Secularization as a set of circumstances

Yehouda Shenhav's blustery review of "New Jewish Time" is full of mistakes based on his misreading of the text and his misconceptions about the world. Some are the outcome of his tendency to reach hasty conclusions, based on a cursory reading of the text and associations drawn from his own backyard and his own battles. Others are the product of reading stereotypes into the writing of others, and rushing to accuse them of employing the ideological cliches that shape the critic's own thinking.

Shenhav denies that Europe has undergone any kind of secularization. Suffice it to say that if Europe had not undergone a profound process of secularization, religious principles and the religious establishment would be ruling the lives of the continent's inhabitants until today. Religion would still be the pivot of state authority, law and order, personal and public morals, and the entire normative system. Democracy as we know it would not exist. Research and science would be restricted. Churches and synagogues would be full, and the Jews would be willingly living in ghettoes, with a culture revolving primarily around religious study and rabbinic literature. Their intellectual power would be invested chiefly in debating the finer points of Jewish law, with a little mysticism thrown in. There would be no Haaretz book supplement, let alone the kind of books it reviews. Is that what life looks like today?

Shenhav claims that religion is on the rise, and growing stronger everywhere, including Europe. He calls this "post-secularism" (although one could ask: If there is no secularization, then how can there be post-secularism?). When it comes to Europe, this argument holds no water: In France not only are the churches empty, but there are hardly any priests. Churches are closing down and going to wrack and ruin. Even the most Catholic countries - Spain, Ireland and Italy - have undergone rapid secularization, and the predominance of religion in all facets of life has taken a beating. Only in Poland has the Catholic Church remained strong, and that sharp contrast serves to play up how secularized the rest of the continent has become.

But a discussion of the situation today is not relevant to a review of the encyclopedia under review. Even if we say, for the sake of argument, that the world is no longer moving toward secularization, this doesn't cancel out the historical processes of secularization that the authors have set out to document. Shenhav quotes a few sociologists from his camp. Allow me to quote a few philosophers from the 19th century, who keenly captured the spirit of their times. Hegel, exactly 200 years ago, wrote about how the "thread of light" that connected everything to heaven had been severed. And Hegel was not a philosopher of the Enlightenment that Shenhav so abhors; he was one of its fiercest critics. Later, Heinrich Heine came along and announced that Kant had murdered God and left the Creator of the Universe lying in a pool of blood. Then came Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared that God was dead, but had left his shadow on culture. Nietzsche grasped the fact that Europe had undergone a profound process of secularization that changed the culture, but that this process was far from complete and some norms were still grounded in the religion of old. One would be hard pressed to find a more apt way of putting it: There were tensions and conflicts in this move toward secularization, but certain vestiges of sanctity remained.

In contrast to what Shenhav says, recognizing this only creates a more interesting and complex picture of the secularization process; it doesn't prove it never happened. In the professional literature there is a dubious theory according to which secularization is intrinsic to human history, or at least an unstoppable process that will eventually engulf the whole world. But these are baseless metaphysical beliefs that go beyond historical fact, and are as far from this encyclopedia as East from West. In any case, there is no automatic connection between the empirical claim that the West has undergone secularization and dogma of this kind.

For the sake of intellectual accuracy, we should be asking three different questions: Is there concrete evidence that the West has undergone a profound secular shift? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Is it a process that is inevitable or part of some greater design? I would say no. Is this process still going on today? To a moderate degree, yes, and primarily in Europe.

Shenhav is wrong from the start, with his Christian-religious interpretation of the name of the encyclopedia. The title "New Jewish Time" refers to contemporary Judaism and nothing more. Shenhav claims that in using this name, we are setting up a simplistic correlation between modernity and secularism (which is the basis for most of his criticism). But the introduction to the encyclopedia states the very opposite: It emphasizes that secularism is one component of modernity, and analyzes the relationship between the two terms, which "do not overlap."

Shenhav's statements about the goal of the encyclopedia create an even more serious distortion. He announces that it is an attempt to define the nature of secular Jewish culture (and concludes that it fails). The introduction clearly states otherwise: "What do we mean by secular Jewish culture? One way of finding out (not a very creative way) is to look for a formal definition. But formal definitions are not particularly enlightening, and in this case, there simply are none. First of all, secular Jewish culture, in its multitude of forms, was created in response to a need that had no historical precedent. In consequence, this culture, with its vital, dynamic character, is typically diffuse and decentralized. There is no supreme authority or solid rallying point. Secularism cannot be approached in the same way as religion; there are no binding, normative patterns."

More than one flavor

We concluded that one cannot define secular Jewish culture, and did not even try to do so. Hence, Shenhav's pronouncement that we failed is meaningless. But what can be done in the absence of a definition? Our solution was to offer a detailed description, empirical and historical, of the processes of secularization in various spheres of Jewish life, and to provide a partial, but representational picture of the cultural products they engendered: social phenomena, trends, personalities and projects. Accordingly, we defined our goal as follows: "This encyclopedia is an attempt to trace the processes of modernization and secularization in the Jewish world over the last 250 years, and to portray, or more precisely, to bring examples of the diverse and multifaceted culture that Jews have created in the wake of these processes."

Indeed, that is the only goal of the encyclopedia: to delineate processes and showcase some of the products. Not to preach secularism (it is not an ideology), not to lock it into a formal definition (which is not possible), and not to set out "tenets" (it is not a religion), but to offer a glimpse of what has happened to Jewish culture in the era of Western and Jewish secularization. The series was written for interested readers, secular or not, who are curious about their history and the state of Judaism today, and want to know more about the events that precipitated the process and the new cultural products to which it has given birth. That is all (although it is quite a lot), and we believe that we have accomplished this mission.

For me, secularization is not an "ideology," as Shenhav writes, but a set of historical and existential circumstances. Secularism, at least in the West, is a lifestyle into which people are born nowadays. They become self-aware within it, and must respond to it and cope with its challenges. It is a lifestyle that is not without its tensions. It can be adopted, or rejected, or moderated in different ways, but it cannot be ignored without self-delusion. Of course, the question is what we mean by secularization, and how it manifests itself. In the introduction, the encyclopedia offers a serious, in-depth answer to that. But Shenhav flattens everything into stereotypes. He ascribes to me (and the whole project) a simplistic "secularization theory" - "binary," he calls it - according to which secularization means only one thing: a total, sweeping rejection of religion in all its forms. Is that really where I stand?

The second part of the introduction completely disproves this. It begins with the statement that secularization is a cluster of processes - not a static outcome. The implication is that secularism doesn't come in one flavor. It is not a finished product. Everything is in flux (and is a matter of proportion). Then the text moves on to an analysis of some half-a-dozen different meanings of the term, some of them standing alone and others overlapping. Contrary to Shenhav's claims, I emphasize that secularization can even exist when a person believes in God and divine intervention. This is because secularization in its primary sense does not mean abolishing religion and faith, but no longer regarding it as the center of life.

Liberated from religion

Even those who believe in God may feel that religion has ceased to be the pivot of their lives and the life of the community, and no longer provides the same kind of justification for their existence as individuals and for the existence of the state. Another important sense is emancipation on the national level: The state, the economy, public and private morals, philosophy and the sciences are liberated from the demands of religion, and are free to develop in keeping with their own immanent norms (even religious people are starting to object to the intervention of the religious establishment in these realms).

Secularization is also the "breaking of the spell," the fading of the supernatural halo attributed to this world as being the corridor leading to the next one, and the crisis of faith affecting attitudes toward the traditional intermediaries - the church, the laws of the Torah, religious rituals and saints - that link man to the celestial world. Again, none of this implies the automatic embrace of atheism or agnosticism. Hence, loss of faith in God and divine providence is only fifth on the list. More important as a component of secularization is the individual's personal validation of tradition (a principle that Shenhav attacks with fury and tosses into the "graveyard of the history of ideas," although he himself would be nowhere without it). So it is easy to see that the project is grounded in a complex and multifaceted approach to secularization, and is very far from being "binary."

Shenhav complains that my typology leaves no room for any intermediary category between traditional and secular. Again, he has misread the text. A whole paragraph in the introduction is devoted to people who might be classified as "traditional," but have many secular components in their lifestyle and environment. These are people who are unwilling to embrace a completely secular lifestyle and ideology. They retain a certain belief in God, and on the strength of these glimmers of faith, as well as their respect for their parents' teachings, they observe some of the customs of the religion in which they were brought up. On the other hand, there are also "hardcore" secularists, who approach tradition from a different angle, and are willing to introduce certain ceremonies and rituals in their daily lives if they lend themselves to a nonreligious interpretation.

So where are the binary opposites, Prof. Shenhav? Where do you see anyone ignoring "Mizrahi" typology? In practice, these distinctions are just as applicable to my grandfather, Leib Freifeld, who kept the basic commandments without being a fanatic, but allowed his children to choose differently.

Prof. Yirmiyahu Yovel teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York and is chair of the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute. He is editor in chief of "New Jewish Time."