The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
an inclusive ethic includes a concern for the world order, the search for international justice, disarmament, the end of nuclear weapons, and support for the United Nations so as to mitigate conflict and prevent new crimes against humanity.
Tradition and Dialogue, published in 1971, continued Agus’ reflections on a variety of contemporary issues. Here the essays concern the Jewish—Christian dialogue; Agus’ ongoing dialogue with Arnold Toynbee over the continuing vitality of Judaism (for Toynbee’s change of opinion regarding Judaism, due to Agus’ influence, see volume 12 of Toynbee’s A Study of History: Reconsiderations, which includes two essays by Agus published as an appendix); his response to the “God is Dead” movement, in two sympathetic but critical essays collected under the heading “Dialogue with the New Atheists”; a variety of issues identified as “Dialogue with Secular Ideologies”; and last, ten essays on internal Jewish matters ranging from “The Prophet in Modern Hebrew Literature” to “The Concept of Israel” and “Assimilation, Integration, Segregation: The Road to the Future.”
What strikes one in reading these diverse pieces is the breadth of Agus’ Jewish learning. Not only are biblical, talmudic, medieval, and modern sources critically evaluated, but Hebrew poets such as Hayim Nahum Bialik and the modern Hebrew authors Saul Tchernichovsky, J. H. Brenner, and Uri Zvi Greenberg are engaged in a serious and informed way.
In 1978, Agus published his next to last book, Jewish Identity in an Age of Ideologies. This is a sustained effort both to situate the Jew and Judaism vis-à-vis the most important European ideologies of the past two hundred years and to view these ideologies from a Jewish perspective. He begins with Mendelssohn and the issue of Jewish-Christian relations in the age of Enlightenment. He then reviews Immanuel Kant’s hostility toward Judaism and the efforts by Jewish Kantians such as Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, and Leo Baeck to bring about some rapprochement between Kantianism and Judaism. He considers the attitude of the German romantics toward religion, Judaism, and religious reform, including a critique of Jewish “romantics,” that is, those who deprecate the role of reason in the religious life, such as Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) and, in Agus’ controversial view, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888). In chapter 4, titled “Are the Jews ‘Ahistorical’?” Agus takes up a critical dialogue with G.W.F. Hegel’s historicism and three Jewish responses thereto by, respectively, Samuel Hirsch (1815–1889), Solomon Formstecher (1808–1889), and Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840). Hirsch and Formstecher tried to meet Hegel’s criticism of Judaism by calling for the internal reform of Judaism. Krochmal, a far deeper thinker, tried to respond to Hegel by denying the applicability of the Hegelian system to Judaism; that is, he argued, in contradistinction to Hegel’s systemic claims, that Judaism is not subject to the normal laws of national development and decay that govern other nations. Other schools and movement’s dealt with by Agus are nationalism; socialism in its various forms, namely, bundism and Marxism; Zionism; racism in its myriad forms; Bergsonian vitalism; Jewish existentialism (Buber and Rosenzweig); biblical criticism; Barthianism (Karl Barth [1886—1968]); and Toynbeeism (Arnold Toynbee). In every instance Agus is a serious and respectful critic; in every dialogue he makes the case for a liberal, humanistic, nonromantic Judaism, shorn of the meta-myth of Jewish being. Though one can differ with Agus’ various judgments, one can never ignore or dismiss them. In the end, he has accomplished what he set out to achieve in this work: to view Judaism from both within and without as it struggles with modernity.
Agus’ last work, a collection of theological essays, was published in 1983 under the title The Jewish Quest. “The Jewish Quest,” he tells us, “is to make oneself and the world fit for the indwelling of the Divine Presence; theologically speaking, it is a yearning for the ‘kingdom of heaven’” (vii). Here familiar themes are taken up, clarified, and deepened: America and the Jewish people, Jewish self-definition, classicism and romanticism, the meta-myth, Zionism, holism, nonliteral revelation, Jewish ethics, Judaism and the world community, Maimonides’ philosophical rationalism, the defense of Conservative Judaism, the foundations for a modern revision of the halakah anti-Semitism, and various aspects of the Jewish-Christian dialogue. To the end Agus was sober, cautious, yet hopeful; opposed to fanaticism of all sorts; an enemy of Jewish “self-mythification,” of “biblical claims of singularity and uniqueness,” of “the seductive fantasies of self-glorification” (Jewish Quest, 10); suspicious of messianic and self-serving metaphysical claims; and intensely committed to a demanding ethical vision that united all peoples.
Agus’ philosophical and theological corpus can, in summation, be seen as extensive, consequential, and provocative. Perhaps best characterized as a neo-Maimonidean, Agus belongs to the long chain of Jewish rationalists that includes Philo, Saadya, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn, and which has been more recently represented so brilliantly by Hermann Cohen. Like Cohen, of whom he wrote admiringly, Agus held firm to the conviction that Judaism was explicable and defensible in universal rational and ethical terms. Possessing their own deep spiritual integrity, the classical sources of Judaism embodied a profoundly humane moral vision that was both philosophically compelling and metaphysically attractive. Those who, out of religious frustration or a failure of philosophical nerve, seek to turn away from rational analysis and criteria in their deconstruction of Judaism and its God do a serious disservice to the intellectual and spiritual tradition they seek to excavate and defend. Here is the ground of Agus’ sharp disagreement with Buber’s dialogical philosophy and his reservations about the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel and other contemporary religious existentialists. Agus admired their religious intentions but faulted their method and logic.
Agus was not a stranger to religious feelings or deep traditional religious commitments; but he held that these necessary aspects of the religious life must be regulated by constraints that only reason could supply. Thus, for example, though a longtime colleague of Mordecai Kaplan, he was critical of Kaplan’s reconstructionist views, not only because they lacked grounding in the traditional halakic and intellectual sources of Judaism but also because Kaplan’s systematic revision of Judaism along functionalist anthropological and sociological lines was spiritually impoverished and impoverishing. God, for Agus, had to be more than “the power that makes for salvation”; Jewish behavior had to be more than sociologically defined “sancta,” and the obligations of Torah and halakah more than pragmatic initiatives and psychological panaceas. Indeed, it was this tension, this firmly held belief in the necessity of holding onto a more traditional spirituality, that led Agus to admire the genuine mystical personality of Rav Kook, even though he was profoundly critical of the cabalistic Weltanschauung that defined Kook’s entire thought world. Kook’s spirituality, his sense of the presence of the Living God, attracted Agus—not least because he shared the same openness to the numinous.
Agus’ rationalism also separated him from all forms of romanticism, the most important modern Jewish manifestations of this inclination being found in certain versions of Zionism. While he defined himself as a supporter and defender of the Jewish right to a national state, Agus’ outspoken criticism of aspects of American Zionism—that is, nationalism as a substitute for authentic religious commitment—made him many enemies. In arguing for this position, he manifested an attitude close to the intellectual-spiritual stance that had been struck by Franz Rosenzweig, though Rosenzweig was writing in the 1920s, before the Shoah and the creation of the modern State of Israel. Like Rosenzweig, and unlike Buber, Agus was suspicious of all forms of nationalism, including Jewish nationalism. I believe his stance vis-à-vis the State of Israel was too critical and that he was too optimistic with regard to both the future of Jewish life in the diaspora, especially in America, and Israeli-Arab relations, but he was certainly right to warn of the pseudomessianic temptations that the creation of a renewed Jewish state, and especially Jewish victory in 1967, has spawned. The State of Israel need not be the messianic state for it to be Jewishly necessary, legitimate, and worthy of our unwavering, though not uncritical, support.
If Agus had serious reservations about the systematic work of other nineteenth-or twentieth-century Jewish thinkers and movements, he shared, in a broad sense, their call for halakic revision. This he did on ethical and rational grounds—and here especially he becomes a “modern” thinker among the pantheon of modern thinkers, stretching from the early reformers to certain