Who Are “Secular Jews” Then?
There are self-styled “secular Jews,” for example, who celebrate Passover (which sociologists tell us is the Jewish ritual observed by more Jews today than any other) not as God’s redemption of Israel from Egyptian slavery but, rather, as the autonomous acquisition of freedom and sovereignty by the Jewish people in the founding event of their “civilization” (a term favored by the equivocally secularist Mordecai Kaplan, and which is as vapid as the term “values” employed by the unequivocally secularist Rebecca Goldstein). Nevertheless, the question is not only how much this deconstruction of traditional Jewish practice corresponds to the Jewish tradition as a whole (whose two constituting documents are the Bible and the Talmud), but also how coherent this kind of Judaism or “Jewishness” really is (a “philosophical incoherence” Goldstein herself honestly admits). So, if Passover is a cultural event, which does not require religious commitment to be properly celebrated, why does one even
