Religion: Existentialism & the Jews

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Existentialism, one of the century's most important philosophical movements, has had little influence on Jewish intellectual life in the U.S. The reason, according to Orthodox Rabbi Shubert Spero of the

Young Israel Synagogue in Cleveland, is that it threatens the philosophical underpinnings of liberal Judaism, which was founded largely on the ethical rationalism of 19th century German thought. Liberal Jews set small store by the Law; some Reform congregations have little to distinguish them from Unitarians. Existentialism, with its distrust of reason and its emphasis on the irrational and emotional nature of man's fear-filled, striving experience of life, points Jews as well as Christians back to the intangibles of the Old Testament, where religion has little to do with peace of mind or making the world a better place to live in.

Under the influence of existentialist thought, writes Rabbi Spero in the magazine Perspective, "the criteria of a meaningful religious system are no longer the mental stability it may bring or its possibility of social acceptance, the doctrines it shares with other religions, or its sweet reasonableness. On the contrary, the very elements of Judaism which but yesterday were in ill repute—our unique chosenness, the reality of evil, the deadly seriousness and unconditional demands of the life of service to God—have today been reinstated."

The fact that religion is "not all 'green pastures' and 'still waters'" is clear to "any serious reader of the Bible." Nowhere is the existentialism of the Old Testament better demonstrated than in the Book of Job. Job dares to demand of God an explanation of evil; his "comforters" put forward their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation, but with the existential experience of God—turns from questioning to wondering silence: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth."

Existentialism is important to Orthodoxy, thinks Rabbi Spero, partly because it has exposed the inadequacy of the liberal, merely rational, versions of Judaism, and partly because it has managed "to create the philosophic climate, and to popularize certain categories of thought, wherein the classic Biblical concepts can again be spoken and appreciated."