Modernity Shocks, Cancelled Bonds and Open Wounds No Escape from Success!
The Hungarian Jewish Congress (1868-1869) and the historical division of Jewry was a formal divorce and remains an unhealed split. The workings of the human psyche and mind are never immune to the social context in which they happen. It is impossible to understand and analyze such an internal modernity shock (madness of modernity) in a religious community, without observing the external conditions that lead to a cancelling of strong bonds and that caused unhealed wounds, for generations to come, with repercussions on the European continent, overseas and later in the state of Israel.
Economic and cultural success in the modern secular world, which emerged ultimately with the advent of capitalist industry and trade in the Hapsburg Monarchy, is bound upon interactive participation in a greater modernized context of human relationships, which does not care for specific religious exercises and convictions. Economic progress and the speed of modernity have no pity for age-old and time-tested models of human religious behavior, which are regarded as superstitions, backwardness and mind control, i.e. there is no place for the supernatural, only a limited tolerance for the practice of cultural traditions, although only in a ‘reduced’ manner.
The ‘theological’ result of the Hungarian Jewish Congress (18681869) shows exactly the degrees of willingness of the participating groups to ‘adapt’ to the consequences of the modernity shock, in cultural and economic terms. This civilizational split in Jewish cultural behavior looks like the result of a physical experiment, where the greater molecular structure of an organic body is divided into three layers, with a relatively thin middle and two strong upper/lower