The answer lies in the 19th century, when Judaism became a distinctively American religion.
By Steven R. Weisman
Mr. Weisman is the author of the forthcoming “The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion.”
A startling opinion survey released this summer revealed just how wide is the rift between the world’s two largest Jewish communities.
Israelis approve of President Trump’s handling of United States-Israeli relations by 77 percent, which is hardly surprising for the most pro-Israel occupant of the White House in many years. But only 34 percent of American Jews feel the same way, and 57 percent disapprove of Mr. Trump’s approach to Israel, according to the same poll, which was taken by the American Jewish Committee.
This division reflects disagreements over West Bank settlements, Iran and other political issues. But Israel’s departure from its secular origins — including its recent downgrading of non-Jewish citizens’ status and the stranglehold of the Orthodox rabbinate over civil laws and women’s rights — has also rankled many American Jews.
Israelis are red-state Jews. American Jews are blue-state — politically liberal in their outlook.
The liberalism of most American Jews has long confounded American Jewish neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz, who asserts that it is illogical for American Jews to embrace the welfare state, and the taxes to pay for it, given their comfortable economic status. Jews, he has argued, mistakenly think that social justice is rooted in the Torah and other Jewish teachings, such as “tikkun olam,” a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing the world.”
If tikkun olam is central to Judaism, Mr. Podhoretz asked, why do Orthodox American Jews, whose numbers are growing, reliably vote conservative now?
That wasn’t always true. Descended from immigrants who fled injustice, Jews of varying religious traditions have stood up for the underdog and voted for liberal Democrats since before the New Deal, in part because Democrats catered to immigrants’ concerns and because anti-Semitism has been associated more with the right than the left. But the answer to why a majority of Jews are liberals has a deeper explanation, perhaps little appreciated, even by Jews themselves.
That explanation lies specifically in Jewish-American history rooted in the 19th century, when Judaism became a distinctively American religion, substantially changed from what it had been for more than two millenniums.
One factor in the rise of an American Judaism was practical. To assimilate and work in their adopted land, many Jews abandoned some of their ancient practices, from observing the Sabbath to keeping kosher and wearing distinctive clothing. Discarding these practices forced Jews to turn their faith into a devotion to core beliefs, rather than customs and practices.
More broadly, Jews sought to “Americanize” their rituals, making them look more like the church ceremonies of their neighbors. The largely German immigrants of the 19th century started Sunday schools, mixed men and women in family pews and incorporated choirs, organ music and sermons in their services while rejecting or shortening some obscure prayers. These changes provoked debates, division and lawsuits. But they took hold, even among traditionalists, and continued even after the influx of two million Jews from Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
The most significant change to Judaism was its untethering from the ancient tradition of praying for an altogether human messiah to deliver the Jews back to Jerusalem, restore the ancient temple destroyed in the year A.D. 70 and re-establish the House of David to rule over Jews in their ancient land of Zion, as prophesied in the Bible. These were among the enduring 13 principles codified as central to Judaism by Maimonides in the 12th century.
In 1841, the Jews of Charleston, S.C. — then the largest Jewish community in the United States — rebuilt Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue after a fire and installed an organ, provoking a seminal court battle. The new building posted Maimonides’s main principles but eliminated the ones about going back to Zion. Gustavus Poznanski, the synagogue’s spiritual leader, declared at the dedication, “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.”
Rejecting the plea for a “personal” messiah was hardly without controversy. After disavowing the practice of praying for a personal messiah, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise was ousted from his synagogue in Albany, N.Y., on the eve of Rosh Hashana in 1851 and got into a fistfight with his detractors when he defiantly tried to take the Torah from the ark anyway. The ensuing riot had to be quelled by the police.
But the abandonment of a belief in a Jesus-like messiah figure generally prevailed, as did the growing use of the term “temple” in the United States to describe a Jewish house of worship, as if to imply that the ancient temple of Jerusalem had become irrelevant.
Yet Jews continued to be drawn to the concept of an era of redemption as foretold by the ancient prophets, a time when the wolf would lie down with the lamb. The difference was that while Jews prayed for such a prospect, they increasingly understood that it was up to humans to work to achieve it. In this, American Jews were influenced by the mainstream Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening, the Transcendentalists and others who substituted human agency for God’s work.
Increasingly, Jews in America saw themselves as playing a redemptive role. “We are deeply convinced that Israel has been called by God to be the messiah of the nations and spread truth and virtue on earth,” as Chicago Sinai Congregation put it in the 1860s, using “Israel” as a reference to the Jewish people. The idea of a special messianic “mission” for Jews achieved an apotheosis at the conclave of rabbis in Pittsburgh who established what became known as Classical Reform Judaism.
The Pittsburgh Platform declared in 1885 that it was the duty of Jews “to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” These pioneering Jews also redefined their history of the diaspora, or exile, seeing these punishments less as retribution for misdeeds committed in antiquity and more as a sacred assignment to disperse, proclaim justice and set an example for a world in need of repair.
Today that idea has spread well beyond Reform Judaism. Arnold Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the leading Conservative institution in the United States, has noted that the idea of Jews as a “chosen people” appears throughout the Bible and that Jews have embraced the message of later prophets that Jews are “the servant of mankind” and “a light unto the nations.”
For many American Jews, the prophetic and messianic role of the Jewish people themselves has become central to their faith. A Pew Research Center survey of American Jews found in 2013 that among the five million American Jews, most regarded “working for justice and equality” as a pillar of their Jewish identity.
It happens to be true that the phrase “tikkun olam” is a kind of modern neologism, derived from Jewish mysticism. But the idea of Judaism with a social conscience is rooted in a rich history of American Jews struggling to Americanize their faith while seeing their “chosen” status as an opportunity to “repair the world.”
Steven R. Weisman, the vice president for publications and communications at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is the author of the forthcoming “The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion” and a former correspondent and editor at The Times.
As taken from, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/opinion/american-jews-israel-liberals.html?emc=edit_th_180820&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=851744250820
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