A Peril for Jews: Secularism

In an eyebrow-raising editorial two months ago, the Jesuit weekly America warned "our Jewish friends" that their opposition to religious practices in public schools might lead to "an outbreak of anti-Semitism.'' America's reward was a torrent of criticism from all segments of U.S. Jewry. Now some leading Jewish intellectuals are having second thoughts about the questions America raised.

In a debate at Yeshiva University. Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Synagogue charged that Jewish organizational support for secularist legislation was indeed adding "fuel to the flames of anti-Semitism." In the forthcoming issue of the semiannual journal Tradition, another Orthodox intellectual urges Jews to forget their anger at the wording of America's editorial and think clearly about the substantive issues involved. Whatever their Reform brethren may want, argues Michael Wyschogrod, assistant professor of philosophy at Hunter College, Orthodox Jews should not be so eager to help secularists raise a rigid, unclimbable wall between church or synagogue and state.

In opposing secularism. Wyschogrod sees theological merit in nondenominational worship in public schools in the manner of the New York Regents prayer outlawed by a Supreme Court decision last June. "One of the leading Torah authorities is said to have remarked that the prayer in question fulfills the Biblical obligation to pray," he points out. More materially, Wyschogrod also thinks that Orthodox Jews might well take another look at their attitude to the question of federal aid to religious schools. Reform Jews almost unanimously oppose such aid; but most of the U.S. yeshivot (day schools) are conducted by Orthodox congregations that are strapped for money.

In the long run, Wyschogrod argues, "it is in the interest of the American Jewish community that America remain a Godfearing nation. The security of all mankind, as of the Jew, is to be found in a world in which God rules and in which all men have a sense of living under his judgment. The temporary and superficial toleration that the Jew enjoys in a completely secular, Godless world is no more than skin-deep." For no matter how deplorable is the history of Christian persecutions of Jews, Wyschogrod concludes, "the danger that threatens us today in this country is not forcible conversion to Christianity. Our danger is secularism, the disappearance of the word 'God' from the minds and tongues of millions of Jews."

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