11 - Conclusion

Summary

AS A SEQUEL, after forty years, to We Have Reason to Believe, this book has sought to defend the theological position of liberal super - naturalism which I had taken in the earlier book and tried to follow through in other theological works during the intervening period. I have tried, in this book, to show why I still have reason to believe in a personal God and in ‘Torah from Heaven’, provided that this latter doctrine is understood in a non-fundamentalist way. In the preceding chapters I have tried to demonstrate why, for moderns, the fundamental - ist attitude, for all its power—it does have power, witness the large number of intelligent, sophisticated men and women who still adopt it—is untenable because it is contrary to the facts of history. Yet, I have argued, a rejection of fundamentalism need not and should not result in a repudiation of halakhah, the legal side of Judaism, provided halakhah is seen in dynamic rather than static terms.

I do not delude myself into imagining that I have arrived at my position by pure theological reflection, and doubt whether anyone else really arrives at his or her religious stance on these grounds. Other factors— emotional, sociological, experiential—than the cognitive are involved in religious belief. Most of us are creatures of habit and conformity in religious matters. Our pattern of life is largely determined by our parentage, the social group to which we belong, and our education, so that an Orthodox Jew, while he may question this or that aspect of his tradition, will not usually contemplate becoming a Reform Jew, and the latter, while finding features of Orthodoxy personally attractive, will usually decide that his religious destiny is with Reform. Jews, like other religious folk, simply get on with it. Given my own background—at first lukewarm, later fiery, Orthodoxy—I would no doubt have remained fully Orthodox in theory as well as practice, and would probably have spent all my days as an inhabitant of the yeshiva world, had I not been introduced to the study of Jewish history. As Solomon Schechter remarked, the real problem for modern Jews is presented by the comparatively new discipline of history.