The post-secular: a Jewish perspective.

The dominant sensibility of our time, in intellectual and spiritual terms, is one of "coming after." In Western discourse, at least, we are clearly in an age of "post"s: post-modern, post-colonial, post-Communist, post-Christian. In Jewish circles it is fairly de rigueur to speak of this time as post-Holocaust, post-Zionist, post-denominational. Of late we are hearing in our culture a less familiar but no less important permutation of this "coming after" syndrome": the post-secular.

Post-secular? In my rabbinic and academic training it was axiomatic that the secular and secularity were and would always remain the order of the day-certainly in the West (and who seriously thought of anywhere else?) The idea was that the Enlightenment was the non plus ultra in human affairs and the Enlightenment had installed the secular as the irrevocable discursive foundation on which all human endeavor would henceforth rest, the grand narrative of the West. Religion, to the extent that it could be credible and flourish, would only do so if it were grounded in Enlightenment assumptions and principles. That was the understanding, however tacit. Yet consider the following phenomena and events that have established themselves as part and parcel of early 21st century reality:

This essay was developed from a paper given in April 2003 in San Diego
at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association, in a seminar on "Literature and the Post-Secular."

The significant appeal of non-liberal religion. We see this clearly now in diverse ways in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: Opus Dei, the so-called Evangelicals, Chabad Chasidism and other varieties of ultra-Orthodoxy, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The ascendancy of the conservative Christian right in American culture and government. We have today a President and an administration that are decidedly faith-based in their approach to policy both domestic and foreign as the boundaries between religion and state look more and more porous. (1) A case in point is the recent debate over the presence/removal of the Ten Commandments monument.

The post-9/11 context. On the world stage we continue to unpack the meaning of 9/11, and in the West are beginning to understand it as the excrescence of a global conflict of ideas and ideologies, a power struggle between the values of the liberal Western secular state and the vision of a radical Islam. In the former, in line with the 18th century thinking that underlies its approach to polity, religion and state are separated either de facto or de jure; in the latter the politically enfranchised religious leaders seek to re-affirm and restore the hegemony of the umma (the world-wide community of Islamic believers) and its eternal values over what is seen as the spiritual emptiness of the Western nations corrupted by the tawdry values of Enlightenment secularism.

Clearly, in the words of one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, "something is happening here, and you don't know what it is ... do you, Mr. Jones." (2)

What exactly is the post-secular? What might it imply? What range of meanings does it carry? How does it relate to the post-modern? How useful a term is it? How does it relate to the contemporary Jewish situation? These are the questions that underlie the following discussion.

These questions interest me because dealing with them, if not answering them fully, helps me in my ongoing effort to make sense of the current cultural moment, which feels so transitional. (I say transitional, not transitory. Because time is a plastic and not a solid dimension, all cultural moments are perforce transitional even if they are of varying duration. But in some of them, certainly this one, one can fairly feel the ground shifting under one's feet.) The questions interest me as a Jew who understands Judaism and its Torah tradition to have a claim on me and yet at the same time is implicated and invested in Western culture and many of its values. That is the perspective from which I address the issues here.

In doing so I hold no particular brief for the post-secular, nor is what follows a critique of it. I see it as one of names some cultural critics have assigned to the post-modern reality we in the West are seen to inhabit at this time. The locution "post-secular" strikes me as offering a fresher insight into our time than "post-modern," which by now is a rather tired and overly contested cultural signifier.

I

On the surface there should not be much for me to discuss here. One could argue that the binary opposition of the sacred and the secular is not a Jewish one and therefore in a Jewish context questions about the post-secular are non-starters. There really is no word in Biblical or rabbinic Hebrew that denotes the secular. The Hebrew words for the sacred or the holy are kadosh (adjective) or kodesh (substantive.) The antonym for kodesh is hol which the revised Jewish Publication Society Tanakh translates as "profane." We see this is Leviticus 10:8-11 where it is given in apposition with another binary opposition tahor "clean" and tamay "impure."

      And the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying: Drink no wine or other
      intoxicant, you or your sons, when you enter the Tent of Meeting,
      that you may not die. This is the law for all time throughout the
      ages, for you must distinguish between the sacred and the profane
      and between the unclean and clean; and you must teach the
      Israelites all the laws which the Lord has imparted to them
      through Moses.

The sacred and the profane here are cultic distinctions and criteria, not cultural or worldview or lifestyle signifiers. Likewise, the appropriation of the kodesh and hol binary by the rabbis for the liturgy of the Havdalah ceremony that marks the termination of Shabbat on Saturday night at dusk does not point to hol as denoting or connoting the secular but rather the "ordinary" or the "weekday."

      Blessed are you, God, Sovereign of the world, who makes a
      distinction between the holy and the ordinary, between light and
      darkness, between Israel and the nations, between the seventh day
      and the six days of creating.

What, then, do we mean by "secular"? The word is a staple of contemporary parlance, bandied about almost without thinking as something opposed to or different from "religious." But what really does it denote or connote? As we shall see, there is no consensus among scholars on this question. In fact there is a substantial body of opinion that holds that there is no such thing as the secular, that it is an empty signifier.

Moreover, if we want to hone in on the subject more precisely we need to note the difference between secularization and secularism. "Secularization implies a historical process, almost certainly irreversible [sic] ... [whereas] secularism ... is the name for an ideology, a new closed world-view which functions very much like a new religion." (3) The ideology was a consequence of the process, but it is important not to confuse the one for the other. In this discussion I shall consider both.

The widely held view is that secularization arises out of discrete developments that transpired within the specific historical and political context of late medieval Christianity. The Israeli cultural critic Eliezer Schweid names these developments and succinctly defines "secularization" as

      the process by which the various spheres of temporal cultural
      creativity--science, philosophy, art, social morality, and
      political government--began to be freed from the dictates and
      dogmas of the Church. The secular ideologies strengthened their
      demand to realize the goal of liberation.... (4)

Harvey Cox, in his short-lived celebration of the secular, amplified this and put a Platonic or neo-Platonic spin on its origins:

      From the very beginning of its usage, secular denoted something
      vaguely inferior. It meant "this world" of change as opposed to
      the eternal "religious world".... It implies that the true
      religious world is timeless, changeless, and thus superior to the
      "secular" world which was passing and transient.... In its first
      widespread usage, our word secularization had a very narrow and
      specialized meaning. It designated the process by which a
      "religious" priest was transferred to a parish responsibility. He
      was secularized. Gradually the meaning of the term widened. When
      the separation of pope and emperor became a fact of life in
      Christendom, the division between the spiritual and the secular
      assumed institutional embodiment. Soon, the passing of certain
      responsibilities from ecclesiastical to political authorities was
      designated "secularization." (5)

These definitions, while historically correct, refer mostly to developments in the external world, the world of politics, governance, and inter-human affairs. What is more relevant in my view is the inner transformation such changes catalyzed in human consciousness, in the Husserlian lebenswelt. It is the secularization of consciousness that is of paramount importance in pointing the way to finding satisfying answers to questions under discussion here.

How do we document epistemic changes and the resulting transformations of consciousness? They are less empirically observable. Daniel Philpott's method is helpful. He begins not with a frontal examination of secularism but with a phenomenological definition of religion.

      The very term religion must be used provisionally and with care.
      Some scholars doubt whether it is even a meaningful concept, that
      is, an essential phenomenon of which there are different forms....
      In the Middle Ages Christians used the term religio, but not very
      often and then usually to refer to the communal life of
      monastics.... Aquinas used religio to mean the activity of giving
      proper reverence to God through worship. By contrast, the
      familiar, contemporary usage of religion, appearing first in early
      modern Europe, refers to a universal interior impulse toward God
      or to a system of propositional beliefs about the transcendent.
      (6)

This definition does not satisfy Philpott because it fails adequately to embrace non-Western religions or, at the same time, to exclude "Marxism, Nazism, nationalism, and witchcraft, all of which ... have also inspired feverish belief, ritual, and devotion." Accordingly, Philpott offers, however tentatively, the following formulation:

      religion is a set of beliefs about the ultimate ground of
      existence, that which is unconditioned, not itself created or
      caused, and the communities and practices that form around these
      beliefs (68). (7)

This definition leads him to the following conclusion:

      If this is religion, secularization is the decline of it. The
      decline occurs in different forms and degrees, corresponding to
      the different valences of religious commitment. The first, most
      thorough form of secularization is the erosion of subjective
      belief in an ultimate ground of existence, a deity, God. In
      ceasing to believe in religious claims, people usually also cease
      to worship and pray in community, in churches, synagogues,
      mosques, and temples. They reject religion altogether. It is both
      possible and common, though, for people to drop community but
      retain their beliefs. (8)

Philpott's last point is noteworthy. One of the significant consequences of the secularization process was the shift in common life from privileging the collective toward enfranchising the individual. I am wondering whether, when all the theorizing about the nature of the secular is said and done, a decisive aspect of what we call "the secular" involves the transfer of authority from the community to the enfranchised individual. It is true that the initial transfer of authority and control was from one collective entity to another: from the Church to the sovereign state, but Philpott reminds us that after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (which ended the great international religious conflict we call the Thirty Years War and which effectively laid the groundwork for the separation of religion from state, a foundational event in the secularization process) "within the state ... religious freedom for the individual was still rare" (73.) It is also true that human beings and the various legal systems they created have always understood and assumed the individual person to have agency. Indeed, since antiquity theologians and philosophers, in our time bioethicists, have acknowledged the existence of free will even as they debated its extent. All this notwithstanding, the issue I hold up here is authority. The Enlightenment established that without necessarily denying their respective existence and power, it is not the heteronomous community or a transcendent God that hold the balance of power in life but the autonomous self. (9)

II

Seen in this light the secular would appear to be essentially a Christian category, secularization a process indigenous to the Christian experience. My hesitation at the outset of this discussion about its relevance in a Jewish context would seem to be well founded.

It is not. The secular as I have briefly outlined it here may have no purchase in Biblical or rabbinic Judaisms but it certainly can be problematized when we apprehend and try to comprehend the modern Jewish experience. It is one thing to (try to) relate the secular to Torah or to Judaism theologically considered; it is quite another to examine it with respect to the Jews. Ben Halpern observed that "the history of Jewish secularism (unlike secularism in Occidental Christendom, which is a native growth maturing over the whole extent of European history) is the application to Jewish matters of standards carried over from the outside.." (10) All that has been noted about secularization as the result of the state wresting control from the Church can be transposed in Jewish terms to the European Jewish situation.

      The political and civil emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth
      and nineteenth centuries created objective pressures that required
      renunciation of control over many "profane" activities
      traditionally subject to Jewish religious law....

      While Judaism was conceived as a "religion" confined to roughly
      the same functions as the contemporary Church in Western
      Christendom (relinquishing everything "secular" to the nation
      state) each Jewish community in fact exercised plainly secular
      functions, uniting it in every country with other Jewish
      communities beyond the borders of the state to which it belonged.
      (11)

When authority passed from rabbis to the lay leadership of the Jewish community--and the passage was, and in Israel still is, not uncontested--thus did the historic and fateful sundering of Jewish religion from the Jewish polity take place. Judaism was now confined to the synagogue and the home, and matters that pertained to the public sphere--governance, fundraising, social services, combating anti-Semitism, even education--all came under the purview of the community, i.e., lay and not rabbinic leadership. While a lay leadership and a non-sacerdotal communal structure were not unknown in earlier times--there was the office of the Exilarch (Resh Galuta) in early medieval Babylonia and the Council of the Four Lands (Va'ad Arba' Aratzot) in late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe--this post--Emancipation situation paved the way for a novum in Jewish history. Now, for the first time, Jews could, if they so chose, reject the authority of Jewish law (halachah) and its commandments yet still maintain a tie to the Jewish community and its institutions and a sense of solidarity with their fellow Jews. Authority now resided in the institutions of the community on the collective level and, in the final analysis, in the autonomous person on the individual level. Thus did what would have in earlier times been regarded as an oxymoron--a secular Jewish identity--become possible. (12) Not only possible but, as the nineteenth century progressed, increasingly prevalent. The purest manifestation of authentic secular Judaism was the General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (in the Yiddish original Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund in Lita, Poyln, un Rusland.) The Bund, as it was conventionally known, was founded in 1897, and sought to develop an autonomous Jewish community and culture predicated on a humanistic, socialist, non-sacral basis. The better known attempt to construct a new Jewish identity on this new foundation--better known because it was, for reasons that are outside the scope of this discussion, more successful--was Zionism, founded in the very same year as the Bund by Theodore Herzl under the rubric of The World Zionist Organization. Although "Zionism was from the start an unstable combination of religious (dati) and secular (hiloni--a term invented by modern Hebraists) Jewishness" (13) we can appreciate the sincerity of the Enlightenment values we hear in Herzl's famous lines in his Der Judenstaat in which he outlines the nature of the new Jewish society he envisions:

       We shall keep our priests [sic] within the confines of their
       temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army
       within the confines of their barracks. Army and priesthood shall
       receive honors high as their valuable functions deserve. But they
       must not interfere in the administration of the state which
       confers distinction upon them, else they will conjure up
       difficulties without and within.

Herzl knew more than he realized. That neither of the aspirations he expressed here has (yet) come to pass in Israel and the possible reasons for it is a whole other story.

Now, as I noted above, the politico-historical process of secularization became in time a full-fledged worldview and an ideology. This reification of the secular transformed it into a construct, and this opens the door to what happens to it in the postmodern world. Secularization may have occurred and, as Cox thinks or, more precisely, thought, it might be, maybe even should be, irreversible. But the worldview it engendered, secularism, is eminently assailable.

III

If there is any one distinguishing feature of the Hydra-like phenomenon or movement or whatever it is that we call post-modernism, it is its searching and relentless interrogation of the verities of the Enlightenment. What was deemed certain is no longer a sure thing. What was assumed as given has been shown to be contingent--contingent on the given, on who postulated that particular given, and on the historical, economic, political, social, racial, and/or gender context in which the postulator or postulators did his or her or their postulating.

Integral to postmodernism's critique of the legacy of the Enlightenment is its calling into question how we know and signify, how we make meaning. Whatever else it may be--and it is surely multifarious and variegated--postmodernism grows out of an acute awareness of the linguisticality of the human reality. Consciousness and meaning are structured by language, and language, it turns out, is a slippery foundation on which to found our understanding of reality. Language is humanly and culturally determined, and therefore it is shifting, contingent, arbitrary. Signification is not nearly as determinate as we would think or like. It is not only language and meaning that are constructed; it is all of reality. I will acknowledge the epistemological debate over whether an objective reality exists, but that is not for now. The fact is that what we know, or think we know, is largely, if not exclusively, constructed out of human perception and memory.

Postmodern sociologists of religion, therefore, have performed a wholesale deconstruction of the interpretation of secularization which I have above only summarized. They have noted that the major proponents of secularization theory, figures such as Bryan Wilson, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, may have been playing out a particular cultural bias. Swatos and Cristiano note that many of these men "were products of a European Christian intellectual heritage and educational system that, we might now say, romanticized the religious past of their nations." (14) This is what enabled them to advance the notion of a pious past that has given way to a Godless present. When these biases are identified and corrected for, the picture changes. At the end of their deconstruction of secularization Swatos and Cristiano reach the following conclusion:

       What can we say of secularization now? We can say that over time
       our epistemologies have changed, that our ideas of the "ways the
       world works" have changed, and that these have entailed
       corresponding shifts of emphasis in global explanatory structures
       or bases upon which we attribute credibility or truth. The
       Medieval worldview, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
       Romanticism, and the era of modern science represent such
       alternative epistemologies. When we consider the relatively short
       history of the scientific worldview, it is not surprising that
       its epistemology has not fully jelled; furthermore, the
       phenomenon of globalization creates a contestation among
       religious epistemologies themselves that, though it has analogs
       in the past, is unprecedented in its scope today. Perhaps because
       he is now an American, it is Peter Berger.... who, of the leading
       lights of secularization theory, has come fully to repudiate it.
       (15)

Rodney Stark's meticulously detailed historical and sociological analysis of patterns of belief and piety in Europe and the United States over centuries arrives at the same place: the "conception of a pious past is mere nostalgia; most prominent historians of medieval religion now agree that there never was an Age of Faith." (16) His analysis of diverse evidence persuades him that people in the past were no more or no less religious or church-going than they are now. He cites Andrew Greeley: "There could be no de-Christianization of Europe ... because there never was any Christianization in the first place. Christian Europe never existed." (17) Stark concludes that

       no one can prove that one day religion will not wither away.
       Perhaps the day will come when religion has been relegated to
       memory and museums. If so, however, this will not have been
       caused by modernization, and the demise of faith will bear no
       resemblance to the process postulated by the secularization
       doctrine. Therefore, once and for all, let us declare an end to
       social scientific faith in the theory of secularization,
       recognizing that it was the product of wishful thinking. (18)

Now what is true for the goose is true for the gander. Not only can secularization be called into question. So, too, can secularism. It is not only the theorists of the phenomenon of secularization that can be smoked out but, strangely enough, many of the major architects of postmodern cultural analysis as well. If the former can be said to have romanticized religion, the latter have idealized Reason. This is what John McLure, in his assessment of the new directions American narrative fiction has taken recently, finds. Fredric Jameson, for example, blithely describes the postmodern spirit as "effortlessly secular" and he is one among many. (19)

      Elsewhere in the academic literature of postmodernity and
      postmodernism the secularity of the moment is frequently simply
      assumed, and evidence to the contrary is not so much denied as
      disappeared through subtle and reiterated acts of selective
      attentiveness. (20)

To be sure, as McLure notes, Jameson does have a sense of the sublime, which I will not detail here, and so, too, does Lyotard. Both "speak of a postmodern sublime" albeit in a different ways. But

      Lyotard's Kantian definition of the sublime so limits the meaning
      of the term as to secure it against any sacred, transcendental, or
      supernaturalist interpretation and thus to distract attention once
      again from such impulses in postmodernism.... Lyotard's sublime,
      like Kant's but unlike Edmund Burke's, is rigorously
      rationalistic.... In both cases [Jameson and Lyotard] ...

      postmodern invocations of radical Otherness, invocations that
      might be read as protests against the regime of Reason itself....
      are instead first acknowledged and then emphatically recontained
      within discourses that celebrate reason and privilege it over mere
      imagination. (21)

McLure thus hoists these theorists of the postmodern condition by their own petard. He shows that that their own thinking too, like all human intellection, floats in a discrete conceptual fluidum. That fluidum is the ideology that resulted from the process of secularization, secularism, which functions for them as a master narrative to which they still cling.

McLure advances a less constricted reading of the postmodern temper, one that "gets" (my emphasis) what he calls "the scandal of continued artistic engagement with non-secular constructions of reality" and celebrates it. (22) This leads him to discern a kind of fiction that is not only resolutely post-modern but also post-secular in tenor. Writers who he finds embody this sensibility are Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ishmael Reed, "the mostly Latin American works of 'magical realism' and the novels of Afro-American and Native American novelists such as Toni Morrison, Michele Cliff, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich." (23)

The post-secular is thus a consequence of the post-modern or an aspect of it, though the two are by no means coterminous. Both are part of the larger project of undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment. If modernity and the secular represent the retreat or the containment or even the banishing of the sacred from both public life and individual consciousness, the post-secular involves its return, the re-sacralization of human reality.

IV

What might this mean? The answer given will depend on the social and political context in which the post-secular phenomenon is viewed. In non-Western societies, for example, where secularization as it occurred in the West did not take place, or has not yet taken place, it may be inappropriate to speak of the post-secular. We in the West need to be sensitive to the fact that what is unfolding in those societies is intrinsic to their respective histories and collective memory, not to ours. The power and influence of religion there may not signify a recuperation or a resurgence of the sacred at all. The Islamization of some countries that we are witnessing today may more than anything involve the use of religion for political ends and not a repudiation of secular values. It is important to remember that Islam, like Judaism, understands itself as something more than a religion. The Islamic umma represents the total world-wide Moslem community of believers, the Islamic analogue to the Jewish 'am Yisra'el.

That said, it is still possible to see the post-secular turn as a development international in scope. I am thinking here of the many manifestations all over the world now of a vigorous fideistic fervor that is often named as fundamentalism. Both in the West and elsewhere this involves an embracing, whether by retention or by adoption, of earlier epistemic modes, modes in which the authority of the transcendent and received tradition are affirmed and privileged, either out of a self-abnegating heteronomy or by a choosing autonomous self (which stances may be two sides of the same existential coin.) It is in this light in which I think the appeal of "fundamentalist" religion can best be understood. (24)

But in other respects the post-secular is something quite new, the consequence of the post-modern discrediting the hegemony of Enlightenment discourse. Questions of value, questions that were considered closed or answered definitively are now up for grabs. Those who embrace this post-secular stance go in different, even diverging directions.

Some seize the moment as a welcome opportunity to rehabilitate theology or ontotheology. (25) Metaphysics and metaphysical discourse are once again possible. The cosmos can be re-sacralized. The sacred and the transcendental can be re-discovered. Others hold that after Heidegger metaphysics and theology are impossible. They insist that the post-secular mandates or involves a phenomenological move, the eidetic reduction of Being that Heidegger tried to exposit. This could lead to a recognition of the limits of subjectivity and to a new openness to the numinous, to an intimation of the wholly Other.

This is where deconstruction, at least as articulated by John D. Caputo, goes.

       Deconstruction is not out to undo God or deny faith, or to mock
       science or to make nonsense out of literature, or to break the
       law or, generally, to ruin any of those hoary things at whose
       very mention all your muscles constrict.... Deconstruction is
       rather the thought, if it is a thought, of an absolute
       heterogeneity that unsettles all the assurances of the same
       within which we comfortably ensconce ourselves.

But, he cautions, "let there be no mistake: `early on' deconstruction does delimit the metaphysical side of theology. [And that, he says is] an honorable and hoary religious project." But something valuable accrues from this. In liberating the Biblical text

       from the grips of metaphysical theology, by inscribing theology
       within the trace, by describing faith as always and already
       marked by the trace, by differance and undecidability,
       deconstruction demonstrates that faith is always faith, and this
       in virtue of one of the best descriptions of faith we possess,
       which is that faith is always through a glas darkly. (26)

On this view to arrive at the post-secular by this route is to arrive at a place of absence, a place where absence is a palpable sensibility. For such souls, and I use the word advisedly, this absence involves a hunger for meaning. Here, for example, is Charles Winquist, a philosopher who, near the end of his life, understood the need for new spiritual horizons:

       The dominant culture in Europe and North America is secular and
       the readers that I envision for this book are deeply influenced
       by this culture.... Those for whom I write are restless. They
       have noted an absence in their lives, but it is not an absence
       that can be readily filled by institutionalized religion....

       The sense of absence is not associated with being outside of
       religious institutions but is instead experienced as a feeling
       outside a sphere of meaning and discourse that gives importance
       to life.... [T]he achievement of a secularized culture
       liberating the human condition from the strictures of religious
       life appears ironically also as a liberation from
       meaningfulness. Those of us who have identified with the
       dominant secular culture also have a vague sense of not
       experiencing finite existence in and through the infinite. (27)

V

How reflective of the professoriate and academe is the sensibility Winquist articulates? I think not very. With the exception of schools that are rooted in an explicitly religious mission of one kind or another, the contemporary (North) American university is still the high temple of secularism, the last great bastion of the Enlightenment worldview and values. Religion still treads lightly there, if it treads at all. In the place where critical inquiry is the first order of business, perhaps the only order of business, the hermeneutics of faith can only be seen as non-critical inquiry. What is taught in departments of religion is the history, sociology, and phenomenology of religion, not the hermeneutics of faith, and certainly not religious praxis. The latter matters, if they are accorded any place at all in the life of the university, are left to such chaplaincies as there may be, entities that the university really does not know what to do with.

The perplexities, ambivalences, and tacit discomfort of many reputedly brilliant academicians and academic administrators with religion, the religious dimension of human existence, and religious praxis, though occasionally amusing, are not hard to understand. They are part and parcel of the legacy of positivism, the intellectual foundation upon which the modern university rests. They are nicely accounted for by Pascal in his doctrine of the three orders of the human enterprise (in Pensees): the order of the body or "the carnal order", the intellectual order, and the order of the spirit, termed by Pascal "charite." Meskin calls them "three distinct ontological orders." Just as "to champions in ... the 'carnal order,' the glory of the intellectual order is invisible," so too "those in the intellectual order are similarly (if not even more) incapable of recognizing the glory of those who triumph in the order of the spirit...." (28) As Meskin points out, to Pascal there is a hierarchy in these orders, spiritual being the highest, but the orders are not mutually exclusive.

       Pascal never indicates that one must disengage oneself from a
       lower order to 'move' into another: one rather hopes to stand
       within all three. Pascal does not suggest antagonisms among the
       orders-except that limiting oneself to, or forging one's identity
       solely within, one of the lower orders will prevent one from
       recognizing the higher values of the others. (29)

The problem with academe is that, having forged its identity solely within the intellectual order, it has put all its eggs into one epistemological basket. In its heart of hearts religion, on one side, is as foreign an element as, on the other side, athletics. It would prefer that both go away quietly. Since they don't and won't, the professoriate--and yes, there are exceptions--is uncomfortable and ambivalent about the manifestations on campus of both these other two orders. It seems largely unconcerned about the dessication of spirit that is almost endemic to graduate students today. It is geared to replicate the paradigms in which it was trained.

Will the turn to the post-secular change all that? The assessments of postmodernism that McLure and Winquist offer, however differently they are oriented, do not suggest an optimistic prognosis. The postmodern alone, a critique of Enlightenment thinking alone, does not automatically lead to a latter-day transvaluation of values. The question is: what will be the relation between truth and meaning? Are they mutually exclusive or inclusive, compatible or incompatible? Is one to be privileged over the other? If so, which one?

Excursus

I hear Winquist privileging meaning, and in his desire for meaning a yearning for the transcendent. The post-secular stance--dilemma is a better word--is to recognize the essential subjectivity of human experience on the one hand and the need to break out of it, to get beyond it on the other. The question, the problem, is transcendence--the nub of the whole matter here. What is the transcendent after the Absolute has been called into question and the interrogation of the Absolute has itself been interrogated? To point the way to the beginnings of an answer--and I think that is all we can presume to attain--I want to hold up in the following little excursus two writers who, to my mind, limn the post-secular in important ways: Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who anticipates it, and Edmond Jabes (1912-1991), who articulates it. Kafka and Jabes are Europeans and the post-secular sensibility or stance is manifest in their work in ways quite different from the American writers McLure discusses. I read them in a context wider than the particular geographic and linguistic ones in which they wrote: as children of the West--Kafka in its modernist moment. (30) Jabes as a quintessential postmodern. The fact that they are both Jews is not incidental or coincidental.

We have to be careful with Kafka. He is so brilliantly indeterminate that he can be made to refract almost whatever a given reader chooses to see in him. So we try mightily to look not at but through the amazingly transparent textual surface he presents. But what is it that we see? A sense of transcendence? A despair of transcendence?

Eric Heller a generation ago situated Kafka in the very same spiritual context as this discussion. He notes that by the time Kafka appears on the scene in the early part of the 20th century, "reality has been all but completely sealed off against any transcendental intrusion.... Kafka writes at the point where the world, having become too heavy with spiritual emptiness, begins to sink into the unsuspected demon-ridden depths of unbelief." (31) We should never lose sight of the fact that Kafka is writing after Nietzsche and I think it is clear that he understands Nietzsche's point about the death of God. Except that with Kafka we get the sense that he is not quite convinced that that is really so, or, perhaps more accurately, he doesn't want to be convinced.

A good place to see this is near the climax of the classic parable "Before the Law" that comes near the end of The Trial. The man from the country, having waited in front of the door to the Law for years, now begins to question his perception.

       Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether The world
       is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only
       deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance
       that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law. Now his
       life is drawing to a close.... (32)

"A radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law." That is such a tantalizing and vexed vision. Or is it an illusion? Politzer notes that the radiance the man sees he sees when his eyes are failing him and his end is near. Politzer reminds us that the parable is told to Joseph K. by the priest in the dimly lit cathedral, where the candle Joseph sees "actually increased the darkness." (33) Politzer writes: "the light shines to reveal the depth of the darkness. Hope is there for man to fathom his despair." (34)

A reading of this parable and of The Trial that understands Kafka to be rejecting the possibility of transcendence is certainly defensible. But it is also possible that Kafka is holding out the notion there is a realm of the transcendent, even if it is only glimpsed or intimated or imagined. He holds this out not only to the man from the country but, by implication, also to the reader, who is as clueless as the man about the nature of the reality into which he or she has been cast. I take the transcendent here to be coeval with a sense of the numinous.

What in fact is the objective reality that the parable holds up? In Kafka's scheme that may not be so important. Let's remember the interpretative upshot of the parable that Kafka stages as the narrative progresses: "The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other." (35) Kafka here anticipates the whole thrust of post-modern hermeneutics. And with it the possibility that the secular may not be the only way to construe reality.

The Castle seems to present the same epistemological or ontological question. In both these respects K. reprises the situation of the man from the country. (36) He is uncertain about the reality into which he has arrived. If Kafka is proceeding allegorically here, the castle and its bureaucratic retinue would be an intimation of a higher realm or authority.

       Truth is permanently on the point of taking off its mask and
       revealing itself as illusion, illusion in constant danger of
       being verified as truth. It is the predicament of a man who,
       endowed with an insatiable appetite for transcendental certainty,
       finds himself in a world robbed of all spiritual
       possessions. (37)

These short but crucial takes from Kafka show us that the apparently solid secular construction of reality can be cracked. The fissures that are visible, if not gaping, to many in our time were already anticipated by him.

Kafka presciently prefigures the particular post-secular situation to which I am pointing. He wants to believe, but he can't. As a Jew in modernity he stands outside the Law, i.e, the halachic tradition, but--this is where he anticipates what is to come--he doesn't leave; he remains standing at the door, contemplating what might be behind it, and figuring out when and and how he might enter. He is a latter-day Spinoza who has not been and will not be excommunicated by his community (though had he lived and stayed in Prague he most certainly would have been exterminated.)

In Edmond Jabes we have one of the most consummate renderings in literary terms of the post-modern sensibility, as Derrida saw early on. Jabes is not a philosopher or a theologian. If anything he is a poet, though what he writes cannot technically be called poetry. Indeed his texts defy generic classification. Yet we can say of him what Frank Kermode has said of Wallace Stevens: "He has a kind of peripheral awareness of the important issues in philosophy [and, I would add, theology JSD], which is more impressive in a poet than actually getting down and working them out." (38)

I shall confine my discussion of Jabes to volume one of The Book of Questions.

Jabes inhabits the spiritual terrain to which Kafka pointed. Kafka was a deracinated Jew in and of central Europe before the Holocaust. Jabes was a deracinated Jew of Cairo and Paris in the post-War years. The dessication of spirit was Kafka's inner landscape. For Jabes in his formative years the desert was literally right on his doorstep.

The trope of the desert as Jabes develops it is a key element in all his thinking and writing. As he explained "The experience of the desert is both the place of the Word--where it is supremely word--and the non-place where it loses itself in the infinite." (39) *

        At noon he found himself facing the infinite, the blank page.
        All tracks, footprints, paths were gone. Buried.... He was
        probably only a few dozen miles from his point of departure. But
        he did not know. And how could one, here, speak of arrival or
        departure? Everywhere: oblivion, the unmade bed of absence, the
        wandering kingdom of dust.... When there is nothing left, there
        will still be sand. There will still be the desert to conjugate
        the nothing. (40)

Being in the desert is being with no center, no fixed reference point which imposes a sense of coherence on the space or on the time spent in it. One who tries to navigate the expanse has great difficulty progressing in any linear way. There is only wandering within a vast emptiness. The steps of those who came before, the directions they took, the destinations for which they were headed, the markers they left--all are either invisible, covered over by the drifting sand, or are seen as traces, traces of questionable reliability. The ear strains here, too, for what voice is audible in the silence? What is real here and what is mirage? Nothingness pervades all. What is real here, immediate, and constant, is absence.

Jabes takes the idea of the extraterritoriality of the Biblical God and turns it on its head. "Being nowhere or everywhere nearly comes to the same thing." (41) In this statement he is pointing to one of the key affects of the post-secular consciousness: a pervading sense of God's absence. And yet, paradoxical or even oxymoronic as it may sound, to postmodern man God is most present in God's absence.

        He who lives within himself, beside his God, beside the life and
        death of God, lives in two adjoining rooms with a door between.
        He goes from one to the other in order to celebrate Him. He goes
        from presence in consciousness to presence in absence. He must
        fully be, before he can aspire to not being any more, that is to
        say: to being more, to being all. For absence is All. (42)

Anyone who knows Jabes, or I should say thinks he knows Jabes, can hear many of the key tropes that are interwoven in his writing: not only the desert but sand, the trace, silence, and absence. Jabes gives us the poetics of ontological absence. The desert is the objective correlative of the postmodern condition. In this it was prefigured in modern terms by Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which showed the physical and spiritual stasis of its two protagonists Vladimir and Estragon on the arid and sterile Vauclose plateau of southern France. Jabes, writing out of his own Egyptian-Jewish experience, re-situates the notion of waiting in a silent universe to the desert and thereby evokes historical and cultural resonances from his own cultural tradition. Jabes stands where Kafka stood, except that now the door to the Law has opened, opened onto a sunlight, barren desert. Jabes wanders in the same landscape his ancestors traversed in Biblical times, except that now there is no Promised Land on the horizon.

VI

Jabes, then, gives us an expression of what the post-secular, at least one strand of it, implies. But if nothing else is clear from this discussion it is that post-secular is a multi-vocal term. If in the wake of secularization we were hedgehogs pace Isaiah Berlin, knowing one big thing, today, in the postmodern reality, we have become foxes, knowing many things. East is East and West is West, but East and West are themselves composites and diverse. The post-secular may look reactionary in one context, avant-garde in another. How it manifests itself in Muslim societies will be different from its expression in Christian societies. So in determining what the post-secular signifies and assessing what it might portend, the beginning of wisdom is to say that one size does not fit all.

Even within the Jewish world in which I live we must contextualize. The Jewish landscape in Israel is different from that of Diaspora, and I speak primarily of the North American Diaspora, and therefore how the post-secular plays out in each and what it might mean will vary. Nevertheless, before proceeding to look at each of these sites or modes of contemporary Jewish existence, there is one over-arching fact to be noted about both, one feature that, in spite of the profound qualitative sociopolitical and geopolitical differences between them, they have in common. That is the fact that while the process of secularization may be over in both, secularism is by no means a spent force, neither in Israel nor in the Jewish Diaspora. A significant majority of Israeli Jews are secular not only in lifestyle but in worldview.

        According to a survey conducted on behalf of The Jerusalem Post
        by the Smith Institute [one of Israel's most respected polling
        organizations JSD], a majority of Israelis would like to see
        sweeping secular reforms implemented including civil marriage
        and public transportation and shopping mall store opening on
        Shabbat. 63% of Israelis polled during August 2001 by Dahaf
        Research Institute supports equal treatment for all streams of
        Judaism. The overall poll results demonstrate an impressive
        amount of support for progressive change on the central issues
        of religion and state facing the Israeli public today.
        Approximately two-thirds of Israelis hold progressive views,
        while only about one-third maintain Orthodox viewpoints. (43)

As for American Jews, it has been documented that

        More Jews than most other Americans respond "None." when asked,
        "What is your religion, if any?"

        More Jews than members of most other American religious groups
        think of themselves as "secular" rather than as "religious."

        Fewer Jews than members of most other American religious groups
        belong to a temple, synagogue or any other religious
        institution.

        Fewer Jews than members of most other American religious groups
        agree with the essential proposition of religious belief that
        "God exists." (44)

What these data suggest is that we should be wary of jumping to quick or definitive conclusions about what the post-secular means in the Jewish context, whatever the context is. On the surface the data could mean that the Jewish experience with the Enlightenment is deep and has not run its course. Or these findings could be telling us that that the dynamics of Jewish life are intrinsically different from that of Christianity or Islam. It could be that the Jews are an anomaly in this regard, and "as we have learned many years ago from historian of science Thomas Kuhn, anomalies point to the presence of dominant paradigms that often serve as blinders to possible sources of new knowledge." (45) It may be that the the sacred/secular binary and the post-secular are concepts of limited or even no utility in mapping contemporary religious and spiritual life.

I once heard Avraham Burg, one of the more thoughtful figures on the Israeli political scene, opine that there is today not one but two Jewish homelands: the United States, which he called the homeland of the Enlightenment, and Israel, which he termed the homeland of Jewish myth. To say that Israel is the homeland of Jewish myth is to acknowledge what many students of the latter-day Jewish experience with statehood have come to realize: that the Jewish national enterprise, though founded on Enlightenment principles, has been overtaken by pre-Enlightenment Judaism. In a sovereign Jewish state the abstraction of a secular national polity from out of the matrix of a pre-modern faith community has proved to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. The fact that there is no separation of religion and state in Israel tells us that secular Zionism, for all its early vigor and for all its hold upon the Israeli body politic, has been defeated by Orthodox, more precisely ultra-Orthodox, Judaism. This would argue not for (further) interrogation of the Enlightenment legacy but, in fact, for its re-affirmation in the evolving life of the Israeli polity and the policies by which it will live. The state of Israel may be more than a half century old but the ideological foundation upon which it rests is still as mushy as ever. The tension between its identity as a Jewish state on the one hand and as a secular democracy on the other has not been resolved and in my view is not likely to be, certainly not in the foreseeable future. Appealing to the exigencies of regional and global geopolitics as the reason for this ongoing postponement is less and less convincing. It is not clear that Israel will yet evolve beyond the current Jewish ethnocracy into a true liberal Western democracy. I myself think that it is too late now for this to happen. In defining itself as a Jewish state I fear the die is cast. I hope I am wrong.

This does not mean that in the American Diaspora a Judaism grounded in post-Enlightenment principles is secure, Burg's appellation notwithstanding. More and more the post-secular turn here leads to two dominant antipodal positions among Jews: either the kind of unreconstructed secularism the American Jewish Identity Survey finds so prevalent or a Judaism that for whatever reason pays no heed to how the Enlightenment has modified our understanding of religion in general and the Jewish religion in particular. Examples of this are the varieties of a vibrant and flourishing Orthodoxy, the functional equivalent in Jewish terms of Christian evangelical religion, on the one hand, and, on the other, the appropriation of New Age-style religion by enthusiasts of Jewish Renewal. In the face of these vigorous expressions of the post-secular, the varieties of non-Orthodoxy--Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaisms--which are rooted in post-Enlightenment thinking, seem now to be variously beset by a tacit self-abnegation in the face of a growingly self-assured Orthodoxy and ultra-Orthodoxy and the more unabashedly celebratory style of Jewish Renewal.

In this climate some specific cardinal principles and values that the Enlightenment put in place need immediate and explicit shoring up. (46) I will identify two.

A first desideratum is a renewed asseveration of the historicity of Judaism and, along with this, a re-affirmation of reading the tradition out of the interpretive canons of religious naturalism. The former was the great achievement of Reform and Conservative Judaisms in the 19th century, the latter the irrevocable contribution of Mordecai Kaplan's project of reconstructing Judaism in the light of modernity. A generation ago these principles were self-evident and de rigueur; today the post-secular sensibility puts them at risk.

One could ask: what's the big deal here? Why make these an issue? The following anecdote shows what's at stake. Some years ago a prominent rabbinical figure from the ultra-Orthodox world was to give a major public lecture in the community where I lived at the time. I was eager to attend to hear this illustrious teacher but at the last minute was unable to do so. A Conservative rabbinical colleague, with whom I had hoped to go to the event, did make it. Later that evening I called him to find out how it went. "Oh," he said, "it was very interesting." When I asked why he explained, "Rabbi X asked a question [about some aspect of Jewish law and practice] raised by a 16th century rabbi and then showed how the answer was given by a 12th century figure."

Now it's true that within the codes of contemporary hermeneutical theory, this is a perfectly legitimate interpretive procedure. But it is legitimate only as a new historicist move, undertaken in full awareness that the limitations of diachrony come into play only after an acceptance of its irrevocable reality. My guess is that the rabbi in question was proceeding in a pre-modern manner, uniting all the generations of Israel under one historically undifferentiated interpretive horizon. What's at stake, then, is to foreground the difference between these two apparently similar but actually antithetical hermeneutical approaches, something best done by re-affirming the foundational nature of history and human experience in how we read and process Jewish tradition (and not only Jewish tradition.) At some point the epistemological and ethical price we will pay for overlooking this difference will be exacted. History matters.

The other hobbyhorse I would ride, that needs riding, is foreswearing once and for all the pre-modern ethnocentrism that comes with holding on to the Chosen Peoples doctrine. In the post-modern reality this is an atavism. Why not ground our Jewish commitments on the proposition that we are, all of us--Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, etc.--all of us--God's chosen people? That we may be chosen to live out our respective religious and communal identities in different ways and for the sake of different, and often conflicting, ideas and values does not negate our election by the God to whom we all relate. The human family has enough problems with religion; retaining the ethnocentric baggage we have all inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages does not serve us any better than perpetuating the sexism that also has been passed down. We have made some progress addressing the latter and have not refused the attendant challenges to theology and praxis, whether Jewish or Christian. Now we need to do the same in regard to the former. Ethnocentrism matters.

VII

In his instructive study of the inter-relationship between the modern and the secular and between the post-modern and the post-secular, Graham Ward usefully observes of these terms, as well as of the word "religion" itself, that

       The importance of drawing attention to the semantic histories of
       these key terms is to show how words slip and slide in their
       different uses ... [T]hese words are exchanged and circulate in
       specific cultural and historical contexts, each impacting upon
       the other.... Each iteration is an interpretation and a new
       cultural negotiation. (47)

Ward's insight points to the end result of the itinerary of concerns I have been following here. From a Jewish perspective it is quite possible that each of these words has little or no valence. It is not clear that the word "religion" adequately denotes what Judaism, i.e., Torah, is. It is not clear that the categories "religious" and "secular" have any purchase in a Jewish context. All the more so with the "post-secular." (48)

We can, therefore, appreciate the wisdom of the Havdalah liturgy, to which I alluded near the outset of this discussion. Recited at the close of the Sabbath, it declares not only that it is God who "makes the distinction between the holy and the ordinary" but, by implication, it is we humans who, in imitatio Dei, are called upon to use the powers bestowed uniquely upon us, to do the same. This distinction is not a given; it is something we discover, or have to discover as we apprehend and seek to comprehend this world and our place in it. That is why the original, determinative place for a Jew to recite the formula of havdalah, of making this critical distinction, is not in the Sabbath-ending ritual that is accompanied by wine, spices, and fire, but in the Amidah prayer that is recited in the dusky silence just before the ceremony, in the evening service on Saturday night. In that Amidah prayer, the formula is inserted into the fourth blessing, which is the blessing where we thank God for the gifts of intellect and knowledge. (49) To live as Jew in the world means to live with the challenge, the intellectual challenge, to know what is holy and what is not, where it is manifest and where it is not. The advent of the post-secular does not mitigate the size or the scope of this challenge.

Notes

1. See "The Secular Society Gets Religion: Experts Differ About the Re-emergence of Faith in Politics," in The New York Times front page of the "Arts & Ideas" section, Saturday, August 24, 2002.

2. "Ballad of a Thin Man."

3. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (N.Y.: The Macmillan co., 1965), 20f.

4. Eliezer Schweid, "The 'Post-Secular' Era" (2000), The Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints.

5. Harvey Cox, The Secular City, 19.

6. Daniel Philpott, "The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations," World Politics 55 (October 2002): 67.

7. Philpott adds: "The nation and Marxist political ideology, though they surely inspire people to worship, kill, die, idolize, and genuflect, do not in their essential forms encompass beliefs about the ultimate ground of existence."

8. Ibid. I think this last sentence does not apply to Jews. Jews who become secularized behave in precisely the opposite way: they tend to drop beliefs but retain a tie, sometimes even a deep tie, to community. I attribute this to the fact that the fulcrum of Judaism (though not Reform Judaism) is not belief per se but an acceptance of the authority of Jewish law, halachah upon one's praxis. That plus the centrality of the State of Israel and its need for support privilege the communal over the specifically religious elements in the Jewish identity.

9. William H. Swatos Jr. & Kevin J. Christiano, "Introduction--Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept," Sociology of Religion 60:3 (1999 Fall): 209-28.

10. Ben Halpern, "Secularism," in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, Arthur A. Cohen & Paul Mendes-Flohr, Eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 863.

11. Ibid. 864.

12. Spinoza is often held up as the one who prefigures this new way of being Jewish. Yirmiyahu Yovel writes: "In abandoning the observant Judaism of his day, but refusing to convert to Christianity, Spinoza unwittingly embodied the alternatives that lay in wait for Jews of later generations following the encounter of Judaism with the modern world. As a result of the encounter there is no longer one norm of Jewish existence. ... Judaism today is determined by the way actual Jews live it and not by any one compulsory model." (In Menachem Lorberbaum, Michael Walzer, Noam J. Zohar, The Jewish Political Tradition [New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003], 420.

13. Ben Halpern, "Secularism," in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, Arthur A. Cohen & Paul Mendes-Flohr, Eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 865.

14. William H. Swatos Jr. & Kevin J. Christiano, "Introduction-Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept," Sociology of Religion 60:3 (1999 Fall): 210.

15. Ibid. 221.

16. Rodney Stark, "Secularization, R.I.P," Sociology of Religion 60, no. No. 3: 255.

17. Ibid. 260.

18. Ibid. 269.

19. John A. McLure, "Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality," Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (1995 Spring 1995): 144.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid. 146.

22. Ibid. 144. He points to counter-definitions of the postmodern, notably that of Zygmunt Bauman, and also, in their own ways, Homi Bhabha and Ashis Nandy.

23. Ibid. 148.

24. Fundamentalism is a much contested term. There is no consensus on what it is and to which religious traditions it is properly applied. Some think it makes sense only in a Christian context. The five volume Fundamentalist project supervised by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991-95) is a crucial source for exploration of this complex of ideas and movements.

25. ed. Henry Ruf, Religion, Ontotheology, and Deconstruction (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

26. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 5f.

27. Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1ff.

28. Jacob Meskin, "Secular Self-Confidence, Postmodernism, and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascal's Pensees," The Journal of Religion (1995): 503f.

29. Ibid. 504.

30. The castle to which the protagonist of the novel of that name has been summoned belongs, he is told at the outset of the narrative, to a Count Westwest.

31. Eric Heller, "The World of Franz Kafka," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle, Ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Englewod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 57-82.

32. Franz Kafka, The Trial, revised E.M. Butler, trans. Willa & Edwin Muir (N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1925), 214.

33. Ibid. 204.

34. Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962), 182.

35. Franz Kafka, The Trial, revised E.M. Butler trans. Willa & Edwin Muir (N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1925), 216.

36. See Politzer, 221ff.

37. Eric Heller, "The World of Franz Kafka," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle, Ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Englewod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 72.

38. Edmond Jabes, "Interview," in Criticism in Society, Ed. Imre Salusinszky (New York: Methuen, 1987), 115.

39. Edmond Jabes, "There is Such a Thing as Jewish Writing..," in The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabes, Ed. Eric Gould (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 27.

40. Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, Vol 1, Rosemary Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 55.

41. Edmond Jabes, "The Question of Displacement Into the Lawfulness of the Book," in The Sin of the Book, Ed. Eric Gould (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 228.

42. Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, Vol 1, Rosemary Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 57.

43. Website of the Israel Religious Action Center sponsored by the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism (Reform) http://www.irac.org/index_e.asp, September 15, 2000 and September 25, 2001.

44. Barry A. Kosmin, Ariela Keysar, Egon Mayer, American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, Report originally published by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001 (New York: The Center for Cultural Judaism, 2003), 9.

45. Ibid. 32.

46. Graham Ward thinks that in the current "deepening crisis of secularism, modernity and liberal values ... our culture--being elsewhere--finds some of the assumptions and presuppositions of secularism, modernity and liberalism no longer credible." But he immediately adds: "I am talking about credibility here, not what is true and what is false." True Religion (n.p.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 2. This strikes me as a specious distinction. If the principles of the Enlightenment are true, then they are ipso facto credible, and if they are false they are ipso facto not credible. In the last chapter of his otherwise fine and valuable book Ward acknowledges the need to preserve the liberal narrative but he seems to throw in the towel and capitulate to his understanding of postsecular religion as a kitschy "special effect." See especially pp. 114-129. I would like to think and hope that post-secular religion can be something more than that.

47. Graham Ward, True Religion (N.p.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 3.

48. Ward sees "religion" after the Enlightenment as denoting what "is only rendered visible when it is necessary. or even 'useful', to calm the fears and insecurities that continually arise in the secular space opened up by the remoteness of the divine and the free reign given to homo economicus to extend his dominion ... (71.).... What emerges as religion is not a return to medieval orthodoxy, nor Protestant dogmatics, nor moral reasoning, but it is nevertheless a continuation--albeit with renewed energy--of the Christian religion's universalization (77.) ... The emancipation and integration of the Jews was the litmus test for the universalization of religion, for they were the explicitly religious 'other' in the ... Christian West ... What is interesting is how the Jewish people themselves began to accept the generic word 'religion', how a process of acculturation occurred" (80.)

49. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 29a.

Works Cited

Ben Halpern. "Secularism." Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, Arthur A. Cohen & Paul MendesFlohr, Eds. New York: Free, 1987. 863-66.

Charles E. Winquist. Desiring Theology. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Daniel Philpott. "The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations." World Politics 55 (Oct 2002): 66-95.

Edmond Jabes. The Book of Questions, Vol 1. Rosemary Waldrop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1976.

Egon Mayer, Barry A. Kosmin & Ariela Keysar. American Jewish Identity Survey 2001. Report originally published by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. New York: The Center for Cultural Judaism, 2003.

Eliezer Schweid. "The 'Post-Secular' Era," 2000. The Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints.

Eric Heller. "The World of Franz Kafka." Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Castle, Ed. Peter F. Neumeyer. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969. 57-82.

Franz Kafka. The Trial. Revised E.M. Butler trans. Willa & Edwin Muir. N.Y.: Schocken, 1925.

Graham Ward. True Religion. N.p.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Harvey Cox. The Secular City. N.Y.: The Macmillan co., 1965.

Heinz Politzer. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1962.

Henry Ruf, ed. Religion, Ontotheology, and Deconstruction. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

Jacob Meskin. "Secular Self-Confidence, Postmodernism, and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascal's Pensees." The Journal of Religion (1995).

John D. Caputo. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997.

Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar. The Jewish Political Tradition. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2003.

Rodney Stark. "Secularization, R.I.P." Sociology of Religion 60.No. 3: 249-73.

William H. Swatos Jr. & Kevin J. Christiano. "Introduction--Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept." Sociology of Religion 60:3 (1999 Fall): 209-28.