The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

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on the Sabbath violates the injunction against kindling fires on that day; or whether it is better to break the ban against working on the Sabbath by milking cows or to risk causing the animals pain—an action that is also forbidden—by not milking them.

Israelis or visitors who are unwise enough to drive their cars through the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem on the Sabbath often encounter a hail of stones. A teen-age girl who naively walks through the same district in a miniskirt may find herself angrily chased by Orthodox youths shouting "Zonah! Zonah!" ("Whore! Whore!"). Many pathologists in Israeli hospitals receive death threats from Orthodox fanatics for performing autopsies, which according to Orthodoxy are a desecration of the dead. Hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv closed down briefly in protest against police failure to curb the threats.

The extremists are likely to lose rather than gain ground in Israel's religious life. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, 53, an Orthodox Halakhic scholar who is Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, is an odds-on favorite to succeed Issar Yehuda Unterman, 86, as the country's powerful Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, perhaps some time this year. He is carefully attuned to Jewish law, but at the same time practical, eager to solve such modern problems as how to maintain a Sabbath police force without violating the strictures of Halakhah. Meantime, other branches of religious Judaism are gaining a foothold there. An increasing number of conversions performed by U.S. Conservative rabbis are now recognized by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Conservatives have eight synagogues in Israel, Reform has eight, and even Reconstructionism has one.

The catalysts for many of these changes in Israel are American. For one thing, after the extermination or exile of European Jewish leadership during World War II, the task of analyzing and shaping Jewish thought fell largely to American Jews. But the basic reason for the influence is that Judaism lives by dialectic. Classic rabbinical law displayed this trait; on every question, great and small, there was always a majority opinion and minority opinion, and one balanced the other. Similarly, Jewish developments in the Diaspora influence the homeland, and the homeland in turn shapes the Diaspora.

Shared Courage. To many Jews, U.S. society represents cosmopolitanism and universalism, Israeli society a community fulfilling its tradition. U.S. society exalts conscience and individual freedom, Israeli society adherence to a communal code. Alone, either set of ideals may become narrow or destructive; exchanged, they could become more balanced and productive for both communities. Since Judaism is an inextricable mixture of religion and nationhood, a certain ambiguity about Jewish identity will always remain and may ultimately be creative. "We cannot live on borrowed courage," warns Los Angeles Rabbi Leonard Beerman, counseling U.S. Jews to define their identities out of their own roots. But shared courage could well add up to redoubled strength.

In his short story Monte Sant' Angela, Arthur Miller writes of the Jewish experience: "The whole history is packing bundles and getting away." That may have been. Now the business, Jews hope, is unpacking bundles and settling where they are. They seem determined to follow the 614th commandment