Introduction

It was 1961. I was all of 20 years old, a college senior and president of student Hillel at Brandeis University. I was thrilled to be engaged in deep conversation with Rabbi Zalman Schachter, whom I had invited to spend a weekend on our campus. He was just on his way out of being a traditional Chabad Hasid, on his way to becoming the key figure of a Neo-Hasidic revival within Judaism. I had just gotten over a period of rather self-punishing Orthodoxy in my adolescent years, followed by a sharp rebellion against it. I was well on my way toward my lifelong journey as a Jewish seeker. I had met Reb Zalman earlier and I knew that he could be an important guide in finding my path. Amid many other things he said, long forgotten, he spoke one sentence that has remained with me over these more than 60 years. It was in Yiddish, a language we both understood and valued, even though most of our conversation took place in English.“Yiddishkeyt iz a derekh in avoyde,” he said. Judaism is a way of service, of serving God.

That is how I have understood Judaism over the course of all these decades. It is a path, a way of approaching a life of service to the divine, to that which is holy, to the mysterious One. Reb Zalman did not use a term for God in that sentence; it was understood. He and I would both have preferred the unpronounceable Hebrew Y-H-W-H to the English G-O-D, but we understood what we meant. Devotion, inwardness, a desire to serve, openheartedness, and “cultivation of the inner life” were all terms that characterized the spiritual path of which we were speaking, in a conversation that continued over many years.Yiddishkeyt or “Judaism” is a language in which to express that path. It is not the only such language or even necessarily the world’s best. But it isours; it is the language our heart speaks, the spiritual legacy of our ancestors implanted within us. That is what remained—and still remains, sixty years later—important to me.

Use of the termYiddishkeyt in this context was entirely natural for Reb Zalman, as one who had spent his formative years within a Hasidic community. But in a broader context, its use becomes more complicated. Is it to be translated “Judaism” or “Jewishness?” There once was a whole world of people out there who rejected quite thoroughly any sort of religious faith, that which they would have called “Judaism,” but affirmed preciselyYiddishkeyt as an alternative to it. The term vaguely described a set of values, including a special concern for fellow Jews and their fate as well as a certain affection for the traditional old-world Jewish way of life, without actually practicing any of its specific dictates.Yiddishkeyt was understood in those circles as something different from “Judaism.”

When I was growing up there were lots of such people. Some of them were even members of my own extended family. Today, they have retreated to a small sect of ideologically driven Yiddishists. The great majority of those who might once have belonged to that camp now just call themselves Jewish non-believers. When asked the “religion” question on a Pew survey form they check off “none.” But they still have a sense of Jewish identity, strong or weak. The vacuum created by the absence of religious faith was largely taken up by Zionism, which they see as a commitment to the Jews as a people, expressed mainly by love and support for the State of Israel.

It did not have to have happened that way. Jews have always had a strong sense of commitment to their fellow Jews, borne along and regularly reinforced by our long history of suffering. Such a sense of Jewish ethnicity or peoplehood might have sufficed to replace traditional religion for generations of nonbelievers. The problem for survival of Jewry here was that ethnicities not reflected in the color of one’s skin do not do very well in the Un