The Secret Knowledge

Chicago real estate with his brother-in-law in the twenties, lost it all in the Crash, and lived as a traveling clothing salesman, on the road throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, gone five days a week.

My father’s mother was deserted by her husband, my grandfather. She raised her two boys, my father and my uncle Henry, by herself, in the Depression, working at an assortment of jobs, the highest paid of which was as a clerk in the Fair, a downtown Chicago department store.

All four grandparents came here with nothing—with little or no command of English, and all their children went to college, and, if not on to great success, to comfort and stability. The boys enlisted in the Army, the girls got married young and were—as was then the norm—housewives.

I and the people I knew, my friends and their families, had a close relationship with the immigrant generation. On Friday nights we went to celebrate Shabbos at the grandparents’ house. We celebrated the Jewish holidays together, we heard their stories of life under the tsar and under Stalin; of pogroms, raids, forced enlistment— dragooning of Jewish males for twenty-five years of military service; of attendance (of my great-uncle) at the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897. Other than that, we, in my own as in many Ashkenazi families, had little or no Family History. Every house had the samovar, which, along with the Shabbos Candlesticks, was all that remained from the Immigration—indeed, it was usually all that came over. By my teenage years, the samovar, in our house and that of our friends, had first been turned into a lamp, and then had vanished. The Shabbos candlesticks remained, but, on the passing of the grandparents, were not used. For we were assimilated Jews.

What did this mean?

Arthur Hertzberg in his The Jews in America, writes that religion in the Jewish home was always transmitted through the father. It was he who took the four–or five-year-old boy to shul, wrapped in a tallis, and who insisted upon the child learning Hebrew. In Eastern Europe there were not degrees of observance (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), there were merely Jews.

And, Hertzberg points out, the deep secret of the Ashkenazi Immigration was the abandonment by the father of his immigrant family. Perhaps as many as one-quarter of the women and children of the Ashkenazi immigration were abandoned. Then who took the sons to shul? No one.

My father was not raised in an observant tradition. Nonetheless, he, like most of the men in our circle of acquaintance, insisted upon a degree of observance, which, however, was so dilute that it could be described as merely an assertion of connection. This dilute Judaism was brought to America by the first Jewish immigrant wave, the German Jews. These came in the mid to late nineteenth century, mainly, from the cities, where they have been admitted, in some number in Germany, since the mid-century. Now they, in America, looked down upon the unwashed, unlettered, and “medieval” Russian-Polish, the unassimilated “foreign” Jews.

These German Jews had established their own, assimilationist religion, Reform Judaism, first in Germany, then in England, and then in America, with the founding of the Hebrew Union College in 1875. This was an attempt to blend in, to consider Judaism merely as different in outward expression from Christianity.

In order to lessen the difference, to increase the possibility of assimilation, all outward show of religious difference was not only frowned upon, but abominated. Not only had Reform Jews, by my bar mitzvah, eliminated the peis (the sidecurls), but also kashrut (ritual dietary laws), the yarmulke, the tallis, the tefillin, the study of the Torah, and the knowledge of Hebrew. What remained? The reduction of Judaism, and Jewish observance, to a dedication to “social justice.”

What is the difference between “social justice,” and “justice”?

The central tenet of Judaism is devotion to God’s commandments. The aim is to allow a closeness to the Divine, and an implementation on earth of the Divine Will, which is that we should dwell in harmony and peace. This last is to be accomplished through a devotion to Justice. As per Deuteronomy, “Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” The human capacity for justice, thus, is imperfect; for the Torah does not say justice shall you do, but “shall you pursue.”

Justice means choice. Justice, thus, essentially must cause pain: to one of two litigants; to the assaulted who sees the assailant go free or to the family of the convicted, et cetera. If the choice did not require adjudication, that is, if it were resolvable through goodwill and compromise, why would it tax the time and energy of the courts? Justice means inflicting pain upon one party. How may one do so in accordance with Divine principles, overcoming one’s human imperfections, one’s desires (for acclaim, for revenge, even for peace), in the lack of absolute certainty as to facts and intent?

Only, so we are taught, by recourse to law. By recourse to and devotion to those laws made impartially, without respect to individuals, and applied impartially.

This is the great contribution of the Jews to the world; for Western law is founded upon “Judaeo-Christian principles,” and these are founded upon the Jewish principles laid down in the Torah (for, as much as the beauty of the Gospels inspires, its spiritual commandments can only be implemented through mechanical human actions, which, in the West, are based upon judicial codes deriving originally from the Jewish law—the Torah).

The ultimate reduction of these codes is the saying of Hillel (the Torah while standing on one foot): “What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor.”

The formation and execution of laws which take into account human frailty, and acknowledge the limits of reason, which cause the judges and litigants, the accused and the accuser to refer to impartial existing statutes in order to allow the least-partial, and so most fair (though imperfect), of decisions, was the essence of that practice which is currently known as Orthodox Judaism, and was known, before Western Assimilation, as Judaism.

Male Jews historically devoted themselves, if possible, to the study of the Torah and Talmud—of those laws which regulate human behavior. The highest status, in the shtetl, the village of Eastern Europe, accrued to him who was the most learned. Riches, then as now, were prized, but the highest status available to the rich man, was the support of the students of Torah, and the institutions of its study.

This millennia-old history of reverence for Justice could not be eradicated in the two generations between my grandparents’ immigration and the baby boom. The mechanism at the center of this pursuit, however, was not only lost, but forgotten.

The assimilated Jews, raised as immigrants, in families, which, for whatever reason, ceased Jewish observance, retained their cultural love of Justice, but were ignorant of the historical methods of its pursuit.

Judaism became Ethical Culture, or Reform Judaism; its cultural inheritors were the leading population of SDS, American Buddhism, est, the Hunger Project, MoveOn.org, various cults, and the Democratic Party.

Of this last, how could it be otherwise? The Republican Party of my youth was the party of the rich, of the Country Club (in my youth the South Shore Country Club, scant blocks away on Lake Michigan, was Restricted, which is to say, closed to Jews).

The Democrats of my parents’ generation revered Roosevelt; my parents came of age in the Depression, and