Will Non-Religious Jews Survive?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Can Jews remain Jewish without a belief in God?

The east European Jews who arrived as immigrants to this country and to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century were, in the main, steeped in traditional Judaism. They tried to hold onto their culture as tenaciously as possible.

Of course acculturation, and even total assimilation, into the dominant culture, does happen, though it often takes two or more generations. Many of their children left the religious fold, nor did they hold on to their lingua franca, Yiddish.

Today, Jews who are secular and feel Jewish only by ethnicity and memory may marry non-Jews; their children, and certainly grandchildren, will probably be lost to the Jewish people. I know many such cases.

The only Jews outside Israel of whom it can be said with some certainly that they will remain Jewish, barring some calamity, will be the Orthodox – and especially the so-called “ultra-Orthodox.”

They adhere to the totality of Jewish faith, the written and oral law (the Torah) as revealed to Moses by God at Mount Sinai, followed by the Talmudic and other commentaries through the centuries, and codified in the rules of Halakha. For them, the covenant with God, who “chose” them to bring light unto the nations, is permanent.

And for them the world will only be redeemed with the coming of the messiah, not through utopian political ideologies of various stripes.

Not until then will even the state of Israel be secure from destruction by its various enemies; these have been many in Jewish history.

Indeed, were Israel to cease to exist as a state, it is conceivable that much of its own secular Jewish population might relocate to the Torontos and New Yorks of the world.

Why not? Speaking Hebrew and living in Tel Aviv is not enough for one to remain Jewish; after all, one million Israeli Arabs speak the language – and they are most decidedly not Jews! Many Jewish Israelis already buy into the “post-Zionist” narrative and some even advocate a “state of the whole people.”

Of course nothing in the Orthodox world – the dietary laws, the various other commandments, the idea that Israel is the “promised land” -- makes any sense to “rational” people steeped in the ways of “modernity.”

But for the faithful, these rules, and the various biblical miracles, simply imply that God has intervened in human affairs. After all, God can do anything – this is the religious equivalent of political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception.”

If there is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then use extra-legal force to normalize a dire situation, argued Schmitt, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity.

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” he wrote. In traditional Judaism, God fulfills that function.

For the truly religious, the Torah supersedes human-created legislation – even acts passed by the Israeli Knesset, which is for them, after all, merely a secular parliament.