Charles Taylor and Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century

INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF DIVERGENCEThe Jewish world is losing its ability to discuss its cultural differences. Our intraJewish dialogue is becoming less coherent. Indeed, the very ideas underlying our Jewish identities, ideas shaped by our language of values, are diverging. The language we use to describe our values is becoming more specific to the respective Jewish communities to which we belong, in Israel and in the Diaspora. We could be heading for a crisis.A serious consideration of the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor may help improve the situation. Born in 1931, Taylor taught at Oxford and at McGill University. Of particular relevance to readers concerned with Jewish communal relations is his work on human cognition and the importance of values in shaping identity. Given the ethics-based content of his work, Taylor s writings have attracted surprisingly little attention in the Jewish world. Accordingly, this essay offers a view on what Taylor can add to Jewish continuity and success in the twenty-first century.Taylor offers important insights as to how we understand selfhood, identity and language. He maintains that the shaping of identity is closely related to the shaping of ideas. Different valuations of a given term can lead to pronounced differences in the shaping of personal identity, and on a larger scale to incompatibilities in the shaping of group identity. Taylor s work also shows that people with different ideas can overcome the differences reflected in value-laden language, suggesting that our current challenge contains the seeds of its resolution. Following Taylor, Jewish communities can pay close attention to key terms used in very different ways by Jews who live in contemporary Diaspora communities and in Israel. Through a dialogue that acknowledges these differences, coupled with awareness that similar terms can be used to express very different concepts, we can reshape the diverging development of language and recreate a mutually intelligible Jewish civilization based on a shared vocabulary of meaning. This would, of course, require an awareness of our typically imprecise use of language. Sometimes, the variation in terminology is unmistakable-the term rabbah used as a title by a growing corps of female rabbis (mostly in the United States) is a good example-and at other times language appears to indicate unity when close examination of a shared term reveals that none exists. Taylors insights point us toward a process by which dialogue can yield a more cohesive global Judaism based on a genuinely shared vocabulary of meaning. This is not a call for ideational unity. We do not need to resolve our internal conflicts in order to engage in meaningful dialogue. We do need to agree on what we are talking about. Unless we come to an agreement on the definition of basic terms, our dialogues will continue to be exercises in cultural misunderstanding, and we will miss the opportunity to nurture a truly global Judaism.HISTORICAL CONTEXTA moment of contextualization is in order. The Shoah shattered the structure of the Jewish world. Before 1939, the demographic and cultural centers of the Jewish world were located in Central and Eastern Europe. After 1945, only the United States and Israel possessed the infrastructure needed to build the institutions that had been lost. The astonishing renaissance of Jewish life in these new centers in which eighty percent of world Jewry now resides can obscure the fact that both communities are radical departures from a European-centered Jewish culture, and further, are radically different from each other.The United States is currently home to two-thirds of Diaspora Jews. While it is anticipated that Diaspora populations will decline in the twenty-first century, the proportion ofDiasporaJewslivingin America will probably rise. Withits pronounced individualism, the United States is the most anomalous of the countries that host and shape a contemporary Jewish culture. …

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