Well, this sure explains some attitudes that I’ve run across.
Years ago, I was sharing an office at Hunter College with a very observant Orthodox Jew, Michael Wyschogrod. He is a distinguished Jewish theologian — not only did he faithfully follow the Torah, but his religion was clearly at the very center of his life. This created a deep bond between us, finding ourselves in a radically liberal university in which religion was at best tolerated, at times overtly ridiculed, or subtly undermined by insinuations such as “passé,” “mediaeval,” and unscientific. No one should be surprised that according to Msgr. Herman Heide, a chaplain of the Hunter College Newman club, 65 percent of Catholic students lost their faith by their senior year.
Orthodox Judaism, however, was not the butt of persecutions. My colleague, born in Berlin, first went to a very orthodox grammar school. Then the family wisely emigrated to the United States. He went to a Yiddish-speaking Eastern European school, and spent a year studying the Talmud. He then received his Ph.D. at Columbia University. This “extra” religious education was no obstacle to either appointment or promotion at CUNY. Once in the course of my long career, a priest (no longer wearing his collar) applied for a position at Hunter. His outstanding curriculum vitae promptly landed in the nearest wastepaper basket. However, there were Rabbis and Protestant ministers on the Hunter faculty.
Roman Catholicism, when taken seriously, was unacceptable in secular colleges because it aimed at converting people and thereby depriving them of their freedom of thought. Catholics by definition proselytize. Orthodox Jews do not share this fanaticism. Moreover, Catholics have a magisterium that necessarily has a paralyzing effect on intellectual “creativity.” Dogmas are an intellectual straight jacket that kills progress in the bud.
My colleague and I became friends; the bond between us was that we both took our faith seriously. With time we had more and more “non-professional exchanges.” One day, trusting my friendship, Wyschogrod said to me: “To be frank with you, what we Jews resent about Roman Catholics is that they are always trying to convert us.” To which I replied with Latin speed; “What we, Roman Catholics, deplore is that you never try to convert us.” His answer: “The Jews are God’s Chosen People. It is to them, and to them alone, that He has revealed Himself. Therefore, the treasures that we have received are not meant to be shared with others.” He added: “but you can be saved in your own way.” My efforts to convince him that man longed for the fullness of truth and could only find peace in finding it left him unconvinced.
He added that the covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants was sealed in blood: the circumcision. Judaism was “a carnal faith”; it is a covenant sealed in the flesh. To be Jewish is something that is determined by blood and therefore something that cannot be shared.
As a result, an orthodox Jew feels closer to an extremely liberal Jew or even to an atheistic Jew (whose Weltanschauung is radically opposed to his) than he does to a deeply believing Christian whose life is centered on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because he shares the blood-factor with the first. In their views, blood seems to have priority over the question of faith.
Some Jews are firm believers, i.e. observant; some are conservative; some reform Jews, others are atheists; some believe in the immortality of the human soul, some do not. But those who deny God’s existence do not thereby sever their full-fledged incorporation in the Jewish race. As Wyschogrod writes: “Before God, there is only the one Jewish people, from which no Jew can resign” (The Body of Faith).
When I raised the question of the immortality of the soul, he evaded taking a definite position and dubbed it a “Greek idea.” To me, the question of Greek or non Greek was totally irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was “is it true?” To him, his key concern was “is it biblical?”
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