The Problem of (Jewish) Positive Thinking

Daniel Gordis is right to cite the American tradition of optimism as a key to understanding the difference in mentality, and what he calls attitudes of “resilience,” between America’s liberal Jewish denominations, on the one hand, and Orthodox and Israeli Jews, on the other. He is right, too, to identify the quintessentially American “assumption that nature’s providence would always satisfy American desires, coupled to a relative absence of concern about security,” which is, as he notes, “precisely the opposite sensibility of that which is formed by traditional Jewish devotion.”

Indeed, he could go further. Gordis focuses largely on the implicit secularization—and “Americanization”—of American Jews, who “have ceased engaging [the traditional Jewish] canon, have ignored much of the [Jewish] calendar, and have rewritten the liturgy, [so that as a consequence] they are finding that a rewritten liturgy is now rewriting them.” But to understand what looks—at the outset—to be “secularization,” we must trace the history of a parallel spiritual movement in American religious history, one that dates back almost to the founding of American history itself. The conflation of divine providence with material success, and with it the assumption that a combination of piety mixed with self-confidence would yield “positive” results is one with a long, complex history in the American religious tradition.

Submission to the divine and valorization of the self might seem like opposing tendencies, but we can trace the roots of this optimistic amalgam back to the early 19th century. The post-Romantic Transcendentalist vision, as exemplified in the writings of New England philosophers like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Amos Bronson Alcott, emphasized not just Emerson’s famous self-reliance, but also the image of an inner divinity. By paying attention to the self—its wants, its needs, its intuitions—we could attain a degree of spiritual enlightenment, connecting the divinity within us with the wider workings of metaphysical forces outside of us. Human beings, the Transcendentalists argued, put too much faith in society and its institutions, rather than the uncorrupted hearts and desires of individuals, losing in the process their connection with the authentic and highly subjective divine. “The height, the deity of man,” Emerson wrote in 1842, “is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me; but best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. . . . All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of your will.” In practical terms, Emerson and the religious tradition he here articulates is intuitional, rather than institutional, spirituality. Intuitional spirituality centers religious observance around the divination of the self.