Orthodox Judaism makes a very small percentage of world Jewry. According to the recent Pew report, out of 6.7 million Jews in America, only about 670,000 are Orthodox. It is a fact that most of the doctrines of traditional Judaism are either untenable or less than overpoweringly relevant to the vast majority of world Jewry. How do Jews affirm their identity in the absence of deep religious conviction?

The 20th rabbi and philosopher Mordecai Kaplan devoted his life to answering that question. According to Kaplan, Judaism is not a religion, but an evolving religious civilization, a civilization that has taken different forms over the ages. The biblical period, the classical rabbis, the medieval philosophers and mystics each represented a distinctive intellectual and spiritual shape that Judaism took over the course of its journey through the ages. Kaplan argued that because of advances in science, bible scholarship and philosophy, Orthodoxy had become untenable. He believed, that like it did many times before, Judaism would have to evolve. To that end, he developed a philosophy of Judaism that dispensed with reference to the supernatural.

Kaplan’s theory was a nationalistic one, centered on the idea of Jewish “peoplehood.” Benedict Anderson, in his classic 1983 work Imagined Communities, argues that nationalism arose at a time of religious decline to service emotional needs once satisfied by faith. Specifically, he argues that religion made the contingency of death meaningful and replaced fatality with continuity (in the Kingdom of God, for instance), a function now performed by nationalistic ideologies. With this shift from religious to nationalistic consciousness came a shift in the experience of what Anderson calls simultaneity. The religious view of the world involves a certain ahistoricism in which there is “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (Anderson, 24). Events are interpreted in light of sacred history, sacred history is constantly recurring, in a sense. Nationalism, conversely, conceives of a united community, moving steadily through desacralized time. The medieval rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides claimed that his biblical namesake, Moses, was an Aristotelian, Kaplan sees Maimonides and Moses as two distinct phases of Jewish history, united not by intellectual concurrence, but by a much more intangible belonging to a common civilization.

Nationalism can serve as a substitute for religion as long as long as the members of the nation envision themselves as traveling through time together, as possessing a common past and future. It is this very idea of a common past and future that is eroding. There is a deepening divide between American and Israeli Jews, and fewer young American Jews are taking the same interest in the Jewish State as their parents. As for American Jews themselves, Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary pointed out in a Jewish Week article over a year ago, that we live in an age of unparalleled individualism and increasing universalism, which makes it harder to attract people to affiliate with religious institutions and to identify themselves with a particular people. Even so, unless Jews can sustain a sense of national identity, of peoplehood, I fear the Jewish people is in danger of finally disappearing beneath the waves of history.

I worry, though, that this erosion is inevitable. Kaplan was heavily influenced by the Eastern European Jewish Essayist Ahad Ha’am (a pen name meaning “One of the People”). Ahad Ha’am believed that the Jewish nation, like all nations, has a will to live, a desire to continue existing as a nation. This will to live accounts for the persistence of the nation during the millennia of exile. Kaplan relies on this idea of the will to live to justify his reinterpretation of Judaism. It is worthwhile to give Jews a new understanding of their Jewish identity once supernatural religion fades away because there is a deep need to continue as a nation. The biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann aptly notes that there is no such thing as a national will to live. People are social animals and have an urge to join social groups, but they have no desire to join a particular social group. As Jews acculturate they can satisfy their social longings just as well with their non-Jewish neighbors as with their Jewish ones.

Kaufmann believed that the Jews remained a nation throughout the centuries because of their religion, because of their faith in the Rock of Israel. Without God, perhaps there is no truly compelling reason to stay Jewish. Certainly some people like Jewish culture (in our day, an idea more talked about than lived in my opinion), but this is akin to romantic attraction and lacks the incontrovertible force of a divine imperative. And people can fall out of love.

Where does that leave us? Is the eternal people nearing the end of its glorious history? Or will Judaism survive, but mostly as a religion? I suspect the latter, but the next 50 years will make it all the clearer whether Kaplan or Kaufmann saw farther and clearer.