But this momentum could carry Judaism only so far. In the centuries following the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth, the enormity of the exile began to make itself felt. Stripped of sovereignty, the Tora ceased to be “history-making.” The Talmud itself gives voice to this understanding, when it asserts that “since the destruction of the Temple, God has nothing in this world other than the four cubits of halacha.”³⁸ Judaism in exile, Berkovits writes, became at once distracted and distorted, unable to apply the divine ideal to the totality of life, while at the same time forced to modify its laws and institutions to ensure Jewish religious survival against the double threat of assimilation and persecution. “With the loss of national sovereignty,” he wrote in Crisis and Faith (1976), “there were no more political problems with a bearing on national survival to confront the Tora…. Judaism was forced out of the public domain into the limitations of the private one. Broad layers of the Tora were thus pried away from the comprehensive life of a normal people, for which they were originally intended. The vital link between Tora and reality was severed in the exile of the people.”³⁹ If Judaism requires sovereignty for its fulfillment, then exile is not merely a historical disaster, but a cosmic one as well, for God’s teaching is deprived of its central field of application, and the presence of the divine in history becomes restricted to the “four cubits” of law in exile.

Exile meant that to survive, Judaism had to be transformed and retooled. Beginning with the decrees of R. Yohanan ben Zakai during the first century c.e. and continuing over a thousand years, the rabbis struggled to preserve the Jews’ basic commitments to Tora study and observance in increasingly difficult conditions. The elimination of broad areas of life from the Tora’s rubric meant the Jews’ mission as an exemplary people would have to be put on hold; and the extreme conditions of exile posed such a threat to the survival of the Tora that preservation became an overriding existential need. Pursuing the ancient dream was no longer an option, and Jewish leaders now turned their efforts to merely keeping the dream alive.

This meant, first and foremost, a palpable constriction in the freedom of rabbinic scholars to innovate or interpret the law creatively in light of its inner meaning. Most strikingly, this was expressed in the emergence of written codes of law as the preeminent source of Jewish authority, displacing the judgment of living individuals, who in Berkovits’ view were more capable of capturing the depth of the Tora’s meaning and applying it to ever-changing reality. “Living authority is always built upon tradition, but as it is alive it can exist only when there is a possibility of an organic evolution in the application of tradition,” he wrote. “When, owing to the hard facts of Jewish history, owing to the insecurity of Jewish life, living authority was no longer practicable, and authority had to be transferred to the book, the Talmud, the records of a once-living authority, Judaism had to sacrifice the possibility of organic development; it renounced the great principle of the evolution of traditional teachings. The structure of Judaism became rigid, for it had lost its evolutionary strength.”⁴⁰

For the preservation of their national law in conditions of exile, the Jews paid in the hard currency of the Tora’s original vitality. Cut off from the hardest questions of public life, the Tora was relegated almost entirely to the purely theoretical or the purely individual. In Crisis and Faith, Berkovits put the problem in perhaps its harshest light:

With the people, the Tora, too, went into exile…. The living Tora needs the dialectical tension of the confrontation with a total reality that asks questions and presents problems. Tora is alive when it meets the challenge, struggles with the problems, seeks for solutions by a continuous deepening of its self-understanding, thus forever discovering new levels of meaningfulness in the depth of its inexhaustible eternity. Tora in exile lacks the life-sustaining challenge of the confrontation. It is stunted in its vitality and, for lack of possibilities of Tora-realization, it is greatly impaired in its wisdom of Tora-application.⁴¹

Exile necessitates taking extreme measures just to preserve Jewish identity and to maintain the Jews’ fidelity to the original dream of the holy nation. For this reason, even as the application of the law became increasingly constricted, the ideal of Tora study continued to include those areas of the law which were devoid of practical application—such as the sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, the governance of the Sanhedrin, or agricultural restrictions in the Sabbatical year, which apply only in the land of Israel.⁴² For this reason, moreover, Judaism throughout the centuries maintained a powerful dedication to the messianic idea, based on the hope that the Jews would re-establish sovereignty and regain their former glory—an idea which attained the status of cardinal belief in the writings of Maimonides, and which even found practical expression throughout the medieval period in efforts to return to the land of Israel and re-establish Jewish sovereignty.⁴³

But these measures, while helpful for preservation, could not correct the immense “breach between Tora and life” that had resulted from exile. Over time, Judaism turned increasingly inward and attended primarily to its spiritual self-defense. It erected firm walls of law and custom, in the process becoming progressively less flexible. Judaism and Jewish life were able to continue this way for many centuries, preserving the integrity of the Jewish nation and its dedication to the Tora as a theological framework and a source of political authority. But the same rigidity and insularity which helped Judaism survive through the medieval period left it unprepared for the modern era.

The modern period in Europe presented so powerful an assault on the traditional exilic model of Judaism as to leave the Jewish people in a state of crisis from which it has yet to emerge. Politically, the emancipation of European Jewry meant that the individual Jew was suddenly offered a national affiliation that could compete openly with that of the Jewish polity-in-exile. Philosophically, enlightenment meant that reason, which always had a special appeal for Jews raised on talmudic discourse, was now turned against the foundations of biblical faith. As Berkovits writes in Towards Historic Judaism:

The result was that the majority of Jews broke with the traditional framework, abandoning the political component of Judaism as well as the four cubits of law—and in the process abandoning the ancient dream of creating a holy nation. Judaism became a realm of private belief which every Jew was supposed to interpret on his own. But in the realm of human history, where the Tora had originally sought to have its most important effect, the Jew was now a proud Frenchman, American, or German. “We German adherents of Jewish monotheism,” Hermann Cohen wrote typically in 1917, “place our trust in history, confident that our innermost kinship to the German ethos will be acknowledged ever more willingly and frankly. Sustained by this confidence, we shall thus go on as German men and German citizens and at the same time remain unshakably loyal to our Jewish religion.”⁴⁵

In Berkovits’ view, therefore, the central crisis facing the Jew in modern times is not his physical survival but the collapse of the system that had preserved the idea of the holy nation. The liberal forms of Judaism, which looked to a universalizing Jewish “ethics” and Jewish “religion” to replace the law and the political commitment it implied, were to him not a modernization of the ancient faith, but its material abandonment. “The biblical conception of the Jewish state is the kingdom of God on earth,” he wrote. “The basic demands of Judaism compel this outlook…. Whoever breaks with it breaks with Judaism.”⁴⁶ At the same time, Orthodoxy, which for a thousand years had managed to fight off every major challenge to Jewish nationhood, stood now like a castle of sand against the incoming waves—powerless to stop the erosion, yet oblivious to the failure of its own material.