When I was 21, a good friend became baal teshuva and convinced me to take a 3-week, Birthright-style trip to Israel. Hosted by an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, the trip was designed to inspire young, secular American Jewish men like myself to become more religious. A slightly lost spiritual seeker, I was their ideal candidate.
A magical new world of Jewish spirituality opened before my eyes, and I quickly grew infatuated. I canceled my return flight and stayed an extra month at the yeshiva, immersed in Jewish learning and religious practice. The tight-knit ultra-Orthodox world of traditional folkways and piety seemed an enchanted alternate universe, offering the community, rootedness and direction I deeply craved, yet found lacking in secular American life. For a time, I may have become ultra-Orthodox myself. But something didn’t feel right– a nagging alienation lingered in my pintele yid.
One day, walking outside the old city of Jerusalem, I decided to pray aloud to a G-d I wasn’t sure I conventionally believed in– ‘show me what I am missing!’ Turning the corner, I discovered an anti-occupation rally. The activists there reawakened my leftist proclivities and invited me to see the occupation first-hand. Before long I left the yeshiva and joined them in the West Bank, engaged in solidarity work with Palestinians for the next four months.
My time on both sides of the apartheid wall changed my life. In the decade and a half since, the cause of justice in Israel/Palestine, and the project of building a Judaism beyond nationalism has become central to my life as an author, organizer and movement-builder. Along the way, my religious commitment has deepened as well. I traversed the landscape of progressive, pluralistic non-Orthodox American Jewish spirituality, explored many modalities of religious practice, and almost attended rabbinical school in the process.
I found much to appreciate, but something in me remained unsatisfied. I couldn’t fully shake the dim feeling that perhaps ultra-Orthodoxy offered the more substantive Yiddishkeit, and sometimes yearned to submerge myself in the thick community I glimpsed in frum yeshiva life, where it seemed one always had a Shabbos table, the camaraderie was always intense, the singing always lasted long into the night. My Jewishness remained an open question for me, and I wondered whether a life under the yoke of halacha would fill the nagging alienation that lingered in my pintele yid.
Nearly a decade after my stint in yeshiva, my wrestling led me to join my baal teshuva friend in Uman, Ukraine for the massive Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage, a kind of Burning Man for the ultra-Orthodox, where I was one of the few non-frum Jews around. After days of immersion in the communities I once came close to joining, tears suddenly flooded my face during the Rosh Hashanah morning service, as I prayed fervently to a G-d I still wasn’t sure I conventionally believed in, asking ‘what am I looking for here? What is this winding path I am on, full of wrestling and restless questioning?’ I was stunned when at that very moment, the day’s first shofar blast pierced the morning sky, and the words in our liturgy read “a great shofar is sounded, and a still, small voice is heard.” In my core, that still, small voice whispered with unmistakable clarity– the wrestling itself is the point.
These days, I’m learning to stop expecting my Yiddishkeit to fill the postmodern void. The grass seemed greener in Orthodoxy, I’ve realized, because my yearning for authenticity and escape reflected a structural lack embedded in late capitalist dystopia. Ours is an alienating, disenchanted world, and mired in its mediated malaise we seek out re-enchantment, connection and rootedness in community, in religion, in social movements. Today, it seems to me more honest to learn to live with this lack, than to imagine that any faith, flag or folkway can fully fill it. This too is deeply Jewish– for klal Yisrael, often translated as ‘the people that wrestle with G-d’, the wrestling itself is the point.
I was reminded of my wrestling while reading Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. Tablets Shattered tracks Leifer’s own decade of wrestling, as a young leftist millennial like myself, with the religious and political contradictions of American Jewish life, and since its release it has generated spirited, often heated debate about Zionism and anti-Zionism, Jewish religiosity, the Jewish Left and more.
While Leifer has drawn attention for his trenchant political critiques of the Jewish Left milieu with which he once closely associated, here I will focus on Leifer’s cultural critique of non-Orthodox American Judaism “from the Right”, as he put it in an interview. Drawing on an ambient malaise and creeping dissatisfaction intimately familiar to myself and many others of my generation, Tablets Shattered valorizes “the radical potential of traditional Judaism” as a solution to the interlocking cultural crises facing 21st-century American Jewry. Eschewing both the American Jewish establishment as well as the dissident left-liberal political and spiritual movements that have emerged in recent years to challenge its hegemony, Leifer ultimately embraces Orthodoxy as “the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer.”
While I understand Leifer’s flirtations with ultra-Orthodoxy, as a researcher of the contemporary Right I find this traditionalist turn unsettlingly similar to the illiberal, anti-democratic Christian and Jewish nationalist movements I study. Tablets Shattered offers plenty of incisive observations and challenging provocations on a range of topics, often from a place of progressive commitment. But by embracing traditionalism as a “radical” counter to modernity while signaling disenchantment with the political Left, Tablets Shattered is naively utopian at best, while at worst, it channels a reactionary zeitgeist in our dangerous era of ‘diagonalist’ politics.
In Leifer’s telling, non-Orthodox American Jewish civilization is in decline because throughout the 20th century, it came to reject halacha as a binding framework for Jewish life, and instead shaped Jewish peoplehood to fit the mold of dominant American liberalism. By ‘liberalism’, Leifer means a modern paradigm of “pluralism, individualism and voluntarism” as well as relativism. Under liberal individualism, “individual fulfillment, gratification of the sovereign self” and a “live-and-let-live” approach to tradition “have supplanted commandedness and commitment to community” for the majority of American Jews.
According to Tablets Shattered, establishment Jewish institutions as well as countercultural Jewish Left and spiritual movements suffer from this same foundational rot of “crowning the individual as the chief sovereign of their own experience, as opposed to precedent, custom or top-down authority,” as he puts it. Thus the great mass of American Jews are content with merely “sprinkling a Jewish fragrance onto things” when it suits them– whether that be a progressive protest, a meditation practice or a wedding– while otherwise living atomized lives emptied of meaningful Jewishness. From this flows not only a crisis of Jewish meaning, but myriad markers of institutional decline– from shuttering synagogues and day schools to declining rabbinical school enrollment– condemning non-Orthodox American Judaism to creeping obsolescence.
Traditional halachic Judaism by contrast re-enchants Jewish life with depth and substance– “there is not a moment of life left unstructured by divine command…from the forming of one’s character to the food that one eats”– and offers “thickness of community” and a durable moral code. Whereas “our liberal capitalist culture celebrates boundless growth, infinite choice, and instant gratification”, traditional Judaism “teaches the merits of long-term commitment, patience and restraint, and contentment with one’s lot.” Tablets Shattered pairs this cultural critique of Jewish liberalism with political critique of the Jewish Left for failing, in Leifer’s view, to adequately embrace Jewish peoplehood in its response to October 7, among other moral shortcomings.
Orthodox Judaism, then, represents Leifer’s escape-hatch from the disappointments and dead-end dalliances of his youth, and the only hope, presumably, for the rest of our futures as well. Touring the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Lakewood, New Jersey, he lauds the communitarian tendencies of mutual aid and traditions of pietist virtue he finds there. For all their flaws, Leifer concludes, Haredi communities practice what Jewish Leftists merely preach, and they remain American Jewry’s most durable bulwark against the modern malaise.
The problem with Leifer’s critique of liberal individualism “from the Right” is, well, that it is from the Right. Compare the words of Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American founder of the Project-2025 aligned National Conservatism movement, a global alliance of political operatives at the cutting edge of the nationalist Right. “Today we declare independence,” Hazony announced at the founding National Conservatism conference in 2019, “from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing that matters in politics.” The central task of national conservatism, Hazony outlines in his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is to preserve and cultivate “the life of conservation and transmission” defined by “loyalty, hierarchy, honor, cohesion, and constraint”– the only way to oppose “the consuming fire of cultural revolution [that] destroys everything in its path.”
For national conservatives, this traditionalism cannot but declare war upon “the modern, liberal idea that the state is founded on individual consent, the purported basis for democratic forms of government,” as Ben Dunson, founding editor of the Christian nationalist journal American Reformer, put it in his glowing review of Hazony’s book. “There can be no stable families, and thus no stable societies, on the basis of such self-centered individualism. A commitment to honoring unchosen (yet binding) obligations, rather than personal consent, must be what ties the people of a nation together.” The nationalist Right’s attacks on bodily autonomy, LGBTQ and minority rights, and multiracial democracy itself flow from this inexorable logic– as does their valorization, like Leifer, of religious traditionalism. ”Orthodox religious traditions– Christian and Jewish– are the only thing that will survive the blast furnace of ongoing cultural revolution,” Hazony wrote in a since-deleted 2022 tweet. “Make sure you’re on the right side of this struggle.”
To be clear, Leifer opposes the nationalist Right and social conservatism more broadly. I’m no militant secularist, and there need be no inherent conflict between religiosity and Left politics. The Left has its own critique of liberal individualism, its own traditions of communitarianism, obligation, and moral virtue. But Leifer’s fiery traditionalism is notable next to his cool ambivalence towards traditions of Left struggle— “the grand ideologies, the old political faiths” of the historic Left, he gloomily laments, cannot be inherited in our “post-ideological age.” Along the way, he mirrors a number of other arguments from his political opponents, claiming, for example, that Israel is the irreducible center of Jewish peoplehood and the primary driver of the Jewish future, a kind of ‘Zionist realism’ long championed by the Jewish Right.
The “radical potential” he identifies in traditional Judaism, meanwhile, largely amounts to a series of lifestyle changes and values tweaks, such as abstention from commerce during holidays or the (often right-coded) merit of “contentment with one’s lot”. Far more radical on a fundamental level– in actuality, not just “potential”– is the materialist project of the Left, where the explicit task is to upend market relations not only on Shabbat but the other six days of the week as well, and to overcome capitalism itself, not merely its ‘liberal culture’. The neo-traditionalists have only re-enchanted the world in various ways; the point, however, remains to change it.
It is a hallmark of liberalism, after all, to confine radicalism solely to projects of lifestyle, inner spiritual/ethical cultivation, identitarianism or the creation of small, localized enclaves. “For all [the Left’s] posturing about mutual aid and ending capitalism,” Leifer sneers at one point, “when was the last time any of us gave ma’aser, tithing the religiously required tenth of our salary to charity, or, much more uncommon, fulfilled the mitzvah of taking the poor stranger into our home?” — curious examples for a text so seemingly critical of a neoliberal culture which, after all, delights in individualist solutions to collective, structural problems.
It’s undeniable that “non-Orthodox American Judaism faces a profound, fundamental crisis of content and purpose,” as he puts it, or that “capitalism’s corrosive effects on virtue, community, and social solidarity— and the need to overcome them— is a pressing moral question of our age,” as political theorist Matt McManus puts it. But we are in a moment of unprecedented innovation in progressive Jewish politics and spiritual life, where new generations are questioning the normative liberalism of our establishment institutions and reaching for new forms of collectivity, enchantment and obligation suffused with emancipatory struggle and deep commitment to Jewish peoplehood. It’s unfortunate that while it positions itself as a progressive exhortation to communitarian, moral and religious renewal, Tablets Shattered greets with distance, ambivalence or even disavowal most of the actual forces of progressive renewal attempting to salvage an ethical Jewish future from the wreckage of our crisis-ridden present.
Indeed, while the critique of liberal individualism is at times a useful analytic frame in Leifer’s text, it often seems to reduce today’s dissident, era-defining progressive diaspora Jewish political and spiritual movements to straw-man caricatures, and refuses to wrestle with forms of futurity beyond demography, forms of obligation and commandedness beyond Orthodoxy, forms of ahavat Yisrael beyond Zionism. Taken together, Tablets Shattered’s neo-traditionalism, ‘Zionist realism’, anti-Left polemic and dismissal of the religious life of the bulk of American Jewry are cut from the same conservative cloth. Rather than a novel rearticulation of Left politics, they signal a rearguard retreat from its emancipatory horizon.
The perils of “liberal capitalist culture” are real. But rather than grasping for traces of utopia in Lakewood, we should be affirming the “radical potential” for the Jewish Left to burst through dominant paradigms and transform the American Jewish future. Piety has its place, but accepting the yoke of heaven shouldn’t serve as substitute for the Left project of building a heaven on earth. Put differently, forsaking utopia and wrestling with what is given is, in a way, its own yoke to bear.
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