Book review: ‘The Myth of the Cultural Jew’

The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition by Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, Oxford University Press, New York;  ISBN 978-0-19-537370-7 ©2015, $34.95, p. 297, plus index

By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.

Fred Reiss, Ed.D
Fred Reiss, Ed.D

WINCHESTER, California — If you’ve ever heard a new employee at work say something like, “We didn’t do it that way when I worked at X,” you have a rough understanding of the concept of culture—that unwritten, shared set of deep values and beliefs, regulating behavior and allowing individuals to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Each of the three largest Jewish denominations has unique cultures. For example, an adherent to Orthodox Judaism, which holds fast to Jewish tradition, meaning that the Written Law, the Torah, known as the Five Books of Moses, came directly from God, would not even think of asking if it is okay to drive to a synagogue on the Sabbath, as the Torah demands that one observe, remember, and keep the Sabbath. The Oral Law, written by the rabbis who received the Tradition, ruled that work cannot be performed on the Sabbath, as it violates the Sabbath commandments, and driving is work.

Conservative Judaism accepts Jewish tradition: the Torah is of divine origin. There is, however, a nuance. Conservative Judaism recognizes a human element within the Torah, accepting that Judaism was influenced by other cultures and treating the Torah as a historical document accessible through biblical criticism. So, is it alright for a Conservative Jew to drive to a synagogue on the Sabbath? Conservative Judaism responds that it is best not to drive, since it can be considered work. However, it is better to drive to a synagogue on the Sabbath than not come at all. Reform Judaism asserts that the Torah is a God-inspired text, allowing one to follow the ethical commandments while ignoring the others and interpreting the Torah liberally as new problems and issues arise. So Reform Jews wouldn’t even think of asking the question, of course it’s alright to drive, drive anywhere you like.

In her newest book The Myth of the Cultural Jew, Roberta Kwall, a law professor at DePaul University, argues that when people say they are a cultural Jews, they mean they are not religious, but unknowingly still align themselves with Jewish-cultural values, leading her to affirm, as the main premise of her book, that although the term “cultural Jew” implies a Jew living a life at the periphery of the religion, nonetheless “that person is inevitably molded and shaped by Jewish tradition, which includes Jewish law.”

The Myth of the Cultural Jew explores this assertion through a cultural analysis of Jewish tradition (mesorah) and law (halakhah). Revelation notwithstanding, Kwall sees mesorah and halakhah as products of human effort within numerous co-existing, evolving, and reciprocating cultures. She argues that Judaism’s Oral Law, a product of the minds of leading rabbis over many centuries, was influenced by the cultures and historical circumstances in which they lived, including the Greeks, Persians, and Romans, as well as Islam and Christianity. As an example, she observes that Jews living in the Christian world adopted monogamy, whereas Jews living under Islamic rule permitted polygamy and concubinage.

Cultural analysis explains that a top-down study, rabbis dictating to the common people, is not the only perspective. To this end, Kwall takes a bottom-up approach, discovering the influential impact of Judaism’s changing ambient culture and the role of Jewish practice on the development of Jewish law. She finds, for instance, that ritual, not rabbinic dictum, provided the basis for the obligatory practice of wearing a yarmulke (skullcap) and of wearing costumes on Purim. “In late Medieval Germany, the Jews borrowed for this celebration a Christian custom of wearing costumes that date back to the Roman carnival.”

She indicates that custom dictated the use of amulets, incantations, and lighting candles during childbirth and circumcision is a physical manifestation of the ancient practice of cutting something when making a treaty. The brit ceremony, she points out, draws from aspects of baptism, which “is not all that surprising in light of the fact that baptism itself replaced circumcision in early Christianity.”

Prior to the eighteenth century, Jews by-and-large accepted the beliefs of traditional Judaism. Using cultural analysis she concludes that with the advent of the European Enlightenment, a segment of Jews, feeling less cloistered and in a position to closely affiliate with the common culture, freer to move away from the beliefs and practices of their religious ancestors, formed a movement known as Reform Judaism. Practitioners of Judaism’s traditional, or orthodox, beliefs in Eastern Europe, where Enlightenment-like laws took longer to enact, split into two groups. One faction, Ḥasidim, emerged from the ashes of the failed messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi. The other opposed the practices of the Ḥasidim, and became known as the mitnagdim, which simply means “the opponents.”

Kwall follows the Orthodox and Reform Jewish movements to America, analyzing the developments leading to the radicalization of Reform Judaism, which marginalized mesorah and reinterpreted and sometimes summarily rejected halakhah; the emergence of Conservative Judaism; and the religious tensions among the Ḥasidim and Orthodox Judaism and between the Orthodox and other Jewish denominations.

Examples of this contention include an extended examination of the Reform Movement’s redefinition of “who is a Jew,” and the Reform and Conservative Movements’ reinterpretation of what it means to perform work on the Sabbath. She further considers the multifaceted links between changing culture and Jewish legal interpretations by Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism with regard to homosexuality and women’s places in synagogue ritual, presenting and evaluating, from the cultural analysis perspective, the formidable arguments of various rabbis.

An Israeli culture, a blend of the secular beliefs of Zionism’s founding fathers and the cultures of the previous ruling countries, appeared with the creation of the State of Israel, a Jewish homeland, in 1948. This secular culture, which Kwall contends holds a kernel of the mesorah and Judaism’s traditional Torah-based culture represented by the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists, clashed at the State’s creation and continues to collide to this day, as some of Israel’s laws are supervised by the religious right and others by the secular government. Kwall takes the reader through the history of this strange mix and examines Judaism’s latent values, showing how these might bring about reconciliation.

Kwall is perplexed by Jewish-American culture. For her, Jewish culture has its basis in halakhah, which cannot be separated from Jewish tradition; yet “American non-Orthodox Jews have become increasingly incapable of recognizing and appreciating the halachic roots of Jewish culture…. [, but] the same cannot be said for their Jewish identity and pride of peoplehood.”

Kwall tells us that American Jews who find fulfillment in non-sectarian Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Federation practice a form of “civil Judaism,” which “at its core is not a model concerned with halachic observance.” Additionally, Kwall examines a number of the present-day social forces militating against Jewish tradition, including, the millennial generation’s “obsession with personalized experiences,” the trend toward a Judaism emphasizing the central role of autonomy in ritual and practice, and the shrinking “boundaries between what is Jewish and what is American.”

In The Myth of the Cultural Jew, Kwall clearly demonstrates that the term “cultural Jew” is an oxymoron and shows that anyone ignoring the inexorable link between Jewish tradition and Jewish law will, in the end, have neither tradition nor law. She concludes that failure to actively develop an appreciation for the role of Jewish law in Jewish life “will inevitably lead to the extinction of the Jewish people.” The Myth of the Cultural Jew is highly recommended for anyone interested in the social development of Jewish culture and for Jewish leaders who need to develop programs or restructure institutions to accommodate the next generation, the millennials, and their unique needs, especially mobility, connectivity, collaboration, experiential events, and the ability to socialize.

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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ: From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)