Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Get the Daily
Briefing by Email

Subscribe

Bridging the Unbridgeable Divide Between Religion and Secular Modernity

Jeffrey Sacks
Mosaic Magazine, Dec. 10, 2018

“[T]hough geographically the two cities [of Jaffa and Jerusalem] were only several hours apart by train, the journey between them was one between two worlds.”

In 2006, a distinguished American Jewish essayist took the occasion of his 50th high-school reunion to reflect in Commentary on the decisions made a half-century earlier in “a period of my life now hardly recognizable to myself.” At the end of eighth grade, he had faced a choice  between two divergent educational paths. On the one path lay a yeshiva, regarded by his parents as “the portals of obscurantism” but a logical choice for a young man then flirting with Orthodox Judaism. On the other path lay one of America’s most prestigious public high schools. In the end, hearkening to the voice of his “evil inclination,” he decided to drop Jewish education entirely and to leave behind the parochial religious velt in order to “be in the world. It had never occurred to me until then that the world was something I felt deprived of.”

In picking this path, the memoirist remarks in retrospect, he was acting on the presupposition, common enough at the time, that such a move represented a clear binary choice. In general, he writes, “We were told [then] to think in terms of ‘either/or,’ not of ‘both/and.’” And yet, unbeknownst to him, the wider “world” that he’d chosen to enter was itself in the process of changing—and so dramatically as to make his adolescent self a person “on the verge of becoming an anachronism. By the time I was a student,” he observes, an understanding between Judaism and modernity was already being reached. Religious faith had ceased to be an issue in Jewish literary and even religious life. Orthodoxy, which had been in headlong retreat for over a century, had rallied and was holding the line.

…  [To read the full article, click here]

Donate CIJR

Become a CIJR Supporting Member!

Most Recent Articles

The Empty Symbolism of Criminal Charges Against Hamas

0
Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe, Sept. 8, 2024 “… no Palestinian terrorist has ever been brought to justice in the United States for atrocities committed against Americans abroad.”   Hersh Goldberg-Polin...

Britain Moves Left, But How Far?

0
Editorial WSJ, July 5, 2024   “Their failures created an opening for Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, a party promising stricter immigration controls and the lower-tax policies...

HELP CIJR GET THE MESSAGE ACROSS

0
"For the second time this year, it is my greatest merit to lead you into battle and to fight together.  On this day 80...

Day 5 of the War: Israel Internalizes the Horrors, and Knows Its Survival Is...

0
David Horovitz Times of Israel, Oct. 11, 2023 “The more credible assessments are that the regime in Iran, avowedly bent on Israel’s elimination, did not work...

Subscribe Now!

Subscribe now to receive the
free Daily Briefing by email

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

  • Subscribe to the Daily Briefing

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.