American Jews and Cutheans?

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Are American Jews Creating a New Jewishness, or Just Abandoning the Real Kind? Most American Jews have effectively cast off rabbinic guidance. Would the Talmud’s rabbis have respected us for it, or disdained us? The column concludes:

All this made me wonder, as I have many times before in reading the Talmud, what the rabbis would make of the situation of American Jewry today. No one can say that America lacks rabbis to point out the correct halakhah, as the Jews of Kabul did. But the vast majority of Jews—unaffiliated, Reform, and even Conservative—have effectively cast off rabbinic guidance and have decided to invent their own Jewish customs. Some keep kosher at home but eat in non-kosher restaurants; some attend Shabbat services, but get there by driving to synagogue. The compromises of American Jewish life are legion.

Would these customs earn the rabbis’ respect, since they are the established practice of the majority? Or would we seem to them like Cutheans, who have lost the knowledge of the law and need to be treated with extra strictness? If, as I suspect, it’s the latter, perhaps we could respond, as the Cutheans would have, that our Jewishness is not a defective version of the rabbis’ but an original creation with its own integrity. But then the rabbis could point out that the Cutheans have all but disappeared, along with the Karaites and all the other Jewish schismatic sects, while rabbinic Judaism remains. It’s impossible to read the Talmud as a modern American Jew, especially a secular one like me, and not wonder whether that argument trumps all the rest.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.