This was published in 1975 but rings very true today.
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz
Our generation has formulated some seductively shining slogans: self-fulfillment, personal freedom, liberation from the taboos of the past, from an absolute law, the new morality and situation ethics, etc., etc. They all sound extremely progressive. And who among us–and especially among us Jews living in the twentieth century–would not like to be known as a liberal. Thus, instead of setting an example for our youth, we thought that there was no safer path to the future and to a happy life, free of hangups, than to let our children lead us. For some time now, a change has been afoot, imperceptibly, gradually. A growing number of Jews are no longer as confident as they used to be that we are really progressing, that we are moving toward some glorious future, indeed toward a future of any kind. Many among the most liberal-minded Jews are no longer as comfortable with the slogans of this new age as they used to be.
We have started feeling ill at ease. We have become rather doubtful whether our former expectations will ever come true. We hardly know what to expect for the future of American Jewry and the future of Judaism in America. We are perturbed by the increasing divorce rate, by the erosion of the quality of Jewish family life, and by the high percentage of intermarriage. Some of our best young people are drifting into alien worlds and alien lives. An inordinately high number of them have been involved in the so-called “drug culture.” They seem to have been an easy prey for every fad in vogue. Many others are just drifting aimlessly, living without a purpose. We sense that something is wrong somewhere. A system which promised human progress seems to have rendered only disintegration and loss of substance.
Survival may be threatened from without, by outside enemies–and God knows Jews the world over have enough of those–but, even more by the enemy within, by the disintegration of Jewish identity. When identity is caught up in a process of erosion, there can be no hope for survival. Of course, whereas in the past survival has been a uniquely Jewish problem, today it seems to have deepened into a universal concern. When properly understood, the reason for it is neither political nor material, but spiritual. The most striking feature of our times is the spiritual exhaustion of Western civilization. The problem of Jewish identity and the erosion of Jewish values result partly from the crisis of Western civilization, of which modern Jewries have been an intimate part and in whose disintegration they now share.
Of course, ever since the holocaust of European Jewry, Jews ought to have been on their guard against being taken in by “modernism” and “progress.” What happened to the six million Jews in Europe was not the work of the Nazis or of the German people alone. Neither the Nazis nor the Germans were a race different from the generality of mankind. Only because human kind is what it is could what happened happen. All over Europe there were the collaborating nationalities, the collaborating churches, the encouraging silence of the Vatican. All over the world there were the barbarously indifferent governments, whose absence of concern, and often determined refusal to help the persecuted, actually encouraged the European executioners. It is enough to think of the refugee ships, which could find no single free port willing to admit them, and which were ultimately forced to return to Europe and Germany, in order to realize that Western civilization is morally bankrupt. We usually speak of the Jewish tragedy of the holocaust. In fact, the tragedy of mankind was greater by far than the specific tragedy of the Jewish people. The Jews were shattered and broken, but did not collapse morally and spiritually because of inner rot. In the ghettoes and the concentration camps Western civilization revealed the bankruptcy of the spirit at its very heart.
We should have been on our guard and were not. But now that disillusionment has become the lot of Western man in general, now that the signs of the exhaustion of this civilization are all around us, we shall be well advised to take cognizance of some of the telling features of this eclipse of modern man.
We have asserted that this civilization is in a process of disintegration. In the past, there was a pretense that it was functioning in accordance with a system of values. There existed a dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil. At least, there was an understanding of the distinction. Today, the dividing line has become blurred and uncertain. There is hardly a Thou-shalt or a Thou-shalt-not that is not being questioned. The value system of the West has collapsed.
There are two ways of looking at values, and interpreting their origin. Buber in Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, Harper & Row, New York, 1952 makes reference to the fact that Kant had no place for God in his Critique of Pure Reason. Theoretically, the existence of God was not to be proved. In his Critique of Practical Reason, he gave God status as a postulate of practical reason. Yet in his posthumous work one finds that he was struggling with the problem of the reality of God to the very end. According to Buber, Kant was searching for a source from which to derive the quality of absoluteness inherent in the ethical law. Kant understood that without God no ethical law could be absolutely binding. One might say that Sartre is the philosopher who represents the most extreme opposing view. According to him, man is initially nothing and has to create himself out of nothing; he is the creator of his own values. To this Buber responds by maintaining that man can only discover values; he cannot create them. Unfortunately, in this respect modern civilization sides with Sartre against Buber. In a sense, it is the logical consequence from what one might call the scientific world view.
For some time now, the modern scientific mind has denied the existence of all Absolutes. There is no absolute Truth, nor an Absolute God, and—of course—there are no absolute values. It has insisted that all our value concepts are relative. This means in essence that man is the creator of his own values. This position has been pursued to its ultimate consequence by the logical positivists who maintain that values are purely a matter of taste. One person likes cherry pie, another may enjoy incest or dislike it. It is all the same. Of course, if man is the creator of his own values, one might ask: which man? which people? which society? which system of government? It is enough to raise the question in order to realize how such relativism must lead to moral confusion, conflict, and chaotic anarchy. The psychopath—why indeed does one dub him thus?—who kills out of conviction is neither more or less right or wrong than the humanitarian—why indeed do you call him that?—who saves with compassion. What is right for one may be wrong for another; what is justice in one country may be inhuman in another. And no one may judge or condemn. All that one may be able to say is: “I like it!” or “I dislike it.” Man in the general, in the abstract, does not exist. He is always an individual, this man, that man, a certain kind of a human being, living at a certain time, in a specific situation, in this society or another. So that if man is the creator of values, it is every man creating his own values, everyone doing his own thing and being convinced that it is right, good, and beautiful. One might also say the test of values is success. Good is what succeeds; bad, that which fails.
At the close of the Second World War, speaking to the assembled leadership of the S.S. about the massacre of the Jewish people in Europe, Heinrich Himmler had the following to say:
“To have gone through that and to have remained an honest man just the same, save for the exceptions due to human nature, that is what has made you tough and strong. This is a glorious page in history, never before, never again to be written.” The statement is not really surprising; it is neither inhuman, nor absurd. It has its own truth, its own logic. Within the frame of reference of this civilization, it makes sense. In a world in which man creates his own values, where all principles of behavior are formulated by man alone and all morality is relative to the man and the society who conceive it, it does make good sense to commit genocide and yet to consider oneself an honest man, the author of a glorious page in human history. It is the ultimate manifestation of the collapse of the value system of modern civilization.
This collapse of values has had its most fateful consequences in the area of education by giving birth to the principle of permissiveness. “Do not frustrate the poor child, do not stunt the free development of his personality. Let him have his own way.” Such were the principles of a new education. The slogan was ‘to every child a childhood.’ All this was very well meant, but children also have certain rights, among which, for example, is the right to learn the difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between honesty and cheating, between excellence and mediocrity. If the child is not taught the difference, he assumes that there is no difference, that the educators themselves, parents and teachers, do not care about the difference. Finally, the child will come to realize that neither parents nor teachers care very much about the youth entrusted into their care. Permissiveness indeed means that they do not care; they do not care because the system of values has collapsed for them within their own personal life conduct.
In our days we have witnessed the rebellion of young people against “the establishment,” insisting that every one is entitled “to do his own thing.” It was a rather pathetic and pointless rebellion. For their elders, “the establishment,”—politicians, lobbyists, governments etc.—were all out doing their own thing. That is why the world today is balancing precariously at the brink of the abyss. What matters in human life is not so much what a person does, but the standards of values by which he acts. Permissiveness has been the betrayal that the elder generation perpetrated on its children. It has been modern civilization’s abdication of responsibility toward the future. Of course, one cannot help being permissive toward one’s children, if one is permissive in one’s life style and ethical and moral conduct. In a condition of the disintegration of all value standards betrayal of the future by permissiveness is unavoidable.
Of course, every school system reflects the image of the society that maintains it and in the midst of which it attempts to function. The school system in this civilization has ceased to provide educational institutions. The schools may offer instruction in the “Three R’s,” they may teach skills in the sciences, history, and languages. But the teaching of skills is not education. Education is concerned with the character, the personality, the soul of the young. A disintegrating civilization is incompetent to educate.
