Secularists to Sadducees
Daniel J. Elazar
Abraham Feder's excellent article (21 December 1984) in response
to those of Shulamit Aloni (26 September 1984) and David Krivine
(30 November 1984) has added depth and clarity to the debate on
the role of religion in society, particularly in Israel, and how
one's expectations from any religious system, including halakhah,
need to be tempered by a more sophisticated understanding of the
complexities of human nature. Feder properly points out that
religion is not only concerned with social justice but also is a
response to the individual's deepest personal needs. True
religion must speak to both. There is another dimension, however,
what in my opinion needs to be added to the overall discussion
with regard to religion, morality, and the State of Israel.
The halakhah as we know it is a product of Pharisaic Judaism.
While its origins as a corpus go back at least to the time of
Ezra, 2500 years ago, and probably to Sinai as tradition has it,
it took its definitive form in the generations immediately
following the destruction of the Second Temple and was not fully
accepted by Jews the world over as normative until the end of the
3rd or early part of the 4th century of the common era. From then
until the modern epoch beginning in the 17th century and
particularly from the late 18th, it was normative for all Jews
except schismatics such as the Karaites.
During the modern epoch its dominance was broken but it was not
until the 20th century that a majority of Jews ceased to live
within the framework of halakhic Judaism. Most simply drifted out
of that framework. Even those who went into non-Orthodox
movements, with the exception of a few intellectual leaders, did
so out of nostalgia, to retain some of the old customs and
ceremonies, or out of the need for an acceptable form of Jewish
identification in the modern diaspora.
Non-Orthodox palliatives worked in the diaspora but did not find
an echo in Israel, where there soon developed a polarization
between those who maintained halakhah in the Pharisaic manner as
it had developed over the centuries, and those who saw a strictly
secular political solution to the Jewish problem. In some cases,
this polarization was papered over by common Zionist aspirations
which led to the development of the famous "status quo" and in
other cases, where no suitable accommodation could be found, it
led to confrontation. In either case, it did not solve the Jewish
problems of the majority of Israeli Jews: the quarter of the
population that defines itself as secular and the growing share of
the middle 50 percent who define themselves as traditional but who
are rapidly losing their links with Jewish religious tradition as
they drift out of older halakhic frameworks.
This might not have been a problem had the secular solutions
advocated by the non-religious Zionists worked. But it is clear
to all by now, except a diehard few, that those secular utopias
represent gods that failed. Thus, even Shulamit Aloni, one of the
most militant secularists in Israel, is involved in an effort to
build a movement of "humanist Judaism" that will draw upon the
moral dimensions of the Jewish tradition in order to cope with the
moral and personal issues which religion addresses in all times
and climes.
Shulamit Aloni appropriately turns to Israel's Declaration of
Independence as one source in her search and relies on it and
other products of the Zionist ideology to help her in her quest.
In the past decade or so it has become apparent that, particularly
for those Israelis outside of the religious camp, Zionism is the
faith of their fathers, the only faith they know, hence the faith
they turn to in hours of crisis. We saw this most clearly at the
time of the Yom Kippur War which revived Zionist sentiments across
the spectrum of nonreligious Israeli groups. We saw it in a
different way in connection with the Lebanon war, when the
morality of the war was attacked by its opponents on Zionist
grounds and defended by its proponents on the same grounds, each
emphasizing a different aspect of the Zionist heritage.
This is a common enough phenomenon, a variant of the "foxhole
religion" experienced by soldiers in wartime. To say this is not
to dismiss it. Quite to the contrary, reliance upon the faith of
one's fathers is a natural human expression and the particular
faith involved tells us a great deal about the aspirations of the
people involved.
In its own way, Zionism has become another branch of Judaism,
parallel to Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform or Reconstructionism
in the United States and other diaspora communities. Albeit, like
Communism, it is a secular rather than a theistic religion in its
fundamentals (not that religious Zionists are not Zionists, but
their Zionism plays a different role for them, representing as it
were, an extension of a larger set of religious beliefs). Zionism
serves as the basis for the Jewish self-definition of a majority
of the Jewish population of Israel just as Conservative and Reform
Judaism serves a majority of the Jewish population in the United
States. The one is primarily an Israeli phenomenon today with some
diaspora outposts while the other is primarily American Jewish
phenomena with outposts in Israel and other diaspora communities.
As such, Zionism has its own rituals and symbols, which, because
of its particular character have become part of the civil religion
of Israel.
Like every religious movement, Zionism in its first stages was
utterly messianic in that its proponents expected that it would
achieve a rapid success which would in turn bring about the full
achievement of its goals, namely, the redemption of the Jewish
people in their own land through political means. In fact,
Zionism was successful enough to capture a major share of the
Jewish people as its adherents and a central place for itself
among modern Jewish institutions. It did succeed magnificently in
creating a Jewish state and transforming the Jewish people in the
process, but like every other religious movement, its messianic
expectations were not realized.
But there was another dimension to the Zionist experience. Zionism
is a reflection of the rebirth of the classic partisan division
within the Jewish people associated with statehood and now reborn
along with the rebirth of Jewish political independence, and which
are best known by the terms attached to them in the Second
Commonwealth: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. While these three
parties (as they are commonly known) or camps acquired their
respective identities under these names in the last era of the
Second Commonwealth, in fact each camp can be traced back at least
to the time of the Davidic monarchy when the Jewish people were
divided into monarchists supporting the Davidic line, supporters
of the prophetic school later identified with Elijah, and the
Kenites, who continued to live as if in the Sinai wilderness for
ideological reasons. The revival of Jewish national existence in
the land has led to a revival of those two of the three camps
which had disappeared during the course of the long exile.
There has been much talk about the normalization of the Jewish
people in connection with the establishment of the State of
Israel, all of which assumes a change in Jewish existence that
will make the Jews "like all the nations." It can be argued that
normalization, for Jews, means the restoration of all three camps
within Judaism and Jewish life.
The Sadducees were eminently the party of Jewish statehood in the
sense that their Jewishness was principally expressed through the
political institutions of a state and those religious institutions
such as the priesthood and the Temple which were intimately bound
up with statehood. The Temple came into existence to emphasize
the new statehood of David and Solomon and became the keystone of
the renewed statehood of the Hasmoneans. It acquired prominence
in the halacha of the Pharisees only after it made no difference
because the Temple itself was destroyed.
With the destruction of that state and the transformation of the
Jewish community in Eretz Israel into one existing on Roman
sufferance, the Pharisaic system of Jewish life, with its special
emphasis on the individual internalization of Jewish norms, became
the dominant one within the Jewish people, ultimately coming to
embrace all Jews who remained within the fold. The Pharisaic
system, with its emphasis on schools as the principal
institutional expression of organized Jewish life and such
political power as remained in Jewish hands, scholars as the
principal spokesmen for the Jewish people, and individual
observance of a highly portable law as the touchstone of Jewish
identification and self-expression, was uniquely adopted to the
needs of the time.
Thus the diaspora experience strengthened the Pharisaic camp in
every respect. Lacking a proper political base, the Sadducee camp
ultimately disappeared. Significantly, the last bastion of
Sadducean ideology was in Babylonia where the particular
conditions of Jewish autonomy made the exilarch a focal point for
its expression, but even the Exilarch had to come to terms with
the heads of the academies in the course of time and became
subordinate to them.
Essenism represented a recurring phenomenon in Jewish life in its
own right, an effort to express Jewish messianic aspirations
within the framework of a collectivist community, but Essenes,
with their emphasis on relatively small communities as the means
to fulfill the precepts of the Torah, similarly disappeared from
the scene. They required the protection of a strong Jewish
presence and power in the land to maintain a protected existence
as a separatist messianic minority within the Jewish fold. Once
that was gone, they could sustain their colonies.
Pharisaic Judaism held fast for nearly 1800 years and was almost
unchallenged for some 1500. No longer a party within a larger
framework, it became a framework itself. It was only with the
coming of the modern epoch in the seventeenth century that the
order which it imposed upon the Jewish people began to break down
under the pressures of modernization. For some time, the only
alternative to Pharisaic Judaism seemed to be assimilation. It
was only with the rise of modern Jewish nationalism and, most
particularly Zionism, that another alternative emerged.
Once Pharisaic Judaism lost its dominant position, the Pharisees
once again became a camp, today known as Orthodoxy. It is no
accident that Orthodoxy as a movement did not develop until the
nineteenth century in response to the emancipationist movements.
Up until that time, there was no need for a special framework for
halakhic Jews as such. Even the divisions within the halakhic
camp could be handled through traditional institutions.
Today the Pharisaic camp can be defined as consisting of Jews who
see in Halakhah the central and unifying principle of Judaism.
After a century or more of retreat, that camp is once again
advancing. They have turned to the offensive after years of being
on the defensive, and have now developed institutions that are
trying to "convert the Jews." Their camp represents perhaps a
quarter of the population of Israel and perhaps a fifth of world
Jewry can be considered within it.
Of those among the remainder of world Jewry who identify Jewishly
in some conscious way, a very small minority are neo-Essenes. The
latter are those who, in the Essene tradition, have sought to
create total messianic societies within the framework of the
existing world. Most are to be found in the kibbutzim since the
periodic diaspora experiments, for example the Jewish communes and
havurot that appeared on or near the campuses of the United States
in the late 1960's, cannot survive without the protection of a
(Sadducean) state.
The largest group within the Jewish fold today and certainly the
largest in Israel consists of those people who must be considered
the heirs of the Sadducean tradition, even if only part of that
camp operates within the framework of a Sadducean party. Today's
neo-Sadducees include those Jews who seek to be Jewish through
identification with Jewish history, culture, and tradition, but
without necessarily accepting the authoritative character of
halacha or the centrality of halacha in defining their Jewishness.
In essence, these are people who tend to have a political sense of
Judaism in the largest meaning of the term. Thus they are
committed to the Jewish people (either as a whole or as they exist
within Israel), first and foremost, seeing in the expression of
peoplehood or nationhood what can well be termed a religious
obligation, the cornerstone of their civil religion. Increasingly,
these neo-Sadducees have come to understand that the maintenance
of Jewish peoplehood is a political act. It was the Zionist
movement that first came to recognize that the survival of the
Jewish people in a post-Pharisaic age required a political revival
and, consequently, who were the first to redefine Jewish life in
explicitly political terms, relating to Jewish history and
tradition through that perspective.
Virtually all of Israel's present political leadership and most of
the diaspora Jewish leadership as well, are effectively within the
Sadducean camp. They have created an alliance with those of the
Pharisaic camp who have joined with them in the common enterprise.
The latter have had to join that enterprise principally on
Sadducean terms, although they have been able to wring concessions
from the Sadducean majority with regard to the maintenance of
Pharisaic norms, because for the Sadducean camp Jewish unity is
sufficiently important to warrant them. Moreover, the Sadducees'
own nostalgia for Jewish tradition makes those norms more
acceptable, particularly since they have nothing viable to put in
their place.
It was precisely that implicit understanding of what the
Mizrachi's alliance with the World Zionist Movement meant that led
to the great fight within the Orthodox camp during the early days
of the Zionist revolution. Agudat Yisrael sought to remain
authentic Perushim (they often used the term) in the sense of
being utterly willing to separate themselves from the majority of
Jews to maintain what they believe was the only correct approach
to Judaism. The Mizrachi, on the other hand, was prepared to
"taint itself" by association with the new non-Pharisaic majority
to advance what it considered to be common Jewish goals, which it
understood as valid per se within the Pharisaic tradition.
The Jewish people will have to reconcile itself to the renewed
existence of this classic division within Jewish life. The fact
that some four-fifths of world Jewry is outside the Pharisaic
camp, means that a Sadducean Judaism will develop whether the
Pharisees will it or not. The only question that is open is what
will be its content?
The ancient Sadducees amy not have accepted the Pharisaic
understanding of Judaism but they, too, shared a religious
conception of Jewish existence. The neo-Sadducean camp must begin
to understand itself for what it is and develop an appropriately
articulated Jewish framework within which to function, rather than
simply transforming those elements of Pharisaic Judaism which are
somewhat appealing into a kind of civil religion that is either no
more than residually Jewish or which uses Jewish forms to promote
un-Jewish content.
While that task falls upon the entire Jewish people, it is of
particular concern and relevance to Israel which, as the center of
the Jewish world and the only place where an autonomous Jewish
culture flourishes, must make a greater effort to make that
culture truly Jewish in one way or another. The civil religion
which has emerged in Israel represents the first articulation of a
revived Sadducean approach to maintaining the rhythm of Jewish
life. No civilization can exist without having its own rhythm. A
great part of the genius of Judaism in general is to be found in
the way it establishes a clear rhythm for all Jews and of
Pharisaism in particular in the way it transformed that rhythm
into a portable one, that could be carried into exile in every
diaspora. Normally life rhythms of particular civilizations are
associated with particular locales. Zionism-as-Sadduceanism has
emphasized the revaluation of traditional Jewish rhythms in ways
that are held to the Israeli locale but, as we see all around us,
under the influence of a universal culture, the way it has tried
to do so is not enough.
The present trend is toward quite separate Judaisms on one level,
despite the Sadducean borrowing of Pharisaic practices for their
civil religion, withe each camp taking on the characteristics of a
separate community within the Jewish state. Interaction between
the two camps should not only be fostered for the sake of Jewish
unity, but for the sake of the proper expression of the Jewish
spirit as well.
Since the very revival of the Sadducean camp is intertwined with
the revival of the political expression of Jewishness through a
Jewish state, more than any other movement in Judaism, the
Sadducees need a living Jewish political tradition based on their
first principled and properly rooted in Jewish sources and
experience -- in the way that Pharisees require a living legal
tradition, to provide them with the continuity which a tradition
offers. To suggest that the Sadducees are in special need of a
Jewish political tradition is not in the least to suggest that the
Pharisees do not need one. Quite to the contrary, just as
Pharisaic Judaism managed to absorb the ideology and symbols of
the Davidic line and the Temple ritual, the two most important
Sadducean traditions, in order to provide a comprehensive approach
to Judaism and Jewishness, so too have they had to relate to the
Jewish political tradition.
Under the conditions in which Pharisaic Judaism became dominant,
political consciousness as such had become dangerous for Jews, to
having led to the disastrous revolts against Roman rule. So the
Pharisees absorbed and hid that tradition within the mainstream of
the Halachah itself, carefully avoiding any reference to it as a
political tradition. In subsequent ages, this tradition survived
and even thrived within the four ells of Halachic Judaism. We are
just now discovering how well it did.
As a consequence we have a paradoxical situation today. The
Jewish political tradition in its most authentic form lives within
the Pharisee camp but the Pharisees themselves are least willing
to recognize it as a political tradition. One consequence of this
is that they have done relatively little to come to grips with the
problems of statehood within a halachic framework. The Sadducees,
on the other hand, have ignored that tradition and have built
their political ideologies on foreign ideologies, mostly imported
from Europe, which not only fail to help develop the Jewishness of
the Jewish state but neutralize the Jewish commitments of the
younger generation.
For the Sadducees to recover the tradition, they must not only
learn from their experience as Jews confronting political
situations, but drink deeply from sources preserved by the
Pharisees. By the same token, while the Pharisees can continue to
exist as individuals and in their communities by living off their
own sources, in order to cope with statehood, they must become
Sadducean to some degree.
The danger in a Jewish normalcy lies in the possibility of intense
conflict between the two between the two principal camps, as was
the case in the last epoch of the second Jewish Commonwealth. At
a time when the Jewish people seems to be breaking apart into
separate camps or communities, and most especially in Israel, this
mutual inter-dependence is a positive factor, a basis upon which
to rebuild a more united and more Jewish state. It is to be
devoutly hoped that, in the Third Commonwealth, the intense
conflicts which marked the Pharisee-Sadducee relationship in the
Second will be avoided for the sake of the Jewish people as a
whole.
