The National Poetic Rebirth of the Jewish People

By HAIM ZHITLOVSKY

Haim Zhitlovsky (1861-1943), an architect of Jewish-American secularism, sought to enhance Jewish identity, continuity, and perseverance through the embrace of Jewish values, humanism, socialist ideals, Yiddish nationalism, and Jewish culture. He was born in Byelorussia, studied at the universities of Zurich and Bern (receiving his doctorate in 1892), and later co-founded the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party. When he moved to the United States in 1910, he worked as an editor, public speaker, and activist in the progressive Jewish community.

Zhitlovsky was a strong advocate for secular Jewish nationalism. He felt that Jews should retain their religious myths, traditions, and images—but not in a theological way. Instead, he believed that Jewish texts should be divested of their divine meaning and injected with cultural and nationalistic meaning. Here was a way of abandoning dogma while, at the same time, retaining Jewish spirit and culture. The result would be so beautiful, thought Zhitlovsky, so full of "human beauty," that he called it poetry. Zhitlovsky thus championed a "poetic rebirth of the Jewish people."

The following excerpt from Judaism in a Secular Age: An Anthology of Secular Humanistic Jewish Thought (Ktav Publishing House, 1995) contains a portion of Zhitlovsky’s essay, "The National Poetic Rebirth of the Jewish People."

… The process of poetic rebirth which the Jewish religion is now going through has grown stronger rather than weaker. In Russia and Galicia, and even in America—where the growth of the Jewish consciousness is so distorted by the bizarre national situation there—the process of rebirth is visible. Much of this is due to the national revival of the Jewish people now taking place all over the Diaspora.

Now, every religious yearning—for God, for holiness, for “something outside ourselves,” for something transcendent—is a kind of poetry. But this is not the kind of rebirth of the Jewish religion that I have in mind. I am talking about conscious poetic expression, where religious images, myths, and ceremonies become precious to us not because we believe in their divine origin, but because our spirit is moved by their human beauty. They evoke in us such poetic feelings and thoughts that we consider them humanistic sanctities. Only this kind of rebirth can remain free of any metaphysical and theological traces.

With the appearance of modern Jewish nationalism and its acceptance by the masses of our people, the possibility of a world-view is created that neither rejects its own people nor spits in the face of its religious parents. One should not imagine, however, that this rebirth is a sort of program with a ready-made shulkhan-arukh [Jewish code of law] or even with a clearly formulated statement of principles. It is rather a mood, an approach.

This process is taking place among other peoples too, but with us the matter is more complicated. The problems of cultural evolution among most peoples of the world are simpler because the physical existence of most European peoples is not in danger. Most of them at least live in their own land, which in itself is a strong safeguard against national extinction. Significant as it is, religion is not the only cultural form in which their national uniqueness is expressed.

So we who believe in the rational interpretation of human development need to pose the problem even more sharply: What can we do, so that the national and progressive factors in our culture can better compete with the religious traditions? Can we pour into the old religious forms themselves a content that will be in complete accord with our views? Or is there in the old forms themselves a content that can be cleansed of all the supernatural accretions and still retain enough attraction for the people? In my opinion, the answer to both these questions is Yes.

We believe that no matter how divine a god or a religious concept may appear, it has grown out of human needs and human ideals. The movement for a national poetic rebirth of the Jewish religion therefore has to examine all the old sanctities critically. It will reject those in which the human essence has been entirely eroded. It will preserve those that still retain their human essence. Already a large section of our generation is working at this task.

It goes without saying that we must put aside any discussion of the universal Jewish God, even the rarefied Holy Being of Jewish religious philosophy, which reached its highest stage in Spinoza’s pantheism. This concept belongs to the supernatural world and for the modern religious believer it remains a living, eternal God in the simplest sense of the term, a divine power that cannot be transformed into a poetic symbol. Secularists must leave God alone—let Jewish theology concern itself with Him…

[Zhitlovsky concludes his essay by replying to a critic who charged him with trying to create a new Reform movement. In his response Zhitlovsky says that one of the mistakes of the Reform movement was that it cut out the soul upon which the entire vital strength of the Jewish people rests, namely, the belief in its future national rebirth.] Should anyone challenge me, what is the soul of your “national poetic rebirth”? I would reply:

“The common hope for the national rebirth of the Jewish people and the common belief in Moshiakh’s tseit—a better world in the future—when the ideals of our prophets will be realized and all the people of the earth will live peacefully together in one common humanity—in this belief and in the work to bring that time closer lies the soul of the national poetic rebirth of the Jewish people.”