042774 Problem Facing U.S. Jews Is the Will to Be Jewish

The central problem facing Jews in America is the will to be Jewish and the content of their Judaism. Jews will have to choose between the desire to be just like everyone else in values and life-style, and the will and capacity to live deeply as Jews. A healthy Jewish identity can only grow out of current experiences and a vital life--out of living Jewishly-not out of nostalgia and inertia. Homes and lives which are the same as all others, we feel, will be unable to sustain a distinctive Identity and community.

This also means Jews must confront Chosenness again. Chosenness means experiencing Jewishness as a calling and a destiny for which Jews are singled out-rather than as the Jewish-flavored version of the American Way, It means the God who has singled us out; for secularists, with the experiences of Holocaust and Israel which represent, in our time, the fate of ,Jews as a singular community. . . .

What we are talking about is a systematic reorientation of personal and communal life-a critique and delegitimization of the reduction of Jewish life to the liberalism-universalism brotherhood syndrome. It implies a willingness to give Jewish content to personal living and to seek out personal meaning and fulfilment through Jewish models. It means developing our Jewish models of pleasure and celebration as well as our models of sacrifice and philanthropy. It means a willingness to be particularistic, to put Jewish concerns first. Part of !his involves developing capacity to judge and draw lines and to articulate value norms that censure casual intermarriage.

There are certainly no easy solutions. For the most part, we are Jews of modernism. Modern America has been very good to us, and the same factors that have engendered intermarriage and assimilation have also allowed for our sense of security here, for freedom from persecution, and our ability to "make it" in this country-educationally, socially, economically.

The question is, must wide acceptance and creature comforts go hand in hand with the tearing away at the fabric of our ethnic and religious life? And the ethical appeal of universalism cannot be ignored. Does Jewish loyalty mean turning our backs on other human beings? We think it need not be so, but at the least it means serious rethinking and criticism of our present way. It will also take more sacrifice, some tightrope walking, and a much greater awareness of what we are up against,

-From an article by IRVING and Blu GREENBERG in Hadassah magazine, published by Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America.