We Jews: Who Are We And What Should We Do?

by Adin Steinsaltz, Yehuda Hanegbi (Translator), Rebecca Toueg (Translator)

In We Jews, Rabbi Steinsaltz explores the most important issues that concern  Jews today as Jews .  He provides wise and uplifting answers to Jews everywhere, whether they are secular and assimilated or orthodox– Are we a nation or a religion? Are the stereotypes of Jews really true? Why are Jews so controversial? How can we navigate the opposing forces of diversity, culture, and politics? Can we survive intermarriage and the loss of tradition? Do we still worship the Golden Calf? In this book, Rabbi Steinsaltz sees causes and consequences, achievements and failures, looks at the contemporary world, and observes the dreams and longings of modern Jewish people.  Written as an intimate and inspiring internal memo to the whole Jewish family, We Jews answers these questions and many more in a way that is at once insightful and inspiring.

Genres: Religion

204 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2005

Reviews

[Jan Rice · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I write, I try not to sound like this book.

It's not that the author doesn't say anything right. He does give his reasoning. He says so much, and so impressionistically, that he would almost have to get some things right. But there are problems with reasons. More about that later.

By the way, this guy is a Jewish scholar who, famously, has published a well-known edition of the Talmud, among his other work. So it's chutzpah time for me.

I brought this book home last fall after somebody donated it to the library where I volunteer. I was writing something about Jewish identity. Nothing anybody says on that subject much satisfies me, so I thought maybe what this author has to say would help. I had no idea who he was. After I had read 100 pages or so, I was disconcerted. What was this?

I went on to other things. But did I return it? No. Every time I thought about returning it, I didn't, and there it sat.

It didn't help that his editor idolizes him. Wikipedia complains that his entry sounds overly star-struck.

In the meantime, I learned of the author's having edited the Talmud. Twice.

I looked him up. Well, he's from an Orthodox (ultra-Orthodox?) tradition. He was a student of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. So maybe he and I might reasonably have philosophical and theological differences. The hard part is talking about them. If someone writes an impressive book, all I have to do is choose what to talk about, but if I find a book is off-target and all over the place, what then?

I finished reading the book.

The chapters have titles such as, "I. Are We Actors with Masks? Our Ability to Assimilate Has Been Too Effective for Our Own Good," and "II. Are We Shattered into Pieces? Despite What Anti-Semites Have Said, Our Infighting and Historical Circumstances Have Never Allowed Unity nor a Unified Leadership."

He sounds as if he were blaming Jews for antisemitism. I think that's because he's so ensconced within his tradition that he's not seeing what's outside it--the context, that is. He elaborated on Jews' losing themselves in other cultures and therefore feeling inauthentic. He forgot about the ubiquity of this concern, although if it comes with the market economy, Jews may have confronted it first. With Romanticism following hard on the heels of the Enlightenment, soon everyone was living in the new economic reality, and Rousseauians voiced that same complaint of feeling inauthentic--not necessarily for the same reasons, though.

Reasons! The trouble with reasons is that people generate reasons without missing a beat, and usually to justify what they're already doing, or what they're already motivated to believe, not necessarily the truth, not by a long shot They are usually doing it without benefit of research. But once there's a reason, there's a blind spot--for any other explanation, that is.

The author says that in this book he's just going to talk, without references and so forth, but without attention to the provenance of his ideas, he does fixate on certain issues as pertaining especially to Jews.

It is the case that antisemitism picked up and took a new turn after Jews in Western and Central Europe were emancipated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, then becoming part of civil society. Accusations then changed from charges of degeneracy and deficiency to new charges of sneakiness, cleverness, and shape-shifting. Was that of their own doing, or rather because the times and the situation had changed? And what should they have done? Hid their light under a barrel?

Or, maybe, refused to accept emancipation. If they had remained in their ghettos, in their own communities, would that have worked better? That was, indeed, the conservative position proposed by some. (Some Jews, I mean. Of course, that was what political conservatives in wider society wanted.)

Later the author explores the alleged over-individualism of Jews, perhaps related to the "inauthenticity" claim. Again, it's a fault, the way he puts it, but what's the alternative? Not differentiating, developing oneself, or finding professional, scientific, or artistic success? Should the Jewish community have established its own quota system and beat the wider community to the punch?

Jews used to joke that they preferred the antisemitic literature to their own; according to the former, they had great power, even ruling the world, while the latter is full of struggle and doubt.

In the tradition, the second Temple fell because of the sin of sectarianism. Because this author is a traditionalist in this sense, it must be easy for him to look on continuing sectarianism as a sin. He comes across as doing just that. That jibes with our societal tendencies to sanctify consensus and demonize disagreement--not to mention making it harder for me to look at this book critically! What am I by dint of doing that--a rebel?

In every tradition there is social control and gate-keeping. Within Christianity I think you see that in what people have to believe, or otherwise they would be heretics. In Judaism it has seemed to me that the social control is in warning against being the wicked one, i.e., the rebel.

I'm not saying social control is necessarily negative. If religions want to exert an influence on how people live, first there has to be a group on whom to exert that influence.

On the other hand, there is the Jewish valuing of debate and argument, so much so that minority opinions are preserved. Without the rebels, or at least the free thinkers, there can be no growth.

The author often seems too eager to say "mea culpa" for issues outside of anyone's control. That, too, could come from the tradition of seeing suffering and unhappy turns of events as evidence of God's punishment for sins.

According to traditional Judaism, then, we're still in the age of sin, while according to Christianity, we've rolled over to a new age. (I say "we" in each case, because whatever age we're in, we're all in it--if these traditional beliefs were facts, I mean.) So some traditional Jews still say bad things are God's punishment, and Steinsaltz sounds like that sometimes. That's interesting in light of what Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) writes about circumstances such as genocide. He said, first of all, there was no word for genocide in English until the mid-20th century. He said that, in the past, no one thought anything was wrong with it when suppressed or conquered peoples were wiped out. It was just God's (or "the gods'" verdict).

So, maybe not the age of sin as much as an old way of thinking!
It is no longer so easy to avert the eyes when there is genocide.

What about this: he also thinks Jews have our own set of character traits--not inherited but inculcated culturally. It is hard to for him to talk about that one without overlapping with the antisemites. It's a big leap from cultural generalities to assuming specifics about particular individuals--stereotyping, in other words.

He contrasts Freud, Adler, and Einstein, with Jung, claiming that, even if they weren't religious, the Jews sought for a unified explanation by virtue of their Judaism-honed habit of thought, and Jung did not. If the author is selecting from the palette of reality just those aspects that color-coordinate with his hypothesis, his reliability is again in question. We also could study and do enough research on these four thinkers to discover if the hypothesis makes any sense.

He posits Jews have a messiah-complex. Even if they have left the religion, they tend toward the helping professions or toward helping humankind through sciences, he says. Or, through politics. The author says the urge to save the world is the reason Jews became involved in communism and leftist revolutionary movements.

In the Hasidic tradition, there can be something of an overlap with Christianity as to an expected Messiah, and I thought I saw that in the author's words. He even uses the male pronoun ("he") in his references to the Messiah. That doesn't necessarily conform to thinking throughout the tradition, although, truth be told, it's not talked of so much. F.E. Peters said in Judaism Christianity and Islam : the monotheists that there is no Jewish theology, and maybe that was the case 100 or so years ago; that's changed, but talking about the Messiah: not so much.

"There is no Messiah--and you are it!"

That's not from a Jewish source but from a Protestant "family order" and social-action movement I encountered in my young adulthood. But that pretty much captures the idea. It's like that Facebook post that shows up now and then:

"Life doesn't come with a remote. If you don't like it, get up and change it."

The Christian-like messiah is too "deus ex machina" for me. I mean that now I can say that. God acts in history and through God's creatures.

In Judaism, divinity is not an attribute of the Messiah. But historical events, including civilizations, come and go. I was disappointed. How could some human entity have a lasting effect?

On that point, my conclusions evolved a few years ago, in part through reading about the "false messiah" Shabetai Svi, who apparently cut a wide swath through the world of the 17th century, including among Christians and Muslims. Finally I faced that no one is going to come down out of the sky and pull humanity's chestnuts out of the fire. And that's okay. That's life.

I'm speaking for myself, not for all of Judaism, but neither does all of Judaism accept a first-century idea about the coming of the Messiah.

I do take comfort in that Deuteronomy verse to the effect that "I shall raise you up a prophet," that (some) Christians believe predicts the coming of Jesus. Although in the singular ("a prophet"), it is in a tense, the distributive tense, I think, that indicates continuous action, or over and over again. I like that. In every age there will be teachers and people to learn from.

So, there. I've talked about it. Apparently I didn't get the memo that says you can't.

Not only does the author posit a messiah complex, he also gets into special-role stuff, that is, speculation about martyrdom and the role of the Jewish people, which is much too traditionally messianic for me. That's why I had to go into the thinking about the Messiah, though. Obviously (to me, anyway), "the Jewish people" (in the sense of Neusner's "Eternal Israel") and Jesus have that same role, its weight coming to rest squarely on Jesus for an entire gentile population that had no affinity for the biblical history of Israel. Have you ever seen the Eternal Israel and the Body of Christ together at the same time? No! You haven't. What I'm trying to tell you! (As Phyllis Tickle says, for gentiles, Jesus is Torah (which leaves the interesting relationship between revelation and salvation for discussion on some future rainy day).

So, anyway, that is what the author is getting at in examining the role of Jewish suffering as he does: suffering, not for sins of our own but for those of the world. Isn't that the diametric opposite of suffering as punishment for one's sins? What's it to be, then?

Supposedly, that role of suffering is not the mainstream of Jewish theology, and, in some other threads, I've talked about living, rather than dying for God. Nevertheless, it does crop up a lot, and not only among the ultra-Orthodox. When I hear something once, it could be a fluke, but when different people in different situations express it, it's more than that. People are looking to make sense of their experience. They want it to mean something.

When you come down to it, saying people have a special role in the sense of martyrdom is a temptation. It's a temptation to grandiosity, I think. The role is one nobody should pick up.

Do people really need a scapegoat? I say, don't project evil; look at the man in the mirror.

I'm not saying people can't take up roles. We know of people who have died for the stances they've taken, Martin Luther King, Jr., for example; Gandhi, Sadat, Rabin, a professor who stands at the door during the school shooting to protect his charges. But I'm saying that martyrdom is not the purpose of their stances.

You know, I don't think any one tradition is the right one. I got into a little debate on that in a prior thread. People shouldn't think they are following the tradition they do because it's the right one. Doing that smacks of Nazism--thinking you've reached some pinnacle of specialness and what God intended (or, what should be, if you're secular). You know it's an accident of birth and confluence of subsequent pressures. Your tradition is the right one--if you (and your community) make it right. It doesn't make us right, but the reverse: we have to make it right. Sorry, folks, but that's the facts, ma'am.

So, what I'm saying is, not this:


That's what bothers me about this book. When one is governed by piety--by being within one's traditions and beliefs to the exclusion of the outer context--one's perspective will be off. Yes, Jews have been singled out. But it's not always and only Jews. In America it's been predominantly people of color for 400+ years. And then there's Eurocentrism. So when the author talks of the relative health of a society based on its freedom from antisemitism, there's a blind spot.

Not that any of that should silence discussion of antisemitism when it arises. That also occurs and is a problem.

I did like the last chapter. It followed the pattern of a dystopian exposition. Jews are on the way out...unless. There is always an "unless." Unless we take a stand. Like the American expression of putting our money where our mouth is, the author says, but our life and soul, instead.

By the way, in answer to the question of what are we: we are a family. "III. Are We a Nation or a Religion? Our People Are Not a Religion, nor a Nation, nor an Ethnic Group, nor a Race"

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since there are so few reviews of this little tome I thought I'd offer some remarks. First, there is nothing "basic" about "We Jews." On the contrary, Rabbi Steinsaltz offers a concise analysis of some of the fundamental questions people ask about Jews (both Jews and non-Jews). The more a reader brings to this book vis-a-vis knowledge of Judaism - historical, cultural, legal - the more profound it may seem. Second, (for what it's worth) I don't recall reading anything like this before, and because he is a deep, brilliant and penetrating thinker, one should not be deceived by the simple format and short chapters. There is great wisdom here.

In the final few pages, he suggests that there is an opportunity for America to become like Bavel, which, in its heyday, rivaled, if not exceeded, Eretz Yisrael in learning. But I don't think we can draw practical conclusions from Rav Steinsaltz' observations, other than that Jews have a mission to live their lives fully as Jews, with all that this entails. As Hillel said: "the rest is commentary; go and study!" There is a great deal at stake.

[Arthur Gershman · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I was disappointed by this book, it was only because the bar was set so high. Rabbi Steinsaltz is a legend and this book was far from legendary. The rabbi argues that Judaism is not a religion, nor a nation nor an ethnic group, nor a race. Well then what are we? According to the rabbi, we are a family. This immediately raises the question, are we a dysfunctional family? The rabbi declines to provide an answer, saying only "I'm not sure." In a previous chapter he hints that we are, but this question deserved deeper treatment, particularly in view of the rabbbi's gloomy conclusion that Judaism is in deep trouble, both in Israel and in the diaspora. I prefer to see the glass as half-full.

[Samuel A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for potential orthodox book club. Nothing groundbreaking though. The book is a collection of inter-jewish topics that would be good for discussion, and the author gives his in-depth opinion. The first topic, about assimilation, was absurdly good though. That chapter alone makes the book worth reading.

[Thebookmistress · Rating 3 out of 5]

On one hand, this is a decent basic introduction to Judaism and Jewish history. On the other, Steinsaltz is trying to insist that, for continued Jewish existence, we need to develop centers of study outside Israel. The basic Jewish history was a bit basic for me, and the need to more Jewish study was not obvious based on the arguments provided.