On January 29th, 2012, Dr. Leora Batnitzky was featured in conversation with Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik on the topic of Batnitzky’s latest book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press). This event, hosted by Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, was a wonderful opportunity to hear reflections of a modern scholar on the topic of Judaism’s various self-definitions in the larger context of the Western world. This lecture was fascinating and raised many interesting issues with which we, as Modern Jews, must grapple. However, the talk could have been better structured on Batnitzky’s part, with perhaps a more in-depth discussion on a single manifestation of her thesis within her book, rather than a broad, superficial outlining of her thesis’s various applications.
Batnitzky began her lecture by discussing an editorial piece in the New York Times which outlined one man’s rather sharp distinction between politics and religion, public life and private life. He characterized Judaism, and religion generally, as a private affair, one of “solitariness” that need not be injected into the public discussion, as religion is irrelevant to life outside of the individual. By contrast, this man argued that politics is an area of life in which people of all backgrounds participate and can be unified in a common practice, and so politics is an area of life acceptable in the public sphere. Batnitzky completely rejected this compartmentalization of Judaism, explaining that this editorial reflects an essentially Protestant, western philosophy which preaches a private religion based exclusively on dogma, and which cannot be applied to Judaism. She explained that Judaism is, as characterized by the famous Jewish philosopher of the eighteenth century Moses Mendelssohn, a religion steeped more in practice than in dogma, a religion based more in communal ritual than in private belief. Because of these defining characteristics of Judaism, she explained that Judaism cannot be separated and erased from public life, as its religious doctrines are action-based and community-centered.
A central argument in Batnitzky’s book is that Moses Mendelssohn’s main work, Jerusalem, argues that Judaism is a religion not of power and domination, but of private life and culture, and that therefore the possibility of allowing European Jews to have citizenship (a main issue during Mendelssohn’s lifetime) in their respective countries poses no threat to the power of these countries’ governments. However, Batnitzky noted that this idea of a private Judaism is oddly placed within Mendelssohn’s discussion of Jewish law, which he sees as essential and perhaps more religiously defining than that of religious dogma. An inherent tension can therefore be seen in Jerusalem between the notions of a private religion and of religious practice. Batnitzky’s chiddush, her innovative idea, is that such a tension can be found in almost all modern Jewish thinkers from Mendelssohn and beyond. For example, Samson Raphael Hirsch went so far as to say that Judaism is a religion of the individual, yet that halacha is at the core of the Jewish experience.
Batnitzky made a sociological observation about Jews in the modern era: Jewish movements spanning the full spectrum, from Reconstructionist to Reform to Conservative to Modern Orthodox, all acknowledge and attempt to resolve the often-seen tension between Judaism and modern life. The exception to this spectrum is the ultra-Orthodox community, which has become largely isolationist and actively strives to reject technological advances and instead views secular modernity as an essential threat to traditional Judaism.
A final point Batnitzky made engaged more modern movements which have sought to redefine Judaism, such as Zionism. She explained that political Zionism, in its original form, centered on the idea that it was impossible to be both a religious Jew as well as a citizen of the modern nation-state, and therefore defined Judaism as a highly secular nationalist endeavor. However, Batnitzky noted that these early rejections of Judaism as a religion proper are untenable nowadays, because these ideologies’ common rejection of religious life was predicated on a deep knowledge of classical Jewish practice which is not universally familiar to Jews of the present day, lending itself to a modern rejection of Judaism less on ideological grounds and more on the basis of ignorance.
Rav Meir Soloveichik asked Batnitzky what the primary legacy of Mendelssohn is, and how the modern Jew should approach his philosophy. Batnitzky commented that it is unfortunate that religious Jewry often writes Mendelssohn off as an irreligious iconoclast who was largely responsible for the undoing of religious reverence in German Jewry of the eighteenth century, when truly Mendelssohn was a traditional Jew with a very rooted sense of peoplehood. She recommended Jews read his Jerusalem for a better understanding.
Soloveitchik then asked Batnitzky how the Rav zt”l’s concepts of two Jewish covenants with God, one of fate and one of destiny, one of peoplehood and one of individuality, fit into the tension seen in writings like Mendelssohn’s in which Judaism is a part of both the public and private spheres of life. Batnitzky said that often this inherent tension is overlooked, so that the Rav is perhaps unique for ambitiously trying to make sense of this tension.
A final point was made concerning the practical ramifications of acknowledging the tension between modernity and religiosity, of public life and private life, of dogma and practice. Batnitzky said that the tension in the Conservative motto “Tradition and Change” has led Halachically-committed Conservative Jews to become Modern Orthodox, and has led non-Halachic Conservative Jews to become Reform or Reconstructionist, showing an inapplicability on the part of American Conservative Judaism to make its ideology transferable from an eighteenth-century German intellectual philosophy to a practical religious movement for the modern layperson.
Batnitzky’s lecture raised many crucial and relevant issues, such as the definition of Judaism throughout the ages and the compatibility, or possible lack thereof, of Judaism and modernity, and of public and private areas of life. The irony of today is perhaps that while there is an increasing desire to limit religious life and its practice to the private sector, there is a simultaneous fascination with the personal, with the internal private lives of other people, a virtually voyeuristic approach to human interaction and to the definition of a community. This lecture and subsequent discussion were food for thought and brought to light a larger discussion which should be of interest to Jews of the modern era.