Muller and Koppel on Jews in Israel and America

Moshe Koppel on the issue

Interviewed by David Gordis, Moshe Koppel says,

Now, what was the big challenge for Jews when they came to America or in Europe, in countries that had undergone democratization and enlightenment and so forth? What was the challenge? Well, of course, the challenge was always assimilation. For a community to keep itself going, it needs to keep itself distinct. So the big battle was how universal do we want to be or how tribal do we want to be? And what happened, if you look at the United States, the forces in the United States between deciding where on this continuum of tribalism and universalism we want to be, the forces are very centrifugal. They push outward. They push out. There’s a point somewhere in the middle that’s like the fault line. And if you fall on one side of it, you’re pulled inexorably out.

For an American Jew, there are two ways to go. The tribal path leads toward maintaining a distinctive lifestyle—eating only kosher foods, observing the Jewish sabbath, and maintaining Jewish rituals around birth, puberty, marriage, and death. The secular path leads toward doing none of those things, instead becoming fully assimilated, abandoning any idea of distinctive tribal membership. In the twentieth century, many American Jews tried to find a Middle Way (my term), but Koppel claims that younger Jews today are increasingly picking one path or the other.

My paternal grandparents immigrated from Russia during the post-WWI pogroms. They stayed tribal, speaking in Yiddish and keeping Orthodox Jewish traditions.

My father rebelled against that. He took the secular path. My mother also was Jewish, and also completely secular. They did not deny that their heritage was Jewish. But they saw no need to keep Jewish customs or for me to get any sort of religious upbringing.

In my twenties, I acquired Jewish friends who were in the Middle Way. That is, they tried to keep some, but not all, of the distinctive Jewish cultural traditions and rituals. When I got married and we had children, we were in the that camp.

Our daughters illustrate the split that Koppel describes. Two of them are more strictly observant than the way they were raised in our home. One is less observant.

Koppel points out that Jews have had the luxury in America of going down the secular path because America has been open and welcoming toward Jews. But if the antisemitism on the left and the right keeps rising, this might revive Jewish identity among those who have gone most of the way down the secular path. They may react by turning around and heading toward the Middle Way or even toward more observant branches of Judaism.

So much for America.

Now, let's look at Israel. For religious people in Israel or tradition, people who wanted to maintain tradition, and they come to Israel, what is the big battle? Where are the fault lines here within the traditional community? The answer is it's not about particularism and universalism at all. It's completely about the community versus the state

For many centuries, Jews maintained a distinctive community. Living in states governed by others, their relationship to the state was always uneasy and subject to negotiation.

Israel changed that. The Jewish people and the state were no longer separate. But for many decades, there was a question of the extent to which the state would be congruent with Jewish religious law. Much of the division in Israel, including the strong opposition to the current government and its proposed judicial reforms, reflects this conflict between religious law and secular government.

Koppel sees this conflict winding down. He implies that Israel is headed toward an equilibrium in which secular Israelis and observant Israelis can get along. They will not demand that the state come down decisively on one side or the other.

if we can get to the point where Judaism in Israel is so organic and the people who are living it wherever they are on this continuum are living it in a very, very natural way, that is, they're speaking it like a first language, we will have reconstructed what was best

I don’t think that Koppel’s optimism is shared by Gordis, but the interview ends rather abruptly without any pushback.

Jerry Muller writes,

Israel has one of the highest levels of measured happiness of any advanced country. Much of that, I suspect, is because of the intensity of family life. To a degree that is rare in the US, families (grandparents, parents, and children) see each other regularly on Shabbat. People have children! And the grandparents of those children play a big role in their lives. (Even more so during the War, when, with many fathers serving as reservists in the army, their parents and in-laws stepped in to help take care of the younger generation.) The warmth generated by that constant trans-generational interaction insulates most Israelis from the sort of isolation and alienation increasingly common in advanced industrial societies.

On a more pessimistic note, Yuval Levin argues that Americans visiting Israel are impressed by its communal strength, while Israelis visiting America are impressed by its institutional strength. Israel would benefit from more robust institutions, and America would benefit from less social isolation. The worry is that instead Israel’s communal strength and America’s institutional strength could both decline.

substacks referenced above:

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Some Obervations After a Recent Trip to Israel

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Can young Jews embrace Judaism if, at its core, we're a tribe?