The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
within the orbit of American Jewry. What Agus said of R. Kook might also be taken as the theme of Agus’ own life’s work:
He transformed Orthodoxy by reviving the components of humanism and secular culture in the Jewish tradition. And he appealed to the secularists to appreciate and reverence the depths of mystery, out of which spring man’s genuine values. He lived “on the boundary” between the sacred and the secular, between the mystique of particularism and the outreach of universalism. And it is to this boundary that we must find our way in every generation. (High Priest, xiii)
In 1954, R. Agus continued his significant publishing activity with a collection of essays titled Guideposts in Modern Judaism. In the opening essay, “The Impact of American Culture,” Agus expressed his admiration for American liberalism, his strong (correct) belief that Zionism cannot be a substitute religion for American Jews—though critical of this vicarious Zionism and various political forms of Zionism, he was a Zionist and defended the basic concept of a Jewish state in the land of Israel—his (correct) view that anti-Semitism is receding as an important issue in forming Jewish identity in America, his (correct) view that ethnicity is declining as a factor in Jewish identity in America, and his judgment that religion in America is distinctively pragmatic in tone and value. The second, quite provocative essay is an extended review and critique of various trends in the modern branches of Judaism. Agus is, not surprisingly, a keen critic of all the various conceptual efforts that have been advanced to explain, justify, or alter Judaism in the modern period. His critical comments on the philosophy of halakah of his former close friend, Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, are notable (37—44), while his own sympathy for the Conservative movement is clear in his analysis of that movement’s handling of halakic matters (133—37).
The third essay in Guideposts, “The Jewish Community,” revolves around the seminal issue of nationalism, that is, how and in what sense Judaism is Zionism. In particular, the essay is critical of Ahad Ha’Am’s and Mordecai Kaplan’s cultural form of Zionism and of the classical Zionist doctrine, espoused by David Ben-Gurion, among others, of “the negation of the diaspora” (shelilat ha-golah). (Agus was critical of all purely secular forms of Zionism, all forms of Zionism that called for the “normalization” of the Jewish people, and all efforts to deny the legitimacy of the golah—Jewish life outside the land of Israel.) In America, Judaism must dominate the Jewish agenda as religion, not nationalism. The fourth essay, “Ends and Means of Jewish Life in America,” originally published in the Menorah Journal in 1949, argues the same point but advances the argument by introducing an idea that henceforth would be central to Agus’ general position on Jewish matters: what he calls the “meta-myth” and defines as “that indeterminate but all-too-real plus in the consciousness of Jewish difference, as it is reflected in the minds of both Jews and Gentiles” (Guideposts, 181). For non-Jews, this meta-myth manifests itself in the belief that
the Jew is different in some mysterious manner. In the imagination of the untutored he may appear to be now partaking of divine qualities, now bordering on the diabolical, now superhuman in his tenacity, now subhuman in his spiteful determination to survive; but always, in some dim sense, the traditional stereotype of the Jew held by the Gentiles includes the apprehension of deep cosmic distinction from the rest of humanity.
This feeling has been reflected in the mythological substructure of antisemitism from its very origins. (Guideposts 181)
Both positive and negative aspects of Jewish-Gentile relationships over time—and here Agus includes both anti-Semitism and Zionism—have been directed, affected, and shaped by this belief. But Agus opposes this myth in all its forms. Instead, he again argues for optimism about the status of the Jew in America and for the centrality of the religious dimension in American Jewish life. Agus’ moral idealism, his unceasing universalism, never wavers:
The true Jewish way is to rise above the hatred by recognizing it as a universal evil, found in ourselves as well as in others, and to labor for its cure both within ourselves and in the total society of which we are a part.
By cleaving to the spiritual interpretation of Jewish experience we provide a means for the non-religious among us to progress in the realm of the spirit through their Jewish identification. To be sure, we have now shown how the gulf in many men’s minds between adherence to spiritual values and the convictions of religion may be bridged. There is in fact a plus of conviction in religious faith, with regard to the roots in eternity of spiritual values, which cannot be obtained by the cultivation of a humanist attitude alone. Spiritually minded people will still find congregational life the best means of continuing their own spiritual progress, through self-identification with Jewish experience in the religious interpretation, and by promoting its values in the social grouping of which they are a part. (Guideposts, 201)
This cardinal theme is further developed in “Building Our Future in America.” While continuing to criticize the notion of a Jewish “mission,” Agus here advocates what he calls “the concept of a ‘creative minority,’” by which he means that the American Jewish community should emphasize “autonomy, on creativeness, [which] will cherish and foster whatever cultural and spiritual values are generated by every individual interpretation, every aspiration, within the community” (Guideposts, 213). That is to say:
A “creative minority” is, first, a minority that senses its underlying and essential unity with the general population, even as it is conscious of its own distinguishing attributes. We are not as a lonely island, battered by the endless waves of the encircling ocean, but one of a chain of islands which form a solid continuous range beneath the raging, restless surface. Distinctive as our history and tradition are, they yet constitute a vital part of the realm of ideas and experience upon which American civilization is based. Thus we are part of Christian culture, though apart from it; and, even as we cherish and cultivate our own specific heritage, we must not ignore the massive historical reality, the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which forms the spiritual substratum of Western civilization.
Secondly, a “creative minority” evolves new values for the general community, of which it is a part, out of the peculiar circumstances which set it apart. While not officiously seeking to lead or teach or preach, it expands the cultural horizons of the whole community by developing the implications of its unique position. In this sense the Jewish community, by faithfully tracing out the inner logic of its traditions and developing the implicit truths of its peculiar status, might unfold fresh insights for the guidance of the entire American nation.
Thirdly, a “creative minority” is value-centered and oriented to the future. Neither exhausted by the elemental struggle for bare survival nor overcome by the great glory of the past, its face is turned toward the sunlight of spiritual growth. It refuses either to chafe vainly against the boundaries that enclose it or to look above them with Olympian detachment as if they did not exist. (Guideposts, 214–15)
The Jewish community will and should remain in America and can flourish here, if it works to maintain and enhance its religio-spiritual identity.
The remaining essays in Guideposts are more directly theological in nature, beginning with a two-part essay titled “A Reasoned Faith” and subtitled “The Idea of God.” The first half of this essay tries, with considerable success, to establish the conceptual basis for a knowledge of God; the second half deals with God as known through our experience. Here Agus argues for the intuitionist position: “When we are face to face with a striking truth, an act of triumphant goodness or an event of surpassing beauty, we recognize the quality of time-transcending reality, as an immediate, direct experience, and we thrill to it as a fact, not merely a reasoned argument” (Guideposts, 257). The most important theological claim advanced in this essay, however, is that God is to be conceived of in personal rather than impersonal terms:
Shall we think of Him in physical-philosophical terms such as Principle, Power, Absolute, Form or Cause, or shall we employ the personalistic-biblical terms of Father, the Merciful One, the Living God? Manifestly, the only concept which, in our experience constitutes the polar opposite to the concept of mechanical causation. Yet, God is not the Self or Soul of the universe, but, as the Kabbalists correctly pointed out, He is the Soul of the Soul,