September 26, 2024

The question of what it means to be Jewish is not a new one, and there is certainly no shortage of texts devoted to answering this question. But in the aftermath of Oct. 7 this question takes on new urgency. Now, when we ask what it means to be Jewish today, we do not mean in this century or in this decade; we mean today — what does it mean to be Jewish today, in a moment where antisemitism is more pronounced than most people have experienced in their lifetimes, in a time when Jews in both Israel and the diaspora often disagree vehemently, and in which evil is regularly called good?

In his new book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue provides an answer to this question as we approach the one-year mark since the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas. Published on Sept. 24, the book also appears just one week before Rosh Hashanah. Given that the holiday is not just a time of joy and celebration but also one of introspection and reflecting on the past year as we move into the Days of Awe, the timing is prescient. The irony is that Cosgrove’s book contains more questions than it does answers, but it is this very tension, this pushing and pulling, that makes the response so powerful. And because it is an answer to a question that can never be fully resolved, it becomes more meaningful to us in a time when concrete answers feel disingenuous.

Trauma and Being Jewish

The book begins in trauma, a trauma that is still an open wound, a fresh wound. We are not yet on the other side of it. We have not yet worked through it because we are still inside of it. It has not yet begun to heal. Decades of post-Holocaust trauma studies and philosophical inquiries into the nature of suffering have taught us that to be within a period of collective trauma is to be within a blind spot, to be unable to understand clearly what has happened or what it means for us because we do not have access to the vantage point that would allow it. We do not yet know the full story. This is the difficulty of responding to the question of what it means to be Jewish today. We do not yet have the luxury of looking back on the events of Oct. 7 — and the ensuing war and attacks on the north by Hezbollah, the endless waiting for news of the hostages, the crushing avalanche of blatantly anti-Jewish racism across the world — and knowing how it will end. We are forced, instead, even if it feels like we are grasping aimlessly in the dark, to find stories of heroism and anecdotes of overcoming as we try to cultivate resilience. It feels like an impossible task, and yet we cannot not aspire to it.

For Cosgrove, the prime example of this is the biblical figure of Esther, who is credited with saving the Jewish people from death and destruction at the hands of the evil Haman. Esther’s heroism empowers us. But as Cosgrove points out, it’s not just about her choices but also her decision to be an agent, her willingness to play a part in the future of the Jewish people. Perhaps this is the crux of the book’s reflections: To be Jewish, today, means to be willing to take an active role in the future of the Jewish people. In Judaism, we are not usually so concerned with intent or willingness. It’s what you do that matters. The nature of intent is more the territory of Christianity, after all. But in this case, both a willingness and an intent must precede the action, because without it, first of all the action may not come to fruition. And second, being willing to step away from the sidelines and become an active agent has a transformative power. It is in this space that we begin to find what it means to be Jewish today.

To be Jewish, today, means to be willing to take an active role in the future of the Jewish people. In Judaism, we are not usually so concerned with intent or willingness. It’s what you do that matters. 

As the story goes, when Mordecai discovers that Haman has released an edict calling for the annihilation of Jews, he is beside himself. He dons sackcloth and wails loudly and bitterly throughout the town. When Esther questions why he is engaging in this behavior, he tells her all he knows and says that she must go before the king to plead with him for her people. But to approach the king in his inner court without being summoned can mean death unless the king grants mercy. Esther knows that this law applies even to her, the wife of the king, and she says as much to Mordecai, who replies:

“Do not imagine that you, of all Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this moment, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for such a time as this” (Esther 4:13-14).

It’s a curious suggestion in a tradition that, at least since the end of World War II, has mostly resisted the notion that everything happens for a reason. If everything happens for a reason, or if God has a divine plan for everything that transpires, both good and bad, then suffering can be justified or seen as having some kind of usefulness. We know, of course, that there is no such thing as the useful suffering of others. All suffering is “useless,” said Levinas, “for nothing.” This doesn’t mean that we aren’t free to find meaning in our own suffering, but only that it is indecent to find it in the suffering of others. Both Primo Levi and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas insisted that theodicy — the idea that there is a grand divine purpose for everything — was transgressive, and that if nothing else the events during the Holocaust proved that this is so. And yet here is Mordecai, proclaiming the possibility that Esther has been placed in her position as a queen “for such a time as this.” 

But the question is what we make of this suggestion. Is Mordecai suggesting that Esther has been placed in this position for a divine purpose, or is it something else? Given that God is not mentioned explicitly in the Book of Esther, it’s possible to surmise that this isn’t so simple as Esther being placed in this role for a divine purpose. If “relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter” should Esther fail to act, then perhaps it is not necessarily her actions that will be the catalyst for redemption here; rather, it is simply her willingness to be an agent of change. For Cosgrove this point is of paramount importance. 

Esther’s heroism is empowering for all of us. “Her leadership moments, and all the ‘Esther moments’ since, can be measured by the degree to which we cease to be bystanders and take action.” But first we must be willing.

In every era of Jewish persecution, Jewish responses have varied. Cosgrove outlines two primary responses in his fourth chapter: empathy and vigilance. We all experience suffering at some point. No human can escape it. “A terrible hurt has been inflicted on our people,” he says, “how shall we respond?” But we’re not the first Jewish generation to ask that question. The Passover story is confirmation of this. Every year during Pesach most Jews sit down for a seder, a dinner that includes the telling of the story of the Israelites’ journey from Egyptian bondage under Pharoah to freedom. The Passover Haggadah “relays a national saga of trauma.” In other words, we have been here before. For Cosgrove, Passover is “less a story about liberation” than it is a story about how we Jews need to be on guard for the Pharoah who will rise up in every generation and the oppression of Jews that will inevitably follow. The lesson is that we must be vigilant.

The lesson is that we must be vigilant. 

But at Passover, this vigilance spills over into the desire for vengeance when we welcome in the prophet Elijah and recite the passage in which we ask God to pour out his “divine wrath upon the nations … and destroy them.” This moment speaks to the “spiteful aspect of the Jewish response to vulnerability.” Historically, we have always been forced to choose between empathy and vigilance — two threads that explain “both our origins and our present day” — and, as is the case with the Passover Haggadah, the Book of Esther’s ending is all about vigilance. We remember our victimhood, while also remaining hypervigilant, and these two aspects are “codified” not just into our yearly calendar but also into “the soul of the Jewish people.”

The mass immigration of Jews to America at the turn of the 20th century provided us with an opportunity to respond with empathy. When we arrived in America, “Jews operationalized empathy by establishing social services and self-help agencies aimed at supporting at-risk Jewish populations or advocating for Jewish interests.” The founding of organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 1881, the American Jewish Committee in 1906, and the Joint Distribution Committee in 1914 among others “reflected the first organizational steps toward an impressive scaffolding of support by which American Jewry could lend aid to Jewish interests worldwide.” As Jews assimilated into mainstream American culture, their services “expanded to include a much broader humanity.” Jews were, for the first time in a long time, in the position to “put their words into action by way of tikkun olam, ‘mending the world.’” Organizationally, American Jewry “pivoted from particularism to universalism,” ultimately becoming advocates of some of the most progressive causes in American history.

Years later in 1948, when the State of Israel was established, “millennia of exiled victimhood” seemed to come to an end. Still “the remembrance of that trauma and vulnerability persists.” The number of battles and conflicts that Israel has experienced in the brief period since its founding demonstrates the “tensions in its national psyche” that “reflect competing responses to the trauma of war.” Cosgrove references the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when 2,656 soldiers were killed, more than 12,000 wounded and hundreds captured and tortured. “Israel would never be the same: The shockwaves of the war reverberated through the country into the years to come.”

For decades scholars have pointed out the way in which collective and inherited trauma is a crucial component of American Jewish identity. But as “is the case with diaspora Jewry, the tensions within Israel are also situated on questions of the response to trauma.” Questions about issues such as settlements and judicial reform are also about “deeper questions in Israel’s substratum of how Israelis respond to the pain of the wars it has fought, and continues to fight.” An important question, however, persists: “Shall the hand it reaches out be open and extended or closed into a fist?” And will American Jews “define themselves with an inclusive and universal empathy or guard against another spasm of antisemitic hatred dating back to Pharoah?”

Vigilance or empathy: We are forever caught between the two responses.

The answer to the question of what it means to be Jewish today is bound up in other questions that continue to be complicated but are nonetheless worth asking. “Are Jews guided by a universalizing empathy or a hardened vigilance? Are we powerless or powerful, outsiders or insiders, vulnerable or strong?” These questions have been posed for a long time. “They are part of the backstory of the Jewish experience, both diaspora and Israeli.” They are also critical to understanding the diversity of responses “in Israel, the diaspora, and around the world to the traumas of Oct. 7.”

Israel and American Jews

Israel is a bit of a paradox. On one hand, “the whole point of Israel was to be a Jewish state. On the other hand, it has sought to enter the community of nations as a liberal democracy.” The tension between these two imperatives cannot be understated. Israel must be a land that gathers Jewish exiles to it, and that provides a safe harbor for any Jew seeking it; but, as claimed in its Declaration of Independence, it also aspires to ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” Since its inception, there has been a “push and a pull in Israel between its two founding impulses.” Cosgrove rightfully points out that given Israel’s lack of any equivalent to the American principle of separation of church and state, things have gotten murky. As the ultra-Orthodox community has grown larger and larger, so has its influence. 

It’s no wonder that some American Jews have begun to feel alienated from the State of Israel, and that many Jews of the next generation have a waning attachment to it.

For Cosgrove, the cracks in his “competing visions of Israel’s future broke open” when he was living in Israel in 1995, the year Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. He recounts his shock upon learning that it was a Jew who killed the prime minister. “I can see that Rabin’s death was not the only one that occurred that day. The vision of Israel that he represented also died.” Following the assassination, Israeli politics took a decidedly rightwing turn — “the growth of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, and the rise of religious extremism all reflect a hardening of Israel’s body politic.” Add to this two intifadas, multiple rocket attacks, relentless bombings and the rise in Palestinian extremism and it is clear to see that “Israel’s peace camp has more or less crumbled.” 

Meanwhile, the Jews of America continued to assimilate and leave their old accents, neighborhoods and traditions behind, “embracing a secular and pluralistic vision of America.” There is a marked distinction between American and Israeli brands of Judaism: Israel’s “stated goal is to be a Jewish state,” but in America no religion can “have the upper hand”; there is separation between church and state. And this is the soil from which all the different forms of American Judaism were born. 

Still far more pronounced was Jewish Americans’ move away from religion altogether. Rather than synagogues, Jews built organizations, institutions and advocacy groups. Holocaust remembrance became a “communal priority.” The “rhythms of the American Jew may not be religious ones, but they reflect a secular religion adapted to American shores.” Yet more than anything, it was engagement with Israel that became the “religion” of American Jews. American Jews felt stronger and safer and more determined with the existence of Israel. Engagement with Israel became the “religion of American Jews,” and at times, “it became an orthodoxy.”

Engagement with Israel became the “religion of American Jews,” and at times, “it became an orthodoxy.”

For American Jews, “uninspired by the prayerbook, unfamiliar with the Talmud,” it became easier to write a check to support Israel than to keep children home on Shabbat or insist on the laws of kashrut. Rather than arguments about Torah or levels of observance, now dividing lines were drawn between commitments to and support for Israel.

As we see, there is a profound difference between the “religion” of American Jewry and the “reality of Israel,” and the Palestinian-Israel conflict is the most contentious point here. Many American Jews see their “most prized liberal value in peril” with the continued occupation of the West Bank, and it doesn’t matter how or why those territories were acquired, or the extent to which safety concerns are part of it. They only care that the territories continue to be occupied, and this is, to them, a threat to Israel’s “commitment to democracy.” Liberal and progressive values have become the religion of many American Jews, and its tenets are codified so deeply that to push back against them is tantamount to heresy. 

American Jews become more estranged from Israel, a country that defines itself by “physical borders and a national identity,” whereas American Jewry is “defined by religious borders” and ideological boundaries. An example Cosgrove notes is the simple fact that Israeli kids graduate from high school and go to the military, while American kids graduate and attend one of the many liberal colleges or universities that often assist in chipping away at any remaining loyalty to Israel. While Israel’s border incursions “come from Lebanon and Gaza,” in America ours come “from intermarriage.”

There has never been more of a disconnect between Israeli and American Jews. But “strengthening the bonds” between us “is one of the paramount issues facing Judaism today.” We must find “common ground and points of dialogue.” Cosgrove is optimistic. Such a future is not out of our reach. Rather than being “clumsy dance partners” stepping on each other’s toes, we must, in the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “find a language that permits us to remain distinct yet produces a unified sound.”

Genesis and Exodus Jews

It would be impossible to delineate what it means to be Jewish today without addressing the rampant antisemitism that has quickly come to define our time. “History never repeats itself,” said Voltaire. “Man always does.” It’s no wonder that vigilance is our default mode in the wake of trauma. This insight is threaded through our DNA, imprinted on our collective memory. Cosgrove imagines Jew-hatred as a spectrum or sliding scale — “from the most vulgar to the most genteel.” At one end, the lowest end, we find “acts of hate-filled violence,” and at the other we find “modest and sometimes barely perceptible sleight-of-hand exclusion … cloaked in pseudo-scholarship.”

We are not unused to contending with “lower” antisemitism, “violence against Jews because they are Jews.” The 2018 murder of Jews at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the hateful “antisemitic screeds in the dark and not-so-dark corners of the web,” the violent assaults and chants such as in Charlottesville: “Jews will not replace us.” Cosgrove reminds us that this kind of antisemitism comes from both the right and the left, from white nationalists and Islamic fundamentalism. And while some deploy the most complex mental gymnastics in order to justify the attacks of Oct. 7, we know that these too were violent attacks on Jews because they were Jewish, notwithstanding those of many other ethnicities and nationalities who were also attacked.

But it’s the “higher” antisemitism that has ”stung the most and shaken American Judaism to its core.” It is also the most widespread and often the “most difficult to discern.” It’s no secret that the critique of Zionism is often a more politically correct expression of Jew-hatred, though it’s not always easy to detect. “The left wing’s critique of Zionism as a colonial project born of sin ignores the thousands of years of Jewish claim to the land, the present-day case for a Jewish nation-state, and cycle after cycle of Arab rejectionism of any Jewish presence in the Middle East.” In fact, the word “Zionist” is “a convenient and fungible term used by antisemites to mask Jew hatred.”

But it’s the “higher” antisemitism that has ”stung the most and shaken American Judaism to its core.”

While less physically violent, this form of antisemitism is “more nefarious” as we realize that “in the eyes of many, Jewish lives are worth less than other lives.” Over the past year, violence has erupted on college campuses, Jewish students have been attacked and blocked from classes, pro-Hamas students have protested the presence of Hillel, and the list goes on. We have watched “hatred, in all its manifestations, emerge with ferocity, diversity, and ubiquity.” 

Despite this darkness, we are experiencing a “tribal awakening.” Most of us know Jews who used to fly under the radar, who considered themselves secular, more American than Jewish, but are now suddenly more committed to engaging in acts of ritual that affirm their Jewishness. Jews who rarely set foot in synagogue are now donning tefillin. We’ve been awakened.

Despite this darkness, we are experiencing a “tribal awakening.”

“In a world that struggles to name evil for what it is, we are thirsting for a moral axis to the universe, where wrong can be named as such.” This is very much what it means to be Jewish today.

To understand this tribal moment more fully, Cosgrove calls on what Rabbi Donniel Hartman calls “Genesis Jews” and “Exodus Jews.” The Book of Exodus immediately follows Genesis, but the two texts could not be more different. In Genesis we find the story of origins and of matriarchs and patriarchs. The narratives are epic: We cross the Red Sea and stand at Mt. Sinai. Identities are passed down through families and inherited. But in Exodus, it isn’t enough to be Jewish because your father Abraham was. In Exodus, we become Jews through doing — “by assent or consent.”

Cosgrove identifies the “positive pull” of being Jewish in Genesis versus the “negative push” from those around them (the Egyptians, for example) that brings them together in Exodus. Although he sees a more nuanced overlap between the pushing and pulling of the two books, he makes a crucial point: In America, we became Genesis Jews, but now we are Exodus Jews. Perhaps nowhere is this more crystallized than in the example of American Jews fighting for progressive causes. Many embraced “the cause of Black lives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and of Asian lives in the wake of the mass shootings of 2021.” But when it came time for our progressive allies to stand with us on Oct. 7, to “name the crimes of violence perpetrated against Jews,” including “barbaric sexual violence,” they were silent. We felt, instead, the Exodus phenomenon, the negative push that distinguished us from all of our progressive allies: our Jewishness.

A new Pharoah has once again risen. “We are without question in an Exodus moment. We must find our front lines, the places where we, as individuals and as a community, can make a difference and fight the fight of our people.” We have to do this. But we must “never forget that we are also a people of Genesis, that this thing we are fighting for, Jews and Judaism, is a joy, a privilege, and a blessing to us and all people.” How do we do this? We defend Israel, we light Shabbat candles, we go to Jewish organization meetings on how to talk to our children, we take our kids to synagogues, we get involved in the often painful battles in higher education. We remind ourselves of “who we are.”

We are a people of both Genesis and Exodus, and as such we must “stand up and stand tall in defense of our people and never lose sight of the joy and the privilege that comes with being a Jew today.” There’s no binary here. We are a people who understands how to do both, how to be both. “Our Jewishness comes from both the push and the pull.” We need both. “The two together must inform who we are and what we will be in such a time as this.”

We Are Our Brother’s and Sister’s Keeper

The biblical story of Cain rising up and killing his brother Abel “serves as a scriptural backdrop for contending with the pernicious moral equivalencies that emerged in the wake of the attacks of Oct. 7.” A crucial part of the text is what remains untold. We do not know the reason they argued. But the “fragmented nature of the text is altogether intentional; the ellipses within is its very point. There is nothing that could’ve happened, nothing that could’ve been said, to justify Cain’s murder of his brother.” And in “leaving the dialogue unstated, the bible provides moral clarity.”

As a rabbinical leader, Cosgrove knew that after Oct.7 he must help to provide moral clarity. Contrary to what anti-Israel voices will shout from the rooftop, there is no context that justifies what happened on Oct. 7. “There is right and there is wrong, and no context or circumstance can justify Cain’s murderous deeds.”

“In the face of abnormal evil,” writes Michael Wyschogrod, “abnormal responses are necessary.” There is a point at which military action is not only justified but also necessary. But, says Cosgrove, we also have a responsibility to ask about the lives of Palestinians. “We are our brother’s and sister’s keeper … It is the backbone to who we are.” We take care of our Jewish brothers and sisters, but that does not mean we cannot extend that concern to innocents impacted by Israel’s military response. While the perpetrators of violence against our people must be brought to justice, “Israel must never fall prey to the perils of unchecked vengeance.”

As we navigate these dark and unpredictable waters, Cosgrove reminds us that the greatest risk is the enemy within, “the danger of infighting among our people.” It “brings about a self-inflicted trauma and the most horrific outcome our rabbis could imagine — the end of a sovereign Jewish state” It’s important to “disagree without allowing those disagreements to be the undoing of our people.” “We need to step forward together,” he says, because “we have hearts of many rooms.”

As we navigate these dark and unpredictable waters, Cosgrove reminds us that the greatest risk is the enemy within.

The Book of Esther is the book “by which to understand our moment.” It carries “extraordinary significance for Jewish identity.” The question is whether we are willing to be agents for the future of the Jewish people. “We will learn to rise up from sorrow. To hurt is human, to begin again is divine.”

Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish studies. She is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal and is author of “The Midrashic Impulse.” X @DrMonicaOsborne