CONTRA GORDIS

I’ve been listening and reading Daniel Gordis for a while, not because I agree with him, but because he offers a different perspective, and I sympathize with some of it.  I want to respond to a recent post where he was talking in Hebrew on some Israeli talking heads TV show.

Gordis seems to believe that diaspora Jews have two potentially sustainable paths to maintain Jewish identity.  One is traditional observance and the other is some kind of Zionist orientation, even if they don’t make Aliyah and go live in Israel.  He seems to believe that American Jews thought they had a third path that might be called Tikkun Olam or Social Justice Judaism, but that this path has been shown to be impossible because of the campus protests and the response to October 7nth that have peeled back the cover of the anti semitism of the left, something that was visible before, but is now more evident.

I think Gordis is wrong in two significant ways.  First, social justice Judaism is alive and as well as it ever was for most social justice oriented Jews.  The anti- semitism of some on the left is obviously problematic, but that hasn’t stopped most social justice oriented Jews for whom there are a myriad of issues beyond Israel’s occupation from continuing their work to feed the hungry, fight climate change, help the homeless, fight against the increasing wealth disparities in the US etc etc. Indeed, the current Gaza war has actually renewed some of these Jews who find much of their Jewish identity in opposition to the exercise of military power over our enemies. I don’t agree with them about Gaza, but I think it is a mistake to think that their Judaism has become unviable. Those Jews for whom their Jewish identity is tied up with pursuing social justice because we were slaves in Egypt, still remember that we were slaves in Egypt, even if some of their erstwhile allies don’t remember it. Further, this social justice orientation isn’t, contrary to what he said on the telecast, motivated by guilt that we have succeeded economically in this country. It’s a genuine learning from our Jewish tradition.

The second thing Gordis misses is a renewed focus on Jewish spirituality from a non halachically observant perspective. The emergence of Jewish renewal, the turn of the reform movement towards much more ritual, the explosion of new Jewish music, the small earth based Jewish movement—these are not nothing. They may not be Gordis’s cup of tea, but there is a lot of life in the Judaism of the United States that he is simply missing.

I’m a little bit older than Gordis. I could see his point if he was talking about the Judaism with which we grew up, which had precious little ritual vibrancy.  But the revolution that in some ways started with the Jewish catalogues and the Havurah movement of the generation that were our teachers has born fruit that he seems to have missed.