INTRODUCTION

What’s the point of being a Jew? And, really, aside from Jews, who cares? There are 7.6 billion people on earth. We’re all hurtling toward climate disaster. Politics has rarely been more polarized. A global pandemic is barely behind us. Artificial intelligence is coming, ready or not. Fundamental questions of racial justice and of the rights of indigenous peoples remain unresolved in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile there are perhaps 16 million Jews in the world, depending on how you count, of whom some 7.6 million live in the United States. What they believe or don’t believe, how they relate to Israel, a country of 9.7 million people (among them 7.1 million Jews), and whether they feel like part of a Jewish people, can seem like trivial questions when seen in this global context.

Yet somehow, the question of the Jews (not the Jewish question, which is something else) remains pressing to many people, not only to those who identify as Jewish. Young Jews—Jews of all ages, really—are trying to figure out whether to think of themselves as Jewish, and if so how and how much. They’re trying to figure out if they should marry Jews, or only marry Jews. They want to know if they have to believe in God to be good Jews, and if so, what God. They are exploring wide-ranging spiritual paths, Buddhist and Hindu-Yogic and New Age, and wondering how their journeys through consciousness might draw on Kabbalah, the ancient and also not so ancient Jewish mystical way. Non-Jews who are encountering these Jews (and their issues—oy, their issues) care about the same things.

Perhaps most pressing to Jews and non-Jews alike in the current moment is the matter of how Jews understand their relationship to Israel. For a country with fewer citizens than Sweden or Tunisia, Israel garners an extraordinary amount of attention in the world press, on social media, and in the minds of people almost everywhere. Its conflict with the Palestinian nation inspires not only rage but fellow feeling around the world, some of it reserved for each side. The latest manifestation of this intense global focus began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched terrorist attacks against Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 240 hostages. Israel responded by besieging, bombarding, and entering Gaza, precipitating a humanitarian crisis and killing thousands of Palestinians, including, inevitably, civilians who were not Hamas fighters. As I write these words, the war is ongoing, as are the expressions of both anger and sympathy from governments, groups, and individuals globally. Most Jews, wherever they are, care deeply about Israel, as do millions of American evangelical Christians. Many of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims care deeply about the Palestinian struggle, as do many left-leaning people of varied backgrounds who are influenced by anticolonial ideas that, they believe, apply to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

And of course Jews still seem to be represented disproportionately in fields from finance to film and comedy to constitutional law, not to mention Jewish accomplishments in science, medicine, and scholarship. Jews helped shape worldviews as divergent as communism and capitalism, psychoanalysis and physics. The earliest standardized intelligence tests identified Jews of European origin as some of the dumbest people measured.1 More recent iterations of the same tests rank European-origin Jews at the top of the table. It seems almost inevitable that outlier status finds the Jews, or they find it. The systematic destruction of the Jews during the Holocaust was an outlying historical case. So was the building of the state of Israel, complete with its displacement of a potential Palestinian state along the way.

For myself, I don’t need an excuse to engage with Jewish belief, Jewish meaning, and Jewish identity. I was born to it, or at least educated to believe that I was born to it. I had Hebrew tutors from the age of four and started full-time Jewish study at six. My parents, thoughtful keepers of their own brand of semi-progressive Modern Orthodox Jewish practice, embraced intellectualism, liberalism, and serious religious observance all at the same time. Our holiday trips to visit family and friends encompassed Afghan Jews who sprinkled us with rosewater, and Yeshivish (to use a word that didn’t then exist), black-hat wearing ultra-Orthodox cousins who embraced us with love and curiosity. Since we didn’t drive on the Sabbath, we walked two miles to synagogue every Saturday morning. After services, we had formal Shabbat lunch at our house with the students, professors, and hangers-on whom my parents invited spontaneously to join us. Then, on Sunday mornings, my same parents would drink Bloody Marys with their sophisticated graduate school friends, looking for all the world like ordinary denizens of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Figuring out how it all fit together—if it did—has been a life project for me. I studied Judaism in college and graduate school and, if I’m honest, ever since. From the Bible to the Talmud to the medieval rabbis and philosophers and mystics and poets to modern reformers and Zionists to the new formations of today, there’s no area of Jewish thought that’s been alien to me. I love them all. And they all make me crazy.

But in nine previous books, I barely touched the Jews. I wrote about contradictions in search of resolutions, like those between Islam and democracy, or American slavery and the constitutional ideals of freedom and equality. Yet I tried to keep the contradictions of the Jews off the page.

For me to write about the Jews, therefore, I must ask your permission to be personal while still speaking historically and analytically. You, my readers, may each hate a different part of what I have to say, and perhaps you will also each love something different. I hope you will allow me to be mystical and rational, traditionalist and progressive, conservative and revolutionist. In my defense I can offer nothing but the truth that Jews, now and always, have occupied all of these different positions, often at the same time.

That’s not all, though. I must also ask you to accept, for the sake of this book, that the many struggles and arguments and debates and exchanges at the heart of this story matter. They matter to me—that goes without saying. But they also matter to other people, Jews and non-Jews and those in between.

Maybe they shouldn’t matter. Nothing in this book will in any immediate sense preserve a verdant earth or establish justice or create the conditions of permanent happiness for us and our posterity. This book won’t solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, nor even offer an adequate account of its intricacies and moral weight.

Nevertheless, the ideas I hope to expound here do have the potential to help humans make meaning. They have that potential for people who think of themselves as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, spiritual believers, or nothing at all. They are meant to help all of us navigate where we come from and where we’re going, and to illuminate the paths we might take to get there.

In what follows, I’m going to start from scratch. I’m going to lay out a range of beliefs that Jews have today, and have had in the past, about God and faith and how we should live our lives in accordance with both of those, or their absence. I plan to show how the existence of the modern state of Israel, and the movement of Zionism that created it, has utterly transformed Jewish life and thought over the past century—and the consequences of that transformation for us all, including for those who worry that eternal Judaism should not be so intertwined with an actually existing nation-state. I plan, too, to explore what Jewishness can mean for our world, as identity, as belief, as family, and as a state of being.

I will be making a number of new arguments here, which will be evident to anyone who has delved into these questions before. To name just a few primary ones: My presentation of how Jewish beliefs should be understood and organized—based on how God and spiritual morality are conceived internally—differs markedly from the standard sociological account of the different movements of contemporary Jews, such as ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Religious Zionist, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, and Humanist.2 My claims about how the idea of Israel has fundamentally transformed all strands of Jewish belief are, I think, new in substance and form compared to the claims of others. My account of Jewish peoplehood as family—real and imagined, solid and evanescent, connected and conflicted—will sound different from other familial descriptions of the Jews. The hint of theology I offer, a theology of struggle, contention, connection, embrace, and capability that is available as much to nonbelievers as to the faithful, also departs in certain respects from other Jewish theological approaches with which I am familiar. In addition to these, on nearly every page I make small or middle-sized new arguments about Jewish history, contemporary Jewish faith, and what one might want to think about God or the Jews.

In the course of writing the book, I intentionally have not flagged what I think is new in it. My goal in that isn’t to make what I write seem obviously true. It’s to allow you, the reader, to use your own reaction to gauge and solidify what you think, not what I think. You can certainly read this book by arguing with it. I read a lot of books that way, and it often works for me. If you want, however, you can also read this book not argumentatively but introspectively—the way I wrote it.

If I accomplish what I am setting out to accomplish, with the help of God or without it, then I will not have told you what to believe. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), by many measures the greatest Jewish thinker ever to have lived, wrote an Arabic book called the Guide of the Perplexed. It was a work of philosophy, in the usual sense of the term. It described, accounted for, explained, and amplified the beliefs of many different people: Greek philosophers, Islamic schoolmen, ancient idolaters whose attitudes Maimonides sought to reconstruct from the best historical sources available to him, and Jewish rabbis. Maimonides had strong views about what Jews should believe, to say the least. His goal was to nudge careful readers to beliefs he considered true. Yet in the Guide, to achieve that objective skillfully, he mostly avoided telling his audience directly what they must think. He spent a long time describing the kinds of contradictions that can occur within a book, no matter when written. As a result, no two interpreters of the Guide have ever really agreed on precisely what Maimonides himself believed. In this, if in nothing else, I seek to follow his model: to illuminate for you, the reader, the multiplicity of different possible viewpoints and ideas, and to let you decide for yourself.

Maimonides would never have considered himself a bad Jew. To the contrary, whatever his exact beliefs were—and I will return to them often in these pages—he clearly thought he had ascertained the true inner meaning of the Torah to a degree not achieved by many of his predecessors. To his admirers, he was nothing less than a second Moses. They captured their adulation in an aphorism: “From Moses to Moses, there arose no one like Moses.”3

The sad truth, however, is that to some who read Maimonides’s work in his lifetime and in the centuries after, this great master of Jewish law, this innovator in the use of the Hebrew language, this towering genius, was in fact a bad Jew, one whose philosophical beliefs ought to be suppressed. In a series of pan-European controversies, leading rabbis called for bans on reading or teaching the Guide of the Perplexed. In the midst of one of these episodes, in 1232 or 1233, Dominican inquisitors in France, presumably inspired by the internal Jewish controversy, seized and publicly burned copies of the Guide.4 The event may have set the stage for a more famous book burning, a tragedy still acknowledged in Jewish tradition and liturgy: the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242.5

The takeaway is that if Moses Maimonides could be denounced as a bad Jew, anyone can be. Which brings me to an important aspect of my argument, one that feels especially pressing in a moment when Jews are experiencing anguish, fear, pain, and anger. It makes me sad when, often in rueful, gentle self-mockery, Jewish friends of mine say of themselves, “I’m a bad Jew.” They aren’t. You aren’t. There are so many ways to be Jewish, so many beliefs and practices and worldviews consistent with sincere and conscientious Jewishness, that we should avoid calling anyone a bad Jew, seriously or even in jest.6

This impulse to include, not exclude, and to embrace, rather than condemn, can be traced back to the medieval rabbis. Faced with mass baptism of Jews, they fell back on a maxim of Talmudic origin that they made into a principle of Jewish law: “An Israelite, though he has sinned, is an Israelite.”7 Even a Jew who goes so far as to embrace a competing religious tradition remains a Jew. According to this perspective, a Jew can do wrong. But by wrongdoing he does not cease to be a Jew. In fact, I know of no expression in the whole vast sea of Jewish teaching that corresponds precisely to the phrase “bad Jew.” According to classical Jewish thought, one may become a bad person by doing bad deeds. But the sinner is not defined as a bad Jew. The biblical commandment to love your fellow applies with equal force to the Jew who disidentifies with the Jewish community to the point of becoming an apostate.

I’ve had my days of feeling like a bad Jew. Probably I will have more. So much of the Jewish tradition is framed in terms of obligations and commandments and prohibitions that it would be almost impossible never to feel that you are a bad Jew for failing to observe the law—or even rejecting it outright. And because Judaism is also an embodied, living tradition, there are always communities of Jews more than willing to tell you that you are a bad Jew. I can pretty much guarantee that someone will read this very paragraph and say, “Yes, Noah. You have felt like a bad Jew because you are a bad Jew—and here’s a list of your transgressions to prove it.” The ability to judge others has never been lacking in the Jewish tradition. The Jesus who said “Judge not, that ye be not judged” was speaking to fellow Jews.8 Not for nothing did his aphorism become central to the Christian religious tradition that grew from his example, not to normative Judaism.

The feeling of being a bad Jew is therefore archetypally Jewish—and simultaneously a misreading of the Jewish way of engaging the world. A Jew can sin and repent, depending on your conception of sin and repentance. A Jew can judge and be judged, regardless of what conception of judging you hold. A Jew should not, however, slot herself or himself into the category of bad Jew. Nor should Jewish communities, however defined, define others as bad Jews. A bad Jew is just a Jew expressing irony and self-skepticism and maybe a little guilt. In other words, a Jew.

GOD, COUNTRY, FAMILY

One initial aim of this book is to chart a map of contemporary Jewish lives and ideas, a map the reader can use not to identify bad Jews but to explore and appreciate the many different ways Jews can be and think and experience. It can be used as a field guide to Jewish people and ideas as they exist today, and as they are being transformed for the future. The purpose of the map, however, isn’t just to know what’s where. It’s to achieve a deeper aim: to help you chart your own journey, or to understand the journey of someone you know or love or don’t like very much at all. It’s to help my children chart their paths and to help me chart my own.

We need a new map today because we are, globally, in the midst of a series of significant transformations in Jewish life and thought. A map from thirty years ago, roughly when I graduated from college, would be surprisingly outdated. Time and again, in writing this book, I have been astonished by how beliefs and attitudes have shifted in a period of time that is historically very short—and how my own views have been changing alongside them, often without my fully noting it.

The book follows, roughly, a three-part plan: God, country, and family. Part I addresses Jewish beliefs about God and the nature of religious faith. It does so by introducing and describing four Jewish belief patterns that crosscut the existing Jewish movements. Unlike the movements, which are best identified and described sociologically via their leaders, members, synagogues, schools, publications, and other institutional accoutrements, these belief patterns are best identified as types of interior experiences or beliefs about who God is and what God wants, however conceived.

I call these belief patterns the Traditional, the Progressive, the Evolutionist, and the Godless. I’m limning these patterns, instead of using the more familiar terminology of Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and so forth, because the old group descriptions are not the right tools to use in deciding what to believe for yourself, if they ever were. I’m encouraging you to figure out what you believe not by asking where you belong but rather by asking what you think, and from there seeing what kind of belonging might appeal to you. This might not fully solve your perplexity, but it should help you determine what you are perplexed about, assuming you are.

As for Jewish mysticism, it is less a belief pattern than an experiential mode of engagement with the divine. For that reason, it can (and does) coexist with any of the four belief patterns. There is a modest amount of mysticism in the book, as in me, even if it is not always labeled as such. You may sometimes notice it peering through the cracks in the wall, especially when I touch on matters of theology.

Jewish beliefs about God have actually changed less in recent decades than have Jewish beliefs and experiences connected to Israel and Jewish peoplehood, the subjects of parts II and III of the book. That’s not because faith always changes more slowly than other kinds of belief. There have been times in Jewish history when stunning shifts in fundamental beliefs about God occurred in just a few decades. Rather, the reason for the comparative stability of these beliefs in the current moment lies in the nature of what most Jews today spend most of their time thinking about: not God so much as politics, morals, family, and community.

For this reason, some readers may want to go straight to the discussions of Godless Jews, Israel, and peoplehood. If that is what moves you, please read that way—or any way you choose.

My reason for starting with God, not Israel, is that the divine has become a too-much-neglected topic in Jewish thinking of all kinds. It’s not that God isn’t there at all. Many Jews, whether personally traditional or progressive, believe that God exists and shape their religious lives accordingly. For Jewish atheists, God’s nonexistence is a starting point. And yet for the large number of Jewish agnostics, as well as for lots of other Jews across the belief spectrum, the most efficient way to engage Jewish life and thought is usually to get on with it and leave God to one side. You can, it turns out, pray to a God who may or may not exist. You can live in community with others without spending too much time asking whether they believe you are united as a community because of a covenant with the maybe-there, maybe-not God. Trust me, I know. For much of my own religious life, I too slighted basic questions about God, not because I knew what to think but because I had no idea. Judaism is well set up to allow God to be kept in the margins.

This setup has some advantages. It can enable various kinds of cooperation, for example. Different Jewish communities disagree strongly about who should be able to marry whom and how inclusive Jewish life should be. But they mostly avoid framing their positions by saying explicitly that they know what God wants. Zionism, the movement that has influenced global Jewish thought more than any other in the past century, is avowedly agnostic. You can be an atheist Zionist or a Religious Zionist or neither. The big-tent character of Zionism has helped it infuse Jewish spaces that resisted its point of view for generations before succumbing, consciously or unconsciously.

The drawback of Jewish religious structures that can operate independent of whether God exists, and in what form, is that they lend themselves to action and practice without reflection. That works just fine provided you never pause to ask yourself exactly why you are doing what you are doing. The moment you do, you will find yourself disastrously lost if you haven’t built your practices on a foundation of belief that you can hold with confidence.


Copyright © 2024 by Noah Feldman