A Letter in the Scroll

Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World's Oldest Religion

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743214964
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Jüdische Theologie

For too long, Jews have defined themselves in light of the bad things that have happened to them. And it is true that, many times in the course of history, they have been nearly decimated: when the First and Second Temples were destroyed, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, when Hitler proposed his Final Solution. Astoundingly, the Jewish people have survived catastrophe after catastrophe and remained a thriving and vibrant community. The question Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asks is, quite simply: How? How, in the face of such adversity, has Judaism remained and flourished, making a mark on human history out of all proportion to its numbers?
Written originally as a wedding gift to his son and daughter-in-law, A Letter in the Scroll is Rabbi Sacks's personal answer to that question, a testimony to the enduring strength of his religion. Tracing the revolutionary series of philosophical and theological ideas that Judaism created -- from covenant to sabbath to formal education -- and showing us how they remain compellingly relevant in our time, Sacks portrays Jewish identity as an honor as well as a duty.
The Ba'al Shem Tov, an eighteenth-century rabbi and founder of the Hasidic movement, famously noted that the Jewish people are like a living Torah scroll, and every individual Jew is a letter within it. If a single letter is damaged or missing or incorrectly drawn, a Torah scroll is considered invalid. So too, in Judaism, each individual is considered a crucial part of the people, without whom the entire religion would suffer. Rabbi Sacks uses this metaphor to make a passionate argument in favor of affiliation and practice in our secular times, and invites us to engage in our dynamic and inclusive tradition. Never has a book more eloquently expressed the joys of being a Jew.
This is the story of one man's hope for the future -- a future in which the next generation, his children and ours, will happily embrace the beauty of the world's oldest religion.

Part I

The Question

1

Why Be Jewish?

SOMETIMES YOU CAN IDENTIFY the moment when a critical question is asked for the first time.

My journey into Jewish identity begins five hundred years ago in Spain, in a place called Calatayud, in the study of the rabbi of the town, Rabbi Isaac ben Moses Arama. He has already gained a wide reputation for his addresses, for they have broken new ground. They are not brief homilies but extended reflections on Jewish philosophy, which take off from some problem in the biblical portion of the week and then soar into the heights of theological speculation.

There is a sense of an ending, for the year is coming to a close. The Jewish New Year is at hand. We have reached the Torah portion of Nitzavim (near the end of the book of Deuteronomy) in which Moses, at the end of his life, renews the covenant of Sinai, some forty years later, with the members of the new generation:

All of you are standing today in the presence of the Lord your God—your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other men of Israel, together with your children and your wives, and the aliens living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water. You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the Lord your God, a covenant the Lord is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, to confirm you this day as His people, that He may be your God as He promised you and as He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I am making this covenant with its oath, not only with you who are standing here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God but also with those who are not here with us today¹

The words are familiar, but a question has occurred to him. Good! This is the way he usually starts a sermon. But as he searches for an answer, he finds himself becoming more enmeshed in perplexity. With a tremor he realizes that this is no ordinary question, for it threatens to unravel his entire life’s work, and indeed his very identity. Eventually he finds an answer and delivers the sermon. But the question has not gone away.²

The question, as he eventually formulated it, was this: Moses stated that he was making the covenant not only with those who were there but also with those who were not there. To whom was he referring as not having been there? Clearly he did not mean members of the nation at that time. They were all there, as the text makes emphatically clear. Nor was he referring to the previous generation. They had already accepted the covenant at Mount Sinai. He meant, as Rashi explains, those who are not yet born —the generations to come.³

Hence the vital importance of this text. It is the very basis of Jewish destiny, the collective immortality of the people of Israel. The covenant will be eternal. It will bind all future generations. Jews will be born into its obligations. Each will be, in the talmudic phrase, mushba ve-omed mi-Sinai, “already forsworn at Sinai.”⁴ There is no need for assent, consent or confirmation. Converts excepted, Jews do not become Jews. They are Jews by birth. Jewish identity, then, is not only a faith, but a fate. It is not an identity we assume, but one into which we are born. That is the proper understanding of the passage as Jewish tradition, and Arama himself, had always read it.

For the first time, though, Arama saw a gap in the logical structure of the covenant. Obligation presupposes consent. I am bound by the promises I make, but I am not bound by the promises you make, unless I agree. There is a rule in Jewish law that someone can impose a benefit on another person without his knowledge. Because he gains, we can therefore assume his agreement. But by the same token someone cannot impose an obligation on another person without his knowledge, for there is no reason to assume that he would agree.⁵ For that reason, children do not inherit their parents’ debts unless property was explicitly mortgaged to meet them.

Now, undoubtedly it is a benefit to be born a Jew. But it is also very demanding. A Jew is bound by 613 commandments. There are restrictions and obligations that he would not have had were he not a Jew. Therefore we cannot impose this status on a person in his absence—without, that is to say, his explicit consent. But that is just what Moses was doing on the banks of the Jordan. He was asking the Israelites to bind their descendants, not yet born, to keep the covenant. That meant imposing obligations on them in their absence, without their agreement. How could one generation bind its successors? How could children be born into duties to which they had not given their consent? How was the eternity of the covenant morally possible?

The rabbi knew that there was a traditional answer, one that went back to an early rabbinical interpretation.⁶ According to this, the souls of all future generations of Jews were present at Mount Sinai. They heard the voice of God. They witnessed revelation. They signaled their assent. But for the first time, Arama realized that this answer would not do.

He puts it this way: a person is a combination of body and soul—absent one, and personhood is lacking. Without a soul, the body is lifeless. Without a body, the soul floats in air. But the two experience the Torah differently. To the soul, God’s command is a delight. To the body, it is a series of constraints. How then does it solve the problem to say that the souls of future generations accepted the Torah? Naturally they would. It is not the soul that might register an objection, but the body. If, then, future generations were not physically present at Mount Sinai we cannot take their agreement for granted. The moral agent—body and soul together—simply was not there. The mystical answer does not answer the moral question.

Isaac Arama eventually proposed a solution. But what has brought me back across the centuries to revisit him in his study that evening is this: that to my knowledge this was the first time the question had been asked in more than a thousand years. In essence Arama was raising the most fundamental of questions: Why am I a Jew? How can the mere fact that my parents were Jews obligate me? How can I be bound by a covenant enacted long ago in the desert by my distant ancestors? Though the vast literature of early and medieval rabbinic Judaism raises almost every conceivable issue, this one question is conspicuous by its absence. The very fact that a question of this kind is posed testifies to a crisis, because it calls into question something that at all other times is taken for granted.

For centuries Spain had been the home of medieval Jewry’s golden age. Under relatively liberal regimes, Jews had risen to eminence in business, the sciences and public life. Their expertise was sought in finance, medicine and diplomacy. They sustained a rich intellectual and cultural life. Jewish learning flourished. Spanish Jewry was noted for its achievements in Jewish law, mysticism and philosophy. But the Jews of Spain were also well versed in the wider culture and made fine contributions to its poetry, politics, astronomy, medicine and cartography.

They were never totally secure. There were periodic attempts to convert them to Christianity. In 1263 the Jewish community was summoned to a public disputation. The Jewish spokesman, Nahmanides, successfully refuted the arguments of his opponent, but he had to pay a price. Two years later he was sentenced to exile. Then, in 1391, there was a volcanic explosion of anti-Jewish feeling. Throughout Spain there were riots. Synagogues were burned, houses and businesses were looted, and many Jews were killed.

For the first time, significant numbers of Jews converted to Christianity. For the next hundred years, there was wave after wave of conversionary activity, accompanied by anti-Jewish legislation. Jews who converted were offered equal citizenship. Those who remained Jewish were confined to special areas, forced to wear distinctive clothing, barred from public life and forbidden to mix with Christians. Eventually, in 1492, the remaining Jews were expelled.

There had been forced conversions before, under both Christian and Islamic rule, but never in such numbers or with such prominence. In the eleventh century Judah Halevi wrote in the Kuzari about the faithfulness of oppressed Jews who, “with a word lightly spoken,” could have ended their misery by joining the faith of their oppressors.⁷In his day the number of converts was small, and he could speak with pride of the heroic resistance of most Jews, who preferred to stay Jewish and suffer rather than desert their faith for the sake of gain.

A century later, the picture was darker. Moses Maimonides, the greatest rabbi of the Middle Ages, was approached for advice by the Jewish community in Yemen. A fanatical Shi’ite Muslim movement was threatening to wipe out Jews who did not convert to Islam. Many did convert. What made things worse was that one of the converts— Samuel, son of Rabbi Judah ibn Abbas—became a missionary to the Jews. Harassed and demoralized, the community turned to Maimonides, who in 1172 replied in a long letter known as The Epistle to Yemen.⁸

He comforted the Jews who remained, telling them that “these trials are designed to test and purify us.” In fact, he said, the Jews who converted were not really Jews, since “God has given assurance … that not only did all the persons who were present at the Sinaitic revelation believe in the prophecy of Moses and in his Law, but that their descendants would do so until the end of time.”⁹ Since all future generations had committed themselves at Mount Sinai, those who defected to another faith merely showed that they were not really Jews. They were not the true descendants of those who stood at Sinai.

So Halevi and Maimonides knew about Jews who left Judaism. They were called conversos or anusim, forced converts. But not until the mass conversions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain did the phenomenon provoke a crisis of faith within Jewry itself. Jews were leaving in great numbers. Many— marranos, as they came to be known— continued to practice Judaism in secret. Those who refused to make such a compromise saw their kinsmen held in honor while they were persecuted. So for the first time a question came to be asked: Why should I remain a Jew? Why should the mere fact that my parents were Jews obligate me to continue? Why should I suffer because of my faith?

We have evidence that these questions troubled the minds of even the most faithful Jews. Don Isaac Abrabanel, contemporary of Rabbi Arama, was the most distinguished Jew of his age. He had been treasurer to King Alfonso V of Portugal and a member of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile. He was also an outstanding Jewish scholar and wrote a great biblical commentary, still studied today. He lived through the Spanish expulsion and escaped to Naples, where he wrote a commentary to the Haggadah. In the course of this work he makes an extraordinary confession. There were moments during those tragic years when, he says, he came close to feeling that “all the Prophets who prophesied about my redemption and salvation are false … Moses may he rest in peace was false in his utterances, Isaiah lied in his consolations, Jeremiah and Ezekiel lied in their prophesies, and likewise all the other prophets … Let the people remember... all the despairing things they used to say at the time of the Exile.”¹⁰ This tone of despair, too, is unprecedented in more than a thousand years.

When Jews ask the question “Why be Jewish?” we know that we are in the presence of a major crisis in Jewish life. I know of only four such occasions in Jewish history. The first occurred in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple in 586 B.C.E. In exile in Babylon, Jews might have gone the way of the ten tribes of the northern kingdom, who a century and a half earlier had assimilated and disappeared. The book of Ezekiel tells us that there were Jews who argued “We want to be like the nations, like the [other] peoples of the earth.”¹¹ In other words, they no longer wanted to be Jews.

The second crisis occurred after the destruction of the second Temple and the later Hadrianic persecutions. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud states that “by rights we should issue a decree against ourselves not to get married and have children, so that the seed of Abraham comes to an end of its own accord.”¹² So great are our sufferings that we should simply not bring any more Jews into the world. Another passage from the same period raises the following question: “If a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, does he then have any further claim on them?”¹³God had handed His people over to the Romans. He no longer ruled their destiny. He had failed to protect them from defeat and savage reprisals. By what right, then, could He lay claim to their loyalty? Why should they continue to be Jews?

The third occurred, as we have seen, in fifteenth-century Spain. For the first time Jews converted to another faith in significant numbers. Those who did so seemed to prosper. Those who remained loyal to their faith suffered ever-increasing persecution. In times such as those, what answer could rabbis like Arama and Abrabanel give to someone who asked, “Why should I remain a Jew?”

The fourth crisis has occurred in our time. For sixty years Jews throughout Europe were the victims of a crescendo of anti-Semitism, culminating in the shattering tragedy of the Holocaust. Where was God when His people were being insulted, humiliated, attacked, degraded, and eventually rounded up and murdered in their millions? Elie Wiesel put it simply: “The Jewish people entered into a covenant with God. We were to protect His Torah and He in turn assumes responsibility for Israel’s presence in the world … Well, it seems, for the first time in history, this very covenant is broken.”¹⁴ Wiesel was wrong in only one respect: it was not the first but the fourth time that the Jewish people had experienced this crisis.

From a Jewish perspective, crisis is experienced in the widespread feeling that the covenant between Israel and God has collapsed. God had promised that the Jewish people would survive. Four times in four thousand years it seemed that survival was in doubt. The Babylonian conquest, the Roman persecutions, the Spanish Expulsion and the Holocaust could easily have brought about the end of the Jewish people. In the first two instances, Jews lost their sovereignty. In the third, they lost their hope of finding security somewhere in the Diaspora. In the fourth, one-third of the Jewish people lost their lives.

What haunts us today, however, is that the fourth crisis did not end with the liberation of the camps and the conclusion of the Second World War. It continues in a new and troubling form. At present, throughout most communities in the Diaspora, one young Jew in two is in effect deciding not to continue the Jewish story by living a Jewish life, marrying another Jew, and having Jewish children and grandchildren. Jewish identity in the contemporary world is being transformed from fate to choice, from a fact of birth to a consciously chosen commitment; and significant numbers of young Jews are evidently unwilling to make that commitment. The future of the Jewish people is once again at risk, this time without the backdrop of external persecution. The question Why be Jewish? is being raised again in a new and searching form.

Judaism is a religion of continuity. It depends for its very existence on the willingness of successive generations to hand on their faith and way of life to their children, and on the loyalty of children to the heritage of their past. That is why the question is so rarely asked in Jewish history and why we have had to travel to fifteenth-century Spain to find a precedent. At most times Jews have seen themselves as a chosen, not a choosing, people. Their identity was self-evident, a given of birth; a fact, not a decision. So when in the past Jews asked why they should continue to be Jewish, what was the answer?

2

Answers

ISAAC ARAMA GAVE ONE REPLY. After thousands of years, Jewish identity was as deeply engraved in the minds of Jews as the instinct of life is in all living creatures. It was, as it were, hardwired into their consciousness. It was no more possible for Jews collectively to desert the covenant than it was for a species to commit suicide. In human societies, even in some parts of the animal kingdom, there are individuals who commit suicide. But they are always the exceptions. Even lemmings go to their death to protect the species as a whole. Within all that lives, there is a desire for life, an instinct for survival. And for Jews that instinct is for Jewish survival. If to live is to love life, then to be a Jew is to love Jewish life.¹

Abrabanel gave a different answer. Ever since Sinai, Jews had committed themselves to God. They were His servants—they belonged to Him and were His property. Until, therefore, God Himself released them from that agreement, they were His. They were bound to the covenant, and the choice to leave was not theirs. Until God said otherwise, they were still His people, his “treasured possession.”²

But in the end, neither was satisfied with these answers. Both Arama and Abrabanel were forced back to a more ancient reply—to the words spoken by Ezekiel two thousand years before:

You say: We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the earth … But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, dec...