Religious and Secular Extremism
January 2nd, 2008

We were on our way to the wedding of Tamar Eini, middle daughter of our friend Eli.  Shlomo was driving and his wife Naomi sat beside him.  We were discussing how upset Eli was at Tamar and her rabbi for insisting upon separate seating at the wedding (Tamar became ultra-religious a few years ago).  I remarked that Eli's oldest daughter Yael was at one extreme end of the Jewish-identity spectrum and Tamar was at the other.  Naomi disagreed.  She said to me: "Yael is not extreme, she's just secular." 

Yes, you never know where or when you are going to learn something.  I knew that most secular Israelis, though having little use for religion, maintain a Jewish identity.  What surprised me was the idea that secular Jewish life could be thought of as normative.  I guess that I as an American immigrant would have particular difficulty with this issue.  Long gone are the heady pioneering days when there were significant numbers of American Jews who made aliyah primarily for ethnic reasons.  Today, almost by definition, an American immigrant is a religious Jew and an Orthodox one at that, since non-Orthodox Jews, with their flexible approach to Jewish law, are much more at home in American society.  Since I am no exception to this rule, since the reason I live in Israel is because I am a traditionally observant Jew, it is understandable why I view secular Jews as extreme.  What for me was the reason for uprooting my family from the golden age for Jews in America is for them unimportant. 

I would argue that the issue is not a subjective one.  An identity is extreme the more it emphasizes or deemphasizes a particular component of that identity.  Since religion has always played an important role in Jewish culture, to remove religion from Jewish identity is extremism.  Similarly, to negate western knowledge as traif (impure), as ultra-Orthodoxy does, is extreme for a people that has traditionally absorbed wisdom from all the peoples of the world.

In America, secular Jews are neither extreme nor normative—they are not on the Jewish identity spectrum at all, since they do not fashion an identity out of their secular Jewishness.  It is only in Israel where you have people who are proud to be secular and proud to be Jewish, and who can confidently assume that they will be able to hand off this identity to their children and grandchildren. 

Yes, I know that I am not going to convince my friends Shlomo and Naomi that they are extremists.  They were raised as secular Jews by secular parents in a country where secular Jews dominate the culture.  Still, precisely its normalcy may prove to work against secular Judaism in Israel.  Sixty years after the founding of the state, being secular has long ceased to be a daring rebellion against the benighted ways of one's forbearers.  With its fuel spent, secularism no longer is able to provide meaning to contemporary Israeli life.  Some secular Israelis have realized this and the culture is full of experimental attempts to make Jewish texts and traditions accessible to the secular Israeli public.   Will something emerge from these Jewish consciousness-raising attempts to capture the hearts and minds of large numbers of secular Israelis?  We'll see.

For now, I am happy to report the following: A compromise was reached at Tamar's wedding whereby the hors doeveres before the ceremony were served in a lobby open to both sexes; plus, Eli managed to sneak into the women's section of the wedding reception in order to dance with his daughter--the exquisitely beautiful bride Tamar.  

Copyright 2008, Teddy Weinberger