Similar generational battles are played out today, with many leaders who should know better leading the flight away from Jewish values to embrace vulgar and transient fashions.

RW: It is interesting that if America remains a religious country, which people feel, oddly, that it will do, then Jews will feel  more able to relax and cultivate their Jewish distinctiveness. What one sees in the American temper is in fact the unwillingness to move in one direction only. Let me give the example of abortion. I met a Hungarian academic at a party. He said that he loved coming to America because this is such a morally serious country. I loved that phrase and I asked him where he meant by it. He said he saw that in the debate over abortion. In Hungary, he continued, abortion has been legal since 1953 and nobody ever talks about it. In America it remains a moral conflict and, in fact, there has been a major push-back of American thinking against the idea that abortion has to become ever more accessible and value-free. This is not a country which is going necessarily in the direction of multiculturalism, of anything goes. There is a kind of a push-back and to the extent that it is there, Jews will be able to take advantage of it. I don't know what's made me so optimistic today.

JW: Let me speak from the pessimistic side. The great irony is that the overwhelming majority of Jews feel so much more comfortable with failing secularism. They do not feel at all comfortable with more conservative forms of Christianity, even though in some important ways these groups are more accepting of and congruent with many Jewish positions. The disconnect is so stark.

RW: I'll give you one example from this week. I find myself on a campus, and the Jewish organisation on campus, which is the dominant Jewish organisation on every campus, is Hillel. Hillel is a catch-all. The difficulty with Hillel is that it feels it has to go along the lines that you mentioned, Jack: Hillel has to be all things to all incoming students. Therefore, it cannot say, "This is what Judaism is, it cannot say, "This is our position on Israel," it cannot say, "This is how we behave." It doesn't have one Jewish service: Hillel at Harvard  has four or five concurrent services in order to suit everybody. 

About ten years ago a Chabad rabbi came and set up a Chabad house at Harvard. Chabad is a movement which when I was growing up was more or less non-existent. One didn't know what its role was. It felt ultra-Orthodox. Well, Chabad is the product of a very long process and I won't go into what constitutes Chabad except to say how different the Chabad house is from the Hillel house. It is different in this respect: it is what it is. It celebrates Sabbath the way it celebrates Sabbath, it takes students to Israel the way it takes students to Israel. It does not change. It tells its students to be whatever they want, they can come on Friday night or not come, they can come on Saturday or not come, they can join them for one holiday or two holidays, the students don't have to change. But it is what it is. It is such a bracing experience to be in that building. This week we had a dinner with 20-odd students and it was fantastic. They were all able to grapple with their doubts and convictions. This is something that doesn't happen in that looseness of Hillel.  Students coming to the university have an option that they didn't have before. 

JW: I would relate this to my previous discussion about the whole question of cultural liberalism because of the pervasiveness of relativism, the terror of being directive, of being coercive. I'll give you one example. To speak in rabbinical seminaries about the commandment to be fruitful and multipy — what most rabbis consider the first commandment of the Bible — has become verboten. It is not to be spoken about because it will hurt the feelings of some. I'm not making a case for tactlessness but what is accomplished when rabbinical students are never told how much their own tradition values raising children? Some rabbinical students are not married, or have married late, and for whatever reason are childless. Should that make it impermissible to teach that Judaism values procreation?