Jews Today

“Whatever is the condition of Jews today, it is not what was expected. One example: In the early summer of this year, twenty thousand Jews gathered in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the completion of a seven year cycle of Talmud study. Not obviously an epoch-making event, until we recall that little over a century earlier, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of his day, Leopold Zunz, had predicted that by the twentieth century there would be no one left to understand a rabbinic text… The trajectory mapped out by Judaism in the late twentieth century has run counter to prediction.”

The Persistence of Faith pp. 6, 7