians” and that one- third of Americans of Jewish ethnic origin say that Judaism is not their religion.

Reversing such decline will require new thinking. For Abrams, the best new idea is also the oldest: He argues powerfully in favor of Judaism over ” Jewishness” as the answer to the problem of Jewish continuity. He recognizes that alternative forms of Jewish expression have not only failed, but have brought the American Jewish community to the brink of disaster.

Although his position is quintessentially a small-c conservative one, Abrams does not advocate the instrumental view of religion common among political conservatives — that religion is good for the masses solely because it makes them law-abiding and virtuous. For him, religion entails personal obligation. He also believes that the survival of Jews requires a religious commitment on the part of every individual Jew and on the part of the Jewish establishment. He demonstrates that the Jewish community is withering precisely because the majority of American Jews has chosen not to make such a commitment.

The trouble began with the large immigration of Eastern European Jews between 1880 and World War I. In the old country, Judaism had defined the life of virtually every Jew. In their mostly segregated and self-governing communities, Jews lived according to the dictates of religious authority, which set the boundaries of acceptable behavior and imposed the rhythms of the day, the week, the year. They had little choice but to stay in their own communities and conform.

Once they arrived in America, however, it was easy for many of them — especially the younger ones — to imagine that Judaism no longer applied. Where there had once been social pressure to conform to community practice, now there was pressure to abandon that practice and assimilate into the dominant culture.

Furthermore, as Abrams points out, the apodictic Judaism of the time was focused more on ritual than doctrine, so it had developed no vocabulary with which to convey the importance of continued religious practice.

From these circumstances came the impulse toward “safety through secularism, ” as Abrams puts it. With philanthropic, rather than religious, leaders guiding the community, American Jewry became committed to “life under the new sacred Law of the Constitution rather than the old Law of the Torah.” To illustrate the phenomenon, Abrams surveys Supreme Court religion jurisprudence and the unwavering support that Jews have provided the secularist side.

While the Jewish establishment has endeavored to break down walls between Jews and Christians, it has not done so where the Christians have been believers, as Abrams notes. At one time — when Christianity was used to incite the murder of Jews — the suspicion of Christian belief might have been justified. But Abrams makes clear that those days are long gone. He records the efforts made in the Roman Catholic Church to reverse anti- Semitism and end active proselytization of the Jews. He also cites parallel efforts within Protestant mainline churches. “In most Christian denominations, ” he concludes, “a two-thousand-year-old war against Judaism is being called off and its direct connection to antiSemitic violence admitted.”

Turning to the Jewish fear of evangelical Christianity, he argues that one of its most powerful sources is not the hostility of the Christians but the political attitudes — and, implicitly, the class attitudes — of the Jews. Because Jews have identified so strongly with liberal politics — abortion, gay rights, environmentalism, opposition to capital punishment — they perceive any attack on that political agenda to be an attack on the Jewish people itself.

Abrams is careful to draw a line between Christian belief and targeted proselytization, a legitimate reason for Jews to be suspicious of evangelicals. The Jews are partly to blame for any rift, though, because of their prejudice against believing Christians, which Abrams finds insulting and counterproductive. He also points out that, even in the face of proselytization, “the vast majority of Americans of Jewish heritage who are now Christian crossed that line not at the urging of a group like Jews for Jesus but because one generation drifted away from Judaism, and, with intermarriage, the next left it behind entirely.”

Indeed, as Abrams argues, this “flight from Judaism” — accompanied by a massive effort to redefine what it means to be Jewish — is much more dangerous and troubling than Christian proselytization. Liberal Jewish leaders and those advocating “alternative forms of group cohesion” have ” changed the borders of the Jewish community so that they suddenly include people and practices not formerly considered Jewish.” Instead of bringing more outsiders into true Judaism, such efforts have merely weakened the borders enough so that Jewish people may feel perfectly comfortable crossing them on their way out. Judaism is indeed “a terribly demanding faith,” as Abrams says, and Jews will take any opportunity to find equally fulfilling but undemanding substitutes — such as Zionism, politics, even the Holocaust. Abrams considers these substitute sources of Jewish identity and finds them all unable to sustain any kind of Jewish commitment for more than a generation or two.

In the end, Abrams’s argument comes down to a rather simple question: If ” the central issue” is “continuity,” then shouldn’t we look to the one element of the Jewish community that has been most successful at it? “Do not the Orthodox and other traditionally observant Jews have the right to claim success — and to insist that their approach must be right?”

It is quite a step for a Jewish intellectual to arrive at such a position, i.e., that “Jewish” isn’t antithetical to “intellectual.” But part of it can be explained by the fact that the religion is meeting the intellectuals halfway. “Intellectual” is no longer antithetical to “Jewish.” Where the religion of the immigrants was unable to answer the challenges of modernity, the Orthodox Judaism of today in part welcomes the reciprocal influence. The answer to the question “Why obey Jewish law?” is now infinitely more sophisticated than, “Don’t ask such questions!”

Elliott Abrams is a severe, insightful critic of the assumptions that have brought the American Jewish community to its current predicament. Of course, his argument is premised on the idea that the Jewish people is something worth preserving. If the majority of American Jews do not think that preserving the Jewish people is worth a personal commitment, then we need only wait another generation or so for the problem to go away.

Mark Miller is a writer living in Washington, D.C.