The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

IN Cincinnati’s Plum Street Temple, Reform Rabbi Albert A. Goldman marks the Sabbath of Passover Week with his civil rights-oriented “Freedom Sabbath,” which is attended by representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and of the N.A.A.C.P., labor organizers and Protestant ministers. In Miami Beach, the ads for a kosher hotel promise not only an olympic-size saltwater swimming pool, but also “Passover Specials” in room rates and a cantor and choir for Seder services. In Connecticut, a self-proclaimed congregation of Jewish humanists fashions a Passover Haggadah (the Seder narrative) that manages to avoid any mention of God. In Manhattan, an ecumenical group of friends sits down to a classic Seder meal including the symbolic foods: matzoth, bitter herbs and haunch of spring lamb. After reading the Haggadah, the group invites one of the Christians present to read from the New Testament; he chooses the passage in Luke where Jesus celebrates his Passover meal, the Last Supper.

Thus, with their own interpretations of the ancient rituals, a number of U.S. Jews marked the eight-day festival of Passover that ends this week. Most other Jews observed the feast in more traditional ways. But all told anew the old stories of Pharaoh’s wrath and the Lord’s good providence that took them out of Egypt, their house of bondage. Sometimes their Christian neighbors joined them, aware that their own celebration of Easter, just days away, was inextricably tied to the Jewish holiday.

It was at a Seder that Jesus first offered the bread and wine as his body and blood, and in Christian liturgies he has become the archetypal Paschal Lamb.

Of course Passover and Easter carry quite different spiritual meanings. Easter is a feast of resurrection; Passover a feast of survival. Easter denotes God’s sacrifice for the redemption of all men; Passover God’s special compact with one people. That compact often seems “exclusive,” yet according to the Old Testament, God did charge his people with a message of love and justice for the world. Thus Passover also means a kind of redemption to Jews, a redemption anticipated in the climactic affirmation that ends the Seder celebration: “Next Year in Jerusalem!” For two millenniums that cry has been the Jews’ link to the homeland and each other, a confident pledge that they will one day be reunited in Israel.

For most of those two millenniums, “Next year in Jerusalem!” was only a dream, a burning reason to stay alive in the midst of the Diaspora (the Exile) and often calumny and pogrom. In recent years the real possibility of aliyah (“ascent” to the homeland) has been realized. Jerusalem is accessible, for the moment at least a precious part of Israel; yet most Jews remain in the countries they grew up in. What does the old pledge mean now, in a world where Israel and the Diaspora exist side by side? Where do Jewish loyalties lie? Who, or what, is a Jew now that Jerusalem is no longer just an evanescent goal?

The questions are part of a new and deep search for Jewish identity in Jews the world over, especially in the U.S., Israel and the Soviet Union. The search takes many forms, for Jews — as indi cated by their diverse Passover obser vances — identify themselves with a broad assortment of labels — ethnic, re ligious and political (see box). There are Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews; Ortho dox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews; Zionists and anti-Zionists. In the welter of causes and allegiances that vie for the Jew of the ’70s, the essence of Judaism sometimes seems hard to find.

Bearing Witness. “I know what one must do to be Jewish,” writes Au thor Elie Wiesel, the melancholy chron icler of the Nazi holocaust. “He must assume his Jewishness. He must assume his collective conscience. He must as sume his past with its sorrows and its joys. Tell the tale. In other words, he must bear witness.” Wiesel’s definition, however attractive, still leaves the in dividual Jew with a dilemma. Bear wit ness to what? And how? Follow the painfully detailed 613 Precepts set down for devout Jews? Immigrate to a kibbutz in Israel? Write a check for the United Jewish Appeal? How does a modern Jew in the Americas, in Europe or even in Israel “assume his past” when it is so redolent with ancient law, so burdened with melancholy history?

In a sense, the quest for Jewish iden tity today is a sign that Jews are more se cure than they ever have been in their history. For most of that history, the UP permost question has been one not of identity but survival. The Jews had to endure the Babylonian captivity, the leveling of Jerusalem by the Romans, and 19 centuries of exile. That exile was exacerbated by enforced conversions and by expulsions from one country after another, and capped by a crime that beggars the imagination: the Nazis’ methodical murder of 6,000,000 people. Then came the painful birth of Israel. As the wandering survivors from the Old World crowded into the infant state, there seemed to be an effort, as Conservative Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum puts it, “to terminate the past and lock the door on it.”

Many other Jews, of course, tried to lock the door on the past in a different way: assimilation. Especially in the U.S., where they made up the world’s largest Jewish population (approximately 5,000,000 in 1945), Jews played a significant role in the material and intellectual life of the nation during the postwar years and won a generous slice of America’s prosperity. By the mid-1960s, 80% of Jewish high school graduates went on to college, in contrast to 40% of the total population. By 1965, 57% of U.S. Jewish families had an income of $7,000 a year or more; only 35% of all U.S. families enjoyed such incomes. Jews were welcomed into most professions, sought out for government office, even invited into some hitherto exclusive white Anglo-Saxon clubs and enclaves. Jewish expressions, literature and customs began to appeal to many non-Jews for their ethnic vigor; the result was a kind of Jewish chic.

Where their parents had found new faiths in Marxism, Freudianism and a succession of liberal causes, many younger Jews followed their contemporaries into the New Left or exotic religious movements such as Krishna Consciousness, Scientology or even the Jesus Revolution. A remarkable number of young people are being won over to the “Messianic Judaism” of an evangelistic group in San Francisco called Jews for Jesus; many of them worship at synagogues and have their jackets emblazoned with Jesus slogans in

Hebrew. For others, young and old, Judaism has been reduced to what one young Jew contemptuously calls a “gastronomical experience”: blintzes, bagels and lox, gefilte fish.

Paradoxically, during roughly the same period, assimilation ran into a countertrend. Orthodox and Conservative Jewry experienced a pronounced new growth in the U.S. Orthodox Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik describes the change: “When I came here in the 1930s [from Germany], there was a certain naivete, a great pride, a confidence in the American way of life. I’m not sure what the American way of life was, but everyone—including a great many Jews —thought it was best. Jews wanted to disappear.” That attitude began to shift, first merely in reaction to the Nazi disaster that had befallen Germany’s Jews, who had wanted to assimilate more fervently than anyone else; later, because the old confidence in the American dream was shaken, and a hunger for spiritual rearfirmation became evident among all groups, religious or otherwise. Now, says Soloveitchik, “America is reaching for values above historical change”—values that he believes Orthodoxy provides.

Tie to Israel. Assimilated or tradition-bound, religious or secular, Jews found common cause in their response to the 1967 challenge from the Arab world: Israel must be destroyed. The effect was electric. Recalls Jewish Historian Max Vorspan of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles: “The Six-Day War tapped Jewish feelings among peopie who didn’t know they had any.” It also tapped a flood of Jewish cash. Financial support for Israel, always strong, crested to a new high: the 750 Jewish families of Charleston, S.C., alone raised a remarkable $250,000 —nearly $100 per person. Young people—and sometimes their parents—suddenly found themselves on jets to Israel, ready to fight, or at least to take the soldiers’ places in the kibbutzim.

For the moment, the answer appeared simple, even if it was not. Most Jews seemed to decide that to be a Jew was to commit oneself to Israel. In the five years since then, that answer has apparently remained sufficient for many Jews. Says Rabbi Robert Seigel, Hillel Foundation director for North Carolina: “Israel’s survival is our survival.”

Black Anger. But the war complicated things as well—not least because Israel was victorious beyond all expectation. Some Jews, especially younger ones, had trouble adjusting to the image of the Jew as conqueror. Those in the New Left found it possible to assail Israel as the new upperdog and to defend the underdog Palestinian guerrillas with Jerry Rubin’s phrase, “Right on, Al Fatah!” The chorus was joined by black militants, who now hurled epithets at the very Jews who had first marched with them in civil rights protests. The blacks’ anger, overtly against Israel, at least partly reflected domestic friction: they were finding up-from-the-ghetto Jews in many of the jobs or homes they aspired to.

Jews also began to feel isolated in other ways. To be sure, they found staunch new allies among many evangelical Protestants, to whom Israel represents biblical fulfillment. Billy Graham’s 1970 film His Land was pointedly pro-Israel. But Protestant liberals, once political allies of U.S. Jews and supporters of Israel, began turning their sympathies toward Palestinian Arab refugees in the wake of the war.

Another issue related to Israel grew out of the determination of American Jews to help their brethren in the Soviet Union. By and large, there was solid Christian sympathy for these efforts. Only two weeks ago in Chicago, a formidable ecumenical group convened a National Interreligious Consultation on Soviet Jewry—including liberal Protestants, black churchmen, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. But at least some critics have felt that in pressuring Moscow to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel (a sort of modern re-enactment of the let-my-people-go theme), a privilege of free movement was being sought for Russian Jews that no other Soviet citizens enjoy. Besides, the extremist Jewish Defense League, which took the Soviet Jews’ cause violently into the streets of U.S. cities, contributed a new and shocking, if hardly lasting image of the Jew as bully—appalling most Jews in the process.

Over and above these pressing concerns, some Jews began to question the wisdom of tying Jewish identity too closely to the precarious existence of a political state. Even International Lawyer Samuel Pisar, 43, an Auschwitz survivor and firmly pro-Israel, warns that “to put the greatness of Jews into that little basket [Israel] is very dangerous. What if it goes?”

Emigration from the U.S. to Israel soared in the years after 1967—28,700 from the Six-Day War to the end of 1971, more than double the number of Americans who went in the entire period between 1948 and 1967. But it is clear that the vast majority of U.S. Jews have no intention of immigrating to Israel, perhaps partly because internal disputes and social conflicts made that state less a Jewish Camelot than it had appeared to be. Jewish thinkers have begun to emphasize an old dialectic in Judaism, the dialectic between the homeland and the Diaspora. In his. 1971 book Tents of Jacob, Anthropologist Raphael Patai points out that Jews had their first consciousness as a people not in the homeland but in an early Diaspora—in “the strange land” of Egypt. History further demonstrates that after the Babylonian captivity, Judaism was never without a Diaspora, never without Jews—some of them important thinkers—in parts of the world other than Israel. Even some committed Zionists now concede that Zionism does not demand immigration to Israel.

Broad Spectrum. Last month, when the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds selected Brandeis Historian Leon A. Jick to direct their new Institute for Jewish Life, Jick emphasized that the $1,350,000 earmarked for the institute over the next three years would go to projects that specifically deepened American Jewish experience. “We intend to reaffirm the value of the Diaspora,” said Jick. “Jews in America can’t live vicariously in another country. If our Judaism is going to be Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, what’s the use?”

Obviously, the spectrum of Jewish identification is a broad one. “Each man’s Jewish story is different,” asserts James A. Sleeper in The New Jews. Many Jews insist, with stubborn existentialism, that a Jew is what he chooses to be. Yet the ends of the spectrum seem discernible enough—and some of the many shades in between. At one end, a very large group stresses the people-hood of Judaism, membership in a cultural and ethnic community that may or may not have religious significance to them. At the other end, a smaller but steadfast group regards Judaism principally as a strict and compelling faith, in which nothing less than exact adherence to Torah and Talmud* will do. In between are those who acknowledge the universal community of Judaism, but who trace that community to traditional roots in a common faith.

ETHNIC OR EXISTENTIAL JUDAISM

Jews in this group may be completely secular—even atheist—or sometimes members of a denomination like Reform Judaism. They simply do not feel that formal ritual or denominational affiliation is crucial. Though a rabbi himself, Philadelphia’s Jacob Chinitz insists that “it is membership in the Jewish people that ties a Jew to Judaism, not his membership in a synagogue.”

Particularly among students, this new communal Jewishness is creating a heightened interest in Hebrew, Yiddish, Jewish history and even Bible study—though for many the latter is more cultural than religious. On U.S. campuses, an impressive number of Judaic courses have been added to the curriculums, often at the students’ instigation. At least 55 secular colleges and universities—more than half of them top-ranking schools—now offer courses in Jewish studies, compared with only eleven a generation ago. Where formal Jewish studies fail to meet the demand, “free Jewish universities” have sprung up for adults as well as collegians.

Samuel Pisar, who is a naturalized American living in Paris and the widely acclaimed author of Coexistence and Commerce, is perhaps the paradigm of the existential, communal kind of Jew. Of the 900 students in his Polish elementary school, Pisar is one of two to survive the holocaust. He calls the communal ties of Jews a “bond of suffering that comes whenever Jews are threatened.” He felt the pull of that bond when he attended an international conference in Kiev last summer. After a VIP tour of the city, he became uneasy. “The [concentration camp] numbers on my arm,” he recalls, “began to itch.” When his turn came to speak, he threw away his prepared text and told the Soviet hosts that the tour had been incomplete: it had not included Babi Yar, where the German Occupation forces had killed hundreds of thousands of Kiev citizens, starting with 70,000 Jews. After a stunned silence the Russians gave in and bused their visitors and themselves out to Babi Yar for a mutual lesson in the bitter fruits of antiSemitism.

“Jewishness becomes stronger,” comments James Sleeper in The New Jews, “when you realize that your people have known what it is to live as pariahs in the universe, with the shadow of total annihilation a constant reality. In such moments of awareness, a lesson of Jewish survival is ‘hope against hope.’ Hope when it makes no sense. Hope when you have known the seamy, brutal underside of a church that stirs the hearts of millions [Christianity], or when you have begun to understand the claim of a Jew dying in the Warsaw ghetto that he would be the oppressed rather than the oppressor if the choice were to be made.”

Existential Judaism operates on a less cosmic scale too. Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz tells in Making It how a high school teacher once insisted on taking him to a nonkosher restaurant—and he was so revolted that he could not eat. Today, says Podhoretz, he retains no traces of the old taboos, but many sophisticated Jews who consider themselves liberated find that the taboos still affect them. On another level of reaction, Jewish Author Milton Himmelfarb has admitted that he takes a second look whenever he sees a Mercedes or a Volkswagen in the parking lot of a synagogue. What is taken for granted in the surrounding Gentile culture may make a Jew feel like an alien. “You can feel just like any other American on the Fourth of July,” notes a Jew from Texas, but “you are vividly reminded that you are different” amid the ubiquitous Christmas decorations festooning American streets in December. It remains true, however, that many Jews relish the sense of unique fraternity that arises from this differentness. There is a note of pride in the old Yiddish saying Schwer zu sein a Yid (It is tough to be a Jew).

COMMUNITY OF FAITH JUDAISM

Partly because of such difficulties, cultural Jewishness is not enough for many Jews. A number of critics feel that it is dangerously hollow. “It makes being a Jew the religion,” contends Jewish Writer Will Herberg of Drew University. “By its standards, you can be a very good Jew without faith.” Herberg, once a Communist, represents the middle of the Jewish spectrum: those Jews who insist that faith must underpin any lasting sense of Jewish identity.

Theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, professor of ethics and mysticism at the Conservatives’ Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, is the godfather and poet of this school of thought. He is also one of its stricter interpreters of Halakhah (The Law, derived from the Hebrew for to follow), the Jewish code of conduct and observance. For Heschel, who lost his first wife and children in the Nazi terror, Judaism is “the track of God in the wilderness of oblivion.” The task, he says, is “being what we are, namely Jews; by attuning our own yearning to the lonely holiness in this world, we will aid humanity more than by any particular service we may render.”

The mystical piety that animates Heschel’s work is an inheritance from his forebears, a prominent Hasidic family in Poland. It is this quality of Hasidism—the 18th century revolt against the aridities of rabbinic legalism—that attracts many younger Jews. Although some are not quite willing to accept the full ritual observance that goes with Hasidism, they do seek to share the Hasidic experience of ecstatic encounter with God. Indeed, some carry it to very untraditional lengths. In Beverly Hills, Calif., on Yom Kippur, a 17-year-old high school student declined to join in the common prayers in his synagogue, explaining, “I decided I have my own concept of God as something beyond the natural world, and I don’t think it is right for me to use other people’s words when I could try to use my own thoughts. I can relate to God anywhere I want to.”

In a recent issue of the new Jewish journal Sh’ma (TIME, March 6), a young woman named Joan Koehler relates a remarkable chronicle of conversion. Raised without a faith, she found Christian churches too dogmatic, was attracted by the Jewish belief that total truth “is not within man’s reach.” Despite the endless intricacies of Jewish law that daunt most interested outsiders—and many Jews—she concluded that “in a sense, each Jew has his own Torah, and I am working out mine.” Among other observances, she keeps a kosher kitchen and a fairly strict Sabbath.

Jew and convert, a growing number of young people are joining the college-based havurat (fellowship) movement and similar experimental Jewish communities. Different from the culture-oriented Judaic studies programs, the havurat have communal houses or meeting places where Jewish students gather to study the Torah, Hebrew and other Jewish subjects and to celebrate the Sabbath and festivals together. Though they pledge no formal adherence to strict Halakhah, the students can, like Joan Koehler, be edifyingly tough on themselves. Some communities observe their own kind of kashruth (kosher laws) by vegetarianism, at least on the Sabbath. At Boston’s Havurat Shalom, one of the pioneering communities in the movement, members live close enough to the house that they can walk to Sabbath services—even if they might use cars for other purposes during the day.

These communal experiences reflect a new interpretation of an ancient keystone Jewish concept: membership in the mishpochah, a family of both blood and faith whose dining table is also an altar. It is a family on familiar terms with God—so much so that members can chastise him, as Tevye does in Fiddler on the Roof. One great Hasidic rabbi, Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev, once warned God, “If you refuse to answer our prayers, I shall refuse to go on saying them.” It was Levi-Yitzhak, too, who one day addressed God in exasperation: “Master of the Universe, how many years do we know each other? How many decades? So please permit me to wonder: is this any way to rule your world?” God is sometimes seen as a sort of puzzlingly eccentric grandfather. One Jewish story tells of a rich man praying for money to start a new business, and a poor man, next to him, praying for food for his starving family. God tells an astonished angel to grant the rich man’s petition, explaining that he sees the poor man every week, but he has not seen the rich man in three years.

The warm circle of the mishpochah became considerably extended as Jewish history progressed; in time it included the entire shtetl, the Jewish village. Now a number of Jewish thinkers would like to define that concept in a special way that embraces the Jewish people as a whole. Among the most influential is a cross-denominational group of theologians and philosophers who have become known as the “Covenant theologians.” Loosely organized, stressing their common beliefs rather than their differences, the group includes such names as New York Reform Theologian (and Sh’ma Editor) Eugene Borowitz, Conservative Theologian Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Orthodox Theologian Norman Lamm. What they mutually try to promote, explains Siegel, is the idea that Jews “are not a people like all other people, nor a religious society promoting certain metaphysical principles and ideas, but a group joined together in relation to God.”

Irrelevant Lines. One of the first issues the group has tackled is the central question of revelation. According to older attitudes, notes Jakob J. Petuchowski of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, “once you discovered that Moses didn’t write the whole Pentateuch, you dropped the idea of revelation altogether.” But the consensus of the Covenant theologians is that God does reveal himself to man, and that he has, in one way or another, established some kind of special covenant with the Jews. For the traditionalist, that may mean the literal, biblical Covenant first made by God with the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and later confirmed with the Hebrew people as a whole at Sinai. For others it may mean a more existential relationship, perhaps with a less personal God.

For Reform Jew Petuchowski, the Covenant theology of revelation means that denominational lines are often irrelevant. His own life illustrates the blurring of those lines: his wife keeps a kosher kitchen, unusual for Reform Jews, and he volunteers his services to a small Reform congregation in Laredo, Texas, on the first night of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), then moves on to a nearby Conservative synagogue for the next night of the high holy days.

The Covenant theologians—and many other religious Jews newly interested in Halakhic observance—generally agree that the Jews’ special relationship with God demands some kind of loyalty to traditional Jewish law. “Without law the Covenant is empty and even meaningless,” says Seymour Siegel. “There can be no Covenant without observance.” That, of course, is an old question in Judaism, and it divides even those devoutly observant Jews whom the outside world paints with the broad brush of “Orthodoxy.”

ORTHODOX JUDAISM

While more liberal Jews are willing to search for the common denominator of faith within a broader idea of Jewish peoplehood, the Orthodox are more demanding: faith must come first, peoplehood second. Indeed, for the strict est Orthodox, their rigidly sectarian faith actually separates them from other Jews. Even so, the basic Orthodox concept of Jewish identification is far healthier today than was expected just a few decades ago. Now it is burgeoning, partly because the melting pot is passe, but also partly because the Orthodox birth rate is unusually high.

Rabbi Soloveitchik, Orthodoxy’s most brilliant interpreter in the U.S., in sists that Orthodoxy and modern life can go hand in hand. A pre-eminent Talmudic authority at Manhattan’s Yeshiva University, Soloveitchik sees the “divine disciplines” of Orthodoxy as part of “a great romance between men and God.” Halakhic Precepts, he argues, are a natural dialectic of “advancement and withdrawal” — six days of work, one of rest; 16 days of the month when husband and wife can have intercourse, twelve when they cannot because of restrictions surrounding the menstrual period. “Detail is important,” says Soloveitchik. “Ethics pays attenion to detail. Some people call us pe dantic; perhaps we are. But if you pay attention to detail you cannot be misled.” Soloveitchik acknowledges that Orthodox belief is not always easy to understand: “We don’t believe because it is absurd, but sometimes in spite of the fact it is absurd.”

Soloveitchik tirelessly commutes between New York and Boston, where he supervises the enlightened Yeshiva he founded there, the Maimonides School. It is designed to give students from kindergarten through twelfth grade the best in both secular education and Jewish tradition. “The American Jew is integrated in American society,” says Soloveitchik, “but we have another commitment too, a metaphysical commitment — a covenant with God. We must burden the child with both commitments.” Burden indeed: to accommodate the dual study load, the school day at Maimonides runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Despite its monolithic aspects, Orthodoxy comprises a host of sometimes bitterly contending factions. There are arguments, for instance, about the fine points of kosher-food preparation, with the result that there are two categories of kosher food — regular kosher, acceptable to most Orthodox, and glatt (smooth) kosher* preferred by the more rigorous ultraOrthodox. More serious disagreements revolve around whether a Gentile who is converted through non-Orthodox procedures is in fact a Jew, or even whether Orthodox rabbis can engage in interdenominational conversations with less observant rabbis. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, a leading theologian of the Orthodox left, has joined Reform and Conservative leaders on New York’s Board of Rabbis, but such cooperation is anathema to the ultraOrthodox.

At least one Orthodox group—the Lubavitch Hasidim—is dedicated to converting less observant Jews back to full observance, and the group usually goes about that task with patience, tact and good humor. One convert to Lubavitch Hasidism, Microbiologist Velvl Greene of Minneapolis, was won over simply by prayer. A young Lubavitch missionary, in the midst of a ten-minute interview with the busy Greene, suddenly looked out the window at the setting sun, realized that it was time for prayer, and, asking Greene’s pardon, abruptly stopped the conversation. Putting on a gartel (a cord round the waist that symbolizes the biblical “girding of the loins”), he turned to the window to pray. Greene was so impressed that he invited the young man back for further conversations and gradually became a fully observant Lubavitcher.

Sabbath Combat. Despite the current interest in Orthodoxy’s various shades, many Jews resent its exclusiveness. Indeed, Reform Rabbi Alvin H. Reines, of Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, turns the tables and regretfully excludes Orthodoxy from his concept of Judaism. Reines contends that there is no single entity describable as Judaism, but rather a variety of Judaisms over the ages, each fashioned to its time. Some have lingered on and now coexist, but the common denominator of most is flexibility. Reines would like to see basic unity among believing Jews under an umbrella he calls “polydoxy.” Poly-doxy’s working principle recognizes the “radical freedom” of every human being to create his own religion for his own “finite needs.” By its very nature, says Reines, this formulation excludes those, like the Orthodox, who would restrict complete human freedom with divine commandments.

Orthodoxy—especially militant Orthodoxy—does create problems within Judaism, but in the U.S. these problems are only minor ones, skirmishes of words. In Israel, Orthodox zealotry has created a national law-and-order crisis. Orthodox Jews are naturally inflamed by secular Jews who spend the Sabbath sunning on the beach at Tel Aviv. Secular Jews are exasperated at the kind of Orthodox legalism that debates whether using electricity on the Sabbath violates the injunction against kindling fires on that day; or whether it is better to break the ban against working on the Sabbath by milking cows or to risk causing the animals pain—an action that is also forbidden—by not milking them.

Israelis or visitors who are unwise enough to drive their cars through the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem on the Sabbath often encounter a hail of stones. A teen-age girl who naively walks through the same district in a miniskirt may find herself angrily chased by Orthodox youths shouting “Zonah! Zonah!” (“Whore! Whore!”). Many pathologists in Israeli hospitals receive death threats from Orthodox fanatics for performing autopsies, which according to Orthodoxy are a desecration of the dead. Hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv closed down briefly in protest against police failure to curb the threats.

The extremists are likely to lose rather than gain ground in Israel’s religious life. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, 53, an Orthodox Halakhic scholar who is Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, is an odds-on favorite to succeed Issar Yehuda Unterman, 86, as the country’s powerful Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, perhaps some time this year. He is carefully attuned to Jewish law, but at the same time practical, eager to solve such modern problems as how to maintain a Sabbath police force without violating the strictures of Halakhah. Meantime, other branches of religious Judaism are gaining a foothold there. An increasing number of conversions performed by U.S. Conservative rabbis are now recognized by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Conservatives have eight synagogues in Israel, Reform has eight, and even Reconstructionism has one.

The catalysts for many of these changes in Israel are American. For one thing, after the extermination or exile of European Jewish leadership during World War II, the task of analyzing and shaping Jewish thought fell largely to American Jews. But the basic reason for the influence is that Judaism lives by dialectic. Classic rabbinical law displayed this trait; on every question, great and small, there was always a majority opinion and minority opinion, and one balanced the other. Similarly, Jewish developments in the Diaspora influence the homeland, and the homeland in turn shapes the Diaspora.

Shared Courage. To many Jews, U.S. society represents cosmopolitanism and universalism, Israeli society a community fulfilling its tradition. U.S. society exalts conscience and individual freedom, Israeli society adherence to a communal code. Alone, either set of ideals may become narrow or destructive; exchanged, they could become more balanced and productive for both communities. Since Judaism is an inextricable mixture of religion and nationhood, a certain ambiguity about Jewish identity will always remain and may ultimately be creative. “We cannot live on borrowed courage,” warns Los Angeles Rabbi Leonard Beerman, counseling U.S. Jews to define their identities out of their own roots. But shared courage could well add up to redoubled strength.

In his short story Monte Sant’ Angela, Arthur Miller writes of the Jewish experience: “The whole history is packing bundles and getting away.” That may have been. Now the business, Jews hope, is unpacking bundles and settling where they are. They seem determined to follow the 614th commandment as propounded by Canadian Philosopher Emil Fackenheim: Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler. That includes maintaining loyalty to two Jerusalems: the earthly city and the heavenly one, the realized and the unrealized. For many Jews, the earthly Jerusalem remains an irresistible symbol of hope and triumph. For others, aliyah to the existing Jerusalem is not necessary to reach the ideal one. To them, “Next Year in Jerusalem” means a spiritual journey: contributing their special vision to help build something nearer to that heavenly city—the kingdom of God—throughout the world.

*The Talmud is the great body of Jewish legal and ritual commentary recorded between 300 B.C. and A.D. 500 and continuously refined by Jewish scholars ever since. Based on the Torah (the five books of Moses that make up the beginning of the Bible), it is Judaism’s most authoritative source, after the Torah, and its greatest literary achievement. *Regular kosher, for example, allows animals to be eaten whose lungs are scarred from old internal injuries: glutt kosher requires the lungs to be completely smooth.