Can you be a Jew if you don’t especially believe in God or practice Jewish rituals? The answer is indisputably yes. But what kind of a Jew can you be? What beliefs or practices or ways of being in the world would make you Jewish? These are much more interesting questions. In previous chapters I mentioned the option of living exactly the same Jewish life without believing in God as one would if one believed, what I’ve called “as if” Judaism, theorized by the theologian (or antitheologian) Mordecai Kaplan. In this chapter, I want to explore something very different. I want to explore ways of thinking and being Jewish that don’t consist of praying in synagogues with other Jews or studying specifically Jewish texts or following the halakhah, but are somehow still identifiably and distinctively Jewish. If you wanted to be flippant, you could say that this chapter is in defense of the bagels-and-lox Jew. If you wanted to be serious, you could say that this chapter affirms the legitimacy of a Jewishness that rejects not only God but certain aspects of Jewishness itself, especially its particularism.
This argument might frustrate some readers. But it’s important because, too often, discussions of contemporary Judaism lay out the primary denominational options and then just end. It’s as if they assume that a Jew who doesn’t associate with any of the existing denominations or engage in some sort of classically Jewish practices isn’t much of a Jew at all. That Jew might be described as “assimilated,” a term that mistakenly implies both that the Jew has swallowed general civilization whole, or alternatively that general civilization has swallowed the Jew. (Such Jews rarely if ever exist, and in any case, general civilization in the West today has many Jewish elements in it.)
The thinker Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967), who was raised as an observant Jew in prewar Poland and became a Marxist and later a critic of communist regimes, spoke of what he called the “non-Jewish Jew,” a “Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry” and whom he characterized as belonging “to the Jewish tradition.”1 In his category Deutscher included Benedict de Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud. That same sort of Jew might even be called by some a “bad Jew,” a category that, I’ve suggested, is not meaningfully grounded in Jewish sources. Or if it is a meaningful category, then many of the most interesting and important Jews to have lived in the past four hundred years were bad Jews—and the label should be embraced as a badge of honor.
I don’t think any of Deutscher’s listed Jews were non-Jewish at all, even if they might sometimes have wanted to be. I prefer to call Jews like this Godless, Godless in the sense that most would deny the existence of God or at the very least would consider God irrelevant to being Jewish.* Jewish Godlessness, however, is not a state of ignoring God. It is, I want to propose, a state of struggling to deny God, and in the course of that struggle, displacing God into channels of thought that are nevertheless recognizably Jewish.
Even the tradition recognizes the possibility of a Godless Jew who nevertheless somehow lives Jewishly. It does so through the figure of Elisha ben Abuyah, an early rabbi who “went sour.” The Talmud offers three different accounts of what caused Elisha to break God’s law and to keep on breaking it. In one, Elisha underwent a mystical experience in the course of which he mistook the angel Metatron for God’s equal and ended up punished by permanent exclusion from Heaven.2 In a second, Elisha could not reconcile why good people who follow God’s laws nevertheless suffer in this world.3 In the third, Elisha was influenced to break the law by the general Hellenistic culture of his time,4 or perhaps by early Christianity.5 On the basis of the report of Elisha’s connection to Greek thought, modern writers set him up as the archetype of the Jew who tries to reconcile secular, Western knowledge with traditional Jewish thought. Elisha, whom Deutscher cited as a role model, has been the subject of plays and novels exploring this idea throughout the past century.6
According to all the Talmud’s versions of Elisha’s story, Elisha broke God’s law. In all of them, Elisha was in some sense Godless, whether because of a philosophical or cultural objection to God or because mystical experience led him astray. The rabbis were so troubled by his conduct that the Talmud refuses to use his given name, instead referring to him euphemistically as Aher, meaning “Another.”† Yet in the Talmud’s stories, Elisha remains unquestionably a Jew. The Talmud records that Elisha never ceased to teach the Law, even though he refused to follow it. His most devoted student, Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages in the Talmud, continued to learn from him. And the Talmud itself preserves the record of Elisha’s legal opinions notwithstanding his deviation.
THE CULTURAL JEW AND THE JEWISH QUESTION
If the Jew who has “transcended” Judaism into universalism is one sort of Godless Jew, another is the Godless Jew who identifies with the Jewish collective through culture and belonging but not religious belief. Classical secular Zionism, which I will discuss at length in part II, offered a nationalist version of this kind of Jewishness, in which Jewish faith had outlived its usefulness and the nation-state would offer a substitute. Some American Jews follow a modified version of this approach, expressing their Jewishness primarily or solely through support of Israel, especially but not only when it is embattled. In Israel today, Jewish religion flourishes, but there are also many self-described secular Israelis who embody some version of Jewishness-as-nationalism. For them, being Israeli, speaking Hebrew, and bearing Israeli culture is the way they manifest a Godless Jewishness, more or less as classical Zionism intended.
A different variant is cultural Jewishness without (Zionist) nationalism. In prewar Europe, before the Holocaust and the state of Israel, this notion often corresponded to an embrace of the Yiddish language as the unifying, quasi-secular connective tissue among European Jews. The General Jewish Labor Federation, or Bund (1897–1920), was a European socialist organization that wanted to unite Jews within a framework comparable to other ethnic or nationalist socialisms.7 YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, founded in Vilna (Vilnius) in 1925, amassed a vast archive of pre-Holocaust Jewish life, using Yiddish as its organizing cultural principle. Much of the archive miraculously survived World War II, courtesy in part of Nazi plans to create a museum of the Jewish world they were destroying. The archive now exists in New York, where YIVO acts as its steward, and in a few eastern European libraries.
Today’s Diaspora version of cultural Jewishness does not focus on language, but on a general identification with Jews and Jewish ways of being. The religious studies scholar Michael Alexander lightheartedly compares it to affiliating with and rooting for a sports team. The fan-Jew wants the best for other Jews, takes pride in their accomplishments, and suffers in their misfortunes. He cares, but, following the sports metaphor, his care may not be existential. He offers his children the opportunity to become fans too. But he isn’t crushed if they become only fair-weather fans, or even if they don’t end up with a strong team affiliation at all.
How distinctive is the idea of the Godless Jew? If I were writing a book about contemporary Christianity or contemporary Islam, it’s unlikely that I would devote a whole chapter to whether these religious traditions could be sustained by self-conscious atheists. It’s not that the question makes no sense at all. Christian and Islamic ideas can be secularized, the same way the ideas of just about any religious tradition can be translated into a secular idiom. In this way, it’s possible to identify Christian and Islamic strands of thought among nonbelievers who are nonetheless influenced by these traditions. Similarly, Christianity and Islam are each embedded in culture, or rather many cultures. So we could identify a practice or a custom or a way of being as in some sense Christian or Islamic even when it manifests itself without professing the faith.
What makes Godless Jewishness special is the seriousness and resilience with which it has been pursued by so many Jews in the modern era. The historical cause is subtle, but I think it can be stated with just the right amount of oversimplification for our purposes.
Until the nineteenth century, very few Jews in the world enjoyed rights to civil and social equality with the Christian or Muslim majorities under whom they lived. Consequently, Jewishness evolved not only as a set of identifiable ritual practices and beliefs about God but also as a communal identity, one with concrete legal meaning attached. Before the emancipation of the Jews—a technical term meaning, roughly, the acquisition of civil rights—Jews’ only realistic options were to remain within the Jewish community or to convert to Christianity or Islam, taking on board the costs of exclusion from families and the always uncertain reception of converts by the majority.8
After emancipation, however, Jews had more possibilities available to them, including the possibility of living outside the official Jewish community without embracing a different faith. Jews who chose this option often did not believe in God. Often they felt critical of the Jewishness from which they emerged. Yet they did not feel entirely like comfortable members of the majority, because of their distinctive background, because of their unwillingness to embrace the majority faith, and because they often sought something more than the then-existing majority culture offered. That something could be a fully open and egalitarian society, or full political membership, or a richer inner life within the framework of secularism, or all of the above.
The predicament of the Jews after their emancipation came to be called “the Jewish question,” in German, Die Judenfrage. It encompassed both the internal question of how Jews should live and the external, political question of how Jews should relate to and be treated by the nation-states in which they resided and of which they were now becoming citizens. If the Jews were no longer defined as a legal community, should they become public citizens who retained a private Jewish religion? Should they give up Yiddish, their distinctive internal language? Was there a way to maintain cultural difference while still participating as citizens? Should Jews cease to be unique in any way at all, and disappear into the general culture of their countries? Would they truly be accepted as citizens of European nation-states, even if they did? Should they embrace a transnational, cosmopolitan identity? Both internally and externally, these questions added up to a perceived crisis, one that demanded answers from Jews and non-Jews alike.‡
THE GOAT JEWISH ATHEIST
The most obvious form of Godless Jewishness to emerge from nineteenth-century Europe was Zionism. (Don’t worry, you’re almost there.) Zionism presented itself as a definitive answer to the Jewish question. It posited that without God, the Jews should not define themselves as a religious community. They should instead define themselves as a nation, a term that had a specific meaning at that time and place. A nation was a group of people who were racially related (the term “race” was widely used to describe Jews at the time, including by Jews); shared a language, a culture, and a history; and who, ordinarily, lived in some proximity to each other in a historically defined homeland. From this definition it followed that the Jews must have their own political independence in their own geographical space, whether in the historical land of Israel or somewhere else. The Zionists’ efforts to prove the Jews were in fact a nation and to find and win them a homeland were, in the deepest sense, a self-conscious manifestation of being Jewish without God.
Zionism, however, was only one kind of Godless Jewishness, and not even the most consequential in world-historical terms. That distinction goes to Marxism, a grand theory and even grander political movement imagined by a Godless Jew who wanted to supplant and replace Jewishness itself and who would have flatly rejected the notion that his worldview was a manifestation of being Jewish. Other influential modes of Godless Jewishness include Freudian psychology, the forerunner of most of our contemporary ideas about trauma, sex, and the unconscious; Franz Boas’s cultural relativism; Ayn Rand’s libertarian perfectionism; and, arguably, liberal humanist secularism, which can’t be identified with any single figure but represents a commonly held worldview in the United States that is inflected by Godless Jewish beliefs, values, and cultural ideas.
Before discussing some of these different ways of being Jewish without God, I want to be clear about what I’m not doing. This isn’t an effort to claim that Marxism or Freudianism or secular humanism are “really” Jewish in some essential way, either as a good thing, the way proud Jews have sometimes claimed, or as a bad thing, the way antisemites have. They aren’t. For one thing, none of these ideologies thinks of itself as particularly Jewish. To the contrary, all would deny the characterization.§ Scientific movements want to be scientific, not Jewish. Political movements that consider all humans to be the same want to avoid or overcome specificity, not reinscribe it. And in characterizing a movement or set of ideas, it’s important to take seriously what it thinks of itself.
For another thing, the notion that some movement or idea is “essentially” or “really” Jewish is so difficult to define it might as well be meaningless. At the very least, an argument about whether something is or isn’t Jewish would need to proceed on the grounds of some working definition of what counts as meeting the category. And we manifestly don’t have a good working definition of what makes something Jewish, which is part of the reason I’m writing this chapter.
So what I’m setting out to do is not to reduce these ideas and movements to Godless Jewishness. Rather, I want to argue that for many Jews, past and present, the development and exploration of Marxism, Freudianism, secular humanism, and so forth constitutes the full manifestation of their Godless Jewishness. They became and remained Marxists, for example, as Jews. And they lived and played out their Jewishness through Marxism. The intellectual and emotional and personal energies they put into their movements came from the place of their Jewishness, and fulfilled it. Put another way, they in particular would not have believed and acted and lived as they did unless they were Jews—Godless Jews. Their struggle to make sense of being a Godless Jew led them to their self-expression.
Crucially, I am also arguing that for these Godless Jews, their expression of their situation through their ideas and actions was itself meaningfully and distinctively Jewish. In other words, I need to be able to point to specifically Jewish or Jewish-seeming features of what they thought and what they did. It’s not enough just to say that they were Jews and that, as a result, everything in their lives was Jewishly inflected. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, the swimmer Mark Spitz won seven gold medals. Before Michael Phelps, he was generally thought to be the greatest American swimmer of all time. Spitz is Jewish. He figured in the (slim) volumes about the exploits of great Jewish athletes that I eagerly consumed as a child.¶ But so far as I can tell, his athletic success was not a manifestation of his Jewishness, Godless or otherwise. If a biographer were to argue that Spitz was motivated to succeed because he was trying to overcome the burden of being Jewish, or if he was motivated to make Jews proud of him, that wouldn’t count. Swimming faster than anyone else on earth is an extraordinary accomplishment, but there is nothing distinctly or meaningfully Jewish about it.
I would say the same thing about Albert Einstein. Einstein was a Jew, and antisemites around Hitler would go on to claim that the theory of relativity was somehow Jewish. (Exactly how is a bit difficult to explain. But thank God for the idiocy of the critique, which arguably contributed to the Nazi regime’s failure to develop a nuclear weapon.) Yet a mathematically consistent, empirically verifiable set of scientific claims about the nature of the universe is not and cannot be described as identifiably Jewish. Certainly Maimonides taught that knowledge of nature was part of the divine command to know God. And a disproportionate number of important scientists were of European Jewish origin in the extraordinary period that lasted from Jewish emancipation almost to the present. No doubt their Jewish backgrounds helped encourage them to study the sciences and theorize about nature. But neither the scientific method nor the content of scientific discoveries can plausibly be characterized as Jewish.
In contrast, consider Karl Marx, his ideas, and the world-historical communist movements those ideas spawned. Marx was descended from rabbis on both sides of his family. His parents had been baptized as Christians before his birth, and he was baptized a Lutheran at age six. In his work, he certainly did not set out to self-express Godless Jewishness. He set out to develop a scientific theory of history, one that would account for the known past and also specify universal historical laws, like the laws of physics.
Unfortunately for Marx and Marxists, it turns out that history is not like physics (or even like biology). Because of the variability of human affairs, strict scientific laws cannot be derived to describe and predict historical events. Yet it is precisely the fact that scientific Marxism does not correspond to scientific fact that enables us to identify how Marxism came to manifest Godless Jewishness for some of its practitioners, Marx included.
What Marx accomplished, at least for himself, was a form of what I would call faith by negation. Marx was, famously, an atheist. He described religion as the opiate of the masses. He was committed to a view known as historical materialism. According to this view, the laws of history may be deduced and discovered not in relation to the spirit or ideals of the times, as Hegel had argued, but in the concrete, material substances of history: technologies, means of production, and the social classes of people who are acted upon by these forces. Historical materialism can be understood as part of a conscious effort to take God out of the equation of the Marxist worldview. Yet at the same time, historical materialism intentionally substituted something for Hegel’s spiritual force, namely the material force of class. Instead of a God or gods or ideals shaping the course of history, the historical laws of class do so. For Marx, God is negated and replaced by historical materialism. The Law of God is replaced by the Law of History.
The law of history for Marx is a law of class conflict: dialectical materialism, which means the constant, repeated struggle of different classes against one another to produce new historical outcomes. And, crucially, the law of history has a direction. It points to an end stage, the stage of history in which the rule of the proletariat will be accomplished, the state will wither away, and humankind will achieve a final, secular salvation. That salvation consists in a utopian society in which all people contribute work according to their abilities while still enjoying the leisure to think, paint, write, sing, dance, or engage in whatever productive pursuits make their lives meaningful. This ultimate stage of history corresponds to what most forms of Jewish thought consider the messianic age.
Seen in these terms, Marxism negates Jewish faith by reiterating it. The God who makes himself known through the Law is denied but replaced by historical laws that are equally universal and, in a sense, even more deterministic.** The cycles of reward and punishment, exile and redemption reflecting the divine will are negated and replaced by historical processes determined and described by dialectical materialism. The messianic end stage is negated and replaced by the communist ideal.
The extraordinary neatness of the correspondence is enough to depict Marxism as a form of Jewish faith by negation in which the divine is displaced by the revolution of the proletariat. But that is not all. For Marx and for many Jewish Marxists, Marxism also answered the Jewish question. In fact, Marx wrote a notorious essay, “On the Jewish Question,” which explained what should happen to the Jews who were being emancipated and becoming citizens. Marx first defined Jews not in terms of their spiritual beliefs (as what Marx called “Sabbath Jews”) but instead in material terms. Seen materially, he argued, the “secular basis” of Judaism was “practical need, self-interest.” By this analysis, Marx defined the Jew as “the man of money”—effectively, the bourgeois merchant whose existence was based upon economic exchange. Marx noted that once Jewishness was defined in this way, it was no longer limited to Jews. Every Christian engaged in bourgeois economic exchange had become a Jew. European bourgeois society was therefore, in a deep sense, Jewish.
To Marx, the bourgeoisie was the social class that must be displaced by revolution of the proletariat. By defeating the bourgeoisie, the revolution would solve the Jewish question: there would be no more Jews, to the extent that Jewishness was defined materially. Marxism therefore addressed the question of what should happen to the Jews as a people by concluding that the Jews, understood materially, represented a stage in the material dialectic that would be transcended, or, in Marx’s terrifying formulation, “euthanized.”
You can see why critics have often depicted Marx as a Jewish antisemite. Both the identification of Jews with money and the prediction that in a postrevolutionary, quasi-messianic end stage there would be no Jews resonated with strands of classic Christian antisemitism. At the same time, Marx’s theory of the Jews reveals that, as a Jew, Marx was seeking to work out his role in history and the role of others like him. By becoming the prophet of a communist revolution, Marx was identifying for himself a role that enabled him to step outside the particular Jewishness of his class position.††
Many Jews followed Marx. From the start, Jewish intellectuals were overrepresented in the leadership of European communist revolutionary circles. Those who took Marx most seriously rejected Jewish religion as a delusion and also rejected Zionism as a bourgeois nationalism. A substantial number of Zionists managed to remain socialists, using the same tools that many other socialists used to reconcile their socialism with the nation-state. That is why the early state of Israel had so many socialist features. A small number of Zionists were simultaneously committed Marxist communists, a self-contradictory enterprise that demanded an impressive degree of Talmudic reconciliation of opposites. The kibbutz movement, which founded collective agricultural settlements in Palestine, had socialist origins, and some of its settlements were overtly Marxist-communist. The kibbutz is the most striking example of the interplay between the Marxist way of working out Jewishness and the Zionist way: its members aspired to de-Judaize money and demonetize Jewishness by returning to the land and by returning to the Land.9
When the Bolshevik revolution took place in Russia, Jews were again heavily overrepresented within its leadership. It took a generation for Stalin to purge the communist leadership of its Jewish overrepresentation. Yet even as that occurred, many Jews elsewhere in the world continued to adhere to Marxism. (Others, of course, became anti-Marxist critics.)
This matters because, for perhaps a century, Marxism was a powerful set of beliefs and practices that could fairly be considered a central mode of Godless Jewishness. Not all Marxists were expressing Jewishness, of course. There were plenty of non-Jewish Marxists, and perhaps some Jews for whom Jewishness played no role, conscious or unconscious, in their espousal of Marxism. But for many Jews, Marxism marked their way of being Jewish. Today, the mode of Godless Jewishness that is most prevalent is not Marxism but a type of liberalism: secular humanism, which can come alongside patriotism, as it does for many Jews in the United States, or take a more cosmopolitan, antinationalist form, mostly found among Jewish intellectuals in the academy.
BAGELS, LOX, AND SECULAR HUMANISM
Secular humanism today functions more as a tacit worldview than as a formal system.‡‡ Nevertheless, it has substantive content. The secular part of secular humanism refers to a this-worldly orientation, one that either rejects religion or, more gently, assigns religion to the private sphere rather than the public sphere. The humanist part of secular humanism is meant to be universalizing, applying to all humans, not just some.
The claim that secular humanism is in some way distinctively Jewish is usually made by its critics, not by sympathizers like me. The criticism makes sense, because secular humanism is designed, broadly speaking, to enable its adherents to be free of religious particularism. To tell secular humanists that there is something Jewish about their point of view is, in a sense, to deny their very objectives.
The point I’m making, however, is similar to the one I just made about Marxism and Jewishness: secular humanism need not be Jewish in any inherent sense, but it can represent a way for Jews to express their own Jewishness. It functions as a worldview that can replace or supplant religious Jewish particularism. And it offers an answer to the old Jewish question, even though the question has been updated to contemporary circumstances in liberal democracies.
The way secular humanism can stand in for Jewishness is by offering a stance on morality, community, and politics. This is a stance particularly fitted to the self-perception of Jews who want to be full members of the broader political community and who want to be free of the insistence, Jewish and otherwise, that they are somehow different or other. It is particularly fitted for a paradoxical reason: it claims universality while, in practice, reflecting particularity.
Here’s what I mean. According to most forms of secular humanism, religious beliefs and affiliations are or should be irrelevant to membership in the political community. It follows that people who were born Jewish are not merely entitled to be full members but actually are full and equal members. They can, according to this logic, leave their Jewishness behind them. Yet in practice, the only time anyone needs to insist on this secular humanist point of view is when it is being questioned by others who want to define political membership by religious belief or identity. Often the secular humanists are in a minority. Often they are embattled. As a result, people who define themselves as secular humanists turn out, despite themselves, to be members of a distinctive community—a community of secular humanists.
In this way, the secular humanists can end up re-creating some of the communal, identitarian features of Jewishness, even while denying that they are doing so. They may be seen as—and may actually be—a group of Jews insisting that their stance has nothing to do with being Jewish precisely because religion and communal identity shouldn’t matter for the task at hand. Meanwhile, it could be argued that in some unacknowledged way, they are living out their Jewishness precisely through denying its relevance.
This phenomenon can be observed practically when secular humanists organize themselves for action, or sometimes when they are just speaking among themselves. You might glimpse it in the American Civil Liberties Union or the boards of trustees of major American museums and symphony orchestras and ballets and (some) universities. Jews who participate in these institutions are often aspiring to universality, but implicitly or unconsciously, they may also be having an experience of particularity. An old Jewish joke captures something of this experience. The setting is an international conference of people who speak Esperanto, the internationalist language dreamed up in 1887 by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named L. L. Zamenhof. The signs announcing the talks are in Esperanto. The lunch menu is in Esperanto. All the lectures are given in Esperanto, as are the formal responses and the panels. But the moment the participants leave the conference room and go out into the hall, they greet each other with, “Nu? Vos macht du, Yid?” the universal Yiddish version of, “Hey dude, how’ve you been?”
The joke is funny—or rather was funny once, to those who understood it—on multiple levels. The first, of course, is that so many advocates of Esperanto were Jews. Their drive for a universal, cosmopolitan language was therefore inspired by their dream of universal belonging. If nationalism posited that each nation had its own language, Esperanto responded by proposing the value of getting beyond linguistic particularity. For these Jews, by implication, embracing Esperanto was both a way of denying their Jewishness and a way of working it out. A further level of humor is that although Esperanto was designed to be an international language to be spoken by everybody, it amounted in practice to a replacement of Yiddish, which was already an international language, albeit spoken only by Jews. The joke here is that Zamenhof just reinvented Yiddish. The participants at the Esperanto conference are therefore every bit as Jewish as they ever were.
Jewish secular humanists have been more successful in advocating for their point of view than were the Esperantists. At the same time, the United States has never embraced secular humanism as its formal or informal norm, despite efforts by secular humanists to convince the Supreme Court to interpret the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution to mandate that any law without a secular purpose or secular effects be held unconstitutional.10
The upshot is that a distinctively American Jewish secular humanism has remained salient. Often it takes the form of deep patriotism. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who immigrated to the United States from Austria as a boy and gave up Jewish orthodoxy in college, liked to say that for him, Americanism had replaced Judaism. The Constitution was his holy scripture. In one of his most famous Supreme Court opinions—a dissent—he wrote, “As judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores.” This formulation captured the intensity of Frankfurter’s Americanism. At the same time, however, Frankfurter was speaking as a Jew even while he insisted that as an American judge he must not speak as a Jew. He began the very same opinion by writing: “One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution.”11 Today, Jewish neoconservatives, neoliberals, and even (as in the case of Bernie Sanders) democratic socialists all provide examples of secular humanist American patriotism.
Another variant on American Jewish secular humanism can be so cosmopolitan as to be, arguably, antipatriotic. The central idea here is that true humanists ought to be so devoid of particularist attachments that they consider themselves citizens of the world, not committed to the goal of advancing the interests of a particular country like the United States ahead of others. This cosmopolitanism can be understood as a logical extension of a humanism designed to render Jews the same as all other people, regardless of group origin. If Jews are the same as other Americans because all are human, why should not Americans be the same as people from everywhere else on earth?
Indeed, this logic can be extended beyond humans to all sentient beings. The philosopher Peter Singer was born in Australia to Jewish parents. Three of his grandparents died in the Holocaust. In his now-classic book Animal Liberation (1975), Singer argued that the distinction between human and nonhuman animals is morally arbitrary and that the suffering of nonhuman animals should be weighed heavily in our moral calculus. Singer is an example of a super-cosmopolitan. His philosophy seeks to transcend the very notion of “humanism” as insufficiently universal, indeed as species-ist. He is also one of the world’s most practically influential living philosophers, credited with inspiring the animal rights movement and effective altruism.
Secular humanism and cosmopolitanism address the contemporary version of the Jewish question by making it clear that Jewishness, whatever it is and however it may be defined, should be irrelevant to public affairs. In their hardest forms, secular humanism and cosmopolitanism would go so far as to say that Jewishness is an active impediment to full moral human expression. Softer forms—such as what is sometimes called “rooted cosmopolitanism”—would find it perfectly acceptable for individual Jews to hold religious beliefs in their private capacity or affiliate privately with Jewish communal organizations so long as these beliefs and affiliations did not interfere with their full public embrace of human values. These forms, too, offer a solution to a contemporary version of the Jewish question, one appropriate to the liberal state. Jews may be full, loyal citizens of their countries. They may at the same time experience a sense of connection and loyalty to the Jewish community, however they define it, including to Israel. These commitments are mutually compatible. Anyone who criticizes them as incompatible is wrong—and maybe antisemitic, whether the criticism comes from the left or the right.
The phrase “bagels-and-lox Jews” is often used critically to describe Jews who have little or no connection to specifically Jewish belief or practice or community but who maintain a vestigial cultural connection to Jewish ethnicity, in this case via foodways. Strictly speaking, this identity, if it were real, would belong to our upcoming conversation about Jewish peoplehood. In practice, I want to suggest here, bagels-and-lox Jews are mostly secular humanists in belief and affiliation. Instead of an absence of Jewishness in their moral, political, and communal commitments, there is a displaced Jewishness that is itself powerfully, distinctively Jewish.
THE LIMITS OF REASON
The obvious benefit of Godless Jewishness is to provide space for Jews to engage the universe as Jews even when they find they cannot embrace any conception of God. The drawback is that Godlessness can harden into a dogma of its own, a dogma of atheism that, unchecked, can approach the fundamentalism of theistic belief. This dogma, taken to its logical extreme, may cause Godless Jews to refuse the content of their own distinctively Jewish experience.
Maimonides anticipated a version of this dogmatic risk, and he did so, intriguingly, through the figure of Elisha ben Abuyah, the Talmud’s Godless Jew. In his Guide, Maimonides invoked Elisha to warn the reader not to make the philosophical errors of believing that there exists demonstrative proof for that which cannot be proven, or thinking that something that cannot be proven therefore is necessarily untrue. If you can avoid attempting to conceptualize things that are beyond your conception, Maimonides says, then you will have achieved the highest available degree of human perfection. You will be like Rabbi Akiba, who shared Elisha’s mystical experience with him but, unlike Elisha, emerged from it unscathed.
If, however, you exceed the bounds of your cognitive capacities and deny the truth of things that are unprovable or unlikely, says Maimonides, “you will come to be Elisha/Another”:
Not only will you not be perfect. You will be more lacking than the most lacking. You will come under the domination of the imaginary and you will tend toward imperfections and repugnant and bad traits that impede the intellect and dim its light.12
Maimonides is saying that Elisha was an intellectual Icarus. Entranced by the exercise of his intellect, he made the mistake of believing that what could not be proven must therefore not be true. There is nothing wrong with attempting to understand the world through reason, according to Maimonides. The trouble arises when you get things wrong because you do not recognize the limits of your human cognition. Some things cannot be proven by logic or understood fully by humans. Or as Hamlet puts it, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
There are, then, limits to what we know and what we can know. Accepting those limits is the key to avoiding fateful error. We must learn to be satisfied with what we are able to achieve. A Godless Jew who does not believe in God need not deny God in any possible form. Put a little differently, as Jews—as humans—we must learn to live with the impossibility of certainty. We strive to know and to understand. We should not, necessarily, expect to arrive at the desired destination.
Let me conclude by emphasizing once again that by identifying secular humanism, cosmopolitanism, and atheism as ways for Jews to live Jewishly without God, I am not setting out to discredit or disqualify these approaches. To the contrary. In keeping with my suggestion that we avoid labeling others as bad Jews, I am arguing that even those Jews who shape their Jewish identities around denial of the relevance of Jewishness are living meaningful Jewish lives. For me, Maimonides’s Elisha errs only in his certainty, not in his Godlessness. I am not arguing, either, that you can’t escape Jewishness. You can, at least sometimes, as I will suggest in part III.
What I’m saying is that our conception of what counts as a meaningfully Jewish life needs to be broadened and strengthened. We need to see the beauty in the many forms of Jewish thinking and believing, including Jewish displacement and disbelief. Even conscious rejection of Jewishness may be meaningfully Jewish. The test is whether, in shaping your worldview, you are struggling with God, the God of Israel. In the next chapter, the last of this part of the book, I will try to explain what I mean.