Halkin underestimated Orthodoxy’s extraordinary vitality

R

 eading a recent profile of the writer Hillel Halkin in the Weekly Standard reminded me of a lesson he once taught me. Halkin, whom one critic recently called “America’s greatest contribution to Israeli literature,” is an American author and translator living in Israel since 1970 who has written nine books — some of which have garnered literary prizes — and has expertly rendered dozens of Hebrew and Yiddish works into English.

I have read a fair share of the many essays on Jewish themes he has contributed to Commentary over the years, yet he’s probably best known for his first book, entitled Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic. The book is essentially a correspondence with a fictional friend whom Halkin seeks to move to consider joining him in Israel. According to this same critic, the book “remains, forty years after publication, the most powerful Zionist polemic ever written.”

Although he’s not religiously observant, one wouldn’t know it from much of what appears in those essays and in the Letters book. Halkin, who lives in Zichron Yaakov, is unerring and withering in identifying the inanities of New Age and heterodox Judaisms and the vapidity of secular American Jewish life. And in his insightful treatment of topics from the contemporary credo of tikkun olam to the stubborn resilience of anti-Semitism to Biblical criticism, his perspective is close to one that a religious Jew might adopt on those subjects. Indeed, over the years I’ve quoted a number of his observations in my own writing.

When Letters was republished four years ago, Halkin sat for a retrospective conversation with the Forward about some of the things he had written back in 1970. When asked about his prediction that Diaspora Jewish communities were “doomed,” he responded that “what is in the long run doomed… is non-Orthodox Judaism…. Jews who do not live wholly Jewish lives — who are not willing to undergo, for the sake of their Jewishness, some form of religious and social re-ghettoization — will sooner or later end up living wholly non-Jewish lives.”

When asked by the interviewer to square his pessimism about non-Orthodox Jewishness in the Diaspora with the seeming creative verve some corners of the Jewish community still display, Halkin let loose one of his trademark salvos:

It’s not my job to tell Jews what kinds of Judaism they should or shouldn’t practice. I can only say that 10 or 15 years ago, someone persuaded me to attend a Yom Kippur eve service in a Manhattan synagogue. It was great fun, with lots of singing and jumping and hugging and kissing and clapping of hands, and everyone went home feeling they were having a wonderful time being Jews. If I hadn’t known it was Yom Kippur, I might have thought it was Purim. Is it fair of me to laugh at that? Perhaps not, but I do. If being Jewish is a matter of feeling good, you’ll be Jewish for just as long as it takes for something else to come along and make you feel even better….

But, the interviewer pressed, why are only the non-Orthodox on their way out? Hadn’t he also written back then that Orthodoxy “cannot hold out indefinitely as it is”? Halkin admitted he had underestimated Orthodoxy’s extraordinary vitality, but then added the following, which, whenever I reread it, still shocks me:

It’s clear that there will be an Orthodox Jewish community, whether Haredi or Modern, in the Diaspora a hundred years from now, too. No doubt there will be one in a thousand years. But as someone who is not a believing Jew in any traditional sense, I find that supremely uninteresting. The fact that Jews can go on indefinitely davening Minchah in New York or London neither comforts me nor speaks to my sense of Jewish possibilities. It’s not a great challenge for a people to go on doing what it always has done. Will there be Jews who do it anyway? No doubt.

Did as astute a fellow as Hillel Halkin really say those things?

Whatever his beliefs or lack thereof may be, in suggesting that it’s “not a great challenge for a people to go on doing what it always has done,” agenda-driven Halkin has dismissed as no big deal the most monumental feat in the history of nations. Even for the Chinese, a massive, highly advanced nation living in the same spot on earth for millennia, it is a great challenge to “go on doing what it always has done” (assuming that involves more than continuing to consume endless amounts of Chinese, which, I’m told, the Chinese don’t actually do).

But we’re talking Jews — the winners, hands down, of the Most Turbulent, Fractious, and Bloody History in History award, due to multitudinous enemies from without and endless schisms from within. It’s been a great challenge just to get from 1917 to 2017 intact — one we’ve actually failed at. Three millennia? Don’t ask.

Mr. Halkin not only dismisses with a wave of his hand the single greatest miracle of national survival and renaissance in the annals of humankind but also expresses disinterest — supremely so — in what he arrogantly and snidely calls the idea of Jews “indefinitely davening Minchah in New York or London.” What can I say? When someone with such wide-ranging Jewish interests as he declares himself unmoved by the drama, the impact, the breathtaking uniqueness of Jewish history, it makes me supremely sad.

Later in the same interview, Halkin describes a “maximal” Jewish life in secular Israel as that of an Israeli “who, even though he is personally non-observant, is familiar with Jewish history, with Jewish texts, with Jewish liturgy — who can, let’s say, walk into a synagogue and know what’s happening and what is expected of him. I think such an Israeli would have a sense of the thousands of years of Jewish life of which he is the heir and whose future depends on him and on his fellow countrymen.”

So, what makes for the maximal secular Jewish life, which Mr. Halkin lauds, is superficial familiarity with texts, liturgy, and some vague sense of Jewish history. Yet the millions who lived that history, whose every waking moment was suffused with living Jewishly — the indefinitely davening Jews in New York skyscrapers and in the corner of an Auschwitz lager and alongside the rivers of Babylon — produce only a bored yawn? How illogical.

Reading his words took me back to one particular piece of his writing, a Commentary essay describing his youth in 1950s New York, growing up as the son of a Jewish Theological Seminary professor and his wife. As an eighth-grader at an Orthodox day school, he had become

quite devout…. My parents regarded this outbreak of pietism with bemusement mixed with some concern. They were sophisticated people for whom Orthodoxy was a pleasantly regulated way of life shared with a social circle composed largely of my father’s academic colleagues…. G-d, as far as I could see, had little to do with it….

When I took to wearing an arba kanfos… my mother made a face; my father, though he complied with my request to turn on the radio for me so that I could listen to college football games on Saturday afternoons, let me know he thought it was absurd.

The essay depicts young Hillel’s progressive attenuation from Jewish observance until he drops it entirely as he finishes high school, while still continuing to deceive his father, who, he writes, “only years later confessed to me that he had not the slightest belief in the Supreme Being to whom he poured his heart out every day in mournful prayer.”

It was heartbreaking to read about this young boy, struggling unsuccessfully to find his way Jewishly in an environment that was tepid and rife with contradiction at best, hypocritical at worst, and bereft of wholesome models of proud, coherent Jewish living to guide him. At one point, Halkin reflects on the fact that not long after the period he describes, Orthodoxy in America came into its own, likening his childhood loss of faith to “a soldier tragically killed, for no good reason, in the last hours of combat before an armistice is signed.”

Hillel, we’ve never met. But if I come to Zichron Yaakov, can we daven Minchah together?

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 696. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com