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"I remember how stricken we were when 47 Jews were killed in a pogrom in the Ukraine. We had days of mourning and fasting. But six million! That dreadful calamity—and the whole spiritual and material crisis of our time—are bringing American Jews back to the faith of their fathers."
The Law Endures. There is no one spokesman for U.S. Judaism, no central authority, no High Priest. All good Jews, in varying degrees of literalness, believe in the Law, but U.S. Judaism is a spectrum shading off by minute gradations from ultra-orthodoxy to ultra-modernism. In this spectrum, Finkelstein, a traditionalist with one keen, dark eye on the future, stands almost dead center.
Judaism's spectrum can be roughly divided into three parts, roughly equal in number of active followers† and reflecting three traditions in U.S. Judaism:
Orthodox Judaism tries to maintain the letter of the Law. To the outsider it sometimes looks like literalness and nothing else. It is a religion that demands strict, hour-by-hour adherence to sacred custom. Promptly at sundown each Friday night, the Sabbath begins, and Orthodox Jews are required to be indoors (to travel in a vehicle on the Sabbath is counted as a sin). Twenty minutes before sundown, the housewife lights the candles which will burn through the Sabbath's 24 hours; any other lights must be turned on before that time. Synagogue services are entirely in Hebrew, and men & women sit apart, with their heads covered. The Orthodox Jew is expected to study the Torah every day and to observe the dietary laws with such strictness that separate plates and utensils must be used for cooking milk and meat dishes. On Yom Kippur, Orthodox Jews keep an absolute fast for 24 hours, and should spend about 13 hours at the synagogue in five services. Their strictly regulated life sets them apart from the rest of mankind, and is intended to: with a persistence undiminished by centuries, they feel themselves to be the Chosen People.
Reform Judaism in the U.S. is barely 75 years old. It was affected almost equally by 19th Century idealism and 19th Century skepticism. Its first leaders were German rabbis, some of whom carried the new doctrines to Britain, France and the U.S. Reform Jews pay scant attention to dietary laws, hold their services mainly in English, the principal one on Friday evening instead of Saturday (a few hold it on Sunday), and stress the ethical teachings of the prophets more than the ritual laws of Torah and Talmud. With the Reform Jews, the sense of being a chosen people is dim or extinct.
Conservative Judaism is newer still, and born in the U.S. It represents a middle way between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Its founders considered Orthodoxy too adamantly withdrawn from U.S. life, Reform too spiritually attenuated. They fashioned a synagogue service in which English is used but Hebrew predominates. Men & women sit together, as they do in Reform congregations; the men cover their heads, as among the Orthodox. Conservative Jews are taught that, as Jews, they have been chosen by God for a spiritual purpose—but that those of other faiths, including Christians and Moslems, have also been chosen. Conservative Judaism is the middle ground on which Rabbi Finkelstein has taken his stand.