Like many Jews of a largely secular persuasion, or like those who oscillate between doubt and belief, I have often wondered what I had to do with other “flavors” of Jewish communicants. Strolling along the streets of Montreal’s Outremont borough, home to a substantial Orthodox society, I feel absolutely no connection to the black-coated, earlocked, fur-hatted inhabitants who hasten by me without so much as a glance, immured in their own sequestered worlds. They may be bent on the preservation of Halachic Judaism and the maintenance of a sacramental community, but they have little interest in the world beyond their exclusionary domain and certainly none in the lives of individuals like me. “Ghetto orthodoxy,” writes James Parkes in A History of the Jewish People, “has no understanding of the moral problems of a modern and independent state.” Or, he might have continued, of modern and independent people.
At the same time, encountering Reformist and Reconstructionist Jews at local events, I feel no affinity with such nominal adherents to a faith they have re-interpreted as little more than a cultural tradition, that is, a set of mores and usages without serious reference to the God of the Hebrew scripture, the Mosaic and Noahide commandments, the poetry of David and Solomon, or the magnificent fulminations of the great prophets. How would they respond if angels appeared at their doors, as before Abraham (Genesis 18), or a divine command resonated in their ears, as in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Jonah, or a latter-day Elijah descended upon their complacency? Heaven forfend!
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