Jewishness as critical assimilation: Observations and polemic

There is in the interpretation of the holiday of Hanukkah a truth that, were it better understood by Jews and non-Jews, would neatly solve a certain problem. That problem is the question of 'assimilation.' 

The holiday is widely regarded as affirming Jewish particularity in the face of secularism, but that is false.

If anything, what nearly dissapeared during the second half of the twentieth century after having emerged into visibility not long before that, was what might be called a "critical assimilation": I will take this up in Part II of this essay, below.

I

The ancient Jewish world, and the Christian and Muslim worlds following it, fully embraced Greek philosophy and other things. What they refused was not that but to abandon those aspects of their own relationship to "God" that were inevitably particular, even if that particularity in itself guarded something universal (as God himself of course is). A small people, Jews in 'diaspora' settings in particular (and Israel's existence cannot change this, because world culture today is global) could absorb and adapt to many things. Why not. Cultural growth has often been stimulated by hybridisms, and today these are many. 'The West' is in no danger of dying, but instead is becoming broadly assimilated to various other local cultures everywhere. "The Jews" are neither identical to "the West" nor outside it. The people who say that, as some "New Agers" do, are trading in absurdities.

I studied in France, where I got a degree in a field of one of my obsessions (the other is the art of cinema), philosophy. Philosophy in Europe and France is a field of some adventure. I dare say every problem that can be posed on the plane of ideas at all gets its solutions there. This is as true today as it was in the time of Maimonides almost a thousand years ago, or that of ancient Alexandria. Further, it is in this specific tradition of thought that I have found "religious" ideas of Christian, Jewish, and other provenance being rigorously and interestingly interrogated.

For this and related reasons, I in some ways feel much more at home and less oppressed in France than in America. American Jews mostly are like other Americans: very American. But my interest in French and European (Italy and the Italian language is now also a big site) thought has had the consequence for me that in some ways I feel much freer there. My way of thinking is apparently different and peculiar enough that, for example, I have to be rather cautious around American doctors. An idea that is interesting to me and perhaps connects with certain elements of artistic avant-gardes will only make me seem crazy to these Americans. I can best hope to escape ennuies probably by just saying that this is why I do by profession. Interestingly, there is enough of a specifically Jewish character to much of what I read in postwar European philosophy and theory that I could wonder pursuing this interest seems to place me just as much on the outside among 'religious' American Jews. This is indeed a strange and curious semi-malediction. I guess there are different ways of living in material and spiritual exile.

But I find an answer in the (true) legend of Hannukah. I am a European, Hellenistic, French-educated (and German) Jewish thinker and writer, or at least I try to be. This excludes nothing except accidentally and in my own case. This could be a contradiction, but it does not have to be.

This is not the place to debate the relative merits of living in Tel Aviv, Berlin or Rome or Paris, or New York. I am a New Yorker, this is where I live, and I am an American with all the blessings and maledictions of being such especially today. But to those who say, "Europe is not a Jewish place," and "the Jews are not a European people," I say, you lie. Europe is Jewish and other things. The Jews are European and other things. Identities need not be closed.

In some ways, French culture today is more Jewish than American culture. I could show this, but for now I ask only that you take a deep breath as you reread that last sentence and take in what I presume is its surprise. France is more Jewish just because the nation and its government acord more importance to intellectual life, and if you haven't notice that Europen culure has Jewish as well as Christian and other roots, than you aren't noticing.

I would therefore note that "It was (only) at Auschwitz that they separated the Europeans and the Jews," and "We must not give Hitler posthumous victories." Happy Hannukah from my European-educated corner of the world's most diverse city.

II

The question of assimilation is a spatial one that seeks to manage exteriority in a situation where an excluded part both does and does not belong in the whole that excludes it. Creative solutions will conceive of identity as somehow simultaneously capable of both particularity and universality (belonging fully and only to the totality). Politically, this is the “American” solution that says one can and should fully express one’s particular identity not as an exception to belonging to the universal state but as part of its condition, which is that universality is a sum (a+b+c+….to a limit at infinity) of particularities, all equally capable of being fully themselves in the particularity of their own (demographically identified) social group, such that this particularity is primary, and the whole needs the parts but the parts merely allow the whole (as in a federalism). This is different from the “French” solution which says that particularity is private and publicness depends on universality; therefore, universality is achieved by abstracting from particularity within the public space. This is in turn based on a linguistically-marked separation between the familiar and the public or polite, to which pertain different modes of address and thus relationship, a distinction weakly marked at best in American life.

But “God” is master or authority of not spatial disposed and arranged things in proper places so much as of time, and thus, history, which is the unpredictable or at least uncontrollable self-making of beings whose temporality is not that they mature and change, as other beings do, so much as that they are born helplessly and prematurely, but with cognitive capacities that enable them to construct powerful worlds, images, models, and forms in relation to which they will never escape a constitutive impropriety that is equally marked most often in dying prematurely as well. We master what we cannot master, which is the conditions of our own existence, and do so in displaced and artificial ways, remaking ourselves in and as worlds made of forms and formed matter. History is what societies do to time as natural: it brings about the new and makes its newness worldly, remarkable, something that is not just different but makes a difference. “Creation, revelation, and redemption” are “the” historical processes, and the ways God works in the world, through us. This means that his transcendence of Being, of what is, is essentially temporal and not spatial; it depends not on exteriority but on a going-beyond, on transgressions, transgressions that are generative of Being, worlds, forms. This means that neither creation nor redemption is perfection, except perhaps relatively; perfect is by definition what is thoroughly made; it is complete, finished. A product or commodity may be perfect in this sense. It should be planned and its production controlled. This fits a patriarchal model in which the mental dominates the physical and God is the primal cause lying outside of space, time, and the totality of Being apart from the obvious ways in which by definition he is also somehow in a sense both inferior and superior as far as possession of these qualities is concerned (that is, both part of some kind of space, time, and being, and not part of those he created, and so any), outside. Such a God could be thought to control all that does and will happen, especially if time is reduced to a vector within the world of what is, Being; then the future would be guaranteed to be at least happy enough that in some activity of reflective thinking past sufferings would be redeemed in relation to a scheme or story that imposes on them an acceptable form. Such a God would also be an object for us more of obedience, which is the principle focus in Christianity and Islam, than, as in Judaism, participation. The world being perfected as created in the sense of an agent standing outside the thing to be made produces it, we would be asked to view the things in this creation and the world they form part of as fait accompli, being as they should be, to be admiringly contemplated perhaps, not transformed.

Now, if the temporality of the divine is essential to it, and if its temporality is a prospective or actual movement towards a greater good, state of realization, or happiness, then we could think that our relationship to what is should be one that can freely oppose, at least some part of it, or imagine something happier. Let us call the critical and visionary modes of relating to what it is. This is motivated broadly by the understanding that what is can be judged, and judged from the point of view of what ought to be, or, if the forms of the better are not yet known, in terms of how things could be imagined differently. In short, we judge, with God concurring, that the world we live in is not as happy is it might be.

We can call the point of view that assumes this “critical.” Now, to return to assimilation, it can be “critical” by posing not the questions of us or them, here or there, outside or inside, or somehow both, which is possible on some integratively inclusive model, but asking instead how things in general, whether here or there, might be different. A culture of criticism would be one of critical assimilation if it were specific to a social group that is in some way marginal. Its alternatives would not be inclusion or exclusion (or central and marginal) but more or less interesting and relevant. Such a culture would not have to be Jewish; it could, for example, be composed largely of artists who have mostly transposed a social marginality of whatever causing or type into a style of thinking with perhaps some strong sense of the necessity and value of engaging in it. Arguably, we have this today and it has broadly taken two forms: artistic avant-gardes, and “the left.” There are stronger and weaker forms of both of these things, and both exist of course in many forms. It is perhaps worth noting in passing that both of these identities can be understood as part of broad historical projects that they partly define, and as such they may be considered secular forms of Jewish and Christian “chosen-ness,” particularly if being or being part of some kind of historical avant-garde is the raison d’être of any such idea. At the moment my ambitions for developing or polemicizing about such notions is limited to noting that, first, Jewish culture in the modern world (beginning in the 19th century) quite often became very involved in one of these two broad projects or tendencies thereto, and secondly, that this is hardly an accidental fact. My suggestion here is simply that Jews ought more often to want to engage with such things, in all their securalism and difficulty of neat definitions (outside things like Marxist-Leninism, which now seems hopelessly kaput), because doing so will produce richer and more satisfying ways of being or doing Jewish. Much more so than any of the sterile retreats to tradition, which may be alright when it is not only that.

Critical assimilation is way of being part of a larger social world to which one did and ought to relate largely by criticizing it. And why not? The whole world is still unredeemed. People should criticize that the society that they are, in part because that is what citizenship is for adults. Leave to people who are morally still children or want to be the notion that citizenship is defined by loyalty. Maybe in some monarchy, not in a republic, where it is better characterized as an agonistic caritas, a care for the common good in a place of habitation that struggles with its problems.

The dominant model had nothing to do with critique. It was about identity and community. Its question was: Must a Jew in France, Europe, America, or elsewhere, have to choose between a Jewish national identity and a French (etc.) one? Most answers veered between the one and the other, and even today there is a Jewish militancy that says "We belong to no nation but our own." But consider what happens if this false choice (be French or be Jewish, you cannot be both) is affirmed. One basis for the critical stance towards the social given disappears. Others exist, including in academia, some bohemias, and worlds of artists and writers, and sometimes scientists and other thinkers. If the other main choices in religion are Christianity and atheism, it can easily be seen that the latter risks nihilism (affirming no values) and thus an uncritical stance (since existing social forms would then de facto be affirmed, albeit unenthusiastically). While the former, for all that it offers, by way of grounds for enthusiasm and ethical notions of humanity and goodness, suffers in this context from the perhaps fatal limitation that it has always been a religion of empire, too closely affirming the state and the state of things. In Christianity, sin is more important than injustice, and social criticisms tend to be psychological. Sociology, like psychoanalysis, was a largely Jewish invention made possible after the French and industrial revolutions, and it is not hard to see why.

In first Germany and then America, Reform Judaism in particular held to the thinnest notions of critique and basically lost most of its inspiration in affirming the possibility of full assimilation to the society in all matters but religion. This left a combination of almost anything goes and/or 'Orthodox lite' (which is what Reform has increasingly become: the affirmation that Orthodoxy is right, Reform adds nothing, except to do whatever you like on Sunday and Monday, and we should all be Orthodox 'tomorrow' just as we should learn modern Hebrew, and 'go up' (make 'aliyah') by quitting our jobs and moving to Israel). This leaves those who need enjoyment if not enthusiasm with nice music to move the soul, a defining characteristic of Reform and its style of modernization. In fact, what limited Reform was more than anything its class basis. Its early members were bourgeois (a bit further East in Europe and most coreligionists were still peasants), and what they wanted was the same things other 'middle class' professionals in Germany and then America wanted: professional success on the basis of full equality and effective sameness as everyone else, except in the matter of religion. And Reform made Judaism into a more 'normal' religion, with an emphasis on the weekend sabbatical day, to be spent partly at the synagogue just as Christians did at their churches. The consequence of all this was that Reform had nothing to add.

The prescription for changing Judaism today that might best work would be a radical one. It would be to try to find more interesting links between this ancient religion, so well guarded by its teachers who know all the classical texts, and aspects of the modern world that would be most interesting to a people who historically were pariahs and exile, which would be ways of understanding the social world at large that have something of the critical or the visionary in them. This would be possible if contemporary art and science were thought to be fields of relevance. Why should they not be? True, the size of such a project would make it impractical. Although in my field, philosophy, it would be a not unmanageable task to ask, say, future rabbis to understand philosophy as a way of thinking and some of its theories. When I say critical or visionary I have in mind partly a relationship to time. God is thought of sometimes as vehicle or author of "creation, revelation, and redemption." These are temporal processes whereby what is moves towards melioration through what it is not but could be. My position, simply put, concerns the poverty of philosophical thinking in Judaism today. It is abysmal: with few exceptions, who are mostly professional philosophers in academia, most religious "Jewish philosophers" are not very rigorous thinkers.

German Reform tried something not dissimilar but it was formulated in a way that was bound up still with the identity/community problem and not the static/dynamic one of critique. They advocated "Kultur," a German notion that meant being well-educated especially in the arts and humanities. The problem with that is not only that it helped justify Germany's entering the first world war against France, an effort that men like the great rabbi Herman Cohen participated in, but also that it is kind of empty as it is too broad. As if no one had much specific to offer.

Of course, the same problem exists in a somewhat different way in Christianity. I am not the only person in France or elsewhere who can read a Catholic philosopher like Jean-Luc Marion, although I am not a Catholic and don't want to go to mass.

If the problem were stated as simply as: Judaism as a religion has largely abandoned its own intellectual life by construing it far too narrowly, than my claim would seem as scandalous as I think it should. It can easily be inferred that if the state of things in the Jewish religious mind broadly concerned is that bleak, what can be predicted is that young people in particular will leave the religion and "the Jewish people" in droves. And that is what they have been doing, and no one much has any good idea of how to bring them back. But that is because they want to do this only by making what they have doing seem more appealing. That's a scant recipe for success.

My only practical proposal at the moment is that rabbinical seminaries ought to require as prerequisite an undergraduate or master's degree in philosophy. And it must not be limited to works written by religious Jews and part of that sub-canon. The reason should be obvious: Religious thought has never far left the field of mere dogma (or mere literature, which no more than folkways and traditions and enjoyments of 'community' truly binds or re-binds- the meaning of re-ligio - any much-thinking person) without being philosophical, meaning doing work in the discipline of philosophy with its specific rigor. It is still the only field that can tie everything together. Art, science, politics, every topic of ethics, and all else meet on its grounds. That is because at its heart it is a way of thinking using rational discourse, whatever other resources it has access to. And because in reason as everywhere else there is at most one ultimate authority, just as every precise and important question has at most answer, and it is binding on everyone everywhere at every time.

I don’t think the world needs a new religion. Secularism will continue its relentless conquests, and the questions, which will be articulated mainly and best in the secular fields of philosophy and in discussions of art, politics, and other things that can and do affect all of us, will be ones that vitally matter, but they will be explored rigorously in philosophy and “theory” and loosely but often with great effect and meaning, in the arts. What might be interesting from a Jewish point of view could just be contributing to this. If the problem of assimilation as a participation that refuses the false alternative of separation or disappearance into the universal is regarded as already solved, the next step is just to strengthen our thinking about everything that matters, including the many things that do and should matter to all of us. While that is obvious, I see so little evidence in the religious groups I have observed that hardly anyone around cares about that. When they do, too often they sound like all the American liberals who want to be more open and inclusive in regard to all the identities. But identity politics is a failure for the same reason the assimilation wars were mistaken. It rests on the same mistakes, so central to American liberalism.

New York, December 25, 2019.