A Choice for the Chosen

To be a Jew, as often as not, means little more than sharing a common stock of habits and lore: bagels and gefuellte fish, wistful jokes about schlemiels, the struggle against discrimination in country clubs--and childhood memories of the stately dining ritual on Passover. This, complains Theologian Arthur A. Cohen, is not Judaism but Jewishness--"the whole array of atavisms and sentimentalities which a secure minority can now afford." Cohen, in a fervent new book marred occasionally by some advanced term-paper prose, summons the comfortable, conforming natural Jew of the American present to recapture his supernatural vocation as a living reminder to all men that history is incomplete until God's Kingdom has been established.

The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (Pantheon; $6) is a wide-ranging survey of modern Jewish thought, by the current enfant terrible in the field. Theologian Cohen, 34, writes of Judaism from the standpoint of the maskil--the Jewish sage who is outside the rabbinate. Although he studied at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary (as well as at Columbia and Chicago), Cohen is by profession a publisher; he founded the Meridian line of quality paperbacks and now edits religious books for Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Cohen is a believing Jew who accepts neither the Orthodox, nor Conservative nor Reform label. He is an editor of the intellectual quarterly Judaism, but just as often writes for the Christian Century.

God Has Called. The existential dilemma of the modern Jew, Cohen believes, is that he is both "a creature situated in nature and activated by history" who by the fact of revelation also belongs to a supernatural community--the Old Testament's Chosen People: "God has covenanted with the Jewish people that it shall transcend nature and history to Him alone . . . Without the belief that God has called the Jew to Himself, to call oneself a Jew is but a half-truth."

No such distinction was possible before the emancipation of European Jewry from the ghettos between 1790 and the 1840s. Until then, the Jew lived in an insulated community that ensured conformance to tradition. Emancipation freed the Jew from the confines of community, and coming in contact with the ideas of the Enlightenment freed him from reliance on the tradition of Jewish theology. But the price of liberty was high. Under the influence of Lessing and Kant, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) stripped Judaism of its supernatural quality by arguing that it was essentially a rational faith. Even the greatest of modern Jewish thinkers, Jerusalem's influential "existential humanist" Martin Buber, dramatically envisions Judaism as an encounter between the "I" of man and the "Thou" of God--and ignores the Jewish heritage of tradition and law.

"The Only Weapon." To Cohen, one of the unhappiest products of the emancipation is American Jewry, which has tended to retreat into the inflexible intransigence of Orthodoxy or blend into middle-class life `a la Marjorie Morningstar. Although they have preserved their "ethnic peculiarities" and "lingual eccentricities," Cohen charges, many U.S. Jews "divested themselves of that which they considered most noticeable, provocative, and embarrassing, namely, their religion." This convenient surrender, he says, is fatal: "Adjustment of the Jew to the natural conditions of his environment divests him of the only weapon, his supernatural vocation, which allows him to survive. The natural Jew as such has, we believe, no hope."

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