Fidelity and infidelity — why choose this theme?
No doubt because, over the course of their long history, the Jews have undergone a great many geographical, religious, cultural and societal changes, which forced them to confront this very problem.
In order to adapt to new realities while nonetheless ensuring a continuity, one question has often arisen for them: what can be kept, what must be rejected, what must be accepted in the face of these new realities? The answers to these questions have often been fraught with divergences and oppositions, and sometimes with schisms. A few famous examples: the conflicts between Sadducees and Pharisees; the birth of Christianity and the reactions it provoked; after the destruction of the Temple and the end of sacrifices, the transformation of a “priestly” Judaism into a Judaism founded on prayer and study and centered on the Synagogue; later still, the messianic movements of the seventeenth century and the rifts they left behind; the birth of Hasidism and the exclusions and excommunications to which it was subjected.
In the modern era, one may also cite the major transformations brought about by Emancipation: social transformations with the departure from the ghettos, cultural transformations in the wake of the Haskalah, and religious transformations with the birth of the Reform movement. Likewise, at the end of the nineteenth century, one may cite the birth of the secular political movements — socialism, Bundism, communism and Zionism — which mobilized the Jewish masses.
Here, in France, Franco-Judaism attempted to realize this twofold fidelity to Judaism and to the Republic, and with a certain success, from the second half of the nineteenth century until Vichy and its laws of exclusion.
The question posed — particularly in our own day — to us, secular Jews, remains always the same: what must one keep, include, transmit, modify or reject? Must one transmit the language (Yiddish, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish) as a language of knowledge and of culture? Must one keep the rites as they are, out of fidelity, or reject them wholesale; must one attempt to secularize them, to transform them by stripping them of their original meaning? Must one inscribe this whole past religious dimension within a historical perspective? Should one — and if so, how — refound an ethics based on our historical, and notably prophetic, tradition? How can the message of our ancient texts, the Bible in particular, be faithfully conveyed so that they may be heard in our own time? How is the past to be reread? Should one have placed oneself in mortal danger rather than renounce oneself, in situations of peril — or rather follow Maimonides, who suggested converting momentarily and superficially and fleeing swiftly from the place of danger?
How can one criticize the dominant current of an age without excluding oneself or being excluded? The difference in situation between Spinoza and Mendelssohn may shed light on this for us.
Can one remain faithful through an act of infidelity? Sabbataï Tsevi, like the Frankists, believed he could redeem evil by plunging into it.
To whom must one be faithful? To society? To the community? To History? To oneself? In a society in transition, as Jewish society has so often been, must one submit to its laws or depart from them?
How far can one transform Judaism, or the received tradition, without it amounting to a definitive rupture — and, if that rupture is collective, without another entity being created, as was the case with Christianity under Saint Paul? There is no clear answer to these questions. All the more so since, in our own day — for at least two centuries now, if not longer — there is no longer any central legitimating authority of Judaism to lay down a line acceptable to the great majority of Jews, and certainly not a religious authority, for ever since the Emancipation religion has ceased to be the unifying factor of Jewishness.
Only History will be able to answer, in the aftermath.
Recent history has also shown that many of the contributions and transformations introduced into Western society were brought by Jews who were marginal with respect to the Jewish society in which they had been steeped. One need only cite Freud, who always laid claim to being a Jew, even as he defined himself as “a Jew unfaithful to the religion of his fathers,” a “Jew without God,” to borrow the title of Peter Gay’s book. For Freud nonetheless remained, all his life, a member of a B’nai B’rith lodge, and from the 1920s on he was part — together with his friend Albert Einstein — of the Founding Committee of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thus marking a certain fidelity to a sense of belonging. But that belonging was not of a religious order: did Freud not speak of his disposition to stand with the minority, against “the compact majority”? Is this not a fidelity to a historical tradition, one that for so long characterized the Jews in diaspora?
This questioning has always concerned humankind in general. It runs through Jewish literature, at the level of the writers as much as of their characters. Finally, through the great myths bearing on fidelity and infidelity, it also concerns, in our own day and with particular acuteness, recently immigrated populations. The very term infidel can, even today, be a source of mortal danger for the man or woman so designated, in those societies where the grip of religion remains dominant.
Faithful to what point, against what, to what?