Some Key Questions Facing
the Jewish Polity
in the New Decade
Daniel J. Elazar
The Jewish people is a great people that too often confounds us
with its pettiness. It is global in scope and too often
parochial in content. It transcends time and space, yet its
members and leaders operate as if they were all sitting around a
kitchen table among family. Its true character is embodied in
these paradoxes.
As the Jewish polity enters the 5750s on the Jewish calendar and
the 1990s on the general calendar, it faces certain key questions
that require continued explanation and further analysis. Those
questions constitute the Jewish policy agenda for the new decade.
This agenda goes beyond this year's critical issues, such as
Soviet Jewish emigration, to take a longer view.
Citizenship in the Edah
Key questions of citizenship and affiliation with the Jewish
polity, including the great question of who is a Jew in the new
context of assimilation and intermarriage need to be addressed
from the perspective of the Jewish polity. On one hand, probably
a majority of Jews would still like a definition of Jewishness
that would be halakhically valid, while on the other, reality
suggests that many of those who identify as Jews would not be
considered Jewish from a halakhic point of view. In such a
sitution, this becomes a critical issue for the Jewish polity as
an edah (the traditional name of the Jewish republic). The edah
has to determine and employ certain criteria of citizenship for
purposes of affiliation and leadership recruitment in the
diaspora and to determine status in Israel. Simply understanding
being Jewish as a matter of citizenship could be helpful.
Patterns of Participation and Affiliation
The citizenship issue leads to some critical questions with
regard to patterns of participation. The edah today, especially
but not exclusively in the diaspora, can be seen as a series of
concentric circles. At its core is a small circle consisting of
those Jews who live complete Jewish lives in every day, in every
way, according to a Jewish rhythm. Surrounding them is a circle
of highly committed Jews, very much involved in Jewish affairs
but whose rhythm of life is not necessarily fully Jewish in the
same way. Around that circle is yet another, of those who are
moderately active in Jewish life and affairs.
Around that circle is a larger one of those who are
Jewishly-affiliated in some way and "pay their dues" as it were,
but are not especially active as Jews in Jewish affairs. Around
them is another circle of those who identify as Jews,
periodically affiliate or are involved in Jewish life in some
way, but mostly go about their own business. Beyond that circle
is another one of those who do not deny their Jewishness but do
not identify with the Jewish people in any particular way.
Finally there is an outer circle of those whose very Jewishness
is unclear, the products of intermarriage.
These circles are of unequal size. The boundaries between them
are somewhat indefinite and always permeable, and the body of
circles has no clear ending at its edges, as we read almost
day-by-day in connection with the Jews of the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe. Moreover, since 1967 there appears to be a
growing gap between the inner and outer circles, with the inner
circle pulling together more tightly and the outer circles
drifting further away. Times of crisis may shift people from one
circle to another but rarely do they move more than two circles
in either direction.
There are three critical questions here:
One: How do we contain or at least deal with the bleeding at the
outer edges of these concentric circles. The question ties in
with the issue of citizenship but is particularly complex because
the edah is not a spatially-bounded polity in which it is easy to
determine who is in and who is out. Unfortunately, rather than
seeking to devise better ways to deal with the "who is a Jew"
issue in the context of the contemporary world, in which the Jews
as totally involved as any other people, those responsible for
the issue are moving toward ever more difficult tests of
Jewishness since this relates to the division between
cosmopolitans and locals.
Two: How do we prevent the inner and outer circles from growing
further apart. Or, as a corollary to that, how do we prevent the
gap between the inner and outer circles from emerging even closer
to the center, that is to say, between the two innermost circles
and all the others.
In previous Jerusalem Letters I have suggested that the greater
share of contemporary Jewish spiritual energy lies with Orthodoxy
and, it often seems, with fundamentalist Orthodoxy at that. One
of the consequences of this is the political resurgence of
ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel. Another is that while Orthodox Jews
in the United States do not comprise more than 10 percent of the
total American Jewish population, they may well comprise
approximately a third of all active Jews because almost all of
their 10 percent are actively living Jewishly, while only a small
share of the other 90 percent are (see VP:53 "Who is a Jew and
How? -- The Demographics of Jewish Religious Identification," [24
September 1986]). Thus the first reality is the distinction
between participation and affiliation. While many Jews are
affiliated, most are in the middle circles. The inner circles are
both smaller and weighted toward the Orthodox, with all the
implications of that fact for Jewish unity and self-expression.
A third question in the pattern of Jewish participation is the
division between cosmopolitans and locals. Cosmopolitans are
those who see the larger picture and who are concerned with their
communities as a whole, and as a result, with the Jewish people
as a whole. Locals see only the narrow aspects of their own
lives as Jews and are involved accordingly.
The cosmopolitan-local distinction is an essentially human one,
with all human beings either cosmopolitans or locals. Organized
Jewish life is built to accommodate both. Locals tend to
concentrate in the localistic institutions of the
religious-congregational sphere and cosmopolitans in the
communal-welfare, external relations, and Israel-edah spheres.
Only the educational-cultural sphere tends to reach out to both
in about equal proportions. One very important consequence of
this is to be found in the who is a Jew issue. Since the
definition of who is a Jew is first determined in the religious
sphere, this means that unless something is done by the
cosmopolitans in that sphere to deal with the current problems,
the definition will be left in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox
locals who will make it as limited and closed as possible.
Issues of Authority and Power
There are significant issues of authority and power to be
explored, including changing sources of legitimacy and issues of
federal versus hierarchical arrangements. Since the very
beginning of the Jewish polity in biblical times, authority and
power within it have been divided among three domains, referred
to since the Second Commonwealth as the keter torah (literally,
the crown or domain of Torah), keter kehunah (the crown of
priesthood), and keter malkhut (the crown of civil rule). Keter
torah, initially the domain through which God's word could be
communicated to the Jewish people, became over time the domain
which controlled the interpretation and explication of the
constitutional foundations of the Jewish polity (Adat Bnai
Yisrael). Originally the domain of the Prophets, it later became
the domain of the sages and rabbinical authorities. The keter
kehunah, originally the domain of a hereditary priesthood and
since the destruction of the Temple the domain of religious
officiants of all kinds, developed into the channel through which
the people reached out from their immediate personal and
collective concerns to the transcendent Power. The keter
malkhut, originally in the hands of elders and magistrates
(zekenim and nesiim), then judges and kings (shoftim and
melakhim), and after that patriarchs (nesiim) and parnasim, was
the domain responsible for handling the civil affairs of Adat
Bnei Yisrael.
These domains have undergone many adaptations in the long course
of Jewish history but they have continued to constitute the basic
framework for the institutions of the Jewish polity and
power-sharing within those institutions. No Jewish community can
exist as a fully articulated community without them. Even where
individual congregations constitute the community, they are led
by rabbis (keter torah), congregational boards (keter malkhut),
and hazanim (keter kehunah). In today's large communities, these
ketarim are represented by complex institutions and institutional
networks. In France, for example, where matters are relatively
simple, the FSJU and the CRIF constitute the keter malkhut; the
Consistoire and other synagogue federations, the keter kehunah;
and the Chief Rabbi, the keter torah. The same pattern exists in
Great Britain with the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Welfare
Board, the United Synagogue, and the other synagogue federations,
and the Chief Rabbi and batei din occupying the three ketarim,
respectively. In the United States, matters are more complicated
but the division is equally clear.
Israel, too, maintains the three-fold division with the civil
governmental institutions of the state as the keter malkhut, the
local religious councils as the keter kehunah, and the chief
rabbis and batei din as the keter torah. In sum, while, from one
perspective, the State of Israel has a fully articulated set of
institutions, similar to those of other states, from a Jewish
perspective its civil institutions are principally those of the
keter malkhut, while, because of the special character of the
state as a Jewish state, there are important state-sponsored and
quasi-state institutions giving expression to the other two
ketarim as well. As in the past, expressions of the keter kehunah
were overwhelmingly local in both Israel and the diaspora.
For over half a millennium prior to the nineteenth century, the
full articulation of these domains was principally local,
occasionally countrywide. After the eleventh century, the world
Jewish polity existed only as a network of poskim within the
keter torah.
Only in the nineteenth century were the Jews successful in
beginning the reconstitution of a more articulated institutional
structure for the edah, through the keter malkhut whose role was
strengthened by the breakup of the unity of the keter torah as a
result of religious reform, on one hand, and the emergence of
countervailing ultra-Orthodoxy, on the other. In the course of
the twentieth century, the fragmentation of the keter torah
continued while the power of the keter malkhut was strengthened
immeasurably by the establishment of the State of Israel and the
emergence of corresponding bodies as dominant in the diaspora
communities. The end of the first postwar generation brought
with it a major step forward in the institutional concretization
of the world Jewish polity through the reconstitution of the
Jewish Agency for Israel, clearly an instrumentality of the keter
malkhut. Not only did these changes involve a series of local
reconstitutions but they marked a millennial shift in the
distribution of authority and power within the Jewish polity.
That shift is connected with the general reconstitution of the
polity as a whole. To the extent that Jewish unity could only be
maintained through the keter malkhut, that keter was strengthened
within the overall framework of the Jewish polity. Thus the
reconstitution of the Jewish polity in our times has been
accompanied by a millennial shift of the balance of power from
the keter torah to the keter malkhut in all three arenas of
Jewish political organization -- local, countrywide, and
edah-wide.
From another perspective, four types of institutions have emerged
in the diaspora. Most comprehensive are the government-like
institutions, such as the local and countrywide community
federations dealing with fundraising and social planning, the
representative boards and community relations organizations
dealing with external relations, local and countrywide boards of
Jewish education, and similar organizations for assisting Israel.
Parallel to them are localistic institutions, such as
congregations and community and sports centers catering to the
more immediately personal needs of Jews. In addition there are
general-purpose mass-based organizations which often seek to gain
control of the government-like institutions, to give them a
particular direction or ideological content, as in the case of
the Zionist parties, or which have fraternal, educational, or
social welfare purposes such as B'nai B'rith. Finally there are
special-interest institutions and organizations devoted to very
specific tasks such as individual schools, yeshivot, and
rabbinical seminaries, hospitals, and health and welfare
institutions. Most of these are local but some serve larger
regional and countrywide constituencies. Most of the
institutions within this four-fold division fall within the keter
malkhut, though in some cases, such as religious congregations,
schools and yeshivot, they include institutions of the other two
ketarim as well. In this sense the four-fold division reflects
both the persistence of the ketarim as active domains and the new
balance among them in contemporary Jewish life.
The shift in power among the ketarim is, on one hand, an
accomplished fact, strengthened by the fact that it is only in
the domain of the keter malkhut that all Jews will still sit
together, even those who will not recognize each other's
legitimacy within the framework of the keter torah or those who
have no interest in the activities of the keter kehunah.
On the other hand, the keter malkhut is now beginning to consider
whether it needs to acquire the ability to grant Jewish
legitimacy on its own. Up to now it has accepted the
constitutional role of the keter torah as the source of that
legitimacy, indirectly if not directly. The secular elements in
the Zionist movement were the first to challenge the authority of
the keter torah in this way, but the who is a Jew issue is
universalizing the challenge beyond the State of Israel.
While the edah was always federal in character, both in the
original sense of being founded on a covenant (the word federal
is derived from the Latin foedus which means covenant and is a
direct translation of the Hebrew brit) and in its
political-communal organization which involves a matrix of
centers bound together within the common frame of
Torah-as-constitution and sometimes common institutional
frameworks in addition to the Torah. However, in the last
centuries before the modernization of the Jewish people, rule
within the edah had become increasingly oligarchical and, with
the intervention of the non-Jewish authorities, it was easy for
oligarchies to become hierarchical as well. In the contemporary
diaspora, this hierarchical structure has fallen by the wayside
because voluntary communities require the active consent of their
members, which among Jews can only be done through the
recognition of the basic equality of all Jews and the broad
distribution of power among many centers.
In Israel, the founders of the new state borrowed a hierarchical
model of government from Eastern and Central Europe which has
turned out to be very disfunctional in terms of Jewish political
culture and behavior and after the first generation with regard
to such matters as economic development as well. It is
significant that the Israel Defense Forces, which as an army
could be expected to be the most hierarchical institution, has
actually done the most to accommodate the egalitarian and federal
elements in Jewish life within its framework, as a result has
been perhaps the state's most successful institution.
Now Israel's civil government must also confront the issue of
changing its structure from a hierarchical one to one that is
more in keeping with Jewish political culture and the realities
of Israeli behavior so as to save the energy wasted on a
basically egalitarian society battling hierarchical structures.
This is especially critical in matters having to do with freeing
the economy from too much government intervention and reducing
the country's bureaucratic structures. Constitutional reform in
the direction of a greater separation of powers between the
executive and legislative branches of government and electoral
reform to break the party oligarchies and tie Israel's elected
representatives closer to their constituancy, while not panaceas,
are vitally necessary steps in that direction.
This also affects the role of the Jewish Agency within Israel and
in shaping Israel-diaspora relations. Israel cannot be and
should not be simply another Jewish community. It is, after all,
the Jewish state and its government and people carry far heavier
responsibilities for the future of the Jewish people and far
heavier burdens in the securing of that future than any diaspora
community. Nevertheless, Israel's goal should not be a monistic
one as many of its leaders often seem to seek, whereby the
diaspora is merely a cow to be milked or a body of troops
awaiting orders from its commander. This approach no longer
works in the diaspora and few Israelis see it as realistic
either. Nevertheless, it still resurfaces when critical issues
have to be faced. A new and better relationship has to be
devised that gives both Israel and the diaspora their due.
This, in turn, leads to the question of accommodating Jewish
political culture and behavior in frameworks of organized Jewish
life, particularly in questions of leadership and representation.
What is representation in a voluntary context? How do a state
and diaspora live together? How do they represent their
respective constituencies? How do their leaders, chosen in such
different ways, share power and interact? This task is further
complicated among Jews by the fact that in a small people, Jewish
leaders, like most other Jews, play multiple roles. They do so
in order to accomplish the many tasks before us with the limited
manpower available.
The Edah's Emerging Constitution
Another set of questions revolve around the emerging constitution
of the contemporary edah. Until modernization, the Torah, as
interpreted, was unequivocally the constitution of the Jewish
people. During the modern epoch, this unequivocal position of
the Torah disappeared. The Torah was no longer understood or
interpreted within a common framework and there were those who
rejected the Torah as constitution altogether, as they rejected
the religious dimension of being Jewish.
At the end of the modern epoch, the very notion of a common
constitution seemed extremely problematic. More recently,
however, there seems to be a reassertion of the principle of
constitutionalism for the edah, with the Torah, however
interpreted, in some way at its core and Eretz Israel as its
rallying point. The full impact of this question has yet to
touch us. At present we are still struggling with the
reconstitution of the edah, just as the previous generation
struggled with the consolidation of the state and the
reconstitution of the individual countrywide communities and the
generation before struggled to achieve the establishment of the
state and the emergence of new Jewish centers in the diaspora.
Even if it is not the principal question for us to address at
this point, at sometime within the next 30 years we will probably
have to begin addressing it.
Religious and Secular
This raises the whole question of the relationship between
the so-called religious and the so-called secular dimensions of
Jewish life, a separation almost impossible to achieve within the
classical Jewish framework but which has become real enough as
Jews have become part of the modern world. This question involves
both matters of commitment and ideology and matters of authority
and power. The struggle between those who claim authority on
religious grounds and those who claim it on civil or secular is
visible enough. It is intensified by the problems of religious
commitment, on one hand, and the ideological divisions among
those who see themselves as religiously committed as well as
those who reject religious commitment.
Public and Private
Another question has to do with the division into public and
private in Jewish life. In classical Jewish life, there was
hardly any such division, just as there was not in the ancient
polis. It is the hallmark of modernity that such a division
should exist, that there should be spheres of private behavior in
which individuals are not subject to the dictates of the public
sector -- civil or religious -- except by their own choice.
The modern epoch invented the idea of civil society, that is to
say, a political order that has both public and private space.
Public space is necessary for the political order to exist as a
res publica, the only legitimate political order. In modern
political thought and belief, a proper res publica, a republic,
must be a democratic republic which rests upon individual rights
or the existence of a private sphere. Contemporary Jewish
institutions willy-nilly recognize this: Israel by design;
diaspora communities because as voluntary associations they
cannot be comprehensive.
In Israel there is a continuing struggle regarding the boundaries
between public and private, especially in the sphere of the
Jewishness of the state. In the diaspora, there are problems of
the extent to which the private behavior of Jews interferes with
Jewish public purposes. There is another dimension here and that
is which diaspora institutions should be considered public and
which private.
Another issue revolves around the relations between citizens
and politicians in Israel, volunteers and professionals in the
diaspora. In Israel, for historic reasons, professional
politicians have come to dominate the country's public
leadership, leaving little room for citizens who do not choose
politics as a career to participate in the public sphere. In the
diaspora, especially in the United States, the development of a
Jewish civil service has been a major gain in Jewish life but it
has also encroached upon the old role of voluntary leadership. At
the present time in both settings citizens and volunteers have
challenged the professionals for redistribution of power between
them. This is an issue on the current Jewish agenda, one that is
likely to continue to be a permanent one which each generation
will have to resolve in its own way.
The New Jewish Public
The edah must also cope with the facts of a new Jewish public,
not only divided between the religious of various kinds and the
non-religious, but in more complex and sophisticated ways. For
example, there have been Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Jewish life
for 1,000 years, but it is only in our time that they have had to
share the same political and communal structures. While the
Sephardic-Ashkenazic division, a product of a certain diaspora
milieu, may be on its way out, for the moment it does involve a
certain amount of tension and stress within Jewish life.
Perhaps more important in the long run is the renormalization of
the Jewish people. For the Jewish people, normalization is not
as the original Zionists thought to be kakhol hagoyim (like all
the nations). Rather it is the revival of the three camps that
have been present in Jewish life when the Jews have lived in
their own land: the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes.
The Pharisee camp emphasizes the role of the keter torah as
expressed through the halakhah in all its detail and with its
primary emphasis on maintaining detailed control over the
behavior of every Jew through the study and internalization of
its norms and practices with an end to making all Jews holy. It
triumphed after the destruction of the Second Commonwealth when
the portability of the Pharisaic system became extraordinarily
functional for a people exiled from its land, always on the move,
and in need of a sense of its special status among the nations.
It survives among the traditionally religious, its militant form
among the ultra-Orthodox.
The Essene camp emphasizes the achievement of holiness through
the development of small, self-contained communities of those
dedicated to its pursuit. It disappeared when there no longer
was a state to protect it. A neo-Essene camp reemerged in the
early days of the Zionist enterprise in the form of Israel's
kibbutzim that both separate themselves in their way of life from
the larger Jewish society but also see themselves as a vanguard
within it. Today that camp is undergoing redefinition as it has
become routinized and no longer can generate the ideological
intensity needed to fuel it.
The Sadducean camp emphasized the role of the state and its civil
religion (in ancient times, the Temple and its world) as the
basis of Jewish identity. It disappeared with the destruction of
the Second Temple and the loss of Jewish control over any part of
Eretz Israel. With the restoration of that control, it has
reemerged, especially among the non-religious Jewish community.
At first these non-religious Jews appeared to be simply
secularists. In the last generation, however, we have come to
see that they are developing a form of Judaism of their own, a
neo-Sadducean Judaism, rooted in the State of Israel and the
civil religion that is developing to accompany it.
As these last two camps have reappeared in Israel, they have
developed parallels in the diaspora. By and large, the Essene
parallels are to be found in the periodic Jewish counter cultural
movements -- the North American havurot, for example -- but they
are inevitably quite fragile since they do not have the dual
protections of land and state. Neo-Sadduceanism has been more
successful, at the very least becoming the civil religion of the
Jewish leadership of the keter malkhut in the communities. The
relationships among these three camps are in the formative
stages, just as the camps are themselves, but they undoubtedly
represent the basis for conflict and cooperation in the Jewish
world in the future.
What is the Real Strength of the Jewish Community?
Finally there is the question of what is the real strength of
the Jewish community. In a sense, Jewish political and communal
organization is stronger and more comprehensive than it has been
at any time in at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 years. At the
same time, that structure rests increasingly on a base of
shifting sands, of a Jewish people that is less well-defined than
ever before in Jewish history, at least since the days of the
Patriarchs, and more open to the world around it with all that
entails in the way of assimilation. Indeed, it may very well be
the organized Jewish community that holds Jews together who could
not be held together in any other way under contemporary
circumstances. A structured edah is clearly a necessary
condition for contemporary Jewish survival. Whether it is a
sufficient one remains to be seen.
