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Session Seven
Yom Kippur Dancing: Yiddish Radicalism
FREEDOM FROM RELIGION RADICALISM
It can be hard to realize today, as we explore Judaism and live
it creatively, how oppressive Judaism felt to many of our forebears.
The fact that the vast majority of Jews in the world today are
not religiously observant is not just due to ignorance or laziness.
For the last couple of centuries, ever since non-Jewish society
began to diminish its restrictions and prejudices against Jews
(this is usually dated from the French Revolution, 1789), huge
numbers of Jews -- given the choice to be traditionally religious
or not -- have made the choice not to be. With good reasons!
This process was especially acute and heart-wrenching in Eastern
Europe, where intense observance and a high level of Jewish learning
were an integral part of daily life for many, many people. Yet
many of the leaders of secular Yiddish radicalism -- and other
secular movements, like Zionism -- were from very learned, religious
backgrounds. They did not reject their backgrounds easily; but
they did reject them.
It's important to remember how restrictive traditional Jewish
life was, maybe especially in Eastern Europe, the birthplace of
Yiddish radicalism. Halakhah and customs of all kinds, including
regulations around the most intimate parts of daily life, were
not matters of choice; they were enforced by social pressure.
For example, someone who did not burn their fingernails after
trimming them would get a reputation as a dangerous heretic. (There
is a tradition that fingernails should be burned because otherwise
a pregnant woman might end up walking on the fingernails and her
baby would be harmed.) Superstitions permeated daily life and
were seen as a normative part of Judaism. (The Kitzur Shulchan Arukh by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried, a popular Eastern European manual
of halakhah which is readily available in English as Code of Jewish Law, is full of "laws" such as not storing potatoes under your bed
because evil spirits live there.) Education for children was based
on long hours in dark classrooms engaged in memorization through
rote repetition, enforced by beatings. For older boys and men
there were the yeshivas where you could learn Talmud in great
depth and other Jewish texts to some degree, but just about any
other kind of reading was considered sinful and dangerous. There
was no higher Jewish education for women; women were stereotypically
referred to by themselves as well as men as "silly" ("narishe
Yidenes"). There was a rigid class structure, reflected in seating
arrangements in synagogue and in many other ways. Care for the
poor was a communal responsibility but was often dealt with so
peremptorily that the Yiddish word "hekdesh", meaning the communal
poorhouse, became a synonym for an absolute run-down mess. Again,
all this was seen as part of the Jewish religion and way of life.
This is not to deny the richness and warmth of Yiddish-speaking
shtetl culture. (Abraham Joshua Heschel's little book The Earth is the Lord's is a beautiful, lyrical tribute to the way of life of Eastern
European Jewry.) But there was a huge amount of narrowness, repression
and injustice that none of us today would put up with. Many of
our ancestors only put up with it because they had no choice.
Once they saw a choice, they chose freedom. (To this day, in the
Yiddish of religious Jews, the non-religious are referred to as
"di fraye" -- the free ones.)
By the late 1800s, Jewish urban and shtetl communities in Eastern
Europe were hotbeds of radicalism. It's hard to imagine, in today's
stifled political climate, the hope and passion that young people
in those years brought to their discussions and activism on behalf
of various movements that promised to make everything better.
Jewish young people joined with Russian revolutionary movements
-- living and working among the peasants trying to raise their
consciousnesses; giving rabble-rousing speeches; committing acts
of terrorism against the Czarist tyranny. Others worked to establish
collective Jewish farms and get Jews out of the yeshivas and marketplaces
and onto the land.
As vast waves of Eastern European Jews came to North America in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they brought
their radicalism with them. In Europe and America there were Zionists,
Communists, Anarchists, Socialists, all constantly having meetings,
putting out educational pamphlets, arguing, and in various ways
doing real, practical work to change the world. Jews were especially
involved in organizing the labour movement, and there are stories
of great heroism among Jewish workers organizing against the deadly
exploitation suffered by immigrant workers, especially women,
in New York. These were all more or less egalitarian movements,
with women playing leading roles, and all of them were united
in rejecting traditional religion and in celebrating freedom and
justice.
Yiddish was the main language in all these movements. It was the
everyday language of most Eastern European Jews, although already
by the turn of the century it was losing ground to non-Jewish
languages both in Europe and North America. Some activists, such
as the Zionists, ideologically rejected Yiddish and used it only
as a matter of convenience. Others, though, celebrated Yiddish
and made it a central part of their ideology, as "a national language
of the Jewish people" (the declaration of the Czernowitz Conference
on Yiddish in 1908). Out of these milieux came the treasures of
modern Yiddish literature and Yiddish song.
