When religion becomes a matter of personal opinion, culture—which by definition is public and corporate—no longer defines what is eternally at stake in man’s relationship to God. Ethics and morality give way to impulse and whim, and sentimentality rides. Private religion appeals to the feeling of the moment, and, under such conditions, learning and tradition no longer govern. What is gained in the attunement of religion to the moment is vastly outweighed by what is lost—the traditions of Western civilization.

With stress on a personal and acutely present-tense encounter with Jesus Christ, Protestant Christianity, particularly the left-wing of the Reformation churches, pioneered the privatization of religion but cannot be accused of its trivialization. The conviction that the “I” forms the criterion of all things is a grotesque misunderstanding of the Protestant conscience of Luther at Wittenberg. In the case of evangelical Christianity, religious individualism insists that jesus Christ intervenes in each person’s life, hi the ease of Reform Judaism, born in the heart of evangelical Christianity in Germany and responsive to the language and theology of Luther, there is a stress on what the individual finds personally meaningful in religious observance. So both evangelical Christianity and Reform Judaism secure a place for the radically isolated individual, for the integrity of his conscience, and for individual rights in the encounter with Cod, all of which characterize the religious bias of Americans.

But in this country, with our cultural bias against history and tradition and our rejection of social authority in favor of individual autonomy, the acute trivialization of individualism has made a mockery of the courage of Luther and the bravery of the early reformers of Judaism who, in the 19th century, thought about Judaic matters in a way without precedent since Sinai, finding room for the “I” of the individual Israelite among the “we” of “all Israel,” the corporate, holy people of God.

The practice of Judaism in contemporary America, which has carried to its logical extreme the conviction that everything begins with me, personally, this morning, here and now, has shown the grotesque possibilities of the privatization of religion. Indeed, it is the unique amalgam of the religious and the ethnic in the corporate life of Jewish Americans, who are Jewish and therefore regard themselves as primary data for the definition of Judaism, that embodies those possibilities. Stated simply, if “Judaism” is “the religion of the Jewish people,” then whatever religion the Jewish people practice is “Judaism.” And then . . . get out of the way, because here comes the do-it-yourself- Judaism that supersedes Reform, corrupts Conservative, and baffles Orthodox Judaism.

A concrete example of the ethnic definition —since I’m Jewish, what I do is Judaism tout court—comes from Clearwater, the Jerusalem of west-central Florida. A local synagogue, Temple B’nai Israel, has invented a new religious rite for itself Thirty years ago. Rabbi Arthur Baseman started what he called “the chain of tradition.” He gave silver ID bracelets to young people who were completing their religious education at the temple. They wore them. Then they linked them together and carried them to the altar; the bracelets were “blessed” and put into the ark, along with the scrolls of the Torah. There are now 571 bracelets linked together, reports Maureen Byrne in the St. Petersburg Times. Baseman explained, “It deepens my faith in the continuity of Judaism and the viability of the people. We speak of a chain of tradition in Judaism from generation to generation. We will pass on our tradition, one link at a time.”

Rabbi Baseman invokes a key image of Judaism: “a chain of tradition,” which is represented as the teaching of Moses to Joshua, Joshua to the prophets, the prophets to the sages, and onward through time to “the oral Torah,” the teachings of the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Midrash and the Talmud—and thence to us. But the tradition that is passed on in a chain from Sinai consists of religious teachings; for example, Hillel’s famous saying, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” That is tradition: content.

I do not believe that, in the centuries since Sinai, anyone before Rabbi Baseman ever imagined that by “tradition” people could mean putting names on ID bracelets and making the bracelets into a chain.