We Jews: Who Are We and What Should We Do

Steinstalz is the greatest living Talmud scholar, an Israeli born into a secular family, and a mystic and Kabbalist. The two things that stick with me most from this book - or perhaps I'll expand that to a few things: -he makes the argument that from the supposed 5 million Jews of the beginning of the CE, there should be 300 million from natural increase. Therefore the surviving 15 million descendents have undergone a tremendous selection pressure, both physical and mental, including those with the inner character and abilities to allow them to choose Judaism and survive. He then tries to list these inherited Jewish character traits. I will try and list them all below, but the one that struck me most was Individualism. He has a whole chapter on the Messiah complex that leads Jews to try and save the world, which I certainly recognize within myself. And he has very harsh words about the attempt to survive and continue as Jews for its own sake, if it is empty of Judaism and the Jewish mission to be a holy nation. His description of the Biblical injunction to be a nation of priests and a holy nation is stronger than anything I have read on the subject. He truly believes the essence of Jewish character, expressed or not, is to be a servant of God, and if we don't want to do this, we might as well give up. one other point he made that I found very convincing: jews are not a race, nation or religion but a family. From a family, you can be estranged, you can betray...but you are never anything but a son or daughter. Jews are the children of God and of the patriarchs and matriarchs. We can betray our inner essence as well, but our inherited heritage cannot be erased either. Some things from the book: His list of Jewish intrinsic traits: All murders of Jews and all the difficulties of being Jewish resulted in a constant winnowing out of people who remained Jewish. Those who remained Jewish and passed it on to their children had to possess character traits, "a combination of qualities that allows them to withstand such difficulties, and also to transmit the message to their children." 1. high survival capacity: adaptability, flexibility, will to live, belief in life, talent for imitation and simulation/to create a false self/to believe in one's false self, to be a wanderer/an alien/a cosmopolitan a. negative expression: pushiness, materialism, loss of values in materialism. Flexibility and adaptability can result in spinelessness, loss of self-respect, pandering, aping with no self-esteem. 2. stubbornness. Persistence. Can be directed towards remaining Jewish, or towards other pursuits - business, science etc. 3. individualism. Main spiritual and religious duties of a jew are as an individual. No priest or imam does religion for you. "most of his duties are between himself and God alone." a. Also, no organizations in civil life required Jew limit his individualism. No guilds, army, church, state jobs, corporation jobs...the

This book is a collection of a dozen essays, each of which can easily be read without reference to the others. The essays fall into three categories: 1. Some essays were, I think, very well thought out. I was especially impressed by his essay on Jews as a family, in which he points out that Jews are far too racially diverse to be a "race" in the conventional sense of the term, are too geographically scattered to be a conventional nation, and too ideologically diverse to be a conventional religion. Jewish ties are blood ties: one cannot easily leave the Jewish "family", and Jews say awful things to each other but can unite in response to threats. His essay on money explains why Jews were perceived to have money in Christian Europe; because Jews were often not allowed to be farmers, they were pushed into finance and thus handled money more than a farmer would. 2. Some essays were just preaching to the converted: reassertions of religious dogma that believers will agree with and skeptics will ignore (such as his essay asserting that Jews must be "priests to the world.") 3. Others didn't fit into either category but just weren't that persuasive: for example, he complains that Jews should somehow be more unified- but today, the most unified religion (Catholicism) appears to be stagnating in much of the world, while a bitterly divided Islam has the flexibility to mutate and to adapt to local conditions. If Judaism had a pope, would there really be more Jews? I doubt it. His essay on Jewish character traits is flatly self-contradictory: he asserts that Jews survive due to "flexibility" yet two pages later writes that Jews are "a stiff-necked people." His pessimism in the last essay seems to contradict traditional Jewish theology: the tradition holds that a Messiah will set the world aright at the end of days, yet Steinsaltz despairs of Jewish survival.

We Jews is an excellent read . Rabbi S. has distilled Jewish thought and life both religious and secular.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is one of the great Jewish scholars and teachers of our generation. His monumental translation of the Gemara into Hebrew and then English and French has been a fundamental tool in spreading the learning of Torah. His teaching of Torah, and outreach work have made a major contribution to the Jewish world of learning in our time. In this book Rabbi Steinsaltz makes the admirable effort of attempting to assay the Jewish situation and reality. He tries to define who the Jewish people are through essays in collective psychology and sociology. He writes about specific characteristics of the Jews , about the ability to assimilate, about the infighting which has prevented Jewish unity, about the notorious difficulty of defining a group which is neither a nation or a religion or a an ethnic group solely. He also writes about stereotypical views of the Jews in regard to Money, about the Jewish Messianic complex, about Jews being excessively Warm or Cold emotionally, about the tendency of the Jews to Idolatry, about our role in the world, about the idea of unification and how it has effected great Jewish thinkers, and finally ` about what will become of the Jewish people'. The work also contains questions at the end of each chapter asked by Steinsaltz's faithful student and long- time editor Arthur Kurzweil. These questions aim to refine and sharpen some of the major points made in the text. With all my great respect for Rabbi Steinsaltz, and with all my understanding that his aim is only to help the Jewish people better serve God, I found myself deeply disappointed with this work. For one thing Rabbi Steinsaltz writes of the Jewish condition almost as if the State of Israel had not existed for the past fifty- seven years, and is not a growing and central part of Jewish history and the Jewish people. Secondly, I was dismayed at the lack of factual matter involving the actual transformations in the Jewish situation which have taken place in the past twenty or thirty years. For example Rabbi Steinsaltz writes at great length about the importance of understanding the Jewish people as a family. There are great insights in his writing on this subject. However the Jewish family today in America is often a family with non- Jewish members inside it. It is not the traditional, historical Jewish family. The degree of intermarriage and assimilation occurring among the Jewish people are a central element in any assessment of our situation now. I would have expected Rabbi Steinsaltz to address this, and provide suggested ways for the Jewish people to act now. After all, the book says it is going to address the Jewish situation and tell us what we are to do. I was deeply dismayed that the worldwide Anti- Semitic attack on the state of Israel is not considered in the book. The survival of Israel is , in my judgment anyway, the most important item on the Jewish agenda. To write so much about Jewish history and character without writing even o

Teacher, scientist, mystic, and the author of more than sixty books, Rabbi Steinsaltz is justifiably regarded as one of the great rabbis of this generation and is perhaps best known for his monumental translation and commentary on the Talmud. His latest work, We Jews: Who Are We And What Should We Do? deftly explores important and contemporary issues concerning Jewish identity and community. Addressing the question of Jews being a nation or a religion, stereotypes of Jews, dealing with the forces of an often hostile secular culture, the phenomena of intermarriage and the loss of tradition, the longings and aspirations of Jewish men and women today, We Jews is informed and thoughtful reading which is completely accessible to the nonspecialist general reader with an interest in Judaism and the Jewish community .