Evolutionary Judaism

Evolutionary Judaism is the radical religious movement that gives E. L. Doctorow's City of God its theological center and its most sustained experiment in rethinking faith for the modern world. Founded and led by Rabbi Joshua Gruen, and after his death carried forward by his successor Sarah Blumenthal, the movement is defined less by a fixed creed than by a method: to take the various aspects of Jewish teaching and practice, consider their historic sources and origins and their theological rationale, and hold them up to modern scholarship in order to separate what appears inessential, intellectually untenable, or blindly customary from what is truly crucial and defining. In its first phase, as Joshua Gruen described it, the effort of instruction is directed toward adults, and the movement's radicalism is tempered by a practical irony: it functions, in effect, as a kind of continuing-education yeshiva, complete with reading lists provided by the rabbi and a small but growing library for the congregants.

Origins and the Synagogue on West Ninety-eighth Street

The movement is embodied in the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive on West Ninety-eighth Street in New York City, reached by a steep flight of granite steps. When the novel's narrator, the Episcopal priest Thomas Pemberton, first encounters the congregation, he receives a voice mail from Rabbi Joshua Gruen insisting that "It is in your interest that we meet as soon as possible," and he is struck that Gruen is "clearly not one of the kooks." On meeting, Pemberton finds Gruen a trim five-nine in sweatshirt and jeans, a serious young man who will answer no questions over the phone, and the narrator wryly deduces that Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. The congregation is small, never more than ten or twelve people in attendance even in its earlier days, and its members form a distinctive cross-section of New York intellectual life: a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman studying at the Actors Studio, a married couple who are both physicians, a Barnard junior, and, most touchingly, an elderly white-haired man whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs and retrieves him at the end of the evening.

The Method of Inquiry and the Sabbath Services

The essence of the Evolutionary Judaism approach is incorporated into the weekly Sabbath service on Friday evening, with the Saturday morning service more or less a replay, and with the coming around of the various holidays providing an additional opportunity to maintain the inquiry on a topical basis. Every service has a traditional liturgical beginning and ending, conducted in English, but an extended effort of examination as its middle. This middle is not a sermon by the rabbi but a rabbinically directed seminar discussion. The congregants have found most interesting the several weeks given over to the documentary hypothesis of biblical authorship, and under the group's analysis the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, have become the collected texts of the different historical sources, J, E, P, and D. A doctoral candidate from Harvard one evening discussed the work of his eminent teacher J. L. Kugel, who has attended in detail to the distinction between the original texts and the interpretive commentary that sprang up in the three hundred years before and a hundred years into the Common Era, creating the Bible read today under the illusion that it is the original Scripture. The biblical texts from the beginning were seen as enigmatic, written in a language without vowels or punctuation, and since they were supposed to be divine in their source and therefore of supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, unsavory passages, and less than noble acts of noble personages by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically, or by changing their meaning with added punctuation, or by otherwise reimagining whatever needed improvement to be truly theologically correct.

The Redesign of the Services and the Ethical Core

As a result of study and discussion among the congregants, the Sabbath services are being redesigned to the basic and unarguable essentials, consisting so far of the Shema, the declaration of the oneness of God and the principle of abstract monotheism; a Kaddish, or ritual prayer for the dead, because this gives comfort to mourners and renews their memories and restores their gratitude; an acknowledgment of the idea of the Sabbath both in the fact of the timing of the services and as the occasion for reflection in a state of freedom; and, for the rest, a commitment to the study of the Torah in order to derive from it the imperatives that would complete the restructuring of the services and eventually provide the theoretical basis for the evolved faith. When a visitor challenges Sarah Blumenthal on where the line is drawn, she answers with the movement's ethical heart: "God is not honored by a mechanical adherence to each and every regulation but by going to the heart of them all, the ethics, and observing those as if your life is at stake, as it may well be, I mean, your moral life, your life of consequence as a good, reflective, just, and compassionate human being." She invokes Hillel: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary upon it." When another congregant insists that the ritual Sabbath blessings of the bread and the candles are not a matter of ethics but simply what the tradition is, Sarah responds that ritual takes people out of the ordinary range of feelings and directs their minds to the consideration of who they are and hope to be, making it ethically meaningful with no conflict, and she distinguishes tradition as characterizing the people, not God: "Our longing, our obsessing. Our poetry, the epic of our people, but not—"

Congregational Debate and the Limits of Rationalism

The movement's method does not go unchallenged, and the novel dramatizes the limits of its rationalism through the voices of its own congregants. An elderly man who had wandered into the synagogue months earlier and stayed, liking the modern young rabbi not afraid to ask questions and the intellectual discussion, eventually presses the question of whether some things must not be questioned, such as that the Torah was given by the Creator and that the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven must be accepted: "Without this, never mind no tradition—it's no religion. Nothing." The narrator watches Pemberton slump in his chair and hold his hands to his head, recognizing the moment when rationalism hits the wall. The narrator also wonders, not without some anger at himself, whether Sarah Blumenthal had depended on Joshua for her theology, whether she was capable of carrying his ideas forward, seeing in her eyes at that moment a longing for her husband's resurrection. The narrator adds to the code a six hundred fourteenth mitzvah, the ritual obligation to work the rabbi over before deigning to join her congregation, observing that the questions had been asked before, the answers given before, and the debate was as sacramental as reading from the Torah.

Pemberton's Conversion and the Movement's Significance

Evolutionary Judaism becomes the vehicle for the novel's central personal transformation. Pemberton takes to wearing his hair in a ponytail and goes on Friday evenings to Eighty-ninth Street, where Sarah Blumenthal conducts the services, and he loves these evenings, finding much that is familiar from his days as a divinity student. His preconversion studies are conducted by a rabbi other than Sarah, a former colleague of hers at Temple Emanuel, and he is profoundly grateful to have been circumcised as an infant, remarking that circumcision would be "one hell of a test of the faith." He insists on the mikvah, the ritual bath, despite its being less assiduously held to by the Reformed, describing the immersion before three witnessing rabbis as being reborn as a son of Abraham, and finding it comforting as a dissolving Christian with a nice Baptist quality. The movement thus serves as the theological bridge by which an Episcopal priest becomes a Jew, and its small, questioning congregation becomes the site where the novel's largest questions about faith, tradition, ethics, and the survival of religion in the modern world are worked out in miniature.