Some note on the slide to the right

Friend and I had the following email exchange this morning. Thought you might like it. I'm in red.

Posted with permission.

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i get the sense, at least in the Jewish community, that in the 1960s, even amongst the orthodox, religion was predominately a cultural thing. You didn't think about it too much. It didn't dominate your life. You still were basically integrated into society. your following of the precepts was not totally consistent. You didn't necessarily cover your hair or abstain from mixed dancing, but you paid homage to the religion of your ancestors. The problem was that if you are even paying homage to the religion of your ancestors, and you are paying lip service to the ideas, you open yourself up to criticism from the right that you are being inauthentic and hypocritical.

Ah, but what the right doesn't get is that paying what you cynically call "lip service to the idea" is a perfectly authentic/traditional approach to Judaism!

Since there is no response to that criticism, you are basically forced to make your religious experience into a logical rational one in which you follow through on those adages you pay lip service to.

No response? The response is: This is what (some) Jews have always done you ahistorical chunyuck.

In other words, religion goes from being cultural to being rational, (rupture and reconstruction).

It goes the other way, too. Scholastic Judaism was rational, or it tried to be anyway. The Judaism that followed was not.

[Snip]

i think there are more OJ's today who actually keep halacha because they think it's from God than there were in the '60s. this opens them up to an intellectual critique that couldn't have been made in the '60s.

I don't agree, or rather I don't see any evidence that you are right. Orthodox Jews today may be stricter, but why do you presume that the less-strict Jews of yesteryear were less likely to believe that halacha was divine? Perhaps they were simply less educated. Perhaps they kept everything they thought they were supposed to keep in the way they thought they were supposed to keep it? Perhaps they never doubted that halacha was divine; perhaps they simply had a different or incomplete understanding of what the halacha says.