To Be a Jew Today by Noah Feldman

A wise book written by an incredibly thoughtful, diligent, well-read and fantastically accomplished writer, the timing of To Be a Jew Today could not be more prescient given what is happening in the Middle East and around the world. Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and chair of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, author of ten books and a contributing writer for Bloomberg Opinion, and in To Be a Jew Today he poignantly struggles and wrestles with incessantly debated and contested topics surrounding God, Israel, and the Jewish people as a whole — and how they relate to one another. Rather than try to present solutions and answers to current issues and controversial topics within and around the Jewish community, Feldman simply traces the historical perspectives of the different sects of Jewish groups and belief systems throughout history, offers some opinion and advice on how best to engage fellow Jews in a time of deeply divided viewpoints, and then mainly seeks to pose more questions than answers, leaving the reader on his or her own to make sense of their own Jewishness today, and what it means to them on an individual level to be a Jew in 2024. The meaning of being a Jew, a member of the Jewish people, the broader relationship with God, and how all of those things surround the debate and conflict over Israel has been a constant struggle for generations, but that struggle is at essence of what it truly means to be a Jew — and it is a generational struggle in search of no truly concrete answers. You certainly don’t have to be Jewish to learn a lot from this book, but for those that are struggling as to what to make of your Jewish identity in a time of uncertainty, To Be a Jew Today can be a wonderful guide to make some meaning out of that struggle.

• perhaps 16M Jews in the world today
• book’s purpose is to illuminate for the reader the multiplicity of different possible viewpoints and ideas, let the reader decide for him or herself
• so many ways to be Jewish
• should avoid calling anyone a bad Jew, seriously or even in jest
• Jesus: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” was speaking to fellow Jews
• feeling of being a bad Jew is therefore archetypally Jewish, misreading of of the Jewish way of engaging with the world
• a bad Jew is just a Jew expressing irony and self-skepticism and maybe a little guilt
• in other words, a Jew
• Jews today spend most of their time thinking about not God so much as politics, morals, family, community
• you can pray to a God who may or may not even exist
• Judaism is well set up to allow God to be kept in the margins
• Zionism made the state of Israel into a fundamental component of Jewish life, thought, and experience
• when the war broke out last year, Jews found themselves reacting intensely and emotionally and spiritually as Jews
• we should hope to preserve Jewishness if doing so reflects out deepest values and beliefs
• “instruction” in Hebrew, musar, “teaching” in Hebrew, torah
• musar is ethical or moral instruction, associated with parental education
• Torah is that and also much more
• what almost all Haredim share is a common and complete inner commitment to what they consider the unbroken tradition of Jewish belief and practice
• God is the ultimate authority — Traditionalists
• seek to operationalize the Torah in every moment, waking or sleeping
• total, comprehensive belonging in an environment of total, comprehensive belief
• solution to doubt, in their view
• more people study in Yeshivas today than at any time in Jewish history
• to Traditionalists, God’s authority is primary, primordial, and absolute
• divine delegated authority today rests with Rabbis known as gedolim, great ones
• when they agree on things, daas Toyre, Yiddish phrase that means “the view of the Torah”
• daas Toyre, consensus of the gedolim
• with respect to equality and difference, Traditionalism teaches that God has created all humans as equals in His eyes, but has not conferred on them equal rights, responsibilities, or obligations
• Traditionalism can change, but it can only change slowly, and change while refusing to admit that it is changing
• if there were none of them left, this would be a fundamental change in Jewish life, a loss to the diversity of Jewish beliefs and modes of living
• Traditionalism is not going to fade away, so long as there are people who self identify as Jews
• Holocaust failed to destroy it
• Halakha means, roughly, Jewish law, set of obligations and laws that shape the life of Traditionalist Jews
• meta-halakhah asks for what deeper purpose do we follow the law
• debate is the lifeblood of Yeshiva study
• Jewish ritual and Torah study are tried and tested means to make and maintain Jewish life
• tradition that is based fundamentally on interpretation and disagreement, degree of pluralism, multiple perspectives are and can. be valid interpretations of God’s word and will
• progressive: progress through history, rather than being fixed in unchanging authority
• recognizing the fallibility of humans
• process of experiencing and reasoning
• freedom of humans to make sense of Torah in light of their commitment to human equality and dignity
• divine plan for human justice
• what really matters is how we treat one another
• openness on respecting each human as an individual
• first Jews to develop this Progressive vision was in the 19th century Germany
• social justice — love thy neighbor as yourself
• tikkun olam, repairing the world
• Kabbalistic idea, perform God’s commandments, act by act, repair the universe and the Godhead itself
• human effort, alongside God, to make the world a more just and hence more perfect place
• aspires to enhance spirituality without contradiction and to create inclusive community without necessary conflict
• challenge is the difficulty of finding meaning in religious ritual
• want to justify, explain, and understand why it is meaningful to be a Jew
• all Jews are equally Jews by choice
• skepticism about whether God exists
• Progressive Rabbi Kaplan, arguably the most influential American Jewish theologian of the 19th century
• Judaism could be sustained and practiced even if it were separated from its traditional theological underpinnings, including belief in God
• gradual convergence between Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist communities
• between movements that espouse Progressive Jewish ideals
• Kaplan’s civilizational approach, designed to enable the flourishing of Progressive Jewish life without belief in God, relies essentially on collective community
• no-God option is extremely challenging
• institutions often struggle to create and shape communities to participate regularly
• need to be sufficiently compelling
• Evolutionists want to acknowledge the ultimate authority of Jewish law while simultaneously seeking to accommodate liberal or at least modern beliefs
• Religious Zionism is a type of Evolutionism
• Rabbis, not God, are in charge of interpretation
• law is capable of evolution
• Modern Orthodox, affirm Rabbinic authority while insisting on interpretation of the Torah that strives to be compatible with living as a modern person in the modern world
• in Israel, Evolutionist category are Religious Zionists who reconcile Rabbinic tradition with modern nationalism
• all Evolutionists rely in interpretation, their own interpretation of God’s words and God’s will
• internal contradiction between authoritative Jewish tradition and liberal commitments
• allegory, interpretation of a text to reveal otherwise hidden meanings beneath its surface
• approach as enabled Jewish rationalists to accept the rational truth of science, philosophy, even morality when they appear to differ from the teachings of tradition
• allegory enabled a shift in perspective, update moral judgements using the same tools they have used to update their scientific judgements
• postmodern Evolutionism is that is allows you to evolve in your own beliefs over the course of a lifetime
• the Bible and tradition enjoin us to love God with all our hearts
• what if you spent your life with a partner, telling them I Love you each day while not actually loving the person in your heart?
• allegorical lesson consciously evolving the tradition carries foundational risks to the stability of the system
• Jewish Godlessness is not the state of ignoring God, it is a state of struggling to deny God
• Godless Jew who identifies with the Jewish collective through culture and belonging but not religious belief
• variant is cultural Jewishness without Zionist nationalism
• 19th century, emancipation of Jews, acquisition of civil rights
• predicament of “the Jewish question”, internal question of how Jews should live and the external, political question of how Jews should relate to and be treated by nation states where they resided
• Godless Jewishness = Zionism, in a sense
• without God, they could define themselves as a nation
• Marxism, imagined by a Godless Jew, Freudian psych as well
• came and remained Marxists, for example, as Jews; lived and played out their Jewishness through Marxism
• historical materialism, shaping the course of history, historical laws of class do so, not Gods or ideals
• for Marx, God is negated and replaced by historical materialism
• law of history for him is a law of class conflict
• small number of Zionists simultaneously committed Marxist communists
• kibbutz movement, socialist origins
• returning to the land and by returning to the Land
• secular humanism, either rejects religion, assigns religion to the private sphere rather than the public sphere
• represent a way for Jews to express their own Jewishness
• Justice Frankfurter, Americanism had replaced Judaism
• Jewishness should be irrelevant to public affairs
• as Jews, as humans, we must learn to live with the impossibility of certainty
• avoid labeling others as bad Jews
• conception of what counts as a meaningfully Jewish life needs to be broadened and strengthened
• Israel: to strive, struggle, and contend with God
• midrash, creative and open ended way of giving meaning to the Bible, and the world
• contentious effort to understand God’s law
• study of Torah can be likened to a war, a war of ideas, but a war nonetheless
• in wrestling with God, Jacob simultaneously embraces God
• to deny God is to wrestle with him, always
• effort of Godless Jews to remain Jews is perhaps the most Jewish struggle of all
• Israel is the people who strive with the divine — and are able
• the Jew who strives with God cannot be a bad Jew, and every Jew strives with God — because that is what it means to be a Jew
• the idea of Israel, transformative, defining factor within Jewishness, both in and outside the actual country
• what mattered to Zionists was that the status of nationhood must be restored
• secular Zionists argued, focus on the nation instead of God
• turn God into the nation
• religious spiritual tradition and repurpose them for the project of nationalism
• idea of “return” closely associated with “Zion”, poetic name for the city of Jerusalem
• yearn for a messianic return
• messiah was a metaphor for the nation
• Judaism and Jewishness, conceived in religious terms, would be replaced by Zionism and Israeliness, conceived in national terms
• Jews would no longer be Jews, they would be Israelis, members of the Jewish nation
• Israel was supposed to be the end of Jewish history
• Israel has become a defining component of Jewishness itself
• Jews outside Israel, self defining in relation to Israel
• enmeshed in a struggle about what to think of Israel and what to do about what they think
• this kind of internal struggle happens on college campuses
• someone says Israel should not exist, rejects who you are as a Jew
• Israel is not only a place but a narrative: a rich, complex set of difficult stories
• narrative that Jewishness has long possessed extraordinary story making power
• interwoven with Christianity and Islam
• narrative of Israel is utterly religious and spiritual and political and moral, all at the same time
• idea of Israel conjures up a field of ongoing argument
• Palestine was densely populated with actual residents
• historical objectivity is a moving target
• all historians carry biases, because all humans do
• history of Israel — Palestine conflict, should try to glean the facts as best we can, recognizing that even the same facts can be understood radically differently depending on context
• Israel exists
• existence is mired, inextricably mired, in its conflict with the Palestinian national cause
• conflict over Israel is at the center of Jewish spiritual life and identity
• Progressive American Jewish engagement first phase was identity based skepticism
• theological embrace
• internal contradiction
• 1967 victory consolidated and enshrined the state of Israel in the minds of American Jews
• 1973 war triggered modern American Jewish Holocaust memory
• American Jews felt unspoken guilt about their own survival
• 1967 inspired Jewish pride, 1973 inspired Jewish fear
• awakened in American Jews a willingness to revisit the Holocaust
• many Israelis viewed the deaths of 6M to a degree shameful because they had not resisted
• “Never again”, social justice context to the institution that the Holocaust determined Jewish uniqueness
• deep religious significance of the Holocaust is today a central, orthodox component of American Progressive Jewish belief
• for Progressive Jews to embrace the idea of Israel, one place of refuge in which Jewish life could flourish
• Yom Kippur War sent a sobering message to Zionists with respect to autonomy
• reality was that Israel need the U.S. to act as a guarantor of its national security
• Zionism as partnership
• equal citizenship and the struggle for social justice had not save Europe’s Jews
• Israel did redeem the suffering of the martyrs of the Holocaust
• Israel’s existence would prevent another Holocaust
• as a result, support for Israel became a theological orthodoxy for Progressive American Jews
• 80s and 90s, centrality of the Holocaust and the redemptive narrative of the creation of Israel
• DC, presence of the Holocaust museum, expression of identity for American Jews
• build a museum, build it in that location, was to treat the Holocaust as an event of national, indeed global consequence
• Holocaust and Israel, formed twin orthodoxies of a Progressivism
• Progressive Jews in the 80s and 90s, was important Israel self define as Jewish and Democratic
• Israel was a liberal Democracy, second intifada and the west bank wall broke the complex of beliefs
• idea that Israel is a democratic state has become possible to sustain only by excluding those Palestinians from the calculus
• Israeli politics have moved far to the right
• problem faced by Progressive American Jews in relation to Israel, morality, theology, belief
• generational rift, two different visions of Israel, refracted through a common commitment to social justice
• young Progressives do not know how to be Jews without engaging Israel
• express their Jewish belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity, and human rights
• criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian cause is the very essence of their Progressive Jewish self expression
• Religious Zionism, messiah is the state of Israel itself
• influence Israeli politics and public life far more than they ever have before in the country’s history
• pervasively messianic
• Begin was “Revisionist” Zionism, maximalist claims to Jewish sovereignty over the entire historical land of Israel
• hard core nationalists
• 70, RZ became a vanguard movement
• settling the whole land of Israel is the ineradicable essence of Zionism, commanded by God
• Jews return to Zion messianic vision of the prophets
• state subordinate to settlement of the land
• settlement project, West Bank, “facts on the ground”
• Christ is Greek for messiah, meaning the anointed one
• secular Zionist reinterpretation, Jewish nation would not be redeemed by a messiah from God, the nation would redeem itself
• RZ messiah son of David, could be a collective entity, community of Jews
• living, enduring, Jewish messianism
• numbers and influence are growing fast
• Smoltrich has the authority to determine whether to remove Religious Zionist settlements created without permission
• today, Israeli Religious Zionism and American Modern Orthodoxy are converging
• Modern Orthodox American Jews before the 90s rarely had close and personal or familial ties to Israel
• wanted to be “modern” Americans, not spiritual Zionists
• uptick in Modern Orthodox American Jews, study in Israeli Religious Zionist institutions
• in the Religious Zionist institutions they attended in Israel, encountered Rabbi teachers motivated by a deep and sincere religious commitment, married to an intense and spiritually infused political ideology
• Modern Orthodoxy has gone to become institutionally rich, successful, and self confident
• looming danger of a renewed theological crisis, with regard to reconciling Jewish law with contemporary life
• RZ, its cousin, Modern Orthodoxy sees a movement that is utterly committed and existentially motivated
• “Israel has come to define Judaism”
• politically, almost monolithically Republican
• Jared and Ivanka Kushner, most prominent figures
• increasingly diverging from contemporary American ideals about how all people should be treated and what rights people deserve
• Traditionalists, community of Jews historically most skeptical of Zionism, had their worldview transformed by Israel over the last 30 plus years
• identifying with Israel’s military might, by pushing the state to implement Jewish law and the viewpoint of Torah (daas Toyre)
• Traditionalists study in Israel today is a form of service to the state
• spiritual soldiers
• 19th century Europe, Traditionalists of the time were antimodern
• practical question is how to interact with the existing state
• Torah study was the basic element of human value and worth, Traditionalist belief in a nutshell
• compromise, Hazon Ish, Ben Gurion, parliamentary government
• Israelis elect the Knesset by proportional representation, voting for parties rather than individual candidates
• then the parties form coalition governments
• Ben Gurion begrudgingly agreed to exemption from military service
• over, time, Traditionalists parties multiplied and their influence expanded
• Lubavitcher Rebbe, “the Rebbe”
• Chabad schools, outreach was an enthusiastic, optimistic, “offensive” mission to bring Jews back to the fold of faith
• unbridled messianism
• Rebbe’s teachings, Israel is a partial blueprint for a potential messianic actualization
• Chabad Houses, designed to enable Jews to live anywhere while still performing the commandments
• Jews belonged wherever they wanted to live
• Israel, precursor of the genuine messianic state to come
• messiah who had already arrived would reveal himself
• praise of the IDF as a point of identification with the state
• Basic Law: Torah Study, exemption from conscription for Torah study permanent is a goal
• Traditionalists are increasingly picturing how they would govern Israel if they came to power
• proposes to supplant the very nationalism that created the state of Israel
• nonmessianic Traditionalist state governed by Jewish law
• theology of covenant, collective sin, collective punishment pervades the Hebrew Bible
• Israel today isn’t just another place Jews live
• idea of Israel has become infused with special theological meaning
• Israelites were a chosen people prone to sinning from the get go
• sin of pride is what allows, enables, and encourages us to forget about the interests and needs of other people
• Jews must scrutinize themselves and their conduct
• must search out and identify their sins
• repent from them
• strive to stop sinning
• sin begets sin
• urging Jews to be more Jewish in their thinking about Israel, and explore this dynamic
• struggle to determine what is right and eschew what is wrong
• five books of Moses, there are no “Jews”
• not until Babylonian exile, disappearance of the so called last tribes, yehudim, tribe of Judah, refer to a larger collective
• “Israel” to the term yehudi, “Israel”, as a formal designator of who belongs to a community
• the word “Jew”, often a non Jewish designation for Jewish people
• even the notion that there is a religion of “Judaism” was introduced by Christians in the 4th century in order to create a contrast to Christianity
• so what are the Jews? who is a Jew?
• why be a Jew?
• Jews have not thought of themselves as a distinct race since WWII
• semiconscious Jewish efforts in the U.S> to be understood as part of the white race and also of the worry that defining Jews as a race would lead to their being considered an inferior one
• large, extended, family
• you can be born into it, adopted into it, join it, leave it
• debates about who is in and who is out, as there are in families
• Bible invented idea that Jewish people is like a family
• pain of families depicted in the Bible
• embrace both the love and the crazy, the joyful support and the enraged dysfunction
• Zionism wanted Jews not to be chosen, but to be normal, exactly like any other group of people who counted as a nation
• Israel’s uniqueness, precisely not treated as a nation like all other nations
• Zionists aspirations for the Jews to be a nation like other nations failed, if measured by the way the rest of the world thinks about Israel
• case for the state of Israel, Holocaust made it overwhelming
• genocide, new kind of crime, Holocaust as its legal conceptual model, emphasized the distinctiveness of the Holocaust
• specific, arguably unique type of morally compensatory nation state, origin bound up in the debt that Europe felt it owed the Jews after the Holocaust
• emblem of global morality, implied that it would be held to a higher standard, morally distinctive
• European left came to condemn European colonialism and imperialism, Israel’s quasi colonial creation as viewed from Europe itself became the basis for condemnation
• Israelis acknowledge themselves to be nationally different from Jews living in the U.S. or Europe
• nation is no longer a nation of all the Jews in the world
• they nation is the nation state of Israel
• idea that the children of Israel are chosen by God is central to the Hebrew Bible and to Jewish consciousness
• idea of Jewish chosenness has persisted
• idea that Jewish persistence is unique has more to do with the theology than with actual history
• people of Israel distinct in their relation to the particular God of Israel
• God of Israelites was the only true, real God — monotheism
• Traditionalists, Jewish chosenness as a religious fact
• Progressive Jews have a much more ambivalent relationship to the idea of chosenness
• Hebrew word for becoming a Jew, giyyur, derives from the biblical Hebrew word for stranger, ger, which the Rabbis interpreted to refer to someone who becomes a Jew
• Hebrew Bible influenced Christianity and Islam
• Individual Jews did not meaningfully shape the religious or secular thinking of these great civilizations before Jews were emancipated
• with this, things did change
• late 18th 19th centuries
• ambition for learning and knowledge, grand ideals of social change, boundless capacity for wealth creation
• Slezkine, eastern European Jews, already “service nomads” in Europe, ideally placed for an era in which the key to success was to be urban, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, occupationally flexible
• drive to succeed
• conditions of immigration and immediate postimmigration
• shift towards Asian Americans disproportionate representation
• some of our accomplishments are already in decline
• antisemitic stereotypes, Jews, it seems, can be everything and its opposite
• tendency to seek after Jewish uniqueness as a secularized form of chosenness leads to extremely suspect generalizations
• Israel is not uniquely moral, nor is Israel uniquely immoral
• Israel’s uniqueness, many citizens believe the state is a manifestation of their chosenness
• potent combo of voluntaristic liberalism and Romantic destiny shapes most current Western understandings of marriage
• only challenge left is to reframe the acceptance of marriage between Jews and non Jews as affirmatively positive, rather than as a concession to social reality
• Jewish communities in late antiquity, like Israelite communities before them, occupied a reality where many Jews and non Jews were married to each other, even as Jewish religious authorities sought to condemn the unions
• Greek civilization still exists in some way, and ancient Israeli civilization, would similarly continue to exist without the Jews
• Jewish culture would go on without the Jews
• Jewishness of the Jewish people entails some degree of differentiation from other peoples
• God commands Abraham, circumcision, God explains, shall be a sign of the covenant between you and me
• always been done, and because it is definitional for their conception of (male) Jewishness
• surely one of the most powerful indicators of persistent tribalism in Jewish thought and practice
• default tribalism, remains in effect unless it is overwhelmed or overcome by some other set of powerfully held values
• whatever course seems best to you, wisdom in empathizing with those who choose to live otherwise
• transmutation of differences into oneness and wholeness
• to be a Jew is to struggle with God together, as a family, embracing one another
• “Israel” name given to Jacob to memorialize his struggle, collective noun, individual Jacob, children of Israel
• covenant joins the people of Israel to God
• covenant, strong force that joins God and Israel and the Jewish people
• to be Jewish requires communication and connection with others
• acts of meaning making
• Jewishness that enables us, engage together and alone in the collective, and individual experiences of embrace and struggle with and alongside God
• first of those settings is the home
• debate is itself an expression of loving God
• to disagree is to seek meaning
• rituals of prayer and study, debates of the synagogue radiate outward
• Jewish family both loving and troubled, embracing and wrestling, search for ultimate meaning is ongoing
• God’s love is a metaphoric representation of the kind of love we humans experience, struggle alongside embrace
• we would do well not to label those with whom we disagree as bad Jews
• struggle embrace with God at the heart of Jewish past, present, hoped for possible Jewish future
• struggle is a covenant and a conflict and a concord all at the same time