Question

Following my reading of your booklet, two questions came up for me.

A. There you raised, really only very briefly, the option that Judaism is defined by the shared “destiny of fate” of the people, and you rejected that option because then there is nothing unique about the “secular” — all Jews share a common destiny of fate. In my opinion, that was the only time you rejected a definition because it didn’t fit with the word “secular,” and not because of the concept “Judaism.” So I wanted to suggest here a possibility: perhaps secular Judaism does not mean that secularity as such has some added value that the other kinds of Judaism do not have; rather, it presents a thinner option and claims that *despite* being secular, it is still Judaism. If you like, its distinctiveness is based on the absence of other additions that exist in the other types, and not on positive content.

B. You mentioned another possibility: perhaps Judaism is defined by a number of criteria taken together. Meaning, if there are 10 indicators of Judaism and I fulfill 6 of them, then I am Jewish. This insight did not receive further discussion in the rest of the book. For example, you mentioned that studying biblical history is not part of Judaism, since Christians also study the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). But here one could import the first claim and argue that a person who was born into the Jewish people, is also part of its history, and in addition studies the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) according to the secular batei midrash, is part of the movement of secular Judaism.