What the Jewish sage Saadia Gaon said a thousand years ago in Babylonia remians true in America today: Jews are a people only by virtue of their Torah.

Since the earliest decades of this century, the American Jewish community has seemed the safest and most successful one in the world. It was not, until the Nazis, larger than the Jewish communities of Europe, nor did it provide Judaism's most revered scholars. But, at least since World War I, its growing size, wealth, and political influence have given it special prestige and self-confidence.

Until now. The results of the National Jewish Population Study of 1990 draw the portrait of a community in decline, facing in fact a demographic disaster. Jews, who once made up 3.7 per cent of the U.S. population, have fallen to about 2 per cent, and the proportion of Jews who marry non-Jews has edged past 50 per cent.

The steady increase in intermarriage rates becomes easier to understand when we examine the present state of Jewish belief. That many American Jews fear Christianity is no secret. Far less acknowledged, albeit much greater in its impact on the Jewish community, is the Jews' widespread anxiety about Judaism. For if the early Jewish strategy for success in America, with its requirement of "social invisibility," might be thwarted by the actions and beliefs of Christians, it could also be thwarted by the strict ritual requirements of Judaism. This is a jarring thought for most American Jews. They have devised a variety of substitutes for Judaism without consciously acknowledging that the search for alternatives to their religion is motivated by the desire to escape the constraints of a terribly demanding faith.

For people born in immigrant communities or to immigrant parents and saturated with Jewish culture, it was possible to feel "Jewish" and stay "Jewish" even without any involvement with Judaism. But it is now clear that it is not possible to transmit this irreligious "Jewishness" successfully, as the Hebrew prayers have it, l'dor vador--from one generation to the next.

The flight from Judaism is very clear in the data about predominant Jewish beliefs and practices. The problem is not that American Jews refuse to be Orthodox, for the term "Orthodox" is subject to varying interpretations. The real problem is that most American Jews are not Conservative or Reform either. Both of those movements have standards of behavior, such as belonging to a synagogue and attending Sabbath services, that the majority of American Jews do not meet. George Gallup, Jr. and Joseph Castelli report on this phenomenon in the 1989 book, The People's Religion: American Faith in the '90s. In answer to the question whether religion was "very important" in their lives, Americans on average said yes 55 per cent of the time, and no only 14 per cent. American Jews, however, said yes only 30 per cent of the time, and no 35 per cent. Among fourth-generation Jews (those whose great-grandparents were immigrants) 8 per cent of Conservative Jews and 2.5 per cent of Reform Jews attend synagogue once a month or more. By comparison, Gallup recently found that 67 per cent of Americans belong to a religious institution and 58 per cent attend once a month or more.

But the substitute faiths American Jews devised in an effort to stay Jewish while achieving success in America are failing. Far from saving American Judaism, they threaten its future.

The Religion of Israel.

It is not too much to say that support for Israel became the key element of Jewish faith for most American Jews, central to their understanding of their own Jewishness. This passionate commitment to Israel, however, must be dated not to 1948 but to 1967. It was the Six Day War that transformed what had been solid support into a faith that must be called religious, and that provided a center to the beliefs and activities of millions of American Jews. Jews spoke of the "eleventh commandment"--no posthumous victories for Hitler--and, faced with a possible new Holocaust, found their hearts moved. Leonard Fein wrote that "Israel has become for us a binding Jewish cement, a powerful explanation of the Jewish connection."

However, the American Jewish sentiment about Israel grew as the risks to Israel grew. It is in that sense a commitment to the survival of Israel-in-danger. As it today far exceeds the level of support that Israel enjoyed prior to 1967, perhaps it exceeds the level Israel will enjoy in the future if American Jews conclude that Middle East peace efforts have greatly diminished the threat to its security.

Indeed, a 1989 survey for the American Jewish Committee by Steven Cohen of the Hebrew University concluded that Israel was already only a "secondary concern" for American Jews. Cohen found, for example, that while 61 per cent of American Jews said that "to a great extent" they felt close to other American Jews, and 40 per cent said they felt close to non-Jewish Americans, only 1 per cent felt equally close to Israelis. On the contrary, 23 per cent said they felt "not at all" close to them.

Where is it possible to find a group of Jews who are committed to Israel, and whose children are likely to honor that commitment? The answer is, in a synagogue on the Sabbath. The faith of religious Jews, of whatever denomination, holds them in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies, or if the cultural links between American and Israeli Jews attenuate.

Faith is the only ultimately reliable bond between American Jews and Isreel. As the fear for Israel's safety and survival diminishes what will be left is the covenant with God that created the Jewish people and ties them to the land of Israel--or nothing.

"Prophetic Judaism" and the Religion of Politics.

The same problem that afflicts a non-religious identification with Israel afflicts "prophetic Judaism" and the link between Jewishness and politics. Most American Jews have come to believe that there is a very close relationship between Judaism and "social justice." The "prophetic tradition" in Judaism, in this view, is as much at the heart of the religion as Halachah--rabbinic law--or prayer. There is no doubt that Judaism is a "this worldly" religion, not given to postponing better days for the afterlife. But many Jews have read a great deal too much into the idea of "prophetic tradition," virtually identifying it with the program of American liberalism and with support for the Democratic Party. In congressional elections since 1980, Jews have cast 74 per cent of their votes for Democratic candidates (versus 53 per cent among the electorate at large); they gave 80 per cent of their votes in 1992 to Bill Clinton (while he received only 43 per cent of all votes cast). In 1996, when Clinton received 49 per cent of all votes cast, preliminary analyses concluded that he had received 78 per cent of the votes cast by Jews.

Before the mass immigration from Eastern Europe, the American Jewish community had not been notably progressive on issues unrelated to direct Jewish interests. Its leadership, drawn from its most prosperous ranks, was not particularly liberal. The Pittsburgh Platform, the famous Reform statement of principles of 1885, largely ignored political and social issues. It was in reaction to the "Social Gospel" movement that arose in Protestent denominations and to the Progressive Movement in American politics at the turn of the last century that Reform Jews began their alignment with liberalism.

But very many Eastern European Jewish immigrants were on the Left politically. For poor immigrant Jews, their status as urban laborers added immediate self-interest to the philosophical attractions of socialism, trade-union activism, and Democratic Party liberalism. Liberalism, wrote Steven Cohen, can be understood as the "politics of integration," the goal being the creation of an American society hospitable to Jews.

Yet liberalism was more than a pragmatic choice for a community of immigrants. It was widely seen, in the words of one key Reform official, as "the essence of religion, certainly of the Jewish religion." The old liturgy and rituals--"rabbinic Judaism"--were marginal and outdated, "vestigial trappings." The heart of "prophetic Judaism" is social activism and social reform-- tikkun olam, or healing the world, in the phrase (borrowed from the Aleinu, the closing prayer at most Jewish services) favored by many Jewish liberals.

The idea that secular Judaism is true to Judaic tradition in placing the search for social justice at the center of the religion can, however, easily be challenged. As Jeroid Auerbach argued in Rabbis and Lawyers, that view was part of the "search for compatibility" between Judaism and Americanism. "How tempting to assume," he wrote, "that the Hebrew Bible was a preliminary draft of the American Constitution, that the Hebrew prophets were the founding fathers of American liberalism." But this compatibility thesis was deeply flawed, for "the constitutional community rests upon a conception of individual freedom, but the Torah community imposes a collective obligation of obedience." Judaism is based on divine authority, not majority rule, Auerbach reminds us, and to the ancient prophets, "Justice meant nothing less than obedience to divine law." As for the prophetic tradition, Auerbach complained that too many American Jews "hear in prophecy what they want to hear." They do not hear the prophetic call to return to faith in God and adherence to sacred law, to Halachah. "Prophecy, in its time a desperate cry to return to the ancient faith of covenantal obligation, became in the modern era an exit from faith." Jews have wittingly or not "transformed prophecy into a repudiation of the very sacred-law tradition at its core."

This politicized, left-wing Judaism will not work even on its own terms: as the demographic and other data show, it cannot maintain the loyalties of Jews over the generations. At a recent meeting of Jewish Community Relations Council executives, the then head of the Des Moines Council, Ted Lapkin, explained why:

After all, there are a plethora of secular or non-Jewish organizations which do excellent work in the social-justice realm. If a person believes that striving toward social justice and Tikkun Olam constitute the primary theme of Judaism, such an individual can express his or her "Jewishness" in a completely non-Jewish organization or environment. I would submit that this line of thought has contributed to the trend which has brought American Jews, to the brink of demographic disaster.

Secular Judaism, and the substitution of politics for Jewish ritual, cannot revive Jewish life in America because they remove precisely that which binds Jews together. Jewish faith and Jewish ritual sustain the Jewish community both by giving Jews common values and practices and by separating them from others--in this country, Christians--who believe different things and worship in a different way. The replacement of that which unites Jews, and separates them from Christians, by political activities that non-Jews can undertake equally well will inevitably erode Jewish identity.

The Holocaust.

Commemorations of the Holocaust can, by contrast, provide a uniquely Jewish bond, and such ceremonies are playing an increasing role in Jewish life. That role, however, may also be perverse.

Attention to the Holocaust has reached a high point only now, a half-century after its end. In the 1950s and 1960s, when there were numerous signs of vigor in the American Jewish community, it was synagogues that were being built--not museums commemorating the Holocaust. But today, 85 per cent of American Jews say the Holocaust is very important to their sense of being Jewish. Fewer Jews say that about God, the Torah, or any other factor.

No doubt the 1967 War had its impact here too. The reminder to American Jews that millions of other Jews were still in peril brought back memories of a past, then much closer, when such peril had turned into mass murder. But as the Holocaust itself and Israel's wars recede into the past, their combined impact cannot be counted on to sustain Jewish identity in America.

Nor, indeed, has the tremendously greater awareness of the Holocaust had much effect on the actual behavior of American Jews even now. The Holocaust "revival" has occurred precisely during the years when intermarriage has spread, and ritual observance and synagogue affiliation have declined.

Unlike a real commitment to Judaism, commemorating the Holocaust is for many Jews quite convenient. This is not to denigrate the work of those who have made it their cause, much less to suggest that Holocaust survivors are taking an easy way out when they decide to communicate their experiences to us. But for most American Jews, remembering the Holocaust is neither a significant commitment of time nor a great and life-changing passion. It is instead a form of melodrama, putting oneself in the shoes of those European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. This permits a deeper understanding of the terrors those Jews felt and the horrors they suffered. But does it produce anything positive? Rabbi Jacob Neusner does not think so. He writes that Judaism has always emphasized the moments when God saved the Jewish people (which are commemorated in the holidays of Passover, Purim, and Sukkot), while the moments of destruction and tragedy became minor fast days. "In fact," he goes on, "Judaic piety has all along known how to respond to disaster. For those for whom the classic Judaic symbolic structure remains intact, the Holocaust changes nothing. For those to whom classical Judaism offers no viable option, the Holocaust changes nothing."

What, then, is the conclusion? It was drawn by the Orthodox scholar Michael Wyschograd in his article on "Faith and the Holocaust" a quarter-century ago: "There is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust. No faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it."

"Ethnicity."

As recently as two generations ago the vast majority of American Jews spoke Yiddish; now, Yiddish speakers are elderly people, and they are not being replaced by new immigrants bringing a rich Jewish culture to America with them. Today, the only large numbers of Jewish arrivals are from the former Soviet Union, and they tend to be even more ignorant about Judaism than their American hosts.

A sense of Jewish ethnicity remains powerful for many Jews, and it is a factor in the Jewish identity of most. But with the immigration of people steeped in Yiddish culture at an end, intermarriage at an all-time high, and the population dispersing from dense urban centers into a more typical American pattern, it is foolish to hope that ethnicity can maintain the size and vitality of the American Jewish community.

And so the exact opposite of what they expected is now happening. Jewish life that is not centered on Judaism is disappearing in America, while traditional Judaism--and above all, Orthodoxy--which was expected to disappear, is stubbornly holding on.

What the Jewish sage Saadia Gaon said a thousand years ago in Babylonia remains true in America today: Jews are a people only by virtue of their Torah. They will decline if they are driven by fear of their neighbors, fear of their own traditions, and fear of the distinct identity that their covenant imposes on them. They will survive if they cling to their faith--to their Torah. It, and it alone, is for the Jews just what the Book of Proverbs calls it: a tree of life.