Notes on the transmission of a cultural Judaism

To question transmission is to ask: what is it to transmit? What is transmission? What should be transmitted? How to transmit? To whom to transmit?

Levinas wrote: “To question Jewish identity is already to have lost it, but it is still to hold on to it — for otherwise one would avoid the questioning.” This sentence has been quoted many times, perhaps to show the fragility of those who question themselves — which is also a way of belittling them. Personally I think the opposite, for I hold that Jewish identity is essentially a cultural identity — one which, unlike a revealed religious identity (the one conceived by many religious Jews, including Levinas), is not fixed or given once and for all, but dynamic, changing, inscribed in history: in short, a cultural identity. I therefore think that questioning is an essential part of the question of transmission.

To question the transmission of a cultural Jewish identity is to ask: what to keep, what to reject, what to transform. But we must nonetheless try to characterize what makes up cultural identity, and Jewish cultural identity in particular. A cultural identity has several aspects, collective and individual, founded at once on memory, on experience, on knowledge and on sensibility; it therefore includes several historical and geographical strata. It can thus have very diverse aspects — be multiple. It is a complex phenomenon in which all these aspects coexist.

Our history, the history of the Jews, is very long — more than three millennia; it unfolded across many geographical spaces: from the ancient land of Canaan, then ancient Egypt, then Palestine, then Babylon and Persia, next the Near East, and — after the destruction of the Second Temple and the definitive dispersion of the Jews throughout the world — at last the return of a part to the ancient land with the creation of the State of Israel.

Our cultural heritage, which serves as the foundation of our multiple cultural identity, is therefore very complex: at the same time as it renders all these historical strata, with their religious, philosophical and artistic thought, it is also the result of the many contacts our people has had, over the course of history, with other peoples, cultures and civilizations — often vanished, moreover. Eighty years ago, an American Jewish thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, wrote a book that also renders this complexity: Judaism as a Civilization.

To feel oneself the heir of so vast a culture is also to face the question: how to make coexist within us — how to feel ourselves — the descendants of Moses, of Hillel the Elder, the Sage of the Talmud, of Maimonides, founder of the modern Jewish tradition and of religious rationalism, of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, of Moses Mendelssohn, of Vladimir Medem, theorist of the Bund, of Herzl and Borokhov, those of Zionism, or of Martin Buber, founder of a religious Judaism grounded in dialogue and the place of the other? All these figures with contradictory visions, and yet all part of our heritage, as are the various languages of the Jewish people: Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish. One thus measures the complexity, which only a diverse historico-cultural perspective can help to hold.

A person’s cultural identity is what attaches them to a collective whole — and in our case, Jewish identity, what attaches them to the Jewish population, the Jewish people, the Jewish community, other Jews. Identity is a lived experience, an imaginary, a way of attaching oneself to that collective whole in time and in space, the sense of belonging to it. Albert Memmi calls this judéité. It is, then, the sense of belonging.

As long as the Jews lived among themselves in a religious society closed in on itself, the question was not framed in these terms, for transmission occurred, as it were, naturally: through reproduction, through the inscription of the individual within a continuity, through religious teaching in the family or the heder; the content could vary but remained more fixed, inscribed in a well-established tradition, through a system of rites and laws.

Now, in our open societies, the modernity that characterizes them is a calling-into-question of tradition — for that is the very nature of modernity. We live in an open society in which identities are no longer imposed but chosen; within this identity, one chooses, as it were à la carte, one’s portion of heritage — for example Corvol, which carries the heritage of the Bund, a movement at once of revolutionary politics and of popular education for the Jewish proletarian masses. But the Bund corresponded to the Russian and Polish Jewish society of before the Shoah: the one in which there were still great Jewish centres, such as Warsaw or Lodz, a culture in the Yiddish language — which no longer exists. The social structure of the Jews has also changed: the majority is no longer made up of proletarian masses, but rather of intellectuals, the professions, merchants.

In our Western societies, identities are no longer permanent but may be transitory; one may take hold of them as one may reject them, and leave the framework of organized communities. They are no longer single but complex, plural. The same holds for Jewish identity, whose plural aspect has deepened under the weight of history. Even those who have chosen a religious Jewish identity have a choice among various affiliations (Hasidim, Orthodox, Masorti, Reform). Religion, moreover, is also part of what I call Jewish culture — all the more so since, until the Haskalah, it was religion that was the foundation of Jewish societies.

At the heart of the Jewish religion are the Bible and the Talmud. They are an essential element of this cultural identity, an element of our history that contains narratives, laws, rituals, myths — our myths of origin. You see that this is a very vast whole, in which we can “do our shopping.”

As regards the Jewish religion, we may evoke the religious festivals; one may note that they historically have a double origin, religious and seasonal: Passover is the festival of spring, Shavuot that of the harvest of first fruits, and Sukkot, the festival of booths — beyond its aspect of showing the fragility of life, since one must eat in a hut that must not be protected from the rain — is that of autumn. One sees that an ecological dimension can thus be attached to it. There is here a whole possible approach, notably toward children, to introduce them at once into our long history and into our care for the world.

In the same way, the social-justice message of the prophets of the Bible can help us build an ethics of reaching toward the other. You see that it is a vast questioning: how memory can serve to build our identity, in grip with our present. To take on this identity is an act that consists in saying: “Yes, I am part of this group, of the Jewish people, which has had this very complex history.”

It is therefore necessary to ensure, through will, a transmission that brings continuity and creativity. Hence the need to reinvent other contents and other means. I will single out three essential aspects on which to build: memory, teaching, and the rites.

Individual memory concerns those who lived through events crucial to the destiny of the Jewish people: for example the Shoah or the creation of the State of Israel. But these witnesses are now few. And the strong emotional charge of individual memory, transmitted within the family, tends to disappear with the direct witnesses. This memory now takes its place within a collective memory, which is transmitted differently: in books and teaching, in places of memory (memorials, traces in the Jewish towns of the present or the past, pilgrimages…), through other means, including the rituals.

As regards the rites, which ensure the emotional insertion of the individual into the collective while leaning on knowledge, it seems to me that there is a kind of continuity between the purely religious rites and the purely secular or cultural rites within Judaism. On the purely religious side, I may cite the collective prayers, for in traditional religious Judaism there is almost no place for isolated individual prayer: recall the minyan, the necessity of having ten persons — that is, a collective — for most prayers. They thus ensure the insertion of the individual into the collective, through knowledge and through feeling. At the other end, a purely secular, cultural ritual, such as the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Yom HaShoah, the Vél d’Hiv round-up, or the celebration of Yom HaAtzmaut, the creation of the State of Israel, which ensure our fidelity and our emotional insertion into the modern history of the Jewish people. There is also a mixed ritual, religious for some, historical for others: the festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the heroic and victorious revolt of the Maccabees against the cultural and political oppression of the Seleucids, the Hellenistic sovereigns who succeeded Alexander the Great.

A particular case is the celebration of the Seder of Passover, which commemorates the Exodus — the founding event of the Jewish people, half-mythical, half-real, in a sense its myth of origin, but also the founding event of the tradition of freedom and of the Jewish ethical demand, notably through the injunction that characterizes it, in all its varieties and for thousands of years: to respect the stranger. Here we have an example of living memory, which joins the dimension of knowledge to emotional experience. Through these few examples, I have wished to mark both the diversity and the necessity of rituals for inserting the Jewish individual into the Jewish collective, into its history and its values. The Seder is also an occasion to question the present meaning of these matters — since it is about oppression, freedom, liberation, slavery: who are the slaves, who are the oppressors today? There is here a whole possible approach, notably toward children, to introduce them at once into our history and into our care for the world. In the same way, the celebration of a secular Shabbat can allow a reflection on work in our world, and on the necessary suspension of work at a given moment, so as not to be wholly alienated.

I have approached transmission by choosing a few themes that seem to me major. One would of course have to add the important place held by the knowledge of Jewish literature — Jewish writers, European, Israeli, American: all explore our recent or more distant past, or our immediate present, through places and characters. Let us add art and music — notably klezmer music. All of this contributes to this complex and plural Jewish cultural identity. The choice is immense. There is no rule. What matters, in my view, is the approach: to transmit is not to repeat, it is to choose and to innovate, so that the one who receives may make their own what they receive.

Good reflection, good exchange and good work for these gatherings in honour of Corvol’s 70th anniversary — a fine example of this transmission through fidelity and continual creation.

1. 1. The CLEJ — Club laïque de l’enfance juive, Mouvement populaire de l’enfance — is the heir of the SKIF, the youth branch of the Bund; it runs children’s camps at the Château de Corvol. ↩

See also: “Transmitting a Jewish identity” (AJHL, 2017).

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