c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Participating in a panel discussion in Cleveland on the ethical and legal implications of new genetic tests to predict breast cancer in Jewish women, Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff fielded a rude question.

A law professor in the audience stood up and announced that she was confused. She bluntly said she failed to see what Dorff could contribute to the scholarly conversations.

The rabbi, a professor of philosophy in Los Angeles, gently observed that when it comes to life-and-death matters, even Jews with the most tenuous connection to their faith become interested in its teachings.

Dorff is one of 47 prominent scholars and opinion-makers contributing short essays on “What Do American Jews Believe?” to this month’s issue of Commentary magazine.

“Whatever else American Jews may believe in, it is doubtful the majority of them believe in Judaism,” Commentary editor Neal Kozodoy says starkly in his introduction. “That at least is what the surveys suggest, as do the low rates of synagogue membership on the one hand, the high rates of intermarriage (to gentiles) on the other.”

Kozodoy invited essays from writers who range from Richard L. Rubenstein, author of a seminal book, “After Auschwitz,” to Michael Medved, the PBS film critic and a vocal promoter of a return to “family values” in Hollywood.

“I believe the Holocaust still constitutes the greatest single challenge to Jewish belief and continuity,” Rubenstein writes. “After Auschwitz, I am hardly alone in finding it difficult to utter prayers praising God as a merciful and compassionate Redeemer. The Holocaust also confronts every Jew with the question: `Is Judaism any longer worth dying for?’ ”

Susannah Heschel, professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, stakes out quite different ground:

“While I understand the loss of faith some Jews feel as a consequence of the Holocaust,” she writes, “it seems to me misdirected, reminding me of parents who divorce after the death of a child.

“Neither parent is responsible for the child’s death, but the horror is so great that the relationship becomes untenable. When Germans murder members of our own family of Jews, it is not clear that the logical response is to divorce God.”

For his part, Dorff states, “For free will to mean anything, bad uses of it must be possible. A small child dying of leukemia is, in fact, philosophically more difficult to reconcile with a benign God than is the Holocaust.”

A pole apart from Rubenstein is David Klinghoffer, the 30-year-old literary editor of the National Review. He calls preoccupation with the Holocaust a type of idolatry and a distraction from the Torah.

He writes that the veneration of Holocaust victims “allows Jews to share in the trendy cult of victimhood. With constant invocations of a fabled nationwide anti-Semitism, scare-mongering groups like the Anti-Defamation League keep this (false) god’s altar fire burning.”

Klinghoffer also argues that liberalism in American Jewish life has been a similar distraction: “For many, the Torah as a source of moral authority has been nudged aside by the editorial page of The New York Times.”

Such strongly argued opinion ranges through the magazine, as essayists wrestle with the meaning of Israel, Jewish disunity and dilution of faith.

David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, writes acidly, “The infantile insistence that religious ritual conform to you rather than the other way around is the essence of modern American culture, and it is strangling Judaism. …

“ `Being Jewish in America’ will come to mean, in time, approximately what `being Scottish in America’ means: nothing. Certain family names will suggest Jewish or Scottish origins.”

Rubenstein and three other essayists contributing this month _ Yeshiva University President Norman Lamm, Rabbinical Assembly President David L. Lieber and author Jacob Neusner _ all had their say in a historic issue of Commentary published 30 years ago. It was called “The State of Jewish Belief.”

The idea this month was to bring the conversation forward three decades.

“Actually, I was surprised to find myself quite moved by many of the contributors,” said Ruth R. Wisse, a trustee of the Avi Chai Foundation, which awarded Commentary a special grant to help pay the writers. “I found them very reflective and very, very genuine. Within the diversity, there is quite an astonishing core of (Jewish) resilience.”

As of this week, more than 300 orders for reprints had poured into the New York City office of Commentary, a neo-conservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee.

“The 1966 symposium asked no questions at all about Israel or the Holocaust. That was a period when there wasn’t much talk about the Holocaust at all,” editor Kozodoy said. “In the current issue, there is less philosophizing about God and God’s activity in history and the abstract relationship between God and the Jewish people, and a greater emphasis on Jewish practice and leading a religious life.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Heschel begins her essay stating, “I was raised in a profoundly spiritual home and I will always be deeply grateful to my parents for giving me the sensitivities to perceive the divine presence and for teaching me how to pray. …

“At the same time, I was frustrated and annoyed from my earliest childhood days by the senseless rules that relegated me, with the other females, to the kitchen, preparing the food, while the rebbe sat at his table, teaching and singing with his Hasidim. I could not accept that and I complained about it from the time I was 5 years old. I did not want to overthrow anything, I just wanted to be part of the experience.”

From Heschel’s Orthodox girlhood legacy as daughter of theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel to her college days as editor of the reader “On Being a Jewish Feminist,” she has struggled to reconcile “the moral justice of feminism with the fragile remnants of Judaism’s spiritual traditions.”

Rabbi Joseph A. Polak, who serves the Jewish community at Boston University, quarrels with the Cleveland scholar.

“Teaching a woman to chant the musical notations of the Torah will not necessarily teach her what is in it,” he argues, “nor will it teach her how to put Jewish children to bed _ both being more likely to assure Jewish survival than the training of cantors of any gender.

“What it does do is sanction women’s public performance in the synagogue, which constitutes exercising a `right’ rather than engaging in the response to a divine command. Religion in these circles has been displaced by political theater even as Torah study has been displaced by Torah discussion.”

Heschel describes part of her predicament, asking, “Why is it that only in Israel I could not find a minyan in which to say kaddish (prayer for the dead) for my father? The Orthodox synagogues would not tolerate me as a woman, while the Reform and Conservative congregations were too weak in members to hold daily services.”

Editor Kozodoy has noticed the same pattern. “I think the dynamism in Jewish religious life is coming from the Orthodox community and the ultra-Orthodox community,” he said. “They are pulling everybody else with them. The spectrum of religious observancy has shifted so that a serious Reform Jew is more religiously observant than even 10 years ago, and is observant with a greater intensity.”

Rabbi Marc Gellman, of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, N.Y., is not drawn to these questions.

“My daily life is not altered one iota by predictions for or against a large-scale revival of Judaism in America,” he writes.

“I still wake up every day trying to serve God, study (the) Torah, do mitzvah, keep my evil inclination in check and sustain my deepest hopes that the good in us will win, that the Covenant will not be broken, that the naked will be fed and that the ones who sleep in the dust will one day be lifted up. For me, only the trying matters; everything else is not my business.”

MJP END LONG