Keeping Faith: Martha Himmelfarb

The following is the third installment of “Keeping Faith,” a six-part series of conversations between politics professor Robert George and University professors of various faiths.

 

 

Martha Himmelfarb is a religion professor and practicing Jew. Her work focuses on religion in late antiquity, in particular the Jewish and Christian traditions.

 

 

Robert George: Martha, were you brought up in an observant Jewish home?

 

Martha Himmelfarb: It was not a particularly observant home, but my father was strongly invested in Jewish life.

 

RG: What led you to become more religiously observant and deepened your interest in Judaism as a faith as opposed to simply Jewish culture?

 

MH: Well, faith is probably not quite the right word when you’re talking about Judaism.

 

 

RG: Because it’s more comprehensive than that?

 

MH: Yes. It is sometimes said that Judaism is defined more by practice than by belief. Now, this is not to say that belief isn’t important. It is. But, reflecting on my own life, it really was more about wanting to incorporate more practice.

 

RG: Was the Sabbath kept in a serious way in your home?

 

MH: Friday night was a time for a family dinner with candles and kiddush, the blessing of the wine and the grace after meals. But, beyond that, we were not strict.

 

 

RG: And do you observe it more strictly with your family?

 

MH: Yes.

 

 

RG: In the Jewish tradition, prayers for the deceased are very important, are they not?

 

MH: The kaddish, the prayer that’s especially designated for mourners, is not exclusively a prayer for the dead. It’s a prayer in which the mourner, who is not feeling very good about the way things are going, nevertheless praises God. But it is traditionally understood also as a way of somehow helping the dead.

 

 

RG: Helping to gain merit for the dead?

 

MH: That’s right.

 

 

RG: In the Jewish tradition, there is a sense of the afterlife, but it is not presented in the detail one finds in Christianity, or, perhaps, in Islam, is that right?

 

MH: As a generalization, that’s probably correct. It’s certainly correct about those Jews who are not very traditional today. Although you’re also quite right that, certainly for traditional Jews, it’s a given that there is reward and punishment in the afterlife. This, Christianity inherited from Judaism.

 

 

RG: Would it be true to say that, though there were different strands of Judaism in the ancient world, the strand that emerged as what we know as Judaism today is the strand that included what Christianity also retained about the idea of a bodily resurrection?

 

MH: Yes. In the third century BCE, did most Jews believe in reward and punishment after death? Not so clear. But certainly by the turn of the era, it has become the dominant Jewish belief.

 

 

RG: My impression is that Judaism is not individualistic: To be a Jew is to be part of a people. But at the same time, there’s also the individual’s relationship with God.

 

MH: Yes, in ideal terms, that’s certainly right. There’s certainly a very set structure of liturgy. An observant Jew will pray the traditional liturgy three times a day. My experience doing that really comes from the year I said kaddish for my father. And I think you have to have a lot of inner resources to get something out of that kind of fairly long, set prayer three times a day. I would say, for myself, there were certainly many moments where I found it very meaningful and moving, and there were many other moments where my mind was wandering, and I was looking at my watch. Reciting psalms also has a very central place in the tradition.

 

 

RG: There seems to be a psalm for everything.

 

MH: Right. And you just think, whoever wrote them had a lot of problems. That’s for sure.

 

 

RG: And some moments of comfort and joy.

 

MH: That’s true, too.

 

 

RG: What is your sense of the role of the modern state of Israel in the religious identities of Jews who are not thoroughly secular? Does Israel have religious significance? Or is it an independent political issue not really bound up with religion?

 

MH: No, it’s not entirely independent. The founding of the modern state of Israel is especially emotionally powerful to American Jews because it came in the wake of the Holocaust. That is powerful for Jews in general, but yes, for observant Jews, I do think there is a religious component to it. As you know, it’s not easy to disentangle the religious elements of people’s Jewish identity from the other elements. I think the state of Israel has had a really profound influence on the Jewish self-understanding of people my age. And one of the hot topics among American Jews today is that our children don’t seem to have that kind of visceral feeling of connection to Israel that we all had. Might American Jews go one way and Israeli Jews go another? For people my age, that would be a very sad thing. Our sense of the connection to Israel was so strong. It was just an absolutely crucial thing.

 

 

RG: The Holocaust certainly caused some Christians as well as some Jews to lose faith in God. People asked, “How could a loving God permit such a thing to occur?” For others, it deepened their faith, especially the witness of those who risked their own lives to help. What’s your sense of what it means to Jews today?

 

MH: That’s a really interesting question. Let me just give you an example of something that I think has changed. The High Holiday Prayer Book that we’ve used on campus at the Conservative services for many years includes a section on the Day of Atonement, the martyrology section, that traditionally involved reading an account of the Roman Rabbi Akiva and the other Jewish martyrs killed by the Romans under Hadrian.

 

 

RG: Yes, I know it well from attending the services.

 

MH: So you could imagine that that wasn’t necessarily the most meaningful thing to 20th-century Jews.

 

 

RG: Because it’s so distant?

 

MH: Yes, in part. I think after the Holocaust, people felt, we’ve really experienced something so recently that shouldn’t we somehow incorporate it into the synagogue service? And the attempts to do that, while completely understandable, were often so heavy-handed. To me, Judaism is a living tradition that has beautiful things to offer, and we shouldn’t be invoking persecution and death to explain why it’s meaningful. Having said that, I also have to say, it’s this great, irreducible tragedy that, as you say, raises the most profound questions. I was talking a couple of minutes ago about the emergence of the state of Israel so soon after the Holocaust. And this has been interpreted as kind of a narrative of death and resurrection. There is certainly something to that. On the other hand, I must also say that it’s dangerous to view any kind of political state in messianic terms. Part of the problem with viewing the state of Israel as the first flowering of redemption is that it suggests also that the Holocaust was somehow part of the plan of redemption.

 

 

RG: In your own Jewish life, how do you understand and experience the idea of the Jews as God’s chosen people? Some people see this as chauvinistic, but it certainly isn’t meant to be.

 

MH: According to the prophets, being chosen means being held to a higher standard. Ideally, you set some kind of example. So the prophets give you resources for thinking about it in a way that emphasizes responsibility rather than privilege. I certainly feel privileged, lucky and sometimes I would say blessed to have been born into a tradition that I think is so rich and nourishing. I suspect, had I been born into some other tradition, I would have found resources in that one that were very beautiful also. I guess, let me just say, the flip side of Jewish particularism is that it actually makes a lot of room for everybody else, which is to say God picked Jews to be this way, but it doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t be the way that they are. So I guess that’s one view.

 

 

RG: But Judaism is not a relativistic religion either, is it? There is, for example, the prayer that looks forward to the day when all nations will recognize the God of Israel and worship Him alone.

 

MH: Actually, that’s the concluding prayer of every service daily. Yes, the teaching is that on that day he will be one and his name will be one. So he will be the God of everybody on that day. It is an eschatological teaching.

 

 

RG: And somehow the chosenness of the Jewish people as it’s presented, at least in the prayer book, seems to have something to do with that day’s coming, that the Jewish example — being “a light unto the Gentiles,” as Isaiah says — is crucial to the rest of the world.

 

MH: I think that’s right. And perhaps it’s a bit imperialistic that, in the end, everybody will sort of get it and join up. But it’s a very strong strand in the Bible’s thought.

 

 

RG: Even now, that is, before the eschatological age, Judaism holds that there are some rules that apply not only to Jews but to Gentiles, too. Is that right?

 

MH: Yes. While conversion to Judaism is possible, it is not regarded as required. But Judaism does, as you say, lay down rules for everyone. There are moral standards for Gentiles to observe that make them good Gentiles, good people.

 

 

RG: Are you referring here to the Noachide covenant and the Noachide laws, the laws banning murder, sexual immorality, theft and so forth for all mankind?

 

MH: That’s right.

 

 

RG: Martha, could we shift to the question of messianism, the Jewish messianic hope? What does it mean to look forward to the coming of the Messiah?

 

MH: I have to say, I find that a very hard one. I suppose that’s because I’m a bit of a pessimist. I feel it as a very distant hope.

 

 

RG: Something too good to be true?

 

MH: Well, I guess we could ask: Which is more contrary to reason, that God will bring his Messiah at the end of days or that human beings will get there by themselves? It’s probably less contrary to reason than to say that God will bring a Messiah at the end of days. But that horizon, I must say, I find a difficult one. I guess the thing that I find myself worrying about is, will there be Jews 200, 300 years from now? And where is Judaism going? And this is maybe a particularly worrying topic for an American Jew like me, who doesn’t belong in the orthodox world but still embraces religious observance.

 

 

RG: Well, that takes us to the question of assimilation.

 

MH: Absolutely. My grandmother, who never belonged to a synagogue, once said all her friends were Jewish because those were just the people they knew. So here was a woman, the beginning part of the 20th century, who was kind of purposely secular. But everybody she knew was Jewish. Today, some very observant Jewish students at Princeton have a wide range of non-Jewish friends. It took a generation or two for Jews to become fully mainstream in America, but it is the beauty of America that it’s never had anything like the anti-Semitism there was in Europe. Has there been prejudice? Sure, but not on the same scale.

 

 

RG: As you know, I was a great admirer of your father, [Jewish sociographer] Milton Himmelfarb, who influenced my own thought, especially on issues of religion and society. He severely criticized the once-prevalent notion that the secularization of the larger society would be in the best interests of the Jews. He thought that, in America, Jews would do better when religion generally flourished.

 

MH: Yes, he did have a kind of optimism, which I keep reminding myself about, a love for America and really an optimism about the Jewish future in America, even with all the difficulties.

 

 

RG: He was also concerned that secularization would have the effect of secularizing Jews, not just everybody else. Now there does seem to be some of that happening. But there also seems to be a revival of interest in Judaism as a religion that offers a relationship with God. You see it here at Princeton and among Jewish young people generally.

 

MH: It’s part of a larger phenomenon. People thought there was no way to reverse secularization. It turned out they were profoundly wrong. The Jewish case is distinctive, but I think it does certainly need to be understood as part of that larger picture that includes Christians and Muslims and perhaps others as well.

 

 

 

RG: Final question, Martha. You, as a professional scholar, study Judaism. And it’s also your personal religious faith and practice. Does that ever create a tension?

 

MH: Well, when you study ancient Judaism, a lot of the other people studying it are Jews, and probably the rest of them are Christians, more or less. So everybody, if you want, is bringing some kind of personal baggage. I do hope that I’m able to engage in scholarly work in as objective a way as possible. Studying the Jews is just very fascinating and fulfilling to me. I hope that, nonetheless, I’m able to do it in a way that doesn’t reflect a particular agenda.

 

 

The next installment of “Keeping Faith” will run on Thursday, Dec. 1.